shewhomust | Entries tagged with recipes

I eventually baked some hot cross buns on Easter Sunday, so we had them for breakfast on Monday - which is still Easter, isn't it? So, not too late (it's never too late for buns!). And J. had called on Good Friday with a couple of buns of her own baking, so we had already had buns on Saturday. J. had apparently never made hot cross buns before, and she had gone to the trouble of making pastry crosses to decorate the tops - which added an interesting crunch, but goodness, how fiddly!

I had already discarded a batch of sourdough (all bar a spoonful to seed the next batch), so I was relieved to be back on schedule.

I made Felicity Cloake's saffron buns: last time I did this, I thought the saffron and cardamom were overpowered by the other spices, so this time I didn't add any other spices. The dough smelled amazing, but not much of that survived the baking. But I leaned into the golden theme: I didn't have any candied peel, so I substituted candied pineapple, and threw in a handful of chopped pistachio nuts. The result was good, but next year I think I'll go back to the traditional spice buns.

I'd make the golden buns again, though. I love saffron. In fact, and I hadn't planned this, I used it twice on Sunday, because I also made paëlla for dinner.

I made a recipe!

I often grumble about the Guardian's 'Feast' section. Yes, I know, the entire readership grumbles about the number of ingredients in Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes, but my grumble is different, it is that it pays constant attention to those following a gluten-free, or meat-free, or exclusively plant-based, or even just low-fat diet. It even has regular recommendations for alcohol-free wines and cocktails. But it never acknowledges that some of us -- rather a lot of us - have problems with sugar. Every week there are recipes for high-sugar desserts and cakes, and some of them are very tempting.

Ahem.

So I made Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for blackberry and sage crumble bars.

durham_rambler has been picking a lot of blackberries, and this seemed worth a try before the season ended. I managed to get some fresh sage while we were at the farm shop: they don't sell herbs, but they do grow them, to flavour the sausages, and parted with a generous sprig when asked.

The verdict, short version: I would make it again, but I'd try some changes.

( The verdict, longer version: )

Also at the farm shop, I found a small quantity of damsons, which I stewed with the last of the plums; but I could have tried them in this fruit bake.

As previously noted, Felicity Cloake puts saffron in her hot cross buns, and I thought I'd give her recipe a try. In theory, I believe in following the instructions faithfully, the first time you make a new recipe, because the alternative is that you always use the same seasonings and everything you cook comes out the same. In practice, I often diverge from the recipe because I just don't believe it; also, some modifications are needed to make things work with my sourdough. So, this is what I did:

Original recipe here

Warm 200 mls milk with saffron, cardamom, cloves and the last corners of a couple of nutmegs. Leave to stand. I didn't use stick cinnamon because I couldn't be bothered. Might be worth trying. Two cloves is plenty, but the cardamom wasn't really identifiable. The saffron did wonders for the look of the buns, but I couldn't really taste it, which was a waste.

Add 3 oz butter (I'd meant to use 2 oz, which was how much I'd used previously, but I ended up emptying the butter dish) and warm the milk so that it melts. Then beat in 1 egg, and add to the starter.

Mix in the flour - and for once I used all white flour - the cinnamon and the ginger. The sourdough doesn't need any extra sugar, so I don't add any, but I see that the recipe also adds the salt at this stage, and while I usually add it much later, don't forget all about it (I did, and wish I hadn't).

I add the fruit at this stage, because I like the vine fruits to soften in the dough: a couple of ounces of peel and 3 or 4 oz sultanas - I see the recipe calls for currants, but I like sultanas.

Usual process of rising and knocking back, for as long as time permits.

Form into buns: the recipe says 16, which would be on the small side, and also tells you to use two baking trays. My usual dozen buns were fine, and would have been even better if I'd managed to make them more even. But I am improving at this. Slash with crosses and leave to rise. I gave them as long as I could, which turned out to be between an hour and an hour and a half. Longer might be better, but this was fine.

Brush with beaten egg, and bake. 25 minutes at mark 5, on the top shelf, was plenty. They were so tender when I removed them from the baking tray that I was afraid they were underdone, but cooled overnight and then warmed in the oven they were fine. Better than fine.

The combination of saffron and egg wash (and, I suppose, white flour) produced beautiful golden buns, on which the crosses were not very distinct. They were just about discernable if you looked, though, which will have to do, because I have no intention of piping flour-and-water paste, or any of the other methods of marking the cross. Nor am I going to add the sticky sugar glaze.

Anyway, we have buns to see us through the breakfasts of the Easter weekend, and that's the important thing.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/626653.html

1. Coughing: I thought I was over this wretched cold, but since we went swimming yesterday, I have been coughing again. It seems unfair that organising ourselves to take some healthy exercise - first time swimming in a couple of weeks, what with one thing and another - should result in my feeling less well. (I exaggerate, of course. The cough is only intermittent, and it isn't painful - but it is irritating).
2. Thawing: We parked, as is our habit, just across the river from the pool. The water is high and fast moving: still within its banks, though we wondered how long that would last. The geese who live on a grassy hummock at the water's edge had taken refuge at the top of the bank, just below the patio of the Passport Office. Returning after our swim we thought that if anything the water level had fallen slightly, and were surprised - but the heaps of snow are smaller today than they were yesterday, and the real test is what happens when it thaws up the dale...
3. Cooking: I bought two bergamots from Waitrose, last time I ordered online - I've never been offered bergamots before, so how could I resist? Two citrus fruits, about the size of a medium orange, greenish yellow, what do do with them? In the end I made a version of Josceline Dimbleby's 'Canary cake' (a flourless almond sponge soaked in an orange syrup): adding the zest to the cake mixture and making the syrup from the juice and a little honey. The two fruits in their packaging were completely inert, but as soon as the zester bit into the skin there was the unmistakable spritz of Earl Grey tea. The juice was sharper than orange, but again, that distinctive flavour. I'd buy more of those...

Meanwhile, I have some pink onions: not the genuine Roscoff variety, these were grown in Essex, but a chance to try out the recipe leaflet I picked up at the 'Maison des Johnnies'.
4. Remembering: The Guardian's 'How we Made' feature talks to the artist and designer behind the poppy installation at the Tower of London. I wish I had seen that: I love the idea of it, and the details in the article are very moving, but you can't really talk about art without actually seeing it (well, I can't, and I don't think you should). So I was pleased to see, at the foot of the article, that there will be a national tour of the Weeping Window section of the work (I'd have loved to see that in Kirkwall during the Battle of Jutland commemorations, but we were committed elsewhere). The nearest it will come is Carlisle, which is not impossible, despite the less than ideal dates.
5. A message in a bottle: The world's oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia by a couple who thought it might "look good on a bookshelf".

Alternative title: "quibbling". This is not the story of a bottle employed to carry a message, it's the story of a message added to make it possible to track a bottle - not communication, but mapping. The bottle was thrown overboard in 1886 as part of a German experiment to track ocean currents; hundreds of bottles from this experiment have already been found, but none since 1934. I think this means that this latest find is the oldest message in a bottle by a margin of a quarter of a century, not because its older but because it took longer to find it. It's still a very cool thing to find.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/622605.html

On Thursday morning we take the train to London for our pre-Christmas visit: not a particularly early train, but I don't want to leave more than the last of the packing until Thursday morning.

I had hoped by now to have sent at least the overseas Christmas cards, and the gifts which need to be posted. Failing that, to have them wrapped and ready to go to the post. So that will be tomorrow's task. Also tomorrow, we have booked for Gail-Nina's Christmas lecture at the Lit & Phil, on Cinderella:

While modern variations may question the happy ending and dismiss the moral, 'Cinderella' remains one of the key story-types of our culture. What could offer a more heart-warming prelude to Christmas than a closer look at the original rags-to-riches narrative enshrined in fairy tales and movies, panto and opera? It's not all just big frocks and charming princes, however - like most traditional tales this one casts some darker shadows, raising questions about rank, love and identity (not to mention shoes.) This richly illustrated talk discusses the roots and variant versions of the tale, symbolic and social interpretations and its wide dissemination as book, drama, image, metaphor and even postcard.

which should be fun. If we go to town by train, I can renew my railcard, which managed to expire without my noticing. Then home in time for the pub quiz. Can we do all this? Who knows?

We are outside the snowpocalypse zone, but snow has fallen, and has been lying around.

durham_rambler has been out this evening, and reports that the weather is improving. I am assuming that I will be brave enough to leave the house tomorrow - but we all know I'm a terrible wimp really.

Where did today go? A few days ago

durham_rambler reminded a number of our clients that they might want us to send out newsletters before Christmas, and several of them have taken us up on that.

And I have baked a Christmas cake. Technically I have baked two, as the mixture filled two loaf tins, but I persist in regarding it as one cake in two tins. For the record, this quantity, which is what I was aiming for, achieved by adjusting the usual mashup to half quantities on Jane Grigson's recipe, and increasing the Maggie's Farm recipe by not very much - an ounce or so all round. I used mostly spelt flour plus some hazelnut flour, and left out the ground almonds (deliberately; but I've just realised I also left out the nutmeg, which was an accident). After two hours in the oven at mark 3 it smelled done, and I had a look, and stabbed it with a skewer and how do you tell if a rich fruit cake is cooked or nor? But I decided it might be, took it out and poured brandy on its wounds. The house smells of cake, which is very pleasant. It feels self-indulgent, to bake a Christmas cake instead of a pudding (and it definitely is either/or: I'm up for cooking either of them from scratch, but not both) but I enjoy bought pudding almost as much as home made, which isn't true of cake.

So, no, not nearly there yet. Never mind. Bed time.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/609729.html

For the first time in over two months, we slept in our own bed last night.

We have been using the spare bedroom while our room was being redecorated, and yes, one way and another it really has taken that long: waiting for carpet to be delivered, then waiting for new mattress and for curtains, and finally buying some more curtain hooks... Even now, there are drawers full of clothes and bedding in the wrong room, not to mention the books (don't mention the books!). But the room is ready to be slept in:

and we were ready to sleep in it. I wish I could say I had a wonderful night's sleep, but I didn't (sometimes I don't). It took us a while to get used to the spare bed - it's narrower than our own bed, and the mattress is very bouncy - and now it's going to take a while to get unused to it again. And I miss having a bedside cabinet (there isn't really room for anything on my side of the bed). Nonetheless, it's good to be back.

There was saffron bread for breakfast. It's taken a while, after the disaster of my last attempt, for me to gather the nerve, but I've been thinking how nice saffron bread would be, so I tried again. ( And since I was disappointed not to find a better record of what I did last time, here are the numbers )

Considering how much higher it was risen after baking, I was surprised at how dense the crumb is - more like cake than bread. But it toasts well enough. Because we have been to IKEA (see lightshade in the picture) I have lingonberry jam. It would be better if it was less sweet, but it's not at all bad.

This recipe for blueberry pancakes worked well, so I don't want to lose it! And I was charmed by its conversion into measurements I could understand (understand, if not obey absolutely. 6 1/4 ounces flour? I don't think so! And I may have been a bit heavy handed with the blueberries.) Short version:
Whisk 2 large eggs and 10 ounces milk, stir in 1 1/2 ounces melted butter.
Stir in 6 1/4 ounces King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour, pinch salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, scant ounce vanilla sugar, 3 ounces blueberries
Fry
I liked the tenderness of the pancake against the sharpness of the berries.

I have just reached the end of a jar of S's home made marmalade: it was very good marmalade, if on the chewy side, and, because she asks her friends to contribute jars, it came labelled 'Old El Paso Hot', which also made me smile.

Talking of breakfast, I make my toast on an eye-level grill. I'd say 'doesn't everyone?', but I've suffered enough toasters at enough holiday lets to know that no, everyone doesn't. This Guardian article in which readers boast of the longevity of their domestic appliances includes a complaint that it's all-but-impossible to find a modern cooker with an eye-level grill.

If I'd known the Guardian was inviting stories of long-lived white goods, I'd probably have told them about donating our washing machine to Beamish museum. My favourite art historian sent me this washing-machine-related cartoon.

Evidence - in the form of 200,000 fish bones - suggests that mesolithic Scandinavians were fermenting fish 9000 years ago.

What? Fermented fish is totally breakfast related!

I mostly avoid the chocolate option on the menu. It's not that I don't like chocolate, it's that it is rarely chocolatey enough: if it isn't rich and dark and intense, I'll have something else, thanks. This is true of beetroot chocolate cake as well: it sounds like a great idea, harnessing those two sombre sweetnesses into one rich cake, but too often the result falls short of the potential.

Now for the good news: I may be on the right track at last! ( Recipe, for the record, under the cut )

What is the purpose of the sugar? By the time a cake contains both beetroot and chocolate, it really doesn't need extra sweetness. The sugar makes it easier to beat the eggs to a thick cream, but does it actually add any lightness?

My views on the correct time to eat hot cross buns are narrow in the extreme. It doesn't seem right that they appear in the shops as soon as Christmas is over, or even before; they should wait until Easter is within sight. But by then, of course, it is Lent, when a rich spiced dough would not be appropriate. So hot cross buns are permissible on Easter Sunday morning, and for a few days after - and that's all. Not that I observe Lent, or Easter for that matter, but I do enjoy the association of particular foods with particular seasons. So when it occurred to me that

durham_rambler would probably enjoy a bun with his birthday breakfast, I didn't make hot cross buns, I made spice buns (the difference being that they are cut across the top with a single slash, not a cross).

I knew I had done this before, and that I had adapted the recipe from Elizabeth David's bread book to suit my own method, so I assumed I would have some record of what I had done. But when I tracked down the relevant post, all I had written was "a mash-up of my basic sourdough, the recipe from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and what ingredients came to hand." Moreover, those ingredients were no longer to hand. So here, for the benefit of my future self, is what I did this time:

I warmed a scant 200 ml of milk in a saucepan with 2 oz butter, then let it cool a little before I beat in 2 eggs. This was the liquid that I added to the starter, and to which I added the flour: the resultant mixture was too wet - yes, wet is good, but this was too sticky to handle, and I had to add more flour. My first thought was that I should reduce the quantity of milk, but there is a further variable, because I had just started a new bag of flour.

The flour was one third plain white, one third spelt, and one third wholemeal; the wholemeal was from a bag I had bought last summer from Lode Mill at Anglesey Abbey, and it had an unexpected crunchiness about it. This made for a good crust, but I wonder whether the flour absorbs less liquid than usual? I must have added an extra couple of ounces of white flour to my basic pound of flour.

The spices were the traditional cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves: plenty of nutmeg and cautious with the cloves. I may have been over-cautious, because the nutmeg predominated. I wondered whether I should add some sugar, didn't do it, didn't miss it. The recipe calls for 4 oz currants, which is quite a lot, and even though the dough was shedding currants all the way, they must have contributed plenty of sweetness. If I were using the recipe to make hot cross buns, I might substitute a mixture of sultanas and candied peel, but I couldn't say why that feels more appropriate.

This made a dozen good-sized buns: I see no need to adjust the quantities, but a touch less liquid requiring a touch less flour wouldn't do any harm.

ETA (1.03.2016): 180 mls milk, 2oz butter, 1 egg wasn't enough liquid this time round. I had to add a small amount of water, and the resultant buns were a bit dense. This may also be an effect of a minimal final rise (one hour from forming into buns) but I don't think so: the rise was unspectacular throughout.

ETA (9.04.2020): 200 mls milk, 2oz butter, 1 egg - and given the difficulty of finding wholemeal flour during coronavirus lockdown. 10 oz plain / 5 oz rye flour. All plain would have been fine. (I may have nailed it.)

Nigel Slater fantasises about what he would do if someone left a box of quinces on his doorstep - and then gives two recipes, one of which is, effectively 'serve poaches quince with gorgonzola cream' (sounds good); the other is for Quince and panettone pudding, but the proportions seem off: the recipe specifies 1.2 kilos of quinces (peeled and cored weight) to 220g panettone (or brioche): that's a whole lot of quinces.

Mistakes do happen. In yesterday's Cook supplement, Henry Dimbleby concludes his introduction to a digest of his 'Back to Basics' series with the words: "And, finally, we have not included baked potatoes in the contents because I was weong. I am so sorry to all of you who sent me photos of your ovens looking like a culinary crime scene. Baked potatoes really can explode if you don't prick them with a fork. Quite violently, it turns out." Oh, yes. Been there, done that, washed the T-shirt. I've typed out the text, because I can't find it on the Guardian's website (though the column in which he claims that the exploding spud is an urban myth is still there).

We had haggis for dinner. Since we did a big supermarket shop rather than going in to Durham yesterday, it was some fancy brand, i.e. not MacSween's, and it was not as good. The casing was some dark thin plastic, and the contents dense and claggy - not unpleasant, but, as durham_rambler says, we'll be having the real thing on Burns Night.

On the bright side, since I was cooking a haggis in the oven (in a bowl of water, because that's what you do), I was able to observe the effects of putting a bowl of water into the oven while the bread is baking. Today's chestnut loaf was rising very nicely even before it went into the oven, so this isn't conclusive, but it does seem to have helped.

This is further support for the hypothesis that the wetter the dough, the better it rises - and the harder it is to get out of the tin.

ETA: some quince links, courtesy of

cmcmck and

browngirl: The NYT praises the quince, because there are quince trees at the Cloisters Museum. But there are more, at the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon. Quinces seem to be having a moment, and there are several cookbooks (or cooking and growing) books devoted entirely to quinces. Barbara Ghazarian wrote one of them. She has a quince blog.

Back in the dark days of December, I made Lussekatter.

A sequence of loaves had been, for one reason or another (one reason being a tendency to leave them too long in the oven, but another is a bit of a mystery) particularly crusty and / or dense. An oatmeal loaf, in particular, had refused to rise, and although the flavour was still good, and my breakfast toast still put me in a good mood for the day, it was a challenge to the teeth, and to the breadknife. I was ready to bake something completely different.

Then someone mentioned that it was nearly St Lucy's Day, and there must be Lussekatter. "Yes!" I thought. "I can do that." I had, of course, read

mrissa's definitive post on the subject, and I knew this wasn't going to be easy: but baking with saffron, baking to bring back the sun, this sounded like what I needed.

So I selected a recipe from the many offered by the internet, and on the Thursday I baked; on the Friday we went to Richard's funeral, and on Saturday which was St Lucy's Day, there were golden saffron squiggles, just as there should be. They were good enough that I'd gladly do it again, so here's my version of the recipe:

Sourdough starter
300 ml milk
generous pinch saffron - really generous
3 oz sugar
4 oz butter
15oz plain flour
1 egg
salt
dried cranberries

Warm, don't boil, the milk in a pan and add the butter and the saffron. Mix in a big bowl with the sourdough starter.

Add the flour and mix into a smooth dough.

Let it rise, knock it back, knead it a bit.

Do it again. Kneading it was not as hard work as I had expected, and it really did do that thing the recipes promise where if you only keep kneading long enough the sticky mess will transform into a silky and coherent dough. That's never happened to me before.

Divide the dough into 24 pieces, and knead each one lightly into a little bun (I saw that the recipe said '24 servings', and disbelieved; but it really did make 24 neat little cakes, smaller than I had pictured them but not ridiculously fiddly to handle).

Let the buns rest for a few minutes, covered by a piece of cloth. Then form each bun into a string, 15-20 cm long (mine weren't as long as this - next time, try harder), then arrange the string in a suitable shape, e.g. an S or double S. Regardless of the shape, the ends of the string should meet.

Press a few raisins into the dough - I tried to add my dried cranberries earlier, to give them a chance to plump up in the dough, but they made the dough harder to handle, and kept falling out. Cover the "Lucia cats" with a piece of cloth and let them rise for 40 minutes.

Whip the egg together with a few grains of salt, and paint the "Lucia cats" with the mixture.

Bake them for 5-10 minutes in the oven at 250°C / 475°F /Mark 6 until golden brownish yellow.

ETA St Lucy's Dat 2018: Are those quantities right? I didn't quite believe them, reduced to 200 ml milk and 3oz butter, which made a dough slightly stiffer than I had intended. It didn't rise much when proving, but a longish final rise produced a light and delicate bun.

I hadn't come across Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith and the Borders, until Dick Gaughan told us about him - "He's English!" He is attempting to strengthen the bonds that unite the United Kingdom, and discourage the Scots from voting for independence, by organising a mass show of unity in which thousands of people link arms in a human chain a human chain from coast to coast. The only problem is that this chain will run along Hadrian's Wall. Given the location of his constituency, I'm pretty sure he knows this isn't the border, and he's careful in interviews not to say that it is. And I can see that it wouldn't be easy to organise a chain along the border itself, which runs through some remote country, and some sizeable rivers. But treating the Wall as the dividing line is just asking for mockery.

Talking of the Wall, the Hadrian's Wall Trust is to close for lack of funds. I'm still trying to process this information.

Library porn! "It's bigger than the Lit & Phil," says durham_rambler.

As we parked by the river to go swimming this morning - hooray! the students are on vacation and there is room in the pool on Tuesdays! - two herons flew low along the river and under Pennyferry Bridge. One flew on, the other doubled back and stood for a few minutes right opposite us, before flying back the way it had come.

The recipe supplement in Saturday's Guardian offers its ten best chickpea recipes. Some of them are just variations on familiar recipes, but some look worth trying, if only to satisfy my curiosity: chickpea, parsnip and saffron soup, for example, or the chocolate cake... The only snag is that most of the recipes use tinned chickpeas, and I use dried (I love my pressure cooker). Does anyone have a rule of thumb for converting quantities, or do I have to proceed by trial and error?

I bought two pounds of beetroot at the farmers' market ten days ago, and the last of it went into last night's salad: sliced cooked beetroot, shredded red radiccio, an orange, an avocado which defied all precedent by being as ripe and ready to eat as it said on the packet, and a walnut oil and lemon juice vinaigrette. I like the bitterness of radiccio, and its firm crunchiness, but it needs to be tempered with richness and moisture if the resultant salad isn't to be dry - this mix worked well.

The beetroot were smaller than usual: the nice vegetable growers are very helpful about picking through the box looking for the size you want, but the smallest are usually nearly the size of tennis balls. These were golf balls if not ping-pong, and they had a lovely purple sheen - which is why I bought so many. Also, there was a recipe I wanted to try in the Guardian cookery supplement; and my foresight was rewarded, because the next Saturday there were a whole 10 beetroot recipes.

So I scrubbed the whole lot and gave them 15 minutes in the pressure cooker, which left them still on the firm side - don't believe recipes that tell you to boil normal-sized beetroot for 20 minutes in a normal pan (yes, beetroot risotto recipe, I am looking at you), this will get you nowhere. On the other hand, raw beetroot is fine, too...

First, from the Guardian's collection of pink recipes (you may want to avert your eyes as you scroll past the pomegranate and lime cupcakes) I made the beetroot and spelt flour bread. Inevitably, since I had been boasting about how I had sorted my baking routine, guests and other distractions intervened, and I had gone eight days since the last batch of bread. I was brave, stirred the separated liquid back into the starter, pretended not to notice how runny the whole thing had become - and it behaved perfectly. It took prolonged kneading to take up all the flour (that is, as much as I was prepared to insist on) but rose so stickily I ended up adding more flour just to handle it. The tricky bit was kneading in the chopped beetroot: chunks kept flying off in all directions, and some got on the floor and I trod on it, there were red stains everywhere ("I thought you must have cut yourself," said

durham_rambler, who thinks I am bluer-blooded than is actually the case) and I had to wash the kitchen floor. Worth it, though.

The following week's ten best beetroot recipes inspired me to make a beetroot risotto, though I can't claim to have followed their recipe. For one thing, it required you to puree the beetroot, and mine (see above) were not really soft enough for this - or perhaps I just fancied the more interesting texture of little cubes of beetroot. Perhaps one day I will puree it, just for the comparison (or perhaps I won't). I also stirred in quite a lot of goat's cheese at the last minute, because I could, and the last of the thyme (yes, I ran out of thyme. I am easily amused.)

I followed the recipe more closely whyen it came to the beetroot and ginger chocolate brownies - though I had to improvise when it came to the stem ginger, since the recipe forgets about it - I chopped it up, and also added a slurp of syrup, and that seemed to work, since the brownies are distinctly gingery, but with no distinct traces of ginger. I halved the quantities, and may have overcooked the mixture, which came out as a light delicate cake with none of the fudginess of brownies. I may have to experiment further with this one.

And I seem to have bought more beetroot, though I'm thinking of grating it raw...

In a more leisured world, any one of these could have been a post on its own; this post is like showing you the bookmarks, but not letting you read the pages they are marking.

If it's February, it must be time for a re-release of Casablanca. One day I will write about the paradox of this movie, product of the studio machine (in which the actors are not the first choice casting, and struggle to perform truthfully without knowing the end of their story or even sometimes the meaning of a scene) and the most dubious of sexual politics. Despite which we continue to love it. There's a clue in Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review, in which he selects a favourite quotation: "I bet they're asleep in New York; I bet they're asleep all over America."

We had a guest to dinner last night: Farmers' Market was this morning, so it was a meal constructed from whatever I could find in the house - it ended up a meatloaf, beef mince seasoned with almost all the harissa that was left in the jar (I should have used it all) and leavened with beetroot (three small ones, coarsely grated). The beetroot was a good addition, but another time, two would probably have been enough. A few walnuts might be good, too - in fact, a few pickled walnuts might be even better.

From Saturday's Travel supplement: where to eat in Ghent. Also links to a the blog of some Flemish foodies capable of taking quite disproportionate pains over a cherry tomoto.

Went to the Lit & Phil yesterday to hear Anne Fine talking about her books, her writing, her life - the first time I'd heard her speak to an audience which included both children and adults, and I was impressed how smoothly she included both groups in the conversation. There's a ruthlessness to her humour - her daughter, learning to play the violin, sounded like someone hammering a nail into a small gerbil - and I laughed immoderately.

Jeanette Winterson proposes the occupation of Valentine's Day in an article of which pretty much every line is quotable: "Love is an ecosystem. You can't neglect it, exploit it, strip-mine it, pollute it, and wonder what happened to the birds and the bees."

It's not that I'm dissatisfied with the photos I took in Spain: they document the trip and help keep the memories fresh. But I'd been wondering why there weren't more of them that stood alone, that I could appreciate purely as pictures, without context or associations. So I was quite relieved to come across this one:

I decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to bake a Christmas cake this year - I had almost all the ingredients, so why not?

I've written before about the recipe I use ('use' rather than 'follow' seems about right). This year's is definitely a plum cake: chopped prunes, a handful of the damsons from the bottom of the damson gin, and the gin itself as the main alcoholic additive. For the record, and because, when I was looking for this information earlier this week, I couldn't find it, these quantities fill the big square cake tin and one loaf tin - rather more than fill them, and although I could have squeezed it all in, I made five little buns (in a muffin tray) from the scrapings.

I reduced the oven temperature to mark 2, with the buns on the top shelf for an hour and a bit more, the cakes on the lower shelf for three hours (or thereabouts; I lost count).

One way and another, this seemed to take most of the day (surprising, since so much of the preparation was done the previous day - but then, it was one of the year's shortest days); the upside of this is that by the time I thought the cakes were ready to come out of the oven,

desperance was there to confirm that they were indeed done. We ate the little buns for pudding. They were surprisingly light and cakey - good, but not what I require from Christmas cake. But perhaps the scrapings of the bowl have a lower than average density of fruit? We shall see.

desperance and I sat up long into the night and a little way into the morning too, with a bottle of armagnac and much conversation to catch up on.

And now, though it's too soon to tell, the season turns and the days begin to lengthen.

Cake update: After cooking the cake remains lighter than usual in colour, and with a more cakey texture, though still moist. I think, in fact, that I have finally got the cooking time right, and while this is good, and it makes a pleasant change to have a cake I can offer to others without a health warning, I sort of miss the damp soggy thing that I usually bake. The damsons are not discernable, but I suspect their influence can be felt, though not identified.

Also, the marzipan: Jane Grigson's recipe makes too much for the larger cake, as you'd expect, even when the quantity of sugar is drastically reduced, and rather too little for both. It's good, though. I'd forgotten how much I like home-made marzipan.

Not autumn yet, but summer's ending. Not so much the rain - Bank Holiday weather, August downpours, I'm hoping for better weather in autumn (it often happens), but the first students returning (much slamming of doors, though not yet the symphony for burglar alarms which signals the new term), and the autumn fruits appearing at the greengrocer's.

Or perhaps that's premature, and plums are the last fruit of summer, not the first of autumn. I bought damsons (from the wonderful Robinsons), thinking they'd make a fine desert for Thursday's dinner party - and they did, though in the end I had to invent a recipe: I could find nothing but recipes for preserves, damson jams and jellies and cheeses (the first place I turned was Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, but she let me down; she doesn't like damsons, finding the flavour unsubtle, which indeed it is). It wasn't hard to invent: I stoned the damsons (don't believe the recipes that tell you you can skim off the stones later; you can't) and stewed them with just enough sugar, and they collapsed of their own accord to a thick wine-dark puree; I spread that over the bottom of a large flat dish and topped it with a Victoria sponge mix to which I had added a couple of ounces of ground almonds. Sprinkled flaked almonds generously over the top, and baked it on a low shelf at mark 4 until I remembered to take it out - something over an hour left it just slightly moist in the centre. I liked it that way, but slightly longer would have been fine, too.

It was a good dinner party, I think. I would have liked to have been slightly better prepared, so that when my guests arrived I could abandon the cooking and play with them - but that's always the plan, and it never happens. Reasons why it didn't happen on this occasion might have included

desperance and

durham_rambler vanishing off upstairs at a critical moment to scan documents (and

durham_rambler reappearing to tell me there was an e-mail just come in that I should probably go and answer); and they might also have included several pounds of greengages bought cheap and needing to be sorted and stewed down. But since it was a gathering of friends, they were able to entertain each other while I caught up. After which, my only regret is that it was all over so quickly, since people had to leave to catch trains.

Probably for the best, though, since we were off quite early yesterday, abandoning the washing up to spend the day in Whitby with the Bears, who were there for the folk festival. The moors were beautiful in the rain, carpets of purple heather and veils of grey sky - except at the highest point, where we were in cloud so dense that nothing else was visible. No first glimpse of the sea, though, and no walk on the beach after. But there was good music. We went to a 'meet the Tom McConville Band' session, chat and tunes and songs, in a curious format at which the audience were implored to ask the band questions - I wondered whether there was an equivalent for musicians of the much-mocked "Where do you get your ideas from?". And we may have been forced to take shelter in a bookshop (or two). There was time for an early dinner together, then back to the flat for coffee and the interesting process of watching the Bears decide what they would do if they got a floor spot (or two) at the folk club that evening - but we didn't stay for the evening performance.

Leaving before eight o'clock, we were driving through deepening dusk from the start. Still summer, but not for long...

rushthatspeaks was inspired by Niki Segnit's The Flavor Thesaurus to build a cake on the flavours of parsnips, anise and lemon. Well, why not? Carrot cake is familiar enough, and parsnips are even sweeter.

durham_rambler refers to parsnips as "God's own vegetable", so obviously what he needed for his birthday was a parsnip cake. I refer you to the original recipe for the sheer pleasure of the writing; this is my working version, with my modeifications / conversions / approximations:

( Ingredients )

( Method )

( Icing fail )

( How it was for me )

There were Seville oranges in the greengrocer's at the weekend. The season never lasts long, so I bought some, thinking of zesty orange puddings for cold grey days.

On Saturday, when

desperance came visiting, I dug out a recipe I'd cut out of a magazine long ago, and made Seville and blood orange tart, reducing the quantities to about two thirds of those given, and using some of the Tropicana Sanguinello that D. had brought us for the blood orage juice. Both this recipe and a similar one I found on the net specified an almost cakey pastry, made with egg: another time I'd use a more standard, crisper, sweet shortcrust. And if I could get real blood oranges, that'd be good, too, and worth trying the finishing touch of slicing a blood orange thinly and laying it on top of the almost-cooked filling. But it was fine without (and the quantities served the three of us on Saturday, and five to Sunday lunch).

I made marmalade with the rest, rather nervously, since I'm never confident that preserves will set. Since it seems to have worked, I'm noting down what I did, while I can still remember. The basic recipe came from a very old pressure cooker cookbook (not only older than my new pressure cooker, but older than my old one, too) but it's vague about times, and I messed about with it.

I had a generous pound of oranges left (including the shell of an orange whose juice I had used; but I discarded the ones of which I had also used the zest). I cut these into quarters, and placed them in the pressure cooker with water to (just) cover. It seemed like too much water, especially since I usually reduce the quantity of liquid when adapting recipes for the pressure cooker - but since it was a pressure cooker recipe to begin with, I thought I'd give it a try. Another time, I'd reduce it a bit. I boiled this for ten minutes at pressure, as per instructions, which made the oranges very soft and easy to handle. When they were cool, I removed the pips and cut the oranges into small chunks. I added a chunk of root ginger, finely chopped, about an ounce of black treacle (all there was in the tin), the last lump of stem ginger and the syrup that remained in the jar, and about 12 ounces of fructose, and brought it back to the boil until the sugar was dissolved. Then I turned it off, put a lid on it, and went and did something else. I don't know if this two-stage process helped at all, but it doesn't seem to have done any harm.

This morning when we got in from the pool I turned the heat on again, and let it boil quite hard while we had breakfast. After about half an hour I tried testing it by dropping a small amount onto a plate, but it didn't seem to have gelled. On the other hand, the fruit element was thickening nicely, and by the time I had a couple of jars ready, the marmalade was ready to go into them.

durham_rambler tested it tonight, on a toasted muffin, and approved.

The fridge has been long overdue for defrosting. It claims to be 'self-defrosting' or some such phrase, but all this means is that it has no 'defrost' setting. When you can't put it off any longer, you switch off the electricity, put the spare washing-up bowl in the fridge where it will catch the drips, and a floor-cloth in front of the fridge to catch those drips which escape the bowl, and pour a kettle full of boiling water into the washing up bowl. Eventually enough ice is dislodged that it is possible to open the door of the ice-box, and then you can put a bowl of hot water in there, too. At a certain point the ice also becomes susceptible to the application of brute force (

durham_rambler likes this bit.

I usually allow 24 hours to complete the process.

Yes, it would probably be an easier job if I didn't leave it so long - but I wouldn't put it off for so long if it were an easier job.

Yesterday, though, the time was right, because of a string of circumstances: we'd skipped the Farmers' Market on Thursday, because

durham_rambler has had toothache (and had been to the dentist who x-rayed the offending tooth, and sent him home with a course of antibiotics and a pack of painkillers) and didn't feel up to much; we'd had lunch guests at quite short notice, which was delightful in itself and also contributed to the emptying of the fridge; and it was too grey and rainy to go out walking. So I defrosted the fridge instead.

This meant that the surviving contents of the fridge (the last of the radiccio from the salad drawer, the lemons, several jars of chutney and some more of jam, some cheese) were spread on all spare surfaces in the kitchen. And to complete the chaos, yesterday was stir-up Sunday, and I wanted to start my Christmas cake. I use an amalgamation of recipes, but they key point is that the fruit is left to soak overnight in a mixture of liquids. The cake is baked the following day (or, this year's variable, the day after - we'll see if it makes a detectable difference).

By lunchtime today the ice had all gone from the fridge. After lunch I mopped up, wiped down and switched on - and then we went out to Tesco's to restock.

Random afterthought from the supermarket: ground coffee usually displays a number on the packet, describing how strong it is, on a scale of 1 to 5 - and this seems to be standard. Everyone who uses the system at all uses the same scale. Except that Taylor's Hot Lava Java goes up to 6.

weegoddess and her husband are back in the UK for a mixture of work and pleasure, fitting an improbable number of visits into their limited time. And yesterday was our turn, for the duration of a lovely relaxed evening of catching up. There were presents, because

weegoddess is a champion shopper, and brought me a coffee pot (because she not only reads her f-list, she remembers, too!) from a charity shop - no, from a thrift shop, because it was in the US (and she transported a glass coffee pot in her luggage from the US, because she is also a champion packer) - and Toblerone from the pound shop. And there was talk, about ourselves and others (

weegoddess tells us news that we didn't know about people in Durham!) and eating and drinking.

And I promised to pass on the recipe for the lentil and beetroot salad: which is not so much a recipe as a 'what it says on the tin', and I've seen different versions of it. But this is what I did last night:

5 oz Puy lentils, soaked
3 medium beetroot, boiled
vinaigrette: tarragon mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt to taste
block feta cheese (the recipe said 'goat's cheese', and that would work too, but I found some good feta)
parsley

Boil the lentils until just cooked, mix into the vinaigrette while still warm.
Peel and dice the beetroot, cube the cheese, chop the parsley, mix into the lentils.
I've seen a version which mixes in rocket leaves - or you could serve it over salad leaves, if you had any.

I also promised to pass on a link to the Durham Daily Photo blog, which has just completed a year of daily photos, mostly from Durham, and has fallen mysteriously silent. I hope there will be more.

And I almost forgot to say: that the goddess departs trailing gifts in her wake. Today the post brought my order of Lush Retro goodies - and while this could just be a sign of the efficiency of Lush's mail order service, I suspect

weegoddess of acting a a Lush attractor...

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with recipes

Saffron Sunday

Local harvest

Golden hot cross buns

Five things...

Are we nearly there yet?

Bed and breakfast

Five things make a breakfast-related post.

Beetroot chocolate cake

Spice buns in Lent

Culinary notes

And bake till time and times are done

All the news that fits into five things

Had we but beetroot enough, and thyme...

Could've been a contender....

Short day, long night

Mists and mellow fruitfulness

A birthday cake for a parsnip lover

Seville orange season

Report from the ice face.

Apparition of a goddess