Chicken & Chorizo Couscous

Yes, I know, I know, another chorizo recipe. But I was talking about this recipe on a Facebook group I'm part of and was looking to see if I'd posted it on this blog as an easy way of passing the recipe on, and I realised that I hadn't - or if I had, I couldn't find it. So here it is. Chicken & Chorizo Couscous.

I'm not a great fan of leftovers of cold meat, but for reasons of economy and saving the planet, it is better to buy a whole chicken and use it up scrupulously, down to the boiling of bones to make stock, rather than buying portions (although I do admit to buying chicken thighs occasionally). This dish has almost become a reason to have a roast chicken at the weekend in itself. It's a ridiculously easy and tasty midweek dish and if you are roasting a chicken this weekend, I suggest you keep back enough cooked meat, and boil up your bones, to knock this up early next week.

This is of course open to various adaptations depending on what you have in the cupboards, and I freely fiddle with quantities and ingredients. I have used tamarind paste in place of harissa, and made it veggie too. You definitely need spice of some sort, though, A bit of a kick, otherwise it's just a bit bland, especially if you're leaving out the chorizo (although why would you?). I also recommend serving with your favourite chilli sauce. Tabasco is good, as is Hot Smoky Bastard.

 And finally, seeing as how we're bring scrupulous, I believe this once came from a Good Food magazine. I can't find it on the Good Food website any more, but the index card I meticulously copied it on to (obviously when I was going through an organised phase) has the initials 'GF' by the recipe title. Anyway, I'm sure they won't mind me repeating it here.

Chicken & Chorizo Couscous

serves 6 (allegedly - but don't bank on it if folks are hungry)

350g couscous
350g cold cooked chicken, chopped into bite-sized pieces
150g cooking chorizo, skinned if necessary and diced
3 medium tomatoes or equivalent cherry tomatoes, chopped up
a couple of handfuls of frozen peas
900ml hot chicken stock 
2 tsp harissa paste
generous pinch of saffron (if you have)
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp olive oil
chopped fresh coriander to serve (optional - more often than not I don't have it but parsley works, or just go without).

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160 fan.

Combine the couscous, chicken, chorizo, tomatoes and frozen peas in a large dish.

Stir the harissa paste spices and olive oil into the stock, then pour the spicy stock mix over the couscous mixture and stir together.

Cover the dish with foil - or, if it has one, a lid - and bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes. Fluff up with a fork before serving.

It really is that simple, and believe me when I tell you it's utterly delicious. If there are leftovers, they are great cold, the next day for lunch.

Caldo Verde

It may not have escaped your notice that I was unable to leave Ultracomida empty-handed last week. Olives, sliced meats and some cooking chorizo which, in my defence, was already on the shopping list.

My love affair with chorizo continues, It may no  longer be the darling of the food scene, trends move on of course (unless it's burgers) but I am (as I never hesitate to remind you) firmly of the opinion that chorizo is one of the finest things to grace this good earth.

And on a late summer afternoon, the sun warm, but the light removed of the harshness of hotter days, lending a lovely mellow glow to proceedings, chorizo is the perfect addition to a soup. This isn't too thick and chunky to feel wintry, more sustaining and likely to contributing a feeling of well being to your soul when you know you have more paint to apply to a small girl's bedroom - or some such travail...

I found the original recipe in my slow cooker book, which tells me this is Portuguese in origin, although the name sounds distinctly Italian. Indeed, Google translate thought it was Italian too - green soup. Ironically didn't have the time to make it in the slow cooker, and so made it on the hob. Also, despite the addition of the cabbage at the end, this looked more like zuppa arancione - or sopa laranje (orange soup - whether Italian or Portuguese - what with the spicy chorizo and carrot). But I like the sound of Caldo Verde, so caldo verde it shall be. Just remember that this isn't a soup that you whizz up, so make sure you chop the veg into suitably small pieces.

Caldo Verde

A good slug of olive oil
2 onions, finely chopped
2 fat cloves of garlic, also finely chopped
3 medium sized carrots, peeled and finely diced
150g cooking chorizo, peeled if necessary and diced
500g potatoes - I used little baby potatoes that had been growing in the compost heap, of all places - diced into appropriate sized chunks
1 teaspoon of smoked paprika - I used my favourite, Chinata hot smoked paprika
1.2 litres hot chicken stock
125g sweetheart or savoy cabbage, finely shredded.

Heat the olive oil in a large pan, then gently fry the onions for 5 minutes or so until starting to soften.

Add the garlic, carrots, chorizo, potatoes and paprika and cook for a few minutes more.

Pour in the hot stock, season, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 20-25 minutes until the potato is cooked. 

About 10 minutes before the end of cooking, add the shredded cabbage into the pan to cook.

Serve, slurp and feel restored.

Ultracomida - a Moor-ish (or more-ish) corner of Pembrokeshire

The skies took on that beautiful soft blue, the sun shone, the geese started massing on the banks of the River Teifi and September was here.

The hedgerows are heavy with sloes and blackberries and the house fell quiet as the slave labour children went back to school leaving me alone to harvest.

In a bit of a first for me, I engineered to have a day with each of Blue & Pink on their own before they went back to school. 'Quality time' if you can bear to call it that - although I'll come clean and admit to dressing up ' making sure both of them were in all respects complete kit-wise for the new term' as 'quality time'. I was particularly keen to spend some time with Blue who has been growing up at a frightening pace recently and (gasp) has just started secondary school. Good job I did the kit check though, as I had completely forgotten to get him rugby boots.

While Pink's outing of choice was a perfectly easy trip to the lovely Peapod Junction, a pottery painting cafe and shop stuffed with lovely things, situated north of us, and rather delightfully in the middle of nowhere between New Quay and Llangrannog,  Blue chose a slightly longer trip down to Pendine Sands, home of the Museum of Speed. Pendine Sands is, of course, at low tide, a vast expanse of flat beach on teh Carmarthenshire coast which gained notoriety for a short period in the 1920s as being the international home of the land speed record. This before speeds starting getting really silly - over 200mph for all you petrol heads that follow this blog - and the action moved to the States.

Anyway, to Pendine we went, Blue and I. A land of caravan parks, cafes and a huge MoD range. If you're in the area and have 15 minutes to kill, I thoroughly recommend the Museum of Speed. Marvellous value (it cost me £2 for both of us), and despite Blue's slightly bewildered pronouncement "Well, it's only got 1 car and 4 motorbikes", it did that car and those motorbikes very well. There's a good little film about the heyday of Pendine as the venue for record breaking, and just enough to occupy you (even someone like me who, let's be honest, has zero interest in cars other than knowing that they can get me from A to B) before you get bored.

15 minutes is all well and good, but what to do for the rest of the day? Well, about half way from our house to Pendine is the gorgeous Pembrokeshire town of Narberth - lovely shops, lovely cafes and home of the utterly fabulous Ultracomida deli & tapas bar. There's a branch in Aberystwyth too, and quite simply if you have any affinity with Spanish flavours at all, it's a 'must visit'. Blue is about as big a fan of chorizo and manchego as I am, so it didn't take much to persuade him that what he really wanted to do, given that we'd exhausted Pendine pretty quickly, was to see if we could grab a spot of tapas on our way home.



Ultracomida is a veritable treasure trove for foodies. Stuffed to the gunnels with all manner of moorish treats, food, drinks, oils, vinegars.... sigh...

Up till now, I've only managed forays into the deli for cheeses, chorizos and salamis, and just fabulous Spanish almonds which I could eat till they came out of my ears and I start rattling. On previous visits to Narberth, I have been thwarted either by time, or a heaving mass of people in the tapas bar, and have had to withdraw, clutching my deli counter prizes for treats at home.




Arrive at 11.30, however, and the breakfast crowd has departed, the lunch crowd not yet arrived. And while the full tapas menu isn't available till 12, we settled down to a platter of 'Embutidos' (cooked meats) and a 'Platter de quesos' (cheeses) plus complimentary olives cornichons and divine, nutty bread.

There's not much to say about it other than it was exactly what I was hoping for - and Blue loved it all too. It's a great thing to be able to share this love of food with him. The only thing he was slightly ambivalent about were the crisp rosemary flatbreads that came with the meats and cheeses, but I thought they were perfect.

There's a really convivial atmosphere promoted by the seating arrangements - no individual tables for 2 or 4, simply a couple of big tables where you grab a seat, plus a bar with high bar stools, which reminded me of the tapas bars I visited in Barcelona many years ago... 

Deeply satisfied, we perused the deli and chose a selection of meat to take home for the Husband and Pink to enjoy too, plus a tin of olives and some cooking chorizo. 

A thoroughly successful outing - and, calling in on the off chance, we even managed to score some rugby boots on sale in the sports shop in Cardigan, too.

Chorizo & Chard risotto

The joy and the curse of the veg box is that you never know what you are going to get. Potatoes, carrots, onions are usually a given, but then what. Just as you've getting used to a steady stream of turnips, celeriac, beetroots, cabbage and the like, when (I assume) the polytunnel starts to bear fruit (well, veg) and the green veg starts its assault. Chard, cavolo nero (posh kale), delicious, punchy salad. We get delicious mushrooms in our box on a reasonably regular basis, and cauliflower too. A joy indeed, but really, it means waiting till the box comes before you start meal planning (if that's how you roll, and I do), even if it's only a loose nod to the contents of the cupboards, the freezer and, yes, the box, before replenishing as necessary. 

Otherwise, I'd end up with lots to cook and nothing coherent to eat.

There were a number of reasons I was keen to get back to a veg box - in our rented house, there has been limited scope for veg growing and as it's always been a temporary measure, the Husband has restrained himself from too much planting. I much prefer buying from a local organic farm too, and veg box schemes mean you can get your veg delivered - much as I'd like to spend my days flitting from farm shop to farm shop, it's just not practical. Finally, if I buy from shops where I make the choice, especially in supermarkets, I tend to steer away from anything I know the children will turn their noses up at. I know, it's weak, but you have to pick your battles... 

Presented with a box of veg means that the kids are, in turn, far more likely to be presented with something that they wouldn't neccessarily choose, but sometimes I reserve the goodies - things I know they will be sniffy about but I love - to cook with just for the Husband and I - and this reflects the sort of cooking that really sums me up - not really following a recipe and just seeing how it turns out. It's not quite as free and easy as it might seem though - I nearly always have chorizo or bacon in the fridge, which makes it much easier to produce a meal rather than a plate of deliciously cooked veg.

I've been getting my veg from the Troed y Rhiw organic farm based a little further up the coast from us, and it's been a pleasure. A good variety of great quality, reasonably priced, organic vegetables turning up every week - what's not to like?

To call this risotto is stretching it, but I used risotto rice, so risotto it is. I also made use of what I think were scallions in the veg box, larger than spring onions, and delicately garlic flavoured and scented, as well as some delicious chard and lovely mushrooms.

Chorizo & Chard 'risotto'

For 2+ (depending on how hungry you are)

125g dried mushrooms (extravagant, but they were hanging about and needed using up - don't go out and get  them especially)
75g diced cooking chorizo
a splash of olive oil
2-3 scallions, trimmed and chopped
2 large fresh mushrooms, sliced
a couple of handfuls of chard, stalks and leaves separated, stalks quite finely chopped, leaves sliced up
150-200g risotto rice
around 600ml good quality chicken stock
salt & pepper
grated parmesan, to serve

Put the dried mushrooms in a small bowl & just cover with some warm water. Leave to soak for half an hour or so.

In a large frying pan, gently cook the chorizo till the fat starts to run, then chuck in the scallions & the chipped chard stems (leave the leaves for later) and cook for a little longer - a couple of minutes, maybe. If it looks a bit dry, splash in a little more olive oil.

Drain the soaked mushrooms - add the liquid to the stock - and add the soaked and fresh mushrooms to the pan. Stir a couple of times, then add in the rice, cook for a minute or so, then start doing the risotto thing with the stock - add a little at a time, about a ladleful, and gently cook away till the stock is absorbed before adding another ladleful. 

After about 15-20 minutes test the rice to see how it's doing. You want it to have a little bite left, but for it all to be creamy and delicious. When you think it's nearly done (sorry, can't be more specific - just guess. I do), add the chard leaves to the pan and stir them in so that they wilt down, and add a good grind of black pepper too, and salt if required.

Once everything's cooked, serve your risotto with grated parmesan. 

Beef & Chorizo Casserole

Ironic, I guess, and perhaps not entirely straight, that while I have been posting about having been a year in Wales, I am, in fact, in London, with the kids, staying with a great friend. We are combining collective childcare, boxing and coxing with various work commitments, taking the kids out and about, and of course catching up and enjoying mutually supportive gin drinking... I've also been seeing something of my littlest nephew, who, conveniently, lives a 15 minute walk (with his parents - my youngest brother & his wife - of course) from my friend.

Our children (mine & my friend's) are similar in age and get on pretty well, so it's working out, and I think they are having a good time. Friend and I have also managed to stay on top of work that we couldn't complete in advance of half term, so everyone's a winner, although sometimes, it can feel a little crazy. As you can imagine, half term and museums in London can be pretty chokka. 


Early is good, but getting everything done and everyone organised and out of the house can be a mission. 

This morning, for example, between us, we'd reviewed a complex legal document (friend), scheduled social media posts for a client (me), knocked up a packed lunch for 6 and put a casserole in the slow cooker, not to mention negotiated breakfast, and the getting dressed, teeth brushing and leaving the house with 4 lovely but ever so slightly scatty under 12s, and made the train to Waterloo by 9.20 a.m. for a day at the Imperial War Museum...

Slow cooking is a total boon for this sort of day - when you return home culturally replete but, let's face it, knackered, all you need do is knock up some mash (or just soak some couscous, or slice up some bread) and bingo, dinner.

Beef & Chorizo Casserole

Serves at least 4 hungry children and 3 adults

1 kg casserole steak
plain flour
1 pack 12 mini cooking chorizo
about 20 shallots
5 medium carrots
2 cloves garlic
sunflower (or other) oil
2 * 400g tins cherry tomatoes
2 beef stock cubes 
2-3 tsp cornflour

Pre-heat the slow cooker. My friend has an infinitely superior slow cooker to mine, with a timer and a warming setting. Marvellous!

Put the steak in a bowl and sprinkle a couple of spoonfuls of plain flour and a couple of grinds of salt & pepper over it.

Halve the chorizo sausages, peel the shallots, peel and chop the carrots so they are similar size to the chorizo. Peel and finely chop the garlic.

Heat  a tablespoon of so of oil in a medium-large frying pan and start off gently frying the chorizo pieces. Add in the carrot and garlic and fry gently for 5 minutes or so before transferring to the slow cooker. If necessary add a little more oil to the an, then brown off the shallots and add to the slow cooker.

Finally, brown off the beef (use a little more oil if you need) in small batches, adding to the slow cooker. Boil the kettle.

Once all the beef is added to the slow cooker, tip in the 2 tins of cherry tomatoes, crumble the stock cubes into one of the empty tins, fill with water, pour into the other empty tin, then add the beefy, tomatoey water into the slow cooker, stir everything round, pop the lid on and cook on low for 8 hours or so.

Go out for the day.

When you return, mix up 2-3 tsp of cornflour with a little cold water, add in some juice from the slow cooker, then tip the whole lot back into the slow cooker for an hour or so to thicken up. Do not sprinkle the cornflour directly into the casserole or it will go lumpy.

Make mash potato, soak couscous, boil pasta, whatever you want to go with the casserole - frankly whatever you have the energy to produce - and serve.

Pour yourself a g&t if you haven't already...

Chorizo Crusted Cod

Some things don't need waffle to accompany them - they just need good homemade chunky oven chips and perhaps some fresh, local PSB.

This is absolutely my favourite way to cook white fish at the moment. I used cod in the title of this post, and I have used cod, but any firm white fish works, the more sustainable the better.

It comes from the Hairy Bikers Hairy Dieters book, and it is utterly delicious. The kids love it, the Husband loves it, I love it and if you're concerned about such things, it's pretty low calorie. It's also pretty straightforward. 

I commend it to you.

Chorizo Crusted Cod

For 4

600g firm white fish, skinned and boned
grated zest & juice of a lime
100g cooking chorizo, sliced
2-3 slices of bread (you want about 65g once the crusts are removed)
1 fat garlic clove, peeled and thinly sliced
1 tbsps finely grated pecorino, parmesan or other hard cheese
15g coriander leaves
pinch of sea salt

Pre-heat the oven to 200C.

Cut the fish into equal pieces and place in a non-metallic baking dish, then drizzle over the line juice.

If you have a non-stick frying pan, heat this then add the chorizo and cook till the fat begins to run. If you don't have a non-stick pan, add a little oil first before adding the chorizo.

Rip up the crustless bread and add the pieces to the pan, cooking for 2-3 minutes.

Put the bread & chorizo inot a food processor with the lime zest, garlic slivers, cheese, coriander leaves and sea salt plus some freshly ground black pepper, and whizz up into crumbs.

Press this crumb on top of the fish fillets.

Pop the fish into the oven and bake for 15-18 minutes till the crumb is crisp and the fish is cooked.

Bask in the happy sounds of your family eating fish for dinner.

Chicken, Chorizo and Courgette 'Chilli'

Sometimes, when I'm writing about something I've cooked, the angle I'll take with it is obvious. Sometimes, it's not so obvious, and sometimes I actually have a choice.

This, then, could be about cooking with the seasonal fruits (well, the veg, actually) from the garden - red onions, elephant garlic, bulbous yellow courgette - all of which I am currently blessed with.







It could have been a debate about what consitutes 'chilli'' given that I seem to apply it to pretty much anything I add kidney beans too, and yet equally, bandy the word around to cover meals that don't even include a sniff of even the mildest chilli or chilli powder in them. 

Chilli for 45 - but no kidney beans. Does that make it tomatoey mince?

Happy 'official' 40th to the Husband 

 

Indeed, I ended up with 8 cans of value red kidney beans and 3 tubs of guacamole, having cooked chilli for 45 for the Husband's 'official' 40th birthday camping & sailing weekend (it's not till December, but no one else wanted to camp/sail then), forgot to add the kidney beans in, and bought too much guacamole. Chilli without kidney beans - and then plenty of kidney beans to use up.


It could have been about how I am progressing with sharing the kitchen with the children, and how Blue chopped up a courgette, worked out how to use the tin opener and threw most of a tin of chopped tomatoes all over his school uniform, and I didn't get cross once (well, may be a little irritated, but, you know, little steps and all that).


Finally,  it could have been about those moments when you look in the cupboards, the fridge and the freezer when you haven't planned anything, wonder what on earth you are going to eat that night, and do it all on the fly with disproportionately pleasing results (always a winner!)

All are equally applicable, and I suppose intertwined, to this, so I leave it to you to decide which angle - or angles -  you'd prefer, and I'll just add that it's probably one of the best received meals I've cooked for a long time.

Chicken, chorizo & courgette 'chilli'

(serves 4)
 
1 large red onion
1 large clove of garlic
olive oil
125g cooking chorizo
2 chicken breasts
1/2 tsp each paprika, ground cumin & ground coriander (I would have used my favourite smoked paprika, but I had - gasp - run out!!)
1/3 large yellow courgette (frankly, how ever much you think you can get away with)
1 400g  can chopped tomatoes
1 400g can red kidney beans
2 tsp veg stock
salt & freshly ground pepper 
guacamole & sour cream to serve

Finely chop the red onion and the clove of garlic. The Husband's elephant garlic is massive, but not as strong in flavour, so a lot goes a little way.

Heat a splosh of olive oil in a large pan and add the onions and garlic. 

Cut the chorizo into chunks and add it to the onions. cooking for 5 minutes or so till it releases its juices. Cut the chicken and the courgette into chunks. Put the kettle on.

Stir in the ground paprika, cumin and coriander into the onions and chorizo, cook for a minute then add the chicken and stir it in, browning the pieces on all sides.

Add the courgette, stir, add the chopped tomatoes, then put the 2 tsp veg stock into the empty tin and top up with hot water. Stir, then add to the pan along with some salt & pepper.

Bring everything to the boil then simmer for 20 mins or so till the chicken is cooked.

Serve with sour cream and guacamole, on rice, and watch with satisfaction as every last bit is licked up off the plate.

Courgettes - a Retrospective

I was going to call this post "Courgettes - I've had a few" then realised that I'd already used that post title last year.
 
That's the thing about blogging, isn't it? Trying to make things new and different, when the inevitability of having a veg patch means that if it's August, there will be courgettes - and pretty much nothing else. I've been burbling away here for over 2 years now, which means that this is the third year I've moaned about the courgette situation.

This week has been a quiet chez RJ. The kids have been at my mum's, and the Husband and I have been working away and doing exciting things like cleaning the carpets. 

We've also been eating lots of courgettes.

A griddled courgette salad on Sunday to take to a post-camp BBQ - based on this recipe from Veg Everyday, the courgettes are griddled and spiked with a dressing of chilli and lemon juice. There's some mint in there, and spot the crafty (skinned) broad beans that I snuck in. Very tasty indeed. Not like eating courgette at all really.

On Monday, thanks to some frozen crab meat I found lurking in the freezer, we had courgette, crab and chilli pasta. No picture, I'm afraid, other than of grated courgettes in the pan, which I am sure you can do without, but the idea came from this blog among other.

On Tuesday, we had a Spanish style omelette with potatoes & shallots from the garden as well as courgette.

On Wedesday, we had courgette (well, marrow, really) and chorizo tart - you know the score: smear some puff pastry with pesto, layer on some thinly sliced courgette and some pieces of chorizo and bake. Or over bake, as I managed to. Still. It was quite tasty.

And Thursday. What courgette-y delight to Thursday bring? Well, my friends, mindful of the fact that the Husband's eyes had well and truly rolled heavenwards when the courgette tart appeared on Wednesday (I mean, he grows them - what does he expect??), I cast caution to the wind, and visited Kev the butcher for some steak.

We ate it rare, with chips, garlic and parsely mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. And no courgette whatsoever. Bloody lovely it was too.

And what did I do with the rest of the courgette? Chutney. That's what.

Posh Poached Eggs for the big 3-0

 
I'm a relative newcomer to the Random Recipes challenge, but it's become bit of a fixture for me. I don't have any sort of pattern or routine to my blogging (you may have noticed), but I find myself looking out for the announcement post every month, and then getting my random recipe selected more or less straightaway in order to have a fighting chance of working it into a meal plan somewhere. You see while I'd love to spend hours in my kitchen designing dishes, tweaking recipes, arranging food beautifully on a plate and taking gorgeous photos, the reality is that the food that goes up here is what I've cooked to feed us, there's no room to re-make and take a better photo (or to take a photo at all if we were all so hungry that it got eaten before I'd got the camera out...).




This month, the 30th month of the challenge, the selection criteria for the recipe was the number '30' (Dom, you're so original!). 30th book on the shelf/ves of cook books, 30th page. 

At the time I made the selection, '30' gave me Posh Poached Eggs in a Cup from Leon - Family & Friends. If I made the choice another time, it would be different because the books don't stay in the same order, or even on the same shelves, depending on what I've been up to in the kitchen.

So, Posh Poached Eggs. "That'll be easy to squeeze in somewhere", I thought.

We ended up having it for lunch yesterday, the kids and I, another sultry day (the rain didn't reach us till late last night) when the last thing I wanted to do, really, was make a cheese sauce - or even poach an egg. The things I do.

So you make a cheese sauce using gram flour and butter, quite a lot of cheese and some truffle oil. I didn't have gruyere or truffle oil in the house, so cheddar and some nice olive oil had to do.

You fry some thin slices of chorizo till they are nice and crispy, and poach some eggs, then layer it all up in a cup.

It's delicious. Even Blue, who, as I have bemoaned before, normally avoids cheese sauce with a barge pole, and isn't massively keen on poached eggs, enjoyed it. Result.

The only thing I'd say is that the recipe in the book makes a huge amount of cheese sauce. More than you could possibly use feeding the 4 specified in the recipe, however hungry. The rest of it is in the fridge covered with greaseproof paper. Pasta bake for dinner tonight, then.

Random Recipes & a poncy ingredient alert - Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake

I was wondering how I was going to fit a Random Recipe in this month, but the blog challenge fairies were obviously smiling on me.

Dom's challenge from Belleau Kitchen this month was to get all those cut out snippets of recipe, those torn out pages, and clippings, throw them up in the air - or spread them out, or do something with them to enable you to randomly select one.

I thought I'd give it a go and see what it came up with. No obligation to complete the challenge if I couldn't fit it in or the recipe was one of the more obscure I'd cut out and kept. But as I say, no need to worry. The selection process turned up Yottam Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake which I'd copied at Christmas from my brother's newly received copy of the Ottolenghi cook book. Fortuitous indeed because we had people coming for dinner, and there had to be dessert. Not that this is a hardship, you understand, but I'd already planned a moorish style chicken & chorizo casserole for the main course, so this fitted perfectly. Caramelised oranges, almonds, some orange blossom water (this is an Ottolenghi recipe after all - poncy ingredients are to be expected!).

First up, though, the challenge of sourcing the ingredients. I know there used to be a bag of polenta in the cupboard, but I must have used it up, because when I looked again, there was nothing. I couldn't get it in my online shop so sent the Husband off to do his hunter gatherer thing. The poor man went to 4 different supermarkets on 2 separate trips after work - he even went and worked at a different office on Friday in order to try different supermarkets, before ending up in Waitrose in Andover. Where, of course, they had at least 2 varieties. Anyway, he came home triumphant with an impressively artisan looking bag, plus some tahini paste and some unsalted pistachios which I also required.

While I've learned my lesson over the years that when people are coming for dinner it's wise to stick to the familiar and easy, there's always a certain amount of frisson to be gained cooking something with a little bit of fiddle factor when you have no idea how it's going to turn out and 10 people expecting to be fed. I have limited experience cooking Ottolenghi, and while it's always turned out brilliantly, I'm not in the same comfort zone with his stuff that I am cooking, say, Nigella. Add to this the opportunity for third degree burns that making caramel presents, and perhaps I should have stuck to something tried and tested, but I like a challenge.

 


The recipe was at least helpful in that it pointed out the need to thoroughly line the tin (if you're using springform, which I was) in order to prevent caramel leaking all over your oven, and as an extra precaution, I also put the cake tin on a baking sheet. A wise precaution as it turns out because even with what I thought was thorough tin lining, I did have a little bit of caramel leakage. But nothing serious.









Anyway, the recipe. I couldn't find it online to link to, but it's in the Ottolenghi cook book. Having lined your tin, you make some caramel which you use to cover the bottom of the tin.

 Next, there are oranges to zest and peel, and place on top of the caramel layer, 

before making a deliciously orangey scented batter using eggs, ground almonds, polenta along with the usual butter and eggs. The recipe also calls for orange blossom water, I forgot to put this on the Husband's foraging list, and having put him through supermarket hell in search of polenta, I didn't have the heart to fess up to needing orange blossom water, so in the end I just squeezed in a little extra orange juice. I think the random recipe rules state that you have to cook the recipe as it is, with little deviation. Well, I'm afraid that as well as missing the orange blossom water, I upped the recipe by a third to make a big enough cake to feed all of us. I hope I'm not disqualified.

 As a result of the increase in ingredients, it took quite a bit longer than the stated 40-45 minutes to bake, and I ended up covering the tin with foil to stop the top of the cake catching, but it all turned out fine. Once baked, the final nerve-wracking turnout passed without a hitch.

Ta daah!