The noble potato - part 3

Back in the UK for the winter I've been rummaging through the cupboards, trying to "tidy up" and get rid of junk and clutter we never use.

I found this gadget, a simple microwave safe rack for making snacks from potatoes that look like crisps without any added fat at all. They were all the rage in the Mummy set I inhabited some 20 years ago but are now relegated to the odd items in the miscellaneous sections of online cook and plastic shops. I had a look and could only find them on e-bay.

A compulsion overtook me and I thought I'd try it one more time before consigning it to oblivion.

They're o.k.

You need to slice the potato really evenly and thinly. A mandoline would be good but I couldn't be arsed with the extra need to wash it afterwards so didn't bother. Fill your gadget with one slice per slot, nothing else needed. My hand sliced crisps took about 13 minutes on high in our old microwave, usually only used for defrosting because I'm not a microwave oven fan. Start with five minutes and continue in increments until the crisps are golden brown and puffy.

And you really need the gadget. Trying to stand slices propped up like cards or on their edges just doesn't work and for some reason the increased thickness seemed to encourage the wretched things to blacken and burn instead of crisping up.

So, it's another way to use potato and has some novelty value but it doesn't beat a full fat home fried crisp. I think the gadget may be for the chop.

Late to the Party

This is my birthday cake. It looks better than last year's which is a bit of a relief!

Coconut and cherries make this just a bit more special than that plain golden exterior suggests. It might have been nice with icing but it's sweet enough already and so I decided to keep it simple. With a good cup of coffee it's phenomenal.

Ingredients

450g self raising flour (use plain with an extra tsp. of baking powder)
120g desiccated coconut
1 tsp baking powder
300g caster sugar
200g glace cherries
125ml vegetable oil
400ml (1 tin) coconut milk, full fat is best.
1 tbsp white vinegar (I used rice but anything, even cider vinegar is fine)
1/2 tsp almond essence (or maraschino flavouring or coconut essence)

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Ensure your oven is really at this temperature, too hot will ruin everything.

2. Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl and stir in the coconut and sugar.

3. Rinse the sticky syrup off the cherries and allow to dry, cut them in half if you like then toss in a couple of teaspoonfuls of flour to coat. This is supposed to stop the cherries from sinking and may have some good effect.

4. Combine all the wet ingredients in another bowl. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients all at once and mix in gently but thoroughly.

5. Pour half the batter into a greased 23cm/9in springform cake tin and sprinkle the cherries over, then add the rest the batter and level off. Bake for about 55 mins to 1 hour, until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.

6. Turn the cake out of the tin and serve with coffee. If you serve the cake warm you could put a sweet sauce with it and call it pudding.

The noble potato - part 2

Scottish Potato Scones

If Latkes are a Jewish staple these simple potato scones might be considered a Scottish one. The ingredients for both are quite similar but for the scones the potatoes are cooked by boiling before mixing with the flour.

400g hot potato (peeled, boiled and drained)
100g flour
40g vegan margarine
1/2 tsp salt

You will need a very heavy pan with a thick base or a griddle to make these.

Melt your margarine. If you do it in your cooking pan it will grease it in the same action.

Mash the potatoes finely, put through a ricer or coarse sieve if you like to remove all lumps but it's not essential. Add the melted fat, salt and the flour to the mash and combine well. It'll be a bit hot to put your hands straight in so use a fork to get the mixture started.

Divide the well mixed dough into two portions. On a well floured work surface gently roll out one portion to a circle about 15-20cms wide (let the size of your pan guide you!) and about 5 or 6 mm thick. Cut the circle into quarters.

Heat your lightly greased griddle or heavy frying pan but don't let it become smoking hot. You need a gentle heat to cook these cakes through. Arrange your scone pieces on the griddle and cook slowly until the underside is golden, then turn and repeat for the second side. It'll be three or four minutes for each side. While you're doing that, roll out the second portion of dough ready for the pan.

Serve warm with spread, marmite or jam. Leftovers will keep for a couple of days, wrapped in the fridge, and can be reheated under the grill or refried to form part of a full British breakfast.

The noble potato - part 1

Latkes with sweet green cucumber pickle.

Part of my current difficulties with having an interest in cooking comes down to an immature (think two year old toddler) tantrum about not wanting to eat what's so abundant it's boring.

We have a lot of potatoes this year (and tomatoes and courgettes) and before I've even eaten many I'm telling myself I'm sick to death with them. Pretty stupid because you can make so many very different dishes with potatoes, all of them delicious and mostly easy too. I've given myself a talking to and will, in penance, attempt a short series of potato based posts, interspersed with anything really good that comes up, showcasing the many ways the spud can make a good meal.

Latkes are potato cakes made with grated raw potato and fried in plenty of oil. So far, so good but when you actually come to research this traditional Jewish recipe, which is made especially for Hanukkah but also at other times of the year, you find that the variations on the theme are legion with vegetables, flavourings and even cheese added.

Consequently I have little concern over offering my own recipe version, which is veganised by leaving out the egg! I have to come clean though and admit these are the first really successful potato pancakes I've ever made, previous attempts have been passably nasty but at least this has allowed me to identify the essential points to address.

Peel and grate some potatoes. Much is made of the variety but I used a mix of waxy (Pink Fir Apple) and floury (old Epicure) and didn't have any problem. Use a large grater, it's less grief in my opinion. Three medium potatoes made enough for eight cakes.

Finely chop a small onion and add it to the potato. Don't add too much, onion is watery and sugary. The water makes the cakes gummy and the sugar will burn before the potato part is cooked. On the other hand, the flavour is much improved by the allium.

Put the potato onion mixture onto a clean tea towel, gather up the corners, go outside somewhere and comprehensively take your aggression out on it, squeezing those vegetables until they are as dry as really dry things.

Put the dried veg into a bowl and season lightly with salt and pepper. Now, I didn't weigh anything this morning so you'll just have to go with the flow. Sprinkle over enough white flour to coat each shred with a light dusting. Use your fingers to toss the flour through the mixture and allow any excess to fall to the bottom of the bowl. Using your hands take small portions of the floured potato and squeeze it into small flat cakes, not more than 1cm thick and about the size of the palm of your hand. Do several and set them to one side.

Heat a heavy frying pan with about 1cm of olive or other fresh oil in it until it is hot but not smoking. Place 4 or 5 of your little cakes into the oil, not too close to each other. They should sizzle as they hit the fat, then reduce the heat a little. You need to cook the cakes through before the outside burns so expect to take several minutes for each batch of latkes. Squash the cakes down as the first side cooks to spread them out a little and turn them once during cooking so that each side becomes golden.

Drain on kitchen towel and serve as quickly and as hot as possible.

Tradition has them served with apple sauce which I think would be lovely but I didn't have any so had sweet cucumber pickle instead which made a similar combination.

Lacking in the execution

Tofu Fingers in a Chinese Curry sauce

This was a nice enough idea, seasoned tofu fingers coated in cornflour and fried in plenty of oil is always a good start but the rice was mismanaged and the sauce inadequate so no recipe tonight. This is just to remind myself I need to try harder next time.

Still I may allow myself a glass of wine, just to help my digestion you understand.

Breakfast?

In a startling reversal of the space-time continuum I'm now working my way through 10 more days without a car or any access to things beyond the garden and the pantry stores. Not such a big deal as we discovered before but it does lead to some issues with everyday foods that are easier to buy in for one consumer. Like bread.

Yesterday I got over this problem by making chapatti which were bloody good if I say so myself, they cooked perfectly and by chance or design I got exactly the softness and puffiness I desire. Unfortunately, giving the recipe out for them is like giving out the recipe for wallpaper paste. It's just flour and water, it's what you do with them that matters and that is so difficult to explain.

Today I crumbled, (ha, get that!) and took the last loaf out of the freezer but it still wasn't thawed in time for breakfast. Enter the instant polenta.

Instant polenta has a bad press, probably mostly from people whose formative years were spent breaking their elbows stirring the 'real' stuff for an hour while dodging the explosive bombs of hot paste spluttering from the pan.

The instant stuff probably isn't as good, but it sure is convenient. Easiest to measure by volume, an espresso cupful (about 60ml although you don't usually get a full cup of espresso) is enough for two not terribly hungry people. Add four more cupfuls of cold water and heat, stirring continuously over a gentle heat for about FIVE minutes. You'll know it's done when it gets thick and starts leaving a trail behind the spoon in the pan. Add a good dollop of oil or vegan marge and you're ready to serve.

I split mine into two portions, one to eat hot and the other to chill and be fried in slices later. With the hot I served homemade beans in sauce. The garden is providing a lot of shelling beans at the moment and with some shallots, garlic and tomato sauce I made this not terribly delicious hotpot type thing which went quite well with the starchy polenta.

I will give you my tips for flavouring though because that worked quite well. A little bit of white pepper adds something that black pepper misses, probably because ready ground white pepper is slightly fermented. You can become quite a white pepper aficionado because various brands and batches may have quite different flavours and I'm well on my way to becoming one. With the white pepper, a pinch of ground allspice works nicely with the tomato although a single clove would also do the job as long as it was removed before eating.

More tomorrow I hope but I've been having a run of failures in my recipes recently, probably because food isn't top of my priorities at the moment, and there hasn't been a lot to share about it.

Flapjack

I had a whole long story to go with these, as well as my own recipe but for reasons that are best not gone into I'm too cross now to tell it properly. The recipe is a reliable one from The Complete Farmhouse Kitchen cookbook, the book of the TV series that informed many of my afternoons spent skiving from school.

Makes 15

75g marg.
2 tbs. golden syrup (about 50g)
75g dark sugar
150g rolled (porridge) oats

Grease a shallow tin, about 18cm square (or line with parchment or ideally both)

Put marg, syrup and sugar into a saucepan and heat gently until all is warmed and dissolved.

Remove from heat and mix in oats.

Spread into prepared tin and press down well.

Bake in a moderate oven 180C for 15-20 minutes. The colour should be just golden but it will burn quickly if you leave it in too long.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for five minutes, then mark into bars. Allow to cool completely before breaking into sections. Store in an airtight tin. Keeps three weeks.

This basic recipe can be gussied up with added dried fruit or coconut flakes if liked.

Baked Quinoa with Plantain Chips

A while back I was bemoaning the fact I couldn't find plantain in Normandy. Somebody must have been listening because I've found them in a couple of places since then.

Inspiration enough to step up to the cooker.

The Quinoa Bake is, because this is France and that's the way they sell it, actually Quinoa and Bulgar based. I would have preferred 100% quinoa but if you want to do exactly as I did then make a 50/50 blend or even just use bulgar in extremis.

Cook your quinoa in plenty of simmering lightly salted water for about 15 minutes, until the curly germ springs loose and the grain is soft and palatable. Drain and place into a well greased oven dish. Put a layer of fresh sliced tomato, not too thick on top - I used yellow tomatoes and sort of wished I had tomatilloes - then cover that with some thick tomato coulis or passata. Sprinkle with a little salt and some dried mixed herbs.

Make a handful of breadcrumbs, wholemeal for preference, grate in some vegan cheese and season well with black pepper. Use this to top off the bake, sprinkle with a little oil and pop into a hot oven.

To make the chips; peel and slice your plantain on the diagonal (or slice and peel if this is easier!). Fry quickly on both sides until just starting to turn golden, then remove from the pan and with spatula and some pressure squash each slice until it spreads a little.

Put onto a baking tray, add salt and hot pepper flakes to taste and put them into the oven with the bake for 20 minutes or so. The chips should be golden and the top of the bake browned and crispy.

Serve with a little hot sauce of your choice. This is really good.

What a pickle

I've not been doing much meal cooking. This last hot week of August has had me eating bread and tomatoes for most meals except for a few days when catering for a guest, when we ate traditional favourites that wouldn't stand to be blogged yet again.

But nature abhors a vacuum apparently. To take up the slack on my time in the kitchen I've been trying to preserve some of the harvest for later in the year. It's something I'm a bit ambivalent about - I love pickles and jams to eat as well as to make but we often find ourselves with a glut of produce turned into a glut of storage goods and still they don't get eaten up. It's just more effort and money in sugar, vinegar and fuel that is ultimately wasted. Still, there are some preserves that we do come back to year after year and if I'm careful with the quantities we'll have finished them up before we're bored of them.

This week I made some hot tomato jam, based on the Mark Bittman recipe here. This recipe is a good starting point for your own flights of flavouring fancy, and I think spicy hot is the way to go. Last year I made some and it was all finished within the month, it was that good. A word of warning though, take care when bottling it. I bottle into hot jars and still managed to crack the bottom off one with this very high temperature preparation. Most annoying.

The Piccalilli is the British standard recipe enshrined in Government handouts since at least the 2nd World War although mysteriously any number of celeb. chefs seem to have their own version. I adore the sweet mixture of ground ginger and turmeric which is the basis of the flavouring. For American readers I should point out that this is pretty much Bread and Butter pickles but Brits like to put cauliflower and onions in theirs. It's a cultural thing. It can be made hot, sweet or both.

The Sweet Cucumber relish is a little less well known so I'll give you the recipe below. We like it very much, sweet and sour with an intriguing flavour from the celery seed. Good on burger type things and in sandwiches.

Sweet Cucumber Pickle

All weights after preparation:

1kg cucumbers, you can use pickling cukes that have got away for this or shop bought ones, it makes little difference. Wash them well and slit lengthways to remove the seeds and wet pulp, then chop the flesh into neat cubes a little smaller than 1cm square. No need to peel unless the skin is really tough.
500g white or yellow onions, chopped finely
300g sweet peppers - use red or green or a mixture. Seed and remove the white pith and then cut into fine short slivers.

Mix all these chopped vegetables in a big bowl with 25g of cooking salt, cover and leave to sweat out their juices for at least 2 hours, and up to 8 if it suits your schedule.

The vegetables will produce a lot of juice. With your bare hands or some improvisation with tea towels and stick, squeeze out all of this juice and put the dry vegetables into a clean stainless steel pan. Most of the salt will be left behind but if it worries you, you can rinse the veg. well before the squeezing operation.

Add 500ml of good quality cider or white vinegar - this is mainly to keep the colour, as dark vinegar won't affect the taste, just the looks.

Simmer the vegetables in the vinegar for 10 minutes or so until just tender. There is barely enough liquid so keep the lid on but don't be tempted to add more because, well, because I say so.

Add 500g white sugar (the devil's food), and 1 tsp. mustard seed (yellow or black!). Then add half teaspoons of turmeric (don't overdo this, the colour again) and celery seed. Avoid ready ground celery seed if you can, I couldn't, the French are weird. Finally add just a pinch of ground cloves, they're really really strong.

Stir everything over a gentle heat until the sugar dissolves, then bring it all to a boil for a couple of minutes.

I pot hot, into sterile jars and seal immediately. This is the British way and the pickle will keep good in a cool dark cupboard for a year, only needing refrigeration after it's been opened. Lift the solids with a slotted spoon into the jar (a jam funnel is an excellent aid at this moment) and then top up with the juice, tapping to remove air bubbles. If you didn't squeeze hard enough or added too much vinegar you'll have a lot of juice left over, don't say you weren't warned. Be careful, it's hot!

If you prefer, allow the cucumber relish to cool, fill your canning jars and process in the way recommended for other pickles.

Gado Gado

The well known Indonesian dish made from cooked and raw vegetables served with a spicy peanut sauce. It's an excellent summer supper, made with vegetables from the garden, whatever you have and lots of rich creamy dressing.

Because every time I make this, I make it slightly differently I'm not going to give much of a recipe; assemble some fresh chopped green leaves, I used rocket here and top with sliced cucumber, slices of cooked potato, lightly steamed green beans, tomato if you like (wiki claims this is not traditional) and seared tofu. The strange little pods in the picture are green seed pods from the radishes, crisp and gently spicy. Coriander leaf is a nice but not essential addition.

Use a commercial sate sauce or whip up your own from peanut butter, dark sugar, lime juice, soy sauce, garlic, a little oil, chillies to taste and enough coconut milk and water to make a smooth pouring sauce, simmered a little to combine the flavours and served warm. I usually use the marinade from the tofu as a base adding peanut butter and coconut milk to make the sauce.

Enjoy on any summer's evening.