Twice Baked Cheddar Soufflé
This is easy, just add shredded wild garlic to a simple Alfredo Sauce BUT I made it extra yummy. My real man had a burger (homemade of course, I’m surprised you asked) topped with bacon, red onions and cheddar. I always finish it in the oven and whilst doing this I crisply fried myself some breadcrumbs in the bacony fat which had bits of caramelised onion in it, thus making a delicious pangratatto!
My meal was seriously delicious (I’d have thought so even if I wasn’t such a bighead) and looked like this.
I also puréed some of the leaves together with olive oil, lemon juice and freshly and coarsely ground black pepper and marinated a piece of haddock in this for an hour or so then pan fried it and ate it with our first Jersey Royals of the season.
… and I had a wonderful Monkfish Madras which was perfect in every way, in fact extra perfect as it had a surprise Onion Bhaji in the centre of it. With this I drank my first, but certainly not my last, wine from Camel Valley; Bacchus, a fruity white wine which was gorgeous.
Yesterday lunchtime, when I hunger struck, I prowled around the kitchen (as much as one can prowl in a 19” caravan) uninspired when suddenly I found a cooked sweet potato in the fridge. I put it there myself so I wasn’t too startled.
I decided to fry it till crisp on the outside and was then downhearted to realise I hadn’t washed the frying pan. However … it had bacon fat in it. Hurrah! Let me tell you sweet potato fried in bacon fat and eaten with copious black pepper and some crunchy sea salt is nothing to be sad about.
Later in the day, about 5, I decided to clear out my food cupboard a bit and when I opened the door a packet with a single seeded Ryvita fell out, so I ate it. I was left with a collection of crumbs and seeds in the packet and wondered what to do with them. I then found some scraps of hazelnuts and flaked almonds and remembered there were some plaice fillets in the freezer so my meal became clear …
Actually when I served the meal it looked a bit dry and boring, but it was so good I’d have been happy to have eaten it at Rick Stein’s or similar!
Instead I used my old fallback dough that I use for everything. I used it for the dumplings in the Mince and Dumplings the other day. It is basically a scone dough but is equally good for dumplings, doughnuts, American biscuits, English biscuits, griddle cakes, rock buns, doughnuts, cobblers, turnovers and flatbreads. It’s so useful I wrote a book about it ~ The Secret Life of Scones.
Mayonnaisy Cheese on Toast – now I may have mentioned this before, I eat it quite a lot. I just mix together mayonnaise and grated Cheddar in the ratio 1:2, add anything I like – in this case red onion and freshly ground black pepper. Spread on toast and put under the grill till bubbling and turning golden in places it makes for a fine lunch.
Just a sweet potato baked in the oven (handy hint – put some foil under it, they ooze like bastards) till tender (about 30-40 mins, they are quicker than normal potatoes) with a dollop of mayo and a little sweet chilli sauce. Delicious.
Today I sautéed the mushrooms in a little olive oil and when they were all golden and perfect I stirred in the leftover gravy (which was not ordinary run of the mill type gravy but wine rich gravy with threads of tender steak and slivers of soft onion in it) and piled the lot onto a couple of slices of toasted Mediterranean bread which has sun dried tomatoes and olives and stuff in it. Just as I was about to eat this tempting lunch I thought “umami”, as one does, and decided to grate over some of the very dried out Gran Padano left in the fridge.
Just in case you don’t know, but I think you do, umami is the fifth taste after the four usual ones; sweet, sour, salt and bitter. It is the flavour that is deeply savoury and wonderful which is found in cheese, mushrooms beef and even in dried tomatoes which were in my bread.
Whilst preparing this repast I thought and thought and thought – what drink really goes well with all these ingredients? And then the answer came to me, red wine of course.
Cornwall is full of sunshine though a bit windy. Stuff bursting out in flower all over the place including fields of tame daffodils which I think are grown for the bulbs as they never seem to cut the flowers.
Don’t make these in advance – they need to be cooked immediately.