Pumpkin pie

Happy Halloween!

Pearl barley "risotto", cavolo nero, tangy goat's cheese

This is a tasty dish using cavolo nero (black kale) from Riverford, and tangy goat's cheese I picked up yesterday at Great Shelford farmers' market. It is made just like a risotto, with pearl barley taking the place of the rice. The barley should be rinsed in a couple of changes of cold water and soaked for an hour or so before cooking.


The following quantities will make one generous portion:

• 1/2 cup pearl barley, rinsed and soaked for 1 hour
• splash olive oil
• 30g butter
• 1 small onion or shallot, finely chopped
• 1/2 glass white wine
• 400ml vegetable stock
• 4-6 leaves cavolo nero, shredded
• goat's or ewe's milk cheese
• salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste

Heat the vegetable stock to simmering point. In a separate pan, warm a splash of olive oil with half the butter. Add the chopped onion with a good pinch of salt and cook gently, without colouring, until the onion is soft.

Drain the barley and add to the pan with the onion. Stir well to coat with the buttery juices. Cook for a minute or two, then add the wine, increase the heat, and cook until the wine is almost gone. Now add a ladle of the hot stock and cook, stirring frequently, until the stock has been absorbed. Keep adding the stock, a ladleful at a time, until the grains are almost cooked - you want to keep a bit of a bite to them. When you judge they are almost there, add a final ladle of stock and the cavolo nero, put a lid on the pan, and allow the greens to steam for 3 minutes.

Remove the lid and give it a good stir; if there's too much liquid for your liking, turn up the heat and quickly boil off the excess. Now beat in the rest of the butter and check the seasoning. It will need salt, plenty of freshly ground black pepper, and perhaps a squeeze of lemon. Serve right away with some tangy goat's or sheep's cheese crumbled on top.

This is great served with a peppery salad (watercress or rocket) and a crisp, dry white wine.

Apple Sauce Cake

...so good I baked it twice! Well, I have a lot of apples to get through, and I did take the first cake into the office to share.

I've been a fan of The Waltons since it was broadcast on British TV in the early 1980's, and one of the Walton children's favourite cakes was Olivia's apple sauce cake. So when I got home with my haul of windfall apples, I picked up  Leiths Baking Bible to see if they had a recipe. They do - along with recipes for 11 other apple cakes.

My windfall apples were sweeter than the cooking apples called for by Leith's, so I reduced the sugar by 50g and added the juice of half a lemon to sharpen it up a bit. First time around, I followed the recipe and added chopped, dried apricots to the mix, but I found their flavour a bit too dominant (perhaps because I used unsulphured apricots, which have a stronger, almost toffee-like flavour). For cake #2 I used raisins instead.

To make the apple sauce, wash and core (but do not peel) the apples, then roughly chop. Put into a pan with 1tbsp water, cover, and cook gently until pulpy. Stir occasionally while they cook, and make sure they don't dry out too much. I had to add a couple more good splashes of water while they cooked to stop them from catching on the bottom of the pan. Second time around, I made the apple sauce in a pressure cooker. To do this, place the chopped apples in the pressure cooker with the lemon juice and 280ml water, secure the lid, bring up to pressure and cook at high pressure for 4 minutes. Release the pressure, then strain the apples to remove the excess water. Whichever method you use, push the cooked apple pulp through a sieve to produce a smooth purée (the peel will be left behind).

Here's the recipe; if you're using sweet dessert apples, you can reduce the sugar by 50g.

Apple Sauce Cake

• 340g cooking apples
• juice of 1/2 lemon (optional, not in original recipe)
• 115g butter
• 225g caster sugar
• 225g plain flour
• 1 tsp ground mixed spice
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 175g raisins or chopped dried apricots
• 1 tbsp demerara sugar 

1. Make the apple purée as described above, and set aside to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 180℃; grease and line a 17cm round cake tin.
3. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Sift in the flour, mixed spice, and bicarbonate of soda. Add the cooled apple purée and stir until well combined. Pour into the prepared tin.
5. Bake for 1 1/2 hours, until the cake is firm to the touch and a knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. N.B. my cake was done after about an hour: keep an eye on yours as it bakes and test after an hour; the time it takes will depend on your oven and the size of the tin. Ten minutes before the end of cooking, sprinkle over the demerara sugar.
6. Cool in the tin for at least 10 minutes before turning out to cool on a wire rack.

This is a simple recipe that makes a moist cake that will keep well. The taste is good, but the apple flavour doesn't come through as much as I expected.

If you're a real Walton's devotee, you might want to try Olivia's recipe - that whiskey frosting can only be an improvement, but you'll have to track down the Baldwin sisters for some moonshine.

Squash soup

This soup is based on a recipe from jamie Oliver's TV series Jamie at Home, and makes good use of the pressure cooker to cook the soup quickly. It can also be made in an open pan on the stovetop, but you will have to increase the cooking time to around 40 minutes. This soup is great made with a sweet squash like butternut; the Parmesan cheese is optional, but I think it adds a nice depth of flavour. The crisp sage leaves used to garnish are made by frying fresh sage leaves for 2-3 minutes in olive oil then draining on kitchen paper. Press play below for the photo recipe.

In the bag: stuffed roasted squash, tomato sauce

Here's my contribution to this month's In the Bag food blogging challenge, hosted by Julia over at A Slice of Cherry Pie. The idea is to cook something using the ingredients "in the bag" - and any others you care to add. This month's ingredients are:

• mushrooms
• herbs
• nuts

My first thought was to make a nut roast with a layer of mushrooms running through the middle, served with a creamy mushroom sauce. But then I thought I should strive for something more original: how about a marrow stuffed with mushrooms and nuts, served with a vibrant tomato sauce? The only problem was, I didn't have a marrow to hand, but I did have plenty of squash. So here we have it: roasted squash stuffed with mushrooms, cashews, and fresh herbs, served with a quick tomato sauce.

To prepare the squash, peel and cut horizontally into generous 2.5cm slices; scoop out the seeds and any stringy bits with a spoon. If you're using a small round squash, you might just want to cut it in half horizontally and trim the ends (for stability). The idea is to put the stuffing in the space you make by scooping out the innards.

The squash takes longer to cook than the stuffing, so it is roasted for 20 minutes or so to part cook it before the stuffing is added.  Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle over some salt and pepper, and roast in a 190℃ oven, turning over half way through cooking. You can get on with the stuffing while the squash roasts.



For the stuffing

• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
• olive oil
• 100g chestnut mushrooms, diced
• 150g cashew nuts, roughly chopped
• 30g fresh white breadcrumbs
• 1 tsp finely chopped fresh sage
• 1 tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley
• 1 egg, beaten
• salt and pepper to taste

Gently cook the onion in the olive oil without colouring. After 3-4 minutes, add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes. Put the onions to one side, wipe out the pan, and add some fresh oil. Bring to a high heat, add the mushrooms, and sautée until nicely coloured. Allow to cool slightly before mixing together with the other ingredients. Add enough egg just to bind the lot together, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. You might want to fry off a spoonful of the mixture to check the seasoning.

Remove the squash from the oven, spoon the stuffing into the cavity, then return to the oven to finish cooking (another 15 minutes or so).

For the tomato sauce

• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic finely chopped
• olive oil
• 450g fresh tomatoes, peeled
• OR 1 400g tin plum tomatoes
• 280ml vegetable stock or water
• pinch dried thyme
• bay leaf
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• salt and pepper to taste

This sauce is made in a pressure cooker, and takes only 5 minutes to cook once it comes up to pressure. It can be made in an ordinary saucepan on the hob, but you'll have to add an hour or so to the cooking time.

Warm the oil in the base of the pressure cooker, and cook the onion gently, without colouring. After 3-4 minutes, add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes. Add the remaining ingredients, put on the lid, and bring quickly to high pressure. Cook for 5 minutes at high pressure, then remove from the heat and let the pressure drop slowly at room temperature. Carefully remove the lid, take out the bay leaf, then blitz the sauce with a hand blender until smooth. Pass through a sieve into a clean pan. Check the seasoning, and reheat to serving temperature.

To finish the dish, spoon a ladle of tomato sauce into the centre of a warm plate, and carefully place the cooked, stuffed squash on top. If you like, garnish with some sliced sautéed mushrooms and crispy sage leaves. The quantities given here will make about 4 portions.

The verdict

The mushrooms, cashews, and sage are a great combination, and would stand on their own as a nut roast. They went well with the tomato sauce, as did the roasted squash, but there was something jarring about all three on the plate. I think the sweetness of the sqaush was just too much: the blander-tasting marrow would have worked much better, perhaps with some thyme or tarragon in place of the sage.

The tomato sauce is a handy recipe to have up your sleeve: it can be served with other vegetables, with pasta, or used as a pizza topping - and the pressure cooker makes it a really quick.

Thank you, Julia, for the inspiration; I had a lot of fun cooking for this challenge.

Windfall

There was an apple tree in the garden of the house where I lived in Oxford. It produced more apples than I knew what to do with and it's something I miss at this time of year, when the English apple season is in full swing. I'm kicking myself now for buying apples to make chutney: for the last few weeks, I have been cycling past trees laden with apples ripe for the picking.

Don't ask me how I didn't notice them until now: there were apples all over the grass verge, overflowing onto the road itself. Today I stopped to look more closely and noticed that the windfall was not too badly damaged, so I picked up as many as I could carry. There are three different varieties, all sweet eating apples rather than cookers.

Leith's Baking Bible has recipes for twelve different apple cakes, and some of tonight's haul have already been turned into an apple sauce cake to take into the office tomorrow. Most of the rest are destined for chutney or apple jelly. There are plenty more where these came from, so I might get to try some of the other Leith's recipes before the season is out.

Pigeon

I don't remember what it was I went into the butcher's for, but I came out with a couple of pigeons. I thought they would make a nice autumn supper, along with some roasted beetroot from the veg box.

To cook the pigeon, I removed the breasts, vacuum packed them with a drizzle of olive oil and a grind of salt and pepper, then dropped them into a 58℃ water bath where they spent about half an hour. [Edit: I cooked the breasts from the second pigeon at 54℃; these were much more succulent, so I'll stick with the lower temperature from now on.] After drying them on some kitchen towel and flash-frying a few seconds each side in a really hot pan, they were set aside to rest for 10 minutes before serving.

Meanwhile, I chopped up the carcases and roasted them in a hot oven to give them some colour, then made a quick stock in the pressure cooker. In went the carcases along with a roughly chopped onion, carrot, celery stick, some leek tops, a bay leaf, black peppercorns, and a couple of crushed juniper berries. Enough chicken stock to cover, then on with the lid and slowly up to high pressure. After 30 minutes at high pressure the stock was ready for straining.

The rich sauce you see was made by gently frying a finely chopped shallot in some butter, then adding a glass of red wine and reducing until syrupy. Next a couple of ladlefuls of the hot stock, reducing some more, then straining. Finally, a teaspoon or so of finely grated Venezuelan Black 100% pure cacao and some seasoning.  Not bad for a Monday evening.

As an added bonus, the leftover stock and meat picked from the bones will make a delicious broth for lunch.

Squash

Where did September go? I managed to let a whole month go by without a blog post. I blame my friends for being born too close together: I've been to two 50th, a 40th and a 36th birthday get-together in the last month. We'll keep the karaoke quiet, as I'm sure that's what anyone within earshot was wishing for. On the food front, I was delighted to be invited to King's College for a great vegetarian meal to celebrate Ben's birthday, and yesterday I made my third visit to St John for a very carnivorous meal with Aaron.

Things have settled down a bit now and I hope to have a bit more time to keep you up to date with what's happening in my kitchen this month. Autumn is here, along with these wonderful squash from Riverford. I'm looking forward to cooking them over the coming weeks; there'll be some roast squash in there, a risotto, and a batch of Fergus Henderson's pumpkin and bacon soup. Speaking of which, I need to get my hands on some pork belly to start curing the bacon.