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The perfect grilled cheese sandwich
Tuesday July 18, 2006
This is a guest post, compliments (I think) of Kate Bolin
You’ll need:
- Two slices of good sourdough bread, or thick crusty white if sourdough isn’t easy to find
- Two even slices of cheddar cheese—prepackaged sliced cheese works here, if you don’t think you can cut it evenly enough
- Good quality butter, slightly softened for easier spreading
- A butter knife
- Frying pan or flat skillet
- A spatula
- A plate
- A stove
To make:
- Turn the stove on high heat, and set the pan on the burner.
- Spread the butter evenly over one side of each slice of bread.
- Prepare the cheese for easy sandwiching.
- Test the pan by flicking small droplets of water onto it. If they sizzle, it’s ready.
- Turn down the heat on the burner by half.
- Quickly lay onto the pan one slice of bread, buttered-side down, the two slices of cheese, and the other slice of bread, buttered-side up.
- Pause for a few seconds, admiring your work, then carefully slide your spatula underneath the sandwich, and gently flip over.
- Wait around two minutes, admiring your work. Smell the delicious cheese and butter and bread cooking before you. Think about how delicious it’ll taste.
- Slide that spatula underneath again, then gently flip over. Check the level of browness on your newly exposed sandwich surface. Has it reached the desired level of brownicity? Could it stand to be a bit browner? Is it too brown?
- Leave it on the fresh side for as long as you feel is necessary. If needed, keep flipping until you’ve hit the right level of brown.
- Lift off of the pan, set onto your nearby plate, and firmly cut the sandwich in half with your butter knife.
- Sit down, look at the loveliness of your grilled cheese sandwich, and enjoy!
— Kate Bolin
Gastric
Thursday May 4, 2006
I
helpedsupervised the Missus in the making of a minestrone soup this evening and found myself squirting in a bit of tomato ketchup at the end to give it some zing.What I was actually doing was taking a short cut to the effect a gastric will give you.
A gastric is simply a spoonful of sugar (I use brown) and a healthy slug of vinegar (I use white wine) mixed together and quickly boiled up to give a sweet and sour tasting substance which you can add to most tomato-based soups, sauces or dressings to give them that little something special. Add with care a little bit at a time though, you can kill a recipe just as easily by adding too much gastric.
But as I said, if you can’t be bothered with all that boiling and tasting a good squirt of tomato ketchup does much the same thing.
Cooking with mustard
Wednesday April 5, 2006
The Missus made liver with mustard sauce tonight (we are casual vegetarians) and noted that she had to add a lot of mustard to get it mustardy, which reminded me of a few mustard tips.
Firstly if you are making a hot (as in not cold) mustard sauce and want to keep the flavour, add the mustard last and do not boil the sauce once it’s added. In other words, make your sauce, remove from the heat, stir in mustard and serve straight away.
The other thing to say about mustard sauces is add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice at the end too, this will also bring out more mustardy goodness.
Read more about mustard at:
http://principiagastronomica.com/post/14
The whole cooking bit
Wednesday March 29, 2006
The kitchen bit of this site has kinda died; well not kinda, it’s dead and buried.
The main reason is I don’t have the time to convert my pro strength recipes into those that can be used at home; takes too long.
What I do have, though, is a head full of tips and tricks that are independent of any recipe. As a simple example:
Making a good bread and butter pudding better.
If you want to make a good bread and butter pudding a fantastic one, put the recipe together as advised and let the whole thing soak for about 4 hours before baking. It comes out all the more like a souffle.
I have two questions (comments are open on this one).
- Is anyone actually interested in me doing this?
- If yes, should it have its own feed or should I bundle it with all the other
crapmeaningful insight?
Something to say? Do tell [27]
Monster mash for kids
Thursday March 10, 2005
Named monster mash by the Missus, this is actually just the pea mash I used to make when I was a chef, all bar the salt.
To make it, boil some peas, strain off the water and chuck in a blender. Boil up some milk and a touch of butter and throw this over the peas and then puree until smooth, it should be about the same thickness as a smoothie.
Bung this mix into your cooked potaoes and mash it up. Green, gunky, gooey Monster mash!
We stuck a load of boiled carrot sticks in ours, just for some contrast.
Commentary [4]
Chocolate Brownies
Wednesday March 2, 2005
This recipe was taken from the collection at bourtonhouse.com. Having sampled the delights of Monique's cooking on numerous occasions, I am confident that you will enjoy the results!
What you will need
- 8 inch x 12 inch Swiss roll tin. Line cake tins with baking parchment.
- 300 g soft unsalted butter
- 1 tsp salt
- 300 g best dark chocolate
- 250 g chopped walnuts **
- 5 eggs
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 400 g caster sugar
- 180 g plain flour
** Or use white chocolate chips and/or cherries.
Method
Heat the oven to Gas mark 4, C180˚ or F350˚. Melt butter and chocolate together. Beat eggs with sugar and vanilla. Cool chocolate a little, then beat in the egg mixture followed by dry ingredients. Bake 25 minutes.
Commentary [1]
How to peel a tomato
Monday February 28, 2005
It might sound dull and pointless, removing the skin from a tomato, but it really can make a huge difference to the end results of a recipe.
Choose good tomatoes
Being heavily influenced by Italian cookery, I can't emphasise this enough; if you attempt to apply this process to those forced, never seen soil, left to ripen on supermarket shelves, abominations that must surely fall foul of the trade descriptions act, then you are not going to meet with success. I hate these kinds of tomatoes with a passion, don't buy them. Tell you friends not to buy them, stamp on them, throw them at people, use them as doorstops but for the sake of all that is good and true, please don't cook with them.
Ahem, anyway, like I was saying you need to buy good quality tomatoes, they should be properly ripe but still firm, if you can get them on the vine, even better.
Preparing the tomatoes
Take a small, sharp knife and insert it into the outer edge of the eye of the tomato i.e. the bit where it was once attached to the vine, and using the outer edge of the eye as a guide run your knife around the eye in a circular motion until it is loosened and can easily be removed. Take care here, you are not looking for a hole that looks like a meteor impact, you want to remove as little of the tomato flesh as possible, so don't dig the knife in too deep, about the height of your average well trimmed, or well chewed in my case, little finger nail. With this done, turn the tomato over and put two incisions, forming an X shape, just deep enough to pierce the skin.
One elephant, two elephant
Next you need a big pan of rapidly boiling water and a big bowl of iced water (if you don't have any ice, free up your sink and put in plenty of cold water). Pop your tomatoes into the boiling water so that they are completely covered with water and count to ten, then transfer the tomatoes quickly from the hot water to the cold water. It is this sudden change of temperature that will cause the skin to peel off really easily. Don't leave the tomatoes in the cold water any longer than is needed to cool them down, a minute or two maximum. With this done the skin should quite literally come away just using your fingers to peel, if it doesn't, pop them back into the boiling water for a few more seconds and then dunk them back in the cold water.
Job done!
Commentary [4]
