The Gyst Of It

Christmas Truffles

2011-12-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

For those who have read the books, you'll already be familiar with my holiday gift-giving tradition of truffles. Not only do I give truffles every year, I am compelled to do so on pain of being excluded from all future celebrations. That's kind of an inside joke, but at the same time I'm not going to test it. I know where I stand.

It all started in 2002, when I was spending Christmas with J, A, S, and S's mum. I brought truffles and a bottle of Bailey's to the proceedings. The truffles went mainly untouched until Boxing Day, where they were discovered by S and her mum, who ate the lot - 25 truffles - in about a femtosecond. They are that good.

How quickly were they nommed? Let's put it this way: if the radius of a truffle is about a centimetre, that means continuing at that rate they could eat a Milky Way-sized galaxy's worth of truffles (I mean a gravitationally bound system of stars and stellar remnants, not the respective chocolate bars) in somewhat shy of 13 hours. That's assuming the truffle-stuff is poured into space, not rolled into balls and packed, by the way. I have time on my hands but not that much time.

Not only are homemade truffles good, far better than any store bought variety, they are easy. So easy you can make them now and give them as gifts this Christmas. So easy you can do them in the microwave. But don't tell your friends and family that, or you might find yourself with an order for 1.13 x 10²³ chocolate sweets come next year. And we wouldn't want that.

The recipe comes courtesy of Orbyn, whose method I shamelessly ripped off.

INGREDIENTS
150g (5 oz) dark chocolate
2 tablespoons of dark rum
150ml (¼ pint) double cream
24g (1 oz) butter
Zest of 1 orange
2 cloves

2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon of plain flour
1 tablespoon of cocoa powder
toasted nuts (optional)

1. Break up the chocolate and melt in a saucepan on a low heat, along with the cream and butter, and the cloves.

2. Grate the orange peel directly into the saucepan; add a squeeze of juice if you like. After a few minutes, stir in the rum and add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.

3. Keep stirring for about 3 minutes, then pick out the cloves and transfer the mixture to a bowl, and place this in the fridge overnight.

4. The next day, dust a wooden board with the flour, and sprinkle some cocoa powder and the remaining cinnamon over it too. If you’re using toasted nuts, keep them on a plate nearby.

5. Take heaped teaspoons of the chilled truffle mixture and roll into small balls with your hands. Roll these in the flour/cocoa/cinnamon mixture (and then in the nuts if you like) and plop into petit-four cases.

Chill until ready to serve.

There are so many variations you can do: for instance, this year half the truffles were flavoured with whisky and Christmas spices instead of rum. The other half had rum, but part of the cream was replaced by coconut cream, and they were rolled in a combination of icing sugar and coconut.

Sinterklaas Kapoentje

2011-12-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

In the interests of being an equal opportunity ~~freeloader~~ ~~offender~~ blogger, I've long taken it on myself to ~~appropriate~~ ~~bastardise~~ adapt any holiday going in order to ~~stuff my gob with delicious treats~~ ~~max out the drinking in winter~~ pay homage to the cultures of the world. There are tons of great reasons to do this and not just because you're angling for more days off from work. Because as we all know while there are many legitimate days of celebration that do not merit a bank holiday, there are none that do not come with special food (and loads of it).

Back when I was a first-year student at University, I met a gent (called A1 in the books) who introduced me to the charming Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas. This is a holiday celebrated in Holland, Belgium, and some parts of France to celebrate St Nicholas Day which is December 6th (not the 25th as I'd erroneously thought). On the night of the 5th children put out their shoes for jolly bearded St Nick to fill with oranges, nuts, and cookies. Because who doesn't love a biscuit in their boot?

A1 also taught me some Dutch. Just the interesting bits though. This is the first word I ever learnt in the language:

He was a hell of a funny guy (still is in fact). Go ahead, look it up. I'll wait.

See? Funny guy.

I wanted to make some biscuits to celebrate, because... well, I like biscuits. Only I don't like the traditional speculaas. Why? No idea. I want to like speculaas. I should like speculaas. I like everything in speculaas. For some reason, though, that biscuit's a no for me. They taste a bit like those horrid little Lotus caramelised biscuits you invariably get with a tepid instant coffee on plane journeys or in huge baskets at the check-in of disappointing hotels. Man, I hate those things.

That's okay though because there's also the tradition of the amusingly (sort of) (if you're Ricky Gervais) blacked-up Zwarte Piet who spends his time ~~applying shoe polish to his face~~ ~~screeching about Political Correctness Gone Mad~~ giving out a different biscuit altogether... pepernoten.

Only, I don't really like those either. Dilemma!

So I made German pfeffernüsse instead. Which are not Dutch and not specifically Sinterklaas-related but damn it they are good and similar enough and kind of sound like they should be eaten out of your shoe.

What's the difference, you ask? Well, see, pepernoten start soft and go hard. So according to UK Customs & Excise law, they're actually cake. Whereas pfeffernüsse start hard and go soft which means ~~you pay 20% VAT on them~~ they're perfect for dipping in coffee. A palatable and extremely grown-up alternative to vile Lotus biscuits.

TL,DR: Any excuse to bake.

Apologies for the US measurements - I was adjusting another recipe as I went along, and all my measuring stuff is in volume, not weights.

This makes about 80, by the way. If you don't want to be a slave to the kitchen for an entire day I highly recommend halving the recipe.

Ingredients:

For the cookies -
4 cups plain flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup golden syrup (or 1/2 syrup and 1/2 treacle)
1/2 a block of butter, about 125g
2 eggs
1 tsp each ground white pepper, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, cardamom, ground ginger

For the icing-
2 cups icing sugar
1 tablespoon cold water, plus more as needed

Heat butter until melted and stir through syrup until well combined. When cooled, stir in the eggs thoroughly. Whisk spices and flour together in a bowl. Add brown sugar and wet ingredients.

Bring together wet and dry ingredients, using a spoon at first and then kneading into a firm dough. When it has come together into a smooth ball, cover and chill for about 2 hours.

After the dough has rested, knead briefly then divide into balls the size of unshelled hazlenuts. Press lightly and bake at 160C for 12-15 minutes, until puffed and just starting to brown.

When the biscuits have completely cooled, ice them. Mix the icing sugar and water (and more if needed) into a paste about the thickness of custard. Dip the tops of the biscuits in the icing and lay on paper to dry. When they have thoroughly hardened (this will take a LOT longer then you imagine it should), pack in an airtight container. Or your shoe. Choice is yours.

Potted Cheese, Please!

2011-12-01T04:45:00.000-08:00

As a small child, I happened to have a chance meeting with Fortnum & Mason's potted stilton. Those of you who grew up posh or British or both may not think of this as a particularly exciting revelation. But for a kid like me living in a tiny bungalow on the west coast of Florida, this was a game-changer. It was like uncovering the treasures of an ancient civilisation. The mists of time have wiped out whether it was ours, a gift, or a neighbour's, but the smell, taste, and texture are indelibly written on my memory. And perhaps, had I never encountered this astounding foodstuff, I still would have become a savoury-food-loving fiend who is to this day utterly addicted to cheese and all who sail in her. But I rather doubt I would have been the same person without it.

And not only is potted cheese as near to spreadable gold as we humans will ever produce, you can also make it at home. And it's easy. As an adult potted cheese has become a staple of my home: perfect for picnics, cherished at Christmas, the perfect homemade gift. For cheese lovers, that is. Because in case you are in any doubt: potted stilton, and variations on the theme, are not for the faint of heart or palate. It's smooth, spreadable, fat-laden salty sin. It's Primula gone to heaven.

It probably goes without saying that I absolutely do judge people based on whether or not they like this.

There are a lot of variations, but the basics go a little like this:

350g strong hard cheese, crumbled or shredded. Vintage cheddar is good here, as is, of course, stilton. You can mix cheeses too. This is also a good way to use up ends of cheese and crusts of cheese. That's right, I save odd bits of cheese. Just call me Norma Major.

125g good butter. The cheese makes the taste, but the butter is the carrier texture, so don't be afraid to splash out on this.

About a tablespoon of ground spices. The choice here is up to you, since there's so much that goes well with cheese: black or white pepper, nutmeg, ground mustard seed, caraway... limitless possibilities. Chopped fresh herbs would probably go down a storm as well, if anyone fancies trying it and reporting back.

A double measure of sherry or spirits. I usually pair brandy with nutmeg, dry sherry with pepper, or whisky with caraway.

1 tablespoon plain white flour stirred into 1/4 pint of cream.

Ideally, you might do this in a warm kitchen. To get the best texture it's better to mash the ingredients together into a smooth paste. That is exactly as tedious as it sounds, though, and takes an age if your kitchen is on the parky side (as mine is). So I soften the butter and cheese on a defrost setting in the microwave, stir in the other ingredients, and - those of a delicate constitution look away now - give it a good whizz with the immersion blender.

If you do go the microwave route, keep an eye on the butter and cheese. They want to be softened but not melted. If the solids and fat separate that's too much. But don't despair! A little extra flour in the cream and a thorough beating should bring it back together with only a small loss in texture.

Pack the cheese mixture into clean, sterilised (but not warm) jars. It's better to use ones with straight sides, otherwise it's hard to get every speck of cheesy goodness out. Try to eliminate air bubbles if there are any by poking in a knife and smoothing the top out.

Melt a couple of tablespoons of ghee or clarified butter (or just butter if you have neither of those). Pour over the top and leave to cool and harden. This will seal the jar.

And that's it. Keep refrigerated. It's ready to eat straight away, which is ideal, because I don't think I'd have the patience to wait for it to age.

Charcuterie 2: The BLO

2011-11-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

It's called a BLO, because it's a Bacon-Like Object. Not bacon exactly (it's a cut from the shoulder and not the back), but cured and prepared in a bacon-like fashion for use as lardons in cooking.

This cut came from leftovers of making chorizo. The recipe called for a shoulder joint and extra fat. The meat at the top of the shoulder was just too hard to cut out and mince, when my hands were already killing me. So I trimmed it up and dredged it in several tablespoons each of curing salt and table sugar, a teaspoon each of crushed black pepper and dried coriander seeds from the garden, and left it in Tupperware in the fridge.

As it cures it draws water out from the meat. So you go from having a well-rubbed dry piece of raw pork covered in salt to one that is redder, firmer, and sitting in a pool of its own (now very salty) juices. A week of turning the meat every day then it was rinsed, rolled, and this is what we got:

It's kind of pancetta... but also kind of not, as pancetta is usually hung up to age further after it comes out of the cure. Which sounds like a fun thing to try next time but I was just too greedy to go the extra step. It was immediately pressed into service flavouring a chanterelle risotto. Success!

If you've been thinking about making your own cured pork products, I would definitely recommend this as a good place to start. There are some great how-to sources on the web. It tastes far better than I remember bacon tasting, it is very easy, and it's economical to make. It's win-win-win.

So easy, so moreish, and such a good use of a piece of meat that would otherwise have frustrated the hell out of me. Not only will I be doing this again, I already am: the latest BLO in the making is a pork belly currently luxuriating in its own brine in our fridge.

Autumn sweeties

2011-11-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

I love Bonfire Night (and not only because it's my birthday). I grew up celebrating Thanksgiving in the US, where large amounts of food and family fun abound. Bonfire Night, to me, feels a bit like a stripped-back version, and a welcome relief between the end of summer and the interminable runup to Christmas.

People seem to love their toffee apples, but to be honest, I find most of them uninspiring. There's something about a plain piece of fruit covered in shards of gum-skewering E numbers that surely only looks good to people who spent their childhoods gazing wistfully at a ration book. No, I'm more of a caramel apple fan, with all the buttery, bad-for-you-ness that represents. They're slippery, sticky, and unreliable - basically sex on an apple.

My other seasonal fave is parkin. Purists (like me) will usually insist that it be made at least a week ahead, to moisten and age properly in a cake tin. Unfortunately this year I forgot (!) until the 3rd. So using the Delia recipe as a base, I tried a little twist: a caramel drizzle parkin to introduce some much-needed moistness.

This involved making the parkin in a loaf tin rather than an oblong tin. While it was baking, I made a thin caramel sauce (a few tablespoons each of butter and sugar, with a spoonful of water to moisten) with an added deesertspoonful of minced fresh ginger. When the loaf came out and while it was still warm, I pricked it all over with a skewer and spooned the topping over. The result was a sticky, moist cake with a peppery and crunchy glazed topping. Think Jamaica ginger cake with a bit of a sugary crust. Very nice indeed! I think I may have to do this again sometime. Maybe with a dram of whisky in the topping... something classically Speyside style, with orange and spice and Christmas cake notes methinks.

And that's all she wrote. Suitably pre-warmed with a drink of smoky BenRiach Curiositas whisky, we took the apples, a couple of slices of cake, and four pints of elderberry mead down to the village and enjoyed a giant bonfire, excellent fireworks display, and the first truly clear and cold night of the season.

Luckily we didn't go to Oban for the fireworks this year!

A first try at chorizo

2011-10-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Once I started eating meat again, I also started looking for ways to raise and process my own meat.

The property we live on isn't very well-suited to most food production, but apparently it's spot-on for sheep or pigs. As much as I like the idea of a little herd of Hebs milling around the place, pig is infinitely more useful as a food source. Our plans is to start off with a couple of weaners next spring and see how it goes.

In the meantime, I've decided to pursue a few experiments in curing meat. Since a porker going to slaughter is north of 100 kilos, even once you take out the skeleton, that's a lot of animal. I'd like to be able to make as much use of it as possible.

Experiment 1 was chorizo. By the way, you probably shouldn't do this at home, at least not in this order. Try a regular sausage or something first. There's a lot that can go wrong with charcuterie, most of it to do with the fact that the meat is dried, not cooked.

So I'm not going to post a recipe but I am going to give you some idea of how we did it. If you want to try it, do the research, and decide what level of risk you're comfortable with.

First I spotted this recipe on the Grauniad site. Looks good, right? Read the comments. Basically, the recipe does not include nitrites or nitrates. Not only that, the guy who put up the recipe poo-poos anyone suggesting he might have a public health risk on his hands by not doing so.

I totally understand his point of view (botulism is vanishingly rare in adults and usually not fatal). Acceptable risk is something you have to take into account making any preserved foods. For instance, I make a lot of jams, pickles and so forth at home. I do sterilise my jars, and they seal up fine, but a final bath in a pressure processor is something I never do. Never felt the need. But then, I'm not making the jam for public consumption, and if I wrote a book about it, would never suggest it's a good idea to disregard safety guidelines. It's that I've been making jam for ages and am personally comfortable with not processing everything under pressure.

Then I went over to this recipe, which is great, but also involves a lot of fiddling about with humidity levels and so on.

So, we went with a happy (enough for me) medium: an approximation of the Grauniad recipe, but instead of plain salt, using both a cure that contains nitrites and adding a bacteria starter culture (both of which I bought here). Again, maybe over the top, but until I find my feet I'm going to want to err on the side of caution.

Also to the recipe we added crushed red chillies and a lot of paprika. No garlic was harmed in the making of this meat product.

Just a note: in the future, I sure as shit won't be chopping this by hand. That was an RSI nightmare waiting to happen. In the end most of the meat got shredded with some kitchen scissors, but seriously... no fun. I'll be getting a proper mincer soon.

So here's the result! Sausage experts will notice a small amount of case hardening (and I forgot to take a pic in the casing, which was indeed covered with white mold as it should be). It tastes pretty nice anyway, and I like my salami on the firm and chewy side. I'm hoping to do another one soon and have this salami business sorted. Unless I succumb to botulism first. I'll keep you updated.

All we need now is for darling husband to crack out the scuba kit and fetch me a scallop.

Mo' Better Beef

2011-10-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

I was a vegetarian from the early 90s until earlier this year. This is why I became one, and why I'm not one anymore.

I was raised in the US South. In the South, even your veg comes with meat. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that people don't think couldn't be improved with the addition of bacon. Added to that, I grew up in Florida, where fantastic seafood abounded. In my parents' house it wasn't the done thing to be a picky eater. I was allowed two exceptions: olives and mushrooms. (Both of which, oddly enough, I grew to love much later. My mother was right.)

As a teenager, I became aware that I didn't actually like most meat, or at least, most standard cuts of dry muscle meat. This was exacerbated by going to University where the student canteen served the absolute worst, overcooked chunks of factory-farmed animal that were nothing like the thoughtfully prepared food I'd grown up with. Increasingly I came to see meat as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The heavy slabs of chewy burger served to us every night of the week were no incentive to keep eating the stuff. I cut down my meat intake to once a week, and finding it easy to go without, eventually gave up on it altogether.

The fact that other people ate and enjoyed meat never bothered me. Okay - some exceptions. I could not take picky eaters or the wilfully blinkered. Example: a university roommate, who told me with a straight face that she didn't eat chicken on the bone because she saw a blood vessel in a drumstick once. This conversation took place while she was wolfing down a god-knows-what-was-in-it student canteen burger.

Or, the guy I knew a bunch of years later who prided himself on not being squeamish about food. Who turned green when I described one of the few meaty delicacies of childhood that I missed: a whole, battered, soft-shell crab. It seemed insane to me that he was fine with crab meat, but eating the entire animal was somehow disgusting? Wha-?

Those are people who I always secretly thought maybe should have been vegetarians instead of me. And funnily enough they were also the people most interested in "turning" me. But lecturing people about their food choices is not my style and I more or less kept these opinions to myself.

While there's something in me that relishes being contrary, it was also sometimes uncomfortable being a vegetarian. I hated the "reveal". As soon as people find out you don't eat something they do, very few can just let that go uncommented upon.

A live-and-let-live veggie is, seemingly, the world's worst dinner guest. My very presence would force people to either apologise for what they eat (as if I care what they eat), or attack me for what I don't. It seemed like a lot of people were projecting their insecurities about their own choices onto me and my choices. It's tiresome. (Yes, we are still talking about food here.)

So when I met my husband I was very happy. Here was someone who had been raised a vegetarian since birth, was a vegan for much of his 20s, and didn't eat meat before the age of 30. Here was a meat-eater whose attitude to my vegetarian habits was one of total understanding and acceptance. Actually, his attitude to everything is acceptance. (No, we are not still talking about food here.)

That truly rocks my world.

Our wedding party was vegan and entirely cooked by us, apart from the cake, which was neither: a stack of whole cheeses. There were vegan cupcakes for the non-dairy crew and those insane people who don't like cheese. I've cooked a lot of food for a lot of people over the years, and that hands-down was the best I've ever felt about feeding the masses. If there was a peak of my vegetarian life, the wedding party was it. All was well in the world.

Until we went on holiday.

It wasn't his attitude that changed, it was mine. I couldn't believe that faced with all the awesome, exotic food choices we came upon in places like Mexico, Egypt, and the Outer Hebrides, if he ate meat at all, he gravitated towards safe choices like fillet steak or chicken breast. This was because after all, he'd always been a vegetarian surrounded by vegetarians, and so didn't know what tasted good and what was interesting and weird and special. Please, I pleaded with him. Try the lobster. Try the kidneys. Eat the ceviche!

While he was game to try most things, I increasingly felt uncomfortable with my own behaviour in these dinnertime conversations: why should I force him to be more experimental with meat if I wasn't eating it myself? The fact that I once had, in a now very distant past, eaten just about anything that moved, did not move him.

As he must have known would eventually happen, I caved. We ended up at a little bistro where calf liver was on the menu. He refused to order it, so I did. And because he didn't like the taste of liver I ate the lot. The Rubicon had been re-crossed. I was not a vegetarian anymore.

So in the last year my culinary life has taken a very different turn. I have become, horror of horrors, one of those picky meat eaters. Only it's not blood vessels and crab shells I'm squeamish about, it's animal cruelty. The ultimate irony after decades as a veggie who cared nothing about animal welfare is that now that I'm eating meat again, I really, really do care.

After all, this animal died for your dinner. What greater honour than to be able to use the whole damn thing, pickle the feet, suck the bones? I'm lucky, both of my parents are good cooks, and my mother is the mistress of turning a whole bird into a week's worth of family meals. I come from a long, long line of people who know how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. Nose-to-tail eating isn't a challenge. It's where I belong.

So if I come to your house for dinner, I don't mind what you serve me. I don't want to be a hypocrite. But it would make me smile if the eggs and birds are free range and the pig is red tractor. And if you met the beef cow before it went to the abbatoir, all the better.

This winter we'll be eating cows that chewed the grass in our front field all summer. Next winter we'll be eating pigs we raise ourselves. Next time we pass the local venison dealer, we're popping to buy some deer, because those Bambi fuckers ate my entire crop of french beans this year... they owe me. In the meantime, we try to buy as little, and as high quality, meat, eggs, and dairy as we can.

I'm posting this because I realised I was about to put up some entries about recent experiments in charcuterie, and some of you who knew I was a vegetarian did not yet know that I'm not anymore.

And to those who've had to make last-minute panic meals to accommodate me over the years, thanks for understanding... and for all the Quorn.

Batch cooking

2011-10-05T04:58:00.000-07:00

We live in the middle of nowhere and our electricity is on an Economy 10 tariff. Never heard of it? Me either. Even the people who supply our leccy don't seem 100% convinced it exists. Long story short, from midnight to 5am, 1pm to 4pm, and 8pm to 10pm, we're on half-price electricity. Which is just the kick up the backside I need to get organised and do the week's baking in one go.

So here's a challah, two wholewheat loaves, a coconut chocolate loaf cake, coconut and chocolate flapjacks, and a pizza. We also did homemade oven chips but snaffled them before the pic. The oven was on for about two hours in all, including pre-warming. And yes, this can be done in a normal-size oven, provided you have enough shelves. Just a little tip for those concerned about the rising price of energy this winter: even if you're not on Economy 7 or 10, take advantage of the oven while it's on and get loads done at once! Although because things are going in and coming out at different times, the opening door allows the oven to lose heat, so give the cooking times a touch longer. It's far better than doing them one at a time anyway.

Challah in a hurry

2011-09-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

After darling husband and the in-laws left for a jaunt to Glencoe this morning, I popped on to Twitter. Good thing too because the trending topics flagged up that Rosh Hashanah starts tonight. It was in the back of my head, but I'd lost track of days. Anyway, the male half of this set of in-laws (stepfather-in-law? Is that the accepted term?) is Jewish, so I set to making some challah in a hurry.

Challah, for those of you who have not yet tried it, is soft and slightly sweet. It's a bit like brioche but it's far, far easier to make and doesn't contain butter or milk. When plaited up they look well impressive, too. Here's a recipe for two loaves:

1 kg strong white flour
4 eggs (3 for the dough, 1 for glazing)
1 pint hand-hot water
2 tsp dry yeast
7 tablespoons honey
1 tsp salt
4 Tbsp oil
sesame seeds

Soften the yeast in the water. When soft, stir together the water and yeast, honey, salt, and oil. Add the flour a bit at a time, beating well, until the dough is stiff enough to be kneaded by hand. Knead until no longer sticky, cover, and raise until doubled (they say about one hour, but go by volume, not time).

Punch back the dough and divide into two equal parts. Knead one of these halves briefly until smooth and elastic, and divide into 4 equal parts. Roll these parts into ropes about 18" long. To plait them into a round challah, follow these directions.

Set the loaf aside and shape the second loaf the same way. Cover the loaves with clean tea towels and raise about an hour.

Preheat oven to 180°C (170°C for a fan assisted oven). Whisk the remaining egg and brush on the loaves to glaze. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Bake for 40 minutes. They're done if they have a hollow sound when you tap on the bottom.

Malted

2011-09-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

An oldie but goodie from back in 2003, this was a piece I wrote for the now-defunct Omnivore.

The first time I met him, he was drinking whisky. A double of something on ice. When the barkeep presented the drink he dipped a finger in it, placing a drop behind each ear as women once did with perfume.

He asked what I was having. "Whatever you're having," I bluffed. He asked me how old I was. I told him, and he laughed, and bought me a soda.

Acquired taste worth acquiring? I'd never been with an older man. Soon after we were lovers. Twice my age, twice as big, educated and well-traveled. And he put back whisky like it was mother's milk.

Well, why not? He was scion of a family where Jack Daniel's was practically secreted by the womenfolk. Bourbon and whisky: given at every holiday, drunk at every meal, the tawny stuff that kept them going and brought the day to a close. The Johnnie Walker blends, based on Cardhu single malt. The legendary B-21 liquor store on US 19 employed more people than lived in town. An off-license on the border of Florida and Georgia, because the state north of us was dry.

We drove to Panama City to sit on a particular beach, drink a particular drink. I was embarrassed by my unconscious reaction to alcohol: wrinkled nose, curling lips. But I loved the way it warmed from the inside and the way people watched me as I tasted it. I was still five years below the drinking age.

He had the best bar game: pick any three whiskys or bourbons from the bar. Pour a measure of each. Bet you twenty bucks he could tell them apart.

I learned. The shape of the glass matters. The temperature of the glass matters. The measure, the pour, the ritual. Swirling it round, a caramel wave of liquor clinging to the inside of the glass. It retracts slowly like the damp line of the falling tide on sand.

Ice in that? Water? Not for me, thanks. A few years later, sitting on a friend's sofa. A tumbler of Laphroaig, my first sip of the harsh Islay malts. Like starting all over again. But the feeling afterward - not drunkenness, not lightheaded. The opposite. Grounded, focused, full.

One year I spent more money on whisky than on rent. Two vintage bottles in Scotland, dozens of nights out, hundreds of nights in. A miraculous pub in Flagstaff, Arizona. A neighbour who worked bar at a hotel. No wrinkled nose any more. It tasted of melted butter. Golden syrup. An acquired taste worth acquiring.

I moved to Scotland and swam in the thickly peaty rivers Findhorn and Spey. They tasted like sweet, aged whisky. I drank up honey-colored light. Scared off the cold of the evenings with a glass of malt. Sat up on the longest night of the year with a friend's father, drinking and playing the mandolin. The sky at midnight was the color of barley.

In London one evening for a date with a woman and her boyfriend. I was early, they were late. Waited at the bar drinking a single malt finished in a rum cask while the underpaid, overcool staff looked me over in pity. Ordered another and the couple whisked in, silver and scented and fabuloso. Later, when I'd made her come twice before dessert, the waiters couldn't fill my glass fast enough.

But you never forget your first. I never did. Years after we were no longer lovers, a decade after putting a glass in my hand, he was married. At the wedding his family and friends eyed me suspiciously. 'How grown-up you are now,' they said. I smiled, pinned a corsage to someone's lapel. Who ever said heartbreak is a cliche? When he said his vows I felt a spasm in my chest. Afterward I drank long and hard. The taste will always remind me of him.

What does it taste of? Like mother's milk, I say.

Bottling mead

2011-09-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a gallon of mead being bottled. It has been racked once, to take it off the yeast, and settled. Ideally it should be racked again, left to clear, and then bottled. But we had a dinner party to get to that night and didn't want to go empty-handed.

First, sterilising the bottles. These are washed, then get boiling water and bottle sterilisation tablets. We re-use cider and whisky bottles for reasons I'll tell you about in a minute.

Once the bottles are sterile and rinsed, the mead is siphoned out of the demijohn to fill them. This one was flavoured with ginger. As you can see, the mead is not really that clear.

Finally, the finished product. We took a litre over to dinner and are saving the rest. It should settle out a bit in the bottle, though because we don't add campden to kill off any possible remaining live yeast, I'll be keeping an eye to make sure secondary fermentation doesn't start up.

Which brings us to the reason for using old whisky bottles, as opposed to say wine bottles. Because we don't kill off the yeast, there is always a chance they will still be hanging out in the mead, especially when we haven't racked it and settled it properly. The thick whisky bottles and snug-but-not-tight corks keep the mead bottles from bursting on the shelf, y'see. As we went for dinner, my husband carried the bottle, striking a pretty vigorous pace up the hill to a neighbour's house. We arrived and our offering was put to one side on the table... where the whisky cork promptly came out with a loud pop! I don't think they believed us when we said that was the first time that had ever happened.

Multicolour mushrooms

2011-09-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

Today we went foraging for mushrooms. With guests staying the week and a much-waited-for break in the rain, the time seemed perfect. Here's a sample of what we found:

Clockwise from top: yellow chanterelles, winter chanterelles, yellow-foot trumpets, some random bolete, hedegehog mushrooms, amethyst deceivers. Sadly the last ones look a bit indigo in the picture rather than amethyst - in real life they're a deep, vibrant purple. And yes, they are all edible.

Confusingly what we call chanterelles the French call girolles, and what we call winter chanterelles they just call chanterelles. Sort of like the US-to-UK Milky Way/Mars confusion. Trust me, for Americans relocating to the UK, the similar naming of completely different pieces of confectionery is a huge hurdle to overcome. A Mars with no almonds? WTF?!? And what happened to the caramel in your Milky Ways? And why are they so tiny? But I digress. We'll be having some of these (mushrooms, not Milky Way) in a risotto tomorrow. The bolete joined a few of its cousins in a lasagne for tonight.

If you're new to collecting mushrooms there are a few guidelines to go by. The first is don't eat it if you're not sure! Remember that Horse Whisperer guy, and the near-death, years of dialysis, and transplants? Yeah, that.

Also, more and more people are concerned about overpicking. I guess it's a south of England phenomenon but it comes up on various fungi forums a lot. So maybe shoot a few pics and pick a single sample to start with, then go back only once you have a positive ID. When taking pics to show a friend or put on a forum, information like what sort of place you found them, what the gills look like, and so on are helpful. Something to scale the image is good too. You'd be surprised how many people expect a positive ID off the top of an indistinct cap shot from head-height looking down.

Finally, when you start to feel more confident, get a guide. I like this one. But there are loads out there and none are the last word in all species everywhere, so be prepared to compare possible identifications against Roger's Mushrooms, Bioimages, and even Wikipedia. Pay particular attention to species they could be confused with. Get familiar not only with what edible species look like, but also with features of some of the more dangerous ones too. Again, the dialysis and transplant thing being something you probably want to avoid.

Also, we found oyster mushrooms today. They'll probably be saved to have with stir-fry or a bowl of noodles.

In other foraging news, we're planning to take the sea kayaks out to our sooper-seekrit shellfish spot later this week, if the weather holds.

Chapati, roti, whatevs

2011-09-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

The internet is brilliant for some things. Especially bread making. Cookbooks are good, and can give recipes and maybe even show a few pictures to illustrate techniques, but there is nothing like watching somebody do it in real time. Especially with bread, and especially flat bread, because it cooks up so quickly.

Okay, so while not strictly yeast-related, I'm going to tell you about chapatis. I love, love, love them. And there are loads of breads (including yeast-risen ones) that make use of the techniques here, so ner.

What I lack in any sort of Indian heritage I make up for in having found the most awesome YouTube cooking channel ever: Manjula's Kitchen. Her roti technique is perfect. It's an excellent foundation for all sorts of Indian breads. And, as I later discovered, a pretty nifty thing to know when making pita breads, too.

Weirdly, I used to think 'chapati' was plural. As in, the singular would have been 'chapato'. Then I realised - duh woman - it's not Italian. I don't know why I'm telling you this. (Doesn't 'chapato' sound like it should be some sort of sausage?)

Making chapatis may seem intimidating, but trust me, once you get the hang of this you will make these all the time. I make them about once a week. A couple of things I've found that seems to be pretty important to getting consistent results, that Manjula mentions, but I'll emphasise:

1. A little oil on your hands really helps the kneading and rolling. And when I say knead, I don't mean like pizza dough-stretchy. Just enough to bring it together and make the outside smoothish. This is what mine looks like before I divide it into balls... not all that stretchy, really. Just enough so that it comes into a smooth-sided ball and rolls nicely.

2. She says to rest the dough for 5-10 minutes, longer is also good. Resting helps it not shrink back when you're rolling or when it hits the hot pan. You can also store the dough if you're not going to cook it all at once at this stage: smooth into a ball and cover completely with clingfilm touching the surfaces (it will turn grey where the clingfilm doesn't touch, so wrap tight!). You can keep it in the fridge for a couple of days and cook as needed. Just bring it up to room temp, divide into balls, and get rolling.

3. No, I can't get them into perfect circles like she does, either. It doesn't affect how they taste.

4. That thing she does, where she dips the dough into flour rather than rolling onto flour dusted on the countertop? Do that. Too much flour sticking to the dough will burn in the hot pan and smell terrible. If you can't lift it off the surface easily, it might be too wet or to thin or not rested enough. It's fine to scrape it off, re-ball, and start again.

5. Just keep up the flipping and pressing, and the bubbles will come together. If they bubble up but have trouble joining, you might have rolled it too thick or too wet. If the bubbles split the dough when you press down, possibly too thin or too dry.

Like with pancakes, it's likely your first one will turn out not so great (pan too cool, pan too hot...) so do like you do with pancakes and eat that one when no one's looking.

...and that's pretty well it! Because I'm hopeless at cooking rice (the Zojirushi does that for me), and my curries are all kind of same-y, I like to think at least bringing fresh flatbread and homemade chutneys to the table makes the whole experience at least as good as a takeaway. Which is good, because there are no Indian takeaways for about 40 miles in any direction here. So it's not as if my chapatis have any competition. Mwahahaha!

Chanterelle ravioli

2011-09-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

I am a huge fan of cooking shows. Huge! Especially competition ones like Great British Bake Off and Celebrity Masterchef. I especially love the invention tests on Masterchef, because what other people choose to cook is never, ever what I would have done with the same ingredients, and it's fascinating to see what everyone comes up with.

So I finally caught up with the current CM series. And I have to say, I was shocked... shocked! at the ravioli one. Granted, I have been making pasta for some time, but I'm far from an expert. Still it surprised me that none of them seem to have done it before. Who are these people who go on cooking shows without any apparent cooking experience?

But it was also interesting as an example of how some people can overcomplicate the shit out of simple stuff. Like, John Torode making the demo ravioli? I'm certain they taste awesome, and he could probably kick my ass in any pro kitchen. But beaten egg to hold the sheets together? Really? Kids, I'ma let you in on a little secret: pasta is made out of pretty much the same stuff that glue is made of. You know how when you dump a bunch of uncooked spaghetti into a pot, you have to stir it a bit, because otherwise the strands will all cook together into a lump? That shit wants to stick together. No scrambled egg required.

(Later: I will probably whinge about how Torode's "sticky toffee pudding" should actually be billed as "sticky date and coffee butterscotch pudding". I'm sure he's a lovely man and I'm sure his food is superb. But so. Over. Complicated! Anyway...)

Suitably inspired, I decided to spend some time this morning making pasta and filling it with chanterelles. Why chanterelles? We live in what is essentially Fungal Ground Zero. Everything here is slowly rotting and turning into mushrooms. Seriously, leave your laundry out too long, and it'll be covered in fungi. When you go out picking mushrooms you have to be careful or else you will inadvertently come back with your body volume in ceps. I've already frozen loads of mushrooms and dried loads more to last through the winter and spring. We had a few kicking around in the fridge, so in they went with some garden herbs, butter, garlic, cream, and a little flour to thicken.

The pasta itself was high gluten white flour, some wholewheat, in a ratio of about 4:1 (I didn't measure, you kind of do it by feel anyway). Add a pinch of salt, then make a well in the flour, add eggs, and I like to add a splash of oil too to make it easier to handle. Stir together slowly bringing in the outside yadda yadda. You don't need me to tell you how to do this, or more to the point, there are people who are better at explaining than I am.

You can, if you want, invest in speciality pasta flour, add semolina to give it that 'grit' feel and so on. If you want to, and it won't break the bank buying ingredients, then go for it, why not? I don't really bother, one, because it doesn't taste too much different, to be honest. And two, because I do a lot more bread baking than pasta making, so high gluten white flour and wholewheat are things that are knocking around the kitchen all the time anyway. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and if someone ate in my house and started going on about this or that hand-milled imported heirloom organic pasta flour, you know what? I would nod, I would smile, and they would never be invited back. Ever. Again.

Cooking is a little like bushcraft: knowledge is far more important than kit. My people have been scratching a living without two brown coins to rub together and making pasta to knock your socks off since time immemorial. Don't let a lack of expensive flour hold you back. You can totally do this (and even the mistakes will be delicious). You want to make pasta? You probably have the stuff in your kitchen right now.

This here is my state-of-the-art pasta machine, aka the rolling pin. It's rolled out until I can see the wood grain through it. I would really love a machine but I've never met anyone who owns one and actually manages to use it regularly enough to justify the expense. Also, if rolling it out by hand was good enough for the generations of Sicilian mommas who begat me, it's probably good enough for me. (But am I good enough for them? No, it took me sodding ages to roll that pasta. My granny is probably turning in her grave. And look at all those wrinkles. Lucky for me pasta is very forgiving.)

Sticking the layers together is pretty easy and requires no extra egg: all you have to do is wet the dough with water and pinch it down. But? Don't go in there all gentle dabby-dabby. We're talking preschool. You want to start to turn that pasta back into paste. This ain't pastry; pasta is tough. Pasta can take it. So kind of rub it around with your wet fingers until the pasta starts to go white, then stick down the top layer and press it around the filling. Don't be shy. You want to make sure the little packets of deliciousness don't open up when you boil them.

Another thing? Pinch together your layers, then cut the ravioli. This will make them look far neater when they cook. Not that mine look brilliant, but it does help. I like mine round, kind of like a Mexican hat, so I put a half pint glass over them and use that as a cutting template.

Then dust with semolina, and you're ready to cook them or save for another time. Only I didn't have semolina so I used wholewheat flour instead. It works fine.

That's about all really. Here you can see a tray ready to go into the freezer so we can have them some other time, maybe with a creamy seafood sauce or something cheesy and spinachy. If you freeze them individually first, then pop them into a bag, they won't come out in a giant solid lump. I cooked off a couple to make sure they tasted okay and (after seeing everyone's Masterchef fiascoes) to make sure they stayed closed. They did, and they did.

Got Mead?

2011-09-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I started experimenting with making our own wine. Following the recipes in CJJ Berry's First Steps In Winemaking, we produced some passable elderflower wine, and rice and raisin. There was also a batch of apricot wine which got stuck in fermentation, had to be restarted with new yeast, and came out tasting rather sticky. Needless to say we disposed of most of it by gifting to unsuspecting neighbours. As hobbies go, winemaking was okay, but hardly taking over the spare room.

By the way, if you ever are considering homebrewing as a hobby, I can't recommend Berry's book enough. Not only is it about as comprehensive as a beginner will need, it also contains some charming photos of the man himself, NHS speccies and all, updating his logbook, wandering an English vineyard with a ladyfriend, and doing the washing up. (Home brewing involves rather a lot of washing up.) Plus his recipe for Ruby Delight - "very popular with the ladies!" - demonstrates that with sufficient booze-making skill, any man can produce in an empty cupboard the kind of leg-opener that would put the collective women of Newcastle out for the count. This man is a hero.

But winemaking is slow. The ferments take forever to get going. The aging takes an age. And then you are left with something that tastes, frankly, underwhelming. So, what we needed was something that combined the ease of, say, prison hooch with the flavour of, say, scrumpy with a shot of overproof rum dropped into it.

That thing, my friends, is mead.

What's mead? I mean, apart from Viking rocket fuel. Mead is honey wine. It ferments faster and easier than the homebrew wines were doing, because (here comes the science bit) honey is a mix of monosaccharides fructose and glucose, whereas a lot of homebrew wine relies heavily on additions of the disaccharide sucrose, aka table sugar. Mead is genius because the yeast digesting the honey sugars to produce ethanol get a head start, and your brew goes from jars of bee spit to bottled liquid gold in about 3 weeks.

Tl;dr... honey makes great booze because it is so ready to get busy with yeast.

I wonder if the last people who lived here (the family who built the house) were into homebrew too. Because that cupboard, where the immersion boiler sits? Is perfectly outfitted with shelves, and there's even (you can see in the pic if you look closely) a little radiator under them. Honestly! Who needs a radiator in the closet? People who like to keep their fermenting honey wine toasty warm, that's who!

We've come a long way since our first effort using Ralpharama's interpretation of Joe's Ancient Orange. We've maxed it, relaxed it, and put a tiger in its tank... In other words, we have stripped any- and everything out of the process that does not contribute directly to tasty, tasty ABV. Like, isinglass. Also yeast nutrient... mead doesn't seem to need it, probably because of the simple sugars. And we don't add campden because the Darling Husband has bad reactions to it.

But it is easy. And kind of bombproof. It tastes good, way better than any commercial mead I've tried. It's cheap to make at about a pound a litre (even though the Morrison's in Fort William did put up the price of their own-brand honey by 50%, something we think we might be accidentally responsible for. Sorry Lochaber!). It's more than palatable, especially if you like dry to medium-dry cider in the West Country style. Mix it with lemonade for a shandy; mix it with lager for an absolutely skull-cracking turbo shandy. You can get really far down the mead wormhole and start going on about this or that honey and this or that yeast, but in the end, it makes tasty plonk and we approve.

The recipe, approximately, is a strong cup of tea, four jars of honey (or 3 honey, and equivalent golden syrup to make up the 4th), spices or flavourings, yeast, a teaspoon of citric acid, and water to make a gallon. I'll post about mead in more detail as more gallons get made, racked, and bottled. I would love to have a go at making something similar next year with birch sap... we'll see.

As you can see in the photo above, we've been ringing the changes with seasonal additions such as elderflowers, elderberries, blackberries, raspberries, bilberries and so on. Elderflower, by the way, tastes amazing. We've had 2 gallons of it bottled already and I wish there was more, but sadly our part of Scotland is not awash with elder. Will probably end up planting our own to guarantee flower and berry supply. And on the right, the sort of greenish looking ones? Those are our first attempts at light ales. Will report on the outcome as and when.

That Time of Year

2011-09-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

In theory, I should love autumn. I love canning, pickling, and preserving all sorts of stuff and spend most days from late summer to full-on winter chopping things up and sticking them into jars. It's also the season of my birthday (November) and my favourite holiday (Bonfire Night, which is not coincidentally the same day as my birthday).

But, I also grew up in a very hot, humid place where one year - prepare yourselves, temperate-climate lovers - it was 30° C on Christmas Day in the Northern Hemisphere (that's 86° F in real money, fellows Americans) and we did not bat an eyelid. If memory serves I think I was also wearing a jacket that day. In fact I almost certainly was: my leave-the-jumper-at-home threshold is about 32C. Hot weather I can do. Cold, not so much.

So I now live on the West coast of Scotland, a place that is best described as "permanent autumn". This is a big fat mistake for a cold-weather hater like me. But. But! There is such an abundance of wonderful stuff here, like delicious wild mushrooms, more mussels than actual beach, and neighbours who do not think it's at all unusual to want to take up beekeeping for the express purpose of producing honey to make alcohol.

(I am sure Peta would have something to say about the wicked exploitation of our entonomous* brethren, but then if I cared about what Peta think then I probably would not have been the vegetarian at uni wearing fur. "Not famed for her politically correct opinions" is probably the front runner for my gravestone inscription. Anyway.)

For last, oh I don't know, month or so I have been canning and pickling like mad. And putting up demijohns of booze - let's not forget the booze. But the realisation is dawning that this is not so much a celebration of the season for me, as a ritualised panic about my fear of the cold. Because were you here last winter? It was like minus fifteen for a couple of weeks. Our drains froze shut. There is a special hell reserved for plumber's daughters, and it involves having to put the contents of your bath down the toilet every night. And then, when the inevitable backups occur, discovering that nowhere in town sells a plunger. And that your husband does not own a toolbox. Oh my god, oh my god. Deep breaths. Go to your special place**. We did get through it but only just.

A nice side-effect of being such a dedicated homebrewer of mead (without bees... yet) is that we have enough empty honey jars to preserve and display the entirety of the Alder Hey paediatric pathology collection. A lot of them are full of chutneys and jams and sauerkrauts and so forth already, so I can't show you how what got in them got in, but I can tell you a bit about the contents and show you what we do with them. 'Tis the season to make like squirrels and start burying your acorns in the ground, innit?

* - is that a word? No? Well too late.

** - My special place is anywhere that does not run its heating and hot water entirely from an ancient coal fire.