You can’t have failed to notice that it is absolute brass monkeys out there. With bells on. I’ve certainly never seen snow this early in the winter in London and I’m immensely grateful that I don’t really have anywhere to be for the next few days so I can stay indoors and stay warm. I could either run the heat all day or I could make a bowl of serious soup to banish the chills. It was time to break out the family recipe for Scotch Broth…
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Mister North and I are known to like a bit of game, so it was no surprise that when this year’s season got under way, he was straight down to Stansfields in Todmorden Market to see if there was any grouse on the horizon. We were both pleased as punch when a brace of these beautiful birds materialised…
I am rather envious of the American holiday of Thanksgiving. I rather like the idea of a day dedicated to family, friends and food (all things to be thankful for) without the added pressure of sheer naked commercialism like Christmas. Unfortunately I have never had the chance to celebrate Thanksgiving and thus have never sampled some of its traditional dishes. I could happily live without ever trying green bean casserole but since I’m a bit of an Americanophile, pumpkin pie has always intrigued me.
Coming across a can of Libby’s tinned pumpkin recently at Whole Foods for a much more reasonable price than Selfridges Food Hall flogs it for sealed the deal. This is one occasion when tinned trumps fresh for me. I roasted some pumpkin last year to puree for cupcakes and it involved an hour’s cooking, draining overnight, about two hours trying to puree it in a blender and the death of my favourite silicon spatula to achieve something that looked exactly like the contents of a can of Libby’s…
The future's orange...
Pumpkin obtained, the next step was to find a good recipe for the pie. I was intrigued to see that most of them are the same recipe but with varying amounts of the products sold by specific companies and different levels of spicing. The only one that seemed to vary was a stunning sounding Nancy Silverton recipe involving real cream and brandy instead evaporated milk and generic pumpkin pie spice. However it sounded like all the ingredients involved would cost so much it would have been cheaper to buy one of the £9.99 pies that Whole Foods also had. I ended up plumping for the ‘perfect pumpkin pie’ recipe from the Guardian recently as it seemed to combine the best bits of the traditional and the more deluxe Nancy Silverton recipes.
Oddly though I struggled to find a small bottle of golden rum anywhere in Brixton. I couldn’t even get a couple of miniatures of the dark stuff. Apparently SW9 only deals in flagons of the stuff, so I left that out since I’m not sure I could manage to use of the rest of a bottle by next November. I also had problems with getting real maple syrup that didn’t cost enough to make my bank manager blink and ended up with a bottle of the maple flavoured syrup instead. Everything else was straighforward.
As was the pastry for the pie shell! A quick sweet shortcrust, it came together and rolled out easily. I did forget to make sure it covered the sides completely all round the dish though and didn’t notice until it was too late that I had a bit of a bald patch in one area. After chilling it, I blind baked it for around 25 minutes in total, ending up with a golden brown crust that had come away from the edges nicely. I had originally intended to go all out American and use graham crackers as the crust, but I was glad I hadn’t bothered.
Blind baked
I actually left it to cool overnight, preparing the filling the next day. This was also incredibly easy and basically involved stirring all the wet ingredients together before pouring into the crust. I wish I’d double checked the amount of evaporated milk needed as a small tin would have sufficed and I wouldn’t be wondering what to do with the leftovers.
Ready to bake
I sprinkled the filling with some freshly grated nutmeg and then the filled shell went in the oven at 180˚C and cooked for around 40 minutes. Once glossy and set with a slight wobble to the filling, it came out and I marvelled at how incredibly stupidly easy making a pumpkin pie is. I’d always imagined it would be a complicated affair, but if I hadn’t set myself more things to bake before people came round, I could have had time to put my feet up and read the papers from cover to cover.
Set, go...
I allowed it to cool well before serving to make sure it was properly set. You can serve it with cream or ice cream and I also happen to think creme fraiche would be delicious. Unlike most American recipes I’ve used, it wasn’t at all overly sweet with just a hint of sugar in the deliciously short and crumbly pastry. The filling was sweetened primarily by the pumpkin itself with a warm note from the syrup. A little bit like a sweet quiche, it had a distinctly vegetable-y tang and was rich with spice. I had added larger amounts of spice than recommended (by about double), including a pinch of mace and I’m glad I did as it could have been quite bland without it.
Even a previous pumpkin pie sceptic enjoyed this and there was barely any left at the end of the afternoon with a even native New Yorker complimenting it. It was super easy to make, and well worth the extra effort of blind baking the shell, looking far more impressive than the work involved suggested it should and very tasty. So while it was much more of a success than my previous dalliance with American classics, I’m still not sure I’ll be adding it to my autumnal repetoire. I think I prefer my pumpkins savoury after all!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of an Americanophile with a particular penchant for all American foods, so imagine my glee when I discovered an online recipe for graham crackers. Forget Oreos, these are the archetypal American biscuit. Golden and honeyed, they are light and crunchy and nothing in the British biscuit family, even the digestive, quite cuts it for me.
Graham crackers are hard to describe if you haven’t had one. Their unique texture comes from the the type of flour usually used to make them. Graham flour is the brainchild of one Reverand Sylvester Graham who believed processed white flour was a devilish abombination and that bran would cure all ills. He created a type of flour that had the wheat germ and endosperm ground separately from the flour and then added back in to create a coarser flour that none the less makes exceedingly light crackers.
This flour is difficult to come by outside the USA and so I was resigned to the fact that I would only be able to indulge my graham cracker love while on holiday or when friends brought me boxes back in their suitcases. But this recipe uses regular plain flour! Time to go crackers methinks and risk the fact the use of processed flour might inflame my carnal desires…
I was originally planning to use these crackers to make a base for a pumpkin pie. They would have been crushed and mixed with butter to make a crumb based crust somewhat like one can do with a digestive or two when making cheesecake. However on first reading the recipe seemed too complicated to start baking something just to destroy it again and I decided to go with a traditional pastry pie shell instead.
I was also pleased that upon thorough reading to see that the recipe for the crackers is actually incredibly easy. I was just thrown by the talk of different mixers with a large selection of attachments making it lot trickier than it is. I don’t have a mixer so I assembled my ingredients (all easily found in the store cupboard, nothing fancy) and decided to give it a go by hand. Apart from it taking twice as long to crumble the butter because it was frozen rather than chilled, this is was so easy I cannot understand why anyone would bother making washing up by using a mixer.
About five minutes after I started mixing it all, I had a gorgeous golden dough flecked with sugar and stiff enough to wrap easily in clingfilm and chill in the fridge overnight. The recipe mentioned it would be rather sticky, but I didn’t find that at all. I wonder if this was because I used golden caster sugar rather than a muscavado or because plain flour is slightly different to all purpose flour? Either way the dough was a dream to handle and I ddin’t need all the flour I put on the clingfilm or the work surface.
Next morning I had a well chilled dough that was still easy to handle. Deb mentions in her recipe using a pastry wheel to cut the crackers into traditional rectangles, but since no graham cracker has ever lasted long enough in front of me to notice the shape, I decided to go off piste and cut them in star shapes instead. The dough cut easily and the scraps came back together well too. I used half the dough, rolled out to about an 1/8 of an inch and got around 40 biscuits from it.
I placed them on lined trays and sprinkled the sugar cinnamon topping over them before popping the trays in the fridge for around half an hour. Cooking the dough from chilled should make the crackers even lighter and crispier so it’s not worth skipping this stage. They then went in the preheated oven at 180˚C for about 12 minutes before they were perfectly cooked. I cooled them on a rack and lasted about 3 minutes before I snaffled one of them.
And they were fantastic. Buttery but light, beautifully crisp and infused with honey, they crunched gorgeously when I bit into them. The scattering of sugar on top made them even crunchier and the hint of cinnamon was perfect with the flavour of honey. It took such willpower not to stuff my face with one after another until they were all gone (and then admit that to my now biscuitless friends what I had done). I managed to get some on a plate and serve them up.
It probably says a lot about how delicious and moreish these graham crackers are that there was only one solitary biscuit remaining at the end of an afternoon so filled with baked goods we didn’t even manage to get round to one of the cheesecakes…they might be my favourite thing to have baked this year and I strongly urge you to try them immediately. I have no idea if they keep well, but I don’t think you’ll have any left to store!
October’s Invisible Food Walk was themed around the autumnal joys of apples and pears (the real ones, not the Cockney version) and I was amazed to discover that I could pick both within five minutes walk of my house.
We visited the pear tree in the Loughborough Estate off Angell Road and using a fishing rod with a handy blade attached, honed our skills at cutting through the stems and sending the large green pears downwards, like a fruity version of a fairground game! I’m not sure what variety of pears these are, but they tasted pretty good after being slowly poached in wine and spices as a light autumnal dessert after some goat stew.
Further round the corner in the community herb garden at Angell Town we came across our apples. Beautiful little cherry sized crabapples to be precise. There are three decent sized trees and they were absolutely groaning with fruit. With a bit of concentration and time, I managed to pick 8lbs of the most perfect looking little apples and carried them home with glee, planning to work on the domestic skills I picked up making quince jelly a few weeks ago and make both crabapple jelly and cheese with them.*