Something for the Courgettes

This year, I thought cleverly, I'll only have one courgette plant. That way they will never overwhelm me. How stupid was that! Even with two of us here we are slowly being taken over by sinister cucurbits. Last night it was time to take action.

They make an easy and light family meal if you slice them thinly, sweat down with an onion and herbs until softened and toss in a handful of chopped fresh tomatoes or mushrooms, whatever you have.

Put them into an ovenproof dish and top with mashed potato. Cover the mash with grated vegan cheese, breadcrumbs, crushed nuts or nutritional yeast, any, all or a mix of what you fancy and a drizzle of oil. Then cook in the middle of a hot oven until golden and fragrant.

Serve with green beans (thistle fluff optional!) and a nice Chablis.

Middle Eastern Style Courgette Dip

A mere 24 hours later and I emerge sweaty and exhausted from a tussle with the killer cucurbit.



A courgette dip or spread seems like a practical use for the monsters, at home on a mezze table or as a filling for sandwiches and I've collected a few versions of recipes for this over the years.

The simplest form is just to use the courgettes in place of the chickpeas in hummus bi tahini, more popularly known as Hummus or Chickpea dip and widely available in various ghastly spritzed up versions all over the world. Call me old fashioned but the simple original is best for chickpeas, courgettes may need a little more help.

Ingredients:
750g courgettes, peeled or not, your choice. I liked the extra sprinkles of green produced by leaving it on.
50g tahini (or in my case, smooth peanut butter, I'm sure tahini would be better)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 large clove of garlic, mashed
Green chilli to taste (French chillies are very mild)
Pinch of cumin seeds
Salt to taste
Olive oil, chilli flakes, onion rings to garnish.

Method:
Chop the courgettes into chunks and place in a steamer. Allow to cook for about 15 minutes until they are softened and pierce easily with a knife. Leave to drain and cool.
   
Throw the flavouring ingredients into the food processor. It helps to mash down the garlic with the salt first to avoid lumps later. Feel free to add more garlic if that's your thing.

Add the cooled courgettes to the processor bowl and process until your preferred texture is achieved. I left mine a little less than perfectly smooth for interest.  To be honest despite cooking by steaming the courgettes were still a bit wet. You might usefully squeeze the moisture from them before processing to make a thicker more pleasing dip.

Test for seasoning, adjust as necessary (more salt, more lemon perhaps) and spread into a wide bowl. Drizzle olive oil on the surface and sprinkle chilli flakes and fine onion rings attractively. I used some chilli oil which worked well.



It's quite nice. Trouble is this made shedloads, at least six times the amount in the picture and you'd need a whole party to dispose of it.

Ideas to consider for next time, if there is one. Char grill the courgettes before blending and consider using a touch of mint in the flavourings, I think that might add a cool note that would give it a bit of distinction.

Summer of Doom

It's barely started and already the courgettes (or zucchini if you must ) are beginning to overwhelm. Each year I gather more recipes designed to handle the glut and each year I fail to try them, leading to a compost bin laden with food waste. Yes, I am to blame for all that.

So this year, for the benefit of all, I thought I'd do a season of courgette recipes. Even so I don't suppose for one minute I'll be able to eat all results but I'll have a better idea about what might work for company.

I'm heading into the kitchen today get started on this. Back soon.

Banana Bread revisited

I forgot a bunch of bananas this week so had need of my banana bread recipe and went back into the archive to retrieve it. Originally posted July 2010 it's definitely worth coming back to again and again.

============================================



Remember all those bananas I bought at a bargain price the other day. I've made six loaves of this bread from them since then, using 18+ bananas and there are still bananas in the freezer and all the fruits that were eaten by guests in the interim. Didn't we do well?

This bread isn't a world shattering revelation of a recipe but it's tremendously popular - which is just as well, really. The method is simple and the basic bread would lend itself to all sorts of innovative additions if you had a mind to it although the novelty of the basic banana flavoured loaf hasn't worn off yet in this house.

It's also packed full of oats which render it positively healthy as a food. What are you waiting for - make it now!

You will need:

290g flour - I have used plain white and a fine wholemeal, both work
100g granulated sugar - white, brown, Demarara or muscovado, your choice
1/2 tsp. salt
11g baking powder, see method
150g rolled oats
3 ripe bananas (or 4, see method)
125ml non-dairy milk (or water)
25ml light flavoured vegetable oil

1 9x5 (2lb) loaf shaped baking tin

Mix together all the dry ingredients. The oats I've been using are jumbo oats but Quaker porridge oats would also work. Don't use instant porridge powder because I think it would be horrible.

100g of sugar is plenty in my opinion but you can bump it up to 125g if you have a sweet tooth.

Salt is always optional.

Baking powder - people get so worked up about their raising agents. In France levure chimique is sold in little sachets containing 11g. This is plenty to raise this loaf. If you don't have a sachet, two flat teaspoons of baking powder is sufficient. If you don't have baking powder then mix together 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate) with 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), use 2 teaspoons of this in your loaf and throw the other one away! Simple, non?

In another bowl mash the bananas until gloopy. Mr. Stripey likes to find bits of actual banana in his bread and this is what the fourth banana is for. Don't mash it, add it in little bits just before the batter goes into the tin.

Add the milk (or water, nobody ever died from using water instead of soy milk in banana bread) and oil to the banana mush and stir together. Then add the whole lot to the dry ingredients and mix well to combine. It should make a nice wet batter, add a very little extra water if you feel the mix is too stiff.

I line my tin with a piece of baking paper, just the long sides and bottom but you can grease the tin if you prefer.

Put the batter into the tin, rap the filled container on the work surface to settle the mix and bake in a medium hot oven, about 180C for 50 minutes to an hour. I'm sorry that's a bit vague but the oven here isn't exactly temperature controlled. Test your loaf after 50 minutes with a skewer and if it comes out a bit wet with uncooked batter be prepared to give it the full hour.

After cooking, allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes and then finish cooling on a rack. It doesn't cut well warm but is nicest fresh from the oven. If you keep it in a sealed container or plastic bag it will slice more cleanly on the second day but the slices are still a bit crumbly. This hardly matters as you'll need to break it into pieces to cram it into your mouth.

Served with apricot jam and banana icecream it's a pretty good pudding too.

Banana Oat Bread

Remember all those bananas I bought at a bargain price the other day. I've made six loaves of this bread from them since then, using 18+ bananas and there are still bananas in the freezer and all the fruits that were eaten by guests in the interim. Didn't we do well?

This bread isn't a world shattering revelation of a recipe but it's tremendously popular - which is just as well, really. The method is simple and the basic bread would lend itself to all sorts of innovative additions if you had a mind to it although the novelty of the basic banana flavoured loaf hasn't worn off yet in this house.

It's also packed full of oats which render it positively healthy as a food. What are you waiting for - make it now!

You will need:

290g flour - I have used plain white and a fine wholemeal, both work
100g granulated sugar - white, brown, Demarara or muscovado, your choice
1/2 tsp. salt
11g baking powder, see method
150g rolled oats
3 ripe bananas (or 4, see method)
125ml non-dairy milk (or water)
25ml light flavoured vegetable oil

1 9x5 (2lb) loaf shaped baking tin

Mix together all the dry ingredients. The oats I've been using are jumbo oats but Quaker porridge oats would also work. Don't use instant porridge powder because I think it would be horrible.

100g of sugar is plenty in my opinion but you can bump it up to 125g if you have a sweet tooth.

Salt is always optional.

Baking powder - people get so worked up about their raising agents. In France levure chimique is sold in little sachets containing 11g. This is plenty to raise this loaf. If you don't have a sachet, two flat teaspoons of baking powder is sufficient. If you don't have baking powder then mix together 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate) with 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), use 2 teaspoons of this in your loaf and throw the other one away! Simple, non?

In another bowl mash the bananas until gloopy. Mr. Stripey likes to find bits of actual banana in his bread and this is what the fourth banana is for. Don't mash it, add it in little bits just before the batter goes into the tin.

Add the milk (or water, nobody ever died from using water instead of soy milk in banana bread) and oil to the banana mush and stir together. Then add the whole lot to the dry ingredients and mix well to combine. It should make a nice wet batter, add a very little extra water if you feel the mix is too stiff.

I line my tin with a piece of baking paper, just the long sides and bottom but you can grease the tin if you prefer.

Put the batter into the tin, rap the filled container on the work surface to settle the mix and bake in a medium hot oven, about 180C for 50 minutes to an hour. I'm sorry that's a bit vague but the oven here isn't exactly temperature controlled. Test your loaf after 50 minutes with a skewer and if it comes out a bit wet with uncooked batter be prepared to give it the full hour.

After cooking, allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes and then finish cooling on a rack. It doesn't cut well warm but is nicest fresh from the oven. If you keep it in a sealed container or plastic bag it will slice more cleanly on the second day but the slices are still a bit crumbly. This hardly matters as you'll need to break it into pieces to cram it into your mouth.

Served with apricot jam and banana icecream it's a pretty good pudding too.

Chickpea meringue

Goose Wohlt experimenter, engineer, and food lover from Muncie, Indiana, US, is credited with vegan meringue but he got the idea from
The fuel for the aquafaba revolution came out of France with a Le Défi FUDA chickpea challenge video that brought into the light Joël Roessel's 2014 discovery of the foaming action of chickpea liquid. from Aquafaba site

Cooking in a chiminea

This is a rather picture heavy and recipe short post. For Christmas I was given (from my wish list) a cast iron chiminea; I envisaged it providing a welcome shot of heat on those wonderful summer evenings when it's too nice to go indoors but the sun has been down a touch too long for comfort. Like any new toy it has both foibles and features.



The drawbacks have been mostly mechanical, the fire grate bars are too widely spaced and allow many of the smaller embers to fall through before they're done, the mechanism for controlling air flow seems to be purely decorative and like most fires nearly all the real heat is lost up the chimney. It doesn't like damp wood, or large wood, or natural charcoal because the small irregular bits fall straight into the ash but when it's happy it does burn quite well.

The feature, that I didn't think we'd ever want to use, is a cooking surface, made of iron that swivels on a pin in and out of the firebox. It didn't seem a practical way to cook for a barbecue where it's traditional to cook vast quantities of food for serving to a crowd but with a change of focus I realised that for two of us it was perfectly adequate and much nicer in a way, cooking together at the side of the dining area instead of having one person on constant duty at the roaring barbie.

So I planned a tasting menu, several small plates each cooked with different implements to test as many chiminea cooking possibilities as I could in one meal.



It's quite difficult to keep a steady heat going, charcoal might be easier but we need to get some briquettes or change the grate for one with narrower spaces. Paul had to chop more wood twice during the meal as the small pieces burned up so quickly. A double wrap of foil helped protect this asparagus in vegan spread and balsamic vinegar from burning before it was cooked.



This was the last asparagus we can take from the garden this year, it was delicious.



Mushrooms on skewers were next. The blackened leaves are mint that in the end didn't contribute much but the mushrooms were tender and not too sooty.



They were served with a peanutty saté sauce.



Skewered onions didn't work quite as well as I hoped. I was trying to recreate a dish we'd had in a Turkish restaurant in Bedford but a more concentrated heat is probably needed to caramelise the onion petals and oil and balsamic vinegar not a very good substitute for pomegranate syrup which isn't readily available in deepest Normandy.



Aubergine steaks in the cage. They were marinated in kimchi  juices and scored before cooking.



Served with chopped kimchi and a borage flower. I liked this but it wasn't quite right and again cooking the vegetable all the way through without burning the outside was difficult.



A sort of campfire sausage and potato fry up came next. The potatoes were parboiled and sausages a couple of the home made gluten sausages in the previous post rescued from the freezer. My excellent little de Buyer cast iron pan (another Christmas present) fits nicely but always remember to have an oven glove handy when cooking in iron over an open fire.

It was served with a rhubarb tzatziki that wasn't photographed.



The traditional end to many barbecues, bananas in their skins straight over the fire. We ate these with a brandy infused syrup.

Although the preparation was just as intense as any ordinary barbie the actual cooking and eating experience was much more laid back with only the need to photograph adding complications. Worth doing again.

Sausage inna bun

Made some gluten sausages this morning from the excellent PPK recipe except I substituted the beans with some leftover Mexican style rice from my dinner last night and the fennel seeds (which are a truly excellent and inspired flavouring) with some more cumin and rosemary as my fennel had gone mouldy. Yes, it's hard being a food snob in rural Normandy. I also made the mix into eight smaller sausages because I find solid gluten a bit intimidating in quantity and only take lonely solo meals. If you don't have white beans or leftovers you can also use chickpeas or even frozen green peas instead. I know this, because I've done it.

Anyway, it all worked beautifully and my split sausage filled a quarter baguette nicely. Cheers.

Oranges of Seville (revisited)

A trip to the garden centre today turned up some end of season Seville Oranges.  They looked in good order so we bought some and I'll be making marmalade this year after all. Here's the recipe I always use, as excellent now as it ever was.


=========== First published Jan 2008 =============

Marmalade is a peculiarly British thing. The French have an orange jam but it's nothing like the robust, slightly bitter, jellied spread that Brits adore with their breakfast toast.

January is the month of Seville oranges and, since due to an oversight, I'm in the UK at the moment I'm not sure if they're in the French shops or not but here, we made a special trip to a local supplier to secure our stocks for this year's marmalade.

The method I've used for longer than I care to remember is an adaption of a recipe from Farmhouse Cooking, a book of the TV series from way back in the 1970s. I looked it up again as research for this post and was surprised to discover just how far I've deviated over the years. The original recipe calls for a pressure cooker which I don't have and 50% more sugar than I use. Still, the reason I started using it was because the fruit is cooked whole, which in my opinion is a really sensible way to go about it, preserving all the juice and making slicing the peel into shreds easy peasy.



So for 7 or so jars of marmalade you'll need about 7 Seville oranges, a lemon, 1.7 litres water (that's three pints!) and 2kg sugar.

You'd be hard put to find a recipe for marmalade that doesn't include a lemon. It's really not necessary if you've got proper bitter Sevilles but I've decided I quite like the lift a small amount of lemon peel gives to the finished product so if I have one handy then I usually include it. The total weight of fruit I used was 1.2 kg.

Scrub the fruit really well, especially around the stem end, then put it into a really big saucepan (I make jam in a 9 litre pan) with the measured water. You should have just enough water to submerge the fruit although as it tends to float it won't look as if it's enough. Bring to a simmer and cooked, covered, for about 45 minutes or until the fruit is completely soft. If you have a pressure cooker and you want to do it that way then reduce the water by a tad, and cook for 20 minutes at 15 pounds.

Remove the fruit from the hot liquid keeping the water in the pan, drain (reserve the drips and return to the pan) and allow to cool for a while. The next stage can be done while the oranges are hot but it's dangerous work. A hour's cooling should be sufficient but you can leave them overnight if necessary.

Cut the fruit in half and scoop out all the seeds and pulp with a spoon. Put the scooped out bits back into the saucepan with the reserved liquid. Bring this back to a gentle simmer for 15 minutes while you chop the peels as you prefer. I usually do long thick shreds but you can cut it as thick or thin as you like. A cross cut to bring the shreds into cubes can be good and makes spooning the marmalade out of the jar and spreading a bit easier.

When the pot of water and seeds has had its simmer, strain the whole lot through a nylon sieve or jelly bag to remove the seeds. You can rub the pulp through to collect all the orange flesh you like although for a sparkly clear marmalade you shouldn't really squeeze too hard. You should be left with a couple of pints of richly orange flavoured and pectinated liquid.

Put the liquid and the sugar back into the pan and stir well to dissolve the sugar. Then add in the peel and over a gentle heat bring everything back to a boil stirring continuously as you do.

Boil hard for 10 minutes, you shouldn't need more time than that and test for a set on a cold plate. Remove from the heat and divide into your sterile warmed jars. A jam funnel is really useful because of the shreds of peel which can be wayward about going into their pots. Use a ladle and fill all the jars one ladle at a time, this gives the preserve time to cool and stops all the peel rising to the top as it sets. Seal while hot.

The edge

The harvest is really picking up now. This year I'm growing pickling cucumbers. Our usual recipe makes a very strong pickle, sharp with vinegar. It's easy, robust and long lasting but it does make your mouth pucker up. Even if it's in a good way, these very piquant pickles are limited in their uses and not for everyone.

The answer is to make the sort of pickles known as the half sour. These are fermented in brine and their own juices producing a lactic acid cured pickle that is sour without the vinegar strength of brewed condiment. However, making these old fashioned fermented pickles isn't without its difficulties. I've shied away from them in the past because I don't want to die of botulism or have to throw out tubs of foul and rotting vegetables when something goes wrong. Chiding myself for being a wimp, this year I've taken our lives in my hands and made some anyway.

There are plenty of recipes in books and on the web. With the best of my understanding of the science behind it all this is the trial recipe I've made for our first couple of litres of dill cucumbers.

1 litre water
50g sel de guerande
60ml cider vinegar 5%
1 head dill
1 bay leaf
1 grape leaf
grind of mixed pepper and coriander.
Enough small (about 10cm long) pickling cucumbers to fill the jar.
(large ones can be cut into spears if needed)

Make a brine by mixing the cold water with the salt and vinegar. These proportions are quite important, the salt and vinegar work together to allow the beneficial bacteria to reproduce whilst inhibiting the undesirables. The grape leaf also has its part to play in this so include 1 or 2 per litre of brine if you can.

Clean cucumbers thoroughly, paying particular attention to the flower end. Trim a tiny sliver from where the flower was. This is because the enzyme which causes the fruit to decay is in its highest concentration at this point. If you have some bigger fruit divide into smaller sections so that the length and thickness of all the pieces is similar. This makes sure that everything will pickle through at about the same time.

Pack cukes into a 2 litre jar, no rubber ring, interspersing with the leaves and spices. Then fill up with brine. Reserve spare brine for topping up. Close lid and set to ferment. Do not seal the jar. It's important that air can get in. A sealed jar may explode and/or encourage the formation of unpleasant things like botulism spores. You really don't want that.

To hold the cucumbers under the liquid improvise a glass jar or small plate as a weight or use a strong plastic bag filled with brine at the same concentration and sealed as a bung.

Sit the jar in a plastic container in case of spills. After two or three days at room temperature small bubbles will start to form, the liquid will become cloudy and the cucumbers will change to an olive green. Expect to have to clean scum from the top of the jar and from around the weight each day. It's a bit gross but as long as the cucumbers are beneath the brine and nothing starts to smell unpleasant all is well. Add some of your reserved brine as necessary to keep the jar full of liquid.

After five days to a week the pickles will be cured right the way through and if you cut one open there will be no white or 'unpickled' parts visible. You can eat it now!

Clean up the jar, top up again with more brine if necessary and store without air tight sealing in the fridge. The pickles will be at their best after about 10 days and should be finished up within the month. If you want longer keepers it is possible to heat treat them but I'm not the woman to ask about that.

I do find this quite scary but the actual pickles are very nice to eat and I'll be continuing to experiment throughout the summer.