Recipe - Braised Red Cabbage

We're not talking advanced cookery here but it is still a recipe that is worth having tucked away. Braised red cabbage goes well with quite a lot of dishes and people have been known to eat is cold as well as heated.

It is definitely something that you can freestyle quite a bit.This time we cooked it quite safe and boring, mostly due to the fact that we were serving it to people whose preferences we weren't sure about. Next time we might swing it a bit more. Add in some freshly squeezed orange juice and grated skin from the orange? Why not. Add some grated nutmeg and grated allspice, why not? We actually had some star anise in from the beginning which we removed once we thought it had added enough aniseedy flavour.

We had this on the side with a beef and blue cheese pie we served on New Years Eve but that's just one thing to have it with. I think you'll be able to think up some other combinations to go with.

Just a note though, if you cook it on the stove top - make sure to check it often and add liquid as and when needed. Alternatively, lid on and in the oven at 180c for about an hour and you shouldn't need to worry too much about it running dry.

Enough chit-chat, we got a recipe to look at.

Ingredients

2 red onions, sliced

1 red cabbage, about 1 kg, sliced
1 large Bramley apple, peeled and roughly diced
250 ml water (more needed later as you cook away)
60 ml red wine vinegar
3 tbsp brown sugar
Salt
Pepper


Method
Heat a large casserole pan on the hob. Once hot pour in some olive oil and fry off the onion until soft. Add in the other ingredients and stir well. Let this cook under a lid (or alternaively in the oven as per above) for about an hour or until soft to your liking, stirring now and then. Adjust the seasoning as you go along.


Enjoy!

Recipe - Celeriac Remoulade

Since I try to be honest with my postings I'll admit it straight away. This recipe is stolen from Jeans excellent blog Delightful Repast, her version with a very nice picture can be found here.

In my view celeriac remoulade is just a slightly posher coleslaw but I find that it goes extremely nicely with smoked meats. One of our regular haunts, The Five Horseshoes, quite often have smoked dishes on the menu.Celeriac remoulade are more often than not part of those dishes.

The inspiration from those dishes is what led me to want to make some celeriac remoulade to go with the smoked duck breasts we were bringing for New Years Eve. Some google-fu later and I had found Jeans excellent recipe and Robert was married to your mothers sister.

The remoulade definitely benefits from staying in the fridge at least over night, the flavours generally gets deeper that way.

I guess this is such a simple recipe that there's really no need for me to waffle on any longer. Let's have a look at how this is made. Just a quick note - you can of course cut/slice the celeriac by hand if you don't have a food processor.

Ingredients (made enough for eight people not to miss out)
700g celeriac (celery root)
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp fresh lemon juice
6 tbsp mayonnaise
3 tsp minced pickled gherkin
2 tsp drained, rinsed and chopped capers
2 tsp Dijon mustard
Ground black pepper

Method
Clean up the celeriac root, trimming off all the nasty stuff. Cut the celeriac into smaller pieces that fits into the feeder tube of your food processor. Pop a shredder disk into your food processor and shred the celeriac.

Put the shredded celeriac into a non-reactive bowl and toss with the salt and two tablespoons of the lemon juice. Cover the bowl and let this sit for about an hour.

Mix together all the other ingredients and stir in with the shredded celeriac.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Forgotten Cookies

I haven't researched it but I would hazard a guess that the name for these cookies come from the fact that you leave them in the oven and forget about them for quite some time.

I'm not much into sweet stuff but when I tasted some of these over Christmas I really liked them. What you seen on this picture is our attempt at making them.

Ours didn't turn out quite as nice as Mrs T's but I blame that on our oven. Make sure that the seal on your oven is intact so the heat doesn't go down too quickly. A long and slow cooking is what's needed to make these extra delicious.

I'm sure you could pop some other nice stuff in them but this is a good start at least. Basically they're just some meringues with walnut and chocolate so there's loads of room for freestyling. Some chopped up raspberries anyone?

There seems to be quite a lot of different recipes around for this but this is sort of what we freestyled together from a bunch of them.....

Ingredients (makes about 30)
2 large egg whites
120g golden caster sugar
120g roughly chopped walnuts
150g good quality dark chocolate, roughly chopped
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180c.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff and dry. Whisk in the sugar a little at a time until you got a nice and glossy meringue. Fold in the walnuts and chocolate carefully, using a metal spoon.

Spoon teaspoon-sized mounds of the mixture onto baking sheets that have been covered with tin foil.

Pop the baking sheet into the oven, turn off the oven and let the cookies sit in there until the oven is cold.

Be careful when you remove the cookies from the tin foil.

Enjoy!

Two quick links...

I was greatly surprised, and felt quite proud, when I got an email from Kevin from The BBQ Smoker Site.


Apparently he had spotted my site and liked it enough to put it as a Blog Spotlight on his excellent site.

I have followed Kevins blog in my RSS reader for quite some time but this came as a complete surprise to me. A very pleasant surprise though.

So head over to have a look at Kevin's site - there's quite a lot of goodness there.

Secondly, hell has not frozen over totally - yet. However, this blog now has its own Facebook Page. This is just the blog, not me. I'm still being a bit of a luddite and refuse to get my own Facebook account but if you are of that persuasion, please like and follow the Freestyle Cookery Facebook Page.

Over and out for now...

Recipe - Merguez Sausages

As regular readers will know I recently bought myself a sausage stuffer, something I wrote about here, and this was my first attempt of trying to use it.

I better give some background as well. Patience have never been one of my strong sides and I might not always have been the best at dealing with things not going exactly as I want, especially when it comes to new things that I think I should be able to master.

There was much joy in my family regaling the story about how as a four year old I was trying ice skating for the first time. Having seen ice hockey on telly many a time even at that tender age I was certain that I knew exactly how to skate.

Needless to say the ice and the skates conspired to show me differently. The tantrum that followed was of epic proportions. The ice skates were thrown across the ice with all the might of a royally pissed off four year old. My parents spent the next couple of weeks quizzing friends and family as to who might have taught me the very spicy language I used.

It took them another three years until I agreed to go near an ice rink again.

With that background, and many more examples that I should not share with you, I did approach this entire sausage stuffing adventure with quite a bit of apprehension. I was envisaging things going horribly wrong, sausage mix all over the kitchen and a very nice and shiny sausage stuffer being smashed into pieces.

No one was more surprised than I when it actually went quite well and I responded maturely to the small setbacks I encountered. The quality of the sausage stuffer I bought from Franco's Famous Sausage Making was probably part of this. A really good piece of kit, top quality. I can't praise it high enough, I'm glad I went for a decently sized machine, I think that will pay off in the end.

The worst bit was probably getting the casing onto the spout, but with some patience and deep breathing I managed to figure out some kind of knack and got it done.

I did have a couple of hiccups where the sausage mixture did some funny things but all that I did then was to cut off the casing and re-tie it in both ends and keep going.

The recipe I used comes from a most excellent Swedish book called Korv (Sausage) written by a bloke named Kristofer Franzén. It is a truly inspirational book and I really hope it would be translated to English because I believe it is worthy of a much bigger audience. It sure beats quite a lot of the English language books I've read on the subject matter.

You might be a bit surprised as to the very exact measurements in this recipe, it's not my normal cavalier freestyling approach. That approach doesn't really work on sausage making, but fear not - once I've managed to understand things a bit better I'll soon be coming up with my own weird and wonderful attempts at making sausages that taste exactly my way.

Well, there's been one quite embarrassing story from my childhood and some other waffling so I think it is high time to head over to the recipe.

One final thing first though, there will be some recipes in the near future where I use these sausages so if you don't know what to have them with - despair not.

Ingredients (makes 2kg mix, enough for about 35 sausages)
Meat
1200g lamb, not too lean - diced
800g beef chuck - diced

Spices
32g sea salt
36g olive oil
6g ground black pepper
3g ground fennel seeds
20g crushed garlic
24g harissa

Method
Make sure that the meat has the right temperature, preferably frozen on the surface. Alternatively freeze it completely and then let it defrost in the fridge over night.

Pour some luke warm water into a bowl and put about 8 meters worth of lamb casings into it to rehydrate and flush out the salt. Let this sit for two to three hours. Rinse through the casings a couple of times to make extra sure that the salt is gone.

Spread the salt on the meat and mince the meat using a medium sized mincer plate.

Mix the minced meat, oil and spices either by hand or in the bowl of a stand mixer on a low speed until it all binds together nicely. Try not to let the meat mixture to get warmer than 4c at any stage of these processes.

Transfer the meat mixture into the container of your sausage stuffer, or whatever apparatus you will be using to stuff the casings.

Thread the casings onto the sausage stuffer spout and feed the meat mixture until it is at the end of the spout and ready to start filling the casing.

Tie a knot at the end of the casing and start filling, making sure not to fill too hard. Finish by tying a knot in the other end too.

Make 15 - 20 cm long sausages by pinching with the thumb and index finger of one hand about one sausage length into the casing and then the same thing with the other hand another sausage length in. Twist the sausage you have between your hands forwards. Measure another sausage length and repeat. Repeat until all sausages have been 'created'.

It's good to let the sausages rest for a couple of hours, or over night in the fridge, before you cook them.

Cut links between the sausages and grill them or fry them in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil until they start browning up.

Try not to overcook them since they don't contain much fat at all.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Cold and Hot Smoked Duck Breast

We were invited over to a couple of friends for a New Years Eve celebration and we said that we'd bring some food with us.

This is what we brought for starter, cold and hot smoked duck breasts which we served with celeriac remoulade. You'll have to wait a bit for the celeriac recipe but you can have the duck recipe now.

This is a quite simple recipe but the end result is very rewarding. This time I cooked two duck breasts, which I thought would be enough for starters for us. If you cook more, just increase the brine proportions accordingly.

As for the brine, I added some brown sugar, black peppercorns and ground allspice to the recipe below. That's not necessary at all but if you feel like it, go for it. If not, just skip it. Even better - freestyle it with the flavourings you think will work.

Adjust the smoking times to suit you, the cold smoking can be in the region of two to three hours (mine was in for two hours and twenty minutes) and the hot smoking is normally fine with around an hours smoke. However, freestyle it to your hearts content as always.

I used alder wood for this, but guess what - if you prefer a different flavour go for it.

As I said in the beginning I served this with celeriac remoulade but I could just as well have gone with a red onion marmalade or chutney for example.

Enough chit-chat, let us have a look how to make this....

Ingredients (enough for 4 very generous starter portions)
Brine
1.5l water
400g salt

Two duck breasts, skin on

Method
Bring the water to a boil, remove from the heat and stir in the salt. Let this cool down before pouring into a non-reactive container.

Score the skin on the duck breasts in a crosshatch pattern, trying not to cut into the meat. Add the duck breasts to the brine, weighing down with a plate if needed to make sure they're fully submerged. Let this brine for 2 - 3 hours, depending on the size of the duck breasts.

Remove from the brine, rinse well and pat dry. Let them sit in the fridge, uncovered, over night to dry out properly.

The next day remove them from the fridge as you prepare your smoker for cold smoking.

Once the smoke is rolling, pop the duck breasts into the smoker and smoke for 2 - 3 hours according to taste.

When the time is up, remove the duck breasts from the smoker and prepare the smoker for hot smoking at 100c/210F instead.

Once the smoker have reached that temperature and the smoke is rolling again - add the duck breasts back into the smoker.

Smoke for an hour and then turn off the smoke generator. Staying at the 100c/210F temperature let the duck breasts cook until they reach an internal temperature of 71c/160F.

Once they've reached that temperature, remove them from the smoker and let them cool down a bit. When they're a bit cooler, heat up a frying pan on a medium temperature.

Pop in the duck breasts, skin side down, and let them render down the fat for about 2 to 3 minutes. If you cook the duck breasts in batches, make sure to remove the rendered fat between each batch.

Remove the duck breasts from the pan and pat them dry with some kitchen towel and let them cool down again. Suitably cooled, wrap them in cling film and let them rest in the fridge over night.

The next day you can slice them up nice and thinly and either eat them right then or vacuum pack them for later consumption.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Guinness Mustard

The other night I overheard(?) a conversation between some Swedish food bloggers on Twitter where they discussed different mustard versions they were making.

As the discussion went to and fro the memory of seeing Guinness Mustard at some farmers market came to my mind and I chimed in with that suggestion.

Having given them the suggestion I also said that I'd try and chase down a recipe for them. Having applied some Google-Fu I soon had lots of version of the same recipe from various blogs. The source of that particular recipe seems to be one published in Saveur magazine.

Having suggested that they tried this and having taken the time to hunt a recipe down I realised that I might as well make some myself.

I'm not proud so I decided to use the same recipe as everyone else, after all - it's not all that often that I can find major faults with recipes from Saveur.

This mustard will last in the fridge for up to 6 months - but I don't think it will last that long for most people. A most excellent mustard and a good start down the slippery slope of playing with different flavourings for your mustards. I'm sure there's space for more jars and stuff in our cupboards... ;)

One thing I'd like to add to the recipe is that it will take some time in the old food processor before it starts thickening up. Fear not, give it some time and it will thicken up nicely.

Ingredients (makes around 800ml)
350 ml Guinness
375 ml brown mustard seeds
250 ml red wine vinegar
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground allspice

Method
Combine all the ingredients in a nonreactive bowl. Cover with cling film and let sit at room temperature for 1 - 2 days so that the flavours mix and the mustard seeds soften.

Transfer the mixture to a food processor and mix until the seeds are coarsely ground and the mixture thickens, stopping to scrape down mixture from the sides of the bowl when needed, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a jar and cover.

Refrigerate overnight before first use.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Meatloaf à la Lindström

Long time readers of this blog might remember a recipe for classic Swedish dish called Beef à la Lindström that I posted back in 2008? No? To be honest, I couldn't remember if I posted it or not so I had to search for it myself.

The other day I saw this take on Beef à la Lindström combined with meatloaf in some email newsletter from a Swedish supermarket chain that I subscribe to just to get some new ideas. Since both Beef à la Lindström and meatloaf are two of my favourite dishes I thought I'd give it a go.

Being me, I freestyled it a bit - at least enough for them not to sue me. I hope. ;)

This is a bit of a different approach to meatloaf but hopefully it can inspire you to try some new variations. I've made cheeseburger meatloaf in the past, where you layer in some crispy bacon and cheese - worked like a charm. Give freestyling your meatloaf a go, what's the worst that can happen? Hang on, please don't answer that. ;)

As you see from the photo, the beetroot juices seeps out and gives the meatloaf a slightly pink tinge. Maybe you could sell it to your kids as a Barbie-loaf. Or not.

Enough waffling, let's see how this was made.

Ingredients (serves 4)
4 tbsp breadcrumbs
100 ml milk
1 kg beef mince
2 eggs
8 - 10 pickled baby beetroots
1 onion, chopped
100 ml capers, finely chopped
Salt
Pepper

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 200c.

Mix the breadcrumbs with the milk and let that stand for a couple of minutes.

In a bowl, mix together the breadcrumb paste with the other ingredients, minus the beetroots. Season to taste.

Take two 1kg loaf tins, or one 2kg one if you got one, and make a bottom layer of mince mixture in each. Portion out the beetroots and top with the remainder of the mince mixture.

Pop this into the oven for 40 - 45 minutes or until it is cooked through.

Serve with potatoes and some vegetables.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Dill Chicken / Recept - Dillkyckling

This is a recipe that really brings back memories. We used to be served this in school fairly often and I do think that we had it at home regularly too.

I might be mistaken but I believe that there's also a very similar recipe but for lamb instead. Swedish readers might want to pipe up and correct me if I'm wrong?

It is funny, I had not eaten this for over 12 years - I don't think I'd be lying if I said that it was over 15 years - but as soon as I sat down to eat it memories flushed over me. Food is one of the things that memories get the strongest associations with, at least for me.

I might have to revisit some of the old dishes I associate with my childhood. There's already been some posts, like my Flying Jacob / Flygande Jakob recipe but there's lots of others that I think (hope?) that you readers might find interesting? Then there are some that are just innuendo heaven when I translate them, Seaman Stew anyone? :)

After that bombshell, let's talk about this recipe a bit.

You can use any chicken meat really, thighs are to prefer for the flavour and texture but 3 - 4 chicken breasts works too if you're not into your thighs.

The amount of water, 1 liter, might look a tad bit little but fear not, it will be ok. If you want to add some more carrot or leek, go ahead. In the recipe I say to use about 500ml of the stock, use more or less to get the thickness of the sauce you want. Guess what - freestyle it! :)

The classic side dish for this is potatoes but I would just as well serve it with rice.

Ingredients (serves 4)
1 l water
1 carrot, peeled and cut into medallions
1 leek, cut into 2 cm wide pieces
2 bay leafs
5 - 6 white pepper corns
2 tsp salt
600g chicken, cut into bitesize pieces
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp plain flour
100 ml single cream
1 tbsp distilled malt vinegar
2 tbsp golden caster sugar
1 bunch of dill, chopped
Salt
Pepper

Method
Put the water, bay leafs, pepper corns and salt into a pan and bring to a boil. Add in the carrot, leek and chicken and let this simmer for about 15 - 20 minutes. Remove any foam etc that gets onto the surface of the water.

Drain the stock into a container and keep the rest in a colander or sieve for the time being.

Clean out and dry the pan. Melt the butter and whisk in the flour, trying not to get any lumps. Slowly add stock, whisking all the time, until you've incorporated about 500 ml of it. Stir in the cream.

Heat the vinegar and sugar either in another pan or in the microwave until the sugar is dissolved. Stir this mixture into the pan.

Add the vegetables and chicken back into the pan and let this heat through for another 5 minutes or so.

Season with salt and pepper.

Enjoy!

Oh my, that's a big one you got there...

Why, thank you. But enough about that - this is after all, at times, a family friendly blog. ;)

Followers of this blog and my Twitter feed will have noticed that I'm getting into smoking, making my own bacon and so on. The next logical, at least to me, step is to start looking at making my own sausages.

I do have the sausage stuffing attachment for my KitchenAid but to say that one looks flimsy is like saying that Paris Hilton seems to be a bit of a slapper. As I quite often do at times like this I used my Google-Fu to look at what other people recommend as well as good reviews for companies to purchase from.

One company that kept popping up, with good feedback, was Franco's Famous Sausage Making. I had a look at the site and there was lots of options, anything from small sausage stuffers to kits with industrial size stuffers complete with rusk, spice mixes and so on.

Me being me, always forgetting that I'm a happy amateur in a small kitchen and not actually a fully fledged chef in a commercial kitchen, decided after much deliberating to go for the "Deluxe Sausage Making Kit". That one comes with a 5L Pro stuffer, rusk, spice mixes and so on. There are smaller models. Much smaller models, that fit in normal kitchens, for normal people. I'm not normal.

Once the decision had been made it was time to order it. When I tried to access the site it was down. Hang on, what's going on here? After checking through a couple of different paths out of our network I decided that the fault was in the other end.

A quick tweet was sent off to @sausagemaking to check what was up. Shortly after that, the site was back and a reply was received over twitter. After I placed my order I was told that due to the problems there would be some extras in the parcel. Ace!

The next day the parcels arrived and I started to realise just how big a 5L sausage stuffer really are. On the plus side, I won't have to refill it as often as I would a wee one. ;)

There was definitely some extras thrown in, very generously indeed.

So now I have my sausage stuffer, casings, spice mixes, rusk and all the other stuff. Coming up on this blog you will follow my trials and tribulations as I try to teach myself how to make different types of sausages. I can foresee quite a lot of swearing, tantrums and chucking of things in the near future. So if you're a fan of car-crash television you might want to check in here every now and then.

Now where can I keep this monster of a sausage stuffer...

488W9XYD7F9T