Welsh Cakes

 We used to visit a local market each Sunday just to buy the lovely hot freshly made Welsh cakes, sadly that market has long gone. There are still lots of places that you can buy these little warm treats but they make the house smell so nice while they are cooking it seems a shame not to make them every now and again. 

Purists will tell you that you need a particular flat iron griddle to cook these but you don't. They are easily cooked on a heavy bottomed frying pan or indeed any flat surface that can be heated.

Ingredients.

• 225g of self-raising flour, or 225g plain flour and 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 pinch of salt
• 100g of butter -   plus extra for cooking 
• 50g of caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
• 50g of currants
• 1 tspn mixed spice
• 1 egg beaten with 3 tbsp milk

Add the salt to the flour in a large bowl and mix, rub in the butter until well mixed and add the sugar and fruit. Mix in the egg mixture to a firm dough consistency.

Roll out the mixture to 5mm and cut out rounds with a pastry cutter.

Heat your pan until medium hot and brush with butter, cook your little Welsh cakes for approx 3-4 minutes each side until golden brown.

Sprinkle with caster sugar and try not to eat the lot in one go! 

Toad In The Hole

It's cold here in Wales at the moment and mostly our thoughts turn to comfort food. Toad in the hole is one of those seemingly only winter dishes that I always abandon once the summer arrives and it's been so cold for a while now that we are thinking of hibernating until March. This dish is always a winner and one mention of it means that I just have to make it sooner rather than later.

 Ingredients

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

4/6/8 Sausages

150g Plain Flour

Pinch Salt

3 Eggs

200mls Milk

50mls Water

Preheat oven to 220c/ gas mark 7

Place oil and sausages into roasting pan ( put sausages where you would like them to be once cooked as they are going to set in the batter ) and place in hot oven for ten minutes. While sausages are cooking prepare your batter. 

In a large bowl, measure the flour and salt, put in the eggs, milk and water and beat well for 5 minutes until you have a nice creamy lump free consistency.

Once the sausages have cooked for 10 minutes, take the pan out from the oven and pour in the batter to cover, put the pan back in the oven carefully and leave well alone for 30 minutes. Do not open the oven door for a peek!! 

I would normally use a lot more sausages but this was not for me ( for one person ) and they were speciality sausages, you could easily get 8 sausages into this mix and this batter mixture would easily feed a family of 4 .

Served with little new potatoes, green beans and loads of gravy, this went down rather well.

Delia Smith's Quick Cheese Sauce

 This is a failsafe quick cheese sauce which is perfect for my fish pie ( next blog ) or cauliflower cheese. I don't think it's ever gone wrong and it takes five whole minutes to make - in one saucepan - it couldn't be easier.

Ingredients

570mls Milk

25gm plain flour

50g butter

1 teaspoon English mustard powder

75g grated strong cheddar cheese

45g grated Parmesan cheese ( I used Gruyere )

salt and pepper

Place milk, butter, cheese and mustard powder into a saucepan and whisk over a low heat until thickened, leave on a very low heat for five minutes to cook out the flour. Add in the cheese until all melted ...Done!! 

Spaghetti Bolognese Frittata

 I started making this many years ago with a Gino D'Campo recipe but honestly it doesn't need a recipe at all really. Having previously cooked for a large family , I'm afraid that my quantity levels are all over the place - needless to say after a spag bol this week I had loads left over. Now, sometimes I love another spag bol dinner but I fancied mixing it up a bit and remembered when I used to make this.

I simply combined my meat sauce and left over spaghetti ( equal quantities ), 4 large beaten free range eggs, 2oz grated parmesan cheese into a nice mixture, poured it into a large buttered baking dish, sprinkled with chopped flat leaf parsely and put it in the oven for 45 minutes at gas mark 4 , 160c/350f.

Before:

After :

This is such an easy fix to leftover sauce and spaghetti, served with some crunchy salad and a cold beer it was very well received. 

Breadmaker Guinness and Cheese Bread

 I first made this recipe way back in 2011 and blogged the recipe back then, it's a fabulous recipe and makes the most amazingly tasty loaf. However , I really wanted to try this in a breadmaker as I was feeling really quite lazy. I couldn't find a recipe which - I think - comes close to this one so I just had to bite the bullet and give the original recipe a go in my bread machine....here goes:

I used my original recipe and the original quantities ( bit of a mistake there ) so I'll post the revised quantities for future attempts.

Ingredients

2 Teaspoons demerara sugar ( but anything will do here )

1 Teaspoon Dried Yeast

225mls Dark Beer ( I used Guinness )

420gms Strong White Bread Flour

100gms Grated Strong Cheddar Cheese

35gms Grated Parmesan

25gms Powdered Milk

1 Teaspoon Salt

1 Teaspoon Mustard Powder

1 Beaten Free range Egg

Place the Guinness and egg into the pan, add everything else at will and turn on bread machine to standard large loaf -  

Now, I came a little unstuck here as the original recipe was twice the quantity and boy this was a huge amount of dough, my poor breadmaker just could not cope with the sheer volume of ingredients so at this point I pulled the mixture out of the breadmaker and gave it a good mix by hand before putting it back into the machine and started it from the beginning - phew!

It seemed ok now so I left it to do its thing - but - Oh man..... it grew and grew and by the end of the cycle it had burst out of the machine.

I really wish that I had photographed it at this point for comedic value alone, the house smelled amazing but I had a Quatermass experiment of a loaf to deal with. I wrestled the loaf free from the pan and as it seemed a little soft on the top ( where it had burst free ) I put it in a hot oven for ten minutes.

It was the ugliest thing I've ever created but curiously it tasted ok, I served the ugly top bit toasted with some soup ( very rustic ) and wrapped up the now quite tidy looking loaf for another day.

This is the thing, the loaf that cooked in the pan without its freedom is astonishingly good, the texture is really quite light and not stodgy at all, toasted with butter it's sheer heaven.

I have halved the old quantities and would make this in a heartbeat as it's so good, so good I can't keep my hands off it!!

Original picture here for the free form loaf 

Not the best picture of experimental loaf but I have swiped the ugly top off so that it at least resembles a normal loaf.

Going to make a vegan one of these at the weekend for Sam, lets see how that goes....

Storecupboard Minestrone

 I had one of those mornings where I couldn't for the life of me decide what to cook for dinner this evening. I opened the fridge and it was there staring me in the face ...... all ( pretty much all ) the necessary essential parts of minestrone ish

Now, this was never going to be an authentic recipe but most of the component parts were there so off we went.

Ingredients

2 Large onions chopped

4 Carrots sliced

4 Cloves garlic chopped

4 Sticks Celery chopped

1 400g tin tomatoes

Half  a tube of tomato puree

1 Tablespoon dried Oregano

1 Tablespoon dried Marjoram

1 Tablespoon dried Parsley

1 400g tin butter beans / can use pasta

2 Vegetable stock cubes or pots

3 Bay leaves

Pepper to taste

Now, at this stage I normally fry all the veggies in olive oil and add to the stock pot but I just flung ( carefully of course ) the whole lot into my slow cooker, gave it a good stir and went out for the day.

I love these heritage carrots, the yellow ones are so sweet. Anyway, six hours later, I gave it a good stir and it was alarmingly good, it didn't need any more salt and had thickened up to a lovely stew consistency. Served with garlic bread it was the perfect supper for a snowy night.

Traditional Corned Beef and Potato Pie

I think that this is a recipe which comes from all over the UK, there seems to be no part of the country which doesn't have it's own take on this pie. I think that simple is best here so I make mine with few additions and it always comes out just lovely.

Now you could make your own pastry for this of course, you could make all shortcrust pastry,  but having made it a few times I find that the combination of shortcrust on the bottom and puff on the top makes for a lovely golden fluffy pie.

You can combine the corned beef and potato into a smooth mushy kind of consistency but I like to chop the corned beef into chunks and combine gently allowing for a little more texture.

Ingredients

1 Roll ready made shortcrust pastry

1 Roll ready made puff pastry

1 Tin corned beef

1 Kilo mashed potatoes

1 Large onion sliced and fried until golden but not brown

1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard

Salt and Pepper to taste

1 Beaten egg to glaze

Preheat the oven to 170c/340f Gas mark 3 

If using pre bought pastry, leave out of the fridge for 30 minutes or so to make sure that it is pliable enough to roll out easily, once rolled out line your greased pie dish/tin with the shortcrust pastry. In a large bowl, combine the mashed potato, onion and chopped corned beef, salt and pepper, brush the pastry case with the mustard and pile the filling into your case.

Roll out the puff pastry top and after a little egg wash around the bottom case, lay the puff pastry on top of your pie. Seal the edges and brush with egg wash, cut a couple of little slits into the top of the pie and bake in the oven for approx 45 minutes - turning around half way through the cooking time.

Now this looks a little rustic, but I know someone who likes all the crispy pastry edges so I didn't trim neatly - lovely

 

Learning To Sourdough

 Learning how to make sourdough bread has long been on my to do list as I just love the taste and texture of it. I've bought it many times but there is nowhere locally that I can buy this wonderful bread and so I end up buying it at artisan bakers whilst out and about. Nothing wrong with that but it's usually rather expensive and I just had to get to grips with actually making it.

I had no idea how to start this sourdough journey and so ended up scrolling endlessly through recipes and blogs and finally stumbled upon a fabulous Youtube tutorial which broke down the whole process into manageable chunks - 

- Thank you so much to Culinary Exploration on Youtube for making this so doable !! 

So many videos but it was easy to find one that I could follow and I could stop it at each stage to catch up etc. It does take some getting used to as it's a world away from usual bread making, the taste at the end of the day is worth it but.....this is a summer exploit for me as my kitchen is on the whole really quite cool and I have struggled to make this work in such a cold kitchen.

Here is a link to this amazing blog, I really haven't found anything that touches this as a complete newcomer, come the summer I'll be back making sourdough for sure.

Culinary Exploration the Blog

Greek Produce

 Coming from a country where - certainly in my area- so much fresh produce seems to be less than fresh and pretty much always wrapped to the enth degree in plastic, I'm always amazed by fresh produce markets on my travels. 

Travelling through Greece for the last few years it does my heart good to come across the fruit and veg markets where the smell is divine. I took this photo for Sam whilst on holiday last year to Kefalonia. As a committed vegan, so much of his diet relies on good fruit and veg and while he lives in an area with much more to offer than me, it's still a roll of the dice how fresh it really is. 

You can almost smell the tomatoes :) 

This lovely market was just along the waterfront at Argostoli by the Kefalonia sign, I could barely walk past it without buying something.

Vegan Bread Pudding

 I made a lovely traditional ( kind of ) bread pudding a couple of weeks ago and wanted to treat Sam - vegan for the last five years - to as best a vegan bread pudding that I could possibly knock up for him. This shouldn't have been difficult as bread pudding has always been one of those dishes that relies on pretty much whatever you happen to have in the kitchen at that time. 

I don't think that I've ever made it the same way twice honestly and its variously luxurious or wartime ration like depending on the ingredients available. 

It was quite interesting to judge this recipe as I made a fully non vegan recipe for bread pudding on the same day, it would be handy to trial them side by side.

Ingredients

• 500 g  / 17½ oz wholemeal (whole wheat) bread
• 600 ml  plant based milk
• 1 Tbspn mixed spice
• ½ Tbspn ground cinnamon (or more mixed spice)
• 500 g   mixed dried fruit e.g. sultanas, raisins, candied citrus peel
• zest of 1 unwaxed/organic lemon
• zest of 1 unwaxed/organic orange
• 50 ml / ¼ cup neutral-flavoured oil ( I used light olive oil ) 
• 100 g / ½ cup unrefined ('golden') caster sugar or coconut sugar
• 2 Tbspn Demerara sugar
• 
  

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan) / 350F / Gas Mark 4

In a large bowl break up the bread and pour in the milk, add spices and fruit and leave until the bread has broken down - about 30 minutes.

Add lemon and orange zest, oil and sugar to the mix ( I added the juice of the lemon and orange at this stage too ), give it all a good stir and add to a 20cm / 8 inch square lined tin. Sprinkle with the demerara sugar - this gives the pudding a lovely crunch.

Bake for approx 1 1/2 hours or until a skewer comes out clean from the centre of the pudding. Leave to cool - if you can , the temptation to try this too soon is overwhelming.

This was absolutely delicious and very well received by Sam - yum !! It didn't last long I think.

It didn't taste as luxurious as the non vegan pudding but it was still a fabulous recipe and I'll deffo make it again.