Cheese & Football Feast day 7: Germany

This was another tough first round clash in the Euro2016 football tournament with Germany playing Poland and the game ending in a draw (earlier error in this post corrected - woke up this morning thing they had won!!). For the cheese feast I chose Flammekueche, a wonderful social dish which is baked in large trays and served on wooden platters for guests to help themselves to, and order more as soon as one has been eaten.

 The base is a made from a very thin white bread dough and the topping is a mix of a fromage blanc style soft white cheese, sour cream or creme fraîche and onion and bacon. Try to get a good dry cured smoked streaky style bacon as the bacon gives this dish much of its distinctive flavour. I may have been a little heavy handed with the bacon on my tart but it was my preference to have quite a lot of bacon. Sweeter onions are good too.

The recipe I based my dish on is from a French Alsace cuisine website here: flammekueche and is written in French but with lots of pictures to make the instructions clearer. I used Italian 00 flour grade for the bread base and for the soft cheese layer a mix of approx 4 parts fromage blanc to 1 part sour cream but I added a little more sour cream after tasting it as the mix seemed a little flat/bland.

The beer was Warsteiner, served nice and chilled.

For dessert we had a baked Polish cheesecake which was nice and simple to make as no crust/base was required.

The recipe came from 'The Polish Kitchen' by Mary Pininska. The printed recipe serves 10 so I halved the quantity for this version and baked it in a square tin with sides approx 20cm long and 6cm deep.

Sernik

125g butter

500g curd cheese

3 large eggs, separated

150g caster sugar

60g raisins

juice & rind of half a lemon

20g potato flour

extra butter and silicone paper to grease and line tin*

Oven 180C

Grease and line the cake tin with the extra butter

Cream the butter

Sieve the cheese if it has any lumps and then gradually mix in to the butter

Add the egg yolks one at a time, mixing well

Add the sugar and mix well

Add raisins, lemon zest and lemon juice.

Whisk the egg whites in a separate clean bowl to soft peaks

Fold the egg whites into the cheese mixture

Finally carefully mix in the potato flour

Pour the mixture into the greased tin and bake for 45mins or until the top is golden brown and cake is set.

Remove from oven and leave to cool before turning out. 

*the original recipe just called for greasing the tin but I chose to line mine with parchment to help remove the baked cheesecake from the tin.

Cheese & Football Feast day 6: Albania

I have been trying to cook cheese based dishes to match the countries playing in the Euro2016 football tournament but there are a few countries that have been a little difficult to find authentic recipes for. I chose Albania for day 6 but I know nothing of Albanian cuisine and if I am honest I could not have even put Albania on the map until I started looking for suitable recipes. I am trusting the internet on this one but this dish did turn up on a few sites, so I give you Byrek ose Lakor - Albanian Leek Pie.

I could not find any Albanian beers or wine, so as Albania played France I have chosen French Meteor beer.

The pie is filled with finely sliced leeks, cottage/farmers style cheese, feta, and flavoured with fresh thyme. The recipe is to be found on the Global Table Adventure site. I chose to serve mine with a roasted pepper and tomato sauce.

The recipe makes quite a lot of pie (serves 8) so I split mine into two smaller pies. I sealed the first one quite well but not so well the second. The lid is being placed on quite a liquid filling which gets a bit tricky if the pasty lid is not quite big enough!

But either way they taste good.

Day 7 sees Germany play Poland and I'm cooking a main course of German Flammekueche and a Polish baked cheesecake for dessert.

Cheese & Football Feast day 5: Portugal

Day 5 of the Euro2016 football tournament and Portugal played Iceland, and with heavy expectations of winning but Iceland were not to be dismissed and they fought hard for a draw. I love the low pitched  'chanting' that the Iceland fans do, which at times seems to be synced with each time the ball was kicked. For the cheese feast I took an easy option of serving a cheese and tapas supper with homemade cheese bread.

The bread recipe is just adapted from a white loaf recipe to which an egg and a mix of Sao Jorge Portuguese cheese and feta are added. It baked up to a nice light loaf with a thin crisp crust. I read that there are very few cooked cheese dishes in Portugal so I gave up looking and settled on this.

Cheese, bread and beer are a match made in heaven and tonight's beer was Sagres.

I found an online Portuguese food supplier to buy the Sao Jorge cheese from as well as a Portuguese sheep's cheese milk cheese called Quinta da Veguinha. The orange rinded cheese was gifted to me by a Portuguese colleague whose father had recently visited bringing lots of Portuguese cheese. I don't know the name but it was the best of the three and the coating has paprika in it.
This Quinta da Veguinha sheeps cheese was very strong and our least favourite. I had maybe kept it longer than I should but it came vacuum packed so I think it started out life with a lot of 'aroma'. There is an interesting article on Portuguese cheese here on  catavino.net where these soft scoopable cheeses are descried as stinky with a pungent barnyard aroma. I would have to agree with that.





I was surprised just how punchy all of these cheese were, even the mild looking Sao Jorge was very characterful.









The delicias online store also sold jars of piquillo roasted peppers which are quite delicious to eat straight out of the jar and not always easy to find. These are good added to a paella too. I also bought some tinned sardines which sounds a little dull but good sardines are quite different to the cheap ones that fill supermarket shelves. The artwork on some sardine cans is also quite beautiful and that is possibly what lured me to buying these.

They made a very nice addition to the cheese tapas menu. Tinned sardines do not often come out of the tin looking quite so beautiful and they tasted very mild too.

The final element was a small dish of cooked globe artichokes. These came from my allotment and whilst I envy the huge size they seem to grow to on the continent I am delighted to have any at all. They can seem like quite a lot of preparation work for not so much to eat but I am grateful to have them, and as a perennial vegetable they are no trouble to grow and are often the first vegetable we harvest each year.

For day 6 I am venturing to Albania and serving a cheese and leek pie. Pies are such good football food and there will be a french beer as I could not find one from Albania.

Cheese & Football Feast Day 4: Belgium

Day 4 of the Euro 2016 football tournament saw Belgium play Italy, which I think was a tough opening draw for both teams. Huge reputations and expectations at stake, but Italy took the win. I continued my cheese and beer celebration of the tournament with a classic supper of Belgian Endive au Gratin and Leffe Blonde beer.

Not much to see of the endive (or witloof chicory) as it was all hidden under a rich cheese sauce and gratin topping, but this is a fine use of the slightly bitter vegetable. I may have been a little heavy on the sauce, and many recipes include ham as well, but this one was all about the cheese. My recipe called for gruyère but I used some comté, as does Raymond Blanc in his bbc website  recipe.

Chicory is not  so easy to cook as the chicory heads can discolour very quickly while you are cooking them, so lemon juice is usually added to the cooking water. The vegetable is produced by forcing chicory plant roots that have been lifted in the autumn and then planted out in dark, warm sheds to produce those pale tight leaved chicons. Well that is a rather simple version, as I think it is quite difficult to grow them as well as the ones for sale in the shops.

The recipe I followed, excluding the ham, was from the book  Everybody Eats Well in Belgium

Although none of the recipes are photographed for the book, there are some charming illustrations throughout and the recipes are written with lots of background information and useful tips. You lean a lot about Belgium life and culture while reading through the chapters. Vegetables that are less common in the UK like salsify, escarole and celery root are to be found and a whole chapter dedicated to cooking with beer!

Leffe Blonde is a rich and malty beer that paired well with the chicory and cheese. The brewery website suggests you drink it with white mould cheeses like brie so I shall have to try that as I always find them a bit hard to match. I love that it is bottled rather like champagne and it does have a very fine soft fizz or 'mousse', like champagne. You can buy some rather gorgeous glasses to go with your beer and I have happy memories of a short trip to Brussels where all the beers came served in their own glasses. I don't remember any good cheese, but we drank plenty of beer and ate lots of chocolate.  

For day 5 I am celebrating the cheeses of Portugal, with cheese bread and a predominantly cheese tapas plate.

Cheese & Football Feast Day 3: Ukraine

Day 3 of the Euro2016 football tournament  and it was a Sunday, so something a little more formal was called for.

The Ukraine played Germany and I have a lovely book on Ukrainian food by Olia Hercules called Mamuska. I chose the 'Potato Cakes with Goats Cheese' and served them with some roast duck as suggested in the book. The 'cakes' are enriched with grated carrot, grated onion and crumbled goats cheese and held together with egg and flour.

But I'm not good at following recipes and before I had even thought to read the instructions I had started boiling the potatoes. Some minutes after they were ready I read the words 'grate the raw potato', too late, mine will have to be made with mashed potato. So if you have the book you will notice these look nothing like the ones in the picture which are much more like latkes. But they were still very good and were possibly easier to cook. The name for the dish is 'Deruny' which apparently means grated so I did get that rather wrong. I consoled myself that my other Ukraine cookbook did have a recipe for potato cakes that used mashed potato, so they are not unheard of in the Ukraine. This book is dated 1975 and I love the covers:

I visited Kiev in the mid 80s when it was still part of the USSR travelling on one of those Aeroflot package holidays. Kiev was a bright interlude between Moscow and Lenningrad.  During some free time we went into a beautiful covered market where the somewhat limited produce was all beautifully arranged. The photo below is a scan of a rather old print, so not very clear, but you can see how the potato stall was organised with all the sellers in their white coats and head scarfs.

This was the Ukranian beer that we drank with the meal, a very dry larger that went well with the fried potato cakes and rich duck meat.

Deruny Recipe (As it should have been made!)
500g floury potatoes peeled and coarsely grated
1 small onion grated
1 small carrot peeled and grated
1 egg lightly beaten
3 tbs flour
30g mashed goats cheese
salt & pepper

2tbs sunflower oil for frying

Preheat oven to 180C
Mix everything together except the oil
Heat the sunflower oil in a large frying pan
Drop dessertspoonfuls of the mixture into the pan and fry for 2 minutes
Flip each pancake over and fry until golden brown
Place fried potato cakes onto a parchment lined baking sheet & finish in the oven (5-10 mins)

I served these with some very slowly cooked duck legs. I like to cook the legs the day before serving them. I simmer them gently for a few hours, then take the meat off the bone and put this into a bowl and cover with the simmering liquid. This is then left to go cold in the fridge so all the fat can be removed. The next day it is very quick to heat up the meat, and if wanted to colour it a little in a frying pan or under the grill.

For day 4 of the Euros I will be preparing Belgian Endive (Witloof Chicory) au Gratin - more toasted cheese!

Cheese & Football Feast Day 2: England

Day 2 of the Euro 2016 tournament sees England play Russia and my chosen cheese feast celebrates that hearty combination of cheese, potato, onion, parsley and pastry.  Not for the faint hearted, but very much for the lionhearted. It is of course Homity Pie.

And I may be dreaming but I've chosen Champion from Badger Brewery as the matching beer.

Homity pie was made popular in the seventies by the London based vegetarian restaurant chain Cranks, and if bean salads, raw vegetables and wholemeal pastry was your thing this was where to go. It was virtuous eating for those with big appetites, but if you liked looking at food rather than eating it you would have sat down in Anton Mosimann's nouvelle cuisine restaurant at The Dorchester instead. I jest, but the no cream or butter mantra of the time, did seem to coincide with rather drastic reductions in portion sizes too.

In the 1980's Cranks published a cookbook which I think I bought just for this pie, but that is one more recipe than I ever cooked from my Mosiman books, beautiful though they are. 

Wholemeal pastry is no longer in such vogue but it does go well here, adding a more nutty flavour to the dish, so stick with it if you can but use fresh wholemeal flour. So whilst I have a place in my heart for wholemeal pastry I still feel utter dismay that there was ever such a strong trend to use Carob as a substitute for chocolate.  

Crank's version for this pie does not have any cream in the filling but I was rather taken by the 'Hairy Bikers' recipe which also has a small amount of spinach and quite a lot of cream, in the otherwise plain potato, onion, parsley and cheese filling. The cheese is of course Cheddar, and I like the fairly local to me Quicke's Mature Cheddar. They make very good goats milk and ewes milk cheddar style cheeses too.

Homity pie works very well as a deep filled pie/flan and is at its best when freshly baked and still warm, but not piping hot. The wholemeal pastry is actually quite difficult to cut until it has cooled a little anyway. Try to use a loose bottomed metal flan tin to ease removing the pie or be prepared to have a messy first slice.

The 'Bikers' recipe makes a rather large pie and I cut the ingredients back by a third to make this one. There was still plenty of pie for 4 persons and a green salad would have been a refreshing accompaniment but this was football food so we passed on the salad.

For day 3 I travel to the Ukraine, for more cheese and potato magic.

Cheese & Football Feast Day 1: France

I love watching the Euro and World Cup football tournaments and I love food, so how better to celebrate than with a 'national' dish for each game night. I have done this for a couple of years now and it has been a lot of fun. The theme for Euro2016 is Cheese! 

And with any celebration there has to be drink, and apart from a few variations most of the drinks will be national beers.

 I have been pulling a lot of barely used cookbooks off the shelf in search of suitable dishes and wandering the internet in search of suppliers. Most of these beers came from the rather fabulous Beers of Europe who are currently offering a specially selected Euro2016 mixed pack, but its more fun to pick your own. They have a very informative web site which is worth a look even if you don't shop with them.

But back to the cheese. It has long been something I expect to see at just about any social feasting; from huge platters found at cheese and wine parties (do they still exist?) to morels on sticks at family christenings, hastily gathered cheese and bread for holiday picnics and now even in the most majestic of whole cheeses tiered into wedding cakes it turns up at every party.

West Country Cheeses Celebration 'Cake'

And for a cheese lover this is all good news. Cheese is also the humble ingredient that sits happily in the fridge for all of those instant meals and snacks. The ubiquity of cheese as the base for fast and delicious family food is what I am exploring for my euro cheese feast. If you are engrossed in watching a game you want something simple to eat and easy to prepare. If it can be assembled during the half time break or just before kick-off all the better. 

So with France hosting the tournament they were the opening act and played Romania. I chose to make Gruyère, Ham & Spinach Buckwheat Crêpes, served with Breton Cider. Gruyère is of course a Swiss cheese, so I've mixed things up a bit here, but it was called for in so many of the Breton pancake recipes I found. I did balance things out though by putting some totally french Comté on the top to gratin the pancake at the end. The Comte was a late addition to the larder. According to cheese.com Comté used to be called Gruyère de Comté, so I think I have the right cheese family at least. 

This Dove's farm brand of buckwheat flour was the only one that I could find locally and although it is described as wholemeal it really is a very pale, light flour. It does not produce the dark brown nutty crepes I was looking for. I found some french branded flours for sale on the internet but they were too expensive to buy by post.

I noticed the producer's own recipe uses the buckwheat flour on its own, where most recipes I found called for a mix of buckwheat and white flour. If you buy this one I wouldn't mix it with any white flour, whatever your recipe says. Doves farm Galettes de Sarrasin recipe

I based my recipe around this one- Buckwheat Crepes with Asparagus, Ham and Gruyere by David Tanis but swapped some lightly cooked spinach for the asparagus. The pancakes can be made ahead and then quickly finished shortly before you want to eat. Just have all the fillings prepped, with plates warm and the grill hot and ready if you want to toasted cheese topping. I don't think that is traditional at all but I like toasted cheese. The basic pancakes make perfect desserts too and on a recent trip to Paris we enjoyed buckwheat crepes with roasted rhubarb and strawberry filling.

The Breton Cider was delicious - just be careful with the sediment in the bottom of the bottle!

Day 2 is going to feature the England vs Russia game so of course I have to feature Cheddar Cheese. Living in the South West of England it would be rude not to.