Delia’s How to Cook: Part Two (2000 UK VHS) (TAPE ONE)

(c) BBC.

I [Music] [Music] if you want to learn to drive in life the one thing you have to do is make a commitment to having driving lessons and then you’ve got to spend a little bit of money on paying for the driving lessons well if you want to learn how to cook in a way the same thing applies so welcome to part two of how to cook and how to start off by spending a little bit of time and money on getting the right store covered [Music] so we’re going to kick off how to cook part two by me emptying out my store cupboard and showing the kind of things that you need if you want to have a lifetime of interesting dishes these are the kind of nucleus of ingredients that you need to have in your store cupboard if you want to cook more interestingly and I’m not going to have time to mention each one individually but I have written about each one what I’m going to try and do is as we go through how to cook home in on some of these ingredients that we’re going to be using in the recipes and explain why they should be in your store cupboard [Music] first of all I’ve got the baking group we’ve got vanilla pods vanilla extract unrefined sugar very important and molasses golden syrup and ginger and we’ll be talking more about Ginger later suppose I have to warn you that this is the most expensive bit because this is the booze but I also think that some of these bottles actually don’t cost a lot of money because what’s happening is you’re just using a little bit here and a little bit there it’s not that EX expensive over a long period of time now we’ve got various spices which we’re going to be talking about in detail later on in this program but I also think buying whole spices and roasting them yourself is so much better than buying them ready ground or buying curry paste then we’ve got the Oriental group here and we’ll be looking at those in just a moment porini mushrooms dried they’re in the store cupboard here olives Capers lovely ingredient Capers and you can have salted Capers which have a lovely strong sort of salty flavor and you can have them preserved in vinegar which is a milder flavor but all these things are so important for getting flavor into your cooking this you’ll be familiar with this is obviously Worcester sauce we’ve got soy sauce going to talk about uh much more about that in a moment this is like the answer to the cooks prayer because this is powdered vegetable weon it’s called and always that in your ladder anytime you need stock make a soup there it is instant all you do is put it in hot water another good ingredient here is organic tomato ketchup has no sugar in it unlike all the others that are sort of packed with sugar this has no sugar so it’s really true to its tomato [Music] flavor the good news is there are certain things you don’t need and over here I’ve got some of them you know you have this sort of designer ingredients now that are everywhere and people sort of like to have them lying around the kitchen and they look good perhaps but they’re not really much use I mean you don’t need Herb vinegars because you can use herbs you certainly don’t need mango vinegar and as for Rasberry mustard well I don’t think you need raspberry mustard and what happens is you know people bring them back from their holidays and give you presents and they sit in the back of the cupboard and just grow dust so no designer ingredients just pure simple ingredients and I’m going to start off by having a word about probably the most important two ingredients in cooking certainly for me and that is good old pepper and salt and salt is up for discussion here because you can buy sort of pouring salt um and that’s all right but it has chemicals in it to make it Pour and actually the salty flavor is a little bit bitter if you want to have really good salt which makes everything you cook you know taste better then I would suggest you go for this I think this is the best salt in the world and it comes from not very far away from here in fact from molden in Essex it’s sea salt and being sea salt it has this lovely extra sort of salty taste so you can use less actually than you would if you were using the running salt now on the table you can just take it between your fingers and crush it between your fingers like that over your food if you want to or if you’re making a salad dressing you can crush it with a pestle and more mortar and uh I’d like to say that this is one of the most important bits of equipment for a cook um it won’t cost you much money you can see how strong it is It’s Made of Stone and it’ll last you a lifetime so pesel and water definitely essential so we’ve got the salt what about the pepper well there’s a lot more to pepper than you might have thought um these are pepper corns black pepper corns and I’ll just show you those they’re a certain type of berry grown from a bush called Piper nigram and they’re dried in the Sun and after they’re dried they have a black outer coating which is very very fragrant and then they have an inner Berry which is very hot and fiery so if you buy white pepper corns what you’ve got here these are white pepper corns without the sort of fragrant outer part and so therefore I wouldn’t recommend that you ever bother with white peppercorns because if you have this type the black peppercorns you’ve got the fragrance on the outside the fiery on the inside and you’ve got a better flavor and another very important bit to cooking is having a good Pepper Mill and a good salt Mill and I know there are many of you out there that have thrown away many of these because they simply don’t do the job so um I want to show you these which are excellent and if you buy them like this good quality ones they will last you a lifetime my first Pepper Mill and salt Mill that I bought like this I’m still using so that’s 30 years ago [Music] well the idea behind having a well stocked store cupboard is that you can rush home from work and cook yourself a really brilliant meal in about half an hour flat that’s what I’m going to show you now this is a recipe for Thai noodles with shrimp in Thailand they call it Pad Thai and the main ingredient are these These are rice noodles sometimes they’re called cellophane noodles and they come in three different sizes is this is the medium size you can get very thin thread noodles and you can get them slightly bigger then this ingredient here is dried shrimp now if you’ve ever bought a packet of Frozen prawns and defrosted them and tasted them there’s no flavor there is there but shrimps have all the flavor of the sea and when you dry them you’ve got the concentrated flavor of shrimp so it’s just a wonderful ingredient and you only have to use very little to get that marvelous sort of sea seafood taste so fried shrimps and then here is Thai fish sauce if you think fish sauce sounds a bit then let me just take you back to Worcester sauce which we talked about a little bit earlier Worcester sauce is actually made from fish it’s made from fermented Anchovies and this is another version an Eastern version if you like of Worcester sauce it has all the authentic Thai Flavor in it which you want to get into this kind of Dish and also it’s quite salty so you don’t need to use salt it sort of takes the place of salt now these don’t need to be cooked these don’t need to be cooked but they do need to be soaked so I’m just going to show you what happens here I’ve got 4 oz of the noodles and what I’m going to do is pour boiling water over them it’s quite a convenient recipe this because what you do is you just let them soak for 10 minutes same with the shrimps I’ve got two tablespoons two rounded tablespoons of dried shrimps there and they’re going to soak in boiling water for 10 minutes so that gives you a chance to get everything else ready now really this is a kind of a stir fried dish and the secret of good easy hassle-free stir frying is to have everything all lined up and ready to go before you start cooking but since we’ve been doing how to cook on television and you’ve all been writing to me I’ve learned that you need to see more than things being chopped going into the saucein sometimes you need to know how they’re prepared so two ingredients I’ve got here are chilies and garlic and I’m going to show you how to prepare them first of all garlic um sometimes beginners don’t even know what a head of garlic is so a head of garlic is all the cloves Al together and a clove of garlic is one that you just take out and then how to prepare that the skin the papery skin needs to come off and you give it a good bash once you given it a bash the skin becomes loose and you can take the skin off very very easily sometimes we put it through a Crusher but this is going to be chopped garlic so all you do is slice it first and then you just put the little slices like that chop them with your knife into little pieces and then when you’ve got it all use your knife going across it to chop it really really finely so that’s how to prepare a clove of garlic next we’ve got two chilies what type of chili should you use well you can have many many chilies and they’ve all got different temperatures or if you like the degrees of heat but the a good guide is that if you buy fat ones like this they’re milder they’ve still got the kick they’ve still got the peony but they’re milder if you buy these the thin ones and they’re called bird’s eye chilies which are used in thae cooking a lot then you know that these are going to be pretty fiery so if you like it very fiery you can use these if you like a little bit milder use these and how to prepare a chili first of will take the the top off like that the stalk then cut it in half and then you need to remove the seeds because the seeds are very fiery I don’t want that much fire I mean in some Thai Dishes they just use you know 20 of those seeds and all but they uh they’re used to hotter food than we’re used to one word of warning if you’re ever preparing chilies you have to be very very careful to wash your hands after you’ve prepared them because if you just happen to sort of touch your face and you’ve been preparing chilies it can be quite painful it can really sting so there we are now we’re just going to cut that into little strips and then the little strips are going to be chopped finely just the same as the garlic so that’s how to prepare chili and garlic right everything else is ready I’ll tell you what it is as it goes into the pan first of all in the pan I’ve got 3 tablespoons of ground nut oil and that’s been heating gently here and I’m just going to turn the heat up high now and in Thailand they’d be using a special Thai walk which is not like a Chinese one it’s sort of round with double handles uh I’m just going to use an ordinary um sauce span here it’s difficult to use a walk if you haven’t got a really good gas flame swirl the oil round and then the first thing that goes in is the chili two chilies like the one I showed you the the the the mild one chili two cloves of garlic the onions so they all go in together and then they’ll need about a minute in the hot pan to a minute and a half until the onion begins to look tender then the next ingredient is the soaked dry shrimp and here in this little pot these are frozen tiger prawns that have been defrosted and I’ve just chopped them into little pieces and you can see as they go in they look sort of lovely translucent blue they look and then in 2 minutes what will happen is that they’ll turn a lovely juicy prawn pink color I just love watching that blue turn into pink while I’m cooking it’s really nice so they’re all lovely and ready to go and what we now need to add is first of all 2 tablespoons of Thai fish sauce and then I’m going to use the juice of a lime and I love using this now this is one of my favorite bits of equipment where you just stick that into the lime and turn it around you need a nice large juicy lime for this and then all the juice comes pouring out and once the fish sauce goes in you’re in Thailand you know you can smell Tha cooking that’s that now I’m going to go and get my soaked noodles after they’ve been soaked in hot water you put them straight into cold water and drain them and here they are if you don’t put them in cold water straight away they go all claggy but these are nice and loose so in they go next and then I’m just going to stir those around a little bit to get all those other ingredients and flavors mixed into them and then the final ingredient that’s going to go into the main part of this dish there is a garnish but the final ingredient is two beaten eggs now what you do is you beat the eggs up and then you pour them in and those of you who are with me with on part one will remember remember when you make an omelette you pour the egg in the pan and you just shake it around a bit and leave it to settle for about 1 minute and then after a minute you can start to stir and the little flakes of egg will begin to appear now we’ve got a garnish for this and the garnish is three ingredients first of all I’ve got 2 oz of unsalted roasted peanuts I’ve got two spring onions that have been finely chopped uh but you use all the green part as well you don’t trim them and two heat tablespoons of fresh coriander now half of that is going to go in now like that and half of that begins to look very colorful now and half of that one brief stir and this is now ready to serve so what you need to do is have ready a hot serving plate if you’re going to serve it on a serving plate there we go onto the plate go the noodles like that and then finally the rest of the garnish gets sprinkled on the top so you’ve got some crunch with the peanuts and you’ve got the lovely flavor of chopped spring onions and then finally the coriander leaves and that is pad thai or Thai noodles with shrimps English mustard is the one and only British spice but it needs to be treated carefully you have to mix it with cold water and leave it aside for about 10 or 15 minutes to really develop its kick this is a recipe using two mustards the first one is English mustard powder and the second one is whole grain mustard prepare one pound of Lamb’s kidneys by cutting them in half horizontally with a sharp knife then using kitchen scissors cut out the white core and then peel off the outside skin fry the kidneys for 3 minutes turning halfway through then remove them from the pan add the onion and then the mushrooms when the juices begin to run stir in three fluid ounces of dry white wine and reduce the wine before adding a teaspoon of mustard powder and two Heap teaspoons of grain mustard this is a 200 mil tub of creme fresh add this to the sauce season and stir everything thoroughly then keep on reducing the mixture until it’s reduced by half finally return the kidneys and their juices to the pan stir again and then heat through for about 1 minute before serving this will be Stu for two or three people well one of the essential ingredients for a well stocked store cupboard is having spices lovely fragrant exotic spices that have been coming here from around the world for centuries but I need to give you a tip on spices whenever possible buy whole spices don’t buy them ready ground because once they’re ground they lose their fragrance and flavor very very quickly some spices you have to buy ground because they don’t come whole but the rule is whenever they do come whole try and seek them out and find them and one of the best ways to find them actually is in Oriental or Indian shops and they’re also um much less expensive if you buy them that way too now to show you a recipe using spices and how to deal with them I’m going to show you my version of a of an Indian type recipe called um meat dopiaza dopiaza means double onions but first of all what I’m going to do is show you how to deal with whole spices when you’re using them for cooking now what I’ve got here is a little selection of whole spices this here is coriander seeds this one here is fennel seeds and this one is cuming seeds this one is called fenu Greek if you can’t get it hold you’ll have to buy it ground but you can hunt around and get it whole um if you if you look hard enough and these are cardamon pods and the way to deal with them is to preheat a frying pan over a medium heat no oil nothing like that that measure out your spices the ones you’re going to need and then just put them into the frying pan and toss them around a bit and then you need to leave them there don’t go away and watch them for about one or two minutes and they start to change color and also you begin to get the fragrance you know it just hits you this wonderful mixture of exotic fragrances and sometimes when they get hot they start to sort of move about and sometimes they jump a little bit I just hear them just beginning to sort of peek but be careful don’t go away don’t leave them too long because you don’t want them to burn then having brought them back to life by roasting them you then put them into your pesum water which we’ve already talked about that and then just go in heily and crush them and I had a letter when I did part one remember we made an egg C I had a letter from somebody saying why did you make me go out and spend all that money and have to go to the bother of roasting and grinding spices why couldn’t I just use a good curry paste well the reason is that if you’re going to cook something exotic and you need to have as much flavor as you can get there’s no point in cooking unless you get the maximum amount of flavor and whole spices will last for about a year so just keep going on like that until they ground to a fine powder and then you can use them to put in your Curry the curry we’re making today begins with garlic fresh ginger and green chilies and the Stars we’re using from the spice cupboard are cardamon pods coriander cumin venel seeds and pre-round fenugreek powder and lastly turmeric this is called curried beef dopiaza and dopiaza means double onions so you need a pound of onions sliced like this into half moon shapes Begin by Browning the onions and then add the garlic and chili and cook for a few minutes next add 2 lbs of chuck steak which has been cut into cubes and brown a few pieces at a time first stir the beef into the onions then add the crushed spices with the turmeric then your Ginger and two medium tomatoes skinned and [Music] chopped now another store covered ingredient this is 3 oz of creamed coconut which is grated and combined with hot water add this to the curry along with five fluid ounces of natural yogurt stir and then let it all simmer really gently for 2 hours then just before it goes to the table add the juice of a fresh lime a tablespoon of coriander leaves serve with basmati rice and some coriander [Music] Chutney now I’m going to show you the easiest most exotic and quickest recipe I know and this is called oriental pork casserole you start off with a large casserole and in it I’ve got 2 lbs of shoulder of pork cut up into 1 in cubes and it must be British pork of course and that’s just been put in a single layer in the base of the casserole so it goes straight in then we’re going to make a sauce and we’re into our store cupboard for two very important store cupboard ingredients this is soy sauce and I want to tell you something about this try and get Japanese soy sauce if you can because it’s the best in the world and this one here is a Chinese ingredient rice wine and this wine is made from rice and if you if you find um there is a choice in the shop of white or the darker one always get the darker one cuz that’s the best now I’ve got four fluid ounces of both of those in my jug here and this is going to have some more ingredients added first of all Ginger and fresh ginger you might be a bit afraid of that if you’ve never used it looks like this rather uninviting and nobbly and all you do is you just take a piece off you don’t keep it in the store cupboard you keep it in the fridge actually in a in a polythene bag take a piece off just peel it as you would peel a potato and then it looks like that and then for this recipe it’s going to be grated so I want to show you this grater here which is very very good for ginger very efficient and then you just grate it on the grater and what we need for our recipe here is a heap tablespoon Al together but I just wanted to show you how very easy Ginger is to deal with but here’s my tablespoon which somebody has kindly already measured out for me so that goes in to join the soy sauce and the rice wine next we’ve got a small onion that’s finely chopped that goes in this is molasses sugar and refined sugar and I’ve got a dessert spoon and then I’ve got two cloves of garlic which have been crushed and I’ve got two chilies which we saw how to prepare a few moments ago chopped small told you how easy it was all you do now is you give that a good whisk and then you just simply pour it over the pork so there’s no Browning nothing like that that just gets poured over the pork as evenly as possible and then you turn the heat on bring it up to simmering point but we’ve got two more ingredients from the store cupboard again this one is cinnamon whole cinnamon sticks so I’m going to put two of those in and then this is a lovely Chinese spice this is called star anise and it’s shaped like a star as you can see and each petal holds a little seed and the seed during the cooking releases a lovely sort of Ana seed flavor you’ll soon have your kitchen smelling like a Chinese restaurant when you make this so in that goes put the lid on and then it’s cooked for just one and a half hours and you can go away and forget all about it but you come back halfway through turn the pieces of meat over and then finish the cooking time [Music] and after 1 and 1 half hours cooking this is what it looks like and the smell the aroma that comes from it is just absolutely tantalizing so here we are Oriental pork casserole I think it’s nice with Thai sticky rice and stir fried green vegetables then there’s finally just a little garnish of shredded spring onion and a little tiny bit of shredded chili I never seem to have enough time to show you all I want to show you but there is enough time for you to just have a little peep at one or two more store cupboard recipes now we’re looking at some of the sweet things in the store cupboard this is stem Ginger it’s one of my favorites it lasts for ages and it’s the basis of lots of wonderful recipes golden syrup is an old favorite brilliant in Winter puddings and there’s also honey here or maple syrup which we used in the first series now we have unrefined sugars light demera and various shades of dark brown to thick molasses sugar and if you want unrefined syrup this is thick dark pure [Music] molasses I do hope you’ll try this recipe using some of the ingredients it’s it’s a light moist preserved ginger cake with a sharp lemony [Music] icing now we’re back to Savory recipes and this is called anad a lovely snack from provant to serve on baked cruts of bread it’s a mixture of crushed anchovies olives onion garlic and tomatoes with oregano marom and parsley this is a recipe from the Caribbean thick pork chops served with a wet jerk seasoning which is made with spices and molasses and to go with them I prepared this pineapple saucer which gives a lovely sweet Edge to compliment the kick of the [Music] pork well now we really have run out of time but I’m going to be back next week and I hope you’ll be back too [Music] oh [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] this time it’s how to cook fish and we’ve got butterfly prawns in garlic butter herrings that are simply fried in oatmeal and a very luxurious smoked fish pie why is it do you think that we live in a group of beautiful islands surrounded by the sea that we don’t actually eat enough fish well over the years I’ve been writing recipes and doing television programs and receiving lots of letters I think the main reason is fear we want to eat fish when we’re in restaurants but we’re afraid of cooking it afraid of handling it and all that goes with cooking it now why are we afraid I think there’s some kind of myth that was propagated years ago when people landed fish straight from the sea and it had to be gutted and scaled and all that is terrifying but nowadays we live in the age of modern fish mongers they will do all the work for for you it doesn’t need a lot of handling at all and don’t forget that in my opinion fish is the 21st century food it’s got everything going for it that we want in the modern diet it’s low in fat for the most part and probably the best reason for buying and cooking fish is that you can have supper on the table in probably about 10 minutes and at the most 30 minutes now I’ve got half an hour to convince you now not to be afraid I’m going to start by explaining to you what the various groups of fish are and how they’re going to cook and eat I think the best way for a beginner to approach the subject of cooking fish is to divide the various fish into families so that we can Define their textures the first family of fish contains probably the ones that we’re most familiar with Cod and hadock which you can recognize by the black stripe along the side and these come under the heading of firm and Flaky and when you cook the flesh it’s quite firm to eat and it separates out into seg ments and in this group also are two other fish one Whiting and the other hake this is the Ferman mey family firstly turet and halet which have much more bite and can stand up to more vigorous cooking also in this Fir and Meaty League are monk fish tales then we come to the more delicate fish this is place with delicate soft flesh and a lovely flavor delicate fish are usually flat and lemon sole DOA so or skate come into this category now as a complete contrast these are oily fish with lots of gutsy flavor this is a family that starts with the tiny white bait and goes up through to the Sardine and the Herring and right up to the mackerel with its beautiful iridescent skin salmon and sea trout are also oily fish but both have a distinctive pinkish flesh the salmon is known as the king of the sea and caught wild in the early spring I would absolutely agree with that well if you’ll forgive the pun we’re going to plunge right in at the deep end and I’m going to tackle first of all perhaps the most frightening fish of all and that’s the Herring now I’ve got a little campaign going about herrings because I can’t understand why everybody goes mad for sardines from the Mediterranean that have to be fro Frozen and shipped over and they sometimes ignore this wonderful fish called the Herring that’s fished in our own Waters and it belongs to the same family now what’s good about a herring is you get more for your money because they’re much juicier they’re bigger and they’re fatter and the thing they’ve all got in common those four fish is they have lots of lovely gutsy flavor and that’s why I’m campaigning for them so now I hope I’m going to take the fear away and show you how to deal with a herring first of all a good fish Monga will prepare it for you he’ll gut it he’ll remove the the scales take the head off we want the tail on I’ll tell you about that in a minute and then when you get it home if the guts have been removed from the top here you might need to just slit the belly open with a pair of scissors and then there’s a fin here that needs to be snipped off with the scissors then the next thing you do is you put your Herring like that onto a board so that it’s sitting sort of upright and there’s another little fin here that’s going to come off and another one here that’s going to come off and then having sat it upright on your board you then need to flatten it out now you can use a rolling pin but I think it’s okay just to use your fist and give it a few Hefty bashes so we’ll do that there we are now when we’ve done that the next thing we need to do is find the backbone with with our hand with the fingers like that and you can feel it and then you press the back bone with your fingers all the way along now we’re going to turn it right way up and then you can see the bone the backbone here the beginning of it you can take a little knife if it’ll help you and then you just pull and what happens is the backbone comes away and all the little bones coming off it will come away as well and any that you’ve missed you can just pull out with your fingers like that or you can take eyebrow tweezers that’s sometimes helpful removing all the rest of the little bones now there’s a row of Bones here that have been under the sort of tummy flap and we don’t need those so we going to cut those away with the scissors like that and do the same on the other side like that Now the recipe I’m going to show you you could of course Fold It Up Like That Make Some Cuts in it and it’s very nice on the barbecue but I’m going to show you today traditional Scottish recipe which is Herring fried in oatmeal and what happens to the Herring is you wash it dry it very carefully with some kitchen paper season it and then you dip it first into flour then into beaten egg and then into this lovely ingredient which is coarse oatmeal and you’ll find coarse oat oatmeal is available at um health food and Whole Food Shops what I’ve done here is it’s got flour on this side but on this side it’s got the coarse oatmeal and what that does is it gives it a lovely crusty crunchy crust when you eat it and all that’s going to need now which I think is ready is a hot frying pan and in Scotland they always traditionally fry herring in oatmeal in lard but I’m using lard here but if you don’t want to use lard you can use a flavorless oil like ground nut oil but it must be very hot when the fish goes in to get it nice and crispy and then that will actually need turning over halfway through I always think it’s best to drain fish when it’s been fried on crumpled grease proof paper and that is going to be served with perhaps a bit of lemon or lime to squeeze over although I actually like on herrings I actually like good old malt vinegar but anyway I’ve got an accompaniment here for you and this is a beetroot relish well speaking a fish and the Fear Factor I think probably one of the most fearful fishes to cook is Skate people are afraid of it but I have to reassure you about skate because first of all it does have the most wonderful flavor it’s it’s a really truly superb fish and so if I can take the fear away from you I will it has lovely meaty flesh that sort of comes off in shards but first of all you can cook it either steam it Grill it but I like it fried just dusted with a little bit of seasoned flour first well what every decent bit of fried fish needs is a homemade tartar sauce one of the things that I think is really disgusting is that kind of factory made tartar sauce that comes in little saet sometimes it’s nice to taste the real thing and the good news is you can make tartar sauce homemade in very very few minutes so we start off with a food processor you’re going to have to have a food processor of course if you’re going to do it quickly and into the processor first of all goes one large egg and then along with the egg I’ve got one clove of garlic I’m going to use half a teaspoon of mustard powder and half a teaspoon of sea salce and then I’m going to put the lid on the processor switch on and blend those together and then this is also a recipe for quick mayonnaise so you could just have it as mayonnaise if you wanted to but we’re going to make tart our sauce the next thing you need is six fluid ounces of light olive oil or you could use ground nut oil or grape seed oil you don’t want a lot of flavor in the oil and all you do now is you let the oil drizzle very slowly it’s good to use one of these because you can make it as slow as possible if you’ve got one of these oil oil cans and let it drip very very slowly and it’ll take about 2 minutes so you can sit down you can start the cross word you can just switch off for 2 minutes while you pour it in [Laughter] [Music] right then we can switch off and I had it running on quite a slow speed there you might have to taste to check the seasoning and you will need to have some freshly Mill pepper in there but now we’re going to add lots of other goodies some lemon juice and these are two more store cup ingredients you know we were in the store cupboard last week this is salted Capers and these are cornishon and cornon don’t confuse them with girkins because girkins are a little bit sharp but cornon are are crisper and better and they’re very widely available now so Ino a tablespoon of Capers and they’ve been rinsed under the tap to get rid of the salt and then four cornishon and this is a tablespoon of parsley and what they’re going to now what’s going to happen to them now is we’re going to chop them with the processor by switching it to a pulse movement and then it’s quite fun to just stand back and watch it chop now you can have it very finely chopped or you can have it chunky I’m of the chunky school myself and then off I just want you to just have a look at that now let’s take the blade out first and it couldn’t be quicker it couldn’t be easier and that is homemade TARTA sauce keep it in a screw top jar in the refrigerator and it will keep for up to a week and here we have our beautiful piece of golden fried skate our lovely homemade tartar sauce which you’ve just seen the skate will take about 4 minutes on each side and the sauce as you saw probably take about 4 minutes from start to finish but as promised I’m now going to show you why you shouldn’t be afraid of eating skate all you do is you just take your knife and just slide the flesh away from the bones like this there’s that beautiful flesh see how easily it comes away it just slides away there’s no need to be worried then you turn it over and eat the flesh off the other side so I hope I’ve taken your fear away and I do hope you’re going to try frying skate this beautiful dish here is Char grilled tuna with a warm coriander and Cape of vinegret fresh tuna has a lovely meaty texture all of its own not like any other fish to cook it preheat a top of the stove char grill until it’s very hot you’ll need to preheat it for about 10 minutes then brush the tuna steak on both sides with olive oil and season each side with salt and pepper now put the tuna on the Hot Grill and Give It 2 minutes on each side to get that lovely charred Ridge pattern meanwhile take the juice of a fresh lime and a crushed clove of garlic combine them in a bowl with the grated zest of the lime add a heap tablespoon each of Capers chopped coriander leaves and a chopped chelot then add 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil one of white wine vinegar and one heat tablespoon of grain mustard mix all this very thoroughly and heat gently in a saucepan before pouring over the fish before [Music] serving now still in the mode of how easy it is to cook fish we’re going to move on and cook some fish in the oven this time and the recipe I want to show you is for oven roasted fish with potatoes and salsa verde and the fish we’re using is cod and as I mentioned earlier on people are afraid of fish they’re afraid of handling it but in this day and age it’s quite easy now to just buy fish that that’s already prepared for you and we’re using one pound of cod in this recipe and here we have a pound of cod that was bought ready skinned all I’ve had to do there is just cut it into chunky pieces but if for any reason you find yourself with a piece of fish that’s still got the skin on and you want to take it off then it isn’t that hard so I thought I’d show you if you’ve got a piece of fish this big cut it in half first to make it a bit easier get of one piece and then what you do is you look at the skin at the end of the fish here make a small cut with your knife and then using all of your fingers but angling them that way cuz you don’t want to cut them you just slide the knife along the fish and just ease it off the skin and it’ll come away I hope you can see just how easy that is now for our recipe we’re going to start by making the salsa verde and the first thing it needs is garlic and I want to show you how to crush a clove of garlic with a pesel and morar and salt the recipe’s got one clove and we’re going to use a level teaspoon of salt if you’ve got a garlic Crusher you can use that but this is perhaps a better way I I find this is the way I mostly crushed garlic now because most recipes have salt in them you start giving a few Hefty bangs like that and then you just work it quite vigorously and you’ll find that very quickly in a couple of seconds the garlic has gone to a lovely creamy puree like that now the rest of the ingredients we’ll just get the garlic puree off of this for a second the rest of the ingredients are first first of all the juice of a lemon so that’s going to go in and then we’ve got here a teaspoon of grain mustard that’s next and then I’ve got anchovies I’ve got two anchovies here that have been uh finely chopped and if you don’t like anchovies just keep thinking Worcester sauce and if you do like Worcester sauce remember it’s made with Anchovies and they just give a lovely lovely flavor then we’ve got Capers we’ve got a tablespoon of Capers which have been rinsed and chopped you can use salted or vinegar Capers and then I’ve got parsley tablespoon of parsley chopped and a tablespoon of Basil chopped this is an Italian sauce you can serve it with cold meat you can serve it with plain grilled fish it’s a lovely sauce and um it’s also quite a Movable Feast you can use you can vary the ingredient inred it’s very nice sometimes made with coriander instead of Basel now we’re going to use 2 tablespoons of quite good olive oil I’d say extra virgin olive oil for this one one two and then just give that a little whisk with this which is a wonderful lovely little whisk for salad dressings and that’s all ready now to assemble the dish which is very simple and very easy now you need 1 and 1/4 pounds of potatoes that are cut into qu of an inch slices and then what’s happened to these is they’ve been boiled for about 8 minutes then the water’s drained off and you put a cloth over them to absorb the excess steam then you put a layer of potatoes in the base of the dish one more there just give a little seasoning of salt and pepper and then we’re going to have the fish next that goes on top of the potatoes like that and then on top of the fish and the potatoes goes this beautiful sauce which is going to give all that lovely sort of Italian Mediterranean Flavor now just sort of flatten it out a little bit and then finally we’re going to put the next layer of potatoes on the top and you’ll have more time than me so you can be a little bit more careful in your decoration that’s it now just a little bit more salt and pepper and then finally the top layer of potatoes has just a little brushing of olive oil and that’s going to make them nice and brown and crisp and then the final Italian ingredient is this this is Pano reano parmesan cheese freshly grated tablespoon of that on the top and that goes into a preheated oven gas Mark 6 or 400° put it on a high shelf and it’ll only take half an hour to cook and there we are the aroma is wonderful and as you can see there’s lovely crisp crunchy potato on the top and then underneath lots of lovely succulent fish with that rather special sauce and what I would like to serve with that part from some chilled white wine is a nice green salad with a lemony dressing and then you’ve got the crispy potatoes and the lovely succulent fish [Music] underneath I love this recipe here because it’s so easy it’s all baked in the oven first you line a baking sheet with foil brush it with melted butter and then lay four place fets on top then make a breadcrumb mixture in a food processor adding 4 oz of stale bread and fresh parsley and seasoning after that add 2 oz of melted butter and 3 oz of grated Parmesan cheese and mix very thoroughly spread the topping over the fish and bake it in the oven set to its highest setting on the highest shelf and give it 7 to8 Minutes serve the fish just as it is with fresh lemon juice squeezed [Music] over well when it comes to fish one of the things the British really excel at probably the best in the world that is curing and smoking for centuries we’ve been curing and smoking fish and well this one here the first one I want to show you is a Kipper and nobody can make a Kipper like we can in Britain and they can be grilled or fried or jugged in in just in hot water but the best way to cook a Kipper is in the open air on a barbecue if you’ve never tried barbecued kippers I suggest you do when the summer comes then we’ve got smoked hadock here now this is this is a nice big fat hadock and traditionally thin and hadock is smoked on the bone like that and I’m one of these people that I quite like eating fish on the bone I think it has a lot of extra flavor and that would be very nice with a couple of poached eggs on top next door we’ve got something called an arbro Smokey now this is a small hadock and what they do is they Hot Smoke them for many hours so that they actually turn a lovely bronze color and the flavor is really Smoky you can just heat it up in little cream with some brown bread and butter and it’s wonderful these are called Golden cutlets and they have dye in them which makes them the lovely yellow color but it’s still the hadock the tiny hadock and that’s also nice with the poached egg if you’ve got a smaller appetite than that one and here is the the haduck just like this one but this one’s had the bone taken out and this is undyed so it’s not so yellow but beware when you buy smoked hadock make sure if it’s undyed that it is a nice yellowy creamy color cuz sometimes it’s not Smoky enough and I think if you’re going to have smoked had it you want to taste the smoke and then finally smoked salmon the king of fish that’s smoked and then thinly sliced and one little tip I have to give you is when you’re buying smoked salmon always make sure that the little fat lines in the fish are thin if you get really really white stripy pieces of fat then it’s not good sermon this is a very luxurious version of fish pie made with smoked fish and it would be very good for entertaining start by poaching undyed hadock fillet in milk with a bay leaf and seasoning for about 10 minutes reserving the poaching liquid then flake the hadock pieces into a bowl along with Kipper Arro Smokey smoked salmon chopped hard-boiled egg cornishon and capers next chop three tablespoons of parsley and add this to a white sauce that you’ve made with the poaching milk and finished off with single cream now add a tablespoon of lemon juice to the smoked fish before mixing in the parsley sauce transfer the mixture to a buttered baking dish and cover with creamy mashed potatoes made with Creme Fresh then decorate the surface with a knife to make a pattern and sprinkle over a mixture of gria and parmesan cheese now bake on a high shelf in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes or until the top is nicely tinged and golden brown and I have to say this is absolutely yummy now we’re going to move on to a shellfish recipe and probably one of the most popular shellfish of all are prawns and these handsome little fellas I’ve got in front of me here they’re called tiger prawns and um if you have a problem getting them fresh which is sometimes difficult it doesn’t matter if you buy them Frozen because provided they’re thoroughly defrosted they’re just as good and they’re fat and juicy and have all the flavor of the sea now I promise you when we making Tha noodles I was going to show you how to prepare these prawns and it’s all very very simple all you do is pull off the head which will come off very very easily as you can see and then not at the back but where the stomach and the legs are you begin to just peel off the shell and the legs and the shell will just come off very easily it’s easy as peeling an orange there we are now I’m going to leave the tail on and I’m going to show you how to Butterfly a prawn now we’ve got the tail intact we’ve got the skin and the legs and the head off so you just take a sharp knife turn the prawn on its back and then just go in with the knife and slit it open but don’t go all the way through you don’t want to cut it in half and then with your thumb you can butterfly it you can make it come out in a little triangle shape like that sometimes you find a little black black thread in the middle there which you need to scrape out then you need to wash that under a cold running tap but I’ve got five here that are prepared already and what’s going to happen is they’re going to have garlic butter put on top of them now what you can do is you can do these in a on a baking tray all together you need five per person and this is for four so you’d need 20 Al together or you can do them in little grattin dishes like this and what you do is you just put the garlic butter little blob of garlic butter on top of each of the prawns and what have I got in my garlic butter I’ve got 3 oz of butter I’ve got the grated zest and juice of half a lemon I’ve got a heat tablespoon of chopped parsley and some salt and freshly miled pepper and four cloves of garlic so it’s quite garlicky and then that will go into a preheated oven which is 450° and they’ll take about 6 to 7 Minutes how do you know when they cooked because they Sizzle so I’ll just let you see one there send it to the table with a little bit of lemon to squeeze over a sprinkling more of parsley and what you need with all that lovely garlic buttery juices is lots of crusty bread there’s just enough time to show you a couple more fish recipes this is a wonderful recipe for Thai fish cakes and they’re served with a toasted sesame and lime diffing sauce they’re not only extremely good but they’re probably the fastest fish cakes in the world to make [Music] this sounds very glamorous tiger prawn risotto with lobster sauce but it’s actually a bit of a cheat because it’s made with a jar of readymade lobster beast and this one here is oven roasted salmon with a crusty topping made with fresh pesto sauce peino cheese and breadcrumbs well it’s such a shame isn’t it when we run out of time but I do hope I’ve been able to take away some of the fears that you may have had about cooking fish and um I’ll look forward to coming back next week to share with you some thoughts on meat [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] now we’re going to look at how to cook meat from traditional roast lamb to a very fast roast pork there’ll be a new angle on a beef stew and a good oldfashioned steak and kidney pie one thing I’m very proud of living in the British Isles is what good meat we have in fact I think we have the best meat in the world there’s so much Hill Country you’ve got the highlands of Scotland the Welsh mountains the lovely Rolling Hills of Devon and the penines and you can’t grow vegetables on Hills so we have we’re very lucky that we have such wonderful meat best in the world and one thing I’d like to tell you about cooking meat is all you need to know is if you think of an animal think of me this half that half this half up here drags the other half along so this does all the hard work and this is the meat that’s tougher and needs longer cooking whereas the back part of the meat that doesn’t have to do all the work is the most tender so so we’re going to start with cooking a steak I think that’s the best thing to learn when you’re starting to learn about um meat and the steak comes from the hind quarters so it’s tender and it doesn’t need long slow cooking these are sirloin steaks sometimes called entot steaks and you’ll need about well depending on your appetite between six to to 8 ounces and then I’ve trimmed most of the fat off but left a little bit on because it gives extra flavor when you’re cooking and you’ll see also that there’s a little bit of marbling of fat throughout the steak and that’s important because as the as the steak hits the heat that little marbling effect will melt a bit and give it more succulent and succulents and more flavor now what I do is trim some of the fat off which I always give to my birds and then just give the the steaks a little bash like that with my fist just to flatten them out a little bit and tenderize them and then some coarsely mil pepper but I’m not going to put any salt on because salt draws out juice and we want to keep the juice in so I think it’s important to actually salt the steaks afterwards now the best way the very best way to cook a steak is in a frying pan I’m going to tell you why in a minute and I thought that I would cook the steaks and show you a very nice source to go with them so in my frying pan here I’ve been cooking it’s going to be the the recipe is actually called Hungarian um steak and what I’ve done is I’ve got a small pepper that’s been chopped small and three shots and they’ve just been cooked in a little bit of oil just to soften them and what I’m going to do now is make the sauce later and so I’m just going to remove them to a plate on the side here and then put my frying pan back on the highest heat now when you’re going to cook a steak you do need to be very daring with the heat you’ve got to get the pan as hot as you dare and I’m just going to put a little tiny spot of oil in there because uh the pepper has used what I had just a teaspoonful is enough just to moisten the pan and then you leave the pan on the heat until you get it really really shimmering hot what we want to do is sear the steak on the outside and it seizes up as it Sears and keeps in all the lovely juices so Ino your steaks and they should make a nice big Sizzle like that and then use a tablespoon and just press it down gently so that the surface of the steak will come into close contact with the heat of the pan now I told you I would tell you why a frying pan and not a grill well while you’re cooking steak some of the juices will run out we don’t want them to run out but some of them inevitably will if you cook them in the frying pan you’ve got all the juice there it’s still in the pan at the end and if you weren’t making a sauce as I’m going to make you just want a plain steak then when you turn it out onto your plate you can spoon all those lovely meaty juices over the steak now how do you like your steak cooked I would say that they would need if you want to eat your steak medium they would need about 3 minutes each side if you want them rare 1 and 1 half to 2 minutes each side and if you want them well done then four minutes each side and sometimes it’s a good idea to just put a put a timer on while you’re while you’re doing Stakes because well when you’re my age you get a bit absent minded sometimes and forget how long they’ve been there so now we’re halfway through the cooking time so we’re going to turn the steaks over onto the other side you can see how nice and crisp and crusty they are and then because I want to show you this sauce this Hungarian sauce to serve with the steak Ste I’m going to let them cook for a couple of minutes and then 1 minute before the end I’m going to make the [Music] [Music] sauce and then when you make the sauce you put the onion and pepper back into the pan some of it can go on top of the steaks like that and what I’ve got in my jug here the 6 o of red wine so that’s going to go in next and the red wine is going to bubble and reduce right down to a really syrupy consistency which is going to take a little less than about a minute now you can see how that’s bubbled down now come become quite syrupy so it’s going to have one more ingredient and that is this which is half fat creme fresh wonderful cooking ingredient behaves well with heat and I’m just going to stir that into the sauce which will make it thicker and let it just bubble and reduce a bit more and then just spoon the sauce over the the steaks like that and then have some pot serving plates ready and then just put a little bit of paprika into the sauce what I’m going to do is just put a tiny bit over the top of the steak as well just let that stir in all the time you’re doing this it’s going down and down and getting more and more syrupy so here we are have a hot serving plate ready serve one steak per person little bit of sauce over the top and garnish it perhaps with a little bit of Water Crest before it goes to the table and that would be lovely with some lovely crunchy jacket potatoes and maybe a nice bris Green Sal [Music] one of my most favorite ways to serve roast lamb is to plainly roast it and serve it with a shos sauce all it needs first is a good seasoning and then as it roasts in a medium oven for about 30 minutes to each pound baste it at least three times with the juices to keep it succulent test with a skewer to see how cooked it is the Pinker the juice the rarer the meat when it’s cooked leave leave it to rest pour off the fat and make a sauce by stirring in flour and mustard powder to the juices next add a pint of balet and when it’s Incorporated add red currant jelly lemon juice and Worcester sauce add some seasoning and whisk until the jelly has completely dissolved then let the sauce bubble and reduce for about 15 minutes and serve it with the carved [Music] lamb well roasting a leg of lamb does take a little bit of time but I’m now going to show you the fastest roast recipe that I’ve ever invented this is called Fast roast fillet of pork with rosemary and caramelized apples and you’re not going to believe just how quickly you can make this when you start off with fillet of pork and fillet is the lovely sort of Juicy bit that comes when you see a pork chop the bit in the middle and when it’s boned out it looks like this we’ve got um two pieces of filet of pork they’re both weighing about 12 oz and what I’ve been doing here is is putting garlic into it I’ve got two cloves of garlic or I had two cloves of garlic what I did was took the skin off and cut the garlic into very thin wafer thin slices like that and then all over the the pork both sides I’ve made little slits with a sharp knife then just sort of pull the slit open with your finger and then just pop the little bits of garlic and press them into those little pockets so two cloves of garlic in all now that’s my first flavoring my second flavoring is Rosemary and you need a tablespoon of rosemary leaves Rosemary has a lovely Affinity with pork and the first thing you do when you strip the leaves from the stem is you put it into a mortar and then you go in quite heftily because what you want to do is crush the rosemary leaves just to release all their lovely aromatic oils and flavors and this is called bruising actually this is called when when you see a recipe and it says bruise the Rosemary this is what that means and then when you’ve done that you tip the Rosemary out onto a chopping board and you chop it very finely so that it ends up like that now the next stage of the recipe is you need to have one and a half oz of butter melted and mixed with 1 and 1/2 tablespoons of this which is cider vinegar so you’ve got the butter and the lovely sharp flavor of the apples in the in the side of vinegar and you brush the pork fillet with the mixture and then sprinkle the ch chopped rosemary leaves all over the surface of the pork and we’re going to use approximately half the chopped Rosemary and when it goes onto the top of the pork Pat it down like that then use some um freshly milled pepper and salt turn it over on the other side and do exactly the same on the other side brush it first then sprinkle with the chopped Rosemary and that’s now all ready we go over to a baking tray and the baking tray has been fairly well buttered and the first thing I’m going to do it’s good solid roasting tray you need a really good solid one for this recipe I’ll tell you why in a minute you sprinkle a small chopped onion onto the tray and then you place the pork fillet on top of the onion and then here I’ve got apples I’ve got three Granny Smith apples and they have been brushed with the rest of the butter and cider vinegar mixture and once you’ve CED the apples you cut them into six wedges from each apple and I’m going to put them around the pork then you sprinkle the rest of the Rosemary onto the apples and I’ve discovered um pork and apples have always gone well together pork and rosemary but pork apples and rosemary is really three ingredients that really are made for each other now I said caramelized apples so the caramel will be in the shape of demera sugar that goes onto the top of the apples like that and the fast roasting which is why you need a solid uh baking tray means that you preheat the oven to its very higher setting 450° and then you pop the pork and the apples into the oven and it’s going to take only 25 minutes to [Music] cook well when you remove the pork from the oven one thing is very important to remember and that is to give it some resting time before you carve it so remove the pork and apples to a warm serving dish cover them with foil when you’re roasting meat what happens is the juices all bubble up to the surface In the Heat of the oven and when you give it this resting time the juices have time to sort of seat back and then you get more juicy meat now after that what I did was scrape all the sort of debris from the baking tray into my sauce span here and all the little bits of caramelized onion and what I did was I put the baking tray over a heat with a little bit of cider and just scraped it all off now the sauce is going to be a cider sauce and the first measurement of this I used a bit already but it was eight fluid ounces of dry cider and that’s going to go in to join the baking tray scrapings and I’m going to give it a little whisk there and turn the heat right up because what I want now is for that to bubble and reduce down to about a third 2/3 sorry of its original volume and that’s going to take about 5 [Music] minutes and now the side has reduced down and become quite syrupy and um the smell is wonderful smells like a an apple Loft here I’m now going to add this wonderful Source ingredient which is half fat creme fresh that’s going to go in and I’m going to give it a little bit of a whisk and bring it back to a simmering point and then the sauce is now ready to be poured over the meat what happens when you let meat rest is that all the juices that bubble up to the surface are allowed to soak back into it and you can see just how succulent it is I prefer to cut the meat thickly in slices like this which are called medallions rather than thinly sliced now you’ve got to think real luxury here Prime fillet steak encased with a wild mushroom filling and wrapped in just a whisper of crisp puff pastry begin by taking some dried pochini mushrooms and soak them in hot water for about 20 minutes while that’s happening finally chop open cat mushrooms and some onion in a food processor then chop the porini finally too and saute whole lot in butter mix everything round to get a good buttery coating then season with a few gratings of fresh nutmeg add some salt and freshly miled black pepper and then cook on the very lowest heat for about about 35 minutes until all the liquid evaporates and the mixture is quite dry now to cook the fet steaks sear them in a hot pan for just 30 seconds on each side so that they’re browned but not actually cooked then turn off the heat but don’t wash the pan yet as soon as the steaks are cold brush them with Brandy season and place them on some of the mushroom mixture which is spread on a square of puffed pastry then put a little more mushroom mixture on on the top now glaze around the pastry with beaten egg and then fold opposite corners of the pastry in to overlap in the center rather like an envelope but be careful to seal the pastry gently and then brush it all with beaten egg cook them in a hot oven for 25 minutes for medium rare or 5 minutes more or less if you like them rare or well done while the stakes are cooking scrape the pan and add any remains of the mushroom mixture and red wine let all this bubble and Reduce by about a third until it becomes syrupy and then spoon a little around each portion as it goes to the table so this is mini B on crout and remember when you’re serving it serve it straight away because the steak does go on cooking inside the pastry well that was fast meat now we’re going to go from Fast to slow and I want to talk to you about slow cooking meat or more specifically cassing now this meat comes from the four quarter the bit of the animal that does all the work dragging the rest along now it is tougher but this has a great Advantage too because something develops in the working and that’s called connective tissue what that does is in the long slow cooking process it begins to melt and it enriches is the flavor and the succulents of the meat so slow cooking is just as good as fast cooking and it doesn’t involve your time it doesn’t take you any longer it just means that you go away and leave it in the oven for two hours so I’m a great champion of cassing now I want to show you probably one of the most popular British traditional casserole dishes of all and that is steak and kidney Stak and kidney that’s later on going to go into individual Stak and kidney pies now the meat you use for this is something called chuck steak it’s Chuck or blade steak that you need for this and the other ingredient is Ox kidney now when you’re doing steak and kidney sometimes you find steak and kidney pies in supermarkets and they haven’t got oou kidney they’ve got lamb kidney or they’ve got Pig kidney but no we’re going to keep everything full of beefy flavor so it must be Ox kidney so the first thing I want to show you when your actually going to make um a casserole or in this case some steaking kidney is the most important bit is Browning the meat now what I’ve done here is the meat is cut up into bite-sized 1 in cubes and the kidney is cut up into very very tiny pieces the kidney is there to give lots of wonderful richness and flavor to the sauce but you don’t want lumps of kidney it just sort of melts into it if you know what I mean and what you need to do first of all is brown the meat that’s going to go in the casserole and to do this you use beef dripping as I say with we’re keeping everything very beefy um put about a tablespoon of beef dripping get the pan really really hot and we’re using two lounds Al together but what you need to learn and this is the most important lesson you need to learn about casserole is when you’re Browning meat you can only put five pieces of meat at a time in your cooking pot you need to have the heat very hot too if you put more than that and you overcrowd the pan lots of steam comes out I mean you can see in there there is steam coming out when all that steam comes out what it does is it creates a bath of steam and you’ll never Brown it in a million thousand years so I’m very good I think at giving you lots of short cuts but this time I’m saying don’t try to Short Circuit this one keep with it stay with the meat and it’ll take about probably about 10 minutes to Brown it all together because what you want to have is a lovely nutty crusty Edge as we had when we were cooking the steaks cuz if you get that crusty Brown Edge that’s going to give flavor to your casserole but it’s also going to seal in the juices and then when all the meat is browned like this you add it in the casserole roll to join the rest and here I’ve got 8 oz of roughly chopped onions and they’ve been browned as well and it’s important with the onion to get the onion nice and brown because that again the Browning is what’s going to give us all that lovely flavor and the whole point of cooking is to get as much flavor as you can out of ingredients so the onion goes back into join the meat and then I’ve already cooked the kidy a little bit as well that’s being cooked so that can go in now I’m going to add some mushrooms cuz mushrooms give good flavor and also for those of you out there going oh I don’t want to eat kidney I know there are some of you that are never going to want to eat kidney so what you can do is replace the amount of kidney and have all mushrooms but this one’s going to have all three so in go the mushrooms that gets stirred around and then when you’re making a casserole it’s going to be served in a lovely thick sauce and the way to achieve a lovely thick sauce is to use flour first of all though I’m going to add some uh pepper and salt a good seasoning very good seasoning of pepper and salt and I’m just going to put a little bit of thyme half a teaspoon of chopped thyme leaves which will give a nice flavor and I’ve got two tablespoons of flour so the meat’s cooking gently and there’s a little bit of um fat in there so the flour will be absorbed by the fat so just sprinkle it in then go back with a wooden spoon and stir the flour in now this is the time when if you’re a beginner making a casserole that you’re likely to panic because you always think oh flour lumps and actually when you look at it now it actually doesn’t look very promising but I promise you you you’ll have to trust me I promise you that there’s nothing wrong the flour just gets absorbed into the fat and this is what’s going to give us a lovely creamy sauce so there we are the Flour’s been absorbed now next thing is stock and I’ve got a pint of beef stock here and this is readymade instant beef stock that you buy in the supermarket and I’ve enriched it with two tablespoons of Worcester sauce so that goes in next add a bit at first and I’m going to turn the heat back up now what we want now is for this all to come up to simmering point and then as soon as it comes up to simmering point we’ll add the rest now what you then do is you put a lid on the casserole and the easiest way you could cook it on top of the stove if you wanted to if you if you’ve got a stove that can really really gently cook but I find it’s quite easy to just pop it in the oven and the oven temperature for that will be 140° so that the liquid only just bubbles just very just a bubble just breaks the surface every now and again and that will take exactly 2 hours well one of the nicest ways I think to serve a steak and kidney pie is in individual portions and what I’ve got here a little heat proof soup bowls and I’ve divided the mixture between six of these and then short crust pastry we made in part one we don’t need to talk about that what I’ve done is I’ve rolled out a lid to fit the top using a saucer um to to cut it out uh to fit the top and then the trimmings of the pastry I’ve rolled out to form a strip so what I’m going to do first of all is just dampen the edge of the of the dish like this and put the little pastry strip round and of course what I’m using here is short crust pastry and that is important I think that’s the best one for steak and kidney pie because the filling is so rich you don’t want a fatty puff pastry or a rich pastry then I’m going to just brush the edges of that with some water put the lid on and this is quite a sort of halfhazard Affair it doesn’t have to look sort of Prim and perfect and all you do now is just squeeze the lid on to the other piece of pastry quite hard and then you take a knife and you just knock the edges up like that to make them look sort of layy and then all I do is use my fingers use my thumb and my forefinger and just make it into a little pattern around the edge I think the nicest thing about this is it looks rustic make a steam hole in the center then just put a little bit of beaten egg on the top of the pastry which is going to to give it a lovely Golden Glow when it comes out of the oven preheat the oven fairly hot 425° put six of these on a baking tray pop them into the oven and they’ll take 25 minutes to cook [Music] now I’ve just got time to share with you my own particular favorite shepherd’s pie and this one’s topped with mashed potatoes melted cheese and [Music] leaks this is a new Twist on a beef stew this is Latin American beef stew and it’s cooked with sweet corn squash red pepper chilies and lots of lovely spices and then it’s garnished with slices of red onion marinated in lime juice and coriander [Music] time for one more this is Spanish pork slowly brazed with tomatoes thyme red wine and olives with potatoes added in at the [Music] end well sadly half an hour isn’t quite enough time to talk about a huge subject like cooking meat but anyway until we get longer cookery programs that is all I’ve got time for but I hope to see you next time [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh e this time we’re looking at chicken and other birds we’re going to be making a Spanish Pella with chicken we’re going to be roasting a duck with a lovely crispy skin and serving it with sour cherry sauce but the most special part of the program is how to fast roast a chicken well I’ve got quite a lot to say about roast chicken actually and the first and most important thing I want to say is when you’re going to roast a chicken what you need most of all is the best flavored chicken you can buy before you cook it it’s got to have good flavor I can only obviously speak as a cook but it has to be said that although mass-produced chicken is widely available and very cheap what has been lacking in the last couple of decades is real old-fashioned chicken with all the Glorious richness and flavor it was meant to have the very best flavored chicken is obviously going to be free range and lead a totally natural life on this Farm in Essex the chickens have shelter they have ba of straw to roost on they have a large Meadow to roam in and plenty of grain if they need to top up their diet and lots of fresh water and the chickens breathe fresh air day and night but this is only half the story chicken should not be specially bred for fast growing they need to be allowed to grow quite naturally these chickens here have twice the lifespan of the mass produced Birds be warned though there are complicated labeling laws and if you want a truly freerange chicken you need to look for additional words which are either total freedom or traditional free range and the traditional way to deal with chicken is to dry pluck it and then allow it to hang completely intact without removing the innards if this is allowed to happen in controlled temperatures the flavor naturally develops now with mass-produced chicken these are gutted and pl lunged into scolding water in order to mechanically remove their feathers they can absorb up to 7.4% of their body weight in water what I’ve got here are two chickens a traditional freerange chicken and it’s rather paler mass-produced cousin next door when you look at this one here first of all you can see that it actually does have that sort of healthy look about it it’s sort of Pinky purple it looks as if it’s sort of been out on the country air and if you want to tell whether you’ve got a good chicken then there’s a little strip of fat Under the Skin both sides here it’s creamy white and that’s always indicates a good quality now the best news I’ve got to tell you is that after all these years of cooking chickens I have cracked the very best way to roast a chicken that I’ve ever tried and I’m going to share it with you now first of all I’m going to put a little bit of um stuffing into the cavity of the chicken and what I’ve got here is half an ounz of butter mixed with 2 tablespoons of this which is taragon leaves which have been chopped and taragon has a wonderful Affinity with chicken and there are two cloves of garlic in there and they’ve just been mixed like that I’m just going to pop that inside the body cavity of the chicken and that’ll Melt while it’s roasting and here I’ve got some lemon it’s half a lemon and it’s been cut in slices and then the slices have been cut into halves and they’re just going to be packed away in there with the chicken as well and then the next thing I’m going to do is I’ve got butter inside but I’m going to put a little bit of olive oil around the skin maybe a dessert Spoonful Al together you just want enough to moisten the skin because that’s going to that’s what’s going to make it lovely and crispy when it’s in the oven and then it needs to have some freshly miled pepper and salt and the secret of this chicken is that it’s fast roasted on the highest temperature in the oven I’ve been doing that a lot lately um cooking things really fast and discovering lots of new ways of cooking and the temperature is 450° highest setting on most ovens and you roast it for just 45 minutes but it shouldn’t go straight from the fridge into the oven take it out about an hour before you’re going to cook it now if it’s a very hot day don’t want to do that then you must allow an extra 5 minutes cooking time and just to emphasize that this method is not for the large family roast chicken which we’ll be looking at in a minute but for what I call the midweek smaller chicken weighing [Music] £3 and there we have it our beautiful roast chicken now I want to show you how to tell if a chicken is cooked or not and the way to do it if you’ve got a very large chicken you go in here at the thickest part part of the thigh and see if the juices run clear but this is quite a small chicken so we’re going to go here where the thigh touches the body and what you need to look for is do the juices run clear and there we have it inside you can see all that lovely chicken juice running completely clear no trace of blood left in it what’s going to happen now is because all the juices bubble up to the surface of the chicken it needs to rest to allow them to seat back into the flesh so we’ll give it 20 minutes covered with foil well now I want to show you how to make a sauce to go with the chicken I can’t believe this is so good and at the same time so simple and what happens is you remember the garlic butter that went inside the cavity of the chicken well that was scraped into this bowl here and then when the chicken is transferred to its serving dish you place the tin over direct heat and all the sort of juices and crusty debris bits in the bottom are scraped into the juices from the bowl and then the next thing you do as soon as it’s hot you tip the juices to the corner of the pan and what you can see then is a little layer of fat on the top and you don’t want the fat so you just skim that off using a tablespoon with just just just resting the tablespoon on the top like that and you’ll find the fat will just ease its way into the tablespoon and you’re left with the juice juices and a little bit of fat you need a little bit then turn the heat right up and what’s going to join all those lovely juices is first of all the juice of half a lemon this is a lemon and tagon sauce so that goes in next and then I’ve got half a pint of dry white wine dry white wine is going to go in and that all looks pretty watery at the moment but we’re going to do now is with the heat turned up wait for it to come up to simmering point and then leave it on a high heat and what happens is it will bubble and bubble and all the steam will evaporate and the sauce will reduce down to half its original volume and you can sort of watch that happening before your eyes and then when it’s reduced it’ll be nice and syrupy and ready to serve with a chicken so we’re just going to wait now for our sauce I think I’ll just put a little bit of pepper and salt in it um and we’ll taste it at the end and then what we’ll do now is just wait for that to reduce to half its volume so you can see the [Music] consistency and you can see how that’s reduced down now by the little tide Mark that goes around the tin you can see how far that’s gone down and I’m going to add just a teaspoon of fresh chopped tagon leaves to add to the [Music] flavor and what you need to know is after 20 minutes resting the chicken all the juices are going back into the chicken but it’s not getting cold it holds its heat perfectly well and what I’m going to do now is just cut up a little piece off and then just turn it round because what I want you to see is I want you to see how juicy the breast of the chicken is cuz that’s the test of a chicken is if the breast is Juicy and not dry so let’s have a look at that now there we are and if I press my knife in like that you can see that’s still lovely and moist and lovely and juicy on the breast [Music] there what I would like to see is a Revival of the traditional family roast chicken I like to serve it with a stuffing you need a large bird about 5 lbs in weight and here I’ve got sausage meat fresh Sage leaves onion a dessert Apple some chopped parsley a little bit of Mace the chicken liers from the giblets and fresh breadcrumbs and the rest of the giblets are simmered for 2 hours to make a delicious giblet stock stuff the chicken in the body and neck caves then seal with a skewer and protect the breast with a layer of butter season then lay on rashes of smoked streaky bacon and cook the chicken for 20 minutes to the pound plus an extra 20 but you must base the chicken three times as the bird is cooking because this keeps all the flavor in half an hour before the end of the cooking remove the now crispy bacon keep it warm and base once again turning the heat up to really crisp the [Music] skin this is a very easy sauce made with cranberry jelly and Sage all you do is whisk them together adding some balsamic vinegar all it needs now then is some gravy made with the giblet stock something green and leafy some crunch roast potatoes and some friends or loved ones to share the feast since I’ve been preparing recipes it’s uh amazing how you get to know what are the popular ones and two of the most popular ones I’ve ever done are called chicken Bas and Moroccan chicken because they’re cooked with rice and other vegetables it’s very easy to serve CU everything is cooked in the same dish so what we’re going to do today is try and do another version of that by me showing you how to do a Spanish Pella and what you start off with is a chicken jointed into eight and you put two tablespoons of olive oil in the pan and brown the chicken now you brown it four pieces at a time don’t crowd the pan it’s the same as uh doing meat and what I’ve got here is the last piece just coming out of the pan so there it is lovely and golden when the recipe says Brown a chicken make sure it’s really nice and golden like that so that’s removed to plate now I’ve got one very large Spanish onion that’s going to go into the pan and that’s just been roughly chopped not too small not too large and to join that I’ve got a red pepper that’s been deeded and chopped again into rough chunks and then the next ingredient is a very Spanish ingredient sureit so sausage and when you’re buying Chito make sure it’s one that’s made in Spain we don’t make it very well in England so get a really genuine one and I’ve got 6 oz and it’s been chopped into quite small pieces I don’t think you need the pieces too large you’re to get a nice color now turn the heat down to medium and just cook those for about 6 to 8 minutes what what we want to end up with is onion and peppers and charito that are nice and golden and brown at the edges once you’ve got everything sort of softened and browned at the edges the next thing you need to do is add some garlic and I’ve got two cloves of garlic here so that’s going to go in next and they the Garlic’s been crushed stir the garlic in give it a few seconds is cooking and then we’re going to have lovely spices first of all we’re going to have saffron and I’m just going to sprinkle it in I’m not crushing it then also in my little pot here I’ve got a/4 of a teaspoon of KM Pepper and a teaspoon of Spanish paprika and that’s going to give it a lovely peppery flavor and the saffron is going to give it wonderful color now what I’m going to do do is put my chicken joints back in and in Spain they would have a beautiful strong concentrated chicken stock or prawn stock but I’m going to cheat what I’m going to do is put the chicken in now and then I’m going to put tomatoes in and these tomatoes have been skinned and chopped and I’ve got 8 oz here and I’m going to pour in two pints of hot water this has been freshly boiled from the kettle that goes in next so what I’m doing in order to make it easier for me and easier for you is making my stock in the same pan so what I’m going to do now is let that come up to simmering point and I’m going to give it 10 minutes simmering and while I’m waiting for that to come up to simmering point I’m going to give it a good seasoning of salt little bit of freshly mil pepper but not too much because we have got the paprika and the kayenne in [Music] there and after 10 minutes you remove the pieces of chicken from the pan and now we’ve got some nice chicken flavored stock the next thing I’m going to add is rice and this is the genuine thing this is Spanish rice it’s specially um grown to make Pella and it comes from Spain in rather attractive little white bags like this that look very good so it’s called kisara rice and I’ve got 12 oz here and then give it a stir but it’s a good idea to leave the rice near the center of the pan because then it Cooks more evenly bring that back up to simmering point and let the rice have 10 minutes simmering before the chicken and the rest of the ingredients go back in and while we’re waiting for that I want to tell you that I have got this rather nice pan that looks like a Pella pan here um but you can make it with a wide shallow casserole or a nice big quite deep um saute pan [Applause] then after 10 minutes you put the chicken pieces back in to join the rice and then we’re going to have two more ingredients the first one are these which are tiger prawns and I’ve got 12 here and I’ve left four as a garnish with the heads on because it looks pretty and traditionally Spanish the others have had the heads removed so they’re going to be tucked in amongst the chicken just put these handsome Fellas on the top here like that they will actually need turning over halfway through and then the final ingredient wonderful ingredient two ounces of fresh shelled peas and I must say I’m a person for Seasons but I do think it’s lovely now being able to buy fresh shelled peas in the winter and I’m just going to just press those down a little bit into the juice it’s 10 to 15 minutes cooking now and the way to tell when the Pella is cooked is of course the prawns are going to turn a lovely pink color but also when the rice is cooked you need to dig out a bit of rice taste it as soon as the rice is tender then the Pella is ready and whilst you’re cooking the last 10 minutes cooking is going on give the pan a shake like that just just one once or twice and make sure the r R is well into the liquid the reason for that is that Pella originally was made outside well it still is in Spain made outside on fires and the area of the heat was wide well when you’re making it at home you the area of heat is is not as wide as the pan so that’s why you need to do a little bit of shaking at the [Music] end now today the rice has taken 20 minutes to cook completely then you turn the heat out take the pan off the heat cover it with a cloth because the cloth can absorb some of the um moisture that’s still left in it and leave it like that for 5 minutes and after 5 minutes your Pella is ready to be revealed to the world and um I’ve got a Spanish friend called Eduardo and he says in Spain they sometimes serve the their Pella with little bits of lemon to squeeze over so you serve it onto the plate and then you squeeze the bit bits of lemon over the top and all I can say about that is after you’ve done your preparation you’ve got 40 minutes cooking time that’s all and you have a beautiful meal for six complete you don’t have to serve anything else all you need to go with that is some nice Roca this is a Thai inspired chicken dish and it’s so quick and easy that you won’t believe how good it tastes the chicken pieces are marinated in lime juice and zest and then fried stir fried on a very high heat until nice and crisp and golden then you add a deeded green chili stir fry for 1 minute before adding 5 fluid ounces of coconut milk and some Thai fish sauce then you add some shredded spring onions including the green parts and some fresh coriander and you let the whole thing cook for about 2 minutes serve it with Thai fragrant rice and garnish with some more shredded spring onion onions and chopped coriander [Music] leaves well we’ve looked at roast chicken and there’s only one thing that’s as good as roast chicken and perhaps even a little bit better and that’s a roast duck with crisp crunchy skin and lovely moist flesh underneath and so after all my years of cooking I think I finally cracked how to do that and I’m delighted to be able to tell you but first of all I want to talk about the type of of duck now there are ducks available one’s called Asbury the other’s called barbery this one here is called gringham and this is a cross between a Chinese PE King duck and a wild melard and what that means is although it only weighs £4 it’s actually got a lot of meaty flesh and a very lovely sort of slightly gamey flavor but the other ducks are good too all duck is good but if you can get this one this is called gringham duck then I think that’s the best one to get and it’s actually terribly terribly easy to cook all you do is first of all a duck is a very Fatty Bird and when you’re cooking the secret is to get the fat out of it and how to do that is you look at the fatty parts of the duck and you just prick those little Parts with a skewer don’t go right down into the flesh because otherwise you’ll lose the juice but just make a few little pricks on the surface and that’ll make little channels for the the come out whilst it’s being cooked I hope you can notice on the duck skin here how dry it is it’s really dry and if you want to have crispy skin the secret is getting it dry before it goes into the oven so when you get the duck home what you need to do is take off the cling film dry it very very thoroughly put it on a plate and just leave it in the fridge so that the skin can dry out as much as possible overnight is best and then finally the most fat is tracked in the thighs here so what you need to do is pull them out as far as you can using your thumbs and then just really do some extra Pricks right down there where the thigh meets the body then another thing uh I’d like to tell you about cooking a duck is it’s quite good if you’ve got one of these and this is a very simple little roasting rack and if you put the duck on that what happens is it means you can get all the hot air from the oven circulating round to get the nice crispy skin and I’m going to season it with pepper and coarse salt so I’ve got some salt here and I’m just going to sprinkle it on you need to have some salt all over the surface rather like doing a jacket potato because it helps to give you a crispy skin now I’m into fast roasting as you’ve gathered and so we’re preheating the oven exactly the same as before when we did the chicken this is 450° very hot put the duck on the center Shelf and then leave it to cook for just 1 hour and 40 minutes now you don’t need to do anything else but a couple of times during the cooking you’ll need to take out the roasting tin and drain off the fat there’s a lot of fat that comes out of the duck but first I have to give you what is the most important part of this recipe it’s very nostalgic for me because it’s the first thing I ever cooked when I worked in a restaurant was roast stuck with cherry sauce and it’s always been a favorite of mine and now I want to show you how to make the very best Cherry sauce ever and these are dried sour cherries they are actually MLL cherries but they’re called sour cherries when you buy them in little packs I’ve got 3 oz and you soak them overnight in eight fluid ounces of red wine if you forget to soak them overnight you can you can get away with four hours but overnight is best and then what you do is you pop the soap cherries into a sauce span and you put 1 oz of sugar in with them and one tablespoon of really good quality red wine vinegar and then you bring them up to simmering point and you let them cook very very slowly on top of the heat until it’s reduced down to a lovely sauce so here we go here’s our wonderful roast duck and I have tried recipe after recipe after recipe over the years for roast duck I’ve tried the Chinese way I’ve tried boiling it first I’ve done everything and this is the first time now I’ve managed to crack cooking a duck getting a very crisp as you can see there lovely crisp crunchy skin and yet still having some lovely succulent meat underneath so I’m very pleased with that one and you’re not going to believe this there is still some fat in the tin here but this is what came out of the duck while it was cooking but it’ll keep in the fridge for about 2 or 3 months and you can use it to make the most wonderful crunchy red potatoes now this duck has been carved to serve four people and as you can see we’ve seen the crispy bit but now you can see the lovely sort of succulent flesh underneath as well and I have written down instructions for you as to how to carve the duck so neatly like this and now all it’s going to need is the delicious Cherry [Music] sauce there it is one of my most favorite recipes in the whole world duck with sour cherry sauce this one is called chicken catcha to which means the Hunter’s chicken and you start by Browning some [Music] onions adding garlic and some rosemary leaves that have been bruised and crushed with a pesel and water then the key ingredient is a pound and a half of well flavored ripe red tomatoes and these have to be skinned and chopped add the tomatoes to the onions along with some dry white wine and some wine vinegar pop in a bay leaf and some tomato puree stir and bring this all back to simmering point then simmer for 20 minutes until it’s reduced by about half after that add a chicken which has been jointed and well browned and then give it another 40 minutes cooking this is good served with vegetables or with pasta I’ve just got time to show you two more ideas inside these little Parcels made from Vine leaves are quailes lovely little self-contained birds that cook up really nice and juicy these are covered in Panetta which gives a lovely flavor and I like to serve this with a comy of grapes these are grilled chicken kababs with lemon that have been marinated with garlic oregano lemon juice and oil they’re served with the syrup of the marinade which is combined with the cooking juices and a gremolata topping of garlic lemon zest and parsley and inside this carefully sealed pot is a lovely bird this is guinea fowl and it’s sealed in with rosemary white wine and believe it or not 30 cloves of garlic but after 1 and 1/2 hours cooking time the garlic Mellows and becomes very fragrant [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh e this time we’re going to look at how to cook vegetables we’re going to cook root vegetables very very slowly and see how to make a Tunisian oine salad and look at something different to do with cett now vegetable cookery is an enormous subject and we won’t be able to get through all of it but I want to try and explain some of the principles we have an unfortunate reputation in Britain abroad that we don’t know how to cook vegetables we always overcook them and I always remember Victoria Wood in one of her Splendid monologues at the Albert Hall talking about her auntie who always put the Brussels sprouts on in November for the Christmas lunch and everybody laughed because we all knew what she meant about overcooked soggy vegetables but then we now have another problem we have the sort of snobby end of cooking vegetables that hardly Cooks them at all and serves them raw and that isn’t good either so what I hope to try and be able to share with you today is how to catch the moment when a vegetable is just cooked but not raw and not overcooked now because it’s winter I want to start off with a recipe for roasting winter vegetables and sometimes at this time of the year it’s it’s it’s easy to think oh there aren’t many vegetables around but all these lovely roots that have been stored for the winter are still plentiful and I’m going to show you a mixture of root vegetables that will be roasted first one is this ugly creature here this is salc sometimes called celery root and why it’s sometimes called that is because it tastes of celery it has the sort of texture of a swed or a turnip but it has this lovely celery flavor and although it looks ugly once it’s peeled and cut into chunks then it’s going to be really really delicious so that’s number one number two is our friend the swed and the swed sometimes you know is is blighted as being a bit boring but when you roast it and it goes sort of lovely and toasted at the edges it does have a brilliant flavor here we’ve got shots and this one is a sweet potato now you might not have used this before it is a vegetable that has got a sort of potatoey texture but with a bit of sweetness but um if you find you don’t like the sweetness you can replace this in the recipe by using parsnips which are also sweet in a different way the other one here is squash this is butternut squash and it’s a member of the pumpkin family and I think I better to start by sort of explaining to you how to prepare this CU you might not have used it before it has a lovely very Meely chunky texture and um when it’s when it’s roasted has lovely flavor too and the way to deal with this one here is to just take a sharp knife and and cut it at the place where it changes shape and then the next thing you need to do is cut it into chunks like this and then when you’ve got it cut into chunks you can then begin to take the peel off and this is going to need a sharp knife to take the peel off but the other vegetables um it’s very important when you’re peeling vegetables with thin skins not the thick skinned ones like this but the thin ones like this to use a proper vegetable peeler if you’re using a sharp knife it’s very easy to take too much much off and most of the flavor is actually near the Skin So if you use one of these and I’m just going to just show you how simple it is it just slides along now you can see the lovely color of the sweet potato and what’s coming off here is just the very thin outer skin and not any of the precious flesh underneath so I think this is quite an important bit of equipment now when you’ve prepared your vegetables they look like this nice of very chunky pieces and we’re going to roast them all together in a roasting tray but first they’re going to need some olive oil and I’ve got three tablespoons of olive oil here so that’s going to go onto the vegetables and oven roasting is a lovely way to prepare vegetables because it leaves you free to go away and do other things and then they’re all ready cooked together the next thing I’m going to do is add some salt and pepper and then we’re going to add some flavoring first of all two cloves of garlic and the garlic is crushed and now on an earlier program we prepared garlic with a pestel and morar but this time I’m going to use a garlic Crusher I put my two cloves in what I’m now going to do is squeeze very hard and you’ll see the garlic coming out like that but this gar garlic uh Crusher has this here so that when you’ve crushed it you can slide it over that way like that and take all the other bits out that were trapped and the very good news about this is for those who have dishwashers it goes in the dishwasher so that’s okay now we’ve got some herbs here some mixed herbs I’ve got Rosemary and Thyme here it’s about a tablespoon Al together and I’m just going to sprinkle those in and when I’ve done that the best way to sort of get this going is to use your hands and just make sure all the vegetables have got a little bit of garlic and a little bit of herb on them and it might not be so good nutritionally but if you wanted to if you’re busy or leading A busy life and you’ve got to work and come home and cook supper for um well this will serve six people you can actually prepare this up to two days in advance what I do is just put it in a plastic carrier bag put it in the lowest part of the refrigerator and then when you come home from work whoosh onto the baking sheet and it’s all ready to cook without any preparation now let me just talk to you about the baking sheet it’s a good solid baking sheet because it’s going to go in at a high temperature 425° and the vegetables will take about 30 to 40 minutes to to roast and what we want to achieve is they’ve got to be tender catch the moment just cooked not overcooked not undercooked and also the other thing um you want it to have is them nice and sort of toasted at the edges and there we are the way to tell if they’re cooked is to use a skewer like that yes and you can see they’re nice and sort of crusty and caramelized at the edges and although I’ve use this particular combination of vegetables you can use any other combination you want to it doesn’t matter just use the same quantities and there you go something magical happens to vegetables when you cook them very slowly this is a simple winter soup and the vegetables I’m going to use are carrots sarc swed onion and leak you prepare the leaks by cutting vertically down in half to about halfway and then you fan the slices of leak on under the cold running tap to get rid of any dirt or grit then place all the chopped vegetables in a large cooking pot season and cover with 2 and 1/2 pints of vegetable stock then bring it up to simmering Point put it in a low oven and leave it there for 3 hours before liquidizing and serving with chopped chives [Music] now I want to talk about the virtues of steaming and boiling and we’re going to begin with steaming vegetables and I thought perhaps it might be quite a good idea to just have a look at some Steamers this one here is the oldfashioned type of steamer where you have a a steaming um compartment that goes on top of the water and then the lid goes on and that’s quite good for doing puddings Christmas puddings then we’ve got the Oriental steamer which is made of bamboo and that’s quite good but they come in different sizes big sizes small sizes but you need to sort of fit that onto the right size of pan obviously that’s the only disadvantage to that one this one I tend to use the most this is called a fan steamer and it closes up into a little fan like that so you can keep it in your cupboard it doesn’t take a lot of cupboard space and then you can open it out according to the size of your saucepan that big that big or that big and so we’re going to start now with a recipe for cauliflower a wonderful vegetable beautiful vegetable and probably one of the nicest English Traditions is to have cauliflower with cheese sauce and I’m going to show you a quick version of that and I do find that um soggy cauliflower that turns a bit gray is not very nice so I find steaming is better than boiling for CIF flower but first of all you need to get your cauliflower it’s got to be sort of creamy yellow not too white in in the curds here the these are called the curds and then the leaves I don’t even hear that the leaves should be nice and squeaky and that means it’s nice and fresh and not limp or too yellow looking now you take off the outer leaves of the cauliflower and I find it’s better not to cook it whole it’s better to cook it separated out into what’s called florett so first of all take the tough outer leaves you don’t actually need those at all in the cooking and then take off the stalk end take a sharp knife and go right the way through quite close like that and then the next little layer of leaves come off and these actually I’m going to cook with the cauliflower because I think they have quite a bit of flavor and I actually quite like eating them as well so I’m going to keep those and then I’m going to separate it into florets and the way to do that is to find a sort of stalky bit now the the core here is I haven’t cut it down low enough so I’m going to cut a little bit more off so I’ve got more Vision that can come off next and then go in with your knife to a stalk like that and you soon see the stalk cut through it and then just break off the florettes and they’ll come I’ll take another one off for you to see now quite easily like that it’s quite good fun actually separating them out now put your fan steamer into a pan like this then put the cauliflower fettes in the steamer and cauliflower has a great Affinity with two flavorings one is bay leaf so I’ve got two bay leaves and I’ve cut them in half and sort of sprinkled them in amongst the cauliflower and the other is nutmeg very traditional English spice nutmeg and uh I’m going to put a little bit of nutmeg on the top of the cauliflower I’ve got a rather smart nutmeg grater here that you can see that’s looking quite good at the moment but I haven’t had it long enough to test it so I don’t know whether it’s going to be good for a long time but this kind of nutmeg grater the the normal one that you buy where you put the nut in the top and just grate it um always works so you can have your choice on that then you put some salt on the cauliflower and enough water to come about 1 and 1/2 in into the pan the water should be boiling when it goes in from the kettle and then you steam the cauliflower for about 12 minutes until it’s really tender and we’ve got some cauliflower here that has been steamed so I’m going to take the lid off the way to tell if it’s cooked is to just take a skewer very important bit of equipment a skewer and just test that the cauliflower is cooked it mustn’t be too soggy but also it’s got to be cooked so when you put your skewer in it’s got to have quite a bit of give but don’t whatever you do overcook it now we’ll take that out and it’s got a little handle here which makes it easy to remove and the cauliflower is going to go into the baking dish here I’ve got a baking dish and then when the when all the cauliflower is in the grattin dish put your cloth over it to to collect the Steam and now we’re going to make a really nice quick fast cauliflower cheese sauce and what I did was when I drained the cauliflower I’ve reserved some of the cooking liquid you can see there’s a lot of the color of that you can see it’s got a lot of flavor in it so that’s the cauliflower 3 ounces three fluid ounces of the cauliflower cooking liquid which is going to go into my uh pan here and then I’ve got two tablespoons of half fat creme fresh that’s going to go in next turn my heat up and bring that go in with a whisk and just bring that up to simmering Point as soon as it gets to simmering Point let it bubble and reduce until it sort of slightly thickens and that’ll take a couple of minutes it’s amazing how much flavor of the cauliflower is in that little bit of stock there because the the smell of the cauliflower and the bay leaf and the nutmeg is is very enticing now I’m going to add the cheese and I’ve got 1 and 1/2 oz of Grier cheese that’s going to go in next and I’ve got 1 and 1/2 oz of Parmesan cheese and I’m just going to stir that a little bit and add some pepper and salt you’ll probably need to do a bit of tasting here to make sure you’ve got enough [Applause] and then turn the heat out the cheese doesn’t need to really cook it just needs to be combined with the rest of the sauce now we’re going to pour it over the cauliflower and the nice thing about the sauce is there’s no flour in it it’s just this wonderful ingredient half fat creeme fresh which cuts out a lot of time and a lot of work then finally I’m going to put some spring onions I’ve got two spring onions finely chopped here and I use the green part of the spring onion as well that’s going to go over the top of the cauliflower then a little bit more cheese one tablespoon of Parmesan cheese on the top and this is the best parmesan parano regano best quality freshly grated and then just a little pinch of kayenne pepper on the top like that to give a bit of a kick and then before you start the recipe you preheat the grill to its higher setting and then that just gets whacked under the Hot [Music] Grill so if you’ve got the grill preheated it should take about 3 minutes at the most to be nice and golden and crusty on the top and the sauce bubbling All Around The Edge now I think that’s a lovely supper dish for two people I like to serve it with brown rice but I think it also would be quite good with some penet pasta here is Promised a delightfully different way to serve corett either as a salad or as a first course first you cut the ends of a pound of corett then slice them in half lengthways put them in a steamer pour some boiling water over them from the kettle then sprinkle with salt and steam for about 12 minutes depending on their size while they’re still warm arrange them in a dish and cover them with a herb flavored vinegret marinade and leave them to chill for several hours turning them once or twice this is a recipe you can make well ahead in fact it’s still good 3 days [Music] later I’ve always believed that food all by itself is art and what about these three three works of art before me now but what are they they are cabbages and they are a much maligned vegetable in fact a lot of people grow up thinking they don’t like cabbage because they’ve not ever had it prepared and cooked properly so today we’re going to look at this beautiful much mign vegetable and see how to deal with it and while we’re doing that campaign as well another campaign’s going here is please chefs and restaurants and Catering trade can we have more of this you know we never see it it never appears or we have those funny little green beans and M to and boring old vegetables and all the time all this is ignored so I’ve got three types of cabbage there are many many more but this one is a favorite it’s got good flavor this is seavoy cabbage with those lovely crinkly leaves this is called pointed cabbage and this is um a green cabbage not very green but sort of Midway and then we’ve got the very Green Spring greens and the same as uh when we looked at the cauliflower the way to tell good cabbage is to listen for that lovely squeak if the leaves are squeaky like that then it’s really ready um you want it as fresh as possible as squeaky as possible now I want to show you how to prepare a cabbage now with these cabbages here this one and the spring greens the best thing to do is to lay the the leaves out like that and then to just cut down the stalk like that what I do is sort of pile them up in a pile and then just cut the stalk out into the center then fold them over and shred them with this one it’s a little bit different take off the really tough outer leaves first of all and then take off the end the way we did with the cauliflower like that and then cut it into quarters the leaves that fall off like that you can do as I as I’ve just done done but with the rest you cut it first in half and then into quarters and what you’ll see then is you’ll see that you’ve got a stalk here so if you cut out the stalk like that a lot of the riby bits will come out with the stalk and the other little riby bits that are still left you can just cut away very easily and it’s all right to have the finer stalks you just don’t want the the big thick stalks and then you just Shred the Cabbage like that with your knife and the best way to cook a cabbage is to boil it and the reason for that is that it Cooks more briefly if you put it into your saucepan like this this is already prepared and you have the heat on high ready you can hear how squeaky that is too as it’s going in and then what you do going to put it onto the heat now now is add some salt and then put boiling water press it down like that and you want enough boiling water from the kettle um pour the water in until it just covers the Cabbage just barely covers it and when you push it down like that that’s the amount of water you need and then you bring it back up to the boil and as soon as it reaches boiling point you you give it about 5 minutes I would have a look after four actually because it depends on how you shredded the cabbage and the size of the pieces I I probably have a look after four and the only way to test if it’s done is to take a piece and bite it [Music] now the minute the cabbage is tender and remember what we said earlier in the program you know it’s got to be cooked not to be raw as soon as it’s tender drain it in a collander and then I always deal with cabbage the way my mother taught me to do it and that is she took a saucer and she presses the excess water out of it like that and sort of chops it and as she chops it with the with the edge of the saucer like that so the excess moisture comes out of it because you don’t want to have uh you don’t want to serve it sort of sitting in its own little pool of water but there we are this is freshly cooked boiled cabbage beautifully green I hope you can see what a lovely color that is and that’s going to be absolutely delicious put it into a warm serving bowl and then I’m just going to give it a little twist a freshly mil black pepper you could put some butter in if you wanted to but I actually think it’s nice on its own this particular work of art is celery and it has such a lot going for it as a raw crunchy ingredient that we forget how good it is when it’s cooked as a vegetable first peel off the stringy bits and then chop the celery into 3in lengths then fry some finely sliced carrot and onion in butter and add the pieces of celery continue to fry until the celery turns brown at the edges then add some vegetable stock stir in and season before covering and cooking gently for 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender then take off the lid bring it up to a fast boil reduce the stock to a syrup before serving garnished with parsley well although I need masses more time than I have I can’t go without explaining a few points about this wonderful vegetable here which is an oen and obene can be a very misunderstood vegetable and it doesn’t taste very good if it’s not prepared and cooked properly so I think it’s very important that I explain all about it to you well the first of all um Obin contain a lot of water and you need to get the water out of them because otherwise they’ll be sort of water logged and Soggy and you won’t have the constant ated flavor so the way to get the water out of them and the recipe I’m going to show you is a Tunisian oine salad very exotic recipe very wonderful recipe and what you do is you just chop the oine into half inch chunks leaving the skin on just take the stalk off and then you put the chunks into a colander and we’re using 1 and 1/2 lbs of Obin in the recipe and what’s happened is they’ve been cut into these small half inch chunks and they’ve been sprinkled with one tablespoon of salt as they’ve been layered into the collander then you put a plate on top and you weight the plate with something heavy now I’ve got scale weights here but you could use tins of baked beans or anything piled up just to make it heavy and then if you leave them aside for an hour what will happen is all the excess juice will come out of them and you can see that these have been sitting there weighted and you can see all the juice that’s come out of them and that means that um we’ve got rid of the excess water and we’ve got all the lovely lovely flavor then the next thing you do is you take a cloth and you take the Obin out of here and give them a good squeeze now there are other recipes I prepared for you using OB jein in slices but these are just little chunks for the salad can you see now more moisture coming out then wrap them in a cloth and give them a good Sor dry well once you’ve got the water out of the Obin the next thing you have to watch when you’re preparing them is that the oil doesn’t go in because they are like sponges and they soak up oil so never cook them in a frying pan because the oil will just disappear in 2 minutes and they’ll taste very oily what I’m going to do is roast them so what I’ve done is put them in a bowl toss them in just one tablespoon of olive oil so that’s all it’s got and spread them out on a on a baking sheet for oven roasting high temperature tempure 450° and they’ll go on the top shelf and then on the Shelf underneath we’re going to have 1 and 1/2 lb of tomatoes that have been skinned and hared and the two together are going to take just 25 minutes to cook now while the O jein and tomatoes are cooking you prepare 10 oz of chopped onion a fat chili that’s been chopped and four cloves of garlic and they’re cooked in oil till they’re softened and now we’re going to add spices and I’ve got whole spices cumin seeds and all spice berries and they’ve been roasted and ground as we saw in the first program and they’re going to be stirred into the onion and garlic now I’ve got the roasted Obin they’re going to go in to join the rest and then the tomatoes that were on the Shelf underneath they’re going to go in all that now needs is a good seasoning and I forgot to tell you that the tomatoes obviously when they came out of the oven were chopped now we’ve got one more ingredient but sorry actually it’s two it’s 3 tablespoons of chopped coriander heaped up and 3 tablespoons of chopped mint a lovely combination what we’re going to do with that is just put 2/3 in now and the rest is going to be kept as a garnish for later and all that happens to this now is it gets transferred to a serving dish and then covered with clean film and left in the refrigerator overnight it needs about 24 hours in fact it’s even nicer if you can leave it a couple of days before you eat it for all the flavors to develop and then it’s ready to serve [Music] this is my version of a Famous Recipe bubble and squeak but I’ve made it rosty Style by using grated potatoes and adding a little mature cheddar cheese it’s great served with cold cuts like turkey or ham at Christmas this is a recipe for pumpkin and toasted sweet corn soup it’s a lovely contrast of smooth creaminess and crunchiness well that’s how to cook some vegetables next time it’s going to be how to make a salad so I look forward to seeing you then now you can find more information about some of the recipes in this program on seax page 580 [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh oh [Music]