Spicy beef under a corn crust

This comes from Mark Bittman’s excellent Food Matters Cookbook, where it’s called Skillet Tamales. Tamales are those corn-based steamed-in-leaves snacks you might have seen on Jamie’s America or something – spicy meat fillings wrapped in a cornbread dough. Calling these skillet tamales doesn’t really describe how this devolves from that, as this is really spicy beef under a cornbread crust – and really good it is, too. So, spciy beef with corn it is – as well as the cornmeal for the crust, you also have sweetcorn as a major ingredient/flavour in the filling. And, don’t be a wuss with the chilli powder; it’s your main spice in this, and it needs to be assertive to stand up to the bland sweetness of the crust.

browning the mince

You’ll need a casserole-type pan which can go in the oven, which needs to be on at 200C. Start by mixing 150g of fine cornmeal (not cornflour, which is a different beast entirely) in a bowl with 300ml (about a mugfull) of hot water and a big pinch of salt. Leave this to sit while you get on with the meat filling. Fry 250g of minced beef (I used a lean beef) for about 10 minutes until it’s browned – by which I mean you should hear the sizzle, and it’ll probably start to stick to the pan a bit. If it hasn’t yet, you haven’t browned it, just, er, ‘greyed’ it, and your heat needs to be higher. Add a chopped onion and 3 chopped garlic cloves, turn the heat down, and let them fry for about 5 minutes until soft. Add 1 tbsp hot chilli powder (don’t be shy!), 3 chopped tomatoes (chop them roughly and lift them from the chopping board to leave most of the water behind) and about 200g (2 cups, if you prefer) of frozen sweetcorn, stir it all up to mix, and turn off the heat.

Then add ½ tsp of baking powder to the corn mixture, stir it all up (a whisk was my utensil of choice) and pour it on top of the meat mixture. Put the whole thing in the oven and bake it for 25-30 minutes, by which time the top will have set and cracked a little. Serve – I had it with a homemade coleslaw and some (completely unnecessary) sweet potato chips.

5:10 Eggs and Bacon

Well, it’s been a while. One missed post leads to another… time to get back onto it, and I’m going to move to shorter posts in an attempt to meet my schedule – although this might slip back to one a week.

Starting with this. I nicked the recipe via a long set of links, to Nom Nom Paleo, a site dedicated to recipes for the unlikely-sounding paleo diet. I’ve been trying to eat healthier the last few weeks, and while I have no time for the cod-scientific reasoning behind the paleo diet (you can’t actually digest grains! cavemen didn’t and so we can’t either!), cutting down on a few carbs does seem to be doing the trick.

yes, that’s Thai chilli sauce with it

Anyway, what there is of a recipe isn’t much – just a note from Momfuku’s cookbook that boiling eggs for 5 minutes and 10 seconds gives you the perfect gelatinous white and just-slightly-thickened yolk. I can confirm that it does, indeed… although one of my eggs cracked and looked like a disaster, when dried out and gently dabbed of the water that got into it, it tasted fine. Boil the water first, add the eggs – gently – and boil (again, gently) for 5 minutes and 10 seconds, then drop into a bowl of cold water and leave for a few minutes (while you get the bacon on, if you like). Shell carefully – the eggs will be squeezy and gelatinous from the loose yolk inside – and serve.