An Easy New Year’s Meal

The tree is starting to droop. Hoovering up the needles is an hourly chore but it’s still not over! Oh no.

The spectre of New Year’s Eve hangs over me yet and we’re all feeling a bit like this:

I feel rubbish!

If, like me, you have no plans then a quick meal that you can prepare in advance and just leave alone until serving time – with some killer puddings to see the new year in – is just the job.

I’m here to give you my menu for this this NYE.

I am going to be serving my Greek Lamb with Orzo. This is a stew with the pasta added in at the final stages of cooking and fills the house with the warming scent of an array of spices and herbs and tastes just bloody fab.

You’ll need *takes deep breath*:

A splash of olive oil

Stewing Lamb (not too lean, you need some good streaks of fat)

1 onion

2 carrots (or one big bastard) Sliced in half, lengthways

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

1 carton of creamed tomatoes (or passata)

Tomato puree

2 Cloves of garlic

Dried Thyme and Oregano

Paprika

Cinnamon, ground and a stick

Ground mace

Ground cloves

Lamb stock

Red wine

Orzo

Fresh oregano, rosemary and mint

Feta cheese.

Got all that? Sounds complicated and a bit of a pain in the arse? It’s not, honestly.

Chop your lamb up into bit size pieces

I've used shoulder steaks

and brown in the olive oil in a heavy based large casserole pan (you might need to do this in batches depending on how many you are cooking for).

While you are sealing the lamb, roughly chop the onion and peel the garlic (I’ve specified a couple of cloves but you can decide how much you want to add – it’s up to you) before blitzing to a pulp in a food processor.

Beware the fumes!

Remove the browned lamb from the pan and add the oniony pulp to the fat and gently cook until soft.

Add the spices and herbs (I’ve not given amounts as I do just tend to throw “an amount” in, with the exception of the ground cloves – I’m not terribly keen on cloves so only ever add 1/4 teaspoon) and continue frying for a couple of minutes.

Replace the lamb into the pan (and the juices which will have accumulated in the dish) and add the tomatoes (tinned, passata and a squeeze of tomato purree) stock (about a pint), a glug of wine, the carrots and the fresh herbs. Bring to the boil and then place on the lowest possible heat and leave to bubble away gently for 2-3 hours (or longer).

Simmer, Simmer, Simmer

SO, while the lamb is cooking you can get on with making some dessert.

I ummed and ahhed over which recipe to prepare, One Jug Chocolate Brownies or Ice Cream Cake and plumped for the ice cream cake as it’s stupidly easy and has a party feel to it.

Needs more chocolate

And now, I will ask for a moment of bowed heads and silence as I have some sad news to impart. This will be the final recipe in which Ken, the Kenwood Chef mixer will make an appearance. At the grand old age of 34 (we think) he has finally shuffled from his mortal coil. Which is a bit strange actually as the problem does appear to be with a spring inside him which has finally rusted to the point of no return.

Farewell Ken. You did us proud. *Bravely holds back tears*

Line a springform cake tin with clingfilm, making sure that you have enough to cover the cake at the top.

Leave your ice cream (I went for vanilla, but you could use chocolate I suppose, or cookie dough, or raspberry ripple, or anything at all!) out of the freezer to soften a little, meanwhile take a rolling pin to some bourbon biscuits and smash them into small chunks.

(place in a sealable bag first, HA HA!)

Add your ice cream  to your *sobs* mixer.

Softened ice cream

And add the bourbon biscuits, chocolate drops (I used both milk and white) and honey roasted nuts before mixing. (Keep back about a third of the biscuits and a few chocolate chips for decorating later)

Delicious

Smash up a crunchie bar and add that to the mix (reserving a third of the honeycomb)

A glycemic spike approaches...

Pour the “batter” into your prepared cake tin and smooth the top a little with a spatula.

And that's it!

Wrap the overhanging cling film over the top of the cake and place into the freezer until five minutes before you’re ready to serve.

When you are ready, take the ice cream and chuck the reserved biscuits, crunchie bar and chocolate chips over the cake (and I’d definitely throw some sparklers on the top for some New Year’s Eve glitter and POP!)

This may well give you a sugar hangover. Or at least, that's what you can blame your bad head on tomorrow.

For the full recipe (and also some details about hot butterscotch and chocolate sauces to go with this beauty) check out here

Back to the lamb. After a few hours of gentle simmering the lamb should be soft and the sauce a little bit thicker.

At this point I usually turn the oven onto a low heat (gas mark 2) and add a couple of handfuls of Orzo before giving the stew a final stir and putting the pan, lid on, into the oven to cook for 30 minutes – or until the pasta is cooked.

Make a quick mix of feta cheese, fresh chopped mint and oregano to sprinkle on the top of the stew.

Sprinkle over stew

Serve with green beans and broccoli. I sometimes make some garlic and rosemary roasted new potatoes, but these aren’t really necessary as the pasta in the stew provides the carby bulk.

Kalá hristúyenna!

I wish you all a Happy 2012, may your year be full of parties and happy times!

How to make Homemade Marshmallows

I didn’t even know you could make marshmallows at home.

That was until I sat slumped in front of the TV on Saturday morning, head banging and awaiting the sweet release of death, and watched as James Martin produced homemade raspberry marshmallows which he then roasted in a tandoor oven.

I obviously don’t own a tandoor oven (and this is the second time that Saturday Kitchen have used one as the main cooking device which pisses me off a bit) but I did start wondering about how a homemade marshmallow might differ from a shop bought one.

On Sunday the hangover departed, but as I was still feeling a bit miserable, I decided to cheer myself up by attempting to make some.

They are weirdly simple actually.  The hardest part about the recipe was getting hold of the liquid glucose. I needed to go into Robert Dyas to buy a sugar thermometer (the sugar needs to come up to a temp of 260 degrees, I have no idea why and thought it best to buy one) and thought that they might stock it – after all they sell stacks of stuff for jam making and other bakery goods. After a futile (and desultory, let’s be honest) look around the store I approached a member of staff and asked whether they sold liquid glucose:

“Nah. have you tried a hardware store like B&Q?”

Me: *boggle*

I then went on a wild goose chase  drive down to the local cake porn shop, all the time knowing in the back of my mind that it would be closed. It was.

I popped into Boots (the recipe says that some chemists might sell it) and was pointed towards some powdered glucose with added vitamin C.

By now I was starting to think that this was all pointless and I should have planned things in a more efficient way. I headed dejectedly onto Sainsbury’s to buy the meat for the Sunday roast. “I might as well have a squizz at the bakery section while I’m here, you never know” and there…shining like a beacon among the vanilla pods and silver balls…was a tube of liquid glucose. I might have danced a bit and I know I kissed it.

Stop judging me.

I got the sugar and *little ray of sunshine in manner of heaven opening* LIQUID GLUCOSE into a pan and set it to boil. While the mixture got up to the required heat, I started whipping 2 x egg whites in a mixer to stiff peaks.

Bubbling sugar syrup

Rather typically of my experience with sugar syrup, you can see I let it get a bit too hot (at least this time it didn’t boil over) but I just allowed it to cool a bit before adding some pre-soaked gelatin sheets and the water they had soaked in, stepping back as the mixture bubbled up close to the top of the saucepan.

Adding the sugar syrup to the egg whites was nerve wracking. The last time I attempted it I had ended up with a serviceable icing which had an unfortunate lake of gloopy sugar syrup underneath. That couldn’t happen this time or the whole recipe would fail.

Slowly, Slowly, SLOWLY!

A word about the mixer. Look, I know it’s ancient (My mum used to make cakes with it when I was a nipper) but it’s solid, sturdy and STILL WORKS. I long for a beautiful KitchenAid mixer (in cherry red) but every time I go to John Lewis and touch one (which happens with an alarming regularity) I always think of old Ken, and how he’s been mixing my cakes, blending my soups and whisking my meringues either by me, or by my mum for the last 30 years with never a whimper, and I think it’s daft to replace him. Anything cheaper than a KitchenAid will probably die within months or years (Mum had one fridge freezer for 25 years, since that one finally died, she’s had to buy another three!) and the truth of it is…I love old Ken, he’s like an old friend who never lets me down.

The marshmallow was ready, I quickly greased a tin and coated it lightly with a mixture of icing sugar and cornflower (the recipe didn’t specify quantities, so I guessed – using about double the amount of icing sugar to cornflour) and then dusted some fresh raspberries in the same.

A layer of mallow, followed by the raspberries and then topped again with the rest of the mallow mixture and I had my own homemade marshmallows.

Spatula wedged into mixture

I left the mixture to set – not in the fridge – for a few hours and then got to cutting it into squares and dusting with the same icing sugar/cornflour mix.

I used a Palette knife dipped into boiling water to cut around the edge of the pan, and then tried to turn it out. Nope.

I cut around the edge again and banged hard on the bottom of the tin. Nope

I submerged the bottom of the tin in some hot water for a few seconds (a la Jelly) and turned it upside down and banged it and swore and still…NOPE.

So I hacked away and poked and prodded and made a mess, but started to get the marshmallow out of the tray and onto a dusted board.

Disastrous mess

This shit is STICKY. I know that sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but it really takes much more icing sugar and cornflour to soak up the moisture than you would think, and the texture is spongier and foamier than shop bought mallows. I think I made a mistake somehow with the raspberries, as they sunk to the bottom of the mix, despite being dusted (this usually prevents fruit sinkage in fruit cakes but didn’t seem to work in this recipe – maybe the raspberries were too ripe and large, or maybe I hadn’t dried them enough after washing. It’s possible that my icing sugar to cornflour ratio is skewed. I would probably up the cornflour next time for a number of reasons).

I finally got the entire tray cut into squares and left to dry for a while on a wire tray before transferring to a cake stand.

Huge chunks

I served the mallows (after the boys had eaten a significant amount ) as a dessert with some more fresh raspberries. I toyed with the idea of a dark chocolate sauce but couldn’t be arsed and I think that a raspberry coulis, or a white chocolate sauce would work just as well.

You will need a fork

Plain marshmallows (without the raspberries) would be terrific with hot chocolate and as part of a Halloween (I promise, I’m going to start talking parties again soon) or a bonfire night party. They are different (and yet tastewise the same) to shop bought versions as they explode in your mouth as a sweet, frothy foam. Toasted on a BBQ? I think they would actually make you thank God you are alive.

They were an absolute hit with kids and adults alike.

I really, strongly recommend you try them (but go straight to Sainsbury’s for the liquid glucose)

Recipe for marshmallow here. Give them a go.