Thing Number Fifteen - Mazzamurru

This is basically an attempt at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's version of this Sardinian bread-and-tomato gratin.  Normally I'd scope out other versions of a recipe and combine together the best bits, but in this case I can't find many (the Winifred Pudding problem again), and most of the ones I did come across seemed to involve just layering up the ingredients, letting them soak, and eating them like that, which does rather play into my horror of squishy food.  (I did also come across this recipe, the ingredients for which call for 'fairies'.  Wasn't really sure where to begin with that, shopping-wise).  So, I'm pretty much doing what Hugh says.

Start by gently cooking some onion in a glug of olive oil until it's soft.  (This is a 'some' sort of recipe; quantities aren't desperately important.  For the curious, I used two small onions.)

Add a clove of finely chopped garlic and cook until that's had a chance to soften, too.

Sling in two tins of tomatoes...

...and add a bay leaf and some salt, pepper, and sugar.  (Again with the 'some'.  Add a pinch of each now, and then taste the sauce later to see whether it needs more of anything.  And yes, you do want sugar; it helps to bring out the flavour of the tomatoes.)

Let the sauce simmer gently for ten minutes or so - long enough for the tomatoes to lose that 'tinned' taste they have to begin with.

Meanwhile, prepare the bread.  You want probably a couple of hundred grams - I used about half of a small loaf.  This was one of those ones where the supermarket have sliced it bizarrely thinly; and actually those thin slices are quite good for this.  I cross-cut the slices into smaller bits, to make it easier to layer up later.

You also want some (yes, I know) cheese.  I've gone with a mixture - a ball of mozzarella, plus some grated pecorino and cheddar.  Go with what you like and have handy (as long as it isn't something that'll be totally bizarre with tomatoes.)

Once the sauce has had its simmer, spread half of it over the base of an oven-proof dish.

Then add a layer of half the bread (this is where triangular pieces come in handy for fitting everything together)...

...and sprinkle on a layer of half the cheese.  (It wouldn't hurt for each of these first halves to be the small half.)  Also drizzle on a bit of olive oil - I used the basil oil from crouton week, because it was there and because I thought the flavour would add something.

Now it's time for round two, building a second layer of each element using what's left.  Then stick the whole thing in a medium oven for twenty minutes to half an hour, 'til it's golden.

Hugh reckons to give it ten minutes after it comes out of the oven 'to settle', by which I take it he means to meld together a bit more and develop some structural integrity.

The verdict

I'm really in two minds on this.  The flavour is great, and the golden, cheese-encrusted top layer is - well, it's golden and cheese-encrusted.  What else does it need?

And then there's the bottom layer of bread.  Which is so so squishy.  I don't do squishy.  Maybe you do, in which case that won't bother you; personally, if I were doing this again, I'd be tempted to make it wider and shallower - a single layer rather than two - and then it would be pretty much perfect.

Thing Number Fourteen - Winifred Pudding

The oven is fixed!  And I'm celebrating by making Winifred Pudding.

I was introduced to this tart-type-thing at a charity bake sale at work this week, where we had to bake things making use of leftovers (because that's just how we roll).  It's a glorious name for a pudding, or indeed for anything.  If I ever marry a Mr Pudding, I'm absolutely calling our daughter Winifred.  The recipe was apparently thought up by Thomas Allinson, (he of flour and bread fame, which shows admirable pragmatism in relation to one's wares) a-hundred-and-change years ago.  No idea who Winifred was, though.

It's rather like treacle tart, only lemony instead of golden syrup-y.  I've pretty much used this recipe (though, in fact, all available recipes seem suspiciously similar, and all appear to be illustrated by the exact same photograph), with a few additions/alterations. 

'The' recipe calls for 'a slice' of bread to be made into breadcrumbs, which is rather unhelpful - whose slice, and from what loaf?  So, I've gone with 75g.  I shamelessly used white bread, because that's what I had in the house; though I'm sure Thomas Allinson is spinning in his wholegrain grave. 

Warm up 5tbsp of whole milk. (Actually, I only had skimmed in the house, so I used four of milk and one of some clotted cream that needed using up, just to even up the balance). 

Take it off the heat, and stir in the breadcrumbs.  Set on one side to cool. 

Butter and flour a 20cm pie plate (use the shallow, plate-y sort, not one with steep sides), and cut out a circle of puff pastry to fit.  I'm being lazy and using ready-made, ready-rolled pastry, which makes this utterly undemanding.

Press it down into the pie plate, making sure the edges of the pastry are arranged in such a way as to be able to puff up.

In a wholly unorthodox touch of my own (stemming partly from a suspicion about putting liquid pie-filling straight onto puff pastry - it has nowhere to puff, surely it'll just go squishy? - and partly from having a jar in the cupboard that needed to be put to some use or another) I smeared the pastry hollow with a few teaspoons of lemon curd. 

Cream together (i.e. mush with the back of a wooden spoon) 85g butter and 85g caster sugar.  (These seem like oddly specific quantities until you remember it's a Victorian recipe, and that's three ounces.) 

Beat in two eggs, one at a time. 

Then beat in the breadcrumb mixture.

Add the zest and juice of a lemon...

...and a teaspoon of lemon essence.  Beat everything together.

Pour the mixture into the pastry-lined plate, and put it into a preheated oven (180C) for half an hour.

Hoik it out, and sprinkle with a tablespoon of sugar (caster if it's all you have, but since the idea is to give it some crunch I've gone with demerara).  Then shove it back in for another 5-10 minutes.   Once it's cooked, serve it warm with cream (or whatever).

The verdict

I'm still not 100% convinced that it's a good idea to use puff pastry for a tart base, but I'm on the road to conversion.  The edges off the pastry puff up in a very satisfying way, and as long as you're careful to cook it hot enough, and for long enough, the base cooks through.  And the insides of this are very comforting in a nursery food sort of way - soft and sweet and with a little bit of crunch.

Thing Number Thirteen - When Your Oven Blows Up, Make Circassian Chicken!

I had a whole intricate plan for this week's Thing; a plan which went more or less literally up in flames when my oven started making interesting sparking noises and being bright when it wasn't supposed to be bright, and then died a smoky death. (Someone is coming to look at it on Monday. I daresay it'll be expensive.)

So, let's go with Circassian Chicken instead. It's a Turkish dish - sort of a salad - of poached chicken with a bread-and-walnut sauce.

The chicken

Roughly chop a carrot and an onion, pop them in a pan along with a bay leaf or two, and cover with a couple of inches of water.  Bring it to the boil.

Turn down to a simmer, and add chicken. I'm using those chicken breast strip things because they were what was to hand - more properly, you'd use chicken on the bone (even a whole chicken, if you have a big enough pan and enough people around to eat it). I used five bits, which should be enough for two people (me; and the me of tomorrow, who doubtless travels to work in a flying car and has all her housework done by a telepathic robot).

Simmer gently until the chicken's cooked - I gave it ten minutes or so, but obviously bigger pieces would take longer. When it's cooked, turn off the heat and leave the whole lot to cool.

The sauce

Slice up some stale bread - I'm using an old baguette. You're supposed to cut off the crusts, but I really can't be doing with cutting the crusts off a baguette, so I didn't bother. About three slices should do.

Pour a cup or so of the stock from the pan over the bread and leave it to soak briefly...

...then squeeze out the excess. (There seem to be in inordinate number of recipes involving squeezing damp bread. This may be my first time bread-squeezing, but I'm sure it won't be my last...)

Break the bread up (I discarded any determinedly crusty bits of crust at this point).

Grind up a good handful of walnuts (I used my trusty coffee grinder) and add them to the bread.

Chop up and onion and fry in a bit of olive oil until soft and golden.

Add the onion to the rest, and blend the whole lot (I used my equally-trusty stick blender). Add some more of the stock to get the consistency right, if the sauce is too thick. (Apparently I forgot to take a picture of this stage, but really, it's a lot of pale beige-y things blended together. It's not that interesting to look at.)

(Incidentally, wash up the sauce bowl and utensils fairly sharpish after you've used them - it tastes great but it's basically walnut flavoured glue...)

Putting it all together

Shred the chicken.

Mix the chicken with half of the sauce - the other half gets poured on top once it's on the plate.

Heat a little olive oil (or walnut oil, preferably, only I don't have any and I'm not buying it just for this) and add a good shake of paprika. Drizzle this over the top of the now-sauced chicken.

Serve the chicken cold or at room temperature. I had it with rice, since that didn't require the use of my now deceased oven.

The verdict

This would be great at a picnic. It's not too demanding to eat - the bitterness of the walnuts is toned right down by the bread - and it would really suit that sort of idle grazing. It's also very soothing on a day when your oven has burst into flames!

Thing Number Twelve - Brown Bread Ice-cream

...or, technically, Wholemeal Hot Cross Bun Ice-cream, since that's the brown bread I wanted to use up.  (In some now-abandoned enthusiasm I was once seized with the idea that I should eat three portions of wholegrain a day.  The evidence of this lapse still lurks in the back of cupboards and, in the case of pitta bread and hot cross buns, in odd corners of the freezer...)

I've never made this (originally Victorian) recipe which flavours ice-cream with caramelised brown bread before, so looked up various sources to see how to go about it.  There seem to be two distinct schools of thought; one in which you do everything you can to combine the two elements together into one beige whole (letting the breadcrumbs soak in the custard, for example); and one in which you go for more of a praline-speckled effect.  Since the former sounded frankly dull, and the latter really quite nice, that's the way I've gone. 

The custard

(If you absolutely can't face making custard, then I suppose you could buy one of those tubs of posh refrigerated supermarket custard and just skip this bit.  Not Bird's, though, or anything along those lines.  Bright yellow custard has its place, but this isn't it). 

You'll need six egg yolks for this (once again, the egg whites have been bagged up and frozen.  I've promised stacks of breadcrumb macaroons to the office no-waste bake sale next week, so this works out quite nicely for me).

Add 100g caster sugar and whisk together.

Pour a pint (or 500ml, if wherever you get your milk from does it in metric measures - it's technically 68ml short of a pint but the world won't end) into a large, heavy bottomed pan.

Add a splish of vanilla...  (If I were making plain vanilla ice-cream, I would probably use the seeds from a vanilla pod, just because the little dark speckles look so nice, but they'd be completely lost against the much bigger bits which will be folded through this mixture later on, so it's not worth the bother, here).

...and heat until it's just about to boil.  Then pour it onto the egg yolks, whisking like mad the whole time.  (Once again I don't have a photo of this stage; it needs too many hands). 

Rinse out the pan (there's bound to be some residual milk) and pour the custard mix back into it.  Heat gently, stirring the whole time, until it thickens.  If you didn't stir constantly, it would start to thicken in the places where it's in contact with the heat (i.e. round the edges and on the bottom of the pan), and when you next mixed it, you'd get lumps.  So, keep it moving.  It'll probably take five minutes or so.

In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that my custard did start to split.  This is not the end of the world, or even much of a problem; just sit the whole pan into cold water (i.e. in the sink) and whisk until it sorts itself out. 

See?  All fine. 

Take the custard off the heat and leave it to cool.  (Sitting a sheet of damp baking parchment on the surface will help prevent it from forming a skin).  This could be used as the basis for whatever ice-cream you want; or just as custard to go with other things - although if I were making it for that, I'd use less sugar - eating things really cold dulls down tastes, so you need the flavours to be pretty full-on when you're making ice-cream.  

The ice-cream

To make the ice-cream, whip about 250ml double cream (or 300ml, if that's how big the tub is; I was just saving a bit back for something else).

Gently combine the custard and the cream.  (Normally I would go cream-into-custard, folding, but this particular cream whipped so quickly and stiffly it wouldn't have mixed into the custard smoothly, so I whisked the custard into the cream instead).

If you have an ice-cream maker, then feel free to break it out and let it do its thing at this point.  Assuming you don't (and you really don't need one) pour the mixture into a freezable container - make sure there's a bit of room to manoeuvre, as the brown bread praline will be going in later (this is a 1.4l box, if that helps) - and stick it in the freezer.

In exactly the same way as we didn't want to let the custard heat without stirring it, to avoid it having a weird texture, so we don't want the ice-cream to freeze all without mixing it.  It would go sort of solid and ice-crystal-y and generally wrong.  So, every 45 minutes or so for the first few hours the ice-cream is in the freezer, you need to whip it out and mix it thoroughly.  Pay particular attention to the edges of the tub, as this is where it'll start to freeze.  Scrape all the frozen bits off the sides off and mix them into the rest. 

The brown bread praline

I used four hot-cross buns for this - I think they weighed about 200g. 

I wanted to make a relatively chunky praline, so rather than make breadcrumbs I just crumbled the buns by hand into little nubbly pieces. 

Most recipes brown the bread under the grill, mixed with sugar, but this needs a lot of watching, and I wanted to make something more genuinely praline-y.  So, I spread the bread out on a baking tray and stuck it in a hot oven for 10-15 minutes, stirring it about from time to time.  You still have to keep half an eye on it, but you don't have to lurk around with your head shoved under the grill, which is what the other approach calls for.  Once they're done, take them out and let them cool.

Put 200g caster sugar into a heavy-based frying pan or wide saucepan, and put it on the heat.  You'll notice that it will gradually start to melt around the edges.

Leave it alone as far as possible - try not to stir it unless you absolutely have to - until you have a reddish-brown caramel.  (Be really careful with this.  Sugar boils at much higher temperatures than water does; if you get any of it on you, it will carry on boiling on your skin.  Pay attention, and ban children and pets from the vicinity while you do this bit.)

Pour in the bread pieces, and stir to mix them through the caramel.

Then pour the whole lot onto a lined (don't forget to line it or you'll be chiselling bread praline off it for the next week) baking tray, spread it out, and let it cool.  Once it's cooled and solidified, break it up into bits by whatever means you like - some people would put this into a food processor and blitz it to dust, but I want some chunks, so I just broke it apart by hand and whacked any recalcitrant bits with a rolling pin. 

Keep it somewhere airtight, or it'll start to go sticky quite quickly.

Assembly

Once the ice-cream has had a few hours of intermittent stirring-up, it's time to add the praline.  I added about half of it, and kept the other half for sprinkling on top later.

Stir the praline through, and put the mixture back in the freezer, this time to freeze unbothered by any stirring.  (The lurking bottle of rum in the background is there because I thought it might be interesting to add a capful on account of the raisins in the buns - a sort of rum and raisin effect.  Feel free to do the same, or not.)  You'll need to take it out of the freezer twenty minutes or so before you want to eat it, to let it soften (that, or give it a teeny 10-second burst in the microwave...)

The verdict

Yum.  If I were doing this again I might stop the caramel before it got quite so dark - it's properly burnt sugar-y - but overall this is really nice.  I actually like what the hot cross buns bring - the occasional raisins and little bursts of citrus are really nice.  (Oh, and it works really well as an ice-cream sandwich shoved between a couple of Bonne Maman biscuits, which handily come in twos...)