Jam Side Down

The last Sunday in September found me in a reflective mood and recharging my batteries as the number of unexpected adventures in the last  month and the responsibility of looking after two houses and two dogs began to take their toll.

As always when I need to focus on having some downtime I fall back on my love of cooking and music. I picked Pink Floyd's 1977 effort "Animals" to bake some blackcurrant buns to. The album, although one of their best, is often overlooked by the casual fan, as it falls between two of their greatest albums (both of which are more accessible) 1975's "Wish You Were Here" and 1979's "The Wall". Animals' best track is "Sheep" which I was lucky enough to see its writer Roger Waters perform in 2008 on his excellent solo tour.

I realised I had mentioned my cooking skills to my work colleagues and I decided that actions spoke louder than words and therefore I should make something to take in for them to enjoy. The recipe I chose was a variation on an old recipe from a 1960s cookbook. It is essentially used to make buns that are topped with Jam.

I first added eight ounces of self-raising flour to my mixing bowl followed by three ounces of  margarine which I cut into cubes and then stirred into  the flour until the mixture resembled large golden breadcrumbs or shingle on the beach.

Then I added two and a half ounces of brown sugar and one egg. After I had thoroughly mixed these ingredients into the margarine and the flour I saw that it was all far too sloppy to cook. This said I added four ounces of plain flour to the bowl which meant that after I had stirred it in there was a mixture that almost had the consistency of cookie dough.

I divided the mixture into twelve equal pieces and put them on a greased baking tray. Then I added half a teaspoonful of black currant jam to the top of each piece trying as I did so push the jam down into them so it didn't run off in the heat of the oven.

I cooked the buns in the oven at 200 degrees (190 for fan ovens) for a period of fifteen minutes. I noticed the buns had become a pale bronze colour, a little like a meathead who hadn't applied enough fake tan before a night on the town, and when a put a skewer into them it came out clean meaning they were ready. The jam had also run a little and crystallised on top of the buns to create a tasty topping.

I tried one after I consumed a large stew for my tea and I found that buns sweet and rich but not too rich that I couldn't manage one comfortably despite a big main course.

At work the reaction was positive as pretty much all the buns were eaten by the colleagues in my team which has motivated me to do more cooking projects to take into work.

Straight out of the oven with a pale bronze colour showing in the dough and the jam well crystallised on top of each bun.

Parkin For Charity

The third Monday in September was a washout; weather wise that is. It was one of several Mondays in September I was having off work as some downtime to allow me to look after effectively two houses and two dogs during the month while keeping things going in my role as this year's president of my local rotary club. Yes I didn't think I was old enough to do the role either but it is an enjoyable one so far.

As I couldn't get much of a walk in with the dog and I was aware that my employer were taking part in the worthy cause of a MacMillan Coffee Morning that Friday I decided to do some baking in preparation for the coffee morning.

Even though it was only September I knew Summer was starting to float into a memory and the foul rain gave a taste of the no doubt cooler and wetter winter weather lurking ahead on the road to shorter nights and mornings spent de-frosting the car. This said the food I decided to make was Parkin.

It's true to say that Parkin originated in Lancashire which is the other end of Pennines from the city where my employer is based. It has a sweet yet charcoal like taste and is very fortifying in the winter months.

As the rain hammered down on the house that I was, rather reluctantly it has to be said, sitting in its owners' absence I got underway with the cooking. On the playlist was the Electric Light Orchestra's difficult second album the aptly titled "ELO 2". During the making of the album founding member Roy Wood left early on during the sessions to become a Christmas one hit wonder and Jeff Lynne meanwhile gradually asserted his leadership of the group. The record contains the King Crimson- like "In Old England Town" the folky "Mama" and some shimmering prog-rock workouts in the shape of "From the Sun to the World" and "Kuaima". After a few spins it becomes clear that it is a strong record and its highlight is a cover of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" featuring Jeff Lynne adapting a filthy rock and roll voice and some clever string arrangements.

I put one pound of self-raising flour in a mixing bowl with a tablespoon of ground ginger and six ounces of brown sugar. I mixed these ingredients together with a metal tablespoon until they were well combined.

I then melted two ounces of margarine in a warm pan on the hob before adding the melted margarine to the mixing bowl with a quarter of a pint of milk and a beaten egg. Finally I weighed out eight ounces of treacle and added this to the bowl. The treacle was like any good treacle should be- a dark colour, sticky and sweet.

I stirred all these new ingredients together with the flour, sugar and ginger until I got a thick paste that was the colour of melted dark chocolate. I added the ingredients to a high-sided baking tray lined with greased cooking foil.

The tray of uncooked Parkin was then placed in the oven heated at 170 degrees (180 for non-fan ovens) and cooked for an hour and five minutes. Until it was even darker than before and the surface of it was solid but still soft enough to spring back when touched lightly.

I turned it out in its foil onto the work surface to cool off.  After a couple of hours I cut it into cubes about 3cm x 3cm and then, as it wasn't to be consumed until Friday, put it in containers which I then put in the Freezer. A work colleague said this was a good way of keeping it until then without losing its flavour.

On Wednesday night it was out of the freezer and slowly defrosting. By Friday morning it had been transported to work and was sharing a table in the firm's kitchen with millionaire shortbread and marble cake amongst others in aid of the firm's MacMillan Coffee Morning.

The Parkin, with its rich ginger taste and surprisingly sweet flavours of treacle reminded me that bonfire night and winter were not far away. Quite a few of my colleagues took pieces and contributed money to the charity as well so it certainly helped the firm raise some money for a worthwhile cause.

Above- on the table at work ready for consumption by my colleagues

Egg timer

Last Sunday was a handy day to mark time part way through a long weekend that was thoroughly enjoyable, confusing and cathartic in equal measures. It had started off with an unexpected trip to a pub in town on Friday night that, aided by the consumption of some Leeds Brewery blonde beer which was the same colour as the hair of the person I was in the pub with,  seemed like a "crazy dream"- perhaps because of the beer. Saturday saw a surprise trip to the cinema with two of my close friends to see the excellent "Straight Outta Compton" a film that depicts superbly the rise and fall of Gangsta Rap's first super group N.W.A.

Sunday morning arrived around six hours after I had consumed my last post film beer and watched my last post evening out N.W.A. video on Youtube. I helped clear the cobwebs that morning with a fun seven and a half mile walk with one of my mates from the cinema trip as we set the world to rights and gave our dogs plenty of exercise in the stunning countryside we are so lucky to be able to live and walk in.

When I got back it was time for dinner and I noticed that the house I was looking after had a large number of eggs in the fridge and I decided that I needed some comfort food and as the eggs needed using up the end product of my cooking project was to be Eggs Benedict. Those of you who have followed this blog for a while may remember me posting about Eggs Benedict two years ago after I had it at the Glasgow Malmaison the morning after a day spent exploring the city with very good company.

Sunday's Eggs Benedict was a modified and even richer version than the one I made previously.

The album I listened to today was the first one I ever bought from a record shop. I bought it back  in Christmas 1998 when I was a scruffy-haired fifteen year old who's world hardly stretched passed my parents' back garden. The album was Dire Straits' third effort Making Movies which, save a throwaway song at the end, is flawless and songs like "Tunnel of Love" and "Skateaway" summed up well the weekend's events to date.

I started by putting a pan of water, laced with Red Wine Vinegar, on the hob and let it steadily come to the boil. While the water was coming the boil I melted eight ounces of margarine in a small frying pan on the hob and then added three eggs to the pan as well as around two tablespoons of red wine vinegar. The reason for this mixture was to make the Hollandaise Sauce that goes with the eggs. The trick with the sauce is to beat it thoroughly with a whisk continuously. This stops the sauce becoming lumpy and resembling a disturbing derivative of scrambled egg.

As the sauce came together I added the leaves of five sprigs of Rosemary to it and continued to stir the sauce. Meanwhile the water was coming to the boil and using a ladle I added the yolk and the white of one egg to the boiling water. As I lifted the egg into the water from the ladle I used the ladle to create a small whirlpool. 

I let the egg cook for 3-4 minutes in the pan and as the Hollandaise Sauce was ready I put it on the lowest light on the hob and stirred it vigorously on occasion to stop it becoming too lumpy. At the same time I put two slices of buttered bread with two slices of smoked ham on each slice under the grill and lightly grilled them for a couple of minutes.

After the first egg was done in the pan I lifted it out with the ladle and put it on top of the ham toasties on a serving plate. I then repeated the boiling process with two more egg yolks and their whites. I arranged these two eggs on the plate when they were done and poured the Hollandaise and Rosemary Sauce over the top of them to serve. I also sprinkled a little black pepper on the eggs.

Eggs Benedict has a reputation for being rich and overindulgent and this dish was in the best possible way. The taste of the Hollandaise Sauce was enriched by the extra red wine vinegar the texture of the rosemary while the boiled eggs were done for just enough time that they were solid while still giving out some flavoursome yolk when pierced.  The toasted ham and bread helped form a delicious base to the whole dish both literally in the way I had served it and with the taste it added to it.

Eggs smothered in Hollandaise Sauce with a base of ham and bread- the perfect post-dog walk and cinema night out meal.

Orange Broccoli Special

Yesterday I needed some serious wind down time after what had been a hectic and exciting summer that also had featured a painful low personal point in July (when things in my life seemed shot to pieces) which eventually was more than evened out by getting my own house at last, an unforgettable birthday party at the house and being made president of my local Rotary Club.

In the week and a bit preceding yesterday there had been no let up to the excitement with a trip to a wonderful Indian Restaurant (that used to be a dodgy drug-ridden pub in a previous life) for a colleague's leaving do, a fun evening watching old episodes of Shooting Stars at the house of two of my friends, a night out in our local town's new German Bar for an enjoyable Birthday Party, a seventeen mile walk in the driving rain through wonderful scenery with two old school friends and a Lakeland Terrier, a meal out in a country pub and a charity golf tournament in aid of Breast Cancer Research. I somehow managed to fit a working week in the city into all this and there was no wonder therefore I felt a little shattered.

I spent yesterday buying food for a fraternal buffet I am holding later today at my house, doing some gardening, cleaning and washing and generally being very domesticated while taking it super easy. Sometimes you need days like this to re-charge your batteries.

I had time for some cooking and today's piece, which is designed to ease me back into the world of food blogging, was a quite basic one but effective nonetheless. I grilled three chicken breasts that were flavoured with peppers and spices and a left-over lingering in my deep freeze from my birthday Barbecue (more of which in future blog posts). I also boiled some carrots, potatoes and broccoli up as a side dish.

I realised  that I wanted a sauce to go with the dish and I was reminded of a recipe in one of my parents' aged vegetarian cookbooks. Thinking back to this recipe I was inspired to make an orange white sauce to mix with the Broccoli.

The album on the media player for this project was the Electric Light Orchestra's excellent and underrated 1983 offering "Secret Messages" which includes the fifties throwback single "Rock & Roll is King" as well as first rate album tracks "Take me on and on" and the title track.

The secret to a good sauce is to make thick and creamy with the consistency of buttercream used in cakes. I melted around three ounces of margarine into a saucepan and once the margarine was almost melted I added a heaped wooden spoon's worth of corn flour. I turned off the heat on the hob and mixed all the melted butter into the margarine until it formed several golden coloured lumps. I then grated the zest of one whole Tangerine into the mixture and stirred the zest in thoroughly. I find that sauces, like sponge mixes and pastries, benefit from having all the dry ingredients including the spices mixed together before you add the wet ingredients.

I next added around 300 millilitres of semi-skimmed milk to the mixture and stirred it on the hob quickly over a medium heat until it was like a thick paste and there were no lumps. This took about two minutes. It is a tricky skill to master as if you use too much milk you end with a runny and lumpy sauce but if you do not use enough milk you end up with a very dry mixture  that's burnt and stuck to the bottom of the pan. If you avoid this however you get a sweet sauce that is surprisingly good at complimenting the rather soggy taste of the broccoli when the sauce is poured over the broccoli and served with it.

The Broccoli is shown here smothered in the sauce to enhance its taste. The orange sauce also set off the flavours in the grilled chicken well.

Scones of Wild Garlic

Today was a day to unwind and relax after an action packed few days. It started on Friday with a very sober bar crawl round three local pubs, then continued the next day with a trip out round town to catch up with some good mates and wound down today with a long walk with the dogs that included some excellent views and healthy dose of setting the world to rights.

We had called time on the trip round town on the Saturday night relatively early, compared to the old days of staying out until three in the morning, and I was in bed by half one in the morning. These days if I stay out too late it wipes me out for the whole of the following day and if I have a really late night then I need to book a few tactical days off work after the night out.

Luckily an early(ish) night meant some time for a good long walk and also chance to do some more cooking projects. This said I decided to make something that you can only really make at this time of year due to the availability of one of the ingredients; Garlic Scones. The reason why you can only make them at this time of year is because rather than using garlic bulbs you use the leaves of wild garlic plants in the recipe which are only really edible at this time of year.

The soundtrack to cookery today was The War on Drugs' recent brilliant album "Lost in the Dream" which includes great tracks like "Red Eyes" "In Reverse" and "Under the Pressure" a song that describes adequately my mind-set since the start of the new year.

I first put in a mixing bowl 225 grams of self-raising flour and fifty grams of low fat margarine. I cut the butter into small, misshapen cubes and then rubbed it in with my hands until the flour and margarine were combined together and shaped like breadcrumbs.

The next job was cut up eight wild garlic leaves. Wild garlic grows commonly near where I live, mainly along the side of riverbanks and footpaths and fortunately some was available in the garden of the house I am currently living at. I sliced the garlic leaves horizontally using a sharp knife into narrow strips. I added the strips of garlic leaves to the flour and margarine together with 100 grams of grated, lactose free extra mature cheddar. I also added one beaten egg and one hundred millilitres of semi-skimmed milk to the bowl and stirred them together until they formed a thick paste.

I realised that I needed to dry the mixture if it was going to cook properly and so I added to the bowl about seventy-five grams of self-raising flour. I then stirred the mixture into a ball and kneaded it like bread dough into the flour until I had something that had the dry, dusty consistency of pastry. I rolled it out on the worktop until it was about a square foot in width and about a centimetre deep. I cut the pastry up into five centimetre square pieces and baked it in the oven on 200 degrees, 210 for non-fan ovens, for about fifteen minutes.

After taking the scones out of the oven and letting them cool down a little I had a taste of them and found the wild garlic to be less potent than garlic bulbs would be. The wild garlic leaves did not overpower the taste of the mature cheddar either. The scones were best served with a spot of margarine melted onto them and proved to be an enjoyable starter to tonight's tea.

Butter would melt: these scones are delicious if halved and then margarine is spread on top of them.

Changing to chicken

Last weekend was one where it seemed that different ways of doing things crossed paths in successive days; the part of me that still likes a good night out and the part of me that wants to knuckle down to the task of settling down and taking on  a lot more responsibility.

The first half of the weekend saw me enact the first role at a loud bar in a big city for a birthday party. The live entertainment needed a volunteer from the audience to embarrass for one of their routines and, as seems to be my lot in life sometimes, I was the volunteer. That said people thought I was a good sport in acting as a volunteer and even though inside I wanted to jump on the first train home in embarrassment at the situation, I held my own as best I could for the sake of everyone watching.

The next morning we had a lie in the peace and quiet of the flat and thoughts turned to cooking a healthy but filling Sunday lunch as well as having some much needed downtime. These days weekends are becoming a lot more about having the time to re-charge batteries through walking in the country, have relaxed visits to quiet restaurants and pubs and friends' houses and looking for a property to buy rather than having heavy nights out all the time. This new approach to weekends was one of my New Year resolutions while the other was to have some dishes that were healthy with more protein in and more meat as well.

The meal we decided to make was a chicken stew with all the ingredients prepared from scratch. I first cut up into halves four medium sized chicken breasts which I added to a non-stick pan which I had first sprayed the bottom of with some very low fat cooking spray. I fried the chicken on a medium heat and turned it constantly with a wooden spoon for around fifteen minutes until it began to turn a golden brown. When I cooked it I added a teaspoon of paprika to the chicken and made sure that I combined the paprika fully with all the chicken.

The trick with cooking any raw meat is making sure it is done all the way through and not undercooked. To help ensure that this meat was cooked through I cut the pieces in half part way through cooking and if the middle part that had become exposed through cutting was uncooked I pushed the uncooked part down onto the hot surface of the pan.

Another trick with raw meat, which I had confirmed as being a good trick if you fry anything savoury when I had a meal in early December with a talented local artist, is that early on you should get the spices mixed into the dish to give it the flavour. This was the reason why I added the paprika to the chicken at an early stage.

Next I diced up one large white onion and finely sliced two cloves of garlic. I took the chicken out of the pan and put it on a plate while then adding the onion and garlic plus another teaspoon of paprika to the pan. I fried the onion and garlic until the onions became translucent.

After this I added a can of Borlotti Beans and a can of tin tomatoes to the pan with the chicken and around a pint of water. I simmered the contents of the pan for around thirty minutes with the lid covering the pan. So as to keep the contents from drying up I added water to it periodically.

In the meantime I boiled some rice in a pan for around half an hour.

After simmering the contents of the pan for thirty minutes I took the lid off and simmered the contents for another twenty or thirty minutes. Towards the end of the cooking I added 100 grams of spinach and two tablespoons of chopped parsley all of which combined very easily with the rest of the mixture.

Once the contents of the pan were ready I added the rice to it and served it with some white cabbage. The chicken was succulent and rich while the spice of the paprika and the Borlotti Beans gave a real depth of flavour to the dish. Certainly this was a good meal to have on a cold Sunday morning in winter.

Tatty Beef

On the last weekend before Christmas Week I went up to my grandparents for a long overdue visit. They are both well into their eighties and both been unwell as a result this has meant that each time I see them I wonder if it will be the last time. Negative thoughts I know but that's what the passage of time does to you.

I knew that they were not quite enjoying the high standard of cooking they used to when my Gran was well and were relying on instant meals so I thought it only right that I cooked them a proper meal when I dropped in to visit.

The recipe I chose is one of my granddad's favourites and one as a child I remember Gran making for him on many occasions. It is basically a variation of corned beef hash and in the part of North East Scotland where my Granddad originates from it is known as Corned Beef and Tatties.

With the sounds of Jethro Tull's song "This is not Love" from their 1991 effort "Catfish Rising" thrusting through my mind, as a result of it being on the car stereo on the drive up, I took four white potatoes and peeled them. I then sliced them in half lengthways and put them in a pan of water. I fired up the hob and brought the pan to boil before simmering the potatoes for around half an hour until they were soft.

While the potatoes were simmering I covered the bottom of a frying pan with rapeseed oil and heated the oil gently on the hob. I added to the hob three large shallots that I had first peeled, topped and tailed and diced. I fried them with a hint of black pepper until they became soft and see-through. I then cut up around eight slices of corned beef into small squares and stirred them into the oil and shallots in the pan until the beef was coated in oil. I find that rapeseed oil is the best oil to use when frying beef.

After the potatoes were ready I drained them and then mashed them with a bit of margarine. After they had been mashed I added the mash to the frying pan and mixed it with the beef and shallots to make a thick paste. The meal was now ready to serve.

This type of food is quite basic and easy to throw together quickly but despite this it is a substantial meal that is very filling. Normally it is made with onions but I decided to use shallots to give it a unique twist.

It was certainly something my grandparents appreciated as they ate their helpings quickly and seemed happy at having a dish they explained they had not eaten for a while. I personally find that corned beef has a wonderful savoury taste sadly lacking in other types of beef and this taste is only enhanced with the use of the potatoes; definitely making it a simple but delicious dish.

The shallot pieces shine out of this recipe