A Bond Girl's Food Diary

Black Quinoa & Halloumi Salad with Wild Honey

8th August 20178th August 20174 Comments

A recipe post with a difference, this week: this black quinoa salad was inspired by Wild Honey. Wild Honey are a fantastic independent Oxford business, selling fresh, local, and organic products. Run by Matt and Jessica, it’s all about the local community and economy, with a real focus on great suppliers. They mainly sell food and drink, but they also sell supplements and beauty products. Obviously for me though, it’s all about the food.

I’m going to be doing a few recipe posts inspired by ingredients from Wild Honey. There are two Wild Honey shops, and both are glorious treasure troves of delicious, intriguing products. Yes, you can buy excellent peaches and honey and chocolate and all sorts of the usual things there, but you can also find some lesser known delights on their shelves. It’s those products that I want to focus on. I’m going to develop a few recipes that should hopefully give people a few ideas on what you can do with some of their more unusual ingredients.

Hence, black quinoa. Yes yes, I know, this blog is usually all about the baked goods. But even I sometimes eat healthy stuff to break up the endless parade of cakes.

Black quinoa is like the exciting older cousin of regular white quinoa. It’s darker, stronger in flavour, and has a more interesting crunchy texture. Like regular quinoa, it’s a complete protein, containing fibre, vitamin E, iron, phosphorous, magnesium and zinc. It’s also gluten free, low in fat, and high in protein.

There’s no need to be intimidated by black quinoa if you’re unfamiliar with it. It’s just as simple to cook as regular quinoa: rinse, simmer, drain if needed. Once it’s cooked, there are loads of things you can do with it. If you make up a big batch, it’s great to have throughout the week. It’s very versatile: you can have it in salads, with curries, topped with roasted vegetables…

This black quinoa salad also contains raw broccoli and kale. Wait, wait, don’t leave. I promise you, it’s really tasty. Especially when spiked with a creamy tahini dressing, and finished with shining pomegranate and crispy fried halloumi. You could also switch it up in a dozen different ways. It would work great with cauliflower instead of broccoli, and I think adding a handful of toasted nuts would also be an excellent idea. You could leave off the halloumi if you want, but… I mean, any excuse for halloumi.

I would really encourage you to pop to Wild Honey for black quinoa if you live in the Oxford area, or to another health food shop if not. You could also buy it online. It’s really beautiful in this salad, and more interesting than regular quinoa, with a lovely complex flavour. That said, this would also work perfectly well with white or red quinoa if that’s what you’ve got in the cupboard.

Notes:

I never, ever measure anything in cups normally. However, it does work easily here, because the quinoa : water ratio is volume based. You don’t need a special measuring cup or anything – just grab any old mug, fill it with quinoa, and that’s your measurement. You then need three times as much water as quinoa.

This salad feeds 4-6 people, depending on whether it’s a main or a side, and how hungry those people are.

Ingredients:

1 mug black quinoa
3 mugs water
1 head broccoli
1 handful/ ½ pack kale
generous pinch of sea salt, and a good grinding of pepper
juice of half a lemon
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

for the tahini dressing

100g tahini
75ml water
2 cloves garlic, crushed
juice of half a lemon

to finish

1 pack halloumi
handful of pomegranate seeds

Method:

Put the quinoa in a sieve, and rinse well for a minute or so. Pop it in a saucepan with the water, bring to the boil with a pinch of salt, then simmer gently, stirring now and then, for around 25 minutes. Check it after 20 to see if it’s cooked – you’re looking for the grains to seem like they have popped open, showing a kernel, and to be largely soft but with a bit of texture and bite. If needed, drain it, but it will probably have absorbed all the water.
While the quinoa is cooking, break the broccoli into rubble (i.e. the tiniest little florets possible) and pop it in a big bowl. Shred the kale, removing any tough stalks, and add it to the broccoli. Add a big pinch of salt, pepper, the lemon juice, and the olive oil. Mix everything together, and then get your hands in and massage it all for a minute or two, or until the kale shrinks, softens, and darkens.
For the tahini dressing, mix all the ingredients together, taste, and season.
Cut your halloumi into thick slices, then fry it in a non-stick frying pan for a couple of minutes per side in a little oil, until golden.
Mix the cooked, drained quinoa into the broccoli and kale mixture. Pop it all into the dish you want to serve in, drizzle with the tahini dressing, sprinkle with the pomegranate seeds, and finish with the halloumi.

The Taste Test: Eggs

3rd August 20172nd August 20171 Comment

A couple of you asked that I put eggs to the test for this series, and I was only too happy to oblige. It’s actually turned out to be a particularly interesting experience. This taste test has been unique so far among all those that I’ve done: you can see why in my conclusions below.

Firstly though, an introduction. It’s basically my dream to own my own chickens (simple pleasures for simple minds and so on). The idea of having pets that actually produce beautiful, fresh eggs for us to eat is stupidly appealing. However, we don’t have a garden, so it’s a dream I have had to put on hold. Also, I’d need a lot of chickens. I go through a lot of eggs. I am a baker, so it comes with the territory.

I think a lot of people buy free range eggs nowadays, knowing vaguely that it’s a good thing. In the UK, 2% of eggs purchased are organic, 47% of them come from free range hens, 48% are from caged birds and the rest are from barn hens.

Sadly, though, ‘free range’ isn’t such a high welfare standard as it sounds. In the EU (sob, let’s not get into it right now), free range hens have constant daytime access to the outdoors. Standards also dictate a maximum stocking density of 9 hens per square metre of ‘usable’ space. There are a few other requirements, which you can check out on good old Wikipedia if you’re interested.

However, organic eggs must meet all the basic free range requirements, and then many more. Here’s a handy summary from the Soil Association (the whole article is very useful):

‘Organic chickens are raised to organic standards, which not only means free-range but a whole lot more. Organic standards cover not only the animals housing and the amount of space they have, but also the way they are treated, what they are fed and how they are transported and eventually slaughtered. They are not allowed to be fed on GM feed (which is common in free-range and non-organic hens). Chickens must not have their beaks trimmed to try and prevent feather pecking and are given plenty of opportunities to express their natural behaviours such as – foraging, bathing in the dust outside and pecking at insects and worms on grass fields.’

In summary: organic eggs come from happier chickens. With that in mind, I set out to taste test some of the happiest eggs I could find, to see if budget versions that conformed to high standards were any different from the fanciest of them all.

As before, I feel I need a rambling disclaimer: obviously, I am doing this in my kitchen and not in a lab and I am not a scientist. These are the opinions of one person – that said, one person who has been trained to taste for quality. Also, the products used in this series are just examples – obviously each supermarket has, say, eight or nine different types of eggs or whatever the product may be, and I’m not going to try every single one because what am I, made of money?

Finally, I should highlight that I tasted all the products blind, and at the time of tasting and making my notes I didn’t know which product came from which shop. I sat in one room while my glamorous assistant (er, my husband), prepared the samples in another. Any notes added regarding packaging and so on were only done after blind tasting, when I learned which supermarket had made A, B, C, D, or E.

The Blind Taste Test: Eggs

Eggs
	£ (6 eggs/328g)*	General Info
Aldi – Merevale	1.39 (328)	Organic, RSPCA Assured, Lion, Class A
Lidl – Woodcote	1.39 (328)	Organic, RSPCA Assured, Lion, Class A
Sainsbury’s – TTD	1.85 (328g)	RSPCA Assured, Free Range, Lion, Class A
Tesco	1.80 (328g)	Organic, Free Range, Lion, Class A
Waitrose – Duchy	2.75 (6 large)	Organic, Free Range, Lion, Class A

Now, I haven’t done all of the usual nutritional information this week because they’re eggs and it doesn’t really work like that. I have, though, noted what the packaging states about the eggs’ standards. You’ll also see from the photos that the sizes of the eggs vary quite a bit. That’s because some of the half dozens I purchased were of mixed sizes and some were large. All had to meet a minimum weight of 328g though.

You’re also not getting any tasting notes this week. You know why? They all tasted like decent boiled eggs. Really, pretty much exactly the same – or so close to it that I couldn’t taste a difference.

A – Sainsbury’s – Taste the Difference

B – Lidl – Woodcote

C – Tesco

D – Aldi – Merevale

E – Waitrose – Duchy

I’m far from an expert, but here’s a very basic guide to the classifications.

Class A simply means the eggs meet the basic standards for retail in the UK – size, cleanliness, basic quality and so on.
The Lion mark is about food safety and legal requirements, not hen welfare.
RSPCA assured means the farms where the eggs were produced meet the RSPCA’s welfare standards. These are less stringent than organic standards, but still higher than basic free range (and the products are often cheaper than organic options).
Organic and/or a Soil Association mark represents the gold standard of welfare.

Conclusion

The conclusion this week is pretty simple. All the eggs taste pretty much the same, so if you’re going to buy high welfare eggs, you may as well buy the cheapest ones that meet the standards you are happy with. The Aldi and Lidl eggs were marked organic and thus met the welfare standard, but are almost less than half the price of the Waitrose eggs.

Although if I have to pick a winner, I pick Aldi. You can just about see in the picture above that the Aldi egg I tried (D) has a double yolk. I’m pretty sure that means I get to be lucky forever or something like that.

*Prices correct at time of writing.

Cherry & Coconut Chocolate Tiffin

1st August 201713th November 20176 Comments

Tiffin is one of those things that seems so simple it barely warrants a recipe. I mean, really, what am I telling you to do here? Crush some biscuit, mix it up with some other bits and pieces, and cover it in chocolate. Hurrah, you have tiffin. You don’t need me to tell you how to do that. You can definitely do it all by yourself.

That said, the reason you are getting a recipe for tiffin today anyway is because I’d forgotten how delicious it is. Sometimes I get wrapped up in things like messing around caramelising white chocolate, or developing an apricot, hazelnut, and cardamon cake. Which is all well and good. But it’s easy to forget the simple pleasures. Tiffin is definitely a simple pleasure. And yet, somehow, I haven’t made it for years.

I actually remember the last time I made it very well: it was when I lived in my old flat and had just gotten together with James. We had friends over, I’d made tiffin, and I went to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge and the the shelf on the fridge door somehow broke. A glass bottle of tonic water fell out and shattered over my arm, and I still have the scar from where they had to pull a bit of glass out at minor injuries. Maybe I have subconsciously been avoiding tiffin since, due to traumatic associations.

Tiffin is, incidentally, one of James‘s favourite things. He nods and smiles politely when I produce some towering, massively over the top cake, but given that his other favourite thing is rocky road, I think he’d secretly be happiest if I just kept it simple.

Notes

Obviously you can make any number of adjustments to this. Dark chocolate on top? White chocolate on top? Swirly marbled chocolate on top? All fine. Prefer hazelnuts to pistachios? Got some raisins but no cherries? Think coconut is the devil’s work? Make your own adventure. This is just a tiffin combination that I happen to like. Rich tea biscuits, digestives, and gingernuts also make excellent bases here, in case you don’t like Hobnobs (you’re wrong though, by the way).

I have used an 18cm round cake tin here, purely because I felt like cutting the tiffin into wedges. You could also use a 20cm square tin if you’d prefer tiffin squares or bars. Finally, you could double the recipe very easily and use a large traybake tin or well-lined roasting tin to feed a bigger group.

Ingredients

120g butter
60g golden syrup
25g caster sugar
10g cocoa powder
225g Hobnobs/oat biscuits
70g dried cherries
50g pistachios, roughly chopped
50g dessicated coconut
200g milk chocolate

Method

Line a non-stick 18cm (or thereabouts) cake tin with baking parchment. Melt the butter, golden syrup, caster sugar, and cocoa powder together in a large saucepan over a gentle heat.
While they’re melting, roughly crush your biscuits (either by putting them in a sandwich bag and bashing them, or blitzing them in the food processor) until you have a mixture of fine crumbs and some fairly big chunks.
When your syrup mixture has melted to a glossy dark liquid and the sugar has dissolved, take the pan off the heat. Mix in the crushed biscuits, then the cherries, pistachios, and coconut. Make sure everything is well combined.
Spoon your mixture into your prepared cake tin and press it down in an even layer. Pop the tin in the fridge to chill while you melt the chocolate. Melt your chocolate either in the microwave on low heat or in a glass bowl over gently simmering water. Pour melted chocolate over the cooling base and give it all a shake so the chocolate is even, then put the whole thing back in the fridge to set for around 1 hour, or until the chocolate is firm.
Cut, serve, try to resist eating whole thing at once by yourself.

Review: Nadiya’s British Food Adventure, by Nadiya Hussain

31st July 201731st July 20172 Comments

Nadiya’s personality shines through her latest cookbook, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure: you can’t help but love her. I saw her interviewed by Barney Desmazery in Oxford a couple of weeks ago, and ‘charming’ doesn’t cover it. Nadiya is warm, candid, bright, and very funny in person – expressive and quick-witted, with a natural comic’s timing.

It’s unsurprising that Nadiya’s been back on our television screens once again for Nadiya’s British Food Adventure. This follows last year’s The Chronicles of Nadiya and, of course, her Bake Off win. She’s a natural food presenter, friendly and casual, seemingly at ease and knowledgeable without being condescending. Having interviewed her last year, I always feel particular interest whenever she pops up in the public eye. Even though she has no chance of remembering the five minutes we spent chatting, I like to think that somehow our brief meeting made us best mates. Hey, it could happen.

Her latest book is accessible and welcoming, packed with little stories and anecdotes about her family and friends. There are also over 120 new recipes. The general idea is that the recipes are Nadiya’s takes on British classics, or new ways with traditional British ingredients. The book shows us a culinary landscape where tradition is turned on its head. Eggy bread is updated with masala. A classic steak and kidney pie marries with the North African spice mix, ras el hanout. A rice pudding meets caradamom, mango, coconut, and lime.

On an initial flick-through of the book, I could see lots of recipes that I was keen to try out – always a good sign. The photography is pretty clean and modern, and the dishes pictured look enticing. Though Nadiya is probably still best known for winning Bake Off, the book is packed with mostly savoury recipes. Never fear though – there’s a sweet section at the end! It’s organised roughly into meal times and occasions – breakfast, lunch, dinner, parties and so on – and is easy to navigate.

The Recipes

The first recipe I tried was the Crab Cakes with Lemon Mayo, a recipe for pretty classic crab cakes spiced up with coriander, chilli, and ginger. I love crab, hence my eagerness to try this, although I did baulk slightly at the amount called for because 850g crabmeat is expensive. In fairness, the recipe does specify that either tinned or fresh crab can be used. However, although I tried three supermarkets, I couldn’t find any tinned crab, so I had to go with fresh in the end.

The recipe was easy to follow. I particularly appreciated the tip for making mashed potato. Nadiya suggests you simply microwave a large potato for 15 minutes. This saved me from automatically going down my normal, and far more time consuming, mashed potato making route. I did find the crab cakes spectacularly hard to fry, as they kept falling apart in the pan. I suspect my mixture was somehow too wet, although I followed the ingredients and method to the letter for the sake of testing. The finished result was undeniably delicious. Even though the recipe made 24 little cakes, they didn’t last for very long at all in our two person household.

Next up was the Lamb Bhuna with Garlic Naan. I am by no means a curry expert, but the recipe was generally simple to follow and didn’t include any hard-to-find ingredients. The finished curry was delicious, with a gorgeous warm and complex spiced flavour. However, mine had a lot more sauce than the fairly dry curry shown in the book’s picture. When making it again, I will cook it for at least half an hour more than suggested in the recipe, and add less liquid.

There was what I’d consider to be a pretty serious flaw in the recipe, though, and that was in the method for the naan. The recipe instructs you to add water to the dough without telling you how much to add, or even how soft a dough you are aiming for. There’s no water listed in the ingredients for the bread, and there are no instructions to measure any for the naan at another point in the recipe. I make bread a lot, so I made an educated guess, and the naan turned out fine. For someone less familiar with the process, though, I think it would be a bit of an issue.

The Caramelised Onion Soup with Cayenne Croutons was a simple twist on a classic recipe. The flavours of cayenne and thyme enhance the old favourite. It’s the sort of recipe which takes a bit of time, but it’s mostly passive time – waiting for the onions to brown and then simmer and so on. It’s well worth the wait for the end result. I made it looking for a simple lunch option, and wasn’t disappointed.

The last recipe I tested was the Apple, Fig, Brie, & Honey Strudel. It’s from the ‘Pudding’ section of the book, but it’s actually an interesting hybrid, because it’s not massively sweet. I went for it because it seemed unusual, and it definitely was. I really loved the combinations of flavours. I’d be tempted to serve it with ice cream or something else to up the sweetness if I was doing it for a proper dessert, but actually, if you leave off the icing sugar it’s almost savoury enough to pass for lunch.

My strudel was not nearly as pretty as the one pictured in the book: I’d personally recommend popping the puff pastry in the fridge for at least half an hour (rather than the fifteen minutes specified) before plaiting. I also found the brie leaked out of the strudel fairly drastically in the oven, probably due to my poor plaiting leaving gaps from which it could escape. Nonetheless, I’d recommend freezing the brie for ten or fifteen minutes after slicing and before putting in the strudel, so that it’s cooked but not melted in a puddle by the time the strudel is done.

The conclusion?

There’s a lot to like about this book. Nadiya’s writing is clear, warm, and very readable: the book has character. It’s full of tempting recipes, and there are plenty more I’d like to cook. I’m particularly pleased to see offal popping up a couple of times, and there’s a chicken liver salad I am very keen to try. There’s a good balance struck between adventurous and accessible dishes. Really, the book has something for everyone, regardless of preferences or skill level.

Having worked my way though a couple of the recipes, I do feel like there are a couple of adjustments that could be made. For the sake of testing, I followed the recipes, but had I been cooking casually I would have instinctively made some changes going along. I think some of the recipes I tried would benefit from minor changes that illustrate the end goals. For example, ‘leave the bhuna to simmer gently for 30 minutes with the lid on’ could be ‘simmer the bhuna for around 30 minutes, or until the majority of the liquid has evaporated and you’re left with a thick, clinging sauce’, or an instruction to chill pastry for 15 minutes could specify instead that you should chill the pastry until firm and easy to work with. This is basically just me being picky, though.

The main thing to note is that James and I really enjoyed all the food I have cooked using recipes from Nadiya’s British Food Adventure this week. The ultimate compliment is that there haven’t been any leftovers. I’m really quite sad that there is no more strudel.

Caramelised White Chocolate & Hazelnut Cookies

25th July 201725th July 20175 Comments

I was going to do a completely different recipe this week, but we’ve ended up with caramelised white chocolate and hazelnut cookies, slightly by accident. In last week’s Taste Test post, I mentioned caramelised white chocolate in passing. I got a surprising number of reactions, ranging from ‘I have never found a white chocolate I like so I am intrigued by your caramelised white chocolate and don’t believe it will change my opinion’, to ‘Please post a recipe for caramelised white chocolate. Please.’

Lots of people are very opposed to white chocolate, and I can see why. There’s the old argument that it’s not really chocolate, as it contains no cocoa solids, being made instead of cocoa butter, sugar, and milk solids. Poor quality white chocolate is often blandly sweet. I would argue, though, that good quality white chocolate certainly has its place, and when caramelised it becomes a true delight.

When caramelised, white chocolate progresses beyond bland sweetness, and develops a deeper, warmer flavour. It reminds me of caramel (well, duh) and peanut butter. If you start with a good quality white chocolate (I’d recommend at least 30% cocoa butter) with a hint of vanilla, then add a good pinch of sea salt before caramelising, you get a grown-up treat.

You can then do any number of things with your caramelised white chocolate. If you leave it in liquid form, it makes an excellent ganache, an enhancing icing ingredient, or the beginnings of an amazing ice cream. You can also do what I did here: let it set solid, then break it up into pieces. That way, you can put it into cookies, use it to decorate cakes, or (let’s be honest) just straight up eat it. I won’t tell.

This is a twist on a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe I posted on the site ages ago. The main point of this post is to tell you all that caramelised white chocolate is amazing, but this is also a really great base cookie recipe that definitely deserves your attention. If I can’t convince you to jump on the caramelised white chocolate bandwagon, you can always use other chocolate and make the cookies anyway.

Source:

The base cookie recipe here is minorly adapted from The Violet Bakery, by Claire Ptak.