The Joys of Christmas

Joy Number One

Oh, first joy of joys: spiced apple breakfast pancakes, served with damson compote, various homemade jams and quince Champagne cocktails!

The apples used were a tart eating apple, pilfered (with permission) from our neighbour, who also attended our Christmas breakfast. The damsons were our own, dug from the depths of our freezer, after they were picked last autumn. As you may remember, I have already commented on our dire (read: non-existent) damson harvest this year.

The pancakes themselves were a spongy variety, the recipe for which was adapted from Nigella’s, How to be a Domestic Goddess.

Finally, the wonderful (I-could-get-used-to-this-at-breakfast-time) Champagne cocktails were made using the reduced quince poaching liquor leftover from making Joy Number Five, the quince, apple and cardamom crumble.

Joy Number Two

Simple and elegant crab pâté, served with smoked malted wholemeal bread and Alan’s truly amazing bread and butter pickle.

I can’t quite communicate how perfectly all the components of this starter dish worked together. The crab pâté was a recipe taken from my Ballymaloe Cookery Course cookbook, which required solely crab meat, butter, garlic, seasoning, parsley and lemon juice. The bread was a loaf I baked that morning, using my favourite Bacheldre Watermill flour, and sliced thinly – a thin slice per person. But the pickle: oh, the pickle! It’s one that my Dad’s friend, Alan, makes every year, which is, cryptically, a slightly sweet cucumber relish.

And it was all perfect. Just perfect.

Joy Number Three

Steamed venison suet pudding, served with root vegetable puree and sprouts.

As you may have gathered, this winter, for me, it’s all about the suet. Those lovely boys at D.W.Wall came up trumps again with the beef fat for the suet pastry (as well as the wonderful smoked bacon used in the filling), and the venison was purchased from our local produce market.

The recipe was another I had lovely cut out and haphazardly pasted into one of my bulging recipe files, and it seems, was originally written by Gordon Ramsey and featured in The Times. It appealed to me not only for its use of both venison and suet, but also because it featured the use of raspberry vinegar. My mum made a cupboardful of raspberry condiments this year, but unfortunately vinegar wasn’t one of them. However, the raspberry vodka I found seemed to work rather well.

Joy Number Four

Smoked fish pie with stargazey prawn, for my non-venison-eating sister.

An individual pie, again, so simple in its list of ingredients: smoked fish, béchamel, seasoning, a hard boiled egg (a Christmas present from our chickens) with a topping of mashed potato and a single prawn, head poking up to the sky.

The recipe is one from Fergus Henderson, featured in his Nose to Tail Eating. The wee astrological crustacean was my own addition.

Joy Number Five

Quince, apple and cardamom crumble.

Now this pudding was all about me, me, me. But that’s by no means an apology. I love fruit puddings; anything with apple always gets my vote, and I’ve been unashamedly gushing about all things quince for quite a while now. But, in my defence (should any be needed), I promise that the preparing of this will ensure that your whole household will smell like Mrs Claus’ pantry for a whole afternoon. And not only that – it will also make damn sure that everyone within said household will get into the festive spirit, whether they want to, or not.

The poaching method used for preparing the quince was taken from David Lebovitz and is officially my new preparation method of choice. Instead of his use of vanilla, I used a 3-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into fat slices.

The fail-safe method for preparing the crumble mixture is Nigella’s, featured in How to Eat. And I twiddle with it, as I always do, adding different sugars and spices as I feel the need. But her ratio of fat to flour and sugar always comes good, so I stick to it.

For the filling: (NB – these quantities make enough for two crumble fillings. But when has that ever been a bad thing?)

Quince – 2

Fresh ginger – 3-inch piece, peeled and chopped into fat slices

Water – 600ml

Caster sugar – 65g

Unwaxed lemons – 1, cut in half

Apples – 3

Light muscovado sugar – 1.5 tbsp

Unsalted butter – a small knob

For the crumble: (NB – these quantities make enough for a single crumble topping. Double up if you’re baking two at once.)

Self-raising flour – 120g

Unsalted butter - 90g, cold and diced into smallish cubes

Salt – a pinch

Light muscovado sugar – 3 tbsp

Vanilla sugar – 1.5 tbsp

Caster sugar – 1.5 tbsp

Cardamom – the seeds from 2 to 3 pods, ground

Ground ginger – 1/2 tsp

Please refer to David Lebovitz for his quince poaching method, replacing the vanilla with the fresh ginger stipulated above. The ingredients I have listed will make a third of the amount that he advises, but cooking times shouldn’t vary (at least, mine still needed the full hour’s poaching). Allow the quince to cool in their poaching liquid while you prepare the apples.

Peel, core and cut the apples into eighths, then chop these into bite-sized chunks. Over a medium heat, melt the small knob of butter in a pan and when it begins to bubble, add the prepared apples, light muscovado sugar and 3 or 4 tbsp of the quince poaching liquid. Allow the apples to soften very slightly, turning them in the pan as you go.

Once they have begun to soften, tip them into a baking dish (or distribute them evenly between two, since the fillings I list make enough for two crumbles). Drain the quince (reserving the liquid and doing something wonderful with it, such as reducing it over a high heat, allowing it to cool and adding a couple of inches’ worth to the bottom of champagne glasses before topping up the rest of the glass with some good bubbly stuff), chop it into pieces the same size as the apples, and add these to the same baking dish/es. Drizzle a couple or three tbsp of the reserved poaching liquid over the top of the fruit.

To prepare the crumble topping, tip the flour and salt into a mixing bowl and add the cold, diced butter. Rub the flour into the fat until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs and then stir in the sugars and spices. Place the mixture in the fridge until you need it.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius/gas mark 5. When you are ready to bake your Christmassy crumble, sprinkle the cold crumble mixture over the top of the fruit in the baking dish and place in the oven for 25 to 35 minutes, until browned on top. Serve with vanilla ice cream or thick double cream.

Each crumble should feed four people, generously.

Joy Number Six

Gooey chocolate and cardamom puddings. For my choccy-choccy-too-choc sister.

Now, I can’t vouch for the success of this pudding, other than it looked the part. My sister certainly seemed to make positive sounding “mmpff” noises to all my questions concerning the prevalence of cardamom, but I can’t quite be sure she was actually listening.

Run Rabbit Run

My mother is officially the Queen of food thrift. As a testament to this, I have been eating rabbit for four days straight. Yes, that’s right: those two beautiful bunnies I (mostly) used in Sunday’s Rabbit Stew have gone on to become a delicious Rabbit and Butter Bean Soup, and on still further to become (oh, so terribly cute) little Rabbit Pies.

And it’s the pies I want to tell you about. They reminded me rather a lot of some that my Gran used to make, which had a filling of corned beef and onions, and involved a heinous amount of lard in making the pastry. And I adored them. That is, until I asked her to show me how she made them and I learned about the whole, ‘half a pack of lard per pie’ thing. (I used to quite happily eat a whole pie to myself, you see.)

Nowadays I’m a big fan of lard. For pastry purposes, anyway. It gives the pastry a strangely light and slightly crispy texture, which you simply don’t get when using all butter. In my Mum’s little Rabbit Pies, she used half lard-half butter and double the weight of flour to the weight of fat. (I love it when people speak in measurements like that. My aim in life is to one day be able to make at least half the things I cook without the use of weighing scales, and communicate all my recipes using the vaguest of terms: ‘a dash of this’ and ‘half a handful of that’.)

She took the few bits of rabbit that didn’t make it into the stew and first made a stock (which later went on to become a soup), before removing all of the meat from the bones and mincing it with root vegetables, some onion, rosemary and seasoning, and encasing it all in 18 rounds of pastry.

This evening, we sat down and calculated that, from those two bunnies, we had – theoretically at least – managed to feed 18 people. Incredible. 6 servings of Rabbit Stew, 6 servings of Rabbit and Butter Bean Soup and 6 servings of Rabbit Pie.

I think that statistic alone proves that my mother has earned her title.

A Loaf for Blue Cheese and a Custard Pie Victory

Saturday was a pleasing day. That description probably doesn’t make it sound like I had anything more than an adequate, run-of-the-mill day, but truly, I was pleased by so many things.

I was pleased to be able to make a final visit to my favourite local Saturday food market before jumping the country; I was pleased that my Saturday afternoon baking session was a success; I was pleased that we took a star-speckled evening walk to a local mountain viewpoint and got an amazing night time panorama; I was pleased and grateful that my friends hosted a ‘going away’ get-together for me; and I was especially pleased that people turned up.

So there. I stand by my adjectival use.

Please allow me to share my evening’s little baking victories with you.

First off my wonderful, wonderful fig and walnut loaf. This was divine with a slice of the blue cheese brought to the gathering by one, Mr Black. The original recipe was another Nigel Slater find from an Observer article published back in November 2006. I halved his recipe to make a single loaf; used figs rather than raisins; and used my new favourite type of flour, Bacheldre Watermill’s Oak Smoked Stoneground Strong Malted Blend Flour (which I waxed lyrical about in my earlier post, Smoking is Good). C’était incroyable. Truly.

Second, was my first attempt at Torta Della Nonna, a traditional Italian, pinenut-studded custard pie. And it worked. Oh, how it worked! To begin with, the custard was possibly the best I had ever made (probably all thanks to my lovely market egg lady) and what started out as a tricky, sticky pastry, turned out beautifully.

To the recipes.

Oak Smoked Stoneground Strong Malted Blend Flour – 125g

Strong white flour – 125g

Fresh yeast – 21g

Honey – ½ tbsp

Salt – ½ tsp

Warm water – 175ml

Dried Figs – 125g, chopped into small pieces

Walnut halves – 25g, broken into not-too-small pieces

Tip both types of flour into a large bowl and crumble in the yeast. Add the salt and honey and stir in the warm water, mixing with a wooden spoon. When all is mixed as well as possible, get your hands in and bring the dough together.

Tip the dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 4 minutes or so, until the dough feels springy and smooth, and doesn’t stick to the work surface.

Wash the mixing bowl in warm water and dry well. Flour the bowl lightly, put the dough back into it, cover with a clean tea towel and put the bowl in a warm place for an hour. By this time, the dough should have doubled in size.

Once it has had its rising time, tip the dough out onto a floured surface and gently knead in the figs and walnuts. They will feel like they don’t want to go in, but keep at it until all have been used. Don’t knead for too long, or the figs will, er… get a bit messy.

Shape the dough into a loaf shape, replace back in the bowl, cover and return it to its warm spot. Leave, this time, for about an hour and a half, until risen well.

Bake in a 220 degrees Celsius/gas mark 7 for 25 mins, or until the loaf is browned and sounds hollow when tapped on the base. Serve, if possible, with a wonderful blue cheese.

Now, to my latest, greatest achievement. This recipe is one of so very many, which has been lovingly but crudely cut out of a newspaper supplement and pasted into one of my recipe files, and has been waiting for the perfect opportunity to be made. It was featured in an article about an Italian restaurant in London, called Ida. (Unfortunately, I’m unable to reference the newspaper that wrote the review, since – despite frantic searching – I can’t find the review online.) Since I read the article, the restaurant has been on my list of Restaurants to Visit, but since tasting their torta, it has made it onto my list of Restaurants to Visit As Soon As Possible.

For the pastry:

‘00’ flour or plain flour – 500g

Unsalted butter – 300g, at room temperature

Caster sugar – 200g

Medium eggs – 2

Baking powder – 2 tsp

Lemon zest – from ½ a lemon

For the custard filling:

Full-fat milk – 500ml

Egg yolks – 5, medium

Whole Eggs – 2, medium

Caster sugar – 250g

Lemon zest – from ½ a lemon

Vanilla extract – 1 tsp

Pine nuts – 25g

Icing sugar for dusting

Put the flour in a bowl and make a well in the middle. Add all the other pastry ingredients to the well and mix these together with a fork. Once combined, start bringing in the flour from the sides and keep mixing until all is combined and the ingredients form a ball. Knead until smooth (adding more flour as necessary, until minimally sticky) and place in the fridge for an hour.

To make the custard, heat the milk in a saucepan and when it comes to the boil, remove it from the heat. In a large bowl, beat together the egg yolks, eggs, milk, sugar, lemon zest and vanilla until combined. Pour this mixture into a heavy based saucepan and gradually beat in the hot milk, stirring continually to prevent the egg from separating.

Place the pan over a low heat and continue to stir until the mixture thickens.

After the pastry has had its chilling time, divide the dough in two, so that one piece is twice as big as the other. Roll the larger piece out on a well floured surface and line a 30cm flan tin. Pour the custard into the lined flan tin, roll out the smaller piece of dough and place this over the top, pinching the edges to seal. Scatter the pine nuts all over the top of the tart.

Place the flan tin on a baking sheet and into an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius/gas mark 4. Bake the tart for 45 minutes until lightly browned. Allow it to cool completely (something that I didn’t do, which is probably the only thing that could have made it even better) and then dust with icing sugar before serving with pride.

This will serve 12 easily and apparently (we didn’t get the chance to test this out), it keeps well in the fridge for up to a week.

P.S. This reeeally doesn’t do justice to the Torta Della Nonna. It was my fault. In my ‘ooh, we need to try it, we need to try it!’ haste, I forgot to take pictures of the pasticceria-perfect slices. By the time I remembered, only the messy slice was left. Darn my greed!

Apple, Meet Blackberry

So, what did ever happen to those Italian blackberries and all the rest of my free bounty then, eh?

Well, those perfect, weeny figs were split in two, brushed with olive oil and grilled, before being lightly stuffed with a cube of feta.

That was this evening’s starter.

And the remaining fresh walnuts? They were added to a pan of sizzling rosemary (another Valle D’Aosta steal) and garlic oil and then, as promised, drizzled over bowls of pumpkin soup and topped with crumbled feta.

And did those blackberries end up getting friendly with my stewed apples? Well, lookie here…