Tomato salad au Charles

Awww, you're all just so lovely :) Thank you for all the sweet comments after my return to blogland. I feel all invigorated to continue and am very pleased to be just managing to sneak in under the wire for this month's No Croutons Required. It's Holler's birthday edition, you see, so it seemed like an extra shame to miss it.


My salad is a very simple one, but the dressing makes it amazing. It's a speciality of my friend Charles, whom I visited yesterday. Charles and I go way back, right back to the first day of university, in fact, and I have him to thank for my initiation into the ways of toasted cheese sandwiches with pickles, how not to make stock, and how to dismount from a bike while it's still moving (actually I've never dared try that again after my debut). Charles' cooking skills have moved on from the cheese toastie days and both times I've seen him recently he's made a version of this salad. It's essentially a mix of lettuce, tomato and cucumber, with assorted other raw veggies and some fruit. The first time he used sliced apples, and this time it was grapes (I nearly made myself ill gorging on all the grapes!). The dressing is what brings it all together in a silky mustardyness, and was passed on to him by his dad. I hope I've remembered it correctly though I'm sure it would stand some customising. My own salad was a a bit of a pared down version as our fridge was a bit low on ingredients - some rocket and watercress, chopped tomatoes and cucumber, and some sliced pear. I added a lot of tomatoes since they are the theme of No Croutons Required this month. I love the smell of fresh tomatoes and am hoping that I'll have some more home-grown ones this year. They are (hopefully) germinating on the kitchen table, along with some peas, broad beans, herbs, and a small cucumber plant I bought on a whim today in the garden centre.


Since it's her birthday Holler has asked that we describe a whole meal to go with our tomato offerings. I'm sending over what I ate my salad alongside as it was fun: sauteed mushrooms, leeks and chard with some thyme and basil in a bit of tomato sauce, wrapped in pancakes. I served mine with some leftover sweet potato soup over the top as a sauce. It doesn't look too pretty but I think it was birthday-worthy. And just in case it's not, I'd bring out a luscious chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing as a dessert :)


Salad dressing au Charles
Put into a jar:
1 thumb of vinegar (not balsamic)
1 tsp English mustard
1 tsp salt
2 thumbs of olive oil

Shake and dress.

It's spring! (and a grainy mushroom pilaf)

The clocks have changed, the evenings are light, the sunshine is here (at least sporadically) and I have nearly finished teaching for the year. I am feeling fresh and invigorated and full of good intentions for actually doing something with the garden this year. I've been out there weeding and scattering seed about already this evening, and I have the soil under my fingernails to prove it.

The Scientist's trademark pancakes

So what has happened in this 6 week blog hiatus at Munchkin Mail? Well, Johanna has had a baby - the lovely Sylvia! Many congratulations! Our friends Tom and Tabitha have also produced number 2 sprog, as have Steve and Sarah. We met another set of friends, Dom and Becca's gorgeous little one last week, and The Munchkinette is crawling! And us? Well I've written 10 lectures, taken 20 seminars, given two conference papers and finished a book chapter. Does that count? I've also still been cooking and baking though I've got completely out of the habit of photographing anything, and so I will just have to tell you about the brownies that were so scrumptious and foolproof that I made them twice in one week, the decadent be-ganached marscapone brownies I made for Comic Relief, the banana-carrot cake I sent to the gamers, my new favourite salad - Ricki's edamame bean and seaweed (so simple, SO flavoursome), Heidi's bulgar and cauliflower chick pea hot pot which actually manages to make kale taste nice, and a delicious cauliflower and coconut milk curry I'm not sure if I can find again. I've made a few more cookies for my colleagues as well but mid-week baking really fell by the wayside with all the lectures and a whole ton of admin which came my way. Maybe next week...

Edamame and seaweed salad

I have to admit that I wasn't really sure if I was going to pick up the blog again after having a break. Although people tell me they keep up with my posts my real life (as opposed to blogland) friends are a little reticent about communicating. You might know what I'm up to, but people - I know NOTHING about what you're doing! So if you read this and enjoy it, please get in touch. Leave me a comment or send me an email with your news. Otherwise it's just me broadcasting random details about my personal life and that's not really what it's all about. Having said that, some people I've met through blogging left me some lovely messages and emails and I thank each and every one (so that's at least two :))

Mushroom wheatberry pilaf

It seems fitting to kick off the rejuvenated blog with a recipe that not only features my favourite vegetable, the mushroom but is also from my favourite cookbook - Moosewood Low Fat Favourites. I actually made it ages ago - in fact I think I even mentioned it in passing in a post - but never got round to writing about it properly. It was inspired by finding some wheatberries in a health food shop - I fancied grinding my own flour for some bread, but have yet to get round to doing that. In the meantime this was a chewy, flavoursome and filling meal which tasted great *and* good for you. I made loads and froze the rest for some day when The Scientist was out. Cricket season is about to start so I suspect that its time is nigh.

Mushroom wheatberry pilaf (from Moosewood Low Fat Favourites)
Serves 6 as a side (I had it as a main course)

1/2 cup raw wheatberries, soaked overnight
1 cup brown rice (or 1 1/2 cups cooked)
1 large onion, chopped
5 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
2 tsp olive oil
1 pound mushrooms, sliced (I used portabellos because that's what was in the veg box, plus some dried mushrooms)
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp minced fresh rosemary or 1/2 tsp dried
3 tsp soy sauce
1/2 cup dry red wine

Drain the soaked wheatberries. Return them to the saucepan with fresh water to cover. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, cover and simmer for about an hour, until tender.

In a separate pot, add 2 cups of cool water to the rice, cover tightly and bring to a boil on high heat. When steam escapes from below the lid, turn off the heat and let stand for 5 minutes. Return to a very low heat and simmer for about 35 minutes, or until all of the water has been absorbed.

While the grains cook, saute the onions and garlic in the oil in a large, covered skillet on low heat for about 10 minutes, until golden. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking. Add the mushrooms, thyme, rosemary and soy sauce and cook for 5 minutes. Pour in the wine and continue to simmer until the wine evaporates. Set aside.

When the wheatberries are soft, drain any excess liquid and then add to the sauteed mushrooms. Stir in the cooked rice, mix thoroughly and serve immediately.

Well, it looks as though term-time and blogging just aren't mixing too well! I am going to have a bit of a break while I plough through the teaching and admin part of my life. If you are looking for other tales of baking may I recommend some of the blogs in my favourites list :)

Kasha varnishkes

Isn't that a great name for a dish? Varnishkes - I don't really even know how to say it, but I like the pleasingly jarring sounds (I am the daughter of a speech therapist after all). I found this recipe in my book of Jewish cooking and had had it bookmarked for ages. It's a simple dish of mushrooms, pasta bows and buckwheat, but I had put off making it because I wanted to try it in all its original 'shroomy glory before tinkering with substitutes - and of course that meant waiting for an opportunity when The Fungus-Hater Scientist and I were eating separate meals.

It wasn't only the mushrooms that attracted me to this dish. There was also the buckwheat which I've been reading is a bit of a powerhouse, but which I've only previously put in one of my favourite seedy breads. There was the combination of buckwheat and pasta which sounded interesting. And then there was the dish's Eastern European origins which made me feel as though it should be part of my cultural heritage and I'm always one for a bit of getting back to my roots.


Buckwheat is one of those sneaky foodstuffs that pretends it's one thing but is actually another. In this case the little kernels you buy in the shop are not a grain, but the fruiting seed from the buckwheat. It's often toasted, in which case it becomes kasha. Mine was regular buckwheat but it got toasted as part of the recipe. Each little groat is also a nutritional angel, containing all the different types of essential amino acid, lots of fibre, and essential fatty acids (would you credit it, I just found a website called 'Buckwheat Health Benefits').

I made this dish a few weeks ago and had my recurring winter photography problems so the pictures aren't too good. Eventually I got fed up and just ate my dinner. Which was very nice. The buckwheat stays quite nubbly - one of those grains which is almost impossible to describe. It was simultaneously hard - a bit like bulgar but more so - and yet quite soft, but with a bit of chewiness. It was softer than spelt but had a more assertive presence than brown rice. Am I getting over how it tasted here?? Just try it. Its unusual texture partnered nicely with the soft pasta, and of course the mushrooms raised it to a new level of bliss. It made a really nice healthy satisfying dish, and all my amino acid receptors tingled with glee (Dr Eco Sis: I don't wish to know that there aren't such things. In my world everyone's body strives to a balance of humours and the uterus roves around a woman's body and can cause hysterical strangulation. In my world the date is somewhere around 1700...)

I have discovered in the last six months or so that I love almost every wholegrain going. Spelt? Loved it. Barley? Love it. Bulgar? Yum yum yum. Kamut? Don't know - the packet is still unopened, but I have high hopes. The only exception is amaranth which is (I believe) almost entirely pointless. You may laugh, but when we had one of our Friday night treat dinners this week The Scientist got a very colourful and healthy-looking microwave paella, and I made a dish of brown rice, wheatberries and mushrooms - and loved it. I didn't take a photo but there's a lot more in the freezer so I hope it will appear here at some stage. The Scientist isn't quite so universally enamoured of new grains so I tend to try them out on my own first. They have to pass the barley versus spelt test to move on to the joint menu planner: he finds the former too slimey but liked the latter when he tried it. Bulgar passed; amaranth, needless to say, did not. I can usually make some sort of assessment of whether he'll like a new grain on those grounds, but buckwheat defies classification a bit because of its unusual texture. It was close enough to bulgar that I'd try it, but I think I'd have a side-dish of mashed potato on standby just in case. For those grain lovers among us though: buckwheat rocks and I recommend that you get in touch with your Eastern-European amino-acid-loving heritage immediately.

Kasha varnishkes (from the Jewish Traditions Cookbook)

Serves 4-6 [I just made a little portion and had the leftovers cold for lunch)

25g dried well-flavoured mushrooms
500ml/ 2 1/4 cups boiling water or stock
3 tbsp vegetable oil
3-4 onions, thinly sliced
250g mushrooms, sliced
300g/1 1/2 cups whole coarse buckwheat
200g pasta bows
salt and ground black pepper

Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl, pour over half the boiling water or stock and leave to stand 20-30 minutes, until rehydrated. Remove the mushrooms from the liquid, then strain and reserve the liquid.

Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the onions and fry for 5-10 minutes until softened and beginning to brown. Remove the onions to a plate, then add the sliced mushrooms to the pan and fry briefly. Add the soaked mushrooms and cook for 2-3 minutes. Return the onions to the pan and set aside.

In a large, heavy frying pan, toast the buckwheat over a high heat for 2-3 minutes, stirring. Reduce the heat.

Stir the remaining boiling stock or water and the reserved mushroom soaking liquid into the buckwheat, cover the pan and cook for about 10 minutes until the buckwheat is just tender and the liquid has been absorbed.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a large pan of salted boiling water as directed on the packet, or until just tender, then drain.

When the kasha is cooked, toss in the onions and mushrooms, and the pasta. Season and serve hot.

A tasty daal - and a narrow escape

We all know that cats like kooky corners and unlikely hidyholes, but sometimes they don't think of their own self-preservation. Scooty is generally too bright white and alarmed to get himself caught, but I am always worried about shutting small, stealthy and tabby-brown Mausel in the wardrobe. She has already proved her capacity for initiative beyond all laws of physics and leverage - she can somehow through extreme doggedness (surely cattedness?) get the sliding door of the wardrobe open no matter how carefully I close it, but I still worry. Last night both my fears and the strength of my emotional bond with my little lap-cat were demonstrated. I opened the airing cupboard door on my way to bed, and she hopped in. I dithered about, went to bed, read, turned the light off, started drifting off to sleep. Then I awoke to a strange, brief banging noise. It was unusual enough to make me alert, but certainly not feline-sounding. I suddenly had a flash of intuition that I had absent-mindedly closed the airing cupboard door again on my way upstairs, and couldn't rest until I'd checked. I'm so glad I did, as I had shut the poor little thing in, though she seemed perfectly happy and purry to see me when I opened the door. I dread to think of how hot it would have got in there when the hot water tank came on in the morning. I'm sure she wouldn't have been the first cat to get caught in a nice warm cupboard - in fact I know that Vet Mum and Dad's cat has spent at least one night in theirs - and has also accidentally leapt from an upstairs window and survived, but still. She is stretched out on my lap as I type so she has evidently put it behind her entirely.


All this is entirely unconnected with the tasty daal I made last week. I have become completely converted to the food columns in the Saturday Guardian recently. I particularly like Dan Lepard's How to Bake column and really enjoy reading Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's even if the recipes are often a bit meaty for me (though not always - you can rely on Hugh to pick a good topic regardless of food type). I really want to like Ottolenghi's column as the restaurant and cookbook are both super-trendy, and it's all about vegetarian food. But I all too often find the recipes overly complicated and sometimes not too healthy and move on. Last weekend though I knew immediately the recipe was a winner - spiced lentils with cucumber yogurt. We both love a good daal - it's tasty, healthy and satisfying, and what's more, yogurty dips are the only way The Scientist will eat cucumber. We even had some fresh coriander lying around after making sweet potato falafel. I made it that very night, and it was very good indeed - tangy, tasty, filling, comforting - I could go on. I used curry powder instead of curry leaves, and missed out the optional asfeotida and fenugreek as we didn't have any, but I did the rest exactly as stated. The Scientist ate his with sausages, and I had mine with wild and basmati rice. The next night I had it atop a grilled portabello mushroom it was yum like that too. I think that it would make great soup too, with a bit more liquid added. I opened this weekend's Guardian with new hopes - and have cut out the noodle salad recipe to ponder some more. I may yet be a convert.


Spiced rice with cucumber yogurt, by Ottolenghi: recipe here

Fixing a brownie problem

I noticed to my surprise the other day that I only have one entry on this blog tagged as 'brownies'. It's possible I made a couple in the early days before I started tagging my posts, but still - that must be at least ten months with no blog-worthy brownies. Surely this is impossible - some brownie-hating little blog fiend must have been swallowing up my posts. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that blogging has made me want to try out new things every time I bake, and the old tried and trusteds have fallen by the wayside. When those tried and trusteds are brownies this is surely a travesty of the highest order which must be rectified immediately.


Luckily, I had an excuse. When we were in Leeds visiting Munchkin Gramps and family a few weeks ago we went into a posh little bakery in the Corn Exchange. It was a Sunday and very quiet, and the young man in there - who also did all the baking - let us taste lots of things. While the others were making appreciative noises about the very non-veggie-friendly lime jelly covered cheesecake, I was looking around, and noticed some manger-shaped brownie cakes filled with some sort of luscious chocolate ganache. When I pointed them out to The Scientist (once the distraction of the cheesecake had been dispatched) he looked very interested and suggested that they could be a good offering for a gaming night.


This weekend was the one. I knew I wanted to make little cakes with proper finished edges rather than slices from a big cake, and so I chose a recipe I'd cut out from a magazine for a brownie cake. It differed from other brownies I'd made because you separate the eggs, whisk the whites and fold them into the mixture at the final stage. Does that make it a cake and not a brownie? Who knows. As a joky nod to the fact that The Scientist has gone gaming over Valentine's Day (not a problem AND he sent me flowers as a surprise before he went), I baked them in heart-shaped moulds, and they looked pretty cute. I must admit that I never got as far as the ganache. I was going to make chocolate buttercream which is The Scientist's favourite, but I was just too tired in the end after a busy week, and we decided there was enough chocolate involved. But if I were making them to woo my beloved at a homey Valentine's supper, I might go the extra hog (sugar-induced coma - always a romantic end to a night).

When I thought more about it I did remember a few more brownies which have graced our oven in the last year. There was Dogophile Vegan Nurse's vegan brownies for one. And the golden syrup-based ones which Noodle helped me make. And I tried some black-beany ones which I rediscovered in the freezer the other day and which are a little odd (I am forced to concede that beans don't improve *everything*). And there was another more recent batch which had Celebrations chocolates baked into it which I planned to post about but which didn't photograph too well. I was relieved to think that the dearth hasn't been quite as bad as I'd feared, but it's good to put a conclusive stamp on it by selecting 'brownie' as I tag this post.

Mini chocolate brownie cakes (from ?? - oh dear, I must start labelling where the recipes in my folder came from. I suspect the Sainsbury's Magazine)

Serves 10

175g unsalted butter plus extra for greasing
225g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
200g caster sugar
3 medium eggs, separated
65g plain flour
50g chopped pecan nuts [I left these out; one of The Scientist's gamer friends has a nut allergy]

Heat oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4. Butter a 20-25 cm cake tin and line with greaseproof paper. Or, do as I did and use a silicon muffin pan.

Place 175g of the chocolate, plus the butter and sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until melted, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool [I wouldn't skip this - the eggs might scramble and that wouldn't be pretty]

Whisk the egg yolks into the chocolate mixture, then add the flour, nuts and the remaining chocolate.

Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks, then gently, but thoroughly, fold into the chocolate mixture.

Pour into the prepared tin(s) and bake in the centre of the oven for about 35-40 minutes, until crusty on top. I set the timer for 20 minutes for my little muffins and then started checking on them at 5 minute intervals. They probably still took close on to half an hour but everything takes a long time in our oven. Leave to cool, then turn out. The recipe suggests dusting with icing sugar and serving warm with custard or cold with cream.

Winter apple loaf

Just a quick post tonight - hectic day, plus my old college is on University Challenge as I type! This is the bread that we ate with our roast chestnut soup. It's another Dan Lepard recipe from his How to Bake column in the Guardian. It's a yeasted bread but it had the texture of a soda bread (though perhaps I was tricked by the fact that it's baked in the same shape as a soda bread). Either way I wasn't complaining - I love soda bread, and I loved this bread too. It was nice and wholesome with the malted flour and seeds, but with a nice sweetness from the apple. It complemented the chestnut and apple soup too. The Scientist found it slightly doughy which was a shame - I could see what he meant and it probably needed slightly longer in the oven though it had even a bit more than its time because I was in the middle of a work task when the oven timer went off! I froze what we didn't eat with the soup and have been eating it as toast and sandwiches. I was sorry when it was all gone and will definitely make it again.

Apple bread with random counter-top accessories!

Better go - my alma mater looks as though it needs all the support it can get!

Winter apple bread, recipe here