FRIDGE BOTTOM QUICHE (or a free lunch)

Quiche is one of my favourite ways  of using up leftovers.  We have enjoyed many a unique quiche over the years, each one dependant on what’s lurking in the depths of the fridge or freezer and in fact it’s almost worth keeping a pack of pack of pastry in just for the purpose of making a fridge quiche when it’s the right time.

Enjoy with a nice glass of chilled rosé or white wine, wrung out of the bag in the wine box before you put it into the recycling.  Toast the good health of yourself and your friends and feel happy and virtuous that you have done your bit to not waste food and therefore, in your own small way, to save the planet.

I’m linking this post to the “No waste food challenge” organised by Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary and hosted this month by  Tracy of “It’s not easy being greedy” blog.  You can see the details here.

Ingredients

1 pack of ready made, ready rolled puff pastry, oblong or round

2 tblsp oil or a large knob of butter

2 rather tired leeks

2 slices of ham, dried edges trimmed off

the noggle end of a St Maure goat’s cheese

half a pack of well scary Camembert

1 rather squidgy tomato, mouldy bits cut off

3 eggs

a few blobs of the cream that died the other day (or crème fraîche)

milk (skimmed or full cream)

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C.  Unroll the pastry and line a suitable flan tin, patching up as necessary.

Heat the oil or butter in a frying pan.  Trim the leeks to remove any grotty bits and slice thinly.  Cook in the pan on medium heat until softened, not brown and crunchy.

Arrange the leeks over the pastry base.  Add slices of ham and cheese, add slices of tomato last.

Put the eggs into a jug and beat.  Add your cream or crème fraîche and enough milk to make up to 350ml, season with pepper and whisk together.  (There is usually enough salt in the ham for our taste but add salt as well if you like.)  Pour gently over the filling and bake for 25-30 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is almost completely set.  A slight wobble in the middle is fine.

Serve warm with a salad made from rescued wrinkly lettuce, any bits of tomato and cucumber you can find and maybe that one last piece of beetroot.

Serves 4, for free, or almost.

BLUEBERRY AND WHITE CHOCOLATE MINI MUFFINS

I am quite a fan of mini muffins.  They are barely more than a single mouthful in size and consequently as a treat they are far less daunting a prospect than regular muffins.  I sometimes find that just one regular muffin is quite filling, and could never eat more than one, whereas mini muffins are so easy to eat that one is never enough – and I don’t feel at all greedy in eating a second or even a third.

I made these soon after our return to France for what was going to be quite a long stay.  I knew I would be leaving our UK kitchen for several weeks so I had a quick look around for anything that would soon need using up and that I could take with me.  Among the various bits and bobs I found a packet of white chocolate chips in the cupboard and half a pack of fresh blueberries in the fridge.

I used my old faithful recipe which I have used before and in no time at all rustled up just one tray of mini muffins.  Most muffins have to be eaten on the same day as baking but these mini versions kept well for three days in a cake tin.  Which means I had three days to eat the lot as Nick is not all that keen on muffins……!!

This month’s We Should Cocoa Challenge, organised by Choclette of Tin and Thyme is “anything goes”.

The No Waste Food Challenge is a monthly event of Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary which celebrates the using up of all food rather than throwing it out.

Ingredients

150 g plain flour

50g caster sugar

1 tsp baking powder

a pinch of salt

1 egg, beaten

50g butter, melted and cooled

100 ml milk

75 g blueberries

75 g white chocolate chips

Method

Preheat the oven to 200º C (180º fan) and butter a 24 hole mini muffin tin.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large bowl.

Add the butter, egg and milk and mix together quickly.  Add the fruit and chocolate and mix in as briefly as possible, avoiding over-mixing, as long as there are no dry bits of flour.

Divide the mixture between the muffin holes.  (I use a mini ice cream scoop to get the amounts reasonable even.)  Bake for 12 - 15 minutes until risen and golden.

Cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out to cool on a wire rack.

Makes 24.

YORKSHIRE CURD TART (with cranberries)

I have not  made any New Year Resolutions this year.  It has finally dawned on me that setting myself up for failure and disappointment every year is a waste of energy and does no good at all.  The only thing I thought I would try to do is to fully grasp the practise of not wasting food, or at least wasting as little as possible.  This is not so much a resolution (therefore doomed to failure) as an expansion of current housekeeping methods.  Which brings me to a little conundrum that occurred last week. 

Our friends Tim and Pauline introduced us to the delights of the above product, which is similar to a clotted cream, very naughty and perfectly delicious on puddings.  So every time we come to France it’s one of the basic items in our first shopping basket.

So we were a little put out when, on opening the jar, we found that it had curdled and looked nowhere near as appealing to dollop on our puds as it should have done. ( The jar on the right is the offending product, the jar on the left is a fresh one we bought to replace it.)

It was our fault, of course.  The little fridge in our little French kitchen was the cheapest we could get when we equipped the place and the temperature control is not the most effective to say the least.  Somehow the fridge had been set to be extra cold and we think this caused the crème fraîche to split.

So I looked at it and thought that it looked like curds and whey.  Wondering what on earth I could do with it, I thought of a Yorkshire curd tart, something I haven’t eaten for an awfully long time, and have certainly never made.  Partly because you can’t buy curds in our local supermarkets, or at least, none that I have ever seen.

I found several recipes on the net but most of them had instructions for manufacturing your own curds from milk and lemon juice.  In the end I found one that used real curd cheese but for tarlets.  I followed the recipe but made it into one large tart instead, using the Mary Berry pastry recipe from my frangipane mince pies!

The other change I made was that I didn’t have any currants (I have never seen currants in a French supermarket) but I did have a few dried cranberries, the leftovers purchased for some long forgotten recipe, lurking at the back of the cupboard and slightly past their sell-by date. 

The tart turned out to be delicious.  We had invited our friends Tim and Pauline round and, as former residents of Yorkshire, they declared that it was fairly authentic in both flavour and appearance compared to a proper Yorkshire curd tart.  Except for the cranberries of course.

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

Also to the “no waste food challenge” organised by Elizabeth of Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary.  This monthly challenge is devoted to making us all think about how to use food in a way that avoids waste and you can see the details here.

So here’s how I made my Yorkshire curd tart ~ you can see the original recipe that I followed loosely here.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

200g plain flour

100g cold butter, cubed

25g icing sugar

1 egg, beaten

For the filling:

250g curd cheese

2 eggs, beaten

75g caster sugar

the finely grated zest of 1 lemon

70g dried cranberries

1 tblsp brandy (an ingredient I was not expecting to find in a curd tart)

freshly grated nutmetg

Method

Make the pastry in a food processor, using just the egg to bind it.  Chill in the fridge while you make the filling

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a 23cm (approx) flan dish or tin.

Beat the cheese in a medium bowl to soften it a little.  Add the eggs, sugar, lemon zest and brandy and beat together.  Add the cranberries and mix well.

Roll out the pastry to line the flan dish or tin.  Spoon the filling into the pastry and level the top.  Grate a little fresh nutmeg on top.

Bake for 40-50 minutes until lightly browned and almost completely set, but check after 35 minutes. 

Cool in the dish and dust with icing sugar if you like.  Serve warm or cold with cream or crème fraîche.

Serves 6-8.

REDCURRANT, ROSE AND RASPBERRY BUNDT CAKE

Bundt cakes, or rather, the tins you make them in, fascinate me.  You can get Bundt tins in such an enormous variety of shapes and designs that virtually anything is possible when it comes to fancy cakes.  If you want to make a cake shaped like a steam train, or a Christmas tree, there is a Bundt tin for it.  No longer is it necessary to carve up cakes and glue them back together in the shape you want.

The thing that has always puzzled me is what recipe to use.  I wondered if you could bake any recipe in a Bundt tin and it would turn out right.  I suspect not.  Then I stumbled upon a blog called Dolly Bakes written by Rachel, who makes all kinds and flavours of Bundt cakes and gives a basic, completely adaptable recipe that she says works every time.

It certainly worked for me when I was deciding what to do with the few redcurrants I had left over from making jam, jelly and relish.

I use a recipe from Delia online for redcurrant jelly, which is incredibly quick and easy and works really well.  You can see it here.

I had so many redcurrants this year that I decided to branch out and make strawberry and redcurrant jam.  It’s a recipe I had not tried before but the jam is delicious.  You can see the recipe here.

I used just a few redcurrants for this relish which is absolutely gorgeous.  There are still some redcurrants to ripen on the bush and with those I think I will make some more of this.  You can see the recipe here.

So that just left a handful of redcurrants from my harvest so I decided to mix them with strawberries and make a cake.  Then I noticed that I had used all the strawberries so I used a few raspberries instead!

 

I used a traditional Gugelhupf cake silicone mould that I got recently and very reasonably from Sarah at Silicone Moulds.  I still feel slightly nervous about using silicone.  Putting cake mixture into something so wobbly and then into a hot oven just somehow seems wrong!  But it worked perfectly.  I expect that sooner or later I will get used to silicone and learn to trust it!

I greased and floured the mould and the cake turned out fine with hardly a crumb left behind stuck to the mould.  But the shape was not as I expected.  The finished cake was not the dome shape of the mould but flatter.  I suppose logically this makes sense.  If you put that amount of cake mixture into a flexible object the weight of it is bound to make it sag or flatten.  I don’t know if there is a way round this, but the cake looked nice anyway.

In fact, not only did it look nice, it tasted lovely.  Here’s the link to the recipe on Rachel’s blog:

http://www.dollybakes.co.uk/2012/10/BuildaBundt28.html

I followed the recipe exactly except for the following adaptations:

I substituted strawberry yoghurt for the plain yoghurt

I substituted 2tsp rose water for the 1tsp vanilla

I added 100g of mixed raspberries and redcurrants.

The cake was huge, cut easily into thick slices and had a lovely crumb.  It would be great for a party, special event or cake stall as it looks so good and would probably serve 20 people.  It was still perfect three days later when we had the last slice made into a raspberry trifle.  So a great big “thank you” to Rachel for a great recipe that I shall no doubt be using over and over again.

As I used my few remaining redcurrants and a handful of slightly tired raspberries I am entering this cake into Kate of Turquoise Lemons “no waste” food challenge, currently hosted by Elizabeth of Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary.  You can see the details here.

Also, because it is full of the tastes of summer, I am also linking it to Rachel’s own Calendar Cakes challenge on her blog Dolly Bakes.  You can see the details here.

SMOKED HADDOCK, PRAWN AND SPINACH TART

We are on a mission to use up the contents of our freezer at the moment.

I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe it’s the time of year when we instinctively want to make space for the glut of home-grown vegetables due to arrive in the next few weeks.  Sadly there is not much sign of that happening at the moment.

Our runner beans didn’t germinate and never came up.  We replaced them with some bought climbing green bean plants but they haven’t grown any more at all, they just sit there sulking, waiting for the sun and warmth to perk them up.

We planted out two rows of peas and days later they were nibbled down to stalks by either rabbits or pigeons.  We replaced them last weekend and in spite of taking reasonable precautions the same thing has happened again.  I think this is the point where I admit defeat and resign myself to buying our peas and beans in Sainsbury’s this year.  At least the broad beans are looking promising and the tomato plants are flowering in the greenhouse.

Anyway, we are gradually working our way through the contents of the freezer and pulling out UFO’s (unidentified frozen objects) on a daily basis.  Yesterday I found a bag containing some smoked haddock, probably not enough to do much with, so I fished out a small pack of frozen raw prawns as well.  In the fridge there was half a bag of spinach, looking slightly past its best, and part of a bag of the highly despised ready grated parmesan cheese (brought back from our last visit to France).  So I went hunting for a recipe to do something with them.

I bought “The Art of the Tart” in a charity shop a few years ago and confess I have barely opened it.  But in it I found a recipe using smoked haddock and watercress that looked interesting – and easily adaptable for the ingredients I wanted to use.

The author describes this as an “everyday tart”.  I presume this is because the filling is made like a white sauce, rather than consisting of lots of eggs and cream.

My piece of smoked haddock had been in the freezer well beyond the time it should normally be kept frozen but it seemed absolutely fine when it was thawed.  The prawns were uncooked, peeled prawns so when they were thawed I cooked them in butter before adding to the tart.

I have to say, there was nothing particularly everyday about the finished tart.  It was absolutely delicious. 

We had ours with new potatoes and an assortment of veg, principally the remainder of the bag of spinach and the other bits and pieces lurking in the fridge.  But it was good enough to serve to guests and would make a lovely starter with some salad, or a nice lunch.  Definitely a recipe I will be using again.

I am entering the recipe into this month’s “No waste food challenge”, organised by Kate from Turquoise Lemons.  This month’s title is “freezer stash” and is presented  by Elizabeth’s Kitchen.  You can see the details here.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

6oz plain flour

2oz Trex or other white fat

1oz butter

For the filling:

250g smoked haddock, dyed or undyed

100g cooked, peeled prawns

300ml milk

1 tblsp plain flour

1 small onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 stick of celery, washed, trimmed and finely chopped

salt, pepper and nutmeg for seasoning

Flora Cuisine, or olive oil, or butter, for frying

a few handfuls of spinach, washed and roughly chopped

2 eggs, beaten

a sprinkling of parmesan cheese

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170° fan / gas mk 5.  Grease a 22cm / 9” flan tin or dish.

Make the pastry as usual.  Line the dish, prick the base with a fork, add baking parchment and baking beans and bake blind for 10 minutes.  Remove from the oven, remove the beans, brush the base with a little of the beaten egg and return to the oven for 5 more minutes.

Meanwhile, put the smoked haddock in a saucepan with the milk, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 10 minutes.  Remove from the heat.  Strain the fish and reserve the milk.  Remove the skin and any bones from the fish and flake into a bowl.  Set aside.

Heat the Flora, oil or butter in another medium saucepan and cook the onion and celery until softened.  Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes.  Add the reserved milk and heat gently, stirring, until the sauce has thickened.  Season with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg.  Remove from the heat.

Add the eggs, fish, prawns and spinach to the pan and stir until combined.  Spread the mixture into the pastry case, sprinkle with the parmesan cheese and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden brown.

Serve warm.

Serves 4-6 good portions.

(Apologies for the mixture of metric and imperial measurements.  I always make my pastry from scratch in ounces but follow recipes in grams.)

BANANA MUFFINS

A friend who lives a few doors away from us had a mishap with her Tesco delivery the other week.  She ordered five bananas and they delivered five bunches of bananas instead.  So she shared them out amongst her neighbours and I qualified for two bunches.

We ate a few but when we came to France for Easter there were still quite a lot of rapidly ripening bananas left so I brought them with me, thinking I would have more time to do something creative with them.

So I decided to make some banana muffins.  The recipe comes originally from a Weightwatchers cookbook that belongs to a work colleague – she gave me a copy of the recipe but I have never actually seen the book. 

It makes great muffins and they keep quite well for a day or two so there’s no urgency to eat them up on the day they are made.  You can of course freeze them but I don’t have a freezer here in my tiny French kitchen.

 

I made some full size muffins and a tray of mini muffins.  A whole muffin can be a bit too much at times, especially for visitors who might already have had their breakfast or lunch when you plonk a plate of muffins in front of them.  However, most people can’t resist a couple of mini muffins and they are gone in two bites so then they can manage a couple more !!

The brown sugar in the recipe gives them a lovely rich flavour and I always think that the next time I make them I will put in half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon – but then I usually forget.  I think it would be worth a try though.

Tea Time Treats is a monthly baking event put on by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked.  The theme for April is “fairy cakes, cupcakes and muffins” and is hosted by Kate – you can see the details here.  Banana muffins are just right for an afternoon in early spring, sitting by the wood burning stove and enjoying a cup of tea because it’s wet and chilly outside.  Which is what it is today !!

Using up my bananas also means my post qualifies to enter April’s No Waste Food Challenge, created by Kate of Turquoise Lemons.  This month the theme is “fruit” and is hosted by Elizabeth of Elizabeth’s Kitchen.

Ingredients

250g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp salt

1 egg

5 tblsp water

80g soft brown sugar

3 medium, very ripe bananas (peeled!)

4 tblsp corn oil (I used sunflower oil as I didn’t have corn oil)

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170°fan / gas mk 5.  Put muffin cases into a 12-hole muffin tin, or grease two 24-hole mini muffin tins, or do half of each.

Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt into a large bowl.

In another bowl, mash the bananas to a pulp.  Add the egg, water and sugar and beat until well combined.  Add the oil and stir well.

Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture and stir until just combined.

Divide the mixture between the muffin cases and bake until firm and springy.  The mini muffins will take 15-20 minutes and the full sized muffins 20-25 minutes.

Remove from the tin and cool on a rack. 

Makes 12 regular muffins, 40 mini muffins, or 6 regular and 20 mini muffins.  Each regular muffin is 3 Weightwatchers points – you will have to calculate the points value of the mini ones for yourself !!