Lamb chops with pickled peppers

There's a fabulous blog called Single Girl Dinner. If you're not already aware of it, and following its fabulous author, Jessica, on Twitter, then you should do. One of my favourite posts discusses one of the upsides of eating along (indulging your own, ocassionally odd, tastes), in the context of a her mother's sole eating habits.

Jessica's mother's favourite single dinner was liver, as was my mother's. Usually stroganoffed. Utterly disgusting. However, I did manage to acquire some tastes from my mother. One of the most noticeable is my love of meat-on-the-bone: all the fatty, crispy, over-done or extra-juicy bits that others sneered at. During my vegetarian phases, I rarely miss the meat itself, but I do miss the fat, and the unctuous gloop of proper meat stock.

This is originally one of my Mum's recipes. I think it did get cooked for the family, but I always think of it as her dinner, not our dinner. The rest of us (I admit that my fat and crispy bits adoration came later) politely  sawed our way round the bones, peeled off the fat, and left them on the side of the plate. Mum ate the fat and nibbled away at the bones. Here's her handwritten recipe:

I've cut the number of ingredients to make it easier, and less wasteful, to produce for one person. The mushrooms and the sundried tomatoes are gone.

I've also replaced the jar of mixed peppers with some of my homemade pickled peppers. The recipe can be found in Diana Henry's Salt, Sugar, Smoke, which I urge you to buy. I did not count myself as a preserving person (I don't really like jam, for one thing) until I had this book, but now there are jars of all sorts lurking in my cupboards. The pickled peppers are incredibly quick and easy to make, last forever, and go well with all sorts of fatty meats or rich cheeses. But if you don't have any, do as Mum did, and use a couple of peppers from a jar together with some balsamic vinegar.

Lamb Chops with Pickled Peppers

2 lamb chops, rib or loin, whichever you prefer. I've used rib, as I think they're more elegant and they also have more fat on them.
2 pickled peppers
1 tin of borlotti beans
2 tbs mint sauce

Trim any extra fat (beyond the amount you want!) off the lamb chops. Score the remaining fat into little diamonds so that it will crisp up well. Drain and rinse the borlotti beans. Drain the pickled peppers and slice into strips.

Heat a small frying pan until very hot, and then place the lamb chops in, fat-side down. Fry for a couple of minutes until the fat is crisping up well and coloured deep golden.

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a small saucepan, and tip in the beans, peppers, and the mint sauce. Pop on a lid and leave over a medium heat to warm through.

Flip the lamb chops onto one side and fry for about 1 minute 30 seconds on each side, until browned. This will give you a medium-rare chop; if you prefer your meat well done then give them an extra 30 seconds to a minute per side, lowering the heat to stop the outside from burning.

Tip the bean mixture onto a plate, and top with the lamb chops. Serve with plenty of kitchen roll for mopping the fat and juice off your fingers/face.

A single breakfast

Breakfast is a key part of our coupledom. Almost without fail, Saturday morning is a lie-in with a cup of tea, then a bacon sandwich and coffee. Sometimes we talk about eating something other than bacon sandwiches - scrambled eggs, sausage sandwiches, waffles maybe - but we never actually do these things. The bacon sandwich is an ingrained ritual.

There are occasions, though, when I'm on my own for breakfast. Weekends when the boyfriend is away, or midweek days off work in the August lull. On these days, I have an entirely different ritual: the croissant and the coffee.

Ideally, this is a summer ritual. To my mind, one of the most calming things in the world is to sit in the morning sunshine, listening to birds and the movement of air and the world starting to shift, with a good croissant and a good coffee in hand.

The coffee part is fairly simple, although it's taken years for me to find my perfect coffee (currently, the Kenyan AA from Cardew's in the Oxford Covered Market, but I'm open to persuasion). It's ground only as and when I need it, in a Krups burr grinder, set to a slightly finer setting than you should use for a cafetiere. I like sludge at the bottom of my coffee. I then pop a heaped dessertspoonful into a small cafetiere, add water about 5 seconds off the boil, and leave for 3 minutes. It then gets decanted, into a large thick Denby mug, with a generous glug of cold milk.

The croissant is harder. Maison Blanc are the best I've found so far. But I've been reading Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery lately, and discovered that croissants are a form of enriched yeast dough puff pastry (I thought they were just puff pastry). And a friend gave me some sourdough starter a couple of months ago. So far, I'd only made bread: but what if I could make my own croissants?

Luckily, I wasn't the first person to have thought of this, although it seemed that most people added either extra yeast, or a chemical raising agent (baking powder/bicarbonate of soda). I did find one pure recipe, though, courtesy of someone called LeadDog at an American sourdough collaborative blog. This is essentially their recipe, with some timing edits and more details on the folding stage.

The easiest way to get your own starter is to ask a friend for some of theirs. If that fails, then you can make your own, but I'm not the person to advise you on that!


Sourdough croissants

For the initial dough:
140g ripe starter (i.e. starter which has been fed recently and is bubbling actively)
280g milk
60g butter (salted/unsalted/whatever's in the fridge)
15g sugar
480g strong white flour
10g salt

Later:
250g unsalted butter
1 egg

Bring the milk to a boil then leave to cool back down to body temperature. When you can dip your finger in, and can't feel the liquid around it, then it's ok. Bring the butter up to room temperature.

Weigh the starter out into a large mixing bowl, then stir in the milk, followed by the butter and sugar. Mix in the flour - at this stage it will be a sticky mess - and then the salt.

Tip the mixture onto a well-floured worktop, and knead for 5 minutes or so. You want a mixture that is holding together well, and which looks smooth even when stretched. Tip this back into the mixing bowl and leave at room temperature overnight, or for around 10 hours. For me, room temperature is about 20 degrees celcius at the moment.

The next morning, take the 250g pack of butter out of the fridge and leave for a couple of hours. Roll it out between two sheets of greaseproof paper until it's about a centimetre thick, then pop it back in the fridge or freezer to harden - this should take around 30 minutes.

Tip the dough onto a well-floured worktop again, and knead very briefly. Roll out to just over twice the size of the sheet of butter - i.e. if you have a square that's 6 inches x 6 inches of butter, you'll need a rectangle of dough around 13 inches by 7 inches. The aim here is to place the butter on half of the rectangle of dough, then fold the remaining half over, sealing in the butter. I hope that makes sense.

Once your butter is safely sealed, gently roll the entire package out until it's about 12 inches x 18 inches. No need to be precise. Then fold the top third of the dough over the middle third, then fold the bottom third over both of these. You're aiming for something like a letter-folding process. The roll the dough out again, and repeat, but this time aim to have the folds at 90 degree to the previous ones, so your layers are going in a different direction. Then pop the parcel back into the fridge for around an hour, to cool the butter and relax the dough. Make a cup of tea and read a couple of chapters of your book.

You can repeat this as many times as you like, until you get bored. I did three pairs of rolling and folds in total, and got fairly good thin laters; I'd definitely consider doing a fourth in future.

Finally, roll the dough out and cut into triangles. You'll need to decide at this point how large you want your croissants. If you want them big (weekend sized), then you're aiming to make eight. For small, weekday, croissants, you're aiming to get twelve. I found the easiest way of doing this was to roll the dough out to as large as my rolling pin permits (around the 12 x 18 inches mentioned earlier, coincidentally), cut it into two or three rectangles, then roll each of these rectangles out again into a square of roughly 12 x 12 inches. Each square can then be cut into four triangles.

I then rolled each triangle out a little more, stretching the tip opposite the longest side. Those of you who enjoyed Pythagorus at school will be having a great time right now. Start rolling up the longest side, up to the tip, then curl the two points round to make a crescent.

Leave the rolled croissants to rise at room temperature for around 4 hours. Heat the oven to 220 degrees celcius.

Mash the egg up, and brush it over the croissants. Mine didn't look very risen at this point, so don't panic. Pop them in the oven for 20-25 minutes and you get these monstrosities: