Haven't done one of these for a while and we had this for dinner this evening. Thought I'd share it. Easy seafood sauce and very scrummy on hot penne or spaghetti.- Pack of deep frozen mixed seafood - de-frosted and rinsed.
- Large onion
- Third of a cup of fish stock (made with fish stock cube - no sweat)
- Dry white wine or Noilly Prat
- Tub of creme fraiche or liquid single cream
- Portion of saffron
- Peel and very finely chop the onion. Soften in oil.
- Turn up heat to max and add the seafood mixture. Cook through until done.
- Add half a glass of dry white wine or Noilly Prat. Allow to sizzle.
- Add the fish stock and sizzle a little more.
- Add the wee pot of saffron and it will go lovely and golden.
- Finish off by adding the cream and if it's not thick enough boil down a bit.
- Pour over pasta and serve with the rest of the white wine!
60 comments:
Shoey's Brandy Sauce:
Melt half a cup of butter & add half cup brandy. Once alchahol has burnt off, add a pot of heavy cream, 3/4 cup of grated parmejan. Add a couple of teaspoons of tomato paste for a nice orangy colour. Simmer & stir well until desired thickness. Pour over pasta & serve with red pepper flakes. If you prefer vodka sauce sub vodka for brandy - but the brandy gives much more flavour.
Oh, & chunks of Italian sausage & peas are great optional extras.
Olive oil. Freshly crushed black peppercorns and salt. Chopped coriander and parsley, in roughly 1:1.5 proportions. Mix together, pour over your spaghetti and toss around in the saucepan until the spaghetti is coated.
Boil linguine until al dente, add slug of vodka or Jubileums akavit (it's flavoured with caraway), boil off alcohol, add small pot of salmon roe (or any other caviar-style roe but be careful of black lumpfish, the dye can turn blue), chopped dill and cream.
My fave "can't be arsed to cook" pasta sauce is this.
Cook some spaghetti until al dente.
While this is cooking, heat quite a lot of olive oil in a pan - about three or four tablespoonfuls.
Chuck in some finely chopped anchovy fillets, some dried chilli flakes, a handful of capers and two crushed cloves of garlic.
Warm through but don't let it fry too much.
Drain the pasta and stir it into the sauce.
Before serving add a load of chopped parsley and the juice of a lemon and a lot of freshly ground black pepper.
Grate parmesan over the top.
Carole, I don't think you even need to chop the anchovy fillets. They'll disintegrate in the oil if you just mash them with the back of a spoon.
That's true Mnemonic, and I usually do that if I want a smoother sauce.
With this sauce though, I want there to be little lumps of anchovy, which is why I don't want the oil to heat up too quickly and start frying things.
My aim with this dish is lots of little bits and pieces of stuff.
Having read through all of those, I feel hungry again although I've just eaten! Thanks so mush and I promise to try them - they all sound fantastic. We eat pasta about once a week so I'll get going!
Can't beat a proper carbonara sauce - bacon, egg, garlic, parmesan - though as the egg is cooked only by the heat of the pasta, you have to be pretty sure of its quality (and I'm not gloating about this, as our hens have decided that autumn is here and they want a couple of months off). Classic aglio, olio e pepperocino - fry garlic and chilli in olive oil, toss with spaghetti. Variant on CaroleBristol's recipe is to fry garlic and chilli, stir in tin of tomatoes and chopped anchovies, cook for ten minutes and then add torn basil leaves. Simplicity, and good quality pasta, is all!
**No thanks, I think I'm about Spenged out already..;-)**
Nice to see some recipes again..
We had Pfifferlinge (small brown trumpet shaped mushrooms) this week with some Tyrollean air dried ham and garlic, served with band pasta... nice. It even induced Mara to eat mushrooms.
Otherwise I usually combine a tin of tomatoes with fresh sage, garlic, sugar and balsamic vinegar for a quick sauce. This was in the Guardian once. When the eggs are good I'll use them raw with lots of parmesan and parsley, plus onions softened in butter. I think I got that one off the back of a pasta box. Saffron butterflies (from the Moosewood book) with butter, double cream, saffron and parmesan is also a quick and delicious pasta dish.
But my alltime pasta favourite is the Moosewood roasted red pepper sauce, not exactly quick but simple. Grill red peppers until black, cool, peel off the blackened skin and slice. Add to cooked tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic, then puree about half, leaving some strips for texture. Add fresh basil and serve over spaghetti. Also very good with Polenta and grated goats cheese.
Lovely lovely!! Two other mouth-watering posts! Donds for the Pfifferlinge which are girolles in French and chanterelles in English. FrogPrince and I take our mushrooms deadly seriously and have grave discussions about the relative merits of cepes (Steinpilze) and girolles but the girolles always win. Best mushroom on the planet, ever. So much so that I'm putting my wellies on next week and we're off with a wild man of the woods friend of FPr's to gather some. Except that I haven't got any wellies. Just thought of that. My old rubber riding boots will have to do. In France, when you gather mushrooms, it's the norm to take them to your local chemists'. They are trained to recognise dodgy ones, you see. A couple of years ago we got a bumper haul of mega-girolles. I took them in a large bowl round to the local chemists's shop. The French adore their mushrooms. The whole damn shop including all the pharmacists crowded bore down on me: "Où avez-vous trouvé tout ça????" "Euh, en forêt, quelque part...." Afterwards we cracked ourselves up at the thought of putting on a vey strong English accent, taking the same bowl to another chemists and saying "Excuse me, but I'm having an awful problem with this strange fungus growing in my back yard - can't get rid of them. Can you recommend something?" The whole shop would be gagging for my address...
On one of our first visits to Germany - staying overnight in a weird place called Bad Wimpfen somewhere south of Heidelberg - Mrs Abahachi and I ate in a fish restaurant that was making a big thing about the state of the Pfifferlinge season. Oh, we thought, having left the dictionary at the hotel, must be some sort of trout...
One of the reasons Bad Wimpfen was weird, incidentally, is that it seemed to be full of witch supply shops. Certainly wouldn't have ordered mushrooms if we'd known they were mushrooms.
'Tag Herr Hachi! If you were south of Heidelberg then you were near me n' Nilpferd. Places in the Black Forest have a highly developed witch culture. There's one town (wonder if it's Oberkirch?) where they have a ceremonial procession of witches ever year. Big business. Probably back in ancient times there was a thriving folklore attached to little old ladies with facial warts who had one or several cats. Or it was it simply because they didn't have Sky TV at the time...?
Has it occurred to anyone that WITCHES and enchanting, magical females of all description would be a bonzer theme for next week's playlist? Maddy?!! MADDY!!! You out there....???
We just had an excess of Broccoli rabe and I made a nice brothy sauce of olive oil, carmelized shallots, garlic, cayenne, white beans, white wine, and boiled-till-tender brocolli rabe to serve with hearty orchiette pasta.
One thing I discovered this summer is the joy of a simple tomato sauce. I usually overdo it with textures and flavors, but I made this....squeeze seeds out of the tomatoes, drop them in boiling water for a minute then peel off the skins. Put the tomatoes in a sauce pan in which you've heated a bit of olive oil and warmed some garlic. Cook until they fall apart when you poke them with a wooden spoon, then add a chunk of butter, salt and pepper. COok a few minutes more, and then (this is sort of a strange step for me, too) process until very very smooth. It's so simple, but I think you actually taste the tomatoes more, and it turns a lovely pale orange color. And it's so versatile!! Sometimes I add shallots or good spicey/smokey Spanish paprika to the oil in the beginning. You can add cream at the end. And any of the obvious herbs--basil, thyme, rosmary, oregano, any of the less obvious herbs, too. Or olives and capers, or red pepper flakes...
It's one of those moments when I discovered something I'd overlooked because it was so simple, and it was like finding a little gem.
Oh lordy yes - just the simple tomato. We don't have to get all complicated if the ingredients are great. I'll definitely try that one. Thanks Steenbeck.
Ha, reminds me of the one pasta recipe we had when we were small: back then, spagetti only came in tins...Anyway, we fried some onions til golden and soft, with some bacen snipped into tiny pieces. Add to cooked spag, along with a tin of Heinz tomato soup and a tin of tom puree, with half a tsp of sugar. Mix, dump half a pound of grated cheese in, and voila! 1982 haute cuisine! We were so working class that when my art teacher asked us to draw half a pepper (capsicum, obviously), mum and I reluctantly bought our first one. I was horrified by the inside and spent the whole 3 hours drawing and shading it retching. I likes em now, of course, but we had to chuck it in the bim, as we had no idea how to use it in real cooking.
Mushrooms are Satan's work, by the way.
Bacon. Bin. Rum. Hic!
Ah, makes sense now Tracy! I read your comments via my email in 'recent-first' order, and wondered what sort of evening you'd had with THAT four word comment!
;o)
Solidaridonds for your stance on mushrooms!!
Oh, and a still-used winter comfort "casserole" that your post reminded me of:
1 onion, chopped.
1 tin corned beef, cubed.
1 tin chopped tomatoes.
1 tin spaghetti.
1 pinch mixed herbs.
1 dollop Worcester Sauce.
¼lb grated mature cheddar.
1 packet unsalted crisps (crushed).
Soften onion in a little butter in the pot until clear. Add corned beef, tomatoes, spaghetti, herbs and Worcester sauce. Stir well.
Sprinkle cheese over top.
Sprinkle crisps over that.
Mk5 for 20 mins.
Serve with a very green veg on side (normally petits pois or haricot verts chez DsD), and whatever warm tearing bread takes your fancy.
Try it after a cold, wet & windy scoreless draw at Portman Road, Mrs P, and it'll cheer you both up no end!
[giggling helplessly] Guys! GUYS! I am having the MOST fun imagining Frogprince's face if I served up either TracyK's OR Darce's EXCELLENT recipes. Now I KNOW that they will be delicious, but I have worked hard enough to ge some culinary entente cordial going in our household and have indeed succeeded. I can only surmise, entre nous, that, as the great sage N. Molesworth once remarked: "The English and the French are separated by more than the Channel..." My mom used to make a lovely dish when I was little called corned beef hash. From memory, it was simply mashed up corned beef with a tin of peeled plum tomatoes, a fried onion and some worcestershire sauce. Served with a pan of mash. I loved it as a kid and would probably go all Proustien if she made it again. Oh and if you have any more English recipes which you think would traumatise our household, you know where to post them, don't you? [grins]
---
@ TracyK: Your post reminded me that we are indeed of the generation which, due to globalisation, freed-up trade conditions etc., discovered the delights of 'world cuisine' as a teenager. You thought spaghetti came out of a tin when you were little, didn't you? And so it did. Made by Mr Heinz. I don't think my mam bought real sphaghetti to be cooked in boiling water until I was into my teens. It just wasn't known until then! Frogprince finds this truly hard to imagine. And I remember one of our neighbours coming round to ask about something their wee 'un had had at our house and liked - asparagus. Out of a tin of course. What a pioneering family we were... And I remember our first foreign cheese which dad had had in a "rest-ront" and liked - "Camenbear". We thought the white skin was very strange indeed and cut it off. Oh I'm on a role now. Parm-ee-zan cheese. With the emphasis on the 'ee' (where else?) Which we refused to eat cos we thought it smelled like vomit. The culinary revolution of the seventies in Northern England... The only thing that saddens me a little is the amount of sugar in that kind of food nowadays. I have had a gap of about 15 years when I didn't have access to British food regularly and now we have a British grocers' (joy!) so I can get macaroni cheese in a tin (bliss) or, the culinary nirvana, curried beans which I could eat forever. It all just tastes so SWEET! Take the sugar out, people! Think I've ranted about that before, actually...
That 'casserole' does indeed sound the sort of thing we'd enjoy, DsD, I'll keep it on file. The way ITFC are playing (and we are going to Notts on Tuesday for the away game. Fingers crossed, please!), comfort food will be needed.
And FP, again, the similarities abound. Tinned spag, tinned hamburgers in gravy, tinned soup, over-cooked veg and Vesta was the curry of (no) choice. Amazing timing, we are having our version of corned beef hash tonight: my boy's foot has swollen up after Friday's footy and he is feeling very grumpy. Spending as little time as pos with him as a consequence! Mashed potatoes, softened onions, tin of courned beef, put into a Pyrex dish with a mountain of cheddar on top, served with Heinz BBQ beans( soooooo sweet!). FPrince would be crying into his moules marinieres, je suis absoluement sure...
Yeah but sod the moules (bravo for the French by the way - you got the 'e' at the end) - that sounds lovely and WE KNOW it's nice, don't we???? I had a good giggle before - did you ever have for tea after school heinz tinned spag bol ON BUTTERED TOAST?? How great was that??? And, oh yes, the Vesta meals!! Our first real taste of foreign food because take away curries were expensive. From memory, the range was: chop suey (with those strange strips you fried which went curly) and then there was a beef curry and wasn't there some kind of chicken supreme in white sauce? Culinary delights every one... In his defence I did fish fingers with melted cheddar on and mushy peas and chips last week and FPr wolfed the lot and loved it. There is a kind of line where we meet in the middle. And he loves good take away curries too. I, for my part, have tried frogs legs. For the first and last time...Ditto snails...
By the way if my and TracyK's seventies-style culinary trip down memory lane bakes your cake then I have 2 books you really ought to read:
NME journo Andrew Collins is the same age as us and kept a diary as a child in the seventies. He's reproduced it with commentaries on the customs of the time. It's an absolute joy ("Cheesecake out of a packet with numbered sachets so that even dad could make it" Remember???) It's called "Where did it all go right?" and is a celebration of a normal, seventies childhood:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Did-All-Go-Right/dp/0091894360/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224433847&sr=1-3
His second book is about being a student in the eighties - "Heaven knows I'm miserable now" and is also full of resonance for me:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heaven-Knows-Miserable-Now-Difficult/dp/0091897483/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224433847&sr=1-2
I really think you'd enjoy them...
Ah, A level French, you still don't let me down, despite never having been tested by meeting actual French people! My dad used to make and my brother cry every time he had to cook dinner for us, because we knew the routine so well.
1: Make toast well in advance, about 30 minutes is fine. Burn all over and then, when cold, apply the faintest of scrapings of marge to the centre of toast only. Cut into halves, definitely NOT triangles, for that is the soft southern way of making toast.
2: Put beans on to boil (!) for 2 minutes, ensuring patches of cold and hot that will baffle and scald your kids.
3: Make cups of tea for children. DO NOT ALLOW SOFT DRINKS! The little sods must learn that suffering must be borne gracefully. Mash tea for about ten minutes to ensure correct depth of greasy film floating on top, which only bleach will later remove.
4: Make for son a fried egg (daughter refuses to eat eggs after mum tells her they come from "chickens' bottoms"). Make sure it is very dry and crispily brown and frilly at edges.
5: Order kids to sit at table and NOT TO MOVE unilt ALL food is eaten, on pain of losing Angel Delight afters. Watch in bafflement as they sob into the hessian tablemats: they never do this when mum is here...
Mum's piping hot, golden, butter-smothered, triangular wafers, bearings the softest, mushiest beans was a delight, on the other hand.
Vesta chow mein. Wow, had forgotten all about that one, I liked the crispy bits a lot.
I'm a big fan of those Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins books, they make me snort in an inappropriate way. Have you read Lucy Mangan's Handbags and Hopscotch, FP? I just know you would love it, she's very much One Of Us.
Ah, Vesta...bringing the generations together! I'm a lot older than you and Tracy, fp, but I too had a Vesta experience - they were my mother's first foray into non-British food. She soon left Vesta far behind though and got into cooking real international grub. Pity. I really liked the chow mein.
ANGEL DELIGHT!!! Chemical desserts! Astronaut food as Andrew Collins called it. Dad cuisine!!!!. Excellent description! My Dad once made a goulash out of a sachet but for some unexplained reason did NOT use beef chunks but bits of Cumberland sausage. Surprisingly it was brilliant. And my parents used to buy powder catering packs of asparagus soup which Dad would insist on making. That was great too. Aaaaaah seventies convenience foods. You and I were brought up on a diet of E - numbers, TracyK. We probably thought they were vitamins at the time...I'll check out the Lucy Mangen book deffo.
Straw pole here: how many people liked Vesta Chow Mein? see? I bloody loved it. And here's the thing. You. Can. Order. It. On. Line.....
http://www.britishfooddirect.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2497
Credit card quick.....
Seems we're not alone....
http://forums.doyouremember.co.uk/food-drink/1406-vesta-meals.html
Goodness - I had no idea they still made it...
So it would seem, unless it's old stock... the sell by date must be something like the year 3000 given the dried ingredients... I'd love to taste that again...
I'm from one of those poncy real food Elizabeth-David-is-divine families, which subsisted largely on home-grown veg in defiance of Surry norms, so for me Vesta is forever associated with hiking across Dartmoor in light sleet on Duke of Edinburgh's award expeditions. On that basis, I'd go with the beef curry.
I wish we'd had that website when we lived in Japan FP. The second Christmas we were there we recived a large parcel from Jon's parents. I was hoping for gifts, but inside there was 2 packets of stuffing, a jar of cranberry sauce, a packet of bread sauce, a jelly mould and 3 boxes of milk jelly, a dessert much favoured by my other half, which I'd never heard of before meeting him. It's a more jelly textured blancmange and contains mostly cornflower and flavouring. I was quite proud of producing an almost-perfect facsimile of a Xmas dinner that year with only two gas hobs and a microwave.
TracyK San. Spooky synchronicity again. I send ma n' pa a hamper every year. And every year I say I'll not get the same Marks and Spencer one which seems the best value and every year I end up getting the same one. I'm currently googling 'christmas hamper' to see what I can find. I like milk jelly very much too. Donds for Japanese turkey dinner!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! AHHHHHHHHH!!!! Ohhhh....AHHHHHHHHHH!!!
AHHHHHHH!!!!
Corned beef is available ON LINE???????????
AHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Nobody told me!!!!!!!!!
All I can say is a) I hope they deliver to Hungary and b) I hope they have an ENORMOUS and freeflowing quantity CONSTANTLY available!!!
(Did I say, I quite like corned beef? And did I say that the Magyars have never heard of it?)
That'll be one suitcase less I will be taking home from now on! ;)
I take it they do deliver then? The corned beef hash went down very well with he hubby, he's not familiar with it, but is has that magical meat + potatoes + cheese combo that he so loves. Jam Roly Poly for afters too, how retro are we?
Yeyyy! Sourpus is one satisfied customer! We aim to please.... Glad the CB hash hit the spot, TK - how could it not? And tell me you had custard with that jam roly poly... One of the school dinner desserts we loved. Come to think of it - they were all great. In retrospect. We've got a good retro-meal tonight - Frey Bentos steak and kidney pie. Yes, Frogprince, that's a pie... out of a tin.....
Pie in a tin! Genius! That belongs up there with our unbelievable 70s food, right there. Interestingly, the Poly was accompanied by Morrison's 'Finest' creme anglais, which J insists on referring to as "cor anglais". Laughs every damn time I look diparagingly at him. By the bypass FP, we're visting Lancaster (ITFC away to Blackpool that weekend and I can't stand Blackpool): any tips?
@Abahachi ... I too hiked in remote corners of the UK, usually fortified by hardcore dried survival rations. A comparative tasting revealed that they were exactly the same as Vesta products and all probably resulting from the same NASA research programme.
As for regional pop products; anyone else remember Cydrax and Peardrax?
Jesus wept - when did this thread get to 40 comments?
I've missed the gravy boat on the pasta sauce recipes but, picking up on the retro food theme, I saw Spam Fritters the other day in Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's!
For me, though, what'd constitute a full-blooded revival of rare groove food, what would be the equivalent of finding a record by The Carstairs in HMV or hearing Misdemeanor by Foster Sylvers on Radio One, would be if they brought back Wimby bars - the hole-in-the-wall precursors of the restaurants.
And that's WIMPY not Wimby, which sounds like a Pimms-sodden posh buffoon's pet name for the tennis tournament.
@ May - Wimpy DO still exist. You can get your fingers messy on that strange pink sauce at various motorway service stations. Why I shall my very self be calling for a quarter-pounder (or OK, maybe two!) at Tibshelf on the M1 around rush-hout teatime this Friday.
" ...rush-hout..." ??
Well it is a fast food takeaway I suppose.
Um, 1-1 on the crap puns I guess.
;o)
Rare groove food! Excellent! Who's with me on a chain of seventies style eateries? We could serve Frey bentos and Vesta meals and... sandwich spread sandwiches!!
Sandwich spread sandwiches! Nice one, fp, that's like Proust's madeleine cake for seventies kids. Also on the sandwich platter, we should find room for Shippam's meat paste sandwiches. And fresh orange juice should be a starter option (though in the beverages menu, orange juice should only be available in the form of Bird's A-peel).
Right, so that's May taken on as menu consultant and Purchasing Manager (Birds A-peel! Powdered orange juice! By Jove you know your stuff! The youth of today don't know what they're missing with all the freshly squeezed crap!) and I've headhunted Speng as marketing manager. I've rented prime A1 locations in Milton Keynes, Welwyn Garden City and Lytham St Annes. The Rare Groove Seventies Snack Bar experience is ready to roll!! But shall we serve Dandelion and Burdock or... Tizer?
Not Tizer. It's a bugger to scrub the sick stains off the lino if we get clients unused to such haute cuisine! "LINO?" Mais d'accords! If we're gonna do it properly ...
I know where to get my hands on some rolls of real wallpaper too:
http://www.designyourwall.com/store/Velvet-Flocked-wallpaper-c-7.html
Oh yes - lino it is. And that's you roped in as Chief interior designer, Darce. Get surfing E-Bay for some furniture to go with that, admittedly brilliant, flocked wallpaper....
Well, we need lava lamps, obv
And 'tropical tumbler' glasses with coloured images on the side.
Do we want upmarket or down?
Enlarge the front & rear sleeve pics from one of my favourite albums for one possible vibe for the RG70sSB ...
http://www.amazon.com/Interiors-Brad/dp/B000002BXQ
OOps - forgot to answer TK's Lancaster question. Sorry about that. I only ever went to Lancaster once - got a place at the Uni which I didn't take. It seems a nice place though hang on I'll see what I can find. Is it daft to suggest to go to Morecambe in the same area? In Lancaster itself I can only see a castle, maritime museum and museum of childhood. I suppose I'm hankering for the beach as I'm so far away from the sea here. Hope you have a great visit anyway!
Darce L-C: That's very up-market seventies and will be fine if no toddlers decide to sick up tizer on it. Looking good. We have the brief. A 'Brad' interior. Now we need... a music consultant for the ambient sounds to sip Bird's A'Peel to...
A MUSIC consultant?! Where the hell do we find one of THOSE?
;o)
May1366/DarceysDad: There is still a branch of Wimpy in Williamson Square, Liverpool city centre.
And if we're going for a retro meal, my local convenience store sells – not the real thing, but a recognisable version of (drum roll, please) –
wait for it
no, wait for it
really, it's worth it
…Arctic Roll!
Gareth - I know and indeed have partaken of a Benderburger and lime milk shake in the Williamson Square Wimpy. But there also used to be high street hole-in-the-wall takeaway burger bars, much like you'd get in food courts and railway station concourses, and my recollection is that the idea of the burger in the bun came from them (and to them from Popeye's sidekick, Wimpy) and that "Wimpy" was at this time the generic name for the burger/bun combo. The great thing about the restaurants (and, btw, memo to frogprincess - we're having oval plates and ketchup in tomato dispensers, right?) is that, having established the concept of fast food, they weren't especially fast but dammit they had dignity.
Arctic Roll's a must. But it has to be served straight from the freezer, as hard as the polar ice cap was then. Then, while it begins its slow descent to room temperature, there'll be time to enjoy a Mellow Birds de facto espresso (in that you'd only be able to stomach the equivalent of a single shot before tipping the rest into a pot plant).
Of course! Note to self - source aspidistras and plastic fake basket weave plant pots.
It's DarceysMam's college night, so guess what me, Darce & Sis had for pudding tonight as soon as she'd gone? Yup, the aforementioned circular ice-cream in jam sponge!!
(In my case, washed down with a bottle o'broondog!!)
Read the new posts from the Blackberry on the train but it won't allow me to post.. I grew up eating arctic roll. Which would explain my current morphology. Utterly stunned that you can still get it. And Darce can double up as Sommelier for his wise choice of beverage to accompany this seventies delight. It's on the dessert menu. Along with cheesecake. Made out of three different sachets.
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