Bluegrass Soy Sauce

My brother's mother-in-law came to the UK for a visit recently. She's from Louisville, Kentucky, and she's a gem. As she knows I like food and food related foodstuffs for fooding, she very generously brought me a dinky little bottle of Bluegrass Soy Sauce.

Told ya.

This is made in Kentucky, in the US's only soy sauce microbrewery. Apparently that's a thing. It's aged in old bourbon barrels, and it's fancy as balls.

Now, I like soy sauce, but in my experience it's rarely anything more than brown salty water. Written down that looks kind of gross, but it fills a need. The need for brown salty water. But the Kentucky stuff, I've got to hand it to them, this stuff is cool. It's smoother, less salty, and muuuuuch more complex. Smoky and spicy and tasty. Well played, America. Well played. As far as I can tell it's not available in the UK, but we must have some comparatively fancy soy sauces? Right? No, no probably not. In a way it's a shame that I was given this free taster of a high end product to get me hooked, ensuring I keep coming ba- waaaaait just a second. Carla, you sly fox.

I have a standard recipe for a meat marinade that I use quite a lot, but that's for regular soy sauce, not fancy soy sauce. I pared it down in this instance so you could taste the soy more. If you happen to have some fancy soy sauce, use this version. If not, add some grated ginger, a pinch of chinese five spice, and half a teaspoon of liquid smoke (if you have it).

You will need:

1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp rice wine or white wine vinegar
3 tbsp fancy soy sauce
1 clove crushed garlic
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon crushed chilli flakes
1 tsp tomato puree

Mix everything together, and use immediately. Phew.

I use this as a marinade for all types of meat, but mainly chicken or belly pork. This time round I had some diced turkey. I let the meat sit in the marinade overnight before making skewers with onions and peppers, and cooked them on a griddle. I poured any remaining marinade over the top while cooking so that it would thicken into a nice glaze.

It worked exceptionally well. Turkey is already quite a smooth meat, so the marinade kept it nice and soft and stopped it from drying out.

Bluegrass Soy Sauce, then. I'd recommend you try it, but I'm not sharing sooo...Well. The weather's nice, isn't it?

Kidneys in mushrooms

Kidneys are gross. That's a science fact. But I'm not going to let a little thing like whether or not something is even vaguely appetising stop me from writing about it.

As I mentioned, I recently picked up a pack of lamb kidneys from the Slow Food market in Bristol. It was a spur of the moment thing and at the time I didn't think too much about how I was going to cook them, since I had no intention of eating them. Pete would have that honour, as he is the sort of person who doesn't mind eating organs designed for wee cleaning. If you are also that sort of person, then good for you! I hope you enjoy this post.

After a little research we decided to combine our efforts. Pete would cook the kidneys while I would make a creamy mushroom sauce. Pete would have the kidneys in the sauce along with chips, and I would just have the chips and the sauce for dinner.

Pete cut the kidneys in half across the middle and asked me to cut out the gristly core, as it was proving difficult with his large, manly hands. This was a little more tricky than I anticipated as it's basically like boning jelly, and they kept on disintegrating on me. Pete then fried them in butter for a couple of minutes in a hot pan, until just pink in the middle.

As you can see, they didn't hold their shape too well, but it's not like they were that pretty to start off with.

Now came the most difficult part of cooking kidneys; putting up with the smell. I'd heard that they vaguely smelt of wee, but that's not entirely accurate. Or rather, they don't just smell of wee. Urine, sure, but also leather, game, sweat, and I think a tang of cement. Like the smell you get on a hot day when a gentle rain hits the pavement, except instead of rain it's piss. Like changing rooms at a gym which weren't cleaned before they were sealed up for a year. Like the festival toilets at Glastonbury if the only people who went to Glastonbury were horses. If you were a connoiseur of bad smells, you would become positively aroused by the depth and complexity and nastiness of the aroma that these things gave off. It did not smell nice.

But back to cooking things I actually want to eat. I made the mushroom sauce by roughly chopping a whole 300g punnet of mushrooms and softening them in a little olive oil with a generous amount of salt and pepper, a pinch of dried chilli flakes, and a crushed clove of garlic. Once they had softened and expelled some juices I added a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice and a dash of vermouth (I would usually use a little white wine, but I didn't have any open and vermouth is a decent enough replacement if you also add some acidity. If you do use white wine you can leave out the lemon juice). Finally, I mixed in about 100ml of creme fraiche.

I took the lion's share of the sauce and piled it over my chips. Lovely. Pete had his kidneys, with a little sauce ladled over the top. Ergh.

He tells me they were delicious. 'A lovely, deep, savoury flavour' he says. He did offer me some, but I politely refused, even though he assured me they didn't taste like they smelled. What can I say? I'm narrow minded. It takes a little while to forgive and forget such a violent nasal assault, and I guess I'm just not a big enough person for that. Maybe one day. One day.

One day...

Actually, no, probably not.

Roast Potato Substitutes

Brace yourselves.

There's a chance I might not be the best cook in the world. Wait, now, and hush the disbelieving gasps that have no doubt escaped you. I'm pretty good, granted, but I have my flaws. I'm impatient and I'm not great at following recipes, which is why my baking repertoire is particularly limited. On the other hand, I like to think I have turned these challenges into positive attributes (I do this a lot, *ahem* potential employers) by being pretty good at improvising.

I am all about taking basic ideas and changing them to suit what you like/what you've got/what's in the discount bin. This involves categorising food, by texture, flavour, type, etc, and making sure your substitutes are appropriate. For example, my mum used to make a lovely little dish made by mixing grated cheddar, chopped onion, and egg, and baking it until it puffed up. We just called it 'cheese and onion', but I can appreciate that the name doesn't give much away, and could potentially be misleading. Maybe 'Cheddar and onion bake'? I don't know. That's for history to decide. Anyway, when I started cooking for myself I figured that the basic cheese + flavour + egg bake formula could be adapted pretty broadly, and I regularly make a feta and thyme for a greek tiropita feel, or ricotta, nutmeg and spinach for a creamier, Italian-ish version.

What I'm saying is, don't feel like you have to be constrained by 'recipes', or 'tradition', or 'common sense', or 'for God's sake Bronwen don't be ridiculous'. Well who's ridiculous now, goddammit, I'll show you all.

This slightly overlong preamble is really just to try and explain why I did something that I wasn't sure was going to work, but it totally did work, and now I'm going to rub it in all your doubting faces.

OK, so the other day I was all set up to make a nice roast chicken for Sunday lunch. I had my chicken, I had my veg for the side, all I needed was some potatoes to roast as I was down to my last one. So out I popped for potatoes. Now you tell me this; if you were a supermarket, what sort of jim-crack, shady operation do you have to be running to be completely out of potatoes during peak shopping hours at the weekend? A question for another time, perhaps, but the upshot is I was in a pickle. Potatoes with a roast is pretty much non-negotiable. I could have gone the relatively short distance up the hill to another shop where I would undoubtedly have found potatoes, but the downsides were twofold. 1) It was up a hill, and 2) I honestly never thought of this option until just now. Instead, I started to do my super-speedy thinking-outside-the-box food-improvisation thing. You know when Sherlock goes into his daft mind-palace whatsit and he's got WordArt popping up in the air all over the place? It's basically exactly like that, except with pictures of starchy alternatives. And you know what is basically potatoes? Gnocchi.

I'll give you a minute here, because presumably I've just blown your mind. Gnocchi is a starchy dough made from mashed potatoes. Makes total sense.

I got a 500g packet of regular, cheap gnocchi, and just poured it in to roast next to the chicken, as well as some onions and carrots.

Call me Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius

It didn't turn out perfectly - some of the gnocchi absorbed too much of the meat juices and disintegrated slightly. But most of the bits around the edges were crispy, chickeny, chewy, and delicious.

While they may not be able to permanently take the place of roast potatoes, I definitely think I'll be using gnocchi whenever I'm cooking for a large number of people, as it saves a massive amount of prep time.

Patent pending, so if you do it you'll have to credit me.  It's only fair.

Playing with: Desiccated Coconut

It's a tale as old as time. Girl needs small amount of ingredient. Ingredient is only available in large bags. Girl buys large bag, uses small amount, abandons the rest in the cupboard for ages. Haven't we all seen this old cliché play out before?

Why won't you just... die

But not this time. I have a big bag of desiccated coconut and I'm determined to use it. Here's what I've been doing:

Toasted sesame seeds and coconut.

I'm not going to insult your intelligence by listing the ingredients for this one. The clues are in the title. Dry toast the sesame seeds in a frying pan until they start to turn brown, then add the coconut and stir through. The coconut toasts quite quickly so it won't need long. Mix thoroughly and pour into a little serving bowl to sprinkle on the top of stir fries or other noodle dishes.

I'm a big fan of coconut in a savoury context (especially with chillies), but I think that desiccated coconut in sweets is dangerous territory. The slivers of coconut are chewy and dry the mouth out, so combining that with sugar can make quite a cloying, drying texture (See: coconut liquorice allsorts. Bleurgh).

On the other hand, with the right texture, a bit of coconut can be a subtle, fancy addition. I like to add coconut to white chocolate rice crispy sweets to class them up a bit. I use:

2 cups of rice crispies
100g white chocolate
2 tbsp desiccated coconut

Melt the chocolate and mix the rice crispies and coconut in thoroughly. Put a teaspoon each in a little cake or petit fours case and leave to set.

The favourite recipe I came up with involves mixing the coconut with breadcrumbs to give a little extra crunch and flavour to breadcrumb coatings.

To make Thai-style chicken goujons, you will need:

2 chicken breasts
Seasoned flour
1 egg
4 tbsp breadcrumbs
2 tbsp desiccated coconut
2 tbsp olive oil
1 small chilli, diced
1 tsp minced garlic and ginger

Slice the chicken breasts into even sized pieces, about a finger in length. Dip them first in seasoned flour, then beaten egg, and finally the breadcrumbs mixed with the coconut.

Cook on a high shelf at 200C or GM 6. In the meantime, mix the oil, garlic, ginger and chilli together. After 10 to 15 minutes, take out the chicken and pour a small amount of the oil over each piece, then put back in the oven for a further 10 minutes.

Serve with something appropriate - I had mine with a salad of coriander and spring onion.

Well, that's about me exhausted recipe wise, and I've only used half the bag, so suggestions welcome. I don't like it seeing it everytime I open the cupboard, judging me.

You son of a bitch.

Playing with: Liquid Smoke

Sometimes I find an ingredient that intrigues me, and I start using it in loads of things even when I don't know how. I did it with tamarind paste (great with couscous, less so on toast), and now I'm doing it with liquid smoke.

Apparently it's been kicking around the States for ages but it's clearly not a big thing in the UK. Probably because our experience of barbecue flavour is less 'smoke' and more 'fire-lighter fluid and sooty rainwater'. Anyway, I heard about it off of that Food Network, and finally found some in Dr Burnorium's Hot Sauce Emporium. And I've been playing with it ever since.

Liquid smoke is basically water which has had smoke bubbled through it, so it's a really authentic smokey (Smokey? Smoky? Smokey.) taste. The main thing you need to know about it is you DO NOT NEED MUCH OF IT. Seriously. This shit is strong. If you want to be subtle you have to add it a drop at a time.

It's a nice addition to chilli con carne, and it's good at making vegetarian bean stews feel more substantial. An extremely basic but perfectly serviceable version would use:

1 drained can black-eyed beans
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 diced white onion
1 clove crushed garlic
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp liquid smoke
1 tsp paprika

Cook everything on a low simmer for half an hour with the lid on, and a further 15-20 min with the lid off until it reduces to the right consistency.

That's what I would consider a traditional use of liquid smoke, but if you don't experiment you'll never find anything new. Yes, you'll make a few crimes against nature along the way, and the townspeople will no doubt curse your name as the 'Bringer of Abominations', but that's what being a scientist is all about. So here are some more counter-intuitive uses you could try. Be thankful I did the research so you didn't have to.

- Salted caramel sauce (add a TINY amount)
- Apple sauce (to go with pork, not puddings. Also, 'Pork not Puddings' would look good on a t-shirt)
- Chilli beef stir fry
- Mashed potato

I've also created my own barbecue sauce based around liquid smoke, but you could use this same recipe without it. This can be used as a sauce on it's own, or as a marinade for meat before it goes in the oven. You will need:

6 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp black treacle (or 2 of dark muscavado sugar)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon liquid smoke

Whisk everything together in a bowl until the treacle has dissolved, then check it's to your taste.

The sauce is quite thin which is perfect for a marinade, but if you want it thicker then heat it gently in a saucepan and whisk in 1 tsp cornflour dissolved in a drop of water. Stir until thick.

Once I made the sauce I stored some of it in a tomato:

And marinaded some chicken breasts in the rest.

After a couple of hours I griddled the chicken and served them with garlicy green beans and mash.

Liquid smoke then. I suspect it's going to be one of those things I use sparingly and when the mood strikes me rather than regularly. It hasn't changed my life, but this barbecue sauce really is a cracker.