Gnocchi!

A few weeks ago while in Carlow, I went to the fabulous restaurant "Mimosa Tapas & Wine Bar". Gnocchi was on the tapas menu, and we ordered some. My daughter absolutely loved them and was amazed to learn that I had made them before (though bizarrely not in her lifetime). I promised that the next time we had leftover mashed potatoes I would make gnocchi. Gnocchi are essentially a potato pasta. The ingredients are simple: mashed potato, egg, flour, pepper and nutmeg.

Mix the ingredients together. I have not measured anything. Spices are to taste, and the flour amount really is just according to how much mashed potato you have. I have only ever used one egg; I have only ever used leftover mash. Basically add flour so that it's a dough.

Roll dough into snakes on a floured surface.

Cut into shapes -- again I don't measure -- but these are about 1-1.5 cm. Dimple the shape with your finger and put on a floured plate.

Gnocchi are a dumpling pasta. Put in boiling water; they sink immediately but then rise to the surface when they are ready (a few seconds later).

Have a collander ready over a bowl and remove gnocchi with a slotted spoon.

Prepare an oven dish with some olive oil, and transfer gnocchi to it, shaking around a bit so that they get some olive oil on them. I always add a bit more olive oil over the top of the gnocchi and then some grated parmesan and ground pepper.

Bake for about 15 minutes.

Serve with whatever you normally eat with any pasta. Last time I made gnocchi I served with melanzane alla parmesana, but bacon & broccoli & chilli peppers with pesto (in this case, wild garlic pesto) is one of my favourite pasta accompaniments. Delicious!

Wild Garlic Pesto

We thought it is normally not out till May, but my husband thought he saw some wild garlic by a roadside a few weeks ago, so this afternoon he and our daughter went for some shinrinyoku in Knocksink Woods in Enniskerry (unfortunately I am having foot problems so had to skip going for a walk). Sure enough, the forest floor has started greening with it. Lots of buds, so their season is at the beginnings.

Regardless, there were plenty of flowers, and all parts of this wild garlic plant are edible. The flowers are a sweet and subtle garlic, the stems and leaves are like a garlicky chive. The leaves would be a bit fibrous to eat on their own I think, but processed in a pesto they are absolutely fine.

I grated the parmesan and set aside, then looked in my cupboard for the nuts. I used brazil nuts and some pre-shelled unsalted pistacchios that I had. Normally I use unsalted cashews, but have also used walnuts in a pinch (a bit of a stronger, woodier flavour) and of course, the classic pine nuts. Whatever nuts are used should be unsalted so that the final flavour is not falsified.

After a quick rinse of the wild garlic, bend the leaves and stems to fit in the processor.

Add some grated parmesan and olive oil.

Whizz of course, adding more ingredients (depending on the size of your processsor).

Consistency of the finished pesto is entirely by preference. Amount of ingredients is entirely to one's own taste (i.e. -- if you love cheese, add more! if you want it to be really green, add more leaves, etc).

More Christmas Cooking - Gingerbread Cookies!

Back in 1999 I returned to Canada for the last xmas and new year's of the 20th century, spending two weeks with my sister-in-law's family in snowy Prince George, BC. Arriving a few days before xmas, my husband and I had the opportunity to help out with the decoration of the gingerbread cookies. We thought the cookies were so delicious and the family evening so much fun that we decided that gingerbread cookies would from then on be part of our annual tradition too. Though we no longer try to decorate the cookies individually (for instance, transforming the gingerbread ladies into a recognisably Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield) we still enjoy the tradition and take pride in our creations! This recipe has been tried annually and remains true.

6 cups self-raising flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder

4 tsp ground ginger, 4 tsp cinnamon, 1 1/2 tsp ground clove, 1 tsp salt

1 cup butter (NB for some reason the past 2 years we have added an extra 2 oz butter as the mix seemed dryer than usual); 1 cup dark brown sugar (packed)

2 large eggs, 1 cup molasses (or treacle) 

First mix dry ingredients in a large bowl.

In a separate large bowl mix butter and brown sugar.

 

Creaming until fluffy...

Add eggs and molasses

Gradually add dry ingredients to wet mix, 

stirring after each dry addition.

Divide mixture and form into several balls.

Wrap in cling film (Saran Wrap) and refrigerate for an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 F/180 C. Roll out dough on floured surface and cut into shapes.

We use dinosaur cutters as well as Winnie-the-Pooh and traditional xmas cutters. Make the most of the rolled dough! Bake 8-10 mins.

Cool cookies -

- before decorating! The icing I use for decorating is a simple glace - icing sugar mixed with a bit of boiled water and various food colourings. I use sandwich bags with a tiny corner cut as decorating bags (discard when finished). This recipe makes well over 100 cookies (I think I counted 180 this year) depending on the sizes of your cutters. Store in a cookie tin or freeze some for later. They are great holiday treats but we also include them with our xmas gifts.

Christmas Cooking - Cranberry Clementine Conserve with Brazil Nuts

I have been very busy with college work, so am behind in my annual Christmas cooking. But finally, last weekend I got started when I saw that cranberries were available in the grocery. At this point I no longer follow the original recipe, but do everything by eye. However, if you have never made this before, follow the recipe and then make your own adjustments for flavour, sweetness, yield, etc. So here is the recipe:

3 clementines, 1 lemon

1.75 -2 cups water

6 cups cranberries (2 standard packages)

3 3/4 cups sugar

1 cup chopped Brazil nuts

I used 3 x 250 g pkgs this year. It helps to spread the berries on a cookie sheet and pick through them, discarding badly blemished and/or mushy berries. My rule of food: if it doesn't look like you'd be happy to pop it into your mouth, you don't want it in your cooking.

It's easy to just pop berries that you're happy with into a bowl of water to give them a little wash.

This year I used between 100-125 g of Brazil nuts, and just gave them a quick whizz in the food processor to chop them finely. Put in a bowl and set aside.

 It's easiest to peel the lemon and clementines before juicing. Cut the zest finely in slivers. Juice the citrus fruit and set aside.

The citrus zest slivers are added to the water in a heavy bottom cooking pot. Cover pot and cook over low heat for about an hour. Check on pot during this time as the water should not be boiling madly, but simmering and you don't want the water to boil away.

Add the cranberries and cook gently. Berries will start "popping" after about 20 minutes; stir regularly and you can help them get jammy by squishing them with a wooden spoon.

Stir in the nuts.

Add juice and sugar and bring to a rolling boil, stirring constantly until conserve thickens. A tip I got somewhere years ago is to warm the sugar before adding to jams. I do this by putting into a bowl and sitting it in the top part of the oven (in Ireland the grill part, not turned on, but getting the heat from the main oven which is sterilising the jars).

There are different ways of sterilising jars. After washing and rinsing, I bake my jars for at least 20 mins at 200 C. Primarily I am using standard jam and mason jars that I brought with me from Canada, so the lids are being sterilised by boiling for at least 5 mins while I am doing everything else. Another tip: only add a small bit of hot conserve to hot jars at first to ensure that the glass doesn't crack. When it is apparent the glass is not going to break, fill jar leaving some headspace and seal using matching lid. If using recycled jars and paraffin, let the conserve cool a bit before pouring in wax; twirl jar a bit so that wax crawls up the sides of the opening, creating a full seal.

The yield for the recipe above is about 6 fancy jam jars. The one with the tin foil, is actually a larger jar, so I would have had 6+ jars. As a matter of fact, I used more berries than the recipe called for and I could have added more water than I did, which would have increased my yield. I have found that I can add more water and the conserve sets pretty well, though the colour can lose some of its intensity. This batch that I made last weekend is quite thick, but still spreadable. It is quite tasty and tart -- a fantastic accompaniment to turkey and turkey leftovers in sambos (mmm, toasties!) but I have also given this conserve as gifts to vegetarians, it is wonderful on toast too, just used as a jam.

Hallowe'en!

As well as all the excitement of carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns every October,

it is the season for me to take out last year's pumpkin mush from the freezer and make a few batches of muffins. These get decorated as jack-o-lanterns too and get sent into school and/or Girl Guides with my daughter for her and her friends. If I have enough mush, I can make additional batches of muffins for sharing around elsewhere.

So after Hallowe'en night, the carved pumpkins get chopped and peeled and cut up into small cubes or rectangles.

A large orange (or several small ones or clementines) and a lemon are peeled and juiced. The juice and a tiny bit of water are added to the pot of pumpkin cubes (the pumpkin release a lot of water when cooking). The peel is cut into slivers

and added to the pot. Cook this gently on low-medium heat, stirring periodically, in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan.

When all the pumpkin is cooked, it is soft enough to be mashed. Tilt the pot a bit to see how much liquid there is; if there is a lot of liquid, raise the heat to boil some of it off,

The pumpkin mush needs to be moist in order to give moisture and flavour to future pumpkin muffins. I will give the recipe for the muffins in another post, but if you can't wait, use pumpkin mush in the same recipes that you use for carrot cake or banana bread. Compare the picture below to the picture above to get an idea of how much liquid should not be left in the final mush.

I packed the mush into equal size freezer bags. In the past I have used weights of 350 g and 500 g, which also work fine in my recipes for muffins, and also in pumpkin pie (I'll give a recipe for that in a future post too). So it is a little bit random that these packs are 450 g but I figured it was a reasonable amount when I was packing and weighing. I put the 3 bags of mush into an additional freezer bag but will only use one bag at a time. One bag of mush will happily be used in a recipe that makes about 5 dozen small muffins or 2 pies.

Happy Christmas!

The Irish Times had a competition about Christmas baubles, and after we did the tree decorating, I entered this picture. My Mum had given me the pink ball, along with a number of other family decorations, when she and my Dad returned to Ireland in 1983. She had initially received the decoration from her Mum when she emigrated to Canada in 1958 and remembers the decoration from her own childhood -- it has certainly stood the test of time! I brought the decoration with me in 1993 when I firmly moved to Ireland myself and it has been on my tree annually since then. I didn't win the competition, but must have been a runner-up as my picture and blurb were printed in the newspaper on Monday with only a few of the other entries.

Every time I bake something for xmas, I think it is the last thing I have to bake. My traditions though seem to never end! Yesterday I made the butter tarts, which have become an annual taste event for a few years now.

As if we don't have enough Christmas traditions in our house, I have watched a number of candy cane making videos and am seriously thinking of co-opting this as a tradition for future years! I thought this video particularly good as it gave the recipe and the woman is making them in a regular kitchen. They are truly home made!

"Ingredients: (this made 15 decent size candy canes, filled one jar with small candies, and still had some left over)

700g sugar
300g glucose syrup (corn syrup)
1/3 - 1/2 cup of water
1 teaspoon of cream of tartar (can be left out if you can't find it)
1-2 teaspoons of peppermint extract/essence
Red food colouring

Will keep for a couple of days. Keep away from humid spots. I stored mine in the fridge :) "

Happy Christmas and a Healthy & Safe New Year!

Pre-Christmas Cooking!

While technically I began my xmas cooking in September, as I made quite a bit of damson chutney and knew I would be giving some of it away, the idea of xmas cooking really begins when I start the puddings - once Hallowe'en is over and done with. My husband was also decanting the plum liqueur around this time, so with all the leftover fruit, I made a few jars of plum vodka jam. The alcohol cooks off, but there is a nice bitter flavour left, which makes the jam more like a marmalade.

Two large and two small finished puddings. We always have a pudding for my husband's birthday (Dec 8) instead of cake.

Before the end of November I made the annual tried and true apricot-pineapple with almonds jam. A couple of them will be wrapped and given away.

Quite a lot of damson liqueur was made, the by-product being lots of alcoholic fruit. Since the plum vodka jam was very tasty, I knew exactly what to do with the leftover fruit! Again, some of this will be given away at Christmas!

There was a teacher's strike day on Dec 2, which was great timing for us as we had our family day of making gingerbread cookies. We decorated them the next day and sorted out everyone's rations!:)

I was thinking that the cranberry clementine with brazil nuts was the last pre-xmas item on my list...

...but then I remembered I had to make the custard to go with the birthday pudding (and put some in the freezer for New Year's). Since egg whites don't go into custard, they are used to make coconut maccaroons, an annual Christmas treat that stays at home!