First of all, you need to melt golden syrup and butter in a big heavy pan. You can practicially feel your heart groan at the sight of this deliciousness.

Add milk powder and cocca powder and give it a good stir to get rid of any lumps.

Then add your cornflakes. The sauce goes a long, long way and you need more flakes than you think you do. It’s quite an effort to give everything a big stir after a while, but persevere. You want every flake to be covered in gooey gorgeousness. After that, add everything to a tin and let it set. Alternatively, add the mixture to some cupcake cases for perfect party food.

Easy as pie and goes very nicely with a cup of tea.

You Need:

6oz Cornflakes (although it’s probably more. When you’re adding it to the mixture, add it bit by bit and see how you go)

1oz Cocoa powder

8oz Golden syrup

3½oz Butter

6oz milk powder

Clever designers SUCK UK have come up with the most useful item for cooks. This apron as all the conversion charts, roasting and boiling times you could ever need while in the kitchen. As someone who uses a lot of American recipies, I always have to fire up the laptop to see how much a stick of butter weights or what 450°F is in Celsius and now I can keep keep my dresses and laptop completely food free. Hurrah. You can buy it here.

Innocent smoothies have a lovely little promotion going on at the moment. Buy a bottle of their limited edition lemons, honey and ginger flavour drink (and it’s tasty too) and not only do you make a donation to the National Trust and The Federation of Irish Beekeepers to install more beehives, but you get a little packet of seeds to grow. What I can’t find out is what seeds are provided. I guess I’ll just have to plant them and work it out for myself.

Next month, jellymongers and lovely foodie people Bompas and Parr open up a house in Belgrave Square and take people through a history of food. It sounds like a real adventure and if it’s anything like the walk-through gin and tonic B&P did last summer it’ll be a hoot. From their website:

Courvoisier and Bompas & Parr present the Complete History of Food – an exciting walk-through dining experience and multi-course meal charting key revolutionary periods in food history. Travel through time eating and drinking food from London’s top restaurants. The deeper you go in the building the further back in time you go.

It’s a bit like Heston’s Feast but on a grander scale and open to everyone. Food eras covered include Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and the contemporary scene with a number of global firsts thrown into the mix. Think flooded dining rooms, giant sugar sculptures, Iguanodon dinners and food that responds to your brain waves.

A meal and four cocktails are included in the ticket price. Bounty!

Tickets are selling out quickly and I have mine booked already. I am so very excited about this. Expect lots of photos once I’ve been.

We opted for the 3 course lunch menu, which at £25 was amazingly good value for money, especially as we were given lots of little extras. This is the first of the three amuse-bouches we received. It’s Crostini de romesco and gordal olives, almonds and Jerez (all the dish names come from Tour de Table – I was a bit too squiffy at the end to remember to ask for a course sheet). It was beautiful and delicate and a perfect start to the meal.

Our second amuse-bouche was this little glass of soy milk and smoky aubergine:

Our excellent refined foodie pallets likened this to that of the jelly from a pork pie. Tastier that it sounds.

This is the bread and butter. It was beautiful. The bread was light and fluffy and the butter was out of this world. It had purple powder on it. Awesome.

I didn’t take pictures of everything, I was too busy eating the stuff, but here are a couple of other courses:

Textures of beetroot and crab, green apple and whipped goats curd. The beetroot jelly was particularly good.

Lemon Sole, brioche, yeast and cauliflower.What was lovely about this dish is that the sous chef (I think) came out and poured on the sauce onto our plates.

Pudding was lovely. We mentioned to the waiters that this was my birthday lunch and so I was given this:

Which quite frankly was the cherry on the top of a very large and beautiful cake.

Everyone in Viajante were lovely and helpful and so, so friendly – as we were leaving head chef Nuno Mendes came out of the kitchen, bid us all goodbye, shook my hand and wished me a happy birthday (which was the cherry on top of the cherry on top of the cake). The food was excellent and we cannot wait to go back in an evening and try the 12 course meal.

]]> http://worldofmildew.com/2010/06/viajante/feed/ 0 http://worldofmildew.com/2010/04/quick-supper-mushrooms-and-leek-soup/ http://worldofmildew.com/2010/04/quick-supper-mushrooms-and-leek-soup/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:36:13 +0000 Mildew http://worldofmildew.com/?p=321 Sometimes when you get home from work, you don’t want to cook yourself a dinner. You just want a light, quick and healthy supper that will only take five minutes to cook so you can sit down and watch the final of MasterChef Australia. It’s not really a soup, but the vegetables aren’t allowed to cook too much, so the liquid has yet to reduce. If you want some carbs added to this, have a couple of thick slices of white crusty bread on the side to mop up any juices. Add very little salt as there’s already plenty of it in the cheese, but do add lots of freshly ground black pepper at the end. Yum.

Leek and Mushroom ‘Soup’. Serves one.

You need:

Half a red onion, chopped

One leek, chopped

2 cloves garlic

2 sprigs of thyme

10g butter

half punnet of button mushrooms

30g dolcelette cheese

Melt the butter into a heavy set pan and when hot add the garlic, onion, leek and thyme. Sweat off for a couple of minutes until soft and then add the mushrooms. Pop a lid on the pan so that the juices don’t evaporate. After four minutes, take the lid off and add the cheese and stir.  Take out the tough thyme stalks and serve straight away.

As we’re slowly packing and getting ready for our move*, I’ve not been quite able to cook as complicated things as I’d like, so I’m having to read cookery books and dream of all the dinner parties we’re going to have in the new house. The book I’m currently browsing through is Ginette Mathiot’s I Know How To Cook, the French cooking bible that’s been around since the 30s. It’s only just had it’s first translation into English and it’s been updated by one of my most favourite food bloggers, Chocolate & Zucchini‘s Clotilde Dusoulier.  There are recipes of every kind, every occasion and everyone. As soon as you feel it in your hands you know it’s going to be living in the kitchen for as long as you cook. Well worth a purchase.

*Have I mentioned me and Dave are buying a house? We’re buying a house! No more living above a flat for us. We’ve got a garden and everything! It’s all rather exciting, or at least it would be if the solicitors would stop arsing around.

The great thing about cranberry sauce is that it’s super easy to make and takes no more than twenty minutes of your time. As it keeps for a good while it can be prepared days in advance of Christmas day and kept in the fridge until needed. I’ve got a batch I made in late November and it’s still going strong.  This is the recipe my mother gave me and the taste is, you’ll have to forgive me for the cliché here, so much better than the shop bought stuff. It’s not too sweet with the flavour of the port and oranges coming through with every bite.

Ingredients

1 orange
175g/6oz caster sugar
5 tbsp port
359g/12oz cranberries, fresh or frozen
1 eating apple, finely chopped

Method

1. Finely grate the zest from the orange and squeeze the juice. Dissolve the sugar in a medium pan with 4 tbsp port and the orange juice.
2. Stir in the cranberries, apple and orange rind. Cook uncovered for 8-10 minutes (slightly longer if the cranberries are frozen) until the fruit is soft and the juices are slightly thickened.
3. Stir in the remaining 1 tbsp port. Serve warm or cold.

I shall be there selling cakes along with a couple of friends where we are collectivity called the Pop Tarts (although I’m currently campaigning for a name change to The Arse Biscuits). We’ve been doing pretty well these past couple of weeks and I have to say that the quality of our food is most excellent. We are awesome. I’ve been providing a number of cakes, two of which are shown below. Red velvet with a green butter-cream icing and a mini Christmas cake.

They’re quite tasty! I’ll also try and post Vinnie’s amazing chili and chocolate brownie and Sarah’s lavender and lemon cake recipes if and when I get them too.

Shoulder of lamb takes a while for it to cook. This shoulder was fairly small so only took two and a half hours, but it’s best to keep an eye over it and see how it’s doing. You know it’s done when the meat falls of the bone like this:

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, start of with some nice herbs, a handful of rosemary (with the leaves taken off the stem and chopped), chopped thyme, sage, some dried oregano and the contents of about four camnomille tea bags.

Together with some salt and pepper, rub the mixture all over the lamb along with a drizzel of olive oil and honey. Pop the joint in a heavy casserole dish (Mum and Dad gave me a lovely, lovely Le Creuset dish for Christmas which is perfect for this kind of meal) and add about 200ml of water to keep the whole thing moist.

Put into an oven at about 175º and like I said before, keep an eye on it for the next couple of hours and add a little water if it get too dry. Also, I’d give it a little baste once in a while too; I didn’t and it took two days of soaking and scrubbing to get my dish clean. Take heed!

We ate the lamb with some potato and Jerusalam artichoke mash and it was lovely, the perfect meal for a cold, dark January evening.