Tag Archives: terrine

December 10, 2012

Repost: Smoked Chicken, Ham Hough and Asparagus Terrines

By Rock Salt

Another repost today – at time of writing, I have won at NaNoWriMo but am still working on getting my story finished. Thanks especially to those who have offered guest posts, which have been keeping Rock Salt up and running last month and this. Seeing how many people are on board with me, and how nobody laughed when I said I wanted to be a writer, has been a great experience in itself, and I am hugely grateful.
My writing style has changed, and I’d like to think improved, since these early posts. This one is from September 2010, and some of it leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve become much more strict (usually) about noting down recipes as I go, though of course I do sometimes lose them after I’ve done that. I’ve also become much more disciplined in the frequency of my posts, so that when I do blog I don’t feel the need to write a trillion words every time. All that said, I was so proud of these terrines, and it’s good to remind myself of that and of the technique I used to make them.

Back to the snacks.

 

This post is about the time I made individual smoked chicken, ham hough and asparagus terrines, with redcurrant jam, oatcakes and salad. I made all of that stuff from scratch, and I feel extremely smug about it. I’d wanted to try a meat terrine for a while, even though it was fairly high-risk in terms of it not setting properly and being like a weird, cold soup on the plates. This didn’t happen, so I’ll report now on what I did to make these little beauties.

Ingredients:

For the terrines -

  • one smoked ham hough
  • black and white pepper
  • three bay leaves
  • half a large onion
  • half a sachet of gelatine
  • three chicken thighs
  • one bunch of asparagus

First, I put the ham hough in a pot large enough to comfortably hold it, along with the pepper, bay leaves, onion. I added enough boiling water to the pot to come half way up the sides of the meat, and put on a low simmer for half an hour. At the half hour mark, I turned the hough over and cooked for a further half hour. After this time, I had the double result of having cooked the lovely soft, salty ham and making a great, tasty stock to hold the terrines together. I drained this stock off into a bowl and whisked through the gelatine to dissolve, then set aside. I then went through the somewhat time-consuming process of removing the meat from the bone and getting rid of the skin and fat from it. What I ended up with can be seen in this picture – a fairly small pile of ham and a slightly larger pile of bits to go in the bin (or possibly make further stock with, if you’re more organised than me).

I love how far apart I’ve put the two piles on the board, like if I left them too close together they might re-attach and I’d have to do the job again. Not the most appetising picture but it gives a good idea of the actual meat you’ll get from a hough. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the wonderful stock you get, too, which is a great base for a soup, as I think I’ve said before, or to hold together some rather fancy mini terrines.

While the stock was bubbling away, I fired up the indoor smoker again for the first time in ages. I replenished the pine cone and dried herb mix in the bottom and sat it over a medium heat to get going. Once it was, I closed in the three chicken thighs and left for twenty five minutes. At this time, the largest thigh wasn’t cooked through, but I chose to finish it off on a griddle pan instead of leaving it in the smoker – I just gave it five minutes on a medium-high heat to really make sure the meat was cooked through to the bone. I then stripped off the skin and fat from the chicken and set aside. I also steamed the asparagus over the ham hough while it was boiling,  just for five minutes till it was cooked and no more. I cut that into lengths that would fit the terrine moulds (read: mini loaf tins) that I was using – this turned out, handily, to be almost exactly half the length of a full spear, so that worked out well. Before I cooked them, I snapped off the woody ends by hand – I think this is a Jamie Oliver tip, though I’m not positive. The theory is that the point where the asparagus stops being tough and starts being tender is also the natural breaking point, so if you just hold a spear with one hand at the bottom and one about a third of the way up and gently bend it, it will snap off and leave you with just the good bit. Pretty good, no?

Once I had all the ingredients ready for the terrine, I lined four little loaf tins with clingfilm, leaving plenty hanging over the sides to cover over at the end, and began to layer them up. I put in a little stock first, then added the tip of an asparagus spear which had been sliced in half lengthways, just for presentation’s sake. I then added a little more stock, a few pieces of ham, a little more stock, some chicken, a little more stock, three lengths of asparagus and repeated with the remaining chicken and ham.  I did all four at once so I could keep an eye on how much was left of everything and didn’t end up with one terrine packed with ingredients and three tiny ones mainly made up of meat jelly. I tried to keep pressing the terrines down as I filled them, and once I was finished I gave each one a few tapes on the counter top to make sure that the stock got down into all the gaps that were inevitably there. Another time I would probably try slicing the meat a bit more uniformly, though there was a certain rustic charm to them. They didn’t slice well, though, which I think was a combination of not using sharp knives at the table and the meat being a little too thick.

To set them, I folded over the clingfilm that I’d left hanging over the edges, then placed two of the moulds on a plate and stacked the remaining two on top. I then put a second plate on top of these and weighed down with a couple of tins, and put the whole lot in the fridge overnight. When I checked them the following afternoon, they came out of the moulds no problem, and looked like the picture above. I think they may have looked nicer with a clearer stock, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice the flavours just to achieve that result. Also, that poor bit of asparagus did go awfully bendy. It must have been just a little too long for the top of the tin, but I made it go in there anyway. Probably shouldn’t have pointed it out – look at all the other (varying degrees of) lovely pictures and go ‘ooooh!’ instead of sniggering over the bendy asparagus, please.

To go with the terrines, I made oatcakes and redcurrant jam. The oatcakes were pretty simple to do – I followed this recipe – the only thing I changed was that I only had jumbo oats, so I gave them a spin in the grinding mill attachment of my blender until they were sort of medium oatmeal. I found that they didn’t colour up a lot when I baked them but they did have a gentle crunch without being too hard to bite through, a problem I encountered when I first tried to make oatcakes. The redcurrant jam wasn’t too tricky, either, though I was making that up as I went along a bit more. I bought jam sugar, with added pectin, and there was a recipe for strawberry jam on the back of this. I didn’t follow it but it gave me an idea of what amounts to use. The first thing I did was wash and pick over the redcurrants, evicting a little caterpillar guy who’d been living in among them. Poor soul, but I didn’t want to add essence of caterpillar to the jam. I put him outside with a few of the berries – he may even have gone on to make a new life for himself.

Once the redcurrants were washed, I took them off the stem and put into a small pot, with a generous dash of fig-flavoured balsamic condiment, and some plain balsamic vinegar. It was a little difficult to judge the flavour because I knew I was going to be adding sugar, so I wanted the mix to be quite tart at this stage. I simmered until the fruit was broken down, then added a quarter cup of sugar and tasted again, adjusted as I saw fit and brought to the boil. I boiled until the jam reached ‘setting point’ – this is when you take a little of the jam and put it on a saucer, let it cool for a couple of minutes and then check to see if the surface goes wrinkly when you draw a finger through/across it. It took about five minutes, as there was only a small amount of fruit – about 150g, I think. I then set the pot aside to cool for fifteen minutes, stirred through once and decanted into a little jar, which I’d thoroughly cleaned and then filled with boiling water for ten minutes in a sort of uneducated attempt at sterilising. The result was a sweet jam with a tart undertaste, which complemented the smoky flavours in the terrine rather well, if you ask me.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Dairy free, Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Scottish food

September 5, 2010

Smoked Chicken, Ham Hough and Asparagus Terrines

By Rock Salt

To celebrate my friend Mr F’s birthday – an extremely long-overdue celebration – I wanted to make him a Scottish-inspired feast. He’s Italian, so I wanted to make something that might be a bit different, and also I’m not really sure that my Italian cooking would ever be up to his mother’s standards so it was safer this way.  There was quite a lot going on, so I’m sticking with our first course for now and will cover the other four (count them) at a later date.

The word feast may be a bit misleading, and the phrase ‘Scottish inspired’ means just that – I went off piste with it quite a lot, but did take the opportunity to buy some lovely Scottish produce from my friendly, local farmers market. It was like Christmas, for me, going there to actually buy and not just browse. Like Christmas in that it was really exciting, but unlike it in that I had to buy myself all the presents. I tried to remain within a reasonable budget, and there were a few things that caught my eye and I had to resist. Buffalo meat, anyone? You can bet I’ll be buying some of that next time – I’m thinking probably a stew to start with, though might investigate what other nice ways there are to cook buffalo.

Look at the colour of it. I kept saying that at the farmers market, about everything... I would like to make a point of shopping at the farmers market more often, though I think I’d be living outwith my means a little bit if I did. Maybe I can treat myself to just one or two things a month… or three… or four… Info on where and when the Glasgow farmers markets are is here, if you fancy checking them out.

The things I bought this time round were: diced venison shoulder steak, venison and mushroom sausages, Lanark blue cheese, Arran cheddar with smoked garlic, some farm-made butter, a pack of quails eggs and a punnet of the most beautiful redcurrants. Now, I’m about to use a phrase that I think the G man was pretty sick of hearing, so if you’re reading, G man, you’d best cover your ears. Wait, no, eyes. Wait… Anyway, look at the colour of both those redcurrants and that butter! I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of everything, how fresh and vibrant it all looked. As I said at the time, I do most of my shopping in the supermarket – you have to live within your means and all that. And the quality of food ranges from fine to great, depending what you’re buying and where from. I make most of my meals using ingredients I’ve bought in the supermarket, and I’ve turned out some fine stuff, if I do say so myself. When you see all this fresh, local gear, though, it does kind of blow your mind. I was hypnotised by the colour of a rump steak on one of the stalls, I swear I was – it just looked so much more meaty than anything you see wrapped up under those ghastly supermarket lights. It’s hard to describe, and I’ll content myself with showing the butter and redcurrants to illustrate my point.

Incidentally, I’m aware how much of a Gordon Ramsay phrase ‘the most beautiful…’ anything is, but it gets into my head sometimes and this time it sort of slipped out. It’s an unfounded statement, possibly hyperbolic in nature, but I’m leaving it in to maintain the spontaneous and charming character of the blog. Yup.

The only thing I bought and didn’t intend to use in this particular feast was the pack of quails eggs. I’m planning on using them some time this month to make black pudding and quails egg ravioli, a dish that’s been in my brain for a long time but has never some to pass. It has to now because I’ve bought the ingredients; probably a weekend project, my pasta making skills are passable, but it takes me a long time to make even with the pasta machine. Not sure why, hopefully just a matter of practise. I’m not sure what will be best to serve it with – maybe just a drizzle of truffle oil, or maybe that would be too rich. Maybe I’ll toss the ravioli in a mild olive oil and add some crispy pancetta – it’s getting to have a sort of fancy full breakfast vibe, now. Maybe I’ll just mix it up with some beans and sausages out a tin, that’ll be fine.

To return to the main topic, I made individual smoked chicken, ham hough and asparagus terrines, with redcurrant jam, oatcakes and salad. I made all of that stuff from scratch, and I feel extremely smug about it. I’d wanted to try a meat terrine for a while, even though it was fairly high-risk in terms of it not setting properly and being like a weird, cold soup on the plates. This didn’t happen, so I’ll report now on what I did to make these little beauties.

Ingredients:

For the terrines -

  • one smoked ham hough
  • black and white pepper
  • three bay leaves
  • half a large onion
  • half a sachet of gelatine
  • three chicken thighs
  • one bunch of asparagus

First, I put the ham hough in a pot large enough to comfortably hold it, along with the pepper, bay leaves, onion. I added enough boiling water to the pot to come half way up the sides of the meat, and put on a low simmer for half an hour. At the half hour mark, I turned the hough over and cooked for a further half hour. After this time, I had the double result of having cooked the lovely soft, salty ham and making a great, tasty stock to hold the terrines together. I drained this stock off into a bowl and whisked through the gelatine to dissolve, then set aside. I then went through the somewhat time-consuming process of removing the meat from the bone and getting rid of the skin and fat from it. What I ended up with can be seen in this picture – a fairly small pile of ham and a slightly larger pile of bits to go in the bin (or possibly make further stock with, if you’re more organised than me).

I love how far apart I’ve put the two piles on the board, like if I left them too close together they might re-attach and I’d have to do the job again. Not the most appetising picture but it gives a good idea of the actual meat you’ll get from a hough. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the wonderful stock you get, too, which is a great base for a soup, as I think I’ve said before, or to hold together some rather fancy mini terrines.

While the stock was bubbling away, I fired up the indoor smoker again for the first time in ages. I replenished the pine cone and dried herb mix in the bottom and sat it over a medium heat to get going. Once it was, I closed in the three chicken thighs and left for twenty five minutes. At this time, the largest thigh wasn’t cooked through, but I chose to finish it off on a griddle pan instead of leaving it in the smoker – I just gave it five minutes on a medium-high heat to really make sure the meat was cooked through to the bone. I then stripped off the skin and fat from the chicken and set aside. I also steamed the asparagus over the ham hough while it was boiling,  just for five minutes till it was cooked and no more. I cut that into lengths that would fit the terrine moulds (read: mini loaf tins) that I was using – this turned out, handily, to be almost exactly half the length of a full spear, so that worked out well. Before I cooked them, I snapped off the woody ends by hand – I think this is a Jamie Oliver tip, though I’m not positive. The theory is that the point where the asparagus stops being tough and starts being tender is also the natural breaking point, so if you just hold a spear with one hand at the bottom and one about a third of the way up and gently bend it, it will snap off and leave you with just the good bit. Pretty good, no?

Once I had all the ingredients ready for the terrine, I lined four little loaf tins with clingfilm, leaving plenty hanging over the sides to cover over at the end, and began to layer them up. I put in a little stock first, then added the tip of an asparagus spear which had been sliced in half lengthways, just for presentation’s sake. I then added a little more stock, a few pieces of ham, a little more stock, some chicken, a little more stock, three lengths of asparagus and repeated with the remaining chicken and ham.  I did all four at once so I could keep an eye on how much was left of everything and didn’t end up with one terrine packed with ingredients and three tiny ones mainly made up of meat jelly. I tried to keep pressing the terrines down as I filled them, and once I was finished I gave each one a few tapes on the counter top to make sure that the stock got down into all the gaps that were inevitably there. Another time I would probably try slicing the meat a bit more uniformly, though there was a certain rustic charm to them. They didn’t slice well, though, which I think was a combination of not using sharp knives at the table and the meat being a little too thick.

To set them, I folded over the clingfilm that I’d left hanging over the edges, then placed two of the moulds on a plate and stacked the remaining two on top. I then put a second plate on top of these and weighed down with a couple of tins, and put the whole lot in the fridge overnight. When I checked them the following afternoon, they came out of the moulds no problem, and looked like the picture above. I think they may have looked nicer with a clearer stock, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice the flavours just to achieve that result. Also, that poor bit of asparagus did go awfully bendy. It must have been just a little too long for the top of the tin, but I made it go in there anyway. Probably shouldn’t have pointed it out – look at all the other (varying degrees of) lovely pictures and go ‘ooooh!’ instead of sniggering over the bendy asparagus, please.

To go with the terrines, I made oatcakes and redcurrant jam. The oatcakes were pretty simple to do – I followed this recipe – the only thing I changed was that I only had jumbo oats, so I gave them a spin in the grinding mill attachment of my blender until they were sort of medium oatmeal. I found that they didn’t colour up a lot when I baked them but they did have a gentle crunch without being too hard to bite through, a problem I encountered when I first tried to make oatcakes. The redcurrant jam wasn’t too tricky, either, though I was making that up as I went along a bit more. I bought jam sugar, with added pectin, and there was a recipe for strawberry jam on the back of this. I didn’t follow it but it gave me an idea of what amounts to use. The first thing I did was wash and pick over the redcurrants, evicting a little caterpillar guy who’d been living in among them. Poor soul, but I didn’t want to add essence of caterpillar to the jam. I put him outside with a few of the berries – he may even have gone on to make a new life for himself. Once they were washed I took them off the stem and put into a small pot, with a generous dash of fig-flavoured balsamic condiment, and some plain balsamic vinegar. It was a little difficult to judge the flavour because I knew I was going to be adding sugar, so I wanted the mix to be quite tart at this stage. I simmered until the fruit was broken down, then added a quarter cup of sugar and tasted again, adjusted as I saw fit and brought to the boil. I boiled until the jam reached ‘setting point’ – this is when you take a little of the jam and put it on a saucer, let it cool for a couple of minutes and then check to see if the surface goes wrinkly when you draw a finger through/across it. It took about five minutes, as there was only a small amount of fruit – about 150g, I think. I then set the pot aside to cool for fifteen minutes, stirred through once and decanted into a little jar, which I’d thoroughly cleaned and then filled with boiling water for ten minutes in a sort of uneducated attempt at sterilising. The result was a sweet jam with a tart undertaste, which complemented the smoky flavours in the terrine rather well, if you ask me.

That’s the saga of the first course. The other courses were venison pie, with home made rough puff pastry, roast potatoes and broccoli. Then we had blackcurrant granita, which contained hand-picked brambles from the slopes of Ben Lomond. After this we had two Scottish cheeses with seasoned tomatoes, red onion, tomato and fig balsamic chutney, then we had rum truffles and brownie squares to finish. Looking forward to sharing everything with anyone who’s interested, but for now it’s lights out. End on a high note…:

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Scottish food

May 31, 2010

An Army of Hedgehogs and a Terrine of Goats (cheese)

By Rock Salt

This Friday past was time for a long overdue girls night reunion – what with one thing and another we hadn’t all managed to get together in weeks, perhaps even months, and we decided to make up for it by having a super cupcake night, on a Friday instead of a Thursday. It was extremely successful, with required levels of drunkenness achieved but not exceeded, bedtime postponed until 5am for some of us, presents by the bucketload and, of course, food. Lots of food. Our host, Miss P, had baked three kinds of cupcakes, a chocolate tray bake and a platter of cookies, as well as supplying sausage rolls and other savoury goods. This is what the table looked like:

There is an interesting red tinge to this photograph; I’m not really sure what that’s about. Certainly there are red items in the room, like the couch, but the lights are perfectly normal, and not loaded with red lightbulbs like a teenager’s bedroom. As you can see, there was enough food to kill more than one horse, and in fairness to us there were leftovers at the end. I should know, I took some of them home in a tupperware that I’d brought for just that purpose; waste not, want not, and all that.

It was a lovely night, and some of the aforementioned presents were for me, about which I was extremely excited and for which I feel joyously grateful. The presents are for another post, for now I want to talk about my contributions to the Double Birthday Cupcake Girls Night table of excess. I had chosen two recipes to test from LC that I knew would be good for a girls night, so this mega-sized girls night seemed an ideal opportunity to make both. The first, and one that took the most planning for, was one they call simply ‘Hedgehogs’, and can be found here. They are little chocolates with a biscuit base and a rum buttercream filling, apparently found commonly in Austria, Belgium and Germany, and known at least in Austria as Igels. I thought that they looked cute and a bit of a challenge, and I also liked the idea of being able to make some pig-shaped ones for Miss P, who loves pigs and whose birthday sadly had to pass without celebration, at least until Friday. I made the biscuit base and buttercream filling a couple of nights ahead. The buttercream is of a kind known as French buttercream, and is made using whisked egg yolks and sugar heated with water to the ‘soft ball’ stage – that means that when you drip some of the sugar and water mix into a glass of cold water, it forms a soft ball shape as it sinks. I was worried that I’d end up with scrambled eggs from adding something this hot to egg yolks but it worked perfectly, thankfully. In fact, this first stage went extremely well and without anything to comment on – no excessive mess, no scrambling eggs, no chocolate smeared the length and breadth of the kitchen… Like a dream. The *first* stage went like that.

The *second* stage, of piping the buttercream onto the biscuits, adding the pine nut ‘quills’, chilling then coating with a chocolate glaze and icing little faces on to the hedgehogs, was a bit messier. A lot messier, actually. I essentially ended up with a chocolate coated kitchen, including all plates and cutlery that were used in the making of the chocolates, all plates and cutlery that were just nearby, some plates and cutlery that were safe in cupboards and drawers, all the work surfaces, the sink, the floor and my hands, arms and face. I barely exaggerate. The glaze has a remarkably low melting point, and as such melted happily any time I touched the chocolates, whether purposefully or accidentally. At times I felt like simply looking at them started them melting, like I had Superman’s eyes in by accident. It was a bit like living in a gingerbread house, gave me a valuable insight into how that witch in Hansel and Gretel must have felt. I feel quite sorry for her now, being cooked in her own oven like that. She was just desperate for some savoury food, the poor soul.

I think my main mistake was trying to overwork the chocolates. I slightly heated the buttercream up to room temperature before piping it on to the biscuit base, because the recipe calls for it to be used as soon as it is ready rather than after it has been chilled. I thought that bringing it up to room temperature would be more according to the recipe, and also when I did try using it from cold it produced a solid line of buttercream that didn’t fit with the rounded, oval shape of the biscuits. I thought that if it was softened a bit it would be more likely to sit in a more fitting shape. However, even once it had been warmed, the buttercream was still pretty much a thin line, only now it was stickier, which as you can imagine wasn’t really what I needed. I then went over all of the chocolates – 28 of them – with a teaspoon, trying to flatten and shape the buttercream. I wish I hadn’t . It was time-consuming, and messy, and at the end of the day the buttercream spread out a little when the pine nuts were stuck in anyway so they probably would have been fine as they were. Lesson learned!

I experimented with different things to make the hedgehogs quills, and some of the chocolates in made into pigs instead. The pigs had chocolate chips for noses (I turned them backwards to give a flat, round snout) and little heart-shaped cake sprinkles for ears (these were turned upside down just to leave the pointy side sticking out). Here is a picture of the army of pre-glazed chocolates with their varying decorations:

As you can see, they’re quite squidgy looking due to the ministrations of my well-meaning teaspoon. I left two rows without any decoration so I could add biscuit crumbs to them to give the impression of quills – this is how I ended up doing all of the hedgehogs, as the cake sprinkles (third row) and the crumbs under the glaze (fourth row) didn’t stick up enough to give any shape once the glaze had been poured over them. The pine nuts looked pretty good, and added texture to the finished result without changing the flavour very much, so I would probably recommend sticking with those if anyone was going to try making them. I think that the pigs looked best, both before and after the chocolate glaze was added – look at this one’s quizzical expression, which he somehow achieve without and facial features. I’d like to make the hedgehogs another time and think that having made them once before will allow me to make them more quickly and more successfully, at least in terms of neatness.

Here is a picture showing the three different types that I made – they all used the same recipe with different decoration. The recipe says that the chocolates should not be refrigerated after glazing but I felt that they would have benefitted from it, as the buttercream was just too soft at room temperature. It’s possible that this was due to a flaw in my method, or it could be that they are supposed to be soft like that – in any case, I preferred them when they were better set.

Looking at this picture does make me happy. The pig is the best, he has a great expression on his face. I didn’t realise until afterwards that the recipe actually calls for them just to have eyes and a little dot for a nose. I gave them my own interpretation with a wee smiley mouth, they look a bit daft but well-meaning, I think. I wouldn’t say that they are the best-tasting things I’ve ever made, but I like the way they look and it has given me some practise in different areas of chocolate making, and some ideas for making chocolates in future. For one thing, I would never have thought of using pine nuts before as I’m not a fan of nuts, but they have a much milder flavour and less squeaky texture than peanuts so I would consider them again in future. I also liked the biscuit base, I am a fan of different textures alongside each other. I probably wouldn’t follow the recipe *strictly* another time, but it is a recipe that delivers what it says it will, and talks you through what is a fairly complex process one step at a time.

My savoury option for the girls night table was a goat’s cheese terrine with basil, rocket and tomatoes. I couldn’t get enough of this terrine; it went down well with everyone. I also took a baguette to serve with it – I felt a bit silly carrying it home from the shops, as I always do when I’ve bought a baguette. I’m just not French enough to carry it off – berets and baguettes, they just don’t suit me. It went a real treat with the terrine though, it was well worth the awkward bus journey trying not to prod anyone in the eye. The recipe is here and here is a picture of the finished item. I don’t have a picture of it sliced, but it didn’t slice easily – I think perhaps the tomatoes that I had were larger than those that the recipe writer had in mind when he suggested quartering them. Next time I would thickly slice them, and that will also make it easier to layer the dish up. It turns out that layering a mix of goat’s cheese, milk and gelatine is quite tricky. It was extremely thick, barely spreadable in fact, but so delicious and creamy that it was worth the hassle of layering it up, and once again getting myself and the kitchen covered, this time in what was kind of mashed goat’s cheese. The worst bit was when I put the whisk that I had been using to mix the cheese, milk and gelatine back into the pot slightly carelessly, so that it tipped backwards again, spattering me with the mixture and then landing on the floor, leaving me thinking ‘Oh, good’, or words to that effect. Spreading something barely spreadable on top of a salad mix that includes curved tomato quarters wasn’t really an easy task, but I got there in the end and I am so pleased and proud of the result – I would urge you to try the recipe, it’s seriously good, and it looks a bit fancy, too.

I think that is all I really have to say about these recipes – I was happy with them both, more so the terrine but I felt that the chocolates were more than presentable, especially for a first attempt. I have made chocolate truffles before, and a version of raspberry ruffles, pralines and sort-of fondants, but this was something different again and in this case I enjoyed the process more than the tasting. There are more new experiences to come, too; I got a number of new recipe books for my birthday, as well as a copy of McGee on Food and Cooking, so I’m hoping to come up with some good recipes of my own once I’ve learned the science, as well as trying new recipes that other people have tested out first. All this alongside my continued membership of the testing group at Leite’s Culinaria makes me feel sure that the future holds a lot of culinary treats in store.

Tunes: I’ve been going through all my CDs, putting my favourite tunes on to my laptop for inspiration and general merriment, and one particularly nice rediscovery was a three-part ska compilation that I had all but forgotten about. Here’s a favourite from that box set, and it fits in with the animal theme of my baking this week, too – Monkey Ska

Movie: *Yet* another present I got for my birthday was the IT Crowd series 2 and 3, woo!However, in terms of relevance to what I’ve been blogging about, there’s a scene in episode four of the first series which includes the lines:

‘You don’t like goat’s cheese?’

‘I don’t like goat’s anything. I don’t like goat’s being involved in any stage of the food production process…’.

I can’t get the clip on its own, so here is another from the same episode: The IT Crowd

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