Archive for the 'Food' Category

What have I been cooking this week?

Published on Sunday, 29th August, 2010 in Food and Ramblings. 3 Comments

Well. After a few weeks of cooking nothing at all and eating rubbish, this week I’ve cooked loads – but not necessarily eaten terribly well.

For Pudding Club on Tuesday, I made celery and stilton soup, rillettes de porc, and onion and bacon fougasse.

Celery and stilton soup as per this Gordon Ramsey recipe, pretty much as writ. Ended up rather stringy, and apparently the way to avoid this is to take a potato peeler to the ridgey side of the celery sticks before you chop them up.

Twenty years ago, when my despairing parents were trying to get us to eat more vegetables, celery made its appearance for the first time in our household, finely chopped, in casseroles. We were deeply suspicious – and they wouldn’t tell us what it was. It went by the name “crinkle cut onions” for a quite a while. These days, I’m a big fan of celery, raw with cheese and grapes, with the leaves sticking out of a Bloody Mary, finely chopped in soffrito-based sauces and cooking, and of course in casseroles.

The rillettes de porc came from this recipe on Dried Basil and again was pretty much as per the recipe. Except… I used pork belly rashers rather than a single joint, as that was what was available. 500grams of pork rendered down to two ramekinsworth. Halfway through the cooking it looked scarily like all that water was never going to disappear, but all was fine by the end of the cooking. And it proved quite tricky to pour the melted fat from the baking dish to the serving dish without just getting it everywhere. This would make a fantastic dinner party starter, but a whole ramekinsworth is way too much for an individual serving, so I would have to find some way of presenting it in smaller portions if being fancy.

The bacon and onion fougasse came from this recipe, again, made pretty much as per the instructions, except that their picture of a fougasse is awful! I was really trying to make mine look a little more like these gorgeous pictures on a random Scandiwegian flickr account:

Fougasse Fougasse Fougasse Fougasse Fougasse Fougasse

But it didn’t quite come out like that, and my version was more like the BBC Good Food version that I would have liked. It was also more than halfway to pretzel – but tasted damn fine, if I do say so myself.

Hmm, bacon and onion fougasse looks like some awful scary horror mask. Bacon and onion fougasse

So, that was Tuesday. Also this week, Kathryn’s post prompted me to make a carrot cake – I think the recipe is the same one, and can be found on the net here. Mostly per recipe, but I didn’t have the right nuts so used mixed chopped; and discovered very late in that I have run out of sultanas, so substituted candied peel, which I did have.

I think this was also my second use of my food processor’s grating attachment. I remember it as being hugely wasteful, but it got through the three carrots in the blink of an eye and did a really good job, with only a small amount of the tail end of the carrot ungrated.

And rewatching 30 Rock last week sent me googling to try and find out what a “snickerdoodle” is – at one point Liz Lemon is being nice to her team and they start expecting her to bake snickerdoodles for them.

Turns out they are pretty simple but tasty biscuits. I found a recipe on Joy of Baking. By the time it came to make them, I was running low on eggs, so I halved the recipe. That still came out with well over two dozen finished biscuits, which is more than enough for us.

Chatting about 30 Rock on Tuesday was enough to finally convince P he would like to try and watch it, so a box set has been procured to take with us on honeymoon. I have no objection to watching it yet again!

Here’s a pic of the weekend’s cakes:

So, snickerdoodles and carrot cake.

Dried Basil

Published on Monday, 23rd August, 2010 in Food. 0 Comments

Quite by chance I came across the food blog of an old friend, started last year some time, and full of absolutely delicious looking things, most of which aren’t too difficult, but look really nice.

It’s here: Dried Basil and Other Heresies

I haven’t been cooking at all much lately. P’s been eating in the canteen at lunchtime at work, and I’m supposed to be subsisting off misery pouches, but instead am mostly eating too much butter and cheese, bagels and crackers and nothing of any real substance.

So having spent the weekend reading through the Dried Basil recipes, when it came to popping up to the supermarket to restock the fruit bowl, I found myself stocking up on the ingredients for half of the things that had been written about. Regrettably, my supermarket does not appear to sell the much-celebrated pre-prepped soffritto mix.

This evening we’ve had Adult Hot Chocolate, (and resolved to have less than a giant mugful each next time). Meanwhile, I’m marinating chicken pieces in a heady mix of marmalade, lemon juice, garlic, ginger and Angostura Bitters for Sticky Chicken tomorrow. I also have the ingredients for rillettes and pommes boulangères knocking about and shall give it a go when three hours of oven time opens up.

The manifesto is well worth a butchers too – I particularly like “Life’s too short for instant coffee” and will be shamelessly reusing that one.

Jellies and blancmanges

Published on Sunday, 22nd August, 2010 in Food. 0 Comments

Today’s Food Programme is talking about jellies, and how they should be revived.

Not sugar free sachet powder jelly (although when I’m being good dietwise, I often use these a free sweet). And not the wobbly superconcentrate blocks of coloured jellies.

More the homemade jellies set with gelatin or vegan seaweed based setting agents.

I’ve had a few goes at interesting things like this – and you can find the recipe for a strawberry / rosé wine jelly here.

I have also made a blancmange from scratch, but it seems that I haven’t ever written that up here.

There’s a picture of the bunny blancmange shortly before it fell apart:

Tonight's pudding club - homemade spicy blancmange (blackberry coulis not pictured)

And the recipe for this is over at Nibblous.

Pudding club: BBQ special

Published on Sunday, 27th June, 2010 in Food and Ramblings. 0 Comments

Pudding club was at our house today as we celebrated the hottest day of the year with a barbecue in our back garden. Which is not looking bad right now, but will look better when a) the Thomson & Morgan “instant cottage garden” bundle arrives and b) when/if the plants grow.

I don’t do barbecues that often, but when I do there’s a few things I always do. Today, I added in a few more things.

The one meaty thing I’ve been doing for ages is a chicken satay. Take mini-breast fillets1 and marinate overnight in chopped ginger, garlic and chillies, with lime juice, sherry, oil and soy sauce helping out with liquid.

Now mostly in years past, I have just bought a pack of satay sauce and that is nice enough. But today my car wouldn’t start, so I couldn’t go to the big supermarket, and so I had to make it out of store cupboard ingredients. Chop a clove of garlic and a chilli and lightly fry. Add in about 6 tbsps chunky peanut butter and enough coconut milk to make it a barely-runny consistency.

Get the chicken out of the marinade, and run skewers through it, then cook on the barbecue until done, and pour the sauce over the top.

There were also burgers and sausages as per norm, without a great deal of thought in them. Just buy burgers, making your own decision about price vs quality and cook until cooked.

This time, I made all the bread: Dan Lepard’s onion hotdog rolls formed into long thin rolls for sausages; and a batch of burger buns made with 700grams breadflour, 350mls milk, yeast, oil, sugar, salt and beaten egg for glazing, based loosely on a recipe found here.

In all the heat, the two batches of bread dough didn’t so much as rise as collapse sideways off the edge of the baking tray, so the resultant cobs were a little on the flat side, and bigger than intended, but all tasted nice enough in the end.

In terms of sides, I made Manda’s delicious tepid salad of mushrooms, lentils and pearl barley in a balsamic reduction; a really sharp coleslaw of red cabbage, apple, carrot with a honey vinaigrette (which could have used more honey, to be honest); and one of our guests brought that day’s harvest of potatoes duly saladed.

But it was the dessert that was really good and definitely something I will do again: Grilled pineapple. After the meat was done and the barbecue was cooling, I took a fresh pineapple and cut it into 6, removing the tough core but leaving the skin and leaves on for decoration. A quick go on the barbecue is enough, cooking all sides until they get a visible griddle pattern, and a bit longer on the skin side, because that’s tough and can take it.

The warm pineapple is delicious enough by itself: all the huge flavour of ordinary fresh pineapple but with with slightly less chewing.

If your barbecue is the sort of affair where you sit around a table with knives and forks, you might like to serve up the bits of pineapple straight from the grill. However, by this point, we were all sitting on the floor in the “glade” bit of my garden2 so I chopped the pineapple into chunks, put it in a bowl, and let people help themselves with skewers.

What really made it, though, was an aromatic sugar syrup I had made the night before: 300 grams of sugar in half a litre of water, boiled up with a chopped chilli, a branch of thyme and a finely sliced lime. This, poured over the pineapple bits, was just lush.

  1. my friends don’t trust me to cook bone-in chicken safely on an open fire, and whilst they’ve all gone for gas barbecues, for me, it’s all about having a fire [↩]
  2. I have a glade and a fountain. At least that’s what we call it – it’s not nearly so grand as I like to make it sound [↩]

Pudding club: foraging for food

Published on Tuesday, 22nd June, 2010 in Food. 0 Comments

Another post that has been very long in the writing.

I’m growing very slowly and gradually in the stuff I eat from hedgerows. I urge everyone to make their own elderflower cordial at around about this time each year. It’s really easy, the ingredients are easy to find, and elderflowers are everywhere in England at least. My recipe is here. This year I also have some elderflower gin which needs to steep in a darkened place for another few weeks yet, and which I will report on in the fullness of time. Loosely based on this recipe.

In years past I have made things with blackberries – I’ve only just finished a blackberry vodka made by steeping blackberries in a jar with vodka for a couple of days, then straining. Bramble jelly has been a favourite too, and a bramble / apple jelly also.

But beyond that, I have not been terribly adventurous when it comes to eating things that can be picked in the park for free.

A few weeks ago, that changed. Inspired by Alys Fowler’s Edible Garden TV series we made dandelion pancakes and nettle soup.

Picking the nettles was… interesting. There’s a huge patch around the corner from me, so I donned some of P’s cleaning gloves1 and went to pick them. Standing in front of the nettles, even with protected hands, it was actually quite hard to summon up the courage to grasp the stems and pick them. Aversion to the sting is obviously very deeply ingrained from childhood.

Standing there in front of them, I was reminded of a story about an Australian friend of mine living and working in London, where he was unexposed to wildlife. When, however, he went on a choir tour the countryside, he returned with a very long face. “No-one told me about nettles!” he said. And I don’t suppose anyone did. English children learn very early on not to touch the nasty jagged-leaved hairy beasties and it would never have occurred to me that they are not common in Oz, home to nastier plants and nastier insects than almost anywhere else on the plant.2

Anyway. The vinyl gloves protected me from the stings. For the first four stems. On the fifth, the nettle won, and so I returned home and got the really sturdy gardening gloves before continuing. Before long, I had a half-carrier bag full of nettles and headed home to soup them.

I was basing my recipe loosely on this one from Wartime Housewife.

Because I think I got there a little bit late in the nettle season, I removed the leaves from the stalks and discarded the stems. If I’d gone out earlier in the year when the nettles are still acid green, the stems might have been thinner and less manky. But at this stage in the year, I kept the gloves on in the kitchen and pulled all the nettle leaves off before sluishing them through the colander, and adding them to a pretty standard soup base – stock, onions, garlic, carrot, the usual stuff.

The resulting soup was definitely a distinctive flavour. It was a very dark, evil-green. It was nice – I couldn’t finish a whole bowl, but my companions all did.

For the dessert of that meal, we made Alys Fowler’s dandelion head pancakes. For these, I’d just picked dandelion heads – flowers, obv, not clocks – and doused them in a light batter before shallow frying. They were edible, a novelty, but not particularly nice.

  1. not that I don’t clean, hem hem, I just don’t mind plunging my unprotected hands into neat bleach [↩]
  2. “It is true that of the 10 most poisonous arachnids on the planet, Australia has 9 of them. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that of the 9 most poisonous arachnids, Australia has all of them.” – Douglas Adams [↩]

Pudding club: chocolate cake / lemon polenta cake

Published on Monday, 21st June, 2010 in Food. 0 Comments

I’m getting far behind when it comes to writing up the things I’ve cooked for various pudding clubs over the past weeks.

The week I made the jellies we learned at short notice that more people would be there than initially planned. I had already cooked ahead and made four individual jellies, but that would be no good for the 6 people who would be there, so I took the jellies, but tried to whip up a quick cake to complement it.

I made this Lemon polenta cake and it was delicious, but very unhealthy. A whole pack of butter!

250g butter , softened
250g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g polenta
250g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
3 lemons (3 zested, 1 juiced)
4 tbsp limoncello
3 tbsp icing sugar

Heat the oven to 160C/fan 140C/gas 3. Butter and base line a 23cm springform tin. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy (use an electric hand whisk). Add the eggs one by one and beat between each addition. Fold in the polenta, almonds and baking powder. Mix in the lemon zest and juice.

Bake for about 50 minutes-1 hour until the cake is risen and golden (cover the top of the cake loosely with foil after 30 minutes to stop it browning too much).

Make the syrup by warming the limoncello with the icing sugar until the icing sugar has melted. Serve the cake warm cut in slices with a drizzle of limoncello syrup.

(I didn’t use the limoncello drizzle as I knew amongst the eaters would be teetotallers and drivers – I just made a syrup of 100grams sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons)

In recent weeks, I have been watching Cook Yourself Thin – despite the fact that my own diet is completely and utterly off track now. Lots of Gizzy Erskine’s recipes have looked really nice, including the chocolate cake below. However, some of them have really weird ingredients, and I’m not sure to what extent I want to try trawling Asian supermarkets for mirin and gochuchang. Nor would I want to buy a big tub of chilli paste if it ended up I didn’t like the recipe!

The format of the show is: meet fat person; hear what horrendous fatty calorie rich terrors they like to cook; suggest lighter alternatives. There’s three dishes per episode, and the focus is a bit on technique and interesting alternative ingredients as well as just the recipes.

Many of the recipes could not conceivably be called healthy or low calorie in their own right. But they are better than the alternatives being cooked by the show’s daily guest.

So far they have had two cakes based on boiling a citrus fruit, and blending it, and using that as the mainstay of the texture of the cake. There’s this Moroccan Lemon cake, which I haven’t tried, but will; and this chocolate orange cake, which I have tried and mucked up a fair bit:

Serves 12 (< — no! no it doesn’t!)
Preparation time 15 minutes
Cooking time 1 hour 50 minutes
Cooling time 2 hours
Icing time 10 minutes
Ingredients
1 whole orange
125g fruit sugar
200g 70% dark chocolate, melted
100g ground almonds
3 free range eggs, separated
½ tsp baking powder
For the icing
150g 70 per cent dark chocolate, melted
Zest of 1 orange
3 tbsp honey

1. Put the orange in a microwave-proof bowl. Add 250ml water, cover with cling film and microwave on high for 20 minutes, turning halfway through (or simmer for 1 hour in a small saucepan). Leave to cool, still covered.

2. Heat the oven to 180°C. Line a 20cm round spring-form tin with baking parchment. Cut the orange in half and remove the pips. Put in the food processor with 5 tbsp of the orangey liquid left in the pan and blitz to a smooth purée, scraping down the bowl a couple of times. Add the sugar, melted chocolate, almonds, egg yolks and baking powder, and whizz again to mix thoroughly. Tip into a large bowl.

3. Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not dry, and fold into the chocolate mixture. Spoon into the lined tin. Put the tin on a baking sheet, then in the oven. Bake for 50 minutes, covering with a piece of foil or baking parchment halfway through to stop the top burning. Cool in the tin.

4. To make the icing, mix the melted chocolate and orange zest It will start to seize so mix in the honey and it will go shiny again. Transfer the cake onto a plate or stand then simply ice the top.

I tried to make this in the middle of the night, and consequently was trying to make it quietly. Not so possible when you need to blitz the orange into a pulp and use the whisk to get the eggs to stiff peaks.

The all-important garnish. "serves 12"
If it’s not garnished, it’s not finished.

My two major failings with this were: using the wrong sized tin – the cake mix barely touched the sides – and in the melting stage, allowing the chocolate / almond / orange mix to get too cool. Ideally, don’t microwave the chocolate, melt it au bain marie on the stove top. Then you make sure it’s still good and liquid. When I made it, the chocolate nearly solidified when added to the orange and dry ingredients. I then had to beat quite hard to mix it with the egg whites, nearly losing all the air and ending up with quite a heavy cake.

The final thing is a query about maybe whether the icing is just too heavy. Does the chocolate need lightening with cream rather than honey to get a ganache rather than, well, basically, a chocolate bar?

Previously on Pudding Club:

Saturday’s cake

Published on Sunday, 20th June, 2010 in Food. 0 Comments

I joked on twitter last week that my reselection meeting was pending, and I didn’t know whether to make a cake or write a speech in preparation.

I got there on Saturday and found I was unopposed, so in the final count, neither effort was needed. Barring some sort of problem I will be one of the Lib Dem candidates fighting to retain our seats at the election in May next year.

But I did have in my diary a note to make a cake on Friday evening, so I knew I had promised to do so.

I have been waiting for an excuse to make this Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. I have his weekly recipe as an RSS feed, and about half of them look interesting enough to make.

This link was for a coffee and ginger flavoured cake with a lemon, cream cheese icing.

And me being me, I didn’t make it up as per the recipe spec.

I don’t have a 22cm tin (I never measure baking tins anyway, which, along with knackered scales, accounts for my hit and miss cakemaking), so I used a 2lb loaf tin. Putting THAT MUCH butter AND cream cheese in the icing seemed a huge amount of unnecessary fat, so I missed out the butter. I didn’t have any vegetable oil, so I used some hazelnut oil that is now, hem hem, three years out of date. The shop I went to for last minute ingredients didn’t have shelled pistachio nuts, so I just got chopped mixed.

But the cake I got out of it was… interesting. Don’t know if it was the lack of butter, but the frosting didn’t stay put and trickled down the sides in a sticky mucky way. The mix was a good fit for the loaf tin – it felt to me like it would have been not enough for a 22cm tin. But the flavour – I thought it didn’t feel terribly coffee-y or ginger-y. It was interesting, but a sort of muddy flavour. Not sure if I should make it again, but if I did, I think I would add more coffee and more ginger.

When I got to the meeting, it transpired the reason I was making a cake was for a “guess the weight of the cake” competition. We meet in a Methodist church hall, and the Methodists do not allow raffles or any game of chance, or alcohol as prizes on their premises. As we try and recoup the (very reasonable) room hire charges from those present, we have a game of skill instead.

I made things happen so that the prize from the guess the weight of the cake was not the cake itself, but half the kitty. I had not remembered to weight the cake before leaving home so we had to dispatch a kind member to the nearest Lib Dem home to weigh it, and it clocked in at 1lb 15 oz. Those members who’d spotted it was 2lb loaf-tin size were ultimately confounded by it being ever so slightly lighter than bread!

After the competition, we all ate a bit of it, and it was generally pronounced good. I even got a few pieces to take back home.

A valuable extra perspective

Published on Wednesday, 16th June, 2010 in Food. 3 Comments

For the last *ages* I have been assuming that they put more things in packets than they say on the outside. This time last year when making elderflower cordial, I noticed that the 50gram tube of citric acid I bought had 75grams in it when I weighed it out for a recipe.

Today, I was weighing for elderflower cordial again and I noticed that the 1 kilo bag of sugar I’d bought clocked in at 1400 grams – like the citric acid, almost half again free!

Now I know that when it says “1 kg e” on the outside it means “more or less 1kg” – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. But how lucky I am that most of the time much of what I buy is so generous!

Weights and measures

P was passing, so I called him in to share my excitement and he looked at me puzzled, and I realised it was one of those many times when he sees the world differently.

“Um.” he said. “Could it…?”

Could it just be the scales?

Ah. Yes. Yes indeed it could. And in fact it might explain a lot about my various successes and lack thereof, kitchen wise, in the last few years.

So, we devised a little bit of an experiment. A millilitre of water weighs a gram, a litre weighs a kilo. So 500mls of water should be 500gram.

And it wasn’t:

Weights and measures

Bah.

Your gardening suggestions please…

Published on Tuesday, 1st June, 2010 in Food and House. 5 Comments

… for things you can plant, that need next to no looking after, that yield an edible crop, year after year.

Rhubarb would be an obvious one, I think. Both of us think we don’t like rhubarb, but it could just be we didn’t like it as children and haven’t properly revisited our opinion in adulthood. Then there’s the worry of the “poisonous” leaves – Wikipedia says it would take the average adult 5kg of disgusting bitter leaves to get a lethal dose.

Raspberry canes might be another? I think you’re supposed to cut them down at the end of the season, but I’m sure I remember some self-seeded ones in my grandfather’s garden that did nearly as well as the highly-attended-to ones in the fruit cage.

We do have an elder tree which yields lovely flowers for elderflower cordial around this sort of time each year. This year, I’m also planning to have a go at elderflower vodka as well for something tasty to last a little longer.

We’ve no room for any more trees, and we have far more shaded parts of our garden than sunny, because of all the trees around the edges.

We have a few seedlings that have been kindly donated this year, which is more than we have managed in the past. If we manage to get them past the highly dubious stage where the local slugs eat out all the growing shoots, that will be a minor miracle.

Strawberry sauce / jelly

Published on Monday, 31st May, 2010 in Food. 1 Comment

A few months ago I somehow got suckered into subscribing to the BBC “Olive” magazine a cooking mag, I think, with easier recipes than BBC Good Food – and in the three months it has been added to my poor overworked postie’s bag, there have been a number of interesting things I’ve tried.

Last month’s had this recipe for strawberry griddle cakes with a rosé / strawberry sauce. When I was making dandelion pancakes1 for a Pudding Club evening last week, I thought I’d use up the surplus batter making the strawberry griddle cakes, rather overlooking the fundamental fact that the dandelion batter was completely different to the griddle cake batter.

So, although I didn’t get the cakes to work, the accompanying sauce was definitely a keeper.

200mls rosé wine (I used the last of a half case of something intended for quick drinking that has been knocking around the house for at least five years)
50 grams sugar
Vanilla essence (original recipe says a vanilla pod, but that gets expensive)
400 grams strawberries, hulled and halved

Put the sugar, vanilla and wine into a pan and bring to the boil, and dissolve all the sugar.

Remove from the heat and add the strawberries. Allow to cool to room temperature, then chill before serving.

Tasted delicious – and our friends suggested we try it again, but make it a jelly. The gelatine I have in stock is sachets that set a pint, so upping the ingredients a bit, that led to:

600mls rosé wine
200 grams sugar
pint sachet of gelatine
vanilla
strawberries

Boil the wine, sugar and vanilla, then remove from the heat, add the strawberries and allow to cool to room temperature. (Since my strawbs weren’t entirely ripe, I actually boiled them very slightly to soften them and get more of their flavour into the sauce)

Remove the strawberries from the sauce using a slotted spoon and divide between 4-6 serving bowls.

Bring the sauce back to the boil, and add the sachet of gelatine (agar for veggies) and whisk until the cow hoof / seaweed extracts are dissolved. Pour the jelly mixture over the berries and chill to set.

Delicious.

  1. of which, more another time [↩]

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