Oct 05 2008
Bungled Brunch
When cooking for people with allergies, it pays to think carefully about what you are cooking.
- Frittata Party!
- Chocolate Croissants
- Lazy Loaf
Our old flatmate, the dearly loved O2, is up in Scotland for a wee golfing holiday with Tadge, another flatmate and friend from home. They were setting off for the hills late-afternoon on Saturday, so, eyeing an opportunity to finish off the breakfast chapter, I invited them and some other friends for brunch. This was to include KK, a uni friend of mine.
We kicked off with Buck’s Fizz. Not sure how that came about but it was a nice touch and one that probably helped save face against the issues that followed.
Now my plan was to do the frittata party (of all the recipes in the breakfast chapter, this instruction for four different types of omelette to be cooked to order for friends hanging out in a kitchen was the one that I felt was least reasonable for Dougal and I to just do on our own to get it out of the way) but as KK is allergic to eggs (and fish, and tree nuts) knew I had to come up with other dishes that would suit her. The chocolate croissants would be fine, but I decided to add in the lazy loaf to bolster recipe numbers. It seemed fairly breakfast suitable.
The first ‘uh-oh’ moment came as I was egg-washing the chocolate croissants…but thankfully I realised in time to keep a stash separate for KK. The bigger ‘uh-oh’ came mere moments later when Dougal realised, to no little horror, that the Lazy Loaf was choc full of KK-unfriendly ingredients.
Lazy Loaf isn’t a proper loaf of bread with rising and working the dough and shaping the loaf etc. You make up the mix, using about the 2/5 museli and 3/5 brown flour, as well as yeast, and then put it in a low oven for an hour where effectively it rises. After that you turn the heat up and bake it properly. We’d managed (almost by chance) to find the specific museli suggested by Nigella in the book which has no fewer than 23 ingredients. Including Hazelnuts. And all sorts of other nasties handled in the same environment as nuts. It was spot on for the Lazy Loaf- lovely big chunks of dates and apricots, and nice crunchy nutty bits, but seriously unsuitable for KK.
I liked the frittata but really they needed an audience of perhaps three or four avowed omelette-likers, each willing to take a turn cooking. And a cheap source of top-notch eggs. We only made one each of the fillings which struck me as a shame, and I ended up cooking all of them. So we now have quite a lot of extra filling in the fridge (perhaps I will do a little omlette for breakfast tomorrow!).
The chocolate croissants (puff pastry with dark choccy rolled up inside it) were pretty good but suffered from my not having ready-rolled puff pastry. I don’t think I rolled the pastry out thin enough, and so consequently these were a bit small (made fitting the chocolate inside tough!) and the bottom layer seemed a bit doughy. Ultimately though the combination of buttery pastry and chocolate is pretty hard to mess up so there weren’t any complaints about these!
The other place we went wrong on Saturday was underestimating the popularity of and demand for Dougal’s bread. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to ask D to make any- it wasn’t needed for the meal, and anyway we’d have the lazy loaf (which went most admirably with my mother’s raspberry jam or honey). However there were practically howls of disappointment when we said that no, there was no homemade bread, and we were told in no uncertain terms that there was to be proper bread next week when the same gang all come back for lunch!
the boy has a BIG reputation (bit like Lizzie’s jam) and if it’s not to be had, there WILL be complaints.
[...] last week’s unfortunate and not well-received brunch we need to make amends. The first thing to do is to make some nice bread to compensate for the [...]