Learn with recipes

The summer has come to an end but there are still an abundance of tomatoes left at the farmers markets or if youre lucky, in your own yard. If youre looking for a unique way to eat them aside from the obvious caprese salad or sauce for pasta, give this a try. Eggs in Purgatory which is a strange way of saying eggs poached in tomato sauce. It sounds weird, I wont lie, but, it is delicious. Eat this on a slice of crusty toasted bread and it is incredibly satisfying. Have a salad on the side if you like and you have a great light meal.

I made this sauce with 10 fresh plum tomatoes but you can make this with a 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes or the equivalent in diced tomatoes. You can jazz this up by adding olives to the sauce or shredding some fontina cheese on top. I just used my standard, pecorino romano.


Eggs in Purgatory

Serves 4-6 (2 eggs per person)

Ingredients:

4-6 large eggs
1 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes (diced or fresh plum can be used)
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper
bunch of fresh basil (or 2-3 cubes frozen Dorat)
extra virgin olive oil
1 loaf thick italian bread such as ciabatta or a round loaf
pecorino romano cheese

Directions:

1. Clean tomatoes, remove the core and make an "X" on the opposite side. Blanch tomatoes in boiling water for 3-4 minutes until the skin starts to peel away from the flesh. Drain and chill in ice water until they are cool enough to handle. Skin will easily peel away from the flesh. Use a paring knife to grab the corner of the skin (this is why you make the "X") but you may not even need to use it, just peel it with your fingers. Slice tomatoes in half and with you finger pull out the seeds. Then slice in 4 pieces. If you have a food mill you can put them through the mill to seperate the seeds from the pulp. I got rid of mine and I just use my fingers.

Nanny with tomatoes from her garden in Brooklyn, New York.

Sorakaya Pulusu is a wonderful South Indian recipe,popular in Andhra Pradesh. The main ingredient is Bottlegourd cooked in sweet, spicy and tangy (tamarind) sauce. I learnt this recipe from my mom who used to make quiet regularly for our lunchboxes. And this takes me back to India, home and mom again, Love you Mom.





We can use Sorakaya peel to make Pachadi which taste very delicious - Here is the Recipe
This Curry has great combination of flavours of sweet,spicy and tangy.Sorakaya Pulusu goes well with Mudda Pappu, Rice and papads. 

Ingredients:


Sorakaya chopped- 1 no
Onion chopped- 1 no small
Chillies Slit length wise- 2 no
Tamarind Juice - 1/4 cup
Red Chilli Powder As Required
Tumeric Powder - 1/4 tsp
Jaggery grated - 1 tsp
Salt As Required


Tadka/Seasoning


Red Chillies - 2 no
Curry leaves - 5-6 no
Jeera - 1/4 tsp
Mustard Seeds - 1/4 tsp
Urad Dal - 1/4 tsp
Garlic - 2 pods
Oil - 2 tsps
Hing - 2 pinch




Preparation

• Peel the Bottle gourd and chop into small pieces.
• Chop Onions and green chillies.
• Boil Sorakaya pieces along with onions,chillies,water in a pressure cooker for about 2-3 whistles.
• Once the pressure cooker comes to off, cook on low flame and mash the pieces with a masher or with a round laddle.
• Now add salt, turmeric powder,chilli powder, tamarind juice , jaggery and cook uncovered till the mixture comes together.
• In another cooking vessel Heat oil add garlic.
• After the garlic turns little brown add jeera,mustard seeds,urad dal and cook for 2 seconds
• Add curry leaves,red chillies and hing and cook for another 2 seconds.
• Now add the above cooked Sorakaya mixture and mix well and cook for 2 mintues on medium flame.
• Serve with Rice

Mudda Pappu


Ingredients:


Toor Dal - 1 cup
Water - 1 1/2 cup
Salt As Required


Preparation

• Pressure Cook Toor dal with water for 4 whistles
• After the pressure cooker comes to off cool
• Take cooked Toor dal in a vessel add salt.

 

Its quite extraordinary the lengths that bloggers will go to meet up and bake. Between the three of us we made a 450 mile round trip to Freuchie in Fife, to learn how to bake Mediterranean Breads with Colin Lindsay at Bread in Fife

So who, you might ask, are the three bloggers baking bread?

Louise, Janice, Jacqueline

Louise (Lou) from Please Do Not Feed the Animals, Me and Jacqueline (Jac) from Tinned Tomatoes.

Colin

After some refreshments and a little discussion about our various bread making experience, we got down to business. Colin is testing the heat of the water  with his fingers.



We started off making an olive oil dough, all the ingredients were weighed, even the liquid.  I was very interested by the importance of the temperature, not only of the liquid, but also of the flour.  The ideal temperature for fermenting dough is 27C.  Colin gave us a formula to get the right temperature for both flour and water, double 27 = 54  minus the temperature of the flour = temperature of the water.  We used flour from  Shipton Mill and fresh yeast, but you could use dried yeast.


Once we had  incorporated all the liquid we started to knead our dough.




Colin showed us a variety of ways of kneading, including air kneading,  all of which is pretty physical, but the air kneading is really hard work.

 Here is Jac, checking whether her dough is ready by stretching it out paper thin, and if you can do that without it breaking, then the gluten has stretched enough and you are ready to prove your dough.  We set aside the olive oil dough to prove, in a converted plant propagator/mini greenhouse in Colins porch.  It had a little heater in the bottom to keep the temperature even, of course you only need this sort of thing if you are proving a lot of dough, a warm room or airing cupboard will do just as well.

This beast of yeast is a plain flour, yeast, salt and water dough that Colin had made before we arrived, so we would be able to continue baking while the olive oil dough proved.

 Bread Sticks

The first  thing we made were bread sticks, not the very thin brittle type of Grissini, you get on the table at Italian restaurants, these were more substantial.
Here are the toppings that we had to choose from: olives, Parmesan cheese, sesame seeds and poppy seeds.

Colin showed us how to incorporate sesame seeds into our dough by folding the dough over the seeds, turning and folding again.
When you start to knead them into the dough, they rise to the surface.
By rolling and pushing the dough firmly in a circular motion against the table, the seeds start to go under the layer of dough.  Reading that back, Im sure it makes not sense to anyone who hasnt seen it - you had to be there!

 Then you roll the dough flat and divide into strips.  Take each strip and roll it into a long sausage.
Place your chosen topping on a sheet of baking parchment on your baking tray, damp the bread stick with a little water from a spray bottle and roll in the topping.  You can also sprinkle with some flakes of sea salt.

These are Lous lovely evenly rolled bread sticks.

These are my rather gnarly and unevenly rolled bread sticks - I think bread sticks can say a lot about your personality!

And here they are after baking.We tucked into them with a cuppa and discovered that you had to go easy on the salt, as some were a little oversalted, especially where we had used olives and parmesan!  However, they tasted great and we all agreed we would make them again.

We used the rest of the plain dough to make Fougasse, a traditional hearth bread, but with slashes cut into the flat breads.

These would be good with a bowl of soup, but as they are so plain, you really need something to go along with them.

The recipe for the bread sticks and the olive oil dough is on the Bread in Fife website, the Fougasse uses the same recipe as the bread sticks.

In Part Two I will show you about how we made pannini and the Focaccia featured at the top of the post.