the weind

...a web journal from the north

Archives for December 2015

see ya, 2015

December 31, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

We never do much for New Year’s Eve. Once the shops have closed, and the bars and clubs have opened, we’re already tucked in cosily, with a bottle of champagne for me (OK, this year it’s an un-drunk bottle of Cava from Boxing Day), and a few beers for him, and nothing more debauched than maybe a little midnight feast of Welsh rarebit ahead of us. To my shame, I am listening to Absolute 80s radio while writing this and sipping my cava, which also to my shame is pink Cava, because why not?

Our somewhat naff town, on the other hand, is celebrating with its usual combination of heroic binge drinking and blowing shit up. It has its charms, does this place, but they’re really not best in evidence on New Year’s Eve.

Still, once I’d made the last run to the shops, after a day of wretched, cold, rainy weather, I was happy enough to drift into the kitchen to make a dinner suitable for seeing 2015 out. Everything near its sell-by date in the shops that won’t be open tomorrow was going dead cheap, and I came home triumphantly bearing some decent minced lamb and a couple of 10p avocados. A rustle through the pantry netted me a tin of chickpeas, and a tube of tomato purée, the spice rack offered up a jar of ras el hanout paste, there was a tube of harissa, rapidly ageing bunches of herbs, and a jar of preserved lemons in the fridge, onions and garlic in abundance, and my trusty tins of smoked paprika. A tasty quickie tagine was the result, along with a nice salad, featuring one of the avocados, some leftover olives, and patiently-ripened tomatoes, and the bit of dressing from the Greek salad I made on Boxing Day. But this:

Maple Pecan Wholemeal Bread.
Maple-Pecan Wholemeal Bread.

was the part I was really looking forward to eating. I baked a fresh loaf of the maple-pecan wholemeal bread I made for Boxing Day (the remainder of which has long since met its destiny as cheese on toast, and oh boy, do we have a lot of cheese left over…), a recipe I originally got from Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess, and which I have been tinkering with ever since. Today’s innovation was to use 300mls of dry cider (once again. left over from Boxing Day, are you sensing a theme?) instead of water, and slightly more than the usual amount of maple syrup, and I always mess with my flour mixes. This bread is not noticeably sweet; Phil thinks it mostly tastes like an exceptionally good, multi-grain “hippie bread,” — his words, not mine, but somewhat apropos —  and it is gorgeous with cheese. Toasts nicely, as well. I’m not sure the cider really added anything to it, but it didn’t do it any harm at all. I washed it with egg, beaten with about a teaspoon of (yes, left over…) double cream, which gave it a nice shiny crust. It’s a bit fresh for toasting, but what the hell; we want our Welsh rarebit.

…and so we had it, as Phil decided Snacking Hour had come. I made my rarebit with some Cornish Yarg that went mostly untouched on Boxing Day, as I suspect the grimy-looking nettle leaf rind put our guests off, which is a shame, as Yarg is a very good cheese. In retrospect, I think maybe it was a bit too gentle for the rarebit, but the good dash of dry English mustard and generous shake of Worcestershire sauce livened it up.

And, two glasses of Cava, and one snack down, I am wondering if I’m going to make it to midnight. 2015 was, in many respects, not a great year for me, but it had its moments, and when those moments came, they were some of the best. I’m not sorry to see it pass, and I’m going to try to approach 2016 with a bit of cautious hope that perhaps the great moments will outweigh the not-great ones when its turn to be the year slipping away near midnight comes.

Filed Under: Baking, Holidays Tagged With: bread cheese holidays baking homemade, lamb, moroccan food, spicy food, tagine

boxing day postmortem II: everything but the sweets

December 30, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

I keep waking up in the night, worrying about how I’m going to get everything done, and what I have to cook or bake or buy today. Then I remind myself it’s OK, I have no more to do for Boxing Day, and now all I have to do is repurpose leftovers. And that’s going pretty well! Plenty went straight into the freezer, and can just be thawed and heated up at a later date, and I’ve made two batches of soup so far, some of which went to feed us, some went to my father-in-law, and the rest will be eaten, or remade into something else, and frozen. It’ll be OK! I’m basically done! But my nervous system hasn’t quite got the message yet.

Back to the food on the day, though. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a roomful of people wanting to eat, Phil didn’t get a chance to take photos of the albóndigas or the chorizo a la sidra, but meatballs and sausages aren’t terribly photogenic anyway, and trust me, they were delicious. The sausage I bought from Lunya was perfection, and many thanks to Lunya’s chef, who came out of the kitchen, carrying sausages from his own stock, when the shop assistant kindly went back to find out which of their (many, many) sorts of chorizo I should use, in response to my query, insisting I must use these sausages, these were the sort they used, and unsurprisingly he was right, as they were fantastic. (Basically, you need to go with an uncured sausage, and they had only cured in the deli’s chiller case.) I can’t say enough nice things about Lunya. I’ve been going in there for years, and have never found the staff anything less than helpful and friendly and totally knowledgable about their wares.

Anyway! Outside of the hot dishes, everything got photographed, and so, with that, here’s the food porn.

Boxing Day Feast
Yrs truly, prying the lid off a jar of chutney.  Clockwise from bottom: spanakopita, tortilla patatas, chorizo, jamón iberico, bread, cheeses, boiled ham for the timid, wild Alaskan smoked salmon, sausage rolls, mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes.

 

Boxing Day Feast
Cheese, ham, salmon, charcuterie…

 

Boxing Day Feast
Cheese tower! Brie, Tetilla, Stilton, Wensleydale, Villarejo Rosmarino, Cornish Yarg. Mango, apple, and tomato chutneys. Maple-pecan-wholemeal and sourdough breads.

 

Boxing Day Feast
And there’s the muhumarra! This turned out to be my favourite thing, and it was totally last minute; I had some uneaten roasted red peppers, a lot of leftover walnuts, and a few bits of stale bread to use up, and thus, gorgeous, lovely, muhumarra.

 

Boxing Day Feast
All as seen previously, but perhaps a little more clearly here. The spanakopita disappeared in the first round of feasting, and the sausage rolls weren’t far behind. I kicked some butt with those, I did. (Plenty stashed in the freezer, but people were losing steam at that point, so I didn’t bake more.)

 

 

Boxing Day Feast
Muhummara, oh I am so pleased with that stuff. And so pleased I have the leftovers all to myself. Yum!
mezze! mezze! mezze!
mezze corner! olives, nibbly things, guacamole, hummus, muhammara, Greek salad (that was amazing; I’d been tenderly ripening those tomatoes for days, glimpses of spanakopita and mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes

 

And there it is, my culinary meisterwerk. No, not, strictly speaking, a purely tapas spread, as Spain was far from the only country represented, but we most definitely did not have the traditional British or American holiday spread. To me, the spirit of tapas and mezze and the groaning board in general is pretty universal; come, eat, be sociable, and happy. Yes, I totally overdid it, but what the hell: it was good.

 

 

Filed Under: Baking, Entertaining, Food, Holidays Tagged With: baking, boxing day, bread, cooking, greek food, mediterranean food, party, spanish food, tapas

that’s the way i like it baby, i don’t wanna live forever

December 29, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

RIP Lemmy. Phil is actually pretty broken up about this, as he has a fine Lemmy story or two under his belt. I was dreading him waking up this morning, because I didn’t want to greet him with that sad news. He’s currently on a memorial YouTube Motörhead binge, which differs only slightly from his not-infrequent past Motörhead binges only in that Lemmy no longer walks among us.

I was never a huge Motörhead fan, but I liked their umlaut, and I liked them well enough, and I liked the fact that Lemmy and his mighty warts existed, and I am sad that is no longer the case. So I will note his passing into Valhalla, and wish his shade well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

boxing day postmortem: the baking

December 28, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

Well, so much for my plan to write about the experience as it was happening, because as it played out, I had absolutely no time whatsoever that was unaccounted for as I was going along. Holy shit, the last week as been frenzied, and time to even sit down at all, much less write something coherent about the experience, simply didn’t exist.

Spoiler: Nailed it, but it wasn’t easy.

TL;DR:  I was overly ambitious, and made way too much food, which doesn’t surprise me, given my tendency to overdo everything, and my irrational, deep-seated fear of under-catering any dining event which I am hosting. So now I have a bunch of happy, well-fed people who have gone home, and a hell of a lot of leftovers, many of which went straight into the deep freeze, and some of which are going to be repurposed over the next couple of days. Most of the soups I plan on making will go into the freezer as well. And I have many, many eggs left, which will keep for a couple of weeks, in my experience, given that they were very fresh when I bought them, and well, all that cheese, so much jamón, endless chorizo…omelettes and fritatta, dead ahead, is basically what I’m saying.

But to the pretty pictures — taken by Phil, who busted his ass helping me get set up on the day, and heroically walked to Sainsbury’s and found leaf coriander and mild chiles on Boxing Day morning, thus saving the guacamole — which, alas, aren’t complete, mostly because there just was no time at all to get everything photographed individually, and on the table in a reasonable facsimile of on time:

First, I spent the evening of the 23rd and the afternoon of the 24th doing my cookies, candied nuts, and baklava. Oh, the baklava. The baklava that was my pride and joy, and to my utter, though modestly restrained glee, deeply impressed the actual Greeks at our party. So I was able to dump most of the leftovers on them, and get that delicious, gooey evil out of my house. But here’s what it looked like in its pristine state:

maple syrup walnut baklava
Maple syrup walnut baklava. Look at that shine!

I came up with the idea to use slightly reduced maple syrup to soak the pastry, and figured if I could come up with the idea, surely somebody else had before me. Google showed this to be true, so after reading through a few recipes, I hacked together something to my satisfaction. I hauled my ass out to the amazing and wonderful Liverpool 8 Superstore, utterly deserving winner, incidentally, of this year’s BBC Radio4 You and Yours Best Food Retailer Award, to get some hardcore awesome Turkish filo dough, and some lovely Lebanese walnuts, and that trip was worth it (mind you, it always is) because it is so, so, much better than frozen or (most; Theos’ is pretty damn good) mainstream chiller case supermarket stuff.

I think I’ve got the touch, when it comes to filo dough, because I had no trouble whatsoever with it, and the Turkish stuff was amazing to handle. It felt a bit sturdier than I was expecting, and I was very prompt in getting the waxed paper and damp tea towel back on it with every sheet, and in all, so surprisingly pleasant to work with that I decided to go ahead and make spanakopita with the remaining sheets. I had plenty of those, because I bought quite a lot of filo under the assumption that it was highly possible I’d make a cack-handed mess out of it. I didn’t, and now I think of it, my previous filo experiences have generally worked out just fine, so I don’t know why I was so worried.

I go for a slightly rustic look to my shortbread; I am all about the texture, and this was perfect. Pro tip: make your flour mixture about 1/3 rice to 2/3 white wheat.
I go for a slightly rustic look to my shortbread; I am all about the texture, and this was perfect. Pro tip: make your flour mixture about 1/3 rice to 2/3 white wheat.

 

sweets!
Gingerbread, the baklava again, and a gingerbread crime scene on the baking parchment to the left.

 

cookies!
The tower block of cookies! Sugar cut-outs, chocolate chip, shortbread, gingerbread trees and people, snickerdoodles and cashew butter blossoms. (I found some chocolate-covered cashews which I used in lieu of Hershey’s Kisses.)

Anyway, along with the baklava, I baked many batches of cookies. Probably too many, as it turned out, because even though I was handing out huge bags of them, I still have lots stashed in the freezer. We will be having cookies for dessert in March at this rate, when we’re not having cupcakes. The remaining baklava I can slowly take care of myself. Today’s healthy breakfast (and oh god, I need to get back on the clean eating bandwagon like now) consisted of a leftover baklava diamond and a cup of coffee.

insulin!!!
Sugar corner. Cupcakes, trifle, cookies, baklava. Off to the right, the two loaves of bread I baked on Boxing Day morning, to go with the cheese. All the fat. All the carbs. 

There’s the naughty corner of the spread, displaying the cupcakes (red velvet with cream cheese frosting, double chocolate), the cookie tree, and the enormously popular strawberry/rhubarb trifle. As if the trifle weren’t sinful enough, I beat some marscapone into the custard. Other than a couple of leftover scoops stuffed into the empty double cream pots which left with a happy, trifle-loving cousin, that was mercifully devoured on the day, so I haven’t got that sitting around, because holy cow, it was irresistible, and well worth stashing some good rhubarb and strawberries in the deep freezer while they were still to be found in the shops, in anticipation of making this for Boxing Day.

Also to be seen, the bread, and there will be a better view of that in the next post. I baked that on the day, because nothing goes stale faster than homemade bread (it is fleetingly delicious beyond any shop-bought loaf, and fortunately, toast is a thing) and I didn’t want to go to all that effort, only to serve bread at less than its best. I made one loaf of sourdough (the long, vaguely oval one) and one loaf of maple-pecan wholemeal, which is utterly gorgeous with strong cheese.

And there’s most of the baking for you. Next time, the savoury food!

Filed Under: Baking, Entertaining, Food, Holidays Tagged With: baking, baklava, bread, cookies, cupcakes, entertaining, holiday, maple syrup, sweets, trifle

148 meatballs, 42 sausage rolls, six batches of cookie dough…

December 20, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

…in my freezer. I am so deeply into the weeds with this Boxing Day tapas spread nonsense that I have two unfinished posts sitting in the draft bin, mostly because as I was writing them, I would suddenly think of something that needed doing, and I’d get up and get stuck in, and then three days would pass, my computer would decide to up and shut down and restart (thanks, Apple!), thus automatically shuffling them into the draft tank (thanks, WordPress!) and then I forgot what I had in mind to write about in the first place.

But it was probably a run-on sentence. I’ll check when I get time (ha!) and see if I can finish them. (Done. See below.)

And then I got up to put my tester tortilla patatas together and in the oven, so I nearly abandoned another post. Yes, I always fry my tortillas, as god and the Spanish intended, except when I’m trying to feed something on the order of seventeen people, in which case, I start Googling stuff like “baked spanish tortilla” and “tortilla traybake.” The Beeb’s Good Food site had me covered, and there are other sources who seem to think this is a workable idea, so I’m trying it. It seems likely to be easier and more likely to be successful than my other plan, which was freezing them. Some sources say OK, some say not OK, and my own personal experience has suggested “mostly OK” is the answer, but definitely not ideal, as they come out a little watery. If I’m just feeding it to myself and Phil, that would be fine, but guests? (Some of whom are, to put it mildly, somewhat judgmental.) Nope. We’ll try the traybake tortilla idea first, thanks. I’m also having a go at making it with fancy Spanish potato chips, because if I can spare myself using the mandoline and then frying several pounds of thinly sliced potatoes, I will gladly take that shortcut. My last mandoline adventure ended in blood and tears when I shaved off a thumbprint, and this is something I do not want to repeat. So it will be me, a pile of spuds, a peeler and the Mighty Magimix if this doesn’t work.

Also, because I am insane, and have this deep abiding fear of there not being enough food for everybody to eat a huge portion of every single thing available, and for there to be a wide variety of things of which to eat a huge portion, I have decided we really need to have spanakopita as well. So I’ve got a bunch of steamed and brutally wrung-out spinach and some onions cooling, waiting to be blended with herbs and some godawful expensive barrel-aged feta and a bit of ricotta. I’m trying not to think of the phyllo part. If I had any brains, or more freezer space, I might just try to make it as one big pie, but no, that’s not going to be possible. Hey, at least the triangles freeze well, right? This has become my new standard: does it freeze well? Then we’ll consider it. Except ice cream of course, because I’ve got six enormous batches of cookie dough to bake, a tray of baklava to assemble, cupcakes, and a trifle to make. I think we’ve got sweets covered. (Oh, but I’m making custard anyway, the evil little perfectionist demon whispers in my ear. FUCK OFF, DEMON.)

But I am quite possibly going to make those padrón peppers stuffed with goat’s cheese and drizzled with honey. I impulse bought those peppers in a OMG NOT ENOUGH FOOD panic yesterday afternoon, and I frankly don’t know what else to do with them. Daft, yes, wasteful, no.

…and the spicy tomato jam is done and jarred. And very good, if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

…and the tester tortilla is done as well, and it is MAGNIFICENT. So that’ll work and has the potential to make Boxing Day morning less fraught.

And now I’m going to sit down with a cup of coffee while my phyllo comes up to room temperature, and spend some time fretting over my list.

Filed Under: Baking, Entertaining, Food, Holidays, Uncategorized Tagged With: baking, boxing day, christmas, greek food, mediterranean food, party, tapas

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