Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker (15 page)

Smoked haddock is a simple thing. Don’t buy the sort that is luridly yellow in colour, but more muted in tone, cook it slowly and simply and it will reward you by being delicious. It’s perfect in the slow cooker, especially as it keeps any fishy smells self contained.

Pour 2–3cm of milk into the slow-cooker crock. Don’t use skimmed; full-fat or semi-skimmed is best. Add a generous knob of unsalted butter and a selection of the following herbs: dill, thyme, chives and rosemary. Season with white pepper. This amount of milk should cover up to 4 fillets of fish. Add a little more if you are cooking more.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and gently poach the haddock on low for 2 hours. Lift out of the milk carefully with a slotted spoon and serve with a freshly poached egg for a gorgeous breakfast or brunch.

I really like salmon because it can be served hot or cold and it’s a versatile ingredient that features in many dishes from around the world. I used salmon steaks here as they cook well and they tend to be less expensive than salmon fillet.

Try to get salmon steaks that are at least 2–3cm thick (4cm is even better here, so don’t be afraid to ask the fishmonger to cut them specially). A specialist fishmonger will be used to such requests and the supermarket fishmonger will be happy to have something different to do.

Fish is traditionally poached in a
court bouillon
, which is a stock made from carrot, celery, onion, black pepper and bay leaves. This adds more flavour than water alone and is very easy to make.

Chop a carrot, two stalks of celery and an onion into the slow-cooker crock. Add a teaspoon of black peppercorns and sea salt and a bay leaf. Set the salmon steaks on top of this all.

Add just enough cold water to cover the fish. You can do two layers of steaks with this amount of court bouillon and the cooking time will be the same for four steaks as one. Put the lid on the slow cooker and poach the fish on high for 2 hours. Turn the heat off and allow the fish to sit for 5 minutes.

Lift the steaks out of the
court bouillon
with a slotted spoon and serve warm as a part of a meal or allow to cool to make delicious salads or sandwiches. This is a perfect summer dish, when cold poached salmon just seems so right alongside summer sun and a small glass of Pimm’s with lots of cucumber. You can skip the standing over a hot stove bit and go straight to the cold drink in a deckchair bit too…

On Sunday afternoons at my granny’s house, afternoon tea in front of the fire wasn’t complete without a tinned salmon sandwich. Fresh salmon was a once a year event in those days, but tinned salmon was the taste of childhood. It was often accompanied by a slice or two of cucumber and a dollop of salad cream and I adored it.

So it seemed apt to find the basis of this recipe in a handwritten cookbook of my granny’s. Designed to make a tin of salmon serve lots of people, it combines leftover mashed potato and breadcrumbs to lighten it. It makes a lovely lunch with some garden peas or is excellent for a picnic. I just have to serve mine with salad cream. Old habits die hard.

SERVES 4 WITH LEFTOVERS

115g mashed potato

75g breadcrumbs

1 × 212g tin pink salmon, drained

1 tablespoon capers, drained

½ lemon, zested (if waxed, give it a vigorous scrub under the hot tap first)

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

50g fresh parsley and dill (optional), chopped

2 eggs, beaten

salt and pepper

I’m not entirely au fait with the concept of leftover mash as I tend to be able to eat all the mash I make, no matter how much there is, so I often use instant mash when a recipe calls for a small amount. Use whichever is easiest for you here.

Put the mashed potato in a large bowl along with the breadcrumbs and flake the salmon into it. Add the capers, lemon zest and cider vinegar and herbs, if using, and season well.

Beat the eggs into it all and mix until well combined. The mixture will come together without being sticky. Put it all into a greased loaf tin and cover with foil.

Place the covered loaf tin in the slow cooker and fill the crock with boiling water so the water comes about two-thirds of the way up the tin. Steam on low for 3–4 hours.

You will end up with something similar to a terrine in texture. Turn the loaf out onto a plate and serve in slices. As well as being an excellent vehicle for salad cream, this is lovely with a fried egg for breakfast.

See that sceptical look you have about being able to cook salmon in the slow cooker? Be prepared to replace it with a very impressed one because you can cook the perfect steamed salmon in there with almost no effort. This would make a fantastic centrepiece for Christmas or Easter or a family meal where you want to spend more time with your family than your kitchen.

You can scale this recipe up to a much bigger piece, although I don’t recommend scaling it down. For each 100g more in weight, give it another 20 minutes cooking.

SERVES 2–4 WITH LEFTOVERS

vegetable oil

650g fresh salmon fillet

25g fresh dill

1 medium courgette (about 150g), grated

1 lemon, sliced

salt and pepper

Make sure your salmon fillet is cut into two roughly equal-sized pieces so you can make a salmon sandwich out of it.

Lay a large piece of foil out on the worktop. Brush it lightly with vegetable oil and place one piece of the salmon on it skin side down. Season it well with salt and pepper.

Mix the dill in with the grated courgette and then put the courgette on top of the salmon. Put the other piece of salmon on top of the courgette, flesh side up. Place the lemon slices on top of the salmon skin.

Wrap up this salmon sandwich up tightly in the foil and place it on top of some reusable baking liner in the slow-cooker crock.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the salmon on low for 2 hours 45 minutes. Lift the salmon out, unwrap it and remove the lemon slices before serving.

Serve the salmon cold or at room temperature along with some green beans or a potato salad.

I cannot enthuse enough about mackerel. A truly beautiful fish with its gorgeous grey markings, it’s one of the healthy oily fish we are encouraged to eat more of. Not only that, it’s sustainable, not seasonal, usually local to British waters and inexpensive to buy. It’s the perfect fish for me.

Sousing is a traditional way to serve fish in Britain. It’s more or less poaching the fish in an acidic solution such as vinegar to preserve it in the fridge for up to a week, but isn’t quite as intense as pickling it to last for months. It’s a perfect method for mackerel or herring as the sharpness of the vinegar cuts through the rich oiliness of them. I like it for lunch on some rye crispbread as one mackerel fillet goes a long way, making it very economical as well as easy.

You need your mackerel filleted for this recipe. A fishmonger will be able to do this without any trouble, even those in the supermarket. You can also do it at home if you can only get mackerel whole. I’ve done it with help from some of the instruction videos you can access online. Either way, make sure your mackerel are very fresh. They should be shiny with bright eyes and no fishy smell.

SERVES 4–6 (DEPENDING ON HOW YOU SERVE IT)

1 red onion

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

½ teaspoon sea salt

4 cloves

2 fresh mackerel, filleted

150ml wine or cider vinegar

150ml water

Slice your onion as thinly as possible and add half of it to the crock. Scatter the herbs and seasoning on top of it and lay the mackerel fillets on it all. Place the rest of the onion on top and pour the vinegar and water over it all. The fish should be completely submerged.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the fish on high for 1 hour 30 minutes. Turn the heat off and remove the lid, allowing the fish to cool down in the vinegar liquor. This helps souse them beyond the initial cooking to add flavour.

After about an hour’s cooling, remove the fish from the slow cooker and serve along with the onion as part of a salad or as a light starter with bread. You can also put them into a glass jar, cover with the vinegar and a bit more water and keep them for up to a week in the fridge. They’ll get sharper in flavour the longer they sit, so I usually serve the last of them with something like avocado to balance it out.

Mussels remain an inexpensive seafood since they are abundantly available in and around the British Isles. They are generally in season when there’s an R in the month and since they are packed with flavour and much more filling than you’d imagine, they can make a great dinner with lots of crusty bread. The advantage to using the slow cooker is that cooking mussels in the shell takes up a lot of space and you never seem to have a pan big enough to make it worth your while. However, a crock makes it very easy indeed.

SERVES 2 AS A MAIN MEAL OR 4 AS A STARTER

1kg fresh mussels in the shell

200g cherry tomatoes

2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced

1 anchovy, chopped

200ml beer (something darker, rather than a very light lager, is best)

fresh flat-leaf parsley, to serve

salt and pepper

Begin by cleaning your mussels, even if they have come in a net bag from a fishmonger’s counter. Scrub them under cold running water, making sure they close when tapped or poked. If they don’t, they are most likely dead and must be discarded, along with any broken ones. Pull the wiry beards out of the shells and then soak the mussels in cold water for 10–15 minutes to remove any grit or sand.

Halve the cherry tomatoes and add to the crock along with the finely sliced garlic and the anchovy. Put the cleaned mussels in and season carefully, bearing in mind the saltiness of the anchovy and the brininess of the mussels.

Pour the beer over it all. I used Guinness as I had some left from another recipe, but you could use anything with a bit of flavour. Bear in mind that the Belgians are equally famed for beer and mussels.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the mussels on high for 1 hour. Serve the mussels in bowls with some of the lovely beer-infused liquor at the bottom and some fresh parsley on top. Some crusty bread is perfect or, if you’ve got the Belgian thing going, some skinny little
frites
are excellent.

Use the shell of the first mussel you eat to then extract the meat, pincer-like, from all the other mussels. This is much easier than using a fork. Don’t forget to discard any mussels that haven’t opened during cooking as they aren’t safe to eat even if you can lever them open.

You’ll also realise that the slow-cooker crock comes into its own as a great big dish for the empty shells as you go. The most mess-free mussels possible.

You may not immediately think of octopus as a budget ingredient, but I’ve often seen them marked down on the wet fish counter in supermarkets or frozen ones in the Chinese supermarkets and considering there is no waste on a cleaned one, they become very good value.

Octopus is much more robust than its cousin, the squid, so it needs longer cooking to make it tender and melt in the mouth. This makes it perfect for the slow cooker. Set aside any scepticism or squeamishness and you will be rewarded. You can also use baby octopi, just keep them whole and halve the cooking time.

This is such a simple summer dish to make with very little effort.

SERVES 4 AS PART OF A MAIN MEAL

1 onion, halved

1 lemon, halved

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

1 whole octopus or 8–10 baby ones (approximately 1kg), cleaned

500ml boiling water

Put the onion, lemon and seasonings in the slow-cooker crock and nestle your octopus on top of them. Pour the boiling water over them all. This ‘scares’ the octopus so its tentacles bunch up slightly and it looks a bit tense. Doing this actually helps it become more tender, so don’t skip this stage.

Pour enough cold water into the crock to cover the octopus, put the lid on and cook on low for 5–6 hours. You don’t want to boil the octopus, you want it to come to heat slowly and gently so this mix of water is essential.

Lift the octopus out with a slotted spoon. It will have shrunk slightly and darkened in colour, becoming more purple than when it was raw. This is normal. The water will be a fantastic pinky purple shade.

Allow the octopus to cool slightly; it is best not served piping hot. I cut it into 4cm chunks across the body and the tentacles into two pieces and toss it through a Tomato Sauce like
here
and serve with a pasta like tagliatelle and a little chopped chilli or I make Octopus, Polenta and Pepper Salad (see
here
).

This is a simple recipe that uses many ingredients you have around the house and is substantial enough to have with a glass of something white and chilled while sitting in the sun if you have it as a summer lunch.