Fish sharing platter starter and whole rib of beef main course for business away day/ Christmas celebration

"....basically, we are all out at restaurants all the time, every day on the expense account with clients, so what we are after is something much more simple, like home cooking, something we can serve family style at the table....."
The boss of this company talked so fast and so passionately about food. Always a bonus!

Didn't do so well getting food photos - so hectic getting everything done and out.......

Beer battered mussells - served in the cleaned shells (my personal favourite of the night - simple is good!)

Home-smoked mackerel with elderflower and gooseberry compote - a platter sized version of the starter above - smoked over hickory chips and lady grey tea. 

Mini size version of the trout en papillote - above (again pic taken from a previous event)

Smoked trout risotto balls with courgette ribbon salad

 Mini fillet of hake with parsley coulis and celariac chips. Hake - such an underated fish sadly - it's so nice!

Crab and apple salad in filo basket - never got a pic of this one in the end.

Phew - totally epic starter!

Then for a main course came these babies:

Huge ribs of beef which the group carved themselves at the table - great fun! We served these with dauphinoise potatoes, glazed Chantenay carrots, steamed kale with chestnuts and a raw vegetable, basil and lambs lettuce  salad.

Then for dessert - large sticky toffee pudding,

large tarte tatin 

and large lemon meringue pie 

... which again all the guests passed round the table family style - if they could steal themselves away from the cocktails being served in the hall way. The same cocktail makers that we recognised from the October wedding near Redditch - small world round here!

Time for those embarrassing office party photos complete with dressing  up kit courtesy of the cocktail guys.

1

Cotswold Way ale sauce

Michael Roux's book 'Sauces'. It's the stuff food dreams are made of. As Eddie and Mary Cadogan point out, recipes can be used just as inspiration, or as a guide - it's when you adjust them to taste that you make them your own. Such is the case with the books stacked up on my desk, on the bookshelf and lodged behind the sofa. I use the books for inspiration, ideas and flavour combining, add my own ideas and then go off and cook.
Half way through cooking a large order of frozen meals I realized rather too many were tomato based, so I hunted around and found the beer baked beans recipe. Beans - beer - beer batter - hake - hake and beans - beer and beans - hake and beer sauce.... it all seemed to fit together.

The beer sauce was one I had been looking at on and off for years in the 'Sauces' book but have never got round to making, so this seemed the ideal moment. Nice, but I needed something that could freeze, so as it is heavy on the cream I also added a little chicken stock I had left from the chicken chasseur and beurre manie to thicken it. You could also use vegetable or fish stock.

Originally this was going to be added to the beans entry to Bookmarked Recipes last week in a two for the price of one, but I just ran out of time in the pre-Easter rush, so here it is.

It 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 Laurie, of Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska.

Re: cipe

60g shallots finely sliced (onions are fine too)
1 small (fresh) bouquet garni
4 juniper berries
300ml mild light beer (but I used Cotswold Way ale - it works well for me)
200 ml double cream
60g butter
1/2 tbsp snipped flat leaf parsley (I had some english parsley growing so used that)
salt & pepper

Put the shallots, bouquet garni and juniper berries in a saucepan, pour in the beer and reduce by two thirds over a medium heat. Add the cream and bubble for 5 minutes, until the sauce will lightly coat the back of a spoon. If it seems to thin, cook it for a few more minutes. Pass the sauce through a conical sieve, whisk in the butter, a small piece at a time, and finally stir in the parsley. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Good with braised/ baked fish and also good with roast cauliflower:


Related posts:

Hake with beer sauce
Roasted cauliflower in Cotswold Way ale sauce

2

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.

XXXXX

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.

0

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.

0