LEMON SORBET – Late but lovely

I have to apologise as it has been so long since my last recipe. I don’t know where the time has gone and I have been making lots of dishes, just haven’t had time to write them up. Very bad. I hope this lemon sorbet makes amends.

I don’t have an ice cream maker so haven’t really explored making my own ice creams or sorbets. Yet lately we have had a lot of lemons in our fruit bowl and when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade… or if the sun is blazing as it has been, you could make cooling, revitalising, lemon sorbet.

I remember the first time I had sorbet. I must have been 11 and my parents and I were staying at a very smart hotel in La Rochelle. We were eating a six-course meal and after every course, the waiter brought this little silver dish containing a small ball in the palest pastel yellow .I took a spoonful and absolutely loved the tastebud tingly citrus zinginess. I thought the addition of this treat throughout the meal was the most heavenly idea ever. Both sorbet and France have shared a special place in my heart ever since.

When I read about making sorbet without a machine, I realised you had to go back to the freezer, take out the sorbet creation and stir with a fork every half hour for two- three hours. And I just didn’t have to the time to commit. Stuff needed doing. I need to be here, there and everywhere. Finally came the day when I could spare a few hours and I’m so glad it did. The sorbet was as refreshing as I had hoped. Even though I’m not enjoying it within the experience of a 6-course meal or enjoying the La Rochelle’s ambience,  I still relish the refreshing taste. 

What you need to make lemon sorbet

250ml of lemon juice (about 6-8lemons)

750ml of water

500g caster sugar

zest of 1 lemon

·      Put sugar in a pan and water. Heat gently to dissolve the sugar and create a syrup.

·      Zest 1 lemon and  then squeeze all the lemon’s juice into a bowl and add the zest.  Stir the lemon mixture into the syrup and leave to cool.

·      While it’s cooling pop a container into the freezer. I used a plastic tub but you can use a Pyrex dish or baking tray. 

·      Then for the next three hours, pop it out of the freezer on a half hourly basis and give it a stir with a fork or a mini whisk. You don’t have to do this particularly vigorously just regularly. 

It’s so worth it. I am definitely going to stay in and make sorbet more often. Try lots of new flavours, but I’m not convinced any will top the zingy pizazz of lemon. Watch this space. 

HOT DOG ROLLS AND PIZZA FAILS

For a blog about feeding your family this post is actually more about failing to feed your family. I love cooking. I love the smells, the touches, the tastes, the ingredients, the alchemy, and the whole process of cooking.  But there are times when I don’t want to cook. Occasions when the art of rustling up a fresh, healthy, made-from-scratch dinner defeats me. Usually this occurs on a Wednesday evening but this time it happened on a Monday, which is a very bad sign. In my defence, we were squeezed with deadlines, Duke of Edinburgh meetings, homework, GCSE revision, late trains, fast day diet for the adults and a Mother Hubbard effect in the cupboard, fridge and freezer. So the kids were given convenience food. Junk food as it may also be known to the judgemental. Pizza and hot dogs. Oven Chips. On the plus side the hot dogs were quorn, which at least doesn’t contain any bits of animal, or indeed any animal that you may wish to avoid consuming. In any case, both the vegetarian child and the non-vegetarian child prefer quorn frankfurters to the real deal. But my guilt was not letting up. I decided to make the hot dog rolls and the pizza myself.  It was a toss up between that or making chips but I can’t stand peeling spuds and am terrified of a chip pan full of hot fat.

My daughter did not want me to make the pizza. She begged me to order her favourite take-away. I said “No, far too expensive, besides I love making dough and if I ordered in, this meal would lacking in evidence of my maternal love for my offspring.” She muttered a response along the lines of “Who cares?”  

At 3pm I unplug myself from the laptop and start to make my hot dog rolls. Well, Dan Lepard’s rolls to be exact, they are found in his brilliant baking book, Short and Sweet, and involve his technique of kneading in 10 minutes intervals for shorter periods. It is a foolproof bread making technique. I do love kneading but there are days when you feel like standing in the kitchen in the same spot pummelling dough for an eternity and there are days when you don’t. Today was one of definitely the later. I have to admit that my shaping of the rolls left a lot to be desired. To call them finger shaped would be wrong. Still they were fine for sticking a frankfurter in and topping with ketchup.

The pizza though was not so successful. A work phone call took up more time than expected.  I didn’t start on the dough process until really too late and you can’t rush the rising of dough. So it left me with little time to cook the thing. In order for my son to eat before he went off to D of E, I did manage to get roundish pizza bases in the oven but the tomato passata, oregano and mozzarella slices got too short a blast. The kids complained the passato was too runny and the mozzarella was too rubbery. I didn’t take a picture, as you didn’t need to see the unappetizing result of anaemic cheesy blobs amidst a thin passata, which was trying to run from the indignity of the misshapen undercooked dough it had been placed on. I could see, reflected in my daughter’s eyes, the logo of the local pizza take-away.

On a plus, the hot dog rolls were a hit. Well, I say a hit but nobody said anything about them at all. If there’s not a complaint or crumb left I take this as a compliment. As it was a fast day for the adults of the house we ate a salad with a meagre amount of the left over mozzarella and eyed the finger rolls lecherously. Nothing like fresh bread, even if it’s a funny shape, to test your mettle, when it comes to dieting. We both knew it would be a race to the bread bin in the morning.  

MAD FOR MADELEINES

When my daughter was little she had a book called Emma Quite Contrary, and my mum said it could have been written about me. Me? Contrary? Never! Yet this blog proves my mum had a point.  First I say I love raspberries and then proclaim my desire for a strawberry recipe.  Also, I have called this blog Cakes of Substance because that is the kind of cake I adore. Cakes that burst with flavours, be they cocoa, coffee, fruit or alcohol.  Strong, gutsy cakes that are more about taste than daintiness and prettiness. Except, I often have a yearning for a madeleine and a madeleine is very far from a cake of substance. The beautiful shell shaped madeleine is as light as a baby’s sigh and is so tender and moist, it practically dissolves in your mouth, just leaving a hint of a flavour.  But for of all this small cake’s apparent delicateness, eating one has a pretty powerful effect.  After all, Proust wrote all about the madeleine’s  impact on his memory in  his novel, “In Search Of Lost Time”. Many people like to dunk their madeleine in the tea. I never, ever do. Except on a rainy Thursday, sometimes. Contrary? Me!

The madeleine recipe I like to use is  Nigella Lawson’s Rosebud Madeleine recipe from How to be a domestic Goddess. The subtle taste and aroma of rose water just add to the absolutely beauty of these little treasures.  These are not hard to make, but I do try to use a lightness of hand that doesn’t come naturally to me.  I don’t have the petite madeleine tin (it’s on my wish list) that Nigella uses so I can get about 10 madeleines from my regular sized silicon mould tray and I  cook for 10 minutes instead of the 5 minutes she suggests.

So what you need is

50g unsalted butter, plus 1 tablespoon for greasing

1 large egg

45 g plain flour

1 tablespoon of rosewater

40g caster sugar

Pinch of salt

Icing sugar for dusting

24-bun petite-madeleine tin

or 12 bun regular madeleine tin

1.   Melt all the butter over a low heat, then leave to cool.

2.   Beat the egg, caster sugar and salt in a bowl until it’s as thick  as mayonnaise. I use my hand held electric whisk to do this.  

3.   Very, very gently and slowly, sieve  the flour into the mixture. 

4.   Fold in the flour with a wooden spoon. I really do try to do this with a light as hand as possible but I don’t really know why.

5.   Put one tablespoon of melted butter to one side and fold in the rest, along with the rosewater. Here, Nigella says fold well, but not too vigorously.

6.   Preheat the oven to 220℃/gas mark 7. Put the mixture into fridge for one hour.  Then take out and leave at room temperature for half an hour.

7.   Brush the insides of the madeleine tins with butter before  filling them with cake mixture

8.   Pop in the oven and bake mini madeleines for 5 minutes and 10 minutes for standard sized madeleines.

9.   Turn out and leave to cool on rack before plating up and dusting with icing sugar.

Perhaps I should have had a vase of roses next to the rosebud madeleines. But I picked tulips from our garden instead. Contrary? Me!

MAKE DO MILLE-FEUILLE

I don’t drive and that can make food shopping a bit tricky. As I get older my packhorse capabilities are decreasing. I do, though,  have a lovely trolley. My teenage children laugh at me going up the road with my blue, dotty helper, cruelly calling it the wally trolley but I ignore them. It’s great, insulated to keep the chilled stuff cool, easy to manoeuvre but sadly it’s not bottomless so I have to restrain myself from buying too much. Not a bad thing, as I am always trying to economise.  I do an Internet shop for the big stuff and then pop up and down to the shops regularly to buy the evening meal fare. Sometimes  though it rains. Well, this this year it has rained more often than not and I  simply can’t handle the trolley and a brolly. So on those days I must look deep into my fridge, rummage through the freezer and scan the cupboards. I have to make do with what I find. Last Friday’s desert was a good example of this.

On Friday nights we have my brother-in-law over to stay as he works in near us at the weekends.   We also have my daughter’s friend to stay so the pair of them can get to drama class early on Saturday. So it’s a matter of making a variety of things that will please everyone.  My son was out at a friend so I didn’t have to offer a vegetarian option for this particular supper. For the meat eaters I put some belly of pork in an ovenproof dish. Following a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen, I mixed together tahini, soy sauce, juice from one lime and one lemon, poured it over the scored bell, marinated for a couple of hours. Popped it in the oven for 3 hours at 150℃ and then turned it up for another half hour to get the skin extra crispy. Delicious and just enough left over to make a sandwich with the next day.

 For pudding I assembled a strawberry Mille-feuille from a recipe by Skye Gyngell. I know in my last entry I said I preferred raspberries to strawberries, which is true, but that’s not to say that a strawberry desert doesn’t capture my heart every now and again. This one certainly did. It also included chopped pistachios. I love pistachio nuts for their taste, texture and the colour they bring to a dish but despite hunting high and low, there was not a pistachio to be found in my kitchen. I did have some chopped nuts though and so used them. I didn’t have orange flower water but did have rose flower water so that had to suffice.  It gave a slight Turkish Delight hint to the pudding. As I adore Turkish Delight that could never be a problem. I also didn’t have as much filo pastry as required in the recipe so made single layer servings instead of double-deckers. Oh, and talking of lacking, I was a bit short on strawberries. There was just enough to go around and none for decoration. OK, OK, I know it maybe would have made sense to give this Mille-feuille a miss and make something else but I desperately yearned for the crunch of the filo and nuts alongside the soft cloud of subtly flavoured cream with the first strawberries of the year.  So to have a pared down version was the compromise.

MAKE DO STRAWBERRY MILLE-FEUILLE

100g finely chopped assorted nuts (or pistachios, for those lucky or organised enough to have them to hand)

75g light soft brown sugar


1⁄2 tsp ground ginger


1 tsp ground cinnamon

Seeds from 1 vanilla pod


3 large sheets filo pastry 


75g melted butter

800g strawberries, hulled and halved

Orange Flower (or Rose Flower) Cream


1⁄2 tsp Orange or Rose flower water


300ml double cream


300g crème fraîche


4 tbsp honey

1.   Preheat oven to 180c/gas mark 4. Line 2 large baking sheets with non-stick baking paper.

2.   In a bowl, mix chopped nuts with sugar, ginger, cinnamon and vanilla seeds plus a pinch of salt.

3.   Lay 1 sheet of filo  (measuring about 31 x 38 cm) out flat, short side closest to you. Brush generously with melted butter and scatter with an even layer of the spiced chopped nut mixture. Cut the pastry in half down the centre to create 2 long rectangles. Lay 1 half on top of the other and cut into 6 rectangles, then carefully lift onto one of the lined baking sheets. Repeat with the remaining sheets to create 18 small rectangles in total. Drizzle over any leftover butter and cook for about 10 minutes, until golden and crisp. If you don’t want to assemble immediately, rest assured these golden sheets can happily stay in an airtight tub for up to 2 todays.

4.   If you want to proceed right now, leave for 5 mins then pop on wire racks to cool completely.  While you are waiting you can make the orange cream, by whipping the orange flower water together with double cream and crème fraiche. It should not be stiff but just hold its shape. Then comes the building bit.

5.   So, first lay down a filo sheet, spread cream over and then add a layer of strawberries. And repeat, finishing with a filo rectangle and top with strawberries, nuts and generous drizzle of honey.