Pan-fried Salmon fillet with tangy herby crème fraiche

I opened the freezer a few days ago. Yes, yes, snigger all you like, of course I often do this. But these days it’s more often to put something in than take something out. My freezer is a graveyard of half-packets of bacon (‘I was going away for a few days and it seemed such a waste...’); odd ends of bread; chicken Kievs I’ve forgotten about; tubs of ice cream; and (my personal favourite) five brace of Whitfield grouse brought down from home in a fit of nostalgia a few months back. Which I will definitely eat any day now. Honestly.

The problem is, I’m moving house in a few weeks, and most of the stuff in the freezer is going to have to go. Oops. Better start eating it.

The first thing that caught my eye as I thought this was a single lonely salmon fillet. Much easier to deal with than five brace of grouse! It also reminded me of a few different crème fraiche dips and general concoctions I’ve recently. They’ve always seemed to go down well. So I thought I’d defrost, marinade and pan-fry this salmon, tell you all about it, and then give you a few other ideas for how you can use crème fraiche to generally jazz up your culinary life.

So here goes:

For the Salmon recipe:

Ingredients

(per person)

1 good quality piece of salmon fillet, wild if possible

Olive oil

Lemon juice

Several sprigs of dill and parsley

Salt and pepper

1-2 tbsp crème fraiche, depending on how greedy you’re feeling

2 tsp finely chopped parsley

2 tsp finely chopped dill

Zest and juice of ½ lemon

½ small shallot, finely chopped

Couple of drops of Tabasco if you like it hot

Salt and plenty of ground black pepper

Method

• Let’s face it; this isn’t a particularly tricky one. Marinade the salmon (I actually did this in a sealable freezer bag, which is great because you can throw it out afterwards instead of washing it up!) by pouring over a good slosh of olive oil and squeezing in plenty of lemon juice. Squidge up the sprigs of herb in your hands to bruise them (helps release their flavour) and add them to the marinade, making sure they get covered in oil.

• Season the whole lot with salt and pepper, make sure everything is covering the salmon and they’re all getting pretty close and personal, then leave it all to marinade for at least half an hour.

You probably don’t want to leave it much longer than this because the lemon juice in there will start to ‘cook’ the salmon, making it turn opaque. Out of interest, this is actually a legitimate cooking method (chemical cooking) and if you leave small pieces of salmon for long enough (say, over half an hour) in a marinade with plenty of lemon juice, you can eat it just as it is. I’m going to cook this piece, though, because I like the caramelised flavour you get when you sear salmon.

• While the salmon’s in the marinade, you can get on with the crème fraiche mixture, which is easy peasy. Chop everything that needs chopping, zest and juice the lemon, mix the whole lot together and season it well with salt and plenty of pepper (less pepper if you’re using Tabasco). Taste and adjust to suit you. Done.

If that didn’t take you half an hour, I’m not surprised. Have a glass of wine while you wait for the salmon to marinade. Yes, that is part of the recipe.

• Get some olive oil in a frying pan nice and hot. When you’re ready for the salmon and it’s ready for you, take it out of the marinade and pick off any herbs that stick. Pop it in the frying pan skin side up to start with. It should sizzle straight away, and if the pan’s hot enough it shouldn’t stick.

• Cook on that side until the outside is turning golden brown, and then turn it over onto the skin side for most of the rest of the cooking time. When it’s perfectly cooked, it should still be moist inside, and just turning opaque in the centre. Just cook it how you like it, though. Obviously.

I shoved some halved baby plum tomatoes in the frying pan with the salmon after I turned it, just because they were hanging around and I like fried tomatoes. You can do this too if you like. Don't forget to season them.

• Once the salmon’s cooked, whack the lot on a plate and spoon over the crème fraiche mixture. Eat with some salad and those tomatoes, and marvel at the power of the quick, healthy(ish) supper.

Yes, a food styling course is indeed top of my Christmas list...

A few other things you can do with crème fraiche

Dip for crisps: Mix it with grated parmesan, plenty of finely chopped fresh herbs (including chives, parsley, and whatever you fancy), lemon juice, Tabasco, salt and pepper.

Canapés: Mix with lots of lemon juice and season well, then heap it on warm blinis or oatcakes and top with smoked salmon and maybe some onuga caviar (not the crazy expensive stuff - you can get this kind in little jars from the supermarket).

With rare beef: Mix with a spoonful of your favourite mustard, finely chopped shallot, Tabasco, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, dash of lemon juice, finely chopped tarragon, parsley and chives, and salt and pepper.

With lamb: Wrap a whole blub of garlic in tinfoil with a bit of oil, salt and pepper and roast it in a hot oven for half an hour. Squeeze out the cloves and put the resulting mush through a sieve. Mix this with the crème fraiche and add a tiny bit of chopped shallot and the chopped herbs of your choice (don’t use rosemary or thyme though, they’re too hard). Season. Nice with roast lamb instead of gravy on a hot day.

With chicken, beef or fish: Mix with chopped chilli, lime zest and juice, chopped shallot, Thai fish sauce and chopped coriander.

As pudding: Mix in a bit of icing sugar to sweeten and eat with ripe berries or slices of mango. Marginally healthier than cream...

Those of us who have seen that South Park episode (no link, because it’s not for the fainthearted...Google it yourself, ‘South Park crème fraiche’ should do it) might have been a little put off this best of dairy products. I think this is a shame. Ok, it’s not very ‘fine dining’, but crème fraiche can be a great friend to the home cook. Let it into your life, and it’ll work for you. You won’t regret it.

Cougette Carbonara - Comfort with a Twist

There are some days when I long for some comfort food. After the long, rainy week we’ve had (which, incidentally, I’ve spent working very hard catering in the North of Scotland!), it’s just what I need. My ultimate comfort food is my Mum’s spaghetti Carbonara. It’s not the traditional Italian recipe – we add cream and white wine.

Totally traditional Italian spaghetti Carbonara just uses eggs; bacon or pancetta; a hard cheese like parmesan or pecorino; and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. In fact, on a family holiday to Italy a few years ago, I mentioned to a local lady that I needed some cream because I was making Carbonara for my family that evening, and she was horrified!

Nevertheless, I’m not ashamed to say that I love a bit of cream in my Carbonara sauce, and even some white wine for that extra bit of flavour. This time, though, I wanted to take it even further. I felt like the comfort of Carbonara, but with a twist.

There was a courgette in the fridge, so I thought I’d inject a few vitamins into what is, let’s face it, not usually the healthiest of meals. I remembered a method of making courgette ‘spaghetti’ I learned recently, so I thought I’d try mixing the courgette stuff with the real thing. In fact, if you wanted you could even try doing the whole thing with courgette spaghetti. I think you might find it a bit squishy, though.

Then I noticed half a leftover bread roll lurking at the bottom of the bread bin and figured I’d top my concoction with toasted breadcrumbs, just to use it up. I liked the result so much I thought I’d write it down for you all.

One last note – Carbonara isn’t really a suitable dish for expectant mothers, the very old or the very young, because there’s a slight risk of the egg being undercooked. If you are cooking for any of these groups, it’s better to overheat the egg and have it scramble a bit in the sauce than to give somebody salmonella. Safety first.

And now that I’ve put you all off, on with the recipe!

Ingredients

(per person)

½ a courgette

Small handful of spaghetti (a bit less than you have of courgette)

½ a small bread roll or one piece of sliced bread

A bit of butter

2 rashers of bacon

A slosh of white wine

A bigger slosh of double cream

1 egg

Grated hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino

Salt and plenty of ground black pepper

Recipe

First of all, get your bacon in the oven to cook until crispy. Put the bread roll in the oven at the same time, until it’s turning brown and completely dried out.

Meanwhile, you want to slice the courgette into long, thin strips about the size and length of your spaghetti. I did this with a knife, but a mandolin works even better if you have one. Set it to thin julienne and just run the courgette up and down. There are plenty to choose from here if you’re interested in one – and no, I’m not being paid by Amazon, or by a mysterious consortium of mandolin-makers. I just like mandolins!

Whiz up the bread roll in your blender or magi-mix to make breadcrumbs. If you don’t have any fancy electric gadgets, you can always wrap the bread in a bag or tea towel and give it a good bash with a rolling pin. When you’ve got some nice small breadcrumbs, fry them off quickly and gently in butter until they’re hot, brown and crispy. Remove them from the pan onto some kitchen paper to drain.

Boil some salted water for the pasta and get the spaghetti going. Once the bacon is ready, chop it into bitesize pieces. Put it in the pan you used for the breadcrumbs, get it hot, then add the wine and reduce it by about half. Add the cream and bring the mixture briefly to a simmer. Then remove it from the heat, let it cool for a few seconds, and add the egg, stirring well so that it combines into the cream mixture without becoming scrambled. The egg will be cooked by the residual heat from the pan, but it should remain liquid.

When the pasta is about a minute away from being fully cooked (when it’s just too al dente for your taste, in other words) add the courgette strips and let them boil with the pasta for the remaining minute of 30 seconds – that’s all they need to cook.

Finally, mix the pasta and courgette into the cream, egg and bacon. Season it well with salt and lots of ground black peppercorns. Plop plenty into your bowl and top with the grated parmesan and breadcrumbs, and maybe a sprinkling of chopped parsley for some extra colour. Comfort with a twist!

A Porky Dilemma

A preliminary note - be picky about your pig

These days, pork is much less fatty that it used to be. The public’s taste tends to be for lean meat, so animals are now bred lean. This is why many people complain that roast pork is ‘too dry’ – the modern meat contains less veins of fat, despite the fact that fat is what used to give proper roast pork its moisture and deep flavour. However, some specialist breeders and food outlets are fighting this trend, particularly by introducing more unusual breeds of pig whose meat has fallen off the map. I’d urge you to search out this superior pork – it’ll make all the difference to your meal.

What to do with pork fillet?

Pork fillet is one of those things I’m never sure what to do with. I found some lurking at the bottom of my freezer recently, and immediately panicked about how to use it up. Just like beef fillet, it’s a lean cut which benefits from quick cooking to keep it tender and moist. Because it’s actually fat that gives meat a lot of its flavour, pork fillet (again like its beefy counterpart) is not, perhaps, the most flavoursome cut. Its appeal rests in its tender texture. However, unlike beef fillet, it can’t be eaten raw: unless your meat is carefully sourced and checked, raw pork can carry tapeworm, hookworm and various other nasties. So all those carpaccios and rare steaks – all that’s best about well-sourced beef fillet – are out of the equation with pork.

How, then, to make the best of this cut of lovely meat? With quick but thorough cooking, I think, and with lots of flavour added to make up for its lack of fat. A stir-fry springs to mind. The one below uses Thai flavours but is not authentically Thai, because while I love the Asian ingredients I’ve used here, I’m not nearly experienced enough in their proper use to presume to tell you about it. I can only tell you what I like to do with them.

A bit about stir-frying

To me, the principle of stir-frying is to cook your ingredients fast in a shallow layer of hot oil, continually moving them around by stirring them or tossing them in the pan keep the cooking even. It’s similar to the technique to French call sauté. You need to use oil with a high smoke point (if you’re not sure what that means, it’s the temperature at which the oil starts to smoke in the pan. Any cooking oil should do, but ideally not olive oil, which burns too easily). Later, I’ve said to ‘deglaze’ the pan with a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce. Again, this is both a French and an Asian technique, and how I do it is not particularly authentic. Still, I like it.

The list of ingredients is long for this one, as is the method. It’s a lot easier than it looks, although the amount of chopping may sound a bit excessive. Do you really want to spend half an hour or more chopping stuff up? I think you do, for two reasons: First, it’s therapeutic, especially if you stick on a bit of music or catch up with some TV. You might even enjoy it. Second, you’ll definitely enjoy the meal. And from personal experience, I can guarantee that the leftovers taste fantastic cold the next day.

Make it your own!

As usual, remember that you can always put your own stamp on your food. By all means use different vegetables to the ones I've specified: red pepper springs to mind for some reason. Also fresh bean sprouts. The tail end of a beef fillet would be a fantastic replacement for the pork - ask your butcher. It's a lot cheaper than the fat end! Try adding some good-quality Thai curry paste (with the veg) and extra coconut milk (at the end) to turn your stir-fry into an extra-quick curry. Or you could marinade the pork for a while, with a bit of chilli, lime, garlic, soy sauce, nam pla and so on...

As always, the culinary world’s your oyster. Or your pork fillet, in this case. 

Ingredients

1 large courgette

Piece of whole pork fillet – it should look like the about same amount as you have of courgette

1 lime, zest and juice

1 handful unsalted cashews

1 chunk fresh ginger (about the size of your thumb), peeled and grated

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

3-6 spring onions

Splash of soy sauce

Splash of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

About 1/3 of a tin of coconut milk

Vegetable or sesame oil (olive at a pinch, but ideally not)

Small bunch of coriander

Thin noodles (fresh or dried)

Method

First of all, get all your ingredients chopped and prepared. Zest and juice the lime; grate the ginger; peel and crush the garlic; de-seed and finely chop the chilli (include the seeds if you like a bit more heat). Pull most of the stems off the coriander and roughly chop it. Cut the white end of the spring onions into small, wafer-thin rounds, and the floppy green end into thin strips. Open your tin of coconut milk and stir the solids into the liquid underneath. Fish your cashews out from the bag. You want everything to hand once you start cooking.

To prepare the courgette, peel off thin strips with a vegetable peeler. Cut these in half widthways, then pile them up and slice them lengthways into quarters. You should end up with thin, ribbon-shaped pieces that are about half the length of the original courgette.

If your noodles are dried, you need to cook them: pop them into salted water which has reached a rolling boil. Once they’re floppy and a bit softened, drain them and put them straight into a bowl of cold water to cool. The best way of telling if they’re done is to taste them! It doesn’t matter if they’re a tiny bit underdone, as you’re going to heat them up once you’ve finished the stir-fry anyway.

Final bit of preparation is the pork. First, slice the fillet into thin rounds. They should be less than 0.5cm thick if you can manage it (the main thing is to have a sharp knife!). Then slice up the rounds into thin strips, about the width of your strips of courgette or thinner.

Now you’re there with your preparation, you’re only ten minutes or so away from dinner. Hang in there – this is the good bit.

Pour a little pool of oil into the most non-stick frying pan or wok you have. Put it over a high heat until the oil is really hot. It shouldn’t be smoking – that means it’s close to burning – but it should be just below that. Drop a piece of pork in to test; if it sizzles, you’re on the money.

Slip all the pork into the frying pan, taking care it doesn’t spit hot oil all over you. Cook it fast until each piece is golden brown all over, keeping it moving with a spoon or spatula and always making sure it doesn’t stick. Then take it out of the pan and set it aside of a moment.

Now for the veg. Keep the pan hot and don’t worry about changing the oil – all that flavour from the pork will get soaked up by your veg as it cooks. Add the chilli, ginger and lime zest first and cook for half a minute or so. Then add the garlic and give it another half minute before you put in the courgette and both cuts of spring onion. Once the courgette looks fully cooked everything else should be too, so add cashews and put the pork back in at this point.

Now you deglaze – add the lime juice, soy sauce and nam pla, and scrape all the flavoursome goodies off the bottom of the pan as it bubbles madly. Turn the heat down a notch and stir in the coconut milk, then scrape the whole lot out of the pan and put it somewhere warm.

Last but not least, put the noodles in the pan (again, don’t clean it first) and stir them around a bit over the heat for a minute or two. At this point, if you like, you can add the stir-fry mixture to the noodles. I like to keep them separate for some mysterious reason, but each to their own.

Serve up in bowls, with a slice of lime and a generous sprinkling of chopped coriander to bring the colours back to life. Was it worth all that chopping? Of course it was!

The Joys of Wild Garlic

All about wild garlic: your new favourite herb

Known officially as ‘Allium Ursinum’ and colloquially as bear’s garlic, wood garlic and ‘ramsons’, the wild garlic plant is a delicious free addition to the larder at this time of year. You can find them growing all over the country, especially in woodlands and by roadsides, and even in parts of London!

They have shiny, dark green leaves shaped like a pointed oval and, as the season progresses, beautiful, star-like white flowers. More importantly, however, they smell very strongly of onions – you’ll be able to locate them in the woods just by following their smell.

Unlike domestic or cultivated garlic, wild garlic leaves are much more widely used than its roots or bulbs, as these are much smaller than those of cultivated garlic. However, the whole plant is edible, so if you want to give the roots a go then do! The flowers are also edible and look wonderful sprinkled onto salad.

How to pick

When you’re picking, try to leave some buds so that the plant can reproduce, and there’ll be some around for you next year! If you’re after the leaves, pinch the leaf off at the stem, leaving the root in the ground if you can – the leaves will often grow back a second time if you leave them enough stem.

When I picked my lot a few days ago, the buds were sprouting but hadn’t yet flowered (they look a bit like pointy seed pods). These ‘pods’ are absolutely delicious pan-fried in butter and olive oil and sprinkled with a little salt – crispy and soft, and tasting mildly of roast garlic. I thoroughly recommend you pick some if you’re out and about.

You need to take a little care when picking wild garlic as there are a few plants that look similar but aren’t edible, notably Lily of the Valley. There’s freely available advice on the internet about telling them apart, but the main clue is the smell – you’ll notice an oniony scent anywhere where wild garlic grows, and it’s really pungent when you crush a leaf between your fingers. Don’t worry: it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as it smells! In addition, the flowers of Lily of the Valley are bell-shaped, rather like snowdrops, and its leaves grow from one central stem, whereas wild garlic leaves each grow individually on one stem.

Eating it

The younger leaves of wild garlic are best for salads, as they’re a little more tender. When picking, you’ll sometimes find them towards the edge of a cluster, or underneath the larger, older leaves. They’re also wonderful chopped into ribbons and added towards the end of a stir-fry, especially with some julienne of ginger. You can add the younger roots to stir-fries as well – treat them a bit like spring onion. Don’t leave out the older leaves – they’re great for soup, since you’ll be pureeing it anyway, and you can also blanche them in some boiling salted water until they wilt and eat them a bit like spinach.

So that’s old leaves, young leaves, roots, flowers, buds; soup, salad, stir-fries, blanched leaves, pan-fried buds. You can even make wild garlic pesto (no joke – the recipe’s below). This could well be the most useful plant in the universe. Now cook with it!

Wild Garlic Soup

Ingredients

Knob of butter

1 large onion

1 large potato

Medium-sized mixing bowl full of wild garlic leaves

50ml white wine

1 litre chicken stock – preferably homemade, but stock cubes are fine

2 tbs crème fraiche or cream

Salt and pepper

Method

Roughly chop the onion and potato and wash the garlic leaves well. Sweat the onion in the butter until it’s translucent and soft, then add the potato and sweat for another minute or so.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine (just pour it in and scrape the yummy bits off the bottom), and let it reduce to a light syrup, then add the chicken stock and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the potato is well cooked through.

Once the potato is cooked through, add the garlic leaves and cook for another two minutes once they’ve wilted. Purée the soup until it is a consistent colour and texture, then add the crème fraiche or cream if you’re using it, and stir it in well. Taste it, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Then pour into a lovely big bowl and enjoy!

As a garnish, you have a few lovely options. You can set aside a few leaves of garlic, and slice these into really thin strips to top each bowl, with a spoonful of cream. Or you can make up a little bowl of pesto from the recipe below and serve the soup with a blob swirled in. Again, this looks fantastic with a bit of cream swirled in too!

Wild Garlic Pesto

Ingredients

A couple of large handfuls of wild garlic

1 small shallot

50-60g hard, salty cheese such as parmesan

50-60g pine nuts or shelled, peeled walnuts

80 ml olive oil, plus enough to cover the pesto in the jam jar

½ tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper

1 tsp sugar

Method

Wash and thoroughly dry the garlic leaves, grate the cheese, and very roughly chop the shallot and nuts. If you need to peel the walnuts, blanche them for a few minutes in rapidly boiling water and try to peel them while they're hot: it's a fiddly job at the best of times, but this makes it a little easier.

Pulse the nuts and shallot in the food processor until broken up somewhat, then add the garlic leaves and oil and continue to pulse until the garlic is chopped up very small and a consistent texture is achieved.

Fold the cheese into the mixture, then season to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour it into clean jam jars, then top up with oil until the pesto is totally covered (this is important to keep it fresh and green).

Keep your pesto in the fridge; it’s at its best up to a week after making it. It’s great with meat, particularly chicken and sausages; with soft, mild cheeses or salads; and with the soup recipe above. It’s also yummy on pasta!

A final note: I've just looked out of my kitchen window into the crummy, bin-filled yard that counts as my garden, and guess what's growing in all the corners? You got it: wild garlic. It's probably closer than you think!