Friday bento

If you’ve read my last few entries you’ll be aware that I’ve been making a big effort to eat up my food stash over the past few weeks – I used up everything except a tub of homemade pasta sauce. Last night I made some venison burgers, and a few portions of venison stew made with mushrooms and port.  The burgers in particular are perfect for bento and are really easy to make.

Quick venison burgers

(makes 4, which is enough for two bentos)

100g minced venison

½ small red onion, chopped finely

1 button mushroom, chopped finely

1 tsp redcurrant jelly

Salt/pepper to taste

I find getting my hands dirty is the best way to make these! Put all the ingredients together in a bowl and combine well with your fingers or a spoon. Divide into four patties and cook in the grill or a non-stick frying pan – they take about three minutes on each side, but cook them to your personal preference.

Today’s bento is:

• Mini venison burgers
• Radishes
• Steamed savoy cabbage and broccoli stalks
• Carrot and ginger salad
• Sushi rice

You’ll notice there isn’t actually any rice in the bento box – I decided to use up some of the rice I froze a couple of weeks ago. It has to be reheated in the microwave and I don’t have one at home, so I take it into work in a sandwich bag and reheat it at work.

In praise of porridge

I love porridge. I’d have it for breakfast every day if it weren’t for the perplexed stares I draw when cooking up oats in summer! So, when the warm weather hits I switch to fruits and yoghurt, but as soon as the air takes a cold turn, I reach for my oats!

I’m quite a purist about my porridge, and quite particular about how it is prepared. No microwave oats for me, and don’t even think about mentioning the awful, tasteless Ready Brek in my presence (sort of like baby food, but worse).

I favour organic oats and at the moment I’m using Flanahan’s, although sometimes I like the big, chunky oats Sainsbury’s does. However, my ideal texture is somewhere between the two so I might try combining them at some point – stay tuned for that experiment.

Step one for me is soaking the oats: 30g is about enough for me and I put them in a cup of water over night. In the morning, I pour the whole lot into a pan with a pinch of salt and let it cook on a very low heat until it reaches my desired consistency. I like my porridge thick, so it takes at least 15 minutes. 

Every five minutes or so I give it a good stir with a wooden spatula ("materials are everything") and when it is ready I tip it into my bowl. 

By now, you will have noticed the total absence of milk from this procedure: blame my Scottish ancestry. Occasionally, when I am out, I have to settle for porridge made with milk, but I never make it at home. I think it was Clarissa Dickson-Wright who described porridge made with milk as “puppy sick”. She isn’t wrong, you know. By all means pour a bit of milk or cream onto your porridge once it is in the bowl, but don’t insult your oats by poaching them in it.

Despite my aversion to milk, I do like to top my porridge with something: soft fruits, dried fruits, banana, peanut butter, grated apple, cinnamon, or some combination thereof. For breakfast this morning, I sprinkled some figs with brown sugar (I know some people are horrified by sugar, but one teaspoon won't hurt, even when you are trying to lose weight) and baked them until it the sugar bubbled:

And then put them on top of my porridge:

Delicious, filling and healthy :)

New Year’s Bake

My friend Gareth gave me a truly awesome gift a couple of weeks ago: The Great British Book of Baking

It’s perfect, not only because I like to bake things, but also because it really focuses on the kind of old, traditional recipes I’ve always wanted to master. Above all the recipes are very ‘social’ – the kind of things that are wonderful to make when friends are coming for afternoon tea. I recommend it!

Anyway, when he gave me the book, Gareth confessed that he’d been dying to try some of them himself, so we decided to meet up over the New Year weekend to make some goodies.

The first stage of this meet was brunch. I baked an apple scone round from the book and a loaf of my favourite yoghurt soda bread to go with kippers, scrambled eggs and pork and spring onion sausages. I halved the amount of sugar in the scone recipe and used light Muscovado instead of Demerara to make it more suitable for eating with cheese – the book’s recommended serving suggestion. I served all these goodies with some lovely coffee which another friend brought me from Betty’s in York.

After brunch, the baking!

Coffee and Walnut cake

Admittedly, my friend made most of this – I measured the ingredients and made the icing. The great thing about this recipe is that it comes out light without the flour needing to be sifted, which is great if you’re me and don’t have a sieve. I used ‘real’ coffee leftover from the brunch to give the cake a delicate flavour, but beefed it up with a small amount of instant for the icing. My housemate was delighted when she came home and spied one of her favourite cakes waiting.

Ham and Egg Pie

No, not a quiche! Basically, you line a pie dish with puff pastry, and fill it with chopped gammon, whole eggs and egg-and-chive custard before covering it with more puff pastry, glazing with egg and baking for 45 minutes. The whole eggs are put in raw, gently slipped into wells you make in the gammon. Ever so slightly fiddly, but really impressive once done. I have to admit it was a bit too salty for me, but my friend loved it and when I took the remaining half of the pie to my parents’ the next day, it only survived about fifteen minutes.

It was so much fun, I have decided to throw an afternoon tea party once a month to work my way through the recipes and spread baked cheer among all my friends.