Quickanapés Part 2

I am always grateful for feedback on my suggestions, glad to hear that it all went well Anxious – nice photos. I’m looking forward to TazGene’s post here soon about your culinary exploits in Morrocco  not least so I can have a go at cooking some of the dishes you mention.

Dear Foodalltheway,

I was relieved to get away with your suggestions for canapés undetected – very fortunate that I chose to use a pseudonym to cover my tracks.  I used a roasted red pepper meze on brioche with molten goats cheese and parsley on top. With a selection of chorizo and jamon on the side, the pate de fois gras didn’t get a look in and the compliments seemed genuine on the whole (with the exception of a few cheap digs which I chose to ignore).

Another face-saving stunt from Foodalltheway for which I remain, as ever, indebted.

Until the next drama…

Yours,

Anxious

London, WC1H

Quickanapés

I’ve had a desperate plea over on the Food Matters page for some Quick Canapés to serve with Champagne – if you haven’t read it, here it is:

Dear Foodalltheway,
In the coming days I am to be visited upon by a combined delegation consisting of my mother and her sister (my aunt). Some of your readers may sympathise with an inspection of this magnitude and will, I am sure, be waiting pen-in-hand to jot down your thoughts on rescuing themselves from a similarly nasty predicament. This bloodline retinue are afflicted by standards so high that men of less steady nerve would stoop to “surfing the net” to track down a London bistro that might be a match for the task. However, as the aunt in question comes from our sadly now lost American colonies, this show of weak will would reflect a thoroughly unBritish resolve to step up to the wicket and meet the job head on. For this reason, I am bravely coming to you for advice.
Stoically hedging my bets, I am offering a pre-supper champagne and canapés spread to act as starter to a later meal in a (I admit it) restaurant. However my lifestyle precludes endless preparation. I have the evening before to prepare what I can, leaving the final stages to a last minute flap between when I come home at around half-six and when they arrive which may well be before me. Dragging the contents of my cupboards onto the floor in a panic I find of potential use: x1 tin of pate de fois gras; some brioche slices; some miniature blinis and of course a well stocked champagne cellar. My time allows for a single visit to the shops. Perhaps you can salvage the situation.
Yours as ever,
Anxious of Bloomsbury, WC1

Gone are the days when bits of tinned pineapple and a cube of cheddar on a cocktail stick alongside a plate of little sausage rolls and pickled onions would have suffised. These days, Canapés have to have a certain waw factor to them – often they are more impressive than the meal they precede!

So, Anxious of Bloomsbury, it sounds like you’ve got some of it sorted – thin slivers of foie gras on toasted brioche. My only worry about serving this is that Americans are notoriously against the idea of foie gras – you can make that call, but don’t waste a good tin of foie gras!

If you’ve got left over brioche toasts, or you decide not to serve the foie gras, you could spread a little Roasted Aubergine and pine nut dip (available at the supermarket near you) on them, topped with chopped fresh parsley and mint.

For your blinis, I would buy some smoked salmon, crème fraîche and black caviar and put a little of each on the blinis (in the order listed) – very tasty and pretty too.

Buy some ready-rolled puff pastry to make some puffy bites: cut pastry into bite sized shapes (squares, circles, stars – anything that tickles your fancy, but make sure they’re the same size) brush with beaten egg and then sprinkle some of them generously with parmesan, others with a pinch of dried herbs, others with a pinch of curry powder and others with anything else you think might work. Cook in the oven for 10 – 15 minutes.

Other things that spring to mind are olives, slices of good quality dried saucisson or chorizo, hard-boiled quails eggs and Provençal black olives on a stick… sorry, I’m getting carried away, that last suggestion is very tasty but too fiddly to be done quickly.

Hope the above quickanapé ideas help, anybody else got any suggestions? Enjoy and let me know what you decide to serve up – take a photo so I can add it to this post.

Fat Ducks

I did something today that I’ve wanted to do ever since I first tasted the delights of Foie Gras de Canard – visit a farm where the ducks for this French delicacy are raised. I wanted to see for myself what conditions the ducks were raised in and decide for myself whether I could morally eat Foie Gras – I was hoping so, because I love it! La Ferme aux Téoulets in Merville is a farm run by Francis and Natacha MASO who specialise in raising “fat” ducks and they held an open day today so we went along  to have a look at what goes on at one of these farms.

After a quick browse of the different stalls selling duck based products, coffee, chocolate, Belgian beers and jewellery (a strange mix for a farm open day!) and a look at the dogs (well-fed dogs judging by the number of duck heads and carcasses lying around the place), turkeys, geese and a donkey, we got down to serious business and entered the duck shed. At this point, I was starting to wonder where the ducks were because for a farm that specialises in ducks, the only ones I’d seen so far were in jars and I hadn’t heard a single “quack”.

The first room we entered was the abbatoir – I was immediately struck by the strong smell, which I can’t really describe, but it was apparent that death had occured in the room! I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue with the tour, but curiosity told me to pull myself together. Francis himself was the guide and he talked passionately about his job. He made it clear from the start that there is a big difference between what he does and what happens at farms who mass-produce duck for foie gras. So here we were in the abbatoir which consisted of a machine that you put the ducks in head first (I think the machine held four ducks) and they get the chop – there was a big bucket underneath to catch the discarded heads and all the blood.  Next they’re passed through a machine to remove the feathers and there you have  your duck ready for all kinds of culinary treats. Francis made it sound very quick anyway. But where were the ducks?  Still no quacks…

To my surprise, through a door just the other side of the abbatoir we finally got to see the ducks – about 80 of them. It was quite dark in there – the only light coming from a little bulb in the ceiling. It was covered in thick cobwebs, which Francis explained were a necessity – they don’t use any chemical products at the farm, so they need to spiders to keep the flies at bay instead of insectisides. The ducks were separated into 10 little pens – about 1m x 1.5m in size – each containing 8 ducks.  Any more than 8 per pen would encourage the spread of disease and they would have to fight for space and water resulting in the smaller ducks not getting enough water. Francis told us that on an industrial scale, the ducks are kept in cages where they can’t sit down and the cages are placed along a trough of water so they all share the same water. At the farm, there was one bucket of water per pen which again limits the spread of disease.

Next, on to the bit that puts people off eating foie gras – the force-feeding. Francis told us that he sometimes shows people how he force-feeds the ducks, but that he couldn’t today as they weren’t due to be fed until the evening. He explained that they force-feed them by hand with locally produced corn. The advantage of feeding them by hand is that you know when they are full so each duck gets just what they need depending on size. It takes him about an hour to feed 60 ducks – in mass production, the ducks in cages all get given the same amount of feed regardless of size (usually the small ones die, because they can’t handle the amount they are given) through a machine driven tube stuffed down their necks and it takes 2 seconds thus enabling them to feed 600 ducks in an hour. On the farm, they are fed like this twice a day – exactly every 12 hours – which gives the ducks the exact amount of time needed to properly digest the food before taking on board the next lot. They are force-fed at the farm for 28 days before slaughter. Needless to say,  the caged ducks get more feeds a day and are only force fed for 13 days before being killed.

Francis insists that his ducks are happy ducks and that they enjoy being fed. Their existance didn’t seem too happy to me, but then Francis told us some more about their lives prior to the pens and the compulsory dinners in the shed. His ducks come from a farm in Guzet-Neige (a ski resort in the Pyrénées), they are raised outdoors on the slopes of the mountains which makes them healthy ducks with strong legs. They live happily in the Pyrénées for the first 4 months of their lives (or until they reach 5kg in weight) and then they are taken to La Ferme aux Téoulets for a final month of fattening up which will take their weight up to 7.5kg and thanks to their strong legs, 98% of them are able to cope with the weight increase. The other 2% ’s legs can’t take the strain and spend their days sat down.

All in all, it was a really interesting visit. I would encourage anyone who can to visit the farm or a similar farm and see for themselves what happens to their food before it hits the plate. I will continue to eat and enjoy Foie Gras, but I’ll try very hard to make sure that it comes from Farms like La Ferme aux Téoulets.

Non piu di cinque

I hope you don’t mind Rhiannon, but I found your comment on Food Quote #7 really interesting and so have promoted it to a blog post to try and generate some discussion!

I’m reading a book called ‘The Glassblower of Murano’ by Marino Fiorata which is excellent. Anyway, you’re probably wondering what that has to do with food, its just that it mentioned the Venetian saying “non piu di cinque”. To quote from the book – “Never more than five. Venetians say that you should not use more ingredients than you have fingers of one hand”. I’m not sure if that’s just to do with sauces or the meal overall? Have you heard of such a saying? I tried to keep to it with my pasta dish tonight but got to 8! garlic, mushroom, baby leaf greens, peas, rosemary, cambozola (+a bit of milk) and pasta (+paremsan sprinkling to finish). It was still delicious even if it was more than five!

Flicking through my cookbooks, I struggled to find any recipes with only five ingredients! I’m sure there are many delicious recipes that exist that contain five ingredients or less. Do any of you have any that you know of and recommend?

Food Quote #7

This quote is for parents who are worried their one year old isn’t eating enough so it’s kind of food-related!

If a child continued to grow at the same rate as in the first year, he would be 29 metres long and weigh 200 tonnes by the age of ten.

ELIZABETH MORSE My Child won’t eat

Perhaps I’ll stop insisting that Harri eats everything I lovingly cook for him!

Discoveries

Sometimes I make great discoveries by randomly combining ingredients that are left over from having bought them for a specific recipe – Rich calls it free-styling. This week I had some Mascarpone left over and I wondered if it would taste good with some Sweet Chilli Sauce as a salad dressing – it did! Combine 1 tbsp Mascarpone with 1 tbsp Sweet Chilli Sauce, a drop of water to loosen and you get a delicious alternative to Caesar Salad dressing – I say this beacause we had it with Chicken, Parmesan, Croutons and the usual crudités.

Have you made any good “accidental” discoveries in the kitchen?

Pollack and Chorizo Kebabs with Butter Beans and Tomatoes

As promised in my previous post (Fishy Business), here is the recipe using Pollack that I made last week when the weather was so hot that anything I cooked had to go on the barbecue. The recipe is an adaptation of one that Gordon Ramsey wrote in this article.

Pollack is readily available in the supermarkets here, I hope you have no trouble finding some and don’t forget to look out for that MSC label. You need about 150-200g of fish per person I think. The fillet I got was a long one so I cut it into strips, you could use chunks if the piece of fish is more suited to that.

For two people you need 1 tbsp olive oil; a small onion, finely chopped; two garlic cloves, finely chopped; 12-14cm chorizo sausage sliced into 1cm (minimum) slices; 50ml Floc de Gascogne (dry sherry will do); 250g cherry tomatoes, halved; 150g butter beans, rinsed; a handful of fresh basil to garnish, 300g Pollack and 15g melted butter.

Gently fry the onion, garlic and chorizo in the olive oil for about 5 minutes – don’t let it burn. Remove the chorizo and set aside. Add the Floc or sherry and cook for another 5 minutes, then add the tomatoes and butter beans and cook for a final 5 minutes.

Now get your chorizo and thread it onto some skewers with the pollack whicheverway suits your fancy. Brush with olive oil and cook on a very hot barbecue until the fish is cooked – it should only take 5 or 6 minutes – brush them with melted butter right at the end of cooking.

Divide the beans and tomatoes between two plates, top with the pollack and chorizo kebabs and garnish with basil. Eat and enjoy!

If you don’t want to barbecue it, or the weather is inclement where you are, then you could do the skewers in the oven, or follow Ramsey’s recipe – it’ll probably taste as good!

Fishy business

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. I first thought about it when I saw an episode of Springwatch  on the BBC in which Kate Humble visited a fish market in the UK. What struck me about the programme was a statistic mentioned by the fish market manager – 75% of fish caught in British Waters is exported and 80% of the fish that the British consume is imported from abroad! I have tried my best to find a video clip of this to no avail. I think if you live in the UK, you can watch it on this page on the BBC Springwatch website and click on Watch a preview of Springwatch Sea Life, let me know.

One of the messages being put accross in the programme was that people are reluctant to try anything new. When we go to the Fish and Chips shop, we like to stick with good old Cod or Haddock. The programme was suggesting that we should try to help fish stocks in danger, like Cod, by eating more sustainable fish like Gurnard, Coley or Pollack. It’s not the first time in the last year that I’ve read about or watched programmes about celebrity chefs telling us all to try new, sustainable fish: Rick Stein loves Gurnard, Gordon Ramsey eats Pollack, Jamie Oliver keeps telling us to make sure our fish is sustainable, so surely, Joe Bloggs must be getting the idea?

I went on holiday to England and Wales this summer and I thought that I would test whether your average Chip shops are selling anything other than Cod or Haddock. France doesn’t really do Fish and Chips so I had two  good excuses to treat myself on holiday! I visited three different Fish and Chip shops and was disappointed with what I found.  Mumbles, Gower – only Cod – plus, if the portions were half the size that would help Cod stocks – neither Rich nor I could eat our whole portions. Next, Seahouses in Northumberland in a Chip shop endorsed by the Hairy Bikers – just Cod – sensible portion sizes though. Lastly, the famous Magpie Café Fish and Chip shop in Whitby, I was sure that they would offer something different. They did – Cod and Haddock! If you go to the actual restaurant menu, there is a broader selection, but still no Pollack, Gurnard or Coley. There is obviously some work to do yet on getting different fish into the Chip shops in Britain – or the three that I visited anyway!

To find out more about declining fish stocks and sustainable fish, visit fishonline, the Marine Conservation Society’s website and if you’re thinking of going out to buy some fish for tea, check out their fish to eat and fish to avoid sites.

You can also look out for the Marine Stewardship Council’s label on any fish that you buy – this gurantees that it has come from a certified sustainable fishery. Here’s a video about the Marine Stewardship Council’s efforts:

Pollack is widely available in France so In my next blog post, I’ll share the recipe for a delicious Pollack dish that I made last night – you can see the photos on my flickr site to whet your appetites.

Real Surf and Turf

Everybody is doing it at the moment – restaurants accross the globe are serving up plates combining the three following ingredients – black pudding, scallops and apple. Type the three ingredients into google and the recipes are abundant.  We had an amazing five course meal at the Hotel des Elmes in Banyuls-sur-mer back in June which included a course of three delectable little towers of boudin noir and scallops topped with pommes julienne. Over the summer I replicated the meal with Scallops and black pudding from Swansea market which was just as nice even if it wasn’t by the Mediterranean sea in the hot sun!

Towers seem to be the in-thing to do – they’re simple, but look good. To break away from the norm, I tried another variation the other night. Rich declared that he wanted surf and turf on the barbecue, so I went to the supermarket to get steak and prawns and came back with 6 Scallops and a length of boudin noir instead! I cut a big apple into quarters and then halved the quarters making big chunks of apple and threaded these along with the scallops and thick (about 2cm) slices of boudin onto 2 skewers (Apple, boudin, scallop, Apple etc finishing with apple) and cooked them on a very hot barbecue for 2-3 minutes each side. Delicious!

I feel the need to add a cautionary note here – French boudin noir is far crumblier than Welsh Black Pudding from Swansea market – the latter I think would work better on a BBQ – we had to be very careful not to lose any boudin through the grill!

Food Quotes #6

Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.

Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are.

ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN 1755-1826 Physiologie du Goût 1825