Fat free waybread with currants

I've been making this bread pudding-like thing since I invented it a few years ago. I didn't really have a name for it, but recently my daughter has been taking it to school as a satisfying treat between her mock exams, and just seeing her put it in her pocket as she leaves for the journey to school has got me referring to it as "waybread" lately, so I suppose that's as good a name as any!

It's a sort of something-for-nothing recipe, using mostly things you've always got in the cupboard and things you'd otherwise throw away.

It starts with the crusty ends off your loaves of bread, and any bits that don't slice right - I just keep them in a bag in the freezer until I have enough to make a mush out of. When you've got a fair amount (usually the offcuts from a week's worth of bread make enough for us), break it up into small bits like this:

Then you need to soak it in milk - I use skimmed because of my dodgy gallbladder, which keeps this a fat free cake effectively - about a pint is usually enough. What I do is just splash a bit in then stir the bread around, adding more until it's all coated and mostly sits beneath the liquid level if you mush it well down. Then leave it to soak for at least an hour with a teatowel over it.

Once it's had a good soak, get your minion to mash it with a fork until the crusty bits are all broken up and it's properly gooey - thus:

Then I shake in some sugar - sorry, I never measure any of this, though I keep meaning to, but I always forget as I'm usually pretty busy doing loads of things at once when I'm doing this. It depends how sweet you want it of course, and you could use sugar, golden syrup or honey, whichever has the flavour you prefer. As a ballpark figure I'd say to start with about 100g of sugar or 3tbsp of honey/syrup, and see how you go. Unrefined (brown, golden granulated etc) sugar is always best, but any will do. If you have them, traditional cake spices like cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg go well in it, so I usually put in half a teaspoon of each. But it still tastes good when I forget to!

At this stage, your mixture is likely to be too runny, so use porridge oats to thicken it. I usually add them a handful at a time, mixing in and giving it time to soak up some of the liquid before adding more, until it reaches a stodgy consistency that can be pressed into a baking dish (as opposed to poured). 

Then if I have any, I mix in a couple of handfuls of dried fruit. I've been looking into cutting down the food miles on cake ingredients and just like the almonds that usually come from California, you can get perfectly good European currants and raisins. I got 3kg of organic ones, grown in Greece, for £22.35, which I make as equivalent to paying £3.72 for your average half kilo pack at the supermarket.

I know the "super value" type is probably about a third of that price, but getting the largest volume for the smallest price is not what this project is all about. It's about learning the true cost of things, being willing to pay a fair price for responsibly produced and sourced products and to adjust your lifestyle in accordance with what this teaches you as regards what are life's necessities and luxuries. If sultanas at £2 per kilo mean huge volumes of them flying over the Atlantic constantly while supply lines by freight train across Europe puts the price up (no doubt thanks to some dirty dealings at the WTO which in reality only "liberalises" trade in one direction!), then I can live with not eating as many raisins for a clearer conscience!

Here's the stodgy stuff in its dish (greased!), ready to go into the oven at 150°C for about an hour:

And when it comes out, let it cool down and it should just fall out of the dish when you turn it upside down. Then you can chop it up into treat size squares and enjoy it with a nice cuppa! Kept in the fridge it'll last about a week, and travels well as it's pretty squash/break/crumble resistant.

One variation I sometimes do is when I have a bit of leftover marzipan from something else, brush your favourite jam over the top while it's still warm out of the oven and stick the rolled out marzipan on it for a bit of added sweetie goodness!

That's genuine crap photography there, an endangered species as phone cameras are doing all but make the tea nowadays! Apple will have my attention when they start doing that! ;)

Pasta & sauce

Well, there's so much to share - where do I start? How about a nice, easy pasta meal? This is what we had on Wednesday - a better alternative to those jars of sauce that are full of preservatives and devoid of flavour.

Start out with your vegetables and meat. I've used spring onions, cherry tomatoes, garlic and a red pepper here, with the leftovers of a haslet - this is a traditional Lincolnshire meatloaf made with pork, breadcrumbs and herbs.

You'll find it in your supermarket delicatessen, usually the cheapest sliced cold meat there is that actually is meat (as opposed to those teddy bear/smiley face "luncheon meat" things), but I buy them whole from local butchers. I used to work in a butcher shop where we made them out the back, so I've a fair idea how to judge a good one!

There's an amazing tomato "project" going on in Lincolnshire. They're using the methane generated by the rubbish at the local tip to warm greenhouses where they grow summer fruits all year round - how cool is that? They don't seem to have much of an internet presence at the moment so I can't give a link, but I'll ask the guy I know who's involved with it to throw me a bone there so I've got something more to give you later. I think this is happening elsewhere too, though.

Anyway, having chopped everything up it was a simple case of draining the pasta, leaving it in the colander while I reused the pan to cook the sauce. I warmed a bit of rapeseed oil and put the veg in, stirring it occasionally till it was softened, then added the garlic and haslet. I've been putting the garlic in later recently to stop it from burning in the pan, which tends to happen when you're still trying to figure out the vagaries of electric hobs. Once the meat had started to release its juices, I put in a whole pot of half-fat crème fraîche:

...and mixed it in till it was heated through, grinding in a bit of salt and pepper to taste. The Co-operative's crème fraîche is from British dairy farms, so I'm using that at the moment, with a mental note to look into that as I don't want to let the supermarkets off the "clear provenance" hook just for putting a British flag on the pot!

Then I tipped the pasta in and mixed it round on a very low heat (to stop the pasta sticking to the pan) till that was also heated through again. Now, if I'd been entertaining guests, then at this stage I would probably have put the whole lot in a nice oven-to-table dish, grated a couple of different kinds of cheese over the top and put it in the oven to melt the top. But it was just me and the kids, so I spooned it straight out of the pan onto the plates, and just grated cheese over the top:

I have biomass heating here thanks to my landlord's forward-looking attitude, for which I pay a flat rate each month for unlimited fuel that comes from the woods on the estate, and which they send round by tractor. As I'm also off the mainline sewers and have my own septic tank, it means my water bills are also very small. So this speeds up cooking quite a bit, as I can use the water that's sitting there, already hot, in the pipes, to pre-heat saucepans and a lot less time is spent on the hob waiting for water to boil.

That all means this meal is very quick - by the time I'm done chopping the veg and meat, the pasta is almost ready, so it's from scratch to table in about 15 minutes. But even your on-grid urbanite, using two pans, could have it on the table in 20 - 25 minutes, I expect.

And there are plenty of variations on the same theme you can do. For example, sometimes I set some chopped ham and crushed garlic marinading in soy sauce earlier in the day (or the previous evening) and that replaces the haslet, adding a different flavour that my kids can never go back for enough extra helpings of. And obviously you can completely omit the meat for any number of vegetarian varieties.

Sweet stuff

I did mention in a post not so long ago that I'd been in the business of trying my hand at traditional Indian sweets, and promised to share the results with you. I've been sitting on this one for a while, but without further ado I give you my first attempt at chocolate burfi.

The first challenge was to acquire some almonds produced as close to home as possible. My research turned up that the vast majority of almonds we find in the shops have come all the way from California. This being unnecessary when they grow perfectly well in Europe. Being the lazy so-and-so that I am, I got ground almonds because I can't be bothered to do all the soaking and peeling and grinding myself - not right now, though I'll have a go in future. I got 1kg of the stuff for £14.28 (incl. P&P) from Real Food Source. I buy in bulk when I can online, to make it more worth the delivery charges. These particular nuts were grown in Spain. That's not far - I drove there last autumn! :)

So, I found the simplest recipe with the fewest ingredients and stages. It was a bit tricky because a lot of the ones I found online were sort of half-in and half-out of American measurements. All-in I can handle - as long as you use the same size cup for everything you're alright. But this half-measures thing confused me. They'd say something like "250g almonds" and then "½ cup milk" in the same recipe. So I'm thinking, do they have a specific cup size in mind considering that the weight of almonds is specific and weight-based as opposed to volume? I don't know why people do that!

Anyway, I figured I'd give it a shot. These ground almonds and sugar were added to this milk:

Which made a gooey paste like this:

And when I heated that up, stirring "occasionally" (a lot), it turned into this:

I had a feeling it was meant to be "drier", but I didn't have time to stand there all night stirring it and waiting for it to reach some undefined state when in all possibility I'd use the wrong ratios of ingredients due to the badly-written recipe. So, at this point I cut my losses and spread it in a dish like so:

Approximately a geological age later, it had cooled down, so I melted some chocolate and spread it over the top. When that had cooled down, I cut it into squares like this:

It was quite a long way from being the thing it was meant to be - certainly not pick-up-able as we had to eat it with cake forks, but I think I learned from the experience and as you can see by the fact that the dish was half-empty before I even got a chance to take a photo, its lack of resemblance to what it was meant to be didn't prevent us from enjoying what it was - in fact it was pretty damn delicious, whatever it was!

I'll have another go next time, using less milk. And then one day I'll see what difference it makes if I don't use ready-ground almonds.

In the process of this project I learned lots about the nut industry, including the fact that walnuts, cobnuts and various other nuts are still grown in Britain. I plan to investigate these guys' produce when I've got a penny or two spare - at present I'm reeling from the house having been council tax banded at last... !

Experimental

Here's a weird little one for you.

I haven't been doing much shopping, as I've just got loads of stuff in stock, so rather than what I've always done - which is to make a weekly menu in advance then go out and buy all the stuff for it - I've been just rustling things up each night as I go, out of whatever suggests itself to me of what I have in the house. But as I'm using a lot of new and slightly off-beat ingredients this means there's quite a bit of invention going on. Which is fun.

I soaked some black badger peas, intending to have them on Sunday, but then decided to do roast veg and sausages instead. But by Tuesday the peas, having been soaked now, needed to be used fairly sharpish. I looked around for fresh stuff to put with it and there was some chicken breast (from Whisby's in Horncastle), a savoy cabbage and some spring onions (local farm, 40p and 30p respectively). If in doubt, bung them all in together and see what happens!

So I boiled the peas up with a bit of baking soda to help them soften, adding sliced cabbage leaves to the pot about half way through. That gave me this:

I then started off softening the chopped spring onions in the frying pan, then cooked the chicken a bit before adding in the peas and cabbage.

All was going okay so far, but it was all a bit too 'al dente' and I felt like it needed some kind of sauce, so I put in about a pint of chicken stock and some salt and pepper. I still thought the peas needed to be softer, so I put in some baking soda and then, remembering the tradition of eating these peas with vinegar, I splashed a load of that in too, which helped the baking soda to work its stuff as well. In the end it came out like this:

I'm not sure if you can tell the difference from these pictures, but the second one was much mushier and juicier.

I served it up to the kids with no small amount of apprehension, and they did come to the table with doubtful looks on their faces. After I'd had the first mouthful though, my fears were allayed - how could anyone not like this? And surely enough, the kids were both soon going up for second helpings and saying we must do this again. Result!

Now, I've no idea what to call this - suggestions are welcome! I expect it's pretty close to the sort of thing our ancestors would've eaten, though as the bean/pulse group has been largely left to the veggies and vegans of the world, it's not so often these days that you'd come across a meal based on them that includes chicken. But I'll bet this has enough protein in it to replace any bodybuilder milkshakes!