(BTW…Yes I know we’re halfway through 2013 already. It’s taken me a while to get round to posting this, okay? Waffles still rock.)

One of my most-loved but underused items rescued from long-term storage is a German waffle maker, brought back from Frankfurt for me by my sister’s friend’s parents when I was about 12 years old. I’d only ever made sweet waffles in it, but encouraged by the mood du jour I decided it was time for a savoury test, one to accompany a batch of cola-braised beef, but you could of course use your favourite recipe for chili con carne, or try mine.

Gram (chickpea) flour waffles

150g Gram (chickpea) flour
100g plain flour
generous pinch English mustard powder
1 tbsp baking powder
1½ tsp salt
3 medium eggs, beaten
425ml whole milk
115g unsalted butter, melted & allowed to cool slightly

Sieve the gram flour, plain flour, mustard powder, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Make a well in the middle. Combine the eggs, milk and cooled butter in a jug, then pour gradually into the flour, whisking all the time to gradually combine dry ingredients with liquid. Preheat your waffle iron to medium. Cook a ladleful at a time, until golden (how long will depend very much on your own waffle iron). Keep the waffles warm in a low oven, covered with foil, while you make the rest.

To serve:

• 4 portions Cola-braised beef*, chili con carne or some saucy pulled pork
• Apple coleslaw (just replace half the cabbage in your favourite recipe with grated green apple with a squeeze of lemon juice)
• Grated cheese

Deliciouso, I hope you’ll agree!

*Pulled cola-braised beef
In a medium casserole dish brown 1.2kg beef shin. Add 2 red onions, peeled and cut into eighths, 4 smashed cloves of garlic, 2 sliced scotch bonnet chillies, 60ml ketchup, 60ml orange balsamic vinegar (or other fruit vinegar, or failing that sherry vinegar), 1 litre coca-cola, 2 bay leaves, 1 tbsp dried oregano, and the pared zest and juice of 1 orange. Season with plenty of salt and pepper, bring to the boil, partially cover, then simmer on a very low flame for 3-4 hours or until very tender. Shred the beef with two forks, reduce the sauce to thicken if necessary, then serve.

]]> http://souperior.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/gram-flour-waffles-with-cola-braised-beef-or-chili-con-carne/feed/ 0 foodbyemma Gram flour waffles with Cola-braised beef (or chili con carne) http://souperior.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/diy-garam-masala-a-giveaway/ http://souperior.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/diy-garam-masala-a-giveaway/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:38:22 +0000 Emma https://souperior.wordpress.com/?p=1582 Continue reading →]]> I really don’t understand why people still buy ground spices, seriously, they almost all taste of nothing! You would too if you’d sat in a clear glass jar in a brightly lit supermarket for months on end, then kept in a hot humid kitchen for years after that first opening, just waiting for someone to feel that particular culinary vibe once more.

Making your own garam masala may at first thought seem a faff on top of an imposition if you’re already making a complex curry, but it really is worth it. You can keep the whole spices for infinitely longer than their ground equivalents, and it takes mere moments to whizz up in an electric grinder (which isn’t expensive & may well change your culinary life).

Garam Masala
Makes: enough for a few curries. Easily doubled if you get through lots of this regularly.

1 dried bay leaf
3cm piece of cinnamon stick
3 black cardamom pods
2 cloves
1 tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp coriander seeds
½ tsp black peppercorns
Pinch of mace

Blitz the spices in an electric spice grinder. Simple as that. No spice grinder? If you want to make this by hand in a sturdy pestle & mortar, no problemo, but do grind just one spice at a time or you’ll be setting yourself up for a Herculean task.

Sieve the ground spices & discard the residual bits (which will mostly be cardamom husk & some prickly bits of cinnamon). Store the spice in a drawer or cupboard away from direct sunlight – a beautiful presentation spice rack will kill it quicker than you can say ‘crappy wedding gift’.

Warning! Cinnamon can tax even powerful grinders if you’re not careful, so do break it up a bit before blitzing, and use a pulsing action with the blender rather than a long drawn-out processor-burning blitz.

Speaking of cinnamon…I have one lovely pack of the finest Mexican cinnamon from Capsicana Chilli Co to give away, simply leave me a comment telling me how you like to use cinnamon or garam masala….*

And for an additional bonus entry please do tweet about the competition or post, mentioning me @FoodieEmma and linking to this post.

*Ts&Cs: deadline for entries is 20th April 2013. Open to UK residents only. Capsicana Chilli Co are not affiliated with this competition, prize is being offered & provided directly by Souperior.

Despite the quantity of hot ingredients – 3 types of pepper, lots of ginger, chilli – this isn’t an insanely hot dish (though it does have a kick!). The Szechuan pepper not only makes your lips tingle, but it had a slight numbing effect too, leaving you hungry for more. It may seem odd to use butter in a clearly Oriental dish, but it creates a gorgeously unctuous sauce and – fusion-sceptics note – really is the best.

Firecracker pepper prawns
Serves 2

300g raw shell-on jumbo king prawns, trimmed of legs & straggly bits
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tsp white peppercorns
1 tsp Szechuan peppercorns
100g butter
15-20g fresh ginger, finely diced
1 red chilli, finely diced (as hot as you like)
3 fat garlic cloves, chopped
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
2-3 spring onions, chopped
a squeeze of lemon juice

In a large wok toast the peppercorns for a minute or two until very aromatic, then tip into a pestle & mortar and crush roughly. Don’t over pound them, you want bits of peppercorn, not dust.

Melt the butter in the wok then fry the ginger, chilli and garlic for a couple of minutes until tender but not browned. Throw in the crushed pepper, the prawns, oyster sauce, soy sauce and most of the spring onions. Simmer, stirring constantly, until the prawns are cooked through (they should be completely opaque, with no trace of grey on their shells), finish with a squeeze of lemon juice, and the reserved spring onions and serve immediately.

To eat, suck the sauce off the prawn shells one at a time, peel off the shell and dunk the prawn back in the sauce. Suck the heads if you’re feeling brave (it’s where a lot of the prawn’s best juice is!). Crusty bread for mopping up the spare sauce is hardly authentically Oriental but works wonderfully, alternatively give each person a little bowl of steamed basmati or jasmine rice.

Admittedly the storecupboard in question is one of a serious chilli fanatic, but the point here was to make a chilli sauce that was totally different from the ones using fresh chillies which abound in my kitchen during the long-distant summer months. All the chillies used are whole and dried, which means you can keep them in your cupboard for a long time and they’ll still be flavour-packed; and are available from loads of retailers online (see below). This sauce has an almost barbecue-y flavour, but without the cloying sweetness of so many purpose-made barbecue chilli sauces, and it goes as wonderfully on fried eggs or chips as it does on a lamb kofte.

Storecupboard smokey chilli sauce
Makes 2-4 smallish bottles 

8g facing heaven chillies
18g pasilla chillies
22g ancho chillies
36g peperoncino chillies
16g mesilla chillies
(or a similar proportion to make up 100g total weight)
625ml distilled malt (white) vinegar
50g caster sugar
30g salt
1/2 tsp garlic powder

Remove the stalks from all the chillies, place in a bowl and cover with a kettle of boiling water. Weigh the chillies down with a small saucer, if necessary, to keep them submerged and leave for around half an hour until they are all tender. Drain the chillies (reserving the soaking liquid) and place in a saucepan with the remaining ingredients. Cover with a lid and simmer for 30 minutes, then puree until completely smooth, adding a little of the soaking liquid until you have a consistency you’re happy with. Decant into sterilised bottles, it should keep for at least a year.

*UK Stockists I particularly like:
Capsicana Chilli Co
South Devon Chilli Farm
Chilli Pepper Pete

I may not have been posting much here of late but that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging. Here are two of my very favourite leftover recipes for the festive season, as written for and posted on the Sainsbury’s Magazine blog:

Asian shredded turkey salad
Brussels sprouts and cheddar soup

Not normally one for resolutions, this year I’m determined to make (and stick) to some, but I still haven’t settled on any and it’s the 3rd already! Eek! But one resolution I can heartily recommend to everyone is this:

Note: This post is not sponsored in any way whatsoever. Even if I didn’t work for the above mentioned company I’d be buying the magazine. So there

Many years ago when I worked as a development chef for the supermarkets, every season some smart-alec sales guy would say “let’s redo the chicken Kiev. Let’s make the best, tastiest, most indulgent chicken Kiev anyone’s ever had – it’ll fly off the shelves!” and no matter how much we grumbled & begged, one of us chefs would be sent into the kitchen to come up with the ‘new Kiev’. Bechamel, bacon, butter, cream, the finest farmhouse Cheddar – we played with variations on them all, in the attempt to make this classic-turned-trash into something smart & fancy the average posher-than-Tesco-but-not-Selfridges-food-hall customer would be thrilled to pop into their overpriced basket. But every time, sure as eggs are eggs, we’d finally get a product the buyers were happy with & then they’d say “Now, about the nutritionals on this…” and that’s where the whole concept would crumble, as we’d always known it would.

Y’see – you can’t make a Chicken Kiev without butter. Or salt. In generous quantities. And a luxury one? Well then you’ll be wanting cream too, and good cheese (whose sodium quotient is almost as alarming as the fat content) and don’t even get me started on the nutritional values on bacon. And so we’d be sent back to make a Kiev that didn’t have a big fat red warning light on all its RDAs, and it’d be, well, okay, but really, it was nothing special anymore. And so the idea would get shelved for another 4 months until someone new joined the sales team….

This Kiev is actually a halfway house between Kiev and chicken Cordon Bleu – that indulgent dish of cream, bacon & cheese in which lucky, devout chickens are sent to finish their days if they’ve been REALLY good. I’ve taken pains to censor no ingredient in pursuit of rich, creamy, indulgence, so loosen your belt and remember that the diet always starts Tomorrow…..

Chicken Cordon Kiev
Serves 2

2 big, plump skinless chicken breasts
75g clotted cream or extra thick double cream
50g soft butter
25g extra mature Cheddar, finely grated
3 fat cloves garlic, crushed
A handful of parsley, finely chopped
6 slices smoked pancetta
A little plain flour
1 egg, beaten
2 large handfuls panko breadcrumbs
15g finely grated parmesan
Vegetable oil, for frying

Mix together the cream, butter, cheddar, garlic and parsley, and season with plenty of salt and black pepper. To make a hole for oodles of stuffing that won’t ooze out everywhere, insert a thin-bladed knife into the centre of the thickest part of the breast, then (with the knife still in the heart of the meat), slide the knife around to make a pocket within the breast. Hard to picture? You can see a great how-to video here.

Stuff your pocketed chicken breasts with the filling. This is easiest if you use a piping bag but perfectly easy to do with a small spoon and your fingers. Keep smoothing the stuffing down inside the meat, just as you would if you’d stuffed butter (or stuffing!) under the skin of a whole chicken for roasting. Now wrap each chicken breast in the pancetta, making sure you cover the opening of the pocket with at least one slice. Coat your chicken breasts in first the flour, then the beaten egg, and then the breadcrumbs (mixed with the Parmesan). This is best done in three plates or shallow bowls, rather than Nigella-style in bags, as the stuffed breasts are rather fragile. Make sure they’re really well coated, and don’t be afraid to double-coat for extra crunch if you want. Place on a wire rack and chill until very very firm (to stop the filling exploding out when frying). Preheat your oven to Gas 5/190˚C and stick a baking tray in there to heat up too.

Heat a couple of centimeters of oil in a deep-sided frying pan or wide saucepan to 180˚C, or until a crumb of bread sizzles immediately when dropped in. Carefully slide the chilled Kievs into the oil, and fry for 3-4 minutes, turning once, until golden all over. Transfer to the preheated baking tray and bake for 15 minutes or until cooked through. Serve with some greens (to pretend it is healthy) and some carbs (new potatoes for preference) to help mop up the buttery, creamy, cheesy juices.

Super-simple chocolate coffee cupcakes with orange cheesecake icing
Makes 12 cupcakes or 20 fairy cakes

225g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
225g granulated sugar
½ tsp fine salt (if using flakes – Maldon for preference – powder them in a pestle & mortar first)
1½ tsp good-quality instant coffee (I like Kenco Millicano wholebean instant)
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste (or Madagascan vanilla extract)
6 tbsp olive oil
For the icing:
50g white chocolate
100g full-fat cream cheese
50g soft unsalted butter
½ tsp vanilla bean paste (or extract)
Zest of 1 small orange
250g icing sugar
Edible glitter, to decorate (optional*)

Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180/Gas Mark 6. Stir the flour, cocoa, baking powder and sugar together into a bowl (preferably one with a pouring lip, if you have one) until evenly mixed. In a jug dissolve the coffee granules in 250ml hot water, then stir in all the other liquid ingredients. Pour the liquids into the dry mix and stir gently until just combined (don’t worry about the odd lump).

Divide the batter between paper case-lined baking tins, the mixture will make 20 little fairy cakes (tins with hollows measuring 4.5cm at the bottom/6.5cm at the top) or 12 cupcakes (5.5cm/7.5cm). Bake for 15 minutes for the smaller ones, or 20 minutes for the larger, or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tins before icing.

To make the icing, melt the chocolate in a small bowl – a microwave is easiest for this, give it 20 second blasts, stirring in between, it should take no more than 1½ minutes. Set aside to cool a little whilst you do the rest of the icing. Beat the soft butter and the cream cheese together until smooth, then add the molten chocolate, vanilla and orange zest. Add the icing sugar a bit at a time (to avoid a giant sugar cloud in your kitchen) and beat until thoroughly combined. Spoon into a piping bag and chill for half an hour or so to firm up a bit.

When your cakes are completely cool pipe on the icing and, if wished, sprinkle with edible glitter*. If you aren’t serving them immediately chill the cakes to give the icing a chance to firm.

*Yes I’m aware there’s been some furore over the use of non-toxic ‘edible’ glitter, but seriously, all it does is pass through your system without causing any harm whatsoever. If you’re not happy about that, or you are planning on selling the cupcakes, simply don’t use it.

Chive flower tortelloni with new potatoes and raclette cheese
Serves 8-10

500g ’00′ pasta flour, plus extra for dusting
4 medium eggs + 6 egg yolks
For the filling:
1kg new potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled
100g butter
300g raclette cheese (or any other good melty cheese)
5 tbsp chive flowers (approx 10 heads)
You will also need a pasta machine

Put the flour and eggs in a food processor and pulse until it forms a dough (or mix by hand on a clean worktop, breaking the eggs into a well in the centre of the flour and working in gradually). Knead the dough on a clean worktop for a few minutes until you have a smooth, pliable dough, then divide into eight portions, wrap well in clingfilm and leave to rest for an hour.

Meanwhile make your filling. Cook the potatoes in boiling salted water for 15 minutes, or until tender. Pick the chive heads apart, checking for any little critters that might be lurking inside, and cut the cheese into 5mm cubes. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain then mash with the butter and a generous amount of salt and pepper. Stir in the cheese and chive flowers (you don’t want the cheese to fully melt), then taste for seasoning and allow to cool completely.

To assemble your filled pasta, clear a large worktop and dust it and your pasta machine lightly with flour. Take an eighth of the pasta dough and run it through your machine, starting at the widest setting and slowly getting thinner and thinner, be sure to run the pasta through each setting at least twice.  When the pasta is at the thinnest setting, use a round cutter (or a suitably sized tumbler and a knife) to cut discs 9-10cm in diameter.  Arrange small spoonfuls of the filling in the centre of each disc, then brush the edges with a little water. Fold the pasta disc in half to give you a stuffed half-moon shape, then curl the pointed edges around a finger to join together, using a dab of water to make it stick. Alternatively just make simple raviolis, in which case it’s prettiest to use a crimped cutter for the discs.  Repeat this process until all the filling is used up, keeping all dough and finished tortellonis/raviolis covered with a teatowel when you’re not working on them.  Any leftover scraps of dough should really be discarded as they’ll be quite dry by the end, but if you abhor the waste you could reroll them and make some linguine or tagliatelle.

Unless you’re feeding an army with all of this batch straight away, I would advise freezing them on open trays (you can actually stack them a few layers deep on one tray if you put greaseproof paper between each layer), then once they are frozen solid transferring to a ziplock freezer bag (they will keep for around 3 months, thereafter they start to fall apart and lose the chive flavour).  To cook (whether fresh or frozen) simply simmer in a large pan of bubbling but not boiling salted water for 3-5 minutes, until they all float to the surface, then toss in plenty of brown butter and scatter with parmesan.  Delicioso!