Freezer filling

When I'm not busy cooking for dinner parties, making wholesale desserts for restaurants or preparing corporate buffets, I also cook meals for the freezer.

I have one regular client who likes to take frozen meals in large containers and frozen canapes to her holiday home in Cornwall so she can feed all the extended family of 12 (children and grandchildren) without spending all day in the kitchen - after all everyone needs a holiday from cooking.

Another local family ordered a month's worth of meals when they were having their kitchen re-built. With just a microwave to cook with in their utility room for a month - they found my home-cooked meals with meat from the farm just 4 miles away from them a godsend - so much so they reccommended me to all their local friends, and the fish pie they liked so much I cooked for 50 of their guests when they entertained just before new year.

These particular meals were for another regular client who has the family to stay in the Cotswolds during the major holiday periods - Christmas, Easter, Whit week etc., and again it saves spending all the time in the kitchen when you can spend it with the family instead.

Cottage pie


Preparation as seen in the shepherds pie post, just using minced beef from Home Farm instead of minced lamb.

Chicken Chasseur

This time using free range chickens from Madgetts Farm.
A traditional chasseur with onions, mushrooms, tomato, white wine and fresh tarragon. Sauce preparation is similar to the coq au vin - once the chicken has been taken off the bones, the bones are used to make a stock which is then reduced and added to the sauce after cooking, so you have an intense chicken flavour.

A few cherry tomatoes are placed on top of the sauce so they soften and burst as the meal is reheated.


Slow cooked shoulder of lamb with tabboulehAs seen in a previous post the shoulder of lamb is cooked for 6 hours will it's soft and delicious. Once chilled it can be sliced as above.

The canelle carrots and onions that were cooked with it are added on top with fresh rosemary from the garden and the sauce.

Taste the tabbouleh and you're almost back on Edgeware Road.

Tabbouleh - the ideal accompaniment to lamb

Lamb shoulder cooked whole

Salmon provençal

Like the gravadlax, this is marinated too - but only overnight, and in a classic tomato sauce, after which it is baked.

With this is provençal style vegetables made to an old family recipe. My grandparents who lived locally when I was young had a large vegetable garden, so we were pretty self sufficient harvesting in the summer months, blanching and cooking like mad and then freezing so there would be vegetables and fruit throughout the winter months. The provençal vegetables were always one of my favourites on it's own with freshly made bread, or as an accompaniment to fish, rabbit or chicken.

Fillet of hake with homemade beer baked beans and ale sauce


There's more on the sauce here, and the beans here. I think it's a winning combination.







Fish pie

Another family recipe - originally from my maternal grandmother who's been making it for 70 years or more, but which I have, again, improved a little bit. I did give away the recipe once to a group on a hen weekend after they raved about it so much, but that's as far as it goes at the moment.
Cod, salmon, king prawns. oven dried tomatoes, egg and parsley. Grain mustard and Gorsehill Abbey Farm St. Kennelm cheese potato puree is piped on top.

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These were taken from our bistro menu, but as they are made to order it means I can make whatever anyone asks for, and can account for any allergies or preferences. They can be made at a clients house using their own dishes, or most often I make them at my premises fitting them in between everything else and then deliver them at a suitable time.

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Roast cauliflower in Cotswold Way ale sauce

Soggy cauliflower no longer.

Isn't it annoying when you sauce your cauliflower cheese and by the time it's browned you have a pool of water at the bottom of the dish. Like broccoli, sprouts, you name it, roasting is the way forward, keeping in the flavour (boil it and the flavour goes into the water), plus you get the caramelisation.

Roasted with olive oil, maldon salt and fennel seeds.

Nice with left over baked beans......

Vegetarian heaven.

Click here for Cotswold Way ale sauce recipe.


Related posts:

Roast tenderstem broccoli with balsamic and pine nuts

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Beer baked beans

So you're half way through cooking a large order of frozen meals for a regular client for the Easter week, and you suddenly realise that rather too many dishes are tomato based what do you do? I hunted around and found a baked bean recipe without tomato from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks. Beans - beer - beer batter - hake - hake and beans - beer and beans - hake and beer sauce.... it all seemed to fit together.

This has been bookmarked for anyone else who wants to try it on the virtual recipe drawer that is Bookmarked Recipes - your one-stop shop for tried and tested recipes from the food blogger community updated every Monday this week hosted by Ivy at Kopiaste...to Greek hospitality.

I'm not sure if the berry beer (beer flavoured with berries) which she mentions has really taken off in the UK yet - though berry cider seems to have - and some can be really good. As I was accompanying these beans with hake I decided against the berry flavours and used Cotswold Way ale. I liked the idea of molasses - this is what you should use in a traditional Boston beans which gives it a deep strong flavour (it's hard to resist the assosciation with liquorice allsorts when you taste it).

!Warning!

If you're using red kidney beans, or, as I was here, cannellini beans make sure you bring them to the boil and boil them rapidly for 10 minutes before simmering/ braising - we don't want any nasty food poisoning outbreaks!..... I used:

500g cannellini beans
Olive oil
1 - 2 onions
1/4 cup of molasses (+ the little bit that spills over the top)
1 tbsp dijon mustard
Chilli - well you decide how much you like
A 500ml bottle of Cotswold Way ale
Chicken/ vegetable stock
Seasoning

Soak the beans overnight. Drain them. Add to boiling water, bring back to the boil and boil rapidly for 10 minutes. Then drain them and wash them through in hot water (keeps the heat). Meanwhile sweat the onion. Then add the rest of the ingredients to the pan (excluding the beans which are still boiling). Bring this the boil and transfer to a deep baking tin along with the beans. Cover with foil and bake in the oven at 180 oC for around 2 - 2 1/2 hours.

As Heidi mentions it's an idea to check them every 25 minutes after an hour or so to see if they are soft or have run out of liquid. If they have dried up and need more liquid add a little more stock or water.

Ideally you want the juice to be mostly all absorbed as above. If the beans are cooked and ready before this you can put them on the stove top, uncover them and boil off the excess liquid.

Season with salt and pepper, and paprika too if you like.

You could also add bacon/ pancetta lardons, kabanos, belly pork, sweetcorn - all these would give it an extra flavour.

Eat warm on their own as an accompaniment (I accompanied these with hake), with cold meats, or just on their own with fresh bread.

Related posts:

Beans means hake - tomato flavoured baked beans
Beer baked beans on toasted nettle gluten free rice soda bread
Beer sauce

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Beans means hake

Beans

“Gouda is ze best cheese in ze world”. According to a former Claridges colleague, Michael from Germany that is. Gouda, ham, warm bread, jam and coffee. These were things you ate for breakfast in Germany, and this is why he could not get used to seeing baked beans in the canteen.

The British it seems are as famous for baked beans as fish and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. But beans are beans - they taste the same pretty much wherever you are in the world. That is until you make your own.

Dried harricot beans before being cooked

Boston bean hot pot - the traditional all American dish cooked in billy cans over an open fire was a regular staple on the Benson family repetoire when I was young. My mum tried to vary our meals as much as possible, although the concept of a meal that wasn’t meat and two veg to my dad with his Yorkshire roots seemed abhorrent (she did at least save the smoked haddock and poached egg for when he was away on business). The beans would be soaked overnight then put in the slow cooker early in the morning before work and school and it was ready for the evening - if you could wait that long. It goes very well with garlic bread and tomato salad, and tastes even better heated up the next day, but then slow cooked things always do.

Stirred in to the tomato/ provençal sauce

It wasn’t till May this year when I first tried making baked beans. At Claridges we would make endless braised harricot blanc. The secret for the best flavour was to sneak in to the veg section’s fridge before they got in in the morning and drain some of their chicken consomme (“must have evaporated overnight“), then add some onion, garlic and thyme from their soup mis en place, then it was into the sauce fridge and shave off some duck fat before they got in, so it wasn’t noticeable and you could hide it in your fridge for later in the day. The harricot beans could then be added to the pilfered ingredients, covered with foil and left in the legendary big red oven when the veal bones came out. The big red oven was the last of the original Claridges ovens - over a hundred years old, the one shown off to all the tours that past through the kitchens and putting something in it was like putting live meat in a lions mouth and hoping for the best. It had a wonderful dry heat - like an aga that seems to be great for baking beans, and drying tomatoes (as long as you remembered they were in there). From the cooked braised beans we made white bean puree to accompany foie gras and corn-fed chicken terrine, or peppered salmon.

Provençal style harricot beans on test, May '08

When you cook your own beans from raw they soak up all the flavour you add. On that occasion I had some provencal sauce left from my salmon dish - so there were capers, olives, peppers and basil among the tomatoes and onion, now you can’t get that in a can. Yet. Once cooked till soft and the sauce reduced and thickened I found they went awfully well with smoked cod and sautéed nettles. Also with poached chicken and rocket. And on toasted ciabatta with blue cheese. In fact I liked them so much it was only a matter of time before they made it on to the menu.

Cannellini beans, bistro menu, 20th September '08

Because cannellini beans are 3 or 4 times the size of a harricot bean they have more texture and they feel more substatial. Cannellini beans like red kidney beans need soaking ovenight and must be boilled vigorously for 10 minutes before braising or simmering otherwise they can be toxic - remember all those cases of food poisoning in the 70’s when the nation started eating red kidney beans in chilli but hadn’t boiled them.

A provençal base - onions, peppers, and a family tomato sauce recipe that has certain vintage Delia origins which is cooked down with a splash of balsamic.

Once boiled they are braised in tomato sauce - onions, peppers, and a tomato sauce. Then either chicken stock (for meat eaters) or vegetable stock (vegetarians) and a bit of thyme and the beans are cooked for 3 - 4 hours till tender. After 4 hours if they are tender and you added too much stock and your tomato sauce is still a little watery, as happened on this occasion (with only 20 minutes to go before I had to leave with them chilled and packed - I love my blast chiller) you can whip them out of the oven and put them on the stove top to reduce fast. Taste them too, adding seasoning, herbs, tobasco, Worcester sauce, balsamic syrup, cherry tomatoes - whatever it takes to make them taste the best…….

What the hake?

To this day I think hake is a really underrated fish - don’t forget monkfish was once the poor man’s fish - and now look at it.

Smoked cod or haddock goes very well with the baked beans, but so does the silky soft, melt in the mouth texture of hake - it's a natural combination, especially when you crisp the skin under the grill.
Here it is prepared for a delivery with sliced lemons, baby plum tomatoes and thyme underneath which will all add to the flavour as the fish is re-heated. It was filleted, baked and chilled first, with instructions to be finished under the grill which will give you a crispy skin. What could be better? Well yes, maybe dauphinoise potato with it as well. But I made those too.

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