A recipe, Coles and Curtis Stone - this and that

2 days ago
5 min read

The recipe in question is from Curtis Stone, in the current Coles Magazine - Lemon-garlic fettucine with crisp chickpeas.

I started out today thinking I would do a whole post on crisp chickpeas as they seem to be turning up everywhere I look these days, so when they turned up in the Coles Magazine in this very tempting recipe, from a professional chef, such as Curtis Stone - well he does have at least one Michelin star - I'm not sure how many - I thought I might look closely at the recipe to see if there was anything else to ponder on.

Top chef, top photographer - Ben Dearnley, top stylist - Steve Pearce - all designed, I suppose to give you the idea that Coles can be classy as well as aware of the problems of the everyday, and not very wealthy housewife. And how they use Curtis Stone in the magazines demonstrates this.

Earlier in the magazine we see Curtis Stone in matey mode making BBQ steaks with potato mash, salad and mushroom sauce with Ash Barty, much loved tennis legend who gave it all up for the quiet life. Well semi quiet life I'm guessing. So we get a few fairly inane questions and answers although you can also watch a video of the whole thing - I just did and there is not much to it - same thing really only with action. It looks like Ash Barty does actually make it herself, but who knows, though I will say that in the video she tosses the mushrooms in the pan in a rather professional manner. It's a simple meal - the kind of thing that most people could make without a recipe but there are tiny cheffy touches in the mushroom sauce - tarragon and Worcestershire sauce. Nevertheless this is definitely aimed at the 'ordinary' cook.

Then a few pages on we have Curtis in teacher mode, telling the 'ordinary' cook everything you need to know about cooking steak. And I have to say that it is a very useful little lesson. What cut to choose, how to cook, how to know when it's done - technicque and very useful illustrations.

Finishing with three more Curtis Stone recipes - the rump steak that went with the barigoule carrots I featured recently, Mustard-pepper sizzle steaks with creamed mushrooms and T-bone steaks with gremolata butter, which is actually even simpler than the 'ordinary' steak dinner he cooked with Ash Barty, but because they use the same high-class pictorial team, it looks classy.

I know this all sounds like an ad for Coles, and I do indeed admire the magazine, but I never forget that the magazine is a marketing tool - not the least because of the use they make of their ambassador Curtis Stone - a real chef, and a likeable personality to boot. It's just clever.

Plus various Coles products are listed in the ingredients, and beneath the picture for the T-bone steak we have a largeish promotion for their T-bone steak. Limited edition - which makes it somehow superior - well they hope so. No added hormones - promoting their environmental greatness, even with yet more cooking tips 'says Curtis'.

Not to mention the promotion of one of their Liquorland wines to drink with the steak.

Make no mistake the entire magazine is a hugely successful marketing exercise - for the people that read it, and a source of income from the suppliers who advertise within it. I imagine the income derived from the advertisers does more than cover the costs of producing the magazine. - and paying Curtis Stone. Well it's not very good business if it doesn't is it?

So much for the Curtis Stone element of my recipe of the day, other than to note that the recipe comes from a section called Curtis Stone's guide to citrus which it isn't really. It's just three recipes plus a box which tells you what to pair lemons, limes and pink grapefruit with - demonstrated by this recipe for Poached salmon with beurre blanc, fennel and grapefruit - which I have to say does look really good - but alas I'm not allowed to eat grapefruit because of taking statins.

The third recipe in the section is for a Velvety pound cake with lime glaze - which I confess did not appeal to me, but that's because I'm not a huge fan of pound cake.

I will add however, that each of these recipes is clearly explained step by step. No guessing is involved.

Back to the pasta. The pasta recipe is made of three elements - the pasta itself of course, confit lemon peel and those crisp chickpeas plus how to bring those three elements together at the end.

Confit lemon peel in this recipe is not the kind of common cheffy topping for sweet things such as puddings, creams and possets, nor its related candied lemon peel. Nor is it preserved lemons.

No, what we have here is what I actually understood 'confit' to mean - something poached in olive oil - which can be taken a step further to preserve sliced lemons, as here with this recipe for Lemon confit in olive oil - California Greek Girl - who uses cinnamon and bay leaves in her preserving mixture.

What Curtis Stone is doing is cooking his shredded lemon peel slowly in oil, with some thinly sliced garlic. Some of the oil is used in the making of the crispy chickpeas, and some is used for the finishing presentation of the dish.

And what about those chickpeas that really started me off on all of this? Because I had been aware of what seemed to be a trend in scattering crispy chickpeas over things, so today I looked it up and found that, of course I am years out of date, and you have been able to buy packaged crispy chickpeas since 2012 - which is about when it all began. The time when everyone was into health foods.

There's not really much more to say about them. And there are lots of people telling you how to do it. Mostly they seem to roast the cooked chickpeas - doing that rolling them between two tea towels to remove the skins thing first; making sure they are really dry before you cook them, and then roasting them in a very hot oven - well spread out - until they are crispy. Heidi Swanson on her 101 Cookbooks website shows you how - as do dozens of others.

Curtis Stone however - well this is the Coles Magazine, not a classy cookbook - fries his, although that said, even though he uses a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained - he does do the rubbing off the skin thing. He fries them in some of the oil from the confit lemons, cools them a bit and then crushes them to crumbs, before sprinkling them on at the end of the whole process.

The dish is finished by melting some butter, adding the rest of the confit lemon mixture, tossing with the pasta, adding and tossing some pecorino cheese - on a very low heat he tells us or it will 'clump together', and finishing off with lemon juice, those chickpeas, some more lemon zest and more cheese. And I should say that pasta water is added as necessary to make it all creamy.

Others have had similar ideas. Nothing is new under the sun after all - Lemon herb roasted chickpeas + bucatini - Orchids and Sweet Tea; Creamy lemon chickpea pasta/The Kitchn; and Double lemon linguine with roasted chickpeas/Rhubarb and Cod for starters.