The temperature drops 9 degrees, it is pouring with rain, the local playground is outright flooded... and I'm cooking again. Hurrah! I did wonder if I'd have nothing more to post in June other than forlorn slices of watermelon and laments for lettuce. Instead, actual cookery.
It's white meat week, so I have been cooking various fishy things mainly.
Scallops with caper and spring onion, parsley and lemon butter, served on peas - super tasty if a bit burnt. I'm sure you can work out how to cook that one if it's your kind of thing.
It's from Home Cookery year, as is almost everything this week, including the next item: brined barbecue chicken. If I'm honest, I'm a bit iffy on brining. It does make for moist meat but it's also a bit on the chewy side, I find. It might be more germane if I ever cooked whole chickens these days, but when you're doing mostly thighs it's not as if them drying out is a big risk.
Anyway. I took salt, sugar, water and beer, and I brined the thighs for about 8 hours, which isn't too bad for my record of advance preparation. Then you add a spice rub to them: oil, cumin, chilli, paprika, mustard, salt. This was good, I might do the recipe again without bothering with brine tbh.
They go in the oven for as long as it takes to cook whatever chicken you're doing (the recipe is for a whole one spatchcocked, so a bit over an hour, I gave these 40 minutes), and then you make sauce. Vinegar, mayonnaise, mustard, garlic, salt, sugar... an odd combination I thought, and very runny. But you're going to do two things with it: baste the chicken every 10 minutes or so once it's underway, and then pour the remainder over the final dish.
While basting regularly is a mild faff, it's acceptable if you get a good outcome, and this really worked for me. Plus you need to shred some cabbage down and chop some parsley. In a way, the uncooked bit of the sauce functions like a coleslaw dressing, but with less chopping.
Ideally, finish off the chicken for 5 minutes skin side down for crisping. Which I didn't really do, but it was tasty anyway.
It's a cheerful plate. Bread on the side is recommended, though I did potatoes with leftovers and mashing that into the sauce was surprisingly delicious. Nom.
The other reason why basting wasn't really a problem was I was in the kitchen the whole time anyway, wrestling with Finnish spoon biscuits. Finland are my Euro2020 team in a twitter sweepstake and this is the best option I could find for representative eating which wasn't too dull or too complicated. Besides, I like recipes that clearly predate kitchenware being a status thing. Can you use a spoon to shape? Eh, use a spoon.
They were actually surprisingly hard to make, but the start was very promising. Anything where you melt the butter instead of rubbing it in/attempting to cream the bastard stuff is okay by me, and cooking it gently for 10 minutes till nutty was v satisfying.
The difficult bit turned out to be taking it off the heat, mixing in sugar and vanilla sugar and then "letting it cool a bit". How long is a bit?
Judging by how liquid it was when I added the flour and bicarb, longer than that... Eventually it cooled a bit more and I added a bit more flour and they *just* became solid enough to form them on teaspoons and squidge them off onto a baking sheet. Emphatically un-spoonshaped by then.
But! They cooked out fine, and cooled down while I had dinner, cocktails etc.
The idea is to pair them up and squidge with raspberry jam, which would be easier if they were regularly sized.
But I'm making it work.
They should also be rolled in caster sugar but since, as the evidence shows, I was also eating strawberries with sugar and cream last night, I didn't do that bit...
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