This is not the confit duck of French tradition, where the legs sit in duck fat as a preserving method.
This is a lighter version that still gives a tender duck with crispy skin, but with less salt and a little less fat. In the four major UK supermarkets, the fat costs more per kilo than the legs!
Continue reading Duck Confit – a lighter version
This chicken and rice mix is a great base for burritos. It’s also good in stuffed vegetables, as a soup base, or even on its own. The method may seem a little unusual, but it’s to keep it low-fat. On the UK Government’s ‘traffic light’ labelling system, it’s green in all categories. It also has good protein levels, based on calculations, of 13.5 g per 100 g.
Get the recipes…I like to think this recipe for ribs was the natural outcome of making porchetta. To make porchetta, a pork middle is deboned and seasoned with salt and pepper, fresh herbs, and fennel seeds. The belly is wrapped around the loin with the skin still attached and the whole roll is slowly roasted. But what of the ribs? They got the same seasoning and were taken home by the butcher. Now we have the convenience of just buying the ribs and starting from there.
When I made these, I wasn’t that pleased with them, thinking that the outside should be crisper and the centre less dense. But then Hannah, my daughter, who’s been to Berlin twice, told me that they are just like the ones she bought there. My judgement was based on ignorance rather than knowledge!
Even so, I now leave them to rise a little after shaping and before boiling. I’ll also try different toppings: poppy seeds, sesame, celery seeds, etc. These use bicarbonate of soda – really traditional ones use lye – yes, believe it or not, they use caustic soda in commercial production.
Choux pastry rings alarm bells with many people who presume it to be the domain of the professional pastry chef. In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth: as pastry goes, it’s one of the simplest. It doesn’t require a light touch, cold hands or any of the other ‘special’ things that many other types of pastry do.
This is my variation of a recipe published in Bon Appetit Magazine. I’ve changed it to include walnuts, increased the apple amount to 1/2 of an apple and scaled it down to two servings. Maple syrup on them is good but the pancakes are fine as is. Any apple seems to work, these were made with Cosmic Crisp.
This recipe is a bit of a fraud; it’s my take on Paul’s Chicken & Rice Sausage Burger. The major difference is the use of chicken breast instead of thighs – I’m on a low-saturated-fat diet – and the addition of spring onions, also called scallions.
This fermented snack stick uses both a barbecue rub recipe and a commercial sauce. The sauce, while low in pH, is not sufficient to lower the pH to a safe range without fermentation. The sauce in the recipe, Sweet Baby Ray’s Original Barbecue Sauce, was chosen for its wide availability. If desired, it can be replaced with a similar sauce.
Other than a couple of sauces and rubs, I’ve not posted about barbecue, mainly because we don’t do a massive amount and often don’t cook the classics: briskets, ribs and pulled pork.
That said, we do cook some and now that Paul’s part of Local Food Heroes – he lives in the home of BBQ, the southern US of A – it’s about time we started!
Continue reading BarbecueA simple midweek kind of meal that’s also good to feed a crowd.
