Fifty shades of the colour purple

In preparation for a sober night on the town in the lingering snow of the last Saturday in January I made a Beetroot Risotto. It's fair to say that Beetroot is a vegetable more often used as a side dish to a main course rather than being the central of it.

With the Moody Blues' excellent mellotron drenched 1970 offering "A Question of Balance" on the CD player I first diced two red onions, half a ginger root and three cloves of garlic. Next I took five medium sized beetroots, topped and tailed them and then cut them into cubes. I saved one the beetroots for later and fried the rest on a low light on the hob in my Le Cresceut dish with some olive oil. When the beetroot began to soften I added the garlic, ginger and onions as well as around half a tablespoon of white pepper. There was enough juice generated by the beetroot to allow the ingredients in the dish to cook without them drying.

While the contents of the Le Cresceut cooked steadily on the hob I boiled eight ounces of long grain rice in a pan with the spare pieces of beetroot. I used enough water to cover the rice and beetroot and once the rice began to show signs of boiling dry I added it to the Le Cresceut dish. The rice by this time had turned a pale orange colour.

In total I cooked the rice for around twenty minutes on a high heat in the pan before adding it to the Le Cresceut dish and in total I cooked the contents of the Le Cresceut dish for around forty minutes always making sure to add a little water if there was a danger of the dish drying up.

I poked the vegetables and the rice with a fork to be sure they were cooked and then served the food. The beetroot itself had a very earthy taste which was prevented from being too bland by the sharpness of the ginger and garlic while the rice added enough body to the meal to make it worthwhile as a stand alone main course.

At the end of cooking and ready to serve. 

The risotto glowing on a plate

The mean street posset

The pack of spices that a friend of mine gave me as a present for my birthday has featured a lot in my cooking over the last year. The main use of the spices has been in savoury main courses and soups so for a change on the first Sunday in January I decided to use some of the spices in a sweet dish that could be eaten as a pudding.

The friend who gave me the spices now lives in the Manchester Area so the appropriate record for the preparation of the dish was the Smiths' final album Strangeways Here We Come a record that is equally as good as its predecessor the much more well-known the Queen is Dead.

The dish to be made was Posset shortbread. I first mixed together together around a hundred grams of margarine with one hundred and fifty grams of caster sugar until the margarine took an almost hairy appearance due to the sugar being mixed well into it.

The next step was to add one hundred and twenty grams of plain flour, some posset shortbread spices, to the margarine and sugar which I then stirred thoroughly into the margarine and sugar. I knew I had stirred the spices and flour properly into the margarine and sugar as it created a dough that was very pliable as well as being smooth to the touch and shiny to look at.

I spread some plain flour onto my work surface and put the dough on top of it. I then rolled out the dough with a rolling pin, after first putting some plain flour on the pin, to stop the dough sticking to it. I rolled the dough out to form a large circle and then cut it into pieces that were about five centimetres across.

I put the pieces on a greased baking tray and cooked them in the oven for fifteen minutes at one hundred and seventy degrees (one hundred and eighty degrees for non-fan ovens). I knew the shortbread was done because its edges had become brown and when I put a meat skewer through it came out clean.

While the shortbread was cooling down on a wire rack I made my own version of lemon posset by filling a milk pan three quarters of the way to the top with plain Greek Yoghurt and the juice from two lemons. I heated the mixture on the hob until it was warmed through and then served it in a bowl into which I dipped the shortbread when it was time to eat it. I find that some recipes use double cream instead of Greek Yoghurt but the Greek has the advantage in that it is healthier for you than double cream and prevents the dish from being too rich for its own good.

The results of the cooking produced shortbread with a sweet taste, as you would expect with shortbread, that was offset against the strong almost aniseed like taste of the spices. The lemon posset however provided a refreshing contrast to the spices and took the edge off them.

The Lemon Posset cooking on the hob. A healthier option without the cream.

The shortbread cooling on a wire rack after it had been cooked. 

Shortbread dipped in posset to stop the spices being too overpowering. 

Pizza payday

The father of a very good friend of mine has a rare talent for making his own pizzas from scratch. He reckons when he retires he'll sell the recipe and make some money out of it. Having sampled one of his pizzas over the Christmas Holiday I could readily agree with the reasoning behind his tasty pension plan.

With these quality pizzas to live up to I decided to have a got my own homemade pizza during the damp early days of January. As I began to make the dough the sounds of a much maligned act found their way onto my CD player in the shape of Jethro Tull's 1974 album Warchild. Often dismissed by those not in the know as a pompous prog rock act listened to only by sad anoraks and country yokels  the subject matter of the band's songs which cover such topics as the pitfalls of celebrity and environmental concerns are as relevant today as they were when originally released in the seventies. Plus the band boasts one of the best guitarists in rock who has almost as many memorable riffs at his disposal as Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi or the Stones' Keith Richards.

To make the dough I put eight ounces of strong white bread flour into a mixing bowl with one sachet of yeast, two tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of warm water, three tablespoons of olive oil and a beaten egg. I then used a metal table spoon to mix these ingredients together until I had a soft, slightly damp dough. In order to make it dry enough to roll out I added some extra flour which I kneaded into the dough and then exercised my limited upper body strength to punch the air from the dough and make it pliable enough to roll out.

I rolled the dough out after first having left on the window sill of the warmest place in the house to rise for an hour. The dough was rolled out until it was a twenty-five centimetres wide circle and to stop the topping of the pizza falling off when cooking it I made a centimetre high lip around the outer circumference of the dough. I put the dough on a greased baking tray and left it to one side as it was time to make the topping.

In a wide frying pan I lightly fried one diced red pepper, five finely sliced cloves of garlic, two carefully sliced large red onions and a teaspoon of oregano. Once the onions began to turn translucent and the pepper began to soften I added a can of tinned tomatoes and a half-sized can of tomato puree and let the contents of the pan cook for another five minutes. After cooking for the five minute period I found I had a rich topping which I poured into the pizza base and spread evenly over it. I then added thirteen stoneless black olives to the topping and arranged them in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

I cooked the pizza for fifteen minutes in the oven at 210 degrees (more like 218 degrees if you don't have a fan oven) and then turned down the oven to 165 degrees (175 degrees for non-fan ovens) and cooked it for another fifteen minutes. I knew the pizza was ready as the edges of the dough had begun to turn a deep chestnut brown.

For a first effort I was reasonably pleased with the pizza as the dough provided plenty of protein and the oregano helped give the topping a distinctive taste to complement the substantial fruit and vegetables contained in it. Next time however I'll put cheese in the pizza as that will give it more taste and texture and the chance to match my friend's dad as premier pizza maker in the area.

The final product with a rich topping and plenty of olives. 

Spelling it out

I have started a campaign recently to make my salads more interesting and the campaign began on Remembrance Sunday when I made a Spelt Salad with squash, walnuts and fennel. The soundtrack to the salad preparation was Pink Floyd's 1975 effort Wish You Were Here which I received for a Christmas present in 1999, the album is for me one of three greatest of all time and is packed with late keyboardist Rick Wright's best keyboard work, plenty of haunting guitar lines and inciteful lyrics.

I peeled a large butternut squash and then cut it in half before using the knife to cut out the inner lining containing the seeds and the chewy orange pith. Once the seeds and pith were disposed of I cut the squash into small cubes and put then in a glass baking dish that I had greased with margarine. I then poured two tablespoons of olive oil onto the squash with a hint of black pepper and stirred the oil and pepper into the squash so that it was completely coated in the oil and pepper.

I then put the dish with the squash, oil and black pepper into the oven, which I had pre-heated to 180 degrees (190 degrees for non-fan ovens) and cooked it for fifteen minutes.While the squash was cooking I took three fennel bulbs and after tailing them and removing their outer layers I cut them into around eight pieces. After the squash had cooked for fifteen minutes I added the fennel and two finely chopped cloves of garlic to the dish and stirred them in vigorously before leaving them to cook in the oven at the same temperature as before for a further twenty minutes.

After the twenty minutes had expired I scattered fifty grams worth of chopped walnuts over the dish and then cooked it for another ten minutes in the oven at the same temperature. After the food had cooked sufficiently the vegetables had become slightly tender and the walnuts were partially toasted. I then took the opportunity to squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the dish and then added two sprigs of parsley to it together with about two ounces of grated Parmesan Cheese.

I served it with a few leaves of iceberg lettuce and found that I had made a salad that was made rich through the walnuts and Parmesan while the squash provided sufficient body make the meal substantial and the fennel acted to give it a pleasant aniseed taste.

The dish is perfect with a spot of iceberg lettuce

Cheddar, Potatoes, Broccoli

The second Saturday in October saw the preparation of a soup that for me is as much a part of Autumn as picking chestnuts from the local wood, scraping the first frost off my car window and wearing a woolly trench coat to work.   The soup in question was a heavy mixture of Cheddar Cheese, Potatoes, Brocolli and Onions.

On the CD player was Dire Straits' quasi Pink Floyd fourth album Love Over Gold a record that was a nod back to my fifteen year old self who used to listen to the Straits almost obsessively until he discovered more genuine and exciting music.

I took two red onions and three medium-sized white potatoes and then diced them into small pieces. I poured some olive oil into the bottom of my Le Cresceut Dish and turned on the heat. After the oil had warmed for about a minute I added a hint of white pepper and then threw in the potatoes and onions.

While the potatoes and onions were lightly frying I trimmed a large bunch of broccoli and proceeded the cut the stems into two inch slices. I collated the stems together and dropped them into the Le Cresceut dish. I fried the stems for about five minutes while stirring the contents of the dish constantly to avoid them sticking to the bottom of the dish.

As I had removed all the stems from the Broccoli I was left with the florets and I now added these to the dish together with a pint and a half of chicken stock. It was now time to let the mixture simmer gently on the hob for about forty minutes so that the various flavours could fuse into each other.

When I returned to the food after forty minutes was up I turned off the heat and poured the contents of the dish into the blender. Once I had blended it on the lowest setting on my blender I returned it to the soup bowl and grated a very generous amount of cheddar cheese into it which I then allowed to melt into the soup to give it even more richness. After warming it through it was ready to serve.

The three potatoes gave the soup a real thickness that made it substantial while the taste of the chicken stock and the rather coarse taste of the broccoli florets made the soup feel like a substantial meal. It certainly fortified me enough for an evening trip to Sheffield for a memorable night exploring a Turkish Restaurant and sampling some first rate real bitter.

Just after blending- the grated cheddar on the surface soon melted  into the soup to give it a pleasant richness.

In the bowl- a soup substantial enough to help keep the Autumn cold away. 

Land of my Victoria

On the morning of the 29th of December the rain hammered down, as it had a tendency to do during quite a few parts of the Christmas Break. As a result of this I decided to stay in and make something a little bit more traditional and British in the form of Victoria Scones.

The soundtrack to the cooking was appropriately the Kinks' 1969 album Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) which is an excellent concept album about the theme stated in its title. It is often remembered for its opening track Victoria which is probably better known to modern audiences for the inferior cover version by the Kooks.

I dropped eight ounces of self-raising flour into a mixing bowl and mixed it with two ounces of white caster sugar.

In a separate bowl I beat an egg before adding it to the flour and sugar together with a touch under a quarter of a pint of milk. I stirred the ingredients together with a metal tablespoon until I had formed a soft dough, however before I kneaded the dough I added about two ounces of plain flour so that the dough did not stick to the bowl or the work surface when I rolled it out.

I often find when making dough for bread, biscuits, buns or scones that I initially make the dough too sloppy. I can often get round this however by adding enough flour to dry it out which I then knead into the dough.

In this recipe I kneaded the dough by keeping it in the bowl and punching it with my clenched fist and then turning it over and doing the same thing again until I had a dough that was reasonably dry but very flexible.

I rolled the dough out until it was about one centimetre thick all the way through. I then cut five centimetre wide shapes out of it and put them on a baking tray covered with a sheet of thoroughly greased kitchen foil. I  then used a butter knife to mark each scone into four quarters.

So as to make the scones a bit more aesthetically pleasing I added a glace cherry in each marked quarter on top of the scone. The scones were then cooked on 180 degrees (190 degrees if it's not a fan oven) in the oven for fifteen minutes until the edges began to turn brown.

Freshly cooked prior to quartering up to take to a house party.

After leaving them to cool on a wire rack for about an hour I quartered the scones up. The taste was like that of sweet white bread, which is how scones should always taste in my view, and glace cherries helped and an extra burst of sweetness to stop the taste being too bland. The scones when cut into quarters made excellent bite size snacks which were perfect to take to house parties as I hope the hosts of the parties I took them to during Christmas and New Year will agree.

Three For the Price of One

The day before New Year's Eve started off with a walk with my new dog, several good friends and their dogs along the sodden ground of the sun-soaked hills above the towns and villages where we live. The evening was to see a trip to meet up with some other friends for some homemade chili and a good catch up. In between the walk and the evening out I chose to make something reasonably quick that I could take out with me to the chili night to compliment my friends' top-rate chili.

I chose to make some bread, but it was bread with three different toppings so as to cater for all tastes. I made the dough first by taking a pound of strong white bread flour and a sachet of yeast and stirring them gently together in a mixing bowl. I then added two tablespoons of olive oil and half a pint of warm water to the mixture. I stirred the oil and water into the flour and yeast with a metal tablespoon until it formed a thick and sticky ball of paste. I realised that I needed to add more flour to make the dough lose its stickiness and allow it to become dry enough to knead. I gradually added a tablespoon of flour to each side of the sticky ball of dough and folded the flour until the dough dried so it could be kneaded.

I kneaded the dough in the bowl by constantly punching it with my fists on one side and then turning it over and repeating the process for about ten minutes. In contrast to the necessary violence being taken out on the dough the music on the CD player for the afternoon's bread making was a little more relaxed. The record of choice was my newly purchased copy of Van Morrison's bouncy R&B infused 1970 offering "His Band and the Street Choir" which includes his big US hit 'Domino' and the pulsing 'I'll be Your Lover Too' among other treasures.

Once the kneading was complete I took the bowl with the bread in and placed in the warmest place in the house, which was the window sill of the south-facing front bedroom. I left it there to rise in the warmth for an hour.

While the bread was rising I made the topping of one part of the bread by frying a diced white onion in an ounce of margarine and a sprinkling of black pepper. Once the onions began to turn translucent I turned off the heat on the hob and left the onions to cool. I also took the opportunity to line a twenty-five centimetre wide and six centimetre deep tin with greased foil.

After an hour I returned the dough to the kitchen and cut it into three equal pieces. I gouged a two centimetre deep and ten centimetre long hole in the top of the first piece of dough and filled it with slow roasted tomatoes covered in oregano. I brushed this section of the dough with olive oil.

I made a hole the same size in the second piece of dough and filled it with the fried onions. I then spread two tablespoons of sour cream over the onions while making sure the flesh of some of the onions was still visible beneath the cream.

In the third piece I made another two centimetre deep and ten centimetre wide hole and stuffed it with freshly plucked Rosemary from the garden and a diced clove of garlic.

I cooked the pieces of bread in the oven at 180 degrees (190 degrees for non-fan ovens) for a period twenty-five minutes. I knew the bread was cooked as the edges had started to turn brown and I could stick a skewer clean through the dough without any pieces attaching themselves to the skewer.

I took the tomato bread and the onion and sour cream bread to the chili night where they went down well with some excellent chili. The sour cream and onion provided a freshness to compliment the dry dough of that particular bread while the slow roasted tomatoes gave the tomato bread a rich and distinctive taste to savour while we watched the director's cut of sci-fi classic Bladerunner.

The Rosemary and Garlic bread made its way south with me on New Year's Eve to the home of some of the people I had walked my dog with the day before. The tangy, but not totally overpowering, taste of the garlic and the fleshy Rosemary leaves contained in the bread helped fortify us for a trip to the local pub to  solve a fictitious murder mystery and let the New Year in later that evening.

Take your pick: in the foreground is the sour cream and onion bread with  the well-cooked onions visible. To the right is the garlic and Rosemary bread and at the back is the tomato bread.