Book Review - The Fat Duck Cookbook

As I mentioned I've not been to well recently and so have ended up sitting far more than I would like. However that has meant I've had a chance to catch up on some "light" reading.

I think I mentioned back along I got a couple of books by Heston Blumenthal for Christmas, well the bigger one as in real big tome is the Fat Duck Cookbook which is basically the cookbook of his restaurant but much more than that really.

I have been fascinated by Heston since he started doing TV programs. The combination of showmanship, science, fantastic cooking and the idea of using all the senses is very appealing. I have loved watching his experiments even if they are obviously just the final set-up bit for the program. I'd love to be famous enough to be one of the guests on his shows ! I think a more sensible wish would be to have the cash to book a table at the Fat Duck and try the tasting menu. The website specifically states they will tailor the dishes for allergies if you ask when you book and  anyway many of the dishes are naturally safe for Celiacs.


So what is the book like? Well even if you get the budget version I got it is physically HUGE I can't read it on my lap without a big cushion to prop it up, really sitting at a table is more sensible. However once you have licked the whole actually being able to read it problem it is a hugely fascinating book. The first 130 or so pages are about how he got into cooking and how his restaurant and cooking style developed and evolved. It seems very much written from the heart and he is obviously a man with a huge passion for what he does. I really love the fact that he has managed so much on basically just being really, really curious. He is neither a trained chef or a scientist but has managed to span both and convince many very eminent people he is worth working with in both fields.  

He talks quite a lot about the many "truths" of cooking which just arn't really true or are true but for different reasons than we think and there were many things that had me noding and thinking yes of course while reading. Probably the biggest being the one he co-wrote a paper on which is that the middle bit of the tomato (the bit many chefs tell you to throw away) is the bit with most of the flavour. I never understood why I should be throwing that bit out as it was the bit I liked best and had the real tomato punch but it took someone like him to look at it analytically enough to work it out and go against traditional chef "wisdom". That isn't to say he throws out everything traditional far from it. He stresses time and time again that it is just as important as the science and newer things he does. 


I must admit he has me hankering after a kitchen that looks as much like a lab as anything but then it has never taken much for me to want to play with dry ice, liquid nitrogen and dehydrators !


Most of his recipes take days to do and have many many components but as he says in the run-up to the recipe section you don't have to do the whole thing, take a single sub-recipe and play with that, use it on it's own or with other things you already know how to do. Not all recipes need special equipment, though some obviously do, most do need a willingness to be organised and start preparing sometimes days in advance but if you are willing to do that they sound perfectly possible to do at home.


I can honestly say that Heston makes me as fascinated as my mum's copy of Escoffier did when I was a teen. That book opened up a whole new way of looking at food for me use as I was to good but traditional English cooking. Escoffier was full of dishes with sauces, a million ways to cook a chicken breast, ingredients I had never heard of and things which seemed posh and exotic to me then and made me think about other ways of cooking.

Heston opens up similar ideas and goes one step farther because Heston is all about Why.. And that is what I always want to know Why should I do this? Why does X taste good with Y but dreadful with Z? and so on.


I found out his first book was about cooking with kids and is now firmly on my to buy list as is the Fantastical feasts book as I'm determined to try lickable wallpaper for a party at some point!!


Finally the Fat Duck website is worth a look it has some fun elements to wander round and look at.

Gingerbread and more cookbooks

This month's Daring Bakers Challenge is Gingerbread houses! As yet i haven't really managed to do it though I might have a proper go tomorrow, due to the holidays the reveal date is more a reveal week so many people already have thier posts up so I thought I would mention it so you could go and check out some fantastic gingerbread houses including some great igloos and other more modern buildings recreated in gingerbread!

I have however made gingerbread and indeed a tiny, tiny gingerbread shack.. I think house would be pushing it. This is because I made a gingerbread cheesecake to take to a family get together today. The recipe is adapted from Martha Stwart, I used the honey gingerbread recipe which worked very well with gluten free flour (Dove Farm gluten free plain flour).

The cheesecake come out very well, very rich but everyone seemed to enjoy it.

As to cookbooks well I lied about getting three yesterday... well not exactly lied. I had forgotten one I got early and I got two more today so in total there are 6 new cookbooks this christmas !

The one I had forgotten is Caribbean Food made easy, not something I would have thought to got myself but it has some quite interesting looking recipes so you may see more of that later.

The second one is the Wagamama book.

If you have read my blog for a while you will have heard about Wagamama who are a Japanese noddle bar type restaurant. They have a file folder at the restaurant telling you what dishes you can have or be adapted for various different allergies which means I know they take such things seriously and can easily chose something I know is safe. They also have the info on the website so you can plan in advance. They also scored huge points for having a policy of serving kids first rather than after the adults which is so common here for some reason I can never fathom. As we already know we love a good few of thier dishes this book with certainly get used and I look forward to trying safe versions of some of the ones I can't have at the restaurant.

The final book is one I've had on my wish list for a while now and have got out of the library on several occasions.

It is the river Cottage Meat book. For those that don't live in the UK the River Cottage series of books is by a guy going by the wonderful name of Huge Fearnley-Whittingstall who a good few years agoi now did a TV series about running his own little country garden complete with chickens and pigs and cooking the results, this has spawned into a much bigger enterprise but one that has always sung the praises of local food and small local producers. The Meat book is another big tome though not as heavy as the Fat Duck cookbook! It is nice to have a modern book explaining the various meats in depth and how you can use them as I have a few old ones but this covers the subject from the view point of explaining to people who havn't grown up knowing the various cuts of meat and eating the more 'uncommon' cuts or rather unfashionable ones...

I'm told I should be getting rid of a few of the cookery books I don't use to make space for them!!

Catching up and getting sorted for Christmas

 Making Banana Bread

Sorry about the lack of posts last week. The week started with both Treestump and I suffering from a stomach bug so cooking as very low down my agenda. However we are recovered and apart from the normal lucking colds of this time of this time if year and the red cheeks which mean Treestump is probably brewing his second set of molars we are fine.

I made five of these in total.

I have finally used the last few bananas from my bargin a few weeks ago, well technically the last hand full were just a bit too squashy and have gone in the compost but it really was just a few last ones all the others got eaten. While they looked rather brown and spotty when we got them they turned out to be very nice and many were eaten just as is or as smoothies and fritters. I also made several batches of banana bread some of which is in the freezer, three batches of chutney and some banana curd which I've never had before and is very nice, though too sweet for me to eat with a spoon unlike Noodles who was happy to do just that!

I also failed to report back on the suet pudding. I did make a steak and onion one and it was really good. The pastry is fairly easy to work with partly as a slightly rough look is part of the appeal and so a few bits filled in by squishing offcuts into the gaps are fine.

The filled pudding before the top pastry was put on.

I used a very traditional recipe from back in Mrs Beeton's day so the ingredient list for the filling was pretty basic but I thought that was fine and the meat was good quality. Really just meat, onion, a bit of water and a bit of seasoning. Then it was steamed for about an hour and a half and came out looking like this.

The plated dish is pretty basic and not going to win any beauty awards but it is very tasty and just right for cold weather, thought I realy should have done a green veg as well !

Anyway on to this coming week.

Of course the week finishes with Christmas Day on Friday and we will be having a Christmas meal with my brother, his family, my mum and stepdad. Un-usually this year I am not doing the main cooking, my brother has offered to do that so I'm supplying vegs, stuffing and christmas pudding.

Working up to that the menu will be roughly as follows.

Monday - Fish pie with greens

Tuesday - Pho

Wednesday - Probably running round like a mad thing by this point so something very simple like "tomato and eggs"

Thursday - Salmon in some manner and Fruit Brulee for pud ( fruit covered in whipped cream with a caramel pored over which goes hard as it hits the cold cream... fantastic and a bit of a Christmas tradition on and off)

Friday - breakfast  - we normally have smoked salmon and scrambled egg but I'm tempted to do gingerbread waffles instead having found a recipe that looks adaptable on Martha Stewart's site.

Saturday - Another get together with Tom's family - we are supplying a pudding. Currently planning either summer pudding as I have a good variety of berries frozen from the summer or gingerbread cheesecake also from Martha Stewart's site.

Sunday -  A quiet day probably just eating any leftovers and the various cheeses and pates we always stock up on this time of year. Possibly a fresh made veg soup and scones.

Baking and batch cooking -
Still have some bits to make for presents as we do hampers for some people.
Plus biscuits and bread for us.

Gluten Free Menu swap round up

This week I agreed to host the gluten free menu swap and I chose dried fruit as my ingredient. We use a lot of dried fruit and even more so this time of year.

This year I plan to make both Christmas cake and Christmas pudding from scratch using traditional recipes adapted to be gluten free. The recipes I plan to use are so full of dried fruit that the flour is really an after though. For those that don't know what Christmas pudding is think if a sort of steamed version of a very dark, very rich fruit filled fruit cake.. Both Christmas cake and Christmas pudding in this country are nearly back in colour and very full of fruit and often pumped full of alcohol for a couple of months if you follow the traditional recipes.

Here are a couple of Mrs Beeton's Christmas pudding recipes, note the large amount of fruit compared to flour and breadcrumbs, the recipe I am thinking of using has no flour at all just some bread or cake crumbs.

The dried fruit we probably use the most is sultanas which I believe Americans either don't have or call by a different name (Edit - Heather says they are often called golden raisins in the US). They are between currants and raisins in size and quite sweet and pale in colour compared to both the others. We also have dried apricots, pears, peaches, bananas, prunes, currants, a couple of types of raisins in the cupboard and probably a couple more I've forgotten.

We snack on them, add them to cereal, cakes, vegetable and tomato sauce to go with pasta and several more dishes including a really nice chicken and apricot Moroccan dish Tom cooks.

This weeks menu

I've also listed my menu this week on Menu Plan Monday on organised Junkie.

Monday - Lamb chops, chips and whatever we feel like at the time.

Tuesday - Fish pie with sweet potato topping (didn't do last week, didn't even buy the fish !)

Wednesday - Polenta terrine which I also failed to get round to last week.

Thursday - Sausage and mash

Friday - Quinoa, dried fruit and chickpeas with spiced chicken..

Baking

Pumpkin tealoaf (with sultanas) - mostly to use up the inside of the pumpkin from Halloween.
Pear pie and/or cake
I now have the urge to try converting Coventry god cakes as well which would mean repeating the puff pastry.. they are basically puff pastry filled with mincemeat.. or maybe Eccles cakes which have a dried fruit filling, similar but different.... argg I should never have picked dried fruit now I've remembered lots of recipes I want to try and convert!!.

Other menus

Kimberly from Gluten free is life sounds like she has had a rough ride recently but at least she likes my ingredient choice. Her menu sounds very nice indeed.

Heather from Celiac Family is making pupusas again which I'd never heard of till she posted about them and this week she has added an link with more information. She describes this week and quick and easy but it still sounds very tasty.

Manda from Asparagus Thin warns about snacking to much on dried fruit as she rightly points out they have a lot of sugar all be it natural rather than refined. She has some very intriguing sounding dishes I wish my menu sounded so interesting and I'd love to know what Risotto Nero is or how to make Curried Sweet Potato Salad, Japanese Style.

Over at Angela's Kitchen  as usual there is a hectic schedual and a great sounding menu plus lots of baking to refill the freezer. Her ground beef freezer plan sound a really good idea and as I'm trying to buy more from the local butcher and less from the supermarket I may try it next time he does a special on mince.

Trishtator over at Gluten Free in Salt Lake City has a picture up of her street which shows that autumn seems at about the same stage here and there. Her menu sounds great and I will be checking back to see here cinnamon apple muffins recipe later this week.

Interesting Fact of the day

Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant and they don't digest digest bread well so bread and milk is not good for them.. leave out meat based (not fish) dog or cat food for them, preferable chicken !

Yorkshire puds

One of the things i've been trying to replicate without a huge amount of success is Yorkshire pudding, something that i have mentioned on the gluten free Yahoo group a few times so when Better Batter posted a recipe it was passed on to me as something to try.

Of course I did try it, that night in fact !

You can see the results above. I think next time I will lave them a minute or two more as they were still a bit soggy in the middle but I have NEVER got a Yorkshire to rise like that before. They are very good and miles better than anything else I managed to come up with.

Now I live in the UK so I can't get the Better Batter mix so I used a faux version I'd been give which is below. If I did live where it is sold I'd be seriously considering adding it to my shopping list on this recipe alone. I'd certainly be very interested to try their mix to see what the differences are.

The faux Better Batter flour blend:
4 cups Tapioca Starch
2 cups Potato Starch
1 cup potato flour (which as far as I can see is mashed potato powder)
1/4 cup xanthan gum

The mix is quite a funny texture, when they say it's like a whipped topping they arn't kidding, it was almost like marshmallow. see the picture below.Noddles thought they should have a hole in the middle like normal ones and after the first bite he said the middle tasted of potato, which i didn't really notice, but he though they were "YUMMMMY" which i agreed with.