It's been lovely having lots of posts on the blog this weekend - hurrah, cooking! Less hurrah, we're all a bit unsettled, reading through. And, well, yes. It's hard to know where we're at at the moment, but "suboptimal" pretty much covers it. For a lot of us that also means "worried". Besides, it's cookery time, since the nights are drawing in, the temperature dropping- Wait, I'm making curry tonight and it's 28 degrees out. Oops. Still, the principle holds. Let's cook.
Let's cook plums, because it's gone unreliable on the stone fruit front near me. I had a batch of very hard, sour Victorias, and I was forced to bring out my (someone on Twitter's) saving stone fruit roasting recipe. Halve your fruit, scatter them with butter, sugar, red vermouth and a useful spice (star anise is nice for plums), then stick them in the oven when it's on. For... a while. At...a temperature. I think these had 30 minutes at 200degrees. It worked.
If you're doing that, you may as well roast some whole bulbs of garlic, no? YES. A little oil and salt, no faffing. In foil, so they don't burn. I squished this one into butter for a most fabulous toast topper.
Both these were a by-product of a borderline faffy, borderline late summer proper cooking dish: from Claudia Roden's Spanish book (still cooking from it, still grateful to you Liz), baked crab in cider. This starts with sweating off an onion, adds a chopped tomato, and then adding a bit of white fish fillet to cook it very lightly (5 minutes or so) till it flakes. I was told to get something skinless and boneless, and failed, oops.
They were quite easy to skin, in fact, once cooked. Then you just flake it all up, add a load of crab meat and a small glass of cider, stir it all up till it bubbles.
Then into ramekins, breadcrumbs, butter, under the grill... but like Sarah I have a stinky integral grill that I never use, so it was more like 10 minutes in the oven. It didn't seem overcooked, and was very tasty. (Two ramekins because I've got no medium sized ones - these were very starter sized...)
It would have been slightly nicer if I'd got mixed crab meat, not just white - this was pleasant but lightly flavoured. However my fishmonger [bloke at the market] was "having a nightmare with his crab picker on holiday", so, heavy sigh. Life is very tough. It was fine, and less irritating to make than I expected - you can warm it up next day which is always useful catering for one. So I will do it again someday.
Lastly, I've started making soup for weekday lunches. It's a good answer to lunch issues, and it's cool enough it's no longer a crisis if I can't get it into the fridge on Monday. I think I'll make this one a lot - it's basically what my granny used to make from her garden, parsley and tarragon. It's another one from Anja Dunk's German cookbook, bless her. They are so simple and nice.
Make a roux, add stock, add stalks of parsley and tarragon (ideally tied in a bundle, but I've no string that looks remotely clean and cookable, oops), boil for 10 minutes. Then add chopped leaves of parsley and a smidge of tarragon. 2 minutes cooking. Serve with garlic croutons if you like, or Smushed Garlic on Toast if you happened to roast up some garlic earlier in the week.
How Prudent.
Prudent indeed. I'm never quite certain what I think about (re-)cooked crab, but I'll own that this looks delish. I saw the Hairy Bikers (I know, what can I say?) do a crab and leek tart on the telly years ago, and it must have looked good given that I remember it 4+ years later. Maybe I'll try and dig that out and give it a bash. Unless the supermarket's having a crab-picking nightmare, too.
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