Magnus Hultberg

Waitrose saved our Sunday dinner (again)
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Building from a Waitrose recipe, we made this for Sunday dinner. While their recipe was basically just the chicken on cabbage and chorizo, served with potato mash, we decided to whack a load of various veggies in there and let it all roast together in the same pan. 

Lazy buggers, we are.

Simple as day, and in Waitrose's own words "quick to prepare, lovely mix of flavours".

While I am at it I'd like to recommend these sausages from Unearthed that we found through the Waitrose recipe. The little kabanos snacking sausages are brilliant on a plate with some Comté cheese...

Mini sausages from Unearthed, delish
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Ingredients (serves 2 hungry piggies)

2 carrots
1 parsnip
1 swede, diced
1 leek, sliced
1 pointed spring cabbage, shredded
1 onion, cut in clefts
1 pack cooking chorizo (250 gr)
4 chicken legs
2 tbsp sherry
rosemary, 4 fresh sprigs
garlic, 4-6 whole peeled cloves
olive oil
salt
black pepper

Method

Heat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Start with cutting the root vegetables and onion in rough pieces, chop up the chorizo, peel the garlic cloves, place it all in a roasting tray. Drizzle with some olive oil, splash in the sherry.

Add the chicken legs to the tray and rub it all around, getting some of the oil and sherry on the chicken. Then place the legs skin side up and season with salt and pepper.

Roast for 20 minutes.

Remove tray from oven and lift chicken out on to a plate. Mix the cabbage and leek into the vegetables and chorizo, give it all a good stir. See how the chorizo has released its juices, all that lovely bronze colour? You want some of that to rub off on the cabbage and leek.

Put the chicken back on top, return tray to oven and roast for another 35 minutes.

Chicken should be golden in colour, and when cooked through no pink meat should be seen near the bone in the thickest part.

Place a few good spoonfuls of vegetable mix on a plate, rest a leg (or two...) on top and drizzle with the juices from the pan.

Serve with a rich red wine that survives the spiciness from the chorizo. Waitrose recommends Vina Fuerte Old Vine Garnacha, Catalyud, Spain.

Why not, I say.

Weird and knobbly, but packed with delicious flavour
Originally uploaded by avlxyz, made available through Creative Commons, thanks!

WHAT: jerusalem artichoke, great from November through March. In fact, if you grow your own, they start producing tubers in August but you should wait until after first frost to pick them as that apparently produces a sweeter flavour.

WHY: they provide an excellent alternative to potato, but with a different taste.

HOW: prepare like you would potatoes, actually, but unlike potato it can even be served raw in salads. Steam (boiling makes them go mushy), sauté with garlic, fry, puré, oven roast, make a hearty soup, deep fry, or fry with batter and serve with a dip. 

Pick out smooth ones as you will waste less when peeling. More knobs does not equal better quality. It is easier to peel them after they are steamed, but keeping the peel on provides more nutrients. Also, the peeled tuber discolours in air unless you keep them in a pot of water with some lemon juice squeezed in.

Jerusalem artichoke puré with apple and spices, yum!
Originally uploaded by wfiupublicradio, made available through Creative Commons, thanks!

Funny plant, this. Despite its name it has no connection with globe artichokes, nor Jerusalem. It actually is a type of sunflower. Native to North America, as Italian settlers arrived they called it "girasole" (Italian for sunflower) and it is believed it was distorted through the years to "jerusalem". And yes, the tubers do taste a bit like globe artichokes. For more background, see "eat the seasons".

While it looks a bit like ginger (or the Mandrakes of Harry Potter...) it is more like a potato in texture and consistency (although very different in taste). Rather than starch the carbohydrate is something called inulin, an important component in the fructose (don't eat too much of this...) industry which uses a lot of jerusalem artichoke.

This inulin is also what may cause some people to get digestion problems from jerusalem artichoke. Sometimes causing tummy pains and excessive wind, it has been nicknamed "fartichoke"...

Taste is often described as nutty and sweet with hints of honey. My favourite way of serving this delicious root vegetable is as a soup. Try 32 Great Queen Street for a fantastic jerusalem artichoke soup, topped with a bit of truffle oil and served with fantastic bread.

Jerusalem artichoke soup, and some very excellent bread.
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Snug as a bug in a rug! My beautiful quail eggs.
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Spent the weekend at the utterly amazing Ashburton Cookery School, doing the "Gastro Plus" course.

Had no clue what to expect, but it certainly wasn't brand spanking new kitchens, Michelin-trained instructors and the best, locally sourced ingredients I have ever had the pleasure working with.

From pan fried red mullet and scallops; through butterflied pork tenderloin with a hot cherry tomato salsa; then baked sea bream filleted by myself served with a fricassee of cockles, artichokes, peas and apple; to confit of duck leg and pan fried duck breast with a cassis jus... 

We were well fed. Or how does lavender creme brulee sound, does that do it for you? Certainly no need to go out and eat in the evenings! Although, of course we did... *blush*

Perhaps the best surprise was the gin and tonic sorbet with lime zest though, followed by the champagne sorbet.

No wonder cookery schools are booming across the UK, if they are all of the same standard.

Ashburton may not be big, but it happens to have the second best fishmonger in the UK for example... And two butchers down the main street, a really lovely veg shop and several bakeries. Foodie heaven! Nearby is also Riverford farm, which delivers veg all over the UK.

We did lots of things, very intense two days, and in retrospect I wish I had taken more photos. There just wasn't enough time though, and I wanted to really immerse myself in the experience and not make the mistake of seeing it all through a lens.

Sometimes I find the incessant photographing and posting of stuff in real time actually detracts from an experience rather than add anything to it. Luckily the WiFi in the school building didn't work, and 3G was just out of the question... Thank you for that! :)

Here are the few photos I actually took in a Flickr photo set with some added commentary.

White chocolate parfait with classy fruit salad and blowtorch action... (Ashburton)
Originally uploaded by Manne.

The dessert of white chocolate parfait on a classy fruit salad with warm sauce was amazing, and so simple to make! Parfait excluded... But replace that with a piece of brownie and some nice old fashioned vanilla ice cream and it is still impressive in my opinion.

One thing I did take a photo of, because I was so amazed with myself, was the one of the three poached quail eggs above, resting neatly in their container before being arranged around a pan fried duck breast served with shredded confit of duck leg and prunes on a potato and parsnip rösti. Man, was that ever tasty!

I never thought I would be able to poach an egg, let alone a teensy weensy quail egg! Or try three at the same time!

Easy peasy. Carve top off with a serrated knife, pour egg into a small bowl with some white wine vinegar. Leave for 10 minutes. This separates yolk and white and starts the cooking process.

Heat a largish pot of water to near simmering  (not boiling, all you need is about 80 degress Celsius!) along with some vinegar (1 tsp to a half litre), give it a gentle swirl and carefully pour in the eggs.

Walk away! Leave them be! Even if it looks a mess just let the gentle swirl collect the strands of white and roll them up.

When you see the white has coagulated you may touch. If they are stuck to the bottom, gently pry them loose with a spoon. They should bob upwards when done.

Pick out and immediately put in cold water to stop the cooking. Remove any trailing strands of white if you like, to make them look pretty.

You can do this well in advance of any serving, to make sure you get it right. When it is time to serve, just heat them for half a minute in simmering water, then dish them out immediately.

I recommend anyone to try out a course at Ashburton Cookery School. Best two days I have spent away in a very long time. Despite the freezing chill at the B&B...

Also, if you are passing through Ashburton (heh...) do check out Moorish, the Spanish/North African tapas restaurant on West Street.

Excellent food, really friendly staff and the warmest, loveliest dining room I have seen.

Perhaps coming in out of the cold made me exaggerate that last part a bit, but the food was spot on.

Big, big thanks to W for this amazing Christmas gift. For her hopefully a gift that keeps on giving as I apply my newfound skills in our kitchen.

If you like me have registered with far too many social networks and is adamant to maintain them all, the addition of Google Buzz is something of a godsend. Not only does it provide a central online profile from where other sites can be linked, it also has some really clever functions to pull in the stuff you create elsewhere to one place. This has allowed me to optimize the time I spend on feeding my social networks with relevant content, and streamline and simplify the posting process.

Update: Since I published this post several people have re-posted it. Thanks! Hope you all find it helpful. To monitor how much my blog is mentioned, I set up this UberVu widget to display the stats.

We now return to the scheduled programming.

For the first time I have a solid way of aggregating content from the sites where I create it, and passing it on as one consolidated RSS feed to various tools that then automatically push it on to social networks where I have conversations. I have tried doing this before, but it has all been very patchy and hap-hazard, resulting in a lot of duplicated posts and weird, irrelevant cross overs between networks.

Been spending the day setting it all up, and now I have a nice conceptual model. That said, right now Buzz seems not too stable... So I am not sure how well this will work in practice.

Anyway. Now Google Buzz aggregates my Flickr photos, Reader shared notes, Tummyrumble, Digg and my GTalk status updates.

The Buzz recent posts feed is then imported to Twitterfeed.com from where I push out updates to Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm. Update 15/02/2010: Here is a recent blog post with screen shots on how to set Twitterfeed.com up, important to remember to push on "descriptions only" as the post titles in the Buzz RSS feed say "Buzz from Application name by User name" which is long, brings no value and very repetitive...

(When it comes to location checkins, which I do with Foursquare, the iPhone app itself updates Twitter and Facebook selectively when I want it to. I see no need for bogging down Buzz with that stuff as it is largely irrelevant to most public people...)

I have then configured Ping.fm to update LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Ning, Jaiku and a few other random services that I have been signed up to for a long time, but they never really seemed to take off.

I do absolutely not want to import the status updates I do on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to Buzz. The way I see it, I have different followers (and myself follow different people) in each network. While I want content I create to end up in all three networks to feed discussion and comments, I want to keep the conversations confined to each network.

With this setup I can also decide if I want to push a piece of content to all networks, or if I specifically want to post something to for example just my friends on Facebook to see.

(For network specific status updates my trusty iPhone is indispensable as it is so much quicker using the apps then looking up the corresponding web site in a browser on my laptop...)

The only thing missing now is for Google Buzz to be able to pull in my YouTube video updates, but that option doesn't seem to exist yet.

Let's see how well this works. Already I can tell some connections seem to work better than others... I am sure some information is dropped going through the maze of APIs involved... If I find time, infographic to follow.

Now I need to sort out my personal web site (what is the purpose of a site like www.hultberg.org when all stuff is published and talked about in the cloud?), and how this all relates to other web sites I use such as Dopplr, Last.fm, Goodreads...

This post was inspired by Louis Gray describing how he has updated his "social network setup" for 2010. Thank you Mr Gray for providing me with the missing pieces required to puzzle my own setup together.