Recipe Review - Grilled Gammon & Baked Onions

From Tender Volume 1 by Nigel Slater
Grilled Gammon, Baked Onions (p 362)

Serves 2, with second helpings of onions

Ingredients:

• Medium onions - 6
• Butter – a thick slice (about 30g, if you are weiging)
• Plain flour – a heaped tablespoon
• Light stock – 250ml, hot
• Milk – 250ml, hot
• Bay leaves – 3
• Nutmeg
• Grain mustard – 2 teaspoons
• Parsley leaves – a small handful
• A little oil
• Gammon steaks – 2, about 150-175g each
• Dried oregano

Set the oven at 180°c/gas 4. Bring a deep pan of water to the boil. Peel the onions, add them to the pan, then turn down the heat and let them simmer until they are tender enough to take the point of a kitchen knife. This will only be a matter of twenty to twenty-five minutes or so. Drain them and discard the water (don’t try using it in the sauce, the flavour can be too strong.)

Put the pan back on the stove, melt the butter in it and stir in the flour, keeping the heat low to moderate. Let the flour and butter cook for a couple of minutes, stirring often so the mixture doesn’t burn, then turn up the heat, pour in the stock and milk and whisk together for a minute until there are no lumps.

Season the sauce with salt and black pepper, the bay leaves, a gentle grating of nutmeg and the mustard. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of these seasonings: they add depth and savour to the sauce and make the whole dish ‘work’. Let the sauce simmer gently for a good ten minutes or more, stirring regularly so that it does not catch on the bottom.

Cut the onions in half from stem to tip – take care, they are slippery – and place them flat-side down in a shallow baking dish. I use an oval enamelled gratin dish. Chop the parsley, but not too finely, and stir it into the sauce, then scoop the lot over the onions. Their caps will probably be poking out, but no matter, just bake for forty to forty-five minutes till the sauce is bubbling.

Turn off the heat, but leave the onions in the oven whilst you cook the gammon. If your grill is, like mine, in the oven, then move the onions to the bottom and put the grill pan two-thirds of the way up, so that it blocks the onions from the grill (if you prefer you can cook the gammon on a hob top grill).

Oil the steaks lightly and season them with pepper, a very little salt and a light sprinkling of oregano. Now grill them for three or four minutes on each side, till golden. Serve the grilled gammon with the baked onions and their sauce.

I made this for me and my boyfriend for a nice late night weekend dinner and found as I had most of the ingredients already, it was very cheap to make. The recipe was easy to follow with no tricky steps and the timings given were accurate. The intensely salty gammon complimented the sweet, creamy onions perfectly and I could have eaten the onions on their own with some fresh crusty bread. The generous amount of mustard in the white sauce worked really well, adding a necessary tang and the slight crunch of the grainy mustard was a pleasant texture against the softness of the vegetables. We had sautéed potatoes alongside, which tasted lovely as a meal, but it would have been filling enough without them. We both enjoyed our dinner, but I do wonder if cheese could have been added to the sauce to give an even richer finish, although the saltiness of cheese may have made the whole dish too pungent and salty. I am going to have to try the onions again but try adding cheese – I will let you know how that goes! The two of us who dined rated this dish 18/20. Well done Nige.

Nigel Slater - Tender Volume 1

Published: 2009

Overview: A hefty coffee-table book with over 400 recipes based on vegetables, with information on growing the vegetables as well as hints and tips on how to season and cook them, from one of Britain’s best food writers.

Review: I love this book. The close up image of a veined cabbage leaf on the front of the thick hardback cover draws a serious foodie in straight away. This is not a glossy book designed to lure a novice into the kitchen, rather it is a food bible meant for pondering over on cold, frosty days curled up in front of the fireplace with a steaming cup of tea whilst dreaming of what to make for a cosy late night supper. Slater is a phenomenal writer, to me this book is food porn. He makes the most un-exciting, mundane ingredients sound like edible gold. I have never raved about broad beans or aubergines, but reading about them in this book makes me dribble all over the pages. That’s a lie – I wouldn’t dream of getting these gloriously textured matte finish pages wet with any sort of fluid, let alone my own dribble. Under no circumstances will this book ever make it into my kitchen! I read it like a novel, letting his descriptions and beautifully simple recipes take over my imagination, and if I do wish to use a recipe I keep it a good distance away from the heat and mess of my kitchen even if that means walking back and forth after every step to check what to do next. The book is broken down into alphabetically arranged chapters, one for every vegetable he covers from asparagus and beetroot to tomatoes and turnips. Each chapter has a section on growing the vegetable in your own garden and then moves on to how to use your vegetable in the kitchen, followed by a selection of recipes. Some of the recipes are accompanied by images, which are gorgeously rustic and imperfect in the most beautiful way, really demonstrating how food is there to be eaten and enjoyed, not to look pretty on a sparkling white rectangular plate with dots of expertly placed jus adorning the merest morsel of edible art. Not that there isn’t a lot to be said for that fancy style of cooking, its just not what Nigel Slater is all about, and I love him all the more for it. Don’t be put off by the fact that this book is focused on veg, he still uses meat, fish and other yummy things (lots of cheese – mmm!) to compliment the main ingredient. It has opened my eyes to the many uses of vegetables that I never would have thought possible, or rather would have just overlooked. Mostly the recipes are incredibly simple, using only a few ingredients with the focus being on fresh, seasonal produce. Some of my favourites are: Chocolate beetroot cake (p 78); luxury cauliflower cheese (p188); A soup-stew of beans and cavolo nero (p 316); Grilled gammon and baked onions (p362) and Gratin dauphinois (p476). I don’t think the recipes would be easy to follow for a beginner as they aren’t broken down into steps and sometimes exact timings and measurements aren’t given – this book is aimed at a seasoned cook who can use their initiative in the kitchen. I have no real criticism of this book, it as beautifully written and presented with some fabulous recipes and advice, but as I have neither the time nor the patience (or the garden space for that matter) I have no real interest in the gardening aspects of the book. I would rather those pages be filled with even more mouth-watering culinary delights.

Rating: 9/10 – purely losing a point because I have not yet found a passion for gardening. Perhaps when I reach my 30s I will find a sudden interest and I know this book will be my first port of call!

Jerk Vegetables - My Recipe

Inspired by Levi Roots – Food For Friends

Serves 2 generously or 4 as a small side

Ingredients:
• 2 orange, red or yellow peppers
• 2 red onions
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp jerk seasoning
• 2 tbsp tomato ketchup
• Pinch of dried thyme
• Salt and black pepper

1. Thinly slice the peppers into strips and the onions into half moons.

2. Heat the oil in a large pan then add the vegetables, letting them sizzle before adding in the jerk seasoning, ketchup, thyme and salt and pepper.

3. Allow the onions to colour before turning the heat down to medium and add about 100ml of water. Let the water bubble away until you hear the vegetables start to fry again, meaning all the water has evaporated. Cook them over a low heat until they are very soft and merging together, this should take from 20-30 minutes, overcooking wouldn’t matter.

Lovely served with Levi’s calypso pork chops and jacket potatoes.

Recipe Review - Calypso Pork Chops

From Food For Friends by Levi Roots
Calypso pork chops (p68)

Serves 6

Ingredients:
• 6 pork chops
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
• Salt and black pepper
For the marinade:
• 10 tbsp dark soft brown sugar
• Juice of 3 limes
• 2 red chillies, deseeded and roughly chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 4 tbsp rum
• Splash of angostura bitters (optional)
To serve:
• Lime wedges, for squeezing
• Fresh coriander leaves (optional)

1. Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a non-reactive bowl. Place the chops in the marinade, turn so all sides are coated, cover with Clingfilm and leave to marinate in the refrigerator for several hours, or up to 24 hours. Turn the chops over every so often.

2. Heat 2 frying pans until they are really hot and take the chops out of the marinade, scraping any that is clinging back to them back into the bowl. Brush the chops all over with the oil, then season. Cook them in the frying pans over a high heat for about 3 minutes, or until you get a good colour, then turn over and repeat on the other side.

3. Reduce the heat to low and continue to cook the chops until cooked through - this takes at least 10 minutes. There should be no pink juices left when you pierce the meat. Towards the end of the cooking time, add the marinade and let it glaze the pork chops and bubble away in the pan. Squeeze on some lime and scatter with fresh coriander, if you like, before serving.

Levi recommends serving with red. green and gold coconut rice (p131) but I served it with fluffy jacket potatoes (obviously oozing with mounds of butter) and jerk vegetables. (see my own recipe) I served this as a midweek meal for me and my family. The recipe was easy to follow, and the ingredients were mostly things I had in the store cupboard. I left out the angostura bitters, as this was optional in any case. The pork chops started to burn after a minute over a high heat as suggested in the recipe, so I cooked them over a fairly low heat which gave them a lovely caramelised colour. The frying pan was a nightmare to wash up though! They tasted delicious but there was a comment that they were too sweet, though I found the mix of sweet, spicy and tangy just right. The four or us who munched on these pork chops rated them 32/40.

Levi Roots - Food For Friends

Published: 2010



Overview: A fair sized hardback book focused on simple recipes with a Caribbean twist, written by the creator of Reggae Reggae sauce.

Review: ‘Food For Friends’ has over 200 pages of delicious recipes, favourite ingredients and an interesting introduction from Levi Roots. His vibrant personality jumps out from the glossy pages, apparent in his colourful recipes and descriptions of his essential Caribbean ingredients. The recipes are arranged in chapter order, with sections such as Lunch, Picnic, Barbecue and Grill, Special Occasions and High Tea, with more in between. I like this layout, making it easy to find a dish to cook that suits the occasion. Some recipes have images, which are all appealing yet homely, some showing Roots and other people making or eating them which gives a laidback, casual feel to the book. The recipe layout is simple and fairly easy to follow, with ingredients that are generally easy to source in local supermarkets. One criticism I have of the recipes is that in some, for example Roots’ version of Spaghetti Bolognese on page 96, it calls for 100ml Sunshine Kit Cooking Sauce, which is in fact a whole recipe in itself on page 123 and contains 14 ingredients, therefore meaning you would need to make this recipe just to make another one. I feel that an alternative should be given, maybe a recommendation to use a bottle of Reggae Reggae sauce would have been better! I do, however, like the recipes, they are user friendly and make Caribbean cookery accessible to the everyday home cook. There is a good balance between sweet and savoury dishes, even showing desserts to make on the barbecue such as Barbecue bananas with passion fruit cream on page 75. The recipes work out to be fairly economical if you are going to be cooking a lot of Caribbean style food as many recipes use the same ingredients such as rum, honey, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, chilli and thyme, which can be bought in large quantities. From reading this book I feel inspired to experiment more with West Indian flavourings and am looking forward to trying out more recipes from this book such as: Pumpkin and spinach gratin (p35); Sweet potato, red onion and feta sunshine tart (p52); Levi’s sticky red cabbage (p120); Coconut pavlova with tropical fruit (p168); Sweet potato pudding (p174); Chocolate and orange spice cake (p178). Can you tell I like sweet things yet?

Rating: 8/10 – Really nice book with great simple layout and lots of colour with some lovely recipes, but a few of the recipes seem a little bit samey and maybe a bit too much rum is used!