Be Excellent To Each Other

The other night I made Pancake cannelloni as well.

Make pancake mix, enough for about six.
Eggs, flour, milk, butter, salt and some white pepper if you have it. Look a recipe up I make mine as I go along, but the consistency needs to be approximate to single cream.

Cook the pancakes and allow to cool.

Make the ragu sauce. Bolognese sauce has a billion different varieties and you can do the really long slow prepped one where you finely chop carrots, onions, garlic and celery and simmer that for 20-30mins as your base and then use beef and veal, tomato puree, red wine and water and simmer it for 5 hours or you can go for a more prosaic version of onions, garlic, meat, passata, herbs (basil and thyme) and salt and pepper. A lot quicker to prep, that's for certain.

Allow the sauce to cool a little once it's cooked but you want it to taste good and rich and not too wet.

Put a decent dollop of sauce into each pancake and fashion them into rolls - like large spring rolls to give you an idea.
Place them in a pan.

Make a thick and creamy bechamel sauce.

Melt about an ounce of butter gently in a pan, add some sieved cornflour (about a heaped dessert spoon) and mix into a paste. Pour about 1/2 to 3/4 of a pint of milk in, whisk it to remove any lumps and turn the heat up.

Add some salt and pepper and a decent sprinkling of nutmeg. You want it to thicken to a custard consistency - if it doesn't just add small amounts of cornflour to a splash of cold milk and pop them in while stirring to get the required thickness.

You can add cheese if you want, preferably some grated parmesan to the top once you poured it over the pancakes in the dish.

Cook, heat through on 170/180 for about 25 mins.

Yeah, my breadmaker takes a similarly ridiculous time.

Not much wrong with SR flour, water and olive oil mixed in a bowl, takes about 20 seconds really.
I often use it immediately, it's a bit crispy but you've still got a tasty if not-very-authentically-textured pizza base.

That is quick. Thing is, we have the bread machine so always turn to that by default.

I always turn to my hand and wrist by default.

My machine takes 1hr 30 to do dough, but that's including rising so when it's finished I tip it out, cut it into 3, stretch and leave to re-rise while I'm finishing up everything else.

I've said in here before but the best dough I've ever had (and still use) is just water, flour, salt and yeast.

So, after making the pulled pork again last week, it seemed like the sauce combination would have been ideal for homemade baked beans. Tonight, therefore, we had steak, chips, and beans:



Plenty to serve 2:

100g bacon lardons (I used sliced pork belly)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp tomato ketchup
2 tbsp worcester sauce
1 tsp english mustard
2 tsp white wine vinegar
250ml red wine
250ml water
1 tin cannelini beans

Really easy to make - brown off the lardons in a pan, then add all the other ingredients and mix well. Bring to a boil, then decant into an lidded ovenproof dish and put into the oven at 160degrees. Cook for 40 minutes, then take the lid off and cook for a further 20.

That looks bloody great, as it happens. Good use of your little pots too!

Needs more meat. Like at least a kilo of pork.

The Classic Era Burger with Cheese
(and Era Style Big Mac Sauce)



Ingredients

Burgers:
1lb of (good quality) minced beef
3 tsps Salt
A good couple of grinds of Black Pepper
Cheese

Era Style Big Mac Sauce:
Thousand Island Dressing (I like the Heinz stuff)
French's Classic Yellow American Mustard

Method

Place minced beef, salt and pepper in a large mixing bowl*.
Knead the mixture as if were a bread dough for a good 10 minutes, ensuring that everything is well mixed.
Divide the meat into four equal portions.
Take one portion and squeeze, compress, roll and pat into a burger shape. The more compressing you do the firmer the burger will be.
Once done, place burger on to baking tray covered with grease-proof paper.
Repeat for the other three.
Place baking tray in the fridge for 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Heat a skillet pan on the hob. It needs to be very hot before you start to cook. Also pre-heat the oven to 180C.
Take your burgers from the fridge and place on the pan. You want to sear the burgers on both sides for about 2 minutes to seal in the juices.
After searing, continue to flip the burgers frequently to cook them evenly. It should take about 15 minutes for the burgers to cook all the way through. Make sure to keep pressing the burgers down using a grill spatula - instead of taking photos - to keep the burgers nice and flat.



After grilling, place strips of cheese on each burger - I like a strong cheddar on mine - and then place in the oven until the cheese has melted.

Serve!

Era Style Big-Mac Sauce:
Mix two parts TID to one part French's Classic Yellow American Mustard.

*Add other ingredients to taste - another personally fave is a small amount of cayenne pepper for that chill-burger experience.

I disagree with some of your burger cooking technique, in particular the squishing of the burger with the spatula -- that just dries the meat out. http://saltandfat.com/post/657214062/burgers is an excellent post on burger making and cooking.

I'll give it a whirl next time, but mine are always nice and juicy.

OMG baked bean, fried onion and pan seared pepper pizza, ommity nom.

Anyone got any "fuck yeah" advice on making pesto?

So far, I'm going to lightly toast some pine nuts, p&m up some basil, garlic, salt and pepper, then whack in some parmasan cheese and extra virgin olive oil.

Jamie Oliver reckons adding a little lemon juice too, so I'll give that a try.

Try some pecorino cheese as well/instead. Parmesan might be a bit too punchy and it could end up just tasting of cheese.

3tsp of salt in 1lb of meat? Attack your arteries FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE!

Doesn't seem that harsh.

Or are there no other ingredients?

That's 3 teaspoons, not tablespoons! I'd say it's too salty but not life threateningly so. You could put other stuff in to replace it, like finely chopped celery to replace some of the onion.

Grim...'s SupaSimple Pesto Recipe
Half a clove of garlic
3 handfuls of basil leaves, roughly torn by hand
1 handful of pine nuts (fuck me, but these are expensive)
Parmesan cheese
Extra virgin olive oil

Stick the garlic and basil in your pestle and mortar with a tiny bit of salt and pepper. Bung the pine nuts in a dry pan while you mash the basil and garlic together.
Only have the nuts toasting for a minute or so, then dump them in the pestle and mortar and mash them up too.
Tip it into a bowl, add half a handful of the cheese and a drizzle of oil to bind it together. Stir it gently, taste it, and add more salt and pepper if you want.
Keep adding cheese and oil until it tastes right.

It's bloody nice.

I am about to have mine in the authentic Italian style - on a burger.

I think I'll give that a go. With a lot more garlic in it though.

Garlic be raw, yo, so you don't need much.

Sainsburys had a 3.5L slow cooker on offer for £8, I obviously couldn't have left it there for that.

So after seeing this recipe ages ago and watch Man vs Food recently (involving lots of pulled pork!) I had to give it a go.

Currently I have a kilo of pork shoulder absorbing some lovely cajun spiced goodness.

I don't have any white wine though so will have to deviate from Craster's recipe and use either beer or apple juice. Undecided. Not sure whether the alcohol is essential for the recipe? Have seen plenty of slow baked rib recipes using beer, so I don't think it will ruin the recipe, just turn out a little different.

The alcohol will help break the proteins down, so I'd say you want some in there, yes. Just get a bottle of cheap plonk from the corner shop, I imagine it'd be fine for these purposes.

Though it would be something like that. Looks like I'll be drinking the remaining cheap plonk this afternoon then.

That's a shame. What time do I need to turn up and scrounge leftovers?

Half past Thursday.

Can't guarantee there'll be any left though.

I'd suggest you tootle down to Sainsburys and snatch a slow cooker for 8 pounds.

It's all in the slow cooker now, working its magic.

I swapped half the ketchup for smokey bbq sauce.

I am incapable of sticking to a recipe.

I've owned a slow cooker. I barely used it. I'd rather stuff a casserole dish in the oven. On a related note, my new Panasonic breadmaker's first ever loaf will be ready in a couple of hours. If only you had ultra-fresh bread to go with that pork, eh?

I reckon (a good) beer would work just fine for cajun purposes. I wouldn't care to hazard a guess at which though, having already been drunk the one time I've had pulled pork, and then it being a small component on a plate of delicious cooked meats.

How was the pork, Egg?

I did it again today, bit with a leg of lamb and making a cooking stock out of lots of mexican spices, then I made the resulting meat into fajitas. Worked really rather well.

It was lovely thanks, it did me for sandwiches for most of last week. I do think that there was too much paprika for my tastes so next time (and there will certainly be a next time) I'll crank that back a bit.

I really liked reducing the sauce and then adding the pork, sepearately the two things (meat and sauce) were both lovely, but together they were fantastic.



That sounds good - did you de-bone the leg of lamb?

Now pulled pork wraps would have been nice, must remember for next time. I aslo thought that the coleslaw helped with the insane wave of savoury from the pulled pork to make a nice balanced sandwich.

I'm hungry now.

Cannot parse 'too much paprika'. Abort.


I did debone the lamb, because the slow cooker wouldn't fit it in without chunking the meat a bit, but I put the bone in with it to help it thicken up at the end.

Heh. I did use smoked paprika as that's all I had, recipe only called for paprika - do you think that may have made the difference?

Smoked is definitely punchier - I just love paprika.

I must make this soon.

I finally made Hasselback potatoes today.


I can recommend the experience.

Any potato recipe that includes rare meat gets my vote.

They look great. I'm doing those this weekend.

It's like I don't even know you any more.

Heh. I made it with the fat on first time, and it goes badly wrong.

Note that I only mean the great big slab of fat covering the top of the joint - there's no point going at it anywhere else.

Yeah, but you could make pork scratchings out of it, couldn't you?

Not with the shoulder skin, to be honest.

We[1] made Craster's pulled pork. It was really nice. Used more ketchup and brown sugar in the sauce and I think it was better for being a bit more tomatoey. It didn't reduce far enough for my tastes though because I got impatient and hungry. I think this would ideally have a sort of very thick, sticky sauce -- the sort you get on BBQ ribs. I need to research that further.



[1] mostly Danielle, to be fair

We also made pizza recently:


Tossing (ahem) the dough by PenLlawen, on Flickr


The finished article! by PenLlawen, on Flickr

That time I did it when you stayed at ours, I transferred the liquid into a big frying pan to reduce as I reheated the meat. Much better than leaving it in the slow cooker.

Indeed, I moved it into a big saucepan for that very reason. However, I suspect we may have run into the famous Gaywood-chilli-it-won't-reduce-because-it's-mostly-just-fat-now factor.

Grim...'s Pringle Sandwiches
INGREDIENTS:
Pringles of your favourite flavour (which better not be plain, yawn)
Cheese

PREP:
Take out two Pringles. Cut a small bit of cheese.

DIRECTIONS:
Place the cheese between the two Pringles. Eat.



OM NOM NOM

What cheese did you use?

That is Cathedral City. And the Pringles are the green ones.

Nice.

Damn, that's a complex recipe.

My food snobbery makes my soul ache every time I eat Cathedral City. Because it's more delicious than it has any right to be.

Yup. And that's why I cut the fat off the meat. We are come full circle!