Thanksgiving menu

If ever there were a time for a (an American) baker to shine, it’s during the weeks between the fourth Thursday of November and 25 December. Everyone’s cooking up something, or thinking about it, or frantically searching for ingredients for it, or trying to find someone else to do it all for them.

I love the reason for Thanksgiving, and miss the pleasant hubbub that takes place back home. I explain it to British friends as Christmas without the presents, but with the encouragement to reflect on the past year and be thankful for events big and small that have brought us to where we are today. 

Cooking a big roast dinner is just too much to ask on a non-holiday Thursday night in the UK (though I have taken it as a day off in the past, when heading up a dinner for 12…), so T and I designated the following Saturday as our Thanksgiving day. The feast (and many, many leftovers) included:

- Herb encrusted turkey crown

- Roast potatoes

- Sweet and sour red cabbage with bacon

- Candied sweet potatoes

- Pork and celery stuffing (traditional Grammy recipe)

- Peas (just to have a token green vegetable)

- Gravy

- Pumpkin pie

Apple oatmeal cookies

Oh, how often dishes and desserts come about because ‘it was what I had around at the time’.  These have a similar story – one cooking apple that really should be used, a tiny amount of maple syrup from a large bottle that’s been taking up cupboard space for months (waiting for a pancake breakfast that never seems to happen), and the need* to make something small and sweet to bring to work during the week.

These cookies have been made with whole wheat flour, a bit of butter, reduced sugar (in an effort to balance the maple syrup) but the same amount of flour and oats that you’d normally find in oatmeal cookies. They’re cakey rather than cookie-y, so adding nuts might make them all fall to pieces, but mixing in flaked almonds could work. These also might be good as bars.

*Ok, perhaps not ‘need’, but it’s nice to have a little something with that afternoon cup of tea or coffee, giving you a final jolt of caffeine and sweetness to get through the last hour or two. Who's with me?

Ingredients:

½ cup (115g) butter

½ cup (110g) sugar

1 egg

1 cup (135g) whole wheat flour

1 cup (85g) rolled oats       

1 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons maple syrup

2 teaspoons cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

1 apple, finely chopped

Raisins (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 375F (190C). Cream butter and sugar.  Beat in the egg, maple syrup, then add the rest of the dry ingredients one at a time, with the flour and oats last. Stir in the apple and raisins.

2. Drop mixture by tablespoonfuls onto a cookie sheet (very lightly greased, if not using a non-stick cookie sheet).

3. Bake each tray for 10 minutes, or until cookies have started to brown. Cool before removing to a wire rack.

Chinese chicken marinade

Cooking during the week is always a challenge, but one untapped area of shortcut magic that I really want to try to do more of is overnight marinating for stir fries. While yes, it does just push the work of chopping meat (yuk) mixing ingredients and clearing up afterwards from one night to a previous one, there is the reward of then preparing a meal that takes 15-20 minutes to make, with two pots and two plates’ worth of washing to do afterwards. And after a long day working and commuting, anything that can save my precious evening minutes is like being given a plateful of fresh brownies.

Mmm, brownies…maybe that’s what I’ll do with the time I’ve saved…

Ingredients:

¼ cup (60ml) soy sauce

¼ cup (60ml) sake (or dry sherry)

4 tablespoons of chilli oil

2 tablespoons chopped ginger

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

6 green (spring) onions, chopped

Method

Mix all the above ingredients well. Put the chopped chicken into a bowl, pour over the marinade and refrigerate overnight.

When cooking with it the next day, pour the entire contents of the bowl into a hot pan, adding any other vegetables you’d like. Season to taste.

Pumpkin apple muffins

This could also be titled ‘what I did with my extra hour’. Clocks in the UK fell back last Sunday, and I thought that hour would be a great time to test a new recipe idea I had for muffins with both pumpkin and apple in them (but not quite the same as what I’d been finding online). So, into the kitchen I went, turned on the radio, and….someone was talking to a baker in a kitchen in Bristol who was also whipping up something delicious in her extra hour. So much for originality.

The recipe, however, turned out pretty well! I wasn’t expecting to get more than 12 out of it though, so it highlighted the fact that I could really do with another muffin tray…

(Makes 16 medium-sized muffins)

Ingredients:

1⅓ cups (270g) sugar

⅓ cup (80ml) vegetable oil

2 eggs

2½ cups (320g) all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup cooked pumpkin (forgot to weigh this one, but it should be about 250g)

1 large, tart apple, chopped

Rolled oats (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C. Grease muffin tray, or line cups with paper.
2. Mix the sugar and oil. Beat in the eggs. Add in the dry ingredients, but do not over-stir. Mix in the pumpkin and chopped apple.
3. Spoon the batter into the prepared tray, filling paper about two-thirds and greased cups about  three-quarters. Sprinkle rolled oats onto the top of the batter.
4. Bake for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. (Note that if you stick the toothpick into an apple, it will come out with some baked apple on it but this does not mean that the muffins aren’t done.)
5. Leave the muffins in the tray for about 10 minutes, then place them on a wire rack to cool.

Pumpkin season

I love everything about autumn – that ‘autumn smell’ and crispness in the air, the vibrant colours on the trees, being able to snuggle into a warm sweater and cosy gloves on a cold morning, and – above all – pumpkins. For me, autumns in the UK have a big pumpkin-shaped hole in them, as not even Starbucks sells pumpkin spice coffee, and people give me strange looks when I mention pumpkin pie.

That of course doesn’t stop me making it and many other pumpkin delights. It is possible to buy pumpkins around this time of year (though the standard kind are usually sold as carving pumpkins for Halloween rather than just pumpkins you can use in cooking). So, every year I buy a few, cut/boil/mash them and freeze two-cup portions that I use for breads, cookies, etc. I’ve found one grocery store in this country – a ‘posh’ store – that sells canned pumpkin, which I prefer to use when making pies and cheesecakes.

We did try to grow our own pumpkins this year, but started a little too late in the season, and had to self-pollinate in order to get any fruit. Only one miracle pumpkin made it to the orange stage (shown above).

One advantage to being in a country that tends to use pumpkin in savoury rather than sweet dishes is that I’ve been trying pumpkin more often in things like risottos, casseroles and stir-fries. The pureed portions I freeze are great for stirring into a vegetable risotto, which adds a comforting autumnal taste as well as a bit of colour.

Because it’s usually dark when T and I leave and come home from work, we didn’t realise that a tree in our backyard was slowly turning into this…

...a lovely site to behold as I sip pumpkin spice coffee from the stash I’ve smuggled here from back home. 

Infused oils

They can look so pretty in a kitchen – rows of coloured bottles of oil, artfully shaped, assembled and positioned to make the room seem like the home of a serious cook who knows how to use them. Infused oils are one of those things that always looks great to buy, but then I see the price and think, “really? I’m sure I could do that myself for a lot cheaper…” and of course, I never do.

Perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as more
expensive versions, but it's the taste that counts..right?

So, during the few manic hours of packing, cleaning and preparing to fly back to the Motherland for a few days, I naturally decided that was the perfect time to reverse that habit and make my own infused oils. To be fair, I’d already been collecting empty salad dressing bottles for a few weeks, and had bought the bits and pieces I needed earlier that week.

Which brings me to the first thing I found out – you can’t just put any old thing in a bottle of olive oil and walk away happy. Fresh herbs, fresh lemon rind, fresh garlic, fresh chilli…seeing the pattern?...are all forbidden unless you’re happy to keep the oil in the fridge and use it within a week or so at most. Anything that hasn’t been dried will have water in it, which is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Even though fresh herbs look so much prettier in the bottle than dried, it’s not a good idea unless you have the fridge space (which means no one can see how pretty it is anyway) and the recipes in mind to use it that week.

I read that dried herbs, etc. take a couple of weeks to infuse properly, but that the risk of bacteria isn’t a problem so you don’t have to use it all right away. It’s still a good idea to keep the oil stored in a cool, dry place, and to make sure it’s not hanging around for months.

Using proportions of 1/4-1/3 herbs, and 3/4-2/3 olive oil, I used:

• Sundried tomatoes
• Dried, chopped garlic
• Dried whole red chillis
• Peppercorns
• Dried mix of shitake, oyster and porcini mushrooms (mostly shitake, as I’d read that they’re particularly flavourful)

They’ve been infusing for three weeks now, and I used the garlic one in a moussaka last night. Not really the best recipe to test it on, as there are so many other spices as well, but I’m looking forward to trying the others in stir-fries later on.

On another note, I look with shame on the dates between my last post and this one. Life circumstances have altered somewhat (in a good way!) and meant that blogging time is more difficult to find than before, but that just means cooking and baking are even more of a necessity to step back from a hectic daily schedule. T and I have been trying to add some new recipes to our usual repertoire, and I hope to be sharing some of those soon!

Rana’s turmeric & fennel cake

I love pulling out old recipes, or ones passed down from friends and relatives because each time I make them it’s like recreating a bit of history. Someone else – whether last week or decades ago – put those same ingredients together in the way they liked best, and served it to people they loved. It's why I like making the few recipes my Italian grandmother gave to us…I never met her, but feel that I can get to know her a little by enjoying the same things she did.

I caught a compelling interview on the radio last Sunday morning with Rana Jawad, a BBC journalist who lives in Tripoli. She described the unimaginable difficulties she and her family have faced over the past few months, as well as her resolve to keep writing about what was going on with the constant fear of being captured by Gadhafi’s forces. She then spoke of how she’d relax in the midst of it all by baking, making up her own recipes, and serving her freshly-made cakes to her loved ones.

While I do not pretend that I can even begin to identify with someone in Rana’s position, what we do share is the simple truth that baking does indeed provide a welcome escape from daily events. Perhaps it’s the comfort of having something that’s a little bit in our control, or just being able to step away from life’s dramas and instead ponder over whether you should add another teaspoon of cinnamon to a recipe.

So, when the radio presenter said that some of Rana’s recipes would be posted on their website (you have to scroll down a little), I was very intrigued. I made her Turmeric & Fennel Cake, which she says is inspired by desserts from her home country of Lebanon. It’s absolutely delicious. There are also recipes for Chilli & Chocolate, and Rose Water & Apricot cakes. 


NB - If anyone out there doesn't have scales, I'd be happy to do a cup conversion for you.

Someone else thought it looked delicious, too (note our photo studio, aka the sun porch,
aka where laundry dries, aka the only room that actually gets decent light)