Cooking With Fire And Smoke

This weekend my brother and I went on a cooking course. It was at the same place I did a fermentation course a few years ag - Harts Barn cookery school. 

I'm never sure what to expect on these courses, but I'll start by saying I was blown away by the afternoon. 

I will also say a bit of bad stuff, the course was cancelled twice, once for bad weather, which was fair enough, and another time because they had another event, which wasn't ideal from our point of view as stuff had to be rearranged. 

 

When the course went ahead though it really did deliver. It was an afternoon of some of the best food I've eaten in a long time, and I'm fairly sure we ate more than what the course cost! 

We made pork koftas and cooked them on the BBQ, then charred some asparagus and aubergine as well as orange. this then went with some cold smoked feta to make an incredible salad. 

We also roasted some baby gem lettuce and made some more salads. 

We cooked flat bread in the bread oven, and made baba ghanoush, and when added with the kofta it was one of the best sandwiches I've ever eaten.  

"Dirty" steak cooked on coals was another incredible eat. 

Roasted rhubarb and creme brulee (which had charcoal added to it as it cooked) was a great pudding. But we also had cold smoked salmon, a blade of beef that had been hot smoking for hours and hours, the food just kept coming. 

I swear I've never eaten so much food in one go before, it was a truly brilliant afternoon, I loved it. I came away with enough food for the five of us to have a full meal Sunday night and for our lunch boxes on Monday. the chef was good fun and the other people on the course were great as well. 

Kitchen Carnage!

I often get comments about how much baking happens in our house - I don't even share all of it, probably about a quarter! 

Some nights it's absolute carnage in the kitchen. All of us cooking, every surface full of food! 

It seems to be if they're at all bored then the kitchen is often their first stop! And they love recipe books and finding new things to try! 

It's always a bit mad and messy in our house but it's great fun. 

Comfort Food

 As the nights pull rapidly in I crave comfort food. I'm always a little sad to see summer go and would happily hold onto it for a lot longer yet. But I see the fact I can happily cook the food I'm really good at as a small consolation prise. 

First one this week was shepherds pie. 

Simple Food Is Best

Really simple dinner of pasta and tomato sauce.
We picked from the garden about 35 fresh tomatoes of different sizes, shapes and colours, a clove of garlic, medium onion and a huge handful of basil along with some bought in chorizo used more as seasoning than anything else.

 Tasted amazing and shows with a few good ingredients it's sometimes all you need.

And of course I had my two chefs with me. My eldest help chop the tomatoes and stir the dish, while my younger daughter made biscuits for pudding. Lovely to spend time in the kitchen like that, laughing and joking. 

Elderflower Fritters

For tea last night I decided to have a decadent foraged pudding - elderflowers fritters. 

Now I know the main calories are from store bought ingredients but it's the elderflower that really makes them taste amazing!

Ingredients -
Elderflower heads - fresh picked.
oil for frying
100g of self raising flour,
2 tablespoons cornflour,
2 tablespoons caster sugar,
1 egg
175ml of sparkling water.

Mix all the ingredients for the batter together, heat the oil, dip the heads in the batter and fry!

Make sure you dust them with icing sugar when cooked and try not to eat any stems (they don't make good eating).

We all loved these and ate far too many! Might have to try it with meadowsweet later in the summer!

Using Up Leeks

 So the leeks are starting to run to seed and we still have a few in the beds that had them in.

So I'm keen to make sure we don't waste too many! 

Forage And Feast Course - Harts Barn

This year for Christmas one of my presents from my mum was a days course at Harts Barn Cookery School. 

Amazing cooking facilities!

The course mum had booked was called "forage and feast" and she had booked it for this month because autumn is an abundant time of year, but mainly because she hates wild garlic and thought if we did it in the spring that would feature heavily.

Our New Wood Oven

A key thing for me when building our new extension was to make sure we had a means of cooking and heating off grid should we need it. 

We already have a stove in the sitting room that we use all winter. There's not many nights between November and March where it's not lit and we have plenty of firewood to keep us going. 

And although we can put a pan on top of the stove it's not ideal to cook with. 

Love the look of our new stove! 

I was a little obsessed with finding the right stove for our house and spent many houses researching what we should have and what would fit. To start with I thought it would just be another log burner like we had in the sitting room, maybe with a small oven on top. Luckily once I'd worked out what size we'd have available and spoke to some experts it turned out we could have a full on range in there!

Prepping On A Budget - Easy Cooking Off Grid

Okay so the last two posts in this series have talk about storing water for three days and enough food for an extra seven days. Now I want to talk about what you'd do to cook that food if your normal means weren't working.


Having a secondary cooking source is a really important area of preparedness. Being able to boil a kettle gives you a great way to make water safe to drink and also being able to heat food is great for making us feel better and making it good to consume.

Bringing firewood for next winter - for cooking and heating

I talked to a few friends after the winter storms we had this year. I was surprised how few had a secondary way of cooking, let alone heating themselves had the power gone out. Many are on gas but lots of modern gas cookers have an electric ignition/fan, etc so won't work without the power (worth testing if in doubt).

The Ultimate Flapjack Recipe

I've gone a bit oats mad at the moment.

After my microwave porridge post the other day, Spade and Dagger mentioned how they'd been spoilt by using Pim Hill Farm organic oats, and how they tasted way better than what you can normally buy.  

I had a conversation with the lovely people at Pim Hill Farm about trying some of their products. Looking at their website I already loved their ethos and how they grew their product, we don't exclusively buy organic, but we do try to when we can. 

I was stupidly excited when the box turned up, not many people get that excited about oats I can tell you!

Well the kids did, but the box didn't last long! 

First thing to try was the porridge oats. I was almost a little worried, would they be any better?
Well happily I can report that they they take porridge to another level! Much smoother, creamier and somehow they taste more "oaty".

Trouble is I think it might have spoilt the children and no other oats will compare now, gone are the days of budget oats! They sell big 5kg bags for £15.75 on their site which still works out at only 15p a portion (adult). I love buying big bags in bulk anyway, so it suits me!

I was a little unsure what to do with the jumbo oats, then I thought flapjack.
But then I looked in the cupboard and saw that we'd got no golden syrup left, I guess with how much porridge we've been eating lately I shouldn't have been surprised!

Looking to the pantry I saw some condensed milk on the shelf. I remembered that mum used to make awesome flapjack using it. I grabbed the family cookbook and had a look through, she used to make huge batches of this when she had a tea room on the farm.


The Ultimate Flapjack Recipe

Now I know Ultimate is a bold claim but this stuff is simply amazing. 

I even had to ask mum if she minded me giving away this recipe! Mum and friend had a competition to see who could come up with the best recipe, mum lost but we gained her friends recipe so we didn't care! 

The recipe is dead simple:

12oz of jumbo oats
8oz of butter
4oz of soft brown sugar
4 tlbsp condensed milk
4 oz of raisins or chopped dried apricots

Packed down ready to go in the oven

Heat the oven to 160 degrees C, mix the sugar, oats and raisins together. Then add in melted butter and condensed milk and mix. Put in a tray lined with parchment paper then bake for 25 - 30 minutes until done.

Variation
For an amazing variation put one layer of flapjack in the tray, cover with cherry pie filling then add another layer of flapjack on top!

It was so good I had to make it twice - once I'd made one batch I saw half a tin of condensed milk left in the fridge looking all lonely, so I made as second batch the very next day. By the weekend ti was all gone! 

What's your favorite flapjack recipe?

*Pim Hill farm did give me the oats to create this post, but all the views and opinions are my own. 

Microwave Porridge

This is a collaborative post.

Being self-sufficient is tough and I'm not ashamed to take all the help I can get. I cook virtually everything from scratch and with young children, sometimes they just need something quick. And that's where a microwave comes in.

Ours is a fairly low budget model and I’d love to upgrade to something better, these Panasonic Combination Microwaves would be ideal. Something to think about when I’m fitting out our new kitchen in the extension as I want to only fit quality items that won’t need replacing every five minutes.

The main thing I use my microwave for, besides heating up milk for my children (they drink 26 pints a week!) is to cook porridge in the mornings.

Now it’s colder the children want either porridge or toast for breakfast, and as I normally bake rolls most days (far less waste), porridge seems to happen more and more.

It’s painfully simple to make it in the microwave, that’s why mine never sees a saucepan.

One part rolled oats, one part water and one part milk, mixed together then cooked on full for 3 minutes, stirred and then cooked again for a further 3 minutes.  This length of time is to cook for my three kids and me so adjust if it’s just for one of you, if you cook too much you could always try my leftover porridge cake!  

Also a tip for the top – porridge gets bigger as it cooks and boils up, you’ll soon learn that a larger dish is your friend when cooking porridge, unless you like cleaning out the microwave.

But cooking it is easy, trying to get my kids to decide on a topping is the hard bit!

Our choices are either homemade jam (raspberry or damson are a favourite on porridge here and homemade is the only option!), brown sugar (one of my favourites), golden syrup or honey (only my eldest does this as the rest of us hate it), we also add a few 'yeah yeahs' (raisins to you and me) just to alter the texture a bit as we eat it.

If my mum is over then she always brings over a pot of stewed damsons that she keeps in the freezer, tastes amazing and far less sugar than any of the others!

Old picture but I love it! Pink porridge from grandma! 

So do you have a microwave?

What do you use it for mainly?

What’s your favourite Porridge topping? And please, no one say salt or it’ll make me feel ill…

Slow Cooked Mutton

Earlier in the year we had a ewe killed. 

The price for cull ewes was rubbish at the time and in all my years of keeping sheep I'd never tried mutton and I quite fancied giving it a try. Mutton is a popular meat all round the world, just in the UK we seem to think that sheep should only be eaten as lamb. 

The ewe was three years old, fairly big and as you'd expect, had a good layer of fat on her. Mutton has a well placed reputation for being fatty, all this means is you need to be careful in how you cook it. 

Talking to friend we decided to make a rub for the meat and cook it long, slow and low. Making the rub in the recipe above (my mate had to come over as I didn't have many of the ingredients!), we then covered the meat, scored the fat and set it in a low oven (160) uncovered for a little while then covered with some water in the tray until the fat started to come out. 

After an hour or so I lifted it up onto a rack on the tray to continue cooking (still covered), this bit is essential because I wanted the fat to cook out of the meat. 

The joint was in the oven for a little under five hours and was cooked to perfection (if I do say myself). I did brown it off a bit at the end by cooking with no cover. 

as you can see the half inch layer of fat in the bottom of the pan shows that this is the right way to cook it! 

The meat just fell off the bone.

I served it chopped up on some rice with steamed french beans (french beans with everything at the moment!), it was beautiful. So tender and so full of flavour. 

Who else likes to eat mutton? 

How do you cook the big joints?

Pancake Day

Although it's getting late in the evening but I've still got a full stomach from eating so many pancakes! 

We don't have them very often, but they are lovely, I ate three and a half and was quite surprised when my eldest wasn't far behind me, put away two and a half and asked for more!

Not a pancake! Soft and fluffy steamed buns with beef in hoisin sauce inside.

I was also really impressed with myself for the tea we ate. I did steamed Dim Sum beef buns (using some slow cooked beef from the other day) with Hoisin sauce and a salad. I'm going to blow my own trumpet here and say that they were amazing! It's a Jamie Oliver recipe (his is pork though) that can be found here - give it a go, makes an incredible meal! 



Back to the pancakes though - what do you have on yours? 

I like sugar and lemon on mine, but golden syrup does just win it for me! 

Peter Cook's Bread

I'm very fortunate to live in an area that seems to have a lot of people who care passionately about food. Locally there are people that make cider, cheese, grow good livestock and a great butchers in the village. The butchers also sells fresh bread. 

Now I bake bread most days but I still think it's great that there is fresh bread available just a mile from my door, when I have bought some it's been lovely and very different to what I bake; sour doughs, cider crumb, rye breads, ciabatta, etc. 

Kneading techniques

I saw on Facebook that the hotel in the village was having a 2 hour demonstration by Peter Cook, the man that bakes the bread and sells it to local shops around the area. He has quite a following in the village and everyone raves about his bread (rightly so) so I thought I'd go. 

Showing some focciaca dough

It was just £5 for 2 hours and I picked up so many tips and learnt that I'm doing quite a few things differently to him (some might say wrong but I still make good bread!). He made, but didn't cook, some Chelsea buns, a focciata and talked about his sour dough loaves. I'm planning on making some Chelsea buns for the school bake sale on Friday so hopefully I should make them even better this time round! 

Rolled up ready to be cut into pieces to make Chelsea buns

What really came across was this mans passion about what he did and that he believes in good local real food and real bread. His loaves are all made by hand and some of them are three days in the making, he even says that some gluten intolerant people can eat his loaves just due to the fermentation times that the yeasts have to work. He could name all his suppliers and even collected spring water from the Malverns to use in his sour doughs.

I think I might have to book on one of his day courses and do some more learning. 

You can read more about his bread here.

Anyone else have great local producers of food?

Five Root Vegetable Stew

I was in the garden today getting some veg for tea. I decided I was going to cook a stew with the brace of pheasants I brought home from the shoot on Saturday. 

I managed to get pretty much all the ingredients from the garden. The veg in the picture above is (left to right) leek, parsnip, black Spanish radish (a cooking radish) salsify, scorzonera and Jerusalem artichokes. I added a bunch of herbs from the garden and some potatoes I've got stored in the shed. 

I've not tried Salsify or scorzonera before and I was very impressed with how they tasted (I'll do a post on them another time). 

The Black Spanish Radish on the other hand isn't doing very well at winning me over at the moment. It's easy to grow and sowed really late, but tastes very bitter, even when cooked. So far we've tried stewing it and roasting it and both times I've left most of it on my plate and the girls haven't touched it. 

It's a real shame we're not liking the taste as it's so easy to grow and being late in the season means you can grow it when another crop has finished. I was under the impression that it was meant to be fairly mild when cooked and a good bulking vegetable in soups and stews, to me it almost taints the whole dish. 

Does anyone else grow this vegetable? 

What am I doing wrong when I cook it?

My Brother's Pizza Oven

If you've read this blog for any length of time you'll know that I come from a practical family. 

My brother has been putting this into practice lately and his latest creation is his beautiful pizza oven!

I'm really impressed with it, he's put so much effort into not only building it but the research side of things as well. 

We've been over three times for pizza now and each time they've been the best tasting pizzas we've ever had. They take a couple of minutes to cook once the pizza is going, with crispy bases and perfectly cooked toppings. You do have to keep your eye on it mind as they burn quickly and there is a bit of technique that's needed to get them in and out cleanly rather than pushing them back into the fire. 

They love making pizza

The girls get really excited about making their own pizzas and then watching them cook. In fact so do I! As well as pizza we've also knocked up batches of garlic butter and made lovely garlic bread and Dave cooked a batch of new potatoes in there as well (possibly the best tasting potatoes I've ever eaten).

Cooking away

All this outdoor cooking has really got me thinking about our outdoor cooking area and what I'd like there once the patio is built. I have to admit that after using my brother's that a pizza oven is pretty high on the list now! 

What would you have in your ideal outdoor cooking area? Who else would like a pizza oven like my brothers?

Baked Apples

Sometimes it's the most simple foods that are the best. At the moment I've been cooking lots of baked apples. 

Simple pud.
These apples are Howgate Wonder windfalls.

 I'm sure there couldn't be an easier pudding. Simply core an apple and stuff it with your filling of choice, above I've stuffed it with raspberries and a little golden syrup but I quite often stuff them with mince meat. Score round your apple with a knife so it has more chance of holding it's shape instead of splitting the skin at a random place when it heats up. a bit of brown sugar sprinkled on top goes nicely as well. 

I had planned on taking a picture of a perfect baked apple but the last lot I did were a different variety and didn't need quite so long in the oven! They were tasty but not exactly nouveau cuisine. 

These fluffed up far too much! It was still tasty though! 

Good healthy pudding for my girls and me! 

Who else has a really simple pudding for me to try?

Which Bread Maker Should I Buy?

If you've been reading my blog lately your know that I've been making a lot of bread. It's been a great activity to do with the girls but it can be tricky with the timing and proving times, sometimes they just don't want to play ball and that can wreck a loaf. I've cooked using no kneed recipes but it normally takes lots of planning and I'm not great at that.

So I've decided to take the plunge and buy a bread maker, or more to the point -get one for my up coming birthday. Every time I write about bread I get comments about how good the bread makers are now, so we've managed to find a space for it in the dinning room, not ideal but it will do for now. 

Some homemade focaccia form last week

The question is which do I go for? I'm planning on using it most days, either just to make the dough so I can cook free form in the oven, or on a timer so we can have the bread ready to make my wife's sandwiches for work in the morning. 

My friend who uses one daily swears by a Panasonic bread maker but I was interested to see what other people are using and how they rate it? 

Which would you go for or would you not bother at all?

Amazing Cookies!

One vice I used to have when I went food shopping was to buy those soft American style cookies they'd sell in bags of four for over a pound. I think I've found a recipe that beats them hands down and doesn't contain any of the nasty E numbers (although they have plenty of sugar!).

Ingredients for the cookies:
125g of unsalted butter (I use stork)
50g of granulated sugar
125g of soft brown sugar
150g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
a pinch of salt
1 egg
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

I then add either 150g of rasins, 100g of chocolate or like I did last time 80g of dark chocolate and a handful of dried raspberries (which was amazing)

 Mix all the dry ingredients together, then melt the butter and add the vanilla to it before mixing that in, then add the egg.

 This slightly sloppy mixture is then ready to cook. I normally make 12 cookies out of this mixture. Just dollop 6 blobs each on to two grease proof paper covered baking trays. Leave plenty of space as they tend to spread.

 Then pop into a pre heated oven at 180 degrees and cook for between 8-10 minutes. They should just start to change colour when they're ready, cookies are always better under done than over! They want to still be soft in the middle when they've cooled - I guess the trick is to actually let them cool before you eat them!

 I think from start to finish I can make and cook these in about 15 minutes and that's with a 3 year old "helping" me! They taste amazing, I've been cooking them most weeks and it's a good use of my vanilla extract when it's ready to be used.

What's your favourite cookie recipe?

I Love Faggots!

During the week we had some friends over for tea. One of them had mentioned that she hadn't had faggots since she was a child so I offered to cook some up for them as in the winter it's a meal we regularly have. 

I always bake them in the oven in a really thick onion gravy, made from scratch, flavoured with Worcestershire sauce and balsamic vinegar. We had them served up with lots of mash, carrots and sprouts. Proper winter food and great for a cold night.

For those who don't know what a faggot is, it's a meat ball made form offcuts and offal normally containing heart, liver, fatty belly meat & bacon all minced together and then wrapped in the caul fat. We buy ours from the village butchers as a really cheap and filling meal and I normally do one extra to have cold in a sandwich the next day with pickle. Lovely!

What other cheap meals do you like from the butchers?