Potato Roses

The other day, as I was clicking around for interesting ideas for plating, I came across this website and I just had to try them out, it looked so easy to do.

Basically, select a number of oblong and round waxy potatoes and slice them thinly across. Boil for 3 - 4 minutes to make them pliable. Then pour out the boiling liquid, rinse in cold water and drain well. Season with salt.

Whisk together one large egg with a pinch of salt for every 6 roses, then line up muffin cases or brioche tins and measure up 2 tsp of the mixture and pour into each.

Starting with the larger potato slices, arrange along the edge of the cases so that they overlap slightly. Continue with smaller and smaller potato slices in circles into the centre.

Distribute the remaining egg over the potato roses, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 °C for 10 minutes until they start turning brown, then reduce the heat and bake for a further 20 minutes until they are completely cooked.

I prepared these on the morning of our dinner party and then let them stand on the side until it was time to bake them, they were absolutely fine.

And an idea that Lundulph came up with is to use other root vegetables to make roses of different colours or even mix them up. Must try that next time.

Painted Bread

A few weeks back, when I was catching up on Susan's Yeastspotting, I saw something amazing. A couple of loaves with an intricate pattern on top. What is this? How can you get such fine detail? And wow, can I do that too? So very quickly I followed the link so kindly provided.

I've been dying to bake and finally today the opportunity came up. There's still over half a boule left from my sourdough experiments in the freezer, but tonight we're having our first family Christmas get-together and Lundulph and I were put in charge of the starters.

So I thought easiest is dips with freshly baked bread and some royal pickle.

I made a double batch of the Bertinet white bread and also got to try out my newly purchased banneton. That's an open basket from the local gardening centre, I think it's made of seaweed or husks from sweetcorn or something. I also had the benefit of spending some time watching dough shaping videos on youtube, so felt very professional.

The breads proofed nicely and baked well, but I should not have had the temperature so high as for normal bread, as they went dark golden fairly quickly and I ended up turning the heat down substantially to stop them from burning. Must remember that next time I intend to paint bread.

Chef Tess says she uses barley for the paint. I didn't have that and getting the concentrate would require some time, which I didn't feel I had, so instead, I improvised by using food colourings. I had one yolk which I stirred and then divided into three equal parts. One part was left au naturel, the second one had about half a tea spoon of green food colouring and the third one had about half a tea spoon of red food colouring. The colours came out very nice and bright. But when baking them, the pure egg yolk bubbled up a lot, I guess I need to whisk it more thoroughly to incorporate any trace of white that may have been left on it.

I also discovered that I don't have a single small paint brush in the house and haven't had for many years. So, what to do? What to do? I used chop sticks to stir in the paints, maybe I could use them? A bit more difficult to control, but would be a bit more precise than finger painting...



To my surprise it worked, but I must get hold of a few brushes before next time. This is definitely something I'd like to develop further. Oh, yes, and come up with a design beforehand, rather than just make it up on the spot. Besides, I have blue and yellow colours in the larder, waiting to be tried out.

Many thanks to Chef Tess for posting the technique and to Susan for including the link in her blog.

Alternative Sushi

After having fun and taking part in Art You Eat in March, I was completely set on keeping it up along with the Daring Bakers. But when the theme for AYE #3 was announced, I got a bit of a mental blockage - what to do with local produce that looks nice? I think I make fairly good food, but plating has never been my strong side, as most of the photos on the blog can tell. So over the next few days I kept scratching my head and unable to think of anything at all that would fit.

Luckily I got inspired when we were invited to Fred & Ginger the following week for a sushi night. Now I'd done a Japanese dinner party many years ago with a friend of mine and we'd spent some 8 hours preparing all the food. Obviously we'd missed one of the points with a sushi night - that the guests help with the "making of".

Anyway, it was nice and there were other things to eat as well, since I'm not a big fan of seafood and fish, I made a veggie sushi roll. Still the seaweed was fishy tasting.

And here's where I got the idea - sushi made with local ingredients. Local in this case being UK.

Now as far as I know, rice is not grown on a commercial scale in this country, if at all. So this would be the first thing to substitute - wheat. In Bulgaria wheat is boiled whole, then mixed with spices, sugar, breadcrumbs and fruit and served in church at special holidays. And when while wheat is boiled, it swells and bursts and releases loads of stickiness, so this should work out fine.

Next thing to change was the nori (dried seaweed). I'm not aware of an equivalent thing in Europe, but in addition to keeping the sushi rolls together and providing some flavour, it also gives a nice colour. Lundulph suggested cabbage. I wasn't convinced, but didn't have a better idea so that's what it was going to be.

Third thing to change was the fish. I'll repeat once again - I don't like fish much. Also not sure what fish would be available, if any, the coast isn't that close and our local river has probably more shopping trolleys than fish in it. So it was going to be chicken and beef, cut in thin long strips and quickly fried.

So with a shopping list of the above and the generic item "colourful vegetables" we went to our local farm shop. It's very posh, always crowded on week-ends and has lots of interesting things that are extremely tempting to buy.

The first thing I spotted was gigantic spinach leaves and with them the nori problem was resolved. But the red cabbages looked nice too and I put one in the shopping basket as well. On to herbs - all the fresh ones were from Guernsey and that didn't feel local enough, so I let them be. The meat was very local indeed, but they didn't have the right cut for what I needed. I got a bunch of carrots and cucumber, both locally grown and rather pathetic looking I might add.

Further into the shop I spotted packets of various grains. They had them all except wheat. The closest was spelt wheat and having had good experience with it in baking, I thought I'd use that just as well.

There was a plethora of sauces and chutneys and I should have taken time to pick some nice local ones out, but I didn't unfortunately, rooting for the jar of horseradish sauce I had in the larder.

And so, please find the majority of the ingredients:



The friendly butcher explained that the beef was from Scotland and the chicken from Norfolk. It could probably have been a bit more local than this.

First thing was to wash all vegetables and let them dry, particularly the spinach.



The next thing to do was to boil the spelt wheat and the packet recommended 1 part spelt wheat with 3 parts water per volume. Or stock. I opted for stock to get some flavour, since I wasn't going to marinade the meat. Vegetable stock from Oxo. The packet also recommended simmering for 1 hour and 30 minutes. I boiled some water in the kettle, measured up 3 dl spelt wheat and rinsed it. Then into a pot, crumbled 5 Oxo cubes over it and covered with 9 dl boiling water and left it to bubble under cover. About an hour later, the spelt wheat tasted rather nice and salty, but there was still plenty of liquid left, so I left it on. 15 minutes after that and it was beginning to burn, so I took it off the heat and drained it.



To make sure I also spread it onto some kitchen paper. In hindsight, this was not necessary, but wasted valuable time scraping it off. Hopefully not too much paper was left in the spelt wheat after this.

I then cut the carrot and cucumber in strips and dug out one large onion from the onion jar as well. Finally I cut the beef and chicken in long thin strips and fried them in a bit of grapeseed oil. Here, everything's ready to roll:



And at first it looked like it would work:



But the spelt wheat was just not sticky enough and disaster struck:



At this point Lundulph came home from work, sniffed from the kitchen door and joyfully proclaimed that it smelt very nice and that he was hungry. So a quick rescue was needed. I skipped the spelt wheat and rolled up the vegetables and the meat - beef in the spinach leaves and chicken in the cabbage leaves. By the way, the cabbage leaves were quite hard and I used tooth picks to keep them in cone shapes. For the spelt wheat, I put cling film in a ramekin, filled it with the spelt wheat and pressed it in, then pulled out the cling film a little, tipped the whole thing onto the middle of the plate and pulled off the ramekin while holding on to the cling film. Once the ramekin was removed, I removed the cling film. Saved on washing the ramekin. I really should invest in some metal rings for shaping purposes, I really should.



And some close ups.





Now the horse radish sauce - I really should have made my own. I bought the jar earlier this year with the intent of trying it out. Well, it was a disappointment - it tasted like mustard but had a sort of fibrous texture. Maybe it had gone off, though it was well within it's best before date.

So we ended up having sweet chili sauce as is traditionally used with spring rolls. Which made a world if difference taste wise, especially the beef "wraps".

I'm not sure if should post this for AYE #3. It was tasty but only because it failed miserably and I gave up and reached for the exotic dipping sauce. Not local at all.

I complained abut the lack of stickines of the spelt wheat to my Mum and she reckons that I should have used regular modern wheat, which is stickier, especially when overcooked.

In theory, though, all ingredients can be provided locally and later in the year, peppers and fresh herbs would also have been available in the garden, to add flavour. I still need to think about dipping sauces to get the sweet, hot and tangy edge to things.

Easter Once Again

Cooking and baking are now becoming serious hobbies of mine and a lot of time I spend reading foodie blogs for ideas and tips. Clicking around, I found the Art You Eat blog, which I thought was a wonderful idea. This month the theme is of course eggs, with Easter coming up and all and so it's time for the annual kozunak baking. This time, I wisely only made one lot and so will get to bed on time, being school night and all.

Unlike last year, I've decided to make the kozunak egg baskets. These are something that my Dad talks about around Easter, with his eyes glittering in nostalgic memories. Apparently his Grandmother used to make these for all her grandchildren.

For each basket a hard boiled painted egg and a twig of willow or hazel is needed. The twig should be thin - about 1 cm diameter at the bottom end, straight with no branches at all and be about 80 - 90 cm long. I used regular food colours for the eggs - 1 tsp of colouring in about 1 dl lukewarm water. I left the eggs in for about 6 hours.



The twigs should be washed thoroughly, then twisted around to a hoop.





Prepare the kozunak dough as per my recipe. Then after the dough has risen take about a quarter of it for one basket. Divide the quarter into 3 equal parts. Roll each part into a long sausage, it should be about 2 cm diameter.

Press in the willow hoop into the rolled dough and make sure it's well covered and evenly thick throughout. This will be the basket handle.



Roll out the second part to the same length and thickness, then spiral around the knot of the willow hoop and upwards. Make sure the dough layers overlap a little.



Roll out the third part like before, then place the egg over where the second part ends and continue to spiral the third part around the basket incorporating the egg as well.



Leave to proof for 30-40 minutes, brush with whipped up egg and bake on gas mark 3 (175 degrees C) until golden brown.



Also what I've spotted on my blog readings is a bread called Challah and by the look of it I have a suspicion that kozunak is related to it. And so with the remainder of the dough, I made two traditional plaits.

Note: Yes, I started out with two eggs and two willow hoops and I made two baskets (one for each niece), but I keep forgetting that I have a double oven and the basket with the green egg sort of rose too much and was almost twice the size of the one in the photo above, so I didn't include it in the final photo. In fact it cracked the egg shell completely! That didn't stop my nieces from eating the baskets a few days later.