Food

70th Birthday Pie

Carrots and Parsnips roasted with olive oil and marmalade, finished with truffle honey, double cream mash spuds, spring greens

Coma inducing food on a plate

In other news, I just made a quick supper of kippers and scrambled eggs with coriander and butter with a pot of coffee sitting next to me to prepare for a night of work. Simple, cheap, 5 minutes to prepare and very tasty.

What are all of your techniques for mashed spuds? Apart from cooking them and then beating them to a pulp (and adding double cream in James' case).

Cut them small and even so it's easy to achieve uniform cooking.

Cook them properly and then drain and cover with the lid in the pan. Leave for 20 minutes or so and they carry on cooking with the remaining heat and go floury.

I then add butter, seasoning and whisk very quickly with an electric hand whisk. Milk or cream added at the last moment.

Do not over do the whisking or the starch is released from the spuds and it goes gloopy.

Butter.
And a ricer.

I make mine exactly how they did at the restaurant I once cooked at.

Cut the potatoes into large equal sizes - the larger the better, as they take on much less water and wet mash is crap. Plus there's less chance of overcooking large pieces. Undercook them too. Leave to thoroughly dry out even further once cooked in a colander over the still warm pan. They need to be bone dry.

You'll need a mouli to pass them through for fineness. Nothing else will do. Potato-ricer is next best. Once you have your puree, add plenty of salt and ground white pepper (disperses throughout rather than in isolated chunks like with coarsely ground black), melted butter (I zap it in a microwave) and a splash of cream. Over a very low heat in a dry saucepan work the combined mash for a good few minutes until it all amalgamates, being careful not to let it catch. The end result is superior mash. Once you use these techniques you'll turn your nose up at anything else.

Cut them small

Ignore this.

Also do not use a very waxy spud.

The Lamb pub on Holloway road are serving Big Apple hot dogs, just a heads up for any meat eaters in the area.

Thanks for the heads up. Will have a gander at some point no doubt!

Butter.
And a ricer.

And grated nutmeg

• mayonaise + cheddar + chilli flakes
  

• mayonaise + chilli flakes
  
  

pisti rep'd, amazing photo, I'm laughing so hard.

I'm all about a little bit of salted butter, spot of cream and black pepper. Depending on what i'm making its quite nice to mix in sweetcorn.

sweetcorn

u mad bro? almost as bad as mayo and chili

cold pie when i got in from MTB training was 'lish

Stop goin on about your fuckin pie?! 2 fuckin pages!!?

My brother just cooked about a kilo of sweet little queen scallops followed by skate wings with black butter.

Lobster infused olive oil is the bomb!

Dirty fast food fixes part un.

M&S Lobster flavour crisps

And Sainsbury's have some sous vide cooked "BBQ" pork ribs , pulled pork and beef ribs for about £5 that you can finish in the oven for 30 mins and add your own sauce instead of theirs.

Having had incredibly variable results with my own beef rib BBQ attempts the unctuous nom-nom of the supermarket version was a bit depressing.

The Waitrose ribs are awesome as well depressingly...

Toad in the hole in the oven, just the right finish to a day of loft flooring :D

Big glass of red just handed to me as well, perfect.

Just been passed a steaming plate of eggy/potatoey/oniony goodness in the form of a hunk of tortilla and a glass of Tempranillo*[I].

*sh'boy
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Going to hmake humous this week for a dinner party thing I'm going to - any recipe recommendations / tips? I've seen loads of recipes but they all vary slightly.

Also, I've only got a hand blender, not a full food processor - this shouldn't be a problem right? Obviously, I'll have to do the blending in batches, but a bit of a rough mix makes hummous more interesting surely...

use a simple olive oil, nothing too precious as it is too overpowering in flavour

hand blender should be fine, it's not like people have had food processors for thousands of years

what do you call a man with chickpeas, tahini, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice on his genitals? a humoussexual

what do you call a man with chickpeas, tahini, garlic olive oil and lemonjuice on his genitals, who has TNT strapped to his chest? a suicide bummer

When you end up with the inevitable left over tahini- make Halva.
http://homemade-recipes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/sesame-or-tahini-halva-recipe-how-to.html

So Damn tasty.

I made vegan lasagne today in the slow cooker. It was brilliant, and in the end it cooked a lot faster than I thought so I turned it off, and when J and I got back from our evening walk I topped mine with vegormet cheese and his with real cheese and stuck it in the oven.