Greek Easter Bread (Tsoureki)

     It was Easter Sunday yesterday, and I am recovering.  I can't remember when I cooked as much as I have this past weekend.  We had three dinner parties this week, plus two brunches.  Food is such an integral part of a holiday, and one main reason I cook is so that my kids will have happy, specific memories of special occasions.  But it does take time - something I'm not very good at admitting to myself.
     So, I was adventurous this year.  I made our traditional Simnel cake, and hot cross buns,

but I also tried not one, but two new Easter recipes.  The first one was an Italian Easter cake, called  Colombo di Pasqua.  It is a yeast cake, and I have been dying to try for years now.  It is very similar to the Italian Christmas cake Panettone.  You have to let it rise three different times, so it is definitely something to do when you know you will be at home throughout the day.  The result was fabulous, but I would say it might be something to serve at tea time rather than for dessert after dinner:

 

 

     The second new recipe I tried was for a Greek Easter bread, sometime referred to as Tsoureki.  The Greeks do Easter in a big way, so I was all for borrowing some of their traditions, particularly when it comes to food.  But I must say that I was not prepared for how very happy it made me to bake a Tsoureki.  Take a look at how BEAUTIFUL this thing is:

 

  

   
     I LOVE the idea of baking bread with dyed eggs!  It makes it really quite special.  This was the perfect thing to serve for our Easter Sunday brunch, which I did.  The kids loved it. I did something a bit different, in that most recipes I read called for the eggs to be hard-boiled, and then dyed, and then baked.  I didn't want to go down that route, as surely the eggs would be inedible by the end of that process.  So, I dyed raw eggs, and put them in the bread.  The result - besides the bread - was 4 beautifully baked eggs - better than anything boiled.
     I didn't quite follow the recipes I used for this bread, so here is my version of Tsourki (never thought I would say that !):

Greek Easter Bread

4 cups flour
4 tsp active dry yeast
1 cup milk
4 eggs
110 grams sugar
zest of three oranges
110 grams butter
1 tbsp. orange juice
2 tsp. vanilla

     OK - preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Warm the milk to 110 degrees F or so in a large bowl that attaches to a mixer.  Sprinkle on the yeast, and 1 tsp sugar.  Mix well, and then let it sit for 5 minutes.
     Mix again, and add 2 cups flour.  Mix well with the dough hook attachment, and let it sit again for a few minutes, until the mixture starts to bubble a little.  Then mix in the eggs, one at a time.  Next, add the sugar, orange zest, orange juice and vanilla, and mix well to combine.  Finally, cut the butter into little cubes and add to the dough, and mix again to incorporate.
     Add the next two cups of flour at little at a time.  The dough will be very sticky, but don't panic.  At this point, flour your hands and take the dough out of the mixer and onto a lightly floured surface.  We need to knead this dough now, even though it may seem like an impossible task because of the stickiness.  Slap the dough down, knead it, pick it up off the counter, and do that again and again.  As you knead, at some point - probably after about 5 minutes - the dough will develop into something beautiful and smooth.  Please don't be tempted to add flour, as this will make the bread heavy and plonky, rather than delicate and light.
     After the dough has become smooth, put it into a lightly oiled bowl, and let it rise until it has doubled in volume, about 45 minutes.  When it has, punch the dough down, and divide it in two.  Take one of the halves, and divide it into three pieces. Roll the pieces out into long, thin strips, and then braid the three strips together.  Form the braid into a wreath shape.  Let the braid rise again, about 20 minutes.  When it is ready to cook, carefully place three or four raw, dyed eggs into the wreath.  Brush the whole wreath with egg white.  Bake for about 20-25 minutes, or until it is nicely browned on the outside but still soft in the middle.
 

Easter Carrot Cake

     Easter's coming, and that's exciting.  I love cooking for Easter.  It's different than cooking for Christmas, to be sure.  I would say there's less pressure, less expectation, than cooking for Christmas.  There are, of course, solid culinary traditions associated with Easter - fish on Good Friday, lamb on Easter Sunday, hot cross buns, Simnel cake, and so forth.  But I feel there is also more scope for experimentation. 
     Last year my daughter Georgiana was baptized on Good Friday, and I found myself catering for about 40 people after the event.  As I tried to think of the perfect Easter-type buffet, I was drawn to all sorts of foods - foods made with ingredients that represent Spring, foods made with fish, and foods with a middle-eastern bent - olives, almonds, dates, figs, apricots, vine leaves, goat's cheese, etc. - in memory of the life and death of Jesus Christ.  Here's a pictures of the buffet, just for fun:

     But surely, standard fare at Easter time is the carrot cake.  Georgiana's birthday is in March, and every year her birthday cake is a carrot cake. 
     I find there is something inherently interesting about carrot cake.  To my mind, it stands somewhere between a sponge cake and a fruit cake, and the possibilities are vast.  This year, I deviated from my normal carrot cake recipe and tried some different ingredients - I swapped butter for the oil, added some ground almonds, walnuts, and dried fruit.  Take a look:

Easter Carrot Cake

250 grams flour
50 grams ground almonds
1/2 tsp. mixed spice
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
250 grams butter
225 grams sugar
5 medium eggs
350 grams grated carrots
65 grams raisins
65 grams sultanas
50 grams walnuts
Juice of 1/2 orange
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Zest of 1 lemon

For icing:
Apricot jam
Cream cheese frosting.

First, in a small bowl, combine the raisins, sultanas and zest with the orange and lemon juice.  Let the fruit soak for about 20 minutes.

Grease and line two round 9-inch cake pans.  Make sure the sides of the pan are rather high. 

In a large bowl, combine the flour, ground almonds, spices, baking powder, and baking soda.  In another bowl, beat the butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each one.  Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture by the spoonful, stirring gently after each one.  When the mixtures are combined, stir in the carrots, walnuts, and the soaked dried fruit with the juices and zest. 

Divide the batter evenly between the two pans.  Bake at 350F for about 30 minutes.  A skewer should come out clean when they are done.

Let the cake cool completely.  When ready to ice, spread about 3 or 4 tablespoons of apricot jam over the surface of one of the cakes.  Frost the surface of the other cake with cream cheese frosting.  Gently bring these two surfaces together to make a sandwich.  Then frost the rest of the cake with the cream cheese frosting.

Decorate as you see fit for Easter.  I can never resist doing something like this:

 

Mock Seville Orange Curd

     I continue to yearn to cook all the things I did in England.  It is hard, though, because much of the food just isn't the same.  There are no digestives here.  Well, OK, you can get them, but they are very rare, and very expensive when you do find them.  The only chocolate here that compares to chocolate in England is the Lindt chocolate, but again, very expensive.  The brown sugar isn't as nice.  Yogurts, cheese, and crackers - forget it. 
     OK - I'll stop whining, and talk about a  success story.  I missed cooking with Seville oranges this year.  As far as I could tell, they were not available here in southern California.  I usually make a Seville orange curd tart in January or February every year, and this is enough of a distinctive event in my culinary calendar that I was really quite sad at the thought of not being able to do it. 
     Then, I remembered a Nigella cooking program that I saw at least 10 years ago now, where she made orange ice cream.  She used orange and lime zest, and said that the combination of orange and lime gave the flavor of Seville oranges.
     It was my only hope of having anything remotely like Seville orange curd this year.  I'm happy to say that it worked, and I've had my Seville orange curd fix.


Mock Seville Orange Curd

50 mls lime juice
100 mls orange juice
Zest of two limes
Zest of two oranges
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
200 grams sugar
110 grams butter, cut into smallish pieces

Combine the juices, zest and sugar in a saucepan.  Whisk in the eggs.  Add the butter pieces, and cook over a low heat until the mixture thickens, stirring constantly.  The mixture will seem thin and unpromising as you stir, but be patient, because all of a sudden it will all come together and all will be well.

     I would say that one main reason I got into cooking, and why I still do it so much, is because I have control over the final product.  I can do a meatloaf with mushrooms, or not.  I can do a vegetable curry with cauliflower and carrots, or green beans and zucchini, or anything else.  I can do  a chocolate cake with all butter, instead of using vegetable oil, or an apple crumble just the way I like it.
     So, imagine my happiness when I made granola last week.  This is only the second time I have made it, and I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to make it years ago.  I love granola - in fact, I love all cereals and am a bit of a cereal addict.  I try to stay away from the stuff because, you know, it's too many carbs blah blah, but if trying to keep at a good weight and eating a balanced diet wasn't an issue for me I would probably eat it every meal.  I've taken recently to eating a handful of cereal in a little mug with a splash of milk as a snack, and that seems to keep my depravation complex at bay.
     Anyway, back to the granola.  I have spent years loitering in the cereal isle at the grocery store, reading the label of every granola and museli available, trying to decide which one I wanted for that week (the fact that when I hit 40 my eyesight became noticeably worse when reading small print didn't make this job any easier, and my older children laughed at me when they saw me hunched over a box of cereal, squinting and moving the box closer and then farther away as I tried to decipher the fine print).  Should I go for dried pineapple and brazil nut granola? Or banana chips, dried apricots and pecans?  Dried cherries and almonds?  How about the standard raisin and hazelnut combination?  And there was always a pumpkin seed option, gently chastising me that eating granola could only be justified if it had some kind of super food.  So much of the time I just went home without any granola, simply because I just couldn't decide.
     So making granola was a bit of a revelation for me.  I could use any combination that I wanted!  Amazing!  No more looking for someone else's version of the perfect granola.  I adapted recipes from both Nigella Lawson and David Lebovitz - my new favorite food person (although Nigella will always hold a special place ...).  They both used almonds, and Nigella added raisins.  I knew I wanted something else as well, so I added pumpkin seeds, golden raisins and dried apricots.  I served it at a church brunch last Sunday, and someone commented:  'This is like Christmas!'

Customized Granola

400 grams oatmeal (not the quick-cooking kind)
150 grams whole almonds
100 grams sliced almonds
100 grams pumpkin seeds
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon all spice (mixed spice)
1/2 teaspoon salt
200 grams applesauce
3 tablespoons vegetable or sunflower oil
150 grams agave nectar
1 teaspoon vanilla
100 grams raisins
50 grams golden raisins
75 grams apricots

Grease a very large, square baking dish with vegetable oil.  Combine all the dry ingredients in a big bowl, except for the raisins, golden raisins and apricots.  Put the oil, agave, vanilla and applesauce in a saucepan, and heat gently until they are well combined.  Pour this mixture over the dry ingredients, and mix well until the dry ingredients are thoroughly coated.  Pour into the prepared pan, and bake at 300F/150C for about an hour, giving it a good stir about every 20 minutes.

     And the fab thing about this is, the nut and fruit combinations are up to you.  Just keep the quantities the same, but chop and change as you will.  I see myself making this on a regular basis ...

  

     Eating in California has its undeniable pleasures.  Everywhere you look, food is growing, even in February.  Right now the citrus fruits are in season, and the orange and lemon trees are a beautiful sight.  It's warm here, so one isn't always in the mood for the rich winter fare we enjoyed in England, like steak and mushroom pie, or lamb stew with dumplings.  Our diet is changing a bit, just because it has to:  we eat more citrus fruits, avacadoes, and Mexican food, and we eat less yogurt, chocolate and cheese because those things just aren't as good here. 
     Still, I miss cooking and eating in England, and so I try my best to cook English food here.  I know that comforts the kids - they need familiarity in their new home, and nothing brings the comfort of familiarity like food.  They ask for sausages and mash, fish and chips, roast chicken, apple crumble, good chocolate desserts - all things that aren't really a part of the American diet.
     Speaking of familiarity, I am so happy to be reunited with my cookbooks.  I have been without them for 6 months, as they went into storage in July.  Opening them up again and reading the recipes was like conversing with an old friend.  And the recipes brought back so many memories - some very old, some more recent.  Each cookbook was acquired at a different phase in my life, so each one is associated in my mind with a specific time and place, and with the events and challenges that I was facing at that time and in that place.  Most of the time, food is made with the intent to respond to an event or a challenge, so when I read a recipe I used to cook, I remember not only when I cooked it, but also why I cooked it.  I cooked a spinach and goat's cheese quiche for a family blessing in Lincolnshire, I baked bread in Cambridge when we were first married because I wanted to get good a making French bread, I cooked Delia's chocolate bread and butter pudding in Huntingdon, usually late at night, because my kids adored it.
     Often what happens to me and cookbooks is that I get stuck into one and attempt to cook my way through it.  I'm fascinated right now with the book, La Dolce Vita. Sweet Dreams and Chocolate Memories by Isabel Coe.  I am especially happy that this book is out of storage.  It's one of those cookbooks that is half memoir, half cookbook.  Isabel Coe tells stories about both sides of her family - some from Italy, some from Switzerland - and gives chocolate recipes which have been in her family for generations.  It's fascinating reading, and the recipes are remarkable for their simplicity and elegance.
     One recipe I tried this week from the book is 'Cold-Weather Parsenstein', which is basically a truffle recipe.  It was Valentine's Day on Friday, and I always make the kids some kind of Valentine treat. This year I decided to make them chocolates, rather than buy chocolates, so I turned to this recipe.  I changed it a bit for my use, and it was a huge hit.  Tim said they were the best truffles I had ever made.

Valentine's Day Chocolates - For Tim
100 mls heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
250 grams dark chocolate
15 grams butter
50 grams raspberries

To coat:
3 tbsp cocoa powder
3 tbsp powdered sugar
150 grams dark chocolate

     Pour the whipping cream and the vanilla extract in a saucepan or microwavable jug.  Bring to the boil.  In the meantime, chop up the chocolate and butter into little chunks in a large bowl.  Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and butter and stir until the chocolate is melted.  Stir in the rapsberries - don't worry, they will fall apart and disintegrate.  Put the mixture in the fridge to cool. 
     When it is set, mix the cocoa powder and powdered sugar together in a small bowl.  Coat your hands with powdered sugar, and make truffle balls - or whatever shape you like - out of the chocolate mixture.  Roll the chocolate shapes in the cocoa power mixture, and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  Freeze the truffles for a couple of hours, until hard.
     Finally, melt the dark chocolate over a double boiler.  Coat the truffles in the melted chocolate, and place back on the parchment paper.  Store in the fridge until ready to eat.  Makes about 15 truffles, depending on how big you make them.


   

     Since I last posted in this blog, we have moved countries.  No more cooking in England, I'm afraid, at least for the foreseeable future.  And I fear something is true which I have suspected all along:  I actually enjoy cooking more in England than I do in the States.  Since we have moved back to the States, I find myself just a little bit less interested in food than I have been for the past 18 years.  This is an alarming development - not one I am happy with at all - but I have to admit that for the past few months it feels as though I have lost my cooking 'mojo'. 
     So, the only thing to be done is to pick myself up and find inspiration for my cooking in this different environment.  We are moving to Southern California later this week, where we plan to live for a very long time, so that's the environment which will inform my cooking going forward.
     To encourage myself to get back into cooking and find the same kind of excitement and pleasure in it that I once did, I forced myself to do something just a little bit different today with our Sunday roast.  I focused on the vegetables.  Instead of boiling the brussel sprouts, I roasted them - a far superior way of cooking them, I think.  With the carrot and swede, I added orange peel, and they were amazing.  To the green beans, I added lemon peel, which improved them greatly as well. 
     I think that vegetables are often hard to get right.  I was surprised at how giving them just a little bit more attention transformed the meal from a bit mundane to rather special:  the brussels were gleaming, the carrots were bright, the green beans dark and sophisticated.  It made me happy to eat them.  And that's a good sign for the future.

Carrots and Swede with Orange
1 lb. carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
1/2 lb. swede, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
Zest of 1 orange
butter, to taste

Boil the carrots and swede until tender.  Drain them, and add butter to taste.  Zest the orange over the pan, and stir thoroughly so the carrots and swede are coated evenly with the zest. 

     Today is the day after Thanksgiving, and that's got to be one of the best days of the year.  It's the official start of the Christmas season, I am surrounded by exciting Thanksgiving left-overs - turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, dinner rolls, sweet potatoes, and I have some surprisingly positive memories of this year's Thanksgiving that will be sustaining me through whatever dark times befall me in the near future.
     I think we need to be clear about the importance of Thanksgiving, and I am not talking here about the culinary importance.  For me, it is the premier event in which food and family intersect so strongly with one another that it is hard to keep them separate and distinct.  This is not to say that I have confused my children with a turkey.  I mean, rather, that while Thanksgiving is most definitely about turkey and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, it is just as much about the company with whom you eat it, such that memories of food at Thanksgiving cannot be separated from the memories of the people eating it.
     For instance, one year my younger sisters were both living in London and I was a newly wed in Cambridge, and of course they came up for Thanksgiving.  We spent the whole day making all the foods we always made at home for Thanksgiving, one of which is a dish called Yams and Apples (a yam is a sweet potato in our neck of the woods).  It is a very time consuming dish and I remember my sister in my tiny apartment laboring over this big vat of yams and apples.  And now whenever I make that dish, I often think of her.  But it wasn't just that.  It was a powerful experience - bonding together as sisters in a foreign country by practicing our own family culinary rituals, which had the deepest of meanings for us as members of that family.
      And what is that meaning?  Well, on the surface, Thanksgiving is about celebrating the survival of the Pilgrims during the first year after they arrived in America in 1620.  We remember that they came to America because they wanted religious freedom which they could not get in England, and we are grateful that they had the courage to follow their convictions and found our country on such noble principles.  That was always a very important meaning in our family.  Thanksgiving is also about being thankful in general for the things that you have and the circumstances that you enjoy.  But I think there is something else going on here that makes the meaning even more robust.  If the ritual of Thanksgiving is about getting together with loved ones for a specific meal with a specific purpose, the meaning of Thanksgiving is embedded just as much in the meaning of those relationships with loved ones as it is in the meal itself.  In other words, the meaning of Thanksgiving is family, and, without trying in any way sound sappy, the meaning of family is love.  That's why my sisters and I had to get together and make Thanksgiving dinner even when we were living in different parts of a foreign country.  Practicing our family culinary ritual meant re-connecting with our family, who were so far away and who we loved so dearly.      
     So, with Thanksgiving now being on an equal footing with life, love and the meaning of universe, as I mother I feel it is my duty to pass on the full Thanksgiving experience, in the hopes that one day they, too will catch the vision and feel the love whenever they see a turkey or a pumpkin pie.
     And that 'full' experience starts with helping out in the kitchen on Thanksgiving eve.  I love the hustle and bustle in a kitchen the night before Thanksgiving or Christmas; I love it when the kids help out.  Not only are they learning, but it provides us with a common experience - a foundation on which to build our relationship further.  So, my three little girls helped me assemble the brine in which we would soak the turkey overnight:

     And my twelve year old made the best pumpkin pie filling I've ever had:

Imogen's Best Ever Pumpkin Pie

16 ounces cooked pumpkin or butternut squash
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp cloves
3 large eggs
12 ounces evaporated milk

Mix all ingredients together, making sure the eggs are well beaten.  Pour into a waiting pastry shell (that has not been baked at all, and see below for recipe).  Cook at 200C/400F for about 15 minutes, then turn down the oven to 180C/350F and cook for another 20-30 minutes.  The pie is done with a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

     I put the teenager in charge of pastry:

     But she didn't always work on the pastry.  Our kitchen was filled with lots of mayhem on Thanksgiving Eve, and it wasn't because of the younger children:

     Now, this year, I feared for the pastry of my pumpkin and apple pies, and not because the teenager was in charge.  I have had too many bad experiences with pastry sticking to the pan, or it tasting like cardboard.  So, I used a method that I learned from one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books.  Instead of rolling it out, we simply broke off bits of pastry and pressed them into the pie dish, like so:

Perfect Pastry

125 grams butter, cut into small pieces
250 grams flour
pinch salt
1 egg yolk
juice of 1/4-1/3 lemon

Rub together the butter and the flour (and salt) with your fingers, until they look like porridge oats.  Mix the egg yok and lemon juice together in a small bowl, and add this mixture one tablespoon at a time until the pastry sticks together.  You may need to add a tablespoon of water or so to the pastry.  Break off bits of pastry and press them into a pie dish until you have covered the bottom and sides sufficiently.

     My next challenge was the apple pie.  I think it is actually quite hard to make a good apple pie, and I was mildly surprised to find that I had a pretty strong desire to get it right this year. I put my nine year old son in charge of getting the pastry in the pan, using the same recipe and method as we did with the pumpkin pie,

The filling was as follows:

Thanksgiving Apple Pie

800 grams Bramley apples, grated
450 grams Cox apples, cubed
145 grams white sugar
15 grams brown sugar
25 grams butter
25 grams flour
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/4 tsp cloves
freshly grated nutmeg

Put all the ingredients into a big pan over a medium heat.  Stir the filling often to make sure it doesn't catch.  Cook for a few minutes until the apple cubes have softened somewhat.  Then pour the filling into the waiting pastry case:

For the topping, I decided to use a crumble topping:

130 grams flour
90 grams butter
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp white sugar

Rub together the flour and butter between your fingers until they look like porridge oats.  Mix in the sugars.  Sprinkle over the filling.  Bake at 190C/375F for about 30-35 minutes, until golden brown and bubbling on top. 

     On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up with refreshingly little to do, but I did have to get the turkey ready.  I didn't do much to it, since I had soaked it the night before, but it was beautiful when it came out of the brine:

     I am paranoid about dry white turkey meat, so I take all necessary precautions to avoid that.  One trick I learned from a Jamie Oliver program is to put butter directly onto the breast meat, under the skin - something my children like to freak out about when they witness me doing it:

     I had more help in the kitchen on the final stretch before dinner, with the teenager actually coming into the kitchen and saying to me 'Do you need me to help you?'  This was without prompting.  When I recovered from going into shock, I felt the biggest sense of accomplishment - my child asked to be helpful!  Funny how having children makes you appreciate the very simple things in life.  Either that or it reduces your expectations for yourself and for them to something so low that any good thing that happens is a bonus.  I put her to work making a topping for some broccoli in a cream cheese sauce, which was bread crumbs, butter and grated cheddar cheese:

     You can imagine how good the topping tasted.  She took a bite, enthused about how delicious it was, and I responded in agreement.  And in that moment, there was a unity between us, a shared understanding, that is not often there as of late.   Food can bridge the generation gap - temporarily, maybe, but in a way that matters.  And that brings us back full circle to the meaning of Thanksgiving:  it's about a common experience, about family unity, about love:

Even when your teenager does this at the table: