Sunday, January 27, 2008

Slow cooker recipes

As casa Spinneyhead now owns a slow cooker,it's a good time for me to have discovered slow-cooker-recipes.blogspot.com.

Technorati tag: Food

Labels: Food blog, Recipe

posted by Ian at 7:30 PM
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Generic chutney

I've been chutneying again, having received a crate of Golden Delicious and a request for sweet apple chutney. I use a different recipe every time, but the geek in me couldn't help thinking there might be some sort of generic chutney, a ratio of fruit:vinegar:sugar that should work as the basis for any version and can be scaled. Spices are not included in this, being added for flavour at the whim of the cook.

A quick search and a few recipes showed that I might be wrong, or at least that there is more than one generic chutney. The two ratios that make most sense are (fruit:vinegar:sugar)- 3:1:1 and 4:1:2. Within those ratios there is also the break down of the fruit, though the larger portion is more likely determined by what you want to call the chutney.

I'll be making mre chutney in the next few days, so I'll try out the two ratios to see what happens. However, as the spices and other factors will also differ, and I'll have to wait a month or two for everything to mature, we may never really know which works best.

Chutney cooking tips.

chnorati tag: Food, Chutney

Labels: chutney, Recipe

posted by Ian at 4:03 PM
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Death to the recipe?

Mark Pallis insists, after an epiphany on a beach in Africa, that recipes are no longer relevant. As at least one commenter says, he seems to be mistaking a barbecue for a philosophy. Most of the food I make is improvised following a simple rule- get some good ingredients and go with it- but there are also a few dishes where I will always refer back to the instructions for at least some guidelines. The trick isn't to pretend you don't need Delia et al, but to work out where you can deviate from their schemes.

Technorati tag: Food, Recipe

Labels: Recipe

posted by Ian at 7:43 AM
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Thursday, August 25, 2005

I did it! I did it!

Poor Ian has been down with the flu for the last few days, so scarily it was down to me to cook for casa spinneyhead. I have a genuine fear of cooking for other people - too much pressure - especially when electric hobs are involved. I also had the added pressure of cooking something that might make Ian better and something non processed.

But I dit it, I broke my innovative cooking duck. Which I was especially pleased with as if I'm cooking from fresh I am always tempted to follow a recipe but this just entered my head. Ian has passed on some of his haphazard wisdom it seems. The recipe went something like this:

1 lb chopped chicken
handful of dried thyme
1 lemon, sqeezed
2 teaspoons of chopped garlic
4 cloves of garlic
1 aubergine, chopped
5 new potatos, scrubbed and chopped
2 tablespoons of tomato paste
2 teapoons of olive pesto
2 tablespoons of olive oil

The amounts are very approximate but I put the thyme, lemon juice and chopped garlic into a bowl and marinaded the chicken. The potato, aubergine and garlic cloves were all covered in oil and put in the oven to roast at about 200 degrees C. Then I mixed the tomato paste with some water and added the pesto until it tasted nice. This was stirred in with the veg in the oven. The remainder of the oil was put in a saucepan to cook the chicken and the marinade. That was about it, although I did garnish the chicken with a few sliced of lemon that I briefly shoved in with the veg.

It turned out very well, I was complemented! I still need to work on my timing though, the potatos took a lot longer than I thought but I'll learn.

Technorati tag: Recipes