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Go to the recipe for Christmas duck
Let’s talk turkey. Actually let’s talk about something else this Christmas. Let’s talk turkey alternatives.
This is a first for Crash Test Kitchen. We’ve never done a Christmas episode before. So we thought we’d focus on two of the basic elements you want on your table: crispy roast potatoes and a lovely bird.
But instead of turkey, we’ve chosen duck. Continue reading ‘Duck in for Christmas’
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Go to the recipe for hot and fast roast chicken
People do fuss over a roast chicken, don’t they? Doing all sorts of things like draping bacon over the fleshiest bits to keep them moist, mucking around poking seasonings under the skin, stuffing all sorts of things inside them to add flavour, even insisting that you have to roast a chicken breast-down in the pan and then flip it over part way through cooking.
In our opinion, if you keep the cooking simple, getting a good result can be reduced to one decision: buying a decent chicken in the first place. There’s been a lot of publicity about chicken welfare lately, with the focus being on battery laying hens and intensively reared, fast-growing meat birds that can hardly stand up by themselves.
In our house we haven’t gone down the full free-range route, but have settled on buying slow-growing birds that are fed better food in more spacious barns endorsed by animal welfare authorities. In the UK the scheme is called RSPCA Freedom Foods and no doubt there are equivalents elsewhere in the world. Continue reading ‘Our roast chicken recipe: hot and fast’
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Go to the recipe (duck breasts)
Go to the recipe (whole duck)
When I found whole duck on sale at our local supermarket, I got very excited. And I remembered that we had an episode up our sleeve not yet launched on the wider Crash Test Kitchen viewing public.
Friends and family were coming over for dinner this week and I had planned to do a simple roast chicken - but I had never cooked a whole duck before, and I want to have one next Christmas. So this would be the trial run.
It might be a tad retro, but duck a l’orange remains synonymous with birds that swim. A while back we did a show for the Word of Mouth blog that involved duck breasts and a recipe by Stefan Reynaud. Recipe-wise, what I’ll detail here is how we did the breasts-only version shown in the video, and how I handled the whole bird - a Gressingham duck in our case. Continue reading ‘Duck a l’orange’
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Autumn is game season, and in years past I’ve indulged in wild meaty delights such as pheasant and woodcock (I think it was). I’ve fantasised about getting out in the woods with my wellies and peacoat, dogs yapping along the muddy tracks while I take a few shots at the woodland foul as the beaters scare them out of the brush. But I never really thought it would happen.
And it didn’t, exactly. But this did: our friend Richard was lucky enough to be taken on a game shoot recently and, lucky for us, his kitchen was being refurbished at the time, so we ended up with two lovely, bright-eyed fresh partridges trussed up in a plastic bag to do with what we would.
Making stock is easy enough - bones, vegetables, herbs, seasoning, then simmer simmer simmer. For a long, long time. And therein lies the problem - can you afford to be housebound for eight hours or so while you wait for all that boney, marrowy, veggie goodness to leach out?
We’ve heard some people talk about making stock in a pressure cooker. You can cut the cooking time down to an hour and a half, maybe less, which should fit in nicely with your TV watching. But do you have a pressure cooker? No, neither do we. But we do have a slow cooker, or crock pot, as featured in our last episode. In this latest instalment of our Adventures in Slow Cooking we find another way to put it to good use. Continue reading ‘Stock while-u-don’t-wait’
Go to the recipe for tarragon chicken
Here’s an episode we prepared earlier. We’ve been doing a few shows for Word of Mouth (WOM), the blog of Observer Food Monthly magazine here in the UK. A lot of you probably didn’t know about these CTK specials, as they were posted only at WOM and didn’t go out in our feed.
It seemed a shame that some of you might miss out, especially the great number who subscribe to CTK via iTunes, so we’ve decided to repost them here for your enjoyment. Even if you’ve seen the episode before, you can now download it to your iPods, Apple TVs and what-not. Continue reading ‘Going, going, tarragon chicken’
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Lenny is a whiz with fried rice. Last time she made it I was well impressed, to the point that I would eat it over stuff from a Chinese restaurant any day.
And that’s saying something. I reckon it’s really hard to replicate the flavours of your better-than-average Chinese takeaway. Maybe it’s down to MSG, which in some Asian cultures is literally known as “taste” (oh, if only you could buy good taste in powdered form). We’ve got nothing against MSG, really - it’s either in the food we buy or it isn’t - but we don’t have it in our kitchen, and don’t have any idea how, or how much of it, to use. Continue reading ‘Rice to the occasion’
The leftover Christmas turkey was on its last legs, and sandwiches had long since lost their appeal … time for what Lenny calls a “flavour changer”.
Larb is a simple Laotian dish of spicy mince (usually pork or chicken) that is eaten with sticky rice, also known as glutinous rice. In Laos the rice comes in a little hopper-style basket made of bamboo and woven grass. The lime and chili flavours are heaven together, and ground rice powder adds a bit of crunch. Continue reading ‘We larb turkey’
Here’s how it works. Lenny does the shopping, I do the cooking. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work - it depends on our work schedules, and I have to admit that Lenny probably does more than her fair share.
A couple of weeks ago she left me vague instructions for some sort of chicken dish. Well, she probably gave me quite good instructions, but I’m in the habit of fobbing her off with a “Yeah yeah yeah I’ll take care of it” and then instantly purging my memory.
So there I was with some chicken pieces and a vague recollection of rosemary, garlic and olive oil being mentioned. Continue reading ‘Whole lotta rosemary chicken’
What a month it’s been. Moving to a new address on the other side of London, getting to grips with a new kitchen (while mourning the loss of the behemoth stove at our previous address), and on top of that, work work work!
THEN, just as we got this episode - where we make Hainanese chicken rice - shot and edited, Apple decided to bring out their new set-top box, Apple TV. It lets you watch podcasts like ours on your telly. Cool gadget, but it posed some issues, because to make the most of it we’ve had to step up the resolution of our videos.
But more on that later. We decided on something simple for the first show at our new place - Hainan chicken, or as some call it, Hainanese chicken rice. Like many Asian recipes it’s big on fresh ingredients prepared in a straightforward manner. Continue reading ‘One chicken, three ways’
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All right you purists. I know what you’re going to say. “You can’t cook tandoori without a tandoor!”
Yes, well, who has a huge earthenware oven in their kitchen, I ask you? The closest most of can get to tandoori at home is applying the curry paste or powder to meat of some description and cooking the results over a grill.
This is another of our “lost” episodes. I had genuinely forgotten about it, and found the raw video while rabbiting through our archive for holiday footage. Continue reading ‘Tandoori flashback’
We saw a moose! Two or three, in fact, right here in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia. One with a great set of antlers that any hunter would have been delighted to bag. Luckily they’re protected in this park.
A few weeks into our road trip we developed a superb roast chicken recipe using a pistachio and plum stuffing of our own invention. When Lenny’s brother Cam flew in from London (UK) to join us for a few days, it seemed the perfect welcoming dinner.
Well, as you know, things don’t always turn out as planned on Crash Test Kitchen. Our portable barbecue ran out of gas, and that should have served as a warning. Continue reading ‘A chicken crashes and burns’
There is a fair-sized community of expatriate Australians here in Edmonton. We Aussies seem to find our way to every corner of the world, no matter how cold and forbidding the place can be.
We met Shaun through the local Down Under Club and quickly became good mates. He’s a South Australian and we’re Queenslanders, so it’s been interesting to spend time together, picking up on the little differences in language and culture. Things you probably wouldn’t notice if you’d met back in Australia.
When our other SA mates Adam and Katrina get talking with Shaun, I sometimes get lost trying to follow the conversation. No problems for them following me and my slow Sunshine State drawl. Continue reading ‘A crow-eater gives us curry’
We’ve decided to reprise a couple of our classic episodes - mostly for our iTunes audience, and others who find it easier to view our new MPEG4/QuickTime formats.
Here’s the first episode we posted, known amongst our small but dedicated fan base as “the one with the orange”.
What we put together here is home-made gnocchi with a very simple, classic pesto. Hope it gets your juices flowin’! Continue reading ‘We Did It All For The Gnocchi - Again’
Go to the recipe for chicken soup
When Lenny’s feeling a little bit under the weather she gets a craving for soup. Actually, pretty much ANY excuse to make this simple, hearty chicken soup will do. You just start with a whole chicken, remove the skin and simmer it with tasty vegetables until the flesh is tender and comes away easily from the bone (Lenny calls this the “fall-apartability” test.
Removing the skin as Lenny does in this video might a familiar process to people who’ve basted a “chook” by getting their hands under the skin to rub a mixture of butter, garlic, herbs and what-not on the flesh. Continue reading ‘Chicken soup from scratch’
Our fondest memory of this dish is when we made it for our good friend Georgie’s “birthday week” party a couple of years ago. Much wine was drunk and much delicious, tender chicken saltimbocca was eaten.
The chicken breasts are sliced in half (horizontally - ah, maybe you’d better watch the vid) and pummelled mercilessly, rendering them more tender than an ardent lover’s first kiss. (Too much attempted poeticism, Waz?) Continue reading ‘Beating the breast’
Our guest for this instalment of Crash Test Kitchen is our old mate Dave.
Now Dave is a bit of a dark horse, it seems, when it comes to matters of the kitchen. Just recently, after all our years of knowing the lad, he declared that he knew how to make a cheesecake.
And not just your fridge-set cheesecake, mind you - the full-blown baked variety. So Lenny and I found this recipe on the internet, supplied the ingredients and set Dave to work. Continue reading ‘Dave makes a cheesecake’
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Chicken breasts, simmered in soy and sake (thats “sak-eh”, i.e. rice wine). It’s a fast, flavoursome and DEAD SIMPLE dish we found in Donna Hay Modern Classics.
Now some people say a lot of Donna’s stuff is style over substance and her exquisitely photographed books are just an excuse for “food porn” (who says it? Okay, wesays it!). But this recipe is a gem. Just a handful of ingredients and none of them terribly esoteric (c’mon, star anise and sake aren’t THAT hard to find!). Continue reading ‘Soy for the “sake” of it’
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Welcome! We’re Len and Waz, a couple of foodies who are not afraid to try something new, different and potentially disastrous in our sparsely equipped kitchen.
What you’ll find here are clips of two normal people attempting new recipes we’ve never tested, as well as some of our old favourites that we’ve tweaked and refined. And it’s all for real. Things go wrong, stuff tastes like crap and, potentially, people get hurt. And we’re not afraid to show it! Continue reading ‘We did it all for the gnocchi!’
Our roast chicken recipe: hot and fast
No-fuss fish pie
Classic bolognese
Portuguese custard tarts (pasteis de nata)
About the soufflé
One chicken, three ways
Bones about it: Beef stock from scratch
Heart-melting chocolate pudding
Cracking creme brulee
Froth my milk up
When bananas turn BAD!
Whole lotta rosemary chicken
Earth to Pilaf! Earth to Pilaf!
What’s French for onion soup?
Where did they go?
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