Category Archives: Food

Afternoon tea for ten

So, on Friday, we finally held a wake for Nottingham’s former Lib Dem councillors and a few extra people who had worked for us at the council. We struggled to find a date we could all do, as well as an activity that suited everyone – eg pub would be no good for our various teetotal, recovering alcholic or Muslim colleagues. Eventually I offered to cook afternoon tea for everyone.

Which I duly did.

Of course that meant that hosting it here would need a flurry of cleaning to get the house acceptable, but it also gave me an opportunity to use the entire wedding list tea set for the first time (we’ve used bits of it from time to time but never all 8 settings)

Here’s the food I did:

Savouries

Muffaletta Tigers

A Muffaletta sandwich is a huge American thing based on muffaletta bread, which is round and seeded, stacked high with ham and provolone cheese and also includes a sort of pickled olive salad, apparently. I first encountered this from Olive magazine, and their version appears nothing like the American version. And then my version is different again because the only bread that seemed vaguely available in the supermarket was tiger bread, the whole white loafs with crunch toppings. You blend a jar of artichoke hearts (Sainsbugs has them in tins) into some mayonnaise, slice the loaf horizontally and spread the artichoke/mayo mix on the top and bottom. Layer the loaf with lots of ham, a bag of mixed leaf salad and lots of sliced Emmental cheese and put the loaf back together. Press firmly – indeed leave it under a weight if you can, although I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this without the weight sliding off. Slice into individual sandwiches. Secure sandwiches with a toothpick with an optional green olive in the top.

Tea party

Verdict: this was delicious, and all of it got eaten. But it was a slimy, horribly mess to make, and the top and bottom of the load, despite being secured with toothpicks, got sheared away from each other when sliced. Have to work on the methodology, but will deffo do again. One tin of artichoke hearts and two huge spoons of mayo was far too much for one small tiger loaf.

Tuna rolls

No real mystery here: two tins of tuna, big dollop of mayo, half a red pepper deseeded and chopped very finely spooned into wholemeal rolls and served with thinly sliced cucumbers.

Lorraine Pascale’s Sun-dried tomato and rosemary palmiers

Recipe here. Nice and simple, kept for a couple of days, tasted very nice. Fooled a lot of people who thought from the look of them that they were going to be cake not savoury…

Tea party

Sweets

Dan Lepard’s cinnamon buns

I have made these once before (recipe here) – and once again they were gorgeous: soft, spicy dough, sweet cinnamon filling. Highly recommended! This time I used the same amount of dough in a much bigger tin and got a much higher yield.

Tea party

Scones

Quite fortunately on the same day, Woman’s Hour had a feature on how to make the perfect scones, and I used their tips and recipe… except…

I had leftover buttermilk, so substituted some of the milk for that. I must have misidentified the size of my cutter, using my smallest, because I got 16 tiny scones out of half of the dough before giving up and freezing the other half. I didn’t use cherries, just sultanas. (Cherries are for cherry scones! Fruit scones are sultanas only!) Served with clotted cream and strawberry jam.

Chocolate cake

I had been hemming and hawing about which cake to make and finally settled on this one. It got rave reviews, but I found it ever so slightly meh. More a gateau than a cake. I tried to ice it but the ganache topping wasn’t sturdy enough to ice letters onto.

Fruit bowl

A nod to healthiness

Served with

Tea and coffee. Of course.

Conclusion

I quite enjoyed the cooking and people seemed to enjoy eating it, but the cleaning was knackering and it’s hard to divorce the effort of the two in my mind. Perhaps if the house were routinely more clean, this sort of thing would be less of a trial? I thought a few weeks ago that I would try afternoon tea as a way of easing into supperclubs but as I was hoovering and plating and laying the table, I found myself thinking that it was ridiculous that people would pay money to come and eat brown food in a filthy house. I lack the perspective to think whether I am doing myself down or being sensibly realistic.

Supperclubs

I’m excited about the idea of supperclubs, underground restaurants and the like – the idea that for one night only, or very few nights, you host a restaurant for paying strangers in your house. How cool is that?

I heard about it first, I think, somewhere on the internet, and then it was cemented in my mind by a feature on Woman’s Hour which led me to circling the block and being late for leafleting so I could listen to it all.

“That sounds cool,” I thought. “Maybe I could do that in my house, once I’ve tidied up a bit?”

Would it be scarier than Come Dine With Me? At least if you fail and massively suck, only a few people find out. And you can close the bedroom doors and not have anyone rifling through your things. Or even going in the massively dusty, cluttered rooms.

There was a list of supperclubs on a website somewhere that I perused. And there seemed to be none in Notts! Or at least one, but with a “we’re no longer hosting events for family reasons” caveat on their website. I later also found someone who hosts afternoon teas for six on Friday afternoons in the South Notts area. But apart from that, no-one at all in the whole East Mids! An opportunity, I thought.

So when my friend, the vegan blogger Cat of Stripes started talking about wanting to host a couple of pop-up restaurant nights, I put our house forward as a venue. We’ve set a date – the last weekend in November – and we’ll firm up all the rest of the details closer to the time.

(NB – if you’re a vegan (or even if you’re not) and you want to sample the Stripey Cat’s cooking – do please drop me a line and I will start a list of people to get back in touch with closer to the time when we actually start selling tickets. By all accounts, the price is going to be pretty bargainous.)

My discussion with Cat of Stripes led to me signing up to a group on Ning and starting to read MsMarmiteLover’s blog, something I hadn’t previously discovered. A few weeks later a plaintive email arrived begging us to consider buying the book, to which, after a few further weeks of hemming and hawing and counting pennies, I acquiesced when on the internet with my guard down ((read – drunk. Apparently even when blotto my fingers can type in my Visa card details without getting it out of my wallet))

And in the last few days I have been reading it. It’s a mix of recipes Kerstin Rodgers uses at her own events, prefaced by some really interesting tips and suggestions for hosting your own supperclubs. And she makes it sound such an awful lot of fun. There’s no glossing over the hard work or personal sacrifice – in her case, she’s emptied so much of her house to make room for chairs and tables that she’s moved sofas and TVs into what was supposed to be her boudoir – and of course you should spend several days cooking for each event.

Rodgers doesn’t seem to have the CHAOS problem we do at the moment. If she did, her first word of advice wouldn’t be “First of all, just do it. Go on, play restaurants. Take the plunge.”

But thinking about doing it might even be just one more prod to start the massive house cleansing we need.

But before we get there, we are Having People Over. Half with this crazy idea in mind, and with some pressure to have a Wake – a last hurrah for our former councillors and our former staff – I volunteered to host an Afternoon Tea, which will ultimately be for 10 people (six former councillors, three former staff – and enough leftovers to feed P when he gets home!) We’ll see how that goes. Baby-steps, as Fly Lady would say.

Excellent low fat icecream recipe

Last month’s Olive magazine syndicated a Telegraph article with a chocolate icecream recipe.

It’s basically frozen blancmange.

Whilst that might not sound appetizing at all, the chocolate icecream is pretty awesome. I found it ever so slightly grainy but my companion ((as they say in restaurant reviews)) didn’t. It is very chocolaty and tastes every bit as good as the Co-op’s “indulgent” Belgian chocolate icecream. Whilst the recipe might call for “high quality cocoa”, Bourneville did me just fine.

Three further points to make about it all:

a) it can be made with all the stuff I just have in the house. Cornflour, cocoa powder and sugar are all things that live in the cupboard. And then a little story about the milk: we now have a milkman, through MilkAndMore.co.uk who is broadly excellent and whom I would have no hesitation recommending. However going back to milk deliveries – and only every other day at that – has occasionally meant running out of milk. So I have got in the habit of having a handful of cartons of UHT milk in the back of the cupboard for emergencies. I actually don’t like UHT – it tastes funny to me. (My mother thinks that it’s the cream that tastes weird and that skimmed UHT milk is OK. I don’t agree) However, UHT milk is better than no milk at all in tea. But the other time to use UHT is if you are boiling it. So it makes no difference to use UHT in sauces, yoghurt, cocoa etc, and it is fine to use it in this recipe, making it a truly storecupboard recipe, for me at least.

b) it looks instantly variable and augmentable for other versions of the icecream. That Sicilian orange flavouring that Dan Lepard made me buy would zhuzh it up into Choc Orange; similarly a splodge of peppermint flavouring sends it to Choc Mint. Add cocoa nibs or coffee beans or chopped nuts for some crunch or marshmallows to make it into rocky road. Addition of a big spoon of espresso powder could switch it to mocha. Moving beyond chocolate, I wonder if you could get away with making this in other flavours entirely? You could use the instant coffee instead of the cocoa rather than in addition to, for a mocha, adding coffee beans again for crunch and even a spoon of ground coffee for mouth feel. As with the blancmange, you could infuse the simmering milk with any number of whole spices: vanilla beans, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon sticks, lemon peel… in combination or alone for a clear pure taste. How about a version with the oh-so-trendy, ouch-my-bank-balance matcha powder for green tea icecream? And so on!

c) it looked to me as if you could easily double the quantities and still have it fit neatly in our icecream maker.

d) serves 10? does it buggery. We rationed ourselves to a single scoop eaten slowly, rather than troughling our way through the whole pot at once. I think you could get 6 scoops tops out of that barely-a-pint recipe.

Mealplanning and cooking with leftovers

For the last three months or so, when I’ve been home all week, I’ve been much more rigorous about meal planning and cooking an evening meal. I start the week – before I go shopping – by writing out what will be the evening meal for both of us, then head to the supermarket. This has really saved me some money, cut down how often I shop and some weeks, when I start off thinking there’s loads leftover, has got the weekly shop down to £20. Not bad!

Some of the parameters for the mealplan for the week are: one and often two veggie nights – or at least meat free. When it’s just us, I don’t make much of an effort to make sure I am totally veggie, so might still use a meat stock, for example. Another is that evening meals contain at least 2 portions of veg to fit in with a general plan of 1x juice with breakfast, two fruits at lunch and voilà – 5 a day.

And for each week I try and make sure there’s at least one pair of cooking too much / cooking with leftovers the following day. An example is the 2×2 lasagne I blogged about a few years ago. ((years? really?? omg)) This week I shall be doing something a little like that, but with canneloni and a blue cheese sauce.

Other things I like to do are:

Roast chicken: one roast chicken will feed two of us at least three times, and then boiling up the bones for stock is a good way to take up space in the freezer get further tasty meals in future. Subsequent meals include: chicken pie with a simple crust and a sauce made from crème fraiche and mushrooms and chicken risotto using the stock as well

Bacon joint: Sainsbury’s has these rolls of smoked bacon as a joint that are particularly delicious and available in smaller sizes. The 750 gram joint will just about feed two twice if you are not piggy. It does rather annoy me that something sold in exactly 750 grams has cooking instructions based on multiples of 500 grams, so I always have to blink twice whilst doing the maths to work out the cooking time. Something like this in the oven is a good excuse to do jacket potatoes at the same time, so the first meal is usually bacon, baked potatoes and cauliflower cheese, and versions of the second meal have been chunky pea and ham soup and yer basic ham egg and chips.

Sausages: usually another excuse to do baked potatoes, supermarket sausages are usually sold in packets of 8, which is too many for two but not enough for four, so the leftover 2/3 sausages need substantial bulking out to turn into another meal. However, what I have been doing lately which is rather nice and reasonably healthy is a veg-ful pasta sauce where you fry an onion, celery and carrot until translucent, then add a tin of tomatoes and a glass of wine and boil furiously until the wine is pretty much reduced and glossy. Add in the sausages somewhere along the line and start boiling pasta towards the end, mix the lot together and there you go.

Pudding Club: canapés

From time to time, Pudding Club extends and there are six of us rather than four (adults) and so we have a three course meal instead of a two course meal. This time I was on starters as our hosts – brave souls – were making Baked Alaska for pudding. And, for entirely understandable reasons, not practising beforehand. Doubly brave!

So for my starters, having plenty of time, I made small amounts of four different canapés.

Firstly, Delia’s Bloody Mary Tomatoes – made pretty much as per the recipe. These were interesting, but didn’t really live up to the description on the front page. Perhaps I am just inured to vodka?

Secondly, there were some pâté-stuffed dates. That is a pretty simple concept really: a pack of sticky sweet Deglet Nour dates and a little tub of Brussels pâté. Slice open the dates, remove the stone and pack the void with a teaspoon of pâté. If there’s a way of making it pretty, I didn’t find it – they ended up looking pretty odd, but tasting pretty good.

The idea came from our recent trip to visit friends in France – they had been very impressed with dried apricots stuffed with foie gras. I don’t like apricots much, and don’t know where you can buy foie gras as an ingredient (and it’s getting harder to find it in restaurants, too) so I improvised.

Finally, two types of tartelet. The idea for this – the bases in particular – came from a recipe on the internet that I forgot to bookmark and so I can’t link to it, but I read and remembered the technique and improvised the oven temperatures and other finer details. You use a small tartlet tin – mine has 15 hollows – and you match a round biscuit cutter slightly bigger. Take a standard sliced loaf of bread – actually, thinner slices might be better – and cut off the crusts and roll the slices thin with a rolling pin. Cut out circles of bread. In a pan, melt a big knob of butter with a crushed garlic clove in it and maybe some spices for interest. I used a few cloves. Use a pastry brush to paint the melted butter thickly on both sides of the circles, place into the pan and weigh down with baking beads to bake blind. After a bit of experimentation, try a 180 deg C oven for about 15 mins – although keep an eye on them as they can burn quite quickly. If your canapé filling does not need cooking, keep them in to a deep golden colour; if you are cooking the canapés take them out before they get that far.

I made 18 canapés in two varieties, although two testers never actually left my kitchen. I made goats cheese, apple chutney and walnut for half; and pesto mozzarella for the others.

All turned out rather well, but the highlight of the evening was definitely the Baked Alaska which turned out sensationally!

PS I have written about canapés before when I made up a recipe for individual canapé Beef Wellingtons, which were rather nice.

Improvised individual cherry cheesecake

Improvised individual cherry cheesecake
Recipe Type: Dessert
Author: Alex Foster
Prep time: 2 hours
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 2 hours 10 mins
Serves: 2
Few ingredients, tasty, simple individual cherry cheesecake. Would work just as well with any frozen berries.
Ingredients
  • 4 Digestive biscuits
  • 30 grams butter
  • 100 grams cream cheese
  • juice and zest of half a lemon
  • tablespoon icing sugar
  • frozen cherries
  • kirsch
  • caster sugar
Instructions
  1. Crush the biscuits, melt the butter, combine, and press into the bottom of two wine glasses.
  2. Mix the cream cheese with the lemon juice and zest and add the icing sugar. Beat until smooth. Check the taste for sweetness and add more icing sugar if necessary. Spoon the mixture over the biscuit base and chill.
  3. Add a glug of kirsch to the frozen cherries in a saucepan and add a tablespoon or so of sugar. Boil them up until they are beginning to take on the consistency of jam. Allow to cool slightly then divide the mix between the two cheesecakes.
  4. Refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.

Dead simple recipe made up as I went along. Presented using a fancy new plugin that will apparently make the recipe appear hot to Google. I took a photo but it looked awful.

I made @danlepard’s Cinnamon buns

Cooking

I made these today, following Dan Lepard’s recipe in the Guardian.

The technique and the ingredients are all a little weird, but the resulting buns are really good. I have had to buy ryvita specially to make it, but it was worth it, even with that.

I don’t know if I didn’t roll the dough tightly enough, but an awful lot of the breadcrumb filling fell out when I started cutting it up.

I was also surprised that the cinnamon only goes in the breadcrumb filling and not the rest of the bun mix. But it still works just fine. I’m not massively keen on the cardamom flavour, but it would be dull without it.

The other thing I made today was at least a second outing for Waitrose’s Chicken Thighs

Cooking

Each time I make this, the potatoes don’t get cooked properly. I thought I could fix this this time by cutting the potatoes into much smaller pieces. That didn’t work, so next time I will try parboiling.

Hot Cross Buns / Hot AV Buns

For this year’s hot cross buns, I made them using Dan Lepard’s Spicy Stout Buns, which were very tasty.

I used the Kenwood, so it was slightly easier than the kneading by hand – at the mixing stage, bung the lot into the bowl with the dough hook, and knead it a bit, and then follow the 10 min – rest phases too. This whole recipe was on the large size for the Kenwood, but just about all fit in the bowl.

My attempt at Hot AV Buns.
But the cooking time wasn’t right for my oven. I knocked five minutes off the time and used the temp for fan ovens, and still it burned.

Gah! All that time making them and I ended up burning the buggers!

And, as per the joke doing the rounds on the internets, I made some of them into “AV Buns” instead of crossed buns. Piping flour and water is a right pain!

Here’s last year’s attempt – I just made a small batch then as I was dieting. Now that I’m thin (hem hem) I made a full batch that made 14 buns.

Only just preheating the oven for my hot cross buns. Have to say I think those came out rather well.

(PS another interesting looking recipe is this one on Bakery Bits, but like all their interesting recipes, it’s mainly there to sell you stuff only Bakery Bits sell…)

Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice

Pudding Club: another go at tarte bourguignonne

I made tarte bourguignonne for another group of friends.

This time I used 4 pears not 3; made jelly with the poaching wine and used that to glaze the tarte; and also made a vanilla mascarpone to go with it, by beating a 250 gram tub of mascarpone with the seeds from a vanilla pod, a splash of home made vanilla essence and a tablespoon of icing sugar. Delish!

Here’s the picture:

IMAG0414.jpg

Pudding Club: poached pear trifle

This is something I made ages ago but, it appears, neglected to write up.

I have poached pears in red wine a fair few times in the last twelve months, and half the time ended up throwing away the sweetened, spicy red wine poaching liquid. That seems such a waste, and so recently it occurred to me, as it did with the strawberry / rosé wine combo, to turn the liquid into a jelly.

Then that thought led to the thought of making trifle, using the pears, their poaching liquid as the jelly, homemade custard and whipped cream.

Heart attack waiting to happen!

So poach 4 peeled, whole pears in 200mls red wine, 200mls water, 200 grams sugar, and flavour with everything your spice rack can throw at it. I used 1 cinnamon stick, 3 cloves, 4 cardamom pods, a few slices of ginger root, a bay leaf. Boil the pears gently until you can easily run a toothpick through them – time will depend on how ripe they are. Once they are there, turn off the heat until cool then refrigerate overnight.

The following day, core and slice the pears into individual serving bowls. Soak gelatine leaves in cold water, strain and reserve the poaching mix, and bring it back to the boil. Add the gelatine to the poaching mix, stir well, and pour the jelly over the pears. Allow to set.

Make custard – Delia’s quantities were not quite enough for four portions, in my experience. Allow custard to set.

Shortly before serving, whip cream and add to top with sprinkles as preferred.

Can’t quite believe it, but I didn’t take any pictures of this!