Week 14 - Abundance- Alys Fowler

As well as #cookbookchallenge, being on lock down has also seen us trying to #eatthefreezer. And this week's effort saw two birds with one stone as I tried to use up a big block of broad beans that had been taking up at least a two litre ice cream tub's worth of room since last summer.

Preparing for isolation meant the Ewing had rushed to our local library and bought home armfuls of library books (half are now being employed as a prop for my laptop as I work from home). One that wasn't roped in to my makeshift office was Abundance, written by erstwhile Gardener's Worlder Alys Fowler, which also happened to be full of lots of useful tips about pickling, salting, fermenting and preserving. Very useful when you're only allowed out for that weekly shop.

There is also a handy freezer chapter that featured a recipe for broad bean falafel using almost exactly the amount I had in my freezer (you can also use chickpeas, or a mix of half and half) plus dill (I had a slightly wilted bag from one of my last pre-lockdown Waitrose trips) plus mint and parsley (our slightly straggly plants had just started to take-off in the spring sunshine). It was a fait accompli.

The only thing I was slightly concerned about was the cooking - the recipe said to shallow fry which always seems like the most awkward cooking method - little splash of oil; no worries. Boiling cauldron of oil, no problem. That middling amount of oil; sudden panic (plus the boredom of standing around, watching them intently while they go from pallid and pale to carbonic in mere minutes)

In the end I used a couple of centimetres in a small cast iron saucepan, cooking three of four at a time until lightly golden. And, apart from a couple breaking up a little at the edges, they crisped up nicely and only took a couple of minutes per batch.

Broad bean falafel 

Adapted from Abundance by Alys Fowler

500g broad beans, defrosted if frozen and double-podded if tough

1 teaspoon of baking powder

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 clove of garlic

1 pinch of chilli flakes

A small handful of parsley chopped

A small handful of dill, chopped

A small handful of mint, chopped

1 tsp ground cumin

Salt and pepper to season

Olive oil

Vegetable oil for shallow frying

Blanch the broad beans for 3 minutes then rinse in cold water.

Mash all the ingredients together with a hand blender, adding a glug of olive oil if needed or a teaspoon of flour until you have a sausage-meat like consistency. Aim for the dry side so they don't brake up too much when you try to shape and fry them.

Rub olive oil in your hands and roll into small balls then dust in flour.

Shallow fry in oil is a wok or deep frying pan until golden brown.

Serve with yogurt mixed with a pinch of salt, 1 tsp of dried mint and 1 tsp of tahini.

Week 13 - Vegetables - Antonio Carluccio

Lockdown, or at least social isolation, finally reaches the blog (which shows you how far behind I am writing these up...). The tail end of March saw the Ewing and I sent home from the office one morning and as I write this - some three-and-a-half weeks later we are still here. Luckily we are considered key workers and can both work from home, so, although adjusting to our new life has been somewhat of a challenge at times, and we have both been kept busy, we both feel very fortunate.

Another reason to feel lucky is the wonderful countryside that surrounds us, which we have been exploring on our Government-approved daily walks. While much of it is familiar, it's surprising just how much is hidden on your doorstep. And of course, the allotment which, according to Michael Gove, is still considered part of your daily exercise. The first (and probably last) time I will agree with him about anything.

It was on one of our visits to the allotment that the seed for this week's recipe was planted. While March is a fairly barren month, the Ewing kept talking about patches of red-veined sorrel that had self-seeded after she grew it years ago. 

I don't remember cooking it back then, but I chanced upon a recipe for a sorrel risotto in Antonio Carluccio's Vegetables  - a far more inspiring title than it probably sounds - and a plan started to fall into place to use some of the wild leaves that are so  beloved of the Italians, and are also abundant here at this time of year. And also avoiding a dreaded trip to a post-Corona world supermarket, with its increasingly bare shelves and paranoid customers.

We picked some wild garlic from the one patch that grows in the woods by our house, and I was also thrilled to find the little patch we have been nurturing under a bench in our garden is also beginning to thrive. Well, enough to make a jar of wild garlic and walnut pesto with, which was added to some homemade gnocchi as well as a splodge ending up in this risotto, too.

I also put on my marigolds and picked some young nettle leaves from the end of the garden (you can see Pusskins came over the fence to help), and then we went on a walk past the allotment and collected the aforementioned red-veined sorrel, originally planted by the Ewing circa 2013, when she first got the allotment, and still popping up in tufts reminiscent of the late Keith Flint's hair when I saw The Prodigy at Reading Festival as a teenager.

Risotto of wild vegetables -  adapted from Antonio Carluccio

serves 4

a large handful of fresh sorrel leaves, washed and tough stems removed

a large handful of wild garlic, washed

a large handful of nettles, washed and tough stems removed

2 tbs of wild garlic/basil pesto (optional)

2 litres chicken or vegetable stock

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped

small glass of dry white wine (Italian if you've got it)

350g risotto rice

50g Parmesan, freshly grated

a large knob of unsalted butter

salt and black pepper

Blanch the nettles and wild garlic in boiling water, rinse in cold water and then blend into a puree. Set aside.

Put the stock into a saucepan on a low heat, next to where you will make the risotto.

Heat the olive oil in a pan (I use a casserole dish), and fry the onion for about 10 minutes, until softened a little. Add the wine and bubble for a minute or two until the alcohol has burnt off.

Add the rice and stir around to coat each grain. 

Add the hot stock a ladle at a time, stirring until it is fully absorbed before adding more liquid.

After 10 minutes add some salt and the puree.

Continue cooking, stirring and adding stock, for about another 15 minutes, which is when you should taste a grain of rice for your preferred al dente texture and the rice should be moist, but not too wet. When it is nearly ready, add most of the sorrel leaves, roughly chopped if large, saving a few to garnish.

When the rice is to your taste, take the pan off the heat, beat in the Parmesan and the butter until glossy, and serve with a sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper and the remaining sorrel leaves

Week 12 - Ice Cream and Dessert Book - Ben and Jerry

When I was growing up, a friend and I found a pint of Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk in his parent's freezer. I don't think I had ever tasted anything so wonderful. Less wonderful was getting caught after we tried to shift the blame onto the (very elderly) babysitter. Sorry Margaret.

You can no longer buy NYSFC in the UK, but, thanks to their Ice Cream and Dessert Book, you can make your own version at home. In fact, theirs was the first ice cream book I ever bought after getting an ice cream machine and, despite buying several more since then, it's pretty much the only one I have used since. Their Peppermint Oreo ice cream has the honour of being one of the first recipes I blogged about, over nine years ago.

According to their website in 1985, a food pundit for New York Magazine named Gael Greene wrote a review of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, stating: “The ice cream is pleasant enough, but not thrilling, and the chips and bits seem rather sparse.” So they decided to make a ice cream choc-full of add ins; 'a flavor tailor-made for the New York state of mind'.

Weirdly, while the description on the side of the carton says 'Chocolate Ice Cream with White & Dark Fudge Chunks, Pecans, Walnuts & Fudge-Covered Almonds' the recipe in the book doesn't include any fudge, subbing in chocolate-covered almonds instead. I used a mixture of the milk chocolate and au naturel almonds I had in the cupboard, plus pecans, walnuts, cheap white chocolate and some chopped up chunks of fudge.

High Wycombe Super Fudge Chunk 

Based on Ben and Jerry's New York version

1 cup milk

2 large eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup double cream

100g dark chocolate

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 pinch salt

50g chopped white chocolate

50g chopped milk chocolate

50g chopped pecan halves

50g chopped walnuts

50g chopped almonds

50g chopped fudge

Combine the coarsely chopped chocolates, pecans, walnuts, almonds and fudge in a bowl, cover, and refrigerate.

Melt the plain chocolate in the top of a double boiler over hot, but not boiling, water.

Whisk in the milk, a little at a time, and heat, stirring constantly, until smooth; remove from the heat and let cool.

Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended, about 1 minute more.

Add the cream, vanilla, and salt and whisk to blend.

Pour the chocolate mixture into the cream mixture and blend.

Cover and refrigerate until cold, I usually leave overnight.

Transfer the cream mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze following the manufacturer's instructions.

Just before the ice cream is ready stir in the chocolate and nuts.

Place in a container and freeze until ready to serve.

Week 11 - The Prawn Cocktail Years - Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham

The Ewing and I we very lucky to enjoy a trip to Paris for our second wedding anniversary a few weeks ago (we actually got married in 2012, but we chose to do it on leap day. Despite the four year warning, I still forgot to buy a card...). 

Predictably, the food was wonderful and we ate our way through most of the classics; steak frites, onion soup, profiteroles, rum baba, daily croissants, and crottins of deep fried chevre. Or, more prosaically, goat's cheese nuggets, picked up from McDonalds on a drunken walk home from dinner.

It seems you can't have too much of a good thing, as on our return all I could think about was how we had friends coming for Sunday lunch and how I wanted to cook boeuf bourginon or coq au vin, after finding recipes for both in Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham's wonderfully retro Prawn Cocktail years. Finally settling on the beef, as we had some beautiful bone-in shin sitting waiting in the freezer.

As things turned out, they had to unavoidably cancel last minute. But the beef shin was already out of the freezer and we had rather a lot of fresh beer we had picked up after our local brewery had shut for the last time (RIP Fishers), that was waiting to be drunk. So I changed tack and went for plan C, again seeking inspiration from the Prawn Cocktail Years, and plumped for carbonnade flamande, a Belgian stew slow cooked with onions, beef and beer.

As it happens it made a fitting end for one of the last casks of Red Rye, one of my favourites of all the beers Fisher's brewed, and there was still plenty left for us to enjoy alongside the finished stew. I also served the classic Belgian accompaniment wortelstoemp, or mashed potato and carrot, which not only soaked up all the beery gravy, but is also really fun to say. 

Alternatively pair with plain boiled spuds, chips or slices of crusty baguette. And a beer.

Carbonnade flamande - adapted from the Prawn Cocktail Years

2 kg of chuck, cheek or shin, cut in inch cubes or left in slices

4 large onions, peeled, halved and sliced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 pint/500ml bottle of beer or ale

500ml water

1 beef stock cube

1 heaped tbsp of flour

1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

2 bay leaves

1 heaped tbsp wholegrain mustard

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Olive oil

Brown the beef in batches in olive oil in a frying pan until nicely coloured and set aside.

Heat a good glug of olive oil in a large casserole dish, add onions and cook on a medium heat until they are soft. Add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes.

Add flour and the browned beef to the onions and stir well.

Add the beer, water, stock cube, nutmeg, bay leaves, mustard, salt and pepper and bring to a simmer.

Put the lid on the casserole dish and place in the oven. Cook for at least 2 and a hours, stirring every now and then, or until the beef is falling apart. Remove the lid for the last half an hour of cooking if it looks like there is too much liquid.

Week 10 How to Eat - Nigella Lawson

Couldn't get through #cookbookchallenge without another appearance from the blushing rhizomes that the Ewing has been forcing under a big plastic barrel on the allotment. The pale pink stems have been turning up in a compote on her yogurt and granola every morning but I also persuaded her to make Pig's Bum, the gloriously monikered steamed pudding that features in Nigella's seminal first tome, How to Eat.

How to Eat came out the year before I went to uni (just over two decades ago now...) and I remember reading my discounted and dog-eared copy while tucked up in bed (in the freezing downstairs bedroom, where I got chilblains and had to scrape the ice from the inside of the windows.) All character building stuff. Although I can't remember cooking much from it I remember being very taken by the idea a M&S steak and kidney pudding with a blob mustard and some steamed greens which turned up in her healthy eating chapter.

The pudding itself is based on a old school dinner favourite, named for the fact it resembles a porcine behind. Nigella's instruction sees some stewed rhubarb being mixed into the pudding batter. I adore a proper steamed pud, and, more excitingly, it also gave me the opportunity to use my new Mason and Cash Hacienda pudding basin. Got to get my kicks somehow....

While I feel it is almost sacrilege to say so, I wasn't sure there was going to be enough of the good stuff in the original recipe, so we also poached some batons for the top and reduced some of the syrupy juices down to soak into the sponge.

Pig's Bum - adapted from Nigella's How to Cook

125g self raising flour 

125g butter 

125g sugar 

300g rhubarb

2 eggs

4 scant tbsp milk 

1.5 tsp baking powder

2 tsp vanilla extract

Approx. 2 tbs sugar for simmering rhubarb, or to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 200c

Butter a pudding basin very well and boil a large pot of water large enough to comfortably accommodate the basin. I use a vegetable steamer.

Chop two thirds of the rhubarb into small chunks and the rest into longer batons (to be placed on top of the cooked pudding). Sprinkle with sugar and roast until tender (15 minutes covered in foil, then remove foil and then cook for another 5 minutes) .

Mash the coins of rhubarb and let it cool. Remove the batons of rhubarb and set aside. Pour the juices into a saucepan and reduce on the hob until thick and syrupy

Put all the other ingredients, minus milk into a food processor, or use a whisk, and mix until very smoothly combined.

Add the rhubarb puree and pulse or whisk quickly till combined with the batter. Do not overmix. Add the milk and pulse or whisk only till incorporated. Turn the batter into the basin. Cover securely with kitchen foil.

Put basin into boiling pot. The boiling water should come about half way up the basin..

Steam for approx 2 hours, topping up with boiling water if the water level drops too low. When a skewer comes out clean from the centre of the pudding, it's done.

Remove from pot and cool a little before turning out.

Top with the batons of rhubarb and pour over the syrup.

serving with lashings of custard.