Getting into the Halloween Spirit

It has been quite a while since I picked a 'recipe book of the month'. I invented this concept when I realised I was in a bit of a food rut, cooking a limited number of dishes, albeit influenced by the seasonal veg that arrive each week in my veg box. This seems ridiculous when I have shelves of recipe books and folders stuffed with hundreds of recipes torn from magazines.

The idea is to pick a recipe book or folder from the shelf and adopt it as my recipe book for the month. The challenge is to cook just two recipes from it, which is a fairly low commitment. However, I tend to end up thumbing through every page to select the two recipes and this invariably reacquaints me with lots of other recipes, even if I don't end up cooking them immediately.

However, the same green recipe folder had been sitting on the book holder in the kitchen for about three months and I decided it was time for a change. I selected Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Veg Everyday and have already made more than two things from it. However, last weekend could have seen the perfect combination of why I get a veg box and why I began recipe book of the month. Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I get a weekly veg box, but one of them is to challenge myself to not always buy the same veg, regardless of the season. Can you see a theme emerging here - getting into a rut and setting myself a challenge to get out of it?!

Anyway, with beetroot in the veg box and Hugh's veg recipes on the go, I turned to the book's index, selected beetroot and began choosing from the options. I was looking for something savoury but soon spotted Chocolate and Beetroot Ice Cream and, with my nephew staying and willing to claim half the calories, I decided to give it a go.

Oh-My-Goodness.... what can I say other than we can't wait for the next delivery of beetroot!

The recipe calls for 4 egg yolks and so I was, rather annoyingly, left with 4 egg whites. However, inspired by the October issue of the Sainsbury's Magazine I decided to make Halloween themed meringues.

Something spooky came out of the oven!

...with something amazing from the freezer

I have to say that I just can't look at the ghostly meringues without smiling, although perhaps they do look more scared to see us than we are probably supposed to be in seeing them.

The success of the meringues made us extend an invitation to my parents to join us today for a Halloween themed Sunday lunch. I do admit that the menu was chosen more for the individual dishes being either themed or family favourites rather than for how well they would sit together. As a result, four hours later I am still fit to burst. However, it was definitely delicious and fun.

We began with Black Magic Martinis: sweetened espresso, spiced rum and vermouth garnished with an eye ball (lychee).

Main course was a mummified sausage pie served with braised red cabbage and monster mash (mashed potato garnished with red onion wedge 'claws' and Gouda 'cobwebs').

Cheesy eyes peaking through the pastry 'bandages'

To finish it just had to be spiced hazelnut treacle tart with cream.

Unfortunately today's batch of gluten-free pastry was a complete disaster (as you can see from the treacle tart) so I must remember to never use that recipe again. However, that means I do need to remember which recipe I normally use. I'd better get searching and perhaps decide which book will be November's recipe book whilst I'm at it.

Pannacotta alle nocciole (Hazelnut Pannacotta)

Wow - is it really a month since I last wrote anything? Actually, I suppose it does make sense since I've worked the last two weekends and have generally been having a very hectic time. However, this weekend was beautifully extended with a day off on Friday. As a result, I was not only able to get up to date with the ever-pressing list of chores, but also find some time to play around in the kitchen.

Initially the idea for making a dessert came from an invitation to my parents for dinner on Saturday night. I asked what I could take as an offering and got looking at dessert recipes. By the time the reply had come back asking for a jar of olives and a bottle of wine, I had set my heart on making something sweet. As a result, my cooking experiment was just delayed to Sunday. Mind you, dinner on Saturday night was so delicious that I had a lot to live up to - an amazing lamb and fennel dish from The Hairy Bikers, a chocolate mousse cake that was to die for, and some delicious cheeses washed down with some smooth port. Mmmmm!

But I digress!

As regular readers may know, I have some lovely friends who now live in Italy. When visiting a few years back I discovered the free recipe magazine that is given to loyalty card holders of their local supermarket. (When I say I 'discovered it', it was actually sitting on their dining table!) Anyway, whilst I was there I attempted a chestnut cheesecake which was so successful that I repeated it last year for a pre-Christmas family get-together.

My friends have since sent me a copy of the December magazine as part of my Christmas present last year and brought me another copy when they last visited the UK in May. It is the May edition that I turned to mid-week and spotted the recipe for Pannacotta alle nocciole or Hazelnut Pannacotta.

Now, the first thing I should say is that I don't speak or read Italian. However, my rudimentary knowledge of Spanish helps a little bit, supplemented by the wonders of Google Translate and a good working knowledge of cooking. It is with this that I set out to see if this particular recipe seemed feasible. Graded with one chef's hat out of a possible four and a preparation time of 10 minutes, I decided it should be fairly simple. Assuming, that is, I could work out what the ingredients were and get hold of them.

The recipe asks for 600ml hazelnut milk, 5g of agar agar, 40ml of agave syrup, 70g of 100% hazelnut paste, and some chopped toasted hazelnuts to garnish. I was OK with the hazelnut milk, the agave syrup, and the chopped hazelnuts and decided that the agar agar was essentially vegetarian gelatine (I used Dr Oetker's Vege Gel). The 100% hazelnut paste had me scratching my head for a bit but, since logic states that if you blitz up hazelnuts for long enough and finely enough you have hazelnut butter, I opted for a jar of hazelnut butter (think peanut butter but made with hazelnuts).

Unfortunately, the only jar of hazelnut butter I could find was 'crunchy' but decided I'd try to deal with that at home. Oh, and do check that any nut butter you buy is made from 100% nuts and doesn't have any of the dreaded Palm Oil added (a small plea on behalf of the environment).

The recipe turned out to be simple enough and deserving of its single chef's hat symbol. Taking into account the ingredients I'd managed to track down in the UK, here's how to make it.

Pour 600ml hazelnut milk, 40ml agave syrup, 70g hazelnut butter and a 6g sachet of vege gel (or whatever gelling agent you can get hold of and the appropriate quantity for around 600ml of liquid) into a heavy based saucepan. If your hazelnut butter is a little on the coarse side, take a stick blender and do your best to blend the mixture together and break up the nuts. If you have a very small blender you could try blitzing the 70g of nut butter by itself but I found this quantity just too small and the butter just avoided the blades. Obviously a smooth hazelnut butter would be best but I urge you not to give up on making this if you can only find the crunchy variety!

Once the mixture is as blended and as smooth as you can get it, place the pan over a low to medium heat and, stirring constantly, gently heat it to boiling point. Keep it simmering for about 1 minute then pour into whatever pannacotta moulds you may have. I chose to pour the mixture into a jug through a sieve to catch any remaining unblended bits of hazelnut. The jug also makes it easier to pour the mixture into the moulds.

The magazine suggests you use a 6 hole silicone mould - the type you may use for large muffins. I surprised myself by having one of these in the cupboard and I'm pretty sure it is the first time it has ever been used. The recipe is supposed to serve 6 but I have to say that the mixture comfortably filled four of the muffin holes I had so I opted to make just four. I'll leave it for you to decide if that makes me practical or greedy!

If you choose to use a silicone mould like this one, can I urge you to place the mould on a baking tray of a similar size so that you can easily lift the whole lot into the fridge without everything spilling everywhere - don't say you haven't been warned! Obviously, you also need to make sure you can fit the whole tray into the fridge. If you don't have a mould like this, I'm sure ramekin dishes or individual metal moulds of the variety you may make steamed puddings or sticky toffee puddings in would work just as well although I can't vouch for the tipping out bit. Of course, you could always serve it in the ramekin dishes.

Whatever, you choose to pour the mixture into, chill it for 4 hours. When ready to serve, tip each pannacotta out onto a plate and garnish with a few roughly chopped toasted hazelnuts. The silicone mould made tipping each pannacotta out really easy as it's completely non-stick. I was worried that turning the whole thing upside down would result in all 4 (or 6) pannacotta falling out everywhere but they didn't, just be gentle and targeted as you ease each one out onto its individual plate.

The result is a simple, light and refreshing, super tasty dessert that is also completely vegan (assuming you have used a vegan gelling agent!).