Thursday 20 January 2011

Four Elizabeth David recipes in one day

Last night I soaked chickpeas, in water with flour and salt.  This morning you added bicarb to the water and rinsed the peas, you boil the gloopy water then add the chickpeas.  Simmer until there is no water and they stick to the bottom of the pan, then put the chickpeas in 6 pints of boiling water until tender.  The chickpeas were yummy but I maybe didn't rinse them well enough as some were still gooey with flour.    I then removed half the chick peas for a salad as instructed and tossed them in olive oil and used the rest to make a Chick Pea Soup.  "this makes an interesting soup, although I suppose that the curious flavour of chickpeas would not  be to everybody's taste. "   It was a sieving soup(Madonna arms here I come)yummy and the youngest girls, the dog and I all enjoyed it.
I then had a proud moment as I made aioli by hand.  Her recipe was made in the pestle and mortar, I love serving things in the mortar, so authentic!  You crushed the garlic, I added salt at this point to aid the crush, then I just used one egg yolk and 1/3 pint of olive oil, greek I'm afraid Elizabeth.  It made for a beautiful green gloss. 
For dinner we had the green gloss, chickpeas, salad and Filet d'agneau au four.  The lamb fillet was roasted in a medium oven on top of bones with a few ladles of game stock.  I left this in the oven during piano lessons and a quick meeting at the bakery to return to a piece of meat that looked like it needed to brown  a bit so just as it was on it's way to the top oven I read Elizabeths instructions, 'remove the bones pour off the juice into a saucepan and leave the meat to brown", genius, how did she know.  What with the juices and all it was a jolly nice dinner, the kids even liked it.

3 comments:

  1. How did the flavour of the chickpeas compare to tinned ones? How did you make your game stock? Intrigued! The lamb sounds very tasty.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just found your blog last week and am loving reading your adventures - Elizabeth David is my favourite food writer!

    ReplyDelete
  3. The chickpeas were delicious, more flavour, cheaper and easy to cook. I made the game stock by boiling up the partridges carcasses. I always make stock after cooking a bird, so easy, just add the carcass, an onion, leek, carrot, potato, parsley stalk(any of these or all), bay leaf and peppercorns, cover with water. I always simmer overnight in my simmering oven, but a couple of hours on a hob is adequate.

    ReplyDelete