Winter Review

So what can I say? We're at the end of our 'challenge'.  It's been fun, really fun! But I have to say that towards the end we were flagging.  It almost doesn't feel like a year since we began, but we have been married for 14 months now (er...where did that time go?!) so we're a lot wiser in many ways, but especially in the cooking department. 

As you will see from our last post, we sadly didn't make a few recipes.  This was due to various reasons - the most predictable being time constraints.  The beginning of this year just seemed to flash by, and we we had so much going on it was difficult for us to be in two nights of the week to cook together.  Another one we hadn't really predicted before we started the challenge was the flavours.  When we were in, we fancied something easy/comfortable - something that was a comfort food, rather than an experiment that might not work.  This was definitely the case more and more as the challenge went on.  I found this particularly difficult in the last season as there was a lot of meat! I do like meat, but we try to eat vegetarian and fish meals throughout the week too, and it's difficult to cope with two heavy meat dishes several nights in a row!  Lastly it was a conscious decision not to pressure ourselves to 'cook the book', as it was becoming a chore.  We think eating, (and therefore cooking), should not be a chore - it should be fun!

We did predictably have some difficulty sourcing ingredients too - we missed the boat on the sloes and then never got round to doing anything about it at any later stage for example.

A few triumphs were had through the winter though - 
Gluten Free Puff Pastry - a first for me and beginner's luck was definitely mine! I enjoyed it so much, I made it again the next week instead of the filo pastry for the strudel. We were never going to source Gluten Free Filo (can you imagine?!) so why not use something we had already tried?
Hot Spiced Cranberry Punch was the flavour of our new year - and very nice it was too.
We never, ever, need to buy mango chutney again.  We can make our own.  In fact, we're planning Christmas presents already!
Oxtail is super lovely - something neither of us had ever eaten before, but it is such a good cheap cut, we vowed to use it again. 

Andrew's top 5:

Vegetable Stock
Vegetable Soup with Cheesy Herb Toasts
Braised Oxtail with Beer & Red Wine
Mango Coriander & Apple Chutney
Breaded Turkey with Spinach, Walnuts & Honeyed Parsnips
Four Minute Figgy Pudding (sneaky extra!)

Rachel's Top 5:
Mango Coriander & Apple Chutney
Hot Spiced Cranberry Punch
Vegetable Soup with Cheesy Herb Toasts
Braised Oxtail with Beer & Red Wine
Christmas Pudding Ice Cream with Satsumas & Caramel Sauce

There are definitely recipes we'd do again. And there are definitely recipes we wouldn't do again...but that was the idea. We tried pretty much everything and even though we didn't do a few recipes, I don't think we can put this down as a failure.  We set out what we wanted to do and did pretty well I think, in the grand scheme of things.

I thought it a funny coincidence that James Martin had his last show on Saturday Kitchen, pretty much as we finished.  

One piece of advice, if you're going to cook a book - take your time choosing the book! We thought we had lots of variety, but because we wanted to cook by 'season' this meant we ended up feeling there were a lot of 'similar but different' flavours. There was a fair amount of unusual ingredients too, which were difficult to source, and sometimes - downright horrible!

It's been a fun year, cooking a book, so if we have inspired you - good luck! Otherwise, enjoy your culinary creations.


  

Autumn Review

Cooking a book means that we sometimes don't realise where the time has gone, and here we are again - doing our Autumn review a bit later than we should be. 

To tell the truth we actually haven't finished the Autumn recipes either...we were late last time and were hoping to catch up with ourselves.  Instead we have increased the number of recipes which have not yet been completed to two! These will follow in due course.  We're definitely not intending to make shortcuts but we are clearly behind...

To start off with the good stuff - our Top 5 recipes

Andrew's Favourites:

Baked Custard Tart with Mulled Spiced Plums
Rib-eye Steak with Stick Fries & Chateaubriand Sauce
Pot Roasted Chicken with Pumpkin, Sage & Star Anise
Cromer Crab Toastie
Potato, Celeriac & Parsnip Rosti (minus the grouse)

Rachel's Favourites:

Hazelnut-Coated Goat's Cheese with Lemon & Beetroot Salad
Salmon & Pumpkin Risotto
Rib-eye Steak with Stick Fries & Chateaubriand Sauce
Swiss Style Meringues with Coffee Cream
Pistachio Coffee Cake

Few sneaky things this season - I have to confess that we did not cook a grouse.  I know we should have but I went into one of the best butchers in London (we think so and so do a lot of food critics) and they had run out...so I got a chicken instead. Hence why Andrew couldn't really say he liked the Grouse.  To be honest, I was getting a little fed up with Game anyway.  I am more than happy to try new things, but there was quite a lot of meat this season and it was all a bit heavy to be honest.  We are yet to try mackerel with creamed horseradish and sloe jam.  We have missed the Sloe season so will be buying frozen ones soon so we can make a batch.

Calf's liver was more edible than the chicken liver, but again, doesn't leave me wanting more! The cider battered onion rings as an accompaniment were good though. 

There are definitely a few meals we will take away from this season - cromer crab, salmon and pumpkin risotto, and chateaubriand sauce with steak.  I personally loved the amount of beetroot and pumpkin.  I have never really eaten pumpkin before, but now I know I really enjoy it and will be trying some next year. 

Gluten free substitutes - again no problems.  I was worried about the welsh cakes, but they tasted just fine, even if they didn't rise quite as much as I was hoping. If you are reading this and are worried about cooking gluten free - I hope this proves that it isn't a scary thing. Most of the time we just replace the gluten items with a gluten free substitute and it works just fine.  You just need to have lower expectations - it's not going to be quite the same as a gluten equivalent but still tastes great!

You will see that we have already started eating winter recipes, so we're on track for this season.  Roll on March 22nd when we will have hopefully finished all of the recipes in the book!

Ps - we used our redcurrant jelly on Christmas day, instead of cranberry sauce - it was lovely!

Spring Review

So, we've just made our 'Spring' deadline - we completed the last of the spring recipes on the longest day of the year (21st June) and whilst this can sometimes be classed as Summer we have stuck to our guns on the deadlines; we'll call the changeover the 22nd of each 3 months!

So it's been quite an exciting time in our kitchen. I definitely started off very excited and looking forward to all of the recipes we were about to cook. My positive attitude did sometimes wane, as the least appealing dishes loomed ever closer! Also, as we've been nearing the end of the season I have been browsing the next section of recipes for Summer.  These look incredibly appealing and as such, I almost lost interest in the last few recipes we had to cook.

There have however, been some absolute revelations along the way.  Some things that we have worried about and then thoroughly enjoyed, some things we were eager to try but didn't taste that good and even some difficulty sourcing ingredients.

Here is a rundown of the ups and downs...

Tricky Bits:

James Martin uses Bibb Lettuce and Frisee lettuce - I had never heard of Bibb, and I could only find Frisee in mixed bags.  I searched and searched and unfortunately, ended up getting what I felt was the closest!  

Going to the Supermarket for Mackerel, I was told that it was not in season. I asked what the season was and was told it was all year apart from the months I needed it! We had to buy fillets rather than whole mackerel in the end which did act as a suitable substitute but I was a bit confused as the whole point of us cooking this book was to be in line with the seasons! (It does raise questions as to why the shops had fillets and not whole fish though...)

Elderflowers are renowned for having a short season - we managed to source some and do all of the elderflower recipes in one sweep - you'll notice that all of those recipes feature in my top 5!

Timings were (as is often the case) a little shy of what our kitchen can do! I expect all chefs have the best gas hobs and top range ovens that can cook things very quickly but alas we do not! We did get caught out with this a few times - for example the rolled rack of lamb for the lamb, mint & little gem salad.  It was very nice, but extremely rare!

There were some general store cupboard malfunctions (or memory malfunctions?) a few times - for example, in one recipe we substituted hazlenuts for almonds as we had run out of stock of hazlenuts! I suppose this is bound to happen, but I thought I should mention it just in case anyone can spot that we've swapped something around in the photos.

Gluten free substitutes weren't really a problem this season - hoorah! The Dill Marinated Salmon was served with one of my standard homemade gluten free loaves - and very nice it was too! We also searched everywhere for a gluten free victoria sponge as we were low on time to do the baked alaska.  Apparently shops do not sell these so I had to quickly whip up a sponge, which worked very well in the end.

The Scotch Eggs did not go to plan.  We're actually seasoned scotch egg makers but we use a different recipe and unfortunately, following these instructions just didn't work this time.  It was a complete disaster really, as the eggs managed to seep out of the sausage meat casing, and once that has happened it's a write off in terms of keeping the egg from drying out.

Things we learnt:

We do not enjoy livers.  At all.  (I feared this from the start, but Andrew did not enjoy them either)
Gremolata is just butter basically - but very yummy with lemon and pistachio added for flavour on top of pancakes!
Broad beans taste very nice when cooked in a good recipe.
Baked Alaska is actually super fun to make and not too tricky.  Two pairs of hands definitely advisable as you have to be very on it.  I got really psyched about this one because I thought it would be a complete disaster (think Great British Bake Off 2014), but because we were so careful it was a great success!
How to segment a lemon - very handy for the halibut recipe.

Top 5

To do a round up - these were our favourite recipes! Hopefully some of these will make it in to our usual repertoire as they were a joy to eat (and cook!)

Andrew's Favourites -

Grilled Halibut with Champ & Lemon Caper Butter
Wok Fried Chicken with Ginger, Chilli & Garlic
Baked Alaska with Elderflower Meringue
Lamb, Mint & Little Gem Salad
Juniper-Pickled Cucumbers

Rachel's Favourites -

Dill Marinated Salmon with Rhubarb & Lime
Elderflower Fritters with Maple Syrup
Baked Alaska with Elderflower Meringue
Wok Fried Chicken with Ginger, Chilli & Garlic
Elderflower & Lemon Cordial

**And of course there are recipes that were still lovely to eat, but didn't quite make it in to the top few...

Now onto the Summer recipes!