Out of hybernation

This blog has been on hold for a while - partly because there hasn't been much fungi-related inspiration over the past few months, and partly because of real world issues. Russia's politicians have been consuming too many bad fungi lately. Or perhaps they have all been abducted and replaced by aliens. Either way, their war games involving occasional mention of ICBMs are unsettling. Nuclear mushrooms, I am not fond of. VERY bad for any other kind.

However, with the new mushroom season just about to start, even impending global destruction is not an excuse. So over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing a backlog of my mushroom photos from this spring, and then if I'm lucky, some of this new season's early finds (first foray planned for this Saturday!), but for now - here is a photo of my breakfast from a couple of days ago.

Pan fried salmon with parsley and cream sauce, tomatoes and oyster mushrooms. Simple but nutritious. Enjoy!

The best way to start a day

Stash in the freezer

The ingredients

With all the recent frost and wind and fog, it seemed like spring was far far away, and mushroom season even further, so I was reluctant to open up my freezer. After all, what if it wasn't just a normal winter but the coming of a new ice age?..

However, with the arrival of snowdrops and aconites it became clear that we were safe from that catastrophe for now, and it was time to start eating into the stashes so that they are fully emptied before the new growth of ceps arrives.

I was really pleased that I was able to supplement my own ceps with an addition of wild mushrooms from a supermarket shelf, consisting of hedgehog fungus (bottom left) and grey chanterelle (bottom right). The three mushroom species, combined with some shallots and single cream, produced a great sauce for goose-fat roast potatoes we were having that evening. They all worked really hard: ceps provided flavour, grey chanterelles added colour, and hedgehog mushrooms were responsible for the firm, almost crunchy texture. White wine and cream took care of the rest!

And here they are, all together in a frying pan, just beginning to soften -

Ahh,, Beautiful!

Winter hunt

Winter is upon us, and I don't care what the calendar says because the temperatures in this part of the world have dropped below freezing already.

Naturally, mushrooms are not keen on the weather, and apart from an occasional bunch of ink caps, there is nothing to be seen among all the frost.

These days my hunts have to happen in mushroom isles of supermarkets. And I can tell you, the latest hasn't been bad at all! Behold - grey chanterelles:

Craterellus tubaeformis, all cleaned and ready to be cooked. Origin: South France, according to the label.
I have a feeling I'm missing out here in the frozen North...

Curiously, despite their name these fungi are only distantly related to the golden chanterelle, and in fact recent molecular phylogenetics studies have placed them in a different genus, Craterellus. Still, when it comes to putting these fungi into omelettes, they are just as good as their better-known cousin.

Sunday brunch: served!

Taste of the future: mushroom burgers

Portobello burger served in Honolulu

I was pointed today to a news article that praises burgers made with a mixture of beef and mushrooms. Apparently, you can mix up to 50% of mushrooms into beef mince without sacrificing the flavour.

Wow. The wonders of twenty-first century life. And mushrooms, of course.

I totally approve of this development. Meat is an important part of our diet, and eating it allowed our distant ancestors to grow larger brains, become more intelligent, and ultimately build wonderful things like computers and mushroom farms. Unfortunately, it also makes the twenty-first century man edge ever closer to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Mixing meat with mushrooms seems like a viable half-measure: it seriously reduces the calorie content of the patty, and therefore your waistline is more likely to stay unexpanded.

After all, if it doesn't, you could always go for hardcore:

16 kcal per 100 grams. No half-measures here!

Image credit:
Grilled portobello mushrooms burger

Soup with Judas' ears

There is a famous Russian cookbook by Yelena Molokhovets, published in 1861, entitled "A gift to young housewives, or the way to decrease expenses in running your household". Its recipes typically start like this: "Boil a whole chicken, keep the stock, and give the chicken away to your servants", or "If you husband has unexpectedly brought home guests, and there is absolutely nothing in the house, don't despair: go to the attic and get a leg of ham..."

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. This weekend I roasted a chicken with lots of herbs and spices, and it seemed to be such a shame just to throw the carcass away after the meat was picked clean off it, so I decided to make some chicken bone soup. Once the stock was strained and ready, I added some chicken meat, frozen sweetcorn and, of course mushrooms.

Just a handful of dried Auricularia auricula-judae.

Normally, when I cook new mushrooms, I tend to be cautious and use just a little bit, but these were pre-packed dried fungi, flown to me all the way from Singapore, so I thought, no need to be shy. I dropped in six, and closed the lid.

Five minutes later, I heard some strange noises coming from the kitchen. The fungi soaked up HALF of the liquid in the pot and were literally crawling out of the pot! (Thankfully, there was more than enough stock in it). The disaster was narrowly avoided only with a hasty transfer to a larger pot. They made for a great soup in the end: a bit leathery in texture, but that was in perfect contrast to sweetcorn and croutons, so the culinary experiment was definitely a success.

Fancy some leathery ears?

That wasn't the end of it though. Next day, I decided to take the remaining fungi out of the soup and give them the standard treatment of frying in butter, because everything tastes better that way, right? Right... Even though I sliced them into thin strips, the explosion in my kitchen was still quite spectacular. Note to self: Judas' ears - soups ONLY. NO frying!

Beef stroganoff with wild mushrooms

Ingredients

With the unique crop I brought home last Sunday, I thought I needed to do something special, and taking upon the challenge of cooking an edible beef stroganoff seemed just right.

Ingredients were as follows:

- 300g rump steak, cut in thin strips
- flour, to coat the above
- 100g shallots
- a few cloves of garlic
- large glass of white wine

The right way to fry meat

- 100g single cream
- sage, bay leaf, peppercorns
- 1 cube of porcini stock (but vegetable stock would do just fine)
- herbs, to garnish

Now, am I missing something? Oh, yes, and of course:

about 300g of finest wild mushrooms as found in Scottish forests. I have used ceps, slippery jacks, one brown birch bolete and a few hundred amethyst deceivers. But if you can't get those, plain chestnut mushrooms will do just fine.

The main ingredient

Process:

Coat the meat in flour, and throw on pre-heated frying pan. Fry for a few minutes on high heat, turning once. The meat must brown slightly, but must NOT be cooked through. This is very important as otherwise it'll stay tough, no matter how long it is stewed afterwards. In another pan, fry the halved shallots, sliced garlic and sage leaves, on medium heat. Once the meat has browned, add it to the shallots. Make sure you scrape all the delicious crispy bits from the pan into the pot. That's what will make the stroganoff taste so good!

Last stage, 30 minutes before end

Turn the heat up and pour in the wine. Dissolve the stock cube in 0.5l of boiling water and pour it all in. Cover the pot with heavy lid and simmer on medium low heat.

Meanwhile, clean and wash the mushrooms. Add them to the pot after 1 hour, and cook for a further 30 minutes. Add the cream, bring to the boil, and you are done!

Serve with chips or roast potatoes and fresh herbs. Bon appetit!

Note how the tiny laccarias keep their purple colour in the stew. These little beauties are amazing!

Mushroom kadai masala

Looks delicious, and not too difficult, provided you can get hold of all the spices. I assume the tomato, chilli, ginger and cashew paste is prepared in advance using a blender.

A great cooking video, just one thing though - mushrooms are not vegetables!

The perfect way to cook mushrooms

This short video gives no-nonsense guidance as to how cook perfect sautéed mushrooms. With white wine! The use of tarragon took me by surprise as I previously thought that it only combines with fish, but I'm definitely going to try it out.

Which reminds me - it's Friday, and nearly time for dinner!

Take care everyone, do not eat any strange mushrooms, and I'll see you next week for more stories and hunting reports!

Mushroom medley

These will make a great risotto...
in three month's time!

This post is not so much a recipe, but rather cooking thoughts. Once the mushrooms are in your basket, what do you do with them?

For instance, yesterday I brought home a couple of kilograms of fungi. Clearly, cooking them all at once does not make much sense unless you have a big hungry family (I don't).

The answer is, segregate.

Ceps preserve really well, in dried and frozen state, so they were cleaned, wiped with with damp kitchen towel,  cut into chunks and placed into a freezer bag.

Stage 1: note the bright orange
of the saffron milk caps.

And, that's almost half of the weight gone. Next, chanterelles. They have no trouble keeping in the fridge for a week or so. Stick them in a container, and leave for laters.

Thus, we are just left with two kinds of birch boletes, slippery jacks, saffron milk caps and amethyst deceivers. All rather perishable, but the quantity is already manageable. After cutting away the maggot-infested parts, it's only about 500-600g left. Perfect for a classic mushroom medley: fry some onion in olive oil, add mushrooms, splash over a bit of white wine, add salt/pepper, then single cream, reduce the heat, stew for 10-15 minutes.

Profit!

Chanterelle and samphire salad

As every successful mushroom hunter knows, while collecting it is important to stay attuned to the spirit world and keep your thoughts proper (i.e., fungi-directed). Letting your mind wander results in stopping finding wild food and becoming food to bloodsucking insects instead.

There is a very thin line indeed between a mushroom gatherer and a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In fact, you almost need to have the latter to be any good at fungi foraging. Attunement to forest spirits must be kept in check, too, or there is a very real danger of your doctor insisting you need hefty doses of haloperidol, or whatever they use to treat psychotic patients these days.

In short: it's the edge of a blade. Tread with caution.

However, when within the space of a few hours I see an article in a newspaper with chanterelle and exotic weed recipe, then find just the right quantity of chanterelles, and finally see that same exotic weed in the supermarket, it must mean something, right? The Universe is definitely trying to tell me that I must cook it, and therefore I obey.

The ingredients

Ingredients:

• 50g of pancetta 
• some olive oil 
• 250g chanterelles
• 100g of samphire 
• Salt, pepper

Process:

Prepare the chanterelles. In an ideal world, it is sufficient to wipe them with a damp cloth, but in reality chanterelles come covered in sand, twigs and slug poo, so I do have to wash them. Putting them on a kitchen towel removes some of the moisture, but still not enough. The original recipe says, cook pancetta first, then add chanterelles, but if the chanterelles need to be washed, I recommend to amend the sequence. Thus, cook the chanterelles in a little olive oil on medium high heat until the liquid has evaporated, then remove them from the pan, cook the pancetta until it releases its fat, return the chanterelles to the pan, add salt and pepper, and after 2-3 minutes add the samphire. One more minute, stirring constantly, and you are done!

I quite liked the combination of pancetta and chanterelles, but not so sure about samphire: it's too salty, and it tastes like seaweed. Maybe next time I'll replace it with something else and see if it makes the dish more edible. Universe, you know what? You were wrong! 

Looks better than it tastes, but maybe it'll find its fans.

Colourful mushroom BBQ

Ingredients (note the psychedelic
colours)

When people ask me, do I ever get tired of eating mushrooms, I always answer in the negative. After all, my reputation of an extreme fungi lover is at stake here. However, I have to admit that there are times at the height of wild mushroom season when things are getting a bit overwhelming. I do my best to preserve the collected mushrooms for later by freezing and drying, but only ceps can take it without significant deterioration of taste and texture, and there are so many other kinds that make it into my basket. I just can't resist them!

So, after about a month of frying, stewing and roasting comes a time when even a seasoned fungi eater like myself thinks, there really can be such a thing as too many mushrooms.

Observe the toxins coming out

And what do I do then? I start grilling them! After all, with the summer almost over, it's a perfect excuse to take out the bbq tools one last time. Thus, without any further ado, behold the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 500g of firm fleshy mushrooms. I used orange birch boletes and scarletina boletes but for less extreme experiences chestnut mushrooms from a local supermarket will do fine. If using the latter, just disregard the boiling instructions as this is unnecessary.
• 1 red pepper
• 1 eggplant
• 1 onion (optional)
• olive oil, salt

Process:

Frying, to add that bit of extra flavour

Cut the wild mushrooms into bbq-sized pieces, or if using chestnut mushrooms, remove stalks and leave caps whole. Boil water with some salt, add the mushrooms, boil for 5 minutes, drain. Repeat, this time for 10 minutes. This is necessary to remove the toxins from orange birch boletes and scarletina boletes. Not that these are particularly dangerous, but we don't want any stomach upsets, right? As stated above, this step is unnecessary for supermarket mushrooms.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, add the mushroom pieces and fry until golden on both sides. Cut the aubergine into square pieces and fry it, too. Cut the red pepper into square pieces and leave it raw. Slice the onion to make some rings (only if you like it)

Put the mushrooms, aubergines, onions and peppers onto skewers. Place over medium-hot grill (I did this once the meat that I had for the evening was cooked), turning frequently until peppers start withering.

And... you are done. Serve with the sauce of your choice!

A little bit more, and they'll be ready to serve!

Mushroom-filled eggs

Ingredients

I know it's Monday and I'm supposed to post a foraging report, but this weekend I had visitors who were not keen on mushrooming. They were keen on my cooking though, so today I'm posting a recipe, and foraging report will be tomorrow. Please, forest spirits, let there be ceps, please!..

Ahem.

There are, of course, no spirits in Scottish forests. Everybody knows that. Now, to the recipe.

Ingredients:

Main ingredient (fried)

• 4 eggs *
• 6 small forestiere mushrooms (or any other mushrooms would do, but this recipe works best with stronger-flavoured varieties)
• half an onion
• real mayonnaise (the one that has fresh eggs on the list of the ingredients and NOT egg powder, otherwise I recommend to use olive oil instead)
• salt and pepper
• fresh herbs to garnish

Ready to blend

* The recipe can be scaled to any number of eggs. The limit is only the size of your pot and your patience.

Process:

Put the eggs into a small pot, add cold water and plenty of salt (this is needed for the eggs not to leak out if their shells crack during cooking). Bring to the boil and cook for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, chop the onion and mushrooms and fry on medium heat in a little olive oil until nice and golden.

Eggs, filled

When the eggs are ready, carefully remove the shells and cut the eggs in half, remove the yolks and put the whites onto a serving plate. Combine the yolks, mushrooms and onion in a blender, add salt and pepper to taste. If you do not have a blender, just use a fork to mash the yolks and mix them with the rest of the ingredients by hand. If the mixture turns out to be too dry, add a bit of mayonnaise, but not too much, or it'll turn all runny and ugly.

Using a teaspoon, distribute the mixture onto the egg whites: fill the yolk hollows first and then spread any remaining mixture on top. Glaze the egg halves with a bit of mayonnaise (this is not strictly necessary but it conceals the drab brownish colour of the filling) and decorate with basil or parsley.

Enjoy! Eggs and mushrooms are a match made in heaven, and this recipe is yet another proof of it.

Tastes better than it looks!

Chanterelle rice with wholegrain mustard

This is a simple recipe for the times when wild mushroom pickings are scarce. Just a handful of chanterelles adds lots of flavour to the rice base, and makes a great addition to sausages or steak.

Ingredients

Ingredients:

• a handful of chanterelles
• one small onion
• two cloves of garlic
• 200g rice
• 2 tsp wholegrain mustard
• salt to taste
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp sherry

Process:

Chanterelle mixture - ready to be
added to the rice

Finely chop onion, garlic and chanterelles. Heat olive oil in a frying pan, add onions, cook on medium heat until they start to soften. Add chanterelles, cook until all water evaporates, occasionally stirring. Add garlic, cook the mixture for 1 further minute and add sherry. Once it is absorbed into mushrooms, reduce the heat, add the mustard and salt, stir well. After 2-3 minutes turn off the heat and set aside.

Cook your rice using your preferred method. I normally use Delia's, but obviously without onions, since they are already present in the chanterelle mixture.

Once the rice is almost cooked, fluff it with a fork as Delia suggests, and add the filler, mix well and let it stand for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Here is what it should look like at the end - enjoy!

Mushroom and beetroot salad

Just three ingredients

This recipe is more of a winter treat, but with the recent dry spell there hasn't been anything in the forest, and somehow I think it is inappropriate to go for fresh cultivated mushrooms in the middle of wild fungi season. Also, I didn't feel like complicated cooking yesterday, and this salad can be bashed together in about 5 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 300g mixed marinated mushrooms in olive oil (I used Tesco mixed wild mushroom antipasto but any similar fungi would do)
• 200g baby beetroots, boiled and peeled
• one small red onion

Great with ice-cold vodka!

Process:

Empty the contents of the marinated mushroom jar into a salad bowl. Slice the baby beetroots and the red onion. Mix well. Garnish with herbs (parsley or dill both work well) and serve. It can be eaten immediately, but will taste even better if you leave it overnight in the fridge, as the onions will release their juice into the oil and absorb sweetness (and colour!) from the beetroots. Enjoy!

Lots of chanterelles in sour cream

Despite my complaints about the weather, I brought home so many mushrooms last week that the chanterelle and mushroom pie only consumed a third of them. Chanterelles keep quite well in the fridge, but still there comes a time when a desperate forager has to either find a way to utilise them all or let them perish. Hold on a second, let them perish? Never!

So I got looking on the web for suggestions as to how to cook a large amount of chanterelles. They don't freeze or dry well, as I think I've mentioned before. It didn't take me long to discover this great traditional Russian method. I hesitate to call it a "recipe" as it only has 5 ingredients, but I've always believed that best cooking is simple cooking, so here it is.

Ingredients:

• 1kg of chanterelles
• 1-2 onions
• 200g sour cream
• some olive oil
• salt

Process:

Slice the onions into thin rings. Pour olive oil into a deep frying pan and gently fry the onions until soft. Add the cleaned and washed chanterelles, small ones left whole, large ones halved or quartered. Keep frying, stirring frequently, until all water evaporates. Salt to taste. Transfer the chanterelles to a heavy pot, add sour cream, stir well, bring to boil. Reduce the heat to the minimum and cook under lid for 20 minutes.

The result can be served with rice as a dish in its own right or as garnish to meatballs or steak. This is how they dealt with bumper crop of chanterelles in ancient Russia. I suspect that for the final stage they used a proper wood-fired Russian oven, but even on a conventional gas top the result is great. Enjoy! 

Chanterelle and egg pie

Selection of ingredients

This is the second recipe I cooked last week, after the courgette salad. Still not sure what to do with the current bounty of wild mushrooms in my fridge. If only they would keep! The forecast now says no rain for 2 weeks at least, so it is quite possible that mushroom season will be suspended. I guess I'll have to hunt for wild strawberries instead: in all this heat they will get ripe in no time. Today we had 26 degrees, which is I think the all-time record.

But let me not be distracted from the recipe. Here it is.

Ingredients:

Just before the return to the oven

• 1 ready-rolled sheet of shortcrust pastry
  (or you can make it yourself, but I am lazy)
• 500g chanterelles
  
• 1 large onion
• 6 eggs
• 100g double cream
• 100g white wine
• grated parmesan
• herbs, salt, pepper

Ready to eat!

Process:

Grease two 20cm baking pans with butter and dust with flour. Line each with half of the pastry sheet, making a case for the future pie. Fill each pan with baking beans and bake in an oven preheated to 180C (if it is a fan oven, or 200 if not), for about 15 minutes. Remove the baking beans and bake the cases for a further 5 minutes until golden.

Meanwhile, clean, wash and tear the chanterelles and chop the onion. Fry them together in a large frying pan with a little olive oil. Once the onion gets soft add herbs, salt, pepper and white wine. Cook on high heat until the liquid evaporates. Remove the herbs. Distribute the mixture between the two pie cases. Beat the eggs together with cream and pour them over the mushrooms. I don't salt the eggs but add their share to the mushrooms/onions instead, but this is up to the cook. Now, for the final touch - cover the eggy surface of each pie with a generous helping of grated parmesan and put the pies back into the oven. The temperature needs to be lower now, about 170C. They will be ready in 15 minutes.

Warm salad with courgettes and chanterelles

Ingredients

Today's recipe is one of my old favourites, as it brings out the best in its ingredients - especially the chanterelles. I've tried cooking it with other mushrooms by the way, and the only alteration it tolerates is the replacement of no more than half of the chanterelles with ceps. Also, you need a really big pan to make this dish in any quantity. The version I cooked today serves two, and the two in question were both complaining about the size of their portions. Don't expect a massive dish. A couple of handfuls of chanterelles makes for a couple of handfuls of salad. It's a starter, ok?

Right, on to the ingredients:

Mixed, ready to go onto the pan

• a couple of handfuls of chanterelles
• a few baby courgettes or one normal courgette
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tablespoonfuls of olive oil
• 1/4 lemon
• a handful of basil
• salt and pepper

Process:

The salad, ready to be served

Cut the courgettes into thin slices, leave chanterelles whole if small or tear into halves/quarters if larger. Put them together into a bowl, with salt, pour over the olive oil.
Mix well. Heat a frying pan over high heat, put the mixture into it. Arrange the courgette pieces around the pan. Wait until golden on one side, turn over. Once cooked, turn off the heat, add finely chopped garlic and ground pepper to taste, put into a serving bowl. Squeeze lemon juice and put basil leaves on top. Serve warm and enjoy!

For the thorough-minded, the original version of the recipe can be found on the BBC Food web site.

Chanterelle omelette

Selection of ingredients

A meal using the first pickings of the mushroom season is always very special. There's usually very little of the wild food, so it's important to choose a dish that will bring out its taste in the best possible way. With chanterelles, nothing can do it better, in my opinion, than an omelette. The version below serves 4, for more/less just scale the ingredients.

Ingredients:

• 6 eggs
• chanterelles - about 100 grams this time but the more the better
• 1 large or 3-4 small shallots
• 100g cream, single or double
• 25g butter
• salt, pepper

Process:

Works best with leafy salad and
fresh tomatoes

Come on, it's just an omelette. Oh, all right. Finely chop shallots, wash chanterelles, leave whole if small, slice in half or quarter if large. Melt the butter on a large frying pan. Add shallots and chanterelles. Fry on medium heat, stirring frequently, until all water from the mushrooms evaporates and the onions get soft. Add salt and pepper. While the mushroom/shallot mixture is frying, beat eggs with cream. Once the mushrooms are done, pour the eggs into the pan. When the omelette turns golden on the underside and starts to set, gently fold it and turn over. Wait for 1-2 minutes, and it's ready! Turn off the heat and serve immediately.

Exotic mushroom tempura

As promised in yesterday's post, here is the recipe for a mushroom tempura. Strictly speaking, it's not really a tempura, because in order to get one right, you have spend 10 years in training and pass a final exam in which you have to eat your own cooking creation and survive. Or am I confusing it with something else? Anyway, life is too short and I am lazy, so the dish I cooked yesterday should be called "battered mushrooms", but I call it tempura, and my friends know better than to object if they want to be fed.

All ready to go

The ingredients are few and simple:

• mushrooms (this time I used yellow oyster, pink oyster, shimeji and shiitake, and also added one white sweet potato)
• 250g sparkling water
• a few ice cubes
• 250g white flour
• an egg
• salt
• lots of olive oil

Pour the sparkling water into a glass and add the ice cubes. Put into the fridge for 10-15 minutes. Put the flour into the mixing bowl, make a depression in the middle, add the egg and salt. Start pouring the cooled water into the middle and mix with a whisk. The bubbles in sparkling water help to make a uniform mixture, so this is possibly the most important ingredient.

Heat up olive oil in a large frying pan on high heat until it starts smoking. Dip the first batch of mushrooms in batter, place on the frying pan (carefully!), wait for 1 minute or until they start turning golden, turn them over, wait for a further minute, take off the pan. Add more oil if necessary and repeat with the next batch.

Time to eat!

A few important pointers are worth remembering, to avoid spoilt food, personal injury and domestic fires:

• make sure that the frying pan is really hot before dropping in the mushrooms, otherwise they'll turn out wet and squishy
• be generous with oil
• do not overcook the mushrooms
• DO NOT LEAVE THE KITCHEN! (I've learned this one the hard way)
• do not be alarmed if you point your camera at the cooked mushrooms and they trigger its face recognition feature: this is normal and is a sign of a good tempura 

Enjoy, and see you tomorrow for more mushroom stories!

Exotic mushroom sauce

Ingredients

Today's post, as promised, is a cooking report. This recipe is one of my favourites, because it works with any mushrooms. However, as mentioned in the previous post, it is especially great with firm-textured mushrooms that have strong flavour, and this time I had plenty of those!

Ingredients:

125g exotic mushrooms (mixture of yellow oyster, pink oyster and shimeji)
100g Scotch bonnet mushrooms
several shallots
a few garlic cloves

After adding the white wine

1 tablespoon of olive oil
glass of white wine
glass of double cream
bay leaf and peppercorns, salt

Method:

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and add mushrooms and chopped shallots. Cook on medium high heat stirring frequently until shallots begin to soften. Add chopped garlic, bay leaf and peppercorns, keep stirring. After a minute or so pour in the wine.

Almost ready!

Increase heat to the maximum and wait for liquid to reduce by half. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan, stir in the cream, add salt if needed. Bring to the boil, then cover with lid, reduce the heat to the minimum and cook for a further 15-20 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the covered pot stand for 5 minutes or so. Serve with rice or pasta and green salad. It is best to eat it straight away, but it is also ok to reheat it the next day, or even use it as cold spread on toast.

The recipe will serve 2-3, if you need to feed more, just double the ingredients. Enjoy, and see you tomorrow!