Beautiful buckwheat blinis

This week two friends came for our annual long lunch - they have birthdays close together. Last year we made ravioli. This year Ali had happened to mention she'd never made a souffle, so I did my Julia Child impersonation and made her classic cheese souffle. To start with, Lynn composed a toothsome salad with roasted pears and superbly fresh roasted walnuts. Ali had brought everything for blinis and showed us how to make them. It was not difficult at all, and I'll definitely do it again. 

Buckwheat blinis with smoked salmon 

(Adapted slightly from Cuisine magazine, September 2012)

Makes 18-24, depending on how big you make them. Can be made in advance, and gently reheated before
serving.

Batter

125 ml milk
¾ tsp active dried yeast
50 g buckwheat flour
50 g plain flour
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp sugar
1 egg, separated
butter for cooking

Heat the milk to lukewarm, then sprinkle the yeast over it.

Sift the flours, salt and sugar into a large bowl. Whisk in the warm milk and yeast mixture and the egg yolk.

Set aside in a warm place until the batter has doubled in size. (This can take up to an hour, depending on the air temperature and the freshness of the yeast. I find a metal bowl standing in about 5 cm of warm water in the sink, covered with a chopping board, works very well.).

When ready to cook, beat the egg white to soft peaks, then fold it through the batter.

Heat a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat, and use kitchen paper to smear it with butter. 

Add small spoonfuls of batter to the pan and cook until bubbles break through the surface, then turn and
cook the other side until golden. 

Leave on kitchen paper to cool a little.

Toppings

4 Tbsp crème fraiche or cream cheese, mixed with 2 tsp horseradish cream
150-200 g hot smoked salmon, skinned and broken into small pieces
1 Tbsp chopped chives and/or dill (Ali brought both from her garden)

Put a blob of the cream cheese mixture on each blini, top with pieces of smoked salmon, and garnish with the chives and/or dill.  

We scoffed three or four each and had to have a pause before the souffle. Then we had another pause before the lemon tarts - pastry by Ali, filling by Lynn. After all that I had a very late dinner of leftover souffle (see my Facebook page), and tonight I finished up the last bit of lemon filling by way of dessert. Waste not, want not....  

Salmon and leek tart

As the dearth of new posts might suggest, things have been going to pot a bit around here lately in the food department. But today I felt like being more creative. In the fridge I had some smoked salmon and a leek, so I looked up Dean Brettschneider's excellent Pie to see what I could do with them. I settled for a simpler version of a tart with both leek and smoked salmon. It's meant to have fennel in it too, but that tastes of aniseed, one of the few flavours I don't like. It had cherry tomatoes on top as well, but I thought that would be gilding the lily. So I made a simpler version, and it turned out very well. It's probably more of a lunch dish, but with bread and a salad, it was delicious for dinner tonight.

Salmon and leek tart
plain short pastry - use the recipe here, or your own, or bought
50g sour cream
3 eggs
50 ml cream
1 nutmeg
100g smoked salmon
1 leek
1 Tbsp butter
50g cream cheese
1 tsp thyme leaves

- Heat oven to 200C. Use the pastry to line either a loose-bottomed flan tin or a rectangular tin. Chill in fridge for 30 minutes.
- Put a piece of baking paper over the base, big enough to hold blind baking beans and lift them out afterwards. Blind bake the tart case until it is lightly coloured - about 20-15 minutes. Remove the paper and beans. Turn oven down to 180C.
- Trim the leek and slice into rings. Cook gently in the butter. Add a little salt and pepper. Set aside.
- In a large bowl, whisk the sour cream until smooth. Whisk in the 3 eggs. Pour in the cream and grate in a good sprinkle of nutmeg. Whisk gently to combine.
- Cut or break up the smoked salmon into small pieces, put it in a bowl and mix it gently with the cooked leek. Arrange them in the pastry case "in a rustic fashion". (These are Dean's words - nice.)
- Carefully pour over the savoury custard. Dot half-teaspoonfuls of cream cheese over the top. Sprinkle over the thyme leaves.
- Bake at 180C for 25 minutes, until the mixture is just set.  Cool before removing from tin.

Pretty, isn't it!

Mum's little salmon sandwiches

What a week! It started with the launch of The Colour of Food and has been hectic ever since. Lois Daish launched it and Mary Varnham published it. I'm wearing the apron my friend Camille sent me, made of recycled tablecloths.

For the launch I made (with invaluable help from friends) retro food from the 1950s, the sort of thing my mother would make for family parties. Ham sandwiches, Snax biscuits with vintage cheddar and pieces of pickled pear (in Mum's day it would have been chutney but I thought there should be a nod to today's goodies too), and Mum's fudge cake (made by the lovely Sarah from Awa Press). And two large plates of Mum's little salmon sandwiches. Several people have asked me for the recipe, so here goes.
        Only it isn't exactly a recipe. The first time my sister and I made these was for the gathering following Mum's funeral in June 2001, almost exactly twelve years ago. We had to marshall our collective memories to work out how she made them. We mixed, tasted and mixed again until we thought we'd got exactly the right balance of salmon and vinegar.

This recipe makes around 80 small sandwiches.
First, you need two loaves of the thinnest sandwich-sliced bread you can find. I used light wheatmeal - I think Mum did sometimes use this too, though she usually used white bread.

Then you need butter or butter-like spread. The classic is butter mixed with a little hot water, but you can also use one of the butter/oil spreads if you prefer.

And of course, tinned pink salmon. No such thing as smoked salmon in the 1950s!
For the launch I used three of the largest (415gm) tins.

Open the tins, drain the salmon and put it in a large bowl.
Add vinegar. Now this is the tricky part.

In my mother's day the only vinegar commonly available was DYC malt vinegar. But this time I thought I could improve on that a little. I didn't want to use balsamic - it's too strong for the salmon. Instead I used Delmaine's red wine  vinegar, with a splash of DYC malt vinegar for authenticity, and also a good squeeze (half a lemon) of lemon juice and a pinch or two of salt (taste it carefully when adding this)..
         But I can't tell you exactly how much of the red wine vinegar to use, because I didn't measure it. I just kept adding it in small splashes and mixing it thoroughly into the salmon, and after a few splashes, added the DYC and the lemon juice, then a little more red wine vinegar until it tasted right. I added the salt at the end, tasting again..
         My sister and I were surprised how much vinegar it took to get the right flavour. It has to be distinctly sharp and vinegary, but not so much as to completely overwhelm the salmon or make it too wet to use as sandwich filling. You need a damp but still firm salmon mixture that you can spread thickly and reasonably smoothly on the buttered bread. Just try it yourself and see how you go. You might like less vinegar than my sister and I do (only then they won't be Mum's sandwiches).

Assembly
It pays to set up an assembly line! Take two pieces of bread at a time from the packet, open them and spread them with butter. Put them lightly together and pile them up in pairs.
Open each pair and spread one reasonably thickly with the salmon, then close them firmly. Cut the crusts off.
Cut each large sandwich into four, either in triangles or in little squares. (Mum usually made triangles but I opted for squares this time, keeping the triangles for the ham and mustard ones. A sandwich plastic cutter guide like the ones they use in choose-your-own-sandwich places helps, but I didn't have one.)
Arrange them neatly on two large plates and cover them with a damp teatowel until required. (We had finished making them about an hour ahead of time - you don't want to leave them much longer than that.)

Very basic, very retro - and everyone loved them.

                                            Here's my little mother with my son in 1987.

Salmon, pastry, leeks

We had K. and G., US friends we haven't seen for two years, here for dinner last night, plus their and our friend B. (who very kindly brought a marvellous apple cake for dessert, bless her). K. doesn't eat meat so we started with an antipasto of vege things, including pickled garlic and white bean dip, plus salami for the carnivores and herrings for her.

For the main course I bought a fillet of fresh salmon, creamed it in a white sauce made with wine and fish stock (French stock cubes) as well as milk, and wrapped the result in puff pastry envelopes - half a sheet, filling on one side, eggwash around the edges, pastry folded in half to make a big triangle and carefully sealed, baked at 220C for around 20 minutes.

I'm convinced, though, that my oven is quite seriously underpowered. In Melbourne I looked in Cuisine World, a supply shop for professional and serious home cooks at 245 Elizabeth Street; it had lots of different thermometers, but not one for ovens. I did get a very good baking sheet, and used it under the pastry envelopes.

To go with them, I made up a nice way of doing leeks. I cut all the tender parts into fine rings and microwaved them in half a cup of orange juice. Then I poured the leeky liquid into a small pan and reduced it with more orange juice, lemon juice, blanched orange zest, a splash of orange liqueur, and a little lump of butter. Just before serving I stirred the reduction into the leeks and reheated them. They had a lovely sweet-sharp citrusy flavour that went really well with the rich creamy salmon and pastry, and the colours looked good too. But I can't seem to take decent photos at night, everything goes yellow in the electric light.