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Tattie scones

13 Mar

 

Tattie scones in the pan

So, as I mentioned, we were expecting G’s kids for supper on Friday evening.  On Friday they contated G to say that supper would be too late for their kids so they’d come for lunch instead on Saturday.  What is it with them that they think they can just dictate when they will come?  I suspect it’s all tied up with the fact he left them when they were relatively young; and they think they have rights over him, and that he owes them in some way. And from the other side, he does feel guilty and wants to develop a better relationship with them.  Ah well.  I prefer entertaining over lunch anyway, espeically when bairns are involved.

 

Anyway, I made a typical Wolffe-lunch with soup for starters, and then followed by a table groaning with tasty salady things: the beetroot and goats cheese tart, beetroot and blood orange salad, egg mayonnaise with capers, spicy prawn marie rose, green salad, teeny tomatoes.. and a cheese board with plumbrillo and quince jelly.  All deliciously tasty, although perhaps we needed another carbohydrate with the main dishes.

Anyway, as a result of the cancellation, we had a large pot of potatoes, peeled and ready to boil. I boiled them up yesterday and we had some of them mashed with some brown stew and champed neeps and carrots. The remainder were destined for tattie scones.

Tattie Scones

500g mashed potatoes

125g plain flour

2 TBsp olive oil

Method

  1. Sift the mashed potatoes, or put them through a ricer.  If you’re working with freshly mashed potatoes, you probably won’t need to do this.
  2. If the potatoes are leftovers, and cold, then chuck them in a microwave for about a minute to warm them up again – this will make them much easier to work with
  3. Add the flour and olive oil into the bowl and bring together – start with a spoon, but then work with your hands. It should create a slightly sticky soft and pliable dough.
  4. Take a chunk of the dough and roll it out to slightly less than 5mm thick, in a big circle. Cut the circle into quarters, and prick the quarters all over.
  5. Pop the 4 quarters into a dry non-stick fry pan over a medium heat and cook on either side till they have the distinctive brown blotches all over them. You’ll need a fish slice at this stage, or it will end in tears.
  6. Place on a  wire rack to cool.
  7. Repeat the rolling, cutting, pricking, cooking process with all the mixture.

This is a slightly time consuming recipe, once it gets to the rolling and cooking stage. Apart from that it is easiness itself.  And so satisfying to make your own tattie scones.

This made 4 (or was it 5?) rounds of tattie scones – plenty for tea for you and half a dozen guests.  If you have biscuits too.  I never did put up that lemon kisses recipe did I?

 

Slather butter all over and eat.

 

 

I’m half way through making a scumptious other thing now – with yeast.  I can’t say any more about it as it’s this months daring kitchen challenge, and I can’t reveal it till the end of the month.  It’s looking good so far though.

And this evening I’m planning on making my first Jamie Oliver 30 minute meal – a salmon dish. I’m omitting the pudding, so it surely has to be possible? We’ll see.

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Lemons, beetroot and cheese

13 Feb

Some of my favourite flavours, and such is the stuff of the perfect Valentine’s feast.

I call it a feast, but actually it’s a series of feasts really.

Yesterday (Saturday) we indulged in some exquisite stilton from Mellis the cheesemonger (a special trip into the west end of Glasgow specifically to buy Valentines cheese!). We had it with freshly baked rolls, sliced relatively thinly like a wee loaf.

For lunch today I made a warm beetroot and goats cheese tart.  And later we’ll be having more beetroot, lightly pickled in a sweet vinegar, with salmon and fresh linguine.

Afterwards we’ll have vanilla panna cotta, which looks delicious, but the coffee gelee on top seems to be liquid coffee, and not a gelee at all.  And for real afters there’ll be a cheeseboard.  Yum.

Lemons.  Where do the lemons come into all of this?

I made a batch of Lemon Kisses – in an assortment of heart, flower and helicopter shapes.  The helicopters will of course be the most popular.  And, I prefer biscuits on their own, not squidged together with cream or icing, or whatever. But the recipe calls for squidging them together with Lemon Curd, so I’ve just made a batch of Lemon Curd, one of my favourtie things to make, and absolute favourite flavours.  I love that sharp lemoniness.  I must experiment with lime and orange curds in the coming months.  Blood oranges are in season right now (and I have three in the fruit bowl ) – I suspect they would make a pretty spectacular curd. Edited to add that no, the blood oranges made the most disgusting curd – far too sweet, and an off-putting fleshy colour. I will not be trying this again, if only because I love lemon curd, and why waste time trying to tweak something else to make it almost as good as the thing that you love? And blood oranges make great upside down cake. 

Large jar of lemon curd – store in fridge

Lemon curd

Makes one relatively small jar

60g unsalted butter
130g caster sugar
Zest and juice of 1½ large unwaxed lemons
2 large eggs, beaten

  1. Chop the butter into a heavy-based saucepan.
  2. Add the sugar, lemon juice and zest
  3. Warm over a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves
  4. Pour the beaten eggs into the pan, stirring rapidly as you pour
  5. Keep stirring over a low heat until the mixture thickens.  This will take 5-10 minutes.
  6. Once it is thickened, pour into a sterilised jar.  DO NOT allow it to boil as it will curdle.
  7. Once cool, seal the jar and keep in the fridge.
  8. Use within 4 weeks.

Delicious on hot buttered toast, stirred into yoghurt, sandwiching biscuits or sponge cakes.

Beetroot and goats cheese jalousie

  • 1 1/2 medium beetroot, cooked
  • a few slices of goats cheese
  • 2 Tbs yoghurt / creme fraiche
  • 3 tsp grated horseradish
  • 1pkt all butter puff pastry

Grease a baking tray. 

  1. Cut a third of the pastry and roll out into an oblong.  Cook in a GM 7 oven for 10 minutes.
  2. Grate the beetroot and mix with the yoghurt or creme fraiche and horseradish. Season
  3. Cut into the pastry base, squishing down the pastry in the middle, creating a ‘wall’ round the edge and an oblong hole in the middle.
  4. Place the beetroot mixture into the hole in the pastry
  5. Put slices of goats cheese on top
  6. Roll the remainder of the pastry into a larger oblong.  Cut slashes into this pastry, to create diagonals on the pastry lid
  7. Brush the edges of the pastry base with beaten egg
  8. Carefully place the pastry lid over the top of the tart (do this by carefully rolling the whole lid round the rolling pin and then unrolling it back on top of the tart base)
  9. Brush the pastry lid with egg wash
  10. Bake in the hot oven for about 20 minutes, or until the pastry is risen and cooked
  11. Eat while warm, served with a watercress salad

The lemon kisses recipe will follow.  Eventually

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more recipes, just click on the recipe link, and you’ll find all manner of interesting things to cook and eat.

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Winter salad

5 Jan

After Christmas, I’d been craving vegetables, and particularly fresh salad-type vegetables.

I was also determined not to do more shopping so did a search in the fridge and the cupboards to see what could be rustled up.  I had a couple of little gem lettuces, but no other real salad veg. But I also had some vac packed beetroot and some pears.  I could see something tasty coming together…

Winter salad

This serves two, and is plenty as a starter, or a light snack with some crusty bread or oatcakes, or part of a legendary Wolffe Lunch.

Enough lettuce for 2 people – I used a whole little gem, but you could just as easily use part of a bag of mixed leaves. Watercress or spinach would be nice

1 beetroot, cut into small cubes – use fresh if you have one, if not those vac packed beetroot are fine. I HATE pickled beetroot though – why smother that deep earthy flavour with all that sharp vinegariness?

1 pear, peeled, cored and cut into equally small cubes

Some crumbled blue cheese – I used stilton, predictably, it being Christmas and there being leftovers in the fridge.  I’ve got some Bleu D’Auvergne which will be tried next

A small handful of walnuts, toasted to bring out the real walnuttiness of the flavour, and extra crunch

Put all of the above in a decent-sized bowl, big enough that you’ll be able to mix them all up once you’ve dressed it.

Now make the dressing.  You can, of course use your own favourite dressing, but these are the flavours that are doing it for me right now:

A good glug of olive oil

A sploosh of vinegar – I’ve been using a combination of a wee bit of balsamic, with a healthy slug of homemade elderflower vinegar (made with elderflowers and white wine vinegar).

A big teaspoon of dijon mustard

An equally big teaspoon or more of runny Scottishflower honey

Put all the dressing ingredients in a small bowl with a twist of freshly ground black pepper and give it a good beating with a teaspoon, or perhaps more conventionally a fork.

Pour the dressing over the salad and lightly mix everything together.

I’m tempted to swap the cheese out for some smoked trout which was pressed into The Captain’s hands on the street in Gatehouse on Boxing Day. Another story.

 

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2010 delights

31 Dec

It’s Hogmanay, and no doubt later on I’ll be making something delish to toast the old year out and the new year in.  But as yet I’m not decided what I’ll cook up.  Something featuring meat from our awesome butcher I imagine.

But for the moment, it seems right to include some of the triumphs of 2010, so they’re not lost forever.

First up, Plumbrillo. We have a couple of damson trees on the edge of our garden.  Well, slightly down our lane and next to the farmer’s field (which now has sheep in it again, which is a sign that there’ll be lambs again before we know it).

So, this year there was a bumper crop of damsons. And being only a part-time country girl, I needed to find things to do with damsons quickly, before I hot-footed it back to the city for the working week. Some inevitably went into a jar with brandy, some made apple and plum jam. Some made the liquor for plum jelly, but was abandoned in the fridge for too long before it was used to make jelly, so had to be chucked.

But the absolute favourite plummy condiment was Plumbrillo, a membrillo like concoction to have with cheese.  It’s easy to make, and I’m not sure I ever want to live without a jar of this stuff in my cupboard – it also makes perfect Christmas gifts, with or without a chunk of cheese.

The recipe is originally from BBC Good Food magazine, October 2008.  The magazine was a present from Aunt Joyce, in a bundle of cooking and gardening mags she had finished.  I must ask if she ever made the Plumbrillo.

Plumbrillo

Makes about 7 x 100ml pots.

2kg / 4lb 8oz black or red plums (or damsons)

1kg bag jam sugar (with added pectin)

  1. Stone and quarter the plums (if you can, I found it really tiresome to do this, so ended up leaving half of them with stones in). Put into a preserving pan and add 500ml cold water.  Bring to boil.
  2. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes until completely cooked down, pulpy and dark, dark reddish plummy purple.
  3. Sieve the fruit and juice through a nylon sieve back into the pan – make sure you get every bit of the pulp out of the mix that you can, this is what makes the plumbrillo.
  4. Stir in the sugar, then stir over a low heat until dissolved.  Now turn up the heat and bubble for about 25 mins or until you have a thick, dark and fruity puree. Keep stirring so that the bottom doesn’t catch. It’s ready when the spoon leaves a trail along the bottom of the pan for a split second before the paste floods back into the gap.
  5. Pot the mix into small jars (use a funnel so you make minimal mess), seal, then leave to set.

Will keep for up to 6 months. My guess is that it might keep a year, otherwise what will I do without it during those summer picnicking months?

I’ll put up my Beetroot and Goats Cheese Tart later.  And perhaps even my Chicken Lasagne.  But for now, it’s back to the home furnishings – curtains and cushion covers to make before the year is out.

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Lentil soup

30 Dec

Today is a lentil soup day. It will also be an eating out day, so all the more reason to have a nice warming, hale and hearty lentil soup for lunch.

I’d bought a couple of ham ribs before Christmas, and they’ve been languishing in the fridge, waiting to be used. I thought I had lots of carrots, but in the end, only one, large, but going soft at the end.

So, the soup had 3 small onions, chopped small, one carrot, a chunk of turnip and 3 parsnips in chunks, all sweated in a smear of olive oil.

A cup or so of lentils were added, along with 2 bay leaves, and the last of a jar of curry powder (Steenbergs organic, and not very strong to start with, so considerably weaker now at the end of the jar). Then I chucked in the ham ribs.

I filled up with water, from the kettle, and let it bubble away for an hour or so.

Now it’s smelling pretty good, but I think will need more flavour, so I may need to add a stock cube, and some more herbs/spices.

We have a loaf of wholemeal, made in the new bread machine overnight. The new machine seems to need more liquid in a loaf than the recipes suggest – the first few loaves came out loking very rustic, but clearly too dry a dough, so I’m experimenting, adding a wee bit more with each loaf and we’ll get there.

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