Caramelised Onion & Goats Cheese* Flan

A perfect egg custard tart baked at the weekend left over some pastry. (It was a perfect egg custard, not just a good one. Gently wobbly and not too sweet, it was consumed with love and mouthfeel).

But I digress. The pastry led to an equally genius potato and cheese flan.

First blind bake your pastry case in a flan dish. The oven wants to be as hot as possible, so 200 deg C at the least. When you get it out, reduce the temperature to 160 deg C.

Cut 2-3 small potatoes into centimetre cubes (leave the skin on) and boil in salted water until just cooked.

Saute 2 medium-sized onions in about 1 tblsp butter for around 20 minutes until they are a rich yellow brown in the pan. Salt them slightly.

Spread two-thirds of the onions on the bottom of the flan case and mix the rest in with the cooked, drained potatoes. Cut 100g or more soft goats cheese into the mix and add a couple of slices of ham (serrano, proscuitto or even just plain boiled bacon) torn and shredded into strips

Don’t overmix the filling. It wants to be chunky with recognisable pieces. Pile it into the shell case, heaping it in the middle.

Beat 1-2 whole eggs together with 4-6 tblsps plain yoghurt (the cheap, low fat stuff is the best) and gently pour it over the piled up filling, helping it to soak into the crevices with a teaspoon.

Grate parmesan over it if you have it.

Bake on 160 deg Cfor about 20 minutes. It’s cooked when it’s browned on the top; just use your nose.

Half eaten, I admit it.

 

*doesn’t have to be goats cheese, I was ready with soft cheese, philly-style in case there weren’t enough goats but just happened not to need it. Ricotta would also be good.

Blinis Sublime

Blinis, on the whole, are supposed to be as light as air and are basically vehicles for cream cheese. Or for fish pate. Scrambled egg. Bacon and maple. Purportedly caviar, though I haven’t had the pleasure. They’re a Russian drop scone, made from buckwheat flour (which is gluten free), and either yeast, or eggs and baking powder as raising agents.

Himself and I had blinis with eggs, scrambled the American way (without milk) with mushrooms and onion*, after a couple of drinks out one night.

Quicki Blini

175g buckwheat flour (it can be ordinary plain flour if that’s what you’ve got, but in that case they won’t be blinis; the result will be drop scones (which are themselves good with anything for breakfast).
2tsp baking powder
2 eggs
300ml milk

Mix the dry ingredients and make a well. Drop the eggs into the well and start beating them on top. As you begin to incorporate them with the flour, start sploshing the milk in, bit by bit. The batter should be smooth and thickly runny, with a caramel consistency.

Let it stand for a short while, then drop it from a dessertspoon into a small frying pan. When tiny  holes begin to form on top of the little pancakes, turn them over until they’re brown on the outside and cooked on the inside.

*Scrambled Eggs Fry finely chopped onion until soft and add mushrooms. Salt (pinch). Beat egg loosely, leaving tracts of yolk and swirl round pan. Salt (pinch). Allow to set slightly, then keep breaking up the curds haphazardly. Grate some cheddar over it, stir some more and add to plate. You want the eggs to still be soft in places, hardly set.

Amazing Pastry

This was going to be a post about how hard pastry can be to get just right and the discovery of a ‘perfect’ way to create it, but many people don’t make their own anyway. The nuances of pastry-making and the pain felt by the baker who has created the perfect steak and kidney filling for a pie that turns out to be encased in chewy leather aren’t concerns for many people.

So here is the point. On Friday I read an article that changed the way I thought about pastry. It’s on the Serious Eats website and is a passionate explanation of why the method it details, works. The type of pastry is called flaky pastry in the UK, to be differentiated from the shortcrust that I make the most often and the puff pastry that everyone loves.

The most important point to note when making pastry is that too much ‘handling’ gives it that leathery texture, and any kind can suffer from this. From the point of adding the water, the danger lies in wait and the only way to avoid it is to incorporate just enough water, a splash at a time, with a utensil, rather than your fingers. In the linked article, it asks you to do so with a plastic spatula. I used a silicone version and normally I use a metal dinner knife.

See the results:

Of course, when taking the picture, I didn’t think to take one of the inside of the pastry crust, but I can assure you that it was as light and thin and delectable as I’ve ever eaten, acting to crisply hold the filling without collapsing as we lifted out the slices.

Truly a revelation if on a small scale.

 

Soul Formula

Victoria Sponge formula is a recipe for life, living, and soul, never mind cake. Think: 4-4-4-2 or 6-6-6-3 or 8-8-8-4.  Think: Everything in Moderation. A balance of everything catalysed by a small amount of potent extra to create a concoction of dreamy delight.

In the case of Victoria sponge which is arguably the easiest cake formula to remember, the 4s are butter, sugar (creamed together), and flour. The 2 is eggs. The eggs bind the mulch together and cause the chemical process (with a little help from heat) to fulfill itself.

It’s simple: if you mix these quantities in the given order, using the given methods (creaming, beating and folding), and then add heat (at 180 deg C), you WILL get cake.

How light it is, how buoyant and delectable is down to practise and error.

To complete the analogy: take equal quantities of love and good times (cream together). Beat in a half quantity of ambition or desire and fold into the mix a measure of hard work (equal to love or good times).

Too laboured? The recipe isn’t.

Peach Cake
4oz caster sugar
4oz butter
Cream the above together until pale and fluffy.
Beat in 2 eggs one at a time, so that the mixture is smooth, not curdled (although it doesn’t really matter if it is).
Sieve 4oz self-raising flour into the mix and fold in with a metal spoon, turning it over and over until the powder is incorporated. DO NOT BEAT. Resist the urge. You want air, not biscuit.

Add a couple of heaped tsps mixed spice and a handful of sultanas.

Pour into a lined single cake tin about 8-10″ in diameter.
Stone two peaches/nectarines, slice into eighths and arrange artistically around the top. Put a few dabs of butter on the top (not much).

Bake in the middle of a preheated oven at 180 deg C.

To be eaten with lightly whipped chantilly cream (because this is my favourite, but I’m sure plain yoghurt, single cream or nothing at all would be adequate).

 

A Lesson in Following Recipes… or, Disaster Strikes in Coffee Pudding Fiasco!

Foodista.com is a varied food blog with a lot of different writers. It has a very American style and a good mix of people who write on it. Serious Eats is a bit more classy (has a beautiful foodporn page, too).  There are some foods and recipes on there that seem quite foreign to Magpie’s limited view and the urge to try them out grew too much this afternoon.

Alas, Magpie’s greed tends to interfere with her cooking.

The Thai Coffee Bread Pudding looks completely fabulous on the image. The imaginary mouthfeel is distinctly present at the front of the hard palate and curious to see if it would turn out, Magpie converted the quantities and halved them. (The recipe serves 8-10 people!) The temperature throughout was 160deg C which was surprising. I have been baking bread&butter pudding in too high a heat for years!

Two bread buns (oven baked, not steam – crusty bread unless a sweet one), cubed, weighed in at about 6oz. Dry them out in the 160deg C oven for about 10 mins and stick them in the baking dish you’re going to use.

Heat the required and STIPULATED quantity of coffee powder (that is, 3 tblsps) in 360ml milk (more on this later) till dissolved. Set aside to cool.

Whisk together:
2 egg yolks
1 whole egg

less than 1 teaspoon (tsp) each of cardamon and cinnamon.
120g light brown sugar

Whisk into the above mixture:
the coffee milk
200ml condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract

Pour over the bread into the baking dish and leave to soak for at least 20 minutes.

Paint 2oz melted butter over the top of the pudding, sprinkle it with white sugar and place in the oven for 30-40 mins. The idea is to eat it with orange zesty chantilly cream.

Unfortunately as you’ve probably guessed, Magpie thought the coffee taste wouldn’t be strong enough (having an odious view of freeze dried coffee granules), so dumped an extra 2-4 (can’t even remember, so stupid an idea it was) tablespoons of coffee into the milk.
It may not have been the £4 espresso powder stipulated, but it sure was strong. The look on Himself’s face as he consumed the first spoonfuls was the same one you’d expect accompanying a mouthful of lemons! The overload of coffee made it bitter, despite the dish’s aspirations to be a sweet, rich pudding. What a shame.

Always encouraging, Himself allocated a score of 9 out of 10 for effort and what Magpie suspected was a very generous 4/10 for ‘taste’.

It looked really lovely though.

Hot Breakfast Hype…. or Roll It Up

Modern diets are full of soul destroying ‘options’. It isn’t a diet unless it’s causing stomach quakes, removing the things you love and reducing  your enjoyment of eating. The guilt that attaches itself to the desire for ordinary, wonderful, taste takes away anything left of the joy for food that you might have had. There is no option.

What seems to me is that you have one of two real options. Either eat no more at every sitting than you need to make your belly full; or if (like me) you suffer from the greedy hand-to-mouth action that makes it impossible to stop, sort your food into food groups and eat them accordingly:

1. Carbohydrates: potatoes, corn, pasta, bread (wholegrain or white) eat in the morning and at the latest, lunch. Lose them at night and you’re laughing – bulk out meals with fresh veg, steamed veg and salads of every kind. Variety is what counts and there’s only so much room in your belly…

2. Protein: eggs, meat, yoghurt, fish, cheese, beans, millet, quinoa…. all good for you in every meal and you don’t need as much as you think.

3. Fats: Good ones: Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Extra Virgin Rapeseed, butter. NEVER margarine. Anything that is grey at any time in its production, doesn’t get a place in my stomach.

The RULE: A little of what you fancy does you good. Everything in moderation and nothing in overload.

Breakfast is my favourite meal. A perfect poached egg on a blackened step of toast at its simplest; cold, left-over curry or egg-fried rice at its most ‘use it up’ or a classic full English for indulgence’s sake, the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is the thought of that with which I can fill my growling belly.

These days I suffer with the compulsory porridge. Himself has a horrible bowel condition which necessitates the eating of porridge every day and I cannot expect him to do that if I don’t do the same. But this morning he wasn’t home, being 130miles north at a farm machinery sale…

So this morning the breakfast was light, yet filling. The kind to keep me going till lunch time. That is to say, the kind to prevent me moaning with hunger by 10.30am.

Put the oven on high, take a soft corn tortilla (or a flour one) and lie it on a piece of foil. Cover it and wrap it with the foil and seal the sides. Place in the oven.

Take one ‘single egg’ sized frying pan and heat a glug of Extra Virgin Olive Oil until it is no longer viscous, but runny and smooth.

Toss in some finely chopped onion, wizened green pepper, a weeny bit of fresh chilli, a few slices of salami (my biggest sin, bearing in mind its dodgy animal welfare likelihood) and whizz round the pan until softened.

Beat a single egg loosely and add to the mixture. Throw in a little sea salt and a lot of black pepper.

Cover the pan with the egg and add some thin slices of cheese – mine was light blue brie. Cook until the egg sets and the cheese melts. You might have to find a pan lid to put over the top to steam the upside of the omelette.

Whip out the tortilla and lay the omelette on top. (The idea is that they are both about the same circumference).

Then roll. And devour.

You can add a spicy sauce or ketchup to the tortilla before the omelette if liked – not everyone is Condiment Queen.