oat-date slice

A few things have happened since I last wrote here.

The husband wrote his PhD thesis and successfully defended it.

We moved across the country (again) and now live in Montréal.

I can now say with confidence: "I have my own bag" and "have a good day" in French when I'm shopping.

La belle province is a land of milk and honey. Literally. We are eating excellent local cheese and the honey from the Atwater Market is so full of flavour that I feel like I can actually taste the wildflowers.

And even though it isn't French, this old Scottish favourite has become one of our favourite snacks.

It's called oat-date slice, and it's rather like matrimonial squares — but much simpler. The squares are soft but sturdy, and full of gooey dates. In other words, the perfect snack with your afternoon tea. (It's possible I've said that about other recipes here. It's all true.)

I adapted the recipe from The Scottish Farmers' Market Cookbook. We picked up this little gem on our honeymoon, way back in 2007.

one year ago: overnight oats with raspberries
two years ago: amazing overnight waffles
three years ago: sriracha tofu and broccolini with coconut rice

oat-date slice
The Scottish Farmers' Market Cookbook by Nick Paul

175 g. quick-cooking oats
130 g. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. sea salt
125 g. wheat flour
     or gluten-free:
     50 g. millet flour
     35 g. sweet rice flour
     40 g. potato starch
     1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
90 g. coconut flakes
135 g. butter
1/4 c. water
37 g. / 2 tbsp. golden syrup*
1 tsp. baking soda
200 g. dates, chopped roughly

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease an 8-by-8-inch baking dish or line it with parchment paper.

Stir oats, brown sugar, sea salt, flours and coconut together in a large bowl. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, melt the butter. Add the golden syrup and baking soda and whisk well. Stir into the oat mix. Mix well. Spread into the baking dish and use your fingers to pat it down evenly.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until golden and somewhat set. Let cool completely before cutting.

*You could probably use honey or corn syrup in a pinch.

 

cock-a-leekie soup

Just a few months of radio silence there.

But now — now!

Now, it is 2018 and it appears to be the Year of the Flu at our house, so I have a great many chicken soup recipes in store for you.

Let's start with this one. Unless you're Scottish, you might not have heard of it before.

I will tell you all about it. First and foremost, it is very tasty and just the thing you want to eat in the winter, whether you are sickly or healthy. It is also quick, which is handy when you're frail or come home from work and want to eat quickly on a dark winter's night.

It is basically a chicken soup with leeks and rice ... but, oh, it is so much more than that.

The leeks and rice are like silky soulmates — you'll know what I mean when you take your first bite. And the lemon rind! Somehow, when you add a bay leaf and a piece of lemon rind to this soup, you get a soup that tastes much more complex than it actually is. The original recipe doesn't call for carrots but I like the way the orange flecks brighten up the soup.

Apparently, the first recipe was printed in 1598, although its very fun name wasn't popular until the 1700s. Also, the original version had prunes. Prunes! I could actually see them working here but I haven't tried them yet. I'll let you know.

Now, in terms of how you do the chicken, you have two options. You may start with a couple of chicken breasts and poach them in the broth while the soup cooks. Then you pull them out, cut them up, and throw them back in.

Or, you may start with the best invention in the grocery story: the rotisserie chicken. In that case, cut out little chunks and add them near the end. Either way, this is easy. And very, very comforting.

one year ago: old-fashioned scottish shortbread
two years ago: kimchi soup
three years ago: cheesecake in a jar with passion fruit sauce

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cock-a-leekie soup
adapted from canadian living
serves 4 — 5

2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 tbsp. butter
3 c. leeks, sliced
1 1/2 c. carrots, chopped
9 c. chicken stock
1 c. long-grain white rice, like jasmine or basmati
3 strips of lemon rind
2 bay leaves
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (raw or cooked)
salt and pepper
3 tbsp. flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Warm a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add the oil and butter, then stir in the leeks and carrots. Throw in a bit of salt. Cover and cook for 5 to 10 minutes until leeks are soft.

Add stock, rice, lemon rind and bay leaf. If using raw chicken breast, throw in now. Bring to a boil. Simmer for about 18 to 20 minutes until rice is tender.

Remove the lemon rind and bay leaf. If you poached the chicken breast, remove it now and cut into small chunks. Add chicken chunks to the soup and heat up again.

Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in parsley. Serve.

old-fashioned scottish shortbread

I've had Scotland on my mind lately.

At the end of January, Scott and I hosted a big Robbie Burns Day party, where we ate Scottish meatballs and everyone wore plaid. Our friend Niall also read Burns poems in Old Scots wearing his Campbell kilt. It was glorious.

When I think of Scotland, I think of mountains and strong black tea and beautiful woolen blankets and ... shortbread.

I've made gluten-free shortbread before, but I was hankering after something a bit more old-fashioned in the shortbread department.

One cold January afternoon, I pulled out my recipe binder for cookies. I kept turning the pages until I found my Great-Aunt Marjorie's recipe for shortbread.

Well, Marjorie gave it to me but I think she got it from her mother-in-law. Although I'm not actually completely sure about that. In any case, it's called "Mom Allison's Shortbread" and Allison is a Scottish name, so I feel good about its authentic Scottish-Canadian roots.

All that to say — it's just what I was looking for. You bake it in an 8-inch tin and then cut it into "petticoat tails," which look like triangles, for the uninitiated.

The recipe says that letting it sit in a sealed tin for a couple of days brings out the flavour, and that is true. However, it was also fantastic an hour out of the oven. So it's good on all fronts: right away, two days later, ten days later. I can't give you any longer time frames because it won't last that long in our household.

one year ago: gluten-free sandwich bread
two years ago: cheesecake in a jar with passion fruit sauce and tomato soup with two fennels
three years ago: nuts and bolts and tuscan white beans

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mom allison's shortbread
bakes an 8-inch round you may cut into 8 or 12 pieces
note: whether you use wheat flour or the gluten-free flours, you still also add the white rice flour

vanilla castor or berry sugar to sprinkle on top*
6 oz. all-purpose wheat flour
     or gluten-free: 
     2 oz. millet flour
     2 oz. potato starch
     2 oz. sweet rice flour
     1 tsp. xanthan gum
2 oz. white rice flour
3 oz. berry or castor sugar**
1/2 tsp. kosher salt (or 1/4 tsp. table salt)
5 oz. salted butter, at room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whisk the dry ingredients together. Rub in the butter with your fingers or use a stand mixer to make a stiff dough.

Roll the dough out between two sheets of plastic wrap. Remove the top layer of plastic wrap and invert the dough into an 8-inch cake tin. Now, peel off the new top layer of plastic wrap.

Mark into 8 or 12 pieces and prick all over with a fork. Bake in the mid-oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until it's set and just the edges are slightly golden.

Take it out of the oven and sprinkle with vanilla sugar. Mark pieces off again.

Once it's cool, you can try some right away. You can also let it sit in a sealed container for a couple of days to bring out the flavour. We found it just gets better with time but it still great the first day.


* Make your own vanilla sugar by immersing a split vanilla bean into the sugar for some time. If you just think of this right before baking — no problem. It still works and you can use the leftover sugar for future baking projects.

** If you don't have this finer sugar on hand, just whiz it up in the food processor for a little while until the grains look smaller. This worked for me.

snack chronicles: cheddar oatcakes

Meet my new favourite snack: the cheddar oatcake.

It is crisp and cheesy with little nubbins of steel-cut oats, and I ate the last one this morning and I'm going to have to fix that soon. Very soon.

The recipe comes from Lucy Waverman, who says she first tried a cheesy oatcake at a farm store on the Isle of Mull. She recommends Mull cheddar, but, of course, sharp Canadian cheddar works, too.

The technique is ingenious: mix the oats, flour and cheese, and then drizzle melted butter and water in. At that point, it looks like wet oatmeal.

But after 10 or 15 minutes, the quick oats have soaked some water in and everything starts to come together into dough. To cut them into circles, I used the biscuit cutter my Scottish aunt gave me when I was 14.

In the oven, the oatcakes don't spread, but instead crisp up and puff just a bit. Once they have cooled, they are firm but a little crumbly, and all together the nicest mid-morning snack you could have. Or mid-afternoon.

P.S. If you're curious about the plate, it's my great-grandmother Henrietta McGaw's wedding china. She was from another Scottish island, the Isle of Skye.

One year ago: lentil soup with chorizo croûtes
Two years ago: rhubarb syrup and cauliflower and mull cheddar soup (must be something about this time of year that calls for mull cheddar!)
Three years ago: gouda and roasted pepper dip and grilled chicken sandwiches
Four years ago: sour cream coffee cake
Five years ago: swedish tea cookies

cheddar oatcakes
slightly adapted from Lucy Waverman, Globe and Mail
bakes about 30 oatcakes

2/3 c. steel-cut oats
1 1/2 c. quick-cooking oats
1/2 c. wheat flour
     or gluten-free:
     30 g. millet flour
     20 g. sweet rice flour
     20 g. potato starch
     1 tsp. xanthan gum
1 tsp. kosher salt (or 1/2 tsp. regular salt)
4 oz. (about 1 1/2 c.) sharp cheddar, grated
3/4 c. butter, melted
1 – 2 tbsp. water

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Stir both kinds of oats, flour(s), salt and cheddar together in a large bowl. Drizzle the melted butter and water over top. Stir until well mixed. Let stand 10 – 15 minutes, until it's firmed up and can come together. If it still feels too crumbly, add a little more water and stir it in.

Flour your working surface with wheat flour or, if gluten-free, sweet rice flour. Get out a 2 1/2 inch cutter and rolling pin. Knead the dough into a ball.  Roll out with floured rolling pin until about 1/4 inch thick. Flour cutter and cut out biscuits. Put biscuits on baking sheets. Bake 25 – 30 minutes, until they have a little colour and are lightly golden around the edges. Let cool on baking sheet.

cauliflower and mull cheddar soup

Have you heard of a Scottish genius called Nick Nairn?

Growing up in Canada, I had not – until I found his big glossy book at a bookshop in Inverness a few years ago. I carted New Scottish Cookery back across the pond and he has joined us for quite a few dinners here in the new world.

Scott especially has made outstanding (and time consuming!) dishes from Nick's recipes. I'm talking baked filet of halibut with cabbage, smoked bacon and a tarragon cream sauce, not to mention lasagne of smoked haddock and peas, which is much more elegant than it sounds and involves a homemade vegetable butter sauce.

There's also a genius spicy salmon broth that comes together very quickly and has lemongrass and chillies practically bursting out of it.

For my birthday weekend this year, Scott offered to make me a new recipe from New Scottish Cookery. I opened the book with great anticipation, but only got three recipes in.

The bright green herb oil drizzled over the white cauliflower and mull cheddar soup got me.

Looking at it, I thought that maybe, just maybe, this might be the cauliflower cheese soup I have been searching for all my life. This might be the one that wouldn't break into watery pockets of bland cauliflower purée. This might be the one that would be supremely creamy and still have lots of cheesy flavour. This might be it.

It is.

And it's so simple that we are now making it regularly on weeknights. It really just has five ingredients: onion and garlic softened in a good amount of butter, cauliflower and some kind of nice cheddar cheese. We like an Irish cheddar called Kerrygold Reserve, although it is possible I was seduced by the handsome wrapper.

Yes, we've made the herb oil too, but you know what?

Aside from looking pretty, it's not really necessary. The soup itself has so much cheesy-cauliflower flavour that it doesn't need any fancy herb oil to gunk up my immersion blender. Adding a bit of chopped parsley also looks pretty and is a lot less work.

Thank you, Nick Nairn, for your new Scottish cookery.

one year ago: mango love on oahu
two years ago: sour cream coffee cake and dutch marzipan cookies
three years ago: chocolate nut balls

cauliflower and mull cheddar soup
slightly adapted from New Scottish Cookery
feeds six

50 g. (2 oz) butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 large cauliflower, chopped finely (1 – 2 cm pieces)
140 – 175 g. (5 – 6 oz) Mull Cheddar, Kerrygold Reserve Cheddar or other aged white cheddar,    grated
freshly ground sea salt and black pepper
1 tbsp. fresh parsley, finely chopped, to garnish

Warm a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat. Add the butter and let it melt. Add the onion. Stir often and cook until it's translucent, golden and almost softened, about 8 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for another minute.

While the onion and garlic are cooking, fill a kettle with 1 litre (4 c.) of water and set it to boil.

Add the cauliflower and boiled water to the onion and garlic. Bring it to a boil, and simmer until the cauliflower is tender, about 20 minutes. Take it off the heat.

Purée the soup with an immersion blender until it's quite smooth. Return the pot to the element and turn the heat on low. Add a small handful of cheese and stir it in until melted. Repeat until all the cheese is melted in. (If you add it all at once, it will clump.) Turn the heat off.

Serve with fresh cracked pepper and chopped parsley on top.

Note: Nick Nairn says that if you'd like to freeze the soup, don't add the cheddar. Instead, add the cheddar when you reheat it.