Tag: round

Pumpkin Scones with Toasted Pine Nuts & Maple Glaze – A Recipe for the Other 10 Months

I have no intention of giving up the best job in the world
anytime soon, but if I do, I’d try and get a job in the marketing department of
a pumpkin puree company.

I’m guessing that like 97% of the canned pumpkin in
this country is used during the time from Halloween until Thanksgiving. So if I
could figure out a way to get people to use this in recipes all year round, I’d
be a total superstar in pumpkin puree marketing circles.

Imagine that. It would be…awesome? Anyway, maybe I should rethink
this whole post-Foodwishes career path, but in the meantime, here’s just one
example of how I would convince the public that pumpkin is great for anytime of
the year. Ironically, I did this because I had leftover pumpkin from
Thanksgiving, but still.

I may have covered this in the last scones post, but I’ve
never been a huge fan of the scone. I’ve always considered it some sort of
effeminate biscuit, but I’m starting to come around in my old age. There’s
nothing like a freshly baked scone with a steaming hot cup of tea or coffee,
especially one tricked out with pumpkin, toasted pine nuts, and maple glaze. I
hope you give this a try soon…or anytime! Enjoy.

Ingredients for 12 Pumpkin Scones:

8 ounces by weight all-purpose flour (about 1 3/4 cups)

1/4 cup white sugar
1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup toasted pine nuts

1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1/3 cup buttermilk

additional flour as needed
1 egg beaten with a few drops of milk or water to brush scones before baking.

*Bake at 400 degrees F. for 15-20 minutes, or until golden
brown

Incoming search terms:

Breaded scallops

Before we got married Giles would, every so often, disappear off to have lunch with a friend, huffing and puffing as he bundled out of the house, always in a fluster, worried he was late, barking on about how he didn’t want to go and god why did he agree to have lunch with anyone when he’s so busy… the last thing he would say to me, as he returned for the fourth time for some forgotten item, was that he’d be home at 3.30pm and we’ll have beans on toast tonight and watch an episode of whatever boxset we had on the go.

And then, without fail, he would go on a massive bender and not come home until 4am, calling at various points in the evening to say that he was just about to get in a cab, and then turning round and going back to the bar for another two hours before ringing again. “No really I am this time… I got distracted by that bloke, you know, that one with the face… I couldn’t find a cab… I’m coming.. on my way… [muffled] one gimlet please, Geoff…”

I used to get incredibly pissed off about it. It made me feel like such an idiot. And also, when he rang at midnight to say he was getting in a cab and then still wasn’t home by 2am, I would worry. Wouldn’t you? My husband never tells lies usually – there was no reason why I wouldn’t assume he was telling me the truth about the cab. I didn’t have a problem with him going out all night – who cares? – but why not be honest about it and I’ll make plans, too? Once or twice I’d even made him a nice dinner and had it waiting when I’d get phonecall no.1 of the evening from him, declaring that he was just getting in a cab and the dinner would sit there sadly until morning.

It took me a long time to get my head round how my husband really didn’t think he was going to go on a bender, even though it would have been obvious to undiscovered pygmy tribes that that’s where he was headed. I didn’t understand how he could genuinely actually feel like he didn’t want to go out and yet then, after merely spying a corkscrew tucked into a waiter’s apron, find himself weaving his way home at dawn, usually having lost his shoes but with his pockets stuffed full of £50 notes, which he’d won on Blackjack, somewhere – he could never remember where.

In the morning, he would tear at his hair and tremble and shriek about what an awful time he’d had, how terrible he was feeling and how he was never, ever going to leave the house again. Wretched confessions rolled out; he’d passed out on the stairs, in a ditch, in a doorway, he woke up and someone was taking his photo with a bloody iPhone, he spoke for hours passionately to that awful bloke with the face.

He was reformed, changed. It was over between him and late nights. And then it would happen all over again.

After a good year of this sort of nonsense, I realised that the thing to do when Giles had finished his work for the week and was off out for lunch of a Friday, was to ignore his protestations that he’d be home at 3pm, make up the spare room, dig out some takeaway menus, pick a film to watch and settle in for a nice night in on my own. Once I went out with friends without telling him, got reasonably drunk myself, came back in the small hours and was STILL in bed before he stumbled in.

He’s much better about all this since we had Kitty. But the thing is, unless my husband goes on out a bender every so often, he goes a bit mad.

He will claim, over and over again, that all he wants to do is bath Kitty, make dinner, watch something on the telly and go to bed and read his book. But after a straight 6 weeks of this, he starts to lose it and fray round the edges. If he was a parrot, he would start pecking out his feathers. He becomes catty, stroppy and unmanageable. He mopes about the house like a depressed King Kong. He starts wailing “Are we just going to go to bed at 9.30pm every night for the rest of our lives??”

At which point, I send him off out of the house and tell him not to come back until morning. Like on Thursday, when he left the house at 12.30pm for lunch and didn’t come back until 3.30am. He’d had strict instructions to sleep in the spare room but he decided that this was not on and so came in and got into bed, waking me up. Then he woke me up further at 5am when he needed to wee, battering the door jamb with unsteady shoulders and stepping heavily on both outward and homeward journey on the really creaky floorboard that we both hop over in the night (when sober).

The next morning he was as contrite and pliable as a feverish child, his eyes trembling with pain as he tried to recall exactly what happened to him between 8pm and 3am. “And I think I’ve lost my black jumper,” he said, sadly. “I’m sorry I’m such a terrible person,” he added, wringing his hands together.

And just like that, he will be good as gold for at least a fortnight. Tee hee.

But when he is not on a bender, or revving up for a bender – and is instead feeling uxorious, he often cooks for us. I am a terribly resentful cook, finding the whole thing an awful drag as I do it all the time, while my husband revels in it, when he has the time to do it, and cooks generously and imaginatively.

Anyway the other night he made us a starter of breaded scallops, which he found in Nigel Slater’s fast food and they were really great

1 clove of garlic, crushed
finely grated zest of one lemon
3 tbs chopped flat leaf parsley
75 room temperature butter
black pepper
1 quantity of scallops – about 3 handfuls small ones?
1 beaten egg
fresh breadcrumbs or medium matzoh meal would work just as well
butter and groundnut oil for frying

1 Mix the garlic, zest and parsley into the butter and season with black pepper

2 Dip the scallops into the beaten egg and then roll them in breadcrumbs

3 Heat some oil and butter in a pan until you have about a cm in the pan. Heat until hot and then fry off the scallops for about 3 mins each side. Set aside

4 Chuck out the oil and butter and then heat your garlic/parsley/butter concoction and spoon over your scallops when midly frazzed and melty – about 30 secs.

Eat and wash down with an Alka Seltzer.

Incoming search terms:

gordon ramsay scallops

Poached chicken breast and its sauce for Laura*

Most diet plans and recipes featured in newspaper colour supplements and in magazines will at some point instruct you to eat a poached chicken breast. I am not averse to diet recipes but a poached chicken breast has always struck me as a terrible thing. Tasteless, papery, depressing.

But I have to lose some weight. I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve got fatter. I don’t recall eating more, or differently, but some cosmic shift has occurred to make me acquire more weight. I don’t know how much because I don’t weigh myself, but I know that a few months ago all my clothes fit and now they don’t. Specifically certain pairs of jeans. Specifically round my middle. I would go on my own-brand Shitty Food Diet, but it has been failing me. I don’t know why.

Things were made worse recently by going on holiday to a Greek island where among the guests were two 40-year-old women who were in terrific shape. They were lean and mean like Japanese calligraphy; they exercised all the time – running down to the beach at 7am to swim to a neighbouring island and back – and ate practically nothing. AND there was this 18 year old boy who had abs you could grate cheese on. He looked like he’d been Photoshopped. All round it was not a terrific week for feeling hot and sexy and whippet-like. And my hands swelled up so much in the heat that I had to stop wearing my wedding ring.

By the way, don’t all rush to shriek that I am pregnant, because I am not – chance would be a fine thing. (Not quite as easy second time around, it seems.)

Anyway looking pregnant without actually being pregnant is the worst of both worlds. So I have been casting about for things to eat that won’t make me get any fatter and thought that things may have got to such a drastic stage that I will have to give poached chicken breast a whirl.

The thing that made me definitely decide to do this was recalling an interview with Cheryl Cole about two years ago, when we were still in thrall to her and were not yet weary of her chocolatey eyes and perfect teeth and cavernous dimples, where she talked about losing a lot of weight. She would eat for dinner, she said, poached chicken breast (A-HA!) with “some kind of creamy sauce” and steamed vegetables.

The creamy sauce here is key – a rich creamy sauce will liven anything up, even a sodding chicken breast and you can, if you are doing a low-carbohydrate regime, as I am, slobber it all over whatever you’re eating. It will just make everything okay.

Please do not be daunted by the sauce I have invented here. It is the same principle as Hollandaise but very easy as you are not required to do that awful buggery thing where you cook the egg-and-butter mixture only for it to fucking split and make you cry (this may only apply if you have PMT). What you sacrifice for ease and speed is a small amount in the way of consistency, which in the case of this sauce is a little thinner than an echt Hollandaise. But it is the key to being thin. So just do it.

Poached chicken with its sauce
For 2

2 chicken breasts
3 egg yolks
200g butter
a dash of vinegar
salt and pepper
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp of stock powder if you have it, don’t worry if not

1 In a pan large enough to accommodate both chicken breasts heat up about two inches deep of water with your stock powder and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat until it is simmering and then add the chicken. Cook this for 12 minutes, turning occasionally. Try not to let the water hit a rolling boil, or dip below a brisk simmer.

2 If I were you, I would wait until the chicken was cooked then take it out of the pan to rest before you attempt the sauce because although the sauce is not hard, it is best to have no distractions while you are doing it.

(I made sure Kitty and husband were both watching television while doing this and not liable to pester me for biscuits, stickers, hugs or story-reading. Kitty can be pretty demanding, too.)

The chicken needs to rest for a bit anyway. Don’t be put off by how utterly disgusting the chicken looks when cooked – all pale and dead-looking – this will be disguised later; see picture above.

3 For the sauce first melt the butter in a saucepan. If you have one of those marvellous pans with a little pouring lip, use that, if not don’t worry. After it has melted keep it over the lowest flame possible to keep warm. Then separate the three yolks into a small bowl.

4 I have an electric whisk for this step. I’m sure you could do it by hand but it might be tough on the old wrists. So, while continuously beating the yolks, add the melted butter in a thin stream. People make a lot of fuss about how hard this is, it really isn’t, just be careful.

5 Once add the butter has been added, season with salt, pepper, lemon juice and vinegar. Add all these cautiously and taste all the time. Egg yolks are precious; leftover egg whites are a bore – you do not want to have to do the whole thing all over again. I like a very vinegary Hollandaise – or should I say “Hollandaise” – but you might not.

6 You can just eat this now, or if you need to wait a bit while cooking some veg – (I made a broccoli accompaniment *cries* by boiling some broccoli for 5 minutes then tossing in toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and sesame seeds) – then get any old pan, fill it 2 inches with water and then heat to skin temperature and keep it there, then place your “Hollandaise” in the water to keep it a sort of baby-bath temperature, which will stop it from going grainy. Stir every now and again anyway.

7 To serve! (And this is key, for morale) slice the chicken into what is know in the restuarant menu trade as “medallions” and lay out on the plate, slather generously with sauce, and also any accompanying boring vegetables.

Giles, to my total astonishment, declared this “the most delicious thing” I’ve ever cooked. I was stunned. He hasn’t said that for ages. So there you go. Although just between you and me, I think he might have just been trying to be nice because I’m so fat and spotty at the moment.

Happy dieting! 🙁

N.B. I have not been posting because my publisher wants an absolutely terrifying amount of original copy and so I have been sitting in my room in front of my computer not posting anything because any new ideas I have must go into the book… but I haven’t been writing any new copy either. What is wrong with me?

*This post is dedicated to a really terrific girl I know on Twitter, @lauraewelsh, who once said the funniest thing to me ever, which is that the greatest skill a parent can have is to eat an entire packet of crisps with their head in a cupboard. She is on a diet, too.