Apple tart

A while back I blogged my love of the Riverford Farm Cook book. In fact I love it so much that I have been evangelising, and I gave a copy to a friend for her birthday a few months ago. When I went to her place for lunch she obligingly served up a dish from the book - the apple and amaretti tart. It was light, crunchy and yummy, and even better I'd never made it myself. So good to be introduced to a recipe you had under your nose the whole time but hadn't made!

This weekend I had a group of lovely ladies over for a meal, so the time had come to make an attempt at the tart. It was super-simple to make, and handily could be made in advance and served at room temperature - the perfect pudding for when you don't want to be spending your time in the kitchen instead of with your guests. The base is not dissimilar to a cheese cake base, so you end up with something like tart tatin but with a crunchier base. I really liked it, especially with a small scoop of creme fraiche on the side.


Not my tart in this picture I'm afraid, but mine did look a lot like it!

I shall now go forth and experiment with different flavour combinations along the same lines - maybe pear with almonds in the base, or rhubarb with ginger biscuits, or perhaps subsitiute the apples for peaches in the amaretti version. Oh the possibilities....

The recipe can be found here. I didn't use quite as much apple as directed as about 200g of apple slices filled my tart tin nicely. I notice that the apples here are a lot more overlapping than mine though, so presumably that's why I didn't need quite so much fruit.

Party food

I love parties.

In the context of my cookery project they're a lovely excuse to try out all those recipes for nibbles that you would never make for just 2 people.

Also, its great to have a house and garden full of friends. Makes me feel all warm and fizzy.

Bank holiday monday was Dan's birthday, so we thought we'd throw a little garden/house birthday and (belated) housewarming party in the afternoon. Being horrifyingly grown-up these days, it didn't degenerate into a drunken mess, but stayed really very civilised right to the end. Lots of children and dogs running around begging for food, free flowing local beer (the Hook Norton Brewery is less than a mile from us), a lovely mixture of new and old friends, party nibbles. What's not to like?!

Also, the perfect excuse to make popcorn which I have never done before. Not just any old popcorn though...peanut caramel popcorn. Definitely the grown-up version. Yummy.



I noted the recipe down from another blog months ago, and have been on the look-out for an excuse to make it ever since. Its a perfect party popper.

Here it is (and here's the Seattle-based blog I found it on):

Peanut Caramel popcorn

100g unpopped popcorn
2 tablespoons vegetable/sunflower oil
225g soft light brown sugar
50g golden syrup
85g melted butter
pinch salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
100g lightly salted roasted peanuts
*You will also need a sugar/jam thermometer for this recipe*

Preheat the oven to 130C.
Lightly oil a roasting tin with vegetable oil.
In a large saucepan heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil until very hot. Add the popcorn, slam on the saucepan lid and shake the pan back and forth over the heat until all of the corn has popped.
Transfer the popcorn to the roasting tin.
In a medium sized, heavy based saucepan whisk together the sugar, syrup, melted butter, salt and 2 tablespoons of water. Bring to a simmer over a medium heat, and continue to allow it to simmer, whisking frequently until the heat reaches 130C.
Immediately remove the pan from the heat when it reaches this temperature, whisk in the bicarbonate of soda and vanilla, then quickly pour it over the popcorn and fold it in.
Stir in the peanuts.
Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour, stirring every 20 minutes.
Remove from oven and allow to cool. This will keep in an airtight tub for about 5 days.

As a complete side note, I also had my parents up for a couple of days over the weekend and made a rhubarb and strawberry crumble for pudding on sunday night. Not a fruit combo I had eaten before, but one I would highly recommend; you don't need quite so much sugar on the rhubarb as the strawberries add an element of sweetness too.

OK, enough of my random ramblings! Hope you had a lovely long weekend.

PS The cheesecakes I made for the party a couple of weeks ago were a great success. Rhubarb and ginger cheesecake - its the future of cookery!

Torta (sorta!)

I had (whisper it) a vegetarian over for lunch.

Dan doesn't understand the concept of vegetarianism. So I had to try and create a lunch where he wouldn't notice the lack of meat or fish.

He does have a weakness for courgettes, so when I came across a Torta Verde recipe I thought that might do the trick. This Torta Verde recipe was basically a rice, courgette and parsley pie, so I adapted it to make a courgette-y quiche.

Here's my adaption of the recipe:

Anwen's Courgette and Parsley Quiche

100g white flour
100g wholemeal flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
warm water (about 60-80ml)

450g courgettes
2 garlic cloves
1/2 onion
2 eggs
30g gruyere
Large handful of parsley

salt and pepper

Pastry:
Mix the two different kinds of flours together, add a pinch of salt. Make a well in the centre add the olive oil. Stir to mix. Slowly add the warm water, mixing with your hands to make a soft, but not sticky dough.
Wrap in clingfilm and put in the fridge to rest for 20 minutes.
Put the oven on to heat to 180C.
Make the filling: Chop up the courgette, garlic, onion. Put everything into a food processor, season, whizz. Add a handful of parsley. Whizz again.
Roll out the pastry , lightly oil quiche dish and line with pastry.
Blind bake for 15 minutes (10 with baking beans and then remove them for another 5 minutes).
Beat two eggs, add to the courgette mixture and mix. Grate the cheese and fold in.
Fill the pastry case with the courgette and egg mixture. Return to the oven for about 25-30 minutes, or until the courgette mixture is slightly puffed and set.
Remove from oven and allow to cool.



Interestingly, last time I made pastry using olive oil instead of butter I didn't think it was a good method, but it went well in this context.

We also had tomato soup, sourdough toast, olives, and a selection of yummy cheeses from the farmers market. Then a good old hearty country walk in the spring sunshine, with a picnic of scones and jam halfway.

What a lovely, chilled out sunday.

Dan didn't moan about the lack of animal protein.

Not once.

Which means that I won this one.

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.

Parents for dinner

My parents were due to visit for lunch and for a nosey around our new place. I felt like the occasion deserved a bit of cookery-effort, and with the weather feeling distinctly autumnal something a satisfying but not too heavy seemed the order of the day. To my mind there's nothing more comforting than pastry. I find the process of making it strangely soothing, and the golden glow of the finished product does lift the heart a little. About six months ago I ate my very first salmon-en-croute, and remembering the wonderful textural contrasts of flakey pastry, nutty wild rice, and soft salmon, as well as my new love-affair with dill, I decided to have a go at making it.

Now, every recipe for salmon-en-croute tells you to use puff pastry. But, smart-arse that I am I decided to use shortcrust.
Rookie-error.
Even though I rolled it out really thin it made the dish a bit too heavy overall. So, definitely puff pastry in future. On the otherhand, I loved everything else about the dish. The salmon was soft and was enhanced by the dill and spinach, while the rice added a bit of welcome bite. we had it with little potatoes, a watercress salad and a yummy bottle of Riesling.
A bit time-consuming, but perfect fuel for the country walk that followed.

Salmon-en-Croute (enough for 4 people):

375g puff pastry
splash of olive oil
2 reasonable sized shallots
450g skinned salmon fillet
Juice of 1 small lemon
Large bunch of fresh dill
salt and pepper
115g mixed basmati and wild rice (pre-cooked)
Handful of wilted spinach
1 egg - beaten

Preheat oven to 200C/Gas Mark 6.
Cut off 1/3 of the pastry and roll it out into a rectangle. (Wrap the other 2/3 in cligfilm and put in frisge). Place onto a non-stick baking tray, prick all over with a fork to stop it puffing up too much in the oven, then bake for 12 minutes or so until golden. Set aside to cool.
Make the filling:
Fry the shallots in a little olive oil over a low heat until soft. Set aside to cool.
Place the salmon in a bowl, squezze over the lemon juice, scatter the dill over the top, drizzle with a llittle olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. (Do this no more than an hour ahead or the lemon will start to 'cook' the salmon.)
Combine the cooked rice and shallots. Season to taste.
Assemble the dish:
Spoon the mixture over the cooked pastry base, spreading out towards the edges. Place the wilted spinach on top in a thin layer, then put the salmon fillets on top of that. Spalsh on a little of the marinade liquid and discard the rest.
Roll out the remaining pastry until it is slightly larger than the base. Lift it and place over the partly-assembled dish. Trim off the corners of the pastry and tuck the sides underneath the cooked base.
Brush the top of the pastry with beaten egg, then bake at 180C for 30-35 minutes until golden. Allow to cool for 5-10 minutes before serving.