AN OVERDUE UPDATE PART 1

So, it’s been a few days since I last posted anything. Ok, so maybe a month. Or two. I realise that I am hopelessly flaky when it comes to posting on my site but I have not been resting on my proverbial laurels.
I have been stripping the spare bedroom down to its floorboards, painting the walls bright sparkling white and attempting to remove all traces of black gloss paint that the previous owners thought made the house look ‘traditional’. Here’s the skinny for the previous owners: it didn’t. It just looked dark. And a bit creepy.
During the process of removing the carpet, I have found my new sworn enemy: carpet gripper. For those not familiar, it is a thin strip of wood that runs around the edge of the room, studded with sharp little tacks that grip the carpet in place. Once you have pulled the carpet up, this carpet grip becomes a hateful, spiteful stabbing beast. My feet are now overly familiar with the bed of nails sensation. Not pleasant. Still, the room is slowly wiggling on and with an impending visit to Ikea on the cards, it should be looking really very lovely in a week or two. The plan is that Coney will choose to sleep in this redecorated room, rather than at the foot of our bed. Don’t get me wrong, I have no qualms about sharing our room with a greyhound (and now a Jack Russell as well!), it’s just that, well, she seems to have qualms about sharing it with us. And we’re getting a tiny bit weary of sleeping with a legs tucked up under our armpits whilst she enjoys the lions share of the bed. And she’s moodier than a teenager so we have to tread on eggshells for fear of snarling repercussion. Of course, these are just things that make her even more adorable. Well, with the exception of her pilchard breath. Not pleasant.
As for cooking, I am still trying to cook something new everyday but with temperatures outside reaching an unbelievable 40c, it is simply too hot to contemplate baking cakes or cookies. This means I have to resort to raiding the chocolate drawer (yes, our fridge has a drawer devoted to that heavenly deity, cacao) instead. I shouldn’t really complain: England is renowned for it’s schizophrenic weather. Next week it will probably be snowing AND raining.
Whilst I haven’t been writing about food very regularly, I have been photographing (poorly) most things that we’ve churned out. Of course, my husband’s freshly baked loaves of bread are the most photogenic: he is attempting to make bread on a weekly basis but has now burnt out two electrical adaptors because he overworks our poor KA. So, until payday, he will be getting more exercise than usual and kneading the dough entirely by hand!
As for me, I have been perfecting my shortcrust pastry (and when you stop thinking about how complicated pastry must be to make if you can buy it ready prepared from the supermarket, you realise that it’s only three ingredients, flour, butter and water. And really, how difficult is cutting some butter into flour and then mixing in some water?). I have recently made what I consider to be the ultimate picnic food: smoked haddock and watercress tart. It looks really flashy but is just a simple case of poaching some smoked haddock, flaking it and adding to a béchamel/egg sauce, tinged emerald green by the watercress which in turn repays the tart with it’s peppery, almost metallic flavour. We served it with bashed new potatoes that had been heavily seasoned with olive oil and sea salt. So delicious that we ate three quarters of it!
In addition, I have been working my way through my favourite cookbook of the moment, The Pastry Queen by Rebecca Rather. She runs a bakery-come-cafe in Texas and the book is filled with recipes that she serves her customers. They are good hearty recipes: dense bundt cakes, sticky pecan bars, scones enriched with double cream. I am particularly fond of this book, not so much for the recipes, but more for the style, which is approachable, generous and friendly. After all, cooking is about sharing with people and the reproduction of recipes should be no different.
The first recipe cooked by myself from the Pastry Queen was about as complicated as they get from this book: Big Hair Lemon/Lime Meringue Tarts. Lemon Meringue Pie is a great British favourite, although it suffers from people using those pre-packed lemon fillings with the oil ‘pill’ that supposedly encapsulates the ‘essence’ of lemon within it’s little gel walls but in fact tastes a little bit too synthetic. Couple that with a soggy pastry bottom and undercooked meringue and it can taste like your worst nightmare.
Anyway, this recipe uses freshly made lemon/lime curd (painfully easy to make), a hazelnut crust (which I completely ruined as my husband got sticks of butter confused with the UK packs of butter (for the record, there are TWO sticks of butter per one English 250g pack) and had to quickly make a pate sucree (posh name for sweet pastry), and Italian style meringue (which is where the egg whites are heated over a bain marie with caster sugar to stabilise the whites making a stiffer meringue). The Big Hair element comes from the meringue, which is piled on top of the curd filled crust and then teased as you might tease a bouffant hairdo. It is then zapped with a blowtorch (or in my case under a very, very hot grill) until it is coloured. They look funky but taste like the best lemon meringue ever!

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Rainy Baking Days

So, the crazy American is turning out to be quite the master baker. He is consistently churning out loaves of bread each week, of varying tastes and textures and with varying results. This weekend was a real tour de force for him. He not only made two loaves of wholemeal bread, but also pizza dough for Calzones AND made his own pasta to make little wormy dumplings for chicken soup. The big bouncing addition of an Almond Cream KitchenAid Mixer has made my husband’s transition from “I don’t believe in baking, it’s not organic enough” to “I can feasibly see us never having to buy bread or pizza again!” very smooth indeed. And, without wanting to sound like a 1960s info-mercial, the Kitchenaid is one of the most useful anniversary presents that I have received (in all of three years of being married) thus far.
It is truly one of the great eating experiences to have a slice of home baked granary toast, slathered in strawberry conserve and unsalted butter. Toast before had no meaning but now I can see why my grandmother and mother have such fond memories of toast from their childhood. It was homemade toast. Look, I don’t mean to wax lyrical about it, but my husband can make a loaf in bread from zero to stomach in less than 90 minutes and 5 minutes is spent kneading the dough (courtesy of our Kitchenaid), another 5 is spent eating it and the rest is proving and baking time. As someone who suffers from IBS and whose attacks were usually brought on by eating shop bought bread, homemade bread is very special indeed. You choose your flour (preferably organic), you choose what grains to go in – you have the ability to know exactly where all your ingredients come from and of what quality they are.
If you can find the time to go to the supermarket and buy bread, why not save yourself the effort, stay at home and make bread. The culinary benefits are obvious but it is also a relaxing pastime and really rewarding.

This mad frenzy of baking must be induced by the miserable rainy weather. The last few days it has been wet, wet, wet. No, it has been wet, wet, wet and wet. It makes you want to cook all sorts of stay indoors and get fat kind of food: muffins, cakes, biscuits. So far, in the last fortnight, I have made Pistachio and White Chocolate Cookies (a partial success: they resembled cowpats and spread out so much on the baking tray that in fact they resembled one large cowpat. They didn’t taste so bad though, in fact, my husband said they tasted like cookies his Mom used to cook when he was a boy. My dog also approves. She finished off the few that were left in the tin, which in turn was open on the coffee table, leaving only a few telltale (or tail) crumbs on the settee and on her nose “what me?”), Pistachio Macaroons (some were undercooked, giving them a desirable chewiness, others were slightly overcooked, they pale green colour had turned to golden and they were a bit more brittle: all variants were delicious though! And my Atkins-ing Mum and Grandma have decided they can eat these as they have no flour in them!), Rhubarb and Walnut Muffins (delicious despite some ingredient tweaking) and the most lovely cake (which my husband has dubbed his favourite!), a Swedish delicacy called Mjuk Toscakaka. This is taken from Tamasin Day-Lewis’ Art of the Tart and tastes like a Vanilla Pudding rather than a cake. It is a very tender sponge with a crunchy almond and caramel topping (and, more importantly is dead easy to make!):
150g butter
125g Caster Sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g plain flour (sifted)
1 tsp baking powder5 tbsp water (tap, not hot)

For topping:
30g Flaked Almonds (although I used blanched almonds chopped up my mini chopper)
60g butter
5 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp milk

Method:
Heat oven to 180c. Butter 9" tart tin (I used 7.5" and lined it with greaseproof). Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs gradually, then add vanilla extract. Sift in flour and baking powder, beat thoroughly. Add water and beat until smooth. I did this on my KA and it took about 5 minutes.Scrape into tart tin, smooth top and bake for 30 mins.Remove from oven, turn up oven to 200c.Make the topping: Put all ingredients in saucepan over medium heat until all amalgamated and bubbling. Pour over top of cake (this is where you hope the cake hasn't gone over the top of the tart tin!). Put back in oven for 5 minutes. Leave to cool for at least 5 minutes for the top to set. It has a lovely, crunchy topping and the cake is tender, almost like a pudding, real nursery food!

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Spring Time!

The onset of spring, heralded by the Daffodils turning their glorious gold lion’s manes heavenward to absorb as much sunlight as possible and tiny ferns uncurling like little prehistoric plants as the frosts eventually cease annoying us every morning, brings with it the promise of new season vegetables. On the walk I take with Coney every morning, I am amazed and excited by seeing the allotments springing into life: tiny spring onion shoots delicately scenting the air, spring greens ready to pluck and serve with roast lamb, the baby carrot’s fluffy green fronds waiting to be pulled from the warm soil. Not to mention new peas and broad beans. Pasta Primavera ingredients.
This first burst of greenery always brings out the cave dweller in me. I suppose it’s because we have spent all winter hibernating that we’re aching to feel alive again, to feel the warm sun on our faces. I feel like catching my own supper and sleeping amongst the ferns (if only the dog faeces, used condoms and broken glass wasn’t such an inhibitor). It always seems as though each year is greener than it ever has been before, but really, like walking around in the dark, it’s just our eyes readjusting to the newness once again.
I might seem almost evangelical about it, but spring, it seems to me, has been a long time coming. We are nearing the end of April and have only had one or two days that have seemed warm enough to sit outside. Everything is coming back to life, almost before your eyes, as the sun, at last with some heat in it, slowly coaxes and cajoles. How I envy the gardeners, so devoted to their precious vegetables. I wish that I had the patience or inclination to lovingly tend to the tiny seedlings each day as though I were nurturing a child. Unfortunately I was born impatient (in spite of being born two weeks late), although I am slowly learning, through cookery, specifically baking, that with patience, you will be rewarded (I am learning to be more resourceful and less remorseful in the kitchen).
Each year the gardeners too are rewarded with the freshest tasting produce for their labours. Thankfully they are often generous enough (or their glut is too immense) to sell the odd bunch of carrots or freshly dug new potatoes by the side of the road. This is the true organic produce, not the green labelled stuff from the supermarkets that is always hopelessly overpriced. Yet I know of some people who trust the supermarket’s organic range rather than the dirt encrusted veg for sale by the roadside. Their loss.
With the promise of all this good weather at a time unspecified in the future, I have a renewed desire to cook some new dishes. I feel that I am chocolated out, at least until autumn and am craving tart fruit pies and ice creams and instead of stodgy stews and roast dinners and comforting risottos, I am looking forward to making some sprightly soups. My husband is currently on a bread making frenzy, which goes perfectly with the soup obsession. Also, what better way to make use of the season’s short bounty? Soups are fantastic for concentrating the very essence of an ingredient, luring out the flavour that you just know is hidden away. It was a wise man (or woman) that realised that lettuce would be even better cooked than it already is raw. I have made lettuce wilted in a cream and white wine sauce, enhanced lightly with mint and sharing top billing with Petit Pois. This has then been served over a simply grilled salmon fillet and baby new potatoes. I have also braised baby gem lettuce in the oven in a simple stock and served with roast chicken.

Over the weekend, we produced both brown and white bread, to be served alongside Shrimp Bisque and Cauliflower Soups. The Bisque is a labour intensive soup, in the Cordon Bleu tradition, extracting every microscopic droplet of flavour from the shrimp. Tiny, diced vegetables are sweated down then sauteed shell-on shrimp that have been pureed in a blender are added, along with some fish stock, passed through a mouli-legume (which, incidentally, is the first time I used that particular gadget), reheated with some white breadcrumbs and then passed through the mouli again. It is minutely seasoned with salt and some Cayenne pepper. The taste is pure shrimp. It is delicate but the texture is like a velvety cream. Completely delicious with wholemeal bread.

Another springtime treat is the first cut asparagus, from the local PYO farm. A sign outside counts down the days until it is ready: the anticipation is great. “Not ready today, hopefully tomorrow!” Eventually a little tiny ramshackle booth holding it’s precious bounty of Asparagus is open for business. The emerald green bundles, fat and stumpy and glistening with dew, are demanding to be dipped in melted butter. I am planning on making an Asparagus Tart and Soup once we grow tired of eating them with our fingers.

Of course, this is England and with the gaudy sunshine comes miserable rain, and the water ratio is far greater. I am consoling myself with the fact that the cherry tree outside of work will produce the sweetest, most bountiful harvest of fruit yet.

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A VOLCANIC CHOCO-DISASTER

Yesterday at work, whilst complaining that we have no cake in the office (or biscuits or chocolate for that matter), I stepped up to to the proverbial tea-plate and made a quadruple chocolate loaf cake (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast). I say quadruple, however it’s more like your bog-standard double because I couldn’t be bothered to make the chocolate syrup or shave the chocolate on the top (and to be honest, I think that the shavings barely count as a fourth choco-element anyway, artistic licence I assume). The batter was incredibly easy, everything in to the KitchenAid (one of the most useful Anniversary gifts – ever!), give a good mix round then slowly pour in some boiling water, pour into loaf tin and in the oven for an hour at 180c. Incidentally, the chocolate batter was the most delicious raw cake product I have ever tasted. Sort of like the icing on a Sara Lee double chocolate gateau but without the chemicals and moussy texture. So, in the oven it went, and I pottered around finishing off the egg and bacon (and sausage and fried onion) pie that was to be our supper.
After forty minutes, temptation, as usual, got the better of me and I peeked at the cake. I was expecting to see the cake, risen but not yet completely cooked. Unfortunately, instead of the wafting aroma of chocolate, I was greeted with cocoa-scented smoke, billowing out and making my eyes water, albeit in a most pleasurable manner. Pushing the sensory overload aside, I quickly retrieved the cake from the oven, peered remorsefully at the blackened, billowy edges, and broke a charred morsel off to sample. Actually, burnt chocolate cake is not unpleasant tasting. It becomes smokily resonant; you can see where the affinity between chillis and chocolate begins.
A skewer in the cake reveals the middle to be runny, not Brownie squidgy-runny but this-cake-doesn’t-have-a-hope-in-hell-of-being-cooked runny. The crack running through the middle of the cake, described in the recipe, was present but once removed from the oven it had gone past the crack stage and into the crater stage – an oozy runny crater. So, back in the oven t’was the cake banished but covered this time with some greaseproof paper to avoid the onset of further charring. After another 15 minutes the cake seemed more cooked than previously so I took it out, speared it, and was content with it’s Brownie Squidgy-Runny Centre. Left overnight to cool, by morning it had set into a not hugely attractive looking loaf cake (the central ‘crack’ still insisted on crater-dom) but which tasted darkly, hugely rich, leaving the consumer with a caffeine kick that makes your jaw tighten and your body jitter. Perhaps if I had poured over the chocolate syrup, in accordance with the recipe, on removal from the oven, the cake would have improved in texture. Perhaps, like the old and wrinkly women who use Collagen, the chocolate syrup would have filled in the gaping crater. Perhaps it was because I used enormous whole chunks of chocolate in the mixture instead of morsels or chips. Who knows? All that matters in the end is that in the end it tasted great (just when you think that you can’t eat anything more chocolately, along comes another recipe) and let’s be honest, a loaf cake is not made for looks but for the family cake tin, for you to cut a huge, comforting chunk of and eat in front of telly. Just beware of the serious sugar comedown that follows.
The point is that mistakes happen in the kitchen. It is inevitable. Last night, both my loaf cake and my bacon and egg pie were partial disasters (the egg wasn’t cooked properly in the pie so liquid egg white oozed out when I cut it open. Not entirely conducive to piquing one’s appetite – back in the oven that went too). Some cookbooks give you cosy reassurances that your cake may stick a little, your pastry may be a little bit short but they can’t hold your hand every step of the way. Ovens vary widely (and I put the blame of last night’s mistakes wholly at the mechanical feet of mine), as do quality of ingredients and myriad of other factoring elements. As I demonstrated last night, albeit wearily, mistakes can be rectified, disasters salvaged. This is also the reason why I save my experimental recipes for my husband and work colleagues.
And as I write, my head is still spinning, woozily, from the sugar and caffeine in the chocolate cake. I think I need to lie down.

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Cupcakes and Muffins!

OK, so a first for me. I’m writing a review of the production of the various sweetmeats that I am cooking today – as I cook them! Aye caramba! I hear you all cry. Yes, it really is that exciting!
Now, onto the cooking. As you will remember from the last posting, I am baking Baklava Muffins, Carrot Cupcakes and Pistachio Macaroons. And in that order too. Easiest first. Now I have to find the walnuts for Baklava mix. Easier said than done.
Joy of joys! They are in the fourth place I look! This must be a record!! Now to chop them finely.
OK, add some melted butter, cinnamon, Demarara (the most outgoing sounding of all the sugars) Sugar, stir and stand to one side. The bowl that is, not you. This is to be our Baklava filling and topping.
Then mix up the muffin mix, which is fairly plain, buttermilk, flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, egg, melted butter, sugar.

Suffice to say, the limitations of typing a review of a recipe whilst simultaneously cooking said recipe are great. Therefore, some four days later, I am now writing about it. Incidentally, these recipes are from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess.
The Baklava muffins emerged from the oven, the tops encrusted with the chopped walnut/brown sugar buttery mixture and smelling aromatically of Cinnamon. Whilst still hot the eight bronzed muffins were to be drizzle with 150ml honey. This seems like an awful lot and I thought to myself that they would taste even sweeter than traditional Baklava, in all its honeyed/filo glory. The muffins absorb most of the honey, leaving the nutty tops looking glossy and tempting. It is advisable to leave them for a little while or run the risk of bee-inducing honey fingers – not such a bad proposition if you’re sharing them with your husband. Unfortunately I wasn’t and I still couldn’t wait for them to cool off: they are not as tooth-achingly sweet as you might think, the plain buttermilk muffin batter and the slightly bitter crunch of the walnuts counter the sweetness perfectly. Perhaps not as enduringly desirable as true Baklava but then again, we don’t always want to consume so much sugar that we get a migraine. It dawned on me, as I looked at the cooling rack of 11 glistening cakes that perhaps making another dozen or so that day would seem a crazy bored woman’s notion: who would eat them all??
So, the next morning, alone once again, I prepared to make Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing. The Baklava muffins had been devoured by my husband, I had delivered two to my mother and another three to my grandparents. Families are always welcome recipients of cakes it would seem, Easter traditions or not.
I have always loved Carrot Cake, even in the days when it belonged, somewhat erroneously, to the realm of tie-dye kaftan wearing Vegan hippies. I even made a carrot cake for my end of year Domestic Science exam, way back in 1980something. There is a certain perfect, perverse alchemy in turning a vegetable into a cake. Kids love the idea of eating gross sounding food (and another quick dessert springs to mind: from Italy, sea salt and good quality olive oil poured over proper vanilla ice cream, very unusual, but good in the same way that French Fries dipped into Chocolate Shakes is good). And not just any old cake. I first tasted green tomato chutney turned into a gloriously sweet and moist loaf cake (more of a pudding really but they don’t have pudding as per know it in America), served with the heavenly 100% pure chemical Cool-Whip (relatively similar to Dream Topping but even lighter and less granular in texture), when my mother-in-law served it to us one Thanksgiving. It was reminiscent of an apple cake but with an ethereal taste, difficult to pinpoint – almost impossible to imagine it starting life as an unripe tomato. Courgettes are another savoury delicacy used in cakes, as are potatoes, beetroot and I can only imagine that swede and squash and parsnip might work too. Including the tomato, which is technically a fruit anyway, the reason that certain vegetables work so well is due in part to the sweetness of their flavour, their relatively high moisture/starch content and the fact that when grated, they break down, almost imperceptibly into the cake batter as it cooks. Carrot is very sweet and very juicy, hence it works so successfully.
Like fruit-cake, a vegetable cake has many variants: sultanas, walnuts, brown sugar or white, cream cheese icing or butter icing or no icing at all. It is a cake that either demands an age-old family recipe or constant tweaking, depending on how obsessive you are about baking (or carrot cake). The cupcakes are a modern-day twist on the carrot cake, utilising all the traditional elements but in a dinky size. Like most cupcakes and muffins they are also incredibly easy to prepare, no more than 30 minutes from start to finish. The only problem, as always with cupcakes, is waiting for them to cool off sufficiently to be iced and then consumed voraciously.
The flavour is delicately spiced, with a wholemeal taste (although I used plain white flour, I think you could use wholemeal flour for an extra nutty taste, but you would probably need to adjust the carrot), the crunch of the chopped walnuts and the slightly sweet, slightly sour cream cheese topping that has been balanced perfectly with a spritz of fresh lime juice. They are delicious but I have a feeling that a large carrot cake is slightly moister, more carroty, more satisfactory. But these would be perfect for a healthy kid’s lunchbox (if such a thing exists these days).
The point about making cupcakes and muffins is that they are almost foolproof. They are easy and quick. There are so many variations of muffins that you could have one for every day of the week for the next 5 years, and probably more.

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CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE

Ok, so there's no cheese in this entry (well, that's probably a matter of opinion), I'm just dropping a mention of my favourite Ween CD.

Whilst there’s not much left unsaid about chocolate, without a doubt it is not just the best friend of the Bridget Jones’ of the world. However, chocolate, if only temporarily, does makes you feel better, whatever incarnation you consume it in: hot chocolate, cookies, brownies, cake, liqueur or a kilo bar. As an example of this, whilst eating half a Snickers Bar (and, most cynical sales ploy of the week goes to Mars for producing the Duo Bar, a replacement for the banned King Size Bar), I was reading a recipe for giant chocolate chip cookies (which I plan to make tonight) and writing a shopping list down that noted, yes, chocolate. I was also thinking that tonight I might share the Aero Bar I have hidden away with my husband. Chocolate is time consuming - once you start to crave it nothing will shift it from your desire and certainly not a punnet of Blueberries - healthy though they may be. Food fascism is a real prison of the mind and, like smokers food fascists insist that there is nothing wrong or unhealthy with their lifestyle choices. This may or may not be true, but let’s face it, life is stressful enough these days and to deny yourself the pleasure of eating food is to deny yourself oxygen. Food and eating is the one thing that ties people, families, together. It is difficult to imagine any joy in sharing a Quinoa Stir-Fry or Broccoli smoothie (although my husband, the crazy American, would probably love a Broccoli smoothie!) whereas sharing a homemade chocolate cake or fresh batch of cookies is another matter altogether.

Like the capacian in chillies which lifts your emotion, chocolate contains Seratonin AND Phenylethylamine, mood enhancers that occur naturally in the human brain. In fact, the very idea of combining chilli and chocolate seems like a natural and delicious alternative to other mood enhancers, i.e. drugs, alcohol etc. and whilst the effects fade a lot quicker, it is certainly cheaper and not quite as bad for you (well, have you ever had a chocolate hangover?). Chocolate also gives you a real energy boost, the darker and more bitter the chocolate, the more caffeine it will contain too, although much less than a cup of Espresso. Ironically, a square or two of chocolate before bed helps me sleep. I say ironic, but really it’s just that the Seratonin helps you relax, one of the main factors behind a good nights sleep.

Incidentally, you can buy ‘herbal’ pills that replicate Seratonin, which you take just before bed. They are supposed to be a sleep-aid. I have tried these because I have a life-long love affair with sleep and dreams. For many years I have experimented with what you can take or eat to make your dreams more vivid. I have always considered that a bad dream is a good way to ‘restart’ the heart, an adrenalin rush akin to falling down the stairs but considering one of my hobbies is reading about true crime, it is amazing that none of decaying corpses that I read about on a regular basis come back to haunt me when I’m asleep. The Seratonin pills are really an expensive way to give yourself vivid dreams. They don’t increase your sleeping hours or help you fall asleep straight away, a nice cup of hot chocolate made with milk can though.

But to be honest, who really cares about what chocolate can do for your well-being? It tastes good and that’s what matters. Like watching a video nasty, you know that nothing good will come of it if you indulge too often really but it seems like a good idea at the time. More importantly, to a cook, it is a versatile ingredient and can be used in both savoury and sweet dishes. I use a chunk of Mexican chocolate in Chilli Con Carne. The Mexican chocolate comes in round, segmented tablets and has a grainy texture. It is flavoured with Cinnamon and tastes quite unlike regular eating chocolate. It is perfect however for making hot chocolate as it has excellent melting qualities and a unique redolent warming taste, quite unlike that of British hot chocolates. In the Chilli however, a couple of chunks thrown in at the end and these qualities add a complex back-note to the spiciness of the other ingredients, a hidden depth that rounds the dish off perfectly, in the same way that prunes add a mysterious hint to less spicy (but no less tasty!) meat dishes.

Of course, the area where chocolate really shines is baked desserts: puddings, cakes, biscuits, muffins, soufflés etc. And because it is versatile, you can combine it with fruits for summer desserts or liqueurs for dinner parties and it has a wonderful affinity with garden herbs such as Rosemary or Lavender.

One evening some organic chocolate cocoa powder saved, if not my life, then my cooking reputation. My husband had a work colleague over for supper and I, not really knowing the correct protocol for such events, hadn’t prepared a dessert although I had spent a good hour preparing a chocolate bread and butter pudding (more on that later) which needed 48 hours chilling in the fridge before baking. Later on that evening, I mentioned to our guest if he liked desserts – the question was really meant innocently enough as I was flipping through a cookbook of puddings at the time – to which he replied ‘well, if you’re offering I’m not going to say no, seeing as you’re kind enough...’ I cast my husband an aghast look and quickly scanned a Meals in Under Thirty Minutes cookbook. Only one recipe could be used in accordance with our pantry status (pretty scant at the time) and that was Self-Saucing Chocolate Puddings. Great! I gave my husband a triumphant wink and headed, cookbook in hand, towards the kitchen, wondering why on earth I hadn’t just said to our guest that ‘well, we don’t actually have any dessert, I was just making conversation...’ I guess I must enjoy a challenge. The recipe is painfully easy. Grease four ramekin dishes. In a mixing bowl combine some melted unsalted butter, good quality (I used Green and Blacks) cocoa powder, baking powder, self-raising flour, pinch of salt and a couple of eggs. Oh and some caster sugar. Divide this mixture into the ramekins. Boil a kettle at this point. Now, sprinkle a dessertspoon each of Demerara sugar and cocoa powder onto the top of each pudding, followed by a quarter of a cup of boiling water. This seems like a lot of water but melts with the sugar to make your sauce. Place ramekins (actually before you add the ‘sauce’ mixture) into a roasting tin and bake in a hot oven, about 180c for 15 minutes or so. The puddings puff up over the top of the ramekins, soufflé-like but an inserted skewer will not come out clean as the sauce that was poured on the top, will have sunk to the bottom of the pudding. Dust with some icing sugar and serve as is. The sponge has a delicate chocolate flavour, not cloying at all, which is fortunate when you consider that the sticky sauce is incredibly rich. You could easily gussy up this dessert with some fresh raspberries or other soft fruit of your choice or a ball of good vanilla ice cream. And best of all, it was, literally, thrown together in less than 10 minutes, ready to eat in less than 30. I don’t see that there would be a problem with preparing the pudding mixture in advance and then adding the ‘sauce’ mixture when you’re ready to cook them.
On the other end of the scale we have the altogether more luxurious and (initially) time consuming chocolate bread and butter pudding from Delia Smith's Winter Collection. If you use the best quality dark chocolate you can afford (I tend to use either Green and Blacks or Lindt 75%. Vahlrona Italian chocolate is the one to aspire to but to be honest, unless it’s a particularly special occasion, at £4.00 a bar, it is really, really expensive), it is the most decadent chocolate dessert you could possibly imagine, and all under the homely, unsophisticated title of bread and butter pudding.
It is simple to make but a bit fiddly. Use a loaf of good quality stale white broad, sliced thinly (1/2”), crusts removed and then cut into four triangles. Break some good quality chocolate up into pieces, put in a bain-marie (or if like me, you’re not as posh, a small mixing bowl over the top of a pan of barely simmering water), with some single cream, a tablespoon or so of rum (although I used Brandy), cinnamon, butter, caster sugar, warm slowly until the chocolate has melted into the cream. Pour chocolate mixture over some beaten eggs (basically you’re making a custard here but without the tears that come with making proper custard. A cautionary tale: I once made my own custard to serve with a homemade Jam Roly Poly, and because I’m horribly impatient, instead of slowly stirring the egg and cream mixture over an incredibly low heat, I whumped the heat up a bit (well, quite a lot) until it started to boil, the custard thickened up a treat – that is until I came to pour it over the Jam Roly Poly and the custard had split into a sort of watery scrambled egg mess – let that be a lesson to us all), stir until combined. Pour some of the custard into the buttered baking dish so it coats the bottom quite thickly, then add a layer of the bread, then cover the layer thickly with the custard, then another layer, then finish up the custard. Cling film, leave to cool then retire pudding to the fridge for at least the next 24 hours. When you are ready to cook said dish, heat oven to 180c, remove cling-film, bung it in the oven for maybe 30 minutes, or until the top is deliciously crisp and you can feel the tremor of bubbling custard beneath that top layer. Serve with some single cream. My granddad said this was the best chocolate dessert he ever tasted and believe me when I say that he is my most fervent critic. He relishes in critiquing my food. For example, I once prepared an old fashioned Scottish dessert, the name of which escapes me, but it involves soaking oatmeal in cream and whiskey and sugar then serving with some raspberries. It’s extremely yummy I think but his words to me, as he churned the oatmeal mix over in his mouth with all the enthusiasm of a cow chewing the same old cud: “well Miss P, I don’t think much to this!” and then proceeded to finish the dessert off! Furthermore, we have the time when I made the aforementioned sausage and lentil dish, made extra especially for my grandparents, grandly displayed to my grandmother who will try anything once, left them to it, and half an hour later got a phone call from my grandmother telling me that my granddad has said “I came racing down from my bath, thinking I had something nice for my tea and I get this....this muck!” referring to the ‘hippy’ lentils. Ah well. He said the bread and butter pud tasted like Death by Chocolate. This may be the case if I should be on the receiving end of anymore non-constructive criticisms!
Anyway, one is growing weary of all this chocolate speak. I shall post this today with the promise that with the four day Easter weekend ahead, I have a cooking marathon ahead of me: Chick Pie Filo Pie, Baklava Muffins, Pistachio Macaroons, Carrot Cupcakes and Easy Almond Cake. Yes, I’m turning the whole family diabetic!

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A New Addition

Spring is supposedly in the air and now seemed a good time to add a new addition of the four-legged kind to the household. Since our much-missed Jack Russell, Benji, passed away in December, we have felt that our new home was lacking something. We had always planned on homing a retired Greyhound, particularly since we visited a Greyhound ‘museum’ in Kansas a couple of years ago. Greyhounds are one of the most regal breeds, and rightly so, given their ancient heritage, however our adopted dog, Coney doesn’t seem to realise this.
When we visited our local Greyhound Rescue Centre, Clarks Farm (http://www.clarksfarmgreyhounds.org.uk/), we were extremely impressed with the professionalism and devotion of the staff, the kennels are amazingly clean and, most importantly of all, the dogs are happy. We walked several Greyhounds but found an affinity with one beautiful girl called Magic. We passed our home visit (I would like to say with flying colours AND I held back on the homemade chocolate chip cookies until after we had been told we were successful!) and collected her the following afternoon. She seemed happy but confused to be leaving her home of the last three months and laid on the back seat of our car with nary a whimper or a whine.
We had decided to rename her Coney as a tribute to my husband’s brother who passed away in February. One of his favourite places to eat was a fast food restaurant called Coney Island Hot Dogs. Not my own personal choice of fast foods, but I have observed my husband and his brother consume four or five of these scrawny, chilli-gunge covered dogs in one sitting – each! As we wanted Magic’s name to be special, my husband thought Coney had all the right connotations, he remembered many fun times eating Coney Island Dogs with his brother.
Of course, she is exactly as we expected and much more besides. She has many human traits and without wanting to anthropomorphise her too much, she is in many ways like her mistress: she growls when she gets woken up in the middle of the night, she comfort eats and she likes to preserve her energy as much as possible. She is a very picky eater though and has unusual tastes. Of course, being a Greyhound, one has to watch one’s figure but it is so hard to say no to custard creams or a decaying mouse down the lane. She is a dog though and dogs will eat when they get hungry so after a couple of days of being fed scraps of chicken and ham and turning her regal ant-eater’s nose up at her ‘delicious’ maintenance mix, she eventually relented and, when our backs were turned (for a lady doesn’t like to be seen scoffing in public), she daintily picked at her bowl.
Unfortunately, the food that is produced for dogs doesn’t seem to be as appetising as a Bean Burrito. Perhaps someone should design a range of dog food that has all sorts of gee-whizz flavours, Crème Brule, Taco Soup, Carrot Cake, Barbeque Beef Crisps...
Anyway, my preoccupation with Coney is the reason for my tardiness with posting over the last week or so, but I am currently writing an article about chocolate desserts and I have lots of new supper dishes to add, including a cornmeal, mushroom and Chorizo bake.

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