I have spent the last few days perving over my new cookbook, the Flavour Thesaurus. Food geeks beware - only get this book if you have some time to spare. Imagine every core ingredient that you use with some regularity, cross referenced against every other ingredient on the list, each time with a recipe, a cultural tidbit or a science lesson.
So anyway, I am reading the anchovy section wondering what to combine with some anchovies, and as it goes through almonds...hard cheese...vanilla..etc, etc, I get to broccoli and anchovy. This sauce is a traditional Italian pasta sauce.
ingredients: anchovies, broccoli, chilli flakes, olive oil, capers, peas, other bits and pieces as desired, pasta.
Pre cook the broccoli and peas, making sure you have quite small pieces of broccoli. Lightly cook the chilli flakes in warm (not hot) oil. Then soften the anchovies in the oil and add all the ingredients except the pasta. Cook the pasta, mix the sauce. Easy Peasy.
My lovely-gorgeous-and-better half and I had a wonderful weekend away in the Yorkshire Dales quite soon after we met. Of all the things we saw there - the rolling hills and dales, the friendly people, the extensive availability of technical walking gear, the sheep, the cows - the highlight was visiting the Wensleydale creamery at Hawes. Sort of like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but with cheese.
It is hard to define what the character of Wensleydale was before Wallace and Gromit made it their Cheese of Choice. Apparently the Wensleydale creamery was struggling before the plastacine pair from Wigan came along. Perhaps their apricot-impregnated version of the cheese had been consigned to the same category as babycham, frozen black forest gateau and cheese+pineapple hedgehogs. But, if you are up close and personal with Wensleydale you will find it to be the most versatile and friendly cheese. A bit salty, mild, good for crackers with a pungent pickle, for crumbling over pasta, and plenty more.
So, this morning I decided to bake a barley oat loaf and include some Wensleydale. The flour is a combination of wheat flour, barley flakes and flour, and some linseeds. In the UK you can get it under the Doves Farm brand. This bread ended up tasting delicious but you could barely identify the wensleydale, so do be robust and put some good old chunks of it in there, say the size of a die (as in, plural, dice).
Ingredients: 500g barleycorn flour 1 tsp easy yeast a little salt and sugar 9 fl oz water. Well that's what the pack said, but this turned out to be too much so add 7 floz first and work your way up. Some olive oil Wensleydale!!!!
instructions: 1. mix it all together and knead for as long as you can be bothered (if for some reason you are feeling cross with someone, ten min of kneading should have you restored to a pleasant new happy mood). 2. leave it in the bowl to rise for about an hour 3. the most satisfying bit. punch it! If you want to give someone a small gift, invite them to punch it. It's really very satisfying. The air will all fall out of it and it is ready to knead for another ten minutes. Then place it in the receptacle that you are going to bake it in. I have no loaf tin and so went for a silicon brioche mould. Leave it in the new receptacle until it has started to rise again, say quarter of an hour. 4. Bake at 200 degrees C for about 30-40 minutes. It's ready when if you knock it on the outside, it sounds firm and hollow. 5. Eat and Enjoy!
We served it with some octopus (not Paul) and smoked salmon:
Everyone loves a Macaroon. They are now officially cooler than cupcakes, although possibly slightly less cool than pop cakes and perhaps on a zeitgeist par with whoopie pies. But here's the thing, it turns out not everyone can make them like La Duree. Here is an attempt with some top tips gathered from many other blogs, whose addresses I have shamefully lost but will credit when/if I re-find them. Picture: cup of English Breakfast with lemon curd macaroon. ingredients: 175g icing sugar 125g ground almonds - in an ideal world, made from blanched almonds that you have blitzed yourself 3 egg whites, ideally at room temperature and slightly older rather than fresh 75g caster sugar food colouring
oven: 140 (no fan), 150 (fan)what to do: 1. Make sure that you have baking paper, or ideally one of those teflon sheets that were invented by NASA so that astronauts could overcome all their sticking/bakery issues. It is wise to do this BEFORE you start cooking, as otherwise you might do an emergency dash to find that the three local shops don't actually stock it, then have to cycle to Sainsburys looking like someone just tipped a bag of icing sugar onto your head. Just a thought. 2. Blitz the icing sugar and ground almonds together in a food processor. Set aside. 3. In a big, clean bowl, whisk up the egg whites with a pinch of salt and pinch of cream of tartar, until they stand up on their own in any shape that you demand of them, except perhaps the Sagrada Familia. At this point whisk in the sugar, the egg whites will become glossy. At this point you can mix some food colouring in or divide the whites to colour them differently. 4. Mix half the almond/sugar mixture into the whites, then fold in the last of the mixture. At risk of pointing out the obvious, if you have halved the egg whites then halve the almond mix. 5. Put the mixture into a piping bag. You can use a freezer bag and cut a hole in the corner when you are ready to pipe it out. It is at this point you will realise that eggy sugary almonds have the same texture as superglue mixed with sand, so if you are a big cack-handed you might want to put the bag into a bowl to stand it up with an open aperture. It will go everywhere and does not come out of your clothes. 6. pipe into small 'plops' (the technical term), say the size of a 50p piece if you live in the UK, so about 3cm across. leave enough space between the plops. mine looked like this when piped, basically really badly spaced. 7. Leave for a few moments so that they form a slight skin, this should make them smoother on top. put them in the oven for about 10-15 minutes, watch them carefully through the oven door, trying not to fall asleep as you do it (watching pain dry not dissimilar). 8. take them out! et voila!
or this is what they look like if you are less adept (with food colouring too)
Filling Choose any filling you like, the filling is basically where the flavouring comes from. Traditionally, buttercream (softened butter mixed with icing sugar), or you could use fresh cream if serving immediately, or jam, lemon curd, hell how about marmite or melted marshmallows, whatever takes your fancy. Here are some ideas;
mashed banana (mix with lemon juice)
tea-infused buttercream
lemon rind mixed with buttercream
rhubarb jam
rosewater buttercream
etc etc please add your favourite flavour in the comments (is there anyone out there yet?!)
I bought some amazing crab this evening. White crabmeat, freshly plucked from a Cornish crab this very morning. Clearly the person doing the plucking was also CEO of a FTSE 100, the best plastic surgeon in LA or a London electrician; gramme for gramme it was approx the same price as antimatter (which according to this website costs $1.75 quadrillion an ounce ha ha ha http://tinyurl.com/3x5z9ye).Anyway I made a salad bed from chopped up chicory and avocado mixed with a tiny bit of lemon juice and chopped mint. I then piled the crab on top, trying to create the illusion that as if I was richer than Carlos Slim Helu and had bought the whole pack, rather than half. This is what it looked like. Not a bad prelude to barbecued halibut served up with some herby garlicky pernod butter (credit to the Fishmonger's Kitchen in Shepherd's Bush). with barbecued baby gem and one of those salads with a load of veg thrown in. For the salad, red cos leaves mixed with bits of cooked-then-rapidly-cooled broccoli and french beans. Also baby courgettes sliced really thinly with a potato peeler. Yum and vaguely virtuous.
I made these muffins when I had a peach and a nectarine reaching the pivotal millisecond when fruit goes from edible into festering mould. I used up some apples too, made a batch, and some went in the freezer for Future Breakfasting Opportunities.
Here's what I used: spelt flour - about 250g. You can mix up some spelt with some plain, if you like. 2 apples 1 peach 1 nectarine some stem ginger from a jar, chopped up into small pieces 3 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs 120g butter (well I didn't have enough so I made up with olive oil) 100g light brown sugar, can substitute some with with ginger syrup from the jar 50ml milk 200g plain yoghurt
Forget those uber complicated versions of muffin recipes. This works just fine: mix the dry ingredients together, the wet ingredients together, then mix wet and dry.
Chop up the fruit into small pieces and mix with the flour and sugar. Melt the butter in the microwave and mix with the olive oil (if using), the eggs, yoghurt, ginger pieces and milk. Mix the wet and dry ingredients, but not too thoroughly, just a very quick stir. Plop spoonfuls into cases in a muffin tin. Do NOT I repeat NOT be persuaded that greasing a tin will actually work, I pretty much guarantee you will be scraping burnt bits off for days and not actually getting a single whole one out of the tin. Unless you have one of those weird NASA designed silicone trays, as yet untried in this house.
Bake in an oven at about 180' until they look dark brown on top and just not sticky in the middle. This will vary according to how pumped up your oven is, in mine it took 20 mins or so.
They look a bit dry but they taste pretty good. And spelt comes from a health food shop so must be good for you, right?
