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* Go to the recipe for Kung Pao Chicken
One of the dishes we returned to time and again when we were visiting our friend Cristy in Beijing a few years ago was the popular Gong Bao Ji Ding or Kung Pao Chicken (also called Kung Po or Gung Po chicken). Traditional Gong Bao Ji Ding is a spicy Sichuan dish, the westernised version of which is often very different from the authentic Sichuanese version. I’m sure there are many variations of the dish within China, as well. But it’s not usual to add other vegetables like onions, peppers (capsicum) or cashews (or even pineapple?!).
I like to call it Gong Bao Ji Ding, because it has such a lovely ring to it, and apologies to Mandarin speakers the world over for my terrible pronunciation. Perhaps, as I’m erring towards attempting to cook an authentic version of the dish, I should also be trying to pronounce it correctly. But the truth is, I simply don’t know how.
There are very few main ingredients in Gong Bao Ji Ding – just chicken, peanuts and spring onions (green onions), really. But, as with many east Asian dishes, the complexity is in the many flavourings. Continue reading ‘How to make Kung Pao Chicken’
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Go to the recipe for Bread and butter pudding
Our friend Anthony brought round one of those panettone things on Christmas Day. In the end not a lot of it got eaten – we had a decent spread lined up already, and the panettone was kind of a last-minute whim on Anthony’s part.
For those not familiar, panettone is a kind of domed bready cake, often containing dried fruit and other goodies. It’s usually risen with yeast as opposed to baking powder. Panettone is a centrepiece at Italian Christmas tables and seems to be becoming more popular in other countries.
So Christmas came and went, as did Boxing Day, New Year’s, and the thing was still sitting there in its box, with only a few slices taken off. Continue reading ‘Panettone pudding recipe – a twist on bread and butter pudding’
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Go to the recipe for Humble rum balls
Go to the recipe for Lenny’s faff-tastic wonder balls
It’s a good idea to have a few snack-like goodies prepared for the Christmas period and rum balls always do the trick. Our friend Angie mentioned she’d made a batch to her Nana’s recipe so Waz thought he’d follow suit.
They are based on Weetbix or Weetabix, a cereal bar made out of wheat flakes, and include condensed milk for sweetening. Instead of Weetbix, if there’s no such thing where you live, you can use a plain graham cracker, digestive biscuit or similar cookie. Continue reading ‘How to make rum balls: two ways, humble and posh’
Published on
November 26, 2010 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Chicken and poultry, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, English traditional, Favourites, Indian, Pasta, Quick and easy, Sauces, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
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Go to the recipe for Pasta with white truffle
Go to the recipe for Eggs in cocotte with white truffle
On “schoolnights”, when everything happens at helter-skelter pace, it’s always a rush to get home from work, throw a meal together and do the day’s housekeeping before crashing into bed. If I’m lucky Waz has been on an early shift and we can share the evening duties.
So on the weekends we really like to give a lot more time and attention to creating lovely meals that we can enjoy eating at a slower pace.
I thoroughly respect the ideology of the Slow Food Movement – begun in 1986 to celebrate and enjoy local and regional cuisines. So when time permits I love to create meals that embody the Slow Food philosophy of creating the simplest of dishes, with the highest quality ingredients.
Chef Michelle and I recently treated ourselves with a whirlwind weekend trip to the centre of the white truffle universe – the Alba truffle festival in Piemonte near Turin, Italy. We ate a fantastic truffle meal at a Slow Food restaurant with some luscious local Barolo wine. We couldn’t believe our luck the following day when, while roaming the Alba hills, we ran into a local truffle hunter who sold us some white truffles that his little dog had just dug out of the ground. Continue reading ‘How to cook with truffles’
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Go to the recipe for Swiss roll, aka jelly roll
Swiss roll – or jelly roll to the Americans and Canadians – is what Lenny likes to call a store cupboard cake. Like my Mum’s teacake, this is baking at its easiest. You’ve probably got most of the ingredients already, and the results are sure to win you a disproportionate amount of praise from your guests. Continue reading ‘Let the jelly roll: Swiss roll recipe from Waz’s Nana’
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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 ‘How to roast a duck, the slow and tender way’
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Go to the recipe for salmon with puy lentils
If you’re good at chopping vegetables, this dish is a doddle. Even if you’re a little bit slower with the knife it’s still worth the effort. We find it an easy way to boost our fish intake, and it’s sophisticated enough to put on a dinner party menu.
Because salmon has quite a strong flavour, it’s good to have something a little bit hearty with it. The bed of puy lentils, diced vegetables and herbs does the job. Continue reading ‘Baked salmon recipe, with a bed of puy lentils’
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Go to the recipe for sausage rolls
This is my Uncle Kev’s sausage roll recipe, and it’s fantastic for parties. Or you can even make a double or triple batch before Christmas, Thanksgiving or local festive holiday and freeze them, then heat them up in the oven for a really quick finger-food for a big group of people. Continue reading ‘Uncle Kev’s sausage rolls’
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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 for crème caramel
If you want a dessert that combines simplicity and wow factor, this has got to be it – crème caramel or flan, either vanilla or au café (the latter, “with coffee”, tends to be preferred in France).
Sure you’ve got to make caramel and custard. But neither could be easier. While a careful eye is needed to get the caramel just right, if you cut and run a bit early it will probably just mean that it’s a lighter colour.
And the custard is not your fraught stove-hovering kind, where you’ve got to heat and whisk over the burner for ages while engaging in some minor bacteriological warfare until the consistency and temperature hit their alchemy point. Nope, as far as custard goes this is really a straightforward heat-and-mix job. Continue reading ‘Crème caramel: from one flan to another’
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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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Pork belly – it’s the cut of the moment, isn’t it? On the menu everywhere. Very now. And very cheap, if you buy it in the right places (look beyond the supermarkets, which have copped on to its foodie appeal and adjusted the price accordingly).
This is a recipe that we don’t do often enough. And it’s attributed to Chairman Mao himself, who always made sure he was eating well while starving the rest of the nation. Being left to starve and told to survive on revolutionary zeal alone was good enough for the masses, but let’s face it, you couldn’t lead them through the Great Leap Forward on an empty stomach! Continue reading ‘Braised pork belly like Mao used to make’
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While it’s nice to experiment in the kitchen and try exciting and slightly scary things like soufflé and partridge, it’s equally nice to build up a stock of really easy, favourite recipes that you can cook any day of the week. You know, the kind of recipes you don’t even a shopping list for, because the list of ingredients is in your head.
This fish pie recipe is like that for me. It’s fairly quick, easy, tasty and you can substitute different kinds of seafood or vegetables, depending on what you’ve got in the fridge or what’s available at the fishmonger (or, let’s face it, the supermarket). Continue reading ‘No-fuss fish pie’
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We reckon you can’t love Thai food without loving pad thai – the country’s national dish. Your average Thai cook can probably whip this up with a few swishes of the wok and flips of the, umm, wok flipper. But for us at home there are two pitfalls that are easy to, errm, fall into. As you’ll find out in this episode.
First thing is those rice noodles (and don’t ever get taken for a ride in a restaurant – unless these particular noodles are under your nose, you’re not eating pad thai). You usually buy the dried variety in a packet. They need to be soaked in warm water before going into the wok. But soaked for how long? You’ve just come to a trap for young players. Continue reading ‘Pad thai with two tries’
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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.
Continue reading ‘Partridges with bread sauce’
Published on
September 11, 2008 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Cooking videos, Desserts and puddings, English traditional, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
Tags: blackberry crumble, cooking, Cooking videos, crash test kitchen, kitchen, lenny, recipe, video blog, waz.
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Although we haven’t had a brilliant summer here in the UK, and it looks like what we did have is pretty much over for the year, we did manage to bid a sad farewell to the summer by taking a lovely walk in the Kent countryside.
I love the public footpaths here in the UK: there is a network crossing public and private property that anyone can walk along and enjoy what the countryside has to offer. We often take a day-trip down to Kent to wander across the rolling green dales, through the fields, woodlands and orchards, taking in the fresh air.
On this particular sunny Saturday our route took us through numerous apple orchards where crisp, pink apples shone on the trees and the hedges were thick with fat, juicy blackberries.
Continue reading ‘Blackberry crumble with short ramble’
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Spaghetti bolognese – it’s an old standby, and as such has become one of the most used and abused recipes under creation. Outside of its hometown of Bologna in Italy, bolognese has become a catch-all name for any meat-and-tomato sauce quickly slapped together and served over pasta, which is almost invariably spaghetti.
But start investigating bolognese and you’ll find out some interesting things. In traditional Bolognese cooking, ragu alla bolognese is rarely served with spaghetti (usually it goes with tagliatelle); it contains very little tomato (eschewing the pound can or two of tommies that many people dump into the saucepan); there are no herbs in it (so rack off home with your shaker of dried oregano); and one of the key ingredients is time (not the herb – the stuff in your wristwatch).
Most surprisingly of all – to me, at least – the key to a lovely rich bolognese is a goodly portion of milk.
Continue reading ‘Classic bolognese’
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King of curry Atul Kochhar had his meen molee published in Observer Food Monthly a while back – and we had the chance to crash-test the recipe.
Meen molee is a coconut fish curry, with green chillies providing the kick. Lenny elected to fillet the fish herself, as a chance to show off her flash filleting knife. We kept the wreckage for our slow cooker dabbling and made a decent fish stock. Don’t feel that you’re punking out if you just buy ordinary fillets or get the fishmonger to do it. Continue reading ‘Good golly fish curry’
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Go to the recipe
I’m not much of a sweet tooth, and unlike Waz I’m not much of a coffee drinker. But when I do indulge in a proper espresso it’s always lovely to complement it with a sweet little morsel. Just like nata – or proper Portuguese custard tarts. These delicacies are made with a puff pastry base and a vanilla egg custard filling with a hint of orange zest.
They are by no means the only custard tart around. Waz and I are also huge fans of Chinese dan ta – those lovely little glossy-topped, flaky-based tarts you get when you have good yum cha (also known as dim sum). Continue reading ‘Portuguese custard tarts recipe (pasteis de nata)’
Published on
May 29, 2008 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Cooking videos, Failures and redemptions, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
Tags: baking bread, bread maker, cooking, crash test kitchen, crock pot, crockpot, homemade bread, lenny, recipes, slow cooker, waz.
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You can’t beat waking up to the smell of fresh-baked bread. But how to get it without the rising, the knocking down, the second rise, and then the EARLY rise on your own part to stick the dough in the oven?
Yes yes, I’ve heard of bread machines. They seem a great idea, but aren’t they a little soulless? Load everything in the evening and it’s done in the morning – the washing machine school of cookery. Surely the tactile experience – getting your hands messy – is part of the satisfying process of baking your own bread.
From what I’ve seen, people tend to buy bread machines as a fad item, then shelve them to gather dust or ship them off to the charity store within a few months. So I’m not sure they are worth the investment. Continue reading ‘Loaf to admit failure’
Published on
April 21, 2008 in
Chicken and poultry, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, Sauces, Soup and Video recipes.
Tags: chicken stock, cooking, crash test kitchen, crock pot, fish stock, food, lenny, recipe, slow cooker, waz.
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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’
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I’m pretty anal (can I say that in the international blogosphere?) about my breakfast routine. Rarely do I break it. I have two staples that I alternate daily. The first: two slices of toast, one with grilled cheddar, the other with quality marmalade (or, occasionally, Vegemite, and, it almost goes without saying, butter). The second: porridge cooked with chopped apple, topped with banana, milk and honey (and, occasionally, summer fruits). No sugar. No salt. Always with a pot of weak black tea (Loose. Leaf. Only.), in a proper teacup, with a saucer and a tea strainer.
So when Waz decided to experiment with a slow cooker (crock pot to many of us, though that is really a brand name) that our mates Shaun and Jeanette gave us when they left London for Australia, I was very sceptical when he told me he wanted one of the experiments to feature my tried-and-tested porridge. Continue reading ‘Automatic for the porridge’
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Go to the recipe for baked treacle pudding
We’ve been cooking up a few videos for the Word of Mouth food blog, as we’ve mentioned before. Here’s another one, where we make a gorgeous and failsafe baked treacle pudding by Fergus Henderson of St John restaurant, London.
OK, straight away you North Americans are asking “What’s treacle?” Basically it’s a sugar syrup, lighter than molasses but heavier than golden syrup. These days you’re likely to find golden syrup used in its place, as with this recipe. I guess pancake syrup (not maple) as found in the US/Canada is fairly similar. Continue reading ‘Pudding it simply’
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A few weeks ago, on a (typically) miserable London winter’s day, I was at home by myself and at a loss for what to have for lunch. The pantry (or store cupboard as the English call it) was pretty much bare and all I had in the fridge was a limp bit of broccoli, the dag end of some parmesan and a few dregs of cream which weren’t quite off.
I boiled up the broc in a bit of water to which I’d added some liquid stock, blitzed it in the blender and added salt, pepper, parmesan and cream for what was a surprisingly delicious repast. I couldn’t believe my luck – I’d stumbled upon the recipe for a yummy, warming lunch from a few ingredients that you might just have in your fridge. Continue reading ‘Brocolli soup with left-handedness’
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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’
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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’
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Preparing and gathering together the component parts of a trifle is only half the job – it is also necessary to give some thought to assembly.
Because even though trifle is ostensibly a slapdash co-mingling of separate (and according to Waz, perfectly edible separately) bits and bobs of sweetness, sharpness and creaminess, the presentation is all-important.
In fact, the appearance of trifle is probably the only thing I have liked about this traditional English pud in the past. Continue reading ‘Tickety-Boo Tipsy Trifle (part 2)’
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Remember Sponge Blob Square Pan? The absolute debacle where we tried to cook a sponge cake?
It was back in the very early days of Crash Test Kitchen. We’ve learnt a few things since then, but the idea of cooking a simple sponge still gives us the collywobbles.
But then Lenny went and decided she wanted to make a classic English trifle – and of course that involves a sponge cake sliced into fingers. This time we armed ourselves with Allegra McEvedy’s “Never Fail Victoria Sponge” recipe, as handed down by her mum and published at the Word of Mouth food blog of the Observer Food Monthly, where we do some cameo appearances. Continue reading ‘Trifle Part 1: The Spongeblob Redemption’
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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’
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I’m always on the lookout for really quick, nutritious dishes that can be knocked up in about 20 minutes after I get home from work. This “herby pasta” fits the bill.
If you have a few herbs in your garden, then you can probably make this without even having to make a trip to the shop. Your store cupboard, or “pantry” to Anglo-Australasians, will have just about everything else you need.
For this dish it’s important to use what I call “soft” or “wet” herbs. I don’t know if these are accepted cookery terms, but I include such herbs as basil, parsley, mint, coriander (cilantro), marjoram, tarragon and dill in this group. Continue reading ‘Pasta fire extinguisher’
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There’s an old Buddhist saying that goes something like: “When two paths open up before you, make soufflé.”
There are two main paths to soufflé, and in accordance with the true version of that Buddhist proverb, we chose the difficult one. Continue reading ‘About the soufflé’
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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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You’ve had eggs benedict – but what about eggs benedict on a fresh, home-made muffin with handcrafted hollandaise sauce? And what if your hollandaise “splits” in the middle of the cooking process? Can it be retrieved, or should you bin it and start again?
These and other questions answered in this marathon episode.
Strictly speaking, eggs benny is made with ham, but in our experience smoked salmon has become synonymous with the dish. Continue reading ‘Project Benedict’
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Waz and I LOVE dumplings. Pretty much wherever we travel, we try to experience the local yum cha – or dim sum as it’s called throughout much of the world. So we often find ourselves traipsing through Chinatown in various far-flung cities sampling the lovely little morsels in their steaming wooden baskets that make up the dim sum experience.
London has a surprisingly small Chinatown, and, sad to say, we’ve had some very dodgy yum cha on Gerrard Street, which is this Chinatown’s main drag. I would say the variety and quality of dishes is better in such establishments as China House and King of Kings in Brisneyland (that’s Brisbane in Queensland for you non-locals). Even good old Edmonton in Canada had some very fine dim sum establishments. Continue reading ‘Your momo says …’
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People of the Year! Yep, that’s us in Time magazine’s special issue, which awarded the Person of the Year title to “You”, meaning independent content creators like us who post video, audio, photos and what-not to the web.
It all started when Time contacted us a few weeks ago for an interview. They hinted that a photo might be needed, but when we left for our Christmas holidays in Australia and they had not been back in touch we assumed the photo call wasn’t going ahead. When we touched down in Brisbane we turned on our mobile phone and there was a frantic message from Time in Sydney saying “Where are you? We need a photo!” We arranged to meet the photographer, Paul Blackmore, on the Gold Coast and did one shoot in our friend Angie’s kitchen, and another around at her mum’s place. Continue reading ‘Perfect Steak … in Time for Christmas’
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Well. To anyone who says I give Lenny too much hassle and back-talk in the kitchen, I say just watch this episode.
I reckon I’m pretty capable with dough and have a good feel for the right texture, moisture and density. So when we decided to make pretzels – the big soft chewy bready variety, not the nasty little crunchy bar snacks – I decided to take charge.
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I got hooked on these things in Canada where there was a chain in shopping malls that baked and sold them fresh. I always wonder about those instant-baked breads – do they use yeast, for example, or some sort of chemical for a quicker result? Anyway, they were still good enough to suck me in repeatedly. Continue reading ‘These pretzels are making us … feisty!’
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Go to the recipe for tarte tatin
A while back we had a giveaway for the Joy of Cooking cookbook’s latest edition. We were impressed by this American culinary tome – it really is quite an almanac, and we use it regularly. No surprise that when we decided to bake a tarte tatin it was right there in the index.
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Tarte tatin is traditionally made with apple but we have used pear once before, and Lenny reckons you could even do it with plums. Loads of butter and sugar are simmered into a buttery, sticky toffee-caramel sauce that fuses the slices of apple to a layer of puff pastry. It’s cooked upside down, first on a hob, then in the oven, and you invert it to serve. Continue reading ‘Joy of tarte tatin’
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Wow! I was interviewed as an authority on food podcasting for the Guardian Unlimited newsdesk podcast this morning and can’t believe how nervous I was. I hope they managed to edit together something sensible from all my babble. You can find the interview about 16 min 40 sec into the bulletin.
Loads of stuff I forgot to mention – like how we’ve been in Time magazine, and how we’re cited in Stephanie Bryant’s new book Videoblogging for Dummies.
Get Crash Test Kitchen in iTunes.
Anyway. It’s been a while since we posted an episode – listen to the GU podcast and you’ll learn that it’s partly because our cooker/stove/oven was broken, and getting it replaced was a bit of a nightmare. Also we’ve been travelling again, and work life has been keeping us busy. But we’ve kicked back into gear and, to coincide with the Guardian interview, here’s an episode in which we make a simple teacake.
This video was previously posted incomplete, but it’s now the full episode, so if you saw “Part 1″ please watch again.
Now, about teacake. As the name suggests it’s the perfect accompaniment to a cup of your favourite leaf tea, and is as much a part of the Anglo-Australian baking repertoire as scones and sponge cake. Continue reading ‘Cinnamon teacake’
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“Welsh rarebit” or “Welsh rabbit” was one of those dishes I’d always wondered about, along with “toad in the hole”, before moving to the UK.
Apparently its name is originally a bit of a slight on the Welsh – who were (many years ago, I’m sure) considered so inept they couldn’t catch a rabbit for dinner, so they had to settle for cheese on toast. In an early example of political correctness the name was adjusted to “rarebit”, supposedly taking a bit of the sting out of the insult.
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There’s more to good rarebit than just slices of cheddar plopped on bread and stuck under the grill (broiler, if you prefer). The recipes vary, but common elements seem to be a good cheddar, some Worcestershire sauce and either beer or milk. Continue reading ‘Pulling a rarebit out of the hat’
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This episode our London-based mate Phil shows us how to make real French fries – so real, in fact, they’re actually Belgian. And his wife Michelle, a genuine chef, chips in (pun for Anglo-Anzac readers) with a tasty and simple egg mayonnaise, plus the mussels that go into a traditional Belgian “moules and frites” feast.
Phil and Michelle know their way around Belgium and its cuisine. Phil is a particular specialist at locating obscure monasteries that run breweries on the side, where the monks only sell their beer to people who show up at the door, and only in bulk.
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The secret to the Belgian “frite”, Phil insists, is the twice-cooked sweating method. You give them a blast in the hot oil, let them sit for half an hour, then fry them again. Continue reading ‘Real Belgian fries, with mussels and mayo’
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Sometimes you just need comfort food. I had never pictured that packet of peas in the freezer as anything other than a quick way of padding out the numbers in a meat-and-three-veg meal, or a source of temporary relief for a wrenched ankle.
Recently, though, Canadian friends and Crash Test Kitchen devotees Shel and Christie visited from Edmonton, the place where CTK had its beginnings. We got nattering about food (as we do) and Christie revealed one of her quick and easy comfort cravings: peas and feta.
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It doesn’t sound like it would set the world on fire, but seriously, it goes really well together. Lenny’s addition of crusty garlic toasts makes a meal of it. Continue reading ‘Easy peasy feta cheesy’
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It seems Lenny has a latent sweet tooth. In the past she was not really one for desserts, but more and more she’s turning out cakes and confections. This simple chocolate sauce based on just four ingredients has become one of her staples.
Our mate Chef Michelle gave us the recipe, handed down from her mum. You combine milk, sugar, cocoa and butter over heat, and whisk gently until it bubbles itself into a velvety and perilously rich topping. Tip it straight over ice cream and wolf down.
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Crash Test Kitchen is all about improvisation, so we slapped together a cherry and brandy maceration to create what Michelle dubbed “black forest chocolate delight”. Actually, she came up with “black forest” bit and I embellished it. Continue reading ‘Revealing our (chocolate) sauce’
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In France, this ubiquitous soup is known simply as “gratinée” by virtue of the de rigueur melted Gruyère cheese on top.
Our travels through Quebec brought me into contact with the real thing (not a packet mix) for the first time, so of course we had to try and make it ourselves. Last episode we made beef stock as the base, and in this instalment we finish the process of creating French onion soup from scratch.
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It was a bit of a tearjerker for Lenny, who had to slice all the oignons because I was busy with bookkeeping. Continue reading ‘What’s French for onion soup?’
We’ve set out to make authentic French onion soup, complete with crusty toasted bread and gruyere on top. And when you embark on such a mission, you simply must make the soup base – beef stock – from scratch.
This is one of those really rewarding kitchen marathons. The stock may take hours and hours to make, but most of that is simply the simmering process that seethes out the delicious juices from the beef bones and vegetables.
And the preparation is enjoyably crude: vegetables roughly chopped, roasted with the bones, then tossed into a pot with water and a few simple spices. Continue reading ‘Bones about it: Beef stock from scratch’
If you’ve watched the last episode (this one includes a quick recap) you’ll know that we made banoffee (banoffi) pie after much pleading from our gastro-pal Chef Michelle and her hubby Phil.
Most of the work was done at our place, then we transported the components , including the fragile shortcrust base, across London to Michelle and Phil’s for completion and gustation.
Go to the recipe for banoffee pie
The crust made it intact and the results were pretty good all round, making allowances for a little over-zealous whipping of the cream by Lenny. Continue reading ‘Banoffi or Banoffee? Vol. 2′
Banoffi or banoffee? The debate rages, and the inventors of this world-famous dessert, the Hungry Monk Cafe, arguably should get the last word – even though they would appear to be in the wrong, since the name stands for “banana and toffee/coffee”. Maybe the “i” is there to make it sound Italian.
Go to the recipe for banoffee pie
Our friend Chef Michelle and her man Phil had suggested we crash test this one at our house, under her supervision. But plans change, and we had to switch the dinner venue to their place at very short notice. That meant whipping up the base and filling at ours, then transporting the components across London and finishing the job at theirs.
The easiest and perhaps most dangerous way to make the basic caramel filling needed for this dessert is to submerge a can or two of condensed milk in a pot of water and boil for hours and hours. There’s always the risk of the cans exploding if you let the water level drop. Continue reading ‘Coffee, Toffee, Banoffee Pie – Vol. 1′
My mum would often make rice pudding when I was a kid. Though I loved the pudding, I would scrape off the skin with my spoon and plop it on mum’s plate, who made an ostentatious show of eating it while I curled up my nose in distaste.
Lenny was making risotto a while back and couldn’t find arborio rice, so bought some “Italian pudding rice” instead at a corner store. I insisted, though, that it wouldn’t work, and went out an ultimately successful mission to find the right kind for risotto. That left us with this packet of pudding rice, which Lenny has finally put to use.
In our modest cookery library she found a recipe for “nursery rice pudding” and went to work, also grilling some pineapple for a topping. Continue reading ‘Rice pudding with pineapple confusion’
Don’t roast it. Braise it! That’s Lenny’s new mantra after discovering the pleasurable results of cooking less-than-choice cuts very slowly in a tasty stock or sauce.
It’s not really stewing – you carve the cooked joint or piece of meat as you would a roast, rather than chopping it up beforehand.
This episode is also a lesson in the hidden perils of pyrex-style cookware. Well, if we’d just googled it beforehand, we would have known the risks of exposing it to a naked flame.
Lamb is available fairly cheaply where we live, so Lenny went on the hunt for value and got a boned-out shoulder for about six quid. She sent me hunting for “kitchen string” so she could roll it up, and I managed to scrounge a couple of metres from a butcher. I must say, she does a fine job of binding a very ordinary looking piece of meat into something that looks like “a bought one”. Continue reading ‘Triumph of the Lamb, Disaster of the Dish: Braised lamb shoulder recipe’
Go to the recipe for heart-melting chocolate pudding
I couldn’t help it. Lenny left those blocks of delicious dark chocolate sitting there in the cupboard for weeks and weeks. Late one night I just had to have a nibble.
In the end, having not quite enough 70% cocoa dark chocolate to make these molten-centred puddings wasn’t such a big problem. Hidden away in another corner of the cupboard was some plain old Cadbury’s glass-and-a-half, and it probably took the edge off the cheek-puckering bitterness of the hardcore Green & Black’s Organic.
Lenny had been dying to cook this devilish delight after we had one at the rather posh St John restaurant in Clerkenwell, London. Continue reading ‘Heart-melting chocolate pudding’
Every Saturday I sit down to the task of writing out the weekly grocery shopping list. It starts off easily with the staples: bread, milk, fruit, white truffles …
But then comes the tricky part: what to eat for dinner for the next seven days. Sometimes inspiration hits and I easily come up with seven tasty, nutritionally balanced dishes with a combination of ingredients that’s both affordable and at least slightly adventurous. And that yields just the right amount of left-overs to pop into a plastic container for tomorrow’s lunch.
Other times I enter into a flight of fancy that Waz might have some ideas for the week’s dinners: “Waz, can you suggest something for dinner this week?” Typical reply: “Twice smoked duck’s liver on a bed of wilted sea kale with smoked maple dressing.” Or, alternatively: “Fish.”
Yeah, thanks Waz. Continue reading ‘Ready, steady, spaghetti: Puttanesca pronto’
Published on
March 8, 2006 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Chicken and poultry, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, Desserts and puddings, English traditional, Favourites, French traditional, Quick and easy, Sauces, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
We all want one of those chef’s blowtorches, don’t we? You know, the ones that you can use to blacken a capsicum (sorry, a pepper), blister a tomato … or make creme brulee!
I’ve had a serious addiction to this oh-so-unhealthy French dessert for years now – probably since I saw the movie Amelie, with that pixie-faced leading lady who rates “cracking creme brulee with a spoon” as one of life’s greatest pleasures.
Most restaurants have it on the menu, and I’ve eaten all sorts of variations – fruit flavoured and the like – in different parts of the world. Continue reading ‘How to make cracking creme brulee’
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 chicken on a barbecue’
One of my pet hates is a cappuccino without good froth, especially one for which I’ve forked out my hard-earned readies.
After I dropped many a hint, Lenny gave me an espresso machine for Christmas. Determined not to replicate the work of dud baristas who have been fleecing me for donkeys’ years, I went to work quickly to perfect my frothing technique. Now Crash Test Kitchen is ready to go public with the cappuccino tips you’ll find in this episode.
Too many of the coffee chains get away with selling fraudulently priced beverages with coarsely bubbled, over-aerated scum on top that has absolutely no body to it. Carry a coffee like this across the room, or up the street to your job, and you’ll find the foam has burst its bubbles and collapsed into plain old milk again. Really, really bad foam will discombobulate under the weight of the mandatory chocolate powder or flakes alone. Continue reading ‘Froth my milk up: cappuccino foam and how to get it right’
