Thai Chick Pea Burgers

After the trouble of yesterday, the gremlins seem to have left and these are looking and tasting really good.

I love Thai flavours, I love hummus and chick pea based things and I love Satay, so this is a marriage made in heaven for me.

My daughter and her fiancé are coming over for dinner and I found this recipe that we wrote together when she was about 10, I think it was for cookery at school, it seemed to be ripe for resurrection and a revamp.  I love the way embellished it with hearts, flowers and boobies!  She might die of embarrassment if she sees it!

I didn't use the egg, we are short of eggs, the chooks are slowing down a lot now, I am going through a phase of leaving things out, rather than adding things in and whilst eggs do bind things together, this is a soft burger and without it it is vegan, which might make this a handy recipe if it passes testing.

Instead of curry paste, I use my favourite red thai curry paste.

Other changes were to grate the courgette as well as the carrot, why make a knife dirty when you already have a grater in your hand?  The chickpeas when pulped seamed like they might be a uniform so I opened another tin of chick peas and put a handful of whole one in, some of which got a bit mashed as I kneaded the mixture together with my hands.

There was a small amount of mix left over so I made a small patty which we tested and was delicious, so I am hopeful for this evening...

So what should I do to go with these?

Fig Frangipan Tarts

You know how you see things on telly and you think, I will try that out, well this was one of those.

I went for a sweet crust pastry as I was aiming for a really crisp almost biscuit like result.

I baked the pastry blind, but instead of trimming before baking like I usually would I followed Mary Berry and tried to trim after baking.  I don't remember what she did, did she saw with a serrated knife, she could not have done what I did because I got crumbs everywhere.

The frangipan with pistachio seemed fine, and I put a slice of fig on top to be pretty.  The fig does look really nice, in that the seeds really pop against the red of the fruit, but... the fig started to catch and so I took them out, they looked a bit soft so I turned the oven down and oput them back in and with all the tooing and froing the frangipan shrank. 

The pastry was good, but the frangipan was not sweet enough and was too oily, I did equal parts egg, sugar, almonds and butter next time, more sugar and less butter... then again cooking at the wrong temperature might have made more oil come out of the almonds.. even so it wasn't that sweet.

The fig was pretty but there wasn't enough to give flavour, perhaps next time, fig on the side is the way to go.  Raw or maybe baked with a little cinnamon and honey.  Perhaps make it even more simple and have the Greek yoghurt with honey and pistachios that I have used on my honey cake in the past.

Things don't go to plan sometimes, there is no shame in that. 

Does anyone have any tips on trimming cooked pastry?

Left over pastry

A couple of days ago I made my upside down beetroot pie, and it uses a small amount of puff pastry, and so I had some left over.

So my daughter is coming over for supper tomorrow and I thought we would be a little indulgent, hazelnut palmiers and apple plaits.

Palmiers are simplicity themselves, just roll out pastry, brush with egg to stick the ingredients, throw on all sorts of good things, hazelnuts, brown sugar, dried fruit whatever takes your fancy roll up from both sides to meet in the middle and then slice up and lay slices on a baking tin glaze and bake.

I used chopped roasted hazelnuts and my home made vanilla sugar as my filling.

Mine are particularly small and dainty, but you can make these a lot bigger.

The apple plaits are not much more difficult, the filling is a compote that I made a while ago from the Egremont russet apples in our garden, we have been having it in a varity of forms, with yoghurt for breakfast has been good, but it is getting a little old now, and we were not going to finish it in time, so I used it all up with the left over pastry to make my plaits.  They are glued and glazed with beaten egg and sprinkled with vanilla sugar.

This is my favourite type of recycling, delicious food and next to no work.
 

When it is time to serve, I will whip of the cling and warm them up in the oven...  And serve with something yummy, ice cream, cream, boozy whipped cream, what do you think?

Sour Dough Bread

I love sour dough bread and it has been ages since we had any.  Autumn is here and my sour dough starter has been in the fridge for ages, so I got it out, warmed it up and gave it a feed, as if by magic it just sprang back into life again.

Sough dough starter is a SCOBY a "Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast" before refrigeration and sanitation,it was impossible to keep yeast as it would always get infected with something, so rather than fight it, the SCOBY works with nature, by having a bacteria and a yeast that support each other and prevent any other organisms getting a foot hold.  The bacteria and yeast are natural bacteria and yeast that were floating around in my kitchen when I started my SCOBY.  The bacteria are a type of Lacto Bacilli the things that make milk turn into yoghurt and they add a sourness to the dough, the amount of sourness depends a bit on how much of the liquid component (hootch) get added to the dough, you can make bread that is barely perceptible sourness or bread that is noticeably sour.

In my book there is no right or wrong, bread should be whatever you want.  Or whatever comes out.  With time and experience you start to know how to change the bread to make it to your taste.  You can make the flavour mild or strong, you can have the crust soft, chewy, brittle, crispy, the bread can have different levels of air in it, you can have big holes, small holes, no holes.  Then there are lots of flours and combinations to do as well.

Things I play with are :-

• The amount of hootch the age of fermentation of the starter that is added
• The wetness of the dough, different flours absorb the water different amounts, the wetness of the dough are a better guide than the amount of water you add.
• The proving temperature
• The proving time (proving at low temperate eg overnight give more sourness)
• The number of provings, you don't have to knockback and prove a second time
• Moisture in the oven affects the crust, people add ice cubes in a tray because they are safer to chuck in than risking burning on the racks using a jug.

Here is my loaf

 and here is my sour dough starter

Beetroot upside down pie 

(with new potatoes and salad)

When I was a kid the only time I ever had beetroot was out of a jar and did I miss out or what.

This is an upside down pie, essentially a filling with a puff pastry top which is then inverted and cooked a second time. Okay you could be posh and call it a kind of tarte tartin

The pie filling is simple, beetroots, onions, shallots, a dash of balsamic, chilli, a pinch of sugar,salt and pepper

Beets go really well with onions and shallots, they are both really sweet.
Beet go really well with chilli, they also go really well with horseradish and you get a great pink colour with them as well.

The onions and shallots are cooked until soft  with a little olive oil and the fresh cooked beetroot and other ingredients added.

They are then put in a lined tin and a pastry top put on a good egg glaze and into the oven.

Once baked is not enough, this pie is twice baked, so after coming out the oven it is turned over and left for the afternoon, (at room temperature with a net umbrella) come preparing dinner time, I put goats cheese on it and bake in the oven till golden.  I sliced a whole chevre blanc onto it, but you could crumble on or use less.

Pastry is not home made, puff pastry just seems too much hard work.  There is not that much pastry in it so calories be damned.

This incarnation has been slightly different, I cooked the onions at a lower slow heat with a lid on and they are more soft and a bit more juicy than on other times. I didn;t add any herbs, typically I would add sage and thyme, I backed off on the chilli a bit and whilst hot it was not over powering.

Normally when I get it out of the oven I turn it out right away, for some reason this time I didn't and you guessed it I got a bit of a soggy bottom, so for the second bake I put it on a rack so the hot air could get to it and it crisped up fine. The day was saved!

One of the best things about this dish is that the other half will make a gorgeous lunch.

Where to go from here:

Pastry, how about a Charlotte? bread an butter crust.

Cheese, perhaps put some cheese on the side instead of on top blue cheese would go well.

Fillings:
Artichoke and gruyere?
Celariac and parsnip?
Apple and cheddar?

...  and the left over pastry didn't go to waste.

Roasted Stuffed Mushrooms with Stilton

What a great success this was, we have done variations on this many times in the past but, this time was significantly different on several counts.

Typically in the past we have had a filling made to thick paste like consistency with breadcrumbs and soft cheese which is packed back on top of a big mushroom, the whole thing is then roasted in a bath of red wine.

This time was a move away from our traditional recipe.

No garlic, hardly any breadcrumbs and no soft cheese.

So what went in and how did it go together.

The big caps have their stalks pulled out
The stalks and some other mushrooms are chopped up, as are some shallots, we used the fancy long ones and a manky old leek from the back of the fridge.

The leek and shallot went in first with a little butter and when they were starting to cook, added the mushrooms. 

A little seasoning, salt, black pepper and some dried Provençal herb mix.

Some hand chopped walnuts, they were chunky but not huge and when they were lightly roasted some red wine went in.

A little bread crumb just to mop up the loose fluid.

A large dish was buttered and the caps placed in and a little salt and pepper ground on, the filling then spooned on and built up on each of the caps.

To finish off a small amount of crumbled Stilton when in the middle
and some wine poured into the dish as a "bain au vin"

Baking was longer than usual, at around 175c probably about an hour.


The result was really good, the shallots had caramelised, the texture mix of the steak like mushroom flesh and the crunch of the walnuts and the flavour of the leeks and shallots was fantastic.

On the downside there were a few bits over caramelised, unlike previous incarnations the "bain au vin" had dried out to nothing and not provided a wet liquor to dunk with.

The wine we used was a light red, a home made merlot left over from a few days before. 

Things, with hindsight, might have been better.

The first thing to do differently next time would be to deglaze the dish and call it a red wine reduction liquor, this has been intense in past cookings and is a lovely tart dip for a mouthful of mushroom, maybe get a bit of shallot into it, the deglazed shallot pan could have gone in to the bain au vin.

Garlic is fantastic with mushrooms, but this time there was none and it was not a bad thing, perhaps we should be less relient on always adding garlic to mushroom "because they go so well together" as sometimes, and this is one of them, mushrooms can be great without garlic.

The Stilton was great, there were bite where we had none and bits where there was quite a lot, where there was quite  lot, there was a bit of drowning going on, maybe we should be brave an leave out the Stilton, like we have with the garlic, simplicity is often the path to great food, we shouldn't be scared of taking things out.

Finally, the accompaniments, we had a great salad, but it is the beginning of Autumn, it has been unseasonally warm.  So what about next time.  Ideas are mashed potato, perhaps croquettes or duchess, maybe a mash and root veg mix, potato and celariac or potato and swede are very good. Or even bubble and squeak. This is big dish with big flavours the mash should balance/extend these.

But what about some veg to go with it?