Thursday 5 November 2015

further adventures of an amateur cook

I'm back on chef duties this week.  It's easier offering to do the evening meal in the dark months when I have to be in from the garden by five anyway.  In the summer we might be eating at midnight if I cooked.  Last night's supper was late anyway, notwithstanding the fact that it was a very dull day when the rain cleared and I came inside good and early before I could poke myself in the eye by mistake.

I made cheese enchiladas from Anna Thomas' The Vegetarian Epicure, first published in 1972 and by now splendidly redolent of its age.  You can tell how long I have had my 1979 reprint by the fact that my maiden name is written inside the front cover, and we have been married for over thirty years.  Her heavy use of dairy products has seemed old fashioned and unhealthy for much of the past three decades, though her magnificent and gigantic Holiday Vegetable Salad has become a staple whenever I'm producing a buffet for a large number of people.  Now, suddenly, butter and cream are being de-demonised, and pasta and wholemeal bread are the foods to avoid for a long and healthy life, along with the new great food Satan, sugar.

The cooking times for the enchiladas are quite short, because you don't really cook them, just warm them through, the finished product consisting of tortillas wrapped around grated cheddar with olives and spring onions and covered with a spicy tomato sauce.  I fell into the trap of starting much too late because I'd overlooked the sheer amount of prepping, slicing and dicing involved, plus the sheer amount of time it takes to peel and de-seed tomatoes.  It used up some of our own crop, but there's cooking from scratch and then there's cooking from scratch.  Compared to how long it takes to pull the skin off every hot water soaked tomato, rupture the flesh, squeeze the seeds out, and then scrub fragments of tomato out of the sieve you have used to get the rest of the juice from the bowl containing the pips, opening a carton of passata is so much easier.  Then there's the garlic to be peeled and chopped, the chilli pepper for the sauce to be sliced, ditto the spring onions, the cheese to be grated, onions to be sliced, and olives to be de-stoned and chopped.

This is not a dish for student cooks with a limited supply of small bowls and plates to hold the prepared ingredients during cooking: you will need loads.  And you have to wash them up afterwards.  To assemble each individual tortilla you place it on the cooked tomato sauce so that one side is coated, then put the filling in a line along the centre on the side with the sauce, then roll it up, and put them all in the final dish to heat with the rest of the sauce on top.  The finished enchiladas were very nice, apart from the fact that the olives I'd chosen were too salty for the SA's taste, but this is not a dish to embark on when you feel like rustling up something quick for supper. And even this version was not true cooking from scratch, otherwise I'd have invested in a tortilla press and made my own.  And a cow and made my own cheese?  Where do you draw the line?

In the morning while it was still raining I made Bara Brith from Julie Duff's Cakes Regional and Traditional.  Geraldine Holt's chocolate cake with honey fudge topping was very nice, but rather rich for daily teatime fare, not to mention a faff to make (though not quite in the cheese enchiladas' league).  Welsh tea bread with dried fruit in it sounded more suitable for the everyday gap between lunch and supper, after a hard afternoon digging out brambles.  I went for the simpler version with self raising flour rather than yeast, wanting a quick and fairly instant cake, and was slightly unnerved when I reread the recipe in detail to see that it contained no fat whatsoever. Would the cake keep for more than twenty-four hours before becoming as dry as a week old scone?

It did not look promising when it came out of the oven, the top as rough as a 1980s artex ceiling, and the height of the cake about the same as I remembered it being before it was cooked, and I wondered darkly whether Bara Brick would have been a more accurate title.  When we ate some, however, it was surprisingly nice, the tea soaked fruit making it good and moist (as Jeremy Hardy observed, moist is only ever an attractive characteristic when applied to cake).  It is still perfectly palatable twenty-four hours later, so we'll see if we get to the end of it before it does turn into a fruit brick.

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