As Strong As Soup

These biscuits are my modest (token, you might say) contribution to Christmas food this year. It may be a modest effort but it's a wonderfully simple recipe to put together and that's got to be a good thing. They're really pleasing with coffee and they're not just for Christmas. Confusingly, this montecaos recipe is based on a French interpretation of an Algerian original that I came across a few years ago and they're sort of remote cousins of the mantecados that are made around Christmas time in Spain. The traditional Spanish mantecado recipe uses pig fat (manteca de cerdo means pork fat or lard, or so I'm told) but North African biscuits, not surprisingly, replace the pig fat with oil. It's best to use a fairly neutral oil in this recipe to avoid more powerful oils dominating the taste. Cinnamon is often used as the primary flavouring but there are many variations such as orange, almond or coconut. I've used lemon because I love it and it makes me thin...

The Dark ‘n’ Stormy cocktail is a combination of dark rum, ginger beer and (usually) lime juice. (I've added a few notes on the cocktail if you're interested at the end of this post). They're great flavours in a drink but recently I decided it was time to eat them. So here's a simple way to get those flavours into chicken.  I've used a little Henderson's Relish in this recipe and I've become a bit of a fan of the Sheffield elixir, lately. (I would call it Hendo's, but I think that's illegal unless you were born in Sheffield). There would be outrage in Sheffield at my suggestion that Worcestershire sauce is an alternative but, if that's what you have, then use it. This method of cooking chicken is based on the way the estimable Rosamund Grant used to cook chicken half a lifetime ago (or thereabouts). While my enthusiasm for Henderson's Relish owes a great deal to the way Tom Wrigglesworth has expounded its virtues. This should serve 2.  8 ch...

Rhubarb is a wonderful thing in desserts, cakes and a number of savoury dishes and there's some excellent forced rhubarb around at the moment. But what happens when you have rhubarb but you just can't face eating yet another rhubarb crumble? Well, I make rhubarb vodka. It's an extremely pleasing drink when chilled and sipped on its own but it's even nicer in a cocktail. The good news is that it's easy to make at home. At least, it is if you make it this way. There are more complex recipes, but I'm happy to keep it simple.  Start by finding some good rhubarb and then this is all you need to do: For a 700 ml bottle of decent, neutral vodka, you'll need around 400 g of prepared rhubarb: just chop the cleaned stalks into small pieces and add them to a sterilised jar with a tight seal. Pour over the vodka. At this point, you need to decide how sweet the resulting drink should be. For average, freshly-picked rhubarb I'd recommend 4 - 6 tablespoons of caster su...

So you've bought a bottle of Passoã to make some porn star martinis at home (it's the most popular cocktail in the UK, apparently) but now what do you do with the rest of the bottle? Well you could make a variation on the classic rum baba. At least, that's what I did. The classic baba is made with an enriched yeast dough soaked in a rum syrup and for many years I thought that everyone made them that way. Eventually a kindly French person took me aside and let me into a secret: a lot of babas are made using baking powder. It's a very quick and easy way to produce babas and I enjoy them just as much as the traditional version.  I used canelé moulds to make the babas simply because I like the shape but small savarin moulds are more usual. I put enough mixture into the mould to make sure that it bulges from the top when cooked. You could be a little more restrained if you like.  If you want to make something closer to a classic baba using this recipe, then omit the vanilla,...

For some reason hybrid berries such as tayberries, loganberries and boysenberries don't seem to be too popular amongst gardeners in this country. I bought a single boysenberry plant about 7 years ago and I get a heavy crop of berries every year in return for very little effort. And when I see a decent crop of berries then I usually think liqueur.  Every autumn I make a bottle or so of foraged blackberry liqueur (crème de mûre) and I've used that same process to make a crème de mûre de boysen. I know that you can simply steep fruit in vodka and sugar and that can be very pleasing but when liqueurs made that way are added to kirs and cocktails they just don't taste right to me. I suppose that's what happens after many years of drinking French crème de mûre and crème de cassis. So I stick to this traditional French method. You don't have to use boysenberries, it will work with other similar berries such as cultivated blackberries or tayberries. This liqueur is very we...

Let's not dwell on the dispiriting aspects of 2016. Here are a few food and drink snippets worth celebrating from 2016 and worth looking forward to in 2017 - well, for me anyway. Given the events of the last year I suppose it's not surprising that a number of them are alcoholic. But first, let me offer a sincere apology. At the start of last year I confessed that I was running out of recipes and that 2016 could well be the last year of this blog. The bad news is that not only have I been hopeless at getting around to adding the remaining recipes to the blog, I've also found a few more in a ditch somewhere with the result that I might well have another year to go. Sorry about that. I did make an effort to be a bit less hopeless and more like a proper blogger early in 2016. I was persuaded that I should start a Facebook page for the blog. It seemed to use up time that I couldn't really spare but I gave it a go until a very successful blogger told me that Facebook woul...