So what have you cooked lately? (Year three!)

Entrecote steaks for silly money so it was daft not to grill them and serve with some great tomatoes just on the verge of turmning so they were incredibly soft and sweet. (we washed this down with an obscene Pomerol that we bought on a whim)

Made duck breasts in a champagne and redcurrant sauce too which rocked.

Ate a shitload of cheese - mainly Paille de Bourgogne and various very creamy ones.

and drank waaaaay too much wine

Teeny, as I'm so mental, I never cook for the baby. I ph34R I will do something wrong. Silly, I know. :-( But I do make sure she gets a lot of different things (and, thus, tastes).

I wanna do more cocktails. What are your guys faves?

Still drunk, sorry.

Cocktails are great! But I only know a few simple (and bastardized) ones. Our summer favorites are gin & tonics with lime and faux-mojitos - fresh picked mint leaves messed about in the tumbler, some simple syrup, some dark rum, squeeze o' lime. Highly effective!

Last night for a small dinner party, we grilled steaks and I made a salad of bow-tie pasta, fresh barely-blanched green peas, dry-toasted pignolias, dressed with a splash of olive oil, a touch of sesame oil and several generous dashes of crushed red pepper. It was incredibly good.

Apparently they used to eat horsemeat in Yorkshire though, some Americans claim that's where calling Yorkshire people 'kicker eaters' comes from, which is strange, as we've never heard that nickname before.

Meat is meat is meat. People's limits differ. Would I eat Dog if I was in Korea, possibly, because there that's what they do. Yes people in the west keep dogs as pets, but some people keep lambs/sheep as pets. To me it's more important how good a life the livestock as had, rather than whether it's an animal that some people interact with. The peruvian's eat guinea pigs, plenty of people eat Rabbits, ducks and geese.

But this could probably have it's own thread, there've been a couple on ILE in the past.....

(I've just been and checked my stuff and the pieds have disappeared :( I was really looking forward to them)

This may turn into a photo essay

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dice the pork to about !/4 inch on a side.
coat it with white pepper, salt, ground coriander, brown sugar, and fish sauce. soak about a half hour.
while soaking...
cut up vegetables for stir fry. I used red and yellow pepper, onion, and snow peas. also a little garlic.
dump the pork cubes into a hot pan. let them get very crispy on a side or two. you could cook it all through and set it aside, or you could cook the veggies with it if you have the space. I set it aside.
cook the veg for minute or two, and add some hoisin sauce, chile sauce, peanuts, and a more fish sauce to taste. cook until veg are to desired doneness.
combine meat and veg.
add some torn basil.
serve over rice if you want.

You can make this to varying degrees of hotness, sweetness, savoryness, any kind of -ness. I especially like the meat treatment, keeps it moist while crispy on the outside. The whole thing could be adapted to chicken, tofu, etc easily. I enjoyed it very much.

Caramelised pear, walnut and Lanark Blue filo tart (half-eaten on return from said pub trip, remainder for lunch yesterday)
Chicken and white pudding pie (shortcrust) (half-eaten last night, other half tonight)
A sort of scotch egg type contstruction, black pudding coated with lamb mince, breadcrumbed and fried (to be eaten at some point in the next couple of days, I have a bramley and mint chutney that I think will go well with them)

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I just stuffed some crusty rolls with mussels and leeks for lunch. That was all right.

i really want to try mark bittman's sausage/grape thing, but i fear the cholesterol.

all this while cooking up an Uber-lasagne veggie lasagne for tomorrow. Cooking really helps me completely forget work troubles (even if I am actually cooking some up)

also, marinated tofu with soba noodles and mixed veggies, which is a regular thing to make chez moi, because it's awesome. (soy sesame marinade)

oh, we made this great salad last week too--mixed greens with cucumbers, shredded carrots, goat cheese, dried cranberries, and slightly-candied almonds (you toast slivered almonds up with a bit of sugar so they stick together in little crunchysweet clusters). and easy homemade vinegrette.

Wow -- meat preserving is more then I feel up to at the moment. I tried to can some chicken & squash soup I made with my excess yellow squash last year and failed -- thought I'd followed the rules but I guess not. I don't have a pressure canner, I use the hot bath method, so I think meat is simply out of range, and I've never eaten much dried meat.

I did buy a split-half of beef (quarter of a cow, 90 pounds) from a local organic farmer a month ago, though. I split it with two other families, so there was 30 pounds in my freezer. I live in farm country, so that kind of thing is available if you know where to look.

I live in Merced, California (north of Fresno), which isn't quite the southwest . . . it's a funny hybrid. It's desert weather in the summer -- 105 days, 70 nights, no humidity at all -- but it rains heavily in the winter and the snowmelt from the Sierras supplies water all year, so it's a good place to put farms, unlike the desert. Nearly 100% of the almonds grown in the US are grown within 30 miles of me, and plenty of other stuff as well.

There are days when I actually kind of miss the North Valley/Central Valley summers. (I used to live in Redding.)

Last night: salad nicoise. Little gem lettuce mixed with arugula, cherry tomatoes, steamed green beans, steamed baby new potatoes, all tossed with red wine vin+oliveoil+dijon vinegraitte. Topped with a couple of hard-boiled eggs, sliced, and the good tuna. Brilliant.

I do like a good nicoise, particularly as an excuse to scran large amounts of boquerones

I've had quite the cooking frenzy today:

vanilla ice cream with a bit of creme fraiche for a bit of tang
Potato salad with a mayo, creme fraiche and buttermilk dressing (also chives,radish and spring onion)
Green beans with a lemon vinaigrette
apple, blueberry and blackberry crumble
baked bean pie that Vic's finishing off as my insanely hot hands make pastry handling troublesome. (it's not as ghastly as it sounds hopefully - it's homemade boston style spicy beans topped with grated cheddar in apie crust..... could go either way)

oh and my first attempt at cornbread too, which looks pretty damn ok

I am intrigued by bean pie. Very intrigued. It all sounds pretty good (I am craving variety after spending the entire day knocking out roasts), the crumble in particular.

Argh, did a double-grind of about 8 lbs of pork shoulder + back fat for bulk sausage today. Still have to mix in the spices/salt and package it up in 1/2 lbs for the freezer, but needed a break. Bean pie sounds delish - I'd be tempted to do one up in the hotwater crust, like a pork pie. In the small size though, not the giant type.

I've got lamb to make up into a faux-tagine tonight and Mr. Jaq brought home some peaches that would be nice in a clafouti. I'm going to be traveling next week again, so even though it's damn hot and muggy I want to cook.

They're unorthodox, but yesterday I made modified samosa-calzones (wheat pizza dough with samosa filling) for future lunches:

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not exactly cooking, but I made pesto from a giant handful of home-grown basil today. Just pignolias, basil, olive oil and salt. Next time, some garlic goes in.

the bean pie worked great, just the right side of stodgy, but it held together very well. The cornbread I made was a bit dry tho.

Last night was my first ever mac and cheese, now that went well.

Beef Skewers. Another major summer thing. A friend is in from Oakland for a few days and yesterday I marinated beef overnight in a Cuban marinade (rum, orange & lime juice, oregano, cumin, salt & pepper) and skewered it with tomatoes, squash, onions, peppers. Served on a bed of couscous. The beef was from the split half (90 pounds) we bought from a local ranch about six weeks ago; the veggies either from our garden or the local CSA.

This time of year essentially everything I cook comes from our garden or a local farmer I know. That's been the one greatest thing about moving from the California coast into the Central Valley three years ago. (For music, it's been crappy; for food, it's been great.)

last night for my dad's birthday i made a lamb pizza with grilled eggplants and tomatoes, mozzarella and feta. i wanted lamb sausage but could only find ground lamb which i cooked with onions and spiced a little. it turned out deliciously which was nice because it was so simple!

A blenderful of green gazpacho. (using a tomato variety that's green when ripe) Looks like green goddess dressing.

Spinach, scrambled eggs, bacon and potatos. I also had some bechamel sauce with it. Not a big success. :-(

A co-worker GAVE me a whole fillet of wild-caught silver salmon from his weekend fishing trip! So that's tonight's dinner, quick seared in a hot cast iron skillet in a 450 deg oven for 10 minutes - dash of salt, grind of pepper, sprinkle of lime.

Sounds good, it never does to get too fancy with good fish.

Lamb's meat (sp?) with spinach and creamy tomato sauce. DA YUM .

I am going to make tartiflette over the weekend with the last of my reblochon.

Oh and I made banana cake with banana (duh!), raisins and chopped walnuts. YUM-MY

Lamb faux-tagine last night and a ginormous dutch baby for breakfast this morning. I forget sometimes how excellent a cast iron pan is for baking things, but it only takes one crispy shelled creamy centered pancake to bring it all back.

I made my first 'proper" pancakes. I need a pancake pan as the one we have is too large. But 2 out of the three attempts were rather yummilicious.

Tartiflette in August, Aldo? It's one of my favourite things but I've always thought of it as very winter.

I had some reblochon, so it made sense. Also, using a very light white helps.

Tonight I'm making flan (vanilla and pumpkin) to bring to dinner tomorrow night. The caramel smell is all over the house.

My lunch today was a few strips of sirloin rapidly seared in oil with diced chilli and smoked garlic, mixed with cous cous and coriander, dressed with a bit of oil and lemon juice and stuffed into pittas, six minutes start to finish (the steak was the last thing I did).

That sounds delicious! Yesterday at lunch one of my fishing co-workers brought in a pile of salmon he'd cured from the last weekend's catch. I was already nuking something else up, but am ready to accept his generous sandwich offer today.

The flans (from Mark Bittman's World's Best Recipes) looked awfully wiggly at the 45 minute mark last night, and even still at the 1.25 hour mark. But we'll see how they are tonight. The caramel worked out well - I love watching sugar syrup transform as it heats up: grainy, clear and thin and small bubbles, thicker and weird quilted pattern of bubbles, giant almost fizzy bubbles, thick and golden and barely bubbling, then suddenly darker and thinner and boiling again and ready to coat a ramekin.

Oh man, I want to work in a place where my co-workers bring in piles of self-cured salmon...
Admittedly it would be a bit of a busman's holiday, but there you go. It'd be nice if the rest of them had a bit of enthusiasm.
Dinner was a quick fry up of chorizo, broad beans and onion, again with chilli and smoked garlic (from the marvellous Port of Lancaster Smokehouse, the best kippers I've ever had).

(also the purveyors of the best kippers, I should say)

I had some of his salmon on a slice of dark russian rye, smeared with sour cream and a bit of grated ginger - really really great. He's bringing in some more tomorrow! He declined to taste my air-dried ham, even after I didn't get botulism poisoning from it. I'll have to think of something else to make to pay back his kindness. It's cooling off enough here that cooking/baking sound appealing again.

I think I'm going to hit up my co-worker who has a near-industrial smoker (also, he's the ocean-fishing organizer) to smoke me some garlic, because that sounds excellent.

Maybe I'll make up some green corn tamales - they are labor intensive but I have a tamale steamer I've yet to try out.

pasta with kale and beet greens. i boiled the greens for a bit with some herbs, then sauteed them with onion, smoked bacon, and garlic and tossed everything together with balsamic vinegar.
the beets themselves are delicious. i roasted them on monday and have been eating them cold with various dressings. i think tonight is going to be sesame-orange-ginger.

Flan update: pumpkin flan was definitely not cooked through, dewatering the pumpkin would have helped. Both tasted great, but I think needed more eggs (recipe called for 1 egg + 1 yolk per cup of milk/cream - that makes a fairly light custard and I like my flans heavier and eggier to stand up to the intense caramel).

This evening I'll be attempting poulet au pot du bearnaise, basically a stovetop casserole with a soft-boiled egg vinaigrette.

My cooking has taken on a bit more of an agenda of late, as I'm gearing up to open my own gaff at the end of october (planning permission notwithstanding). So pretty much everything that gets cooked at home is fine-tuning dishes I'll be knocking out at the deli when it opens.

Matt, that's awesome! I will come eat at your place every time I'm in the UK :) Are you focusing on any particular stuff?

It's falling into place? that's great news, well done mate

Wow, Matt, that's awesome, congrats! Where's it gonna be?

Thanks chaps. I expect a visit next time you're north :)

Um, it'll be in Ormskirk ("A hotbed of nothing" - R. Fowler). It's been a couple of years in the planning and getting stuff into place but we're now just the stroke of a council official's pen away from actually opening (do not get me started on planning committees, they thought we were planning to be a wine bar so we've just had to restart the whole planning permission process). Once the change of use goes through then the lease on the site will be signed, we'll quit our jobs and get busy with sledgehammers.

The focus is on local as fuck, fish landed at Fleetwood, smoked stuff from Port of Lancaster, local meats and cheeses. It's a delicatessen with kitchen, so my business partner will be selling stuff in the shop whilst I'm knocking out meals upstairs. Platters constructed from the shop's stock, daily changing hot specials (for takeout also), cakes and what have you for afternoon tea (as a proud cornishman, I fully intend introducing a proper Cream Tea to the local heathens). Emphasis very much on the english though (admittedly my background is mostly in French/Italian so doubtless that'll creep in).

congratulations! i was going to say that i made a very nice beet and goat cheese thing last night, but that pales in comparison with your news.

Matt, that's so exciting!

Wow! ILCooking FAP/M (pint/meal) in Ormskirk, anyone? Good luck, Matt!

Woohoo! Matt, that's awesome! When will you know for sure?

I'm already considering how one might rig the OFM awards next year :)

Aw, you'll make me blush.

Basically all we're waiting on is the council's change of use coming through from the planning department of the local council. The licence is fine, the police are happy, the fire officers are happy, the disability access people are happy. The suppliers are ready, the contractors are ready, the staff are trained and waiting to go. The planning department were concerned about losing retail sites until we pointed out that we ARE retail. At which point they said "oh we've got you down as a wine bar". We said "eh? What on earth are you talking about? Wine merchants, yes, wine bar wtf?" and they said "well you'll have to start the change of use process again. So ner" and we smiled politely and said "of course" and plotted dark murder behind our smiles.

End of October, with a bit of luck.

fingers x'ed Matt!

Company pitch-in today, so whipped together greek potato salad (redskins, feta, chopped green olives, w/ olive oil/lemon/black pepper dressing), parsley/tomato/mint/couscous dressed w/ olive oil/lemon/sea salt, and a pan of brownies.

Marinated some top sirloin in lime juice, sriracha, and toasted sesame oil (no chipotles in the house and wanted some kind of spicy smokiness w/ the lime) for about 15 min, stabbing with a fork all over and flipping around 3-4 times. Dried off and grilled and was very spicily excellent.

smoked bacon & kale over pasta. the smokiness of the bacon is very overpowering, i may have used to much! hahaha like that's possible.

Mrs Coastaltown has just cooked plum crumble, which was throroughly fabulous. I'm susbsisting on butties at the moment, long work stint.

Happy culinary new year!

Oops look here instead. Stupid cut and paste.