Foodie Friday - Do your scrambled eggs stick to the pan?

  

I have been having trouble with this. I found this little tip.  So before you put the eggs into the pan let it heat up a bit.  The little imperfections in the metal surface will close up as the metal expands and your eggs will cook on top of the surface rather than into it.

Foodie Friday – Sticky Toffee Pudding

Another British classic for you today – Sticky Toffee Pudding.  Its origins are typically obscure.  But there is agreement on what constitutes a traditional sticky toffee pudding – sponge cake, chopped dates and a toffee sauce.

 

Here is a traditional recipe (thanks, Food Network)

 

Ingredients

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup pitted dates

1 1/4 cups boiling water

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

Toffee Sauce:

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 cup packed light brown sugar

1 cup heavy cream, whipped

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 10-inch round or square baking dish. Sift the flour and baking powder onto a sheet of waxed paper. Chop the dates fine. Place in a small bowl and add the boiling water and baking soda; set aside. In a bowl of electric mixer beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla; beat until blended. Gradually beat in the flour mixture. Add the date mixture to the batter and fold until blended with a rubber spatula. Pour into the prepared baking dish. Bake until pudding is set and firm on top, about 35 minutes. Remove from oven to a wire rack. 
2. Toffee Sauce: Combine the butter, heavy cream and brown sugar in a small heavy saucepan; heat to boiling, stirring constantly. Boil gently over medium low heat until mixture is thickened, about 8 minutes. Preheat broiler. Spoon about 1/3 cup of the sauce over the pudding. Spread evenly on top. Place pudding under the broiler until the topping is bubbly, about 1 minute. Serve immediately spooned into dessert bowls. Drizzle with toffee sauce and top with a spoonful of whipped cream.

Foodie Friday – Recycling Little Bits of Nutmeg

 
 

Thanks to a neat little Cook's Illustrated Book, Kitchen Hacks, I can share with you a hack for not wasting those little bits of nutmeg that you can't grate without grating your fingers as well.

 

Just put them into a mortar and pestle and grind them up – they grind up quite easily.

Foodie Friday – Reviving Limp Celery & Carrots

 

Thanks to a neat little Cook's Illustrated Book, Kitchen Hacks, I can share with you a hack for reviving limp celery and carrots.

 

Chop off the bottom of the celery stalks and peel the carrots.  Then put them into a tall container with water.  After a night they should have perked back up nicely.

Foodie Friday – Punch Bowl

 

 

Celebrations in the past often involved a Punch Bowl.  As you might expect this is a bowl that the drink Punch is served from.

 

Punch as a name is thought to come from Hindi – meaning five.  And there are traditionally 5 ingredients in Punch – sour, sugar, spirit, water and spice.

 

Punch was probably a British invention emanating from the Raj. It was a way of diluting raw spirits to have the sweetness and water of wine.

 

Punch went out of fashion in Victorian times but has had a bit of a renaissance.

 

Charles Dickens used to make punch for his friends – here is his recipe:

 

THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

TO MAKE THREE PINTS OF PUNCH

Peel into a very strong common basin (which may be broken, in case of accident, without damage to the owner's peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double-handfull [sic] of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy -- if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. [L]et it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to Time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again. At this crisis (having skimmed off the lemon pips with a spoon) you may taste. If not sweet enough, add sugar to your liking, but observe that it will be a little sweeter presently. Pour the whole into a jug, tie a leather or coarse cloth over the top, so as to exclude the air completely, and stand it in a hot oven ten minutes, or on a hot stove one quarter of an hour.  Keep it until it comes to table in a warm place near the fire, but not too hot. If it be intended to stand three or four hours, take half the lemon-peel out, or it will acquire a bitter taste.  The same punch allowed to cool by degrees, and then iced, is delicious. It requires less sugar when made for this purpose. If you wish to produce it bright, strain it into bottles through silk. These proportions and directions will, of course, apply to any quantity.

SOURCE : Letter from Charles Dickens to "Mrs. F." (Amelia Austin Filloneau),

January 18, 1847

SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

Use an enameled cast-iron pot for the "common basin," or at least something heatproof. Six ounces of demerara sugar should do -- particularly if you can get the sort that comes in rough cubes. Use 20 ounces of rum and 6 of Courvoisier VSOP cognac (the brand Dickens kept in his cellar) to be  authentic, or 16 ounces of rum and 10 of cognac if you don't want the brandy to get completely lost in the mix; for that rum, I find a sixty-forty mix of Pirate Juice and Planter's Best styles works well here, although you can also go all out and deploy something in the Reverend Stiggins's Delight line. Indeed, Dickens's cellar also held a number of bottles of "fine old pine-apple rum" (the good reverend's favorite), which may be approximated by combining 12 ounces Smith & Cross

Jamaican rum and 20 ounces Angostura 1919 rum in a sealable jug along with an eighth of a pineapple, sliced, for a week; strain, let the solids settle, siphon off the clear rum and bottle.

Whatever you do in the way of rum, the fire will melt the sugar and extract the oil from the lemon peel. Dickens's advice about lighting the spirits from a spoon is extremely sound: always bring the fire to the alcohol, not the alcohol to the fire. (And a stainless steel spoon is fine -- anything but pewter or, God forbid, wood or plastic.) The rest of his advice is also sound, as befits a man who was an acknowledged master of the art. The water should probably be an imperial quart, or 40 ounces.

YIELD : 8 cups (more than "three pints," but who's counting?).

Foodie Friday – Making quick and cold tuna sandwiches

 

Thanks to a neat little Cook's Illustrated Book, Kitchen Hacks, I can share with you a hack for making quick, cold tuna sandwiches – I can't believe I've never thought of this myself!

 

Just store a few cans of tuna (the spring water kind) in your fridge!

Yes - that's a bit of my fridge - needs a sort out!

Foodie Friday - Coquilles St Jacques

 So what are Coquilles St Jacques?  It is a traditional French dish involving scallops.  In fact the name of the dish just means 'scallops'.  France leads the world in per person consumption of scallops.

 

One thing that all the recipes seem to call for is to serve the scallops on a half shell.  But where can one find those??

 

Here is a recipe attributed to a French chef , Michel Roux.

 

Ingredients

6 scallops, in their shells if possible

2 tablespoons olive oil

10 white peppercorns, crushed

1 sprig of thyme, preferably lemon thyme

30g shallots, finely chopped

50g carrot finely diced

1 small bouquet garni

100ml dry white vermouth

30g butter

1 lemon, decoratively carved for garnish

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preparation

The scallops: using a knife with a rigid blade, open the scallops, debeard them and separate the white parts and corals from the beards.  Rinse the beards very thoroughly in cold water and reserve them.  Rinse the white flesh in cold water, pat dry and place in a dish with the olive oil, crushed peppercorns and thyme leaves.  Place in the fridge and leave to marinate for several hours.  Reserve two of the concave shells, for serving.

The sauce; combine the shallots, carrot, bouquet garni, vermouth and scallop beards in a small saucepan.  Stand it either on the edge of the barbecue or over low heat indoors and reduce by two-thirds.  Remove the bouquet garni and scallop beards, then beat the butter into the sauce with a whisk.  Season to taste and keep the sauce warm over low heat.

Cooking the scallops

Pierce the corals with the point of a knife.  Place the scallops and corals on the barbecue or in a grill pan over high, but not excessive heat.  Turn them after 1 minute, then cook until they are attractively patterned and done to your liking.  A 50g scallop will need 4 minutes to be cooked à point (medium).

Presentation

Place the white flesh and corals in the two reserved shells or, if you prefer, in a deep dish and leave in a fairly warm place for 1 – 2 minutes.  Just before serving, pour the warm sauce over or around the scallops.  Garnish each shell with a decoratively carved lemon half and serve immediately.

Foodie Friday – Cod Liver Oil

 

Long before supplements became fashionable my mother used to dose me up with cod liver oil.  Which I hated – not just the taste but the very thought of it.

 

New Zealand's Healthline still touts cod liver oil as being good for children – assuming no more than the recommended dosage is taken.  Check for yourself before dosing yourself or your child with it.

 

I'm still not going to take it! I don't mind fish, but fish liver…yuck. [And, no, that isn't me or my mother in the pic]