Pottery, Pies and Picnics

Work is a bit hectic at the moment and I’m afraid the blog has been suffering from it the most. After a long day of writing papers and grants, the last think I feel like is sitting down behind the computer again. But last weekend, we managed to escape to the far north of Scotland to celebrate the Summer Solstice (which is actually today). This was a real trip down memory lane for me as we went to Achmelvich, which is the first place I visited outside of Dundee when I moved here the first time in 2000 as an undergraduate student. I came here for 7 months to work in one of the labs, fell in love with Scotland, came back the next year to do a PhD and haven’t left since (although the end is in sight)….this is one of my fabourite parts of Scotland and I love coming here. This time, Barry came with me as he had never been and I wanted to show him this area before we move....but I digress.

So last Friday we drove up with friends and pitched the tent next to the sea. Saturday morning we woke up to the sound of rain so stayed in the tents for a while, had breakfast and around 11, when it dried up wondered over to Lochinver, a village about 4 miles away. We visited the Highland pottery shop, which has stunning pottery but quite pricey. So I was sooooo chuffed when I found a seconds serving platter, which was perfect on top but had an ugly mark on the bottom (nobody will ever know!) half price (pics will follow soon). We then went to this amazing shop I’d been told about a long time ago but never had a chance to visit (even though I’ve been in the area five time already). It’s the Lochinver Larder and they sell lots of wonderful pies. There were so many different varieties that it took us a long time to make up our minds but in the end we shared a venison and cranberry pie, a wild boar, port and prune pie and rounded it off with a strawberry/rhubarb pie for dessert.
The pies were heated for us but we took them outside where they made a perfect picnic whilst looking out towards the see. The pies were really moist and full of flavour, the fruit was perfectly balanced with the meat and the pie crust had a nice bite to it. After this, we wondered back and the rest of the weekend was spent walking beaches, swimming (for some...way too cold for me!), playing rugby on the beach, building dams in sand, having barbeques and roasting marshmallows and wondering along the cost. I can really recommend this area if you’re ever this far north. It’s a beautiful rugged part of the country with lots of sheep and little people but everyone is really friendly and the food is great. There are a lot of wonderful seafood restaurants and at this time of year the light is really fabulous, it’s so far north that it doesn’t even get completely dark and we sat up with a bonfire till the early hours.
Now back in Dundee with the piles of papers, I find myself staring at the mountain scenery on my new plate and contemplate ordering some pies by post soon, unless I find the time to make one….

When you can't make ice cream...

...as you don't have an ice cream maker and you can't go out and buy one as you will be moving by the end of the year and you have to move your vast quantity of kitchen paraphernalia again....you make granita! I've been restraining myself from buying an ice cream maker but with the warm weather there is nothing like some frozen comfort but I have found the solution to my problem....granita's! They're somewhere in between a sorbet and a slush puppy but so much better then the horrible synthetic tasting ones we get here (I mean turquoise for raspberry flavour!). They are very easy to make (and quick, which is a big bonus at the moment as work is hectic) as you just boil a sugar syrup and can then add anything you fancy to thin the liquid out, preferably with some alcohol. The liquid is then frozen in a shallow tray and scooped out as a crystallite mixture. Lovely on its own, with fruits or cakes, the possibilities are endless.

I've previously made a mulled wine granita and this time went for a lemon one with the lemons we got from our organic citrus box. I took the rind off the lemons and boiled this with the sugar syrup. The syrup was strained and water and alcohol (in this case Corenwyn; a Dutch version of gin) was added. This was then frozen and had been sitting in my freezer for ages until we ate it last night. I had baked some lemon and poppy seed cookies to go with it from the parcel Marie-Laure sent me for EBBP4. The cookies were great and their crunchiness contrasted nicely with the fresh, tart and slighlly boozy taste of the granita...the perfect summer dessert!

Some random food...

...that we've been eating over the last week or so. I'm very busy at work at the moment so don't have that much time to write posts but I thought I'd share these pictures with you as I like them. First up, a summer salad of mixed leaves with Beluga lentil and goats cheese crostinis which we enjoyed in our garden on a Sunday afternoon (the weather has been absolutely fab here the last week).

Followed by some daikon and roast beef rolls from the Japanese feature in this month's Delicious. These were very easy to make, just grate some daikon, squeeze out the juice, add some chopped spring onions and roll them up in a slice of roast beef. The dipping sauce was made off soy (4 tbsp), sesame oil (1 tbsp) and some finely sliced garlic. The whole thing took about 5 min to assemble and was very tasty....great finger food for entertaining.

Finally, we had some pork burgers (mince, onion and garlic mixed with ground coriander, cumin, tumeric and chilipowder) with some steamed runner beans and these lovely ceci with garlic and sage. They are a bit of an effort to make but very much worth it, crunchy and with a bit of a kick they make a lovely snack or part of a full meal. So hopefully I'll have more time to write a proper post soon but first we're off for a weekend of walking on the westcoast...fingers crossed we'll keep the nice weather!

Something old and something new

One of the souvenirs I brought back from my recent skiing trip in the Savoie (France) was a bag of Crozets. This pasta was introduced in the Savoie in the 17th century. The pasta is made from a mix of plain and wholewheat flour or buckwheat flour that is cut into little squares and is a good example of hearty mountain food. I bought a bag of buckwheat crozet as I like their nutty flavour. Traditionally, they are prepared in a Croziflette (a tartiflette made with crozets in stead of potatoes) in which they are paired with bacon and Reblochon. This is a tasty and filling dish, just what is needed after a day on the piste or perhaps whilst having lunch on the piste.

A few months I already made the traditional version, but with spring finally here and summer fast approaching; it was time to use them in a new combination. So I decided to use the crozets in a fresh summer salad. After boiling them, I paired them with some lovely organic mixed leaves we got from our organic veggie bag delivery. I also added some slices of roasted kabotcha pumpkin, a few bits of gorgonzola and some slices of Parma ham. This combination was great, lots of strong flavours that combine well. The crozets stay pretty al dente so have a nice bite to them and as the mixed salad contained mizuna, shungiku, tai sai, cress, rocket, raddicio and little gems it was crisp and spicy. The sweetness of the roasted kabocha pumpkin combined nice with the Gorgonzola, which started to melt slightly with the pumpkin and the Parma ham finished all this off beautifully. A very pleasant lunch indeed and I think this new combination is at least as good as the old one!

Three uses for Katsuo-bushi

A few weeks ago I got a very nice surprise as I received a parcel from Anna at Baking for Britain. Anna was my allocated person for EBBP4 and I some of the ingredients I sent her were for making Japanese food including dashi (seastock). However, my ingredients were incomplete and contained no bonito flakes as just can’t get everything in Dundee. These flakes are made from the dried flesh of the bonito (skipjack tuna) which has been repeatedly smoked. This is then shaved into flakes and mainly used for adding a smoky, fishy flavour to stock or as garnish for a variety of dishes. Anna very kindly found some in for me in London and this was the parcel that arrived, 5 precious little bags of bonito flakes (or katsuo bushi as Anna discovered from the Japanese shop owners).

So I wanted to make something a bit more special then just stock and decided to make okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is what they sometimes call Japanese pizza, as you can vary the topping but it’s more like an overly filled omelette. The first time I had one was years ago when one of my Japanese colleagues in Dundee organized a pot-luck dinner party, Her contribution was an okonomiyaki and I remember being amazed at the topping. The omelette is garnished with katsuo-bushi and as the flakes are so thin, they seem to “dance” on top of the omelette as they sway in the hot air.

Then whiles living in Japan, we would sometimes go to restaurants specialized in okonomiyaki. These are very fun places as all the tables have a hot plate built in and you order the premixed ingredients but get to cook the whole thing at your own table. However, after dinner there, you are definitely in need of a shower as you stink of frying but it’s well worth it.


So I got the recipe from the book Untangling my Chopsticks, a book I absolutely love and recommend if you are interested in Japanese food and the culture involved. The recipe is very simple, you just chop and grate all the veg and meat (or you can of course make it vegetarian, mix everything and then start frying them. You only use one egg, which doesn’t look like much, but it gets it’s lovely creamy golden texture from the grated taros (also known as Japanese mountain yams or satoimo). To eat, you garnish with okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, katsuo-bushi and nori (seaweed) flakes and pickled ginger. Okonomiyaki sauce is actually based on Worcestershire sauce so you can use this as a replacement. Worcestershire sauce came to Japan in the second half of the 19th century but the flavour has been made milder to suit the Japanese palate. I couldn’t find the right pickled ginger so used gari (that you use for sushi) instead which doesn’t really matter flavour wise, although the other one does taste a bit stronger. I’d also run out of mayonnaise. As I had to make dashi for this recipe, I used one of the bags for that and then “recycled” the used bonito flakes by dry frying them with some soy…this makes a great sprinkle over rice. The rest of the dashi I used for making miso soup the following day. When frying the omelettes, the smells made me all nostalgic about Japan. Once again, the fish flakes danced on top and the taste was perfect.
Okonomiyaki (makes 2, serves 4)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp (0.5) tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp coarse salt
1 1/2cup dashi
1 large egg
1 cup grated taro’s
2 cups coarsely chopped green cabbage
1 cup fresh bean sprouts
1 medium carrot, peeled and shredded
1 bunch scallions(±6) trimmed and thinly sliced
2 tbsp vegetable oil
4 ounce boneless, skinless chicken breast, thinly sliced into small pieces
10 medium shrimp, peeled, deveined and sliced lengthwise in half

for garnish
mayonnaise
okonomiyaki sauce (can substitute with Worcestershire sauce)
shredded red pickled ginger
dried bonito flakes (katsuo-bushi)
shredded nori

Mix flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together dashi and egg, then add the grated taro’s. Add this wet mixture to the dry, whisk until the batter is smooth and add all the vegetables. Heat a non-stick skillet on medium-high, brush a tablespoon of oil on the surface and, when hot, put half the mixture in the pan. Spread this out till about 8 inch wide, scatter half of the chicken and shrimp on top and press them into the surface. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook the pancake for about 4 minutes until the top edges appear cooked and the bottom has stiffened. Turn the pancake and cook for 3-4 more minutes until the other side is golden. Repeat this process with the remaining oil, batter, chicken and shrimp.

Cut the pancake into wedges and let people garnish their individual wedges. First spread creamy mayonnaise on top, followed by okonomiyaki sauce. Next, scatter some ginger shreds, bonito flakes and finally add a generous pinch of nori on top.

What’s For Pud?...Summer!!

What a wonderful day we’ve had yesterday! We’ve gone straight from winter into summer up here in Scotland so the only fitting English dessert to make for What’s For Pud was Summer pudding. This was my first attempt at any kind of bread pudding as I have a great dislike of soggy and I was pleasantly surprised. It was very easy to assemble just boiling the fruit, sugar and water, lining the mould with bread and putting the fruit mixture in there, then leaving it in the fridge over night. The taste was really good, the juices sweetened the bread and even though the bread was slightly wet, it wasn’t soggy and the fruit inside was still intact. We had our first barbeque of the year and had the pudding for dessert. Thanks to Becks&Posh and Jamfaced for organizing this, it made me discover a great dessert and I’ll definitely make this more often, specially once it gets to picking season and you can pick your own berries at the farms around.

What's For Pud? and St George's Day

Liquor used at long last

This Sugar high Friday is hosted by Chandra at Lick The Spoon and she picked a drunken dessert, preferably not rum….so I had the perfect recipe for this that I’ve been meaning to use since I bought my very first silicon mould (sigh). It was a cold November Sunday, I’d spent the weekend in Edinburgh and was on my way home. The last few months I’d been reading more and more blogs and had been reading about this new baking product called a silicon mould. Everybody seemed over the moon with these moulds and they did sound good but I’d never spotted one in the Dundee shops.

So little unexpected me was wondering in and out shops on the way to the train station and suddenly found myself in the Jenners (it’s a bit like the Scottish Harrods, but not quite so grand and without the foodsection) cooking department where I was greeted by a table full of lovely baby-pink Fauchon silicon!! So I ages to decide but finally settled on a mould with nine small rectangles (very practical) as I figured buying the pink mini heart-shaped moulds would give him a hart attack.

When I finally sat down on the train, I unwrapped my lovely new mould (there’s nothing quite like getting something just for you wrapped as a present anyway) and found another bonus: there were two recipe cards included with the mould. One was for vegetable mini cakes and the other for miniature pear cakes. Both sounded appealing but I’m definitely sweets person so I started plotting this recipe. I wouldn’t be able to get pear liquor in Dundee I would have to make some and I had just the bottle for it.

My parents have this habit of giving us presents and then not remembering so giving them again. This way we’ve steadily been building up a collection of Corenwyn (only in Dutch I’m afraid). This is almost like a Dutch combination of vodka and whiskey, distilled from grains but matured in oak casts for three years it has a high alcohol percentage and a sharp taste and I’m not a big fan of it as a drink. But as the taste isn’t very pronounced it can easily be used for cooking.

So when I got off the train, I bought some pears, made the liquor using equal quantities of sugar, fruit and alcohol and left it in the cupboard to rest……for about 6 months! For all my initial excitement, I never actually got around to making the cakes until now so this was a great motivator. The batter was very straightforward to prepare although I could really have done with braising the pears earlier but I left everything till the last minute, so they weren’t quite cold when they got mixed into the batter (and still had quite a lot of juice with them). Another thing that worried me was that there was no use of rising agent but the dense consistency worked quite well once the cakes were soaked. Once cooled, the cakes were really nice and moist, the flavour of the alcohol wasn’t to overpowering but gave this subtle hint that there was a little more than just pears in there. It was great for dessert as it was still all warm but even better the next day when all the flavours mixed.

Miniature pear cakes (makes nine)
165g caster sugar
3 eggs
165g butter
2cl pear liquor/brandy
165g flour
165g diced pears
17g butter
33g honey
Pear punch:
40g sugar
6cl water
3cl pear liquor/brandy

Braise the diced pears in the honey and butter; cool and set aside in the fridge. In a bowl beat the eggs and sugar until the mixture forms soft peaks. Blend one third of the mix with the melted butter and brandy, add the flour to the other two thirds of the mixture. Then mix these two together. Fill each miniature cake tin with the mix and the diced pears. Bake at 160C for 35 min. Mix the sugar, water and pear liquor to make a pear punch and heat it for a few minutes. Leave the miniature cakes to cool for 3-4 min; then soak them in the hot pear punch for 30 sec.

Easter extravaganza

I am writing slouched on the couch as we’ve just had soooo much food this afternoon, I could not possibly sit up. But it was wonderful, we had lovely company, the weather was beautiful and allowed us to go out and sit in the sun, and after two days in the kitchen we had a true Easter feast. As this was the first time in about one and a half years since I’d had a big dinner party I went a bit overboard. So a big thanks to Barry for helping me out with everything and calming my panic attacks (we’re not gonna have enough food!!). Anyway, this is what we had but unfortunately I forgot to take pics of lots of the dishes so I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

We had spiced chickpeas to nibble on, then Nigella’s
ham in cola, which is always a great success. For the vegetarians there was an asparagus quiche, chickpea fritters with a tikka sauce and Jerusalem artichoke salad, both from the Crank’s cookbook I got for my birthday and hadn’t had a chance to cook from yet. Then our guests brought lovely salads, potato cakes and chocolates and we had lots of different homemade breads with rosemary, sun-blushed tomatoes and a butter lamb as well (the mould was another present).

For dessert we had chouquettes, a slightly adapted version of Gateau de Mamy with more almonds, less flour and pieces of dark chocolate, Pate brisee with Dulce de Leche instead of ganache, hot cross buns, as I’d never had any before and finally a Pavlova with a mascarpone lime cream topped with raspberries and strawberries from the Avoca cookbook.

So now…we just need to digest (which will take a while I think) and then have it all over again as we made way too much food! There was no need to panic after all….

Chocolate balls turn into eggs

The first time I had these chocolate balls was over a year ago in Jaiselmer, India. We’d just come back from a two day camel trek in the dessert and were tired, sandy, smelly and incredibly sore. But after a shower we felt a bit more human and staggered into town (John Wayne style). We had a lovely sand-free italian dinner after 6 weeks of curry) in one of the hostels and as they had no tiramisu on the menu, we settled for chocolate balls. Not expecting very much, they were amazing...perhaps it was the 2 days in the desert, the motion of the camels or the lack of sleep but these balls were fabulous. After much persuasion, they let us come back the next day at lunchtime and showed us how to make them. What they claimed was a carefully guarded family secret turned out to be incredibly simple and easy!

The second time I tasted them was a few months later when I met up with one of the girls I travelled with and she had made some for old times sake. So we took a London bus tour and enjoyed our “balls” in the fresh air and sunshine whilst reminiscing of the camels and driving past Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge and more.

So this is the third time I’ve had them and the first time I’ve made them myself but they were just as easy and tasted as good as I remembered...and instead of balls, I turned them into Easter eggs as it’s almost that time. They looked lovely next to my new decorations of eggs I blew out and wrapped in left-over bits of ribbon and I’m sure they’ll look great on the table, next to my newly knitted sheep egg warmers. I hope you all have a lovely Easter with lots of nice food and of course lots and lots of chocolate!

Indian chocolate balls
8 bourbon biscuits
2 heaped tsp of dissolving chocolate or cocoa
½ tsp of desiccated coconut (optional)
1 tsp butter
3 tbsp sweet and condensed milk

Crush the bourbons in a blender and when fine, add the rest of the ingredients. Mix till you get a mouldable paste and roll these into balls (or in this case, eggs). Sprinkle with coconut powder to serve.

I’m sure these would taste great with some crushed nuts, dried fruits or anything that takes your fancy instead of the coconut. And perhaps adding some rum, grand Marnier or other liqueur would be nice too...so many options!

Sakura in Dundee

Last week a friend from Japan was visiting my work. We had a great time both in work and at ceilidhs and sessions. But he also brought some sweets from Japan including these Sakura cookies. Whilst I lived there last year I got really fascinated by all the food, especially the sweets so this was a lovely gift.

Sakura, the cherry blossom, is Japan's unofficial national flower. It has been celebrated for many centuries and takes a very prominent position in Japanese culture. When the blossom is blooming, there as special weather forecasts telling you where they are at their best and people go out to admire them at hanami. At Hanami festivals, people go out to celebrate the beauty of sakura, and for many, it is a chance to relax and enjoy the beautiful view. The city planting in Japan is very thought out so they have rows and rows of these trees in scenic spots. This way people can enjoy their free time admiring them, having a picnic there and having a good time.

The cookies were beautifully and thoughtfully packaged as everything in Japan is. Every detail matches perfectly like the stylized flours on the outside package, the two trays of cookies that fit perfectly into the outer container, one labeled with the leaves and one labeled with the flowers of the cherry tree as this is what’s in the cookies to the instructions on how to open a sachet. The cookies tasted lovely, very light and full of flavor with a hint of cherry blossom. I find myself wishing I was back in Japan to see the cherry blossom (as I missed it when I was working there from May-September) but for now, I’ll admire the few sakura trees that are randomly spread around Dundee while enjoying my cookies.