theordinarycook

The Ordinary Cook loves to cook. If I am not cooking or baking then the chances are I am thinking about cooking and baking. I love sharing recipes and ideas and my website is my space to do this.

Ludlow Food Festival’s Sausage Trail

17 Comments / sausages, The Ordinary Cook /

Ludlow is a wonderful place to get good food, and once a year they have a fantastic festival that celebrates local and regional food.  The festival grows every year with new events and new foodie fanatics displaying their wares.

Some of you may remember that I was a judge for Shropshire’s Tastiest Sausage back in January and I blogged all about the wonderful time I had tasting delicious sausages.  Well, luckily for me, one of the expert judges, The Sausage King, had other commitments this year and found my post about judging sausages and asked if I could step in for him as an Expert Judge for this year’s Sausage Trail.  This was quite an honour, and when you take a look at The Sausage King’s website, you will see that I had a lot to live up to. The Sausage King certainly knows his sausages.

The Sausage Trail is a great part of the festival. There is a People’s Choice, where you pay £3.50, then you set off around Ludlow to taste the sausages in the competition and mark your score on the sheet you have been given.  This year there were five sausages to judge.  This is the busiest I have ever seen the festival and I can tell you that the queue I saw for one butcher’s sausages was long!

Then there is an Expert’s Choice and this year there were four judges, including me.  The other judges were Dave Gurr-Gearing, chef at The Queens, Ludlow, Howard Lyons of Taste Real Food, and Anthony Harrison, who bravely volunteered his services from the audience.

The entrants were all local or regional butchers, four from Ludlow and one from Bromyard in Herefordshire.

We decided that the sausages would be judged by taste, smell, appearance, texture and the salability of the sausage.  This last one was the hardest to judge, as I think you are either a person that prefers a plain pork sausage or you are a person that loves to try the more unusual varieties and so that would form the basis of judgement on the potential for commercial success of a more unusual sausage.

All of the sausages in the competition are new flavours that haven’t been sold by the butcher before.

Ludlow butchers are very proud of their sausages and the competition between them to create the best is strong.

The Expert’s Choice this year was A H Griffith’s Pork with Wild Hedgerow Berries sausage.  It was a difficult  decision to make because all the sausages were very delicious. It was the fact that they were all so good that meant that the vote wasn’t a unanimous one and the decision was made after a tot up of the scores we had given for each sausage.

The other sausages in the competition were:

Legges of Bromyard’s Pork and Black Pudding sausage
D W Wall & Son’s Pork with Wild Mushrooms and Blue Cheese
Andrew Francis’s Rare Breed Pork with Sage and Black Pepper
Ludlow Food Centre’s Pork with Honey Roasted Onion

It was a great experience being an Expert Judge and so thank you Sausage King for finding me and asking me!

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Byron Bay Cookie Review

6 Comments / review, The Ordinary Cook /

I was looking at the UK Food Blogger’s Association website the other day and noticed that Beyond the Bean wanted food bloggers to sample their range of cookies and write about them.  Well, never one to turn down the chance of eating a cookie I offered to do just that. Paul sent me a box of ten cookies, which arrived the very next day. This called for a cup of tea and some serious taste testing.  I suffer for my art.

I had asked them to send me their gluten-free cookies as my sister is gluten intolerant so I have a vested interest in finding a good gluten-free cookie.

The Byron Bay Cookies are made in the UK, using free range eggs exclusively, which is a very good thing. The gluten-free cookies come single wrapped to make sure that they don’t get contaminated by any naughty gluten cookies. They are distributed to cafes, to have with your take-away coffee and are also available in mini cookie bite boxes from larger Sainsbury’s stores and health food shops.

Right to get down to business:

They are certainly substantial in size, so should satisfy even the biggest of appetites.

Gluten-free biscuits are always more crumbly than their gluten-y counterparts and I wish I had asked Paul to send me a sample of their gluten containing range so I could have done a comparison.

I received two of each of the White Choc Chunk & Macadamia Nut, Sticky Date & Ginger with Walnut, Triple Choc Fudge, Dark Choc Orange and Dotty Cookies to sample.

I shared them around.  My girls jumped on the Dotty Cookies, the ones that I guess are aimed at children with their sugar-coated chocolate sweets on top.  My adult nephew who is a big fan of chocolate and knows about gluten-free cookies, because my sister is his mum, tried the Triple Choc Fudge and the White Choc Chunk & Macadamia Nut Cookie.  Mr OC got to try the Dark Choc Orange and the Sticky Date & Ginger with Walnut Cookie.  In the interests of this review, of course, I tried a bit of each.

My favourite was the Sticky Date & Ginger with Walnut Cookie, which surprised me as I am a big fan of the chocolate cookie.  But this has a lovely gingery zing to and is a really comforting biscuit.  It is not quite so crumbly as the rest, or perhaps it’s because the crumbliness suits it better. There are good pieces of stem ginger in there and you can taste the walnuts and the cinnamon, but you can’t really taste the dates. If I see them in café, this will be my biscuit of choice from the range.

The Dark Choc Orange cookie has a powerful orange kick, which I am afraid I found just a little too powerful for my liking.

The Triple Choc Fudge Cookie is a sweet cookie, which found favour with my nephew.  There are good-sized chunks of fudge in there and it has a strong chocolate flavour.

If I saw these cookies for sale in a café I would buy one to see how the cookies that aren’t gluten-free compare to these.  I am always pleased to see that gluten-free biscuits are becoming more of a feature in our cafes and shops and so well done to Byron Bay for producing a range of gluten-free cookies. If I was to see them in a café then I would happily buy the gluten-free Sticky Date & Ginger with Walnut cookie to go with my coffee.

Disclaimer: I have received no financial reward for this review, but I did receive 10 free cookies to sample. The review is based on my honest opinion of the cookies and the information about them received from Beyond the Bean.

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The best tomato soup

21 Comments / soup, tomato, vegetarian /

We have an abundance of homegrown tomatoes at the moment. Every year at this time I make tomato soup, because, really, is there anything better?

Anyway, yesterday was deemed tomato soup day and we agreed that this was the best tomato soup I have ever made.  It tasted like cream of tomato soup, but no butter or cream had been added.  I can’t really explain where that creaminess came from, other than maybe the roasted garlic, but it was delicious. Roasting the tomatoes and the garlic first makes a big difference to the flavour, so don’t leave this stage out.

Serves 4 or 2 greedy people

500g fresh tomatoes
4 cloves garlic unpeeled
olive oil
2-3 rashers of bacon
1 small onion or a couple of shallots
550ml (1 pint) vegetable stock

Method

Put the whole tomatoes and the unpeeled cloves of garlic onto a baking sheet and drizzle with a good glug of olive oil and place in a preheated oven at 200°c (gas mark 6) or the roasting oven of the Aga for about 20 minutes until nicely roasted and starting to brown a little around the edges.

In the meantime, slice the onion and dice the bacon and fry in a large pan with a little olive oil over a medium heat until the onion is translucent and the bacon is cooked.

Add the roasted tomatoes, with all the lovely juices, to the bacon and onion and squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skin and add to the tomatoey mixture.  Add the vegetable stock and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Take the soup off the heat and whizz with a hand-held blender or in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Place back on the heat to warm through and serve in warmed bowls, with lots of bread for dunking.

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Blogiversary

26 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

Today is my blogiversary! It has been a great year and I love writing my blog.

I started this blog because a long-term work contract had come to an end and I still wanted to have something to focus on that would fit in with being a full-time mum.  I have always wanted to write a recipe book and I originally thought that was what I would focus on, but I realised that I had no idea how to go about doing such a thing. Then I thought about blogging and realised that this was something I could do and it would mean that I shared my recipes with the world too.

When I started I had no idea that it would give me as much pleasure as it does. I had no idea that I would make so many new friends.  I hadn’t delved into the world of food blogging before I started this, but I now spend hours poring over other food blogs and it’s wonderful to be invited into other people’s kitchens and lives.

It has also made me more creative in the kitchen, trying new foods and new ways of cooking – you learn a lot from other people’s blogs!  I still sometimes cook the same old thing for tea, but not quite as often as before.

The only downside that I can find to this lark though is that it has encouraged me to bake more, and then, of course, to eat the result.  The bathroom scales have been shoved out of sight and I really need to devote more time to exercise. Oh well, you can’t have it all ways.

So, this is just to say thank you to everyone who reads my blog and to say here’s to another year’s blogging.

Kath x

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Aubergine and tomato salad

12 Comments / aubergine, salad, The Ordinary Cook, tomato, vegetarian /

This post has been waiting for me to write it for a while.  I made this dish probably about ten days ago, but it’s been the end of the summer holidays and we have been making the most of our time with the girls.

This was the harvest from our polytunnel:

We were very excited as this is the first time we have had success with growing aubergines.  Mr OC planted a mixed seed collection and these beauties were the result. We kept them in the house on the windowsills until the fruit appeared and then transferred them into the polytunnel and this, I think, has been the secret of our success.  The ones planted directly into the polytunnel have produced flowers but no fruit, which was our experience last year.  Our tomatoes have been brilliant this year, supplying a constant stream of ripe fruit and our basil is beautifully scented.  I think this particular harvest is from a supermarket plant that I had pretty much used up in the house and so put it in the greenhouse and it has survived and gone from strength to strength.

I wanted to do something which made the most of both the aubergines and the tomatoes.  Sometimes, the aubergine gets a bit lost when baked with a tomato sauce when I do an aubergine lasagne thingy.  That is OK (and really quite delicious) when the aubergines are from the grocers, but when you have looked at them growing every day for a few months you really want them to be the centrepiece.  I do minted aubergines quite a lot, but the mint is over and cut back in the garden now.  Michele at Cooking at Home posted a wonderful and very inspiring pomodoro crudo the other week and so this seemed perfect to adapt a little for an aubergine and tomato salad.

So the tomatoes were diced and thrown into a bowl with some crumbled feta, salt and pepper and extra virgin olive oil and the basil and left to marinate whilst I got on with roasting the aubergines.

This picture doesn’t compare with Michele’s, so pop over to her site for a more beautiful image, where she uses mozzarella with her tomatoes.

I sliced the aubergines, sprinkled them with olive oil and seasoned generously with salt and pepper.

I then roasted them in the baking oven of my Aga, which is the equivalent of 180°c (gas mark 4) for about 20 minutes until soft and golden.

I placed the aubergines on the serving platter and placed the tomatoes and the lovely juices all over.

It’s best to leave it to stand for five minutes or so for the juices to be absorbed into the aubergine and then serve with lots of bread to mop up the juices.

This was a dish which definitely made the best of our polytunnel harvest.

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Lamb paprika with spiced rice

15 Comments / lamb, leftovers, rice, The Ordinary Cook /

I haven’t shared a dinner with you for quite a while and there has been a very good reason for this.  A few weeks ago Chele at The Chocolate Teapot said she had lost her baking mojo (only temporarily, she soon found it again), well I seemed to have lost my making dinner mojo.  I burned quite a few things, some things I undercooked, some I just didn’t season right.  Poor old Mr OC, he has had to suffer some disappointing meals.

This is why I was so pleased when this dinner made from Sunday’s leftover lamb was so tasty.  I do hope my making dinner mojo is back for good! (And so does Mr OC).

For the Lamb paprika:

Cooked lamb (however much you have left from a roast, or put another way, enough for two greedy people)
1 onion, diced
1 red pepper, diced
5-6 fresh tomatoes or 1 tin of plum tomatoes
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp sugar (if you are using fresh English tomatoes)
salt and pepper

Method

If you are using fresh tomatoes, place them in boiling water for 1 minute, drain, allow to cool and then peel off the skin. Dice the tomatoes, keeping the juice.

Fry the onion and pepper in a little olive oil over a medium heat until the onion is translucent and the pepper is softened.  Add the cooked lamb and the paprika and cumin and cook for a few minutes, stirring all the while so that the spices don’t burn. Add the diced tomatoes and their juice or the tin of tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and add the sugar if using fresh tomatoes.  Turn the heat down and simmer gently for 30-40 minutes until the tomatoes have cooked down and the juices have reduced to a pulpy sauce.  Whilst this is happening cook the spiced rice.

For the spiced rice: (generously serves 2)

200ml basmati rice
300ml water
25g butter
1 scant tsp salt
1-2 tsp cumin seed
5-6 cardamom pods
generous handful of raisins

Method

Measure the rice in a measuring jug and rinse several times with water and then leave to soak in a jugful of water for 30 minutes if you have time.

Melt the butter in a heavy based pan and add the cumin seeds and cardamom pods and cook for a minute, stirring all the time.  Drain the rice and add to the buttery spices, stirring carefully until coated with butter. Add 300ml of fresh water and the raisins and salt.  Stir once gently, cover with a tight-fitting lid, bring to a gentle simmer and simmer for 20 minutes.  Take off the heat, take off the lid and cover with a clean cloth and leave to stand for five minutes.  All of the water should have been absorbed and the rice will be perfectly cooked.

Serve the rice and the lamb and tuck in.  A spoonful or two of yoghurt wouldn’t go amiss.

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Boiled fruit cake

45 Comments / cake, dried fruit, spelt flour, The Ordinary Cook, vegetarian /

With it being the summer holidays, the girls and I have done lots of picnics on our days out and this cake is excellent for picnics.  It’s easy to make, is very moist, lasts for ages and is absolutely delicious.  In fact Mr OC loves it so much he moans with joy when eating it!

I have adapted it from Jill Brand’s version in Best-kept Secrets of the Women’s Institute Cakes and Biscuits (ISBN 0 74322 111 7) and reading through her introduction for this cake now she also says it’s ideal for picnics, so I must be right.  Jill uses half and half wholemeal plain flour and self-raising flour.  I use half spelt flour, half plain flour and two teaspoons of baking powder instead.  The spelt flour gives it a lovely nutty flavour and texture.

Because I am lucky enough to have an Aga I make this cake in the evening and then leave it to cook slowly in the simmering oven all night and then check with a skewer when I get up and if I think it needs it I bake it for about 10 mins in the baking oven just to finish it off. It is deliciously moist this way and has the added bonus of filling the house with the scent of fruit cake with a generous dollop of mixed spice all night. But I have also cooked it the normal way and the way I will tell you about in the method below and it is almost as delicious.

For the mixed fruit I use whatever I have in the house, but it normally includes equal measures of raisins, sultanas and cranberries.  I have tried dates but I didn’t chop them finely enough and I found them a bit mealy.

450g (1lb) mixed dried fruit
200g (8oz) caster sugar
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g  (4oz) butter
200ml (7 floz) water
2 eggs
100g (4oz) spelt flour
100g (4oz) plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp ground mixed spice
50g (2oz) glace cherries, chopped

Method

Preheat the oven to 160°c (gas mark 3) and line the base and sides of a 18 cm round cake tin.

In a large pan place the mixed fruit, sugar, butter, bicarbonate of soda and the water and bring to the boil.  Simmer for 10 minutes and then take off the heat and cool for 15 minutes.

Beat in the eggs.  Sieve the flours, baking powder and mixed spice into the boiled fruit.  I add the cherries to the flour whilst I am sieving them so that they get a good covering of flour in the process and this helps to stop them sinking to the bottom of the cake when cooking.  Add the cherries and mix well.

Pour the mixture into the tin and either cook in an Aga in the way described in the introduction or in the preheated oven for 1¾ – 2 hours until a skewer comes out clean.  Leave to cool in the tin for 15 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely.

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Chocolate Nut Cake

13 Comments / cake, chocolate, gluten-free, vegetarian /

The name for this cake could indeed have a double meaning.  I get asked if we can make a chocolate cake at least once a week, and it is very often more regular than that.  Well, the request was sounded at about 6.30 am on Sunday morning, something along the lines of  ‘Can we make a chocolate cake that we can ice and decorate’.  The request was, of course, answered with a bleary ‘Later, maybe’.  Well, I am afraid my children are determined little creatures and so after a trip to the garden centre and before making sunday lunch for my parents and our neighbours, this chocolate cake was made and iced.  It was then decorated after dinner and before pudding – very extravagantly I have to say, and there was no time to take pictures, it needed to be eaten. Needless to say it involved a lot of sugared orange and lemon slices, hundreds and thousands and silver balls.

Here is a slice I finished off about mid-morning today.

The recipe is based on Rachel Allen’s Italian Hazelnut Cake in her Bake book (ISBN 13 978 0 00 725970 0), with the added chocolate and the addition of ground almonds as I didn’t have 200g of hazelnuts in the house. Then it was iced with a fudge frosting, which is not entirely necessary but does make a very good addition.

If you use gluten-free baking powder, then this makes a delicious gluten-free cake.

For the cake:

100g whole shelled hazelnuts
100g almonds (ground or whole, depending on what you have available or go for 200g of hazelnuts should they be available to hand)
50g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
1 tsp baking powder
100g softened butter
5 eggs separated
175g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

Butter and line the base and sides of a 20 cm springform tin.  Preheat the oven to 170°c (gas mark 3) or use the baking oven of a 3 or 4 oven Aga.

Whizz the hazelnuts, almonds, baking powder and chocolate in a food processor until they are fine crumbs.  Add the butter and pulse until just combined.

Beat the egg yolks and the sugar with an electric whisk until the mixture has a mousse-like texture. Add the nut and chocolate mixture and the vanilla extract and mix until combined.

Whisk the egg whites in a very clean bowl until they are stiff.  Add one-third of the egg whites to the mixture and mix in well to loosen the mixture.  Add the rest of the egg whites in two batches, folding in very gently to retain as much air as possible.

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 45-60 minutes.  I placed mine on the oven rack placed on the bottom rung of the baking oven of my Aga and it was cooked in 40 minutes, so do adjust according to your oven.  The cake is cooked when it is firm to the touch and a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the middle.

Leave the cake in the tin for 15 minutes, then take the side off, leave for another 15 minutes and then remove the base and then leave to cool completely.

For the icing:

25g good quality dark chocolate
100g icing sugar
25g butter
1 ½ tbsp milk
½ tbsp vanilla extract

Method
Place all of the ingredients into a heavy based saucepan and heat gently until melted and stir well to combine.  Beat for a minute or two until cooled and spread onto the top of the cake.

Decorate, or not, to your heart’s desire.

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Chunky chocolate biscuit

15 Comments / biscuits, chocolate, spelt flour, vegetarian /

Quite a lot has been happening in this household lately and I felt in need of some serious comfort and restorative baking.  These biscuits are an adaptation of my chocolate, oat and almond cookies that I posted some time ago.  This time spelt flour comes into play and gives the biscuit a delicious crumb.

My eldest is now off from school for the summer and so we baked these together, the three of us, piled up at the worktop.  I was very happy indeed when she shouted “Yippee, this is fun, and I am not at school this time”.  A reference, I have no doubt, to the fact that since she started school she usually comes home to something that her younger sister and I have baked together,  but the three of us haven’t had much time in the kitchen together lately.

Making these biscuits went a little way to righting that wrong.

Makes about 12 large biscuits.

100g softened butter
100g soft brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
75g plain flour
50g spelt flour
50g ground almonds
25g cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
100g good quality dark chocolate, chopped into chunks

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°c, gas mark 4, or use the baking oven of a three or four oven Aga.

Beat the butter and sugar together until fluffy and light.  Add the egg and the vanilla extract and beat well.  With a large metal spoon stir in the flours, baking powder, almonds and cocoa powder.

Place heaped dessertspoonfuls of the mixture onto lightly greased baking sheets and cook in the centre of the oven for 12-14 minutes.  Take out of the oven and leave to cool for a minute or two before lifting onto a wire tray.  They are delicious eaten still warm from the oven but they taste good the next day too, should you have any left.

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