What do you do about dessert when the main supermarkets are closed and the only option left is a corner shop with a dubious selection of Viennettas and assorted vegetables. I grabbed a pot of double cream, a tub of normal and a tub of the new chocolate Philadelphia, and a packet of ginger nuts.
Once home, the gingernuts (about 200g) got boshed and then mixed with melted butter (50g), the cream cheese was beaten together with some caster sugar, and the cream was whipped soundly.
The gingernut mixture was squashed into the bottom of a springform cake tin, the cream was folded into the cream cheese, and then the whole lot was spooned on top of the biscuit base. 15 minutes later, the whole lot is in the fridge awaiting it's demise - after our roast beef dinner.
Chocolate ginger cheesecake. Done.
Sunday, 26 August 2012
Friday, 24 August 2012
Bringing Culture to the Countryside
As much as I would like to, I cannot take full credit for bringing culture to the countryside on Wednesday night. Instead, the initial responsibility for this feat lies with an enterprising fishmonger who has a stall at the weekly market in Wantage.
In a town that's centre is starting to look very bleak, with every other shop closing down (thanks primarily to some interesting local planning decisions), this fishmonger and his sign for 'sushi £4.50, 2 for £8' stood out like a beacon of decency. 4 trays promptly purchased, my mother and I took up the proverbial gauntlet and ran with it. Not literally, of course, or we might have dropped the sushi!
Our family is one of confirmed Japanese food lovers. Our favourite restaurant in Edinburgh was Izzi (before it shut down), our first dinner out when we're in the states is sushi, my last birthday was at a tepenyaki restaurant in Lytham... Need I go on?
So, with our newly purchased sushi as a base, we set about preparing a Japanese feast for dinner. We had some edamame (soya beans in their pods) in the freezer, which we usually have served with a good sprinkling of rock salt, so that as you suck the beans out of the pods you get a lovely salty, steamy taste. When I was in Taiwan in 2010, though, I had tried edamame with raw garlic crushed through it. Garlic being the one thing that is always on my shopping list, I was pleasantly surprised by this development and tried a variation out for our Japanese feast. I warmed up a good amount of olive oil in a tiny pan and added finely chopped garlic, cooking it very gently, not allowing it to colour. I poured the garlic and some of the olive oil over the cooked edamame and then tossed in a couple of pinches of rock salt. First course done.
When you order set menus in restaurants, you tend to get a miso soup course accompanied with a sweetly dressed salad. Using Clearspring Organic Miso paste, we made up the soup served sprinkled with finely sliced spring onions. We made a quick salad of shredded lettuce, grated carrot and grated radish. For the salad dressing we combined finely-grated ginger, a splash of soy sauce, a glug of sesame oil, a pinch of sugar, a slosh of white wine vinegar and a big tablespoon of mayonnaise. I don't know whether this ingredient list is even close to that of the traditional dressing, but it certainly tasted like a good approximation.
The feast was completed by our market-bought sushi for third course and a small bottle of sake, poured into a jug and heated in the microwave.
We may not have slaved hours in the kitchen cooking sushi rice, we may not have trawled the south west sourcing ingredients, but we did have a very nice evening, with very tasty food courtesy of a fishmonger with a vision in the deepest, darkest countryside!
In a town that's centre is starting to look very bleak, with every other shop closing down (thanks primarily to some interesting local planning decisions), this fishmonger and his sign for 'sushi £4.50, 2 for £8' stood out like a beacon of decency. 4 trays promptly purchased, my mother and I took up the proverbial gauntlet and ran with it. Not literally, of course, or we might have dropped the sushi!
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| Showing Off Some Skills On My Birthday |
So, with our newly purchased sushi as a base, we set about preparing a Japanese feast for dinner. We had some edamame (soya beans in their pods) in the freezer, which we usually have served with a good sprinkling of rock salt, so that as you suck the beans out of the pods you get a lovely salty, steamy taste. When I was in Taiwan in 2010, though, I had tried edamame with raw garlic crushed through it. Garlic being the one thing that is always on my shopping list, I was pleasantly surprised by this development and tried a variation out for our Japanese feast. I warmed up a good amount of olive oil in a tiny pan and added finely chopped garlic, cooking it very gently, not allowing it to colour. I poured the garlic and some of the olive oil over the cooked edamame and then tossed in a couple of pinches of rock salt. First course done.
When you order set menus in restaurants, you tend to get a miso soup course accompanied with a sweetly dressed salad. Using Clearspring Organic Miso paste, we made up the soup served sprinkled with finely sliced spring onions. We made a quick salad of shredded lettuce, grated carrot and grated radish. For the salad dressing we combined finely-grated ginger, a splash of soy sauce, a glug of sesame oil, a pinch of sugar, a slosh of white wine vinegar and a big tablespoon of mayonnaise. I don't know whether this ingredient list is even close to that of the traditional dressing, but it certainly tasted like a good approximation.
The feast was completed by our market-bought sushi for third course and a small bottle of sake, poured into a jug and heated in the microwave.
We may not have slaved hours in the kitchen cooking sushi rice, we may not have trawled the south west sourcing ingredients, but we did have a very nice evening, with very tasty food courtesy of a fishmonger with a vision in the deepest, darkest countryside!
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Either You Need To Change Or I Do
Ordinarily a meticulous planner of weekly meals, but recently frustrated by the demanding schedules of a harvesting farmer, I decided to ‘wing it’ in the supermarket yesterday. Initially daunted by the thought of entering into a major shopping expedition unarmed and unprepared, I quickly embraced the new-found freedom of spontaneity.
Vegetables of all varieties found their way into my trolley, as yet unassigned to a particular dish or day. Moving on to the meat and fish section, I picked up a few deals and made sure I had some fish for one dinner. And so the shopping progressed.
It was only later, when I was in Wantage’s market square contemplating what to cook for dinner, that I realised that I had pretty much only bought pork. I’d picked up some steaks, perhaps for a stir fry, some mince for some lean burgers or maybe to stuff a pepper, and some posh sausages – pork, leek & chive and pork with, wait for it, cherry wood smoked bacon.
I laughed inwardly at the irony – I had given myself a free rein in the supermarket and actually ended up limiting myself more so than if I'd had a shopping list. I continued to muse this over as I entered the deli and absentmindedly selected three small cooking chorizo sausages for a lentil stew.
That evening I recounted the amusement of the day’s shopping to my beef-farming friend. "I think I need to come up with a new way to shop," I said. "Or I need to start farming pigs, Ellie," she countered.
With a freezer full of beef-farming perks in one of the farm sheds, I really have no excuse not to replicate this week’s ‘in praise of the pig’ with an ‘homage to the humble heifer’ next week.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Practice Makes Perfect (British) Paella
I wrote this for the Leith Open Space blog in October 2011, as part of our World Kitchen in Leith activities. Thanks to Fay Young for her keen editorial eye!
I have always loved paella. How could anyone not love sitting in bright sun on aged wood decking, pale blue paint peeling off the beams, 10 feet from the sand and just 20 feet from the Mediterranean? It really doesn’t matter what you’re eating, if you’re sitting at the back of Restaurante Kati on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by families enjoying the day, the view, the food and each other’s company.
Restaurante Kati is in a fishing village called Cabo de Palos in Murcia, where there is also a lovely Sunday market. It is run by a family of fishermen. The men bring back their catch after an early start, and their wives and sisters cook in the kitchen for locals returning from the market laden with bags of oranges and this week’s fashion must-have.
My father was the first brave soul in our family to attempt to replicate the paella that we know to be the best in Spain. With a St Michael’s cookbook for guidance, the first product was delicious. But not quite a paella.
Dad persisted over a number of years, learning from Spanish friends the secrets to their paellas. One would add ñoras, dried whole red peppers. Another would prefer a fish-only paella. All agreed that the golden yellow comes not from saffron, but colorante – the amount of real saffron you need would cost a small fortune and a herd of camels.
Unfortunately for Dad, he is British. So even when he replicated the recipe of one Spanish friend to the letter, another would tut and say that it was a very good effort. But not a paella.
This is why I have always been anxious about making paella. However, for the World Food event on the 16th of October, I set self-doubt and fears aside.
I do not have the benefit of Dad’s Spanish master classes, but I have a good stock of cookbooks, the internet, and I know what the best paella in Spain tastes like. Research done, I set about my trial run.
It seems the secret to a good paella is first the oil. In 80ml of olive oil (from my friend’s very own trees) I separately cooked then removed a whole, unpeeled head of garlic, a ñora, a good bunch of thyme, chopped chorizo, chunks of pork belly, squid cut into rings, and chicken thighs. Had I had the heads of some prawns I would have cooked these too.
The next important stage is a flavoursome sofrito. [see above]. I made mine with garlic, onions, and chopped chargrilled peppers. Then I added 8 small, peeled tomatoes and cooked the whole mixture until almost all the moisture was gone.
Now the rice: Spanish Calasparran or bomba rice is added and cooked for a couple of minutes before half the stock is added, along with browned chicken, thyme, garlic bulb, ñora and, in this – but not future – cases, saffron. A good amount of salt is added too. Then the hard part. Do not touch! All I did was add more stock if it was looking a little dry.
15 minutes later, I added chunks of hake plus cooked chorizo, pork belly and squid. Another 15 minutes later, with a touch more stock along the way, in went prawns [above] to simmer with the rest of the ingredients until just cooked.
Result? Almost spot on. In future I shall use colorante and I will take a little more care about how much stock to add, but I think I am as close as I can get to the best (British) paella I will ever be able to make. No sand, no Med but so far there is sun: Scotland’s October weather this year seems to be on my side to complete the experience!
I have always loved paella. How could anyone not love sitting in bright sun on aged wood decking, pale blue paint peeling off the beams, 10 feet from the sand and just 20 feet from the Mediterranean? It really doesn’t matter what you’re eating, if you’re sitting at the back of Restaurante Kati on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by families enjoying the day, the view, the food and each other’s company.
Restaurante Kati is in a fishing village called Cabo de Palos in Murcia, where there is also a lovely Sunday market. It is run by a family of fishermen. The men bring back their catch after an early start, and their wives and sisters cook in the kitchen for locals returning from the market laden with bags of oranges and this week’s fashion must-have.
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| Shopping at the Edinburgh Farmers' Market for World Food Day |
My father was the first brave soul in our family to attempt to replicate the paella that we know to be the best in Spain. With a St Michael’s cookbook for guidance, the first product was delicious. But not quite a paella.
Dad persisted over a number of years, learning from Spanish friends the secrets to their paellas. One would add ñoras, dried whole red peppers. Another would prefer a fish-only paella. All agreed that the golden yellow comes not from saffron, but colorante – the amount of real saffron you need would cost a small fortune and a herd of camels.Unfortunately for Dad, he is British. So even when he replicated the recipe of one Spanish friend to the letter, another would tut and say that it was a very good effort. But not a paella.
This is why I have always been anxious about making paella. However, for the World Food event on the 16th of October, I set self-doubt and fears aside.
I do not have the benefit of Dad’s Spanish master classes, but I have a good stock of cookbooks, the internet, and I know what the best paella in Spain tastes like. Research done, I set about my trial run.
It seems the secret to a good paella is first the oil. In 80ml of olive oil (from my friend’s very own trees) I separately cooked then removed a whole, unpeeled head of garlic, a ñora, a good bunch of thyme, chopped chorizo, chunks of pork belly, squid cut into rings, and chicken thighs. Had I had the heads of some prawns I would have cooked these too.
The next important stage is a flavoursome sofrito. [see above]. I made mine with garlic, onions, and chopped chargrilled peppers. Then I added 8 small, peeled tomatoes and cooked the whole mixture until almost all the moisture was gone.
Now the rice: Spanish Calasparran or bomba rice is added and cooked for a couple of minutes before half the stock is added, along with browned chicken, thyme, garlic bulb, ñora and, in this – but not future – cases, saffron. A good amount of salt is added too. Then the hard part. Do not touch! All I did was add more stock if it was looking a little dry.
15 minutes later, I added chunks of hake plus cooked chorizo, pork belly and squid. Another 15 minutes later, with a touch more stock along the way, in went prawns [above] to simmer with the rest of the ingredients until just cooked.
Result? Almost spot on. In future I shall use colorante and I will take a little more care about how much stock to add, but I think I am as close as I can get to the best (British) paella I will ever be able to make. No sand, no Med but so far there is sun: Scotland’s October weather this year seems to be on my side to complete the experience!
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Old Spice
Cumin can be the extra ingredient that is the making of a great dish, a fact that was highlighted during a palatable but decidedly uninspiring dinner last night.
I was making Valentine Warner’s Prawn Tangiers at my friend’s house, and was relying on her supply of spices for the aromatic kick that gives the recipe its exotic name. Unfortunately, my friend had inherited her spice rack from a relative who had previously lived in the house. Cumin seeds excavated at archaeological sites have been dated back to the second millennia BC, and I have suspicions that my friend’s stock may have been sourced directly from this find.
The first inkling I had that something was wrong was the absence of the warm, musty smell emanating from the pan usually associated with toasting cumin. I tried adding more cumin to the pan, but to no avail. At this point I noticed the conspicuous ‘RRP 59p’ on the side of the Schwartz jar. Oh dear. With similar jars now priced just under £2, this particular jar must have been purchased back when shoulder pads and neon was in fashion… the first time!
With a starving farmer desperate for dinner, and no available alternative, I had to press on with the recipe, complete with flavourless cumin. I added extra garlic to make up for it, but the dish was just not the same.
I really enjoy this dish as a simple supper. It’s clean and fresh but with the mysterious edge of an Arabian summer. Take my advice, though, and do not underestimate how central the cumin is to the recipe. And make sure your cumin is at least a decade younger than you!
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| This Prawn Tangiers was made on a previous occasion, but I thought you'd enjoy the illustration. |
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