Cheese gunk

Ailbhe of Simply Splendiferous is pretending it's summer. A good idea, even as the weather drops its gloomy reminders that it is not so.

And dips are prime summer food. She has an easy cheesy dip on her blog, and my competitive instinct has led me to post one which is even easier and, I suspect, even tastier.

I took it to a Eurovision party, and people I didn't know came out of the kitchen saying things like 'Who made that? It's delicious! You have to tell me how to make it.'

The recipe in all its glory:

Packet of Danish Blue
Packet of cream cheese
Clove of garlic (optional)

Mash the Danish blue with a fork in a bowl. Mash in about the equivalent amount of cream cheese. Crush garlic clove with side of knife. Place in bowl.

It doesn't sound like much, does it? But it's utterly addictive.

It's another old family recipe known as 'cheese gunk', although @linderella29, whose party it was, misheard it as 'cheese dump'. We like slightly disgusting food names in our family – one day I'll introduce you to 'phlegm cakes'.

Looks awful, tastes fabulous

Chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies

Easy ways to make yourself popular on a long coach journey – get a cake tin, fill it with about 60 cookies and pass it round.

My lovely choir went on a trip to St Ives, Cambridgeshire (yes, yes, seven wives) and I decided to bake something. Partly, the church were providing 'refreshments' and as that can mean anything from biccies'n'tea to a four trestle-table blowout (Darwen URC, I'm looking at you), I thought I'd better bring reinforcements.

This cookie recipe is our family recipe. It has three main advantages: it's delicious, it's easy and it makes loads. It has one major disadvantage: it uses cup measures.

I grew up using cup measures in the UK. I grew up making this recipe, even. Just buy a cup measure and have done with it! I think mine came from Poundland, or it is possible to buy jugs with cups down one side and ml or fl oz down the other.

11/2 cup shortening (As I was once on Radcliffe and Maconie to explain, shortening is whatever marge or butter you have to hand)
11/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1tsp baking soda dissolved in 1/3 cup boiling water
1tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
4 cups rolled oats
12oz chocolate chips (ie 100g, or three bags)

Mix in large bowl in above order. Cover bowl and refrigerate at least 12 hours (I never bother). Drop by greased teaspoon onto greased baking. Bake at 325 F (170C) until lightly browned (that's about 8-10 mins).

The recipe says it makes 7-8 dozen. I've never got that much out of it, but I got 64 out of it on Friday, and I ate quite a bit of dough... (It was there! I was never going to fill another baking sheet!)

Members of the choir were very appreciative and a couple of people asked me for the recipe. I can actually recite the recipe, it's that easy and I've been making it so long, but they didn't have a pen. This blog post will hopefully serve instead.

(Apparently it's National Oatmeal Cookie Day today and I finally got my mother's permission to post the recipe...)

Chicory pakora

No matter how scrupulously one scans the veg box 'dislikes' list, something always gets through.

Chicory. Endive for my American readers. For the avoidance of doubt, those green/white leaves that, when laid out in threes, looks like the Prince of Wales' feathers.

I find its bitterness off-putting and its crunch over-powering. Yeah, I don't like the stuff.

So I posted on Twitter, wonderful wonderful Twitter, for 'recipes that make chicory not taste like chicory'.

I garnered a bunch of suggestions, including from one wag: 'Many, but none of them include chicory'. More helpful ideas were 'braise it in butter' or 'braise it in chicken stock'. The folks at @discoverendive suggested using it in a smoothie. I'm afraid I assumed they were a bot and wrote a rather derisive reply, but they took it in good humour and provided several more choices, such as wrapping it in ham and covering it in Mornay sauce.

Cookwitch, however, who is always good in a food crisis, suggested making pakoras out of it and gave me PukkaPaki's okra pakora recipe to alter. One utter failure to buy chaat masala later, and I gave it a go.

I didn't so much shred the chicory as whack a knife around on it a bit. It seemed to brown very quickly, so place it in what I once saw described as 'acidulated water'. That's water with a squeeze of lemon to you and me.

The batter, even including dry-roasting and grinding the spices, could not have been easier. I made it relatively thick, but it wasn't really thick enough. Go for a proper 'can barely move the spoon' style batter.

I just glumphed wooden-spoonfuls of batter-covered chicory into a vat of vegetable oil. I did wind up turning them, as the oil was not very deep.

I did it in two batches, so I know that cold and crispy is jolly good, as is hot and crispy. In the middle, not so much. Very little of it tasted like chicory, but when it did, the bitterness was a plus.

As I didn't have amchoor (mango powder) or chaat masala, I found myself wanting salt, but I'll try it with those seasonings first.

And now I know how to make pakora batter, I'm sure I'll use it when I want something fried that's a bit more interesting than onion rings.

PS I also made a chicken stew by frying onions and leeks, browning chicken thighs and drumsticks and lobbing cider over it while I messed around with pakoras. Turned out delicious. The cider was Green Goblin.

Roasted beetroot, trout and horseradish

I'm really getting along with beetroot. I first discovered it could be sweet and flavourful in this salmon and horseradish dish, which is a really useful dinner party recipe. (As if I give dinner parties...)

It's cropping up in my veg box a lot, and I made beetroot risotto from this recipe the other night. I put (clean) Marigolds on because I was going to a trade fair the following day and didn't want to do so with blood-red fingers.

We needed something simple, because the storecupboard is depleted. I knew 'pink' fish, like the trout we have out of the freezer, beetroot and horseradish was a match made in heaven, so I did a Google search.

This recipe from Tastebud Travels fitted the bill.

I've cut out quite a bit of it - I may yet do the smoked salt, pepper and lemon rub, but it'll have to be homemade with lemon zest. And I'm ashamed to say that neither of us can quiiiiite be bothered to go out to get cream or yoghurt. We were out till about 20 to 1 at Leluu's supperclub last night, to excuse our utter laziness.

So, essentially, it's roasted beetroot with trout and horseradish sauce ... it's the foodbloglondon difference! We've done the caraway and thyme, but we both think beetroot comes up pretty sweet roasted, so we skipped the honey.

I did do the smoked salt, pepper and lemon rub, partly because I do like crispy fish skin, and partly because I received some Maldon smoked salt as a freebie at Sabrina's French Launderette, which I've never used. As I was making it, I did think, this is a really useful idea just to flavour some fish if I have nothing else in.

The rub. If you think this one is out of focus, you should see the other.

It turned out very nicely. I could have used more rub. And if you wanted to, the rub and a spread of horseradish would do for a quick meal.

Look at the rainbow colour on those scales. Amazing!

The beetroot and caraway was interesting, and quite bitter - hence the honey no doubt. I'll definitely try that combination again, but I think I'd rather have simple roasted beetroot with this.

The finished dish, including an attempt at food styling. Beetroot looks good though, no?

Christmas Challenge: Gingerbread House

It seems Mum's and I's Christmas Challenge is now an annual thing. (See last year's Buche de Noel).

I rang her up a couple of weeks ago, basically hinting that I'd like to do something other than a buche. When I mentioned a gingerbread house, she said 'I've always wanted to do one of those!', so we settled on it.
I knew it couldn't be that hard, because I made one in Guides when I was about fourteen.

We used the simple gingerbread house recipe from Good Food.

The trouble with this recipe is that the roof is very, very steep. It worked without too much hassle, but I think next time I'd save myself the worry and use one with a shallower roof.

 First of all, we made gingerbread and cut out the pieces to the template. This recipe (I keep calling it a pattern) suggests sticking in almonds as roof tiles. Mum liked the idea, so we did it. I wanted to use Jules Destrooper biscuits for the roof, but in the end, we used them somewhere else. The almonds did fracture in our hands, and it's worth remembering to leave places to handle the gingerbread round the edges.

Then bake, allow to cool slightly and trim the pieces to the template. Slightly's the key. I left it too long and wound up chipping bits of solid gingerbread across the kitchen. Also, at the time, I was all 'if it's not exact it won't fit perfectly!', whereas in reality 'stick some more icing on it!' fixes 100% of all house engineering problems.

The recipe suggests piping long snakes of icing down the sides and then sticking the pieces together. Round about this point, I swore more volubly then I ever have in front of my mother, because I'd forgotten the icing set. I had to send Mum to a neighbour. (Thanks, neighbour!).

The icing (500g sifted icing sugar, two egg whites) is like putty, so rolling snakes and placing everything together would actually have been much easier. And I'm sure you can see my finger-dimples in this photo as I did everything possible to make sure it stayed up. If you're making this yourself, do bear in mind that the icing hardens, so you can cut down on the engineering and just hold-and-wait.

The roof, as I mentioned, is steep, and our gingerbread roofs had flared in the oven, so we had to pad the eaves with icing. A few nervy moments as Mum held the roof and I stuffed icing into every crevice, using a mirror to see under the eaves. That 'snow' across the top of the roof? Just a decorative device and definitely not an integral part of the structure...

The two yellow-ish circles in the pictures are acid drops. I thought they were clearer, so next year I'd use clear boiled sweets or Fox's Glacier Mints. (Or possibly gelatine sheets as used to great effect in Su-Lin's Mies van der Rohe Barcelona pavilion).

The chimney's a Cadbury's mini-roll, sliced and stuck on with icing. Mum and I agreed it's too big for the scale, and can we just not mention it's directly over a door?

Then we decorated with liquorice spogs (apparently, that really is their name!) and gumdrops.

Then we got really silly.

The thing I most enjoyed about doing this house is that it gave us free rein to do what we wanted, to say 'Hey, how about this?'. If we could think of a way of doing it, we did.

We knew we wanted front and back paths. In the sweet shop (Sweet Memories of Twickenham, who were patient with us and let us order 'four of those, six of those'), I'd seen the rainbow strips and decided they'd make a great path, while Mum spotted the Pontefract cakes and suggesting stepping stones. We used the Destrooper biscuits for the doors.

As we were laying out the stepping stones, I said 'why don't we make a river?' I used the chipped-off spare bits of gingerbread as banks (essential because I was using runny icing), coloured some icing blue and trailed it across the corner of our surface. Then we put a 'stepping stone' in it.

Mum's genius idea was a log pile. The recipe suggests using Cadbury's mini-fingers, but Mum bought Elizabeth Shaw Amaretto flutes, which taste and look better. As we were snipping off bits to fit the sides, Mum said 'I see a log pile' and constructed one from off-cuts at the back door.

Then I got carried away and daubed 'snow' absolutely everywhere, running down the roof, forming icicles on the roof, and so on.

I placed it on two sheets of baking paper, to save the tablecloth, and dusted everything with icing sugar. I also put 'ice' (clearish icing) in the river. The baking sheets made the house easy to slide around and work on.

Even my dad got involved. As we were all sitting around after the Christmas meal, he got his (clean!) knife, and drew ski-tracks and the marks of a snowplough stop, which you can just see at bottom right in this pic.

We're already brainstorming all sorts of ludicrous things for next year. My brother wants a yeti, so a yeti he shall have!

Picture special

I am quite, quite lousy at posting.
This has become embarrassing after meeting a lot of other food bloggers and definitely joining the food Tweetosphere (that really shouldn't be a word).
I cook quite a lot of interesting recipes, but I often don't write about them, or finish writing about them.
As I was looking for good photos on my camera to be the backdrop to the blog, I realised I had lots of rather nice looking photos but often no posts to go with them.
So this is a picture special.

This is a lemon meringue pie from, oops, LAST Thanksgiving. No view of the lemon, but this is the meringue before (top) and after (bottom) baking. I didn't make an extra pie this year (you have to have pumpkin obviously), because we were so bloody full last year.

This is a mint creme thing from, I think, the front of a Sainsbury's mag. One of the reasons it wasn't written about was the cream essentially turned to butter as we churned it. 

Pie! Quite proud of making pie. Steak and ale recipe from Delicious.

I went through a crumpet phase, starting with pikelets (top), which were way too small to be any use, graduating up to crumpets in my cookie cutters. It is ridiculously easy, but they always tasted a little 'short' to me, and the different ring sizes was a bit awkward. 

Wholemeal rolls. Probably Joy of Cooking. (Recipe not online)

Baguette. Again, almost certainly Joy of Cooking, because if you do everything it says, it will work. 

Must've burnt this one. The stuff that looks like kibble at top left is toffee chunks for toffee apple ice cream from BBC Food (which is highly recommended),

That's more like it. 

So, there's your picture special. No one say anything about 'making a virtue out of a necessity', ok?

French Launderette Supper Club

It turns out there's a different etiquette when you sit down with food bloggers. Not only do you wait for everyone to be served, you wait for everyone to take a photo. Also, picking up bones and chewing is absolutely de rigeur.

I never intended to do restaurant reviews on this blog, but it seems criminal not to write about October's (second-)hottest ticket, seeing as I snagged a spot.

Sabrina Ghayour decided to spoof Thomas Keller's French Laundry pop-up at Harrod's, which comes in at £250, and asked on Twitter if anyone would be interested in a £2.50 pop-up. 'At last!' I thought 'A supper club I can afford', so I instantly said yes.

I've been slapping myself on the back for that decision ever since.

The canape was a salmon tartar cornet, with a sweet red onion creme fraiche. This was a Keller homage. I didn't pick up much red onion, but I did get a lot of lemon in the creme fraiche which I loved.

The cauliflower soup with Dorset black summer truffle was served in espresso cups, and was very thick. The spicing was spot-on, so that the cauliflower came through as a flavour of interest rather than a foul vegetable one gives away to one's boyfriend.
Etiquette problem though - how to eat it with no spoon and without dressing my nose in soup. I'm very grateful to Cookwitch, who went 'Bread!' and started us all mopping it up with the gorgeous bread.

For me, the starter was absolutely the stand-out course. I suspected I would like 'rolled loin of Gloucester Old Spot pork with wild mushroom stuffing, wrapped in pancetta and served with a tarragon sauce vierge', but when it turned up. Oh! It looked beautiful, naturally. The pork was probably the softest I've ever tasted, and when I read the Skinny Bib's review he said 'It was as if the pork was massaging my tongue'. 'Yes!' I thought, 'That's exactly it!' But that's not why it was beautiful. It helped, but the real beauty was the way the sauce cut through the richness of the pork. The olive oil was unbelievably good, I can still taste it now, fresh and cold. (Frankly, it deserves a plug: @nudoitalia)

The main was hogget. I've heard a certain amount about hogget, which is a sheep from 1-2 years old. (Lamb is 0-1). It's one of these cuts that's coming back into fashion. I don't like lamb much, but I did really like hogget. The flavour seemed to me much more subtle. As it was rack of hogget, this is where all the bone-chewing came in.

At any other event, anyone feeding me six wafer-thin slices of potato as a 'galette' would be in serious trouble. I'll let them off.

Dessert was a black fig and pistachio frangipane, made by Bruno Breillet. I'm going to big up Bruno here, because I follow him on Twitter, and there's something amazing about getting a blast of delicious-looking patisserie in my timeline. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if I'd eaten his food and it wasn't any good. It was gorgeous. Light, soft, with a complex marriage of fig and blended pistachios. (Oh, go on, stick me in Pseud's Corner).

Cheese. CHEESE. All British, naturally, and from a shop that turns out to be in Hampton, very close to where I grew up. Nuns of Caen, a sheep's cheese, was my favourite. The other one I'd go straight for in a shop again was Dirty Vicar (fnar!). Norbury Blue and one-that-unfortunately-I've-forgotten rounded it off. The chutney was unbelievable, the other thing I went away from the event tasting.

I have to mention the other major plus of the event, and I'm sorry if this sounds like sucking up, but I had a fantastic time talking about food-and-other-things with all my tablemates. Not a bad apple in the bunch.
They are: @theskinnybib, @sulineats, @cookwitch, @ailbhetweets plus husband, @goodshoeday and @goingwithmygut plus husband Babs. Also, Sabrina and her team clearly absolutely worked their arses off, and it was a roaring success.

Another bonus? I put in for the raffle, and won a cookery demonstration for two from Henry Harris of Racine, doing steak tartare, lapin a la moutarde, steak au poivre and petit pot au chocolat. A quick stress because it was on Thanksgiving, when Mum and I sing in the big American service at St Paul's, but it's in the evening, so I think we're going to have a fun girlie day out.

Su-Lin was kind enough to let me link to her Flickr photos, so you can see all that lovely food.

And @goingwithmygut runs Edible Experiences, which lists and reviews different food experiences - restaurants, cooking schools, supper clubs and so on - on which this blogpost is now linked.