I spent about an hour on Sunday strolling around the internet looking at food related stuff. I've realised that BBC Good Food is a great resource for recipes and also exhibits excellent food photography - something that most definitely floats my boat!
Inspired by some of the recipes, I decided to embark on a concerted flurry of cookery on this Sunny Snowy Sunday in an attempt to delight the tastebuds of my visiting parents and sister.
Breaded goats cheese and caramelised red onions on rocket
We've been eating Soignon goats cheese (tried to find a link, but they're obviously too busy cheese-creating to faff around with silly internets) for a while now, indulging ourselves in it mostly using pizza. However, I decided to breadcrumb it and gently shallow fry it - hoping for some oozy soft cheese and crunchy crust.
First, I cut the cheese into rounds. Can you guess how many of us there were?
For the breadcrumbs, I put the following into a mini-blender:
- Stale bread
- Salt
- Pepper
- Oregano and basil
- Olive oil
- Parmesan
Using egg as glue, I generously double-coated (dip, coat, then dip, coat again) the cheese rounds, until they looked like this:
To complement the strong, salty goats cheese, I wanted something sweet and tarte, so I quickly caramelised some red onions with balsamic vinegar, a pinch of sugar and a tiny dash of soy sauce (don't tell anyone). About 2 minutes in, the onions looked like this:
I continued cooking them for about 10 minutes at least, until they were extremely dark and soft.
While the recently breaded goats cheese rounds were on a very low heat on a lightly oiled griddle pan, I dressed rocket leaves with balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt.
After 5-6 minutes the breaded rounds were perfectly golden and crunchy on the outside, and soft and gooey inside. I served them on the dressed rocket leaves with a generous portion of the caramelised red onions on top, voila:
Tomato, Rosemary and Garlic flatbread
Tomatos in this country suck. More often than not they're hard, tasteless and a pathetic off-red colour. To significantly improve the experience of eating such sub-par fruits, I cook them for absolutely ages with my favourite things:
My favourite things to slow-roast tomatoes with:
- Garlic
- Really good quality sea salt
- Fresh basil
- Olive oil
Halve the tomatos, chop the garlic, tear up the basil and use olive oil like it's going out of fashion and you'll end up with something like I did, this:
After being in the oven for 1 hour on a low heat (80C?), everything is soft and delicious. There's a rich, red oil left with the tomatos, and if you do enough it'll keep in the fridge in a jar.
I made a quick flatbread and threw on rosemary from the garden, garlic slivers and the roasted tomatoes (as well as some of that awesome oil) to have with an excellent macaroni cheese that Jo made (the photos of the macaroni cheese came out terrible unfortunately):
We sat around our new japanese-style dining table (read: re-purposed Ikea coffee table) to eat and drink together:
Lovely.
