Scotch pancakes

After many years of staunchly preferring thin English pancakes or French-style crepes, my kids have suddenly flipped over and been converted to the juicy wonders of Scotch pancakes (or fat pancakes, as they call them). This is the recipe they use.

Ingredients
200g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
300g milk
2 eggs
1 tsp vegetable oil

Method

1. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Add the baking powder and salt, mix well.
2. Whisk the eggs thoroughly.
3. Add the milk, eggs and vegetable oil to the flour and mix until you have a smooth, thick batter. Leave to stand for 5 minutes, until the surface is covered with little bubbles.
4. Heat a lightly oiled, non-stick frying pan. When it is hot, pour half a ladle of pancake batter into it and cook for between 30 seconds and 1 minute. Flip over, and cook for another 30 seconds or so.

Arbroath smokies

I was at the Foodies Festival in Edinburgh and was lucky enough to see Iain Spink smoking his haddock on site. The process itself is pretty simple: the fish have their heads removed and are gutted and cleaned, before being tied in pairs and hung over a stick.


Next, the stick itself is placed over a half barrel, with a fire of beech and oak burning inside it.


Then the barrel is covered with a few layers of damp hessian.


After half an hour or so, the Arbroath smokies are ready.


Arbroath smokies keep for a while, and perhaps the most famous dish in which they feature is Cullen skink. They are also good in a potato salado. However, the best way to serve them is definitely hot from the barrel.

Warm Arbroath smokie, potato and bacon salad

When I got back from Amsterdam I was in the mood for more herring, and I nipped along to my fishmonger (Something Fishy, on Broughton Street in Edinburgh) expecting to find some nice fat herrings waiting for me. Unfortunately they had all gone, so I bought some Arbroath smokies instead. Smokies are hot-smoked, salted haddock which are a north-east of Scotland speciality, and bear no resemblance to herring, but I thought they would still go well in the warm potato and bacon salad I had planned for the herring. If you can't get hold of smokies then you could substitute them with fresh herring fillets, very lightly fried, or just about any other fish you fancy - mackerel, trout etc.


Ingredients
2 Arbroath smokies
750g new potatoes
6 rashers of smoked back bacon
3 pickled dill cucumbers, thickly sliced
dill
white wine vinegar
Dijon mustard
olive oil
Salt
Black pepper

Method

1. Place the smokies in a large saucepan (cut them in half crosswise if they won't fit), cover with boiling water, add a few sprigs of dill and about 50 ml of white wine vinegar, bring to the boil, turn off heat, cover and leave for 5 minutes. Transfer smokies from pan to a bowl, allow to cool and remove the flesh from the smokies with your fingers.
2. Steam the new potatoes in their skins, allow to cool and then cut into halves or quarters depending on size. Grill or fry the bacon until it is just done, remove from pan, allow to cool, and cut into strips.
3. Combine the fish, potatoes, bacon and pickled cucumbers in a serving bowl, sprinkle plenty of chopped dill over it.
4. Prepare a dressing with the olive oil, some wine vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper, and pour over the salad and mix gently.

Memory lapse
I often forget things when I am cooking, and when I was putting this together the pickled cucumbers slipped my mind, which is why you won't find them in the photo, however hard you search.

Tattie scones (potato scones)

These are a classic Scottish breakfast food, and often appear as part of a cooked breakfast, although they're also great on their own, with a little bit of butter. Now that I've got round to making them, I've realised that in many ways what they're most similar to is a chapati.



After a bit of trial and error, I realised that the key to this is to think of the potato and flour mixture as a dough, and to treat it accordingly. Also, you have to add plenty of flour during the shaping and rolling stage to prevent the scones from sticking.

Ingredients
500g of leftover mashed potato
100g of flour
salt

Method

1. Gradually work the flour into the potato, gently kneading the dough until you have a good smooth dough. (The exact quantity of flour required will depend on how dry your mashed potato is, so best to add the flour gradually.)
2. Flour a worksurface or board, put more flour on your hands, and take off a smallish ball of the mixture (somewhere between the size of a golfball and a satsuma).
3. Press the ball so you have a fat disc, flour each side well then, using a well-floured rolling pin, gently roll it to a flat circle, about 1/2 cm thick, turning it between each roll and adding more flour to the worksurface or board if required.
4. Heat a heavy-bottomed pan, grease with a little oil (but not too much), and then cook the scones on a low heat for about 3 minutes each side.

Islay seafood

No recipes as such in this post, just a paean of praise to the fresh seafood on Islay.



This is the second year that we've gone across to Islay to spend some time with Angus and his son Joseph (pictured below fishing for crabs). We stayed at the house they have had built there, across the bay from Port Ellen. I was at school and then at university with Angus, and also at university with his partner (and Joseph's mum) Penny, who sadly died three years ago.



For me, there is something magical about the place. A mix, I guess, of the island, the house and its setting, and spending time with people I love.

And, of course, you can also get great seafood there. We bought some live lobsters from a fisherman, and he threw in a bag of crab claws and some velvet crabs for free. Earlier on we had bought some scallops from a little processing plant set up in what I think used to be Port Ellen's schoolhouse, and I also had some magnificent oysters at the Islay Fair.



The scallops were great (and about half the price of what I would normally pay), although the scene was a bit 21st-century Dickensian: a large worksurface surrounded by half a dozen eastern Europeans shucking away frantically. The sort of thing which makes me thankful to have landed myself the relatively cushy job of being a translator.

We took the meat out of the crab claws and Angus used it to make crab linguini. The lobsters were boiled then grilled and eaten with some homemade mayonnaise, the scallops were pan-fried with a bit of garlic, and the velvet crabs were just boiled and eaten plain.





There's not a lot of meat in the velvet crabs, but if you approach them as a large prawn rather than a small crab then you shouldn't be disappointed. (I searched the web for recipes, but mostly came across long and complicated procedures for making velvet crab bisque - crema de nécoras in Spanish - which involved moulis and muslin sieves.)

To dye for
In Britain there's a tendency to think of the work done retrieving meat from shellfish as an inconvenience which may or may not be justified by the prize at the end. In Spain, there are lots of snacky seafoods which involve quite a bit of cracking, biting, poking or sucking. These include crab claws (bocas), winkles (burgaillos) eaten with a pin, and cañaillas, a type of sea snail whose shell ends in a long spike, which provides a handly implement for removing the flesh. (An example of evolution backfiring, if ever there was one!) The scientific name is bolinus brandaris, but their common name in English is spiny dye murex, because their mucus was extracted and used by the Phoenicians to produce Tyrian purple. The dye was one of the ancient and medieval world's most expensive commodities and was used to dye the togas of triumphant generals and of emperors in Ancient Rome. Production eventually ceased with the fall of the Byzantine Empire (1453) and was replaced with vegetable and then modern chemical dyes.

Cullen skink

This is a lovely simple soup which me and Sammy made for our friends Kevin, Ros, Laila and Aisha when they visited us in Edinburgh. Cullen is a village in the north east of Scotland; skink, apparently, is the Scots word for a shin bone used for making soup. There are no shins in this one, though, just Arbroath smokies, which are delicious whole smoked haddock.



Ingredients
2 Arbroath smokies (whole smoked haddock)
1 bay leaf
whole peppercorns
1 small onion
1 lb of potatoes
salt
mustard
milk

Method
Stage 1: preparation

1. In a large pan, cover the haddock with boiling water, add the bay leaf and a few peppercorns, simmer gently for five minutes, remove fish from the pan and allow to cool, reserving the water. Meanwhile, peel the potatoes and boil them in a little water. Once they are cooked, strain them and mash them until fairly smooth. Or use a ricer.
2. Chop the onion very finely and fry gently in a little vegetable oil. Remove the skin and bones from the fish and break the flesh into smallish pieces.

Stage 2: assembly

1. Combine the fish and onion in a large pan, with a little of the stock. Add the mashed potato, and then enough stock and/or milk to make a thickish soup. (No measurements or proportions here. It's up to you how thick or thin you want it to be, and whether you want it to be more or less smokey or creamy.)
2. Stir in a teaspoonful of English mustard, check the seasoning and add salt if required. (The smokies are quite salty, so you may not need much if any.) Gently reheat the soup, being careful that it doesn't stick.

If you can't get hold of whole Arbroath smokies like the ones above, you could replace it with good quality undyed fillet. Whatever you do, don't use the nasty yellow dyed fillets. Far better to just use plain haddock (or cod or whatever else you fancy) and bump up the flavour with some herbs and spices. It won't be Cullen skink, but it will still taste good.

Smoked salmon on rye bread

Good smoked salmon should have a nice smokey flavour which complements without overpowering the taste of the salmon itself.



In Edinburgh, I get mine from my local fishmonger, Something Fishy, who smoke it themselves in the backroom of their tiny shop. I also got some very good salmon over the internet from Ugie Salmon.



I don't see the point of cooking it or even putting it through scrambled eggs. It only changes the texture and obscures the flavour. Instead, I like to eat it on a slice of light rye bread, with a squeeze of lemon and a little black pepper.

Scottish meatballs

Continuing my Scottish-themed summer, I decided to make some haggis-inspired meatballs. I have to admit I was rather pleased with them, as they have a nice light texture and a flavour which can only be described as 'haggisy'.




Ingredients
500g beef mince
50 g of oat flakes
1 egg
1 tablespoon of shredded suet
half an onion
½ teaspoon mace
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon salt

Method

1. Set the oven to 180°C, and oil a large, non-stick baking tray, or a normal tray lined with baking paper.
2. Chop the onion very finely, then fry gently until cooked. Mix the mince, oatmeal, suet and onion in a large bowl, add the beaten egg, and season with the mace, pepper and salt.
3. Form the mixture into small balls (about the size of an unshelled walnut), and place on the tray. Bake for 30 minutes, until done.

Mace is made from the outer casing of nutmeg and, together with pepper, is the traditional way of spicing a haggis. If you can't find mace, then use nutmeg instead.

Haggis

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang's my arm.



When I get back to Scotland after a spell away, haggis is always near the top of things I have a real urge to eat. I'm not sure why, but haggis suffers from a bad reputation. I guess it's part of the general prejudice against offal. Anyway, a good haggis is meaty, spicey and oaty. What more could one ask for?

I get mine from Crombie's in Edinburgh. Far better than the fake efforts in artificial casings sold in supermarkets and even by some supposedly reputable butchers. (I name no names!) To cook, I wrap it in foil and boil it gently for about an hour, then remove from the foil and finish it off in the oven for 5 minutes to give it a nice roasted look. Recite "To a haggis" over it as you lovingly slit it open with a sharp knife, and then watch it slowly open out.




Haggis filling is also great as a leftover: I've used it to pep up cauliflower and parsnip soup, and to make a bolognaise sauce.

Pan-fried mackerel fillets in oatmeal

Apart from the opportunity to drink real beer, one of the things I love in Edinburgh is shopping at the farmers' market. This may seem a bit odd, as I live next door to the central market in Cadiz. Visitors to Spain are always impressed by the market, and rightly so. It has an incredible range of really fresh fish, and also has loads of fruit and veg, butchers, a superb olive stall, a couple of stalls selling snails and fresh herbs, spices, a baker, and so on. In short, it's a great place to shop and I am really grateful to have it on my doorstep.



However, forcing my way through the crowds as I fill up my shopping trolley is not always the most relaxing experience. (And even more so as the old market is currently being refurbished and the stallholders have been temporarily crammed into a large marquee.) Another problem is that, because the stalls are generally not owned by the producers, they tend to duplicate each other. The butchers' section, for example, consists of about 20 different stalls, but they sell more or less the same things, at more or less the same prices. (Fortunately, there is one butcher who sells his own produce, and who has supplied me with some of the most delicious beef I have ever eaten.)

The farmers' market movement in the United Kingdom was inspired by outdoor markets in France rather than those in Spain, and I had always suspected that this involved a bit of mythologising, as is often the case when people in the UK talk about eating habits in other countries. On our journey back from Cadiz to Edinburgh at the beginning of this summer, we stopped off for a few days at Annecy (in the Haute-Savoie department, on the Swiss border), to visit our friend Catherine and her daughter Alice, who had been spending a year in France. It was my first time in France since a holiday there as a 15 year-old, and I loved it. There was the strangely enjoyable experience of being somewhere where I didn't speak the language (including asking for a 'minced' loaf, rather than a sliced one, in the baker's), there was superb bread, croissants and pastries, and cured meat, and there was a great farmers' market, which was surprisingly similar to the Edinburgh one. (If anything, the Annecy one felt a little more touristy, and less down-to-earth. Click here for some photos taken at both markets.)



At a purely physical level, arriving in France direct from Spain felt like entering the Thinnifer Republic after a spell in the Fattypuff Kingdom. (A sensation which was felt even more sharply in reverse when flying up to Scotland from Geneva Airport. I made it to the departure gate with Sammy and Carmela, looked around and realised that I was surrounded by fat people reading books. Welcome to the UK - we're fat, and we read!) Hardly anyone in Annecy was fat. I'm not sure if the reason is healthy eating, frantic exercising, obsessive dieting or whether chubbies are quietly removed from their streets and turned into saucisson. (Or perhaps just too scared to go out in the first place.) My grandfather, Sam, who had a fair-sized belly, used to love visiting the States in the 1970s because he felt normal there, and being a bit of a Thinifer I had much the same feeling in France. Unlike the Thinifers, however, I do not subsist on a diet of dry spaghetti. (Spain, while not close to challenging Scotland for the title of fat man of Europe, does a pretty impressive line in adipose adolescents and bulging 20-somethings. Obesity crisis in the making?)

What I really like about the Edinburgh farmers' market is the stallholders' enthusiasm for their products, and the fact that you are always likely to come across something new. Although each stall is quite specialised this seems to act as a spur to innovation, so the raspberry and strawberry stall has an incredible range of different jams and chutneys, in addition to the obvious cuts, the venison stall also sells venison sausages, haggis and pies, and smoked venison, and so on.



When I went to the market today, the guest cook at the Slow Food Edinburgh stall, the chef from Creelers, was cooking mackerel in oatmeal. (This is the traditional way of cooking herring in Scotland, and I suspect it would also work well with the fresh anchovies I sometimes buy in Cadiz.) It's really simple to make, but the fish must be spanking fresh, and you must fry in butter rather than oil. I copied the man from Creelers and used stoats porridge oats bought at the neighbouring stall and containing a mix of rolled and flaked oats. The traditional recipe for herring would use pinhead oatmeal, soaked overnight.



Ingredients
4 large or 8 small mackerel fillets
plenty of butter
porridge oats
salt

Method

1. Spread plenty of porridge oats on a plate, and season with salt. Coat the mackerel with the oats. (The fillets should not be too dry, to help the oats stick to them, although even so the coating will be uneven.)
2. Heat plenty of butter in a large frying pan, and fry the mackerel fillets in it, turning once. They will cook quickly so a couple of minutes per side should be long enough.

Scotch eggs

One of the fun things about living in another country is that it gives you the opportunity to pass off all kinds of dubious information as hard fact. “Yes, yes. Everyone makes these at home in Scotland. We keep our own quails in the garden specially for this purpose.”




Every year Sammy and Carmela’s school has a multicultural buffet, where parents are meant to bring things from their own country. There are quite a few Moroccan kids in the school, so there is always a good supply of little pastries, and last year there was a great chicken couscous too. There is a girl whose parents are French/Belgian and who have a patisserie, so they bring along a tray of pastries, and this year there was a bit of an Anglo baking competition involving apple pie, brownies and flapjacks.

Anyway, I decided to use the event as an excuse to make Scotch eggs. (Which may not even be Scottish.) They went down surprisingly well, despite a wobbly moment at the beginning, when one of the Moroccan mums bit into one of them and had to be quickly reassured that I had only used beef. (Actually, I wasn’t that surprised, as Spaniards love eggs and mince, and are also pretty keen on anything breaded and fried.)

Making them with quail eggs involves a little more work at the beginning (peeling and coating), but they are easier to fry and much more attractive. Steaming the eggs is important, as it stops them from cracking as they cook and so makes peeling them easier.



This is one of those recipes that I thought would be frustratingly fiddly to do, but it wasn't. For me, there are two kinds of fiddliness in the kitchen: fiddly and difficult (e.g., making baskets out of spun sugar), and fiddly but easy. This one is time-consuming, but it's fairly foolproof and doesn't demand any great technique. So long as I'm in the right mood then I find this kind of thing quite therapeutic.

Ingredients
24 quail eggs
400 g of minced beef
3 spring onions, roughly chopped
fresh parsley
1 teaspoon of mustard
4 teaspoons of grated Parmesan
freshly ground salt and black pepper
3 chicken eggs
flour
breadcrumbs

Method

1. Steam the quail eggs for about 5 minutes. Remove, cool in a large bowl of water, and peel.
2. Place the mince, spring onions, parsley, mustard, Parmesan, salt and black pepper and ONE of the beaten chicken eggs into the food, and chop until the mixture is quite smooth. (It should start to form a ball.)
3. Take a small piece of the mixture, flatten it out in your hand and wrap it round the egg, making sure that the egg is completely covered with a thin layer of meat. (This sounds fiddly, but is actually quite easily. You can just squash it round the egg and pinch off any excess mixture.) Repeat this until all the eggs are covered. (With the quantities above there should be a bit of leftover mixture which can be turned into beefburgers.)
4. Put plenty of flour on a plate, plenty of breadcrumbs on another plate, and break the two remaining chicken eggs into a bowl and mix with a fork. One by one, roll the covered eggs in flour, shake off any excess, then pass the floured egg through the egg and then roll it in breadcrumbs. (It’s best to do this in stages: first flour all the eggs, then put them all into the egg mixture, then roll them in breadcrumbs: otherwise you will find that your fingers gradually become covered in a sticky egg and breadcrumb mixture!)
5. Fill a large, high-sided saucepan about 2.5 cm deep with sunflower oil. Heat the oil until it is hot but not too hot. (Sorry to be vague, but I don’t use thermometers for this kind of thing.) Place the breaded eggs gently into the oil, fry for a couple of minutes before carefully turning over and frying for another couple of minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on some kitchen paper.