I love recipe books, and have a relatively large collection. One I’ve owned for a while, but have cooked little from is Leon’s Naturally Fast Food. It’s a beautiful thing, lovely design (although will it seem very dated when I look back at it in 10 years time?) and some great recipes for making fast, fresh food.
This morning before I left for work I had a quick flick through the recipes and decided to make their South Indian Pepper Chicken. It’s a beautifully simple recipe, and pretty low fat, so it’s my kinda healthy too.
South Indian Pepper Chicken
A drizzle of olive oil (use the stuff from the spray bottle if you care, otherwise use about a teaspoonful)
About 500g skinless, boneless chicken thighs, diced
Maldon sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
4 garlic cloves chopped
about 1″ root ginger, chopped fine
1 large onion, cut in half, then sliced finely to give thin crescent shapes
a heaped tsp turmeric
2 tomatoes, roughly diced
Heat the oil in large frying pan, add the chicken pieces, then sprinkle on a good pinch of sea salt and LOTS of black pepper. Stir it about then add some more black pepper
Cook for a few minutes, till the chicken browns. Then tip it out of the pan into a bowl and set aside
Add the garlic, onion, ginger and turmeric to the pan and cook for a couple of minutes
Add the tomatoes and a good glug of water and stir together
Add the chicken back into the pan and cook with a lid on for about 10 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked. Take the lid off and reduce the sauce down a little if it’s all too wet still.
Serve with rice and kale. I had no rice in the flat, so had it with noodles instead and it was bloody lovely. This is enough to serve 2 or 3, depending how hungry you are, and what you’re serving it with.
Muffins are one of the easiest things to bake. Once you have a recipe, it is easily adaptable – just make sure you have roughly the same proportion of dry goods to liquid and you’ll be fine.
I don’t always manage to get my 5-a-day of fruit and veg and I know I’m not alone. So, these muffins will help you on your way. OK, they might not get you that far along the way, but they are healthier than chocolate muffin.
Tropical muffins
9oz plain flour
1oz porridge oats
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
1 egg
4oz soft brown sugar
3fl oz vegetable oil
6fl oz milk
8fl oz tinned crushed pineapple (without too much of the juice)
2fl oz pineapple juice (some of that juice squeezed from the pineapple in the tin)
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda and salt. Stir in the porridge oats. This will be the bowl everything ends up in, so make sure it’s big enough
In another bowl beat the egg and stir in the sugar, oil, milk, pineapple and juice
If the creamed coconut is solid, warm it up to loosen it enough to pour, and add to the eggy mix bowl
Pour all of the wet mixture into the dry and stir lightly just to combine. You don’t want any dry flour left in the mixture, but really it hardly needs stirring at all or the muffins will end up more solid than you’d like.
Fill muffin cups about 3/4 full.
Sprinkle generously with desiccated coconut.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until tops are lightly browned and spring back gently
I suspect you could substitute some of the milk in this recipe for malibu to make a proper grown up cocktail muffin. I think I may have to do a series of cocktail home-baked goods.
One of my colleagues is in his early 20s and is really just learning about cooking properly. A few weeks ago he was very proud of the chicken gumbo he had made. He was surprised how easy it was to make something so tasty.
Fast forward to this Monday, and I was at a bit of a loss as to what to cook for supper. All I knew I had in the fridge was a chorizo sausage. So, my colleague suggested chicken gumbo. Perfect!
The basic recipe which inspired this is on the bbc good food website here. If you haven’t checked out the recipes on bbc good food, you’ve missed out. Go on, have a browse – they have more pics than I usually do.
A top tip here: chop up everything else and put them in bowls (doubling things up that are being thrown in the pan together) before you cut up your chicken. That way, you just need to clean the knife and the board at the end.
Chicken Gumbo
4 – 5 chicken thighs, cut into chunks
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, smooshed up
1 green chilli, sliced finely
2 stalks of celery, chopped finely
1 TBsp plain flour
1 large tin/carton chopped tomatoes
a chicken stock cube
a mug of boiling water
1 courgette, cut into chunks
2 red peppers, cut into chunks
2 bay leaves
a couple of stalks of fresh thyme
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp paprika
about 100g chorizo, chopped into chunks
a couple of new potatoes, cut into small chunks
a few handfuls of spinach
Using a wee bit of oil, fry off the chicken in a large heavy bottomed frying pan
Remove the chicken, and let it rest in a bowl till you’re ready for it again
Add the celery and onion to the pan, and cook over a gentle heat till the onion is translucent. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for another couple of minutes
Add the flour to the veg, stir and cook for a minute or so.
Add the chopped tomatoes, chicken stock cube and boiling water and stir together
Put the chicken back in the pan, followed by all other ingredients, except for the spinach, and simmer with a lid on for about 20 minutes
Add the spinach and stir through – it won’t really need further cooking as the spinach will just wilt into the gumbo
EAT!
This is great the next day once the flavours have melded together. I had it on its own as there is plenty veg in there with the meat. However, if you want more carbs, it would be lovely with noodles or rice.
It’s a pretty flexible recipe – add peas, sweetcorn, even prawns or fish. And make it as spicy or plain as you want. But you knew that already.
Next year it’s Gumbo instead of pancakes for Shrove Tuesday!
Baking for colleagues is incredibly rewarding. Baking for colleagues and asking them to make a donation to charity is even more rewarding. And when the charity is the organisation we all work for, it feels like some kind of virtuous (although slightly insane) circle.
I wanted to make a chocolatey almondy cake… and when I came across a chocolatey, orangey almondy cake recipe I knew it was The One. I’d never tried a recipe where you boil the orange in water for half an hour and then smoosh it up in a food processor (or liquidiser in my case) and add the whole thing to the cake mixture. But I have now! And so can you, it makes for a deliciously moist and tasty cake.
The other brilliant thing about this recipe is that it is ridiculously simple – it doesn’t need any elbow grease, beating butter and sugar till fluffy. In fact it is like a carrot cake recipe in that it uses oil instead of butter. Try it and see – but make sure you have lots of friends who want to eat it, it’s a big beast of a cake!
Chocolate truffle icing on the orange almond chocolate cake
Orange almond and chocolate cake
Pre-heat oven to 180C / GM4
Prepare a 24cm deep (or springform) tin
2 oranges
150g dark chocolate
5 eggs
400g vanilla caster sugar
350g sunflower oil
125g ground almonds
25g cocoa powder
375g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3-4 TBsp grand marnier or cointreau
for the icing
350g dark chocolate
225ml double cream
Put the whole oranges in a pan and cover with water. Bring tot he boil and simmer for about 30 mins.
Whizz them to a pulp in a food processor or a liquidiser (if you go down the liquidiser route you may have to cut them up into chunks before you put them in the goblet)
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water
In a very large bowl (this is the bowl the cake batter will all end up in) beat together the eggs, sugar and the oil (I used a balloon whisk)
Gradually beat in the orange puree, then the melted chocolate
Sift the dry ingredients together (or whisk together with another balloon whisk) and then mix into the egg mixture
Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour 20 minutes (a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean)
Turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool, and spoon over the orange liqueur to soak in while it is cooling
The icing
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water
Remove from the heat and allow to cool briefly
Stir in the cream and keep stirring till smooth and glossy
Set aside to cool and firm up slightly then spread over the cake with a palette knife
Serve with creme fraiche if you have any, if not, just eat it. In small slices, with a fork. It’s a VERY rich cake. But deliciously tasty – and usually I don’t approve of orange and chocolate together but this is my exception to that rule.
Over a year ago I bought a silicone pan to make wee heart-shaped cakes, intending to make wee treats of love for Valentines Day.
But I left the cake pan in Edinburgh, while I was enjoying Valentines in the country. So that didn’t work.
This year I remembered to bring the cake pan to the country, but had over-indulged so much already over the weekend that there was no way I was going to make any chocolate cakes, however cute and heart shaped they might be.
But this weekend was different.
I had a whole list of things to achieve: long walk with the dogs; drink with his kids in Glasgow; a couple of sewing projects to finish; soup to make; a curry to make (and eat); a greenhouse to clean and set up for the spring seed-sowing; laundry to wash and hang out; candle lit baths to loll about in. And I intended to do some veg bed digging too, but that didn’t get done. All the other things did get completed though (ish). And while I was on a roll, achieving so much, I ended up achieving more too – I made the cutest heart shaped gingery dark chocolate cakes. And it so happens they are perfect with fresh pears, not even poached, just chopped up and put in a bowl with all their juicy loveliness, accompanied by a sweet wee chocolate heart of cakey wonderfulness.
So, this is what I did:
Wee ginger chocolate hearts (or morsels of love)
Pre-heat oven to GM 5 or 6, if you don’t have a silicone cake pan, prepare either a 23cm sandwich tin, or a loaf tin, or put a load of paper cupcake cases in a muffin tin.
4oz soft butter (at room temperature if you have a warm room, otherwise pop it in the microwave at a low power setting in 20second bursts till it’s squishy soft)
4oz light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
2 TBsp syrup from a jar of stem ginger
3oz SR flour
1oz cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 balls of ginger from a jar of stem ginger, chopped fine
Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy
Add the eggs and ginger syrup and beat again. It’ll probably curdle, but don’t worry too much about it
Sift in the flour, cocoa and BP and beat again
Now fold in the ginger bits
Spoon the batter into the cake moulds (or sandwich tin or paper cases, or whatever you are using)
Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cakes are firm to touch
Delicious warm (heat up for 30s in the microwave) with that blackcurrant icecream I first made a few months ago. Or as I said, just with fresh pears. Or on their own, just as a wee treat with a cup of coffee.
Wee chocolate heart cakes
I suspect that they would be mighty scrumptious with a cream cheese icing too.
Or replace the ginger nibs with some frozen raspberries, scrunched, or chopped up, and serve with a raspberry coulis.
I bought one of those value bags of onions the other week.
And I still seemed to have a huge bagful of onions in the kitchen this morning. What to do? Well the first obvious recipe was french onion soup. I have several recipes for french onion soup, but for some reason went for a new recipe: Nigel Slater’s Onion Soup with Madeira and Gruyere Toasts. The picture of it looks oozingly and unctiously dark and delicious. But mine wasn’t. He uses chicken stock instead of the traditional beef. I have no problem with this – I’ve often made onion soup with chicken stock. But I’ve no idea how he managed to get his soup so dark in colour, without a beef stock, as mine is light in colour, as you’d expect.
But, we didn’t have onion soup for lunch. And the dough for the baps remained in the bread machine till later in the afternoon.
And I got started on a better lunch solution: Cheese and Onion Tart. This was clearly a far more sensible lunch, as it made use of not only a whole load of onions, but also some leftover cream, leftover pastry and a lump of cheese from the fridge. I love a fridge-sweep to make something new, delicious and unexpected. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner?
Cheese and caramelised onion tart
Shortcrust pastry made with 4oz flour
a big glug of olive oil
a big slice of butter, about 25g
4 large onions, cut in half from end to end, and then thinly sliced into half moons
2 soupspoonfuls of muscovado sugar
1 egg, plus 2 extra yolks
about 200ml cream
about 50ml whole milk
2 soupspoonfuls of cream cheese
50g mature cheddar cheese
2 tsp dijon mustard
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
Preheat your oven to 200C or GM7. Butter a sponge sandwich tin (well, that’s what I used, a 23cm round tin with a loose bottom).
Roll out the pastry and line the tin with it. Place the tin on top of a baking sheet – it’ll make everything so much easier later on. Put back in the fridge for 20 minutes.
Prick the base with a fork, then cover the pastry with some baking paper and baking beans. Put in the hot oven for 12 minutes.
Remove the baking beans, turn the oven down to 180C / GM4 and return the pastry to the oven for 5 minutes.
While the pastry is in the oven (for the first time) put the oil, butter and onions in a heavy bottomed frying pan and heat on an oh so gentle heat for 25 minutes with the lid on. You might want to stir them from time to time, but not too often, as you need to keep the lid on to retain their liquid. After 25 minutes they should still be pale in colour, but have a certain sticky gloopiness about them.
Now remove the lid from the onions, stir in the sugar, and cook the onions for a further 10 – 15 mins, till nicely caramelised, and the liquid has all but evaporated.
Whisk the egg and the yolks together in a big bowl. Add the cream cheese, the cream and the milk and mix. Add the grated cheddar, and season with lots of freshly ground black pepper.
Spread the base of the pastry case with the dijon mustard.
Pick the thyme leaves off the stems and fold them through the onions, then spread on top of the mustard
Pour the cheesy, eggy, creamy mix over the top of the onions and carefully slide the whole thing into the oven.
Bake for about 35 minutes – the tart should still have a wee bit of a wibble wobble about it.
Serve with boiled new potatoes and a salad. It’s best at room temperature, or a wee bit warmer.
If you have a notion to make a tart mid-week, and you don’t get home till about 7pm then you really need to use bought pastry.
And if your rolling pin is in the country and you are in the city, then you need to use pre-rolled bought pastry.
So, I swallowed my pride and bought pre-rolled shortcrust pastry tonight. I think it may be a first. And now that my pride is well and truly swallowed, I can admit that it probably won’t be the last!
My notion was to make a rich chocolate tart. I’d been thinking of rich chocolate tart since before breakfast (I know, I know, this isn’t healthy behaviour) and then I went out to lunch with the lovely PAtothecity and she told me all about her fabulous Hotel Chocolat experience yesterday evening, including chilli hot chocolate. She asked how to make chilli hot choc, and I have a sneaky feeling I read a recipe for it just the other day, but have NO IDEA where, probably somewhere on this world wide web. Anyway, I suggested she split a chilli in half longways, de-seeded it and then popped the chilli in a pan with the milk. Warm it up and steep the chilli milk for a few minutes (depending on desired heat). Then remove the chillis, and add the chocolate, and warm to the right temperature for your hot choc.
With this in mind, I decided my chocolate tart would be a chilli chocolate tart. A RICH chilli chocolate tart. A rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes.
Rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes
Rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes
Preheat oven to 180C or Gas Mark 4. Grease a 23cm/9″ tart tin.
A packet of ready rolled short crust pastry, or if you have time, make your own pastry
300ml double cream
a couple of fresh red chillis
2 tsp caster sugar
50g unsalted butter
200g dark chocolate
a big glug of full fat milk
some maldon sea salt
Line the prepared tin with your rolled out pastry. Cover the pastry with a large piece of baking paper and fill the paper with dry chick peas, or baking beans* or rice, or whatever you can find in a packet or jar to weigh down the pastry.
Bake for 10-15 minutes
Take the pastry out of the oven and remove the paper and the baking beans
Return the pastry to the oven and bake for another 15 minutes, till golden brown
While it’s in the oven you can get going on the rich chocolatey-ness
Cut the chillis in half longways, and de-seed. Put them in a saucepan with the cream and warm up to not-quite-boiling
Leave to steep for a wee minute or two, and then remove the chillies (and throw them away)
Add the sugar and a pinch of salt to the cream and heat back up till it boils. Remove from the heat immediately, and add the butter and chocolate (broken into chunks) to the pan
Beat with a wooden spoon till all melted and glossy and nummy
Put aside for a wee minute or ten (depending on how cold your kitchen is – mine is freezing, so I just left it for a couple of minutes and it had cooled down quite a bit) and then add a glug or two of milk (about what you’d add to a mug of coffee.
Keep beating till it comes all glossy again
Now, if your pastry shell has just come out of the oven you’ll need it to cool a wee bit before you go any further
Once both shell and chocolatey goodness are cool-ish pour the choc mixture into the shell. Cool at room temperature, and then sprinkle with sea salt flakes
* Please do NOT use baked beans. It will get messy and will taste disgusting
If you have a hot kitchen, or if you like really cold things, cool it further down in the fridge. But personally, I’d serve it at room temperature, with a scoop of creme fraiche.
Now, all I have to do is work out how to get it to the office tomorrow morning.
And, given that St Valentine’s Day is next week, this might be an appropriate recipe for wooing your loved one. It would certainly work for me, but then I’m particularly susceptible to that chocolatey, salty, hot chilli combo of flavours. And not too sweet. All I need to know now is what wine to serve with it, as I suspect that it won’t work with fizz. Better ask Convivium Wine.
I owe some colleagues some home baking. I’d promised one muffins and another doesn’t eat sugar, so it was clearly time to make another batch of savoury muffins. It would have been the Parmesan and Courgette Muffins again, if Tesco’s had any courgettes. But at 7pm I wasn’t about to go traipsing round town hunting down a courgette, so beetroots became a worthy substitute.
Now, if only I’d consulted with the facebook fairies before I went shopping – the recipe could have been enhanced with feta cheese, goats’ milk, smoked salmon and creme fraiche. But there’s always next time.
Pink savoury mufflets
Savoury beetroot mufflets (a mufflet being a mini muffin)
8oz plain flour
1tsp baking powder
4 small beetroot, cooked and coarsely grated
2oz parmesan, finely grated
2oz mature cheddar, finely grated
200ml milk
about 1/3 tub of plain yoghurt
1 egg, beaten
75ml olive oil
about 3 -4 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
Line a muffin pan with paper muffin cases.
Mix together flour and baking powder in a big bowl (everything else will be poured in here eventually)
Add beetroot and cheese and mix – try to get rid of the claggy lumps of beetroot
In a separate bowl, mix the oil, milk, yoghurt and egg together. Add the herbs
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and mix quickly together. Don’t over-mix, just bring everything together so the pink colour suffuses the whole mixture and it has no lumps of flour. The mixture needs to be quite soft and wet, but not runny
Spoon a large soup spoonful of mixture into each muffin case
Bake for 20 minutes (or until golden) in a medium hot oven (Gas Mark 5)
OK – they are out of the oven now. They are more like mufflets than muffins, slightly on the wee size, and not quite enough oomph in the flavour. So this is what I would do differently next time:
Use baking powder that wasn’t past its best
Use the correct size tin for the muffin cases
Swap the milk and yoghurt for goats milk and yoghurt (thanks cousin!)
Add some salt and pepper
Use more sage or some nutmeg, or possibly orange zest, or dill, that would work
Add some finely chopped scallions
Cut some of the milk by volume, as the mixture was a bit too sloppy
Go on, have a go yourself – they are too easy.
And yes, they would be just delicious with a dollop of creme fraiche and some smoked salmon on top. Thanks Barry Bryson.
Tollhouse Cookies are a memory from my childhood. I had a recipe written in my childish hand-writing, which if memory serves me correctly had the list of ingredients but no instructions. I made them so often I didn’t need instructions and so I knew that they were the most delicious of cookies.
I’m pretty sure the recipe came from my Aunt Joyce, the Queen of Baking in my world. And I’m also fairly certain that the recipe is in my mother’s recipe book. So, if I really wanted I could no doubt get back the original, and make them exactly as they were in those eternally sunny summers back in the mid 70s. But I also recall that they had half lard, half butter (or even marg) … and I know that using half lard can make pastry beautifully short, but I don’t think I want to use lard in my biscuits any more. So, if I’m going to play about with the recipe anyway, I may as well just find a new one, and adapt from there.
So, this weekend I did some internet research, so you don’t have to. Although if you really want to find out more, you can do worse than starting out here on my friend wikipedia.
Now, a bit of background for you. One of the reasons I feel quite so strongly about Tollhouse Cookies might be because my father’s office was in the original Tollhouse in our town. I know it’s purely circumstantial, and literally hundreds of towns must have their own historical tollhouses, so clearly my recipe was no more authentic than any other. But, my recipe had choc chips AND nuts and I am not about to mess with my memory by either making a Tollhouse Cookie with no nuts, or re-naming the biscuits of my childhood Choc Chip n Nut Cookies.
But anyway, the research revealed a few things about 21st century tollhouse cookies: the butter should be melted and the sugar needs to be a mixture of brown/muscovado and caster – this will give a more caramelly taste and chewy texture, which works for me. And the cookies should be left on their baking sheet once nearly cooked so they complete the cooking out of the oven. No-one seemed to want to put nuts in them though, so feel free to omit them if you want. But then please just call them choc chip cookies.
Tollhouse cookies
Preheat oven to 170C or Gas Mark 3. Grease at least two baking sheets. Or I guess you could line them with baking parchment instead.
170g unsalted butter
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1/2 tsp salt
200g dark brown or muscovado sugar
100g light brown sugar (or caster)
1 TBSp vanilla extract
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
200g dark chocolate, chopped into wee chips
125g mixed nuts, chopped into wee chips. I’ve not tried it, but you could probably use salted nuts if you’re a fan of the sugar-salt-choc thing.
Melt the butter in a big bowl (this is the bowl that the whole mixture is going to end up in so make it big enough). I use a microwave to melt the butter, but of course you could melt it in a pan and then tip it into the bowl.
Sift the flour, bicarb and salt together in a different bowl – this is really just to mix it together, as most flour these days doesn’t need sifting – but it’s an old habit with me, so I like to sift it all
Add the sugars to the melted butter and beat with an electric beater (or a wooden spoon if you want to work off those bingo wings) until you have a light fluffy mixture
Now add the vanilla essence and the eggs and beat some more
Mix in the flour and stuff with a wooden spoon, then mix through the nuts and chocolate chips
Depending how warm your kitchen is, you’ll either have a soft-ish batter, or a much stiffer dough… my kitchen was baltic this weekend, so the butter cooled down quickly and I had quite a stiff dough
Now, how big do you want your cookies? I use about a soup-spoonful of mixture in a big lump, and they spread out to around 3-4 inches diameter. But you might want to make ENORMOUS cookies like those ones you get at train stations… you’d probably need about 4 TBsps of cookie mixture for that size.
Remember to leave gaps between each dollop of mixture – the larger the dollop the bigger the gap required. For the enormous ones you’ll need at least 3″ I’d say.
Bake for about 16 minutes, but this will depend on which shelf they are on in your oven, how hot the oven actually is and what size you’ve made your cookies. Ideally you need to take them out when they are golden around the edges, but not toasted in the middle. Leave them on the baking tray to cool down, they will continue to cook. Then remove them to a cooling tray. This will give you a slightly chewy cookie, if you prefer them crisper, just keep them in the oven a wee bit longer, till they are uniformly coloured.
Once they are cool, transfer them into two separate airtight containers. Keep one lot at home, and take the rest to your colleagues, or to someone you love (not mutually exclusive).
There! How easy was that? And according to my colleagues, they’re a winner.
But before you run off to bake cookies, a top tip for you. Some of you will know this already, but if you’re not a baker you might not. Don’t keep opening the oven door to check your cookies, and when you do open the door, be sure to shut it gently afterwards, as slamming it shut will blow in cold air, and mess with the cooking. This is even more important when you’re baking cakes, or anything you expect to rise. If you slam the door, it’s like slamming a big weight onto your delicate cake.
Shewolfinthevalley 