Mock Mash

A couple of Wednesdays ago I needed some quick comfort food to perk me up after a long day at the coal face and I elected to cook a variation on the traditional sausage and mash dish that we all know and love. The reason for this variation was that I had four sage-flavoured vegetarian sausages that needed eating.

My spirits were lifted before I started cooking the meal by the arrival in the post of Demon Records' excellent reissue of Elvis Costello's 1979 album "Armed Forces". The original album is good enough on its own with tracks like "Accidents Will Happen" " Green Shirt" "Party Girl" and "Oliver's Army" but it is made even better by the bonus tracks including essential b-sides such as "Clean Money" and "Tiny Steps". Needless to say it went straight on the CD player while I cooked.

I first peeled and thinly sliced two white potatoes, which I steamed whilst I cooked the sausages in gravy. A steamer has the advantage over a traditional pan to boil vegetables on the hob as once the water is up to temperature the vegetables you cook get done more quickly than those that are boiled.

While the potatoes were steaming I peeled and then cut an onion in half lengthways. Next I cut into long thin slices and fried it in my Le Creseut dish in a small amount of olive oil with some white pepper until the onions turned a little translucent. When this occurred I knew it was time to add the sausages and I cooked them on a medium heat until the started to turn a dark brown. Once they had changed colour in this way I made half a pint of gravy using a vegetable stock cube and half a tablespoon full of plain flour. I was able to manage the risk of getting lumpy gravy by adding boiling water to the stock and flour a little at a time and stirring it gradually so as to get a thick gravy.

After adding the gravy to the onion and sausages I let them stew on the hob for around ten minutes so as the sausages and onion absorbed a reasonable amount of the gravy. Meanwhile the potatoes were soft enough to be mashed; the trick with getting good mashed potato in my opinion is to use no milk and instead mash the potatoes with two ounces of margarine. In this way you get mashed potato that is not too sloppy and also very rich and tasteful.

The rich gravy and mash combined with the substantial sausages made this some good quality comfort food to put me in the right frame of mind for the next working day.

The new ones are the best: a classic dish is given a new twist with the vegetarian sausages.

Treatloaf

Part two of Saturday's baking programme was to make a loaf to take to the barbecue that evening. The loaf I was to make turned out to be an orange and raisin loaf as the raisins in my cupboard needed eating more than the sultanas did. The key difference between the loaf and the cake in the previous entry on this blog is that the loaf uses slightly more drier ingredients and does not use any eggs.

I greased a loaf tin that was ten centimetres wide, sixteen long and around seven deep. Again the reason for the extensive greasing was to ensure that the loaf came out cleanly when cooked.

I first mixed eight ounces of flour with one ounce of margarine and then six ounces of raisins and four ounces of caster sugar into a bowl. The effect was to create a very dry mixture that looked colourful talcum powder. I added some further colour to the proceedings by grating an ounce of orange rind into the bowl.

I set the bowl to one side and in a measuring jug I squeezed the juice of half an orange and added enough milk to make the cocktail up to quarter of a pint. I added some much needed dampness to the to the mixture in the bowl by then adding the orange juice and milk and not stopping stirring it until all the dry ingredients had absorbed it. Once I had done this the mixture was ready and I poured it into the cake tin and cooked it for one hour on 170 degrees (180 if you don't have a fan oven). Again I used the skewer trick to be sure it was ready when I took it out of the oven.

The use of fresh orange was the key to this loaf as I find raisins a bit bland on their own when used in baking. Here the raisins provide enough texture while the oranges gave a tropical flavour to the loaf. Certainly the guests at the evening's barbecue must have agreed in some way as most of the loaf was consumed.

Glowing loaf- the loaf fresh out of the oven.

Cake Bush

Yesterday I was in preparation mode as after being on hand at a local pub on the Friday night to celebrate the birthday of one of my oldest friends I decided to cook a cake and a loaf for two other friends who were having a belated birthday celebration at a barbecue that evening.

I chose Kate Bush's super 1989 effort "The Sensual World" to listen to while I prepared the cakes. The album's strengths lie in the atmospheric use of uillean pipes on many of the songs, David Gilmour guesting on guitar on some tracks and above all some consistently top notch song writing by Kate. The song "The Fog" made the album an appropriate selection also as I had spent most of the week driving to work in fog and latterly walking in it with my dog that morning.

The first cake I made was a Madeira Cake. I started by greasing with margarine a twenty centimetre wide cake tin that was around five centimetres deep. I cannot overstate the importance of greasing a cake tin thoroughly so as to stop the cake sticking in it after it has been cooked.

I broke three eggs, after first getting them to room temperature, and whisked them together in a bowl. Next in a separate bowl I creamed together five ounces of margarine and five ounces of caster sugar. I made sure that the ingredients were mixed together by mixing them so thoroughly that very few of the grains of sugar were left loose in the bowl.

After the margarine and sugar were mixed together I added the beaten eggs and two ounces of self-raising floor into the bowl and mixed the ingredients together until there was no loose egg yolk or flour showing in the bowl.

Some variations on this recipe use lemon essence in the cake mixture but I prefer the real thing and with this in mind I squeezed the juice of half a lemon into the mixture and then added the remaining flour to it which I folded into the mixture leaving it with the consistency of a thick paste.

I added the mixture to the cake tin and then cooked it on170 degrees (180 for non-fan ovens) for one hour. I knew the cake was ready when I took it out of the oven, pierced it with a skewer and the skewer came out clean.

I took the cake to the barbecue that night where it was able to compliment the excellent Spanish Food and delicious barbecue prepared by my friends. The light sponge and lemon certainly in my mind helped provide good support to the tasty pork belly, flavoursome chorizo and the sausages that I consumed.

The next instalment of this blog will cover the orange and sultana loaf so watch this space...

Golden Brown: fresh out of the oven.

There was not much of the cake or the loaf left by the end of the barbecue- a good sign :-)