Blueberry Macaroon Things

I haven't done too much baking recently. I feel like I should probably prioritise sorting out 3 meals a day for me and the now-eating-solids-babe over cake, and that is quite enough work and kitchen mess most days.

However, this caught my eye and I happened to have just about the right ingredients and the baby was happily eating dirt off the floor or headbutting chair legs or something, so I seized the opportunity.

It's a bit of a Chinese whispers recipe now - originally from 101 Cookbooks' Heidi's new book, I saw a reinterpretation of it on Smitten Kitchen, then I've adapted it further to fit the contents of my kitchen.

Easy as 1-2-3 - check. Tastes like a kiss in the summer sun - check. Rustically pretty - check. My kind of cake/tart/thing.

I actually think blackberries or raspberries - something slightly tarter - would be better than the blueberries I went with, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this

Blueberry Macaroon Tart (adapted from Heidi Swanson)

Preheat oven to 180C/350F

Mix 1 cup wholemeal flour with 1/3 cup sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon and a generous pinch of salt.

Add 4tbsp (c.4oz) of butter, melted, and mix thoroughly.

Press mix firmly into base of a greased 7" square pan or equivalent and cook for c20 mins or until slightly golden/starting to brown.

Let the base cool slightly whilst you prepare the topping

Mix 2 egg whites with 1 cup desiccated coconut and 1/4 cup sugar

Scatter a cup of berries (blue/black/raspberries/whatever) over the base then use your fingers to drop the macaroon mixture around them so they are not all completely covered.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the macaroon peaks are browning.

Scatter with 1/4 cup chopped almonds (or other nuts).

Cut into bars once cooled a little

Happy Pancake Day!

I took baby to the doctors this morning and we found out she'd dropped off her percentile line. So the health visitor advised me to stuff her full of dairy and fat. Or something like that.

Accordingly, I went home via Tescos and picked up some double cream. Which I whipped and mixed with yoghurt and boiled raspberries to create a delicious pink fool.

Baby being baby, she was having none of it. Not even having seen my biceps nearly combust whipping with a manual whisk because the electric handheld thingy is bust. Not a fan of the old spoon-feeding.

However, later I was trying to give her pancakes and slipped a bit of the fool on that, and she lapped it up! Result. Full of cream now!

Anyway, the pancakes...

I've being feeling a little bit odd about eating eggs recently. I don't know, I guess it's just that all those times I pick up a pack in the supermarket and wonder how free range they really are has added up to a critical mass and now I don't really feel right eating them. So I seem to be cutting down. In aid of which I decided to try out a vegan pancake recipe.

And guess what? You don't need eggs to make a good pancake. Who knew? Yep, these don't have a whole load of flavour, but you want to drench them in lemon and sugar anyway, and the texture is just fine. So, good.

Vegan Pancakes

Adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

Mix : 2tbsps sunflower oil; 5tbsps water; 300ml soy milk; a few drops vanilla extract; and a tsp agave nectar

Add: 5oz plain flour; 2tsp baking powder; 1/2tsp salt; and 1tsp cinnamon

Whip very briefly together and let rest

Fry one ladleful at a time in a medium hot pan. Flip etc.

Mmmmm vegetables!

I don't want this blog to give the wrong impression - what with making its own granola, knitting(albeit badly) with a newborn, doing all its new years resolutions, and now telling you about a brown rice and vegetables and seeds kind of dinner... If it weren't for the general lameness in blogging frequency and the sporadic posts about angst and nothingyness, you might start to think I'm one of those macrobiotic, organic-proselytising, champagne-hippy types who are up at 5 every morning to do a few quick sun salutations before spinning some hemp to make their own sheets and then whipping up wheatgrass and goji berry smoothies, all whilst looking perfectly groomed and balancing the well-behaved babe on a hip.

Fear not. I am not even imperfectly groomed - barely even clean most days; we had Sainsburys pizza followed by dark chocolate digestives for dinner last night; and far from sun salutations and smoothies I spend much of my daytime perusing Mumsnet and watching America's Next Top Model (Tyyyyyyy-raaaaaaa!!!!)

However this is a very good dinner, I liked it very much, and I would like to share. It might sound like something you'd eat because you were on some strict diet to 'cleanse' yourself of sin and caffeine. But it tastes - I'm not lying - really more-ishly delicious. It looks so unassuming and meek, but it's full of flavour and satisfying in a really good-feeling way.

So, you slice a couple of carrots into large chunks and boil until just cooked (c5-10mins). Meanwhile you put 1 small cup brown rice and 2 cups water in a pan, cover, bring to the boil and then turn down to a very low simmer. It should then take c30mins to cook. After about 25 minutes cooking you throw a handful of sliced green veg in. The recipe called for spinach; I went for pak choi and sugarsnap peas. (and have since done a version with purple sprouting broccoli and celery cooked in with the carrot, which was great)

Once the green stuff is just wilted and the rice cooked, remove from the heat and - here's where the magic happens - you then stir through a mixture of olive oil, light soy sauce, lemon juice and grated parmesan. About equal amounts oil and lemon juice (maybe a few tbsps each) and about half that amount of soy sauce. A good couple spoonfuls of parmesan. And then - if you like - top with some toasted sunflower seeds.

And that's it. Try it, you might like it...

This is an adaptation of Skye Gingell's original, published in the Independent

Granola

Cereal is not an uncommon dessert in my household. Shreddies are satisfying after dinner; crunchy nut on top of a little muesli a pleasant pudding, but for the truly luxurious experience, a good granola is the way to go. Oh, and you can eat it for breakfast too if you're that way inclined.

The shop bought stuff is expensive and making your own is not only very simple but makes your kitchen smell delicious. And you get to choose exactly what goes in, which is fun. Endless possibilities for combinations.

I've experimented with a few recipes recently, and finally found one I really really like, courtesy of the lovely Clotilde , whose granola formula gives you the basic principles from which you can experiment with the details to suit your taste.

So, mine went like this:
3 cups of oats, rye flakes and barley flakes
1 cup whole almonds
2 tbsps sunflower oil
6 tablespoons golden syrup
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp sea salt

The above well mixed until thoroughly combined, then spread onto a couple of greased baking trays and baked at 150C for 30-40 mins turning every 10mins.

Then to the cooled mix, added:

1/2 cup dried sour cherries
1/4 cup coconut flakes

Seriously good.

Two simple salads

Not a terribly appealing photo there, but I just wanted to make a note to self on this little dish. I'm not really a repertoire cook - I have a couple of standard dishes I wheel out again and again but often I just play around with what I have. The experiments are not always super succesful, but every now and then I make something I really like, only to forget it and never make it again.

So, so that I remember. These two simple salads both deserve another outing.

First - romanesco cauliflower with roasted peppers and pine nuts. Roasted the peppers in olive oil in the oven for half an hour or so, then added par-boiled florets of the cauli to crisp it up. Dressed only in the roasting oil, topped with toasted pine nuts. Good.

Second - to cooked wild rice I added a little very finely sliced red onion, and halved segments of tangy clementines, dressed with lemon juice, clementine juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Surprisingly delicious.

Chocolate Almond Cake

This is luxuriously soft, subtly almond-y and studded with rich dark chocolate chunks. I think it would suit a strong velvety latte, on a sunny but brisk autumn morning, setting the world to rights or reading the paper at a pavement table.

1. Butter a 28cm tin and line with greaseproof paper.

2. Mix 150g butter with 1/4tsp salt until soft. Cream in 100g sugar, then add 5 egg yolks and mix well.

3. Chop 150g dark chocolate, and add to the mix, along with 150g ground almonds.

4. Add in 100g flour and 1 tsp baking powder.

5. Beat 5 egg whites until stiff, then beat in 100g sugar to produce a shiny mixture.

6. Mix egg whites into other mix.

7. Bake at 180C for 50 minutes - done when a knife comes out clean.

8. Yum

(Recipe from 'Chocology', a leafet produced by some Swiss chocolate board or similar - sorry I can't give a proper reference; I found it at my parents' house and don't have to hand!)

Date, Walnut, Cardamom Cake

I may no longer pluck my eyebrows every day, go to the cinema in the evenings or always know what day of the week it is, but one thing I can and do still do is bake.

This one is soft, sweet and warmly spicy. Would go beautifully with a light black tea - Jasmine perhaps - rugged up inside on a rainy day.

Adapted from The Glasgow Cookery Book

1. Chop 150g dates and sprinkle with 1tsp bicarbonate of soda. Cover with 250ml boiling water and leave 30 minutes.

2. Cream 50g butter with 100g soft brown sugar. Add 1 egg, soaked dates, 50g chopped walnuts, and 200g wholemeal flour that has already been mixed with 2 tsp ground cardamom and 1 tsp baking powder. Mix well

3. Put into greased, floured tin and bake for about an hour at 180C

Pear and Walnut Cake

Given the choice of a fabulously pretty cupcake or a more plain looking fruit-laden cake, I'll choose the fruity one pretty much every time. I like to look at the pretty cakes, but I prefer to eat the uglier ones. You can't go far wrong with a carrot cake; a good banana cake will always make me happy, and anything with apples or pears in will generally be good in my experience. I like dense, moist satisfying cakes. This is one of them.

It's based on a Joy the Baker recipe for Apple, Walnut and Flaxseed bread . I'm not sure why I decided on pears rather than apples - they just looked nicer in the shop I think. I haven't adapted an awful lot - used a bit less sugar, swapped in oil instead of butter (just to avoid using a saucepan to do the melting!) and I didn't want to buy buttermilk and have a load left over I wouldn't know how to use so I used milk and cream of tartar, which I already had, instead. Result - fruit and nut laden soft cakey goodness.

Pear and Walnut Cake (adapted from Joy the Baker)

• Preheat oven to 350F/180C and grease and flour a suitable pan (9x5x3-inch loaf pan specified in original recipe; I used a shallow pan about 9x6 inch)
  
• In a bowl mix together: 1 cup white flour; 3/4 cup wholemeal flour; 2/3 cup packed brown sugar (you might want to break this up first or you'll end up with little brown sugar pockets in your cake like I did); 1/2 tsp salt; 2 tsps baking powder; 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda; 2 tsps ground cinnamon and 1 tsp ground nutmeg.
  
• In a larger bowl mix together: 2/3 cup milk, mixed with 1 tsp cream of tartar; 2 eggs; 1/3 cup sunflower oil; and 1 tsp vanilla extract.
  
• Mix dry ingredients into wet (I know all recipes say to mix wet into dry; I guess it's something to do with how it mixes, but I always mix dry into wet, as it makes the washing up easier).
  
• Add: 1 pear, grated; 1 pear, chopped into small dice; and 1/2 cup walnuts.
  
• Spoon batter into pan and bake for 40-50 minutes until a skewer comes out clean
  
• Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then on wire rack.

Joy recommends toasting and buttering, which it suits very well, although it's equally good as it is.

Spelt Honey Pecan Cookies

Following on from the choc-banana bars, yet more wholesome-y sweet stuff!

This recipe comes from the back of the flour packet (Doves Farm Spelt Flour). It takes literally seconds to put together, and the end result is satisfyingly dense, soft but crumbly little nuggets of slightly spicy goodness. Very good with a cup of tea.

Ok, so:

In a bowl, mix: 4 oz wholemeal spelt flour, 2 oz honey, 2 oz sunflower oil, 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp cinnamon.

Once combined, shape into little balls, and place on a greased baking tray (a bit too sticky to roll with your fingers, I used teaspoons to shape) with space to expand.

Press pecan halves into the top of each cookie (I added this element myself - genius).

Bake in a preheated oven at 190C/375F/Gas 5 for about 10 minutes.

Cool on tray.

Yum.

(I have a feeling this would also work with black pepper instead of cinnamon, but that might just be weird. If I try it I'll let you know how it turns out.)

Chocolate Banana Bars

These little beauties went down very well indeed in our household recently. Not surprising really as they come via two grand doyennes of the foodblogging world - I picked up on them at the marvellous Chocolate and Zucchini, which in turn was a slight tweak on an original post on the equally wonderful 101 Cookbooks.

They contain no sugar except for that in the chocolate, no flour and no dairy produce - pretty handy go-tos then for vegan/gluten-free/low sugar friends. They are also magnificently tasty in that satisfying wholesomely filling way, and go well with an espresso or a nice cup of tea.

I pretty much followed Clotilde's recipe albeit with olive oil instead of almond butter and a lazier technique - I just mashed everything together in one bowl, which worked fine, so another plus point - easy and not too much washing up!

Check out either of the recipes linked to above, or for my summary of how I did it, keep reading:

(makes about 12-18 small (finger-sized) bars)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F) and grease a medium baking dish (I think the one I used is about 11" by 7" rectangle, about 1.5" deep) with vegetable oil.

In a mixing bowl, combine 1 cup rolled oats, 1/3 cup ground almonds, 1/6 cup shredded coconut, and a pinch of salt.

Chop around 60-80g very dark chocolate (I used 80% cocoa) into small chunks (this is easier to do if it's at room temperature rather than fresh out of the fridge).

Add two very ripe bananas, a couple of drops of vanilla extract and 1/8 cup olive oil to the oat mixture. Mash the bananas thoroughly and mix everything together until well binded.

Fold the chocolate in gently.

Spoon into the prepared baking dish, level the surface, and put in the oven. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the top is set and golden-brown.

Let cool completely before slicing into bars.

Orange and Pistachio Biscotti

The Italians, in my opinion, are the best at biscuits.

Several years ago, I booked a last minute flight to Italy to accompany my friend Lucy to a tiny town on top of a mountain called Monte San Martino. We were both approaching final exams and she had decided that the best place to get the peace and quiet to concentrate on this was in a monastery on top of a mountain. (Her aunt is a nun at this monastery, and no I don't mean a convent, for some reason it was definitely called a monastery).

Anyway, it was exactly perfect for its purpose. We got lots of work done at a small table in a sparse room, overseen by Jesus on the cross. I had been having a somewhat turbulent time in London and the quietness and unbelievable greenness and beauty of the place could not have been better conceived to heal that.

But, the point of this story is the food. My goodness, I've never since or before come across such food. The nuns worked some fields a little way down the mountain. They had cloistered pigs and cows, and made their own cheese and ham. They received gifts of fruit and wine from the villagers. We arrived for breakfast, lunch and dinner at set times and dined with the local priest and various others at a big stone table.

Fresh tomatoes, oozing soft cheese, simple pasta soups, slices of meat and potatoes, wonderful bread...

And for breakfast, we got a bowl of milky coffee, soft fresh brioche style rolls, homemade jam, and a whole massive tray of homemade biscuits. They were divine.

These aren't quite up to that standard, but they are pretty good. This is an adaptation of a more normal Cantuccini recipe with almonds. I just happened to have pistachios to hand and thought I'd try that. Compared to commercial ones, I think they lack some perfume and sweetness, and wonder whether an addition of orangeflower water or fragrant honey would help.

Orange and Pistachio Biscotti

1. PREHEAT oven to 190C

2. MIX TOGETHER: 1.25 cups plain flour; a pinch of salt; 1/2 tsp baking powder; 1/2 cup ground pistachios; 1/4 cup sugar; 3/4 cup chopped pistachios; zest of one orange

3. ADD: 2 lightly beaten eggs and MIX TO A DOUGH

4. ROLL dough into a sausage shape of about 2cm diameter. Cut to fit baking tray and place the sausages about 5cm apart on the tray.

5. BAKE for 20 minutes

6. REMOVE from the oven and turn oven to 80C. Slice the sausages into 1cm diagonal slices and place back on trays.

7. BAKE for 1 hour, turning half way through. Cool on a rack.

Summer vegetable soup

Ok, so this looks not a world away from a bowl of sick but please don't let that put you off; I promise it tastes better than it looks!...

A little while back the younger sister and I journeyed down to Devon to attend a day's cookery course at Ashburton Cookery School. I've been in one of my non-blogging moods since then and it feels too ages-ago to rehash too much now, so suffice it to say that I enjoyed the course, would definitely recommend the school, and its lovely accommodation, and recommend that if you find yourself there you also spend an afternoon in the garden of the Green Ginger Café in Ashburton stuffing yourself on an exemplary cream tea.


My travelling companion, Wife in the City, has a much better write-up, with pictures of the food we cooked, here.

Anyway, one of the things we cooked was a Curried Mussel Soup, which was a lovely summery yellow and very more-ish.

So once home I tried to recreate a similar soup, sans mussels. I tend to make pretty simple soups - essentially bits in water. This works pretty well for me; I like bits in water. But I want to add things to my repertoire that might appeal to people with less simple tastes, things I could cook for dinner guests and that kind of thing (which was a lot of the impetus behind going on the course in the first place).

The no-mussel soup worked pretty well, and was light but rich and very flavoursome although not quite as pretty as the mussel one had been somehow. I love the tomato in it, and the coriander finish. I still think I'd be as happy with some diced up potatoes and carrots and lentils in seasoned water, but for something a bit different and a little bit more sophisticated, this is pretty good.

This is how I made it.

1. Make small crosses on the non-stalk end of 2-3 tomatoes. Place in boiling or just boiled water for about 10 seconds, until the skin starts to split. Remove, place in cold water, then peel the skin off, remove the seeds, and cut into fine dice. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, boil 250ml white wine in a pan until reduced by about half. Set aside
3. Sweat one medium onion, diced, and a clove or two of finely sliced garlic in sunflower oil until starting to soften. Stir regularly so it doesn't stick.
4. Add a couple of spring onions, sliced, and one carrot, thinly sliced.
5. Once these are starting to soften, add about a teaspoon of ground, toasted cumin and a teaspoon of mild curry powder.
6. Then add the reduced wine
7. And a few cups of vegetable or chicken stock
8. Cook for a few minutes until veg is cooked
9. Add a cup full of frozen peas, and the diced tomato. Continue cooking for 1-2 minutes just to warm these through.
10. Add a large dollop of double cream and stir through.
11. Add a generous squeeze of lemon juice and serve garnished with chopped fresh coriander.

Vegbox cooking - the green soufflé

Day one of cooking with my veg box contents...


I decided the sprouting broccoli needed to be tackled first, as I already had a heap in the fridge (love it!). And the massive bunch of wild garlic that I wasn't sure what to do with.

Just a day or so earlier I had been watching Tamasin Day-Lewis on some cookery channel making haddock soufflé, which had looked surprisingly easy.

I've never tried a soufflé before, but it struck me that it might work with some green veg.

So, I sweated down some finely chopped shallots in butter and oil, then once they were soft added a handful of shredded wild garlic and a couple of handfuls of sprouting broccoli, cut into fairly small florets and leaves.

I stirred this for about 5 minutes more until lightly cooked, and took off the heat.

Then I made a béchamel. Afraid I can't give you the measurements because I just do it by eye. About a finger's width of butter, a shake or two of flour, maybe 1/2 pint of milk?

Into this, I intended to add two egg yolks, but clumsily split the yolk when trying to separate the first egg, so it ended up being one yolk and one whole egg. I whisked the remaining egg white until stiff peaks formed, and then folded this into the bechamel and egg mixture and seasoned (salt, pepper, a little mustard powder).

The greens went into an oval oven dish, and I spooned the soufflé mixture on top, then popped the whole lot in a moderate oven (when in doubt put it on 200C is my general oven philosophy) for 20 minutes.

I popped a couple of the vegbox mushrooms in the oven also, with some butter dotted on them. I had been boiling some new potatoes that I already had in stock, and sauteed these as the souffle and mushroom cooked.

And...

... the result was one of the nicest things I've eaten in ages. Despite the broken yolk and missing an egg white, the soufflé was meltingly soft and light, and the creamy souffle top went perfectly with lightly garlicky broccoli underneath. The mushroom was big and meaty, and it all went together like a dream. I felt like I'd just been to a really nice restaurant (although admittedly it doesn't look that special!).

And then, carried away with the cooking bug, I also got together a batch of Joy the Baker's brownies.

Yum! Look at that gooey goodness...

I sliced and lightly steamed some of the hard green pears and apples in the veg box, and served these and a dollop of greek yoghurt alongside.

Delicious...

So nice to finally cook a meal I really really enjoyed. Recently I seem to have eaten far too much mediocre stuff, uninspiring stuff. And I really think it is down to the ingredients in the main. If they're right, then the inspiration is there and with a little bit of knowledge and some careful handling you're pretty much guaranteed a good eat. If the ingredients are just a bit crap, on the other hand - the watery peppers and tasteless tomatoes that supermarkets serve up for example - then it'll be much more difficult to salvage something delicious.

Totally Scrummy Choc-Banana Bread

My boyfriend and I are very different in many ways. One of these ways can be illustrated through the following story... We had invited friends over for brunch and B was going to go out to get some milk. He asked if I needed anything. I thought perhaps a banana would be a good addition to the fruits I already had for fruit salad, and asked for one, adding to pick up maybe a kiwi or some other more exotic fruit if there was anything nice.

45 minutes later, guests were due to arrive and he finally returns (he'd been for milk via the bike shop to check on progress of his new handlebars - another way in which we differ; I'm a little more 'time-sensitive'...), bearing a bunch of 8 bananas, and two mangos as big as rugby balls. Fine, if we were expecting 20, but no, I only had 6 mouths to feed...

Me? I probably would have come back empty-handed because the choice between fairtrade bananas that looked nice but you had to buy in 6s in plastic packets and the normal bananas which were looking just slightly too ripe for my liking was proving a bit taxing. And then I might have started thinking about airfreighting and whether maybe another pear would be better, and then the decisions would all get a little too much and time would have been ticking on and I'd just turn back round and go home again...

Anyway. After I'd used the one banana that I actually needed, we had a whole load of ripe bananas that sat there steadily ripening. Something had to be done before they were only good for the bin, and that something is normally banana cake... (do you know of anything else to do with overripe bananas?)

I tried Joy the Baker's Oatmeal Banana Bread recipe on the Friday, and we wolfed it down so fast, I made it again on Sunday, with a few tweaks this time. This is the kind of cake I absolutely adore. It's got a wholesome satisfying feel to it. It's soft and not too dry and pairs beautifully with a cup of tea. It feels at home as breakfast or dessert, or afternoon tea. It leaves you feeling like you just ate a warm hug. And you get the benefit of knowing that there is all kinds of goodness in there - vitamins and minerals in the wholemeal flour and oats and bananas, some protein from the eggs, complex carbs so it's not too sugar-rushy. Why it's practically a health food.

So, my adaptation of Joy's recipe is as follows:

First, preheat oven to 350F/180C/Gas 4. Grease and flour a loaf pan.

You are going to need three bowls.

In one, put:
- 11/4 cups wholemeal flour
- 1/2 cup muscovado sugar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 3 tsps cinnamon
- 1 cup porridge oats
and stir together

In the second, mash 2 or 3 ripe bananas. Add:
- 3 tsps sunflower (or other) oil
- 1 egg
and mix, then add:
- about 50g dark chocolate, chopped into small chunks

In the third bowl, beat 2 egg whites until medium stiff peaks form.

Fold bowl 1 into bowl 2 (recipes always say put wet into dry, but I always put dry into wet, just because it leaves the dry bowl less messy for washing up). Then fold bowl 3 in as well, in three additions.

Pour batter into tin and bake for 45-50 minutes until top is firm to the touch.

Let cool in pan for 5 minutes, then cool on wire rack.

Vegan chocolate cake

Yes, I know I'm a little late for an Easter-themed cake, but after a manic week at work I'm finally catching up on some posting, and I really wanted to tell you about this lovely recipe I used for these cupcakes, which were served up to general appreciation for brunch desserts on Good Friday.

They're from Joy the Baker, which I've only just discovered, and is an absolute delight. I made two of her oatmeal banana cakes this weekend because the first one was so good it didn't even last a day.


This particular recipe is unusual in that there are no eggs or butter, and instead avocados provide the fat. I've made vegan cakes with tofu before, and I've made cakes with potatoes, parsnips, beetroots and carrots in, but never seen an avocado recipe. My curiosity was piqued!

I liked to let people eat them first before telling them what was in them; in my experience people can be ever so prejudicial against vegetables in their bakery products. They were pretty impressed at the alchemy. As was I. They rose beautifully, produced lovely shiny cracked crusts and were soft and moist and springy to eat. Lovely.

Treacle scones

Aaannd, back to baking...

Following on from Saturday's breadfest, on Sunday I just felt like scones. Not a common feeling, but it was definitely scones I was wanting to make. So I turned to my new favourite cookbook for a recipe - it's called the Glasgow Cookery Book and it's gloriously no-nonsense. I like books with no pictures; just recipes. I love to read my penguin paperbacks of Rick Stein and Jane Grigson in bed - I like to imagine the recipes, rather than to look at impossibly perfect creations that I'll never quite create (though I do have some lovely books with pictures I'm fond of too).

The GCB takes the no-pictures approach to its limits, with virtually no descriptions either. It's all kind of: "mix ingredients, bake for 20 minutes" brief and to the point. A welcome change from some recipes which adjectivise every ingredient and interject with metaphors about the mixture and so on. It covers absolutely heaps from basics to some quite complex stuff. There's some quaintly old-fashioned stuff in there but some really interesting recipes too. And the baking section is top-notch.

So, I tried their treacle scones. Intriguing, I thought, I've never tried a treacle scone before. But treacle tastes a bit like sunshine or hugs I think. It's undeniably warm.

And they were lovely - soft, big crumb, nicely lightly spiced, warmly treacly and perfect with some raspberry jam.

RECIPE (for a small batch - just 4-8)
100 g self raising flour (or 100g plain flour plus 1/2 tsp bicarb and 1 tsp cream of tartar)
1 tsp mixed spice
salt
12.5g butter
1/2 tbsp treacle
milk, to mix

Mix dry ingredients. Rub in butter until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Mix in treacle and milk until a smooth pliable dough is formed. Roll out (I did mine only about 1cm think, though it advised 2cm I think) and cut.

Place on a greased and floured tray and bake for about 10-12 minutes at 200C until browned on top.

Lovely.

My favourite bread recipe

This weekend was quiet. I've felt tired, my brain vague and struggling, energy low, concerned about a friend, needing quietude and the self-permission to be quite slow and un-productive.


I baked because it felt like what I needed to do. First, Saturday, I devoted three hours to proper bread (after last week's soda disaster). This is a tried and tested recipe. When I ate it toasted for breakfast Sunday morning, I must have exclaimed at least four times how incredibly good it was. It tastes like goodness, like comfort and warmth and love. I really truly am besotted with good bread and this is good bread.


This is a recipe I've done so many times I haven't needed to refer to a book for ages. It's super-easy; do it once or twice and you too might feel moved to commit it to memory...


You take 1 cup of yoghurt (I use various size cups to measure, it doesn't matter that much - about the size of an individual yoghurt pot works well)

And add 1 and a half cups of warm water (I mix boiled with cold)

Mix and test with a finger - it should be lukewarm - too hot and the yeast will die; too cold and it will never develop. If it's too hot, let it cool a bit before adding yeast

Add one sachet or one tablespoon dried fast-action yeast

Then six cups of flour (I use 2/3 wholemeal and 1/3 white, or all wholemeal depending on how I feel and what flour is available) and a pinch of salt.

Mix flour in until it becomes something like a dough

Tip it out and knead on a floured surface for at least 15 minutes until pliable and starting to show little wrinkles

Put in an oiled bowl, cover and leave in a non-draughty place to rise for about an hour until doubled in size - it's ready if you push it with a finger and the dent stays there; i.e. it doesn't expand to fill it out

Punch it down to knock out the air, knead a little more, and shape into loaves. If you want to make any additions, make them at this point. I made one plain loaf and one walnut one.

Put on a greased and floured tray, cover and leave to rise until about doubled again - about 40 minutes.

Preheat oven to 180C, pop the loaves in and bake for about 40 minutes until brown on top and sounds hollow when you knock on the bottom with your knuckle.

Leave to cool on a rack.

(The short version of that is this: 1 cup yoghurt; 1.5 cups water; 1 sachet yeast; 6 cups flour; 15 minute knead; 1 hour first rise; 40 min second rise; 40 min bake at 180C)

NB - I thought I'd bought natural yoghurt, but when I went into the fridge discovered it was actually Apricot flavoured. Not wanting to go to the shop, I just chucked that in, and happily it was a great success - no apricot flavour, but I think the little bit of sugar helped it rise nicely and gave it a very slightly sweet taste. Can't say for sure whether it was down to the yoghurt, but it was one of the best loaves I remember making.

This is of course a very basic loaf. To see a different league of breadmaking altogether check out Clotilde's recent post on sourdough baguettes - how amazing do they look!? Sourdough is definitely on my to-do list of things to try.

I was going to move on to treacle scones but this post is already too long so I'll leave that for another one...

Degrees of (baking) success

So, I'm not quite sure why I have such an urge to keep blogging about things which hover between disappointing and disaster, but such an urge I appear to have.

As a prelude to a post on this weekend's baking - which actually was quite a success - I present last weekend's baking - a bit of a wash-out all round. I would have posted last week, except I was on a 'leadership' course, where I was encouraged to reflect on teamwork, my 'core self', and the difference between leading and managing. Most of it such utter nonsense that all it left me with was a steely determination never to end up in any job where I have to mix with anyone who spouts that kind of jargon non-ironically.

Anyway, back to the baking poor show. First, there was soda bread. I hadn't the requisite three hours for my usual bread recipe, so I tried my hand at soda bread for the first time - instead of yeast as a raising agent, it uses baking powder so is a lot quicker to knock up. It looked ok, it smelt reasonable, but when cut it crumbled into little chunks, and if you managed to somehow end up with a slice, and even to get some butter somewhere on top of it, when eaten it reminded me more of cake than bread. We ate most of it so not a total disaster, but somewhere near.

Next came the Seville Orange Tart. I couldn't resist buying some Seville oranges, as you only really see them in the shops for one month a year. But, still having marmalade in the cupboard from last year's batch (which was great - see recipe here), I didn't feel like any more and plumped for Moro's Seville orange tart instead. It was on the next page from a dark chocolate and apricot tart my sister's made several times to great acclaim, so I was hoping this might also turn out to be a winner.

Alas not. My orange curd looked promising, but once in the oven it rudely refused to colour and set before separating, and on removal from the oven looked like a lumpy, greasy, spotty mess. It tasted better than it looked, but just like a lemon tart, so I couldn't really see the value in using seville oranges. I'd rather perfect a really good tarte au citron. Disappointing.

The tart required 6 egg yolks, and I don't know what else to do with excess whites but to meringue them, so that was the third project of the weekend. Here's where this entry segues neatly into next, because both include a recipe I have committed to memory. With meringues it is this:

To each egg white, 50g caster sugar
Whisk egg white until stiff
Whisk in half of sugar bit by bit
Fold in remaining half of sugar
Bake in very low oven about 1 1/2 hours

Now, these weren't in and of themselves a failure - they looked quite perky and magical, and I experimented with coconut in some, and lime and lemon zest in others, both of which were quite pleasing. They were crucnhy and sticky and chewy. All good stuff. It's just - I don't really get meringues.

On our course we divided people up into introverts/extroverts, intuiters/sensers, thinkers/feelers etc. What would have been more interesting I feel would have been to divide us up into those that would buy a meringue and those that wouldn't.

I see them in bakeries and cafes looking perfectly delightful, but I don't understand why you'd want one over a cake or a flapjack or a toasted teacake. I mean, they don't go with tea, surely! They're really just a way of eating neat sugar, and they splinter all over the place, leaving you with little sugary crumbs everywhere (or is that just me and my appalling meringue-eating habits?...) Do you understand the appeal??!! If so, please do enlighten me...

Experiments in Rye

So, this will be terribly dull but I'm going to expose you to my evening meal thought processes...

It was a week or so ago and I started thinking about dinner around lunchtime, as usual. Throughout the afternoon I was thinking about the half a head of broccoli languishing in the fridge, and about what vegetables might be cheap and available at the shops. Winter - root vegetables right? I thought about carrots and celeriac and swede and turnip and parsnip and about roasting, mashing, soup, sauces.

But nothing was really calling out to me. It was when I was on the tube that I suddenly thought about cauliflower - quite a wintery vegetable I think, and one that I love when it's roasted - crispy and sweet, quite elevated from the usual boiled cauli one comes across.

But what with? It's nice with a tomato and caper sauce, maybe some potatoes on the side. But something about capers wasn't sitting right with me that evening.

Half way down a rain-sodden street towards the food shop, I hit upon lentils - little nutty green ones; perfect with roast cauliflower. But what else, what else? Lentils plus vegetable does not a meal make...

I reached the shop and popped in some butter, some bread, eyed up the posh and delicious but seriously expensive apple juice, as I always do, and managed to walk away from it. I came to the grain shelves, and quinoa presented itself, and I thought, 'Hello!'. Just recently I'd read about a lovely sounding red quinoa salad. And I've had success in the past with bulghur wheat salads.

But the quinoa was nearly £4! I held it a while, realised that was absurd, and replaced it on the shelf. My eyes alighted upon some other grains I hadn't cooked with before - spelt and rye and some stranger things I can't recall... The rye was a steal at under a £1 and only required 40 mins cooking.

So, rye, lentils... I headed for the veg. Disappointingly dwarfish cauliflowers led me instead to think about squash - another good partner for lentils. And the broccoli in the fridge could go nicely with all that too. A little smattering of sundried tomatoes, perhaps something crunchy - hazelnuts? pine nuts? Finally I had a kind-of recipe sorted!

Seriously, if I didn't think about food all day long I don't know what my head would be full of...

Anyway, the rye was a huge success. Easy - just boil for 40 minutes (I used 1 cup rye to two cups of water, which was a good proportion, and about enough for 3-4 servings) and really nutty and satisfying.

I added the lentils to the rye after about 10 minutes - 1/2 cup with another cup of water - and cooked together to save space.

Meanwhile, I roasted parboiled squash and broccoli florets with some dried tomatoes I'd rehydrated in boiling water (these burnt - I should have just added them at the end!)

The whole lot was mixed together with a load of olive oil and a little red wine vinegar, and topped off with an avocado.

It seems great minds think alike, as Julia posted a delicious sounding similar kind of dish recently, with farro, another grain I've never cooked with, but am now keen to try. I definitely think her suggestion of a squeeze of lemon juice would have been ideal for my version. Perhaps a little parmesan too.

The possibilities with this kind of thing basically are endless - a grain, a pulse, a softer vegetable (roast squash, avocado, roast peppers, courgettes... ), something for crunch (red cabbage thinly sliced, pomegranate, pine nuts, celery...), perhaps even some cheese (feta, parmesan...), and a simple dressing. And there you have an easy-ish, healthy and really delicious meal (the leftovers of which are perfect for lunchboxes too!)

Tortilla

I made my first proper tortilla the other night. They always seem such simple things, I was surprised at how much time and prep it took, but the end result was just about worth it and it's a marvellously cheap dinner.

The recipe I followed fairly faithfully from the first Moro book which I like but rarely use.

The first stage is preparing your onions and potatoes. I used 1 and a half medium onions and about 5 small-medium potatoes, which worked out well (I don't have scales, so I always have to estimate if the recipe gives me grams).

You slice both fairly thin, and then put the onions into fairly hot olive oil in a frying pan, turn the heat down and let them cook slowly for 30-40 minutes until they are dark and sweet and soft (stir every couple of minutes to prevent sticking).

Potatoes you can do in a deep fat fryer or - as I did - in a couple of inches of sunflower oil heated up in a big heavy-based pan. The oil should be hot enough to cook them but not too hot - they take about 20 minutes to get tender. Drain and reserve the oil once they reach this point.

(As an aside - I added rosemary and garlic to my oil thinking it would add a nice 'twist', but any flavour they imparted was completely overwhelmed by the sweetness of the onions, so it was pretty pointless. Don't skimp on the onion cooking by the way - without their deep flavour I think it would have been much the poorer).

Once your onions and potatoes are cooked, beat 5 eggs, and mix in the vegetables. Season.

Heat some olive oil until it's just smoking in a frying pan, then pour the mixture in with one hand whilst shaking with the other. This bit is fun! After about 3-4 minutes, once the underside is golden brown, put a plate on top of the pan, and carefully flip the whole lot over.

Put a little more oil in the pan and let it get hot, then slide the tortilla back in, runny side down. Breathe a sigh of relief as it all stays together.

3 mins more cooking and it should be cooked through.

I served mine with a hastily put together ratatouille-type-thing, and a simple salad. It was a pretty good dinner...