Simple baked veggie breakfast – sausage, eggs, potatoes and tomatoes

This is also known as Hannah Bake Two since it was baked and a recipe passed onto us by a friend, Hannah.

It’s a simple breaky and all baked in one dish in the oven.

Recipe as follows (for 2 people – adjust as required):

Oven at 150 degrees C (our oven is fan assisted)

• Potatoes – we used a couple of handfuls of Jersey Royals, kept the small ones whole and cut larger ones in half. You could use any potato, just cut it into bite-sized chunks.
• Cherry tomatoes – we used a couple of handfuls of mixed red and yellow. These go in whole.
• 4 cloves of garlic whole.
• 6 veggie sausages.
• 4 duck eggs (chicken eggs would be fine as well)
• Fresh chives.
• Salt and pepper.
• Olive oil.

Method

1. Put a drizzle of olive oil in the pan and put in the warmed oven.
2. Clean the potatoes and cut to size if needed. Chop the bottom end of each garlic clove off, but keep whole and don’t peel. Add all this into the warmed oil and put in the oven to begin to roast.
3. When starting to crisp up (about 10 minutes) add the veggie sausages and put back in the oven.
4. Roast the sausages, turn once or twice, and then add the cherry tomatoes. Cook for a further 5 minutes.
5. Then break the eggs into the pan and put back in oven. I cooked the eggs for around 12 minutes and this was a tiny bit too long, not all the yolks were runny. These were big eggs though, so adjust your cooking time according to your eggs and oven.
6. Serve up with fresh chives sprinkled over the top.

Vanilla and salted caramel macarons

So it might seem a tad hyperbolic, but I am genuinely excited to have finally attempted to make macarons.

Although the plan had been to do the whole recipe from the Adriano Zumbo recipe book, a broken sugar thermometer meant we ended up melding a Roux recipe with the Zumbo one.

So now to the recipe.

Vanilla flavoured macaron shells

• 110g ground almonds
• 180g icing sugar
• 40g caster sugar
• 90g or 3 egg whites
• 3 tbsps vanilla bean paste

Method

Pre-heat oven to 160 degrees C

1. Sieve the ground almonds and icing sugar into a bowl and combine evenly.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until firm. Fold in the vanilla bean paste.
3. Slowly, fold in the dry ingredients to the egg whites until fully combined.
4. Prep a baking sheet lined with parchment, you’ll need to pipe circles 3-4cm in diameter onto this – we drew around the bottom of a vanilla essence bottle to ensure that the circles were as uniform as possible.
5. We didn’t have a piping bag, so used a large freezer bag and filled that with the almond, icing sugar and egg white mix. When full we cut the corner off ready for piping.
6. Pipe out all the mixture (makes about 40 shells) and then put in the heated oven for approximately 7 minutes.
7. When cooked, remove from oven and slide parchment and macarons onto a wire cooling rack.

Salted caramel filling
Caramel salt:

• 220g whipping cream (35% fat)
• 300g caster sugar
• 60g liquid glucose
• 120g water
• 1 vanilla pod

Caramel butter

• 75g butter
• 150g caramel
• 2g sea salt flakes

Method

1. Heat the whipping cream and vanilla pod slowly until boiling. When boiled remove from heat and set aside.
2. In the meantime, add the water, liquid glucose and caster sugar to a separate pan and heat on a medium/low heat until sugar is dissolved.
3. Once sugar has dissolved, turn the heat up and heat until water has evaporated and the mixture has turned a golden amber colour. This took us quite some time to get to.
4. Once the sugar syrup is ready, add the warm whipping cream vanilla mixture slowly, stirring all the time. Be careful as the mixture will spit as you do this.
5. Pour all the mixture into a bowl and set aside to cool.
6. When the mixture is cooled, add the butter to a bowl and beat until light and fluffy.
7. Slowly add the cooled caramel sauce, beating until mixture thickens (you’ll need to pipe it into the macaron shells so it needs to thicken to do that).
8. When thickened, stir through the salt and then it’s ready to pipe onto the waiting macaron shells.

Finishing the macarons

1. Match up halves of shells to pairs that are of similar size.
2. Put the filling in piping bag and then pipe the desired amount onto one half of each of the pairs.
3. Sandwich together and pop in the fridge to cool.

Now go lay down, you’ll need to recover from the sugar coma you’ll now be in.

We had a lot of caramel mixture left over, but I’m sure we’ll figure out something to do with it! Obviously, simply doubling the macaron ingredients and the butter part would use up more of the caramel.

It was a labour of love, but well worth it.

The weekly shop

Turns out the bank holiday weekend is going to be mostly about food and food shopping.

Yesterday we headed to the Anchor and Hope on The Cut for an early luncheon. Three courses later and we were sated and a little bit tipsy. One caution on this eatery, it’s not vegetarian friendly. I was eating veggie and there was really only one choice for starter and main: asparagus with melted butter to start with spiced lentils and goat’s curd cheese for main.

Both we’re tasty but certainly didn’t blow my socks off. The asparagus was a tiny bit watery and the first couple of bites of the lentils I thought I could taste stock powder.

My poppyseed cheesecake with caramelised orange segments, on the other hand, was amazing:

Light, rich, syrupy goodness. I’d go back just for that dessert.

The apple almond tart with creme anglais and prunes didn’t quite hit the spot however. It was nice but the cheesecake is where it’s at.

The boys had far more choice for meat dishes: pappardelle and beef shin; lamb with Asian sauce and asparagus. There was a kid leg for 4 to share which the table next to us had, firm hangover cure if you could afford to £68 it cost.

Service was lacking a little, but fast enough. Our bill came to £88 for 3 courses for 3 people with a round of pints (excluding tip).

After this meal we headed down to the South Bank to visit the Real Food Market. We were also there for the wine and cheese festival the previous weekend, where we had the experience of trying savoury macarons:

I’m not entirely convinced to be frank; two sweet macaron shells with a chunk of cheese in the middle. At £2 a mouthful too. I wasn’t itching to seek them out again.

Today we’ve been to the trusty Blackheath Market. A simple bus ride away from our flat in Stratford, we usually go there in pursuit of fish. Alas, today it was not meant to be! However we did get some lovely spoils:

Most excited about the goat’s curd and courgette flowers.

Here are some more pictures from the weekend thus far: