Black eyed bean and squash stew

Oh dear, I really should have taken a photo of this, cos it was lovely. Anyway, this depends heavily on what I found at the Farmer's Market this week and two weeks ago. The insistence on small squashes is because that is what we have available this year. I'm told the weather was just too cold during April and May and they never really got going.
Note, the main ingredients are all in pretty vague amounts. That is fine, we are not baking, so little precision is needed. 

Ingredients

1. 250g black-eyed beans, soaked overnight
2. 2 small Kabocha squashes
3. About 20 shallot-type onions
4. Two or three cherry-bomb chillis
5. Large handlful of rainbow chard
6. Lots of garlic
7. 2 bay leaves
8. Twig of rosemary, twig or two of thyme
9. 2 pints of vegetable stock
10. Dessertspoon of molasses/treacle

Method

• Get someone who is not terrified of pressure cookers to deal with the beans. Otherwise, I would treat them like kidney beans, hard boil for 10 minutes to make sure they are no longer poisonous, then simmer for an hour or so until soft and floury inside. Are black-eyed beans poisonous? Of course you can use tinned, and I often do. Advantages of dried are: you don't have to carry the water and the weight of the tins, plus the beans will soak up more flavour from the sauce if they are not aready cooked to death and swimming in tin-juice.
• Get a large pan and start frying the whole, peeled shallots in oil. Do this very gently, for 20 mins to half an hour.
• Meanwhile, cut the squashes into halves (they really were small!) and take out their seeds. Place cut-side down on an oven tray at around 190°C, also for half an hour or until soft.
• When the onions are halfway there, add the herbs and four or five chopped up cloves of garlic. You don't want to burn the garlic, it tastes horrible.
• When the onions are golden, pour in the stock. There really is no shame in using powdered stock, such as Marigold, especially if you are adding lots of other flavours.
• Add in the molasses (this means, stick a dessertspoon in the tin, take it out full and leave the spoon in the pot of stew until the molasses has slid off it).
  Make a hole in the chillis with the point of a knife and add them whole. This worked very well with fresh juicy chillis and we got as much heat as seems reasonable with an autumn squash stew. By all means slice them up and add with the garlic if you prefer.
• While this is all simmering, get the cooked squash out of the oven and turn the oven to 140°C.
• It should be fairly easy to spoon the flesh from the skin and just drop spoonfulls and lumps into the stewpot. The cut flesh will be slilghtly carmelised, the skin will be a bit blackened and you don't need it.
Put the stewpot (mine is cast iron) in the oven for about 40 mins.
• Just before serving, slice the chard across and fry gently in butter with garlic until wilted.
• Serve the bowls of lovely orange stew with a topping of bright green chard and garlic. It is pretty filling!

In case you are wondering why I haven't blogged on anything techy in I don't know how long, the answer is MCTS. I am studying for Microsoft Certification as a Technical Specialist (Foundation). This is difficult and also pretty dry. I am producing no work of any creative value and you really don't want to know, trust me.

How bread gets made in this house

My bread recipe is an adaptation of Mollie Katzen's in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest (I know that is twee but her later books have more grown-up titles). I have been making it pretty much ever since we left Germany (12 years ago) because I couldn't find any nice English bread. Things look better these days but I still like my own.

This recipe produces bread that is half wholemeal and half white. It has a good texture, provided by the nuts and grains and most people love it. I do NOT use a breadmaker, I think they are silly. I have 6 loaf tins, each for a roughly 750g loaf, and that fills my oven. I freeze 5 and we start eating the other one. I make two amounts of her recipe. I must mention, it has one "bug", in that she asks for 2 cups of water. This will never work with such a lot of flour! use 3.

cup = 250ml
tablespoon = 5ml

Ingredients

• 3 cups warm water
• 1 tablespoon dried yeast
• pinch sugar or honey
• 4 ½ cups strong wholemeal flour
• 4 cups strong white flour
• 1 cup cooked grains (barley, quinoa or millet for example)
• ½ cup seeds (sunflower, linseed, pumpkin, sesame, poppy - poss. not all at once)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• ¼ cup oil
• 1 dessertspoon honey or molasses

Method

1. Cook ½ cup of grain (barley, millet or quinoa, for example) in 1 cups of water. You need to bring it to the boil and then cover up and simmer for 10 minutes. Then leave to cool until just hand-warm.
2. Get a large mixing bowl and add 3 cups hand-warm water.
3. Add the dried yeast and a pinch of sugar or honey.
4. After about 5 mins you will see the yeast start to move around. At this point add 1½ cups of wholemeal flour and whisk it in. Leave for ½ hour or so until it has a foamy top. This stage is called the sponge and is important, as the yeast gets a chance to grow without lifting a lot of heavy flour.
5. Now add a lot more stuff! Stick a dessertspoon in some honey or molasses and add to the mix.
6. Now add the salt and the oil
7. Stir in the cooked grains and the seeds
8. Beat in three more cups of wholemeal flour
9. Stir in two cups of white flour. this will be much harder
10. Mix in the last two cups of white flour with your hands. After a while, the dough starts to come together. Sometimes you have to add more flour, sometimes it is hard to incorporate it all. Tip it onto your work surface and knead it until you have a nice smooth ball of dough
11. Put it back into the bowl and leave to rise for at least two hours. More than four and it will reach its maximum size and collapse but this has never caused me any problem
12. Oil three loaf tins
13. Take out the dough and knead it again on a floured surface. Divide it up into three portions and press one down into each tin
14. Leave to prove for about an hour (it really depends on the weather, yeast likes it warm)
15. When the dough is starting to rise above the rim of the tin, turn the oven on to 190°c (fan oven)
16. Put the bread in only when the oven has reached temperature (this is baking, not stew!) and bake for 45 minutes
17. To test the bread, turn it out of the tin and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow
18. You might want to give it at least 5 minutes so you don't burn your mouth on the first gorgeous slice with butter!

Variations
I always make two batches, as I said. A common combination is barley for the grains plus pumpkin and sesame seeds. I use molasses in this one. In the other bowl I would have quinoa or millet for the grains plus poppy and sunflower seeds. I would use honey in this mix.

Mollie Katzen also suggests chopped dried fruit. As a family of marmite addicts, this is not all that appealing, since we use this as our everyday bread. I have alos at times replaced most of the wholmeal flour with rye, or the white flour with spelt. Both of these work fine. The grains and seeds are also optional, bear in mind that leaving them out means you have less mass, so perhaps marginally smaller loaves.

I find the American habit of using cups to be well suited to measuring flour. I have tried putting all 8½ cups of flour for one batch on my scales and it just runs over. Far easier just to keep a clean cup measure and dip it into the flour bag. You could use an ordinary cup (not mug!) and work out roughly where 250ml would reach to. For a ¼ cup you could try an egg cup. This is only used for measuring oil, so it need not be accurate. Our egg cups have holes in the bottom for water to drain away, so I don't measure liquids with them!

I think I'll take pictures of the sponge and dough stages next time I bake, so you can see them.

Damson Time!

You may remember a few posts back I put up a picture of some beautiful damsons growing in our tree. This is called a Shropshire Prune, and I bought it from Keepers Nursery in Kent three years ago.
At that time, I had to go away for the weekend to take the children to a competition and David had to plant the tree in a really pretty large square (not round!) hole. Since he was suffering from vertigo, he had to get a neighbour to make sure he didn't put it in at 45 degrees!
This year it is tall and fairly bushy. Thanks to great weather and huge amounts of water, it has produced a crop for the first time. I'd say about 8 kilos. To my surprise, the small, silver-bloomed dark fruit are very good to eat raw but that is not why I wanted them. When I do get round to eating jam, my favourite is certainly dark purple damson. I have a soft spot for sour cherry as well, perhaps I should find room for a cherry tree?
Anyway, over the last two weekends, my indefatigable husband has produced several jars of damson jam (front, one went to helpful neighbour), one large jar of damsons in rum(back) and reasonable amount of chinese plum sauce(right), which should work just great as a marinade for pork and other things. The rum fruit is for Christmas, if I can wait that long.
Recipes should follow, when I can prise them out of David. I know he made the rum one up. I am also waiting for my daughter to turn the remaining damsons in the freezer into dark red crumble. Me cook? Actually, I make curries and fab wholemeal bread. More another time ...

Recent trip to Berlin

Thought I'd better scribble down something about last weekend's trip to Berlin, since I found myself buried in a thriller I bought in Hugendubel, Berlin's answer to Waterstones. Staff there very friendly. I homed in on one and asked her to recommend German Science Fiction writers. Nothing really appealed, so I ended up on the "Krimi" pile, picking out "Tannöd" by Andrea Maria Schenkel. Great stuff, several narrators but all pretty straightforward people, or I'd be lost. Lovely to read Bavarian voices, which sound so much like Austrian ones and remind me of the year I spent in Kärnten in my twenties.

I've included a picture of surely the best ice cream (sorbet, actually) in Berlin. Eismaufaktur. For my talent at reading detective stories and other intellectually undemanding books to flower most fully, it has to be in a good cafe. How could it be otherwise?

The second picture is from a gallery I like very much near the spanking new Hauptbahnhof. Confusingly, the gallery is called Hamburgerbahnhof but has been converted, like the Gare d'Orsay in Paris. You can't really resist Anselm Kiefer's plane made of soft lead, can you? No doubt it means something serious but I think it is cute. I found myself in the position of having to explain Joseph Beuys obsessions with fat and felt to my friend Lesley, when I have limited sympathy with him myself. She seemed to like him, which is something.

I felt totally at home in Berlin (don't say it's because I have spent most of my adult life in flat landscapes!) and it is soooo tempting to try and find a job there.

I also discovered I love white Rioja, though I only had one glass. Gorgeous.