Really Easy Pastry

This was an accidental discovery.

I was making pastry to blind bake in a hurry as usual. I weighed out ingredients in a bowl. The butter was very hard so I popped the bowl into the microwave and turned it on for one minute, thinking the flour would insulate it and it would need that to soften. Needless to say it was a liquid when I removed it. Rather than waste over 200g of butter I decided to plough on because in the back of my mind I remembered Raymond Blanc making a pastry where he heated the butter. I searched on line for it and discovered this.

Now I very rarely follow a recipe verbatim. So I just added enough water to my dough to make a cohesive ball. Then I followed the method above and pressed the dough into the dish and baked it for 15 minutes at 180 deg in a fan oven. It was for a large Bakewell tart and it was a runaway success.

My version of this recipe is (for a 21cm removable base pie tin) -

200g plain flour
Pinch salt
95g butter
Water to make a cohesive ball.

Sieve flour with a pinch of salt. Melt butter and mix in. Add water very slowly and mix with a fork.  When you have a ball of dough all holding together transfer to your pie dish.

Press mixture into your dish as in the method above. I used my fingers and a fork to get it to an even thickness throughout. Press it into the fluted edges until at same level (no need to push it higher). Put in the fridge while the oven heats to 180 for a fan. Bake for about 15 minutes. Cool.

No need for rolling, baking beans, baking paper etc.

And it really works.

For the pear and almond tart above I made a frangipane, 100g butter, sugar and ground almonds mixed together with one egg beaten and 25g sieved plain flour and half a teaspoon of baking powder. Three pears, peeled, cored and fanned into the frangipane mix. Bake at 175 deg fan for approximately 55 minutes or until springs back to touch.

Veggie Sides

Kale and Chorizo

As a confirmed meat eater, walk it through a warm room/twitching/black and blue advocate this might seem like a surprising post but, I love veg.

No meal is complete without at least two different portions of veg as far as I am concerned. I love figuring out different and interesting ways to cook and serve vegetables. I love eating seasonal veg and I love buying interesting and unusual varieties of veg in the local farmers' market I go to every Saturday. The selection there is always better than a supermarket or even a green grocers who always seem to stock the old reliables no matter what the season.

What started this epiphany was discovering that flash frying Brassicas on a pan was infinitely better than boiling them. It began with Brussels sprouts. That hated vegetable. Fed up of listening to my children when they were small moaning how much they hated them. One (now the chef) actually hated most vegetables but being the understanding mother I am, I told him he'd die of bowel cancer if he didn't eat them. It worked! Shock therapy or maybe just sheer terror at the vague promise of a painful death, he grudgingly picked at both sprouts and spinach. My daughter was much better but she used to complain loudly about spinach especially if I included it in lasagne. They both now eat all vegetables.

Slicing up sprouts very finely and tossing in a mixture of butter, olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed garlic and toasted almonds or hazelnuts transformed them into a different animal. Especially fabulous at Christmas.

Sautéing shredded cabbage with a clove of garlic and seasoning well, likewise the same.

Wilting spinach on a pan is so much better than cooking it in a saucepan. Don't ask me why.

But my recent discovery is kale. I love making Colcannon with it, but I discovered blanching it and refreshing it in cold water followed by tossing it on a hot pan with some finely diced Chorizo and a small clove of garlic is really delicious. 

Buying the best quality Chorizo you can find is important because the cheap stuff has a really nasty after taste.

The Chorizo pictured is from Kilruddery Farmer's Market in Bray but there is another fabulous one I bought recently in The Milk Market in Limerick from On the Wild Side, based in Kerry.

Giving vegetables a starring role in a meal by making them more appetising especially if it gets children to try them has to be a good thing.

I really believe that coercing, okay tempting children to eat vegetables when they are small makes them much more adventurous as adults. How many adults say they dislike this or that, but when you ask them have they tried it, they invariably say no......

Save your Veg

Food waste has been in the news a lot lately. Tesco say that over two thirds of their bagged salad is often thrown out. I'm not sure why, but bagged salad in general seems to go off really fast. In days gone by when I occasionally bought it, very often it was slimy by the time I had got it home. It's not even nice so not sure why I ever bought it.

Over the years I have discovered a few secrets to storing vegetables.

Fruit is another story. It really doesn't keep well especially in summer. But don't ever put bananas in a fruit bowl with other fruit unless you want them to help ripen something. They emit ethylene gas which ripens fruit or over ripens it. A cool room is best for a fruit bowl even in winter.




Salad and Spinach
For both, if pick I my own or buy it in the farmers' market, I've found the secret is to wash it immediately and then shake it well. Transfer to a clean plastic bag and store in the vegetable drawer in your fridge. It keeps really well this way for a least a week.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes keep better at fridge temperature but taste a lot better stored at room temperature. I actually keep them on a sunny window sill. If they get soft just use them in a tomato sauce for pasta or pizza.

Cucumber

Pickled cucumber

Cucumbers need to be stored in a loose plastic bag (remove the clingy plastic) in the salad compartment for a few days but then tend to go mushy. The best way to preserve them (and they taste a lot better I think) is to pickle them.











Root Vegetables (carrots, turnip, swede, celeriac, etc)
For root vegetables remove from plastic and place in paper bags. Store in a cool, dark place in a cardboard box in a garage/shed if you have one. All root veg keep much much better if you buy them unwashed. I have kept carrots for weeks like this and the flavour is incredible. I also never buy them in summer when they are out of season.

Potatoes
As above. Never store in fridge or in plastic. Must be stored out of direct light.

Celery and Brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, romanesque)
They keeps best in a plastic bag in the vegetable compartment. In fact they tend to keep well for the longest of all, probably because they are used to the damp and the cold in our climate. They will also keep really well in a cool, dark garage if your fridge is full (especially in winter).

Allium
Onions and garlic need to be kept somewhere dry and dark preferably. Do not store in fridge. A cool cupboard or a cardboard box in your garage or shed is best. The exception to this are scallions which really have to be stored in fridge in loose plastic (not cling film).

Chillies
Get a needle and thread and thread the chillies through the stalk. Hang them somewhere dry in your kitchen. I hang them under a shelf. This way if you don't get to use them fast enough they will dry naturally.

Mediterranean Vegetables
As in peppers, courgette and aubergine, they need to be stored in the vegetable compartment in paper bags. If you leave them in plastic they go slimy.

Mushrooms
Keep best in paper bags. Remove from plastic. Can be kept in the hard plastic tub they come in but with the cling film removed.


A good plan is to check your vegetables weekly, and for anything that is going a bit wrinkly, use in a soup. You can use even use lettuce and cucumber in soup.

Anything that is beyond redemption can be composted. And even if you don't have a garden you can make compost for herb or flowering containers. 


See no need to waste. Do you agree or disagree?

Foodborn