Puff Pastry Christmas Calzones - Paul's Christmas Post - part 2

Hi Guys,

One of the things I love about this time of year is that you get to go round and see so many people, and as soon as you walk in the door you are offered some food and a nice drink (if this doesn't happen then you've probably walked into my Nan's house, in which case my only advice is to get on with it and make your own refreshments - only joking Nan!). Finger food, or party food can be brilliant and I love being offered home made sausage rolls or little tasty combo's spiked on forks - things like fresh figs wrapped in a little prosciutto with a sprig of mint and a small drizzle of balsamic vinegar , or some smoked salmon (responsibly sourced) with a little bit of watercress, some creme fraiche  and a squeeze of lemon are heavenly. The downside of party food is that alot of the stuff that is ready made from the supermarket is horrible. Sometimes it gets served to you in the same packet it was bought and cooked in, which makes it even worse!

As I promised at the end of the last post, here is a little Christmas recipe for you to try. Sage, cranberries and stilton are all classic Christmas flavours and I've brought them together in a pastry parcel - it is Christmas, so a little pastry treat is allowed! Use the all butter puff pastry you can get from the supermarket and roll it yourself. I've made my own sticky cranberry jam, but you could buy a jar, just make sure it's chunky. You can also use any cheese you want, but just make sure it's one with lots of flavour which is why I've used stilton, but a lovely mature cheddar works really well too.

Sticky Cranberry Jam

300g fresh cranberries

2 tbsp light brown sugar

Juice of 2 clementines or 1/2 an orange

flat teaspoon of ground cinnamon

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp red wine

Add all the ingredients to a frying pan and simmer over a medium heat for about 7 minutes until dark and sticky, but the cranberries still retain their shape. 

Allow to cool.

This makes about 25 calzones:

plain flour for dusting

500g all butter puff pastry

heaped teaspoon dried sage

1/2 my Sticky Cranberry Jam recipe - use the rest alongside your Christmas Turkey!

wedge of stilton (or your favourite strong cheese - or even a mixture!)

1 egg, beaten

Preheat the oven to 220℃ / gas mark 7

Roll your pastry out until it is the same thickness as a pound coin, as you do so dust both sides with the dried sage. This will give you a lovely subtle flavour to your pastry. 

Use the rim of a pint glass (or something similar approx 8-9 cm diameter) to cut the pastry into little circles.

Place a little cluster of cranberry jam in the middle of each of the circles. 4-5 cranberries is the ideal amount. You are going to fold the circles in half, so place the cranberries towards one side, but leave a 1 centimetre gap between the filling and the edge.

Crumble the same amount of cheese over the cranberries and then brush the egg in the 1 centimetre gap you left.

Carefully fold the pastry over the filling and press down to seal.

Now you can be as fancy as you like with this next part, you need to crimp the pastry to keep the filling from coming out. I like to fold and pinch all the way along to create a little calzone shape. What this means is that I start at 1 end, fold over a little triangle of the pastry and pinch it down, I then take the next piece and fold it over into another triangle, and then pinch that down. This follows on until I get to the end where I finish it with a big pinch, making the finished calzone look a little bit like an ear! (the big pinch at the end looks like an earlobe to me!) You could always just press down the edge with a fork, like you would a sausage roll, if you prefer. Try to make it as tight as possible without getting any holes in them. You will probably find that the cheese will still manage to find a way to bubble and ooze out a little as it cooks, but that doesn't matter too much, you want them to look rustic and homemade!

Brush the top with some more egg and place on some greaseproof parer on a baking tray.

Do the same with the rest and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes or until golden.

You can adapt this recipe any way you like. It's really nice to do a batch using different cheeses, just keep them separated on the tray as you bake them and remember which is which! 

You could also try using some leftover turkey instead of cheese, or using a different herb, like thyme in the pastry. 

I hope you enjoy the recipe, do let me know what you think, as it all helps with future recipes that I'll be posting in the new year.

Have a brilliant Christmas, and thank you so much for reading my blog over the past couple of months.

Paul's Christmas Post - part 1

Hi Guys,

This week there really is no escaping the fact that Christmas is upon us. Hopefully you are all organised in terms of what food you are cooking and serving. I am pretty sorted, although I don't actually have that much that anyone wants me to do! This year we will be staying with Esther's family over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day before visiting my Aunty Lyn on Boxing Day and my Cousin on the 27th. My "Christmas Day" with my Grandparents, Parents and my Sister isn't until the 28th (yes that is 5 solid days of Christmas!) and we are going alternative, so I'll be coking a beautiful lamb rogan josh with fluffy rice and making some fantastic lime pickle and a few other bits and pieces. Apart from a retro pale ale fondue that has been requested for a late evening Boxing Day treat, the only other cooking that I'll be doing will be any desserts that might be requested from me (there usually is!) and of course I will be available as a sous-chef for anyone who needs any help.
I can't wait for Esther and I to be able to host a proper Christmas Day, as I usually end up lugging half of my kitchen around with us and when you live in a second floor flat, it is a nightmare going up and down the stairs so many times! I love it really!
I also want to be able to start some proper Christmas Day traditions, things like a good breakfast and a little homemade alcoholic drink to get you started, that sort of thing. It would also be nice to be able to do a few "get ahead" recipes and keep them in the fridge. Anyone who saw Jamie's Christmas with Bells On on Wednesday will know what I mean by that. There are loads of jobs you can do in advance of Christmas Day to tick off your list and leave you free to enjoy yourself instead of being a slave to the kitchen. This includes a fabulous "get ahead" gravy and brilliant stuffing recipe. You can find these recipes on the channel 4 website if you are interested, and believe me you should check them out as they are genius!

While I am on the subject of Christmas food on TV this week, I have to write a bit about Jimmy's Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner which was also on channel 4. I love Jimmy Doherty and think he is brilliant. This week he decided to try to grow all the components of a traditional Christmas dinner and compare them to ones that most people would buy from a supermarket. This meant that he would be cooking 2 Christmas dinners at the same time . . . . . . Jimmy has always been a bit crazy!
The other thing Jimmy has always been is a really fair person, and he told the stories of both his homegrown and the supermarket produce in a very non-biased way, even when he was in a Bernhard Matthews turkey farm, something he should be commended for.
Along with rearing his own free range turkey, he grew sprouts, carrots and a really traditional variety of potato that sadly we don't see very much anymore. He also made his own Christmas pudding using a very old recipe using suet. This looked incredible and is definitely something I will be doing next year.
I love programmes like this, they get you excited about growing your own stuff (all I need now is a garden and I'll be all over it) but I also now know a lot more about the food I buy in the supermarket.
Jimmy has taught me so much over the years and he really inspires me. In his last series he used heavy duty power tools in his barn to create his own versions of supermarket food, it's pretty easy to understand why I like him so much! I don't think I would be any good at running a farm, but I love visiting the farm shop at his, as he has some amazing meat amongst all the other nice things.
The outcome of the programme really didn't matter that much, as you already know that free range meat tastes better,  allotment grown veg always tastes better and the pudding will be either a "love it" or "hate it"
kind of thing with the suet. What was important was the idea that we should try to preserve some of the traditional varieties of things like potatoes that are being lost. Apples are another example of this and it's astounding to learn how many different varieties of apples there are, but only a few are readily available to the average consumer. I think that is really sad, and something should be done to actively push these things back into our shops.

As the title of this post suggests, there will be another Christmas post coming in the next few days. This hopefully will be a little recipe to try out. I have been experimenting in the kitchen over the last couple of weeks in an attempt to give you something really special to do. Not everything has been as successful as I would have liked and there have been a few disasters, but I'm confident that you'll love what I'll post!

In the meantime get as much of your shopping done as possible. Christmas is the worst time for food shopping and if you can have all the cupboard stuff already so all you need to pick up are the fresh items then you'll be reducing the supermarket stress for yourself big time! Just stay calm and it'll all be fine, I am hoping not to be pushed out of the way by an angry lady looking for parsnips this year - there isn't the need for it to get to that stage!

Happy shopping!

. . . . . Leave them kids alone!

Hi Guys,

This week I was more than disturbed to hear of the governments plans to relax the nutritional standards in the food sold and served in over a third of schools in England. This is truly shocking and will only lead us back to a very dark place with the health of our kids and ultimately the country as a whole.

Seven years ago when Jamie Oliver started his campaign to improve school food we were in that same dark place. Sub standard processed food was being fed to the children of this country with horrific consequences to their health. Something that stuck in my head whilst watching the TV shows was the fact that this generation of kids would be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Every day, by sending your child to school with their lunch money or their packed lunch full of crisps and chocolate, you were slowly killing them. In my mind, the argument for healthier food in schools was a complete "no brainer" to be honest, but both money and politics did what it always does and caused a whole load of problems. Money is a horrible thing, I would love a world where important things didn't have to be compromised because of profit margins and contract negotiations. The health of our country (the worst in Europe and not too far behind the worst of them all, the U.S.A) has to be one of the most important issues. A quarter of kids under the age of 10 are obese, and a third of all teenagers. This is putting an enormous stress on an already overworked NHS. This costs our economy £4,000,000,000 a year. Diabetes costs our economy £10,000,000,000 a year. If you want to talk about saving money, that's a good place to start. If standards start to go backwards, as the government are pretty much pushing that way, then those figures, which are enormous, will only increase further. They are already predicted to double in the next 15-20 years.
The other shocking thing I learned 7 years ago, was that there were more standards to comply with in producing Dog Food than there were for food served to kids in school. That meant that so called "meat" products could be sold with as low as 20% meat content and 80% anything else. I think we all remember Jamie blitzing up all sorts of nasty stuff in his food processor as a demonstration as to what that 80% was made up of. Processed food is bad news, and Jamie's campaign managed to rid schools of it, take away sweets, crisps and chocolate bars from vending machines and educate kids about food and nutrition at the same time.
I saw a news report from a school in Greenwich the other day, which asked the kids (and remember we are now talking about a new batch of kids who didn't grow up with the turkey twizzlers) about their school dinners. These kids were happy and healthy and statistics also show that they are performing better academically. They enjoyed their healthy food and were not bothered by the lack of the unhealthy stuff. To relax the standards and ask schools to self assess is crazy, and the kids don't even miss it in the first place!

In a perfect world these schools would only serve the healthy meals and kids health would improve, grades would improve and it would be sunny all the time. Unfortunately, it seems that these schools are having pressure heaped upon them to make a return to unhealthy profitable snacks in vending machines and low standard processed products that fall well below the acceptable level. Schools need money, it's a simple truth and the temptations are obvious. Having strict guidelines mean that high standards have to be maintained, and success stories like the one I saw on the news might not have happened without them.

We cannot allow this relaxing of standards to happen. Lots of my friends and family have some fantastic little kids and I want all of them (and mine when we get around to it!) to have fantastic futures . If we take a stand and make some noise, then I have every faith that they will.