Another Food Blog

There was some butternut squash left over, already roasted to make it soft and sweet.  I made it into a quick soup by heating it up with half a pint of water and a half-cube of chicken stock.  I add black pepper, then zapped it in the blender to blend in the squash.  Finally I stirred in a big spoon of crème fraiche and then served it.  Alongside it I had two smoked salmon sandwiches on brown bread with light mayonnaise, black pepper and lemon juice.

They’re from Sainsbury’s, and come with the Weight Watchers logo on them.  Hmm, diet cookies?  I once thought of writing “The Chocolate Diet” for the airport bookstall market.  If you’re on a diet, I wouldn’t really have thought cookies or chocolate should feature very heavily.  However, it looked an interesting idea, so I thought I’d try some.  Each (quite small) biscuit has about 50 calories, so 2 of them clock up about 100.  Now that’s not all that light.  Sainsbury’s digestives come in at about 80 calories, and the extra might roughly reflect their larger size.  A medium apple does about 80 calories, by the way.  However, they had a lovely lingering tang of ginger in the mouth, which digestives do not.  I ate some with goat’s cheese, a pickled onion and some Branston pickle.  Yes, they were quite nice…

Sometimes my mood takes me to Highland or Strathspey malts, sometimes to Islay (pronounced eye-la) ones.  The most popular Highland one is probably Glenmorangie, and the most popular Speyside might be Glenlivet.  I’ve recently been trying anCnoc (pronounced a-knock), named after the source of the spring water used in making it.  It is produced by the Knockdhu Distillery in Aberdeenshire, and the version I have is a premium 16 year-old one distilled in 1993.  Some call it a Speyside, but some (including its own label) refer to it as a Highland malt, and it does actually exhibit some of the characteristics of each.  It’s a honey gold colour, and its nose has vanilla and toffee.  Its taste is slightly peaty, but quite light.  This one comes in at 46 percent, so I add plain water (no ice) to it to bring out its flavours.  I read that it’s made using American bourbon barrels, and that it is neither chill-filtered nor coloured.  This gives it a certain clean taste that only adds to its charm.

It is my own recipe, and although I call it ‘lasagne,’ no pasta was harmed during the making of this dish.  The ideas is to use the squash as a substitute for the pasta.  First of all it has to be softened.  I peeled it, cut t in half and scooped out the seeds and pulp.  Then I cut it into pieces of about a third of an inch thick, instead of the usual one-inch squares.  I brushed these with olive oil and gave them half an hour in the oven, turning once.  The cheese sauce I made with about a third of a pint of semi-skimmed goats milk, butter, and a dessert spoon of cornflour mixed in.  I alternated layers in a deep dish pan: one of squash pieces, one of tomato and herb pasta sauce, and then one of cheese sauce sprinkled with parmesan.  After 3 sets of such layers I covered the top in cheese sauce and parmesan and baked it for a quarter of an hour.

It was good, but maybe next time I’ll use a tangier goat’s cheese.  The natural sweetness of the roasted butternut squash needs to be countered by something a little bit sharp.  But it was immensely tasty and very satisfying.  I followed it by baking a split banana sprinkled with cane sugar for 12 minutes, then putting soy ice-cream in the middle and pouring hot caramel sauce over it.  This, too, was delicious.

This year I baked Sam Stern’s Christmas biscuits instead of mince pies.  I may yet bake a batch of my own, but to tide me over I bought two boxes from Marks & Spencer.  One was of lattice mince pies, with holes in the top pastry, and the other was of deep filled mince pies.  I didn’t know which would be best.  I tried each one by itself cold, and then warmed up with cream.  The verdict is that both are good, with soft, crumbly pastry and succulent filling, but the deep dish ones were better.  Since they both cost the same price, I’ll know which ones to go for next year, or which to buy this year if I see them marked down post-Christmas.

My guests included adults with their children, so lunch in Brown’s seemed like a good idea.  After a bracing walk through Cambridge and along by the river we arrived in Brown’s at about 12.15pm, early enough to get a table.  The boys filled up on bacon burgers with cheese and fries on the side.  The healthy stuff of lettuce, tomato , cole slaw and onions had been carefully put on one side of the plate so the boys could leave it for the adults to eat.  Th girl had a child’s portion of fish and chips which looked good enough to tempt me to lie about my age.  Instead I had a chicken schnitzel, an escalope of chicken breadcrumbed and fried with a poached egg on top.  It took some doing, but I did manage to finish it.  I watched others eat a three-bird special featuring partridge, turkey and duck, and a rib cut of beef.  The adults all shared a platter of cheese, toast and biscuits afterwards.  They were all interesting cheeses, and two of the three were goat’s cheeses.

It was from Sainsbury’s ‘basics’ range, and inexpensive.  I bought a large bag of ‘meat tortelloni.’  I have never quite worked out why Sainsbury’s calls ‘tortelloni’ what most others call ‘tortellini,’ but I was amused to see the word ‘meat.’  In the bad old days of the evil empire I was once unfortunate enough to eat in East Berlin.  “No beef,” said the waiter, “no pork, no lamb, no chicken.”  “What do you have?” I asked. “Meat,” he replied.  This was rather more reassuring, in that the label told me it was pork.  I guess they say ‘meat’ to alert vegetarians that it isn’t the spinach and ricotta sort that they prefer.  This one had herbs and cheese in it as well.  I boiled it in salted water for four minutes from frozen.  I drained it and drizzled extra virgin olive oil on it, working it through very lightly with a fork, finally sprinkling parsley and a little pepper on top.  I was surprised by how good it was – a quick and tasty lunch.

As well as that Astronaut freeze-dried ice-cream, Santa also left a box of luxury Polish chocolates under my tree.  The name ‘Wawel’ means nothing to me, but it is apparently one of the oldest and best known chocolate and confectionary makers in Poland.  The company was founded in 1898 by Adam Piaseckie.  The box decoration makes it clear that this is a seasonal box.  I looked up “Wawel mieszanka choinkowa” on the internet and found they are chocolates with three assorted fillings: truffle, marzipan, and something called ‘Michalki Castle,’ which is “a castle made of peanut bricks.”  Well, I can report that they are all completely delicious!

Of all the goodies that Santa brought this year, the most unusual was a packet of ‘Astronaut’ freeze-dried ice-cream.  From the early days of the manned space programme the astronauts took freeze-dried food into space in order to save precious weight.  This is less necessary now, and the International Space Station has a fridge on board so the crew can enjoy real ice-cream.  The packet tells us the complex process by which freeze-drying is done.  It doesn’t give any instructions about rehydration, so I looked that up on the internet and discovered that it isn’t needed.  The saliva in the mouth is enough to rehydrate it as you chew on it, turning it to normal ice-cream in the mouth.  The pack I was given contained Neapolitan ice-cream.  When I opened the packet I found what looked like small pieces of coloured rock.  A block in the Neapolitan colours had obviously broken into smaller pieces.  In the mouth they do indeed rehyrate, but the texture is too chewy to emulate real ice-cream.  The taste is like that of Neapolitan ice-cream, but it’s neither cold nor creamy like the real thing.