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Serrano ham, goats cheese & honey crostini for a housewarming

Housewarming.  Isn't it a lovely word? Apparently the term is related to the ancient practice of taking embers from the fire of an old house to start the first fire in the new house.  These days, however, it's more a case of your friends wishing you a warm welcome into your new home.  Either way, seeing as one of my major life goals is not to move home too often (!), I have not had the opportunity of throwing too many housewarming parties.  My last one was over ten years ago back in Port Elizabeth, and I remember very little about it, other than Bronwyn and me mixing a lethal batch of punch in a cooler box, and one guest bringing along his Jack Russel terrier and her puppies. As you do.

The housewarming party we had last weekend was slightly more organised, but also more fraught.  For a start, we had only been in the house for five days.  Secondly, we only had the carpets fitted the day before, so until 24 hours before the guetss arrived, most of my worldly possesions were stacked up in the conservatory - where I pictured the guests sipping cocktails!  Oh, and did I mention we had two houseguests staying with us, and that I went to see the Pet Shop Boys in concert the night before the party?  It all made for an interesting couple of days...

But I my friends are forgiving bunch and that, coupled with a Herculean effort from Nick to clear the conservatory while I was at the concert, meant that the party was a roaring success.  I had decided to keep things simple and restrict the canapés on offer, so what we had was:

• vegetable crudites with hummus

• crisps

• crostini topped with crayfish meat in Marie Rose sauce

• caprese mini skewers

• crostini topped with black olive tapenade and cherry tomato

• home-made smoked mackerel pate with crackers

• parmesan puff-pastry pinwheels

• spicy barbecued chicken wings

• a cheese board

• crostini topped with Serrano ham, goats cheese and honey

To drink, I offered Kir Royale and Bucks Fizz cocktails, plus some beer for the boys, and soon the party was well under way.  Sadly I took very few photographs of the catering as I was too busy socialising and walking around with canapés, but here are a couple for your viewing pleasure:

 

No matter how crazy my off-blog life has become, I would not dream of missing out on the event that I co-founded, Waiter, There's Something in My... and I was thrilled that the theme of tapas, chosen by Andrew this month, roughtly fitted in with the food for my party.  The inspiration for these came from our fabulous chalet hosts when we went skiing in Morzine earlier this year, and I figured that the addition of Spanish Serrano ham and their bite-sized nature brought them firmly under the umbrella of tapas ;-)  Call them what you like, I do encourage you to try them as the flavours are just marvellous.  Salut!

SERRANO HAM, GOATS CHEESE & HONEY CROSTINI (makes about 20)

Ingredients:

About 20 baguette slices
3-4 slices of Serrano ham (or similar cured ham)
1 small log of goats cheese with a rind
runny honey
parsley and/or black pepper to garnish

Method

Toast the baguettes slowly in a medium oven, turning once, until they are crisp through.

Slice the ham into pieces so that each slice of bread gets enough to nearly cover it.  Slice the goats cheese very thinly so that there is a slice for each piece of bread.  Cover the ham with the cheese. 

Place the toasts onto a baking sheet and pop them under a medium grill for 5 minutes or until the cheese is begnning to melt. 

Transfer to a serving plate, drizzle with honey and garnish with parsley and black pepper.  Serve hot.

Saturday Snapshots #44

Hibiscus - April 2009

Hibiscus (also called Jamaica, hence the wonderful hibiscus drink agua de Jamaica) is a member of a large family of over 200 flowering plants, related both to cacao and cotton.  They have a tremendous range of colours (often two-toned, my favourite being hot orange and hot pink) and although I grew up thinking they were common as mud, they are a rarity here in the UK's cold climate.  Now, together with frangipani, they are probably the flowers I miss most from home, and every time I visit South Africa I come back with copious pictures of them.  This pretty pink specimen lives in my brother's garden in Port Elizabeth.

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store.

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I love moving house.  It ranks right up there together with self-immolation, root canal work and repeatedly smashing my thumb with a hammer as a leisure activity.  Gee, how I wish I could move more often.

NOT! 

As relaxing weekends go, last weekend (12-14 June) was probably not the best, starting as it did with a visit to the new house late on Friday to check that all the work was done.  Although everything looked like million bucks, we did notice straight away that the lounge was still full of building materials (and a toilet!), meaning the building work hadn't quite finished on schedule.  In the overall scheme of things, not too bad.  But from there, the annoying discoveries came fast & thick:

1) the electrician was not sure which lights to mount on the wall in the bathroom, so he mounted the 2 lights that are meant to be the ceiling lights in the lobby and guest loo!! All I could think of was the 3 screw fittings that those lights come with, and how they had probably drilled holes for them in my pristine porcelain tiles...

2) the loo roll holder was mounted in such a way that it was too close to the wall to get a full roll of loo paper onto it!!

3) nobody had checked to see if the toilet and the boxing behind the toilet (to cover the bath waste pipe) were matched in size, despite the fact that the loo had been standing in the lounge, ready to be measured, for 2 weeks. So they had built the box, then installed the toilet... but the back of the cistern was a good 5-10cm away from the wall. If you were to lean back, it would TILT!!

4) they had fitted a Yale lock to the front door... and managed to misalign the lock and the little hole in the door jamb where the lock is meant to engage, so the Yale did not lock/work.

I'd be lying to you if I said I was a happy puppy on Friday night. I just felt totally defeated by it all - it was as if we'd put in SO much effort and commitment and planning, and one careless afternoon screws it all up. And now we not only had the prospect of a fight with the builder on our hands, we also had more work to be done on the house and the prospect of builders on site next week when we are living there! And things got worse. On Saturday morning the electrician showed up to change the lights and we told him just to push the key (to the old, working lock) through the mail slot when he was done. We went shopping, had lunch, and at about 3 Nick returned to the new house with paint & brushes, ready to go. Only to find that... the electrician had SOMEHOW forced the door to lock and engage the night latch, so he was locked out of the house completely. Call the builder - no answer. So Nick called a locksmith, who came out and spent AN HOUR (and £90) breaking into our house and explaining to us how this was the wrong lock for the door altogether. So now we also had a big hole in our (steel plated) door!! (at least we know the house is hard to break into...).

But through all this, we still had to move.  Our old landlord had his builder coming in on Monday morning, so we had no choice but to get our stuff into the new house.  I read a wodnerful Stephen King book a year or two ago called Hearts in Atlantis.  In the first novella, an old man arrives to lodge with the young hero and his mother, and the mother takes against the lodger purely on the basis that he arrived with his possessions in shopping bags rather than suitcases.  On that score, we were already marked out as social pariahs, as most of our stuff made the move in the council's orange plastic recycling bags! This is what happens when you decide to move yourself rather than engage the professionals... 

Because we had a couple of oversize pieces of furniture (and because Nick did not want my potted plants in his car!), we also engaged the services of that great British institution: the man with a van.  Ours was Polish and arrived looking like a 16-year old surfer in need of a beach, as well as looking stoned off his board.  Nice.  Just the look you want in the man who is moving your precious possessions.  Good thing the drive between the houses takes precisely 30 seconds!

So by Sunday night, everythign we own had been hauled out of the old house and deposited in the new house, mainly in the uncarpeted rooms (i.e. the kitchen, the conservatory and the study), so as to avoid having to move everything again ahead of re-carpeting.  Our first meal in our new house was (*shocking culinary exposé alert!*) a bucket of KFC eaten on the lounge floor shortly before midnight.  It had been that kind of day.  And then it was off to dreamland on our borrowed inflatible mattress (thanks Olwen!).

Monday morning bright and early we had the builders back in, and to our relief they agreed with pretty much all our gripes and immediately set about rectifying them.  As I said, the electrician had already switched the lights on Saturday, and as it turns out he had stopped short of drilling holes for the incorrect ones, so no holes in my tiles.  The loo roll holder was removed and flipped around so that it became usable.  The space behind the toilet cistern was promptly boxed in and tiled so that it is now solid as a rock. And the lock was replaced with a perfectly fitted Yale.  They had brought extra drill bits, so soon the bathroom fittings were all installed; and the plumber made short work of installing the downstairs loo, so no more lounge-loos for us.  Hurrah!  I have to say, overall I was really impressed with our builders, and still amazed at the fact that they got the project done on time (give or take a day!) in 2 weeks flat - and for exactly the quoted price.  If ever you are in need of bathroom specialists in East London, do yourself a favour and give Jason from JJH Interiors a call.  And if you want a reference, call CookSister :) Check my Flickr album for a full photographic account of the renovations and move.

All that remained were the new carpets (which were done last Friday and look like a million bucks) and painting (an ongoing project for which Nick volunteered!).  And of course the unconfined joy of living in a house where anything you need is guaranteed to be packed in the box at the bottom of four tons of other stuff, behind the upturned desk in the study.  Luckily my work colleagues have been too discreet to mention the fact that I suddenly only appear to own three outfits. 

So apologies if posts have been scarce on this blog - as you see I have been spectacularly otherwise occupied.  But I have lots to tell you, particularly about our houswewarming party last weekend and the food I served - which was, incidentally, a perfect match for the latest edition of the Waiter, There's Something in My... event.  Andrew is hosting and the theme is tapas, so make sure you check your chorizo, try your tortilla, and manage your morcilla in time for the deadline at the end of June. 

Please don't forget to check out my latest column on Food24, all about when to buy organic and when not to bother. 

Saturday Snapshots #43

 

Brooklyn Bridge sunset, New York City - October 2006

The beautiful neo-Gothic Brooklyn Bridge connects Manhattan with Brooklyn and upon its completion in 1883, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.  A week after it opened to the public, a rumour that it was going to collapse started a stampede in which twelve people were crushed to death.  A year later, to put paid to these rumours (and, presumably, to promote his circus), PT Barnum had his star attraction Jumbo lead a parade of 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge to prove its strength.  Today, it is one of New York City's best-loved landmarks and no trip to the city is complete without a walk across the bridge at sunset.

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store.

Saturday Snapshots #42

The Trooping of the Colour - June 2005

The Trooping of the Colour takes place each summer in London and is the official celebration of Queen Elizabeth's birthday - even though her real date of birth is 21 April.  It consists of a military parade involving a staggering 1400 men and women from various army regiments, plus hundreds of horses and gun carriages.  The parade starts at Buckingham Palace and moves up the Mall to converge on Horseguards Parade.  Here, surrounded by spectator stands, a lot of very impressive precision marching to military bands takes place, as well as an inspection of the troops and a chance to glimpse members of the Royal Family. 

The troops participating in the parade are drawn from a military organisation called the Household Division which is a part of the British Army and therefore composed of fully trained, operational troops.  The participating regiments include the Life Guards, Blues and Royals, Grenadier Guards, Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, Irish Guards, Welsh Guards, and the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery.  For more details on these and some photos, please check my previous detailed post on the Trooping of the Colour.

If you want to see the action up close and personal from the spectator stands on Horseguards Parade, you have three chances to do so:  two rehearsals and the event itself, on three consecutive Saturdays in May/June.  You need to apply in writing to the Household Division in about February and request tickets. They then allocate tickets by ballot and inform you whether your application is successful. Tickets must be paid for in advance and are sent to you by post about a month before the event. Should you be lucky enough to get tickets, remember that there is a dress code in the parade ground stands: lounge suit, morning dress or military regalia for men. No mention of women, but I presume a frock would be in order rather than jeans! Also, take a hat - some of the stands face directly into the hot sun.  (If you can't get to London but want to see a trooping ceremony, DVDs of the Trooping of the Colour are also sometimes available.)

And even if you don't get a seat in the stands, you can watch for free from anywhere along The Mall.  Beware though - the event is extremely popular and you may have to show up and stake your claim early to a spot with an unobstructed view, like I did - otherwise all your photos will be of the back of the tall guy in front of you's head ;-)

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store.

Pork neck fillet roast with cumin & apricots - and renovations!

I must admit that I never thought this house move/renovation project would be so all-consuming! It really does seem that all I am doing is liaising with the builder, popping round to the house to see what the tiler/plasterer/carpenter are up to, notifying banks, utility companies etc. about the change of address, talking to the shipping company in South Africa about sending our stuff, packing up our current abode, trying to clean all the neglected corners... it's just never-ending!  And there will be more upheaval in the new house when our furniture finally arrives.  Until then, we'll be sleeping on the floor and living out of suitcases.  Joy.  Maybe I'll just sleep in my beautiful kitchen ;-)

Thanks to all of you who have wished me well in my new kitchen.  Sadly, I haven't been able to use it for the past 10 days as there is no running water till the bathroom renovation is done.  But with a bit of luck, the contractors will finish up at the end of the week and we will move over the weekend.  And especially for Mark (and all you other renovations voyeurs out there!) I have put up a Flickr album of the work in progress - browse at your leisure - I will be adding more as work progresses :)

Even amidst all this upheaval, you need to maintain some sort of order.  Despite Nick spending most of Sunday painting and me spending most of the day preparing the potplants for their big move and packing books and clothes, I still found time for a proper Sunday roast.  And it's a recession-friendly one, no less!  Whereas our pork purchases are usually limited to pork chops or pork loin, the other day we came across a pork neck fillet joint at Sainsbury's - marked down to a shade over £2 for 0.8kg.  It was tied up in netting to keep its shape and looked just the right size for the two of us so into the basket it went. 

As you will see below, I prepared it simply so that I could carry on packing while it cooked - and I have to say that it was a roaring success!  I felt that the meat had more flavour than pork loin (rather like a comparison between poultry dark meat and light meat) while still retaining tenderness.  Paired with mustard mash and steamed broccoli, our Sunday roast was a delicious little island of comfortable familiarity in a sea of upheaval around us.

PORK NECK FILLET ROAST WITH CUMIN AND APRICOTS (serves 2-3)

Ingredients:

1 pork neck fillet, preferably rolled into a roast and tied in netting to keep its shape during cooking
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
3/4 cup of chopped dried apricots
a little olive oil for brushing
1 tsp ground cumin
Maldon sea salt (or koshering salt)
water

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 190C.  Place the roast in a suitable roasting tin and brush with a little olive oil.  Rub all over with salt and ground cumin.

Arrange the onions and apricots around the meat and pour enough water into the roasting tin so that the apricots and onions are almost covered.

Cook uncovered in a pre-heated oven for 35 minutes per 500g, plus an extra 30 minutes.  Every half hour or so, spoon some of the cooking juices over the meat to keep it moist. 

Allow to rest for 10 minutes before carving, during which time you can pour the cooking juices, apricots & onions into a small saucepan and reduce.  Serve with mustard mash and steamed brocolli, with the reduced cooking juices spooned over the meat.

TIP:  You could also use pork neck fillet to make my mustard-glazed pork.

Saturday Snapshots #41

 

Rose - June 2009

What is it about roses that inspires us endlessly?  O rose, thou art sick.  A rose by any other name. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  Maybe it's the scent, maybe the mysterious unfolding of the petals, or the unique pattern of each flower's structure, like a floral fingerprint.  Either way, this beautifully scented peachy pink rose had me mesmerised last weekend.  Georgia O'Keeffe, eat your heart out!

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store.

Blueberry fool with pistachios

 

Another week, another post drought here on Cooksister. Aaaargh.

I have to say, I do not know how people undertake their own DIY house renovations.  Even just trying to project manage somebody else to do my renovations is doing my head in!  It eats up all your time and energy and I hardly cook (true confession: we had sardines on toast one night this week.  Mea culpa.), let alone blog.  It's just a whirl of carpenters and plumbers and porcelain vs. ceramic tiles and choosing door handles. On Wednesday night Nick and I were standing in the large room formerly known as "two separate bedrooms", staring at the wall we had taken down in preparation for redistributing the space.  I turned to Nick and said "well, I guess we've passed the point of no return now!!"

Still, life goes on, and last weekend before true chaos descended on the new house we did manage to take advantage of the FABULOUS weather and host a little braai in our new place.  We sat in the garden among the bumblebees who were all lazily exploring the flowering hedge (some sort of pyracantha, I think), enjoying the sun and later moved to the conservatory where we feasted on Nick's marinated chicken thighs.  Given that we are still not living there and all cooking utensils and ingredients have to be ferried across from our old place, desserts tend to be simple.  Last week I made my volcanic baked apples for friends - this time round it was an old English favourite:  blueberry fool.

Now a fool is an ancient English dessert in which whipped cream, puréed fruit, sugar and possibly a flavouring agent are mixed together, with the classic being gooseberry fool.  I have noticed on recent visits to gastropubs that such old English desserts are enjoying a revival - rhubarb crumble, lemon posset, and all manner of fruit fools are gracing all sorts of upmarket pub tables.  Although the theme that my co-founder Johanna selected for this month's Waiter, There's Something in My... event was bistro cooking, she expanded the theme slightly to include the kind of food that you might find in a gastropub - which is why this is my (hilariously late) entry into this month's WTSIM.  The pistachios are an entirely untraditional addition but looked gorgeous on the cover of a recent Sainsbury's magazine - so I proceeded to be inspired :)

BLUEBERRY FOOL WITH PISTACHIOS (serves 4)

Ingredients:

1 x 300g punnet fresh blueberries
500ml whipping or double cream
a little caster sugar (of desired - I didn't use any)
4 Tbsp crushed roasted pistachios (I used salted)

Method:

Place the blueberries in a small saucepan over low heat with about 50ml of water (and a little caster sugar is you like it sweet).  Simmer until the berries start to break up.  Use a fork to break them up further and continue to simmer until all the berries have been roughly crushed.  Allow to cool.

In the meanwhile, crush the pistachios roughly and beat the cream until stiff peaks form.  Fold the cooled berry mixture into the whipped cream, leaving swirls of colour rather than mixing it in completely. 

Scoop equal amounts of the cream/berry mix into 4 wine glasses or glass bowls, top each with a Tbsp of crushed pistachios and serve. 

Green Thai curry vegetable ribbons

It’s been a good week for Carla Bruni and Hugh Jackman.

It’s been a bad week for Peter Andre (poor lamb.  But what was he thinking marrying her?!?)

It’s been a good week for Austria.

It’s been (another) bad week for Zimbabwe.

It’s been a good week for Cooksister the Homeowner (OMG, could I love my new house any more??)

It’s been a bad week for Cooksister the Blogger (I still love you all!!  I’m sorry I have been so scarce!!)  In fact on the topic of a bad week, I discovered this week that since mid-March, Nourish (the service that provides the weekly Cooksister newsletters to which some of you subscribe) has not been functioning and now appears to have closed down without telling its users.  So my apologies to all of you that have been denied your newsletters – I am working on finding another provider and I’ll let you know when it’s sorted…

I must confess that it’s also not been the best week for cooking.  Every day after work I’ve either been working on the house, meeting with contractors, or at the gym.  Creative cooking has taken, shall we say, a back seat for now and I have found myself falling back on quick and easy favourites, or foraging in the fridge for random leftovers until inspiration struck.  Probably not my finest culinary hour, but there you go!

It is only when you cook for two (or one), that you realise how the supermarket world is geared towards portions for 4 or more people.  This means that I often had half a pack of this or half a tin of that left over, and in these credit crunched times, I’m sure as hell not throwing any half-tins of anything edible out!   One of the things that most often lurks in my fridge as a half tin is coconut milk.  When I make my easy Thai green chicken curry for me and Nick, there is invariably a third to a half a tin left.  It doesn’t keep all that long, so I usually have to think of something to do with it pretty quick – and that was the dilemma facing me this week.  What to do with a little leftover coconut milk and some vegetables that needed eating?

The answer was a huge hit with both of us:  vegetable ribbons in a green Thai curry sauce, served to accompany quickly pan-fried medallions of pork loin.  It’s pretty, it’s quick, it’s delicious… and it takes care of that pesky half-tin

GREEN THAI CURRY VEGETABLE RIBBONS (serves 2)

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Ingredients:

2 Tbsp sunflower oil
2 carrots, peeled
2 small zucchini
1 small red pepper
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 Tbsp green Thai curry paste
dark soy sauce
about 150-200ml coconut milk

Method

Crush the garlic, slice the pepper very thinly, and using a vegetable peeler, cut the carrots and zucchini into ribbons lengthways.

Heat the oil in a large pan of wok, add the garlic and sautee till aromatic.  Then add the pepper strips and sautee for about 3 minutes.  Add the carrot strips and zucchini and sautee briefly, just until they begin to soften.

Add the green Thai curry paste and stir to mix thoroughly.  Add a splash of soy sauce and allow the liquid to reduce.

Finally, add the coconut milk, stir and heat through until starting to bubble.  Serve immediately.

I could imagine this would go well with grilled fish or chicken, but my vegetables were delicious with couscous and pan-fried pork medallions.  The choice is yours!

Saturday Snapshots #40

 

Brussels Atomium - June 2007

The Atomium is one of the the most famous landmarks in Brussels.  Built for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, it consists of nine steel spheres connected in such a way by tunnels that the entire thing looks like an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times.  The spheres contain exhibition halls and all the connecting tunnels house escalators and staircases like the one pictured.  I love the contrast between the round tunnel and the jagged line of the bannister, and the strong resemblance that this photo bears to a Giacomo Balla painting. 

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store.