Super-posh intellectual dining

Last night I dined at one of the Oxford colleges, thanks to a kind invitation from a friend with a visiting fellowship. Whatever you think about elitism and snobbery, I love the traditions and ceremony of occasions like these. I haven't dined at a college for ages and it was great fun. The college in question was Corpus Christi which is a small and not very stuffy college - quite similar in size and spirit to the one I went to myself. It's beautiful, especially on a nice warm evening, with (I think) the only paved rather than grassy front quad of all the colleges. My friend gave me a brief guided tour of the quads and the chapel before we went up to the SCR (Senior Common Room) for drinks. I'm like a kid in a sweetie shop in hotel rooms, looking through all the cupboards and the complimentary goodies you get, and I think my friend was a little startled at how lively I became at the sight of so many bottles and juices and types of tea bags you could *just help yourself to*! I am very fond of my institution but it rarely gives us access to crystal glasses and sixteen types of Twinings tea.

The meal itself was pretty nice though these things are a bit wasted on me, fussy, small appetite person that I am. The first course was poached egg on asparagus with hollandaise on the side. This is a combination of some of my favourite foods, and as someone who can *just* manage to poach one egg successfully, the sight of about 35 all done to perfection and served at the same time was pretty impressive (cue more enthusiasm and no doubt more discomfort on the part of my host who could probably see his fellowship being revoked for bringing in unsuitable guests). The next course was fish, and some deep fried spring rolls for me, which were ok, and then stuffed pheasant (or something similar) for the carnivores and a Mediterranean tart for me. I'm not too keen on tarts, so I mainly ate the roasted veggies which were very nice. And finally, dessert was chocolate creme brulee, which was very rich and decadent. There was a layer of crunchy sugar under the torched brulee - is that normal? I didn't know whether to be impressed or surprised. All of this was accompanied by both red and white wines, and fully butlered service.

So far so decadent - we'd just eaten four courses, after all. But no, there was still "dessert" to come. This was back in the SCR, with a new seating plan, and consisted of dessert wine, claret and port, with fruit platters, and plates of truffles and petit fours (mmmnnnnn). I had to leave a little early to get my train but it was a lovely evening of conversation, good food and a nice dose of nostalgia. I have to admit that I did snaffle a little treat to take home to The Scientist - they really will never let me back. I hope my friend's fellowship is safe!

Ummmm....lemon mousse cheesecake

The Scientist's favourite dessert is lemon meringue pie. When I was out shopping recently I picked up a couple of limes on a whim, thinking I might try out a lime version. Then I decided I might use the lime as the drizzle for a lemon drizzle cake variation for him to take gaming. Then I made him mini chocolate chip cookies instead after he reflected on how nice it is to have a whole pile of mini treats (one mini treat is pointless in his book because it's over too soon). So I still had the limes, and meanwhile they had been augmented by two lemons for the cake. So then I thought I might make a lemon and lime swirled cheesecake for a Sunday dessert. I even imagined how attractive the light yellow and light green halves would look. But I didn't really want to buy a whole packet of biscuits for the base and have lots left. When I had a flick through some cookbooks I hit on a lemon mousse cheesecake which just had biscuits crumbled on top. There were a few mini choc chip cookies left from the gaming batch and my mind was finally made up (about time, you may be thinking, but I like a good back story :) ).

The mixture was very much like a regular cheesecake, but the egg white was whisked up separately and folded in to the rest of the batter - hence the mousse part. I quartered the recipe and made it in the little star shaped foil pots April sent me in my Blogging by Mail package, just for fun. I also cut down on the sugar a bit and used double the amount of lemon for more tang. It made three, but there's never any harm in having a spare - or so I heard The Scientist saying on his way to the fridge later in the evening.


The verdict on this dessert was an absolutely resounding thumbs up from both of us. The Scientist is generally a fan of dessert but he really got excited about this one. The mousse part was beautifully light and soft - airy round the edges and just softly damp in the middle. The extra lemon gave it a really good flavour - I'd definitely recommend using more than the recipe says. I dusted one with icing sugar just for the photo but it tasted lovely like that, and the crumbled choc chip cookies added a really good extra substance and texture to the others (the cookies were slightly soft which was nice, although I'm sure that crunchy biscuits would work just as well).


I'm sending this souffle pie to Tartelette's round of Sugar High Friday, which has a citrus theme. Now, does anyone have any good ideas for limes...?


Lemon mousse cheesecake (from Martha Day's Complete Baking - again!)

Serves 10-12

1.2kg cream cheese, at room temperature [I used reduced fat]
350g caster sugar
45g plain flour]4 eggs, at room temperature, separated
25ml fresh lemon juice
grated rind of 2 lemons
115g digestive biscuits, crushed

1. Preheat oven to 325F/170C/Gas 3. Line a 10-2in round cake tin with greaseproof paper and grease the paper.

2. With an electric mixture, beat the cream cheese until smooth. Gradually add 285g of the sugar, and beat until light. Beat in the flour.

3. Add the egg yolks and lemon juice and rind, and beat until smooth and well blended.

4. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Add the remaining sugar and beat until stiff and glossy.

5. Add the egg whites to the cheese mixture and gently fold in.

6. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, then place the tin in a larger baking tin. Place in the oven and pour hot water in the outer tin to come 1 inch up the side.

7. Bake until golden, 60-65 mins [I started checking through the glass oven door at about 40 minutes for my little ones]. Let cool in the pan on a rack. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

8. Unmould using an inverted plate. Smooth the top with a metal spatula. Sprinkle the biscuits over the top in an even layer, pressing down slightly to make an top crust. To serve, cut slices with a sharp knife dipped in hot water.

A quilt for Isabel

My friend Julie has become a mum for the first time! Young Isabel made her appearance last week, and mother and daughter are both doing well. This exciting event leads me to mention a hobby previously absent from this blog: patchwork. Kiwi Sis and I have always been quite crafty, and Kiwi Sis has actually been doing a machine patchwork course herself in New Zealand, so I expect to be challenged on my amateur ways any day now! For the last few years I’ve been making cot quilts as presents for my friends’ new babies – I love doing it and I’m always incredibly touched at how much people seem to like them. I’d made Julie’s – sorry, Isabel’s – early because I wanted to give it to Julie in person, so I’m not spoiling any surprises by posting a picture here.


Julie didn’t know the sex of her baby in advance so I kept the colours gender-neutral, with a nod to the scarlet she wore in her wedding dress. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Julie yet, and I imagine that she’s probably a bit busy going ‘ouch, I hurt’ and ‘aaaargh, I’m a mother’ to be reading this, but we had a little toast to her, her husband and her daughter – spot where the wine’s from, Julie (but ignore its name!)?

¡enhorabuena! May the start of your family life together be very, very sweet.

I realised while going through my photos for pictures of other quilts that I actually haven’t been very good at recording them before sending them off to their new little owners. Here are some of those I have recorded, and there will be more coming in the next few months. I’ve had to start asking my friends to get pregnant in an orderly manner so I can keep up!

The mother of all the quilts: the first and hugest

Callum's quilt
Munchkin's quilt (modelled by a pook)

Zoe's quilt

A meal for the Puritans: intercontinental blog challenge #3

Firstly: happy birthday, Junior Bro! I'd like to think that you're reading this on your new laptop, but I suspect that 14-year-old boys have more interesting things to look at on the web. Ah well, this square older sister wouldn't have it any other way.

Anyway, this post is another installment in my fun challenge with Lisa from Unique Little Bits. We each cook a dish from the other one’s cuisine after a particular theme. This time I suggested bread, although since Lisa has written about some really professional-looking breads on her blog I am a little worried about how my efforts will pass muster!

The two American breads that sprang to mind when I was deciding what to make were cornbread, and steamed Boston brown bread. I’ve made a nice pumpkin cornbread before, but it comes under the heading of ‘savoury scone’ for The Scientist, so I always end up eating it on my own. I thought that the brown bread – which looked quite sweet from the recipes I found – might suffer the same fate, so I decided not to tell him what was in it beforehand and go for it anyway!

When I looked up the history of brown bread I discovered that it’s based on the ingredients available to early Puritan New Englanders – rye and cornmeal flours, which eked out the more precious wheat flour. Also, since ovens weren’t that common, the bread was steamed, usually in a cylindrical jar or mould. I found a recipe which baked the bread in the oven but I wanted to stay true to the spirit of its origins, so I steamed mine. I didn’t have a big coffee can, which is what’s usually used to make it in nowadays – in fact I didn’t have any tin cans at all as we’d only just done our recycling. So I improvised with an empty glass jar (the one which had held the applesauce which has already featured as prompting several other baking endeavours – this sauce keeps on giving even after its demise!). I steamed it by standing the jar on top of an improvised trivet in a saucepan, inverted the matching steamer basket over the top to accommodate the height of the jar, and then covering the holes in the steamer with a lid. I love it when science meets pragmatism! Anyway, despite the making do, the bread steamed fine, although I had been a bit worried about how thin the dough was – really more of a batter than a dough. I suppose it’s supposed to be like that.

Ready for steaming (top), and posing an intractable problem (bottom)

More perceptive readers may already have noticed a problem with my loaf, however: the neck of the jar was narrower than the base, making it almost impossible to get it out! I thought about ships in bottles; I thought about those clever science experiments you do with children to get an egg inside a bottle with a narrower opening. But my thoughts didn’t get me any further to getting my loaf out, and The Scientist informed me that the egg in bottle principle worked on the basis that there was spare air in the egg which could be sucked out. My loaf looked pretty dense and I wasn’t confident about any spare pockets. In the end I abandoned the scientific principles and cut it up inside the jar. This is why there is no picture of it beautifully sliced – it was more of a rustic carving.

It may not have passed the science (or the common sense) test, but I’m happy to say that it did pass The Scientist test. He thought that it tasted a lot like malt loaf, which he really likes - dark yet sweet, and with a soft, slightly chewy texture. We both enjoyed it served with Boston baked beans and apple sauce, which are its traditional accompaniments, and some grilled corn on the cob.

Update: go and take a look at Lisa's lovely looking Bara Brith speckled bread here

Boston brown bread (from Martha Day Complete Baking)
Makes 1 loaf

45g cornmeal
45g plain white flour or wholemeal flour [I used half and half]
45g rye flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/s tsp bicarb of soda
45g seedless raisins
60ml milk
60 ml water
60ml molasses or black treacle

1. Line the base of one 1 pint cylindrical metal or glass container - a tin, jar or heatproof glass coffee jug, with greaseproof paper.

2. Mix together the cornmeal, plain or wholemeal flour, rye flour, salt bicarb of soda and raisins in a large bowl. Warm the milk and water in a small saucepan [I did it in the microwave] and stir in the molasses or treacle.

3. Add the molasses mixture to the dry ingredients and mix together until it just forms a moist dough. Do not overmix.

4. Fill the jug or tins with the dough to about 2/3 full. Cover with foil or greased greaseproof paper and tie securely.

5. Bring water to a depth of 2inches to the boil in a deep, heavy-based saucepan large enough to accommodate the jug or tin. Place a trivet in the pan, stand the jug or tin on top, cover the pan and steam for 1 1/2 hours, adding more boiling water to maintain the required level as necessary.

6. Cool the loaf for a few minutes in the jug or tin, then turn it on its side and the loaf should slip out [ha!]. Serve warm, as a teabread or with savoury dishes.

Spring watercress soup

Here’s another product of our trip to the watercress festival at Alresford last weekend: watercress soup. But first, here is a picture of the lovely Alresford itself which I’d forgotten I’d taken:

Watercress soup has had a bit of a bad press over the years as it’s one of the faddy weight-loss foods you subsist on until you’re nothing bit a bit of green string yourself. I made a nice watercress, pea, asparagus and courgette soup last year which was much more substantial though, and just sang ‘spring’. I was going to go for that again with my Alresford cress, but then I saw a recipe which was actually called ‘spring soup’ while flicking through Moosewood Low Fat Favourites and incorporated some of their flavours too. In particular, theirs also had carrot in it, and some pasta which I liked the sound of. I used edamame beans instead of their lima beans (I never knew until last week that edamame beans are the same as soya beans). Their soup was a brothy one, but I quite like nice thick soups (and wasn’t sure how appetising bits of watercress would be) so I cooked the pasta separately, blended the soup, and then added the pasta to it at the end. I meant to cook one person’s worth, but ended up with three good portions, so so much for my maths! The recipe is very rough – just use what you have! It wasn’t the most photogenic soup in the world but it tasted really good – nice and fresh but good and filling. In fact I had to go and collapse for a bit after eating a bowl, so it’s definitely not in the stringy water category – though still nice and healthy.

Spring watercress soup (adapted from Moosewood Low Fat Favourites)

Made three portions

1 garlic clove, finely chopped
Half an onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and diced
½ tsp dried thyme [of course, you could use fresh herbs – just double the quantity]
½ tsp dried basil
1/8 cup of water
3 cups stock
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 cup edamame beans [the original recipe was for butter beans, and they also used green peas. I decided I had enough veggies already]
Half a bundle or so of asparagus. [they say cut into 1-inch lengths. I chopped them much smaller since I was going to blitz it, and reserved the tips which I steamed separately and added to the finished soup]
Handful of small pasta shapes – I used little stars
½ tsp salt
½ tbsp lemon juice
Handful watercress, chopped [I didn’t use the stems though I thought later that I probably could have done]

In a covered soup pot on a low heat, cook the garlic, onion, carrot, thyme and basil in the water until the veggies have softened – about 10 mins. Add the stock and tomatoes and bring to a boil. Add the beans, asparagus and watercress and return to a boil. Cook until soft, adding the salt and lemon juice about half way through. In a separate pot cook the pasta until al dente. Blitz up the soup using a hand-held blender, and then add the pasta. Serve hot.

Watercress galore

I love the traditions of English village fairs and festivals, and last weekend we went to a great one: the fifth annual Alresford watercress festival. Yes, a whole festival devoted to this gracious and peppery vegetable - and why not? As the festival program informed me, watercress put Alfresford in Hampshire on the map, sending trainloads of the stuff up to Covent Garden market every day. I also learned that watercress was cultivated by Hippocrates in 400BC to treat his patients, that it contains mustard oils which give it its peppery taste, and that people used to eat it in sandwiches between the wars. The industry drooped a bit later in the twentieth century, but now that watercress has been labelled a superfood, it's back with a vengeance, complete with the slogan 'not just a bit on the side'.


Alresford (pronounced 'Allsford') is as beautiful a small rural town setting as you could hope for for a community festival, especially in last weekend's sun. I have a friend who lives there and he had raved about it so much that we decided to make the trip down from Warwickshire to visit him and see what it was all about. I think he panicked a bit that he'd built it all up a bit much and started mumbling about pond weed and watercress beer, but he needn't have worried (I can get excited about a lot less than cress). The Scientist grew up in north Hampshire so he got positively dewy eyed on the trip down, reminiscing about cricketing glories with his dad, and we even started calculating just how far one could commute to work (not THAT far, we decided). The town's main street was cordoned off and was lined with stalls selling watercress goodies galore. I was all up for anything weird, but sadly the watercress ice cream was off the menu this year. There was a lot of meat about, so I went for some watercress and chilli fudge (very hot!), a watercress scone (very green) and a watercress and coriander flatbread (very tasty). The Scientist shunned the watercress beer (actually it was far too hot to contemplate alcohol of any sort), but we both tried a little taster of watercress and tomato panacotta and a watercress flapjack from one of the local restaurants (very....interesting). We missed Anthony Worrall Thompson's cooking demonstration in favour of catching up with my friend at a riverside pub, but did see the watercress bug stilt-walkers and some morris men (I love morris dancing - it just sums up English country fairs). Sadly we were too late for the watercress eating contest - one of the few such contests where you use up more calories than you take in, I suspect.


I also, of course, bought some watercress to take home, and here's what some of it turned into: watercress, potato and goat's cheese tortellini. I used wonton wrappers for the pasta, and just blitzed up some cold baked potato flesh, some chopped cress and a mixture of cottage cheese and goat's cheese. I even managed to fold them into a sort of tortellini shape. I steamed them and we had them with a tomato relish and the Slayer Tombstones and garlic dip I blogged about yesterday. They were yum - the filling had a nice creamy consistency and the combination of cress and goats cheese worked really well. In fact the 'grass' around the tombstones was watercress as well, and I also put some in my vanilla bread, fig relish and goats cheese sandwiches (I really have been eating them most days this week!).

Alresford Watercress festival: www.watercress.co.uk

Buffy bites

After failing to make Stephanie from Dispensing Happiness's street food cocktail party last month I'm pleased to be back on track for this month's event - a Buffy Bash! I've never seen a whole episode of Buffy though I sat through the film that preceded the series once, but I'm not sure you can be a student in the 1990s without absorbing Buffy-culture. Especially not if you live with as big a sci-fi fan as The Scientist. I do know, though, that Buffy was written by Joss Whedon, who also wrote Firefly and the film Serenity, which I have seen or I think The Scientist would have sued for (non)divorce. I did quite like them, actually - I like the engineer character (I've forgotten her name and can't ask The Scientist because he is taking part in his first online poker game and I don't want to be accused of breaking his concentration). Anyway, I thought of going down the pink and girly route for the blog party, which seems to be Buffy's trademark (who is called Buffy anyway - is it a nickname?). But in the end I went for Slayer Tombstones with blood-red relish and anti-vampire garlic dip.

I always have more difficulty thinking of drinks to take along to Stephanie's parties. I'm not a big drinker and our 'cocktail cabinet' is somewhat random. I'm quite pleased with what I came up with though - Nosferatu's bane (The Scientist came up with that one just now in a brief break from play). I should say that I'm pleased with the idea - the reality tasted absolutely disgusting and I would not recommend that Stephanie pass it around her guests unless she wants it to be her last cocktail party. I found it on this website where it was listed as a natural hay fever remedy. I hope it does something useful as it certainly serves no agreeable purpose as a drink. It consisted of water which had been boiled with garlic cloves, mixed with half that quantity of cider vinegar, and some honey (if you actually want to try it, I'd go for a LOT of honey). It looked a lot like a nice glass of wine and I kept almost being tempted to try it, but one small sip left me reeling from vinegar fumes so I'm afraid it didn't last much longer than its photography pose.

Still, it was good fun and the tombstones were great, as were both the dips. The garlic one was a new invention - I bought a jar of garlic relish at the weekend, and we just mixed it with some Greek yogurt. We'll be revisiting that one - though perhaps without the cocktail. We'll take our chances with Nosferatu.