Leftovers and what to do with them...

I got to the stage today where I got a bit "fooded out" - I had to plan next weeks meals and go shopping but I really didn't want to, the past few weeks have been a bit full on in the kitchen, and just for a while my enthusiasm had waned.  The house was full of good things but I didn't want to eat any of them, and I had to use up stuff that we were all a little bit bored of.  Thankfully my friends on Facebook came to the rescue  with some helpful suggestions and I got over it!

We don't usually have leftovers in our house, unless I've cooked extra on purpose so there's some for the next day's lunch.  Christmas is the only time when I have to think extra carefully what to do so as to avoid waste and boredom of  eating the same old things, ie turkey.  Following on from my "It's Christmas!" and "Waste not want not" posts, here is a guide to how to manage what can be a food overload during the Festive Season.

One.  Don't overbuy in the first place.  It's very easy to go crazy with the shopping and cook way too much of everything.  Remember there will be snacks, starters, the main course, probably a selction of puddings, cheese, chocolates, sweets etc.. The only thing in my experience you have to cook loads of is roast potatoes.  Also, check use by dates and buy the longest date possible.

Two.  After Christmas dinner, make sure to give away lots to those who are going back to a house without any leftovers.  There's nothing worse than waking up on boxing day with a bare fridge and no leftover meat to have with chips that day.  Keep enough for yourself though!  This is one of those times when washed out Chinese takeaway containers come into their own (and yes, I DO have takeaways now and again).  I've also given away excess macaroons, trifle and Christmas cake, which keeps for ages and incidentally is yummy with cheddar cheese.

Three.  Make bubble and squeak with the sprouts and carrots, you can make it into little patties, Nigel Slater puts a piece of cheese in the middle (I'm going to try that!) or go for the freeform version.  As a greens lover, B&S is one of my favourite things.  Have with cold meat and a fried egg.

Four.  Freeze some.  I froze a good dollop of the parsnip and ginger puree and the red cabbage this year, to enjoy with a roast dinner at a later date.

Five.  Think creatively.  This is what I did with my  seven and a half kilo turkey this year:  Fed thirteen people for Christmas Day dinner, gave some away, had some cold while I picked the meat off the bones on Christmas evening, made sandwiches, husband took some to work in a box with tomatoes and chilli and cranberry sauce.  Had some more cold with bubble and squeak, remains of bread sauce and remains of red cabbage.  On Boxing day I made three litres of stock from the bones, adding two chicken carcases from the freezer and the usual carrot, celery, onion, herbs etc. I froze two litres and refrigerated the rest.  I was going to make soup but changed my mind and made a turkey, ham, leek and mushroom pie using both the stock and some leftover double cream that was brought to go with the puddings -  I rustled up some shortcrust pastry in the processor and there you have it - there was enough for two pies so I gave the smaller one to my parents.  Turkey, gone.  Other friends have had ideas of Asian turkey salad, Turkey fricassee, Fajitas etc.  I think the Asian salad is a great idea, lots of people tell me that after Christmas they crave salad, fresh tastes and a bit of spice!  There are often ideas for using leftovers in food magazines and on websites such as lovefood.com.

Six.  Plan the next weeks meals around what you have left, this usually means you will spend less too at a time of year when money is tight. 

Seven.  Remember things keep for longer than you might think. Cheese, for example.

My food waste bin was emptied today (after three weeks) and it was still only two thirds full, even with all the bones from the stock, and some bubble and squeak which had to be wasted because I burnt it :-(   There was only a very small amount of plate scrapings on Christmas Day, but this IS my family we are talking about.

And it's okay to have tea and chocolate for breakfast every day if you're not going to work or school.... you think I'm joking, don't you?

Thank you for reading, more soon.

Caroline x

PS  I don't think I ever mentioned the result of the Bake Off.  I did win the biscuit category, but there was only one other entrant.  So I am officially the best biscuit maker out of two biscuit makers in the hospital.  And I have a high quality certificate to prove it!

PPS  I am now the proud owner of  a KitchenAid Artisan Food MIxer.  I think that after a while it may deserve a blog post all to itself...

It's Christmas!

Christmas dinner.  Everyone has an opinion.  Sprouts or not?  Where to go, who's going to cook?  Love or loathe the whole thing?  I am firmly in the "love" camp and I had been looking forward to cooking Christmas dinner and planning it for quite some time, in fact for over a month, on and off.  I've only cooked Christmas dinner twice before, once for two (with my first husband) and once for eleven when I was expecting my son and at the stage of pregnancy where you have the burst of energy and feel like superwoman for a short while.  I had an issue of delicious magazine with a very inspirational festive menu and during a family dinner at my brother-in-law's house suddenly thought "Why not?" and invited everyone on the husband's side of the family for Christmas dinner.  My father-in-law didn't come in the end but there were thirteen of us: Mother-in-law, three brothers-in-law, two sisters-in-law, one sister-in-law's Mum, two nieces, plus husband, daughter, son and me.  We couldn't seat everyone in one room so we had one table in the kitchen diner and one in the conservatory. It was also the one day in the year where I used both my ovens.  The smaller one is usually only a glorified baking tray cupboard.

The large number of guests in a relatively small house dictated that we had to do a fair amount of borrowing: some folding tables and chairs from my parents, extra cutlery, salt and pepper grinders, crockery, serving dishes and pans from mother-in-law. We bought lots of new wine glasses when we saw a special offer too as we didn't have enough matching ones.

In the end it was pretty much a complete triumph, the secret being I didn't do it all myself.  I accepted all offers of help, and it paid off.  The only thing that really went wrong was that I was so busy cooking and having such a great time that I forgot to take photos for this blog, so there aren't as many photos as I'd like!  So as the smell of turkey stock wafts through the air, I'll take you through it..

Starting with festive drinks.  While at the Good Food Show, husband and I had discovered The King's Ginger, a gorgeous ginger liqueuer discussed  in my previous post, and mixed with a glass of cava it became a "Ginger Royale" and was beautiful. In fact ginger somehow ended up being a recurring theme throughout the meal so it was just as well everybody liked it.  I also mixed cava with Chambord (a raspberry based liqueuer) and added a frozen raspberry.  The main course was accompanied by red or white wine, there was a dessert wine (2007 Domaine de Grange Neuve Monbazillac) for later on, and port and whiskey with the cheeseboard. We forgot about the chilli vodka in the freezer though, which was probably a good thing.  And a cup of peppermint tea was essential for me to aid digestion!

There were the usual olives, crisps, etc and sister-in-law M (a trained chef and fellow foodie) had made seasonally spiced nuts, sausage & sage plamiers - which were delicious bite sized pastry morsels - also figs and goats cheese wrapped in prosciutto; and smoked salmon triangles.  Everyone enjoyed these while the main event came together.

On counting afterwards the main course had thirteen components!!  The turkey was not an expensive one but simply a supermarket frozen bird, but it was excellent value for money.  It weighed about seven and a half kilos and took a couple of days to defrost in a bucket in a cool garage.  I think it's what you do with a turkey that decides the flavour, rather than it's origins.  Rick Stein once failed in attempt to distinguish between an expensive turkey and a cheap one by taste alone, so I think that says a lot.

I stuffed the neck end of the turkey with a stuffing made with dried cultivated mushrooms soaked in boiling water for twenty minutes (the soaking water being kept to add to the gravy), good quality sausagemeat from sausages we had as part of a half pig purchase earlier in the year, pork mince, torn up sourdough bread, chopped rosemary from the garden, onion and garlic softened in butter, with some grated parmesan and seasoning - all bound together with an egg yolk. I put two halves of an orange in the body cavity together with more rosemary and bay leaves from the garden, rubbed the outside with softened butter and covered the breast with rashers of streaky bacon.  The turkey was roasted in a very deep and thick foil tray (I washed it and recycled it afterwards) on top of a large roasting tray borrowed from Mum.  It only just went in the oven widthwise.  It was roasted for three hours covered with foil, plus another 50 minutes with the foil removed, and then rested for an hour and a quarter while the roast potates were cooked.  Sister-in-law M kindly carved it for me as there was so much going on at the dishing it up stage.  That was the time I had my usual moment of panic and wanted to run away and hide under the duvet, but I did some deep breathing and told myself to get on with it!   Pigs in blankets were brought ready cooked by sister-in-law M's Mum and warmed up in oven number two.

 I didn't get a photo of the intact turkey...

The gravy was the secret of alchemy!  I did partially cheat with two Knorr "gravy pots", some boiling water, the mushroom soaking water which had been left in a jar for a couple of days so that all the gritty bits had setled out, the juices from the turkey tin after the fat had been skimmed off, a splosh of red wine, and some Worcestershire sauce. The resulting mixture was thickened with cornflour in cold water.

The gammon was a biggish unsmoked joint, roasted with a glaze brushed on for the last 45 minutes of the cooking time.  The idea was from a Sainsbury's recipe card from several years ago.  The glaze was a mixture of the grated zest of eight clementines, clementine juice, chopped stem ginger from a jar, some of the ginger syrup and some mustard seeds.  The zested clementines were halved and added to the roasting dish too.  The gammon was sliced and served cold.

The roast potatoes were the husband's domain.  He always maintains his roasties are better than mine and he's right.  He only cuts them up if they are very big, apparently size does matter.  They were parboiled, roughed up  by shaking the pan and roasted for a good hour in goose fat which was heated up for ten minutes first in a hot oven.  As the turkey rested for so long, there was plenty of time to turn up the main oven and cook them. Before roasting he sprinkled them with cornish sea salt and some less coarse salt flavoured with rosemary.  The end result was spectacularly good, very crisp and crunchy and the outside and a beautiful golden colour and fluffy on the inside.  He used two and a half kilos of potatoes and there was only one potato left over.

Vegetables!  All our family LOVE Brussels sprouts, in fact they are my husband's favourite vegetable and I could get my son to eat unfamiliar foods when he was a baby by mixing chopped sprouts in with them.  Christmas dinner just wouldn't be Christmas dinner without sprouts in my opinion.  I blanched the sprouts until just done, then mixed them with roasted carrots, browned butter and toasted halved macadamia nuts.  Red cabbage was provided pre-cooked by sister-in-law M and microwaved to heat it up.

I've found roast parsnips always get burnt somehow, and I wanted to try a new way with them, so I made a puree of softened shallots and parsnips cooked in milk with ground ginger.  This was done in advance and reheated in a pan.  There was also the traditional bread sauce with nutmeg, made by sister-in-law M's Mum and brought in her slow cooker which I plugged in in the conservatory. Sister-in-law M had made proper cranberry sauce too.

Another new accompaniment recipe from delicious magazine was caramelised pears and chestnuts.  Chopped onions were softened and set aside, then peeled quartered pears cooked in butter and sugar until golden and set aside.  Then pre cooked chestnuts were toasted in foaming butter with thyme (from the garden) and salt, and all the ingredients were combined, adding a squeeze of lemon juice, and put in an overproof dish ready to be reheated for twenty minutes in the oven prior to serving.

And that was the main course!  It all came together and nothing got forgotten.  I have memories of Christmas dinners where dishes have been found in the microwave at teatime...  After all that we needed a loooong pause before the large selection of puddings, so we did some present opening and had a poetry competition between courses.  I won! But that's another story.

For afters on Christmas day I think you have to have a Christmas pudding and you have to have a trifle.  Mother-in-law had made a really top notch and not at all heavy Christmas pud, which she had cooked at her house and brought snuggled up in a towel.  It was put to gently re heat in a pan of water between courses, and served with brandy butter made by sister-in-law M's Mum which tasted as if it had an entire barrel of brandy in, it fairly took your breath away but was very good.  There was cream too if you wanted.

I had also designed a Black Forest Trifle, inspired by the classic gateau.  I started with some chocolate cake trimmings I had in the freezer and soaked them in creme de cacao and kirsch from the  jars of cherries in kirsch I had tried so hard to source (as previous posts testify). Then came a layer of cherries in kirsch and blackcurrant jelly. Next a layer of chocolate custard. I was going to cheat and buy it ready made but I could only get normal custard so I melted some dark choloate and mixed it in.  Then came a layer of  halved red grapes. Then whipped cream with creme de cacao in, another layer of cherries in kirsch and topped with more whipped cream, gleaming with edible silver shimmer spray and chocolate stars.

Sister-in-law M had made a very very chocolatey chocolate log, Mother-in-law had made mince pies and a Christmas cake which my son had helped with on Christmas Eve, it was her very thoughtful idea to remove him from the house for the final day of preparations as a six year old helper is not always all that helpful!

I had made coffee cream macaroons which were favourably received as always.  Brother-in-law R and sister-in-law V had brought a luxury cheese hamper with gourmet crackers, grapes, the Wookey Hole cheddar, apparently voted the best cheese in the world, all manner of other lovely cheeses and wild boar pate.  They had also brought a selection of hot chilli sauces (as are enjoyed by many members of our family) and there followed a chilli sauce tasting session.  Others had got to the having-a-nice-cup-of-tea stage.

The whole thing took from about 11am to about 7pm and was so relaxed and happy, even the clearing up was a case of pottering about, running the dishwasher and doing some more when you felt like it.  No one felt dumped on, everyone helped and although looking back it WAS a lot of work, I really, really enjoyed myself.

I couldn't have done it without a great deal of planning and organisation.  I'm a great one for lists and notes, and I had bro-in-law T to help me for two (quite relaxed) days of prep.  We didn't get stressed or feel rushed at all.  On day one, Sunday 23rd, we cooked the gammon, made the stuffing, made the pear and chestnut dish, made the parsnip puree and prepped the sprouts.  And made a sausage casserole for dinner.  On day two, Christmas Eve, we spent the morning making the trifle and the macaroons, and in the afternoon we prepped the carrots, toasted the macadamia nuts, stuffed and baconed the turkey and made a few things for an evening meal - three pizzas, sticky cranberry sausages and stilton puffs.  We also laid the tables, sorted crockery, cutlery, candles, crackers and chairs.  All this preparation enabled Christmas morning to be very chilled.  All there was to do was put the turkey in the oven at the planned time, slice the gammon, peel and parboil the potatoes and wait for the other dishes to arrive...

All that remains for me is to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I feel a post about using up the Christmas leftovers coming on soon...

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)

The Good Food Show Experience.

Last Friday my husband and I went to the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC in Birmingham.  A few of my friends found it hard to believe I hadn't been to a Good Food Show before, and I'm not really sure why I hadn't, it was just one of those things I hadn't got round to doing - and hubby had got tickets as part of my birthday present, so I had been looking forward to it for a while.

We got there about half an hour after opening time and it was already fairly busy.  We seemed to have arrived at the alcolic beverages end, and apart from a venison hotdog for a second breakfast, the first half an hour was spent sampling a wide variety of drinks, including elderflower liqueur, Belgian fruit beer, premium gin, blackcurrant liqueur and best of all, ginger liqueur.  Even the cheese had whisky in!  The ginger liqueur actually turned out to be the best thing I tasted all day, and I bought a big bottle.  It was called the King's Ginger, and was created in the early 1900s for 
King Edward VII. The Royal Physician was concerned about the monarch's health, exposed as he was to the elements indulging in one of his preferred pursuits, driving his 'horseless carriage'.  In 1903 he commissioned the formulation of a liqueur which would warm and revivify His Majesty; the result, a rich, golden nectar with a pronounced spicy ginger emphasis and delightfully crisp flavour. It came with assorted cocktail and "winter cup" recipes but was gorgeous on its own, and will be drunk with cheese after Christmas dinner..

Speaking of cheese, the show was host to the 2012 World Cheese Awards.  A large area was devoted to a display of hundreds of cheeses, but sadly, even though only a tiny bit of each had been eaten, they were labelled as "no longer fit for consumption".  What a waste!  I was very unimpressed.

 
In addition to all the stands, there were quite a few "theatre" kitchens, sponsored by various programmes or manufacturers: the Masterchef Experience (with adjoining Masterchef restaurant where you could go for lunch); The Great British Bake Off Stage, where we saw John Whaite, GBBO Winner 2012 doing his stuff and explaining why it is a good idea not to put your fingers into a blender; Saturday Kitchen Live; The Magimix Theatre; the M&S Christmas theatre and the Food for Thought theatre.  My favourite of these was the Masterchef Experience, where we saw the wonderful Monica Galetti making chicken livers with onion puree and winding up Andi Peters.  She was very funny, with a wicked smile to match her wicked sense of humour; and not at all as fearsome as she seems on the television. 

We had booked tickets to the Masterchef Cook Off in the Supertheatre, which was in a separate screened off area and much larger than the other demo kitchens, with space for an audience of 2,500!  After the warm up man, Gregg Wallace and John Torode came on and introduced the Masterchef and Celebrity Masterchef winners of 2012 - Shelina Permalloo and Emma Kennedy, who had 20 minutes to cook a dish for John and Gregg to taste.  The presenters and contestants all held their own, it was as good as, if not better than watching the programme, partly because you could actually smell the cooking!  They both cooked fish, Shelina winning with red mullet and courgette flowers stuffed with crabmeat.

After the cook off we continued looking at the stands, although it was sometimes hard to keep track of where you were and what you had seen before because some companies had several stands in different places and there were often different companies selling similar products, for instance I lost track of the number of different toffee flavoured vodkas.  The husband was also keen to try all the different types of chilli sauces, but the choice was so bewilderingly large that after a while he  just couldn't face any more! We weren't really hungry for lunch, so we just shared a wild boar, prune and armagnac sausage roll.

I didn't think that every stall fitted with the "Good Food" ethos - for every artisan sausage there was a curry sauce in a jar stall - but we did come away with a good range of delicious items.  As well as the ginger liqueur, we bought the cheese with whisky; peach and rosemary chutney; lamb carpaccio; Chinese jasmine tea; strawberry bellini;  and a new whisk.  I had hoped there might be a special offer on Kitchen Aid mixers, but there wasn't, probably because the show was heavily sponsored by Magimix. I got some Christmas gifts too.  The show guide was free and had loads of good ideas and interesting recipes in, including Shelina's, so I may have to try that soon.

There also happened to be a stand with an enormous display of black cherries in kirsh!

In other news, this week's new recipe was creamy lobster soup for the husband's birthday dinner, using the shell from the last lobster and another one to further flavour some fish stock, herbs, carrot, onion and a roux based milky sauce; with the lobster meat stirred in at the last moment.  A resounding success.  We followed it with steak and chips, berry panna cotta and cheese & biscuits.  I bought the panna cotta ready made as I spent so long cooking the soup that there wasn't time to make a pud.  Just wanted you to know that I am normal and I do cut corners now and again... I have also bought a frozen turkey for Christmas, but I think with Christmas turkeys it's what you do with them that can make all the difference.

This week I will be entering a Bake Off competion in the hospital where I work, but first I'm off with the hubby in search of a Kitchen Aid artisan stand mixer in oyx black for MY Christmas present.

Thanks for reading, come back soon and find out how the Bake Off goes, will I finally win something?

Caroline x