Baking Update

For a while there I didn’t feel I could justify making baking posts because I was mostly just continuing my adventures with the bread machine. I had guests come to stay a couple of times which proved my theory right on the delights of putting on a loaf first thing and having time to shower, tidy the flat and make some soup before my guests arrived just as the loaf came out of the machine. However as I was mostly just playing around with different packet mixes to see which settings gave the best results with a fairly consistent starting point. (I did discover that different brands, despite having nigh on identical weights and ingredients, produce vastly different results!) I have in the interim, developed opinions on the best settings to use on my machine and, while yes, I would still likely never have bought one myself, I am delighted with it and it has earned its space on my kitchen counter.

Then in March my colleague left us and as his last week involved him being on early shift and thus precluded us taking him to the pub, we had a coffee and cake morning for him. Lots of baking was done and cake eaten. And, because if I have a niche in baking it’s unusual savoury pastry treats, I dug out the pastry swirls recipe and made little pesto puffs for the occasion which the guest of honour proved particularly fond of so success! (I often find at these sort of occasions people overcompensate by making the sweetest, richest recipes in their repertoire, so making a savoury option as a contrast will go down well.) I actually made a double batch, one lot of pesto and one sweet batch made with nutella. They were a great success, except with a late arriving colleague who mistook them for cinnamon rolls and was somewhat discombobulated by the pesto when he bit into one!

And I started writing this entry about my baking progress and then never actually finished it! It’s been months, this file was labelled ‘march baking’, it is most definitely not April any more. However, I may have stopped writing about it, but I definitely did not stop baking. I didn’t bake as much as I might have hoped, but that has been impacted by different external forces, between work and the weather I haven’t had as much time for baking or other cooking as I would have liked, but I’m still managing to carve out some time.

Unless I’m baking for a particular event – the puff pastry swirls for my colleague leaving, or the brownies for the triathalon folks – then I tend to bake on a Sunday evening when I know I’ll be on early shift in the morning. I like to do a batch cook on a Sunday night more generally but it’s more vital when I’m going to be on earlies and there’s a high chance I’ll be too tired to cook anything too adventurous. As that quite often involves making a pasta bake or something similar – a big dish of cauliflower cheese, a pie or a quiche perhaps – I often motivate myself to do it with the thought that well, I have the oven on anyway, I might as well bake. I was reminded about this tendency this afternoon as I made three cheese and spinach muffins, these are particularly complex muffins, but my usual go-to muffin recipe is really quick and straight-forward and can be easily adapted to almost any fruit I have in the house at short notice. (I’ve even make them with frozen cherries before.) A while back I resurrected an old favourite by making Danish pastries, but with rhubarb I’d found on special. I will say that using up food stuffs that I bought on special, whether fruit or pastry, has definitely been a theme of my baking lately. I think if I were going to set a target for my baking for the rest of the year, it would be to try more new recipes because after an adventurous start to the year I’ve definitely been falling back on old favourites.

CCC – More of July than Expected

Somehow, July seems to have disappeared on me in a flash. It feels like barely a fortnight has passed and yet somehow here I am, a month on from my last post, wondering where the time has gone. It’s not as though I’ve not been cooking, I’ve still been cooking – if slightly less than before – but I suppose with lockdown loosening I’ve had less time to let my thoughts about food percolate into writing about food.

It’s not as though I’m thinking that much less about food. If anything this whole situation has made me hyper aware of the fragility of the ‘just-in-time’ food system and I’m keeping a weather eye on upcoming events with a heightened awareness of potential issues. I’ve always had a tendency to over-stock in terms of cupboard staples, which has served me well in times of scarcity, and again during lockdown. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can stock up a little more and have been making preparations accordingly. Nothing ridiculous, just, when I pick up a can or a packet of something and the Best Before is somewhere in 2022, I’ll grab an extra one to put away, just in case. Perhaps I won’t need them, perhaps in early 2022 I’ll be doing another of my cupboard cook-ups and feeling a little silly, but if this year has taught me anything, it’s how quickly the world can change.

In my last entry I was debating making cornbread, and I did in fact make cornbread muffins, with cheese and actual sweet corn, which were perfectly acceptable breakfast muffins, but I think if I make them again I’ll add spring onions and maybe some hot paprika? I think them might benefit from that – though perhaps I could kill two birds with one stone and use a Mexican cheese, perhaps a manchego or something spicier?

I also made my jackfruit chilli, which I enjoyed, though I think the jackfruit would be improved by marinating in a strongly flavoured marinade for a while beforehand, as I was using tinned jackfruit and it retained a certain, briney aftertaste that I’d rather avoid. I can totally see why it gets used as fake ‘pulled pork’ because that texture is lovely. Speaking of tinned vegetables that are a bit out of the ordinary, I’ve got a tin of banana blossom to try, apparently it’s a tasty option for vegetarian fish and chips.

This month’s main food obsession has been soft tacos. I’ve eaten a wide variety of things in them – I had a lot of lettuce to use up – tattie scones, with tomato paste and lots of cheese, quorn nuggets, peppers and sour cream, leftover chilli, and even the potato salad I talk about below! They’re the perfect size to eat hand-held, two is the perfect amount for lunch and they fluff up nicely in the microwave to turn into something special. Having spent much more time at home over the last few months, I’d got a bit scunnered with my usual lunch options. Therefore, it was the perfect time to discover something new that I could either throw together quickly before heading out to work, or make a bit fancy if I was working from home and had the time.

This afternoon I’ve been making potato salad, something that until a couple of years ago, I would have politely declined as a dish I didn’t enjoy – finding it sad and bland. The change came at a colleague’s flat warming BBQ where I was the only vegetarian in attendance and would myself eating pasta salad and politely accepting potato salad that turned out to exceptionally more-ish. I’d never had potato salad with boiled egg in, but there was definitely something special about it. My colleague’s wife – who’d made the salad – reckoned it was celery that made the difference, more for the texture than the taste, another attendee recommended adding spring onions; another that a little mustard in the mayo would really lift it. It was a revelation! I seem to think that that was the summer that I got obsessed with making my own couscous salads for working lunches so all round an excellent summer for food.

CCC Intinery Update

I’ve not been very adventurous in the kitchen the last couple of weeks. The first week it was intentional, my big pasta bake from my last post, was meant to see me through my week of early shifts and it did. Then I was able to make a surprise visit to my parents for the weekend, and this week while I’ve been on annual leave it has, honestly been mostly too hot to cook anything complicated. I made myself a nice giant couscous and beetroot salad – with sprouting broccoli and baby sweet corn alongside the essential feta cheese – and some tasty beetroot hummus to use up the rest of the beetroot, and those lurking flat breads.

I was thinking about what I could make for the coming week – perhaps a stir-fry? – and I wasn’t feeling inspired, so I decided to look to my cupboards for inspiration and remembered that I had actually documented what was in there so I looked up my list and updated with some new acquisitions. While I was off work I’d given my kitchen a good tidy out, re-organised some cupboards and sorted out some better storage solutions. It seemed a waste to just throw that empty box that the Christmas crackers – the kind you have with cheese, not the kind you pull – came in, it’s a good sturdy plastic box, so now it’s keeping all the less usual dried ingredients I’ve picked up lately for one recipe or another and haven’t got round to trying. (There’s two different kinds of flour, both loose and pre-made polenta, split yellow peas, pinto beans and randomly a bag of caster sugar – spot who intended to bake lots this week before the heatwave hit…) Hopefully having them all in one place will encourage me to actually use them up!

First up we have a can of jackfruit, I dug up a recipe for a bean chilli with jackfruit, because a) I love chilli and lately my chilli has felt a bit uninspired so that seemed a good option for trying out a new ingredient and b) that’s an ideal bulk cook meal for the week ahead. Also, lately I seem to have lost the ability to leave the supermarket without at least one can of some variety of beans or another and this recipe uses several different kinds.

At some point I found a flat-bread recipe that called for corn flour – in the American sense of maize flour, rather than in the UK sense of the starchy stuff you use to thicken sauces – and went to the effort of tracking it down. The recipe book in question had a bunch of recipes that used it so it seemed a good plan at the time. However the recipe book has long been back at the library – and for obvious reasons I can’t get it back out – and most other recipes that I would expect to use it, give substitutions for the sensible reason that it’s actually a weirdly specialist ingredient here, I eventually tracked it down a health food shop, I guess because it’s gluten free? Anyway, eventually I’ve tracked down a tortilla recipe that at least uses some maize flour so that seems a fun accompaniment to my chilli.

That’ll still leave quite a lot of maize flour, so I had the bright idea of making cornbread or at least cornbread muffins, but all the UK recipes I’ve come across seem to use polenta rather than maize flour – and frankly a lot of chefs seem to treat the two as interchangeable, heck the BBC Food website, usually my ally in these matters, offers ‘maize’ recipes that use both polenta and cornmeal interchangeably. I am a terribly confused penguin.

(More importantly, if you’re a vegetarian and therefore don’t put bacon in your cornbread, what do you put in…? Spring onions maybe?)

Finally, given how nice the weather has been lately, it seems like a good time to take another run at making Bubble Tea. After the success of my tapioca pudding, I feel like I have a better grasp of how long to cook my pearls for now, so I have a more realistic view of the time investment required.

I’ve got a few more ideas lurking about, but I think that’s quite adventurous enough for one week…

Cooking the Book – April Edition

In which I attempt to do more writing earlier in the month, so I don’t spend the last weekend of the month frantically cooking and frantically writing. One or the other please!

This month’s first experiment was Feta, Spinach and Basil Omelette Muffins. They’re really just mini baked omelettes but they are little bundles of delicious perfection. I’ve made them three times in the last month and I think I like them more each time. The first time I made them, they were mostly just egg and spinach with a little garlic and chive cheese I had left in the fridge and they were pretty good. But the second time I made them I had feta in the fridge and bought a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes specifically for the recipe – I’m not really a fan of them – and they were elevated to something amazing. In my original attempt the nutmeg was a bit much, but with the salty feta and the sundried tomatoes added to the mix, the flavours balanced perfectly.

You’re supposed to mix the sun-dried tomato in with the eggs, herbs and spinach but I have enough trouble portioning the mix out correctly as it is, so I just put a piece in each muffin tin and then pour the mix over the top of it. Ensuring that I don’t have to fish bits of tomato out to ensure equal tomato distribution. The other advantage of putting the sundried tomato in first, is that a little of the oil it was stored in will seep out and stop the muffin sticking to the tin, removing the need to grease it.

I had great plans for what I was going to make as my second April dish. I was debating between Beetroot risotto and pumpkin & sweet potato gnocchi. But then: disaster! The gas man came to fit a new meter, did his checks and…condemned our cooker. So my elaborate cooking plans for last weekend went out the window. We do now have a shiny new oven (that goes above 190ºC!) but I was forced to scale back my ambitions.

I fell back on my old failsafe and made a smoothie. (Breakfast Green Super Smoothie, to be precise.) A proper green smoothie too, as its essentially pear and spinach. (It was supposed to be kale, but I’ll still not ready for that, and I had a bag of spinach in the fridge just sitting there.) And, well I can see why the turmeric is optional I think I’ll give that a miss next time, but otherwise pear and spinach is really nice – I couldn’t taste the ginger at all. I might add some kiwi next time go for epic greenery!

It also meant that I started May will a tall glass of overnight chilled smoothie and some cute little egg muffins – well, I had to check they still worked in the new oven didn’t I?

Bake More Often: Off-List Edition

I suppose I should really stop teasing with my illusions to an epic weekend of baking and actually talk about what I made shouldn’t I?

Well, it started with Sausage Rolls, we had sausages that needed using up, and in my quest for a recipe to cook them up, I remembered that Sausage Rolls were on my list and not knowing how much puff pastry I’d need grabbed a big pack on my late night supermarket run. (For reference a 1KG pack is too much – I fed a family of three twice, plus lunch for two and still managed a one-person fake-pie for myself on the Monday night!) So having successfully managed sausage rolls, I had a dig through my recipe books in search of something to use up the rest of the pastry. I stumbled across a recipe that struck straight to my childhood nostalgia – vol-au-vents. But what to put in them? The recipe called for feta cheese and pomegranate and in my opinion vol-au-vents should be hot with an equally hot filling. Handily my mum was making ham soup so I pinched some of the meat, she made a nice white sauce and a tasty filling was born.

If I had issues about ‘proper’ baking with the sausage rolls, they were nowhere to be seen with the vol-au-vents. Perhaps it was the cutting out and construction work involved in putting them together, but they definitely felt like ‘real‘ baking. I do take a couple of issues with the recipe as written though. First up, why get rid of the inner circles? Bake them separately and they make cute little hats/lids for the vol-au-vents, judicious application of the rolling pin would doubtless resolve the overly puffed result I got. Secondly, once they’ve been in the oven it tells you to cut out the puffed up centres and discard – cut them out certainly, but they squash down easily enough under the weight of the filling, and if you really want to remove them they make a tasty treat for the peckish cook. Particularly tasty, I find, with mashed potatoes and broccoli.

While I had the oven on and was using up things in the fridge, I made some Spinach and Cheese (Cheddar, Parmasan and Cream-cheese to be precise) Muffins. These are an old tried and tested favourite of mine and make an excellent savoury breakfast. A wee 30 second blast in the microwave before eating re-melts the cream-cheese nicely. Handily they also cook in the oven at the same temperature as the vol-au-vents, so I was able to whip them up while the vol-au-vents were chilling/resting in the fridge and stick them both in together.