Little parcels of goodness

My latest plan is to make more packed lunches, but the Man says he rebels against the Tyranny of the Sandwich.
So instead of buying lovely bread and expensive cheese or salami, I concentrate on thinking of other ways to get food to work without it getting all over my notebook or going undesirably cold.
This is not the first time someone has faced this problem, as you will realise if you consider the fact that almost every culture has developed some version of a pasty, a parcel of dough containing a filling.
I decided to experiment with the Mexican version, the empanada. The main distinction, as far as I can tell, is that the pastry dough usually seems to have some acid in it, vinegar or lemon juice, and the parcels are covered in egg wash to make them shinily golden.

Pastry:
6 oz self-raising flour
pinch of salt
4 oz butter (or some combination of butter and lard)
juice of half a lemon
3 fl oz cold water

Sift the flour and salt together and cut in the fat till you have the traditional pea-shaped lumps. Add the lemon juice and enough water to pull it together as a soft dough, then cover in cling film and leave in the fridge for an hour. (Or more).

In the meantime, make a filling. I fried some bacon lardons, then added a large leek, lots of mushrooms and a red chilli. When everything was soft, I threw in some fresh thyme and about 150g of ricotta that I happened to have in the fridge. When the filling looks yummy, leave it to cool.

Next, while the oven is heating to 220 C (gas mark 7) roll out the dough. This is enough for six official 6 inch rounds, plus one scrunched together from scraps. I found it made life simpler to divide the dough in two, roll out each half to big enough to cut out two rounds (using a cereal bowl), then roll out the scraps from both halves for one more rectangle big enough to make two circles.

Have a beaten egg standing ready to paint on the empanadas. Each circle gets a dollop of filling - two tablespoons-full, my recipe said - then the border of one half is painted with egg. Fold the other half over onto the wet edge and crimp it down with the tines of a fork.

Finally paint all the empanadas generously with egg and put them in the oven for around 15 minutes or until they are beautifully golden brown. Leave on a wire rack to cool for a while - this is an important step if you value the skin on the roof of your mouth - and enjoy.

Pretty is as pretty does

Near my office there is an Italian cafe run for the benefit of Italian and Southwark autistic people. I'm not sure what that means, but they do good sandwiches and delicious soups, and sell Italian products for Enormous Amounts of Money. Sadly for my bank balance, those products are generally so good that I cannot resist spending the money.
Most recently I bought some beautiful coloured striped pasta in the shape of little sombreros. I'm too embarassed to tell you how much I paid for it, so I'll move swiftly on to what I did with it, even though that was far from a triumph.
The packet suggested stuffing them, then baking with a sauce over them. Fair enough. I roasted a small butternut squash and  puréed it with melted butter and garlic, plus generous amounts of salt and pepper. Meantime, I flung the pasta in boiling water for three minutes, as suggested on the packet, then sat them on a teatowel to drain.
Each little hat got a filling of squash, and then was sat on its individual base (the whole process was extraordinarily cute, or finicky, depending on your mood) in a baking tray. I then poured a tomato sauce over them and topped the whole lot with torn gobbets of mozzarella, covered everything with tinfoil and shoved it in the oven as suggested.

Turns out, if you want to show off your gorgeous stripey pasta hats, smothering them in tomato sauce and mozzarella is not the best course of action. It further turns out that three minutes in boiling water was not nearly long enough to cook the pasta, particularly as the peaks of the hats remained poking out of the sauce, ending up much crisper than pasta is traditionally supposed to be.
But we are not downhearted! (NO!). We're going to cook them again on Sunday for friends. I know this time to boil the hats for longer, but how can I serve them looking pretty, but not horribly dry?

It's just not pretty

What's the ugliest vegetable? Celeriac certainly has to be a contender, and it fails to meet my basic quality test: if it comes out of the ground, it should be a potato.
So what do with a hideous tuber that I don't like? Turn it into soup, of course, because I don't like soup anyway, so making it out of celeriac couldn't make it any worse.
A bit of vague googling gave me the courage to plunge in with a celeriac, ginger and carrot soup.


2 onions
some oil
4 carrots
1 medium-sized celeriac ... what - head? bulb? lump, I think
a chunk of ginger, about 2 cubic inches
1 ltr chicken stock approx (actually the full of one tub formerly used to hold biological washing tablets)
I chopped the onion finely, then gently fried in the oil while putting the carrots, celeriac and ginger through the grating attachment of my minifoodprocessor (thank you, mother-in-law!)
This I added to the onion, stirred it all up and then added the stock and left to simmer.
When all the veg was soft, I whizzed it up with my soup-gun and seasoned it.
Hmm, not offensive, but a bit dull.
So I decided to experiment a bit - remember tarka dal, for which the 'tarka' is a lovely spicey butter mixture? I melted some butter and added minced garlic and cumin. When that had foamed up and smelt delicious, I stirred it into the soup.
It worked beautifully, I'm happy to tell you, though it was even nicer reheated for lunch, with a splash of tabasco sauce to spice it up.

PS Don't ask about the new oven. Please, just don't ask.

Tarte Tintin - Bashibazouks!

The parents of one of the Man's colleagues have an orchard. Or possibly just an apple tree, but at any rate, they had surplus apples this autumn, which somehow made their way to my kitchen, just in time for me to try out the newly-discovered tarte tatin possibilities of my silicone-handled skillets.
Tonight I bumped into the reality that one should pay very careful attention to the instructions in a recipe, not just the ingredients list. My usual practice is very carefully to make sure I know what's on the list, then skim through the instructions, based on an (over-) confident assumption that I know roughly how to put things together.
This may be the case with recipes I've tried before. It's not so good with things I haven't ever tried before.
Tarte tatin recipes call either for halves of apples or quarters. I blithely sliced my apples much thinner, which had two disadvantages. The first is that it's much harder to squish them all into the pan (I failed - two tarts are better than one, luckily) and second the little pieces of apple effectively disintegrate while cooking in the buttery sugary glaze.
Luckily the unbelievably rich pastry stood up to the wondrously toffee-ish sauce that resulted, although the whole thing didn't look quite as beautiful as a proper tart like wot my mother used to make.
The second tart I made with a scone dough instead of going through the faff of a proper flaky pastry, resting the dough for ages in the fridge and so on. I haven't tasted it yet - it's destined for my work colleagues, but it looks yummy!

Nutty tart

Two simple mistakes and I ruined what could have been a masterpiece. The first was that I forgot to keep my pantry stocked, so when I came to make this hazelnut tart, I had no plain flour.
Not a problem, I thought. I'll use wholewheat flour. That'll be grand.
I'd forgotten the salutary experience of an evening at a local restaurant in Ireland where the chef had decided on a whim to make wholewheat pasta. He'd never done it before, but when our spy in the kitchen muttered that perhaps he should cook it longer than normal pasta, he simply screamed, threw a tantrum and fired her.
As a result we had to wait for our order for nearly an hour while the manager soothed the chef, then the pasta itself was inedibly thick and undercooked.
My wholewheat pastry was not quite so disastrous, but since the recipe originally made a very crumbly pastry, with brown flour it would have been impossible to do anything without the brilliant tip to roll it out between layers of clingfilm.
The other mistake was to follow the recipe too slavishly. It called for lemon zest in both pastry and filling. I don't like lemon flavoured sweets much, but I religiously zested two little lemons.
Nobody else complained, but the lemon note in the hazelnut filling to me was overpowering and somehow medicinal.
The big excitement was that there was enough pastry and filling left to make an ancillary tart. I couldn't find any mini-tart tins, so I used a frying pan, the first time I've dared put one of my lovely Analon Professional pans in the oven.
Apart from a minor incident where I branded my own hand with the handle, it worked like a dream. Tarte tatin next, I think!

Twinkle, twinkle, little tomato

Have I told you about my arbitrary garden? For Christmas I was given a lovely wooden windowbox, containing nursery-bought thyme and sage, transplanted chives, mint and rosemary and a completely rogue tomato seedling.
The thyme and sage fell early victims to my habit of forgetting to water them. The chives, mint and rosemary have survived but bear the ravages of the ordeal. The rogue seedling is trying to take over our flat.
The tomatoes have even turned a lovely dark red, so I decided to override my own mild dislike for the fruit (and the Man's much more deeply held belief that Tomatoes are Evil) and use them in supper.
This was helped by my having brought back from Ireland some lovely floury potatoes and sweet carrots from my uncle's garden.
A couple of sea bass fillets seemed like a good idea when passing the fishmongers'.
I did have a bit of a Ready Steady Cook moment when I considered the menu, but it turned out surprisingly well.
The outcome was grilled seabass with tomato and fennel coulis, carrot gratté and steamed potatoes.
The seabass I rubbed with salt and pepper on the skin side and honey, balsamic vinegar and pepper on the flesh side, then put skinside up under a hot grill for seven minutes. (Hat tip to Jane for the honey and vinegar idea)
For the coulis, I softened garlic and fennel seeds in olive oil and butter, then simmered the skinned and chopped tomatoes in the fat for about 15 minutes. Then (struck with inspiration at the last minute - never very convenient) I sieved the sauce and put it back on the heat to reduce.
Fresh garden carrots are so delicious and unlike bought carrots that I simply grated them very finely with a microplane grater and sprinkled some window-grown chives on them for the colour. This left them light, fluffy and juicy all at once, as well as allowing their sweetness to display itself to admiration.
The steamed potatoes I just steamed.
I thought the whole was excellent, although the Man was less than enthusiastic about the carrots. I think he noticed there were vitamins in them.

Smoothie stiffie

I like to be inventive with the odds and ends in my fridge - sometimes it's not even very difficult to work out what to do with some leftover blueberries and some rather elderly yoghurt. Smoothies for breakfast - what could go wrong?
So I whisked them up with my magic soup gun and laid the breakfast table while the Man was still in the shower. Since that can be up to 40 minutes before he is ready to breakfast, I went off to do various other household tasks.
When we sat down to eat our muesli and drink our smoothies, the drinks had completely solidified. Not just got a skin on, as I initially thought, but turned into rather nasty crumbly blueberry cheese.
Why would that happen?
So we had to start the day without any superfoods at all.

How do you say it again?

Everything I've ever read about quinoa tells you how to pronounce it, so I'm not going to add my mispronunciation to the general melee.
I had always assumed it was horrible, or at least indigestible, just like all the other stodgy, worthy stomach-ache-inducing foods health fiends try to persuade one to eat. But recently Jane, a blogger whose taste I trust, said she had cooked quinoa for dinner just because she liked it.
That made it worth a try, so tonight I cooked quinoa and spicy tomato and mushroom sauce. The sauce was a little over-chillified and the Man is not keen on chilli mushrooms, so it wasn't an entirely successful experiment, but the quinoa itself turned out to be very nice. Flavour-wise, I couldn't rate it much higher than innocuous, but the texture was lovely - soft, nubbly seeds with crispy, crunchy elements.
The next stage is to try it out on the Kitchen Accomplice. If she likes it, it will be a valuable extension of our repertoire.