Back to basics...

Over the last 7 years, i have changed from a single person, surviving on mainly processed foods bought at the supermarket and microwaved in minutes, to a married mother of two who spends a lot of time in the kitchen, making things from scratch. In fact, the transformation is so complete that i have a nice vegetable patch in the garden, and we grow lots of vegetables, which we pick, cook and serve regularly.

I have become a pretty decent cook, and am proud of the food i put on my children's plates, but one thing that has confounded me for years, is pastry. It would seem to be such a simple thing, flour,fat, water- how can you go wrong?? Well I have, over and over again, for years-but that all stops here. No more lovingly preparing pies and tarts, only to have rock hard pastry- or worse, pastry that crumbles so badly it resembles some kind of dry sandy biscuit! From now on in, i will have light, flaky pastry, that only complements whatever luscious filling i happen to fill it with :)

Since I am such a lovely person, i will save you all the heartache, and let you in on my new found secret... In a medium size bowl, put one cup of water, one cup of vegetable oil, and a teaspoon of vinegar. Now add 1 teaspoon of salt (or sugar if you are making fruit pies) and 2 cups of plain flour. Add a further cup of self raising flour and mix until you have something resembling a nice elastic bread dough. (You may need to add a little more flour- do so a tablespoon at a time until the dough is not sticky anymore).

 

Cover the bowl with cling film and put it into the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes, before you want to use it.

Today i did a reboot of the bacon, leek and potato pies as i had some leftover filling-but then i had leftover dough. What to do, what to do??? Well, i had one lonely apple sitting in the fruit bowl, getting bruised, so i cut it into small cubes, put it in a frying pan, added 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and a pinch of cinnamon. I made little apples pies, and after egg washing the apple pies, a sprinkle on a little more sugar and another pinch of cinnamon.

Whaddaya think??

Give us this day our daily bread

When my son was diagnosed with his allergies, one of the things that came up was wheat. I was determined that he should have his daily bread, and so set about making bread form various flours, until i found the perfect recipe, and the perfect bread. These days George is able to eat wheat so we use normal flour, but the best recipe i have found is one of Nigella's. I love the fact that it produces small,white, very soft little rolls- perfect for elegant dinner party or kids bun fight (and dinner at our house is often a combination of the two!).
I put 500g of plain white flour,1 packet of instant yeast,1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar into a bowl and mix it. I then add the milk and butter (Nigella recommends that you heat these two together to melt the butter, but butter doesn't last very long here in cyprus once out of the fridge, so this step isn't really one i have to do :) and mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together into a dough (if it is too sticky add some more flour). Now take your dough and knead it for about 10 minutes until it is nice and smooth. Place your dough into a greased bowl, cover with clingfilm and place in a  nice warm place (not hard to find here!) until it doubles in size. Punch the air out of your dough, then turn it out onto a floured surface.

 Now comes the fun part! Pinch off bits of dough the size of a walnut, and roll them in between your hands until they look like ping pong balls. Place the balls onto a greased cookie sheet, around 5mm apart. Then leave the dough to prove again, for around half an hour. When you come back you will have something like what you can see on the left here :) The little rolls end up touching.

Preheat the oven to gasmark 7 or 220C while your rolls are proving. Once the rolls have done their thing, brush them with milk, oil or egg and them dust them with seeds. Nigella suggests dusting alternate rows with different seeds. We tend to dust one row with poppy seed, leave a row plain, then one row of sesame seeds, another plain row, and then back to the poppy seeds, and so on until you have finished :)
It should end up looking something like this!



Into the oven then, for around 15 minutes or until the rolls are a nice golden brown.

They are fab straight out of the oven, all hot, with melted butter- yum! They are also very good for up to 3 days afterwards (if there are any left by that time of course!). Until tomorrow....

Comfort food...

Being dairy free and cooking everything from scratch doesn't mean that everything we eat in this house is super healthy. As you can see from my previous posts, we make cakes and sweet treats, but we also make dairy free versions of all the food the kids know and love, such as chicken nuggets :) We make chicken nuggets very simply, we just take 3 eggs and a cup of cornflour and whisk it together. Sometimes eggs can be larger than other times, so if the batter is too thick, just add water a teaspoon at a time, until the batter looks like a thick cream consistency, like so 

Then i cut the chicken into strips (or into small rounds with a cookie cutter), dip into the batter and fry. I serve them with salad and french fries or, as today, with rice and steamed green beans. The green beans are dressed with olive oil and garlic (or just a knob of dairy free butter for quick and easy!)

And there is usually enough batter left over to make some tempura vegetables (whatever veggies you have in the fridge- carrots, peppers,courgettes etc,) or even onion rings :)

Oh, and when i am cooking for the whole family, i cook the kid's food first then i had a pinch of salt and pepper, and a teaspoon of dried chilli flakes to the batter to give it a little kick.

The other thing i do with leftover batter (as long as i haven't spiced it up that is!) is dip some pineapple rings in it. When the pineapple rings come out, i dust them with icing sugar- the kids just can't get enough!! :)

Bacon, Leek and potato pies

So, I have been missing in action for a few days, but i'm back now! Here is a pretty simple recipe that i came up with to use up the enormous leeks that we have been growing in our vegetable patch. Take one enormous leek (2 or 3 small ones) and slice it. I added 3 potatoes (chopped), half a glass of chicken stock and boiled the mixture for  10 minutes or so-to the point where the potatoes are nice and soft. 

I then took the pan off the stove, and added 5 slices of bacon (chopped) and 1 tablespoon of flour. (At this point you could also add cheese if you so wished- or indeed any other vegetables you may have lying around). Then i rolled out my pastry (i used a 500g packet of ready made pastry-just because it is too hot to be making pastry today!) and cut out my little pies, using a wide mouthed glass as a cutter to get a nice round shape. I placed around a teaspoon of the filling into each pastry round, then brushed water around the inside of the circle of pastry and sealed the pies using a fork to make a nice pattern.

I placed the pies onto a sheet of grease proof paper, and put the tray into the oven at 180C for around 18 minutes or until the pies look a nice golden brown. (I brushed the pies with egg today, but if i was making it for my egg allergic pals, i would've brushed them with milk).

End of school cookoff

When the kids come home with the letter that features the word "party" i start to panic! School parties mean milk, chocolate, and craziness.  Children hopped up on sugar tend to forget the rules that have been drummed into them over the last school year- that one of their classmates has a deadly allergy, and I (as the mother of the poor child with allergies) have to get creative, to make sure that my darling boy doesn't feel like he is missing out on this fun day!

It is 35 degrees C here today with no breeze and yet, here I am sleeves rolled up,baking up a storm!
On the menu today- chocolate covered cookie bites, mini iced cupcakes, and chocolate truffles :)

I took a basic cookie recipe: 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup sugar, 3/4 tsp salt, 1/2 cup soya milk (plus a few extra tablespoons to bind), 1 cup oats, 5 tablespoons of vegetable oil.
Mix flour, salt,sugar and oats together. Then add the 1/2 cup of soya milk, and the 5 tablespoons of oil. Mix. Now add soya milk tablespoon at a time, until the dough comes together.
Press out your cookies ,the original recipe (which featured butter and real milk) reckons this makes 3 dozen cookies and the small cookies i made worked out to around 40.

Bake cookies at 180C until cookies start to brown around the edges. Take the cookies out of the oven, and cool on a wire rack.

 Then take some dairy free chocolate chips- melt them in a bain marie (or stick them in the microwave for 20 seconds.) Stir to melt all the choc chips. One by one, add the cookies to the chocolate, stir around, until they are covered in the chocolate- then place onto some baking paper to dry. Voila- dairy free chocolate covered cookie bites :)

Now, onto the mini cupcakes. Why mini i hear you ask? Well my biggest customers are my two little ones- George (7) and Tina (5) and they are big fans of icing- so if the cake is too big, then the little ones tend to just nibble off the icing, and leave the cake! This way, the cakes are little mouthfuls, and the kids eat them in one gulp :)
Today I used Isa Chandra Moscokowitz'  recipe for Golden Vanilla cupcakes, from her vegan cupcakes take over the world cookbook (which i HIGHLY recommend), and iced them with a plain glace icing ( 250-350g icing sugar, 2-4 Tbsp water, and a few drops of food coloring)and finished them off with some sprinkles. They are pretty adorable...look

(hint-i didn't have any pink food coloring, so i used 1/2 teaspoon of plum jam instead- put it together with the water, and the icing sugar- voila pink icing :)
Last, but not least, i made some chocolate truffles. These are the easiest things in the world to make, and are just delicious! I take 200g ground almonds, and mix them with 5 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 100g icing sugar. Mix until there are no lumps, then add 4-5 tablespoons of liquid-if i am making them for the children i might use freshly squeezed lemon or orange juice, but if i am making them for adults, i usually use a liqueur :) Add the liquid one tablespoon at a time, until the mixture starts to come together. Then squeeze the mixture into small balls. At this point you can also put something into the middle of the truffles (candied peel, small nut, chocolate chip)if you like. The truffles are now ready, you can finish them off by rolling them in sprinkles, crushed nuts or even by dipping them in melted chocolate.