The Fat Chicks' Guide to Real(ish) Food

So, that inevitable post-Christmas moment has arrived when you open the fridge, and find something with a use-by that’ll arrive before the 3 Wise Men. In my case – various things.

Having tried out a fine, fine Hairy Bikers tartlet over New Year’s (blind-bake mini pastry cases, sauté some thinly sliced pears in butter and add to cases, crumble in some Stilton and walnuts and top with a seasoned, beaten mixture of cream/milk and egg. Bake. Scoff.) having guessed quantities, I’d got waaaay too much cream and egg mixture left over. Add to that, industrial mountains of Stilton, and a large packet of smoked salmon with a use-by, you got it, of today.Woe unto me, for clearly MORE delicious tarts must ensue! What to do?

1) Bash together a pâte brisée in the food processor. Historically, I’ve been a bit rubbish at pastry, but I find this one quick to make, easier to handle, and more reliable in the oven.

It’s just 250g plain flour, 125g of cold diced butter, add in whatever you want by way of herbs/seasoning, (chopped dill and cracked black pepper today) though hold any extra salt if the butter is salted. Blitz to a fine breadcrumb texture, then add an egg yolk and 2-3 tablespoons of cold water. Mix gently, then turn out and squodge into a ball. You can chill it for 30 mins, but today I was impatient. 

Roll out thinly - this quantity did a large round flan dish with spare – push well into the corners, and leave a slight overhang to stop it from sinking down the sides. This pastry, however, slumps much less than the conventional stuff – bonus! With the trimmings, I also had enough spare for a shallow 5-inch square dish.

I blind-baked it, and this DOES make a difference – you get a much crispier case for your time. Bake for ten-fifteen mins at 180oC with greaseproof paper and baking beans/crusts/lentils/whatevs holding down the base, then hoik the paper etc. out and bake for another ten-fifteen mins until the pastry looks dry.

‎2) Meanwhile, blanch some broccolini for literally 3ish minutes until al dente, then douse with cold water – it’ll keep them grassy green, and avoid that depressing overcooked olive colour. Roughly chop the smoked salmon and Stilton; in this case, about 200g of each. For the egg and cream mixture, it was probably about 2 eggs and 1/3 pint of cream/milk mix. You can do all cream, but it will be very rich. I added black pepper, but again no salt as Stilton and smoked salmon are pretty salty.

3) Layer up the goodies in the cases, finishing with the crumbled cheese, then pour over the cream/egg mix. It shouldn’t overfill the case – we’re looking for tart, more than quiche here. Bake it at 180oC until the egg mixture looks set and the top goes light gold – my little square dish was cooked substantially quicker and came out first. The big one took a good forty minutes, but play it by eye/texture, and don’t be fooled by the melted cheese if you stick a fork in.

It’s best served warm, with a full chorus of appreciate nomming noises. :)

I’ll be honest here-I was just drawn to the name.

Happily this worked out pretty well for me, because I tried one their products, a take on the traditional Bakewell tart called “Ooh You Jammy Tart!”

Despite the name, the Nutty Tarts have clearly grasped that it’s better to do a simple cake well than a fiddly cake badly, and to this end the jammy tart is comprised of a layer of pastry, a layer of jam, and a layer of sponge with some flaked almonds on top, all baked in a tiny cardboard half-box.

There’s no sickly-white slime of icing on top, no lone glacé cherry sitting like the nose of a nightmare clown in the middle. Instead, the pastry is crisp without being concrete, the jam layer could be a little thicker, and the sponge is fluffy but substantial. In fact, substantial is a good word for this tart- it look small but it’s surprisingly deep, so one tart is more filling than it might at first appear.

On the basis of this tart I’d like to check out the rest of the range- I suspect I’m going to find a lot of comparatively simple treats done with great competence rather than affectation.  

http://www.thenuttytarts.co.uk/

This is GreenThunder, announcing that her move from the North of the Midlands to the South of the South has been completed. I am now proud to be able to say that the South West - Hampshire through to Cornwall, up to about Bristol - has it’s own Fat Chick!

So. Expect pubs, restaurants, small shops, big shops, delis and butchers, grocers and condiment stores to be coming your way!

As soon as the internet is a permanent fixture, that is. 

Where now the cake and the biscuit? Where is the scent that was blowing?
Where is the cone and the ice cream, and the hot drink flowing?
Where is the hand on the till-top, and the displays glowing?
Where is the joy and the pleasure and the hunger growing?
They have passed like sweetness on the lips, like dragon cakes in windows,
The days have gone down in the shop behind the screens into shadow.
Who shall gather the hope of the chocolate yearning?
Or behold the customers from Sadlergate returning?

Serenity, the last independent chocolate shop in Derby, is closing tomorrow. They’re concentrating on their online business because it’s just too expensive to run a shop these days. I’ve got a lot of memories of the unfailingly cheerful family that run it, and the little treats I’ve given as gifts. 

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m rather upset. 

Our fourth Fat Chick, RedWine, has joined us. She’ll be dealing with all the food-related matters in the North West. 

‘Tis the season for it! Actually, it’s always the season for jam, but I managed to get the cherry jam to set this time: didn’t bother to make cherry last year as the previous year’s effort had been so squidgy.

Rule of thumb for cherry jam though, with a good set and a colour vampires would salivate over:

for 2lb 8 oz stoned cherries, add 1 bag (2 lb 4 oz) jam sugar, and two and a half lemons’ worth of juice. Only use a little water - enough to half cover the cherries in a standard stock pot/preserving pan. And it’s very quick - I didn’t have time to finish prepping the jars before it was ready - only 20 mins, say, on a feisty boil after the sugar had dissolved. So make sure your jars are already drying in the oven before you put the sugar in! Enjoy - it’s great with warm croissants. 

Ooh, and the other worthwhile escapade for surplus cherries? Cherry brandy. Roughly 1lb per litre bottle? Not as fiddly as sloe gin - stone your cherries, which is easily done by hand (you might want to use gloves, or you’ll end up with thumbs like a tanner’s for days) and post them into an empty bottle until it’s 1/2 or 2/3 full. Don’t add sugar - the cherries are quite sweet enough. Fill to brim with brandy, bung in your drinks cabinet and forget for a couple of months.

Develops a lovely rosewood colour and warm fruity-sweet flavour, nothing like the horrendous cough mixture taste of commercial cherry brandy. This is one for neat drinking (no ice) by a winter fireside, adding a boost to your home-made fruit cake or mince meat, or as a summer twist on a classic Champagne cocktail. Though I’d hold the angosturas for that last… hmmm… citation needed… off to experiment!

Really, it’s entirely my own fault. I’m very susceptible to salesmen with twinkling eyes and Irish accents. Nonetheless, I came home carrying a pack of potato farls that I suspect are associated with a celebrity, and which I had no idea how to cook.

I was right about the celebrity chef, by the way. The cheerful man with the wavy hair on the packet is named Paul Rankin. Whether you consider this an advantage, or whether you feel obscurely disappointed it’s got nothing to do with crime fiction Ian Rankin is entirely up to you.

In the spirit of curiosity and not being bothered to make the traditional grill-up, I popped a couple of farls in the toaster and sliced some cheese. Being pre-cooked, they didn’t change colour all that much but they were filling (the packet holds four, but I only tested two at a time) and with the neutral starch of the potato underlying everything they’d be good with both the salt and sour of cheese and the sweet and sharp of jam.

Despite their small size, though, don’t be fooled. These unassuming squares will sit on your stomach for an age afterwards. Since they’re not that expensive, I feel a new source of tasty starch entering me life.   

Every so often, an idea appears which is genius in its simplicity. 

I like pizza. To say I like chocolate would be an understatement of such proportions it might shatter Tumblr. So the Gourmet Chocolate Pizza Company is automatically on to a winner with me for combining the two. 

It’s not anywhere near as grim as it sounds. The pizza base, rather than being dough, is a smooth disc of (rather decent) Belgian chocolate, upon which a variety of sweet little toppings are sprinkled. White chocolate shavings often take the place of cheese, but since it’s possible to create your own pizza on the website that’s not necessarily a constraint. 

The individual pizza slices are nice as an alternative to a chocolate bar, and there’s also whole pizzas for parties or team events. There’s even mini pizzas for sharing with the family- or not, depending on your conscience and appetite. 

Gourmet Chocolate Pizza is an almost unique concept, but it isn’t simply a gimmick- well, all right, it probably is, but happily it’s a very well-made and enjoyable gimmick, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

http://www.gourmetchocolatepizza.co.uk/

There’s a certain sort of person who has a weakness for something costing at least £5 and quite probably coming from Lakeland. This sort of person would of course be me, but recently I’ve been branching out. 

Aside from my nascent collection of pie birds (the traditional blackbird is all very well, but I’m very susceptible to the novelty ones) I can’t resist all the different ways of processing garlic. 

My personal favourite is the Garlic grater set from Rigas http://www.rigas-enterprises.co.uk/ which consists of a brush, a plate and a rubber roller. The plates look handmade and hand painted, in a surprisingly wide variety of designs. The idea is that you place the garlic clove in the robber roller, and rub it between your hands until all the skin is off the clove. Wet the plate, then scrape the garlic clove all over the grater surface and gather it in the middle with the little brush.  

Sounds like a hassle? Actually, once you get the hang of it it’s very easy and the garlic texture is almost perfectly smooth. And once you do get the hang of the garlic, you can use it for ginger, or keep the plate dry for chocolate crumbs. I’ve found that if you need some butter softened in a hurry and you’ve just got it out the fridge, give it a bit of a scrap on the plate and you have little soft butter scrapes to collect up with the brush.

It’s pretty, it’s useful, and it lets me play with garlic. Frankly, this is probably my favourite kitchen toy of 2011.

Popcorn is, oddly enough, one of those snack foods that has more or less escaped reinvention. Faced with a limited choice of Sweet, Salt, and maybe Toffee, popcorn has been trapped behind the glass boxes of the cinema concession stand for too long.

So the prospect of adding garlic to snackfood was always going to be enough to get me interested. In point of fact there isn’t very much garlic immediately obvious, mostly because the “herb” (a grab-bag of oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary) swamps anything else that’s going on. As is usual with popcorn, some corns are coated more thoroughly than others in the flavours, but you find yourself being oddly grateful for the rest when the oregano pauses from its frontal assault on your tastebuds.

And yet, and yet…it’s very difficult to stop eating this popcorn. In fact, go ahead and open the second bag now.

Once you’ve got used to the powerful flavour, you can start to appreciate what else is going on. The corn itself is fresh and crisp, with nothing stale or soggy to be found in the entire packet, and no “old maids” (unpopped kernels) in the bottom either, despite the packet containing a warning for them. And once the packet is regretfully gone, the garlic gently introduces itself to you in the aftertaste.

If at first you don’t succeed with this one, keep munching. It’s astonishingly easy to do, and you’ll find yourself richly rewarded in the end.  

http://www.cornagain.co.uk

In a lot of kitchen cupboards, there are the little bottles. They’re often hidden behind the ketchup and the mayo, and that part-bag of pasta that you’re going to use up any day now. 

In among the bulky everyday food, these little bottles are tiny but insistent beacons of luxury. Whether it’s a limited edition version of your favourite spread or condiment, or whether it’s something else entirely.

You can tell I’ve been cleaning out my cupboards, can’t you?

Imagine then, my little squeak of joy when I found the bottle of Sapa.

Sapa is another term for grape must, an incredibly sweet, slightly thick and very dark by-product of winemaking. It’s a great alternative to those of us who find things like balsamic vinegar a little bit disappointing, and it’s got a wide range of uses. 

My favourite use is a couple of drops added to the top of a brisket or stirred into a beef stew just before cooking. There’s this subtle phantom sweetness that you don’t explicitly identify as coming from the sapa, it just helps along the flavour of the meat- definitely a good thing if you’re using a cut of beef you’re still getting used to.  

Don’t stop there, though. It’s great, again with just a few drops, on a really salty slice of cheese. Though for this I’d advise getting a really good cheese, something like a pecarino, otherwise the sapa ruthlessly exposes the flabby greasiness of cheap cheese.

And now I’m thinking about it, there’s probably whole avenues of investigation left untravelled. Sapa is Italian, so if there is a dessert-based application, it would probably a drop or two either in or on top of a panna cotta. Or the little, stylish bottle could find a home at the cocktail bar, performing the counterpoint to Angostura bitters.

I wonder what a sapa and vodka is like?

http://nudo-italia.com/products/22

Today, as I was travelling across London - ooh, get me and my widely travelled self - I stopped in St Pancras to pick up some food for the second part of my journey and decided to try Source Market. I will be extolling the virtues of Source Market later on, but for now, I want to focus on one of their productts - Arancini.

 Arancini are shaped, fried rice-balls, filled traditionally with meat sauce and mozzarella, but I tried a vegetarian one, filled with spinach and mozzarella, served cold. They are surprisingly nice - I say surprisingly as I am not usually a fan of cold rice dishes.

 One thing I will say - be sure to have some form of drink handy, cold rice and melted cheese can be a little sticky on the palate.

If you’re making bread, snip in some sun-dried tomatoes just before you knock it back. And since sun-dried tomatoes tend to come packed in oil, pour in the tomato oil instead of your regular oil when making the dough, and the bread will turn a splendid orange-red sunset of a colour when baked. 

No, don’t worry, pharmacy is a little bit out of my remit. 

Tablet is a Scottish sweet that sometimes gets mistaken for fudge, though in truth fudge tends to be smoother in texture and more sickly, weight for weight. It’s one of these things that’s extremely difficult to mass-produce properly. It’s full of subtle flavour and the crumbly texture has to be just so. I guess Thorntons has the closest facsimile to the good stuff, but it’s still not quite right. 

Step forward, then, The Old Chapel Fudge Company. There’s precisely three ingredients in their tablet- milk, sugar, butter. No ill-advised flirtations with vanilla, no overly-synthetic preservatives, just three subtle flavours dancing. 

Sadly, while they’ve registered <a href=”http://fudgecompany.co.uk”>their website</a> it has no content as yet, so I’m not sure where else to get this lovely tablet. Keep an eye out!

A test for Twitter. We’re now at @fatchicksguide.  

Westons English Cider, estd 1880. 

A very refreshing, light, 4% vol cider that doesn’t really taste alcoholic per se. The refreshing taste of raspberry is found about halfway through every mouthful - it starts off with a crisp taste of apples, as one would expect from apple based cider, but the aftertaste is a light and pleasant raspberry which tingles quite nicely.

There is a certain nostalgia to this - it reminds me of hot summer days watching the cricket team, sitting down by the Water Meadows in Winchester watching the world go by whilst at Uni… Mostly summer. The raspberry gives it enough zing to be novel and different whilst still retaining a good, light, fizzy cider base.

It is also, for all those colour fans out there, a surprisingly pleasant pink colour, reminiscent of raspberry juice. I am not fond of pink, personally, but I do like the colour of this.

This was purchased from the Twisted Cider stall at the Real Food Festival. Their website is www.twistedcider.co.uk, and they are based in Hammersmith, London.

This is to welcome the first of our new recruits - CheeseBeast! CheeseBeast, also known as Fat Chick 3, will be in charge of the South East Region of Food Hunting and Logging.

A warm welcome to CheeseBeast, may our collaboration be long and fruitful.

They’re currently selling these at my local Asda for £1 each. 

Dragonfruit are pretty striking if you’ve never seen one in real life, being these bright pink alien-looking pods. They don’t need any special preparation, either. It’s a matter of cutting in half and grabbing a teaspoon. 

In contrast to the brightly coloured outside, the pulp inside is grey, scattered all the way through with little black seeds like a more evenly distributed kiwi fruit. Actually, these could possibly replace the kiwi fruit is the price went down a fair bit- they’re nearly twice the size, there’s no central core so the spoon cuts through more easily, and there’s none of those irritating hairs on the outside.

Unfortunately, there’s also no taste to the pulp at all. It’s vaguely refreshing, but after a while I got an odd sensation of my tongue wondering what the hell was going on with all the flavourless texture. 

Oh, and I’ve spent all the time writing this entry picking tiny black seeds out my teeth!

It’s not bad by any stretch, but unless you need a fruit to make your fruit salad more striking I wouldn’t necessarily bother. 

The better of my two local Polish shops has a freezer section now, so I impulse bought some little dumplings called pierogi. 

They’re thumb sized and filled with blackberry, though there were several other fruity flavours and I think I saw some savoury potato ones as well. They’re pretty easy to prepare as well- drop in boiling water, simmer for ten minutes, serve with cream or custard or whatever you prefer.

I waited the ten minutes, though since they bob to the surface of their own accord you could probably use that as the signal they’re ready. They’re very soft and would probably be agreeable as a treat for sore throats, and while they’re not hugely interesting in terms of flavour they’re handy as a quick, comforting dessert.   

If eating olives with a cocktail stick, make sure you have two cocktail sticks to perform what has been named the “pincer-and-scoff” manoeuvre, as one stick is often insufficient.