Category Archives: recipes

Better cookies

There have been occasions for cookies recently – visits with friends, the need for something sweet on a cold night, so last week I determined that I would make some Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, which always seems to suit autumn well. My first thought was for a huge batch of Oatmeal Raisin cookies from my copy of The All-American Cookie Book – they have gone down very well before, being tasty and crispy, with just the right amount of chew from the raisins. However, then I read David Lebovitz’s post on Nick Malgieri‘s Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies – low fat, but still good, made with some apple sauce instead of butter. As it happened, I had a couple of Bramley apples sitting in the fridge, so it seemed fated that I should try this recipe instead of my normal one. And I have to say it turned out very well – the cookies are chewy, but softer and moister than my usual ones, and without the usual shortening and butter combo, you can feel extra-virtuous about eating them!

I converted the recipe as posted by David into metric, and also added some spices that I usually add to the other recipe – and they worked very well.

140g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
30g butter, softened
100g caster sugar
90g light brown muscovado sugar
1 large egg
70g unsweetened apple sauce
1 tsp vanilla extract
135g rolled oats
85g raisins

Preheat the oven to 190C (375F, 165C fan) and line a couple of baking sheets with baking parchment.

Mix the flour, baking powder, bicarb, spices and salt together so that the leavening is evenly distributed. Set aside.
Cream the butter with the caster sugar (it will be much stiffer than usual) for 4 or 5 minutes. Mix in the brown sugar, followed by the beaten egg, apple sauce, and vanilla. I used my electric mixer for all this, but it’s all perfectly possible with a wooden spoon. Stir in the flour, oats and raisins until just combined – do not beat hard. Spoon tablespoons of the mixture (a bit smaller than a golfball) onto the baking sheets, and press with a fork to flatten a little. (I forgot this on the second sheet, but it didn’t seem to make very much difference).

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until they look dull on the surface, but are moist and soft, and are just golden at the edges.

Macaroni and other crunchy-topped things

I was going to write a recipe for Macaroni Cheese here, but it occurred to me that this wasn’t very helpful. For one thing, it’s a pretty simple recipe and most people have one somewhere. For another, I don’t even have a recipe as such. This is one of those dishes that I have been cooking for as long as I can remember – an essential dish in my mother’s repetoire, along with bolognese sauce (and by extension, lasagne) and quiche.

So instead of a recipe, I wanted to turn this into a set of guidelines for gratins, which is all that macaroni cheese is, at heart. Richard Ehrlich’s compilation of Guardian columns ‘The Perfect …’ includes a wonderful 2 or 3 page set of instructions for the perfect potato gratin. I don’t think I need to be so prescriptive, though. The definition of a good gratin can be much broader and more forgiving than this.

Sauce
The sauce of a gratin, the part that allows all that bubbling goodness to take place, is composed of either a bechamel sauce, or simply of milk or cream (and occasionally stock) combined with the starchy contents. Only raw potatoes are really starchy enough to thicken the sauce in the second case, so this method is restricted to gratin dauphinoise and its variations.

Starch
The best gratins are generally made with starchy contents (although fennel and chard gratins are both good). The homey, comforting nature of them – the need to serve them ‘family style’ from a communal dish – is enhanced with soft, starchy contents such as potatoes, pasta and root vegetables.

Crispy top
The original meaning of ‘au gratin’ was simply something browned under the grill, and this brown, crispy top remains the crucial element of this dish, and the reason for the wide, shallow gratin dish, giving a large area of crispy, with just the right amount of creamy underneath. The crispy top can either be achieved with cooking on the stove plus a stint under the grill, or by a long spell in the oven (which is the preferred method for gratin dauphinoise).

So, using these basic principles, we can create:

  • Macaroni Cheese – sauce is bechamel with cheese (aka cheese sauce), starch is al dente cooked macaroni, and crispy top can be just cheese (for purists, and those who like lots of cheese – and who doesn’t) or cheese and breadcrumbs.
  • Gratin dauphinoise – lots of dispute about this one, but basically just milk and/or cream as the sauce, raw potato slices layered with onions and cooked in the oven until the top is brown.
  • Root vegetable gratin – slices of carrots, parsnips, swedes, cooked gently in a pan, combined with bechamel, then covered with breadcrumbs and baked.

And while away the whole autumn and winter with gooey, creamy, starchy dishes with crispy tops…Perfect.

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Ale Cake

I recently made the same fruitcake for the 3rd time since hearing of the recipe early this year. I first heard the recipe on Woman’s Hour in my lady-of-leisure days. It’s a lovely recipe, simple and tasty, that has to be approached in quite a leisurely manner, requiring pre-soaking of the fruit and a long, long cooking time. However, it didn’t occur to me that it was particularly unusual until the other weekend. The reason for making the cake this time around was to take as a birthday cake for a friend of ours that we were meeting up with in Woolacombe (that’s a great surf spot in Devon by the way). As this cake (in fact, any fruitcake) can be made in advance and is robust enough to travel, it seemed an excellent choice. Both Friend and his fiancee loved the cake, but she made a particular point of saying that she usually dislikes fruit cake, but liked this one – which made me wonder, (as Carrie Bradshaw might write):

What makes this one different?

The Ale Cake recipe fits with most other fruitcake recipes – it calls for you to cream together the butter and sugar, gradually beat in the eggs, fold in the flour gently, then the fruit, and back at a low temperature for a long time. The quirks are that the fruit is first soaked overnight in a generous quantity of beer, the sugar is dark brown muscovado, and the cake starts off at a moderate 160C for the first hour, lowering to 120C after that.

So to think about it further, my starting point was to compare this recipe with a standard fruit cake – and what could be more standard than Delia’s Classic Christmas Cake? I also compared it with Delia’s Dundee cake recipe. So here is the comparison of the quantities of the three recipes (I increased the quantities of the Dundee Cake recipe in proportion so that all used 4 eggs – the original uses 3 eggs):

All in grams (unless stated) Classic Christmas Cake Ale Cake Dundee Cake
Fruit 900 875 600
Liquid 45ml 250ml –
Butter 225 225 200
Sugar 225 225 200
Eggs 4 4 4
Flour 225 225 300

This ignores the minor ingredients, such as treacle & spices, plus any chopped nuts, which shouldn’t make any real difference to the texture. The two things that jump out at you are

  1. the ale cake has much, much more liquid than the other two and
  2. the dundee cake has a good deal more flour and less fruit in.

I would expect this to mean a moister, and possibly flatter cake for the ale cake and a drier, ‘cakier’ texture for the dundee cake, which certainly fits Delia’s description. The reason that the 250ml of beer in the ale cake doesn’t play havoc with the cake batter is that the fruit is soaked overnight in it, and it is virtually all absorbed. So instead of a runny cake batter, what you have instead is lots of moist, plump fruit, that doesn’t draw moisture from the cake after baking, and helps keep the cake moist and give it its almost fudgey texture. I suspect that the relatively mellow beer, compared to the brandy in the Christmas cake, helps to ensure that the flavour is not too sweet or too bitter, which some vine fruits can be.

So, as we are getting into Christmas Cake baking season, I am asking myself if this recipe would work well as a Christmas cake as well? I suspect that it could stand a few modifications to make it a bit more ‘Christmassy’, but would hold up well. Perhaps a shot of brandy in with the beer (would that be too weird?) and a bit more emphasis on citrus flavours – citrus juice and citrus zest and peel – would help give it that hot toddy feel. Or what about using red wine for soaking the fruit to give it a mulled wine feel? I will let you know how I get on with this one. Christmas cake is an important tradition in our household. Nathan’s gran has baked him a personal Christmas cake for at least as long as I have known him. As she sadly died earlier this year, this will be our first Christmas without her, and there will be complaints if it is not up to her standard…

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Buffet food

This is a special post in response to Sam’s heartfelt plea over at Becks & Posh. She wants recipe suggestions for her Mum to make for her own retirement party. As it happens, waaaaay back in February, I made a brunch buffet for a load of people, and the stand-out winner was the frittata. I wanted to make eggs (because you can’t really call it brunch unless I have eggs) but I also wanted as much of the buffet as possible to be done in advance. So I made a baked frittata, assembled from various sources (including an Australian Women’s Weekly book, and epicurious.com, if I remember rightly). It’s a very forgiving recipe that lends itself to including leftovers, and can be cut into as small pieces as you need.

Breakfast Frittata
To fill one 30cm x 21cm (roughly 8″ x 12″) tin, cut into 12 large triangles.

6-8 charlotte potatoes, boiled until tender & cooled
3 onions, halved and roasted in the over for around 1 hr until caramelised
1.5 – 2 cups frozen peas
120g crumbled lancashire cheese
8 eggs
284ml carton double cream
lots of salt & pepper

Chop the potatoes and onions into roughly pea-sized pieces. Crumble in the cheese. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl and pour over the vegetables with the cream. Mix around and pour into the foil-lined tin.
Bake at 140C for around 40 minutes, or until just set in the middle. (Keeping the temperature low helps keep the texture creamy).
Leave to cool, then store in the fridge. Unmould and cut into pieces while cold, then leave for an hour or so to come to room temperature before serving.

Broad bean crostini


Broad bean crostini
Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

Lunchtime rolls around and I have the following at my disposal:

  • Half a frozen foccacia

  • the end of a piece of St Chevrier Ash – a creamy, tangy goat’s cheese

  • 2 bags of broad beans (fava beans) from Hammersmith farmer’s market on Thursday

    • Seems like a no-brainer, so I put the foccacia into the oven to defrost for 5 or 10 mintes.

    Half an hour later, I have half a foccacia crispbread (you can see it in the background of the photo).

    Well, at least it’s not burnt, and sliced thinly the centre is still chewy and the edges crisp. I pod and blanch the broad beans and pop them out of their little grey skins. Half go into the fridge for tea, and half get ‘bashed’ in my mortar, Jamie Oliver-style, with salt, lemon juice, olive oil and a little grating of parmesan. I spread the St Chevrier on the thin foccacia slices, and top with the broad bean mush. It all turned out much better than those inauspicious beginnings.

    Turkish Delights

    bazaar

    Stall at Spice Bazaar
    Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

    I have just come back from a long weekend in Istanbul. Everyone told me before we went that it was an incredible city, and I wasn’t disappointed. We heard the muezzins calling people to prayer at lunchtime while overlooking the Suleyman Mosque. We cruised along the Bosphorus and had a special performance from one of Turkey’s foremost belly dancers (apparently – I mean, how would we know?!). We watched the red moon rise over the city from a restaurant in the hills. We saw the inside of the Haghia Sophia, a sight so awe-inspiring that it caused both a Roman Emperor (Justinian) and an Ottoman Sultan to prostrate themselves and thank their respective Gods the first time they saw it.

    I also (inevitably) visited the Spice Bazaar in the Old Town, where Istanbullus still come to buy their supplies for the week. I looked around at the spice stalls, shops selling fresh feta and other cheeses, stalls with Turkish Delight, ropes made of dates, baklava and all types of nuts and dried fruit. I settled for buying some spices and pomegranate molasses from a kind looking man in one of the hidden-away spice stalls. He was quite bemused that I would want the molasses – not something he sees many Europeans buying, I suspect. I also bought some Turkish coffee from Mehmet Effendi’s stall – freshly roast and ground that morning. It smelled too good not to.

    Sumac
    This is a dark red berry that is coarsely ground and used in Turkish cooking. It has a sour, lemony taste and is often sprinkled on meat (such as kebabs) or fish just before serving.

    Pomegranate Molasses
    This is a dark, syrupy liquid made by boiling down the juice from the sour pomegranate (rather than the sweet pomegranate whcih is usually used for juice). It is sour, as you might expect, but also has a slight sweetness which makes for a very interesting flavour.

    I used my brand-new pomegranate molasses to make one of Claudia Roden’s recipes (which also appears in her new book, Arabesque), Muhammara, a walnut and pomegranate paste.

    muhammara

    Muhammara
    Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

    Muhammara
    100g walnut pieces
    2 small slices of white bread, stale
    1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
    1/2 tsp ground cumin
    1/4 tsp chilli flake
    3 tbsp olive oil
    4 tbsp water

    Soak the bread briefly in water and then squeeze it out. Grind the walnuts in the food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and puree, adding a little more water if it’s too stiff.

    This was much tastier than I had anticipated – bitter from the walnuts and pomegranate but with a little sweetness from the molasses. Next time I would add a little more chilli (Claudia also suggests stirring in some harissa), and maybe toasting the walnuts and cumin to bring out their flavours more.

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    Blood Orange Marmalade



    marmalade.JPG
    Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

    I have something of a glut of citrus fruit at the moment, courtesy of my weekly organic box from Abel and Cole, so my thoughts turned to marmalade. Although traditionally made with the sour Seville orange, it is also possible to use sweet oranges, especially if you up the acid and pectin content by adding lemons to the mix.

    Marmalade is nothing more than orange jam, but the traditional recipe, originating in Dundee, requires two particular things – the afore-mentioned Seville orange, and finely or thickly sliced orange zest. The word marmalade comes from the portguese marmelada, which originally described a quince jam something like quince cheese or membrillo. Like quinces, citrus fruits are rich in pectin, the substance that sets jams and jellies into that particular firm and quivering consistency.

    Basic marmalade principles are the same as those for other jams:
    • Extract the maximum pectin. This is usually done by gathering the pips from the fruit, sometimes also the pulp and pith, in a muslin bag and boiling it with the juice before removing it and squeezing the bag to extract the soluble pectin.
    • Ensure there is plenty of acid. This helps to extract the maximum pectin and gives a better set. Extra lemon juice is often used for this, but it’s not a particular problem for marmalade.
    • Dissolve sugar completely before bringing the fruit and sugar mixture to a boil. This helps to prevent crystallisation

    The aim is to extract pectin, and then to make a 60-65% sugar solution with the fruit by boiling off the water until this setting point is reached. I based this recipe on one for Sweet Orange Marmalade from Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine, adding a step to increase the pectin, as suggested in other recipes.

    2 lemons
    2 small pink grapefruit
    9 blood oranges
    500g granulated sugar

    Zest the lemons, one grapefruit and 3 of the oranges using a vegetable peeler to remove just the zest. Finely julienne the zest.

    Juice all the fruit. There should be just over 1 litre.

    Add the pips, pith and remaining flesh from the fruit into a square of muslin. Add this to a pan of water and boil for 45 minutes. Leave to soak overnight.

    The next morning, squeeze all the pectin from the muslin and add with the water to the juice, zest and sugar in a large pan. Heat gently to dissolve the sugar, then bring to a simmer and boil for 1.5 hours, or until temperature reaches 104 degrees C. Start testing the set on a cold saucer, looking for a wrinkle on the surface when it is pushed.

    Let cool for 15 minutes or so before putting into sterilised jars (this helps make sure all the zest doesn’t float to the top).

    This looks beautiful, and is quite tart because of the grapefruit. It’s possible that it would have benefited from the zest being blanched before adding to the marmalade to remove some of the bitterness.

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    Bread to be proud of

    Sourdough

    A paste of ground wheat and water. Yeasts from the air land on the surface and start to grow and multiply. The yeast consumes the sugars from the wheat, and produces carbon dioxide. Bubbles appear. Bacteria also start to colonise the paste, feeding on other sugars that the yeast does not consume.

    This dual colony grows, produces lactic acid, produces carbon dioxide. More flour is added, more water, a dough is made. The proteins in the flour join to make a long protein, which is developed by working the dough. it is stretched away, pulled back, turned. The surface becomes smooth, stretchy, soft. The yeast trapped within the proteins keeps growing, producing carbon dioxide. The bacteria keep growing, keep producing lactic acid. The dough swells, becomes puffy, pillowy. It is moulded, shaped, the surface tightens, dries. The dough is put into the warm oven. The yeast grows faster, the gases expand, the dough stretches. And then, the heat is higher, the yeast dies, the protein sets and stiffens. Moisture in the oven gelatinises the starch, creates a stiff shiny exterior. The starch caramelizes, browns, darkens.

    And you have a loaf of bread. Just as the Egyptians would have made, just as the goldminers made in California, just as the French have been making for centuries. And it tastes good too.