Apples for Jam (making my cookbooks earn a place on the shelf)

It’s been a while since I last wrote about a cookbook I’ve been road testing, making it thoroughly earn it’s place on my groaning cookbook shelves, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking (well actually there’s been a bit of not cooking, I haven’t been particularly inspired), it’s just that I’ve been working my way through a particularly large volume; Tessa Kiros’ Apples for Jam. Apples for Jam is an old favourite of mine but one I no longer cook from that frequently, flicking through the recipes I could see that a lot of what I make ‘off the top of my head’ had their original roots in recipes from this book and as I cooked them again ‘properly’ I found, probably not that surprisingly, that I preferred my versions better. However I rediscovered one old favourite, which I had stopped cooking altogether, probably because I don’t make a habit of keeping vermicelli in the house (a habit I need to rectify), the vermicelli soup with tomato and basil, this was just as delicious as my shady recall remembered and very filling, which is good.

I also made the Berry and Buttermilk cake, which I didn’t remember making at all before, but the blog told me otherwise, here’s the 2013 attempt.

The tomato risotto, which was one of those recipes I now make up off the top of my head, turned out to be very bland, I even bothered to go as far as making my own stock, as recommended, it wasn’t worth it.

The macaroni cheese however was, yum and not that much cheese either, it almost felt virtuous (and the ham was perfect in it).

The pear and berry crumble was ok, but you can’t go that much wrong with a crumble.

The brownies on the other hand, wow, I think I may have just found my default go to brownie recipe, they’re very chocolate-y (way too chocolate-y for Mr. Lacer, not enough chocolate-y for the kids), the recipe, which makes a lot of brownies (we ended up freezing some and Kiros was right, they do freeze well), called for three large bars of dark chocolate, I had misread the recipe when menu planning (possibly out of disbelief) and only had two on me, which is what I used, the kids are very gung-ho for upping to the full three bars next time, whereas I’m thinking possibly the addition of chocolate chips in the brownie batter would be good.

The next was an attempt to be a bit more virtuous after all those brownies.

Raw veg and soldiers of thick brown bread with a mustard-y sesame seed-y dip, the kids turned their noses up at the dip straight away, I liked it though although the mustard pretty much drowned out all the other flavours.

Next up was another new ‘go to’ recipe for me, the banana bread, like brownies it was just good, simple food, nothing fancified about it and therefore it worked, well.

And then there was another new ‘go to’ recipe, the chocolate and vanilla biscuits, a really simple biscuit dough which had a pleasing resemblance to play dough, you can shape the two doughs together (although I wouldn’t attempt to use a cookie cutter), I made some twisted shapes but in the end, for most of the biscuits, took a bit of the chocolate dough and a bit of the vanilla dough and just rolled them together in a ball and then squidged them down on the baking sheet. The result was very very close to the chocolate and vanilla marbled biscuits we buy at our favourite bakery (which has the unfortunate characteristic for a favourite bakery, of not being in our home town, so we only get to go there once in a while), in fact the kids said that they were nicer than the favourite bakery biscuits and as Girl Lacer, ever the practical, said, probably cheaper to.

And finally; gingerbread biscuits. These had the allure of promising to be cut out biscuits, I fancied playing with some biscuit cutters, but one look at the dough, even after the prescribed 3 hours in the fridge, I knew it wasn’t worth trying. So more cookie dough rolled into balls. The spice mix on these is ‘interesting’, possibly the sort of interesting my kids, despite loving gingerbread, may not like, I’ll see when they get home (they like them, even Mr. Lacer, who hates gingerbread, likes them).

So in summary; of course this book is staying on my shelf, it’s an old favourite and I’m sentimental but actually if I was going to be hideously practical, I’d say that the main reason why I was keeping it was for the baking recipes, recipes which, although having the book for years, I hadn’t really touched before. It’s made me think about how many other baking recipes I have in my non-exclusively baking cookbooks, that I don’t really use, as I tend to use specifically baking books when baking, so those recipes are an untouched resource.

Toffee popcorn

Rachel Allen recipe.

The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

I am not doing too well in my efforts to get rid of some cookbooks, I’ve only got rid of one so far and now I’ve gone and bought another cookbook, so sum change = 0. In my defence the kids owed me some Waterstones vouchers, so pah, what was I gonna do? Anyway, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook attracted me because I’d read in reviews how small Deb Perelman’s kitchen was and I thought “I’ve got a small kitchen to, this might just be the book for me!”, so I bought it. I don’t follow the Smitten Kitchen blog, although I feel I perhaps ought to now because I really liked the book.

This is what I made

Ratatouille sub

This was a semi regular attempt of ‘I’m going to get vegetables into my family even if it kills me’, the result? Boy Lacer devoured all of it (good boy), Girl Lacer picked out the bits she didn’t like (about half of it) and Mr. Lacer ate his to. Me? I really liked it but even though the ratatouille method was meant to be easier (and more small kitchen appropriate), I found it a bit of a faff and will be resorting to my normal ratatouille method next time. As for a ‘next time’, I’m not sure I would go and make ratatouille specifically for a sandwich again but it’d be a great way of using up left overs.

Toastie with emmental and red onions with green slaw

Pretty much the only thing that wasn’t burnt about the toastie was the emmental. I thought the red onions cooked in brown sugar and balsamic vinegar was a really nice idea but I felt that the cooking time was too long and I should have trusted my instinct more than the book. The burnt bread, entirely my fault. Still, it was nice and it’s tempting to do again because who doesn’t love a cheese toastie? And I love anything to do with red onions.

The green slaw was ok to but despite the claims in the book I thought it didn’t keep very well and I ended up throwing out the left overs the next day.

Apricot breakfast crumble

This was delicious, not sure it was particularly breakfasty mind you. It took a while to make as well, which resulted in Boy Lacer throwing a hissy fit, me having to make him a normal breakfast and then him having a second breakfast when this came out of the oven.

Butternut squash and caramelised onion galette

Making this felt like a Great British Bake Off moment, one where the contestant is about to go home, as the butter from the made from scratch pastry completely leaked out all over the oven. I think that the instructions to make the pastry were a bit iffy but I went along with it because I haven’t made that much pastry before, so I’m no expert, hmm should have trusted instinct again, as I later went and consulted how to make pastry in Paul Hollywood’s book and the method was pretty different. However thankfully, even with the butter all leaking out, the result was still absolutely delicious. I had been kicking myself whilst it was still in the oven, that I didn’t cheat like I normally did and bought ready made, however even with the butter leaking out, the pastry was still gorgeous and as nice as ready made pastry is, (badly made) homemade is nicer. The filling was gorgeous to (basically just cheese, butternut squash and onion) and would make a great topping to the Nigel Slater inspired tarts I usually make (with ready bought pastry). And the left overs were great cold to.

You can find a similar recipe here, interestingly the pastry recipe is different and is more how I’d expect to make pastry.

Leek fritters

(Made with a mix of the remains of my allotment leeks and shop bought ones). These were nice, particularly the creamy lemon dressing. They also freeze and defrost well.

Margherita pizza

OMG best homemade pizza ever, so simple and quick (relatively) to. I used the Rushed pizza dough method, which involves adding more yeast and letting your dough sit in a previously warmed for 5 minutes oven, I’ll admit I’m not sure the dough even raised (I think it was meant to) but still the resulting dough made the thinnest most authentic you’re ever going to get out of my kitchen, pizza base. The toppings were really simple to, which is what it should be.

The pizza above was for the kids’ tea, I just had to make it again a few days later for me and Mr. Lacer, I wasn’t convinced the pizza size above would be enough so I doubled the recipe. I consequently (for some reason) couldn’t roll the dough out as thin as before, although it was still pretty thin and doubling it for two adult was probably a bit too much. Will try it at 1 1/2 x the amount next time and there will be a next time.

Butter popcorn cookies

Oh just typing those words made me drool, these were, although a bit odd, absolutely gorgeous, they just had that perfect combination of textures, the crunch of the popcorn and the cookie itself, oh the cookie, the cookie itself was the closest I’ve ever seen to the sort of soft and chewy cookies you get at Millie’s, I will definitely be experimenting with that dough to see what other cookies I can make.

The kids, when they came home from school and I announced I’d been making popcorn cookies were all a little sceptical “Did you get that from a book mummy? Or did you just decide to put popcorn in?”, I think they were more siding on the mummy’s gone loco viewpoint. But even they liked the cookies once they tried them (sort of reluctantly).

-

So, in summary I wouldn’t get rid of this book anyway, I’ve only just bought it but I wouldn’t anyway, admittedly there are a few recipes in here I’d do a little different if/when I make them again but the book is fantastic inspiration and to be honest worth the price alone for that pizza and the popcorn cookies recipe. There is still quite a lot I’d still like to make from the book, the baking sections in particular I feel I’ve only just touched the surface of. So I’d recommend this book.

Flour-free chocolate and beetroot cake (Love, Bake, Nourish)

I’m in the middle of having a bit of a thing about beetroot, which is unfortunate for the rest of the family, as no one else likes it. Today it was flour-free chocolate and beetroot cake from Love, Bake, Nourish by Amber Rose. Love, Bake, Nourish is a bit like Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache, in that it’s ‘healthy’ cakes, except this time as well as getting rid of the butter (in most of the cakes), Rose has also (in most of her cakes) got rid of the sugar to, well the processed sugar, there is honey, but not that much. But unlike Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache, where there you have various vegetables hidden in the cakes (to make up for no butter and to reduce the amount of sugar that is needed), the flour free chocolate and beetroot cake in Love, Bake, Nourish, is one of only a small handful of cakes in the book with vegetables in, I’m not quite sure how Rose does it, it’ll be interesting to see what her Victoria Sponge type cakes (of which there are quite a few variations), taste like with no sugar. So far though I’ve been talking about what’s not in the cakes (and puddings and tarts to), what is in them is quite a lot of fruit, hence the ‘nourish’ bit of the title I guess and of course that makes up for the lack of sugar.

So, the flour free chocolate and beetroot cake, it was fun making, which is a big part of the point of baking I think, it smelt gorgeous and was fairly simple to do. I was surprised when the cake came out of the oven, there’s still definitely a purple tint, I had thought the brown of the chocolate would overwhelm and upon tasting the cake, you could still taste it as well, but in a nice way (I suspect that the rest of my family aren’t going to think that). It’s very rich, more out of curiosity and less to do with me supposedly being on a diet, I worked out the Weight Watcher’s points value, 7, for those lucky enough to avoid Weight Watchers, a can of coke is 4, a bar of chocolate 5 – 6, no idea what a slice of normal chocolate cake would be, I suspect a lot more than 7. The richness is probably a good thing, makes it so that one slice is definitely enough, I will see if the rest of Lacers will eat it when they get home from work and school today but I suspect I’m going to have to try and freeze slices or something because there’s no way I could eat all that cake myself before it went off. There was one thing I didn’t really like about the cake to, although it was bearable (that’d be the chocolate for you), the ground almonds that allowed the cake to be flour free, I don’t ‘mind’ almonds, specially ground almonds, I can’t normally taste them if a cake recipe calls for them to be included but here I can and it’s a bit off putting. It’s a very strong flavoured cake thinking about it, with three things; the chocolate, the beetroot and the nuts assaulting your taste buds, no bland shop bought thing this cake!

Making my cookbooks earn a place on the shelf – Bill’s Basics

I’ll admit straight off that I knew I wasn’t going to get rid of this one, it contains the so indispensable I’m actually bored of it, Cake For a Crowd recipe, which I have made over and over and over again and is the go to recipe for quick birthday cakes or cake sales. I also hazily remembered there were some other good recipes in it to, but other than Cake for a Crowd, I hadn’t cooked from this one for a while.

Now, my testing was under the slightly ‘extreme’ conditions of it being the Easter holidays (where suddenly I was even more in love with my children’s school dinners than I normally am), my oven requiring several engineer visits and my kitchen floor was having ‘issues’. So I spent a lot of the time between now and my last cookbook test ‘giving in’ and cooking for the consensus (as Mr. Lacer also had a week off work) and cooking food that wasn’t guaranteed a chorus of “I don’t like that!’, so imagine lots of fish fingers, pasta and supermarket pizza. However when I did cook (and the oven was having a random bout of actually working), this is what I made.

Butterscotch madelines

The oven conceded to work for about 24 hours, so I made these, I even bought a madeline tray (Mr. Lacer buries face in hands as he know’s exactly how overflowing my cake tin cupboard is, actually *ssh* don’t tell Mr. Lacer but I couldn’t actually fit it in the cake tin cupboard and it’s on top of the fridge on top of the wok). However the madeline tray was a little bit pants, as the shell like ridges weren’t that obvious on the finished cakes (unlike on the kids favourite brand of shop bought madelines). However, the actual cakes tasted fine.

(Not so lemony) Lemon Drizzle Loaf

Then the oven wasn’t working again and in desperation I resorted to our smaller microwave-combi oven, which I am normally very distrustful of baking anything in, you can see what happened to the cake, it broke apart when I tried to get it out of the tin, I don’t know if that’s something to do with the oven, maybe too many blueberries or maybe I should have lined the bottom of the tin (which I did grease) with baking paper, even though the recipe didn’t say so. Anyway, the cake includes a lemon drizzle, which I didn’t do as Girl Lacer hates lemon cake but even missing that step out she still thought it was too lemony (honestly the cake was about as lemony as my shoe, it only have a very tiny amount of lemon zest in it and I couldn’t taste it) but anyway, that just meant more cake for us because despite its appearance, it was quite nice (it’s beginning to cramp my baking style Girl Lacer’s dislike of citrus based cakes, she also doesn’t like cakes with buttercream icing, unless it’s chocolate buttercream or cakes with jam, sigh, Boy Lacer is distinctly less complicated, cake of any form is one of his favourite food groups).

Chicken parmigiana

(Cooked in the microwave-combi oven again). This was ok, a little too meaty for me (I would definitely not call myself a vegetarian but I don’t eat much meat and when I do I prefer dishes where meat is an ingredient amongst many others and not the star of the show), Boy Lacer wolfed his down, as when he’s not eating cake, he’s eating meat, he’s quite a carnivore.

all’Amatriciana

I may have made this before, I can’t remember, it probably wasn’t that memorable, just as it wasn’t that memorable now, could have done with being spicier. But still, this marked the kids being back at school and me cooking for myself at lunch times, yay!

Chickpea burgers

This was an attempt at ‘my kids are going to eat decent food even if it kills me’, they didn’t eat it. I quite liked mine but I hate cooking with chickpeas as tinned chickpeas smell so strongly of cat food (well I think so anyway), it always puts me off. Will probably not be making again.

Beetroot soup

This was yummy, one of my favourite soups is Yorkshire Provender Beetroot and Horseradish soup, this soup lacked the kick of the horseradish (although is fairness to Bill Granger he did say to make an accompanying horseradish cream but I didn’t have any cream), so I’m still not sure which soup I prefer, I have tons of left overs in the freezer, so will have to try it with the horseradish cream next time I heat some up but I think even without Bill’s Beetroot soup had a nice warm depth, due to the added tomatoes that my favourite branded soup lacked. And of course, making the soup is so much more cheaper than going to buy a posh branded one, I have another five portions in the freezer and considering I’m the only one who likes beetroot soup, I’m all right for beetroot soup for quite some time.

Tomato soup

After attempting to make tomato based homemade baby food for Girl Lacer, I decided that life is definitely too short to peel a tomato (and she still doesn’t like them anyway), so I rarely cook with fresh tomatoes, they’re quite expensive anyway compared to tinned tomatoes or passata and if you buy them out of season, nowhere near as much flavour as tinned tomatoes or passata anyway. But this soup, although involving fresh tomatoes, at least didn’t involve skinning them, so I gave it ago, halving the ingredients as no way was I buying four packs of plum tomatoes (ouch). The tomatoes are roasted alongside a pepper and some carrots and it gave the soup a nice rich added extra warmth that I don’t normally associate with tomato soup. It was ok, I’m not a massive fan of tomato soup, I think someone who actually really liked the stuff would really like it.

Peach and blueberry pudding

This was gorgeous, I substituted the fresh peach and blueberries with tinned peach (meaning I missed out the first baking stage) and frozen blueberries, I was worried that this would add too much liquid to the dish (even with draining the peach) but it was fine. There is no way I’d get fresh peach this time of year and blueberries would have been shipped in from god knows where, so this was a really great way of getting a nice, colourful, flavour packed pudding in early spring, the bright orange – yellow of the peach and the purple of the blueberries was just so cheerful! Even Mr. Lacer the pudding hater liked this one and it literally vapourised from Boy Lacer’s plate, will definitely be making again.

-

So eight dishes from one book! And there’s still quite a few more I’d like to try, the baking section looks particularly good but I obviously wasn’t doing much of that over the last few weeks. There’s also a good breakfast section for when my life miraculously transforms into the sort of life where I have the time and energy to make those sort of breakfasts, hmmmm. I wouldn’t say that Bill’s Basics has loads of blow your taste buds away type dishes, most of them are more a little run of the mill but they’re incredibly doable, don’t have massive ingredient lists and are the sort of basics you want to have in your repertoire, so it does exactly what it says on the cover. So of course this book is not going to go down the charity shop, in fact I’d say if I ever had to reduce my cookbooks down to just a fraction of a shelf instead of the more minor going from 3 shelves to 2, which is what I am doing, this cookbook would be on that fraction of a shelf.

Related articles

• The Re-Return of the Naked Chef aka the balsamic week (making my cookbooks earn their place on the shelf) (lacer.wordpress.com)

Garibaldi biscuits

Our refurbishment earlier this year did not agree with our oven, since moving back in I’ve literally now lost count how many times it’s broken down and we’ve had to call the engineers out, only for them to get it working long enough for me to use it for a day (for example the day I cooked the hot cross buns) and then for it be as dead as a dodo again when I tried to turn it on the next day. So far since the latest engineer visit it has been working for two days, I still feel like I’m dicing with baking jeopardy every time I switch the thing on though and the pessimist in me is absolutely convinced it’s going to break again, so I thought I’d better bake whilst I could (we also have a small microwave – combi oven which I’ve been using, but it’s not brilliant at baking, I’ve tried).

So I made Garibaldi biscuits from the Peyton and Byrne book. Garibaldi biscuits are very much a biscuit from my childhood, in the same way my kids are probably going to get fond memories of plain Hob Nobs, I’d never tried homemade Garibaldi biscuits before so I was interested to give them a go. Well, the dough was tricky to handle and needed at least twice as much milk as the recipe suggested for the dough to stick together and even then the dough was definitely not ‘firm’ as the recipe suggested, hence the biscuits rather shoddy appearance. I also used a dried fruit mix instead of just currants as that’s what I had in the cupboard (from the aforementioned hot cross buns). However, even with all that they were pretty delicious, so much so I’ve just eaten way too many of them, oops, and not at all like the shop bought biscuits of my youth.

The Re-Return of the Naked Chef aka the balsamic week (making my cookbooks earn their place on the shelf)

Whereas I’m keeping The Naked Chef for largely sentimental reasons, the Return of the Naked Chef proved to be a lot more cookable from, although as you’ll see below, quite a lot of balsamic vinegar.

Crunchy Thai salad

I used to make this sooo much in my ‘youth’ but Mr. Lacer hated the smell of the sesame seed oil dressing (which quite frankly is the best bit), so I stopped, pah, I’m making it again because unlike other old pre-kid favourites which didn’t taste quite as good when I remade them years later, this is still absolutely delicious. Interestingly, as well as Mr. Lacer, who still hates the smell, Boy Lacer also hated the smell, whereas Girl Lacer thought it smelled amazing.

‘Spaghetti’ with olive oil, garlic, chilli and parsley

I think I used to make this a bit but my knife skills have improved a bit in the intervening years (still not that good) and consequently the flavours were a bit more spread out, which was much nicer, no more lumps of overpowering flavour whilst the rest of the pasta is bland. This was so quick and delicious.

‘Spaghetti’ with red onions, sun dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar and basil

If this dish doesn’t scream the nineties, nothing does. It was a bit, ‘hmmmm’, first time I’d made this one and the last, although it was edible.

Baked beetroot with balsamic vinegar, majoram and garlic and Basil, balsamic vinegar and pinenut dressing

Again, two dishes I don’t remember making before. I set the beetroot up to be baked in the foil parcel Jamie had instructed them to be cooked in (remember when Jamie was in to baking food in parcels?), stuck it in the oven, picked up the remaining foil to put back in the cupboard, happened to glance at the packaging ‘do not let acidic food touch the foil’, oh yeah. So whipped the beetroot out of the oven, emptied it into a ceramic dish and cooked it that way instead. I guess they weren’t so worried about aluminium poisoning back in the nineties. Anyway, without the enclosed environment of the sealed foil package, the beetroot burned a little and at the same time, didn’t complete cook through, I did have a try of the smaller pieces that weren’t totally rock like and they were quite nice, I will have to look up some better ways to roast beetroot.

The salad dressing was also nice but isn’t up there with my favourite rocket dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, little bit of salt and maybe some parmesan cheese.

(By the way, the sausages are vegetarian cumberland sausages from Cauldron and are my new favourite veggie sausage. I used to eat Linda McCartney veggie sausages but there was something about the taste of them that was getting a little overpowering, these ones are much nicer and quite low in calories to!).

-

So, in summary I’m definitely keeping this one and I should definitely try and cook from it more often, specially that thai salad (sorry Mr. Lacer and Boy Lacer). There are lots more recipes in the book that I didn’t cook this week that I’d like to go back to / try for the first time. It really looks like Jamie got into his stride with this book.