Blackurrants.

Apparently we have blackcurrant bushes in the garden.
I wasn't aware of this fact until my brother and sister proudly brandished a large bowl of the things in my face this morning.
Despite my obviously marvellous and astounding talent of being able to eat a lime like an orange, I find blackurrants too sour, so whatever we decided to make with the haul, it had to involve copious amounts of sugar. (And so it did! A whole kilogram, in fact.)

After one initial boiling with just a bit of water, we strained them to remove all the skins and tiny stalks and possibly insects. The thicker stuff that came out was mixed with sugar and combined with cream to make a delightful fool.



The rest was boiled again with sugar and a few pieces of ginger. Whilst skimming, I took the time to enjoy the pyschadelic swirls of colour in the pot.

Okay, so it doesn't look too impressive, but trust me, it was.
Kind of. I'm clearly very easily amused.
Anyway, after the syrup was boiled I squeezed in one lime to make a blackurrant, ginger and lime cordial. It's scarily addictive in its un-watered down form - tart and sweet, slightly hot and tantalising from the ginger, and fragrant with lime. I needed a bigger lime hit however, so I trickled some cordial into the squeezed out lime and sucked it all back out. I love lime, did you know that? My teeth were squeaky and my stomach hurt after repeating this process many times, but it was worth it.


I think I also might have invented my own cocktail. This cordial + gin + tonic water = a good drink? I know nothing about cocktails, but the family seemed appreciative. (The kiddies, of course, got an alcohol free version.) Can I ™ that? I'm going to ™ that.

That's the non-alcoholic version. It was pretty cool the way this foamed right over the top of the glass, and it does make a beautiful - and entirely natural - colour. The parents christened this a Bloody Sophie, which they found hilarious. I most certainly did not, and would love and suggestions for an alternate name before that one sticks..

The last blackurrant related item were some cupcakes with blackcurranty icing. My sister is having a sleepover as I type and apparently children these days require sugary treats at ridiculous hours of the night. We ran out of cupcake cases, so I hedged my bets with some petits fours cases - adorable, but labour intensive. What would have been 12 normal cakes turned into roughly 45 mini ones.

Icing them was not fun, let me tell you. Here is a 10-year-old brother's hand to illustrate the size:

Cute, but annoying.

Gnocchi with veal ragu.

Gnocchi, in my opinion, is the best pasta ever. That's probably because I can take or leave spaghetti, orecchiette and farfalle but, hey - these little potato dumplings are fantastic. I adore the way they obediently float to the surface of the water when they're ready.

Usually we would just buy gnocchi ready-made, just like normal pasta, but also just like normal pasta it is very enjoyable to make from scratch.
In my madness, I didn't leave nearly enough time to make these properly and calmly, which is why they look exceptionally lumpen and misshapen. However, it matters not - a blanket of veal ragu and parmesan masked most of the dumpling's 'hunchback of Notre Dame' ugliness.

Gnocchi, of course, would be very easy to convert into a vegetarian meal. You could have them with a simple tomato sauce, or pan-fry in butter until crisp and melt over some mozzarella along with some basil and tiny fragrant tomatoes.

Toffee meringues, blackberries & cream.

There was a small cupful of egg whites in the freezer, and upon finding that there was nothing else interesting to bake with in the cupboards, decided to try my hand at something new.

Meringue, fruit and cream isn't an original combination by any stretch of the imagination, but I really had forgotten just what a good one it is.
I called these 'toffee' meringues because the muscavado sugar gives them a gorgeous buff colour and toffee-like taste. I was going to christen them 'burnt sugar meringues' but decided that sounded a bit too pretentious! So toffee it is.
If we must get technical about it, these are actually mini pavlovas - the addition of cornflour and vinegar makes them so. But, hey, does it really matter? They taste bloody brilliant.

Ingredients:
5 egg whites
200g brown granulated sugar
150g light or dark muscavado
2 tsp cornflour
splash of vanilla
1 tsp vinegar

How to do it:
Preheat oven to gas 4/180°C
1. Whisk the egg whites until they hold firm peaks.
2. Add the sugar slowly, spoonful by spoonful, beating after each addition.
3. Once the mix is thick and glossy, fold in the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla. Spoon onto a paper-lined baking sheet.
4. Stick in the oven, close the door and immediately turn the heat down to gas 2/150°C.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, then switch off the oven, leaving the meringues in there for about half an hour.
6. Sandwich with whipped cream and serve with a tumble of fruit alongside (blackberries for preference).



The home oven is completely unreliable, so I go by eye for everything which is not a great idea for something as exacting as meringues! But I didn't find them too scary - as long as they're baked at a low-ish temperature, you'll be fine. I started off at roughly gas 4, immediately went down lower, thought they weren't cooking so whacked the heat up a bit more, and then switched it off completely. They turned out lovely though! And as you can see, I had no greaseproof paper so used foil instead. It was absolutely fine, you just have to peel them off rather nimbly.
I also foolishly did this recipe by hand. Suffice to say, my arm just about dropped off.
Also, I think my mix wasn't quite stiff enough - I didn't even contemplate doing the bowl over head test! So it's probably best doing it in a machine.


If you're in the UK, look out for 'king' blackberries. I think they may be exclusive to M&S. They are absolutely stunning fruit. The normal variety are delicious, but these, these are something else.

I honestly haven't enjoyed a dessert as much as I enjoyed this - the meringues were crisp and chewy, the cream soft and thick, the berries slightly tart and staining everything a gorgeous purple.
My little heart is all aflutter with joy after the first attempt at these worked!

Basil, minestrone & veg box fury.

Mother is on the verge of cancelling the organic veg box we get every Wednesday.
I would believe her but for the fact she has said this every week for about 2 months now. Granted, it is rather annoying - it's summer and we're still getting rubbish potatoes, wizened carrots and massive smelly onions, just with the odd gnat-infested lettuce chucked in as a sign of 'summer' produce.
I know for a fact that not all organic produce is as crappy as this. We used to have an allotment, and the stuff we got out of there was 100 times better. It's just a theory, but we're almost certain they save the best produce for the market - everything was so fresh and crisp and enticing enough at their stall to make us sign up for the scheme in the first place.
That being said, we did get some utterly charming little broad beans this week, so maybe we'll hang on in there and see if it gets any better!
They were shelled by little hands (sibling no.4) and added to the minestrone.


Weirdly, I've never actually made this before, but I wasn't too worried since soup is one of the easiest things to cook.


I sauteed one large onion and three cloves of garlic and added two courgettes, a red pepper, two carrots and a handful of wholewheat spaghetti. On top of that went a whole load of water, one chicken and one mushroom stockcube, and a tin of tomatoes.
The ubiquitous squirt of ketchup and dash of soy (in my cooking at least!) also went into the pot.
Our purple basil is growing wonderfully, so a handful was finely chopped into lovely ribbons and added last of all. Yes, yes, I know - never chop basil, always tear. But to that I say CODSWALLOP.


I won't give a step-by-step recipe as it seems a bit condescending to be honest. Soup is lovely and forgiving because it is completely open to interpretation, so is pretty hard to get wrong.
Please forgive the photos, it looks rather awful but tasted fantastic - savoury and tomato-ey and fragrant with basil which was intensified with a little pesto and handful of freshly grated parmesan. Even the veg hater of the family managed a whole bowl! (And no, that's not me..)
I just wished we had an old hunk of parmesan rind to chuck in the pot, because it makes the broth lovely and silky and provides a beautiful savoury undertone.



I'll definitely be making more of this in the future. It's a fantastic way of using up odds and ends, tastes great and is exceptionally good for you.
Huzzah!

Chicken macaroni soup, revisited.

So, waaaaaay back (well, okay, only a month ago, but doesn't it feel a lot longer?) I promised to get a better shot of my chicken macaroni soup, since the last photo, frankly, sucked.
If you've read that post you'll know just how much I adore this. I mean, I will love it irrevocably until I die. True story.
Anyway, if you haven't eaten this before, I must implore you to do so. It's really easy to do and can be tailored to your own taste with ease.
(Clickety click on the link above to get the recipe.)

Dan Leperd's 'simple milk loaf'.

As you can most certainly tell by now, 11:00pm is my favourite time to be baking.
The house is quiet and I'm always effortlessly calm.
Tonight I chose to do a plain white bread, and went with Dan Leperd's milk loaf because he is simply quite brilliant and his recipes are among the few that I trust.
The technique is really interesting - usually the wet ingredients are added to the dry, but in his you whisk together milk, yeast and golden syrup, and then add the flour and salt. To make things even weirder, you knead in the fat after forming the dough. Then there's also the fact that you knead it FOUR times (leave for 10 minutes, knead for 10 seconds, repeat).
Clearly, it was worth it - the raw dough looked absolutely gorgeous, and the finished product was outstanding.
So, it seems that trust remains unsullied.
This bread is truly delicious, and isn't at all leaden or tough like I feared homemade bread would be. It has a lovely dark crust and a pillow-soft, fluffy inside.
The only instruction I didn't quite get the point of was to split the dough in two before placing in the tin. Why? It looked a bit weird, kind of like a seam. Frankenstein's (bread) monster:


Sorry about the fuzziness, it was obviously rather dark so the shutter was really slow. I absolutely refuse to use flash - I hate the way the light looks harsh and flat. I did try out a flash diffuser a few times, and although there was a difference, it was only a slight one.



So, simple it is not.
Was it worth spending 3 hours of my life on?
100%, definitely, absolutely yes!

Extreme deliciousness and an Indian takeaway.

First off, mother will probably want you to know that we hardly ever get takeaways.
We've given up on Cantonese ones because they aren't executed very well, do not do the cuisine justice and the quality of the chicken makes me want to vomit. The only pizza place near us is Domino's, and at £12 a pizza it's not very cost-effective for 7 people.. so basically, we never get takeaways.
The occasional exception to the rule, however, is an Indian takeaway. Unfortuently curry is one of the worst foods I could be presented with*. However, upon trying a new place, I have decided to give it another go. I generally enjoy sniffing at food (I do this when no-one is looking as it is quite a bad habit), and I must say, this smelt pretty nice.



What we ate:
- raita and chickpea salad
- chicken pakora and vegetable pakora
- lamb samosa
- naan
- potato paratha
- lemon and cashew rice
- chicken curry
- chicken and spinach marsala
- Delhi style lamb
- lamb kofta
- okra curry
- yellow split pea dhal
- gulab jamun
- AND carrot halwa which we got for free because we are awesome!

Even though I really couldn't face properly eating any curry*, I did try a scant amount of each sauce. It was outstanding for takeaway food - everything tasted fresh and vibrant rather than sad and old and greasy.

I had a samosa, some salad, two pakoras and some paratha;


And damn fine it was too, sir. In an average meat samosa most of the content is veg, but this one was stuffed full of lamb mince - in fact, I think I only detected three peas in all, an outstanding result I think you'll agree. The paratha (a type of flaky pastry/flat bread hybrid) was also absolutely delicious.

Okay, I must admit something. This whole meal was in fact a ruse. A cunning one to disguise the fact that all I really wanted was gulab jamun. These babies are the absolute pinnacle of perfection. They are basically balls of dough, deep-fried until dark brown, and then doused in a sugar syrup. They are 100% joy, 100% deliciousness, and a 100% better than doughnuts (!). They are also incredibly sweet, so eat all four at your peril and your dentist's disapproval.

Everyone was overjoyed since the last time we had them was.. actually, I can't even remember. They are quite tricky to get hold of because not many shops stock them, and if they do, they're all the way over in the other side of Glasgow.
So all in all, this was a pretty fantastic dinner.
I shall sign out with another shot of the lovely golden spheres, and a video of a lady named Manjula showing us how to make them - whatever else?





*There was an unfortunate incident about a decade ago in which I was rather violently sick after eating some curry. Only recently have I been able to smell any kind without feeling faintly nauseous, but there's still a fair few years to go before I could face actually ingesting any.

A lonely dinner - chicken macaroni soup.

You know how food from other countries can seem really strange? And then you think to yourself, 'it's obviously not strange for them, because that's whast they've grown up with.. but DAYUMN! That's some weird food.'
Well, this is a dish that may seem slightly weird to some. I mean, it's not outlandish in any way, but I find a lot of people don't really get how delicious this soup is!
I don't think of it as anything exciting since I've been eating it my whole life. Actually, it's one of my top 3 favourite meals ever, but whatever.
Chicken macaroni soup (praise the lord) is from Singapore, where my mum grew up, and it is absolutely divine. I don't know why I like it quite as much as I do, but there you go.
As usual, I don't have any weights or measurements because this is also a meal that heavily depends on personal taste. Go with what you feel you will like, but if you feel you want some weights, give me a shout.

Ingredients:
chicken (breasts, thighs, wings, a whole bird, whatever you've got)
ginger
garlic cloves
spring onions (i.e. scallions, green onions, salad onions)
a red chilli
coriander
soy sauce
sesame oil
sriracha chilli sauce
chicken stock cube or concentrate
macaroni
beansprouts


How to do it:
1. Fill a big pot with water and place over a medium heat. Add the raw chicken. (The base of the soup is a chicken stock so meat on the bone is best, but you can use breast meat and add more stock cubes.)
2. Chop up the rest of the ingredients for the stock.
Slice the ginger into thick coins, and squash the garlic cloves under a knife. Add to the pot.
3. While the stock is bubbling away happily, get on with the garnishes.
Finely slice the spring onions and place in a ramekin or small bowl. Slice the chilli into rounds, as thinly as you can, and put in another ramekin. Chop up the coriander, and, you guessed it - put in a remekin.
4. Once the chicken has cooked and become tender, remove from the pot and shred the meat. Throw away the bones and put the shredded meat into a serving bowl. Taste the stock. It'll probably need some more chicken flavour, so add a cube or concentrate from a bottle. Keep the stock on a low simmer.
5. Cook your beansprouts by blanching them in a big pot of boiling water. You want them to still have some crunch so don't overcook them. Put the cooked beansprouts to the side. In the same water, cook the macaroni according to packet instructions. Once cooked and drained, return to the pot and douse in sesame oil to stop it from sticking and also to give a faint aroma that's crucial to this dish.
6. Pour some soy sauce over the sliced red chilli in the ramekin.
7. To serve: place the ramekins of spring onion, chilli in soy sauce and coriander on the table along with the bowls of beansprouts and chicken and the pots of soup and macaroni. Also have on the table the condiments (soy sauce, sesame oil, chilli sauce). Construct your own bowl of soup and enjoy!


This is the way we have it at home - everyone serves themselves and adds as much or as little of each component as they want.
I have my chicken soup with lots of shredded chicken, beansprouts, sliced chilli, a squirt of sriracha, copious amounts of spring onion and lots of soy sauce.
Your finished bowl, however you wish to garnish it, will be fragrant with ginger, very faintly garlicky, and extremely, extremely delicious.
You could also have some chinese veg in this, such as pak choi, or substitute the macaroni for noodles (but trust me, macaroni is the best here!).


Sorry for the rubbish photo. I'm at the flat so I only have access to a rather old compact digital camera. (But look how sparkling and white my stove is ;D) And unfortuently I don't have those lovely big chinese bowls at the flat, or chinese spoons so I had to have it in a tiny white bowl ):

I love chicken macaroni soup more than life itself.

The cookie saga continues! (And possibly ends)

Today I was reflecting. Reflecting upon my failure to bake a proper cookie. Yeah, yesterday's were okay but they just weren't good enough.
Well, I decided that this pitiful character flaw cannot go unchallenged so I tried a new recipe today.

Ingredients:
2 cups + 2 tablespoons plain all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 & 1/2 sticks (170g) butter, melted
1 cup soft light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg +1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
chocolate chips

How to do it:
Preheat oven to 325°F/Gas mark 3
1. Combine together the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and set aside.
2. Combine the melted butter, two sugars and vanilla extract and beat together. Add the egg and egg yolk and beat until thick and homogenous.
3. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar/egg mixture until combined.
4. Stir in the chocolate chips.
5. Roughly shape into balls - the craggier the better - and bake for roughly 15 minutes.
6. Take out when the edges are lightly browned. You want them to look slightly underdone in the middle - they'll harden slightly upon cooling and still be soft and chewy.



I don't know exactly how many this recipe makes since I only baked one as a test run and froze the rest of the uncooked mix in logs. Since mother reads this blog I thought it best not to be gorging myself on dough. However, I would guesstimate it to make about 15 chocolatey circles of delight. (UPDATE: It makes 12 large cookies.)
And, yes, these are about as near to perfect that I'll probably ever get. They're thick and chewy and soft and pretty amazing.
I implore you to make these as soon as possible. In fact, just go and do it now. Yes, you. Make them. Make them now! And tell me how you get on (:


NOTE: The dough will seem really crumbly and won't mix together easily, but do not add more liquid! Persevere and squidge it together with your hands.
Also, the recipe specified unsalted butter + 1/2 tsp of salt. I used salted butter and also the extra salt. Possibly because I am a disgusting human being, but whatever. They taste goooood.

Original recipe here.