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.

Vietnamese fresh rolls (a.k.a. scrambled rice)

I tried making another meal of my Vietnamese recipes. This did not go to plan. So I'm not going to write out the original, just the final recipe.

It went wrong for primarily one key reason- I had no rice flour so I tried to make my own.

1. Put some rice is a pestle and mortar. Try to grind then give up.
   
2. Move rice into container so that you can use the hand blender on it.
   
3. With luck after quite a lot of blending about half the rice will get through a sieve meaning you have something a bit like rice flour.
   
4. I now tried adding some water too this and spreading it out as thinly as I could on a baking tray to make rice paper.
   
5. I tried drying this out in a warm oven. This resulted in warmish kind of dry rice paste with no papery properties :( So I needed a new plan.... Vietnamese style rice pancakes! Start by adding milk, turmeric and pepper to the failed rice paper. Then start working on the sauce- fry some garlic, shallots, ginger and finely chopped lemon grass in a pan.
   
6. Remove the fried stuff from the pan, keeping the oil, and poured in the batter along with some prawns and a chopped spring onion. I only took the photo after attempted the flip the thing. This did not work. I added some more spring onion and some more prawns now.
   
7. I mashed the fried stuff (removing the ginger) from before along with a chili in the pestle and mortar then mixed this with some light soy sauce, sugar and lime juice.
   
8. I put some shredded Chinese leaf lettuce mixed with some coriander into the 'middle' of the 'pancake'.
   
9. Finally I 'folded' this in half and added the sauce. They say the first bite is with the eyes. Oh well.
   
   
   
   Review
   
   
   Need to buy actual rice flour- the stuff I made was far too coarse so never bound together properly, so the texture of the pancake was quite like short bread dough, which isn't ideal. Also  was meant to use coconut milk if I had meant to be making the pancake from the start. Maybe an egg would have helped the batter. Tasted OK bit I added too much chili to the sauce here. 

British Enchiladas

Fusion food. I like the idea. I like enchiladas and I'm British. Putting all this together, inevitably, lead to this.

1. Take some fancy sausages. I used 2 leek and Stilton and 2 pork, black pudding and apple.
   
2. I chopped up a Bramley apple.
   
   
3. Apple and sausages and cider vinegar and a little sugar. In a pan. With heat.
   
4. Extra flavour from mustard, parsley, rosemary and thyme. At this point dice and boil some swede and parsnip.
   
   
5. After a while on a medium heat the apple softens. I kept adding water to keep the consistency a little runny.
   
   
6. Take out about half the apple sauce and put in a bowl. As the remainder in the plan looked a little like sick I felt obliged to add carrots, as well as some of the chunks of swede and parsnip.
   
   
7. Put quarter of the mix long ways in a tortilla wrap, and wrap it.
   
   
8. End up with a dish with four wraps in it. Mash the remaining swede and parsnip.
   
   
9. Coat the wraps with the remaining apple sauce and then a layer of the swede and parsnip mash.
   
   
10. Serve. Here I've used a plate, you may use whatever you like.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Review
    
    
    This meal was a gamble. So I was pretty happy it was even edible. It was actually quite nice, although the apple sauce was a little too sharp in the end. I guess using a little less vinegar and maybe a standard non-cooking apple would have worked better. Overall I think this idea has some merit- the wrap in the middle of what seemed more like a pie actually didn't taste out of place.

An attempt to follow a Vietnamese recipe

So I went on holiday to Vietnam and did a cooking course in Hoi An. It was good. They gave me a recipe recipe booklet of the stuff I'd cooked. So here is my version of  Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern style Beef Vermicelli).

1. I pan fried some shallots garlic and a some lumps of ginger, take the stuff out the pan and set aside. Realise at this point you didn't really want the ginger in there and put it away.
   
   
2. My first major deviation. I used salmon instead of beef. Thinly sliced whatever is used.
   
   
3. A bed of salad, it suggest slightly different in the recipe but I'd say this was a fair substitution. There's some basil and dried mint in there as well.
   
   
4. Pan fry the slices of salmon in the oil from the shallots.
   
   
5. OK I didn't take many photos. Two important steps- first cook some rice (my second main deviation from the recipe), pile it in the middle of the salad and rest the salmon on this, second deglaze the pan with  light soy sauce, stock (I stuck with beef), some sugar, pepper and some lime juice. Reduce this by half and then pour this over the rice and salmon. Sprinkle the shallots over this and garnish with some basil.
   
   
   
   
   I like this, pretty simple, quick and could be made to look really fancy. The swaps seemed to work despite the fact I barely kept anything from the original. I'll definitely be frying salmon in this way in the future.

Ross's pulled pork experiment

I decided I should actually do something a bit more experimenty. By that I mean I decided I'd try cooking basically the same meal in two different ways. That meal would be pulled pork. I went for a quick method and a slower method to see if I could tell the difference.

Quick pulled pork

1. Spice rub- mix loads of paprika, smoked paprika, ground corriander, black pepper, ground mustard seeds, ground cumin, sugar and garlic together. 
   
2. I coated two pork chops in this rub and but this in a the fridge for use with pulled pork attempt two on the next day.
   
3. I wanted a wetter rub for the quick pork- so i added olive oil, tomato puree and white wine vinegar to the remaining spice mix (which was about half the total). I rubbed 3 skinny pork chops with this mix.
   
4. Boiling some new potatoes, with mint and half a lemon,
   
5. I chucked the pork in the oven(lowish temp) with some chopped spring onion, some white wine vinegar and a little water. 
   
6. Salad. Contained some basil leaves but pretty standard otherwise. Unlike people salad is better dressed.
   
7. Potato salad. Chop potatoes, mix in some chopped gherkin and whatever spice mix you have left.
   
8. The pork looked like this (but less blurry) when I took it out the oven. I'd basted it a bit whilst cooking.
   
   
   
9. The crucial pulling of the pork, tare the meat to shreds using two forks. Its fun to begin with but gets dull.
   

The assembled meal. On the sink because its the only surface I hadn't made a mess of.

Slower Pulled Pork

The next day...

1. Take the two pork chops out the fridge and put in the oven with some white wine vinegar water and spring onions. I tried for some honey and mustard glaze but used the wrong jar and ended up coating this in honey and horse radish sauce. 
   
   
   
2. Create some more spice rub because you ran out.
   
3. Cook some tomatoes in in this spice with a little olive oil.
   
4. Add in some mixed Mexican beans (they were in Asda and looked interesting) and a little tomato puree and you have something similar to baked beans.
   
5. For some reason this pork comes out the oven a lot drier, maybe i didn't baste enough
   
6. This should have been the pulling stage :( I chopped the pork up small instead and then mixed it in with the beans.
   
7. Same salad. The potatoes I did strangely- I cut them in half and tried to pan fry in a little oil. After about 15 mins they were crispy on the outside and raw in the middle, so I shifted them to the oven. They look like roast potatoes but tasted liked baked.
   
   
   
   
   
   Review
   
   
   Firstly the quick method made pulled pork, the second didn't. Although I think this is more to do with how long I kept the meat in the oven and the temperature. Really I should be using a fatty join of meat not a steak anyway. The taste of both was good although not as strong as I'd hoped. I think if you do successfully manage to pull the pork a sticky spicy sauce of some kind should be added. The pork and beans were probably the best tasting, although I'm not overly convince by leaving the meat in the spice rub for 24 hours. I guess a proper marinade should be wetter. The crazy failed sauteed potatoes I made by accident were good, I'll use this again.