Goose eggs

Sometimes village life is surreal.

Last weekend in a neighbourly fashion I took a few slices of ginger cake over to our neighbour. In return I got to meet the 1 week old puppies his terrier has just had, and I also came home with these:

That's a normal sized pudding bowl they're in - ie these eggs were HUGE! Apparently there's a farmer nearby whose geese lay for a couple of months a year.

Well, it had to be eggs for breakfast. Bob (the neighbour) suggested soft boiling (8 minutes). That actually resulted in a slightly harder-set yolk than would be my preference, but they were tasty and very filling!

Breakfast

Once in a while I like to mix things up a bit at breakfast time. I don't eat the same breakfast everyday anyway, but I do have quite a narrow repertoire - muesli, yoghurt and fruit, eggs on toast, porridge (in the winter), or toast and jam. It seems to work just fine, requires mininimal thought when half asleep and fuels me through the morning.

However, every now and then I get bored. This was one of those weeks, so summoning some Scottish inspiration I made oatcakes to have for breakfast.



Boiled eggs, smoked salmon (well, trout), and homemade oatcakes. I must grow some chives - they would be good with this.



I know that this is not going to set the world on fire with its inventiveness, but it was enough to satisfy my need for something new!

The oatcakes were a little less crisp than the ones you buy in shops, and I imagine they will be very well suited to jams and honeys as well as the savoury accompaniments.

Here's how to make them:

Oatcakes
Mix together 50g fine oatmeal with 50g plain flour (white, wholemeal or a mixture) and a pinch of salt.
Rub in 30g chilled butter.
Mix to a dough consistency with water.
Roll out and cut into shapes, or do as I did and form golf ball sized lumps and flatten them with a rolling pin. I added a scrunch of black pepper to the top at this stage.
Heat a heavy frying pan and dry-fry the coatcakes until starting to go golddn at the edges, flip over and bake the other side. Set aside to cool as you cook the rest.

Croissants and other pastry delights

Generally speaking I'm not a massive lover of pastries for breakfast. They're one of those things that I occasionally get lured into buying by the smell, but then the taste almost never lives up to that promise. I usually find them too greasy, too flakey, and they just don't have enough flavour.

Of course there are some notable exceptions to every rule - I love the much breadier varieties that they make at the Natural Bread Company (an Oxfordshire bakery with a shop in Woodstock) - they're always buttery but not greasy; flakey, but not so much that you get annoyed with the bits of pastry all over you. They have texture and chewability. This, for me, is definitely how pastries should be.

Well, having set my bar quite high, I decided it was time to have a go at making breakfast pastries myself. I have a recipe book from the Bourke Street Bakery in Sydney, Australia which gives brilliantly clear instructions on how to make croissants. Time to take the plunge.

So here goes...

The night before, I mixed up a small amount of yeast, flour, milk and sugar, kneeded it well, then left it in the fridge overnight. This is the croissant ferment.


Next day I mixed the dough, kneeded it well and put back in the fridge. The instructions said to leave it there for at least 2 hours; I left mine for about 3 hours.


Next, I weighed out a truely extraordinary amount of butter. I actually used 400g instead of the recipe's 500g, as I wanted to achieve pastries that were a bit less greasy than the norm. I bashed the butter into a square about 1cm thick - I placed the butter between 2 pieces of baking parchement and hit it with a rolling pin. Quite theraputic!


After this I rolled the dough out into a rectangle about the same width as the butter square and about twice the length. I placed the butter in the middle, then folded the dough over the top.


The next step was to roll the dough out into a long rectangle then fold it over; I folded in thirds - one third towards the middle, then the other side over the top of that. I then returned the dough to the fridge to rest for 20 minutes. This had to be repeated twice more, turning the dough through 90 degrees each time I rolled it out. The dough was rolled out 3 times in total.


After a final rest in the fridge I had a laminated dough:

This was now ready to form into pastries.

I had inadvertantly made a hundred-weight of dough, so I had enough to make about 12-15 croissants and also about the same number of bear claws.

Here are the croissants, formed, risen (I let them rise for about an hour and a half, but if its a cool day it may take a bit longer), and ready to go into the oven:


I was very proud that the croissants actually looked like croissants. Amazing!



For the bear claws I made about 150g of frangipane and put a teaspoon of it in the centre of each piece of dough along with a teaspoon of damson jelly then folded the dough over and sealed the edges. Any jam would work nicely but I thought the slight sharpness of damsons would complement the frangipane.

The bear claws looked pretty good as they came out of the oven.



The house smelt lovely for the rest of the day after making these. I was really hoping that their taste would live up to the smell! When I finally did the taste test the next morning (5 minutes in the oven at 180C crisped them up beautifully) they were just as I'd hoped; flakey but still with plenty of dough-texture. The croissants were lovely with some homemade strawberry and mint jam, and the bear claws were tastey just as they came; no extras needed.

Just as well we both liked the outcome as we have freezer full of pastries now! This isn't a recipe I would make often as it is time-consuming and very messy, but I definitely will attempt it again. Its nice to be able to have pastries made to my own preferences. The recipe quantities makes such a lot of pastries that I have several months worth now. I will have to try making the Pain au Raisins recipe next time - its my favourite kind of pastry.



Full marks to the Bourke Street Bakery instructions. Its shaping up to have been an excellent cook-book purchase.

Pancake Day!

I love pancake day: Pancakes for every meal should be the rule of the day.

Handily, I found a pancake recipe that used egg whites, so I could use up the remaining whites from my icecream making at the weekend. I feel a bit bad actually, because I was terribly sniffy about Sophie Dahl's cookery/life style programme when it was on the BBC, but it was an adaptation of her Buckwheat blini recipe that I ended up using this morning. It was pretty good too. I still don't think she was particularly skilled or inventive, but the girl can come up with a decent breakfast pancake.

So, this morning's menu was Buckwheat blinis (basically a fluffy American-style Buckwheat pancake) with smoked salmon and scrambled egg. A very decadent start to the day.

Buckwheat Blinis (for 2-3 people)

85g buckwheat flour
1 tspn baking powder
150ml milk
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
salt and pepper
Chopped chives
2 egg whites - beaten until they hold soft peaks

Mix together the flour, baking powder, milk, mustard powder, chives. Beat well and season with salt and pepper.
In a separate bowl whisk the egg whites, then gently fold them into the flour batter using a metal spoon.
Heat a non-stick frying pan over a moderate heat, add a little vegetable oil to the pan. Ladle in a scoop of pancake batter and allow to cook for a couple of minutes until bubbles appear on the upper side and the underneath is a toasted brown colour. Flip the pancake and cook for a couple of minutes on the other side. Keep warm while you cook the rest of the batter.

Sophie Dahl also added cheese to her pancake batter, but I thought that was a bit heavy and greasy for breakfast. It might be good at lunchtime. If you omitted the mustard powder you could add fruit to these and serve them just like American pancakes.

Cocktails and baking

First things first: the most important recipe for this week was clearly tonight's Vodka Gimlets. Yummy. I'm coming over all Mad Men! Shame we didn't have Martini glasses - clearly something for the shopping list.



I don't know what's got into me lately, but I'm really enjoying trying out new bread methods. The freezer's now completely chock full of bready things, so I must stop baking. Afterall, I have enough in store to last me many many weeks!

Having made Bialys the other week, I used up some of the yeast I had leftover from last weekend's baking-fest to try out bagels. Dan Lepard's column in The Guardian gave me the recipes for bagels and bialys. I also tried out the Light Rye Flatbread from his book The Handmade Loaf (bought on impulse when browsing in Foyles last week).



So the verdict? Well clearly I need to make larger holes in my bagels next time! But other than that they were lovely and chewy on the inside with a good crunchy crust. The flatbreads were well-flavoured from the rye flour, and good with soup or houmous.



Flushed with the success of my first bagel batch I tried a second lot - this time my favourite cinnamon and raisin flavour. I should have checked how much white flour I had left! I ended up using 2/3 white to 1/3 wholemeal, which worked out OK, but they didn't have quite that same chewy texture. White flour's clearly the way to go in future. But, as you can see, I did do better on the holes.

Bialys

Continuing my exploration of bread-baking, I made bialys for breakfast. There's nothing quite like fresh bread for breakfast. MMmmmmmmmm.

I came across bialys for the first time when investigating how to make bagels. They're alot like bagels in that they have a lovely cispy crust and a chewy doughy interior. The best thing about bialys though is how low effort they are! I mixed up a batch of dough on friday night and left in the fridge until sunday morning. Then I shaped it, let it rise for an hour while I had coffee and read a magazine. Then it was a matter of 12 minutes in the oven for lovely fresh breakfast bread.

I haven't made bagels yet, so that's for another time.

The recipe was adapted from Dan Lepard's recipe published in The Guardian. I left out the black olives to make them a bit more breakfasty. I wasn't sure about the onion top for breakfast, but I tried it anyway and it was tasty. It may not be the point, but these would be good without the topping too - just warm with jam or honey.

Here's the recipe.

Rise and Shine!

Breakfast - they say its the most important meal of the day.

I tend to agree - if I don't eat breakfast I'm STARVING for the rest of the day. Its my favourite meal too. Good bread, a lovely cup of hot coffee, time to savour it and gradually emerge from the dozy feeling. Lovely.

However, breakfast is a meal I rarely tinker with. Eggs on toast, porridge, muesli, yoghurt and fruit: these are my standard choices.

This week, purely by chance, I branched out a bit. No massive leaps - I won't be having miso soup or wheatgerm for breakfast any time soon - but I tried my oats soaked in juice instead of made into porridge, and we had American pancakes for breakfast at the weekend (Jamie Oliver's recipe - find it here).

Having declared himself not very hungry Dan wolfed down 3 blueberry pancakes with enthusaism. They were dead easy to make, you just need to ensure than you have enough oil in the frying pan to stop them from sticking. My first one stuck, but after that I got the hang of it.

I swear my pictures are getting worse as time goes on, but these give you the general idea:


Batter in the pan - I was surprised by the consistency of the batter - it was much thicker than a normal pancake batter; more like cake mixture really (makes sense when I think about it - the pancakes are cakier than normal thin pancakes afterall).




The finished thing - they may not be all that neat at the edges, but they tasted lovely with a drizzle of honey.

Daring Cooks December Challenge

This month's challenge: Jenn and Jill have challenged The Daring Cooks to learn to perfect the technique of poaching an egg. They chose Eggs Benedict recipe from Alton Brown, Oeufs en Meurette from Cooking with Wine by Anne Willan, and Homemade Sundried Tomato & Pine Nut Seitan Sausages (poached) courtesy of Trudy of Veggie num num.

So, poached eggs....I didn't feel inspired, I confess. I do poach eggs rather a lot anyway, so it wasn't a challenge which pushed me to make something I wouldn't otherwise have thought of. On the otherhand, Dan is always a happy man when eggs benedict are on the breakfast menu, so he was in heaven!

So, ta dah! Eggs Benedict feature again.



I won't bother to describe the method again, but I did realise that I had been overly cautious with the butter the last couple of times I made hollandaise sauce, and that was probably the reason for it curdling. It worked better this time.





So that I'm not totally cheating (and that would not do!) I am planning to make chorizo and potato hash with poached eggs later this week - that will at least be a new recipe including poached eggs.

UPDATE: I have been poaching away, and eating lots of eggs. I think eggs might just be my favourite fast food. I tried out the Chorizo and Potato Hash recipe, and it proved to be a massive hit with Dan. I liked it too, so thumbs up all round for that one. Find the recipe on the BBC Good Food site here.