It's Getting a Whole Lot Meatier Around Here

We are back in the company of our husband/dad/carnivore figure, that would be for me/the girls/our borderline vegetarian tendencies in that order. That means there will be a couple of changes. The first is that I can reasonably expect someone else to share in the nappy changing duties. The second is that I will cook and eat more meat than I do in the absence of the aforementioned figure. I even start to think about meat I can cook and actively shop for it.

When I say actively shop for it, I should clarify. Now that I am in America, and away from home, I need to find new, safe and happy sources. I can’t rely on the usual market purveyors and our semi-annual trip to Windsor to stock the freezer. I need to ask questions and read labels and generally be less trustworthy than I am at home, in the familiar.

While that will, likely only temporarily, be a shopping hiccup, there are other things I don’t need to think of. I am in California. This is where lots of the unlocal produce that I am not supposed to buy at home comes from. I can buy avocados and tomatoes and broccoli and fresh fruit all year round. It grows here. Woot woot!

The little holiday complex we are staying in has a little courtyard full of barbecues, for those who want to use them. The idea of dragging the family down there and trying to quietly and civilly have supper is unthinkable, but the idea of getting it all ready and sending the husband/dad/carnivore down to cook his meat is entirely workable.

I found the meat, after a brief read of the butcher’s signs and only one question, at the very nice supermarket which is not nearly close to our little holiday flat, but it is around the corner from the more permanent neighbourhood we will be relocating to. The gorgeous heirloom tomato was, the sign told me, grown a mere five miles away. The onion just said local and I would expect nothing else, at this time of year, pretty much anywhere below the tree line.

The marinade was a little thrown together, with only one brief shopping trip worth of ingredients in the cupboard, but it worked really well. It provided a tiny bit of sweetness from the tomato sauce caramelizing which was nicely offset with a slight tang from the chipotle.

I kept the salsa mild, because of the children and all, but I would happily spice it up with some grilled hot pepper peeled and diced with the onions and tomatoes.

We cooked it to rare/medium rare and personally, I wouldn’t cook it much more. Once sliced, I could, and did, cut it with a spoon. And, I am not the one to rave about a bit of steak but this made me wonder why I don’t eat more.

Grilled Flank Steak with Grilled Onion and Heirloom Tomato Salsa

2lbs 4oz.(1.09kg) flank steak (let’s call it 2lbs or 1 kg)

Marinade

1/2 teaspoon ground chipotle 

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground oregano

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

3 tablespoons tomato sauce 

1/2 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon olive oil

Salsa

1 medium onion thickly sliced into rings

1 heirloom tomato thickly sliced

1 teaspoon (or so) of olive oil

Juice of 1 lime 

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 tablespoon olive oil

Handful of cilantro/fresh coriander

Maldon sea salt to serve

Mix all the marinade ingredients together and rub it into the flank steak. Leave, covered, in a non-reactive dish in the fridge for at least four hours. Remove from fridge 30 minutes before cooking.

Toss the onion rings and the tomato slices with the olive oil and some ground black pepper.

Preheat your barbecue to a high heat. Place the meat and the vegetables on the grill. The barbecue will likely need to be turned down. After a minute or so, check the vegetables and turn them. The tomatoes will get soft very quickly. Don’t worry if they are about to fall apart but try to get them off the grill before they completely melt in. The onions will take a little longer. The flank steak will need about five minutes on each side for rare/medium rare.

Remove the steak from the barbecue when it is cooked to desired doneness. Cover and let rest for ten minutes. Meanwhile, chop the onions and tomatoes and mix with the remaining salsa ingredients and season.

After resting, slice the flank steak very thinly and across the grain. Pile it on a serving plate, sprinkle with a little finger-ground Maldon sea salt and top with the salsa, or serve it beside. 

What? Cauliflower Cake?

I discovered this while I was catching up on some posts from the Guardian food section one night. I should have been sleeping but it seemed such a shame to let all that peace and quiet and perfectly good reading time go to waste. I wound up reading it and thought I would file it away, by file I mean forget about in my ‘spirited’ daughter addled brain, for supper some day.

Turns out, some day came sooner than I thought. It came in the form of our say-goodbye-to-my-beautiful-bamboo-counterscape dinner rolled into a last-big-gong-show-before-we-leave-all-of-our-friends-for-six-months dinner. It also came because I needed something to sop up the beef and chestnut and the spicy butternut and lentil stew juices.

Because I am trying to empty the cupboards before we go seasonless in CA, and I will be countertopless for the rest of the week, I didn’t want to wind up with any leftovers. I wanted something a little different though and I remembered, miraculously enough, that I had seen this cauliflower cake thingy somewhere. After a mildly frenzied interweb look around, I found it or remembered where it was. 

I was alarmed that it asked for 10 eggs. I needed to make two and I had exactly four eggs in the house. I had decided that this was what we were having for supper though and continued some by-now-not-so-mildly frenzied (Little Daughter was underfoot and Big Daughter’s return from a friend’s house was imminent) interweb search until I found something the contents of my cupboards and fridge could cope with.

I was not skeptical, Big Daughter was when she got wind of what was going on. The recipe struck me as a little bland but I had remedied that, I hoped, with the addition of more cheese than it called for, a lot of grainy mustard and some finely sliced onion.

Turns out, Big Daughter changed her tune. It is pretty delicious. It has a really great texture like a cross between cake and fritatta but the ground almonds keep it from getting gummy.

I used some 2 year old cheddar because let’s face it, cauliflower and cheddar cheese were pretty much made for each other. I used Kozlik’s Double C mustard but any good grainy mustard would be fine.

I doubled the original recipe, which was lucky, because breakfast was ready for the next day. I even cooked bacon to go with it - big brownie points with Big Daughter. She was putty in my hands for all of about forty-two seconds.

Which leads me to what I may do next time, not that this isn’t really delicious as it is. I keep thinking about roasting the cauliflower with caraway seeds and adding sauteed onion to the batter. I also think that some lardons, that’s bacon bits in English, as Croque-Camille forgets in the recipe I started from, would also make it kind of perfectly meal-like.

Cauliflower Cake adapted from Chou-Fleur de Bretagne by Croque-Camille

1 head cauliflower

2 cups grated old cheddar cheese

4 eggs

1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon olive oil (plus some for roasting the cauliflower)

2 tablespoons grainy mustard 

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/4 cup almond meal

1/2 teaspoon salt (plus a little for roasting the cauliflower)

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup milk

Thinly sliced onion rings

Preheat oven to 350º.

Break the cauliflower into florets and put it on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss. Put it in the oven and roast, tossing once or twice, for about twenty minutes or until cauliflower is tender and starting to brown.

Oil two 8-inch round cake tins.

Whisk the eggs, olive oil and mustard together in a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, almond meal, salt and some pepper.

Add half the milk to the eggs, then half the flour mixture, half the milk and the remaining flour, thoroughly mixing between each addition.

Fold in the cauliflower and cheese. 

Pour into the baking pans and top with the onion slices.

Bake for 35 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack for a few minutes. Loosen edges from pan and carefully remove the cake from the pan and serve in wedges.

Apple Pie, but Better

It’s apple time. Yep, I know it has been apple time for a month or so but that last month has been a little nuts.

Still, I feel that I should be making apple pie at this time of year. Only thing is, I am not an apple pie lover. Or, a cooked apple of any kind lover. Cooked apples to me are just, well, just okay, nothing to jump up and down about and, until now, I didn’t think anything to really blog about.

My, oh my, how my opinion of cooked apples has changed after this discovery. It is not a revolutionary idea but it is perfectly sweet in all the right places. They are chewy where they should be. They are crisp and biscuity on the bottom. They are nutty and crunchy on the top. And, they are moist and spicy and sweet right in the middle.

They are half tart, half crumble. The leftovers don’t make a crostata or a free-form tart, but a pizza, as I was matter-of-factly informed by Big Daughter. In fact, it would be worth making a whole batch of these in the form of pizza for a more substantial dessert.

There is a little finickiness, but once you get going it is all just fine and fun and the finished product, especially warm with a little vanilla ice cream or crème fraiche, is pretty frickin’ good.

I used Gordon Ramsay’s pâte sucrée recipe. Not because I love it but because I had made too much a while ago, had it in my freezer and needed to use it up before we go seasonless in California. Turns out, it is perfect for this. It is strong enough to hold up to the filling and the crumble top and some minor manhandling getting the little tarts out of the tin and, conveniently enough, perfectly crisp enough to balance the soft of the apples and the tender crunch of the crumble.

The apples I used, while I bought them as Macintosh, didn’t taste like Macintosh. We think, maybe, that they had been growing with some Gravenstein and got a little mixed up. Regardless of all that, they cooked beautifully in this. You could use any cooking apple. 

Apple Crumble Tarts (makes 24 or 6-8 pizzas for a little less finickiness)

1/2 recipe Gordon’s Pâte Sucrée (see below)

Crumble

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup spelt flour (I like using spelt because it makes the crumble a little crunchier I find)

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1/2 cup slivered almonds

1/2 cup softened butter

Filling

6 apples 

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

11/2 tablespoon cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Grated nutmeg

Butter 24 muffin tins. Preheat oven to 350º.

Make crumble by rubbing all the crumble ingredients together until it makes pea-sized crumbs.

Roll out pastry and using a biscuit cutter or a lightly floured glass, cut out 24 circles. I used a 78mm biscuit cutter for this. I recommend rolling the pastry out in batches to avoid re-rolling and the toughness this can cause. Line the muffin tins with the pastry circles. They won’t come up the entire side, they should come up about 1 1/2 centimetres.

Make the filling by peeling, and grating the apples into a large bowl. Quickly mix with the lemon juice to avoid discolouration. Mix the sugar spices and cornstarch together and mix in to the apples.

Use the filling to fill the tarts being careful to avoid dripping on the sides and filling them just level with the top of the pastry.

Crumble the crumble over the tops.

Put in the oven and bake for around 20 minutes or until the crumble is cooked and the bottoms are golden brown.

Remove from oven. Cool a few minutes in tin. Using a small knife, gently remove them from the tin and continue to cool on a wire rack. 

These will keep for a couple of days in an airtight container. 

To make the pizzas, roll out the pastry, place on a parchment lined baking sheet, top with filling, roll edges up slightly, crumble the crumble on top and bake until golden brown.

Gordon Ramsay’s Pâte Sucrée

250 grams softened butter

180 grams caster sugar (you can substitute granulated, just don’t tell Gordon I told you so)

3-4 vanilla pods (which is a lot, so I understand if you cut it back)

2 large eggs, beaten

500 grams plain flour (use all purpose and you should be fine)

1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together in a bowl until smooth and creamy, but not fluffy. Slit open the vanilla pods and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife, adding them to the creamed mixture.

With the mixer on low speed, gradually incorporate the beaten eggs. Stop the machine once or twice and scrape down the sides.

Sift the flour and salt together. With the mixer on its lowest speed, add the flour in 3 or 4 stages. As soon as the mixture comes together as a crumbly dough, stop the machine.

Gather the dough together and turn onto a lightly floured surface. Briefly knead it with your hands until smooth - this should only take a minute or two. Avoid over-working the pastry.

Divide into 3 or 4 batches and wrap in cling film. Leave to rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before rolling out. Or freeze it for later.

Before you roll it out, give it a light kneading to prevent it from cracking as you roll. Dust your work surface very lightly with flour and, using light, even strokes, roll out the pastry.