This morning Lucius found the first egg from our new bluebell pullets. No idea whether it was the little grey hen, or the brown one who is too timid to stray far from the cockerel.
Fabulous Easter pud - make it with the best chocolate you can find. I make it with Willie Harcourt-Cooze's Peruvian or Venezuelan, but anything darkly delicious will do. It's (more or less) his recipe, too - they come on the inside of the wrappers.
I've got one sitting in the fridge for dinner tonight. I may make another for lunch tomorrow ... it's the work of moments, only you'd never guess.
Tartuffo
for 8-12 (it's v rich)
180g cacao, grated
300ml double cream
150g icing sugar
Melt the chocolate. Whip the double cream to soft peaks, add the sugar. Let the chocolate cool a little, then beat it into the cream. Pour this mixture into a mould lined with cling film - this is enough for a small loaf tin. Chill.
Related links
Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake - particularly good with Willie's cacao
Nigella's fudge icing for chocolate cakes
Rich chocolate refrigerator cake
Dense chocolate loaf
I've made all the bread eaten in this house for well over a year, so today I'm making hot cross buns, a great British tradition for Good Friday. These are just notes so that I can make them again next year. I've simply tweaked the pizza dough I mix in my machine.
for 5-6 hot cross buns
1/2 tsp instant yeast
300g strong white flour
20g melted butter
a handful of sultanas
150g water
pinch of salt
dssp honey
tsp mixed spice
When the dough is mixed, form into buns and leave to rise in a warm place. Decorate with a cross - either by slashing, or with a flour and water paste. Bake in a hot oven.
While they are still warm, brush with melted honey. Mmmm
PS as I forgot to put a tsp mixed spice into the mixture, I added it to the honey, which I melted with a drop of water
PPS putting the sultanas into the machine at the beginning means that they get cut up into little pieces, which sweetens the dough, but means you don't have whole sultanas. My machine isn't reliable at mixing in additions, they're often left sitting on the edge of the dough - next time, I think I'll add a few as I'm forming the buns.
PPPS there are so many alternative views about making the flour paste for the crosses, and I'm running out of time - so I simply slashed the buns
This apple tart is quick and straightforward as apple tarts go, and there's the added oomph of thriftily boiling up the peels in the syrup mixture. It's the prettiest apple tart I've ever made, thanks to a new-to-me way of dealing with the fruit: peel the apples whole, halve them, dig out the core, slice them and leave them in their halved shape so that you can easily fan them out in circles on the pastry. Obvious really, but it had never before occurred to me.
Apple Tart
for an 8-9 inch tart lined with your usual pastry
5-6 dessert apples (I used Jazz apples, grown in Kent)
a little butter
sugar
Heat the oven to 200C (400F).
Peel and slice the apples. Arrange them on the chilled pastry. Dot with tiny slivers of butter (or melt butter and brush it over - I would have, but my pastry brush is moulting, and I found this just as effective). Bake for (up to) three quarters of an hour, turning once or twice.
Meanwhile, put all the peelings into a saucepan with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and as little water as you can. Bring to the boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Strain - it will be beautifully rosy coloured. You might then want to boil some of the liquid off if you think it's not thick enough.
Give the tart a minute or two to settle out of the oven, then brush with the apple-y syrup.
Serve warm, or at room temperature. Very good. Alfred ate half in one sitting.
These are the leaves I used to make a salsa verde for lunch. The dandelions came from the lawn, just before its first cut of the year; the nettles came from a newly-sprung patch just outside the greenhouse; the rocket had self-seeded in the greenhouse; the sorrel has seeded itself all over the path - my fault for not picking it hard enough last year. In other words, this is the lazy gardener's sauce. Tastes good.
This variation on my basic salsa verde recipe went as follows:
Blitz:
Our new chickens are very inquisitive ....
... and it's the little grey hen who leads the way
It's very satisfying, eating weeds, especially nettles, which grow so readily here. This is a quick addition to lunch: I split my "usual" flatbread dough in two, made two rough circles, covered one with a cheesy nettle mix, covered and slashed it, then baked it in a hot oven. Delicious.
Nettle flatbread
for the dough:
300g strong white flour
1/2 tsp instant yeast
170ml water
pinch of salt
glug of oil
Put everything in the bread machine and use the dough setting.
for the nettle mixture:
A handful of nettle tops
A few leaves of mint
onion
cheese - whatever you've got
Slice an onion and sweat in a little oil. When it is soft (or browned, if that's what you'd like), add the chopped washed greens. Continue cooking until they've collapsed and the nettles have lost their sting.
Make two circles of dough. Cover one with the nettle mix and add some chopped cheese. I used gruyere, but blue or creamy would work here too. Cover with the second circle, pinch it together, slash and bake for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven.
Mmmm
Other things to make with nettles
Nettle pesto
Nettle soup
Nettle tea
Nettle beer
A week or two ago, I spent a very merry day at the Miele Experience Centre, trying out their kitchen equipment. We've got a little light kitchen remodelling to do here, and I've been humming and hawing about it for months. Not any more. I've got it all sorted. Nearly.
The Experience Centre is unique amongst white goods manufacturers: anyone can go (by appointment) and play with the full range, everything is "live" - ie plugged and plumbed in. You can even take your washing. But mostly, people go there to cook, guided by Miele's home economist Elspeth.
You might think that a cooker is a cooker is a cooker. But you'd be wrong. (Well, I was wrong.) The test kitchen has four work stations, and each of them is equipped slightly differently: a hob, ovens, plus one item which might be described as a novelty. There was a barbecue grill, a salamander (which is a fancy, space age sort of a grill that rises up out of the worktop), a tepanyaki hotplate, and a built-in wok. All good fun, if in total contrast to my Esse woodburning stove, and the Aga that I have cooked on for over 20 years.
Someone commented that this was scientific cooking ... all that programming is not the thing for an instinctive cook. On the other hand, here's something worth having - the whole range is integrated, so that all the trays and racks fit everything .... you can prepare food ahead, put it on a metal tray which slots into your fridge and later will go straight into your oven. Every last little detail has been thought about - top class design and engineering.
I'm not a great one for gadgets, but the built-in coffee maker is a dream. We won't need a microwave any more, as we only ever use it to heat up milk for hot chocolate. And we'll have a heated drawer, which will primarily be used for proving bread, although we'll never have an excuse for cold plates any more, and we'll be able to keep supper warm for late-comers.
Miele are kindly going to lend me a steam oven to play with .... people who have them say that they are the best; I just wonder if it's too scientific for me, if it would end up as the world's most expensive egg boiler.
Anyone can spend the day at the Experience Centre, for which there's no charge (that's real confidence in your product), although my day there was specially arranged for a group of bloggers. I cooked with Sam, the Cycling Cook, whose post explains what we made. Also there were Alex from The Princess and the Recipe, Joy of Almanzo's Belly and Alex at Just Cook It. A great day out ... made perfect by Anna, the washing-up fairy, who made it possible for one fabulous day to cook without having to bother about clearing up.
Beware though, you may end up, like me, thinking that there's really no alternative ...
I read in the paper this weekend that people have forgotten how to cook with leftovers, so I thought I'd blog about how to squeeze an extra meal out of the remains of an oxtail stew. It meant that I got a second meal for three out of the oxtail (just as well, as these days it's significantly more expensive than braising steak). This works because oxtail gravy is about as meaty as gravy comes.
Oxtail is well suited to this treatment: there's always a lot of gravy because of the need to cover the big bones. But second time around there's not much meat, so you'll need to find some "meaty" vegetables to take its place. Mushrooms are a must, and I also used the last blue squash in the larder. (You could, at a pinch, use a well flavoured gravy, providing there were plenty of vegetables.)
We ate this for lunch yesterday, sitting in the garden - this wintry meal was perfect for our first al fresco meal of the year in the weak spring sunshine.
Something special with oxtail leftovers
Meat and gravy
Mushrooms
Onions
other vegetables to roast - squash, carrots, parsnips, etc
thyme
Strip the meat off any remaining oxtail bones and set aside. Next, enrich the gravy as if you were making stock - boil up the bones in it for an hour or so, adding extra water if necessary, even some fresh vegetables. Strain this mixture. You can do all this a day or two in advance, so that you're not eating oxtail two days in a row. This will also mean that you can scrape away the fat which will have risen to the top.
Braise some mushrooms in a little stock or wine. Roast some onions and any other vegetables you have - I used the last squash in my larder, a lovely blue one, and chopped a great deal of thyme onto the roasting tin. When the vegetables are ready, layer them into a heavy casserole dish with the scrapings of meat, then add the gravy, which will probably have jellified. Heat through - in the oven if it's on anyway, or slowly on the hob.
A couple of days ago, I noticed the nettles bursting through in the garden - a real sign of spring. A weed, but welcome, because the butterflies love them. And because they taste so good, at least while they are young.
Here's a quick recipe for a homemade convenience food that will sit happily in your fridge for most of the week. This nettle mess works both as an green sauce / salsa verde AND as a pesto. It's a thrifty recipe, as it uses breadcrumbs to cut down on the nuts and cheese. It's delicious too. We ate it with vegetables at the beginning of the week, and finished it today on pasta, thinned down with a little of the cooking water.
Nettle pesto
Nettles
Mint (if you've got it, or other herbs, or none)
Garlic
Wholemeal bread
Cheddar
Oil
Pick a colander full of young nettle tops (you'll need gloves). Rinse them, then plunge them into boiling water for one minute to blanch them and take the sting out of them. As soon as the minute's up, tip them back into the colander (keep the water, it's full of goodness and can be drunk like a tisane) and run under the cold tap to stop them cooking. When they're cold, squeeze out the water.
Put a slice of wholemeal bread into the food processor. Add a chunk of cheese, a peeled clove of garlic and the nettles and a little mint. Blitz, then add oil in a stream. I used rapeseed oil. Keep tasting, adjusting the amounts. Hard to say how much oil, as it depends on what you are going to do with the sauce.
Links to related posts
Nettle soup
Nettle tea
Nettle beer
Ground elder salad
Welcome to new readers who have come via the forum at Taste Australian ... four and a half years ago, my apparently healthy husband had a heart attack out of the blue (on the tennis court). Soon after, I started this blog to keep notes for myself and my friends about the changes we were making to our diet. Less salt, less fat, more vegetables, more oily fish - easy to say, harder to incorporate into daily eating, particularly with a young family.
After all this time, my main piece of advice would be to take back as much control of your diet as you can from the food industry, by cooking from scratch as often as you can manage. You've got the best interests of your family at heart; the food industry doesn't even know them.
But, whatever you do, don't get worked up about getting there all in one day: baby steps, one meal at a time. And remember the 80/20 rule on bad days.
The sidebar has links to posts for people starting out on this journey ... also quick links to some of the best authorities on heart disease. Do feel free to email me if you think I can help
PS that heart-shaped stone ... my youngest, then aged about four, lugged it up a cliff from a beach in Brittany. At the top, he took it out of his rucksack, and gave it to me. It's been on my mantlepiece ever since.
Another five minutes' work this morning, and there's fragrant fresh bread for lunch. Not a smooth round ball, because I'm cack-handed. But who cares, when it's gone in minutes? This is a good daily loaf, achieved with very little effort (see previous posts for details).
It takes a little more salt than I usually use in my bread, but that is both to preserve the dough in the fridge and to keep fermentation in check (a couple of months ago I posted at length about the role of salt in bread dough).
If you like, you can replace some of the white flour with wholemeal, but not too much, or you'll lose the lightness.
This type of baking originated in the US: Jim Lahey's no-knead bread swept the blogosphere a couple of years ago; around the same time Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois published Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Peter Reinhart is currently testing recipes for a second book on the subject. These notes are based on a recipe in Hertzberg and Francois's book, which I have adapted for a European kitchen.* Americans cook and bake using cup measures, which are in some ways very freeing. But with bread, I like to know what I'm doing so that I can do it again, and that means weighing. I use a very cheap scale, the sort you can re-set to zero between ingredients. Perfect for weighing water, yeast, salt and flour into a box - no washing up. And if you like the taste of sourdough, no need to wash it up between batches.
Dough to make four loaves over a fortnight
5 litre food-grade plastic box
650ml cups of water
15g tablespoons dried yeast
20g tablespoons Maldon salt
780g cups strong white flour
cornmeal / flour for dusting
The flour and water mess I made this morning has - all by itself - turned into bread dough, full of lovely air pockets. I've put it in the fridge; I'll be baking either late tonight when we get back from the theatre, or first thing tomorrow morning. I'll post the proportions I've used tomorrow, when I'm sure it works as well as I think.
Nine o'clock this morning, straight after measuring the flour, water, yeast and salt.
12 noon, the shaggy mess has turned itself into a smooth dough. No kneading involved, just a little light stirring with a wooden spoon.
It's also twice the size, and full of air pockets.
Want to try this yourself? Come back tomorrow ...
Baking your own bread seems to me to be at the heart of a thrifty kitchen - there's always something wholesome to eat, expensive ingredients can be stretched further, there are myriad delicious dishes to cook with any stale slices and crumbs. To simplify daily baking, I've been using a bread machine for over a year for the majority of our dough (I haven't bought a loaf of bread since 2007). And now I'm experimenting with the kind of dough you mix up once a week and pull off pieces to bake.
I've just spent five minutes measuring water, dried yeast, salt, flour into a huge plastic box. The resulting shaggy mess - enough for four loaves - is sitting on the kitchen table, and later this morning will go into the fridge, where it will stay until I'm ready to bake the first loaf this evening: by then it will have magically transformed itself into dough. That's it: no kneading, no fiddling with little cups of yeast foaming in warm water, no fuss. The proof, of course, will be in the baking. Watch this space.
Things to do with stale or leftover bread
Panzanilla
Herb stuffing for roast chicken
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Anchovy toasts
Related posts
Six seed rolls
Bread knots - another simple way to make beautiful and delicious rolls, using this dough, or your default dough
Yeast starter for bread - and the bread make your own sourdough starter
No-knead bread the famous NY Times recipe
Speeded-up no-knead bread and a different take on it
Yoghurt bread fabulous, easy, TRY IT
Quick oat loaf
Spelt bread - it's getting easier to buy this highly-flavoured flour
Anti-oxidant tea bread - I made this for my husband for a pre-surgery boost - delicious, too!
Yeast conversion - fresh/dried/quick
Links to the best blogging bakers I know
Tanna at My Kitchen in Half Cups
A Year in Bread
Susan at Farmgirl Fare
this list is not exhaustive, there are dozens of wonderful blogging bakers
To Devon for my brother-in-law's week-long 60th birthday party: walks on the beach, a recital of the Goldberg Variations by the harpsichordist David Wright, lots of talk, a little bridge, knitting - and no cooking.
I missed the party on the first night (I was at Lord's), but sent Lucius with a pudding, Jennifer Paterson's Adult Chocolate Cake ... and, unusually, several people enjoyed it so much they took the trouble to find out who had made it and remember to say something a day or two later. I'm not taking the credit, that belongs to JP; it's a very easy pud for a special occasion, a good one to have up your sleeve (so to speak).
Pride comes before a fall ... and (so?), of course, Oxford failed to win a single match, although they were all closely fought. Half way through the last match, the lights went out. And that was the end of that. Ditto the dinner, as the lights were still off two-and-a-half hours later.
The match was duly abandoned, and we all repaired to the Long Room bar for drinks (Pol Roger, as they are the sponsors). The room was lit with a few emergency lights, and a long line of silver candelabra, which flickered flatteringly for the mothers (and a sprinkling of grandmothers) - the young women tennis players would all have looked fabulous in any light. But there was still no electricity by the 8.30 deadline - the emergency lights were due to fail at 8.45. Alfred and I left Lord's as the players were all milling about trying to make a dinner plan. We drove back to Henley, got takeaway from Pizza Express, and ate it while watching Match of the Day. (Hubris for Lucius, too, now I come to think of it, as he swore Aston Villa would beat Chelsea 1-0. Ha!) Not what we'd planned, but nice.
Fingers crossed. It's the conclusion of the real tennis varsity match at Lord's today, and it's the first time for over a decade that Oxford has any chance of beating Cambridge - the long-serving Cambridge postgrad tennis players all graduated last year: one of them (the one playing my boy) was playing for Cambridge for the 14th time.
Horatio is captain of Oxford this year (see post title), and started the match with a doubles win yesterday. Sadly the other doubles match went to Cambridge, but that means today's four singles matches will be keenly contested.
My top photo shows Horatio warming up; the one below shows my chaps watching the second match, and gives you an idea of what the court looks like. I'll try to take better photos today.
Related post:
We went to last year's match too - and I managed to post something about the food
Half term, so off to Windsor and Eton to buy sports kit.
We had lunch at Carluccio's in the old station at Windsor - busy busy busy. This tin of five different sorts of bread inspired us to make something a little more exciting than our ordinary daily loaf. There was grissini, oil-laden and salt-encrusted foccacia, a dark-ish bread with fennel seeds, a white slice full of soft raisins, and a crackerbread which seemed more Scandinavian than Italian, but which was very good. We thought we'd make some crumpets - so English you'd never find them in Carluccio's, and as simple as making pancakes.
On the way home, we stopped at the Italian deli in Maidenhead and bought some interesting pasta shapes, the end of a Parma ham, and a salami. Btw, if you want to visit, the shop is not in Denmark Street (that's the wholesale part of the business), it's two streets away in Vicarage Road).
It's funny, one day there's five inches of snow and only the spears of a few snowdrops, the next day most of the snow has gone and the wood is strewn with snowdrops. This tea glass is full of the false promise of spring: those catkins have been hanging in the hedge since December, the witch hazel is almost over, and the snowdrops - well, they're a winter flower.
But there's more and more light, so I'm spring cleaning. It's amazing how the cobwebs show up at this time of year, although I leave as many as possible, because I'd rather have spiders than flies in my house, and because it's a losing battle here - the spiders come in when the nights start to get cold in the autumn, and none of them seems inclined to go back into the garden as the weather gets warmer. Luckily, I'm not afraid of them, although I don't much like it when they drop onto my pillow. Which they do (no rude remarks about cobwebs in our bedroom, please Eleanor!).
There's a culinary side to the spring cleaning: we're eating up the larder and the deep freeze. We've been eating fish cakes, using up various tins and packets, and using my usual recipe. When I used up all the Matzo meal, I forgot to buy more, but I found that fresh breadcrumbs worked just as well.
Mostly I use this method for making crab cakes, but it works well with other fish, and saves a lot of palaver with potatoes - although if there's leftover mash in the fridge, I'll happily use that. I've used this basic recipe with both fresh crab & tinned crab, as well as with a mixture of the two, also with salmon or tuna. I've replaced the Matzo with fresh breadcrumbs. I don't bother weighing anything any more - I find that a mixture made with one egg and one lemon will support enough fish for two or three people, and that if there isn't enough fish, then a little more Matzo or a few more crumbs will eke it out, especially if there are plenty of herbs in the mix. I'm not sure I've ever used the full specification of fish.
Fish cakes
1 egg
2 tsp Dijon mustard
the juice of one lemon
450g cooked fish - although I rarely use anything like this much
50g Matzo meal
chopped herbs (optional)
Mix the egg with two teaspoons of Dijon mustard and the lemon juice (zest, too, if you like). Add the salmon and Matzo meal and, using a fork, stir together until it's all amalgamated. When you're ready to cook, you can chop in some herbs - dill would be good with salmon, or parsley, chives, perhaps coriander. Shape into patties - these days, I use a ring, because these are a little flaky, but you really don't have to. If you want to freeze them, now's the moment, interleaved with greaseproof paper. I'd thaw them all day in the fridge before cooking them, but I dare say you could cook them from frozen (as if you'd bought the cardboard sort in Tesco). They need about five minutes on each side.
Here's an interesting idea: which three or four gardeners would you invite to dinner? They don't have to be alive, just to make the fantasy more difficult to decide on.
First I'd go for my great-grandfather, the Rev Henry Ewbank, who spent forty or so years pushing the boundaries of horticulture from his gardens in Ryde, Isle of Wight. He was a scientist by inclination, he was rich enough to be able to buy interesting plants and seeds from the plant hunters who explored the world in the latter half of the 19th century, he was the first to overwinter a Mojave yucca in Britain. He also had a tulip named after him, which you can buy from the tulip museum in Holland.
I'd also invite Christopher Lloyd, because you could say many of the same things about him that I've just written about Henry Ewbank. And because I like his books a lot. Also his garden.
And Roger Phillips, whose photographic categorising books are so helpful, lovely and learned. Bulbs, Trees, Roses, and Wild Flowers are my favourites. And because the book he wrote with Leslie Land, The 3,000 Mile Garden, is my favourite comfort reading.
Oh, and of course Joseph Paxton. This is what he wrote in his diary the first day he went to work at Chatsworth:
I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield, and arrived at Chatworth at half past four o'clock in the morning of the ninth of May 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds, and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole place, set the men to work there at six o'clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works, and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning's work at Chatsworth before nine o'clock.
Unbeatable.
Thanks to Veg Plotting for organising this.
PS, now furious with myself for forgetting to invite Thomas Jefferson
I say Suzie's because she made these delicious pancakes on New Year's Eve - a steady stream of them came out of the kitchen, loaded with salmon and sour cream, spritzed with lemon juice. But actually, they're from Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite ... writing the note I've had in my jacket pocket ever since was my first culinary act of 2009.
Buckwheat pancakes
for 10-12 blini pan sized, or lots of tiny ones
85g buckwheat flour
85g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt
1 tbsp caster sugar
200ml semi-skimmed milk
1 1/2 tsp melted butter OR olive oil
2 large egg whites
a small knob of butter for cooking
Mix together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the centre, then add the milk and fat. Mix until you have a smooth batter. Leave to stand for "a few minutes".
When you're ready to cook, whisk the egg whites to firm peaks, and fold them into the batter.
Fry over a medium heat for 60-90 seconds, until they are brown underneath, then flip and cook for a further minute.
Gordon Ramsay suggests serving with smoked salmon, sour cream, capers and salad leaves. Drizzle with olive oil and black pepper.
Snow here for the third day in a row. Lovely. Especially now it's sunny. Light has such a cheering quality: Monday was Candlemas, we're more than half way to the equinox, every day there's more light, and suddenly I have more energy.
This was the dinner Lettice cooked last night when her friend Lucy came to stay. Tomorrow Lettice is off to South Africa, the next day Lucy's off to Central America.
Duck and orange
for four
4 duck breasts (with skin)
1/2 mug fresh orange juice (2-3 oranges)
1/4 mug soy sauce
2 glugs of oil
2 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
zest of an orange (do this BEFORE you juice the orange)
Score the duck skin both ways so that you have a diamond pattern. Whisk everything together in a large bowl, then add the duck. Leave as long as possible - up to 24 hrs, although ours was fine after 2-3 hours.
Shake the duck dry, then fry vigorously skin side down for five minutes (watch carefully at this point, because the skin burns very easily). Drain off the fat (do NOT pour this down the sink, because it will block your drains). Cook skin side down for another five minutes or so, but at a lower heat. Drain again, then turn the meat and turn the heat right down. They need 15-20 minutes in total (it's hard to say exactly, it will depend on size, heat, and whether they were at room temperature when you began). Rest on a hot plate while you make the sauce.
Drain any fat from the pan. Put the pan back on the heat and de-glaze with some wine, a little stock, water if you don't have anything else. Add the marinade, bring to the boil, then keep it bubbling for a good five minutes.
Slice the meat across the grain. Strain the sauce into a jug (this is easy only if you have a small conical sieve; if you don't, and most people don't, then try not to mind about any stray bits at the bottom, they're probably delicious anyway).
PS this is based on Keith Abel's recipe in Cooking Outside the Box
It's funny, stuffing used to be made to eke out the meat. These days it's mainly used as part of the Christmas feast. The best shouldn't just be relegated to December, and this one is good enough to eat all through the winter. We're having it tonight alongside the duck in orange sauce Lettice is cooking. Easy, too.
Gingerbread stuffing
Blitz three smallish onions and two peeled and cored eating apples. Put them in a large saucepan with some oil and fry gently. Meanwhile, blitz 400g bacon (I used smoked bits the butcher sells at a discount). Add this to the pan and continue frying.
While this is going on, blitz a gingerbread loaf (say a McVitie's 400g Jamaica loaf). Use the same food processor bowl each time, and you don't need to wipe it out, because the whole mixture will be cooked in the oven later.
Take the pan off the heat after 10-15 minutes in total, and grate on the zest of an orange. Cool a little, then add the crumbs.
When you're ready to cook the stuffing, stir in an egg, then press the mixture into a loaf pan. Cover, and bake for 3/4 hour at 200C. Take off the lid/foil for the last 10 minutes.
You can use this to stuff a bird; I always cook it separately, because that's what we did when I was a child. Fear of bacteria, I seem to remember. No picture again: I'm back to using my blog to remind myself of what I've cooked, so that I can cook it again.
Left Over for Tomorrow, by Marika Hanbury Tenison.
I bought my copy in a sale at a wholefood shop in Bristol when we were first married, and, two decades later, it's well worn. This is a really good reference book for anyone wanting to make the contents of their fridge go further. Only this week I consulted it to see what to do with a tiny bit of hard cheese. Answer: grate and store in a screwtop jar in the fridge, then add to soup, pastry or vinaigrette.
The Pauper's Cookbook, by Jocasta Innes.
I bought this soon after I got my first job, and was living in London on not much more than fresh air. I haven't used this so much in recent years, although leafing through it, I can see why I loved it so much - loads of interesting things to do with cheaper cuts of meat and the sorts of fish my grandmother used to buy for her cat.
Poor Cook, by Susan Campbell & Caroline Conran
I graduated to this when I realised how much I enjoyed cooking. It's a quirky '70s book, and the recipes have stood the test of time better than, say, Diet for a Small Planet (I can no longer find anything I want to eat there). I still vividly remember the oxtail stew I cooked for the first time, decades ago now, and recently bought a replacement copy of this in order to recreate it. And, yes, it's just as good now as it was then.
Budget Gourmet, by Geraldene Holt
I bought this in the mid 80s, and it's the most adventurous of these five. Geraldene Holt is a wonderful and inexplicably underrated cookery writer. The green herb tart, the koulibiaka, the mackerel cooked in tea. My copy is literally falling to pieces. (Here's a gratuitous link to her butterless pastry.)
English Food, by Jane Grigson
This is not specifically about frugal food, but traditional English cookery encompasses the idea of thrift, so there's lots of frugality here: leek pie, brawn, pease pudding, herrings in oatmeal, gooseberry sauce for mackerel - to find a few at random. Grigson's recipes always work, and she always has something interesting to say about the origins of the dish she's describing.
It goes more or less without saying that the most frugal way to buy these books is second hand.
I'm tidying up, so I'm using my blog for its original purpose, which is as a 21st century manuscript cookery book. This is a reminder for a quick pasta. I've written it down twice while watching re-runs of Jamie Oliver cooking in a very up-market garden shed.
Mix 1 egg and 100g OO flour per person. Draw together in a ball. On the pasta machine's widest setting, roll and fold four or five times till it's silky. Then push it through until it's as thin as you'd like. Fold loosely, cut to tagliatelli. This takes 45-60 seconds to cook in boiling water.
I'd be grateful for any tips which would improve on this. I never find it quite as easy as Jamie makes out ;)
This idea for cooking beetroot came with the Riverford veg box last week. Delicious.
Preheat the oven to 160C
Slice raw beetroot into a bowl. Add a little chopped garlic and rosemary (or thyme, or summer savoury when the moment comes). Salt if you like. Pour on a little cream - not too much, or it will bubble up and boil over, making a lurid mess in your oven (or on the potatoes baking beneath, in my case). Mix well so that all the beetroot is coated.
Arrange in a gratin dish, cover with foil and bake for 45-60 minutes. You can uncover it for the last 10 minutes if you remember.
Very rich. A little less sugar next time. And half the quantity, unless there are 20 for dinner.
225g 85% plain chocolate
225g unsalted butter
280g caster sugar
5 eggs
Grease a 22cm cake tin. Heat the oven to 180C.
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water. Add the cubed butter towards the end. Beat in the sugar.
Meanwhile, beat the eggs until they are frothy and foamy, then fold into the chocolate mixture until everything is thoroughly combined. Pour into the cake tin and cook in a bain marie (a couple of centimetres deep, cold water is fine) for one hour.
Let the cake cool in the tin, then put into the fridge. Do not eat warm.
JP says: It's a killer. She's not wrong.
How about this? The complete menu, with recipes, for yesterday's inaugural lunch. I'm slightly appalled at the "winter vegetables" selection - asparagus, carrots, baby Brussels sprouts, wax beans - half of which probably had jet lag. But this seafood starter sounds like a good dish to make ahead when you're having a dinner party. (Although I suspect some of the seafood will need substituting for better sustainability.)
Seafood Stew
for 10 servings
6 (1 Lb) Maine lobsters
20 medium size Sea scallops
36 large shrimp, peel, cleaned and tail removed, approx. 2 lbs.
10 (1 oz) pieces of black cod
½ cup small dice carrots
½ cup small dice celery
½ cup small dice leek
½ cup small dice Idaho potato
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground white pepper or black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 quart heavy cream
1 cup dry vermouth (can be made without)
10 (5 inch) puff pastry rounds
Equipment
10 (3 ½ inch) terrines/ramekins or serving dish of your choice
Directions
1. Bring 1 gallon of water to a boil; poach lobsters, then shrimp, then black cod and last scallops. After seafood is cooked, remove from water; reserve water and bring to boil.
2. Cook all vegetables in liquid that was used for the seafood, remove vegetables when tender. Allow the liquid to continue to boil until only 1qt of liquid remains. This will be the base for the sauce.
3. Bring seafood liquid back to a boil and add the vermouth and heavy cream and reduce by half,
season with salt, white pepper and nutmeg to taste. You have reached your desired thickness when the sauce will cover the back of a wooden spoon. Set aside to cool.
4. Cut Maine lobster, shrimp and scallops into bite size pieces.
5. Pre-heat oven at 400 degrees.
6. Fold seafood and vegetables into cool sauce, being careful not to mix too much as this will break up the seafood. Scoop mixture into terrines or ovenproof baking dish of your choice.
7. Cover terrines with puff pastry rounds, brush them with egg wash and bake them until golden
brown about 8-10 minutes, allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving. You can cook this 2-3 hours ahead of time and keep warm at 150 F degrees.
*All seafood can be substituted with other favourite options of your choice and availability.
Here's the link to the whole inaugural meal, with recipes - there's a rather good cherry chutney for duck breasts, and a lovely recipe for cooking sweet potato with molasses. Thanks to Lifehacker for showing me the way in the first place.
This is seriously good, seriously unphotogenic, a wonderful winter alternative to salsa verde. We've eaten it every night this week.
It's particularly good with broccoli, goes well with roast lamb, with lentils. If you make a stiff mix with only a little olive oil, then you can use it to spread on toast (a sort of homemade Gentleman's Relish without the butter). If you make it with plenty of olive oil, then you can use it as a salad dressing for bitter winter leaves. It's also good as a dip with carrot and celery sticks.
For years I've bought Waitrose own-brand anchovies in little tins which come in a black cardboard box. Last summer there was a supply problem, so I began to buy Connétable - lovely silvery fish with a much milder flavour.
This recipe is enough for two or three evenings - it keeps for ages in the fridge, although you may want to stir in a little more oil second/third time round. The very last scrapings from the bowl are good added to gravy or a stew.
Anchovy sauce
5-6 cloves of garlic, peeled
a tin of anchovies
a splash of red wine vinegar
olive oil
Put the garlic and fish into a food processor - I use my Magimix, but a mortar would do. When they're smooth, add the vinegar, blitz, and then add olive oil glug by glug until you get the consistency you're after.
Spoon the warm-ish sauce over broccoli as soon as it's drained and serve hot.
Inspiration for this came from Fergus Henderson of St John.
This time last year, I was blogging about Lady Westmoreland's Soup - possibly the most frugal soup in the world. See what you think!
I made a classic bacon and egg tart at the weekend (aka quiche lorraine, but I'm English). Utterly delicious, but the pastry - well, it wasn't as good as it could or should have been, and I need some help, as this has always been a weak area in my cooking.
The problem was that I was afraid of putting in too much water (which causes shrinkage), so I think I didn't put in enough, and so it didn't come together into a smooth paste, but was a sandy mess that had to be pressed into the tin. It was short and delicious, but only held together because I coated it with egg white after blind baking - essential for a custard tart, but I used the whites of two eggs rather than one.
Does anyone have a foolproof method for making shortcrust pastry? Or some tips? I'd be really grateful.
In the meantime, here's the recipe for the egg and bacon filling .... the simplest ingredients creating more than the sum of their parts. Not sure why we always give the French credit for this, because it's a classic of English cookery too. (Although Elizabeth Ayrton says in The Cookery of England that the 18th century English version had a pastry covering. Too rich, I think, for modern tastes.)
for a 23cm / 9" tin
6 rashers of smoked bacon
300ml double cream
2 eggs and two yolks
pepper
mace is the traditional flavouring, but I don't have any
Cut and gently fry the bacon - it's important to use smoked bacon, even if you normally buy unsmoked (which we do), otherwise the tart will taste insipid. Don't overcook it, you want soft pieces, not crisp ones. Spread over the bottom of the cooked pastry case (which, when ready, should have been brushed with egg white and given a further minute or two in the oven). Whisk the cream, eggs and yolks, pepper, and pour over the bacon.
Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes, then, when it's brown but not burnt, turn the heat down to 160C for 10-15 minutes. Leave it to rest for five minutes before serving.
Related links
Two ways to make pastry without using butter - which I find much easier, as well as lighter eating
Shaken hot water pastry
Olive oil pastry
Not sure why making stock is such a problem for so many people. It takes moments of your time, and makes everything taste better. So much better, that I got one of my children to eat lentil soup AND ENJOY IT.
There's no doubt that making stock satisfies my inner 40s housewife: when there's no stock in the fridge, I arrange the shopping and eating so that I can make some straightaway. I never freeze it: if there's a glut, then we eat risotto or soup, the two biggest consumers of stock.
Recently, I've been making Fergus Henderson's highly flavoured "trotter gear", a stock made of pork, garlic and wine, very good and cheap to make. But my mainstay is chicken stock, made with the carcass of a roasted chicken, although I sometimes use raw chicken wings. Either way, I use a lot of vegetables, and lots of different ones to give a depth of flavour: peppercorns, herbs from the garden, mushroom stalks - whatever there is.
There's no real recipe - you need to make it a few times to feel your way to the stock you like. But here are some of the things I wish I'd known when I first started to make stock, three decades ago.
I have NO IDEA where these tips came from, they're just scribbled (in my writing) on a piece of scrap paper which has come to light in the great January tidy-up. Useful though, especially if they turn out to work.
1. To stop blackfly eating your broad beans in April, spray them with nicotine water, which you make by boiling loose tobacco in water. I suppose you could steal a couple of cigarettes off a passing smoker.
2. Soak your peas in paraffin for half an hour before planting. Anathema to mice, apparently.
No idea if these tips actually work, but now I can throw away the piece of paper, knowing that the information is still to hand (should I remember come spring).
... a cup of lapsang souchong is on the way.
It takes a while to boil the kettle on the stove, so you have to start before you get thirsty. In the mean time, I'm tidying - and now that I've seen the picture, I'd better get cleaning, too - does anyone have any tricks for refreshing brick that don't involve paint?
I'm rather fond of this simple fireplace, it's in what was once the housekeeper's sitting room, built in 1918, when housekeepers were already rather thin on the ground. I do such housekeeping as goes on here (not much, not enough), so this now my study. We (or rather Lucius) installed the stove in November (also the lovely Delabole slate), and the room is now warm for the first time any of us can remember.
There's a deep frost here - the Mahonia has given up scenting the garden, which those yellow flower buds normally do pretty effectively in the weak winter sunshine. I'm planning to stay indoors as much as possible, and read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, a very ace Christmas present. And perhaps do a little more cooking from Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail. And trying not to get the cough which has been plaguing this house for a week or more.
My boys are very keen on four-cheese pasta, just about the only ready-made food I still buy: tortelloni with a mixture of cheeses. Waitrose has sold an own-brand version for years, and that is what I've always bought them. Until this week, when it had vanished from the shelves, in its place a branded version made by Del'Ugo.
On the back of the unfamiliar new pack I found a letter from the owner of the business, Paul Ugo, about its history. And I realised that Paul's grandfather was the man my grandfather bought pasta from for three decades. Let me re-wind a little here.
My grandparents met in 1915 in Italy, both members of a Red Cross unit led by the historian GM Trevelyan which served the Italian armies fighting the vicious mountaineering war on the Isonzo front. My grandmother was a VAD nurse, my grandfather the unit administrator. Amongst other legacies of that terrible time, my grandparents were left with a lifelong love of Italy and Italian food (also the ability to talk in fast and fluent Italian when they didn't want us to know what they were saying).
Luigi Ugo arrived in London in 1921 aged 14, and began making fresh pasta by hand for restaurants. He opened a shop in Gerrard Street in 1929, which soon expanded so that he was able to import machinery from Italy to establish a small fresh pasta factory.
And so on Saturdays, my grandfather, on his way home from work at the British Museum, where he was Keeper of Incunabula, would walk to Soho to Luigi Ugo's shop to buy fresh pasta. When they moved to Oxford, they missed Luigi's shop - I remember them pining for it. Instead, they befriended the Italian proprietors of the Luna Caprese in North Parade - but that's another story of family connections, discovered at the school gate when my younger daughter was five years old.
PS the photograph shows my grandfather arriving at our wedding on the arm of my uncle, who is now about the same age as my grandfather was when the picture was taken
Just come back from the funeral of an old and dear family friend. Lots of people from my childhood were there, and the remnants of my parent's friends. I've chosen a cartoon at random from the New Yorker to cheer myself up ... not sure why it makes me laugh, but it does
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