Feeling crabby?

For some time now, I have wanted to tackle a crab. It's one of those foods--along with lobster, raw artichokes and snails--which intimidate me, as I have no frame of reference for how to deal with them. However, I like crab, it's tasty and sustainable, and cheaper than lobster, so when I was last in the supermarket I slid one into my basket. I did have a recipe in mind: September's Olive Magazine not only had a recipe for garlic, black pepper, and butter crab and paratha, but also a guide to how to deal with my six-legged friend.

So, I carefully read the directions and gathered my equipment, which involved a raid on Sam's DIY kit for a hammer. Opening the crab and getting his brown meat out was straightforward enough. But I was slightly worried that, as the hammer was on the large side, the crab's claws would shatter and I would spend the next seven hours trying to separate meat from shell fragments. Not so: while they required quite a whack before they gave out, they then cracked in such a way that getting the meat out was really rather easy, although--and perhaps this is because I have particularly delicate lady hands--I generally found it easier to get the meat out with my fingers than a skewer.  


Olive Magazine omitted to say that there was any point in picking the legs out; fortunately, I also had the packaging from Morrisons, which told me that 'there be meat in them legs', or something like that. Granted there isn't pounds and pounds, but enough that it would be a shame to throw it away, even though it is fiddly to get at. Perhaps this is a symptom of the North--South divide: pampered Southerners will just buy supersized luxury crabs with so much bounty in the claws the legs aren't worth considering, whereas we Northern folk need to pick the legs out and can't bear the concept of waste!

Anyway, the crab meat is fried with lots of butter, garlic, and loads of black pepper, as the oh-so-snappy title of the dish suggests. Making the paratha is a cross between making soda bread and a usual kind of loaf: it needs some resting time, but is made with plain flour and not really kneaded. It is cooked by frying in butter. I could probably have done better here; I thought the dough was a little loose, added a slug of water, and the dough immediately became very heavy and it made heavy bread. As it was hot, cooked through, and covered in butter, though, it wasn't unpleasant to eat. I substituted coriander for the advised wild garlic shoots which were out of season and not stocked by my favourite Northern supermarket. This was a lovely meal, really tasty, and piquant from the pepper. Well done Olive!

On to jam. Again, this was a recipe from September's Olive Magazine. It was supposed to be raspberry flavoured, but I couldn't get any any; however, blackberries have just come into season, so I bought some of those instead, along with some jam sugar. Making jam is not hard; I just thought it would be. My two comments on it are these: I only got two jars full out of 400g of fruit, and seeing as it was blackberry jam, I wish I had gone scrumping to have more fruit; and blackberry jam is a beautiful colour, and has a lovely taste, so I wish there was more. I think I'll spend the bank holiday among the blackberry bushes of Kirkstall (for those of you who know Leeds and are now chortling at the idea of urban berry picking here, there ARE some blackberry bushes).

The starter: it is now in a clean bowl!

Finally, finally, sourdough bread by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This, as I mentioned last week, has been on the go for over a week now, as I had to grow a starter (essentially making yeast by using flour, water and a piece of rhubarb (!) to attract natural yeasts and get them to multiply). The starter smells appalling at first, but by the time it's settled down into something usable, it has a mellow fruity aroma, and if you look closely you can see the yeast breathing and releasing bubbles. In order for it to thrive, half of it has to be thrown away and replaced on a daily basis. The bread dough is made in two stages: there's an overnight phase with the starter, and then some water and flour is added to make a 'sponge'. This is mixed with the rest of the flour to make dough, which quite literally can take all day to rise and prove (this is a time-consuming thing to make, even by bread standards!). It was rather heavy, but I'm guessing these things take time; it tasted right, and you couldn't actually build walls with it.

I feel I've achieved a lot in the last week: in tackling picking a crab and making jam I've successfully made two things for which I had no frame of reference whatsover (I'm sure that those of you who remember the weeks when I was cutting the tops of burnt things will excuse this ballyhooing).

Fantine

I was calmly listening to 'Woman's Hour' this week when, to my alarm, a small boy came over the airwaves explaining how he was cooking a hundred recipes in his school holidays as part of a school project. 'No, no, no!' I thought, 'not only am I going to be asked till the end of time whether I'm copying Julie out of Julie & Julia, but now I'm being beaten to my rather modest target by a pre-pubescent! I must up my game!!' To which end: puff pastry.

I went for Lorraine Pascale's puff pastry recipe from Baking Made Easy. Now I know the name of this show belies the fact that this is difficult, but bear with me--what I have learned this week is that puff pastry might not necessarily be hard, but it does take time and patience.

You start by rubbing cold butter into flour and mixing in cold water to make a light dough--easy peasy, when done in the food mixer. After which it needs a rest in the fridge for just under half an hour.

A block of butter ready  to be melded in...

The next stage is filthy, though: it basically entails enrobing almost an entire packet of butter in the refrigerated dough, carefully rolling it into a rectangle, folding it in on itself, rolling out again, and repeating the process. At this point it gets soft, so it has to go back in the fridge again.

The rolling and folding is repeated twice more, before it is rolled out and chilled--yet again--before use. See a kid's attention span would be far too short for all that. Ha!

I'd decided that I wanted to make apple turnovers with the pastry, so I carefully cut up the pastry before I chilled it once more and made the filling from this recipe. Apple turnovers had been on my mind all week: I've been reading Les Miserables for the past fortnight or so, thanks to friend C who emphatically recommended it, and apple turnovers are mentioned in the context of a vulnerable woman being abandoned by a heartless cad whom she loved. Perhaps it was a deep-seated sympathy that made me fancy one--possibly it was because their mention in the book reminded me of my dad bringing them home for a treat when I was little.

Enough whimsy. They ended up being cuboid instead of triangular, as I stupidly cut the pastry into rectangles instead of squares. Once out of the fridge, the pastry becomes very soft really rather quickly--so I was speed stuffing and there was a bit of apple-filling leakage on the way to the oven, but nothing too unsightly. And the pastry worked! It was slightly greasy (which presumably had something to do with all that butter), but I was very pleased as a first attempt. It rose in crispy layers, and cooked underneath. Win.

So, in going all out to beat a nine-year old, I have only cooked one recipe! However, coming up I have jam, crab, and sour dough bread (I am maturing the starter for this at the moment--it smells and looks like baby sick). Over and out.

Pulsing

For the vast deal of my life, the only pulse I liked was haricot beans covered in tomato sauce; all other pulses I had disdain for, considering them to be the blandly served fodder of worthy vegetarians. These days, however, I think nicely seasoned beans or chickpeas are in some ways preferable to meat, their nutritional value certainly beats that of a sausage, and they are much cheaper! Although, as you will see, I have combined the two to great effect this week.

The first recipe is entirely suitable for any vegetarians out there amongst you: Moroccan aubergine and chick pea salad. This was chosen partially out of necessity (it was cheap), partially because I was astonished at how little I had enjoyed the last dish I made from aubergines (I know they are delicious, and do not actually taste of slippers), and partly because I had a hankering for chick peas (I am aware of how odd that sounds). This is a really good demonstration of chick peas and aubergines at their best, soaking up strong flavours--in this case, cumin, coriander and chilli--and delivering a tasty meal for not much money. Lovely.

Following a weekend which saw the consumption of a lot of rich food, this week Sam and I fancied something a little plainer. Olive Magazine's  recent booklet of £5 suppers supplied us with black bean and chilli soup. I have to put my hands up and say straight away, I couldn't find black beans, so I used their tasty cousin, cannellini beans, as these are also good in soups. This was nothing special, just a hearty bowl of homemade soup. I wouldn't serve it to impress, but that wasn't what I was trying to do; I wanted simple, and it was. Success.


Finally, finally, Boston baked beans with sausages, another one of Olive Magazine's meals for a fiver. I can't see how this is a recipe for two, really, as it's got six sausages, bacon and a load of beans in it. ANYWAY, putting that to one side, it's very good, the mustard in it makes it taste much more grown up than baked beans, and it tastes lovely and smoky, in a sort of barbeque sauce kind of way. I served with olive-oily roast potatoes and A, H and I agreed that it seemed to herald the start of autumn, along with the rain was also lashing down in Kirkstall that night. Oh and by adding an extra can of beans, I made it stretch round four of us--Sam ate when he came home, and I also had some for lunch the next day. It relieves me to see that even the BBC's publishing team couldn't make it look nice though!

I think after this week's successes I shall perhaps turn to being a professional pulse chef, bringing their nutritional wonderment to the masses. On the other hand that might make me into the next Gillian McKeith, and no-one wants another one of those! (Gillian, I know you like suing people, so this is my own subjective opinion and probably wrong. Ahem.)

Birthday Girl

You may remember some weeks ago, I made a gigantic fruitcake for my grandmother's 90th birthday, which I had been maturing in a box and feeding brandy. Well, last week the birthday cake construction continued. On Thursday I made a scaled back (so's it would go in a 15cm cake pan) version of this lemon cake, the idea being it would be the top of a three tier cake (this is the same recipe I made for A's graduation cake a while back).

On Friday, I made a scaled back (to fit a 22cm cake tin, so it wasn't that small) version of this chocolate cake, for the middle tier. I took a full day off work to make it and ice all three cakes and thank goodness I did! This chocolate cake is delicious--however, it takes forever to put together and sugar paste is an ill-behaved substance that needs so much coaxing to look nice! By the end of the day my kitchen looked like a herd of baby elephants had been rampaging through it, I was covered in chocolate, and unable to string an interesting sentence together.

However, few things smell as good a baking chocolate cake, so it wasn't all bad--in fact, I definitely enjoyed myself, and sampling the batter was an amazing bonus (although I am, sadly, allergic to chocolate).

In One Piece...

And here it is, fresh out of the oven and cooling on the window sill, looking as though butter wouldn't melt...








Shortly afterwards, in a glorious victory of optimism over common sense, I, pressed for time, thought it was cool--it'd had two hours by the open window--cut it when it was still a little warm and soft, and ended up with a structurally dubious cake. This led me to abandon the stacking plan and just make three differently decorated cakes, which actually worked fine. (Never have I been so grateful for a flower cutter.) Grandma liked the fruitcake, and fortunately the brandy in the cake did not get her tipsy and my cousin CD methodically ate two slices of chocolate cake in front of me to show how good it was (she is 8). I must thank cousin R for help in displaying them (the fresh flowers would never have occurred to to me) and a couple of wise friends who advised me what to do when the fruitcake looked as though it might be more booze than cake. Grandma, it was a pleasure to do for you, and I'll need at least fortnight off to make what I have planned for your hundredth birthday!