i Lead Recipes

I love cooking with cream, but I have to admit that I don’t do so often enough. I am lucky in that I have never suffered from any weight or cholesterol problems, so I have as few qualms about cooking with cream as I have when eating streaky bacon. You can use cream for a simple sauce made by adding it to the browned bits left over in a pan, you can use it for a pasta sauce or for a rich crème brulée. When you find yourself at the cream counter at your local grocer, you’ll probably find several different types of cream there. Which one do you chose? If you were to stock only one kind of cream in your refrigerator, I would recommend a double or thick cream. It’s good for whipping, makes perfect sauces and if you need to it can be mixed with milk to thin it down.

Filed under: 1 Sauces, Dips and condiments, Cooking Tips | No Comments »

There are five great foundations to fine cookery

1. olive oil,
2. butter,
3. cream,
4. wine and
5. eggs.

Of these five ingredients the cheapest by far are eggs, and there are literally thousands of recipes for this extremely nourishing food. Compare the price of eggs to that of the others, or indeed to the price of fish or meat, and you will see that eggs stand out by far. Pure extra virgin olive oil is expensive, but there is absolutely no substitute. Butter, too, is expensive, but again there is no substitute – don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that you can use other vegetable oils or butter substitutes in fine cooking – you can not. In many cases where a recipe calls for cream, you can use whipping cream rather than double cream. It is cheaper and less fattening, but if the recipe calls for a cream that has to be reduced in a sauce, it can be better to use double cream. Reducing single cream to the correct consistency you may have to use so much single cream and reduce for such a time that it would have been cheaper to use double cream in the first place.

I will say only one thing about using wine for cooking – never cook with a wine that you would not be prepared to drink – if you wouldn’t drink it, don’t use it.

Filed under: Cooking Tips | No Comments »