Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker by Miss South
Book: Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker by Miss South
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Authors: Miss South
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finely and set aside. Frozen livers are quite wet and they will create lots of liquid as you chop. Reserve this.
Melt the butter in a frying pan on the hob, add the shallots and bacon and sweat them both over a medium heat. You want the shallots to become translucent, but not coloured. The bacon should just start to crisp around the edges.
At this stage, add the chopped chicken livers and any liquid from them. Cook them for about 1 minute until they just start to change colour. Add the alcohol if you are using it and allow it to bubble slightly.
Pour in the cream and season. Sprinkle over the parsley and cook it all for 1–2 minutes until the livers are almost completely cooked. Remove from the heat immediately.
Blend with a hand blender until it is smooth, but retains a little bit of texture. Pour the mixture into a shallow dish or ramekins. Cover with foil. Set the dish into the slow-cooker crock and pour boiling water into the crock so that it comes about halfway up the side of the pâté dish.
Cook the pâté on low for 3 hours to firm up the texture. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before eating. It will keep for about 3 days in the fridge. Keep it covered, but don’t be surprised if the top of it oxidises and darkens slightly. This is natural and doesn’t affect eating it. Mine rarely lasts long enough for that to be an issue.
I love fish and seafood. It’s a family joke that if you left an old boot in the sea for long enough, I would eat it. Yet not as many British and Irish people share my love as you’d expect for island dwellers. One of the reasons for this is that they are unsure how to cook fish, believing it to be difficult. They also dislike the smell of fish in the house, and the bones, and so the majority of fish eaten in the UK comes from the chippie or with a crumb coating.
You probably don’t think of a slow cooker as the way to introduce people to fish or seafood, but it’s a great fuss-free way to get to grips with cooking it, mainly because there is very little odour during or after cooking. Invaluable in a day and age when so many kitchens are part of the living room!
Fish and seafood doesn’t need the long cooking that many cuts of meat benefit from, but several hours cooking will give you tender and tasty cuts of fish using the natural abilities of the slow cooker to steam and poach food. You can copy the ‘just steam’ fish dishes available to buy, but for less money and with more variety. Seafood can also be cooked easily due to the capacity of the crock and it’s difficult to overcook either by a minute or two, which can often make all the difference with traditionally cooked fish.
WHOLE BAKED TROUT
Fish is a favourite meal for me when I’m eating alone. I am lucky enough to have an excellent fishmonger near me and I really enjoy picking out my fish of the week. There’s such a wide choice I don’t know what half of them are and constantly ask my fishmonger, Donna, questions. And then I buy a trout anyway because they are my absolute favourite fish. I’ve given the recipe here for trout, but I’ve also done mackerel, snapper, sea bream and sea bass the same way in the slow cooker. It’s so easy you can definitely experiment!
Take one whole trout with the head and tail still on. This makes it easier to cook the fish well and allows you to see how fresh the fish is. Look for bright sparkly eyes, shiny glossy scales and a tail that doesn’t look like it’s starting to droop. It shouldn’t smell fishy, at most it should smell of the sea. Ask the fishmonger to gut it if it’s whole.
Fill the inside of the fish with any of the following, depending how you feel: fresh dill, tarragon, rosemary, sage or parsley and lemon for a Mediterranean feel; fresh lemongrass, sliced red chilli, fresh ginger and star anise for an Asian feel; or fresh sliced tomatoes, onions, garlic, lime, whole allspice berries and Scotch bonnet peppers for a Caribbean version.
Season the skin
Melt the butter in a frying pan on the hob, add the shallots and bacon and sweat them both over a medium heat. You want the shallots to become translucent, but not coloured. The bacon should just start to crisp around the edges.
At this stage, add the chopped chicken livers and any liquid from them. Cook them for about 1 minute until they just start to change colour. Add the alcohol if you are using it and allow it to bubble slightly.
Pour in the cream and season. Sprinkle over the parsley and cook it all for 1–2 minutes until the livers are almost completely cooked. Remove from the heat immediately.
Blend with a hand blender until it is smooth, but retains a little bit of texture. Pour the mixture into a shallow dish or ramekins. Cover with foil. Set the dish into the slow-cooker crock and pour boiling water into the crock so that it comes about halfway up the side of the pâté dish.
Cook the pâté on low for 3 hours to firm up the texture. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before eating. It will keep for about 3 days in the fridge. Keep it covered, but don’t be surprised if the top of it oxidises and darkens slightly. This is natural and doesn’t affect eating it. Mine rarely lasts long enough for that to be an issue.
I love fish and seafood. It’s a family joke that if you left an old boot in the sea for long enough, I would eat it. Yet not as many British and Irish people share my love as you’d expect for island dwellers. One of the reasons for this is that they are unsure how to cook fish, believing it to be difficult. They also dislike the smell of fish in the house, and the bones, and so the majority of fish eaten in the UK comes from the chippie or with a crumb coating.
You probably don’t think of a slow cooker as the way to introduce people to fish or seafood, but it’s a great fuss-free way to get to grips with cooking it, mainly because there is very little odour during or after cooking. Invaluable in a day and age when so many kitchens are part of the living room!
Fish and seafood doesn’t need the long cooking that many cuts of meat benefit from, but several hours cooking will give you tender and tasty cuts of fish using the natural abilities of the slow cooker to steam and poach food. You can copy the ‘just steam’ fish dishes available to buy, but for less money and with more variety. Seafood can also be cooked easily due to the capacity of the crock and it’s difficult to overcook either by a minute or two, which can often make all the difference with traditionally cooked fish.
WHOLE BAKED TROUT
Fish is a favourite meal for me when I’m eating alone. I am lucky enough to have an excellent fishmonger near me and I really enjoy picking out my fish of the week. There’s such a wide choice I don’t know what half of them are and constantly ask my fishmonger, Donna, questions. And then I buy a trout anyway because they are my absolute favourite fish. I’ve given the recipe here for trout, but I’ve also done mackerel, snapper, sea bream and sea bass the same way in the slow cooker. It’s so easy you can definitely experiment!
Take one whole trout with the head and tail still on. This makes it easier to cook the fish well and allows you to see how fresh the fish is. Look for bright sparkly eyes, shiny glossy scales and a tail that doesn’t look like it’s starting to droop. It shouldn’t smell fishy, at most it should smell of the sea. Ask the fishmonger to gut it if it’s whole.
Fill the inside of the fish with any of the following, depending how you feel: fresh dill, tarragon, rosemary, sage or parsley and lemon for a Mediterranean feel; fresh lemongrass, sliced red chilli, fresh ginger and star anise for an Asian feel; or fresh sliced tomatoes, onions, garlic, lime, whole allspice berries and Scotch bonnet peppers for a Caribbean version.
Season the skin
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