Bake Cheese and Courgette Scones

When we were out the other day, we ended up stopping at a cafe so baby Joe could have a break from shopping, which is not his favourite thing these days! I gave him a cheese scone and he seemed to love it, which reminded me of a recipe I have for cheese scones with grated courgette. This seemed like it might also be an easy way to sneak some extra veg into his diet, and make a tasty treat for my lunch too!

In fact they were even easier to make than I remembered, since I now have a food processor. The recipe is from a book called How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet, with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time... by Gill Holcombe, which has lots of cheap and healthy family recipes, as well as great menu planning tips.

I started by placing the flour, seasoning and butter, which should be chilled and cut into small pieces, in the food processor. I puled it until the butter was all rubbed in and the whole thing looked like sandy breadcrumbs. I then tipped that into a bowl and swopped the main blade for the grated attachment. I grated the cheese, and then the courgette, in the processor and tipped all of this into the same bowl. I mixed all of this together with enough milk to make a dough and turned it out onto a floured surface. 

I rolled out the dough to about an inch/2.5cm thick and cut out the scones with a round fluted cutter. However you could just cut them into triangles with a knife, or use a glass to cut out circles. The recipe says it makes about 12 but I managed to get 17 out of this mixture, because I was using a small cutter.

Lay them out on a baking tray with a couple of centimetres space between them, glaze with milk (or you could use a beaten egg if you prefer). Bake at gas mark 7 for about 10 minutes until risen and golden brown.

These were so quick to make and made a delicious lunch for Joe and I, served warm from the oven. Any leftovers will keep for a day or two, or can be frozen.

I hope you enjoy making these scones - don't fear the grated courgette!

PS. Just thought, if you're in the USA, you probably call courgettes zucchini. As you will do if you're in Italy.

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Make Lemon Squash with Lemongrass

Happy Monday!  Do you remember I posted a picture recently of all those lemons I bought at the market? Well, I finally got round to doing something with them! I used a recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook for Lemon Squash, which is especially perfect since we have been having some really lovely sunny warm weather here lately.

Since we had a stick of lemongrass in the freezer I thought I would add this for a fragrant twist (you can never buy a single stalk of lemongrass so I always end up freezing the rest of a pack when we cook Thai curries). I was inspired by Belvoir's delicious lime and lemongrass cordial, which you can buy in the supermarket here in the UK. We drank a lot of this Belvoir cordial on our honeymoon in Dorset a couple of years ago, especially as a cocktail with sparkling water, ice and gin! The taste always reminds me of sunny, lazy summer afternoons in the garden with a drink, a book and a blanket, and it is this that I wanted to recreate.

So here's the recipe:

• 7-10 lemons (I think I used the full 10)
• 650g granulated sugar
• 1 stick of lemongrass (or whatever extra flavouring you would like - I think root ginger would work really well here as well)
• water

As explained above, you pare the zest of four of your lemons and set it aside. I used a vegetable peeler because I don't have a special citrus parer, which would create fine shreds (you might have see the type of thing, a small tool with a row of little holes at the end).

You put the lemons in a pot of boiling water for one minute, which flavours the water and makes the lemons yield more juice. I also put my lemongrass stalk in the water with the lemons too. Take the lemons out and squeeze them once they are cool enough to handle. You need to keep going until you get 500ml of lemon juice, which in my case meant adding another lemon's worth of juice, but it will all depend on the size of your lemons.

Put the lemon zest and sugar in a pan with 500ml of the water you boiled the lemons in, and bring this to the boil. When it is just boiling, take it off the heat for a minute and add the lemon juice. Put it back on the heat and bring it back up just to the boil. Then you just have to strain it through a sieve and pour it into sterilised bottles while the bottles are still hot (here are Delia Smith's instructions on how to sterilise bottles and jars - along with a recipe for strawberry jam!).

PS. Another new font I downloaded for this post! I really like this handwriting font, appropriately named Sunshine in My Soul, which I downloaded from Dafont.
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Making Sloe Gin Out of Season

Normally making sloe gin would be an autumn/winter activity, often made just in time for Christmas presents. But we picked so many sloes last autumn that we couldn't afford to buy enough gin for all of them! So we stashed what we had left in the freezer and pretty much forgot about them until this week when we came to defrost it. So this week I ended up making spring sloe gin! It is a simple assembly job really, and sloe gin is a big favourite of mine so I like to make as much as possible when we can get sloes.

We gathered our sloes in the woods nearby where we live. Once you know what you're looking for you'll find that sloe bushes are all over the place in the woodlands and hedges here in the UK. Here is a handy online guide to recognising wild sloes, along with rosehips and blackberries.

My recipe for sloe gin comes from one of my absolute favourite and most used recipe books, The River Cottage Preserves Handbook. You will need 450g sloes, 450g granulated sugar and 600ml gin (it can be the cheap stuff!). Traditionally you are meant to prick all the sloes individually, but for reasons I don't completely understand, instead of doing this you can simply freeze them, which has the same effect. You then mix your sloes, gin and sugar in a large clean jar and put it somewhere cool and dark. Give it a shake every now and then to make sure the sugar dissolves.

Most recipes say that you should strain it to remove the sloes and rebottle the gin after a month or so. I must say, with our last batch of sloe gin, we left it all in the jar, sloes and all, for about a year, and never removed them except to serve, and it was really great. I was amazed how much better it was than shop bought sloe gin, plus it is cheap and easy to make and a good excuse for a walk in the woods. And since you can freeze sloes, you can pretty much make it whenever funds allow you to buy the gin!

I'll have to post some of my favourite sloe gin based drinks once we break open this lot later in the year. Happy preserving - and drinking!


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A trip to the market and a sweet treat

Last Wednesday we visited my parents in St Albans. I try to go on Wednesdays or Saturdays because those are the market days in St Albans. I love a shopping trip to the market and I've found it's the best place to buy fruit and veg, herbs and spices, flowers, fabric, eggs, fresh fish, all sorts of things... Today I bought some vanilla pods and used them to make vanilla sugar to use in cakes and custards. I thought I'd share it with you in case you fancy a little domestic dabbling, or need a last minute homemade gift for any bakers you know!

That's it: sugar, jar, vanilla, done! It is so simple I don't think you can really call it a recipe. The longer you leave it the more the vanilla flavour will infuse, so I am going to put mine in the cupboard for a while to mature. And the best thing is, apparently you can take the pods out, infuse them in liquid (for example when warming milk for custards and sauces - or wouldn't that make the best hot chocolate?) and afterwards you can take them out, wash them and return them to the jar.

 You can make all sorts of other flavoured sugars, like lavender or lemon - I might try a few more experiments... I'm so excited to try my vanilla sugar out - maybe in baby Joe's birthday cake. I hope you enjoy this little mini project. Do you have a great street market near you that you like to shop at? Or maybe you even have your own stall?

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Make homemade gnocchi

The other day we made our own potato gnocchi for the first time, and it turned out really well! We had some beef stew in the freezer and rather than serve it old skool with mash or dumplings (not that I don't have a lot of love for both these ways), we also like to use it as a sauce for pasta or gnocchi. This is really delicious, makes a nice change and can really help to stretch your stew.

Gnocchi with beef stew.

Usually we would buy fresh or vacuum packed gnocchi from the supermarket but we had some elderly potatoes in the cupboard and thought we might try making our own. This turned out to be thrifty, easy and YUM. We followed the recipe from Elizabeth David's Italian Food, which I give below if you want to try it out.


Elizabeth David's Gnocchi di Patate


2lbs potatoes, cooked
2 Eggs
1/2lb Flour
1oz Butter


Puree the potatoes, as dry as possible. Mix in the butter and eggs. Season with salt and pepper and knead to a dough. 


Roll it in to sausage-like rolls of the thickness of the finger. Cut into pieces about ¾ inch. long, and make a dent in each one with a fork or your finger.


Drop them one by one in to a large pan of gently boiled salted water and cook them for about 3 minutes: when they float to the top they are done. Take them out of the pan with a perforated spoon.


My top tips would be that we boiled our potatoes but I think you would get a drier puree if you baked them (as you would make jacket potatoes) and then scoop out the cooked flesh. Mr Cardigan, who made the dough, found he had to add a lot of extra flour to make a dough. Also, we halved that recipe and it easily served two adults and a baby. In fact, the baby seemed to really love them, which was another bonus.


This is a less daunting prospect, somehow, than making your own pasta, but still gives you that feeling that you are living the Tuscan earth mother dream with bambini running around your rambling farmhouse while you swarthy Italian husband gathers olives to make oil... Or whatever.


I hope you enjoy trying this recipe out.

Putting the Sun in Sunday

Morning lovelies,

I thought I would just quickly share with you one of our Sunday traditions here in the Cardigan household - or sometimes a Saturday tradition as well! Since having a baby nearly a year ago, I have found I am always looking to start family traditions that my little boy will grow up with, both for special occasion days but also for ordinary days too. For a few years now, Friday has been homemade pizza night in our house, and I can't wait till little Joe is old enough to pick out his favourite toppings for his own pizza. It is really nice to build in these little treats and markers each week, giving us things to look forward to and a shape to our family life.

Drop Scones on a Sunday Morning

For the last few months our weekend breakfast has been the wholemeal dropscones featured in the River Cottage Everyday book. This is a great book that we use all the time, since, as the name suggests, it has lots of everyday recipes (as opposed to those equally lovely recipe books with lots of dinner party type recipes that are great to use but don't tend to be the ones that end up with wrinkled pages and food splatters from repeated use). Don't be put off by the thought of wholemeal flour, they are so delicious and not at all worthy.

We add sultanas to ours as they cook and serve them with a little bit of salted butter - I think this pretty much negates the health benefits of the wholemeal flour! We usually listen to Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music while we are eating them. Here is a picture of the last of our pancakes this morning, along with Mr Cardigan's espresso in the background from my NEW COFFEE MACHINE! My love for the coffee machine is probably the subject of a whole other blog post...

If you would like to make these drop scones you can find the recipe on the River Cottage website or in the original book which you can find on Amazon (and all over the place in shops as well). I have to say, I also have a great affection for this book since my husband bought me an autographed copy for my birthday!

What are your favourite and most used cookery books? And do you have your own family weekend traditions?

Enjoy your Sunday,

Love

Amy Xxx

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