Savoury Saturday Scones (With Recipe)

I love Saturdays. They are the only day of the week that I don't set an alarm (I do tutoring on Sunday mornings, so I have to). I wake up whenever I feel like it (usually at the time when my bus to work would be leaving) and have a nice slow morning. Sometimes I knit and watch telly, sometimes I make a cup of coffee and catch up on emails on blog posts, but whatever it is that I choose to do, it is always non-forced andI do it because I want to, not because I have to.

Today my morning included, apart from doing the dishes and two loads of washing, making savoury strudels and cheese scones for today's  Macmillan Cancer Support Tea Party at my sister-in-law's - a part of "The world's biggest coffee morning" taking place later in the week. Its main purpose is to eat cake, drink coffee and collect money for a charity that heps support people with cancer and their families.

I find making scones incredibly easy. When I first moved to the UK and started working as a teaching assistant (because no school wanted to employ me as a teacher), Food Technology (now called Food and Nutrition) was one of my favourite subjects. Mostly because I got to put on an apron and get on with the cooking hands-on just like the students that I was supporting. I do not remember the teacher's name but I remember how encouraging and calm she was even though the class asn't exactlyideally behaved. It is her recipe that I wrote down have used ever since. Here it is.

INGREDIENTS:

• 150 g of self-raising four
• 50 g of butter (if you are making savoury scones, you can use salted butter)
• 50g of sugar or any sweet or savoury ingredient you want to add
• a couple of spoonfuls of milk

METHOD:

1. Mix the flour and butter together by hand until crumbly (if you are making sweet version, add sugar now, if savoury, add the savoury ingredients)
2. Add milk bit by bit and gently mix until the mixture joins together
3. Flatten by hand and cut out shapes
4. Bake on approx. 180°C until golden brown

I made mine with the most ordinary hard cheese I could find in the supermarket and grated it on a coarse grater, so the chunks of cheese are quite large and visible in the scones. They are delicious with a bit of butter and fresh chives. Enjoy!

Shark Week Biscuits and Visit to the Aquarium

A while ago you could have seen a picture of my very messy kitchen worktop (below) on my Facebook page. It wasn't my intention to make Linzer biscuits in shape of little sharks straight away. I was baking birthday treats for someone else when the idea occured to me - and since it was Shark Week and I had some cookie cutters from the Natural History Museum shop, I gave it a go.

After baking (I promise to publish the recipe here soon) and cooling I joined them together with jam and decorated them with melted milk chocolate. So here they are. I guess they resemble blacktip reef sharks best, what do you think?

Later in the week I also had to visit London, which gave me the perfect excuse to check out the Sea Life. I sat in front of the massive tank for good twenty minutes, just watching these majestic creatures swim past me and then more time reading all the labels and displays, trying to soak up as much information as I could.

I know some things that happen during Shark Week have been criticised because they are controversial and don't have much to do with the original purpose of it - education and conservation of these beautiful marine predators. It is sad. However, I prefer to focus on the original message, thatour planet is a balanced system, full of magnificent creatures that need to be protected. We cannot protect them without understanding them and education is the first step towards gaining this understanding.

Maundy (Green) Thursday with Nettle and Mushroom Quiche

Back in Slovakia Maundy Thursday is called Green Thursday. There are many traditions linked to "Green" Thursday. One that I tried to keep since I was a child is to eat something green in colour. This year I decided to use the green garlic and nettle tops from our garden to make a refreshing quiche.

My pastry is a variation of the pastry from foodlover.cz, which is a blog from which I learned to make quiche and since then made it many many times, although I must admit that I rarely measure out all the ingredients, I just throw things together and add flour/water depending on the dryness/stickiness and thickness/runniness of the pastry.

For the pastry you will need:

• 350 g of plain flour
• 185 g of unsalted butter (if you use salted to easier on the pinch of salt)
• 2 egg yolks
• a pinch of salt

You can roll it out and then place in the tin/baking dish or if you are - like me - reluctant to get another piece of equipment messy, just push it into the dish with your fingers. It looks less pretty and neat but tastes exactly the same. Bake for about 15 minutes on 180°C. Some recipes suggest covering the top of the pastry with ceramic baking beans to prevent it from rising but I find this step is unnecessary and the pastry doesn't rise that much.

My quiche is quite massive, so you may want to halve the amounts and masses above. Alternatively make two quiches or one regular quiche and a lot of mini quiches in muffin cups.

For the filling you will need:

• 2 large mushrooms
• 3 eggs (plus the two whites that you did not use when making pastry)
• 3 spring onions, bulb and leaves, chopped
• grated cheddar (or any other hard cheese you like)
• nettle tops, steamed
• 150 ml single cream
• 5 green garlics, bulb and leaves, chopped (to be completely honest here, my garlic wasn't traditional green garlic, it was garlic that survived the winter, thenw as given summer to grow and survived another winter and was still minute, so I lost my patience with it and pulled it out and sowed lettuce leaves in its place)
• optional - salt and pepper to taste

METHOD:

1.  Steam the nettle tops until they wilt and stop stinging.

2.  Prepare and bake the pastry.Take it out of the oven.
3.  Lay out sliced mushrooms on the pastry

4.   Lay the steamed nettles on top of the mushrooms

6.  Add the chopped spring onions and garlic on top of the nettles.

7. In a bowl mix the eggs, single cream and half of the grated cheese (you can add more salt or pepper to taste). Pour the mixture over the raw ingredients.

8.  Return to the oven and bake until the top starts getting golden and crunchy looking, but do not overdo it! (It usually takes 20-25 minutes depending on the thickness of your quiche.)

9.  Cover the top with the remaining grated cheese and return to the oven for 5 minutes until all the cheese is melted.

10.   When you like the look of it, take it out of the oven and serve with your favourite salad and a bit of vinaigrette.

I love what a versatile dish this is, you can add any vegetables you have in your fridge or freezer and it will keep in the fridge for several days. It can be eaten cold or warmed up, with salad or on its own. It is great for using up seasonal vegetables and I would imagine it freezes quite well, too (although I haven't tried yet as I never have anything left over :) )

I made a version of this quiche for my family when they came over for our wedding. Stressed out as I was I forgot to add the cream! And - it was still delicious and nobody noticed anything!!! A very forgiving meal :)

Mother's Day Cakes

Tomorrow my English family is gathering to celebrate mother's day, so I made some little cakes (recipe here), one for each of us. With spring coming and so much fruit in the shops, it only made sense to make them extra fruity. And they look pretty, too.

Our Brief Time with Peter Fantastic and Sourdough Baking

My husband likes sending me links to interesting ideas that we could try one day. One of the more recent ones has been the link to a sourdough started and the ways to make bread with it.  Finding out about it some more, I have found that there is a little bit of craze around it and that many of my friends back in Prague have actually got experience with sourdough baking. So I joined the Facebook group, researched the topic on the Internet, read through the Say! Little Hen blog and eventually we decided to give it a go.

Sourdough is fun but it needs some attention. This New York Times article describes sourdough as “America’s rising pet” and it is true. You feed it, you take care of it, if you don’t give it the right conditions and don’t feed it, it will die. It will smell and look weird and you will have to get rid of it. It also mentions that people name their sourdough cultures, which was a little challenge in itself!

… and so with a little strange twist of fate and possibly extremely weird train of thought and mental associations we ended up living with Peter Fantastic. He is a lot like one of those relatives that you barely know about but from time to time you have to doing something nice for them.

We set him up in an IKEA jar, combination of water and plain flour, adding more water and flour every twelve hours.

Here he is, twenty-eight minutes in

And he grew. After about a day and a half there were first bubbles. One couldn’t be sure whether they were just bubbles of air that got caught in the starter during mixing that are now escaping or actual carbon dioxide created by the yeast, but we kept our fingers crossed for him.

Soon it was clear that we were successful. He was properly bubbling!

The first thing I baked were Kaiser buns, because my husband loves them and we have them every single time we go to Prague. So I tried to re-create them, but the proofing did not work that much and we ended up with some quite dense stuff. However, they were still pretty good

The first actual bread was very hard on top but nice and airy inside, even though a bit too dry.

This one was much better, probably the biggest success of all.

The above is my most rustic and probably crunchiest loaf. It was delicious with butter and honey and a cup of tea.

This was a challenge. Bread with pieces of lardons are quite popular in Slovakia and Czech republic, so I tried to make my own, as we happened to bring some lardons home from Surrey County Show. The only thing I did wrong was add the chopped up lardons early on and then started kneading it properly and - ouch - they are sharp!! ;D

***

We do not normally eat that much bread but with Peter, we kind of had to. It was a proper adventure, getting up early  on a Saturday morning to make bread - but only with the two of us we were overflowing with bread a bit.

I write in past tense because, well, as the weather got warmer, Peter started being less and less active (which is strange) and eventually the way he smelled has changed, there were no bubbles and small pink specks started appearing in the starter. That was the time when we gave up and gave him a good old down-the-toilet funeral.

However, the whole experience has opened the door to the amazing craft of breadmaking which I am sure I will return to one day. One day when we have a house in the country, family to feed the bread to and a garden full of bees buzzing outside the window (although just writing about it makes me want to go and set the whole thing up right now!)

Elderflower Season and the Taste of Summer

Summer really is here now. Okay, so it's mild British summer, but it has started! Over the past few weeks, I have encountered several tutorials on how to make your own elderflower, how to fry battered flowers, how to make this and that using elderflower... All I could think of was there aren't any elderflower bushes around!

But then... As I was walking home from town with my shopping bags, I smelled the sweetest smell there is. It took me about 15 seconds to locate the bush (which could not be seen but could be smelled) and in spite of the fact that it was right near the road, I decided that a little cup of fully leaded town centre finest will not kill me. I went home with three massive blossoms, stuck them upside down into a tiny jar with a lot of sugar and lemon juice and here it is!

A couple of days later I enjoyed two glasses of delicious homemade elderflower cordial.

My recipe for elderflower cordial (it's SO easy!):

• A lot of washed flowers (just to remove the insects and the biggest dirt)
• A lot of sugar (I use regular white caster sugar)
• A lot of lemon juice (some people add citric acid but I find it works fine without it as well)

• Leave stand for about a day, then remove the flowers and sieve the liquid to remove lemon pips and any fallen off flowers.
• Fill bottles and store in fridge. When drinking, dilute with water to taste.

Cheers! (May contain traces of aphids)
___________________________________________________________________________________

Since I first wrote this, I have located another bush of elderflower near our place and made more cordial. Most of the flowers are gone now, but there are many berries developing, promising another interesting foraging opportunities for later in the year.

A New Job and New Peace of Mind

So, here I am again. Only two weeks after the refusal from one job, I participated in another job interview... this time successfully :)

Sowing seeds in the utility room

At first I was too tired to be fully happy about it, being tired from getting up at five in the morning to do last preparations for the interview and the lesson I was about to teach... But the following day - I was dancing around. Lots of pats on the back, "well-done"s and high fives from colleagues and friends and a completely new peace of mind came to me.

I know where my life is going and it is all right. I know where I will be and what I will be doing for the next year or so and I know it is good. Hard work, but good. Well done me! And now it is finally time for some gardening and playing computer games. And of course - cakes! ;-)

Windowsill Salad

After about a week of rain the weather turned warm again, bees are buzzing in the garden, white fluff from poplars flies around in the wind and the streets smell like barbecues and my windowsill vegetables are growing nicely. Summer always makes me want to eat healthy food. this time I made a salad of lettuce, spinach and beetroot leaves and pea shoots that I grew.

With some egg, red onion, sesame seeds and dressing added and combines with a nice hot crunchy bun, it made a great dinner. One day, I will be able to grow all these ingredients in my own garden. Soon, I hope :)

Bits of Garden on My Plate

It's the first time that I used the bits of my windowsill-grown plants to add to my food. This bruschette-type snack contained some of my home-grown spinach and chives. All the other things were bought, but it felt great to eat something that I grew myself.

My messy plant containers are full of spinach, carrots, little tomatoes, peas and chives.

This is my spinach container. The plants are starting to flower, so I'd better consume them soon. The name tag is made out of a used plastic coffee stirrer that I got somewhere, I don't remember where.

Easter Baking

For the past two Easters, I was away from Slovakia. Two years ago, I was on a field trip and I spent the last Easter Monday working at the zoo. I felt very much like an adult, spending one big holiday on my own in an interesting job, but now I am packing for my parents' place, with some of these in my bag : )

Happy and sweet Easter to you!

Homemade Noodles - Recipe

Having brought home some gorgeously looking home-produced eggs from a friend's house, I decided to do what I saw my Czech Grandma do so many times - homemade noodles. I always watched her make them and cut them with great precision, so thin and then so nice when they were cooked and put into chicken soup - yum!

All you need is some flour, a pinch of salt and one egg (mine was blown, because I liked the colour of the shell so much, I am saving it for Easter decorating). If it is too hard, it is ok to add a tablespoon of water.

Knead the mixture properly, it is a really hard one, until all the ingredients join together, then roll the dough out as thin as you can manage. Given the hardness of the dough, it is really hard work, at least it was for me.

Let the dough dry for a few minutes, then cut it into stripes, place them on top of each other and cut thin stripes off. You can also make squares and other different shapes you  like in your soup, but thin short noodles are my favourite, because we always had them like that.

When all the noodles are cut, spread them out and let them dry. Of course, you can cook them straight away, but once they are dried well, they will keep for a long long time in an air-tight container. I am going to get transparent jars for my homemade pasta, so that I can see them, because I think they look incredibly pretty : ]

And the shells? Well, I'd say I'm pretty much ready for Easter :) White, blue, brown and speckled shells to put into my spring decoration bowl with grass (pictures soon).

As for the rest of the eggs, they ended up fried with onions and cheese, sprinkled with fresh chives, tomatoes and roasted bread.

Thank you for a wonderful dinner meal, lovely noodles and Easter decorations, my friends!