When is your pie not your pie?

Call for help from a friend asking me to come by and help her bake a beef and mushroom pie.  I’m passing shops on way so ask if she needs anything – “some beef?”   Hmmm.  

I’m in my work suit and this is a long detour but also an excuse for a natter on the way to an afternoon meeting.  I love cooking with friends so can’t resist.  When I arrive, we start to make a beef casserole sauce from scratch;  sweat some onions, brown the beef, add some flour and cook for one minute, stir in some red wine, balsamic vinegar and beef stock. Bung in some mushrooms at some point and la-di-da, we have a sauce on the go. 

Curious thing is during all this, I’m instructed not to touch anything, which is weird as we usually cook together and I’d thought this was a joint venture. She gives some excuse about my work suit smelling of onions, but I’m not convinced.    So, I’m dictating, with my hands behind my back, not allowed to touch and making a bit of a joke about it.  Friend keeps drifting off to text while I hop around the frying pan calling, “quick, it needs stirring, it needs stirring!”. 

It turns out the pie will not be eaten for hours and over two supper sittings; the first for her kids and the second sitting for her new gentleman friend.  He is coming over for supper for the first time (and confirming his appearance by text).  We split the pie filling into two dishes and discuss vegetables and chips or no chips (no to chips – carb overload!).   I advise serving the pie to gentleman in its dish on a wooden chopping board with a side dish of vegetables.  “Imagine you are in a gastro pub” I suggest, (like that would be a good thing) “– that’s how they’d do it and he can serve himself, otherwise you are dictating his portions and I just hate that for adults”   

We also discuss pastry and decide that just a puff pastry topping the pies will work. She’s only used short crust before and we agree that it can be topped now, but not cooked until just before ready to eat.  Job done, I head off to my meeting smelling of onions.  Hours later I receive panic phone call – the pastry has shrunk!  After some probing, it turns out she rolled out the puff pastry quite thinly (as we’d done previously with short crust).  Thankfully she had some more and is able to redo it and bung it back in the oven.  (Pies are quite forgiving).  She is fretting a lot over this pie and I realise now, why I was not allowed to touch; it’s so she can tell gentleman friend that it was all her work.  It dawns on me that this is how celebrity ghost writers must feel at publication time.   I asked what she would do if it turned out a disaster and she replied “oh, I’d just tell him that you’d come round and made it”.   

Twenty-one Times is back!

ok, after a break of a couple of years, my food-crash-literary blog is back. I'm going to work on some pictures, tweets and shorter ancedots. Heck - we all eat, we all need some Latin proverbs and twentieth century poetry in our lives. God bless ya all xx

Baked Bananas in cream, chocolate sauce and 'licor de Ananaz'.

“The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie; And a thousand thousand slimy things, Lived on; and so did I”.  Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner.

Darling Husband cooked lemon roast chicken with roasted parsnips (which deserves it own entry).  However, he baked in the Aga from the ‘cooking with an Aga’ book baked bananas (The Aga Bible, Amy Willcock).  They come out looking very unattractive, and 5 year old daughter initially dismissed her plate and asked for a ‘raw’ one from the fruit bowl.  However, she soon changed her mind when the chocolate sauce appeared and I mashed it all together (minus the liquor of course) for my 3 year old son.  After confirming the bananas were indeed ‘dead’ (a current food concern of his – it was fish on Friday night), he tucked in with such silent enthusiasm that daughter decided this must be too good a thing to miss out on and tried some.  Silence then all round. I was surprised that husband cooked fruit as this is something he is in principle, opposed too.  He scoffed at the 70’s favourite of baked grapefruit that we were once served as a starter a few years ago, so I thought this was sacrilege.  The use of novelty booze left over from a foreign holiday many years ago added nothing to the dish.  But that is one of the things an Aga does – it’s always on status gets you baking everything.

Jellymonger

"If you only do what you know you can do - you never do very much" Tom Krause, inspirational speaker (b.1939).

My craze for jelly and all manner of set puddings continues!  When we have a glut of fruit juice in the fridge, I'll make some jelly using gelatine and pop in some fruit.  Some tinned fruits are good for this too and you can add the juice to the jelly.

Needless to say, the kids go love it.  They also love making it, although of course it involves the slightly tricky ingredient of boiling hot water.  We sometimes make a rainbow jelly over the course of a few days, this requires that the jelly is cooled, but not set, before you add each layer, rendering it safe for little helpers.  The pouring of the jelly in the mould is a much coveted kitchen task.  It also teaches kids some patience as they can't eat it until it's set.  Then there is the wobble and the will it/ won't it collapse spectacle on serving.

If you want to see some amazing jellies visit Bompas and Parr website.  They are famous for their architectural and neon, glow in the dark jellies.  They also make custom jelly moulds, (starting at eight hundred pounds).  I haven't progressed past my two pound fifty plastic Partridges white rabbit mould but it's nice to dream.  Us jellymongers clearly inhabit a broad church.

My daughter (aged 4) wants to know what will happen if you drink jelly before it sets!

Lentil Bake with Walnut Crumble

"As is the mother, so is her daughter".  Ezekiel Chapter 14, v 44.

When I was heavily pregnant with my first child, my Mother stayed with me Monday to Friday as my husband was working in Bordeaux.  Baby (a daughter) came late and so she was a regular commuter between north London and her west country home for quite a few weeks.  There is nothing quite like a mother's love.

One evening she showed me a store cupboard standby that apparently she has been serving for years.  Strangely, but I have no prior recollection of it.  She says it came from a Slimming World recipe from the early 1980's.  Both my parent's are slim and the family joke is that this is because my father has been unknowingly on the Weight-Watchers core programme for thirty years. 

You chop and onion and some garlic and saute them in water (!), yes really, it works perfectly well, although I do tend to use olive oil.  Then add some diced carrots and some of the following; diced courgettes, red pepper, celery.  After about 5 minutes, add some tinned tomato's, some vegetable stock and perhaps a sprig of rosemary.   Simmer for 20 minutes.  Then add a tin of lentils and simmer for 5 mins.  In effect you have a lentil sauce that you can do one of the following things with;

- pour over spaghetti and cover with grated cheese
- layer with lasagna sheets adding a white or cheese sauce or just a layer of natural yogurt and grated cheese on top, pop in the oven for 20 mins.
- layer with sliced boiled potatoes with a layer of natural yogurt and grated cheddar cheese on top before bunging in the oven to brown the top.
- blend it up into a soup
- Serve it with rice and vegetables

-My favourite; top with a savoury crumble.  Rub some soft butter into some wholemeal flour, add a handful of oats, maybe some breadcrumbs, some grated cheese and ground nuts - walnuts work particularly well with this), sprinkle on the top and bake in the oven.
-or finally, freeze it.

Sometimes I also substitute the lentils for chickpeas and add a squeeze of lemon juice - makes nice soup or a stew to have with wilted spinach and couscous.

Cranks Flapjack with Molasses

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do".  John-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). La Nausee, Vendredi.

My son went crazy a while back over some flapjack squares from an M&S bucket that were on offer at the music group we go to.  They were incredibly sweet.  It had me thinking that I could make this at home and adjust the sweet content  It can't be that difficult. After consulting a few recipe books, I was shocked at the amount of butter and sugar that goes into these things.  But of course!  How else would you make oats so delicious?

First, I tried a Prue Leith recipe produces some nice bars, but they set so hard that they'd risk breaking a tooth.   My Mum makes several 'healthy' flapjack variations with dates and oranges which I will try next but I wanted something that just used oats at this stage.  Co-incidentally it was at her house I was thumbing through a copy of the Cranks Recipe Book (Canter, Canter & Swann, 1982).  I remember a beautiful Armemian soup from here many years ago at a friends house.  I also used to meet my brother for lunch at their Covent Garden restaurant in the early 1990's when we were students.  Sensing Mum was a little reluctant to loan me her paperback (knowing how many of her other cookery books are on loan to my shelves), I decided to buy a copy online. However,  I didn't want a modern reprint, only an original dogeared paperback would do.  I found one for 99p (minus postage and packaging) and it arrived home before me.

The Cranks flapjack is a triumph.  It contains raw brown sugar and molasses.  The molasses gives it a depth and second flavour.  But most of all, it stays perfectly moist out the tin, three days after I made it.  Son and husband love it and it was perfect to make at 3pm in the afternoon and then bung in the oven later with supper (apologies to Sartre).

Also, I have finally found an outlet for the jar of molasses.  It hasn't so far proved popular on any previous outings in my household, even in tiny amounts, on breakfast porridge.  It may contain health-giving minerals, but it looks like tar.

I see Cranks now have a restaurant at the Dartington Cider Press - I've lunched here twice in recent years, why has this completely passed me by?  I'll make sure I find them on our Devon trip, this summer.

Camping

"Better by far far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad". Christina Rossetti (1830-1984) Remember.

So the planned Easter camping trip took place and was a great success.  We went to Dorset and stayed at Norden Farm .  It was fantastic; the kids loved it and the weather held.  Lots of animals running around, passing tractors, a steam rail to Swanage across the road.  I diligently packed and measured out an evening meal (pasta, anchoives in olive oil, fresh asparagus, lemons and garlic along with a packet of instant custard and a tin of peaches for dessert).    The flaw in this plan was that while darling husband had brought the camping cook box, he assumed that the actual camping stove was underneath all the other implements.  It wasn't.  Stoveless, husband suggested we just get fish and chips - I retorted that there was no way we'd find that on a bank holiday.   So imagine my surprise when we found a surf n' turf van open on  the camping site.  By now the kids were starving and my expectations were low.  However, we all enjoyed fantastic pan-fried haddock with chips and salad.    Chatting to the vendor, he assurred me that it was a local catch in that day and it was too good to put in batter.  It was most certainly was.  We also had buttered bread rolls with the meal which the kids found very funny, made into chip butties.  The next morning the lady in the farm shop took pity on me and filled up our tea mugs with boiling water.