Mild egg curry

If I'm making an Indian meal with a couple of spicy dishes, I generally try to make something really mild for my kids so that they aren't left just eating plain white rice. The spicing in this is so mild that I hesitate to call it a curry at all, but it makes a great foil for hotter food.

Ingredients

12 eggs

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 tsps minced ginger

1 tsp minced garlic

1 tablespoon mild curry powder

1 tsp salt

1 tin coconut milk

small bunch of fresh coriander, chopped

juice of 1 lemon

Method

1. Steam the eggs for 10 minutes, then allow to cool. Peel and cut in half lengthwise.
2. In a large frying pan, fry the onion gently in plenty of oil. When it is cooked but not brown, add the ginger and garlic and fry for another minute. Add the curry powder and salt, fry for another 30 seconds or so, then add the coconut milk.
3. Simmer for about 5 minutes, add the chopped coriander and lemon juice, stir to mix, then add the eggs, yolk side up. Spoon the sauce over the eggs and simmer very gently for another 5 minutes.

Tortilla (Spanish omelette)

Spaniards are somewhat obsessed with tortilla, and rightly so. It's pretty simple - just a set omelette with potatoes and onions - but when done right it's really delicious. Cookery book explanations are never quite right.




The cooking times and proportions of egg to potato are often wrong, tending to produce a rather dry tortilla. And they often fudge the process of flipping the tortilla over (or even tell you to stick it under a grill). Another problem is that the Spanish concept of frying and the British one are a little different. When Spaniards fry, they use quite a lot of oil, whereas people in Britain tend to try to use as little oil as possible (which kind of defeats the purpose of frying).

The undisputed tortilla queen of Cadiz is Manolita, the mum of Gemma's friends Ana-Cristina and Alejandra, and the method below is hers. As you can see from the photos, she doesn't believe in fancy nonsense like chopping boards. (And I thought I was austere with my prejudice against garlic presses.)





Like many things, I wouldn't usually measure the ingredients when making a tortilla, as it's all about proportions rather than absolute volumes. All you have to do is make sure that you have a few more eggs than you think you need. However, the last time round I decided to measure everything and make a note of it - the quantities below make one good-sized tortilla.

It's also difficult to be precise with cooking times. The perfect tortilla should be a little runny in the middle. However, some people prefer theirs more well-done, and if you're taking it on a picnic you may also want it to be a little firmer.

Ingredients
Plenty of olive oil
1 medium-sized onion, peeled and thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed or very finely chopped
1 kg of potatoes, peeled and quite finely chopped
8 large eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon of salt

Method

1. Place the onions and plenty of oil in a medium-sized non-stick frying pan, heat gently, and fry until the onions are translucent. Add the garlic, and cook for another minute or so. Place a colander over a large bowl, strain the onions and garlic through it, and return the oil to the pan.
2. Add the potatoes to the pan, and add more oil if required, so that the potatoes are just about covered. Heat gently, with the lid on, so that the potatoes are both frying and steaming at the same time. Once the potatoes are cooked, straing them in the colander containing the cooked onions. (The oil which gathers in the bowl below can be reused.)
3. Allow the potato and onion mixture to cool for a few minutes, then add the beaten eggs and the salt, and mix well. If the mixture looks too 'potatoey', add another beaten egg.
4. Return a little of the oil to the frying pan (just enough to form a very thin layer on the bottom), heat it gently (being careful not to let it get to hot), pour the omelette mixture into the pan, turn heat to minimum, cover and cook for about 10 minutes, until the bottom and sides of the omelette have set, but the top is still runny.
5. Flip it over using one of the methods described below, and finish cooking for another 3 minutes on a low heat. Flip the tortilla out of the pan onto a serving plate (see below).

The flip
One of the scary bits of making a tortilla for the first time is how to flip it over when it is halfway through cooking. Here are three ways of doing this.
Method 1: Two Pans
This is my method. I have two identical pans. When the tortilla is cooked underneath, I put a little bit of oil in the second pan, place it face down on top of the first one, hold the two together (using oven gloves!) and flip them over. The tortilla thus ends up face down in the second pan, ready to continue cooking.
Method 2: One Pan - Two Plates
This is an adaptation of the traditional Spanish method, made a bit easier for guiris. When the tortilla is ready to flip, place a large dinner plate face down on top of it and flip it over (using oven gloves) so that your tortilla is now cooked side up on the plate. Now get another plate, place it face down on top of the raw tortilla, and flip again, so that the tortilla is raw side up on the second plate. Finally, put the frying pan face down over the tortilla, and flip so that the tortilla is raw side down in the pan, and carry on cooking.
Method 3: One Pan - One Lid
This is the authentic Spanish method. When the tortilla is cooked underneath, place a large frying pan lid face down on top of it and flip it over (using oven gloves) so that your tortilla is now cooked side up on the lid (As in Method 2.) Now slide it back into the frying pan so that it is raw side down, and carry on cooking.





As a child, I remember my mother making 'Spanish omelette', and it turning out as scrambled egg with some sauteed potatoes in it. (Still good, but not quite the real thing.) Since then, my mum has had a masterclass from Manolita and now produces top notch authentic tortillas.

Scotch eggs

One of the fun things about living in another country is that it gives you the opportunity to pass off all kinds of dubious information as hard fact. “Yes, yes. Everyone makes these at home in Scotland. We keep our own quails in the garden specially for this purpose.”




Every year Sammy and Carmela’s school has a multicultural buffet, where parents are meant to bring things from their own country. There are quite a few Moroccan kids in the school, so there is always a good supply of little pastries, and last year there was a great chicken couscous too. There is a girl whose parents are French/Belgian and who have a patisserie, so they bring along a tray of pastries, and this year there was a bit of an Anglo baking competition involving apple pie, brownies and flapjacks.

Anyway, I decided to use the event as an excuse to make Scotch eggs. (Which may not even be Scottish.) They went down surprisingly well, despite a wobbly moment at the beginning, when one of the Moroccan mums bit into one of them and had to be quickly reassured that I had only used beef. (Actually, I wasn’t that surprised, as Spaniards love eggs and mince, and are also pretty keen on anything breaded and fried.)

Making them with quail eggs involves a little more work at the beginning (peeling and coating), but they are easier to fry and much more attractive. Steaming the eggs is important, as it stops them from cracking as they cook and so makes peeling them easier.



This is one of those recipes that I thought would be frustratingly fiddly to do, but it wasn't. For me, there are two kinds of fiddliness in the kitchen: fiddly and difficult (e.g., making baskets out of spun sugar), and fiddly but easy. This one is time-consuming, but it's fairly foolproof and doesn't demand any great technique. So long as I'm in the right mood then I find this kind of thing quite therapeutic.

Ingredients
24 quail eggs
400 g of minced beef
3 spring onions, roughly chopped
fresh parsley
1 teaspoon of mustard
4 teaspoons of grated Parmesan
freshly ground salt and black pepper
3 chicken eggs
flour
breadcrumbs

Method

1. Steam the quail eggs for about 5 minutes. Remove, cool in a large bowl of water, and peel.
2. Place the mince, spring onions, parsley, mustard, Parmesan, salt and black pepper and ONE of the beaten chicken eggs into the food, and chop until the mixture is quite smooth. (It should start to form a ball.)
3. Take a small piece of the mixture, flatten it out in your hand and wrap it round the egg, making sure that the egg is completely covered with a thin layer of meat. (This sounds fiddly, but is actually quite easily. You can just squash it round the egg and pinch off any excess mixture.) Repeat this until all the eggs are covered. (With the quantities above there should be a bit of leftover mixture which can be turned into beefburgers.)
4. Put plenty of flour on a plate, plenty of breadcrumbs on another plate, and break the two remaining chicken eggs into a bowl and mix with a fork. One by one, roll the covered eggs in flour, shake off any excess, then pass the floured egg through the egg and then roll it in breadcrumbs. (It’s best to do this in stages: first flour all the eggs, then put them all into the egg mixture, then roll them in breadcrumbs: otherwise you will find that your fingers gradually become covered in a sticky egg and breadcrumb mixture!)
5. Fill a large, high-sided saucepan about 2.5 cm deep with sunflower oil. Heat the oil until it is hot but not too hot. (Sorry to be vague, but I don’t use thermometers for this kind of thing.) Place the breaded eggs gently into the oil, fry for a couple of minutes before carefully turning over and frying for another couple of minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on some kitchen paper.