A Spot of Cookery: Potato Pancakes

My grandmother came from the West Coast of Ireland. She and my grandfather met just after WWI, and by the time I was born they were both quite elderly. And not doing a lot of cooking. However, this is her useful and tasty recipe for using up leftover mashed potato. I do not know if this is an Irish delicacy or just something my granny cooked a lot. And then my mother.

Ingredients:

1 egg

Leftover mashed potato 

Salt and pepper 

Cream or natural yoghurt if necessary

Bring your leftover mashed potato to room temperature. Break an egg into a mixing bowl. Scramble it up with a fork and add plenty of salt and pepper. 

Gradually add small spoons of mash into the egg and mix very well. You are looking for a dropping consistency. Just one egg takes a lot of mashed potato. But if you enthusiastically add too much potato and the mixture gets too thick, add a little cream if you have it or perhaps a teaspoon of natural yoghurt to slacken the batter.

Heat a nob of butter and a glug of sunflower oil in a frying pan and use a desert spoon to drop the batter into the hot fat, three or four pancakes at a time. When the batter starts to bubble, check to see if they are ready to turn over. Cook until both sides are golden brown. You will know.

These little pancakes work brilliantly with leftover stews, baked beans, scrambled/fried eggs and bacon, pretty much anything that needs a carb. 

Every single person I have shared this easy recipe with has added flour. I have no idea why. I keep telling people not to add flour, but they don’t pay any attention. Do NOT add flour unless you plan to make a different recipe entirely. I think there’s a dough you can make and shape it with your hands, but don’t look at me for the recipe.

A Spot of Cookery: Pork Chops in Tomato Soup

This is my mother’s super easy pork chop recipe.

Basic Recipe: take one large London-style pork chop per person. Fry the chops until they are browned and throw them in a casserole dish. Season well with salt and pepper. Chop an onion and soften it in the same pan you cooked the pork in. When the onion is ready chuck in a can of Heinz tomato soup and bring it to the bubble. Pour your onion and soup mix into the casserole and put in the oven at Gas Mark 4 or 180 degrees for an hour. Serve with mashed potato.

I said “London-style pork chops” because I have never attempted to buy a pork chop in any other part of the UK, and you never know what cuts of pork might be on sale in, say Inverness, unless you’ve shopped there. Which I haven’t.

Our local shop here in beautiful Switzerland sells thin slices of pork. Very nice, but not the same. Plus, since Coronavirus lockdown we no longer have access to Heinz soup, so what to do? Obviously I have to make my own tomato soup... I mean sauce, for the Chef and me.

So, make a roux with about an ounce of butter and a spoonful of plain flour. Add a big squirt of tomato purée and then carefully mix in ½ pint of chicken stock. Obviously if you are cooking for more than 2 people you will want to add more stock.

Most times I can make a roux without a struggle but sometimes I get loads of lumps so if you aren’t an expert add the liquid very slowly, on a low heat, stirring all the time. Add ¼ teaspoon of marmite to the sauce and 100g passata (or more if making a larger quantity of sauce).

Season with salt and pepper and a teaspoon of sugar. It really does depend how much you want your sauce to mimic Heinz tomato soup, so add as much or as little seasoning as you like.

Cook the pork and onion according to the basic recipe. Add the sauce to the onions.

If your pieces of pork are smaller you only need to cook them for about 40 minutes.

Ingredients:
Butter
Plain flour
Tomato purée: about a tablespoon
Marmite: the Swiss make a version called Cenovis, and you could use Vegemite, but we import Marmite from London
Chicken stock: I always use a celery-free stock cube
Passata if you can get it, or finely chopped tinned tomatoes
Salt, pepper, sugar
1 Onion: chopped
Pork chops: 1 each if they’re big and chunky, 2 each if they’re small
Mashed potato, pasta, rice or maybe flatbreads to serve.

 I used the last can of Heinz tomato soup in the local supermarket

A Spot of Cookery: Rose Petal Jelly

When we moved into this house the garden was a disaster. Just chock full of horrible shrubs that didn't even try to flower. I suppose the previous owners wanted a low maintenance garden, but it didn't even look pretty. So after a great deal of effort - I would like to say we ripped the shrubs out - but in fact we struggled them out very slowly; at times it felt as though we were digging to Australia. But eventually we planted some fabulous old roses, mostly dark red or white, chosen especially for their fragrance. Honestly, there is no point in having roses if they don't smell wonderful.

Well, our roses do smell fabulous but this summer we are battling with torrential rain and thunderstorms and the poor old roses are not having a happy time. So I thought I'd grab the blooms before they got totally sodden and make rose petal jelly.

The last time I tried this was over 20 years ago and I have lost the recipe, but I know I used hybrid tea roses which have larger flowers with bigger petals than the old roses we have in the garden now, so I looked online and read 10 or more recipes to see what everyone recommends. I read US recipes in cups, UK recipes in imperial measurements and any old recipes in metric. And they were surprisingly different. So I kind of made up my own. After much research this is what I did.... sort of...

One pint of rose petals
I found recipes that ask for 2 pints of petals which is a vast amount unless you have a huge garden (or don't mind taking all the flowers from your garden at once), or perhaps 200g which is fine but the petals have to be dry when you weigh them or the measurement is skewed. One recipe told me that 15 roses would be 2 pints. I found that 15 of my roses made about 1 pint. So see what you get from your garden.

I don't remember anything about the recipe I used before except that it made a really big deal about removing the white bit where the petal attaches to the central stalk. I seem to remember it's supposed to be bitter. Not one of the recipes I looked at mentioned this, but I snipped off the white bits anyway because I remembered doing it before. If it isn't necessary it is at least a good way of picking over the petals and removing any that are damaged, and searching out any insects.

Wash the rose petals

250g sugar
½ pint water

Put the sugar and the water into a pan with a lid. Heat gently until the sugar is dissolved and then take off the heat. Add the rose petals, cover the pan and leave for 3 hours. With my lovely old roses this infusion smells wonderful.

Sterilise some jam jars by washing in hot water and then drying them in the oven. I found that 1 pint of roses makes only about a jar and a half. I know, that sounds vague, but I've made this recipe twice now and the measurements are not precise. So have more jars ready in case you need them.

Strain the liquid and add about 4 tablespoons of lemon juice. This will brighten the colour.

Bring to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Skim off anything you don't like the look of.
Remove from the heat and add 50ml liquid pectin.
At this stage one of the recipes I looked at suggested that you could add a few of the discarded rose petals. I thought not. My 25 years ago recipe left the petals in but I found that the jelly + petal mixture squeaked. Call me weird but I don't like food that squeaks, and a scone with clotted cream and rose petal jelly should be a great delicacy... and I don't want it to squeak. So I left the petals out. Besides, by this stage they had taken on an unpleasant dull mauve colour so I didn't fancy adding them back into the mix.

Put the pan back on the heat and boil for 10 minutes.
Your jelly should be ready to set. Take a little bit out with a teaspoon and drop it on to a cold plate that’s been chilling in the fridge. It should show signs of setting almost at once. If not, boil for a little longer, or maybe add a bit more pectin and try again. Basically, see how you go.
Rest for a couple of minutes and then pour into the sterilised jars.

The roses that I used are dark red or deep pink. If yours are a lighter colour you may feel the need to add some food colouring. Or not. The first rose petal jelly I saw was pale pink.