HASSELBACK POTATOES

It’s several years since I cooked this recipe for potatoes.  I used to make them every couple of weeks then for some reason I completely forgot about them.  A TV clip about wildlife the other day reminded me of them ~ in this house we always refer to them as “armadillos”.

Now that I have remembered them we will probably go back to having them every couple of weeks!  They make a nice change from roast potatoes with the Sunday roast and also go well with casseroles and sausages.  The good thing is that the oven temperature isn’t critical so you can more or less cook them alongside anything else you have in the oven.

These potatoes do have slits in them, they just don’t show up in the picture.

This is another dish for which you don’t so much need a recipe as a guide to the concept.

You take as many potatoes as you need for the number of people you are serving and try to choose them fairly evenly sized.

Peel them and cut in half longways.  Put them cut side down on a chopping board and make vertical slits into each one, about ¼” apart, being careful not to cut all the way through.  Arrange them in a suitable roasting tin for the number of potatoes.

Brush each half with melted butter and season with salt and pepper.  Then carefully pour hot stock into the roasting tin.  Any stock will do and the quantity will depend on the number of potatoes and the size of the tin.  The stock should come about a third of the way up the potatoes ~ don’t drown them!

Bake at around 180°C / 160°fan, but a slightly higher or lower temperature will be fine to suit what else is in the oven.

At 180° they will be done in about 40-45 minutes, depending on the size of potatoes.  If you let the stock dry out they will be crisper than if you top it up, in which case they will be nice and chewy.  I like to top up just a little when the first stock has been absorbed.

They will be gluten free if you use Marigold stock powder or Kallo cubes.

CIDER AND ONION SOUP

This month’s Random Recipe selection turned up another of my charity shop finds – a book simply called “apples”.  This was slightly inconvenient as there were no apples left in the house, the last having been used for dessert as baked apples the night before.

Luckily when I flipped the pages the book opened at a recipe that uses cider, not actual apples and we happened to have a can of dry cider lurking in the cupboard.  Which is odd because neither of us drinks it ~ we must have got it in for a long since forgotten recipe for something.

Having spent ages slicing the onions by hand I then remembered that I could have used the slicing disc on my food processor, which would have saved a lot of time and sliced them thinner, which would have been better.  I shall try to remember that next time, as I will definitely be making this soup again.

It was an unusual soup and we enjoyed it.  It’s a good way to use up a glut of onions, whether home grown or in one of those large bags of onions that can be bought quite cheaply at the supermarket.

So thanks again to Dom of Bellau Kitchen for getting me to cook a recipe that I almost certainly never would have done otherwise, if it hadn’t been for his Random Recipe Challenge.  You can see the details here.  Also, having found the book on my shelf again, I shall explore its pages even further as it’s full of lovely recipes.

Ingredients

50g butter

3 tblsp olive oil

1kg onions, peeled and thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, sliced

500ml chicken or vegetable stock (can be gluten free if using GF stock cubes)

500ml medium dry cider

Method

Heat the butter and oil in a large saucepan until the butter has melted.

Add the onions and garlic and fry, uncovered, for 30 minutes, until the onions are soft and golden.

Add the cider and stock, bring back to the boil on high heat and boil for 4-5 minutes.

Season with salt and pepper and serve in warmed bowls with crusty bread.

Serves 6.

ORANGE AND BANANA YOGHURT CAKE

It’s the usual story.  A couple of very sad looking bananas in the fruit bowl and a guilty conscience about throwing them out.  Not that many years ago they would simply have gone in the bin and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.  Then I started putting them in the compost bin which made me feel very smug and virtuous.  More recently I have put them in the freezer for use later but the freezer has quite a few in it already.   So to ease my conscience I just had to bake something.

How’s that for an excuse to bake a cake ?!

I also found half a large tub of plain yoghurt in the fridge and a few oranges about to become slightly past their best at the bottom of the fruit bowl.  After a bit of research it appears that bananas and oranges do go together so I decided to go for it, using up most of my leftovers in one guilt-free bake.

Lulu gave me that “who do you think you’re kidding?” look.  She can be extremely perceptive at times and we both knew that as Nick absolutely loathes cooked bananas in any form, the only person available to eat the cake would be yours truly.  Sadly, dogs are not allowed cake in this house.

I adapted this recipe which is actually written for children.  It was indeed very easy and produced a huge quantity of mixture, far too much for my large loaf tin.  So I made some of it into six muffins.

The muffins were fabulous.  Nice and moist with a lovely light texture.  This could be my favourite recipe for banana muffins from now on.

The cake was lovely too.  The orange and banana combination worked very well and I would definitely do that again.  I drizzled some orange icing over it to glam it up a bit but with literally only me to eat it, it was beginning to be past its best after three days.  I had taken the precaution of freezing some thick slices but by the third day I couldn’t eat any more so a small piece went in the bin after all.  Still, at least I tried so my conscience is clear.

I am submitting the cake to this month’s Alphabakes Challenge, organised by Ros of The more than occasional baker and, this month, by Caroline of Caroline Makes.  This month the letter is “O” and you can see the details here.

Ingredients

120ml sunflower oil

225g light muscovado sugar

3 large eggs

225g self-raising flour

1tsp ground cinnamon

zest and juice of one orange

2 ripe bananas, peeled and mashed

150ml low fat natural yoghurt

2tbslp golden icing sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a 900g (2lb) loaf tin or use a greaseproof paper liner.

Put the eggs, oil and sugar into a large bowl and whisk together.

Sift in the flour and cinnamon and stir in gently, do not over mix.

Add the mashed bananas and orange zest and stir.

Spoon the mixture into your loaf tin to about two thirds full.  (Make muffins from any remaining mixture.)

Bake for about an hour, until risen and golden.  (Muffins will be done in 15-20 minutes.)

When cold, make some icing with the sifted icing sugar blended with enough orange juice to achieve the right runniness and drizzle over the cake.

Makes 6 muffins and one cake that will cut into 8-10 slices.

PORK AND LEEK LATTICE PIE

The leftover season  is coming up.  By which I mean that most of us spend the week after Christmas conjuring up interesting dishes that use up the leftovers.

A couple of weeks ago we had a family lunch and cooked a large joint of pork which resulted in plenty of leftover meat.  I find it difficult to immediately think of what to do with leftover pork.  I have a reasonable repertoire of dishes that make good use of leftover chicken, lamb or beef, but apart from a roast pork sandwich I was a rather stumped.  I Googled “leftover pork” and came across  this recipe for pork, leek and celeriac pie on the Sainsbury’s website.

Although the meat used in this recipe is pork I think it would work just as well with turkey or chicken.  You could even add a few pieces of leftover stuffing to the pie mixture.

Basically, you cook some root vegetables ~ I didn’t have any celeriac but used carrot, parsnip and swede ~ fry some onions and leeks, add flour and milk to make a sauce.  You add pieces of cooked pork, smother with the sauce and add a pastry lid.

The interesting bit for me was that I decided the time had come to once and for all get my act together and make a proper pastry lattice top.

By which I mean strips of pastry that weave under and over each other rather than just a layer going horizontally topped by a layer going vertically.

It was fiddly but worth it.  I started by sticking a strip all the way round the edge of the pie dish.  Then you add a few strips and start weaving.  There are several tutorials on YouTube that show you how to do it, including this one:

The pie was delicious.  Definitely tasty comfort food for this time of year and a good way to use up leftover pork and an assortment of vegetables.  And don’t panic if you can’t face making a proper woven lattice on the top ~ a plain pastry lid would be just as good.

Ingredients

3 carrots, 1 parsnip and a piece of swede, peeled and cut into 3cm cubes

1 onion, peeled and chopped

1 leek, washed and sliced

Flora Cuisine or olive oil for frying

shortcrust pastry made with 200g flour and 100g lard, Trex or similar

2 tblsp plain flour and 500ml milk to make a sauce

a handful of fresh parsley, chopped

250g (or however much you have) cubed leftover roast pork

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C / 180°fan / gas mk 6.

Put the vegetables into a pan of boiling water and cook until soft.

Meanwhile, heat the Flora Cuisine or oil in a deep frying pan or sauté pan and cook the onion and leek until soft.  Sprinkle on the flour and cook for  minute or so.  Add the milk and stir until you have a thick sauce.  Season with salt and pepper.

Put the cooked vegetables into a pie dish and scatter over the pork.  Sprinkle over the parsley and pour the sauce over the top to coat the whole mixture.

Make the pastry and roll out as usual.  Cut into strips about 2-3 cm wide.  Lay one strip (or two depending on how long they are) in a single layer along the rim of the dish.  Press two or three more strips onto the rim and begin weaving.  (See video).  Continue weaving until the whole pie is covered.

Brush with beaten egg and bake for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden and the filling bubbling.

Serve hot with more vegetables.

Serves 4.

STUFFED MARROW

A marrow is really just an overgrown courgette.  My father grew them in the greenhouse when I was a child, as did most of my uncles, and the neighbours.  A single marrow goes an awfully long way in terms of culinary use so using them up was a bit of a challenge.  (Giving them away was not an option as everybody in the village had more than enough already.)

My mum had three principal uses for a marrow; stuffed with sage and onion stuffing then baked and served with chops or sausages, in homemade chutney or, the family favourite, stuffed with a meaty filling, smothered in cheese sauce and baked.

Once my brother and I had flown the next, using up the marrows was more of a challenge for my mother and in autumn every visit I would come away with half a marrow whether I wanted it or not.  Which I did, of course.

My dad no longer grows anything at all so I had completely forgotten about stuffed marrow until I found myself looking at a modest sized specimen in the supermarket the other day.

To make stuffed marrow you don’t so much need a recipe as a guide to the concept.  Think beef lasagne, bolognaise and a large green vegetable and there you have it.  It’s almost a cross between a lasagne and a cauliflower cheese.

I always peel and pre-cook the marrow by putting thick, deseeded rings of it in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes.  Then I turn the heat off and leave it in the water to continue cooking while I make the filling and the sauce.

On this occasion I used 500g lean minced beef and made a kind of bolognaise/cottage pie concoction using onions, carrots, peppers, mushrooms, tomato purée, and enough stock to make it thick and not runny.

I placed the cooked marrow rings in a baking dish, spooned the meat mixture in and around them and poured a thick cheese sauce over the top.  I also added a few slices of goat’s cheese just because I had it in the fridge and it needed using up.

Bake at 180°fan for 20-30 minutes until browned and bubbling.  You can just have it by itself, or with salad or vegetables.   A dish like this would easily serve four hungry people.  It’s great comfort food for chilly autumn evenings.

WAR CAKE

The local Clandestine Cake Club meeting this month was themed “Vintage”.  I tried to imagine what “vintage” actually means and decided it was probably anything from the late 19th century until maybe the 1950’s.  I considered all the old family favourites such as battenburg, parkin and coffee cake but fancied making something unusual.  I spent a few minutes looking up “vintage cakes” on the internet and something called “war cake” cropped up several times.

A war cake is one made during war time when many cake ingredients might be too expensive or completely unavailable.  So almost all of the recipes use  shortening  (white fat) instead of butter or margarine, and no eggs, both of which would have been rationed during the second world war.  As food rationing was still in place when I was born, the idea of making a war cake appealed to me.

I also liked the idea of using what I had in, rather than going out to buy special ingredients.  Anyone trying to eke out their food rations would probably have used lard, which is basically rendered pig fat.  Amazingly, I stumbled across a recipe written by the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, for something called “pork cake”.  You can read about that here.  The recipe is in the cookbook she herself wrote called  “Some Favourite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor”. 

Now who would have thought that the Duchess of Windsor, whose occupation is described in Wikipedia as “socialite”, would have written a cookbook?  As a complete coincidence, last month we visited the château in the Loire where Edward and Mrs Simpson were married.  It was a charming and captivating place and I am currently posting lots of pictures of it here if you’re interested.

A common feature of war cake recipes is that the fruit is boiled before stirring in the flour and spices.  My Aunt Vera often made a boiled fruit cake and now I come to think of it, she also used lard and cold tea, so maybe that was a war cake of sorts.

I have to say the cake would not win any beauty contest and I was a bit nervous about taking it to the CCC !!  It had a crater in the middle, a mottled top and the fruit had obviously sunk to the bottom, but I tried to imagine how pleased anyone would be to see any kind of cake, especially a fruit cake, on the tea table during the first or second world war.  I sprinkled it with icing sugar in an attempt to improve its looks but nothing was able to disguise the craggy exterior.  I just hoped the interior looked better.

I placed the cake on the table with the others and was relieved that it was not the only plain cake on display.  There was an interesting collection including two ginger cakes, two battenburgs, one pineapple upside down, one classic chocolate and one nutmeg cake.  (I was surprised there was no Victoria sponge.)

I took the cake as Nick’s offering and for my own I took a caraway seed cake.  I was very pleased to find that by the end of the evening they had both been almost completely eaten up.  It appears that the introduction I gave for the war cake was so negative that everybody wanted to try a piece just to see if it was as bad as they expected !!  I managed to sneak the last slice home to have a proper taste myself.

In fact, it was lovely.  Very moist with a chewy texture and the flavours were delicious.  Several people asked me how it had been made.  So now I feel less embarrassed about it I am also offering this cake for this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, organised by Karen of Lavender and Lovage.  The currant theme is “dried fruit”.  Currant theme ~ get it ??!!  Anyway, you can read the details here. 

There were lots of different recipes for war cake that I could have used but I based mine on the one that seemed most likely to work and taste nice, which you can see here.

This is how I made my version of war cake.  You need to start several hours before you want to bake the cake, to allow the boiled fruit to cool.

200g light soft brown sugar

100g dark soft brown sugar

90g Trex vegetable fat (you could use white Flora or Cookeen)

230g mixed dried fruit

350ml water

200g plain flour

1½tsp mixed spice

1tsp bicarb

½tsp baking powder

½tsp salt

Method

Put the sugars, fat, fruit and water in a large saucepan.  Bring slowly to the boil and boil for three  minutes.  Leave to cool completely in the pan.

Preheat the oven to 150°C / 140° fan / gas mk2.  Grease and line a 22cm  round cake tin.

Put all the other ingredients in a bowl and whisk together.  Tip them into the cooled fruit mixture and stir well until there are no floury lumps and it is all fully combined.

Pour the mixture into the tin (it’s quite a runny batter) and bake for 1½ until it passes the skewer test.  It will still look wet on top.

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out carefully onto a wire rack.  Allow to cool completely before wrapping in foil and storing in an airtight tin.

Cook’s note ~ the cake is dense but fairly fragile as well as being sticky, so handle it carefully and as little as possible.

Cuts into about 12 slices.

GINGER AND CHOCOLATE CAKE

Nick and I have known each other for twenty years and our nineteenth wedding anniversary is next month.  So it still amazes me that every so often I find out something about him that I didn’t already know.

I know he’s not fond of cake.  This is a problem because I really enjoy making cake and now that I’m not going to work it’s an even bigger problem.  More time to bake cake but no more work colleagues to eat it !!  I end up timing my baking so that I can take a couple of slices to my appointment with the chiropodist or the dog’s hairdresser !!

This weekend I finally got to the bottom of Nick’s cake preferences.  It seems the only cakes he actually likes are rich fruit cakes, such as a Christmas cake, and the sticky type of cake you buy at the supermarket such as Jamaican ginger cake and the golden syrup and chocolate versions.  He especially dislikes any cake with fruit in it, particularly dried fruit.  (Unless it’s a Christmas cake.)

So there we are.  To be fair to him, he will always eat a slice of any cake, just to be polite, but one slice is enough, which leaves me with the rest of the cake.

This last weekend we had a double birthday, Dad on Sunday and Nick today.  It was Dad’s 85th so to mark the occasion we had a family lunch and I made a birthday cake for them both.  Dad will eat any cake (pretty much) so to make Nick happy I baked a ginger and chocolate Bundt cake.  I baked it to the recipe from the blog Dolly Bakes, which you can see here:

Sticky gingerbread Bundt cake.

This recipe suggests soaking the cake with a gingery syrup after it’s baked to make it extra sticky.  I didn’t do this but iced it with a chocolate icing instead.  You can find the recipe for the icing here:

Milk chocolate and toffee Bundt cake.

The cake recipe requires most of a bar of ginger chocolate and I was very tempted to eat the bit left over, but instead I used it in the icing along with the milk chocolate.  It was definitely worth the trouble of using the ginger chocolate I think. 

Having drizzled the chocolate icing on the cake I decorated it with some chopped crystallised ginger, edible gold stars and gold disco glitter. 

It was a fairly dense cake and although not very sticky without the ginger glaze, it was perfectly moist enough and the chocolate icing added some stickiness as it doesn’t quite set completely.  It had just the right balance of chocolate and ginger flavours, each being identifiable but neither being so strong as to wipe out the other. 

I have to say it looked gorgeous and tasted delicious.  Definitely worth doing again for a special birthday.  Or any excuse I can come up with !!

Cuts into 16 –20 slices.