Soap Wars - Episode 2

The scent of lemongrass is divine. It's a while since we made soap but we had all the ingredients in stock and a bottle of lemongrass oil waiting to be used so, soap making was on the cards. We first made soap in 2012 and it was great but together with soap we had been given, bought and had in stock, we've had no real need to make it since. The good news is we are running low and the opportunity to make our own cannot be missed.

The recipe was pretty much as before but with amounts adjusted to create a perfect balance of hardness, bubbles, persistence, cleanliness and conditioning. We used an online calculator which gives you the values for each depending on your mix of ingredients. We also added some white clay which helps with the texture of the soap. The whole process of creating the right blend is know as a Saponification Calculation.

The soap was poured into a large wooden mold and a cupcake tin where it was allowed to cool and set overnight. The large block was cut into presentable slices and the whole soap will be left to cure for several weeks: it is caustic to the skin until it cures.

Home made soap is truly lovely and you can sure that it contains no unnecessary chemicals, micro beads or palm oil. If you do fancy having a go and making some it really is quite easy but special care is needed as you are dealing with chemical processes that can burn and injure unless handled with extreme care.

We used a processed lemongrass oil for the soap but we are also growing lemongrass in a pot. We hoped we would be able to harvest the bulbous part of the grass when it matured and infuse it with olive oil but last year it didn't reach such maturity. We'll just have to be content with the lovely fresh lemon smell it gives off as you brush past it. The cats love to eat lemongrass and can often be found grazing on the fresh green shoots.

Lemongrass

Here is Soap Wars from 2012 if you missed it the first time around. Click here

Time to make a luscious tea loaf

The tea loaf is quintessentially British or to be more specific, Yorkshire in origin. No doubt some of you will be screaming "that's not true" at the screen as you read this, but it is, I should know being a Yorkshire man...

There is nothing more luscious, in my opinion, than a slice of tea loaf spread thick with butter served in the shade of a sunny terrace with a cup of strong tea or lemon verbena infusion. Luscious because it has scent is to die for with the aroma of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg permeating the air as you raise a slice to your mouth and take a bite of the moist, fruit-laden loaf.

It is quite difficult to get dried fruit here in Spain and when you come across it, more often than not it is in small 100gm bags. I usually stock up with dried fruit in the UK and periodically use it to make this lovely afternoon tea treat.

The recipe we use has been adapted to suit our taste and with the reduced sugar, additional spices and earl-grey tea, it has proved very popular with our neighbours and friends who happen to to be around when tea loaf is on offer.

Tea Loaf

These quantities will make three loaves but they freeze well so you don't have to eat them all at once...

225g raisins
225g sultanas
225g currants
50g mixed peel
900ml of tepid Earl Grey tea
250g brown sugar
750g self-raising flour
3 eggs
3 tsp cinnamon
3 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ginger

Soak the fruit overnight in in the tea. Next day add the flour, sugar, beaten egg and spices, mix well. Spoon into greased or lined loaf tins and transfer to a pre-heated oven 175c /Gas 3 for 60-75 minutes until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Cool and serve with butter and jam to taste.

A true Yorkshire treat made with the finest Yorkshire ingredients... ;-)

Go on spoil yourself...

Making the most scrumptious Tiramisu

It's fiesta time again in Spain. Luis' birth village is having one of it's annual gatherings to celebrate San Pedrin. There will be a large family gathering, a large domed wood oven will be lit in one of the outbuildings, lots of home reared meat will be roasted, and tables will be laid for a weekend of feasting.

No matter how much seafood and roast meats you eat, there is always room for a pudding. Luis decided to make Tiramisu for 16. He's taken it with him for the past few years and despite offering to make other puddings they always want Tiramisu...

The recipe we use is a classic Tiramisu recipe but with additional vanilla seeds mixed into the cream.
Here is the recipe we use but there are many more around with various combinations of liqueur, cream and coffee.

Tiramisu

(Serves 4)

250g Mascarpone cheese
3 tablespoon of Liqueur (Tia Maria, Brandy, Marsala...or whatever you fancy)
1 teaspoon of vanilla/seeds or essence
150 ml of strong coffee or espresso
150 ml of single cream
4 tablespoons of icing sugar
16 sponge fingers
Chocolate/cocoa powder

Whisk the mascarpone, vanilla, liqueur,and 50 ml coffee mixing well. Whisk cream and icing sugar until smooth then fold into mascarpone mixture.

lightly dip the sponge fingers in the remaining coffee and line the bottom of a dish with half of them, spoon over half of the mixture, repeat and refrigerate. It will set in an hour or so. When ready for serving, lightly cover the top with cocoa powder or grated chocolate.

It really is calorie heavy but as a special treat once a year you might as well go the whole hog and use generous amounts of ingredients. Here you go, I'll let you have a taste of my sampler...for quality control purposes you understand.

Winter food stores

As the evening mist settles in the lower fields and the sun sets behind the mountain, there is something quite comforting about checking the stores and seeing them well-stocked and knowing that you'll have food on the table and a fire to keep you warm.

Over past year we have made a few jams: fig and vanilla; fig; red berries; rhubarb; raspberry. We are yet to make orange jam.

We have produced: mustard seed and gooseberry pickle; green tomato chutney; ginger, chili and marrow chutney; piccalilli; pickled figs; pickled walnuts; pickled peppers; and pickled chillies. We are yet to make date and apple chutney. We have jars of tomato frito and pisto from Luis' sister but fewer than usual due to her crop being wiped out by a hail storm earlier in the year.

We tend to buy in bulk where possible so having somewhere dry and cool to store things is important for us. We have a dedicated area for food storage which houses a freezer and the dehydrator, a series of shelves and racks. We also use a cool floor area to store crates of apple and squash.

Luis has just returned from the Matanza and as usual loaded up with supplies of eggs, apples, pulses, potatoes, onions and oranges. The oranges (14kg) are particularly welcome as they are from a farm in the south of Spain which do not use dye or wax to improve the appearance of the fruit unlike many commercial oranges. We have ordered 10 kilos of Kiwis from a local organic kiwi farm which will last us through until spring if kept cool.

Our dried herbs and infusions are now ready for processing and will hopefully last us through until the fresh plants are available along with the other dehydrated produce such as figs and apples.

With plenty of fresh vegetables in the garden we are set for winter and look forward to making nourishing food fit for a king on a winter's day. We will cook, sometimes in bulk, more hearty soups, casseroles and stews and use dried herbs and spices, our home-made stock cubes and home produced balsamic vinegar to flavour and enhance.

It is times like these you really do see the fruits of your labours and welcome the storage space...oh and a warm cosy fire.

Making jam- Fig and muscovado

As a jam lover, breakfast would not be the same without a serving of some home-made jam on a hot slice of our home-made bread toasted and dressed with either butter or some vegetable oil. For the last few months I have being decreasing my intake of butter and thus I have being dressing my toast with olive oil or rape seed oil. The use of rape seed oil is very controversial here in Spain since the time in the 1980s when rapeseed oil intended for human consumption was adulterated with some mineral oil and sold cheaply as a cooking oil; many people died and many more suffered ill health as a consequence.

As a result, you can never find this nice and delicate tasting oil here in Spain. We obtain ours during one of the several trips Ian makes back to the UK to visit friends and family.

Making this jam is a simple and very rewarding process. Today I want to share with you my method for jam-making. It is a method I have being following for several years and that works very well for us. We usually make about 30 kg of fruit worth of jam some of which we give away to friends and family.

Some cookery books present jam recipes in which you need to add water but I never do this regardless of the water content within the fruit used; the more water the longer you will need to boil the jam for it to set. Other recipes will advice you to use preserving sugar with added pectin, a natural substance that makes the jam set and fruits contain in varying concentrations. I personally no longer use this sugar. Other recipes will advice you to use the juice of a lemon per kg of fruit as a source of pectin but the acidity within the lemon may alter the resulting jam therefore I do not use lemon either.

Another alteration I have made to traditional jam recipes entails a reduction of the amount of sugar used. Instead of using equal quantities of fruit and sugar, I always use 0.5 kg of sugar per kg of fruit; using a lesser proportion will compromise both the setting and preserving of the jam. The use of sugar as a natural food preservative has being practised in home cooking  for a very long time.

FIG JAM

1kg ripe figs
500gr muscovado sugar, this gives a lovely caramelised taste to your jam but you can use any other type of sugar.

Method
Chop the fig and in a large cooking pan cover them with the sugar and leave over night. I always follow this step as it draws the liquid from the fruit. Just before you start boiling the fruit, stir the mixture until the sugar is dissolved.
Bring the mixture to the boil on a high fire and stir constantly so that the sugar does not stick and burn at the bottom of the pan. When you struggle to control the spluttering from the mixture, lower the heat a notch. Remember you are dealing with a very hot substance that will burn you.
Continue  lowering the heat to a level you can control the spluttering by constantly stirring while ensuring you boil the jam at the highest possible temperature.

Once the fruit changes colour and becomes thicker, it is time to test if the jam is done. To test this, you need to have cooled a side plate in the fridge. Pour a spoonful of the jam on the plate, put the plate back in the fridge for a couple of minutes until the jam cools down and run your finger across the blob of jam. The jam will be made when you note a slight ripple forming on its surface.

Sterilize your jam jars in the oven for 15 minutes at 100 Celsius and bottle the jam. A bain marie will ensure your jam will keep for over 12 months without the need to use other preservatives.

Alterations of this recipe include adding mixed spice, cinnamon or vanilla. When adding one of these spices, I tend to use brown sugar with a softer taste than muscovado or white sugar.

Vanilla works particularly well with muscovado sugar but is best used after the jam has matured for several months. I look forward to opening the last jar from last year of jam I made with figs, muscovado and vanilla.
I hope you have a go at jam making and look forward to hearing from you telling me about your own favourite recipes. One of my favourite is fig with brown sugar and vanilla but you need to let it mature for a few months for the delicate tastes to balance out.

Making marrow and chilli spicy pickle

We make a lot of pickles and jams of fruits and vegetables in season; enough to see us through the year and to gift a few jars to friends and family. We came across this wonderful pickle last year after being given a jar by our friend Cal. We were given another jar this year which prompted us to have a go at making it.

Cal and Rob brought us some wonderful chillies from their plant and together with home-grown marrows, further chillies from our plot and some bought fruit, ginger and sugar, we were ready to get hot in the kitchen.

We made double quantities to this recipe and eagerly await for it to mature. We compared the taste with Cal's as we adapted the recipe by adding more fruit and slightly less chilli. We also chopped the ginger very finely and left it in whereas Cal removed hers after cooking; cooking time was reduced. They are strikingly similar of course but there is a difference in when the heat strikes but both are sweet and spicy; wonderful.

We of course sampled it with freshly cooked tortilla and sautéed peppers and, again with some cheese and crackers. Absolutely delicious. I can't wait to try it with a fruit and veg based curry. Have a go and maybe adapt it to your own tastes.

HOT MARROW AND CHILLI CHUTNEY

2 kilos finely chopped and de-seeded marrow

3-6 hot chillies to personal taste

2 kilos soft brown sugar

300mls of vinegar

60 gm fresh ginger

60 gm fresh garlic

120-240 gm raisins

40 gm salt

1. Gently simmer marrow and sugar for approximately one hour.
2. Add finally chopped chillies, garlic and raisins plus the salt and vinegar.
3. Add chopped bruised ginger
4. Boil gently until thick – approximately 2+; depends on sugar used and moisture content.

5. Leave or remove ginger and bottle.

Making elderflower cordial

Friends, Birgitta and Manfred at Casa Belén recently gave us some homemade elderflower cordial which we really enjoyed. With its slightly heady aroma, a sharp sweetness and thirst quenching qualities, we thought it would great to go, sooner rather than later, to collect flowers to make our own. We were sure we had missed the main blossoming of the wild elderflower bushes but we managed to collect enough for a decent batch.

We set off along the Camino de Santiago which is about 500 meters from La Pasera and explored some of the many tracks that lead off it to the left and right. Many of the bushes were sited in overgrown meadows now inaccessible due to thick bramble growth which made collection difficult. We carried on as walking the camino is great anyhow and in the end we managed to collect about 50 or 60 newly blossoming flower heads.  We ensured we didn't strip entire bushes thereby leaving some to fruit later in the season.

We searched on line for a recipe and decided to try this one from River Cottage. We also needed to collect lemons but given the plentiful trees around the area we were easily able to gather enough for our needs. In this recipe we needed 6 for zest but only used the juice of 3.

In total we made about three and half litres which we will use over the coming weeks. We also made some ice cubes with the undiluted cordial for using in a nice sparkling wine or Cava. If we get chance we intend to make another batch but that really does depend on finding elder flowers that are not turning to fruit.