Courgette polpette

My sisters and I grew up on a diet of fish fingers, beans, sausages, spaghetti bolognese, toast, scrambled egg, chips and boil in the bag cod with rice. My mother occasionally made a concession to our general education, by giving us Alphabites, with which we would construct rude words on our plates. We never had to eat vegetables or salad or anything we didn't want to, although it was always available.

Eventually we started eating that stuff of our own accord ,when we reached an age when we thought eating vegetables might make us thin and get rid of our spots. (Misguided of course. In order to be thin it doesn't matter what you eat, as long as you eat almost none of it, and in order to get rid of your spots you need some sort of pharmaceutical assistance.)

So I do not labour under a thing where I think Kitty ought to be eating a lot of fruit and vegetables. Do you even really NEED fruit and vegetables up until the age of about 12? I thought all babies and toddlers and small children need is carbohydrate and a bit of protein. That's all they want anyway. That and the food group known as CAKE.

Anyway it's a good thing I am very relaxed about all this, because Kitty doesn't want to eat any of that vegetable shit, thanks very much. She used to make a good fist of eating broccoli but now doesn't care for it much. From 8 months old onwards she has survived on about seven different kinds of spoonable stew that we make and freeze, mostly bean and animal fat-based.

And she has never, ever been interested in fruit. I must have placed a hundred different pieces of banana, apple, grape and clementine segment on her tray table only for her to discard them with various different disgusted faces. She did once put a piece of banana in her mouth, while mesmerised by one of her cousins - but I think she thought it was cheese.

Now she has reached a stage where she won't eat anything she hasn't eaten before. She will put it in her mouth but then hook it out with her forefinger with the word "Mmlair". Or simply open her little beak and let the food roll out.

The fact that you cannot bribe, cajole or otherwise force a pre-verbal toddler to eat something it doesn't want to is both frightening and liberating. She doesn't want it. There's nothing I can do except try again another time.

But even though I privately think that she can eat whatever the hell she wants, I must maintain a pretence in front of my husband and other middle-class people that I think she needs to eat vegetables.

So I purchased the River Cottage Babies and Toddlers Cookbook and set about making what I thought looked like a very tasty fingerfood, called Courgette Polpette.

They are really, really yummy and easy and I heartily recommend them as a delicious canape for your next soiree. Kitty hated them, obviously. But, thankfully, I don't give a fuck.

Courgette polpette

500g courgettes, finely diced
Grated zest of 1/2 a lemon
1 beaten egg
2 tbsp grated parmesan or pecorino
1/2 ball mozarella
50g breadcrumbs
1 tbsp chopped parsely
1 garlic clove, finely sliced or grated
salt and pepper

1 Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the courgette over a medium flame for 10 minutes (time it) until they have taken a bit of colour and have collapsed just slightly

2 Allow to cool for as long as you can be bothered and then combine with all the other ingredients. The mixture will be quite wet and sticky

3 Form walnut-sized blobs and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes and serve to your baby with prosecco.

Banana bread for Dory

I often, as you might guess, struggle to feel positive about stuff. Any small knock can send me spiralling into an unwashed, disconsolate, uninspired, make-up free bundle of nerves. In recent times, Kitty being ill has been a sure-fire way of me plummeting into despair. A tiny cough, a bout of teething, a sticky eye and I'm moping round the house with eye bags and dirty hair, snapping at my husband and refusing to do any washing up or laundry.

But recently, I've been fighting back. Kitty's been ill for about a week now. Started with a hacking cough, graduated to full-on fever, dull eyes, sporadic weeping (mainly at 3am) etc. It's been pretty tough. Our new plan of action is to have dinner eaten by 8pm and be in bed asleep by 9pm so that when 2/3am comes around and with it an hour or so of analgesic administration, cooing and soothing, we are prepared for it and not utterly fucked by 7am the next morning because we stayed up until 11pm watching Borgen.

My other plan of action is to get up the next morning, have a shower, wash my hair, put on fresh clothes and put my old ones in the wash. I make an effort to keep the house tidy, I try to make dinner every night, rather than barking "Let's just get a takeaway" at my husband.

It helps, it works. This illness, although with its persistent blubbery hacking cough, feverishness, sleeplessness and general horror, has been the longest and worst illness Kitty has had to date, hasn't sent me quite into the depths of despair that it would have done 6 months ago.

And so when the sun came out yesterday and I had a rush of blood to the head having smelled spring on the breeze, (like a demented Carwash in Will o' the Wisp), I decided to bake something.

I have been meaning for a long time to make a lot of things out of the Leon 2 cookbook, which is about baking and puddings. Recipe Rifle's very own pork pie is in there - with a picture and everything - on pages 284/5. And Henry, a friend of my husband's, who runs Leon, remarked the other day that I hadn't mentioned the cookbook once here. That's because I can't see what good it would do them and I'm staggered that he noticed, but still I took the hint.

And then Henry and his wife Jemima, who as coincidence would have it was my first ever boss, went and had a(nother) baby! Little Dorothy "Dory" Dilys Dimbleby. What a little peach she is. And my husband Giles is her godfather, which really means that I get to go absolutely bonkers with his credit card twice a year.

Let me tell you a story about my godfather. His name is Sir Douglass Wass and  he was, I think, my dad's boss when dad was a spy worked at the Treasury. The story goes that dad said to Sir Douglas when I was born "Will you be her godfather?" and Sir Douglas said "Oh I am very bad at that sort of thing but yes sure." And by then it was too late for dad to say "Oh forget it then you useless bastard." And as a result I heard absolutely hide nor hair from Sir Douglas. Ever. Never. Like, NEVER. But then I didn't actually have a christening so he may have been within his rights.

But it didn't stop me from thinking that it was something about me, something I'd done, that made him not especially interested in fulfilling his godfatherly duties. It left me feeling really quite shit about myself, seeing as my other sisters had perfectly normally functioning godparents. And next-eldest didn't have a wretched christening either.

So I can now, at last, lay a bad godparenting ghost to rest by being, via Giles, the world's best, most extravagant and mad godparent ever to Dory. I have started by purchasing a new hat for the christening.

And I am following this up with a banana bread baked in her honour. Yes I know it's more bananas, but I need the potassium, okay? And this banana bread is absolutely outstanding - much better than the other banana bread recipe on here. It is very banana-y, it's basically a lot of bananas held together with eggs and flour.

One of my favourite readers, Oraleek, just made the other banana bread, I note via my comments, and I feel very bad that she's been diddled out of making this one because I didn't post in time. But what can I say - life stinks.

Banana bread from the Leon 2 cookbook 

50g pecan nuts
150 veg oil
200g dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
350g ripe skinned bananas
75g natural yoghurt
1 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
225g wholemeal spelt flour (yes they sell this in Waitrose)
1 extra banana, peeled
2 tbs caster sugar

1 Pre-heat your oven to 170C and butter a 2lb loaf tin and line it (YES you must do this, don't be lazy) and line a baking sheet, too.

2 Spread the pecans out over the baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 5 mins until golden and smelling yummy. you could probably also do this in a dry frying pan

3 In a bowl whisk together the oil, sugar, vanilla and eggs

4 In another bowl, roughly mash the bananas. I do mean roughly - you are going to stir them a lot later, so don't worry if there are very big lumps at this stage. Add the youghurt and mix together. Sprinkle over the bicarb of soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt and stir again.

5 Mix the banana mixture and the sugar/egg mixture together. Chop the pecans and chuck those in too. Then sprinkle over the flour and stir until things are only just combined. Over-mixing is disastrous here so I actually left about 15% of dried flour still visible, which resulted in some seams of flour left running through the cake. So be brave, but not too brave. Spoon the batter into your smugly lined tin.

6 Slice your spare banana down the middle and place one half on top of the batter, then sprinkle over the caster sugar. The banana half will sink into the mixture during cooking and look terrific. I advise you to eat the other half to get in the mood.

7 Bake for 45-50 mins.

Pate de Canard en Croute Part II: Hubris

Oh dear, so - after all that fuss about how easy it all was, I cocked it up anyway.

Although I'd like to point out that this was an execution error and not a planning error - i.e. the pastry was fine, I just put it together slightly wrong. The pastry has split along the seam between the "basin" and the "lid" of the pastry - simple physics, really; an eggwash wasn't enough to stick the two bits together and the basin sagged under its own weight.

What I ought to have done was brought the basin pastry up and over the brow of the duck, so that it had something to rest on and then applied the lid as a sort of large piece of sellotape to hold it all together.

This means you can't execute Julia Child's final command on this, which is to cut round the lid of the pastry case, lift the duck out, untie the strings and then put it back. But I didn't do that anyway.

But still, it tasted jolly nice. I'm not sure phrases like "worth the effort" really apply here because nothing is worth that much effort. But, strangely enough, my husband went nuts for this - he thought it was really great and really special. Who'd have thought it? He wants me to make it for a festive Christmas Eve dinner. And, although I swore I'd never do it again, the look on his little face was so very winning that I might just have to.

Christmas special #9: Mince pies



Photo by Elena Heatherwick

It really is very Stepford to make your own mince pies, so this one is for home baking enthusiasts only. Or for anyone who basically never, ever sees their family or does any cooking and is desperately trying to over-compensate.

Anyway having said all that mince pies are really easy. I do my mince pies in a slightly controversial way, in that I make them quite small and I make them with puff pastry and not shortcrust pastry.

I'm sure you all know the difference, but for any newcomers, puff pastry is like what vol-au-vents and savoury pie toppings are usually made off - sort of flaky n stuff know what I'm saying? And shortcrust pastry is what you get in a quiche, or on top of a fruit pie.

You can make up a quantity of puff pastry using Hugh F-W's recipe, which I've written about, with photographs, in this post: http://reciperifle.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs-corens-chicken-pie.html

That makes quite a lot. Even though you can just wrap up the leftovers and put in the freezer for another time, if you don't want that much puff pastry hanging about, then make it in half or even quarter quantities.

To assemble the mince pies you will need:

1 fairy cake tray
1 jar of mincemeat - I get mine from WAITROSE - one 410g jar of mincemeat will do about a dozen small pies.
1 quantity puff pastry
pastry cutters of your choice. I put stars on mine because I put stars on everything. I even have some stars tattooed on my person - although I'm in the middle of trying to get them taken off because tattoos are just like SO over
1 beaten egg to glaze
icing sugar

1 Roll out your pastry quite thin, like 3 mm, as it will puff up on cooking

2 Grease your fairy cake tin thoroughly as what will happen otherwise is that the mincemeat will bubble up and over the top of your pastry and superglue the little buggers to the tray and you will have to chip them out with a hammer and chisel

3 Cut out with a round cutter your pie bases and settle them into the fairy cake dips, fill with mincemeat and lay the festively-shaped lid of your choosing on top. Brush with eggwash

4 Bake in a 180C oven for 25 minutes

5 Eat hot, or reheat for 10 mins before eating and dust with icing sugar.

Christmas special #8: Christmas biscuits



Photo by Elena Heatherwick. Decorations by Recipe Rifle

Another Jamie Oliver recipe. The dough quantity here makes loads of biscuits - at least 30 depending on how big your biscuit cutters are.

I decorated these using Dr Oetker's writing icing, available from Waitrose, but any writing icing, sprinkles, or silver ball decorations will do.

So here we go:

210g plain flour
pinch salt
1tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarb soda
125g butter, cubed
100g sugar
1 egg
4 tbsp warm golden syrup

1 Preheat oven to 190C or 180 for fan ovens.

2 Mix together the first 6 dry ingredients. I recently learnt that swizzling dry ingredients with a whisk does pretty much the same job as sieving.

3 Rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture is crumby then add the egg and the syrup and mix with a spoon - not a fork or a whisk or it'll all get stuck between the spikes and drive you mental.

4 You ought to have a fairly soft dough by now, depending on how accurately you manage to measure out your syrup. Too much syrup - very easily done - and you'll have to compensate with a bit more flour.

This dough at the best of times is quite soft and fragile. It breaks away and flops out of shape quite easily - so don't lose heart if you only manage to get 2 out of every 3 dough-shapes safely onto your baking tray. A useful tool to have at hand is a fish slice or any other slim, flat metallic thing to slide your shapes off the worktop.

This dough rises a bit, so best to roll it out quite thin - about 2-3mm. If you want to use these as tree decorations, poke a hole in the top before baking.

5 These biscuits are incredibly sensitive to individual oven strengths. Mine has a fan and is brand new and is a very unsubtle creature - she is the BA Baracus of ovens - and so I only needed to do these biscuits for 5 mins at 180C.

Your oven will be different. So my advice is to start off by baking one or two biscuits at 190 for 10 minutes and take it from there. What you're looking for is a nice golden colour but a still a fraction of give in the middle of the biscuit. When they come out of the oven, they will still be squidgy and will harden on cooling, so wait 5 mins before testing their done-ness.

Decorate when cool.

A note: Babies seem to go completely nuts for these, especially those teething. It's the ginger or something - and the fact that if you drool a lot over them they turn into a sort of cakey consistency. If you wanted to do them especially for a baby, you could halve the quantity of sugar, (or cut it out completely depending on how sensitive you are about that sort of thing), and then cut them out quite thick, like a rusk.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Red Velvet Cupcakes Recipes

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups gluten-free cake flour
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup white sugar
1/8 cup light agave syrup
1 1/2 cups canola oil
2 large eggs at room temperature
3/4 teaspoon red gel/paste food coloring
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 rounded tablespoons Tofutti “cream cheese” almond or soy milk (directions below)
2 tablespoons 1 plus tsp distilled white vinegar, separated
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Directions:

Recipes Sweet Potato Casserole with Marshmallow Topping

Recipes Sweet Potato Casserole with Marshmallow Topping

Ingredients
    4 1/4 pounds sweet potatoes
    2 tablespoons butter $
    1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
    1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
    1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
    Cooking spray $
    3 cups miniature marshmallows