Random Recipes - Hummus from Claudia Roden

God bless Dom for extending the deadline for Random Recipes by an extra day!  I ran out of time over the weekend but now I can get an entry in, even if it's a really quick and simple one (although that was dictated by the book I chose and not my laziness/tardiness, believe it or not).  

The theme this month is "first and last", because Dom quite rightly recognises that the very first and very last recipes in a book often get ignored in favour of the more glamorous recipes in the middle! Due to our impending house move, our stuff is very disorganised at the moment and there are cookbooks scattered all through the house, but the first one that came to hand was A Middle Eastern Feast, by Claudia Roden (who has never written a bad recipe - I think this is an extract from the much heavier tome A New Book of Middle Eastern Food) and the very first recipe was Hummus Bi Tahina which is one of my favouritest things to eat, I can scoff it by the bucketload.  

 

I whipped up a batch in about twenty minutes, including cooking the chickpeas (if you have dried, unsoaked chickpeas, throw them in a pressure cooker, bring up to full pressure and cook for 15 minutes).   This recipe is adapted very slightly from Claudia's.

Ingredients: 

250g tinned chickpeas (I used about 150g dried chickpeas and cooked them as described above) - drain them but keep the water they were packed/cooked in

150g tahini (I didn't have that much left so used about 70g, but that was plenty)

2 or 3 cloves of garlic 

Juice of a couple of lemons

Salt (I use Maldon)

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Paprika and chopped parsley to garnish (optional)

Crush the salt and garlic in a pestle and mortar.

Blend the chickpeas roughly in a food processor (or you could use a potato masher if you don't have a processor).  Add the other ingredients, including the crushed garlic, and process again to mix it all together.  The mix will probably be quite thick, so add enough of the cooking water (or water from the tin) to loosen it up.  I like my hummus a bit lumpy but if you prefer it to be much smoother, just keep the motor running till it's the consistency you like. 

It really is simplicity itself!  Serve with carrot and celery sticks, crusty bread or flatbread, whatever you like really.  I'm having some for lunch today in a sandwich, made with some crusty bread with black onion seeds, hummus, grated carrot and rocket.  Not sure I can even wait till lunchtime.

Claudia suggests garnishing with chopped parsley, but as you can see my parsley plant isn't being very prolific at the moment!

Thank you to the ever wonderful Dom for hosting every month :)

Here's a bonus cat photo of Pokey looking like she's up to no good.  She was very interested in the hummus!

Random Recipes/No Croutons Required - Leek & Potato Soup

This month, Dom from Belleau Kitchen and Jac from Tinned Tomatoes have teamed up for a joint challenge.


I sort of cheated a little bit, and only picked from my cookbooks that have "soup" in the title or that I definitely knew had a few soup recipes (because I have so many that don't involve soup at all). I ended up with Lindsay Bareham's A Celebration Of Soup, which I was rather pleased about as I've never even opened it - I acquired it as part of a set of books from the Book People, which I really only wanted for the Elizabeth David titles it contained.


Anyway, this is actually a lovely book. No pictures, but that's fine with me, and it contains a vast amount of recipes I actually want to make. Especially as I'm currently stuck in a mushroom soup rut and really need to break out of it. But I suppose that's what this challenge is about, right?

The random page I opened had a recipe for leek and potato soup, which strangely included bacon. As the challenge required a vegetarian soup and as I didn't actually have any bacon, I left it out, and ended up more or less ignoring the recipe and just going along with what I had and how I thought it should be done. Sorry Lindsay... but I promise I will cook one of your recipes very soon and actually follow your instructions.


Here's MY leek and potato soup recipe, in case you need something to warm you up during these winter evenings.

Ingredients:
2 big leeks, sliced
2 medium white onions, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, sliced or chopped
3 biggish spuds, peeled and quartered (I used Maris Pipers)
Marigold bouillon powder, or vegetable stock if you're feeling very keen
A kettle full of boiling water
Salt & pepper
Olive oil
Double cream

Pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a cold saucepan (pick a good-sized one), add the onions, garlic and leeks, and cook over a medium/low heat for a few minutes until everything is softened and going translucent.

Add the spuds, and fill the saucepan up with boiling water from the kettle. Add two heaped teaspoons of bouillon powder (assuming you haven't made your own veggie stock). Simmer until the spuds are completely cooked and starting to fall apart.

I like my soup nice and thick!

Take off the heat and liquidise with a stick blender, food processor or whatever you have. Add a good slosh of double cream and liquidise again until it's all well mixed. Return to the heat and season with plenty of salt and pepper.

Eat with some buttered crusty bread for dipping in. Obviously.

Home made wholemeal bread - my favourite

Random Recipes - Magazines, Cuttings & Pull Outs

Great theme this month for Random Recipes - my stacks (and stacks and stacks) of foodie magazines go largely ignored in favour of cookbooks, recipes from the internet and my own head, so it's great to have an excuse to dig through the magazines for a change.



I randomly pulled a magazine out of a big shelf full of them and ended up with the March 2011 edition of Good Food Magazine - definitely my favourite of the food mags. This particular issue was familiar because I happened to be reading it in the bath and dropped it in, and rather than go out and buy a new copy, I spent about half an hour drying each individual page with a hairdryer. It looks like an absolute mess (I'll update this post with a photo tomorrow when it's bright again as the one I originally took seems to have vanished) but it's a particularly good issue with lots of budget recipes.


I opened it randomly and ended up at a page with recipes for main meals, but thought I could do without eating any more cake so I chose a recipe for lentil ragu. I made the whole batch (to serve 6) and hubby and I had some with pasta for dinner, and the following day I turned the leftovers into a veggie lasagne which was actually really nice. This is definitely a recipe I'll make again.

My version alongside the magazine version!

Recipe [url=http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1139652/lentil-rag]here[/url] on the Good Food website.

Apologies for terrible iPhone photos, the natural light had gone by the time dinner was ready!

Random Recipes - Marguerite Patten's Victory Cookbook

I'm sneaking in right at the last minute, despite having actually made this recipe and photographed it right back at the start of August! I just didn't have time to write it up, and then life got in the way, including changing jobs, a very last minute trip to Ireland to visit a new baby, a few social events and all sorts of stuff. Anyway I've hung up my chef's whites for the last time (although I've said that at least twice before) and now I will be strictly baking only for pleasure!

So this month's random recipe theme was completely random! Dom instructed us to lay out all our cookbooks and pick one but as I have far too many to do that with, I used a random number generator instead. It came up with The Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten, which is a book that I bought to read, not to cook from.


Marguerite Patten is one of my heroes. I'm fascinated by the Home Front, rationing and everything to do with the home during the Second World War, and this is such an interesting book - but I really never envisaged actually making any of the recipes! But I thought it'd be interesting. There are lots of small recipes on each page so I opened it randomly and then picked a recipe with a pointy finger and my eyes closed! And I got Beetroot Pudding, which was good as I had a beetroot that was needing to be used up.


Ingredients:

6oz wheatmeal flour (I used wholemeal)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 oz sugar
4 oz finely grated raw beetroot
1/2 oz fat (I used lard)

Method, in Mrs Patten's own words:

Just the job to make your sugar ration go further! First mix flour and baking powder, rub in the margarine, then add sugar and grated beetroot.

Now mix all the ingredients to a soft cake consistency with 3 or 4 tablespoons of milk. Add a few drops of flavouring essence if you have it. Turn the mixture into a greased pie dish or tin and bake in a moderate oven for 35 minutes. This pudding tastes equally good hot or cold.


And the verdict? Well, I was expecting it to be horrible. But it wasn't. It was okay, not gorgeous, not disgusting, just okay. Definitely nicer with a drizzle of custard though!

Random Recipes - My Favourite Cookbook

The theme for this month's Random Recipes really gave me a headache. Have you seen my cookbook collection?! How on earth was I supposed to pick a favouite? But I had a good think about it. Which ones did I use the most? Which recipes did I keep going back to, and which ones always worked? More importantly, which ones did I find myself reading in bed?

And after much pondering, I've decided that my favourite cookbook is...

*drumroll*

How To Be a Domestic Goddess, by the wonderful Nigella Lawson.



I've had this quite a few years now and so many recipes in it have become old favourites that I've memorised from making them so often. The American Pancake recipe is ridiculously good. The Easy Almond Cake on page 6 is amazing, and so easy that my husband managed to make it all by himself for my birthday cake this year. And Nigella's sweet pastry recipe is the one I've adopted as my own, choosing it over the likes of Michel Roux because it just works so well.

Once again I got carried away and made two different recipes for this challenge.



The unappetising stuff in this jar is pineapple chutney. Doesn't it look disgusting? Please don't judge by appearances. This stuff is fantastic. Put a great blob of it in a cheese sandwich (even better if it's toasted). It tastes of cinnamon and star anise and turmeric and all things nice. There is absolutely no better use for a mouldy pineapple, I promise.



And the obligatory sweet cakey thing. I don't know why I haven't made these before: Baby Bundts. Delicious little yoghurty lemony squidgey things that, despite my coffee fixation, really need to be eaten alongside a cup of tea.



I'm not sure if this book is as popular in the US as it is in the UK - can any readers across the pond enlighten me? Do you guys love Nigella over there as much as we do here?

Anyway here were the other contenders for my favourite cookbook, in no particular order:

Muffins Fast and Fantastic by Susan Reimer
Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (even though I only started actually cooking from it last month!)
The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf
The River Cottage Bread Handbook by Dan Stevens
Good Food: 101 Cakes & Bakes
The Italian Cookery Course by Katie Caldesi
Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom
Ursula's Italian Cakes and Desserts by Ursula Ferrigno

Random Recipes: My New Cookbook

Dom's theme for this month's Random Recipes is "my new cookbook", and the book I've chosen has been my new cookbook for five months! So it's definitely about time I took it off the shelf and started actually using it.

Ever since I started reading food blogs, I've been aware of the Tuesdays with Dorie group, who bake from Dorie Greenspan's universally adored book Baking From My Home to Yours. Every Tuesday I would drool over that week's offerings on all the blogs I subscribed to in Google Reader, and for ages I longed for my own copy of the book.


Last Christmas, my lovely in-laws obliged, and I found a copy hiding under the Christmas tree. To say I was excited would be putting it mildly.

And ever since, I've been carrying the book around with me, reading it in bed, peering at the photos with my useless, dim little booklight while my poor husband is trying to sleep. But I never, ever made any of the recipes, and I've no idea why. Perhaps it was because of my hatred of cup measurements, maybe it was because there was so much to bake that I didn't know where to start. I don't know.

Anyway, enough. Even after all these months I still consider it my new cookbook, so this week it's taken pride of place on my little green cookbook stand and I've made not one but TWO recipes!


First I made Dorie's Lennox Almond Biscotti. I adore biscotti, but for some reason I've never made it myself. Now I have, and I will definitely do it again. The recipe uses polenta, which is unusual and gives it a lovely crunch without breaking your teeth like a lot of biscotti. I found some candied peel in the cupboard that was left over from making Christmas cakes, so threw that in and it was a nice addition. Next time I'll use some different nuts, perhaps pistachios. I love a recipe that's easily adaptable.


Then the other day I had a raging need for a brownie (in fact it was a post-migraine sugar craving - does anyone else get this?) so I had a go at Dorie's Classic Brownies. Now I have made a lot of brownies in my time, I've posted at least two different recipes on my blog and there are countless others from before the blog existed or that I haven't bothered posting because they were nothing special.


This one IS special. Very very special, and honestly this one recipe alone is worth buying the book for. The recipe calls for walnuts, but in the absence of walnuts I used macadamias and it was fabulous. Then yesterday I wanted another batch but had hardly any plain chocolate left, so I made it with mostly milk chocolate and pecan nuts, and you know what? That was fabulous too. I almost wish I hadn't discovered the recipe because I can see myself gaining a LOT of weight just by eating mountains of these.


Even after trying these two recipes, it still feels like a new cookbook. It's huge, and it'll take me years to get through it all. But I'll definitely be plodding through it one cookie, cake or scone at a time!

Dorie's Classic Brownie Recipe

2 1/2 oz butter
4 oz plain chocolate
2 oz milk chocolate
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp instant espresso powder (Kenco do a nice one)
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup plain flour
1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Line an 8" square tin with parchment.

Melt the butter and chocolate together. Whisk in the sugar (it will go grainy, and look almost as if the chocolate has seized, this is normal). Whisk in the eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla and espresso powder. Fold in the flour, salt and chopped nuts.

Pour into the tin and smooth the surface. Bake for 30 to 33 minutes (it takes 30 exactly in my oven) until the top is dull and a skewer comes out clean. Sit the tin on a wire rack and let the brownies cool. Turn out, peel away the parchment, turn back the right way up on a board and cut into squares.

These are amazing with vanilla ice cream! And that's another recipe I'll be sharing very soon, because I might, just maybe, have bought myself another new toy...

Random Recipes - Just Desserts

The lack of posts lately is due to the sad, untimely death of my laptop. RIP Macbook, you will be missed. Hopefully it will be replaced under our contents insurance, but in the meantime I'm posting from a tiny netbook with a tiny keyboard so I can barely see the letters on the screen and there's bound to be lots of typos.

I do, however, have a new toy to play with: an iPhone! I know I'm very late to the party but I got there eventually (even if mine is only a 3GS, last-gen technology doesn't bother me). To celebrate, I've been snapping photos using Instagram, so you'll have to excuse the 70s style photos because the novelty hasn't worn off yet.


This months' Random Recipe challenge was to bake something lovely from a desserts/baking-related cookbook. Just for a change, I thought I'd pile up my current stash of library books (all sixteen of them, and all food-related!) and pick one at random. As luck would have it, I got Phil Vickery's Puddings, which is obviously very appropriate for this challenge :)



Every page had something I wanted to make, but I thought I'd keep it simple and make one of my husband's favourites: creme brulée. Yummy! Phil's recipe is simplicity itself, but is definitely one of the better recipes I've tried and it turned out perfect.



Ingredients:

6 egg yolks
600 ml double cream
55g caster sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 vanilla pod
zest of 1 lemon, removed with a peeler (I left this out)

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees C.

Place the cream in a saucepan with the vanilla pod and lemon zest and bring to the boil.

Meanwhile whisk the eggs and sugar till well combined. When the cream boils, strain it through a fine sieve onto the egg & sugar mixture and whisk it all together.

Divide between four ramekins and place these in a deep roasting tin. Pour boiling water into the tin so it comes halfway up the ramekins (this is called a bain marie, by the way). Bake for around 30 minutes, or until set but still a bit wobbly. Leave to cool and chill for a few hours or overnight.

When ready to serve, sprinkle a teaspoon of caster sugar onto each dessert and use a blowtorch or a very hot grill to melt and caramelise the sugar.



The best bit of eating a creme brulée is shoving your spoon through the caramelised top and hearing the lovely satisfying CRACK!

Random Recipes - My First Cookbook

Dom's brief for this month's Random Recipes challenge was really quite an interesting one - you had to cook from your very first cookbook!

I thought my first cookbook was a copy of Practical Cookery, the cookery textbook from my first stint at catering college when I was about 18 and which was lost in one of my many house moves, but I had a dig through my bookshelves and found something that was a bit older: The Complete Creative Cook, by Frances Cleary. This was definitely my first cookbook, it was published in 1997 when I would have been 17 and I remember that even then I found it pretty uninspiring, so I wasn't totally thrilled that I had to cook from it now.


Still though I had a flick through it till I found something I liked the look of, and something called "chocolate and coconut slices" vaguely appealed, even though they didn't look hugely appetising in the photo.

They don't look that tasty, do they? WRONG!

Sometimes, dear readers, appearances can be deceiving. These are FANTASTIC. I'm glad I found them, because they're quick, easy and incredibly delicious, but part of me also wishes I hadn't discovered them, because I'll probably want to make and eat them all the time and end up the size of a house.



Here's the recipe, and I really do urge you to give it a try.

Ingredients:

175g digestive biscuits, crushed
55g caster sugar
pinch salt
115g butter or margarine, melted
85g dessicated coconut
260g plain chocolate chips (just use a big bar of chocolate or two, chopped up)
250ml sweetened condensed milk (it tends to come in 397g tins - just use all of it)

Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Line a baking dish or tin about 33x23cm with parchment, but don't grease it. Let the parchment hang over the edges - this will help you lift it out later.

Combine the digestive crumbs, sugar, salt and melted butter. Press the mixture evenly into the lined baking dish.

Sprinkle the coconut over the biscuit base, then scatter over the chocolate chips. Pour the condensed milk evenly over the chocolate and sprinkle the walnuts on top.

Bake for 30 minutes. Let cool and lift out using the overhanging parchment. Cut into squares.



I made this a few days ago but it's only now I've had time to post it. In the meantime, my inlaws, who are staying with us at the moment, have devoured it. Like vultures. And mum in law wants the recipe so they can continue devouring it when they get home. A high recommendation indeed.

Random Recipe - chocolate ginger brownies from Martha Stewart's Cookies

Last month I missed out on taking part in the Random Recipe challenge run by Dom at Belleau Kitchen, and this month I was determined I'd manage it. However illness and general beingtoobusyness meant that today being the last day to get your entries in, and me being off to London at about 10am, I had to get up disgustingly early to make my recipe. I'm so dedicated!


So the rules were that you had to count along your bookshelf till you reached the eighteenth book and that's what you had to use. Number 18 for me was Martha Stewart Cookies, a gorgeous book that sits criminally ignored on my shelf because I despise using cups to measure out ingredients. Seriously - what's wrong with a good old weighing scale? I also have her Cupcakes book, a lovely book called Swedish Cakes and Cookies and Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home To Yours, all of which use cups which really puts me off using them. I really must get over myself.



Anyway I opened the book at a random page, which had a recipe for chocolate ginger brownies. Lovely, I love anything ginger, and while I know I've done a brownie recipe on the blog before, that was a low fat one. This definitely isn't. And it's also a nice quick and easy one.

Recipe from Martha Stewart Cookies, adapted very slightly.

Ingredients:

3oz plain chocolate, chopped
4 oz butter
1 tsp grated fresh ginger (I used a jar of minced ginger)
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground or freshly grated nutmeg
1 clove, ground up in a pestle & mortar
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup plain flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt

Line an 8" square tin with baking parchment, letting the ends overhang the tin. Preheat the oven to 160ºC.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in the microwave - take care not to burn the chocolate. Stir in everything else. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 30-35 minutes until set. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes, then lift out using the parchment and cool completely on a wire rack before cutting into squares.


I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone else has come up with! I got an easy recipe but I know other people won't have, so it'll be very interesting.

The few things I have cooked from this particular book have all turned out very well. The lemon squares in particular were gooey and gorgeous and definitely worth making again. And these brownies are fantastic. So I'm determined to stop hating cups and make more of Martha's lovely goodies.


Oh and by the way, I have had a very, very unsuccessful week of baking. I made some Viennese biscuits that went a bit wrong, some Cornish fairings (little spicy biscuits) that I overcooked and consequently went absolutely rock hard and inedible, and yesterday I made a ginger cake that stuck horribly to the (really well greased and floured) tin. Luckily all the disasters happened at home and not at work (although last week I did forget to put the eggs in a carrot cake, the staff ate the resulting disaster with spoons) but it's a bit disheartening. I hadn't had a baking disaster in years and then three happened within the space of a couple of days. It almost made me go out and buy a cake from the supermarket...

The disastrous ginger cake, with the offending tin