Want to make an interesting, unusual and totally dekadent drink this Halloween? Make Butterbeer! But the real stuff, not the fake and horrible drink you get in the Warner Bros. amusement parks. Our recipe is inspired by a traditional English Butter or Ale Recipe, something that was quite common back in the good old days. It's such a fantastic and authentic drink, and it does remind you of being in Hogwarts, but in a good way!
Besides making recipe videos we also want to make short videos about common problems in the kitchen. Obviously one of the main reasons why we make our videos is to share our experiences and to help fellow foodies and passionate cooks.
This video features the common problem of looking after shop-bought basil plants properly. They're available everywhere and are great for garnishing dishes, they're not always in good shape but if you get a decent plant you should be able to keep it for 1-2 months. Funny enough, so many people we know always tell us that their plants only last for a few days or a week, and also the description and use-by date on the plants often say that they only last for a couple of weeks. But our experience with shop-bought basil plants has always been rather different, sometimes you can get the odd bug or virus on a plant and they won't keep long, but otherwise we find that our plants last for a really long time.
Our video will guide you through our tips of how to keep your plants happy and productive and hopefully you will never again feel the disappointment of a dwindling rotting basil plant in your kitchen!
We love making our YouTube videos to document and share our experiences, especially food related experiences :) As we're travelling quite a bit this year we want to film our travels a bit and especially our cool foodie moments abroad. It's all not that serious, it's just simple fun and we want to show that.
This time we went to London and we really love going to London for food. We really believe that London is one of the food capitals of the world, the amount of fantastic restaurants and excellent food is just staggering. There's so much to discover everywhere, from chic restaurants to alternative health food places, to great chocolate and fantastic gastro pubs.
We hope you enjoy our banter! Thanks for watching and let us know what your favourite places are in London?!
This here's a cool little recipe, inspired by Japanese Hot Cakes, which are basically fluffy pancakes. Almost all hot cake recipes use a 'hot cake mix' which people simply mix with milk and an egg and then cook in a deep pan. Of course not everybody can get hold of a 'hot cake mix', so we wanted to make a recipe from scratch. Our recipe is pretty much a basic pancake recipe, but what we do to get them really fluffy is to beat the egg whites until they're really fluffy and then fold them gently into the batter. This makes the pancakes really fluffy, and when you use a deep pan and you cook them gently with a lid you can get really good fluffy pancakes with a fantastic flavour. They taste a lot more natural than most fluffy pancakes because they don't have that strong baking soda flavour. They're very easy to make and incredibly satisfying so please try our recipe :)
I've really been enjoying making this series of gardening/food programmes. It's great to see how the whole garden is coming along over the months and we're trying so many new things this year that it's great to record our experiences and to share them with our audience. Of course the latest episode was a week late, but the weather at the end of March here was just awful, snow blizzards for days, something quite unusual for Northern Ireland! It didn't really damage the garden much, it just delayed everything. But growing and producing your food is like that, it's quite unpredictable, that's why it's always good to have a few options when growing your own.
This month's episode gives an update on our seedling situation. The seedlings from January were quite slow and they didn't germinate that well, however we did manage to get around 60 pea plants, a lot of spring onions, spinach, lettuce and lamb's lettuce from that sowing. The indoor february sowing was more succesful, we got another load of healthy peas, which we put into the polytunnel at the community garden. Then there's more spinach, more lettuce, spring onions, turnips, broccoli raab and kailaan that has been planted, and beetroot, celery, cauliflower and calabrese broccoli still have to go into the ground. So all in all not too bad!
Then we also looked at Asparagus. I really love fresh asparagus, and the fresh stuff is so different to most asparagus you can buy. It's incredibly sweet and you can easily eat it raw, whereas the shop-bought stuff is nice, but it mostly only has that strong asparagus flavour. However, it will take two more years for us until we can eat our planted asparagus! That might seem like a long wait and a waste of a good raised bed, but we're also growing other crops alongside our asparagus, such as lettuce, peas, spring onions, bush beans, anything shallow rooting basically that won't disturb the root system of the asparagus. Now asparagus can be quite a tricky crop to get right, and we've tried to produce the perfect conditions as described in the video. Also, asparagus really doesn't like weeds, that's why weed-free raised beds are particularly suited to this crop. And during high summer it's alsways good to put a layer of grass cuttings or straw over the asparagus so that it keeps dry, later in the year you can then mulch with compost or manure to provide your plants with additional nutrients.
At this time of the year it's quite good to look at compost and mulching. Compost is an invaluable resource to the gardener, it does so much for the soil and your plants and you can make it for free! Compost is very easy to make and as long as you use raw biodegradable material such as fruit and veg peelings, paper, grass cuttings etc you will create compost. But a lot of people have a compost bin without actually having in mind to create compost! It's just another bin to them! However, getting it right makes all the difference with compost, it will be less stinky, sticky and wet. I try to put in half and half of 'greens' and 'browns', greens meaning veg peelings, kitchen and gardening waste, and browns meaning carbon materials such as cardboard, paper, tree leaves, wood shavings, ash etc. Most people make the mistake of only using 'greens', which makes compost very wet and stinky and attracts loads of flies! If you use half and half of greens and browns and mix these from time to time you will get a perfect mixture, moist and crumbly compost. It's almost like cooking! I tend to leave my compost for six months after I've finished feeding it, which generally makes very good mulching compost. I mostly use my homemade compost for mulching, but if you would like yours to be finer either sieve it or leave it to ferment longer.
I tend to have compost ready twice a year when I need it for mulching, in early spring and autumn. Mulching is very important for fruit bushes and trees, it will really make a difference in your crop production. It suppresses weeds, it improves the soil by adding organic matter and nutrients and it keeps your soil most. So many things can be used for mulching, compost, manure, sea weed, grass cuttings, ash, wood shavings, or a mixture of all these. I tend to use whatever I've got lying around! And of course whatever each plant species prefers. So do give mulching a try, it's really very straightforward and inexpensive but it makes such a difference.
Finally our epsiode looks at a field to fork recipe, by using our fresh lamb's lettuce, also known as corn salad, to make a scrumptious salad bar recipe. We love salads with lots of different ingredients, they're not at all like the boring stuff you get in most restaurants. Salads can have real character by chosing some fantastic ingredients. We like a mixture of grains like couscous, lentils, quinoa or pearl barley to give body and provide that delicious carb-comfort; we then like to add some toasted nuts or seeds, which add great texture and bold flavours. Then we really like adding different type of veg, sometimes roasted, sometimes raw, depending on what's seasonal. And finally we like adding something creamy and salty, maybe a bit of goat's cheese or sheep's cheese, or a nice creamy dressing. We like a nice mayo dressing, which basically consists of homemade mayo with the zest and juice of half a lemon, half a clove of crushed garlic and some fresh herbs (we used ground rosemary). Absoluetly delicious! When you try this salad you'll soon forget the boring iceberg alternative!
As always, thanks for watching and we hope our advice is helpful :)
Thanks to all our subscribers and viewers for your support! We are so excited that we've reached 500 subscribers 100.000 video views, we know it's not that much compared to some YouTube people but it really means a lot to us. We remember the days whenever we got a new subscriber every two weeks or so, and now it's up to 50 a week. It can obviously change really quickly on YouTube, so we are enjoying the fact that more people are watching our videos and are trying our recipes. The feedback is also really great, we are so happy that all of your comments are really nice and that the recipes really work for you, that's our main goal after all!
And we also love the fact that so many of you are from far away countries, where we have never been to and quite honestly didn't even know that YouTube existed there. Shows how much we know about the rest of the world...but we truly love this international aspect of YouTube, to be in touch with so many different cultures and people that speak different languages is something that is close to our hearts because we ourselves are from an international background. So please spread the word and we hope that our cooking videos can help you experience the amazing world of homemade food :)
We also hope you enjoy our St Patrick's Day footage! A big thank you to Claude, Marie and Ryan who came along and supported us during the parade, we couldn't have done it without you guys! It was really so much fun, as you can probably tell from all the nonsense on camera, and we will never forget that experience!
This episode was so much fun to make! Ciabatta is such an amazing bread and this particular version with olives, pine nuts and semolina, really reminds us of Italy and the great holidays we had there. Hence also our Italian intro, and our bad attempts at Italian gestures and body language! It was also great to have our friend Claude over for a visit and to do some filming with him, and to hear his very discerning taste critique. But in the end, what made this episode so much fun was the bread itself!
Ciabatta is a really easy bread to make as long as you remember a few steps. Your dough has to rise a lot longer to create those air bubbles. You also don't want to properly deflate your dough as you would with other breads. Ciabatta dough is also a lot wetter than most breads, and wet doughs usually tend to make a lighter bread with more air holes and they also tend to have a better crust. Although it's obviously great to have those nice air bubbles for looks and texture, too many recipes tend to focus on that aspect of Ciabatta only, whereas we think it is vital not to forget flavour! That is what makes this recipe different, because the ingredients we use are just great and work so well with each other and just give loads of flavour to the bread, making it a feast of classic Italian ingredients!
Pretty much all of the ingredients used in this recipe have something to do with Italy. White Spelt flour is not the most obvious one, especially when it's not grown in Italy, but Spelt was actually one of the most important grain crops in the Roman empire. Also, the bread that the Romans made with spelt flour was very similar to a Ciabatta, quite flat and either round or oval shaped. I truly love Spelt flour for breadmaking, it makes the lightest and stretchiest dough, even when using wholemeal flour. And the taste is also outstanding. So if you can, get some Spelt flour for this recipe. In the UK and Ireland it's available in a few supermarkets, but you can also find it in many health food and organic food stores. Otherwise just use 'strong' white bread flour.
Then we have semolina which is a classic Italian ingredient for baking and pasta. Semolina juts gives the bread a rustic texture and flavour, making it taste proper Italian. We didn't do this in the video, but often we also coat our Ciabatta in semolina before baking and it gives the bread an even more rustic flavour and texture.
The combination of olives and pine nuts works so well in bread, and many other foods! In Liguria so many dishes are made with pine nuts and olives, which are two main crops of the region. And this version of Ciabatta really reminds us of our holidays on the Ligurian coast. Also, using good quality extra virgin olive oil adds to that Ligurian feel and again just makes such a difference flavour-wise.
The bread itself is very simple to make, it's an almost no-knead, no-shape bread, it requires very little work especially if you're using a food mixer. If you're kneading by hand we suggest you use a fork for the initial mixing, and then a spatula to fold the dough as shown in the video. And use lots of oil, that makes it less sticky!
And do try this bread as suggested in the video, by rubbing a clove of garlic on the bread and eating it with a selection of nice cheeses and Italian antipasti. Simply delicious! And it's such a good example of how bread can be the main star of a meal. Obviously other savoury foods such a prosciutto, salamis and even patés and terrines are great with this bread. If you're having an Italian dinner party this bread is a must for a starter, but it's also great for those midweek meals when you don't want to cook much but simply eat some bread and something nice on the side. That's what we like :)
