52 Cookbooks #34: Polenta pizza fail!

August 30, 2014

So, I found an old cookbook all about pizzas and as I quite fancied a pizza I thought I'd deviate from my normal "go to" recipe and try one of these. Hmmnn, now I wish I hadn't!

The book is an M&S Pizzas book, and it's so old it still has the St Michaels branding on it!

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a

new recipe from one of my (many)

cookbooks each week for a year...

As I was flicking through it I noticed this recipe for a polenta pizza with sun-dried tomatoes and basil. It looked interesting enough to try and I thought would be a good alternative to more bread...

I don't think I've used this cookbook before, definitely not recently as I found it in the bookshelves in the study rather than with the rest of my cookbooks. That meant it was about as far away as it could get from our kitchen!

Perhaps that was a sign... If it was, I ignored it and started by boiling water, adding salt and stirring in the polenta then cooking for 5 minutes until it thickened. At this point as I didn't have a 12" pan I used two smaller baking tins and poured the thickening polenta into these and left it to cool and set.

So far so good. I'd even remembered to do this in advance, to give them plenty of time to cool and set - which makes a change! Next it was time to brush them with oil and grill them. This is where it I think it went wrong!

I was aware that polenta doesn't have much flavour so takes on the flavours you add. I brushed the tops with a tablespoon of garlic oil and shoved it under the grill for the allotted time. It was supposed to crisp but hadn't, so I shoved it back in. After more than double the time it still wasn't crisp - the oil was bubbling away and both of the pizza bases were swimming in oil.

I'm not sure it was supposed to be like that. However, on we went and the toppings went on - the square tin followed the recipe with passata, sliced cherry tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, cheese and black olives. For the round pizza I added pesto, a few more tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes and some goats cheese.

Well they looked like pizzas, I'll give them that - then it was into the oven for 25-30 minutes to cook.

This is how the square pizza looked straight out of the oven, it still looks like a pizza!

Unfortunately it tasted nothing like pizza! The base was awful, there are no other words for it. MOH was bravely soldiering on as in his words he was "bloody hungry" but I was for giving up and finding something else to eat. It was that bad.

In fact I don't think I've stopped eating anything part-way through a meal that I've cooked before, so this was a first. Even the time when I halved a recipe and forgot to halve the chillies in the recipe we managed to eat it - and that was a very long time ago!

So having given up on this and having a hungry husband it was down to a sesame seed bagel topped with peanut butter to fill the hole...

The verdict

No, no, no, no, no!
Do not try this at home!

I think you know that I won't be cooking this again, but I'm in two minds as to whether I should keep the cookbook or try one more recipe before throwing it out (for recycling, not even to the charity shop!)

Have you tried, and had any success with polenta as a pizza base?

52 Cookbooks #33: Coq au Riesling and creative leftovers!

August 23, 2014

I was late to the Nigel Slater cookbook party but am now a fan of his recipes, this Coq au Riesling from his Real Food cookbook is a simple but elegant dish. As it says on the cover of the edition I have "big-flavoured, unpretentious cooking. Good ingredients made into something worth eating. Just nice, uncomplicated food"

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a

new recipe from one of my (many)

cookbooks each week for a year...

I really can't disagree with any of that.

So as I was searching for something to cook for dinner on Friday I stumbled across this recipe, and unusually it appealed. Unusually I'd chosen a recipe that calls for opening a bottle of white wine, it uses 500ml of Riesling and even I knew it would be a dish best served with more white wine.

For any real Riesling or Gewürztraminer aficionados please look away for the rest of this post...

I didn't have Riesling, but I did have a bottle of Gewürztraminer which is similar enough (for me) - I mean, it comes in the same shape bottle so it must be ok!

The next substitution was chicken breasts for the "4 joints of free range chicken on the bone" - I knew it wasn't exactly the same but they were all I had, so I'd take care not to overcook them. In fact instead of the 500ml of wine, I used 300ml of wine and 200ml of water. That left us enough wine to drink with the meal... we only had one bottle of the white stuff in the house!

So anyway I was all set with my ingredients, even if they weren't quite the same as Nigel's. I had streaky bacon, onions, garlic, mushrooms, double cream and parsley. What could go wrong!

Actually, not much. I was careful to keep the chicken breasts moist and they were lovely and tender. I had a bit of trouble with my sauce not thickening - Nigel said to remove the chicken from the pan and cook the sauce "at an enthusiastic bubble" until the cream starts to thicken slightly.

Well maybe my bubble wasn't enthusiastic enough or it was because I had a higher water content or my meat didn't have any bones, but it wasn't up for thickening naturally. It thickened a little after I added some cornflour mixed with water, but even then it was probably on the thin-side.

It still tasted good though, but I did have quite a lot of sauce left, so I saved that in a plastic container and we got on with eating dinner with a glass or two of Gewürztraminer - to say MOH was shocked that I had suggested this meal was an understatement to say the least!

The verdict:

It tasted good, although the sauce was a little on the thin side (see above)

This would be a relatively easy dish to cook when you had people over, although I think I'd use "on the bone" meat if it was for more than MOH and I to be on the safe side!

It made a nice change to have a wine-based sauce and I'd definitely cook this again

I did wonder if I'd gone a tinker too far with the sauce, but the creative leftovers (see below) were a real bonus and just show you don't have to ditch your kitchen disasters mishaps all of the time!

Creative leftovers

With a tub of thin creamy- white wine sauce left over, I decided that I could do something with this and make it into a pasta sauce if I could thicken it a little. There were still some mushrooms, bacon and onions in the sauce so after a day or two in the fridge the flavours were just as good, if not better.

I grated some cheese and juiced a lemon and added both of these along with a couple of spoonfuls of plain flour to the sauce and stirred constantly while it was on the heat. It had the desired effect and we had a much thickened sauce to stir through some freshly cooked pasta.

Bonus - two meals for the price of one!

Linking this post with ClaireJustine

52 Cookbooks #32: Grilled mushroom risotto

August 18, 2014

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a new recipe from one of my (many) cookbooks each week for a year...

This week it's not only another Jamie recipe but it's also MOH's second appearance in the 52 Cookbooks guest slot, which is more than fine by me!

The recipe this week is Jamie's Grilled Mushroom Risotto from his Jamie at home book. I like this book as the recipes are split into sections by season and by vegetables which form the main ingredients for many of the recipes; there's also tips for how to grow that veg too.

This one was in the autumn & mushrooms section but I have to admit the only place I really want to get my mushrooms from is the green grocers, farmers market or supermarket.

I admire foragers and anyone who knows their mushrooms but really think I should leave it to those who know. It's probably safest that way!

MOH likes a mushroom risotto and has been known to choose it when we're eating out; I like risottos and will happily eat one but they're not usually my first choice when we're out, I'm not sure why. I say to MOH that they make me snore, but he says he hasn't noticed it to be any different after eating risotto... as I always snore! Hmmnn...

Jamie's risotto has the mushrooms grilled and served on top of the risotto - the recipe suggests shiitake, girolle, chestnut or oyster mushrooms and definitely no button mushrooms! We had a mixture of chestnut and oyster mushrooms - so phew! and after much debate MOH chose to stir them into the rice as because of a pan shortage the mushrooms had been fried early on...

I don't think it was any worse for it, many mushroom risottos are like this and it meant there were mushrooms all the way through the meal.

As usual I was called in for onion chopping duties and these were fried along with the celery before adding the rice and vermouth and soaked porcini.

Then it was the many ladlefuls of stock which Jamie's recipe says "keep adding ladelfuls of stock, stirring and massaging the starch out of the rice, allowing each ladleful to be absorbed before adding the next" - that's quite flowery language there. And this is where risottos and I don't get on - I'm way too impatient to wait for the stock to reduce before adding the next one, perhaps if I thought about massaging each piece of rice it might be different?

Then again, probably not. I'll leave the risotto making to MOH as he does it so well!

As well as the usual seasoning there was also lemon juice and some fresh herbs and it was served with a good shaving of Parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil. Yum.

The verdict:

I'm very happy to eat any mushroom risotto made for me, I'm less fussed about cooking them though

We stirred the mushrooms through the risotto rather than serving the grilled mushrooms on top, however if you had some more unusual mushrooms they would be good to have a few on top.

I always think we could make arancini balls with the leftover risotto, but then again what leftover risotto - we never have any!