Cracking crumpets

I read Emily's post on making English Muffins the other day with interest. It reminded me of the crumpet rings I bought a long time ago (probably from Lakeland, but the ones they sell now don't look like mine). I think I tried to make crumpets with them once, when we lived in England, and it wasn't a successful experiment. But crumpets, once regular weekend tea-time fare for us, are hard to find in the shops here (and disappointing when they are found) so I thought it was worth repeating the experiment.

I can't remember what went wrong last time I tried, but I suspect the problem was that the crumpet batter stuck to the rings. The trick to avoiding this is to make sure that the rings are greased and that they are allowed to get hot in the pan before you add the batter.

Anyway, here's the recipe I used. It's from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1998). I note that the other recipe on the same page is for Peshwari Naan Bread. This one cookery book page sums up a century of British food tastes, I'd say. But I digress...

Crumpets
Makes 12 crumpets. (The book says this quantity makes 24. The book lies.)

350g/12 oz/2 generous cups strong white flour (I used all-purpose)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1½ teaspoon instant dried yeast
300ml/10 fl. oz/1¼ cups warm water
250ml/8 fl. oz/1 cup warm milk
Oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients except the oil in a food mixer for a few minutes to make a thick batter. Cover and leave somewhere warm for an hour. Beat for a further minute then pour into a jug.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan over a high heat. Grease four 3-inch crumpet rings and stand in the pan for two minutes until very hot.

Pour the batter into each ring, so that they are about three-quarters full (the batter will expand as it cooks). Cook for 5-7 minutes on a medium heat until the surface is set and holey.

Remove the metal ring - the batter should have shrunk away from the edge, so this is fairly easy (not how I remember it from my earlier attempt!). My rings have little handles, which help. Flip the crumpets over to cook for one minute on the other side.

If you eat them straight from the pan, you don't need to toast them. But if you let them get cold, then toasting them will bring them back to full crumpetty perfection.

Watching the holes appear in the surface of the crumpets is fun. Here they are after a minute or two, with holes appearing at the edges:

Two or three minutes later, nearly ready to flip over:

And the finished product, crying out for some butter to melt into all those holes.

Personally, I don't think crumpets are complete without Marmite on them, too. But I accept that might be a little too English for some people...

Wind of change

There's a damaging gale blowing down the lake at us this morning. From our house, we could see white horses on the surface of the water, as the ice was broken up by the wind. The dividing line between water and ice was rapidly advancing down the lake from west to east, so I went for a walk with the dog to capture the moment of change. This is happening about three weeks earlier than it usually does.

The eastern half of the lake was still fairly frozen, although close to the shore the ice has broken up into large, angular chunks. This picture looks peaceful, but it was so windy at this point on the road that I could hardly stand upright.

A limb of this tree had fallen into the road, so I carefully pulled it off to the side, so as not to impede traffic. Not that I'd seen any cars this morning.

The boundary between the ice and the water was fairly clear:

The waves on the water were echoed in the ice which moved in an much slower wave. One that made me feel slightly seasick to watch.

Just past the join between the water and the ice, the reason for the lack of traffic became clear:

One of our neighbours' trees is completely blocking the road. I couldn't even get past it on foot.

Made me feel a bit silly for pulling that other branch off the road, I can tell you.

Signs of life

It may still be looking snowy outside, but my thoughts are turning to this year's vegetable gardening. I've had onions and lettuce growing on the windowsill of the living room for a few weeks now. The corn salad is looking good:

In past years I've started peas off indoors, too, as I've found that they get eaten if I sow the peas directly into the greenhouse beds at this time of year. I'm doing things differently this time, though. These Lincoln pea seeds were gathered from the plants I grew last spring: I left some of the pods to fully ripen and then stored them over the winter. I did the same with some of the Oregon Sugar Snap II peas. A few days ago, I soaked the peas overnight in water, then drained off the water and waited to see if the peas would sprout.

Now they're actively growing, I hope they'll be less of a temptation to the local rodent population. I'll put them out in the greenhouse at the weekend and see how they fare. Mike dug the last of the over-wintered carrots out for me last week, creating some space in there for the peas. There were over ten pounds/five kilos of carrots to be retrieved.

I think this is one vegetable that we can safely claim to be self-sufficient in!

Messy mix

The weather people don't like it when the temperature is around the freezing point and a system is due to arrive. It makes it difficult to forecast whether people are going to get rain, freezing rain, ice pellets or snow. They always say that there will be a 'messy mix' as the system passes through.

Messy from a forecaster's point of view, perhaps, but my ears always prick up when I hear that phrase, as I know it means there will be a chance of some interesting ice formations for me to take pictures of. Today was such a day: we had freezing rain on waking, which turned to regular rain and then to snow.

On my morning walk with the dog, I found a fence-post decorated with a combination of snow, ice and lichen:

Some aster seed-heads, weighed down and encased by ice:

This Canadian thistle head looks like something microscopic blown up big:

And this seed head of Queen Anne's Lace was somehow still standing upright, where most of the others had toppled to the ground:

Not messy at all, in my opinion!

Taste test

When I looked at this huge pile of citrus skins to shred on Sunday night I felt like Cinderella or some other of those put-upon fairytale characters who are given impossible tasks to do.

But eventually I managed to turn every single orange, lemon, lime and grapefruit shell into shreds for the marmalade. I didn't have time to do the boiling down afterwards, though, so I saved that job until yesterday afternoon, when I was slightly more awake. Somehow I don't think being in charge of boiling pans of syrup is a good idea when you're dog-tired!

My reward at breakfast-time this morning was to test the new four-citrus marmalade alongside last year's Seville orange variety, to see whether it came up to standard. The toast on top has the 2011 batch, the one underneath is the new variety, which came out a few shades lighter than the old one. The taste is different, as you'd expect, but still pleasantly tart and definitely something I will enjoy eating for the rest of the year.

Missed the boat...

...the one carrying Seville oranges, that is. Somehow it's already the end of February and there isn't a Seville orange to be had. This year my marmalade will have to be made from something different. Here are some of the starting ingredients:

I'm going to use the same method as the Seville orange marmalade I've been making since 2009, but this time there are regular oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruit in the mix. They're simmering away on the stove right now in the first stage of the process, filling the house with the smell of citrus. I'll let you know how it turns out...

Cabbage-stuffed pancakes

Tonight's supper was a Shrove Tuesday variation on the cabbage soup I talked about the other week. I chopped up about two-cupfuls of cabbage, fried it gently in butter for a few minutes and then poured in some canned tomatoes which had been blended to a purée. These were home-grown ones I canned last summer (using this technique), which had some thyme and oregano in with them, but a can of regular tomatoes would work fine, too. I added a cupful of red lentils, some salt, pepper and smoked paprika and let that all simmer away for 30 minutes until the lentils and cabbage were soft and most of the liquid had been absorbed or boiled off.

While that was happening, I cooked pancakes. For four people, I used two eggs, about 2.5 cups of flour and two pints of milk-and-water (I don't do a lot of measuring when it comes to pancakes...). This made eight pancakes, which got steadily smaller in size as I realised I was running out of batter! I stacked them on a plate with kitchen paper in between to stop them sticking together and to make the process of folding them up easier.

Then I made a roux sauce and stirred some grated cheese into it. This is what the cabbage and lentil mixture looked like when it was cooked:

I folded each pancake around a few spoonfuls of cabbage, then arranged them in a lasagne dish and poured on the cheese sauce, scattering some more grated cheese on top.

After about 20 minutes in a 350F/180C oven, here's what the finished dish looked like.

Warming, filling and satisfying food. Perfect for a February night.