Cupcakes for the wounded

A very dear friend of mine has had a somewhat unfortunate accident recently. Nothing life threatening, nothing that requires casts or major surgery, just something very unfortunate. He managed to almost cut off the tip of his left index finger. If you’ve ever had a cut in your index finger, you’ll probably know just how annoying that is and how you suddenly become aware of how much you actually use it. However, in his case it’s slightly more unfortunate, as he has a job in which he works with his hands.

Unexpectedly, his accident is also very unfortunate for me. This person plays in a band that I am somewhat of a fan of, not because they’re my friends, but because I actually think they’re excellent. (Click to hear one of their songs right here. If you’re into Korpiklaani or Finntroll you’ll probably enjoy this, too. If you don’t know those bands and you’re not from mainland Europe, you’ll probably think this is the weirdest thing ever.) They were meant to be playing a gig this week and I was really looking forward to it, but it’s more than likely that they won’t be able to do it now – hitting piano keys when you’re digitally impaired is said to be pretty hard.

In order to make him feel better, I decided to invite him over for coffee and sweeties. He’s off work now, so he’s got time to stop by during the day anyway. I made him some citrus cupcakes, lemon-flavour with orange icing. If that doesn’t cheer him up, I don’t know what will.

The following ingredients will make you 12 cupcakes:

• 125 gr softened butter
• 125 gr caster sugar
• 125 gr self raising flour
• 4 eggs
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• zest of 1 lemon
• a pinch of salt

And for enough icing for 12 cupcakes you will need:

• 60 gr softened butter
• 60 gr cream cheese
• 120 gr icing sugar
• zest of 1/2 lemon
• zest of 1/2 to 1 orange

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Beat the softened butter with an electric whisk. Add the flour, sugar, eggs, salt and lemon zest + juice, mix some more. Scoop the mixture into 12 paper muffin cups in a muffin tin and stick them in the oven for about 20 minutes.

Whilst you’re waiting for the cakes to cool, beat the softened butter with the cream cheese and icing sugar. (To avoid getting your face covered in icing sugar, cover the bowl with a paper towel or some cling film whilst you’re beating.) Add in the zest and beat some more.

Cover the cupcakes with delicious icing and serve straight away.

Exam-time library lunch

It’s exam time, which means panic. It also means that I’ve had to cook strategically, spending as little time as possible in the kitchen whilst still eating healthy. This is not some sort of diet nazi OCD, I actually like healthy food more than I like junkfood, and I also think you need it more than any time during exams.

Over the last week I’ve been cheating a lot, living on fruit and salad, because those are healthy and also easy. Salad only requires that you chop up some ingredients and chuck them in a bowl or tupperware, whilst fruit requires absolutely nothing, unless you’re talking satsumas or bananas, in which case it requires peeling – still very minimal.

When I’ve felt I wanted to eat something more substantial and, more importantly, warm, I’ve resorted to stir fry or fried rice pretty often. It only takes a few minutes to make, you can practically chuck in anything you have in the fridge and it’s still good when it’s cold, so you can make lots of it and take some to uni the next day to eat in the library – mind you, in the café bit, not near books. Best lunch ever, cold fried rice topped with fresh coriander, peanuts, lemon juice and spring onion.

For one dinner and one lunch, you will need:

• two cups of cooked white rice
• vegetables of your choice in bitesize chunks – I used broccoli, mushrooms and onion
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1/2 fresh chili, chopped
• some fresh coriander, chopped finely, stalks and all
• spices of your choice – I used ground coriander, ground cumin, black and white pepper, and a little bit of ground ginger
• some sesame seed
• 1 egg
• dark soy sauce
• oil for frying

For garnishing:

• some spring onion
• some fresh coriander
• a lemon, for squeezing
• some fresh peanuts

Take a frying pan and without oil, roast the peanuts on low heat.

Grab a wok, heat some oil and fry the chopped coriander along with the garlic, the dry spices (1 – 2  tsp of each coriander and cumin, 1/2 tsp of the ginger) and the fresh chili. When it starts to get all aromatic, chuck the vegetables in, along with the sesame seed. Rain down on those bad boys with soy sauce. Stir fry on high heat. Then add the rice, keep stir frying, and then the egg – keep stirring so it’s evenly distributed.

Top with fresh coriander, thinly sliced spring onion, peanuts and a little bit of lemon juice.

Dinner club

Guess what! I’ve been invited to a dinner club. As in, a bunch of people who get together more or less regularly and then eat things that they’ve made. This is new to me. I’m not really that much of a social animal so I’ve never joined in any such group cooking and eating. I used to have something with a couple of mates that we called a dinner club, but that was really just me cooking them dinner most of the time. Which was great. Best dinner club ever. We called ourselves The Hungry Wolves for sundry reasons, the most prominent that we’re losers.

But now I’ve been invited to an actual dinner club, and there’s going to be many ladies that I imagine will be very sparkling and social and I’m pretty sure they’ll all come out with really nice food and I’m very keen to impress, seeing that it’s my first time and I only know one of the attendees. I’ve mulled it over for a while and by process of elimination, I think I’ve come up with a pretty good idea.

See, it’s an Italian themed night, which is lucky – I’m pretty comfortable with the Italian kitchen. However, it’s a potluck style night, so it has to be something you can take with you, that doesn’t require further preparation upon arrival, and that doesn’t have to be super fresh – that means pasta and risotto are out of the question. I contemplated a big massive pot of minestrone, but figured that would be hard to take with me on public transport. However, this potluck isn’t going to be one attended by students only (in fact, I might be the only undergraduate there), so there isn’t going to be an overwhelming amount of sweeties. I decided I’d make a dessert.

Lemon ricotta pistacchio cake, here we go. If you don’t have pistacchio spread and your supermarket doesn’t stock it (which is likely), you can get it at the Italian delicatessen, online, or if you insist, you can make it yourself. I got mine in Italy a while ago but I’ve not actually used it so far – time to change that.

For a 22 cm diameter cake, you will need:

• 300 gr self raising flour
• 150 gr caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 100 gr melted butter (unsalted, preferably)
• 100 gr ricotta
• 1 tsp baking powder
• a pinch of salt (unless you’re using salted butter, in which case leave it out)
• zest of 3 lemons
• 1/2 to 1 glass of milk

For the icing:

• 150 gr cream cheese
• 50 gr soft butter
• 150 gr ricotta
• 4 tsp crema di pistacchio, or pistachio spread
• 50 gr icing sugar
• some raw pistachios
• some more lemon zest

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Beat the eggs with the sugar, then add the pinch of salt and liquid butter, then the ricotta, the lemon zest and finally the flour. Mix well and loosen up with some milk until you get the right consistency – it shouldn’t be runny, but it should be easy enough to stir.

Grease a 22cm round cake tin and pour the mixture in. Pop it in the oven for about half an hour, then check the colour (should be golden brownish) and check with a knife or skewer if it’s cooked all the way through. If yes, take it out and cool. This will take a couple of hours, but you really want it to be completely cool when you put the icing on.

So, to make the icing, you make sure your butter is completely soft (but definitely not liquid) and put it in the bowl along with the cream cheese, ricotta and sugar. Beat with an electric mixer until completely homogeneous. Then add the pistachio spread. The mixture will get a nice light-greenish colour.

Apply to the cake, then cover with some whole and some chopped pistachios for decoration and finish the beast off with some more lemon zest.

Pickled things

So, if you’re from (or currently living in) the UK, bear with me for a bit. I need to explain something to everyone else.

So here in the UK they seem to enjoy their pickled foods. I realise most cultures know some sort of pickle-to-preserve tradition, but the UK seems overly fond of it. Apart from the expected pickled gherkins and pickled onions, the British also pickle slightly more outlandish things like beetroots, eggs, and mussels. (Incidentally, of that last one I once suddenly owned a jar after a drunk night out, without knowing how, or why. It still sits in my fridge, untouched, until this very day.)

To make matters confusing, they also have this thing called pickle which is really a sort of pickled jam or chutney. They call this pickle and they call a pickled onion ‘a pickle’, whilst most of the rest of the world seems to think of pickled gherkins when you say the word pickle.

Do you still get what I’m on about?

So anyway, the point I’m getting at is that the British like their sour vegetables and I was therefore a bit surprised that it was so hard to find sauerkraut in this country, which I (falsely, it turns out) believed to be nothing but pickled cabbage. I always imagined that to make sauerkraut, you sliced up a bunch of cabbages, stuck them in a big vat with a load of vinegar and left it, just as you’d do with your onions. But it turns out I was wrong: sauerkraut is a product of fermentation, not pickling, and it is made with salt, not vinegar. Maybe that explains why the British don’t seem to eat it.

Thankfully, the Polish do eat sauerkraut and there’s a fairly big Polish community in Glasgow, so Polish shops abound and most larger supermarket will have a wee Polish corner. There you can find large jars full of the tasty krauts and they cost next to nothing. It keeps in the fridge for like, a decade, it’s said to be super healthy, it’s cheap and it’s easy to prepare. Go get some. And then have some sauerkraut with tatties and a bunch of meat.

All credit for this recipe goes to my mum, by the way.

So for 1 you will need:

• 2 or 3 potatoes
• a good handful of sauerkraut (in quantity more or less the same as the potatoes)
• some lardons
• a couple of tasty sausages
• some butter

First, peel your potatoes, cut them in chunks and boil them in water with enough salt for a few minutes. You only need to parboil them, don’t leave them too long.

Stick the lardons in a large pan (I used a wok), and fry them on medium-high heat so they start leaking fat. Add some butter if you think you need to (you want quite a lot of grease, actually, just add a bit of butter, what do you care), then add the parboiled, drained potatoes. Cut the sauerkraut up a little bit, then add that to the pan to. Then also add the sausages. Now just leave everything for a while with a lid on, if you have one. No disaster if not. Stir occasionally. Then check if the potatoes are nice and soft and that the sausages are cooked all the way through. If they are, serve up! You see? Super easy!

Sitting around a kitchen, high

Yes people, once more exam time has arrived, and exam time brings out the worst in all of us. For instance, I am now even less socially inclined and more intolerant of other people in the vicinity of my person. Moreover, exam time seems to render us students more pessimistic about our future. I say us students – what I really mean by that is us Arts students.

Another Arts graduate-to-be and I were recently indulging in a self-pity and self-deprecation spree, moaning about what useless degrees we were both about to get, and what could have been a better and more productive use of our time. Sadly, most things seemed more useful to us, but the only one we considered feasible to us was ‘sitting around a kitchen, high, coming up with cool food’. And unfortunately, the competition in that sector is pretty fierce.

You see, if you’re a chronic procrastinator, like the both of us are, and you hang around the internet way too much, you’ll have seen some pretty nifty ideas for food. If not, here’s one for you:

Not necessarily very good, I’m sure it’d be awful, but it certainly looks cool. There’s plenty of other amazing food ideas to be found online – panda bread, jar cakes, Hulk cocktails, whisky glasses made entirely out of ice, rainbow cakes. All so creative and colourful and clearly made up by people who were in no way distracted by the woes of the world. It’s the stoners of this world that come up with the most amazing food, and they don’t mind sharing it with the rest of us.

One of my favourite internet-kitchen-stoner ideas that I’ve come across is the slicey baked potato. Instead of quartering your baked potato as normal, you cut it up sideways, fill it with whatever and then you stick it back in the oven for a bit. Result: instead of four giant lumps of potato and not enough room for your delicious toppings, you get a potato with enough toppings that are, moreover, evenly distributed over the delicious starchy vehicle that is the spud. I flippin’ love it. So I made one and ate it all. And it was great. With any filling you want, but in this case with mushrooms, blue cheese, cheddar and spring onion.

 

 

So for one, you need:

• a big baking potato
• a few mushrooms
• about 30 gr blue cheese
• some grated cheddar
• 1 spring onion

You bake your potato as normal: poke some holes in it with a fork, then wrap it up in tin foil and bake it at 200°C for about an hour. Then take it out and slice it up with a very sharp knife. Make sure there’s enough room for your fillings, but be careful not to separate the slices completely.

Slice your fillings up in thin slices so that they’re easier to pop into the potato. Don’t worry if anything sticks out quite a bit at the top – it’ll melt and disappear between the potato slices soon enough.

Now top with a whole bunch of grated cheese and some spring onion. Pop back into the oven for another 5 – 10 minutes. Top with yet more spring onion. Enjoy.

 

The Kingdom of the Breaderlands

Over the Easter holidays I went to stay in the Netherlands for a while. I spent a fair bit of time in and around Amsterdam, seeing some friends. The new craze in Amsterdam seems to be elaborate little sandwiches and rolls – fancy bread with fancy stuff. I’m not surprised. The Dutch are all about their bread.

The Dutch eat bread pretty much all day, with any variety of toppings. Did you know that in Dutch there is a word for ‘something you put on bread’? Yes there is, it’s ‘beleg’ and it is one of those words that I believe tells you more about a culture than a month’s worth of biological field notes would. The Dutch do bread like no other nation. Breakfast will consist of bread, lunch boxes will be filled with more bread and even to that slight peckishness in the afternoon, a sandwich will often be the answer.

I don’t mind. I love bread. I practically lived on bread for years, and I never suffered because of it. I have fond memories of my elder brother munching on sandwiches almost perpetually in his teenage years, and sometimes giving me half of one when I was already in bed, refusing to sleep – I was even more gluttonous then than I am now.

However, the endless bread does maybe get a bit boring after a while. After, let’s say, 18 years. But then I moved abroad anyway and I started eating other things. Like porridge for breakfast and left-over fried rice for lunch.

Apparently the rest of the Dutch, the ones who still live in the Netherlands, got tired of the perpetual cheese sandwich too. So now they’re having all kinds of special bread and rolls with special fillings. With special beleg. Here’s my take on my two favourites of the past weeks – one an elaboration on a classic, the other something I hadn’t tried before. For lunch, a ciabatta with cheese and sour things. For a hungover breakfast, a poached egg and avocado sandwich.

Ciabatta with cheese and sour things

For the first you will need:

• a small ciabatta or other tasty bread type of your own choosing
• some mature cheddar
• butter
• a bunch of pickled onions and gherkins
• some slices of cucumber
• some sort of lettuce – I used pea sprouts, which was pretty tasty
• mustard sauce – 1 tsp of smooth mustard, 2 tsp of mayonnaise

So slice your ciabatta (or baguette or whatever other tasty bread product you got yourself) open, butter it generously and put enough cheese on. Slice the pickles and gherkins in thin slices and scatter them over the cheese. Spread some cucumber slices over the other toppings, and finish with your pea sprouts or other salad. To make the mustard sauce, mix 1 tsp of mustard with 2 tsp of mayonnaise – preferably the sort of Belgian, slightly sweet, lemony type. Drizzle that over the toppings or spread it straight onto the bread. Easy.

Poached egg and avocado hangover breakfast sandwich

Poached egg and avocado goodness

For this one you will need:

• some nice, dark bread, preferably unsliced so you can get nice thick slices
• half an avocado
• one super fresh egg
• some vinegar, for the poaching
• salt and pepper

Boil a wee saucepan full of water. Take your bread and slice some really thick slices. Then you take your avocado, slice it in half, pop out the pip, then carve it whilst still in the skin – you can easily pop the slices out afterwards. Cover one slice of bread with the avocado.

***Now here’s how to poach an egg. If you know how to poach an egg, skip this bit.*** So your water’s boiling and you’re ready to poach the hell out of that egg. Good. Add some vinegar to your boiling water, it’s meant to help. Some people say there’s no need, that it doesn’t actually help at all with the poaching, that it’s all just superstition, but I kinda like the flavour, I quite enjoy my poached egg coated in a little bit of vinegar so I always add some anyway. I used white wine vinegar but I’m sure any type will do.

Now you get your fresh egg out so that you’ve got it handy. Stir the water in the saucepan like a madman, so that you get a little whirlpool in the middle of the water. Quickly but carefully crack your egg and gently drop it in the centre of the water. The miniature Charybdis will keep the egg together and prevent it from forming long eggy tentacles and going all over the place. Leave it in for a minute if you like your yolk runny, or 2 minutes if you prefer it a bit harder. ***End of the egg poaching business***

Lift it out of the water with a slotted spoon or a skimmer, leave to drip for a wee bit, then put it on top of the avocado. Grind some salt and pepper over it, top with the other slice of bread, enjoy with a whole bunch of coffee and feel ready to face the harsh realities of a sober day after an inebriated night on the prowl.

German Scotch eggs

My best buddyroos have a knack for moving far away from me to foreign countries. I’ve got one in Canada just now, there’s one waiting to go to China, one is in Dundee which, admittedly, is not in a foreign country, but it’s still a bit out of the way. And just the other day there, I saw one off to Germany. I went to stay in Berlin with him for a few days, because why the hell not, before putting him on a train to his new home town and taking a train home myself.

At some point during these days I suddenly felt the urge to sing this informative song about Scotch eggs in his face. That’s when he told me that he’d never eaten a Scotch egg in his life. Lived in Glasgow for two years, and never eaten a Scotch egg! I was slightly outraged. But we were in Berlin at this point, I couldn’t just go get him a Scotch egg, they don’t sell those in Berlin. They sell incredible quantities of Currywurst and kebab, but no Scotch eggs.

This would never do. I decided I’d put them on the blog, so that he could make them himself. I then said I would make it out to be much easier than it was in reality, to be absolutely certain he’d give it a shot one day. No need, I tried it today and it’s actually pretty easy. For real. But it is a lot easier with a food processor which I suspect he doesn’t have. It can certainly be done without, though. So here, Friend, Scotch eggs. Better make them.

I managed to get 8 eggs out of the following ingredients. They fill you up like nothing else so if you’re not in the company of several people who might help you out, consider halving the quantities and making 4.

• 800 gr of pork sausages
• 10 eggs – 8 hard boiled, 2 beaten
• 1 spring onion
• handful of fresh flatleaf parsley
• 1 tsp of mustard
• 1 tsp of mace – I used the whole lacy bit and ground it up with a mortar and pestle myself, which seems to come out pretty oily. If you can’t be bothered or don’t have a mortar, use dried powder. Alternatively you could use nutmeg, the taste is very similar.
• flour
• breadcrumbs – preferably homemade
• salt and pepper
• enough vegetable/sunflower/groundnut oil for frying

If you don’t have a food processor, you could also just chop the spring onion and parsley very finely, not that difficult. Alternatively, you could leave them out altogether – they’re not absolutely necessary, but I do really quite like them.

First of all, boil 8 of your eggs for about 7 minutes. Drain, rinse in cold water and leave to stand in a bowl of cold water for a few minutes. Then peel and make sure they’re free of all little bits of shell.

Meanwhile, fill a heavy frying pan for about 1/3 with oil. Heat up so that it’ll be about 170 or 180 °C by the time you’re ready to start frying. If you don’t have a thermometer, don’t worry, neither do I. Chuck in a small piece of bread, if the oil starts bubbling without instantly burning the bread, you should be OK.

Back to the recipe.

Roughly chop the parsley and spring onion, then put them in a food processor. Chop it all up best you can, try to make it into a fine-ish mixture so that it’ll mix well with the meat. Squeeze the meat out of the sausages and add this to the greens. Add the mace, the mustard, a generous sprinkle of black pepper and a small pinch of salt. Mix well, using the processor again, or your hands.

Put flour, 2 beaten eggs and breadcrumbs on an individual plate each and line them up in that order.

Coat a chopping board with cling film. Divide your meat mixture into the correct amount of portions. Now take one of the portions and flatten it out with your hands on the chopping board. Take a peeled egg, roll it through the flour, coating it lightly (lightly wiggle it around in your hands to shake off any excess flour), place it in the middle of the meat and carefully start folding the meat around. Because of the cling film the meat should be easy enough to peel away from the chopping board. Now just fold the meat around the egg and seal it up properly, squeezing it all together.

Rolled up on the left, in the making on the right.

Roll your giant eggy meatball through the flour first, then through the egg, then through the breadcrumbs. Check to see if your oil is hot enough, then carefully lower the Scotch egg into the frying pan. You can fry 2 at the same time, but I wouldn’t put in any more, or the oil will cool down too much.

Leave them to fry for about 7 minutes, turning them every now and then to make sure all sides are cooked properly.

Eat still hot, or leave them for a few hours and cool in the fridge. Serve with Worcestershire sauce or mustard.