Vindaloo bbq chicken wings

So, I'm working on a recipe for Vindaloo bbq ribs, but I didn't have any ribs yesterday but I did have some chicken wings. Hence, Vindaloo bbq chicken wings so I can try out the flavours a bit more. I'll post the ribs recipe when I get it nailed.

The flavours are based on my Vindaloo recipe posted previously. 

Make up a dry rub from 4 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp salt, 1/2 tsp mustard seeds, 1/4 tsp fenugreek, 15 curry leaves, 1/2 tsp ground turmeric, 1 tbsp ground cumin, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp ground coriander, 5 tsp cayenne and 1 tsp ground ginger.

Apply all but a handful of this to the chicken wings, I had 14 chicken wings in total. Leave at room temperature for a couple of hours. Put the wings into your bbq at about 100 degrees C for about 90 mins. Get them out then cover with a sauce made by boiling then simmering for 15 mins 240 ml ketchup, 160 ml rice vinegar, 240 ml cider, 120 ml cider vinegar, 120 ml brown sugar, 60 ml soy sauce, 2 tsp mustard, 1 tsp garlic granules 1 apple grated and 1/2 an onion grated and the remaining handful of the dry rub. Finally add a bit more cider vinegar as you want quite a vinegary sauce to deal with the heat of the dry rub. Put back in the bbq for another 20 to 30 mins and serve.

Ultimately the bbq sauce was a bit too sweet for me. I'm going to cut the sugar down to 0 next time then build it up from there and possibly replace it with honey. I also thought it maybe needed thinning down a bit as the sauce is supposed to clear the chilli heat from the mouth rather than coat it so I'll maybe leave it a bit thinner next time as well or paint it on as I serve rather than 30 minutes before. Finally the dry rub may need more cayenne but possibly cutting the sugar down in the sauce will let it stand out a bit more anyway.

also, apologies for the lack of photo, these got eaten pretty quickly.

2 recipes for when you find yourself the owner of 40 pints of finest red wine vinegar

This is the blog post for people who can answer yes to the next two questions (although others should feel free to read it anyway)

1. Have you just discovered that instead of being the proud owner of 40 pints of finest red wine you are in fact the owner of 40 pints of finest red wine vinegar?
2. Have you got a naturally sunny disposition and a 'if life gives you lemons make Moroccan spiced chicken with preserved lemons' attitude?

Still with me, then let me begin.

The two recipes to take the opportunity to try out should be a vindaloo and Poulet saute au vinagre. Basically very similar recipes but one has taken a trip round the world with a Portuguese sailor so some enterprising Goan chef can make a few delicious tweaks. The vindaloo in this case is as far removed from the usual Indian restaurant fare as any of Madhur Jaffrey’s other recipes are, which reminds me I should do her korma again which is a lot spicier than you'd expect still without being too hot.

Poulet saute au vinagre

[Disclaimer: I've not cooked this yet]

Season and brown 1.8 kg chicken in butter and olive oil (brown the butter to the point of just turning nut brown before browning the chicken for cheffy bonus points). Add 6 large tomatoes chopped (or 2 tins maybe?) and cook down until the tomato is totally stewed. Pour in 300 ml top quality red wine vinegar and simmer until almost completely disappeared. Add 300 ml chicken stock and simmer to reduce by half then remove the chicken and keep warm. Whisk 60g butter into the sauce, add 1 tbsp parsley then pour over the chicken and sprinkle over another 1 tbsp parsley. 

Chicken Vindaloo

[Disclaimers: 1) although I've done it very successfully with boiling hens and a lot longer cooking time, the original recipe used duck, chicken may be nice and tender before the cooking time is up, maybe pull the chicken out and finish the sauce off separately if need be. 2) The original recipe used cider vinegar, although the original-original recipe would surely have been red wine vinegar brought from Portugal, or red wine brought from Portugal which had turned a bit vinegary. Some experimentation with quantities of vinegar and sugar below may be required but the final dish wants to have a good sour note to it. ]

Brown 2.7 kg chicken in oil and remove. Add 1/2 tsp mustard seeds and 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds to the hot oil and when the mustard seeds start to pop (a few seconds after going in) throw in 15 curry leaves and 2 medium onions sliced into half rings. Stir fry until the onion starts to brown then add 2 tbsp grated fresh ginger and 10 garlic cloves smashed to a pulp. Fry for a minute before adding 1/2 tsp ground turmeric, 1 tbsp ground cumin, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp ground coriander, 1 tsp cayenne, 1 1/2 tsp garam masala and frying for another 30 secs (probably best to mix these together before you start). Add 2 chopped medium tomatoes (1 tin?) and cook until softened. Add the chicken back in alongside 120 ml top quality red wine vinegar, 3 tsp salt and 1 tbsp sugar. Bring to the boil then simmer for 45 mins stirring occasionally. Finally turn the heat up for the final 30 mins to thicken the sauce and finish cooking the chicken.

That’s all, happy cooking.

Dandelion wine

Dandelion wine is apparently a good thing. Or so I'm told. I enjoyed the Elderflower champagne we made last year and frankly enjoy the idea of making some more wines so given the rave review figured I'd give this one a go.

However...

This is what happened to the dandelions on my estate, thus nixing my plans to bottle my own wine from my own dandelions. Possibly this happened because I was too busy watching this

and this

doing this

Luckily enough the nearby (and slightly more extensive) grounds of Ashton Court provided rich pickings last Sunday. It was relatively cloudy and we didn't go out until mid/late afternoon so they weren't all as open as hoped, the traditional technique being to pick your dandelions at midday on a sunny day. The recipe was a combination of the last two from here, that guy seems to seriously know his stuff about wines. I'm only 3 days in on the recipe at the moment so no reports of success or failure but I'll detail the steps so far and the future plans.

Firstly, I've made just over 3 gallons from 6 litres of dandelion petals, these were pulled out of about 2 carrier bags 1/3 full each of open dandelion heads. This takes a while, put some food in the oven before you start, we had Lasagne, other foods are available. These were put into a steralised plastic brew bin and coverred with enough boiling water to make the total volume up to 3 gallons. Two days later I boiled one gallon at a time for 10 mins with the pith (no white bits) of 2 lemons and 1 orange each. This was strained back into the steralised brew bin (I had taken it all out of the brew bin before boiling the first gallon) along with a total of 2kg sugar, the juice of all 6 lemons and 3 oranges and a 900g tin of Youngs Medium White Grape juice compound. After the whole thing cooled down I added 3 tsp of wine yeast and am now waiting for fermentation to get under way.
Once fermentation starts and then settles down (assuming it goes mental at first) I'll decant the lot into demijohns, there is now about 3.4 gallons of liquid in there so I might water it down to stretch it out to 4 demijohns worth. After that I'm following recipe 3 from the above link, so will rack once the wine clears, then continue racking every 60 days so long as any sediment appears. I'm also considering bottling some when I transfer the rest to demijohns to produce fizzy dandelion 'champagne'.

Hopefully tales of great success and drunken nights to follow in some months time.

Pasta

I'd tried making my own pasta once before but that was over 10 years ago with a guessed recipe of plain flour and water which I rolled out rather thick by hand and served with pesto. It resulted in something not inedible but not inspiring either. For Christmas this year I got a pasta machine bought from boots back when they sold that sort of thing and I think sitting at the back of someone's cupboard since that day. Reading Bill Buford's Heat recently has filled me with the desire to start making more Italian food and some kind of stuffed pasta seemed a good place to start after reading some recipes in his book. So, a few days ago I made my first attempt, no photos of the results I'm afraid as I was too busy swearing and huffily  muttering under my breath about 'stupid fucking pasta' when I realised they'd all stuck together on the plate. When I cooked the five I could salvage they weren't around long enough to get a photo. The result? a few tips on how to cock pasta up and five pieces of delicious pasta.

I tried again two days ago, applying the lessons I learned the first time around. I used about 80g pasta flour and one egg, mixed, kneeded then wrapped in clingfilm and left in the fridge for at least 30 mins. For the filling I roasted 1/2 a squash cut in half and smeared with one chopped garlic clove and butter, until soft, about 45 mins. I mixed the roast squash with about 80g parmesan but would probably use feta again next time which worked better in the original effort being a bit sharper. Season the filling as required with salt and pepper. Get the pasta dough out of the fridge, when not working with a piece of it keep it under a teatowel and when you are working with it keep the surface and it floured at all times or it will stick and you'll start swearing, which is terribly bad form. Roll it out a bit first to help it fit through the pasta machine on setting one, this seems to stop the pasta developing stretch marks which can turn into holes as you roll it thinner. Whilst on setting one fold the pasta sheet in three, roll out again and put back through the machine a few times. Not sure why you do this but the pasta which I'd put through the machine twice the first time round seemed better and this step is recommended by some recipes out there so I'm not just making it up. For the ravioli I took the pasta down to number 5 on the machine, but could have got away with 6 I think which might have made the dish a bit more about the filling and less about the pasta. By this stage I'd cut the pasta into two equal sheets, so dolloped the filling onto one then placed the other over the top. This is where some things can start sticking, my recommendation is to cut the ravioli then pick them up from the surface and seal them in your hands, then put them back down and trim the excess off. Instead of using two sheets you can also place the dollops a little wider apart and wrap the filling in a single piece of pasta in a semi circle shape which also works well. Keep the trimmings under a tea towel, roll out and repeat the above.

I cooked them in some very salty boiling water and served with sagey brown butter. Next time I'll make them smaller as they were a bit unweildy, two bites per piece I think should be the maximum, ideally just one. The use of eggs in the pasta seems not to have been considerred required forever although if using water people seem to add salt and oil as well. The quality of the eggs does seem paramount though and some use additional yolks to make up for poor quality eggs. Also I'm a little confused as to whether I need to be using the pasta flour or can just use plain flour or semolina, pasta flour seeming to be used for dried pasta. I imagine a lot of this will be a matter of taste and expediency. The filling is obviously the other big area for experimentation and then the sauce which seems to get more involved when you don't have a filling in your pasta. I'm looking forward to some Ragu experiments although not convinved they are really summery recipes being long slow cooks of pieces of meat.

Chicken Leek and Taragon Pie

I occasionally get a chicken from the Ark Chicken company at the farmers market, delicious but expensive enough that it's a rare thing. They do often have boiling hens though, ex layers which I imagine without being sold through these guys wouldn't otherwise be sold to the public. This isn't a chicken you can get at any supermarket or even butchers that I'm aware of, they won't be meat breeds so may not be super delicious on their own although they've no doubt had a pretty good lifestyle so should have some of that genuine free range flavour. They are good for a number of recipes which would I think be something of a waste of a prime roasting hen, coq au vin is the one recommended on the label, which as the name suggests is intended for a scraggly old farmyard cockerel once it's cookle-coo is too weak to rouse the family any more. I'm doing a chicken pie this time, sort of making it up as I go along guided by a few recipes out there.

This is the scrawny lady I'll be cooking with, looks pretty enticing to me.

I roughly jointed the chicken keeping everything on the bone, I also kept both breasts together since they were pretty diminutive, and packed the whole thing into a pan with 1 1/2 onions, 2 carrots and 3 bay leaves and water to cover. Ie a stock, ingredients, preferences and results may vary, for example if I remember next time I'll briefly roast the joints I think or elsewise brown the meat beforehand to get some extra depth to the flavour of the stock. I very lightly simmered this for about 4 to 5 hours, until the meat was tender. Then I took it out to cool a little and strained the remaining stock to keep it simmering whilst I did everything else.

After letting the meat cool a little, pulling all I could from the bone and roughly tearing it I lightly fried 2 leeks and 3 crushed garlic cloves in a little butter and oil and added some black pepper. Whilst that was frying I melted 25g butter over a low heat and added a tbsp of plain flour heaped as high as it'd go, I cooked this until it stopped smelling like uncooked flour. I added in about 250ml of the chicken stock and once that was combined added about 4 tbsp of single cream and probably 1 1/2 tsp dried taragon. For the last 5 mins of this I'd had the chicken in with the leeks which had all gone soft, after a little more cooking I poured the thick source onto the leeks and onions then poured the leeks and onions into the pie dish. Topped with puff pastry it was ready to bake, about 30 mins at 220C. Not a pie I know, but 'Chicken Leek and Targon lidded casserole' didn't quite work as well. Here it is in all it's valentines night finery:

 

 

A few things I'd change next time. Firstly I didn't salt the filling at all, I tasted the sauce on it's own but not mixed with the chicken and leeks, not to worry, I lifted the lid and sprinkled some salt under but would hope to correct this next time. Secondly, although it was nom I think it could have dome with something else, either an additional ingredient in the pie (mushrooms seem popular), more tarragon or perhaps a more heavily reduced chicken stock for a more chickeny hit. Not sure which of those but I'll try something different next time.

What not to plant?

It's February, it's sunny, it must be time to start planning what to grow this year.

 

This is the garden s it stands, probably a days labour away from really being presentable, you can see the purple sprouting there some of which has got away from me, better eat some of that today me thinks. 

I've got out all the seeds from last year, probably won't need to buy many new ones this year I think which is good. I'll try and spend a bit of an evening this week getting the things which need a big head start planted, the pappers and tomatoes etc.

Things I'm not planting this year

Potatoes, we got blight last year and I don't think I reacted fast enough, I'll give the ground a break from potatoes this year and give space over to something a bit more interesting. 

White beetroot, I grew some of this last year, it was ok but nothing to write home (or the internet) about.

Peas, I said this last year though and still ended up planting a little patch of them only to rediscover I'm unable to produce enough at once to even make a snack for even one un-hungry person.

Things I'm definately planting again

Perpetual spinach, this is nice stuff, massively prolific and keeps producing all year round, I've still one admittedly slightly sad looking plant left from last years planting. I'll probably only do half a row this year as a lot went to wast last year.

Tomatoes, we did just 2 plants last year but got probably one of the nicest meals from them, hit by the blight as well I'm hoping they might escape this year. I'd not done many last year as I figured they'd never grow without a greenhouse/polytunnel but was proven wrong so will try to put a load in this year.

Sweetcorn, I've grown this for 2 years now, the first years were delicious and something of a revelation as to how different something freshly picked could be to something shop bought. Last years didn't grow anywhere near as well, and should really have been called dry-mealy-corn, not impressed. Last years were a heritage seed, possibly something in how I grew them or the rubbish weather is to blame for the shoddy results, I did give some seeds to a friend so I'll compare notes with them as to how theirs turned out, eitherway I think I'll go back to the F1 hybrid.

Squash, these did ok last year, one vartiety (Anna Swartz Hubbard) was true to predictions, producing a lot of plant and a lot of fruits. Out of about 8 plants though I only had one which actually survived. I'll keep the anna swartz hubbard but will also plant some none heritage butternuts as well. Also, I'm planning to grow them on a bit more before planting them out to give them a better start and I'll make sure I've got spares to replace any which keel over. I'm going to interplant the squash with the sweet corn which worked well last year if you ignore the fact that all but one squash died and the sweetcorn was rubbish.

Beans, I'm thinking of having a beans year with the extra space available by not planting potatoes. 2 years ago I had more runner beans than you could shake a stck at, last year I cut down the space allocated for beans and planted mainly french beans and got less beans than you could shake at a stick. They were all heritage french beans, including the much hyped Cherokee Trail of Tears, the tears I presume come because they didn't have any beans to eat. I'll try these again I think anyway but will include a more regular variety in as well as a backup. We also planted just a few Borlotti beans, these did really well even though they were heavily crowded out by the potatoes and combined with the tomatoes above were one of the nicest things we ate. I'll definatelly do borlotti beans again, and likely any other beans I can get my hands on to try.

Courgettes and summer squash, some limited success, the standard courgette plant we got off a friend did really well, the summer squash and fancy courgette I planted all keeled over leaving big patches of open garden to the weeds. I'll give these similar treatment to the winter squash, planting a variety and giving them some extra care and attention. 

Theres a few things I'm considerring giving a first try, Lettuce and other salad greens I've feared growing as I assume the slugs will eat the lions share. Carrots I considerred too boring but might allow a row of. Most herbs I've ignored, we've a small herb garden which could do with some attention so I may sort that out and get some more herbs planted there and in pots. Cucumbers I tried last year without success, I'm going to try again. I've not a lot of seeds and the variety I've got isn't currently availble anymore so if I don't get some this year it'll probably be the last time I try these. Kale I grew last year but misidentified it as something else all together so decided I didn't like it, if I'd realised it was Kale maybe I'd have done it some justice, doh. It grew really well though so may try half a row again. Cabbages I've never bothered with, might try those, I'll probably take a wander round the garden centre one day soon and see if anything else takes my fancy.

Battle of the flours - pt3 Marriages Very Strong vs ASDA

The Marriages bag of flour makes no claims of being organic or using superior milling techniques, the big difference here is that the Marriages' is Very Strong as opposed to just Strong white flour. This means a higher protein content, 13.8% vs. 12.1% for the ASDA flour. In theory the additional protein means more gluten produced and a more vigorous rise and hence a lighter loaf. Difference in taste isn't an advertised part of the bargain. Protein levels in white bread flours seem to range between 11% and 14% so we're not comparing the full extent of the range here, but we're not far off with the Marriages being pretty much at the top of the scale.

Technique was the same as last time, here are the loaves after a little tasting has been done:

I did slightly overcook the marriages one (on the left) which gave it more of a crust which definitely helped the flavour. The ASDA one didn't stay formed either (my fault) so put some of it's energies into growing out rather than up. Even with that in mind, the marriages one did form the best loaf shape so far and rose noticeably more than the previous 2 test loaves. The claims of a lighter loaf are definitely true. Tasters could definitely tell the difference between the two loaves again but didn't agree on their personal favourite, exhibiting the same preferences as last time. Personally, I think the marriages had the edge and there was an obvious difference in the finished loaf visually suggesting something extra was going on. I'll probably be paying attention to the protein content of my flour in future more than how it was milled but I'm not totally convinced it's worth the extra cash yet.