A Quick Snail Recipe

You would think that if you pulled the shell off a snail it would move quicker. I tried but if anything it made it sluggish.....

Many thanks to our favourite peace artist Mr Gerald Leonardo Salvador Vincent Pablo Dinnage for that one which leads me boldly into my first post of 2011 after totally hurdling 2010 for a variety of reasons none of which were due to the lack of decent nosh which we have lobbed down our gob holes. Indeed 2010 has been the Year Of The Gadget in the Casa del B. We’ve been given a magnificent manual sausage filler by my Godfather. We bought a table top pizza oven (makes unbelievable pizzas in about four minutes), a juice maker, a new rice steamer (wore the old one out), a vacuum sealer, a bread maker and finally coughed up the heady sum of £24 in Ingerlund this Crimbo for a slow cooker.

And to boot I’ve made my own bacon as well as a parma ham, both of which turned out rather well. Next up will be home made black pudding after I bought enough dried pigs blood to make 15 kgs of finished pud.

But back to the gastropods. Seeing as Mrs B and myself “enjoy” a large lunch each day at our respective places of toil we tend to eat lightly of an evening. I suppose we do supper now, not dinner. Anyway we’d had a punnet of parsley in the fridge which needed using, there was a half a packet of butter that couldn’t have been more than a few weeks past its sell-by date and finally there was a tin of snails in the cupboard (as there often is).

And this is what I came up with, basically in an attempt to use up rather a lot of parsley.

Poor Homeless Garlic Snails With Parsley and Garlic Purée

20-24 or so snails serves 2 for a light meal or 4 as a starter

A tin of snails (always a good idea to have another tin in hand as I opened one once only to find it contained but five snails)
Half a packet of butter
A bag/punnet/big bunch of parsley (flat-leaf or curly) including the stalks
Plenty of cloves of garlic
A splash of white wine
Salt and pepper
Crusty bread or baguettes

Ok, start by draining the snails then leaving them for a few minutes to soak in cold water. If you give them a good sniff before you do this you’ll understand why I do it. They do tend to pong and the soaking in fresh water seems to loosen the flesh up a tad, making them even more tender than usual.

To make succulent, juicy garlic snails warm the butter in a saucepan on a medium-low heat with as much chopped garlic as is legally allowed. The idea is to extract as much garlicness from it without actually frying it. If you keep it gently simmering along you can set this going a good half hour or more before you need it. The garlic will eventually disintegrate which is a very good thing. Then when almost ready give it a spludge of white wine then delicately roll in the snails (or just bung them in). These need but a gentle warming through, giving them enough time to absorb the holy garlicbutteryness but without actually cooking them. Finally season with salt and pepper.

Now for the parsley purée. Wash the parsley well then bung it into salted boiling water with a fistful of chopped garlic for two or three minutes. Then, after draining, lob it in a blender/food processer, give it a blitz, season with some finely ground black pepper (and salt if required).

To serve put a couple of spoonfuls of purée on a warmed plate or, preferably, a shallow bowl and flatten it out in a circular motion leaving a couple of centimetres gap to the edge of said serving receptacle. Place some snails in the middle of the purée then pour the garlicybutteryness around the edge of it all. Serve with crusty bread. This is simply the best garlic snails I’ve ever had. The parsley purée is simply a revelation. And, funnily enough, it’s healthier than your normal escargots a la bourguignonne as you use less butter and more gweenewy. Not that I give a thlying thuck about calorie counting, mind....

If snails don’t thingy one’s dingy then one can use fungi instead. My way of cooking mushrooms is a bit different to how I understand is “the right way” where you fry them on a very high heat. I prefer to:

1) Keep my mushrooms, be they whatever type/breed/persuasion, in large bits/slices/chunks
2) Fry them in a little olive oil on a medium heat, they must not burn.
3) Just as they start to give off liquid remove from pan
4) Make the garlicbutterconcoction from above in same cooking vessel
5) Return mushrooms and reheat through

By doing them this way the mushrooms retain a nice bite and texture. I’ve used normal and brown mushrooms as well as Portobello and chanterelles. One day, one autumn, one year, I’ll get to do a bit of proper mushroom hunting coz I just know ceps would taste fantastic like this.

We’re off to Barcelona for four days of gastronomic exploration at the end of the month. This time we’ve rented a rather nice looking apartment overlooking the harbour in Barceloneta. The idea is that, on top of eating in restaurants and bars, we can buy stuff in the various markets to take home and prepare. Goose barnacles are top of our “must buy” list. Can’t-Bloody-Wait.