Dinard

I've just returned from my first holiday abroad since 2012 and felt inspired enough to revive this blog. The hiatus in detailing my food obsession can only be blamed on life changing events... you know - having a baby, moving house, going back to work, and so on and so forth.

Now onto my recent holiday. France but not as I have known it - it was a visit to the north, staying with dear friends in a country house, eating and drinking local stuff and cooking in every night! Blissful.

Dinard in Brittany is well known not only for it's coastal beauty but also it's seafood and fish. A local speciality is Galettes - a light, thin buckwheat crepe served with cheese or other toppings. I had one and I hope to try and replicate this at home one day. It was a savoury delight and the fact that buckwheat is a gluten free treat, was a bonus.

There was an inevitable excess of cheese and bread and saucisson consumption upon arrival and throughout the week, which just could not be helped. I succumbed to all the Comte and Roquefort I could get my hands on! And there really is nothing as good as the freshly baked daily bread - best consumed upon purchase first thing in the morning as the baguettes tend to become solid weapons by the next day! All the little villages here are neat and tidy replicas of each other with a boulangerie being an essential feature in every one.

The huge range of different saucisson found in any supermarket or farmer's market here made me feel like a kid in a sweet shop! However my main source of gluttony came in the form of fresh fish and seafood, salads and veg which is never a bad thing - think of all the lean protein and omega 3s and vitamins. I actually managed a trip to the local market and bought fresh ingredients to cook with.. my first french market and it was everything I had hoped for.. the produce was incredible and very very cheap in comparison to our London markets!

These mackerel were line caught that morning according to the lady selling them in the market. 8 of these bad boys came to about 21 euros. I smothered them in olive oil, parsley, salt, garlic and lemon juice before sealing them tightly in foil parcels and then placed the parcels directly on the bbq for 15 minutes - I then served them up with rice and salads. The freshness of the fish was quite evident as the taste was out of this world!

On one very special occasion and in true French style, we went for a 3 hour 4 course lunch. Our host with all his local knowledge guided us to the back of what looked like a sports bar but actually housed Madame Picard's seafood restaurant. It was packed out at lunch time, mainly by elderly French locals - so we knew we were on to a winner! I started with an assortment of seafood [oysters, crab, langoustines, prawns, shrimps, cockles, snails and winkles!] straight out of the sea that day and served with nothing but a segment of lemon and a pot of mayonnaise! Simple and delicious and very messy. The mains were more fish and seafood dishes mostly dressed with butter sauces to die for! Not really sure how I managed the cheese course that followed all this food but I had to draw the line at dessert!

No French foodie holiday would ever be complete without Moule Frites. This Moule Mariniere dish was served up to me by the seaside from a little outdoor shack for about 12 euros. It was a very generous portion and I gorged myself on these plump little mussels until I could eat no more!

Finally I leave you with a picture of a perfect fig. Ripe and straight off the tree outside our country cottage. It made a rather good fig and blue cheese salad and will be a reminder to me that French food need not always be fattening as long as you use your own produce off the back garden [or indeed your neighbour's well tended garden!] or visit the markets and use local seasonal produce. There will always be the temptation of cheese and saucisson here but they can be balanced out with home cooked simple fish, colourful veg and salads straight from the market. I look forward to more holidays in France but never ever again in a city hotel. 

Clementine cake [no flour no butter recipe]

I made quite a lot of cakes in 2013! This particular one was possibly my best and we had it on New Years Eve. So I had to start 2014 with this cake blog as it's so good! I know January is dieting month for most and the time to rein in the treats, especially when it comes to sugar. However this long bleak month [even longer for those of you brave souls who are having a dry one] may require a treat or two to keep you going. So think on this recipe as a relatively guilt free option, as the only fat in the cake comes from eggs and the ground almonds.

There is no flour in it, so it's great for coeliacs and those on low fat, low carb diets [Atkins/Dukan]. Most of you are probably trying out the 4:3 or 5:2 fasting diet which is the new trend I believe. In which case on non fasting days this makes for a great treat with tea/coffee bearing in mind each slice [out of 12 in total] is about 350 calories. If you are on a no sugar diet then look away now and don't even go there! Clementines are quite sweet already and the recipe calls for quite a lot of sugar! I swiped the recipe from Lizzie Kamenetzky in the January edition of Delicious and my version had a small grating of 70% dark chocolate as a garnish on top of the sticky cake.

Ingredients:

Cake:
3 Clementines - simmered in boiling water for 2 hours
250g of caster sugar
300g of ground almonds
Seeds from 8 cardamom pods crushed into a powder
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp of vanilla extract
6 large eggs lightly beaten

Syrup:
Juice of 2 clementines
Juice of 1 lemon
50g of caster sugar
1 stick of cinnamon

Garnish [optional] - small amount of grated 70% chocolate

Equipment:
Springform tin with loose bottom - greased with oil and lined with baking paper
Pre heated oven to 160 degrees fan / 180 degrees normal
Food processor
Juicer [optional] for lemon
Grater [optional]


Method:
1. Bring 3 whole clementines in water to the boil and then turn down the heat & simmer for 2 hours until they are very soft. Add more boiling water over time if needed. Drain and set aside to cool enough to handle.

2. Put all the dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix [250g sugar, 300g almonds, baking powder & the crushed cardamom seeds]. Make a well in the middle.

3. Cut the clementines in half and check for seeds. Then blitz them into a pulp in a food processor.

4. Put the pulped fruit, vanilla extract and eggs in the well of the dry ingredients and gently mix everything together.

5. Pour the mix into your springform tin and bake at 160 degrees fan / 180 normal for 55 minutes

6. Make the syrup in a pan by dissolving 50 g of caster sugar in the juice of the clementines and lemon. Allow to gently simmer with the cinnamon stick in for about 5 minutes. Sieve and set aside.

7. When the cake comes out it should have an even rise and a golden brown colour. Make some holes in it with a skewer and pour the syrup over the cake and leave it in the tin for an hour.

8. Release the tin and turn out the cake and serve with the grated chocolate garnish on top.

I absolutely must stop making cakes now. This was the final one on my list. I think I have enough in my repertoire to be proud of and can safely say 2013 was the year of the baking! I need to now go back on a diet and kick this sugar habit that I've picked up, as that's the only way to lose weight! 2014 - the year of the diet..Now which diet should I go for ... hmmm.. the no more cake diet I guess...

Apple & Apricot Jam Tart

Having a batch of pastry stashed away in the freezer meant that I was itching to bake another tart this week! I came across Mary Berry's French apple tart on Channel 4's website and decided to give it a try. Hailed as the Queen of Baking, surely her recipe was going to be a winner! Well it did not disappoint as the result was quite professional and our Sunday Lunch this weekend ended with high praise from my friends! Thank you Mary - you rock!

Ingredients:

Sweet pastry - rolled out & blind baked in loose bottomed tart tin/ Ready made pastry shell

Filling: 

3 Bramley apples peeled and roughly chopped

100g of butter

splash of water

6 tbs of Apricot Jam

125g of caster sugar

Top layer:

2-3 Bramley apples sliced thinly

Lemon Juice

1 tbs of Apricot jam heated to glaze

Sprinkle of caster sugar

To get the finished tart to look like the picture on line, I peeled and thinly sliced 3 Bramley apples and immersed them in water and lemon juice to stop them browning too quickly. I then lay them out on the tart tin to check I had enough to create the pretty fan effect at the end.

All the rest of the apples in the bag got peeled, cut into chunks and gently heated in a bit of water and about 100g of butter. When the apples were stewed down into a soft mulch I passed them through a sieve into a bowl with 6 tablespoons of Apricot jam and 125g of caster sugar. This was then mixed together and gently reduced over a medium heat for about 10 minutes. I had to be very careful at this stage because the hot lava of sweet and sour apples was very hot indeed & difficult to stir continuously while it was spitting! When it became a thick paste, I set it aside to cool.

I defrosted my already made sweet pastry the night before so on the day I just rolled it out as thin as I dared then placed it on a loose bottomed tart case. I then trimmed off the excess, pricked the base and then chilled in the fridge for 30min. Then the tart got covered in foil and I placed rice grains in it to blind bake at 190 degrees for 10 min. I then removed the foil and baked the pastry for another 5 minutes until biscuity & cooked. This was then set aside to cool a little as well.

Finally the apricot and apple puree got spooned into the case before I carefully arranged the slices of apple on top. I then sprinkled it with caster sugar and baked the tart for another 30 minutes - I switched the grill on at the end to get a bit of caramelisation on the edges of the apples. The final glaze was done using a bit of heated up apricot jam & lemon juice brushed over the apples with a pastry brush.

I served this cold [with a bit of cream] & it was delicious. Thank you Mary Berry - I shall be using this easy recipe again.. perhaps with a few more tweaks of my own next time. I'm sure a bit of cinnamon would work in the recipe as would, dare I say it, a bit more sugar! Oh dear I think I'm developing a sweet tooth. This won't do - back to healthy recipes next time!

Lemon Tart

It's time for a not-so-healthy recipe. I'm still trying to get the hang of baking because I want a decent list of classic desserts in my repertoire. This time I wanted to bake a tart from scratch. Who doesn't love a good tart? To enable this to happen I had to first go out and by a loose bottomed tart case and now there will be no stopping me. 

I searched high and low online for an easy recipe and found Gregg Wallace's recipe on the BBC Good food website. I lifted his recipe mainly because his pastry quantities result in double the dose and you basically freeze half of it for another day - 2 tarts with one stone & so on. Genius.

However I decided not to follow his instructions too closely as I don't have the patience or the time to rub flour and butter together till they look like breadcrumbs. It's too messy and takes too long! I saw Delia online advocating using a food processor for that stage of pastry making and if it's good enough for Delia then it's good enough for me! I also played it by ear when pulsing the processor and adding little bits of water at a time to get the pastry to bind into a ball and so I didn't follow his recipe exactly - a bit risky but the final result was a delicious lemon tart. The verdict from those who sampled it [i.e. my other half] was that the pastry could be thinner on the base and the filling could be more lemon rich but all in all, for my first attempt, I was pretty pleased with the result!

Pastry ingredients: [For 2 batches]

Plain Flour 500g [plus a bit to flour the work surface]
Icing sugar 140g [plus a bit to decorate at the end]
Unsalted butter 250g [cold and chopped into cubes]
Egg yolks x 4

Filling ingredients:

Juice of 4 [maybe 5] lemons
Lemon zest from 2 of the lemons
Caster sugar 140g
Double cream 150ml
Whole eggs x 5

Equipment:
Food processor
Weighing machine
Loose bottomed tart tin
Zester
Rolling pin

Method:
1. Put the flour and icing sugar and the cold cubes of butter in the food processor and pulse until it resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Add the egg yolks one at a time and pulse each time
3. Add a splash of water at a time and keep pulsing until the whole lot come together in a lump of dough
4. Take it out onto a clean floured surface and flatten the dough with the palm of your [clean and washed] hands. Put half in some cling film and freeze for another day. Put the other half in cling film and chill in the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes.
5. After 30min take the dough out of the fridge and use the rolling pin to flatten it to the thickness of a pound coin

[ I don't think I was brave enough to thin it out sufficiently - I was more worried about trying to transfer the rolled out dough onto the case! This I managed by lifting the pastry up on the rolling pin and then laying it over the case gently.]

6. Gently cover the tart case with the pastry and gently squish it in against the edges & base.
7. Trim off the excess and prick the base with a fork. Put the case back in the fridge for another 30min.

Meanwhile preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and place a large square of baking paper on the middle shelf of the oven [to catch any spills]

8. After 30min take the case out from the fridge, place a piece of foil on the pastry and pour in some rice/dried beans
9. Bake this for 10min at 160 degress C
10. Remove the foil - discard it and the contents
11. Put the case back in the oven for another 15 minutes to become biscuity

15. Make the filling by combining all the ingredients apart from the zest & gently stirring with a fork until it's all smooth. Pass the mixture through a sieve and then add the zest.

16. Put the filling mixture in a pouring jug and take it to the oven. Then pour into the tart case right to the top very carefully.
17. Bake for 30 min - till its just set but still has a little wobble.
18. Cool it completely before transferring out of the case and then sprinkle it with a little icing sugar. Et Voila! Tart-tastic.

I am definitely feeling more confident with pastry after this recipe and will be attempting an apple tart next time! Luckily there is a batch of pastry already in the freezer! Brilliant!

Veal Meatballs

I think the stigma attached to eating veal is slowly disappearing in the UK and some supermarkets are starting to stock various cuts. But it's still sometimes hard to find veal, unless you go to the butchers. If you want it delivered with your weekly online shop, Ocado is your best bet as they have veal mince, escalopes, chops and various other cuts.

British Rose Veal in the UK is not only ethical to eat but should be encouraged so that young male calves are consumed by the British public instead of people on the continent. The transport conditions and the feeding laws have changed for the better since 2006 so as to give these animals a fighting chance but if they are not in demand for their meat, they get slaughtered at a young age as they cannot produce milk or sold to veal eating nations in Europe.

Veal is a tender and delicious young beef and can be substituted in all beef recipes. Veal mince is used along with other mince in many Italian meat sauces and you can certainly use veal with any other type of mince [like pork/lamb] in this meatball recipe. My recipe uses pine nuts and raisins which gives the meatballs a really pleasing nutty texture and sweetness.

Meatball mix:

Veal mince
Handful of pine nuts
Handful of raisins
Chopped fresh parsley
Sprinkle of dried oregano
1 crushed clove of garlic
1 large red chilli deseeded and finely chopped
4/5 tbs of ground almonds to dry the mix and bind
1 whole egg to bind
Salt and black pepper

Mix and roll into balls then chill in the fridge for at least 30min while you get the tomato based sauce on the hob.

Sauce ingredients:

2 leeks finely chopped
2 celery sticks finely chopped
2/3 carrots finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic crushed
2 brown onions finely chopped
Thyme, Rosemary and Bay leaves

Chopped Tomatoes
2 pints of chicken stock
Tomato puree - 2/3 tbs
Chopped anchovy fillets x 2/3
salt, pepper and sugar

Fry the vegetables and herbs in olive oil for 30min on a very low heat with a pinch of salt.
Add the anchovies, tomato puree and fry for 2-3 minutes
Then add the stock and the chopped tomatoes and a tsp of sugar

Simmer the sauce for 45min

Add the meatballs into the sauce when it's thickened and the oils have risen to the top. Then simmer gently for 30min. Take the pot off the heat and gently stir the meatballs around. Cover and set aside to rest.

Garnish with parsley and then serve with a crisp green side salad, maybe some bread to mop up the sauce or serve on pasta. It's a big batch so a container load can be frozen.. I always like to have some extra balls in the fridge, in case of meatball emergencies.*

[*meatball emergency e.g when someone drops round for supper and there are only 4 meatballs left in the pasta dish .. you need extra meatballs & sauce or else there will be disappointment all round...This is classed as a middle class crisis]