Mabel Murple's Purple Maple Syrple

Mabel Murple ordered breakfast

She had purple eggs on toast

And when she ordered dinner

She had purple short rib roast

Mabel Murple cooked a supper

Murple’s super duper purple stew

It was served with purple ketchup

And Mabel’s maple syrple too!

(Mabel Murple’s purple maple syrple!)

  -Sheree Fitch, Mabel Murple

One of our favourite books of late has been Mabel Murple. Whether it is Sheree Fitch’s infectious rhyme, Sydney Smith’s perfectly purple illustrations or the simple fact that they get to shout, ‘UNDERWEAR’ at the end, the girls love it. If we miss reading it one day, it is read twice the next. 

One day, during an early morning reading, the breakfast demands were made. They didn’t just want pancakes, they wanted them with Purple Maple Syrple. So, donning my indulgent mother cap, I leapt out of bed and got on with it.

You can buy this stuff in stores. It usually comes in tiny bottles. Around here they are often tied with Nova Scotia tartan ribbon which, maybe, is supposed to make it okay to pay THAT MUCH for 100mL of syrup. We go through this stuff, and maple syrup generally, by the bucketload. For us, this proves a little more economical despite missing the ribbon. And, you can make it in about as much time as it takes to whip up a batch of pancakes anyway. (I think I can feel the wrath of the value-added maple syrup industry coming down on me now)

This was some time ago, blueberries weren’t quite in season and I was still in the midst of using up the frozen winter’s berry stash. You can easily use fresh, the last of them are still trickling through markets, and I have since. Still perfectly purple.

Mabel Murple’s Purple Maple Syrple inspired by Mabel Murple written by Sheree Fitch

2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen, washed and de-stemmed, preferably)

2 cups maple syrup

Bring the berries to a boil over low to medium heat. Don’t let them burn. Add the maple syrup and return to a boil.

Strain through a sieve, pressing to extract all the liquid. Or, leave it chunky if you don’t mind the bits.

Serve over pancakes, french toast, waffles, porridge, ice cream, yogurt...

Allow to cool before refrigerating in a clean, dry container.

Rhubarb Chutney - Rhubarb Trilogy 2011 Part III

This post could easily have been called God’s Gift to Grilled Cheese. It isn’t though. That would mean that I think that chutney is just for grilled cheese sandwiches. I don’t. However, I do believe that grilled cheese sandwiches with chutney are one of the best things ever.

It is rhubarb time, as you know. It gets to the end of rhubarb season and, while I really, really love rhubarb, I start to wonder what to do with it besides making ice cream, crumble, sorbet, roasting it, making cheesecake with it, chopping it up and putting it in the freezer and so on.

This recipe makes just four cups but you could easily double or triple it if your canning and preserving sense has kicked in this early in the green season. If, like me, your’s hasn’t, this will keep in the fridge for at least a month. And, since it is barbecue season as well, you should have it used up in no time since you will need something for all those chops and sausages.

This is very uncomplicated and I wanted to keep the rhubarb taste there, as much as you can in a chutney anyway. I almost started adding some orange zest and cinnamon and stopped myself because this is summer chutney. We can talk about heavier, spicier chutneys at the end of the green season, right? 

This has a tiny bit of heat and a decent ginger kick. You could nicely freshen it up with some fresh cilantro/coriander and a little squeeze of lime just as you put it on the table with your grilled offering. With cheese, or grilled cheese, is it good just as it is.

Rhubarb Chutney

5 cups chopped rhubarb

2 cups diced onion

2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger

1 teaspoon ground coriander seed

1/4 teaspoon dried chili 

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

1 cup cider vinegar

Put all ingredients in a large pot. Slowly bring to a boil.

Reduce to a simmer. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the mixture has thickened and the liquid stops running in to the spoon tracks when you stir. This should take about 40 minutes.

Towards the end of the cooking, as the chutney thicken, you will need to stir more often.

Remove from heat and transfer to clean, dry jars. If you are ‘putting it up,’ you should process the jars in your canner for about ten minutes.

Your grilled cheese will never be the same again.

Seeded Brown Irish Soda Bread

While at work, my husband has the privilege of being cooked for and cleaned up after. There is a lovely Irish girl who keeps him from withering away. Her name is Janine.

From time to time, the girls and I are lucky enough to share the privilege with him. Janine puts up with my children under foot and the forty-six questions that get fired at her about exactly what ingredients are going where and why the stove moves and why the fridge doors are so heavy and why the galley is called the galley and how come she has to cook for the boys and why the bread needs to cook for an hour and why she chose to paint her toenails that colour and if she is going to wear a pretty dress later on and well, you get the idea. She not only puts up with them, she does so patiently and calmly and sweetly in moments when I would have lost any shred of cool I may possess by question four.

She made us some soda bread for lunch one day. Poppy and I decided we would try and reproduce her delicious loaf. We tried and it was good but I am thinking it may need an Irish hand to be as delicious as hers was. For the rest of us this will do just fine to be sure.

I toasted the sesame seeds and pine nuts and cooled them before adding because they taste even better that way.  The seed/nut combination is up to you. You could add pumpkin seeds or chopped nuts or whatever you feel like.

Don’t forget to cut a cross in the top which is not a religious symbol - I had thought it was. Janine says it just helps it rise evenly.

Seeded Brown Irish Soda Bread (adapted from Janine’s adaptation of Rachel Allen’s Brown Soda Bread in Bake)

225 grams (8 ounces) whole wheat flour

225 grams (8 ounces) all purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

100 grams mixed seeds (I used sunflower, poppy, pine nuts and sesame seeds)

25 grams (1 ounce) butter

1 egg beaten

375-400 mL buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425º (220ºc). 

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Rub the butter in to the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center.

Whisk the egg and buttermilk together and pour most of the liquid into the dry ingredients. Using your hand like a scoop, bring the flour and liquid together, adding more liquid if necessary. The dough should be soft an not too sticky.

Turn out and bring dough into a round on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Cut a deep cross in the top of round.

Bake for 15 minutes. Turn heat down to about 390º (200ºc) and bake for another 30 minutes. The loaf will sound hollow when it is done.

Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Cornmeal Biscuits or, My Story of Late

Last week, I was bemoaning my recent lack of kitchen enthusiasm. I had made some biscuits, but I didn’t want to post about it because I had posted some other biscuits not so long ago. Then, today, the girls and I made some more biscuits, because we love them and Cook’s Illustrated said they were really good, so we had to. The whole time I was thinking that I should be making something I could write about without making you all think we eat nothing but butter and flour with a bit of stuff to hold it together.

Then, I started thinking about what Denae at The Back Ordered Life said on the weekend. She said you should always write about what you know, you should write your story. And, while I know that I am using this pretty literally, right now I know all about biscuits. All sorts of biscuits, all sorts of fluffy, light and airy little puffs of buttery carb. They are a part of my story. If you make these, they could be part of your story. And, a fine story it will be.

I rarely happen upon a cornmeal based recipe I think I would enjoy. I am not a cornbread lover, most are too sweet. For the same sugary reason, I don’t care for cornmeal muffins. If something looks savoury enough, I may give it a go, but usually not to wind up raving about it. This little number from Cook's Illustrated looked just like the thing I needed to change my mind about cornmeal bakery plus, they are biscuits.

It was raining here. In the rest of the world, one would put on a slicker and brave the elements. This is Southern California, and I was doing like the locals do and chose to act as though a category three hurricane was upon us. Or, you could argue, I had found the perfect excuse to stay in my pyjamas and not brush my hair, let alone actually get in the shower.

All this to say that the recipe calls for buttermilk, I didn’t have any and, although the nearest shop is 100 metres away, I wasn’t going there. I used the old tablespoon of lemon juice in the milk trick and it seems to have worked a treat.

The good person at Cook’s Illustrated, Cali Rich, says to knead the biscuit dough 8-10 times before patting it out. I did not do this, which was fine. However, I did notice that those last biscuits that I cut from the scraps that were smushed back together in a kneadish kind of manner were a little fluffier than the ones cut from the unsmushed dough. So, if you want to knead your dough a few times, I think it would be a good thing. If, like me today, you can’t spare the extra nine seconds it will take, then don’t knead. I leave it up to you.

The other thing the girls and I discovered about these little lovelies I was planning on having for supper is that warm from the oven and drizzled with honey, it is almost impossible not to want to make these a frequent part of your breakfast, lunch and tea time story.

Cornmeal Biscuits adapted from Spring Entertaining from Cook’s Illustrated (makes 12)

1 1/4 cups whole milk

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 cup cornmeal (avoid coarsely ground)

1 tablespoon honey

2 cups all purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

12 tablespoons (3/4 cup) cold salted butter cut into 1/2-inch pieces

Preheat oven to 450º.

Whisk milk and lemon juice together in a large bowl. Let stand until thickened, about ten minutes. Add honey and cornmeal, whisk together. Let stand ten minutes again.

In the bowl of a food processor add flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda and pulse to combine. Add butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. 

Add the flour mixture to the cornmeal mixture. Stir until a dough forms.

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and if you are kneading, knead. Otherwise, pat dough out to about 3/4-inch thickness. Cut into 2 1/2-inch rounds with a cutter or a floured glass or cup. Place on baking sheet.

Bake for 5 minutes, reduce heat to 400º and bake for a further 8-10 minutes.

Let cool for a few minutes on baking sheet before you devour them all.

An Unrecipe

I made something the other day. I have been debating whether to post it or not. It isn't nice. It was pretty but not nice. It was delicious but not nice. Even as I write these words, I wonder whether I should do it or not. I have been lucky enough to be spending the last few months in a seasonless oasis. But, I have decided, if things like this make their way into my market basket, there is little i can do but share it. Throwing caution to the wind, I am going to post this. Not in a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah way. In a please enjoy and share and remember there is only five more weeks of winter.

***

You don't need a recipe to make hash. It is a pretty simple thing. It can be made plain or fancy. It can be eaten any time of day. It fits every meal.

You take some potatoes and onions and sauté them. You add some meat or fish or, in this case, beautiful green goodness and you sauté it a little more. Add some green onions near the end of the cooking time, almost no matter what kind of hash you are making.If you are want to get carried away, you can top it off with something. It would be the rare combination that a soft poached egg wouldn't suit. Poppy and Stephen think bacon is pretty nice too. Tilly even eats the green bits, but only because they are covered in egg yolk.

Anyway you put it together, it is simple and good and wholesome. It makes you feel good and cozy and that is important.

Rainbow Bread Pudding (almost)

The other day, over at sweet salty, Kate said I was all rainbowy. Well, not me exactly, but my house. And, I am pretty sure she was referring to what we eat and not how we decorate. At least I hope that is what she was saying. 

Well, just as she was saying that, I went and posted this. Then I read what she said and felt all embarrassed and immediately wanted to post something cleaner and brighter, more orange and green, good for the body as well as the stuck in the depths of February soul.

Problem was, we were in no fit state for contact with the general public. We were at the stage of the cold when trying to wipe away the green nasal discharge (am I really talking about this in a post about food? Yes, but I am going to blame it on the fever.) creates shrieking one could easily associate with murder by chainsaw. That and the fact that I could not bring myself to put pants, and by pants I mean trousers, on let alone shoes, jacket, find the car keys (yes, I know the supermarket in less than a block away), load two children into their car seats, etc, etc. This meant that we were cooking with what we had.

We get squash in our CSA, and while I don’t dislike the lovely little orbs, I don’t love them either. It takes a bit of motivation for me to get excited about cooking them up into something good. Luckily, Kate had asked for orange, and since I had a few of these little pumpkin cousins sitting around here, I could do orange.

I could do green, well I guess it is greeny white but greenish anyway. I had some leeks and green onions. I had a slightly stale loaf of bread that hadn’t become the sandwiches it was meant to because preschool and picnics had been called off. While the bread is not very rainbowy, it would have to do for all of the reasons mentioned above.

A one dish, casserole kind of supper was pretty appealing. I couldn’t think to manage getting more than one thing on the table at the same time. Throwing all of my found, and by found I mean rescued from the depths of the refrigerator, ingredients together seemed like the best thing to do. Adding eggs and cheese, I had a Kabocha and Leek Bread Pudding, fodder for the Februariest of souls.

The kabocha can be replaced by any squash you like or have to hand. I chose this one from our ever-amassing collection because it is so niftily neat and easy to peel. I used some myzithra cheese here but, on a higher energy day, when I felt like leaving the house to get some, I may just have chucked it full of little blobs of goat cheese. You could easily substitute some feta as well.

All of this to say that despite feeling like a small person is sanding away at the inside of my throat, I am now challenged to be as colourful as I can be, in the kitchen anyway. So, thank you Kate for the kick in the pants. Unless, of course, you really were speaking of our decorating aesthetic. In which case, please disregard the above.

Kabocha and Leek Bread Pudding (this should handily feed 8)

4 cups peeled, seeded and cubed squash

2 teaspoons olive oil

3 large leeks washed and sliced (about 2 cups)

1 large onion chopped

3 cloves garlic

2 teaspoons olive oil

5 cups cubed french bread (a round boule, a couple of days old is perfect)

4 green onions chopped

1 cup cream

1 1/2 cup milk

6 eggs

1/2 cup myzithra cheese grated

1/2 teaspoon salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Butter a large baking dish.

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Sauté the squash in the first two teaspoons of olive oil over low heat until it is tender. It is packed full of natural sugars, so make sure it doesn’t burn. Browned is okay, burnt is not. Remove from heat.

Sauté the leeks, onions and garlic in the second two teaspoons of olive oil until soft. Remove from heat.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the cream, milk, eggs and salt and pepper.

In the baking dish, mix together the bread, squash, leek mixture, green onions, cheese and egg mixture. Press the bread down a bit to make sure everything is soaked with the egg mixture.

Bake for 40 minutes.

Enjoy with some sautéed greens or salad or, if you must, some bacon.

Grapefruit Guacamole

We got some avocados the other day. Despite being local, they were hard as hard things. I explained to Poppy, our resident guacamole La Jefa, that there would be no guacamole for a couple of days because of the state of the avocados. She, of course, forgot that somewhere in the midst of asking the next eighteen rapid fire questions in our daily never-stopping, seven-to-seven barrage of questions, forty-two minute songs and general, but demanding response, chit chat and she was was pissed when we got home and she couldn’t make guacamole.

Everybody had posted this, and we had also bought some grapefruits, so I suggested that we make our take on that but no, ‘if I can’t make guacamole I don’t want to make anything at all,' was shrieked while stomping up the stairs and threatening to never come out of her room. Yah, because that would teach Mommy a thing or two about making sure the frickin’ avocados are ripe, wouldn’t it? 

Our avocados sat ripening for a very long three days and our grapefruits sat near them, waiting for their time and purpose.

The avocados ripened and we still hadn’t used up the grapefruit and we had some tortilla chips waiting for some guacamole to dip themselves into. 

I had a hankering for something citrusy and I remembered an old school little grapefruit and avocado salad number from somewhere. It has been done but it sure was good. 

After no small amount of negotiation with La Jefa, a promise of three toppings on a chocolate frozen yogurt and three chapters of Ramona Quimby, Age 8 at bedtime bought me permission to guide and assist her in making a sunny tasting grapefruit guacamole.

The chief left this a little chunky and we added lots of the grapefruit juice which made it pretty juicy. I would be inclined to leave some out but she was enjoying squeezing that poor grapefruit so much, I just left her to it. It is so simple it could probably almost make itself and there are only four ingredients.

It was 80ºF that day, that’s around 27ºC, so it was perfect for a no-cook lunch. The ingredients are all pretty local to us as well, I know that isn’t the case for those enjoying a Northern January, believe it or not I am finding myself a little jealous of the snow. You can save this up for a grey day splurge. Add a margarita or two and you won’t be able to tell where you are.

And yes, when La Jefa wants to make guacamole and we can't find the stool, I let her perch on the counter top. You've got to pick your battles.

Grapefruit Guacamole

2 avocados peeled and sliced

1 pink grapefruit peeled and segmented and juice squeezed out of what remains

1/4 cup finely chopped red onion

1/2 cup chopped coriander

Salt and fresh ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together and season to taste.

Eat with tortilla chips, on top of fish or chicken or on its own.

What? Cauliflower Cake?

I discovered this while I was catching up on some posts from the Guardian food section one night. I should have been sleeping but it seemed such a shame to let all that peace and quiet and perfectly good reading time go to waste. I wound up reading it and thought I would file it away, by file I mean forget about in my ‘spirited’ daughter addled brain, for supper some day.

Turns out, some day came sooner than I thought. It came in the form of our say-goodbye-to-my-beautiful-bamboo-counterscape dinner rolled into a last-big-gong-show-before-we-leave-all-of-our-friends-for-six-months dinner. It also came because I needed something to sop up the beef and chestnut and the spicy butternut and lentil stew juices.

Because I am trying to empty the cupboards before we go seasonless in CA, and I will be countertopless for the rest of the week, I didn’t want to wind up with any leftovers. I wanted something a little different though and I remembered, miraculously enough, that I had seen this cauliflower cake thingy somewhere. After a mildly frenzied interweb look around, I found it or remembered where it was. 

I was alarmed that it asked for 10 eggs. I needed to make two and I had exactly four eggs in the house. I had decided that this was what we were having for supper though and continued some by-now-not-so-mildly frenzied (Little Daughter was underfoot and Big Daughter’s return from a friend’s house was imminent) interweb search until I found something the contents of my cupboards and fridge could cope with.

I was not skeptical, Big Daughter was when she got wind of what was going on. The recipe struck me as a little bland but I had remedied that, I hoped, with the addition of more cheese than it called for, a lot of grainy mustard and some finely sliced onion.

Turns out, Big Daughter changed her tune. It is pretty delicious. It has a really great texture like a cross between cake and fritatta but the ground almonds keep it from getting gummy.

I used some 2 year old cheddar because let’s face it, cauliflower and cheddar cheese were pretty much made for each other. I used Kozlik’s Double C mustard but any good grainy mustard would be fine.

I doubled the original recipe, which was lucky, because breakfast was ready for the next day. I even cooked bacon to go with it - big brownie points with Big Daughter. She was putty in my hands for all of about forty-two seconds.

Which leads me to what I may do next time, not that this isn’t really delicious as it is. I keep thinking about roasting the cauliflower with caraway seeds and adding sauteed onion to the batter. I also think that some lardons, that’s bacon bits in English, as Croque-Camille forgets in the recipe I started from, would also make it kind of perfectly meal-like.

Cauliflower Cake adapted from Chou-Fleur de Bretagne by Croque-Camille

1 head cauliflower

2 cups grated old cheddar cheese

4 eggs

1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon olive oil (plus some for roasting the cauliflower)

2 tablespoons grainy mustard 

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/4 cup almond meal

1/2 teaspoon salt (plus a little for roasting the cauliflower)

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup milk

Thinly sliced onion rings

Preheat oven to 350º.

Break the cauliflower into florets and put it on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss. Put it in the oven and roast, tossing once or twice, for about twenty minutes or until cauliflower is tender and starting to brown.

Oil two 8-inch round cake tins.

Whisk the eggs, olive oil and mustard together in a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, almond meal, salt and some pepper.

Add half the milk to the eggs, then half the flour mixture, half the milk and the remaining flour, thoroughly mixing between each addition.

Fold in the cauliflower and cheese. 

Pour into the baking pans and top with the onion slices.

Bake for 35 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack for a few minutes. Loosen edges from pan and carefully remove the cake from the pan and serve in wedges.