Annelida Libris

Back to Jamie Oliver again this time, for a recipe from his ‘Jamies America‘, which I haven’t done that many recipes from. Lisa really like sausage stew, but I thought this gave a nice twist to it so I thought I’d give it a go.

Pictures : click to show

The usual assembly of the ingredients. The recipe called for all red peppers, but I used a mixture of red and green because that’s all I had.

Attack everything with a knife. Note the plastic bowl for all the trimmings. That was one of the key things I picked up on my Italian cookery course. Although it seems like such a simple thing, it stops you having to run back and forth to the bin all the time. If you had a compost heap you would stick it on there I guess.

First stage is to brown the sausages, which doesn’t take long. I guess you would do these in the oven, but catching all the juice that comes out of them gives you something to cook the vegetables in.

Done. Simple as that.

I took this picture because this is a sight that always made me panic when I started cooking. All the brown and crusty bits on the bottom of the pan look like something has gone wrong. But as any cook will tell you – that’s the good stuff, it’s where all the flavour is. Cooking the vegetables in the juice and fat from the sausages will capture all that flavour.

So, stick the vegetables straight in the same pan, and allow them to cook slowly to soften and absorb all the meatyness.

Then add the spices.

Once that’s all cooked in, add the tomatoes, stock and sausages to make it into a recognisable stew. Let it bubble away and thicken up into a nice thick sauce.

Serve with some rice (or potatoes I guess) and chopped spring onions on top. Easy.

This was very easy to put together, and it was very nice, although didn’t have a lot of depth for my taste – I’m not quite sure what I could do to improve that. I’ll definitely try it again, perhaps with a few more spices to give some depth.

Tags: Jamie Oliver • sausages • stew

Categories: food diary

I decided to move away from Jamie Oliver for once, and went back to ‘The Silver Spoon’, which is still one of my favourite recipe books. Inspired by ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ (long story) I settled on Involtini di Pollo alla Salvia, which is ‘Chicken Roulades with Sage’, but it sounds a lot more impressive in Italian.

It’s actually a pretty simple recipe. A quick web search actually found someone who is as much of a geek as me, and blogs their recipe attempts as well – so thanks to Sara for giving a good description of the process.

I decided that just having sage in the middle might be a bit ‘ordinary’, so I decided to ad some mozzarella as well. So here we go.

Pictures : click to show

Pretty simple stuff – some nice chicken, parma ham, sage and mozzarella for the involtini. Tomatoes and garlic for the sauce.

Put the chicken breast between some clingfilm, and basically bash it about with a rolling pin to make it nice and thin. I actually made the first one a bit too thin, so it started to fall apart a little bit, but the second was a lot better.

The chicken breast basically doubles in size. It’s quite delicate to handle, but not too bad if you’re careful.

Cut the chicken in half into a couple strips, and put sage on top.

This was the bit I added, by including mozzarella in the middle of the chicken.

Basically, I’ve just rolled up the chicken, then wrapped it in the parma ham, and put cocktail sticks through to keep it all in place.

I made the sauce simply by putting the tinned tomatoes in a pan with the garlic, some salt and pepper, sugar and white wine.

Put the involtini on to cook on a fairly medium heat. They’re quite hard to turn with the cocktail sticks in, but you can move the sticks from one side to the other to make it easier.

Halfway through the cooking.

The involtini Are now browned all over, so I put some white wine in to add moisture, and covered them on a low heat for 20 minutes while I cooked the pasta.

The involtini are completely cooked, and just resting.

Serve, just pasta with a tomato sauce, and some golden baby tomatoes and basil.

I really liked this, especially as it was so simple to make. Lisa thought the sage was quite strong, but I didn’t get that at all. You could clearly do all sorts of different things in the middle of the chicken – maybe something spicy with chilli or peppers. I’ll definitely try a variation on this again.

Tags: chicken • food • involtini • Silver Spoon

Categories: food diary

A bit of a change of direction for this one. I was really just reading through my recipe books trying to get inspired, when I came across this recipe in Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’.

We don’t normally eat fillet steak, as we prefer ribeye – more taste basically, and poaching steak just sounds wrong somehow. A point Jamie addresses in the book Still, I decided to give it a go as it sounded quite nice. I did change one aspect and did normal potato mash rather than celeriac as Lisa isn’t keen.

Pictures : click to show

The usual routine of gathering all the ingredients. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary here, just some nice steak, red wine, stock and some potatoes.

Virtually no preparation required really – just peeling the garlic, and stick it in the pan with the red wine, stock, thyme and pepper.

In an amazing turn of events, the poaching liquid is heated up – not quite sure I thought this required a photo – but there you go. The steaks are in there, but it’s not easy to see I think.

Making a cartouche. I don’t do this very often, but it’s not exactly hard – and it looks quite impressive for some reason.

Put the cartouche on top, and simmer. While all this was going on I peeled and chopped the tatties and set them to boil – that really doesn’t need a picture does it? Thought not.

The steaks are finished, so keep them warm and sort out the sauce.

Some of the poaching liquid in a pan – boil.

Add butter and ’swirl’.

Elelgently presented I’m sure you’ll agree

This was very nice. Not quite what I expected maybe. The steak didn’t take on as much of the liquid taste as I might have expected, but it certainly had more taste then fillet usually does (in my experience) and too much would probably have ruined it. I did cook this for a bit longer than I might have done normally, but Lisa really doesn’t like steak anything other than ‘well done’ so I had to make sure. This is actually one of the easiest recipes I’ve followed, and while it’s not going to replace ribeye in my favourites list, it’s a different take that I will definitely use in the future.

Tags: fillet steak • food • Jamie Oliver • poaching

Categories: food diary

The Background
I, like many other people, have recently started using Twitter, the latest craze to sweep the internet. I actually signed up quite a long time ago, but never really got into it until I visited NoRM and got the feel of it from him updating on his iPhone.

So I started having another look at it, and picked up on the BadMovieClub phenomenon that started about a week ago when Graham Linehan (of Father Ted, Black Books and I.T. Crowd fame) had the brainwave (inspired by watching ‘A Few Good Men‘) of getting together a load of people at once to watch a ‘bad’ film and comment on it as they go. A lot of people seemed to like the idea, among them Phil Jupitus (Never Mind The Buzzcocks etc.), who volunteered to ‘run’ a second showing as he couldn’t make the first.

This was all organised remarkably quickly. The online community can either be masterful at procrastination or quite direct and to-the-point when it comes to getting things sorted out, and this was a great example of the latter. In only about 4 days, hundreds of people were lined up to watch M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening‘. I was among them.

I’m not really that familiar with Mr Shyamalan’s work, having only seen ‘The Sixth Sense‘ (which I quite liked), but many people commented that this film truly deserved the ‘bad movie’ tag. They were not wrong.

The Event
At 9pm last night, a lot of people (estimates vary from about 400 to 2000) sat down to watch ‘The Happening‘ and give their comments on Twitter. Talk about sensory overload! Hundreds and thousands of Tweets flooded the network. I was using twIRC to follow the flow, partly because each Tweet takes up less screen space, and also it’s a somewhat familiar look from years of IRC experience It was, as a few people have commented, quite hard to follow both the comments and the film, and Graham commented that it would have made sense to watch the film beforehand – he is possibly right. It certainly isn’t a way I’d want to watch a good film, but it actually made a bad film something of a pleasureable experience. There were plenty of simple jibes at the film (a bitch-fest as someone quite accurately described it), but a lot of witty and biting comments as well. Everyone had their own take on the film, and it was certainly noticeable that a lot of people picked up on certain moments that stood out for their comedy value.

It was something of an intense experience, and I was actually quite exhausted, particularly as I hung around for the second showing at midnight, although I didn’t watch the film a second time – just read the Tweets. There were a few hiccups – although we didn’t manage to kill the Twitter servers which I half expected. Graham disappeared after about an hour due to a little-known limit on the number of Tweets you can send in an hour, and the timing of the film was a bit off for a few people – but nothing that really created big problems.

Everyone seemed to enter into the spirit of the thing, and everyone’s tongue was firmly in their cheek. One thing that would be interesting to know was how Phil Jupitus felt coming in halfway through, because the #badmovieclub crowd were on a massive high, and I definitely got the feeling of a huge rolling mass that just rolled on from the 9pm showing to the 12 midnight showing, an unstoppable force that just swept everyone up with it. It was a great way to spend an evening, and one of those events that you just love to have been part of.

Will it work again? Who knows. The choice of film is certainly key. The Happening was a good choice because it’s a relatively simple idea, with enough going on on-screen that you can actually comment on things without being bored out of your mind. With too much going on it would be impossible to follow the film and the comments at the same time.

I had a really great time (I even bought a T-Shirt!), and look forward to the next one, which will no doubt be different (in good ways) and a changed event from this first one – but that is a good thing, and things need to evolve to improve. Things can, and need to be, tweaked, but in concept it seems like a really cool idea, that people have taken to heart and may just have legs…time will tell.

Links

Mostly linked in above as well, but gathered for reference
• The BadMovieClub site Including lots of info about the event.
• Graham Linehan’s blog
• Twitter

A number of other people have blogged about this. I hav elisted them by their Twitter username. These are the ones I am aware of. If you know of others, or I attribute something to the wrong person – by all means let me know
• @everythingalibi
• @cartoonbeardy
• @crusty
• ???
• @cowfish
• @mrhaytch
• @manuscript
• @newretro

Categories: diary • geek

I’m trying to take part in Jamie Oliver’s ‘Pass It On’ movement, as seen on his new TV series – the Ministry of Food. I’m hoping to pass on the recipes to people at work, so I thought I’d better check that I could cook them myself

So, first of all, I decided to try one of the main recipes that featured on the TV programme.

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Gather all the ingredients. Nothing massively exciting here, just some nice chicken, prosciutto and some good parmigiano.

The first, really exciting step, is to peel and chop the potatoes, then put them on to boil while the rest of the work goes on.

Then open up the chicken and lightly score it, to allow the flavours to penetrate the meat.

Sprinkle some thyme on the chicken. I actually think I used a little too much here.

Grate a bit of lemon zest on top

Grate a bit of the cheese and …

…sprinkle it over the chicken.

Cover the whole of the chicken with the ham, to protect it, and to give a good seal.

Put the chicken between two layers of clingfilm (I actually used two layers on top and two layers on the bottom)

Then, using the base of a pan, give the chicken a good bashing until it’s all evenly thin. This doesn’t take a great deal of time, although it is a bit of a faff, but it does make a difference. The whole point is to make the chicken the same thickness all the way over so it cooks at the same rate.

Heat a good non-stick pan with a bit of oil. (clearly it’s vital that I show a picture of this)

Slap the chicken in – ham side down.

Once the chicken is cooked about halfway through, and the ham is starting to go crisp…

…turn it over, nice and quick and smooth

At the end, once it was cooked right through, I turned it over again and just gave the ham a bit longer to make it really crispy.

Turn it out onto a board and slice across the middle.

Serve – in this case dressed with some lemon juice and with some mash and soya beans.

This was very nice. The thyme was a bit strong which makes me think I used a bit much. Lisa also did’t like the lemon juice squeezed on at the end, so I’ll skip that next time. This was very easy to make though, and I can see why Jamie used it as an example.

Tags: chicken • food • Jamie Oliver • prosciutto

Categories: food diary

I’ve never been much of a JFK fanboy. I didn’t really know that much about the story until the Oliver Stone film came out, and I mainly just accepted the story of the film, like the naive muppet that I am. Not that I believed every single thing in it, but I certainly came to the conclusion that there seemed to be some sort of conspiracy.

Having become more interested in skepticism and critical thinking, I recently re-examined much of the evidence surrounding the assassination of JFK, particularly as it was presented in the film, and I pretty much reversed my position.

That’s not to say that it was definitely Oswald, acting alone, who shot JFK, but certainly most of the evidence seems to point that way, and the evidence that points towards a conspiracy is pretty weak, and in many cases has been somewhat exaggerated, re-interpreted or just plain made up.

I have no real reason for posting this, other than it’s something I have recently been interested in and reading about.

One website that I found particularly interesting (although there are many others) is The JFK 100, which highlights the 100 most striking errors in the film. The page debunking the oft-repeated ‘Single Bullet Theory‘ is very well done.

Tags: interests • jfk • skeptic

Categories: general

Well almost. I’ve done some fiddling with the layout and it’s pretty much how I want it. I’ve almost caught up with the food diary posts. I had more than I thought to catch up with, and I’ve got at least one more to do once I’ve uploaded the photos. Because I post them with the actual date I did the cooking, they have appeared down the page a bit, but here is a list so you can go straight to them :

• 1 March 2008 – Fish Pie
• 2 March 2008 – Coq au Vin
• 5 March 2008 – Shepherd’s Pie
• 12 April 2008 – Chicken stuffed with mozzarella
• 17 May 2008 – Roasted chicken breast

Tags: food • updates

Categories: blog

Slight change of style, which seems quite nice. And some of the page links may not be working due to my insistence on custom templates which I need to update after the upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of food posts to make, and then I can get on with the general wittering, and my new favourite type of comment, what I have come to call the ‘Victor Meldrew’ post.

I think the name speaks for itself.

Current topic thoughts:

• Generalisations
• Psychics
• Internet vs Web

Oh such fun

Tags: plans • templates • upgrade

Categories: blog • geek • general

We went to Eyemouth and got some lovely fish. They had some really nice mackerel, so we got some for dinner – as well as some nice cod, dressed crab, and scraps for the cat.

I’m never quite sure what to serve with fish, so I looked at what we had hanging around (potatoes and butternut squash), dug out a recipe for butternut squash from Recipezaar (which is a great resource) and got on with it….

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Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. I never get tired of the process of gathering ingredients. Samantha gives me hassle for being so organised, but since this is one of the few areas in life where I am organised, I think I can get away with it.

As usual, do all the prep. This included actually making the potato salad, but it’s hardly a major dish. The mackerel has just been slashed and seasoned with salt, pepper and a little olive oil.

The mackerel goes under the grill, and the bacon is started off for the squash.

The recipes I had printed out kept getting in the way, and falling off the counter, so I hung them from the cupboards.

Add the onions to the bacon, and check the mackerel.

The squash goes in, as well as the herbs, and turn the mackerel.

The squash is now done.

The mackerel is also done, even if the picture is a little dark.

Serve. Easy really

This was very tasty, and it was well worth going to get the fresh fish.

Tags: butternut sqaush • mackerel • potato salad

Categories: food diary

This is from ‘Cook with Jamie’. I’ve come across the recipe a few times but never quite got round to using it. Then Lisa asked if I could do something with butternut squash because she really likes it, and this gave me the opportunity to try it out…

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Including the oh-so-phallic squash.

Attack everything with a knife, and spend ages getting nice thin slices of squash – only to remember way too late that you have a mandolin especially for this sort of job. Idiot.

Basically, you put the chicken in the tray with the chilli, herbs and oil, and arrange the squash around it, adding some cream over the squash. It looks very pretty

Get the onion and celery started for the risotto.

Add the rice and start the long stirring process. Interestingly, most common advice is to stir constantly. When I did my Italian cookery course, the instructor told us not to stir any more than necessary. I tend to come in the middle somewhere. I just can’t be bothered with constant stirring

Adding stock and getting rather large.

Add in asparagus and tomato. This is just to make the risotto a bit more interesting, and is a combination of a couple of Jamie’s risotto recipes. This is one of the reasons I like risotto, you get the basic recipe right, and you can add pretty much anything to it.

See – there is a spoon – it’s right there! My ever-present tasting spoon – a requirement whatever you’re cooking really, but a real must when making risotto to check when it’s done.

The finished risotto which is now clearly way too much for two people, and the rest went into a tupperware in the fridge for lunch the next day.

Serve. A nice clean-looking plate. I could have made more of an effort with the squash probably.

Tags: butternut squash • chicken • food • Jamie Oliver • risotto

Categories: food diary