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Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #4

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the dishwasher.

When I thought about today's challenge in prospect, I thought the absence of recourse to the dishwasher might cramp my style in the kitchen big time. I felt, if I was honest with myself, that I had become rather too dependent on this resident in my kitchen as a kind of unpaid, mechanical assistant. When we lived in London, I did all my cooking in a pocket-handkerchief-sized kitchen with a doll's-house sized fridge. All washing up had to be done by hand as we had no space for a dishwasher and it was only when we moved to Oxfordshire to a bigger house with a correspondingly bigger kitchen that we acquired this particular bit of kit and, of course, having it there, means it's been used all the time and the prospect of a day without using it, I confess, did fill me with some secret dismay. 

It's not that I never do any washing up by hand nowadays - there are always things that are not dishwasher-friendly that have to be hand washed - but I have come very much to rely on the dishwasher for the 'heavy-lifting' of cleaning cooking-pots, plates and cutlery and general batterie de cuisine. 

But my misgivings have not been borne out by today's experience. I've rather enjoyed not having to wait for the dishwasher to finish its programme before retrieving the articles I use a lot. And I've enjoyed the 'thinking time' washing-up by hand has provided at various junctures during the day. Completely unexpectedly, it's felt curiously liberating. To be fair, I haven't cooked anything too ambitious, or sticky, or greasy today - just the soup and the pumpkin rolls - so I may not be giving it a fair assessment and today only represents one day without it, after all, but let's just say that I am actually looking forward to the prospect of a few more dishwasher-free days over the course of the next few weeks. 

So today's menu has been as follows:

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
citrus fruit salad as per yesterday and the day before
sweet breakfast rolls from the freezer with blueberry and lemon verbena jam 


Lunch 
sourdough crackers (made as per my recipe here but with 30g rather than 20g rapeseed oil and no milk or aniseed so that they are vegan-friendly and also suitable for days down the line, when imported foods are banned)
yoghurt cheese and a taste of this summer's apricot and tomato chutney 
tomatoes

Tea
black tea
Armenian Easter buns from the freezer (yes, I know it's unseasonal but that's what the buns are called - they're slightly sweet, dotted with raisins and candied pink grapefruit peel and flavoured with mahlepi and aniseed)


Supper
tomato and sweet potato soup - made from onions, fennel, carrots, red peppers, sweet potatoes, tinned tomatoes and homemade vegetable stock cooked in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes and then whizzed to a deep rusty orange purée
pumpkin rolls / KGB* rolls from the freezer (for the bacon fanciers)
fig and melon spoon sweet as per yesterday


*KGB rolls are an affectionate name given in this house to rolls with a secret agenda. On the outside they look like plain white rolls but in their depths they carry a covert filling of bacon pieces cooked with red onions and Aleppo pepper. H loves the things and fortunately, there are a few of them in the freezer. 


The pumpkin rolls with their sunny, yellow colour were a cheering lift on a cold, dank and grey evening and I think they go well with soup. 

All in all a much easier day than I had anticipated despite rather more time spent at the sink than usual!

E x












Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #5

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... wheat.

Going wheat-free is counter-intuitive for me - I bake wheat-based bread most days and it's a rare day indeed when I don't consume something made from wheat so today has been a departure from the norm - no bad thing perhaps.

Today's wheat-free menu plan was as follows:

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
a pear and a clementine
porridge made with oats, milk and water and drizzled with maple syrup 


Lunch
homemade Greek-style yoghurt
half a mango and a clementine

Tea
black tea
Christopher's macaroons - my brother-in-law's recipe which I pass on below.

Supper 
cottage pie made with minced beef, onions, carrots, celery, tinned chopped tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, homemade vegetable stock* and topped with mashed potato dotted with butter
steamed spinach and carrots 


stewed blackberry and apple with some more Greek-style yoghurt on the side (I have a yoghurt glut at the moment!)

* I usually add a teaspoonful of Marmite to my cottage pie base. Truffle Marmite, for preference, if I have a jar on the go, which adds a wonderful, rich, extra, umami flavour but although I had initially thought that Marmite would get under the wire today as 'yeast extract', when I checked the label on the jar, it clearly states 'contains wheat' so I had to omit it. 

Have you tried Truffle Marmite? It's the latest in a series of varieties that Marmite have produced recently. It has a slightly strange, not entirely pleasant aroma, compared to original Marmite. Our verdict, (as a household of dyed-in-the-wool Marmite-lovers) is that it is not terribly nice on its own, spread on toast or in sandwiches. All that changes when you use it in cooking though where it is dark brown, liquid gold! Add a teaspoonful to mushroom or meat sauces for pasta, to other mince based dishes like cottage pie, to gravy, or to a glaze for sausages before baking or barbecuing and you are in for a treat. I recommend it wholeheartedly. I don't know how available it is abroad but here in the UK, Sainsbury's stocks it. 

Back to tea-time macaroons! Macaroons have become very trendy in recent years especially those little French-style ones in different colours and flavours, often sandwiched together with various fillings. My preference is for the larger, more old-fashioned, single-decker kind which are plain and more homely in appearance but very good. Pâtisserie Valérie used to do a particularly delicious version of these but they were a staple in old fashioned British bakeries and cake shops for decades. Sometimes topped with a single blanched almond or a scarlet glacé cherry.  Macaroons like these can be deceptive. Although simple in formula, it's not easy to get the right balance of crisp outside and melting inside and it has to be said that some iterations can be disappointingly dry. 

This is the recipe I use, which I find excellent. It comes from my brother-in-law and so in this house they're known as 'Christopher's macaroons'.  

2 large egg whites
250g caster sugar
200g ground almonds
½tsp almond extract
blanched almonds
rice paper

Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Stir in the rest of the ingredients. 

Wet your hands and form the mixture into 10 golf-ball size portions - don't make them too small or they can dry out more easily. Place each ball of dough onto a rice paper-lined baking tray with plenty of space between each one. Now fill a mug with cold water and take a fork and dipping it into the cold water first, flatten each macaroon slightly. Wet the fork afresh each time. Use a slight rocking motion from side to side to release the fork as you lift it up and it won't stick. Add a single blanched almond in the centre of each macaroon. 

Bake at 130-140℃ for about half an hour depending on the size of the macaroons, your oven and the way the macaroons look - watch them like a hawk and take them out sooner, if you think they're done. They should be just tinged with colour to give you that crisp shell and melting centre. Leave the baking tray on a wire rack to cool - the macaroons are fragile on emerging from the oven. 


Once the macaroons are cold you can cut round them with kitchen scissors to remove the excess rice paper or just tear them away.

E x





Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #6

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all out of season foods.

Eating seasonally is more complicated for us in our globally interconnected world than it was in the past when it was a simple matter of availability. So much of our food is either imported or manipulated to be available out of its natural growing season that apart from some obvious candidates such as summer berries or asparagus say, it's quite hard to have a feel for what is genuinely naturally in season at any one time. I found a useful site here which lists seasonal food in the UK for each month of the year. There is a sister site for the US and Canada and I'm sure there are equivalents for elsewhere in the world too. 

For December in the UK seasonal food primarily means winter vegetables - potatoes, carrots, onions, parsnips, leeks, cabbage, cauliflower, pumpkin, turnips, swedes etc, home-produced autumn fruit that keeps naturally in cold storage such as apples and pears, supplemented by meat, game and shellfish. Add to that imported seasonal foods such as cranberries, pineapples and citrus fruit such as tangerines, clementines, satsumas, oranges and grapefruit, new season's dried fruits, a wide range of fish, including cod, haddock, coley, sole, plaice and mackerel and nuts - almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts and chestnuts. 

As I said in my introductory post, in the past, eggs and dairy products were less plentiful in winter as the heavy milk yield and prolific egg-laying of spring and summer naturally dwindled towards the end of the year. Cheese and salted butter made from summer milk surpluses might last however into the winter with careful storage with some cheeses only really coming into their own in the winter after maturing over the autumn. Modern food production has evened out these natural fluctuations but I shall try to keep them in mind. 

There are a couple of no-unseasonal-food days over the coming weeks, if I remember correctly, but this has been the meal plan for today:

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice - pressed from this autumn's apples grown in the garden and bottled 
stewed blackberry and apple made from this autumn's apples as above and foraged blackberries
porridge made with oats, milk and water, drizzled with maple syrup

Lunch
aubergine and walnut butter* with crudités and sourdough crackers
a Golden Delicious apple from the garden and a pear


*This is based on a recipe I found over twenty years ago in Lunchbox by Amanda Grant. I've simplified the original a bit and fiddled with the quantities but the method is the same. You roast two or three halved aubergines for an hour until soft and, for just a few minutes of that time, add a baking tray with some walnut pieces to the oven, to toast them lightly. Once cool, scoop the flesh from the aubergine skins and tip it and the cooled toasted walnuts into the food processor. Add some salt and pepper, a splash of sherry vinegar and some walnut oil and whizz to a subtle, taupe-coloured purée. Sometimes I add a bit of thick, Greek-style yoghurt too though I didn't today. The stuff may look a bit drab but it's addictive. It makes a good prepare-in-advance starter for a dinner party or a light lunch with crudités, crackers, breadsticks or whatever you fancy.


Tea 
black tea
individual panettone with golden raisins, orange and vanilla 

Supper
scallop soup - the base is made from leeks, fennel and potato, homemade vegetable stock, salt, pepper and a good pinch of dried saffron, cooked in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes before being whizzed till smooth in the blender and reheated just before serving. I then halved and added the scallops and some whole milk and simmered the whole for a few minutes to cook the fish before finishing with chopped fresh dill from the garden.
pumpkin rolls 


fresh pineapple and mango with lime zest and juice
almond and pistachio cantuccini** flavoured with fresh rosemary from the garden


**Cantuccini are a good use for some of the seasonal nuts coming into their own now and I tend to associate them with the run-up to Christmas. This recipe uses a mixture of raw almonds and raw pistachio kernels but you can use any nuts you like. I like to flavour the dough with some vanilla seeds and some very finely chopped rosemary leaves which are still green and tender in a UK garden in winter if you just pick the youngest tips.  


Mix 225g plain flour, 175g caster sugar, a pinch of salt, ½tsp baking powder and any flavourings you want in a big bowl. Add 175g raw nuts of your choice and mix together. Add 2 large beaten eggs to the bowl  and mix to a soft, quite sticky dough. Form the dough into 3 slim sausage shapes and place on a lined baking tray. Bake at 180 ℃ for 25 minutes.

 
Remove from the oven and slice each sausage into approx 1.5cm thick slices. Turn the slices so that the cut edges are uppermost and return to the oven for another 10 minutes. 


Cool on a wire rack. They are versatile - as good dunked in tea or coffee, as in their classical accompaniment, vin santo, - and they're useful to have in a tin, as they keep for ages, to be deployed as needed. 

Because they keep so well and are quite robust, bagged up in a cellophane bag and tied with a pretty ribbon, they also make a nice small gift for anyone you want to give a little something to at this time of year, or to pop in an adult's stocking when it gets to Christmas. These probably won't make it that far so I shall have to make another batch for stocking-fillers nearer the time.


E x





Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #7

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all imported foods.

When I sat down to think about both what was off limits and what was permitted under the heading of today's challenge it was quite a sobering exercise. In the UK, we are very dependent on imported food, something of which we've become increasingly aware, both in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and more recently, with the war in Ukraine. It's not that we don't produce any food here - the UK's 'green and pleasant land' still has much to offer for food production but a lot of the things we take for granted in our supermarkets and on our plates comes from abroad with all the attendant air-miles that go with that.

Once you exclude all imported foods, particularly in December, you are left with what does look, at first sight, like very plain fare. For starters, almost all the flavouring agents we take for granted in our cooking these days are gone, including even the bog-standard basics of table salt and pepper, for goodness' sake! 

Fortunately, at least as far as salt is concerned, help is at hand, in the form of UK produced flaky salt - Maldon Salt from Essex or Halen Môn from Anglesey. This is much more expensive than the free-running, imported salt you get in an ordinary salt cellar but it's lovely stuff with which to cook and season food.  Not, if I am honest, quite as good as my favourite sel gris de Guérande, the coarse, French salt from Brittany whose grey, slightly clumpy crystals, rich in sea-derived minerals, resemble granulated sugar and which I use for preference in my cooking. Never mind that however - I bought a tub of flaky Maldon salt and felt considerable relief that today, and any other day marked with this challenge, would not have to be salt-free.


Moving away from basic flavourings, as I said in my introductory post, many other basic foodstuffs are off limits today - a lot of fruit and vegetables, most beans and pulses, all rice, most oils (apart from rapeseed oil), cane sugar, chocolate, many cheeses, some meat and quite a lot of fish, and worst of all, coffee and tea! Yikes!

To say I felt dismay on realising this last ban, would be something of an understatement! No tea?! Forget salt and pepper, never mind foregoing basic fruit such as bananas or oranges, or air-freighted salads and tender vegetables from Kenya or the US, going without tea was going to be privation on a whole new scale! 

And then I remembered something. During WW2 when the UK's tea supply was under threat from the U-boat attacks on shipping convoys, Winston Churchill was so concerned about the threat to the national beverage that was (and still is) so universally depended upon in this country, that, in addition to buying up all the global tea supply he could, he commissioned plans to be drawn up for establishing tea plantations in Britain and it turns out that certain areas of the UK have a climate that is not dissimilar to that of Darjeeling where so much tea is grown. These plans were only shelved because the tea bush, Camellia sinensis, takes a good six years to reach harvestable maturity. 

Half a century down the line however, the baton was picked up by some enterprising horticulturalists and down in Tregothnan, in south-west Cornwall, I discover, a viable and thriving tea plantation exists today. Hallelujah! Having discovered this life-saving fact, I hastened to visit their website. Much of the tea they produce for sale is mixed with imported Indian tea to make a balanced and affordable, if still expensive, blend. My heart sank again - a blend of homegrown and imported tea was no good to me for this project. And then scrolling a bit further down, I spied the Holy Grail - a small, elegant tin of single estate, pure English tea! Eye-wateringly expensive but pure, home-produced, unimported English tea! Reader, I bought some! 

Moving on, but equipped with salt and my all-important tea, today's meals looked like this:

Breakfast
black Tregothnan tea
apple juice pressed from apples grown in the garden
a Golden Delicious apple from the garden, cold-stored in the garage since picking in late September 
oatcakes (made as per Day #3 but with all UK-produced ingredients - see below) with local Oxfordshire honeycomb




I had to make another batch of oatcakes as I suddenly realised that the batch in the tin contained soft brown sugar which is cane sugar and therefore imported. They also contained imported rather than British salt. Fortunately these are easy to rustle up quite quickly and the new batch is made with British caster sugar and Maldon sea salt. The tins are now carefully labelled as the contents look identical - you can taste the brown sugar in the originals and I do prefer that but this is nit-picking!



Interestingly, all British sugar, made from sugar beet, grown mostly in East Anglia, seems to produce only white sugar of various types - granulated, caster and icing sugars but nothing brown - no demerara sugar or my favourite soft brown muscovadoes. I guess this has something to do with a difference in the refinement process between sugar beet and sugar cane but I am not sure exactly what.

Lunch

I was out at lunchtime today and had to break my no-imported-food fast, I'm afraid.


Tea
black Tregothnan tea
toasted English wholemeal muffin (made from Lancashire-grown wheat, British butter, salt, yeast and milk) with homemade rose-hip jelly made from locally foraged rose-hips, crab-apples from the garden and British sugar


Supper
potato and turnip pie* made with British potato, turnips, carrots and onion, herbs from the garden and pastry made from British flour, butter and salt
steamed Cornish collard greens


Yes, that speckling you can see in the pic is black pepper - I added it on auto-pilot without thinking! By the time I realised what I'd done, the pie was in the oven!


bramble fool made with frozen, foraged Oxfordshire blackberries, British cream and sugar and homemade Greek-style yoghurt made from British milk (recipe comes The Hedgerow Cookbook by Ginny Knox and Caro Wilson)
shortbread made from British flour, butter, sugar and Maldon sea-salt


*This pie is a version of an old family recipe my mother used to make in the winter when I was a child. She used to add a small quantity of beef to the filling but it was known as 'potato and turnip pie' in honour of the main ingredients. It's very similar to Lord Woolton pie - the pie, made of home-grown vegetables that was popularised during the rationing and shortages of WW2. I rather like it in its vegetarian guise, despite its plainness, but there was grumbling in the ranks about the lack of meat so I gave in and cooked some locally produced pork sausages to go with it for the meat-hankerers.

Turnips are not as easy to get hold of as they were decades ago. I had to go to several supermarkets to get the two I needed for today's pie. A crisp, white English turnip, its skin flushed with a tinge of green and purple and, if you're lucky a sheaf of leaves to cook as turnip-tops still attached at the top of the root, is a thing of joy in the winter kitchen. The Italians, who handle greens with consummate artistry, have always prized 'cime di rapa' probably more than the roots from which they grew. Nowadays, even the turnips that are available have all been routinely shorn of their dark green top-knots which is a shame.

Some of the bantams have decided to start laying again, despite the cold, dank weather and dwindling light and a small bantam egg was perfect for using to glaze the pastry. Thank you very much, Minette!


For what looked as though it might have been a day of rather plain fare, this has not been a bad menu, I feel!

E x


Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #8

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all dairy products.

A non-dairy day today. Dairy products normally make up quite a significant percentage of my diet, especially yoghurt but also milk, a certain amount of cheese and quite a lot of butter in cooking and baking so today has felt a bit unusual. 

Traditional dairy products often get slightly frowned on, I feel, despite the rehabilitation of proper butter, in place of artificial margarines and spreads in recent years. Beside the smug virtue of so-called 'plant milks' and plant-based yoghurt, cream and cheese substitutes, the real McCoy often seems to have to apologise for itself. Of course, there are some people who simply cannot digest lactose and for whom dairy products are a recipe for indigestion, or worse, but the number of people for whom that is a serious issue is rather more limited than health gurus would have us believe. Dairy products, within reason, are good sources of protein, calcium and vitamins; they are produced to a very high standard in this country and they are delicious. I've missed them today.

Be that as it may, dairy products have been off today's menu. In their place has been the following:

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
pears and clementines
oatcakes (made as per Day #3) with honeycomb

Lunch
aubergine and walnut butter as per Day #6 multigrain seeded crackers
fruit - apples / pears /clementines

Tea
black tea
Pfeffernuße - the classic German cookie made with flour, spices, honey and egg. The recipe I use comes from Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss. They are raised with ammonium bicarbonate which gives them their special light texture. You can get this from a specialist German ingredient supplier such as this one. You'll find it listed in their bakery section under 'Baking Ingredients'. Its German name is 'Hirschhornsalz'. It gives off an unpleasant smell during baking but this soon dissipates and in no way affects the taste of the cookies which are very moreish. As with Maltesers, it's impossible to eat only one. 



Supper
Puy lentils cooked with fresh rosemary, thyme and bay leaves dressed while hot with French dressing* (apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and black pepper)
roasted red peppers in agrodolce dressing (apple cider vinegar, olive oil, agave syrup, salt and pepper)
ciabatta-style white rolls made from yeast, strong white bread flour, salt, olive oil and water




fruit - apples / pears /clementines and assorted nuts in their shells

*These Puy lentils are one of my favourite things. The fact that they are dead simple to make and happen to be vegan is by the by. For best results, firstly, make sure that you use genuine Puy (or Puy-type) lentils - the small dark, olive-green ones that hold their shape and texture after cooking which is what you need. A lentil purée, or dal, is a lovely thing but it's not what you want here. Secondly, add the dressing (made with plenty of salt - 1½ tsps salt:250g lentils) as soon as the lentils have been drained of their cooking water and are still piping hot. This is what enables them to absorb the oil and herby flavours and sing. Thirdly, the lentils are at their best while still warm so ideally, don't prepare them too far ahead of when you want to eat them. Leftovers stored in the fridge benefit from being warmed through in the microwave before serving and are very good with poached eggs. 


You can use any mixture of fresh herbs you like to cook with the lentils but rosemary, thyme and bay are a good starting point - a good few sprigs of each. I tend to leave the herbs in with the lentils unless I spot any very woody 'tree trunks' but you can fish the bay leaves and stalks out before serving, if you prefer. You can, with advantage, include a few peeled cloves of garlic too. I would do this but, sadly, garlic doesn't really agree with me these days so I omit it. 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #9

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... oils and fats.

Quite a tough ask, this one. I don't generally eat a lot of high-fat foods or use a lot of fat in my cooking (though I do use quite a bit in my baking) but not to eat, or use, any at all is a bit more challenging. I haven't been able to eliminate absolutely all fat today  - there's a little in the milk in my breakfast porridge, in the sourdough crackers, the aubergine and walnut butter and in my homemade yoghurt but I've done my best within reason.

Today's menu plan:

Breakfast
black tea
apple juice
citrus fruit salad
porridge (made with oats and semi-skimmed milk, diluted with water) and homemade date honey*

*This is a happy experiment from a couple of weeks ago. H went to Saudi Arabia back in September for a work conference, with the request to bring back, if he could, some date honey. Undaunted by his lack of fluent Arabic, he sallied forth into downtown Riyadh in search of an appropriate emporium for this. He drew a blank in lighting upon date honey as such, but he did come back with 2kg of dates (along with some wonderfully aromatic Arabian peppercorns and cardamom pods). 

The Saudi dates were of two types, Medjool and Ajwa. They both had an excellent flavour but were quite dry. "Why don't you turn them into date honey?" H suggested. Why not indeed? So I did a bit of research and had a go. The result is certainly as good as any commercial date honey from the Middle East that I've tasted. The process is simple. You boil the dates with enough water to cover them until completely soft and beginning to disintegrate (approximately a couple of hours). You then strain and squeeze the softened date pulp with very clean hands through some very clean muslin and return the resulting dark brown liquid to a clean pan. This is then reheated and boiled until thick and syrupy whereupon it can be poured into jars and stored in the fridge. It thickens even further on cooling - to the consistency of black treacle. Delicious on pancakes and on porridge and on vanilla ice cream and yoghurt and... and ... and... ! If you discover any dates past their best at the back of your cupboard or have a load left over after Christmas that you don't know what to do with, don't throw them out or waste them - a whole new lease of life awaits them in this versatile, dark syrup! 


Lunch
eating up low-fat leftovers - sourdough crackers, aubergine and walnut butter, fruit, yoghurt

Tea
black tea
Pfeffernuße - the ones I made yesterday which are fine for today too because with just one egg in the mixture and no other fat, they are naturally, virtually fat-free.

Supper
fat-free tomato and sweet potato soup* as per Day #4. 


rolls made with yeast, flour, salt and whey left over from yoghurt-making which is naturally fat-free

baked apples stuffed with fat-free damson and hazelnut mincemeat**


*In the past, I've always started soup off by sweating the chopped vegetables in some olive oil (or sometimes butter) but I'm finding this is not as necessary as I thought and I've recently gravitated to simply cooking the vegetables in the stock straight off. As this is how I made the tomato and sweet potato soup last week and it was a big batch, there was plenty left over which I froze and could happily ride again today, complete with fat-free credentials!

** The baked apples were particularly delicious stuffed with some damson and hazelnut mincemeat I discovered in the pantry. 


I made the mincemeat back in August 2020 but because Christmas 2020 celebrations were so compromised and scaled back during the pandemic, we never used most of what I'd made. And last year they got overlooked. The jars had been pasteurised however in the boiling water canner and the mincemeat has kept perfectly. It's a bit of a faff to make because you have to extract all the damson stones but worth it because the flavour is excellent. It happens to be fat-free - the recipe uses no suet, or melted butter, or anything, which is how I like mincemeat. Deploying it as a stuffing for baked apples is a good use for it.

I chose some large dessert apples from the cold-store in the garage rather than using cooking apples so that they would hold their shape during cooking nicely, cored them, scored their middles and spooned in as much mincemeat as the cavities would hold. 



After 25 minutes in a hot oven (210℃) with a splash of water in each baking dish, they turned out beautifully fluffy and sweet. 


I don't know what variety of apples they are. Possibly James Grieve. Or possibly not - it's not at all easy to identify apple varieties unless you know your onions, if you will forgive me for mixing my metaphors!

E x


Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #10

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the dishwasher.

Another dishwasher-free day. It's also the Feast of St Nicholas so it was Stutenkerle for breakfast. Stutenkerle which are sometimes also referred to as 'Weckmänner' or, in Switzerland, as 'Grittibänz' are rather jolly, brioche-type buns baked in the shape of gingerbread men. For some reason, in addition to their raisin eyes and buttons, they traditionally carry a small clay pipe. You can get these oven-proof, clay pipes ('Tonpfeifen' in German) either in Germany itself or via Amazon to add to your own Stutenkerle, if you wish. 


I use my standard sweet bread dough recipe for these that contains a little sugar and some butter along with eggs and milk to mix the dough. I actually made the dough yesterday evening and let it prove and then popped it in the fridge overnight ready for shaping and baking first thing this morning. This is convenient time-wise, but more to the point, it makes the rolling out and shaping a great deal easier if the dough has had a long rest overnight and the butter has firmed up in the chill of the fridge. 

There are various ways of shaping the Stutenkerle - you can use a large gingerbread man cutter, like this one, which is what I've done, or you can go more freeform, using rectangles of dough and cutting away portions to create a person-shaped bun. Unlike cookie dough which you can cut out and the shapes bake more or less in the form you've cut them, bread dough has a mind of its own and, however it's cut, it tends to spread and swell in unpredictable ways so it's quite difficult to make them uniform in shape and demeanour - I rather like this element of unpredictability - it gives the Stutenkerle character and individuality and it makes no difference to how they taste, of course. 

It's also quite difficult to get the Stutenkerle to hold on to their Pfeifen properly! Despite having their arms tucked around them neatly and glued down with a bit of egg-wash before baking, several of them naughtily let go of the things completely and flung their hands wide in the oven! Fortunately the egg-wash has more or less kept the pipes attached despite this, although it has not prevented a few raisin-buttons bursting free from their rounded tummies! 


Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
citrus fruit salad
Stutenkerle - see above

Lunch
eating up leftovers - sourdough crackers, soup, fruit, yoghurt

Tea 
black tea
Pfeffernuße from the batch I made a couple of days ago

Supper
a one pot meal consisting of giant pasta shells stuffed with spinach and ricotta and cooked in tomato sauce (from the freezer) in the pressure cooker. The recipe for this comes from here. I already use my pressure cooker a great deal but in the interests of cutting down the fuel I use in cooking, I thought Catherine Phipp's book might expand my under-pressure-repertoire which it certainly has done. I don't always agree with her on the timings she recommends as one of the reasons I use my pressure cooker is to make sure things like onions are very well cooked - they don't agree with me if they aren't - so I reserve the right to increase her suggested timings by a few minutes and add the correspondingly extra liquid required, if necessary, but apart from that, this book is very useful if you either want to expand your existing use of a pressure cooker (like me) or if you're a pressure cooker novice wanting to acquire a totally new set of skills, in the interest of keeping fuel costs in the kitchen down - something pressure cookers are brilliant at. 





Having said that, I don't feel that this recipe showcases the best that pressure cookers can do. It's a great idea, in principle, for a one-pot meal and the flavour was good but the pasta shells which, according to the recipe, are not pre-cooked before stuffing and cooking in the sauce were much too unpleasantly al dente for my taste. Worse, the tomato sauce which sits underneath the stuffed shells, burned horribly on the bottom - something reduced tomato sauces can do quite quickly in the pressure cooker. This didn't seem to affect the flavour of the rest of the sauce too much, mercifully, but it resulted in a thick layer of carbon welded to the base of the pressure cooker which took the concerted efforts of three of us, in turn, a good half hour of vigorous scrubbing with a pot-scourer to remove afterwards. 

The only consolation was that the dishwasher would never have lifted that black layer of carbonised sauce by itself, in a month of Sundays, so the scrubbing would have been inevitable even if it had not been a no-dishwasher day. But along with all the other washing up to do by hand, it was tedious to say the least of it. Next time I make this, I will par-boil the pasta before stuffing and then bake the stuffed shells nestled in the tomato sauce in the oven. It will take longer than the 5 minutes cooking time that this recipe boasted but I can be confident that the sauce won't burn and the washing up will require minimal effort compared to this evening's extravaganza!

baked apples stuffed with damson and hazelnut mincemeat as per yesterday - so good they had to be repeated!
E x

















Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #11

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... one meal of your choosing out of your normal daily routine.

I have to say I greeted today's challenge of simply skipping a meal as something of a relief. Not so much because the juggling of ingredients or recipes was getting difficult as because I've needed a day to catch up with eating up leftovers which I foolishly omitted to factor in to my fasting-challenge planning. I hate wasting food and generally we waste very little but with a different restriction each day it's not been easy to avoid it. Fortunately, H was not very keen to participate in my Advent fasting challenges and although he's not here all the time now, he's still basically living at home and, Gott sei Dank, has happily mopped up what might otherwise have gone to waste. 

Today I skipped breakfast. The rest of today's meals have been (or will be) a combination of leftovers from the fridge and freezer. See above.

I have however baked some baguettes to go with the said leftovers and some more panettoni to freeze ahead of Christmas itself so I thought I'd share my recipe for the latter here today.

Panettoni are delicious but tricksy customers. A fairly recent arrival to the mainstream Christmas goodie scene in the UK, they have a long history in Italy as a Christmas bake - much lighter and fluffier than our British Christmas cake which is heavy and dark by comparison with its dried fruit, marzipan and icing. In fact, you can't really compare the two. I love panettoni and have been known to splash out on them at Christmas not just for the cake but for the beautiful tins they come in. See herehere or here for a little tin-bait but be prepared for temptation! 

I have a thing about tins and can be lured to buy almost anything from panettone to soap powder packaged in a colourful, well-made tin even with an outrageous price mark-up. I'm sure I am not alone in this as manufacturers know well!

Anyway, back to the cake itself. Or bread. Panettone is raised with yeast and more akin to brioche than cake so perhaps falls more into the category of sweetened bread rather than cake. 

I prefer individual panettoni to big ones because I find that the big ones dry out very quickly. Wonderful on the day you cut into them, 24 hours later and they are already heading for stale territory, however carefully you wrap them. This is disappointing, either if you've bought one - and good ones are quite expensive - even more so, if you've gone to the trouble of making one so I now make individual ones and freeze what is not consumed on the day of manufacture. True, you do miss out on the outrageously extended ratio of fluffy inside to crust but this is more than compensated for by life-expectancy, if I can put it like that! 

Good quality commercially made panettone are expensive both because of their ingredients - butter, eggs, candied and dried fruit and flavourings such as saffron and vanilla and also because their manufacture is time-consuming and hands-on. Traditionally, the dough is given a very long proving time and once baked, the panettone are suspended upside down to cool so that the crust doesn't become soggy. Quite a faff so making them at home may, or may not, be something you feel like attempting. Particularly if the result is going to go stale very quickly. Buying one, if you have a whole houseful who will devour it at one sitting is a good option, especially if it comes in a lovely tin (enough said!), but if you want something a little more frugal and you don't have numbers sufficient to demolish a big panettone at one sitting, then I recommend making your own individual panettoni or 'panettoncini' as little ones are called in Italy.

And this is a breeze, especially if you have an automatic bread maker. You do need individual paper panettone cases like these which you can get either from Amazon or various other On-Line baking suppliers such as Bakery Bits which is where I get mine from. The baked panettoncini are delicious fresh and freeze beautifully so will never go stale - just defrost what you want, to use as and when.


The recipe which I'm sharing here is what I've evolved from various sources and what I've found by trial and error works for me. I do have an automatic bread maker so this is what I use to prepare the dough. If you don't, then it's perfectly possible to make by hand -  just follow the method for any enriched dough that you like and works for you. You can also, of course, vary the flavouring to suit your own particular tastes - change the type of dried fruit - sultanas for raisins, or try dried cherries and blueberries, or use less fruit if you prefer - I like mine fruit-heavy; swap the orange and vanilla flavouring for lemon and almond or even rosewater. The great thing about this kind off bread dough is that it is a canvas for creativity so you can play around and have fun with it so long as you keep the basic proportion of ingredients the same. 

Ingredients
3tsps instant dried yeast (12g)
500g strong white flour
80g cubed unsalted butter at room temperature (it's important the butter is not chilled from the fridge or even cold - weigh it out several hours ahead of making the dough)
80g golden caster sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp orange zest - either fresh or 1heaped tsp dried powdered orange zest (I use dried tangerine peel blitzed to a powder in a spice grinder)
½ tsp vanilla seeds or paste (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)
3 large eggs (minus ½ an egg for the glaze)
c 225g whole milk - enough to make up 350g with the eggs
100g golden raisins
100g ordinary raisins
100g homemade candied peel - orange or grapefruit - chopped in small pieces

For the glaze
½ a beaten egg - about 25g (removed from the eggs going into the dough)
pearl sugar like this to finish also available from Ocado or Amazon 

Choose the basic raisin programme on the bread maker or prepare the dough as you would usually by hand ie mixing everything together apart from the fruit and kneading to an elastic dough. Add in the dried fruit when the bread machine prompts you to or by hand and leave to finish the programme on the bread maker or to prove for a couple of hours at room temperature, if making by hand. 

At this stage you can divide up the dough and slip it into its paper cases and leave to prove further in the fridge overnight or you can bake straight away depending on what suits you.

Divide the dough into 12 portions of approximately 110g each. Form into tight balls and drop each one into a paper panettoncini case on a baking tray. Chill in the fridge overnight or leave for an hour or so to bake straight away, if you're in a hurry. Preheat the oven to 195 ℃. Brush the tops of the panettoncini with the reserved beaten egg and sprinkle on some pearl sugar which looks pretty and adds a nice crunch. 

Bake for 14 minutes then slip an unheated baking tray above the panettoncini in the oven, on a rack above them but without touching them. This unheated baking tray acts as a heat sink and protects the tops from burning. If your oven is quite fierce, you can turn the heat off entirely and just leave the panettoncini in there for another 6 minutes. If it's gentler, turn the heat down significantly but leave it on for the final 6 minutes. This last stint of time at a lower temperature is important - with the relatively high yeast percentage and all that dried fruit, it's important to make sure that the panettoncini are cooked all the way through and I've found they do need the full 20 minutes cooking time, divided up as indicated. On no account, forget about them if you've turned the oven off! Or all your careful efforts to avoid them burning will be to no avail! Always set a timer and check back ahead of time to avoid disaster is my rule here derived from learning the hard way with a number of burnt offerings in my baking past! 

Once the time is up, remove the panettoncini from the oven and slip them onto a wire rack to cool. No need to suspend them upside down from broom handles as the professionals do with their panettoni. Once cool (or still warm), sample your efforts. Any you do not consume on the day you make them should be frozen for further delectation with not a stale, or dry crumb in sight! Don't freeze them until they are completely cold though. 


Of course, the texture of these is not going to compete with the best that professional panettone maestros in Italy can produce but they're not bad for a homemade version nonetheless, especially with any possibility of dryness eliminated. To see how the professionals do it, give yourself a treat and watch this - it's a joy to watch and listen to Vincenzo and Domenico in their bakery. Between them they have been baking pannettoni professionally for over 80 years and every year they say their pannettoni get better and better which I find inspiring beyond belief!

E x













Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #12

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the oven.

I use my oven a lot as a rule. I do a lot of baking in it and a lot of the things we often eat here spend a considerable amount of their time in it before arriving on the table - things like roasted vegetables, and slow-cooked casseroles (with or without meat). This is fine but heavy on fuel use and both for reasons of economy and being more eco-friendly it's not a bad discipline to have the odd day off from using the oven. 

The pressure cooker is my go-to ally here - it cooks efficiently and thoroughly in a fraction of the time that conventional cooking takes, either on the hob or in the oven and I am discovering from Modern Pressure Cooking that I can use it for a lot more things than I previously thought. Cakes, cheesecakes and rice pudding, for example. Even buns. Dishes with meat, or pulses, or both, that are conventionally cooked long and slow in the oven. As well as the staples for which I've long resorted to it, such as soups, stocks, sauces, vegetables and steamed puddings. 

The only drawback with the pressure cooker is that things don't reduce or brown during the pressurised cooking process so if you need to lose a volume of fluid, you need to add less to begin with (bearing in mind that the pressure cooker needs a certain minimum amount of liquid to function safely), or reduce it by boiling away some of the liquid in the open cooker after the pressurised cooking period has been completed, which takes extra time. Lack of browning can be rectified by a brief spell under a hot grill but you need to protect the handles of the pressure cooker from also being grilled and going brown (or worse!) so I don't think this is optimal. 

That said, I've found the pressure cooker invaluable today.

Today's oven-free menu is as follows:

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
citrus fruit salad
Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch
eating up leftovers - sourdough crackers, soup, fruit, yoghurt

Tea 
black tea
Pfeffernuße

Supper
minestrone soup made with leeks, onions, fennel, carrots, potatoes, celery, tinned chopped tomatoes, homemade vegetable stock (made from the vegetable trimmings, herbs from the garden and salt) and pasta stellette cooked in the pressure cooker in two bursts, 3 minutes before adding the pasta and 5 minutes after adding it. 




homemade baguettes from the freezer turned into garlic bread with the addition of garlic butter and the strategic / opportunistic use of the top of the wood-burning stove as an impromptu hot-plate. 


I hope this doesn't qualify as cheating but we lit the stove anyway today as the temperature has barely scraped above zero all day and the house has felt very cold so I thought I would capitalise on the heat and use the top of the stove as an ad hoc baking aid without breaking the ban on using the oven. I love garlic bread but it doesn't like me so this was for the garlic-consumers. It was so cold today, even in the kitchen, that despite leaving the butter out to soften before mashing in the garlic I had to warm it up over a bowl of hot water. Perhaps the butter is trying to tell me something!

Anyway the woodturner-as-hot-plate idea worked beautifully - the garlic butter melted without burning and the baguettes heated through in about the same time as they would have taken in the oven. 


rice pudding cooked in the pressure cooker - short grain rice cooked for 15 minutes with milk, a split piece of vanilla pod, grated nutmeg, ground cinnamon, soft brown sugar and a pinch of salt. This was another experiment with a recipe from Modern Pressure Cooking. It certainly saved a lot of time and fuel - 15 minutes on the hob over a couple of hours in the oven but I wasn't entirely convinced by the result. It didn't look very appetising to say the least of it and although it tasted OK, the texture was not as good as if it had been cooked long and slow in the oven. On top of that, the mixture stuck to the pressure cooker base and lid so yet again the poor old pressure cooker had to be scrubbed to within an inch of its life this week! 

Some you win and some you lose...!

E x





Advent 2022- Fast Tracking #13

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all animal products.

Another vegan day today for which I've returned to what has become an old favourite since 2017 and my first £1-a-day food challenge, namely chilli sin carne with rice for supper. Away from the exigencies imposed by the £1-a-day ceiling, I make this with rather more vegetables - more onions, usually a big bulb of fennel, several red peppers and more tinned tomatoes.  

I finish it with a spoonful of dried epazote which is a Mexican herb of the amaranth family that grows like a weed. It has an unusual scent and flavour, sometimes described as reminiscent of turpentine. It's strong and you don't want too much of it but a small amount added at the end of the cooking time adds a subtle, aromatic depth to the finished dish. In Mexico, it's known as 'the bean herb' as it's believed to aid the digestion of beans. We rather like it. If you're in the UK, you can get it On Line here and if you're in the US, Walmart seem to stock it. 

In Mexico it's generally used fresh and I have, in the past, grown some myself, here in the UK. I don't have any plants still going in the garden at the moment so I haven't had any fresh leaves for today but in any case I've found the dried version a good substitute. The name is Aztec in origin - the herb has a very long pedigree of both culinary and medicinal use as an anthelmintic.

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
citrus fruit salad
oatcakes (made as per Day #3) with maple butter

Lunch
left over minestrone soup
baguette made from sourdough starter, yeast, flour, salt and water

Tea
black tea
multigrain seeded crackers

Supper
chilli sin carne made with dried, soaked and pressure cooked kidney beans, onions, carrots, fennel, red peppers, tinned tomatoes, hot chilli powder, homemade vegetable stock (including the water from cooking the kidney beans), salt, black pepper, and a teaspoonful of dried epazote added at the end after 4 hours baking in the oven at 170 ℃. As you can see from the 'tide-mark' in the pic, it's lost quite a lot of liquid in that time and become nice and thick. I leave the lid slightly ajar in the oven to encourage the evaporation process.


basmati rice and some parsley to finish it off. The parsley was frozen stiff this evening but seemed none the worse for it!


Marsala spiced prunes - a Nigella Lawson recipe in which you bake soft prunes in a mixture of tea and Marsala with star anise, cinnamon sticks, cloves and orange zest. Very nice with a splash of cream to finish although cream is, unfortunately, off limits today.


E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #14

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all imported foods.

I find the no-imported-food challenge one of the hardest to comply with - there are just so many imported everyday foods one takes for granted, especially flavourings. Doing without them certainly turns my cooking into much more of a plain-jane affair than usual but it's a useful lesson to be reminded that it's a privilege to have access to these things, as a general rule and good also to be challenged to find inventive ways around ingredients that are off limits. 

Honey has been today's star - as topping for my oatcakes at breakfast, sweetener in my London Fog, core ingredient in my cupcakes and flavouring and sweetener for my baked apples. I confess I have used rather a lot! Yes, this jar was full this morning!


Breakfast
black Tregothnan tea
grape juice pressed from grapes grown in the garden and frozen in September
blackberry and apple compôte made from home grown and foraged local fruit sweetened with a little Oxfordshire honey
oatcakes (as per Day #7) with Oxfordshire honeycomb

London Fog made with black Tregothnan tea, dried homegrown lavender, ½ a tsp local honey and frothed British semi-skimmed milk. London Fog should strictly be made with Earl Grey tea and should also have a dash of vanilla extract in it, I believe, but this version, tweaked to be compliant with no-imported-food, was not too far off and it was perfect on a very cold winter morning. And I just love the name which is perfectly evoked by the subtle, misty colours of the drink in a glass. 



Lunch
homemade yoghurt cheese made from British whole milk and flavoured with a pinch of Maldon salt
micro greens grown on my windowsill over the last ten days. 
homemade sourdough crackers made from British wheat and rye flour, rapeseed oil, salt and milk as per Day #4 


Tea
black Tregothnan tea
sticky honey cupcakes with a honey glaze as per recipe below

Supper
jacket potatoes with Cornish cheddar cheese and for the sausage fanciers (of whom I am not one) locally produced pork sausages baked with dried herbs from the garden 
steamed British carrots and spinach




baked homegrown apples drizzled with local Oxfordshire honey, British cream and some of the British shortbread I made last weekend for Day #7. 

The sticky honey cupcakes are derived from a recipe from a local beekeeping association which I've tweaked slightly to comply with today's challenge. All the ingredients are British. 

For twelve cupcakes:
125g salted butter at room temperature
75g caster sugar
140g runny honey
2 eggs beaten
225g self-raising flour
1 tbsp apple juice

For the glaze:
100g salted butter
70g runny honey
c150g icing sugar, sifted

Preheat the oven to 180℃ /160℃ fan. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the honey and beat well again then add the beaten eggs and flour alternately. Finally fold in the apple juice. Spoon into a bun or muffin tin lined with paper cases and bake for 20 minutes until golden and springy.

For the glaze, melt the butter and honey in a pan and blend into the icing sugar with a balloon whisk. Use enough icing sugar to create the consistency of icing you want. Allow to cool slightly until thickened but still spreadable, then spoon over the cupcakes. 






E x




Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #15

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... wheat.

Wheat-free days are easier than I thought they would be. Not nearly as hard as the no-imported-food days, for example. 

Breakfast 
tea with unsweetened soya milk
grape juice
blackberry and apple compôte as per yesterday
oatcakes (as per Day #7) with honeycomb

Lunch
homemade Greek-style yoghurt
mango

Tea
black tea
Christopher's macaroons as per Day #5

Supper
Goan-style prawn curry with basmati rice
crème caramel

This Goan-style prawn curry is something I make a lot. It's based on a spice mix of toasted cumin and  coriander seeds blitzed with some black peppercorns in a spice grinder, mixed with some ground turmeric and hot and sweet paprikas. The spice mix is added to a pan of chopped onions, plenty of grated fresh ginger and some chopped assorted fresh red chillies cooking in a little olive oil. I add some salt, a tin (or sometimes two) of coconut milk and a little water and let the whole mixture bubble away for some time on the hob until thick. I tend to use defrosted, frozen, raw prawns which I add at the last minute and cook just until they have turned opaque and pink. A squeeze of fresh lime juice is nice at the end and some fresh parsley on the top. Today's curry was quite hot. I always tend to have a heavy hand with fresh ginger - I love the stuff! and I slightly lost count of the number of Scotch bonnet chillies I'd added! But it was perfect for the end of a freezing cold December day.


The crème caramel is made from a classic recipe of sugar, eggs and milk infused with a piece of vanilla pod which I cook in individual ramekins in the pressure cooker. This gives a good, velvety result in very little time - 5 minutes under pressure is all it takes. They need to be well-chilled before serving though so they're not an instant pudding. You can turn them out or eat them straight from the ramekins. 


E x
















Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #16

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the oven.

In the past, ovens were not universal bits of domestic kitchen kit. They have always been expensive in terms of the fuel they need to produce the consistent high heat required for baking, so even if you had your own oven in previous eras, perhaps a free-standing wood-fired one, outside your home rather than in it, baking was not something you necessarily did every day. People were naturally thrifty about the process - they often set aside a designated baking day - once a week, once a month, or even once a year, (depending on the scarcity and / or cost of fuel), when the oven was fired and food prepared and lined up to cook, in a carefully orchestrated order, with items requiring the highest heat going in first, followed by those that required less, so that as little of the expensive heat was wasted as possible. Commercial bakers in small communities, (who were obviously firing their ovens up for bread-baking more frequently), often found themselves hiring out the falling heat of their post-bread-baking ovens to locals who would bring along their own loaves, pies or casseroles to cook in them, if they had no easy access to an oven of their own. A practice still common in rural Greece well into the 20th C.

The modern oven with its minutely variable, thermostatic control and consistently reliable temperatures that we turn on without a second's thought, at the flick of a switch, is a relatively recent luxury. The microwave was only invented in 1946. Ingenious cooks, however, have always found ways to get round obstacles to their art and just because you had no oven didn't mean you didn't make your own bread, (or cake!) Dutch ovens - heavy cast iron pots with close fitting lids - were an early solution. Heated on a hob or over an open fire, these were effectively mini-ovens in which you could bake a loaf of bread or a cake. Sometimes the lids of Dutch ovens were (and still are) concave allowing the user to pile hot embers, or coals on top, to help provide all-round heat for the cooking. Not as controllable a process as in a modern electric oven but effective nonetheless. Alternatively, breads might be cooked on the hob in a greased pan or on a hot griddle - the origin of things like flat-breads, farls, scones, pancakes, Welsh-cakes, English muffins, pikelets and crumpets.  

In some parts of the world people have also used steam to cook dough above a pan of boiling water. In China, where, traditionally, ovens were not commonplace - most Chinese cooking, in fact, is done without an oven - there is a well-established category of steamed buns and breads and it's this that I thought I might experiment with today.  Although one thinks of rice as the primary carbohydrate in Chinese cooking, quite a lot of wheat is grown in China and where wheat grows, bread follows and wheat-based buns have a recognised place in Chinese cuisine. Usually filled with spiced pork, or beef, they are steamed rather than baked and are known as 'bao'.

I've never made bao before but why not? Being steamed rather than baked, they look more like dumplings than buns and they don't have the crisp crust of buns baked in the oven but buns they are. I've chosen to make a vegetarian filling with mushrooms, onions and herbs rather than the spiced meat version, partly because I shall want a similar mixture later in the week and I can therefore batch-cook and save time, effort and fuel by doubling up today.

I found stuffing the buns a bit tricky - I think I tried to use too much stuffing and had to remove some of what I had initially spooned out onto each circle of dough. I also found that despite having cooked the mushrooms yesterday and evaporated off, as I thought, most of the liquid, some excess liquid still remained and that also hampered the stuffing-proceedings. 


I got there eventually though and managed to get all twelve buns in one layer in the top of my steamer where they sat on their baking parchment squares and steamed happily for twenty five minutes, emerging at the end hot and fluffy and unexpectedly delicious. They would have looked more aesthetically pleasing if I had not crammed them all in but left some space between the buns but this is a small point and I shall be making them again with a few refinements to the process. 


Breakfast 
tea with unsweetened soya milk
grape juice
fruit
oat porridge with maple syrup

Lunch
leftover Goan-style prawn curry 
rolls from the freezer
fruit

Tea 
black tea
panettoncino from the freezer

Supper
steamed mushroom 'bao' buns with stir-fried carrots, red pepper, mangetout and broccoli
leftover crème caramel  



E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #17

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the dishwasher.

Today is the Feast of St Lucy. We don't celebrate that much here in the UK but in Sweden they make a big thing of it. It's a light-centred festival which used to mark the shortest, darkest day of the year - 13th December, under the old Julian calendar, was originally the winter solstice instead of 21st or 22nd under the Gregorian calendar we use today. Traditionally it was an occasion when the eldest girl in each household dressed in a white dress with a red sash and wore an evergreen circlet of lighted candles on her head. Her duties for the day (in addition to keeping her hair from catching fire!), included preparing breakfast for the family and making specially baked, golden 'lusserkatter' or St Lucy buns.

Supposedly, this is in memory of the original St Lucy who, according to tradition, was a young Roman Christian at the time of Diocletian who used to take food to the Christians who were hiding in the catacombs in Rome, in fear of violent persecution. With her hands full of food packages, she had no way of holding a candle to light her way in the dark, labyrinthine passages so she wore a circlet of twigs into which she inserted lighted candles instead - the 3rd C equivalent of a head torch! 

Regardless of whether there's any truth in this story, St Lucy became a symbol of taking light and hope to people in literally and metaphorically dark places something that caught on easily in the dark winters of Scandinavia and it's a lovely opportunity, before Christmas itself, to bring in a few evergreens, light an array of white candles and enjoy a golden bun, fragrant with saffron and cardamom as it gets dark. 


These saffron and cardamom buns which are made all over Scandinavia today are traditionally curled and twisted in a variety of scroll shapes which have their own individual names. The most well-known of these is the 'lusserkatter' or 'St Lucy's cats'. I think the coils are meant to represent the curls at the tips of cat's tails. In addition to the curly cat's tails, The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson lists some intriguing alternative shapings - the 'julgalt' or 'Christmas boar', the 'pojke' or 'boy', the 'lilja' or 'lily', the 'julvagn' or 'Christmas carriage', the 'julkuse' or 'Christmas kiss' and the 'prästens hår' or 'priest's hair'.

I haven't managed an example of each of these today but I had a go at a few. See pics for how they came out! 






The 'julgalt' or 'Christmas boar' (in the pic above) is the easiest to shape neatly, I think. The recipe for the dough is a tweaked version of Kate Young's recipe in The Little Library Christmas. I use two eggs in the dough, not one and I add a teaspoonful of ground cardamom which Kate Young inexplicably omits. I also include some golden raisins in the dough itself rather than as decoration.

As it's another no dishwasher day, the rest of the day's menu was on the simple side. I always cook scrambled eggs in a non-stick pan which can't go in the dishwasher anyway so I made a virtue out of necessity and cooked this for supper.

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
fruit
oat porridge and maple syrup

Lunch
leftover yoghurt cheese, rolls from the freezer, apricot and tomato chutney
fruit

Tea
black tea
St Lucy's buns

Supper
scrambled eggs on granary toast
tomatoes
leftover Marsala spiced prunes 


E x








Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #18

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... sugar.

Another sugar-free day today. The only time I really find the no-sugar regime difficult is afternoon tea-time. But I've found the multigrain seeded crackers make quite a good stand-in. They aren't remotely sweet but their intense, salty nuttiness is an acceptable (temporary!) substitute for my usual bun or whatever. 

I found the basic recipe here when I'd acquired a small packet of seaweed flakes for cooking and was wondering about how to use them. I've adapted and simplified the original formula to suit my taste. For starters, I only make half the original quantities. While I find the crackers keep well in a tin for a bit, after a week or so, I find they taste a bit stale so a smaller batch is better, at least for my rate of consumption. Having halved the quantities to 50g each of oats and rye flour, I omit the sunflower seeds and use 30g linseeds, 20g sesame seeds, 50g pumpkin and 10g poppy seeds for the seeds and much less seaweed - only 1tsp. I do use 1tsp ground fennel seeds but I omit the nigella and cumin seeds and the chilli flakes. They need a little more salt in my version - a generous ½tsp or so, as I don't sprinkle any on the top. 


I often substitute rapeseed oil for the olive oil but you could use any oil you like - sunflower, grapeseed, flaxseed, avocado or a nut oil. That said, the basic method is Kellie's original one and it's excellent. The dough is not as cohesive as some - it is definitely easiest to roll out on a piece of baking parchment which you then transfer to a baking tray. I've found a single sheet though is enough if you dust the dough surface with a little rye flour to stop the rolling pin sticking.


Remember to cut the crackers before you bake them as they are very brittle and fragile, once baked, and will shatter into a million fragments if you forget and try to cut them afterwards! Just saying!


For supper I made a simple one-pot chowder - the idea came from a Waitrose recipe which again I've changed up a bit. It's basically chopped leeks, onions, fennel, red pepper and potatoes sweated in a little butter with the addition of a couple of fresh red chillies and homemade vegetable stock, and then cooked in the pressure cooker for 10 minutes before adding frozen sweetcorn and 100g single cream and simmering for a few extra minutes to cook the sweetcorn briefly. It's nice sprinkled with a bit of fresh parsley.

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk 
apple juice
fruit 
homemade Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch
homemade yoghurt cheese, sourdough crackers, fruit

Tea
black tea
multigrain seeded crackers

Supper
sweetcorn, potato and chilli chowder
white rolls flavoured with ground fennel seed



clementines and Brazil nuts in their shells
E x



Advent 2022- Fast Tracking #19

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all animal products.

Today has been another vegan day, the third so far. I'm beginning to run out of ideas that are part of my existing repertoire so I decided to branch out and experiment with some vegan pasta for supper. 

I make pasta regularly but it's always egg pasta made with strong flour, fresh eggs, a pinch of salt and a spoonful of olive oil - it's easy, reliable and quick. Ordinary dried pasta in the supermarket tends not to be egg pasta but simply made from durum wheat and water. I did a bit of research and it looked quite possible to replicate this at home although here in the UK specifically durum wheat flour is not readily available. You can get round this by using fine semolina as part of the flour mix though, so that's what I did, as I happened, for some inexplicable reason, to have two bags of fine semolina in my pantry which need using up. I could, of course, simply have bought some dried durum wheat pasta but why buy it when you can make it?! 

In an adventurous spirit however, after my happy colour experiments with my pink spaghetti cooked in beetroot juice, I didn't use water to mix the dough but a couple of glasses of Puglian red wine. This was H's idea after he had been given a packet of Fortnum and Mason's red wine pasta, courtesy of a foodie-friend. The colour of the resulting tagliatelle was a soft dusky pink - nowhere near the vivid colour of my earlier experiment using beetroot juice - but it rolled out beautifully despite the absence of eggs in the dough and as it dried, the slightly granular texture of the semolina became more apparent in the finished pasta (see the second of the two pics below). I guess this is quite useful in providing a keyed surface for whatever sauce you're using to cling to.



My chosen sauce was a simple one, that I often make, of chopped field mushrooms cooked down to an intense almost jet-black sauce with some onion - I used the same mixture for filling my bao buns on Monday. I do add in a handful of soaked dried porcini mushrooms and a little bit of balsamic vinegar but by and large the flavour and colour of this all comes from ordinary field mushrooms, sold very cheaply in any supermarket for about £1 a punnet. It takes time to cook down though - several hours and you need to watch it as the liquid evaporates, to avoid it catching and burning - you want mushroom-black on your pasta, not carbon-black!


I then decided I would follow the same method I used with the beetroot juice and cook the tagliatelle partly in ordinary salted water and then in the rest of the wine. There was slightly less wine than there should have been in the bottle because a glass or two had been drunk by D and H last night but there was enough to do business with, eked out with a bit of water.

The results were rather good - both the pasta and the sauce had an understated but pleasing note of acidity to them and although the colours were more muted than my beetroot-dyed pasta with watercress pesto, it was nonetheless a very satisfactory colour as well as flavour combination. 


It would have been even better with Parmesan or pecorino cheese on top...! Just saying!

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
fruit
oatcakes with maple butter as per previous vegan days

Lunch
fruit, sourdough crackers

Tea
black tea
as per breakfast - oatcakes with maple butter*


*Today has been absolutely freezing - the temperature here last night was -8℃ which, for the southern half of the UK, is most unusually cold. Several of our pipes have frozen up (although fortunately not in the kitchen) and I am afraid, after being outside this afternoon where it only warmed up to a balmy -4℃, I just could not face a vegan multigrain seeded cracker with my pot of tea. The temptation to whip up a tray of buttery flapjack, sneak an early, miniature Christmas cake or simply devour a bar of milk chocolate was a very strong one! I resisted however and returned to what I'd had for breakfast - that maple butter is amazingly delicious on oatcakes. I do hope I can get another jar of it without too much difficulty now that I've rediscovered it. (I can - Ocado stock it - hooray! It's not cheap - a smallish jar costs £6 but it's gorgeous stuff.)

Supper
salted popcorn popped in a little sunflower oil with hot cranberry and ginger cordial** 
vegan red wine tagliatelle with mushroom sauce
fruit and assorted nuts in their shells




**This is another recipe from Kate Young's Little Library Christmas adapted to include a hefty whack of fresh ginger and using some orange zest and juice instead of all lemon. It's warming and cheerful and, happily for today, it is totally vegan. As is the popcorn. And we all needed something a little extra this evening to face down the cold and the frozen pipes. I dilute the cordial with a bit of boiling water but not much - it's nicest, I think, in small syrupy quantities. 

E x


Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #20

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... one meal of your choosing out of your normal daily routine.

Good news - a day of respite from culinary juggling! And, as I was travelling to see my parents today, this suited me just fine. Skipping breakfast enabled me to depart for London at crack of dawn ahead of the traffic and my mother was cooking (hooray!) so I certainly did not go hungry! 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #21

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all highly processed foods.

As a household we don't eat a great deal of highly processed food but as I said in my introductory post, virtually any foodstuff acquired in the supermarket has been processed in some way or other. To be 100% rigorous with this challenge one would more or less need to restrict oneself to food grown from scratch by oneself or foraged. At this time of year, the pickings would be very lean indeed so I've compromised by taking a more pragmatic approach that allows basic raw ingredients, processed for preservation and sale, but excludes anything composite or with a lot of extra ingredients added. I've also decided to allow any processing that is done by myself prior to consumption.


The only food that this immediately eliminates for me is the soya milk I drink in my tea first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I've tried to include as much home grown food as I can despite the time of year ie the frozen homegrown grape juice, bottled apple juice and sun-dried tomatoes. I tried to grow a tray or two of  micro-greens over the last couple of weeks but they haven't grown at all well on account of the bitter cold and the poor light levels so that's been a bit of a fail. The honeycomb is not home produced by me but it does come direct from a beekeeper a few miles away.  

For tea time I made some panforte di Siena which is a kind of Sienese Medieval energy bar really - a combination of dried figs, candied peel, raw nuts, spices and honey. Normally I save time by using at least some of the spices pre-ground but today I used all the spices whole and blitzed them together in the spice grinder - my considered verdict is that it was worth the trouble. This batch of panforte is probably the best I've come up with, so far. 

Spices for panforte clockwise from top left - aniseed, blades of mace, cloves, black peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon stick, coriander seeds and in the centre, grains of Paradise (a type of scented peppercorn)




I quite often make panforte at Christmastime - the mixture divides neatly into two 20cm tins - I usually keep one to eat and give the other away. It's a straightforward recipe, easy to package and keeps very well. I like it with a cup of tea at the end of the day or with a tiny glass of some liqueur or other, at the end of a winter meal. 

I bake each round on a disc of rice paper  to make it easy to extract from the tin and put another rice paper disc on top as it's quite sticky and this makes it easier to cut and eat. 

The trick with panforte, I've found, is not to cook it at too high a temperature or for too long as this is what can make it tough and over-chewy which is not nearly so nice. I use a version of Felicity Cloake's 'perfect panforte' recipe from The Guardian here but only cook it at 150 ℃ for about 25 minutes. It goes without saying that you need good quality dried figs - soft ones - and ideally, homemade candied peel, not those nasty tubs of dry, pre-cut stuff. You can use whatever nuts you like. I tend to use just almonds - raw almonds and some ground ones as well for cohesion. You can also vary the spices a bit depending on your personal taste. Tradition stipulates that the recipe should contain at least seventeen ingredients - one for each of the seventeen 'contrade', or 'districts', of Siena.

Breakfast
black tea
frozen raw home-grown grape juice (defrosted)
an orange
oatcakes with raw honeycomb



Lunch
yoghurt cheese, sourdough crackers
mango with lime zest and juice

Tea
black tea
panforte di Siena



Supper
potatoes baked in their jackets with watercress, sun-dried home-grown tomatoes and toasted walnut salad 
whole pears poached in home-pressed apple juice with whole star anise, a piece of vanilla pod and raw honey






E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #22

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the oven.

Another oven-free day. The scattering of oven-free days over Advent has definitely made me think ahead more strategically and double up bread-baking etc where possible which is a good discipline. I'm not sure how much fuel will have been saved over the four weeks of Advent but if I were to persist with observing oven-free days regularly, it would probably make a small but significant impact on our energy use, bearing in mind how much I use it, generally. 

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
grape juice
an orange
oatcakes with honeycomb

Lunch
cheese, date and apple chutney, sourdough crackers, fruit 

Tea
black tea
panforte di Siena

Supper
pumpkin and ricotta stuffed ravioli* with chopped fresh thyme, Parmesan cheese and a swirl of olive oil
tomato and black olive salad
steamed blackberry puddings with homemade egg custard and blackberry sauce**


*These ravioli are stuffed with a mixture of roasted pumpkin, ricotta, black pepper, grated nutmeg and some salt. I baked the pumpkin a few weeks back when I had the oven on for something else, removed the skin, mashed the flesh and froze it for subsequent use either in pumpkin rolls (see Day #4), risottos, or, as today, in a filling for ravioli.



I don't make ravioli all that often - they are a bit of a fiddle - but when I do, even if I am making them as I did today for serving on the same day, I always freeze them ahead of cooking. 


This dates back thirty years or so to when I was first making fresh pasta and, in a fit of enthusiasm, decided to produce homemade spinach and ricotta ravioli for a dinner party. It was time-consuming to make the number required but the little ravioli turned out beautifully and I was delighted with them. I'd made them a few hours ahead and carefully stored them in the fridge on flour-dusted plates. Unfortunately, when I came to cook the blighters, despite the fact that I had squeezed the spinach as dry as I could when I made the filling, liquid had oozed forth and turned my beautiful ravioli into a gluey mess of which nothing was remotely salvageable. 

There was nothing to be done but tip the whole lot in the the bin in a cloud of blue language that would not have been out of place on a rough building-site, and send D hot-foot to the supermarket to lay his hands on a commercial alternative. After the considerable number of hours I'd spent making them, it was heart-breaking and ever since then, I've erred on the safe side and frozen them immediately after making  and then cooked them from frozen which eliminates any risk. Because, however dry you try and make the filling, there is always some moisture in there which can't be relied upon to stay put! 

I don't know how this is avoided in commercial, fresh ravioli which seem to sit in their packets and emerge as they're meant to, when you're ready to cook them, but all I can say is that my empirical experience of making them at home has been unequivocal and I ain't risking a repetition of what happened that evening thirty odd years ago! 



Pumpkin makes a nice filling as a change from spinach and ricotta although you do need to season it well. Smoked salmon fillets, baked in the oven and skinned, or mushrooms cooked down, as I did the other day with onion and herbs, and then blitzed in each case with a tub of ricotta in the food processor, also make excellent homemade ravioli fillings, I've found.

**The steamed blackberry puddings are a reprise of what I did at the end of my food challenge project in May here. They have remained a firm favourite and so quick to cook in the pressure cooker - 5 minutes steaming and 7 minutes under pressure is all they need. 



E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #23

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all imported foods.

Breakfast
black Tregothnan tea
grape juice (pressed from our own grapes and frozen) 
morello cherries picked at the local PYO in July and bottled
homemade Greek-style yoghurt



Lunch
British cheese (Lincolnshire Poacher, Isle of Mull cheddar), granary bread

Tea
black Tregothnan tea
toasted English wholemeal muffin made as per Day #7 with homemade damson jelly made from foraged and homegrown fruit


Supper
egg pasta (made with eggs from our bantams who are kindly still laying) with home-grown tomato sauce* from the freezer and grated Cornish cheddar cheese. 


leftover steamed blackberry puddings with blackberry sauce and homemade egg custard

*I made and froze the sauce for this back in November when the last of our homegrown tomatoes needed picking and using up. 


In addition to the slightly motley selection of homegrown tomatoes, I used some British red onions, a handful of carrots, a couple of red peppers, herbs from the garden and four homegrown and home-dried chillies as per the pics below. I don't usually add chillies to my tomato sauces but in the absence of being able to use any black pepper, I thought the home-grown chillies might add a welcome note of warmth.





I usually cook the vegetables for tomato sauce in olive oil first before adding tinned Italian chopped tomatoes and a bit of water before cooking in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes. The sauce sometimes needs reducing, once the pressure has dropped and I then just blitz it with a stick blender for a smoothish pasta or pizza sauce. For this, olive oil was out so I cooked the vegetables first in some British salted butter.


The end-of-season fresh tomatoes made the sauce much more watery so it needed a lot of reduction to  thicken it and  I then had to put the whole thing through the mouli to remove the tomato and pepper skins, chilli stalks and seeds and the woody stems of the herbs which in November were rather tough. The sauce was a lot of effort to make and get to the right consistency but making it ahead of time and freezing it made supper today pretty straightforward. 
E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #24

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all dairy products.

Today has come slightly unstuck from my planned no-dairy menu on account of other things going on and too much other stuff in the kitchen to juggle so although breakfast and tea time complied with the no-dairy rule, lunch was non-existent and supper almost complied but not quite - the spiced, split yellow pea soup was entirely dairy-free but the bread wasn't. I had quite a lot of whey to use up which I often use to mix my bread doughs and rather than throw it out, it went in my granary rolls, I'm afraid.


Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
bottled morello cherries
sourdough crackers

Lunch
N/A

Tea
black tea
panforte di Siena

Supper
spiced split yellow pea soup made as per my recipe here 
granary rolls
clementines, pears and homemade vanilla marshmallows*



*These are a seasonal joy that make lovely gifts to bag up and give away and even people who think they don't like marshmallows, love them. You do need a free-standing mixer to make them as you need to pour the boiling sugar syrup onto whisked egg whites, while the whisk is whisking, if you see what I mean, so a hands-free set-up makes things much easier (and safer). 

In the absence of a free-standing mixer, you need to commandeer someone to lend an extra pair of hands to whisk while you pour, or vice versa. It's just not possible to manage the operation safely as a one-person band otherwise. Having said that, they're straightforward to make and the homemade version knocks the spots off any commercial marshmallows I've ever tasted. I use the basic vanilla marshmallow recipe in Genevieve Taylor's Marshmallow Magic which, I've found, works reliably every time. 

It's a little bit wasteful to cut out specific shapes because unlike biscuit dough which you can reroll, you can't do that with the set marshmallow mixture. But it is a nice touch to cut them into Christmassy shapes, if you're giving them away, as I shall be doing with half of these, and it's not exactly a penance to eat up the irregular and ungainly off-cuts, or add them to the top of hot chocolate, at home.  


If you are going to cut them into shapes, my advice, for what it is worth, is to stick to simple outlines and avoid anything too small and intricate as the marshmallow mixture tends to cut with slightly blurred edges and also to adhere to the cutter so something uncomplicated works best. 


And it helps to dust the cutter with some of the dusting mixture of icing sugar mixed with cornflour, between each cut. 


E x






Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #25

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all animal products.

This was meant to be effectively the last day of stringent abstinence in my 'Fast from... 'Advent challenges, although there are technically three more days of Advent to go. I had to do a bit of 'teeming and lading' with the final days of the challenge as with people coming to stay for Christmas and one or two other duties to perform there were some constraints on how much of a strait jacket I could impose on the commissariat. So, as I say, today was meant to mark the last day of real restraint, as such.

Having said that, like yesterday, I haven't managed to make the whole day compliant with its vegan constraint, I'm afraid. For a variety of reasons, today's plans went slightly off piste and with Christmas itself fast approaching I needed to use up various things to make urgently required space in the fridge and freezer. In addition, as it happened, lunch was completely missed on account of being out and about, with a happy stop for a (non-vegan) chai latte, so it's meant that only supper this evening was totally vegan. 

I had been scraping the barrel to come up with something vegan for supper that I either hadn't done already and /or that appealed. Turning to the pressure cooker book again for inspiration, I chose a spiced dish of black lentils and wild rice with greens. I searched high and low for black lentils in various supermarkets without success. In the end I had to order them from Amazon. If you have an Indian or Asian supermarket near you, you may be luckier as 'urad dal', as they are known, are a popular ingredient in Indian and Asian cooking. Urad dal may be white or black in colour. The white ones are simply hulled black ones. They are the main ingredient in poppadums, apparently.  Anyway, what I needed here was the black whole ones as they cook in the same time as wild rice, enabling the two to be cooked together at the same time to good effect. 

I used the recipe in the book more as an inspiration than precise guide. I added in an extra onion, some fresh chillies and more fresh ginger. As I've confessed before, I have a heavy hand with fresh ginger - difficult to have too much of the stuff, I think! And the tin of coconut cream was rather larger than the recipe specified but I used it all anyway - I don't want a third of a tin of coconut cream lurking at the back of the fridge over Christmas. You can use any greens to go with the lentils and wild rice dal. I just steamed some baby spinach to go on top. The result was very good, I have to say and went down a storm with the rest of the household who are normally a bit sniffy about vegan dishes. The recipe, as written, is not vegan  - it includes lamb - but I don't think omitting the meat remotely shortchanged the result and I shall definitely be making the vegan version again. It's nice to have added a new dish to my rather limited vegan repertoire. 

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
bottled morello cherries
Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch
N/A


Tea
black tea
St Lucy's bun from the freezer

Supper
spiced urad dal and wild rice with coconut cream, chillies and greens
baked apples with damson and hazelnut mincemeat 


The rest of my cooking today has not been remotely vegan - mince pies to feed a small army have been prepared and squirrelled away in the freezer, ready to be baked as and when required and pheasant and partridge pâté with cranberries and apricots, intended as part of my parents-in-law's Christmas present has been bubbling away in the oven in preserving jars. 


I feel I may now cooked be out for the day!

E x


Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #26

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... one meal of your choosing out of your normal daily routine

Today I am back on track with my Advent challenge as skipping breakfast meant I could get on with other stuff today without delay and the rest of the day's meals have been a motley assortment of left-overs before playing the annual game of fridge-tetris where I try to pack what seems like all the residents of the Bethlehem stable into one manger. Never mind'no room at the inn', it's no room in the fridge, this year and every year! 

I may have to resort to the heavy guns and get H to repack the whole thing. I avoid this, if I can, as I tend to get a raft of derogatory comments about my inefficient use of space and opprobrious remarks about my containers of whey and the like but I have one cloven-footed critter and one winged one to get in there and assistance may be necessary! I am inspecting the mild weather forecast with a slightly jaundiced eye - a temperature of around zero outside is a huge help at this time of year as one can simply turn one's car into a mobile, temporary, additional fridge so long as one doesn't forget its new purpose and turn the heating on when travelling anywhere!

Advent is drawing to a close and although I have eaten, pretty well, I think, over these last few weeks, I am looking forward to indulging without any particular restraint over Christmas. The feeling of appreciation and looking forward to even very simple things has been magnified hugely for me with this little project.   


And instead of arriving at Christmas having overindulged with the gloomy prospect of having to make stringent cut-backs once January arrives, I have the opposite. What is not to like?!

I hope to have a final couple of posts for the last remaining two days of Advent but although they will have an element of constraint as I still have two doors to open on my Advent calendar, they will also be more celebratory in feel as Christmas begins in earnest - after all, that was the whole point of my little Advent challenge in the first place. 
E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #27

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Today's Challenge: Fast from... all out of season foods.

For various practical historical reasons, I've often not been able to cook a traditional roast on Christmas Day and we've made a virtue out of necessity and roasted a bird on another day. In the past it was usually after Christmas itself but in recent years it's had to be brought forward because of practical arrangements with the farm which supplies our bird of choice, goose. Actually, this works out rather well. Roasting a goose is quite an undertaking, not because it's inherently any more complicated than roasting a chicken or turkey but because geese give off a great deal of fat as they cook. By a great deal, I mean a medium sized goose will give off around a litre and a half of fat! This has to be regularly poured off and the process is best done without a million and one other distractions because the pan with the roasting bird which has to be tipped up is heavy to manhandle and the fat is not only copious but very hot. I find it easier to do all this not on Christmas Day itself. So the goose hunts closer to the winter solstice than Christmas Day these days which seems not inappropriate.


Goose is one of the few foods that remains resolutely seasonal - traditionally, geese were reared over the spring and summer, and fattened during the early autumn ready for killing and eating either at Michaelmas at the end of September, Martinmnas in mid-November or Christmas. That remains true today. Here in the UK, you cannot buy fresh goose in March or June, say. For me, its seasonality is one of its attractions and because it is expensive, we generally only ever have it at Christmas. It therefore remains intensely evocative of this and no other time of year. 

Although red cabbage is available throughout the autumn and winter, for me, a bowl of braised red cabbage, spiced with cloves and cinnamon and cooked long and slow in the oven with red onions, apples, some demerara sugar and a splash of apple cider vinegar is also always very much associated with Christmastime. It accompanies roast goose or game beautifully and has the great advantage of being better made ahead and chilled (or frozen) and then reheated when required.

The same better-if-prepared-ahead characteristic applies to the potato and celeriac purée. This is a Delia Smith recipe from her 1990 book, Christmas. The vegetables are cooked, drained and then mashed together with sour cream, salt and plenty of black pepper. I like to dust the surface with a bit of freshly grated nutmeg too. 

Both the red cabbage and the potato and celeriac purée sit happily in a bain marie in my upper oven while I deal with Mrs Goosey in the oven below!

This year, my Christmas guests arrived this afternoon so today has marked the beginning of Christmas celebrations here. Advent has felt appropriately observed and abstemious enough to sharpen the anticipation of a little uninhibited feasting over the next few days, without a feeling of boredom or déjà vu. That in itself has been quite a precious Christmas gift. 

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
pear
Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch
leftovers from the fridge

Tea
black tea
baby Christmas cakes with marzipan and fondant icing*


*These cakelets are a forerunner of my Christmas cake proper. I use a, slightly adapted, version of the BBC Good Food boil-and-bake recipe by Sara Buenfeld for the cakes.  For the marzipan, I use Delia Smith's almond paste recipe in her Complete Cookery Course. I can't give you a link to the marzipan recipe itself because it doesn't seem to exist in any On-line form. It's a cooked almond paste so it's slightly more complicated than some but I think it's unbeatable - it has an excellent flavour and texture and it's easy to work with. It's also suitable for anyone who shouldn't eat raw eggs. I've made it every year for over 30 years now and although whisking the eggs and sugar over hot water for 12 minutes, (which is what's involved), is time-consuming, it's non-negotiable. Hell will have to freeze over before I'll willingly abandon it!


The fondant icing recipe I've only come to in the last few years but am a convert to it for icing these little cakelets, even though I still use a classic royal icing mix for my big Christmas cake. You can find the recipe I use here. The flavour of the homemade stuff, I'm afraid, does knock the spots off what you can buy. Not worth it perhaps if you know people are going to leave the icing on the side of their plates uneaten, but if it's there to be eaten and enjoyed, (and in this house that's what it's there for), then it's worth the trouble. I started making fondant rather than royal icing for these mini cakes in order to use a rather jolly, snowflake-embossed rolling pin my mother-in-law gave me a few Christmases back. I love the effect this has - the raised white-on-white design is understated but elegant. 


The world divides into dyed-in-the-wool Christmas-cake-lovers and others. I know some people really don't like the classic, British Christmas cake. Too much dried fruit. Too much sugar in the marzipan and icing. Or just too much, all in. But for me, this is one of the great culinary triumphs of British baking; one of the highlights of Christmas and I love it. 

In fact, in all truth, I'd be happy to pass up all other Christmas food and just have the cake! 

Supper
roast goose with herby stuffing** 
apple sauce made from cold-stored apples in the garage 
braised spiced red cabbage with apple and onions
potato and celeriac purée
pigs in blankets

mince pies with damson and hazelnut mincemeat and Cointreau and clementine cream***

**The stuffing is my mother-in-law's recipe which is very good with chicken, turkey or goose and yes, I do use it to stuff the cavity of the bird. So long as the bird is fresh, not frozen, and has had a bit of time out of the fridge before cooking to take the chill off it, I find this is fine. If you cook stuffing separately, you miss out on the unctuous joy of the meat juices and fat seeping into the stuffing during cooking. 

It's made from a loaf of two-to-three-day-old homemade 50% wholemeal / 50% white bread, de-crusted and whizzed to crumbs in the food processor - about 400g for Mrs Goosey today, lots of chopped fresh herbs from the garden (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, hyssop, summer savory - whatever is still going in the garden basically), salt, pepper and boiling water to mix. It has no fat - plenty of that drips through as the goose cooks. And it has no egg - the egg added to stuffing is what makes it stick together but it also makes it tough, I think. I much prefer the looser, almost melting texture of this stuffing and just add enough boiling water to the mix to allow it to coalesce enough for me to get it into the cavity of the goose easily.

***One of the few things I buy in over Christmas rather than make from scratch - I've tried to do a homemade version of this but have not found a satisfactory recipe that actually produces the equivalent of the commercial stuff. If anyone reading this has a good, thick Cointreau cream recipe, please do share it with me.  
E x


Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #28

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 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all highly processed foods.

In many parts of Europe it is traditional to eat fish on Christmas Eve. Carp in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe; salt cod in Provence and Italy; a spicy fish stew known as halászlé, in Hungary and gravadlax, or cured salmon in Scandinavia. In part, this is a reflection of European Christian heritage - Christmas Eve is traditionally observed both by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians as a strict fast day on which no meat is consumed since it is the vigil of the Solemn Feast of Christmas. But this also reflects seasonal availability, more relevant in the past than today perhaps. Unlike fresh meat, fresh fish continued to be available throughout the winter, either from the sea or from freshwater lakes and rivers and if fresh fish wasn't available, dried salt fish or pickled fish in brine were additional options that could be relied upon when other food could be scarce. 

Fish these days is a luxury - it is expensive, often prohibitively so - the days of being able to fill up on oysters and salmon because they are so cheap are long gone. I often serve fish on Christmas Eve - a nod to past tradition and since it is a treat, I feel it is also an appropriate harbinger of the feast of the morrow.

I usually make a fish soup - either a flaming scarlet, Italian-style burrida with a base of onions, fennel, carrots, tomatoes and white wine, flavoured with orange peel and rosemary, or a paler more English-style one, with onions, leeks, celery and potato, flavoured with saffron and dill and finished with cream. The fish in either soup is usually of one kind rather than a mixture, cubed white fish such as cod or haddock loin, monkfish if I'm feeling extravagant, or pale scallops, halved if they're large, dropped into the simmering broth and poached until just done. Sometimes I use fresh salmon fillet for the English-style one which looks beautiful - the pale pink of the fish against the golden yellow backdrop of the soup. 

Today I have not made fish soup; I've produced something I usually leave until after Christmas to make and that is homemade gravadlax. This sounds more ambitious than it is and if you've never tried preparing this at home, I recommend it. Minimally processed, it has all the nutrients and vitamins of raw fish and is absolutely delicious. 

I first tried it in 2014 the year I got 'Salt, Sugar and Smoke', Diana Henry's excellent book which contains a couple of recipes for cured salmon, one with vodka and one with whisky and I've made it for high days and holidays ever since. I prefer the version with vodka. To make this, you do need at least one whole side of very fresh, good quality salmon, cleaned and boned but with the skin on. I get mine by mail order from here ahead of time and freeze it. Freezing is recommended in fact, prior to curing, as it kills off any parasites. I m not sure how this works but that is the advice given by Diana Henry and elsewhere. 

Preparation (it can hardly be called cooking) is a doddle but it has to be done well ahead of time as the cure needs several days to 'take'. You mix sugar, salt, black peppercorns and chopped fresh dill together and sandwich this together with the vodka between two pieces of fish. 




This 'sandwich' is then tightly wrapped in a double layer of tin foil, placed on a baking tray and weighted down in the fridge for four - five days. Diana Henry says two to four days but I would say it's best to leave it to cure for the full four days before unpacking and slicing . You can either sandwich two whole sides of salmon together or, if you want to prepare a smaller quantity, you can cut one side of salmon into two chunks and place one on top of the other. This is what I've done for today. Either way, you need to turn the salmon once a day, replacing the weights to keep the fish in contact with the cure. I usually put my weights on a tray or plate as once you've started to turn the salmon, the cure draws out a lot of liquid and you don't want that all over your weights. 


At the end of the curing period you remove the fish from its foil parcel and slice thinly with an extremely sharp knife. You can discard the peppercorn and dill residue of the curing mixture or I like to add some of the black and green fragments back over the sliced salmon. And the best bit of the process? Those teensy weensy nuggets of cured salmon that haven't made the grade of proper slices are the cook's privilege to sample and savour in the quiet of the kitchen. Christmas has begun in earnest! Actually the apostrophe is in the wrong place - it should come after the 's' as this is usually a joint effort between H and myself. I prepare and turn the salmon beforehand and H, armed with a wickedly sharp, very long, slim blade is generally charged with the slicing as he is far more proficient than I am at patiently and skilfully taking off long, thin, elegant slices right down to the skin at the base of the fillet. 


Diana Henry comments that the preparation of cured salmon is traditionally done in Scandinavia 'in coolness, in silence and in shadow' and I can confirm that preparing this in silence, by candlelight, before dawn, around the time of the winter solstice, feels wonderfully atavistic. On a practical note, regardless of how you conduct the preparation, the slicing should definitely be undertaken in coolness and silence, although not in semi-darkness. It is a job requiring very clean hands, good light and plenty of space and time. Always slice horizontally away from you as H is doing in the pic below this afternoon. Any interruptions or distractions should be banned - a blade that lethal should be treated with considerable circumspection. Enough said!


Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk
apple juice
fruit
homemade Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch
homemade game pâté on granary toast and homemade apricot and tomato chutney

Tea
black tea
panforte di Siena

Supper
cured salmon
watercress salad
pickled marinaded mushrooms with dill and black peppercorns
Russian sourdough rye bread with unsalted butter

mince pies made with homemade damson and hazelnut mincemeat with cream 
chocolate meringue log*


* A BBC Good Food recipe from 1995 - I can't find a link to this anywhere - it pre-dates Internet days - but it's basically meringue flecked with grated plain chocolate, baked flat and rolled around a filling of whipped cream, rum and melted milk chocolate. The only tricky thing is making sure there isn't too much of a differential between the temperature of the melted milk chocolate and that of the whipped cream for the filling, otherwise, if the chocolate is too warm and the cream too cold, the chocolate seizes on contact with the cream. Not a disaster if this happens - it just makes the filling a bit granular in texture. This has happened to me in the past and I've served it up anyway - no one has ever complained! 

The chocolate holly leaves are a frivolous extra but do make it look very pretty. You pipe the outlines in melted dark chocolate before filling in with melted white chocolate. They are 'glued' in place with a little bit of reserved filling. 

I am conscious that although the roulade is homemade it does rely on the processed food that is chocolate. I fear this therefore may be a fail at the last fence as it were! 

Anyway, Happy Christmas Eve to you and all who are with you in spirit, body or remembrance.

E x














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