Recipe 28: Stem ginger shortbread

Now you may have noticed that most of the recipes so far have been savoury rather than sweet, and there’s a reason for that. I generally much prefer savoury to sweet food. As a kid I used to love biscuits, but not normally chocolate ones, more shortbread (who doesn’t like them?) digestives and malted milk. But this love has waned as I’ve grown older and if it were a choice between a freshly buttered croissant (maybe with some cheese and a little ham) and some chocolate fudge cake, the croissant would win hands down every time.

It may be for this reason that I wasn’t overly impressed with Recipe 27, the chocolate and ginger biscuits. Thinking they were too sweet I was unsure what my colleagues would make of a tin full of the things when I brought them in for our tea-time treat: 36 large biscuits between half a dozen people - they were going to be there a week at least. However, a lady from the Quality Department (amazing that such departments exist, eh?) popped into the office this morning and, as I looked up from my computer to see how I could help I, I saw that it wasn’t me she was coming to, but the biscuit tin. As she lifted the lid she exclaimed, “It’s the last one!” This was under 48 hours from bringing in the things. Based on this evidence, I think they were far better than I imagined; it was just my savoury tooth that influenced my judgement.

And so I’m bake on the biscuit trail to try another simple biscuit recipe for the office, this time stem ginger shortbread – not as sweet as Recipe 27 and, having just eaten one, a lot closer to what I’m after! I wonder if they’ll still bring in the ladies from Quality…

This makes 20 biscuits.

Ingredients:

200g butter or margarine	½ teaspoon ground ginger
100g caster sugar (plus a bit for sprinkling)	Healthy pinch of salt
260g plain flour	50g chopped stem ginger
40g rice flour or corn flour	1-2 greased baking sheets

Put the soft butter into a mixing bowl and beat it until soft and creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar and continue until it’s light and fluffy.

Combine the flours, ground ginger and salt and sift into the mixing bowl, gently mixing it all up. Add the chopped ginger and then mix it all together with your hands, ensuring you get a nice mixed up dough. Form the dough into a 20-25cm long sausage and wrap in cling film. Transfer this to the fridge for 20-30 minutes to firm up a bit.

Heat the oven to 170⁰C. Unwrap your shortbread sausage and, with a sharp knife, cut into 20 rounds. Pop them on the baking sheets with a little space between them and bake for 20 minutes until firm, but not so that they colour; maybe just to a little bit golden just on the edge of the edges.

Once out the oven, sprinkle with sugar and then leave on the trays to cool a little and ten, when firmer, transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store these and eat within a week [if they last that long…].

Today’s learning:

You can take out the ginger and stem ginger and replace with chopped pistachio nuts to get pistachio shortbread – now that one does sound like a winner!

Recipe adapted from: BBC Books (2011). The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake. London: Random House.

Pic to the left: my desk at work with one of the little shortbreads...

Recipe 27: Chocolate and ginger oat biscuits

As I was walking out the College this evening, a colleague passed me and commented on the empty cake tin I was carrying, asking if there were ‘cookies’ inside [she is not from British shores].  As it happens, there weren’t, but it had recently carried a carrot cake (see recipe for Week 7) for colleague Peter’s 50^th birthday. An amazing cake and one I’ll make again and again. And again.
 
Anyway, it occurred to me that I hadn't made ‘cookies’ or biscuits for some time, well, since the first recipe in this blog in fact, and so, with wifi enabled, I went in search and found these fellows on the BBC website, from the Great British Bake Off. Can you get a higher pedigree of biscuit?

Now this made 36 big biscuits in my mix – unless you eat a lot of biscuits or know people who do, maybe reduce the recipe accordingly…

Ingredients:

225g/8oz unsalted butter	4 tsp ground ginger
100g/3½oz golden syrup	2 tsp ground cinnamon
200g/7oz soft brown sugar	400g/14oz rolled oats
150g/3½oz plain flour	2 free-range eggs, beaten
2 tsp baking powder	50g/1¾oz stem ginger, chopped
1 tsp sea salt flakes	115g/4oz good quality dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line two to three baking trays with non-stick parchment. Melt the butter and the golden syrup in a pan over a low heat. Set aside to cool slightly.

Combine the sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and spices and mix well to combine. Stir in the rolled oats and mix thoroughly. Pour in the melted butter and syrup and stir until well combined. Then stir in the beaten eggs and the stem ginger.

Spoon in even, heaped teaspoons onto the lined baking trays, leaving room for them to spread. Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Remove the biscuits from the oven and set aside to cool completely. Don’t take them out too early or they’ll be a bit gooey. Let them crisp up to a very light brown.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl suspended over a pan of barely simmering water (do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water). Dip the biscuits in the melted chocolate and place on a cooling rack until the chocolate has set.

Recipe 26: Lamb, greens and anchovy dressing

Sunday in autumn and it’s time to start roasting meat again! A slight departure from the traditional Sunday roast but with the magical pairing of lamb and anchovy, this is one to savour and repeat. I think anchovy is fast becoming one of my surprise favourite constituent ingredients used in this blog. Adds tremendous depth of flavour. Super tasty!!!

  

This one serves 2.

Ingredients:

125g butter	Salt & pepper to taste
1 onion, thinly sliced	100ml lamb sauce base (see recipe 25)
4 sprigs rosemary (tied together)	For the anchovy dressing
150 cream (double if you can)	150 ml rapeseed oil
Splash of truffle oil (if you can!)	2 tablespoons of dried herbs
2 rumps of salt marsh lamb	1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted
2 tablespoons of rapeseed oil (or other lightly flavoured oil)	Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
200ml water	8 salted anchovy fillets, finely chopped, plus extra to garnish
Greens (broccoli stalks are very good but this time I used cabbage – it needed eating up)

 Melt 50g of butter in a pan over a low heat. Add the onion, rosemary and a good pinch of salt. Cover and sweat for 20-25 minutes until softened, but not coloured. Pour in the cream and bring to the boil, reducing until 1/3 original amount of liquid. Now discard the rosemary.

Transfer mixture to a food processor, add the truffle oil (or suitably flavoured oil) and blend until you have a smooth onion puree. Now leave to one side.

To make the anchovy dressing, mix the rapeseed oil, dried herbs, fennel seeds and lemon zest and juice together in a non-metallic bowl. Stir in the anchovies and leave until needed.

Season the lamb with salt and pepper. In an ovenproof frying pan, heat some rapeseed oil and add the rumps, cooking for about 8 minutes until caramelised and brown. Spoon over some of the anchovy dressing, place the pan in the oven and roast the rumps for 5-6 minutes, becoming medium rare-medium. Remove from the pan and spoon over more of the anchovy dressing. Now leave them to rest, covered in foil, for 10 minutes.

Melt the remaining butter with water and cook the broccoli stalks. If using cabbage, steam in a frying pan with a drizzle of fish sauce to add a zingy flavour.

To serve, place a pool of puree on each plate, slice the lamb and put on the puree. Put a little more anchovy dressing on the lamb, drizzle some lamb sauce around the lamb. Add the greens and garnish with anchovy fillets.

Today’s learning:

1. I now know what ‘salt marsh lamb’ is. Check out this description from the BBC’s ‘Good food’ page:

The lambs are born between March and April and live first of all on their mother's milk, then after four to six weeks, grass is added to their diet. They graze on the estuary salt marshes and coastal pastures that are flooded by the spring tides and doused by the sea. The lambs feed on a rich variety of plants and minerals growing in the salt marshes, which give the meat a superb flavour. Surprisingly it doesn't taste at all salty or of seaweed as you might expect; instead the richly flavoured meat has gentle hints of the coastal flora and fauna, such as glasswort, sea purslane, samphire and sea lavender.

I just used lamb shoulder and it still tasted good – just choose some lamb you’re fond of, I think.

2. Broccoli stalks are delicious. I always used to through them away and just eat the florets but the stalks, peeled and julienned are very tasty. No more ‘going in the food waste’ for them. They’re going in my stomach!

3. Onion puree is fantastic. Sweet and amazing!

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.

Recipe 25: Lamb sauce base

Following on from the success of my red wine base, I’m adapting Tom Kerridge’s lamb sauce base recipe to the one you see here.  This one takes more time overall than the red wine base but still good to do for lamb recipes. Smells lovely too.

The recipe calls for lamb bones but I've used some rather bony and fatty lamb ribs instead (the Morrisons couldn't supply me with lamb bones!). Be sure to cool the sauce afterwards so that you can easily scoop off the fat that rises to the surface...

I just did a third but with these measures,  you get about 3/4 litre.

Ingredients:

2 litres chicken stock	1 onion, chopped
1kg lamb bones, chopped up	2 celery sticks, chopped
½ bunch of rosemary	Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oven to 180⁰c and roast the lamb for about 40 minutes so that it’s nice and brown. Add the bones, stock, onion and celery to a pot and simmer for one or two hours to reduce by at least a third. Remove the pan from the heat and add the rosemary to infuse, uncovered for 30 minutes.

Pass the stock through a fine sieve (with muslin if you have it) and leave to cool completely, allowing you to remove any fat congealed on the surface. Now you can use it for lamb stock or to reduce it down for a sauce (see Recipe 26).

Keep for up to 3 days in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer – use those little gin miniature bottles from flights to store in handy-sized portions.

Today’s learning:

Once you’ve had lamb chops, or any meat off the bone, don’t be lazy with them bones! Make a sauce base out of them. I’ve always used a chicken carcass this way, so about time I got in the way of doing this with lamb to make a tasty stock or even better sauce.

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.

Recipe 24: Red wine sauce

Now we all like a bit of gravy. The gravy that’s been made from the oil and fat from a roast, mixed with wine, mustard and the a little flour and poured over that self-same roast on a chilled autumnal evening – the kind of flavour that makes you have just one more roast potato just so that you can soak up that lovely, meaty gravy.

Well I’m not making gravy today. I’m moving beyond the realm of Sunday roast gravy and the instant Bisto (other brands available) for a sauce for chops or juicy chunks of meat: it’s red wine sauce time! Since having tried this out, I've made it again and again; great for keeping in the fridge or freezing for later use mid-week when you need a taste of luxury to raise the game of your choice of lamb, cow, fowl or even game itself!

This recipe is good to halve but, with these measures, makes about 900ml.

Ingredients:

2 litres chicken stock	1 onion, chopped
1 bottle of red wine	4 celery sticks, chopped
150g red currant jelly (or other flavour as desired – left over cranberry sauce worked for me) or jam (gives a sweeter taste but not as thick)	Handful or parsley stalks (rosemary just as good, or better if having it with lamb)
100g berries (blackberries or other as you like)	Salt and pepper to taste

Mix the chicken sauce/stock base, wine, redcurrant jelly and blackberries in a saucepan over a high heat to melt the jelly. Add the onion and celery and continue boiling until it reduces down to 1/3 of its original volume, skimming any fat off the surface as necessary.

Remove pan from the heat and add the parsley stalks to infuse, uncovered for 10-15 minutes.

Pas the liquid though a fine sieve (with muslin even better) and leave to cool completely. Cover and chill for 12 hours so any fat on the top can be removed (I find it’s fine just to use it once passed through the sieve).

When ready for use, heat up and reduce to a sauce consistency. All done and flavoured brilliance!

Today’s learning:

Just make a batch of this stuff and it will bring joy to a weekday dinner. Great with duck [best with creamy mash but here with duck and egg noodles]!

Top tip:
Those little gin bottles you get on flights make excellent individual storage bottles for sauces and salad dressings. The vodka ones too!

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.

Recipe 23: Proper baked beans on soda bread toast

I recently got given Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food by brother Matt and his fiancée Rache. This is a journey into Tasty-land, a place full of butter, lard and the kind of things you want to see in decent cooked breakfasts and quality country pubs. If you like porky things, this is for you. If pork's not your thing, maybe give this a miss or just drop the lardons from the ingredients.

Tom (we’re on first name terms, you see?) says this recipe for beans and bread is for 4-6 people. It’s not. This is a considerable under-egging of the pudding, so to speak. The bread will do 10 and the beans 16, make no mistake. Unless you’re feeding 6 very hungry people who like lots of beans this is. Lots of beans. This recipe has given me plenty to put into individual portions to freeze for breakfasts – this will remove the need to get up three hours before breakfast to enjoy this beany treat. First made 16^th August 2014.

For the baked beans	For the soda bread
4oog dried white beans (e.g. haricot) or 1,400g drained tinned beans (!)	340g plain wholemeal flour
5 tbsp rapeseed oil	340g strong white flour, plus some for dusting
200g smoked streaky bacon/bacon lardons	45g butter, softened
200g chopped onions	2 tsps bicarbonate of soda
2 garlic cloves, crushed/grated	1 ½ tsps Salt
2 x 400g chopped tomatoes	1 tsp cracked black pepper
2 tbsps tomato puree	625ml butter milk (or normal milk and yogurt if no butter milk)
150g soft brown sugar
200ml red wine vinegar
500ml water
Salt and pepper to taste

If using uncooked beans, soak and cover them overnight. Drain and then cover in water and bring to boil. Drain and cover in water again and bring to boil again. Simmer for one hour. Drain and set aside. Or, just get pre-cooked ones out of a tin.

If you do take the logical option and just buy the pre-cooked beans, remember that pre-cooked and cooked beans differ in weight. This difference in weight only occurred to me as I put the beans into the sauce (one of the final stages) and found that I had far too much liquid to bean ratio. I then had to pop back to the shops and get more beans. This recipe makes a lot of beans. The internet reckons that 125g dried beans equals about 400g cooked beans. This recipe calls for 400g dried and I ended up putting in 1,400g cooked beans. That’s a lot of beans, as the picture shows. When I made them a second time, I halved the recipe and still had loads.

Heat the rapeseed oil in a large saucepan (I had to change up to my biggest pan after I realised how much this recipe makes). Add the bacon and fry until a bit crispy. Then add onion and garlic for another 3-5 minutes until the onion is softened.

Add the chopped tomatoes, puree, sugar vinegar and water and bring to the boil, stirring all the while to dissolve the sugar. Add the beans, reduce to a very low heat and gently simmer, uncovered, for 1 ½ to 2 hours until the sauce is thick. After two hours I ended up adding a little corn flour mixture to help thicken it up a bit. Now you’re ready to go with the beans – season as desired!

Now for the bread. If well organised, you can multi-task while making the beans. Heat the oven to 200⁰C. Put both flours, butter, bicarbonate of soda, salt and pepper into a large bowl. Add the buttermilk, mixing with your hands until it forms a smooth-ish dough. You may need to add a drop more flour if too sticky.

Transfer the dough to a greased baking sheet and pat into a ‘loaf shape’, dusting with a little extra flour. Pop into the over for 45-50 minutes until golden and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Toast the bread, smother with butter and add the beans (and eggs if hungry). If feeling gourmet, sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top as well for a splash of colour to make it look healthy. As you’ll see from the pictures, I didn’t bother with the parsley. Damn tasty beans. Be hard to go back to Heinz, HP or Branston’s.

Today’s learning: When cooking with uncooked beans, remember there’s a weight difference with cooked!

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.

Recipe 22: Turnip & Horseradish Soup with Crispy Beef

I think I'll give up the pretense of trying to do one recipe a week and logging it on here week-by-week. I have been cooking lots more new things than I would normally (and tasting so much good stuff too), but I'm not quite managing the New Year's Resolution... However, cook on I shall, and I wonder if 52 new things isn't an outrageous target to meet. Hmmm. I think i need to plan this one.

Anyway 'Recipe 22' [more recipes yet to write up] was done just this evening (14th October) and comes from Tom Kerridge's Proper Pub Food (2013. Bath: Absolute Press). Although seemingly just a soup, there are two key soupy tings learnt in this recipe, giving just one of the reasons I'll be making this again. The main reason is that it's very tasty!

vegetable oil	75ml white wine vinegar
1 onion, finely chopped	50g caster sugar250g beef bavette steak, thinly sliced
1 litre of chicken stock	50g cornflour
700g turnips	2 green chillies (I used red for a little extra punch!)
200g double cream (or single if feeling a little healthier…)	Paprika or cayenne pepper, to taste
3 tablespoons of freshly grated horseradish (or 3 heaped tablespoons of creamed horseradish if freshly ground unavailable)	Salt and pepper, to taste

 Nb: In the pic, I missed out the cornflour, oil, cream and white wine vinegar

1. Heat some oil in a large pan over a low heat. Add the onions and a pinch of salt, cover and sweat for 10-15 minutes until softened but not coloured.

2. Add chicken stock and turnip (I supplemented my turnip with swede...) and bring to boil.Simmer uncovered for 10-15 minutes, or until the turnip is tender.

3. Add the cream and return the soup to the boil, then stir in the horseradish. Blitz the mix until smooth.

3. Put the white wine vinegar into a pan over a high heat and add the sugar. Stir until the sugar's dissolved. Now pout this into the soup mix - it'll give a lovely, sweet acidity to the soup. Really.

4. Coat the beef strips in cornflour, shaking loose any extra, and fry for 6-10 minutes until suitably crispy. The dusting of cornflour makes a lovely crispy shell which is particularly good. Once done, drain on kitchen towel and sprinkle with paprika/Cayenne pepper and chopped chilli.

5. Ladle the soup into bowls and add the crispy, chilli beef. Super tasty.

Today's learning: 

1. The white wine vinegar and sugar trick adds an amazing depth of flavour to root vegetable soup. Before I'd just relied on chilli, salt and pepper, but this gives a delightful, zingy flavour.

2. Coating the beef in cornflour (rather than plain flour) helps gives a crunchy edge with extra crunchy bits, making the beef a most excellent garnish. I'll be doing this again!

3. 'beef bavette' is more commonly known as 'Butcher's Cut', so called because it's a very tasty bit, there's not much of it on the cow and as a result, the cheeky butchers often kept it for themselves. A perk of the trade, shall we say?

Week 21 (ahem... cough cough): Crispy grilled bacon with creamed corn on sourdough

So far behind the cooking schedule and even more behind the blog schedule, but back on the bus, I hope, with a dozen recipes to write up and still more to cook. So, I thought let's not delay things by not writing up the ones I've meant to do and just try and get what I can in. Today it's crispy grilled bacon with creamed corn on sourdough (from: The Guardian’s ‘Cook’, Saturday 11^th October 2014).

Now everyone loves corn on the cob, don’t they? Imagine a country fete, a friend’s summer barbecue or maybe a festival in a foreign country, with the cob drizzled in miso or butter, peppered in the extreme or charcoaled beyond yellow. I mean, the fresh, juicy, tasty bits of corn, succulent and tasty, popping in the mouth.  All good, except for the bits of corn stuck between the teeth, stubbornly refusing to go without a mighty effort with toothpick. Tasty, either way but also not without its problems…

And so, the taste of corn on the cob without the bits stuck in the teeth? Well creamed corn it has to be; and what a recipe this is. I always know when something tastes good because, when I taste it near the end for seasoning, etc., I can’t stop going back to ‘check’ if it needs more seasoning. And this is the case with this one.  Add the bacon on some crunchy bread and ‘Hoopla!’ You’ve got yourself a meal. Ideal for lunch, a treat to spoil yourself at breakfast with or, with a drop of decent white (a Cotes du Rhone for me), some sprightly evening repast. This one’s a keeper. If you want to experience it in the same way as I’ve done, cook and eat while listening to Iggy Pop’s excellent John Peel Lecture from BBC6 Music (broadcast 13^th October 2014). Great food and a surprisingly articulate speaker. Joie de vivre and a ‘lust for life’? Without a doubt.

Ingredients:

1 white onion	A good glug of cream (single or double if you like)
2 knobs of butter	Freshly grated nutmeg
2 or 3 corn cobs	Slices of sourdough (or other decent bread)
180-250ml water	Salt and pepper
6-8 rashers bacon

1. Set the grill to medium high. Sweat the onion in a pan over a low heat in a knob of butter. Cut away the kernels from the corn cobs then add them to the onions, stir, and add the water. Add a knob of butter and bring to a simmer under a lid for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, grill the bacon on a high shelf until crisp, turning halfway through.

3. When the corn is tender, add the cream and nutmeg – don’t overdo it on the nutmeg else it taste something a little like rice pudding (!). Season and then blitz until smooth.

4. Keep warm while you toast or grill the bread. Butter it, then top with corn and bacon.

Easy to make and oh, so tasty. Definite seconds (and thirds?), just be sure to make plenty - I went on the higher side of the listed ingredients. This recipe would do two nicely. make more; you'll wish you had if you didn't!

Today's learning: Creamed corn is delicious. Why haven't I cooked it before? Fresh corn, cream and butter? It's a no-brainer, as they say.