The Homemade Heart

Cookery Calendar Challenge- April

 

Welcome to the Cookery Calendar Challenge for April.
Click here for the Cookery Calendar Challenge page, which has all the information about the challenge.

My recipe book of choice for March was 'Simply Nigella', the latest offering from Nigella Lawson.  Nigella's first book,  'How to Eat', published in 1998, remains one of my favourite recipe books, and I fully respect and acknowledge her role in presenting an unfussy, relaxed cooking and eating style to home cooks. However, I found 'Simply Nigella' very hard to get to grips with; not many recipes jumped out at me, and the two I made for the Cookery Calendar Challenge were judged 'ok' by the family, but neither will be added to my repertoire of family recipes.

'Thai Turkey Meatballs' was my first recipe (though as Nigella herself acknowledges, turkeys do not exactly roam free in Thailand). The recipe itself uses a high proportion of grated courgette (wet) with the turkey mince (wet). Various other ingredients are added and then lightly mixed together to form meatballs. Though the courgette is squeezed in kitchen roll to remove some of the moisture, the meatball mixture is very slack. I didn't feel confident the meatballs would stay intact in the broth and ended up adding some breadcrumbs to bind and stabilise the mixture. Not difficult to make, but a fair bit of fiddling about, and the dish didn't receive a rave review from the family.

My second recipe was 'Chicken Shawarma' which I was quite excited about making, as it had lots of different spices in it, yet was simple to prepare. I thought it looked and smelled good when it came out the oven, but it received a lukewarm review from the carnivores in the family and I am unlikely to make it again.

Overall a disappointing start with 'Simply Nigella'. When two out of two dishes have been tolerated rather than enjoyed, it takes a leap of faith to try many more from the book. I appreciate that much of Nigella's writing is about a lifestyle, and a general vibe of on-trend recipes and ingredients channelled via her image for use by us less stylish mortals, but this time round I felt slightly wearied by it all. Positive things about the book.... attractive cover; what looks like some interesting baking recipes at the back, and make-ahead and storage notes for all the recipes.

My cookery book choice for April is 'French Leave' by John Burton Race. I talked a little about this book in my last post, it has been on my shelf for a long time; time for a good look through it again to find two new dishes to make.

Many thanks to those who joined the link up last month, I hope you enjoyed it and will continue the challenge with me. If you haven't joined before, and would like to, here's how to take part.

How it works:

The challenge is simple: the first week of every month, select a cookery book from your shelf and cook two new recipes from it. The recipes can be for any meal. Cakes and bakes are excluded, but puddings are included. At the beginning of the following month, blog about the recipes you have used, and announce your chosen cookery book for the month ahead. This is an ongoing project, it's never too late to get involved, and everyone is very welcome.
I would appreciate a link back to this Cookery Calendar Challenge post in your post. Grab the Cookery Calendar Challenge badge to display on your blog too if you like. (Just copy and paste the code into your blog dashboard to display) You can also join via Instagram using hashtag #cookerycalendarchallenge (you will find me on Instagram @penny.homemadeheart).

An InLinkz Link-up

 

chocolate bunnies in abundance

In my last post I was mulling over pudding options for our Easter feast. In the end I made tarte tatin, a classic pudding that I thought suitable for a still-chilly early-Spring Easter such as we have had this year. I didn't make anything chocolate based; there were chocolate eggs, chocolate chicks and chocolate bunnies in abundance, I couldn't in all conscience add to the chocolate load.

I have never (to my own mild surprise) made tarte tatin before, and used a recipe from 'French Leave' by chef John Bourton Race. This is his memoir of a year spent in the south of France with his family, and is full of recpies, and stories of the people he met in his quest to discover new foods and techniques. It was written to accompany a series on television, which I never saw, having picked up the book in a charity shop some years ago, long after the series had aired. It has earned space on my kitchen shelf by virtue of a recipe for cauliflower soup which is truly delicious, and a sentence which I love, describing a particular cake as 'good to eat with a glass of champagne if you have some friends coming round for afternoon tea'. When I bought the book, this suggestion struck me as ludicrously bourgeois, but with the passage of years I now regard as a very nice idea. Thus are our lives and attitudes measured in recipes. Reasons for keeping the book are now further bolstered by this excellent Tarte Tatin which was easy to make yet looked celebratory and appetising, and disappeared very quickly on the day.

Tarte Tatin

Ingredients:

125g unsalted butter

125g caster sugar

6 dessert apples

3 tablespoons Calvados

plain flour for dusting

200g shop bought puff pastry

Method:

Preheat oven to Gas 6/200c

With 100g of the butter, grease a heavy, circular ovenproof pan measuring 20cm across.

Peel and core the apples and cut them in half. Lay them cut side up in the pan, packing them tightly, as they will shrink on cooking.

Put the pan on the stove over a medium heat. As the butter and sugar start to caramelise pour on the Calvados and set fire to it.

Sprinkle the remaining sugar over the apples and dot the remaining butter in little pieces round the pan.

Turn down the heat a little and allow the apples to cook and caramelise to a golden colour; this takes 5-10 minutes.

Put the pan in the preheated oven and cook for a further 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little.

Once the pan is cool enough to touch safely, roll out the puff pastry into a circle about 1cm thick and slightly larger than the base of the pan. Lay the pastry over the cooked apples and tuck inside the edge of the pan to encase the fruit.

Put the tart back in the oven for about 15 minutes until the pastry is pale golden and puffed up.

Remove the tart from the oven, allow to rest for about 5 minutes. Place a serving dish over the tart, and quickly invert the pan onto the plate, pastry side down.

Serve immediately with generous helpings of double cream.

I used home made plum brandy left over from Christmas as we didn't have any Calvados. It worked very well, imparting a delicious flavour to the apples. I did not, however, flambe . I can steel myself to set fire to the Christmas pudding once a year, but adding further flambes to the cookery calendar seems an unnecessary fuss.

No photographs of the tarte tatin, but a few of the posies from the Easter table. The vases are SylvaC pottery. My Nana had a large SylvaC jug in her house when we were children which I always loved, predisposing me to gather these over a few years from charity shops and eBay. They are now brought out annually with the Easter decorations.

 

 

a busy day ahead

 
It is 8 a.m. on  Saturday morning. Everyone else is still asleep. I am greatly enjoying the silence of the hour. I can hear the clock ticking on the mantelpiece as I sit on my laptop at Mrs Doubtfire. The bird feeders on the cherry blossom trees outside the window are quiet, just one or two draggled sparrows have come for breakfast in the steady rain. Meg greeted me enthusiastically when I came through, but she has now lost interest and has lain down on her bed again, snoring gently, dreaming of muddy walks and rabbits no doubt. Her peaceful presence is comforting.
I have a busy day ahead. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, and we are having a celebratory meal. Lamb is traditional, but I will be cooking a glazed ham, and making a salmon coulibiac for the non meat eaters (Mum, and me), though everyone else will have some too. Lots of vegetables, and small new potatoes cooked slowly with a slick of olive oil, and plenty of salt and pepper. Pudding is still to be decided; something chocolatey for the boys, and perhaps an apple fool, or something lemony. As you can tell, I haven't done a huge amount of forward planning for this meal, but I am looking forward enormously to having everyone here.
I am confident that by the end of today the house will be tidy, the Easter decorations will be up, the food for tomorrow will be well under way. The big kitchen table will be laid with a bright cloth, and scattered with small posies of flowers. A Lindt Easter bunny will mark each guest's place the table.
However you enjoy Easter, be it for you a religious festival, or, like me, an opportunity to gather dear family and friends together for a celebration meal, I wish you a very happy day. 

a pile of new books: 2

There are few things in this world that make me happier than a pile of new books.   

I like to own books, rather than borrow them from the library. A borrowed book never has the same feel as an owned book. I worry about library books being somehow damaged, or having tea spilled on them, or simply disappearing under a pile of laundry in our (often untidy) house. I keep the library books in a quarantine, in a neat pile on the sideboard;  they can never go on to the bookcase in case they disappear for ever. Even when the boys were young, and I felt a parental obligation to initiate them into the mysteries of library membership, I never enjoyed reading them library books as much as I enjoyed reading them books that we owned. An owned book has the potential to become part of the fabric of home; a library book is only ever passing through.

One thing I do rather like though, is buying second hand library books, either from the library, when they have an occasional sale of withdrawn books, or from Amazon Marketplace. The slightly sticky, translucent, plastic covers, mildly unpleasant to the touch when reading borrowed books, once removed by the new owner, reveal an almost perfect book cover, something of a bonus in a second hand book. I also rather like the thought of the book finally having a permanent home, and becoming part of the general ebb and flow of family life.

The physical presence of books comforts me. I re-read favourite books many times, and get to know specific editions so well that I can picture in my mind's eye exactly where favourite phrases fall on the page. I can't imagine a life, or a home, without books.

The pile of books pictured is a mixture of second-hand, and new.
New is Emma Bridgewater's latest book, 'Pattern' a hop, skip and jump through some of the patterns she and her husband, Mathew Rice, have designed for their pottery business over the last thirty years . I read 'Toast and Marmalade' last year, also by Emma Bridgewater, which was a fully developed autobiography. This latest book also has a lot of autobiographical detail in it, relating to how various patterns were developed, and has a back catalogue of many of the patterns, which makes for interesting reading.

Second-hand is 'Childhood Treasures by Caroline Zoob'. An ex-library book (now denuded if its plastic cover), with lots of beautiful, inspirational photographs and clear instructions for how to recreate the embroidered, painted and patchworked treasures within. Caroline champions the idea that children should be given beautiful, tactile objects to own and play with, proposing that by being trusted with beautiful things, they will learn to love and respect them. A high risk strategy in reality, but a nice idea in print, and I (broadly) applaud the sentiment, with a few caveats. 
Another Caroline Zoob book, 'Hand Stitched Home'', new this time, full of her trademark delicate but simple stitching ideas for the home.  A book to sigh over.

A recent purchase, 'Hexa Go-Go'. The title makes me wince a little, but I was looking for some inspiration for hand quilting, and this book has some really appealing ideas, one of which I am using currently in slightly adapted form, for a very slow-growing hand stitched quilt which I started just after Christmas, when my fingers were almost physically itching to start some English Paper Piecing.

'About A Village'. This is a curious book, and one that appeals to me very much. It is a photographic essay of a village in England, called Firle. I bought it for photographic inspiration, I like the photographer's style.

My pile of new books for spring time.

 

concientious, though not obsessive

I am a conscientious, though not obsessive, recycler. I sort dutifully through the junk mail; separate plastic and paper food packaging, recycle all jars and tins, and  wash and return our empty glass bottles to the milkman when he comes for his money on a Thursday teatime. Clothes and shoes not suitable for the charity shop go to a huge sealed skip beside our community centre and are recycled. Our local council supplies different coloured bins for glass, paper, plastic, and food waste, and a complicated rota for kerbside collection which I adhere to like a good citizen. It is an easy habit to get into, and I like to think that at least some of the household waste will be reused.

Growing up in the Highlands in the 1970's, there were many examples of recycling, based not so much on the ideals of ecology, as the straightforward difficulty of disposing of unwanted items. Recycling, re-using, and re-purposing was done with a minimum of fuss, and certainly without the slight air of self-conscious congratulation that so often accompanies modern day endeavours.  No field was complete without an enamel bath or sink, removed during someone's house renovation, tucked in the shelter of the hedge for the cows to drink from. Old cars, once run in to the ground, were never towed away, but left round the back of the croft to rust; put to use as a hen house, or somewhere for the cats to sleep. A childhood friend kept several generations of guinea pigs in a broken down caravan.
Smaller household items too, were not thrown out, but re-used, sometimes with disastrous results. Our childhood was peppered with stories of children who had drunk bleach from old glass lemonade bottles, kept under the kitchen sink within easy reach of small hands. Petrol, decanted into unsuitable containers, was ripe for conflagration. Old tin cans with perilously jagged edges, filled with nails or screws, caused nasty cuts, and inevitably, tetanus. Not that any of us knew what tetanus was, but it sounded terrifying.
Happier recycling examples were old biscuit tins, or pretty chocolate boxes, usually from Christmas time, hoarded with delight and filled with small treasures. Again, this was not so much due to whimsy, but because there wasn't really anywhere to buy plastic storage boxes or containers. The nearest shop was 17 miles away, and if the owner had wasted shelf space with empty containers the locals would have taken a very dim view of such frivolous behaviour.

Childhood habits can be hard to shake off, and whilst I do not have any cars rusting in the garden, or bottles of bleach decanted into child-attracting juice containers, I do find it hard to get rid of pretty tins, or cardboard boxes that are just a good, handy size. I have to absolutely force myself to recycle all the little pots that cosmetics and body care products are packed in; they are so pretty, so sturdy, and just the right size for pins, or bobbins, or icing bag nozzles, or paper clips... I have seen myself standing at the recycling bin in minor emotional turmoil over getting rid of a nice little pot or box.

Fortunately, I also have a horror of hoarding, which keeps in check my tendency to keep hold of absolutely everything that might just come in handy for a need not yet specified at some vague time in the future. I always have a charity shop bag in the house, which fills steadily with old clothes, books etc, plus more thorough clear outs a couple of times a year, which usually result in at least a dozen bin bags going to the charity shop. I encourage the boys in this habit too, occasionally asking them to tidy their rooms and identify everything as belonging to one of four categories: keep, charity, recycle/bin, loft. (The loft category must always be the smallest, it is there for things they really cannot bear to get rid of but have no immediate use for). I don't attach a judgement to what they choose to keep or not, I want them to get into the habit of feeling in control of their environment, as well as keeping their rooms tolerably tidy. I also want their rooms to hold things that they enjoy being around, feel comforted by, or use regularly.

I started writing about recycling in this post because I particularly like the vase in the photograph above. It is a good size, and perfect for showing off the vibrant orange and yellow of the daffodils. It once held a candle (from here, though bought on holiday in Wales). When the candle burned down, I melted the remaining traces of wax by warming the container in a low oven, then wiped round with some kitchen paper and the transformation, such as it was, was complete. I kept the box too, it is a good size and well made; I keep reels of thread in it. Recycling in action; thankfully it's not always about old newspapers and empty yogurt pots.