Lucky dips

For a lovely festive get together with friends today, I made some dips as my contribution. They were based on the following BBC Good Food recipes:

Butter bean, lemon & herb pate

Tangy roast pepper & walnut dip

Cream cheese & sweet chilli dip

Of course, I can't leave anything alone, so my tweaked recipes are:

Butterbean dip
2 400g cans butterbeans, drained
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
Handful of torn coriander
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 good tsp ground cumin
2-3 tbsp olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Whizz everything in a food processor to the desired consistency. If you need more liquid, add water or runny yogurt. Next time I think I will add some toasted and well-ground cumin seeds.

Hard to say how many it serves as it depends on the situation, but this makes a takeaway container full.


Roast pepper dip
2 jars roast red peppers (not hot!)
150g walnuts
1 clove garlic, crushed
A good squeeze of tomato puree (2 tbsp?)
1 tbsp cider vinegar (or any decent vinegar)
5-6 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp 'normal' paprika
small pinch of hot smoked paprika
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil gently with the spices and garlic. Meanwhile, whizz the other ingredients together in a food processor, and pour in the warm oil and spices. Adjust consistency and seasoning to taste.

This makes half to two-thirds of a takeaway container.


Cream cheese & sweet chilli
1 regular pack cream cheese
1 regular pot greek yogurt, e.g. Total
Handful of coriander, torn
Salt to taste
Sweet chilli sauce

Whizz the yogurt, cream cheese, coriander and salt together (I used a stick blender this time). Pour it into a serving dish, and layer the sweet chilli sauce on top (adjust amount to taste). Dip your dipping things through it to get some of each layer.

All the dips are vegetarian, and the first two are vegan.

Dipping things
To dip, I just put together lots of lovely fresh veg, and some home made pitta chips: split pittas, cut into rough triangles, brushed with oil, seasoned, and baked at 180°C for 8-10 mins until crisp.

It turned out to be easiest to cut the pittas with scissors - first crosswise into two pockets, then each pocket flatwise (if that's even a word) into separate sides, and then each side into triangles. My idea of microwaving them to puff them up and separate the two sides didn't work, they just got soggy and harder to cut.

Pork in orange sauce

This is an old family favourite dish that somehow I haven't got written down anywhere, but decided to make tonight nonetheless. Thankfully mum was in when I phoned for help :)

The recipe came from my late godmother, Cynthia, and reminds me of having dinner while staying with her in Formby, near Liverpool, during school holidays. It's fantastic comfort food.

Cynthia's pork with orange

Four good quality pork chops or loin steaks
Plain flour seasoned with salt and pepper, and mixed spice (I added cumin too)
Juice and finely chopped zest of 2 large oranges
1-2 tbsp brown sugar (or to taste)
1tbsp oil for frying

Coat the pork well in the seasoned and spiced flour, and fry in the oil until beginning to brown. Add the orange zest and juice (I used the pulp as well) and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Add the sugar and simmer for 20-30 minutes more until the pork is tender and the sauce is reduced. You can also put it in the oven at about 150-160°C for about the same time. It's not a precision dish!

Serve with mashed potatoes and peas.

Simple suppers round-up

Having acquired 101 Simple Suppers (BBC Good Food) for 50p at a book sale, this week I went mad and tried four recipes.

Pork with paprika - basically pork fillet, onions, stock, paprika, half fat creme fraiche. I added mushrooms (lots of mushrooms) and served with roast squash and courgette. I also discovered that you can't freeze half fat creme fraiche because it splits :(  It was really very tasty but quite watery and of course the split CF detracted a bit. The mushrooms were a great addition though. I used lots of normal paprika and just a smidge of the hot smoked stuff. Would be good with mash I think - will definitely do again and keep refining.

Greek lamb with potatoes - lamb leg, potatoes, onion, garlic, stock - the only thing making this Greek was some oregano - and not even a lot of it. It was OK but not stunning, a bit boring frankly. I served it with roast courgette and cherry tomatoes. Probably wouldn't do it again.


Honey and soy salmon - this was very good - the salmon was just cooked, the sauce was a tasty mix of sweet and savoury with the pop of mustard seeds, and the stir fried veg (mange tout and shredded cabbage) were still crisp. A good non-stick pan made washing up painless too. Will make again.

Mix together 1 tbsp wholegrain mustard, 2 tsp clear honey, 1 tbsp soy sauce. Fry skinless, boneless salmon fillets for 5 minutes, turning once, and pour over the mixture. Bring to the boil and add 100 ml vegetable stock. Bubble for a few minutes. Serve with rice and stir fried vegetables.

Chick peas with bacon and cabbage - I can see this becoming a one pot staple. Below is my slightly amended recipe (pre-cooking the squash and cooking the onion in the bacon fat). It said to serve with cous cous, but we just had it as a one pot meal. Crisping the bacon is essential!

Peel, de-seed and chop a butternut squash. Microwave on high with a splash of water for 7-9 minutes to start cooking. Meanwhile, fry a couple of rashers of streaky bacon until crisp, and cut into pieces. Remove from the pan and cook a chopped large onion in the remaining fat. Add the squash and a cube's worth of stock,and simmer for 15 mins. Stir in 2 tbsb wholegrain mustard, 2 tins of chick peas (or 1 CP and one of another pulse, forvariety), the chopped bacon, and a good handful or two of shredded green cabbage. Cook for a further 5 minutes and season with lots of black pepper.

Chocolate ginger marble cake

This was a basic 8oz/225g sponge mix: 4 large eggs, 225g each of butter, light brown sugar and SR flour; begin by creaming the butter and sugar really well, then add the eggs (beating after each) and finally the flour.

Divide the mixture in two, and add:

• 1-2 tsp ground ginger, and a handful of crystallised ginger, chopped
• 3-4 tbsp good cocoa (Green & Black's for me) and a handful of dark chocolate chips

Dollop into a tin (I used my 9" square silicone pan), swirl together and level off, indenting the middle a bit. Bake for 55 mins at 170°C (fan oven) or until done according to the skewer test.

Photos and taste verdict to follow!

Grilled pineapple and butterscotch sauce

 More BBQ goodness.

1 fresh pineapple, peeled/cored/chunked, marinated overnight in the juice and zest of 2 limes, 1-2tbsp caster sugar (to taste), and a handful of chopped fresh mint.

Thread the chunks on skewers and grill, or just eat from the bowl. Delicious with butterscotch sauce - I used a recipe from simplyrecipes.com which translates as:

225 g / 8 oz light muscovado sugar (lump free) (original said dark brown sugar, but I think this made it too treacly, whereas light brown will not overwhelm)
112 g / 4 oz unsalted butter
175 ml / 6 fl.oz double cream
1 tbsp vanilla extract
sea salt to taste (original = kosher salt)

In a heavy bottomed pan on a medium heat, melt the butter. Add the sugar and stir well - it will look like wet sand. Let the sugar melt and the "sand" mixture become more liquid, stirring to make sure no sugar gets left behind. Once it's liquid (it will still be slightly granular), pour in the cream and whisk well. Keep whisking occasionally as the mixture bubbles away for about 10 minutes. Pour into a heatproof but cool container and leave to come to room temperature, then stir in the vanilla and salt.

Goes well on the pineapple, but also other fruit, ice cream, biscuits, fingers, etc...

And she'll have fun fun fun 'til somebody takes her sprinkles awayyyyy

I fancied trying funfetti cake. It's a USAnian invention, plain white cake with fun bursts of colour courtesy of sprinkles in the mix (you know, sprinkles, like these)

It was featured on The Kitchn food blog this week, with a from-scratch recipe rather than the usual boxed mix version. Having been asked to bring something sweet to a birthday barbecue, I thought this would be the biz, especially as cupcakes. And I knew I had some hundreds and thousands in the cupboard to be used up.

I thought I'd make the effort and follow the linked recipe for white cake. It was quite an effort... the flour + butter + sugar + milk mixing stage could only be described as claggy. I am sure I will be finding randomly flung blobs of cake mix for weeks to come, but most of it seemed to coagulate around the stems of my mixer's beaters. Weird. I think next time I may just make a normal sponge cake! However, kudos to the author for giving grams as well as cup measurements.

So I made the cake mix, gently gently folded in my hundreds and thousands, blobbed it into a dozen silicone cupcake moulds (and then another dozen paper moulds - there's loads), and baked. After baking, it was time to try one (in the name of science of course) so I eased it in half and... no sprinkles. No Sprinkles!

Having gone ahead and shared them anyway, I can say that in some of the larger cakes, there were vague smears of yellow and pink. But on the whole - No Sprinkles. I can only assume that my use of hundreds and thousands, which were tiny sugar balls with natural colouring, was insufficient. The colours just diluted and dissolved in the cake mix. Re-reading the recipe, I see it says "The best sprinkles for baking into a cake are the longer "jimmies" — multi-colored and waxy". Darnit. Bring on the artificial colours!

Just as well I iced them and sprinkled more H&T on the top, eh? No sprinkles. Pah.

Photo: Crazy Cool Colorful Candy Confetti Creative Commons by Pink Sherbet Photography, on Flickr

And all because... (lemon and poppy seed cake)

... I only had medium-sized eggs.

This was one of those recipes inspired by one random bit of potential food waste that I wanted to avoid. Approximately 63% of a lemon lingered in the fridge after yesterday's oven-baked cod fillets with lemon (duh) and parsley, and a bit of ferreting around in the cupboard unearthed a packet of poppy seeds, albeit with a palaeolithic Best Before date. Ha - we scoff at such trivialities. Lemon and poppy seed cake was on the cards.

I even delved into a new cook book. Life on the edge, I tell you. Just like mother used to make features the following recipe:

Ingredients:
125g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
125g caster sugar
25g poppy seeds
zest of 1 lemon
pinch salt

2 large eggs, beaten
2 tbsp milk
dash vanilla essence

125g butter, melted

Method:
Combine the first five ingredients. Combine the last 3 ingredients. Add half of mix 2 to mix 1, plus half the butter. Mix well. Add the second half of mix 2 and the butter, and mix well again. Pour into a 20cm cake tin and bake at 180°C for an hour.

I found I only had medium eggs in the cupboard. I've been caught like this before so I used 2 whole eggs plus another yolk. I also decided to make a loaf cake, since lemon and poppy seed cake just should be a loaf in my book. Everything else went swimmingly. I decided to make a syrup from the otherwise-unneeded lemon juice and some more sugar, to top the cake off and make it into a lemon drizzle kind of thing.

Then I got carried away. I whisked up the leftover egg white, determined to make meringue. For some reason I chose to do this by hand. By the time I had got it to soft peak stage, the unwatched lemon syrup was lemon caramel. Rats. At this point, a quick check of the cake revealed it was a) volcanically uneven and b) somewhat toasty (ahem) at one end. And there were still 12 minutes left on the timer. An hour my arse. I dribbled the caramel on it anyway.

So, a nearly-but-not-quite burnt lemon and poppy seed loaf, with nearly-but-not-quite-burnt lemon caramel topping. Which sticks to your teeth. And is quite eye-wateringly lemony ("makes your tabs sing", I can hear mum saying) (tabs being ears, for the latitudinally challenged). It's edible, but domestic goddessicity is not at home today.

The meringues are still in the oven, but they'll have to go some to redeem the cake. [Edit: they were pretty good, but were fully crisp after 1h40 @ 125°C; glad I didn't do them at 140°C for 2h like the book gave in another recipe, and actually I would have preferred them a bit gooey in the middle...]

Note: making the mixture with melted butter made it relatively runny for cake batter. It pooled in the tin and levelled itself, when I think I could have done with making a hollow in the middle to even out the rise. Sorry, Tom Norrington-Davies, I don't know how your mother used to make cakes, but I'm not convinced this way is for me. I'm going back to Hannah Miles next time!

Note 2: while initially writing this post I constantly mistyped poppy as poopy. Says it all.