Sweet Treat of the Week. 'Lemon and Limoncello Posset.'

This recipe comes from 'Mary Berry Cooks the Perfect, Step by Step.' by Mary Berry. Page 274. 

Book Pic.

Like I said before, I am fairly clueless when it concerns pudding and desserts, however I am always a keen learner especially if it involves doing something with flavour I enjoy. We happened to be fond of the sharp tang of lemons and for both our favourite cake is lemon drizzled cake. We also love yogurt, lemon flavour or not.
So from the book picture, we had a straight winner.

the result. 

Gathering the skills of making possets, from the onset is valuable to me for I can see myself serving those in the future at dinner parties. They have a very simple elegance about them but also a lightness which cleans the palate at the end of a good meal.


With the ingredients on the kitchen counter, I was all set up to learn step by step: 

-Double cream from Jersey MooMoos that happily live in grassy fields.

Double Cream.

-The lemon, that handy fruit which can give some zesty humph to so many dishes.

-Caster Sugar and Mint.

the Limoncello.

-And last but not least, the 'Limoncello'. We tasted that Italian lemon liqueur in a Italian restaurant for my birthday last year, it was offered by the manager at the end of the meal as a celebratory gift. (As I review restaurants for TripAdvisor, you will find my review among many for that lovely place on their site.) 

The Limoncello was a discovery for us both which delighted us so much that we quested for it the following week on supermarket shelves. In this dessert, the Limoncello gives that extra 'je ne sais quoi' of sophistication and elevates the flavours subtly. 

The frosted mint leaves.

our mint in pots on the patio.

To decorate the possets, you have to frost the mint leaves. This was fun if slightly delicate to do. But the beauty of Mary Berry's book is that there is a section called key to perfection at the bottom of recipes which is fab and plenty of tips, helping you getting it right. For a learner like I, I found that invaluable. 

Even if they are just edible decoration, mint always have that lovely refreshing flavour, and my partner was so fond of them that he wants to learn the technique for himself. His plan is to transform many leaves of our garden mints ( the common one and the chocolate variety one) into after dinner treats. I think next year we will grow a couple more pots of mint, two for our late night treats, and two for my culinary use. 

Before the set in the fridge.

I would recommend that recipe for its ease to follow but also because it tasted lovely. It was a crowd pleaser in our home which did got the high five. I intend to do that recipe at our next dinner party at home.

Saturday. 26/09/2015. 'Cannelloni with Double Cheese Sauce'.

This recipe comes from 'Mary Berry Cooks the Perfect, Step by Step.' by Mary Berry. Page 166. 

Book Pic.

When it comes to pasta, we are both partial to lasagna and cannelloni, however if I learnt to do the first one with a Sicilian boyfriend back in the days, I didn't know how to make the latter. So when we saw the book picture, our eyes lit up, and our ears could hear imaginary 'Kerching!'.

The magic wand: Celery.

It was a joy to make although it demanded some time and efforts. First you prepare the mixture. This is when you appreciate combinations that travelled through time and just work, purely and simply. 

It is a bit like getting your basic right for a flavoursome dish. You will often find those in combination in your foodie adventure: 
-Onions, Carrots, Celery and Garlic. 
It is like a simple magic formula, and 'Abracadabra': -'Et voilà!', you have a flavoursome base.

The Magic Base. 

minced meat.

As for combining the two different minces, beef and pork, I did hear of it before and tried it in shop bought meatballs which claimed to be made the Italian way and they were lovely. If it initially made my partner's eyebrows raise a tad, the result spoke for itself and convinced him not to be a minced purist about mince.

Becomes the Magic Minced Mixture

Béchamel Sauce.

The Béchamel sauce may be tricky to do but I always found the home made ones are much better than the white sauce stuff that you can find in jars. Now that is me being a purist in that matter but I would add by experience. 

The Cannelloni Operation. 

However the trickiest part has to be the filling of the cannelloni tubes. It does require an operating surface of some sort to get on with the delicate operation. My partner joined me there, for he loves all sort of uneasy tasks and finding a way to make them easy. So he soon got the filling of the cannelloni organised like a military operation that goes smoothly, and it was fun. When our bellies's ammunitions were full up to the brim they went in the oven.

the lined up Cannelloni.

Emmental.

I only swapped one ingredient cheddar cheese for Emmental to give those cannelloni a northern italian feel, where you share different slopes of a same mountain with Switzerland. Like Gruyère, Emmental is fantastic to melt but more importantly taste great. You recognise Emmental by its distinctive holes.

Luscious amount of Emmental and Parmesan.

The result looks very homely and comforting. It delivers on flavour and fill your belly right up. It was a hand on heart five from both of us and we will keep that recipe close to our heart. It is going to be home staple and a joint effort each times we do those babies.

  

Friday. 25/09/2015. 'Pork Chops Arrabiata'

This recipe comes from 'Mary Berry Cooks the Perfect, Step by Step.' by Mary Berry. Page 144. It was accompanied by 'Pan-fried Courgettes with Crispy Shallots.' Page 210 of the same book. 

book pic.

This dish looked simple on the book picture but with the ingredients it uses, was sure to be full of flavour and pack a punch. Growing tomatoes, chillies and peppers, this one was just bang on the garden bounty money! 

my more messy result

With the preparation done, I went to cook what we are very partial to in this house, a good chop. Whatever the meat, this is a prime cut to us.

The Prep.

Romanesco Peppers.

Romanesco Peppers in our Garden.

I used more peppers than the recipe required to prevent waste of the few that we had in the fridge but also because we do love them. We are growing Romanesco peppers in the patio for the first time. If we have many of them, if they look quite successful, they are still very much green, a couple of days to October. This summer didn't lack of rain but it did a bit sunshine wise. So we chopped three shop bought Romanesco peppers which means we have another batch of seeds to sow next year and one Californian yellow bell pepper.

chopped peppers.

Bumble Bee Cherry Tomatoes.

The Sauce on the stove.

The sauce was truly the star of the show in this dish. I had a fair few cherry tomatoes of the Bumble Bee variety to use up which this sauce allowed me to do. They have that exquisite sweetness which was only a plus. I also chopped a fresh cayenne chilli from the garden instead of using a dried one. The taste of that sauce is absolutely delicious.

Bye Bye Bumble Bee tomatoes. 

Book Pic

Book recipe

For the side, the pan-fried courgettes with crispy shallots worked really well to keep in the line of the Mediterranean feel of the first recipe. It also added extra textures to the entire plate which was a true bonus from the mellow softness of the courgettes to the crispy skin of the sweet shallots. This year I haven't grown any courgettes like last year, making their usual space available to try my hand on growing pumpkin and butternut squash however I intend to have them next year again in the garden. This means that that very nice side recipe comes very handy to keep in my mind in order to deal with any future and potential courgettes glut.

Pan-Frying the Courgettes and Shallots.

All in all, we loved the entire dinner and gave it another high five. The result is that we will have it again.

Thursday. 24/09/2015. 'Swiss Chicken, Spinach and Mushroom Bake.'

This recipe comes from 'Mary Berry Cooks the Perfect, Step by Step.' by Mary Berry. Page 102. 

Book Pic.

For me, melted cheese is food porn and I absolutely cannot resist it. When I was given this book, when I browsed it all, that Swiss Chicken dish stood out in my mind as a must do. The luscious picture of that chicken coated with that golden melting Gruyère was enough to trigger anticipating salivation.

Spinach.

The guilty pleasure is however made better, easier to admit, when you have to use 750 g of spinach. I can be cheeky and tell you who turned a pale green when he saw the three bags of spinach on the kitchen counter. It wasn't me. For someone likes his greens in moderation on his plate and come Roast day, Sunday, it is the fifty shades of brown on the plates, from the roast to the 'tatoes', passing by the gravy. But to be fair since we are kin gardener, a meat and two veg tend to be a weekly norm, which makes the vegetables being eaten with more fondness.

Beetroot Spinach from my Garden.

We are growing beetroot spinach in the garden this Autumn, but they were not quite ready when we did that recipe. It took more than fifteen minutes to destalk the entire bunch to perfection but it pays off later when the spinach melt in the mouth as you eat.

wilting the Spinach

Now I do have a little trick when I wilt down spinach, I don't use just ordinary water. I prepare a little chicken stock in advance and use spoonful of that instead. By that I don't mean that I killed a cockerel put it in the pot and infused it for hours, I am not living in a farm yet, no, I am using a bog standard stock cube, usually Knorr, which I put in 500ml of boiling water. 

The stock cube trick.

It is funny how you do get attached to your brands, I swear by Knorr while my partner swears by Bisto, it may be due to what you have seen in your home as a staple as a child, being brought up to see this or that in the cupboards. Being it habit or taste, our stock cubes war makes me laugh, especially when I see the man running to get a Knorr cube to beef up the gravy when he ran out of Bisto. Lately Knorr got that new stockpot little paste which comes in lots of different flavours, which I tried a lot and love. I used a chicken one of those in there. 

Using stock, any, the one of your preferences, infuses the spinach and gives it a yummy flavour. Mary Berry's seasoning with the grated nutmeg and her way to process the spinach properly did the ultimate trick. The result was in the plate with my partner finishing all his greens. 

Seasoned strips of chicken.

I prepared the chicken into tender strips, well seasoned and fried them to that lovely golden like the instructions. I must say that this level of attention to details comes together in the end when you finally eat the dish. Done as it says it gives a beautiful texture to the chicken which was awesome. 

chicken strips on a bed of spinach.

Then comes the preparation of the mushroom sauce which is easy 

Button Mushrooms halved.

to make. I added a little fresh thyme, because I do like its flavour with mushrooms. With mushrooms reducing quite a bit, like the spinach, I am considering to increase the amount to 300g next time rather than 200g. 

cooking the mushrooms in butter and leftover chicken juices.

In recipes it all depend if you like one ingredient or not, and you are free to ask yourself the question: do you like that ingredient or not? If you are fond of it increase, if you are not kin on it, decrease. Be playful, experiment with your taste buds. 

Normandy Cows. 

As I mentioned earlier, your childhood plays an important part in influencing your choices and taste as an adult. For example whenever I can, if I have to use a crème fraîche, I will go for an AOC Isigny Ste Mère/Isigny Sur Mer, just because I grew up not far from the place, just because I remember the cows grazing under the apple trees in the hilly fields of Normandy. It gives me that sense of security that the cows had that happy life eating grass outdoors, and were not cramped in a barn all day, hence their milk didn't turn sour in their tits. So this is the one I used here for the sauce, thinking of happy milking cows.

Le Gruyère

Plenty of grated Gruyère.

To finish, came the 'piéce de résistance', le Gruyère. Duly grated, covering every nook and cranny, an entire block of it, skip the amount, it is undisclosed... Do try this at home. Gruyère has that nutty, sweet yet slightly salty flavour which is just gorgeous. 

The melting result.

The result was absolutely fantastic: Proper comfort food on the plate. Again it was a five stars for Mary Berry's recipe. Again it gave us lunch boxes for the following day. It was not complicated to do and it just delivered on taste perfectly. We will have that bake again and again I can tell you that much. It has that lovely warmly, cosy, winter feel about it.