Italian Bread

After taking T's brother and his girlfriend to a couple of restaurants over the long weekend, we decided that Saturday night should be a bit quieter (and cheaper!). We decided on a games night, with pizzas, beers, and perhaps even a bit of X-Factor thrown in.

I wanted to make something for people to nibble on, that was a bit more interesting than a bowl of crisps or nuts. Riffling through Leith's, I found a recipe for "Italian Bread". I'd also seen this post on Wild Yeast, which made me really want focaccia.

Italian Bread served with olive oil

The recipe itself is pretty quick to pull together, although the kneading time of 8 minutes is a bit of a killer if you are lacking in upper body strength. I mixed in a handful of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and some fresh basil, but rosemary, cheese or olives would also be tasty.

My two food fears are baking with yeast and deep-frying. Luckily this recipe didn't involve deep frying, but it did involve yeast. The last few times I've used yeast, I've seemed unable to get any rise out of it. However, on this occasion, an hour in a previously warmed oven seemed to do the trick.

Italian Bread flavoured with Sundried Tomatoes and Basil

I was initially a bit disappointed, as the bread was quite hard and crusty. It was still tasty, but it wasn't as soft as I was expecting. Left overnight, it softened up a bit, but still was a bit too tough and crusty for my liking.

Slightly too crusty.

I think if I was to make this again, I'd give the Wild Yeast recipe a go instead. It's fairly similar to the Leith's one, but the photos look less crusty so the small tweaks obviously make a difference.

Italian Bread (Leiths Cookery Bible)
Makes 1 large loaf

30g fresh yeast (I used a 7g sachet of quick yeast)
225ml warm water
450g strong flour
2 tsp salt
4 tbsp olive oil
coarse salt to sprinkle over the top

1) Dissolve the yeast in the warm water.
2) Put the flour and salt in a large bowl and make a well in the centre. Mix in 2tbsp of the oil and the yeast mixture.
3) Once a dough in formed, knead well for 8 minutes. (After kneading, I added a handful of sundried tomatoes and some chopped basil.)
4) Roll the dough out until it is about 2cm thick. Place on to a greased baking sheet and cover with greased clingfilm.
5) Leave the dough to rise in a warm place until it is soft and fluffy looking. Preheat the oven to 200C
6) Make some indentations in the dough with your finger, and drizzle over the last 2tbsp of oil. Sprinkle over coarse salt, or you could use woody herbs like rosemary.
7) Bake for 20 minutes, then remove from the tray and bake directly on the oven rack for a further 10 minutes.

Palmiers

Although it was fun making the vol-au-vents for the Daring Bakers, using circular cutters meant I had loads of puff pastry scraps. Unlike shortcrust pastry, these can't just be scrunched up and re-rolled. The scraps have to be stacked to preserve the layers, but even then they probably won't be able to achieve the same rise as the original pastry could.

So, having a massive pile of scraps that weren't going to rise properly, it seemed sensible to follow Joy's advice and make palmiers!

I couldn't decide whether to go sweet or savoury. I went with both.

The sweet were dusted with vanilla sugar and mixed spice. The sugar caramelised and made them crunchy and chewy and delicious. The speckles of vanilla and spices mingled to give an appropriately autumnal flavour.

Sweetly Spicy Palmiers

The savoury ones were layered with an extra mature cheddar and cayenne pepper. The cheese is far too strong to eat on it's own, and even T, who loves a good cheddar found it too harsh. However, when baked up, the cheese flavour mellowed out and became more pleasant. The cayenne gave it a bit of a kick and stopped it feeling too fatty.

Cheesy Palmiers

Although I preferred the taste of the sweet palmiers, the cheesy ones would be perfect for a pre-dinner snack, and are a great way to use up any puff-pastry scraps you might have lying about!

Strawberry Jam - Why You Should Stick To Just One Recipe

Almost as soon as we got home from the PYO farm, it became obvious that we had way too much fruit, and unless we wanted to eat strawberries and cream at every meal for the next week, there was no way we would get through all of it. The cashier in the farm shop had asked if we planned to make jam, so on the way home we'd picked up some jam sugar just in case the mood took us.

The recipe on the back of the jam sugar packet said boil the jam for 4 minutes. The recipe in Leith's Bible said it could take up to 30 minutes for the jam to set, as did a recipe on BBC food. I also had a sugar thermometer with a handy "jam" marking on it. I've seen plenty of jars of homemade jam that are too runny, and have to be poured, but I couldn't imagine what jam that was too hard would be like. I decided to boil the jam until the sugar thermometer was satisfied. I also chucked in some vanilla seeds and a squeeze of lemon juice for fun.

As I am greedy and curious, it was only a couple of hours later when I broke in to the first jar. Instead of spreadable jam, I had some kind of fruit toffee. It was like a giant wine gum in a jar. I managed to chip a lump out of it, and it tasted fine. The only problem was the texture.

Strawberry Jam

After googling various phrases about hard jam, I discovered what had gone wrong. The "up to 30 minutes" recipes were using ordinary sugar, but the jam sugar I'd used had added pectin. This had caused the jam to set quicker and at a lower temperature than relying on the pectin in the fruit alone. The lemon juice had also bumped up the pectin levels. Luckily, I also found that melting the jam down and adding in over-ripe fruit would probably give the jam a slightly better consistency.

A few nights later, when trying to get rid of the last few strawberries, I put the two jars of jam I'd made in a saucepan of cold water, which I slowly warmed up. In another pan, I mashed up the remaining fresh strawberries with a splash of water. Once the jam was warm enough to be stirrable (this took some time) I added in the mashed strawberries and their juice, and mixed it in to the existing jam as best I could.

I left the jars overnight, and consoled myself that a jar of strawberry toffee was not the worst thing that could have happened. The next morning I made toast while staring at the jars of jam with apprehension. Opening the jar gave no clues, and the jam still looked firm. As I dipped the knife in, I knew the fix had worked. The jam was spreadable! Success!

Jam on a petit pain

I've been eating the jam all week, just on bread or crackers, sometimes with butter and sometimes without. I've even substituted jam and bread for dinner, in a move reminiscent of my grandmother. When my mother would tell her to eat a proper dinner, she'd reply that jam and smoking were the only pleasures left in life at her age. I haven't started smoking though.

I wouldn't say this jam is life changing, but it is very fruity, with the right balance of sweetness and tartness. The vanilla adds a little something, but the flavour is not obvious. For a first foray in to the jam-making world, I'm pretty happy. I've also learnt my lesson about not trying to combine 3 different recipes when I have no idea what I'm doing!

Home Made Tapas

It's been a busy week for me. My parents came up to visit, as did most of my flatmates' families. It's graduation week! I got to wear a cape! I was also a bit disappointed that I only got a white hood, some of the other degrees got red with fur trims. I am now officially a graduate. Scary.

Before the madness started, we had tapas for dinner. I spent 5 or 6 hours in the kitchen making 11 dishes, it was probably the most extreme savoury cooking I've ever done. As there was only 4 of us, most of the dishes were quite small. It was still tough, and I struggled to get everything out at once. I have a new appreciation of the amount of work an underground restaurant must involve!

Tortilla, chorizo, gambas al pil pil, patatas bravas

The photos are pretty rough because I was so hungry and tired by this stage that spending time taking well lit pictures just wasn't going to happen.

• Green Salad
• Potato and Onion Tortilla
• Grilled Chorizo
• Gambas al pil pil
• Patatas Bravas
• Sardine Escabeche
• Olives
• Pan con tomate
• Meatballs in tomato sauce
• Chicken and Chorizo Stew
• Garlic Mushrooms
  

Very rustic looking pan con tomate

I tried to make things ahead and reheat them nearer to dinner, as well as including a couple of cold items such as the tortilla, salad and olives that just needed to be plated up.

The meatballs and the tortilla were my favourite dishes. The tortilla was made by cooking potatoes and onions in a sea of olive oil, then draining off the oil and replacing it with beaten eggs. It took ages to cook as I don't think our frying pan conducts heat very well. (This might be because it was cheap, but probably more due to the bashed in bottom not sitting flat on the hob). I ended up grilling the top to try and get the egg to set enough to turn it over in the pan. We didn't manage to eat it all on the night, so had another slice for breakfast the next morning. Yum!

Meatballs

The meatballs were made with a mixture of pork and beef, with a red wine and tomato sauce. I browned them in the pan before baking them in the oven with the sauce. They were deliciously meaty, although the sauce wasn't quite right.

Tapas was quite stressful, and I'm not sure whether I'd be bothered to make it all again! As always, there was way too much food so I'm still eating left over chorizo and salad. It was a fun evening and I drank more sherry than I should have done! We've still got loads of onions, eggs and potatoes, so another tortilla might be on the cards, especially if I can eat it for breakfast!

Student Dinner: Home Made Baked Beans

Today was meant to be my last day at university. I had my final exam on Tuesday, and I was meant to pick up my dissertation mark today. Typically, the secretary was ill and the office was closed. I still had dinner planned though.

I had been thinking for a while what I should have. I toyed with the idea of recreating the food I ate in first year, when I lived in halls and ate in the canteen.

For starters, there would be vegetable soup. Only the soup has gone, and your bowl has some mushy vegetables in it. Once we got a serving so unsouplike that it could be scraped up in a heap on one side of the bowl.

Next up would be fish and spring vegetables. Excellent. A nice, healthy, tasty bit of fish. Yum. Here, the catch would be that I would give my flatmate the last piece of fish, and I would have a burrito filled with the mushy vegetables from the soup. No matter what time I got in the queue, the last portion of fish would always go to the person two or three places ahead of me in the line. If I was really lucky, I would treat myself with fried chicken. Except the kitchen has run out of breadcrumbs, so they used breakfast cereal. Not cornflakes though. Rice Krispies. Sweet!?

Finally, dessert would involve me considering a pot of fruit salad, but being put off by the excess of melon and not enough grapes. Over to the dessert specials! As there is that box of Rice Krispies that needs using up, why not make orange jelly, and top it with whipped cream and puffed rice? Why not indeed? *

Talking of Why Not? (a rather expensive and cheesy club favoured by public school types) I'd squeeze on to the dining table with one or two friends, while the rest of the seats were taken up by posh kids discussing whether to go to Why Not? or Opal Lounge. Plus Daddy and Pimsy are coming up on Saturday to watch the rugger. Tally Ho!

Instead I went for the student favourite of baked beans on toast.

Classic.

I made the baked beans yesterday as they took 13 hours to make. You had to soak the haricots for 10 hours, boil for an hour, chop and brown onions, garlic and bacon, then simmer the ingredients in chopped tomatoes for an hour and half. I can't find the exact recipe online but there are loads on Google. I might give some of the others a go, as although mine we nice, they lacked a certain je ne s'ais quoi.

For the toast, I bought a sourdough loaf from Peter's Yard. I love the way the crust is really chewy but the inside is soft with a slight tang to it. (I got kicked out of there the other day as I had been in there for 3 hours studying and they wanted to close! I feel a bit embarassed about this but it is also a bit cool that the staff now recognise me as the person who can make coffee and a cake last half a day.)

On its own, I thought it looked a bit ascetic, so I added a side salad and a portabella mushroom stuffed with peppered cheddar and breadcrumbs. It was a pretty tasty dinner and good for my student budget too!

(*All this talk of the halls' canteen makes me want to go back and review it objectively. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all...)

Scouse and latkes

Last night I made scouse for dinner. T is from Liverpool so this is his local dish. Liverpool used to be a major shipping port, and scouse is a product of all this immigration and multiculturalism. It's similar to Irish stew, although there are also suggestions that it originates from the Baltic states.

We'd had some roast lamb the other week, and I'd used most of the leftovers in a shepherd's pie. There was still some left in the freezer though, so we phoned T's aunt (whose recipe is apparently world famous!) and she told us how to make scouse.

As our lamb was already cooked, we stewed a couple of potatoes, three leeks and three carrots with some chicken stock (just enough to cover the veg) and seasoning for an hour. T's aunt told us a secret ingredient, but we couldn't find it in the shops so we used curry powder instead to warm it up a bit. We added the lamb, put the lid back on the pan and stewed it for another 30 minutes. It was a nice end to a chilly day in Edinburgh, and I mopped up all the all the juice with buttered bread.

Tonight T had the left over scouse, and I went back to mine for some left over pheasant stew that I had frozen a while back. There wasn't much left, so I made some latkes to go with it. I had seen an interesting looking recipe on Sassy Radish. My last attempt at potato cakes was disastrous, and they fell apart, so it was time to give it another go. I did the icy water element, and was really surprised by the amount of starch in the bottom of the bowl. As I used smaller potatoes than the recipe recommended, I wan't sure how much egg to put in, but the consistency seemed good and they worked out fine.

The latkes were crispy on the outside, and cooked through, so softer in the middle but it was still possible to feel the individual strips of potato. I dipped some in the stew and ate the rest with some creme fraiche. I made two portions, and ate them both...