New-obsessions week, day 2: Cold-pressed iced coffee

Okay, so coffee is not a new obsession. But this is something new for me: iced coffee at home.

I am a travesty of an American. Don't tell the people who gave me that certificate, but we don't have a coffee machine in our house. We drink instant coffee here, mostly. (This also makes me a very bad European. Sorry, everyone.)

But we do have a cafetière, otherwise known as a French press, otherwise known as a plungy-thingy [imagine me doing dodgy-looking hand movements to indicate the plunging]. And we have a fridge. And I bought some ground coffee in a bag. But the special thing about this is that it's cold-press coffee, which makes it even easier, as well as smoother and deliciouser. All you need to do is remember to make it before you go to bed.

1. Put four heaped tablespoons of coffee grounds (or more) in the French press.
2. Fill it up with cold water. Stir a little. Do not plunge yet.
3. Put it in the fridge overnight.
4. Get up on a warm summer's morning. Open fridge. Plunge, and pour into a nice tall glass.
5. Add ice cubes*, milk, and a straw.

* I do not have ice cubes. This is the other reason they'll throw me out of the country, but if we had ice cubes the children would do nothing but take them out of the freezer, play with them, and crunch them up for their dinner. Besides, I don't want to dilute my lovely coffee with anything but some nice creamy milk.

You can play around with the quantities until you get the strength you like best - this is weakish, but if you use ice, you might want it stronger. Keep the rest in a sealed jar (or just where it is) for tomorrow and the next day, unless you need to drink the whole thing in one morning.

You can also make a simple syrup to sweeten it a little, or just stir in some sugar if you're not fussy. I'm sure I'll get around to that some day soon, but for now I've just been enjoying mine along with a rhubarb muffin from the freezer for second breakfast after my workout.

Tune in tomorrow for my new all-purpose household and beauty obsession.

Accidental quiche

I remembered late in the day that I was supposed to bring some food to Monday night's board meeting - an appetizer or dessert, because it was at 6.30 and some people wouldn't have had time to eat. There wasn't much in the fridge, I didn't even have a lemon handy to make scones or muffins, and I knew someone else had already taken the chocolate option.

So my brain, as it sometimes does, lit upon probably the most complicated thing possible and decided that was the obvious choice. I would use that lone zucchini (courgette) in the salad drawer and the leftover cream from a cake at the weekend, and make mini quiches.

My brain also decided it was too good for recipes, or couldn't find anything just exactly right, and so thought it would wing it. This could have been disastrous, but by happy chance things came together deliciously and I ended up with some very nice mini quiches.

But then we had nothing for our own dinner, so I decided we should keep the quiches because there weren't enough for everyone at the meeting, and that I'd make some healthy blueberry muffins (frozen blueberries) instead. I ended up bringing seven quiches and some slightly odd-looking mini muffins (all the blueberries stuck to the pan), and I'm sure everyone thought I was a terrible overachiever.

Apologies for the approximate quantities, but I eyeballed the liquids.


Zucchini (and ham) mini-quiches

Pastry:
1 cup (200g) flour (I used white wholewheat flour)
Pinch salt
4oz (100g) butter (I used some spreadable Dairygold I had in the fridge, which might be what led to the very soft texture of this dough)
1 tablespoon cold water

Filling:
1 zucchini (or any vegetable, probably)
About half a small onion
A slice of deli ham (if you have it, or want it)
Some feta, if you had any, would be a delicious addition
Two eggs
A large splash of heavy cream (if you happen to have some hanging around)
As much milk as it takes to get what looks like the right amount of filling
A good grating of parmesan
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Turn your oven to 400F.

I made the pastry in the food processor. Put the flour, salt, and butter in the bowl, and pulse until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the water through the tube, pouring slowly. You might need a little more - I was surprised that the dough came together after just one tablespoon. Remove from the processor, smush into a ball, and chill in the fridge for half an hour, if you can spare it.

Meanwhile, finely chop the onion and cut the zucchini into 1/4-1/2 inch cubes. Saute them in a little olive oil until soft but not mushy - maybe five minutes over medium-low heat. Cut your ham into little squares and mix it in with the vegetables. If you have some feta, put that in too.

Mix the eggs, cream, and parmesan in a measuring jug, and then add as much milk as you think will make enough filling. I had perhaps 16oz (500ml) in the end. Better to have too much than too little. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Take the pastry out of the fridge and knead it a little on a floured surface, before rolling it out as thinly as you can. This dough seemed scarily soft to me as I rolled it out, but it stayed together and turned out deliciously. I don't know if it was the flour or the butter or the weather that did it, but I can't swear yours will be just this good.

Use a cookie cutter or a drinking glass to cut circles to fit your well-greased muffin tin or mini-pie pan (I used my mince-pie tin, imported at vast expense from Ireland, but they probably sell something similar here too). Put a circle of dough in each hole, pressing it out to fit the shape, and then prick the base all over with a fork.

(I was afraid at this juncture that I'd made a huge mistake because now my filling would run through the holes, but that didn't seem to happen.)

Bake the pastry cases blind (that just means with nothing in them) for 10-15 minutes at 400F. Take them out when they're still pale - don't wait for them to be golden brown. Take it out and (carefully - remember how hot the tin is) spoon an equal amount of the zucchini mixture into each piecrust. Then pour over the thick and creamy egg mixture to fill each one up.

Bake for about 20 minutes more, turning the oven down a bit to 375F or so, until the top is set and starting to turn brown. Cool before serving, but they're delicious still a little warm.

I had a bit more filling than pastry, so I made three muffin-sized crustless quiches with the rest.

If I'd known how well they were going to turn out, I'd have taken more photos

Spanish-ish dinner

I spent a year in Spain as a student, have I mentioned that before? I must have. I usually describe it as a year "studying", with heavy air quotes, as it took place between my second and third year of college and sufficed to turn my plain old BA degree into a much more high-falutin' BA (Int.). They hadn't quite ironed out the process of the Erasmus year at my home university, though, and told us frankly before we left that though we were quite entitled to take the end-of-year exams in Spain and count them towards our final degree, we'd in all probability do better at home (where our Spanish-literature courses were taken through English, for one thing).

How they thought this would entice us to actually attend classes all year I don't know. I was the most studious of the four from our University, and even I only attended everything I was meant to in the first term, about half my classes after Christmas (the 9.30am modern-literature class was first to go), and nothing at all by summer term. When some members of our department came out to see how we were getting on, at Easter, only one of us was even in town* - and she was the one who'd barely gone to a class at all. She was running a lucrative and enterprising English-language teaching business, but had to employ her considerable acting talents and bullshitting skills to convince the visitors that we were all going to class every day. She may have been rumbled by the end of the night, but at least she got a fancy dinner out of it. (*One had a green card and had gone back to America "early" for the summer, I was sightseeing in Lisbon with some friends, and the third was also in Portugal, busking with an American mate and two guitars.)

Anyway. What I did learn that year, apart from a lot about beer, was to cook for myself. It was the first time I'd lived away from home, and once I stopped going to the university cafeteria, a few of us used to make dinner together every afternoon. We'd make an outing of it and vote on our choice, which almost always came down to creamy pasta or tomatoey pasta. Gradually, however, under the tutelage of someone's Spanish housemates, our repertoire broadened and we learned to make arroz a la cubana, tortilla de patatas, and lentejas (that's lentils). As well as calimocho. (That's cheap red wine mixed with cola.)

Towards the end of the year, when the other foreign students were studing for exams, my fellow Dubliners and I (except the one who'd gone to San Francisco in February) were finding new and delightfully empty bars. One was a little tapas bar called El Cielo (Heaven) where on a Monday night we'd be the only patrons, and the barman (Jesús, of course) would give us a little lesson on how to suck our red wine through the slice of chorizo already in our mouth, to marry the two flavours in the most intense way possible. (We never paid for real tapas, because we had no money to spare. So the free stuff at the bar was all we got, and since this was the centre of Spain rather than the south, a few slices of chorizo and some bread was as much as there was to pick at. If Jesús was feeling generous, he'd even let us have some shavings of jamón serrano and maybe a black olive or two while he polished all the glasses for the second time that day.)

Spanish chorizo is hard to find in the US, especially when people often take chorizo to mean the spicy Mexican sort of uncooked sausage. Spanish chorizo is a type of salami, garlicky and paprika-y, cured and dried and ready to eat - though of course you can fry it up to release some of that delicious fat and make it even tastier. I hadn't cooked with it for an age, but I came across some in our local supermarket last week and decided to invest a few dollars in some memories. It has worked out very well.

Egg and chorizo scramble

First, I fried up a little as a background accent to a pasta and kale dinner. Next I used a little with a scrambled egg and some spinach leaves in a pita pocket for a two-minute lunch. And tonight I used a bit more with chicken and all the spanish flavours I could think of, and the aromas as it simmered transported me back to Valladolid and apparently inspired all that remeniscence you just waded through. So I decided to share it with you, in all its glorious inauthenticity.

About an inch and a half of Spanish chorizo, diced
1 sweet onion, chopped
2 large cloves of garlic (or more), finely chopped
1 chicken breast
3 tablespoons of flour
About half a teaspoon of paprika
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Red wine, about half a glass, perhaps, if you can spare it
1 can of white beans, drained and rinsed
1 can of fire-roasted tomatoes
Good shake of dried oregano
Salt and pepper

First I fried the diced chorizo in a dry pan. Then I stirred in the onion and garlic and let it all soften in the chorizo fat. I put that much in a bowl to one side and added a bit of olive oil to the pan. I mixed the flour and paprika on a plate and tossed the chicken in it before browning it in the pan, and then threw the onion and chorizo back in, along with the red bell pepper. Once all that was hot again, I sloshed in some red wine and inhaled the memories as the alcohol bubbled off. Finally, I added the beans and tomatoes, and some water - about half the capacity of the tomato tin, to pick up the leftovers in there. I sprinkled over a good shake of oregano, some black pepper and about a 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and some red pepper flakes for a little heat. Then I let it all simmer for 20 minutes until the liquid had thickened into a delicious sauce.

You could have it on rice or even with mash, but we just ate it with crusty bread as we had some left over and it works well to mop up the sauce. You could use pork instead of chicken, but you'd probably want to simmer it all for longer, depending on the cut. I won't say it's authentic Spanish food, but it tasted good. I served it on top of some baby spinach leaves, just for extra vitamins and some green.

Of course, if you're not trying to stretch one chicken breast into a healthy dinner for four**, you could just fry the chorizo with the garlic and skip straight to the bread part and put all the wine in your glass, and experiment with sucking the wine through the chorizo in your mouth, and that would be transcendentally glorious too.


** No, of course my children didn't eat this. Even if they didn't have stomach viruses, there's no way on earth they would eat this. So in our house, that's dinner for the grown ups for two nights.

Good deeds and pumpkin bread

Remember Hurricane Sandy? Way back when? Oh so long ago, before Halloween and Mabel's birthday and November started and all that stuff. We bunked in the basement and the wind blew and things got wet. Ancient history, right?

But not so much for people in New Jersey and New York who are still deep, deep in the throes of cleaning up, recalibrating their lives, starting over, and somehow at the same time getting through the day-to-day requirements of staying warm and fed and dry. Not to mention the fact that nature threw a snowstorm at them a week ago.

Justine lives in New Jersey, and she's going to use her lovely blog for even more good than usual - as if thoughtful posts, delicious food, and lovely pictures weren't enough - by hosting an online auction for bloggers' baked goods on November 26th. As I both blog and bake, I offered to take part. You can read more about it here, and I'll link again when it's happening. I predict there will be delicious things available for a really good cause, so you might want to bear it in mind.

I won't be making pumpkin bread for it, as a loaf would be pretty heavy to ship, but apparently there's a great outcry for this, perhaps by now my signature recipe. It's certainly one thing I bake that both children will eagerly eat.

I found it on the internet somewhere but I'm afraid I've no idea where at this point, and the addition of chocolate chips is my own, so it's almost original. Or else so ubiquitous that it can't belong to anyone.

Pumpkin Bread
(chocolate chips optional but recommended)

1.5 cups (200g) all-purpose flour (or you could probably use half white, half wholewheat)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice

1 cup (200g) white (granulated) sugar
1 cup (200g) pumpkin puree (half a 14oz tin)
1/2 cup (120ml) vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup (60ml) water

1/2 cup (85g) chocolate chips (I like semi-sweet)

Mix the flour, salt, baking soda, and spices together in a large bowl.
Mix the rest of the ingredients except the chocolate chips in a medium bowl.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing until just combined.
Mix in the chocolate chips.
Pour into a prepared loaf tin and bake at 350 F (180 C) for one hour or until a skewer comes out clean (without hitting a chocolate chip).


P.S. What do you think of the new banner? Seasonal, yes, but does it make the title hard to read or not? Feedback welcome.

Seasonal produce

I am here to tell you that if you didn't think you liked eggplant (or aubergine, because we're fancy like that in Ireland) it's because you were doing it wrong. Specifically, like me, you may have never bothered to salt and drain it, because who has time for that sort of thing? People who know how delicious it makes eggplant, that's who. I just recently bothered, for the first time, to take my eggplant out a bit ahead of time - an hour is good, in the morning is great - slice it thickly, and spread the slices out on some kitchen paper. Then I shake salt all over them, both sides, top with more kitchen paper (paper towels, whatever you call 'em), and weigh it all down with a few hefty cookbooks. I just did it now while my waffle popped out of the toaster, and the butter still melted by the time I was done.

Later on, when you put the eggplant into whatever you want - this, perhaps, or just ratatouille, or vegetarian lasagne, which is what I'm planning today - it will turn out to be both chewy and creamy, and a most wonderful vehicle for the garlic that I exhort you to use liberally. If I was Nigella Lawson, the word unctuous would be bursting forth right about now, but I'm not, so I won't go quite that far.

The other thing I've been doing lately is massaging my kale. (I told Facebook about it and got a few entertainingly salacious comments. My work there is done.) From being a person who never even thought about kale to one who decided she didn't like it, I have lately come down heavily in favour of the curly dark-green leaves. It started with this recipe for quinoa salad with kale and cranberries, which I ate for most of the summer. A little fiddly what with the roasting of the walnuts, but totally addictive. You can leave out the shallot (or even the onion) if that's too much trouble, and you won't miss it.

But then I got even lazier, and decided cooking the kale was too much trouble for a salad. And I remembered something a friend had said once, in my pre-kale-eating days (when I was offloading a bunch of donated kale onto her, actually, because I didn't think I'd use it) about massaging kale. How ridiculous, I thought. Maybe you and your kale are on those sort of terms, but I prefer to keep mine at fork's length, thank you. But about a week ago, I googled "massaged kale" and came up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable suggestions. Basically, you put your (washed and de-stemmed) leaves in a bowl with a shake of salt and a sprinkle of oil, and you work it with your hands until the fibres break down, turning this tough saute-only veg into a perfectly nice wilted salad leaf. (I have been told that you can also just leave it alone for an hour or so and the dressing will do the work on its own, but I like instant gratification.)

Then you can put a bit of what you fancy on top and call it salad. Some dried cranberries and a shake of roasted sunflower seeds with a drizzle of red wine vinegar or avocado and lemon juice are two versions I tried last week, but there are a ton of options. I think you need something a little sweet to counterbalance the leaves, but probably just a pinch of sugar or a drop of honey in your dressing would do the trick quite well.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to stop getting hungry again at 2pm when I've had a big bowl of kale salad for lunch at midday. When I find out, I'll let you know, because otherwise it seems like an ideal way to counteract the effects of the muffins.

Monday dinner: pizza party

So last night we had the pizza. I asked B if he'd like to write it up as a guest post, since he made it, but he was suddenly and unavoidably attacked by a flock of marauding pterodactyls, and decided not to. (Don't worry. He's fine. Just a flesh wound.)

Our pizza dough recipe is pretty basic, but it seems to work. I reproduce it here as I wrote it up for the cookbook I made for our own use back before I had children, when apparently I had nothing better to do than write my own cookbook:

Makes two medium pizzas:

2 cups flour
1 envelope yeast, either fast-acting or regular is fine (contains 1/4 ounce, 7 grams, or almost a tablespoonful)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
As much tepid water as it takes to make a soft dough, with a shot of olive oil mixed in - say about 2/3 of a cup in all.

1. Mix the dry ingredients together and gingerly add the water and oil until it's a good consistency.
2. Knead like a maniac for ten minutes.*
3. Leave it in the bowl, covered with a damp teatowel or cling wrap or a plate, in a warmish place for as long as you can - at least an hour. It should double in size.
4. Knock the dough back (i.e. knead it pushing all the air out) and divide in half. You can freeze one half at this stage if you're not making two pizzas tonight. Leave the other half, or the whole lot, to grow some more - at least 20 minutes, but another hour would be fine.
5. Shape and top as desired.

*Here I will note that B likes to demonstrate his upper-body strength and exorcise his stress demons by kneading it by hand. When I make it, I like to demonstrate my mastery of kitchen appliances and my multitasking skills by using the wonderful doughhook on my wonderful stand mixer. Either approach is perfectly fine, but you don't need to let it go for ten minutes if you use the machine.

Ball of dough, defrosted

Usually, pizza is a weekend thing for us, but because I'd already bought the mozzarella, we made it on Monday. I had taken a ball of dough out of the freezer the night before, and out of the fridge at about 3pm, though sooner would have been better in hindsight. When B got home at 5.30, all he had to do was stretch it out a bit - he likes to use the rolling pin, though when I made pizza the previous week I went all artisan and just worked it and flapped it around with my hands instead.

Rollin', rollin', rollin' ...

We used pizza sauce from a jar this time, though often I just take some tinned crushed tomatoes and stir in a heaped teaspoon of pesto. Toppings were some caramelized onion that was sitting around in the fridge just waiting for a good use, fresh red pepper, and sliced ham. And the secret to most delicious homemade pizza, acquired from our friend Mark, is to splash out and use fresh mozzarella. B chops his into little cubes for better coverage - I like the look of large thin discs when I make it.

Observe: jar of sauce; cubes of mozz

That thing it's sitting on is a pizza peel. If you make your own pizza dough, which is a lot thinner and floppier than a pizza base you might buy ready made, you need something like this to slide it into the oven without making a huge mess and some very disappointed diners. If you sprinkle a little cornmeal on the peel before putting the dough onto it, it acts like tiny ball bearings and slides the whole thing beautifully into the oven and onto your pizza stone.

Sorry about the blinding lights

If you don't have a stone, you can use a baking tray / cookie sheet, but the stone works better. Just don't try to put it directly on the rack as if it's a frozen pizza. Our pizza stone lives on the floor of the oven when not in use, and if you can remember to put it up on a rack before you turn on the oven, that's a good thing. Set the oven to 450 F or as high as you can, for best results. It will be done in less than ten minutes, so don't go anywhere - just wait till the cheese is bubbling.

Best results, right here

One eager diner. The segment - if you can call it that with such an irregular (I mean, handcrafted) shape - with no toppings is for her. The yummier remainder was for us. Dash often partakes of the crust, so long as it's been carefully picked clean of all alien substances, but last night he decided not to.

All the more for us, we said.

Sunday dinner: sausages, mac, cheese

On Saturday, I went out to dinner. [Trumpets peal, victory march.] I got all dressed up in a skirt and boots that have not seen the light of day for several years because there's no way I can run after children in them - and cleavage and mascara and stuff, and I went out to dinner with my lesbian lovers. I mean, two friends. And left my poor husband at home with rice and meatballs from the freezer and two lovely children to put to bed. He managed admirably and when I rolled in at the ungodly hour of, um, 9pm (it was an early dinner) both children were asleep. [Clouds part, angels sing.]

On Sunday, I thought we were having pizza, because I had definitely seen B making pizza dough the day before. Belatedly, I realised that he had put it the freezer, not the fridge, so at 5.30 I was faced with an ever-enhungrierening family (it is so a word) and no plans. Fear not! Luckily, I had sent them swimming that afternoon while I took myself on an important mission to coughbuybootscough and had stopped by the organic food market on the way home, because they have the round crackers that the kids love because they taste like Ritz and I prefer because they don't have HFCS.

I've been increasingly ... dissatisfied, no, that's not it; disillusioned, hmm; icked out, let's say... by the meat department in my supermarket lately. When I first moved to the US the sheer volume of deep-red, styrofoam-trayed parts of dead animal in that corner of any supermarket overwhelmed me; now I'm used to it, but the more I try to avoid reading all those articles about mass-production of meat, the more I know that they're out there with horrible information in them just waiting to make an ethical consumer out of me. So while every now and then I just say "Feck it" and buy a package of minced beef or their so-called Organic chicken tenders, I'm also willing to spend a bit more less often and get meat I can feel good about. So I bought some happy sausages, because Mabel loves sausages and whenever I feel she's probably lacking some protein, I know she'll eat them.

I accidentally bought the pre-cooked type, because they looked just as anemic and undone as the regular sort, and I failed to adequately read the packet. In Ireland, the only sort of pre-cooked sausages we have are salami and its relations, so I'm still confused by the concept of pre-cooked sausages here, and tend to avoid them. Still, I decided to cook them in the oven just as I would the other sort, only for a shorter time, and they tasted pretty good. They went with some hastily conceived mac-n-cheese with that broccoli I didn't put in the carbonara I didn't make on Friday (are you still following this? Oh good), and thanks to my mistake it was all ready in 20 minutes.

So, without further ado, I will tell you how to make a cheese sauce. Mac 'n' cheese is such a staple of American childhoods that apparently it has to come out of a box, and many people - not you, obviously; all the other people - seem to be terrified of making their own sauce. It's easy, it takes five minutes, and you can use nice cheese. So do it.

Take about a tablespoon of butter and melt it in a saucepan. Stir a heaped tablespoon of plain flour into the liquid butter, season with salt and pepper, and let it cook, stirring all the time, for a minute or so. It will puff up and look weird.

That is not a scoop of vanilla icecream; it's the flour. I promise.

It's not weird; it's good. This is the gluten molecules popping, if I remember correctly, and this is what will thicken your sauce. Then put some milk in a jug, because it's easier to pour out of than from a gallon container - you'll need about, oh, I dunno, two cups, maybe. Then, still stirring with your favourite wooden spoon, start adding the milk to the pan, very gingerly, the merest splash at a time to start with. You'll think that it will never incorporate into your flour blobs, but it will.

Argh! Lumpy blobs of puff!

At some point, the whole thing will magically stop being puffy flour blobs and turn into a sauce. Now, keep adding as much milk as you want for the consistency you're looking for, remembering that the cheese will thicken it some more at the end.

Stir, stir as if your life depended on it.

This is where it's just starting to come together. See? You didn't think that was going to work, did you? Oh ye of little faith. Then you just add the cheese. I recently decided that life's too short to save money by buying crappy cheese, so I had to hand a block of Cabot Sharp Cheddar. My favourite is Kerrygold Dubliner, which was my basic go-to cheese in Ireland but sometimes I balk at the price here, so today we had the Cabot.

Cheese enters sauce. Sauce becomes delicious. My one other addition was a little blob of Dijon mustard, because Mrs Madden told me that mustard brings out the flavour of cheese. (It's supposed to be a pinch of mustard powder, but I don't have mustard powder.)

If I was baking this in the oven, I'd stir in my cooked pasta, probably top with slices of fresh tomato, sprinkle over a mixture of melted butter, breadcrumbs, and more cheese, and bake for 20 minutes or so until the top looked yummy; but as we were hungry I just stirred in the broccoli as well, and served up.

Mabel's looked like this. She ate about half the sausage, ignored the pasta (she eschews that particular shape), and bit some of the "leaves" off the "trees" and declared them yummy.

Mine looked like this. I ate it all and forcibly restrained myself from attacking the leftovers. Mostly.
Pizza tonight; pizza dough recipe (as if you needed another one) tomorrow.

Good muffins

Recipe is an awfully strange word. I always want to put an extra i in before the final e, thus: recipie. I actually went to dictionary.com to check it just now. It's much too phonetically pronounced to be English.

Anyway. I made some new muffins the other day. I'll show you my photo but I'm just going to link out to the recipe, since it was a totally random choice rather than something I made up or adapted. I had ricotta to use up, and felt like humouring Monkey (for some reason) who asked for chocolate muffins (hmm, maybe it was the chocolate), so I did a quick search and came up with these: Chocolate Ricotta Muffins from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe. The picture didn't look very chocolately, but it was nice and simple and I had everything it called for so I went ahead.

And got these delicious articles. They're almost like brownie muffins, they're so densely chocolatey, and they freeze and reheat perfectly. I would go so far as to say you should procure yourself some ricotta to use up (maybe by making that stuffed-pancake recipe; I think that's where mine was from) just to make them.

Since Mabel was wide awake reading a book to me from 3.14 to 4.15 this morning, and only fell back to sleep at 5.00, by which time a thunderstorm was in full flow, I think I'll leave it at that for today.

Post-pancakes

I am in no way suggesting that you should forbear from eating your Pancake Tuesday pancakes just so that you can make this delicious dinner, but if it should happen that you have heinous ingrates for children who scorn the pancakes you made, and you can't manage to eat them all yourself, this might turn out to be a good thing to do. At least, that's how it was for me.

 

First we have Mabel, helping me to make the pancakes way back a few Tuesdays ago. (If you didn't know, one is supposed to have pancakes the day before Lent begins, to use up all the eggs. Because eggs were verboten during Lent, don't you know. Same concept as Fat Tuesday, just no parade.)

Sieve one cup of flour and a pinch of salt into a large bowl. Beat an egg with 10 oz of milk and then mix all of that into the flour. Melt a tablespoon of butter, let cool a little, and mix that in too. That's it: no leavening agents, no sugar, nothing else. Let it stand, covered, in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, or even overnight. I mixed these up at breakfast time and cooked them for lunch. It made about 14, but my pan was quite small. (You could, of course, double the recipe.)

These are not puffy American pancakes, though I do like to make those at other times. These are thin pancakes, closer to crepes but not that thin because I am not a magic French person with magic crepe-making equipment. Just as thin as I could get by ladling enough onto the pan and swirling it around quickly to coat the bottom. If you use a good non-stick pan (or even a bad one; I'm sure mine was cheap), you'll know when it's ready to flip because it will come up easily when you try to slide a fish slice or other flat non-metal object underneath, or even move when you give the pan a vigorous (but not too vigorous lest it end up on the floor) shake. Whether to safely flip or devil-may-care toss I leave to the conscience of the individual.

 

The good specimens look like this. (The bad specimens are discarded, unless you have a dog.) You may gobble as many as you can with fresh lemon squeezed over and plenty of sugar. Unless you are my children, this is delicious. 

However, you might have some left over. In this case, freeze them with a layer of cling wrap (cling film) between each pancake. They freeze well and reheat very quickly in the microwave. Or you can make dinner with them, as I did the other night.

Take your pancakes out of the freezer. Look, they're still lovely.

Defrost a packet of frozen spinach in the microwave. Squeeze it out in a clean teatowel to get rid of the excess water. Chop a small onion (or half a large one) as finely as you have the patience for, and sautee it until it's very soft. Add a crushed clove (or two) of garlic for the final couple of minutes. Now break up the spinach in a bowl using a fork, add the onion and garlic, and mix in about a cup of ricotta cheese. (I think it was a cup. About the same amount as there is spinach, anyway.) Season with salt, pepper, and a good grating of fresh nutmeg.

Take your defrosted pancakes and roll them up around the spinach mixture in a lasagne dish. Thusly.

Then I took a jar of pasta sauce - look, there's mine, it was Classico Tomato and Basil - and pour about half of it over your plump and lovingly rolled babies. Five pancakes, in my case, gave us enough dinner to fill two people and still have leftovers for lunch.

Top with lots of parmesan - I should have used more than this, but we ran out. And bake at 350F for half an hour or until it's bubbling.

It was delicious, even if the parmesan did all disappear.

The pancakes worked perfectly here, but of course you don't have to go to all that trouble. You could use manicotti or giant pasta shells (but then you have to cook them before stuffing them, which is still a nuisance). You could make an inside-out lasagne. You could probably even use tortillas and call it Italian enchiladas. Or you could just make pancakes for breakfast and plan to have enough left over to make tomorrow's dinner.

Oscars, vegetarian lasagne, and IKEA pencils

I amused myself greatly on Sunday night by live-Facebooking the Oscars. It turned out I was not the only one among my friends to be sitting at home watching TV with a laptop on my knee, and we ended up with a spontaneous virtual Oscars party. I was so entertained by thinking up smart comments (smart in the Irish sense of cheeky, not the American sense of erudite) for my status updates and scanning my friends' comment threads to see what further nonsense I could add to the proceedings, that I ended up watching the whole thing. Though I may have missed a few nuances of the speeches.

On Monday I made vegetarian lasagne. I took some photos along the way and it turned out delicious enough to blog, I thought.

First, I chopped a large onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, one courgette (zucchini), one summer squash (the yellow ones), and sauteed them all with a tub of ready-sliced mushrooms. (You could slice your own, but I'm lazy.) I usually do half an aubergine (eggplant) too, but they were out of eggplants in the supermarket. And I never manage to use up the other half becuase I don't really like aubergine, so maybe it's just as well.

When the vegetables were soft, I added half a big jar of pasta sauce, a tin of fire-roasted tomatoes, and a small jar of roasted red peppers. You could, of course, just use a normal red pepper at the sauteeing stage, but I like the roasted ones. I tossed in half a carton of tomato soup that was sitting in the fridge too. Salt, pepper, dried oregano and a teaspoon of fresh pesto. Simmer for as long as you can bear it, or as long as it takes to make the white sauce.

Here's Mabel helping by balancing pencils on the empty mushroom container. After that she was a little less helpful and decided to empty out the pencil holder all over the floor. Twice.

Take a moment to appreciate how many little IKEA pencils we have. I think it may be time we mounted a pencil-returning mission.


Then I made the white sauce, of which process there are no photos because it's not very picturesque. Visualize, if you will, in your mind's eye, me melting some butter in a saucepan, then stirring in a tablespoon of flour, seasoning it, and stirring some more. Then adding milk, gradually, in between stirring a lot more.

Somewhere around this point Mabel started chomping on a magnet from the fridge.
"We don't eat fridge magnets, Mabel," I said.
"We don't eat fridge magnets?"
"No."
I continued stirring to the sounds of Mabel methodically removing each magnetic letter from the fridge, slurping it noisily, and dropping it to the floor.

When I'd added all my milk and the sauce was too thin, I turned off the heat and put in most of a bag of grated cheese (sorry, JeCaThRe) and some extra parmesan. Sauce thickened up nicely. I built my lasagne. This is layer two of tomato/veg sauce going on.

And the finished product, pre-oven, with the last of the cheese on top.

Out of the oven. 350 F for 30-40 minutes, or until it looks like this. Let it cool down a bit before you serve it up, or you'll burn your tongue.

On the plate. My lasagne always lacks cohesiveness on the first night, but it tastes divine. On the second and third nights it sticks together better, and tastes almost as good.

This was the third night. There is no more.

Balls of meat

I have been hanging around smitten kitchen a bit too much lately, mouth watering at the delicious photography and the beautiful recipes, and as a result I have decided to blog tonight's dinner.

Usually I disagree with the idea of stealth vegetables, a la Jessica Seinfeld, because I think kids (or adults) should (a) know what they're eating and (b) not get the idea that a wide selection of cakes forms a balanced diet, even if it does. I also think it's too much work. I do make black-bean brownies for Monkey's school lunch "dessert", but he knows there are beans in them and is proud of the fact. (He also knows there's a little instant coffee powder in the recipe, and enjoys scandalising adults by telling them that there's coffee in it. In his mind, I may as well have made them on straight gin. If he knew what gin was.)

Pre-pureed sauce

Anyway, I had a head of cauliflower, and I didn't have any red pepper, which I would often use to veg-up a tomato sauce. So I sauteed the cauliflower with the onion and then pureed the whole lot with my handheld whizzer device after I'd added two cans of tomatoes. It sort of worked, in that you couldn't taste the cauliflower, and it wasn't yucky. On the other hand, it had a bit of an unusual consistency going on, and the colour wasn't quite the rich red one expects from a straight tomato sauce. I still prefer my cauliflower roasted with lemon, parm and garlic, but that would have been extra work. This made it a one-pot meal.

Meatballs going in - I like little ones

I hadn't made baked meatballs before, always afraid they'd be dried out and crumbly, but they turned out to be just as tasty as the fried ones, and so much less work. I will probably never fry a meatball again.

I mostly made up the recipe, but it was a pound of (organic) minced (ground) beef mixed with an egg, some breadcrumbs (I used panko because that's what I had to hand), a couple of teaspoons of pesto, a tablespoon or so of grated parmesan, and some finely diced and sauteed onion. (I did the onion before starting the sauce, which also started with chopped sauteed onion, so it was hardly any extra work, just a little more careful chopping and some extra standing around.) I think it's a variation on a recipe from the first Avoca cookbook.

Then I baked them at 400 F for about 15 minutes, until they looked done, and transferred them to the sauce where they simmered for another 15 minutes or so.

Meatballs, meet saucy goodness

I like my meatballs with rice, as Nigella suggests, rather than spagetti. And my rice is almost always basmati, because it cooks in ten minutes. I use twice as much water as rice, put a glass lid on, turn the heat up till it boils, turn the heat all the way down and set the timer for ten minutes, and at the beep it's perfect. Five or ten minutes sitting waiting does it no harm at all and lets any excess water steam off.

I don't know who put that measuring jug at the other end of the table

Dinner is served. There's enough for tomorrow, and one serving for the freezer.