Pork Tenderloin in a Stroganoff Sauce with rice

Seeing as i had lost 4 pounds in the last 3 weeks I felt I owed myself some quality stodge.  Although this isn't too over the top as I used low fat yoghurt as well as some (not much) sour cream.  This is a really quick dish to make.  If you have everything prepped and ready to go you could easily cook this in 10-15 minutes.

What goes in it:

• 300g/10oz of pork fillet, sliced into medallions
• 200g of Chestnut mushrooms, thickly sliced
• 1 medium onion or 2 large shallotts
• 3 large tablespoons of yoghurt  
• 2 large tablespoons of sour cream
• 1 heaped teaspoon of Paprika
• 1 heaped teaspoon of whole grain mustard
• 1/2 pint of stock (I stole some more from The Mansion but you can use chicken stock cube)
• 100ml of wine (or you can use 2 tablespoons of brandy and flambé)
• 1 teaspoon of honey 
• Salt and pepper 

Stage One 

So kick off with the fillet and cut into medallions, not too thinly as you want these nice and tender.  Give them a good bit of seasoning and add to a hot frying pan with oil (or butter depending on the state of your arteries) Fry on both sides so they are just cooked through and then remove from the pan and leave to relax, at the same time reaching over for a nice glass of wine - yes my January 'not drinking in the week' is very hard when you have such nice food to go with it, water just isn't the same.

Stage Two
Fry the onion and the mushroom so they are cooked through and then add the wine and let the alcohol cook off before adding the stock.  Let that reduce a little and then add the yoghurt, sour cream, paprika and mustard.  Let this reduce down so that it thickens.

Stage Three
While the sauce is reducing put the rice on to boil and whatever vegetables you fancy.  We had green beans, anything green will do (looks nicer on the plate).  When the rice is nearly ready add the pork back in and make sure that it's heated all the way through. Drain the rice and serve...

Enjoy - by the way its probably about an hour on the running machine in calorific content that's the way I look at it...

Cod and Poached Egg Florentine in a Mornay Sauce

This is comfort food at its best and despite the cheese is very good for you!!  Its a simple dish with 4 basic elements, cod loin or fillet, eggs cheese in a Bechamel sauce - simples!


The hardest part of this is to poach the egg, make sure its underdone if you like it runny as its going under the grill for 2 minutes or until the top is browned and bubbling.  Use whatever size fish portion you fancy and about 1 large bag of spinach  (Sainsbury size) about 200grams per person 
The process
Stage One 
So to start with make the Bechamel sauce.  I didnt bother with infusing the milk as i was adding cheese to it .
To make the sauce:

• 15fl oz/425ml milk 
• 1½oz/40g butter 
• ¾oz/20g plain flour 
• salt and freshly milled black pepper
• 2oz/50g of Emmental or Gruyere
• 2oz/50g of strong cheddar
• large teaspoon Dijon mustard
• half teaspoon of Paprika

Just in case you don't know how to do this, melt the butter and add the flour so they have bound into a ball or paste and cooked through.  Gently add the milk and make sure you stir this hard enough so that it binds completely.  Continue to do this slowly so that you don't get any lumps.  Once you have done that add the cheese, mustard and paprika and heat through.  I used a hand whisk to really make sure the cheese melted through and no lumps.

Stage Two 

Season the cod on both sides.  Loin is better simply because a nice thick steak is better than having to chop a fillet as it won't fit in the bowl and the tail will cook quicker.  Cook these on a very high heat one one side so it goes from opaque to nearly white.  Turn off the heat and turn them over and leave.

Stage Three

Cook the spinach.  A really easy way of doing this is to microwave the bags of fresh spinach - takes 3- 4 minutes.  Put the spinach in a pan and heat through more to get rid of some moisture but you don't want the spinach to become too wilted so that its an unidentifiable blob!

Stage Four

Poach the eggs.  This seems to be a tricky one for some people.  I make sure the eggs are very fresh and at room temperature and the water not bubbling with some vinegar and salt to help hold the egg.  A little swirl of the water helps too.

  

The assembly 

The bowls are covered in the Mornay Sauce and then sprinkled with Paprika and the placed under the grill for 2 minutes or until browned and bubbling

The finished dish with my knife spearing the soft poached - this dish is awesome.  Its comfort food at its best.  Don't forget to lick the bowl...

Tom Yum Goong

Luckily I'm not Scottish so I avoided a calorific night of gargantuan proportions and went for a very non Scottish option of Tom Yum Goong -  which is a hot and sour Thai soup which can be made with either prawn, chicken, or mushrooms.  There are many recipes for this but here is mine.  There are a lot of ingredients but all of them pretty easy to get.  There are a couple of ingredients in traditional recipes namely galangal that i haven't used and i didn't use fresh prawns but had home made fish stock (fresh prawns not just for freshness but the heads are full of flavoursome fat).
The ingredients you will need are:

• 1 medium sized onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 sticks of celery
• 2 medium sized chillies
• 2 sticks Lemon Grass
• 4 spring onions
• 200grams of small plum tomatoes
• 200grams Chestnut Mushrooms (traditionally straw)
• 300grams Shell on Prawns
• Tablespoon of chopped ginger (julienne)
• Tablespoon of Kaffir lime leaves (preferably fresh)
• Tablespoon of tomato paste
• Pint of stock (I used a Miso stock cube and half pint of fresh fish stock) Chicken or pork will do.
• Tablespoon fish sauce
• 10 stalks fresh Coriander (use the stalks in the soup for flavouring the soup and add the leaves at the end)

The Process...

Stage One
Add the herby elements to the stock - roughly chop the onions and cut the celery lengthways in to batons and julienne the ginger. Smash the garlic and roughly chop and bash the lemon grass with the butt of a big knife to release the flavour (I don't bother cutting as its more hassle removing when finished)  Put the Kaffir Lime leaves in whole for the same reason)  I used the medium chillies (helps me manage the heat better and you get more chilli than heat).  Add the fish sauce and the mushrooms (depending on their size I put in whole)

Stage Two
The soup should be cooked for about 5-10 minutes until all the flavours have had a chance to infuse.  At this stage i would check the seasoning.  It may well need a lot of salt (you don't season stocks as the effect of reduction is to intensify any flavour) unless you have used stock cubes.  Also if you need it hotter for your taste you can add more chilli.  At this stage I add the tomatoes and the spring onions and cook these for a 2 minutes.

Stage Three
Add the prawns.  Be careful not to over cook these.  If the prawns are fresh its easy to know when they are cooked as you can tell once they have gone pink all the way through.  I would suggest no more than 1 or 2 minutes to heat them all the way through.  Shell on prawns hold their shape and flavour - they are more fiddly but the ones with shells removed will shrink to nothing very quickly.  Finally squeeze the lime into the soup.  Don't cook lime juice as it gets bitter.  Again add to taste.  I use a whole lime and make sure every drop is squeezed out - this really gives this soup the real zing!

Serving
Place the soup in a bowl and make sure you remove the Kaffir Lime leaves, Coriander stalks and Lemon Grass.  Sprinkle the Coriander leaves on top of each bowl and serve.  Tom 'Yum Yum' Yun Goong - a seriously tasty, refreshing and 'good for you' dish.

Top Tip 

If you want to make this into a meal then add some noodles

Sea Bass fillets served with Ginger, Red Peppers, Spring Onions and Noodles

My January resolution was to avoid red meat in the week and eat more healthily so a tasty piece of Sea Bass, served up with spicy noodles seemed to the right balance of healthy and tasty.  That's the problem with trying to be healthy is that taste often suffers (yes there are plenty of vegetarians out there that will disagree).  The great thing about Asian food that it doesn't rely on red meat and is very tasty indeed.

Prepare the fish by filleting.  Keep the bones and head and make a fish stock.  This is very easy - add carrots, celery, onion or leeks with bay leaves and parsley)  This cooks for no longer than 30 minutes as fish bones can get bitter over time.

To make the noodles was simple, its really all about preparation (mise en place to you chefs out there).  The actual cooking tome is very quick especially the fish and you don't want to be messing about with the noodles as when the fish is ready - its ready and should be eaten straight away.

For the noodles you need

• An inch square of fresh ginger, 
• A stick of lemon grass, 
• 2 cloves of garlic, one red pepper 
• 4 spring onions 
• tablespoon of fish sauce
• tablespoon of dark soy 
• Thai noodles (enough for 4 people 
• 2 red peppers
• Packet of 2 pak choi
• Sesame seeds (to be browned off and sprinkled on the fish)
• Ladle of fish stock (i had used the fish heads and bones to make a stock)
• 2 good handfuls of Mange Tout 
• Bunch of coriander

The garlic, lemon grass and garlic are fried in a wok and once cooked through add the peppers, cook those for 2 minutes and then add the pak choi, spring onions and noodles which will have been soaked in hot water for 3 minutes.  Add the stock and sauces, check for seasoning and your done.

when you put the noodles on put the fillets which you have seasoned with salt and pepper  in a hot pan with sesame oil.  Cook skin side up for 2-3 minutes or until you can see the flesh starting to go white and then flip over.

Pass the chopped coriander through the noodles and serve in a warm bowl.  Place the fillet on top and sprinkle with the sesame seeds and some more coriander.

Now that's a tasty healthy dish to start the week!

Fillet of Beef with Mushroom, Gherkin, Tarragon and Dijon Mustard cream sauce.

I took out a lovely piece of fillet, part of a whole fillet I had been sent by Richard from Natsley Farm situated in Exmoor near Barnstable.  Richard has a herd of Ruby Reds, now over 100 cattle having built the herd from scratch 4 years ago.  We had used half the fillet on Christmas Eve in a Beef Wellington and fancied something stodgy to shift a stubborn hangover (all my hangovers seem stubborn these days).  With a piece of meat that good it just had to be griddled on a very hot griddle pan for a few minutes each side and eaten 'blue'.  So the decision was to go for a rich sauce and serve with Taglietelle (and peas as that all i had that was green in the house!)

The sauce needed a good base of stock which (and this is one of the benefits of owning a pub) i purloined from The Mansion.  Andy, my partner in the business and also the head chef is especially good at stocks and sauces.  Veal bones, pigs trotters, onion, celery, carrot, thyme and bay all rendered down over hours leaving a silky smooth gelatinous stock, intense in flavour and a great base for any meaty dish.

The hard part done for me the rest was easy.  Shallots sweated down and the mushrooms added, after they had been cooked a tablespoon of medium sherry was added and cooked off, shortly followed by the stock, Tarragon, Dijon mustard and gherkins.  Checked for seasoning this was left waiting for the cream to be added once the steaks were underway.

The fillet was cut into 7oz steaks and seasoned before being placed on a very hot griddle pan and cooked on both sides for a few minutes each.  The Taglietelle had been put on to cook and as the steaks neared cooking the cream was added to the sauce.  The steaks were removed and rested for a couple of minutes and the plate was plated up with the steak, a generous covering of the sauce and the peas.

The meat was exceptional and I defy anyone to find a better breed of beef (slow grown - 2 years to maturity and only on natural feeds)

So nothing too glamorous, just a very nice piece of meat and a simple sauce - delicious...

Bellevue Rendez-vous

www.bellevuerendezvous.com  Inspiration that's what it needed..sitting at my computer thinking about something interesting/witty/ funny (fat chance) to say was never going to happen.  Coq au Vin in a small French bistro in the same location as, what i thought of at the time 18 years ago, a smart Italian restaurant on Trinity Road in Tooting - which I can assure you 18 years was NOT smart. was interesting.  Rewind a little.  We, that's Lisa and I, looked for somewhere local and found somewhere, which a friend when asked, 'had they been there', replied, 'Is it a swingers club?', Bellevue Rendez-vous - you can see why...Anyway it had good local reviews - unpretentious, great value, very pregnant patron (added authenticity) and didn't disappoint.  Having been, and still trying to be, on a diet of sorts, the idea of Coq au Vin did it for me -  dish that I think I can do well.  However this arrived on a plate smaller than the one my starter arrived on and i was set to be critical but to cut a long story short (its late and i need sleep) it was sensational.  The chicken was blackened by the wine that it must have bathed in and when i asked why the plate was small the chef apparently wanted to make sure the chicken, mash and greens were adequately covered - boy were they and had i been at home i would have sucked the bones, liked the plate and kissed the chef...Suffice it to say we were happy.  By the way the charcuterie was small but perfectly formed and (Yes I know white wine with coq au vin is a sin, we had a lovely bottle of Macon Fuisse 2007). In summary, trust local review sites and take a punt..we did and we are very happy we did.