Buttermilk – Nectar of the… cows

The other day, I saw several pots of buttermilk in the reduced-to-clear pile. What do do with so much buttermilk that will go out of date on the day? First of all, it usually doesn’t. Secondly, you can make a variety of things with the lovely sour stuff, especially if you are blessed with living in the following location:

My favourite one is: Lassi! Just stir in some orange, mango, lemon or lime juice (or whatever juice you fancy) – or whatever you’ve got handy to make a drink with (squash? mint leaves?).

Another thing buttermilk is good for is as a raising agent. If you’ve ever made a cake with buttermilk, you will have marvelled at the height your cake or bread has climbed to. Here is a recipe for my grandmother’s buttermilk cake (you can also do a similar cake with cream – see note below):

2 pots of buttermilk (I think most of them are about 200ml)

Wash out the pot and measure the other ingredients with it:
2 pots of sugar
4 pots of flour
3 eggs
1 -2 tsp baking powder
lemon peel

If using cream instead of buttermilk use 1 pot of cream, 1 pot of sugar, 2 pots of flour, 3 eggs, 2 tsp baking powder and lemon peel.

Pour the dough onto a large, deep baking tray (or use 2 trays, if they are small). Bake it until the surface is just firm.
Take out the trays and distribute the topping over the cake. The topping is made from

125 melted butter
3 tbsp milk
1 pot of sugar
100g sliced almonds

The cake is then baked until it is firm and it’s surface a delicious brown!

Tuesday’s Dinner

Another soup – I know. I even had to omit some soups such as Sunday and Monday’s creme of cauliflower soup not to cause embarrassment to myself online. I am on an instinct driven soup marathon. I am also trying to cure myself of a swede and turnip phobia that started when one of my co-workers made a horrible swede & turnip soup that smelled like old adult incontinence pads. That was about four years ago and since then, I haven’t been able to face said vegetables. But lately, a little voice in my head has begun to remind me that I might be doing these neglected bulbs a gross injustice. As a result, I have begun my ‘redemption of the swede’ programme – which will hopefully later be extended to the humble turnip.

Swede & Carrot Soup

This recipe is based on the one from the 5-minute-dinner soup, to enter into a relationship with the feared vegetable in the most familiar and thus comfortable surroundings…
I cut 2 shallots, a clove of garlic, THE swede and two carrots with my housemates scary razor blade grater. I dumped everything into 2 pints of simmering water, together with one stock cube and some semi-random herbs from the back of my fridge (I think it was some coriander and chives from last week’s reduced-to-clear section raid). I let everything simmer till it was tender (didn’t take long). The vegetables gave the stock a very distinct flavour, so I only had to add a little salt and pepper to it. I got everything out and chopped some leftover coriander into it. And to my own surprise, I ate (and loved) the whole lot!

Afterwards, I treated myself with my favourite dessert, again, courtesy of the reduced to clear rack: creamy-dairy stuff with some nice squash (sometimes with chocolate sprinkles, sometimes without). What I mean by ‘creamy-dairy stuff’ is, that you can use anything from yoghurt, greek yoghurt, fromage frais (can we invent an English word for this it one day, please?!) for it – either on its own or mixed with cream and/or lemon juice and sugar (or vanilla sugar or sugar and vanilla flavour). My favourite combination so far:

Fromage frais with Pomegranate Squash

1 pot of fromage frais/quark
dash of cream
dash of lemon juice
sugar or vanilla sugar

mixed pomegranate based (pomegranate-ish) squash
chocolate sprinkles
(the last three ingredients were Christmas prezzies from my mum, I have to confess!)

Instead of squash, you can also mix in cranberry sauce, mashed bananas, mashed berries (you be lucky! ;D), pineapple pieces, tin fruit etc. I once tried mixing in some custard and Angel Delight Powder. It worked, but I still prefer it with sugar and ‘proper’ vanilla flavouring only

Orwellian Supermarkets – A food related rant…

My good deed of the day: walking out of Marks & Spencers. I was in there for 1 minute just having a look at their range of pickles (before I go and make my own!), when the security guy asked me to take my hood off - because the security camera could not get a good enough profile of my head (!!!). This is outrageous – I am already deeply offended when I have to take my hat off at music venues (I usually don’t ask my money back), but supermarkets?? Is that because occasionally a thief might take a sandwich or cream cake – or because they are actively hunting terrorists?  Is that why M&S is making all of their customers feel like crime suspects?

The funny thing is that a friend of mine who is about twenty years older than me, is never asked to take her hood off if she goes in there.  So obviously, if you are thirty like me, you are not old enough to leave your hood on – Marks and Spencer can still interfere with what you wear in their shops. Unless you are lucky to be a nun or a Muslim woman, maybe, or will they kick them out, too??  Anyway, how do they know some old lady on a terribly small pension is not going to steal anything. According to some article I’ve read recently, crime amongst pensioners is on the rise (I frankly don’t blame them as I know who little some people get). But somewhat unexpectedly in these times, some politeness and respect is still left for the elderly. Not for teenagers though. My friend said: ’Maybe they thought you were a teenager – I would take it as a compliment’. So teenagers are equated with criminals - I can understand why so many teenagers are angry. Here is an example how ‘welcome’ the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre makes people who wish to patronise it:

What about some nice words of welcome for a change?

I am just glad, I can get most of my stuff at the outdoor market – at least, everyone is happily wearing hoods there and no one tells me what to do and what not to do. Thank you!

Blog Slogan

I saw this advert on the tube the other day. Could be the slogan for this blog…

5 Minute Dinner – Mushroom Egg Soup with Coriander

This is one the results of unbelievable luck in the reduced-to-clear section. Last night’s bargains were: coriander (19p), ‘taste the difference’ madarines (49 p), organic tomatoes (49p), organic portobello mushrooms (99p), buttermilk (39 p – makes great breakfast lassis and cakes).

Dilute stock cube in boiling water, add mushrooms and whatever other vegetables you want to throw in. While this simmers for a while, make some scrambled poached egg. After tasting the soup (you could add some soya sauce, lemon juice, tomato purree, whatever sits in your fridge or on your spice rack that you fancy), dice the set egg and add it to the soup. Just before serving, add some chopped coriander. Done! 

The ‘Mini English’

 This is what happens if you want a ‘Full English’, but don’t have everything for it in the house – or are too lazy to cook it with all the ‘trimmings’. I called it the ‘Mini English’, but it is basically a combination of German dinner and English Breakfast. Thus it is ideal for lunch

Tar Croissants

One of my colleagues forgot about some croissants in the oven. They turned into fantastic little artworks.

Prussian Dessert

I have this 200 year old German cookery book which I inherited from my grandma. In gothic script, it tells you some very strange recipes and advice. The most bizarre one so far is the ‘Prussian Dessert’. To make this cold pudding you will need:

1 slice of coarse brown rye bread

1 dash of bitter beer

1 dash of cream (single, double or whipping cream)

sugar, cinnamon

Crumble the bread into a dessert bowl, pour a bit of bitter beer over it and a bit of cream. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon.

This should definitely take you back in time! Unfortunately, I am allergic to alcohol, so I have not tried it. If you feel inspired to do so, please let me know about your taste experience… In the meantime, I might make a non-alcoholic version with supermalt!

Horror Cookies

What to bring to a Dungeons & Dragons game, a horror film night or a seance you’ve been invited to… Cookies with tentacles!! Naturally they come in a Duel Masters ‘cookie’ tin… found in the sales for £1!

Preserving for the urban scavenger

As an urban scavenger, you often end up getting large quantities of one type of food. Sometimes the quantities you get are so large that you either can’t or don’t want to eat all of it before it perishes. I hate freezing things, and often did not even have a freezer where I lived. What I then did was to preserve it. There are several methods of preserving food: what will interest you if you have gas bills to pay is whether the method involves hot or cold preserving. Cold preserving often involves the same ingredients such as hot preserving (air, sugar, vinegar, salt, fat), but usually the stuff does not keep quite as long. But then you only want to prolong the shelf life of your bargain for a bit – you’ll be forced to eat it soon enough anyway. There are plenty of recipes for so-called ‘no cook’ preserves on the net. Just google whatever you fancy right now with the word ‘no cook’ in front, e.g. ‘no cook jam’, ‘no cook pickles’, ‘no cook chutney’ etc. I have had a delicious no-cook chutney and an equally delicious no-cook jam at a friend’s house, so I’m speaking as a convert

I haven’t tried these recipes out myself, but what I have tried out are preserves from unusual ingredients (for me, anyway). My favourite recipe is by a chef called Oded Schwartz whose book ‘Preserving’ is practically my kitchen bible. Unfortunately it’s out of print, but they have it at lots of public libraries (and the British Library!), so if you’re in one anyway, have a look – it’s worth it! I am planning on trying out as many recipes as possible from it (I’ve just made 2 fruit butters from a huge bag of stuff I got for £2 from the local market). The first recipe I tried was carrot jam. It was literally a revelation! It can be made extremely cheaply (you don’t even have to put the raisins in) and it tastes unbelievably good, especially on melba toast (I happened to find large quantities of melba toast in the place I moved into from the previous inhabitant). Apparently this jam can be made with other root vegetables as well, but, as he writes, ‘beets, parsnips, turnips, and kohlrabi need blanching several times first to mellow their strong flavour’.

Luckily, the recipe is on the internet, so I can let the master speak for himself:

http://www.showcook.co.za/root_vegetable.htm

And here is an alternative recipe from the ‘Carrot Museum’:

http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/jam.html

Great jams and marmalades can also be made from pumpkins and green, red, or yellow tomatoes. A friend gave me two pumpkins last Halloween, and I grew some tomatoes (I got the plants for 50 p each and they yielded at least 1 kg each!) on my balcony, and thus had enough pumpkins and tomatoes to try out the recipes (I made pumpkin soup and battered fried green tomatoes which came out nicely, too, and tasted great with ketchup!).

What I also discovered with the help of this book was that you can make three different kinds of preserve out of the white rind of watermelons. So you can eat or use the red stuff, you shave off the dark green stuff, and then you can either candy the white stuff or make a sweet or savoury pickle – wow! I always felt that it was a waste to chuck the white stuff away! Another useful thing to know, if you are a carnivore, is how to preserve meat and fish. Often, I come across the painful sight of packets and packets of chicken legs or even organic fish or seafood in the reduced to clear pile. Ah, humanity!