When i was a child, one of my favourite things to eat was a McDonald’s Cheeseburger. The worst thing – the pickle. I goddamn hated those pickles. Now, I love all sorts of pickles and this recipe for Piccalilli was a beauty! It is super quick and super tasty. And also very pretty with all it’s different colours.
Piccalilli
I was inspired to make some pickles after a visit to Meatmaiden. One of their entrees is a “Quick Pickled Heirloom Veg with Chilli and Goat Curd”. These are just clean, fresh, , delicious and a perfect counterpoint to the meat, meat and more meat of the rest of the menu.
I found a recipe for a quick Piccalilli in Slow, one of the Tasty Reads Book Club books.
Piccalilli 2
According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Piccalilli is
“an English nterpretation of Indian pickles, a relish of chopped pickled vegetables and spices”
dating back to 1758.
But enough education.
You wouldn’t think that pickles were that contentious….but hooley dooley did this cause a commotion in la maison de la retro food.
“That’s not piccalilli,” said the Fussiest Eater in the World.
“Is so” I said.
“Not like any I’ve ever seen” he muttered.
The thing is, he has only ever known piccalilli as this luridly coloured, mushed up kind of chunky paste in a jar. I have never been able to bring myself to taste this because to my eye it looks totally unappealing!
Piccalilli Recipe
I didn’t make the ham hock terrine but if you feel so inclined, this is a two for one!
I”m not sure where you fall on the spectrum of piccalilli, all I can say is this fresh version was delicious and even if you are a diehard lurid yellow stuff in a jar fan, it’s certainly worth a try! And it might just change your mind!
As regular readers will know I am cooking my way through Sylvia Colloca’s Made in Italy which was a Tasty Read’s book whey back in 2015. To date, I have two recipes left to cook and I am going to try to get them both done this weekend. However, one recipe which bamboozled me was Silvia’s recipe for homemade ricotta.
I really wanted to make my own ricotta but there was something in Silvia’s recipe that was a stumbling block. It called for a whole litre of whey. I had no idea where I could get that from. I mean I eat a lot of yoghurt but even for me, collecting a whole litre of whey would take about a year! The internet abounds with recipes and ideas to use your leftover whey but falls strangely silent on how to get it in the first place. There’s whey protein powder but that seems to be more for bodybuilding than cheesemaking.
I asked a friend who regularly makes her own ricotta. “Where do you get your whey from?” The answer was a largely unhelpful “From the previous lot of cheese”.
Hmmm….so, with no seeming way to get whey, I turned to the internet. Which did not disappoint. I found an Epicurious recipe that used water and lemon juice instead of whey!
Well whey, hey we are good to go for the making of ricotta! It’s so easy!!!! It’s not a pretty process as it involves curdling the milk and cream with lemon juice.
And then straining the curds out of the whey.
So simple! And the end result is proper ricotta!
Making anything from scratch is great. Making cheese…amazing!!! I was so proud of myself! And this is a great way to use up cream that you may have leftover from making other things. I guess that technically I should have saved the whey from this batch so I could make Silvia’s recipe but I totally forgot. I am thinking about what a goat’s milk ricotta might be like so maybe I will save that batch.
Silvia says you can use your homemade ricotta for breakfast with honey and fruit. I used mine, with some homegrown oregano to make Ottolenghi’s Ricotta and Oregano Meatballs . They were delicious and I thought I would have some over to take some photos of the following day but we ate them all!
Homemade ricotta and homegrown oregano!!! Look at me being all homestead! I felt like I was from the little house on the prairie!
Now excuse me, I’m off to turn a hollow log into a meat smoker!
Hola amigos!!!! It’s done!!! It’s taken me SIX years but have finally finished cooking my way through Cantina by Paul Wilson. Not every recipe mind you, just the ones I wanted to cook. Sixty-one recipes. Which is more than enough I feel to pass judgement on this as a book. But first, let’s celebrate with some cake!
This was my birthday cake this year, a cake spent in the middle of lockdown when we were allowed no visitors. So a very solitary birthday. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about Cantina as exemplified by this recipe. Because everything that is wrong with this book is in this recipe. As is everything that is right. So let’s get to it.
A Rose is A Rose is A Rose
A rose may be a rose. And a rose by any other name may smell as sweet. (Ooh la la – look at me, with the Gertrude Stein and the Shakespeare refs in the one post!!!) But, apart from me showing off my fancy book learning, seriously, Cantina bandies about terms that have one meaning to mean something different.
(I have already waxed lyrical about how annoying this book on this point ere. So if you want to see my earlier rant click here.)
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece…
You may have noticed my slice..erm cake is missing the Mescal Roasted Pineapple. The cheapest mezcal I could find was $55 a bottle. Most were in the range of $90-100. Of which I would use 80ml of a 750 ml bottle. I’m sure that over time I would be able to find other uses for the remaining 89% of that bottle.
This seems likely given the general state of the world
Seriously dropping that much money to use less than a tenth of the bottle for is frivolous at the best of times. Let alone during a global pandemic / economic crisis etc. Fair enough the book was published in 2014 so way before covid but the cost equation still stands. It’s a lot of money to drop on one recipe. And you know it’s not like you can use the remainder on the recipe for Chorizo with Apricot and Mezcal Aioli (again, not an aioli). Because when you read that recipe it contains no goddamn mezcal at all. None. Nyet. Cero.
I was so incensed at this the first time round I tweeted the publisher.
They responded that it was a typo.
Eerrrrrrmmmmmm … no.
Speaking from embarrassing experience, a typo is when you work for an accounting firm and you hand your boss a report that leaves the o out of the word accounting.
Twice.
Why’d you have to make things so complicated?
This slice is made up of a lemon cake, a lemon syrup, a mousse, a lime curd glaze and the mezcal roasted pineapple. Five components. Thirty-two ingredients if you make your own lime curd (I did not) and the pineapple (which as per above, I also did not make).
Included in these thirty two ingredients is 100g of lemon aspen. Do you know what lemon aspen is? Nope, me either. According to Cantina’s glossary, it is
“A small, pale yellow fruit, with a lemon flavour and aroma and spongy flesh…it is available from bush food specialists and gourmet greengrocers”.
Let’s just put aside the fact that it was neither available from gourmet greengrocers or bush food specialists when I was looking for it.
Because you know what else is a small pale yellow fruit with a lemon flavour and aroma?
A lemon.
Readily available all over the damn place.
I also made the soft shell crab tacos with guacamole, shaved fennel and sweetcorn salad for my birthday dinner. Softshell crabs weren’t available for love or money so I made these with lobster tails. Because you know, it was my birthday and dammit if I wasn’t going to get fancy!!!
It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely
You know the absolute worst thing about Cantina? It’s cheffy, it’s pretentious, it’s fiddly, pretty much everything was a pain in the arse to cook. But when they worked, which was most of the time? They were so damn tasty that they almost made all the effort worthwhile. So, whilst I part of me really wants to consign this book to the second-hand shop pronto, I am going to hang onto it for a little while longer!
Both the cake/slice and the tacos were mouthwateringly delicious, even if they were also a lot of work to prepare!
The standout recipe for me from Cantina was the Heirloom tomato escabeche. It was so good!!!!!
I have a challenge with myself that I will reduce either through binning or donating 1000 things in the next 12 months. Twenty days in I am up to 190 so it is going well. But there’s a long way to go I may need to put Cantina on the donation pile later in the year!
Next up on my Tasty Reads book cook though Silvia Colloca’s Made in Italy. I only have about ten recipes left to cook from it so I should easily be done by the end of the year. And based on everything I have already cooked it is pretty down to earth which is exactly what I needed after the high-end madness that was Cantina!
So tell me, do you have a cookbook you find infuriating? What was frustrating about it? Did you keep it or give it away?
“I hope somewhere in this book there is a dish or two that you choose to serve to your family. Something that gets asked for again and again, and each time you make it, it becomes a little more your own. Then one day, years from now, when the people you cooked for have left and live their lives and come back to visit, you make that meal for them again. And that’s what makes them feel like they’re home” Adam Liaw, Adam’s Big Pot
Okay. Now that there’s not a dry eye in the house we’ll talk Tasty Reads.
Our latest theme has been Asian food and I kind of lucked out in that I already owned one of of the book choices, the absolute classic Charmaine Solomon’s Complete Asian Cookbook. But ‘s that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. Because, on high recommendation, I bought Adam’s Big Pot.
For those of you who have not heard of him, Adam Liaw was the winner or runner up or something in Master Chef a few years ago. But you don’t need to know that. What you do need to know is that apart from his annoying man-bun, Adam Liaw is immensely likeable.
I on the other hand am not intensely likeable, in fact, I am a contrarian at best and part of my reason for choosing this book was to take it down, It was SO highly recommended I thought there was no way it could live up to the expectations that had been set.
I stand corrected.
This book is AWESOME.
I have not been so excited about a Tasty Reads book since Persiana – only 17 recipes to go after I totally botched the baklava on the weekend. But we’re not here to talk about my cooking disasters.
OK, fine, seeing as you insist. I overcooked the sugar syrup so when I poured it over the pastry it set like toffee so the top of the baklava is tooth breakingly hard and the bottom is as dry as dust. My fault entirely, because after cooking the syrup for the requisite amount of time I thought it looked too watery. And because having made Baklava precisely…let me see…never before, I considered myself a bit smarter than the recipe. (Sigh, eyeroll, face palm).
But lets not focus on the bad, let’s talk about why I am excited by this book!
Adam’s Big Pot – Highlights
This is a very good primer in Asian food, lots of counties are represented – Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, India. A great variety without being too daunting.
There are lots of super photos
Adam’s descriptions of each recipe are great
He’s not too prissy – he offers lots of alternatives – eg if you don’t have a master stock handy, use chicken.
His tips are great
The book is beautifully presented
The meals are quick, easy and approachable
Cooking from this book is like cooking with an old friend. He’s just so damn likeable!
The food is super delicious. I have only made one thing I didn’t like (see Dishes Made below).
Adam’s Big Pot – Weaknesses
I feel like I’m being super picky here but you know, just so you know this isn’t paid for by Adam or anything (ha! I wish!).
If you were utterly unfamiliar with Asian cooking and you wanted to try a lot of the recipes in here you may have to buy a lot of ingredients that you may not use again if you did not love the dish and / or they may make you break out into hives (see below).
I think the Bits and Pieces section which is the very first in the book and contains the recipes for the curry pastes, the stocks and all the other base ingredients would have been better placed at the end of the book.
No bread! No roti, chapati, naan or paratha! I would have LOVED at least one bread recipe in here!
Adam’s Big Pot – What I’ve Cooked
Carrot and Cumber Som Tam.
So good. This is Adam’s version of my favourite, green papaya salad. Lovely, fragrant, spicy, fresh.
Tuna Takaki Salad.
Just divine!
Tuna, Corn And Avocado Salad
This is on high lunch rotation! I have made it pretty much every week since finding this recipe. The recipe calls for raw corn, I have used tinned and leftover grilled corn. All super.
Chicken and Cashew Nuts
Something in this recipe made me break out into a horrible rash and massive hives. I suspect it was the dark soy sauce because it was the only thing I have not used before. This probably says more about the excitability of my skin than a real flaw with the recipe because the fussiest eater in the world was perfectly fine. He had seconds and took it to work the next day.
Tandoori Chicken
Starting with homemade tandoori paste! I was RIDICULOUSLY proud of myself for making this. Who makes their own tandoori paste? Isn’t that what supermarkets are for? But it was so easy to do. I will never buy it again! And you know, seeing as I am Ms Allergic to the World, the more things I can control in my diet the better!
And then the chicken:
Salt and Pepper Squid
I love squid. The Fussiest Eater in the World will, however, not touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. So, I quite often make it for one. Adam’s recipe is so quick to cook, it is a great after-work meal for one or many! It’s also why I bought rings instead of tubes – easier to control portions.
I also had absolutely no idea that Salt and Pepper Squid was not a thing everywhere.
Adam says
“You could argue that salt and pepper squid is Australia’s national dish. It’s universally loved and you can buy it in just about any pub, Vietnamese, Thai or Chinese restaurant or Italian café around the country. On top of that, it’s not commonly found in any other country. It’s a truly homegrown favourite”
So, here it is rest of the world. What are you waiting for? Make this tonight. And thank me later!
Cut down one side of the squid tubes and open them flat. Lightly score the surface in a cross -hatch pattern, cut into bite sized triangles and toss in the flour.
Shake off excess flour an deep fry the squid din batches ffpr about a minute per batch or until just cooked and lightly golden.
Drain well.
Remove the oil, leaving about a tbsp in the wok. Heat the wok over medium heat and add the garlic, chilli and spring onion.
Toss in the wok for about a minute, or until the ingredients are lightly browned.
Add the squid and toss constantly scattering with the salt and pepper.
Remove the squid from the wok, scatter with coriander leaves and serve with lemon wedges and aioli.
What to cook Next?
I have some of the tandoori paste left so it would be sensible to make the tandoori chicken again. And the naan and the rojak I made from the Charmaine book when I made the tandoori chicken were super and the flavours went really well together.
However, with so many other delicious recipes still left to cook, including:
Prawn and Grapefruit Salad
Tom Yum Fried Rice
Kuku Paka which is an African chicken curry
Whiting With Nori Butter
Tiger Skinned Chicken
Baked Thai Fish Cakes
Canonigo which is a Filipino desert made from meringue, orange custard and caramel
D0 you cook Asian at home? What is your Asian favourite cuisine? What is your favourite Asian recipe? You know I’m nosy and love to know your business so please leave comments!
Anyhoo, I’ve loved cooking from this book and I’m awarding it Five Golden Rings of Squiddy Delciousness!
Let’s see if the rest of the Tasty Reads crew agrees!
Mexican was a recent selection at the Tasty Reads Book Club. I chose Cantina by Paul Wilson for my book because it is food porny to rival Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana!
Cantina
Take a look at these pictures from Cantina.
Pacific Oyster Cebiche with Melon Salsa.
Dani made this as her bring along to the discussion and they are even more delicious in real life than the picture.
Cantina Cebiche
Ranchero Style Beef Broth With Bone Marrow Toasts
Personally, I’m not sure about eating the Bone Marrow Toasts but they LOOK amazing!
Cantina Ranchero Style Beef Broth
Street Style Tostadas With Seared Tuna and Wood Grilled Vegetables.
Would it be wrong to say this just made me want to lick the page?
Cantina Street Style Tostadas
Gorgeous right? However, as you may have spotted, this is not your typical bean and burrito Mexican. There is not a yellow box in sight. As a Mexican Dorothy might say, “We’re not in Chipotle anymore Toto”. Cantina delivers high end, highly complex Mexican food. For instance, those “Street Style” Tostadas?
22 ingredients – minimum. But you also need a base. So depending on which of the bases you choose you can add another
7 ingredients if you use the Jalopeno and Finger Lime Crema
13 ingredients if you use the Veracruz Sauce
8 ingredients if you make the Sesame Pipian. But hold up. One of the “ingredients” of the Sesame Pipian is a Tomatillo Verde which in turn contains another 8 ingredients…so that would be another 15 ingredients.
Thirty. Seven. Possible. Ingredients. And up to three separate recipes. For “street style” tostadas. And ok, I get it, sometimes you need a lot of ingredients to get a depth of flavour and that alone would not necessarily be enough to put me off a recipe.
However, these recipes were further complicated by a lot of the ingredients not being readily available in Australian supermarkets meaning a lot of ingredients having to be bought on the internet or having to drive across town to pick them up. And then some could only be bought in bulk – hence the almost kilo of padron peppers sitting in my freezer!
Not to mention that cooking from Cantina was like going down the rabbit hole – one recipe lead to another which required another…it seemed never ending! Here is a prime example.
Heirloom Tomato Escabeche
I made this – it was one of the things I took to the Book Club Night. It’s a salad. It’s a fancy salad. It’s maybe the BEST salad I have ever eaten. But it’s a salad.
However to make this salad, as per the recipe, you need to first have made the Mexican pickles. And you also have to have made the Pasilla Chilli relish.
Then you make a lime crema base…
THEN you make the salad.
Then you collapse in a corner quietly sobbing…or….erm…you know….
I did LOVE this, it was so pretty and also incredibly tasty. But so much work for a salad. Bear in mind this would usually be an accompaniment to something else – which probably also had multiple elements. It was hard enough cooking one thing. An entire meal would have sent me loopy!
Cantina Heirloom Salad Escabeche
But to really demonstrate how this book just about sent my sanity to the edge and had a damn good crack at ruining my relationship you can go no further than….
Hanger Steak with Huitlacoche Mustard and Salsa Negra.
Cantina Hangar Steak
That pictures looks pretty damn simple right? It’s steak, salad and a condiment. How hard could it be?
Let me step you through the timeline of this one meal shall I?
Week -1:
Order Huitlacoche off internet.
Day of the Hangar Steak
6:30pm – Get home from work
6:45pm: Make my Latin Spice Rub. This stuff is awesome. Because you make much more of this than required, I have sprinkled this over everything since I made it and it makes everything – steak, chicken, fish, eggs, calamari – taste better. Just beware it is hot, Hot, HOT so if you don’t like it spicy, go very easy!
Cantina Latin Spice Rub
6:55pm – Soak the dried porcinis
6:58pm – Chop onions and garlic.
7:03pm. Open can of huitlacoche. What is in the tin looks like corn covered in snot. Wonder if you have got a dodgy tin.
7:05pm. Google huitlacoche. Realise it’s supposed to look like that. Wish you hadn’t bought it.
7:15pm. Heat oil and cook onions garlic and both types of mushrooms
7:20pm. Add huitlacoche and porcini liquid.
The recipe them says to cook for 10 minutes until the liquid has reduced to a glossy sauce. This never happened. For a start it was way too chunky – bear in mind the recipe does not even tell you to chop your mushrooms (which I did) but what I had in my saucepan after ten minutes looked like chopped mushrooms and corn covered in snot.
7:40pm. “When are we eating? I’m hungr….what on God’s green earth is THAT?
“It’s mustard”
“It looks like mushrooms and corn covered in snot. Why are you making mustard? Can’t we just have Colman’s?”
“You can’t have Colman’s, we’re having Mexican. It’s special Mexican mustard.”
“It looks revolting”.
It didn’t look great. And I don’t want to be pedantic (I so totally do) but surely…a major component of anything called mustard should actually be mustard?
And don’t even get me started on the Apricot and Mescal Aioli that contained no mescal and was not any sort of aioli I ever had.
7:45. I’m staring at a hot mess in a pan, thinking maybe if I blended it it would look a little bit more like the mixture in the picture.
7:55. After some blending with the hand mixer, we now have something that looks pretty much like the picture in the book. Which is to say, like baby poo.
I’ve now been cooking for an hour and have….a spice rub and some sort of condiment which probably should not be called mustard. Which he is refusing to eat and I’m losing interest in by the second..
Never mind. The rest is steak and salad. Easy Peasy.
8:00pm. Rub the steaks with the spice rub. That can sit for a while because now, we need to turn to page 36 to make the Latin Vinaigrette for the garnish. Yes. Even the garnish requires you to move to a different page.
Latin Vinaigrette contains 10 ingredients. Roll eyes, sigh. Make Latin Vinaigrette.
8:10. Latin Vinaigrette Made.
8:15pm. Start on the Salsa Negra.
8:16pm Turn back to page 36 to make Salsa Mexicana for the Salsa Negra
8:17pm Salsa Mexicana requires a Zesty Lime Dressing found on page 37. Sigh, roll eyes start muttering swear words underbreath.
8:20pm. : “When are we eating? ”
“Soon. I just need to make the steak. And the salad”
“I thought that’s what we were having”
“It is” This through gritted teeth.
“But…you’ve been cooking for hours…why is there no steak? Or salad?”
“Because it’s Mexican and it’s driving me insane. I just need to make this dressing first. And I really need you to be quiet.”
“I thought you just made dressing”
“I did. That was a different dressing”
“Right. So you’ve been cooking for ages. And you’ve made a mustard that isn’t even a mustard and two salad dressings? When will you cook the steak? I’m starving!!!!”
“Just. Don’t. Speak. This Mexican is doing my head in and the more I have to chitter chatter with you, the longer this is going to take.”
8:30pm Zesty Lime Dressing Made.
8:40pm Salsa Mexicana made.
8:45pm “Where’s the can of black beans that we absolutely definitely had in the cupboard?”
“I ate them for lunch…”
“But….the salad is back bean salad. How are are supposed to have black bean salad with no black beans?”
“We have white beans”
“You can’t make black bean salad with white beans”
“Don’t be a bean racist”.
“Shut up”
We didn’t have white beans. By now I was slightly hysterical. Two hours and no beans to make the bean salad.
8:55pm “I’m hungry….when are we eating?”
“Shut up, I need to think”
“I’m going to have some cereal”
“Don’t eat cereal, we’re just about to have dinner”
“A likely story…”
9:05pm. We had couscous in the fridge. I ended up making the black bean salad with couscous.
9:15pm. The steak finally hits the grill.
9:30pm. Nearly three hours later, we sit down to eat. It was good. It was really good. The couscous was fine – maybe even better than black beans. But it was steak and salad. And it had taken nearly three hours to make. And i was in such a bad mood by the time it was ready I didn’t really enjoy it on the night. Next day for lunch though? Super!
And here in lies the what I feel is the dilemma of Cantina. Two and a half hours of cooking is WAY to long for a weekday meal. Ok, you could make the rub and the dressings and the mustard before hand but that it still time spent somewhere. And for me this is not a dinner party dish either. It’s something…I’m just not sure what – it’s too complex for a casual meal but not fancy enough for a dinner party meal.
Oh, and that so called mustard? I wouldn’t even bother with that. I didn’t like the taste of it and there was enough flavour in the rub and the dressings and the other bits and bobs so that you would not miss it.
And finally…here it is:
Don’t get me wrong. It was DELICIOUS. Nothing I made from Cantina was bad. Except for maybe that mustard. But you had to work hard for that goodness.
Will I cook from Cantina again? Hmmm….Possibly. There are still a few recipes I really want to try. But I would do it on a weekend. Ideally a long weekend.
Here is some of the other stuff I made:
Jalapeno and Finger Lime Crema
Mexican Style Pickles
Loved them!
Baked Devilled Eggs with Sobrasado
I did a cheaty version of this in that I swapped in similar stuff I had for the listed ingredients such as barley wraps for the corn tortillas, pancetta and salami for the serrano ham and sobrasado, cheddar cheese for the Mahon…It was still awesome if not exactly remotely authentic.
Chorizo with Apricot and (no) Mescal Aioli
Pumpkin Soup with Chorizo Migas
I had to buy achiote paste for this and didn’t like the flavour of it at all.
I do enjoy saying Chorizo Migas in a very bad (a la Speedy Gonzales) Mexcan accent though.
Your’re meant to drink this alternating with sips of a shot of tequila. I just put my tequila in the drink along with all the rest of the stuff. Loved this!
Here is the recipe for the Spice Rub, direct from Cantina. And also serves as my Spice Blend for a Daring Kitchen Challenge MONTHS ago. And hey, I guess the Hangar Steaks cover off on their Grilling challenge!
[yumprint-recipe id=’33’] I honestly feel like cooking from Cantina once a week which is what I try to do with the Tasty Read selections almost broke me. And, if the end result hadn’t almost invariably been delicious I would have gladly tossed the book in the trash multiple times. Instead, it’s filed away in the bookshelf just waiting for the right occasion. So, just know this. If you ever come to my house and I make you Mexican food that looks lovely and casual, know that I must REALLY like you! Because that stuff is hard!
