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Granny Sue’s seeded cheese nibbles

Granny Sue, I should explain, is not my granny. She’s the granny of a friend, and creator of the world’s greatest cheese biscuit recipe. Last time we visited, her grandson’s lovely wife produced a dish of Granny Sue’s most excellent biscuits, and kicked half the batch she made up a notch with a sprinkle of cumin seeds. I waited until they were both rendered soft and giving with drink, and demanded the recipe: here it is, unaltered by me aside from the addition of some more whole spices.

The unholy amount of butter and cheese in these makes for an intensely crisp, rich finish – I defy you not to scarf the lot in about five minutes flat.

To make about 25 toothsome little biscuits, you’ll need:

60g plain flour
60g sharp Cheddar cheese
60g salted butter
1 egg yolk
1 heaped tablespoon whole-grain mustard
Water
20g Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon each fennel seeds, cumin seeds and coriander seeds

Put the butter in the freezer for 20 minutes, while the oven heats to 200°C (400°F). Sieve the flour from a height, making sure you get plenty of air into it, into a large mixing bowl, and grate the Cheddar cheese into it. Grate the frozen butter into the bowl, and use a knife to mix the butter, cheese and flour together well. Add the egg yolk and the mustard to the bowl with a little water (the amount of water you’ll need to make a soft dough will vary according to the conditions on the day you make the biscuits) and mix with the knife until you have a dough which comes together nicely without sticking.

On baking sheets, form teaspoons of the mixture with your fingers into little rounds or lozenges about half a centimetre thick – it’s fussy but rather nice to create a different shape for each of the three different spices you’ll be using. Sprinkle a pinch of grated Parmesan on each one, then a pinch of one of the spices. I made a third of my batch of biscuits with cumin, a third with coriander and a third with fennel. Press the top of each biscuit gently with your finger to make sure the whole spices are firmly engaged with the cheese. Bake for 12 minutes until the biscuits are sizzling and golden. Cool on the baking sheets for ten minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. Serve with drinks before dinner.

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Gratons de canard – duck scratchings

The UK’s most splendid pub snack is, for my money, a lovely salty bag of pork scratchings. These aren’t at all like American pork rinds, where the skin from some pork is separated from the fatty meat and baked; the English version uses that fatty layer which, along with the crackling skin, is rendered into a fatty, crunchy, salty mouthful that’s perfect with a beer.

When we lived in France, Dr Weasel and I discovered that there’s something even better than pork scratchings: duck scratchings. Ducks which are raised for foie gras don’t end their usefulness with the sacrifice of their liver. Their plump breasts are sold as magret de canard; their fatty thighs and wings are preserved in confit; and the bits of fat from inside the bird and the trimmings of skin are rendered down for cooking fat. The crispy bits, or gratons, left over from the rendering are sold in some French charcuteries as a snack to accompany drinks. They are light, crisp, puffy and delectably ducksome.

My Dad was cooking a couple of ducks the other day, so we saved the extra skin and the poultry fat from inside the birds to render. The best way to do this is in a frying pan on the hob; baking the gratons will make them cook down unevenly, and may result in some burning.

Cut the pieces of skin and poultry fat from one or more ducks into pieces about an inch square in size. They will shrink dramatically when cooked. Spread out in a single layer in a frying pan and place over a low heat for about an hour, periodically pouring off the liquid fat that renders out. (Save it in a bowl and refrigerate it when you’re done; you can use it for making perfectly crisp sautéed or roast potatoes.)

Continue to cook the gratons, turning and draining occasionally, until they are crisp and an even gold colour. Use kitchen paper to absorb any extra fat – your gratons should be dry to the touch and puffily crisp. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm with drinks as a pre-dinner snack.

I’m leaving for America for a few weeks tomorrow morning. I’ll try to keep the blog updated, but I’m hoping the wireless provision at the Horizon Casino Resort in Lake Tahoe has improved significantly since last year. I’ve somehow managed to score a booking at Picasso in Las Vegas too, which is tremendously exciting – watch this space for a review.

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Roast, spiced nuts

Roast nutsWe’ve got some friends over for a drink tonight, and I decided to get all post-ironic and serve a bowl of nuts. These are delicious, sweetly spicy, fattening and go perfectly with a large glass of something cold – they are very like the nuts served in Pizza Express if you’re English and like that kind of thing. To serve four for nibbles you’ll need:

100g almonds
100g pecans
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
1 ½ teaspoons Maldon salt
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 ½ teaspoons whole fennel seeds
¼ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons herbes de provence
4 sprigs fresh rosemary

spicesThis is as easy as pie – just melt the butter in a non-stick pan until it bubbles, and tip everything else in with it. Use a wooden spoon to keep on the move for about eight minutes, then turn out onto a cold sheet of greaseproof paper.

Cool the nuts at room temperature. When they are cool, they’ll be nice and crisp. Transfer to a bowl and hover over it, because if you don’t they’ll all be eaten before you get a chance to have any.

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Clinical canapes

Being related to a doctor is a wonderful thing, but those of you who aren’t can buy your own drugs paraphernalia at the chemist’s. Nothing is guaranteed to concern your guests more than arriving to find you injecting home-flavoured vodka into a couple of giant punnets of cherry tomatoes.

These little guys are, by design, very sharp. Be sure not to have any vodka yourself before you start this; you’ll need all your faculties clear and lucid in order to avoid spicy vodka-finger.

I made a Bloody-ish Mary base by mixing nearly half a small glass of unflavoured vodka with half a glass of lemon vodka, the juice of two limes and two teaspoons of wasabi. You need lots of spicing; only a little of the mixture goes to flavour each tiny tomato.

Carefully insert the needle at the place in the tomato where the stalk was attached. Squeeze down on the plunger gently until you can feel the little tomato swell and become stiff. Serve in a great big bowl, warning guests that these are not precisely tomatoes.

Here is an equally tasty option for needle-phobics. Unfortunately, I put this canape together after a few too many tomatoes, so it’s not as pretty as the first batch was. The first seeded, skinned tomatoes were diced attractively. The layers were neat and not smeary. The baby basil leaves were not all oily. Still – it still tasted great, and they’re very easy to make. You’ll need:

1 loaf white multigrain bread, sliced
1 bulb garlic
1 pat butter
1 pot fresh pesto
2 tubs soft goat cheese
1 punnet tomatoes, skinned and deseeded
Basil

Simmer the chopped garlic in the butter for fifteen minutes until it is soft, and the butter is infused with the scent. Use a rolling pin to roll flat the slices of bread, and cut out fifty circles of the squashed bread with a cookie cutter. Brush each side with the garlic butter and bake in a hot oven for around 15-20 minutes until the little rounds are crisp and brown. Once they have cooled, you can keep the garlicky bases in an airtight box for a few days, and they won’t lose their crispness.

Score the skin of the tomatoes in a little cross at the base, and pour boiling water over them straight from the kettle. This should loosen the skins so that you can peel them off easily. Chop them into four and throw the seeds away. Dice the tomato flesh.

Spread each crisp round with a layer of fresh pesto, a layer of goat cheese and a sprinkling of diced tomatoes. Garnish with basil and eat quickly to keep the crunch.

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Sausage rolls

My Grandma’s second husband (yes, the Grandma with the salad cream) was a butcher in a town where they liked their meat cheap and homogenous. He had a sausage machine. In one end, he’d put pieces of elderly grey stuff which looked like precisely what they were – anatomy. He’d add a dehydrated, pre-bought rusk mix that he’d wetted overnight with some tepid tap water. He’d drop in a pellet of pink food colouring and a wodge of aging fat that he’d scraped off some of the meat he’d sold to the partially-sighted lady who thought she was buying topside. Sausages came out the other end, excreted by the burping machine into glistening, protein-condom skins.

The thing I still, all these years later, completely fail to understand, is why people used to queue up to buy these gristly objects, full of bone-nubbins and unidentifiable chewy things. Why they still snatch their supermarket equivalents off the shelves with dead-eyed apathy. It took me years to trust sausages and sausage meat again, and I still read sausage packets more closely than I’ve ever read an employment contract. Be careful with your sausage meat. When you make this recipe, buy whole sausages you trust and whose packets list ingredients like meat and herbs (rather than trays of sausage meat full of nitrates and soy), slit their skins, and squeeze the meat out.

These sausage rolls are loosely based around Delia Smith’s sausage rolls, with tweaks to the filling and one very important difference; the pastry is not hers, but my great grandmother’s. Nana was a proper cook in the Edwardian tradition who believed that fat was extremely good for you. I agree with her (nothing is better for your mental health than bacon), which is why these sausage rolls contain nearly twice the butter that Delia’s very good rolls do.

This pastry is a traditional flaky pastry which doesn’t require the samurai-sword folding that many more modern recipes require. It also has more butter in it than it does flour; surprisingly, it’s very easy to handle. If you can’t eat without guilt at Christmas, when can you? Try these; they’re excellent and dreadfully English.

You’ll need:

Pastry
10 oz salted butter
6 oz plain flour
Water – amount depends on heat and humidity of kitchen
1 egg yolk

Filling
1 lb sausage meat (squeeze it out of trustworthy – probably quite expensive – sausages)
1 heaped tablespoon dried sage (preferable to fresh in this recipe)
1 egg
1 onion, chopped very finely
Lots of pepper
A grating of nutmeg
A pinch of salt

It’s important that you work your pastry as cold as you can to make it crisp and short. Begin by chilling the butter until it’s completely solid – I freeze it a la Delia for an hour before beginning. Put the mixing bowl in the fridge for the hour as well. (Nana used to put the mixing bowl in a sink with the plug out, running the cold tap around the outside of the bowl as she worked. I don’t go quite this far – my fridge is cold enough.) Use the coarse side of your grater to grate all of the butter into tiny curls – the idea here is to keep the pastry as cool as you can all the time, and to avoid handling it with blood-hot hands wherever possible. With a knife blade (Nana had a knife she used specifically for pastry), blend it into the flour, working as fast as you can. When everything is mixed well, add icy-cold water, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the pastry has collected together in a clean dough which doesn’t stick to the sides of the bowl. Use your hands to make it into a ball, working the pastry as little as possible. The finished pastry doesn’t need to look smooth throughout; aim for a texture like that in the picture.

Nana’s cooking genes were good ones where pastry was concerned. While I’m useless with bread, dumpling and other doughs, I excel at pastry; it’s always short, light and melting. I think it’s the cold hands and the disregard for my arteries.

Refrigerate the pastry for an hour, wrapped tightly in cling film.

While you refrigerate the dough, mix the filling ingredients with your hands. Leave in a bowl for the flavours to mingle while the pastry is resting.

When your pastry is ready, divide it into three and roll each third out on a floured board (if you have a glass board, you’ll find these stay nice and cold and also remain non-sticky for longer than they would on wood) into a rectangle whose long side is around 50 cm.

Roll it out as thin as you possibly can, then divide the filling into three and make a line with a third of the filling down the middle of the pastry rectangle. Trim the surrounding pastry (there will be some wastage) so that you can fold one thickness of pastry around the roll of sausage meat, dampen one edge with some water and roll it up. Use a knife to chop the long roll of pastry and sausage into ten pieces.

Use scissors (thank you Delia) to snip two little arrow shapes in the top of each piece, and glaze each one with egg yolk. Bake on a non-stick sheet for 25 minutes at 220 c. Remove with tongs and eat piping hot and crisp, thinking happy Santa thoughts.

I am in a state of terror about what we’re going to eat on Boxing day. We seem to be getting through the freezer’s stash of nibblable things very fast. The good news is that these sausage rolls freeze at the pre-glazing stage perfectly, and I’ve another thirty or so in a Tupperware box, freezing away happily. Defrost to cook and give up thanks that the great god Miele thought to invent the freezer.