Last week it was my Dad’s birthday and since we’re on this “saving money” bent AND my Dad is the most difficult person in the world to buy for, I decided that I’d make something for him. But what to make? My Dad isn’t really into dolls, works on a building site so knitted goods would be nice but impractical, isn’t really a big cake fan and doesn’t watch much TV. ARGH!

In the end I decided to go with something I remember my Dad liking as a wee treat – the quintessential Scottish treat known as the Macaroon bar. Now, don’t mistake the Macaroon bar for a Macaron – these are polar opposites in the confection world. The Scottish macaroon bar is overwhelmingly sweet, traditionally made from mashed potato (seriously!) and coated in chocolate and toasted coconut. I’d been given a copy of the Maw Broon’s Cookbook for Christmas last year and it has a recipe for Macaroon bars inside. Bonanza! Or so I thought…

Unfortunately the recipe is extremely unspecific, calling for ‘medium-sized potatoes’. I mean, that in itself should have been a warning sign. How do you define a ‘medium-sized potato’?! Anyway, clearly my spuds were too big because despite using almost TRIPLE the amount of icing sugar called for in the recipe my mixture never turned into a dough. Ah well. Instead, we popped into Glickmans which is a fabulous wee shop. It’s the oldest sweetie shop in Glasgow and can be found just down from the Barras on the London Road side. The lovely lady behind the counter suggested that I try their technique which is to use a fondant centre instead of the traditional mashed potato so I shall give that a try next time. Luckily they supplied me with a box of Dad’s favourite chelsea whoppers and a macaroon bar that worked!

So tell me about your crafting or culinary failures! What have you tried that has been a dire mistake?

Posted under baking, cooking

Three posts in three days! You lot really are lucky!

So Sunday was my “get stuff done” day and this was the last thing that I made. I made a HUGE pot because at 35 weeks pregnant I want to have a stack of frozen meals ready to go after the baby arrives. I wouldn’t say we’re really arsey about what the kids eat, but in general every night time meal is prepared from scratch because I want to make sure that at least once a day they are getting a meal that I’m happy with. This meal makes me really happy because there’s loads of veg in it and the kids absolutely love it. The addition of root veg means that this curry casserole is nice and sweet and your choice of curry paste will determine how spicy it is. We used a balti curry paste which gave it nice flavour without blowing our heads off!

This recipe fed the five of us plus I froze easily enough for us to have another two meals. I used the biggest soup pan that I own and it was practically full so you might want to adjust your quantities if you’re only making one meal, but this is fab if like me you like having a freezer full of healthy meals that are prepared in a few minutes.

You will need:
4tbsp olive oil
2 onions, sliced
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1.5kg potatoes, cubed
8 good-sized carrots, cut into chunks
4 parsnips, cut into chunks
Half a swede, cut into chunks
One butternut squash, cut into chunks
4tbsp curry paste
250g red split lentils
3 litres stock (chicken or vegetable)

Put the oil in your pan, tip in the onion and garlic and cook over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes until softened. Tip in all your chopped veg, turn up the heat and cook for another few minutes until the vegetables are golden. Add in your curry paste, make sure your vegetables are well coated and keep stirring over the next few minutes while you make up your stock. Add in your stock, bring to the boil then reduce the heat. Add the lentils, cover your pan and simmer for 15-20 minutes until all the veg has softened and your sauce is nice and thick. Keep an eye on things because there’s so much veg in this that it could absorb all the stock and leave you sauceless! If it’s drying up, add more stock half a pint at a time with a tsp curry powder.

We served it up with wholegrain rice, naan bread and a dollop of natural yoghurt on the top. Absolutely gorgeous!

Posted under cooking

As I’ve mentioned before I read a lot of blogs, including every blog written by the lovely people who choose to leave me a comment and my one recurring thought when I read your musings or admire your work is, “I wonder who taught them to do that?”

I was chatting with my wee Nana last week on the phone and telling her what I’d been knitting and sewing lately. I was the typical eldest grandchild when I was younger, spending weekends staying at my Grandparents and getting that one to one attention that was unavailable at home with a plethora of siblings. When I was growing up my Nana made me the most amazing jumpers – she was always knitting until she had a stroke when I was about 9 or 10 and then she just wasn’t strong enough – and she taught me how to knit when I was barely a toddler. Before that, she used to let me cut up all the scraps of yarn and play about with them so I had an appreciation of textiles from a young age. It was my Nana who used to let me help her bake, who taught me the basics of cooking and food preparation, and who first let me play around with a needle & thread. Nana commented during our conversation that she finds it amusing that I sew, knit and bake but my Mother never did. Maybe it’s a generational thing?

Anyway. Two things that I associate with my Nana are knitting and jam-making, so it would appear that I’m more like her than I ever thought! Last Summer I used a massive crop of rhubarb to try and replicate the yummy jam from my childhood and it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. Not quite the same, but not bad. Last week I decided to expand my repertoire a little and made lemon curd. It was so easy, despite me making a huge error, that I thought I’d share it with you lovely lot.

The other jar in the photo is the fantastic marmalade that my lovely husband made recently following this Delia Smith recipe. It’s a nice recipe but I’ve found it very tart, next time I think I’d play about with different quantities and perhaps add a vanilla pod to the cooking process.

Those are 1L Le Parfait jars (available from Lakeland) so the recipe I’m giving you will make approx 2/3 of a litre, or 2-3lbs. It’s a bit of a mixture of different recipes I found combined with what I had available to me at the time.

Lemon curd
4 lemons, preferably unwaxed
5 eggs
100g/4oz butter, soft
450g/1lb sugar

Set a pan of water to boil on the cooker ensuring that you have a bowl which will fit on top of the pan to create a bain marie. Crack your eggs into the bowl and whisk them briefly to break the yolks and combine. Add the butter and sugar, then set aside.

Grate the zest from your lemons remembering to give them a good scrub first if they’re not unwaxed. Squeeze the juice from the lemons then add both zest and juice to the egg mixture, then set the bowl on top of your pan making sure you keep the water simmering.

Stir your mixture with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens to coat the back of the spoon and is all combined. This will take no more than 10 minutes. Do not do what I did and doubt yourself, as I ended up stirring my lemon curd for two hours before giving up and decanting it into the hot sterilised jar where of course it thickened as soon as it cooled down.

It won’t thicken much whilst hot from my experience, but if you are concerned about the viscosity then you can add another egg. Additionally you should feel free to play about with the quantities of sugar. This recipe used a lot of sugar in comparison to others that I found and the resulting curd is very sweet which may not be to everyone’s taste. It is yummy though!

Posted under cooking, recipes, sewing

This last week has been a very trying one for us at home. I do value my privacy and don’t like to post too much detailed information about my family on this blog where I can’t restrict who views it, so I’m not going to divulge too much other than to say life with three very young children is a very testing experience. When any combination of those children get ill, that experience is made all the more trying. Our daughter has been quite unwell since the weekend and we’re hopeful that she’s on the mend now.

In any case, as we’re off to London tomorrow I thought that we should have a more relaxing evening with a family meal together so I have spent some time today cooking. Tonight we had carrot soup, roast chicken with white wine sauce and lemon drizzle cake.

Recipes
Carrot soup

2 litres of stock (I used home made chicken stock)
2lbs carrots, sliced
2 onions, sliced
25g butter
2 cloves garlic, chopped
natural yoghurt to serve (optional)

Melt the butter in a large pan, and add the garlic. Let it infuse for about a minute then add in your carrots and onions and let the vegetables soften over a medium heat. Once they’re soft, add your stock and turn the heat up until the soup is boiling. Cover and simmer for as long as necessary (I usually leave it for around an hour) then blend. Add a dollop of natural yoghurt if you feel like it, and serve.

Lemon drizzle cake

I had some gorgeous lemon drizzle cake from Theo’s cafe a few weeks ago and I decided to try and recreate it. Such a gorgeous cake, and reasonably easy to recreate. I googled for the recipe and found this entry on the Gastronomy Domine blog written by Liz so I’ve pinched it. The original recipe is from Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake book.

4oz (100g) soft margarine (I used butter as I had no margarine)
6oz (175g) caster sugar
6oz (175g) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 extra large eggs
4 tablespoons milk
zest of 1 lemon

For the topping:
juice of 1 lemon
4oz (100g) caster sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4, and line and grease a 7in deep round cake tin. Other recipes I found recommended using a 2lb loaf tin for this purpose.

Combine the sugar and margarine, then add the eggs and milk. Sift in the flour and baking powder and beat the whole lot together. Add the lemon zest and tip into your prepared tin. Bake for 40 minutes. Liz recommends listening to your cake at this point – as she says, “to find out whether your cake is done; put an ear near it. An underdone cake will make tiny pricking noises. A done cake will be silent.

When you’ve taken the cake out of the oven mix the lemon juice and sugar together. Prick the cake surface with a skewer or fork then spread the sugary lemon (or lemony sugar, however you want to look at it) over the top, and leave the cake in the tin to cool.The lemon juice will soak into the cake, leaving a crunchy lemony topping. Turn out and serve.

Posted under baking, cooking, recipes

Tonight, I felt like having a proper family dinner which for anyone who knows me usually means that I wait for my other half to get home and then he cooks! Not today though…

This is roast chicken with garlic butter and a lemon gravy, with roast potatoes and garden peas. And a chunk of burnt garlic bread (oops!). This was my first time making roast chicken, and for an ex-vegetarian it was quite an experience! It was gorgeous too, really tender and the lemon was a stunning addition.

In other firsts, I made a steamed syrup sponge pudding this afternoon. This was my first attempt at a steamed pudding and I was so impressed. It was surprisingly easy and everyone ate it which is really the benchmark for success!

Anyway – I apologise for the lack of detail in the photos but it was a long day for the family today and those are the best we could do!

To make it yourself:-

Roast Chicken

Medium sized chicken (mine weighed 1.4kg, approx 3lbs) with all strings cut
1 lemon
10g butter
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
salt and pepper
125ml dry white wine

Soften your butter and add the garlic, crushed. Using half your lemon, slice it and stuff both the lemon slices and the butter into the chicken cavity. Put your chicken into a roasting dish and rub with the olive oil, season and cover with foil. Place in a preheated oven at gas mark 8 (230C/450F). When you’re calculating your cooking time, you want 20 minutes per pound of chicken plus 20 minutes extra, so mine took 1h20m and I removed the foil after an hour to let the chicken brown.

Remove your chicken from the oven, and tip it up in the dish to remove the lemon slices from the cavity and the cooking juices. Pop the chicken on a large plate or carving block and cover with foil to rest. Pour the juices from the roasting tin with the lemon slices into a pan. Add the juice from your remaining lemon half, and 125ml dry white wine. Bring to the boil and simmer until it has reduced by half. Sieve to remove the lemon and you have a tangy gravy ready.

Steamed syrup sponge

1 tablespoon black treacle
3 tablespoons golden syrup
175 g self-raising flour
1 rounded teaspoon baking powder
175 g butter, softened
3 eggs
175 g soft light brown sugar

Tinfoil
Greaseproof paper
String

Butter the basin, then measure 3 tablespoons of golden syrup into it. Sift the flour and baking powder into a large mixing bowl and add the softened butter, eggs, sugar and black treacle. Next, beat the mixture for about 2 minutes until it’s all blended and changing to a light golden colour (an electric whisk is amazing for this if you have one). Tip it into the basin and level the top.

Place the sheet of foil over the greaseproof paper, make a pleat in the centre to allow the pudding to expand and place this foil-side up on top of the pudding. Pull it down the sides and tie the string around it, taking it over the top and tying it on the other side. This gives you a wee handle which makes removing the pudding much easier. Trim off the extra paper and roll the foil up to cover the string. Stick your pudding into a big pan and add boiling water up to roughly the halfway line on your dish, and leave it on a medium heat for at least two hours. Remember to check on the water and don’t let the pan run dry.

Try it yourself!

Posted under baking, cooking, recipes

This is my favourite comfort food. I make it whenever I need a little pick-me-up and the best thing about it is that it’s really fairly healthy. This recipe comfortably serves my two sons (who love their food!), myself and my partner who also has a healthy appetite.

1. Chop up a couple of chicken breasts and cook them. I fried mine in a little toasted sesame oil because I picked it up without looking, thinking it was olive oil. Oops.

2. Set the chicken aside and slice up an onion and chop a couple of garlic cloves.

3. Heat 2tbsp oil in the biggest pan you have and toss the onions and garlic in there to cook while you slice up some mushrooms. I really like mushrooms so I added four

4. Once the onions and garlic look a bit softened, chuck the chicken and mushrooms in and cook it all for a couple of minutes until it’s browned.

5. Add 350g Arborio (risotto) rice and stir it so it gets coated in oil. Add 150ml dry white wine and leave it for a couple of minutes simmering until the wine is all absorbed. Add 2 pints of chicken stock a ladleful at a time until all the liquid is absorbed.

6. Once all the liquid is absorbed it should look something like this

Dunk it on a plate and add parmesan – don’t skip the parmesan (yes, I know it smells like feet and vomit) and make sure you use fresh stuff. Mix it in and it really pulls it all together.

Voila!

Posted under cooking, recipes