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.

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.

Crumble tart

Mike and I made a bit of a lifestyle change in mid-August when we started following the 5:2 way of eating. This involves eating perfectly normally most of the week, but drastically cutting back calories on two days to 500 for me and 600 for him. It's been going pretty well and I've set up a separate blog about it, with recipes and so on, as it doesn't really fit into the theme of this one.

Today was a not-a-fasting day (hurrah) and I took advantage of it by making this delicious tart. The recipe is from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, where it's called German Plum Tart. In my version I used two slightly spongy apples (which were sitting neglected in the fruit bowl and destined to become compost if I didn't do something creative with them) and two peaches instead of the plums called for in the recipe.

The tart consists of three layers. The bottom one is a sweet yeasted dough which is pressed into the bottom of a roasting dish:

Then comes the layer of fruit with three tablespoons of brown sugar, which makes a sweet syrup with the juice from the peaches:

The final layer is a crumble of flour, sugar and butter (I didn't have the walnuts or pecans that the recipe called for). The syrup sinks into the dough and the crumble on top crisps up beautifully.

A perfect treat after a day of abstinence!

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.

Baked beans and spaghetti squash

I'm reading Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy at the moment, which features a lot of cowboys. Perhaps that was why I thought of baked beans as a meal for today. I'm not fond of commercially-canned baked beans, but home-made ones are a different proposition entirely and they're something we eat fairly regularly in the colder months. I use dry haricot beans (called navy beans here) and soak them overnight. Then you boil them for an hour or so in fresh water.

Usually I add onions, ketchup, molasses, mustard powder, salt and pepper (in unscientific quantities) to the cooked beans  and the water they've been boiling in. Today I had a batch of rather battered tomatoes which I had to do something with in a hurry, so instead of using ketchup I cut out the good parts, whizzed them in the food processor then boiled the tomatoes down into a thick sauce (while the beans were boiling). I added a splash of vinegar to the tomatoes to get roughly the same effect as making ketchup.

Here's how the mixture looked before it went into the oven:

It's quite runny at this stage, which is what you want, as it then bakes for two to three hours at 325°F/160°C and a lot of the water is absorbed or steamed off. You can leave the lid off the pot towards the end of cooking to make sure that the texture of the sauce is the way you want it. I'd recommend stirring the beans every half-hour, too, so that they don't stick to the bottom.

After baking, the beans looked like this:

You can see from the line on the side of the pot how much the liquid level has dropped.

While I had the oven on, I also baked a couple of our Small Wonder spaghetti squash. I've been picking these for two weeks now and on Thursday I harvested the first of the New England Sugar Pie pumpkins, too:

In the past I've always cut spaghetti squash open (usually rather nervously, with a big knife and a conviction that I am about to lose a finger), scooped out the seeds and then baked them in the oven for about an hour. This week I discovered that you can also microwave the fruit, with much more speedy results. I also found out that you can cook them whole and remove the seeds after cooking them, which makes them a lot easier to deal with. The important point to remember if you cook them whole, whether in the microwave or in the oven, is to pierce the skin in several places with a knife. Otherwise you'll have an exploding squash on your hands. And all over your oven...

I tried this new method out today. It was a great improvement: once cooked, the skin was easy to cut through and the seeds came out with no bother at all, leaving the soft yellow flesh to fall away from the outer shells. This is definitely the best way of cooking them: no more near-accidents with big sharp knives and smooth-skinned squashes for me!

Spaghetti squash is a versatile vegetable - you can serve it as a side dish with some butter or oil and pepper, or use the strands in the place of pasta as part of a low-carbohydrate main course. With these ones I'm planning to stir in some parmesan and seasoning and then form them into cakes, coat them in flour and shallow fry them for supper. Rather like rösti or hash browns. Hm, the thought of that's making me hungry already and I've only just eaten the baked beans...

UPDATE: I mixed some crushed garlic, parmesan, salt, pepper and flour into the cooled squash, then coated them in more flour, egg, and breadcrumbs and shallow fried them in a mix of oil and butter:

They tasted great and, for once, everyone agreed with me. This is quite an achievement when you consider that Child#2 has recently taken to supervising me at mealtimes to make sure that I haven't sneakily inserted any zucchini into his food.

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 teaspoons 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...

*I tried this recipe with strong flour a week or two after writing this post. It wasn't a success: much harder to pour the batter, which turned into a gloopy mess. My advice is to stick with regular flour. If you like, you can substitute wholemeal flour for half of the total, to make a slightly more rib-sticking version.

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.

Hooray, pesto!

I picked the first basil leaves this afternoon and turned them into pesto this evening. By some oversight, I didn't have any pine nuts in the house, so I replaced those with some slivered almonds. The basil, a couple of parsley sprigs, some Parmesan and almonds were blended with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. After putting the blended mixture in the jar I put a thin layer of olive oil on top, to stop it discolouring.

And that's it - very simple, and it tastes just as good with almonds as it does with pine nuts. It will keep in the fridge for about a week, although I don't think it's going to last that long!

Almond macaroons

I associate macaroons with Enid Blyton books and they're not something I've ever made before. But today I had two leftover egg whites and went hunting on the Internet for inspiration. David Lebovitz came to my rescue. I'm already a fan of his, thanks to his ice cream book The Perfect Scoop. He suggested macaroons as one way of using them up. I've always thought macaroons were made with desiccated coconut, which I don't much like, but a bit more hunting around brought up recipes for an almond variety, which sounded preferable.

There seem to be as many variations on the recipe online as there are recipes: oven temperature, method, quantities all seemed to be different in each version I read.

In the end I settled for an amalgam of several: as usual, opting for the most simple method and ingredients.

Ingredients

2 egg whites
1 cup ground almonds
¾ cup sugar
½ tsp almond extract (optional, I just happened to have some)

Whisk the egg whites to the soft peak stage. Gently fold in the almonds, sugar and almond extract (if using). Spoon the mixture into mounds onto a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet and bake at 400°F/200°C for 15 minutes. This quantity made 12 macaroons.

My end result wasn't the classic smooth, domed macaroon you'd get if you piped the mixture. But the taste and chewy texture are wonderful. And you don't leave half the mixture behind in the piping bag.

My Internet browsing brought up the fact that macaroons have become a traditional Passover treat, which wasn't something I knew (and which I'm finding hard to reconcile with the Enid Blyton association I had before, if I'm honest). They're certainly very quick to make - so a perfect food for Passover (or any time - I'll definitely be making these again).

I'm glad the macaroons turned out well, because I used the yolks of the same eggs to make a hollandaise sauce. Which was a complete failure. Ho hum.

Carrot, pine nut and dill salad

The greenhouse is beginning to yield more root crops. We had carrots and beetroot for lunch today, with the last of the greenhouse-grown potatoes. I made the carrots into a salad with some pine nuts. It was an experiment, and one that worked out well, so I thought I'd make a note here of the recipe. I sliced the carrots into coins and steamed them for ten minutes. Half-way into the carrots' cooking time, I dry-roasted the pine nuts over a medium heat for five minutes. I added the cooked carrots to the pan at the end of that time, to dry them off. Then I tossed the carrot slices and nuts in the dressing, which was a mix of olive oil, lemon juice and chopped dill.

Last tomato harvest

I took the aubergine and tomato plants in the greenhouse down yesterday. They were still alive, but as the temperature is going to drop this week, it seemed sensible to clear them away. I picked some of the remaining tomatoes and was surprised to find one last aubergine/eggplant, too. The pepper plants are still producing, so I've left them in place for now. It seems amazing that we're still picking such things in late November: the greenhouse has made a huge difference, but the mildness of the month has been a significant factor. I'm not assuming that we'll have the same level of success next year.

Elsewhere in the greenhouse the oriental greens are coming on well:

And the flat-leaved parsley is still looking embarrassingly exuberant!

I turned the eggplant, some of the tomatoes and a pepper into a quick and warming winter lunch today.

Two-cheese eggplant bake

1 small aubergine/eggplant
1 clove garlic, minced
1 red pepper, chopped
4 small tomatoes, halved
Soft goat's cheese (about 2 inches of a small cylinder)
1 thick slice bread
½ cup grated cheddar

Heat oven to 200°C/400°F. Bake eggplant until it is soft (this only took about 10 minutes for this small specimen). Put the bread slice in the oven towards the end of the cooking time so that it is crispy, then turn it into breadcrumbs in a blender. Let the eggplant cool slightly and then scoop out the flesh, which should be soft, and roughly chop it.

Fry the garlic and peppers and then add the eggplant pieces and the tomatoes. Turn off the heat and stir in the goat's cheese until it is melted. Pack this filling into two ramekin dishes. Mix the breadcrumbs with the grated cheddar and cover the eggplant with them. Put back into the oven for 5-10 minutes, until the breadcrumbs are beginning to brown.