They were worth the tummy ache.

At least, they must have been, because we could never resist picking and eating the apples from our tree long before they were ready (and, in truth, they never got that sweet anyway). We would use them to play bob the apple at Hallowe’en and, later, they would be arrayed on makeshift tables in the shed and would keep us in stewed apple, apple tarts and glorious baked apples for the winter.

Neither, I might add, could we resist climbing our apple tree and, on occasion, swinging from its branches.

My brother demonstrating the fine art of swinging from an apple tree

My brother Tom doesn’t swing from apple trees anymore (at least, I don’t think he does) and, while my parents long ago moved away from the site of that particular tree, there is another in its place.

One of the best things about October: the Ma's Howgate Wonder apples

As my mother’s Howgate Wonders don’t keep particularly well, most of them are stewed and frozen to make them last. At this time of year, though, when they’re not long off the tree, there is no better thing to do than bake them. And my Ma’s baked apples, tasting of times past and present, are, quite simply, the best.

The Ma's apples, baked

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Ma’s Baked Apples

These really are the simplest things in the world to make.

You just need apples, sugar, butter, cloves and either an apple corer or some other means of removing part of the apple core. I improvised with a corkscrew and a spoon handle to get the job done.

No appler corer? Then may I suggest you improvise.

The only other thing that you need to be aware of is that the degree to which the apple flesh softens while baking will really depend on the type of apple you use. Bramleys, for example, will break down quite readily, while my Ma’s Howgate Wonders are much firmer, but they do bake divinely.

You’ll need, per person:

• 1 cooking apple (large or small, depending on your appetite)
• 2-3 tsp granulated sugar
• small knob of butter (0.5-1 tsp)
• 2 cloves

You’ll also need:

• An apple corer or other implement to remove part of the apple core, plus one or more baking trays or ovenproof dishes, enough to accommodate your apples.

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 180C
• Cut a slit in the skin of each apple, right around the thickest part of the fruit (around its waist, you might say). This will head off any irregular bursting that might happen while the apple bakes.
• Remove about 2/3rds of the apple core using an apple corer, leaving a base for the sugar to sit on. If you don’t have an apple corer (and I didn’t), you can use a corkscrew or perhaps a small vegetable knife to cut down through the core and, say, a narrow spoon handle to clear the contents.
• Fill the now-empty core with sugar, top with a knob of butter and stick 2 cloves into the butter.
• Sit the apples on a tray or ovenproof dish, pour a small amount of water (say 100-200ml) around them and bake, uncovered, until the skin has started to brown in spots and shrink back from the centre slit. The flesh will also have softened to some degree, though this will depend on both the size and type of the apple – mine take around 30 minutes or so for large-ish specimens.
• Eat on their own or with the very classic accompaniment of warm custard.

The Variations:

• Of course you can use whatever kind of sugar you like to fill the apple, while my Ma sometimes puts sweet mincemeat into the hollowed out core instead of sugar

The Results:

• Baked apples for those that wants ‘em

I hereby issue a warning to all passing lemons.

I am going through a zesting phase and any lemons within range are likely to be relieved of their outer garments sharpish. Zorro-like, I will unsheath my beloved microplane zester, draw razor-sharp blades across their citrusy skins and have my wicked culinary way with the finely shredded results.

Other citrus fruit, I might add, are also at risk.

No lemon is safe...

Ah, yes, it’s true that the zing of a little citrus zest has lifted many a meal lately. I think, however, that my zesting habit started with my first attempt at lemon shortbread bars.

There I was, ready for kitchen action, lured by the promise of the most lemony of lemon bars ever. Suffice to say that the author of the recipe should have their license to use superlatives revoked, because the lemon bars were nothing of the kind.

Fortunately, I realised that the situation could be retrieved by means of emergency zesting. A generous sprinkling of lemon shavings on top and at least I now had bars that spoke of lemon, rather than vaguely hinting at it.

Needless to remark, I have been zesting generously ever since.

Redcurrant shortbread bars with a little inner lemon zest

Many lemons later, the time finally came to return to the scene of the shortbread crime and make a properly tangy shortbread bar.

Rather than go the pure lemon route, however, I looked to my recent harvest of redcurrants, which boast their own particular brand of tartness. They made for a gloriously pink topping but, sharp and all as redcurrants are, they still lacked the oomph I was looking for in my shortbread bars.

One zested lemon later and they had all the oomph they needed.

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/14/lemon-bars-shortbread-redcurrants/feed/ 24 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/07/oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/07/oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:32:57 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=20858

That’s the trouble with words. They mean different things to different people.

Time was when any self-respecting paddy would not have thought to call the items in the picture below anything other than biscuits or biccies.

Oatmeal, chocolate chip and redcurrant whatsits

But the fact is that we’re pretty comfortable with the term cookie these days, it being many years since “American-style Chocolate Chip Cookies” started to appear on Irish supermarket shelves.

Some Irish people might even use the terms biscuit and cookie interchangeably, though I think there is a perception that cookies are a bit fancier than your average biscuit. I mean to say, nobody that I know of ever elevated plain ol’ Marietta biscuits to cookie status, while I, personally, have great difficulty in separating the word cookie from the phrase chocolate chip. Where one goes, the other inevitably follows.

Plain old Marietta biscuits
(image from jacobfruitfield.com)

Still, while these words might be the little pegs on which we hang our cultural identity, what I call said baked goods, in the end, really matters less than the fact that they are just the thing to have with a nice cup of Irish tea.

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Dried Redcurrants

One of the joys of having a generous redcurrant harvest is that I could afford to experiment with slow-roasting as a means of drying some of my redcurrants out. They lose a lot of volume in the process, but there really is a nice concentrated tartness to the end result.

You’ll need:

• redcurrants

You’ll also need:

• One or more baking trays – enough to hold the redcurrants in a single layer

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 110C
• Wash the redcurrants and drain on kitchen paper
• Spread the redcurrants in a single layer on your baking tray(s) and roast for about about an hour and a half or up to 2 hours, until darkened, shriveled but still a little bit juicy.
• Scrape from the baking trays and use for baking or add some to your breakfast cereal.

The Results:

• 500g fresh redcurrants will yield around 75g dried redcurrants

Apple pudding, hot whiskey sauce, 'nuff said

Winter hasn’t gone away, y’know (like you needed reminding). Neither, therefore, has the need to keep my body warm both inside and out. And while thermal underwear will do for the latter, you still can’t beat a hot whiskey for the former.

The unfortunate truth, though, is that (try as I might) Spud cannot live on hot whiskeys alone – I find that pudding is required at least every once in a while.

What better, then, than a warm wintery pudding inspired by the lemony cloveness of a hot whiskey. A lemony apple pudding with a buttery whiskey sauce, to be exact. Resident sis was heard to say that this may just be my best dessert ever. High praise indeed.

My increased apple intake had a lot to do with the fact that the Best In Season folks were running another recipe competition, this time with bramleys in mind. I hadn’t done too shabbily last time out, so I was all on for having another go. Thus there was much baking and subsequent consumption of bramleyed goods. Enough, if the old apple-a-day adage is anything to go by, to ensure that my doctor would be kept away indefinitely. And in the end, I tasted what I had made, and indeed it was good, I-must-make-you-again-soon kind of good.

Bramley apples, desserted

What I held in my hands was a dessert bowl full of bramley chunks baked with soft creamy goats cheese, honey and rosemary, with some oats and pine nuts to top it off. Crumblesque but, dare I say it, even easier to make than an apple crumble. Regardless of how it fares in the competition, it’s a winner chez Spud.

Thanksgiving, I mean. It’s an event that generally passes us by on this side of the Atlantic but, having enjoyed several Thanksgiving dinners in the company of American friends and family, I’ve become quite partial to the event.

Finding no guidance on the matter of who to ask, I thought it best to go straight to the top.

Dear Mr. President,

I would like to borrow, if I may, your Thanksgiving holiday. Given that it has its roots in celebrating harvest bounty and involves eating lots of nice food, it seems like rather a good one to me.

May I remind you that you seem to have Paddy’s Day out on permanent loan, it seems only fair to claw one back.

Yours,
D.S.

P.S. Hope you like the cranberry sauce

Giving thanks with cranberries

Sacks o' Flahavans

Mary Flahavan reports that her mother, at 92 years of age, is both hale and hearty and eats porridge twice a day. I suspect very much that these facts are related – good stuff, is porridge.

Oats, the stuff of porridge

Porridge is an ancient food and was the staple in Ireland until usurped by none other than the potato in the the late sixteenth century (sorry ’bout that oats, but a spud’s gotta do what a spud’s gotta do). Even after the über tuber made its Irish debut, oats cooked in the form of porridge or stirabout were still frequently eaten, becoming more common as a breakfast dish in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And where there were oats, there were oat millers. The involvement of the Flahavan’s family in milling stretches back over 6 long-lived generations. In this, the era of the heavily manufactured breakfast cereal, it’s refreshing to see that their enduring Progress Oatlets product has no “added this” or “reduced that” or “fortified the other”, but, rather, a shockingly spare ingredient list of one: wholegrain rolled oats.

That the Flahavans are still milling their oatlets at a site in Kilmacthomas, Co. Waterford, whereon mills have stood for centuries, and use oats that have been grown within a 60 mile radius of the mill, is heartening in a country where “The Mill” is far more likely to refer to a building that has been converted into apartments, rather than a millhouse that serves its original intended purpose.

View from the roof of the Flahavan's mill. And, yes, I admit that I would quite fancy an apartment that had this view.

All of this and more I learned at first hand last week, when I had the pleasure of being brought to both see the mill and meet with John and Mary Flahavan, the current generation of owners.

The Flahavans and scenes from their mill

Theirs may be a centuries-old business, but one which must adapt constantly to the demands of changing markets. In the 1930′s, Flahavan’s Progress Oatlets were so named because the new-fangled rolling process was deemed to be progress over traditional, steel-cut oats, drastically reducing the time it would take to make a bowl of porridgey goodness.

These days, progress for the Flahavan’s means developing the organic side of things. 15% of their business currently, the demand for their organic oats far outstrips the supply grown in Ireland but, year on year, they are working with farmers to make more organic oats happen here. Progress also means getting customers in on the porridge-making act, with the company announcing their first All-Ireland Porridge Making Challenge this week. You can read more about it below. It may be well worth your while.

There was an old lady from Ryde
Who ate a bad apple and died
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside

I can’t imagine that the resulting cider was anything to write home about, unless, perhaps, the lady in question was given to eating cider apples, a subject about which I am now somewhat more informed, having attended last weekend’s cider-making festival in Hereford.

That I was at the cider festival at all was merely lucky happenstance. I was in Hereford for my niece’s wedding and noticed a sign containing the words cider and festival in the same sentence. It was bound to catch my attention. I would like to thank my niece for (a) taking up residence in the heart of England’s cider country (b) arranging for her wedding to coincide with the cider-making festival and (c) suggesting accommodation that, it turns out, was right across the road from the cider museum. That is what I call a result.

So, whilst not otherwise engaged in wedding activities (some of which, er, included drinking local cider), I was able to duck into the festival and museum to see what it was all about.

Traditional cider pressing

Turns out that the festival was about many things, from traditional cider pressing to coopering, that ancient art of crafting water-tight wooden casks. It’s a trade which has been in steady decline over many years, as breweries opt to use metal casks instead. Not only is Alastair Simms (pictured below) the last master cooper working in Britain, but he says that, at present, there is no funding available from the British government to support a coopering apprenticeship. It seems a great shame to see skills such as his die out.

Master cooper at work

The festival was also about cider apples. A great many of them in fact, presented for display by Gillian Bulmer. Gillian’s grandfather was one of the founders of HP Bulmer, which grew into what is now the world’s largest cider-maker.

Scenes from the cider museum

I learned several things about cider apples from Gillian: that they should have plenty of sugar, which helps the yeast to ferment the cider; that they should not have too much acidity, though some may be needed; and that they need plenty of tannin, which helps to give the cider its body. This last surprised me – merely, I think, because tannins are something that I associate, not with apples, but with red wine and black tea. Several pieces of cider apple later, however, my mouth was filled with that characteristic dryness and I was left in no doubt that a tannin has been to call. Luckily, my cider apple consumption did not have any other ill-effects. Had that not been the case, I might have provided some new rhyming material for my Ma, immortalised, not as a Spud, but as a late lamented cider insider.

I don’t know why that should be – I mean, tomatoes and potatoes are family. Be that as it may, the tomato branch of the clan comes in for the poor relation treatment in my garden. I never pinch out the tomatoey side shoots as they develop, even though I know I should. As a result, my tomato plants invariably end up an unruly mess, largely neglected and, because I grow them out of doors in an Irish summer, the harvest is, at best, decidedly green in colour.

Spud's green tomatoes

Still, I redeem my poor farming ways by making the likes of green tomato chutney and mustard pickle with green tomatoes. And, who knows, with any luck, some of the harvest will eventually turn its proper colour after a few weeks indoors. The tomatoes won’t be anything like as sweet as those fully ripened on the vine, but they will still be better than what often passes for tomatoes in Irish supermarkets. As anybody who lives here knows, the tomatoes offered for sale in this country are very often a pale imitation of the real thing, which makes growing your own a particularly satisfying endeavour, even if, like me, you’re not exactly top of the tomato-farming class.

That's a lot of bottles to get through, best get started

So there I was, with a few lucky others, being enlightened in the ways of vodka by Mike and Kevin from The Soul Shakers, London-based bar consultants and cocktail meisters. They were in town as part of the Irish launch of both the 2009 Finlandia Vodka Cup, an international cocktail-making showdown, and the Finlandia Finnishing School, which aims to instruct interested barkeeps in the mysteries of mixology.

And, whereas before the masterclass, my take on vodka might have been summarised as “Take water. Take some starchy plant matter. Mash ‘em up, ferment ‘em, distill the vapours. Drink. The end.“, now, I know that’s not quite all there is to it.

I know that the purity and taste of the water matters.

I know that the source of the starch matters. So, despite the reputation that potato-based vodkas have had as being a poor man’s drink, it transpires that it’s relatively more expensive to produce the clear liquor from spuds than from grain. Their lower starch content relative to the likes of barley, wheat and rye means that more effort is needed to remove that which is potato and leave that which becomes vodka.

I know that the distillation matters. Most vodkas use a sophisticated column distillation process, though you will always end up with a little something other than pure ethanol and water, depending on which starchy plant you started out with.

In summary, I now know that vodkas do taste of something after all.

Mike and Kevin lead us through a blind tasting and instructed us in what they see as the 3 broad styles of vodka. There are those with a rounder, more unctuous taste, like Absolut, or with a refreshing character and crisp, peppery bite like Finlandia, or those that are slightly sweeter, like Stolichnaya and other Russian vodkas, where a small amount of sugar softens the peppery hit and is just the thing for straight vodka shots (and, if you’re in Russia, lots of ‘em). For the record, I liked the Absolut best of the pure vodkas, though I think I could happily savour the wonderful aroma of Finlandia’s vodka grapefruit fusion with maybe just a bit of ice and perhaps some tonic.

Mike makes martini

And finally, having been suitably educated as to the raw alcoholic material involved, we were inducted into the school of vodka martinis and grapefruit juleps. Suddenly I felt that my cocktail-making career had taken a giant leap forward.