The best and easiest scones (aka rolled biscuits)

I move tomorrow and the disaster that is currently my apartment, my kitchen, and my fridge means that I had to scrounge around and get creative for dinner– which meant I couldn’t stand to do one more shrimp stir-fry, basically. Since I wasn’t that hungry I flashed back to what we used to do when I was growing up in Victoria with my Welsh mother.

Sundays after church always brought a cooked Sunday dinner in the middle of the day, the traditional British meal: roast lamb or chicken, usually, with potatoes or Yorkshire pudding, a couple of vegetables, and gravy. Followed by a trifle, crumble with custard, cake, pudding, or fruit pie. Do I need to mention that my family believes in Sunday afternoon naps as well?

In the evenings, then, we didn’t always want another meal, but we needed something to tide us over until Monday morning breakfast. The solution was sometimes an English tea. Homemade scones with jam and cream, sandwiches, some fruit, another slice of cake with oranges, maybe a cup of mint or chamomile tea, that sort of thing (not all these things at once, you understand). So tonight I made scones with what I think is the best and simplest recipe, courtesy of Joy of Cooking, and I thought I would share it with you because it is just so easy, and so good, it seemed wrong not to share.

Scones

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp salt

3 tsp baking powder

4-6 tablespoons of chilled butter

3/4 cup milk

Sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl. Cut in the butter as you would for pastry. Make a well and pour in the milk. Stir until the dough starts to pull free from the sides of the bowl, then briefly knead until it comes together (do this gently and quickly, about 8-10 folds). Roll out the dough and then cut. Brush tops with milk or melted butter.

Bake in a preheated oven at 450F for 12-15 minutes. To change this recipe, try adding 1/3 cup grated cheddar, or dust with cinnamon and sugar before baking.

“The Joy of Cooking” is one of those iconic cookbooks that I think most people have or have heard of. If you haven’t tried this recipe of theirs yet, you definitely should next time you make soup…or breakfast….or want to have a cup of tea.

Yay! Indian Food!

I defend my thesis on Wednesday (I thought it was Thursday and had an unpleasant shock yesterday when I realized it was a day earlier than I thought) and I am moving Monday, so in the midst of all this angst it has been really great to have all these good friends feed me over the past week or so. Thursday night I was over at Jun’s (a new friend from Beijing) and she and her son cooked for me. For all of us B.C. – Alberta people, she also introduced me to Island Farm’s mango ice cream. Pretty good. Tonight I was invited to Khyati’s for dinner, which was great, because I helped out at a funeral at the church this afternoon. I had to help make 200 sandwiches, and the food generally made me feel that I didn’t want to get in the kitchen for a while. Well, let’s say that when you are asked to put on a funeral and the family expects the food to be donated/ provided at no expense to them, you won’t get gourmet catering. I understand that. But it makes me a little depressed all the same to see the kind of bread, cheese, brownies etc. that people buy and eat, and it puts off my own food, which in no way resembles what I helped prepare today.

We had our usual wonderful meal at Khyati’s, which you can see here. A tender tofu and pea curry (how does she get her tofu so tender?), rice pilau, a fried bread whose name I cannot now remember, spicy potatoes and squash, and lentil dumplings in yogurt with a tamarind chutney. Then we headed out to an Indian grocery (“Fruiticana”) because we all wanted things from there.

As you can see in this photo, I might have gone a bit overboard, but the guavas were putting up a heavy, heavenly perfume and the mangoes were on the edge of overripeness the way I love them, and I needed some ingredients because I am going to cook Indian food for my parents when I get back to the island, and lo and behold my favorite candy bar was there at the till and Aranya and Khyati had never tried them, so I had to get us each one. This is how it goes. But I finally have mango powder! I’ve really put this picture in because I want my sisters to feel a bit jealous of my easy access to exotic food when they read this post.

Aranya and Khyati gave me farewell gifts, one of which was the cookbook “660 Curries” by Raghavan Iyer. They assured me the recipes are authentic and easy, and I am excited to use my new mango powder, asfoetida, dried curry leaves, and jaggery with some of these recipes. Since we were in the Indian shopping district of Edmonton, we stopped off at Punjabi Buffet and Bakery so Aranya could have some jellabies (a neon-orange sweet: crisp tubes curled into shapes, filled with sugar syrup, very sticky. I cannot understand why so many Indians love this).

We then went back home for a slice of my pie. Some of you might have thought that since my kitchen equipment has been shipped back to the coast that I wouldn’t be making a pie this weekend.  You would be wrong. I made the pie crust and froze it in a disposable pie plate, ready for this weekend. That, my friends, is the kind of organization and preparedness of which I am capable.

This week’s recipe claimed to be a version of pecan pie, but with maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and oats/ coconut/ pecan mixture instead of pecans. I was a little suspicious of the fact it called for only two eggs and 40 minutes of cooking. I really have to start listening to that little inner suspicious whisper.

Aranya has named this granola pie, and you can see why. The syrup did not set, and it in no way resembles the picture in the magazine, which actually looked like a version of pecan pie. Instead, it is a maple-flavoured granola mixture drenched in runny syrup. It tasted fine but I was aggravated by the not-setting because it affected my all-important texture.

However, I do have to say that the pastry turned out a dream. Flaky, melting, tender. I am not bragging but stating a fact when I tell you that my 9 months of pie baking is really paying off. I make very good pastry. So good that people taste it and cannot buy store bought pie anymore. Seriously. Maybe that is part of my cooking mission. To educate palates so more people stop buying junk. I’ll have to think it over. Oh, and I have decided that if I ever find guava-scented perfume or skin products I am buying litres of the stuff. I love the smell of guavas– love, love, love it.

Apple Raspberry Pie; My favorite Edmonton restaurant

This weekend I packed up and shipped most of my things to the coast; helped friends move and clean their apartment; taught Sunday School; cleaned my apartment; and went to the theatre Friday night and to dinner Saturday night. It’s been snowing without stop for the past three days and it’s -10 degrees. I don’t know if it was the exertion on top of finishing my thesis or the weather, but I am home today with a sore throat and cold, feeling tired and miserable.

Saturday night I went with Forest and Lucy to have one last visit to my favorite Edmonton restaurant, the Blue Nile. They serve Ethiopian food. As you can see from the photo, it’s in someone’s house. What you can’t see is that it’s in a scary neighborhood next to Chinatown, or that the food is really good and really cheap. I’m getting hungry right now just thinking about it. It’s another Edmonton restaurant that has dual-language displays and menus– English and (what I assume is) Ethiopian. It was something new for Forest and Lucy to try, and Lucy said she liked it. Forest ate a lot so I am assuming that means he liked it too. At dinner we had another one of our discussions about food and cooking. They said they were going to stalk me and move to the coast in a few years when they were both done school. I said, if we all end up in Vancouver we should take some cooking courses together. Forest then gave me his little speech about how cooking should be a reflection of how you feel, your inspiration in the moment, and that it is not something that can be taught. I think that’s all very well when you are cooking Chinese food and everything goes in the wok, but Western food is a lot about technique, and some things need to be taught.

Then we went to Little Italy and they introduced me to the huge Italian market down there and I was wishing I still had a fully stocked kitchen with equipment so I could play with the poppy seed paste, the dried peaches, the cheeses, the dozen different types of olives. I consoled myself with a huge round of bread, some mortadella, capicollo, provolone, and olive paste (which came in a tube saying “voulez-vous pâté avec moi?” which I find weird and therefore funny), all for making sandwiches. I also bought some dried apples which taste like garbage and need to be thrown out, and some blackcurrant juice. I’m enjoying it, but it is indistinguishable from Ribena. Why can’t food manufacturers let us have some things slightly sour, instead of sugaring up everything?

Then we went to Lucky 97 so Forest and Lucy could buy rice and use my car for hauling it home. I thought about taking out my camera and snapping pictures of things but it was late, I was tired, and as I have said before, there are some scary people at these ethnic Chinatown stores, so I desisted. But looking around at the lotus roots, the display of Bird’s Nest energy drinks, the pomelos, and the little shrine just inside the doorway, I realized that I am going to miss a lot of things about Edmonton when I leave in a couple of weeks.

Last night, as the snow kept falling….and falling…I pulled out a small pastry shell I had made with some leftover pastry last weekend and tried a combination I had read about in one of my pie cookbooks– apple and raspberry pie. I wasn’t that taken with it. It’s an OK combination, not a classic. Why that is, I can’t really explain except to say that apple and blackberry works and apple and raspberry is second-best. I ate some with a bit of tinned custard, despite my sore throat (my whisk has been packed and shipped, so no homemade custard for now).

My Cooking Philosophy

I got home about an hour ago from a Sunday dinner get-together. I brought pie. Yeah, you’re shocked. This week was time to do the raspberry chiffon pie. I had planned to do the recipe in the America’s Test Kitchen “Best of 2008″ but I was warned against it, so I did half Lee Bailey’s raspberry pie (my favorite) and half the Betty Crocker raspberry chiffon, topped with whipped cream. And if you are mocking me for turning to Betty Crocker instead of a celeb chef, then all I can say is, you’ve obviously never turned to those red plaid cookbooks yourself. They are handy!

I also made another orange cream. I am inserting a picture here so I can soothe my ego by showing you that yes, I am capable of making a decent meringue. AND I made a meringue pie today that didn’t weep one bit. I would have been more pleased with myself, though, if the orange cream had set properly, which it didn’t. So it wouldn’t have mattered if the meringue had wept, since it was all soup beneath anyway. Please be impressed, regardless? Making a meringue pie that doesn’t weep is huge. Trust me.

Now it might seem kind of dumb or embarrassing to make a mistake like not having the orange cream set in front of this huge group of people. My response is, I don’t really care, especially since I am figuring out that I am usually the only person in the room capable of making any kind of pie, soupy or perfectly set. There’s something I’ve started thinking about lately and it needs to be articulated as a step towards figuring it out. I am going to try to start spelling out for myself what my cooking is actually all about.

1. Taste trumps looks.
2. On a day to day basis, I would rather have something simple perfectly done than a complicated and expensive dish.
3. I like clean flavours.
4. Everything should be accompanied by vegetables or fruit.
5. Texture is nearly as important as taste.
6. Voluntarily feeding someone is an emotional gesture of liking, affection, and sometimes love. If I repeatedly cook for you and try to anticipate your favorites tastes and textures (or, say, let you stick a finger in the cookie dough–ugh), you know I love you a lot.
7. I only want to cook what I myself would like to eat, which is usually pretty basic stuff a la Nigel Slater.
8. It’s OK to make mistakes in cooking. Even in front of other people, who I know must have their own mistakes in their kitchens. Even when I am being emotional about them, there is still a place inside me that finds my mistakes funny. It’s too bad that graduate school has made me so aware of copyright law, otherwise I could put up pictures of what I am trying to cook side by side with what I actually do cook, and we could all have a laugh.
9. Sometimes weird things have to be tried, just to explore what can be done, even though their making might be followed by a tin can being opened.
10. Cooking is relaxing, and I like to do it.

Well, ten seems like a good round place to stop. I am still trying to figure out the basic building blocks of my favorite food and why some things ’speak’ to me and others don’t. If I ever do get it nailed down I will tell you all about it. If you look at the picture of the raspberry chiffon pie being eaten at the top, this sums up a lot of what my list is about. Raspberry chiffon is kind of weird, in a 1950’s housewife sort of way. The techniques for making it were totally new to me, and I wasn’t sure it was going to turn out. I had fun making these pies this afternoon (I am at the point where I’ve broken through the wall and now find pie making fun). I was happy to make these pies for the people I was with tonight. And finally, I think my cooking is about home and comfort and nurturing feelings being evoked. It’s domestic cookery, not restaurant or gourmet cookery. And I like that.

Emotional Reassurance in a Sad World: Cream Cheese Brownies

My thesis is well on its way to being done.  I’ve submitted all my chapters and appendices (other than my works cited, which horrifies and amazes me by being 7 pages long) and I’ve done my rewrites for my first two chapters.  You would think that I would feel happier, lighter, less oppressed.  No.  I feel emotional.  I’ve been muttering internally all day about debt and how quickly I can pay it back, and about getting a job.  That terrible emotional and creative void that occurs between finishing a degree and getting a job you like is about to occur and I’m anticipating it already.  Anyway, when I didn’t want to cook dinner and got Japanese takeout, and then while eating my rice, tempura, and sushi started crying over Vivian Stringer’s life (the women’s basketball coach at Rutgers) as depicted today on “Oprah” I knew things were critical. I needed to bake, and it had to be chocolate.

Last night I made almond macaroons for a woman I work with who has a gluten allergy, so I could take them into work today.  It’s Nigella Lawson’s recipe but adapted to what’s in my kitchen, which doesn’t include rosewater and ground cardamom.  Needless to say these look nothing like hers as shown in the cookbook, and I am not sure they are all that good, but they are chewy which automatically means I like them (texture is verrrry important to me.  It’s all about mouthfeel, baby).

The almond macaroon baking wasn’t enough, though, at least not enough to see me through today.  There’s something about chocolate that is so comforting and calming.  Well, it makes you feel better until you eat too much and then you start thinking about how you will never lose weight until you stop cooking with chocolate and butter and sugar.  But the chocolate makes that reality somehow easier to bear.

I had some cream cheese to use in this weekend’s pie, but it turns out my mum made the pie recipe I planned to try a couple of weeks ago and advised me against it.  So, having some spare cream cheese, I thought I would take a favorite brownie recipe and add some dollops of cream cheese (8 oz cream cheese beaten until smooth with one egg, a pinch of salt, and 1/2 cup granulated sugar) to try and make it super-exciting.  The cream cheese stuff is good, and it looks good, but it’s mis-matched with the brownie recipe.  This needs to be paired with a cake-y, drier brownie, rather than the fudge-like brownie seen here.

Regardless, it’s done the job.  I had some brownies, looked at pictures my sister sent me tonight of my nieces taking their first horseback riding lesson this week down in Texas, and watched gardening shows on HGTV.  The world seems a much better place.  And “The Office” is back this week.  I’m excited to see Andy and Dwight again.