The Thorngrove Table

Crisp Stir-fried Shrimps (or Prawns)

One of my favourite fast dinners is prawns tossed in a wok with a large splash of Thai Sweet Chili Sauce and some chopped spring onions. Mmmm - tasty (it works well for frogs legs too). When I have a little more time however, Crisp Stir-fried Small Aquatic Arthropod is also a favourite, especially when paired with egg stir-fried rice (as seen above).

Although it's in the Hors d'Oeuvres section of my cookbook, I eat it as a main, and 500gm of shrimp or prawn is enough for 2 - 4 anyway (depending on their appetite and liking for arthropods), or can be reheated for lunch. It's a nicely flexible dish, i.e. this time I used prawns rather than shrimp, a Fino sherry and chicken consommé rather than stock, of which I had none. I was also lazy and didn't bother to de-tail the prawns.

The recipe I use comes from the very comprehensive "Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook" (recommended by Barbara of the excellent Tigers and Strawberries), which has become my favourite Chinese collection, and is reproduced below:

Crisp Stir-fried Shrimps
Yan-Kit So "Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook - A Complete Guide to the Equipment, Ingredients, Recipes and Techniques" Dorling Kindersley Ltd, 2nd ed. 1998. ISBN 0-7513-0563-4; p.48

Ingredients
500 gm fresh or frozen raw peeled shrimps or prawns cut into 2 cm pieces
groundnut or corn oil
15ml (1 Tbs) Shaohsing wine or medium dry sherry

For the Marinade:
5 ml (1 tsp) salt
15 ml (1 Tbs) cornflour
1 egg white

For the Sauce:
5 ml (1 tsp) cornflour
60 ml (4 Tbs) clear stock
1.25 ml (1/4 tsp) sugar
salt to taste

1. If frozen shrimps are used, defrost thoroughly. Wash the shrimps under cold running water. Pat dry with kitchen paper but leave damp. Put into a bowl.
2. Prepare the marinade: sprinkle the salt over the shrimps and mix well. Sitr in the cornflour, then add the egg white and stir again to coat the shrimps evenly and thoroughly. Cover and leave to marinate for at least 5 hours.
3. For the sauce: mix together the cornflour, stock and sugar in a small bowl. Put aside.
4. Half fill a wok or deep-fryer with oil. Heat until just hot (150C/300F). Carefully add all the shrimps and fry for 30-45 seconds, seperating them with a pair of long chopsticks or a long-handled wooden spoon. Remove the shrimps before they are quite cooked with a hand strainer or perforated disc and drain on kitchen paper.
5. Pour most of the oil into a container, leaving only about 30 ml (2 Tbsp) in the wok. Reheat until smoke rises. Quickly add the shrimps to the wok and stir a few times with a wok scoop or metal spatula. Splash in the wine or sherry around the side of the wok. When the sizzling dies down, pour in the well-stirred sauce. Continue to flip and toss for a few more seconds. Add salt to taste, if necessary. Remove the mixture to a warm serving plate. Serve immediately.

Hummingbird Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

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Even the most devoted Musaphile must tire of eating banana bread eventually, and last week I realised I had reached the point where the prospect generated disinterest rather than delight in my heart. So, searching for a new cake + banana recipe ensued.

The wonderful Tastespotting photo-link blog (one of my favourite ways to waste a lunch hour) led me to Cheryl Porro's excellent food blog, Cupcake Bakeshop, which concentrates on (no prizes for guessing) cupcakes.

In addition to gorgeous photography, Cupcake Bakeshop does a very thorough job of inventing, testing and listing recipes. These range from the Americacentric (S'mores Cupcakes) to the exotic (Adzuki Bean Paste Filled Chocolate Cupcakes with Matcha Green Tea Frosting) to the healthy (Gluten-Free Chocolate Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Frosting - one for my mum) to the OMG-I-definitely-hafta-try-that-one (Lime Custard Cupcake with Meringue Frosting).

On the banana front I was tempted by the Peanut Butter-Banana Chocolate Cupcakes with Caramel Glaze and a Caramelized Banana Disk, but eventually decided to tone my ambitions down to match my abilities, and instead chose to make the Hummingbird Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting, a banana, pineapple & nut mixture. Apparently this is a common Southern US recipe, but as a NZ/English cook I'd never heard of it before.

This was a nice quick put-together (unlike the banana bread recipe) and as specified, made about 24 cupcakes. Eleven of these were in my 1" deep cupcake tray, but the rest were in my 2" deep individual silicon cups. The only deviations from the recipe were the substitution of mixed nuts for pecans, and the baking time; rather than 25 minutes at 350ºF/180ºC/GM4, the cupcakes in the tray took 30 minutes to cook and the individual cupcakes took 45 minutes. As I've mentioned before though, I believe this is a problem with my decrepit oven rather than inaccuracy on the recipe's part.

I only made half the amount of cream cheese icing (ooh - cream cheese icing!) listed, and found that was quite enough to give each cupcake a generous topping and still have a spoon or so to lick from the bowl afterwards (oops, I'm not supposed to admit to things like that, am I?).

Taste-wise, I'm really happy with the cupcakes. The outside is a little sticky (I assume from the pineapple juice/banana mush mixture), but browned really nicely with a good even surface denseness. The inside is light and moist, and the little bursts of flavour from the pineapple bits contrast nicely with the overall 'banana-ness' - a combination I wasn't sure about initially, but am now totally sold on. It's a sweet cupcake, especially with the addition of the (very yummy) cream cheese icing, but it isn't sickly, and the nuts provide a bit of textural interest to offset it too.

So, in summary - quick & easy to make, and very tasty. Definitely a recipe to repeat and I'm sure Tanya, who ends up with half the baked goodies, will agree. Of course Mark, who's allergic to bananas and can't partake, might not! But I've promised to make him non-banana cupcakes for my next batch of baking. I just have yet to decide what...

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Raspberry Semi-Freddo/Parfait, Ginger Glass Cookies & Raspberry Sauce

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For the current WTSIM's theme of "Terrines" I have no historical recipes to offer you, as Terrines and Pàtes per se are absent from the repertoire of the medieval cook. There are dishes which might - with a rather large leap of the imagination - be considered forebears (in the same way primordial slime might be considered our forebear) but the earliest definitive reference I could find in my bookcase was in my rather battered 1911 copy of the redoubtable Escoffier, which leaves a rather gaping hole of several centuries. So I shall leave it to experts such as Carolyn of C.18th Cuisine to illuminate the mysteries of terrine genesis, and concentrate on the modern era.

I make chicken liver pàte with some regularity during summer. It's an excellent lunch dish, in addition to keeping well, and it's easy to vary the recipe to stave off taste monotony and tailor to my food obsession of the moment (capers, peppadew, jellybeans, etc). However chicken liver pàte recipes are a dime a dozen, so I decided to stretch my wings a bit and attempt as my terrine something I wouldn't normally. Which with me, usually equates to a dessert that requires more than just basic assembly.

My final choice was a recipe from Gordon Ramsay's "Just Desserts" cookbook. Originally a guilty pleasure I bought just so I could read the recipes, look at the pretty food-porn pictures, and drool, I didn't actually expect to ever use this book. But I was wrong! I'm happy to say these are the fourth and fifth recipes I've now tried from Just Desserts (an astronomically higher number than from any other dessert recipe book I own!) and my first parfait recipe ever; the Strawberry and Vanilla Semi-Freddo.

The Parfait and the Pàte â bombe
This is a two-part recipe. First you make a pàte â bombe base (a mixture of 'hard boil' sugar syrup and egg yolks) and then you make the fruit and vanilla cream parfait, and put the two together. The recipe is for strawberries, however there was a box of raspberries in the freezer that were heading towards freezer-burn, so I thought I'd use those instead. I drained off the excess liquid and got about 300g solid weight fruit to use in the parfait. This was my only deviation. The pàte â bombe and parfait recipes were fairly straight forward and the end result was a gorgeously rich raspberry creaminess, quite heavy on the tongue.

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Strawberry [Raspberry] and Vanilla Semi-Freddo
1 quantity Pàte â bombe [see below]
250g hulled Strawberries & 125g Redcurrents or 500g box frozen Raspberries
200ml double cream
1 vanilla pod

1. Make the pàte â bombe. Purée the [fruit] in a food processor or blender until smooth, then sieve to remove the seeds if preferred. Fold the purée into the pàte â bombe. Cover and chill the mixture for 1 hour.
2. Pour the cream into a bowl. Slit open the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife, adding these to the cream. Three-quarters whip the cream until softly peaking.
3. Fold the vanilla cream into the [fruit] mixture, then freeze in a 1.2 litre loaf tin or individual moulds.
4. To unmould a large parfait, dip the mould into warm water for a few seconds, then invert on to a board and soften at room temperature for 5 - 10 minutes before slicing. Turn out individual parfaits straight on to serving plates.

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Pàte â bombe
100ml Water
150g Caster Sugar
5 large free-range Egg Yolks

1. Heat the sugar and water until clear.
2. Beat egg yolks until creamy.
3. Bring sugar to 'hard ball stage' or 120°C.
4. Drizzle sugar into yolks, whisking all the while.
5. For ice creams and parfaits, whisk until mixture is a thick foam.
6. Use at room temperature or chill for up to 2 days, whisking again before use.
   
   Paraphrased from Gordon Ramsay's "Just Desserts" - buy the book! It's worth it.

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The Ginger Glass Cookies
I thought these pretty cookies would make excellent side pieces for dessert - they have a nice spicy kick to them. They're simple to make and the substitution of Golden Syrup for the Liquid Glucose/Clear Corn Syrup didn't go too badly. I'll try the other syrup another time. The recipe comes from "The Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson, and I've paraphrased it:

Ginger Glass Cookies
50g unsalted Butter
40 g Liquid Glucose/Clear Corn Syrup (I used Golden Syrup)
90 g Caster Sugar
40 g plain Flour
1 tsp ground Ginger

1. Put the butter and liquid glucose in a bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir until melted together.
2. Sift flour and ginger into the sugar.
3. Stir into the butter mixture.
4. Cover with cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 25 minutes.
5. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/GM4.
6. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment, or like I did, use a flexible silicon baking sheet.
7. Roll teaspoons of the mixture into balls and place them on the baking sheet.
8. Flatten them to as thin as possible. The book suggest laying another layer of parchment/silicon on top and using a rolling pin, but I found flattening the second lot with my fingers worked just as well, didn't show in the end result, and was a lot less fiddly!
9. If you want, stamp the cookies into rounds with a cutter or glass.
10. Bake for 5-6 minutes, until golden brown and lightly bubbling.
11. Leave on baking sheet a few minutes to firm up slightly, then either fold over or leave flat.
12. Leave to cool completely, then store in airtight container.

Note that I found the oven temperature too low to properly bake the cookies and had to turn my oven up to 190°C/375°F/GM5 to achieve success. This is probably because my oven is old, decrepit and anything but airtight, so your mileage might vary. I suggest doing this in two lots, as I did, and adjusting the heat accordingly if necessary.

The Raspberry Sauce
The sauce was made using the leftover raspberry juice (waste not, want not!), a cup of sugar syrup base, a tablespoon of cornflour and a shot of Bramley & Gage's delicious Blackcurrant Liqueur. Tasty, and the colour, as you can see, was glorious!

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And last, but definitely not least, Happy Birthday Johanna!

Sunday Lamb shots & silicon glee

Lamb roast for dinner this weekend. On which I got to try out my new camera. It's an Olympus EVOLT 510, which What Digital Camera recommended as the best of the entry level DSLRs. The last time I owned an SLR was almost ten years ago, a trusty old Praktika I'd owned since I was 16. It's somewhat amusing to note that digital SLR cameras don't help one shoot any faster. But so far I'm having great fun playing around with it - and realising just how much I'd come to rely on the autofocus...

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Please note underneath the lamb my spiffy new silicon roasting rack I got from Anne & Michel for Christmas. Thanks guys! Another excellent bit of kitchen kit that's so much easier to clean.

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Confucius Fortune Cookie say:

"You will find the source of your fortune... in bed Japan."

Yes, it turns out that Chinese Fortune cookies originated from slightly further to the east than previously thought - researcher Yasuko Nakamachi has uncovered the genesis of the fortune cookie in C.19th Japan.

"Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies."

Full article by Jennifer Lee, available from the New York Times online here.

Renaissance Recipes for Breakfast I

For those who like myself find the idea of ale & leftovers, or toast in wine a bit much to stomach first thing in the morning (I swear beer & cold pizza has no correspondence to those combinations at all!), here is the first of a few medieval fast-breaking recipes you might find more to your taste:

Carbonata
Translation: To make carbonata, take salt meat layered with lean and fat, and cut it in slices, and put it in a pan to cook; do not let it overcook. Then put it on a plate and sprinkle it with a little sugar, a little cinnamon, and a little finely chopped parsley. And you can do the same to prepare salt pork [?] or ham, using orange or lemon juice in place of vinegar, whichever you prefer; it will make you drink all the better.
Maestro Martino, Libro de arte coquinaria, Italian, mid 1400s

Redaction for 2:
1 pkt Unsmoked Bacon Rashers or Pancetta or Ham (4 slices each)
Juice of 1 Lemon or Seville Orange, or 2 Tb Vinegar
2 tsp Sugar
1/2 tsp ground Cinnamon
2 TB chopped Flatleaf Parsley

Fry the meat in it's own fat, olive oil or butter. At this point you can either squeeze or pour the citrus or vinegar over the meat, then sprinkle over the sugar, parsley and cinnamon, and serve. Alternately you can set the meat aside, covered, then heat the sugar in the juice in the frying pan until dissolved, throw in the cinnamon and parsley, boil it briefly and then pour it over the meat and serve it forth. Simple!

A few comments...
Maestro Martino was head cook for the Patriach of Aquileia in Rome in the mid-fifteenth century. He was as famous in his time as Escoffier or Mrs Beeton or Gordon Ramsay is in ours and for very good reason, being the author of the first 'all-rounder' treatise on Renaissance cuisine, Libro de arte Coquinaria (The Art Of Cooking).

Carbonata is one of my favourite brunches - not only is it quick and simple, but the combination of salt, sweet and sour with spice & herb accents is delicious and just the thing to pair with hot buttered toast, strong black coffee and a glass of orange juice. If you are cooking it with a very strong vinegar, water the vinegar down, so as not to overpower the dish. Balsamic vinegar is especially nice in carbonata, and I'm particularly fond of the white balsamic vinegar myself. Don't use distilled vinegars if possible, as these weren't available back then, so won't give you the authentic effect.

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Bibliography
REDON, Odile et al. The Medieval Kitchen : Recipes from France and Italy June 1998, Univ of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226706842

P.S. The picture is a bad pun, it's a picture of a young Francis Bacon.