Summer pudding

/in , /by

Yes yes, I know summer is hiding her light under a bushel right now, but I’m hoping to coax her back by eating a variety of delightfully summery dishes all the while. And what is more gloriously summery (or more gloriously British) than a panopoly of soft fruits?

A recent trip to Brixton’s Farmers’ Market came up trumps when I came home with an old fashioned paper pick-you-own punnet with a handle filled with fresh juicy Kent cherries, gorgeous redcurrants and tiny tart whitecurrants all for £4. The cherries didn’t even make it til teatime, eaten one handed on the patio while reading the Sunday papers. The currants didn’t lend themselves just as well to absent-minded nibbling being much tarter and less juicy. I half-heartedly ate a few and went off to rummage in the freezer for something for dinner…

And while there I espied a forgotten bag of frozen summer fruits from Sainsbury’s and my mind leapt to making a juice drenched summer pudding as a beautiful vehicle for some organic thick cream I happened to have picked up as well. I’m a big fan of the frozen fruits Sainsbury’s sell, especially when on an offer for three bags for a fiver and often buy them to make my five a day more interesting and affordable. The fact that they also make a mean frozen daiquiri is entirely incidental!

I haven’t eaten summer pudding for years and wasn’t entirely sure how you make it, but figured it would be fairly easy once I found a recipe. A quick Google turned up this fantastically easy sounding one from Sophie Grigson on the BBC Food Website that sums up just how easy this fabulous dessert is to make! Especially since my local shop has an inability to sell fresh sliced bread, with all their loaves seeming a bit dry round the edges. This makes them perfect for a good summer pud!

Luckily I had lots of time to make the pudding so I was able to leave the frozen fruits to defrost overnight and brings the juices out as recommended, although I halved the amount of sugar she suggested. However I don’t think you’d be missing too much if you go straight to the heating stage. I simmered the fruit for about ten minutes, before adding a few tablespoons of Ribena and allowing it to cool enough to be able to dip my bread into without burning myself. I trimmed the bread of crusts while I waited and cut the slices into triangles, except for one that I cut into a circle using the base of the bowl as a template.

Once the fruit mixture had cooled enough, I dipped the circle of bread for the base in juice on both sides and began lining the bowl. I dipped each triangle on one side and began making my juicy jigsaw, wedging each piece of bread in carefully to make sure there were no gaps, adding little plugs of bread where needed. I then filled the bread shell up with the gorgeous fruit mixture and realised I was slightly short of bread to make the lid. Some judicious cutting and trimming later and all the fruit was covered and I was relieved that no one would see its hotchpotch look when the pudding was served!

I then put a saucer on top of it all, popped the bowl into the vegetable drawer of my fridge and put a few cans of chickpeas on top to weight it down overnight and allow the lovely juices to soak into the bread and help shape the pudding before eating. This should happen overnight, but it was a full 48 hours before I got back to mine. The juice hadn’t completely soaked through the lid and I was a bit worried that the pudding would fall apart when I turned it out. Crossing my fingers while I did it made it a bit trickier, but I needn’t have worried! It slipped out of the bowl easily and looked lusciously purple and mouth-watering on the plate.

I had a generous slice cut and on a plate with a dollop of thick cream in next to no time. It was delicious. The soft succulent bread contrasted with the still crunchy berries beautifully. The cream tempered the slight sourness of the berries and turned this frugal dessert into something truly stunning that I would servee to anyone. I’ve been eating this for breakfast most mornings this week and as well as tasting wonderful, it keeps incredibly well in the fridge. My five a day haven’t been this enjoyable in a long time!

Edamame Bean Dip

/in , , /by

Magic beans...

I am a big fan of frozen vegetables. Cheap, long lasting and extremely handy, I usually keep several varieties to hand. But when frozen peas and sweetcorn get a bit bland, I reach for the somewhat trendier frozen soyabeans or edamame from Bird’s Eye to add some Eastern promise to dishes such as fried rice. I love their nutty moreish taste and texture.

So when I espied a little pot of edamame bean dip with chili and lemongrass in Marks and Spencer a few months ago, I couldn’t help snapping it up to try it. It was delicious sweet and nutty with a warming kick, but unsurprisingly it was a tiny pot for the price and laden with oil. I wondered if I could make my own slightly less fatty version.

Back home I got out the soybeans, a nice juicy lemon and some Cap Bon harissa and the blender and pondered what I could do to make this a soft smooth dip that would yield to a toasted pitta or a crisp tortilla chip…and surprisingly my mind turned to cottage cheese!

Here's one I made earlier...

Personally I find cottage cheese on its own to be offensively bland and extremely unappealing, but for this it seemed just right. Low in fat, soft, creamy and easy to blend without an overpowering flavour of its own it would make the perfect base with the soybeans.

Since I was feeling casual in my creation, I didn’t really use any precise measurements. About a quarter of the bag of soybeans were boiled and drained, before going into the blender with the juice of a lemon, a big squirt of harissa, some salt and pepper and about 3 or 4 dessert spoons of cottage cheese. This created the perfect consistency for dipping and spreading with just enough of a chili kick.

Dip-tastic!

I served this for as a surprisingly filling lunch on some Ryvita. The high protein content of the beans makes this tasty and filling without being heavy. It was also just too tempting not to scrape the bowl of the blender clean with a few salted tortilla chips…

Cheap, quick and pretty healthy, this dip has become a bit of a lunchtime favourite already. It stores well in a tupperware pot and is really really good with a  few flatbreads and some fresh tomatoes from the garden if anyone calls unexpectedly and needs a snack. It’s also achieved the impossible and rendered cottage cheese delicious!

Pick and choose…

/in /by

Are you a fussy eater? That was the question on everyone’s lips over the Guardian Word of Mouth blog recently as they discussed people’s foibles and finickiness.

I was amazed by how many people both outed themselves as fussy eaters and seemed quite proud of that fact. I consider myself a fairly fussy eater and am quite embarassed by it since I’m a grown woman and the rest of my family are fairly unflappable when it comes to food. I hoped that some of Mister North’s sangfroid would rub off on me when we started this blog…

And I think it might be working. In the past few months, I have tried quite a few things I would usually have skipped in favour of something less challenging to me. Bad childhood experiences with liver have left me wary of offal for years, but I have eaten liver and hearts recently and enjoyed both of them greatly. I have long been suspicious of broad beans as drab little bitter things after eating frozen ones as a side dish in the 80s, but have been converted to their charms when served peeled and fresh.

I also ventured out for an Indian meal recently with Mister North, setting aside my lifelong distaste for garam masala, curry powder and tumeric to at least try something different. I also didn’t baulk when my dining companions ordered cumin chilli chicken at Chilli Cool despite a deep loathing of this retch-inducing spice. I actually quite enjoyed the dish when I tried it, but that was probably because I couldn’t taste the cumin…

However my new found bravery (and fear of looking like the fussy one when eating out) will not get me over my previously mentioned loathing of bell peppers. Unlike my childhood dislike of mushrooms which has more or less faded to an indifference now, my hatred of peppers is for life. That’s a carefully nutured abomination, cultivated over years of sitting at the dinner table until finished as a child, vegetarians dishes that didn’t mention them yet are chockful of them and a late 80s belief that stuffed peppers were the height of swank at the dinner table. It’s a dislike that has come to define me and I’m not letting it go.

While I fully admit to being (rather) judgemental of really fussy eaters who as adults can only force down chicken nuggets, potato shapes and boatloads of ketchup, I think it’s perfectly normal to have at least one thing you really dislike whether that be because of taste or texture. I would also never judge if someone is forced into fussy eating by food intolerances, allergies or illness, but I admit to a few qualms about people who refuse to at least try new things.

I shall be continuing to try something new as often as possible, even attempting to challenge my dislike of fruit in savoury dishes with the very generous gift from loyal blog reader Margo-a-go-go of the beautiful The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit which seeks to encourage the creative cook to try new and unexpected flavour combos. I’m particularly keen to see if I can overcome my antipathy to oranges…

So what say you? What’s your dealbreaker? Or what are you secretly yearning to try despite the fear that it make you spit food into your table napkin?

Feeling Hungary

/in , , , /by

Mister North’s recent trip to Hungary made me very very envious as a weekend of beer, pork and paprika is definitely something I would revel in. I decided to create a little Magyar magic at home and make goulash with the lovely looking tube of gulyáskrém he brought me…

Paprika in a tube...

Strangely I loathe, despise and abhor peppers, yet I adore paprika. Something about the drying and grinding of peppers to obtain this rich intricate spice seems to remove the taste of a regular bell pepper that I hate so much. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I’m very glad it does, since avoiding the unexpected addition of peppers is the bane of my life when eating away from home. Such is my hatred of these vile fruits that I try to avoid walking past them in shops in case I get a whiff of them. At risk of sounding like the princess and the pepper, I can even tell if you used the same knife for peppers and and didn’t wash it before moving on to something else. It is impossible to cut peppers up small enough that I won’t notice them in a dish…

Yet I add paprika to everything I possibly can. Along with anchovy sauce, black pepper and Maldon salt, it is my essential can’t live without it food flavouring. I tend to fill up the famous La Chinata tins with cheaper tastier paprika bought from my local Portuguese deli and I like to keep all types in the spice cupboard, but favour the sweet paprika most generally.

Keen to try the new spicy paprika cream Mister North had provided, I set about finding an authentic sounding goulash recipe that didn’t involve adding in strips of bell pepper. This was quite difficult to find as many of those that omitted peppers relied on other ingredients like dried ceps to make life more awkward and expensive. I eventually found what I was looking for thanks to the lovely Liz at Gastronomy Domine and set about making a paprika infused, pepper free stew to tantalise the taste buds!

The recipe is very easy to follow. I used goose fat to brown the meat since the Hungarians are the most goose obsessed nation on earth. Everything was easy to come by and apart from an exploding tube of tomato puree, everything was straightfoward. I was making the goulash for about 3-4 people, but used the same amounts of paprika as Liz suggested anyway. I also deglazed the pan with some red wine as that was all I had to hand. This rich heavily scented stew was ready for the oven about 15 minutes after starting. I popped it in for 2 hours and settled down with a glass of red wine as delicious aromas filled the house.

Ready for the oven...

A few hours later, I pulled this stew out of the oven and realised I had turned the oven up too high and carbonised this round the edges! Luckily the meat and sauce were fairly easy to salvage and once I’d added some lemon juice, it all looked deliciously thick and tasty. Rather than make the nokedli mentioned in the recipe, I served this slightly singed stew with some plain pasta.

Ready to eat!

And it was delicious! Rich, deep paprika-y flavours with just the right amount of tang from the tomato puree and the lemon juice and a slight warmth from the gulyáskrém. Surprisingly it was quite light to eat on a warm night despite its reputation for being a heavy dish. The meat was a bit tough from my mistake with the temperature, but tasty enough to do justice to the sauce. I will definitely be making this lovely paprika spiked stew once more…I’ll just double check the heat of the oven first!

Sour Faced

/in , /by

There is an alarming trend creeping across the land that chills me to the core; it is becoming impossible to get vinegar to go with your chips when eating out…

Read more