I ate this risotto in Fortnum & Mason in London. It was completely delicious. I love Fortnum and Mason. They were particularly nice to me there yesterday. They asked me to move tables, not a problem, I had not even started eating, so they gave me my drinks on the house! How nice.
One thing I struggle with in places with impeccable service however is being called “Madam” all the time. It takes quite an adjustment and it makes me feel really old!
Tarts are a simply sublime way of using up old stray vegetables that you have in your fridge if you are at a loss for what to do with them. That is, once you get over the obstacle of making some shortcrust pastry. Pastry puts fear into many peoples’ hearts, (including mine), not only can it be difficult to make, but it can also seem difficult to handle. My last pastry making attempt was an unmitigated disaster, for many reasons. Principle amongst them, the lack of grease proof paper for baking blind. If you have no greaseproof, you can of course use tin-foil, but that thought didn’t occur to me last time around.
Yesterday, I decided to conquer shortcrust pastry. After trawling through every cook book I own, I decided finally on a recipe.
125 grams butter, (as I was making a savoury pastry, I decided that salted butter would be ok, because the recipe called for salt anyway).
250 grams of plain (cream) flour.
1 egg yolk
some chilled water (still not sparkling).
~ Take butter out of fridge and cut into cubes.
~ Seive the flour into your blender. Our blender is a Magimix. Magimix make very good blenders, my mother’s is over twenty years old and still going strong.
~ Add cubes of butter to the blender and pulse until you see a fine breadcrumb mixture
~ Add egg yolk and pulse again
~ Add water very gradually, a tablespoonful at time. Pulse for a coupld of seconds after each water addition to see if the pastry is starting to come together. It is extremely important to add water very very slowly because this ensures that the pastry will not have too much water in it which makes it wet and gloopy and very difficult to handle.
~ When the pastry has just come together in a ball, tip out into a bowl and mash all the leftover bits from the blender bowl into the pastry. Wrap it in clingfilm and chill for at least an hour.
Getting back to the pastry after an hour:
~ Remove pastry from the fridge and cut in half (I wanted to keep some pastry over and half my pastry was more than adequate for lining a twenty centimeter tartlet tin with fluted edges).
~ On a floured surface, roll out pastry as thinly as you can. Too thin pastry tears when you try to life it up to line the tin. I have seen a thickness of four milimeters recommended, but you can use the ability to handle the pastry as you roll as a guide. What I mean by that is, as you roll, you have to lift up and turn your pastry to help shape it, so you can feel whether it is getting too thin, by seeing does it feel like it is stretching itself when you lift it up. Practice rolling a small amount of pastry first to guage the correct thickness for your tin.
~ Place the pastry over the tin and gently push it down into the edges of the tin and the flutes. The pastry should be gently pressed, but never stretch it to get it to fit. A gap is better filled with a stick on bit of pastry than a stretched bit.
~ When the tin is lined, return to the fridge for 30 mins, or the freezer for 10 minutes. Turn your oven on at this stage to preheat to 180 degrees celsius.
~ After ten minutes, remove pastry from freezer, or after 30 minutes, remove pastry from fridge. Place a sheet of grease proof paper over the pastry and fill with beans or a weight system of some sort. I use butter beans, but any dried bean mix will do. You can keep the beans and continually re-use them.
~ Bake the tart pastry blind for thirty minutes. Remove from oven at this stage and let cool.
While cooling, you can prepare the fillings:
Open your fridge and see what vegetables you can find. Yesterday, I found mushrooms, onion and courgette. So, I decided to make an onion and mushroom tart and a courgette tart.
For the onion and mushroom tart: Thinly slice the onions and mushrooms. Fry until they are sauteed.
For the courgette tart: Grate the courgett and fry until cooked. Add some nutmeg or cinnamon and some salt and pepper.
Let the mixtures cool a little while you are making the tart cream mixture.
For the tart cream mixture:
Mix salt, pepper, nutmeg, 250mls cream, 2 eggs, 1 egg yolk together. You are ready to fill the tarts:
Place the mushrooms and onions in one half of the tart. Place the courgette mixture in the other half of the tart. Pour in the cream mixture until it fills the tart case almost to the top, without over-flowing. Bake in oven at 180 degrees for thirty minutes, until the mixture is set and it has turned golden brown.
Eat while still warm.
Or, refrigerate some and eat the next day.
Either way, tart gives a warm and fuzzy feeling.
SK is always bringing me biscuits from Sweden, so this evening out of boredom I decided I would make some biscuits. SK is back in Sweden and I am here! The recipe I found in a book about Scandinavian things. The biscuits turned out OK. They do not have as much flavour as I would have hoped and also, I don’t know that I rolled the dough thinly enough. Next time I make them, I will use fresh ginger instead of dried. I will also roll the dough into a sausage and put it in the fridge. I will leave it there over night. Then I will cut very very thin slices to bake on a proper baking sheet. I did not have a proper baking sheet. I didn’t deocrate them either, although I would have loved to, but I thought that might take too long.
The nice thing about these biscuits is that the texture was similar to the texture of the biscuits that come from Sweden. i.e. C-r-u-n-c-h-y. Crunchy biscuits are an achievement. I don’t think I have ever managed crunchie biscuits before. I’ve managed chewy, but not dry crunchiness. Soft crunchiness too, the sort of soft crunchiness that doesn’t leave you wondering whether you are going to break all your teeth. The secret I think comes from boiling some of the ingredients instead of mixing everything together when cold. But, I will have to mix everything together when cold to ensure that I can prove this hypothesis. Which leaves me with two recipe changes to try. One, don’t boil. Two, roll in sausage, slice very thinly.
Thankfully, the recipe makes lots of biscuits, way more than twelve. I think if I had rolled the dough thinly enough, I might even have got twenty four.
