Harvest swap & DIY disco at the Barbican

Image Source: Treehugger.com

Hello Londoners, particularly those with allotments or other means of growing produce! If I understand it correctly, the Barbican is hosting an Urban Harvest Festival where harvested food (or possibly other grown materials and decorations) can be swapped with other harvesters (or those deprived of harvests?). Accompanying this temporary market place is a ‘DIY’ disco which will allegedly play any tune you bring to it. Might go there with a jar or two of homemade preserves and accompanied with a track of home-made music!

Another lost skill – Handling change

I know I’m probably the only person who still pays in cash at the supermarket – at least it feels like it everytime I’m in my local supermarket. When I have to pay an amount, let’s say £2.72 and I do not have the correct amount, but have £3 and two pennies, then I will give the cashier £3.02 to receive 30 pence in cash. My reasoning is from my experience as a cashier that it is making things easier for both parties involved – no thick wallet plus coins I can use in machines for me, no counting and loss of coppers for the cashier (they need to give these out quite frequently). But no, there are so many people who don’t seem to get it, even after decades (!) of working as cashiers. The usual situation is: they either overlook the two pence coin and give me the wrong change or ask ‘why did you give me 2 pence’? Usually one following the other.

Erm… how do cashiers get trained these days? If I wasn’t already notorious at my local supermarket’s customer service point (the second supermarket now that seems to think I’m a criminal for wearing black hoodies), I would actually complain about this – not because I care for my pennies, but because I fear for the CASH(!)ier profession. Are there so few people using cash these days or is nobody else using basic logic while paying for their groceries? Thankfully, the guys at the local market stall still know this stuff. I just wish markets were open at night when most people come from work!

Final Cheese Fest

My friend left today, so I created a final cheesefest in her honour! I don’t normally eat a lot of cheese, partly because it is so expensive, but I just had to have this cheesefest culminate in a final display of excess!
The picture above is the Lemon, Lime & Ginger Cheesecake which will make any dieter faint on sight. I normally prefer baked cheesecake with quark, but this one is my friend’s favourite! The base is made with crushed ginger nuts and melted butter. The topping is made with a combination of

lemon & lime juice & zest
icing sugar
whipped double cream
mascarpone
creme fraiche

The second cheesiness I produced was Macaroni Cheese. I boiled macaroni and made a sauce for them from:

double cream
creme fraiche
milk
wholegrain mustard
cooked & mashed broccoli
crushed blue cheese
grated cheddar & parmesan
lemon
salt, pepper (and I think a dash of nutmeg & paprika & cayenne)

After today, I think some fasting is appropriate in a reverse kind of Ramadan spirit…

Yoghurt Cake & more guest cooking!

Another case of being too reluctant to get out of my pyjamas and wanting cake… So the cake had to be made with what was in the house. Added difficulty: I wanted it to be cheesecake-like. The problem: only yoghurt in the house! So I started looking for yoghurt cheesecake recipes. Unfortunately, the only ones I could find used strained yoghurt, and I did not want to wait for 12 hours until the yoghurt was strained. I wanted the cake NOW! After a few minutes of searching I came across a suitable recipe that could be modified to suit my needs. You can find the original recipe here.

My recipe turned out as follows:

Base:

1 ½ (tea)cups flour
½ cup sugar
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1/3 cup butter
2 eggs
vanilla sugar & vanilla pod insides

For the fruit filling I used 2 peeled & finely cut apples, half of my temporary room mate’s frozen mixed berries and a packet of vanilla sugar. Makes a pretty tangy filling, especially combined with the yoghurt topping.

Yoghurt topping:

2 tbsp flour
2 cups plain yoghurt
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
grated rind of 1 lemon
1 or 2 vanilla sugar (can’t remember how much)

I then also made a crumble topping:

1 cup flour
about 1/2 cup sugar
vanilla sugar
at least 1/2 butter
(you can also add cinnamon, but I forgot!)

I baked the cake at gas mark 5 for about 90 mins. That’s because my oven is a bit temperamental. You’ll probably need less! The result taste very fresh & summery…

Er, and now for something completely different – another example of my friend’s cheese mania!

Spinach-gorgonzola pasta, which got cooked for me by my favourite temporary housemate

Basically, you boil pasta. While you boil it, you make the sauce from

finely cut shallots
crushed garlic
1 bag of spinach
gorgonzola
fresh parmesan cheese
cream cheese
nutmeg
salt
pepper

As another friend commented, afterwards you’ll probably need your arteries replaced!

Guest cooking 2 – Figs & experiments with fermented milk

I love fresh figs! They are very cheap at the moment, so I get them as often as I can. My favourite way of eating them is after a recipe from volunteer work. I make them slightly differently though – and without the mascarpone! Here is the recipe:

Cut figs open so they almost fall open like a flower. Mix a bit of honey (try to get creamy honey, but if you don’t have or can’t afford honey, just dissolve some sugar in butter) with some rose water and some orange flower water (careful with the latter, it’s pretty intense!) and a bit of butter. Spoon the runny mixture into the figs.
Bake for about 15-20 mins at Gas Mark 6. I eat the warm figs plain without any custard, mascarpone or ice cream or pistachio nuts, but you can eat them with anything you like!

My temporary room-mate also got some figs and wrapped quarters of them with some ultra-thin bacon type stuff (parma ham?). She put four at a time on kebab sticks and grilled them until they were crispy!

She also made some lasagna, substituting the bechamel sauce with yoghurt and a bit of quark (she normally uses crème fraîche, but I didn’t have any). That was also nice!

Here are two stages of a banana dessert I made up today. I sometimes have cravings for these semi-toxic cheesecake-mixture cheesecakes. I had to find out last week that Green’s cheesecake has altered its recipe for the worse: the topping is less tasty and you also get far too much base now! So I made the base with a third of the crumbs, improving the recipe to a degree. I then kept the remaining two thirds of the base. Today, I finally thought of a use for it! I made up some more base with some butter (you can also use crushed biscuits with butter – digestives or ginger nuts work best!), flattened it in bowls, cut some banana slices on top of it and covered everything with my friend’s custard. I also added some of the chocolate sprinkle my mum had sent me. The result looks like this and tasted yummy!

Guest cooking

I have acquired a temporary room mate! So, amongst sharing just about everything, we also share the cooking! The first novel thing that appeared in the kitchen was a fruit-yoghurt smoothie with oats and seeds. Makes a very good breakfast and can be used to get rid of all sorts of things lurking on the shelf, in the fridge and in the fruitbowl… Today, I managed to even grind down a super-hard apple with my rubbish hand-blender. My friend had treated me to some berries, so I also put a few of those in as well as an over-ripe banana, a handful of oats, half a lemon (juice only!) and some yoghurt. With this, we had my creation from last night: kamut-spelt bread:

To make it, I used
about 400g kamut flour, about 150-200g spelt flour
sour dough
1 packet of yeast
1 tbsp salt
generous dash of vegetable oil
about 500 ml warm water
generous dash of honey
spices (I think I used caraway, fennel, cardamom)
linseed, mixed seeds

I let the bread rise at room temperature, then kneaded and bashed it about a bit, then let it rise in the baking tin for a bit (for a bit too long, actually, because we forgot about it, hence the flatness of the bread…) and baked it for about 70 mins at Gas Mark 6. I also sprayed it a bit with water just after it had left the oven. The bread it very moist and tasty!

I have to say that my friend is also pretty cheese-crazy and not too keen on veg, so the kitchen is seeing a lot of cheese influx. Even the tomato sauce on the pizza gets substituted by spiced cream cheese during joint cooking projects! Apart from the cream cheese base (stretched with milk and with some added cayenne pepper), the pizza topping consisted of a spinach-garlic-onion-spice mixture that my friend pre-cooked, toasted seeds and…. more cheese! Anybody with tomato allergies?
I made the dough as usual, but with a mixture of plain flour, kamut and spelt, because I was too lazy to go to the shop and get more plain flour. I accidentally made too much dough, so we had some left to make rolls with (see below).

Another example of my friend’s cheese-mania is the bluecheese risotto. Technically, it is not a risotto, but it very much tastes like one. I steamed some long grain and wild rice while my friend fried portobello mushroom cubes, courgettes, shallots and garlic. She then added the rice as well as cubes of blue cheese, mature cheddar and bits of philadelphia. The whole thing got seasoned with salt and pepper. Tastes great, but it obviously a very rich dish. Good for using up cheeseboard leftovers that otherwise might wander into bins at work…

Btw the next day, we had the same dish with some fried quorn pieces (half price!) and Italian herbs (dried, supermarket’s own brand). Also great.

Chinese Cabbage Salad

Anyway, here is the recipe:

1/2 Chinese cabbage
2 apples
1 red, one orange, one yellow pepper (for example)
4 spring onions

Chop everything quite finely. Use as much of the spring onions as possible.

For the dressing:
lemon juice
sugar
oil
(you can also add a bit of fresh or dried tarragon if you wish, or add some spiciness)

Dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice. Add a dash of oil and stir vigorously. Pour over salad.
This salad keeps fine for more than a day.

(Mostly) Yellow Thai Curry

Today I made my first thai curry paste. Normally, it is cheaper to buy a ready-made paste (even a good one), but I noticed that I had most of the spices in the house anyway (some of them donated by culinarily minded friends) and just needed a bit of fresh lemon grass! I did not stick to any particular recipe and made up the following tasty paste in a blender from:

6 cloves or garlic
3 chillies (one yellow, two birdseye – red and green)
2 stalks of lemon grass
generous dash of mustard powder
generous dash of black mustard seeds
juice of 2 limes
cinnamon
bunch of fresh coriander
big chunk of ginger, deskinned (with a teaspoon)
coriander, ground
cumin, ground
paprika powder
turmeric
kaffir lime leaves (dried)
4 shallots
nutmeg
a few tbsp of dark soy sauce
generous dash of brown sugar
dash of coconut milk

Not totally authentic, but was extremely pleased with the result!

For the actual curry, you fry the paste either in the fat of the coconut milk or some oil, then slowly add the coconut milk. You cook/steam some rice (about 1 cup of rice to 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 cup of water, depending on how sticky you want it & I also add some salt) and add some extra protein and vegetables of your choice (I used fried tofu and spinach, but many people use these small bitter aubergines and water spinach)! The result should look a little something like this:

Red Chicory Salad

I found some red chicory in the reduced to clear section the other day along with some organic apples. Still having some spring onions on the balcony, I thought, I’d combine these three ingredients to make a salad! After all, the guy from the video rental keeps telling me to ‘eat more purple things’! Here is the recipe:

2 red chicory bulbs, chopped
1 apple, chopped
spring onions to taste, chopped
juice of 1 lemon
sugar to taste
dash of oil

Yum!

Apple & Pear ‘Sunflower’ Tart with Lemon & Poppy Seeds

Last winter I had a really nice pear, lemon and poppy seed tart at a cafe in South London. Yesterday, I made my first attempt at re-creating it!
I made a simple pastry dough from 150g plain flour, 25g sugar, 125g butter and a bit of water, pre-baked it and filled it with a mixture of (approximately) 1 egg, 60g butter, 60 g sugar, 50g flour, lemon juice, lemon peel, poppy seeds and some real vanilla that my friend and fellow foodblogger from Schnuppensuppe sent me! (thank you! ) (Yes, I forgot the baking powder!) And, of course, lots of pear and apple slices (at least 1 large apple & 1 pear). I then brushed the fruit slices with butter and sugar and baked the whole lot for a good 45 mins. When the cake came out of the oven, I additionally brushed the top with some hot marmelade. Verdict: quite a good cake, but the lemon and poppy seed filling could be improved. Next time, don’t forget the baking powder maybe?