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Soul food for wintery weekends – a bowl of homemade French onion soup and chunky slices of bread smeared thickly with butter. We ate Miracle Bread from Jane’s Handmade Bread bought at Abbey Ley’s farmers market spread with white goat’s butter.
I know I’ve been pretty terrible at posting recently – partly I have got the winter blues and partly I am exhausted by hectic workloads at both of my jobs. I am so looking forward to Christmas – I am craving that cosy Christmas feeling and a good break – and a chance to eat great food.
We have been eating a mixed bunch of food recently - some good, some crap. A couple of Friday’s ago we cooked a killer fish pie for friends…but we ate it before I had a chance to take a photo of its golden crusted gorgeousness.
We are majoring on sausage casseroles full of root veg, tinned beans, and other leftovers.
Last weekend we visited my family and cooked a pheasant casserole (my brother has become a beater and comes home with pheasants often at the moment).
I am just in the middle of cooking our dinner – Salami and Fennel Linguine – which I will endeavour to post tomorrow as I’m snapping pictures while I type – of course only if it tastes good – we’ve not made it before! I also promise to try and get the second part of our Italy holiday food posted asap. Watch this space.
Last night we cooked a meal that we’d never had before, and it was delicious. Over the summer I bought a recipe book called Freshly Pickedby Jojo Tulloh after reading a lovely excerpt from her book in a magazine on how to make the perfect salad.
One recipe I have been wanting to try from the book, is Sorrel dhal. My favourite grocery, Unicorn Groceryin Manchester currently has big bundles of sorrel, so I thought this the perfect time to try this dish. They also have a nice deli counter, with olives and hummous and all kinds of goodies (often an incredibly delicious homemade dhal!) and amongst all these I spotted a ‘channa salad.’ It comprised of a spicy chickpea salad – fantastically, Unicorn have a recipe for it on their website.
So along with some pitta bread (this was what we had in the freezer) rather than naan, we set about creating ourselves an Indian inspired feast. The dhal recipe itself was not difficult to make, but I did have a few teething problems – nothing too difficult to fix though. This was my first foray into dhal making, so it was bound to have a few hiccups.
Once the dhal was made, we served it up on plates with warm pitta bread and the channa salad. It was more delicious than I was expecting, incredibly comforting, a wonderful blend of gentle spices and hot chilli, and all vegetarian. Even N was pleasantly surprised and wolfed the lot down.
Below is the original recipe from Freshly Picked, with a few tweaks that I made whilst cooking it.
Sorrel dhal
Feeds 4
450g chana dhal or split yellow lentils (we used yellow split peas)
3 thick slices of ginger, unpeeled, smashed with the handle of a knife
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 – 1 tsp salt (use this as a guideline, I seasoned it until it tasted the way we liked it)
a pinch of garam masala (I used a generous pinch)
a knob of butter
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and flattened with the flat side of your chopping knife
2 green chillies, deseeded and finely sliced (I used one small green chilli as we don’t like too much heat)
a bunch of sorrel leaves, sliced into ribbons
Put the chana dhal into a saucepan and cover with about a litre of water. Bring to the boil and remove any scum. Add the ginger and turmeric and cook for at least 1 1/2 hours.
Caution, if you are not experienced in using pulses, like me, check on your pan regularly. I set my timer for 30 minutes as the cooking time on the packet of split peas said 40 minutes – I didn’t check on it during those 30 minutes and it boiled dry – an almost disaster! I simply added more water and carried on cooking it until it was the ‘thick puree with the pulses very soft to the touch’ that Jojo describes later.
If you are following Jojo’s recipe…
Keep your eye on it during the last 30 minutes and add a little more water if it is too dry, stirring occasionally. You are aiming for a thick puree with the pulses very soft to the touch. Add the salt and garam masala.
Just before you are ready to serve the dhal, heat a knob of buter in a heavy frying pan. Add the garlic and the chillies, quickly followed by the sorrel.
Cook the sorrel down gently for 5 minutes until it starts to disintegrate. Tip the whole mixture into the pan with the cooked dhal.
At this point, I tasted the dhal and adjusted the seasoning to our taste. This involved adding some more salt, and a couple of other ingredients: a little lemon juice to enhance the lemony flavour from the sorrel (perhaps I didn’t add enough) and some Tabasco sauce to increase the heat a little.
Add a little hot water from the kettle if it looks too thick. Stir well and set aside until you are ready to eat it.
Jojo recommends that this dish goes well with sour chickpeas and chapattis (both recipes included in her book, Freshly Picked) for a simple Indian supper. This is an utterly lovely book and I would recommend you go out and buy it and add it to your collection – it will become a family favourite!
Following on from yesterday’s post, mom cracked open a jar of the freshly made plum jam for breakfast today. She spread a slice of organic white bread with some butter and topped it with a dollop of plum jam.
It was a gorgeous amber jelly, just holding together enough to be great for spreading.
We all had a nibble. It was just sweet enough, with a soft and subtle plum taste. Not too overpowering, with a lovely smooth, slippery texture.
My recommendation: find some local plums and get making your own homemade plum jam. Perfect for Christmas presents, and in the depths of winter you’ll be pleased of a little slice of summer for breakfast.
I thought it was about time for a cake recipe (a little later than planned). I love cake. Most of all chocolate cake, but also lemon drizzle cake, Victoria sponge, pound cakes and cupcakes.
What better way to cheer oneself up than with a delicious homemade cake. That mouthwatering smell that wafts from the oven as it bakes away. It’s almost too much to bear. And then there’s the difficult decision about what to ice it with, if anything – melted chocolate or chocolate butter icing, or just as it is, warm from the oven.
Whatever you decide, it will be scrumptious. You will come down the next morning to find your boyfriend/husband/child has taken a HUGE chunk and run off to work with it. You will then eat an equally large chunk. For breakfast.
Use the best quality cocoa powder you can find – Green’s & Black is pretty nice. Usually I cook cakes in round tins, but this time I chose to bake it in a tray so it could be cut into chunks which are much easier to fit into lunchboxes.
Chocolate Cake
80z caster sugar
8oz butter (room temperature)
4 eggs
4 tbsp milk
8oz self raising flour
2oz cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
Preheat your oven to 180°C.
Line and/or grease your cake tin with a smear of butter and some greaseproof paper.
In a bowl cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
Slowly add the eggs one at a time.
In a separate small bowl, mix together the cocoa powder and milk to form a paste – add a little more milk if needed.
Mix the cocoa paste into the cake batter.
Sieve the flour and baking powder into the batter and gently fold in.
Pour the mixture into your cake tin and pop in the oven for about 30 minutes. You can test to see if it’s cooked by inserting a skewer – it should come out clean.
An absolute classic, timelessly tasty and always popular with friends. At its most basic, tomatoes and basil, but here I’ve added in a little crumbled feta.
Mixed Tomato and Basil Salad
Feeds 2 as part of a meal
100g red plum cherry tomatoes
100g yellow cherry tomatoes
Handful of fresh basil
Feta cheese
Dash of balsamic vinegar
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Cut the tomatoes into halves or quarters and pop into your serving dish.
Tear over the fresh basil.
Add a dash of balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
Crumble over the feta and season with salt and pepper.
Eat!
We ate our salads with cheese – a Danish blue cheese called Castello (available from -the dreaded- supermarket) and a sheep’s cheese called Brebirousse Argental (one of my absolute favourites and available from Barbakan Deli in Manchester).
To finish it off we had a plate of slightly toasted Polish black bread, that we rubbed with garlic and smeared with olive oil.
Yum yum yum.
Coming tomorrow: Chocolate Cake
Marinated Green Beans
Feeds 2 as part of a meal
Good handful of French green beans (enough for two people)
1 small shallot
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
Glug of white wine vinegar
Extra virgin olive oil
Small bunch of flat leaf parsley
Salt and pepper
Pop a pan of salted water on to boil.
Wash and cut the tops of the green beans. Once the water is boiling, drop the beans in and cook for about 5 minutes. Drain them and set aside.
To make the marinade, finely slice the shallot and pop it in a bowl. Add the Dijon mustard and a glug of white wine vinegar and give it a good mix.
Add the warm beans to the marinade and mix well.
Chop up the parsley and add it to the bowl along with a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Give it another good mix and season with salt and pepper.
This salad is best served after the beans have had a chance to marinate in the shallot, mustard and vinegar mixture, so make this ahead of time – 15-20 minutes is great.
Up next: Mixed Tomato and Basil Salad
I am a huge fan of River Cottage and really enjoyed watching the summer series – I especially loved their strawberry fayre. I would love to organise events like that for my living. Anyway, before I get off topic…Hugh made blackcurrant ice lollies and they looked so tasty I made a mental note to make them before the summer was out.
On a recent trip to the dreaded supermarket to stock up on a few basics, I discovered they were ‘chucking’ tons of fruit away (common sense would tell you none needed to be reduced) that had reached its sell by date. There were a couple of punnets of organic peaches from Italy, the peaches soft and furry. I came away with three punnets and an idea to make a peach versions of Hugh’s lollies.
So here’s my recipe for Peach and Yoghurt Ice Lollies, but really I’m sure it would work with other combinations of fruit and yoghurt, or just pure fruit if you preferred.
Peach and Yoghurt Ice Lollies
Makes 8 ice lollies with fruit purée leftover
About 10-12 peaches (less if you don’t want leftover purée)
Something to sweeten it with (honey, caster sugar, icing sugar, agave syrup)
Vanilla yoghurt
Start by skinning and pitting all your peaches. Discard the skin and stones and place the peach flesh into a bowl.
Blitz the peaches up into a smooth purée and add a sweetener if needed.
Take your ice lolly moulds – now, as I see it there are two (main) options when deciding on how to fill your moulds.
1) I chose fill 1/3 of the mould with purée before topping it up with yoghurt. Using a spoon I slightly swirled the peach mixture into the yoghurt which made it look quite pretty! Of course, this is not necessary! I then added a final thin layer of peach purée. These were popped into the freezer.
2) The other main option would be to mix the peach purée into the yoghurt before filling the moulds, so you have a peach flavoured yoghurt lolly.
I suppose you could also do multiple layers – peach, yoghurt, peach, yoghurt and so on. Have fun!
On tasting the lollies, I think next time I would try mixing the peach purée into the yoghurt before adding them to the moulds to create a more consistent flavour. My lollies were lovely, and great if you fancy a bite of icy cold frozen peach, then a refreshing burst of frozen yoghurt.
This is my recipe for homemade tomato soup. It’s got a nice tang to it from the addition of some sundried tomatoes, and is a delicious meal in winter or summer. There’s so many ways you can serve it – with crusty white bread spread thickly with butter, a dollop of cream cheese, crème fraîche swirled through it, a drizzle of olive oil, toasted pitta bread, a sprig of basil. Or what I really liked as a child was to put a big knob of salty butter into the middle, wait for it to melt and then swirl it in – probably not very healthy, but I loved that extra smooth salty edge it gave the soup.
Homemade Tomato Soup
Feeds 2
2 small shallots or 1 medium onion, chopped
6-8 sundried tomatoes, chopped
Tin of plum or cherry tomatoes
Bunch of thyme, leaves only
400-500ml vegetable stock
Salt and pepper
Start by softened the chopped shallots over a medium heat. Once they have softened and started to turn translucent, add the sundried tomatoes and thyme leaves.
If you can’t be bothered or don’t have the time to pick off all the leaves, pop the whole sprigs in to impart their flavour - just before you blend the soup remember to remove the sprigs or you’ll end up with bits of twig in every mouthful…it’s not pleasant!
After a couple of minutes, add the tinned tomatoes and break them up with a wooden spoon.
Add the vegetable stock and bring to the boil.
Reduce to a simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes.
Turn off the heat, remove any sprigs of thyme if left whole, and blend to a smooth puree.
Season with salt and pepper to taste and eat straightaway however you wish.
It has been months since N baked homemade bread, but last night, prompted by a cube of fresh yeast, he got baking again. There was a near disaster at first, when the bread didn’t rise. We think it’s because the recipe we were following (find it here) called for dry yeast and we used fresh. On searching the internet I found out you need to use a lot more fresh yeast than dried…so while N started a fresh batch, I searched to find out if we could rescue the original batch. Turns out you can, thanks to those helpful people on the Jamie Oliver forums.
We ended up with two delicious loaves rather than one, neither of which were disastrous, and in fact were probably the best loaves we’ve made. We followed the recipe, misting the oven with water and the loaves before popping them in to bake. It produced the most fantastic crust, so we’ll definitely be using that technique again.
So, there you have it – my favourite meal…ever: still warm homemade bread smeared (generously, of course) with lightly salted farmhouse butter. Mmmmm mm.
*Note: we used white bread flour and didn’t follow the rye flour coating.
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