A belated Burns Supper

Actually, our Burns Supper wasn't at all belated, just my posting about it is! While we don't do the poetry and toasts and pagentry, we do use the 25th of January as an excuse to eat haggis. Because it tastes good and contains about a million calories (or, in fact, 300/ 100g), so is an occasional treat and therefore needs an excuse.

Instead of buying a whole, traditional haggis, this time I bought a 200g section of a "haggis pudding", packed like a black pudding in a plastic skin. This suited my purposes perfectly. I divided the haggis in two, and pressed each portion into a big, flat portobello mushroom and roasted it in the oven until the mushroom juices were flowing and the edges of the haggis were crisp but not too dry.

I served it with bashed neeps (mashed turnips - which are what we Southerners call swedes) flavoured with a little butter and a lot of nutmeg, broccolini and a whiskey sauce. The whiskey sauce is a bit contentious; apparently only tourists would eat haggis with a whiskey sauce. Well, sometimes I am a tourist, and the sauce tasted good so I am not ashamed.

Whiskey Sauce for haggis (or steak or chicken)

1 tsp butter
1 shallot, finely diced
1/4 cup whiskey
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
2tbs double cream

Melt the butter and add the diced shallot. Saute until transparent. Add the whiskey and allow to reduce by half. Whisk in the mustard and cream. Do not allow to boil again.

Since we were already doing an "occasional treat" meal, I also made a dessert. Now, I found a couple of recipes for something called Edinburgh Fog - basically amaretti biscuits with boozy cream - and I decided to make it into a Scottish-influenced version of Eton Mess (broken meringues, strawberries and whipped cream) .

Fettes Mess (serves 2)

1/2 cup amaretti biscuits, broken into pieces
2 tbs whiskey
1 tbs honey
1 cup raspberries (fresh Scottish ones in summer - these were frozen)
1/2 cup double cream

Whip the cream to soft peaks, fold in the other ingredients and divide between 2 glasses. Allow to chill for a couple of hours before serving.

Split Pea and Ham Soup

Just a quick one today - inspired by George at A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse.

It's not exactly fast food, because it takes about 4 hours to cook, but those are 4 very low-effort hours! And the rich, comforting flavour makes the time spent well worth it. As an added bonus, it gets really thick when it cools, so it is fabulous to take to work because it doesn't leak all over your lunch bag.

Split Pea and Ham Soup (makes lots)

2 leeks, washed and finely sliced (or an onion, but I had leeks that wanted using)
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 smoked ham hock
2 bayleaves
water
500g split peas (yellow or green - in Australia I always used green but I've only seen yellow in the UK)
500g frozen baby peas
Black pepper

In a big saucepan, combine the leeks, carrots, ham hock and bayleaves. Cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, cover and reduce the heat. Simmer for at least 2 hours, more like 3, until the flesh is falling from the ham bone. Remove the ham hock. Add the split peas to the ham stock, cover and continue to simmer for an hour or so until the split peas have completely collapsed to mush.

When the ham hock is cool enough to handle, peel off the rind (most of the fat will go with it) and pull all of the meat off the bone. Cut it into big bite-size chunks (as in, not dainty bites, but still small enough to get them into your mouth) and set aside.

When the soup is a mush, stir in the ham chunks, the frozen peas and a lot of freshly ground black pepper. Simmer another 5 minutes or so, until the frozen peas have cooked through but still retain their fresh, sweet flavour.

Serve generous bowls full.

I think this is definitely one to send to Deb's Kahakai Kitchen for her Souper Sunday round-up!

Calamondins

Paul's calamondin bonsai has picked up an unfortunate outbreak of aphids. God knows where they came from in this weather. So he picked all the fruit hanging on it before he took it outside to treat it.

Nine little sour orange limes. As with the blood oranges, I like something that doesn't look as it tastes. These look like perfect little oranges, a bit smaller than a ping pong ball, but the flavour is like an intense lime, with an amazing citrus fragrance.

One went into a batch of friands, since I had 6 eggwhites in the freezer. I halved the calamondin, removed the seeds and chopped it really finely, before proceeding with my usual friand recipe. They were buttery, citrussy and just the thing with a cup of coffee.

The other eight went into a very small batch of marmelade. I used this recipe, which is very simple. Because the calamondins have thin, loose peel like a tangerine, it was very simple to get every scrap of flesh and pith out of them. I overcooked the marmelade a bit, so the flavour is very rich and caramelly and it has set very firmly. I think a batch of home made bread is in order, to provide a fitting base for a lovely preserve. Or maybe a marmelade rolypoly pudding. Or some scones.

Mushroom Fondue

The craving for melted cheese overwhelmed me. I ordered a fondue pot. Now, most of the time I don't feel particularly connected to my Swiss heritage - I don't even back Roger Federer in the tennis (although good luck to him in the Australian Open today) - but it all came bubbling out while I was looking for a fondue pot. Non-stick aluminium? What is this fuckery? How can you possibly make a caquelon from non-stick aluminium? The cheese needs to stick and you need to scrape the brown crispy bits off with the fork, to take that away is to deny the essential nature of the fondue experience!

Anyway, I did find a good ceramic pot, just the right size for the two of us. And we set out to re-create the mushroom fondue we had in Geneva a couple of years ago. It went pretty well really!

Mushroom Fondue (serves 2)

2 cloves garlic
2 shot glasses of dry white wine
1 tbs porcini puree
125g gruyere, grated
125g emmenthal, grated
Handful of mushrooms, sliced
1 tsp cornflour, slaked in 2tbs white wine
Bread cubes and steamed broccolini, to serve

Bring the wine and garlic to a simmer, remove from heat and allow to infuse for a couple of hours. Just before serving whisk in the porcini puree and return the caquelon to a low heat (best done on the stove, easier than trying to regulate the heat of the fondue pot) and add the sliced mushrooms, then gradually add the cheeses, stirring until they have melted. Add the cornflour and stir until smooth. Place the caquelon of melted cheese over the lit burner, and dunk cubes of bread and steamed broccolini in it to eat it.

It can be very indigestible, so drinking wine with it, and a herb tisane afterwards is a good idea! Better for lunch than dinner too.

Childhood Ambition Realised - Sugar on Snow

When I was a little girl, my mother and aunts spent a lot of time reading to me. Some of the books that they read to me captured my imagination and have stayed with me for 30 odd years - Teddy Robinson being ex-and-shoff at a birthday party, Millie Molly Mandy's pink and white striped frock, the Beaver's house on the dam in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Of course, me being me, a lot of the things that have stayed with me have involved the food in those books - marmalade rolypoly, marrow and ginger jam, ginger biscuits with ham as picnic food. And maple syrup sugar on snow in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Little House in the Big Woods. When I got Diana Henry's excellent winter food cookbook Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, I discovered that I was not the only one. The image of gathering the maple sap, boiling it in big cauldrons and pouring it onto fresh snow to make a sticky, dark brown toffee was unimaginable alchemy to me.

Now, as you may have heard, the UK has had an unusually snowy winter. The first two years we were here there was hardly any snow at all. Last year there was quite a lot. This year there has been an enormous amount, as this video of Urchin's first venture into it attests. She was initially very sceptical, but she took to it after a while.

As we had sufficient clean snow, I decided that the time really had come to try my own sugar on snow. I bought a bottle of organic Canadian maple syrup, fetched a pan of snow and set to it. It's really not rocket science, but a candy thermometer takes the guess work out of it.
It froths up a lot as it boils, so use a larger pan than you think you need. The traditional accompaniments are sour pickles and doughnuts. I didn't have either - I just lifted the lacy toffee off the snow with a fork and ate it. Pouring the boiling syrup onto snow and not having the snow instantly melt really is magic. And it is delicious, with a much more complex flavour than a plain cane sugar toffee. But that being said, now that I have done it, I don't need to do it again, unless some day we end up in Vermont in winter.

Home made cheese, a first attempt

I'm inspired. For a while now I have been reading on Natashya, Heather and Simona's blogs about their forays into homemade cheese making. It has all sounded amazing and wonderful and I decided that I really had to have a go at it. I ordered some supplies from Leeners, bought a couple of litres of full-fat goats milk from the supermarket and got stuck in.

I started with these recipes, following the method for cheddar because it sounded the most achievable. I didn't have the right sized mould for making a single cheese, so I used egg rings, lined with scalded cheesecloth and set in my bamboo steamer. 2l of milk made 4 cheeses. The curds didn't set up as firmly as I was anticipating, so I abandoned the idea of pressing them into a hard cheese, and just went where I was led, into a soft goats cheese.

After 2 days draining I turned them out of their moulds, onto a fresh piece of scalded cheesecloth, and let them mature for another 4 days before we sampled one. Isn't the pattern from the bamboo steamer pretty? It was delicious. Very mild and creamy, goaty but not intensely so and with an unmistakeable "cheese" texture - it definitely wasn't yoghurt. It had grown up.

The intention was to let the other 3 cheeses mature for longer to see how the flavour developed, but sadly they developed a nasty mould and had to be chucked. Oh well - for a first attempt I was happy!

Of course, when you make cheese at home, you end up with a lot of whey. In a lot of areas (well - Stilton and Parma) a thriving dairy industry has also led to a thriving pork industry, as they whey is fed to the pigs and they grow fat and flavoursome. But I don't have a pig.

The last scoop of the goats curd (which didn't fit into the moulds) and a little of the whey went into my blood orange syrup cakes instead of yoghurt.

The rest of the whey went to make ricotta. Now, making ricotta this traditional way is very, very low yield. But since it takes no effort and it is really a bonus yield from the cheesemaking, I wasn't too bothered. Remember I started with 2l of milk, got 4 x 10cm cheeses and 200ml of goats curd for my cakes. The 1/2 cup of lovely fresh ricotta was eaten almost straight away, in this pasta with artichokes dish. It was seriously delicious, but I kept thinking that it'd be even better in summer with fresh baby courgettes substituted for the artichokes.

So THEN the whey drained from the ricotta needed a home. Oh yes - I was very keen to make this milk go as far as possible! 1/3 cup went into the syrup for the orange syrup cakes - it added a slight tang and richer flavour than a plain citrus syrup. Some went into the freezer - I hear it makes a good marinade for meat - and some went into a version of this buttermilk syrup (I say "a version" because I used twice the amount of whey as the recipe calls for buttermilk, no corn syrup and no baking soda). Then THAT syrup went into this spelt porridge, which I portioned up and took to work for breakfast.

Spelt Porridge

250g pearled spelt
250ml water
1/4 cup golden flax seed
1/4 cup dessicated coconut
375ml whey syrup
60g dried cranberries
80g dried figs, cut into quarters
100g hazelnuts, roughly chopped

Combine ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer gently on a low heat for about 1/2 hour, stirring frequently, or until it is thick and gelatinous and the spelt is tender. Serve hot, with extra cold milk poured over. It's very filling and sustaining.

Blood orange: theme and variations

Winter is when you get the best citrus in the UK. Sweet, easy to peel clementines and satsumas for Christmas stockings, lovely sour Seville oranges for the best tangy marmalade and blood oranges for, well, loads of things!

I love blood oranges. I get a weird thrill from seeing red and tasting orange. In the short time that they are in season it is definitely worth while grabbing a bag to play with. The skin is generally orange, although some have a flush to them, so it is worth looking for dishes where the colour of the flesh and juice really gets to sing.

With my bag of 6 organic and unwaxed blood oranges I made:

1. Buck's Fizz (known to the Americans as mimosas) - just blood orange juice topped up with sparkling wine. This would be perfect for brunch, but we had it in the late afternoon.

2. A warm salad, to accompany duck breasts. I segmented 2 of the blood oranges, reserving the juices. I roasted beetroot, peeling and cutting them into wedges while still hot and combining them with cubes of feta, the blood orange wedges and mint leaves. I mixed the reserved orange juice with finely diced shallot and a little sherry vinegar and microwaved it until hot and used it as a dressing for the salad.

3. I revisited this recipe for St Clement's Cream to make a tangy, fresh-tasting dessert. I didn't strain it, because I wanted to maximise the citrus flavour, so it wasn't a smooth, velvety cream, but the flavour was just gorgeous. The last time I made these St Clement's Creams I thought they were one of the best desserts I'd ever made, and this opinion hasn't changed!

4. I made little cakes and soaked them in blood orange syrup. I followed this recipe but I used the zest and juice of the whole orange instead of lemon, I used fresh goat's curd instead of yoghurt and I baked them in my friand tins. It made 11 little cakes. For the syrup, instead of using water, I used some whey that I had leftover from cheesemaking (more about that later). The flavour was wonderful, the texture was perfect, and they had very good keeping qualities - we ate the last of them 6 days after baking and they were still soft, moist and delicious, with a pretty soft pink colour from the juice.