Thursday 6 September 2007

French Onion Soup

After my last unhealthy cooking recipe, here's one to balance the cosmic scales, French Onions Soup. I mean, Onions are a member of the same family as garlic, and garlic is brimful of goodness. And it keeps vampires away too.

Once again I've delved into Lloyd Grossman's The 125 Best Recipes Ever this time a contribution from Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd's cookery book Plats Du Jour.

Ingredients
About 50g/2oz butter or beef dripping
450g/1lb sliced Spanish Onions
1 small Bay Leaf
1 clove
Salt, Pepper and Brown Sugar
2 Pints of Beef Stock (I tend to use shop bought boullion for convenience)
Some dried slices of Bread
Grated cheese (if possible Gruyere)

Preparation
Melt most of the butter with a little oil in a pan and fry gently until golden
Add the bay leaf, salt pepper and brown sugar then crumble in the knob of the clove.
Heat the Beef Stock and add it to the onions. Simmer for at least half an hour and enjoy the oniony smell wafting through your house.

About 10 minutes before you plan to eat, fry the dry bread slices in another pan. When golden sprinkle the grated cheese on top and put in the bottom of your soup bowls. Pour in the soup and serve more grated chees on the side (there goes the healthy part of the dish). Alternatively, float your bread bits on the soup while still in the pan, sprinkle on the cheese and let it bubble. The heat will slowly melt the cheese. When it has melted, remove carefully to your bowls and again ladle over the soup.

The steriotypical frenchman, as seen on Alo Alo, is normally portrayed with a string of onions around there neck. Having eaten this soup I can understand why.




Wednesday 5 September 2007

Chocolate Chip Cookies


Arguably two of the finest contributions to the art of the sweet snack from America are the Cookie and the Brownie. The best brownie recipe I've come across is in a Sue Lawrence cookbook and I'll blog that later. The finest chocolate chip cookie recipe I've come across is in Lloyd Grossman's The 125 Best Recipes Ever, which in turn is taken from The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook by, surprisingly enough, Wolfgang Puck.

Ingredients
100g (4oz) Unsalted Butter
75g/3 oz Sugar
75g/3 oz Brown Sugar
1 tsp good quality Vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
275g/100 oz Plain Flour sifted
1/4 tsp baking soda disolved in 2 tsp of warm water
100g/4 oz Chopped Nuts - Optional - being a purist I tend to leave out the nuts.
175g/6oz Chocolate chips - I think if you leave out the nuts you are honour bound to increase this to 200g. Better still buy 200g of good quality chocolate and chop it into largeish chunks.
Use dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocoalte or a mixture.


Preparation
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.

First off bring the butter to room temperature in a mixing bowl. Then cream it with a mixture until light. With the mixer on a low setting slowly add the sugars, vanilla, salt, egg, flour and disolved baking soda. Mix until just blended. Stir in the chocolate and, if used, the nuts.

If the dough is too soft put it in the fridge till it stiffens a bit (something I've never needed to do).

Divide the dough up into equally sized portions. The original recipe says that the above quantities make about 36 cookies, but being a big cookie fan I tend to make between 9 and 12.

Form the portions into balls with your hands and place on a baking sheet leaving roughly 2 inches between each (the cookies grow considerably during cooking so need th space).

Bake in the oven for 15 to 17 minutes. Let them cool in the pan then transfer to a rack. The optimum time for eating is 15 minutes after they came out of the oven when they are still a little warm. Lacking preservatives the cookies wont last more than a couple of days, but hey I don't think that's going to be a problem, you'll be lucky if they last longer than a couple of minutes. Store in an airtight container.

Freshly baked Puck cookies a warm September evening with a glass of cold milk. Mmmm could be a midsummer nights dream....