Bargeman’s Stew Is A French Classic And One Of The Best Meals You’ll Ever Eat

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | February 5, 2013

A few weeks ago I posted up a photo series on Death row meals. A comment came in about the morbidness of the subject and why anyone would think about their last dinner on earth, their last moment with food. The comment brought to mind my family’s obsession with food and our endless discussions about our last meal, our ‘hangman’s dinner’. It’s a common theme in our house, food that is, not death, and I began thinking about mine. I haven’t thought about it in a long time. My favourite dinner on earth. Big question. Easy answer. What is the most comforting, delicious, mouthwatering stew in existence? Bargeman’s stew of course.

Passed down from my grandmother this recipe is a French classic – I believe it’s Norman but I’m open to correction – and is really simple to make – its basically meat cooked in onions over a long period of time with some anchovies, red wine and a vinaigrette thrown in for good measure. It’s served best with a simple salad or a lovely buttery mash. Or both. If you’re vegetarian there’s no point. This is not for you. This is strictly a carnivorous dish.

So here goes. Let me know what you think.

Ingredients
1kg round steak cut into little steaks each weighing about 100g
500g onions peeled and sliced very thinly
1 generous glass wine (optional)
1 generous tablespoon flour
30g butter
salt and freshly ground pepper
4 tablespoons chopped parsley
60ml vinaigrette (Dijon mustard, vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper)
6 anchovy fillets chopped

Method
Preheat the oven to 140C°
Place the onions and steak in layers in an ovenproof casserole dish finishing with a layer of onions. Season as you go with salt and pepper. Put the flour into a bowl with the butter and work the two together with your fingers. Divide the mixture into small balls and place them on top, and around the sides, of the onion and beef (this is to thicken the sauce during cooking).

Pour in the wine, if using. Cover the casserole dish with foil before placing on the lid and allow to cook in the oven for about 3½ hours, checking every hour or so to make sure the meat is not sticking to the bottom of the dish. Remove from oven, stir in the chopped anchovy fillets and vinaigrette and return to the oven to cook for a further 30 minutes.

You’re going to love this. I promise. Try it. Tell me all about it.

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Chorizo, Potato, Spinach and Chilli Brunch Recipe

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | February 2, 2013

This chorizo, potato, spinach and chilli fry up makes for a delicious brunch especially on a wintry weekend so our resident foodie has given you a wonderful recipe for it.

I find it hard to have a lie in on a day when I have nothing planned, how things have changed in 10 years! I always feel guilty once the clock goes past 9am, even if I have had a busy day or night previously.

BUT, and yes that’s a big but, there is one great thing about having a lie in and crawling out of bed a little late- Brunch!
Brunch is the best excuse to indulge, to take your time and enjoy your food. Brew a fresh pot of Coffee, blend up a tasty juice and take your sweet time over a delicious midday feast with your friends, family or loved ones.

I reckon this is the perfect Brunch to cook your other half for Valentines weekend, take your time to enjoy each other’s company and conversation with the perfect food to add to the moment. So getting planning now!

121 total views, 2 today

This Pizza Recipe Is Perfect For Making At Home

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | January 28, 2013

Our new food writer, the burlesque chef, has a delicious pizza recipe for you this week. Hope you give it a go and remember the best thing about pizza is that the bases freeze really well. And what does that mean? It means you’ve always got a dinner handy. And the toppings? Whatever’s hanging around your fridge and presses. Now how good is that.

I’m so obsessed with pizza, thinking of that doughy base, be it thin or deep crust, that rich reduced tomato sauce and the waves of cheese that lap around pepperoni, jalapenos, olives and onions.
Ever since I was young pizza was always a special occasion treat which normally centred around the weekend. Now, no longer a young one, I can have pizza whenever I feel like but I still tend to prefer it as a weekend or celebratory meal.
I have been known to go to fancy restaurants and go for the pizza option (if I’m lucky enough to find one!) and normally settle for either the ‘’Four Cheese’’ or the spicy option.

Pizza can be pricey, and this had me on the (dough) dry for a bit when living in Australia so I decided to try and make my own, from scratch!
It took me a few attempts to get the base perfected but everybody likes their base differently. I usually make them once a week. It’s so simple and it’s great that you can control what you put on, and in, your pizza. You can make it as healthy or as unhealthy (and let’s face it, sometimes the unhealthy option is the tasty option!) as you want!

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Delicious Vegan Recipe For A Black Bean, Brazil Nut, Chilli, Coriander And Oat Burger

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | January 19, 2013

I’m delighted to introduce a new contributor to our mutant kitchen. We’ve been without a food writer for a number of months so I’m thrilled that Ethna Reynolds, the Burlesque Chef, is going to start contributing to our blog. So please make sure that you check out her food blog and let us know what you think. This week you get to try out her very own Vegan burger recipe. I’ve only ever eaten meaty baps but I promise to give this a try over the coming days.

188 total views, 1 today

Ignacio’s Mostly Latin Lunch Film Is Delicious

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | July 5, 2012

This short film brings you into the home of well known New York chef Ignacio Mattos who’s cooking up a ‘mostly latin lunch’ with his wife Gabi Plater, their son Paco Plater Noya and a few friends. Rather than this being a straight cookery short film Mattos celebrates the simple enjoyment of sharing a meal – it’s sweet, well made and you get to learn something about food.

The film is part of a project by Todd Selby called The Selby, a very influential website that gives you a look into the lives of creative individuals in their personal spaces.

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A Delicious Root Vegetable Soup Recipe

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | May 31, 2012

Here’s a delicious root vegetable soup recipe from our mutant kitchen. Enjoy it.

In early February, I paid a routine visit to my doctor and in the course of that visit, he trailed the word obese. This remark had an electrifying effect on me and, for the first time in my life, I went on a diet. For a man who loves his food, this decision was to generate a degree of misery but it did deliver. Over eight weeks, I lost ten kilos.

And so what is my secret? I did nothing that could be described as sophisticated and neither did I go hungry. I always ate enough. I just did not eat everything I wanted. Thus, full fat milk was replaced by the low fat variety and butter and cheese were forsaken. All bread, pasta, rice and potatoes were banished, and in their place I ate mounds of vegetables and crisp breads. Fortunately, I do not have a sweet tooth and so in accordance with my normal diet, I also did without, for example, all cakes and chocolate. I cut out beer and thereafter reduced my alcohol intake to two glasses of red wine a day. Finally, I stepped up my exercise and even resumed a little gentle running for a few minutes every morning. About once a week, I confess I broke out. I allowed myself a steamed potato or a small portion of rice or pasta. On occasion, if I felt really low, I even savoured a sliver of good cheese.

One of the problems I faced while dieting was lunch, a meal which for me and many others is centred on a sandwich. Bread was verboten. A partial solution lay in large bowls of nourishing soup carefully selected to avoid fattening ingredients like potatoes. In this context, my favourite was a root vegetable soup, which I stumbled across in a Delia Smith recipe book. The only objection for me was the inclusion of swede amongst the ingredients. I have never much liked turnip in any shape. I accordingly replaced it by simply increasing the weight of the other vegetables proportionately. However, I reproduce the recipe below more or less in its original form.

Slow-Cooked Root Vegetable Soup
Vegetable quantities are prepared weights

225g peeled carrots, cut into 5cm lengths
225g peeled celeriac, cut into 5cm pieces
225g trimmed and washed leeks, halved and cut into 5cm lengths
225g peeled swede, cut into 5cm pieces
1 small onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1.5 litres vegetable stock
3 bay leaves
Salt and freshly milled pepper

A few chives, snipped (optional)

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 1, 140°C

Place all the ingredients in a lidded flameproof casserole and bring gently to a simmer. Put the lid on and place it in the lowest part of the oven for 3 hours, by which time they vegetables will be meltingly tender. Remove the bay leaves and liquidise in a processor. Reheat and serve garnished with the chopped chives.

331 total views, 2 today

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Recipes For Leftover Turkey

Shaun Usher | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | April 12, 2012

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald kept innumerable notebooks during his lifetime. Books filled with ideas, letters, jokes and essays. In this excerpt he lists 13 ways to use leftover turkey. It’s pretty funny. You could almost attribute some of the ideas to the Italian Futurists.

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The Best Rhubarb Crumble Recipe

moray mair | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | April 2, 2012

Rheum Rhabarbarum or rhubarb has been cultivated by the Chinese for thousands of years. They used it for medicinal purposes. It appears to have arrived in Europe in the 14th century via the Silk Road from China and was a high value commodity. Thankfully, this is no longer the case and rhubarb is widely available in Ireland from now until the end of the summer. Until this year, the early rhubarb on sale in my local supermarket came exclusively from a small area near Leeds in Yorkshire, where there is a long tradition of forcing it in large, dark sheds. This year, I was delighted to see that the early rhubarb came from Co. Dublin. Well done to the enterprising farmer, who has entered this niche market!

Rhubarb loomed large in my life as a boy when I was in boarding school. We seem to have had rhubarb jam or stewed rhubarb at every meal and this led us to speculate about its provenance. One theory was that the school had been left a bequest of the stuff by an old boy. However, it is much more likely the powers-that-be simply served it to us in large quantities to ensure that we had regular movements, for rheum rhabarbarum is a well-known laxative. In my early adulthood, I spent a long period in the South Pacific in a group of islands which, in culinary terms at least, were dominated by the French, who do not eat rhubarb. The upshot was that I suddenly found myself denied this staple food of my schoolboy days. This in turn sparked off a craving for it and perhaps explains why I love rhubarb so much to this day.

Rhubarb crumble has long been a favourite pudding and over the years I have made it following many different recipes. Recently, a cousin sent me the recipe that follows from England. She guaranteed that it was a gem and she was right. This is a yummy pudding made special by the addition of the orange and lemon flavours to the rhubarb and those hazelnuts and porridge oats in the crumble.

For the filling
800g rhubarb cut into 2cm lengths
Juice and zest of 1 orange
Juice of ½ lemon
200g caster sugar

For the crumble
145g cold, cubed butter
100g flour
80g porridge oats
35g shelled hazelnuts
100g soft brown sugar

221 total views, 0 today

A Deliciously Fragrant Thai Chicken Curry

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | February 20, 2012

This Thai Chicken recipe is divinely fragrant and our skills exchange food writer took it straight from a kitchen on the beautiful Thai island of Koh Samui

If you like Oriental cuisine as much as I do, you will enjoy this month’s recipe. As I have told you before, I lived in Hong Kong for many years and grew to love Chinese food. However, I have never had a wish to serve it. It is troublesome to prepare and worse still involves cooking at the last moment, something I always seek to avoid. Chinese cuisine should definitely be confined to restaurants. However, there are very few Chinese eating houses of quality in Ireland and it is thus many years since I have eaten the food of that great country.

I am told that there are excellent Indian restaurants in Dublin these days, but I certainly can’t say that about my corner of Ireland. The preparation of Indian food is also time – consuming but on the other hand, it can largely be prepared in advance and, once I get my teeth into one of my curries, I quickly forget how long it took to prepare! Indian food is thus part of my regular diet and a choice of Indian dishes is always to be found in my freezer.

While living in Hong Kong, we often took holidays in Thailand. Our favourite haunt was Koh Samui, a small island of 228km² just off the east coast of Thailand’s Kra Isthmus. Koh Samui, with its famous Lamai and Chawaeng Beaches, was highly developed even in the early 1990s, when we were around those parts. However, we opted to stay on the quiet, south coast in a charming resort called the Laem Set Inn. Nestling along a sandy beach cove with palm trees, Laem Set comprised a relatively small number of bungalows and huts of varying degrees of luxury (we always stayed in the simplest huts, which made up by their position right on the sea front, what they may have lacked in terms of facilities!) clustered around a swimming pool, a bar and a dining-room. Lurking in the undergrowth, there was also a rondavel, housing a library, where I often sat and read during tropical downpours.

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Trifle Done The Traditional Way

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | January 30, 2012

It is astonishing how dishes move in and out of fashion. My grandparents would not be able to identify most of the food we eat today and, closer to home, much of what was commonplace in my childhood now rarely, or never, graces the table of an Irish home. In that context, I want to talk to you this month about trifle.

I was reared in a household where plain fare was our lot. Like most families at that time, we had dinner in the middle of the day and always had homemade soup followed by meat, potatoes and seasonal vegetables. For most of the year, we also had hot desserts, such as milk or steamed puddings, bread and butter pudding or perhaps stewed fruit and custard. However, on high days and holidays, trifle was always served, sometimes made with jelly but more often than not, with custard. We never tired of it, and indeed fought like proverbial dogs over the second helpings.

Later in life, it was my fate to marry a woman, who had a detestation for custard and so for many years, trifle never made an appearance; it was thus a pudding completely unknown to my children. However, with my wife’s passing some ten years ago, it has slipped back on to the family menu and there, as far as I am concerned, it will stay. Mind you, no one is suggesting that it should not be served. On the contrary, it is a great favourite and well it should be. It is a thoroughly delectable dish.

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Curried Parsnip Soup Recipe

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | December 13, 2011

The Festive Season is firmly upon us and, even though we live in grim times, there is already an atmosphere of excess about the place. Why do we cram so much into such a short space of time? But as the hailstones beat against the windows for the fifth successive day, I also wonder how we would ever survive the winter, were it not enlivened, half the way through, by the arrival of Christmas. So yes, excess may be the name of the game but let us not dwell on that. It is also a time of family and joy and memories. I complain about what it involves for me personally, but I wouldn’t be without it.
I am a traditionalist about Christmas dinner. I love that plate piled high with turkey and ham with all the trimmings. It has an unrivalled and magical combination of flavours and, in this family, is only eaten on that unique, annual occasion, which is Christmas. However, in the days leading up to the New Year, I am always looking for tasty, new dishes to add sparkle to the turkey and ham leftovers. Jaded palates are also in need of titillation. Oysters and smoked fish fit the bill here, as do spicy dishes from the East. But in this context, my offering is something much simpler. I am plugging a recent discovery – curried parsnip soup.

510 total views, 1 today

Recipe For Making Your Own Delicious Bread Rolls

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | November 15, 2011

What memories do you have of the bread of your childhood? I was largely reared on different kinds of soda bread, which was baked daily in our house. We had both the brown and white variety and, on occasion, the white bread had raisins, which we loved and intriguingly called, “spotted dog”. Then, there were also times when we were given shop bread as a treat. My parents sometimes made forays to Dublin and when they did, they invariably brought us back Bolands bread, which was not available west of the Shannon. We relished it, not only because it came from the Big Smoke and was therefore intrinsically exciting, but also for its dark, crunchy crust and slightly salty flavour. During the summer months, we used to decamp as a family to a cottage on the south shore of Clew Bay in County Mayo.

659 total views, 2 today

A Delicious Traditional Irish Recipe: Boxty or Bacstai

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | October 19, 2011

This month from the mutantspace kitchen our skills exchange foodie gives us an old traditional recipe for boxty. A very simple recipe that is absolutely delicious – with eggs, steak and whatever else you’re having – especially around Halloween time

Hallowe’en is nigh and I have been scrambling around looking for a dish, which is associated with this time of year. When on the brink of concluding that my repertoire of autumn recipes had been exhausted by previous blogs contributed to this site, boxty suddenly came to mind. Here is a potato dish traditionally found in the northern counties – e.g. Cavan, Leitrim, Donegal and Monaghan – and much favoured at Hallowe’en. The Irish bacstai is said to be derived from bocht meaning poor and perhaps explains why this dish is sometimes called the bread of the poor. I grew up in the north-west of Ireland but have no memory of boxty. Perhaps it was not made in that particular part of the country. However, I suspect that my mother’s intense dislike of grating any kind of food is the more likely reason why boxty did not feature in my childhood.

701 total views, 4 today

A Delicious Recipe For A Classic Quiche Lorraine

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | September 27, 2011

We sorely missed our regular food writer and skills exchange member, Joseph X, last month and I’m delighted he’s back with one of my all – time favourite dishes, Quiche Lorraine. And yes this is the real, classic, authentic, Quiche Lorraine, not the version espoused by many food writers today. Read, make it and enjoy.

Like many others, I have been on holidays and consequently absent from these pages for many weeks now. In my village here in the West of Ireland, the September gales have been blowing and it saddens me to think that the summer, such as it was, is over. Somehow, I feel cheated. After the cold of last winter, were we not deserving of some bouts of prolonged sun and warmth? Deserving we may have been, but there is still no sign of that Indian summer. Let us now hope that in the months ahead, we shall not have to face the arctic conditions we endured over the winters of 2009 and 2010.

This month, I thought I might engage in a bit of culinary pedantry around quiche Lorraine. Let us first address the meaning of that French word quiche. It means nothing more than an open tart with a pastry base. Thus, one can have a quiche à l’oignon, quiche aux pruneaux and so on. However, for most of us it is quiche Lorraine that springs to mind when the word is mentioned and this quiche contains nothing more than smoked bacon, cream and eggs. I know that you may have eaten a quiche with cheese in the pastry case, or indeed cheese in the filling, which passed itself off as a quiche Lorraine. You may even have had it with some onion or herbs amongst its ingredients. If so, you were not eating true quiche Lorraine, whose history goes back at least as far as the 16th century. In support of this contention, I am happy to pray in aid both Elizabeth David and Nigel Slater and if you want to take me on, I shall give you chapter and verse of their musings on this very subject.

677 total views, 0 today

Delicious recipe for Potato and Feta Cake

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | July 29, 2011

This month our regular mutantspace kitchen writer scores again with a delicious recipe for potato and feta cakes

I have been neglecting you. The garden is currently consuming my life, as I desperately try and make up for the time lost while my back was acting up. It is great to be toiling out there again and the recent run of good weather has enabled me to lift the pall of neglect, which hung over my wind-swept patch. My focus has been on emptying a large bin of mature compost to make room for the mound of clippings, which will be generated as soon as I around to cutting the overgrown hedges. The decanting of the compost could only be done, when I had found suitable spots in the garden to scatter it, which in turn necessitated mass weeding of flower beds and under trees. Although it has taken its toll on my aging body, this exercise is now drawing to a close and I am slowly giving my attention to you and others, who may have wondered about my recent absence from these pages.

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