It’s all about rhubarb…

Posted on by vlatsou

If you follow food blogs like I do you will have noticed the recent rhubarb craze. Everybody is making cakes, crumbles (or crisps as they like to call them on the other side of the ocean), muffins, ice-creams, tarts with rhubarb. I understand that in America there is quite a short rhubarb season, from April to September, which would justify why everyone goes absolutely mental about it, since it is so amazing! But here, thankfully, we have rhubarb almost all year round, and I am prepared to trust Gregg Wallace when he claims that rhubarb is in season all year apart from Autumn.
My rhubarb obsession has resulted in an almost endless supply of rhubarb crumble all winter. Now that the spring/summer is here, I thought I might spice things up with a little strawberry.

Rhubarb and Strawberry Crumble

To prepare the filling, I chop up the rhubarb and boil it with some red wine until it becomes very soft and jam-like. Some people prefer it with some bite to it- I don’t. Rhubarb is very sour and usually takes a fair amount of sugar to make it edible. I don’t really follow a recipe and I like to add the sugar to the rhubarb at the end and taste it to see if it’s sweet enough. Brown sugar is definitely the way forward here. The strawberries are added after the rhubarb is cooked, and left it the pot to cook for as long as you want them- depending on whether you actually want whole fruit in your crumble or not. At that point the kitchen smells amazing and I would happily eat the whole thing without the topping. Actually, it goes great with just a bit of yogurt.
But back to our target, time to make the crumble topping. I use a simple recipe that involves just 3 ingredients:

175g/6oz plain flour
50g/2oz brown sugar
100g/3½ oz butter

You can add some chopped out ground nuts like almonds for some more texture/taste.
The amount of topping is usually enough for 4-5 stalks of rhubarb, depending on their size.
Bake for as much as you can really, before it burns, because the topping will just get nicer with time. Half an hour is a minimum I usually find, if you want to avoid a floury crumble.
You can serve it with either cream or custard, and I even like it with some greek yogurt, especially if the filling is a bit on the sweet side.
I’m not looking forward to September…

Oxford

Posted on by vlatsou

I visited Oxford last weekend, for the first time ever! It was awesome; sunny and hot, we watched some rowing (I hate rowing but the atmosphere was great, I got a tan and there was Pimm’s), had a barbecue and saw lots of colleges. Oxford really is very pretty. We found (with some help!) a hidden pub that apparently lots of famous people have visited. We had to walk down a little alleyway to get to it. Disappointingly, it was another Greene King pub, but it still had lots of atmosphere and the extra element of mystery to it. We had a drink there and on the way out we saw this little Hotel entrance, which I found very pretty and ever so slightly french looking.

Oxford feels more like a city than Cambridge does but without looking industrial or dirty. Also, it doesn’t have a phallic-looking University Library, which is always a bonus.

Anyway, food! On the way back, we stopped at this pub just out of Oxford. First impressions were great. It has a huge garden (and a playground!) and you can have your little picnic there which you can pick up in a pretty picnic box from the pub. You can’t have any hot food though and we were keen for some Sunday lunch.
Although it looked pretty busy, we were lucky enough to find a table to fit all 8 of us on the balcony. By that point, I was trying to avoid the sun because I could really feel my shoulders burning. I wasn’t very successful. Shouldn’t complain though, or the sun will never come back.

We had the choice of, well, all the standard ones really: beef, pork, chicken and lamb. Only beef came in a individual portion so we had a pork for 4 (on the other half of the table) a pork for 2 and a lamb for 2 for the 4 of us to share. It was good. The pork was a bit dry, but came with good crackling and some roast apples which I loved. The lamb was tasty and most of us preferred it. They also looked cool on those big boards. I would have liked some more exciting vegetables than boiled carrots and cauliflower but it seems to be acceptable to serve boring boiled vegetables with roasts. Whatever.

For pudding, I wanted to have the Summer Berry Crumble, being a crumble addict, but Alex had his eye on the Special Cheececake for two, and no one to share it with so I offered. It was served on a wooden board, the two individual cheesecakes looked properly homemade, with loads of vanilla in the cream. There were also 3 pots of different toppings: the first one was some chocolate sauce which, although tasty, didn’t seem to compliment the cheesecake that much. That’s what I thought at least, Alex loved it! There was also some wild berry compote which was great, tangy enough to counteract the sweetness of the cheesecake. The last one was supposed to be granola and it was nice for texture since the base wasn’t very thick. As we were eating, the waiter came up to us, apologised and gave us the £10 pudding for free. Apparently, the granola wasn’t granola but biscuit. Oh no.

All in all, the meal ended being a bargain, and pretty tasty too. I would happily go to The Fishes again if I didn’t live two hours away.

Getting ready for July…

Posted on by vlatsou

…when we are going to Germany to watch the Grand Prix. It is going to be a road trip and anyone that knows me and my obsession with Formula 1 could imagine how excited I am about it. I am now wasting half of my life thinking of ways to meet Sebastian Vettel.
Anyway, we are going to make this a road trip round Belgium for a few days and then head to Nurburg. I’ve been preparing myself by sampling a few belgian beers. Last week, I was in a pub up north and, to my surprise, they had a good collection of them. We decided to sample a few and share.
But before we did that, we thought we’d get in the mood by having lots of nice Fruli, which I would recommend to anyone who doesn’t like beer. That probably says a lot about it, very fruity and not very beery. But still really yummy. As Alex said, you just expect to find loads of strawberry puree at the bottom of the glass!
The favourite was Kwak. It was recommended to me by someone I can’t remember a few weeks ago, mainly because of the entertaining glass. We were advised that there is £7 charge if we break it, which kind of made sense when we realised how thin and fragile it was and that it was their only one!

It looked good, it was fun to drink (although I was a bit scared about breaking the glass) and it tasted great! It was actually surprisingly smooth and drinkable given the high alcohol percentage (8%). Well, I suppose that is low for a belgian beer, but it did help towards my hangover then next morning.
We also tried Rochefort 10, a strong 11.3% trappist beer that I have had before but in that case it just smelled a bit of cleaning products. Not great. When I had it in the past it was dark and bitter, and very very rich. I remember enjoying it, so maybe there was something wrong with that particular one!
We had a nice Chimay Blue for a bit of reference really since I knew I was going to enjoy it. Chimay is good, pretty and dark and just a bit bitter.
The Delirium Tremens that we had, was ok, although the highlight was probably the entertaining name and the “manly” glass with the pink elephants! It was tasty, but not exciting. I’d rather have a Hoegaarden!
Anyway, today I made a strawberry cake and got a sudden craving for strawberry beer. Unfortunately, out local Wine Merchants didn’t have any, so I had to settle for some interesting looking honey beer, called Barbar.
The smell is very sweet and you can really tell there is honey in there. Fortunately, the taste isn’t as sweet and it is very smooth. I will be buying that again!
Anyway, I might just go back to reading F1 news now. Crazy things happening there nowadays. The beer diary shall continue…..

Yaaaar!

Posted on by vlatsou

This weekend I was supposed to be writing a talk. Instead, I spent all of Saturday baking a cake and all of Sunday recovering from a hangover. I thought it might be more interesting to talk about the first one.

It was a friend’s birthday a few days ago and his girlfriend decided to throw a surprise party for him. Apparently, the friend with the birthday likes pirates (hmm..), so there was a theme. Sophie and I spent ages getting excited about the prospect of making a cake in the shape of a pirate boat, although I have to admit I was terrified that it would be a complete disaster. Hoping for the flavour to compensate for appearance, I suggested we made one of my favourites, Nigella’s Guinness and Chocolate Cake.

It is a really easy cake to make, and I think it is also quite a safe one too, given that the first time I made it I managed to put the oven on 110 degrees rather 170 and only realise after it had been in there for half an hour. It still turned out great.

So, the recipe (from Nigella’s website):

Ingredients:

250ml Guinness
250g butter
75g cocoa
400g caster sugar
142ml sour cream
2 eggs
275g plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons bicarb of soda
vanilla extract

Basically, it’s a one-pot cake. You melt the butter with the guinness. At this early stage, it looks disgusting. When it’s all melted, take it off the heat.


Then, you add cocoa and sugar and whisk, and it’s starting to look amazing, really really dark and smooth. Next, you beat the eggs with the sour cream and the vanilla extract and add to the mix. Finally, sieve the flour and bicarb soda and whisk until smooth.

We made an extra 50% to make two cakes. The recipe is supposedly for a 9″ tin and that will give you a tall cake. We made two of them.

Then, the fun started!

Basically, we cut each cake in half, stuck the two halves together with chocolate icing and put them in the freezer for an hour or so. That gave us the two boats, which looked a bit like this after we covered them in chocolate ganache:

At that point I was just a bit worried that no one would be able to tell what our cakes were supposed to be, and that they would probably be put off by the way they looked too. But thanks to Sophie’s creativity it turned into a real ship battle!


She decorated the rest of the table too. It was a great party, especially after Phil decided to make some more punch. But that’s a different story.

Happy Hour

Posted on by vlatsou


Being a hard-working (!) PhD student, you have to look forward to the social event of the week, happy hour. I know it sounds bad: lots of mathmos drinking beer in the maths department. But, it’s actually surprisingly social. And the drinks are cheap. And nice, since I choose them.

Now, I love beer and I’m not a cider fan. I’m not a cider-drinker fan either. So, when people requested some cider on the happy hour menu, I got a bit annoyed. Anyway, I know I said I don’t like people that choose cider over beer, but sometimes you have to accept your friends with their flaws, and that’s what I’ve done with my French friend who has been introduced to the concept of pubs but still can’t get her head round beer. Weird.

Her favourite is Henney’s Frome Valley cider. Since it has been available at happy hour, it’s one of the most popular drinks. It comes from Frome in Herefordshire. You can get sweet, medium or dry. I’ve only tried the dry one, and it’s awesome. At first it tastes like apple juice, fruity and sweet, but the aftertaste is crisp and dry. In Paul’s words (see picture): It’s GOOD. And he isn’t a cider drinker either.