Peanut butter and caramel popcorn

I read this recipe inThe Kitchn, and it scared me by the copious amounts of peanut butter and sugar and honey. But the idea of peanut butter popcorn danced in my head all day until there was nothing to do but get into the kitchen and adapt.

In the interests of research I have popped many bowls of popcorn, and remain unconvinced about the best microwave method. So far a big paper bag with plastic clips, or a bowl topped with clingfilm have worked best, but stovetop remains supreme.

My children are very small, though, so microwave it is. Likewise, I make the sauce on my own, well away from little critters who might jump up and down excitedly and burn themselves with caramel.

I leave them to pop the corn and feel proud of themselves.

Once you have the sauce you simply pop the corn whichever way you like, and pour the sauce over. This is more than enough for two 1/4 cup kernel batches of popcorn, but that´s because I like to taste the popcorn more than the sauce, which to me is a bonus treat more than an overall cover.

You choose how you like it best.

To make the pb caramel:

Put 1/3 cup of sugar in a pan with a couple of spoonfuls of water. I use brown sugar but caster is fine.

Stir it over a medium fire until you have caramel, which is when it bubbles like a witch´s brew and smells like heaven.

Add 1/3 cup of peanut butter (smooth, without sugar) and stir until it´s dissolved.

If the sauce looks too thick add some water until it´s how you like it.

The good news is that it keeps in a jar just so, and that it´s just as wonderful over ice cream, or fruit, or pancakes, or, you get the picture. I dare say this isn´t even very good news.

Also, it´s vegan, so go ahead and pour it over banana ice cream when you entertain people of that persuasion.

French toast

French toast is so easy to make that probably nobody needs a recipe, but then again, somebody makes French toast for the first time some day, and you won´t want it to catch you at a bad time, like Dustin Hoffmann in Kramer vs Kramer.

My children love this, so I make it for dinner rather than breakfast. It goes just as well with cheese and broccoli as it does with maple syrup and bacon.

Take one egg per person, add the same volume of milk, more or less, beat it well and dunk sliced bread. It has to soak up the liquid but not turn soggy, so it´s best to use old bread, from a good loaf (the guys from the bag above make the best in Aberdeen).

Toast in a pan you´ve brushed with oil or butter and that´s it. Easy.

And, as a little Friday bonus, a link to a beautiful short film by Maira Kalman.Guaranteed to put a smile on your face, and tighten your heart, all at the same time.

Royal weddings app, out in English, and chocolate sauce

Hello dear readers. As promised, our royal weddings app is now out in English. As the world gears up for royal wedding madness, get ready with some brushing up on frivolous historical tidbits.

Also, a chocolate sauce to enhance your celebrations.

Chocolate sauce is one of those things you just have to know how to make. It´s part of being a civilized member of this planet. Life is simply much better when you know you can pour some hot sauce over ice cream .

The simplest is, of course, ganache. Cream and good chopped chocolate, there you go. The little black dress of sweet sauces, dark, elegant, restrained, classic, it goes with everything and gives it a touch of class.

Sure. However, it depends on your having cream in the house. I don´t have cream in the house. In Spain, yes, I always have those little cartons of UHT cream, but here in the UK cream is fresh, so I only buy it with specific dishes in mind. Or else. You know how it is with cream, specially when it´s as criminally good as British cream.

Enter the storecupboard solution.

Chocolate sauce needs only cocoa, fat and sugar. So to make a very very simple and very very quick one, you can skip several steps and use Nutella, which, however well it cloaks itself in wholesome nuttiness is basically oil and sugar.

Put a whopping big spoonful of Nutella in a coffee mug with a half teaspoonful of cocoa and a glug of milk, and give it thirty seconds in the microwave.

Beat it well with a spoon and watch the messy melted spread turn glossy, dark, wicked and even more irresistible.

It is the perfect sauce, at once grown-up and intense, yet fudgy and sweet, with a praline undertone. It is the goods, I´m telling you. Ice cream sundae has never been so perilously easy.

Pour that over vanilla ice cream as you watch the royal wedding, and if you´re a true fan, add Rich Tea biscuits, which the groom seems to favour.

Pressure cooker flan

Dear 399 followers of Lobstersquad,
I´ve never told you, because I am a very slapdash blogger, but I´m sure you can guess; I love you, and I don´t say it enough. Likewise, dear readers. I´d love to give you all a great big hug.
I would also love to get down to tidying up this old blog, and use the new Blogger templates that allow the followers to show, and all those new bells and whistles. I promise you, it´s been on my list for long, and I hope to be able to do it soon, and make a proper links sidebar, and organize the tags. All those things.
There will also be a Lobstersquad surprise soon (and no, it´s not another baby). Three friends and I have teamed up to start up a little editorial project that we´re very excited about. The drawing above is part of it.
But for now, here´s a recipe I mentioned earlier, suitable for hectic lifestyles, and for celebrating eggy easter.

Pressure Cooker Flan

Take 3 eggs and 500 ml milk, 5 tbs sugar, and mix well, in a blender if you can.
Do the caramel trick with two tablespoonfuls of sugar in a soufflé dish that fits inside your pressure cooker, while you boil two cups of water in it (this is just to save time).

Cool the caramel a little by swirling it around, and pour the egg and milk mix in. Cover with aluminum foil and put in the steamer basket of the cooker. Bring up to pressure and count 15 minutes. Let the pressure drop naturally for about five.
Let cool and unmold. Eat chilled.

This is it. The silky, smooth, elegant flan of dreams. It helps to use the oh-so-excellent Scottish milk I find here, but normal milk works well. If you´re feeling decadent, use half milk half cream. I like puddings to be not very sweet, so you might want to add sugar.
Serve on its own or with strawberries (or strawberries and cream).

Lemon Muffin

Last weekend in Spain I saw my two friends called Paula. Both complained about recipes in this blog, which , as every blogger knows, is thrilling, since it means that your friends read your blog.

So, to start, I´ll try to address Paula F´s complaint first. The lemon muffins-cupcakes-madalenas, call them what you will.

It has been my arduous duty to make these winsome little cakes several times over the past few days, in different ovens, even, and all I can say is, I have no idea what can have gone wrong in Paula´s kitchen. These babies practically make themselves.
Maybe it was all due to The Fear. Cakes, like dogs, can smell it, and will bite given the chance, so here is some cake advice:

1- be confident but
2- be obedient. this is not where you splash merrily around and substitute ingredients and quantities to suit your prophetic soul.
3- this means, be attentive to measurements. I posted the recipe using volume measures, and they can be notoriously wayward, so here is one in grams, all nice and tidy. However, if you have no scales (though you should) and want to use cup measures, note that I use a set of cups that is marked 1 cup 250 ml, 1/2 cup 125 ml, etc.
4- do not overbeat. Be gentle. An unhurried few strokes, just enough to make the flour dissappear, even if there are lumps, will be enough.
5- if you have a muffin tin, then don´t bother with the paper. a little butter and flour will mean you don´t lose the crunchy outside.

These are the measurements in weight, which is more consistent and easier, if you have a scale.

Lemon Cupcakes

The measures are in cups, but for Spanish eyes, half a cup is 125 ml, or the size of a normal yogurt.

180 grams of flour
100 brown sugar
100 caster sugar
125 ml natural yogurt
1/2 teaspoonful baking powder
pinch of salt
zest and juice of one big lemon
2 eggs
75 gr. butter, melted or really really soft

Preheat oven to 180ºC and put muffin cases in tin (12)

Measure out the flour, salt, baking powder and sugar in one bowl.
In a bigger one, mix the butter, eggs, yogurt and lemon.
Tip the dry stuff into the big bowl and mix, with a very light hand. Better have lumps than overbeat.

Spoon the mixture into the cups, and good luck to you if you think you can do it without spilling stuff between the paper and the tin. Don´t go above two thirds, although you won´t, if you´re dividing evenly.

Bake for 20 or so until golden and puffed up. They don´t rise an awful lot, and the texture is grainy and not feather light, but they are pretty awsome.

I usually sprinkle some icing sugar on top, but that is very much optional.

Strawberry Syrup

Strawberry Syrup, originally uploaded by Lobstersquad.

you know perfectly well that it's too early for strawberries, even if they look pretty. So wait.
But if you fell into the trap, and came home with a lovely bunch of berries that turned out to be unyielding and tasteless, here's what you do.
Wash and hull them, then put them in a pan with some sugar, a splash of water and a slosh of balsamic vinegar. If you have one, squeeze an orange in there too.
Cook it over a medium flame until it's syrupy, glossy, and has turned a dark ruby red.
Wait for it to cool a little and eat with vanilla ice cream.
this is so good that you won't mind the hit and miss quality of so many strawberries

Caramel in the microwave

I make a lot of flan these days. Flan, and natillas/custard. A friend of J´s keeps hens, and every other week or so J turns up with a carton of muddy, enormous, gorgeous eggs.
If these eggs arrive when I´ve just bought some perfectly all right but otherwise unremarkable eggs from the shops, there are suddenly too many. So I just have to make a pudding with them, and keep the excellent eggs for poaching.

I make the flan in the pressure cooker, and will post the recipe, but for now, the discovery I´m happiest with. Caramel. That tricky, dangerous thing that I´ve always avoided. It can be made in the microwave, straight in the bowl you´ll use for the flan. isn´t that handy?

I use a soufflé bowl that holds about a litre. So put a couple of tablespoons of sugar in it, and a spoonful of water, and put it in the microwave. Give it twenty second bursts until it´s bubbling malevolenty, looks golden and smells delicious, a minute or so total.

That´s it.

Chocolate pudding

Forgive the cliché, but...what´s not to like in chocolate pudding? In Spain we call it natillas de chocolate, and I´d never consider it in a romantic dinner. This is strictly children´s food, the sort that the adults love to find at the back of the fridge, or steal from unsuspecting toddler´s plates.

I make it in the Thermomix, because it´s just very very convenient. You dump, the machine stirs, and when it´s over you pour it and let it cool. If you top it with whipped cream it becomes the ur version of the Copa Danone, beloved of Spanish children.
The hardest part is hiding it from children (and husband) until it´s properly cool. I dare say it´s very easy to make by hand, but I´m not sure I´m up for the careful stirring for minutes on end. I´d make chocolate mousse instead.
For a more adult and punchy flavour, try this malted version of Sally Schneider´s.

This makes four or five portions.

Put 50 gr of chocolate in the bowl and chop it with a few pulses of the turbo button.
Now add 30 gr. of cornstarch, 500 ml. of full fat milk, 50 gr. sugar and a pinch of salt. Program 8 minutes, 90 degrees, speed 3.
Now add a few drops of vanilla extract and give it a further two minutes with no heat, so it cools down a little.
Pour into a big bowl or ramekins, and if you hate the skin that will form, cover it with clingfilm.

The actual pudding is best enjoyed cold, but nobody said you had to wait to lick the bowl.

Instant gratification chocolate pudding (the toddler special)

Remember when you were a kid, how long everything took? It used to drive me nuts to be told that we were almost there, or that something was almost done, and then have to wait the ages a half hour seemed. In the case of cooking, it was aggravated by having to wait while something baked, then wait for it to cool. I usually ended up sick from eating warm cookies.

It´s with that in mind that I offer this recipe, perfect for making with children. It takes almost no time to mix, needs only a scale and a bowl and a spoon and you don´t have to turn on the hob or the oven. The cooking time is two minutes, and you can eat it warm.
I don´t claim that it´s the most elegant or stylish concoction, but boy is it fast. It tastes very good, specially when served hot with a scoop of ice cream, and it´s real food; not a rice crispie in sight. You can keep them entertained for a little while, and by the time the sugar rush hits them and they go berserk, it will hit you, too, and leave you with a beatific smile on your face, and the calm of good chocolate.

Chocolate steamed pudding

Makes two generous deep ramekins, or three less bountiful ones (which is fine. remember that ice cream?)

Put 50 gr. of 52% chocolate and 50 gr. butter in a big microwave safe bowl. Give them one minute on half strenght, and then mix well with the wooden spoon. Little fingers willl interfere but let them. Butter and chocolate, what´s wrong with that?
beat in an egg, and add 25 gr. of flour and a pinch of baking powder. Mix well and put the mix into ramekins. Cover them with clingfilm and microwave on high for 60 seconds.
That should have a bit of sauce underneath, but if you prefer to have the thing cooked through so you can turn it out, then give it 90 seconds, and butter the ramekins.
(You might need a test run. Microwaves are notoriusly weird, and different from each other)

See? Easy as anything. And satisfactory. By the time the bowl has been thoroughly licked, it´s cooked. If you need to entertain a toddler who doesn´t understand delayed gratification, this is it.

Ice cream

Sometimes only ice cream will do. You can either rush out and buy a tub of whatever´s your poison, or you can stock it for emergencies, but that way you usually eat the whole thing and then feel slightly sick and mildly guilty.

I prefer a bit of DIY, a spot of therapeutic chopping, a minute or two of mindsettling pottering about, so here´s how. Take two scoops of plain vanilla ice cream and let them soften a little in a pretty bowl. Meanwhile chop some very good 70% chocolate into very small pieces, and a couple of biscuits (plain Digestives, or whatever´s around) into chunkier ones. Put these in the bowl, mix them around, and there you have it, a perfect indulgence, just the right size, creamy and crunchy and exactly what you need.

Pressure cooker rice pudding

Here´s a good reason to love the pressure cooker; it´s honest, real cooking. There´s nothing gimicky about it. The spectacularly cut-down times only come after you have done all the real work of a recipe, slicing, dicing, browning and sauteeing. So it´s not really less work than the tradtional methods, where you leave things to simmer away on their own for hours. But it does make it possible to make spur of the moment stews and soups and bean salads that you would otherwise have to plan for. And they come out tasting as good or better than the usual.

I´m very impressed with pork shank soup done under an hour, mashed potatoes in ten minutes, and beef stew in half an hour. And note that these are the real times, not just the minutes they spend under pressure, and I factor in the depressure time too. The recipe I´ll give you, though, if for one of my all time favourite puddings, done in record time and much better than the way I used to make it. Please welcome the 

20 minute rice pudding

(adapted from Lindsey Bareham and Diane Page)

Put a walnut sized knob of butter in the open cooker, and turn 60 gr. pudding rice in it until it´s translucent. Add 600 ml. milk and three tablespoonfuls of sugar and bring to the boil with whatever flavouring you like; lemon peel, vanilla, cinnamon. Bear in mind that because no steam escapes flavour is intensified, so use less than you would normally.

Lock, and leave 12 minutes under pressure. Let it come down naturally and put it in a basin to chill. Just made it looks a bit soupy, but after a few hours it´s the creamiest, most delicious pudding, and the rice mantains its bite. Wonderful.

This image is one I´ve used before, in the days before I met my rice cooker and fell in love with it, but that was a long long time ago, and it´s a pretty drawing, no?

Almendrina (lazy almond peach tart)

One of my father´s more winning characteristics is that, working as he does in the food business, he often turns up with boxes of good stuff under his arm. And since these things are presents from the people who make them, they usually come in industrial sizes. My mother takes exception to them, saying they clutter the pantry, so I´m always kindly ready to lighten the load when I find a box of 24 jars of anchovies from Santoña, or several kilos of the best tiny brown lentils, or a huge can of duck confit.
This morning, rummaging around in the clutter of odds and ends in the terrace shelves I found two kilo tins of Almendrina. This is a sweet almond paste with a gorgeous old-style design, and I´d always been curious but never to the extent of taking one of those massive tins home.
Having one already there, though, I had to open it and start playing around. Apparently you can use it to make an almond drink, and as a sweetener in all sorts of things (try it instead of sugar with rice pudding) but here´s what I did:

Almond and peach tart for very lazy people with a couple of good tins to hand

This is a killer pudding, sweet and rich but not cloying. The almond paste isn´t too almondy, but provides a creamy undertone, almost like creme patissiere. I´ll try it with fresh stone fruit when it´s in season.

Ready made puff pastry
Peaches in syrup
Almendrina
Slivered almonds

Preheat the oven to 200ºC
Roll out the pastry. Smear some of the almond paste until just shy of the edges. Place the sliced peaches prettily or as you will. Pinch the edges of the pastry so that they´ll hold the juices when they start to run. Scatter slivered almonds on top, and bake until golden.

15 minute emergency brownies

I don´t want to start with a tiresome cliché about how brownies are the little black dress of chocolate puddings, so I won´t.  I will say, though, that they´re an endlessly useful recipe, because everyone seems to love brownies, and they go with everything, and they can be served just as is for a picnic or dolled up with hot fudge and ice cream for your best dinner party.

Or so I think, anyway.

They can also be frozen, so that when you make a big batch and have leftovers you can remove temptation, a little. Once they´re frozen they don´t even have to be thawed; just slice them thinly  and you won´t miss any Swiss bonbon.

If they have one shortcoming it´s the  impromptu chocolate binge. From start to finish, including baking time and cooling time, it´s at least an hour before you can be biting into your brownie. Not bad, but sometimes not quick enough.

For these moments we have the wonder brownie, also known as the brownie-cookie (no, I won´t say brookie).

This is simply a scaled down recipe, made with just one egg, and baked in dollops, cookiewise, for just five or six minutes.

The result are about fifteen wodgy disks, chewy at the rim, fudgy in the middle, perfect for scoffing right out of the oven, or to serve any way you would a brownie, in case of a brownie emergency.

I made them on Sunday and it took me eighteen minutes from start to finish, but that included doing the sums, never my forte. Since you have it done already, count on fifteen minutes, tops.

Preheat oven to 180ºC.

Melt 65 grams of chopped chocolate and 65 of butter in a bowl in the mircowave, on medium, for a minute. Once out, stir thoroughly with a wooden spoon so it mixes really well. Add one egg, beat, add 65 grams of sugar, and 40 of flour. Pinch of salt, stir well and spoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake for six or seven minutes. 

In this time you can lick the bowl and spoon, wash them for real, make coffee and prepare a pretty tray.

A palette knife might be good to take the things out, as they´ll be still sticky in the middle.

Serve and astound friends and family. You´re gonna love me for these, I bet.

Oh, and if you want to make a proper tray, the recipe I use is Nigella Lawson´s from How to be a domestic goddess, minus 100 gr. of sugar. It´s here.

Exhibition

Tomorrow is the opening of my show, and I am in that marvelous state where I am either staring blankly at the wall or snapping at whoever has the misfortune to speak to me. I can´t eat, or I am ravenous. I feel there are a million things I must do, but can´t think of any. Very much like pre-wedding nerves, except on that day I knew what I was going to wear, and had only to make sure I fit into it.
Since I have no idea what I will be looking like tomorrow, I have instead cooked myself a beautiful, decadent breakfast: pancakes with sauteed pears.
I´d never made pancakes for one, because one egg makes too much batter, and if I make the whole batch intending to freeze some it´s more than likely that I will eat all the pancakes anyway. But Marion Cunningham says you can keep batter in the fridge, and if that is true, well then, we´re home free.
I made three panckaes from this batter and sauteed a pear in butter and brown sugar in another pan, and it all took fifteen minutes, including one phone call to J to apologize for having snapped before, and another to my mother to schedule Pía´s morning.
Why don´t we make pancakes every morning?

Apple and pear sauce

Life is pretty hectic, and my kitchen is bubbling with all sorts of new things. I tote "The Zuni Café Cookbook" around, and make it bristle with post-it notes, even as I tell myself to ignore its higher flights ( use pecorino sardo for this dish, as pecorino romano would be way out of line. really?).
The markets are all closed for Semana Santa, so I can´t go wild with tubs of sardines. Instead, I boil vats of bones for ramen broth, after Hiroko Shimbo´s instructions.
Also, I mourn the loss of the shop where I bought the flakiest, crispest dough for turnovers. Will I find those Argentine beauties ever again?
Then there is Pía. Every day she has a lunch consisting of a bunch of vegetables and a few scraps of chicken or beef, simmered and pureed until they lose all identity and interest. She is very welcome to this.
Her tea, now, that´s different. That´s a world-class smoothie of several fruits, and there are always several vultures lurking around to finish off whatever she doesn´t eat.
I also make batches of applesauce to freeze, and to give her when we´re out of the house, as we were last Thursday, when she came with us to see the Bacon exhibition at the Prado (no, it didn´t seem to scare her or give her nightmares).
It´s a mushy, velvety, not overly sweet and very good apple and pear sauce. I´m not above stealing a few spoonfuls myself.

All you do is peel and core three apples and three pears, toss them into the Thermomix bowl, add a cup of water or so, and program 15 minutes at 90ºC, speed one. When it´s done, puree it at speed 7 until it´s very very smooth.

Hot sauce for ice cream

Here are two useful recipes for Christmas. One is the stuffed chicken we do every year. Provided you have a good butcher who will debone the bird, it´s not difficult at all. It feeds a crowd and makes the house smell wonderful during the long baking time.It´s an essential part of our family Christmas, together with the film "Donavan´s Reef", which we always watch as the chicken cooks, after a siesta.

For more impromptu entertaining, the best thing to have always on hand is a block of basic elemental own-brand vanilla ice cream. If you have chocolate biscuits, make ice cream sandwiches. If not, a hot sauce tastes great and looks like you went to a lot of effort.

I always eyeball the hot sauce, so can´t help very much with quantities, but it´s something like this:

1 heaped spoonful of Nutella
50 gr. dark chocolate, chopped
a generous glug of cream

melt this in a saucepan, pour into a jug. If you have any, toast nuts briefly in a frying pan to scatter over.
If you have no Nutella, peanut butter can do. If you have no cream, a bit of butter and a splash of milk will do beautifully. And if you have any bonbons or chocolate bars around, chop them and throw them in at the end, so they melt but not all the way.

The ultimate lemon bar

First off, a new discovery: I have a food writer cousin in Palm Beach! She does great stuff, so go check it out. This is not one of those Spanish stretches of the word cousin, either, but an actual relative. We are both descended from same the great-grandmother who made American style biscuits for tea in Bilbao.

Simon Hopkinson says that good cooking is one third talent, one third skill, and one third good taste.
I think that´s probably true for high-end creative chefs. But for the rest of lowly mortals, it´s one third skill and two thirds repetition.
Take these lemon bars. They are without question the most wonderful morsels of tangy-sweet deliciousness known to mankind, but they didn´t start out this way. I tried several versions, all of which were good, but not quite as good as I hoped. Finally, after tweaking and trying and making them several times, I am now convinced that I have the ultimate lemon bar.

The biscuit base is from Belinda Jeffrey´s "Mix and bake". The lemon curd is from Donna Hay´s "Modern Classics 2". Both have been tampered with by yours truly, and adapted for that versatile and trusty old machine, the Thermomix 31*.

The ultimate lemon bar

Preheat the oven to 180º, and make the base

225 gr. flour
180 gr. butter
80 gr. sugar
zest of one lemon
pinch of salt

Put them in that order in the Th, program 15 seconds, speed 6. Turn out and let rest in the fridge for 30 minutes. It´s so buttery that it can be hard to work, so I just squish it into a 30x23 cm. tin, lined with greaseproof paper, and hope for the best.
Bake until pale golden, about 25'.

Meanwhile, make the custardy lemon filling.
Put 6 eggs,
1 and 1/2 tablespoonfuls of cornstarch
1 cup sugar**
1 cup lemon juice
zest of the lemons used for the juice
200 ml. cream

in the bowl. Program 5 minutes, speed 4, 80ºC.

This makes more than you´ll need for the size of tin. You can either do the complicated sums needed to cut down the recipe to four eggs, or have a bit of a lick-the-bowl fest, and still have some left for a couple of sweet little ramekins.

Let it cool a little, and spread it over the pastry base. Put in the oven for five minutes to set a bit more, then take it out and leave to cool.

To serve, dust with icing sugar and cut into squares. If you make the squares very small, nobody will even consider doing that annoying polite "oh, no I couldn´t" thing. They´ll come back for more and more.

*If you´re making them without machinery the best way to go will be to make the base as you would shortbread, and the filling as you would custard.

**I like my lemon desserts tart and not overly sweet, so just for your information, I will point out that the original filling in Belinda´s book called for two cups of sugar, and Donna for only 3/4 cup lemon juice.

Prunes in Pedro Ximenez syrup

Prunes have a bad rep. I don´t know why this should be so, but it is. Maybe it´s better if you think of them as dried plums? After all, plums are popular, beautiful, exciting little things with a short season and a winning nature. Prunes are their unglamorous spinster aunt, maybe, but still and all, they´re the spinster aunt of an exciting family, and I love them.

This is my adaptation of a Nigella Lawson recipe. She makes it with Marsala, but of course I use Pedro Ximénez, and so should you. It´s a wine made with rasins, so it goes particulary well with prunes. The result is a strong, dark Rembrandt-brown shiny compote. The fruit is chewy on the outside and smooth inside, and the syrup is beautiful and spicy, and you´ll have plenty to drizzle over yogurt and cereal once the fruit is finished.

Prunes in Pedro Ximenez syrup

Make 500 ml of tea (Earl Grey preferred but any black one will do).
Put it in a saucepan with a strip of orange peel, a star anise, a clove and a stick of cinammon. Add 80 gr. of brown sugar and 100 ml of Pedro Ximenez.
Bring to the boil and put in the plums (prunes, I mean). Simmer for 20 minutes.

Leave it to cool and wait at least 24 hours. It gets better and better, all winey and dark and sticky. N says to serve it with custard, but that´s overkill. Fridge cold yogurt cuts the richness perfectly.

Quick cake with plums

I´ve always had a bit of a cookbook habit, but of late it´s spiralled out of control. I´ve realised it´s the perfect reading when you have a new baby cornering the market for attention.

Cookbooks are cut down into very manageable chunks, so that even if you have the concentration span of a mosquito, you can generally get to the end of a recipe. There are no sub-plots, barring the occasional suggestion to serve with mashed potatoes. And always, always, there´s a happy ending: serves 4-6.

But this is strictly for entertainment. Now I only cook things that I know by heart, that are very simple, and can either be done ahead of time or in a very short flash. The soups, sandwich fillings, roast tomatoes or rice I might do while Pía lounges in her buggy and looks on with very mild interest. The quick stuff I reserve for just before dinner, when J can look after her and I am left alone. At the risk of sounding like an evil mother, I´ll say it´s a very relaxing break. I focus on the food, and the food only, and come back to my baby much refreshed. And I get to eat dinner, too.

The shopping is somewhat more erratic than it used to be, and I find myself with surplus stuff that needs to be used, fast. This is what I did yesterday with a bowl of plums that needed to be eaten. I´m very pleased with the result: a dead-easy, delicious cake that can be done on the spur of a moment (no need to remember to leave butter to soften), isn´t guilt-inducingly decadent, cooks fast and keeps very well for a day. I know that for a fact, because that´s how long it´s lasted, but for all I know, it might keep for longer.

All you do is use the batter for these little lemon cupcakes, sans lemon, and put it in a square pan of 21x21 cm. Then cut 8 plums in half, and arrange them in the batter so that you can later cut sixteen squares.

Bake as you would a normal cake. Sorry to be so imprecise, but my oven has no buttons. It took somewhere around 40 minutes in a mid to lowish one, with the heat coming only from below.
The result is a dense, slightly coarse sponge that surrounds quivering sweet fruit. Can´t wait to try it with pears.

Three epiphanies: café frappé, roast pork and lemon churros

Madrid is in the middle of a long long weekend. These are lazy times. If you stay in the city it takes at least a couple of days to wipe off the smug grin off your face when you hear the horror stories of people locked in nine-hour traffic jams on the way to the beach.
Turning on the computer is an act of sheer willpower. Particulary since to get to it I have to leap over a Scalextric set I´ve been lent (childhood dream), and a pile of rubbish J has promised to throw away after my crazy bout of clearing up yesterday.
So. This post is going to be a lazy, catch-all post, but it will be full of useful stuff. In the past weeks I´ve had no less than three epiphanies, but they are all such simple stuff that I can´t justify a whole post for each of them.

Number one falls under the category of the "how is it possible that it took me 32 years to do this". I can´t understand it, but there it is. A lifetime of sprinkling lemon juice and sugar over pancakes and crepes, and it never, ever, ocurred to me to do it on churros. A true eye-opener. Crunchy salty greasy churro and sweet sugar is a classic, but it can be a bit heavy. The lemon brings freshness and tang and danger: you end up eating quite a few more than you would otherwise.

Number two is, again, one of those duh moments. It took my cousin Pablo to mention the frappé method with Nescafé to send me hurtling to my cupboards to hunt down the cocktail shaker I received as a wedding present and never used (I´m a basic elemental gin and tonic girl, you see).
The pricey and not-really remotely good iced latte of Starbucks can be done at home with minumum fuss and maximum fun.
Just put 2 oz. milk, 3 oz. water (Euro meassures would be 50 ml and 75 ml), ice cubes, a spoonful of Nescafé and sugar as you like, inside a cocktail shaker or a glass jar with a trusty lid.
Shake the hell out of it, dancing to Carmen Miranda, or not, as you will, and pour the icy milky coffee with its creamy beige frothy head into a big glass.
This is a small quantity, but the shaking is such fun that I´d rather make two small ones than one big.

And finally, three. The Dutch oven method for pork shoulder. People. Seriously. What took me so long? I´ll tell you; it seemed too good to be true, that´s why. I just plain didn´t beleive it would taste better than an effortful way. Normally I slow roast my pork shoulders, basting from time to time, and it´s very good, juicy and flavourful. I´m not saying I´ll abandon that
method forever, because it´s hardly a big deal, but compared with the total ease of this other one, I´m not sure.
All I did last Wednesday was put the 1 kg hunk of meat with the ingredients of this marinade in the covered pot and leave it in a low oven for 3 and a half hours.
At the end, the meat really and truly fell apart. It was golden, and when brushed with the thick syrupy gravy, a thing of true beauty.
True, it becomes a shreddy, jellified mess at the slightest touch, but when has that ever been a problem?