Category: General kitchen chat

I’ve been cooking since I was young and there have been different influences that have shaped how and what I cook. I cook for the joy of feeding people I love and for the pleasure of using skills I have developed.

Julia Child has probably been one of the biggest influences on my cooking. If you want to improve as a cook, ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ (MTAOFC) is a must. It has no colour pictures and there is the odd line drawing say of a vegetable or some other item of food, if you’re lucky. It is the perfect artefact of the analogue age.

There is a lovely film called ‘Julie & Julia’ that tells the story of how Julia became an exceptional cook via her passion for food and the Cordon Bleu school. How she came to change cooking in America is beautifully told (with expected artistic license). Or you can read Julia’s own book ‘My Life in France’.

Julia was a perfectionist. She deconstructed classic French dish after French dish, learned how to make each, broke it down into steps and then wrote those steps down in MTAOFC. Julia’s recipes work. If you have the proper ingredients and carefully execute the steps – the results are wonderful. Any difficult skill or technique is explained.

I’m a word person (duh – blogger) so I’m good with the explanations. You might not be – but you can search any recommended technique and you’ll find a video on Youtube. Here’s one on how to bone a duck. Not recommended for vegetarians. Veggies and vegans – check out this one on making apple matchsticks.

Julia did fail the Cordon Bleu final exam on the first attempt but rallied and passed the second time. Working with MTAOFC you will absorb classic French techniques. And you will eat a lot of butter and cream. And bacon. Lots and lots. But Julia ate this stuff everyday, was a happy woman and lived to be 91.

Cooking ‘like Julia’ from her cookbook made me a much better cook. Many of most significant recipes have you cooking the elements separately and combining them at the point of serving. However, the impact of this approach is to call down devastation on the kitchen. You may need a dedicated assistant to help with the washing up or wash up at every pause in the recipe. Thank goodness for the Davinator.

Our favourite from MTAOFC is ‘coq au vin’ or chicken in red wine sauce. Sounds simple doesn’t it? You will find many many versions of this dish in France and many recipes on the Internet. Here’s a link to an updated version of Julia’s classic from ‘The Endless Meal’. I cook from the book but this is a good internet alternative.

Below are the ’10 Commandments of Coq au Vin’. I was inspired to write these after an early attempt at Coq au Vin. They are irreverent but I’m not mocking religion. We all worship different gods. My worship is probably bad for your cholesterol but your taste buds will be happy.

The Ten Commandments of Coq au Vin

1. I am Cordon Bleu, the Lord of French Cooking, who brought thee and thine out of the land of happy meals, ready meals, instant noodles and supersize me’. Julia Child is my prophet. Thou shalt have no other cookbooks or recipes before me.

2. Thou shall not make for thyself any ‘shortcuts’ when following my commandments. Thou shalt not omit to cartouche thy pots with buttered parchment paper. Thy shall peel as many tiny pearl onions as is commanded and caramelise them thyself. In all ways, thou shalt observe my guidance. For I, the Lord of French Cooking, shall visit the iniquity of the chef upon thee and thy dinner party guests even unto the dessert and petits fours for those who do not keep my laws.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord of French Cooking in vain. Thou shalt never say ‘Gordon Ramsay’, ‘Jamie Oliver’ or ‘Nigella Lawson’ and thou shalt not keep any of the works of these heathen in thy kitchen. For they are examples of false prophets and they and their followers are the unholy ones.

4. Thy shall sacrifice an entire day and a night to making of thy Coq au Vin. Thou shalt cause the coq to marinade for 24 hours from the eve of the Sabbath and then dedicate thyself to the making of the coq au vin from just after lunch on the seventh day until thy dinner party guests arrive that evening.

5. Honour my disciples Paul Bocuse and Michel Roux and all those that follow my true ways for they are thy teachers and can show thee the path of righteousness. Worship at the many shrines to me that thy shall find in France.

6. Thou shall procure a true French coq from Bresse, the only A.O.C (appellation de origine controlee) chicken (if possible) and the true pearl onions even if thou must worship at the shrine of natoora.co.uk or Whole Foods or another importer of gourmet produce.

7. Thou shalt sacrifice two good bottles of the true Burgundy that have ageth at least five years. These need not be a grand cru nor a premiere cru, a village appellation shall suffice. However, if thou truly honour the God of Cordon Bleu thou would happily give up thy Romanee Conti to worship him.

8. Thou shalt not retain the vegetables that are stewed with the coq in the sauce once the coq in sauce hath passed through the high heat of the oven. For these vegetables have served the Lord of Cordon Bleu with honour and their continuing presence would disturb the smooth deep brown of the ultimate sauce.

9. Thou shall degrease thy sauce. Indeed, if thou arriveth near the end of the creation of the coq au vin and there is a clean saucepan, spoon or kitchen implement – thy must pause to reflect if any steps have been omitted. For the scrubbing of pots, surfaces and implements is pleasing to the Lord of Cordon Bleu.

10. Thou shall use butter (unsalted French butter) with reckless abandon for it is pleasing to me. Thou shalt never use the words ‘too much butter’ for this is heresy and thee and all thy generations shall suffer if thou utter it.

A couple of tips for Americans:

• if you can’t get Burgundy at a reasonable price, then reasonably dry Pinot noir of decent quality. This is not the dish for any old cooking wine.
• get a fat roasting chicken if you can’t get a capon.
• eat the butter, you know you want to.

Thanks for reading the blog, for comments, for following and sharing.

Don’t know what to get your favourite cook for Christmas? Another cookbook never goes amiss because a cook never has too many books.

We all use the internet for recipes, techniques and inspiration for our cooking and our baking. I’m a big fan. The internet is also amazing for finding communities of bakers and cooks interested in your specialist subject.

There are times though that only a book will do. Even for cooking. Perhaps especially for cooking and baking. Bookmarks, browsing, page flipping, looking at pictures. And actually using them for cooking. With care, a beginner could use most of these cookbooks. Except for the Guy Savoy cookbook and the Tartine book – approach those with caution as I explain below.

No links here but all are easily found on your favourite book buying platform.

Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques

An amazing book that ups your game. If you have MasterChef envy or just you want to know how to skim the fat from your meat stock without letting it cool – this is the book for you. Full of tricks of the trade – it will show you an easy way to make your egg whites stronger (thus your souffle will never fall). It starts with a great section on equipment for your kitchen – with illustrations. And finishes with a glossary of terms from ‘al dente’ to ‘zest’. I get this book out when I feel like I’m getting the taste right but my presentation or finish needs help.

The Taste of Country Cooking

Edna Lewis, the genius behind this book, was the descendant of freed slaves and grew up in Freetown, Virginia. She moved to New York City as a young woman and became a famous chef. Her book is a hymn to country cooking, an inspiration to eat in season, to make your own food and to support local producers and farmers.

The book is arranged in seasonal menus with a good index at the back to find recipes. It starts with ‘ An Early Spring Dinner After Sheep Shearing’ (sheep shearing is not required) and ends with ‘A Dinner of Chicken and Dumplings and Warm Gingerbread’. I take this book down off the shelf to inspire me when I’m bored with my current cooking routine.

The New Basics Cookbook from the Silver Palate.

The Silver Palate claims to be the first gourmet take out food store in Manhattan. Not sure if that’s true but it appeared in the early 80s, followed by a couple of cookbooks and finally this one. I have them all and use them regularly. The pages are falling out of this one – I have thought about making it a looseleaf book but it’s just too much work to hole punch all the pages. It’s not a comprehensive cookbook but it’s full of fun and interesting recipes and fun twists on classics. Published long before gluten free, lactose intolerant and vegans became things – it’s a book for feasting not calorie counting. Joyful cooking.

Essentials of Italian Cooking

The Slow Food movement was founded by an Italian who was profoundly distressed by the slow disappearance of Italian regional cuisine (in Italy) and the attempt to open an McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome. If Italian cuisine was being homogenised across Italy you can imagine what happened to Italian cuisine elsewhere in the world.

Marcella Hazan was a one woman rescue party for Italian food. Early in our relationship the Davinator said to me ‘I don’t like Italian food’. I said, ‘that’s fine’ and proceeded to start feeding him Marcella’s classic dishes. Without telling him they were Italian.

The book is fun reading if only for Marcella’s food snobbery as a counterbalance to my childhood spent eating SpaghettiOs. Her disdain for mass produced pasta, heavy handed use of garlic and Kraft grated parmesan (remember the bright green container?) is entertaining even if I disregard some of her absolute prohibitions. I also think (at least in the UK) it’s easier to get quality ingredients than when she wrote her books.

The book is a celebration of the regional cuisine of Italy; any complicated technique is well explained and illustrated. There is a fab section on basics that covers not only sauces and ingredients but stocks and cooking techniques for things as diverse as beans and anchovies. From crostini to zuppa including a fabulous section on Italian desserts – dive right in.

Guy Savoy – Simple French Recipes for the Home Cook

Guy Savoy is a famous French chef with a Michelin 3 star restaurant in Paris, another in Las Vegas and a chain of bistros. Guy’s in Paris is my favourite restaurant in the world. But the big money in cooking is not in the ultra fancy restaurants but in the cooking shows, the cookbooks and the chain of more reasonably priced restaurants. This book was one of Guy’s efforts expand his footprint.

This cookbook is not for the faint hearted. I call it ‘3 lies for the price of 1’. It’s not simple, it’s not really for ‘home cooks’ and I’m not sure it has recipes. It has lists of ingredients and an overview of cooking methods; but they make leaps of process that are a serious challenge to any but an expert cook. It took me 3 attempts to achieve the macaroni and cheese recipe. I have had to revert to other reference materials (see Cordon Bleu above and Julia Child below) to master recipes.

But once I had worked out the mac & cheese – it is absolutely amazing. As are the other recipes in the book. Worth the effort of practice for the impact. Take a deep breath and plunge in.

Artisan Sourdough Made Simple

This has slowly become my go to book for sourdough recipes. It makes a lot of sense and the recipes work. I found a sourdough sandwich bread recipe that the Davinator loves and an amazing brioche recipe. It’s a contest to see if I can make brioche rolls faster than the Davinator can eat them.

If you’re dipping your toes into sourdough – this is your book.

Tartine Bread

The Tartine mob may deserve credit for the artisan bread craze in San Francisco. The book describes their amazing journey and has lots of detailed descriptions of how to make sourdough bread. It’s beautifully written and has good photographs but it reminds of that joke about asking for directions in Ireland. A couple is lost. They stop and ask a farmer for directions to Ballymaloe. The farmer thinks for a few minutes, asks a couple of clarifying questions and says ‘Well, if I was trying to get to Ballymaloe, I wouldn’t be starting here’.

If you’re starting out as a sourdough baker – I wouldn’t start with Tartine. I do use it and it looks good on my shelf. But recommended not for beginners.

King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking

I use this book more than any other baking book I own, including the sourdough ones. The King Arthur team set out to making whole grain baked goods taste good. And they succeeded. There may be recipes in this book that don’t suit your taste buds (I realised I don’t like things made with cornmeal) but all the recipes work and they taste good. It’s an American book and they use both quantity and imperial weight (pounds and ounces). My sister Rachael bought this for me some years ago – it’s a perennial favourite and produces crowd pleasing bread, cookies, muffins and damn fine brownies.

The Art of French Cooking (Volume One) Julia Child

Julia Child changed cooking in America. There’s a lovely movie ‘Julie & Julia’ about a woman who decides to cook all 524 recipes in the The Art of French Cooking in a year and blogs about them that covers Julia’s story. We should all be so fortunate with our cooking blogs. This cookbook made me a much better cook. It’s hard to describe how in a paragraph.

Julia Child had an abundance of common sense about food and conveys difficult concepts in simple language. ‘Don’t crowd the mushrooms’ is a classic. If you are sautéing mushrooms and you put too many in the pan, you steam them you don’t brown them. So, if you want lovely golden brown mushrooms – DON’T CROWD THE MUSHROOMS. This is Julia.

If Julia says ‘do not let the cream come to a boil or it will separate and your potato dauphinoise will suffer’ you know it to be true. You follow her instructions and you produce food fit for the gods.

Delia Smith’s Christmas

This book was a gift and when I was perusing the bookshelf prior to writing this blog I was surprised by how much I use it doing the winter, not just at Christmas. Perhaps Christmas food is the ultimate comfort food for cold weather. If your weapon of choice at Christmas is turkey, goose, beef, ham or vegetarian – there is a recipe for you here. I swear by her roast beef instructions, the red cabbage recipe and the parmesan parsnips. There is also a great planning section with a countdown. Has saved me when I was too tired to do my own planning – I relied on Delia.

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

Cooking is a chemistry experiment – combining ingredients, processes, heat and cooling to change raw material into food. This book will explain (often in excruciating detail) what went wrong or right in the kitchen and why.

Chefs say ‘beat the egg whites in a copper bowl’. Science & Lore tells you why this is a good idea. (It does work better). I was trying to make white chocolate fudge (it’s a good story worthy of its own blog). First time – would not harden. Second time – hardened in the pan. Then I checked Science & Lore – and the third time I stirred the damned molten white chocolate mixture for twenty minutes (by hand) with the bowl sitting in a bigger bowl of ice water. And the fudge was perfect. Of course, I found the twenty minutes of stirring so annoying I never made the fudge again.

The perfect book for cooking nerds.

Thank you for reading the blog. And best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a healthy prosperous 2020 to all.

Or yourself!  It’s the run into Christmas and when I’m not baking or decorating, I’m Christmas shopping.  I try and give only gifts that people want.  Seems simple, but it can be surprisingly time consuming.

Here’s my list of 13 great gadgets for a baker that will fit in a Christmas stocking. Well,  maybe not in the min-stocking in the photo.  All really useful and none very expensive.  I am possibly Amazon’s biggest customer in the UK but all of these should be fairly widely available via a google search.

But first, why is a bakers dozen 13? Are bakers just bad at counting? Not really.

The most widely accepted theory is about avoiding a beating.  There were laws in England that based the price of bread on  the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who cheated  their customers by overpricing or selling undersized loaves or rolls were  punished by fines or flogging.  We all know its hard to make baked goods uniform and medieval bakers did NOT have a digital scale to help them.   The bakers would add that bit extra to ensure their goods didn’t come up ‘short’.  Hence, the baker’s dozen.

1. Dough scraper: a nice plastic gadget that gets all the batter out of the bowl, handy for kneading wet dough,  scraping stuff off the counter tops, mixing heavy dough, cutting dough.   Upper right corner.
   

   Clockwise from top left; countertop protector, dough scraper, fast read thermometer, cheap shower cap.

2. Plastic shower caps – but not the cheapest ones.  You can buy 100 on Amazon or eBay for £6.50 but they are so cheap it’s essentially single use plastic. We’re not fanatics but we’re trying to avoid plastic waste. So, give  the boxed ones that are 10 for £3 a try.  They last longer and survive a gentle rinse out if you get dough on one.
3. Thermometer(s).  Baking (all cooking actually) is essentially a chemistry experiment.  It’s good to be precise when it makes a difference.  There are instant read thermometers that will tell you if you roast is cooked,  your bread is ready or your boiling sugar is hard crack.   And things like oven temperature can be the difference between an exploding chocolate cake that creates an oven cleaning emergency or a mouth watering Sacher torte.  I have three I rely on; one to check the temperature of baked goods, one to leave in the roast and one to check oven temperature.  Search ‘instant read thermometer’ ‘oven thermometer’ ‘roast thermometer’.
   
   
4. Loaf pan liners. Paper liners save greasing pans, make clean up easier and a way less fiddly than cutting parchment to fit.   They come in 1 and 2 pound sizes.  There’s also pan liners for round cakes.   And the amount of fat that is used to grease a cake pan can destabilise the chemistry of your cakes.  Some day I will write on blog post on my struggle with making a Victoria sponge cake.  It’s my nemesis.  But pan liners helped me get there.
5. Offset spatula. Nerd alert here.   An offset spatula allows for better control and precision when icing cakes or lifting and moving cookies, chocolates or anything delicate.  Better yet, a set of three offset spatulas in different sizes.  The baking nerd in your life will love you. 
6. Pastry mat. A pastry mat is a flat sheet of plastic with markings that helps you eyeball when the dough has been flattened to a six inch diameter disk., for example.  A great short cut.  Also really speeds clean up.  Instead of painfully scraping up dough or flour you can just put the whole thing straight in the sink.  Roll it up tight and it should fit in the Christmas stocking. 
7. Egg whisk. Okay, more nerd stuff.  I went on an all day ‘egg’ course with my mate Lisa.  We cooked and ate a LOT of eggs.  Fried eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, scrambled eggs.  We learned the ‘right’ way to crack an egg (and a one handed crack method).  The best gadget we saw was a specialist egg whisk.  Lisa bought one for me later.  Here it is.
   
8. Miniature tape measure. I have a tiny tape measure in a magnetic case that lives on the extractor fan in my baking kitchen.  It means I don’t have remember (or guess) the dimensions of my multitude of pans, tins, baking trays etc.  It’s the kind of thing you might get in a Christmas cracker, but it’s a super little tool.
   
9. Spacers for rolling dough and sugar paste icing.  Back to our desire for precision.  If you’re making cookies or some kinds of dough or pastry – you want to roll it out to an even thickness.  Spacers are simple plastic guides – you put them on your pastry mat, whack the dough in between them and roll away.  Here’s a link to a YouTube video because it’s hard to visualise these until you’ve used them. 
10. Active dry yeast. Many bakers may have a favourite type of yeast, you can take a peek in your baker’s cupboard and see.  But if they make bread,  active dry yeast is a good bet.  I use a French brand ‘saf-levure’ that comes in 500 gram tins.  It might be a tight fit in the Christmas stocking but its top quality and its about 1/4 the price of supermarket purchases on a per gram basis. 
11. Cookie cutters.  Shaped cookies are not just for Christmas anymore.  So many shapes, themes and materials these days.   You can cut cookies for any holiday or special occasion. Find a shape that is special to them (I have a friend who’s a unicorn freak and I have a unicorn cookie cutter to make cookies for her) or maybe find them an antique biscuit cutter.  I have a set of Star Wars cookie cutters.  Serious Star Wars nerds in our house.
    
    

    One of my first forays into royal icing.

12. Good quality hand cream. Bakers wash their hands about 500 times a day.  I don’t actually know, I’ve never counted but it’s a lot.   I have two pricy favourites; ‘Occitane en Provence’ shea butter hand cream or ‘iColoniali’ myrrh hand cream.   Find a scent that your baker loves.
    
13. And finally – edible gold glitter (or any other special sprinkles for your baker).   Try this website for some fun and funky sprinkles.
    

Have a lovely Christmas, and bake on everyone.

Okay, I couldn’t resist just one more.  A stand to help fill your piping bags…….

 

Merry Christmas all…….

 

 

I’m travelling in the USA for a week or so visiting family – so here’s a short blog on my summer kitchen. I might blog on that when the dust settles.  It’s been a lot of family in a week.

I am blessed when it comes to space, equipment, gadgets and these days – time – for baking.  The upside of being married to one’s general contractor (aka the Davinator) is that he builds you one of these – a second kitchen.

It’s an American thing, I think to have a second or ‘summer’ or ‘working’  kitchen, often in the basement (also much more common in America).  Before air conditioning was ubiquitous, having a kitchen in the basement was life saver during a hot summer. Year round, all the hard work happened in the summer kitchen and the ‘upstairs’ kitchen always looked nice. Like this…

 

The working kitchen can look like a bomb went off in it and no one will be the wiser.

But my ‘summer kitchen’ was inspired by Mrs F, the mother of an Italian-American guy I dated in college.  She had the best ‘summer’ kitchen I’ve seen.  I went out with Al the first time because he was good looking and he drove a blue Trans-am with the big bird painted on the hood  (1979 folks)(Did you know there are blogs on those Trans-am birds  ) . I kept on going out with him because I loved  his very Italian-American mother.  She was a great cook as well and had a big kitchen in the basement.

Mrs F never did anything more complicated than make coffee and assemble food (maybe warm it up)  in the upstairs kitchen. Of course, it was always spotless. Think kitchen showroom.

Mrs F made perfect Italian coffee in one of these, BTW.  She was a coffee snob in 1979.  So far ahead of trend.  All the rest of us were drinking Maxwell House if feeling fancy and Sanka if you were at your grandmother’s.  Well at least at my grandmother’s.   I adored Mrs F and she taught me a lot about good Italian food. What happened to Al you ask? Well basically he was a nutter and I had to break up with him the hard way.

The Davinator built me my ‘summer’ kitchen.  It’s got oodles of storage, more counter space, a deep sink, an enormous oven, my KitchenAid disappears beneath the counter and oh so much more.  I’ve got room for stuff that gets used infrequently – like the Millenium Falcon cake pan, the 50 different Christmas cookie cutters,  20 round cake pans of different sizes and functions, loaf pans galore, tart pans big small and miniature.  I could go on.  Well, a marble rolling pin, an ordinary rolling pin and a special long dowel rolling pin for pasta.  A gazillion mixing bowls.  All my speciality baking ingredients.  Okay, I’m going to stop now.

It’s on the northeast corner of the house so it stays cool but I baked plenty before I had the summer kitchen.   It’s a luxury but it really enables complex stuff like sourdough bread and fancy decorating.  It’s a space that inspires me.

What inspires you?