Pets, Vets & Unexpected cherries

So I know I shouldn't let him, but the dog really loves running through the wheat. And he seems to merely pass through it rather than crashing it all down. The only evidence he is there is a ripple passing over the top as he choffles through at speed, nose down hot on the scent - any scent. The problem with stopping him will be forgoing the look of utter joy that is a springer spaniel 'wheat sharking'. But there we go. I know I shouldn't be letting him do it.

My internal tussle came to a head yesterday after I spent time I didn't have and £50 (ditto) at the vets having a rather viscious spike of grass removed from the dog's ear, so this morning, we avoided the wheat and headed up to a gorgeous little plantation of trees that sits up on the Downs to the north of the village.

Well, it's beautiful up there, shady, cool, green. I go up there in all seasons and it's wonderful at any time, but seemed particularly lush this morning, not least because I stumbled upon cherries. Now, I know that there are cherry trees up there - crab apples too - but usually I see them in the early stages of fruiting, and then they are all gone - the birds have them. I reckon the birds must have sunstroke this year, because there were hundreds - ripe and luscious. Far too good to pass up.

I might not have had a conventional picking receptacle, but being the good, responsible dog owner that I am, I had dog poo bags (unused), and while the dog took advantage of the shade, I picked. I only stopped because I thought I'd better save one bag, you know, just in case...


So 1.5 kilos later, and I am a happy Recipe Junkie. My head is reeling with the thrill of the forage, and the prospect of what I might make with my pickings - and of course, I will need to go back and try and get some more later on.

I'm thinking jam, clafoutis, cherry bakewells, cherry vodka - so much choice...

What should I make?

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

What?! More cranberries? Cranberry Jam & possibly a Bakewell Tart

Now you'd think I'd have learned - the fact that I had a bag of cranberries in the freezer left over from last year which I turned into cranberry & orange sauce ready to accompany the Turkey on Tuesday, says something about the way I shop when I'm not concentrating and my head is turned. So what possessed me to virtually chuck a couple of bags of fresh cranberries into my virtual shopping trolley AFTER I'd made the aforesaid sauce is a mystery. But chuck I did, and rather than consign them to the freezer ready to be discovered next year, I decided that this year would be different.

Once again, Nigella has come to my rescue. She has a whole section devoted to cranberries in Feast, first up is Cranberry Jam.

Cranberries are full of pectin so it's a really easy jam to make - just an equal amount of cranberries to caster sugar. I had 600g of cranberries so I put a splash (literally, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan) of water in a large pan, added the cranberries and 600g of sugar and stirred over a low heat till all the sugar was dissolved.

If you haven't sterilised your jars, do so first, and make sure you keep them warm, either in the oven or in a bowl of hot water - otherwise they may crack when you decant the hot jam into them.
It does take a bit of time, and you can tell when it's all dissolved when the syrup that's being produced around the berries looks clear rather than cloudy. If you scoop a little out on the spoon and feel it, the sugar is dissolved when you can't feel anything but sticky syrup.

Then you have to increase the heat and bubble up the contents of the pan till it reaches setting point. This is where I always get the fear with any sort of jam. I was feeling more confident because I know that cranberries set very easily, but even so. In the end, although I did bung in the sugar thermometer, I also set the timer for the 7 minutes the Goddess indicates. The jam hadn't quite reached temperature at the 7 minute point but it was looking pretty jam like and I was worried that it might start to burn.

The jam went straight into the jars, and there was enough left over to go on the brioche that I made yesterday, for breakfast. Happy times.

And if I get round to it, there will be a Cranberry Bakewell Tart on the menu for tomorrow's lunch. Watch this space!

I am, of course, linking up to Maison Cupcake's Forever Nigella event, hosted this month by Laura on her blog lauralovescakes . Enjoy!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

From Alsace to Yorkshire by Lionel Strub - A Review and a recipe for Brioche

Another review. Get me.

This is another book which is more than just a recipe book.

Before we get to the food, it tells the story of the hard work and dedication of the author, Lionel Strub that took him from his childhood in Alsace, North Eastern France, to his restaurant, Mirabelle in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

It was clearly not an easy childhood, which saw him spending time in foster care, or with various friends and relations until the age of 8. He is very open about the lack of support he received at school, and it's not surprising that he left at the age of 15 to begin an apprenticeship in a restaurant.

It's easy to think that the life of a chef might be a gilded one, but this is clearly not the case for Lionel, and certainly the early years at 'Le Gran Cerf' in a town not far from Strasbourg sound fairly grim, but what is clear is that grim or not, this is where life started for him.

We learn then about his apprenticeship, his time spent on National Service cooking for soldiers, his move to England in 1986 and more hardwork in a London brasserie before heading North, first to Leeds, and then to Harrogate and his own restaurant, via a deli in Wetherby. It's an impressive story and well worth a read for any one who thinks the chef's life might be an easy one.

Now I haven't eaten at Mirabelle, but if the food in this book is anything to go by, I will be angling for a table the next time I'm up north at my parents'. Strub indicates that most of his recipes come from his Grandma, and as you would expect, there's a real French slant to his dishes. However, that doesn't meant that they are unachievable by any means. In fact, what I like about this book is that many of the recipes are surprisingly straightforward, with short but careful ingredients lists.

The recipes are wide ranging. There's an initial section devoted to Alsacienne recipes, which includes a delicious sounding warm salad of smoked bacon and chicory (salad Vosgienne), a savoury ham cake and a divine and incredibly easy sounding Gateaux aux myrtilles (translated as Bilberry sponge cake -  6 ingredients mixed together and baked - simples). He goes on to cover jams, chutneys and, breads, then starters, mains and desserts, and there's a straightforward grading system indicating the level of difficulty involved for some of the recipes. Pate en croute a l'Anglaise for example (posh pie and peas) is essentially a pie filled with duck confit, foie gras and truffle, served with mushy peas, and rated a Level 4 for the pie. He has plenty of fish and game recipes which I like, and some heavenly puddings, including some very reassuring words about choux pastry, not yet attempted by me, I should add, and a Toblerone cheesecake which is on my must make list for the New Year. Watch this space.

Each section has a little introduction with some general hints and tips, and some story or words of wisdom. Despite being a book by someone running a high end restaurant, these additions make the book much more homely than it might be. For example, in talking about setting point, rather than taking a high brow approach, he explains how "the saucers method" (the one where you put 2 saucers in the freezer, then put a dollop of jam on the cold plate and see if it crinkles when you push it) - the one preferred by his mother - is the best one by far. The fact that the saucer method makes me panic, and I have long since resorted to the jam thermometre method is by the by - I like that he chooses the method that works for him, even though it is the most low tech.

On occasion, it can seem as if there is not enough information - and this is borne out by the fact that there do appear to be some ommissions - for example, although the duck pie recipe is in the book, the recipe refers to the mushy pea recipe on an undeclared page, and no amounf of rifling revealed itself to me. The grading system for recipe difficulty isn't applied to every recipe - which may or may not be an ommission. There are also quite a few obvious typos, but I guess I have a proof copy, and hopefully, these issues will be ironed out for the final print runs.

The book is presented fairly plainly - white pages, black writing, nothing fancy - but I quite like that and there are plenty of photos to keep me drooling and happy, even if I can't find the recipe for mushy peas.

Brioche - makes 1 loaf

"Rich buttery, yet it's light. Brilliant for breakfast, the best bread in France"
 In the bread section, there's a brioche recipe. I've been meaning to try brioche for some time now, and have been angling for a proper mould to make it in. The mould has not been forthcoming so far, but I decided that it was meant to be, and I have permission to share the recipe with you. Bear in mind that when I started out, in my return to baking fitness enthusiasm last night which saw me marzipan the Christmas Cake and also make a banana and blueberry loaf cake (about which more another time), it was quite late. so I changed the method a little, but I've just indicated that in brackets:

350g unbleached white bread flour (I use Dove's Farm)
tsp salt (I assumed 1 tsp)
25g fresh yeast (I didn't have fresh so used 10g dried)
60ml warm milk
3 large eggs
175g unsalted butter (this needs to be at room temp, or warmer if you have a cold room)
25g caster sugar

1 egg yolk
1 tsp milk

1. Seive the flour into a large bowl, melt the yeast in the warm milk, then pour into the flour, add the eggs and mix to a soft dough
2. Beat the dough for 3 to 5 minutes (I used a dough hook on the Kenwood), cream the butter and sugar together
3, Gradually add the butter to the dough in small amount
4,. Beat until smooth and elastic and leave to prove for an hour
5. Lightly knock back the dough and place in the fridge for an hour (at this point, I decided to leave mine overnight in the fridge, then this morning bought it back to room temperature before continuing)
6. Shape the brioche in a loaf tin or brioche mould if you have
7. Glaze the brioche with the egg yolk and milk mixture cover and leave for at least and hour or double the size
8. Preheat the oven to 230C/Gas 8 put the brioche in the oven then turn the temp to 190C/gas 5 and bake for 25-30 minutes
9. Turn out on to a rack and leave to cool

 

 

 

Rich, buttery, light? All of the above. And very good with home made strawberry jam.

 

 

 

 

I was provided a copy of the book "From Alsace to Yorkshire" for the purposes of providing the review. I was not paid and I was not required to provide a positive review. The opinions are my own!



reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Christmas Cake Part 2 - the Marzipan

I like to think I'm a glass half full kinda gal most of the time. Generally, I find it much easier to cope with life if I can look on the positive side and try not to dwell too much on things that haven't gone so well - the 'character building' things I was muttering about a couple of weeks ago. I know I don't always succeed, but mostly, I can pull myself together pretty quickly.

So looking on the bright side - as I can, now that the pain is under control - of this whole painful jaw episode, if I hadn't been flying on pain killers this week, I would have gone out drinking and carousing the other night. And as I have been trying to take things easy, I sat down and watched TV, instead of running around doing a million other things at home, and caught the Christmas Great British Bake Off programme. As a result of that, I remembered that I'd made a Christmas cake and it needed icing. I also realised that if I got a move on, I could do the whole icing bit properly: marzipan first, and leave it to dry, before topping with the actual icing. I even had some apricot jam knocking around, to do the whole brushing the cake bit to get the marzipan to stick. Normally, I end up using marmalade and picking out the bits - or not, depending on the mood I'm in. To be honest, the extra orange peel can add an extra something to the cake...

Now I did wonder if this year would be the year that I made my own marzipan. It's not.

So moving swiftly on, I got down the cake and unwrapped it from its foil parcel - fantastic smells all round. I have to say that it's not a particularly boozy cake - I do prefer to drink my alcohol than eat it given the choice - but there's a definite aroma of Christmas to it - sherry-tinged Christmas this year.

I have a piece of granite chopping board which I use for rolling things out (got it in Sainsburys - it's nothing grand), so I dusted that with icing sugar, then put a couple of dessertspoons of apricot jam into a small pan on a low heat to melt.

I rolled out a pack of golden marzipan so that it would cover the cake, top and sides, and some (you want to have trimmings to make tasteful decorations for the final cake, anyway). Brush the melted jam over the cake, and then cover with the marzipan. You need to get the blunt side of a knife and kind of tuck the marzipan in under the cake and trim it off. I did notice that Mary iced her cake by having the flat side uppermost, which would probably make the tucking in and trimming off bit easier, but in all the excitement I was feeling this evening about actually wanting to do something in the kitchen after the last week of indifference, I got a bit carried away and forget. Anyway, it wasn't that hard:

So now my cake is all marzipanned and can dry out before I put the icing on. This has never happened before. It also leaves me some time to consider what beautiful cake adornments to turn my left over marzipan into, instead of doing it all at once in a hurry.

Any ideas gratefully received.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Rhubarb and Vanilla Jam

This is my jam pan. It is huge and enormous and we rescued it from on top of my mother’s kitchen cupboards. She had at least 3 up there, I think they were breeding.  

We’re at a bit of a critical period of the year as far as our preserves (ha ha!) are concerned. We ran out of chutney a few weeks ago as Blue seems to be inhaling it, and we’re running pretty low on jam. It’s at this point in the year that the balance between the shelf for jam and the shelf for empty jam jars starts to tip in favour of the latter, while the kids end up digging out something half-crystalised to spread on their toast from a jar that bears a label indicating the contents to be at least 3 years old.

The 'jam' cupboard. Spot the home-pickled chillies

I am not great at making jam. In fact, the Husband usually comes into his own here, confidently taking over the whole setting point thing, until he got so fed up with me wailing about it that he bought me a sugar thermometer. I used the sugar thermometer last summer when I made Nigella’s

peach and redcurrant jam . Not a fantastic example of confident jam making, granted, but we made some pretty lovely marmalade earlier this year with the help of the thermometer, and so tonight, I was prepared, and instead of sticking plates in the freezer, I just got the thermometer out of the drawer AT THE START of the process.

Everything is so late in the garden this year, there’s not much to make jam out of, and certainly nothing that could be worth turning into chutney yet, but we do have rhubarb. A colleague gave me this recipe a few months ago and I have been dying to try it. She assured me that the resulting jam tastes like rhubarb and custard. She was not wrong.

The original recipe was copied out of a Country Living magazine, but I have added a couple of bits in, and given some more detail in the method.

***Before you start on this, bear in mind that you need to leave the rhubarb to macerate in the sugar for at least 8 hrs – I left mine for 24 – before actually making the jam***

Rhubarb and Vanilla Jam

Ingredients: 1kg summer rhubarb (trimmed weight), 1 kg jam sugar, 1 vanilla pod, juice of half a lemon and half an orange.

Method: wash and trim the rhubarb, and slice into short lengths – I followed the picture my friend gave me so the pieces were about 1-2 cms long. Split the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds. Put rhubarb, vanilla pod and seeds in a large bowl with the sugar, stir together, cover and leave for at least 8 hrs somewhere cool – the fridge is good.

This draws out a lot of liquid from the fruit.

When you are ready to make the jam, empty the fruit and sugar mixture into a large pan. It will be quite gloopy and sticky with a load of sugar at the bottomg of the bowl. Scrape it all into the pan.

It doesn’t have to be a specific jam pan, but it needs to have a good, thick bottom.

Add the lemon and orange juice, then heat up the pan gently and stir (also gently) till the sugar is dissolved, then increase the heat and bring the pan to the boil till it has reached setting point. You can faff about with frozen plates but I urge you to buy a jam thermometer. It has a big line with the word JAM by it at approx 102⁰C /220⁰F.

check out the pink froth!

When the jam mixture has reached this temperature, turn the heat off, remove the vanilla pod and skim off any scum that has formed on top of the jam. Leave for 5 mins then fill your sterilised jars (I used 850g rhubarb and 850g sugar and it made 4 jars). Cover the jars with a clean tea towel until cool, then put the lids on and feel smug as you put them in the cupboard.

Just loving the colour!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad