Category Archives: lemon

lemon and black pepper olive pork

food, lemon, olives, pork

lemon and pepper olive pork steaks

My family can’t get enough of olives. So when Olives from Spain sent me a bunch of ingredients to try to create a marinade for olives I set to it right away. There was an almost embarrassing selection of things to try, but I kept going back to, of all things, the lemon. Paired with it’s old friend, black pepper and just a hint of clove to reinforce the spice this works lovely with fatty pork. If you try it, make sure the sugar is on hand to help round out the flavours.

Lemon and black pepper pork steaks (serves 2):

Zest and juice of ½ a lemon

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

Pinch of sugar

About 10 Spanish black olives, halved

1 clove

2 pork shoulder steaks

  1. Put the lemon, sugar and peppercorns in a pestle and mortar and crush lightly so the peppercorns are coarse. Mix well with the olives and clove and taste – depending on your olives you may need a pinch of salt and / or sugar to balance it out. Add a dash of olive oil and leave to stand for an hour uncovered.
  2. Heat a griddle pan to pretty darn hot and the oven on to 200°C. Lay your pork steaks on a chopping board and slice most of the way through horizontally, so you have a meaty book. Discarding the clove, stuff the pork with the olive mix, press down firmly with your hand and add a pinch of salt to the surface of the pork. Put on to the hot griddle.
  3. After 4 minutes one side should be cooked, so turn over and put into the oven. After 8 minutes turn the oven off and leave for a further 5 minutes, then serve. Great with potato gratin and some greens.
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pinot grigio potatoes

food, garlic, lemon, potatoes, wine

image

Shock, horror! Another roast potato recipe on this blog. What an anomaly.

Of course it isn’t, I’ve got roast potato recipes here, here and here for starters. But this was another twist, derived from cooking Heston’s perfect chicken (again). The chicken there is treated with a boozy butter baste. I’d gone a bit crazy and made too much, so decided to slather it on the potatoes. And with a little lemon and garlic to really boost those flavours I think it’s a great alternative!

Any white wine would work, but I had some Pinot Grigio a-wastin’ so that’s what I used. You want something sweet-ish here I think, a dry wine could turn out bitter with such fierce roasting.

Pinot Grigio potatoes (serves 4):

700g – 1kg Maris Piper potatoes, peeled and diced to walnut-sized pieces

100ml white wine

125 unsalted butter

A few sprigs of thyme

1 lemon

3 cloves garlic

  1. Preheat your oven to 200°C. Simmer the potatoes in salted water until really tender. Drain and allow to steam off excess water a little while you prepare the baste.

  2. Put a heavy baking tray in the oven to preheat. Add the wine, butter and thyme to a saucepan and bring to the boil, then immediately remove from the heat. Toss the potatoes in the buttery wine and tip on to the baking tray and roast.

  3. After 20 mins, peel the lemon zest in strips and add to the baking tray along with the garlic. Toss the potatoes well to coat. If it’s looking a bit dry add a dash of oil.

  4. Roast for a further 20 mins, or until the potatoes are very crisp. Season with salt and pepper before serving.

turkey and courgette meatballs

bacon, courgettes, food, lemon, turkey

turkey and courgette meatballs

student-survival-guideIn another one of my recipes for students, I’ve taken inspiration from the wonderful Ottolenghi. In his latest book (Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (Ebury Press, £27)) he and long-time collaborator Sami Tamimi return to their home town of Jerusalem to reminisce on the food gems of their youth. It’s full of wonderful recipes and ideas, and generally speaking most of the recipes are thrifty and homely in nature.

This recipe is inspired by “turkey and courgette burgers with spring onion and cumin.”  The meatballs are so substantial they don’t need any carbohydrates; if you need to make it go further serve with pasta or rice. This meal is relatively expensive but you’ll make tons of meatballs that freeze well, and extra tomato sauce which keeps in the fridge for a couple of days

Approximate cost  for main ingredients, excludes storecupboard ingredients (prices from Tesco.com 7th Oct 2012): £4.13

Turkey and courgette meatballs (makes about 20):

For the meatballs:

500g minced turkey

2 rashers bacon, diced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 cream cracker, bashed to dust

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

1 large courgette, grated

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 egg

For the sauce:

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 tin tomatoes

  1. For the meatballs, combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well with a pinch of salt. With damp hands form into chunks the size of golf balls.
  2. Heat a large frying pan over a medium heat with a little oil, and a normal saucepan over a high heat with a little oil. Add the meatballs to the large pan and brown them on all sides for about 7 – 10 minutes. You should do this in batches if this is going to crowd the pan.
  3. Meanwhile in the other pan crush in the garlic and then immediately add the tomatoes. This will spatter and bubble so watch out. Add a pinch each of salt, sugar and pepper. You should continue to simmer this sauce until when you draw a wooden spoon through it leaves a channel, so it is thick and rich. At this point tip the meatballs into the sauce and cook for a couple more minutes to cook through.

lemon chicken on crispy noodles

carrots, chicken, lemon, noodles, stock

lemon chicken on crispy noodles

student-survival-guideNot having money sucks. Worse still, not having money and really enjoying food sucks. The time you most notice this is when you’re a student. Most Wanted, the magazine for VoucherCodes.co.uk has asked me to come up with some recipes that are frugal but hopefully don’t feel like it!

The first of these is lemon chicken on crispy noodles. It’s inspired by a Ken Hom recipe that’s a favourite in our house. It’s tasty, messy and great fun to eat. It also scales up really well if you need to feed a few more friends.

The ingredients in this are pretty basic but raised up by making the flavours big and punchy. Shopping around you could save money on the chicken, and can be adjusted to suit any other sturdy vegetables you wanted to add, such as peas or green beans. However don’t cut too many corners with the stock, it forms the base of the flavour and carries the rest of the dish. I like Knorr products so look out for good brands of stock cubes and stock pots: stock is handy in almost all savoury recipes. One thing to watch for in this recipe is it needs two frying pans on the go, so you may need to borrow another! You should be in and out of the kitchen in 15 minutes once you get the hang of this one.

Approximate cost  for main ingredients, excludes storecupboard ingredients (prices from Tesco.com 4th Oct 2012): £1.72

Lemon chicken on crispy noodles (serves 1):

1 packet of instant noodles

1 chicken breast, diced

250ml stock made with ½ stock cube

1 lemon

2 carrots

1 teaspoon cornflour

  1. Get a pan of water on a rapid boil and add the noodles. Cook for 3 – 4 minutes until tender and then tip into a sieve to drain. Rinse with cold water to completely cool them down.
  2. Get two frying pans on over medium-high heat. In one of them you will cook the noodles; this should have a layer of oil to coat the base of the pan. The other just needs a tiny bit into which to cook everything else.
  3. While the pans heat up dice the chicken and prepare the carrot. Peel the carrot, and after you’ve discarded the skin keep peeling until you reach the bitter core, which you can chuck away. Being very careful to avoid spatter add the noodles to their pan and spread out with a wooden spoon so they cover the base. Add the chicken to the other pan and stir fry for a couple of minutes until coloured all over, then add the stock and carrots.
  4. Into the chicken pan grate in the zest of the lemon and the juice of half. Stir well to combine and let it bubble away for a couple of minutes. The noodles should be crisp on one side now so with confidence flip them over. While the other side cooks taste the broth. You may want to add more lemon, or possibly a pinch of sugar or salt to balance everything out. When you’re happy with the flavour add a splash of water to the cornflour in a small dish and mix well, then tip this into the sauce.
  5. When the noodles are done tip them on to kitchen paper to drain, and then into your serving bowl. Tip the chicken and the sauce over the top and start slurping!

revani

cake, food, lemon, orange, polenta

revani

I spotted this little gem on the pages of an Ottolenghi article in Waitrose magazine and made it immediately: it’s a squidgy and sweet Turkish cake. Surfing around it seems to be a very popular and traditional dish and when you taste it it’s not hard to see why. It’s kind of like a drizzle cake in that you bake a sponge, then slice it up and pour over a syrup while it cools. And definitely follow Yotam’s advice: it improves immeasurably overnight as the cake soaks up more and more of the lush, sweet juice. Perfect with a cup of tea.

You are supposed to use marmalade in the batter but I used some leftover orange jelly.

You know the other clever bit? Cutting the cake into diamonds. No messing about with even slices, just merry little diamonds which are easy to eat and cute for the virtue of being different.

Revani (makes about a 20 piece cake if cut into diamonds):

5 eggs, separated

100g caster sugar

50g plain flour

100g semolina

Zest of 1 orange

50g butter, melted

50g marmalade / jelly

For the syrup:

250g caster sugar

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla paste

1 orange, halved (the one you zested above)

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a 21cm springform tin and line with greaseproof paper. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until pale and then incorporate the flour, semolina, pinch of salt, zest, butter and marmalade. Continue beating until smooth.
  2. In a separate bowl whisk the egg whites to soft peaks and then gradually fold into the batter. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
  3. While the cake is in the oven make the syrup. Put all the ingredients in a saucepan with 300ml water and bring to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes.
  4. While the cake is still warm and in the tin, slice it into diamond shapes about 3cm wide. Pour the syrup over the cake – it will look like too much but it will take it all! – and leave to cool and let the cake soak up the juice. You can eat it straight away but it’s so much better if left overnight.

inverted lemon tart, fruit salad with lemon sorbet and orange tuile

food, lemon, orange

Inverted lemon tart, fruit salad with lemon sorbet and orange tuile from Waitrose cookery school

I’m not much of a golfer at all but I do like to chase a ball into the rough for a couple of hours, and drink a flask of coffee in the horizontal rain. A couple of years on the trot a buddy took me along to the annual Wentworth weekend PGA tournament. It’s a great day out and I really recommend it, but the most fascinating thing as a dorky sub-player is to watch a real pro at close quarters. It doesn’t come across on TV but the mental rehearsal they go through, the microscopic movements of the arms, the careful concentration in the swing… these small details contribute massively to your own game, offering these sudden light bulb moments of inspiration that only the years of craft can give, shamelessly stolen by this charlatan. And so it was when I attended the Waitrose Cookery School recently.

I was one of the winners of their Easter Lunch Facebook competition. We were to be taken through a three course menu which we would then reproduce: Coquilles St Jacques, rack of lamb and lemon tart. Our hosts were Jon Jones and James Campbell, both experienced, genial and patient trainer chefs. And being able to observe a professional chef up close as they go through their routine just helps those little things slip into place. The way you work a knife, the mise en place, having an “s-star-star-t bucket” as James put it… all those tiny things you miss when you’re watching a cookery show.

Jon, a veteran of Fortnum &  Mason’s, took us through our savoury menu: the scallops were fresh, tender and mushroomy. The lamb was sumptious, rich and meaty. But the dessert was out of this world, possibly one of the best desserts I’ve ever eaten. The genius touch of leaving the fruit to macerate in a little vanilla, icing sugar and lemon was just perfect. Combined with a creamy lemon tart,a yoghurty lemon sorbet and wafer-thin orange and sesame tuile, this was clearly a dish constructed by someone who knows his puds. James has spent time in five different Michelin-starred restaurants, with accolades as long as your arm, and it shows. His passion for constructing and instructing is clear from the beginning. I’ll be making this again at some point, and I’ll run through the recipe in more detail then.

I went with my Dad, an experience in itself as I’m fairly sure he’s never made anything for me besides toast. Other members of the family advised me to keep him away from a tin of beans lest he chuck it into the scallops. But he had a great time too, despite phrases like “nappe” and “roux” going right over his head. If he can attend and get something out of it, anyone can. This is my second time at the cookery school, and I can’t wait to go back again.

Waitrose filmed parts of the day, I appear in the video far too much.

Update: Waitrose kindly sent through the recipe in handy PDF format: Waitrose recipe – Inverted lemon tart, summer fruit salad & lemon yogurt sorbet

rossi’s lemon ice

food, ice cream, lemon

rossi's lemon ice with a Cadbury's flake

One of my favourite food bloggers, Kavey of KaveyEats, hit upon a great idea for bloggers everywhere to explore their childhood ice cream-related memory. Like most Britons, particularly those that grew up on the coast, ice cream is a very tangible memory to me. One brand in particular is the first that comes to mind: not Wall’s, not Lyons Maid, not Haagen-Dazs. Rossi’s.

Southend Rossi's Kiosk

This is the kiosk I would get my Rossi's lemon ice from. (Image copyright Upixa.com via "Southend Sites")

Rossi’s in known throughout South Essex as the ice cream brand. The Rossi’s van came round my street every night after school, you could stroll along Marine Parade and visit their shop, or drop by their kiosk on Southend High Street. I was astonished as I grew up and went outside of the county to realise no-one else had heard of it. But it’s a brand that goes back eighty years, and it’s familiar blue-and-white livery is a prominent landmark on the Southend promenade.

The kiosk is now unfortunately gone, and you can buy tubs of their ice cream in many grocers and delis throughout the county. It’s not quite as magic buying it this way, but it still tastes the same as when I was eating it thirty years ago.

Their “vanilla” ice cream is great – doesn’t actually taste of vanilla, it tastes of white, but it’s great – but the crown jewel in their flavour riches is the lemon sorbet, or as it’s more commonly known, “the lemon ice”. If you’ve not had the pleasure it doesn’t quite taste like a sorbet that you are used to; it’s smooth and extremely fine-grained, with a curious luminous yellow hue. But it’s the perfect treat on a hot Summer stroll along Southend High Street.

For my attempt I needed a really strong syrup with a slick of gelatine to try and recreate the smooth texture. After freezing I was amazed how close to the real thing it tasted! I would probably dial down the lemon a tiny bit next time – maybe 4 lemons instead of 6, but otherwise it’s a perfect little scoop of childhood memories.

Visit KaveyEats for more info and lots of brill ice cream recipes!

(Oh and thanks to Kavey herself for kindly colour-correcting my typically crud photo)

Rossi’s lemon ice (makes about 500ml):

300ml water

200g sugar

Zest and juice (about 250ml) of 6 lemons

1 leaf of gelatine snipped into tiny pieces

1 teaspoon yellow food colouring

  1. Bring everything to boil in a saucepan. As soon as it boils take it off the heat and whisk vigorously to dissolve the sugar and gelatine. Pour into a freezable container and freeze overnight.
  2. When ready to serve, whizz up in a food processor and serve in a cornet, garnished with a Cadbury’s Flake.

heston blumenthal’s roast chicken

chicken, food, lemon, salt, thyme, wine

heston blumenthal's ultimate roast chicken

Heston’s latest series, How to Cook Like Heston, is probably the one that could finally convert the non-believers. It’s vintage Heston treading familiar recipes, but taking them just far enough, and just explaining enough to make them accessible for those that want to try. The best example of this is roast chicken: I’ve previously cooked his perfect roast chicken (from In Search of Perfection) and it’s a brilliant recipe. But despite its relative simplicity there are a couple of stages in it that could be intimidating: plunging into water a few times, trying to cook a whole chicken in a frying pan, and chicken wing butter. So I was intrigued to see him show an even further simplified version on the show.

chicken roasted to 71°The brining is still there; an absolute necessity in my book. A low solution of 6% keeps the meat moist without making it too strong and cure-like. The slow roasting is also there, “low and slow” as Heston puts it, and after a simple resting back into your hottest oven to finish off. For the roasting itself, you simply have to use a meat thermometer to be sure that it’s done. I recommend Salter’s Heston-branded one but any one will do. It is recommended that you take the meat to 75°C; Heston admits that but says 60°C gives you the perfect succulence. If you have bird of spotless provenance that would probably be fine but I took my mid-range supermarket bird to 70°C.

And it’s tremendous of course. In fact I’d possibly argue that the extra stages introduced by the Perfection version are unnecessary. You get a fabulously juicy, tasty chicken, plump with flavour and intense chickenness. It’s well worth giving a go once – it takes no more effort than a regular roast chicken, just the brining the night before and a bit longer time blocked out for the oven. If you love your Sunday roast chicken, you owe it to your dinner table to try this one out.

The link to the Channel 4 recipe is here. An even more developed and detailed version of the recipe is in the book Heston Blumenthal at Home.

Heston Blumenthal’s roast chicken (serves 4–6):

6% brine (I used 240g salt dissolved in 4 litres of water)

1.4kg chicken

1 lemon

1 bunch of thyme

125g unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus extra for rubbing into the skin

30ml dry white wine

  1. Remove the trussing from the chicken to allow it to cook more evenly then place it in a container. Pour over the brine ensuring that the chicken is submerged then place in the fridge overnight.
  2. Preheat the oven to 90ºC. Remove the chicken from the liquid, rinse with fresh water and pat dry with kitchen paper. Place on a wire rack over a baking tray.
  3. Roll and pierce the lemon then place it in the cavity of the bird with half the thyme. Rub some softened butter on top of the skin. Roast the chicken until the internal temperature in the thickest part of the breast is 60ºC (for mine to hit 70ºC took 2 hours 20 minutes but there’s so many factors involved you should check every half hour from about 2 hours onwards).
  4. Remove the chicken from the oven and allow to rest for 45 minutes. Turn the oven temperature as high as it will go. This is a good time to use the oven if you’re doing roast potatoes.
  5. In the meantime, melt the butter in a pan and add the wine and a few sprigs of thyme. Bring to the boil then remove the pan from the heat and use the melted butter to baste the chicken before browning. Grind over some black pepper.
  6. Once the resting time has elapsed, put the chicken back in the roasting tray and return it to the oven for approximately 10 minutes or until golden brown, taking care that it doesn’t burn.
  7. Once coloured, remove the chicken from the oven and carve. Serve with Heston’s perfect carrots and my perfect roast potatoes, a combination of methods including Heston’s.

empire chicken with indian gravy and bombay roasties

carrots, chicken, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cucumber, cumin, curry, food, garlic, ginger, lemon, nigella seeds, potatoes, red onion

empire chicken with indian roasties

What a triumph this is. Just when I was feeling a bit indifferent to Jamie Oliver’s Great Britain along comes this absolute belter. Jamie introduces this by saying most people when asked about their favourite foods will mention roast chicken and curries, and this utterly unites the heart of both of these.

With blackened, tangy skin the chicken comes out juicy and tickling on the tongue, although be warned it will make a mess of your oven as it sits on the rack.

Being the kind of blog this is though, I have to talk about the roast potatoes. They are a triumph. I used to get “spicy spuds” from a dubious takeaway near me and these are very, very close to those – crispy, spicy and fluffy.

I’ve made a few changes to the spices in the potatoes based on what I had, and used floury over new pots to get them really crispy. I’ve served mine with a refreshing salad.

I cannot recommend this recipe enough.

Jamie’s original recipe is here.

Empire chicken, Bombay roasties, Indian gravy and refreshing salad (serves 4):

For the chicken and marinade

1.4kg free-range chicken

1 heaped tablespoon each finely grated garlic, fresh ginger and fresh red chilli

1 heaped tablespoon tomato purée

1 heaped teaspoon each of ground coriander, turmeric, garam masala and ground cumin

2 heaped teaspoons natural yoghurt

2 level teaspoons sea salt

For the gravy

1 stick of cinnamon

2 small red onions, peeled

10 cloves

3 tablespoons each of white wine vinegar and Worcestershire sauce

3 level tablespoons plain flour

500ml chicken stock

For the Bombay-style potatoes

800g new potatoes

sea salt and ground pepper

1 lemon

2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil

a knob of butter

1 heaped teaspoon each of nigella seeds, ground coriander, garam masala, fenugreek and turmeric

1 bulb of garlic

Pinch of chilli flakes

For the salad

½ a cucumber, peeled

3 carrots, peeled

1 red onion, peeled

½ lemon

    1. Slash the chicken’s legs a few times right down to the bone. Mix all the marinade ingredients together and smear all over the chicken. Leave to marinate overnight.
    2. Preheat the oven to 200°C and organize your shelves so the roasting tray can sit right at the bottom, the chicken can sit directly above it, right on the bars of the shelf, and the potatoes can go at the top.
    3. Cut the potatoes into golf-ball size pieces then parboil them in a large pan of salted boiling water with a whole lemon for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are cooked through. Drain the potatoes then let them steam dry. Stab the lemon a few times with a sharp knife and put it right into the chicken’s cavity.
    4. Roughly chop the onions and add to a roasting tray along with the cinnamon stick, cloves, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce, then whisk in the flour. Pour in the stock or water, then place this right at the bottom of the oven. Place the chicken straight on to the bars of the middle shelf, above the roasting tray. Cook for 1 hour 20 minutes.
    5. Put a roasting tray in the oven for five minutes to get hot. Add the olive oil, butter, the spices, halve a bulb of garlic and add it straight to the pan. Add your drained potatoes to the tray, mix everything together, then season well. After the chicken has been in for 40 minutes, put the potatoes in.
    6. Once the chicken is cooked, move it to a board to rest. Pass the gravy through a coarse sieve into a pan, whisking any sticky goodness from the pan as you go. Bring to the boil and either cook and thicken or thin down with water to your preference (I had to add some boiling water to deglaze the surface and make a sauce out of it.
    7. For the salad, use a vegetable peeler to make thin strips of the carrot and cucumber. Then finely slice the onion and add this to it. Add a pinch each of salt and sugar, then squeeze over the lemon and toss to combine. Leave for 15 minutes while everything else finishes off.
    8. Get your potatoes out of the oven and put them into a serving bowl, then serve the chicken on a board next to the sizzling roasties and hot gravy.

lemon yoghurt cheesecake

cream cheese, jelly, lemon, yoghurt

[There is supposed to be a photo here, but once I'd seen it I couldn't inflict it on your poor eyes. It was an awful abomination unto lenses. It did however taste great.]

The lovely people at Frank PR sent me some Onken Sicilian Lemon Yoghurt to try. Trying it neat it’s has a wicked tang, properly lemony. Really nice texture too that coats the tongue. But I couldn’t leave it at that, I thought it would taste perfect in a cheesecake. The version I’ve made has a jelly topping which is completely optional but just gives it one more tart edge. Zestilicious!

Lemon yoghurt cheesecake (makes about 8 servings):

200g shortbread biscuits

25g butter

1 450g pot Onken Sicilian Lemon yoghurt

300g cream cheese

1 tablespoon icing sugar

Juice of 2 lemons

1 gelatine leaf

50g caster sugar

  1. Bash the shortbread to dust and melt the butter. Combine to form a sticky paste and put it in the bottom of a pie dish. Bung in the fridge while you carry on.
  2. Combine the icing sugar and cream cheese and beat in the yoghurt until smooth. Put this on top of the biscuit base and return to the fridge.
  3. Snip the gelatine into bits and soak in the lemon juice on a heatproof bowl. After 10 minutes add the sugar and a splash of water, and sit on top of a saucepan of simmering water. Stir continuously until all the gelatine has dissolved, then pour on to the yoghurt base.
  4. Pop in the freezer for an hour, then transfer to the fridge for another hour or overnight if you can. Serve once the jelly has set.