Recipe #2 - Ginger Pudding

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Recipe #2 Ginger Pudding

When I first read this recipe I was really excited thinking that the end product would be a homemade version of instant Jell-O pudding, which I think is where most Canadians’ minds go when one brings up pudding. It had clearly slipped my mind that my grandmother was British and that not only do most Brits call all desserts pudding they tend to call a moist cake that we seldom see on this side of the pond pudding as well. The pudding that this recipe is referring to is similar to Christmas pudding, which I remember my Grandma making and my experiencing a similar disillusionment when I realized that we not about to eat a special chocolate Christmas pudding but rather a weird cake with fruit in it (you think I would have learned from this). It appears that Canadians seem to have forgotten the steamed pudding, as in looking for additional instructions the majority of the recipes I found were from Britain, Australia and South Africa.

Here’s my Grandma’s recipe

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Ginger Pudding

½ cup butter

2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

½ cup molasses

1 cup raisins

1 ½ cups flour

2 tsp. ginger

2 tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. salt

½ cup milk

Mix, put in coffee tins, steam greased 1 hour.

So from these instructions I was really unsure of where to start so I started googling steamed ginger pudding like crazy.

By the way, you are also going to need two cereals bowls, tin foil, parchment paper, 2 elastics, string and two large pots.

1. I decided to go with her ingredients minus the raisins because I am not a fan and I doubled the ginger and used fresh because I really like ginger.

2. Every recipe I found referred to a "pudding basin", in all of the photos it just looked like a cereal bowl so that is what I used and it worked quite well.  The recipe made so much that I had enough for two full bowls. I greased the bowls first with butter and then poured the mixture in, I left a few inches at the top which worked out well as the puddings rose quite a bit as they were steamed.

3. Then came sealing the pudding which was the complicated part, I read a lot about this but only grasped the concept when I watched the video below. I took a piece of parchment paper about twice the size of the top of my bowl and greased one side of it and then put a piece of tin foil on the ungreased side. I then folded a pleat in the tinfoil/parchment combo down the middle so there was a vent as the pudding expanded. 

I covered the top of the bowl with the parchment and foil with the foil side up. The video below used string to seal it but I found that an elastic band worked a lot better; I then tucked the remaining edges of foil under the elastic band so it was completely sealed. I then used string to create a handle so that I could get the bowl out of the boiling water. If you still have no idea what I’m talking about check out this helpful link: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/videos/1060/steaming-a-pudding

4. I then placed the sealed bowls in a larger pot on the stove filled with water up to about two thirds of the way up the pudding bowl. I brought the pots of water to a boil and then turned them down to low. Most recipes said it should take around 1 and half hours, but mine took at least two hours. Avoid the temptation to peak at your pudding; they work a lot better if they stay sealed.

5. The result was an incredibly delicious moist cake; I recommend you eat it right away, as the pudding does not taste the same the next day.

Prep time – Active – 15 minutes Inactive- 2 hours

Cost – Pretty cheap under $10 (I already had all the ingredients in my pantry).

Recipe #1 – Fish Cakes

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Like the majority of her recipes the fish cake one was lacking in details, I filled in the blanks with a Jamie Oliver recipe that can be found here:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/recipes/SALMON_FISH_CAKES

Here is her recipe

Fish Cakes

2 cups of mashed potatoes

1 lb salmon

2 tbsp of chopped parsley

½ tsp onion juice

1 well beaten egg

salt and pepper

Directions:

1. Mix well and form into cakes.

2. Roll into cakes

3. Fry until golden brown.

For the life of me I could not figure out what she meant by onion juice, so I substituted lemon juice and some lemon zest as suggested by Mr. Oliver. I also skipped the parsley.

1. I cooked my mashed potatoes first, she makes no mention of cooking the salmon so I am guessing she would have used canned salmon, canned meat of any kind really grosses me out so I used 2 of the Captain Highligner frozen fillets that I normally eat. I cooked them using the ingenious method suggested by Jamie, by putting my fillets in a colander on top of my boiling potatoes so the steam from the boiling pot can be used to cook the salmon at the same time.

2. Once my potatoes and salmon were cooked I put the fish aside and put my potatoes in my freezing cold stairwell to cool them off quickly.

3. Once the potatoes were fairly cool I added the rest of the ingredients and broke up the salmon fillets and mixed them in.

4. I formed the mixture into cakes and rolled them in flour.

5. I am fairly skeptical of any recipe that requires you to roll things into cakes or balls and fry them (ie: crab cakes) as I rarely have any luck keeping these so called cakes together and end up with something that could be described as crab hash. Surprisingly though with this recipe they actually stayed TOGETHER! I Then fried my salmon cakes in about 2 tbsps. of olive oil for 2- 4 minutes on each side on a medium to high temperature, until they were nice and brown.

6. The result is a really hearty meal that makes good leftovers, is easy to reproduce and delicious.

Cost of this meal  - If I skip the parsley I will usually have everything in my pantry except the salmon (which goes for around $6 for 4 fillets).

Prep time – Active under ½ hour, overall around 45 min to 1 hour

Getting to know my Grandma through her recipes

My Grandma died last year and in her eulogy I talked about how there were a lot of things we didn’t have in common. She had a green thumb and loved to make quilts. I can’t keep a plant alive for the life of me and I can’t sew at all. There were a lot of other things I didn’t talk about because they weren’t so easily defined or easy to say. My Grandma was born in1921 and by the time she was my age she had two kids and another one soon to come. My Grandma was a product of her time, never was this more clear than when she would come out with a comment that was blatantly racist or sexist without seeming to notice that anyone was taking offense. Some of things she said were even harder to stomach than her openly racist attitudes whether they were a part of her generation or not; such as her opinions on the appropriate size of a female, leading her to often declare that she thought my mom and I were getting fat.  She was also blindly devoted to any and all males who were related to her, believing they could do no wrong. Whereas the women were under constant scrutiny, never quite getting anything right. However the more I look for differences between my Grandma and me, the more I run into the similarities. I know there are many things in my life that she would not approve of such as my tattoos and perpetual singledom, but there are a number of ways that we are similar. I see her strength in myself both emotionally and physically when there is a job that needs to be done. I also see myself in her, in our mutual ability to stretch a dollar. She lived through the depression and raised a family on almost nothing and I see same trait in myself when I manage to support myself on very little. Finally I see a similarity in our use of good food to bring people together.  She was a good cook and used both familiar nostalgic recipes and fresh new ones to bring her family together, Christmas wasn’t Christmas without scalloped potatoes and ham with pineapple. Her food was  good, hearty and simple, something which I think is true about a lot of the things I like to cook. When I was home at Christmas I started going through her recipe box and realized there was a number of recipes I wanted to try. I want to use this space to share my attempts at some of her recipes - both successes and the mistakes ( I mean there’s a recipe for an aspic in there) in the hope that I might get to know her better and perhaps myself in the process.