Scottish Shortbread for #RandomRecipe Tea Time Treats

Once again, I am taking part in the #RandomRecipe challenge! This month Belleau Kitchen has gotten together with two other fellow food bloggers, Karen and Kate to come up with our theme for this month’s challenge: Tea Time Treats.  So rather than choosing a random recipe from ALL of my cookbooks, I was allowed to choose from the ones I thought would best exemplify tea time food, which for me means British food.  (If I read the instructions correctly.)  Top of my list were Elizabeth David, Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver and their many cookbooks in my collection.  I was delighted when my random choice fell on Jamie’s Great Britain and then, coup of all coups, it opened to Scottish Shortbread.  I was sort of hoping for a savory treat because, as many of you know, I am not a big sweet eater but these biscuits are deliciously simple (only four ingredients!) and not too sweet.  I am, on the other hand, a lover of all things British, including my dear husband, so this challenge was right up my street, as they say on the small island.

Ingredients
1.6 cups or 7 oz (by weight) or 200g flour
Scant 1/4 cup or 50g sugar, plus extra for sprinkling over
Generous 1/2 cup or 125g unsalted butter
1/8 teaspoon salt (This was my addition, because even sweet things need some salt.)

Method
Preheat the oven to 325°F or 170°C.

Mix the flour, sugar and salt together in a mixing bowl.

Cut your butter into pieces and, using a pastry blender, mix it into the dry ingredients.

Once it is almost all mixed in, use your thumb and fingers to make sure that all the lumps of butter are gone.  Jamie says, “Don’t knead it, you just want to pat it down flat,” but I am here to tell you that this was so crumbly that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to.

Push the crumbs together in the side of the bowl and scrape the resulting lump out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Press it into a flat circle using two hands, one on the outside and one pressing the dough down and out towards your other hand.  Keep going around the circle until it is compact and flat all over.  I couldn't  take a photo with both hands in place, so just put the next two photos together and you'll get the idea.

Left hand holding the side in.

Right hand pressing it flat and pushing the side out.

If it breaks apart, just press it back together but remember, the less you work the dough the lighter and flakier the shortbread will be.

I also crimped the edges, as you can see, but the decorative edge really doesn't show up once baked so just do it if you feel like it.

Gently score lines on the shortbread with a sharp knife, then make some shallow decorative indentations with the tines of a fork.

 Sprinkle over some sugar, then pop the baking sheet into the oven and cook for 20-30 minutes.

Keep an eye on it - you want a lovely light golden color.  Mine turned out a little darker than I would have liked, but it was still delicious.  Truly, shortbread is one of the great mysteries of baking. Without leavening of any kind, these delectable treats do turn out light and flakey somehow.  It must be magic.

When it comes out of the oven, cool for just a minute or two and then, using a sharp thin knife, cut through where you scored the shortbread.   After scoring and baking, you are supposed to be able to snap these apart but that has never worked for me and I end up with irregular shortbread and a small pile of crumbs.

Leave to cool completely and then separate the pieces.  Store any leftover shortbread in an airtight container.  If you have a lovely thistle teapot given to you by a dear Scottish friend, this would be the appropriate time to bring it out.  Shortbread is best served with a nice hot cuppa.

Enjoy!

Update:  A couple of days after I made the shortbread, I had guests for dinner.  Taking the simple shortbread a step farther, I dressed it up and called it dessert: a wedge of shortbread, two scoops of store-bought vanilla praline ice cream, all drizzled with warm homemade salted caramel sauce.

To see what other tea time treats have been created for this challenge, please follow these links and scroll to the bottom on their websites:

Belleau Kitchen and Lavender and Lovage 

Sticky Roasted Quail with Sausage

Today I went off shopping in search of heat.  The heater in our house stopped working again, when the new repairmen came by.  “It needs parts,” they said. “We need to speak to the landlady,” they said.  What they neglected to say was, “We also disconnected the actual working parts.  You will be cold until we can come back.  Perhaps next week.”  Well, we discovered that soon enough so, today, with authorization from the landlady, I went to look for small space heaters that would warm us until the repairmen come back.  Next week. God willing.   But since Cairo is experiencing an unusually cold winter, there were no space heaters to be found.  Or firewood, which was plan B.  I did, however, find quail!  Which kept me warm this afternoon and part of the evening because I roasted the little babies in the oven. 

Adapted from Jamie’s Great Britain.

Ingredients

4 whole quail

4 fresh sausages

4 slices of smoked bacon

6 cloves of garlic

Four stalks of fresh rosemary

Sea salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

1 – 2 tablespoons honey

Several splashes white balsamic vinegar or cider vinegar

Method

Clean your quail by cutting off all visible fat and removing any residual feathers.  Cut them up into pieces just as you would do a chicken.  Two breasts, two legs, two thighs and two wings.  I left the backbone attached to whichever pieces seemed most handy because I was not about to throw any of these small birds away.

This is for scale.  The legs compared to my teaspoon. 

Cut your sausage into 16 pieces. Cut your bacon slices into four pieces each.  Yeah, that is 16 pieces too.   Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

Crush the garlic with the side of a knife. 

Pull the leaves off of the rosemary and mince.

Pop your sausage, quail and bacon into a large bowl.  Add in the garlic and rosemary and season well with salt and pepper.  Mix thoroughly.

Drizzle generously with olive oil and mix again.  Leave to marinate for about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 375°F or 190°C.

 Skewer the quail (skin side up for all the pieces) and sausage and garlic and bacon.  One satay stick holds half a quail (one breast, one thigh, one leg and one wing) and two pieces of sausage and two pieces of bacon.  I spread the garlic around as justly as I could.

Roast in your hot oven (skin side up at first) for 20-30 minutes, turning once half way through.  

Near the end of cooking, take the tray out and turn the skin side back up.  Drizzle with a little runny honey and the vinegar.  (I did take one photo of me drizzling on the honey, but unfortunately it was really blurry.  Sorry.)  Return to the oven for a few more minutes.  Remove from the oven when sticky and caramelized.

Enjoy!

Crispy Roasted Fishcakes Wrapped in Bacon

Whenever we move houses, there are two books that come with me, in the suitcase, because I wouldn’t trust them to the shipment and I might need them right away.  This was especially true before the days of internet.  (And often the first weeks in a new home are like the days before internet.  We were fortunate here to have internet within a couple of days of moving in.  That doesn’t happen very often, believe me!)  My two essential books are the Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, 1980 edition and my own binder full of personal, many irreplaceable, family recipes, collected over the last 30-something years.

This move, a couple of extra books joined that treasured literary pantheon:  Fried Chicken and Champagne and Jamie’s Great Britain, because they were much salivated over Christmas gifts and I couldn’t bear to put them in the shipment and not see them again for six weeks.  They have both been well-thumbed this last week and a half and now are duly bookmarked with sticky tabs. 

So many recipes I want to try!

Here, then, is the first attempt from my two wonderful gift books, a recipe adapted from Jamie.

Ingredients

100g or 3.5 oz smoked salmon

60g or 2 oz smoked herring fillets

(or 160g or 5.5 oz smoked fish of your choice – Jamie recommends just salmon or salmon and trout.  The herring fillets were a bit strong so I will probably try this again with just salmon.)

2 green onions (or more if yours are skinny)

Knob of butter 

Sea salt

Black pepper

340g or 12 oz potatoes

2 large eggs

1 small lemon

Handful celery leaves or flat leafed parsley

Handful plain flour

2 oz or 60g of breadcrumbs or 4 slices dry sandwich bread

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper

Olive oil

4 slices of bacon

Method

Cut the root end off of the green onions and slice them finely.  Sauté with a knob of butter, a drizzle of olive oil to stop the butter from burning and a sprinkle of salt and pepper.

Peel the potatoes and cut them in cubes.  Boil them in salted water until tender and mash-able.

Meanwhile, chop the smoked fish with a big knife.  Sure, you can do it with a small knife but it is not as satisfying as rocking a big knife under two hands. 

When the potatoes are cooked, drain them and mash them and leave them to cool a bit.

Chop your celery leaves or parsley.

Put your breadcrumbs (or four slices of sandwich bread) into the food processor with 1/2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper.   Drizzle in a little olive oil while the thing is whizzing around until you have rough, ever so slightly moist breadcrumbs.

Break one egg into a shallow bowl.  Break the other egg and let the white fall into the same bowl.   Add the yolk to the cooled potato and mix thoroughly.

To the potatoes, add the fish, the green onions, the zest of your lemon, juice of half of your lemon and the celery or parsley.  Mix thoroughly.

Now divide your potato/fish mixture into four equal balls and shape them into patties.  Whisk your egg.

Now for my favorite part.  When I can add bacon to a recipe, I’m happy.  Spread a piece of cling film on your cabinet.  Add your bacon slices and top with another piece of cling film.  Using a rolling pin or wine bottle, roll your bacon to stretch it into longer pieces.   This really works!

Using your hands, lightly flour the patties and then put them into the egg.  Both sides.  This is going to get messy so don’t even try to keep clean.

Next pop them into the breadcrumbs and coat both sides well.  Return the patties to plate.

After all four are coated in breadcrumbs, wrap each one with a slice of bacon and secure with as many toothpicks as it takes.

Put them in the refrigerator until you are ready to cook them.

To cook:  preheat the oven to 425°F or 220°C.  Put the baking pan in to heat up.   When the oven reaches temperature, drizzle the pan with olive oil then put the fishcakes in the pan and drizzle a little more olive oil on their tops and bake for about 15 minutes. 

Remove from the oven and turn the patties over.  Cook for five or 10 more minutes or until they are crispy and browned all over.  

Serve with wedges of lemon.

Enjoy!

Addendum:  I am adding this post to the #Cooked in Translation blog hop, so just a little information about that. The concept is simple:  Once a month on the third Wednesday we interpret a classic international dish through the lens of our own or another culinary tradition.  See who else has taken the challenge and add your own fishcake link below.  You can find the rules here.