Thing Number Seven - Crispbreads

There has been a packet of flatbead-ish things lying unopened at the back of the cupboard ever since I bought them for 40p because they were going off at midnight (on, presumably, the 13th November, because according to the packet they went off on the 14th).  And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them, they aren't mouldy at all.  They must, on the other hand, be somewhat past their best... 

So I thought I'd try turning them into crispbreads, on the basis that crispbreads are supposed to be very dry, so it won't notice if I make them from bread that was dry to start with.

This is not very complicated.

Step 1 - Cut up bread

... into whatever size and shape you think crispbread ought to be.  Just because I happen to be using flatbread, I can't see why this wouldn't work with actual bread; I'd just slice it very thin.

Step 2 - Crisp-ify bread

Stick the bread in the oven on a very, very low heat, just to dry it out.  Straight onto the shelf, no tray.  This shouldn't take terribly long (especially given that the bread was pretty dry to begin with), but don't be tempted to turn the oven up - you don't want to brown (or, indeed, burn) it.  I think I left it for half an hour or so, but I wasn't really counting.  It's done when it snaps and splinters if you try to bend it.

Step 3 - Let it cool down

This shouldn't take long, given it wasn't hot-hot to begin with. 

(I know they don't look very interesting, but they're crispbreads.)

Step 4 - Serving suggestion time...

(For the curious, from left to right: piri-piri hoummus with cherry tomatoes; king prawn with black pepper and squeezy cheese from a tube; and posh giant baked beans with posh red lettuce; aka random stuff from the fridge.)
 
Given the vintage of the bread, I didn't hold out a huge amount of hope for these but they were actually perfectly all right.  I hesitate to be too gushing about them - they are, after all, crispbreads - but they did the job of being a crispy, neutral delivery system for other things without any problems. 

I can't see any reason why these wouldn't keep in the same way as any other crispbread or cracker (which is to say, for a little while if you're careful to seal them up somewhere airtight; and for no time at all if you aren't).

Thing Number Six - Chicken Croquettes

If I'm roasting a chicken, I do want to make sure I use all of it - picking over the carcass to get every last bit of meat, and then boiling up the bones for stock.  Sometimes I'll use up the chicken-pickings by making croquettes along these lines - basically, binding the meat in a really thick white sauce, covering dollops of the mixture in breadcrumbs, and frying them.  And I was going to do that now, until I realised that the leftover bread sauce in the fridge was effectively a ready-made croquette base, already flavoured to go well with chicken, and raring to go...

This isn't a very quantity sort of recipe - it's made, after all, from leftovers, which aren't all that controllable.  I went with a roughly equal volume of cooked chicken (minced; or if, like me, you're between mincers at the moment, then finely chopped) and leftover bread sauce.  Mix the two together.  Because the sauce has plenty of flavour already, I didn't think it needed anything else adding; and since it had just come out of the fridge the mixture didn't need to be chilled back to firmness - you're good to go straight away.

Form spoonfuls of the mixture into balls (or whatever other shape you feel befits a croquette).  Roll these in beaten egg...

...and then dredge them around a plate of seasoned breadcrumbs. 

Then fry the croquettes - don't go mad on the temperature; this is largely an exercise in thoroughly reheating everything, and if the pan's too hot, you'll burn the outside before the middle's had a chance to get warm. 

(Mine ended up less spherical and more un-nameably geometric; each side cooked flat.  Makes no odds to the taste, though.)

These worked really well.  There's something oddly familiar about them that I can't place, but suffice to say they fall into that sort of comforting, school-dinners-only-nicer bracket that's just what winter calls for.  I still might not rush to make bread sauce again, but now I do at least have a backup plan as to what to do with it if I happen to be landed with some...

Thing Number Five - Bread Sauce

I have to confess that I have never - or not so far as I recall, anyway - actually eaten bread sauce.  It's possible I had some dreadful childhood encounter with it and have repressed the memory, but I think it's unlikely; mine is not a bread sauce sort of family - or, indeed, a Yorkshire Pudding sort of family; I must have been in my late teens before I ever tasted one, though I love them now.  But I do remain wary of bread sauce.  It looks as though it has the sort of squelchy, porridgey consistency I really can't deal with in food.

I wanted to give it a go, though, because in preparation for Christmas, the shops are full of it in sachet form, and those sachets of sauce always annoy me no end.  I always think of them as magic stones, after the story in which a traveller convinces a miserly old woman that he posesses a magic stone which can make wonderful soup... but it would be that bit better if she'd add some onions.  And a bit of bacon.  And some peas.  And tomatoes.  And potatoes.  And so on...  (That's the version I know, at any rate.  There are others but the general idea is the same.)

Sachets of sauce always seem to me to be magic stones in that you need to put in so many things to finish them off that you might as well have made the sauce yourself and had done with it.  For packet bread sauce, you have to add milk, so effectively they're selling you a bag of breadcrumbs, probably with a bit of dried onion and a few spices added... and I can't believe it's actually hard to make bread sauce yourself.  So, let's find out. 

Make onion-flavoured milk

I'm only making a relatively small amount of bread sauce since I have the distinct impression I won't actually like it when it's done.  So, half a pint of full-fat milk goes in a pan with half an onion, cut in two and with a clove stabbed into each piece, a bay leaf (should be fresh but I've only got dried), a pinch of salt, a few peppercorns, and a sprinkling of mace. 

Heat until it's just about boiling and then take it off the hob, cover it and leave it alone for a while.  Half an hour or so would be fine; I left it for the length of time it took to have a bath and roast a chicken.  You please yourself.  Longer will presumably be onion-y-er.

(So far this is quite entertaining to make.  Anything involving sticking cloves into things always appeals, and it's all very medieval...)

Make the sauce

Fish out all the bits and pieces from the milk.  (I realised at this point that it would have been a good idea to count the peppercorns...)

Add about 50g breadcrumbs.  Most of the recipes I've found call for breadcrumbs made from white bread with the crusts removed, presumably to keep the sauce as white as possible.  I used a ciabatta roll, crusts and all, because that was what needed using up and, if we're honest, I don't really care about keeping my sauce dazzlingly bright. 

Heat gently and stir a bit.  (I should probably have used a thicker-bottomed pan; the sauce kept wanting to catch.)

(If there is a way to photograph this and make it look appetising, I haven't found it.  Sorry.)

Keep heating and occasionally stirring for 15 minutes or so, until it's formed a thick sauce.  Then add a bit of butter (this was probably about 5-10g)...

...and some double cream and nutmeg. 

And we're done!

The verdict

Hmmm.  I'm in two minds about this.

On the one hand, I really like nearly all the things that go in to it, and actually, with chicken, it's surprisingly nice.  The onion and spice flavours go well with the meat, and with the meat the texture isn't noticeable so isn't a problem.

On the other hand, it doesn't really go with any of the other things I had on the plate.  It doesn't work with roast onions (the sauce is very oniony in itself, but next to an actual onion it gets lost); potatoes are baffled by it; and with roast tomatoes it's weird and the texture becomes ever so slightly unpleasant.  It's a bit like inviting someone to your party and then realising they a) don't know any of the other people there and b) are temperamentally unsuited to making new friends, with the end result being that you have to focus lots of attention on them and can't just relax and let everything flow together. 

So, maybe not my thing.  But better than a magic stone...

Thing Number Four - Breadcrumb-frangipane mince pies

My normal mince pie recipe is more or less Nigella's frangipane one from How to be a Domestic Goddess (but with plain shortcrust pastry instead of the almondy one she uses).  It's the mince pie recipe which converts everyone who eats one, however much they thought they didn't like mince pies to begin with.  I think often the reason people don't like them is that they've only eaten shop-bought ones, which consist of an enormous wodge of tasteless, textureless pastry filled with an even more enormous amount of mincmeat (something people tend to be a bit wary of anyway), and the end result is pretty horrible.  The frangipane pies, on the other hand, contain just enough mincemeat to give them flavour, but not so much as to be hard work; and the almondy topping makes a change from pastry.

This year, though, I had one of my 'what if' moments.  I wondered whether the same arrangement would work with breadcrumbs in place of the ground almonds.  And then I was reading that frangipane "is derived from frangere il pane (Italian for 'break the bread')" which seemed like permission to try it out, if permission were needed.  And so began an experiment in terror pies...

The pastry

I don't get why people worry about making pastry.  It's basically just taking a few ingredients and smooshing them together into a paste...

You want twice as much flour as fat - so, I've got 100g plain flour and 50g butter, cut into small cubes.  Chuck in a pinch of salt as well.  Rub the lumps of butter into the flour with your fingertips until they look like fattish, clumpy breadcrumbs. 

Then stir in some liquid (I had a whole plan to use orange juice, and put the orange zest in the pie topping, but I forgot all about it until I found the orange after I'd finished making the pies, so I actually just used water) to bind it together - go very slowly, a spoonful at a time, and stop as soon as you can stick the mixture together to make a dough. 

Wrap the dough in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge for twenty minutes or so.

The mincemeat

I generally make my own mincemeat - I used a jar of something cherry-ish which was lurking at the back of my baking cupboard for this - but bought is fine.  I used about two thirds of the jar (no idea how much that weighs because I didn't check) and mixed a grated apple into it.  (If it was bought mincemeat, I'd probably have added some lemon juice, too.)

Pie assembly part one

Roll out the pastry (make sure to flour the worksurface so it doesn't stick) and cut circles with a cutter or a glass - you need them slightly larger than the dents in your bun tray.  The quantities here should be enough for about two dozen mince pies, but you can always do two lots of twelve if you only have one tray. 

Sit the pastry circles in the (buttered) tray.

Put a teaspoonful of mincemeat into each pastry hollow.  You don't want to fill them up to the top - don't worry if it looks a bit parsimonious; it'll turn out just right.

The topping

You need 90g breadcrumbs - I used the remains of a cranberry baguette (which sounded like a good idea when I bought it, and explains why the breadcrumbs look a bit pink) but pretty much anything plain or sweet would work. 

(Incidentally, the cunning measuring device in the picture is a Cook's Dry Measure.  They're properly brilliant.  If you don't have one, you want one for Christmas.  It includes measurements for all kinds of dry ingredients, and although technically you aren't supposed to use it for liquids I do, all the time, and have yet to bring about the end of the universe.)

I was a bit wary about whether the breadcrumb topping would just turn to mush, so I decided to toast the breadcrumbs - I just spread them out on a tray and sprinkled on a bit of sugar, shoved the whole thing under the grill, watched it very carefully and did lots of stirring to stop it from burning.

To make the topping, beat together 2 eggs and 90g sugar, and stir in 90g melted butter.  Then mix in the breadcrumbs. 

Pie assembly part two

Add a spoonful of the topping to each pie - not too much, as it'll puff up a bit and if you go mad with it at this point it'll just end up flowing across the bun tray like lava once it goes in the oven. 

Put them in the oven at 200C for 15 minutes or so, until the top is puffed up and golden and the pastry is cooked.

My experience is that you need to get these out of the trays while they're still hot - especially any that have erupted - or the sugar in the topping will more or less weld them in place as it cools.  If any of the pies turn out to be not quite cooked underneath, stick them back in the oven upside down for another minute or two.

The verdict

I am so pleased with these.  They work!  Not just in a 'not awful' way; I actually like them more than the almond version.  These are simultaneously chewier and more brittle, and the topping just is - I don't suppose anyone would know it was made of breadcrumbs if you didn't tell them.  I may test it out tomorrow.  Assuming they last that long...

Thing Number Three - Pan con Tomate

I love this Spanish tapas dish.  Ridiculously much.  Yes, it's basically just bread with tomatoes, but this is one of those times when all the component parts come together to make something greater than their sum - and I like bread and tomatoes quite a bit to begin with...

Strictly speaking this isn't really the place for stale bread, but it does call for bread that's reasonably solid (anything too soft risks disintegrating into a squishy mess), so it's a good approach for those times when you've been in the supermarket at the end of the day and bought a loaf that goes off at midnight (because BARGAIN! and also you wouldn't want it to go to waste) and then got it home and realised you don't actually need it before midnight, and then forgotten it for a couple of days, and then not much fancied it for sandwiches any more.  Or is that just me?

The recipe - if you can call it that, it's so easy - goes like this...

1 - Slice bread

(I told you it was easy.)

2 - Toast bread

Both sides.  (This is highly technical stuff, folks.)

3 - Garlic

Cut a clove of garlic in half, and rub the cut side over one side of the toast.  It will gradually wear away - you may need to use more than one bit of garlic if you're making a lot - leaving garlickyness behind as it does.

4 - Tomato

You now want to basically repeat the last step, only with a tomato instead of garlic.  The tomato has to be ripe and should preferably be one that actually tastes of something - December isn't really the best time of year for making this, but see what you can find. 

What you're aiming to do, here, is mush all the tomato seeds, juice and flesh into the surface of the bread.  (That's why this wouldn't work with anything too insubstantial as the base - it would just go soggy and fall apart.)

5 - Finish it off

Add a sprinkling of salt (I use Maldon) and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and you're done.  Eat it.  It's yummy. 

The only problem with this, as far as I'm concerned, is that as soon as I've finished eating it I always experience an irresistable urge to make more...

Thing Number Two - Almonds and cherries and pears, oh my! (Christmas Pudding. More or less.)

It being Stir-up Sunday, I'm thinking Christmas pudding. 

I appreciate that not everyone likes Christmas pudding.  I do, but I can understand the reservations - it's got lots of things in it (like spices, and raisins) which people tend to view with a certain amount of suspicion, and the dark, treacly flavour is quite challenging - we're used, now, to sweet things that are more obviously sweet.

I think, also, that people are a bit wary of making their own Christmas pudding, because steamed puddings are out of the ordinary run of cooking - it can all look a bit faffy and complicated.  Really, it's very easy to make - a bit of chopping, a bit of stirring, and that's about all.  And, if you make your own, you can control what's in it, and steer things in the direction of flavours you actually like, rather than wheeling out a supermarket version that you don't.  Hate cinnamon?  Leave it out.  Love figs?  Chuck 'em in.  I personally can't be doing with currants - they're so shrivelled and miserly-looking - so I usually go with fat, golden sultanas and raisins.  But really, there's scope to do whatever you want, and I say go for it. 

Having made the case for individualism in Christmas pudding choices, I thought it was only fair to see it through. So, I decided to cram this year's effort entirely with things I really, really like, and leave out everything else. Whether the result will still be Christmas pudding, or more a vaguely-Christmassy-steamed-pudding-thing - well, we'll see. 

(Oh, and by the way - I'm actually making more than one pudding, so if one or two of the pictures seem to have a massively larger quantity of ingredients than I'm describing, well, they probably do.  In the extremely unlikely event of anyone else wanting to replicate this, the quantities given should do for a 1.5l pudding basin.)

Saturday night - the fruits (and nuts)

I love sour things.  (You know those sour sweets with citric acid dusted over them?  I'll eat them until the surface of my tongue goes numb.  I'll eat them until the acid starts eating away at my taste buds, and I can't taste anything properly for the next couple of days...)  No great surprise, then, that my absolute favourite dried fruit is dried sour cherries.  I've used them in Christmas pudding before, in amongst the sultanas, but this year I've decided they get the starring role.  So, 100g of dried cherries - and no sultanas at all - and to make them even cherry-er I'm soaking them in Kirsch overnight.

I'm also very fond of dried pears.  (They can be a bit hard to find, but a bit of poking around health food shops usually turns some up, if there aren't any in the supermarket.)  That slightly gritty texture pears have suddenly starts to make much more sense when they're dried; and where some dried fruits are chewy in a problematic, grim way, pears just take on a satisfying chomp without being hard work.

You need 200g.  I've chopped them up fairly small - much as I love them, it would be rather dispiriting to think you were getting a mouthful of pudding but find, instead, that it was half a pear with a bit of pudding stuck on. 

I happened across some pear-and-ginger cider (perry, surely?) so the pears are getting their overnight steeping in that.  There's no sensible reason why both fruits couldn't be soaked together in brandy; I'm just having a little bit too much fun.

To add to the cherry-ness, I've also decided to use glace cherries (100g) - these aren't getting any soaking, I'm just in chopping mode so I've gone ahead and halved them now rather than wait until tomorrow.  I went with the dark, 'natural' coloured ones, because the bright red ones are a bit distracting.  (I was reminiscing about how in my childhood you used to be able to get glace cherries dyed not only red but yellow or, most alarmingly of all, bright green - and then I found some in, of all places, a health food shop!  Let's just say I was very tempted.)

The last bit of chopping is almonds (100g).  My logic here is that almonds go with both cherries and pears (and also my mum really likes them and will be one of the pudding-eaters).  I quite like having something in the Christmas pudding to give it a bit of crunch and texture, so I've only chopped them very roughly.

Breadcrumbs

I don't really understand why anyone ever buys breadcrumbs.  (Especially not those terrifying orange things.)  All you need to do is whizz up dried-out bread, and you're sorted.  A food processor would be ideal, but since I don't have one I stuff a few bits at a time into the electric coffee grinder which does me for grinding up spices and nuts and really anything except coffee, which I don't actually drink.  (In a pinch you can even make breadcrumbs by hand with a grater, though it does require a slightly devil-may-care attitude with regards your knuckles.) 

You'll need 125g breadcrumbs for the Christmas pudding - I've used the end of a rather uninspiring supermarket baguette, but something slightly sweet (like brioche) would be great, and anything not actively savoury would be fine. 

Coin

I'm with whoever it was that said £2 coins are the ones to use for Christmas pudding just because they're prettiest.  Again, just to overdo things, I've hung onto an interesting one - a DNA double helix one.  Whatever you use, scrub it to within an inch of its life. 

Sunday morning.  Go for a walk.  Get distracted by a flood.

 

(This stage isn't strictly essential, to be fair.)

More flavours

I grated the zest of an orange, and then stuffed a couple of Chinese salted plums into the orange itself to rehydrate a bit.  My logic, on the plum front, is that I'd be adding a pinch of salt anyway to bring out all the other flavours, and this is a way of doing it via fruit; I may yet be proved horribly wrong, of course...

Once the plums softened up a bit I chopped them up very finely.  At this point, having as it were opened the culinary floodgates, I threw caution to the wind and minced up half a stick of lemongrass and a half-inch piece of fresh ginger as well.  I'm hoping they'll bring a speckling of bright zinginess to the whole affair. 

I also grated up an apple (a sharpish eating apple is good).  If I'd been able to find a quince anywhere, I'd have used that instead, though. 

Drain the soaking fruits from last night (but hang on to any remaining liquid, especially from the cherries.  You can 'feed' the pudding with it later.)  Mix them up along with the nuts, glace cherries, grated apple, and the ginger-lemongrass-plum-zest flavours.

The dry ingredients

In a large bowl, mix the breadcrumbs along with 90g self-raising flour.  Add 175g sugar - I want to keep the flavour of the pudding relatively light (well, light in the context of Christmas pudding, anyway) so I've used mostly soft light brown sugar, mixed with a bit of golden caster 'cos I ran out.  Also stir in 125g shredded suet.  I use the veggie stuff - not that I'm vegetarian, but you can never tell when you may find yourself feeding someone who is. 

Add half a teaspoon of whatever spices you like.  I'm always a bit wary of  'mixed spice'; I'd rather just add the flavours I want.  In this case I've gone with cloves (because I love them), nutmeg (ditto), and allspice for warmth.  (People tend to think allspice is just another word for mixed spice, but actually it's a whole thing).  I'd have put in a bit of mace, as well, if I could actually find it in my spice cupboard...

Stirring up

Into the bowl of dry ingredients, mix three beaten eggs, and the (now slightly salty and plummy) juice of the orange from earlier.  I also added a teeny bit - maybe half a teaspoon - of almond extract.  Mixing it up well now guarantees no lurking pockets of flour in the finished pudding.

Now stir in the fruit.  Traditionally, everyone in the house should give the mixture a stir, and make a wish, but since there's only me in the house (aside from the cat, who doesn't much go in for stirring), I'll have to do the lot myself.

I'm using a ceramic pudding basin, partly because this pudding is by way of an offering and they look nicer, partly because I rather enjoy all the fiddling around with string, and partly because I couldn't actually find any of my pudding basins and, when I went to buy a new one, found that they were, gloriously, cheaper than the plastic ones.  (Although, Mason Cash, if you're reading this, give it a rest with all the stickers.  Getting them off was more trouble than making the entire pudding.  Just saying.)  Plastic ones are fine, though - and arguably easier.

Last year there were Christmas pudding in the shops with a layer of glace cherries on top, and I thought I'd give that a go (though I'm far from convinced they'll actually come out of the basin all in one go).  So, basin buttered, cherries in the bottom.  (If I had succumbed to the green ones, now would be the time to break them out, I think.)

Spoon the pudding mixture into the basin.  Be a bit careful with the first few spoonfuls so as not to dislodge the layer of cherries, but thereafter, pack it in and squish it down - you don't want gaps. 

Somewhere in the middle, add in your coin.

Once the basin's full (and you don't need to leave a lot of room for the pudding to rise - yes, it has self-raising flour in it, but not enough to lift the rest of the ingredients that far) take a sheet of foil and a sheet of baking parchment, and fold a pleat across them both (just in case the pudding does suddenly rise more than you anticipated).

Then put the whole arrangement, parchment side-down, over the top of the pudding.  Scrunch it round the sides, and tie it in place with string - the lip around the top of the basin will help to hold it.  Make a string handle so you can lift the pudding easily, and cut off the excess foil and parchment.  (I only used pinking shears because they were to hand; I'm not suggesting you should!)

If you have a steamer, steam away.  If not, you can steam the pudding in a saucepan - sit something in the bottom (like an upturned saucer or a bit of scrunched-up foil) to keep the pudding away from the direct heat of the bottom of the pan, put the pudding onto it, then pour boiling water round it 'til it comes about two-thirds of the way up the sides.  Put the lid on the pan, and boil gently for three and a half hours or so, topping up the water as necessary.

This year, though, I read about people using slow-cookers as a water bath to cook Christmas pudding, so I thought I'd give it a go.  It has the advantage that you can go off and leave it, which is a bonus, though I think the pudding would need longer - maybe six hours - to make up for the slower cooking. 

Whichever way you go about it, once it's finished steaming and cooled down take off the whole string-and-foil-and-paper arrangement, and then put on a whole fresh set (pausing, if you feel like it, to first stab the pudding and pour the tarry kirsch from the fruit-soaking into the resulting holes).  Stash the pudding away until Christmas day, and then repeat the steaming in the same way for more or less the same amount of time.

The proof of the pudding

I'd like to say I made a little test-pudding in order to check that the recipe turned out well before inflicting it on other people, and that's at least partly true, but it's truer still that I'm too greedy to spend all day cooking something and then not get to eat any of it for a month. 

It was actually rather nice.  None of the wackier things have proved to be dreadful mistakes - I'm not sure how much difference they all made to the end result, although the ginger, at least, comes through.  The almonds are great, and the smudges of sour cherry are lovely, too.  If I were making it again I might go a bit easier on the glace cherries - they have a slight air of belonging to a different pudding, as though they'd wandered in from a passing pineapple upside down cake - and although I ate this with brandy cream I think it would actually be better with something plainer.  Brandy cream is more an exercise in covering up the taste of Christmas pudding than in enhancing it, really. 

What I learned

• You can steam Christmas pudding in a slow cooker
• The cherries did come out in one go!