To start with, I whisked egg yolks and sugar in a bowl until creamy. I then added gin and golden syrup, and again whisked everything together.

I then added some cream and whisked until soft peaks formed. Sorry – no photos of this – I whisked by hand and must have been too addled/tired at the end to take any photos.

Next, I roughly chopped some walnuts and folded them into the mixture, before putting the whole thing in a loaf tin and into the freezer. I ended up freezing it overnight, and was rewarded the next day with something very icecream-like in appearance. I also didn’t take any photos of this stage (as I was too busy eating the icecream) but here’s a photo of the tin when the icecream was about half eaten, just so you can see how much it made.

To serve, I chopped up a few more walnuts and sprinkled them on top.

The only difference between this and normal icecream is that it seemed to melt faster. In all other ways, it was icecream! The flavour of the gin clearly came through, and was complimented nicely by the walnuts. As someone who doesn’t like super-sweet things, I really like the idea of being able to control the amount of sugar in the final product. This basic recipe is also very forgiving and I have since made a rum and raisin version which was also delicious. I think as long as the correct ratio between alcohol and cream is maintained, any combination of flavours would be possible. The other great thing is that it’s now possible for me to make a close approximation of icecream without needing to get an icecream maker, which keeps both my bank balance and my (already cluttered) kitchen bench very happy!

Not having any Jamaican curry powder, I made my own using curry powder and allspice. I immediately knew this curry was going to be a success when I smelled the Jamaican curry powder.

I chopped all the meat into cubes, then added some of the curry powder to some oil. When that was heated, I added the meat to brown it – I had to do a few batches.

After all the meat was browned, I cooked garlic, ginger, onion and chilis in the flavoured oil, and when they were soft, I returned the meat to the pot. I added coconut milk, some water, dried thyme, and the remainder of my Jamaican curry powder.

I brought it to the boil, and then it was simply a matter of reducing it to a simmer and leaving it for about 3 hours. As you can see, the sun was starting to set when the curry was finally ready.

I did skip one step in the original recipe – I didn’t make any potatoes to put in the stew. Instead, I made some polenta to sop up the wonderful sauce that had formed.

This was a very nice curry and certainly a new flavour for me. The goat was nice, being slightly gamey but not overwhelmingly so – but I’m sure that beef would work well too. Leftovers the next day were even nicer as the flavours had more time to deepen and mingle. I really liked the taste of this curry and while spicy, it was more tasty with interesting flavours rather than just being hot. I was particularly happy I’d found such a great use for my goat – once I’d actually located it, of course…

I started by chopping up celery hearts and cantaloupe, trying to keep them approximately all the same size. I ended up using some normal celery pieces too, so I had a good ratio of celery to cantaloupe.

I made a dressing of tarragon vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. The recipe called for currant jelly to be added to the dressing; not having any currant jelly, I substituted plum jam. Here’s the dressing all mixed up.

I tipped the dressing over the salad, and added a generous amount of poppy seeds and coriander seeds.

I mixed these all together and served.

I admit I wasn’t sure of this. The crunch of the celery was nice, and the dressing provided a nice vinegary tang. However, the overwhelming sensation was one of sweetness, from the cantaloupe. I understand that the sweetness was mitigated somewhat by the dressing, poppy seeds and celery, but overall I thought this was too sweet for my thought of what a (savory) salad should be.

Nero Wolfe still hasn’t converted me to his way of thinking about sweet and savoury together. However, I am willing to continue experimenting with these recipes in the hope that Wolfe’s theory of sweet and savoury will grow on me.

Garlic: enemy of vampires and polite dinner parties alike. It appears that Nero Wolfe is not overly fond of garlic, except in shrimp bordelaise. He sometimes uses a miniscule amount, but in general seems to prefer using onion and other aromatics. Well, Nero Wolfe may well disapprove, but when I was presented with a large bunch of freshly picked garlic, I needed to put it to good use.

Roasted garlic

Once all the bulbs were washed, it was time to start looking at recipes. To start with, I put some pieces in a muffin tin and drizzled them with olive oil.

I covered the garlic with foil and roasted them in a hot oven for about an hour. This is not a particularly new way of preparing garlic but I really like garlic like this way. The roasting removes the sharpness, and the resulting pieces can be eaten as is, or blended into a paste (useful to add to sausages or stews).

Garlic soup

When reading through Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail, I was struck by his garlic soup recipe. It had an awful lot of garlic in it but the soup itself seemed that it would be soothing and mild. I began by adding a number of cloves to some chicken stock.

I left this to simmer for about 40 minutes, until the garlic was completely soft. I then removed all the cloves and squished them through a sieve to produce a fine garlic paste.

I added the paste back to the soup, and while it was heading up again, I quickly grilled some stale bread I had sprinkled with a bit of parmesan cheese.

I served the soup by adding pieces of the bread to it, so they absorbed the soup.

As promised, this soup was soothing and satisfying. The garlic produced an almost nutty flavour, which permeated the soup and made it somewhat creamy. As with the roasted garlic, the long cooking time meant the garlic was no longer sharp or strong in taste, allowing many other flavours to come through. I also really enjoyed the addition of the bread which added a nice texture and a bit of saltiness from the parmesan. This is definitely something that I think will become a regular fixture.

Pickled garlic

Finally, I decided to pickle some garlic. I used a recipe I found online (which I can’t find now!), and started by making a brine with vinegar, sugar and water. I brought this to the boil to dissolve the sugar, and also added the garlic to cook it briefly. I added some chili, fennel and peppercorns to a jar, and poured the brine and the garlic in with the other spices. I added a thin layer of olive oil on the top and left it to pickle.

The recipe I used said the garlic would be done in a couple of days – I ended up leaving mine for about a week and a half. I suppose it depends a bit on how pickled you like your garlic. I pickled mine until they were going a little soft, but were still quite firm inside and held their shapes well. The addition of the sugar meant they had a tangy sweet and sour flavour, which was very nice. I’ve used both the pickled garlic and the brine it pickled in, in salads, stews and so on, as the brine has also taken on a nice garlic flavour.

I think because we add garlic to so many different recipes, it’s easy to forget that it’s a great ingredient in its own right. These recipes certainly put garlic in the centre of the dishes created, and I appreciated learning new ways of preparing garlic.

They were billed as alphabet or printing press cutters, but we all know they’re really for writing cookie ransom notes and other suitably murderous messages. I wasted no time in putting these cookies to use, by making a suitably Nero Wolfe message.

I also tried a new sugar cookie recipe, by Sweet SugarBelle. I must say this will be my go-to sugar cookie recipe from now on – it doesn’t require chilling before using, the cookies rose consistently, and the cookies were very smooth on the top – perfect for decorating. I began to stamp out the letters.

I found the best method was to cut out the shape, then dip the cutter in flour and stamp the letter. I dipped the cutter after each stamp to ensure it didn’t stick to the dough. After cooking and cooling, I started decorating them. I stuck to simple colours but was able to vary the cookies by icing some of them in outline and filling some of them in.

And finally with all the letters coloured in.

So what message did I spell out? I wanted to do something Nero Wolfe-related…

Now, before you think that’s a little morbid, this is actually a quote from “Help Wanted, Male”, part of the Trouble in Triplicate collection, and it is mentioned that it is from a movie playing at the time of the case.

The great thing about this message – unlike the one in the story – is that you can quickly remove any trace of it in an effective and delicious way.

I’m sure there are lots of nice messages I can make with these cookies, but for now I’m thinking of more murderous messages I can make and send to people!

As I was starting with pre-cooked meat, I used the approach taken with the Saucisse Minuit recipe: make a slurry, add the meat, and mix everything together. I used some fat left over from making pork confit, and cooked some onions and garlic.

When the onions were softened, I added wine, pistachios and breadcrumbs, and mixed them together until it turned into the aforementioned slurry.

Meanwhile, I minced the pork meat (and some of the skin), and once the slurry had cooled, mixed everything together.

Meanwhile, I set to work making a sauce. I made a bechamel sauce, and thinned it down with wine and stock. I added some finely chopped mushrooms and let it all simmer together for a while. I didn’t want the sauce to be too creamy, so I added some red wine vinegar to provide some acidity and tanginess.

I’d already made some pasta dough, which had been chilling in the fridge until now. I started making the ravioli – which was fun for about the first 20, and got rather tedious after that…

As the filling was already cooked, I only needed to boil the ravioli for a couple of minute until they done. I served them with the mushroom sauce, with some basil on top.

It’s hard to make light-brown things look attractive, so you’ll have to take my word that this was a very nice combination. The ravioli were quite rich from the pork, there was the odd crunch from the pistachios and this was contrasted with the tangy mushroom sauce. I was very happy to find such a nice way to use up the remains of our Christmas feast, and, given the quantity I made, we can be reminded of Christmas for many meals to come.

When I’m not making brain-shaped headcheese or silly detective cookies, I work as an archivist. Some of the stereotypes are true – I do work in a basement, and sometimes I wear cardigans. However, archivists and records managers aren’t just interested in old stuff, and serious time and research has gone into looking at methods of preserving electronic information – which increasingly includes information contained on social media sites. The capturing and use of social media records is something I’m interested in, and the charcutepalooza twitter archive provided me with the opportunity to conduct some analysis.

I originally set up the charcutepalooza twapperkeeper archive in February so I could look back on the scheduled twitter chats as they were always held at a time when I couldn’t attend. In December, I was reminded that I’d set this thing up, and sure enough, it had continued to merrily tick along, capturing all tweets using the #charcutepalooza hashtag. Since I had this great data source to use, I thought I’d see if I could do some basic analysis and see if any trends emerged. I closely followed some of the analysis methods used by Dr Axel Bruns as part of the Mapping Online Publics project, after I saw him speak earlier this year.

Capturing the tweets

I originally created the Twapperkeeper archive on 14 February 2011. At that time, Twapperkeeper was one of the main ways I’d heard about to capture tweets on a particular keyword or hashtag. However, in March of 2011, the ability to export Twapperkeeper archives was removed, as this was deemed a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. This removed one of the most useful features of Twapperkeeper, but at least the tweets were still being captured. Then in early December 2011, Twapperkeeper announced it had been purchased by HootSuite, and that existing twapperkeeper archives would not be available after January 6, 2012, unless you moved to the (paid) HootSuite model.

Luckily (and thanks to twitter!), I was directed to the blog of Martin Hawksey, who had written a script to extract twapperkeeper archives into a google spreadsheet. I lost no time in immediately exporting the existing charcutepalooza archive to a google spreadsheet, and then set up a new google spreadsheet to continue capturing tweets using the charcutepalooza hashtag (thanks again to Martin Hawksey). This will continue to capture any tweets using the #charcutepalooza hashtag into the future.

Basic information

• The following analysis was done on tweets captured from 14 February – 28 December 2011 (so does not include the announcement of the finalists on 29 December and subsequent tweets)
• The archive contains all tweets tagged with the hashtag #charcutepalooza – but not tweets which do not have this hashtag. This means if you have replied to a #charcutepalooza-tagged tweet but have not used the hashtag, it won’t be in this collection
• It contains manual retweets (ie if you have used “RT”), but not retweets done using the automatic twitter retweet button

Some statistics

• Total number of tweets: 15,244 – which means an average of 1270 tweets per month and 48 tweets per day
• Number of words contained in tweets: over 235,000
• Number of retweets (using “RT”): 5042, meaning about 33% of the tweets were retweets
• Total number of tweeters: 1524 (including people who only used the hashtag once)
• Number who used the hashtag more than 10 times: 149
• Number who used the hashtag more than 50 times: 50 (while I haven’t cross-checked, I would suggest this would correspond with the final 33 participants, those who completed the majority of the challenges, plus leaders/advisors such as Mrs Wheelbarrow, Kim Foster, Michael Ruhlman and Bob Delgrosso.

Trends over time

Not surprisingly, there were many more tweets towards the start of charcutepalooza than in November-December. I suggest this is because many people signed up for charcutepalooza, and were very enthusiastic towards the start, but as people dropped out, and there was less publicity surrounding charcutepalooza month by month, the overall number of tweets reduced.

Tweets over time - click through for a bigger image

While the overall quantity of tweets reduced as the months progressed, there was a definite spike on the 15^th of every month – corresponding, of course, with the time that everyone’s posts for that month had to be in. There was a larger dip in posts in July (while it still spiked on the 15^th it was less dramatic than other months): it seems that the blending challenge did a few people in.

Top topics

When I first took a grab of the Twapperkeeper archive on December 11, I created this chart of the top words in the charcutepalooza tweets. This was done using wordle then some simple manipulation to get it into an appropriately-themed image. The size of the words relates to how often they were used.

Charcutepalooza keywords - click through for a larger version

I removed several symbols and words, such as “RT”, “@” and URLs. As you can see above, the top words also included people’s twitter names. I used a program called wordstat (you need to pay for it – I used the demo version) to analyse the text in the tweets. Here’s the top words in the tweets, once the word “charcutepalooza” and the names of participants were removed.

Top keywords - click through for a larger image

Not surprisingly, everyone announcing their new posts each month meant that “post” was the top word (I assume this was pushed higher by other people commenting saying “great post” and similar). Both Ruhlman and BobdelGrosso were also mentioned quite a lot; I suggest this is because of the twitter chats conducted each month, and people generally asking them questions. Most of the other words related to charcuterie ingredients or techniques (Wordstat also let me look at the top phrases – things like “corn beef” is probably no surprise, but my overall favourite was “miraculous crispy pig ear”!).

Here’s another look at the top words – the size of the bubbles indicates how frequently the words were used, and the different colours indicate the words were used together, or grouped frequently.

Click through for a larger version

Top tweeters

Finally, I wanted to look at who was tweeting, and the frequency. This is a graph with all tweeters who used the charcutepalooza hashtag more than 50 times.

Top tweeters - click through for a larger version

Not surprisingly, Mrs Wheelbarrow led the tweeting charge, by a fair amount. Some tweeters changed user names during the year; I grouped them together as the twapperkeeeper harvest had no way of knowing these were the same people (apologies if I missed anyone changing their name).

Another way of looking at the network between tweeters is to use the tags explorer, again developed by Martin Hawksey. This is set up to run off the google spreadsheet, so is only from December 16 onward, and does not contain the full charcutepalooza tweet set.

Network of charcutepalooza tweeters - click through to the live version

This is a live network – it will continue to expand with charcutepalooza tweets, and allows you to replay any users’ tweets and connections from December 16 onward (click on the username to be taken to the replay screen).

This map also tracks top contributors, which we already know, and something we don’t already know: top conversationalists. This looks at how many connections participants have with other participants (ie, how often they are replying, retweeting and generally interacting with other charcutepalooza participants), rather than total number of tweets.

Click through for a larger version

Here we have the interesting case of Janis Tester, who, while not being the person with the top number of tweets, has the most number of connections within the charcuteplaooza twitter network. This means she is probably directly replying to charcutepalooza tweets (and replying using the #charcutepalooza hashtag), and generally actively engaging with other charcutepalooza participants by commenting and retweeting their tweets. On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that Janet being the top conversationalist will not come as a surprise to any charcutepalooza participant

There’s definitely more analysis to be done on the charcutepalooza twitter collection but I’ll leave it there for now. Thanks for putting up with a non-food post!

We ordered  4-5kg pig, which came frozen. The amusing thing is that we had nowhere large enough to defrost it, except our shower. So in a scene reminiscent of a serial killer film, the pig was left in the shower to defrost. I’ll spare you the photos of the pig in the shower, but here it is in the sink once it got a nice rinse off.

It was such a nice little piggy! I had been concerned that it wouldn’t fit in our oven, but luckily I was able to just fit it onto our largest roasting tin, with its legs tucked underneath it. I put some pieces of garlic and ginger in the cavity. I sprinkled inside and out with salt and pepper, then covered both the ears and the snout with foil, to make sure they didn’t burn.

Then it was just a matter of waiting until the pig was done – about 3 hours. I should tell you that I was feverishly cooking for that entire 3 hour period, preparing delicious side dishes, but that would be a lie. Instead, I waited until the pig was done and resting, then made a simple salad of rocket and endive, and some asparagus with lemon, to go with the pig.

Almost finished cooking; crisping up the skin

Final plate of pig, with asparagus and salad

I had intended to make some maple jellies from the recipe by the Butcher’s Apprentice, thinking it would provide a nice contrast to the pork, but forgot completely until I sat down to eat. Needless to say, the pork was delicious, even without the jellies. The pork skin was ridiculously crispy, and the meat was super rich and flavoursome. Both the asparagus and the salad provided nice, vinegary, bitter contrasts to the pork.

To finish, I’d intended to make chocolate truffles; however, the filling never properly hardened (I think I added too much brandy!), so we ate scoops of the filling with some pieces of orange and a sriracha-sugar brittle I’d made to go on the top of the truffles.

In some ways it seemed so appropriate after a year of eating the insides of animals, we finished it off by eating the insides of some chocolates!

Other things we ate and drank, not shown:

• Mulled apple cider
• A punch with aperol, gin, champagne, orange juice and mint
• Mince pies, which I made the day before
• More panettone, this time with a caramel (dulce de leche) filling

I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday time! Regular posts will resume soon, once I emerge from this pork coma…

This isn’t so much a full relapse, as it is some recipe testing / investigation I did to find the perfect panettone recipe. Panettone, for those who are unaware, is an Italian sweet bread/cake, often served at christmas or new year’s. Around here, is certainly ubiquitous in Italian delis and supermarkets leading up to christmas. With H’s family being Italian, I decided I should try and make some panettone from scratch, and (if successful), give it away on christmas day. I’ve never had homemade panettone so was not sure what to expect.

To be honest, I think the reason I’ve never had homemade panettone is because it’s really time-consuming to make, and you need to start so long in advance! I started with this recipe, which I scaled down to make one (large) panettone, rather than multiple small ones.

I started by adding flour, yeast, milk and eggs, mixing them together before leaving them to rise. After this, I added additional egg yolks, sugar and vanilla essence. I mixed these all together before adding butter and mixing it further.

I left it to rise again before adding in mixed dried fruit and some grated orange and lemon peel.

I left it to rise again (about 3 hours had gone past by this time) before putting it into a bundt tin. I know this is not a traditional panettone shape but it seemed the best option out of the tins I had.

Leaving the dough to rise for another 30 minutes, I was finally able to bake the dough. It took about 45 minutes until it was done.

Once it was cooled, we sampled the finished panettone.

The panettone was quite nice, but almost too cake-like. I wasn’t sure if this was the way it was meant to be (having only had store-bought before) or if the recipe was out. I decided to try another recipe to compare.

The next time, I tried this recipe, which I did not bother to scale down. I started with yeast, a little bit of flour and water, and let the yeast bloom. I added more flour, eggs, sugar and the rest of the yeast and water. After this was mixed, I added softened butter, mixed it in well, and then left the whole thing to rise.

After this first rise, I added more egg yolks, sugar, honey, more butter and the rest of the flour, and again mixed until it was all combined. And again, I let it rise until doubled in size.

Rather than adding dried fruits to this one, I thought it would nice to try the homemade nutella I’d previously made. I turned the dough out onto the counter, kneaded it a few times, then added the nutella.

Already this was a big improvement over the last dough; it was not as goopy and I could knead it without a problem. Overall, it seemed drier and closer to bread dough than cake batter. I was able to incorporate a large amount of nutella, before I put it in the tin and left it to rise for the last time.

This one rose more dramatically than the last one and I had to trim it once it came out of the oven. I let it cool, then we cut a slice to sample.

This was must more like the panettone I was used to. It pulled apart nicely, and was lighter than the previous one. It was the perfect balance of cake and bread. This will definitely the recipe I’ll use to hand out panettone gifts.

This panettone was far nice than the store-bought one, and in that sense I’m very glad I made it. It is not a difficult recipe, but does require forward planning and a lot of time to let the dough rise, rise and rise again. As long as you have the time and remember when it’s time to do the next step, this is well worth the effort.

There are lots of recipes for nutella around. I ended up using this recipe, as it seemed like the easiest of the lot, and didn’t require the sourcing of ingredients such as powdered milk. I also cheated a bit by buying pre-roasted and skinned hazelnuts so I skipped the step of needing to roast the hazelnuts. I therefore started by grinding up the hazelnuts in my miniature food processor.

I melted the chocolate and butter together, and when it was all melted, I added it to the ground hazelnuts and again blended it until it was combined.

My grinder is so small, I ended up having to do it in batches. I added a splash of milk just to thin it out, and was finally rewarded with a giant bowl of nutella.

It wasn’t perfectly smooth like the store-bought stuff, but I actually preferred it with a little bit of texture. I admit I had to do some taste tests while I was making it – just to make sure it was OK, you understand.

Apart from just eating a giant bowl of nutella, there were a few things I did with it. Being close to christmas, I decided to give some away as presents. I found some labels I thought would be good gift tags which I altered to add details about what I was giving (ironically, the person I was giving them to is a coeliac and may well have appreciated the original, gluten-free labels I’d altered!). I packed the nutella into some small jars and added the tags.

I did use the nutella in other things (as you will see shortly) but must admit that some of the nutella was just eaten straight from the bowl, not even making it onto a slice of toast. I think everyone should give this a go – it’s a lot nicer than the store-bought stuff – the only problem is I can’t see it lasting very long in anyone’s house!