Monthly Archives: July 2011

Croque-croissant

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Time saver: if you like a ham and cheese croissant, you’ll probably like this.

First things first: this isn’t a recipe for croissants – I’ve never even attempted to make them, for a couple of reasons: firstly, it’s a lot of work, and secondly, seeing how much butter goes into them might put me off eating them. Sometimes it’s nice to keep a few things you don’t make just so you can enjoy them when you’re out. (Sushi also falls into this category for me – although I think making it is less involved than making croissants.)

I’m not sure if a croque croissant is an actual thing in France. They might just be for foreigners and the French may consider them some sort of travesty. Who knows? A local French deli (Pyrénées – if you’re in Auckland and you like French food I highly recommend it) sells these and I love them. It’s really just a “Croque-monsieur” (these are definitely a thing in France) but made with a croissant rather than two slices of bread.

The basic concept with a croque-anything is some kind of bread with ham, cheese, and bechamel (white) sauce, put together then grilled (broiled) to perfection.

As you may have guessed, since I don’t make my croissants I have to buy them. You could use supermarket croissants (some are better than others) but if you’ve got a French bakery (or really, any bakery) nearby it’s probably worth picking them up from there. Another good option is to get frozen  croissants and use those. (For some reason the Asian Food Warehouse in Christchurch used to have an awesome deal on these, I think sourced from the French Bakery. Unfortunately the food warehouse is out of commission because of the earthquake, but they may return.)

Here’s the recipe, pictures to follow…

Croque-croissant – makes 4

  • 4 medium sized croissants (already baked)
  • 100-200g shaved ham
  • ¾ c milk approx – for a thick white sauce (or ½ c milk and ¼ c cream for a richer creamier sauce)
  • 2 Tbsp plain flour
  • 2 Tbsp butter
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard
  • freshly cracked black pepper and salt to taste
  • 4 slices cheddar cheese for tops (use Gruyère if you have it)
  1. Melt butter in a small saucepan over a medium heat.
  2. Add flour to make a white roux. Stir well to combine and keep from catching on the bottom. Cook for around 1-2 minutes.
  3. Gradually add the milk and stir well with each addition to avoid lumps. It’s most likely to go lumpy if you add too much milk in one go at the beginning. You can use either a wooden spoon or a whisk for mixing.
  4. When you’ve added all the milk, remove from heat. You should have a very thick white sauce. Add the Dijon mustard (if you’re not a fan, use a ½ tsp, or leave it out altogether), cracked black pepper and salt to taste and mix well.
  5. Cut an opening along one side of each croissant to allow you to fill them.
  6. Spoon about 2 Tbsp of the Bechamel sauce into each one, spreading within the croissant.
  7. Divide the shaved ham into four, and put a layer on top of the sauce in each croissant, then push the croissants closed.
  8. Put another Tbsp of Bechamel on top of each croissant, spreading slightly, then place a slice of cheese on top of this.
  9. Grill/broil in the oven until the cheese has melted and gone golden, then serve.

Chicken and lemon risotto

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Timer saver: risotto does not come in a box.

Chicken and lemon risottoWhen I first offered to to make my wife risotto (back in the days before she was my wife) she seemed a bit hesitant to accept. I told her it was delicious and she’d like it (I say that about all the food I like, I have a bit of a limited vocabulary in that regard) and she eventually gave in. It was and she did. Up till then though, she’d never had an Italian style risotto, and had only experienced the boxed kind. If you’re in the same boat, you need to ditch the boxes and bring on awesomeness.

Get this right and it’s so tasty you almost can’t stop eating it. I often find myself going to put the leftovers away and then just eating them before I can (we’re talking a whole extra bowl here, and I wasn’t skimping on my serving the first time around).

When I made this for my friend Marty he was shocked by the lack of vegetables, I tried to tell him it’s just the style, but if you feel the same way you do have options. I’ll often chop up a red capsicum and throw that in towards the end, or sometimes even some corn (½ c – 1 c). Marty was keen on baby spinach and that works too (in a green sort of way). Or you could keep it pure and just serve a salad on the side.

Risotto With ParsleyChicken and lemon risotto – serves 4

The first time you make this it probably pays to have everything ready to go before you start cooking. After you’ve done it a couple of times you can leave a bit more of the prep to do as you go. Stirring should all be done with a wooden spoon to help release the starch from the rice.

  • 1½ c arborio rice
  • 1 litre of good quality chicken stock (homemade is ideal, but most liquid stocks from the supermarket are fine)
  • 1¼ c white wine (major part of the flavour here, so skip that $6 bottle and splash out on something a little better –  say, an $8 bottle…)
  • 2 chicken breasts – for around 400-500g chicken, chopped into small cubes/pieces
  • 1 medium-large onion, or 2 small ones, peeled and diced finely
  • 2-3 sticks of celery, washed, sliced into crescents (1-2mm wide)
  • 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed or chopped finely
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil or a knob of butter (or a mix if you prefer)
  • zest and juice of 1 large lemon or 2 small-medium ones
  • ½ tsp dried thyme
  • plenty of freshly cracked black pepper
  • 200g mushrooms (if buttons, chop into quarters/halves, if large flats cut into half slices) + 1-2 Tbsp additional olive oil
  • 1-1½ c grated cheddar cheese, or ½ c grated parmesan for the purists (plus more to taste)
  • (optional) parsley to garnish (sprigs or chopped)
  1. Put stock in a small saucepan and heat to just below boiling – maintain at this temperature throughout.
  2. Heat olive oil/butter in a stockpot (or very large saucepan) over medium-high heat.
  3. Add onion, celery and garlic, and soften – probably around 3-5 minutes.
  4. Add arborio rice, stir thoroughly to ensure rice is evenly coated with oil. Stir for around a minute, the rice should make a slight popping sound, go opaque, and start absorbing any moisture in the pan. The clock starts now – you want to cook the arborio for about 20 minutes for optimal texture. (Too much longer than that and it will be mushy. Too much less and it will be too firm. You want “bite” – a kind of yielding firmness to each grain.)
  5. Add 1 cup of white wine, stir well till absorbed.
  6. Add all of the lemon zest, and ¾ of the lemon juice, and stir. (There’s a lot of stirring involved in this one I’m afraid.) Reduce heat to medium.
  7. Start adding the hot chicken stock, a ladle or two at a time. Stir in between each addition, keeping the rice moving and preventing it from catching and burning on the bottom. Add the thyme, and cracked black pepper.
  8. About ten minutes after first adding the arborio to the pot, add the chicken. This will poach it (leaving it tender) – but to make sure it’s well-cooked you want to add it ten minutes before the end.
  9. Continue adding the chicken stock and stirring.
  10. Eventually you’ll run out of stock, this should happen around the 17-20 minute mark. Add the final ¼ cup of wine, and the remaining lemon juice. Start testing the rice periodically, it should be firm but not hard. Continue stirring.
  11. When the rice is ready, remove the pot from the heat, and stir the cheese through. Put a lid on the pot and leave it to rest for around 5 minutes.
  12. While the risotto is resting, quickly fry the mushrooms in a little extra olive oil. I often just use the pot I had the stock in to do this (saves messing up another one). When cooked, stir them through the risotto then serve. Garnish with parsley if desired.

Bowls of risotto

Raspberry compote

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Time saver: Phil mixes raspberries and sugar for deliciousness.

Raspberry compote is one of those things that is super easy to make but tastes awesome. For reward vs effort, it’s pretty hard to beat. It’s great on vanilla ice cream, with cakes etc. (If you’ve never had it before, it’s basically a raspberry sauce which still has large parts of the berries intact.)

This is just the basic recipe and gives a generous serving for two bowls of vanilla ice cream – if you want more, double it, triple it etc.

Rasberry compote – makes about ½ cup of compote

  • 1 cup raspberries (fresh or frozen)
  • 2 Tbsp icing sugar
  1. Put berries and sugar in a small saucepan and heat on a hot element for around 2 minutes until the sugar is dissolved. Stir occasionally but try to avoid breaking the berries up too much. The raspberries will come apart and release a lot of juice, giving you a tart red sauce.
  2. And serve. (I told you it was easy.)

For a rapberry coulis, do exactly the same, but after making the sauce, strain it through a sieve to remove seeds and berry pulp.

Mushroom, blue cheese and pesto pizza redux

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Time saver: Phil repeats himself, cat still isn’t interested.

Cooked pizzaMy wife’s back, so I told her about this pizza and then tried to impress her by making it. This time around I used home-made pizza dough, and rolled it out to a 12″ base, then scaled the recipe up to fit. I think this size is probably more practical (well, it fed two hungry people, the 9″ base wouldn’t) and the home-made dough gives a much better pizza. I’m planning on writing a post to fill you in on the wonders of five minute artisan bread, but basically, it’s a dough you can make really quickly, then keep in the fridge for when you need it. Unlike most other bread doughs, it requires no kneading whatsoever, you literally pull a lump of dough out of the bowl/container you’re keeping it in, shape it, let it rise a little, then bake it. One of the other wonders of this dough is that you can grab a lump of it, roll it out and use it as a pizza base immediately, and it delivers a great result. That’s what I did this time around. Conveniently awesome.

Pizza baseI took a few photos this time, so you can check out the end result. One small note, we didn’t have any pesto this time around, so I used a few pine nuts instead and I’ve updated the recipe to include those. (I think the pesto is better, but we make do.)

Mushroom, blue cheese and pesto pizza – 12″

  • 12″ pizza base (preferably hand-made – I recommend 5 minute artisan bread)
  • 3 Tbsp tomato paste
  • 1 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 clove or ½ tsp crushed garlic
  • freshly ground black pepper and salt
  • 1-2 c grated cheese (125g is roughly 1 cup when grated) (this time around I used 2 cups, but for a more stylish contemporary pizza you could use less. As before, I used Edam cheese, if you’ve got mozarella by all means use it)
  • 125g mushrooms, sliced (could use more if you can fit them on)
  • 30-40g blue vein cheese (I used Kapiti Kikorangi if the cheese is not very strong you could use more)
  • 3 Tbsp basil pesto or 10g pine nuts
  1. Pre-heat oven to 230°C (about 450°F). If you’ve got a pizza stone, use it, otherwise just put one of your trays in to heat.
  2. Roll out pizza base to a 12″ circle, then place on a sheet of baking paper.
  3. In a small bowl, combine the tomato paste, olive oil and garlic, mix well.
  4. Spread tomato paste over pizza base, going right to the edges.
  5. Crack some black pepper and salt over the base, then cover with cheese.
  6. Spread mushrooms over the cheese – they’ll shrink a lot, so cover the whole thing.
  7. Crumble the blue vein over the pizza, distributing in small pieces. If you’re a fan, feel free to use more.
  8. With a teaspoon, dollop some basil pesto around in a stylish fashion. Alternatively, sprinkle pine nuts over pizza.
  9. Put the pizza in the oven (with baking paper) on your pre-heated tray/pizza stone. Cook for 14 minutes or so, until the base is cooked and the cheese is melted and golden.

Pizza slice

Lemon sorbet

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Time saver: Phil cleanses your palate, and proves he doesn’t own an ice cream maker.

I used to make this all the time, until I started feeling guilty about all the sugar in it. Whatever, it’s delicous and surprisingly easy to make…

Lemon sorbet

If well beaten, this recipe makes just shy of 1 litre.

  • 2 c water (use filtered/bottled water if the tap water is chlorinated)
  • 1½ c caster sugar (plain white sugar also fine)
  • 1 c freshly squeezed lemon juice (around 6-8 lemons, more if they’re small)
  • (optional) zest of 1 or 2 of the lemons
  • (optional) 1 egg white, lightly beaten
  1. Put water and sugar in a small saucepan, and heat on hot element, stirring frequently until sugar is dissolved. If using zest, add this to the saucepan too.
  2. Let it come to the boil, and simmer for a minute or two, then remove from the heat.
  3. While the syrup cools, juice the lemons. You want around 1 c of juice, but if you’re a bit over/under don’t worry too much. Add juice to the saucepan of syrup and mix well.
  4. Pour the syrup into a freezer proof bowl – I normally just use an old 2 litre ice cream container. If you’re using zest, you could strain some or all of it out at this point.
  5. Put the bowl in the freezer. Come back in a couple of hours time, retrieve the bowl and beat with electric beaters. You can also use a stick mix quite successfully – and this will work better than beaters if you’ve over-freezed it. After beating, put it back in the freezer.
  6. Repeat the beating process a couple more times, with 30 minute to an hour long intervals, depending on your freezer. Over this time the syrup should transform to slush and then sorbet. If I’m making it overnight, I’ll generally beat it a couple of times at night, and then return in the morning, using the stick mix if it’s too frozen. (Being ice you can always just leave it out for a few minutes to melt if it’s too hard to beat.) The more you beat it, the lighter the sorbet.
  7. Lots of recipes would now have you beat an egg white through the sorbet. Doing so will make it smoother, airier and add body. It’ll also mean you have raw egg white in your sorbet, it takes all sorts.
  8. Serve in chilled glasses. For the degustation I used chilled 40ml shot glasses. If you’re serving it as the main dessert, chilled martini glasses work very well and look the business.