Search for the Green Papaya

Recently, P and I visited Ayutthaya, a Thai restaurant on Nicholson Street. I've been craving a green paw paw salad for about two years now. So, as we were passing, P nicked in to ask if it was on the Ayutthaya menu. He came out and winked. The waitress had assured him that green paw paw was available. We usually avoid east Asian food here because nothing can match that which is available to us at home, but the thought of crunchy papaya and sweet and salty dressing already had me salivating.

Unfortunately, the salad I ordered turned out to be a sort of coleslaw with fish sauce dressing. The carrot and cabbage mix failed to satisfy, despite the tasty dried shrimps and peanuts that accompanied it. So, I'm still on the look-out for a real paw paw salad and will be eternally grateful to anyone who can tell me where to find one in Scotland.

The rest of the meal was very pleasant. P's Tom yum soup was deliciously tangy, although was lacking the fistfuls of coriander that I like. The red curry was tasty but the only true glory of the whole meal was the rice. The sweet glutinous rice was served in a small grass basket. It was sticky (but not at all gluey) and there was a slight chew left in each grain. Having been seeped in coconut milk (after cooking I think) it also smelt wonderful. Unlike other coconut flavored dishes, there was no coconut fat coating left in the mouth after eating. I think I might go back just for that rice!

Ayutthaya has a website and is at 14b Nicolson Street.

Birthday Books

April 24th was my birthday. Armed with a picnic lunch and intent on cycling to the Holy Isle, P and I caught the train to Berwick upon Tweed. Unfortunately, I sprained my ankle running for the train at Haymarket. By the time we reached Berwick, each malleaous ankle bump had transformed into a dent in the swollen purple grapefruit that now joined my foot to my leg. The cycle to Lindisfarne was replaced by a slow hobble around the city walls and lunch looking out to sea over the golf course. Walking back to the train station, we passed Berrydin Books, a second hand and remaindered bookseller. I limped through the door and soon spotted the cookery section.

Cookery sections in second hand bookstores and charity shops are rarely inspiring places, being generally stocked with encyclopedias of microwave gourmet that encourage the creation of entire Sunday lunches using only electromagnetic radiation. However, at Berrydin books I found a new set of titles from the Penguin Cookery Library. As a present to myself, I purchased the volumes Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David, English Food by Jane Grigson and A Celebration of Soup by Lindsey Bareham.

I've read the introduction to English Food and, while still a sceptic, I'm prepared to be convinced of the "wonderful inheritance" of English cooks. I've also read the introduction to the Bareham book, along with the first few sections on Stock-Making, Stock Recipes and Stock-pot Information. This book has so inspired me that I included a soup resolution in the usual list that I write on my birthday.

This year I will abandon stock-cubes and learn how to make quick and easy vegetable, poultry, red meat and fish stocks.

I think I might have to move to a flat with space for a fridge-freezer that is larger than a bread box.

One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.

P and I have been flicking through our dictionary of quotations recently, in order to find choice quotes that we can write Amelie-style, in window chalk, on our living-room window. (The people at the bus-stop below look so miserable every morning that we thought they needed some poetic inspiration or at least some humorous prose.) A few days ago I found the E. M. Forster gem which gives today’s title. Given that I had spent the previous hour trying to work out what to make for dessert at a dinner party the next day, I remembered how true it is.

I went for sticky date pudding. While I wouldn't call sticky date my absolute favorite, it is right up there. Sticky date is probably the culinary equivalent of Jane Eyre on my favorite books list: sweet, dark and rich, but just a little too sugary at the end. Lacking an appropriate square tin, I made my puddings in muffin moulds which probably helps prevent the usual over-indulgent finale.

170 g stoned dates
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
300 ml boiling water
60 g unsalted butter
¾ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
170 g self-raising flour
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Chop the dates and mix them with the bicarbonate soda. Pour over water, stir and leave to stand. (I left my dates for most of the afternoon. As that seems to break them up really well.)
Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each. Fold in the flour. Gently stir in the date mixture and the vanilla.
Pour the mixture into 10 greased muffin moulds. Bake in a 180°C oven for 30 minutes.

When the puddings are nearly cooked, make the sauce.

400 g brown sugar
1 cup thick cream
250 g unsalted butter
½ teaspoon of pure vanilla extract (because I didn’t have a vanilla bean)

Bring all sauce ingredients to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
Once the puddings are cooked, use a butter knife to pop each pudding half-way out of its tin and spoon a little sauce underneath. Slip each pudding back into its tin and spoon more sauce over the tops. Return the tray to the oven for 2-3 minutes.

Serve with ice cream, cream and the remaining warm sauce.

Easter Cookies

The week before Easter, my mum and dad visited us in Edinburgh. As a present, my mum brought me four Easter cookie-cutters that she had picked up in Germany (where they had spent the previous month). She brought me a fat (woolly) sheep, a thin sheep with long legs, a leaping rabbit and an egg.

Hunting around online, I found a few recipes and this is the

Sugar Cookie that I made to try out my cutters:

500g flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
240g butter
300g white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract.
In a separate bowl, whisk (or sieve) together the flour, baking powder and salt.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, one cupful at a time.

Stir until you have a smooth dough.

Divide the dough in half and place each lump onto a piece of plastic-wrap.

Refrigerate for at least one hour.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.

Remove one half of the dough from the fridge and roll out, on a floured counter top, to a quarter-inch thickness.

Cut out cookies and lay on a baking-sheet covered in baking parchment.

Place each tray of cookies into the fridge for twenty minutes.
Bake the cookies for ten minutes.

Leave to cool on the tray for a minute or so, before removing to a wire rack to cool.

I use the fingers of one hand to get the butter and sugar started, as I am often not organised enough to take the butter out of the fridge. Once roughly combined, I switch to a spoon to avoid melting the butter.
When refrigerating the dough for the first time, I press the lumps out into half-inch thick disks. This way the dough cools faster and more evenly.

Sugar cookies are not really very exciting. The icing is what makes the whole thing fun. This time I made white royal icing for flooding and used cocoa and different food colours for decorating. Quantities are rather inexact as I always seem to need more egg-whites and sugar than I expect I will.

A rough recipe for Royal Icing is:

350g pure icing sugar
2 egg whites
2 teaspoons lemon juice.

Beat together the egg whites and lemon juice.

Slowly beat in the icing sugar (mixed with cocoa, if you want brown icing for brown bunnies) a little at a time, until the icing is the appropriate consistency.

Consistency

For outlining and decorating the cookies, the icing should form peaks in the bowl.

For flooding the cookies, test the consistency by lifting the spoon and dribbling icing back into the bowl. The trail of icing should sit on the surface for a few seconds, before disappearing back into the mix.

I only have one piping bag, so I use baking-parchment to make icing cones. I find it easiest to fold a square of paper in half, then use the folded edge of the paper to form the point of the cone, by wrapping up and around at each side. I usually secure the cones with some tape. I also snip the smallest possible hole in the bottom and have a go on some paper before starting on the cookies.

I outlined and flooded the bunnies in white icing. Then I used coloured icing for the bows. On the sheep, I swirled the firmer icing in circles to look like wool and gave them bows too. The eggs were a bit of a mess: stripes, dots, squiggles and I even played with marbling (dipping cookies into flood-icing with food-dye only partially stirred through.) It was great fun, and extremely messy!

Brinjal (noun): An Indian plant cultivated for its large edible, ovoid, glossy, usually purple-skinned fruit.

Eggplant or aubergine, brinjal or baingan? Never mind what it's called, lots of men I know don’t seem to like this purple fruit very much. (Growing up, we ate moussaka and other eggplant favorites only on the nights that my Dad was out playing bridge.) Only Indian men seem to truly relish the eggplant. As the fruit is native to India, perhaps we had best look to that country for a tempting baingan recipe.


This evening, we made Baingan Bharta (Eggplant Mash), only we didn't just make one dish. We made the same dish twice, using exactly the same ingredients, but altering one cooking
technique.

The first step of every baigan bharta recipe is to cook the eggplant whole. This is done either by roasting the eggplant on a rack in a moderate oven or by sitting the eggplant directly on top of a gas burner. We’ve tried both in the past. Generally, P and I think that the cook top method is best. However, we decided to stage an objective test, so P invited Aashvin to dinner to be our blind judge. Aashvin sat in the lounge and watched The Apprentice while we cooked the following recipe in double quantities with each eggplant.

Ingredients:
1 egg plant
1 large onion – chopped
2 small tomatoes - chopped
2 green chillies – thinly sliced
1 tablespoon ginger - finely cut
1/4 tsp red chilli powder
1/2 tsp haldi/turmeric powder
1 tsp dhania/coriander powder
a handful of green peas (frozen is fine)
salt to taste
vegetable oil & ghee
fresh green coriander to garnish

Stage One
Eggplant 1
Place the whole eggplant on the centre tray of a moderate oven for 40-45 minutes. (You might want to stick a fork in a few times first, to avoid an aubergine explosion!)

Eggplant 2
Place the whole eggplant directly onto the wire, above a middle-sized gas burner on moderate flame (see left). Rotate frequently, until the skin is black and flaky and the whole fruit is soft and mushy.




Stage Two
Let the eggplants cool slightly and then peel of the skin and roughly mash the flesh.

Stage Three
Saute the onion and the green chilies until soft. Add the dried turmeric, coriander and chili-powder and fry for another 2-3 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and cook on a medium flame for 7-10 minutes. Stir in the brinjal. Stir in the peas. Garnish with fresh coriander.


Aashvin was immediately able to pick the stove top brinjal (left). Indeed, it was vastly different to the oven-roasted dish (below). Not only did the stove version have a distinctive smoky taste, it was much sweeter than the other dish. (The oven-baked eggplant had a slightly bitter tang.) Surprisingly, the colour of the dishes was also quite different. While the oven-baked aubergine produced a greyish brown mash, the gas-cooked aubergine resulted in a golden coloured bharta. (How's the Hindi coming?)

Today, not only have I discovered a hithertoo unidentified link between lexemes and flavour, but I have come to one other conclusion:
Poor, poor people who only have electric cooktops.

If you’re in Edinburgh and looking for the ingredients used in the Baingan Bharta, I can recommend
Super Asian Foods (formerly PolyPack)
27 Jocks Lodge, Edinburgh, EH8 7AA
ph. 0131 661 4966
for ghee and all the necessary herbs and spices.

Abroath Smokies

My Lonely Planet guide to Scotland elects Abroath Smokies as Scotland's fourth most important Scottish attraction. That means that before you visit Edinburgh’s old town, before you tour Stirling Castle, before you sip whiskey in a Hebridean distillery or play a round of golf at St Andrews, you should consume an Abroath Smokie.

An Abroath Smokie is a haddock, traditionally smoked over a hard-wood fire. Gutted at sea, the fish are transported to the smoke-house where the first stage of the process is to head and clean the fish. The fish are then salted and packed into barrels (and left overnight). After salting, the fish are washed and their tails are tied together in pairs. The pairs of fish are slung over wooden sticks and suspended over a whiskey barrel, lined with slate to protect from the slow fire of oak and beech. Hessian sacking is placed over the fish, allowing sufficient oxygen to sustain the fire whilst retaining heat and smoke around the fish. Smoking time is usually 30 to 40 minutes.

Last Saturday, Iain R. Spink's Original Smokies from Abroath had a stall at the Edinburgh Farmers market. I usually wander over to Queens Street on a Saturday morning to check out the stalls and breath in the smell of the Roast Crackling from the Reiver Country Farm Foods Stand (although that’s another entry). Other than the Pork smell, the market is often slightly disappointing; the range of produce is sometimes quite limited, excepting an eternal plethora of sausages. This week, the market was wonderfully busy. It was obviously the on-week for most traders, including the elusive Abroath Smokies company. As soon as I turned onto Bread Street, the air had a wood-fire flavour and any thoughts of crackling and apple sauce were forgotten.

Abroath Smokies had set up a row of smoking fires along the verge of Castle Terrace. Freshly smoked fish were cooling on a park bench. The fish had been filleted once they were out of the smoke and all the bones were tossed in a large bin. On other benches and garden edging around the stand, were dozens of people picking the very last flakes from the skin of their smokies. I bought two smokies. I pulled a flake of white flesh from the tail of one (just to have tried it when hot!) then wrapped them up again to have for dinner. The fish was so delicious and so delicate that I was quite tempted to sit down in the middle of Johnston Terrace and eat them both, despite having had a huge breakfast an hour before.

I did reach into my bag for a second flake about half way up to the Old Town, where I was going to meet Hattie. My hand came out of my bag covered in clear, warm juice. The fish were leaking all over the place. I pulled out my wallet, my diary, my camera and my phone, all of which were covered in a sweet sticky liquid. (I know it was sweet because I had a good lick of my fingers!) I then retrieved the fish bag, which continued to drip all over my boots. I really needed something to sop everything up and I badly needed to wash my hands and my phone! I thought of going into the Ness shop to ask for a bag, but I figured that they wouldn’t be very obliging after I’d dribbled smokey fish juice all over their floor. I called Hattie (getting a sticky ear in the process) and asked her pick up a plastic bag and a newspaper for me to wrap the fish in. Thanks to Hattie, the Saturday Scotsman, a granite bench in Tron Square and the teeny tiny bathroom of the Southern Cross Cafe, I was soon cleaned up. (My keys and phone still smell a bit smokey though.)

P and I ate the fish cold for dinner with rocket and shaved parmesan on the side. They were just as good as they had been in the morning – sweet, smokey and salty like the sea. Delish!
I agree with the Rough Guide about the number four attraction in Scotland and would recommend that all visitors to the country try an Abroath Smokie.

Whirlwind visitors might have a hard time getting one though. Unless your Highland's tour stops in Abroath, the only other option is to visit Iain R. Spink at one of Scotland's farmers markets. It is particularly difficult to catch them at the Edinburgh Farmers market as they only come to Edinburgh on the fourth Sunday of the month, if, and only if, there are five Sundays in the month. By my calculations that is about two times in the year.

Other market locations for Original Smokies from Abroath can be found on their website.

Wordsworth Biscuits

Morning tea hasn’t happened in my house for a while. We’ve had plenty of afternoon teas. We’ve had cakes and scones and sandwiches. We’ve had cookies, but they’ve been big fat cookies, the kind of cookies that are good to munch during a long night in, at the end of an otherwise too small lunch, or in response to the hunger pangs that arise on the walk home from school. So today I made hazelnut biscuits, perfect for placing on the saucer next to a cup of tea or good coffee.

The recipe I adapted from Stephanie Alexander The Cook's Companion. She calls for thinly sliced candied peel to be added but I switched for dried cranberries (as below) and increased the quantity of ground hazelnut and decreased the almond meal of the original recipe.

2 eggs
200 grams castor sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
60 grams chopped dried cranberries (although perhaps not chopped next time)
180 grams ground hazelnuts
120 grams ground almonds
½ teaspoon baking powder

Beat eggs, castor sugar and vanilla until the batter is paler than when your started and it is coat-the-back-of-a-spoon thick. Fold in remaining ingredients. Using a piping bag with no nozzle, pipe the mixture in fingers onto baking trays line with paper. Bake for 30 minutes in a 140º C oven. Once out of the oven dibble a thin icing made from:

1 cup pure icing sugar
juice of one lemon

The original recipe did call for the egg and sugar batter to be beaten until ‘pale and thick’. This instruction lead me to a quarter hour of frenzied beating but the batter never would get as thick as I thought it should – nowhere near as thick as egg yolks will go if they are beaten alone. Hopefully my instruction, while less elegant, may help avoid any extraneous beating. Candied peel might give a more exciting tang to the biscuit but I never really like peel. Cranberries certainly add a similar sour flavour, and a somewhat Christmassy look, but perhaps fresh peel might be a nice change next time.

The amoretti biscuit that one occasionally receives with coffee at an Italian cafe always fill me with happiness. When I see them. When I eat them, I often find that they are dry, over-crumbly and contain too much almond extract or they are just too small. Wordsworth biscuits are much more satisfying but still light enough for a morning tea. Also, compared to some of those other almond biscuits, these are really, really easy to make.