Results tagged “eggs”

This recipe comes from Mia Kristensen of CPH Good Food in Copenhagen, who I collaborate with to run New Nordic cuisine classes in London.  This recipe featured in our Summer 2012 class.

Don't be put off by all the steps in the recipe.  You basically need to separate half a dozen eggs and use the yolks to make a simple sponge and the whites to make a simple meringue.  The rest is basically fresh fruit and cream!  In any case, it's well worth the effort. 

Fresh pasta dough can be made with just flour and water, or with a mixture of eggs and water, with whole eggs and/or egg yolks.  The more egg you use the easier the dough will be to handle and cook, and the more yolks you use the richer its golden colour will be.  Use genuinely free range eggs, as it is the hens’ diet of green things which makes their egg yolks orange.  If you don’t have special ‘OO’ (very fine) pasta flour 'di grano duro' (made from hard wheat, with high protein content), you can use regular plain flour and it will still work. I recommend the pasta flour available from Shipton Mill.

Last night Barnaby stayed up quite late touring the bars of Takoradi, so when he got up this morning he was ready for a hearty breakfast.  And when he went out into the street he realized that he wasn't going to have much trouble finding one - every street corner was filled with little stalls, and every other stall was run by a friendly lady selling some kind of delicious-looking food.

So it didn't take long to find what he was looking for: street egg.  A big herby peppery omelette cooked fresh right in front of him - then stuffed into a big wodge of sweet doughy bread and cooked some more.  Yum.  Just the thing to get you ready for a hot day in the market - especially when you wash it down with a great big mug of hot condensed milk and sugar (or as it's known round here, "coffee").

And as he chewed thoughtfully (for him) on his egg sandwich, he thought back to some of his favourite parts of the journey.  Chermoula sardines in Morocco, deep-fried fataya in Senegal, rice galettes in Mali, porc au four in Burkina Faso ... and last night's goat kebabs and spicy octopus, of course ... they'd all been delicious, and they'd all been made and eaten on the street. 

Perhaps this was no coincidence?  The only disappointing food he'd had on the whole trip had been in restaurants and hotels.  Street food must be where it's at, he decided.  And went up the road for some keliweli and spicy yam chips.

We were honoured to be given ‘soğanlı yumurta’ for breakfast while staying with Mehmet and Kadar Demirci at their eco-lodge in the foothills of the Kaçkar mountains.  It was one of the best breakfasts we had in Turkey - the lightly caramelised, meltingly soft onions went superbly well with the eggs, which were of course directly from their chickens in the coop next to the little outdoor kitchen.  

Literally translated as ‘oniony eggs’, soğanlı yumurta is an old Ottoman recipe - the sultan’s favourite breakfast no less.  Mehmet also told us that according to the original version, the onions should be slow-cooked for six hours, as was presumably done by the breakfast team in the sultan’s crew of a thousand cooks at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.  You might think that’s asking too much of your Sunday morning.  But do give it at least half an hour - it’ll be worth it.

This recipe is really thanks to Zeliha İrez, Özge’s mother, but I’m naming it after Özge as she helped make it while we stayed with them.  In fact, Özge has not (yet) taken after her mother kitchen-wise, but does know how to boil an egg.  This is a great little starter or amuse bouche, and so simple to make. Go on, try it!

This weekend Barnaby was lucky enough to be staying with the Dindelegan family in Zalău, who celebrate both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters, due to a Greek Catholic connection.  This meant Barnaby got to eat delicious roast baby lamb and other yummy things expertly cooked by Ileana Dindelegan. 

But not before taking part in the Romanian custom of egg cracking...  Brightly coloured boiled eggs, traditionally red round here although painted with intricate patterns in other regions, are employed in a competitive round-the-table contest not unlike the British schoolyard game of conkers - if your egg stays intact, you win.  Barnaby turned out to be a champion egg cracker.

This is a classic recipe, which we have practised at school.  It is based on one by Julia Child in ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ (1961).  It may not be trendy, but I like it.  Hope you do too.

To make your water bath extra safe for your delicate custards, line it with a towel.  This protects the bottoms of the custards from getting too hot.  Don’t discard the vanilla bean (they’re expensive).  Instead wash and dry it, then add it to a jar of sugar and leave for a few weeks, shaking occasionally.  This makes delicious vanilla sugar, which you can use the next time you make a custard.

Sorry for the lack of Christmassy recipes.  I could document the saga of my Christmas pudding and Christmas cake for you (candying own peel - 6 days; tracking down suet in a city where nobody's heard of it - 10 days; working out what to do with a huge hunk of fat cut straight out of a cow - 3 days; preparing pudding and cake ingredients - 1 day and night; baking cake - 5 hours; steaming pudding - 8 hours; feeding cake - 10 days), but I suspected not many would care to replicate this bizarre use of time.  Am I wrong?