Wild Garlic Digestives

I'm learning to forage. It's something you have to be careful about but I'm a member of a Facebook group called Wild Food and Hedgewitchery which keeps us on the straight and narrow and allows us to post pictures to check what we've found is edible.

But wild garlic is fairly easy to spot; you just rub your fingers on the leaves and they smell of garlic. There was a great pathway of new growth  on Friday's beagle walk and I thought, this time, I'll do it!

Oh my! It's delicious all on its own but I was planning to make some gluten-free digestives and after crushing the leaves with a pestle and morter, added them into the mix.

Yes, I know they're not pretty (if you've read this blog before you'll know I'm not an artistic cook 😄) but oh my! Talk about yummy. With digestives, I can generally get the dough into the oven without too much interference but about a quarter of this stuff was gone before I could get it onto the tray.

I'm pretty sure that if you made the mix with a bit more care, you could roll them out and make them with a round cutter but they won't taste any better!

Recipe:

GF Digestives

12g porridge oats
20g mixed pumpkin, sunflower and flax seeds.
75g Dove’s Farm GF plain flour (or use the SR but don’t add baking powder)
½ tbsp baking powder
Large pinch salt
25g soft brown sugar
1 tbsp soft butter
1 tbsp goat (or other) milk

Preheat oven to 200c/Gas 6
Line baking tray with parchment

Blitz oats and seeds in food mixer
Add flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and butter and whizz until well mixed
Knead briefly on a floured board and roll out (if you like neat stuff!) and cut into shapes about 3mm thick
Otherwise, spoon onto baking sheet and flatten with fingers

Bake for about 12 minutes until lightly golden.

Flushed with success, I made a wild garlic cauliflower cheese last night. Yum!

Cooking With Spelt.

I try and eat as healthily as I can, for a given value of 'Oh for God's sake!' when the gluten-free, sugar-free, yeast-free, vegan, lactose-free (and sometimes even raw) effort collapses in the dish either before, during or after cooking or dehydrating. I will point out here that I am not vegan nor vegetarian so you will be facing bacon on this blog.

Like now.

This is a quiche made with with spelt flour. I love cooking with spelt and it tastes delicious and this turned out pretty well

It's a half-and-half quiche in that the left-hand side has cow cheese and the right-hand side has goat cheese. Luckily I only have slight intolerances so I can do that sort of thing — and it helps my husband who is an old-fashioned bloke when it comes to food and who finds quinoia, dehydrated kale and such stuff scarier than spiders in the bath.*

I also make wraps with just spelt, seasoning and a little water, flatten them with my bare hands and dry fry and they are just gorgeous.

Quiche Recipe:

• 300 gms spelt or plain flour
• 150 gms shortening (I used coconut oil)
• 50 gms butter.
• Two eggs, beaten.
• 1.5 kilos Spanish onions
• Cheese and bacon to taste.

Grease a flan base. Put flour, shortening and season in the food mixer and wizz (or, if you're being impressive, mix in a bowl).
Bake blind for 20 minutes. I use temperature of 325F for most things and guess for the others but all cookers are different so I can't really advise here...You'll know.
Heat the 50 gm of butter in a large pan or casserole. Quarter the onions and cook vigorously for about half an hour. Take care they do not burn - stir occasionally. Towards the end of the half hour, turn the heat up and stir continually until the onions start to brown and liquify.
Pour them on to the pastry and cover with the beaten eggs, grated cheese and slices of ham or bacon (or asparagus or whatever).
Cook for half an hour on 325 - or until nicely bronzed and gooey.
Eat warm.

However, I had forgotten the traditional custom of putting pastry into the fridge for half an hour before rolling it out. Do not try that with spelt flour.

This (right) is what happens when you do that. It shatters. This is another pie - a chicken pie made with spelt flour. I'd already made the base and it was already showing a tendency to shatter when I blind-baked it. So, I thought the fridge might help when it came to putting the top on.

Obviously not...

After I'd stopped laughing, I served the pie without a pastry topping.

A second attempt (below) was hardly more successful than the first aesthetics-wise. But both pies were yummy. No, I'll not post the recipe because they are just pastry, leftover chicken, frozen veg and some gravy from the freezer.
You can manage that :-)

Time For Some Not Fake Food.

I want to introduce you to my 2014 Christmas cake. This is the cake that started it.
As you can see, it’s a mess.

At the time of making it, I was coping with a serious diagnosis, the first sessions of treatment and was feeling sick, discouraged and as weak as a kitten. But I ‘had’ to make a Christmas cake because I always have made one. Buying one or doing without was out of the question, despite my husband’s entreaties not to be an idiot. It was crazy; I admit it. But I simply had to make the cake.

Slowly and with many stops to rest, I managed to bake the cake, ice it and, as I was carrying it to the storeroom, in its tin, I lost my balance and fell. The tin stayed shut but the cake was shattered.

As you can imagine, I was desperately upset. And then, as I tried to patch the shattered cake back together—while pushing away two beagles who wanted to help clear it up with great enthusiasm— my first tears of frustration stopped and I began to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I patched up the cake, still laughing. I laughed all the way through that Christmas, every time I saw that disreputable, messy and cracked cake and every time I remembered it. I showed it to family and friends with delight. They laughed too. It became the highlight of the whole of Christmas.

And, what’s more, it was delicious.

And it made me think - because all the pictures of Christmas cakes you're going to see all over the Internet are perfect. Mostly they're made with that kind of plasticy-roll-on icing which I'm too snobby to touch with a bargepole. Frankly, my icing is always a bit of a mess - and I don't mind.

So, from now on, this blog is going to be my Not Fake Food cooking blog, with real cooking pictures. Enjoy!