A Moroccan Crew Lunch in Cornwall

It's been an age since I did a crew lunch recipe. What with all the Queen stuff and the weird Westward Cup, (it was weird and I would rather not do a regatta based on politics and money again) I've been a bit out of sync.

But here we are in Falmouth, Cornwall with a good week or so before the Pendennis regatta which in huge contrast, is the best regatta ever! The Pendennis organisers throw a great event, give the best of Cornish welcomes and have the correct understanding that if it wasn't for us little crew folk, there wouldn't be a regatta because there wouldn't be anybody to sail these great big,  beautiful classic sailing boats. It is the crews who have the skills, the know-how and the passion for it. It is the crews who work incredibly hard, set the tone of the atmosphere, the evening vibe; and boy do they know how to drink. Being a professional sailor often means being a dab hand at the bar too, a skill that merely encompasses all the wonderful traditions and ancient history of a life at sea. Pendennis understands all this and throws a damn fine regatta ensuring boats come back here from far and wide to race again and again.

Bravo!

And back to lunch.

So I made for my hard-working, highly skilled, beer-swilling crew (just kidding - some of us prefer Gin), a little Moroccan number which I always find has a nice lunch-time ring about it. Moroccan is easy enough to make without having to buy one of those expensive Moroccan spice-mixes you get at supermarkets these days. Basically for Moroccan I always work ground cumin, ground coriander, paprika, and cinnamon together. Get some flaked almonds and dried apricots in there somewhere and bish-bash-bosh, you have a Moroccan meal!

Obviously there is a teeny-weeny bit more involved and I have never been to Morocco but I have on more than one occasion considered taking belly-dancing lessons...

However for now I shall give you the recipe for a very easy butternut and chickpea couscous served with a light, fantastically tasty chicken in yoghurt and tahini with mint and lemon. Serve with hot pitta breads and salad and your crew will not go hungry.

Soaks it up too. (Really I'm just kidding, we're not a bunch of piss-heads, we're all highly professional here)

So for a quick and easy Moroccan lunch for 6 you will need;

For the Couscous;
400g couscous
1 butternut squash, chopped into bite sized bits and peeled (which is optional)
1 tin of chicpeas
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp tomato puree
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp cinnamon
150g dried apricots, roughly chopped
toasted flaked almonds to garnish
hot chicken stock or water
knob of butter or a dash of olive oil

For the Yoghurt, Tahini and mint chicken you will need;
4-6 chicken breasts
juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp black sesame seeds (optional)
1 tbsp yellow mustard seeds (optional)
2-3 small pots of natural yoghurt
2 tbsp mint sauce
zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp tahini paste (if you don't have this then use peanut butter, yum)
1 clove of fresh garlic, crushed
fresh mint leaves to garnish

Method;

• To begin, pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5, 190C, 375F. Slice each chicken breast into 4-5 pieces and fry in batches in a hot frying pan until very lightly golden but still a bit pink inside. When each batch is done, set aside on a baking tray. When you have browned all the pieces, drizzle over the lemon juice, season well with salt and pepper and sprinkle with the sesame seeds and yellow mustard seeds. Pop into the oven to finish cooking for about 30 minutes.

• In a large non-stick pan saute the onions in a little olive oil for about 5 minutes till translucent and starting to colour gently. Add the chopped butternut, stir fry on high for a few minutes and then cover with a lid. Turn the heat down to low.

• Meanwhile, put the couscous into a big bowl. Pop in the butter or olive oil and a good pinch of salt. pour over the hot chicken stock or boiling water from the kettle to just about cover the couscous and give it all a good stir then put a large plate or cling film over the bowl so that the steam is trapped, cooking the couscous perfectly.

• And whilst the butternut is softening now is also a good time to mix the yoghurt, tahini paste, lemon juice and zest, mint sauce and garlic in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.

• Check to see if the butternut has cooked. If it has stir in the chic peas, tomato pure and all the spices and season with salt and pepper. Let it have a bit of a sizzle then add about 300 ml hot water from the kettle. Stir and cook this for another few minutes then add the chopped apricots. Continue cooking until the butternut is completely cooked through and the apricots have softened a little. Check the seasoning. At this point I added a tablespoon of mango chutney but that's just me.

• With a fork, fluff up the couscous. Add about two thirds to the butternut and chickpeas and stir to combine. To serve, spoon the last third onto a serving dish and make a well in the centre. Pour the mixed couscous and butternut mixture into the well. Sprinkle with the flaked almonds and some chopped fresh coriander or parsley.

• Once the chicken has cooked, remove from the oven. Let it cool for a few moments  and pour off any excess juices. I kept about 4 to 5 tbsp to add to the yoghurt but ditched the rest.  Once the chicken has cooled off slightly, stir into the yoghurt mixture along with the saved juices. Pour into your chosen serving dish and garnish with lemon wedges and lots of torn fresh mint leaves.

So that might look long but its all pretty straight forward and do-able on a hob. If you don't have the oven just turn the heat down on the chicken when it's in the frying pan and make sure you fry it till its fully cooked. Oh and pop the pittas in the toaster.

A great, easy and filling lunch for a group of hungry people. And fun to try out the spices and go all Moroccan.

Falmouth is great fun, Pasties are so delicious and I must regulate my consumption of them to a max of one a day...

I'll try.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers.

Leaving the Solent and heading for Falmouth

Chicken, Leek and Tarragon Casserole. For sea.

It's hard to imagine that in one weeks time I will no longer be sitting cross legged upon my lovely double bed with the view all flat and stationary out of the window. We will be all at sea, slowly discovering our sea legs and adjusting to the routine of watches and life aboard. As the ships cook, I  only have the one 3 hour watch to do, usually after dinner and the rest of my time will be spent preparing meals for the crew. Now if the weather is fine and the seas are calm then, to be frank, it's a pretty cushty job. But if the weather is not so favourable, the responsibility to feed the crew lies with me alone as nobody else on board would volunteer.

I've been pre-cooking these last few days at the house and taking the prepared dishes down to the boat to stuff in my tiny-wee, little freezer. These are my rough weather dishes. If it all starts to get a bit gnarly out there, then I am prepared for it. Take out a frozen meal and slap it in the oven. Easy. Otherwise it can take literally hours to make the most simple of dishes and it's exhausting.

Mariquita has been transformed from her stripped winter maintenance bareness, to her fully geared and accessorised passage coat. Complete with life rafts, passage sails and stanchions. Ooh , it's all starting to get very exciting. That feeling of impending change. A journey is afoot!

Now, before I start getting all poetic on you, let me give you a little recipe. It's a little recipe but with the potential to feed lots of hungry mouths and tastes delicious, is simple and economic, hearty yet elegant. Its the tarragon you see. Its a clever little herb that has an air of sophistication. It's grace can turn any run-of-the-mill dish into a charmer. Even a frozen chicken and leek casserole, emancipated from its tin foil and bunged in a gimballed oven swinging willy-nilly in a stuffy galley that's bucking like a bronco, will taste like it's heaven sent and all because (I reckon) of that most debonair of herbs; tarragon.

A great family sized dish served with mash, or rice or pasta! And will freeze splendidly. 

For Chicken, Leek and Tarragon casserole to serve 6 you will need;

8-10 chicken portions, a mix of thigh and breast.
6 large leeks, washed and sliced but not too thinly 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
4 stalks of celery, washed and roughly chopped
1 large bunch of fresh tarragon, the leaves stripped from the stalks and chopped
500ml white wine
500ml chicken stock
2 tbsp plain flour
1/2 tbsp clear honey or sugar

Method;

• Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4. In your largest nonstick frying pan, fry the chicken pieces in some oil so that they are a gentle golden brown on both sides. This might take a few batches. Place the browned chicken into an oven proof casserole dish with a lid.

• Once the chicken is browned and resting in its dish, add a little more oil to the frying pan and start to saute the leeks and celery. This shouldn't take too long, around 5 minutes, before adding the garlic and half of the chopped tarragon. Add the honey or sugar and saute for another couple of minutes, stirring frequently. The honey balances out the acidity of the wine.

• Add the leeks to the chicken pieces in your casserole dish.

•  Add a little more oil or butter to the pan and use a wooden spatula to stir and loosen any remaining leeky, garlicy goodness from the pans bottom before adding the flour. Over a very gentle heat stir the flour in to make a roux, which will look like a paste. Take the roux off the heat and begin to very slowly add the stock and wine, stirring well between additions to get rid of any lumps before adding more of the liquid.

• Once all the liquid has been added, let the sauce come to a gentle simmer then season with salt and pepper before tipping into the casserole dish with the chicken and leeks.

• Add  the remaining tarragon, give it all a good stir and pop into the oven for 1 hour 20 minutes. Check the seasoning before serving.

This is delicious served with mashed potatoes but also goes beautifully with pasta or rice, so it can suit any taste,  occasion or weather condition and angle at which you are serving it. Handy.

If the wind we have at the moment dies down a little, tomorrow we go out for our first sail of the year.
It’ll be a learning curve for everybody with such a new crew and it feels like its been ages since the last race at St Tropez! 

Hope I remember how it all works...
Thanks for reading,
Cheers!

A Very Quick Sunday Supper

If you tried to avoid all the dodgy looking streets in Barcelona, you wouldn’t get anywhere. You just clutch at your bag a little tighter and hope for the best. Then much to your surprise as you step over your second pile of some indeterminable and foul smelling goo, past the hobo’s and graffiti, you might happen to pass by a small entrance leading into a dark but quite well crowded tapas bar. If you adjust your eyes to the gloom enough to peer in, you can tell by instinct, this is where the people of Barcelona go for Tapas. This is a good place. A cool, dark little gem, unknown to the tourist. So you make a mental note of the name of the bar and if you’re lucky, the street name and continue on your way home via many other dodgy and smelly little allies with the intention of returning and sampling what must be a great cocktail and selection of tapas,  like a smug and knowing local. If you don’t want to be ‘in the dark’ in Barcelona it would appear you have to seek out the darker corners of the streets.

Of course you never do. You will never find that place again. It is lost to the rabbit warren that is Barcelona. We’ve been here for a month now and I have barely scratched the surface of brilliant places to eat and drink. To be honest, I’ve done well and admittedly we’ve been doing a lot of eating in lately because we’d be broke and fat otherwise. Tonight is Sunday night and it is way too hot to cook a roast and quite frankly my little Force Ten oven and I regularly fall out over roasts so why ruin the peace?

For my mate Liz who has 4 children, 2 of which are babies, I’m doing the easiest, put-it-in-a-pan-and-run-away method of Sunday supper; and for my mate Liz, it only has 2 ingredients. I first saw this recipe in ‘The Flavour Thesaurus’, by Niki Segnit, an amusing and very interesting book. I have made wee adjustments to the recipe in the book but essentially it really does just have the 2 ingredients. This also makes this a great recipe for any strenuous, rough-seas cooking on a boat too and it is surprisingly delicious. I just had a huge bowl-full to prove it for you. Aren’t I good?

For a Sunday meal of chicken and bell peppers for 6 you will need;

8 Chicken thighs, bone in and skin on (I had 4 thighs and 2 large breasts and it worked just as well)

6-8 red and yellow large bell peppers

4 cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped (optional)

Method;

• Begin by heating a very large, non-stick pan with a dash of olive oil and browning the chicken pieces, a few at a time over a medium heat. They just need to be lightly browned all over. Once they have all been browned, set aside.

• Deseed and roughly chop the peppers. Add some more oil to the pan and turn the heat to high. Add the peppers to the pan and let the peppers start to sizzle. After a few minutes add the chicken back to the pan.

• After about 8-10 minutes the peppers will begin to release their lovely oils and juices. Give it all a good stir, adding the roughly chopped garlic then put the lid on and turn the heat down to low, letting the chicken and peppers cook for another 40 minutes.

• After 30 minutes, I took the lid off and turned the heat up for another 8-10 minutes to reduce and thicken the sauce a little. It’s surprising how much sauce there is. Season generously with salt and pepper.

• Serve with some fluffy rice and lots of bread to mop up the juices. I made some paprika sautéed potatoes with lemon and red onions and would have added some spicy chorizo if I had any. All good things to serve with the easiest dish in the world.

In Niki Segnit’s book, she does literally say to put the chicken and peppers in together without browning the chicken first, which did work very well and is even easier. But next time I cook this it will be as the recipe above.

I think that may well have been our last weekend off for a while. By Friday we’ll be in Palma for our next regatta. I think I’ve just about recovered from the last one…

Hope you all had a great weekend too.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

P.S Apparently it isn’t a good idea to use a roll of kitchen paper towel as a makeshift tripod for your camera near a naked flame…    Who’d of thought?

A Cacciatore Made for Sea

View from Nice into Villefranche-Sur-Mer

Everyone has ‘their’ dish don’t they?  The dish you have made way more than a few times, perfected and almost claimed as your own. Well mine is my version of the classic chicken cacciatore. I’m almost positive I invented it. I’m not Italian though my Brother-In-Law, the Sommelier, Bil, is Sardinian and once at a party I think I drank my own body weight in Prosecco.

Does that count?

Chicken cacciatore is up there on the Dessert Island Dish list for me with the meatballs. (See, I must be Italian). And once again it is a delicious tomato sauce, slow cooked with beautiful plump chicken thighs, rosemary, moorish black olives all simmering together slowly with a lot of red wine and then served on a perfectly cooked bed of tagliatelle, drizzled with lots of fresh olive oil. Its meaty, it’s rich, it is so deep.

I can get carried away.

It’s all about the slow cooking for me. A dish along these lines can taste one way after an hour of cooking but with exactly the same ingredients and given 2 more gentle hours on the hob, can taste entirely different. It’s a bit like going from economy to first class on an aeroplane (that’s never happened to me actually), like going from flip flops to Jimmy Choos. (This isn’t working for me) I’ll just say it’s another level of good; it’s perfection.

I’m cooking chicken cacciatore in advance for a delivery meal. We leave on Monday for Corsica. It can be gently re-heated and simmering away in one big pot on the gimbaled hob of my boat cooker whilst we sail the high seas. All I have to do when it’s time is to make a big pan of pasta, a big crunchy green salad with parmesan shavings and I’m pretty sure the crew will be happy. It’s a meal that can be made, re-heated and always ends up tasting better the day after it was made and freezes brilliantly. It’s a winner and I’ll say this very quietly due to the very suspicious nature of sailors; it is very good made with rabbit instead of chicken, almost better in fact but I can’t make that on Mariquita. Rabbit on boats is bad-luck. 

To feed 5-6 people you will need;

1 jointed whole chicken, 10 skinned thighs (or 1 jointed rabbit, Sssshhh!)

4 sliced onions

1 tsp sugar

5-6 crushed garlic cloves

1 jar of roasted red peppers or 3 freshly roasted and skinned red peppers, roughly chopped

1 tbsp dried oregano

2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary

1 jar of black olives in brine

½ pint of red wine

2 chicken stock cubes

3 tbsp tomato puree

2 tins chopped tomatoes

3 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Method;

• Start by sautéing the chicken pieces in a big pan in sunflower oil until they are browned all over. You're not trying to cook them all the way through, this is just to brown them. When the pieces are browned, remove them from the pan and set aside.

• Using the fat that’s already in the pan, start to gently sauté the onions with a sprinkling of salt and a tsp of sugar. This could take up to 20 minutes. Your looking for them to just start to colour. Add the garlic and oregano and rosemary.

• Then add back to the pan the chicken pieces. You may need to transfer to a very large pan like I did, if you’re running out of room.

• Then bring the heat back up so everything is having a good sizzle and add the tomato paste. Stir it all around to mix well and to fry the tomato paste a bit.

• Then add the red wine. Let it bubble and reduce for about 8-10 minutes. Next add the tinned tomatoes, red peppers and some of the brine from the black olives. Crumble the chicken stock cubes into the pan and add the balsamic vinegar.

• Now bring to the boil, then turn the heat down to its lowest setting and leaving the lid off, let the cacciatore sit there for about 1 ½ hours or longer if you wish. It should be just barely simmering.

• When you put the pan on for the pasta now is the time to add the olives to the chicken. Taste it for seasoning and adjust as you see fit. Garnish with lots of torn basil leaves and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Serve with rocket and parmesan and a nice big glass of red. Mop up the juices with warm ciabatta bread.

I wish you could smell that.

I have been making this dish as I write it for you so this is exactly how I make it.  But this does mean that you won’t be looking at any pretty pictures of the finished dish just yet. It will be going straight into the freezer once it has cooled, ready for Monday night whilst on our trip to Ajaccio in Corsica. I’ll make sure to remember to take some pictures before I eat it. Well, I’ll try.

I’m going out for dinner tonight in Nice. I’m very excited because apart from a meal at the Delhi Belhi, a great little Indian in the old town, I haven’t really managed to explore Nice all that much. I can say for certain that the super markets are quite a way from the harbour and it’s definitely worth calling a taxi for the Carrefour. There are lots of little Spars around the old town and some open on Sundays, but do watch out for the dog pooh (all week, not just Sundays). French hop-scotch.

Before I go I’d love to hear some feedback from you, so please fill in the comment box below. If you’re struggling with that, I’ve heard it’s not easy, then if you go to my Facebook page, 33 Degrees, and leave a comment there, I would be very grateful. Simply click on the Facebook window on the right, halfway down this page.  If you would like any menu ideas, advice or have any questions at all about food, I would love to be able to assist if I can. And if you want to share some recipes of yours with me, especially your secret little tricks for making good food excellent, I'd be even more grateful. I can try your recipes out on my crew. You'll recieve the best feedback from them. They're a large, hungry bunch of foodies.

Thanks for reading folks. Let’s get talking!  Cheers.