The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Its true, I really do love take­aways. I have them quite often.

With my weird and uncon­ven­tional lifestyle and hours, there’s noth­ing eas­ier and more con­ve­nient than hav­ing a stranger bring freshly cooked food to my front door. With­out fail, I must have them at least 3 times a week.

For the last cou­ple of years, I’ve been using Hun­gry House to order my take­aways online. I’ve tried all the major take­away web­sites and Hun­gry House is my favourite.

Their web­site is easy to use, they offer a wide selec­tion of restau­rants that deliver to me, but most of all, I like their service.

Using Hun­gry House is a breeze, you just pro­vide your post­code and it returns a list of restau­rants that deliver to you. You can browse the menus to your heart’s con­tent, then when you choose one, you can put your order together quickly and easily.

You check out like you would on any shop­ping web­site, pro­vid­ing your deliv­ery details and con­firm­ing your order, but unlike other shop­ping web­sites, you can pay by credit card, or cash and reg­is­tra­tion isn’t required — though it does sim­plify the process if you’re going to order again.

Once you place your order, you receive the first of two emails, con­firm­ing the details of your order, but what really sep­a­rates Hun­gry House from other take­away web­sites is the sec­ond email you receive. That sec­ond email is sent when the restau­rant acknowl­edges and accepts your order, so you know that your food is being pre­pared. Hun­gry House mon­i­tor every order, so you never have to wait very long for con­fir­ma­tion that its all cool.

Hun­gry House offers user pro­vided reviews of the restau­rants as well, and they share the good with the bad. Their cus­tomer ser­vice is also very good, if you do have a prob­lem with an order, they are there to help and will make sure things are resolved to your satisfaction.

I really do use Hun­gry House all the time, I have it set up with both my home and work addresses. I can’t remem­ber the last time I tele­phoned an order through to a restau­rant. It would just seem old fash­ioned now.

You might have noticed, I’ve added an advert for Hun­gry House to the right side­bar of my site. I wouldn’t have put it there if I wasn’t 100% sat­is­fied with them.

I hope you try out Hun­gry House, I think you will be glad you did.

If you would like to check out their site, please CLICK HERE.

First of all, to avoid any con­fu­sion, there is no such thing as a “hippy crab”. If you go to your local fish­mon­ger demand­ing one, he will look at you like you are crazy.

You’re not crazy, are you?

I don’t nor­mally post recipes, but in the real world, I’m actu­ally a pretty damn good cook. I’ve been cook­ing for decades, hav­ing honed my skills by watch­ing TV chefs over the years and mix­ing and match­ing the tech­niques I’ve picked up along with com­bin­ing inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents. Its like art with food, only hand-eye coor­di­na­tion doesn’t play as big a part.

I’ve seen crab risotto on restau­rant menus, but I’ve never tried it. That doesn’t mean I can’t make a good one. And if I have noth­ing to com­pare it to, then it must be per­fect already.

What fol­lows is my made-up recipe for crab risotto, with help­ful hints along the way. I have cooked risotto many times in the past, so I am not a total beginner.

You’ll need:
– one medium yel­low onion, chopped
– 2 fresh cloves of gar­lic, chopped
– but­ter and olive oil
– 500g Arbo­rio Rice (its meant for risotto)
– 1.5 litres of stock (chicken or veg­etable)
– 20cl white wine (appx one glass)

For fin­ish­ing:
– 100g white crab meat (some­times called lump meat, its already cooked)
– 10g chopped chives
– 10g chopped tar­ragon
– juice of one fresh lemon
– cream or creme fraiche
– 50g freshly grated parme­san cheese
– 50g frozen peas
– 10cl sherry (not cook­ing sherry, the real stuff)

Here’s a photo of the main ingredients:

Hippy Crab Risotto Ingredients

(Miss­ing: Yel­low onion, frozen peas, sherry, but­ter, olive oil)

You need a large sauce pan (or pot if you pre­fer) and you will only need the lid at the very end, so put it to one side.

Put the saucepan on the hob over a low heat and let it warm up a bit. Cover the bot­tom of the pot with a bit of olive oil and a bit of but­ter, basi­cally enough so when you add the onion and gar­lic, its cov­ered and coated with it. You don’t need to use extra vir­gin olive oil, cheaper oil is fine. Extra vir­gin is cold pressed, so its a bit point­less to use when you are going to heat it up. Save it to dress your salad!

Sweat the onions and gar­lic until they are soft, ten­der and a bit translucent.

sweat­ing the onions and garlic

While the onions and gar­lic are cook­ing, mix up your 1.5 litres of stock. I use Swiss Bouil­lon Veg­etable Stock, but you can use any­thing one that you like. You can do this in a sec­ond saucepan, but my method is to mix 500mls at a time in a pyrex mea­sur­ing jug and an elec­tric kettle.

Swiss Bouil­lon

You can’t just use any rice for risotto, Arbo­rio is the best. The rea­son is the high starch con­tent, which is what makes it thicken.

Gallo Organic Arbo­rio Rice

Once the onions and gar­lic are soft, turn the heat up high and add the 500g of Arbo­rio Rice to the pot, stir­ring con­tin­u­ously, so it doesn’t burn, for around 2 min­utes. You want the rice to be infused with the flavours and oil.

fry­ing the rice for 2 minutes

After 2 min­utes, lower the heat and then can begin to add your hot stock. The nor­mal advice is to ladle it in grad­u­ally from a sec­ond pot, and as the rice absorbs it, add a bit more, but I don’t do it that way. Instead I add the stock a 1/3 at a time, in 500ml incre­ments. The heat should be on lower, so the stock simmers.

stock added to rice

Whether you add the stock in a lit­tle at a time, or in stages, its impor­tant you keep on stir­ring. Also add the 20cl of white wine. From here, it will take about 20 min­utes for the rice to cook and for the tex­ture to become creamy and sauce-like.

Once the rice is cooked, give it a lit­tle taste to see if it has the cor­rect con­sis­tency. If it is still too firm, cook it longer, but the rice should not become too mushy either. Al dente is what I am look­ing for, it should have a lit­tle bite, but not be too hard or soft. You’ll know it when you taste it. That’s the basis for all risotto recipes, from here you can mix in what you like.

Now, time to add the addi­tional ingre­di­ents to fin­ish the dish. Add the crab meat and stir it in, fol­lowed by the lemon juice. The fresh white crab meat is the one lux­ury ingre­di­ent and I’ve used Cor­nish because I know it is sweet and very tasty. You could eas­ily used tinned, or a mix of brown and white meat.

Fresh white crab meat

Once its all mixed through, add the frozen peas, they will quickly defrost and heat up. Then add the juice of one fresh lemon and the sherry and mix them in.

Time for the fresh herbs, toss the tar­ragon and chives into the pot and stir them in too. You can chop the tar­ragon with a sharp knife, but its rec­om­mended you use a pair of kitchen scis­sors to cut the chives.

Fresh herbs

Finally, add a large spoon­ful of the creme fraiche and a the grated parme­san cheese and stir some more. Put the lid on the pot, switch off the heat and let it sit for a few min­utes, so every­thing is at a nice even tem­per­a­ture. Give it a final taste, to check the sea­son­ing. I’d add freshly ground black pep­per at this stage, and salt only if I thought it really needed it. With the cheese, crab and stock, the salt will prob­a­bly be OK, I don’t use much salt when I cook, so its up to you.

The dish is now fin­ished and ready to serve, you can hold back some chives and grated cheese to gar­nish the top once its on the plate.

The fin­ished risotto, ready to be served

Serve it with a fresh green salad and warm crusty bread. Yummm.

Hippy Crab Risotto is served!

And that my friends and hip­py­fans is Hippy Crab Risotto. If you cook it up your­self, email me and let me know how you make out! Enjoy!