Perfect boiled eggs every time! The last tip for 2013. If you have been, thanks for following. Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New year

I absolutely guarantee that you will get a perfect bolied egg, even a boiled egg, with a set white and a runny yolk every time by following these few simple steps.

Requirements

Pan with lid

Egg(s)

Water 

Heat

Method

Put the egg(s) in the pan and cover them with cold water

Bring the water to the boil

Immediately the water boils remove the pan from the heat and cover it 

Set the timer for exactly three minutes, when the timer goes off remove the eggs and get them to the table as quickly as possible.

Eat immediately with buttered toast soldiers

Beetroot and Walnut Hummus - One for the Boxing Day Buffet.

First I must credit Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one of the TV chefs I actually admire, as the inspiration for this recipe. You know him, he's the one with the scruffy hair, goggly stare, big specs - an intense almost evangelical approach to cooking and food. He's usually broadcasting outdoors from a muddy river bank or in a screaming rainy gale in the wilds of the Herefordshire countryside, wielding a wild mushroom and telling the viewers how to cook it with an even wilder squirrel!

No, stupid! Not the lovely late lamented "lets have a slurp" Keith Floyd, the poor chap died years ago, sadly; drunk and skint, but at least he had lived, rather too much I fear, RIP Keith!

My recipe has a more intense and distinctly Mediterranean feel about it than HFW's and NO bread in it. If you want bread, eat this dip with delicious home-made pitta bread!

Beetroot Hummus

Take a close look at the breakfast table in the picture, just above the croissants, you'll see a little white bowl and in it a "cyan" coloured dip.  Voila! Beetroot Hummus! It looks a bit lurid, but the flavour ...... yummy!

There's a funny story related to this picture.  It was taken illustrate the brunch offering in my guest apartment - look at www.ibizahomestay.com for more details (not yet though, I still need to revise it for 2014) well, you can if you like, but some of the text is out of date. I'll be keeping the 2014 tariff the same as 2013.

On with the tale.  A group of lovely Swedish girls came to visit and wanted a vegetarian brunch.  This is a picture of what I made for them.  Later that day I was having friends round and making a chicken and leek pie for them. As the smell of it reached the terrace, the girls wanted to know what I was cooking, so I told them - "Ooh, its smells so good" they said, "could we just have a little taste of the leeks and cheese Bechamel, please?"  No problem.  Then one of them scooped a bit of chicken up with her taste, by accident. "Mmmm, that's meat!" she said, "but not so bad!"  Then the rest of them dived in, liked it, started to giggle (by the way, there were no special Ibiza ingredients in it) and went off into a huddle.  So when I asked them what was making them laugh, they said "we have decided that from now on Chicken is officially a Swedish vegetable!"

Beetroot and Walnut Hummus

Ingredients

100g walnuts

1 tbsp cumin seeds

200g roasted beetroot coarsely chopped

1 tbsp tahini or more, to taste 

1 large garlic clove, crushed

Juice of one, or more lemons, to taste

sea salt, to taste

freshly ground black pepper, to taste

olive oil

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C

Wash the beetroot well to clean off any soil, do not peel or cut off anything other than a straggly root and the foliage, then rub well with olive oil, wrap in aluminium foil and roast at 180C on a middle shelf until tender. Usually about 45 minutes to an hour.

Allow the beetroots to cool, then peel and coarsely chop them

Sauteé the walnuts, stirring constantly, in a little olive oil in a heavy frying pan until they begin toast lightly and release their lovely aroma.  Take care they burn very easily

Toast the cumin for a few seconds in a hot pan then grind it, finely, in a pestle and mortar or spice grinder

Transfer the ground cumin, beetroot, tahini, garlic, half the lemon juice, a little salt and a grind or two of pepper to a food processor and blend to a thick paste. 

Taste the mixture and season it to your own taste with salt, pepper, more lemon juice and olive oil.

Eat with homemade, thin, warm pitta bread

End Note

Do not feed any leftovers to "Rover" or "Fido."  'Cos when you take him out for his early morning "business meeting" you may be inclined to rush him straight to the vet :-)  You have been warned!

Grandma's Pea and Ham soup and a rant!

One of my pet hates is the food produced on competitive TV cooking programmes, I'll be having a rant at the BBC, not just you, shortly!  The ingredients are expensive and extravagant; not even the most ardent home cook could either afford or find room for  the equipment used and the finished dishes are more worthy of the walls of the National Gallery than the table - edible art on a plate. Oh and whilst I'm at it, who the blazes wants to stare down John Torode's throat way past his tonsils as he chomps his way through "Lightly Roasted Pigs Nose and a hint of smoked cauliflower foam with an Owl turd jus!"  That's a job for his dentist, not TV viewers!  Let's get real, nourishing, inexpensive and hearty food is fun to make and healthy. 

Life wasn't always easy in the 20's and 30's when my grandparents were raising families in the north of England. In fact keeping body and soul together was top priority after getting a job and keeping it.  My Gran and Auntie Lizzie had a tough time raising dad and mum, but one thing is for sure, there was always a delicious meal on the table each night even if the ingredients cost next to nothing and would probably scare the pants off some of today's young mums and dads if you put them down on the kitchen worktop and said make something delicious from this!

Today's recipe harks back to those times and is still relevant to the tough times we're having today.

Ingredients

• Water 
• Dried marrowfat peas - 1 packet 250gm
• Pork Hock - 1
• Carrots - 4
• Onion - 1
• Bay leaves, to taste, I use three
• Salt, to your taste but wait until the soup is made before adding seasoning.

* Pork hock is a pigs knuckle joint, found below the ham, fore leg or hind, it doesn't really matter, above the 'trotter,' it has loads of meat, and when cooked releases lots of lovely rich sticky gelatine into your finished soup.   It is highly prized in Germany and much of Northern Europe. 

Method

Day one - evening

• Put the dried peas in a large bowl, big enough to allow the peas to expand to two or even three times their dry volume. Add a pinch of bicarbonate of soda if you have it. 
• Boil a full kettle of water scald the peas with it and leave overnight to soak.

Next day.

• Peel and chop the carrot into medium sized pieces, do the same with the onion.
• Drain the soak water from the peas and rinse them well with cold water in a colander under a running tap
• Wash the hock well in cold water
• Put the hock into the largest pan you have, scatter the peas and vegetables over it and cover the meat and vegetables with plenty of water.  Put the bay leaves on top
• Set the pan onto the hob and bring it gently to the boil.

• Skim and discard any scum from the top of the cooking liquor as the water boils.
• Once the liquor boils put a lid on the pan and turn down the heat to a rolling simmer.
• Then wait for as much as four hours for the peas and meat to cook!  Slow cooking releases and combines all the delicious flavours of the ingredients. 
• When you are happy that everything is cooked, remove the lid from the pan and take out the hock. Set it aside on a chopping board and gently remove the bones, fat and skin.  If you have pets, they'll love the trimmings!  
• Remove the bay leaves.
• Break the pork into bite sized pieces and put it back into the pan, then decide what consistency you want the soup to be.  I like mine quite thick, so I reduce the contents of the pan until the soup is the consistency of loose porridge.  Your choice.
• Check the seasoning and add salt or a chicken stock cube to your own taste.

Finally

For a main course serve a generous portion in large bowls, making sure that each serving contains chunks of pork.  Eat and enjoy your soup with warm crusty bread.

As an h'ors d'oeuvre serve rather less, but still expect to be asked for "seconds."

This soup keeps well in the fridge for several days - put it in a suitable covered plastic container then heat it up as you want it.  To store it for longer, put portions in the freezer in airtight zip-lock bags.

Spuds (potatoes to non Brits) a classic crafty tip!

Billy's Birthday Potatoes

It's my dear chum "Farmer Bill's" birthday in November and as usual I let myself be conned into cooking his birthday dinner, for around fourteen people. "I don't care what you make" he said, "but I want a lot of potatoes with it". Bill, you see, grew spuds for most of his farming life, support the old firm I suppose.

"Ok" I said "go and get some for me" which he did and must have come back with 25kg or more, full of soil straight from his brother's field. Almost as much muck as potato!

How the blazes am I going to clean them and get dinner ready on time I thought to myself? Then as I was heaving the sack through the utility room beside the back door, came the brainwave. Why not heave them straight into the washing machine?  Yes why not?  I did and it worked.

Make sure there are no dirty (or clean for that matter) underpants lurking inside, load the drum with the potatoes, set the programme to cold wash and high speed spin, then voila!  In about twenty minutes you'll have a machine full of polished potatoes ready to cook, roast, boil or bake!

"ELF and SAFETY WARNING!" DO NOT put washing powder or fabric conditioner in the machine.

Oh and another thing. It's such a drag peeling tons of spuds, so if you have one of those frenchy, cheffy, windyroundy apple peeling machines, use it to peel your potatoes. You get a nice furrowed finish and a long tail of potato peel. Then deal with the result as you like and for the super frugal, you can deep fry the skin you peel off as a fancy garnish or curly whirlysnack!