Ballymaloe Gardenfest 2016

Binning the bagged Salad & growing your own in a “fish crate” 

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Ballymaloe Gardenfest 2016 Talk by Johann & Tom Doorley

Tom’s/Rowley's Dressing

Mustardy!

We like to use a mixture of oils, extra virgin olive oil for salads, light olive oil and sunflower oil for cooking and mayonnaise and toasted sesame oil for added flavour. These are our favourites, but feel free to experiment with the recipe.

smashed clove garlic

100ml olive oil 

3tsp* Dijon mustard (*2 heaped & 1 not so heaped)

3tbsp red wine vinegar

Put the garlic into a jar and add the rest if the ingredients, cover with a tight fitting lid and give it a really good shake until it forms a thick sauce. Pour over salad leaves and toss & serve.

My sister Madeline and her daughter Holly are "Brown Envelope Seeds" in west Cork, they do 4 salad mixes for the 4 seasons. 

Charlotte’s Dip

Our daughter au paired in France and this was a family favourite with her host family, even with the three little boys she looked after.

In a bowl whisk together 1dsp soy sauce

and 3dsp of made mustard, while whisking trickle in 

100ml light olive oil mixed with 50ml sesame oil until thick.

Toast 3tbsp sesame seeds in a dry pan and serve with the dip and crudities, Charlotte liked to include blanched calabrese in the vegetables, but carrots, radishes & cucumber are the main ones we use.

“Fly Away” is the carrot of choice for us.

Mayonnaise

All you need for Mayonnaise 

The quality of the egg makes a huge difference to the mayonnaise, proper free range with thick, dark orangey yolks are best.

1 egg yolk

¼ tsp dry mustard

pinch of salt

lemon juice/vinegar

150-170ml oil (about 100ml sunflower & 50ml EVOO)

pepper

Put the egg yolk, mustard and salt into the bowl of a food processor and add a squeeze of lemon juice to dissolve the salt. Run the processor and start adding the oil a little at a time and then in a thin stream. 

If the mayonnaise becomes very thick add more lemon juice or if it is too runny don’t add all the oil. Taste and pepper and add more salt and lemon juice as you see fit.

We sometimes flavour our mayonnaise with crushed garlic or chopped herbs or a spoonful of harissa or chopped preserved lemon skins.

Pickled Radishes

Ready to slice.

Mix together

12-16 radishes very thinly sliced

a peeled slice of ginger cut into matchsticks 

a small chilli very thinly sliced

4 peppercorns

1tsp salt

And leave for 5-10 minutes stirring once or twice. 

Pack the radishes into a sterilised jar* and pour over the liquid and add 50ml of cooled boiled water and 50ml of vinegar, mix gently and leave. We sometimes add a few nasturtium seeds or buds too.

These are pretty much ready to eat after an hour or two and will keep in the fridge for a week at least.  

*Nutella jars are good as they have plastic lids.

Pickle jar

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! 

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.

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

A Seasonal Pie: Apple and Blackberry Tart!

      Now you may well ask why this is called a tart, as it has a top on it and is therefore a pie, but for some reason this sort of plate pie is known as a tart here! We were regularly fed on apple tarts and custard in the autumn. Apple tarts are always a big hit with any older men at a gathering, so much so I keep a supply of foil plates to make them on if I'm asked to bring a dish to a 'do'!

An Apple and Blackberry "Tart"

      

       I love the old white and blue enamel plates for these tarts, they remind me that no matter how sophisticated we have become or so on trend with our kitchen equipment that something like enamel wear, used by our grand parents is still around and doing a great job.  

      And why didn't I put tart in the post title, well you can guess what might come up if you put "Seasonal Tart" into an internet search! 

      

      The filling for this tart I make by eye rather than by exact measurement. I do use exact quantities for the pastry, but the filling is dependent on the size of the plate, the sweetness of the apples and blackberries, all variables. Elderberries are also good with the apples.

      
      The blackberries were really good the week before last I picked a couple of tubs full and froze them the day before the rain came. And rained steadily for about 18 hours! I was very glad of them as I needed some for a cookery demonstration at GROWFest organised by GIY  in Waterford.
      Blackberries have a uniquely autumnal scent when hot, well worth the stained fingers to be transported back to childhood kitchens, warm and fuggy with just out of the oven tarts.

Pastry 

250 g plain flour 

125 g butter 

3-4tbs cold water

apples

blackberries

sugar

egg wash 

      Sieve the flour into a bowl and cut the butter into small chunks.

Add the butter to the flour and rub it in with the tips of your fingers. When the flour and butter resembles breadcrumbs add the water.  Mix with a dinner knife or wooden spoon to make a stiff dough.
      Take the pastry out onto a floured worktop and shape into a ball, cut in half and flatten into two discs. Wrap in cling-film and chill for 20-30 minutes in the fridge.

       Place a baking tray or pizza stone in the centre of the oven and pre heat the oven to 200˚C, GM 6. 

Roll out one of the pastry discs on a lightly floured work surface and line the pie plate. 

Fill with a layer of peeled and sliced apples and sprinkle with sugar, then add a layer of blackberries and some more sugar. 

Frozen Blackberries and Sliced Apples

      Repeat until the layers come just above the hight of the pie plate. Leave the edge uncovered and paint with egg wash.

      Roll out the other disc of pastry and cover the tart with it crimp the edges, decorate with pastry leaves stuck on with egg wash and paint the top with egg wash.

      Place the tart into the oven onto the hot baking tray or pizza stone and bake for 15-20 minutes. When the top is golden turn the oven down to 180˚C, GM 4 and finish baking for another 15-20 minutes.

A Slice of Autumn!