Sourdough

I began my most recent sourdough starter (Bertha) on 14 June 2024 and have been making bread with it every week. It isn't always a resounding success, but I seem to be getting into a good place with it recently, so thought I'd better record my current method in case I get out of the habit in future. With sourdough, the most important ingredient is patience: I start making this the day before I want to eat it!

 Ingredients

150g sourdough starter
350ml warm water (hand-hot: 100°F/37°C)
1 tsp sea salt
3 tbsp olive oil
140g wholewheat flour
445g white bread flour

Method 

I add all the ingredients in the order above, mixing after each addition, the day before I want to bake the bread (usually in the morning). Once it's all mixed, I don't usually bother kneading it, although I do sometimes. I might fold it a few times if I happen to be around, but I'm not convinced it makes a lot of difference. I just place the dough in my largest mixing bowl and put a dinner plate over the top of it to keep in the moisture. Then I leave it to sit at room temperature for the rest of the day and overnight.

Usually, by the next morning, the dough has risen to reach the plate and is sometimes lifting the plate off the mixing bowl. I put my round cast-iron Dutch oven (casserole dish) into a cold oven and then turn the oven on to 450°F/230°C. While the oven is heating, I knock the dough down and scrape it out of the bowl onto a floured work surface. I shape it into a round and sometimes I cut a few lines into the top (the one in the picture had a pound/hashtag symbol on it).

When the oven hits the right temperature, I take out the hot pot and carefully place the dough in it, covering it with the lid. I turn the oven down to  400°F/200°C and set the oven timer for 40 minutes. After that time, I remove the lid of the pot and place the bread back in the oven for another 20 minutes to finish cooking and to get the top the right shade of brown.

Once it is out of the oven, I try to leave it an hour before cutting into the loaf. But that's the hardest part of the process! 

  

Ginger Explosions

I've been experimenting with ginger, trying to develop the ultimate ginger biscuit/cookie recipe. Of course, this is in a month where a worldwide ginger shortage has been announced. 

The cookies in the picture are the result of my third attempt and this time I am satisfied with the end result (the first two were just not gingery enough). The secret ingredient is crystallized or candied ginger, chopped small:

And this recipe also contains fresh ginger, along with the usual ground variety. I combined two different recipes to get the perfect combination.

Ingredients for Ginger Explosions

100g butter

75g brown sugar

100g golden syrup

0.5 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

250g all-purpose flour

1.5 tablespoons ground ginger (1 tablespoon for a less fiery taste)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 egg

100g crystallized/candied ginger, chopped into small pieces

Method

1. Melt the butter with the syrup, grated ginger and sugar. Set aside to cool.

2. Mix the flour, ground ginger, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.

3. Stir the cooled butter mixture into the flour mixture and add the egg and ginger.

4. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture on to baking sheets lined with parchment paper, leaving room for spreading.

5. Bake at 350F/180C for 15 minutes. Cool on sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to cooling racks. 

 

Tomato Last Hurrah

I'm still picking tomatoes from the greenhouse, but they are ripening very slowly now and I know it won't be long before a killing frost gets to them.

This week I have been making the most of them by making panzanella for my work lunches. I often make a Dutch oven loaf at the weekend (I follow Tara O'Brady's recipe for Seeded Boule from her book Seven Spoons but don't always bother with the seeds. So these days it's just Boule, really...). If I'm lucky, there will be some of the loaf left over for Monday. This week I was extra fortunate, with enough bread left for Tuesday, too.

Both days I made panzanella with a torn-up slice of the bread, a few tomatoes, and a few olives. Then I drizzled over some red wine vinegar and olive oil, mixed it all together and let it sit until lunchtime. It's such a simple dish, but tastes lovely and is a great way of appreciating these late-season harvests. On Tuesday I made the same thing, but this time added a few of the pickled peppers I made last week, just to give the meal a bit of a kick.

Resurrection with Pickled Peppers

It's been a while since I've been here (over two years, wow), but I want to get back in the habit of writing regularly, and this seems like a sensible place to start. I thought I'd write up my recipe for pickled jalapeño peppers. It's an adaptation of a few different recipes I found online. And, unlike one of those, it does not begin with "Clean your kitchen" as the first instruction. 😒

I grow two kinds of hot peppers: a cayenne type and tam jalapeños. The cayennes are easy to deal with: I just put those straight into the freezer and take them out when I need them. They are thin-skinned and defrost quickly. I probably have enough for the next ten years...

The jalapeños are a bit more work: they can be frozen for a short period of time, but their thicker skins mean that they suffer from freezer burn if you keep them like that for too long. I like to slice and pickle them, but as I only grow four to six plants, it takes a while to harvest enough to make it worth pickling a batch.

My solution is to freeze the jalapeños as they ripen to red, and leave them frozen for a month or two until I have a sufficient quantity to pickle.

Today I harvested the remaining (mostly green) jalapeños from the greenhouse and let the frozen ones defrost before slicing them all up and discarding the stems.

I use my pressure canner to process the pepper slices. The recipe is pretty simple: for each pound of sliced peppers, you need 330ml of water and 110ml of white vinegar (roughly 1 cup and ⅓ cup) and half a teaspoon of salt. Bring the water, vinegar and salt to a boil to make a brine, then blanch the sliced peppers in the brine for two minutes. Pack the peppers into a two pint jar, then pour the brine over, seal with a lid, and pressure can the jar for ten minutes.

These are nice as a pizza topping, or to add a bit of heat to quesadillas or salads. Once opened, they will keep for several months in the fridge. In theory, anyway...

Ontario feijoada

I love dishes which combine meat and beans: cassoulet, Boston baked beans, any kind of slow-cooked meat and beans. When I read about the Brazilian national dish, feijoada, in Jamie Oliver's new book Comfort Food, I had to try it, particularly as I had some leftover pork belly slices which I didn't use at Christmas and the remains of a smoked pork picnic shoulder joint. Not to mention a load of the black beans I harvested this year! The end result was lovely: garlicky, rich and definitely worthy of the comfort food label. I had to adapt the recipe to suit my available ingredients and I'm noting them here for future reference, as this is a dish I guarantee I'll be making again.

Ingredients (serves 4)

Stage One
2 cups black beans, soaked for at least 5 hours
1 ham bone, stripped of meat
1lb/450g pork belly slices (with rind)
4 cups water

Stage Two
1 onion, diced
2 tsps smoked paprika
9 inch chorizo sausage, sliced into 1-inch lengths
Any leftover ham, sliced into small pieces
5 cloves garlic, crushed
salt & pepper

I used my pressure cooker for the first stage: slice the pork belly pieces into narrow strips and fry them until golden. Add the beans, water and ham bone and cook at high pressure for 15 minutes. (If using a regular pan, cook for an hour, or until the beans are tender.) Then remove the bone and transfer everything else into an ovenproof dish with a lid, with the remaining ingredients. Cook at 300°F/150°C for four hours (or use a slow cooker if you have one). By the end of the cooking time, most of the liquid should have been absorbed or evaporated, leaving a thick, glossy coating on the beans and meat. Serve over brown rice.

Easter nostalgia

I seem to have more memories of childhood Easters than I do of Christmases, for some reason. Like the time I left an Easter egg on the living room windowsill and it melted into a puddle. Mum put it in the freezer and I remember sitting in the garden the next morning, nibbling on frozen chocolate, thinking it was much nicer than the egg would have been.

Apart from hot cross buns on Good Friday, I don't think we had any particular food every Easter. Except various forms of chocolate, of course - the children at school would brag about how many eggs they'd received. Easter eggs don't seem to be as much of a thing over here, although chocolate certainly is.

My aunt sent us an Easter parcel with some Cadbury's mini eggs in it and they brought back a vivid memory of a cake my mother made one Easter. It had a bird's nest on top, made out of Shredded Wheat coated with chocolate, and a clutch of mini eggs in the middle.

I don't have any Shredded Wheat, but I did have some chow mein noodles which I thought might work just as well. I melted a bar of 85% chocolate with about 50g of butter and a tablespoon or two of honey, then stirred in the noodles, breaking them up a bit. I used my crumpet/egg rings as moulds for the nests (on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper) and piled the chocolate-covered noodles into them. 

I used the handle of a wooden spoon to make a bit of an indentation in the centre of each nest, then refrigerated them for a couple of hours until the chocolate had hardened, Then I removed the rings and put the mini eggs in the centre.

A perfect Easter dessert!

Individual steamed puddings

One of my Christmas presents was this set of silicone tea cups, designed to hold cupcakes. I don't often make cupcakes, but it occurred to me that they'd be good for making individual steamed puddings - and at this time of year I make a lot of those. It's compulsory to eat steamed puddings when it's this cold.

This quantity makes four little cupcake puddings - one is not really enough to make a satisfying dessert, but if you've already had a big main course, it is nice as a 'sweet nothing' afterwards. Two would be perfect (I just have to persuade the children to leave home...).

Ingredients

75g/3oz butter

75g/3oz sugar

1 egg

75g/3oz flour (I used a mixture of wholemeal and white)

1 tsp baking powder

1-2 tbsp milk

4 teaspooons golden syrup or jam

Beat the sugar into the butter until creamy, add the egg and mix well, then stir in the flour and baking powder. If the mixture is very stiff, add milk to loosen it up a bit - it should drop off a spoon if you tap it against the side of the bowl.

Grease the cases with butter or oil and put a teaspoon of syrup or jam in the bottom of each one. Spoon the pudding mixture into the cases (muffin cases would work here, too) and place them in the top of a steamer.

I cut some parchment paper to fit the steamer basket and put that over the cups to stop water dripping into them. You could use foil instead.

Steam the puddings for 40 minutes until cooked through.You can eat them in the cups or turn them out onto plates or saucers and add some cream or ice cream.

Ways with cabbage

With the weather due to take a wintry plunge this weekend, I decided that I'd better harvest the remaining cabbages from the barnyard. It made for a daunting pile:

I spent some time on Thursday shredding the heap. Two kilos of it are currently being turned into sauerkraut, I blanched and froze another batch and have been using the remainder fresh in meals: a simple braised cabbage for supper last night and as an ingredient in hash browns for breakfast today. I'm not sure how authentic it is as to have cabbage in hash browns, but it seemed like a good way of using up one of the smaller Savoy cabbages (and it really was small - about the size of a tennis ball!).

I never made hash browns when we lived in England, although I did sometimes eat them in hotel breakfast buffet spreads. Home-made are much nicer and really easy, I discovered quite recently. With the addition of cabbage, they are quite like bubble-and-squeak, so perhaps this recipe should be called squeak browns, or bubble hash. Or something...

Anyway, here is the recipe. This is enough to serve four people:

Squeak Hash Bubble Browns

2 medium-sized potatoes (unpeeled)
1 onion, peeled
1 very small Savoy cabbage, shredded
quarter of a cup of flour
salt/pepper/spices (whatever you fancy - I put some smoked garlic powder in this batch, but I'll often add paprika or maybe some shredded sage)
1 tablespoon butter or oil

If you have a food processor with a grater attachment, the easiest way to make this is to put the potato and onion through that. Or you can use a regular grater. Put a non-stick frying pan on a medium heat and add the butter or oil. Meanwhile, mix the grated and shredded vegetables together and stir in the flour and seasonings. Once the pan is hot, pack the hash brown ingredients into it so that they form a layer about 1cm/half an inch thick. Then leave it to cook for about seven minutes.

After that time, use a plastic spatula to divide the mixture into four (assuming you're feeding four) pieces. Carefully flip each one over and leave it for another seven minutes until the other side is brown and crispy.

My cabbage cornucopia is looking a little less intimidating now:

Plum preserve

When we lived in the UK I used to buy a fruit preserve by Bonne Maman - I think it was plums or peaches (or perhaps both). It was good as a fruit pie or crumble filling or to go with ice cream - it was softer in texture than a jam, but sweet.

I haven't seen the same product over here, but when I saw the plums coming along in the orchard I remembered it and thought I'd aim for something similar if the crop was a good one. The variety we're growing is 'Stanley'.

Mike and I harvested the plums today, fighting the wasps for them. There were over eight pounds in all - not bad for our first harvest - and I've converted all of them into preserve, in two batches. Once they'd been stoned and quartered, each batch weighed about four pounds, to which I added four cups of sugar and a little water. Then I just brought the mixture to a boil until my cooking thermometer read just under 100°C/210°F. As it's not a jam, you don't need to worry about reaching setting point and they don't need long cooking - about 15 minutes at boiling point is plenty.

The skins turn the cooking liquid a deep, ruby red, which looks fabulous with the light behind it.

This quantity of plums made nine one-pint jars of preserve. I processed eight of them in a hot-water canner to make sure they won't spoil in storage and thought we'd have the other one in the next week or two as a dessert. But Child#2 spotted the jar this evening and thought it would be really good to have it in a plum crumble RIGHT NOW. For quality control purposes, naturally.

He knows me too well. Guess what's in the oven...

Blueberry and curd tartlets

I had a pint of blueberries* to use up and this last-minute dessert seemed as good a way of doing that as any.

Ingredients

175g/6oz flour
40g/1.5oz butter
40g/1.5oz lard
8 generous tablespoons lemon or gooseberry curd
500ml/1 pint blueberries

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C/Gas mark 6. Rub the fats into the flour and add enough water to make a dough. Divide the pastry into four and press into individual tart dishes (I've got some oval metal ones, but you could divide the dough into eight and use a muffin tin instead). Spoon the curd into the pastry shells and sprinkle the blueberries over them. Bake for around 15 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown at the edges. Allow to cool in the tins for 5-10 minutes, until the curd sets, then carefully remove and serve with a dollop of cream.

*From North Carolina - Mike did the shopping and he hasn't really got the hang of this local food thing. Despite extensive brainwashing training. Sigh.

Gooseberry curd

I planted my gooseberry bush in 2008 and this is the first year I've successfully picked a good amount of fruit. In 2009 the bush suffered a lawn-mower-related accident (regular readers may notice a trend here) which reduced it to a single branch, but since then it has been growing well and really I have no excuses for not harvesting a crop in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Except that I think my problem has been the size of the fruit. I found out today that North American gooseberries are smaller than European ones. I think in previous years I've been waiting for them to get as big  as my mental picture of an ideal gooseberry and of course they never have.

Well, no more! I harvested over two pounds of them today:

I read a Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall recipe for gooseberry curd in The Guardian the other day (yes, still in the habit of reading British newspapers) and thought it sounded lovely. Once you start looking around the web for recipes, you soon find that there is very little agreement on the quantities of ingredients for gooseberry curd. I'm hoping that means it doesn't matter too much.

I didn't bother to top-and-tail the fruit (mainly because it would have taken me all day). I just added about half a cup of water to them and stewed them down gently for about 10 minutes until they were soft and disintegrating. Then I dug out my old food mill. I bought this when Child1 was starting solid foods and I don't think I've used it since. I found it didn't actually work that well for making baby food, but it is perfect for taking the stalks off gooseberries. I knew there was a reason I'd kept it...

This process left me with 900ml of purée. I froze half of it to use in something else (HFW also has a recipe for gooseberry ice-cream which sounds tempting) and got to work with the remaining 450ml. Plumping for an average of all the different quantities I'd found online, I added 90g unsalted butter and 330g sugar to the purée in the top half of a double boiler. While the butter melted, I whisked up three eggs and strained them into a jug. Then I mixed the eggs into the gooseberry mixture and patiently stirrred it for 15 minutes or so, until the mixture was good and thick. It got to 74°C according to my sugar thermometer (custards are safely cooked once they get to 71°C or 160°F (I only found this out today!)).

Then I strained the mixture through a fine sieve to remove any lingering pieces of gooseberry flower and transferred it into two sterilised jars. This quantity (annoyingly) made just a little less than two pounds of  curd. I'm pleased with the colour and hope it will taste as good as it smells!

Early harvest

Food is starting to come in big handfuls. Today I've gathered asparagus and rhubarb from the garden. The greenhouse is yielding snap peas, garlic scapes and dill.* The Tuscan/dinosaur kale plants survived the winter in there, too. A few of them went to seed in the spring, but the others didn't and those are now delivering respectable quantities of fresh kale.

I froze the dill, blanched and froze the kale and peas, cooked the rhubarb and froze half of it and turned the garlic scapes into pesto. This is the work of moments - just blend together half a cup of flaked almonds, three-quarters of a cup of olive oil, ten garlic scapes, a squeeze of lemon juice and about 50g cheese (Parmesan if you have it - I didn't and used Cheddar). Again, I froze half of that.

Can you tell I've made a resolution to make better use of my freezer space this year? I always freeze loads of tomatoes every August and September, but I'm not usually so well-organised with everything else. I'm not sure how long this hyper-efficiency is going to last, but at least I've made a start!

*It's called 'dill-weed' for a reason, I've discovered...

Preparing for Spring, eating like Winter

Friday's ice storm didn't do too much damage here, although the trees were coated with a fairly thick layer of ice for several hours.

I'm wanting to transfer my tomato seedlings to the greenhouse, but the temperature isn't high enough yet. I did mobilise the children to start the process today. We liberated an old table and a cable spool from the big barn and carried/rolled them down to the greenhouse to act as potting tables. Then we spent twenty minutes or so laying out pots and filling them with potting mix. So the pots are now ready for the tomatoes, if the weather should ever decide to co-operate.

Our reward for all the hard work was a new dessert (on the premise that it's still cold enough to be eating hot puddings). It's based on a Bakewell tart, but without the pastry. So just a 'Bakewell', maybe.

Ingredients

150g/¾ cup sugar
150g/1½ cups ground almonds
4 eggs
75g/3oz butter
300g/10oz mixed summer fruit
60g/½ cup flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Melt the butter and mix it with the eggs, 100g/half a cup of the sugar and all of the ground almonds. Mix the summer fruits with the remaining sugar and put into the base of a glass dish. Pour the egg mixture over the top, then sprinkle with the flaked almonds. Bake for 40 minutes.

Gingerbread Pudding

Bread Pudding is one of those names that could trip a British English speaker up, over here. It usually refers to what I think of as Bread and Butter Pudding - sliced bread, spread with butter, layered with dried fruit and sugar and baked in a milk and egg custard and served hot. Bread Pudding in England was similar in that its main ingredients were bread, milk, egg, sugar and fruit, but different in texture and temperature: it is much more dense and is usually eaten cold. In both cases, the dishes seem to have been designed as a way of using up stale bread. And in my current domestic situation, I can't make either, as Child#2 objects to dried fruit.

I've shared my gingerbread recipe on the blog before. Having to use up stale gingerbread is one of those 'never gonna happen' situations, but I needed a dessert in a hurry today and happened to have half a loaf of gingerbread to hand. I turned three large slices of it into a ginger version of bread and butter pudding. But as there was no butter involved, I've had to call it Gingerbread Pudding. Which just perpetuates the confusion, I suppose. But this is definitely a hot pudding, not a cold one.

Ingredients

12 small slices of gingerbread (about 1 by 3 inches)
3 eggs
¼ cup sugar
300ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
(If I'd had any preserved ginger, I would have added that to replace the dried fruit in 'classic' B&BP)

Heat your oven to 350°F/180°C. Arrange the slices of gingerbread in a shallow ovenproof dish. Beat the eggs with the sugar, milk and vanilla extract. Pour the mixture over the gingerbread slices and allow to soak in for a few minutes. Then transfer the dish to the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes. Serve with custard or ice cream.

Flat as a...tortilla

I do try to resist getting new kitchen gadgets, but we eat a lot of shop-bought tortilla wraps and I thought it might be better to make them myself. Not least because the ones from the stores contain a long list of 14 ingredients, including carrageenan which is under suspicion of being a carcinogen (although the name suggests to me that it is in fact a species of leprechaun (which I also would be reluctant to eat)).

Therefore my birthday request this year was for a tortilla press, because, enthusiastic though I am, I can't face the effort of rolling tortillas out by hand. As today is pancake day, it seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

It is a very simple low-tech device, made of extremely heavy cast iron. You make the dough (2 cups of flour (half wholewheat, half white), ¼ cup vegetable oil, pinch of salt (I forgot to add that, actually) and enough warm water to bind everything together - I did all this in the food processor as though I were making pastry), let it rest for half an hour, then it's time to play.

You have to encase the dough with plastic to stop it from sticking to the press. I cut a freezer bag open down the two sides and folded it over the lump of dough. Two cups of flour makes about 12 tortillas this size (6 inches in diameter).

Then you shut the top down, press down with the lever, et voilà!

I cooked them in a non-stick frying pan at a fairly high heat for about a minute each side.

I had a couple for lunch as quesadillas, with cheese and slices of pickled pepper inside.

But the true test was in the evening, when I gave the children the same thing for their tea. "You have to make these again!" was Child1's comment, while Child2, who invariably won't eat the cheeseless 'crusts' of quesadillas made with shop-bought tortillas, said "I would eat these without cheese". The dog, who usually gets to gobble down Child2's leftovers, was the only one destined for disappointment.

Not bad for a foodstuff made with three ingredients! I'd love to try making them with proper corn masa harina - but first I'll have to find a supplier...

Orange, Lemon, Lime and Ginger Marmalade

I haven't seen any Seville oranges yet this year, so 2013's marmalade is a mix of other citrus fruits, with some ginger thrown in for good measure.

Ingredients
5 Navel oranges
2 lemons
5 limes
3 inch section of ginger root, peeled and cut into narrow strips
4 pounds of sugar

I used the boiling-the-fruit-whole method that I first used in 2009 (here's the PDF of the original recipe I followed). I still think it's one of the easier ways of making marmalade, although if you wanted to make it even quicker, you could maybe do the peel-cutting part in a food processor with a slicing attachment.

Thanks to Quinn for her comment about sprouting lentils (she's also blogged about it), I had a go at that this week, to make something green for the chickens to peck at. I hadn't realised that store-bought lentils could be used to make sprouts. I think I'd always assumed that they'd been heat-treated or something to stop them from sprouting. But it works just fine, as Quinn said:

Although it seems that the chickens are quite good at finding new things to eat by themselves. When I went into them yesterday evening to replace their frozen water with a new supply (we've had a very cold week), I found one of the hens happily pecking away at half a dead rat. :-(

How to boil an egg

Well, it's more 'How to peel an egg', to be strictly accurate. I present for your inspection two batches of hard -boiled eggs.

Batch 1:

Batch 2:

Batch 1 was cooked on Sunday, with the intention of making pickled eggs. As you can see, they peeled so badly that they are only fit for egg sandwiches. Batch 2 was cooked today.

The eggs were all the same age: 3 or 4 days old and I cooked them exactly the same way (gentle simmer for 10 minutes then drained and plunged into iced water). The only difference was in the length of time I allowed them to cool. With the first batch, I was distracted by something else and they sat in the bath of iced water for half an hour. During that time the outer layers of the white became firmly glued to the shell and impossible to separate. With the second batch, the eggs went into the iced water and were then peeled almost immediately, as soon as they were cool enough to handle. Maybe this is something that everyone else already knows, but I thought I'd share my discovery here in case it's helpful!

Pickled eggs have established themselves as a firm favourite since I first made them back in 2011. They're very easy to make and the end result is a useful, nutritious component of a packed lunch or a satisfying snack. Here's how I make them.

Recipe for Pickled Eggs

14 hard-boiled eggs
200ml/7 fluid ounces water
200ml/7 fluid ounces white vinegar
1tsp salt
Whole spices to taste, e.g.whole chilli, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, garlic cloves

Bring the vinegar and water to the boil with the salt and spices, then remove from the heat and allow to cool. Pack the eggs into a two-pound jar, pour over the vinegary brine and refrigerate. You can start eating the eggs after two days, but they'll taste better after a week or two. They keep for months in the fridge. Or would do, if they didn't get eaten much more quickly than that (I find I'm making a batch of these once a week!).

Caribbean concoction

A lot of Canadians escape the cold at this time of year by heading south to Florida, Mexico, Cuba or other West Indies destinations. I can understand the need for a break from cold weather, but these days I'm not even slightly tempted by the idea. I'm quite content to wait for the change of seasons here for my next taste of summer.

Instead, I'll conjure up some Caribbean flavours in the kitchen and warm us up from the inside. Today I made a dish based around black turtle beans, a common ingredient in South and Central American cuisine, and a pork hock which came in our meat CSA order. For heat, I've added smoked paprika and some smoked garlic which I picked up in Sainsbury's when I was in England last week.

Ingredients for Pork Hock and Black Bean stew (serves 6)

180g bacon, sliced into strips

130g onions, sliced

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp smoked garlic

1 pork hock (940g uncooked weight)

2 cups/400g dry black turtle beans (soaked in water overnight)

750ml/1½ pints water
salt & pepper

The pork hock had no skin on it, so I cooked the bacon first in a crockpot to generate some fat. Then I stirred in the sliced onions and cooked them for a few minutes until they were softened. I added the paprika and garlic and then put the pork hock in the pan to brown it. When the hock was browned, I added the beans and the water. Then the pot went into a low oven (275°F/135°C). If you've got a slow cooker, this is a great dish to make in that.

After four hours of cooking the meat was falling off the bones and the water had been transformed into a richly flavoured, thick, dark brown stock. I tasted it (mmmm, delicious) and added a little salt and pepper. This type of dish is usually better when you've let it cool and then reheat it (if you can bear to).

Then it is just a case of cooking some rice to soak up all that lovely stock made by the bones in the hock.

Fried wontons

I'm not sure what it is about early November and fiddly Chinese food, but I decided to make wontons again this weekend, just as I did on the same weekend in 2010. Last time I steamed them, but as it wasn't a fasting day today (and as our new way of eating has been going so well), I decided to fry them this time.

The filling was a finely-chopped mixture of some of our winter vegetables: red and white cabbage, a carrot, red onion and two cloves of garlic, with a few mushrooms and some fresh ginger, salt and pepper. I put them all through the food processor which was very quick to do and created a fairly uniform dark purple paste.

A teaspoon of that mixture was put into the centre of each wonton wrapper, then the wrapper is moistened with water and folded in half over the filling:

and the two 'wings' of the hypotenuse are curved inwards to make a sort of dinner-napkin shape:

Child#2 and I got quite a good little production-line going (there were over 50 wrappers to fill) - this kind of fiddly food works really well when there is more than one person and it's easy for kids to do.

We covered the base of a frying pan with sunflower oil to the depth of a millimetre or two, then heated it over a medium heat for five minutes until it was suitably hot. We fried the wontons in batches of eight for a minute or two on each side, until they were golden brown.

The dipping sauce was a mixture of vinegar and soy with a crushed garlic clove in it. If I make these again I'd add a bit more heat to the vegetable mixture itself: these were a bit bland for my taste. They needed a chilli or two in the mix!

Pumpkin seed granola

Remember the spaghetti squash I used on Sunday? I confess that I usually just put the seeds in the compost, as my one earlier attempt at roasting pumpkin seeds failed for some reason. This time, though, I was determined to make it work. I'd been meaning to make some granola, too and somehow these two intentions ended up being merged into one. Mainly because I didn't have a huge amount of granola ingredients, if I'm honest.

Making granola is so easy that I'm always amazed that I didn't work it out sooner. Here's what I threw together yesterday, once the cleaned squash seeds had been drying for 24 hours.

Recipe (makes around 5 servings)

2 cups rolled oats
Cleaned and dried seeds from two spaghetti squashes
Handful of flax seeds
2 tablespoons of peanut oil
¼ cup of water
¼ cup of maple syrup
¼ cup of brown sugar

Mix all the ingredients together, then spread out on a baking sheet and bake at 300°F/150°C for about 40 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes or so until the mix is a uniform golden brown. The ingredients are very flexible: I would have added cashews, almonds or peanuts if I'd had any.