Recipe Wednesday! Elderflower Cordial

I know. This isn’t going to be a regular thing, I promise. And I know it’s not Wednesday – but I started making this on Wednesday so I think it qualifies. It seems I get round to cooking more often than blogging.

We’ve been having some lovely summer weather (off and on, between the thick cloud and the rain showers and the freezing cold days) and the elder tree is out in full blossom. Put that together with my lovely cousin posting about elderflower cordial on her Facebook page, Foraging with Amelia and Leon, and I just had to try it. On Wednesday the sun was out and the garden was full of the scent of elderflowers, and it was too good an idea to resist. You can’t exactly claim I foraged for the elderflowers. I walked to the bottom of the garden in pink rubber shoes. But still, I got the flowers.

You start this recipe the night before (hence Wednesday), ideally using a small boy (Oscar in this case) to help you clip the flowers from the tree. We cut more or less 25 heads. I tried to make sure I got nice, fresh, pollen-dusted blooms. Oscar tried too, but there were a few more spider webs on his than there were on mine. I’m sure it adds to the taste. We spiced it up by having a ginger cat (and a tortoiseshell) share the box for a while, too.

The recipe was the one my cousin suggested, from the River Cottage website. Who doesn’t love River Cottage? Probably lots of people. When I lived in a rented first floor flat I viewed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with intense jealousy. Now that jealousy is ameliorated somewhat by my front and back gardens, my herb bed and elder tree, and the promise of, one day soon, swapping suburban living for a four acre permaculture smallholding.

The night before part of the recipe is pretty easy. Checking your flowers aren’t covered with all sorts of legged and winged creatures, putting them in a bowl, and adding the zest of an orange and three lemons. One day I must buy a lemon zester. I’ve had two instances now in my life when I’ve felt in need of one. My husband tells me to just use a fork. I can’t work out how, so I used a slightly serrated sharp knife to scrape the things clean of their outer skin. Painful, but effective. Once that’s done, you just dump one and a half litres of boiling water over the lot. I’m sure there must be a sensible Imperial alternative to that, but Google tells me it’s 2.63963 pints, which is not convenient at all.

By Thursday, the clouds had crept back over, rain had fallen constantly all day, my back ached, and the children were taking the opportunity to scream at each other pretty much non-stop, prompting the unplugging of the computer and the removal of the games console controls. But still, there was the steeped elderflower mixture waiting to be boiled up with sugar. Somehow this got done. Thankfully I had a muslin cloth in the nappy box to strain it through. (I did sterilise it first – I shoved in in the kettle while it boiled.) It doesn’t taste too promising at this point, but once I put the liquor together with the sugar and boiled it up it tasted lovely.

Then I had to perform some kind of bizarre sterilisation dance involving a pan, glass jars, two spoons, and a tea towel. It would have helped if I could find my funnel for pouring it into bottles rather than just a wide-necked jam funnel, but in a house with three boys interesting kitchen equipment doesn’t stay where it belongs for long. It’s probably been used as a trumpet, and is languishing somewhere bewilderingly illogical. But since I could only find one nice bottle to put the stuff in, and all the rest were jars, that wasn’t too much of a problem.

And there we are. I ended up with a bottle and four or five jars of what looks like urine, but thankfully tastes very nice (not like Magners, despite the photo trying to tell you otherwise). A thick, syrupy liquid perfect for diluting with water and giving a lovely taste of summer. George (5) told me he can’t drink it because it makes his eyes hurt, and curled up like a hedgehog to avoid it. Ben (almost 3) made grunting sounds of pleasure on trying it. Oscar (8) liked it so much he asked for a whole cup to himself – and since he’s the pickiest of all of them, I think I can be satisfied with that. Although he did just ask for more of ‘that cauliflower squash.’ Oops.

Recipe Wednesday! Houmous

It’s Recipe Wednesday!

Home-made Houmous with wholegrain bread and Cothi Valley goat's milk feta. 

Recipe Wednesday is a lie. It’s very unlikely that there will ever be a recipe Wednesday on this blog. I do enjoy cooking, but it very much depends on how stressed I am, how depressed I am, how much the children are driving me insane, how my back feels.

The 'sampled' cake, beside the second cake.

But today I somehow spent the whole day cooking. I decided to make a coffee cake for my husband’s birthday (typical Victoria sponge recipe of 4oz flour, 4oz butter, 4oz sugar, and two eggs, from my wonderful 1960s Good Housekeeping cookery book.) The same recipe is here on the BBC. You have to add a little instant coffee dissolved in warm water to the mixture before you add the flour, for the coffee flavour.

So I cooked the cake. It seemed rather flat, so I decided to cook another to put on top of it. I had to go out for more eggs, walking down to the local shop holding almost-three-year-old Ben’s hand all the way. (He seemed rather surprised we had to pay for the eggs. He’s used to his grandparents’ eggs coming straight from the chickens.) So I came home with my eggs and cooked another cake. I left it to cool while I did half an hour of exercise.

I came back into the kitchen after my exercise, rather tired and looking forward to a rest. Ben was still sitting innocently in the living room playing on Club Penguin. But I went into the kitchen to find that while I had been diligently exercising in the hall, Ben had been helping himself to half of the first cake.

Sigh.

I baked another cake. By the time that was done it was time to pick up the other children from school. Now we have a three-tier coffee cake with a rather wobbly middle.

Some basic ingredients - chick peas, garlic, and lemon.

In the middle of all this cake baking I was inspired to try making my own houmous by a friend on facebook. I have to believe that hers was more successful than mine because she’s more stylish than me and lives in Milan. I have no style and live in Wales. But it seemed like a refreshingly easy challenge, especially after my three-cake day.

I used this recipe from the BBC, but I stuck to it rather loosely. We didn’t have any tahini or cumin, and I put more garlic in than I should have. My husband, who has such a lack of taste buds that wine gums all taste the same to him, surprisingly found the garlic overpowering. The garlic had a kind of hit-you-in-the-back-of-the-throat quality, which I quite enjoyed, but I found the olive oil overpowering, and I think next time I’d find a blander oil. I hate the taste of olive oil. But spread on a sliver of toasted wholegrain bread with a slice of sublime Cothi Valley garlic, lemon, and parsley feta goat’s cheese, it was rather yummy.

Tomorrow I might blend in some more chick peas to even out the taste and thicken it up a bit – it’s a bit too sloppy. If I did it now I’d wake up Ben, who is sleeping soundly above us, and needs his rest so he can wake up at 5am, as is his wont at the moment. If I made it again I think I’d change the oil, use more salt, and make the effort to get tahini, because I think the bitterness of the sesame seeds would help to even out the flavour. But after all, it's a learning experience. Better luck next time!

[EDIT - so, today I put a whole new tin of chickpeas in and a very little sunflower oil, and it's much better, has more of that creamy houmous texture, and is less overwhelming on the garlic front. The olive oil taste still detracts somewhat for me, but it's much less strong. I have some for lunch with couscous and a little of last night's leftover chilli and black pepper belly pork, and a ratatouille type vegetable mix. At least, I try, while Ben tantrums over his boiled egg not being served in a precisely correct manner, feeds it to the dog, and then comes and aggressively sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at me.]

 

That lovely goat's cheese.

A little bite.

Next day's lunch. We have good leftovers when my husband's been cooking (which is pretty much every night.)