Hopefully when this appears I will be on an aeroplane whizzing towards Denmark to spend the weekend with my family. As I am off galivanting I will leave you with the treat of another competition. This time the lovely people from Robert Roberts have a hamper of their award winning tea and coffee to give away.
At the Great Taste Awards, products are blind tasted by a panel of judges. In order to win 1 star, 8 judges have to agree upon its merits and to gain 2 stars, at least 20 judges have to agree. So you can understand that Robert Roberts are pretty happy about their products collectively gaining 12 stars.
What have you got to do in order to get your hot little hands on this basket of goodies, that includes products such as their Campbells tea and their range of coffees? Leave a comment below stating the strangest place you have ever had a cup of tea or coffee. Oddest place, as chosen by my independent adjudicator will be notified as the winner.
Deadline is 10pm Wednesday 18th August.
Please note that we will use your email address to contact the winner and by posting in the comments section you are agreeing to this.
UPDATE (19/08/10): After much deliberation and discussion, the winner of the Robert Roberts Hamper is Siobhany! Congratulations, you'll be getting an email from me to your inbox very soon.
This is the recipe for the tart I made as the starter for the #twishparty evening last Friday.
I was originally inspired to make this recipe after having a taste of the mini quiches Mags from Goatsbridge Trout had on her stand at the Bloom Festival. Hers contained smoked trout, leeks and Knockdinna Cheese. They were little bites of heaven. So when I had some of her smoked trout sitting in the fridge along with some leeks and the end of a piece of aged gouda, I knew I had to give it a go. The resulting tart was delicious!
When I heard Mags was judging the seafood cookalong I knew I had to have another go at the tart to serve as a starter. Unfortunately, I was foiled in my plan to influence the judge by not being able to get any smoked trout from my nearest supplier, Donnybrook Fair. Instead I decided to go with the hot smoked salmon from The Burren Smokehouse as it has a similar texture to that of the trout.
The resulting tart was just as delicious as the original and was described by my friend Shelly, who was helping out with the cooking and eating, as a "foodgasm". Hopefully, you'll think so too.
Ingredients
Pastry
As per previous recipe
Leeks (2 large or 3 small)
2 - 3
Hot Smoked Salmon (You can also used smoked trout)
Frying pan, rolling pin, measuring jug, baking parchment, clay baking beans or similar for blind baking and a tart or quiche dish measuring approx 20 cm in diametre.
Preheat the oven to 170°C.
Make the pastry as described in this recipe. Alternatively you can use a sheet of ready made short crust pastry.
While the pastry is chilling in the fridge, clean the leeks and cut up into 1cm pieces. Melt a little butter in the frying pan and add the leeks. Cook over a low heat until they have become soft and silky.
Leave the leeks to one side to cool, while your prepare the pastry case. Grease the tart tin well and remove the pastry from the fridge, and place on a well floured board or worktop.
Roll out the pastry so that it will cover the whole tart dish with a bit of overhang. Carefully roll the pastry up onto a well floured rolling pin and gently unroll over the dish.
Gently push the pastry down into the dish and ensure that all parts are covered. Prick the base and sides all over with a fork. This will ensure that any trapped air will escape during the baking.
Cut out a sheet of baking parchment, large enough to cover the tart dish. Place over the pastry and fill the centre of the dish with clay baking beans, or you can use dried rice, lentils or marrowfat peas. These help to keep the pastry case from bubbling up while you blind bake it. Blind baking will prevent the pastry from becoming soggy when we add the filling, and beacuse the filling has a shorter cooking time than that of the pastry. Put the pastry case into the oven and bake for 15 - 20 mins.
While the pastry case is baking, prepare the rest of the ingredients for the filling. Grate the cheese and put to one side. Break the salmon into pieces, I found this easier to do by hand rather than with a knife.
Break the eggs into a bowl, add the cream and beat well.
Season with salt and pepper. Add thyme (if using) and beat again.
At this point the pastry case should be about ready to come out of the oven. It should be a very pale golden colour. Remove the parchment paper and baking beans. Add the leeks to the pastry case and spread evenly over the base.
Nice it's time to start layering in the other ingredients.
Spread half the hot smoked salmon over the leeks then sprinkle over half the gouda.
Next, layer on the remaining salmon. Reserve a handful of the cheese, then spread the remainder over the top of the other fillings.
Carefully pour in the egg and cream mixture. Pat down any floating filling ingredients so that they become coated with the egg mixture.
Sprinkle your reserved handful of cheese over the top of the tart. Next, carefully cut off the excess pastry from the edge of the tart. Try not to take too much off, or you might spring a leak!
Take a moment to admire your handiwork, before transferring the tart into the oven for 30 mins.
After 30 mins the filling of the tart should be firm to the touch and have turned a golden brown colour. If it still seems either a little runny or pale, return to the oven and check at 5 min intervals. Allow the tart to cool a little. Enjoy a slice on it's own or served with a salad.
This is the fish dish I cooked as our main course for the #twishparty last Friday. As I previously explained Fiskeret translates from the Danish as "fish dish" or "fish recipe" and as this is my grandmother's fish recipe we call it Granny's Fiskeret. She learnt it years ago from someone else (who's name is lost in the mists of time) and modified it slightly to get the version we cook today.
This recipe is very simple and the flavours in it, while they may seem a little odd, combine to make a very Scandinavian tasting dish.
Ingredients
Haddock (You can also use cod or other white fish)
Grease the oven-proof dish, to stop the fish sticking to it, and cut the haddock fillets in half to make nice portion sizes. Arrange comfortably in the dish and leave to one side.
With the fish out of the way it's time to make the sauce to cook it in. First measure in the mustard and the curry powder. I used Sharwood's Hot Curry Powder, but I know my mum has made this dish with a milder curry powder and it still tastes just as nice.
Next add in the oil, tomato pureé and vinegar to the mixture.
Finally add the ketchup and stir everything together.
To finish the sauce and create the right consistency, add the cream and stir through the rest of the mixture thoroughly.
Pour the mixture over the fish and spread evenly so that every part is covered.
Next, finely slice the half onion into rings. If you really like onion then you could use a whole one, but I found that half was perfect for the amount of fish I had and size of my dish. Place the rings of onion over the top of the sauced fish.
Place the bay leaves on the top and put into the oven for 20 - 30 mins.
The fish is cooked through when it becomes flakey and easy to break apart. Take out of the oven and serve with potatoes and green beans (which I forgot to buy). I served it with mash but boiled new potatoes are just as nice an accompaniment.
Please let me know if you try this as I would like to know what you make of the Scandinavian flavours in the dish.
On Friday 3rd August, the Irish Foodies once again embarked upon our montly cookalong. This time the theme was seafood. Taking part this time were the usual suspects plus quite a few new people (see the Irish Foodies Cookalong Facebook page for details) with all entries being judged by Mags of Goatsbridge Trout.
Having already had a bit of a seafood feast the previous week, complete with scallops, giant prawns, mussels and squid, I decided to raid the family cook book for a suitably fishy dish. I also decided that I would recreate a tart that I had made a couple of weeks previously which contained smoked trout from Goatsbridge. I admit that this may have been an attempt on my part to influence the judge.
Unfortunately they were completely out of stock of the trout in Donnybrook Fair, the closest supplier of same, so instead I went for the Hot Smoked Salmon from the Burren Smokehouse. I combined this with leeks and a mature gouda called Old Amsterdam.
The resulting tart was described by my friend Shelly (my glamorous assistant for the evening) as a "foodgasm".
With one success under my belt it was time to tackle my Danish fish dish, which I call Granny's Fiskeret. Fiskeret translates as "fish dish" or "fish recipe". My grandmother learnt it from someone else and modified it a bit. The flavours in this dish are quite distinctly Scandinavian and I thought that it would be a bit different from the usual fish dishes served in Ireland.
This dish also got the thumbs up from both Shelly and the Beau, who had turned up at this point.
The recipes for both dishes will be appearing in blog posts this week and I'll be sure to keep you updated on who the winner is this time around.
The lovely people of Gallagher's Boxty House in Temple Bar (a review of which you can read over at the Daily Spud) have created a series of short videos showing you how to prepare some simple Irish dishes. My favourite, below, is how to make Irish Coffee.
To mark this, they would like to give you a dinner for two, including a bottle of house wine. To enter the competition, all you have to do is leave a comment before 10pm* on Tuesday 3rd August and a winner will be picked at random.
*10pm as per the time stamp on the comment.
UPDATE (04/08/10): Congratulations to our randomly chosen winner; Marcel! We hope you enjoy your meal out at Gallagher's.
Last Thursday, 22nd July, myself, Babaduck Babbles, the Beau and one of his friends, went on an adventure to Dun Laoghaire to learn the art of curing bacon from the gregarious Ed Hicks of J Hick & Sons.
We arrived at the factory shop of Hicks which is located in the laneway behind Upr George's Street and were warmly greeted by Ed and met the rest of the people taking part in the course that evening. We were all there to learn for various reasons; ranging from owning a pig to curiosity at one of the oldest food preserving techniques.
The first thing Ed did was give us a run down of pork curing and how there is two ways you can cure; wet and dry. Wet curing is when the salt is mixed with water to create a brine in which the bacon sits. Dry curing is when the curing salts are rubbed directly into the skin of the bacon which is then wrapped and left in a dry, cool place. We listened to this information whilst surrounded by sausage making machinary and the work bench where we would later cure our bacon.
Ed then produced some raw beech-smoked rashers, some of which he put immediately onto a hot plate to cook, after a brief discussion about whether cutting or not cutting the rind is the best thing to do when cooking.
He cut the remaining rashers into pieces which were handed out for us to smell. The rasher had a golden ring around it from the smoking and a lovely wood smoke scent, which got more complex the more you smelled it. Then we got to eat some of the pieces that had already been cooked, and boy were they good! The first flavour, unsurprisingly, was salt, then you got the flavour of the beech wood smoke. I'm afraid that my descriptive powers are a little lacking at this point, but suffice to say they were the nicest smoked rashers I have ever tried.
Still chomping on bits of bacon, Ed showed us around the rest of the factory. We saw the smoker and the walk in fridge which contained stacks of curing bacon, which are rotated during the curing process, in order that all of them get time in the liquor, the liquid that is released by the salt coming into the meat.
He also showed us their brine mix for wet curing. He explained that, much as with a sourdough bread, it's good to have a starter for the brine which is kept between each curing. This gives a greater complexity of flavour to the wet cured bacon.
We then headed back to the main room to get down to the business of curing our own bacon. First we each had to claim a metal container, which we then weighed, making a note of the weight for future use. Ed then produced 2 loins of pork which he divided up between the 7 of us that were there that evening.
Each piece of pork was at least a kilo in weight, my own ended up being 1.5 kg and the Beau's piece was 1.3kg. We put the piece of pork into the containers and weighed them again, taking away the empty container weight to get the size of our pork piece.
Next came the complicated maths to work out how many grams of the curing mixture we would need for our piece of meat. The curing mixture was made up of salt, saltpetre and sugar. 34g was needed of this mixture per kilo, so out came the calculator. The curing mixture was weighed out in a seperate container for better accuracy. Then it was poured on to the top of the meat.
After a quick removal of my rings, it was time to rub the cure into the meat, making sure to especially rub it into the rind side and get it into all the little crevices.
After we had thoroughly salted our pork, Ed came around and put each piece of meat into a plastic bag with as much of the salt as we could scrape off our fingers and out of the container. Then we stuck our names onto the bags for easy identification.
Each of the plastic bags was then vacuum packed and Ed gave us the all important instructions on what to do with our bacon once we got home. He also told us that if we had any queries at all to email him (with pictures if we were really worried) and he would help as best he could.
Before we left we picked up our own bags of curing salts to take home, weighing 300g so that we could cure another 10kg of bacon ourselves. We also got a bag of beech wood chips so that we could try smoking our own bacon too.
For €40 per head, this is a very competitively priced evening. You spend 2 - 2.5 hrs learning about curing, you get at least 1kg of bacon, 300g of curing salt and a large bag of wood chips. I would highly reccommend it to anyone who is really interested in food.
Myself and the Beau can hardly wait the 4 - 6 weeks until our bacon is ready to eat.
This is the last of the cookies that I made for the Twookie Party. This is also the recipe that I think might be slightly wonky, but it does still work and makes pretty tasty cookies.
I've modified it again a little from the original version in the Best-Ever Book of Cookies by Catherine Atkinson. I have lessened the amount of plain chocolate in the mix and left off putting more plain chocolate pieces on the top of the cookies. I found this made them quite rich and hard to eat, but if you would like to try it, change the 60g of plain chocolate to 200g, of which you put half in the mixture and blob the other half on the tops of the cookies before they go into the oven.
Glass bowl, saucepan, 2 baking trays and a wire rack.
I found that these cookies were ideal for using up all the spare chocolate we had hanging around our kitchen, some of it which was quite out of date, but still good for cooking with. So in the pictures if you think a piece of chocolate looks a lot like the bottom of a Lindt bunny, it probably is.
Preheat the oven to 180°C. weigh out 100g of the plain chocolate and put in a glass bowl. Put some boiling water into a saucepan that is slightly smaller than your bowl so that the bowl can sit in it without touching the water. Put the pot on a low heat so that the water stays just under a simmer to help melt the chocolate. Let the chocolate slowly melt.
While the chocolate is melting, roughly chop up the white chocolate, milk chocolate and remaining 60g of plain chocolate and put to one side along with the halved macadamia nuts.
Take the melted chocolate off the hob. Add the butter and vanilla essence, stir both through the mixture. The butter will melt into the warm chocolate.
Now add the sugar. You may have to mush up the sugar a little with your wooden spoon to make sure it's not clumping.
Once the sugar is mixed in, add the flour and carefully stir into the chocolate mixture. It will pull together to form a dough.
Add the chopped chocolate pieces and nuts. Mix into the chocolate dough as best you can. You might find that you need to use your hands for this.
Don't worry if the mixture looks a little bit crumbly at this point, it does come together nicely in the oven to make pretty tasty cookies. The next thing to do is grease the 2 baking trays very well.
Then, as the mixture is so crumbly I took a spoonful of the mix, squished it together a little in my hands and then put it onto the tray. I fitted 9 on one tray and 8 on my other, smaller tray. Put into the oven and bake for 10 - 12 mins.
When they come out of the oven, leave them to cool on their trays for at least 5 mins as they will be very soft and difficult to move. Once they've cooled a bit and become a little harder, move carefully to a wire rack and leave to cool completely.
There you have it, triple chocolate cookies. Let me know what you think, and how you get on with the recipe. I think an egg might pull it together a little better, but they work as is anyway.
This is the second of the biscuits that I cooked for the Twookie Party. Again, this recipe comes from the book Best-Ever Book of Cookies by Catherine Atkinson. This time I made no modifications to the recipe, as I think they're fine just the way they are.
Mixing bowl, electric hand whisk or beater, 2 baking trays and a wire rack.
These cookies were so fast and easy to make I think they will become a favourite for those days when you really need something baked with your cup of tea.
Preheat the oven to 190°C. Weigh out your sugar and butter into a bowl together and whisk well until pale and fluffy. This takes at least 3 minutes but probably closer to 5 depending on your whisking method. I used an electric hand mix.
Add the egg and again, whisk until thoroughly beaten into the mixture.
Now add the baking powder, flour, and peanut butter.
Beat until well mixed.
Grease the baking trays well. I like to use old butter wrappers for the job, as it uses up the little ends of butter that would otherwise go to waste. This way they fulfill their buttery destiny.
Once the baking trays are greased, measure out a dessertspoonful of mix, spaced well apart. Then place in the oven and bake for 15 mins. If they still look a little pale after this time give them another 5 mins.
After 15 - 20 mins they should be a lovely golden brown colour. Take them out of the oven and leave to cool on the tray for 5 mins as they will still be a little soft at this stage. After the 5 mins, carefully transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
This is the first of the biscuits/cookies I made for the Twookie Party. I've modified it a little from the original recipe that's listed in the Best-Ever Book of Cookies by Catherine Atkinson.
My modifications were adding a little plain chocolate in with the milk for the main base of the slice as I think this makes it not as sweet as it is with just milk chocolate. I also added equal amounts of white and plain chocolate, whereas the original recipe says to choose one. My final modification was to add Cointreau into the mix, this I think adds a lovely orange flavour to the chocolate slice.
This is a nice simple recipe, but the results are fantastic and a slice would make a lovely dessert.
First weigh out all the milk chocolate and 50g of the plain chocolate then break into pieces in a glass bowl. Add the butter.
Put some boiling water into a saucepan that is slightly smaller than your bowl so that the bowl can sit in it without touching the water. Put the pot on a low heat so that the water stays just under a simmer to help melt the chocolate. Let the chocolate and butter slowly melt, stirring occasionally with a spoon. When the chocolate and butter is melted together, take off the heat and leave to cool for a couple of minutes.
While the chocolate is melting, measure out the rich tea biscuits and break up into pieces.
Roughly chop up the white chocolate and the remaining plain chocolate. Place them to one side with the chopped nuts.
Back to the slightly cooled chocolate, now if the moment to add the Cointreau if you're using it. Pour it in and stir through thoroughly.
Add the crumbled rich tea biscuits and stir in. Next add in the chocolate and chopped nuts and again stir into the mixture.
Now take your loaf tin and run it under the cold tap for a moment, then shake of the excess water so that it's damp rather than wet. Tear off enough clingfilm to line the bottom and sides of the tin. Don't worry if you have too much, you can just fold it over the top of the slice.
Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin and pack down using a fork.
Fold the excess cling film over the top of the flattened mixture and put in the fridge to set for 2 hours.
After 2 hours (or more if you forget about it like I did the first time I made it) remove from the fridge and tin and unwrap the log from the cling film.
Turn out on a plate or board and peel away the remaining clingfilm. Serve by cutting into slices and scoffing as many as possible without feeling sick. Enjoy!
As my Beau was out galivanting for the evening, I pottered over to my parents' house to use their much nicer and bigger kitchen to cook in. I brought with me a bag full of ingredients and my copy of the Best-Ever Book of Cookies by Catherine Atkinson, which no longer seems to be in print. Though this book seems to be the latest version.
Unfortunately while we were trying to tweet about our cookie creations, Twitter was having a bit of a meltdown. However, we valiently cooked on, posting pictures as we could and hoping they would make it past the defences of the Fail Whale.
During the week coming up to our twookieparty, there was a lot of chatter about who was going to bake what. As usual though, I left my planning to the last minute and spent my lunch break trawling through the cookie book and then running to the nearby supermarket to stock up on supplies. My final choices were;
I made the chocolate slice first and put it into the fridge to cool and set for 2 hours while I put the oven into overdrive with the other two.
The next thing I put together was the peanut crunch cookies. Both these and the chocolate nut slice are some of the easiest cookies I've ever made and very tasty too! The batter for the peanut crunches only takes about 15 mins to throw together.
Pop into the oven for another 15 mins and they're ready to eat.
While the peanut crunches were cooling, I had a break and a little dinner before setting into the challenge of the triple chocolate cookies. I actually think that there might be an error in the recipe for these as the mixture is more crumbly then I would have expected. However, they do cook up alright and are quite tasty.
They have lots of chocolate in them, as you would expect, as well as my favourite, macadamia nuts.
When the triple chocolate cookies had finished cooking, I took the chocolate nut slice from the fridge and cut a couple of slices to try. Hands down this is the best recipe and an excellent thing to prepare as a dessert or served with tea or coffee.
Once again I had a super evening with the other Irish foodies through the medium of Twitter. I really enjoy the challenge of finding something new to cook and showing off the results to others doing the same thing. I can't wait for our seafood evening in August!
seems to be the latest version.
