jackal10

Not much and a lot. Not much in that they are all milk or cream thickened, custard like, and usually with some vanilla. A lot in that they can differ in texture from pouring to solid, and in thickening agent. Stuff under the caremel for creme brulee: Usally a rich baked egg custard (eggs, cream sugar, baked in a ramekin in a bain marie), but can be anything from plain whipped cream (cream Chantilly) to fruit fool (fruit puree + sugar+ cream or custard - setting agent is the pectin in the fruit). Incidently it is claimed the dish was invented in the kitchens of Trinty College Cambridge "Trinity Burnt Cream", but probably derives form an older Scotish recipe. Creme Anglais: Classically milk thickened with egg yolk cooked over gentle heat. Pouring consistency Custard: Thickened with starch custard powder or cornflour. Invented by Mr Bird as his wife was allegedly allergic to eggs. Pouring, but some like it thicker, as blancmange Instant Whip etc: Same principles, but the product of a chemical factory. May use other setting agents, like carrageen. Zabaglione etc: Thickened with egg yolk, flavoured with Marsala, and whipped while cooking Syllabub: Cream, wine, lemon. The acid in the lemon sets the whipped cream.

Cinnamon Balls 200 g ground almonds 200 g caster sugar 2 egg whites 1 T ground cinnamon Mix together. Form into small balls with wet hands Put on silpat/silicon baking paper 30 mins low oven 300F Cool, roll in icing sugar (confectioners sugar) Keywords: Easy, Cookie, Passover ( RG356 )

Slice the potato thinly on the mandoline. Boil in the milk, with seasonings, bay leaf, garlic until the potato is almost cooked. Add Morels Pour into shallow dish, nuke under hot grill or in extremis blowtorch.

hmm... Bone and stuff the chicken leg with some of the morels, pancetta, bread, herbs; roast off; deglaze pan; edit: Adam got there first. Potato: Dauphinoise with garlic, and the rest of the morels Salad from the fresh herbs Tomato: Iced soup, with mint foam and garlic croutons (the weather is warm today) Are the morels fresh or dried? If dried use with the soaking water as a base for a sauce. A morel souffle might be an alternative

Gratins, like cauliflower cheese, Kedgeree Eggy sandwiches, with the egg mashed with mayo and flavourings Tea marbled eggs (crack all over, boil with soy, tea etc)

I guess they are looked down on as they de-skill food service. Its too easy to take a cold or even frozen pre-prepared or bought in dish, and just re-heat. The slight loss of freshness (and the too high internal temperature) won't be noticed by most diners, alas. Not that chefs don't reheat using conventional means (dump the par-cooked veg into a chinois in boiling water, for example) in the throws of service, but many have the expectation that at high level each dish is freshly prepared for them, in house. Properly used they are a great tool. I must admit to using a microwave to reheat food at home quite often, and especially to take the chill off, for example cheese or slices of rare roast beef for a sandwich. Taken out of the fridge 20 secs in the microwave makes all the difference. There are a few things that can be done much more easily, or only in a microwave. Steamed puds, for example, or ice cream with a boiling jam centre

Hot or cold? here is a basic recipe for a cold terrine: Illustrated Foie Gras recipe Main thing to remember is that Foie Gras is really just structured fat, with a low melting point. Get it much hotter than 50C and you destroy the texture. There is almost no need to cook at all - you can just clean it, brown the surface (30 secs in a hot pan) then put it in a terrine and weight it. If you want to embed truffles use the cheapest - they are mostly just decoration. Add the flavour from oil. Make a sauterne gelly seperately. Foam if you must.

Busy days in the garden The daffodils are coming to an end, but being replaced by tulips and the plum and pear blossom. Planted potatoes: Arran Pilot (old fashioned first early, does well here) Pink Fir Apple Salad Blue and Salad Red (coloured all the way through - can make blue mash or red white and blue potato salad). Planted tomatos in the greenhouse, and sowed more lettuce. Tomatos: Sungold/(Golden Cherry) (small yellow). The sweetest tomato I know. Consistently wins the local taste tests Gardeners Delight (small red) (wins the taste tests when Sungold doesn't) Fireworks II (determinate, large red well spoken of but not tried, but I liked the name) Last year I grew Brigade (advertised as the "Chef's Tomato"); good solid paste tomato but disappointing raw. Great dried and mi-cuit. Maybe one needs different tomatos for different purposes. Lettuce: Little Gem, Lollo rosso, Buttercrunch. These are fairly arbitary choices. Which are your favourite potatos, tomatos and lettuce, and why???

1/2 hour in the wood fired bread oven after the bread is out EVOO sea salt, coddled egg.

But did you strain it through a fucking chinois to get the solid bits of shallot out?

I think we should boycott the wine of the power crazed war mongerng Americans.

Can we get back to food? You'd do better with the Newburg sauce I posted above. Not as rich (1/3rd pt cream rather than 2 cups), and more attuned to the lobster. Less burnt garlic, and less likely to split (no vinegar). You can still strain the fucking solids with a chinois, and there are a lot more of them with all that lobster shell. You could even rub it though a tammy. Makes a great base for a souffle as well. I guess you could do a a modern cream and vanilla sauce for the lobster - its called custard...

Classically, Cream Sauce is 1 pt thick bechamel with 1/2 pt cream and some lemon juice, but then you knew that. For a flourless sauce, you could consider Newburg Sauce, which will highlight the lobster: I think the taste of the burnt brandy goes well. Saute the shells and bits of lobster left over in butter, flame with with 2 Tbs brandy and good glass of sherry. Reduce by 2/3rds. Add 1/3 pt cream and 1/3rd pt fish stock and a faggot of herbs. reduce to texture; strain, check seasoning, finish with butter.

Ivy leaf Damask, starched white, neatly folded (but not pleated) on the service plate. In these days with fewer staff, placing it on the left side is permitted, where the cold first course is already on the plate. For home use or for regular diners in a proper silver napkin ring. Decently large, not one of those handkerchief sized apologies.

Hope springs enternal. Planted more Raspberry canes (Autimn Gold and Autumn Bliss) in the new fruit cage. Also purple (Jaquama) and white (Gijnlim - RHS award of Merit) Asparagus crowns

There is the old chestnut about the Kosher resturant with the chinese waiter who speaks perfect Yiddish - including the repartee for which such waiters in Jewish establishments are famous. Shlomo says to the owner "Moshe, where did you get such a marvel? A chinese immigrant who speaks such good Yiddish?" "hush - he thinks I'm teaching him English!" Repartee examples include: "Waiter bring me Chicken soup with Kneidlach, and a kind word or a stranger" "Here is the soup" "And the kind word?" "Don't eat the Kneidlach"

I have much too much storage space, or more exactly I have much too much stored. Why? Almost all of it is easily re-supplied from the 24hour open supermarket 15 minutes drive away. The saving in buying in bulk is trivial - maybe 10%, and there are only two of us, not a complete tribe or restaurant. Half the time I can't find it, even if I know its there, so I buy fresh anyway. Do I really need 7 types of flour (soft white (cake) , strong white bread, granary, spelt, buckwheat, self-raising, rye) and 13 types of dried fruit going stale (small raisins, big raisins, currents, sultantas, apricots, peel, dyed and undyed glace cherries, candied angelica, dried cranberries, dried cherries, dried blueberries), just in case I have a midnight craving? The situation for spices is even worse. Most are long past there best and should be thrown out, but I haven't the heart, since each is so evocative, and I just might need them...Then there are all the flavoured oils, and vinegars and the other oddities like Australian bush foods or home made chutneys that well meaning friends have brought from afar. As for the jam cupboard - I make it religously each year when there is a glut of fruit from the garden, only to find that we haven't touched last years, or the one before that - we don't eat much jam. Hoarding must be psychological in nature. Its certainly not justifiable on logical grounds.

How thin you roll them depends on whether you like your bun mostly bready, or the dough just a partition between the sugar/cinnamon goo. Don't forget it will double in thickness as it proves and bakes, so if it starts out 1/4 inch it will end up 1/2 inch. Most people have trouble rolling dough this thin, so my advise is still roll it as thin as you can.

Don't know about cinnamon buns, but these are the finest Chelsea buns in the world Fitzbillies Chelsea buns My guess is that you are cooking too long/not hot enough. Make sure the oven is properly pre-heated - turn it on an hour before you want to cook. A pizza stone, or quarry tiles lining the shelf help as well. Most of all use an oven thermometer. Oven themostats are notoriously unreliable. Aim for 220C 440F. and only cook for 18 mins. Also the dough needs to be rolled very thinly, and not over-proofed. Cut both first and second proof times in half - say 1/2 hour each if you are using dried yeast and the proving in a warm place.

From Schlesinger Library . Cambridge, Mass.--The Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is acquiring the Elizabeth David papers. The foremost British food writer of her day and author of nine definitive books, David (1913-1992) famously helped reawaken the postwar British palate while educating, through authentic recipes and compelling investigation, a generation of cooks about food and its joys. The collection of David's correspondence, diaries, travel journals, handwritten recipe files and photographs--which is coming from Jill Norman, the literary trustee of the David estate and David's publisher, editor and close personal friend--is expected to be available later in the year. The Schlesinger Library is renowned worldwide for its holdings of published sources that document the range of issues, organizations and activities--from social reform movements through culinary history--in which women have been central. The Elizabeth David papers will add to the library's unparalleled culinary collections, which currently include the Julia Child papers, the MFK Fisher papers and over 16,000 cookbooks.

Th is might be a new topic, but my impression is that there is a wide divergence of ways restaurants handle the "tronc" (service charge/tips) from the other side of the till. Traditionally they went into an account controlled by the maitre'd, from which the staff were allocated shares by senority, but I guess this is rare now.There are also discrepencies whether the kitchen or just the wait staff join in the share. The greedier restauranters pocket the service charge leaving the staff no option but to collect tips as well. If you want to reward good service it is worth enquiring of your wait person what system is used, and if need be crossing out the service charge and leaving a cash tip instead. Some interpret the service charge as a charge for linen, bread and other overheads, rather than as an optional reward for service. If so this should be made clear. What tax is paid, by whom, and how it is assessed for staff by the revenue are also hot topics. .

This is known as Potage Dubarry in classical cuisine. Escoffier's recipe [my additions in square brackets]: Parboil 1lb of califlower divided into bunches Drain them and put them in a saucepan with 1pt boiled milk and 2 medium size potatoes for the thickening. Set to cook gently, and [when soft] rub though a tammy [puree and sieve]. Finish with boiled milk, despumate [skim] [season] and add butter. Garnish with bread dice fried in butter The soup may also be prepared as a veloute [cooked with stock, finished with a liason of egg yolks and cream. Proportions for 2pts soup are 1 pt stock, 1/2pt vegetable puree, 3 eggs and 1/4pt cream, 2oz butter], or as a cream [1lb puree; 1 1/4 pts bechamel, thin with chicken stock to consistency desired, finish with cream] Personally I like Escoffier's original for its simplicity. Roasted cauliflower soup, IMHO, is something different, in both taste, texture and colour. Browning the cauliflower by roasting or frying first means that the caramelised caullifower taste is more dominant, the cauliflower has less water in it and is tougher to puree. It is better suited for "brown" soups - beef rather than chicken stock, brown roux or espagnole rather than bechamel. An onion based recipe works well, starting with roast cauliflower, and using beef stock to dilute to puree rather than milk. 1 lb onions peeled and chopped 1/4 lb butter 1 lb cauliflower florets Sweat the onions in the butter without colouring. Put the cauliflower on top. Add 1 large glass sherry [and some soy]. Cover with greasproof paper and a lid. Sweat slowly for an hour. Puree. Dilute with water or beef stock to consistency. Season generously Swirl with cream. Croutons, chopped chives.

Confit. Rub the thighs with salt, thyme, pepper, garlic, spices. Leave for half an hour (or as long as you like) in the fridge. Wash off the salt etc Immerse in fat of choice (preferably duck or goose, but you can use butter or even oil) and cook slowly for a long time 140F 2 hours. Drain. Lots of ways to serve: - with a warm salad - bacon bits, garlic croutons, eggs - with saute potatos, or just mashed - with a bean puree - on lentils - shredded , wrapped in lettuce leaf or pancake, chinese duck style etc etc

I'd second the Ram Jam Inn suggestion, unless you want to divert for lunch at Hambelton Hall itself.

I was involved with a restaurant where the food was great, but the presentation plain. We sold it and the sucessors served average food but great presentation - two colour sauces squiggled together on the plate, caramel hats, synchronised cloche lifting, the lot. Attendance (and revenue) doubled. Talking to the chef he pointed out that most people did not have trained palates, but wanted food which they could not prepare easily at home.. Thus they select visually. Squiggling two sauces on a plate is easy for a restaurant (thanks to squeeze bottles) but a fuss for home cooking