I heart Hugh (he's bready brilliant)...

A little while ago my mothership sent me a pamphlet of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's breads and puddings from the Telegraph. Much as I dislike the tory press, their cookery booklets are not to be argued with and this one has proved (hur, hur) a gem. I'm about to tell you about three recipes from it.

First off, his basic bread recipe. I actually looking at the kneading diagrams for this, and stretched my way into some of the lightest loaves ever to come from my hands. 

I love bagels, they are one of my favourite things to eat of a weekend morning, and the fact that the dough needed poaching was intriguing enough to inspire me to have a go. The steps are thus: mix (quite a dry dough, presumably that is because they are soaked through in the pan of  water), knead, prove, shape, prove and then BOIL. I shaped the ring-doughnut shape pushing a hole in the middle and then stretching, rather than Hugh's way of rolling a sausage shape and then sticking together, because, as he even admits to in the recipe, they can come apart in the water if made like that. Poaching them (one minute each side, and I timed it) was fun, not least because they smelled amazing. Once out of the water, glaze with egg (I left some glazed, topped some with sesame seeds and others with Malden Salt and black pepper). Brilliant, I am now a bread genius, these were delicious--despite every one being a slightly different size!

Finally: brown bread ice-cream. When I first heard of this a few years ago, I assumed it was some hideous high fibre version of my favourite food. Not so--the bread is toasted in the oven with lots of sugar, the ice-cream itself is made from a custard base, with no fibre in sight, just lots of cream, sugar, whole milk and egg yolks. the toasty bits are mixed in as the mix is firming up in the ice-cream maker. I really enjoyed this, it tasted like premium ice-cream, and the bread was sort of caramelised and, although its flavour was distinctly recognisable, it worked.

Tinker Tailor Sorbet Pie

I hope you will forgive the trial of a third focaccia recipe this week--in an effort to become a Jack of all trades and master of one, I have given myself focaccia to try and work on in this project. The other recipes, I can assure you, are all completely new to me.

 This week I had a theme: literary food. I put out a call for this on Twitter and N came up with the Lamb Shank Redemption and, between us, Tinker, Tailor, Sorbet, Pie. (Actually, I meant food which had appeared in books, such as Proust's madeleines--but N's ideas made me laugh, so I was game.) I'm not really a fan of Nigel Slater's shows--the faux notes on notice boards reminding him to cook for a fisherman he probably met at a production meeting two weeks ago being one good reason for this--but he does produce recipes that work. He came up with Lamb Shank with anchovy last week on his new series, which I nicked and applied our much more fun title to.

The butcher had sold out of lamb shanks, so it had to be the Lamb Shoulder Redemption. I scaled up the recipe for five. The anchovies merely flavour the sauce in which you braise it, so you don't end up with fishy meat. It's extremely easy, produces lamb so tender that you can cut it with a spoon, and--even though I hit the white wine before I'd finished cooking and therefore the sauce was somewhat thinner than I might have wanted, and the parsley stayed in the fridge and never made it into it--it still elicited these words from H when she was polishing it off: 'I'm a bit sad my dinner's ending'. I served it with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's foccacia. This is less messy than Paul Hollywood's version, and more authentic than the recipe I tried a few months ago. However, Paul Hollywood's recipe, despite the fact that my kitchen table was resurfaced in sticky, sticky dough, wins on taste. (Hugh F-W's is much easier to make when you're doing other things, like cooking the rest of dinner.)

And finally: Tinker, Tailor, Sorbet, Pie, or Baked Alaska. As plums were in season, I went for a plum middle, and made the following: sorbet. Which I then spooned into a large novelty coffee cup (lined with cling film so I could get it back out) and froze for an hour. While the sorbet was freezing in its 'mould' I chilled an all-in-one, two-egg sponge cake in the fridge (I'd made it whilst the ice-cream worker was doing its work). The trick to a Baked Alaska is to keep everything really cold till the eleventh hour, so I lifted the sorbet out of the cup after an hour, turned it upside down to make a dome, put it on the cake, covered the whole lot in more cling film, and stuck it in the freezer for three more hours. When it came to nail-biting cooking time (and I admit at this point I wasn't at all sure it would work: images of weeping meringue and melting sorbet haunted me all day, and there was some back-up Ben and Jerry's in the freezer) I whipped up the meringue from this recipe from Waitrose, quickly took the sponge and sorbet out of the freezer, smeared the meringue on, stuffed it on the oven as fast as I could, and started praying!

I'm afraid I only took this after we had eaten the rest--hence melting!

This was the best dessert I have made all year. The sorbet was fruity and sharp (and, praise be, frozen), the meringue did not weep and was crispy and fluffy and you could taste the cake was home made. I am blowing my own trumpet, but this was a day on which I made sorbet, cake, and meringue for one dish, so I feel as though I deserve it!

Pollocks to it!

I'm getting more lax than ever with these posts--nevermind, be assured that cooking is continuing and I'm grinding my way onwards to culinary enlightenment (or at least expanding my imagination beyond cooking pesto pasta three times a week). Although, the first of the dishes for this week is not so exotic: fish fingers.

Fish fingers are one of my favourites, perhaps because they were one of the few convenience foods that were allowed over the threshold when I was little (how I yearned for Findus crispy pancakes and chicken kievs [Mum I am grateful you didn't make me obese, really]). ANYWAY, there have been a few recipes around for home made ones and I've been, as a new age (desperately scrabbling for a word which isn't 'foodie') nibbler, I wanted to know if homemade meant better.

Whatever the taste may have been like the fact that I was using pollock and not cod automatically made the fish fingers 'better' than the vast majority of shop bought ones, as pollock are much more plentiful than cod. I used Jamie Oliver's recipe for fish fingers, from his recent fish supplement for the Telegraph. Jamie, I am sorry, I pillaged your recipe--I completely forgot to do any shopping, bar getting the fish--there was no parmesan or lemon for my crumb coating, middle-class disaster if ever there was one! Instead, I rolled the fish strips in flour (trick of my mum's for when you're coating things, makes the egg stick better), dipped them in a beaten egg and then coated them in a mixture of bread crumbs and parsley.

I failed to make them uniform in size, so Sam referred to them as goujons, H, who was visiting for supper as fish finger pieces. Anyway, they were good, despite the fact that they cooled extremely quickly and were tepid when we ate them. They were crispy, and the taste of the fish was much more present than in Captain Birdseye's variety. Excellent chips by Sam.

Sam, doing the only permitted eating on the day of making

The other dish for this post was in honour of F, who popped over from Australia for a visit. As it happened to be her birthday I created a sticky ginger cake with lime icing. It's this exact recipe, but I was using a cake pamphlet from Olive Magazine. The biggest problem with this one is the self restraint it requires, as after baking it has filled the kitchen with a lovely gingery cakey smell, and it has cooled and it looks ever so inviting, you have to pack it up to mature! No eating allowed. Until that is, you unwrap it two days later, cover the top in butter icing flavoured with lime zest and juice.

It's nice. No scrap that, it's delicious and several people have verified this. I recommend this it's sticky, the treacle gives it a dark toffee flavour and the lime icing, despite it being a buttercream, stops it from being all too cloying, and, please forgive me for sounding like a second-rate food critic, gives it another dimension. This is one for the list of favourites.

A tale of a tea loaf

And so back to the more chatty style of post. This week I have returned to that which I am most comfortable with: baking.

New recipe number one was supper on a miserable Thursday evening and cooked as comfort food for the other half as he found himself bogged down with work. We whittled red meat out of the things we fancied and settled on some kind of pie--I had just been paid so this pie, complete with a near full jar of Waitrose's grilled artichokes, was slapped on the evening's menu.

I could not find wild mushrooms in Leeds city centre, and had to settle on closed cup and chestnuts. Also, I did as the recipe suggested and was lazy enough not to make my own short crust pastry. I came to regret this, as I have now reached the proud point of being able to make better-than-shop-bought pastry (gentle readers who have been with me throughout this journey will remember I used to be Sally Carrie Cackhands with pastry: it scared me, and that which I made was not nice to eat). Anyway, Mr Waitrose's slightly tough pastry aside, it was very good. The mushrooms gave it a really autumnal taste and because it was filled with veggies, sharing a rather large pie between us for supper did not leave us feeling as sordid as we might have. Before I move onto the next recipe, the pie is not blind baked, and you can avoid the problem of a 'soggy bottom'--which seems to have plagued those commenting on the BBC's webpage with the recipe--by cooking it on a chip tray with holes in it.

I have also successfully made my Grandma's tea loaf (or rather loaves: the recipe makes a brace). All families seem to have foods which are traditional to them; whether it be your mum's Sunday roast, or your dad's bar-be-que sauce, most families have recipes which are tweaked to become their own or things which are the taste and smell of home. Although this year has mostly been about branching off into new things, I have also realised that there are some things closer to home which I wanted to learn to make. This seems to be a recipe which my great-grandfather brought home from his travels and, presumably, gave to my great grandmother; it is a much treasured heirloom.

It is also a recipe which I thought might go wrong: all the measurements were imperial; I had to guess at the cooking times, as I knew my thermonuclear oven would char on the time and temperature stated (it was cooked in 30 minutes under the time, so my caution paid off); and I had never made a cake that doesn't contain fat before. What it does contain is sugar and dried fruit which have been soaked overnight in tea, and a flour and some egg which are stirred in in the morning. There is no creaming, no folding, no whisking--it is so simple. It is also the best use for dried fruit I am yet to come across and I have eaten slice after slice slathered in butter this afternoon.

Here I will leave you. I need to work out how to skin some pollock fillets, but that's another story for next week.

The world in ten words

Ok, so, a bit of a break, I was off enjoying a staycation and intimidating myself by reading Julie and Julia, although it didn't really intimidate me as she seemed to spend a lot of time whining and didn't really say that much on the food--more about her tantrums. So I am not going to waffle about my personal problems--you can have a round up of the recipes in 10 words or less--per recipe. (I made another recipe for focaccia, as I realised, having watched The Great British Bake Off that nice as the rosemary one which I made earlier this year it did did not actually produce focaccia, I shan't bore you with details of an uneven crumb structure which should happen.)

Simon Hopkinson's Olive Oil Mash:


Grown up babyfood. Mash shouldn't be puréed. Tasted nice.









Paul Hollywood's Focaccia

Messy--dough everywhere! Eaten before I could photograph. Nom, nom.

Tiramisu Cake (author's own)


A's birthday: sponge, brandy, chocolate ganache. Peculiar candles.

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.