Oh Madam! Pineapple & Coconut Sponge Pudding

With nothing else to do on a relentlessly rainy Sunday, I looked wistfully around the kitchen in search of something productive to do. Finished editing the vegetable drawers in the fridge, my eyes settled on the fruit bowl. I'm afraid the lemon's had it and the pineapple ain't so good looking either... you know a pineapple is ripe enough to eat when it will give up one of it's centre leaves with ease, but when all the leaves have gone grey and the fruit is starting to develop signs of outer bacteria there's only one thing for it before it hits the bin. Out with the excellent Fyffes pineapple corer and give it a whirl. To those of you who know nothing of which I speak, the pineapple corer is a work of culinary engineering genius. Simply cut the top off the pineapple and push the serrated tube over the core of the fruit with a clockwise motion. Then just wind away until you hit the bottom and pull the whole lot out, ready cut into a beautiful pineapple spring. Pop the handle off, unload the spring of fruit and push the core into the bin with a wooden spoon handle. Bravo!

Anyway, this baby was like a good cheese, pretty manky on the outside but ripe and delicious on the inside and as sweet as a schoolboy's spangle. "I'll make a sponge pudding out of it", says I, "reminiscent of school dinners, with coconut in it". And I have to tell you, it was delicious - really good - greater than the sum of it's parts good and I promise you'll have this in the oven in less than ten minutes. So here goes:

The Fixings
110g Self raising Flour
110g Caster Sugar
110g Baking Margarine (Stork) at room temperature
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
3-4 tablespoons dried coconut
2 tablespoons Coconut liqueur (or Canned Coconut milk if you don't have it)
1 really really ripe pineapple

The Prep
Sift the flour into a baking bowl with the sugar and baking powder. Add the eggs and margarine and roughly bind with a spoon. Add the dried coconut and whisk with an electric mixer until really smooth, adding some coconut liqueur or milk if it is too dry.
Meanwhile put the pineapple in the bottom of a greased baking dish and add the coconut liqueur or coconut milk. If your pineapple isn't ultra-ripe and naturally sweet, add some sugar as well.
Spoon over the sponge mixture and roughly flatten over the pineapple - don't worry about going all the way to the edges - the sponge will rise well and spread.

The Final Act
Bake in 170c or 325f oven for about 30 mins or a toothpick comes out from the highest part clean.

Points to consider:
This can be a delicious Sunday dessert served with custard or some whipped cream and will be made in no time. The sponge mix also works beautifully (without the coconut but with a few vanilla drops) on top of apples, sweetened to taste. However, if you wish to really blow their socks off, try making individual puddings using a whole ring of pineapple, topped with sponge mixture and baked in a 4 inch ring, served with some pina colada ice cream, the recipe for which I will post soon. Enjoy!

It's rice Jim, but not as we know it.

Apologies to any of you Delias out there who have been cooking perfect rice for years and who may consider this to be teaching you how to suck eggs... but for years I had a shameful secret. I couldn't cook rice without making a complete bangles of it. It was either mush or a watery flavourless mess. Now I was quite happy to do dinner for six or bake you an apple sponge with homemade custard, but at the mention of rice I looked away like a dislexic at a book club.

Then, as luck would have it, my chum John announced that he was coming over from Hong Kong and bringing his new fiance Sherry with him. Perfect I said, I'll borrow Sherry for a day and throw a Chinese dinner party that evening. 'So Sherry', say's I, 'making rice for you must be the same as boiling spuds for me, but er, I can't, so what's it all about Alfie?'.

So she showed me with great simplicity and first explained the finger method. Take a cup of rice per person and put it into a pot. Rinse it until the water is clear. Add as much water as to reach the first joint of your forefinger as it rests on top of the rice. Add salt. Put lid on and bring to the boil then turn heat down to lowest. Keep lid on and after a while check. When it has craters on the top it is done. Put lid back on and turn off heat. This will happily sit there for fifteen minutes until you are ready to serve. Then fluff it up with a serving spoon. Fluffy and slightly sticky, but most importantly, full of flavour because it hasn't had the life rinsed out of it after it has cooked.

Since then I haven't looked back.
Things to consider though: If you are using a finer grain jasmine or basmati rice, add slightly less water and check sooner as it will cook a little faster. If you are making a curry, consider using Swartz Pilau Rice Seasoning. Now I'm not a great one for things from jars, but this wee mixture is very good. Sprinkle a teaspoon of the spice mixture on top of the water in the pot before you bring it to the boil. Job done - the result is a pleasingly yellow and subtly fragranced rice that works a treat with that curry you just had to make.

Tastes Just Like A Restaurant Chicken Korma

Touchy subject curries - everyone has their favourite restaurant and in it, their favourite dish. There's a kind of curry snobbery amongst the gentle middle classes, much the same as wine foolery. You know the type: "we always use the Star of Ganesh because they always use fresh herbs and their tandoori oven is centuries old and powered by wood from the Ganges. Oh yes, we've tried your restaurant but I didn't think the spices were tempered properly". Aye right. Anyway, I digress. Most of us who reckon they can rattle the pans has had a go at a curry at some stage and some will have got sucked in to the bottomless pit of grinding your own spices and making batches of curry base. Great fun, I say, and well worth it if you are in search of the true taste of the Raj. But sometimes all you want is a comforting chicken korma just the same as the one you get in your local - sweet, unctuous and mildly warming - perfect for a slightly hungover Saturday or an ideal intro to the joy of spice for your children.

I have no doubt that if any of you actually try this, you will like it but will probably say it's not the same as your local take out. But I tell you what, it's delicious, easy to make and not far off the mark. I came upon the basis of this recipe years ago which specified a portion of curry base, which was fine at the time, but since then I have run out and made do without it, using stock in its place, which is good. I also use the excellent Bolst's Mild Curry Powder which in my book is about as good as curry powders get. Excuse the vagueness of the ingredients, you'll know as you go along if you need more or less, but this gives you the general idea. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of Mango Chutney, which goes along with the sweet theory and to be honest, I prefer it in rather than out.

The Fixings
2 x tablespoons ghee or vegetable oil
1 x fresh chicken breast per person
1 x dessert spoon grated fresh ginger
1 x large garlic clove minced
1 x medium onion very finely chopped
1 x dessertspoon of Bolst's Mild Curry Powder
400ml fresh chicken stock (or half a cube in water)
2 x dessert spoons dessicated coconut (or creamed coconut if you don't want the texture
1 x tablespoon good Mango Chutney
2 x tablespoons condensed milk
enough cream to thicken
Freshy chopped coriander leaf

The Prep
Cut the chicken portions into cubes

The Final Act
Heat the ghee or oil in a large pan. Add the onion and sweat until translucent. Add the ginger and garlic and cook for another couple of minutes until softened. Add the curry powder and cook in to the mixture for a couple of minutes, then add the chicken pieces. You don't really want to brown the meat, just seal it. Then add the stock and cook until tender - fifteen to twenty minutes. When you are happy with the chicken add the rest of the ingredients, except for the coriander leaf and cook until thickened. Decorate with your fresh leaf and serve with some Pilau (pilaf?) seasoned rice, the instructions for which I will post later.

Points to consider
This is not a traditional recipe, it is a quick fix and I think carries its head high despite that. If you dont like coconut, then use cream and some ground almonds. If you don't like it too sweet, leave out the condensed milk. I took a while to get used to the idea of Mango Chutney as an ingredient, but in the classical british notion of fruit in curries, I think it adds to the dish, especially if you use a good one like Geeta's with chunky mango and indian seeds. Come to think of it, a few cumin and cardamon or black mustard seeds in there would be good anyway. I have found that this is an excellent introduction to curries for my children as it is sweet(ish) and not too spicy. I have also made it with prawns and it was delicious.

The Baldy Notion loves... Bolst's Curry Powder

Rarely have I found a prepared ingredient as pure as Bolst's Curry Powder. This is truly an ingredient straight from the days of the Raj when the Empire stained most of the world's map pink and I have no doubt that it is unchanged since then. Whenever I use it I can't help imagining that the factory in Bangalore is unchanged and still pulverises sacks of dry spices using giant victorian crushing mills run by old men with white raj moustaches and turbans. The tins are a design classic and retain a beautiful packaging simplicity which again harks back to a bygone era. Yellow and blue for mild and orange and blue for hot and believe me it does exactly what it says on the tin. Hot means hot and I can take a curry, squire - use it with respect and resist the temptation to add "one for the pot".

The mild powder is the tin of my choice when I fancy knocking together a mid-week spice-fix. It is very aromatic and far from mild - retaining just the right amount of kick without bringing a tear to the eye. It contains coriander, cumin, black mustad seeds, dried red chillies, black pepper, turmeric, fenugreek seeds and curry leaves - the fenugreek really gives it that characteristic "curry smell" and lends itself to homemade curries beautifully (you know, 70's style with bits of fruit in and a chutney on the side). I personally love to use this when I make my Can't Tell It Apart From A Restaurant Korma which I will post next.

Available from all good Asian food stores in a variety of sizes. Buy a big tin, you won't regret it.

Ola, Granola!

You know that feeling... You've let your self go for a while too long now and your body's starting to turn to mush. You subconciously feel the pull of vitamins, good polywhatsitsnames, essential oils and, well, something good to put into the temple you've been worshiping the devil in lately. Don't get me wrong.. a well made bacon butty with brown sauce is a worthy temptation, but it doesn't exactly tick any health and wellbeing boxes, does it? What you need is something your stomach will thank you for. Something that will be not just good, but great for you. Something that will keep you going all the way up to lunch time. Something actually really nice to eat.
Bring on the Granola. Thing is - it's one of those wee recipes that only takes one making before you totally understand it. One of those things that you could say "I think I'll add a few dried whatsitsnames" and it would work because you have a mental picture of how it would turn out. And above all, it's REALLY easy. Any numpty could do it. Just make sure you've got something airtight to put it in. I use an old biscuit tin and it does rightly.

The fixings:
* 3 tbsp vegetable oil
* 125ml maple syrup
* 3 tbsp honey
* 1 tsp vanilla extract
* 300g rolled oats
* 50g sunflower seeds
* 4 tbsp sesame seeds
* 50g pumpkin seeds
* 100g flaked almonds
* 100g dried berries (find them in the baking aisle)
* 50g coconuts flakes or desiccated coconut

The Prep:
Heat oven to 150C/fan 130C/gas 2. Mix the oil, maple syrup, honey and vanilla in a large bowl. Tip in all the remaining ingredients, except the dried fruit and coconut, and mix well.

The Final Act
Tip the granola into a deep baking tray and spread evenly. Bake for 15 mins, then mix in the coconut and dried fruit, and bake for 10-15 mins more or until light golden. Remove and leave to cool, turning occasionally.

Points to remember: it won't go crunchy in the oven, so don't try otherwise you've screwed the pooch - it will go crunchy as it cools down. Don't overcook it otherwise it will taste burnt. Add some stoned dates in big chunks for a toffee-like chew. Add hazlenuts or pecans for a nutty twist. Add dried apricots... you get the picture. After a couple of goes, you get to know the right consistency and make it up by feel.

One last thing... This cereal is absolutely delicious if you use yogurt instead of milk and I like to leave it sitting for a few minutes to get a sort of porridgey texture. Oh yea!

Ultra-Comforting Chinese Chicken Noodle Soup

Here's one for a cold, dark, had a hell of a Monday after a large weekend. Or whatever day suits your blues. This soup is warming, both in temperature and in tummy soothing gingeryness, ultra tasty, very healthy (I swear you can feel it restoring one's mojo) and satisfyingly slurpy, especially if you tackle it with chopsticks and a spoon.

If you've got a left-over roasted Oakham free range chicken with plenty of meat left on, them I'm impressed but secretly thinking you're telling porkies. If not, then drop into Tesco on the way home and buy the following:

A hot roasted chicken in a bag
Pak Choi
Fresh Sweetcorn
Fresh Ginger
Spring Onions
A tray of fresh Chinese style stir fry vegetables
Maybe some mange tout
A bag of fresh beansprouts
An onion
Toasted Sesame oil
Five Spice Powder
Dried Thread or Egg noodles (whatever)
A couple of red chillis

First, boil a full kettle, then start stripping the meat off the chicken and throw the bones, skin and hot juices into a large pot. Reserve the chicken meat.
Pour over the water and bring to a simmer.
Slice up about a thumb size piece of fresh ginger leaving the skin on, and cut the onion into rough slices. Skim the stock and add both.
Season with salt and pepper.
Pierce a red chilli several times and add to the pot.
Cut the fresh corn kernels off their cobs and reserve, adding the bare cobs to the stock for flavour.
Prep the other veg: i.e. wash and separate the pak choi, chop the spring onion into 2 inch diagonals.
After twenty mins of boiling, strain the stock and put back into the pot, bringing back to a simmer.
Add two teaspoons of five spice powder
Add the veg except the beansprouts. Cook for another five minutes.
Add the beansprouts, chicken meat and dried noodles and cook until the noodles are ready, seasoning to taste.
When the noodles are cooked, add about a tablespoon of toasted sesame oil and stir in.
Ladle into deep bowls, decorate with finely chopped spring onion, serve with chopsticks and spoons.
Deeply satisfying, my friends.

Ramekins of Cullen Skink

Here's one to blow the socks off your guests next time you are entertaining. I'll stick my hand up to this one any day of the week. I was having my good friend Pad and Co. round for dinner a while ago and, knowing how fond he was of fish, decided to jump on the Duke and roar up to the excellent St. George's Market near Belfast's City Centre. That, I learned some time ago, is by far the best way to get to St. Georges - you get there in a few minutes and park on the pavement at the doors - I've even had admiring glances from the traffic wardens. The Duke does that. At least it did before I crashed... Anyway, back to business. For those of you outside the metropolis of oul' Belfast, St. George's is an original and thriving city market, revived by the council and largely untouched by the troubles. On a Friday it serves the early fish, meat, knickers and tat brigade and generally fizzles out by midday. On Saturday, however, it throbs to a different beat - it doesn't like to rise too early and gets all gourmet and arty with a laid back touristy buzz and the thrum of city-paid musicians entertaining the exotically catered, who are in no mood to hurry. First stop my chums on the middle fish stall which usually makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop. What's good? Hake? Yes enough for 5 please. What's that - fresh Portavogie crab? I'll take a tub of that. Oh, and a punnet of raw shelled Portavogie prawns a.k.a. langoustines to the supper brigade. And... your wee man does what? Smokes his own haddock? Well, it would be rude not to. Same story at the cheese counter and then What's that? Quails eggs? Fek me! In Norn Iron! Gotta have some of those.
So the prep for dinner was more Ready Steady Cook than Masterchef as I emptied my bikers rucksack. So here's the story...
Sweat a small shallot in a little mild olive oil, then add some cream and a little butter. Bubble it up and add the smoked haddock skin side down for a minute to release it and the smokey flavour. Turn it and cook until just flakeable, then remove with a slotted spoon and bubble the smokey cream down to just coating a spoon consistancy. Take off the heat and add some sweet white crab meat, keep it chunky if you can, and a few langou-vogie prawns and let the pan cool a little then add the haddock. Butter some starter sized ramekins and spoon in the fishy cream mixture, ready for a hott-ish oven to re-heat when ready (about 5 mins should do it). Griddle some diagonal cut slices of baguette till they're just pretty and butter. Take a pot of boiling water and crack in a Quail's egg per person - you don't need me to tell you they cook quickly to soft. Serve the egg on top of the ramekin and a couple of cleverly arranged slices of griddled bread on the side.
Apologies to my Scottish friends who may consider this the equivalent of making an Irish Stew Roly Poly, but it was made in the spirit of many a good bowl of the real thing. Enjoy

The Baldy Notion Web of the Week

www.cheeseandburger.com
I loved this website simply for the quality of the graphics and the way it animates. It belongs to an American cheese company, Wisconsin Cheese and advertises, through the medium of outrageous burgers, their impressive cheese range. All styled round a pre-war sort of rollidex which animates beautifully and has a really cool brass period slider to flip the pages over, accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek narrative. I found it through another interesting site www.stumbleupon.com on which you tell it your interests (obviously in my case, food) and it just keeps hitting you with food sites. The nice thing is that you can educate it along the way by giving the sites a thumb up or thumb down and it keeps a note of the ones you liked and tries not to show any more like the ones you didn't.
The cheese and burger site didn't seem to like my Mac's browsers, however, but it ran beautifully on our PC and had myself and the Moo tittering as we turned the pages. Beautiful pictures of heartstopping cheeseburgers and recipes too. Enjoy

Smother me in smokey sauce

Sometimes you've just gotta have it. The craving sets in. The need. Its ribs and beer night. Ribs covered in piquant smokey sauce that just leave a big sticky grin on your face. Sure you can get it out of a jar with Ainsley or Jack written all over it, but turn it round and have a wee peek at the ingredients on the back. That sure wasn't on Uncle Buck's finger lickin prep table. I'd bet my sweet bippy that the smokey flavour was all the way from the flavour labs. So one fine Saturday afternoon when I was fixin to have the boys round I played around with this excellent recipe I discovered on the wonderful VideoJug.com. It's satisfyingly good and offers plenty of scope for a bit of customization. Chances are you will have most of the ingredients in your store cupboard, save, maybe, for the sweet smoked paprika. I've made this recipe a few times now and it just gets better.
Points to remember: the chilli sauce isn't the sweet Thai sauce, its there for a bit of heat, so you could go your own way with a good dried chilli powder or, even better, grind up some smoked chilli to your own powder. The Sweet Smoked Paprika, La Chinata (in that timeless beautiful little spanish red tin) is there for the smokey flavour - use one teaspoon and then re-visit the smoke later on when it is cooked down a bit - you don't want it tasting like an old fire tunic. Take the time to reduce the sauce to a thick and dark consistancy if you are just making a batch of sauce to store in the fridge and please stir often as it thickens to prevent it catching. If you are going to cook it with the ribs, season and single the ribs, add a little stock or water and cook them down to tender under a tightly fitting roof of foil, then when you are ready to colour them up, put in some of the sauce you made - you don't want to cook the sauce to oblivion.

The sauce result: Smokey, tangy, sweet, spicy. Definitely one that you keep tasting as you stir. Result!

The fixings:
1 onion , finely chopped
6 cloves of garlic , chopped
160 ml red wine vinegar
40 g brown sugar
60 g honey
300 g ketchup
30 ml Worcestershire sauce
60 ml soy sauce
60 ml chilli sauce
1 - 2 teaspoons Smoked Sweet Paprika
100 ml water , or stock
1 blender
1 saucepan
1 wooden spoon

The Prep
Put the onion, garlic, vinegar, sugar, honey, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, chilli sauce and the water into the blender. Pulse it a few times and then blend on high until it has thoroughly combined into a smooth sauce.

The Final Act
Pour the sauce into the pan and place it over a medium heat. Bring it to a gentle simmer, add the teaspoon of sweet smoked paprika and cook for 15 - 20 minutes on a low heat so that all the flavours have had time to combine and the sauce is reduced in volume. Re-adjust for smoke/spice to your taste about half way through.

Sharp as a razor

At last I have found a knife sharpener that really does the business. A drawer full of expensive but blunt knives is a frustrating thing. Bloody useless actually. I'd tried lots of different types, the chef's steel, the run your knife in and out of a stone wheel thingy and the little plastic overlapping prongy thingy. Not only did they never give me a satisfactory finish, but some of the techniques were literally a second away from stitches. Thing is - walk into any cook's store and you soon realise that these things ain't cheap and if they are, chances are, they won't work. So the other week I sat down and did a wee bit of plundering about on the internet and found myself looking at sharpeners on Ebay. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that some of the products were comparing themselves to Accusharp. So... ten quid including postage later I waited for it to arrive, which it did in a couple of days. Like most good things, it's incredibly simple. A plastic handle holds two metal bits at an angle to each other and there is a nylon-ish knuckle guard. It really couldn't have been easier - just hold the knife with the blade pointing upwards and run the sharpener down it's length at right angles to the blade. You can satisfyingly feel it stripping metal from the knife blade as it shapes it to the ideal sharp angle and little bits of metal come off with each stroke. It stated on the instructions that a blunt knife only needed ten or twelve strokes, and I have to admit, that was about right. Oh joy of joys - my favourite knife was now a surgical instrument - and everything I could find got sharpened, pocket knives and all. Having lived with it now for a couple of weeks I can honestly say I'm delighted - three strokes and the blade is like a scalpel. Boned out a duck last week and it was a clean as a whistle. We're talking 1mm slices of tomato sharp. Apparently the wee metal thingies are double sided so when the little darling starts to struggle, you can unscrew them and swop them over and it's like new.
I've really got to say it's the best tenner I've spent for a good while. They claim in their blurb 'Accusharp - the last knife sharpener you'll ever need'. I've got to agree.
Go on - you know you want to...

Oh well, here we go...

Last night, at the start of a wine induced thought process, I realised how much a part of my life food had become. My generous host had just poured me another glass of champagne and the subject of food raised it's pretty head yet again. So much to talk about and so many things to know and learn. Here I am, living just outside Belfast, a city I never really associated with quality food over the years, in a country more associated with heart disease through over indulgence than fine and simple dining. Yet, lately I have discovered more opportunities for eating out to a high (or not so high) standard and more sources of really good ingredients, combined with much more information at my fingertips for outstanding and achievable recipes.

So this, I hope, is my story of my food. What I like to eat, what I like to cook, how I tried to cook it. Where I went to get it, how much it cost and whether it was a success. Greater Belfast has seen a real boom in the number of new eateries opening in the last couple of years and it is with one simple level of standard that I visit any of them. If I eat food that is as good as I could have made myself (and I don't claim to be anything special in my kitchen) then I am happy because someone has put some thought into my meal. If I sit down to a dish which is much better than I could have made or beyond what I would even attempt to prepare, then I am very happy indeed. However, if I feel that the food is cooked without care, to a level below that of my own modest capability, then that's when I start to complain. And vote with my tip and my feet.

Hopefully over the coming months you will share my thoughts on this diversity of restaurant dining - warts and all - and experience some of my personal favourite recipes, together with the background to where I found them and who was originally the author (credit where credit is due, if possible). We have a saying in Northern Ireland "He's not getting bullied at the trough" when a man of a certain weight starts to cast a bigger shadow... Bon Appetite!