First foodie blog

I like food. If you've seen me lately, this will have been obvious.

I also like to cook, and if you've seen my twitter account, you'll know that to the annoyance to my followers, I like to put pictures up. 

This blog is therefore, dedicated to the food I cook, and other food-related musings. I shall put up some pictures with descriptions of food I have cooked lately, and then will endeavour to cook something interesting weekly for this blog.

First up.... Cooked this last week for my sister for lunch, nothing too fancy: 

Simply.... Steak, with salad, a peppercorn sauce, and triple cooked chips (I bought a deep-fat frier just for this purpose). 

The chips are a Heston recipe, from a book I was given for christmas last year. Requires removing the starch, then boiling, chilling, deep frying at a low temp, then chilling again before finally deep frying at a higher temperature just before serving. They are NICE. 

Next up, something a bit fancier. My brother and sister have been back from university this week, so I decided to cook something a bit more special.

This is a braised lamb dish, with celeriac pureé, potato gratin, a broad bean and garden pea salad, and jus (or GRAVY (my family are northern)). 

The lamb was braised in stock and a concoction of other stuff for a few hours, before chilling and rolling. To serve, the rolled lamb was sliced and then fried in sunflower oil, before being glazed in some of the lamb's cooking liquor.

The remaining dishes aren't quite as recent, but are the pick of the bunch from the last year or so.

Butterflied Prawns in a chilli, garlic and tomato sauce, served with garlic ciabatta. 

Not too much to say about this, just de-vein and butterfly some large-ish raw prawns and cook very quickly on a high heat, with chilli, garlic, onions and tomato.

Ballotine of chicken, with fondant potatoes, mango and summer vegetable salsa, and a mushroom sauce. 

This one was crazily complicated, and definitely not worth the length of time it took to think up and make! Chicken was stuffed with minced pork belly, and then rolled and chilled. Fondant potatoes require boiling, then frying, then roasting. The salsa type thing was a bit of a bonkers idea, but worked fairly well. 

Roast pork belly, savoy cabbage, potato pureé, mushroom sauce and crackling. 

This is probably the dish that I know best. The pork is roasted at a low temperature, then heated up later on in a pan. Potato pureé is just fancy mashed potato, passed through a sieve. The mushroom sauce served with this dish, and the chicken dish above, is fairly simple. It consists of sautéing mushrooms, then adding cream, red wine, dijon mustard, vegetable stock, salt, pepper, and then letting it cook out for 10 minutes or so on a low heat.

And finally, a homemade neapolitan pizza. 

Method is completely stolen from my sister, and is the most authentic attempt you can make without a pizza oven. Dough was made by her, and then left for 4 days before cooking. My sister is really the pizza expert, and her foodie based blog can be found at justanotherpizzalover.wordpress.com. Its pretty good.

If you want to see the real me, then follow me on twitter (@joelwalker14).

Got to get thinking of what to cook next week now!