Crunchy Turkey Burger

Burgers go well with gherkins, which is all well and good if you have any. I didn't but I did have a cucumber and some vinegar. Thinly slice the cucumber with a mandolin, and soak in vinegar with some sugar, garlic and dill. You should probably leave this overnight or something, I managed to wait about an hour and a half.

 Another standard is some kind of sauce. I went for grated carrot, ginger, tomato puree, tomato ketchup and hot chilli sauce mixed together. This doesn't really need to be left.

 Next I made the burgers themselves. I had some left over soya mince, which looks a little like bread crumbs. Therefore I tried to use it as such. I took some turkey fry steak, coated in beaten egg then covered in the soya mince with a little paprika and turmeric (mainly for colour).

Shallow frying these things worked pretty well, in fact I'd go as far as saying they ended up looking a lot better than I'd ever hoped they might. 

Now it was just general assembly, bread, cucumber, turkey, grated carrot, bread.

 The end result is a little like what you see below.

Review
By using the soaked cucumbers and grated carrots I added some little of the required moisture, but to be honest it needed a little more. Real gherkins and and some kind of carrot salsa would have been better then the grated carrot mixture I used. The turkey burgers with soya mince coating worked very well, I'll be using this instead of bread crumbs again.


Bonus:
Choco-coffee-Quark-cheese-cake

Not really experimental so just gets an entry as a bonus feature. Melt some butter, mix it with some crumbled digestive biscuits and you have a base. I make sure I crumble some extra biscuits on top of the buttery mix to make sure the base isn't made soggy by the cheese.

 The 500ml tub of quark is mixed with 200g of icing sugar. To make it set I mixed in a sachet of gelatin with about 10 tablespoons of hot water as well as 2 tablespoons full of cocoa and instant coffee. There was no reason for the amount of the flavours I chose here other than the amount of cocoa I had. I mixed all this together and put it on the base.

 Left in the fridge and sprinkled in the very last degrees of cocoa powder and I had a cheese cake. Yay!

Review:
This worked pretty well. A little too bitter so maybe needed more cocoa and less/better coffee powder, but in general, quick easy (and for a cheese cake fairly cheap and healthy due to the quark).

Cider and Star Anise Pork with Polenta and Samphire

I've had quite a few people tell me recently that they don't like pork, so I thought I'd try to prove them wrong. Also there was a big lump of meat half price in the shop...

The aim was to roast the pork with some big flavours in the hope the'd permeate the meat a little. Therefore the pork loin went in a pan with cider, a chopped apple, garlic, some star anise, a cinnamon stick and some caraway  seeds. I just rubbed salt pepper and oil to the  skin the hope of getting crackling (I wasn't expecting much with the cider in there though). 2.5 hours 170 degrees.

 I've bought the ready made polenta shown below a few times before and am usually disappointed with the result, but I decided I wasn't ready to give up yet, there was at least one way of cooking it from the back of the packaging left. Slice and and put in the oven.

The final element of the meal was the vegetables. I went for a long and green theme, samphire, green beans, some kind of broccoli, garden peas and asparagus. Too many for one go really but I like to get my 5 a day all at once if I can. These were steamed.

 So after the time was up the pork looked as below. I drained what remaining sauce I could from the pan to use as gravy, then took the slices from either end for the meal as these would be the bits most exposed to the flavourings.

Finally I put everything together along with a little homemade mayonnaise to produce the plate of food shown below. By my standards I was happy with the presentation here.

Review
I liked this one. The whole roasting with cider worked well, keeping the pork tender whilst adding what amounted to a fairly delicate flavour. The little amount of sauce I managed to collect was awesome, basically being sweet sticky and aniseedy. Samphire kind of distracted from the meal a little as it should probably be classed as a beer snack rather than a vegetable for its saltiness, the mayonnaise helped a little here. The disappointing blandness of polenta actually suited this meal so I've finally found a way of using it.

Soya Mince and Dock leaf pasta

So I've been messing about with vegetarian recipes and someone mentioned foraged food to me recently. As is only to be expected this resulted in me picking some dock leaves and creating what you see below. 

So I removed the stalks and washed the leaves before simmering in white wine for about 20 minutes using a pan as seen below?

 After this had turned the leaves to a murkier green colour I decided they must be cooked, so I fished out the dock leaves and chopped up some mushroom and fennel. Notice how the leaves have shrunk quite a bit cooking in the wine, maybe I should have bought more.Not pictured below I cut up a carrot. Use your imagination or google images to work out what chopped up carrot looks like if you're confused.

 As I still had the Dock leafy wine I used this to (re?)hydrate some soya mince. This is the fake meat stuff they put in pot noodles and it's actually quite nice. This takes around 20 minutes to complete.

 At the same point in another pan I mixed together butter, onion, flour, milk and fennel to construct the white sloppy sauce pictured below.

 I roughly chopped up the dock leaves before mixing everything together in the same pan, to create what one of my greatest culinary masterpieces to date. Add some pasta and the meal is ready.

So how well did this turn out? To put it simply OK. The dock leaves aren't bad (for something I picked off a road side at least) but do have a fairly strong bitter taste. To combat this I added a little honey whilst cooking although I haven't got balance right yet (if it is indeed possible). To do this again I'd simmer in a sweeter wine or maybe some different sweet liquid.

Garlic Flat-bread and Tuna Risotto Bake

So I had the vague idea (from asking the internet) of Spaghetti carbonara with home made garlic bread".

To begin with the garlic bread. I was hungry and the quickest bread to make is also the most flat, so thats what I went for. Mix white bread flour, olive oil and some water, along with a few finely chopped cloves of garlic. 

Next I realised I didn't have any of that cream stuff peope use in carbonaras, but an idea struck me. Risottos are meant to be creamy, why not make some of that. Chopped onions, mead as a wine replacement because mead is a better drink than white wine, although I'm not sure if this logic could be extended to using a cup of tea here...

Back to the bread, by now I had an idea of how to put this together and this required thin round container sized bits of bread. I made of few of these little round flat breads, squashing them flat within the container to get the size right.

Next some courgettes cut into thin rings, and warmed in the oven with a little oil. The reason is given below.

Next make the risotto as usual, although aim to make it as thick as possible. I used tuna, some peas, a vegetable stock cube risotto rice and the aforementioned onion an mead. Whilst you're during this pan fry the flat breads for a minute or two each side.

Now beat together a couple of eggs and you have all the components required for the garlic flat-bread and tuna risotto bake.Once the risotto has cooled enough stir in the eggs, then the assembly phase begins.

Put a flat bread in the container.

Put some risotto on the bread, which is in the container.

Put some of the oven warmed courgettes on the risotto which is on the bread which is in the container. Repeat this process until the container is full or you run out of stuff to put in in.

Put the bake in the oven and by using a process known as baking cook the whole thing in the hope that the eggs will make is all set properly, and you should get something like what I've shown below.

Finally scoop some of this out and it'll fall apart on the plate like some inelegant mush.

Remarks
The garlic flat breads worked well, both as themselves and within the bake. Tuna and mead risotto worked better than it had any right to, although probably because the tuna somewhat over powered all the other tastes. The courgettes were OK, they didn't add much other than one of the 5 a day though. The bake didn't stick together into some kind of bready lasagna as I'd hopped, maybe more eggs would have helped, although I'd be inclined so add layers of cheese to cover the binding.
I'm tempted to try something like this again but with chicken instead of tuna and the addition of mozzarella cheese.

Cauliflower Dessert

We had a bit of a surplus of cauliflower in the fridge, so my housemate challenged me to use this to make a dessert. I thought I'd play it safe and make a kind of rice pudding where the rice is cauliflower (so cauliflower pudding I guess). This is a pretty simple recipe, the experimental part is the idea. To be fair other people have tried this before on the internet although the stuff I read was more about it being vegan and low GI than being something nice or worth making for its own sake.

First I riced the cauliflower (well chopped it up as small as I could be bothered). I used about half of one.

The plan was to mix this with coconut milk and serve with golden syrup. Here are these ingredients decoratively arranged.

This was put in a pan for a medium heat for what was meant to be around half an hour. After about half this time this had resulted in something that tasted like bits of cauliflower floating in coconut milk. To correct this I upped the heat a little to try to thicken it up a bit and chucked in a cinnamon stick for flavour.

 This helped a little but it was still a bit to thin so to thicken it up I blitzed it up (without electrocuting myself this time). This was then put back on the heat with the cinnamon (I'd removed this whilst blending).

 Finally after another few minutes on the heat, up to the point the bits of cauliflower stuck to the edge of the pan were burnt, I declared it ready. At this staged I placed it in a bowl and 'decoratively' drizzled golden syrup over it.

Not being one to keep all of a good thing to myself I presented a slightly smaller portion to my housemate, also arranged decoratively below.

Review

In short this the the best cauliflower dessert anyone who has tasted it has ever tried. Although to be fair it is also the worst. It turned out quite well actually and I like to think because of my on the fly corrections (that tasting as you go thing the chefs talk about on the TV seems a good idea).

I think I got the cinnamon in there for the right amount of time, although the final result wasn't a thick as I would have liked...adding a large proportion of cauliflower would correct this, but probably unbalance the tasted. An odd thing about this was that I couldn't taste the coconut, so by replacing this with something slightly thicker (cream/condensed milk?) it might be possible to get a better overall result, although that would need testing. 

The Return Returns (still with Marrow)

You may have noticed I only used some of the marrow in the last post. You'll be glad to know that it's back. Also back is the shredded chicken. The here aim was to make a very different meal with the same basic ingredients, I leave judging the success of that to you.

First dice some marrow, I took another third (don't worry I'm not writing up what happen to the final third... I'll leave that to your imagination.

 Next I prepared the chicken. I coated the chicken with cornflour and 'hot mango mint' sauce (this is great stuff if you find it anywhere I recommend it).

 Now back to the marrow, add chopped onion, garlic, chili, broccoli and cabbage in a pan with some water. Boil this until the veg softens.

 Whilst the marrow is boiling you can have some fun deepish fat frying up the chicken. I was aiming for both crispy and sticky at the same time, which was maybe a little adventurous but it came out pretty well (if in doubt leave it in until it starts browning)

 Once it is cooked fish the chicken out the pan and mop off the excess oil with some kitchen paper. I didn't use the brush here, it's just photo bombing here.

Now once the marrow is ready you can blend it to produce a soup. Note: don't try unplugging a blender when it has got loose screws and your hands are wet. You have been warned.

 Now you have two components ready to mix together. I put the soup in a bowl. Then I put the crispy chicken bits on top and finally garnished with some coriander.

Review

So I was happy with this. The soup worked well, I'd probably recommend it as the main way of using up loads of marrow if you get stuck in my situation. The crispy chicken was nice, but the frying killed off most of the mint mango sauce's flavour... I ended up adding a little extra to both the soup and the chicken, so it was probably a bit of a waste to use it to make a batter (it also burnt a little in the oil during the frying which wasn't ideal). The combination of the soup and chicken bits was good, I can see myself doing something similar again with a soup.

The Long Awaited Return (with Marrow)

So I got a marrow from my parents and that inspired me to do a bit of experimentation. Seeing as these marrows happen a little bit too often I this blog is meant to help me keep track of these 'experiments' it inspired a new entry here.

So regular readers may have worked out when I'm not sure what to make I make some kind of fajita. In this case a marrow fajita.
So chop up as much marrow as you can be bothered with, about a third of the one shown above in this case. Chuck in some onions and garlic (because that's what you do when a frying pan comes out). Heat this until the marrow starts going mushy.

Next (well as early as possible I guess) add some Chorizo, chili,tomato puree, tomato ketchup, coriander(fresh and ground), cumin, paprika and cocoa powder. 

Cook all that stuff together until your chicken is ready, btw you should have shoved some chicken thighs in the oven already.

Shred this chicken and stir it in with everything else (well as much chicken as you need) and mix in any salad leaves you can find (well I had coriander, I suspect I used a bit much here) before chucking this on a tortilla and wrapping up the fajita. I also added a handful of peas at some point (I made this meal a few days ago and forgot about the peas until i saw them in the pick but it helps with the magical 5 a day target I guess).

Now go for the arty shot by grilling the whole thing and then tearing it open and spilling out the inners a bit (OK I still haven't master the presentation bit).

Review

It turns out that tomato puree plus cooked marrow results in something fairly similar to chopped tomatoes when there's lots of flavourings about, so this tasted fairly normal. Slightly thicker texture than normal I guess and less tomatoey than using chopped tomatoes (obviously) though I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not. So my conclusion here is cooking marrow results in a fairly thick sauce that takes in flavours well, this could be used to good effect with enough thought.