Recipe Wednesday! Blackberry Pie

(A little note - blogspot has stolen my nice background again, and none of my carefully centred pictures are in the centre. I am blameless.)

I fully acknowledge that, again, it's not Wednesday. In fact it's a rather pleasant Saturday with some early September sun. The bees are busy, the flowers are open, and there are blackberries ripe on the brambles. Thanks to the fields at my parents' being left largely to their own devices in places there are brambles all over the place, which is wonderful. There's none of the 'will the hedge cutters come just before the blackberries are ripe?' anxiety that has prevailed in the past, because there are blackberries aplenty in the field. And what better to do with blackberries than to make a pie?

Actually I can think of a few good things. Eating them straight from the bush springs to mind. Making bramble jelly is another. But for today, pie it is!

First up is to go out into the fields and pick some blackberries. The children started this, gathering a handful of late raspberries and then some blackberries. Then four geese scared them inside, so off I went to pick a few more, Ben on my hip and the dog snuffling around at my heels. There's nothing like picking blackberries from prickly brambles surrounded by gorse and nettles. My hands still feel a little tingly.

Next up was to make the pastry. I enjoy making pastry. Or I should say I enjoy eating pastry. I enjoy the fact that the fruits of my labour will be short and crumbly and melting in the mouth.

I always use the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book for pastry making (since it's usually been long enough that I'm not sure of the amounts or cooking temperature.) This book is my bible in the kitchen. You can tell how much it is used by the amount of centuries old flour on the page. I also learnt a few handy tips in the short time that I was learning catering in school, such as use only your fingertips to rub the fat into the flour. Ideally your palms should stay clean. Keep everything as cold as you can.

Recipe

I used these quantities to make a pie of about 8 inches diameter -

8oz flour (I used brown spelt flour.)
2oz lard
2oz margarine
A little water.
Blackberries (or other berries) - enough to fill your pie.
A little sugar.
Egg to glaze.

Oven: 220°C (or 425°F, or Gas Mark 7)

Once you've weighed out your flour and fat, you get a small kitchen minion (in this case George, who loves baking almost as much as he loves eating what he cooks) to cut the fat into small pieces, to make it easier for rubbing in. Then rub the fat into the flour with your fingertips (clean and cold hands are best!) until it resembles breadcrumbs. Then mix in water (tiny, tiny quantities to be sure you don't put in too much and make your pastry tough and doughy!) I didn't have to put any water in at all this time. The fat was sufficient to hold the flour together. Once it's moist enough to stick together, roll it into a ball, flour the worksurface well, and start to roll it out with a light hand and plenty of flour on top of the pastry as well as below so that the rolling pin doesn't stick!

You can easily get your minion to help with the rolling out. If you want an even sheet of pastry I'd suggest helping, though. Make it about a quarter of an inch thick. Or half a centimetre, if you're feeling metric. If it's lovely and short, as it should be, you'll have a hell of a time picking it up to drape it over the pie dish. I forgot to mention the pie dish. You'll need a pie dish of about 8 inches diameter, and be sure to grease it with margarine (or butter if you don't have dairy intolerant children.) Also, some time during the rolling out is a good time to put the oven on to preheat, at 220°C (or 425°F, or Gas Mark 7).

Once your pastry is rolled out you can prise it off the worksurface with a palette knife and lay it over your pie dish. If it's short enough it will probably crack like an earthquake-torn country and you'll weep and make a ball again and roll it out again, and you might have better luck the second time. Or you'll put up with the cracks and just squish them together once you have the pastry in the pie dish. Once you've laid the pastry over push it down gently into the dish and cut off the excess around the top with the palette knife. When your pastry is nicely bedded down fill the dish with your berries and sprinkle with sugar, as much as you feel is necessary. I don't have a very sweet tooth, but I found some lovely vanilla sugar that my mum had made by putting vanilla pods in a jar of sugar and that complimented the taste of the blackberries beautifully.

Hopefully you will have enough pastry left to roll out to make the top. Lay that over the dish just as you did before, and cut around the top with the palette knife. Crimp the two sheets of pastry together with your fingertips by pressing the top layer into the bottom. I still had enough pastry left over to cut out a lot of little pastry leaves with a table knife. I brushed a beaten egg over the top of the pie and arranged the leaves to garnish, then brushed those with egg too.

Voilà! Your pie is complete! (Well, mine is, anyway.) Put into the centre of a pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes. Be sure to keep an eye on it in case it needs a little more or less time.

Once your pie is cooked you can sprinkle a little icing sugar over the top to make it look pretty, if you're going to take photos of it, anyway.

Cut, and serve! Blackberry joy is yours!

I would have enjoyed some expensive vanilla ice cream with this, or some clotted cream. Thankfully for my waistline we had neither. It was still lovely.

Recipe Wednesday! Elderflower Cordial

I know. This isn’t going to be a regular thing, I promise. And I know it’s not Wednesday – but I started making this on Wednesday so I think it qualifies. It seems I get round to cooking more often than blogging.

We’ve been having some lovely summer weather (off and on, between the thick cloud and the rain showers and the freezing cold days) and the elder tree is out in full blossom. Put that together with my lovely cousin posting about elderflower cordial on her Facebook page, Foraging with Amelia and Leon, and I just had to try it. On Wednesday the sun was out and the garden was full of the scent of elderflowers, and it was too good an idea to resist. You can’t exactly claim I foraged for the elderflowers. I walked to the bottom of the garden in pink rubber shoes. But still, I got the flowers.

You start this recipe the night before (hence Wednesday), ideally using a small boy (Oscar in this case) to help you clip the flowers from the tree. We cut more or less 25 heads. I tried to make sure I got nice, fresh, pollen-dusted blooms. Oscar tried too, but there were a few more spider webs on his than there were on mine. I’m sure it adds to the taste. We spiced it up by having a ginger cat (and a tortoiseshell) share the box for a while, too.

The recipe was the one my cousin suggested, from the River Cottage website. Who doesn’t love River Cottage? Probably lots of people. When I lived in a rented first floor flat I viewed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with intense jealousy. Now that jealousy is ameliorated somewhat by my front and back gardens, my herb bed and elder tree, and the promise of, one day soon, swapping suburban living for a four acre permaculture smallholding.

The night before part of the recipe is pretty easy. Checking your flowers aren’t covered with all sorts of legged and winged creatures, putting them in a bowl, and adding the zest of an orange and three lemons. One day I must buy a lemon zester. I’ve had two instances now in my life when I’ve felt in need of one. My husband tells me to just use a fork. I can’t work out how, so I used a slightly serrated sharp knife to scrape the things clean of their outer skin. Painful, but effective. Once that’s done, you just dump one and a half litres of boiling water over the lot. I’m sure there must be a sensible Imperial alternative to that, but Google tells me it’s 2.63963 pints, which is not convenient at all.

By Thursday, the clouds had crept back over, rain had fallen constantly all day, my back ached, and the children were taking the opportunity to scream at each other pretty much non-stop, prompting the unplugging of the computer and the removal of the games console controls. But still, there was the steeped elderflower mixture waiting to be boiled up with sugar. Somehow this got done. Thankfully I had a muslin cloth in the nappy box to strain it through. (I did sterilise it first – I shoved in in the kettle while it boiled.) It doesn’t taste too promising at this point, but once I put the liquor together with the sugar and boiled it up it tasted lovely.

Then I had to perform some kind of bizarre sterilisation dance involving a pan, glass jars, two spoons, and a tea towel. It would have helped if I could find my funnel for pouring it into bottles rather than just a wide-necked jam funnel, but in a house with three boys interesting kitchen equipment doesn’t stay where it belongs for long. It’s probably been used as a trumpet, and is languishing somewhere bewilderingly illogical. But since I could only find one nice bottle to put the stuff in, and all the rest were jars, that wasn’t too much of a problem.

And there we are. I ended up with a bottle and four or five jars of what looks like urine, but thankfully tastes very nice (not like Magners, despite the photo trying to tell you otherwise). A thick, syrupy liquid perfect for diluting with water and giving a lovely taste of summer. George (5) told me he can’t drink it because it makes his eyes hurt, and curled up like a hedgehog to avoid it. Ben (almost 3) made grunting sounds of pleasure on trying it. Oscar (8) liked it so much he asked for a whole cup to himself – and since he’s the pickiest of all of them, I think I can be satisfied with that. Although he did just ask for more of ‘that cauliflower squash.’ Oops.

Recipe Wednesday! Houmous

It’s Recipe Wednesday!

Home-made Houmous with wholegrain bread and Cothi Valley goat's milk feta. 

Recipe Wednesday is a lie. It’s very unlikely that there will ever be a recipe Wednesday on this blog. I do enjoy cooking, but it very much depends on how stressed I am, how depressed I am, how much the children are driving me insane, how my back feels.

The 'sampled' cake, beside the second cake.

But today I somehow spent the whole day cooking. I decided to make a coffee cake for my husband’s birthday (typical Victoria sponge recipe of 4oz flour, 4oz butter, 4oz sugar, and two eggs, from my wonderful 1960s Good Housekeeping cookery book.) The same recipe is here on the BBC. You have to add a little instant coffee dissolved in warm water to the mixture before you add the flour, for the coffee flavour.

So I cooked the cake. It seemed rather flat, so I decided to cook another to put on top of it. I had to go out for more eggs, walking down to the local shop holding almost-three-year-old Ben’s hand all the way. (He seemed rather surprised we had to pay for the eggs. He’s used to his grandparents’ eggs coming straight from the chickens.) So I came home with my eggs and cooked another cake. I left it to cool while I did half an hour of exercise.

I came back into the kitchen after my exercise, rather tired and looking forward to a rest. Ben was still sitting innocently in the living room playing on Club Penguin. But I went into the kitchen to find that while I had been diligently exercising in the hall, Ben had been helping himself to half of the first cake.

Sigh.

I baked another cake. By the time that was done it was time to pick up the other children from school. Now we have a three-tier coffee cake with a rather wobbly middle.

Some basic ingredients - chick peas, garlic, and lemon.

In the middle of all this cake baking I was inspired to try making my own houmous by a friend on facebook. I have to believe that hers was more successful than mine because she’s more stylish than me and lives in Milan. I have no style and live in Wales. But it seemed like a refreshingly easy challenge, especially after my three-cake day.

I used this recipe from the BBC, but I stuck to it rather loosely. We didn’t have any tahini or cumin, and I put more garlic in than I should have. My husband, who has such a lack of taste buds that wine gums all taste the same to him, surprisingly found the garlic overpowering. The garlic had a kind of hit-you-in-the-back-of-the-throat quality, which I quite enjoyed, but I found the olive oil overpowering, and I think next time I’d find a blander oil. I hate the taste of olive oil. But spread on a sliver of toasted wholegrain bread with a slice of sublime Cothi Valley garlic, lemon, and parsley feta goat’s cheese, it was rather yummy.

Tomorrow I might blend in some more chick peas to even out the taste and thicken it up a bit – it’s a bit too sloppy. If I did it now I’d wake up Ben, who is sleeping soundly above us, and needs his rest so he can wake up at 5am, as is his wont at the moment. If I made it again I think I’d change the oil, use more salt, and make the effort to get tahini, because I think the bitterness of the sesame seeds would help to even out the flavour. But after all, it's a learning experience. Better luck next time!

[EDIT - so, today I put a whole new tin of chickpeas in and a very little sunflower oil, and it's much better, has more of that creamy houmous texture, and is less overwhelming on the garlic front. The olive oil taste still detracts somewhat for me, but it's much less strong. I have some for lunch with couscous and a little of last night's leftover chilli and black pepper belly pork, and a ratatouille type vegetable mix. At least, I try, while Ben tantrums over his boiled egg not being served in a precisely correct manner, feeds it to the dog, and then comes and aggressively sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at me.]

 

That lovely goat's cheese.

A little bite.

Next day's lunch. We have good leftovers when my husband's been cooking (which is pretty much every night.)