New Year celebration

I'm really in the cooking mood at the moment and all this time off work has meant I've had the time to think about and plan menus and meals. We had another day of feasting yesterday. I kept it simple but it was very tasty. 

I started out inspired by Nigella (on UK TV) to cook a joint of gammon ham in a bottle of good ginger beer. Inspired by Nigel Slater (ditto), I added a couple of bay leaves, 3 cloves, 2 star anise and a few black peppercorns to the ginger beer. I cooked the ham for 7 hours in the slow cooker. It was almost falling apart when I lifted it out. I then took off the top covering of fat and smothered it in ginger preserve and put it in the oven for half an hour. It was delicious!

I served it hot with the thickened the cooking liquid. First, I removed the spices and then boiled it steadily for 20 minutes until it reduced a bit and added some cornflour dissolved in water. No further seasoning was needed as the gammon had made it salty enough.

As side dishes, I made fruity red cabbage (shallot fried in butter & oil, chopped peeled apple and a big handful of cranberries - until softened - then red cabbage added and two ladles of the gammon's cooking liquid - simmer until soft). And veggie mash (potatoes, swede, carrot and parsnip all mashed together with butter, salt & pepper). 

With tamari pumpkin & sunflower seeds as nibbles, goat's cheese grilled on toast with beetroot salad to start and chocolate mousse & ice cream to follow ... it was a great gf winter meal!

A traditional gluten-free Christmas was enjoyed

Yesterday went really well. We were eating for hours ... took our time and really enjoyed each dish. We started with coffee and my answer to mince pies - warm Christmas crumbles (see Cakes) when our guests arrived mid-morning. Later, the bacon-wrapped prunes and salt & pepper cashews went down well with the Prosecco. 

The gravad lax was awesome (see Starters) ... what a simple but tasty way to do salmon. However, the flavours were quite strong and not much of the mustard dressing was needed.

In the end, I made a chocolate tart with clementine cream for pudding. We had it with a glass of Bailey's (well, it is Christmas!). Here's the recipe. 

You will need:

For the sweet pastry case:

• 110g butter - chilled and diced + for greasing
• 150g Doves Farm gluten-free plain white flour + for dusting
• 75g caster sugar 
• 75g ground almonds
• 1 egg

For the filling:

• 300g 70% dark chocolate (I used Green & Black's)
• 100ml double cream
• 100g butter (slightly salted or unsalted)
• 4 eggs
• 100g caster sugar
• (optional) 2 tbsp brandy

1. Make the pastry in a food processor/mixer. Just blitz all the dry ingredients together until they start to form big clumps.
2. Empty it into a large bowl and add a beaten egg a little at a time until you can form it into a dough. 
3. Leave it to rest for 20 minutes and then roll it out as thinly as possible and use it to line a well-buttered quiche dish.
4. Bake it "blind" in an oven at 180 degrees for 10 minutes or until it's just starting to brown. 
5. Turn the oven down to 150 degrees.
6. For the filling, melt the chocolate, cream and butter in a glass bowl over a pan of boiling water
7. In a separate bowl whisk the eggs and sugar until fluffy (add the brandy a little at a time)
8. When the chocolate has completely melted, remove from the heat and pour in the egg mixture, blending well.
9. Pour this into the pastry case and return it to the oven for 10-15 minutes.
10. Remove and cool. 

Serve with whipped cream with some clementine zest and juice added.

A merry gluten-free Christmas menu

I'm cooking this year and I thought I'd share my menu for the big day tomorrow. 

As an aperitif we're having chilled Prosecco with salt & pepper cashew nuts and bacon & prune rolls (half a rasher of streaky bacon wrapped around a soft prune, held together with a cocktail stick and then baked in the oven - serve warm). I'm making the cashew nuts myself too as they sometimes have a wheat flour coating. I chuck them in a non-stick frying pan on a medium heat - stir/shake well to stop them burning. When warm and a little toasted shake on fine sea salt and black pepper, toss and put them in a bowl to cool.

For the starter, I'm curing gravad lax - as I write this it's been in the fridge a day and is looking goooood! I bought the freshest 600g piece of boneless mid-side salmon fillet I could find. The curing mixture is: 100g sea salt, 125g caster sugar, 3 tbsp gin and 100g of fresh dill chopped quite small. Just mix it together in a bowl, line a small baking tray (the same size as the salmon) with a long piece of cling film and spoon a third of the mixture onto the base. Lie the salmon skin side down on the mixture and spoon the remainder over the top and down the sides until the fillet is well-covered. Wrap the clingfilm over the top of the fillet and put it in the fridge with something heavy on top (mine's under the turkey - they may as well get to know each other!). Turn the fillet over in the tray at least twice a day. Don't throw the liquid away that forms in the tray. I'm serving it with a mustard & dill dressing (mustard, caster sugar, lemon juice, salt & pepper, dill), slices of cucumber and a handful of rocket leaves.

We're going all traditional for the main course - roast turkey and all the trimmings ... roast potatoes, chestnut stuffing, brussels (with bacon bits, shallot & chestnuts), mashed swede & carrot. To make chestnut stuffing, fry an onion in butter & olive oil, when it's soft add some chopped mushrooms until they're cooked and then stir in a chopped clove of garlic. In a bowl, mix some gf sausage meat (I got mine from our butcher but you could empty the skins of supermarket-bought ones) with fresh herbs to taste (sage & parsley in my case), a tin of chestnut puree (can be hard to track down but well worth it - Merchant Gourmet is the UK brand in supermarkets) and some chopped cooked chestnuts (bought vac-packed - you could make your own but I've tried it and personally think life's too short!). It's also best to add the giblets from the turkey that you like the look of - that's usually limited to the liver and heart in my case. Stir in the cooked onion, mushrooms & garlic and mix well. I stuff the turkey - under a part of the skin, inside the cavity - but some people prefer to cook it separately in balls or in a buttered oven dish. I think it usually ends up tasting better than the turkey!

I haven't decided on the pud yet ... I 'volunteered' to cook this year way too late to make a Christmas pudding. I was going to make a sticky toffee pudding but I think it'll be too heavy after all that food. I'm deliberating between a classic lemon tart and a chocolate tart. Lemon would be more refreshing but I could serve a clementine cream with the chocolate one and add some brandy to make it more Christmassy. Mmm, chocolate may be winning out ... I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Birthday orange cake

Going to a friend's birthday meal tonight. I said I'd make dessert (as they're usually the hardest part of a meal to make gluten-free). I'm taking along this simple orange cake with some greek yoghurt with honey and raspberry coulis (frozen raspberries defrosted, blitzed with caster sugar to taste and then sieved). Happy birthday Cath!

You will need:

- 2 medium-sized (or 3 small) oranges (I used organic blood oranges from Riverford)
- 300g ground almonds
- 3 eggs
- 250g caster sugar
- 1 teaspoon gluten-free baking powder

1. Scrub then boil the oranges (whole) in a pan of water until they are completely soft - change the water two or three times during boiling to get rid of the bitterness from the skin. When cool (the boiling can be done the day before), chop the oranges and check them carefully to remove the pips then blitz them to a smooth paste in a food processor or blender.

2. Butter a cake tin with a removable bottom and 'flour' the sides with ground almonds. Use a circle of baking paper in the base and butter that too.

3. Pre-heat the oven to 160C.

4. Whisk the eggs and sugar together until foamy and light. Mix the baking powder with the almonds and add this to the egg mixture - folding in gently.

5. Finally, carefully fold in the orange paste and then pour the mixture into the baking tin. Bake until a skewer/knife comes out clean from the middle (mine took an hour and five minutes). Cover with tin foil if it starts to brown too much.

Lunch party

Dad's coming over for lunch today. Here's what we're having ...

• roasted peppers (see Starters page)
• lemon, rosemary & garlic chicken (see Mains) with mashed potato and braised cabbage with bacon bits
• lemon cheesecake with summer fruits (see Cakes and puds)
  

Carrot cake

Like the banana cake (see Cakes and puds page), this is a sort-of healthy cake in that some of the fat is replaced with fibre - in this case, carrots.

You will need:

• 150g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 150g butter or margarine
• 200g gf flour (I used Doves Farm plain flour and added 1.5 tsp baking powder)
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1-2 tsps ground mixed spice
• 200g carrots
• 170g raisins or sultanas (I also added some dried cranberries left over from Christmas)

1. Heat the oven to 170C.
2. Butter and flour a cake tin (I used a round one with a removable bottom)
3. Grate the carrots into a large mixing bowl. Add the sultanas.
4. In a food mixer, cream the sugar and butter until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and blitz briefly.
5. Sieve in the flour, mixed spice and bicarb a little at a time and blitz briefly.
6. Pour the flour mixture into the carrot mixture and fold until well combined.
7. Pour into the cake tin and bake until a skewer comes out clean. Mine took 40 minutes at 150C in a fan oven.

I made a not so healthy or low fat(!) butter cream topping for mine using the juice of an orange, 100g of butter, 100g icing sugar and 100g unrefined caster sugar. Cream the butter with a hand mixer until smooth, sieve in the sugars a little at a time and mix well. Add the orange juice and then chill until the cake is cool enough to ice. (It went a bit runny but tasted good!)

Cottage pie

An economical Sunday lunch! A cottage pie used to be made from left-overs but it's usually made from scratch these days. I use a quarter pork mince to three quarters beef mince - I just find it tastier. We had our first Riverford organic vegbox delivery this week for 3.5 years - it was delicious! I really appreciate the reasonably-local (Devon) seasonal veg delivered to our door and that's what I used in the pie. To make it even more economical I used the slow cooker for both parts of the pie. We recently got a gadget from the electricity company that shows how much we're using - it's scarily high when the oven's on! I'm shopping for a slow cooker on Amazon right now ... if only I hadn't car-booted ours years ago!

You will need:

• mince
• a chopped onion
• a clove of garlic (chopped)
  
• optional: root veg (a parsnip and a carrot or two adds flavour and vits)
• potatoes (mashed)
  
• worcester sauce (check it's gluten free - I use Life's)
• a thickener such as arrowroot (see Thickeners page)
  

1. Put the mince, onion, garlic and root veg into the pressure cooker. Add enough water to make a paste. Cook on low for 10-15 minutes.
2. When cooked, season the mix with worcester sauce, salt and pepper to taste and thicken it with arrowroot or cornflour (dissolved first in a little water).
3. Pour the mix into a casserole dish, top with the mashed potato (and I like some grated cheese on top) and bake in a hot oven for 20 minutes.
4. Serve with a green vegetable - we're having broccoli.
   

Pork baked in cider

Happy new year! Tonight we're having a slow-cooked winter casserole that's really tasty. It also works well with sausages or pork chops. Great served with mashed potato and a green vegetable.

You will need:

• 500g pork (shoulder, chops or fat sausages)
• 2 large apples - peeled, cored & quartered
  
• 1 large onion - sliced
  
• 2 cloves garlic - chopped
  
• 6 juniper berries - crushed
• 2 pinches of dried or fresh sage
  
• cider (or apple juice or stock)
• arrowroot or cornflour to thicken (see Thickeners page)
  

1. Lightly fry the pork or sausages in a little vegetable oil to seal the outsides. Put them in a large casserole dish with a lid.
2. Add the sliced onion to the pan and fry until beginning to soften, add the garlic and fry for a minute longer. Add these and the apples to the casserole.
3. Sprinkle over the crushed juniper berries, sage and some salt and pepper.
4. Pour in the cider until about halfway up the casserole contents.
5. Bake in the oven (or simmer on the hob if using a pan) as slowly as possible - until the meat is completely tender.
   
6. Thicken with a dessertspoon of arrowroot or cornflour dissolved in a little water. Return to the oven until ready to serve.