Off to Ilkeston this morning to learn how to decorate cupcakes. I made the purple and green ones, P coloured his sugar paste blue and yellow. The last photo is the flyer, in case you would like to decorate your own cupcakes.
I’ll be taking mine with me on the coach to Germany to share with the other teachers 🙂
A meeting of the pudding club again this evening. Today, however, I am a few days into a somewhat radical, no carb diet. The diet I am on is supposed to be no carbs – no rice, no pasta, no bread, no cereal. Which is proving challenging, but not nearly as challenging as the no-alcohol rule. It’s the holidays! I did choose to start during the holidays as I wasn’t sure how eating like this would make me feel and I didn’t want to be too far off my game in the classroom, but I hadn’t quite factored in how many social occasions there would be.
A no carb, no sugar dessert that isn’t plain fruit is quite a challenge. Next to impossible if you also avoiding highly chemical artificial solutions like sweeteners.
A bit of googling took me to this dessert idea. Blend cream cheese into sugar free jelly and use it, with fruit as a topping for an ersatz cheesecake. Since a biscuit base is out, replace it with blitzed nuts bound by melted butter and maple syrup.
A rare occurrence – a term time pudding club – made possible because of a training day.
I made lemon posset with lemon shortbread, and we also took over one of P’s award-winning chocolate cakes.
Whilst the shortbread was a wee bit fiddly – and not properly cooked in the event – the posset is an incredibly simple but effective dessert. Three ingredients, made in less than five minutes, allowed to cool and then a few hours in the fridge. Yields a complex and tangy taste that is super delicious. A pint of cream yielded 7 filled reused gü pots.
Wikipedia reveals that whilst these days, a posset is a cold dessert, it was originally a warm drink of hot milk curdled by adding wine or ale. Hmmm, hot, curdled beery milk. Delicious!
Every now and again something weird drops into my email and I just shrug and think that sounds interesting, lets do it. Vanishingly rarely I’m offered something to review, or an event to go to, or something to write about. Much more often, it’s poorly written and sometimes downright discourteous PR posts from people hoping to use my blog’s tiny amount of SEO clout and I just ignore them. But sometimes it’s an offer of something tangible.
And so last week I was invited to a soirée to sample a new menu at the Living Room in Hockley, Nottingham.
This is a place I have been to twice before. Once to film day after reaction pieces and menu unveilings for Come Dine With Me, and a second time last year for our PGCE Christmas meal. The first time I boggled that they had a bottle of cognac for £2500 on their menu, and the second – well, as an impecunious student I wasn’t hugely impressed at the value for money of their Christmas party offering.
This time I plus one was invited to a Blind Tasting of some new menu items, which sounded rather interesting, never having done anything like that before. It was on a school night, but it was early and promised only to last an hour, so I thought I could just about cope with balancing the work and the opportunity to go and do something a little different.
We arrived a little late as my Plus One got held up in traffic and I dashed straight from work to home to the event in my school tie and suit. Arriving, we went into the bar and found in progress a cocktail making class with a large group of people huddled round the bar learning how to make an amaretto sour from a barman keen to show off his flair. Unsure whether that was part of the event we hung around behind them watching until my companion wisely suggested we check upstairs in their main dining room to see if they were there.
Indeed they were, and they were champing at the bit to start, we by then being ten minutes late to something they’d urged us to be punctual for. We were hurried to seats, time to barely exchange names with the people next to us, and then put on our blindfolds.
The evening was fascinating. We were given tasters of lots of different food across the menu. Blindfolds on, food served, empty spoons / pots / glasses whipped away and then we could take off the blindfolds and answer in writing a quick quiz with very specific questions: what is the sauce with the duck? What meat is in the shepherd’s pie? Name three ingredients in our Glamorgan sausages.
The technicality of eating what you can’t see was fab, and half the times our hands had to be guided by our unseen waiting staff right onto our food. “Hold your hand in a cupping motion!” and then they placed a shot glass with a cocktail taster right into your fingers.
And with no sight of what you’re eating, it is really disconcerting. There were a number of times when I was chewing a mouthful with no thought really other than this is pretty tasty but I have no idea what it is. I did find myself pondering colours. What colour is this mystery food? Because the plates were removed before we could take off the blindfolds we didn’t even know that!
When the quizzes were marked and we got to know the answers, one thing that really did surprise me was that I had been unable to identify or even notice that at least two of the things I had eaten had things I think I really don’t like in them. “What are the ingredients in this tart?” was one question. I had identified the huge sloppy splash of something that came out of the tart and landed on my tie when I bit into it as honey, but had been oblivious to the fact that the main ingredient was butternut squash, which I thought I hated. The fish course was served with broccoli; I had no idea and thought it was cabbage!
Somehow I managed to end up with more points than my fellow guests – although many of the points I got not from being able to taste ingredients, but having prior knowledge of what is in things. I have made Glamorgan sausages, so I know what is typically in them; I know you make a daiquiri with rum; I know what to expect on a cheeseboard so if I’m stumped for ideas I will write brie, cheddar, stilton… and somehow this clocked up to a winning score, which netted me a dinky little trophy and the adulation of my fellow diners.
After it was all over we invited downstairs for a free drink and then there was an opportunity to actually talk to our fellow diners, who turned out to be representing Experience Nottinghamshire, Noshingham and Nottingham Confidential. Quite how I ended up in such illustrious company is anyone’s guess. Talk turned to our experience of the Nottingham restaurant scene and we had quite a few minutes on whether Hart’s is better than World Service. (they thought yes, I think no. Both have amazing lunch time offers as well as the expensive à la carte evening offer) It’s a shame talk didn’t turn more comprehensively to the mid-range Nottingham restaurant scene rather than the high-end, as I think that’s a much more diverse market.
All in all, it was a very agreeable evening and the taster foods we had from Living Room were definitely delicious. Highlights for me in particular were the duck in plum sauce, the Glamorgan sausages and their delicious new pudding the Basil Grand, a sort of Eton mess with Grand Marnier and, yes, basil. Basil. In a pudding. Sounds crazy but was delicious.
Having not seen our pudding club friends for ages, and what with me being on half term and them still working full time, we went to see them this evening taking both courses.
A couple of weeks ago, we gave away a dozen eggs after we had managed to build up a bit of a stock. Since then we have more or less been keeping on top of the girls’ production.
But every now and again it helps to have a meal that gets through quite a lot of them. So this evening, six of us ate 9 eggs in two custard-based dishes: a quiche and a crème caramel.
The quiche was essentially this recipe: Smoked Mackerel and Cheddar Quiche and was completely delicious. I substituted a leek fried in butter for the spring onions, made my own pastry with dried Italian herbs, used own label mature cheddar and slightly less cream, and it was very well received.
My other favourite thing to do with smoked mackerel is this warm mackerel potato salad.
The crème caramel was à la Dan Lepard.
Various things – friends visiting to see our new chickens, the last opportunity for Pudding Club before term starts again and a new found fatalism on the weight front (yeah, topping 100kg again!) has meant I have been cooking an awful lot of cake this week. I made…
Mary Berry’s Victoria Sandwich.
Which I burnt. Things I learned: a four egg mix is a good amount for my sandwich tins. 2oz of buttercream is not really enough to fill it and it takes an awful lot of jam. I need to turn the oven down. It’s really enough to combine the mix quite loosely – I would normally cream the butter with the sugar quite vigourously before adding the eggs and flour. This recipe calls for all the ingredients to go in at once and only basic mixing. And it’s fine for it.
Coffee flavoured cupcakes
Things I learned: a one egg sponge mix is ample to fill all four of the dinky new cupcake moulds I got for my birthday. Two spoons of instant coffee for the buttercream and two in the cake mix is about right for my taste but a bit too strong for everyone else. I need to work on my two tone icing technique and on icing more generally.
Mary Berry’s Chocolate Roulade
Things I learned: this is easier than it looks. It uses a lot of eggs (might be a good thing once the birds start laying!) No flour! I turned it into a sort of Schwarzwaldkirschroulade with half a bag of frozen cherries turned into a simple jam by boiling with sugar and bits of port and kirsh I had knocking around. I make sure the sponge was good and damp and boiled some of the left up juice to a slightly stiffer set to make a drizzling jus for presentation:
An old favourite. I don’t think I’ve ever made them without burning them a little, however – in this case, although they looked blackened they didn’t taste burnt at all.
What I learned: the recipe fits neatly in my large rectangular roasting tin – I’ve always used my round 9″ cake tin before. If you leave them to prove whilst ringing for a wedding, they will likely go over the top of the tin.
But they will still taste delicious and wonderful anyway.
This recipe is a good’un and came out with the desired highly squidgy interiors. The recipe is extremely detailed, and I might have glossed over the finer points.
I had to pop off to Dunelm to buy a new tin for making the swiss roll needed for the roulade, and whilst I was there, bought a square tin for brownies and tray bakes, which I have felt I needed for a while. This recipe fills it really well.
The picture shows afternoon tea with tuna and yellow pepper sandwiches, a small plate of cucumber sandwich bites, strong black coffee, and brownies and cinnamon buns for after.
Perhaps the main thing I learned is that my mobile phone takes horrible food pictures!
So this summer, we have been making a lot of smoothies.
I’ve resisted them for years, because I assumed they relied on using those punnetts of expensive soft fruit, often flown across the world, and out of season. But somewhere on the internet, I got given the idea that bags of frozen berries work just as well, and can go straight into the blender from the freezer.
The frozen fruit is far cheaper than the fresh Class I stuff at the front of the supermarket, and so for the last couple of months I have kept my freezer stocked with berries and the blender in almost daily use.
My supermarket has a variety of berries, and we have mostly been using frozen cherries and a blueberry/strawberry mix. The black forest bags look like they ought to be delicious, but they are chock full of seeds from raspberries and they get stuck in my teeth.
The average smoothie is made with about 80grams of frozen berries, a banana, a small spoon of oats, and enough milk to get the consistency right. There’s two of your 5 a day right there! All of the ingredients can be room temperature, so long as the berries come right out of the freezer, and it still makes a nice cold smoothie without the need for ice.
I have been using these remedially when I am conscious that my diet has been poor and that I am nowhere near getting enough fruit and veg in. In extremis, some days I’ve been making 4-fruit smoothies by adding in canned fruits – the cheapest supermarket basics in the tinned pear and pineapple ranges. Since they’re going to be bashed into pieces, it doesn’t matter what size is in the tin.
I only really know about Speculoos biscuits as an accompaniment of espresso or café coffee. Order a coffee, and get a lovely little spicy biscuit wrapped in plastic. I’d mostly thought of it as a ginger sort of thing.
If you like your speculoos enough, you can buy the same biscuits they use in cafés here on Amazon.
Also recently Time to Cook Online Blog gave a recipe for making your own Spekulaas biscuits, based on a Dutch recipe, where they are common. In the Netherlands, you can buy the spice mix, but elsewhere you just have to make it yourself. I’m not rushing to do it because either my pestle and mortar are not very good or my technique is poor – it goes all over the place! I’m not in a hurry to grind cloves by hand.
Interestingly, Time to Cook does not list ginger as one of the spices in the mix – but the Wikipedia page does.
The reason for my renewed interest was a trip to a French hypermarket while we were in Normandy last week. In addition to the classy French food and booze and the crate full of French stationery destined for the classroom we bought, we also strayed in the “Pâté à tartiner” aisle where there are things to spread onto baguettes for French children’s tea time. We swooped on some Cora own brand white chocolate spread and then eagle-eyed P also spotted some Speculoos spread.
Once we got home we found it’s delicious! It almost has the colour and grainy texture of peanut butter but is sweet and spicy. The jar will not last long in our house and it’s all we can do to remember to spread it on bread and not just eat it out of the jar with a spoon. I haven’t seen it in UK supermarkets, but you can buy it on eBay. (Also available in crunchy!)
Whilst searching for the spread, I also found on Amazon this Speculoos syrup Рsimilar, I suppose to the sort of syrup Starbucks use to make a gingerbread latt̬. Another suggestion for its use is to flavour whipped cream. Delicious suggestion.
Photo credit – Charles01. PS is it ok to link to images hosted on wikipedia or do I have to copy them?
(File this one under “things I should have blogged months ago!”)
In November last year, just over a year after I opened our doors for CDWM, we hosted a supper club in our house.
We weren’t cooking, we were hosting for my vegan chef friend who used to blog here but is presently on hiatus.
I think it was a good evening. We had an interesting blend of people, who enjoyed our chef’s food. Our guests were a mix of vegans and not. For an evening, we had a house full of people who had never been here before.
In order to get the house ready we had spent about a week tidying clutter away, and I spent the Saturday hoovering, dusting and laying tables. Our guests didn’t seem disgusted by the state of our house, but then, as we learned on Come Dine With Me, they don’t usually express their disgust to your face! (And they weren’t allowed in as many rooms as the CDWM guys!)
Some things I learned:
* if I borrow a table and six chairs, I can easily seat 16 people for dinner in our house.
* We already have enough cutlery, crockery, glassware, candles, table linen without borrowing any more (!)
* in November, we need to run the heating all day to get the house tolerably warm
* if you deadbolt the kitchen door and put a camping table up against it you can get an extra prep surface. But it will be uncomfortably low down.
Some things that were hiccoughs along the way:
Boiling enough water to feed gnocchi to 16 people takes a looong time. They had to be cooked in separate batches because some of them were gluten free, so we needed two pans of boiling water. The gnocchi had been made ahead and frozen and needed to be plunged into large pans of boiling water. Getting 20l of water to the boil in a domestic kitchen is a time consuming challenge.
The second thing that held us up was plate warming. This is all the more important in our house because our kitchen is unheated and the cupboards fix directly to the walls. In winter, some of our cupboards are colder than our fridge. Our plates are often icy. There’s no point getting the food good and warm if you then By the time we needed warm plates, the oven was very hot cooking puff pastry, and the sink was full of used pots and pans. We actually warmed plates in the end by wetting them and microwaving them, all the while worrying this might break them.
Two of our guests were the hosts of North Nott’s Clarkies Supperclub (last few spaces remaining at their April event!). We had been worried they might be hostile to competition, but that wasn’t the case at all. It seems there is plenty of market share available for another supper club in the Nottingham neck of the woods – in fact there doesn’t appear to be any other one currently running anywhere in the East Midlands. The Clarkies have said they are keen for others to set up just so they have an opportunity to go and eat out instead of hosting for a change.
They had suggestions for the platewarming problem – buy a hostess trolley. They’re pricey new, but there does seem to be a steady supply of really cheap ones on eBay.
Which leads me to my conclusion. Would I do this again? Is it worth buying a hostess trolley off eBay? So far, I only have experience of hosting and not cooking. At our last event, our chef partner did all the cooking, devised the menu, and did all the publicity, mostly through the very obliging Nottingham Vegan website. I’m not sure I could cook as well as our chef, nor present the food as well, nor work out such an interesting menu.
Certainly working as a teacher I could not run an event in term time, as the prep and publicity would take too long. Do I want to spend half terms hosting a restaurant in my house?
If you do it regularly, it does seem to take over your house a little. In her book, Kerstin Rodgers confesses she’s had to move her entire life into the bedroom of her flat as her sitting room is dominated now by tables and chairs. In conversation with the Clarkies, it seems they have had to give over a spare bedroom to holding the folding chairs, tables, extra dinner services and linen they need.
Do you ever make any money from it? We were on a profit share basis with our chef partner and at the end of the evening divvied up the takings. And we got a nice handful of tenners in return for our efforts. We had incurred some cost – heating, and professional help in cleaning up ready for our guests – so we comfortably broke even. But the temptation to buy ever more things to make the evening go better – cooking kit, serving kit, must mean if you do it regularly, you incur costs. Would it ever get to the point where you made money? I doubt it. I guess most people who do it, do it for the love of food and the interesting times you end up with.
Will we do it again? I have not ruled it out forever, but I am sure as heck going to try and get teaching a bit more sorted out before I have another go myself. So certainly ruling it out for PGCE year and (hopefully) NQT year to summer 2013.
I’ve become One Of Those People Who Has to be Careful with Garlic.
Last night at Pudding club, I made Osso Buco with polenta.
Normally I would doctor a recipe so that it had no more than half a clove of garlic per finished portion. Last night, my husband was not eating with us so I threw caution to the wind, and made it as per recipe, four cloves of garlic for three people, plus the gremolata. The recipe called the gremolata, a garnish of chopped parsley, lemon zest and raw garlic, an essential part of the dish. Without that warning, I would probably have not made it, because I know that raw garlic almost always has unpleasant effects on my digestion, not least horrible burps, heart burn and the sort of acid indigestion that leads to me waking up traumatically feeling like I’m drowning in bile. My only real cure on nights like that is to trough a packet of gaviscon and spend a few hours trying sleep sitting upright.
I should have trusted my instinct, because that’s exactly what happened! After feeling garlic-sick all evening, I could only finally go to bed without problems at gone 4 in the morning.
At least I now know for certain that I don’t like and cannot eat gremolata!
As for those websites that see raw garlic as a cure for heartburn, well!
I made the osso buco in the first place really only because the butcher didn’t have any lamb shanks when I ordered and suggested this as a substitute, stewed, bone-in, meat.
Not a huge fan of polenta as a side dish either.
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