A productive afternoon...

It rained non-stop this afternoon, so I spent most of it in the kitchen. As well as cooking dinner (roast chicken, homemade stuffing, veg and gravy) and producing enough bolognese sauce for 4 meals, I decided to rustle up a batch of my Grandma's ginger biscuits, which brought back some great childhood memories.

Lunch at Grandma's was always good - and my brother and I always looked forward to the ceremonial after-lunch opening of the biscuit barrel, which typically contained two sorts of homemade biscuits: ginger biscuits and Canadian cookies. My brother, my grandfather and I were allowed one of each, each. Both were absolutely delicious; next time I bake I shall make the Canadian cookies.

Grandma's Ginger Biscuits

Take a saucepan, and put in it:
170g golden syrup,
85g granulated sugar
110g butter (Grandma used to use margarine, but I thought I would try butter)
and set over a gentle heat to melt.
Weigh out 250g plain flour, and add 2-3 level tsp ground ginger, 1/4 level tsp salt, and 1 level tsp baking powder. Mix together well.
In a ramekin (or similar small bowl) mix together 1 tbsp milk and 1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda.

Once the contents of the pan have melted together, stir, then tip in the flour/ginger mixture and pour in the milk and bicarb mixture. Combine well with a wooden spoon.
Now you have two options - you can either chill the mixture, form it into a sausage shape, wrap it in cling film and keep it in the fridge, cutting slices off whenever you fancy baking some biscuits, or you can bake it straight away, which is what I did.

Line the base of a couple of baking trays with baking parchment (this makes it so much easier to detach the biscuits from the trays when they come out of the oven) and put 6 blobs of biscuit mixture, each the size of a large-ish marble (about a 2 to 2.5cm sphere), on each. You can either get bits of the biscuit mix out of the pan with your fingers, or else use two teaspoons to put the blobs on the tray.
Squish the blobs down so that they are about 5mm thick and roughly circular, then put in the oven (190degC). They will spread out a bit more, and puff up a bit, and go brown. When they are a lovely golden brown all over, take them out, let them sit on the tray for a couple of minutes to firm up a bit, then carefully transfer them to a cooling rack. (Makes about 40).

Fend off hordes of ravening boys who are lured into the kitchen by the wonderful biscuit smell, then hide the biscuits (once cool) in a tin. They keep for at least a week, I am told, but I can't see them lasting that long.

Back in one piece and getting ready for Christmas

After an operation this summer, which meant that the family had to take over cooking duties for a while as I was unable to, I have sadly been unable to update my blog at all since I returned to the kitchen a couple of months ago. I have been unable to sit down for prolonged periods with any degree of comfort and so recreational computing has been out, as I have had to devote my energies to necessary computing for work.

However, I have now reached the point where I can sit down for a while and type without wincing, so normal service should be resumed shortly. Hurrah!

I've made a Christmas cake which is sitting in a tin maturing at the moment. I have the family for Christmas - my husband and sons will be spending it with me this year rather than going and sliding down mountains as they have for the last two years (it's amazing what a threat to change the locks while they are away if they go away for Christmas for the third year in a row will achieve), and my parents are joining us, so there will be six of us. So what will we be eating?

Turkey, of course, along with chestnut, apple and sausagemeat stuffing, plus my great-grandmother's recipe for sage and onion stuffing, which is a thing of absolute joy. Sprouts by the bucketful, buttered carrots with basil, and mashed potato. (The mashed potato and sprouts will be cooked in enormous quantities so as to provide plenty of leftovers for the traditional Boxing Day bubble and squeak.) And, of course, Christmas pudding and white nutmeggy custard, with a generous splosh of rum poured over the pud before applying the custard. Although, having had Christmas pudding served with advocaat last year, rather than rum and custard, I am torn...

And, of course, mince pies will be prepared... quite possibly some scones too (pronounced to rhyme with "bones" and "cones" rather than "Johns") to serve with raspberry jam and clotted cream for Christmas Day tea... if I get myself organised, too, I can make some Christmas biscuits to my old schoolfriend Sabine's recipe, which are rather delicious. I can feel a plan coming on.

Roast socks - delicious...

So, the older son has been in Paris this week, and he returned home clutching a whole Reblochon cheese, which the wrapper says is the cheese for Tartiflette.

This is something I've heard of but have never tried, so I did a bit of research on the interwebs and every recipe I found for it was different. There were the common threads of Reblochon, potatoes, onion and bacon, but otherwise just about every aspect of the recipe varied profoundly.

Garlic, or not garlic? (Duh - it's French, so it really ought to.)
Mushrooms?
Cream, or not? And if yes - single, double or creme fraiche? And how much? 6tbsp up to 300ml...
Boil old potatoes and then peel and slice them, or boil new potatoes in their skins and then slice them, or slice them and boil them? And do you fry the potatoes before putting them in the dish? Or not?
Butter the cooking dish, or not?
Lardons or regular bacon? Smoked or not?
White wine? If yes - do you pour a glass over the whole thing before it goes in the oven, or deglaze the pan with it? Or just drink it?

Apache potatoes

Oval Pyrex dish

In the end I stopped reading the recipes, as it was all getting too confusing, added new potatoes and cream to the shopping list (I had bacon and onions in stock already) and then older son and I set to this evening to assemble it. We found some rather lovely Apache potatoes (left) in Tesco today so they were an obvious choice, and decided to make it in a large oval Pyrex dish (below).

This is what we did.

Take 1.2kg Apache potatoes, wash them, then slice (5mm slices) into a pan of cold water. Add salt and bring to the boil. Simmer for 7 mins (according to one recipe, the potatoes should be "tender when pocked with a knife"). We gave them a quick pocking and determined that they were sufficiently done, so drained them and kept them warm.
While the potatoes are cooking, chop a pack of sliced smoked bacon into 1cm slices and fry gently in 15g butter and 15ml olive oil. (I used a 6-rasher pack of back bacon as I had one lurking in the fridge.)  Put the oven on - 200degC.
Peel and slice 2 med/large onions and add to the frying pan. Peel and chop 3 cloves of garlic and add those to the pan as well. Cook gently until the onion and garlic are soft but not coloured. Add a bit of pepper and salt.
Put 15g butter into the dish and microwave it until it melts, then cover the inside of the dish with butter using a pastry brush.
Put half of the potatoes in the bottom of the dish in an even layer, then half of the onion and bacon mixture, then 75ml cream (we used a mixture of single and double). Repeat the layers, then unwrap the Reblochon cheese, and, cursing freely, attempt to cut it into two rounds. Give up on that idea, and cut it in half first into two semicircles, then attempt to cut each half into two thinner semicircles. (It's evil stuff, Reblochon - as the knife passes through it it has a magical self-healing property, so it sticks itself back together again. Son and I both tried  with a semicircle, with varying degrees of success.)
Use the somewhat ragged semicircles, rind-side up, to thatch the top of the Tartiflette, then pour a glass of wine over the top (using a pastry brush to make sure the cheese rind is thoroughly wine-y).

Put in the oven, and listen to the howls of horror from younger son as the house fills with the delicious aroma of roasting socks. Once the top starts going crisp and brown, and it's bubbling vigorously, it's done.

Serve with a green salad.

Cheesy leeky mash

Take 1kg potatoes, cut into even sized pieces, and put into a pan of cold water. Add 1 teaspoon salt. Turn the heat on. Wash and slice 500g leeks (including the green bits) and add to the pan. Bring to the boil. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain, add 150 ml milk, 20g butter and about 100g grated cheese, plus a good sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper to the pan, and mash roughly. Good with oven-ready fish in breadcrumbs/batter portions, and takes about the same length of time to cook. Feeds two starving teenage boys and two adults with normal appetites. I gave up peeling potatoes that I was going to mash some years ago. It's much quicker, tastes good, and gives a dish an appealingly rustic look. Extra fibre too. What's not to like?

Upside-down cake

So, in order to get through the rhubarb in the garden without repeating myself too often, I spent some time today looking at recipes and decided to attempt my own variant of a rhubarb and custard cake. I started off by roasting about 800g of rhubarb, chopped in 2cm lengths and sprinkled with 150g of sugar, in a shallow tin at 180degC for 30 minutes, which reduces the water content greatly and ended up with about 600g of cooked rhubarb in deep pink syrup. I drained this, reserving the syrup. Next, for the cake, I lined a 23cm springform tin with baking parchment, made some custard (11g custard powder, 13g sugar, 160ml milk) then creamed 250g margarine with 250g sugar and 5ml vanilla extract and added 4 eggs, one at a time, before adding 250g SR flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon baking powder and about half the custard, plus some of the syrup from the rhubarb. Half of the mixture went into the tin, and after spreading it out I topped it with half of the rhubarb, then put the rest of the cake mixture on top of that, in rough spoonfuls, then the rest of the rhubarb on top of that. Then I spooned blobs of the custard on the top, and it was ready for the oven. Then, disaster. While I was lifting it into the oven, the base of the springform tin sprung out. The cake mix ended up all over the oven door. I grabbed 3 2lb loaf tins and liners (thank you, Lakeland) and hastily scraped the mix into them, so all my careful layering went completely to pot. After washing the oven door, I put the tins in with crossed fingers and baked them for about 50 mins at 180degC. We had one for dinner, served with the leftover rhubarb syrup, and although it did not look pretty it tasted good.

Salad 'n' soup

What is the correct response when your husband proudly presents you with a strangely misshapen beetroot that he has discovered in the garden? One of the batch that he grew last year, which has somehow escaped being harvested with all the others?

Why, make a salad with it, of course.

So, I peeled it, then out came my trusty vegetable shredder (which looks rather like a mutant potato peeler; something like this one, and which confuses my husband dreadfully - oh, how I laughed when I heard he had been trying to peel potatoes with it once) and shredded it into a bowl along with two carrots and a finely sliced onion. The juice of a lemon, about a tablespoonful of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper went in next, then the whole lot had a good toss and was good to go.

Still in a salad-y mood, as I'd picked up a couple of cheap cucumbers and some tomatoes at the supermarket yesterday, I soaked 150g of bulgur wheat in 300ml boiling water for about 20 mins, then chopped up half a cucumber and quartered 8 cherry tomatoes to make some tabbouleh. A good squeeze of garlic puree, the juice of a lemon, another tablespoonful of olive oil, salt, pepper and a generous handful of flat-leaf parsley from the garden (with the earwigs and ladybirds carefully removed before bringing it indoors) roughly chopped, made the dressing, into which I folded the cucumber and the tomatoes and then the still-warm bulgur wheat.

And the soup: broccoli today.
One onion, chopped and fried gently in 10g butter, with 2 potatoes, diced, then added to the pan with the onion, plus the broccoli stalks from a medium head of broccoli, chopped. About a pint of boiling water, salt and pepper, then after it had simmered for about 10 mins, the rest of the broccoli, and about 8 further minutes simmering. Then a quick whizz in the pan with a hand blender, about 1/2 a pint of milk, and it was ready to serve.

All in all, not a bad lunch!

Rhubarb, rhubarb...

The weather has been a bit dreary for the last couple of weeks, but the rhubarb in the garden has enjoyed the recent rainfall. So much so, in fact, that I think we will mostly be eating rhubarb for the foreseeable future.

I have recently acquired a new crumble dish - the one that I used for my last crumble foray ended up getting used to hold a flower arrangement of anemones for my mum's 75th birthday (happy birthday, Mum! It was a GREAT party!) which she took home with her after the party, and so that my poor chaps at home would not be unduly deprived of crumble, I now have her oval pyrex dish, which is significantly bigger than the one that had the anemones in.

Tonight I gave the larger crumble dish its first outing, with the first crop of rhubarb from the garden.

900g of freshly picked rhubarb, washed and cut into 2.5cm chunks, covered the bottom of it quite nicely. 85g of sugar was sprinkled over that, and that all sat in the dish thinking about things quietly while I whizzed up 300g of plain flour and 120g butter in the food processor, then added 80g rolled oats and 100g sugar and gave it another quick whizz.

Spreading this evenly over the lumpy rhubarb in the dish was a bit challenging - I could have done with more crumble mix, really. Particularly as there is the regular "crumble grumble" in which it is strongly suggested to me that the main point of a crumble is the crumble topping and certain young gentlemen in the house would definitely prefer their crumble with not so much fruit and a lot more topping. As there were some areas where the crumble topping was a bit on the thin side, due to the underlying rhubarb substrate being a little uneven, I popped this in the oven (180degC) for about 50 mins, until the rhubarb juices were bubbling up pinkly through the (all too sparse) crumble topping, bracing myself for the inevitable whingeing when it was served. However, older son and husband both ate it with apparent relish (and a large helping of custard) and younger son will be having his when he gets back from helping at Scouts this evening.

Yes, I'm such a bad mother that I don't even feed my poor son properly before he goes out in the evening these days. But as I didn't get back from work until 6 today, having a crumble that could be eaten by 7 was never really a possibility, and he has it to look forward to when he comes home.