Caliper Music: an experimental music blog: Stolen Summer - Harrison & Dunkley

Caliper Music: an experimental music blog: Stolen Summer - Harrison & Dunkley

Tomato & Anchovy Salad

The new fish stall on Coventry Market has made me very, very happy indeed. I am very partial to anchovies, both the heavily salted variety and those in a marinade - boquerones in Spanish tapas bars. I bought a massive container of them for £3! Having hardly dented them after a weekend of making tapas for friends, I made a tomato & anchovy salad as a starter. 

All it needed was a couple of ripe tomatoes, some homemade pickled cabbage (thank you Will!), fresh basil and roasted red pepper from the excellent Polish deli. I didn't even make a dressing: just a squeeze of lemon and a spot of Balsamic was perfect, topped off with a twist of the black pepper mill. 

Quick, Easy, Cointreau Mincemeat

I bastardised several Googled recipes for this, looking to make some last minute mince pies and, possibly, a mincemeat & apple pie for Boxing Day. 

Ingredients

• 1 bag of Sainbury's Basics mixed fruit

• 1 tub chopped candied mixed peel
• 1tub glacé cherries, chopped 
• 2 small apples, cored and chopped small 
• Glug of rum 
• 150ml Cointreau 
• zest of 1 lemon, juice of same
• 200g shredded veggie suet
• 200g dark brown sugar
• ½ small nutmeg, grated, or to taste

Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl apart from the Cointreau and the rum. Add about 100 ml of the Cointreau, give it a good stir and leave overnight. If you're in a hurry ignore the resting bit. 

In the morning heat in a pan on a low heat until the suet is melted, stirring hard and often. I used veggie suet as I have veggie guests coming for Xmas. 

Stir the mix often as it cools. When cooled add the rest of the Cointreau and the rum. Stir some more. Eat small spoonfuls to ensure no more alcohol is needed. 

Mmmmm...

Damn those Archers!

Yesterday I made a batch of mincemeat using Cointreau. This morning I find that Jennifer Aldridge, in the Archers, has done the same. So much for what I thought was a moment of mincemeat genius..,

Fresh Bread

Baking your own bread has a number of things going for it. Firstly, the taste is great - there's nothing like freshly baked bread. Secondly it's cheap. Artisan bread is rather expensive, although you can get decent bread from most supermarkets these days. Thirdly, though, it's great to have the oven on when it's so bloody cold!

This is  the result of a rather nice simple French bread recipe, which I'll post soon. 

Packed Lunch

I'm back working now, albeit part time, and getting back into the routine. This includes, of course, a working lunch. My new role is rather different to my last 'proper' job as a marketing director in the City, where lunching was a part of your working life. Indeed, I was known to certain colleagues as the 'luncheon director'. This is not to say that the quality of my lunches has declined. A great packed lunch should rival anything in respect of flavour if we put a little bit of love & effort into its creation. 

A lunch time staple is the sandwich, of course. We may have invented the sandwich, but we don't pay them sufficient respect in my view. The French and the Spanish do better in terms of quality of ingredients. The Catalan bocadillo chorizo, with its fresh bread rubbed with tomato springs to mind. The Americans, on the other hand, produce magnificent sandwiches, which often feature all the contents of a well stocked fridge. It is almost impossible to bite a New York deli sandwich with a dainty, European sized mouth. 

So back to today's lunch. Regular sliced white bread, I'm afraid, but with a magnificent filling. Tuna, anchovies, those little plum tomatoes, gherkin & beetroot. Flavour comes from white wine vinegar, smoked paprika and ground black pepper. No olive oil as the tuna came in sunflower oil and that does the trick. 

The problem is not eating them on the bus into work....

Not HP, Not Daddies, No Way, Never, No More

I have always been disposed to try the 'basic' ranges. I am generally skeptical that premium brands are any better, like for like, in most cases. I used to use the example of aspirin when giving presentations on the power of marketing (I've since discovered that John Hegarty uses the same case study) where the power of the brand means that people pay 5 or 6 times more for what is exactly the same active ingredient. Anadin's ad campaign, Nothing Acts Faster, was brilliant - nothings acts slower, either, of course.

Of course, this nonsense applies to food as well. The worst outcomes are with fresh veg, where we'll never have the pleasure of comically mis-shaped carrots in the supermarket because the buying public apparently won't buy anything that doesn't look like it's been preformed in a carrot factory. Muppets. We are wasting so much of the harvest due to this silliness. I can't fix that, but we can start moving away from ludicrously priced branded products to the cheaper versions.

On to brown sauce. Was it just me that felt that the recipes of HP and Daddies changed when they went to Holland or wherever it is that they're made now? More vinegary? I switched my allegiance away from them sometime ago - not due to financial constraints but to taste alone. I found that the Aldi brown sauce, Bramwell's, was just as good as the big brands. Recently, though, I've not been over to Aldi and have been experimenting with other, even cheaper sauces.

Top of the list is the Sainsbury's Basic - no longer in the glass bottle pictured as it's just been changed to a squeezy plastic bottle. It costs only 25p! That's 6p per 100g compared to about 40p for HP.

I like the taste, I have to say. It doesn't contain any E numbers and it's amber on the bizarre scale of badness for sugar and salt whereas most brown sauce is red. Perfect for the traditional Dunkley breakfast of sausages and tomatoes.

If this anoraky tale of bargain brown sauce leaves you wanting more, I found an almost perfect fan site out there, http://www.tablesauce.co.uk - who would have though that there'd be a site dedicated to the bottled elixir? Perplexing that they only have a brief mention of OK sauce (a past favourite - fruity brown sauce that is, apparently, still in production) and nothing at all on Ideal Sauce. Still work to do out there....