The Trials & Tribulations of Cooking Christmas Dinner

The below photo is of me at 4 years old having apparently eaten my entire birthday cake myself! This is exactly how I was feeling at the end of a 5 course pre-Christmas dinner I made this week for my family as my sister, Lucy, and her boyfriend, Jamie, were here for just 1 night en-route to the UK. The mammoth dinner is also my excuse for my lack of postings this week...not much of an excuse I agree, but I'm sticking to it.

I have cooked for large groups of people in the past, but I've always kept it simple. Christmas dinner has to be special though and I wanted to make it something to really remember. As a result it ended up requiring a huge amount of planning, preparation and exhaustion! I had an hour by hour chart up on the fridge of what I needed to do to make sure everything would be ready on time and I got started at 7:30 on the morning of the big day. Prior to that, the shopping alone had taken 2 days since I couldn't get everything I wanted in the one supermarket. I also thought it would be really nice for everyone to have a memento to take home with them so I had typed up the menu and made red menu cards - with a childhood photo of each person stuck on in the place of name cards. Sourcing all the photos had started a good 6 weeks ago and it was well worth it since it gave everyone a great laugh.

Last year I had done a Christmas dinner in November (a more simple one) during a fleeting visit from Lucy and as a result had to use a frozen turkey since fresh ones weren't available. This year I automatically planned to buy a frozen turkey and it wasn't until the day after the dinner that it struck me that I could have bought a fresh one. Just for the record: frozen turkeys are an absolute pain in the derriere! Last year's 5kg turkey had defrosted quite quickly and easily but this year's 8kg bird seemed to take forever and I practically got frostbite trying to get the bags of innards out from inside it - with a frozen turkey they bag up the offal and it's stored inside the turkey since some people like to eat it...that does not include me and those tricky bags went straight in the bin.

With the dinner planned for Wednesday night, my trusty sous-chef (my husband Simon) had to work which left me to prepare everything myself. For our starter I had planned a plate of small bites: a melba toast with smoked salmon (smoked salmon's a tradition in Jamie's family); a skewer of prawn & pineapple (prawn cocktail is Simon's family tradition so this was a twist on that) and finally a skewer of mozarella & tomato with basil out of my balcony garden. I bought fresh prawns on the morning of the dinner and cooked them in sweet chilli sauce since I'm not happy to eat cold, previously frozen, pre-cooked prawns as I'm pregnant (news flash for those not aware of that fact!) They were all easy to assemble - and they did taste delicious - but of course they required a fair bit of advance work. I also made a tomato soup (using my Granny's recipe) for the second course; again, buying tinned soup would have made my day a lot easier but I had set my bar high and wanted everything to be as fresh and homemade as possible. I only have myself to blame for all the work! I served this in a small mug so everyone wouldn't get too full before the main event and it was just the perfect size.

Now for the main course. Having a standard small oven, I had bought a combination microwave a few months ago so I could use that as an oven when necessary. The problem with a microwave oven that's used as a convection oven is that once you have pre-heated it and set the timer, you can't then increase the time (or not as far as I'm aware anyway). The roasted beetroot and honeyed parsnips & carrots were in the microwave-convection oven, which inconveniently turned itself off about 10 minutes before everything else was quite ready. No problem...I just pressed for the convection to start again and the 'pre-heating' sign flashed up. Ten minutes later, with a slight acrid smell in the air I opened the microwave door to find that my gorgeous beetroot was blackened to a crisp! I was so annoyed I could have screamed but didn't want to ruin the evening so I had to bite my lip, stamp my feet and carry on. Luckily I had a back-up of peas and sweetcorn just in case - clearly, I know myself well.

The beetroot was thankfully the only casualty of the evening and the turkey turned out perfectly; I cooked it for 5 hours but it could have probably done with only 4.5 hours - that is actually what my Mum had recommended to me but in my infinite wisdom I didn't want to risk it not being cooked enough rather than listen to the woman who has been cooking turkeys for 30 years! The honeyed parsnips & carrots survived the microwave, the sprouts with chestnuts were very well-received (so many people don't really like sprouts but these were tiny baby ones and were very sweet), the pigs in blankets had been made with real sausages (not cocktail ones) and everyone agreed mine were far more tasty and whilst I think some people were a bit dubious about the wild rice, cranberry and sausage meat stuffing (I didn't stuff the turkey, just cooked the stuffing separately), it was declared really delicious - thank you, Choithram's Good Taste magazine. The only big mistake was that I completely forgot to take a photo! I must have been so wrapped up in getting tucked into my plateful that it slipped my mind. At least I remembered in time to photograph the turkey before it was totally carved up.

Dessert was Nigella Lawson mincemeat puffs with a choice of vanilla ice-cream, custard (tinned, I wasn't going so far as to make that from scratch) or home-made passion-fruit sorbet (Jamie Oliver recipe). There was also a fruit salad but I forgot about that until well after we'd finished eating and I saw it tucked away in the back of the fridge! The mincemeat puffs were not quite what they should have been since I used more puff pastry than the recipe called for (I could only buy 500g packs, not 375g ones) and I didn't have a square cutter so had guessed at the size of each puff which means they turned out about twice the size they should have been with half the amount of mincemeat they should have had. Still, everyone ate their large square of puff pastry with a hint of mincemeat spices and they weren't too bad! I have to say, though, that my puff pastry ones were a lot lighter than the Mr. Kipling shortcrust pastry ones I served up to my friends on Friday - his also had too much pastry and not enough filling which was very disappointing. Finally, with coffee and tea, I served my homemade chocolate dates and After Eights to anyone who could fit anything else in.

A fantastic evening with my wonderful family (only my older sister and her family were missing) but I think next year I'll leave it to Mum who always seems to pull it off in a far more relaxed way - I suppose that's what 30 years of practice does for you. Roll on her dinner on Saturday...yum yum yum.

Cooking up a Thai Storm

There are probably hundreds of food blogs around the world but only a handful here in Dubai. Arva, the writer of I Live In A Frying Pan has successfully managed to get a number of us in contact and last Thursday we all met up for a Thai cooking class at the International Centre for Culinary Arts (ICCA). From the cyber world to the real word, it was a great opportunity to meet like-minded foodies around our common interest...eating!

I had never heard of the ICCA but whilst their main focus is on training professional chefs, they offer a huge variety of cooking classes for the general public as well. Hidden away in the Hana Centre shopping mall in Satwa, it was a real shock to find a huge gleaming industrial kitchen hiding behind the innocuous looking door. Group classes require a minimum of 8 people and at Dhs 200 per person it is great value since we learned not only how to cook delicious Thai dishes but we also got to eat the full 3 course menu once we were finished.

Being a professional cooking environment, extremely attractive hair nets were the order of the day - needless to say I didn't bring that little memento home with me to use again. We started off with dessert since that needed time to cook and set: Pandana Creme Caramel. I had always thought that the brown syrup on top of creme caramel was poured on before serving, I learned that in fact it is toffee (simply melted and caramelised sugar) which is poured into the bottom of the ramekin so that once the creme caramel has set and you tip it on to your plate then the toffee is there on the top - a sort of upside down cake. Pandana leaves cooked in coconut milk, liquidised and then strained into cream, egg and sugar are what gave this dessert its Thai flavour. Not being able to eat dairy and not being a big fan of cold custards, I didn't actually eat the finished article and realise that I also forgot to even get a photo!

Starters included a Green Papaya Salad with caramalised cashew nuts and Shrimp on Lemongrass Sticks. The shrimp was very much like the sate lilit that I had in Indonesia; shrimp, chillies, ginger, coriander and other ingredients minced together and molded around a lemongrass stick which was then breadcrumbed and deep fried. The demonstration from the chef of how to do it looked easy - in practice, picking up the wet shrimp mixture and trying to mold it around the stick was disastrous and the chef had to 'improve' pretty much everyone's attempts. It seems the trick was to have as much flour as possible on your hand and to move your hand round the stick as quickly as you could so that the mixture wouldn't glue onto your hand instead of the stick. Not an easy job. Both dishes were quite heavy on chilli (as with a lot of Thai cooking) so whilst I could appreciate the flavours, in order to preserve my tastebuds I could only manage to eat a small amount.

The main courses of Red Fish Curry and Crispy Beef in Honey were both amazing and suited my palate since I put in the tiniest amount of red curry paste into the fish and no chillies at all into the beef. Luckily my team (Arva and Salman from Dubai Moves) had no issues with these changes to the official recipe. The fish was extremely easy to cook since the sauce was basically just coconut milk with curry paste, fish sauce and lime juice and the fish only needed a few minutes to poach in the sauce. I made this again last night and Simon agreed - yummy! The beef was also easy to make but it required a bit more preparation since the beef needed mixed with oil, soya and rice flour before cooking it and it included julienne'd vegetables (always painstaking to cut veg so finely). The result was fabulous though and when the time came to plate up all our dishes we had significantly less beef on display than the other teams - I have no idea where it had gone but the fact that we didn't finish cooking until 9pm and were starving may give a small hint! I've also made this again at home but it sadly didn't turn out half as nicely - practice will make perfect though.

To accompany the mains we had sticky Thai rice and stir-fried noodles with vegetables. I usually use rice vermicelli noodles but these were the flat tagliatelli-style rice noodles and they gave the dish a much more attractive look - when I made it again this week I used vermicelli noodles so my official verdict was to use the tagliatelli ones next time. As a team, preparing all the julienne'd vegetables didn't seem like a big task, doing it alone this week I seemed to be there finely chopping carrots, peppers and other veg for an absolute age. Still, worth investing the time to eat a flavoursome meal - you could throw in some prawns or thinly sliced meat to make these noodles into a complete meal on their own.

This is the first cooking class I've done and I really enjoyed it. My only issue was that by starting the class at 7pm, I was already feeling extremely hungry so for the future I would definitely want to start around 5pm so that everything would be ready to sit down and eat at a more reasonable hour. It was great to meet other bloggers and hear about how they got into writing their blogs - check their sites out too. Roll on the next event.

My Custard Pie / Anja's Food 4 Thought / Scribblelicious / Spontaneous Euphoria / Ballpark It

French Food - Success!

After my unfortunate Italian experience, I'm pleased to report that my French cuisine is a huge improvement! How could it possibly let me down considering it is my favourite country and food?!

We started the week with a smoked mackerel salad accompanied by boiled potatoes. I didn't find it in any of my French recipe books but I've had this dish many times sitting outside at a cafe in France and for a light meal, it is one of my favourites. The main difference between my version and the one you'll find in France is that the real French one would have been made with smoked herring - those were not be found in my supermarket unfortunately but the mackerel worked just as well. My French dressing isn't half as good as the one my Granny makes, or the ones you will find in France but it was not bad and overall a really good meal.

The next night we had chicken chasseur with courgette and tomato bake. I have a feeling my French cookbook is for dieters because there was no requirement to put cream in the sauce, so I didn't but in the past I would always have added cream and I found the sauce a bit thin without it. Despite that though, the flavour was mouth-wateringly good (if I do say so myself!) and the courgette and tomato bake (interlaced slices of the two vegetables drizzled with olive oil and topped off with grated cheese) was so simple but so tasty.

Finally, we had veal with tarragon sauce. My brother, Struan, was not impressed that we had veal but I wasn't thinking of the ethics / politics of it when I bought it - next time I'll just use minute steaks (plus I can't actually tell a difference in the flavour anyway). Again, the lack of cream lead to a rather thin sauce but I didn't want to repeat my mistake of 'improving' recipes again. With this dish I just made roast veg, not really French but delicious roast beetroots, local sweet turnips and juicy carrots apply to all European cuisines I would say.

A big thumbs up for all the French meals from Simon, so those will stay in my repertoire for the future. I was going to continue with French food for the coming week but I bought a book (on my nutritionist's recommendation) yesterday that has got me planning in a totally difference direction. More on that next time...

Italian Cuisine – Mamma Mia!

I decided it would be interesting for the blog and for Simon’s and my dinners to focus on a particular country’s food each fortnight. Simon’s favourite food is Italian so we thought that would be a good place to start. I sourced all my recipes online at BBC Good Food since I don’t have an Italian cookbook and I looked through a recipe book at the shop to see if it had anything more interesting – it didn’t. So was Italian cuisine the start of a great love affair?

A few things to bear in mind here are that:
1. I can’t eat wheat so pasta, pizza, gnocchi and apparently most typical Italian food is out for me. 2. I’ve been on holiday to Italy twice and both times have been entirely disappointed with Italian food. In Tuscany back in 2001, most places I went served pre-prepared and microwaved dishes. In the ‘proper’ restaurants I went to I didn’t realise everything had to be ordered separately so ended up one night with a plate of chicken and nothing else! Last year in Venice (for our honeymoon) we can safely say we had no outstanding meals at all – we got the impression that since everything has to be floated into Venice that it’s all frozen and then defrosted for cooking. In fact, our best meal in Venice was in a little Chinese restaurant we found in a back street!
3. When I eat in an Italian restaurant here I generally have fish with vegetables – yes it’s an Italian restaurant, but does that make it an Italian dish?

Our first meal was Italian Chicken with Ham, Basil and Beans. The recipe called for chicken thighs wrapped in prosciutto with 2 tubs of halved cherry tomatoes scattered around them in the roasting tin and a large glass of white wine poured over it all. It then had to cook for 40 minutes, add the beans and cook for another 30 minutes. Now, cherry tomatoes are quite juicy and when they get hot what happens to the juice? Yes, it all oozes out so after an hour in the oven I had a mush of tomatoes surrounding the chicken wrapped with extremely dried out prosciutto. Maybe if there hadn’t been so much wine in the dish then it wouldn’t have had such a tomato puree consistency. Simon thought it tasted alright – I forced myself to eat it.

Since I’d exactly followed the recipe the night before and come to no good, the next night I thought the Italian Beef Stew seemed very bland so I ‘improved’ it by adding some red wine to the mix. I don’t believe it was the red wine that ruined the dish, I think it would have been just as bland, thin and un-hearty without that bit of help. Beef, onion, a can of chopped tomatoes and a yellow pepper just don’t make the sort of stew that I am used to.

The third night of Italian cuisine was an improvement on the first two nights: Smoked Salmon and Lemon Risotto. I’ve never cooked risotto rice (when I make ‘risotto’ I just use normal brown rice and cook it with veg and wine) and could not believe that 1.5 litres of water was absorbed into just 350g of rice. The mascarpone, smoked salmon and lemon were stirred in and hey presto. I can’t eat high-starch foods (hence no wheat) but what I didn’t realise is that risotto rice is extremely starchy. I knew I was eating rice, but it tasted like pasta! As I used to find with pasta dishes (in the days when I ate them), after a few mouthfuls I wouldn’t be able to face eating any more but would still be hungry – too rich and creamy. Same with risotto. It did taste very nice, but only in small amounts and my stomach did not react well to it later!!

Finally, with my parents coming over for dinner, I chose to make Roasted Fish – Italian Style. Italian style seems to mean simply lots of tomatoes, olives and basil. With my last roasted tomatoes fiasco in mind, this dish only needed to be in the oven for 15 minutes so I thought it should come out fine. Simon and I don’t like olives but since Mum and Dad do and the recipe called for them to be included I scattered them over the dish. Sadly, the smell and taste of whatever brine the olives had been in inside the jar permeated through the fish and everyone thought the fish was off (which it wasn’t since there was no smell when I opened them and nobody was ill afterwards). Another really successful Italian meal!

One very nice Italian dish I made was the Mozarella Peppers (bell peppers stuffed with tomato, basil and mozzarella). Really juicy and delicious – a great take on the traditional caprese salad. So at least one thing I cooked last week turned out well. I was meant to cook Italian for two weeks but I’ve knocked that firmly on the head and moved on to my favourite food for this week…French. Will let you know how that goes.

The Perfect Poached Egg (or not!)

I’ve just finished reading Julie Powell’s book Julie & Julia which is about her foray into the culinary world through her decision to cook every single recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. It was very good but not a gripping page-turner; the film of the book (with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams) is similar – a light comedy. There is a whole chapter about Julie’s struggles to make a poached egg and it gave me an idea. I’ve always been able to make poached eggs…just not very perfect looking ones. So I decided to try out all the various ways I know of and see which one gave the best end result!

First up was the standard ‘get the water bubbling and crack an egg in over the water’ style. Into the same pan I added a second egg which was cracked into a ramekin and then gently tipped into the bubbling water. Did it make a difference? YES! The egg that was cracked straight into the pan spread out everywhere and looked anything but picture perfect. The egg from the ramekin stayed together a lot better and came out looking like a real poached egg. See for yourselves:

My Mum had breakfast at the Burj Al Arab once (something everyone has to do at some point with special visitors) and the chef there told her they wrap the eggs in cling film before poaching them. Interesting idea. Technically, if the egg doesn’t come into contact with the water then it isn’t poached – it’s coddled. Technicalities aside though, I gave it a try. It did work to keep the egg nicely together (how could it spread out when it’s confined?) but the lines of the plastic were left on the egg which did look a little strange. Maybe I should have folded the plastic around the egg instead of twisting it up like an Easter egg. Regardless, I’m not convinced about putting plastic into boiling water, isn’t plastic toxic once it gets hot? Hmm.

Finally, I tried cooking the egg in a ramekin dish in the water. Definitely coddled, not poached. Definitely not a good idea since the egg came out as hard as a boiled egg. The first day I tried it the egg cooked away for 30 minutes before I realised I should put a lid on the pan so that the top of the egg would get the heat! Runny yolk? No chance. The next day I immediately put the lid on but the top it still didn’t seem to cook – it stayed clear and wet – and when I finally decided that it must be ready it was once again solid as a rock. Not a success.

I could have tried with a poached egg pan (basically the ramekin concept but the dishes are built in to the pan) or with a silicon egg poacher (same again, just a small dish that hooks over the pan edge. However, I don’t have either of those and since neither of them would be genuine poached eggs I figured it wouldn’t ruin my experiment. It is possible that one of these methods would give the best looking egg though.

The conclusion: crack the egg into a ramekin, get a shallow pan of water boiling and then turn it down so it’s simmering and finally tip the egg into the water. Fail-safe plan? Sadly not. I tried the ramekin-dropped egg again a few days later and it didn’t turn out quite so well as the first time – certainly not as bad as cracking it straight in from the shell but not as tidy as the photo. In the end though (except for the hard boiled one) they all taste the same and that runny yolk, soft egg white and fresh toast taste just can’t be beaten.

Give it a try and post up your results!

BBQ: The Simple Pleasures

There is something so satisfying about BBQ’d food. The smell of the charcoal burning and the meat slowly grilling fills the air and I don’t think anyone can smell that and not have their mouth watering. A gas BBQ just doesn’t have the same effect. Then you have the taste of the meat…impossible to get that in the oven or in a griddle pan. Divine.

Last night we had some friends over for our first BBQ party – we only got the BBQ two weeks ago. We’d resisted getting a BBQ for 3 years and finally, not able to think of anything else to buy my husband, Simon, for his birthday I decided on that. An apartment’s not really ideal and 11 people on our average-sized balcony was a bit tight; in the end we moved inside and left Simon to the grilling with just a couple of trusty assistants!

Apart from the taste of the food, grilling is acknowledged as one of the healthiest ways to eat meat. Plus there’s minimal fuss in the kitchen once the BBQ gets going. Of course, there’s a fair bit of preparation needed to marinate the meats, make the salad, scrub the potatoes and get anything else ready but once that’s done you can sit back and let the BBQ’er get on with finishing the meal all off.

I can’t think of any downsides to having a BBQ. The preparation time and amount of washing up are more or less the same as preparing any meal, I’d say. The actual BBQ grill shelf doesn’t need cleaned as it’ll get self-cleaned with the flames the next time you cook, so there’s no soaking and scrubbing needed which is a big plus point. The first ten minutes while the flames get going are a bit eye-wateringly smoky but nothing too severe. So all in all, a resounding thumbs up.

Although it was a lovely temperature outside, once the BBQ got going things heated up a bit too much for me. Not sure how many more we’ll have before the summer really kicks in, but we’re going to cram in as many as possible before then. Now I’m off to warm up the leftovers so we can experience it all again…