Native of England learns to `translate' American recipes.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

There's always a lot of adjusting to do when you move from one place to another, but for Katy Brundan, who moved to Eugene from England about seven years ago, one of the biggest changes came in the kitchen.

For the most part, British recipes follow the metric system, so they call for many ingredients in grams - with a few "ounces" thrown in for good measure - so Brundan had to begin by "translating" her favorite recipes into the cups, tablespoons and teaspoons that everyone here takes for granted.

But beyond that, some well-loved foods weren't available here at all, at least not in familiar form.

"I found there were so many things that I simply couldn't buy here - Christmas puddings, hot-cross buns, clotted cream, scones made the way I was used to," she says. "I really had to start making these things for myself."

Her newfound interest in cooking intensified a couple of years later after the birth of her son, Joey, now 5, and daughter, Aisha, who just turned 2.

"When you have children, you have to become so much more aware of what you cook," Brundan says.

She's vegetarian, a philosophy she adopted during her college years at Cambridge, where she met her husband, Jon Brundan, who now teaches mathematics at the University of Oregon.

But she does eat fish and occasionally cooks chicken for the children. Besides cooking and caring for Joey and Aisha, Brundan's finishing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the UO.

Specialty: Desserts and cakes - "I do like to have my desserts," Brundan says - but she also enjoys preparing curry dishes "and beany things" for her family, probably reflecting the popularity of Indian cooking in her native England.

She makes bread-and-butter pudding as a winter treat and serves a fruit-filled summer "pudding" when berries begin ripening in June.

Cooking experience: She didn't do all that much cooking during her growing-up years in Surrey, south of London. Once she became vegetarian during college, cooking for herself became a must.

Not necessarily exciting cookery, though, she now admits.

"I made a lot of pasta and vegetables. It was the same meal every night - so boring," Brundan says.

Her culinary techniques likewise have matured through the years.

"Before I came here, I always cooked in very substandard conditions - for years, I used a wine bottle to roll pastry," she says. "After I came here, I got a real rolling pin and started collecting other kitchen gadgets that I'd never had."

Her most recent acquisition is a bread machine.

"I find some of the breads in this country too sweet," she says. "With the bread machine, I make almost all of my own bread. It's fantastic."

Biggest cooking success: Probably the Triple Dinosaur Cake she made for Joey's third birthday.

"He was so interested in dinosaurs then, and he knew everything about them," Brundan recalls. "His favorite was Tyrannosaurus Rex, but I couldn't do a large one and make it stand up, so I did three smaller ones - the T-Rex, a stegosaurus and a triceratops. They had marzipan heads; I was very proud of that cake."

Biggest cooking failure: Her attempts to make Pavlova Meringue - a 3-inch-high, melt-in-the-mouth confection of baked meringue heaped with fresh fruit, so-named because it was the favorite dessert of the famed Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova.

"I've made a lot of 'Pavlova pancakes,' ' Brundan says wryly.

If the eggs aren't just the right temperature, or the beaters and bowl completely free of fats or oils, "you don't get meringue, you get pancake."

Favorite cookbooks: Brundan relies most heavily on the British edition of "Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook," "which has anything English that you want, all the traditional recipes," she says.

She also likes a French language cookbook, "Tante Marie" - in English, "Aunt Mary" - that she picked up while living in Lyon in southeastern France for three months.

"I like the fact that it's so vague," she says. "One recipe says to 'make bechamel sauce,' but it doesn't tell you how. But I'm quite vague when I cook - I often don't do what the recipe says."

Another favorite, "Bistro Cooking," looks like it may have participated in a kitchen disaster. It's red-and-white soft cover has a big charred hole in the middle.

"I probably put it accidentally on a hotplate," Brundan says.

Why these recipes: Some remind her of growing up in England, others of her enjoyable sojourn in France.

Some, like the strawberry jam recipe, simply taste delicious, she says.

Spinach Tart

1 cup unbleached white flour

1/4 cup olive oil 

1/4 cup water

1 pound spinach or swiss chard (roughly two bunches of spinach or one of chard)

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

3 eggs

1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Make the pastry by putting the flour in a mixing bowl and adding the oil and water, mixing with a spoon until thoroughly blended.

Knead the dough briefly; it will be moist, like cookie dough.

Using your fingers, press the dough into the bottom of an 8-inch pie plate and a little way up the sides.

Wash and chop the spinach. If using chard, cut off the stalks and chop of the leaves. Wilt the spinach or chard by placing it in a pan over medium heat until most of the water has evaporated. Pour off any excess water and add the freshly ground pepper. Set aside.

Combine the eggs and cheese in a bowl; mix until thoroughly blended.

Once the spinach has cooled a little, add it to the cheese mixture and stir well. Pour the vegetable-cheese mixture into the pastry shell.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until the crust is golden and the spinach mixture firm.

Remove from oven and let sit 5 minutes. Cut into wedges.

Serves 6.

Source: Adapted from "Bistro Cooking" by Patricia Wells (Workman, 1989).

Sunshine Strawberry Jam

4 cups strawberries (or substitute blackberries, raspberries, quartered apricots or sliced peaches)

3 cups granulated white sugar

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Wash and hull strawberries or prepare other fruit.

Combine the fruit with the sugar and lemon in a large saucepan. Stir gently to mix. Cover and let stand at room temperature for 1 hour.

Over medium heat, bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly.

Turn heat to high and boil vigorously, uncovered, for 4 minutes without stirring. Let cool, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

Pour mixture into shallow glass, metal or foil baking pans. The syrup around the fruit should be between 1/3 -inch to 3/4 -inch deep. Cover with clear plastic lids or plastic wrap, leaving a 1-inch-wide opening along one side.

Place the pan in direct sunlight. Gently stir the mixture and turn the fruit pieces every hour.

Remove the jam from the sun when the fruit is plump and the syrup has thickened to the consistency of corn syrup, usually about 8 hours, but varying with the heat of the sun.

If not completed in one day, bring the jam in overnight and put it out again the next day.

Put the finished jam into clean containers and freeze it until needed.

Source: Sunset Magazine.

Apple Galette 

Pastry:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup cold water

Put flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Using a knife, cut the butter into very thin slices or slivers, and add to flour.

Mix the butter and flour very lightly with your fingers for a couple of minutes, rubbing the butter in gently. The butter should still be visible as lumps.

Do not over mix or rub the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs. When the dough is done, lumps of butter should still be visible in it.

Add the cold water and mix the dough with your hands.

Roll the dough out to about 16-inches-by-14-inches and 1/8 -inch thick, and place on a greased cookie sheet.

Topping:

5 medium apples

2 to 3 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons apricot jam

1 tablespoon cognac

Peel the apples and cut them in half. Core them, then cut the halves into 1/4 -inch slices. Chop the end pieces coarsely and sprinkle the chopped-up apple bits onto the dough.

Arrange the apple slices in one layer on the dough, in patterns such as circles, leaving a margin of about 1 1/2 inches on the edges.

Sprinkle with sugar and butter, and fold the dough at the edges inward over the fruit to make a border.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the pastry is well-browned and crusty.

Meanwhile, dilute the jam with a little water, and the cognac, if desired, by warming it in a pan on the stove.

After baking, brush this mixture over the hot apples as a glaze.

Source: Adapted from www .jacquespepin.net/members/ recipes/applegalette.html.

Traditional English Scones

1 2/3 cup unbleached white flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

3 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Put flour and baking powder in a bowl. Rub butter and flour between your fingers until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in enough milk to make a fairly soft, light dough.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to 3/4 -inch thick and cut out round scones with a 2 1/2 -inch cookie or biscuit cutter.

Place on a greased baking sheet and brush the tops of the scones with milk. Bake for about 10 minutes until golden and well-risen. Serve split with jam and butter or cream.

Source: Adapted from "Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook" (Ebury, 1993).

To nominate a cook for this feature, send a letter to Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; fax [phone]; contact Randi Bjornstad at 338-2321 or [phone], Ext. 2321; or send e-mail to rbjornstad @guardnet.com. Include the nominee's name and phone number, your name and phone number and what makes your choice an interesting cook.