Making a Hash of It: Traditional Scottish Lasagne

Well look at that, my highly esteemed food blog almost made it through 2020 without a post. No more:

Since having a daughter, my repertoire at dinnertime has very much refocused on nutritious foods that are quick to throw together and taste good to both five year olds and middle aged men. In retrospect it's astonishing I thought it was a good idea to serve pigeon breast to my pre-teen nieces.

In this spirit I document my effort at recreating a recipe for my husband's childhood favourite, Corned Beef Hash; be warned this is not an American hash, it's a Scottish store cupboard recipe presumably prized mostly for thrift:

1. Make up a packet of Idahoan instant mashed potato, using less water than recommended (I do 425ml). You could also cook and mash actual potatoes, I just don't enjoy potato enough to discern a difference. I just wouldn't sink to Smash.

2. Thinly slice an onion, soften in a frying pan with a little oil, add a cubed can of corned beef, heat through and then stir in two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce.

3. Pour a can of low sugar baked beans into a sieve to drain off some juice (this elevates the recipe to cordon bleu), then dump this into a lasagne dish.

4. Add the corned beef layer on top.

5. Top with mash.

6. Bake at 190°C for 20 minutes, then sprinkle a little cheddar on and bake 10-15 minutes longer to crisp up.

Pairs well with nursery veg like cauliflower and peas.

I tell my daughter it's Scottish lasagne and she accepts this and eats it up. My husband is transported back to chuldhood. It's rather growing on me too.

Sourdough

There is only one place I've found with decent bread in our home town - and if you don't turn up in the morning it's often sold out of the nice stuff - so a few weeks ago I figured it was finally time to attempt making sourdough bread from scratch again.

I've tried making sourdough starters twice before, and it always turned into a foul, black slime. I guess a basement flat in North London and a cold, damp tenement flat in Edinburgh weren't the best places to be capturing wild yeasts and bacteria! We now live in a much nicer and cleaner part of the world, and I had much greater success.

I used the Serious Eats method of creating a 'mother' this time. The previous methods I've tried have involved adding lots of flour and water to feed the mother, and then because that creates a lot of product you need to throw a lot of it out (some require throwing out half each day), while Serious Eats takes a much more sensible approach of making a very tiny batch which you feed in very small volumes until the colony is established, and then you can build it up to the volume you need for baking. After all, it's not like a tiny yeast needs a giant meal. I've made four loaves from my mother so far and I haven't had to throw any away.

I used white bread flour initially to establish the colony and it quickly settled into a nice, vanilla-like aroma with a hint of sourness. This matured over a week into what is now a very vigorous starter, that only smells of delicious yeasty bread dough. Perfect.

Serious Eats provides some really useful guidance on tailoring the mother too. In particular, the more you stir it the stronger the yeast colony becomes, but the less you stir it the stronger the bacteria colony becomes (and so, the characteristic sour flavour can emerge). On previous attempts I had no idea, but this very basic understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the two colonies in the mother helped get me ensure it established the flavours it needed.

I moved to the River Cottage bread handbook for recipes, once the mother was established, as US bread flour has different protein levels and I just have no interest in imperial measurements. River Cottage also suggest feeding the mother equal volumes of flour and water - while Serious Eats uses equal weights - and I found the lower hydration of the River Cottage method to be both easier and produce a healthier colony.

I also switched to feeding the mother wholemeal rather than white flour, and it was akin to turning a switch. The bottle suddenly became alive.

For my first batch I used a white bread recipe that was very high in hydration and that guarantees those big, spongy holes associated with sourdough. Unfortunately it was horrible to deal with in terms of kneading and shaping, and then so sticky it rose beautifully in the proving basket but then wouldn't leave the basket, so when I turned it out in stretched out like chewing gum. Tasted okay, looked horrific and had a very compacted texture as the bubble network I literally spent ten days creating was destroyed in a single second.

My second batch is a lower hydration wholemeal loaf, that's risen nicely and is proving now ready for baking in the late afternoon.

Fingers crossed.

A Fairly Tart Crumble

I also made a crumble while Bear was visiting. He likes things to be fairly tart so I used a mix of gooseberries from the garden and granny smith apples for the filling. I always vary my recipe for crumble with differing results but this one was especially nice so I record it for posterity:

Oven to 170°c.

Mix in a suitable deep dish for 4-5 people:

• 500g gooseberry + chopped apples
• 40g caster sugar
• 1 spoon of cornflour

Rub together into breadcrumbs:

• 175g plain flour
• 85g salted butter, chilled (I used Vitalite as Bear is vegan; any spread suited to baking will work, but not a low fat spread)

Stir into the flour mix:

• 75g soft dark sugar (break up so not too clumped)
• A handful of slivered almonds

Pour topping onto the filling, making an even layer but without pressing down. Bake for 45 minutes. You can grill the topping further if you want it to be toasty golden but I didn't bother.

It was the hottest day of the year so we ate it at room temperature with soy-based vanilla ice cream. Very delicious.

I found the Vitalite easier to rub in than dairy butter, so might use this in future instead. You also get much better texture in cakes with margarine than butter so maybe I should stop being a snob about it (although butter has a much better flavour in a yellow cake I guess).

We all agreed the topping worked because it's not homogenous. The sugar sits as crystals among the slivered almonds within the topping, giving a lot of crunch and texture, almost like a granola. This is the polar opposite of my sister-in-law's method where the topping is made on the stove and everything cooked together.  This is exactly the end of that spectrum I was aiming for.

Update October 2022:

We didn't have any butter - not even for ready money - and so I adapted the crumble recipe for basic vegetable oil. It tasted great and was much quicker to make, so this is my recommended method now. Stir together:

• 100 grams flour
• 75 grams oats
• 75 grams dark brown sugar
• A handful of slivered almonds
• 1tsp cinnamon
• ⅓ cup sunflower or other oil

Then use as above.

Given oil has no water content it seems to toast very quickly, so cooking at 160°C for 45 minutes might work well. You can cover in foil halfway to stop it browning further too.

Summer sanchis

In my twenties I would go with my friends on regular road trips to the southwest of England, without any level of planning at all. We'd inevitably end up in a remote caravan park for the night with no food, and at thay point Monkey would pull out a Tupperware box of sanchis and dinner was sorted. On one long trip to collect Spim from France, Piglet and I were dispatched in a van with a weekends' worth of sanchis in a bucket.

Monkey invented the sanchi, which is effectively a samosa jaffle, i.e. curried vegetables toasted between two slices of bread in the sandwich toaster. They are delicious hot or cold, and perfect picnic material. I'd not had them for a decade, but Bear is visiting and kindly resurrected our ancient wiki to unearth a rough version of the recipe, and together we put together this interpretation:

• Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a big pot, add a heaped spoonful or two of mustard seeds, a cinnamon stick and 3-4 cloves. Let the aromas release.
• Add a small chopped onion and salt, let soften.
• Add a big carrot and big potato - both cut in small dice - stir and let sweat, then stir in 1 tbsp garam masala, 2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp turmeric, a good pinch of chilli flakes and a handful of red lentils.
• Stir until aromas are released, then add a small can of drained sweetcorn, a handful of frozen peas and enough water to cover the bottom of the pan, put on the lid and leave to cook for 10 minutes or so. It's ready when the potatoes are tender. Keep an eye on water level - you don't want it to burn, but it should be dry when finished.
• Stir in the juice of a lemon, a very finely chopped small red onion and adjust the seasoning.
• Use the filling to make toasted sandwiches, using cheap white supermarket bread. Butter the outside of you like it crispy and brown but it's not essential.

Serve hot or cold with appropriate condiments. We went for a Canarian green mojo sauce and - in the absence of any tamarind sauce at Waitrose - tonkatsu sauce, which was perfect.

Mojo sauce is: blitz two garlic cloves, half a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon of salt, a bunch of coriander and half a cup of olive oil in a small blender. Add five tablespoons of cold water, blitzing between each spoonful to mix it in. Finish with a few teaspoons of vinegar or a good squirt of lemon juice. Adjust the seasoning.

Sponge pudding and custard in the microwave

I felt nostalgic for the sponge puddings with custard which I was fed as a child, but didn't have much time. Or any ready-made custard. Or custard powder. Or cream. But after a bit of googling I found this easy way to make it in the microwave, which I mostly record here so I won't lose it:

Whisk 450ml milk into 3tbs caster sugar and 4tbs corn flour in a jug.

Blast for 2 minutes in the microwave, whisk and then repeat. Should be a thickened paste. If not cook a little longer.

Pour the paste slowly into a large bowl containing two eggs, whisking enthusiastically.

Pour this mix back into the jug, microwave for another minute and then whisk in 50g butter and half a teaspoon of vanilla paste (or the equivalent of extract etc).

It tasted better than most other custards I've had.

The sponge pudding I made just the way my mum always did - in about five minutes in the microwave! Microwaves were new and exciting in the 1980s and entire books were written about how to get the best results from them. This was all before they earned their reputation for reheating ready meals for lonely singletons. The basic pudding is:

Microwave 115g butter and 115g caster sugar in a microwave for 15 seconds. Beat with a wooden spoon until a unified paste (should be quick given you heated it all).

Beat in two eggs until a unified paste, then sift in 115g of self raising flour and beat that in.

Grease a pudding basin, put your filling in the bottom (jam, syrup, fruit compote, Nutella, etc ... I did pineapple), dump the sponge mix on top and cover with a lid or cling film.

Microwave for five minutes, test with a toothpick and cook longer if it needs it.

It was lovely and brought back a lot of memories, but I have no idea how we managed to eat something this heavy every Sunday after a full roast dinner!

Toddler's gluten-free birthday cake

My toddler daughter was having a birthday party, and in order to include one of her wee friends we wanted the cake to be gluten free. As she loves eating strawberries and as British strawberries are at the height of deliciousness in August, I came up with an adaptation of Nigella Lawson's apple and almond cake (which is short and squat but very lovely) to come up with a gluten free, dairy free strawberry Victoria sponge (which is tall, light and moist).

Consensus among the parents was that the cake was even more delicious than a traditional Victoria sponge. The kids also loved it. Several people went back for thirds. I would actually make this in preference to a normal gluten-full sponge in future, even ignoring particular dietary requirements. A real hit.

Details:

1. Oven to 180 degrees.

2. Peel, core and chop three eating apples, add to a pan with the juice of half a lemon and two teaspoons of sugar, and cook gently for ten minutes with the lid on until you can mash to a rough puree with a potato masher or fork. Spread thin on a dinner plate to cool down.

3. Oil and line two Victoria sandwich tins. Be sure to line the sides as the mixture can stick. Ideally use non stick paper rather than parchment.

4. Separate six of eight eggs in total.

5. Put six egg yolks, two eggs, 325 grams of ground almonds, 275 grams of sugar and the juice of the other half lemon into a food processor, mix to a batter and then in three batches mix in the Apple puree (in batches so there's not too much concentrated heat being added, as it won't be wholly cool yet). Scrape batter into a large bowl.

6. Separately, whip the egg whites into soft peaks. Fold a tablespoon of the egg whites into the batter to loosen, then fold the remainder in a third at a time.

7. Divide between two sandwich tins (fill to the brim if you like, the mixture is already light and won't really rise much) and bake for 25-30 mins. A test knife should come out fairly clean, if not cook for 5 minutes more until it sets. With all those almonds the cake won't easily dry out, so overcooking is only a problem if you leave it so long you burn the top and sides (which even then adds a nice, bitter biscuity note).

8. Remove from tins ten minutes after leaving the oven, then cool completely on a rack.

9. Fill as you please. I whipped up ~400ml of double cream until soft and holding its shape, then filled the cake with jam and cream and topped it with cream and fresh strawberries. This worked very well.

... I imagine you could put lemon or orange zest in the mixture for a different sort of cake, or any other flavouring really. The base cake tastes buttery and moist, and holds its shape really well. I've never known a gluten free cake made without those shop bought, fairly artificial gluten free flours to sit so tall and light, so this is really a good base recipe to work from.

It may also help that the cake is dairy free, but that didn't matter to me this time round.

A much easier sweet potato macaroni cheese

I have a 21 month old daughter who loves eating Nigella Lawson's most excellent sweet potato macaroni cheese. The thought of macaroni cheese has always appealed, but the reality is usually disappointing: a claggy, heavy, greasy mess often made worse in many recipes by the addition of bacon or chorizo (two ingredients not well known for their capacity to cut through fat). Nigella's recipe is therefore a bit of a revelation, as the sweet potato replaces a lot of the cheese in volume but not flavour, bringing a surprising freshness to the dish. The vivid orange colour also lends a certain retro processed charm, but without the e-numbers. It's also much healthier for my daughter to eat.

I've often put off making Nigella's recipe, as it is a complete faff with its bechamel sauce. Thankfully there is a super easy way to make macaroni cheese without a bechamel sauce by minimising the water you boil the pasta in, to concentrate the starches being released by the pasta which can then thicken the sauce naturally. You can also add evaporated milk rather than normal milk, as the proteins thicken more quickly. I also ditched Nigella's method of boiling the sweet potato and then reusing the water for the pasta to retain nutrients, and instead steamed the potatoes to keep all the nutrients in from the start. You could even try steaming the potatoes over the boiling pasta, I'm not sure how important agitation is to releasing the pasta starch and I'll experiment with that next time.

So here is a cross-breed of Nigella's recipe with the starchy cooking water method, with some added steaming, and the results are honestly just as good while taking a fraction of the time and effort:

500g sweet potato	Peel and cut into 2 cm pieces, steam for ten minutes Mash with a fork.
300g macaroni-ish pasta 360ml evaporated milk (ie 2 small cans) 125g mature cheddar 1 tsp English mustard 0.25 tsp paprika	Put pasta in small medium saucepan, add just enough water to cover (some pasta peeking out is fine). Bring to a boil over a high heat, stirring frequently. Cook for 2 minutes less than the pasta’s official cooking time. Pour in the evaporated milk and bring back to the boil. Reduce the heat, add the cheddar, mustard and paprika and stir continuously until creamy (like, 2 minutes)
75g feta cheese	Stir the sweet potato and crumbled feta into the pasta. I make this for my daughter, so just portion it up at this point for freezing once cool (it makes dozens' of meals, and a single portion cooks in the microwave from frozen in one minute). If you want to serve it as a meal to human adults, pour it into a lasagne dish, scatter with some extra cheddar and some shredded sage leaves, dust with paprika and bake at 200C for 30 minutes (or until bubbling and delicious). The sage makes the dish so much more delicious, but I've not bothered with this for my daughter as I'm not certain it would freeze well.

Bonus Gousto update

Long term readers will have spotted I never got round to posting the results of my other two Gousto meals. Life took over somewhat as we flew 4,600 km away to California to have a baby and this then kept me busy for a year or so. Still, as I recall, they were rather hit an miss affairs, and one was especially disappointing as the instruction came at one point to stir chipotle paste into Heinz mayonnaise, which isn't really home cooking as I would recognise it.

Gousto #1: Harissa Chicken Curry

Our first meal from the Gousto delivery box was Harissa Chicken Curry.

The ingredients

The box provided just eight ingredients for this recipe:

Top: lentils, harissa paste, a nub of ginger, a chicken stock cube. Bottom: filthy potatoes, two spring onions, diced chicken breast and some yoghurt.

Along with salt, pepper and oil from the pantry, this was everything I needed to make the meal, and all in the correct volume. I found it strangely satisfying to have no leftover ingredients at the end, even though one of my favourite things about cooking is looking in the fridge and coming up with ideas to use up all of the nubs and stubs of yesterday's leftovers (after all, I did come-of-age in the Ready Steady Cook epoch of man). 

It was all organised very well. Really, the only downside was the childish wackywriting Gousto uses to signify it is an honest and simple brand. I'm beginning to find this marketing technique a bit wearying after 15 years (Innocent Smoothies kicked off the trend in 1999). So we inevitably had ingredients labelled with quirky names like 'gorgeous ginger', 'poh-tay-to poh-tar-to' and 'spread-your-legs spring onions', which didn't raise much of a smile and really only made it harder to find what I needed when I was delving through all of the other ingredients in the box.

The recipe

The recipe card was very easy to follow: 

1. Chop and fry the potatoes - sounds easy, but the potatoes kept sticking to the pot, and then flying off across the kitchen when I tried to loosen them... I assumed we weren't meant to brown the potatoes. Certainly there was no mention of that.
2. Add the chicken and some paste and fry off - you're supposed to fry until brown, but the chicken was quite soggy from sitting in its own juices in a plastic bag for several days so I just settled for white.
3. Add the lentils, grated ginger, seasoning, half the chopped spring onion whites, the stock cube dissolved in half a liter of water, the rest of the paste and a dollop of yoghurt and simmer until delicious - they recommended 7 minutes, I ended up at closer to 10 for the potatoes to be done.
4. Serve with the rest of the yoghurt - seasoned with salt, pepper and the rest of the spring onion whites - and sprinkle with spring onion greens.

It was fairly foolproof really, and I'm fairly certain this recipe would work well if you just put all the ingredients (bar the garnish) raw and cold into the pot, brought to a simmer for 15 minutes and then served. Browning the chicken really achieves next to nothing in terms of flavour when also paired with the chicken stock and harissa paste, while the frying of the potatoes might take a few minutes off the simmering time but otherwise had little discernible effect.

I followed the recipe to the letter and it took 30 minutes from start to finish, rather than the advertised 15, but this is still pretty quick dish to prepare and frankly only salad takes 15 minutes.

Alas, I forgot to scatter spring onion greens randomly across
the table top, as shown in the photo accompanying the recipe

The taste

The curry was very nice indeed - and my husband declared it thoroughly delicious - so this is something I'll probably make again. It's very good comfort good, possibly better suited to autumn and winter, and I think the only changes I'd make would be to swap the chicken out for some veg or butterbeans (the chicken didn't add much, in terms of flavour, and I'm loathe to slaughter another animal just to provide easy protein), and also perhaps finish with a splash of lemon juice or wine vinegar to brighten.

It was also a generous portion, I'd say the meal for 2 would easily stretch to feed three.

I'd score this meal 8 out of 10, if assessed as a homely, work night meal.

Value for money

I wondered how much this meal would cost if I just bought the ingredients via Ocado, which has all the convenience of home delivery but would not offer the advantage of eliminating leftover ingredients. Still, a jar of harissa can sit happily in the fridge for the next meal, while lentils, potatoes, ginger and spring onions can always find later use in the weeks and months to follow.

To buy these ingredients and then throw away all of the leftovers would cost £11.74, which actually makes Gousto cheaper than Ocado. Even if I take a conservative estimate of what I might use up in other dishes (with some throw-away of random off-cuts - for example, I rarely use a whole hand of ginger) it comes to £7.09 in total, which compares very well to Gousto's £5 per portion (which also offers extra advantages such as not needing to plan ahead or think of new dishes to make).

That said, the chicken accounts for a lot of the cost. If I replaced the poultry with butterbeans - as I probably would, for sake of my own health and that of the chicken - we're looking at £2 a portion. Which, as luck would have it, is about the price of this meal once the discount voucher used.

Conclusions...

Would I recommend Gousto? I think I'll need to try the remaining recipes before I decide. I wouldn't recommend it to enthusiastic and experimental home cooks, nor to harried workers with no time for cooking (Gousto doesn't really meet the needs of either of those). However, it's certainly looking promising for those who like to cook - or more to the point, who like to eat homecooked food - but don't have any time to think about what they actually want to eat.

I suspect when my daughter is born next month, that latter group might start to include me...

Let the Gousto Experiment Commence

I found a £25 gift voucher in my Amazon delivery last week, for something called 'Gousto'. It was a slow enough afternoon and a high enough discount to make me want to go find out what Gousto actually is.

It transpires Gousto is Timo and James, two humans on Homeworld who'll send you a box of ingredients portioned out for the various recipes you select, along with recipe cards so you can put the food back together like in the photos. At least, that's what they say.

You can order from around ten possible meals each week, so I ended up picking two portions each of this lot:

Images courtesy of Gousto.co.uk, your one stop shop for Gousto orders

Well, I thought £25 off seemed like it would be next to free, but I still had to pay £12.99 on top. I wouldn't ordinarily be willing to pay £35 for six home cooked meals, but the discount made it only £2 around per portion which definitely made it worth a try. 

The food parcel was delivered today. It didn't quite look the like the overflowing cardboard cornucopia pictured on the website, but I recognise it's hard to 'style' two spring onions, a yoghurt pot and a couple of buns (the rest was wrapped up in sheep's wool to keep it cool).

I'll update this blog later in the week so you can see if the meals turned out anything like in the pictures. Unfortunately I don't have any terracotta flowerpots to serve my harissa chicken curry in, and my white-washed 18th century trestle table is down the dry cleaners at the moment, but I will struggle through as best I can. 

How to separate an egg

An egg, relaxing at
home yesterday

I use a method of separating eggs which is effortless and requires no clean-up, and yet searching online I can't see anyone else mentioning it. This is baffling. A 'How To Separate Eggs' video I watched during my research recommended the use of funnels, or the vacuum from a compressed soda bottle, or running the egg through your hands. Euw, no thanks. My method means you just pour it out like you'd pour out milk, and then move on.

And I've never had a yolk break and mix in. Just pour it straight into your recipe.

I feel a bit like the first monkey to learn how to wash fruit in the river, then all the other monkeys see him and copy and it spreads like wildfire through the savannah. I really hope this becomes the dominant egg separating method by 2025. If that is all I achieve in life, and when I die in 2082 everyone on the savannah is cracking eggs the Rick Bot way, it will still truly have been a live worth living. 

So:

• Step 1: Crack the pointy end of the egg, just like you would normally crack the side.
• Step 2: Peel open the top slightly, like you would normally peel open the side... only you get a much smaller hole this way.
• Step 3: Pour the egg white into your bowl, and the yellow will stay behind.

That's it.

You can stick the egg yolks in the fridge in their shells until you need them, if you like. The antibacterial effects of the eggshell will probably* keep it well protected for a few days (unless you live in America, where the antibacterial effects of the shell are all scrubbed off by law).

*Here, 'probably' should be regarded as an adequate legal defence in any resulting homicide investigations.

ALSO, A BONUS EGG THOUGHT:

Why are most people not steaming their eggs? Boiling is so 20th century. Stick them in a steamer for however long you would normally boil them. They never crack when they're cooking - as there's no jostling in the water - and they're much easier to peel. I didn't invent this one, but I am eager to convert anyone I meet who cares.

This is my first food blog post in over 5 years. I rather enjoyed it. See you in 2020 - hopefully by then I'll have a new method for peeling fruit.

Attribution: photograph of an egg by 'digitalart', courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net, largely because I was too busy cracking eggs to take a photo. I recommend freedigitalphotos.net for all of your egg photo needs.