Warming Up to Spring with Pizza Pinwheels

The last couple of days have been a chilly, windy return to wintery weather (regardless of the sun!) - what I hope will be the last stint of cold and yuck before a long summer. It got me thinking about warmer things - like hot soup, and savoury scrolls (pizza pinwheels, as I prefer to call them). This is a recipe that I've been wanting to share for awhile now, not just because they are so popular at shared morning teas! And it's super simple because you get to use whichever scone dough recipe you know and love. 

This morning my grandfather passed away due to illness - we had been expecting him to succumb for a month or two. I think he would have loved these pinwheels. A stand-out memory of him at the lunch table involved him including a cheese and jam sandwich with every midday meal! Minus the jam for this recipe but I don't think he'd mind, as long as there was plenty of cheese ;-)

Pizza Pinwheels

Ingredients for quantity of scone dough from your favourite recipe (mine is Edmonds!)
4 tsp dried herbs of your choice (I love oregano!)
1 cup grated cheese
4 Tbsp tomato paste

A well-worn page in my Edmonds cookbook 

Sift together the dry ingredients for your scone dough, including the dried herbs.

Rub in the butter to the dry mixture as per your scone dough instructions.

 Once the texture of the mixture is like breadcrumbs, add 2/3 of a cup of the grated cheese.

Slowly add the milk (1 to 1 & 1/2 cups if you're also using the Edmonds recipe) and 'cut' into the mixture with a knife. The best consistency is when the mixture separates into what look like many doughy ribbons, like the second image below. Then use your hands to knead it into one large lump of dough.

Perfectly 'cut' dough

 Separate the dough into two equal-sized parts...

For each half of the dough, shape it into a rectangle with your hands, then roll it out onto a floured board or bench-top. Try to make it about half a centimetre thick, a hand-span wide, and a rolling pin's length-long!

Spread the tomato paste on two-thirds of the width of the dough. 

Use a small amount of milk to moisten the edge that is not covered in tomato paste. Roll up from the tomatoey edge to the moistened edge (you might find it easier to roll by cutting the dough rectangle in half first).

Action shot!

Once rolled up, secure the moistened edge by pressing it onto the roll. Use a sharp serrated knife to cut the pinwheels approx. 1.5cm thick. 

Arrange the pinwheels on a lightly floured or papered baking tray with at least 2cm spacing.

Use a pastry brush to paint the tops of the pinwheels with milk and add a sprinkle of the remaining cheese to each one.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in a hot oven (check your scone recipe - probably around 200 degrees C). Cool on a baking rack once done.

LLB Scones - or, The Easiest Scones You'll Ever Make

As a perceptive reader of my blog has pointed out, when one posts a soup recipe it is only right to provide a tasty bread to go on the side. And I have one! A few weeks ago I made The Easiest Scones in the World. Were you ever told that it was impossible to stuff up scones? I, too, was told this myth. Perfect scones were an impossibility in my experience. Too dry, too stodgy, too floury - I could never get them just right.

Then I met Allyson Gofton's 'Bake' book. I've just discovered that she also publishes her recipes online here. Her 'Waiheke Lemonade Scones' (I assume named for the Island north of Auckland, popular for day trips and weddings) contain three ingredients: cream, self-raising flour and lemonade. However, I had a bottle of Lemon Lime and Bitters (LLB) kicking around in the fridge - I bought 'diet' by accident, will ALWAYS check the labels now! Hence LLB scones were born. You can't taste the soft drink in the scones, and as far as I can tell it's there to provide the liquid for binding and carbonation for rising. 

These scones are truly un-stuff-up-able. They are unbelievably light and soft-textured. And they go beautifully with soups, or jam and cream cheese, or just on their own when hot out of the oven. I think it would be worth substituting regular cream with coconut cream to reduce the fat or lactose content. 

LLB Scones

2 cups self-raising flour

¾ cup Lemon Lime and Bitters )or any other carbonated beverage e.g. lemonade)

½ cup cream

Set the oven rack towards the top of the oven. Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Dust a baking tray with flour or line with baking paper. Sift the flour into a bowl and make a well in the centre.

The recipe for deliciousness has these three ingredients :)

Pour the lemonade and cream into the centre and use a knife to mix together to make a soft dough.

If the dough's a little too moist (i.e. leaves batter on your fingers) then add a little flour and mix in.

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead very lightly - I prefer to knead dough while it's still in the bowl, then spread it onto the floured tray.

Pat into an 18-20 cm round or other preferred shape and place on the prepared tray. Use a sharp cook's knife to make the scone into 8 even wedges without cutting all the way through. Or, as I prefer, shape into a rectangle and cut into approx. 12 squares spaced just apart (see image below). The cut squares will rise against each other, helping them to bake through - or so my Mum tells me!

Brush with milk to glaze. Bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes or until cooked. 

Different stages of risen-ness (using slightly different iPhone camera filters)

How'd that one get in there?!

Transfer to a clean tea towel covered cake rack to cool. Serve warm.

Unbeatably light! 

Here's a flock of 'em, ready to eaten quick-smart.

Variation: add a cup of cheese and half a cup of cooked bacon to the flour mixture. You won't taste the LLB/lemonade at all! Mmm...savoury yums!

  

This method of cutting up scone dough is what I grew up with - I'll never get sick of it!

This batch provided much-needed sustenance before an important rock concert ;-)

There you have it - the lightest and easiest scones you'll ever make! Grab one before they head out the door... The plain ones are delicious with jam and cream cheese, and both varieties are best served warm.

Soon only the crumbs with be left

Half-Baked Soup - Market Courgette, Kumara (Sweet potato) and Fresh Herbs

I thought we would take a break from cakey sorts (fear not, there will be PLENTY more, so much you will almost get sick of it) and I would share a different sort of baking recipe. 'Tis nearly the season for soup and I was recently inspired to have a go at a (partly) baked version. I think it counts as baking enough to be included here!

To me, a farmers market is a melting pot of inspiration. At the Riccarton/Deans Bush market in Christchurch every Saturday you can buy fresh produce, eggs, meat, condiments and snacks. So this Saturday gone - a mock-summer morning - that's just where we went. In somewhat hipster fashion, we got on our bikes and braved the busy Saturday morning traffic to reach said market.

Two very similar images to the sights that beheld us - thought I'd spare you the blurry phone photos!

We were well-rewarded for our efforts. Among other things, we got our paws on coffee (for Nathan), delicious Middle-Eastern pastries (for me), pepperoni salami (for Nathan), the cheapest bulb of fennel I have ever seen (for me and Nathan, too, little did he know it!), and... a foam cupful of courgette and basil soup. Smooth, creamy and with just enough sharpness from the basil to stop you slipping into a winter's dream.

I had to know what was in it - the woman flitting between the soup stall and half a dozen other stands, with wispy grey hair and wearing hemp-based everything, was quick to inform: fry up an onion and garlic, add a couple of red kumara with your courgettes, and put the chopped up basil in at the very end. Great, I thought, and headed to the nearest produce stall to pick out the biggest courgette of my life with plans for it to be part of my replica of a soupful masterpiece.

Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction: I found this picture on the net while searching for images of "Farmers Market Riccarton", and this one pops up of the very stall I visited with the same soup on offer and the SAME grey-haired woman smiling and her customers! Maybe life is better without the internet...

Back home with the biggest courgette of my life and some lovely fresh fennel.

Nathan was onto it almost before I had formulated the rest of the recipe in my head: "This is going to turn into a blog post about 'Claire's famous courgette and basil soup', isn't it?" I was (and still am) indignant - I am certainly not above crediting my sources. So, wispy-haired, hemp-wearing woman from the Farmer's Market, this one's yours... with slight appropriations for my own purposes!

My first point-of-difference is that my basil plant is not doing as well as my Vietnamese mint plant, so I have the nice, peppery taste of those leaves as my main flavour.

My prolific Vietnamese mint, dwarfing the lemon thyme it shares a pot with.

Next, in the spirit of 'half-baking' I chose to roast the veges. Chunks of gold and orange kumara (sweet potato) went into the oven for a good half hour at 180°C. We were doing well. Then I had the brain-wave to roast the forearm-sized courgette (zucchini). I didn't think it was an entirely bonkers idea: a work colleague had raved about how courgettes can be turned into amazing pasta sauce if they're cut up finely and roasted until they're just mush. 

T-0...

 What I hadn't factored into my recipe-equation was just how much courgette you need to have for enough 'mush' for a soup like this. After spending a good half hour dicing the thing then more than an hour with the trays in the oven, rotating every 15 mins, I ended up with a fraction of the amount of courgette that I started with. So perhaps next time I'll grate it. I'd also reduce the amount of kumara that I used so that the courgette flavour gets more of a look in. 

...T+60mins...very little change!!!

In the spirit of crediting my sources fully (not like I'm trying to prove a point or anything...), I used recipes from The Food Network and Operation: Get Fit Again! to get a feel for the amounts of stock and veg.

Courgette and Kumara Soup with Fresh Herbs (serves 8-10)

2 large sweet potatoes (orange/gold/purple)
Approx. 8 cups of courgette, finely chopped (if baking) or grated (if not baking)
One large onion
2 tsp crushed garlic
1 tsp green curry paste (more if you want the zing!)
Half a bulb fresh fennel, finely chopped

Approx. 2 L chicken stock (2 Tbsp chicken stock powder dissolved in 2 L boiling water)

1/2 cup coconut cream or fresh pouring cream 2 large handfuls of your favourite fresh herbs, roughly chopped (I used Vietnamese mint because it's going crazy in its pot, but basil, thyme, mint, coriander are all good options).

Chop up the sweet potato into cubes approximately 3cm in size, spread on a lightly oiled roasting dish and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for approximately 30mins. Once cooked, cool in a different continue (to cool faster!) then chop up into small pieces, approximately 2cm diameter. If you prefer to boil them, remember to add the extra time for that to happen (and it's ALWAYS longer than you think once the other ingredients are in, too) to the total simmering time later.

Spread the diced courgette on an oven tray and bake for an hour at 180 deg C, or until it smells really good! Alternatively, grate it and set aside.

Dice the onion and fry in a little oil (1-2 tbsp) in the bottom of a large heavy-bottomed soup or stock pot. Add the garlic and continue to fry until the onion is translucent.

Onion and garlic while playing around with the 'chrome' filter on my camera phone :)

Add the sweet potato, courgette, fennel, curry paste and 1.5L of the stock to the onion and garlic. Cover and simmer for approximately half an hour. 

Colourful mixture!

Remove from heat and add fresh herbs. Set on a heat-proof board and using either a potato masher or whizz-stick if you have one, blend until no clumps of vegetable remain. I don't recommend pouring this mixture into a blender because it's usually so hot that it's not safe for YOU!

You may want to add the rest of your stock to get a smoother, thinner texture but it's up to you whether you want more of a thick chowder or not. Also add the coconut cream at this stage and stir well. Serve immediately or freeze in small containers. Stores in fridge for up to five days.

There you have it! Bon appetit for a delicious quick dinner or warm mid-week lunch...

Perfect pick-me-up at work...minus the burnt toast!!