Haggis Pancakes

Despite the new year’s resolutions….it’s been ages since I posted anything!! Very very bad, but work has been mad and life even more hectic with walking trips, pottery, knitting and birthdays. Anyway, today it is Shrove Tuesday, which is also known as Pancake Day! And even though I’m not planning to give anything up for Lent I feel this is a tradition worth honouring. Pancake Day and Lent were whole new concepts to me when I first moved to the UK. In the Netherlands, we would eat pancakes occasionally as a meal, but as my family is not religious, I never realised it was a tradition associated with the church. Traditionally, people would finish all their food on Shrove Tuesday before fasting for 40 days over lent. This specially included finishing all the milk, eggs and butter which were traditionally eaten as pancakes.

We decided to have pancakes with a Scottish twist…partially cause we’re off skiing next week (hooray…France, here we come!) and I got given a veggie haggis that needed eating. I do enjoy a normal haggis as well, but this was the one I received. I think it is one of these meals with a high yuck (!) factor but actually its very, very good and not much different from eating pate or black pudding. This traditional Scottish dish is made by mincing sheep heart, liver and lungs with oatmeal, onion, herbs and spices. All of this is then put into the sheep stomach. It was made famous by the Robert Burns poem, which I still don’t totally understand. But my favourite haggis story is that it is a small animal with legs shorter on one side then the other, so it can run around the hills. To catch it, you make it run in the other direction so that it rolls off the hill and then catch it on its way down. But anyway, I digress, especially as our haggis was a veggie one

So as a main I stir fried some onion, curly kale with bits of vegetarian haggis and had this on a wholemeal pancake with a creamy mustard and whiskey sauce. It was a very tasty combination with the slightly crunchy kale and a smokey hint of Laphroaig. Then for dessert we went for the old traditional combination of a plain pancake with lemon and sugar, it’s still my favourite in all its simplicity.

Apologies, but having difficulties with the pictures...coming soon hopefully!

Dad’s favourites

When we were young, the main person cooking in our house was my mum but she lived by the motto “nobody works seven days a week” so from the age of 7ish on Saturdays, my brother and I (never together!) were allowed to choose and prepare what we ate. I think this was part of the way they taught us to cook and it has definitely worked. When we moved out to go to university we could prepare a very decent meal instead of taste and boiled eggs.

But back to the Saturdays….to prevent us from just getting a takeaway, my dad would encourage us to pick something we could cook ourselves and then he would help us prepare the whole thing. This ranged from Spaghetti Bolognese to leek tarts and more….however, when he had the choice he would pick traditional Dutch dishes or variations on the theme. Dutch traditional food isn’t very exciting and mainly consists of mashed potatoes combined with something (curly kale, andive, carrots and onions, sauerkraut etc) and accompanied by either meatballs or sausages.

This dish is a variation on the Dutch sauerkraut mash and comes from Hungary. As a kid I found the sauerkraut alone a bit much but these days I love it. It comes with little packages of green cabbage filled with mince, onion and rice, chorizo, bacon and paprika served with mash to heat you up on cold winter nights. So I decided to make this dish even though the winter is once again pathetically warm (all these predictions of the coldest winter ever….maybe it’ll still happen but I’m sceptical). It tasted delicious as usual and brought back many pleasant memories, even without the chorizo, which I didn’t have in the house.

Hungarian Sauerkraut / Csarday (serves 4)
500 g sauerkraut
8 nice green cabbage leaves, without the central vein
400 g mince
4 tbsp boiled rice
1 onion
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp dried marjoram or oregano
1 egg
salt and pepper
2 slices of bacon, cut into 4 pieces each (not too fatty)
2 small chorizo sausages, in slices
sour cream
butter
------------
Soften the cabbage leaves in boiling water for a few minutes. Fry the onion in butter and mix with the mince, rice, paprika, marjoram, egg, pepper and salt off the heat. Divide into 8 portions and fold each portion into a cabbage leaf. Put the sauerkraut on the bottom of a thick (Le Creuset) pan, then the cabbage rolls followed by the slices of chorizo and finally the bacon. Add some of the juices from the cabbage and simmer for 45 min - 1 hour. Serve in the pan with some sour cream and paprika

Chestnut experiments

As part of my attempt to cook more seasonal produce I bought a big bag of the last chestnuts as I’d never used them before. I used to have a great dislike of these nuts, on cold winter days it was great standing around the roasting stalls for the warmth but the nuts were wasted on me. I think they were just too bitter for me at the time…but I decided to give them a second chance. I didn’t want to make the traditional British chestnut stuffing but instead chose two recipes, one Japanese and one French.

The first one proved fairly easy, as it didn’t matter if the chestnuts stayed intact or not (in my case not!). I boiled the nuts, peeled and mashed them roughly before putting this through a sieve to make the puree very smooth. After this, the puree went back into the pan with a few tablespoons of sugar and thinned it out with water. I didn’t want to use milk or cream as I think the nuts are quite creamy anyway. Using a bit of clingfilm I twisted the paste back into a nut. The sweets looked great and tasted even better, they were quite subtle in taste and not too sweet but had a lovely creamy texture.

We also tried them with persimmon cakes, which I made from the persimmon cookbook using the recipe for Marguerite Hager's Persimmon Pudding. This was a nice cake but I was a bit disappointed, as the cakes didn’t really taste of persimmon, however the fresh jam I made after it from this recipe tasted very good with it. To flavour the jam I used a cinnamon, pink peppercorns and kardemom.

The second recipe, French this time, was for Marron Glace but this turned into a bit of an epic. After checking out various recipes I settled on this one, which seemed fairly straightforward but lengthy. However it dragged out considerably, first of all, peeling the nuts was quite a task, trying to keep them intact as the thin membrane is wedged into many cracks, then the cooking was easy enough as was the re-boiling but instead of the nuts absorbing all the liquid it just turned into a solid block of sugar! So in the end, I dissolved this in water and preserved them this way for future use.


Kuri kinton (makes 12)
150g chestnuts boiled and peeled
3 tbsp demerara sugar
water
------------
Boil the nuts for 30-45 min and peel. Break up and then press through the sieve to make a fine puree. In the pan melt the sugar with a bit of water, add in the chestnut puree and cook on a low heat till it makes a thick glossy paste. Put a spoonful on a piece of clingfilm and twist to form a chestnut shape

Japanese comfort food meets Scottish smokieness

Happy new year!! May 2006 bring you many culinary adventures, new flavours and satisfaction, both in the kitchen and outside :-) It’s been a while since I’ve posted, after a luxury three week holiday its back to work now and I have many things to post about, both from last year and since Christmas so best get on with it....
When my brother came to visit at the start of December I wanted to cook something I had eaten while in Japan. I also wanted to use the local produce I’ve recently been getting from a local farm. They deliver organic veggie bags, eggs, bread and more, which are all very tasty. I had also bought some lovely smoked mackerel from a smokehouse in the highlands at the monthly farmers market.

I picked a recipe from Untangling my chopsticks by Victoria Abbott Riccardi. This is a great book in which she describes her move to Kyoto for a year where she studies tea kaiseki, the formal cooking that accompanies Japanese tea ceremony. She beautifully describes life and food in Japan, both from an authentic point of view and as an outsider. I read this book while I was working and living in Tokyo last summer and found it accurately described the way I felt about moving to this extraordinary country. Plus it contains a number of recipes so you can recreate the food yourself, what more could you want!

The recipe I chose was for Donburi, which Victoria describes as “Hot, soupy, salty, sweet and satisfying….that just about sums up Donburi, which is quintessentially Japan’s comfort food”. Its lovely food, which is easy to prepare by mixing stock, soy, sugar and mirin (sweet syrupy rice wine) with egg. While frying this I added spring onions and served it on top of rice with the baked mackerel. You add quite a lot of stock but it turns out great, not too soupy at all, and all the flavours balance each other out nicely. The salty flavour of the mackerel fitted well.

For dessert I found this recipe for a beetroot and mandarin tarte tatin. I was intrigued to use beetroot for dessert as I only cook or roast it normally. It was straightforward to make and the colors looked beautiful in the pan (although the pictures didn’t turn out very well). The taste was really nice, the caramel brought out the flavour of the beetroot but the tangy mandarin cut through it nicely. All in all, a very good meeting of east and west.

Christmas Eve….the big dinner

Ever year we have a big dinner for Christmas, generally on Christmas Day….but this year we had it the night before as it suited best for everyone. Some of my Mums family comes along for this so this year we were with 11 people. So “De Gouden Garnaal” (The Golden Shrimp in Dutch) was opened and serving up the following menu:

Mousse de sole a la truffe
~
Terrine de Lapin aux Pistaches
~
Filets Mignons en Croute
~
Plateau de Fromage
~
Meringe aux Pignons et aux Myrtilles

We also had irish soda bread with the mousse and pate. For the cheeses we had some Stilton with port, Bleu de Gex, Tomme de Savoie, Camenbert, soft goats cheese and Old Rubens. Then various biscuits and truffles with the tea and coffee to finish. With all this food we drank some lovely wine, with the starters we had the choice of Tavel (a rose from the Provence) or Touraine (a Sauvignon from slightly south of the Loire). Then with the main course and cheese we drank a Morgon (a Beaujolais from the Cote du Py). For dessert we had a Banyuls, a very spicy sweet red wine.

The pate was made a few days in advance which was fairly straightforward...although watching the fat bubbling away in the oven around the pate made my hart already feel tired, but the smells were amazing the taste was great, crumbly, meaty and very subtle with the pistachios. The meringues and the filet mignons were prepared/started one day in advance so we did not have much to prepare on the day itself. The mousse was fairly straightforward and we made a gratin accompany the Filets mignons. The dessert was lovely, the meringues were nice and gooey on the inside and the nuts added a lovely flavour. It was a great evening, catching up with every one and eating all this lovely food.


Mousse aux sole et truffe (serves 11)
300 g sole fillet
1 vegetable stock cube
splash of white wine
125 g sour cream
salt and pepper

Boil the fish in water with the stock cube and white wine, then take it out of the liquid and blend it with some seasoning and the sour cream. Leave in the fridge to harden. Serve with blanched asparagus, sweet peas, a boiled quail egg and a slice of summer truffle

Terrine de lapin aux pistaches (for 8 people)
1 nice boned rabbit
125 g cooked ham
125 g pork shoulder
200 g soft bacon fat (+ more to line the mould)
100 g peeled non-salted pistachios
----------------
Marinade
5 dl white wine
5 cl cognac
1 onion
2 shallots
1 carrot
1 garlic clove
Herbs (parsley, tarragon, thyme and bay leaf)
10 pepper corns
20g salt

For the marinade, peel and cut the onion, shallot, carrot and garlic. In a large pot add all the other ingredients for the marinade and mix well. Clean the rabbit, cut the meat into stripes, cut the pork and 200g fat into pieces and add to the marinade. Leave for 24 hours in the fridge. The next day, fish out some of the onion and drain the rest. Pick out some nice pieces of rabbit and cut into bit sized pieces. Mince the rest roughly. Cut the gammon into cubes and mix this with the pistachios, rabbit and mince. Line a pate tray with fat or with puffy pastry (to make a pate en croute), fill with the mix, making sure the pistachios are covered (otherwise they burn) and bake at 200C covered for 1 hour and 15 minutes and then for another 15 minutes without cover. Take out of the over, leave to cool for 15 minutes and put a weight on the pate. Make this two days in advance and store in the fridge.

Filets mignons en croute (8-10 people)
2 pork fillets
500 g puff pastry
2 glasses of white wine d’Alsace (preferably Riesling)
3 garlic cloves
1 egg yellow
salt and pepper

The day before, put the fillets in a dish and add the wine, peeled and chopped garlic , salt and pepper. Leave to marinate overnight. The next day, drain the meat, divide the pastry in two and roll one half out 8mm thick. Put the fillet lengthwise on the middle of the pastry, roll out the second part of pastry and put this on top. Join the edges of the two parts, decorate the top and cut some holes into it to let the hot air escape. Coat with egg yellow and bake for 45 min at 225C, halfway through the process, pour a few spoonfuls of marinade into the holes. Serve hot or cold.

Meringues aux pignons et aux myrtilles (Serves 4-6 people)
3 egg whites
200 g caster sugar
100 g pine nuts
oil, for greasing
300 ml whipping cream
2 tbsp icing sugar, sifted
200 g blueberries

Preheat the over to 145C and lightly grease two baking trays. Whisk the egg whites to stiff peakse, then gradually whisk in the sugar, a third at a time, until the meringue is glossy and fairly stiff, holding soft peaks. Using a large spoon, carefully fold in the pine nuts and spoon heaped teaspoons onto the baking trays (±12). Bake 1 hour, then turn off the oven, leaving the meringues to cool inside. Lightly whip the cream and mix in the icing sugar, serve the meringues with the whipped cream and blueberries

Christmas cookies part 2

Here’s some I made earlier! I made this biscuits about 10 days ago as Christmas present for my friend. The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s “How to be a domestic goddess” which is a wonderful cookbook. I spotted this recipe for Christmas cookies months ago and planned to make it. It was quite interesting using a lot of freshly ground pepper next to mixed spice so I used black and pink peppercorns. The dough tasted great (I’m afraid I’m an avid dough eater, somehow it always tastes great before cooking) but when the cookies came out I thought the taste was quite bland. This might have had something to do with the extra flour I had to add as the dough was so sticky, you couldn’t roll it out so I will give this recipe another shot next year.

We decorated the biscuits with a plain sugar icing (icing sugar and water) and some silver, pink and purple sparkles (although he refused to use these last two as they weren’t “manly” enough) and they looked great!

Chocolate and cheese

Two more additions to the food we’ve made in the last few days: Chocolate Truffles and Gougere (cheesy profiteroles). There were two reasons for this, we had a lot of old bits of gouda cheese left that needed finishing and two old chocolate letters from Sinterklaas that needed using. Sinterklaas is a Dutch celebration we have on the 5th December where we celebrate the day of St Nicholas (Santa before he went to the USA and Coca Cola). There are many traditions with these celebrations but one of them is that you get a chocolate letter of the first character of your name (E for Eva…I was always very jealous of people with a name starting with a W as they got more chocolate!!). Both are very easy to make and very tasty although the Gougere were a bit disappointing. I think this was because the cheese was grated instead of cubed and it makes the taste less pronounced. The truffles were delish although rolling them was a bit tricky and very, very sticky. In the end, we made the balls using spoons as it was far easier and our shapes had more “character” this way.


Gougere
250 ml milk
100 g plain flour
50 g butter
4 eggs
75 g cheese (cubed)
pepper and salt
---------------
Bring milk to a boil with butter, pepper and salt. Take off the heat and add the flour at once. Stir well until it forms a big ball then add the eggs and cheese. Put dollops onto a greased plate but space them well as they rise quite a bit. Add some more cheese on top, glaze with milk and bake for 45 min at 180C till brown and risen.


Chocolate truffles
250 g dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more)
50 ml crème
75g butter
2 tbsp sugar
2 egg yolks
2 tbsp Cointreau
50g cocoa
----------
Melt the chocolate in a bowl placed on a pan of boiling water with 1 tbsp of water. Add crème, butter and sugar gradually, then remove the bowl from the pan. Once the mixture has cooled at bit, add the egg yolks and Cointreau and cool for at least two hours. Put the cocoa powder in a bowl, form balls of the cooled mixture, roll these in the cocoa and cool for at least another hour before serving (keep 2-3 days).

Raclette

My parents recently traveled to Geneva and brought back a piece of Raclette cheese. "Raclette" is derived from the French word "racler" which means "to scrape off". This is true winter/mountain food from the Alps and the cheese is traditionally cut in half, melted in front of the fire and layers are scaped off as they start to bubble. The cheese is eaten with boiled potatoes and pickles. We also had some dried meats with it. As we don't possess a traditional raclette setup, we used this. hmmmmmm cheesyness is wonderful but very very filling.....I'm so stuffed!!!

Old favourites....

Last night, we made our old favourite recipes that we have made for Christmas as long as I can remember. Every year, Christmas is a great excuse to try new recipes but at the same time, without these, it would not really be Christmas.

So we made vanille kipferl, a traditional German biscuit, which recipe we got from the mother of one of my German friends when we were still living in France. There, all the German families seemed to make them and I have already seen other people blog about them. These lovely golden almond biscuits are so crumbly, they fall apart in your mouth, are not too sweet and the vanilla sugar on top gives them that extra crunch. For me this means Christmas has properly started and, as every year, they tasted delicious, we'll have to try and leave some till the 25th!


The second is a creamy pate from a french magazine called Femme Pratique. My mum used to buy this when we were living in France and we have a whole pile of them. This mousse aux foies de volaille (bird livers) is a lovely velvety pate and to make it so fine we use our cast-iron mincer (only comes out once a year for this). Of course you could use a blender but this is just so much more fun and I love all these old traditions. Finally, it gets put into the pate dish which unfortunatly has a boar on it instead of a chicken but this is a minor detail :-) The pate tastes great on French bread, oatcakes or anything really.


Vanille Kipferl (makes 60)
200 g Butter
100 g Sugar
1/2 Vanilla pod
100 g Ground almonds
260 g Plain flour
-------
50 g Sugar
1 Packet of vanilla sugar
-------
Melt butter and mix it with the sugar till its smooth, then add vanilla and ground almonds (peel these first as it makes the biscuits look sooooo much better). Finally sieve flour into the mixture. Roll the dough into a sausage of 2cm thick, then cut pieces 2 cm wide and roll these into half moons. Bake 20 min at 175C then roll into mixed sugar and vanilla sugar while they are still hot.

Mousse aux foixes de volaille (makes lots, we usually prepare half)
800 g Chicken livers
300 g Smoked bacon
3 Medium onions
250 ml Creme
25 ml Cognac
Salt

Cut the bacon, bake it till it releases the fat, then add the onion and cook till soft. Finally add the livers and cook on low heat for 5-10 min. Add salt if necessary. Mince this till it is very smooth, add cognac then whip the creme and fold this in. Cool overnight.

Christmas cookies part 1

The Christmas cook-a-thon has started! I'm currently at home in The Netherlands and we have just started with the preparations for Christmas. This morning, we put up the tree and nativity. Then this evening, my dad wanted to bake some biscuits so I gave him a hand. The recipes came from a Swiss colleague of his they visited last week. She had a huge tin of cookies that her family baked each year for all the family members. We picked two recipes from the list of Hedwigs Weinachtsbackerei, Ochsenaugen (oxes eyes!?) and Monikas Schokoherzen (chocolate hearts).


Both were very easy doughs to mix up, the balls were left in the fridge to harden slightly and then it was just a matter of rolling it out and cutting shapes. For the Ochsenaugen we used a homegrown/made jar of redcurrant jelly my mum still had in the fridge and as we didn't have a heart shaped cutter, the chocolate hearts became stars instead. We baked both types of cookies for 20 min at 180 degrees Celsius and they came out looking shiny from the egg yellow put on top. Although I have to admit, on the chocolate biscuits this wasn't the best of looks (I improvised...oeps). Both tasted good though, in the jam ones as the tangy jelly nicely complemented the sweet biscuit and the chocolate stars had a lovely rich flavor. Perhaps we can just hide the icky yellow on top under some sugar icing :-) That's it for today, but no doubt there will be more to follow soon.


Oshenaugen (makes 60)
375g Plain flour
250g Butter
125g Sugar
2 eggs (+1 for brushing)
Mix all the ingredients, let the dought rest then roll out and cut shapes of about 5cm diameter. Brush half with egg white and put a bit of red currant jelly in the centre. In the other half, make a small hole and put these on top of the ones with jelly. Brush with egg yolk and bake 20 min at 180C.

Monikas Schokoherzen (makes about 50)
125g Plain Flour
75g Cornflour
100g Sugar
1 Packet of Vanilla sugar
1 Tsp Cocoa
65g Ground almonds
100 Ground chocolate (preferably 70% cocoa)
125g Butter
1 Egg

Mix everything to make the dough, roll it to about 5mm thick, cut out shapes and put these on a buttered baking tray. Bake 10 min at 180C (I backed mine for 15min as they were still quite soft)