Sunday 27 February 2011

Old Enemies

So recipes 22 and 23 were spent making things that I don't always find work well for me. Firstly, pastry, in the context of Cornish pasties. Except, as of last week, I can't call them that. Let's call them Cornish-style pasties then. I used this recipe from masterbaker Paul Hollywood (I don't know how the Great British Bake-Off's announcer kept from corpsing when they had to refer to his job title) .

Now the pastry for these is different to any that I had made before: it needed kneading and liked being treated roughly. I think that's why it worked for me. Instead of worrying about the temperature of my hands, over kneading, over stretching and generally fearing that my cack handedness would ruin my creation, I could smash, stretch and fold to my heart's content.

The filling is nice and easy to prepare just chopping and seasoning the veg and meat, no pre-cooking required, but, worrying that it would taste plain, I decided to remove more authenticity from the recipe by sloshing in some Lea and Perrins! And much good it did them.They were huge and hearty, so I just served them with a side salad; and they went down well at lunch with some lovely visiting friends.

My second recipe is still in the oven, and it has made me feel slightly nauseous already. It's probably very wrong to eat large amounts of meringue mix, but it tastes so good! Up till now, every recipe for meringues that I have tried has gone wrong: they have wept and gone sticky, not cooked, or burnt. So I have tried the superhero-esque 'Ultimate Meringue' recipe from BBC Good Food. I really want to get this right, when I was little one of my favourite treats was a deliciously sweet, plain, chewy meringue from a local shop. 

They were easy enough to make: an electric whisk did all the hard work. I added a teaspoon of vanilla essence to them, perhaps not advisable to change the recipe, given how many times I have failed to make edible meringues, but they are smelling pretty good! 

Meringue update: not as nice as the raw mix, but very, very good all the same: crispy, chewy, light and, of course, sweet!

Sunday 20 February 2011

Happy Days

We finally finished Sam's birthday celebrations this Friday, six weeks to the day after his actual birthday, with a trip to see the cycling world cup in Manchester. I decided to use this as an excuse to crack open  Favourite Picnic Recipes, compiled by Carol Wilson and published by J Salmon Ltd, as it is a well established fact that food in sporting venues is never what you'd call delectable, and I wanted some birthday-worthy food to take with us. For first course we had 'Picnic Pie' which sounds much more complicated than it is, rather than being the entire contents of a picnic, sandwiches, cake, ginger beer, etc. encased in pastry, it is a layer of bacon, with six eggs on top, encased in pastry. The eggs go on top of the bacon unbeaten, so you aim to get a whole egg in each portion. Unfortunately, I managed to grill mine (the symbols have worn off our cooker and I was tired, alright) so it required the burnt bits to be scalped off before it was edible. Pies are not my strong suit, it seems. It was ugly (see pic), but it tasted better than the sandwiches at the Velodrome looked.

Cakes are much more my game. For our pudding I made the 'Fresh Cherry Cake' from the same book. The recipe uses ground almonds which make the cake dense and the cherries keep it moist; it's the ideal combination of chewy and sticky. I am sorry I didn't take a picture, for myself more than anything, its appearance did me more credit than the pie.

This week has been a bumper week. Yesterday I added two more recipes to my repertoire. My friend A came over for an evening of cookery and watching Absolutely Fabulous last night - - two of our favourite things. We used  The Silver Spoon, an Italian cookery book, to make potato gnocchi. I love gnocchi: a plate of potato dumplings is pure comfort on any day. They are also remarkably simple to make, from peeling the potatoes to boiling the finished gnocchi takes under an hour. The most complicated part is adding the flour to the potato and egg mix, too little flour and they fall apart, too much and they become very dense. We made a lucky guess as to when the dough was ready (there is nothing helpful in the cookbook to tell you what to look out for, just a warning that it might all go horribly wrong). We served them with a simple tomato sauce, also from the Silver Spoon, (I can't possibly count it towards my total as I have made so many tomatoey, basilly, garlicky sauces in my time) and a huge ball of artfully torn mozerella. Half a ball of cheese per serving is the ideal amount and no health-nut will persuade me or A otherwise. The gnocchi were very nice, and incredibly light, although A at some point mistook icing sugar we'd been using for pudding for flour so a few had a startling sweet aftertaste.

We'd been using the icing sugar to make French macaroons: the pink ones from this recipe. Up until now, almost all of my attempts at meringue type recipes have ended in absolute inedible failure. However, these worked a treat. Not even too fiddly to make (for me at any rate, A was so good at piping them out into little rounds I let him do nearly all of them, if you don't have your own piper, it might seem more labour intensive!). This week takes my tally up to 21 dishes. Even with time off for holidays/weeks when I just want to sit in my PJs and eat takeaway from the box, it seems I am ahead. Should I double my target?

Wednesday 16 February 2011

Of Cakes and Comfort

After many, many leaving dos, and many tears, F has departed for Australian shores. As I have said in previous blogs, I like to make cakes to show I care. I made F a huge cake. The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook has long been furnishing me with recipes that are both delicious and always work (some of the cupcakes are rather fiddly). Anyway, I picked the Hummingbird Cake to make as a leaving cake for her, as with its three layers, it looked suitably flash. Essentially it’s a carrot cake, but the dried fruit and carrots are replaced by mashed bananas and pineapple.  The result is a cake much lighter than a carrot cake, but just as moist. Also, it keeps amazingly well in the fridge wrapped in foil; I know this because I had to be sneaky and make it ahead of time, on the Monday of last week when F wasn’t looking, I then iced it on Wednesday with just under a kilo of cream cheese frosting (it was a special cake!). I’d definitely recommend this one, the work was light in terms of the result, and made with sunflower oil (not butter) and low fat cream cheese in the frosting, it felt positively saintly!

Last week marked the end of the annual dry month that take place in our flat. Sam and I spent most of the week undoing our good work. By Sunday, we were worse for wear with our excesses and sad after F’s plane had departed. What we needed was calming, comforting Sunday soup. I selected Jamie Oliver’s Ribollita from Jamie’s Italy. I had wanted to cook this for a while, but was scared of soup with bread as an ingredient (yes, I am that uncultured!). I needn’t have been afraid, it was very good - - although I am yet to find cavolo nero in Leeds, and had to substitute it with spinach. It was spicy, and thick and starchy enough so that Sam didn’t feel as though he’d been cheated out of his dinner by just having soup. The trick to getting the adding of the bread right is to go slowly, as F advised from the airport. And long may she continue to dole out remote cooking advice.

Sunday 6 February 2011

Jammy Faces.

I am now risking morbid obesity for this project. This week's main ingredient was jam. Sam (he no longer wishes to be known as S) and I visited Mum last weekend and she had some particularly nice damson jam on the go - - I ate half a jar with breakfast and Mum was eventually moved to give me a teeny tiny jar of it. If I made jam that fruity, sweet enough, but not too cloying, far nicer than anything Bon Maman can turn out, I too would want to hoard it all to myself. This jam was far too nice to just use on the morning's toast...

The weather this week has been murky and damp, and there has generally been the need of a pick-me-up kind of a treat. There is nothing so good at this as the pudding that I can't even name without smiling: roly poly pudding. The dough for the crust is super simple to make (you would actually have to try quite hard to ruin it!). Admittedly mine did need scalping a little bit after my enthusiastic fan oven had overdone it a bit, but it was delicious crispy and had a lovely toasted taste and did the jam justice.

I love homemade rice pudding. It reminds me of feeling warm all the way up to my ears when I was growing up in North Yorkshire in a house with a Baltic climate. The skin is half the fun when it goes all golden and crispy - - flavouring it with jam has to be the only way to enjoy it, it feels as naughty as eating jam from the jar. Again, it's easy to throw together, I used the recipe on the back of the Tesco Pudding Rice packet, as I wanted an uncomplicated recipe like my Mum's. F is staying with us before she heads to foreign shores at the end of the week, and she and I ate it straight from the dish I baked it in with the remains of the jam. I can say little about its flavour other than the synthetic-been-in-a-can taste of Ambrosia couldn't hold a candle to it, and this: F 'cleaned' a dish which had been in the oven for over an hour so well with spoon, fingers and mouth, that it barely needed a wipe.