Ginger Tablet

Elderberry Cordial and Probable Sloe Gin and Other Lessons I Have Learned

 

1. Spiders really like to live on elderberry clusters. But they can be easily removed from your harvest by just throwing them and their sprig right out the window. Of course they'll survive the fall. Plus this way, you may have elders in your garden next year.

2. Maneuvering litres of hot boiled elderberry juice is a tricky activity. If you need to strain it from one massive pot to another container wait until you have a friend around who can offer a hand or yell at you when you start to spill. I did this alone. I am still finding purple drops on many surfaces of my kitchen.

3. It is difficult to know exactly what to do with four litres of elderberry cordial(made by reducing the boiled juice with 2 kilos of sugar and flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg). Possibly pour it on ice cream, use it to poach pears, add a splash to white wine or a glug to mulled wine. Definitely add it to cloudy apple juice. Not only will it make the drink purple, it will make it taste just like pressed apple cider. If you live in a place where this is commonly purchased, then that's wonderful for you. If you live in Scotland, then this is your ticket. This is what my past four autumns have been missing. Probably nice warm as well.

4. Sloes grow on the banks of Loch Lomond, close to campsites!

5. If you buy 4 litres of gin and a bag of sugar on a Tuesday morning when you're off work, the cashier will not bat a single lash. Glasgow is brilliant.

6. Sloes are not the only fruit.After you freeze the sloes overnight and then spend a hour or so pricking them and dropping them into gin and topping everything with about 500 grams of sugar. You may do some internet research that will convince you that you have instead picked plums. Tiny ones that look just like sloes. In fact, sloes are a kind of ancient plum and sometimes it's really hard to tell the difference. You can obsess about this for hours! In the end you can decide that wild plum gin doesn't sound too bad either. Meh.

 

7. "Sloe" gin changes colour over night! And glass demijohns are so cute.

8. The apple butter recipes that pop up first in a search do not yield anything like the stuff you grew up with. There should not be vinegar, so much sugar or any spices. Just a velvety, sugar assault. The vinegar taste doesn't go away; the sugar makes it jammy. You'll end up with 1.5 jars of disappointment.

9. If you wash out pickled onion jars and boil them for, like a good 15 minutes, and then wash them out again, they will still sort of smell like pickled onion. It imbues the glass. This does not improve the already vinegary and weird apple butter.

11. The Amish/Mennonites should have settled in Glasgow. There's no apple butter and I can't make it right and I wish I could just buy it. Plus *all* of the dolls here have faces.

10. Masterchef: The Professionals makes baked desserts very, very appealing.

11. Tarte Tatin is really hardly any more work at all that an apple crumble (the easiest dessert).  Given the amount of butter and sugar involved, this is a devastatingly dangerous realisation.

12. It might not be worth it to slow roast a pineapple with caramel and rum. It's pretty good, but possibly not better than regular pineapple served on ice cream with a bit of rum splashed on top. The debate rages.

13. If you are making a rum caramel for a slow roasted pineapple and after you pour the caramel over the fruit, you scrap the bottom of the pan with a spoon to get the very sticky golden bits, you end up with a rum-flavoured caramel pop, a delicious treat that's possibly better than the end result and that you do not need to advertise to your dining companions. It can be your little secret.

14. Pork and Lamb Shoulders!This has been one of the most valuable lessons I have learned this year. Tasty, tasty shoulder. Meat that loves you right back. The lamb can be thrown in a pot with an inexact amount of garlic, olive oil and rosemary. While it should feed you for days, it will be so delicious, you'll just kind of gorge yourself and there will be barely enough left for a snack. It is therefore another dangerous realisation. For the pork, you can make a spicy rub and slow cook it for three hours or so with a bit of water. You can then eat it in fajitas, throw it into pea soup, or make a vegetable gravy sauce, add the leftover meat as well as some sausages (just to feed your impromptu guests). Serve it on mashed potatoes with a side of cabbage with bacon. You will then not care that the days are alarmingly short and your winter coat is starting to seem like a sensible option. Whatever. Pigs and Lambs have shoulders. And you can eat them.

Greengage and Damson Jam

The damsons were the size of rotund grapes. So small, they certainly didn't look like plums. And when you bit into them, there was a pucker and a wince. Their bright yellow flesh sour and bitter.

Contrary to the signals your brain was firing, the atomic pulp of the greengages was nothing but sweetness. Already jammy before it went in the pot. 

There is nothing to making these jams. I bought approximately a pound and a half (600 g) of each kind and stood at the counter, slowly pitting them. First the damsons went in the copper pot with a tiny bit of water and a good amount of sugar. As the juices released and the fruit started to bubble slowly, more sugar was added to taste. Judged by dipping a small parade of teaspoons in the hot syrup until the sweetness balanced out the tart bitterness of the fruit. After adding almost as much sugar as fruit, I let the jam simmer until it clung  to the spoon, no longer threatening to slip off.

Old jars were sterilised in boiling water and lined up on a clean tea towel and I decanted the royal purple jam, trying to be careful, trying not to spill, almost succeeding. The colour is surprising. With their yellow interiors you never suspect that the resulting  jam will be such a uniform and profound hue.

Lids go on, and the jars are turned upside down to create a seal. 

And then the procedure repeats for the greengages, but as they are already quite sweet, just a fraction of the sugar is required. Sugar is surreptitiously bulky and adding less gives a smalled yield and a runnier texture. Once again it cooks slowly until the plums lose their shape and become a puddle of thick, sticky liquid. Once again, the hot green jam is carefully spooned into jars.

Despite these rituals, I have no faith in my processes. So I make a small amount and keep it all in the fridge.

It doesn't matter. Jam is an embellishment. There is none of the pressure of dinner, the expectations of a cake. If, somehow, it doesn't work, no one will notice. It won't be missed. If it does, it's an unexpected joy. A tiny gift.

Samphire and Crab Linguine

We've spent the last two weekends running away, first to the east coast and then to the west, staying just one night each time, getting covered in sand and midgie bites and learning the peculiarities of our new tent. These were not culinary journeys, although there were some delicious moments. Like the roasted sausage and pepper sandwiches I made over the campfire with the help of my trusty stick. See the raw materials below:

Waking up far earlier than necessary the next morning, I went for a walk through my hangover and down the length of the estuary on the way to the beach. The tide was low, the river just skimming over the sand and trickling down to the sea, leaving a vast, flat, sandy moonscape stretched out until the grasses and dunes in the distance. It's the expanse behind the sausages in the picture above. You can't tell that the sea lies beyond, but it does, the brave among us swam in it later on. In the estuary, though, was the second delicious treat. The sole vegetation; colonies of micro cacti, hundreds of small samphire plants breaking up the endless sand. I grabbed a few sprigs on my way back to the tents. 

Samphire is often called sea asparagus, and I suppose that's apt in some ways. It's long and green, for example. But I belong to the tiny minority that finds asparagus terribly dull. So boring. It tastes like stringy grass unless it is thoroughly roasted with strong aromatics. Now and then I'll buy some out of an obscure sense of duty and add them to a risotto or pasta, but it's just wasted on me.

And that's absolutely fine as no one ever forces me to eat asparagus anymore. But I resent the association with samphire. They do not taste the same. First of all, samphire absorbs all of the salt in its environment, making it an already seasoned vegetable. A truly rare beast. As the levels of salinity are just shy of aggressive, you don't need very much in any dish. Also, it's a member of the succulent family. It's closer to aloe than asparagus. So it has a pleasantly satisfying cruchy/snapping/jelly texture.  And its flavour, underneath the saltiness, is subtly floral and alien, almost peppery. It's a green curiosity. Something that would be difficult to grow bored of and it makes asparagus seem pretty darn plain.

Samphire grows in exactly the kind of environment in which I found it; river beds near the sea. The best way to collect is by cutting a few sprigs off and leaving the base intact. You can eat it raw, or lightly cooked alongside of fish and seafood. It would probably be nice with eggs or in a seaweed salad as well. I can't imagine it would hold up to long cooking times, but perhaps I'm underestimating it. We had it first panfried with butter, a fat piece of salmon on top and mashed potatoes underneath. Next I made this pasta and it was delicious. How could roasted tomatoes, cream and crab not be? If you haven't been to the seaside recently, you could easily make it without the samphire. You could even throw some asparagus in if it was in season and you were a pedestrian sicko.

Roasted Tomato, Samphire and Crab Linguine

Given the amounts, this probably should feed 3-4, but we are greedy and it just fed two of us. 

Ingredients

• 1 kilo cherry tomatoes 
• garlic
• a handful of crab meat (I used a tin and it was just fine)
• another handful of chopped samphire (well rinsed)
• olive oil, salt and pepper
•  cream
• chopped parsley
• something spicy: pepper sauce, chili flakes
• linguine, enough for 2-3 people

Method

1.  Dump the cherry tomatoes on a roasting pan with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast on a high heat, as high as your oven will go, for about 20 minutes.
2. Once they are juicy and broken and just a little bit black, remove them from the oven and start boiling the water for your pasta. Cook the pasta following your normal procedures and rituals.
3. Dump the tomatoes in a pan with the garlic. Then add the crab meat and the samphire.
4. Pour in some cream. As much as you can get away with. Ok, not so much that it will dull the acidity of the tomatoes, but enough that it feels like a small luxury.
5. Add your spicy poison of choice and the parsley, toss with the drained pasta.

Not a Success but Not a Failure: Sour Cherry Cardamom Biscuits

It all started when the shop in the basement of my office building started selling individual slices of McVitie's Genoa Cake. Those slices of yellow cake riddled with glace cherries and raisins, sent me straight back to the fake wood panel sliding door of my Grandma Mary's biscuit cupboard. Inside biscuits were kept wrapped up with parchment and elastic bands, nestled in tupperware and tins. This (mysterious) lack of original packaging meant that opening one of these boxes was always a surprise. And more often than not, I wanted them to contain Garibaldi biscuits. Although I definitely didn't call them that. I probably called them "the cookies with the raisins in them" not even realizing that they were currants. That's because I was an ignorant child of the colonies. I was not educated in the multitude of ways that dried fruit can be incorporated into biscuits and cakes, an impulse that is so, so British. My grandmother was never a great cooking enthusiast, but she was a keen baker and when her arthritis made that too difficult, she kept a very sound collection of very British biscuits. It was one of the ways she seemed to harken back to her early years in Scotland. A rejection of Fudgee-Os and  love of candied ginger and mixed peel.

I'm not sure she ever actually had Genoa cake, but that's not the point. The cake was just a trigger for the Garibaldi biscuits, a treat that it more about texture and sound than anything else. They come in strips that you have to satisfyingly snap apart. The cookie itself is basically a matzoh with currants squashed in the middle that are guaranteed to get stuck in your teeth; a deliriously banal mix of crisp and chewy. Totally boring and totally one of my favourites. Wikipedia says that they were named after and Italian general who sat on an eccles cake on an official trip to Wales. Sounds good. Let's believe them. 

I wanted to make them, but to tart them up a bit with dried sour cherries instead of currants and a bit of cardamom in the dough. Grandma would not have approved; but we're going to have to differ here. The problem came in finding a base recipe to have my way with. No one wants to make Garibaldi biscuits at home because you can buy them in the shops for 74p.  Accordingly, there aren't very many recipes for Garibaldi biscuits online, but I found one from Marcus Wareing and I wanted it to work. As he is reputable and unbelievably cocky on tv, I thought he would provide me with the answer. Not so much. The first annoying thing about this recipe is that all measurements are by weight. That's fine for flour, butter and sugar, but irritating when it comes to egg whites. The ratios also seemed to be a bit funny. Originally, you were supposed to use 200 g of currants. That's half a pound and twice as much as any other ingredient. I used less than half that amount of fruit and it was gloriously ample. Also, after mixing the butter, flour and sugar, my dough was quite soft and turned almost to batter with the addition of an egg white. I stopped at one egg and added more flour, but the consistency was very different from the description in the recipe.

I knew when I was making the dough that it wouldn't make a Garibaldi biscuit, not the crisp and pale treat that i wanted. It was too enriched, too buttery. It was more like a shortbread. But since the dough was made, it would have been stupid not to proceed. Besides, Once the cherries were swaddled into the soft dough and everything was rolled smooth, cut, pricked and baked, the biscuits were delicious. No, they were not Garibaldis. There was way too much crumble and not enough of a cracker crunch. But the flavour combination was lovely and there's something about a long, thin cookie that's perfect with tea. Lots of dunking potential. 

It's actually almost time for an evening cup of tea now. Off to the pantry to raid one of my tins...

Cherry Cardamom Not-Garibaldi Biscuits

Adapted from Marcus Wareing

Makes approximately 6-7 long thin biscuits

Ingredients

100g butter

100g icing sugar

130g flour

1 separated egg

75g chopped dried sour cherries

3-4 pods cardamom, seeds removed from pods and crushed (I used the butt of my knife)

Method

1) Melt the butter in a large bowl

2) Add the flour and sugar and mix until smooth. Add one egg white and save the yolk.

3) Fold in the chopped cherries and the ground cardamom and form the dough into a ball.

4) Chill in the fridge for an hour and preheat your oven to 350/180.

5) Roll out the dough on a floured surface, shaping it into a rectangle. Cut the dough in strips and then brush with the reserved egg yolk and sprinkle with demerara sugar.

6) Bake for about 10 minutes until golden.

Warm Green Dinner and Gooseberry Crumble

Without wanting to jinx anything, it looks like Glasgow might be the recipient of a summer this year. (knock, knock, knock on wood) Sure it won't be a endless string of crystal clear skies and steamy afternoons, but so far we've definitely seen the sun, our muscles relaxing into the rising heat.

Still these tentative summer days don't demand the same kind of food that's compulsory in a hotter climate; grilled meats and fresh salads, cold noodles and spicy chilies, endless fruit, infinite ice cubes. It's just not that warm. And even when it is, the day could turn back to cool and grey in a second. Just like it did yesterday. The morning and afternoon were brilliantly warm and sunny, enough to require extra water on our bike ride and to punish me for not wearing sunscreen with an attractive red burn across my back. But although we arrived home sweaty and hot, within an hour the sky had clouded over, the wind picked up and cardigans were once again being drawn across our shoulders.  

This specific kind of summer demands its own kind of meal. One that makes use of all of the produce bursting forth, while still being comforting on a blustery evening. And the foods that seem to fit are the green ones. Beautiful green vegetables, gently cooked. And veiny green gooseberries, tart and hairy; how could you not want to bring them home?  

The menu last night was whole steamed artichokes (bottom and tops chopped off, placed in a steamer for about 45 minutes over lemon water), served with a dipping sauce of melted butter, mustard and white wine vinegar. Next was an almost panzanella: leeks, fresh peas, yellow courgette, cherry tomatoes sauteed in butter and loads of chopped parsley, raw fennel added in right at the end. This was ladled into bowls and topped with chunky croutons, dripping in melted gruyere.

Then a gooseberry and elderflower crumble. This combination of hedgerow treats is a new one for me, but its so perfect for the season that I'm making it a mandatory summer flavour from now on. Sour, sweet and redolent of blossoms, this taste takes you outside into fields and meadows. This crumble is as easy as any other. Gooseberries are topped and tailed (a bit tedious, admittedly), placed in a dish, sprinkled with sugar and a swig of elderflower cordial. Then the topping. The crumbles of the UK tend to be pale and dusty, using a good deal of flour. I just don't think this is right. While I improvise my topping every time, I think it should be dark and chunky, using less flour, more sugar and a bunch of oats. Chopped nuts and cinnamon are encouraged. My method is to melt roughly 50g of butter and then mix in brown sugar until most of the butter is absorbed, next adding flour until the mixture isn't shiny anymore and enough oats that everything gets lumpy and well, crumbly. Spices and anything else can be added at this stage. I know it sounds vague, but it's a hard dessert to mess up. That's why they're always making it on Masterchef. Once the topping is on the fruit, it just goes in the oven at 350/180 for about 40 minutes.  

And all of this was just right. Green and vibrant enough to make us feel July, warm and filling enough to keep out the wind.

Arbroath Smokies

A couple of weeks ago my friend came to visit from Arbroath, a town famous for its twinned, brown smoked haddock. These fish are tied in pairs and then hot smoked over oak or beech chips in small batches. They've been granted Protected Geographical Indication or PGI, so you can't smoke some haddock in your garden in Pollockshields and try to pass them off as the real thing. Or, I guess you could try, but it wouldn't be right. 

I had never tried them before, and they were just incredible. I normally eat more commercially produced smoked fish so the flavour of the wood coming through the flesh was a miracle. You can't replicate that on a large scale. After splitting them open and removing all of the aggressive little bones, I fried them in a bit of butter. Served with boiled new potatoes and peas, this was one of the easiest and most delicious meals we had and nothing has been better than "easy and delicious" this past month. 

Lemon Polenta Cake, For Passover, For the Gluten-Free

This is a cake recipe that you can keep on a spare piece of imaginary paper, folded and memorised and tucked safely in your brain until you need it. Because a flour-free recipe that can be quickly assembled and only has five ingredients is a very handy trick. Especially if you happen to have dear ones who don't eat wheat or you happen to celebrate Passover. But the thing that really endears is that it doesn't taste like a subsitute. Like something you're eating because you've been denied normal food. As someone with a few obligatory and restrictive diets in her past, that is a damn fine trait.

I got the recipe for the Lemon Polenta cake from Nigel Slater's lovely, lovely site (that makes me want to have a garden urgently and immediately. Read that section and tell me your not a) getting on the waiting list for an allotment, or b) plotting the death of your lawn for the sake of dense fruit, flower and vegetable plots). He makes it into a layered cake filled with lemon curd and cream, and who would argue with that approach? I decided to keep it as one layer, brush it with a simple lemon syrup and cover it with whipped cream and some blueberries. I served it for tea, thought there would be leftovers and was totally wrong. I think anything remaining on the plate was, um, tidied up, as we made dinner that night.

And although there is of course no reason why you wouldn't eat flour normally at Easter, this would still be a festive little cake with all of its eggs, bright yellow colour and its ability to mate happily with cream and berries.

This cake will also save you if you want to bake, but find yourself without nice butter. One of the cruellest tales of the kitchen is The Fate of Baked Goods When Made with Crappy Butter. There's no need to relive this nightmare. Don't delude yourself and think it won't happen to you. It will and you'll cry.

Lemon Polenta Cake, for when you can't eat things, but don't really wish to be reminded of that fact (from Nigel Slater)

The cake serves not so many people. If you were making it for a seder, try doubling the quantity, baking it in two tins and making it a real layer cake.

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs, separated
• 110g sugar
• 50g fine corn meal/polenta
• 30g ground almonds
• Lemon

Method:

1. In a mixing bowl/stand mixer combine the eggs yolks and the sugar. Add in the zest of the lemon followed by the polenta and the ground almonds. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and add it in, too.
2. In another bowl, whisk up the egg whites until they're stiff (a pinch of salt helps here). If your bowl is large, you can place a tea towel underneath one side of it, gently tipping it away from yourself. This makes the pool of egg whites a bit easier to whisk and also stabilizes the bowl so you don't have to hold it. I used my eggbeater for this part and it was great.
3. Fold the egg whites into the yolk mixture in the following fashion: Add a dollop of egg white into the yellow mix and fold it to lighten it up. At this stage you can add the rest of the egg whites in two additions. To fold, use a broad spatula to scrape around the perimeter of the bowl and then cut through the middle of the batter. Use it like a blade so that is mixes it thoroughly, but you whites don't deflate.
4. Pour the batter into a butter/flour/parchment papered cake tin (8 inch) that you prepared earlier. Around the same time you also preheated the oven to 180/350.
5. Bake for around 30 minutes until it's golden and your trusty cake-tester comes out all clean.
6. Garnish at will, but think about boiling a tiny bit of sugar and water and lemon juice/zest while the cake is baking and giving it a gentle syrup shower once the cake is cooled. The lack of fat could lead to a dry cake, and this step will prevent that from happening.

Fame and Homemade Granola

So the most exciting bit of recognition I've ever received for this blog has been getting contacted by Kellogg's because, in their words, I'm a "discerning food lover". They asked if they could send me a sample of a new cereal, and I momentarily thought I might be giving my details to an identity thief, decided to say yes anyway just to see what happened, and then I forgot all about it. 

The anticipation didn't kill me mostly because I thought they were going to send me sample-sized samples. Food in small packets is simply dissatisfaction all wrapped up in over-packaging. I knew I would just relegate it to a cupboard while I ate items that were more guaranteed to satiate. Big foods, shoveled in. 

When I retrieved the very large and heavy box from my neighbours a couple of months later, I thought it was some sewing paraphernalia. I only started to clue in when I noted that it was addressed to Ginger Tablet, not a nom de plume I've ever given the sewing machine man. Nope, this was a load of cereal directly from the kitchens of Mr Kellogg. But not only cereal! Inside the box was a straw-filled wood and wicker crate, a rustic (questionably food safe) wooden bowl, a single hefty spoon and four boxes of cereal. One of each flavour of their new granola. I got all of this in exchange for filling out a little questionnaire online. 

Now, I was never asked to blog about these products, but I can only imagine that they thought that by sending me such a winsome array of props, I could stage quite the photo. Unfortunately I won't make that dream come true, but I did have some thoughts on their offering:

- Freeze-dried fruit is weird. These blends have half dried fruit and half freeze-dried. One part chewy and one part foam-y. It's an unappealing contrast. Although the cherry/raspberry turned out to be our favourite once the foam berries reconstituted themselves in milk, the apple/black currant variety with the foam apple chunks was pretty strange. I didn't dip into that box very often.

- I like my granola 100% oat-based. Wheat and barley do nothing for me in this context. 

- The product range is called "Nature's Pleasure". This horrible bit of branding is fertile ground for many a suggestive joke at breakfast time. And perhaps all of our breakfasts should be just a little bit dirtier. I know we sure giggled a few times. 

- The overall design and promotion of this cereal is a little something I like to call "twee as f**k". This aesthetic that earnestly embraces cupcakes as a political lifestyle choice. An attitude that privileges cuteness and the preservation of ignorance. This can be fine in a small business on Etsy and adorable in your first art school girlfriend, but when Kellogg's goes for hand-drawn graphics and the word "yum!" and a breakdown of the ingredients and how wholesome they are, the general effect is both creepy and obscuring. One does not read the label and think things are just that simple, one feels lied to. I also do not like packages addressing me directly: "as it's such a beautifully simple process we thought we'd share it with you". This is awfully forward. They totally don't even know me.

- Realization: I enjoy overproduced free things and for the first time wanted to be very, very famous 

- Realization: I will never be able to understand the enormity of advertising budgets that can promote these products in such a ridiculous fashion. How many rustic crates did they send  out?

Overall verdict: It was fine. A bit boring. Not quite crunchy enough or sweet enough or full enough of fruit/nut bits. None of the flavours were horrible, although our last box is languishing a bit. And the suggested retail price of 2.49 is cheaper than I would have thought. Basically, if you're stuck for a cereal, then this would be fine. I think it's going to hit the shelves in April.

But I love cereal and feel that it can be so much more than whatever. I've been making a batch of granola every Sunday since January and not only is it easy, it is phenomenally good and completely adaptable. You can put in whatever you want. The basic premise is that you mix some vegetable oil and your sweeteners of choice (applesauce/honey/maple syrup/brown sugar/etc) in one bowl and your oats and chopped nuts in another bowl and then smush them together, spread the mixture on a baking sheet and pop it in the oven at 350/180 for half an hour, stirring it around now and then until it browns evenly. If you want to add dried fruit you can just dump it in once the mixture is out of the oven. I've read that you should keep it in the fridge, so that's what I do. It's not a lot of work and the result is (technically) delicious x 1,000,000. 

In conclusion, you can do exactly the same thing as Kellogg's and not spend very much time or money, but instead of ending up with a product that's meh, you get the cereal of your fantasies (if you're into granola). In the concluding section of the on-the-box essay concerning Nature's Pleasure, Kellogg's goes onto say that the process of producing it is "so simple anyone could make it. Anyone with time. And an oven."

Dear reader, I would like to suggest that you are indeed such an anyone. 

Granola Any Way You Like It (if you like it to begin with)

Dry ingredients

Oats (6-7 cups)

Nuts! A couple of handfuls, whatever kinds take your fancy! Chop them up!

About 1/3 c of brown sugar

Wet Stuff

1/3 c vegetable oil

Honey

Applesauce - or if you live in a country where that's an exotic substance, finely grate a peeled apple instead. Very similar texture.

Maple Syrup

Other sweet liquid

Maybe some nice juice (I used apple/rhubarb once with great success)

Extra stuff

Cinnamon

Ginger

Vanilla Extract

Fruit

Anything dried, and chop anything big

Method:

Turn on your oven 180/350

1. Mix all the dry stuff together

2. Make a custom blend of your favourite sweeteners. The exact ratio doesn't matter. I use oil, one grated apple, a good glob of honey and maybe some juice. Try to end up with roughly 1.5 cups of stuff.

3. Mix the wet and the dry and add any some spices if you want.

4. Spread the mixture on two baking sheets. Pop them in the oven and every now and then rotate them and stir the oats around. When everything is lightly browned (25-35 minutes) remove the sheets and let them cool. Don't worry if things appear soggy. It will crisp up as it cools.

5. Break it up into the kind of chunks you like best. Add fruit if you're one of those people. 

To increase the overall smug quotient of making your own granola, have it with plain yogurt and pomegranate seeds after your swim in the morning. Take it into work. Tell people that you not only went for a swim, but you made this granola with your own dear little hands. This is a surefire way to gain admirers and allies.

Sticky Toffee Pudding for the Last Miserable Days

 

Oh, we're all going to get our little hearts broken. Was it nice where you were today? It was pretty nice here and it's supposed to be that way for the rest of the week, and, if we're really really good, maybe even into the weekend. It's time to feel pretty smugly pleased with ourselves for once again witnessing these stretching days as they warm right up. Flowers everywhere. Trilling and chirping birds. And bike rides with jackets open and warm breezes and later sunsets. So lovely. We're just so optimistic and full of love and hope. We are so headed for a fall. 

Because it's March. It won't last. Wherever you are in the Northern Hemisphere, however well the weather is currently behaving, we will be delivered with some really awful days in the next little while. March is a tease and never a safe bet. April is no better. Even worse because our expectations are higher.

So here's what I'm proposing the next time we get walloped with a chilly and mediocre and grey day: make Sticky Toffee Pudding. Because oh my god it's one of the best things that will ever enter your mouth if you like concentrated sweetness, warmth and toffee. And it's easy. And it's really good for any lazy night curled up in front of a film. And because it won't be that appetizing by when it's properly warm outside. 

I had been meaning to make it for months, ever since those first autumn shivers. I knew I had to get my act together and fortunately this past weekend was gross and kindly accommodated. We sometimes buy pre-made versions of this pudding. And I love them. So I was pretty concerned that my at home attempt wouldn't equal the grocery store equivalent. But it was even better. The crisp outer edge of the cake that gives way to the soft, cakey centre all smothered in toffee sauce and served with a pool of warm custard. This is a dream in a bowl. 

Last week a study claimed that some celebrity chef recipes contained dangerous amounts of saturated fat. In particular, Gordon Ramsay's STP recipe was targeted. Why this was front (of the Life and Style section) page news when, duh, obviously recipes that are primarily made with cream and butter are high in saturated fat, and the study was funded by a margarine company, so there might have been a bit of bias and anyway, hasn't saturated fat been given the not-totally-terrible-for-you clear when compared to some of the weirder and more horrible people-made fats, is a mystery to me. But just so you know, this recipe is not great for your saturated fat levels. It is very good for your emotional well-being. Eat vegetables before and during the day that follows and forget about it.

Do you want the recipe? Here it is. It's mostly taken from the BBC's website, but I added raisins to the mix. If you are a raisin person, I feel like it's an essential addition. It breaks things up. If you're not, then whatever. This has a lot of dates in it. If you're weird about dried fruit maybe you should just stop reading all together and have a long hard think about what's wrong with your palate.

I've also adapted some technique from David Lebovitz because the toffee layer on the bottom of the pan is crucial. I cut the recipe in half, poured it into a loaf tin and baked for about 20 minutes. It served the two of us twice. But this is the full strength version in case there are more of you.

Here we go! Sticky Toffee Pudding!

Ingredients for the cake:

225g whole dates

150g raisins

boiling water

175g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking soda

2 eggs

85 g butter

140g brown sugar

2 tbsp black treacle/molasses

100ml milk

custard!

 

for the toffee sauce:

175g brown sugar

50g butter, in pieces

225ml double, heavy cream

1tbsp black treacle

1. Place the dates and the raisins in separate bowls. Cover both with boiling water. Let them sit.

2. Grease your baking dish or mini pudding dishes and preheat the oven to 180/350

3. Make the toffee sauce: Put butter and sugar and half the cream in a heavy pot and bring to a boil. Stir all the time! It's going to bubble and slowly turn brown. After about 5-7 minutes, remove from heat and slowly whisk in the remaining cream and the treacle. Pour half of the sauce in your baking tin and put the tin in the freezer. (At this point I added a bit more cream and butter to the remaining sauce so it wouldn't solidify completely and I would be able to easily  heat it up again).

4. Make the cake: cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time and the vanilla. Now beat in the treacle. Combine the flour and the baking soda in a separate bowl. Add it to the batter in 2-3 additions, alternating with the milk. All the recipes said not to over-mix, so just in case, I'll warn you of that as well. Drain the dates and mash them up with a fork. Add them to the batter. Drain the raisins and put them in there as well. Pour the batter in the pan (on top of chilled toffee layer) and bake for approximately 25 minutes or until your cake tester comes out so fresh and so clean.

5. To serve, heap the cake into a bowl, add warm toffee sauce on top and surround with custard. Die of pleasure.

 

French Leek Soup and Lunch All Week

Let's say that any meal comprising solely of slow cooked onions, such as French Onion Soup, makes you an unpleasant person to be around a few hours later. Let's not say anything more than that. Let's say that you know this and you don't want to be that person, but the idea of lovely onion soup topped with toasted bread and a lot of melted cheese torments you. You get bitchy when other people casually mention eating or making it. Well, if this is you, I have something to share: Put cheesy toast on another kind of soup. It works! It will satisfy you! You won't be embarrassed to share a room/couch/bed for the following 24 hours.

This is what you do: Chop three leeks and soften them in a fair amount of butter. Like a lump and a half. I had 5 big white mushrooms, so I diced them into wee bits and threw them in. I also very thinly sliced two small potatoes and when the leeks were soft added them as well. I added a splash of vermouth (but white wine would have been good), a bay leaf and some dried thyme, and topped everything up with vegetable broth to simmer for an hour or so. Now this is a fair amount of time to simmer a soup like this, but that was a productive period. Because while the flavours were becoming fantastic, lunch for the week was being prepared.

We're into packed lunches around here for pretty much every reason going: better for us, better for the planet, better for our wallets, often more delicious. Of course making them is a pain. But I find that if I have various delicious things I can scoop into a container, I can still get out of the door in the morning. How come making a sandwich takes so long? Sandwich making definitely will make you late. Salads are key.

So I made the spread you see before you while the soup was maturing. There's an eggplant, pomegranate and pine nut salad in a garlic yogurt dressing, a tabbouleh of sorts with diced zucchini and pine nuts, a grated carrot, beet and celery salad with a honey mustard shallot dressing and some cooked sausages purchased from our lovely local butcher. All things that work together and all things that are even better cold. 

And although it looks like a lot of work, it's pretty simple. Here it is in Nine Simple Steps:

1. Prep your eggplant. Turn the oven on to 350/180. Cut two eggplants lengthwise and then score the flesh. Rub with oil and sprinkle with salt. Place them skin side up on a baking tray and roast them for 30-45 minutes. Until they look like this:

2. Dice half a large zucchini (or one whole small one if that's what you've got). Place the pieces in a bowl with about 1.5 cups of bulgur. Turn on the kettle. Cover the bulgur/zucchini with boiling water, put a lid on the bowl and let everything steep for a while. Just forget about it.

3. Toast a bunch of pine nuts.

4. De-seed half a pomegranate.

5. Mince three cloves of garlic. Your co-workers will really like this.

6. Remember those pine nuts! Don't let them burn!

5. In a mixing bowl combine 3/4 cup of plain yogurt, a glug of olive oil and one of those minced garlic cloves. Add the pomegranate seeds and pine nuts, combine and set aside.

6. Quarter some cherry tomatoes and chop a big bunch of parsley.

7. Throw some sausages on. Use the pine nut pan!

8. Check on the bulgur and zucchini. They're probably just lovely. If so, add the parsley, two remaining cloves of garlic and the pine nuts. Squeeze a lemon over them. Add some olive oil. Stir. You're done! One dish out of the way!

9. Make a dressing for the carrot salad. Finely dice a tiny shallot and place in your dressing-making device (like a tall glass). Add a spoonful of Dijon mustard, honey, salt and white wine vinegar. When making vinaigrettes, always put your water-based ingredients in together first before adding oil. This helps you get a better emulsification. Now add a trickle of olive oil. Just a bit. Stir a lot. You should see it thickening. Add some more oil and keep stirring. Eventually it will get quite thick and glossy and you can start adding the oil faster. Taste and adjust sugar/salt/vinegar/oil as needed.

7. Dice one stalk of celery and grate two carrots and one big beet. Toss them with the dressing. Another dish done!

8. How are the sausages? Getting close? Burn them just a bit. They're ready, too!

9. Your eggplants should be mushy and fragrant now. Take them out of the oven, give them a rough chop and add the pieces to the yogurt/pomegranate mix. That's it! Four dishes made while you were waiting for dinner to cook.

Tomorrow you can have a mound of each of these babies with a sliced sausage on top and not only will this be pretty healthy and colourful, but your co-workers will be jealous little suckers.

But back to tonight and back to this soup. 

This will feed four people or two very, very greedy people. Whatever. We were watching Tampopo at the time and how can you watch that movie and not continuously eat soup if there's soup to be eaten? Anyway. Cut four pieces of bread and toast them. I used a seeded rye and it was actually ok. Grate some emmenthal or gruyere.

At this point you could put the soup into individual bowls, top each one with a slice of toast and a bunch of cheese and broil, or if you don't have bowls you know are over safe, just put the pieces of toast right into the soup pot (carefully, so they float), cover the whole thing with cheese and stick the whole thing in the oven under the broiler/grill until it bubbles.  

Ugh. How did you manage to make so many delicious things in such a short period of time? What will you do now except feel full and smug?

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J has just told me that this will definitely not last all week. That could be because he's eaten three sausages today alone. Something tells me he'll see to it that there's still some grated carrot and beet for my lunch by the time Friday is here, though.