Foraging

One of the great joys of country living is stumbling across delicious foods for free. Everyone knows about the joys of blackberry-ing in the autumn, but I have recently been discovering other treats in our hedgerows and woodlands.

Last year my Dad pointed out some wild garlic growing on the riverbank at the end of our garden, and I discovered that the leaves could be used to make a lightly garlicy pesto. This year I found that the old railway line a few minutes walk from our house is absolutely covered in the herb. I ventured up there a few weeks ago with a large carrier bag and picked lots and lots of wild garlic leaves. The majority of them went into a lemon, almond and wild garlic pesto (last year I used walnuts instead of almonds), which I have been stirring into pasta sauces, spreading on pizza bases, and toasting on bruschetta. It does need a bit of cooking or it can be a little bitter, but once warmed through it makes a lovely pesto.

This week I have started to notice elderflowers in bloom around my area. When I was a child we had an elder tree in the garden and I remember my parents making elderflower and elderberry wine. I was too young to try any at the time, but I am reliably informed that when it was good it was GOOD. (But when it was bad it was awful?)

So, trusty carrier bag in hand, I hit the hedgerows to pick elderflower heads one morning. It said online that they should be picked in the morning if you want a slight banana-y flavour. That sounded better than the slight cat-wee flavour they said you get if you pick them in the evening! Also, you have to pick and use quickly or they loose their lovely floral scent.

I had in mind to make elderflower cordial, so I got online to find a recipe. An article by Tom Parker Bowles yielded a method, I bought citric acid from the chemist (and was cross-questioned about how I planned to use it - apparently heroin-users need it), and was good to get going.

300g sugar, 15 heads of elderflowers, 3 quartered lemons, plus 1oz citric acid:



Then add 1 1/2 pints boiling water. Stir until the sugar is all dissolved. Leave for 24 hours, stirring regularly.



Strain through muslin. Serve ice cold diluted with sparkling water, garnished with a couple of mint leaves. You could use it with cava too for an alcoholic treat.



The drink has a dry taste on the palate; like the dryness of unsweetened lemonade. Very refreshing, and floral, but if you have a sweet tooth then you'll probably want more sugar and less lemon.



Using elderflowers got me thinking about other culinary uses for flowers. Why not make use of violets, lavender, roses, and other beauties? Watch this space....

Christmas catchup

Apologies for the rather long Christmas break between posts. I won't bore you with a super long post but here's a brief run down of my new recipes over the Christmas period:

1. Christmas cake!



I was really pleased with this. I made it from Nigel Slater's fruit cake recipe and it turned out with just the right amount of citrus and fruit. Lovely.

I'd made fruit cakes before but never one that was such a high proportion of fruit to flour. The recipe was quite free and easy with the fruits you should use which made it easy to tailor to your own tastes. I used my new favourite dried fruit - figs! I had dried figs for the first time this past spring when we went to Croatia. They were served with coffee and schnapps absolutely everywhere and I liked the sticky grainy texture of them. We bought a bag from the market - you can just about see them for sale in the picture, bagged up with bay leaves.



They appeared in Sainsburys just in time for my Christmas cake. Marvellous!

I also made the marzipan (a bit fiddly to get onto the cake) and the royal icing (took longer to set than I'd anticipated). I felt I had make both in order to keep in the spirit of the recipe challenge; shop bought would have seemed like cheating.





2. Mulled white wine

I think the recipe for this needs a little tweaking as it tasted more like mulled cider, and I would definitely have preferred a winey-er taste. I think next time I'll put a lot less apple juice and less sugar too (the quantity here is half the recipe quantity and it was still a bit sweet for my tastes). Don't get me wrong, the flavours were nice and it was a lovely warming drink, but it seemed a shame not to taste the wine much. Didn't stop us drinking it all of course!

Here's the recipe:

Apple & spice white wine

1 * 750ml bottle white wine (I used Riesling)
400ml apple juice
2 cinnamon sticks
2 star anise
50g demerera sugar
a few strips of orange rind

Put all the ingredients in a pan over a medium heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Heat gently for about 10 minutes to allow the flavours to infuse, but don't allow the mixture to boil or you will lose all the alcohol content.
Serve.
Easy peasy.

3. Pickled pears

I made these a couple of weeks ago after catching a bit of the Hairy Bikers Christmas cookery special. They need about 10 days pickling time before you can eat the pears, so we had our first taste of them shortly after Christmas with cold meats, oatcakes and cheese.

Yes, you read correctly - I did eat cheese. I bought some Manchego cheese to have when we had my younger sister and my Dad up for lunch, and I discovered I actually liked it. In very small quantities.

Anyway, I digress - the pears were tasty, although my sister thought it was distinctly wierd that I would pickle pears.
She may have a point.

4. To go with the Manchego cheese - hazlenut and black pepper cookies.

I came across the recipe for these on a blog called Chocolate and Zuccini. Its written by a French lady (in English although there is a French version). They sounded interesting and she mentions that they go well with figs. Since I had a few figs left over from the Christmas cake it seemed the ideal time to make these biscuits.

They turned out to be a semi-sweet biscuit, and did go well with the dried fruit. The black pepper added a pleasant zing but I think I would use cinnamon instead in future, just because I prefer the warmth of cinnamon.

5. Brussel sprouts

I know these are a love-them or hate-them vegetable, but I definitely fall into the love-them category. Which is just as well as we've had them in our vegetable box quite a lot recently.



A colleague at work suggested baking them in the oven in a parmesan cream sauce. I liked the general idea, but thought all that cream and cheese would probably disagree with my stomach. Instead I found a recipe that suggested baking the sprouts in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was a good way to do them. I would imagine that a scattering of grated parmesan and a sprinkle of pinenuts would be a tasty addition.

Here's the method:

Balsamic Brussels

Mix 1 dessertspoon of olive oil with 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. Peel and quater your sprouts then toss them in the oil mixture until well coated.
arrange in a single layer on a baking tray or roastig tin and cook for about 20 mins at 180-190C.

Christmas

There's something about the last week or so before Christmas which puts me in the mood for baking. I want the smell of cinnamon and ginger and citrus wafting through the house and snowy dustings of sugar and flour on the kitchen surfaces.



I made my Christmas cake a couple of weeks ago, to Nigel Slater's recipe, and this weekend I will need to put the marzipan on it in readiness for icing on Christmas eve. That will be my contribution to the family Christmas food as I know my parents never have time to make their own cake. I have to confess I've never made anything for the Christmas meal before - my job has always been to peel, stir, chop, and lay the table. This year I'm spending Christmas at Dan's parents' place, but I still wanted to do something helpful for the Greenaway family Christmas preparations. So the cake won't be there until Boxing Day, but who needs Christmas cake on Christmas Day anyway?! After all that other food the Christmas cake always ends up being a post-walk Boxing Day nibble.

I'm breaking with tradition and doing mulled white wine on Christmas Eve this year. I had it at the Christmas market in Lille last December and it was lovely, so I'm going to recreate it at home with a bottle of Riesling, apple juice, cinnamon sticks, orange peel and a sprinkle of other Christmas flavours. Yum scrum.


I like to make foodie Christmas presents where I can, although I do worry that despite the fact that plenty of thought and effort go into them alot of people might consider homemade items to be a 2nd class Christmas present. Nonetheless, I'm taking the risk and baking this weekend. Tubs of miniature shortbread biscuits for my new neighbours, dried pears and apricots dipped in milk and dark chocolate as semi-healthy festive nibbles, and a second attempt at fudge. Christmas is the only time of year when I fancy sweeties.


The fudge has disaster-potential written all over it. Last year I tried to make fudge and all I ended up with was a very burnt saucepan which took 2 days to clean. Its taken me a year, but I'm now good and ready to do battle wth the sugar syrup again. Lets hope I can succeed on the 2nd go, as I don't think I would have the determination to go for 3rd time lucky!
Wish me luck.....

UPDATE
The fudge worked! My neighbours said they finished it in one sitting because they liked it so much. They might just be flattering me, but its still nice of them to say so.

Food foibles

There are certain tastes you are expected to grow into as you get older. Dark chocolate, for example, or olives. A full-bodied glass of red, strong dark coffee. All of these I adore. They are grown-up tastes. To be lingered over and savoured, but too intense to tempt one into over-indulgence.



Smelly cheese, so ripe it oozes definitely makes it onto the list, but this is a taste I just can't seem to acquire. When I mentioned this is a previous post, Carisa was has horrified and it got me thinking - Isn't it interesting how, even as adults, we still all have certain food foibles?

I'm well aware of the ridiculousness of eating raw fish with enthusiasm but being unable to force myself to eat a mushroom.


I've eaten a whole bowl of snails (actually rather nice - a bit like mussels), but I'd rather go hungry than eat anything with mayonnaise on it.



My complete failure to see the point of condiments remains a source of puzzlement to Dan, and makes buying a sandwich tricky. (Next time you buy one see if you can find one without mayonnaise, mustard, salad dressing, or cheese - see, its not easy!)
Apparently I've been this way since childhood. My mother still shudders at the shame of me declaring at a friend's house that I wouldn't eat food with 'guck' on it. I was 5 years old.

As a child I had an allergy to beef and dairy products and I still tend to avoid both. I don't understand the lust a good steak inspires in people - give me fish or seafood any day - and all I see when I look at a latte is a tummy-ache.
I love fresh, flavoursome fruit and vegetables, interesting herbs and spices, and the satisfaction of a plate popping with different colours and tastes. A little good-quality meat (I'm a terrible snob about meat) and as much fish as I can decently manage.

Whilst this all sounds horrifyingly healthy, I do have to confess to having a terribly sweet tooth. My current object of obssession are the Hummingbird Bakery's muesli bars. Sound's healthy doesn't it? They're not. I'm pretty sure there's condensed milk, butter and sugar in there; so sweet it almost makes your teeth ache, but soooo goooooood! The irony of eating super-healthy, low cal, low fat, blah, blah, blah all day, only to scupper the whole thing with one innocent-looking sweet treat is not lost upon me.

But I'm sure cake should count as a legitimate food group.