Waitrose Christmas Cake

The good people of Waitrose sent me a wonderful box last year full of the ingredients needed to make a Christmas cake. Normal life has got the better of me until now and prevented me from finding time to write about it. But now, I find myself next to a belching chap from Chicago with time on my hands.

My father in law got rather excited last Autumn and decide he would turn the otherwise sedate making of a Christmas cake into a competition. He turned to Delia for inspiration as I reached for my little box of magic from Waitrose.



I decided to jazz my Christmas cake up by adding dried figs soaked in Stone’s Ginger Wine for an extra kick of spiced booze. It’s a little supplement that worked well and gave the cake extra longevity. That said, it did mean that on Christmas day it was still a bit juicy!

So with Christmas only 7 weeks away, it’s probably time to get soaking, stirring and baking. Don’t be afraid to add a few extra goodies. It’s a good way of using up mystery brown spirits and fortified wines.

Thank you to Waitrose. And sorry it’s taken a year to write about it. I figured a Christmas cake story between January and September would have been a bit weird.

Needless to say, thank you Waitrose. It's not quite time to say Merry Christmas yet, but it has certainly got me in the mood for some festive baking.

Mince Pie and Brandy Butter Sausages

Bonkers. But delicious. The suet from the mincemeat, along with the butterfat make these sausages very moist, whilst the fruit and the brandy give them a sophistication that helps to elevate them out of the novelty category. Given that Santa and his band of merry reindeer have buggered off for the rest of the year, they also make a great way of using up any leftover mincemeat.



Start with a 60/40 mixture of minced belly and shoulder. Add two big spoonfuls of mincemeat and a spoon of brandy butter. Then add a glug of brandy. Mix together with some salt, pepper and breadcrumbs until the consistency feel sausagey.

Then pump into some natural casings and leave to rest overnight. Create mini links and serve to unsuspecting friends as mini mince pie sausages on the end of cocktail sticks.



We ate these after a long walk in the frosty Somerset countryside with a cup of tea. To my delight the idea turned out to be far less hair-brained than I had feared. The sausages were moist, sticky, full of festive flavour and universally approved of. The stewed fruit led Cowie to think they tasted like Devils on Horseback. So if you’re keen to use up your mince meat the last dregs of brandy butter, spare them the pastry treatment and ram them inside some pigs intestine.

Gareth from Bibendum suggests quaffing some rich Alsatian Pinot Gri with these, whereas Fiona thought they’d go down a storm with Tawny Port or off-dry Amontillado.

Top photo is from kyz on Flickr via creative commons.

This is part of a series of posts about experimental sausages and a potential sausage-fest

Home Cured Gravadlax

Whenever I pick up HF-W’s Fish book, I’m always drawn, as if by osmosis, towards the smoking and curing section. Hugh gets very excited about Gravadmax, but given that we had a beautiful salmon it would have been a crime not to do the proper version. Ever since we had some amazing gravadlax at the Dorchester Grill, I’ve wanted to make it myself.



Apparently gravadlax started in Scandinavia as a way of preserving the seasonal glut of salmon. They buried the fish in the sand at the high tide mark with dill, salt, pine needles and an array of other locally prevalent herbs and then removed it days, weeks or months later after it had fermented. The technique has since evolved away from pine needles and fermentation towards a more elegant solution involving pressure, salt, sugar and dill. Loosely translated the "grav" bit means to bury in a grave and the "lax" means salmon. Luckily "gravadlax" sounds a lot better than "decayed salmon".

Season your salmon on both sides with copious amounts of good quality salt. Then sprinkle with a few spoons of sugar. Then empty an entire jar of dill into the equation and cover the whole fish like a crazed Viking (shamefully we didn’t have any fresh dill). Say a couple of prayers to Thor and then slip the fish into a freezer bag. Pop this in a flat bottomed ceramic dish and then stack your heaviest cooking books on top to squish it down.



Pop it in your larder, or failing that, fridge and turn the fish over every 12 hours or so. Some juice should leach out and after 3 days you’ll be rewarded with some sensationally cured fish. You can leave it for longer if you like a stronger cure.

I cast my mind back to our meal at the Dorchester Grill and remembered the way our charming waiter had carved the gravadlax at our table side.



Inspired by him, I sliced the fish on a slight angle with a super sharp knife and presented it in a rosette with a cup of mustard and dill spiked crème fraiche.





With a glass of shimmering Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc it was every bit as good as the tea smoked salmon we devoured the day before. And even if I do say so myself, as good as the Dorchester.

Smoking is Good For You: Orange PeokoeTea Smoked Salmon

Don’t tell Cowie, but I love smoked salmon. I get it from my grandfather who grumpily protests like Father Jack when the meal starts without a few slithers of tulip pink, oily smoked fish, anointed with a drop of lemon and befriended by a slice or two of buttered brown bread. Sadly, we’re all banned from the joy of freshly ground pepper in his presence because it makes him sneeze.

So in the interests of experimentation and as a sneaky way of getting around the need for pepper, I decided to have a blast at hot smoking my own salmon over some tea leaves as the opening gambit to our Christmas day feast. Luckily Mum had picked up a quiveringly fresh side of salmon from the fishmonger, so my task was an exciting one. I decided to smoke half of it and make gravadlax with the other.

For someone who doesn’t smoke, I’ve done a fair amount of smoking. Albeit of the edible variety. Cowie gave me a smoker as a present a couple of years ago, so I’ve had a bit of practice. Our main successes have been with smoked trout and with tea smoked duck. Both dishes employ the hot smoking method which not only cooks the food in the heat, but also cures it with the mysteriously alchemic qualities of the wafty smoke. When done right you are left with moist flesh and the irresistible flavour of fire.

Whilst everyone was watching soporific Christmas Eve telly, I got busy with the salmon. First heavily season the fish on both sides and remove any pin bones. Some people suggest brining, but I found it works fine if you skip this step. Place the fish on a pyrex dish that will fit inside the dish that is going to act as your smoker. Then line your mother’s finest Le Creuset casserole dish with two layers of thick foil. Cover the foil in tea leaves. I used Orange Pekoe which I had brought back from India, but I suspect any old tea leaves will do. Then throw in a couple of spoonfuls of rice, a sprinkling of sugar and a blob of honey. This will get the smoke kicked off.

Next it’s time for some Blue Peter improvisation. Scrunch up three balls of foil and position them in the bottom of the pan to act as supports for the plate or pyrex bowl that your salmon is sitting on. You need the gap between the base of the pan and the pyrex dish to allow the smoke to billow.

Then place your smoking vessel on the hob and get the tea leaves smoking. Once the feathers of smoke are smoldering consistently place the pyrex dish on the three foil feet and whack on the lid. If it doesn’t fit perfectly then you’re in trouble. So have some kit handy to improvise.



Keep the heat high for the first 10 minutes and then turn the heat down and smoke for a further 15 minutes. This is all quite trial and error so you might want to have a peak after 20 minutes has elapsed and then take a call on how much further your want to take it. My preference is for the fish to still be moist and rare in the middle, but I imagine some would get squeamish about it.

One precaution you should take is to make sure you’ve closed all the doors leading out of your kitchen to the rest of the house and opened all the windows to mitigate against smoking the rest of the family out. When the big moment came to check on the salmon, I decided to take it outside into snow and was delighted to see that the smoke had worked its magic.







The flesh was translucently moist yet cooked. I let out an embarrassing fist pump in triumph, which was sadly witnessed by my sister, before popping it in the fridge and collapsed in front of the telly.

On Christmas Day, I simply whipped up a crème fraiche and lemon dressing and served it in rosy pink wedges with a small salad and a glass of top class Grüner Veltliner.





It was a wonderful start to our meal and one of the most satisfying things I’ve done this year. The highlight was the way the fish teased apart like the indented divisions in a posh dictionary and the support from the dazzlingly alive wine had us all purring as loudly as our rather talkative Siamese cat.

For a more in depth guide to hot and cold smoking get your hands on Hugh F-W's brilliant Fish book or have a butchers at this site.

Christmas Day

Back in Novemeber I very foolishly volunteered to be in charge of our Christmas roast this year. Gung ho bravado got the better of me and come Christmas morning I was regreting it! Mum seemed to have an extra few inches of bounce inher step. Partly because we'd given her such a good stocking but also because she had been spared a day of slogging it out in the kitchen.

Our goose came with a free book from Throncotte the other side of Bedford in a village called Northill. A very quiant little place that was inundated with cars collecting their prize birds for Christmas. Having a cup of coffee after breakfast I had a flick through the book and became engrossed in the rich history of eating goose and the countless ways people have found across Europe to eat them!



They are a great favourite in Jewish cooking occupying the space that pigs hold in Christianity. In northern Italy they are experts at making goose ham and goose salami which sound utterly delicious. I guess the amount of fat you get on a pig and a goose can't be that different.

Having failed to find a suitable recipe in the Goose book for a roast goose... we opted for Delia instead. The goose book suggested that we roast our bird for around 3 hours whereas Delia was keen to cook it for closer to 5. Big difference. As it turns out the goose book would have been slightly more accurate.

Having watched Heston blow air into a duck to get the skin crispy and having watched James Martin prick the skin of a duck and pur boiling water over it to get some of the fat out I decided to give it a go on a goose! Having carved the Christmas goose for the last couple of years I have always been staggered by the litres of fat that render out or don't!

I pricked the skin all over and poured boiling water all over it with the roasting pan underneath. After two pours you could see that a substantial amount of fat had oozed our of the skin and had formed a greasy skin on the water. We left the goose to dry in the lader and got to work on a sage, apple, potato, liver and onion stuffing a la Delia.

Simply sweat loads of onions and add some sliced apple. In the meantime par boil some potatoes. Once tender lob these into the onion mixture and cook through for a bit. Add the goose liver in slithers and then chuck in some sage. Then ram it all inside the goose! Easy. Don't forget to season it.

Then rub salt and pepper vigorously into the skin of the goose find a roasting tin big enough and rest the goose either on a rack or on an asortment of root vegetables and onions. This means that the bird is raised out of the fat. Using veggies means you'll also get some good stuff to go in the gravy.

Pop in the oven for how ever long you see fit and wait for the little white popper to get an erection. Then it's done! 3-4 hours should do the trick!



Gorgeous stuffing. Realy sagey and with some good depth from the liver. Suz loved it until someone let on that it had ofal in it!





We had some great wine with it, which I bought especially from Philglas and Swiggot for Dad's Christmas present. He's a big white Burgundy fan so this Chassagne Montrachet went down a treat. Oily, rich, lemony, super smooth, buttery and full of great adjectives!



Tired by a full day of cooking and a mamouth amount of carving I rocked back into my seat and realised that I had to change out of shirt and tie and into jeans and polo shirt before Mum wheeled out her famous figgy pudding. She'd steamed it for 24 hours making it really moist and nowhere near as heavy as a Christmas pudding! We all gave in and gobbled down our pudding before rejecting cheese and retiring into the drawing room for coffee and the Christmas special of Strictly Come Dancing!



So another Christas has passed now and we're all so full we can barely move. My resolution is to lose weight so I can fit into all of my old clothes. Shouldn't be too hard. More squash. Less carbs. Smaller portions.