This one is straight from the pages of Jamie’s Great Britain. I don’t have particularly as strong memories of arctic roll as other people seem to – but what’s not to love here? Ice cream, jam, sponge…
And it is good – but it’s extremely similar to his pudding bombe masterpiece (which I’m making for about the sixth time this week, do try it now pannetone is in the shops). Given the choice I’d have the bombe every time.
Arctic Roll (serves about, ooh 6 – 12?):
For the sponge:
3 eggs
100g caster sugar
75g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon cocoa powder
For the filling:
500ml vanilla ice cream
500ml chocolate ice cream
300g raspberry jam
1 Crunchie
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Leave the ice cream on the side while you do everything else so it softens.
Whisk the eggs with the sugar until pale and fluffy. Fold in the flour.
Grease a baking tray and line with greaseproof paper. Spoon half the mixture on to the tray, fold the cocoa into the remaining mixture, then swirl that through the stuff on the tray. Place in the oven for 15 minutes, or until cooked through (it’s only thin so watch out!).
Get another piece of greaseproof paper and scatter with sugar. Get the sponge out of the oven and flip it on to the sugar, and peel off the ‘cooked’ bit of paper. Carefully roll up the sponge in the paper and leave to cool curled up.
Once cooled spread unroll the sponge and spread over the jam. Blob it with ice cream, alternating to make sure there’s a good mix of flavours. Bash the daylights out of the Crunchie and scatter over the ice cream, then roll it back up again. Leave in the freezer until you want to serve it.
If there’s ever leftovers from a Sunday roast, just try and stop me making bubble and squeak. This is proper Autumn grub, with apples, cider, pork… just the kind of thing I could eat all season long. The pork here comes from Farmer’s Choice, a lovely butcher’s providing excellent meat delivered to your door.
Pork chops with bubble & squeak and creamy apple gravy (serves 2):
Get two frying pans on a medium heat. Season the pork chops and scatter over the marjoram.
Mix the potato and veg together in a bowl and season well. Form into little patties and add a little oil to each pan.
Put the pork chops in one pan and cook for 5 or so minutes until coloured on one side, then flip over. Add the onions and apples to the pan.
Meanwhile fry the bubble ‘n’ squeak patties on both sides until golden brown. Drain on kitchen paper before serving.
When the pork chops are done, transfer to a board to rest and cover with foil. Turn up the heat and deglaze the pan with cider.
When the cider has bubbled away to almost nothing, add the creme fraiche and reduce the heat right down. Stir well to combine with everything in the pan, check for seasoning and serve over the chops with the bubble on the side.
This giveaway is now closed. Feel free to keep leaving comments though!
I have too many cookbooks. This is probably true of quite a few of you if you’re mildly food-obsessed like me. So I had to be quite tough with a cookbook reorganisation lately. Quite a few went to the lucky charity shops. Some others I thought to sell on. There’s Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food, which features one of my favourite things to cook in the whole wide world. There’s Gordon Ramsay’s Pub Food, packed with lovely British recipes. And Rose Prince’s The New English Kitchen which gives you kitchen classics for nearly everything. They’re all in fine condition but I have exhausted their usefulness and can’t see me needing them again. But you look at the second-hand market for big-name cookbooks but it’s a complete waste of time – I’m competing with 1p copies. One penny. What is the point?!
And these books are too good to get rid of for a penny. So I thought I’d take that idea and shove it through a logic hole until it falls out the other end and get rid of them for nothing. I’m going to exchange them for a comment you make. Because a comment from another real person is worth more than a penny to me. The acknowledgement that these words aren’t just tumbling into anonymous Internet noise, but that some people’s RSS feeds and Google searches find these witterings and leave their own ideas, photos and suggestions is worth a lot more.
Here’s the deal. I’m on 959 comments all-time for this blog. Let’s pick a round number, say, I don’t know, 1,000 comments. When I hit that number I’ll give one of these books to someone who commented in between 959 – 1,000 at random. Don’t comment on this – this is a pretty pointless post, history will reveal. But have a trawl through the archives. Tell me about one of these recipes you’ve cooked. Or about what I’m doing terribly wrong. Or that I need to try making XYZ. Whatever. Just leave me something interesting to read. You never know, you might get a free book out of it.
Tedious obligatory bit: these are freebies after all, so I’m only going to send these on to a UK address.
Sunday lunch is when you want to just go for it. I grew up in one of those lucky houses where my Mum cooked a Sunday roast every week without fail, and recently it’s been nagging at me to do this much more regularly for my own family. But my Mum didn’t have Twitter to distract her. Or Facebook. Or Dave Gorman’s Absolute radio show. But I’m trying.
This is a fairly typical roast for me, and when you do more involved roasts with a few side-dishes, I think you should forgive yourself a few shortcuts. Why not use packet stuffing, or frozen yorkies? We all know you can make them, but the extra timing, oven space and graft is more worthwhile concentrating on getting the big stuff right. So I took a few liberties.
And I know what some of you are thinking. “Yorkies? With chicken?” Yes. They were made to float on gravy of any description. Try and stop me.
The chicken here was excellent, from those fine chaps at Farmers Choice. It gave brittle, savoury skin with plump and flavour-packed meat. A real treat.
If the thought of making a Sunday roast scares you, and just seeing that list of things is too daunting, don’t panic. I bet you could cook all those things on the list individually. So it comes down purely to timing. If it helps, write a list. Start with the thing that takes longest to cook, and count things in from then – see below for a guide. Don’t forget to allow the roast time to rest. But be bold, and always remember that the gravy will heat everything back up again 🙂
Sunday roast chicken with roast potatoes, carrots and brussels sprouts (serves 4 – 6, + leftovers):
1.6kg chicken
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 onion, quartered
20g butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon parsley, finely chopped
500g white potatoes, peeled and diced into golf ball-sized chunks
1 tablespoon fine polenta
25g butter
2 bay leaves
Dash of red wine vinegar
3 carrots, peeled and sliced
250g brussels sprouts
100g cooked chestnuts
4 rashers back bacon, rind removed and reserved and sliced
1 tablespoon maple syrup
A few hours before, sprinkle the marjoram over the bird. Spread it all over generously with salt and black pepper, then place on a rack over a roasting dish and pop in the the fridge for about 3 hours. This step draws flavours down into the chicken, while at the same time drying out the skin to make it super-crispy.
Pre-heat the oven to 220°C. This temperature will really blast the skin and make it golden.
Get the chicken out of the fridge and add a few more flavourings: put 2 quarters of the onion inside the carcass and the other two on the base of the roasting dish you’re going to use. Mix the butter, parsley and garlic together. Work your fingers under the skin of the chicken to release it from the meat, then slowly push the butter into this little pocket you’ve created. Put into the oven and leave there for 15 minutes, before turning the heat down to 180°C.
Meanwhile, get the potatoes on. Get a large pan of boiling water on and salt generously. Par-boil for 10 or so minutes, until a knife can slide in and out easily (I usually jab a knife into a wedge then suspend it above the water – when it can fall off within a few seconds they’re ready). Drain well and leave to sit in the warm pan without a lid for a few minutes to steam dry. Put the butter with a splash of rapeseed oil into another baking dish and place in the oven to heat up. Toss the potatoes in the polenta and then tip out into the now hot fat. These are going to need about 45 minutes, which will cross over with removing the meat from the oven. When you remove the meat, turn the heat back up to 200°C for the potatoes’ sake.
When the chicken is cooked (look for juices running clear when probed), remove to a wooden board and cover loosely with foil. Pop the roasting dish on a high hob and add a tablespoon of flour, stirring well. After a minute add about 300ml boiling water to cover the bottom of the tray and get scraping to get all that good stuff. Sieve into a jug for serving, and give it a short blast in the microwave to keep the heat up right at the end.
If you’re using packet stuffing like me, you’ll probably need to do the boiling-water-and-stick-in-the-oven thing here. Let the instructions on the box guide you.
When the potatoes have had about 20 minutes, add sea salt, a little white pepper, the bay leaves, red wine vinegar and the bacon rind. Return to the oven.
Get the carrots and sprouts on to cook. When you are cooking multiple veg I recommend a multiple-tier electric steamer. It gets everything going at once and frees up a space on the hob. The carrots will need around 15 minutes.
While the sprouts cook, get a frying pan on medium hot and add a little oil. Throw in the bacon and wait til it colours on one side before adding the part-cooked sprouts and chestnuts. Stir fry well for five minutes.
The potatoes might need a final blast of seasoning, otherwise they’re good to serve. Take the chicken to the table, pouring any spare juice into the gravy jug, and get someone else to carve. You’ve done enough.
If you’re using frozen yorkshire puddings, they’ll need their 2 minutes in the oven now.
When the sprouts are tender, take them off the heat and add the maple syrup. Toss well to coat and serve, and don’t forget the carrots!
