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 :-)

New Jerusalem

The last four days have been good ones; the sun has shone, I've played a round of golf, seen plenty of good friends in super surroundings, enjoyed some relaxing walks and been away from the office. The generally sunny weather has meant a lot stickiness and mugginess hanging in the air as well, not good weather you would think for making soup however the soup I prepared on today was an exception to the rule.

I had been a long walk in a sun that had succeeded in burning my neck and making my dog collapse with exhaustion in a meadow at various points but we made it back by mid-afternoon even though I could have stayed out all day.

One of David Bowie's slightly weaker efforts, 1984's "Tonight" was on the media player and it contained some summery music in the form of a slightly tired cover of the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows".

The key ingredient of the soup was a selection of six Jerusalem Artichokes that I had picked up  from the local market the previous week. You will be hard pressed to find this vegetable at your local supermarket and I would certainly recommend looking at your local market stall to pick it up, one good reason why you should not always rely on the big supermarkets for your food.

Before starting work on the artichokes I topped and tailed two white onions and then diced them. The onions were so strong that I had to put on a pair of goggles while preparing them! Next I topped and tailed six cloves of garlic but I did not cut them up in any other way. After melting four ounces of low fat margarine in a large pan on the hob I added the onions and garlic and let them stew for around fifteen minutes until the onions became soft and translucent.

While the onions and garlic cooked I prepared the Jerusalem Artichokes by peeling the dark brown skin from them and then cutting them up into small rectangles. I added them to the pan of onions and garlic with a pint and a half of chicken stock and a quarter of a pint of milk. I let the ingredients simmer away for around half an hour before taking them off the heat and then blending them when cooled.

After the blending I added half a pint of plain, low fat Greek Yoghurt to the pan and stirred it in thoroughly with the rest of the soup. Once I had warmed the soup through I served it with some chives to garnish that I put on top of each bowl of soup.

The margarine and the garlic gave the soup a real tangy and sweet taste that offset the strong flavour of the Jerusalem Artichoke, which tasted much like watercress. Despite it being a warm dish I found it to be very refreshing especially when consumed sat in the garden as the evening sun beat down.

Ready to eat and garnished with chives freshly cut from the back garden.

Salmon Saturday

The second part of our eve of Tour De France meal was a dish that I had not cooked for a while and was long overdue pride of place on my menu- roast salmon. This was a dish that had first came to my attention as a young child when I saw an advert on the TV which extolled the virtues of roasted Salmon Steaks with a side helping of watercress mixed with yoghurt.

For my dish however I substituted salmon steaks with salmon fillets. The reason for this was that salmon steaks tend to be festooned with bones and you spend half your time picking the bones out of the steaks which in turn detracts from the taste experience of the salmon.

The album of choice for cooking which I had earlier in the day picked up second hand from Poundland, ironically for the sum of £2.00, was Radiohead's patchy 1993 debut "Pablo Honey". Although some of the tracks clearly illustrate that the band was still finding its feet before having a tilt at greatness, the melodic singing and biting guitar of "You", the evergreen "Creep" and the confident, surging "Anyone Can Play Guitar," show that some of the ingredients of their classic second album "The Bends" were already in place. Funnily the enough the album was released around the same time that I saw the advert for the salmon steaks.

I prepared the fillets by putting them on a foil sheet and sprinkling fresh Thyme on them and thick circular slices of red onion as well as the juice from a whole lemon. I then wrapped the salmon in a foil parcel and left it to one side while I prepared some new potatoes. The trick with new potatoes is not to peel them fully but instead to cut out any black or brown bits and then wash them thoroughly. Once the potatoes had been prepared I boiled them on the hob with fresh mint to give them a fresh flavour of summer.

While the potatoes were cooking on the hob I cooked the salmon in the oven for twenty minutes at 180 degrees,or more like 170 degrees with a fan oven. I also prepared the watercress by first washing it thoroughly and then adding it to a bowl with a tub of low fat, plain Greek Yoghurt. In readiness for the meal I put the bowl of watercress on the dining table next to the bottle of Bordeaux red wine.

Next I sliced finely five shallots, after first topping and tailing them, and cooked them lightly in five ounces of melted margarine. After the shallots had softened slightly I sliced thinly two ounces of spinach leaves and added them to the margarine and shallots. The spinach soon shrank and became part of the mixture which meant the spinach butter sauce, as I dubbed it, was ready.

I served the salmon with red onions and the lemon by splitting it between two dinner plates. I then added the sauce exclusively to the salmon and kept the potatoes and spinach on a separate part of the plate. The reason for this was that the spinach and potatoes, as a result of the mint, had a very fresh taste which contrasted with the rich taste of the salmon and the sauce. Certainly the mint and spinach helped us cool down from the high temperature caused by the Mediterranean- like weather while we were consuming the delicious salmon.

Together with the French Onion Soup this meal served to set us up well for the following day's unique opportunity to see the Tour De France first hand as it passed through a nearby village and got us in the mood for the Tour De France themed barbeque afterwards.

Just like on TV twenty years ago but without although the bones in the fish

Tour De Food

Last weekend I was away up north in Huddersfield for a Tour De France themed barbeque and also to watch a stage of the Tour as it came on a route near the town. The night before we went to see the Tour and have the barbeque we settled upon a spot of home cooking followed by an early night.

There was only one choice for the starter- French Onion Soup. As I was away from home I didn't have the usual wide range of cooking facilities so I started by frying in a wok two thinly sliced white onions with three ounces of melted margarine. I stirred the onions constantly while they were being fried and once they were translucent I added the leaves from five shoots of fresh Thyme together with half a pint of red wine.

I let the wine boil vigorously until it was absorbed by the onions and the Thyme. In doing this I ensured that the onions were soaked with lots of flavour. I then added a pint of beef stock to the wok and let it stew.

While the soup stewed on the wok I cut some white baguette into thick slices and put thin slices of Gruyere cheese on top of it. I then shared the soup out in bowls and put a slice of baguette with Gruyere atop it on each bowl so that the bread floated on top of the soup. Next I heated up the grill and put the bowls underneath it until the Gruyere had melted on top of the bread. Now the soup was ready to eat.

I've made French Onion Soup on a number of occasions and often utilised vegetable stock or chicken. However the beef stock made a real difference this time round and gave the soup a more earthier taste which complemented the rich Bordeaux Red Wine and Gruyere cheese I used in the recipe. The main course for this meal will be on the blog very soon...

  Rich Gruyere cheese on top of a baguette floating on a rich soup containing Bordeaux Red Wine all of which equal a dish that is as French as the Eiffel Tower.  

                                        

Sweetness and white

On Friday I felt pretty shattered after what had been a challenging March which contained some high points that included learning to drive a tank, quiet nights in with an important person and attending the wedding of a very good friend I have known for the passed twenty-six years. It had also been an intense month in my professional life and left me with some food for thought about my plans. I was therefore glad when the end of the working day came on Friday and my heart was gladdened by a phone call that meant I would have a special guest come for tea that evening.

I decided to bake some sweet potatoes and on my return home I found three large sweet potatoes in the pantry and topped and tailed them before washing them and placed them on a greased baking tray. I then added them to a pre-heated oven and cooked them in my fan oven at 210 degrees (220 degrees for non-fan ovens) for forty-five minutes.

While the potatoes cooked I top and tailed two red onions and sliced them finely into thin strips. Next I took three cloves of garlic and topped and tailed them. I then cut the garlic into small chunks around half a centimetre wide and two or three millimetres thick. I then fried the onion and garlic on a medium heat in a deep frying pan with some olive until the onions became transparent and the garlic was soft enough to cut with the edge of a tablespoon.

When the onion and garlic was ready I turned off the heat and left it on the side to cool down. I then added a tub of sour cream with chives, that was sourced from the local grocery in a rough part of town, to a serving bowl. After the onion and garlic cooled down I added it to the serving bowl with the onions and garlic.

By the time I had prepared the onion and garlic mixture the potatoes were ready. I took them from the oven and sliced each in half- lengthways. I then filled them with the mixture and served them. At this point my special guest arrived and we sat down to our meal. The sweetness of the potatoes was offset well with the sour cream, onion and garlic mixture which, with its thick consistency, transformed the meal into a flavoursome and filling main course.

Filled with sour cream, chives garlic and onion with some steamed carrots as a side helping.

Fritter and taste

The third weekend in January was very much one that was all about overcoming illness and generally taking it easy. However as the weekend wore on I began to feel a little fitter and on the Sunday evening I felt well enough to make some simple but tasty food in the shape of some sweetcorn fritters.

I first had sweetcorn fritters over Christmas when visiting a Thai takeaway restaurant out of town with some new company. I was impressed by their taste and despite feeling like I was about to fall to sleep at any time I resolved to work hard to make my fritters as tasty and flavoursome as those I had sampled over Christmas. I also wanted to ensure the fritters came out successfully this time round as  I once tried to cook potato fritters at a cookery class as a schoolboy and failed epically on that occasion.

I took a nine ounce can of sweetcorn and drained the water from it using a colander. I then put half of the sweetcorn in a food processor and blended it on a medium setting in the blender. Next I place two ounces of plain flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a well beaten egg and three tablespoons of soy sauce into the blender and blended the ingredients again on a medium setting.

I added the contents of the blender to a mixing bowl with the rest of the sweetcorn and two teaspoons of ground coriander. I then took a medium-sized frying pan and covered the bottom with olive oil which I then heated lightly. After the oil had reached the right temperature I added three separate pieces of the mixture, each was about three centimetres by three centimetres, and fried them for around five minutes until the underneath had solidified and began to brown.

The key part of preparation was about to follow as I used a wooden spatula to flip the fritters and fry the other side. The test with the turning of the fritters is to make sure the underneath is solid enough that when it comes to be flipped it does not fall apart. After frying the fritters for five minutes on the other side I served them as a starter to my main course of artichoke and tomato frittata.

The fritters were everything they had promised to be and more as the sweetcorn and egg made them substantial without being too filling while the coriander and soy sauce provided a taste as authentic as that to be found at any Thai or Chinese Restaurant.

Golden Brown- these fritters certainly turned out better than those I made at school several years previously

Let the Barley Grow

The penultimate weekend in November saw me make a typical winter soup to match the cooler weather that was now starting to arrive my area. In times gone by Pearl Barley was a staple ingredient of many winter soups made in this country and I decided to honour that tradition by making a soup using this interesting foodstuff.

I peeled, top and tailed and diced two carrots, two white onions and a leek which I proceeded to gently fry in some olive oil in my Le Cresceut dish with six ounces of Pearl Barley and the leaves from five stalks of fresh Thyme. I stirred the ingredients constantly for around fifteen minutes so as to ensure that they did not stick to the bottom of the dish before adding a pint of chicken stock to it and letting the ingredients stew on a medium heat for a further half an hour.

After this I let the dish cool, blended the contents, reheated it and then served it. Despite having no actual meat in,other than an essence of chicken with the stock, the presence of the Thyme and Barley brought back memories of the rich chicken casseroles made by my Grandmother in years gone by. This in turn in my mind pushed the clock back to the tastes and smells of meals produced in the kitchens of Old England.

Chicken Casserole Puree anyone?