You know when you make a big dessert and there’s still some leftover in the fridge, so you just have to have some for breakfast the next day?

We like that

Lately, we’ve been immersed in two fabulous cookbooks by genius Brit Simon Hopkinson: Roast Chicken and Other Stories and Second Helpings of Roast Chicken (which was in Half Price Books on South Lamar for a bargain $10 brand new, so they may have more if you hurry along over there). Hopkinson is the least famous of the great British cooks, as he has never made a TV show swearing at people or tried to save America from obesity, and the first Roast Chicken book only got super successful after being voted Most Useful Cookbook Of All Time in a publication called Waitrose Food Illustrated. Which was quite strange really, as very few people have even heard of Waitrose Food Illustrated, but suddenly Hopkinson was outselling Harry Potter and being called “the best cook in Britain“, which must have been rather nice. The books are a joy to read as well as being useful, very informative and evocative and witty.

In the chocolate section of book one, Hopkison appreciates British chocolate, and instructs on cooking with darker varieties:

I agree with the late Roald Dahl that the British chocolate bar is the best in the world. There is nothing to beat the gorgeous sickliness of a Mars Bar, and as a boy I was seduced by the honeycomb centre of a Crunchie [...] And I remember the effortlessness of eating a Milky Way or an Aero, and of being repeatedly surprised by the alarming speed with which one could consume a packet of Munchies, or one of those small, strangely shaped bars called Toffee Cup.

[...] However, setting all those mass-produced chocolate goodies apart, it has to be said that the great chocolate-makers of Belgium and France , who produce such pure, dark and bitter blocks of black chocolate, are without equal anywhere [...] It is only with this quality of chocolate that you can hope to achieve a good chocolate dessert or pudding.

So, make this with semisweet Callebaut from Central Market, not Dairy Milk! It’s just a lot more chocolately. The recipe for Chocolate Tart is in the original book, or you can google to find it on various foodie blogs. The hardest part is the pastry, which is French-style sugar pastry with egg yoks instead of water, more like a biscuit (cookie) dough than shortcrust. This can crumble up when you roll it out if it’s too cold and inflexible, so do chill before using, but then knead it if necessary until just soft enough to roll out gently without falling apart. The way to line your tin is by carefully rolling the pastry round the rolling pin to lift, then unroll over the tin and lift the edges into the bottom edges without pulling or stretching. It is quite firm, and we baked it empty, without putting foil and baking beans inside to hold the shape, no problem.

Then you make and add the chocolate filling, which is the easy bit; you whisk the eggs and sugar till they are super thick, almost like whipped cream, then add chocolate melted with butter. This is very simple in the microwave on defrost, for 20 to 30 seconds at a time. Take it out when not quite fully melted, and the last few lumps of chocolate will finish melting on their own, as you stir. Then add to the whisked egg mixture and pour the whole lot in the pastry case, and bake for another five minutes. We gave it seven- not sure why! It was utterly gorgeous anyway…

And one day we will manage to post a photo of a dessert that isn’t half-missing already…

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Everything still good as we roll ahead towards opening day, whenever that turns out to be … as I write, the whole main floor has been finished but we don’t have any pictures of that yet, as we had to stay outside the building while it dried. Plus brand new air conditioning and a roof are both set for this week (big jobs belonging to the property owner not us, thankfully), which will be brilliant.

Meanwhile, pictures:

A sink on a unit thing.

I know what you’re thinking. Pink, right? Yes you’re right, it’s pink. We had this enormous bucket of pink from the Lowe’s reject paint area, and it needed using up.

By remarkable coincidence, the sink came from another reject area, the IKEA as-is room. We do like a good bargain! Good thing too, or there is no way we could do all this and still be, like, living indoors with food for ourselves etc.

Behind the counter: new floor, sink on the wall (a very pseudo-religious special hand-washing sink of course, as required), proper electrical outlets.

This picture is proof that we are not just subjecting our customers to The Pink: we are following through on our values, and looking at it ourselves too, from the inside of the kitchen/serving area. Oh yes.

More pink shelves. To be honest, we would rather have left them with the original garage wood-chip look, but regulations state that everything made of wood has to be painted. So we painted.

Pink.

New floor, lovely and flat. Not everyone knows this, but not all floors actually are flat. For instance, my old house in England had sloping floors upstairs, as there weren’t as many building standards officers in the eighteenth century and the yokel builders who made it were probably drunk on local ale at the time.

And the original floor of 2000 Southern Oaks, our cafe location, was actually modelled on the surface of the moon, complete with mountain ranges and dry riverbeds (not so dry when the original roof leaked). This seems to have worked out fine for the previous tennants. Or maybe not, as they are now “previous”. But anyway, we thought people might fall off precipices and break their legs, so decided to go for the traditional “flat” look instead.

A lovely wooden bar top.

Bathroom sink. This has to be regulation too. Luckily it’s perfectly OK. But the hand-made concrete one with embedded gold glitter that we found at Habitat for Humanity was tragically disallowed. Hoping it might come in useful in the back yard some time, whenever we get round to making the back yard safe for humans.

We did have some other pictures of new bathroom equipment, but it seems like a bad idea to post them here on a food blog. You don’t want to click the wrong page in the middle of a lovely recipe and suddenly find yourself staring at a big photo of a urinal, really. That’s the sort of thing no woman should ever have to witness, and even the strongest male stomach might find off-putting in the middle of contemplating lunch. Please forget we even mentioned the U-word.

Anyway, if you see us in the IKEA as-is this week, do say hello. We’re popping up there to hunt for a few more lampshades to match the ones we got in the as-is previously (which are… pink). Yes Round Rock is a long way from South Austin, but we have a clever method of dealing with that: rather than thinking of it as a very long way to go for a few bargains, we think of a trip to IKEA as a Very Short Visit to Europe instead.

Our dream is that one day, scientists will finally get bored with inventing ever more slightly different kinds of touch-sensitive minicomputer, and return to inventing proper, futuristic sci-fi stuff again. And it will be possible to cross the planet by instant transporter, like on Star Trek. And there will be a portal at the front door of every IKEA in every country in the world- in this way, it will be possible to walk out of your local branch and into any country you like, without the suffering or expense of international airline travel! While inside, of course, you won’t know where you are, as all IKEAs are exactly the same, with everyone enjoying the same Swedish meatballs and Chocolate Overload cake wherever you go! Except on Rib Wednesday, which is Dumpling Soup Wednesday in Poland, Goulash Wednesday in Hungary and Curry Wednesday in England. So, stick to travelling on Wednesdays and you won’t get lost!

Hmm, perhaps the long wait for opening day is affecting our brains, just a little bit…

This is an incredibly useful and delicious and simple recipe. If you can make a Pot Noodle, you can make this. It’s a bit like fresh sun-dried tomatoes from a posh supermarket, but local, seasonal and cheaper. Next time you have a glut of ripe tomatoes that can’t be eaten right away, roast them. They last longer than fresh tomatoes, up to a week in the fridge, and are much more exciting to eat. You could even figure out a way to preserve them longer (by adding something acidic, like garlic- anyone who does that, please tell us about it!) Get your tomatoes from markets in Texas in the summer and fall. The more ripe and tasty the tomato, the better it will roast.

Ways to eat roast tomatoes:
- on toast, which is even better than traditional Italian bruschetta & tomatoes,
- on top of pizza- more delicious than plain tomatoes on top- or as a substitute for tomato sauce,
- with cold meat or cheese, on the side
- as a relish, in a sandwich
- on pasta
- with bagels and cream cheese
- in a bacon sandwich
- next to a juicy steak

But there are definitely plenty more ways than that- these things are totally multi-functional food items!

Heat your oven to 375F (190C).

Slice your tomatoes, put them in a roasting tin cut side up, and drizzle with your chosen olive oil.

Our favourite olive oil is whichever extra virgin comes cheapest at the supermarket that week. Sometimes it’s Greek, sometimes Italian.

A good idea is to check out one of those tasting sessions they have at Central Market and pick a special one you know you love. Then, don’t use it for cooking, save it for salad dressing and bread where you will be tasting it in more detail, and add your bargain extra virgin to these tomatoes instead

Grind over some pepper and sprinkle with salt.

Add a bit of local Texas thyme if you live in Texas and have local thyme plants in your garden or store. Or any other thyme if preferred. Or no thyme at all, it’s an extra. Rosemary might be good too, but we haven’t tried that yet. Save the basil for later, it doesn’t cook so well with this.

Now roast till done. Check after 45 minutes; depending how big your tomatoes are and how well done you like them, you might need up to a couple of hours. As you can see, we like ours really well done, with a little tinge of black, as if they were grilled or roasted in a proper brick Italian pizza oven in the backyard of our lovingly restored Umbrian villa halfway down a hill near a quaint village where the unfeasibly friendly locals gather to perform Verdi operas before dining al fresco on thirty-eight kinds of exotic mushrooms and pork products while telling uproarious tales of love and dangerous driving till 4am under the stars…

… sorry, just daydreaming.

When they have cooled down, put them in a bowl with a lid, drizzle over more olive oil, add optional basil leaves, store in the fridge, and enjoy… then write an international bestseller called Romantic Delights of an Umbrian Tomato Garden or somesuch. It will probably just pop right into your head while you eat. Oh yeah

We’re getting there! This week we achieved a new roof on the storage shed, and a new freezer to go inside (that’s the new hot water boiler next to it)…

… new lighting fixtures, like these in the corridor between the cafe area and the back door…

… exit signs …

… electrical outlets…

… and grout. You can just see it in the corner of the bathroom here. Also, blackboard paint on the inside of the door, for people who suddenly get poems popping into their head while… washing their hands.

And that’s it for now. All good. We’re still not making any ETAs- we gave them up after the first six months- but there’s really not much left to do compared to everything we did already. So, it should only be another tra-la-la! weeks.

By the way, have you tried making the fig souffle yet? Because you should, it’s TRULY fantastic and Texas figs won’t be ripe forever, you know…

This is the first in a series of recipes for locally-produced, seasonal food available in Central Texas; in the best tradition of British international exploration and plunder, we will be featuring dishes from anywhere in the world, not just the UK.

If you live in Austin, go buy some figs this week! They are in season right now, and totally sweet and delicious. Lightsey Farms, at the Austin Triangle farmers’ market, had three different varieties last week, and we picked up a couple of pounds of the smallest, sweetest ones, perfect for baking one of our favourite desserts of all time- fig souffle.

This is a spectacularly delicious dessert which you absolutely must try making sometime. It’s not British, it’s Greek. You really want to live near figs to make this, as it requires quite a lot. If there were a lot of fig trees in England, no doubt it would be British too. The idea is basically just fruit baked in custard, which is a dish that exists in various European countries. As this one contains whisked egg whites, we’re calling it a souffle, but it’s quite easy to make and you don’t have to be up to cordon bleu standards to make it work.

Here is the long, illustrated recipe. For an abbreviated version, with bilingual weights & measures, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Here are our figs cooking in syrup.

First peel your figs, and chop them into similarly-sized chunks. Put them on one side, then make the syrup; dissolve half a cup of sugar and 4 tbsps of water in a small heavy pan over medium heat. Boil for 4 minutes, then add the figs. You can use anywhere up to a couple of pounds of figs, depending how many you have. One pound would be fine. Less would still be fine- definitely still worth making!

Then you want to simmer the figs until they go darker and look a little bit cooked. Maybe five minutes. They would be really good poured over ice-cream now, but hang on and make the souffle instead! It’s really really good!

So, the figs are cooked a bit, you can put them aside to finish the recipe later, or you can get going on the souffle custard. In that case, turn the oven on to 375F.

And now, a note about sugar and vanilla.

This is a picture of our short-cuts for avoiding having to infuse vanilla pods in warm milk, which a lot of recipes call for, but it’s a big hassle. You can use a proper vanilla pod in this recipe later on if you want; just heat a couple of inches length in the milk before adding it to the sauce (see below). But we would do one of these:

1) add a teaspoon of vanilla extract (see below for when),
2) get a jar of sugar, stick a broken up vanilla pod inside, and let them marinate; make this a permanent arrangement in your pantry. You now have vanilla sugar! Use in place of normal sugar, where the recipe requires vanilla of any kind. This makes your pod go further, and iss way easier than infusing it in hot milk (the usual vanilla pod technique).

Now put your figs on one side, and do the custard.

First, melt 2oz butter in a small heavy pan. Then mix in 3 tablespoons of all-purpose (plain) flour. Cook this for a few minutes to a nice goldish colour, like the picture above.

Not all custard involves flour. But this one does. It’s just a thickening agent.

Then pour in 3/4 of a cup of milk, gradually, while beating it into the sauce. Keep whisking it or beating it over a low-medium heat till it simmers and starts getting thicker. Make sure it doesn’t glue itself to the sides of your saucepan while this happens. Keep scraping the sides with a wooden spoon or something.

Here’s our sauce. As you can see, it got pretty thick. This happens when the custard cooks too fast, and the milk evaporates before the flour in the sauce has actually cooked. What you really ought to do is stay on a lowish heat, and go easy, because if the sauce is really heavy you won’t get such a fluffy puffy souffle. So, if you are keen to impress with your souffle skillz- and souffle skillz are all about maximum fluffiness and getting as high as possible (no not like that you know what we mean don’t be daft), then watch the heaviness of your custard.

But on the other hand, don’t worry about it. If you just want to eat darn good food, and your dinner guest loves you for who you are, the height of your souffle in inches is not that important!

So, when your sauce is either accidentally so thick the spoon can stand up in it, or nicely cooked to a proper white sauce/ American gravy-like consistency, take it off the heat. Now remove the vanilla pod if you used one, or add vanilla extract if you’re using that.

Then beat in an egg yolk.

Then beat in another three egg yolks, one at a time. Now you have a much yellower sauce.

At this point in the proceedings, we temporarily forgot to take photos. But off-camera, we whisked the egg whites that came from the same eggs as the yolks, in our Kitchenaid, till they were totally fluffy, known as “stiff peaks”. Stiff peaks are not really stiff, they just look stiff. They wouldn’t hold up your spoon, like overcooked sauce, or anything like that. Probably there was a French chef in the olden days on holiday hiking the Alps, and he saw snowy mountaintops, and thought to himself, “Mon Dieu! Ces montaignes vraiment resemble mes oeufs blancs quand ils sont tres tres frappe!” (translation, “My goodness, these mountains truly resemble my egg whites when they are very very beaten!” Apologies to any French-speaking readers.) And then the idea just stuck around and eventually became an official cooking term.

Back to the recipe!

Next, add the figs to the custard. Then fold the egg whites into all of that. Folding means gently flopping the mixture over with a big metal spoon, till it miraculously combines.

And here is the mixture poured into an oven dish at least a couple of inches deep, buttered and sprinkled with more sugar on the inside. It doesn’t look like mountains, or any other poetry-inspiring scene from the world of nature, does it?

At this point in the recipe, we have to make a confession.

This dessert is not the prettiest dessert you ever ate.

Traditional souffles are made in a deep, round dish, and they look impressive by rising over the edges and into the air: you can then dust them with icing sugar (which means sprinkle through a sieve, don’t try using a feather duster…) and the effect is quite pleasing, although you then have to present and eat it fast, because the whole thing will start to sink in under five minutes, due to the air inside shrinking. Even in Austin in the summer, it’s not 375F.

Anyway, we didn’t bother with any of that. We just wanted to get this baked and eaten as fast as possible. We just used a wider flatter dish which happened to be in our kitchen at the time.

So, this is not the beautifullest of desserts. We admit it. BUT it is as delicious as ANY other pudding you will EVER eat in our opinion. We guarantee it; whatever else you eat, we will insist it was NOT better than a fig souffle. Even if it was made by Heston Blumenthal out of a snail, a packet of gelatine and a fire-extinguisher, we will keep insisting. Because we genuinely and totally believe that good home-cooked dishes made from things lovingly grown in your area can be equalled, but never truly bettered.

Yes we do.

Cook for half an hour till risen and golden brown.

And eat as follows:
1. right away if you want to appreciate the puffiness while it lasts, OR
2. whenever it suits you, this will sink a bit but stay warm for quite a while, OR
3. for breakfast the next morning straight from the fridge. Although we’ll be surprised if there are leftovers. This recipe is supposed to serve six, and three of us shared it and ate the whole thing in one sitting.

Did we tell you how delicious this is? It’s so delicious, you shouldn’t tell anyone about it in case they all get addicted and cause a fig-drought. This dish makes people a little bit deranged. It’s better than most forms of medication, religion, politics and extreme sports combined. But if you don’t believe us, we will just have to shrug.

************

FIG SOUFFLE

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup (4oz or 115g) superfine or caster sugar, or vanilla sugar, plus more to sprinkle in the oven dish
1-2lb figs
2oz butter (half a stick), plus a tablespoon or so to butter the oven dish
3 tablespoons (1oz, 28g) all-purpose (plain) flour
3/4 cup (180 ml) milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (unless using vanilla sugar)
4 egg yolks and 4 egg whites

1. Heat oven to 375F
2. Peel and chop figs
3. Dissolve sugar in 4 tbsps water, in a small heavy saucepan.
4. Bring to boil: boil for 4 mins.
5. Add figs: simmer for 5 mins. Put aside.
6. In another pan, melt butter on medium heat, then beat in flour. Cook 3 minutes.
7. Gradually add milk, beating it in. Keep stirring and cooking till custard thickens to gravy consistency.
8. Remove from heat and beat in egg yolks one at a time.
9. Whisk egg whites separately to stiff peaks.
10. Combine custard and figs, then fold in beaten egg whites.
11. Butter your oven dish, and sprinkle with sugar all over.
12. Put mixture in dish, bake for 30 mins till golden and risen.
13. You know the rest…

Good progress this week with the cafe renovation! No more floods, earthquakes, bolts of lightning or anything like that, plus everyone on the team managed to hang onto all of their limbs and sensory organs etc. Not only that, but we got a bunch of stuff done! Most importantly, the official anti-fire gadgedtry is now installed, which means we are protected against anything spontaneously combusting in the kitchen. And here’s some other stuff:

Canvas ceiling and insulating materials going up- this will look nicer than the underside of the old roof, and save a lot of energy in heating and air-conditioning. Plus we prefer it to polystyrene tiles.

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Well, it hasn’t been the greatest of weeks with our cafe renovation. The bad news was, dramatic indoor rain due to roofing issues. The good news is, these are now finally scheduled for full and proper sorting out, which is a big relief (the roof being out of our control, due to the terms of our lease), and in the meantime we finally have temporary repairs that are keeping out the rain.

So, no pretty pictures from the interior of the cafe today, because most of the week it looked like this:

picture attribution

Well, it looked like this in our fevered imaginations and nightmares, anyway

And then, as if flooding was not enough disaster, our head contractor guy Chris sustained a horrific work injury requiring urgent medical attention: Chris was cutting floor tiles when a giant splinter of rock-hard porcelain flew up into the air then embedded itself right in his eyeball!

WE KNOW!!!! EEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!

Anyway, that was a few days ago and you will be glad to hear that Chris’ eye is somewhat recovered now. Or at least, he has been given special anaesthetic retina-numbing eye-drops to reduce some of the agony.

Get completely better soon, Chris!

So, hopefully next week’s report will be more positive and successful. Meanwhile, let’s all remember to follow the example of this fellow….

photo attribution

…. and heed the moral of this week’s story: REMEMBER TO WEAR YOUR GOGGLES!

photo attribution

We’ll be posting cafe updates here weekly now, as things move forward. For more frequent news & views, follow our facebook page. Thanks!

Hello again! We are still working away at the cafe renovation, and although it has taken much longer than originally expected (more on that in another post), everything is stil going really well, it’s just not very fascinating stuff to write home about. However, here is a recent batch of photos from inside the cafe, in case you’re not already overwhelmed with letters from other, more interesting, friends and family members

They’re not exactly super-exciting photos, mostly because you’re still looking at what is basically an empty building. This is because the work that took so long was building work inside the walls, under the floor, underground and on the roof, (and on the phone to City Hall, and in waiting rooms and offices down at City Hall), most of which you can’t exactly… see. Things will get a lot more exciting, and much prettier, when the floor is finished, meaning things can go on top of it. And this should happen fairly soon as the weather is a bit less wet now. Apparently, it’s really hard to set concrete in 100% humidity…

(100% humidity is one of those amusing expressions we have in Austin, Texas- it sounds as if the air is actually completely water, and we are all swimming round will gills under the hot, tropical sea. Yet actually… yes, that really is exactly what it feels like. Austinites, you know.)

So, when the floor is done, we can get stuff inside, which is actually a very quick job compared to the other work so far. We’ll post more pictures when that happens soon. Meanwhile, here are a few things that are already visible to the human eye:

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Ingredients:
raspberries (one punnet per pint of ice cream, or more, or less)
sugar (a couple of tablespoons per punnet)
vanilla ice cream (as much as you want)

Raspbery ripple is a favourite flavour of ice cream in the UK, apparently invented by a Mr Longhurst as part of a competition. Very simply, it is vanilla ice cream with raspberry syrup inside. An excellent combo, like vanilla ice cream with raspberry syrup poured on top, but more frozen and swirly.

However, you can improve on the standard version by making your own vanilla ice cream and your own raspberry syrup from real raspberries; or simply adding your home made raspberry syrup to some half-melted (good) store-bought ice cream. We made this batch especially because raspberries are cheap this time of year so you can buy loads and this way they last a very long time.

The first thing to do is blast your raspberries in a food processor, or mash them by hand, then push them through a metal sieve with a spoon. A few seeds will get through, but most of them will stay in the sieve. Then you have your raspberry puree:

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This recipe goes with the next recipe, raspberry ripple ice-cream. It’s also a base for any fruit ice-creams: just add pureed fruit instead of vanilla extract.

And if you don’t want to make custard, here is an incredibly simple all-in-one Martha Stewart recipe without the eggs. It won’t taste as rich or smooth, but it may well taste better than store-bought, especially if you eat it pretty soon after making.

1 1/4 cups whole milk
6 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 vanilla pod OR 1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Whisk together the egg yolks and sugar.
2. Heat the milk in a heavy saucepan till it comes to the boil, then remove from the heat.
3. Pour hot milk onto the egg yolk mixture and whisk it all together.
4. Return mixture to the heavy saucepan and heat on a low heat while stirring continuously. As it cooks, the custard will gradually thicken. Make sure it doesn’t stick to the sides or bottom of the pan. It should take somewhere around ten minutes. (You can’t speed things up by turning the heat higher, that just spoils it.)
5. When the custard is a little bit thicker (“coating consistency”), remove from heat and pour in a bowl. If you are using a vanilla pod, cut it lengthwise and into small pieces and add to the custard to infuse as it cools. Cover with cling film or a damp tea-towel so the custard doesn’t get a skin on top.
6. When it is cool, pour the custard through a sieve, cover and put it in the fridge.
7. When the custard is cold, whip the cream till thick then whisk it together with the custard. Add the vanilla extract if using. Chill completely before churning and freezing to make ice-cream.