Tag: Observer Food magazine

Sweet Basil Biscuits

As you will have noticed from the previous post about my balcony garden in the sky, one of the things I love to do is grow my own basil – one of the most aromatic and useful herbs there are.

It saddens me when I see it in little pots in the supermarket. All you get are weedy, little, soft stems and a poor plant that is far too big for the pot. The seedlings are grown indoors in their thousands and, once bought and brought home, tend to die quickly in their thousands too. The best basil is grown from seed and allowed to get good and strong outside. I’m certain that the buffeting of the wind strengthens their stems. The sunshine concentrates their scent. Is there anything nicer than the scent of fresh basil? It’s enlivening.

OK, there’s a lot of the time when you simply CAN’T grow basil outside but when the opportunity is there – make the most of it. Failing that, of course, you must have a windowsill?

I like to grow the usual sweet basil, with its large soft leaves and the smaller leaved variety, Greek Basil. It’s not really Greek at all, but Italian, originating in Chile. An international basil with the most wonderfully strong scent. It grows tidily too, like a tight,  little ball. I keep promising myself that next year I will grow it in two, tall and elegant pots and put them on either side of the french doors to the balcony. Can you imagine the smell of that, wafting into the living room on a hot night? Scented topiary. Blissful.

I use my basil in traditional ways in tomato based sauces, scattered on top of  beautiful buffalo mozzarella with tomatoes as a delicious salad, in pesto for a simple pasta dish and in oil that I would make to drizzle over salads or cheese or bread later. Always it seemed in savoury ways. I’d never even thought of using it in something sweet.

And then, in last month’s Observer Food Magazine,  Nigel Slater wrote about going to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show and meeting his friend, Jekka McVicar (she of the famous Jekka’s herbs). She handed him some basil biscuits…..

Basil biscuits?

Could this be a new use for some of the basil I was growing? I had to try.

And a biscuit, too…. well, it would be in the interests of research, obviously. You are allowed research on a diet, I’m sure of it. Obviously, me working in a University has caused me to develop serious academic concerns.

Besides, it was quick and easy. What more prompting did I need?

No more prompting but I did need 100g of butter, 50g of sugar, 50g of ground almonds, 100g of plain flour and a large bunch of basil leaves.

I like the symmetry of that recipe – easy to remember quantities and not many ingredients. Perfect!

The oven was switched on to 180 degrees C ( 160 degrees if you have a fan assisted oven) 350 degrees F.

It was a simple matter of creaming the butter and sugar together

Then adding the ground almonds and then the flour.

Pop that out onto a floured board and knead it into a dough.

Then, chop your basil and start rolling the dough into it… the basil will  get right in there and the smell is magnificent.

See?

All you have to do now is slice the roll into biscuits! The recipe says 15 -20 biscuits from this amount of dough so use your judgement. I can never work out, with any speed, just how big 1cm is. It’s about the width of a little finger, if that’s any help? And yes, I did just measure it with a ruler to check.

(Comes of being a child of the crossover age when we switched from Imperial measurements to metric, I suppose, although I do think all of us Brits are like that. It doesn’t matter how long we have been metric, or how many regulations there are to stop shopkeepers selling us half a pound of butter when we should be asking for grams, or a pint of milk  instead of 0.5862 of a litre; we still, generally, think in pounds and ounces, pints and gallons, feet and inches.

Look at when a baby is born – we still coo with delight (and understand exactly) what a good 8lb baby will be like. Same goes for feet and inches. I am five feet three inches tall. I can understand that. 160 odd centimetres? Sounds like a giant! And my waist… well that used to be 24 inches – though with age and greed that has certainly increased. 24 inches? You know where you are with that. But 61 centimetres? Dear me.)

So, slice your biscuit dough into the appropriate size. Use whatever measurement you like. I am most fond of commonsense as a measurement.

Put them onto a baking tray – either grease it well or use, as I do, a silicone baking sheet so the cooked biscuits can slide off easily. (Saves on the washing up, too!)

Into the oven for 15 – 20 minutes and then you get this….

Deliciously golden, green flecked biscuits… the smell is utterly gorgeous. The taste is subtle, sweet and delicious.  very definitely more-ish.

Whoever would have thought that putting basil into a biscuit could be so inspired? Jekka McVicar deserves a medal.

I took some in to work and they were devoured there too.

All I can say is, basil is not just for tomatoes but for biscuits too!

Strawberry Pistachio Shortbreads

I love reading. I especially love reading food writing.  I think there’s nothing better than reading the story behind the recipe. A recipe just set down by itself doesn’t grab me the way a recipe does when I get to know more about the cook… the reasons why they made that recipe and just how they did it.

 I have quite a large collection of cookery books  (well over 150) and a mountain of food magazines. The Bear is always on at me to do something with them but I just can’t. I suppose I should go through the magazines at least and cut out the recipes I really want to try but I just haven’t got around to it yet. Part of it is, I think, that I was bought up never to despoil a book (and by extension, a magazine.) I would no more take a pair of scissors to a book than I would turn down the corner of a book or crack its spine. Books are to treasure and read again and again.

Jeffrey Steingarten – now, there’s a writer! A lawyer turned food writer for Vogue, his books “The man who ate everything” and “It must have been something I ate” kept me enthralled for hours and I still go back and read a chapter every now and again. That’s not so much recipes as mini essays and it is one of the things the Bear and I bonded over when we first met. If you are looking for entertaining (hugely entertaining) and erudite, informative stories about food, he’s your man.

Nigel Slater is another – endlessly fascinating with a huge list of cookery books to his name. “Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger” is his autobiography… start to read that and I bet you won’t put it down. His “Kitchen Diaries” is one of my favourite books of all time. Nigel also writes for The Observer and the monthly Observer Food Magazine is one of my treats. There’s always something I want to cook from his articles –   everything he does is so beautiful – just look at his website and see what I mean.

The last Observer Food magazine (June 2010) featured his garden recipes and there was one in there that instantly appealled – Strawberry Pistachio Shortbreads. Strangely, for England, we have been having a marvellous summer – lovely bright days with lots of sun and the strawberries are making the most of it. There are mounds of fresh British strawberries everwyehere and this was my chance to make the most of them.

I wanted to take something nice to a friend’s house and the thought of lovely shortbreads topped with strawberries and vanilla cream seemed to be a brilliant idea. Very summery. Very British. Which would be good, because we were going to J’s house (he’s from Catalonia) and meeting N (from Argentina)  and L from the Czech Republic! Our get togethers are always brilliant international affairs.

Anyway, that was what I was going to make.

I needed  100g of butter, 3 tablespoons of caster sugar, an egg yolk, 200g of plain flour and 100g of finely ground pistachios for the shortbread….

And that is when I started to wonder. If you look at the article you can see a picture of the shortbreads and they seem to have bits of pistachios in there… not finely ground at all. So what should I do?

I sat at my desk (OK, so I was at work, but a girl can’t work constantly…) and flicked through the article again… it definitely said ground pistachios and the picture didn’t show that. Then I noticed at the end of the article was Nigel’s email address at the Observer.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained has always been my motto, so I emailed him, just asking for clarification. I mean, had he done it one way and decided the other way was better?

I didn’t really expect an answer but within 20 minutes he had replied! How marvellous was that? I never for a minute anticipated a reply.. or if I had got one, it would have been a standard response, copied and pasted into an email some weeks later. What a gentleman!

And the answer… you can use ground or roughly chopped as you choose. the resulting difference will only be the texture.

I liked the look of the ones in his photograph so I decided to do roughly chopped pistachios.

So… I was ready…

I weighed 100g of butter, beat it until it was soft and fluffy with 3 tablespoons of caster sugar (that’s superfine to those of you across the Atlantic)

Roughly blitzed (briefly) 100g of pistachios so I got a range of shapes and sizes of bits of nuts

Then dropped the pistachio bits into the buttery mix and mixed it in well

One egg yolk was added to bind it together and then the  200g of flour was added.

It was a stiff mix and Nigel advised adding a tablespoon of water to it all to make it into a firm dough.

This had to be kneaded into a ball and then rolled into a thick sausage shape. As this was to serve 8, I could see how big the roll should be.

Don’t they look pretty?

I pre-heated the oven to 180 degrees C/355 degrees F (actually, Nigel didn’t put the temperature on the recipe but I used what I thought would be appropriate and anyway, it was a bit late to be emailing him again. I couldn’t really expect him to be sitting there just looking at his emails)

In they went, lying on a silicone sheet for ten minutes or thereabouts. They weren’t to get coloured really,  just dry to the touch.

The cream was made by mixing extra thick double cream with some vanilla seeds…

 just slit the pods with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds

and mix it through for the most gorgeous vanilla cream.

I sliced my beautiful strawberries and they were ready to be balanced on great, generous spoonfuls of delicious cream… on top of those gorgeous shortbreads.

What could be more British than strawberries and cream on a hot summer’s day? Our international gathering made short work of them.

Thanks, Nigel. Thanks a lot – they were lovely. And thanks for replying!