Jono & Jules do food & wine

These are pretty healthy and not many calories – hopefully you don’t care but we are trying to be good 😦 Not least because I’m off to Belfast for the weekend for a Thai cookery demo in my Mum’s. I presume we have to eat all the Thai cookery afterwards and coconut milk is evil… well not evil but calorific. Jono meanwhile is off to Hungary to be wined and dined and massaged and wined and dined and  … (ok probably not massaged).

So if you would like to try them for yourselves you can find the recipe here:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/12228/stuffed-tomatoes-with-lamb-mince-dill-and-rice

Btw, I couldn’t find any beef tomatoes so had to use lots of big little ones. If you live in Dublin you may have the same problem.

Julie

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A great side with real taste and texture!

We roasted these sweet potatoes after tossing in a mix of Hot Paprika, Cayenne Pepper, Sea Salt and Olive Oil.

Roasted hot for 30 mins they end up a good combination of soft and sweet centres, spicy and tangy spices and a slight caramelisation that combines it all.

These jazzed up very simple chicken breasts to make a meal with character.

We’ve decided to do them again soon

Drank a glass of the 2007 Sipp Mack Riesling Vielles Vignes: lovely and dry with thrilling flavours of lime and grapefruit citrus, hints of honey and touches of minerality. Very easy on the palate and yet chock full of flavour and a thrilling length and verve. Do this wine again too!

Jono

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Domaine de Pecoula, Monbazillac 2005

delicious sweet wine made from semillon – late harvest and with a bit of noble rot (which is a good thing) 🙂

we found this at Marks & Spencers for €7.99  for 375ml (don’t tell anyone!) and it was lemony, sweet, delicious and a complete bargain

Jules is a chatter box and should have had a blog years ago, coz she is telling me what to say 🙂 ………..

That said this wine is a bargain .. it has great balance so that the sweetness is not anything but delicious and never cloying. We drank this with cheese (blue and cheddar) which worked perfectly. It was also not too heavy so we probably could have drunk a whole bottle (not the half that it was sold in). Really easy and smooth.

If I see it again I’ll buy at least another bottle if not more – yum scrum!

Jono

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Not quite true … we found a recipe that promised to be the Ultimate Ratatouille recipe … so we had to test this out … and as Jules is studying the Rhone wines we happened to pick up a Tavel Rose while out in town and it just happened to promise on the back label that it was a perfect match for Ratatouille… we couldn’t believe it!

Guess what – we have found the best Ratatouille we have ever tried (see recipe below)

Jono

So the wine…. great colour and yum scrum strawberry aromas. Low acidity but the strawberryness  balances out the high alcohol (and you don’t notice the alcohol (14%)  too much with the food). Oh yes it works with Ratatouille! The two together more than made up for the horrible wet Dublin weather… we could have been on a beach in the south of France (except we were inside and we could see outside… and it was nasty!).

Julie

The Ultimate Ratatouille (from Angela Nilsen – published in BBC Good Food Magazine in September 2007) – Serves 4

Ingredients:

2 medium onions

5-6 large tomatoes (about 450g)

sprig thyme

sprig rosemary

1 bay leaf

125ml olive oil

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 red peppers

3 medium courgettes

1 large aubergine

1.5 tsp coriander seeds, crushed

coriander and parsley to finish

crusty bread to serve

Method:

Chop the onions (not too finely) and garlic. Heat 2 tbsp oil and sweat in big frying pan until soft but not coloured for 12-15 minutes.

Quarter the tomatoes and cut out their cores. Roughly chop the tomatoes. Wrap the thyme and rosemary in the bay leaf and tie up with string. Add tomatoes and herbs to onions and cook gently for 20-25 minutes, stir every now and again.

Remove the cores and seeds from peppers and cut into one inch pieces. Cut the courgettes and aubergines into similar size pieces.

Heat 2 tbsp oil in pan and fry peppers for about 5 minutes until soft and a little bit browned. Tip into a bowl.

Add 2 tbsp oil and aubergine to the pan and fry for 5 minutes (don’t add more oil even though it gets absorbed).

Tip on top of the the peppers and repeat with the courgettes until they are golden.

Add all to the tomatoes with coriander seeds, cover and barely simmer for about 15 minutes or until everything is tender.

Season and sprinkle chopped coriander and parsley over.

Enjoy!

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Chicken Tagine

Made some preserved lemons, thanks to Stephanie Alexander, so had to use them: et voila! a chicken tagine with lemons and olives from Jamie Does …

Great delicate and elegant flavours but the chicken pieces were too large – Jamie says to quarter the chicken but I think you need smaller pieces (ie jointed or legs, breasts or thighs). I also think you need a touch more spice marinade, but I’ll try both these ideas soon to see if they work.

Enjoyed a Rioja with the meal. Found this suggestion on the net and it worked! We tried a Gran Reserva – in this case the Solar de Samaniego 2001 – the age mellows out the aggressive tannins perfectly and the structured, elegant tannins work with the food. Spices and chicken meld really well with the aged strawberry and vanillin fruits. Good match!

Jono 🙂

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What to do when your hubby brings home some Kingfish from the shops cause it “looked interesting”? This was the dilemma I found myself in last week.

Interesting it may look but no one seems to have a damn clue what it is. We consulted Rick Stein who only had one rather complicated dish but between Rick and the web we figured curry was the way forward.

The Kingfish kind of looked like a meaty steak, like swordfish or tuna.

As well as trying to make healthier stuff we’re also trying to save lots of money so we picked a fish curry that wasn’t going to break the bank with lots of fancy ingredients.

Nigel Slater came to the rescue. This is “a very fresh-tasting and really quite spicy fish curry” from his book Appetite and it was very good indeed.

Nigel Slater’s fresh-tasting and really quite spicy fish curry (made with Kingfish)

(Makes enough for 2 or 3 according to Nigel but we managed to polish the lot off)

Ingredients:

2 medium onions

veg oil

550g assorted fish and shellfish (or 2 Kingfish steaks)

black mustard seeds

2 or 3 hot red chillies

a tsp each of garam masala, ground turmeric, mild chilli powder

4 tomatoes

about 500ml of Marigold vegetable bouillon

100ml coconut milk

Peel and roughly chop onions and cook slowly with a small amount of oil in a casserole over a low heat, until soft and pale gold.

Remove all skin and bones from fish and cut into large chunks.

Sprinkle a tsp of mustard seeds into the onions, then seed and chop the chillies and add them too.

Cook, stirring in the ground spices, till it all smells fragrant.

Chop up the tomatoes and stir them in, cook down for five minutes or so, then pour in the stock.

Bring to the boil and slide in the fish. Simmer until tender (6 or 7 minutes).

Stir in the coconut milk, season with salt and simmer for a minute or two longer before eating.

We ate it with basmati rice.

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So this was Thursday’s pretty healthy and very tasty dinner.

We got the recipe from my trusty BBC Good Food Magazine without which I would still be living on a diet of toast and cereal. My first issue was September 2000 and I still have every issue published since and use them all the time.

Click here for the recipe:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/12278/creamy-beetroot-risotto

P.S. Strange things might happen in the toilet after eating this but don’t panic! You’re not bleeding to death it’s just the beetroot!

Julie

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Made this a while back – need a small bird or big oven but the result is a really tasty and succulent roast chicken 🙂

covered in spices that give great flavours as well as crisping the skin – yum

thanks to Jamie in America

Jono

I just like the way he’s got his hands on his hips 😉 Julie

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So we are on a bit of a diet. I say a bit because we are trying to be ultra good during the week and just a little bit naughty at the weekend. All this eatin n drinkin has one downside… it makes your jeans too tight. So we are going to be good until the jeans are a bit looser again and then go back to making tarts and pies (well occasionally) and eating cheese (cause we really love cheese).

So maybe not the best time to be starting a food blog but I see it as a bit of a challenge. How to make exciting, tasty things that don’t make your jeans too tight. This is our mission for the next couple of months (or as long as it takes).

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Well not actually boneless… just more boneless than the usual grizzly little things that you need a bath after eating 🙂 The cool thing is you can pick them up like a drumstick and suck the meat of the remaining bone without getting all sticky. Takes hours and hours and hours to perfect the technique though so don’t make for a party if you have any more than four guests!! They do make you look exceptionally clever though so it’s kind of worth the hours of hard labour and stab wounds. Oh and Yotam Ottolenghi’s green couscous. Yummy!

Thanks to Jono’s Mum, Gera, for training us in how to part-bone a chicken wing (and Australian Masterchef for teaching Gera) 😉

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I just deleted my whole blurb about this tart by accident. Grrrr! So here I go again. This is Yotam Ottolenghi’s very full tart and believe me it is very full, so full it’s hard to believe that all the stuff is going to fit in the dish, but it does… just! We were sorry we hadn’t asked someone over for dinner to share it cause it was so damn good (though we almost fell out making the pastry which mightn’t have impressed the guests). I’ve seen this on other blogs so won’t bother typing out the whole recipe (just google “very full tart” and you’ll get it).

Julie

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