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DianaB

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Everything posted by DianaB

  1. Well that’s me educated for the day! I had never heard of Cheez Whiz or “ants on a log” until I read your post, now, thanks to a quick search, my mind has been expanded! I guess you are right about blue cheese with celery; we tend to be very boring with a cheese course restricting non-cheese content to crusty bread. The two might pair nicely in a salad though, or with a poached pear.
  2. This is our recipe for pikelets, I really can’t remember where we appropriated it, quite possibly from my mother’s handwritten recipes. We have made them this way for a few years now having been lured back to such calorie laden delicacies thanks to Betty’s Tea Room in York (worth a visit if in the area). 230g plain flour 5g instant yeast 255g water 70g milk 5g salt 5g baking powder added once the batter has stood for 2 hours. All dry ingredients go into the Magimix (food processor, other brands available 😁) except the baking powder. Pour liquids in through the tube while the mixer is turning, once added, blend 3 minutes. Decant to a jug and let stand at room temperature for 2 hours Whisk in the baking powder. To cook, we use a cast iron pan heated to about 160c. Brush cooking surface with melted butter (less is more with our Le Creuset pan). Pour batter into pan, size is a personal thing but the above mix makes 7 or 8 pikelets depending on how the batter is dosed. Remember that they will rise as they cook. We find that they cook in about four and a half minutes, flip once the upper surface shows signs of being cooked if you want browning on both sides. The same batter can be cooked in buttered metal rings to give a slightly deeper result, we call them crumpets when cooked in rings but frankly it isn’t worth the bother. Allow to cool just so that mouths aren’t burnt. Apply generous amounts of your favourite salted butter*, it will of course run through the holes onto your plate but you can mop it up with the pikelet as you eat. Mmm, pikelets, delicious. Mouth watering now. *The very best butter available to us is Yorkshire Butter (https://yorkshirecreamery.co.uk/our-range/), not sure if it is exported but if you come across it I highly recommend it.
  3. Is celery perhaps one of those foods that our taste buds adapt to with a little age? I use it in mirepoix but had never really experimented with it beyond that due to a misguided belief that I didn’t like the flavour on its own. A year or two back OH requested celery for his salad, I was quite happy to prepare some for him (yes I do remove the strings, it only takes a few seconds with quantities appropriate for 2 people), I decided to taste a chunk and, quelle surprise, I thought that it was ok. I wouldn’t whip my cat across a field of broken glass to acquire celery but I can now appreciate it on its own. I guess that other things in this category include blue cheese - still remember the day that I discovered that I love the flavour Roquefort - couldn’t tolerate any blue cheese until at least in my mid-20s. Same for parsnip. Can’t think of others for now but am certain that there are quite a few. I think that age also permits us to distinguish flavours more, certainly it is only in recent years that I have properly been able to identify one type of potato from another. In the UK our key potato moment is the arrival of Jersey Royal new potatoes and I have been known to pay a small fortune for those at the start of the season because there are no other spuds with similar flavour. In winter I appreciate King Edward potatoes, thankfully these are inexpensive. Not sure that 10 years ago I would have been able to detect a King Edward from a Maris Piper. Perhaps it is just me 🙃
  4. Many thanks @blue_dolphin and @Shelby for advice with regards making better use of the NC ‘pints’. I will try the plastic bag inside my clean jar this afternoon, I can’t see why that won’t work….. I am in the UK at the moment where Amazon doesn’t own up to having any ‘pints’ to sell me, this was not the case a week ago when I bought the machine so I imagine that they will reappear soon. If I can get away with bags I will do that until I work out how much we will use the NC once the novelty wanes. Frankly it is so quick and the results are so delicious that I don’t imagine it collecting dust anytime soon. Last night we had our first go at adding praline to my basic vanilla gelato as a mix in. Stunningly good result, 1 tablespoon of hazelnut praline paste transformed the already excellent vanilla to another level. Highly recommended, guess a pistachio paste would also be excellent. I seem to recall promising a neighbour pistachio ice-cream a while back but she is yet to provide me with any pistachios and given their cost I’m being mean about donating the nuts. Might just give in, easy enough to make pistachio paste in the Magimix. I made mint and chocolate chip sorbet a while back in our freeze the bucket and churn machine. It tastes delicious but the texture is extremely hard so what is left of that is in the fridge just now so that I can decant it once melted into a ‘pint’ and then let the NC do it’s thing. Guessing that we will lose the texture of the chocolate chips but the taste should still be good. Since Amazon didn’t have any pots for me I have ordered an ice-cream scoop that should arrive this afternoon. Perhaps I might get servings worthy of photos in due course!
  5. What’s left of today’s pickings, the little gold cherries don’t always make it into the house let alone onto a plate, just little globes of sweetness. The long red tomatoes are San Marzano, ripening well now, the bunches/trusses on the plants remind me of cow udder clusters somehow. The other red tomato is a Fantasio; not sure about these, they are supposed to be happy outside as well as in an unheated greenhouse but fruits growing outside don’t seem to have the usual shiny skin.
  6. Interested to know of any techniques to remove a frozen block from a NC jar in order to keep frozen for later use. We are regretting not buying more than the 3 jars that are included with the NC. I had a pint of blackberry sorbet frozen overnight that I wanted to set aside so that a similar mix could be frozen ready for the NC at a later date. Immersion of the frozen jar in a bowl of hot water eventually freed the block but I’m not convinced that this is the best approach. For now the block is wrapped in cling film and a decent freezer bag, yet to discover if it will slide back into the jar successfully. There was certainly some loss in the process. Does anyone have a perfected method to reuse jars in this way? Tonight we finished the sorbet that began life as a tin of grapefruit segments in light syrup. Another spin on ‘sorbet’ to soften then addition of a tablespoon of Irish cream on ‘mix in’, delicious, a great value dessert.
  7. I have given up buying mangoes because even those sold as ripe and ready to eat would be better used as building materials than food. They are cheap and I guess that this is the problem, they are no doubt harvested too soon with mechanical equipment and then stored too cold to allow for natural ripening, this is all guess work but I know that for similar reasons many peaches and nectarines sold in the UK will never ripen. Mangoes are not identified by variety here, another unfortunate trait that applies to most fruit and veg locally. Very different in France where one can choose variety of most fruits at least. I have recently come across a specialist fruit and veg merchant selling hard to source items through the post. I’ve been buying finger limes from them, impossible to find in shops/markets but good quality from this mail order company. Glancing through their listings I note that in exchange for huge amounts of money when compared to buying from a local shop one can choose from various mango varieties: alphonso atoulfo green mango banana mango bori bocado bombay ceylon coco-boeuf dasheri fazli graham haden harumanis himsagar hendi honey hoo loc julie kabish I’ll stop there! Any advice on which varieties might bring the most enjoyment as a dessert fruit would be much appreciated! Unfortunately the company concerned doesn’t seem keen to engage in correspondence to help identify the right fruit to purchase.
  8. If you have space outside this should grow into a decent size plant that will give you some tubers (sweet potatoes) in due course. I grew a couple of plants from seed in decent sized containers a couple of years ago, the harvest was modest but edible. As we only have very limited space I haven’t repeated the experiment but I would certainly grow sweet potatoes if we had more ground available. Of course your little plant is pretty as it is but if you do fancy eating your own sweet potato the roots need space to develop.
  9. Our experiments with the NC continue if slowly. Husband and I are each very happy with results so far, summarised as follows: 1. Creme anglaise based plain vanilla - as reported up thread this is our usual ice cream mix and the NC certainly gave a result smoother than any previously achieved, smoother in fact than any ice-cream we have bought. After a night in the freezer (-18c) the mix was as hard as a very hard thing, just as though it had never been transformed. I ran the remains on ‘gelato’ again and, once again, we had perfect vanilla ice-cream. Same hardening happened overnight for the second time, very little left in the pot so I ran a respin and that did the job. First tub of NC ice-cream therefore considered a success. 2. Tin of grapefruit segments in light syrup with the addition of 2 teaspoons of Aperol. Used the sorbet button for this experiment and it created a sorbet unlike any I have tasted before. I had no idea that sorbet could taste so creamy. Neither of us could taste any hint of the Aperol, we need either to add more or to switch to an alternative with flavour better able to sit alongside the grapefruit. Value for money, if we forget the “invisible” Aperol, this is an amazing dessert. A few pennies for the cheapest tin of fruit the supermarket had on offer and nothing else (beyond the purchase of the NC of course). 3. Chocolate. There was a small amount of the vanilla mix left over after filling pint 1 giving opportunity to play. Anything complicated will have to wait until we are better recovered from Covid but husband loves chocolate ice-cream and had requested that for the future. I just made a basic ganache with some Callebaut 811 that was sitting in the cupboard. A stabiliser had already been added to the crème anglaise mix so I just combined that with the ganache, let the mix cool and then froze overnight in the usual way. Processed this as gelato, the outcome was sheer bliss, once again the best ice-cream we have ever eaten. We have mountains of huge blackberries this year so some of those have been blitzed with sorbet syrup and strained ready to freeze. I am already regretting that we only bought the basic 3 pint pots with the machine. I know that others have frozen mix in the NC pints and then transferred the eventual ice block into alternate storage. I think that we need to start doing this.
  10. Despite the temptations of our new NC we have both struggled today thanks to Covid. We should probably have left our frozen pots in the freezer in hope that tomorrow will be a better day but in the end temptation was too strong and we decided to have a first spin of the crème anglaise based vanilla mix without the complication of even the simplest mix-in. What a revelation! I have used this same recipe in our basic freeze the bowl and churn machine for years and it was always delicious. Improvements have come through switching to invert sugar and addition of a readymade stabiliser and we have been happy with the outcome as a basic vanilla ice cream and as a base for variations. Having studied the little booklet that came with the NC the closest to our recipe was the gelato. We mounted the blade into the machine, dropped in the “pint” (odd to us, we have grown up with metric measures and I struggle to visualise a pint), pressed the “Gelato” button and a very short while later we discovered our usual ice cream transformed to the smoothest, creamiest concoction imaginable. I have never had better vanilla ice cream anywhere. The grapefruit and Campari pot remains in the freezer. Hopefully we will both feel better tomorrow and more able to appreciate the machine. That said, we are both delighted with the purchase and through somewhat scrambled senses we look forward to experimenting further.
  11. Sounds like an amazing evening! Cheese, steak, baby goats and music, can’t think of a better mix! I’ve only seen a saw used as a musical instrument once, in France, it was incredible. Lovage pesto sounds like something to experiment with, I’m glad that I kept a couple of the plants, it sounds like a versatile herb and I don’t really know why we don’t use it more as it certainly grew very easily from seed. I also have lemon grass from seed as a first this year, it can be difficult to source locally so looking forward to having stems large enough to cut without divesting the plant of all its strength.
  12. I’m growing lovage for the first time this year, a neighbour asked me if I knew where she could buy a plant so I got a packet of seeds and sowed some to help her out. Any tips on how to cook/serve lovage would be much appreciated! The only tip I have found to date is to use the stems as substitutes for drinking straws….
  13. Tomatoes just getting going here in North Yorkshire. The cherry tomatoes are plentiful (Sun Gold and Tumbling Tom). We are trying new varieties otherwise this year because seeds of our much loved Ferline F1 were just impossible to source. We have 2 varieties of San Marzano in our tiny unheated greenhouse and Fantasio F1 outside as a salad option. I’ve planted basil at the foot of each tomato as a companion plant and, as a result, we have more basil than I had imagined possible. Not complaining, we will freeze any that we don’t eat. Very happy with capsicums and chillies, usually these have to be grown under cover in this less than clement corner but the exceptional weather has seen them flourishing in the open air. Certainly one of the best years we have ever had for fruit and veg. Sugar snap peas have been amazingly plentiful, unfortunately we stopped picking last week due the dreaded Covid but there is another row of small plants sitting in a run of guttering that should get transferred into the garden next week if one of us finds the strength to move them, hoping that these will produce into autumn. Spuds have also been great, Charlotte work well for us and it is just lovely to take them from garden to pot.
  14. Many thanks! I watched the James Hoffman video again this evening, thinking of adapting that to add to the small amount of base mix left. We have learnt much from Mr Hoffman over the past couple of years. We will have 2 x pints to play with tomorrow afternoon so at least the adventure begins!
  15. Many thanks. Pot 1 vanilla and pot3 (grapefruit/ Campari) are in the freezer. Not enough vanilla base to freeze as pot 2 but will think of something to add tomorrow. Pot 1 will become the praline, will report further tomorrow.
  16. We are delighted to announce that a Ninja Creami is a part of our kitchen! 3 x pint pots just waiting to be filled so that tomorrow we can test the results. As mentioned above, I have made a litre of my usual crème anglaise vanilla base, I had planned to split that between 2 of the pots, freeze one as it is so that we will have a starting point and do something a little more creative with the second. My idea was to add some praline paste as a “mix in” for pot 2. Having glanced through the little book that came with the machine I find that the nearest recipe to my basic vanilla is the Gelato. I also find a warning against adding any kind of nut butter. My praline paste is 60% hazelnuts and the rest is sugar. I use it to make truffles at Christmas and while I appreciated that it isn’t the finest ingredient available it does make a nice truffle. Has anyone tried adding praline paste to a NC spun treat? Not sure what to call the results yet, perhaps a generic “ice” will do. Would it be better to stir some praline into the processed “ice” by hand? For the 3rd pot I’m going to read up-thread in hope of finding the recipe for grapefruit & Campari ice. I love both grapefruit and the taste of Campari, just wondering if a touch of timut pepper might be overkill? Happy Days!
  17. Is it a service available in Europe? @Anna N has excellent taste. Villleroy & Boch did/do a pretty service known as “wave” but your plate seems very much nicer.
  18. I can’t remember the last time we watched “broadcast” TV, decent broadband has fundamentally changed how we consume all kinds of media. My favourite cooking shows are now a mix of the old, the very old and the very new found on YouTube; also French language cooking via streaming. A favourite (but not to replicate the recipes, just nostalgia because she was such a presence during my childhood) is Fanny Craddock, with or without henpecked husband Johnny who acted as commis. Ina les recettes is an archive of French language cooking broadcasts going back to the 1960s, hours of fun. in the 1980s and newly married husband and I learn to cook thanks to a BBC series “The Roux Brothers”, all episodes are freely available on YT. The brothers have both died now but their sons maintain cooking excellence, Michel Roux is perhaps the best known and also found in many cooking shows. Current YT creators that we enjoy include “Pasta Grammar”, American male with his Italian wife who produce some beautiful food. We learnt how to make our best ever Spaghetti Carbonara through one of their videos. Max Miller has created an interesting food history series, a project that came out of the pandemic confinement that has gone from strength to strength. A third is Australian Ann Reardon, a food scientist who presents recipes but also “debunks” other YT content that is, at times, extremely dangerous. We both love watching Chef Jean Pierre, Florida based French guy now proud to consider himself American. Current French favourites (VPN required to access) include Le Combat de Régions - teams headed by a professional chef pitch recipes based on regional specialities in competition; Top Chef - very skilled young chefs compete for the title, this has become a highly regarded and, in some cases, life changing competition for the contestants. There is also Objectif Top Chef, a competition that allows very young chefs to compete for a place on Top Chef. For me Top Chef is all that UK cooking shows fail to deliver. A matter of personal taste of course!
  19. That’s a beautiful plate! Sure the lime will be lovely too.
  20. This is really interesting, we have followed James Hoffman for a while (husband’s retirement has allowed him time to finesse his coffee making), I now realise that I have never made coffee “ice cream” of any kind. An omission that I look forward to addressing in the next few days. Ninja Creami due for delivery between 2.15 pm and 4.15 pm BST. Can’t wait!! 🍦🍨🥤🍨🍦
  21. The plunge has been taken and our Ninja Creami should be with us tomorrow. My last visit to eGullet was in 2018, I’ve looked for an appropriate place to briefly explain the long absence but pending that I will just say”reasons”, nothing whatever to do with eGullet but somewhat diverting. Back to the NC, I have really enjoyed reading this topic from start to finish. I have seen numerous reviews (a generous term in many cases) but it wasn’t until I came across Chris Young’s critique that I began to feel my stubby little finger heading towards the Amazon “buy now” button. Finger hit button this afternoon, £179 for NC plus 3 containers + £15 for 3 year guarantee. Amazon UK give decent service under guarantees, we have used them previously without any difficulty. I have been making everyday ice creams and sorbets for years using a basic quality freeze the bucket type device that set me back about £20 back in the day. I make a vanilla crème anglaise base as a starting point for “ice cream”, I have found that invert sugar improves the texture, also addition of a stabiliser sold by a speciality ingredient store in the UK. They have just switched their formula so I’m hoping that the new will be as successful as the old. I’ve made a litre of this base just now so that we will have something to freeze once those “pints” arrive. I have used invert sugar and a different pre-mixed stabiliser for sorbets. This has been a way to use up fruit from the garden, at the moment the freezer is filling fast with blackcurrants , gooseberries, rhubarb and blackberries. Looking forward to experimenting with different flavour combinations and additions. Husband and I are particularly interested by the discussion above on adding Campari, Aperol and similar. After managing to stay virus free we both managed to get Covid infections last week and I have found that for some odd reason Campari now tastes like an elixir from heaven! So glad we didn’t get the earlier variants that threw in loss of taste and smell as a starting point. I digress, apologies. Having read this topic I think that we are perhaps unusual in making such basic ice cream. The vanilla is tasty though, addition of a handful of rum soaked raisins makes for a delicious if more wintery treat. Should we manage to create anything of interest I’ll post again; for now I’m enjoying finding names of members that I still recognise and exploring the wealth of content accrued in the past 4 years.
  22. I’ve really enjoyed catching up with your gardening exploits. For the first time in years I have some ‘free’ time and this coincides with a mini heatwave in North Yorkshire. First run of summer days with blue skies for around 3 years! . You all seem well ahead of us in terms of gardens. We have plenty of salads and herbs to eat but attempts to get other stuff started in good time didn’t succeed and it is too soon here for tomatoes to be ripe. There are plenty coming on so we look forward to those. Strawberries usually do well here. Plenty of berries were produced and we netted the raised bed as usual. We must have netted some kind of beast in there with the plants because the vast majority were eaten for us. I have no idea by what. Certainly no birds caught in the netting and the damage was far too extensive for the usual slug or snail that gets to the plants. The only thing I saw was a toad, I suspect he or she lives between our raised bed and the neighbour’s fence but research didn’t confirm that toads like strawberries so I’m at a loss really. We were so disappointed being both strawberry lovers. On a happier note raspberries are now ripening. We don’t have many and we don’t net because birds haven’t shown much interest in the past. There are also lots of blackberries to look forward to, and gooseberries. We are trying Romanesco for the first time. Lots of leaves but as yet no sign of any centres forming. These are very much an experiment so we wait and see, checking often to ensure no caterpillars installing themselves. I like to mix flowers and veg, below is a pot with Romanesco, Coriander and some lobelia for colour. Taken last week I think. Salads in baskets, spring onions in the trough on top of the gas bottles. Apparently we can’t enclose the bottles... It looks as though ugh this was taken before I replanted the basket closest to the window and we had eaten the first lot of lettuce. The far basket has oak leaf lettuces still.
  23. Many thanks @rotuts and @kayb for your kind messages. Your blue pans certainly seem to have come from the same place of origin as our ‘new’ collection. Taking artistic photos is not amongst my skills but below are a couple of the new editions. We are sadly lacking in storage space so the whole set is waiting for us to get around to fixing more hooks so that they can join the existing kit hanging from the beams in the kitchen... If there’s an award for the least well taken photo this must be nominated. I know there is a lot of helpful advice elsewhere on eGullet and one day I shall set aside time to improve my food related photography.
  24. Many years ago we began cooking with Le Creuset cast iron pots. They were expensive and generally beyond our budget but gradually we accumulated a reasonable collection. We didn’t get as far as the saucepans that were generally sold as a set of five before the company stopped making them. Over the years I’ve kept an eye out for a second hand set but those that did appear on eBay or similar were generally not in a condition that I would want to use. We were in France a few weeks ago and there was a village sale very close to where we were staying. We hadn’t planned to visit having reached a stage in life where we are trying to reduce the amount of things we own rather than add more but it was a beautiful afternoon and we were persuaded to wander around just as the event was coming to an end. Often these events are populated by regular sellers with vast amounts of glassware and household stuff that they box up and drag from one village to another during the ‘vide grenier’ season. Sometimes there are individuals selling their own stuff, I did exactly that when moving back to England a decade ago. That was a long day and by the end I was happy to give away anything left on my stall. While wandering alone I came across a chap who was selling his own family stuff because, he told me, his wife had insisted that they have a clear out. Amongst the items left was a complete set of five Le Creuset saucepans with their lids; exactly the set we had wanted for many years and given up hope of finding. The pans were in almost new condition, the wooden handles on a couple had suffered from going through a dishwasher but the interiors were clean. I was advised that the set had been a wedding present 25 years earlier but hardly used. By now we already had good pans and I didn’t need the full collection. He wanted 20€ for the lot, I offered 10 just for the smallest of the pans to replace our coming to the end of its life Le Creuset milk pan. Clearly wanting to be rid of as much stuff as possible and ready to go home the guy accepted my offer but only on condition that I took all five pans. I couldn’t refuse. I staggered back towards our accommodation with the set in an inadequate bag. Thankfully our car was parked only a few hundred metres from the sale so I dumped the lot in the boot and reflected on how I might announce the acquisition to my husband. A drink or two later I disclosed my purchase. My husband and my very good friend who was providing us with our holiday accommodation came with me to our car where the pans were sittting in their collapsed plastic bag. Both were amazed at the condition of the pans, save for the handles they looked almost new at first glance. At home the handles were restored to their former glory with the assistance of Ikea wooden worktop oil and they now look perfect. The paint on some of the lids is a little dull, I guess more damage from dishwasher use. Not a problem! We finally have our complete Le Creuset collection.
  25. Also on sale now in the UK: http://www.chocolatetradingco.com/buy/free-sample-ruby-chocolate-chips?by=cat&c=3407&o=2&pz=10&p=1 You can have a free 40g trial bag if you order from this company. I do buy from them from time to time so might take advantage of this...
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