Recipes

Cheddar and Rosemary Sables

- Alex Leave a comment

Rosemary and Cheddar Sables

I have millions (well, maybe not quite) of recipes tagged in delicious and every now and then I make a concerted effort to actually cook one of these recipes. I recently discovered I have over 100 chocolate cake recipes tagged so you can expect to see a flood of those in the near(ish) future.

With the festive season well and truly upon us I’ve been doing quite a lot of party cooking and trying out a few new things. One recipe that seemed both simple and savoury (for some reason, not everyone wants a party full of desserts) was a recipe for thyme and emmental sablés (recipe in French). As I had Gruyère in the fridge I thought this would be the go.

Of course, when I came to make these, I discovered the Gruyère had been eaten but I still had some reasonably good Cheddar hanging around and rosemary, well, it grows like a weed in our garden and Cheddar and rosemary sounded like a good match.

These are super easy biscuits to make but as you do need to keep the pastry cold, don’t decide to make them on a 36°C day!

Take 80g of Cheddar and coarsely grate it into your trusty food processor. Add 60g of unsalted butter, 100g of plain flour, 1 egg yolk, a pinch of pepper (if you can use white, then all the better) and one sprig of rosemary, finely chopped. Give it a quick whizz up and then add a little cold water to bring it all together. The recipe states 5cL of water and I always get really muddled with French fluid measurements. I actually thought it meant 500mL of water (which I knew would be ridiculous) but a bit of investigation shows that it is actually 50mL which is much, much closer the mark. You don’t need very much at all.

Wrap the dough in cling film and refrigerate for about an hour and a half. As I was on a schedule I didn’t have the luxury of that long a rest and things still turned out OK.

Preheat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan).

Roll the dough out to very thin – let’s say no more than about 5mm. Work fast: you may need to cut off chunks of pastry and keep the remainder in the fridge as you go along. Cut out the biscuits, place on baking trays and bake for 10-15 minutes. You can see from the photo that you want them to puff up and cook but you don’t want them to start taking on too much colour.

Allow to cool on a rack before serving. They’re perfect as a pre-dinner drink snack, but they’d also be great after dinner with more cheese.

And you could even try making them as Emmental and thyme …

Gluten Free Shortbread

- Alex 2 Comments

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I’ve been doing a ton of cooking lately – a first birthday party, followed by a Christmas party and I’ve still got a Christmas Eve party AND the big day itself to go!

For the first birthday I was on the hunt for gluten free (or coeliac friendly) recipes.  As with vegetarian food, I find it better to seek out those things that are naturally gluten free, or very nearly so, rather than try to adapt a full fat version of a recipe.

A few years ago I went on a bit of a shortbread baking spree and remembered that many of the recipes made use of rice flour and/or polenta so I figured that I should be able to find, or at worst adapt, a gluten free recipe.

And I was right – I found this recipe on the That’s Life site. It’s really simple and I think you’re probably better off not even bothering with the food processor in the first place. I did and just had to transfer the mix to a bowl to bring it to a dough!

Sift together ½ cup of corn flour (do check that the corn flour is 100% corn and is gluten free if you’re catering for coeliacs), ½ cup of icing sugar (again, check it’s pure icing sugar and not an “icing mix”) and 1 cup of rice flour. Add 180g of unsalted butter. Now the butter can be cold and hard and you can grate it in, or you could use it slightly softened. If you do this first part in a food processor it doesn’t really matter.

Mix with your hands until the mixture comes together in a very soft dough. Chill for an hour. To make life easy for yourself, roll the dough into a sausage or log – this way, when you come to bake the biscuits you can just cut off slices.

So, while the chilling is going on, preheat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan). Line some baking trays with baking paper and then take a sharp knife to your log of shortbread. Take thin slices of shortbread, spread out on the baking tray (they’ll expand a little while cooking) and bake for 15-20 minutes. The edges of the shortbreads will start to go brown but you don’t want to over cook them.

Remove from the oven and carefully place on racks to cool. Hot they will be very very fragile so use a slice and allow them to cool before hoeing in.

Then make yourself a cup of tea and indulge!

Rocket Pesto

- Alex 1 Comment

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So, rocket, or arugula, or even more irritatingly, roquette.*  It grows like a weed in my parents’ garden and there’s only so much that can be used in salads or as decoration.  Mum gave me a huge bunch after a weeding session and probably thought it would sit in my fridge until it was thrown out.

To be honest, I was a bit worried when I came to the bunch of rocket a couple of days later … but mum had done the Jamie Oliver trick of wrapping the herb in damp kitchen roll and then putting it in a plastic bag and it was as good as new.

The most painful part of this recipe was picking over the rocket and stripping the leaves.  If you go and buy a bag of rocket from the supermarket you won’t have to worry about that (it’s also likely that your rocket won’t have quite as much flavour as home grown, but you can’t have everything).

Throw your rocket, with a clove or two of garlic, into a food processor (we all know that that was my trusty MagiMix), and chop it finely.  Add some pinenuts (you don’t need to toast them and walnuts make a perfectly adequate substitute), a good few handfuls of grated parmesan and mix it all up, adding some good quality extra virgin olive oil, to arrive at the consistency you want.  Taste as you go along … if you’re generous with the parmesan, you may not need salt.  If you want to use this as salad dressing, add more oil, if it’s to be used on canapés, use less.

This isn’t really a recipe – it’s a technique.  Some bought pestos aren’t bad (and some are outright awful), but this but a few moments to put together and is far tastier than anything you’ll ever find on a supermarket shelf.  And if you have free rocket it is also far far cheaper.

Just look at the gorgeous colour!

*Most people are neither Italian nor French, so unless you are going to start referring to basilico or basilic you have no business called rocket anything other than rocket!