Scones, a British tea time treat

Delicious fruit scones

When rich, cranky, Auntie Maud decides that she'll get the Rolls out and un-announced, have a drive round to your place on a Sunday afternoon, when she's bored and you've nothing to give her; here's the answer that will protect your inheritance!  Almost everyone has the makings in their larder.  Easy and quick to make fruit scones.

Ingredients

225 gm Self raising flour

Pinch salt

7 gm Baking powder

80 gm granulated or caster sugar

80 gm cubed butter 

2 x Medium eggs

6 x Tablespoons full fat milk

100 gm golden raisins

Method

Set the oven to 220° C 

Line a baking tray with baking parchment to fit the tray and butter it lightly. 

Sieve the flour, baking powder and salt into a large glass or stainless steel bowl.

Put all the dry ingredients into the bowl and add the butter; then first, using a knife to 'cut' the ingredients together, and next your fingers, crumble the butter and flour mixture together until it forms a uniform crumb.  Then having beaten it, add one of the eggs and continue to mix the dough to a consistent consistency, being careful not to overwork it.  Or if you have one use a food mixer with the bread making tool.

Carefully add milk to the dough, observing the texture of the mixture.  At the end of the mixing process you will need a slightly loose dough that will allow the baking powder to work, creating a good rise as the scones bake.  Too stiff and the scones end up like curling stones, too loose and they're too sloppy to cut out to put on the baking tray.  Oops, no legacy!  

Finally add the raisins and mix thoroughly but gently through the dough. Then take it from the mixing bowl and put it on a floured board and pat it, it shouldn't be rolled, to a thickness of approximately 2 cm.

Take a lightly floured 6 cm cookie cutter to cut rounds from the finished dough, then put each round, well spaced out on to the baking tray.  Re-form the dough from the leftovers as each few rounds are made. There should be enough dough in this recipe to make six scones if you do it right!  Here is a "Delia" tip that I like.  Avoid twisting the cookie cutter as you cut the dough.  Twisting has the effect of 'sealing' the cut surfaces of the dough and causes the scones not to rise to their full potential.

Using the second egg, beaten, brush the top of each scone with the mixture for a glossy finish.  

Bake at 220 °C on the lower middle shelf of the oven for 15 minutes precisely, then check that they're correctly cooked.  The tops should be ever so slightly springy to the touch.  If they feel a bit heavy and "doughy," return the tray to the oven for two or three minutes, no more, then test again.  If they're hard like rock cakes, either sign yourself out of the will or give them to the neighbours children or gerbils and start again if you have time!  After all, this is a quick recipe, end to end this bake should only take forty five minutes.

Lastly bring out the posh cake stand, tea plates, butter and jam and get ready to make polite small talk to your potential benefactor.  Good luck!

What to make with this year's amazing crop of Lemons

Lemons III

Wicked, 40° Proof Limoncello

There is nothing, but nothing so refreshing after usually, a big meal, than a shot or even two, no more, of ice cold Limoncello.  Better still home-made Limoncello.  It is an absolute doddle to make once you have convinced your friendly local pharmacist to sell you 96% alcohol.  You might even have to bribe him or her with a cheeky sample!

Ingredients

12 x Organic or at least, pesticide free lemons

1 litre 96 % pure food grade alcohol

Distilled water

1125 gm white granulated sugar

Equipment

1 x 4 litre seal-able glass jar

3 x snap top 1 x litre bottles

1 x "Lancashire" potato peeler

1 x large funnel

1 pack coffee filter papers

Method

Wash and thoroughly scrub the lemons and dry them

Similarly wash and dry the large glass container, inside and out.

Using the potato peeler remove the zest from the lemons, taking care to avoid the pith 

Put the zest into the large jar and add all the alcohol, neat.

Seal the jar and put it in a cool dark place.  Give it a shake every day for eight days or so to extract the lemon flavours. Don't ask me why eight, that's just how I do it, it seems the optimum time to extract all the lemon oil from the zest, without the alcohol turning bitter.

After eight days, remove the zest from the liquid in the jar and put it into a jug.  This is to make sure that you don't loose the alcohol that drips from it. The alcohol will have turned from being colourless to a beautiful vivid yellow.-0

Carefully decant the alcohol from the large jar into a large glass jug, temporarily.

Wash and dry the large glass jar, making sure all the zest residue has been cleaned out

Put all the sugar into the jar and then using the funnel and filter papers, filter all the lemon infused alcohol back into it.  Strangely, even though the alcohol looks bright and sparkling, it still contains small particles of lemon, which means that you may need to use several changes of filter paper.  When all the alcohol has been put back, put the lid on and lightly close it, then give the whole lot a jolly good shake.

Finally carefully measure out 1.35 litres of distilled water and add it to the sugar/alcohol mixture.  If you want your drink a little less punchy, 36% is often used by drinks manufacturers as a control point. 

If 36% is your preference add 1.7 litres of distilled water.  When all the water has been added, reseal the jar and shake it well to fully dissolve the sugar.  The brew will turn slightly cloudy, due to a cheeky little scientific phenomenon called spontaneous emulsification.

Spontaneous emulsification may occur when immiscible liquids in non-equilibrium conditions are in contact.  So now you understand, Simples!

Then let it rest for half an hour to fully infuse whilst you have a cup of tea!

The last step is to give the large jar a good shake to check that all the sugar has been dissolved, then once more using the funnel, fully bottle off the finished limoncello into the snap top bottles.This recipe will make slightly less than 3 litres of product

Just a suggestion, if you plan to make gifts of the Limoncello, use 500 ml bottles.  Even though this is a home-made drink, it isn't cheap, the base pure alcohol is the catch, at least here in Spain where I live.  

What to make with this year's amazing crop of Lemons

Lemons II

Rich Lemon Curd

There's nothing nicer for breakfast than a crispy warm croissant smothered in rich home made lemon curd.  Or use it spread on meringues, smothered in whipped cream, when you make a "different" 'Pavlova,' and a jar makes a great gift when you're invited to lunch or dinner.
There are literally dozens of ways to make it, ranging from Grannie's famous "Mrs Beaton" way that makes enough to feed the population of Wales with a bit left over for the Isle of Man, to Auntie Lulu's whizzo microwave version.  There just isn't a definitive way and it isn't difficult to make, so here's how I do it.  All you need is a little time and patience

Ingredients - to make 4 x 400gm jars

8 x Lemons, well washed and dried

8 x Large eggs

2 x Large egg yolks

600 gm Caster sugar

500 gm Butter cubed

Method

Top and tail the lemons, then juice and zest them

Whisk the eggs and yolks, well, preferably using a stick blender.

Put the lemon juice, zest, and sugar into a heavy pan and heat slowly, until the sugar dissolves, stirring constantly with a hand whisk.  Keep the syrupy mixture warm to allow the lemon flavours to infuse and extract all the flavour from the lemon zest, for not more than two or three minutes. Take great care not to caramelise the mixture!

Strain the hot zest and juice syrup through a 'chinois' or fine sieve*, into a second pan, then, stirring constantly, add the cubed butter whilst heating gently, allowing the butter to melt and homogenise.  Straining ensures that the finished lemon curd is smooth and has a creamy texture.

When all the butter is melted and combined with the syrup, slowly add the egg mixture whilst continuously stirring with a whisk.

Keep the pan heated gently and continue to whisk the mixture until it begins to thicken, which might take up to ten minutes.  Don't allow it to boil, it will split!

Egg mixtures begin to "set" at about 80 C, if you have a jam thermometer don't hesitate to use it and be guided by the readings, however, the "frozen saucer" test is almost as good, here's how.  Sample a drop of the lemon curd and put it on to a saucer you've had in the deep freeze for five minutes or so, then return the saucer to the freezer, take it out after a couple of minutes, then put a finger on to the sample and gently push it across the saucer.  If the sample "wrinkles," the lemon curd is done, if it doesn't continue to cook a little longer, then repeat the test.

Do not forget to lick the plate, it is a wicked shame to waste any of the delicious brew!

Decant the finished lemon curd into pre-prepared sterile 400gm jars and cover the surface of the curd with circles of oven parchment or ready made waxed "jam seals."  Screw down the lids of the jars tightly and allow them to cool on the kitchen worktop before storing them in a cool dark place.  As the jars cool, you should hear a 'pop' as they create a vacuum in the air gap at the tops of the jars between the lid and the lemon curd.  This is a good sign that an airtight seal has been created.

Again once it has cooled, do not forget to lick out the pan or give it to any passing small child to spread all over its self and/or the kitchen.

* If you're frugal like me, you can keep the strained zest in a small jar, covered with a couple of good measures of vodka.  I then use it to sprinkle over strawberries or other soft fruit or onto apples in pies or strudel - delicious.

Lemon Season - A few recipes and ideas about what to do with all the delicious lemons just hanging there waiting to be picked

Lemons I

I posted on Facebook and Instagram earlier this week that I’d soon be putting lemon recipes up, lemons are so good right now, in early March. However, before I start posting actual lemon recipes, and assuming people will be working with only the zest and juice of the fruit, I have some really good tips to share first. They to help the get most out of each piece of fruit. Naturally, before starting, each lemon should be washed well and dried to get rid of wax and pollutants.

Zesting

To maximise the yield of zest from each lemon, a “box grater” will be needed. You’ll see one in the next picture.

Cut off the top and tail off each lemon so that the flesh, inside is just exposed, more on this later

Next grip the lemon, now shaped like a barrel, between your thumb and second finger, then rasp it up and down on the grater’s fine cutter*, at a slight angle and turning a little with each downward stroke, until the zest is removed from about a half of the barrel of the lemon, then turn the lemon and repeat. Avoid rasping yourself and into the white flesh below the yellow skin, it hurts and the pith tastes very bitter!

I tend to find it most convenient to collect the shards of zest on a plate, rather than a bowl or directly into a pan.

Use immediately, before the lemon oil in the zest begins to evaporate.

It will now be obvious why I said to remove the tops and tails of the lemon. This way, it makes it easy to rasp the entire fruit and collect the zest from the whole lemon without scuffing up the knobbly bits at each end.

*Not the so-called nutmeg grater, it cuts much too fine.

Juicing

The second reason for cutting the tops and tails off the lemon is to enable the “crown” of the juicer to penetrate all the way into the flesh of the lemon and to poke through the top of the fruit whilst it is being squeezed, as you'll see in the picture. If the tops and tails are left on, the crown of the juicer is unable to reach that last little bit of flesh and juice at the pointed ends of the fruit.

A cheeky succulent little chicken in a pot

If you’ve been unexpectedly invaded by a posse of friends needing to be fed, or run out of ideas for feeding your family and they’re starving, when all you have ‘in’ is that frozen chicken tucked away somewhere at the back of the freezer, do not despair! I have the perfect solution AND it is amazingly economical, three dishes from one bird and it can be cooked from frozen in less than forty minutes.   I invented this recipe when I was a bit boxed in, but I’m sure it is at least partly rooted somewhere in Jewish medical culture :o)

Ingredients

It goes without saying that you should use organic or at least certified pesticide free ingredients if you can find and afford them

1 x Frozen chicken, organic and as free range as you can get

3 x Celery sticks

3 x Carrots

1 x Large white onion

2 x Tablespoons of dried tarragon

2 Litres still, spring water

Salt

Method

Remember that it isn’t necessary to defrost the chicken for this recipe

Dice the celery and carrots

Peel and quarter the onion

Put half of the vegetables and tarragon in a pan that is big enough to hold the whole chicken

Put the chicken on top of the vegetables

Add the remaining vegetables, tarragon and about a heaped teaspoon of salt, then cover the chicken with the water.

Quickly bring the ingredients to a rapid boil, then reduce the heat until the water is at a hearty rolling simmer, for 20/25 minutes.  At this stage, don’t overcook the chicken otherwise none of the flavour will be retained in the bird.  They will all transfer to the liquor.

After 25 minutes the chicken will be thoroughly cooked, inside and out because of the immersion method of cooking, it should be falling apart and tricky to lift out of the pan.  The cooking liquor will be full of delicious tarragon chicken flavour.  At this point if your family or guests are desperate, the chicken can be served straight from the pot.  Don’t forget “boiled fowl” has an honourable gastronomic history.  The “Tudors” would happily scoff down a couple for breakfast, before moving on to heartier fare, maybe swans leg or a beef chop or two!

I digress, my choice to finish the chicken, given time, is to sprinkle the bird with just a little salt and smoked paprika and then whack it into a piping hot oven at 220 C to colour up for a further 15 to 20 minutes.

Then just plate it up and serve it in your usual way, you might even just rip it to pieces and eat it with your fingers, whilst dipping crunchy soda bread or baguette into some of the cooking liquor.  Its fun and much healthier than a certain transatlantic, highly calorific offering.

Footnote

I said at the beginning that you could get three dishes from one bird, this is how.

1.      Divide the cooking liquor two thirds to one third, retaining the vegetables in the larger portion.  Add a cup or so of pearled barley and simmer until the barley softens.  Voila, spectacular and nourishing chicken and vegetable broth.

2.      Simmer the smaller portion of cooking liquor until it reduces to about 5/600 ml and decant it into a clean glass jar (whilst still piping hot) and rapidly seal it.  Make sure that the lid ‘pops’ as a vacuum forms whilst the jar and contents cool.  When it is completely cold it can be kept in the fridge for a month or so and used whenever a recipe calls for chicken stock in sauces or better still in a rich risotto!

Home-made Sausage Recipe

Ingredients

1 kg Minced pork shoulder

0.5 kg Minced belly pork

250 gm breadcrumbs

200 ml water

15gm Salt

Sausage skins* (known as “casings”) to the trade

Spices

·         Chilli

·         Juniper

·         Black Peppercorns

·         Pink Pepper corns

·         Mace or nutmeg

Method

Take a skein of “casings” and rinse off the preserving salt in a generous quantity of cold water, wash through with warm water, then soak them in warm water until ready for use.

In a large bowl mix the pork meat until fully blended, best using clean hands.

Everyone who makes sausages has their own taste as to the blend of spices they prefer.  I’m not going to set out a mix to follow, experiment for yourselves.  I’ll just offer one tip, go easy to begin with especially with the salt and chilli.

The peasant ladies who live here in Ibiza, where I live, make sausages the traditional way, and gradually add their spice mix to their “family” taste by blending and tasting, blending and tasting repeatedly until they decide that the flavour is correct.  Each time they’ve made an addition and its been mixed in, they take samples from different parts of the bulk mix and form the samples into a small patty and then fry it.  The cooked patty is then broken into pieces and handed round to the gathering of butchers and mixers to taste and for their opinion, but only when Grandma has given things the final nod is the decision sealed! Collective decision making at its rural best!

Put your choice of spices in an electric “coffee” grinder together with the salt and grind to a fine powder, then add it to the water and finally mix the ‘brew’ well, into the pork mix.  At this point the mixture will be quite ‘loose’ as the posh TV chefs say, I’d rather say sloppy!  Add the breadcrumbs and mix until the whole combination has become homogenous.

The next step is to stuff the meat into the casings.  For this you will need an electric mincing machine fitted with a sausage stuffing nozzle (they’re usually supplied from new) or If you don’t have one you can easily find one on eBay or Amazon.

N.B.

Do NOT fit the mincer blades whilst stuffing the casings or you’ll end up with a skin full of pink mush!

Give the casings a final rinse whilst removing them from their soaking water, then load them carefully on to the stuffing nozzle and tie a knot in the open end of the casing.  It’s a bit tricky, rather like fitting a massive slippery condom! 

Load the feed tray with pork mix, pushing the meat well down into the screw mechanism, set the machine going and get ready for the action.  If you have a choice of speed on the mincer, start on slow until you get the hang of things, otherwise it’ll seem as if a massive python has jumped on to your kitchen worktop!

As the meat passes through the nozzle it will gradually emerge into the casing, as it does, gently slide more casing along the length of the nozzle to allow meat to feed into it freely and evenly.  At this stage allow the sausage to fill gradually and evenly, don’t worry too much if the shape isn’t 100% even, that can be rectified later.  Keep feeding meat into the mincer’s feed tray until all of it has been used and you have a huge length of sausages on your worktop.

Lastly smooth out any lumps and bumps in the filled casing before deciding how big you want each sausage to be.  Simply take the filled casing and give it three or four twists, where you want each sausage to be, then move on to the next.  10 - 12 cm in length and 70/90 gms in weight makes a good “manageable” sausage for most people and most dishes, from grilled breakfast bangers, to Toad in the Hole.  Finally decide how many sausages your likely to want for meals, six or eight will feed a family of three well, so then cut the skein into appropriate lengths or “hanks”.

Now put the finished sausages into a glass or stainless-steel tray or bowl and put it into the fridge overnight, so that the sausage can mature a little.  It was a surprise to me, first time round, how much of the added water comes out.  It is perfectly safe to freeze sausages that have been made hygienically, from fresh meat, and now is the time to do it, immediately and straight from the fridge. 

Take hanks of sausages and put them into new, labelled and dated “ziplok” bags.  Immerse the bags into a bowl of water to expel as much air as possible, seal and set aside repeating until all the hanks have been dealt with.  Put the bagged sausages, widely spread into multiple freezer drawers, to ensure the quickest possible cooling and freezing!

I’m lucky I have a domestic vac-pak machine for this job, its absolutely indispensable to me for all sorts of applications and cheap as chips.  It saves me a fortune just in not wasting leftovers!  I got mine on Amazon from the Andrew James company.

Last of all, and being a Yorkshireman, I ask myself, what must I do with the sausage mix that is left in the mincer?  I certainly can’t waste it, no, no horror of horrors!  So scrape it all out and on a clean surface roll it out into a sausage shape (no, I don’t try to fit it into a skin :o), I’m hardly that daft) then using shop bought puff pastry I make sausage rolls, with it yummie!

* You can get the casings at a very fair price, by post from a delightful supplier called Weschenfelder in Middlesbrough weschenfelder.co.uk  they're super helpful to home cooks. 

Perfect Yorkshire Puddings

Those of you who follow Carl’s Crafty Kitchen will know how much I love to cook, especially for my friends; and one dish that they ask me to make, more than any other, is a Sunday roast of beef with loads of gravy and Yorkshire puddings; so, I thought that I should share my failsafe recipe and method.  If you follow these instructions to the letter, your Yorkshire Puddings will never fall flat.

My recipe uses four plus one (I’ll tell you about this later) medium sized eggs and makes approximately twenty puddings.  Even if I’m only entertaining eight adults I make this quantity, if they have their children with them, the puddings always disappear!  If not, they go into the freezer in a vac-pack bag.

As to equipment, any old bun tin will do so long as it is liberally dosed with lard for cooking.

Ah, what is a “bun tin,” I hear you ask? Well dear people ‘buns tins’ for those of you of less than forty summers or so, were what we used before the transatlantic invasion by “The Muffin” brigade, to make those lovely tea time treats with icing (frosting) and a cherry on top!  And we certainly didn’t have them on our way to work.  We had dripping on toast then if we were lucky, 😋!

The older and better used they are the better they seem to work and a dear Yorkshire friend of mine absolutely insists that she never washes her Yorkshire Pudding tins, she only scrapes off any residue then wipes them out with kitchen paper.  How about that!

#

In the picture you’ll see I’ve used old jam jars for measuring my ingredients, because in my recipe, ingredients aren’t weighed, they’re measured by volume, and the trick is equal volumes of flour, eggs and milk!!

Ingredients

·         Eggs x 4+1

·         Full fat milk

·         Plain flour

·         Salt

·         Lard or dripping

Method

Hardware preparation

Set the oven to 220 C.

Grease the bun tins with a generous quantity of lard or best of all beef dripping or corn oil if you really have to!

Put the baking racks in the middle slots of the oven.

Put the greased tins into the oven on the racks, once the pudding batter has been made.

Preparing the pudding batter

Break four medium sized eggs into a glass jar.  Note the level!

In another, same sized, glass jar pour “full fat” milk up to the level reached by the eggs in the first jar, simples!

In a third, same sized glass jar add plain flour up to the level reached by the eggs and milk in the other two jars!

Add a good pinch of salt.

Finally, using (preferably) an electric stick mixer, beat all the ingredients together in a pouring jug then finally beat in one more egg!

Please don’t ask me why the extra egg?  I don’t know the answer, but folklore suggests that this is the egg that makes the puddings rise mountainously!

Cooking

When the oven is up to temperature, put in the greased bun tins.

When the fat in the bun tins begins to smoke, quickly open up the oven and pour a portion of batter, about half way up, into each indentation of the bun tin.

Put the tin back, close the door, set a timer and DO NOT open the oven door for at least fifteen minutes better still, twenty minutes.  It depends on how well you “know” your oven.

At this point its up to you, do you like crispy or soft puddings, pale or browned, you choose, more or less cooking time?  Practice makes perfect.

Eating

In days gone by when farm workers were fed on site as part of their pay, it used to be said “them ‘as eyts most puddin gets most meyt!” Because meat was expensive and puddings were cheap to make, workers were encouraged to fill up on them so that when the meat came on the table, they wouldn’t have room for big helpings.

This is the history of why a true Yorkshireman or woman will always ask to have his or her puddings served with lots of rich gravy before the meat and vegetables come to table!

Easy tasty Cheese Scones

Ingredients

225 gm Self Raising Flour.
3 Teaspoons Bicarbonate of Soda.
70 gm Butter, cubed.
1 Teaspoon Maldon Salt (or similar)
220 gm finely grated Strong Hard Cheese, odd and ends will do.
1 Large Egg.
150 ml whole Milk.

Method

Set oven to 220 C
Prepare a baking tray with silicone paper

Put all the dry ingredients plus the butter, except the cheese, into a food mixer and blend with the K blade. Hands are just as good if you don’t have a mixer, but they take longer. Blend until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then add 80% of the milk and keep mixing. Next add most of the the egg, lightly beaten or depending on your taste just gently scolded!  Finally add the cheese and the remainder of the milk and let the mixture come together.

Remove the cheesy dough from the blender bowl and put it on a lightly floured worktop. Knead it gently, then flatten it without beating it up, by hand, to a thickness of approximately two centimeters.
Using a cookie cutter cut out eight or so rounds and put them on the prepared baking tray. Lastly  using the last of the beaten egg, baste the tops of the scones immediately before they’re put in the oven.

Bake at 220 C for 15 minutes on a middle shelf by which time they should be a beautiful light brown colour and perfectly cooked. If they’re not quite cooked pop them back in the oven for five more minutes maximum.

As well as being an amazing savoury snack, with lashings of butter, of course, these little beauties make a delicious alternative to the bread that is often served on the side with bowls of soup.