PMT and an Homage to St. John

I apologise.  What I actually wanted to call this post was, ‘Afternoon Tea and an Homage to St. John’, however, my oh so droll subconscious had other ideas.  So PMT it is, I’m afraid.

Today’s Afternoon (or pm) Tea was something never before seen in our house.  (Although by normal standards what we ate would not have been considered terribly unusual at all.)  Allow me to explain.

I come from a long line of bakingly inept (on my mother’s side, at least).  On the odd occasion that she jokes about this impediment, my mother recounts the story that as a girl, she came home from school one day with a friend, to find that my grandmother had baked a cake.  Upon tasting it, my mother’s friend turned to her and said, “Ooh, it’s delicious! It tastes just like Yorkshire pudding!”.

Now, my grandmother could make the best Yorkshire pud in the world, but this must have been one of her last attempts at cake-baking, since I honestly can’t remember eating one at any point during my childhood.

(Actually, that’s not strictly true.  My grandmother did bake fruitcakes.  The boiled variety.  But that’s a story for another day.)

I’m happy to report that the deficient baking buck stops with me.  I love to bake.  But until I attended Ballymaloe, I’d never attempted a layered sponge cake.  They just didn’t appeal to me.  Yet since I’ve been taught the art of making them (and since I do love a bit of old school cookery every now and then), today I thought I’d make an event of it.

Our Afternoon Tea consisted of sponge cake layered with poached rhubarb and whipped cream, cups of tea (with saucers, naturally) and rhubarb cordial (made using the reduced poaching liquid).  Everyone enjoyed it so much, that they’re lobbying to make it a weekly event.  Damn it.

So after all that – hours after – supper needed to be a lightish affair.  Soup was called for.

Along with purple sprouting broccoli, wild garlic and rhubarb, I’ve gone a bit nettle crazy over the past few weeks.  My nettle beer was more than a pleasant surprise and my risotto was a good one too.  I had been meaning to try nettle soup for a while and since my birthday visit to St John Bread and Wine, I’d wanted to try theirs.

It wasn’t bad either.  Obviously not as good as the one we ate at St John’s, but pretty good nonetheless.  Definitely worth the half a gloved hour spent picking the prickly little devils, but if you should happen to try their recipe, be prepared to get your sieve out and spend just as long making it smooth as smooth can be.  Serve with a dollop of wild garlic cream, thick slices of soda bread and a tasty young goat’s cheese.

Wild Garlic Cream (Hardly a recipe, really.)

Double Cream – 150ml

Wild garlic leaves – two large handfuls

Salt – to taste

Pour the cream into pan, tear the wild garlic leaves in half and add to the cream.  Season with salt, place a lid on the pan and bring to the boil.  Remove from the heat and allow to cool for a while before liquidising/blending the mixture until it’s as smooth as it will go.  Allow to cool completely.

When the soup is ready, dollop a tablespoon of wild garlic cream into the centre of the bowl and serve.

Purple Sprouting Soup

Even before I embarked upon the kitchen marathon that is the 12-week cookery course at Ballymaloe Cookery School, I did wonder whether the intensive cook-eat-watch-eat-sleep-eat regime would quash my enthusiasm for food. Fortunately for me (but possibly unfortunately for all those who want to use the kitchen in our household), this has not been the case.

Yessiree, it seems that I’ve returned home with a whole new set of addictions, and, coupled with my new found ability to make said creations with a pretty decent amount of proficiency, it’s looking likely that I’ll be taking the monopoly on our kitchen for the foreseeable future.

The scone cravings began early on in the afternoon. Everyone was out and the kitchen was empty, so I whipped out the necessaries and made a small batch. And then I figured that while the oven was on, why not crack out a wholemeal loaf too?

No sooner had I closed the oven door on my lovely loaf, last night’s chicken carcass began calling me from the fridge. And that was it. Things just spiralled from there, really. All the techniques that we had been practising repeatedly since early January just came spilling out: chicken stock; shortcrust pastry (which I have since decided will become tomorrow evening’s quiche); a basic soup technique; and yet more scone dough for a rhubarb pie-type affair.

I can already predict that the basic soup technique is one that will be revisited regularly over the coming months. This evening it was employed to deal with a glut of purple sprouting broccoli we’re currently enjoying and next it’ll be tackling the spring cabbage, which is coming on abound.

And if all my forthcoming soup tastes as good as the one we ate tonight, I’ll be one happy Ballymaloe baby.

Here’s how it went:

Purple Sprouting Broccoli Soup

Onions – 1, medium

Potatoes – 1, large

Purple sprouting broccoli, plus the leaves – 250g

Butter – 50g

Chicken stock – 900ml

Full fat milk – 100ml, or more

Salt and Pepper

Parmesan for shaving (I used the wonderful Gabriel cheese made by the equally wonderful Bill Hogan. See note below.)

Caper Oil

Capers (I used some packed in salt) – 3 tbsp

Olive oil – 7 tbsp, approx.

Garlic – ½ a clove, smashed

Chop the onion and potato into fairly fine dice (approx. ½ cm if you feel like measuring). Melt the butter in a pan and add the onion and potato, turning to coat them, and then season with salt and pepper.

Turn the heat right down, press a used butter wrapper or piece of greaseproof paper down onto the onion and potato, and cover the pan with its lid. Sweat the onion and potato for 10 to 15 minutes, until the onion is completely soft.

Meanwhile, make the caper oil. Chop the capers roughly and tip them into a pestle and mortar along with the garlic and a tiny drizzle of oil. Pound these ingredients together until smooth, add the remainder of the oil and then set aside.

Once the onion has softened, add the chicken stock, bring to the boil and simmer the vegetables until the potato is completely cooked. Add the purple sprouting broccoli, replace the lid briefly until the soup returns to the boil, then remove it (so that the broccoli retains its colour) and continue to cook until the broccoli is tender.

Puree the soup until smooth, return to the pan and thin as necessary with milk. Correct the seasoning, but bear in mind that the caper oil will be pretty salty, so be careful not to add too much at this point.

Serve the soup in warmed bowls, drizzled with caper oil and topped with shavings of Parmesan cheese.

P.S. Apologies for the shockingly bad quality of the picture above. I was rather hungry by dinner time and had seemingly developed a case of the shakes!

Note

Bill Hogan is a cheesemaker based in West Cork, Ireland. He makes two terrific cheeses, Desmond and Gabriel, which are both made using unpasteurised milk from a local farm cooperative.

These cheeses are thermophilic (think Parmesan and Gruyere style) cheeses, which were originally made in Ireland up until the Great Famine took place during the 1840s.

Gabriel is definitely the feminine of the two cheeses and is wonderfully aromatic and nutty in flavour. It can be slightly gritty in places, due to salt and dry ripe curd becoming crystalline as the cheese looses water during the ageing process. Typically, Gabriel is sold when it is at least eighteen months old – the age at which the crystals become apparent – with its flavour intensifying the older it gets.

If you should ever happen to come across a wedge of this wonderful cheese, I urge you not to think twice about buying it.

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…