Pancakes, England-style!

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent starts. In England, it is called "Pancake Day" even though most people don't recognise Lent. The funny thing is, because people don't follow a religious calendar, everyone forgets about this day until the Sunday or Monday or even the Tuesday itself. Then Facebook erupts with posts about pancakes and at 9:00 this morning I even got invited to a last minutes pancake dinner. Now, Simon and I are not the type of people to forget about pancakes or Lent, and we had invited our friend Rachel and our neighbours to pancake dinner tonight. It's becoming a family tradition. We had Rachel over last year, too.

I went shopping yesterday for ingredients. Note that the supermarket had erected a helpful floating frying pan to remind us all about the day. I waited for these people to move but they spent forever looking at the display! From left to right, the display shows pancake mix, cooking spray (not a common product in the UK), vanilla sugar, pouring syrup (just corn syrup. Maple syrup is available but expensive), pancakes (English pancakes are what I would call crepes), and lemon juice. The most traditional way to eat pancakes in the UK is with lemon juice and a dusting of icing sugar. As you can see, you can also use vanilla sugar or syrup.

Simon and I tend to have some form of savoury crepe/pancake because it just makes more sense to have it for dinner in a weeknight.

I use the recipe from the Be-Ro cookbook, which is published by a flour company. You obtain one by sending a cheque for £1.50 to the company. Simon's grandmother gave this one to me shortly after I got married.

The proportions in their batter recipe are exactly the same as the ones in other cookbooks I have: 100 g plain flour, pinch of salt, 1 medium egg, and 300 ml milk or milk/water mixture. I doubled the recipe today and had about 18 smallish, thin crepes. I remember when i moved here I was amazed that you could get cartons of medium eggs or mixed size eggs (usually cheaper) and that the standard UK egg is brown but they sell special cartons of white eggs.

I'm really proud of how well the pancakes turned out this year. I fried them early which was really helpful. I hate spending the whole time in the kitchen when we have people over! I also hate how the smell of frying pancakes clings to everything, and getting the frying done early means time to shower and air out the apartment before guests arrived.

For the savoury filling, I roughly chopped portobello, chestnut, and button mushrooms, and sautéed them with red onion and thyme. Then I added walnut pieces and "Greek-style salad cheese," which tasted better than it sounds, but not as good as feta. I will not buy it again.

I put a few tablespoons of the filling in each pancake and rolled it, and arranged them in a baking pan, and put them under the broiler to heat up. Then I went in the other room to talk to my guests, allowing the top of all the pancakes to burn. So no pictures. They still tasted good, and the filling was delicious. We had enough pancakes left over for everyone to have a pancake with Nutella for dessert.

Do you ladies have Shrove Tuesday traditions?

Flourless chocolate fudge cake

This year I volunteered to bring a dessert to Christmas dinner because a lot of people, including me, don't like the traditional English Christmas pudding. I decided to make the chocolate fudge cake from Ottolenghi.  It turned out really well, so I decided to make this cake again for New Year's Eve. I think it'll become a tradition at dinner parties and special occasions.

The book describes is recipe as simple to prepare, but typically with Ottolenghi the instructions are quite precise and involved. It's baked in two layers so that you'll have a firmer one on the bottom and a mousse-ier one on top. The whole process takes a few hours at least. You are allowed to bake it all at once, "for a less discerning audience, or if you want to hasten the process or are feeling lazy." In case you were afraid they were judging you!

I was unable to follow the instructions precisely because this is my kitchen scale. I think it was part of the "furnishings" of our first house, and somehow got packed with our things.  It's precise to the nearest 25 g at best. I'll give you ladies my measurements, with the book's measurements in brackets.

Chocolate fudge cake (from Ottolenghi: The Cookbook by Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi)
250-ish g unsalted butter, cut into cubes (240 g)
275-ish g dark chocolate, 52% cocoa solids (265 g)
100-ish g dark chocolate, 70% cocoa solids (95 g)
300-ish g whatever golden brown sugar you have (290 g light muscovado sugar)
4 tbsp water
5 large eggs, separated
A pinch of salt
Cocoa powder for dusting

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

Put the chocolate and butter in a large bowl.

Heat the sugar and water over medium heat until they boil.

Pour them over the chocolate and butter and stir until it is smooth. Stir in the egg yolks one at a time. Allow it to cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile, beat the egg whites and salt to a firm, but not too dry meringue. Fold the meringue into the chocolate sauce a third at a time until fully incorporated, but it's ok to see small bits of meringue in the mix.

Pour 800 g (about 2/3) of the mixture into a prepared cake tin and level it. I don't have a palette knife so I used a spatula. Bake for 40 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out almost clean. Leave to cool.

When it is cool, flatten out the top (again I used a spatula) and don't worry about breaking the crust.

Pour in the rest of the batter and level it again. Bake again for 20-25 minutes, until a skewer comes out with moist crumbs.  This time you can't really level it.  It's supposed to look like that.

Allow to cool while you drive to visit your friends.  This is a picture of the gorgeous English December weather. I bet you're all jealous.

Dust the top with cocoa powder before serving.  The one I made for Christmas was made the day before and it was much neater to slice than this one.  We served with whipped cream but I think plain yoghurt or creme fraiche would be nice, too. That slight tang goes well with rich chocolate desserts like this.

Enjoy!

So many food adventures!

Since I accepted Amy's invitation to join the Leek Geeks, I have had so many food adventures!

We got to go to afternoon tea at the Ritz in London with Simon's grandparents, as part of his grandmother's 80th birthday gift.

There was a dress code: jacket and ties compulsory for gentlemen. Simon wore one too. (Ha!)

Look at all the teas! We had the traditional one, because you don't go to the Ritz to drink herbal tea.

They bring out the scones (on the middle level) just before you eat them, so they are at the perfect temperature when you are ready to eat them with clotted cream and jam. There were also sliced cakes from a trolley. Afternoon tea was actually quite a feast! They offered more of everything, too.

I also bought a new slow cooking cookbook in an attempt to do more interesting things with my slowcooker, and of course the first recipe I used was not a slowcooker recipe!

This is beef rendang, apparently a famous dish. You make a curry paste and simmer it with stewing beef and coconut milk so that it goes from this:

To this. With lots of time for evaporation, then more liquid and more time, and then toasted coconut, tamarind paste, and coriander. The whole process took about five hours.

We didn't have our dinner until 9 o'clock, but Simon was happy! I served it with basmati rice and steamed spinach. The next day I had tinned "Thai chicken soup" for lunch and it tasted like salty, slimy water. I think my palate is getting used to all this nice food!

Are we allowed to share recipes that come from books? I documented the process of making a gorgeous, flourless chocolate cake from the Ottolenghi cookbook, but I didn't know if publishing it here would be frowned upon.

And finally, we are obsessed with homemade pizza now! We keep the toppings constant (mozzarella, caramelised onion, mushrooms, feta, and olives) and I make the crust thinner and thinner every week! The same amount of dough that made a dinner plate-sized pizza in the beginning now makes a monster that barely fits on my baking sheet!