Rosemary Walnut Shortbread

Rosemary, with its unforgettable pine-like fragrance, pungent flavour, and unique health benefits, is an indispensable herb for every kitchen.
They are often used to flavour meat, fish, sauces or soups. Besides its well-known culinary use, rosemary has been used in cosmetic and to treat digestive disorders and headaches.

Adapted from BBC Good Food

• 325 g All purpose flour
  
• 200 g Salted butter
  
• 125 g Caster sugar
  
• 2 Egg yolks
  
• 1 tbsp Rosemary
  ©angiesrecipes, finely chopped
  
• 60 g Walnuts, chopped
  

1. Put the flour and butter in a food processor and whizz until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, egg yolks and rosemary and whizz to a dough.
   
2. Tip onto a lightly floured work surface and knead in the walnuts. Shape into a log about 5cm across. Wrap in plastic and chill for an hour.
   
3. Line two baking trays with paper. Heat the oven to 180C/350F. Slice the dough into biscuits and arrange on the prepared trays. Bake for 20 minutes until lightly golden brown. Remove and transfer to the wire racks to cool.

Interlude: best kitchen kit shop ever.

Last night I went to a professional catering shop on Shaftesbury Avenue called Pages and it was like a magic kingdom.

They stock things in there that I've only ever heard about, like sugar thermometers, and there are stacks and stacks of pans and trays and boxes and deep-fry baskets in 5 different sizes and 6 six different sorts of kitchen timer and huge, plastic, colour-coded chopping boards and industrial-sized pouches of white peach syrup for bellinis.

I went sort of crazy and bought myself:

- a thermal teapot, which I've been wanting for ages because a ceramic teapot is all very well and jolly but the tea goes cold and I think tea cosies are ridiculous
- three of those squeezy clear bottles for storing salad dressings and drizzling icing (which you cannot buy anywhere else, for love nor money)
- a medium-sized aluminium roasting tray
- the most amazing kitchen timer you've ever seen that does hours and minutes and seconds, four different timer settings and a bleeper that could wake the dead
- some tupperware (because you can never have too much)
- an extra pair of tongs (ditto)
- and a heavy-duty flour dredger. I had a crappy plastic flour dredger and even in its crappiness I used it a lot, so I felt like it was time I went pro with my flour dredger.

Forget everything I ever said about getting things from John Lewis. Go directly to Pages, 121 Shaftesbury Avenue, or you can buy online from their excellent website.

Christmas special #9: Mince pies



Photo by Elena Heatherwick



It really is very Stepford to make your own mince pies, so this one is for home baking enthusiasts only. Or for anyone who basically never, ever sees their family or does any cooking and is desperately trying to over-compensate.

Anyway having said all that mince pies are really easy. I do my mince pies in a slightly controversial way, in that I make them quite small and I make them with puff pastry and not shortcrust pastry.

I'm sure you all know the difference, but for any newcomers, puff pastry is like what vol-au-vents and savoury pie toppings are usually made off - sort of flaky n stuff know what I'm saying? And shortcrust pastry is what you get in a quiche, or on top of a fruit pie.

You can make up a quantity of puff pastry using Hugh F-W's recipe, which I've written about, with photographs, in this post: http://reciperifle.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs-corens-chicken-pie.html

That makes quite a lot. Even though you can just wrap up the leftovers and put in the freezer for another time, if you don't want that much puff pastry hanging about, then make it in half or even quarter quantities.

To assemble the mince pies you will need:

1 fairy cake tray
1 jar of mincemeat - I get mine from WAITROSE - one 410g jar of mincemeat will do about a dozen small pies.
1 quantity puff pastry
pastry cutters of your choice. I put stars on mine because I put stars on everything. I even have some stars tattooed on my person - although I'm in the middle of trying to get them taken off because tattoos are just like SO over
1 beaten egg to glaze
icing sugar

1 Roll out your pastry quite thin, like 3 mm, as it will puff up on cooking

2 Grease your fairy cake tin thoroughly as what will happen otherwise is that the mincemeat will bubble up and over the top of your pastry and superglue the little buggers to the tray and you will have to chip them out with a hammer and chisel

3 Cut out with a round cutter your pie bases and settle them into the fairy cake dips, fill with mincemeat and lay the festively-shaped lid of your choosing on top. Brush with eggwash

4 Bake in a 180C oven for 25 minutes

5 Eat hot, or reheat for 10 mins before eating and dust with icing sugar.

Christmas special #8: Christmas biscuits



Photo by Elena Heatherwick. Decorations by Recipe Rifle


Another Jamie Oliver recipe. The dough quantity here makes loads of biscuits - at least 30 depending on how big your biscuit cutters are.

I decorated these using Dr Oetker's writing icing, available from Waitrose, but any writing icing, sprinkles, or silver ball decorations will do.

So here we go:

210g plain flour
pinch salt
1tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarb soda
125g butter, cubed
100g sugar
1 egg
4 tbsp warm golden syrup

1 Preheat oven to 190C or 180 for fan ovens.

2 Mix together the first 6 dry ingredients. I recently learnt that swizzling dry ingredients with a whisk does pretty much the same job as sieving.

3 Rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture is crumby then add the egg and the syrup and mix with a spoon - not a fork or a whisk or it'll all get stuck between the spikes and drive you mental.

4 You ought to have a fairly soft dough by now, depending on how accurately you manage to measure out your syrup. Too much syrup - very easily done - and you'll have to compensate with a bit more flour.

This dough at the best of times is quite soft and fragile. It breaks away and flops out of shape quite easily - so don't lose heart if you only manage to get 2 out of every 3 dough-shapes safely onto your baking tray. A useful tool to have at hand is a fish slice or any other slim, flat metallic thing to slide your shapes off the worktop.

This dough rises a bit, so best to roll it out quite thin - about 2-3mm. If you want to use these as tree decorations, poke a hole in the top before baking.

5 These biscuits are incredibly sensitive to individual oven strengths. Mine has a fan and is brand new and is a very unsubtle creature - she is the BA Baracus of ovens - and so I only needed to do these biscuits for 5 mins at 180C.

Your oven will be different. So my advice is to start off by baking one or two biscuits at 190 for 10 minutes and take it from there. What you're looking for is a nice golden colour but a still a fraction of give in the middle of the biscuit. When they come out of the oven, they will still be squidgy and will harden on cooling, so wait 5 mins before testing their done-ness.

Decorate when cool.

A note: Babies seem to go completely nuts for these, especially those teething. It's the ginger or something - and the fact that if you drool a lot over them they turn into a sort of cakey consistency. If you wanted to do them especially for a baby, you could halve the quantity of sugar, (or cut it out completely depending on how sensitive you are about that sort of thing), and then cut them out quite thick, like a rusk.

Orange Beetroot Salad

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A delicious and simple salad with fresh oranges and quality vacuum packed cooked beetroot served with orange caper dressing. d makes The contrast of colours makes the salad extremely appetizing and pleasing.

• 2 Cooked Beetroot, cut into 4mm thick slices
  
• 2 Oranges
  
• 1 tbsp Flat parsley leaves, chopped
  
• 3 tbsp Orange juice
  
• 1 tsp Honey
  
• 20 ml Olive oil
  
• Salt and fresh ground Pepper
  
• 1 tbsp Red onion, finely chopped
  
• 10 Capers
  

1. Slice the cooked beetroot into 4mm thick slices. Peel the oranges, removing the white pith and slice into 4mm slices.
   
2. Place orange juice, honey, olive oil in a jar, season with salt and pepper. Close the lid and give it a good shake. Add in chopped red onions and capers. Mix thoroughly.
   
3. Arrange the orange and beetroot slices alternately in a row on a serving platter. Pour the dressing over and sprinkle the chopped parsley on top. Serve immediately.

And I also want to thank Alisha of The Ardent Epicure and Sara of The Lonely Radish for sharing this award with me. THANK YOU!

Christmas special #7: Suppliers

Can you remember the day when you found out that life was, occasionally, going to be really really disappointing?

I can't myself remember the exact day I realised that life was going to be disappointing. I've had so many disappointing days that they all merge into one and I can't remember which one came first.

Maybe it was the day I realised that...

- however hard I diet, my hands are always going to be a little bit fat

- clothes shops do a thing where they send all their best stuff to be photographed by newspapers and magazines and then immediately sell out of whatever it is so that when you go to the shops SPECIFICALLY for it, there's not hide nor hair but you buy something anyway, therefore falling for their ruse like an idiot

-  mouthwash is not a substitute for flossing

- popstars are now all younger than me

- I am never going to be "sporty"

- I am never going to be good at maths

- that really really really amazing pair of boots will never change my life. But  I will buy them anyway

- freelancing is much harder than it sounds

- Sex and the City 2 was a simple betrayal of my long-standing support of what is generally considered to be a ridiculous television programme

- you can't force people to dump boy/girlfriends you don't like, just by shouting

- tattoos don't come off that easily

- nail varnish doesn't really suit me

- neither do pastel colours

- or lipstick

- if you go to Art 4 Fun in West Hampstead on a Wednesday, because you want to make a mug for your friend Stefanie's birthday party on Saturday, you can't, because it takes 7 days to glaze and fire. And then you have to go home despite having put £4 in the parking meter


Those are some disappointments you can't do much about. But you can limit your disappointment at Christmas by ordering stuff in advance. Because even in this day and age of plenty, stuff runs out.

I used to be confused by ordering Christmas things in advance. Why would you do that? Why would you want a turkey or a cheese sitting around in your house for a whole month? But then I realised that the idea is to ring up or go online - like TODAY, yeah people? - and either order something to be delivered when you need it, or put your name down for something to be collected.

Then on the 23rd December you can smugly take delivery of your giant Ocado order, or on the 24th December you can sweep in to a butcher, barge to the head of the queue, greet the man behind the counter by his first name, take in both hands the last goose in North West London and then sweep out again and get in your car that you've double-parked outside with the hazard lights on.

So here are my recommendations for best suppliers. These are all except one, I'm afraid, London-based because I don't know any different, but if you don't live in London and know of a good supplier, let me know and I'll add it to the list. Or if you live in London and think I've missed something out, let me know.

All of these people are very nice. If you've never bought something from a specialised supplier and are a bit nervous about it, don't be. Just ring up and say "I've got 10 people coming for lunch on Christmas Day. Can you put aside a turkey that'll do all of them?"

And they'll say "Yes. That'll be £500 please."
Only joking!!!!!!

It'll be more like £750.

For all meat, but not poultry, get in touch with the one and only Ginger Pig in Marylebone: http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk/

For meat AND poultry, pay a visit to Frank Godfrey, in Highbury: http://www.fgodfrey.co.uk/

Straddling both Marylebone and Highbury is the mighty La Fromagerie, for all your cheesy needs. Although note that La Fromag specialises in French and world cheese, so if you're looking for a Cropwell Bishop they probably won't have it. Not cheap: http://www.lafromagerie.co.uk/

For smoked salmon, go to Panzers in St John's Wood. They do two sorts - wild and farmed. The wild smoked salmon is amazing but just, like, vomitingly expensive and none of your family will really appreciate it unless you are Jewish, so just go for the farmed stuff. Perfectly ethically sound, exquisite and half the price. http://www.panzers.co.uk/

And now for my one out-of -town rec, my friend Becky B says that this year she's getting some spicy boar cocktail sausages from Sillfield Farm - http://www.sillfield.co.uk/ - I haven't tasted them yet because her party isn't until tonight but she assures me that they're jolly nice.

Christmas special #6: glazed cocktail sausages

I didn't take this photo. My friend Elena Heatherwick did. She is available for all manner of photographic commissions. Nudity if classy.

It's possible to go really wild with cocktail sausage glazes. There are all sorts of knowledgable people who will tell you to add cranberry sauce or soy sauce or sugar or sesame seeds or chilli or whatever.

And by all means, do these exotic glazes if you feel like it. But don't let anyone tell you that there's anything wrong with a good old honey and mustard glaze as it's very easy, very festive and very delicious.

When you're buying cocktail sausages for a party, it's worth taking a trip to a butcher to see if they can get you a bag of 50 - or even 100 for a reasonable price. Supermarkets will gleefully bumrape your wallet when it comes to cocktail sausages, ("18 sausages for £9.99 - what a bargain"), because they know full well that you are desperate. So if you wanted to do them for a lot of people, perhaps go elsewhere.

Unless you are some hedgefund manager and cost is no issue, in which case, why the fuck are you doing your own party catering? Actually, I know a hedgefund manager and she'd probably do her own party catering because they're like that - (over-achievers) - but even then, be smart and go to a butcher.

So, for 20 sausages you will need:

- 1 tbsp runny honey
- 1 tbsp mustard - either grainy or English. Don't be scared off by the English mustard: I know it's fieryhot but the honey will balance it out and all you'll get is a mustardy note in the background, which will be very nice. You can use Dijon, but I think it's a bit of a wimpy flavour and a sausage needs something more robust
- the juice of half a lemon, just to loosen the whole thing up

1 Cook the sausages for about 15-20 mins at 180 on a baking tray or until coloured around the edges. At this point you can either take them out of the oven and store somewhere until you're ready to glaze them, or just go straight for it.

2 Whenever you're ready, assemble your glaze in a bowl, then pour over the sausages. You'll worry here that there isn't enough glaze to go round (and it IS true that there's no such thing as too much) but the honey will melt and spread out.

3 Put back in a 180C oven and continue to bake for about 15 minutes. If you've got time and are sober enough to remember, give them a bit of a shake half way through so that the glaze coats the sausages evenly.