Saturday, April 21, 2012

Green spaghetti


Quick!  The boy is sleeping... I may just have time to try to persuade you to make pasta with a sauce of boiled cabbage and onion.  It doesn't sound very appealing does it... but it is delicious, I promise you, and also healthy, quick and cheap as chips - which, let's face it, is an all-too-rare combination of qualities in a dinner.  We eat it every couple of weeks and never get fed up of it.  I have even had some success feeding the startlingly green sauce to Isaac.  One day soon I will take a deep breath, plonk a bowl of the pasta in front of him and let him dig in with his hands, painting himself, his highchair, the floor and anything else within a one-metre radius a fetching emerald shade.

Green spaghetti
Adapted not very much at all from Jamie Oliver

Sauce serves 4-6 - we make a whole batch and freeze half

1 large leek, washed and cut into chunks (an onion also works)
4-6 cloves of garlic, peeled and left whole
2-3 big handfuls of cavolo nero or curly kale, washed well, tough stalks removed (Jamie says savoy cabbage works too - I think that might be taking the boiled-cabbage thing too far but should try it one day)
100g dried spaghetti, linguine or your choice of pasta per person
50-100ml good olive oil - the quantity proportional to the poshness of the oil (more of a posh one, less if it's  bog standard)
Grated parmesan



Bring a pot of well-salted water to the boil, add the leek or onion and garlic and simmer for 3 minutes (a bit longer if you're using onion).  Add the greens and cook for another 3-4 minutes, until they are just tender and a beautiful bright green colour.  Tip the veg into a colander set over another saucepan, and then into a blender, adding a slosh of cooking water and the olive oil.  Blend to a smooth puree of impossible greenness and feel healthier already.

Bring the cooking water back to the boil in the second saucepan, adding a bit more water from the kettle if necessary, and cook your pasta until just al dente - a bit harder than you like to eat it, as you're going to cook it a tiny bit more.  Drain the pasta, keeping the cooking water, and return to the saucepan.  (I am always telling Matt off for not keeping the pasta cooking water.  He never learns.)  Add as much of the sauce as you like, along with a bit of pasta cooking water and a good grating of parmesan, and simmer for another minute or so.  (I like my pasta more liberally sauced than is considered proper by the Italians, and was told by a teacher at cooking school that I'd get booted out of Italy for grating my parmesan on a microplane, but I'm just a renegade like that.)  Taste and add a grinding of black pepper, and more salt and cheese if needed.

Serve on warm plates with more grated parmesan on top.


Sunday, April 15, 2012

Oat (& buckwheat) pancakes


Matt's default response to "What would you like for breakfast?" at the weekend is "Pancakes!".  (Not sure exactly when I became weekend-breakfast-maker-in-chief - but I spose he does work all week, while I gallivant about changing nappies and wiping up vomit without a care in the world... haha.)  He doesn't mean thin, delicate crepes - Matt spent four years living in Montreal, and for him pancakes are thick and fluffy and ideally draped with syrup.  

I like pancakes too - both sorts - but they can feel slightly insubstantial, faintly frivolous, and I am plagued with the notion that refined carbs fried in butter do not a wholesome breakfast make.  (Pudding, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely.)  I like my morning goods to be a little more sustaining, to have a bit more heft to them - otherwise I'm hungry and/or sugar crashing half an hour later.

A few weeks ago, I thought I'd found the solution in these oatmeal pancakes... but on the third making they seemed a bit too porridge-stodgy.  They are also quite a faff to make - you have to grind oats to a powder in a food processor (a bit antisocial on a Sunday morning - sorry, neighbours) and make porridge before you make the batter, and all you wanted was pancakes.  Still, I liked the idea of a pancake made wholesome with oats, but with weekend-indulgent butter-crisp edges, so I googled and I tweaked and I think these will do nicely.  We had them with a blob of Greek yoghurt and some rhubarb and vanilla compote, but they would be equally good with butter and maple syrup or honey, or fresh berries or sliced bananas, or some combination of the above.  The buckwheat flour gives them a really nice nutty flavour, but if you don't have any then all plain flour would be fine.

A note on cup measurements: I know - cup measurements are annoying.  But pancakes are such a classically North American foodstuff that I think they are acceptable here.  Plus it's late and I can't be bothered to do the conversions, so there.  If you don't have cup measures, see here for conversion tables.

Oat (& buckwheat) pancakes
Adapted from here, here and here

Serves two hungry grown-ups and a baby

1 cup milk
1 tablespoon lemon juice or white wine vinegar
3/4 cup oats - porridge or jumbo
1/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
Generous pinch salt 
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tbsp melted butter, plus more for frying
A neutral oil such as sunflower or grapeseed

In a medium bowl, combine the milk with the lemon juice or vinegar and leave for five minutes - you are making a quick, cheaty buttermilk substitute.  Add the oats to the 'buttermilk' and soak for as long as your pancake-hungry hordes will allow - I think I left mine for about twenty minutes. (One of the recipes I found online said to soak them overnight - maybe this makes the pancakes even more delicious, or perhaps easier to digest - but twenty minutes is fine.)  

Sift the flours, baking powder and salt into another bowl.  Have a coffee.  Beat the brown sugar, the egg and the melted butter into the oat mixture and then gently stir the wet mix into the dry ingredients - stop as soon as soon as you don't see any more streaks of dry flour (the less you mix, the lighter your pancakes will be - for more pancake-making tips, see here).  

Heat your best frying pan (non-stick or cast iron) over a medium heat.  Add a drop of oil and a pat of butter, and when the butter is foaming, spoon big spoonfuls of batter into the pan.  Wait until you see lots of bubbles on the surface of the pancakes, then lift up the edge of one - if they are a nice golden brown, flip them over.  They will cook much more quickly on the second side.  You might have to adjust the heat to get the requisite golden-brownness and crispy edges.  Serve the pancakes straight away, or keep them warm in a low oven.  We have also found that they reheat really well the next day in a toaster, but take no responsibility for any long-term damage that the toasting of previously fried foods may cause to your electrical appliances. 




  

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Maple syrup and olive oil granola


I'm back! It only took two and a half years... But to be fair I've been a bit busy since I came home from Ireland: opening a café (not mine, someone else's); falling out spectacularly with boss at said café (but that's another story); working on this Sustain project; trying and only very occasionally succeeding to conquer breakfast service at the lovely Clerkenwell Kitchen; and, most recently, having a baby.


Ever since I got pregnant last November - no! the November before last, blimey - I vowed that when I went on maternity leave I'd start my long-neglected blog up again. After all, plenty of mums juggle blogs and small people - this woman, and this one, and my friend Anne, and you can bet that these two bloggers-with-buns-in-the-oven aren't going to let a mere baby get between them and the computer screen. (And that's not counting the legions of women who blog about motherhood itself - a laugh-out-loud-on-the-train-home example of the genre here.) Hats off to you, ladies, cos nearly 9 months have slid by - enough time to grow another baby, dammit! - and I've managed not a single post. Until now (we won't talk about the fact that this one took me a month to write).


You need to know about this granola recipe. The WORLD needs to know. I gave some to two fellow February birthday girls, and both gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up - one began her thanks-for-the-nice-granola text with "Holy shit, Charles…!" which I think is how I'd like all compliments to be prefaced from now on. ("Holy shit Charles, your hair looks amazing!" - hmm, not so likely at the present time, or perhaps indeed ever, but I can dream.) I feel quite evangelical about this recipe. Since I started making it I've sent it to at least half a dozen people, and now, through this blog, another... oooh... half dozen or so might get to read it. I am doing my duty.


I've been looking for my perfect granola recipe for a long time. Back in my festival catering days I used to make great big vats of it to serve with fruit, honey and an incredible, thick, yellowish natural yoghurt made from Jersey milk by a dairy in the Cotswolds that has sadly since bitten the dust. It was good stuff, dark and crunchy, cinnamon-scented and packed with nuts and seeds and dried fruit, but it wasn't perfect - your jaw started to ache a bit towards the end of a helping, and after toasting load after industrial load of the stuff, I started to get a bit sick of the smell of it.


This granola, by comparison, makes light work for the jaws and has a cleaner, sweet-savoury flavour, thanks to an unlikely-sounding but insanely addictive combination of maple syrup, olive oil and sea salt. Now, forgive me if I get all granola-geek on yo asses for a moment, but I always thought the clumpiness of granola was of paramount importance – individual flakes of oat, bits of nut and seeds just didn’t cut it. But I've changed... and now I am prepared to go out on a limb and say that crispy crunch trumps clumps. There’s the advertising jingle sorted already. Anyway, with this granola you get both – although I will concede that here, the clusters are so delicately formed that by the bottom of the jar, most of them have disintegrated into individual niblets. That doesn’t matter as they still taste bloody lovely – just ask Anne, who finished off her birthday batch straight from the jar.


I like it by the fistful too, but lately I’ve also been eating it with Greek yoghurt (a breastfeeding perk – full fat everything, no guilt) and steamed apple. I know steamed apple sounds like something you would only feed to the elderly and infirm or babies (and in fact I did initially steam it to feed to 7-month-old Isaac) – but it’s intensely appley and surprisingly delicious, and a nicely fresh, virtuous foil to the rich, sharp yoghurt and sweetly, saltily moreish granola. Seriously, this is the crack cocaine of breakfast cereals – I find it impossible to walk by a recently baked batch cooling on its trays without a nugget or several ending up in my mouth. Another bonus (assuming you agree that the crack cocaine bit is a bonus) is that this is the easiest, most fuss-free granola I’ve ever made – which is a good thing, considering how easy it is to polish a batch off.


I got the recipe from Orangette (such a beautiful blog), and I haven’t changed it much – just added some sesame seeds for extra crunch, and inched down the sweetness a little bit (those Yanks sure like their sugar). Sometimes I make it with flaked almonds instead of coconut, depending on what’s in the cupboard. You could fiddle with the combination of grains, nuts and seeds a lot more, just don’t mess with the olive-oil-brown-sugar-maple-syrup-and-salt part too much. On the dried fruit: usually I’m a fan of dried fruit in a granola, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this one is so good, it doesn’t need it. Cranberries do look pretty in the jar though.

Maple syrup and olive oil granola
Adapted from Orangette, who adapted it from Nekisia Davis of Early Bird Foods


300g jumbo oats
120g pumpkin seeds
120g sunflower seeds
50g sesame seeds
130g walnuts, in halves or pieces (or pecans – but I always use walnuts because pecans are so eye-wateringly expensive)
50g coconut flakes OR 75g flaked almonds
1/2 tsp fine sea salt (or use 1 tsp of a flaky one like Maldon, but crush it a bit between your fingers)
50g light or dark brown sugar
150ml maple syrup
120ml olive oil
Dried fruit such as sour cherries or cranberries, if you like


Preheat the oven to 150C and line one big or two smaller baking trays with parchment. Mix the oats, nuts, seeds, brown sugar and salt together in a big bowl, breaking up any clumps of brown sugar with your fingers. Add the maple syrup and olive oil and mix again. Scrape out onto the baking tray(s), making sure you’ve got all the precious oily, syrupy goodness out of the bowl. Bake for around 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes (set a timer – burnt granola is a terrible thing). When the granola is toastily golden, take it out of the oven, taste it, and add more salt if you like. Allow it to cool, reminding yourself that it would be good to have some left for breakfast. It will crisp up as it cools, and some of it will set into big jaggedy clusters. Once cool, stir in the dried fruit if using – gently, so as to keep some clusters intact – and transfer to airtight containers. Put containers on a very high shelf or at the back of a cupboard, or resign yourself to making another batch very soon indeed.