2018 Christmas Feasting

Merry Christmas, all! Hope you had the best possible day yesterday.

Last year, of course, we ate mostly vegetarian over the festive period - and very nice it was too. This year we were back on the beasts. And it was just us so we pared things back to a few indulgent meals.

Solstice dinner

We started on Friday, to mark the Solstice. A roast rack of cured pork, with roast autumn vegetables (a Diana Henry recipe), steamed kalettes and parsley sauce. We had some gorgeous Somerset cider brandy later on, to toast the turning of the wheel and the return of the sun.

There was loads of pork leftover. The bones and some of the meat made a lovely thick bean stew, and the rest of the meat went into sandwiches.

Stollen buns

I made a big batch of Spiced and Fruity Stollen Buns for our breakfasts this week. I don't think we'll get through them before they go stale, but the last few are going to make a magnificent bread and butter pudding.

Miso-butter double salmon rillettes

For Christmas Eve we had seafood. Mostly a bought seafood platter - which was vast, we have loads of prawns left - but I also made these absolutely gorgeous miso-butter double salmon rillettes. The miso gives the rillettes an extra deep savour. We had some of the leftover for lunch on Christmas Day, on toasted olive bread, and we're very happy to still have some tucked in the fridge.

Salmon rillettes on chicory leaves, garnished with finger lime

Seafood platter

We had our Christmas Dinner in the evening. As people who don't have a carved-in-stone traditional Christmas meal, it's snuck up on me that my most enduring tradition is Diana Henry's persimmon and chicory salad, which has adorned our Christmas table on three of the last four years, only missing Christmas 2015 because I couldn't get persimmons. This year I left out the pomegranate, because they were really expensive for just a bit of garnish. We had a really lovely lightly-smoked venison rack, and sort-of confit potatoes, cooked slowly with loads of garlic and thyme, and white wine, butter and vegetable stock.

Going easy on the main course left us with space for a very boozy almond tiramisu, made with an abundance of amaretto. And I used Paul's decaf coffee, so we both got a good night's sleep afterwards. 

Tiramisu

Winter Solstice

Chaenomeles in flower

The weather at the moment is a bit ridiculous. The Japanese quince is back in flower, the crab apple bonsai is coming into bud about a week after the last leaves fell, and on Saturday evening we barbecued. It's mild, wet and very windy.

Crab apple in bud

Barbecue, 19th December 2015

Barbecued lamb chops on smoked cheese and garlic flatbread

But today is the longest night. England is an old country and it's hard not to feel some of the traditions and archetypes that have been soaking into the land for centuries, so we always try to do something to welcome back the sun. And for Paul, pretty much any old English ritual requires boar and mead. In this case, a joint of wild boar, seasoned porchetta-style and wrapped in some pork rind from another occasion, to help keep the lean meat moist. I baked some sausage-stuffed Bramley apples alongside, and made a dish of Brussels sprouts and chestnuts with garlic butter. We drank some mead. We banished the dark.

Other bloggers' dishes

It's less than a week to Christmas and it's hard to believe we're so close to the end of the year. I thought about doing a gift guide but I've clearly left it too late - so if you are still at a loss, have a look at Kavey's or Gemma's for inspiration. I thought about some other sort of seasonal round up - favourite things I've cooked this year or something - but that just hasn't grabbed me either. Instead, here is my latest round up of Other Bloggers' Dishes: the things I have cooked from other blogs.

Helen Graves' Nargisi kofta curry was basically spiced lamb scotch eggs in a yoghurt-based gravy. Completely delicious and very, very filling. Really - you may think you could eat two kofte but I would be surprised.  

Given that Ed's been writing for The Guardian and who knows who else lately, it seems a little cheeky to claim his tarragon chicken for this series, but there you go. Delicious and old-school. I added some mushrooms, because mushrooms love tarragon so much, and served it with basmati rice to soak up the sauce and some kitsch little bean bundles (not, I assure you, prepared by me).

Heather's mashed butternut and potatoes with roasted garlic, smoked gouda and bacon looked so appetising and indulgent, like a perfect holiday side dish if your family isn't utterly wedded to roast potatoes. Unfortunately, when I came to make it my squash (kabocha, not butternut) had gone a bit tragic, so it was just potatoes. And I used my ricer on them, not a hand mixer. They were fab though. Definitely worth doing again - with the squash next time.

Squashless mashed squash

And finally, Miss South's Easy Salted Caramels. These would be a perfect gift for any friend who is known to eat condensed milk by the spoonful. When I saw them on her blog I immediately imagined them rolled in freeze-dried raspberry or cranberry powder, for a bit of a tang. Which is what I did. Unfortunately, the cranberry powder is so intense that, unadulterated, it tastes like cystitis powder. SO I tipped the caramels back into a bowl, microwaved them for 30 seconds to make them pliable and kneaded them back together, giving me a pleasantly cranberry-flavoured pink caramel. I rolled it into balls again per Miss South's instructions, then rolled them in more cranberry powder, this time diluted with sifted icing sugar and some food-safe glitter. Sparkly and very delicious!

Yes, Chef! Doro wat and injera

I first heard of Marcus Samuelsson from Joanne's blog - she was publishing some of her recipes on his blog. And shamefully I didn't pay very much attention. They were her usual healthy but delicious-sounding vegetarian dishes but I never looked into who this Marcus Samuelsson was. If I had a mental image of him I guess I imagined he was a vegetarian chef from Minnesota or something. Then I saw an episode of The Taste and realised that he was definitely not a vegetarian from Minnesota.

It meant that I was delighted when his memoir, Yes, Chef!, was chosen as the latest Cook the Books Club selection. And the story of how an Ethiopian child was raised in Sweden and became a celebrity chef in New York is really quite something. In a Sliding Doors scenario there are so many little twists that could have changed everything - if his mother hadn't made it to Addis Ababa, if his grandmother hadn't taught him to cook - so many factors came into play, but Samuelsson's determination is the thing that shines through.

Having read Helen Graves' posts about visiting Ethiopia with World Vision, and the process of making injera, I was pretty keen to have that as part of my Cook the Books contribution. I discovered that Ocado sell teff flour in tiny quantities, but it was enough for me to have a go.

I followed this method, using 23g of teff flour and 60 ml water for a half quantity, every time it specified 1/3 and 1/2 cups. I did a seven day ferment, and it behaved perfectly. It bubbled when the recipe said it would bubble and had a fermented, grassy aroma when it was supposed to. I didn't do the bit with the food processor, because the flour was very finely milled and there wasn't any grainyness to get rid of.

The final addition of the self-raising flour was fascinating. This was my mixture when I added it - sitting just below the 400ml mark.

And this was the mixture a couple of hours later when I was ready to cook them. I guess the acid from the sourdough activated the raising agents in the flour and made it go nuts. Very satisfying.

I wanted to do something that would acknowledge both Samuelsson's Ethiopian and Swedish heritages, and I thought that little injera would be an outstanding base for very Scandi sour cream and cured fish. So leaving the batter a bit thick, I made canapé-sized bites.

They look like little crumpets

I meant to top them with crème fraiche, gravadlax and salmon roe, but laziness got the better of me and I couldn't be bothered making the gravadlax. I just went more lavishly with the salmon roe.

As a little snack these were perfect. The tang from the injera was the perfect thing with the salty salmon and creamy, sour crème fraiche. I might have to do these again, maybe for Christmas.

The main event, though, was the injera served with Samuelsson's own recipe for Doro Wat and a mustardy lentil salad. The lentil salad was not at all to my taste, but the firey Doro Wat was delicious.

I actually made this right at the beginning of August, but hadn't got around to posting. So now you only have about a week left if you want to join in! But it is definitely worth a read.

Coronation Chicken Salad for Mystery Box Madness

I tried, OK? I really did. I approached this week's Mystery Box Madness challenge at I Heart Cooking Clubs with a completely open mind. And I still ended up doing a Diana Henry recipe.

For Mystery Box Madness we're allocated a list of ten ingredients, and we need to find a recipe from one of the featured chefs containing at least three of them. This week's ingredients were chicken, seaweed, sesame seeds, parsley, mozzarella, pasta, mango, brown sugar, zucchini and mint. I was absolutely sure I'd find a Nigella or Ottolenghi recipe using pasta, zucchini and mint. Or a Jamie Oliver recipe using mango, brown sugar and mint. But the first recipe that caught my eye was Diana Henry's take on Coronation Chicken.

Coronation chicken is the sort of post-War British cooking that gets a pretty bad reputation - invented by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume for the coronation of Elizabeth II, it can be an extremely lurid combination of cold chicken, mayonnaise, curry powder and raisins. It's the dish that Americans should point to every time we say rude things about American food. But it can be absolutely wonderful. Made carefully, with a kick to the dressing and a good balance of fresh ingredients it's a really wonderful combination of savoury, sweet, creamy and crunchy. Diana's recipe uses fresh mint, mango and chicken breast - I used thigh fillets - and the mint gives everything a wonderful lift.

Pared-down pizza rustica

As well as my Scandinavian-inspired breakfast buns, I decided to make a savoury pie for snacking on over the Easter weekend. Most of the Italian-American pizza rustica recipes I found have at least an inch-thick layer of cold meats, which I decided was a bit over the top. So I made a slightly more restrained version.

Mine was a shortcrust pastry case, with a bottom layer of spinach and mozzarella, bound with an egg. Then layers of mortadella, proscuitto and soppressata. Then a layer of ricotta and smoked semi-dried tomatoes, bound with another egg and seasoned with nutmeg.

It compressed as it cooled, which was good for slicing but left a big gap between the filling and the top of the pastry. But it tasted good.

Raspberry Semlor for Easter

The cherry decided to flower in time to be our Easter tree

Semlor are cardamom-flavoured, almonds and cream-filled buns which are eaten in Sweden on Shrove Tuesday in the same way that we eat pancakes in Britain - a final indulgent binge before the austerity of Lent.

I don't observe Lenten fasting. And I have my dance class on Tuesday evenings so I'm never up for special cooking on a Tuesday. But I was intrigued by the idea of semlor, so I decided to make them for Easter instead of hot cross buns.

I didn't follow a traditional recipe. I used Paul Hollywood's iced fingers dough, because it is my go-to enriched yeast dough recipe, using all skim milk instead of whole milk and water. I added the seeds from 12 cardamom pods, ground in a pestle and mortar as finely as I could manage before I got bored. After the first rise I halved the dough and froze one portion - we don't need that many buns - and shaped the other half into 4 round buns.

When they were baked and cooled, I cut off a lid and scooped out some of the crumb from both pieces. In a perfect world the almond cream filling would be made from scratch, but I decided that was a step too far. I mixed the scooped-out crumb with about 75g grated marzipan, and a small slosh of milk to make a paste.

I packed the almond filling back into the bottom halves of the buns, pressing it in well, then topped it with some lovely fresh raspberries (not traditional, but raspberries go so well with almonds). Then added a mound of freshly whipped double cream. I dusted them with icing sugar once I perched the lids on top of the cream.

I think I could have been a bit more heavy-handed with the cardamom - the flavour was very subtle. And I can see the marzipan nay-sayers (mother) screwing up their noses at the idea of it, but combined with the crumbs it just gave a nice almond flavour and sweetness which balanced the sweet but tangy raspberries and the bland richness of the unsweetened whipped cream.

Le Grand Aioli for I heart cooking clubs

This week's I Heart Cooking Clubs theme is particularly dear to my heart - "Sweet cloves and liquid gold"; the heaven of garlic and olive oil. We eat a lot of garlic. It is extremely unusual for us to cook a meal without garlic featuring and we are both mystified by religions that limit the eating of garlic.

Aioli - egg yolks, garlic and good olive oil. I haven't tweaked the colour. 

I immediately knew what I wanted to make. Aioli. What could be a more perfect expression of the theme? AND it is noteworthy because about 10 years ago I made an aioli which we declared inedibly garlicky - the only time that has ever been said in our house.

Fat cod fillets curing in salt

In Salt Sugar Smoke, Diana Henry gives a recipe for the traditional Provençal Grand Aioli to accompany her home-salted cod. Le Grand Aioli is a funny dish, a simple collation of salt cod, eggs and steamed vegetables lifted from extreme austerity by lavish quantities of the garlicky sauce.

Because I was only making it for two people, I reduced the number and variety of vegetables, using just cauliflower and tenderstem broccoli with the potatoes and fish. I also added some quail eggs for something a little more luxurious. Unfortunately I forgot to take the fish out of the salt and put it to soak far enough in advance, so it was a bit too salty, but the luscious garlicky-but-not-too-garlicky mayonnaise was divine with the vegetables and quail eggs.

Oddly, though, the court bouillon I poached the fish in was not overly salty, so I strained it and used it the following day to cook lamb shanks in, which worked extremely well. And the rest of the aioli itself made a wonderful lunch, smeared thickly on toasted rye sourdough and served with broccoli, simply dressed with balsamic vinegar and capers.

Piccalilli (and pork pie)

For several years, sometime around midwinter, Paul has asked me why I never make piccalilli. And my response is always "Because it's the middle of bloody winter and none of the veg are in season. I'll make it in summer", but then in summer when all the veg are in season I forget.

This year, I remembered.

Having never made it before, I had to do some research. I knew I wanted crunchy, and I knew I wanted tangy. Of the piccalilli recipes on my shelf, Diana Henry's recipe in Food From Plenty had the lowest ratio of sugar to vinegar AND the shortest cook time for the vegetables, so that seemed like the best option.

The problem with piccalilli, of course, is that it has to mature before you eat it. I almost broke and opened the jar after a week, but I was patient and waited the recommended month.

To accompany it, I made a pork pie - hot water crust pastry (made with home-rendered lard!), a filling of sausage meat, bacon and pork loin, seasoned with white and black pepper, nutmeg and mace, and aspic spiked with cider brandy. My pastry was a bit thick, but the top crust and filling were excellent.

And the piccalilli was extremely good. The vegetables are crunchy and the vinegar is quite mellow, without the aggressive punch of commercial versions. I think next year, though, I will double the amount of dried mustard in it, because it needed just a little more fire. I might also have to make a double batch, because this one won't last us to midwinter.

Bobotie fit for a President.

When Paul came home and saw this he was slightly overcome. Not by its beauty, because pretty it is not, but by one of the smells of his childhood.

I based this bobotie on the recipe given by Hilton Little at the Club des chefs des chefs event a couple of months ago, although I did make a few changes. I suspect he'd cut down the recipe from a much larger quantity and a couple of the proportions went a bit wrong.

Bobotie (serves 4)

Slosh of olive oil
2 medium onions, very finely diced
500g beef or lamb mince (Hilton's recipe says beef, Paul says he remembers lamb or mutton)
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
250ml whole milk
2 slices white bread (I used some stale sourdough, cut into cubes)
1tsp apricot jam (apricot is traditional, I didn't have any so used homemade peach, vanilla and chilli)
1tbs hot chutney (has to be Mrs Balls)
1-2tbs curry powder (I used a hot one, but it doesn't end up particularly spicy)
1tsp salt
1/2tsp ground black pepper
284ml buttermilk (that's how big the tubs we buy are - if your tubs are 250ml or 300ml I can't imagine that it would be a problem)
2 large eggs
bayleaves

Preheat oven to 180C

Soak the bread in the milk in a shallow dish.

Brown the onions in the oil in a large saute pan. Add the mince and garlic and brown the beef well, breaking up the clumps.

Squeeze the excess milk from the bread, reserve the milk and add the bread to the meat. Mix in the jam, chutney and curry powder. Season with salt and pepper.

Pour the meat mixture into a 9x9" casserole dish.

Whisk together the buttermilk, eggs and the reserved milk from soaking the bread. Pour half of the mixture over the meat and ripple it through the meat mixture with a knife, so it soaks in.

Bake for 20-30 minutes, then remove from the oven, pour the rest of the egg mixture on top and garnish with bayleaves. Return it to the oven for another 20-30 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Serve hot.

The traditional accompaniments are yellow pilau rice, and old-school curry garnishes like bananas rolled in coconut, cucumber raita and tomato and onion katchumber. We had it with roast butternut and some buttered runner beans.

Salt beef bagel

Here's the thing about bagels - I tend to think I like them more than I actually do. I've lost count of the number of times I've thought "Oh yum! Bagel!" and then got bored half way through the interminable chewing and scraped off the topping with a fork. Generally, I'd rather have something from the fluffier side of the breadroll family (as long as it isn't dusted in flour: I hate that).

But we were watching an old No Reservations episode, and Bourdain was eating bagels at a deli in New York, and it looked so good, that when I was offered some limited edition New York Bakery bagels to try, I was powerless to resist. These are a mixed seed bagel, with pumpkin, sunflower and linseeds baked in, and more seeds on top.

I didn't have time to cure my own brisket, so I bought a nice piece of organic salt beef for our sandwiches.

I split the bagels, toasted them, smeared them lavishly with hot English mustard and piled on the hot salt beef. It is, incidentally Colman's mustard's 200th anniversary, which they are celebrating with these adorably nostalgic labels. Unfortunately, the labels are only the normal paper ones, but I am hoping that they will produce some more memorabilia with that polar bear on it. The museum (you make mustard for 200 years, you get a museum) does sell a tea towel and an apron, but I'd like it on a proper mustard pot. Or one of the mustard powder tins. Anyway, since the Jewish community in London has been selling bagels for almost as long as Colman's have been making mustard, since before the influx of Polish Jews to New York even, it makes sense to me to use the very English mustard on what is usually considered a very American sandwich.

In the 20s apparently a bear with a toothache suggested mustard

The bagels were so nice that they weren't very bagelly at all...

My favourite salt beef sandwich in London is the one at the Brass Rail, in Selfridges. Lavishly filled with excellent salt beef and eye-watering quantities of mustard, the only drawback is the rye bread isn't quite sturdy enough, and ends up dissolving into wallpaper paste around your fingers. Making the sandwich on a toasted bagel does avoid that; it has the structural integrity to stand up to hot, moist meat (oh behave!) to the last bite. They did not, however, have the dense, chewy texture that I associate with bagels (another plus as far as I am concerned).

These seeded bagels had a pleasantly nutty, malty flavour that complemented the spice of the beef (this beef was quite a spicy one, it had residual little bits of coriander clinging to the edge). There was a slight sweetness to them as well, that I thought went well with the clean heat of the mustard.

I've never made bagels myself, but it is my understanding that they are usually a lean, fatless dough. Looking at the ingredient list, these bagels do have rapeseed oil in them, which is probably why they didn't go instantly stale the way other bagels seem to. In fact, they were still pleasantly fresh-tasting a couple of days later, ready to stand up to a schmear of cream cheese and quite a lot of smoked salmon, for a very good brunch.

In fact, the only thing I didn't like about these bagels were the seeds on top - the millet was impossible to chew, and most of the seeds just ended up scattered on and around the board where I prepared the sandwiches. So it turns out that I do like bagels, but only when they aren't very bagelly.

Lily's scones revisited

The thing that triggered my latest attempt at scone-making was strawberry jam. Not just any strawberry jam - jam made by my friend Penny from her own homegrown strawberries. It would have been rude not to.

I used Nigella's Lily's Scones recipe again, substituting buttermilk for the milk. I also kneaded the dough for a couple of minutes: you are always told not to overwork scone dough, but I think my previous attempts were underworked, which is why they were so crumbly.

These were definitely my best yet.

Yorkshire pudding

I'm not posting about pancakes today. I know - bad blogger! We did have pancakes over the weekend, baked with a delicious savoury four cheese and spinach filling. Unfortunately they didn't look appetising in the dish, and when served looked slightly pre-digested.

But, in the spirit of getting behind the egg-and-milk-using-up nature of Shrove Tuesday, I thought I'd show you the progress I am making with Yorkshire puddings. This is to Felicity Cloake's recipe, and is definitely an improvement on the last time I made them! I think the dripping could have been a little hotter before I started. It did sizzle when the batter hit it, but only a little bit.

There is more work to be done! But these were not bad at all.

Animal Vegetable Miracle: pork chops and baked apples for Cook the Books

Back at the end of summer our apple tree and grape vines were bowed down with fruit. It wasn't supermarket-pretty, but it was ours. The thought of coring and slicing so many tiny apples was more than I could bear, so I picked the fruit that I could reach, added some rosemary from the garden and a finely chopped chilli from our supply in the freezer, and made jelly.

Which went very, very wrong. Despite all those lovely pectin-rich apples, it turned to a plasticy toffee before it passed the wrinkle test or read 106C on my thermometer. I think there is something wrong with that thermometer. I haven't been able to bring myself to throw it out though, so the "jelly" has been sitting in the cupboard, waiting for its moment to come...

Having missed the last few rounds of Cook the Books, the foodblogger bookclub hosted by Rachel, Deb, Heather and Simona, I was determined to participate this time around. Unfortunately, the fact that it was Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle put me off a bit. The only one of her other books that I have read is The Poisonwood Bible. It is brilliantly written, absolutely gripping and quite harrowing. Not a book that would lead you to believe that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle would be a fun time. Which is unfortunate, because Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is indeed a fun time.

Barbara Kingsolver's account of her family's year of choosing local produce reads like The Omnivore's Dilemma-lite. Fewer facts and figures, much more humour and some nice-sounding recipes. I loved the idea of locking your house so people couldn't leave courgettes in your kitchen while you were off dumping courgettes on other neighbours.

The fact that I was reading this book in November was a bit of a problem. As Kingsolver says "Eating locally in winter is easy. But the time to think about that would be in August". Aside from my caramelised jelly and a couple of pots of jam, I hadn't done anything towards preserving foods for the cold months this year. I was thrown on the mercy of the internet to find some local food suppliers and see what was actually available around here.

The first promising lead I had was a farm a couple of miles away that rears water buffalo for meat and milk. I've made queso oaxaca before, using a mozzarella recipe, so the account of making fresh mozzarella was quite familiar to me. I thought buying some raw buffalo milk and making a pizza with homemade mozzarella was a good idea. Unfortunately it turns out that the farm with the buffalo hasn't updated their website in three years and they no longer sell dairy products.

Then I found Hazeldene Farm, a farm specialising in rearing rare breed animals using organic farming principles. Just 12 miles away, through some particularly pretty countryside. We hopped in the car.

It was everything you would want an English farm to be. There was an exceedingly elderly labrador in the barnyard, a moth-eaten and cranky-looking cat keeping an eye on the bales of hay and chickens strutting about the place.

In the farm shop itself a butcher was trimming up some pieces of meat, from a whole carcase, using a knife and hacksaw. Very traditional. Paul's dad always used to get very stroppy about butchers who used band-saws, because you end up with splinters of bone pushed into the meat.

We bought a shoulder of Oxford Down lamb and some pork chops and sausages from the British Lop pigs. It was very reasonably priced. We scooted home and ate some of the sausages for lunch, while we considered what to do with the rest of our booty.

The lamb shoulder became a delicious, melting lamb boulangere. Even though the recipe came from Tom Kerridge, whose pub The Hand and Flowers is less than 25 miles from us, we didn't really feel that it said enough about local produce to count for this exercise.

We set off again, on a day with rather different weather, 11 miles in another direction to Home Cottage Farm, which "sells apples until the crop is sold out (usually December)".

We bought Spartans, Bramleys, Lane's Prince Alberts and some fresh apple juice. Paul's planning to make me a pie from the Lane's Prince Alberts, which is a local cultivar, and I think the Spartans will become dinky wee toffee apples. But the Bramleys were destined to take pride of place with our local pork chops.

I cored the apples and scored the skin around their equator, then stuffed them with some of the remaining sausage meat. I also peeled some onions, scooped out their middles and stuffed them as well. This was a meal where I got to use both my melon baller and my apple corer. Almost unheard of. The apples and onions baked in the oven for about half an hour before I added the pork chops.

I followed Jamie Oliver's pork chop recipe, adding a sliced clove of garlic to the meat when it went into the oven.

I chopped the reserved onion scoopings and browned them in a pan with a little oil, then added shredded red cabbage, some of the apple juice and a spoonful of my caramelised garden jelly. I covered it and let it simmer away quietly until everything else was cooked. It was our part of Britain on a plate.