Got Any Leftover Mashed Potatoes?

If you have a vat of leftover mashed potatoes in your refrigerator, there are lots of things you can do with them, including this.

All I did here was mold the cold mashed potato into a round cake, brushed it with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkled it with some oregano and baked it in the oven at 225 C for 10 minutes. At this point, I took it out and put a very thin slice of tomato and some emmental cheese on it, then baked it for another 7 minutes or so.

If you have sprigs of fresh oregano, garnish them with these and they can either be a starter or served on the side with some roast.

If you really want to get fancy with this humble leftover, I'd make a variety of potato cakes seasoned with different kinds of herbs (dried) and all garnished with a fresh sprig of each type of herb. Imagine what this would look like served on a tray at a party.

You can also change the topping. It doesn't have to be a thin slice of tomato. Maybe it could be a thin slice of grilled zucchini. What about braised leeks? The cheese could be goats cheese, Camembert cheese, Brie cheese, Manchego cheese, Cheddar cheese, Parmesan cheese....use whatever you fancy...or whatever you happen to have lying around at the time.

Note: If you wish to make these from a fresh batch of mashed potatoes, you need to cool them overnight so that they can easily be molded. Of course by then they won't be fresh - but you get the picture.

Easy Sourdough Bread

Now that Ronny's back working and I've already got a sourdough starter, I thought I should learn to bake bread myself since it's not fair to expect him to spend an entire day baking bread over the weekend. There are lots of fascinating recipes available on the Internet these days but since I'm a novice baker I thought I'd try out the easiest one I could find and this was S. John Ross's recipe.

It's very warm in Costa del Sol now and it was 29C at 9:35 a.m. this morning and was getting progressively warmer so I didn't proof the sponge overnight but took it out in the morning. Even though each starter may behave differently one variable that will make any yeast happier is the temperature and I felt that this variable was in my favor.

I put 1 cup warm water and 1 cup flour into a bowl with my starter which totaled to 2 cups of sponge, but then thought I'd better add another 1/2 C each as the recipe calls for 2 cups of sponge and I'd need to put 1 cup of the sponge into my bottle again. So like an afterthought I added 1/2 C water and 1/2 C flour more to the sponge after about 30 minutes.

I washed and sterilized the container in which I normally keep my starter as recommended by S. John Ross.

Because of the additional flour and water I added, I decided to give my starter more than 2 hours and left it for 3hours.

When my sponge was ready, I first put 1 cup of this into my glass container again and fed it with 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and put it back into the refrigerator.

Before you start, please note that you must not preheat the oven in this recipe. Not sure why this is the case, but I think it might be a way to get one last rise out of your bread.

S. John Ross's Sourdough Bread

Ingredients

2 Cups Sponge

3 Cups AP Flour (add 1/2 cup at a time and you may not use all of it)

2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

4 Tsp Sugar

2 Tsp Salt

Step 1: Mix the sugar, salt and extra virgin olive oil into your sponge and then start mixing in the flour, 1/2 cup at a time. This is because flour varies in absorbency and the wetness of your sponge will vary too. The amount in the recipe is only a rough estimate and you should stop adding flour when you have a nice flexible dough.

Step 2: Let the dough rise in a warm place until it's doubled in bulk. Cover loosely with a cloth when doing this. One way to check whether the dough has risen is to poke the dough and see if it springs back. If it doesn't it has risen.

Step 3: Punch the dough down and knead it again. Then make a loaf and put it on oven paper on your oven tray. Cover the loaf and let it rise again until it's doubled in bulk.

Step 4: Put the tray into your oven set at 350F/176C. Do not preheat the oven. Bake your loaf for 30-45 minutes or until its crust is a delicious brown and it makes a hollow sound when you hit the bottom side of it with a wooden spoon.

Step 5: Let the loaf cool on a rack and wait for 1 hour before slicing it.


So was this easy or what? To be honest, I never would have become a sourdough baker had it not been for S. John Ross's site. This is because the recipes on the other sites were too complicated and precise for me and S. John Ross's site was a no nonsense, no frills version of sourdough bread that even a baking dummy like me thought I could handle. His explanation of how this whole thing works was so concise, clear and simple that I had a good idea of what I could do and could not do to keep the yeast alive without following everything to a tee. He kind of gave basic guidelines that sounded more like a elementary school chemistry experiment and I liked it.

I think that once you're comfortable with how to bake basic sourdough bread, you can become more daring like those Daring Bakers or all those wonderful bakers featured in Yeast Spotting and try to make something fancier, but I personally feel it's important to keep things simple when you make your first baby steps in the art of baking bread so that you don't get scared and not bake at all.


Note: The proofing took about 3 hours. The first rise needed 3-4 hours and the last rise needed 3-4 hours. However, the time required depends on your starter and temperature variables so making sure that your dough has doubled in bulk is the only way to know when it's ready.

Paper Chef #42 : Chicken with Almond Sauce with Gremolata & Crispy Corn Kernels

Well, here's my Paper Chef Entry for this month. The ingredients were chosen by the lovely blog owner of Former Chef and were: chicken, almonds, corn and fish sauce.

Despite my familiarity with all 4 ingredients I was at a loss as to to what to do with them and spent a few hours surfing the Internet and leafing through some cookbooks and then I knew what I was going to do....but not entirely. So I admit to changing a few things while I was cooking.

Chicken with Almond Sauce with Gremolata & Crispy Corn Kernels

Serves 2

Ingredients

The Almond Sauce - Adapted from 'Cooking in Spain' by Janet Mendel

25 Marcona Almonds (blanched and skinned)

1 Slice Bread (25 g)

2 Cloves Garlic

3 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

10 Black Peppercorns

2.5 g Saffron Powder

Dash Clove

1/2 Tsp Salt

100 ml Dark Sweet Vintage Sherry

1/4 liter Water

Other Ingredients

2 Chicken Thighs

1 Bird's Eye Chili

Fish Sauce (sprinkle this onto the chicken when marinating)

1 Lemon (the juice goes into the marinade - the skin is used to make Gremolata)

Rosemary

Salt

Black Pepper

Parsley (a bunch of it)

Maiz Frito (Crispy Corn Kernels aka Corn Nuts)*



Step 1: Marinate the chicken legs inside fish sauce, lemon juice, 1 bird's eye chili, rosemary, salt and pepper. Leave for about 30 minutes.

Step 2: Fry the blanched marcona almonds, bread and garlic in extra virgin olive until toasted, and then put them inside a food processor.

Step 3: Add the black peppercorns, saffron, clove and salt and pulverize everything.

Step 4: Add the sherry to make a smooth paste.

Step 5: Braise the chicken in a pan until golden brown and then lower the heat and make sure they're thoroughly cooked, then set aside. Use a strainer of some kind to remove some of the excess rosemary inside the pan because the sauce won't look pretty with too much rosemary in it. You also should remove the bits of chili in there.

Step 6: Add the almond mixture into the remnants of the juices and oils from braising the chicken along with the water and let it cook until it's nice and thick.

Step 7: Put the chicken back into the pan with the sauce and let it cook for 10 minutes or so and then serve.

Step 8: Make the Gremolata without the garlic - lemon peel and parsley only.

Step 9: Serve the chicken with rice. Sprinkle the plate with crispy corn kernels and sprinkle Gremolata all over to make it look pretty.

Note 1: I didn't make Maiz Frito but bought them. You can make them but my kitchen already looked like a war zone.

Note 2: This tasted good and I'd make it again except I'd roast the chicken next time. It was too much work frying it inside a pan. Then I'd use the juices from the casserole dish to make the sauce.

Note 3: You will have leftover almond sauce, because this part of the recipe is for 4-6 people. I've saved my lovely sauce in a container now and will use them with some meatballs that I'll be making later today. The sauce is absolutely lovely with rice.

Warm Green Bean & Potato Salad with Tuna in a Wasabi Soy Sauce Dressing & Toasted Sesame Seeds

Sesame seeds are an important ingredient in Japanese cooking which is generally very simple and uses very few herbs or spices. And because the composition of ingredients is very plain it's important to pay attention to detail to get that flavor really out there.

First you've got to toast the sesame seeds in a pan. When they start smoking and popping a bit they are ready - and then you've got to grind them in one of these to really release their aroma and flavor. My grandmother used to hand me the mortar and pestle and ask me to do this while I watched TV.

In the most basic vegetable dishes it's customary to then pour some soy sauce and sugar (brown sugar will do) into the mortar and pestle and mix it all up with the sesame seeds (Goma-Ae) and use this as a dressing for boiled spinach or boiled green beans. Another very basic dressing is made in a similar manner but with the addition of Tofu (Shira-Ae). It's ridiculously simple isn't it?

What I've made today isn't really typically Japanese as I've added some extra elements that aren't normally mixed together. I combined the flavors of Wasabi, Soy sauce and toasted ground sesame seeds together and added some canned tuna (I prefer leftover roasted Sichuan chicken or any type of roasted chicken, but there wasn't any today!).

Warm Green Bean & Potato Salad with Tuna in a Wasabi Soy Sauce Dressing with Toasted Sesame Seeds

Serves 2

4 Medium Sized Potatoes (or as many as you think you can eat)

12 Green Beans

4 Tbsp White Sesame Seeds

4 Tbsp Soy Sauce

1 Tbsp Wasabi (or however much you dare to use)

Leftover Roast Chicken or Canned Tuna

Step 1: Peel and boil the potatoes until they're cooked and then cut them into bite sized pieces. Do use floury potatoes because this is how potatoes should be in this type of a recipe.

Step 2: While boiling the potatoes, toast the sesame seeds in a pan until they're smoking and popping a bit and then grind them inside a mortar pestle like this one to release its flavor and aroma.

Step 3: Prepare the green beans by snapping off the hard ends and then cut them into bite sized pieces.

Step 4: When the potatoes are done, remove them from the water and then put the green beans in there and parboil them until they turn into that nice bright green. Don't let them get mushy!

Step 5: Put the potatoes, green beans, leftover roast chicken (or tuna) into a bowl and toss with your Wasabi Soy Sauce Dressing and garnish with the toasted ground sesame seeds. If you omit the roast chicken/tuna it's pretty much suitable for vegans.

Note: The basic ratio for Goma-ae is 3:1:1 (Sesame Seeds: Soy Sauce:Sugar).

Japanese Cold Noodles

During those hot steamy Japanese summers, people naturally lose their appetites and the entire nation ends up eating lots of cold noodles. There are many different types of noodles all eaten with Dashijyoyu (soy sauce with fish broth), and these are most typically consumed with chopped scallions, Wasabi, Shichimi (Japanese 7 spice) or grated ginger.

I tried to find Soba here but the only one I could find was made in China and when I looked at the ingredients it said 100% wheat flour so I put it back． Even the lowest grade Soba should at least contain some buckwheat flour and a good one should be made from 100% buckwheat flour or close to it. I didn't feel like eating some artificially colored noodles made to look like buckwheat.

I did have some mung bean vermicelli noodles lying around so I just had these with some Dashijyoyu and freshly grated ginger. I also sprinkled it with my own mixture of 3 spice (chili, sesame seeds and sichuan peppercorns) and some thinly slice leeks. It tasted good enough and I guess I'll be having this and some other types of non-Japanese noodles until I run out of my Dashijyoyu.

Note 1: My favorite brand is Kamada. This brand is now available in the US and Canada.

Note 2: It's not customary to eat mung bean vermicelli noodles like this but well, I was desperate!