Totopos - Mexican Leftovers

So. We had fish tacos last night, as I've mentioned. But the fridge is now full of bits and pieces leftover from the meal and there were also some small tortillas left out on the bench overnight which were now chewy beyond all repair.

Thankfully, Thommi Miers has a great recipe for dealing with this - totopos, or tostadas - fried stale corn tortillas topped with lovely things. Basically you deep fry (or shall fry in the wok in my case) small rounds of tortilla (or the whole thing if, like me, you have bought tiny tortillas) and then once they've cooled, top 'em. She has a whole smoked mackerel thing going on in her recipe (which does sound good), but I topped mine with the left over (cold) fish from last night, a splodge of the chipotle mayonnaise, coriander and lime juice. Wow - best lunch ever! This is definitely going to have to be tried out with other toppings.

And since I was lax last night with the pictures, here is a lovely shot of my lunch before I scoffed it. Such self restraint...

Jess-Goes-to-California Fish Tacos

I've long been fascinated by the idea of fish tacos. I was constantly tempted by the idea of Mexican-style fish but to me the combination of soft fish and crunchy taco seemed incongruous. That, though, was before I read that 'proper' Mexican tacos bear little resemblance to those crunchy folded shells we tend to buy in our supermarkets. In fact, so the experts tell me, tacos are meant to be soft. Corn tortillas, certainly, but soft, not crunchy. What a revelation! Suddenly fish tacos seemed to make perfect sense!

My recipe is largely made up, though I'm sure it is similar to others out there. What I do is this:

Slice fish fillets (I use tilapia - a sustainable and soft white fish with a lovely sweetness) into long 'fingers' and place them in a dish. Drizzle over some olive oil, a heavy-handed shake of ground cumin (we're talking here about 2 heaped tsp for about 300gm fish), some sea salt (a tsp I would say - you need a bit to bring out the cumin flavour) and a wee pinch of sugar (for similar reasons to the salt). Smear it all around so the fish is coated in cuminy oil, then squeeze over the juice of half a lime. Heat a fry pan (last night I used my new griddle pan which added a lovely charred quality - definitely will be doing that again) and cook the fish until it just flakes. Place into a serving dish/plate, breaking the fish fillets up into chunks/flakes and drizzle over the other half of lime juice. Scatter with plenty of chopped coriander and, if you fancy, some chopped red chilli. Serve in warmed, fresh corn tortillas* dolloped with chipotle mayonnaise** and some shredded lettuce and chopped avocado. Delicious - especially when served with a large pitcher of slushy margaritas or an ice-cold lager with lime.

We had this for dinner with friends last night but I had had too many of aforementioned margaritas to think to take a picture sorry! But it does look as good as it sounds, I promise.

* (I buy mine from Cool Chile Company online and they are totally unlike that 'certain' brand of bright yellow, stale, corn tortillas you buy in the shops. If you can't get access to good fresh ones online, I'd make your own and freeze 'em)
** Use either homemade mayo or a good quality bought one, add a tbsp of chipoltes in adobo and a small clove of minced garlic. Finish with a squeeze of lime and a pinch of salt. 

Behold - in all its blushing glory!

The first home-grown tomato of the season!!

Ain't it pretty? I thought so. And I felt that the first tomato of the season needed to be eaten in style, you know? Unfortunately there was only one ripe one (the others are slowly getting their 'red' on) so it wasn't going to be the main meal. But I figured, you can't go wrong with the (highly unoriginal but v delicious) salad caprese, right? Buffalo mozzerella (which I contemplated making myself, but there was no citric acid at the supermarket...I plan to persevere on this front though, because I can, quite remarkably, buy unhomogenized buffalo milk!), basil from the garden and our own beautiful (Latah variety) tomato. A drizzle of Simone's family's olive oil and some sea salt was all it otherwise needed.

But, as I said, it needed something more to make it a meal. That's where things may have gotten a little out of hand...

What we ended up with was something of a feast. Salad caprese, a raw marinated zucchini salad with mint, grilled zucchini with olive oil and garlic, beans stewed in sweet tomatoes, fresh foccacia with potato and rosemary, fresh foccacia with parmesan and red onion, smoked salmon, meats, olives and wine! What we really needed were 3 or 4 good friends to share the feast with, but we made do and it was delicious. The lad noted [he seems to increasingly find himself cast here in the role of food critic...intense pressure, poor lad!] that the tomato tasted like the ones his Grandma used to grow and give him in tomato sandwiches when he was a kid. He was right - it was a nostalgic tomato taste that only home-grown fruit can give. And the good news is that the other 4 tomato plants are covered in hard, green, ugly fruit - just waiting for some sunshine to make their cheeks all rosey and ripe.

And so we wait too....

The feast

Grilled zucchini with garlic and olive oil (and basil because it looked pretty)

The two types of foccacia. It's a potato-based bread and is really lovely

Summer = Courgettes

Call 'em courgettes, call 'em zucchini, call 'em what you will, but we've got 'em! We've hit that point in summer when you suddenly think, "hmm, at this rate, by next week we may be drowned in a sea of zucchini". This thought is usually followed by, "why the hell don't I ever remember how much each plant produces?!" This year (it having been a while since I grew any) I planted two varieties and three of each kind. Six plants in total (plus the 20-odd bean plants, the 5 tomatoes and umpteen brocolli and cavolo nero plants). Two of the courgies have been producing fairly regularly for a few weeks, but are really upping the ante at the moment, and the others are just starting to bear fruit. Both are lovely varieties - I got them from this lovely seed-saving catalogue which sells only plants which it knows will grow well in Britain (tune into a later post for my tomato harvest!! First ripe one to be picked tomorrow...an exciting day!). One is a normal courgette - an Italian green variety which is sweet and gorgeous. The other is a patty pan (summer squash?) and it's a whiteish French heirloom variety. See how pretty?

Pretty courgettes picked this afternoon. I picked twice this many yesterday so this lot grew overnight. Also some beans - I have 2 kinds of them as well

However, for all that they do tend to become an over-prolific blight towards the end of summer, I do love them and can easily eat them with every meal. But you do have to get a bit creative. I suspect (given that there's still a lot of courgette season left and the plants are only kicking into high gear now) that my courgette chocolate cake will make several appearances later this year! (if i haven't already, I will post that recipe next time I make it!) But tonight, I felt like something super simple for dinner and pasta with courgette seemed like an excellent idea. I didn't really fancy anything creamy or dense so it was very basic.

Summer Spaghetti with Courgette/Zucchini
2 courgettes (or a mix of courgettes/zucchini and patty-pans)
1 very large clove of garlic
big glug of olive oil (I used my friends' family's stuff for extra Italian charm! Yum!)
salt
freshly grated parmesan, to taste (I like a lot; Andrew's not such a fan so I added extra for mine)
basil (although I did also contemplate mint...the basil was on the windowsill though, so it won out)
courgette flowers if you have them
spaghetti or linguine

Cook the pasta and in a fry-pan, heat the oil then add the vege (I julienned mine in the food processor lengthwise so I had long thin strips. You could grate it if you don't have a food processor) and garlic. Add salt to bring out the moisture and softly saute until it is cooked but still bright green and with some texture (some of it will break down, other bits will hold their shape). Take off the heat and add a good handful of parmesan and the herbs. Throw in the pasta and a glug more oil and mix. Done.

I felt like being fancy with the flowers so ours had extra garnish (which tasted great!).

It was deemed very Italian by the other half - something, he said, like his room-mate when he lived in Italy, Salvatore, used to cook for him. I'd deem that a success! Buono!

Post-script: In the interests of actually getting some photos of food on here, I've taken to using my phone to take photos. This means the pics won't always be particularly good or arty, but I figure it's better than not having any! Trade off...

Burger Bun victory

I've long been searching for the perfect bread roll to use in homemade burgers (fish, chicken, beef, chickpea...whatever) and finally - FINALLY - I have found it. Thank you Dan Lepard, you are a bread-making genius.

This is his recipe, copied from his column in the Guardian. Alls I do differently is that I bung the combined wet ingredients with the dry in the food processor with the dough attachment on it and let it do the hard work of kneading. They are really lovely rolls and they keep quite well too - staying fresh and tasty for a couple of days. I also don't actually bother with the poppy seeds, mostly because they just make a giant mess when you're eating. For weeks afterward I keep finding them on the floor. They're quite tasty without, and they're also nice with sesame seeds.

Apologies for the dodgy pic - I was using my cellphone and I still haven't quite learnt how to keep get it to focus!

Dan Lepard's BBQ Onion Burger Buns


275g sliced white onion
50ml sunflower oil, plus a little extra for kneading
75g low-fat yoghurt
2 tsp honey
1 medium egg
1 sachet fast-action yeast
75g wholemeal flour
425g strong white flour, plus more for shaping
2 tsp salt
Poppy seeds
Put the onion and oil in a saucepan with a dash of water (this helps it sweat quickly) and cook over a medium heat until very soft, translucent and tender, with all of the moisture gone. Leave to cool, then mix the onion and any remaining oil with the yoghurt, honey and egg. Pour in 125ml warm water and the yeast, mix well, then add the wholemeal and white flours, plus the salt.
Start mixing everything together, adding extra water (about 50ml) to make a soft, sticky dough. I can't be exact here because it depends a little on how soft the cooked onions are, so gradually add the extra water and stop when it feels right for you.
Set aside for 10 minutes, then lightly oil a worktop and give the dough a quick 10-second knead. Return it to the bowl, cover and leave for another 10 minutes. Repeat this knead-and-leave sequence twice more, before finally leaving the dough to rise undisturbed for an hour.
Divide the dough into six or eight equal pieces, shape each into balls and flatten to about 2-3cm high. Brush the tops with water, roll in a plateful of poppy seeds so they stick well, then place on a couple of baking trays lined with nonstick baking paper. Cover and leave to rise for about 90 minutes, or until risen by half. Bake at 220C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7 for about 15 minutes, until just brown on top.
danlepard.com/guardian

I miss proper summer fruit...

So, I bought this packet of apricots at the supermarket on Monday. They were marked down because they were best before Monday but I figured that would mean that they might actually just be ripe, you know? Sure enough when I got them home they were rock solid and miles from ripe. But because they were obviously picked so long ago, they have not ripened at home - instead they have gone bad but have, rather spitefully,  remained unripe. 

How hard is it to leave fruit on the freaking tree until it's actually ready to be picked?! Summer fruit needs sun people - it's the thing that makes it taste good. If you pick it in June, it will not ever get ripe. Ever!!!! It's so annoying. And so wasteful! They pick all this fruit unripe, no one buys it because they know it tastes like crap, so it gets thrown out and wasted and the farmers are all like 'no one is buying our hard grown produce'. Then the supermarkets stop stocking it because people won't buy it and it's this ridiculous vicious circle. 

I miss central Otago apricots and nectarines and peaches and cherries - fruit that actually tastes like the sun has warmed it. 

Birthdays and boredom (where would I be without alliteration?!)

I am bored. Very very very bored. I have much to do but it's all Big and Scary and requires actual brain power so I'm trying to ease into it. Also the internet has failed me miserably today. I have looked at all my normal sites and there is nothing there to sufficiently interest me (despite this whole NOTW drama which does interest me, but about which I have already read too much).

So, since I have a desperate need to do anything other than what I should be doing (which also includes walking to the shops to buy a lottery ticket - but I can't be arsed getting dressed and doing my hair etc etc. Every possibly choice of activity seems to involve too many other requirements today. My laziness knows no bounds), I thought I would reinstate the 'mighty' blog, have a whinge and talk about the cake I made myself for my 30th birthday this weekend.

On Friday (the eve of my birth), I felt like baking. I don't love cake, and could easily endure a birthday without one, but as you know I do quite enjoy the baking process, and that's what I felt like doing. I originally set out intending to try and replicate an infamous birthday cake that Andrew once bought me (for my 26th birthday...a birthday which fell a week before my original PhD submission deadline and which ended with me hysterically sobbing over the realisation that, no matter how hard I worked, I simply wasn't going to get 30,000 words written in a week). That cake was a raspberry white chocolate mousse cake and it was amazing. I could have eaten the lot. It was layers of light sponge cake sandwiched with a white chocolate and raspberry mousse and topped with a sort of berry glaze/jelly thing. In the end on Friday, it was the glaze/topping thing that stopped me trying to make that cake. But thinking about it made me realise that I fancied something with a berry vibe. I came across a recipe for something called a Pink Lady cake which looked rather festive. It was made with strawberries and had cream-cheese icing - all rather tasty sounding. My other half, though, doesn't much care for cream cheese icing and since he'd eat the vast majority, I thought I'd go with chocolate icing. And then I thought that raspberries would go better with chocolate than strawberries and so my 4 tier raspberry chocolate layer cake was born.

I used this recipe as my starting point: http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/10/pink-lady-cake/

Instead of the strawberries, though, I first pureed 600gms of fresh raspberries (they being in season here at the mo) and then sieved those to remove the seeds. Rather conveniently, that produced a cup and a half of berry puree.

When making the cake (which, by the way, is a freaking enormous batter! My Magimix couldn't cope - there was pink batter flying all over the place), I changed some of the instructions because they just didn't seem to make sense to me. For instance, I added the milk to the main batter rather than mixing it with the egg whites. I am far from an expert baker, but my baking instincts railed against the idea of trying to whip egg whites that have dairy added to them. Just didn't compute. I also may have inadvertently added a LOT more food colouring than was strictly necessary. The kitchen was splattered in red batter, as was I, and it all looked like a grizzly My Little Pony murder scene.

I persevered, though, even when the batter wouldn't fit into the first bowl and had to be decanted into the large, hideous plastic blue fruit bowl that was the only vessel I could fit it in. At this point every single bowl, utensil and surface in the kitchen was covered in fluro crimson batter. Deep, calming breaths. The batter smelt wonderful though - fresh and berry-scented, and when I licked the many spoons I had dirtied in the making, it tasted delicious. Sort of like melted raspberry icecream. What's not to like?!

The baking process also seemed to go well (given the whole Magimix/bowl/batter explosion thing, I figured the cake with its 8 egg whites and 5.5 tsp of baking powder would overflow out of the pans and into the bottom of my less-than-pristine oven. It did not. A small coup). The cakes looked pretty good when they came out - a less terrifying shade of pink, and perfectly edible. Progress.

Once they were cooled, I made an enormous vat of chocolate butter frosting (running out of cocoa along the way - I tried to make up for it by blitzing into the mixture some dark chocolate. This did not work and made the icing look like I hadn't sifted anything. Which I hadn't, of course, but it still wasn't a good look), and started the layering process. I split both cakes in half and towered them up with icing between them. Naturally I hadn't made the pieces uniform before doing this so my stacked cake had a rather trapezoid look about it, but not to worry, I thought! I'll just keep coating the thing in icing - no one will notice! Of course, despite using half a pound of butter in making my icing, I didn't have quite enough, so it was spread rather thinly in places.

But, despite all of this, the cake was a thing of relative beauty at the end. A giant towering beast of a cake with a chirpily blasphemous comment piped on top. I was so proud. Wouldn't you be?!

We lugged the beast with us to our friends' place on Saturday night, thinking it would make a delicious ending to a wonderful birthday. I should have known better. American recipes almost never work out for me, and this was another of those times. It was a thing of visual glory, this cake, but it tasted rather a lot like eating pink playdoh. In fact, if someone told you they'd made it in their Playdoh kitchen, I don't think you'd have been surprised. I'm not sure what went wrong to be honest - perhaps I tried too hard? Perhaps cakes just shouldn't be fluro pink (because, let's remember, this is not the first fluro pink cake incident I've had)? Perhaps raspberries are denser than strawberries. Perhaps the milk should have been whisked into the egg whites (though I remain v sceptical about that argument)? Perhaps blaspheming in icing wasn't the smartest karmic move?

We will probably never know. Alls I can say at this point is, I hope to god that my lovely friends' wedding cake (which I have volunteered to make - arggh) tastes much more like baked goods than childrens' novelty modelling substances.

Happy Birthday to Moi.