Pancake Day!

I love Pancake Day! It may not be quite on the same scale as Mardi Gras but there’s something lovely about such a simple idea that you can just get on with and celebrate at home. I fully intend to ignore Lent but Pancake Day must be observed. Especially as I haven’t been in the UK for it for a few years.

And I really made the most of it, I think. Spinach and mozzarella pancakes followed by lemon and sugar pancakes. It was supposed to be spinach and ricotta pancakes, as I’m sure you can imagine, but the supermarket let me down. (A seasonal run on ricotta perhaps …) The mozzarella worked really well, though, with onion, a little garlic and a grating of nutmeg. And that’s about all the recipe you’re getting! There are pancake recipes here and here, so you don’t really need one. Plus, I’ve got to tootle off and pack some stuff for my 24 hour trip to Helsinki because my job finally got jetsetting and exciting. So off I go, with a happy Pancake Day wish to all!

Sweet and Sour Tuna and New Zealand Carrot Cake

These are a couple of recipes that I've had for a while. Although the fact that they are tried and tested doesn't mean that they're not hazardous - while preparing the cake I managed to both spray lemon juice directly into my left eye and cut my finger with the bread knife! But maybe that's more to do with me than the recipes...
Anyway, they are two fine dishes, and just the thing for treating your fella to a delicious post-Valentine Sunday lunch. Mr Splorer has been despairing of the lack of fishmongers in Cambridge and I can't say that I blame him. Although he was a bit spoilt by living in Valencia just 10 minutes from the Central Market! But we tootled off to the market in the centre of Cambridge this morning in search of some fish. We weren't massively impressed with it, but we did get a couple of tuna steaks to satisfy his fish cravings.

Sweet and Sour Tuna
(based on a Marcella Hazan recipe from The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking)

2 large tuna steaks (about 500g)
half a large onion, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons olive oil
50g flour, spread on a plate
1 tsp sugar
2 tbsp red wine vinegar (I used white wine vinegar, which worked fine)
3 tbsp dry white wine
1 tbsp chopped parsley

Remove the skin of the tuna steaks, wash them in cold water and pat them dry with kitchen paper. Get a saute pan wide enough to later accomodate all the steaks in a single layer. Put the sliced onion into the pan with half the olive oil, and a pinch of salt and turn the heat to medium-low. Cook until the onion has wilted completely, then turn up the heat to medium and continue cooking until the onion becomes coloured a deep golden brown. Transfer the onion into a small bowl.
Add the remaining oil to the pan, turn the heat up to medium-high, dredge the tuna steaks in flour on both sides and slip them into the pan. Cook them for 2-3 minutes, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add the sugar, vinegar, wine and onions, turn the heat up to high and cover the pan. Cook at a high heat for about 2 minutes. Uncover the pan, add the parsley, turn the fish steaks over once or twice, then transfer them to a warm dish.
If there are thin juices left in the pan, boil them down and at the same time scrape loose with a wooden spoon any delicious bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. If there is no liquid in the pan, add a splash of water or more wine and boil it away while loosening the cooking residues. Pour the contents of the pan over the tuna and serve at once.

Now for the cake recipe. This is actually the second time I've made it this week - first time was to celebrate my first 6 months at work (any excuse!). I snaffled the recipe from a friend's mum a few years ago. I have no idea what it has to do with New Zealand or where it came from originally, but it is my favourite carrot cake recipe. It's quite a long shopping list but easy peasy to make. And you can always make it again!

New Zealand Moist Carrot Cake
9oz / 250g flour
6oz / 170g muscovado sugar
6oz / 170g soft brown sugar
3 large eggs
6 fl oz / 180ml sunflower oil
2 fl oz / 60ml soured cream
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
11oz / 310g grated carrots
3 oz / 85g grated dessicated coconut

Preheat the oven to gas mark 2/300F/150C. Beat together the eggs, oil, vanilla essence, cream and sugars (sieved). In another bowl mix the flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, soda and salt. Add the egg and sugar mixture followed by the carrots and coconut. Mix well and then place in a 24cm cake tin and bake for 1 and a half to 2 hours.

To make a topping, mix:
4oz / 110g cream cheese
2 oz / 55g unsalted butter
2 oz / 55g icing sugar
juice of half a lemon

The cake recipe makes quite a whopping amount of mixture, so you can either make one big fat kick ass cake and put the topping, rather imaginatively, on the top, or you can make two smaller cakes and use the topping as a filling, in the style of a victoria sponge. Oh, and don't ignore the bit about sieving the sugars. I was sceptical about sieving muscovado sugar the first time round but not doing it left lumps of muscovado sugar in the mixure. Didn't do the cake much harm to be fair, but it was a little distressing!
Everyone at work was very positive about the cake, but big bro had some "constructive criticism". He said that it was too savoury for his taste and that the topping could use more sugar. I'm not sure that I agree with him, but if you have quite a sweet tooth, you could quite easily up the sugar content.

Greengrocer's Pie

In honour of this being my first post as a married woman, this recipe is one of Mr Splorer's new specialities, as well as being the delicious Valentine's dinner he just made me. As a house husband with access to a whole new set of ingredients, he's been doing some marvellous experimenting. Although I must admit that the first time he made this, when he said he was going to make vegetarian shepherd's pie, I wasn't overly enthused. But it turned out to be a delicious little number, a fine nourishing meal. Just the thing to warm you on chilly winter evening, as you cosy up to your new husband!

2 big potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
5 tbsp grated parmesan
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1 stick of celery, chopped
1 leek, halved and sliced
2 carrots, diced
420g can mixed beans, drained and rinsed (he uses bog standard baked beans in tomato sauce)
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/2 tsp rosemary (optional)
1 tsp tomato purée
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Heat the oil. Add the onion, garlic, celery, leek and carrot and fry gently for about 10 minutes. Add the beans, and tomato purée with 1 tbsp water (or more if you're not using baked beans in sauce). Season to taste and simmer for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the potatoes in boiling salted water until tender. Drain then return to the hot pan over low heat to dry out briefly. Mash them then beat in the egg, followed by about 2 tbsp grated parmesan. Spoon the beans mixture into an ovenproof dish and top with the cheesy mash. Sprinkle over the remaining cheese. Cook for 20 minutes until the topping is golden brown.

The recipe is adapted from one from the BBC Food website and going through it with Mr Splorer we realised that he'd been putting mixed spice in instead of the mixed herbs specified in the recipe. (These funny foreigners!) And the surprising thing is that it really works. That's evolution, I suppose!
Oh, and I've just noticed that yesterday was the one year anniversary of my blogging life - how exciting! Am obviously now a seasoned blogger type. Have just been checking out some of the other food blogs that are about, actually. I could spend hours going from one recommendation to the next, checking out all these amazing things that people are making. I'll try and update the list of blogs on the left so that you can check them out - although I warn you, it's quite addictive!

Apple crumble

Mmmmm, so comforting and delicious. A fine British classic too. And easy peasy. The recipe for the crumble bit comes from common-law-sister-in-law (who got it from Nigel Slater). The rest of it involved making it up as I went along, but it wouldn't have made the heights of the blog if the result wasn't damn good. It seemed especially right on such a cold, snowy day.

4 small apples
zest and juice of one lemon
half tsp mixed spice
1 tbsp soft brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
6oz butter
6oz caster sugar
6oz plain flour

Peel, core and slice the apples and mix them with the lemon juice, zest, mixed spice, and half the cinnamon and brown sugar.
In another bowl, rub the butter, caster sugar and plain flour with your hands, until it gets that breadcrumb look. Then add a splash of water and mix in to make little lumps.
Get yourself a nice oven dish and layer the apples on the bottom. Cover the apples with the buttery crumble mixture and sprinkle the remaining brown sugar and cinnamon over the top.
Cook in a preheated oven at Gas 5 for about 40 minutes. Serve with yoghurt, cream or custard.

Right, I'm off to curl up in bed with a good book. And hope that the streets don't freeze overnight ...