Raspberry Coulis and White Chocolate Mousse with Fresh Blackberries

Well. An exciting week here at PDKTC. I've officially submitted my application to study at the renowned school of culinary arts Le Cordon Bleu in London, and I am ecstatic! In tribute to the school I was hoping to cook something blue this week (yes, I know, embarrassingly keen). Unfortunately, as you may or may not know, the edible world is sadly lacking in natural occurrences of the colour blue. In fact, supposedly when Heinz tried making blue ketchup a few years back no-one would eat it because the idea of blue food was just too much to handle. I finally settled on blueberries, which are actually more purple but at least have 'blue' in their name...


Another hiccup became apparent almost immediately. It is emphatically not the British blueberry season - they begin around June, so we're almost as far from last season as we can get. After a gruelling trawl around my local greengrocers and supermarkets, I came up with some rather suspect Mexican-grown raspberries and blackberries (fail on the food miles there). So much for the 'blue' theme. But bear in mind that from June to August this recipe would be delicious with in-season British blueberries in place of the fruit specified here. Please also bear in mind that it's best made the day or at least the morning before your meal.


A final note - in my version, the mousse mixture separated out into two distinct layers as it set in the fridge, a testament to my inaccurate quantities and inability to beat an egg white. However, if this does happen to you, both layers still taste good and in my view it just gives it an extra bit of personality!


On to recipes.


Ingredients
(Makes 3)


Punnet of raspberries
Punnet of blackberries
Large bar (c.200g) good quality white chocolate, broken into small bits - I used Green & Black's
2 eggs, separated
c. 100ml double cream
50g sugar
50ml water


Method


First of all, make the raspberry compote: put about 1/3 of the punnet of rasps into a small pan with the sugar and water. Warm gently, mash the raspberries up a bit, and bring to boil for 5 minutes or so, until the mixture begins to look syrupy. Set aside to cool slightly. Run 3 martini glasses (or wine glasses if you're not the martini type) under hot water, dry, and then divide the raspberry compote evenly between the glasses and refrigerate immediately.


Next, put a slightly larger pan of water on to boil, then lower the heat to a gentle simmer. Put the cream, egg yolks and chocolate into a heatproof bowl which just sits over the top of the simmering water and heat slowly until the chocolate melts, occasionally giving the mixture a very, very gentle stir. As the mixture is melting, whisk the egg whites in a scrupulously clean bowl until very stiff (if they won't stiffen, add a small splash of white wine vinegar and keep trying). When the chocolate mixture is fully combined, fold a small amount of it into the egg whites then fold the egg whites into the rest of the chocolate until completely consistent. 


Take your glasses back out of the fridge and fill each to within 1-2cm of the top with the egg and chocolate mixture. Put back in the fridge overnight, or for as long as you can (at least a few hours).


To serve, gently place or pile the remaining raspberries and blackberries on top of the glasses in a pretty pattern. Enjoy your achievement, it looks great!


...And a sneaky picture with some enormous flowers to distract from the quality of the photography...

Five-Vegetable Pasta Sauce

Hello and welcome back, dear reader. Today, I felt an overwhelming need for vitamins - a quick-fix diet of far too many crisps has left me gasping for something green and crunchy. Solution: a dash to the shops for as many vegetables as I could carry.

This simple, chunky and fresh-tasting sauce goes well with pasta or couscous, can easily be embellished with the herbs or spices of your choice, and, if you eat enough of it, pretty much deals with any 'five-a-day' problems in one easy swoop. As an inveterate carnivore, I added some smoked bacon lardons for that meaty kick, but my vegetarian readers can easily leave these out or replace them with some tofu pieces. Vegan readers, do this and then eat with egg-free pasta or couscous. Don't be overwhelmed by the fairly lengthy list of ingredients - they all go in together very easily, and the veg will only take a few moments to chop, I promise. You can replace any of the vegetables with your own favourites, and you don't even need to stop at five!

I won't include the pasta in the recipe, but some words of advice:

Use about 3 handfuls per person; cook in plenty of boiling water, very well-salted, as directed on the pack; and drain thoroughly before using. Al dente (still with a bit of bite there when you chew it) is the way to go.

Without more ado, then, on to the sauce:

Ingredients
(serves 3-ish)

Around 50g bacon lardons or cubes of pancetta (optional)
3 large spring onions
A good-sized courgette, washed
A medium head of broccoli
A red pepper, or pointed sweet pepper
2 large tomatoes
1tsp tomato puree
1 glass white/pink wine
1 pint tomato passata (or 1 tin chopped tomatoes)
Generous splash of balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Shavings of Grana Padano/Parmesan cheese to garnish

Method

First of all, chop all of your vegetables into pieces (they don't have to be cubes - go with the natural shape of the vegetable) about 1cm square. This does mean cutting your broccoli smaller than you're probably used to, but it makes for a lovely, consistent sauce which is easy to eat.

Next, pop a good-sized frying pan with high sides on a medium heat and add the bacon pieces. You won't need oil - it's got plenty of fat in it already, which will melt as you cook it and lubricate the pan. When the bacon is beginning to brown, add the spring onions and the pepper and allow to cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the rest of the vegetables and the tomato puree, and again cook for a couple of minutes, turning gently to ensure everything is coated with oil and puree.

When all the veg is beginning to cook, add the white wine and let it bubble vigorously for a minute or two, then add the passata and balsamic vinegar. Simmer for ten minutes or so, or while you cook the pasta, then season to taste and serve on top of pasta, garnished with the shavings of cheese.

Note: if you'd like to add any herbs or spices, I suggest you add dry or ground with the onion, and anything fresh and chopped with the passata or right at the end. Some parsley mixed with the cheese shavings would be a great addition to the garnish, the bright green matching the fresh taste of the sauce.

Anyway - if you're ever feeling short of essential vitamins, you know what to do! Enjoy your daily shot of vegetables, folks.

A Lunchtime Puff Pastry Treat

After a long absence (Please Don't Kiss The Cook has been hitting up London!), we're back with a quick but nevertheless wonderful lunch-or-snack-time treat based on puff pastry, which, although a devil to make, is the easiest thing in the world to buy at your local supermarket and doesn't suffer too much from the 'non-homemade' stigma.

This recipe is not only delicious, but benefits from a great deal of flexibility - you can change it up from day to day, making it a fantastic way to keep your lunchtimes varied. The method below is the version I made recently, but I'll give you a few ideas for variations as well.

Ingredients

A dusting of flour
Puff pastry - about a quarter of a standard 'Jusroll' pack
Tomato puree - about a teaspoonful
A red onion, finely sliced
One garlic clove, crushed
A small, ripe tomato, sliced
About 25-50g of the cheese of your choice (I used Taleggio, which may smell like feet but tastes delicious)
A tiny bit of butter or egg wash
Basil to finish (optional, and not with the Taleggio I think)


Method

Preheat your oven to 200 C. Dusting the table and your hands with flour first, roll or press out the puff pastry to about half a centimetre thick, or until it's around 20cm long and 10 thick. Make sure you keep it reasonably well-floured or it'll stick. You can also buy it ready-rolled if you like. At the same time, sweat the onions and garlic in a small frying pan and allow them to begin to turn golden at the edges.

Now lay your pastry flat and cover with the tomato puree, leaving an edge of at least one centimetre all around. Top with the onion, tomato, and cheese. Wash the pastry edges with a little melted butter or egg. Bake for 10-15 minutes in a hot oven until the pastry has risen and turned golden brown, and the cheese is bubbling. Finish with chopped basil if using. Delicious hot or cold, and lovely with a salad.


Some Variations

You can see how easy the basic method here would be to vary - it's sort of a high-class pizza, and enjoys the same breadth of variation. Just don't insult it with plain tomato puree and cheddar cheese. It's worth more.

Here are a couple of ideas:

Goat's cheese: Cut out the tomato and tomato puree, and use caramelised onions instead of plain red onion. Replace the taleggio with goat's cheese. Top with a little chopped thyme, and serve with a cherry tomato salad.

A fresher option: Leave the tomato and half of the cheese out of the basic recipe (use cheddar or similar, not blue cheese here), and top the finished tartlet with fresh ripe tomatoes, chopped and tossed with torn basil, balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and a sprinkling of torn-up fresh mozzarella.

Salad-on-a-pastry-plate: Use olive oil, rosemary and crushed garlic instead of the puree, and leave out the rest. Bake like this, then top with lightly dressed rocket salad, cherry tomatos, slices of cured beef (bresaola), and shavings of really good quality grana padano.

Meatier Munch:  Sprinkle with some crispy-fried pancetta or some thin slices of cooked chicken before topping with the cheese and baking.

Experimenting with herbs: It's definitely not just basil you can involve here. Some chopped parsley rarely goes amiss for a garnish, a bit of tarragon would be lovely with the tomatoes (you could even sprinkle a tiny bit of tarragon vinegar on before the cheese), thyme or rosemary are both an option. Go wild.

Puddin': Why not? Puff pastry is just as much a dessert as a savoury taste. Try strawberries, honey and a dash of lemon juice to bake, with a dollop of creme fraiche to finish. Or, even naughtier, some very good quality dark chocolate and a generous sprinkling of chopped nuts. Eat sparingly!


So there you are, food fans. Fun with puff pastry. Incidentally, smaller versions of this recipe can make a nice canape idea, as the pastry base makes them easy to grab with a drink in the other hand. Just be sure to make them bitesize!

Creamy Spinach and Smoky Pancetta Soup

A simple and delicious soup (if I do say so myself). Dad always has soup for lunch, and a couple of days ago - shock! - we had run out of the usual 'Covent Garden' style stuff. Well, no worries, because it's not too hard to knock up a soup from a reasonably stocked fridge. Ours wasn't bulging, but it did contain some spinach and industrial quantites of smoked pancetta. Bingo.

Your basic soup method is pretty consistent. Cook all the meat/vegetables, involved, add some sort of liquid, usually stock and perhaps some cream or creme fraiche, simmer, liquidise, and (if necessary) strain. Exceptions are things like broths and chowders, which need a very good quality stock and are not liquidised. But for the minute our focus is on the classic 'vegetable soup with some sneaky meat involved'. This, incidentally, is not what the French call it.

Without too much fuss, then, we'll get on to recipes. The only other thing to bear in mind is that in this recipe the bulk of the spinach - which is to say the stringy bits - is sieved out before the end, so there will be less soup than you'd think.

Ingredients
(for 2)

Knob of butter
50g smoked pancetta (or use smoked streaky bacon)
Large bunch fresh spinach (one supermarket bag, or equivalent. Use frozen if you need to, but please defrost and thoroughly drain first, and bear in mind cooking time will be reduced)
Glass of white wine
200ml chicken stock, or more if necessary
50-100ml of cream or creme fraiche, depending on your calorie wants!
Salt, pepper
Generous grating of nutmeg


Method

Simple. Melt your butter in a medium pan and cook the pancetta until golden brown/crispy. Add the spinach and the white wine, and cook until the spinach has wilted. Add the warm stock.

Liquidise by whatever means available and strain thoroughly (you have to be tough with it. Knock it about a bit with a spoon).

Return to the pan and stir in the cream or creme fraiche. Season to your taste. Incidentally, nutmeg is always a winner with spinach - if you're serving it as a vegetable side dish, a grating of nutmeg on top brings out a whole new range of flavours.

This is a lovely soup, almost game-y in its combination of earthy spinach and smokey pancetta. Even if you're not the biggest spinach fan, I do urge you to give this a try.

Kedgeree

Hello and welcome back, dear reader. I've had a few requests for a recipe for kedgeree, so I knocked some up last week and I'll give you my usual exciting and informative instructions below. Incidentally, if anyone else has a request for a recipe/something you would enjoy hearing me fail to cook, you can always leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @roseblackettord. I'm always open to suggestions.

On to some kedgeree chat.

Traditionally thought of as a breakfast dish, and especially as an element of that great old English institution, the Country House Breakfast, kedgeree also makes a great simple supper. Like the kipper, its days of regular early-morning appearances are, for the most part, a thing of the past; nevertheless, its creamy combination of rice and fish is not something that should be allowed to slip away into the mists of time. Hence, this recipe, along with the recommendation that you give kedgeree a chance on your supper table. One final added bonus? It's brilliant for using up leftover fish - one of those 'leftovers' recipes which gives the sad remains a whole new lease of life.

Ingredients
(for 3)

250g fish - almost any kind/combination. It should be cooked (cover with milk and water in a pan, bring to the boil then allow to cool). A combination of smoked/fresh often works well. Smoked salmon is nice too, and a few prawns won't go amiss.
100g rice - basmati or long-grained.
2 eggs - hardboiled (immerse in boiling water for 12-15 minutes, allow to cool) and shelled.
Double cream - 1/2 a small pot, c.70ml
Butter - a chunk
Chopped herbs - about 2 tbs altogether. Parsley and chives are good. Dill would work too. You can also substitute spring onion for chives.
Salt, pepper, cayenne pepper - pinch of each

Method

First of all, make sure the fish and eggs are all ready and cooked. Run the eggs under cold water to cool, then remove the shells and chop them into medium-sized chunks.

Cook the rice according to the instructions on your packet, then drain, run some cold water over it, and drain again. While the rice is cooking, make sure any skin and bones are removed from the fish and gently separate it into bitesize pieces.

Now for the quick putting-together bit, which you can normally do just before you eat. Melt the butter in a pan, and add the cream and chopped herbs. Leave over the heat. When it begins to bubble, add the fish, rice and egg and stir gently until all is evenly combined (try not to break up the chunks of fish too much if you can avoid it). Season to your own taste with the salt, pepper, and cayenne. Eat with green vegetables and hot buttered toast.

A lovely supper which can be pre-prepared and put together at the last minute. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.

Magical Banana Cake

I say 'magical', because this is the easiest piece of baking I have ever had the pleasure to undertake.


Let me just get on the record here and say that I. Absolutely. Love. Banana. Cake. 


Seriously.


I very rarely get the chance to eat it, because its not something we tend to make at home. The two times I had it before today were once in Scotland after a long day's walking, when I felt like it warmed all my insides up at once; and once at tea with a friend when I'm pretty sure I ate at least half a whole cake. Scrummy. And today, well, I saw four slightly sad-looking bananas sitting on their own in a bowl, ostracised from the big fruit bowl where the oranges and apples and grapes all squatted looking snide (bananas in your fruit bowl make other fruit go bad faster). And I thought, what joy those bananas will bring to the world when I make them into CAKE.


There's something about the texture of a banana cake that just sets it apart. Not for you the slightly crumbly fluffiness of the average sponge. Your cake is heavy and moist - a word which is often reviled but which here means wonderful things. Your cake is solid and satisfying and easy to bake. Your cake quite possibly counts as one of your five fruit and vegetable portions a day.


Enough chatter. On to the recipe. Munch on this one with hot cup of tea in the middle of the afternoon and, as with the cookies, make sure you take your first bite when it's still warm from the oven.


Ingredients
(Makes one loaf-sized cake)

170g each of:  
Caster or demerara sugar 
Self-raising flour 
Butter, cut into small chunks

2 bananas, cut into chunks
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence (NOT extract, as usual)


Method

Behold! The easiest baking method in the history of man. Ladies and gentlemen, if it wasn't for the hot oven and the blades, a five year old could do this standing on its head.


Grease a small cake tin or a standard-sized cake tin. Pre-heat your oven to 160 C. 


Put all ingredients in your blender or food mixer. Mix/blend until totally combined and consistent (takes 5 mins or so). Put in cake tin. Put cake tin in oven. Wait one hour. Take out, cool, munch. 


Boom. Banana cake. Do It Now.

Cookie?

More baking! My brother is going back to school today after his half term. Poor little feller. So I've baked him some cookies to take with him, because that's just the kind of fantastic big sister I am. Being 17, 6'1'', and probably too old for cookies, he's supremely ungrateful, but I've baked them anyway, because I love cookies.


A cookie can come in almost any shape, size or consistency, from those huge American-style ones, still soft and slightly gooey in the middle, to the medium or small English versions which are hard and crumbly all over. To my mind, only the former merits the title - the latter are really just chocolate-chip biscuits, and would probably be better off replaced by some proper shortbread. This recipe is best for American cookies, therefore, but if you must make English ones (*shudder*), just put them on the baking tray in slightly smaller quantities (teaspoon instead of dessert spoon, say) and bake for 10-12 minutes instead of 8-10.


Ingredients
(makes 18-20 big ones)


225g light brown or demerara sugar (or a mixture is fine)
200g caster sugar
250g butter
Few drops vanilla extract (NOT essence, leave it out if you've only got essence)
2 large eggs, whisked
1 tsp baking powder, one tsp bicarbonate of soda
375g plain flour
Salt (just a pinch)
200g good quality dark chocolate


Method


First of all, pre-heat your oven so your cookies actually cook later. 180 degrees, which is around gas mark 4. Line more baking trays than you think you need (about 3) with greaseproof or silicone baking paper.


Now, chop your butter into little bits and cream it with both types of sugar. As I said when we made brownies, this can either be quick and a bit boring in the food processor, or slow but satisfying by hand in a bowl. Either way, when the mixture is very light, creamy and paler than it was, add the whisked eggs and vanilla extract and beat them in, then put the rest of the ingredients bar the choclate through a sieve and fold them in. 


Chop, bash, or (at a pinch) food process your chocolate into uneven chips, flakes and lumps, then mix them evenly through the cookie dough. Plop heaped dessert-spoonfuls onto your baking trays, absolute max 6 per tray. Leave them plenty of room to spread out, remember how big American cookies are! Stick them in the oven for 8-10 minutes, or until the dough has all melted and flattened out into cookies shapes and the tops are just starting to be golden. If The dough looks mushy still don't worry. 

Leave them on the baking trays until they are cool enough to touch, then transfer to wire racks. Eat the first ones while they're still a bit warm!


Other Things To Put In Your Cookies


Most flavourings go in at the same time as or instead of the chocolate chips. Any spices or ground things go in with the flour etc. Liquids go in with the eggs, and not too much of them or the dough will be runny.

• Glace or dried sour cherries
• Dried cranberries
• Raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, all berries...
• Milk or white chocolate chips
• Nuts - pecans are great, but also walnuts, peanuts, macademias are fantastic.
• Cinnamon
• Mixed spice (tastes like Christmas)
• Ground ginger
• Raisins or sultanas, dried peel
• Pieces of toffee or fudge
• Small marshmallows (the kind you put in hot chocolate)
• Finely chopped lavender flowers (for a very delicate and sophisticated taste)
• Very fintely grated citrus peel - lemon, lime, orange, etc.
• Chunks of caramelised orange from marmalade
• Cocoa powder and melted chocolate (in with the eggs for the latter) for a brown chocolate cookie
• Banana slices
• A spoonful of golden syrup
• Oats
• Stem ginger
• Chopped nougat
• Chopped chocolate bars - Mars, Snickers, whatever's your favourite.
• A combination of any of the above...experiment!

If anyone thinks of some crazy combinations or just wants to tell everyone how your cookies worked out, post a comment and let us know!


Have fun cookie-ing!