Summer Arrives!

      Summer has arrived with a bit of a heatwave and we've been enjoying BBQs with our Aldi Pizza oven and some Irish lump wood charcoal from The Irish Artisan Charcoal Company. 

      I have to admit we got both of these as gifts, my husband Tom who is connected with Aldi on the wine side was given the Pizza oven to test and due to a modicum of interaction and retweeting with Colin on Twitter he very kindly gave me a bag of charcoal at Litfest.ie in May.

Fuel!

      I put the oven together, it was relatively easy and when I looked at it I felt it was a bit low so I put it up on two cavity blocks, much better for our backs.

The cat inspecting the new addition!

        Now what to cook? First up some mini pizzas on the pizza stone, these will need a bit of practice as we got the bottoms to be crispy bit there wasn't much browning on top, but we will persevere. Then we removed the pizza stone and BBQed some free range pork chops and roast peppers, much more successful. The next night we spatchcocked a chicken and seasoned it with the Bharat spice mix below, this was a great success and it was as good cold for lunch next day.

         We had, well Tom had used different fuels apart from the charcoal the first night. He'd had some trouble getting the charcoal started, but Colin came up with a good tip, dip strips of the paper bag the charcoal came in in vegetable oil and add that to the kindling. With the last of our charcoal we cooked these burgers and an aubergine for a tasty supper on a warm evening. 

BBQ, burgers and aubergine slices.

Spicy Lamb Burgers

This recipe is one I have developed for the Summer cooking camps I do at Brennan's in Cork, it makes 6 small burgers and while it has spice it doesn't have heat, feel free to add chilli if you like things hot.

500g minced lamb

1 clove of garlic

1 small onion

2tsp baharat spice mix

1tbsp pinenuts 

1tsp salt

1tbsp olive oil

      Place the minced lamb in a bowl.

Peel the garlic and the onion and grate them. 

Add the grated garlic and onion and then the spices, pine nuts and salt.

Mix well and divide the mixture into six, shape each sixth into a burger and leave to rest on plate.

Brush the top of the burgers with oil.

Heat the grill for 5-10 minutes and then grill the burgers for 4-5 minutes on one side and turn them over and brush the other side with oil and for another 4 minutes.

Make sure they are cooked through and serve.

      These are even nicer cooked on a BBQ, timings will vary depending on the heat of your BBQ. A great accompaniment is aubergine cut into 2cm thick slices and brushed with oil and grilled on each side with the burgers.

The spices

Baharat spice mix

1tsp black peppercorns

1tsp coriander seed

2cm cinnamon stick

½tsp cloves

2 allspice berries

2 tsp cumin seeds

1tsp green cardamom pods

½tsp grated nutmeg 

      Put all the spices in a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle and grind to a powder.

Store in an airtight container for up to 8 weeks. Makes about 6 teaspoonfuls.

This is based on a recipe from "Jerusalem" by Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi 

With tzatziki and salad.

Beetroot Tzatziki

Depending on the beetroot this can taste quite sweet.

1 small cooked beetroot

¼ of a cucumber

½ a shallot

1 small clove of garlic

12 mint leaves

¼ of a lemon 

salt & pepper 

125g thick yogurt

      Grate the beetroot onto a plate. 

Cut the piece of cucumber in half and scrape out the seeds with a teaspoon, grate the flesh onto the plate.

Peel and finely chop the shallot and the garlic and add to the beetroot and cucumber.

Roll the mint leaves up and very finely slice them across the roll, add to the plate.

Season the vegetables on the plate with the lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Put the yoghurt into a bowl and add the vegetables stir to mix well.

Taste and add more seasoning if you think it needs some.

Evening light!

Let us hope the good weather continues, it sure puts everyone in better form! 

To Chew or Not to Chew?

Bite and Chew!

        I suspect that at some stage in our lives we have all been told “Don’t wolf your food! Chew!”. Or an elderly childless relative has reminded an impatient gobbler at the table to “Chew each mouthful 32 times!” or risk indigestion. 

        With the increase in people making protein shakes, smoothies and ‘juicing’ and the availability of the ready made versions I wonder if we are forgetting how to chew? 

        Would you actually eat a banana, an orange, 2tbs milled linseeds, a scoop of protein powder and a tub of yoghurt if it was laid out in front of you? 

But when it is all whizzed up into a smoothie it is all too easy to glug down. 

        This could become a problem, as the machine has done the chewing for you, there is very little saliva mixed into the smoothie which will affect how it is digested in the stomach. Or if you make it earlier in the day for a quick boost later on, the enzymes in the fruit will start to break down the nutrients in the smoothie.

        Then again if this is the only way some people will eat fruit and vegetables, a shot of juice or a smoothie might be the way to go, but they are missing out on the satisfaction of a well deserved break and nourishment while chewing their way through their snack or meal. Having foods in smoothie form may also lead to eating more, due to lack of satiety.

        Chewing is good for us, by chewing we start the digestion process mixing the food with silva which contains enzymes that break down the food and makes it soft and wet. 

Chewing exercises our jaws and strengthens the bones that hold our teeth in place.

Chewing slowly, brings out the flavours of the food, hopefully adding to our enjoyment of the it. The more slowly we eat the sooner we start to feel full, as the brain takes 20 minutes to register what is in our stomachs.

        The Edwardian Chew-Chew diet was based on the philosophy of Horace Fletcher 1849-1919. It can be summed up in his catchy phrase “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate!”

He was quite keen on people chewing 100 times a minute, but was happy enough to encourage an average of 32 chews per mouthful of food.

He also felt that meals should be enjoyed and mealtimes sociable, encouraging his followers to only eat when hungry, eat what they enjoyed, chew well and stop eating when “the appetite begins to slack up a bit,”

All this takes concentration, being “mindful” even, while eating. 

        The recent trend for chefs to create purées and foams to add to their dishes that include cuts of meat cooked sous vide or long and slow. This food requires little or no chewing to reduce it to a paste before swallowing. While these beautiful plates of food are delicious, each element is carefully chosen to enhance the others on the plate, I fear we may be turning them into flavourful pap for the toothless. While I don't want tough meat I am prepared to chew to break down my food.

        In our fast moving world where time is money and not a minute should be wasted on something as mundane as refuelling the body, perhaps it is no bad thing to take some timeout to chew. 

Maybe while you were reading this you were eating something? Any left? Take a small mouthful and chew 32 times………………………….. 

Well, any difference? 

It’s worth trying even for one mouthful and then maybe another?

        Eating is necessary, so why not take pleasure in it too, sit down, relax and chew!

Happy Birthday to both my Grannies!

          

           March isn't always a good month to have a birthday in if you are a mother, as Mothering Sunday falls in it. Both my Grandmothers had their Birthdays in March. My paternal Granny, Helena on the 1st of March and my maternal Granny, May on the 14th. They were both born in 1884, these photos were taken in 1953 at my parents wedding when they were 69. May died in 1968 and Helena in 1977 just before her 92nd birthday.

Helena 

May

           I didn't have much time with them as I was three when May died and 11 when Helena died, but I do remember her quite well.

Winter Salads

       I always think of salads as summertime food, I find it hard to summon enthusiasm for them in the winter. They are cold and should come with a dose of heat and vitamin D from a sunny day! 

Having thought about a bit more I am slowly coming round to winter salads and these two are becoming my favourites. 

       The first makes use of oranges very much in season at the moment, I made my marmalade a while back and the blood oranges are now in the shops, and fennel available for most of the year.

The second salad is a bit of a salmagrundi, using Asian flavours and as much chilli heat as you like.  Both of these go very well with duck, the acidity cutting the rich fattiness. The second is good with crispy, spicy belly pork added. 

      The important thing is to make sure the ingredients are not straight from the fridge and have time to warm up to room temperature before you eat the salads.

Orange and Fennel Salad

      This is so simple I almost didn’t write it down, I love the scallion in it but it can linger on the breath!

1 orange

salt

¼ of a lemon 

¼ of a bulb of fennel

2 glugs of good olive oil

the white of a scallion or 2 optional*

Cut the skin off the orange and slice it into rounds and lay them on a plate and sprinkle with a pinch of salt.

Slice the fennel as thinly as possible and spread over the top of the orange slices, squeeze over the lemon juice and pour over the olive oil. Leave to stand for 30 minutes at room temperature.

* Finely slice the white of the scallion and sprinkle on with the fennel.

A Warming Salad

      Roast beetroot is nicest in this, but the vacuumed packed cooked beetroot will be fine, it also gives a little colour to the dressing.

1 small clove of garlic

juice of half a lime

1tbs soy sauce

2tbs olive oil

1tbs sesame oil

0.5cm ginger

¼ to 1 chilli

a piece of cucumber

1 cooked beetroot

¼ of a red pepper

1tbs sesame seeds

lettuce

2 scallions

salt & pepper

Grate the garlic clove into the bottom of a salad bowl and add lime juice, soy sauce and the oils.

Peel and cut the ginger into fine matchsticks and finely chop the chilli, use as much or as little chilli as you wish or leave it out and add some chilli oil to the dressing.

Deseed the cucumber and cut into thin batons, cut the beetroot into small cubes and the pepper into thin strips. Add all of these to the salad bowl and mix well.

Toast the sesame seeds on a dry pan until they are just turning darker and sprinkle over the salad. Very finely slice the scallions and tear the lettuce into bite sized pieces and add to the salad. 

Toss before serving and taste adding salt and pepper if necessary.

A Sunny Dish for a Dark Winter Day

        We've been having a lot of windy and blustery weather over the past while, including flooding in some parts of the country. 
        The darkness of these stormy winter days makes me want sunny food, food that reminds me of warm Summer days and calm seas. 
        Hake with Chorizo and Peppers will do the trick, but I may have to wait for calmer seas for there to be any hake at the fishmongers. Cod, pollock or monkfish would work well instead of hake.

I like steaks for this dish as the bones transfer the heat into the centre of the fish helping it to cook.

A reminder of Summer

Baked Hake with Chorizo and Peppers

1 cooking chorizo

1 onion

2 cloves of garlic

2 peppers

2 hake steaks

salt & pepper

Heat the oven to 220˚C, GM 7 and place an ovenproof dish in to warm.

Cut the chorizo in to small cubes, peel and slice the onion and garlic.

Cut the peppers into 2cm squares.

Heat a frying pan over a medium heat and add the chorizo when the oil tuns add the onion and garlic and cook gently until soft.

Add the peppers and season with salt and pepper then cook for a minute or two. Put a couple of spoonfuls of the vegetables into the hot oven proof dish and put the hake steaks on top, spoon the rest of the vegetables over the hake and bake in the hot oven for about 15 minutes until the fish is cooked. 

Granny's Plum Pudding

          When does Christmas begin? It seems to begin earlier and earlier each year. A department store in Cork had its Christmas decorations up before Halloween this year!

When I was growing up Mum always made the mincemeat in late September when there were lots of apples around and it had matured enough by mid November to have some mince pies for my sister’s birthday, because she liked them and once her birthday was over we could start to get a little bit Christmassy. 

         The next thing we did was to make the Christmas puddings on “stir-up” Sunday, which is the Sunday before Advent Sunday. Then there was a lull until the tree and decorations went up in mid December about a week and a half before Christmas.

         The 8th of December was the official start of the Christmas shopping marathon. Nearly all the schools had the day off and everyone or so it seemed headed to Dublin to do their Christmas shopping. 

My Mother claimed that all the dubliners stayed away from the shops that day because of the crowds. She preferred to go into town on Christmas Eve with her sister just to enjoy the crowds on Henry’s Street!

The 1935 ingredients 

         This year I felt I should make a Christmas pudding not having done so for quite a few years. We have been very lucky to have been given puddings over the past Christmases and very delicious they were too, But this year I wanted a home made Granny Mahon Pudding.

I took out the black note book Granny had kept her notes in, she started it in 1932. 

         It has a note of all the marmalade and jam she made each year and how much it cost at the end of the year she totalled the pots/pounds up in 1940 she made an incredible 201¼ pounds! Well, there was a war on, she was cooking for seven people and bread and jam would have been a reliable filler up.

         She also kept a record of the Christmas cakes and Plum Puddings she made. The year that caught my eye was 1935, 80 years ago this year, she would have been a year older than I am now at the time. The 1935 pudding, she noted, weighed 14 pounds! That’s a stone or 11kg. 

         She didn’t use pudding basins or bowls to steam the pudding, her pudding was wrapped in a floured cloth and lowered into a large pot of boiling water where it remained on the boil for the next goodness knows how long, being topped up regularly with boiling water from the kettle. The kitchen must have been like a steam room with the walls streaming condensation.

        It would have been a marathon session each year!

My Mum was more up to date using 4 four pudding basins to cook the mixture in and instead of steaming up the kitchen all day she started the puddings off in pots on the hob and then placed them covered into the hot oven to get on with the process.

        Well, four puddings is more puddings than we’ll get through in the next five years. So I divided the recipe in four and I still ended up with two puddings that would serve six after a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. One of the joys of leftover Christmas pudding is to fry it in butter for breakfast on boxing day.

         I tried to remain true to the recipe, but I failed to get Muscatels and Valencia raisins, these are large raisins with the seeds still in them, delicious as they are taking the seeds out is a fecky and sticky job. I replaced them with a similar weight of a mix of dried apricots, stoneless dates and dried figs cut into pieces. Muscatels and Valencias are available in good delicatessens and health food shops in November. I even went to my butcher to get proper beef suet. This is the fat that protects the kidneys in the animal. As he was reluctant to shred it for me I brought a piece home and froze it overnight before grating it in the food processor.

         Below is the recipe I used this year, I even made a wish as I stirred it!

This years ingredients

PLUM PUDDING 2015

115g/4oz sultanas

115g/4oz raisins

115g/4oz currants

75g/2½oz dried apricots chopped

75g/2½oz stoneless dates chopped

75g/2½oz dried figs chopped

55g/2oz mixed peel chopped

115g/4oz demerara sugar

¼tsp salt

200ml/7floz stout 

2  hens eggs

85g/3oz beef suet shredded or grated

115g/4oz breadcrumbs

30g/1oz ground almonds

115g/4oz self-raising flour

½tsp baking powder

½tsp mixed spice

In a large bowl mix together the dried fruit, peel, sugar, salt and 150ml/¼ pint of the stout and leave to soak overnight.

Ready for soaking

Butter two 900ml/1½ pint pudding basins and place a disc of buttered greaseproof paper in the bottom of each of the basins. Prepare the greaseproof and foil lids or a buttered disc of greaseproof to put between the pudding and plastic lid. Elastic bands are easier than string. Fill the kettle and bring to the boil. 

Add the eggs, suet, breadcrumbs and ground almonds to the soaked fruit and mix well.

Sift the together the flour, baking powder and mixed spice and fold through the other ingredients, if the mixture is dry add the rest of the stout. Stir three times clockwise and make a wish!* It should be a fairly thick.

Making a wish!

Spoon into the basins leaving a hollow in the centre and add coins wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil and push them under the surface.**

Adding the lucky money

Cover the basins with the greaseproof and foil or plastic lids and place them on trivets*** in deep roasting tin or oval roaster and pour in enough boiling water to come halfway up the basins.

Bring the water to the boil on the hob and cover tightly with a foil or lid and simmer for one and a half hours and then place in a hot oven at 130˚C, GM ½ for 8 hours.

Check occasionally and if the water level has dropped top up with more boiling water. 

Remove from the oven and take the basins out and let cool. If you used foil it needs to be replaced and retied.

Steam for another one and half hours before eating.

*optional ;)

** but not if you are reheating the pudding in a microwave!

*** a scone cutter makes a good trivet.

Short cuts! Steam in a slow cooker or pressure cooker, refer to manufacturers instructions.

Reheat in the microwave, turn out onto a plate and cut into slices, separate them slightly, cover with a bowl and microwave until hot through. Hide the wrapped coins before serving.

Note; If you are using greaseproof and foil to cover the pudding basins you have to put a “pleat” into them so that the pudding can expand during cooking. Tying the greaseproof and foil on is tricky! Use a rubber band to secure the greaseproof and then tie with string, the thick ones from a bunch of asparagus work well. This makes it easier to tie on the foil with string and make a string handle to lift out the pudding basin from the hot water. 

The pleat

The string handle

Devilled Crab Gratin

Devilled Crab Gratin

         Some jobs in the kitchen just have to be done by hand, topping & tailing gooseberries, stoning plums for the freezer, shelling fresh peas, pricking sloes for sloe gin and picking the meat from a hole crab. There is nothing for it but to gather all you need sit down at a table and get on with it. Company of some sort is essential, ideally a real live person who will share the task or one engaged in other activities that you can chat to. Failing live company the radio will keep me entertained.

Of course the point of these activities is to end up with something delicious to eat!

Last night I took on the crab picking challenge and it was well worth it. The brown meat is essential to this dish as it gives a richness that can’t be achieved with anything else.

Crab meat and shells

and the rest.

2 crabs

2 small onions or 1 large one

50g butter

2cm piece of fresh ginger peeled

2 cloves of garlic peeled & chopped

1 dessert spoon of lime pickle

double cream

salt & pepper

fresh coriander chopped

grated cheddar

Pick the brown and white meat from the crabs.

Peel the onions and slice them very thinly, melt the butter in a pan over a low heat and add the onions. Cook the onions gently. 

Grate the ginger and chop the pieces of lime in the lime pickle. Add the grated ginger, garlic and lime pickle to the onions and continue cooking until the onions are soft.

Heat an ovenproof dish and preheat a grill.

Add the crab to the pan with the onions and enough double cream to loosen the mixture. Heat it all through and stir through the chopped coriander, pour into the warm dish and sprinkle with the grated cheese and grill until browned and bubbling.  

Leave to cool until the bubbling stops and serve with a green salad.

Let the bubbling stop before serving!

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main course.

PS Add a chopped chilli if you want a really spicy version, but I like the crab flavour not to be drowned by the chilli.