Denniblog

There are three people milling around in a kitchen too small to swing a frying pan in, and two of them are rubbing against you as they flitter between kettle, toaster and fridge. Neither of them are of any help.

You haven’t brought your soup-stick, there’s no fresh parsley and the chestnuts come in a net, not a can. Countdown: four hours ’till Christmas dinner. At six, everyone’s due for a visit at the neighbours. No delays.

It would help to have an idea how much the goose weighs. It rests on a wooden chair, wrapped in white plastic bags. It’s the size of a baby.

And how should it be cooked?

It will come together, it always does. At last, the visitors leave the kitchen, having assembled the breakfast on the dining table. It takes 45 minutes to peel and chop the chestnuts, but that is just enough time to work out a recipe for the stuffing. You make hasty notes on a post-it smeared with butter and breadcrumbs. Meanwhile, the man of the house makes a detour to the neighbours’, standing on their bathroom scales, holding the wrapped goose. Like a baby.

“Eight pounds.”

That is—what? 20 minutes per pound plus twenty minutes. Exactly 3 hours. You grunt contently. “We’re on target. Dinner at 17:00 hours, sharp!”

So to the last of the Christmas preparations: cranberry sauce (this can be made on the morning, as it only take ca 15 minutes, plus a few hours for the flavours to infuse).

After all that baking, I had enough of sugar. I remembered one of my relatives, who has diabetes, raving about a sugar substitute which is made with a sucrose analogue. This seems to be just the ticket: I reckoned that the analogue isn’t digestible, but would taste the same—maybe something along the lines of L-glucose.

So I went looking for the wonder-sweetener. However, what threw me off was the weight. The package contained exactly 1/10th the weight of a bag of sugar ‘with equivalent sweetness’. Even in its purest form, sucrose (which I used for making gradients in the lab) isn’t very different from sugar. This clearly wasn’t the ‘indigestible sugar’ I was thinking of, but something else entirely.

Sucralose, it turns out, is a modified form of sucrose which is 600 times as sweet. Hence the low weight of the package—99% of which was bulk.

Anyway, I took it home and dipped in a finger. It didn’t taste particularly offensive. Still, 600 times…

I cut the amount from 6 tablespoons (recommended) to 4 and used it for making my cranberry sauce. Big mistake.

Sucralose is no sugar substitute, in the same way that instant coffee is no filter coffee substitute or there is no substitute for butter. Only more so. When added in sugar-equivalent volumes, the stuff tastes bitter—just like any other sweetener. I can taste the difference immediately.

So, I shouldn’t have used it, unless I planned on feeding a diabetic. Stick to good, old sugar!

1 pack (pound) cranberries; zest & juice from 1 orange; 75g sugar; small piece muslin; fingernail-sized piece mace; ½ cinnamon stick; 1 star anise; 1 bay leaf; ½ tsp dried rosemary; fingernail-sized piece stem ginger; 2 tablespoons brandy

Tie the spices into the muslin, like a teabag. Use what you have available, or to taste.

Heat the orange juice with the sugar and stir to just dissolve. Add the spice sachet and zest, then pour the berries on top and simmer, covered, about 5-7 minutes. By then, they will start to pop. Stir them very gently until they have all just about popped, but still retain a bit of their shape. Fish out the spice sachet and stir in the brandy just before the sauce is cool.

Onwards with the Christmas cooking business.

Pâté can be made up to five days ahead, and also freezes well. This recipe is loosely based on a River Cottage recipe (the place famous for the ten-bird-roast Christmas-special—don’t miss Channel Four tomorrow (21st), at 20:00! —BTW, I’ll stick to a single goose, thank you).

The bitterness of the pâté depends on the proportion of liver to other meat, and also on its coarseness. Since my food-processor is buggered, I had to use a pureé stick for mincing the liver, and it wasn’t sufficiently fine. From what stuck to the foil (hint: brush the foil with oil…), it tasted rather like the yucky stuff we used to make at boarding school in Denmark.

Whatever. It’s being matured right now, and I’ll find out what the final result is when we’re at my sister’s in Borth.

So, here goes:
[read on]

Everything around here is sticky. Not only my fingers, but also work surfaces, cutting boards, knives…even my feet are sticking to the floor.

As for my teeth—they are on their way out anyway, but I was hoping to preserve my smile at least until Worldcon. Fat chance of that now.

The injustice is that I don’t even like sweets. Give me a pickled egg any day, but I’m not one for chocolate and cookies. The only exception I make is for salty liquorice, and that isn’t what I would call ‘sweet’.

Anyway, Spekulatius. Traditionally baked in the Netherlands and Westphalia on the 6th of December to honour St. Nicholas, the name of this biscuit refers to a Latin term for ‘Bishop’ (Overseer). The thin, spicy biscuits are usually imprinted with embossments depicting scenes from the Saint’s life. Naturally, I don’t have the traditional wooden plates. Anyway, what do you take me for?
[read on]

Both of today’s recipes are ‘professional’ in that I only know these cookies from shops and did not think that they could be made at home. Marzipankipferl are normally available in any German cakeshop as Marzipanhörnchen—this is a mini-version which should be a similar size to yesterday’s Vanillekipferl. They require patience, but the final shape doesn’t matter too much—coated in almond flakes and dipped in chocolate, they look yummy!

Elisen-Lebkuchen are the finest of the German-style spiced cookies—named after the patron saint of bakers. I did not do her honour!

Reason to prepare these two together: I used egg yolk for the Lebkuchen, whites for the Kipferl. Also, both use lemon zest. But bake them separately to keep an eye on them—unless you feel very confident.

Unlikely Accident No. 1: I stabbed myself with a pistacchio kernel. The kernel, not the shell. I was peeling off the salty skin when the damn thing sliced right under my thumbnail. Yeah, go on, laugh—I had to process garlic and chillies for that night’s black bean chilli and was in a house of pain. Ouch!

And today’s lesson is: Baking professional-style pastry is best left to the professionals (!)
[read on]

OK, so I’ve just prepared the first batch for the oven, but of course blogging the recipes will be one day behind.

Fingers crossed, I’ll have something to write about tomorrow.

During the coming days, in the lead-up to Christmas, I will try to resurrect some recipes for spiced cookies which I remember from my childhood. All of these are easy to make at home (or I wouldn’t try it—I’m crap at patisserie!). The recipes have been drawn from various sources, usually in German and tweaked as necessary/convenient.

The fun is most likely to start tomorrow, unless I’m out of so many ingredients that I’ll have to make a shopping trip first.

This is something we did a few weeks ago, but today I’m cooking with apples, so I thought I take the opportunity to talk about them, and some other glorious autumn foods.

When thinking of apples, I’m thinking of England, and more specifically the orchards which surround my in-laws house in Kent. Of course, apples are also associated with American pies and childhood memories of Germany, but dare I say, nowhere are more varieties found than in the UK. The climate in England specifically is the best in the world for apples. In the West Dean Estate in Sussex alone, over a hundred varieties are grown.

I’ve always thought that so many varieties of a particular food points to a native crop, but the same is true for spuds, and what it rather points to is the rich horticultural history of this country. The kitchen garden was at the heart of any Victorian estate and the head gardener’s proudest achievement. In West Dean Gardens, an astonishing variety of fruit and vegetables are on display at this time of year, mainly left to rot on the plant. I must confess that I had itchy fingers, but it would be a pity to take away from this bounty and spoil the enjoyment of other visitors.

Gourds and figs grow against sunny brick walls. In front of others, staggering arrays of tomatoes are heavy with fruit—the heat reflecting back at them helps to produce a crop which could have come straight from the Mediterranean. There are lush cabbages, beans and onions in dense, green rows, and leeks as thick as my arm. An entire greenhouse is devoted to chillis, the plants lining the walkway with a gaudy array of green, red, purple and yellow—even black. In other greenhouses, bulging peppers, aubergines and even avocados are produced, the latter on trees that stretch to the roof. It was a matter of pride for the Victorian kitchen gardener to grow pineapples in heated greenhouses. Nor did any of the crop go to waste: storage cellars ensured an even temperature of around eight degrees.

But back to the apples. They didn’t originate in central Europe. In fact apples originate in the Tien Shan ‘Mountains of Heaven’ in Krygyztan. Their astonishing variety is due to the ability of every pip to produce a different kind, in theory (only a few will produce edible apples at all). Two new varieties which I tasted during the West Dean Garden ‘Apple Affair’ last month—’Golden Blush’ and ‘Falstaff’—are not yet available to the public. No doubt, next year there will be others.

In the crudest sense, apples divide into ‘eaters’ (dessert apples) and ‘cookers’. Then of course there are the many idiosyncratic varieties employed in cider and scrumpy making, which ensures that no two farms down the road in Devon or Somerset produce the same kind, and there aren’t enough names to label them all. Neither is the division between ‘eaters’ and ‘cookers’ absolute, because of course ‘cookers’ are used in desserts (they make the fluffiest baked apples, as they tend to disintegrate) and they say that the best apple sauce contains a mixture of both. I can’t attest to that. In our household, apple sauce is mainly used to complement roast pork or red cabbage, and for both, Bramleys are the apples of choice.

Which brings me back to the cooking thing. I’ve already posted a recipe for red cabbage. It is usually eaten with rich stews, particularly game, and I always make it with the Christmas goose. Today, I’m having it with faggots.

The faggots which our newly-found Newbury butcher (think home-made free-range Scotch Eggs!) provides, look nothing like the frozen variety I’ve seen before. For one, they are wrapped in caul fat. This means, they have to be roasted first. They are then served with swede and potato mash and onion gravy. For the mash, use 1/3 to 1/2 swede and add the zest of one orange to bring out the flavour. Fastidious cooks also reduce some orange juice. For the onion gravy, finely slice a lot of red onions, place them in dripping and slowly braise them, covered, for two hours. Take the lid off for the last twenty minutes to allow the liquid to evaporate, then fry them off. Red wine or stout is often added, and a good beef stock. I’m adding thyme- and garlic-fried mushrooms, carrot and celery and place the faggots and onions in the gravy to heat through, treating the whole thing more like a stew.

Something white flashed among the tufts of grass and shrivelled brown thistles which grew on patches of horse manure in the field we were driving past. The thing was round, not irregular like a crunched-up plastic bag. I was almost sure—

“Stop the car!”

Bemused, John let his old Vauxhall roll to a stop. I squinted.

“It’s a giant puffball! A little one.”

With these words, I climbed over the gate.

On the far side of the field, two piebald horses looked on curiously as I approached the spot. I was right.

My heart was hammering. Finding a giant puffball is a mushroomer’s dream, but even as I lifted it off the ground, I imagined the sight of the farmer’s air-rifle trained on me, prickling in my neck.

I hurried back to the car and we high-fived and laughed like schoolchildren.

The mushroom weighed over 800 grams—considering that giant puffballs can grow up to 20kg, it was indeed a baby. But the younger the better: when I cut it, the flesh was firm and creamy white. It was in perfect condition. Saying that, even though it rates 3 knives-and-forks in my edible mushroom guide, it tasted of—nothing.

According to the guide, coating the thing in spicy or herby breadcrumbs and frying it in butter is a vegetarian delight, but the crumbs have to be flavoured strongly to impact on the mushroom’s bland taste, and cutting the steaks 1 cm thick meant they needed plenty of time to steam. In the end—after a less than stellar result—we cut the remaining steaks into thinner strips and fried them with bacon, majoram and garlic, followed by marinating in an orange and Dijon mustard vinaigrette.

That still left over a pound of mushroom.

I turned to one of my all-time favourites: the White Dog Café Cookbook for inspiration. Among the many pointers there, I adapted the recipe for ‘meaty mushroom’. Uncooked giant puffballs will not absorb liquid, no matter how long you soak them for, so I reduced the quantities as follows:

80ml each of balsamic vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and soy sauce; 1 crushed garlic clove; 1 tsp dried rosemary; 1 minced shallot; salt & pepper.

Cut the mushroom into potato-sized chunks and soak in the liquid for a few hours, turning occasionally to coat all sides evenly.

Stick into a hot oven (with the Sunday roast) for about ½ h.

A delicious dark glaze coats a marshmallow-like interior.

Day 3, and we are about to polish off the last of the mushroom…

Yep, it’s that time of year again. John’s birthday is here.

I’m still broke, so I thought I’d make him another chocolate cake to show off in the office.

Last year, the effort ended in near-disaster, took 6h instead of the advertised 75 minutes but in the end yielded an impressive result (if I may say so myself). I doubt that this year’s effort will look as good, primarily because I’m not using frosted rose petals for decoration (we’re out), but I’ll see what I can do with marzipan and chocolate. At least I now have a camera to record the result for posterity.

The version of Sachertorte I remember eating as a kid always had a layer of marzipan under the chocolate glaze, so this year I’m including it. The recipe loosely follows Orangen Sachertorte, but with considerably less (apricot only) filling and brandy instead of orange liqueur (the local shops aren’t sophisticated enough to have miniatures of Cointreau or Grand Manier for sale).
[read on]