Category Archives: Irish food

March 20, 2013

St Patrick’s Day Snacks!

There are so many fun recipes around for things to make on St Patrick’s Day – mostly unusually and improbably green things, it must be said. I don’t usually celebrate or make anything special, but this year two friends asked me if I was doing anything, so I took it as a Sign and had them both over the flat for some drinks and snacks.

I wanted to make green snacks, but without employing any food colouring. It turns out that naturally green food doesn’t always stay very green after you process it in some way, so I had varying degrees of success in this endeavour. Here are some snaps I took:

Feta, cucumber and mint skewers. Pretty simple.

Spinach and pea quiche, with thyme crust.

I sort of made this one up. I followed the crust recipe from this mushroom quiche - a very forgiving recipe, as it turns out, since I ended up seriously manhandling the dough with my hot hands and it was still light and crumbly in the end.

The filling was a mix of defrosted spinach and peas, salt and pepper, a splash of milk (I only had a splash left in the carton) and an assortment of whole eggs and egg yolks. There was a lot left over, which I baked in a dish as little crustless quiche bites.

Mini soda breads (not green).

Broad bean dip.

Parsley hummus.

This is a simple food processor dip – a tin of chickpeas, a bunch of parsley, a clove of garlic get whizzed round with a drizzle of sesame oil, then seasoned to taste. To adjust the texture, I added water from the chickpea tin until it was scoopable.

The soda bread was great with either dip, or with some butter sprinkled with smoked sea salt.

Ricotta gnocchi with pesto.

I followed this recipe from Delicious Days, for fifteen minute ricotta gnocchi. I kid you not, it was so easy, genuinely taking less than fifteen minutes even though it was the first time I’d tried the recipe. Sometimes a new recipe takes longer because you’re checking it at every step, but not this one. For a start, there aren’t that many steps to check. For another, it really is that simple – mix the ingredients in the bowl, roll out, slice, boil.

I made the dough ahead of time, only leaving the shaping and boiling until just before serving. Even after sitting in the fridge for several hours, it was light and soft when it was cooked, and tasted amazing even on its own. To serve, I mixed with a drizzle of olive oil and a huge mound of fresh pesto.

If you haven’t made pesto before, I’d say it’s time to give it a try. Another food processor classic; I started with a handful of hazelnuts and two garlic cloves, which I whizzed up until the nuts were finely chopped. Then I added two basil plants and some pecorino, followed by enough olive oil to make a smooth paste. Season with salt and pepper and we’re done!

Lime-oncello (disappointingly not green).

This was the same method as my successful limoncello, but with lime rind instead of lemon, and more sugar syrup to balance the more bitter taste. It didn’t turn out nearly as green as I’d hoped, as you can see!

We also made an as-yet un-named and unperfected cocktail. It contained lime-oncello, vodka, gin, simple syrup, fresh kiwi juice and a squeeze of lime. We had it both short and topped up with soda, and it was pretty awesome either way.

I also made these non-green bonus marshmallow pies. Now, the trouble with these is that they were born of a total recipe failure. I tried to make green tea marshmallows using veggie gelatin, and oh boy, did that not work… So I used the resulting gooey, sticky not-marshmallow (which was liquid at room temperature) to fill little pate sucree shells, using the recipe from these jam tarts. This is my go-to sweet pastry, it works perfectly every times. I baked the tarts up, keeping an eye out for the not-marshmallow burning, and ended up with these lovely little things, which were a bit crispy on the top and chewy in the middle. And no longer even a tiny bit green.

Can’t win ‘em all, right?

7 comments | tags: buffet, green food, St Patrick's Day | posted in Bread, Drinks, Irish food, Italian food, Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Pastry, Snacks, Vegetarian

April 6, 2012

Chocolate Coated Pretzels for Guinness and Chocolate Cupcakes

By Rock Salt

This post is more about technique than recipe. I’d noticed a recipe (on Leite’s Culinaria, where else?) for Guinness and chocolate cupcakes, with a Guinness and vanilla frosting and a topping of – this is the crucial part – crushed chocolate covered pretzels. I love those sweet-savoury, chocolatey-salty snacks, though they’re less common here in the UK than they used to be – I remember there being a fad for them in the 90s, but now you can only get them in select places and for a select price. I decided I’d coat my own pretzels, partly because I wasn’t sure where I’d get them, but mostly because I thought it would be fun! Hopefully most of you will understand how this could be fun, if not I can’t really explain it to you…

I started with a 150g back of normal, salted pretzels. Make sure not to get sour cream and chive flavour or anything. Blargh. I made a thick dark chocolate ganache with 200g plain chocolate and about 100ml of single cream, which I melted together in the microwave. I set it over a pan of hot water to keep it laid back and easy to work with. I laid out a sheet of greaseproof paper, which I lightly coated with a spray of rapeseed oil – coconut oil would have been better, but any flavourless oil will do the trick. I was being extra cautious – a couple of recent sticking incidents have left me twice shy and with a slight twitch.

So, to begin! I decided that my weapon of choice would be… THE CHOPSTICK. More accurately, two chopsticks. I’ve often had trouble with coating things in chocolate – truffles and such – and so I wanted to try a new approach this time. The chopsticks let me grip the pretzel while tapping off the excess ganache back into the bowl. It took a bit of practise but it worked out perfectly once I’d done a few and got into the swing of it.

I dropped each pretzel in the ganache, turned it over to coat then lifted it back out with the chopsticks, trying to grip it across the middle. Then I tapped the chopsticks off the edge of the bowl until the holes in the pretzels were hollow again, and lined up on the greaseproof paper to set. It’s important not to grip the pretzels too firmly or they’ll break and you’ll have to eat them to get them out of the way. It is dreadful when that happens.

The white chocolate ganache needed far less cream, about 50g to 200g of white chocolate. They were less pleasing to look at, I’ll need to work on this particular pretzel coating – I think part of the problem was the quality of the white chocolate, which was supermarket fare. This is fine for most baking but I think a higher quality chocolate would have a better colour and probably a better flavour, too.

They look better when they're dried, honest.

It took me about an hour to dip all the pretzels, and I then set them aside for several hours to harden and dry. In this time, I made the cakes and icing, but even then the pretzels were a little soft when I added them to the cakes. Luckily I was making them the night before eating them, and by morning they were set and shiny, ready to eat.

My biggest batch of cupcakes to date - there were 50 of them in the end (for the OCD among us, they are not all in this photo, no need to give yourself a migraine trying to count them)

The longer you leave these pretzels the softer they get – eating them on the next day was OK, but the same day would be better. I also had some the day after, and while the flavour was fine there was no crunch left in them at all. The pretzels had given up the fight to be crisp and accepted the chocolate overlords.

I’d highly recommend the cake recipe, they were absolutely first class, especially the Guinness and vanilla frosting. So smooth and billowy, but with a big hit of flavour. I have some left, in the freezer. It may not last beyond my next craving for something sweet. You can use your own favourite stout in place of Guinness, if you have one, of course.

11 comments | tags: baking, cake decorating, chocolate pretzels, cupcakes, ganache, Guinness | posted in Cake, Confectionery, Irish food, Other people's recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

October 4, 2011

Irish-ish Stew

By Rock Salt

Here is a recipe that I set out thinking would be dead straightforward, precise and quick. I managed to complicate it up a bit, but it’s still nothing fancy. It’s perfect for the grey, windy weather we’re getting in Scotland at the minute – we’re definitely entering the Time of Stew.

When I was buying the ingredients for this stew, I found lamb bones on the shelf next to the other lamb products – dirt cheap they were, too, at 20p for 200g. I bought them to put in the stew, thinking that they would help thicken it nicely without having to add flour and run the risk of the gravy getting too thick or gluey. I kind of forgot that I’d have to take them back out again in the end, which took away from the quick and easy meal I’d been aiming for. I ended up leaving them in, in honesty, and the G man and I picked them out and gnawed the meat off them as we found them. I also added full stems of thyme, which then meant I had the stems to pick back out once the leaves had fallen off and mixed in. This was a pain. If I were to do it again, I’d probably take the extra time and make a lamb stock with the bones first, and strip the thyme leaves off before adding them. Still, fairly minor inconveniences, both of them.

Ingredients for a pot of stew – serves three or four depending on greed:

1 tsp rapeseed oil
80g sliced leek
50g sliced carrot
225g mixed diced swede and carrot
450g lamb mince
salt and pepper
2 tomatoes, pureed
350g peeled new potatoes
200g lamb bones
2 tbsp red wine
100g pearl barley
3 ‘handfuls’ of thyme (see picture)
700ml water
80g peas
190g broccoli florets

For the record, this is a ‘handful’ of thyme, in my book:

As you can see from the first photo, I bought all pre-prepared and packaged veg, even potatoes, which is super lazy. Still, the point was that it was an easy meal to make, even if I did add some fussy bits…

First, I heated the oil in a large pot, then cooked the leeks, carrot and swede-and-carrot for about five minutes over a medium high heat, till they started looking a bit rough and smelling all nice. I put the lamb mince in the pot, seasoned and browned. Then I reduced the heat to low and added all the rest of the ingredients apart from the peas and broccoli. I simmered all this for 40 minutes. The pureed tomatoes add a nice acidity to the stew, I’ve started putting tomatoes in all my stews. Some tinned tomatoes or passata would have done the trick too, though with the pureed tomatoes you know you’re getting all the goodness from them.

After the 40 minutes were up, the barley looked nice and fat and everything was thickened up. I tasted it for seasoning, added salt and pepper, then put in the broccoli and peas and cooked for a further 10 minutes to cook those through. I also used this last ten minutes to pick out all the thyme stems I could find.

Now, I would never say this is a great looking playdafood, but it was very delicious. I do love broccoli, but there’s something about it being in a stew that makes it look leggy and dreadful. Also that potato is so peely-wally, it looks a bit like an egg… I’d have been better off just putting in some baby new potatoes with the skin on, really, for extra flavour as well as colour. Still, for a low maintenance dinner this was a good result. Putting in the lamb bones meant that I didn’t have to add any stock for depth of flavour, and it was quite fun to nibble off the meat from the bones as we went along. I especially loved the barley, which I’d never cooked with before, apart from in a broth mix. It’s getting to be Broth Time too. Winter’s not all bad after all!