Lemon Drizzle Cake

It’s been a while since we’ve had cake in the house, so I thought I’d see whether the bread machine does a good job with its cake setting. The recipe booklet that came with it is pretty poor, but it gave a basic cake recipe, which I’ve changed a bit in order to make a more lemony cake. Here are the ingredients (in order of adding to the machine):

8 tablespoons of melted butter
160g caster sugar
5 eggs
The juice of half a lemon
The zest of a whole lemon, finely chopped
250g self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

And that’s it! The machine is mixing it all up, and apparently will take two and a half hours to make the cake. Once it’s done and cooled, I’m going to drizzle an icing sugar/lemon juice/lemon zest mix over the top – and there we have it – lemon drizzle cake!

Later – much later…

..the cake has come out looking just fine – it’s still cooling, so I haven’t iced it yet, but I’m pleasantly surprised. If you don’t have a bread machine with a cake setting, I think it would work if you just mixed all the ingredients together, then put in a cake tin and baked for around 45 mins at 180 degrees C – test it with a toothpick – if it comes out clean, it’s done. Photos to follow!

As promised – here it is – yet to be tasted, but it’s looking good to me.

Buying meat online

You’d think, with a perfectly good butchers in our village, and supermarkets galore in the nearest town, I’d buy all my meat locally. The ‘green’ part of me says this is what I should be doing, but the fact is that certain cuts of meat (belly pork, for example) aren’t that easy to get hold of – even our local specialist pork butcher only has them in on certain days of the week, which usually turn out to be the days that I’m not in town. With this in mind, I went looking for reliable sources of meat online – and I found McCarthy’s of Kanturk – a Cork-based artisan butcher who supplies free range pork (among other things).

Order duly placed, I had to phone them to clarify something about the delivery charge – and had the most delightful chat with ‘yer man’ on the phone. It is, apparently, a lovely day in Cork, thanks be to God, and the wild garlic is sprouting. ‘Imagine a sausage with wild garlic through it’ he said. I dutifully imagined it, and decided that it was a wonderful idea. There’s a place near here where the wild garlic grows, and I have sausage casings waiting to be filled. I expect McCarthy’s will do a far better job than sausage amateur me, but I reckon it’s worth a try!

New books on the way!

Although I bought a Kindle last year, and love it for indulging in my secret passion for trashy thrillers, I still prefer my recipe books to be in the traditional format. I’ve just placed an order for two more books from Amazon – both of which look interesting. The first is Formulas for Flavour by John Campbell (it has Heston Blumenthal’s name all over the cover, but he simply wrote the foreword – another example of misleading marketing, if you ask me!). This book claims to show you ‘how to cook restaurant dishes at home’ – but that’s not why I bought it – I was more interested in the instructions it offers – how to do things the right way, basically. We all have our own shortcuts in the kitchen, but understanding the correct techniques and terms really helps when you try to create your own recipes, I think.

The second book I’ve ordered is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. Now this one intrigues me. The idea behind it is that you can look up an ingredient, much as you’d look up a word in a thesaurus, and it offers complementary flavours – eg, you look up ‘duck’ and it tells you ‘orange’ or ‘cherry’ or whatever, or look up ‘cheese’ and it suggests ‘apples’ or ‘grapes’ (and hopefully offers a few more unexpected taste-mates). That’s what I understand from the blurb and reviews, anyway. I’m hoping it will inspire me to get creative!

Proper reviews to come after the books arrive – watch this space!

Moving on in a Malaysian way…

My next project is a Malaysian curry, gleaned from the Food and Drink section of Boards. It’s taken me some time to get the ingredients together (and I’ve still failed to find palm sugar locally), but today I got as far as making the Malaysian curry powder. Here’s the list of ingredients:

10 black peppercorns
10 cloves
The seeds from 4 black cardamoms
1 cinnamon stick
4 whole dried chillies (except I didn’t have these, so used dried chilli flakes instead)
4 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 star anise
1 tsp ground turmeric

Put all that in a heavy saucepan, and heat until it smokes (you’ll smell it – catches the back of your throat, so be prepared to cough a bit), then grind to a powder and store.

The house smells wonderfully spicy now, and I’m hoping to make this curry tonight. Unfortunately that means I’m going to have to freeze the coq au vin…

Things that can go wrong with Coq au Vin

Oh dear. I can’t say that this recipe was a disaster, because we have yet to eat it. ‘Life’ happened over the weekend, and we didn’t have dinner on Saturday night – which is when we were planning to eat this – so it’s now languishing in the fridge waiting to be finished off. There’s a good layer of fat on it – I need to take that off, take out the ‘solids’, then reduce the liquid, heat the chicken, and serve with the sauce. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but at this point I’m worried about how elderly it’s all getting…

Coq au Vin – part two

So, we left the chicken marinating in wine overnight… and today I cooked it. It had taken on a kind of purple hue from the wine – I think that’s normal – but it doesn’t really look a lot like chicken, more like some kind of game.

I heated some extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) in a pan with some butter, then briefly browned the chicken (which I’d taken out of the marinade and dried on paper towels). Chicken went into a Pyrex casserole dish, 2 quartered onions and some chopped bacon went into the chicken juices in the pan, followed by a handful of halved mushrooms. I cooked the veg until the onions softened and took on a little colour, then they went into the dish with the chicken, the marinade was poured back over, about a cupful of chicken stock I’d made from the carcass was added, and it all went into a slow oven (150 degrees) for a couple of hours. Now it’s cooling, ready for me to remove the fat tomorrow.

I must say it smells divine, but I’m a little worried that the meat’s going to be tough, having tasted a tiny piece. It’s got another hour of cooking to go through tomorrow, so we’ll see.

Tonight we’re having cheese on toast!

Things that can go wrong with bread…

Thing number 1 – Human error!

One thing that can go wrong with bread happens when you forget to add enough flour to the mix (doh!). Today’s bread recipe called for 520g of strong white bread flour. Fine. Because I have a small set of scales, I measure out 400g, and then another 120g. This usually works well. It doesn’t go quite so well when I leave 120g of the flour sitting on the scales, whilst the bread machine happily works on the rest!

The dough came out very – how to put this – floppy, I suppose is the right word, but I managed to bully it into some kind of shape and it’s baking now. The bread machine is working on batch #2 – this time with the correct amount of flour.

I believe this to be the first post in a series…

Adventures in Sourdough

Seems I have my posting head on today – I went to check on the progress of my chicken stock (coming along nicely thank you, smells divine) and spotted my new sourdough starter on the windowsill, so I thought I’d post about it.

I’ve recently started making bread again after a gap of a few years – I’ve never got the hang of kneading dough by hand, despite many attempts (I think having a very restricted workspace accounts for a lot of my problems) – but I used to make bread in a machine, and very nice it was too! One day, the machine stopped working, and it took a while before I got around to buying another, but I have one now – it was very cheap – under €40 from Argos, their Value range – and it does everything you’d want it to do.

So, I’m making bread again – but this time with a difference. I bought the River Cottage ‘Bread’ book and read up on the theory behind a loaf. Now, I use the machine to knead the dough, but take it out and shape it by hand, then bake it in the oven – much nicer result and it allows for all sorts of experimentation with baking temperatures, shapes, toppings and coatings. But I digress…

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten sourdough bread, but it’s supposed to be the bees knees of breads, with a distinctive taste and a method all its own. The secret to sourdough is a ‘starter’ mix, which you make with just water and flour, and leave the natural yeasts in the atmosphere to start it off fermenting. That’s the theory anyway. As you probably know (and I should have realised), fermentation takes warmth – and an unheated kitchen in February in Ireland is possibly not the warmest place on earth. This could be why I sat waiting for my wallpaper paste mix of flour and water to do ‘something’ for days on end.

After almost a week, I have achieved bubble. Well, maybe more than one bubble – things are starting, slowly, to happen. I followed all the recommended steps, feeding my starter, mixing my starter, aerating my starter. I think we’re getting there. I’m going to give it another week to get a bit more active, and then try to make my first sourdough loaf.

If you’re really lucky I’ll post a picture of my ‘goo’. Watch this space!

A digression concerning chicken

Chicken is probably the most popular meat in Ireland. Those boneless, skinless and, it must be said, tasteless chicken breasts or breast fillets that are on offer in every supermarket are very easy to cook, they don’t have any ‘bits’ that remind you that they came from a living creature, and they adapt themselves to a huge variety of treatments. I never buy them.

I used to buy them, of course I did – but they seemed to increase in price at about the same time I became more interested in ethically farmed meat, or at least in respecting the food I ate – so now I buy my chicken in a different way. For under €5, I can buy a whole free range chicken at Aldi or Lidl. I bring it home and, unless we’re planning a roast, I joint it into 2 breasts, 2 legs (thigh and drumstick), 2 wings and a carcass. The carcass always goes to make stock (which I subsequently use in risotto, nine times out of ten). The breasts get used in curries or stir fries, the drumsticks and thighs in paella. The wings I freeze until I have enough to make a nibble dish of buffalo wings or similar.

Apart from being far more economical than buying chicken already in pieces, my way of buying and using chicken means that there are fewer leftovers, and less gets discarded. After a roast chicken, I’ll use the carcass for stock, too. It takes about 10 minutes, after a bit of practice, to joint a chicken – all it takes is a sharp knife and a little care.

If you’re lucky enough to buy chickens that come with giblets – freeze the livers until you have enough to make paté. Chicken fat that you skim off your stock can be put to one side and used to make dog biscuits (just flour, oatmeal, some parsley, chicken scraps and offal – no bones! – and stock, made into a dough, pulled into little pieces and baked until brown and crispy). Chicken skin goes into the dog biscuits too.

I suppose my point here is – I try not to waste anything. Not only does it save us money, it makes the most out of the bird that gave its life for our dinner. I think that’s important.

Coq au Vin – part one!

On Tuesday, my husband came home with a chicken. Not just any chicken, this one was a 7 or 8 month old cockerel which had been hatched and raised by friends of ours but, alas, you can only have so many cockerels in a small area, and this one was surplus to requirements. Our friend dispatched him, his wife plucked and drew him, and my husband brought him to me to cook*.

[*Correction My husband would like me to change this to be factually correct (I wasn't actually there at the time) so here goes: Our friend held the bird upside down whilst his wife cut its throat, then he plucked it, and his wife sorted out its innards. I bet you're glad of that clarification.]

I must admit to a slight – and unexpected – squeamishness when it came to dealing with this particular chicken. Although I buy free-range from the butchers, I’ve never actually been presented with a bird which has never seen the inside of a shop. Anyway, I got him out of the carrier bag he came in – and immediately I could see this was a whole new chicken experience.

Firstly, he was shaped entirely differently from the ‘norm’ – the breast was higher and narrower than I’m used to, and his legs were straight, instead of folded as they are in shop bought birds. I decided that – to do him justice – he’d be made into coq au vin (being an older bird, he needs slow gentle treatment to prevent him being tough), and so I went about jointing him ready for the pot. Here came the second surprise. Under the skin was a lot more fat than I’d seen before on a chicken – lovely yellow stuff. My mother had an old cookery book – printed in the 50s – which had pictures of roast chicken in it – this bird looked like those did. I suppose that’s how all chickens were before they were more selectively bred for the table. I’m hoping he’ll have that old-fashioned chicken taste, too.

Anyway, I took off the breasts and the legs, skinned them, and they’re now marinating in some red wine with garlic cloves, thyme from the garden, and a couple of bay leaves. The carcass is simmering away in my stock pot with an onion, some carrots, salt, black peppercorns and bay leaves.

Tomorrow I’ll start cooking, but we don’t get to eat until the day after – there’s a whole fat-removal process to go through between now and then. I’ll post the full recipe as I go along…

A very simple supper

A while back, I ordered some spices from Seasoned Pioneers including a Blackened Cajun mix. Tonight, I had a simple fresh tuna steak, rubbed with the mix and quickly seared in a hot pan.  Served with a few sliced tomatoes, it was just right.

 

Cottage Pie

This is one of those dishes that my husband loves – it’s plain, it’s simple, and it uses  a bought gravy mix – nothing posh about this food!

Ingredients:

1lb minced beef

1 onion, finely chopped

5 or 6 medium mushrooms, chopped

Bisto Gravy Granules for beef

6 medium sized potatoes

2 oz cheddar cheese, grated

Milk

Butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Start by peeling the potatoes, cut them into even chunks, and put them on to boil whilst you cook the mince.

Put the mince in a pan over a medium heat, and cook until browned – no need to add oil unless you’re using very lean mince, which I wouldn’t recommend for such a homely dish.  Add the chopped onion and mushrooms, and continue cooking until the onions have softened.  Grind in some black pepper. Sprinkle over about a tablespoon of the gravy granules, then add a little boiling water to make a fairly thick gravy – don’t make it too thin or your potato topping will sink!

Put the meat mixture into the base of an overproof casserole dish.

Drain the potatoes when they’re soft, add a bit of butter, then mash – I use a fork, it seems to give a better result than a proper ‘masher’ or even a ricer – I’m all for simplicity! Add half the grated cheese and continue to mash. Use a little milk to loosen the mash – not too much, you don’t want it sloppy. Taste, and add salt if necessary.

Spoon the potato over the meat base, then use the tines of a fork to spread it out and leave furrows in the top. Sprinkle over the remaining grated cheese and put into the oven at 180 degrees until the top goes golden (about 40 minutes).

Serve with Heinz baked beans for some real comfort food!