Spanish omelette

Well you all went perfectly nuts for the vegetarian idea and I was inundated by your favourite vegetarian recipes. I mean... there must have been at least 10!!!!

I haven't cooked any of them yet because I haven't had a chance to go to the shops again for the ingredients - mostly more butternut squash and a large sack of lentils by the looks of things. But such is the life of a duty cook that when the evening rolled around again I had to make supper for my hungry husband with no vegetarian option available.

In times of stress such as these, I like to ask myself "What would Judge Judy do?" But this isn't very helpful in the kitchen because I imagine what Judge Judy would do would be to get a Chinese takeaway. Or have her own personal chef knock up a pizza. (She is worth $90m, Judge Judy. Ninety. Million.)

So instead I asked myself, what would K-Mid do? There was a lot of talk around the royal wedding of what an excellent short order cook the Duchess of Cambridge was at university. Short order cooking, for those of you who don't know, is stuff like macaroni cheese, bacon and eggs and shepherd's pie - simple kitchen suppers. So I asked myself "What would K-Mid do?" and the answer came back to me that she would probably make a spanish omelette.

It so happened that in Waitrose the other day I stumbled across a cooking chorizo by a company called Unearthed, who - if I'm not mistaken - are new to the shelves of Waitrose. And I like to investigate new things in Waitrose. So I had some chorizo and I had a potato and I had some eggs and I had some onions and off I went.

And it was great, as Spanish omelettes always are.

Not meat-free, but I never made any promises. I never signed anything.
Judge Judy would approve.

Spanish omelette for 2 hungry people, or 4 less hungry with a salad

5 eggs
6 Unearthed cooking chorizo sausages, cooked and diced. Or really any chorizo you like
a long sloop of cream if you have it but don't worry if not
1 large onion
butter
olive oil
groundnut oil
1 large baking or waxy potato
some fresh oregano and sage if you have it
salt and pepper
monteray jack or cheddar cheese - this is optional if you think it's a calorie too far

1 Peel and chop your potato and then if you can, steam it for 25 minutes. I really advise the purchase of a steamer, I use mine all the time. It's Le Creuset. I love it. If you don't have one, you can balance a colander over a pan of boiling water and chuck any old lid that fits on top

2 Chop and sautee the onion in a sloop of groundnut oil, a sloop of olive oil and about 25g butter. Do this in a pan big enough to take the entire omelette. It doesn't have to be non-stick because this has got quite a lot of oil in it so shouldn't stick to the bottom too badly. But use a non-stick if you like.

Sprinkle over a large pinch of salt, which stops the onion burning. Don't know why so don't ask - and don't CARE so don't tell me. Throw in the sage and the oregano if using.

3 Cook and dice the chorizo. Incidentally, my husband is something of a tapas and Spanish food enthusiast generally and says that this chorizo is very good. You can either cook it in the oven or in a frying pan. It will leak orange gunk everywhere. I'm sorry about this, but it's just the way with chorizo.

Put on your grill to full bongos.

4 Whisk up the 5 eggs in a separate bowl with cream if using and season cautiously as the chorizo is quite strong.

5 Add the potato and the chorizo to the onion and shift around carefully so's not to mash the potato up too badly. Then pour over the egg mixture and give the whole thing a shake. Turn the heat up to medium and keep an eye on the pan. Little bubbles ought to start coming to the surface after about 4-5 minutes.

When you reckon the bottom's firming up (oh how I wish my bottom would firm back up) grate over some cheese and slide it under your redhot grill for another 3-4 minutes or until you reckon it's done.

Depending on your pan, you may not be able to turn the whole thing out, but you certainly ought to be able to cut triangles directly out of the pan without too much bother.

We ate this with a very crunchy salad, a lot of Tabasco sauce and some beer.




Why are children so keen on The Gruffalo? I read it for the first time this morning and it was okay, but its cult status is baffling. Mog the Forgetful Cat or Six Dinner Sid or The Tiger Who Came To Tea are surely more moving, generally. You will note a strong feline theme. I did call my child Kitty, after all.

How to Cook Hamburgers So That Someone Like Me Would Like Them

I normally don't care too much about how absolutely accurate the color profiles of my photos are. I'm the video guy, so if the pictures are a little off, or my grammar's ain't perfect, I get a pass.

But here I was concerned that my average-at-best photography skills would give readers a false impression of exactly how cooked this hamburger was. You'll have to take my word for it, but this was a pretty perfect medium. It may have been the bright light, but the photo makes this look a little rarer than it was.

I'm not a big fan of rare burgers, as I've always believed the beef fat therein should be hot and flowing, not cool and flabby. If I want raw meat I'll make a tartar. At the same time, I do want to keep the burger somewhat pink, if possible, so it stays moist and tender.

The technique you're about to watch is fairly straightforward, but like any cooking methods, it takes a little practice. The good news is, once you get a feel for this "cook it just over halfway up" system, you should be a perfectly pink hamburger making machine.

By the way, I won't engage in any inane debates on the wisdom of eating less-than-well-done burgers. The topic's been covered online, ad nauseam (pun intended). Is it potentially dangerous to eat a pink burger? Of course, but so is crossing the street. Enjoy!

Butternut squash pie

I have been the executive decision-maker in this house for some time now.

Famous decisions I have executed executively have been to switch to quilted bog roll, to convert the loft, to stop giving Kitty baby rice and to buy a family diesel estate.

They've all been very successful decisions and riding the crest of this success-wave I have now decided executively that we need to eat less meat in the house.

For one, I don't like buying meat. Since Kitty was born, I haven't been able to eat lamb anymore. First, I've decided that it stinks. And second, I feel like I may as well go up to the nursery and hack one of my child's limbs off as eat a leg of lamb.

Every time I walk down the meat aisle in Waitrose in the back of my mind is the terrible worry that all these animals had a ghastly time, that they died in pain, that I am a monster. This is despite me buying only the most faithfully organic and free-range farm-based meat I can.

But my range of vegetarian cooking - that isn't pasta - is pitiful. I can cook a very good spanakopita but that's it. So recently I have been casting round for interesting vegetarian recipes.

This butternut squash pie is a sort of made-up thing inspired by a pie I saw in the Cranks Bible, which is a vegetarian cookbook, but which I mostly don't find that exciting. It's full of fucking SOUP and you know how much I hate soup. But there is this pie in it. The other ingredients I added because I thought they might be fun. It is also based on the spanakopita principle of using filo pastry as a casing.

I mostly fucking hate butternut squash. It dates back to the time when I was on the Atkins diet and ate it all the time. I grew sick of the sight of it. But once in a while, it's fine, especially when combined with a lot of cheese and spinach and pastry.

This worked very well but it is very rich and I would advise that you eat it with an extremely sharp, cold cucumber or tomato salad. This makes enough for 4-6 people and I used a 25cm flan dish.

So here we go.

Esther's butternut squash pie

1 butternut squash
4 sage leaves
some butter
1 bag baby spinach leaves
1 pack dolcelatte (about 150g)
some olive oil
filo pastry - about 8 sheets
salt and pepper
walnuts
3 eggs
some cream if you have it but don't worry if not

Preheat the oven to 180C

1 Peel and chop your butternut squash and then cook it gently in a frying pan with a lid on for a good hour with the shredded sage leaves in some olive oil. Butternut squash seems so hard and unforgiving that you may doubt that it will cook down in this time, but it will.

2 Meanwhile wash and wilt the spinach in 0.5cm of water for about 5 minutes

3 Lightly toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan and chop

4 When the buttenut squash is mostly soft, combine it with the dolcelatte (torn up by you) the spinach, the walnuts, the eggs and the cream - if using. Sprinkle over a very large pinch of salt and about 10 turns of the pepper grinder.

5 Lay about four sheets of filo pastry in whatever dish or tin you're going to cook this in. Brush olive oil between the sheets so they stick together. Pile in the fillling and then lay more sheets of filo on top. Bung in the oven for 20 minutes.

p.s. if you have any favourite vegetarian recipes that aren't pasta, potato or risotto-based email me: esther.walker@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Coming Soon: How to Make Perfectly Pink Hamburgers

I just found out that amazingly delicious cheeseburger you saw in the Pinot-Glazed Mushrooms video can't air until July, 27th. It was a sponsored post, so I have no choice but to wait, however I did film some extra footage during that session on how to get a perfectly pink burger. I'm in Los Angeles on some semi-secret business, but I should have this hopefully helpful how-to up tomorrow evening. Stay tuned!

A Pickled Peck of Padron Peppers - Twist Your Tongue with Flavor

While I was at the inaugural Atlanta Food & Wine Festival a few weeks ago, I attended a demo by Donald Link, on the topic of working with hot peppers. When Link told the crowd he's used over 150 different varieties of peppers, we knew we were listening to the right dude.

During the presentation Chef Link made a quick and colorful batch of pickled peppers, and while they did look great, it was the vinegar they were brined in that really caught my attention. 

The James Beard Award winning chef said that every station in his kitchens have some of this spicy vinegar in it, and that this magic potion is used liberally in all kinds of things; rice, dressings, and marinades, just to name a few.

So, when Michele came home last week with a bag of oversized Padron peppers, I decided to give this a whirl. I was in one of those 'don't do any research before you start' moods, and just went for it. I decided to use vinegar and sugar, but no salt.

I know salt, and lots of it, is found in virtually all pickling brines, but I wanted to see what would happen if it was omitted. Since I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to use this vinegar on or in, I thought that would give me more flexibility

Of course, the only problem with an experiment like this is I have to wait a few weeks, at least, to taste my creation. I'm not a patient person, but hopefully I'll be rewarded. If you can't find Pardon peppers (see bonus coverage below), then any small fresh pepper will work, especially jalapeno or red Fresno chilies. Enjoy! 

Disclaimer: Like I said in the video, this is an experiment. Try this at your own risk!

Ingredients:

Enough peppers to almost fill a quart jar

3 cups white vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

4 cloves garlic, peeled, halved

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Bonus Padron Pepper Coverage!

Padron peppers are such a fascinating fruit (yes, like tomatoes, they are technically a fruit), and I covered them in way more detail in this post I did last August. I've posted the video below, but I encourage you curious culinarians to go check out the full post here. Enjoy!

Mahi Mahi with Spicy Thai Chili Mango Sauce and a Lesson Well Learned

Making this mahi mahi with spicy Thai chili mango sauce recipe didn't have me dreaming of tropical beaches, or some exotic outdoor market in southeast Asia. No, it reminded me of getting yelled at in the back of some dingy prep kitchen, a very long time ago.

I was given a recipe to make by an old French chef for a tomato pasta sauce. The first step was sweating a finely minced mirepoix in some olive oil. Since it was a fairly large batch, I decided to use the food processor to mince the carrots, celery and onions. Le chef was not le happy.

After teaching me a few new, colorful French phrases, he explained that while a mechanically minced mirepoix may look similar to a hand minced one, they were very different. He told me when you use a food processor, the vegetables are torn into tiny pieces, as opposed to being cleanly cut.

There is way more damage done to the cellular structure, and depending on the ingredient, that can create a noticeably different taste and texture than using a sharp knife and a little elbow grease, or as I believe it's called in France, elbow butter.

Anyway, this mango sauce is an example of how much I took that lesson to heart. For all I know that culinary theory has been debunked by Alton Brown, or some other food wonk a long time ago, but I don't care. I'll always believe my spicy mango sauce tastes better because I cut it by hand. Thanks chef! Enjoy.

UPDATE: I just listened to this video recipe again, and am proposing a new drinking game where every time I say "beautiful," you have to do a shot. ;-)

Spicy Thai Chili Mango Sauce Ingredients: (note everything in this is "to taste")

3/4 cup finely minced mango

1/2 small Thai chili, minced very fine

1 teaspoon sambal chili sauce, or other similar chili paste

1 large clove garlic, crushed fine

1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar

juice from one lime

1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro

Coming Soon: Grilled Mahi Mahi with Spicy Thai Chili Mango Sauce

I will explain all this later. Thank you. Come again. UPDATE: This was edited and posted during my IACP session (which explains the brief and cryptic first sentence), that I blogged about yesterday. It went very well! I'll be back in San Francisco tomorrow, and will upload the full video then. Thanks!

UPDATE to the UPDATE: I'm back in San Francisco, but will not be able to upload the video today...unless you want it without any narration. :-) Stay tuned!