Soda bread

I know lots of people who love to cook, bake cakes, cupcakes, biscuits, cookies. Only very few bake their own bread, though. Baking bread still seems to have the aura of something complicated, mysterious, I've never really understood why. It's not hard (well, it's a bit hard when you use sourdough, but that's not really the object here), it's not dangerous, it's not expensive. Still people always think that baking your own bread is a huge deal.

This post is here to convince you of the opposite.

 

The bread I'd like to introduce you to is certainly the most simple bread ever to have walked (or rather have been eaten on) this earth. Soda bread. It only requires four ingredients that are assembled in absolutely no time, and 40 minutes later you can pull the most perfect soft, crispy-crusted, heavenly smelling loaf out of the oven. Who said anything about complicated?

 

There are countless recipes for Soda bread on the web and they all vary slightly (though they're all equally simple). I stuck with Sophie's recipe and was very, very happy with it, but feel free to try another one and tell me about the result.

Soda bread

(Recipe by Sophie Dahl (2011): From Season to Season - A Year in Recipes. - London: HarperCollins.)

Makes for 1 loaf

400 g/3 cups flour (you can use buckwheat, wholewheat, rye, spelt, it all works. I normally use half wheat and half spelt)

350 ml/1.3 cups buttermilk

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 200° C/390° F

Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Create a small well in the middle, pour in the buttermilk and mix. Don't meddle around with the dough for too long, stop when everything is only just combined.

Dust the dough with flour and form into a ball, then place on a baking tray and cut a deep cross across the top.

Bake for 40 minutes. The bread should make a hollow sound when tapped on the base.

Cut off several slices immediately, spread clotted cream and jam on top and eat.

Store in a paper bag (don't use an airtight container/plastic bag as it would make the bread develop a very strong pretzel-y smell). Consume within a week.

Flapjacks

Monday was an absolutely awful day for me. I won't go into the details, let me just say that I got into a row with my ex-flatmate, felt depressed anyway, had trouble with our electricity provider and my ex-landlord, and the cold that had already announced itself last Wednesday finally kicked in (yay! (not).  I've almost got over it by now). In short: I felt like the whole world had turned on me. 

On days like that, for me, there are only two things to do: (1) Make yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, snuggle up in a blanket, turn up the heat, and watch a movie, (2) get in the kitchen and bake something. Anything. Preferably biscuits or something like that. 

I went for option 2 (when you have a cold, milk and chocolate aren't that good, anyway) and decided to make flapjacks. Not American flapjacks which, as you might know, are some sort of pancakes, but British flapjacks, in other regions of the world mundanely known as muesli bars.

 

 The basic recipe is, of course, by Sophie, but I made quite a few modifications. You can really get creative with flapjacks. As long as you get the ratio honey/syrup to butter, and honey/syrup/butter to dry ingredients right, you can use whatever you want.

They came out a little more flat (and as a consequence also a lot more brittle) than I intended them to which, of course, was entirely my fault: It said in the recipe that you should use a medium-sized deep baking tray, and that the thickness of the flapjacks depends on the size of the tray. I ignored this and just spread the mixture on a normal (=large), shallow baking tray, thinking that would work. Well, it didn't. The flapjacks mixture spread about 2 inches on each side, something that a smaller, deeper baking tray would propably have prevented.

 

No matter how they look, they taste de-li-cious and make a nice snack for breaks between classes. Or for tea. Or breakfast. Or whenever.

Flapjacks

(Basic recipe by Sophie Dahl)

Makes for 12-24 pieces, depending on how large a baking tray you use

 

2 Tbsp runny honey

2 Tbsp golden syrup

2 Tbsp black treacle (if you don't like it, you can leave out the treacle and substitute 1 Tbsp runny honey and golden syrup respectively)

150 g/2.25 cups butter (Sophie uses salted, I don't)

150 g/1.5 cups porridge oats

75 g/0.5 cup dried cranberries

50 g/0.5 cup chocolate chips

100 g/1.5 cups julienned and flaked almonds, mixed

Preheat the oven to 180° C/350° F.

Grease a medium sized, deep baking tray. Remember: The size of the tray will determine the thickness of the flapjacks.

Melt the honey, golden syrup, treacle and butter in a heavy-bottomed pan over a low heat. Stir until combined, then remove from the heat.

Mix all the dry ingredients, then add them to the molten butter and syrup.

Spread the mixture onto the baking tray and smoothe it down.

Put into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Cut the flapjacks into pieces as long as they're still hot. Allow to cool, then take them out of the tray and store in a dry, cool place.

They crumble quite a lot which annoyed me at first until I came up with the idea to sprinkle the crumbs on yogurt and have that for breakfast. Yum!

Spelt blinis with a mediterranean tomato filling

I spent a large part of last weekend in front of my MacBook, watching "The Delicious Miss Dahl", the wonderful cooking show that Sophie Dahl produced for the BBC. All the episodes are lovingly designed around themes like melancholy, nostalgia, escapism or romance, and are peppered with Sophie's favourite poems and anecdotes from her life.

She is just as you imagine her from her cookbooks. Plain lovely, floating around her beautifully decorated kitchen (though it isn't actually hers, but someone elses. I forget who), oozing contentedness, joy and a boundless love for food, revelling in abundance and keeping everything quite simple at the same time, smiling big Julia-Robertsy smiles, and finding more joy in shopping for cheese than in picking out a new dress. I can't help it, I just want to hug her.

In one episode, I think it was the one called "Romance", she made a fabulous blini dish, a variation of which I had already been (excuse the choice of words) salivating over while reading her second cookbook.

So I was sitting at home this afternoon, clicking my way through the bookmarked recipes in my browser, when I came across the blinis again. Sophie's version has scrambled eggs on top and smoked salmon on the side, but I didn't feel much like eggs and I didn't have any salmon, so here's what I came up with:

Spelt blinis with a mediterranean tomato filling

(Blini recipe adapted from Sophie Dahl, filling inspired by the contents of my fridge)

Serves 1

185 g/3 oz spelt flour (Sophie uses buckwheat but it works with any kind of flour)

1 tsp baking powder

salt and freshly ground black pepper

145 ml/5 fl oz milk

1 tsp mustard

75 g/2.5 oz cheese, grated (I used emmentaler because I didn't have anything else but I imagine it would be even better with crumbled feta or goat's cheese)

2 egg whites

1 pinch of salt

A knob of unsalted butter

A handful of cherry tomatoes

A few branches of fresh rosemary

3 or 4 tsp curd

1 pinch of salt

Olive oil

Combine flour, baking powder, salt and pepper in a bowl, then add the mustard and the milk to make a smooth batter. Add the grated cheese.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form. Carefully fold them into the batter.

Heat the oven to 200° C/390° F. Mince the rosemary. Combine oil, half of the rosemary and salt in a small bowl, add the tomatoes and toss until completely coated. Pop them into the oven until they start to crack (roughly 10 minutes).

In the meantime, heat the butter in a frying pan (a very small one would be best since it enables you to keep the blinis neat and tidy). When the butter is hot, add several spoonfuls of batter and smoothe it down. The blinis should be nice and round and about 1-1.5 cm/0.5 inches thick. Fry until the surface starts to bubble and/or the edges start to set, then flip over and fry for another few minutes. Continue until you've used up all the batter (I got two normal-sized and one small blini out of it).

Take the tomatoes out of the oven, put them back into the bowl and smash them with a fork. Add the curd and the remaining rosemary, combine and season to taste.

Put one blini on a plate, spread the tomato curd on top and cover with the second blini.

I had this for high tea with a cup of Yorkshire but it would also make a good supper with a nice glass of red wine, or even a breakfast (without the wine, of course).

French toast with poached fruits on yogurt

This morning, the alarm clock woke me up at 8 a.m. I was extremly tired and felt a cold creeping up to me, so after having hit the snooze button for the umpteenth time and not feeling the least bit better, I decided to stay at home. There's almost nobody who takes the first week of class seriously anyway.

I stumbled into the kitchen, pulled Sophie's new cookbook off the shelf and went back to bed.

As I flipped through the pages, uuh-ing and aah-ing every so often, several thoughts hit me and I came up with an idea for a wonderful breakfast. But I've got to go further back:

It all goes back to my grandmother on my mother's side. She and I didn't have much in common. We disagreed on many things starting with how to dress and ending with how to lead a life. What we did share was an enormous passion for food, for making as well as for eating it.

When I was seven, my mum took up a fulltime job and I spent my afternoons after school at my grandparents' house waiting for her to pick me up in the evening. These afternoons were usually filled with my running around the garden, picking strawberries or uprooting carrots after which I would go back to the kitchen and have a plate of delicious homemade apple strudel, rice pudding, yeast dumplings or French toast placed in front of me. My grandmother was an amazing cook and baker and her specialty were those fabulous Southern German puddings with eggs, flour, sugar, milk and copious amounts of butter. To this day, the smell of something floury, eggy, sugary being fried in butter always reminds me of her.

Four years ago today she died, taking many of her treasured recipes to the grave. And although we disagreed more often than not, I still miss her sometimes. Her low, dirty chuckles when she found something amusing, her love of cream gateaus and the comforting sight of her short, plump figure bent over the kitchen table, kneading dough, cutting fruit or whipping cream while some delectable pudding was sizzling in the oven. This dish is my tribute to her (although she would have disapproved of the plum wine as she disapproved of all ingredients that were foreign to her).

French toast with poached fruits on yogurt

(inspired by grandma and Sophie Dahl)

Serves 1

Ingredients

1 slice of wholewheat toast, dry

1 egg

30 ml/1/8 cup milk

1 Tbsp cane sugar

1 generous pinch of pure vanilla (alternatively 1 glug of vanilla extract)

1 Tbsp butter

2 firm plums

1 firm pear

2 Tbsp cane sugar

3 cardamon pods

Half a cinnamon stick

1 pinch of ground cloves

Some water

Some plum wine (I strongly suggest you buy some (available at asia food shops) as it goes really well with the plums. Otherwise you can always substitute fruity red wine. And don't worry about the alcohol, it will boil away while cooking.)

100 g/ 1/2 cup yogurt

1 pinch of ground cinnamon (optional)

Whisk together the eggs, milk, 1 Tbsp cane sugar and vanilla. Place the toast in a shallow bowl and pour in the egg mixture. Leave to soak for 20 minutes.

Core the pears and cut into chunks. Stone the plums and cut into quarters. Fill a small pot with about 1 cm/1/2 inch of water, add the fruit, the cardamon pods and the cinnamon stick and bring to the boil. When boiling (really bubbly boiling) slowly add the plum wine until the fluid is still simmering but stopped bubbling. Turn down the heat and let it cook for 5-10 minutes or until the fruit is soft. Add the sugar and the cloves, cook for another few minutes, then take off the heat and remove the cardamon pods and the cinnamon stick.

When the toast has soaked up all the fluid, take a small pan and melt the butter. Fry the toast for a couple of minutes on each side until the outside has browned.

Put the toast on a plate, top it with the yogurt and the poached fruits and sprinkle with cinnamon. Some flaked or julienned almonds would certainly be delicious, too.

It's here, it's here, it's HERE!

My darling, my baby, my love!

The wonderful and inspiring Sophie Dahl, my personal food deity, has written a new cookbook and as of three hours ago, I am in possession of a copy.

Goodbye world, I will now retreat to my room and and disappear into food paradise!

Indian sweet potato latkes with quinoa and mint yogurt

Yesterday was one of those days that seem to go by in a flash and at the end of it you've done absolutely nothing and are left wondering where the time went. On top of it I was in a terribly whiny mood for absolutely no reason and even the fabulous Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies could only cheer me up for a couple of minutes.

The only thing I did manage yesterday was burning the quinoa while making supper which made me feel even more rotten than I already did. In the end I managed to save some of it, though, and the latkes were so delicious that they made up for this horrible day after all, just like they were supposed to.

(Sorry for the terrible picture, my camera was a little stubborn yesterday and I was too hungry and tired to argue with it.)

The recipe is adapted from Sophie Dahl's "Voluptuous Delights". According to her, it is a breakfast dish which serves "2 hungry people with some left over for tea". I, however, ate all of the latkes at once and all by myself.

Ingredients

2 egg whites

340 g/1,5 cups sweet potatoes

2 medium-sized red onions (Sophie's recipe uses spring onions, but I didn't have any)

1,5 tsp curry powder

1 pinch of ground cumin

1 pinch of cinnamon

Salt and pepper

Groundnut oil (didn't have that, either, so I used olive oil)

about 100 g quinoa

some low-fat yogurt

3 branches of mint

-Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into 2,5-cm/1-inch cubes. Fill a pot with a few cm/inches of water, insert a steaming basket, fill it with the potatoes and steam for about 10 minutes or until the potatoes are soft. (If you don't have a steaming basket, just pop the potatoes into the oven. 15 minutes at 180° C/350° F should do it.)

-In a small bowl, whisk the egg whites with a fork until slightly foamy.

-When the potatoes are done, put them in a large bowl and mash them coarsely, using a fork. Dice the onions and add them to the mash, then add the spices and, last but not least, the egg whites. Combine thoroughly.

-Cook the quinoa according to the directions on the box (normally 1 part quinoa to 2 or 3 parts water), adding a little salt and some minced mint leaves.

-In a frying pan, heat the oil and place dollops of the potato mix into it. Be careful not to make the latkes too big because otherwise they will break when you try to flip them over. They take a couple of minutes on each side.

-Coarsely chop the remaining mint leaves and mix them with the yogurt and a little salt. Put everything on a plate. Eat.