Spinach Pie

Mr VST cooked on Tuesday. His spinach pie just keeps getting better and better and Tuesday's pie was no exception. Delicious with the last of the home grown potatoes and left over pink coleslaw. 

Pasta Bake

After a week of living pretty much on cake and toast I decided on Sunday evening that an injection of vegetables was necessary. Inspired by the Summer Lasagne I cooked up some veggies and mixed them with a tin of tomatoes and then layered those with some cooked pasta and the lovely crème fraîche with nutmeg mix. It was great!

Scones with Plum Jam and Clotted Cream

Radio Four last week were tweeting about making the perfect scones. Scones are something I never feel like I have mastered. My Mum makes amazing ones, she has even shared her recipe with me but to no avail. I could just never get them to rise properly. When I saw that Radio 4 had come up with the perfect scone recipe I just had to try it especially as my plum jam needed testing out.

Mr VST and I cycled for two hours on Sunday and there happened to be some clotted cream in the village shop where we stopped for a drink. I thought it was a sign so I bought it and when we came home I went to make some scones. 

The first problem I encountered was having no milk. Well I did have some but it was frozen and I didn't want to wait for it to thaw properly before making scones. I decided that I would have to mess with the perfect scone recipe and use soya milk curdled with a teaspoon of cider vinegar in place of the milk, like a non-dairy buttermilk.

The recipe worked well even with my amendment. The scones were light and melted in the mouth. They went well with the clotted cream and plum jam too and it didn't seem to matter whether they were topped the Cornish way....

...or the Devonshire way.

You may be able to tell from these photos that the plum jam was rather runny which is why I reboiled it and added some lemon and liquid pectin, sadly you now have to slice the jam rather than pour it!

Plum Jam with Cinnamon

I bought the River Cottage Handbook No 2: Preserves hoping to make more than a few jars of jam this year. One of Mr VST's colleagues had a glut of plums and he brought home two kilos last week. I had planned to make plum jam, plumbeena and plum leather too. 

Unfortunately the plums had been left a little too long and so I had to throw quite a few away so I needed more to make the jam and there wasn't enough to start on the plumbeena or leather and I didn't have any apples for the fruit leather anyway. The plum jam recipe in the book suggested cracking a few of the stones and blanching the kernels to give an almond like flavour. They smelled amazing.

Another tip was to add a couple of cinnamon sticks to the mix which I did.

Jams always use a shocking amount of sugar and in this case the recipe said to use granulated sugar rather than jam sugar so I did.

I let it all bubble away for absolutely ages and I couldn't get up to temperature partly because the pan wasn't big enough. I eventually got it up to temperature and bottled it up.

Mr VST and I tried out some of the jam on some home made scones. It was absolutely delicious, I couldn't taste the kernels but the cinnamon gave the jam a real depth of flavour. Unfortunately it didn't set at all and ran right off the scones. Mr VST went and got me some liquid pectin today and after much searching around I worked out how much to add to the jam. I added some lemon juice and pectin and boiled the jam up again, in smaller batches this time. 

It set almost immediately - eek! I may have added too much pectin. Oh well, it was very nice on a bit of toast this evening. I'm not too impressed that the first recipe that I made from the book didn't work. I hope the rest are better. 

Bread, Crackers and Cheese

We had run out of bread earlier in the week and so I decided to make some more on Saturday. I mixed as usual and kneaded before leaving it to rise. Mr VST and I went out shopping and then had to go out on a call. I called Mr VST and asked him to knock it back before leaving it to rise again and then I continued with the proving and baking of it later in the evening. I had forgotten to shape it properly during the process and the cuts didn't work as well as they had the last couple of times. I put the bread in the oven and it didn't rise dramatically as the previous loaves had. I thought that this batch wouldn't be as tasty as the last ones had been. I cut open one of the loaves and had a few slices and to be honest it wasn't that different from the last batches and it was still a hundred times better than supermarket stuff. I had some cheese and crackers while I was waiting for the bread to cool down.

Corn & Spelt Rolls and Burgers with (more) Pink Coleslaw

On Friday I made some more of these delicious corn and spelt bread rolls. We ate them with some Linda McCartney quarterpounders with mozzarella.

The bread rolls were great as they were last time. Not sure about the quarterpounders though.

Veggie Mexican with Home Made Tortillas

Going along with the make your own bread theme I decided last Thursday to make my own tortillas for the usual veggie Mexican. There is a recipe in River Cottage Handbook No. 3: Bread but having done some research online I discovered that authentic recipes contained lard. Now of course I was never going to put lard in mine but other recipes added veggie friendly oil in them. I decided to go for this recipe but amended it slightly by using a quarter wholemeal flour. 

Using a quarter wholemeal flour made my dough a bit more 'thirsty' so I needed to add a bit more water than the recipe suggested. 

I rolled out 17 little balls, they were slightly too small and only made tiddly tortillas but they were very tasty.

They were much more substantial than the ones you buy and they didn't do that horrible claggy thing in your mouth either.

They went down very well indeed with the usual veggie mix with cumin, chilli and paprika.

...and I even remembered that I'd frozen some batches of refried beans but not until I had nearly finished cooking. Microwaves are good sometimes!