lydia saucepan

marmelade

2009-03-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've been making marmelade! I can't work out yet how (if possible) I can just copy a post at my new blog over here, so I'll just post the link to there for now - http://startfromwhereyouare.blogspot.com/2009/03/7-making-marmelade.html

Hiatus

2009-02-10T01:34:00.001-08:00

So, I stopped blogging here a while back, as I suddenly realised I could let myself just let it go. For pretty much the whole past year I kept hoping I would suddenly hit my stride and get as good and consistent as I hoped to be. But it turned out to be more like this: I'd plan posts then make made-up dishes that didn't quite work and then feel disappointed, I'd keep writing lists of what I wanted to make and blog and never quite find the time to do it. I'd take a load of pictures in a restaurant when I wanted to just be eating and then never get round to writing about it. I constantly felt like I should be better at this and doing more...

I don't have that much access to the internet and I don't have that much time to cook at the moment. I also realised I feel more pleased if I can just make some kind of dinner every night and it is enjoyable and uses up what needs to be used up, rather than attempting experimental or ambitious things that require one-off purchases and too much washing up...

So, at some point, I thought: I don't have to keep holding this over me like something I have to do - I can take a break.

Which is what I'm doing.

UPDATE 16th March - The blogging urge is too strong! I have started up a new blog on a bit of a tangent. There'll still be some food involved, but also some craftiness and a little about trying to live less wastefully and more resourcefully. When I do food-related posts I will cross post here so LS will keep going albeit slowly! Please do come over and see me in my new home!

And thank you, as always, for reading x

You're a star, eurostar

2008-11-18T08:55:00.001-08:00

Not a lot of cooking going down recently (or succesful cooking anyway), so I thought I'd share some high-speed cross-channel catering knowledge instead. I took this photo ages ago, on my first fancy class trip over to Brussels. I was so excited. I am normally excited where free champagne is involved (not technically 'free' I guess, but free enough). But the food was pretty cool too, so I took a picture to document it. After the very decent smoked salmon and bread roll, I got a tasty risotto for the vegetarian option, followed by not only that yummy shiny chocolate thing up there, but also the cheese with its cute little cube of manchego, and-and-and... coffee and a crunchy little biscuit thing. So I arrived at Brussels sated and happy and slightly light-headed...

Pintxo, pintxo!

2008-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

(pron. 'pincho, pincho!')

So, Papa Saucepan was planning a gathering in the garden. There was a significant number hovering in the air, and it seemed some kind of celebratory shindig was due. We - the younger saucepan and I - proffered our catering services of course, were duly taken up on the offer and it went to work on a Spanish kind of theme. I forget what it was now, but there was something to eat up - chorizo, olives, or somesuch Iberian delicacy. And besides, PS had a string of Spanish flags, proclaiming 'Wines of Spain', which we could use to deck the trees (this is the kind of aesthetic the Saucepan household tends to go for). No idea where that came from - did PS sneakily remove it at a wine trade fair? Was he offered it as a prize? Or was it left over from working in the wine shop, 20-odd years ago? I never found out...

Anyhow, somehow I got onto pintxos. I think I had been searching tapas, and pintxos popped up, and as soon as I discovered that they are pronounced 'pinch-ose' I set my heart upon them. I honestly can't think of a more euphoniously named food right at this moment.

Using the marvellous food blog search I sourced inspiration; largely from the dough ball, who had done a magnificent job documenting her pintxo and non-pintxo culinary adventures in San Sebastian (a place very high up on my must-visit list). Essentially these are just little open sandwiches, and you can let your imagination run riot with what to place on top.

Incredibly enough, I was organised enough to do not one but two test runs for my pintxo performance. The first was fun but kind of unimpressive. By the second however, my ideas were sleeker and bolder and more refined, and if I say so myself, pretty damn good.

I did happen to be in Madrid the next weekend after and ended up in a bar where there were some pintxo-style things sitting in front of us on the bar as we supped coffee waiting for lunch to start being served. And it dawned on me that the whole idea of these little Spanish canapes was advance preparation, easy serving. We, however, had fun rushing in and out of the kitchen every half hour to freshly prepare another batch. Now I think about it, most could be served cold, so all that running around is not really necessary.

Anyway, enough babbling, let me introduce you to each little specimen. In a slightly off-on-a-tangent twist, I decided to pair them with shoes, like we're on a little fashion catwalk. There's something about them all being so pretty and different lined up together that reminded me of a shoe shop, and with exams coming up soon and how I promised myself if I passed my ACA I would be allowed an extravagantly pretty pair of shoes, somehow the two ideas got all mixed up in my mind...

So, number 1, the courgette and grape combo.

Accompanied by some equally light, playful and refreshing Chie Mihara flats, this one is made of ribbons of courgette, lightly sauteed in olive oil with a heap of lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon juice, and topped with toasted pine nuts and grapes roasted in pomegranate molasses (about 40 mins in a medium hot oven). Yay, I finally got to try roasted grapes after being intrigued about them ever since Claudia cook-eat-fret posted about this peculiar idea. They're delicious. And an excellently sweet and rich match for the light and lemony courgette.

Onto number 2, the beef and mushroom

A more classic combo, this is just thin slices of medium-rare beef steak, tossed with fried wild mushrooms, which have had a glug of red wine or sherry reduced in them. We topped it off second time round with some chopped flat leaf parsley which really added something. The shoe is likewise both classic and sexy, (albeit a little more technically proficient than my basically-an-open-steak-sandwich!) - a beautifully sculptural Nicholas Kirkwood.

Number 3, tuna and red onions
Seared tuna steak slice atop caramelised red onion (1 red onion fried off til soft in olive oil, 1tsp muscovado sugar and 1tsp balsamic vinegar added, and cooked down til dark and rich) and lovely piquant little capers. Equally elegant, smooth but spiky is this lovely Reiss patent indigo number

and, numero quatro... bold, possibly a teensy bit ugly, but bright and bam! full of flavour.

That's homemade tapenade (just a load of Crespo's dried black pitted olives whizzed up with a food processor), topped with slow roasted cherry tomatoes (an hour in a low-medium oven with just olive oil, salt and pepper), and lightly steamed green beans. It is not quite so pretty, a little messy and ott looking you might even say, but velvety deep in the roasted toms, spiky with saltiness, and very tasty. And another Chie Mihara to match...

So, introducing the Morcilla pintxo...

A lovely rich slice of roasted piquillo pepper - char it under a grill or on a hob flame until blistered, cover in cling film til cool, and peel off all that pesky burnt skin - topped with a delicious soft and smooth butterbean salad (butterbeans, olive oil, garlic, parsley, salt, pepper, paprika), and a couple of slices of fried black pudding (which I'm calling morcilla, as 'black pudding' doesn't have quite the same Iberican ring to it). Scrumptious. And that, is a wedge heel from The Jacksons of Notting Hill - velvety and smooth with lots of contrast and rich colours too.

And... last, but certainly not least:
A slice of ripe beef or plum tomato. A couple of sprigs of rocket. A slice of juicy, fragrant mango. Three quickly fried fat chilli and lime marinaded prawns. A sprinkling of pepper. Vibrant and exotic and just lovely. Nicholas Kirkwood again on the right. That's not a shoe; that's a work of art.

Ok, I've spent far too long writing this post, and I am feeling like some kind of bizarre sommelier from some peculiar world where instead of suggesting a pleasant Riesling or fruity Burgundy to accompany Madam's excellent choice, I proffer instead various items of accompanying footwear...

I should get back to work.

I'm still here!

2008-10-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Another post-free month has sailed past and I'm hanging my head in bloggerly shame. I do have a few little things lined up to post when I get the time (exams are looming once again!) but mostly have just been eating ready-made soup and lots of Spanish ham.

Anyway, divert yourselves for now with this gem of a blog http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/ devoted entirely to cakes gone wrong. Awesome.

And I will be back soon - I promise...

Holiday breakfast

2008-08-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

Pancakes are one of those things that if I thought about for a minute I would probably consider a peculiar weakness - just a load of flour eggs and milk, hardly very gastronomically exciting; and all that time standing in front of the stove, waiting for each to firm up and brown, before the next one can have its time in the pan, and then finally getting to eat them half an hour later, their meek flavours are drowned out in sharp lemon juice and liberal snow showers of sugar and a couple of seconds later they sit stodgily in the belly...

But their time-consuming nature contributes to their appeal. Because when else do you have the time to mix up batter and stand there idly daydreaming and singing along to Broken Social Scene as you fry each little flat and floury fellow and pop him in the oven to keep warm for later? On holidays, on weekends, on those glorious days of No Work and Nothing More Important To Do Than Breakfast for HOURS!

I'm off work this week. Holidaying in the lovely north London environs which I live in. I've been perusing books in the library, crocheting on the hill, watching Scrubs and making oatmeal pancakes. Apart from the distinct lack of any weather that could remotely call itself summery, it's been lovely.

I chose these oatmeal pancakes, rather than my usual 'recipe' (eye-estimated amounts of plain flour, milk and 1 egg) because they struck me as a little more meaty and substantial, more worthy somehow. And there is somehow something about that name 'Oatmeal Pancakes' which transmits ideas of homeliness, of rusticity, of heartiness and fun to me.

The recipe is adapted from a much-loved copy of 'Recipes for a Small Planet' that I picked up in a second hand book shop a while back. It follows Frances Moore Lappe's 'Diet for a Small Planet', which espouses a non-meat but protein rich diet in response to global famine and the wasteful practice of fattening up animals before ourselves (see http://www.smallplanet.org/ for a much better explanation that this and more current writings from Lappe and Lappe junior). I don't use the book much - rather I like to delight in its enthusiasm and lovely old-school line drawings, and to marvel at the amount of milk, cheese and eggs which can be edged into pretty much any meal you care to think of.

The pancakes worked well. They're thick but not stodgy and the oats give you something to chew on. I covered them in combinations of honey, yoghurt, banana, lemon juice, sugar and jam. Messy and delicious.

Oatmeal Pancakes (adapted from Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet)
(makes enough for 3-4 people)

1 cup wholewheat flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 tbsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 egg
1 tsp oil
1 tsp honey
1 1/2 cups milk

1. Mix dry ingredients well

2. Stir in wet ingredients until all well combined

3. Fry on a hot pan (I used a little butter and/or oil to do mine) until brown on both sides.

beautiful on the inside

2008-07-21T06:28:00.000-07:00

Mmmmm mmmmm - open wide for a mouthful of mud and snow covered in little white worms! Or at least, that is what my lovely pie has ended up looking like in this picture. It's not the most glamourous of gastronomical spoonfuls, in any sense.

But to hell with glamour. As the newscasters shower us with ever more scary statistics and shadowy harbingers of impending economic doom, and the frequency with which we converse about energy bills and the price of a loaf of bread multiplies exponentially, there is a place for a little humble pie. Simple - yes, ugly - maybe so. But tasty, comforting, cheap and easy too...

I've told you before of my love for lentils, I'm sure. And may have even mentioned how smitten I am with sweet spring cabbage... So, whilst for most people the idea of the two together may engender merely mild disgust, or even sniggers at the supposed flatulent effects of these two fibrous heavyweights, I am licking my lips with glee.

This is then, a fairly basic little recipe. It's nothing particularly new or clever, but with a little seasoning trickery and some rich luxurious dairy products sneaked in, it's really much more delicious and satisfying than you might imagine of a lentil and cabbage pie...

Saucepan-Style Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie

(Serves about 4)

* Chop an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and a carrot in to small dice

* In a heavy over-proof cocotte (if you have one - otherwise use a normal saucepan and transfer to oven dish later) heat a little olive oil over a low flame, and cook the diced veg, stirring frequently until softened

* Add in half a cup of lentilles vertes, a couple of bay leafs, a finely chopped clove (or two) of garlic, and stir until the lentils are coated in oil.

* Add a good squirt of tomato puree and mix in

* Top up with a couple of cups of stock, bring to the boil and lower to a simmer (stir every couple of minutes and top up with water/stock if it looks like getting dry)

* Meanwhile, cube about 6-8 small potatoes (3-4 larger ones), peeled if you like (though I rarely bother) and cook in salted boiling water.

* After about 15-20 minutes, your potatoes should be done, and your lentils will just want another 10 minutes or so. At this point, drain the potatoes and add half a pointed (spring) cabbage, finely shredded, to the vegetable pot. Add also a can of chopped tomatoes.

* Mash potatoes with a generous knob of butter and a splash of cream (or milk if you don't have cream) and maybe a little parmesan, or any other hard cheese of your choosing.

* Once the lentils are almost cooked, and the cabbage wilted down, mix around, adjust seasoning for taste, and then top with the mashed potato (transfer first to an overproof dish if your saucepan isn't ovenproof)

* Pop in an oven preheated to 200C and cook for 20-30 minutes until browned on top.

* Serve.

oh for some breeze and a biscotto!

2008-07-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

I don't know if you've read that book by Joshua Ferris - half my fellow tube-travellers seem to have their noses buried in it so maybe you have. 'And Then We Came To The End', it's called, and it's set in a modern-day workplace. The workers are 'creative types', as opposed to the accounting types that surround me here, but there were some gems of workplace observations that I think will wring a wry smile of identification from most any of us who spend our days under humming fluorescent lights, wrestling with supposedly ergonomic chairs, staring into the glare of our screens. One phenomenon well known to anyone of the office-worker clan is those fluctuations in the passage of time. How the morning, punctuated by coffee breaks and cemented together with email updating can fly by, but then the afternoon can leave you dazed, beleaguered, emerging into the outside world, feeling a time-space continuum must have been breached and surely a decade has passed by...

Oh, sometimes - like now - time drags. And eyelids droop and minds melt, and thoughts turn to the joy of being free...

Like last bank holiday - (praise be for the 3-day weekend!) - when I walked up to Hampstead Heath, and I could curl up in the grass, and feel the wind playfully muss up my hair as I lost myself in a book and watched the city from through the grass.

And then I went home and made biscotti. And they were so incredibly easy. I love things that turn out good but take so little effort. Perfect! I thought, for impressing people who come round for dinner. For a simple dessert - a little vin santo dribbled over some good vanilla ice cream, biscotti on the side. Or just a good little nibble to go with the coffee.

Or, you know, they can always just sit there in a tupperware box on the counter, and I'll eat one when I get home from work, or as a little 'breakfast dessert' after my toast and cereal, or take them to work for my morning tea break etc. etc.

I just finished the last one, 5 weeks later, so that's what I'm thinking of now, lying in the grass on the heath, or having a slow cup of milky coffee in the sun, a zesty, nutty little biscotti for dunking and crunching alongside

Unfortunately, I don't have the recipe I used right here... but hold on and I'll post it as soon as possible, so watch this space.

And now, there are 38 minutes til hometime. I've expertly wasted a good chunk of afternoon work time so I had better do something before I escape into the lovely warm summer's evening...

Update - I've finally got internet access and the recipe together at the same time!

Biscotti (adapted from Leith's cookery bible)

Mix in a bowl: 200g plain flour; a pinch of salt; 1/2 tsp of baking powder; 40g ground almonds; 75 g sugar; 75g chopped or flaked almonds.

Make a well in the centre and add two lightly beaten eggs. Gradually incorporate dry ingredients to make a firm dough.

Roll the dough into a long sausage shape about 2 cm in diameter. Slice into two or three sausages so that they fit on a baking tray.

Place the rolls at least 5 cm apart on the baking sheet and bake in a preheated oven (190C/350F/gas 5) for 20 minutes.

Remove the rolls from the oven nd turn the temperature down to 80C/175F/gas 1/4

Cut the rolls at a 45-degree angle into 1cm slices and place on the baking sheet. Bake for a further hour, turning the biscuits over after 30 minutes. Leave on a wire rack to cool completely.

Squash and walnut risotto

2008-06-07T07:08:00.001-07:00

Just a note on a new favourite risotto combination:

Sweetly squashy sweet squash
Tart chewy sundried tomatoes, wrinkled lipstick red
Crunchy little brain-like walnuts
Thyme, just a few leaves like light snow in spring
And parmesan, of course, dear parmesan.

Mmmmmmmmm mmmmmm

(ps - for risotto instructions and quantities see this post - cut out the lemon and fennel, and add the tomatoes near the start of cooking, the squash and walnuts right at the end. Squash should have been roasted in a medium-hot oven in olive oil for about 30-40 mins until soft and brown-edged. Walnuts - just break them up a little and chuck them in. )

Update - In response to a request I am amending my lazy ways, and putting a whole recipe here!

Skin a butternut squash and cut into chunky dice (about 1" across). Coat in oil and roast in a preheated medium-hot oven until soft (about 30-40 mins)
Meanwhile, fry off a finely diced onion in a generous slug of olive oil over a low heat.
Once soft, add a handful of chopped sundried tomatoes and about 400g/14oz arborio rice, and stir until all the rice is coated with oil.
Tip in a small glass of white wine and stir in.
Cover with a generous amount of vegetable stock, bring to a simmer and put the lid on. Stir every 5 minutes or so for the next 30-40 minutes, making sure the rice doesn't stick to the bottom, and adding more stock or hot water as required by the rice (I never bother with the one spoon at a time method - it's ever so time-consuming and I'm not sure it makes that much difference - do try not to forget your risotto tho - it will burn!)
When the rice is cooked to your taste, stir in a little butter and parmesan for extra creaminess (optional), then add the squash and a couple of handfuls of chopped walnuts, stir lightly to mix through
Serve scattered with chopped thyme and parmesan shavings

Simple things

2008-05-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

My mother told us once how one of the most memorable meals she had consisted of a boiled potato, a boiled carrot and a boiled onion. There was possibly another vegetable, maybe even some white sauce, but that was the gist of it. Each thing just tasted of itself and that was perfect and exciting just how it was.

Of course, we mocked. A boiled onion! A boiled potato! But, oh, how I know now - sometimes a simple boiled potato - smooth, fresh, nutty - can be truly a thing of beauty.

Recently this is the kind of thing I've been hankering for in the evenings. No complicated melange of unusual items and techniques and flavourings, just a few unadulterated lovely ingredients.

How can you go wrong with some good parma ham and a plate of ripe melon?

And the other day I delighted myself by using the leaves off the beetroots that would often I suppose get thrown away. Certainly I've never cooked with them before. Wilted quickly in a little butter and served on toasted home made bread with a squeeze of lemon juice and a poached egg, they made a really enjoyable supper. It's so much more satisfying to make something easy and pleasing out of some odds and ends hanging around than to spend too much time and money to churn out something slightly disappointing.

And then, we had the meal at the top of this post recently, which finally gives me some kind of recipe to post. With asparagus starting to appear all over the place my mind drifted to homemade mayonnaise. I'd made it once before in an electric food mixer, and really wasn't that impressed, but I had a little time to kill and thought I'd give it another go.

So, I'd like to report that if, like me, you thought you needed a mixer to make mayonnaise, you can consider yourself corrected - a wooden spoon and plenty of elbow grease is all it takes.

And it's good. Very very rich, but a plate of fresh olive oil and lemon juice dressed asparagus, those lovely boiled potatoes and a dollop of silky, sharp mayonnaise is really quite, simply, superb.

Homemade mayonnaise

Beat one egg yolk and a pinch of salt in a bowl with a wooden spoon
Add 75ml oil (olive or half olive and sunflower as I used to make it less strong flavoured) DROP by DROP, beating all the time. The mixture will get very thick.
Beat in a squeeze of lemon juice
Add another 75ml oil - this time you don't need to be quite as careful but still pour in little bits. Alternate the oil with small quantities of white wine vinegar (about a dessertspoon in total).
Season to taste with salt and pepper.

new look...

2008-03-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

as you can see, I've finally upgraded my template and a little bit of decorating has been going on here. I was going to wait until I'd tweaked the new logo a little more, but I'm SO bored at work that I thought at least this would be a productive way to spend the afternoon (as opposed to staring at spreadsheets I don't understand)...

Main advantages of the upgrade are the hierarchical archive which will make it easier to find old posts, and the labels, so you can search by label. I haven't worked out yet how to make my links open in new windows, so you'll just have to right-click and open in new window for the time being, if like me, you prefer that way of doing things.

On the cooking front, things have been... um... experimental. I had spent some time between spreadsheets thinking up spring recipes. One of which was a beetroot and orange soup, served with toasted fresh herb bread and a poached egg. I thought the colours and flavours would be glorious. I invented some crazy prolonged method of making this soup. I decided - I don't really know why - to add a little cumin, coriander and nigella, to spice it up, and lemon to make the orange flavour more bitter. Result - it tastes like curried pickled beetroot and looks like purple sludge. I then decided to strain it, hoping it was just the baby food texture my palate was rejecting, but alas no, the purple juice that resulted tasted the same...

At least the herb bread was a semi-success. I will post about this some time when I've made it again in a less fally-aparty fashion...

I also experimented with a polenta cake, but realised too late I had too little ground almonds. Never mind, I thought, I'll just reduce the amount of almonds, and up the polenta. Result - a curiously crunchy cake. Not unpleasant but not really to be recommended...

And I've been working on a cheesecake. The first one was magnificent looking but so rich every time I ate it I got groaning stomach ache. The second, lighter but less attractive. Hopefully it'll be third time lucky then I can post that too...

Anyway, hope you are having more success in the kitchen than I, and hope you like the new look site...

Lentils. Fish. Salsa

2008-03-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

That's right, today I am extolling the virtues of 1. eschewing carbs in favour of pulses 2. matching paw paw with fish. Excellente.

So, first, lentils - my humble little friends. This dish features probably my favourite lentil - the lentille verte. Like puy, but cheaper (I know this might be considered philistine in some circles but I'm not really sure I get the point of puy lentils. They just taste the same as lentilles vertes to me, for twice the price, but there we go). I don't see how you could fail to be charmed by these mini green pebbles of goodness. They are full of an earthy, satisfying flavour. And easy to cook to boot.

Now, let's introduce our fish of the day. Chosen mainly because for value for money reasons, he's the exotically named tilapia. A good choice it turned out - sweet white flesh, nice and firm.

And finally, salsa! I love the sweetness of pawpaw and the zing of lime - fresh and sweet and spicy and how nice to have all that colour on the plate - orange and red and purple and green....

Put it all together and you have a really good light dinner dish. I really think with lentils and fish you don't need any extra rice or potato or bread or whatever - this was plenty for us.

Tilapia Fillets with Pawpaw Salsa and Lentille Vertes
(serves 2)

Put 1/2 cup of lentilles vertes in a pan with a cup of water. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for about 20-30 minutes until soft but still with a touch of bite. Season with salt and pepper to taste (add a bayleaf too if you have one). Top up with water as needed, and give an occasional stir to stop any sticking to the pan.
Meanwhile, make your salsa. Seed and dice one pawpaw and about 6 ripe cherry tomatoes. Finely slice 1/4 red onion, and some fennel stalks, if you happen to have a fennel lying around (nice but non-essential).

Put these all in a bowl together, and add a handful of chopped coriander (cilantro), a finely chopped fresh red chilli, the juice of two limes, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Stir to mix.

When your lentils are just about ready dust a plate with some flour, salt and pepper, and coat two Tilapia filets on both sides. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan until hot to hold your hand over it.

Cook the fish on both sides for a few minutes until nicely golden brown, firm to the touch, and flaking cleanly when inserted with a fork.

Serve with extra lime

Pink Scallops

2008-03-03T01:45:00.000-08:00

You know when you really love something and you can't help but share your enthusiasm and you recommend it to all your friends and acquaintances, but then it turns out all wrong, and you sit there feeling slightly cheated, protesting, "but it wasn't like this before"? A good restaurant, a cool bar, a show, a dish...

Well, happily that didn't happen when I sung the praises of scallops to a visiting friend. She had only tried them once before - barbecued - and found them unremarkable.

And they can be unremarkable, but they can also be sublime. These were big fat specimens. We cooked them in a hot pan, dusted on both sides with a little sugar, salt and pepper til they were brown on the edges, then perched them atop a simple combination of finely sliced fennel, segments of pink grapefruit and diced avocado.

They were sweet and soft and perfect with the tang of the grapefruit. In fact, I would happily have pared it down further and just had a plate of slightly caramelised scallops on pink grapefruit segments, but Shelley thought the crunch of the fennel was a worthwhile addition.

Either way, a good dish and supremely satisfying to be able to share the true beauty of these seafood pearls and convert someone to the love of scallops! Once again, I feel slightly inadequate for giving you a combination rather than a real recipe - but well, it's a good combination, and you know I'm all about the easy stuff.

Caramelised Scallops with Pink Grapefruit Salad.
(serves 2)

Thinly slice half a bulb of fennel and dice a ripe avocado.
Place in a bowl over which you will segment one pink grapefruit, letting the juice drip in to the bowl.
Dust 4 fat or 6 smaller scallops with sugar, salt and pepper and heat a dry pan until pretty hot.
Cook for a couple of minutes on each side until the flesh has turned opaque and the surfaces caramel brown.
Place scallops on salad. Et voila.

PS - I don't know what is going on with all the links falling to the bottom of the page! I will try and look into that.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

2008-02-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

I've been watching Masterchef recently. Apart from being great 'roll your eyes at the telly TV' (for the ludicrous amateur dramatics of judges John Torode and Greg Wallace as they make 'tough' decisions, cast their judgmental eyes over the contestants' work and raise eyebrows in a serious manner) there's also been some pretty good cooking. One of the contestants in particular - Emily - made some dishes that were genuinely surprising and really exciting.

Which has been making me and my meals feel disappointingly pedestrian. 'Why can't I think up crazy rabbit, langoustine and pear dishes, or work out how to make beetroot into tagliatelle?!', I fret. When I am planning dinner in my head, it's different variations on old combinations that I work with, bits of this, bits of that. Like a comfortable old wardrobe where everything matches. A bit like my wardrobe, come to think of it. My 'innovative' combinations, both sartorial and culinary, are rarely successes...

Still, we can not all creative culinary geniuses be, and sometimes it's better to stick with the pieces you know...

Which is bringing me around to this dish above. The bulghur wheat from my Fabulous Crunchy Salad is making a come back; roasted aubergines and crispy onions I loved recently in a dahl recipe from the Hungry Tiger; the pinenuts and sultanas something I've come across in the Moro books I've been flicking through recently.

It's good - a kind of rich, fruity and yet wholesome-tasting comfort dish.

I served it with a yoghurt slaw - finely shredded green veg (white cabbage, cucumber, green pepper and green chillies) with lemon juice, salt, pepper and natural yogurt.

Jewelled Bulghur Wheat
(serves 2)

Chop half an aubergine, half a courgette and half a red pepper into about 1 cm square dice, and toss in a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Spread out on a baking tray and bake in a hot oven for about 30 minutes until crispy and soft in the middle.

Meanwhile, bring to the boil and simmer 1/2 cup bulghur wheat (the coarse type) in 1 cup of water for about 15 minutes until soft and fluffy (or follow instructions on the packet) and set aside to cool.

Mix a handful of golden sultanas in whilst cooking so they can plump up nicely.

Toast a handful of pinenuts in a dry pan over a medium heat, shaking the pan regularly until they are just browned. Set aside

Chop a small bunch of fresh mint.

Finally, fry some very thinly sliced onion in hot oil, moving continuously until crispy and brown. Put on a piece of kitchen towel to drain off some of the oil.

Mix the roasted veg and mint through the wheat, serve in bowls or plates, and top with pine nuts and crispy onions

Steak for vegetarians

2008-01-24T15:02:00.000-08:00

The photo yet again doesn't do this dish justice, so ignore that slightly messy looking plateful for a minute and just let me tell you about it.

There's three components - a cauliflower 'steak' - browned outside and soft inside; a strangly almondy cauliflower puree; and a rich tomato and caper sauce. The steak and puree bit I borrowed from Bon Appetit magazine, slightly adapted, and the sauce and pine nuts I added.

The other day I tried a recipe for a chickpea and celeriac salad I had had bookmarked in Australian Gourmet for ages. It involved a lot of different ingredients, making your own houmous, and roasting celeriac in about an inch of liquid that needed to be sporadically topped up. Complicated stuff, but I thought it would be worth the effort because it looked like a beautiful dish that would be bursting with flavour and something very special from two humble main ingredients.

I learnt a valuable lesson trying this out. Namely, that complicated recipes are just not my thing. I cut corners and I substitute ingredients, and I expect too much from something which takes all of my evening to prepare. It was a bit of a mess, and the kitchen was so messy by the time I had finished, and I so tired, that I barely noticed eating it in between all the prep and the tidy up.

Hang all that. I am much happier with recipes with a little give and take. That concentrate on one or two ingredients, that don't require the finely tuned balance of 17 different spices, that can be thrown together in an hour and then enjoyed at leisure.

I saw this cauli recipe and it seemed much more the kind of thing. I thought there was something very dignified and beautiful about presenting this vegetable in both a luxurious processed form and in a proud, unadulterated chunk. It required few ingredients and only three pans. It looked promising.

And it delivered. The 'steak' is good and caramelised and tasty. The puree is light and slightly sweet and rich. The sauce is rich and sharp and a good complement to both. It's a good dinner dish. Something a bit different and fully satisfying. And not too complicated!

Cauliflower steak with cauliflower puree and tomato sauce
(Serves 2)

First, chop half an onion, a clove of garlic and several handfuls of cherry tomatoes (sorry - I forgot to weigh them so no more accurate weight, but you can work out how many you need I'm sure!) or just use a tin or two of tinned tomatoes.
Heat some olive oil gently, add the onion, garlic and tomatoes, a good slug of red wine, salt and pepper and a few branches of rosemary. Let simmer for an hour or so, stirring occasionally, until rich and thick.
Near the end, add a handful of capers and pick out the sticky bits of rosemary.
Meanwhile, cut two 1 inch slices from the middle of a medium-sized cauliflower and break the rest into florets.
Heat some olice oil in a frying pan, and cook the 'steaks' on both sides for about 5-10 minutes until browned, at which point transfer to an oven tray and bake at about 180C for another 20 minutes to soften the inside
While the steaks are cooking, put the florets in a saucepan with a cup of milk, a cup of water and a couple of pieces of cinnamon bark. When soft (about 10 minutes), drain, reserving the liquid, spread out on an oven tray and put in the oven until they've crisped up a little (5-10 minutes)
Process the florets with a cup of the reserved liquid and a little grated parmesan, until nice and smooth.
Toast some pinenuts in a frying pan until lightly browned.
Put a blob of puree on each plate, top with a steak, and scatter with pinenuts. Sauce on the side.

The Fabulous Crunchy Salad

2008-01-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

I made the fabulous crunchy salad on a Thursday night. Its composition had been settling in my thoughts for a few days and I finally had some time to boil bulghur and to pull apart a pomegranate and bring my ideas into reality.

And boy was I glad that I did. I know it sounds humble, and it's, if not super easy, then just one smidge below that, but it is utterly utterly fabulous. Hand on heart I can say this is the best thing I have eaten in months. I kept closing my eyes as I ate it, the better to taste all its constituents and savour their happy amalgamation.

It was so good I'm almost scared to make it again, in case my expectations are too high and will be cruelly dashed.

But you should make it. Even if you think you don't like bulghur wheat or red cabbage or celery. In fact, especially if you don't like bulghur wheat or red cabbage or celery. Retain your gastronomical scepticism, and, I hope, you will have your preconceptions pleasantly re-buffed. Fabulous Crunchy Salad

Serves c.4 people - nb measurements are approximate; adjust as you see fit

Bring to the boil and simmer 1 cup bulghur wheat (the coarse type) in 2 cups of water for about 15 minutes until soft and fluffy (or follow instructions on the packet) and set aside to cool.

Roughly chop a couple of sticks of celery and thinly slice half a red cabbage.

Dice a ripe avocado.

Prise open a pomegranate and pick out all those jewel-like seeds (this will make a mess!).

Mix the cooled bulghur, cabbage, celery and a handful of chopped fresh parsley with a good slug of olive oil, the juice of a lime, salt and pepper.

Set on plates, top with the avo and pomegranate, and some more parsley if you like.

Squeeze over a little more lime and drizzle over a dribble of pomegranate molasses.

Serve and enjoy.

Great minds think alike

2008-01-14T12:49:00.001-08:00

I was idly perusing the wares of Liberty a couple of days ago. I'd gone in to get myself a Moleskine diary - an object which I had coveted for many weeks, and which, now it is in my possession, I love more even than I imagined I would. It's the perfect diary! I keep getting it out to show various friends and aquaintances who don't seem quite so enthralled at the smooth leather cover, and the neat elastic to keep it closed, the page for notes next to a week-to-view page (who doesn't like a good page for notes?), the maps, the pocket for keepsakes and cards...

Anyway, I had the diary in my hand, but when in a store as full of pretty things as Liberty, it's a shame not to slow a little and just to look at them all and maybe pick up one or two or tilt your head appraisingly before this and that. Which was how I came to be in the chocolate room and how I came to notice a brand of chocolate hitherto unknown to me, and how I came to pick up this delightful looking and intriguing sounding confection and take it to the cashdesk with the aforementioned Moleskine.

I love pink peppercorns. Quite simply, they are pink and peppery, and they taste like you might imagine a black peppercorn would if it were a little more pink. Quite joyous and zingy.

I am also not unfond of dark chocolate.

The two together though, I was not sure of. I had tried and been disappointed by chilli chocolate, and you know how often you love two friends separately but together they just don't bond, are not well suited.

Was it to be thus with chocolate and pink peppercorn? It was not! I was delighted.

And the title of this post? Well, just hours after I'd made this happy chocolatary discovery, I was reading Claudia's lovely blog, and found more pink peppercorns cosying up to some chocolate. (Except in a much more beautiful and better researched fashion than mine!) Read this post to see what I mean. I am definitely going to try her pretty diy version next time I fancy this sweetspicy treat. Superb!
(and he likes it too!)

The Guest Slot #3 - Gluten-free cookies

2008-01-13T03:50:00.000-08:00

This time it's Big Sister Saucepan who's augmenting the saucepan repertoire with a culinary contribution from the other side of the world. The first specialist gluten-free recipe on the blog as well! Which reminds me, Shauna's book is out in the UK now so I must go and look that up sometime soon...

Anyway, back to the biscuits. Apparently these are so good they have to be strictly rationed in the BSS household. Sounds good to me...

Gluten Free Orange Dark Choc Chip Cookies (alternative Lemon & White Choc)

125g unsalted butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
The rind of an orange, finely grated
1 cup baby rice cereal (or cornflour)
1 cup plain gluten free flour
2/3 teaspoon bicarb soda
200g choc chips

Preheat over to 170degrees. Line tray with baking paper
Cream butter and sugar until creamy
Add the egg and orange rind until all combined
Separately, mix the flours and the bi carb
Fold this into the egg mixture along with the choc chips
Once all is mixed together well roll into small balls and flatten slightly. They flatten during cooking.
Cook for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Jerusalem 'Chokes with Celery Leaves

2008-01-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

A little while ago I was happily reminded of how sublime these knobbly little fellows can be. I met them again as one un-assuming little dish in an array of mezze, seeminly boiled or baked in a lemony-oily sauce. They were silken and tangy and slightly nutty.

I'm fond of jerusalem artichokes. Maybe partly because I have a fondness in general for 'ugly' vegetables, and probably a lot because I remember digging up artichokes in my parent's garden one winter, and I remember the sheer joy that came from plunging fingers into soft soil and unearthing first one silvery nugget, then two, then four, then a whole heaving bunch of them. Something so lovely about this bounteousness emerging from a barren earth.

And because they taste good. I know some find them bland and un-arresting. But they have to me a flavour quite velvety and delicate and delicious.

Good in soups, with lots of thyme and creme fraiche. Also good in this kind of warm salad/mezze dish, which I created based on the memory of the little 'chokes I had in Turkey the other week, and with the leaves of a magnificent bunch of celery which the little shop sells. They have a lovely soft celery flavour to them.

Jerusalem Artichokes with Celery Leaves and Yoghurt

1. Peel your jerusalem artichokes (3-4 for each portion), and cut into c.10mm slices. Place in a small saucepan with a generous splash of olive oil, the juice of a lemon (for two portions, more for more), a clove of garlic - minced fine, salt and pepper.

2. Cook over a low heat for 30-40 minutes, shaking every now and then to make sure it doesn't stick, until the chokes are soft to a knife.

3. Add a couple of handfuls of celery leaves, replace the lid and return to the heat so they can steam for a further 5-10 minutes.

4. Turn out on to a plate and garnish with fresh plain yoghurt, chopped parsley, more lemon juice and pepper.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

Oh jeez, over a month since I last wrote. I meant to remind you of menu for hope, which I somehow sadly managed to miss this year (will make up next year!), I meant to post at least a Christmas message, if not a recipe, something, anything...

Ah well, sometimes things slide. And now a super fresh new year lies tantalisingly before me (I still fall every January for the promise of the new and improved). I won't repeat last year's attempt to keep myself disciplined and hemmed into my self-promises though. This year, things will just go as they go I think. Though this humble little site hasn't quite lived up to my dreams of it in terms of content, it has been much more rewarding and challenging and fun than I imagined, and I feel now I know better where I want to go with it and what I want to do and say.

I have been enormously cheered by those of you who have visited and commented this year. It makes it all so much more enjoyable. I really truly appreciate each kind word left and feel uplifted by each visit on the counter. And I have been hugely inspired by all those others out there in food blog world producing such treats for eyes and brain at a rate much faster than I can digest it all. May it all continue and grow.

And the very very best wishes to you and yours for 2008. Happy New Year!

Oh yes!...

2007-11-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

... black treacle AND golden syrup!

To me, this is always a sign of a good thing. In this case the good thing is flapjacks. Soft, treacly flapjacks.

I think it occurred to me to make flapjacks because I bought one from a shop the other day and it tasted so sickeningly sweet - all glucose syrup and margarine - that I couldn't finish it.

I like good pale flapjacks (the ones made just with golden syrup, butter, oats and sugar) - especially chocolate dipped or fruit filled - but I like treacly ones better. And I hear treacle is a good source of Vitamin B, so they're practically a health food.

This recipe is the one my mum used when we were little - it's child-level simple and it makes dense ginger-y treacly bars, perfect for lunch boxes, or afternoon snackage. A good addition is some chopped dried apricots for a little extra fruitiness and moistness.

Treacle Flapjacks

In a saucepan, melt 75g butter with 50g dark brown sugar, 1/2 tbsp of golden syrup and 1/2 tbsp black treacle over a low heat until all combined.

Mix in 50g wholemeal flour, 75g porridge oats and 2-3tsps ground ginger (and 25g chopped dried apricots - optional)

Squash into a shallow dish and bake at Gas 3-4 for about 45 minutes until it looks set and browned on top. It will still be a bit wobbly at this stage, but will firm up as it cools. Slice while its still hot, but let it cool and firm before removing from the dish.

(NB - I like Jordans Organic Porridge Oats the best - they are the only ones I can find that are proper whole oats, not mashed up little pieces.)

The fall from innocence... (A tomato's tale)

2007-11-22T12:31:00.000-08:00

Well, just imagine what you could do with these little bad boys! Aren't they superb all piled up like that? Handfuls and handfuls of ripe cherry tomatoes. And these ones they really smell like tomatoes, and they really taste like tomatoes; not the pale impostors you find on supermarket shops (my local Turkish shop, for its tomatoes and avocados alone, is one of the major plus points of living in Archway).

I feel a little bit guilty actually looking at them there, because here were these fresh ripe fruit, all bright-cheeked and eager. Just look at them!

And then, what did I go and do? I corrupted them, poor loves, with bucketloads of sugar and hot hot heat and bubbled them and boiled them so they were no longer unsullied and innocent, but sticky and broken and all in a heap.

Although, to be fair, they were going to end up meeting their ends via mine or someone else's greedy mouth anyway, so whether drizzled with balsamic, as part of a fresh greek salad or reborn as jam, I don't suppose they really minded anyway.

Yes, that's right, I said jam. And I suspect you might be a little sceptical. Tomato JAM?! You might even be wrinkling your nose up and wondering what the world is coming to.

Well, I saw this recipe in Vogue Entertaining and Travel you see. And it intrigued me. I couldn't work out whether it would be exquisite or grotesque or merely just mediocre. But the colour was superb, and the tomatoes were a bargain, so I thought I'd give it a go.

As it turns out, it's good, very good. But slightly disconcerting. There's lemon and pomegranate syrup in there too (the latter is my addition, the former in the orig.) so it's quite tangy and marmalade-y although not as bitter as a marmalade, not as pickly as a chutney, but not quite as jammy as a jam. So as you eat it you feel a little disorientated, as it won't fit in any gastronomic pigeonhole your tastebuds want to slot it in to.

But it's good on toast, and it's good in sausage sandwiches and it is fabulously red, so I think in the end it was worth it.

Tomato and Lemon Jam

- Chop 900g cherry tomatoes in quarters (I halved them, but then the skins are too big in the jam, so better to quarter I think)

- Put in a heavy-based pan with 1/2 lemon, thinly sliced, the juice of the other half of the lemon, 6 dessertspoons pomegranate molasses and 650g jam sugar.

- Bring to a boil and simmer until it reaches the setting point - to test this you take half a teaspoon of the jam and dot it on a cold plate. After a couple of seconds you push the edge with your finger. If it wrinkles, it's ready; if it's still just liquid keep cooking. For me, this took about two hours.

- Once done, bottle in sterilised jars (thoroughly cleaned old jars, put in a low oven for 10-15 minutes until hot)

- VE&T say it will keep for a couple of months in the fridge, but if the jars are airtight I don't see why it shouldn't keep longer unopened, like most jam.

Fireworks and overwork

2007-11-18T14:50:00.000-08:00

Numbers have even started invading my sleep now - I surface to wakefulness only to be shrouded in a sleepy mirage of financial statements and tax calculations. Three weeks to go until these looming shadows can be cast off...

Anyway, whilst exam madness has been brewing, sadly other parts of my life - little things like eating and sleeping and any kind of domestic chore - have fallen a bit by the wayside.

I've been almost hibernating from things I'd like to do, think I should be doing, like updating this blog. But, well, it's time to get things a little in perspective. What's more important in the long run - informing the world wide web about the variant of sausage I have been eating or getting to grips with weighted average cost of capital? Well, obviously...

I have got a few more interesting things to post soon when photos have been uploaded and so on and so forth, but in the meantime some pictures from bonfire night, and a cunning canape idea...

We donned hats and coats and decanted to the balcony for fireworks night - hoping to see the sky light up as it had been doing on the drizzly walk home. Alas, we got sound but no visuals...

Still, we had Imogen's superb creation of mini baked potato - I can't think of a better canape for a bonfire night - New potatoes baked in a medium-hot oven for 30-40 minutes until soft to a knife, then filled with sauteed leeks and cheese, secured with toothpicks and popped back into the oven for a little meltage.
And we had the aforementioned sausages, with a homemade condiment, which I will keep you in suspense about until I post again. We had winter Pimms (which is scrummy, but I think really you'd be better off just to do your own with brandy or calvados, hot apple juice, apple and orange slices and a couple of cinnamon sticks, cloves, that kind of thing.)

And sparklers!

Let's hope my brain is sparking too, come mid-December...

Oh, and by the way, it was so lovely to return to two new comments from hitherto unknown readers when I finally checked in here. Thank you! and thank you for reading all, old and new...

Autumn Fruit Salad

2007-10-26T02:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago at college I was struggling though the finer points of tax accounting when my mind drifted (as is its wont) to food, and more specifically figs.

The stalls at Chapel Market had been heaving under the weight of plump velvety figs and I had been thinking about how they signify Autumn for me - around September/October every year as the leaves start to turn, London succumbs to a glut of figs. On street stalls and markets there are big fat purple figs aplenty. And I love them.

So I thought I wanted to celebrate them and their heralding of autumnalness.

Slowly a plan starting to form - Apple crisps that looked like leaves; nuts, that seem autumnal to me (although, are they?!); bright physalis the colour of golden leaves; pears, also lovely this time of year; a hint of alcohol to warm up the seasonal chill...

And lo, my autumnal fruit salad was born! I think it'd make a really pretty and tasty dessert for a nice meal - light without being too saintly and virtuous, and simple but a little special too.

Autumn Fruit Salad
(Serves 4)

1. Poach your pears
- Peel and quarter lengthways 3 slightly unripe, or only-just ripe conference pears. Place them in a saucepan with enough red wine to cover them (or add a little water if you don't want to use so much wine). You can add a cinnamon stick, some cloves and/or some orange peel for extra spice at this stage if you like.
- Bring to the boil and let simmer slowly for 10-15 minutes until soft through to the poke of a knife (Don't over cook though!)
- Take out and leave to cool.

2. Make your apple crisps
- Core and slice one apple (I like Pink Lady apples for this) very thinly. As thinly as humanly possible! (I did it with a knife, but I guess if you have a mandolin that'll be better). Lay them on baking paper on a baking tray and scatter scantly with caster sugar.
- Bake in a low oven (about 120C) for 30-40 mins, turning halfway and sprinkling sugar on the other side. They should be nice and crisp when done.

3. Toast some almond flakes
- Take about 75g almond flakes and heat in a frying pan, tossing regularly until just browned and smelling delicious.

4. Compose
- Trim and quarter 6 ripe figs
- Halve 16 physalis
- Chop pears into chunks
- Optional: Quarter 6 unsulphured dried apricots.
- Pile the figs, pears, physalis and apricots stylishly on little plates and scatter with almond flakes and apple crisps.

5. Serve as is or with rick greek yoghurt.

Quick'n'dirty coconut icecream

2007-10-18T03:38:00.000-07:00

This has to be the quickest way to make ice-cream. It's kind of like cheating. And yes, it's not the best ice-cream in the world; but it got pretty good reviews from the people I fed it to. It's rich, so to my mind it wants to be garnished with tart fruit - I scattered raspberries and drizzled lime syrup, though my original plan had been pineapple.

Ever since my trip to Le Cercle (review) I've been fantasizing about the roasted pineapple I had there - wondering how I can recreate it. I tried a few different variations, which unfortunately resulted more in stubbornly burnt baking trays and too sugary syrups than ambrosiac chunks of idealised pineappliness. I was gearing up to try again, and I started thinking about ice-cream to go with it. No idea how I could tackle spiced toffee, so thoughts drifted to coconut. In fact originally I thought about malibu - last drunk by myself on the streets of small town England circa 1996, but retro is cool isn't it...

Then I found out Malibu is really expensive nowadays! Frugalness kicked in, and I invested in a box of creamed coconut instead.

There's various recipes on the internet for coconut ice-creams - I amalgamated ideas and came up with this:

- First, put 1/2 pint milk and 1/2 pint double cream in a pan and heat gently
- Add half a block of creamed coconut and 300g of sugar and stir until both are dissolved
- Chuck in a handful of desiccated coconut (optional) for texture, and mix in
- Let cool a bit, pour in a freezer-proof dish and pop in the freezer
- For the next three or four hours, get it out each hour to give it a good beat with a wooden spoon and bash out the ice crystals

No roast pineapple in the end, as my impatience to experiment with the coconut meant this was made before there was a pineapple in the house, but it was pretty good with raspberries and lime, and for the next few weeks with crumbles and chocolate puddings and just on its own.

The Guest Slot #2: John's Beef Stew

2007-10-15T05:35:00.001-07:00

Another contribution from the house of Little Sister Saucepan, to make up for my slack efforts on the cooking front, this time from her equally talented other half.

Though I haven't tasted it myself, I have sampled enough of Mr R's cooking to confidently wager that it'll be pretty damn good. And one day when I have a minute between the important businesses of learning international financial reporting standards, ironing my clothes and watching America's Next Top Model, I shall put this to the test...

If you would like to do so too, you want to get hold of the following:

c.200-300g Steak (preferably braising steak)
a little bit of flour, salt and pepper
1-2 Carrots, chopped chunky
1 Onion, medium dice
3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine-ish
A handful of Button Mushrooms, left whole
50g Cubed Pancetta
Red wine, a couple of glasses
Worcestershire sauce - a dash
1/2 tsp mustard powder
2 bay leaves
Stock - about 750ml

John's Beef Stew
Serves 2

Heat a good splash of olive oil in a heavy based pan.
Chop steak into chunky cubes and coat in seasoned flour
Brown off in pan, once the oil is hot enough that it sizzles when you drop it in (not too hot though! oil shouldn't smoke)
Remove the meat from the pan and put carrots, onions, garlic, and button mushrooms in.
Once softened add the meat back to the pan and stir together.
In a separate pan dry fry some cubed pancetta or lardons, add these to the pot
De-glaze the lardon pan with red wine, and add this to the main pot
Add worcestershire sauce, mustard powder, bay leafs and stock.
Top this up with red wine so it is all covered. Bring up to a boil, then simmer for 4-5 minutes with the lid on.
Place into a preheated oven at 190-200C and leave to cook for 1.5-2 hours, stirring occaisionally.
When the sauce has thickened and the beef tender it's ready to serve.
Just before serving stir through some generous tablespoons of creme fraiche.
Serve with crusty bread, a green salad and a dollop of creme fraiche on the top!

A perfect pickle

2007-10-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Beetroot is so deliciously dramatic and flamboyant with that vibrant violet juice. It's just a shame whenever I buy it I never quite know what to do with the earthy-tasting little globes. I've tried baking and it didn't do much for me, I've tried plain boiling, and it's a bit like sapping its soul.

But I do enjoy them in jars - deeply pickly and purply. So when I saw a recipe for quick pickled beetroot I thought it worth a try (I forget where I saw it now - it's so simple I committed it to memory and carried it around in my head til I could try it out).

You take half a pint of white wine, add half a pint of white wine vinegar and 2 modest dessertspoons of brown sugar. You boil it slowly until the sugar's dissolved, and then you place your whole beetroots in and let them boil away until just cooked (I can't remember how long this takes - 10-20minutes I guess?)

You take them out, skin and slice into wedges. Then cover in their pickling juices and let cool. Then they can sit in the fridge, where they will keep for the next two or three weeks, and you will find yourself adding them to salads, garnishing dishes, and slyly sneaking one here or there whenever you happen to spy them in the fridge.

They're just so good! So much fresher and brighter than the bottled versions. Try it!

Min........ T!

2007-09-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

It's worth eschewing peppermint tea bags sometimes and getting a handful of nice fresh mint leaves and dousing them in boiling hot water and letting them to brew until the water is rich with them.

And pouring the viridescent liquid into a little glass, augmented with a teaspoon or two of sugar if such is your wont.

And standing on the balcony in the last of the evening sun as it sinks away dragging its colour with it, enjoying the air and the sweet spiky warming tea and some moments of solitude.

Apple and cinnamon cupcake

2007-09-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

Making cupcakes is always fun. There's something just a little frivolous about bite size cakes and their pretty frilly cases.

These ones are very moist and appley, streaked through the middle with a band of cinnamon sugar and crunchy with the same on top. Very tasty.

The recipe is adapted from a very cute little book called simply cupcakes! by Elinor Klivans.

Without further ado:

Preheat oven to 350F
In a small bowl, mix 1/2 cup sugar and 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
In another bowl mix 1 cup grated cooking apple with 2 tablespoons of the cinnamon sugar mixture
In a larger bowl stir 1 1/4 cups plain flour, 3/4 cup soft brown sugar, 3/4 tsp baking soda and a pinch of salt together, and make a well in the centre
Add 2 eggs, 1 cup sunflower oil and 1 tsp vanilla extract and mix well
Stir in the apple mixture with any juice that has been released
Put 12 cupcake papers into a muffin tray and half fill each with mixture
Sprinkle 1/2 tsp of cinnamon sugar over each one and top up with more mixture
Use a pastry brush to dab the top of the batter with the melted butter and sprinkle a tsp of cinnamon sugar on top of each
Bake until the tops are light brown and a knife inserted comes out clean; about 25 minutes

The guest slot #1: Sausage and Potato Salad

2007-08-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm sit here working my way through a decidedly un-gastro supper of celery and houmous, feeling decidedly un-food-bloggerish (it doesn't make for much of a post really does it - 'hey kids, buy some houmous, stick some celery in it! et voila!) Um, nope.

Luckily, though Little Sister Saucepan has stepped into the breach to make her first guest-blogger appearance with a slightly more appetising and creative supper from the last couple of days.

It's very topical I think, in light of the continuing seasonal tomfoolery the heavens are playing - all kind of 'yeah, technically it's summer, technically we should have salad; but like not too cold or anything - basically it's just winter with some extra daylight hours'

So, A Warm Sausage and Potato Salad

1. Roast your potatoes - Par boil a couple of small potatoes for each person, chop into little bits and put in a preheated oven dish. To prepare the oven dish wipe a garlic clove around the dish and put a reasonable helping of olive oil in the dish. These will take about 20 minutes or until brown and crispy.
2. Make a base of spinach and watercress leaves on the plates
3. Add some finely diced red onion and sliced ripe tomato
4. Chop the roasted potatoes and scatter over
5. Grill or fry sausages as instructed on the pack. Slice as you wish and arrange on plate.
6. For the dressing mix olive oil, dijon mustard, garlic, white wine vinegar, pepper and salt.

et voila! (works better here than with the tub of houmous. Thanks Little Sister Saucepan!)

Using it up

2007-08-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago I was lamenting my metamorphosis into a greedy, short-termist, zombified food consumer, abandoning my principles of resourcefulness and real appreciation of food.

Well, since then I've been more zealous about shopping frugally and seasonally; making my lunches and using whatever is to hand. Unfortunately, this hasn't resulted in much of interest to be posted here - lots of quite lovely but ordinary salads, sandwiches, stews and the like...

One new glad discovery for me though was pilaf. I've been a member of the risotto appreciation club for some while - once I'd tried it a couple of times and found it far easier than anticipated, and very amenable to a whole host of bits and pieces mixed therein, I wholeheartedly embraced it in my dinner repertoire. But pilaf, that was a ricey relative of risotto that for one reason or another I hadn't much bothered with...

But Anjum Anand's book has been sitting in our kitchen for a while, enticing me with bright, moreish looking Indian dishes, and one day I came across the pilaf recipe, a component of which was leftover veg...

Hence, the next time I had veg left over* I set to following Anjum's recipe. (I find her television programme vaguely annoying incidentally, but the book is very good.)

It's very simple, but if you like me haven't previously dipped your toes in pilaf waters you might be interested to know the general idea. Which is as follows:

1. Saute a chopped onion until soft (about 4-5 mins) then add spices and cook until fragrant (about 30 seconds) - I used: a cinnamon stick; a bay leaf; a tsp cumin seeds; a few cloves; a couple of black peppercorns; and some coriander. Anjum doesn't use the coriander, but adds cardamom, which I would have done if it hadn't been for drawing blanks at the five shops I tried for it.

2. Add your chopped left over vegetables and cook gently for 3-4 minutes to heat through - I used carrot, courgette, green beans and peas. Anjum suggests cauliflower also, but there I would imagine there is practically no limit to what you can chuck in

3. Add cooked rice (this too can be left over, but I cooked from scratch) and gently stir fry for 1-2 minutes.

4. Stir in a squeeze of lemon juice and serve. (I served mine, above, with an egg curry from the same book and some fresh mango, which was a very good accompaniment)

As for quantities - it's just whatever you have or whatever looks about right; there's no hard and fast rules. Adjust spices down or up if you're making for significantly more or less than 2-3.

Super easy, but very very good and very versatile. (Still not very photogenic unfortunately!)

*well, to be fair I rarely have anything left over; these were kept over specifically with another destiny in mind, but it was still a way of utilising that which was already in my fridge and planned for one meal

banana bread

2007-07-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

What to do when mid-afternoon in midsummer looks as ominous as this?

Storm clouds, thunder and lightning, hail stones as big as golf balls... Summer has forgotten its lines...

What to do in the face of such seasonal craziness? Bake banana bread of course. Well..., of course.

That's how it seemed to me anyway (especially as we had a fruit bowl of formerly yellow bananas lazily ripening into an inedible slush). It is good for this winter-summer though; it's got the sweetness and soft cakiness of wintery comfort food but the sunshiny taste of summer.

Banana and Walnut Loaf
adapted from Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course

* Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, 350F (180C)
* Grease a loaf tin, 9x19cm, or equivalent
* Beat 3oz soft butter with 4oz caster sugar
* Add in a beaten egg, slowly, and beat well
* Stir in 8oz plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and a teaspoon of ground nutmeg
* Mash 3 bananas and add to the mixture, along with the grated rind of an orange, the grated rind of a lemon and 2oz roughly chopped walnuts
* Transfer to the loaf tin and pop in the oven for 50-55 minutes, until the loaf is golden, well-risen and springs back.
* Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then loosen round the edges and turn out to finish cooling on a wire tray.

Good things come in small (filo) packages?

2007-06-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

I was still thinking about green stuff when I read somewhere about spinach with tea-soaked raisins and pine nuts. As ideas sometimes do, it wedged itself in my head and at the next available opportunity I set to exploring this combination which I think is pretty well-known, though I have never heretofore either eaten or made it.

I decided on filo pastry - I suppose I was thinking of spanakopita and how happily spinach and filo get on in that. I made my filling with spinach, tea-soaked raisins (do you really need to soak them?), walnuts (which are more economical than pine nuts), ricotta and egg. I baked them and I sat as they took on a golden crispiness, hopefully anticipating the finished product.

And... well, as I bit into layers of flaky, then chewy pastry, and got a mouthful of slightly bitter spinach, I must admit to feeling a little deflated. What makes spinach go bitter? How do I get it less so?

However, I'd made a batch so I took one to work as part of my current drive to take packed lunches as often as possible. And, happily, it surprised me by being much better cold. Easy to eat, filing, and not at all bitter on the second day, I enjoyed the moist spinach filling, the juicy raisins and crunchy nuts.

Not perhaps the most succesful of ventures, but a pretty decent addition to my lunchbox repertoire. This is the recipe - adapt it as you see fit. I think blue cheese might fit in nicely instead of the raisins, or parmesan and dried tomatoes...

Spinach, raisin and walnut parcels

Melt a knob of butter in a frying pan and drop a large bag of fresh spinach leaves in it, turning it over until all just wilted - leave to cool for a few minutes whilst you:
Mix together a tablespoon ricotta, one beaten egg, salt, pepper and a touch of nutmeg
Add a handful of chopped walnuts and a handful of raisins that have soaked in tea for half an hour or so
Squeeze as much juice out of the spinach as you can, chop fairly finely and add to the mixture
Arrange 5 filo sheets in a cross shape by layering them in alternate directions, brushing each one with melted butter as you go
Put a large dollop of spinach mixture in the middle and fold in the sides one at a time, pressing down to get a tight fit
Coat in melted butter and put on an oven tray in a 190C preheated oven
Cook for about 20 minutes until golden-brown and crisp

Green and lovely

2007-06-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

When I chopped this beautiful pointed cabbage in half and sneaked a couple of those creamy white, crunchy baby leaves into my mouth, the sweet crunch and the sheer joy of all those squeaky green leaves almost made me sad to adulterate it at all...

But then I tried this recipe that I saw a couple of months ago in Yoga Journal of all places, and oh, it didn't hide this cabbage's loveliness, it elevated it into one of the most satisfying pleasing dishes I have eaten recently.

That made me happy.

It's a gratin. The inside is creamy and full of green cabbagey goodness, and the top is cheese and breadcrumbs - and I can not believe there is anyone who can resist a cheese and breadcrumb topping on anything. (But maybe that is just me?)

I used a pointed cabbage for this recipe as I mentioned; the author of the article favours swiss chard and kale, but the original recipe calls for savoy cabbage, so go with what you like. Cheese is flexible too. Try gruyere instead of the cheddar and parmesan I used or any other hard tasty cheese you fancy. This is the version of the recipe I used:
Green Gratin

Slice one onion in to the thinnest slices possible
Melt 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat, add the onion, reduce the heat to low and cover to let the onions sweat, stirring them occasionally until they are very soft
Cut one pointed cabbage into very thin slices and add them to the onion. Cover and cook for 10 minutes or so until it has all wilted.
Remove the cover and continue to cook, stirring, until the cabbage is soft - about another 10 minutes.
Preheat oven to 400F
Grease a baking dish and set aside
Sprinkle a teaspoon each of salt and pepper, and a tablespoon of plain flour over the cabbage, increase the heat, stirring still, and add one cup of milk a little at a time as you continue to stir, creating a sauce for the vegetables
When it has thickened (about 5 minutes), spread the mixture evenly into the prepared baking dish. Mix 2 tablespoons grated parmesan with 2 tablespoons grated cheddar and 3 tablespoons breadcrumbs and scatter over the surface.
Bake for about 20 minutes until the top is crusty and golden and the edges are bubbling - about 20 minutes

The original recipe apparently came from 'Great Greens: Fresh, Flavorful and Innovative Recipes' by Georganne Brennan, which looks really interesting.

Yay - how cool is my lunch box?

2007-06-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

I got...

Homemade bread, Moro Carrot Salad, Rhubarb and strawberry compote...

Yum!

The carrot salad is straight out of the first Moro book and has been put to service a good few times now because it's really very good. You just:

boil 4 or 5 (preferably oldish) carrots, whole with their skins and tops and tails on until soft
when cooked, let them cool, and then scrape the skins off with fingers or knife and slice
toast a couple of teaspoons of cumin seeds in a dry pan over a low heat until fragrant and starting to colour
bash up the cumin seeds a little, and add to the juice of one lemon and about an equal amount of olive oil (and some chopped garlic if you so desire)
Mix the carrots with a big bunch of chopped coriander and the dressing

Lovely as part of a mixed mezze

As for rhubarb and strawberries, well you don't need me to tell you how good those two are together - I just boil them with a little brown sugar and freshly squeezed orange juice. But if you fancy something in a whole different league of rhubarb and strawberry chic check out this incredibly beautiful creation from La Tartine Gourmand's talented Bea...

Breaking it down

2007-06-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a bit quiet round here. Not so much a feast as a famine of words. And after all that about posting once a week and so on...

This is what happened. This time it wasn't simply my natural tendency to laziness and abandonment of projects. I've been working away a lot again, eating crap, eating junk, eating far too much. And then in the few days I had back home I would suddenly get panicky about posts and about making something 'good'. I would spend some obscene amount of money at the supermarket with some hasty idea in my head - something photogenic and impressive. And then it would be a bit ill-thought out and not so good and I would feel all disappointed.

And then I started to wonder what I was doing... This did not accord with my position on food, the reason I started this blog. I was getting all caught up in the end result and losing sight of what inspired it all in the first place. It wasn't the number of posts or the photos and whatnot. It was an appreciation of good food, of food as nourishment and joy and as something which draws links all over our world, that is important and inspiring. Wanting to share that.

I don't believe in buying a whole bunch of new things frantically, stressing over the cooking, not enjoying the end result, throwing stuff away because you bought too much.

I wondered what happened to the days when I shopped once a week and I had a cupboard full of veggies and fruits and staples and I made dishes depending on what I had, what needed using up. Sure, I'd be inspired by recipes, by reading, books and magazines. I still love the art of food, the experimentation, the craft of it. Sure, I'd buy special ingredients and plan stuff. But I'd fit it around being sensible and resourceful and thrifty.

Alongside this, I was putting in less effort. I was buying all my lunches and dinners, and it was making me feel dissatisfied, or nauseous, or sticky or gross. Disappointed...

So, first of all I decided to spend a week recording everything I ate, thinking about it as I ate - about how it made me feel, and where it came from, being more conscious of my eating. Trying to get back in touch with food, with my beliefs on food, trying to identify better what it was that made it good, what made it bad. Which was really interesting for me. I may post a link to this at some point.

And now I am just trying to get back into the routine of making lunch, of shopping wisely, of thinking about what I eat. Of delighting in food again.

And mostly that has just been big fresh salads - grated carrot and new potatoes and lettuce drenched in vinaigrette, juicy tomatoes and smoked mackerel or houmous or grilled halloumi. Or things unashamedly simple like the roasted vegetables in the picture at the top of this post.

Not particularly pretty, and nothing like the recipes I aspired to be churning out weekly. Not really postable lamentably...

But good. And now I'm going to try and experiment and find some new recipes and work that in to the mix. And hopefully I'll have more exciting things to post soon...

For now, here are the veggies above - eminently simple but really rather good. Broccoli turns sweet and crispy like the 'seaweed' in Chinese restaurants - slightly barbecue-y and very moreish. Fennel is delicate and slippery and sweet and roasted tomatoes just make my tastebuds sing...

Roasted Summer Vegetables

Roast fennels chopped in quarters, big stalks of broccoli and tomatoes with a liberal splash of olive oil, a teaspoon each of salt and sugar and a good grind of black pepper for about an hour at 180C.

And enjoy.

Peaches on Toast

2007-04-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

This is one of those things you make when you’re bored and you fancy cooking but there’s really very little to cook and you can’t be bothered to go to the shop or do something proper so you just gather up the few edible items around, apply your ingenuity, imagine you are on Ready Steady Cook…

… and most of the time you end up with horrible student-esque concoctions, things like the flapjacks I tried to make without instructions, which were just a sticky over-sweet mess that I nevertheless devoured in one sitting. Or like the soup I once made from swede and cabbage (it was awful; really truly awful, don’t try it). Or frozen broad beans fried with onions and bread and bits of old cheese… Yum.

Anyway, this one happened to be a more happy experiment. It’s very very simple, but very very good. All you will do is pluck a ripe peach (or plum, or nectarine) from the fruit bowl, stone it and slice it. You’ll dip the slices into icing sugar then lay them in a heated frying pan and cook them on both sides until they are soft and brown and bubbling.

Then you’ll slice some crusty white bread and pop it in the toaster. And you’ll lay the peach slices on top of the toast, drizzling over whatever juices you can get out of the pan. And you’ll eat it and it will be like super super deluxe bread and jam, monstrously fruity and satisfyingly sickly sweet and slightly naughty.

Mmmmm Cardamommm...

2007-04-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Was it just my imagination, I thought, or did the subtly spicy milky coffee I just supped as I reclined on the sofa, settle in my belly with a warmth like the physical feeling of happy contentedness?

I had got home a little earlier from a lazy day enjoying the city, and had decided to crack in to my treat to myself of a bar of the beautiful blue and white packaged Rococo chocolate. Discovering I had unwittingly bought white instead of dark chocolate I was momentarily disappointed. (I’m not a big fan of the pale stuff.) However, the cardamom it was infused with converted it completely from a sweet milky confection to something regal and intriguing and good.

I hadn’t had cardamom for ages - my first memories of it are of surprising chewy mouthfuls of a strong bitterness, when encountering whole pods in Dad Saucepan’s curries. And, its reputation stained by childhood distrust, I hadn’t afforded it a place in much of my cooking. Like much met with an older palate, it was joyous then to rediscover and re-learn the flavour and to find I really – really – liked it…

Inspired by this discovery, I found an old jar of pods in the spices collection, smashed some up and added them to the milk I heated to make the aforementioned coffee, with its feelgood aftertaste.

And, carried away on a wave of fondness for my new best spicy friend, I set to augmenting a recent VE&T cake recipe, which turned out pretty nicely...

Spiced Summer Fruit Mini Cakes

Preheat oven to 180 degrees
Sift 200g plain flour with 75g ground almonds, 2 tsps baking powder, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 tsp ground cardamom seeds and ½ tsp salt into a bowl.
Beat 125g butter, 220g dark brown sugar together until pale and fluffy
Add 3 eggs one at a time, beating well after each.
Add 150g sour cream, beat until just combined and then stir in flour mixture, followed by 100g raspberries or mixed summer fruits (I used frozen ones defrosted and drained).
Grease a muffin tin, spoon in the batter and scatter another 100g raspberries or mixed summer fruits on top.
Bake for 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Cool in tins for 5 mins before turning out.

PS - I’ve since discovered an utterly luxurious breakfast from a Jane Clarke article in the Times – you put a couple of crushed cardamom pods in with your porridge, and serve it with pomegranate segments and some thick greek yoghurt. It’s divine.

Lemon and Fennel Risotto with Scallops

2007-04-05T07:14:00.000-07:00

It's a pity it couldn't be a little more pretty, but sometimes things just aren't so easy on the eye as the palate...

Imagine though, if you will, the creaminess of a risotto, cut through with clean, tangy lemon and studded with soft aniseed-y fennel. You place a little on your fork and add a slice of fried scallop with an almost caramel taste from the seared surfaces, and the inside all meaty and silky.

It's comforting and refreshing and a little bit special and chic all at once.

Make it. See for yourself...

Lemon and Fennel Risotto with Scallops

(serves 4)

Fry off a finely diced onion in a generous slug of olive oil over a low heat.
Once soft, add one fennel, cut into thin (about 5mm) slices.
Add about 400g/14oz arborio rice, and stir until all the rice is coated with oil.
Tip in a small glass of dry sherry or white wine and stir in.
Then add the juice and zest from two lemons and continue to stir.
Cover with a generous amount of vegetable stock, bring to a simmer and put the lid on. Stir every 5 minutes or so for the next 30-40 minutes, making sure the rice doesn't stick to the bottom, and adding more stock or hot water as required by the rice (I never bother with the one spoon at a time method - it's ever so consuming and I'm not sure it makes that much difference - do try not to forget your risotto tho - it will burn!)
When the rice is cooked to your taste, stir in a little butter and parmesan for extra creaminess (optional).
Heat a little oil in a frying pan til fairly hot, and sear 8 scallops on both sides. Turn heat down and cook for 3 or 4 minutes until cooked through.
Serve the risotto with a little parmesan and then the scallops and top, and some green beans on the side.

Adventures in Dining Out - Andrew Edmunds; Le Cercle; Barrafina

2007-04-05T07:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I would do a little round-up of restaurant reviews, as I seem to have been (prandially speaking) getting round a little bit recently...

A couple of weeks before my 21st birthday I was wandering through Soho and spied a hand-written menu pinned outside a building so dark and unassuming as to be almost invisible. The dishes described thereon impressed me, and the cute, small, apparently nameless restaurant to which it belonged charmed me. So, I declared, that's where we would eat in my 22nd year.

Four and a bit years on I finally made it to the place I later discovered was called Andrew Edmunds. (Soho can be tricky, I forgot which street it was on, we didn't know the name... For my 21st, we ended up at a Greek place and had a largely forgettable evening.)

Another birthday - Mum Saucepan's this time - precipitated the long overdue visit. We went for lunch on a cold rainy day a few weeks back, and spent a couple of pleasant hours in the cosy, crowded basement of the restaurant.

Aesthetically it really appeals to me - well-chosen flowers, candles, mirrors, plain tablecloths, a simple, comfy, stylish look.

The menu changes weekly, and features fresh, simple dishes - we had a scallop ceviche with guacamole; langoustines with lemon mayonnaise and a salad of jerusalem artichokes, artichoke hearts and snow pea shoots to start. All were good and clean and tasty.

Mains of smoked haddock on lentil and green bean salad, daube of beef and duck confit slipped down equally well. They taste un-tampered with, more homely than restaurant-y. Traditional, relatively hearty and yet stylish and somehow still very London-y. (I have got to stop this horrible habit of lazily adding 'y' to nouns to disguise the fact I'm all out of proper adjectives)
The wine list is extensive and the service is good. It's cosy and friendly and definitely recommended. Glad I got there in the end...

Since then, I've had the opportunity to eat at one place which I had no preconceptions of and found to be a real treat, and one place I had high expectations of and found to be merely good. (Sorry - no photos for either of these...)

To start with the latter, Barrafina attracted great press interest when it opened a few months back. The brothers who own it - Eddie and Sam Hart - regularly pop up in newspapers here and there, either with respect to their well-received smart Spanish restaurant Fino, or with Spanish recipes (though they are not actually Spanish, rather British hispanophiles). They added to their existing media-friendliness by setting up new venture Barrafina in a room barely bigger than my lounge room. Hence, only 20 or so people can eat at a time, and with a no-booking policy queues form, making it a rare spot and therefore in many eyes a highly desirable place to eat.

I visited Fino a year or so ago, and had some magnificent pork belly amongst other good and excellent dishes (along with a hearty amount of sherries, riojas and brandies which may contribute to why my memory of said dishes is rather patchy). The owners chatted with us, we had views of the kitchen from where we ate at the long bar, and the barman was lovely and helpful, all making it a rather pleasant experience.

Barrafina is a pared down kind of Fino. The few seats are all around the L-shaped bar, behind which the chefs work, and a narrow ledge on one side of the room holds the drinks of those waiting for seats to empty.

In keeping with the smaller, more casual venue, the menu is shortened and simpler. We went for a razor clam special, a classic tortilla and the now-ubiquitous chorizo, with watercress. Clams were rather
like I've found snails in the past - nice and garlicky and chewy, but really you could be eating any number of simple little life-forms. They were a lot smaller than razor clams I've had in the past. The tortilla was good - pleasantly less cooked than many, but really just a tortilla. And chorizo, similarly good but unspectacular. A santiago tart was unneccessarily accompanied by some kind of muesli-fruit mixture, and was not as good as others I've had.

One of the brothers - Sam - was there, welcoming guests, serving, clearing glasses; admirably involved. Our waitress however, albeit very friendly, was a little intrusive we found, and not altogether helpful.
At £22 a head with drinks, it's not bad value, but I wouldn't queue round the block for it.

A meal at Le Cercle on the other hand, I would happily wait in line for. I was a little sceptical - hidden away in the basement of a hotel on a side street just off Sloane Square, I was worried it would be overpriced and stuffy. A menu that could be considered somewhat gimmicky - small dishes are grouped into categories such as Marin, Terroir, Vegetal, from which you create a tasting menu for yourself or to share - didn't help allay my fears.

However, we soon stopped worrying when we started eating. In a tiny black pot, suitable it would seem for a pixie, or a squirrel, we found chanterelles in a port and wine reduction so full of flavour a single pixie-sized spoon seemed to spread flavour right throughout my body. Ravioles de Royan - a kind of very posh version of that lazy-persons favourite supermarket 3-minute pasta parcels - were bathing in a truffle juice, and were also delightful. A sliver of sea bass and some chunks of stuffed rabbit with a chicory gratin were similarly well executed and full of interesting tastes and textures. The piece de resistance however was a pudding which - I lie not - made me grin like a cheshire cat completely involuntarily. Roasted pineapple was somehow much more pineapple-y than I could have imagined and the accompanying spiced toffee ice-cream was one of the most dreamy things I have ever eaten - and this from someone who is not normally a massive fan of ice-cream.

The dishes are very small - so don't go if you prefer hearty, generous cooking - but we found that we felt fully satisfied without feeling full. I think the intensity and interest of the flavours means you savour the food for much longer and so fill up in a very grown-up kind of way.

The room is very smart and cosy - separated with chiffon-y curtains, and with views on to the wine cellar at one end (they have a large selection and recommend different glasses for each dish), and a cheese room at the other.

To me it felt somehow kind of foreign - I suppose because I don't frequent that style of restaurant all that often, and so gave me the pleasant impression of being out of London for the evening. A mini gastronomic holiday if you will.

life is not too short...

2007-03-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

... to stuff a tomato. At least not in my opinion. I mean, how long does it take? 20 minutes maybe? I must confess, I am not such a busy efficient important kind of person that I don't have 20 minutes to prepare some food...

I'll admit though - in the past, I have been a bit suspicious of stuffing vegetables. I didn't really see the point. Often the vegetables were better off by themselves. It seemed a ploy to make vegetarians think they were getting something exciting; a proper dish, just because it was all shoved together.

However, I've been converted by these little tomatoes, which I tried the other day. The cheesy stuffing goes all soft and oozy inside the roasty red shells. They are a little messy to eat - cutting into one can initiate a kind of landslide effect; but to eat, pretty good...

Tomatoes with a Goats Cheese and Chilli Stuffing

Per person:

1 largish tomato

about 30g goats cheese

1/4 of an onion, diced

about 1/2 a small red chilli, finely diced

2 dessertspoons wholemeal bread crumbs

tsp chopped walnuts

1 dessertspoon Creme Fraiche

Sweat off the onions in a little oil, and add the chilli

Mix onions and chilli with the breadcrumbs, walnuts, goats cheese and creme fraiche

Slice the top off the tomato, scoop out all the insides and stuff with the mixture.

Rub a little oil on the outside of the tomato, replace its 'lid'

And pop in a preheated oven at 180C for about 10 minutes, until the tomato looks cooked.

Serve with a little salad perhaps.

failures and freebies

2007-03-24T16:36:00.000-07:00

myah ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..

...that was approximate to the sound I made as I walked away from the new Daylesford Organics shop the other day with a bag of swag. No, I have not - as a mid-twenties crisis - taken up middle-class shoplifting; it was the sound of freebie glee, heightened by the fact that the freebies were not meant for me.

I had walked past the newly opened store in the morning, and - anything to prolong the pleasantness of walking in the morning air and delay the inevitable arrival at work - I stopped for a quick look. It's like a kind of foody roman palace - all made of marble, with completely ott displays of willow branches and other springlike decor. Food is piled up in seductive arrangements - bounteous fruit and veg, a well-stocked cheese stand, breads, beautifully presented cakes...

My eyes alighted on some jewel-pink rhubarb, sprouting proudly from a pot on the fruit table. A friendly man in a white coat informed me he had picked it personally at 6am that morning...

And so it was, that on my way back from the office I suddenly decided to buy the beautiful rhubarb and make a little pudding I had been sketching and planning in my mind for some time. When I reached the shop however, they informed me a prvate function was taking place. I explained my purcasing plans and they let me sneak in to get my wares.

The place was packed with people - your typical Daylesford clientele I would imagine. What I always find strange about rich people (or at least the kind of rich people who live in West London) is how clean they look. They look like they spend inordinate amouts of time being scrubbed and polished. Money may not be able to buy you happiness, but evidently it can buy you cleanliness.

Anyway, they were happily tasting English sparkling wine and various artful organic nibbles, comparing red corduroy trousers and bouffed up hairstyles, whilst I made my way towards the rhubarb and picked four superb looking stalks.

After paying some absurd amount of money for them, I made to make off into the night, when a tall man politely stopped me and offered me one of the goodie bags, no doubt for the official guests of the private event.

And so it was that I walked back to the tube grinning maniacally and inspecting my swag. There was a loaf! and a carton of milk! a pot of marmelade! a little spoon! (I think it rather a blessing, do you not, that free bread can cheer up my day so?)

As for the rhubarb - well, I had been thinking about a carrot terrine I had seen in The Cook's Book, where you layer up roasted carrot sticks, dipped in a carrot-juice and gelatine mixture, to make a glisteningly orange terrine. Rhubarb, I thought would suit it beautifully, make a grown up kind of jelly slice, which would be appealing on the eye, and tasty to boot. I was going to make a ginger cream to serve it with. Unfortunately I forgot how soft rhubarb gets when cooked, and how difficult then for it to hold its shape, even when set in jelly. So I ended up with a kind of sloppy cold rhubarb coated in jelly dish. Not so great. Ah well, nothing ventured nothing gained...

For more on Daylesford see here : http://www.daylesfordorganic.com/ . Yes, it is all a little bit expensive and chic - not your muddy farm shop kind of organic, but the food does look pretty good. And of course I am quite fond of them now, as I am easily bought with free food...

Home again, moving home again

2007-03-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

So after five weeks working out of the office, crunching numbers in various delightful locations across the UK, I'm back to London for a little while. I've become inured to the humungous lumps of solid scrambled egg and tinned mushrooms that are customary to hotel breakfasts; sampled the delights of numerous staff canteens; got bored of a multitude of chain restaurants; sat in my hotel room eating avocados and grapefruit in front of the TV. And now finally I'm back; I've settled in to my second short-stay home of 2007, and I can cook for myself again... hallelujah.

So, recipes to come - soon I hope... Sorry it's been so long. What with the security on work computers preventing me from uploading photos, and the lack of a laptop, internet access, kitchens or fresh food recently it's all been a little difficult to stick to my regularity resolution... In the meanwhile, a picture of something green and fresh and unadulterated - the antithesis to the processed mass-catering I've had recently...

Savour it

2007-02-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

...those moments that make you stop and smile and appreciate.

Some of mine from the week just gone:

The novelty of staying in posh hotels for work - mini shampoos! cleaned rooms! new biscuits every day!

Daffodils and crocuses signalling the beginning of the end of the gloominess with their brazenly cheerful petals

Finding a new good book to get into on the tube - (Bel Canto by Ann Patchett)

Radiator-warmed trousers ready for post-work lounging

Surprisingly succesful crumbly sweet pastry

...

The last of which, I would like to share with you. I was planning to make cooked pears to eat with yoghurt for breakfast. I HEART cooked pears. It was a sunny lazy kind of morning however, and I found myself idling, vaguely thinking and reading the paper as I sliced. And they emerged from my fingers uniform and slim, not chunky for stewing. I was arranging them all neat in the bottom of the pan. Obviously my subconscious had been thinking about tarts. So, what else could I do but return to the little shop for butter and flour? Breakfast fell by the wayside, and I settled in to improvise a pear tart. I don't believe there are many better things to do with a saturday morning.

Now I wasn't actually going to mention the words, those alliterative beauties. But I can not kid myself that that was the platonic ideal - the mighty Tarte Tatin... But, you see, I have issues with tarte tatin. I tried it once and the caramel went wrong and it fell in a heap and the pastry was Awful, and I felt a little tricked and unamused.

So, I didn't put any pressure on. It's not a pear T---- T----, I told myself, it's merely a pear tart, upside down. Which really it is, because I couldn't be bothered with the caramel sauce.

And besides there are a million and one recipes for the TT. But in case you too are afeared of it, or you just quite fancy a plain Pear Upside Down Tart, then I thought I would share with you that this is: 1. very simple 2. fun to make (it's all that flipping out and watching the pastry float and brown above its fruity load) and 3. so tasty I polished the whole lot of in a day (NB - this is not recommended; try and make it when you are in the company of hungry people not avoiding white flour and sugar).

So, without further ado:

An Upside Down Tart of Pears...

4oz flour
2oz butter
2oz caster sugar
about 4 or 5 smallish pears
another few slices of butter (maybe 1 or 2oz)
another few spoonfuls of sugar (probably 4 or 5 dessertspoons)

1. Peel, core and slice the pears, and arrange in a frying pan that is ovenproof (I didn't peel mine, but I should have)
2. Put over a low heat with some slivers of butter and a sprinkling of sugar. Put a lid on and heat until it's all starting to cook
3. Add a little more butter and sugar and cook for a little longer with the lid off until it's going all brown and caramelly
Meanwhile...
4. Rub the butter into the flour and sugar with fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs
5. Drip in a little cold water - a teaspoon at a time, cutting it in with a knife until the breadcrumbs turn into bigger lumbs you can push into a soft dough - you will not need more than 2 tablespoons of water, probably more like 1. Err on the side of caution
6. Roll out your dough to a little larger than the size of the pan
7. When the pears are soft and covered in a sugary sauce, put a few more slivers of butter and sprinklings of sugar on for good measure, and then cover with the dough, tucking in the edges round the pears as best you can
8. Put in a preheated oven at 200C for about 20-30 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown
9. Cross your fingers, cover the pan with a plate and flip the whole lot over - hopefully it'll fall out, all golden and triumphant
10. Serve warm with greek yoghurt, or cream, as you like...

Drink and be happy

2007-02-15T09:02:00.000-08:00

About 350 years ago some unknown someone, or somebodies, introduced to the island nation I inhabit a drink made out of the brewed leaves of the camellia sinensis plant. It had quite an impact. The people liked it so much its importation created trade deficits with China. The ensuing attempts to counteract this by selling opium to the Chinese, sparked the first Opium war. And after failing to set up plantations with illegally smuggled seeds in Britain's murky climes, they set about sowing great swathes of India with this special plant. Across the atlantic it was involved in another little ruckus when the residents of Boston destroyed crates of the stuff in a lively protest...

I can understand the fuss. There have been so many occasions when this ancient drink has been just the elixir to ease aches and pains and worries and weariness. It leaps to the rescue, it comforts, it soothes, it revives. It brings together, it refreshens. Morning tea, afternoon tea, tea break, after dinner tea, lunchtime tea, black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong, earl grey, jasmine, gunpowder, caravan. I love it all.

One day a little while back I was feeling a little grey, a little weary and tired, a little lost and uninspired. I was trudging through the streets of London, quite aimlessly, as I often did in the days before nine-to-five. And I noticed I was outside a little shop I'd seen often before, with blue and white awnings and windows full of pastries. It must have been nearly Christmas because there were rows upon rows of endearingly imperfectly shaped mince pies alongside the normal enticing confections.

I had nothing better to do. I went in and sat upstairs and ordered a pot of tea and a pastry. And the joy at having proper tea in a teapot with a strainer, at having the best pain au raisin I'd ever eaten, and sitting in this small scruffy smoky room strewn with handmade paper Christmas decorations, erased all the lacklustreness I'd been feeling. And I loved it ever since.

So if you find yourself in Soho, on Greek Street, in front of a little french patisserie/cafe with a blue and white awning, go in and have a cup of tea. They've been up and running for over a hundred years apparently and they're pretty damn good at what they do.

Maison Bertaux
28 Greek Street
Soho
W1D 5DQ

020 7437 6007

And look at the cake I had! (on my last visit, with little sister saucepan, partner in crime and cakes).

I'm dreaming of it all - tea and cakes and escape from the bustle - now, as I ache with mild wintery illness and irksome work travel. Oh, for a cup of tea.

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future." ~Thich Nat Hahn

Warm food for cold nights

2007-02-13T08:50:00.000-08:00

So, after all the excited newscasters telling us for days there would be the most snow in, like, a Million years, we got, a few days ago, a delicate smattering of the cold stuff; a dusting of squeaky white icing on trees and letterboxes and rooves and cars.

Enough to make me smile at this cute little bike, not enough unfortunately to mean gigantic snow drifts stood impassable in the way of my commute to the office. Enough for kids to create snowball crossfire across the morning streets; not enough to hold out until lunchtime before becoming soot-coloured slush. Enough, though, to make it feel wintery enough to search out the lentils and make this humble but classic dish from my childhood:

Oh I know, there's lentil and sausages a plenty in the cookbooks and gastropubs of the day. But we've been eating this in the saucepan household since I can remember. We've had it on Christmas day, we've had it with friends and without, for celebrations and just for long weekend meals. It's always been a 'treat' food, despite its rustic simplicity, and the unglamourous basis of lentils - how many children have lentils as the basis of their favourite food?...

And although I know there are a myriad variations i could do, I like it just like this. So I'll put the recipe here so you can see if you do too.

Lentils with Chorizo
Serves four

Lentille vertes - check the packet for per person quantities and then add some; it's good cold too if you're not greedy enough to eat it all (Btw - I don't know why similar recipes call for puy lentils - they seem to be much the same, just more expensive. The little lentille vertes do fine for me - not to be mixed up with green lentils, which are bigger, flatter and more mushy)
1-2 onions
1-2 carrots
A few sticks of celery
(Optional - any other bits of vegetable you want to use up such as an old pepper or some cauliflower leaves, etc.)
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
4 or 5 bay leaves
A splash of red wine
A ring of chorizo (or two little ones like you get in Sainsburys)
Stock (or even just hot water, as the chorizo adds lots of flavour)
Salt and pepper

Chop all the veggies into small-ish dice and the chorizo into discs or half-discs, depending on your preference.

Sweat off the onion in some olive oil in a big deep pan, then add carrot, celery and garlic. Cook, stirring, until softened a little.

Add the lentils and stir round til coated in oil and vegetables.

Add splash of wine and stock enough to cover generously.

Add chorizo and bay leaves

Bring to the boil then simmer for about 30-40 minutes until lentils are cooked to taste. Season

Serve with potatoes (to mash in the juice) or crusty white bread. A green veggy or fresh salad will go nicely too.

p.s. apologies for those extremely unphotogenic potatoes. Actually, it's not much of a looker of a dish all round. Trust me though on this one - it tastes good.

Too cute!

2007-02-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

Many, many years ago, before email and mobile phones and reality tv, two little girls lived in a small town in South West England. Every Saturday the older of the sisters would get a shiny big 10 pence piece - pocket money. Being a generally super kind of big sister, she would allocate one penny of this to the younger child. Both would walk up the road and over the bridge and across the crossing, and enter the kingdom of the little shop on the corner, where big sister and littler sister deliberated over which of the myriad of sugary delights to drop into the old Vitalite tub and purchase with the treasured pocket money. Aniseed balls or white mice or sherbet spaceships for me and my one penny probably. Maybe a blackjack or fruit salad, a cola bottle...

Predictably, the splendour and allure of pick'n'mix sweets has rather faded 20-odd years on. However, when I popped into Heals on Tottenham Court Road recently, that wide-eyed kind of wonder and greed flooded back as I found an impossibly cute miniature bakery shop where there used to be a flower stall.

Before I'd even got to inspecting the edible wares, I'm a sucker for that old-style type font they use. Cute! - especially with the soft lights and tiled walls and minty hand-written labels. As for the food... it had rows of pretty multi-coloured fairy cakes with far too much swirly icing and liberal scatters of sprinkles; it had hand-thrown pork pies and big, luscious looking slices of quiche; it had fruit tarts and hugely decadent looking frou frou cakes; it had hot pies and cold sandwiches; it had jams and stylish boxes of various teas; it had plates and plates of sweet-smelling biscuits and muffins and cakes...

I wasn't really hungry and I didn't really need a cake but as with those Saturday mornings at the sweet selection, the fun was all in the oohing and aahing and ummming about what to pick over everything else.

I picked a banana muffin. It was good. Not super, but pretty damn good. And now I'm just enjoying thinking what I'm going to spend my pocket money on next time I go in...

Celeriac - just in time!

2007-01-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

Only two days left of this week to fulfil my resolution to post at least once a week!

So, before I'm off home for the weekend, I'm going to just quickly tell you about a gem of a salad we created a couple of days ago, after a wintery amble around the slightly eerie late-afternoon lit Wimbledon Common.

The humble celeriac has already been seen over at the magnificent Orangette having its praises sung, so it may be blushing with pride after I chip in my admiring two cents.

Yes it's an ugly lump of a vegetable, and sure, there are those that will screw up their faces at the very thought, but for those of us for whom neither its rooty bulbous nature or its sweet, strong celery-nut taste is a turn-off, it's quite a treat when it turns up at winter time; an interesting specimen to play with.

It just so happened that our particular celeriac was sitting there, awaiting its time to be cooked and eaten at just the same time some green beans were threatening to go off in the fridge, oranges were stacked high in the fruit bowl and chicory bulbs peeked out from the shelves. Chicory and orange is a classic combination in my family's repertoire of salads, and remembering a recipe I'd seen recently for a green bean and roasted squash salad, I imagined the celeriac playing the squash's role to perfection.

And lo! A gorgeous winter salad. Warming and refreshing. Light and filling. Adaptable to many different fridge situations. Super!

Winter Salad of Celeriac, Chicory and Orange

1/2 medium celeriac - peeled and cubed (about 1.5 cm x 1.5cm)
1 tsp each salt, black pepper, sugar
a splash of olive oil
2 heads chicory
2 oranges
a handful of green beans
juice of half a lemon
wholegrain mustard

Mix the celeriac cubes with the oil and seasoning and place in a roasting tray in a preheated oven at about 180C for about 40 minutes. At regular intervals give the tray a little shake to stop it sticking.

Meanwhile slice the chicory lengthwise or into rings, as you prefer, and segment the orange, reserving the juice for later.

Steam the beans until just tender and drain - run cold water over to keep their greenness.

Prepare the chicory, orange and beans on a plate and scatter over the roasted celeriac

Mix the orange juice, lemon juice, some olive oil and mustard to form a vinaigrette and dress.

Voila!

(Suggested additions - feta cheese, walnuts, toasted seeds, parmesan, red onion - experiment... )

NB - pre-salad walk under gloomy skies, past bare trees full of big black birds - optional!...

Getting there slowly...

2007-01-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

‘Resolutions serve to ease our conscience’, I read at the weekend. It was one of about 300 ‘truisms’ scrolling across an electronic display board, a piece by American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer in the Tate Modern (more here).*

Well, and they do for a bit, don't they. I'd been feeling quite chipper in the weeks leading up to Christmas as I thought about how much better things'd be in the brand spanking new year. Plans, lovely plans, bubbling away in my head. I am one of these people who spend so much time stuck in the lovely invented future that I leave little time for the real-world mundanities of Actually Making Things Happen. *sigh*

Anyway, my conscience is now not feeling eased, but slightly sheepish. Time's marching on and my plans and projects are following me around like people I don't want to see, tapping me on the shoulder and pulling disapproving and neglected faces at me...

So, I'm going to turn around and try to placate them. Set them out in type at least, and thrust them into cyberspace for all to see (ok, enough with the dodgy metaphor already lydia; onwards!... )

Without further ado then, my belated new food year's resolutions (always best to start resolutions in February anyway; January is such a terrible month for discipline...)

1. I will no longer cross with silver the palms of those huge multi-national coffee corporations!

Yes, I admit it, I have in the past had a bit of a weak spot for a Caffe Nero pain au raisin and macchiato, a Pret cappucino and breakfast baguette, a Starbucks tea and cookie. But every time I do it I think what a sucker I am to feed their coffers. How much better food I could buy with that money. I have found it more easy recently to stop seeing comfort and a guilty treat in these overpriced, mass-produced soulless products, and have been able instead to see myself buying an image and succumbing to the lure of instant gratification, which is all too often hollow and dissatisfying.

So from now on, I will not eat and drink that junk. I may yet spend long pleasurable hours reading the papers and drinking a latte, or writing notes on minor mishaps or pleasant surprises whilst enjoying a pot of tea. But it will be occasional and at smaller, more individual establishments. And........... I shall buy a thermos flask for my own hot drinks at my convenience and a tenth of the price!

2. I will post every week! No, really, I will. I really will try and get the momentum going and sustain it... This will be the year of lydia saucepan...

3. I will determine my position on meat! I became vegetarian once, for about 18 months. It was a general kind of misgiving that led me to take it up, but it was a vagueness about my misgivings which meant I lapsed so soon after (that, and the fact I was in Australia and enjoying the hospitality of many meat-eating relatives who I didn't want to inconvenience).

I like meat. I really do like a perfect fillet steak, a plate of good cured ham, some chorizo here and there, the occasional sausage sandwich...

But I have an issue with intensive meat production. I don't like the sound of all the antibiotics and the dinginess of living quarters. I'm not sure about abattoir conditions, I really hate the thought of those hens who can't walk because they're bred with short legs and fat bodies that grow too fast.

So I think I need to come up with a better stance on this. I'm going to do some research and then I'm only going to eat meat which comes up to my individual standards of what meat should be.

4. I will learn new skills and recipes! Yes, some kind of course, many kinds of investigations and experiments. All to be documented here of course...

So that's it. That's the aim. And now it's all here as evidence I can't just feel my conscience salved and move back into inertia; they'll be mocking me if I do. I'll let you know how it goes...

Menu for Hope

2006-12-18T02:09:00.000-08:00

I was just trying to think of a good title to sum up this post, and decided that, well, the title that's already been given me is pretty damn good already - there's the food bit and the giving bit (well, kind of). I just want to expand on the cool bit... It is very cool.

So... this is the third year of Menu for Hope, though only the first year I've been aware of it. Pim, of the legendary Chez Pim, has once again brought together an extravaganza of food-blogger-powered giving and foodliness to raise donations for a good cause linked to a subject close to all our hearts.

The idea is so perfect it almost hurts. Like all the best ideas, it's beautifully simple. And symbiotic. A load of lovely people give some lovely food prizes, a load of other people give money in return for chances to win the particular prizes they like the look of and then all the monies raised go to the UN Food Programme . Given our preoccupation with food, and the time of year there doesn't seem a more appropriate cause than those who will be at the very opposite end of the scale from our seasonal greed and gluttony.

Oh, and the prizes are GOOD... I have my eye on a voucher for the tasting menu at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon and half a kilo of Cambodian peppercorns.

So... GO!, as below:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from the Menu for Hope.

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhopeIII and make a donation.

3. Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. Please specify which prize you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code—for example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 for EU02. (Please use the double-digits, not EU1, but EU01.)

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so the corporate match can be claimed.

5. Please allow your email address to be seen so that you can be contacted in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Check back on Chez Pim on January 15 for the results of the raffle.

Hot Sour Good

2006-12-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

Obviously there were good intentions. There always are. Home by 10, up early, that kind of thing. And, as is often the way with good intentions, their blithe little voices were soon drowned out by louder, bolshier characters - temptation, jollity, the first glass of wine...

I did have a good excuse for overindulgence though, having just finished the monster exams which brought an end to my recent intensive stint at college. Still, that didn't do anything to lessen the equally monster hangover which took hold of me the following day.

By about mid-afternoon I started to fantasise about soup. In my experience it's a surefire ameliorator when plagued with a hangover. A little while later, the thought of chillies slipped into my soupine daydreams. Guaranteed to clear out a foggy head, and packed full of vitamin C.

As if that wasn't enough, the idea was cemented when I started googling for hot soup recipes and came across this article . Hot and sour soup it was...

This is my take on hot and sour prawn and scallop soup then. It's fantastically easy and it did the job to perfection. It just tastes like goodness. And the chilli-effect (watering eyes, streaming nose - the birdseyes were stronger than I anticipated) you can imagine (if you so desire) is tantamount to purging all those excesses of yesterday. The broth is deliciously spicy and flavoursome and comforting. Scallops, pearly and smooth, are - without wanting to be hyperbolic - heavenly, and meaty prawns, crunchy sugarsnap peas and mushrooms add enough interest for it to be like a whole meal in a bowl.

Scallop and Prawn Hot and Sour Soup

(serves from 2 very hungry people to 4 polite people)

6 scallops (no roe)
8 raw king prawns
150g sugarsnap peas
150g chestnut mushrooms
2 cloves garlic
1/2 red chilli
2 to 3 green birdseye chillies
2 sticks lemongrass
Juice of 2 limes
tsp Thai fish sauce
about 600g good chicken stock (sorry, I don't know the liquid measurement as I bought it in pots that measured in grams, not litres)
3 spring onions - finely sliced
Handful of mint - sliced

Chop and crush together the garlic and red chilli

Put in a pot with the chicken stock, fish sauce, lime juice, lemongrass, sliced birdseye chillies and mushrooms

Bring to boil and simmer until mushrooms are cooked (add more boiling water as necessary according to your desired liquid:solids ratio

Add peas, scallops and prawns and cook for just a minute or two until the prawns have gone pink and the scallops are cooked through

Serve topped with a handful of chopped spring onions and mint

Of Fat Slugs and Acorn Houses...

2006-11-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

An interesting food-related fact for you: "In the Thames Valley area alone, 1,000 tons of fat enters the sewage system every year. Eighty per cent of this is estimated to come from restaurants and takeaways.

"The fat quickly congeals, forming plugs that can cause raw sewage to back up behind the blockages - just like in a domestic sink. This is particularly bad in Soho, in central London, where in the year 2000 a 150ft-long, concrete-hard slug of cooking fat had to be cleared with pick-axes."

Yum.

This from this article in the Independent this Saturday. The article describes Acorn House, a new restaurant in London's King's Cross describing itself as 'London's first truly eco-friendly training restaurant'. Reading it consolidated in me a feeling of - what was it now? guilt? resignation? disgust? a melange of all these and others? - whatever; it has set off a constant simmering pot in the back burner of my mind over the last couple of days.

This linking food to the environment is nothing new of course. The ethics and consequences of what we put on our plates and in our mouths are everywhere nowadays. From all corners there's evangelists and doomsayers proclaiming the new food sins and absolutions. Books, articles, television programmes.

And of course, as someone with a passion for food - (and the world!) - it's an issue which has often piqued my interest. Though the terms of the arguments can sometimes annoy me - the 'good vs bad', the continual onslaught of what is in and out this week - in general it's a jolly good thing to have this raised awareness and noise about the tremendous and manifold global political, social, economic and environmental effects food and its industries have.

My particular current concern is not one of these big issues you read about though; it's more personal. It's the gap between what I proclaim to believe in and how I actually act. I rail against intensively-farmed meats and then blithely order beef curry with no knowledge of its sourcing. I tut as I read how much food we waste, and then find myself filling the bin up with sad mouldy creatures from the depths of the refridgerator. I wax evangelical on the joys of home cooking and then buy a ready meal from Marks and Spencers...

And I make some excuses for myself - about living in the city and working 9 to 5 and so on and so forth. But really I know they are baloney. To be sure, I don't live in a country idyll with chickens producing fresh eggs outside my kitchen window and a garden full of produce, and I don't have hours on my hands to whip up everything from scratch, BUT every single time I buy food or eat food I have a choice in how I do that. Noone frogmarches me into Wetherspoons for lunch, noone tortures me to make me buy cheap sausages...

I don't want to lessen the enjoyment of my food by getting all puritanical and dogmatic about it. I know I can't live in line with what my absolute ideals would be; but I do want to heighten the enjoyment of my food by knowing that I have made the best decision I can given the circumstances about what it is I choose to buy and eat and cook. And to enjoy knowing that I am putting my mouth where my mouth is, as it were, eating as a means of activising belief and ideals.

So, some soul-searching and researching to be done I think. It's not so long until 2007, a nice blank page, so watch this space for some new-food-year resolutions...

Cookies

2006-10-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

So, you want to say ‘Thank You’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Welcome’ or maybe just ‘Hello’ or ‘Mid-morning break!’. And you want to not just say it, but bake it. What could be better than a batch of homemade cookies?

Who can not like cookies?

(Not that I had anything in particular to say, just certain ingredients to use that lent themselves to cookie-cooking. But as soon as I had made them I thought, what a good little gift these would make... )

These particular cookies are from The Cook’s Book – one of those books with big photos of clear, numbered steps to perfection that almost makes you feel anything in the world – buying a house, finding a husband, upholstering chairs, solving the middle east crisis - should be perfectly simple if you just follow the nice, ordered steps properly.

Well, whilst this is obviously not the case, happily the cookies, although they don’t look much like the picture, do look strikingly gorgeous, once all steps have been properly adhered to. It’s just a matter of a simple dough mixture, which is chilled and then sliced. Maybe 20, 30 minutes to make, and 10-12 to bake.

This recipe makes about 30 large-ish cookies – plenty for giving and sharing. The original recipe was the chocolate-nut version, but I’ve included the other two varieties I tried – Chocolate Orange and Orange and Blueberry. The blueberry ones (below), due to more moist berries and less dry nuts, were a bit moister, cakier than the others. Still delicious, but in a less cookiesome way.

Cookies - Three Ways

150g (5½ oz) butter
1 tsp salt
240g (8½ oz) light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
225g (8 oz) flour (I found you needed actually a little bit more than this – experiment until the dough sticks; it doesn’t need to be dry but not too gloopy)
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

For Choc-Nut variation
120g (4oz) chopped nuts (hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, macadamias, whatever you fancy)
240g (8½ oz) really good chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids – I used Green and Black’s cooking chocolate)

For Choc-Orange variation
Finely grated zest of two large oranges
240g (8½ oz) really good chocolate

For Orange-Blue variation
Finely grated zest of two large oranges
Two handfuls of frozen blueberries

1. Cream the butter, sugar and salt together until light and fluffy
2. Mix in the eggs one at a time until well combined
3. At the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and which ever of the additional bits you are using (chocolate etc. )
4. When it is mixed into a dough scrape it into a ball with your hands then roll out into a sausage shape about 5cm in diameter
5. Wrap in foil or cling film and put in the fridge for at least 2 hours (you can leave it overnight if you want to prepare a day ahead)
6. Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4
7. Cut the dough into 1cm thick slices, put on a greased tray and bake for 10-12 minutes until just golden brown
8. Cool on a rack

NB - The first batch I made I had no bicarb, and they came out pretty crunchy. The second, with bicarb were more spongy and soft. Neither had that perfect balance the book described of being ‘crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle’ so I’d advise on adjusting your bicarb and baking powder levels – less for those who like a little crunch and more for those of you in the soft cookie camp.

In all of the unlikely places...

2006-10-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

It's an inauspicious kind of corner - opposite the bright lights of the Windmill Fish Bar, and continually subject to the waxing and waning roar of Kennington Lane. There's a Pizza Express round the corner, a couple of estate agents and a smattering of shops and eateries, but Kennington is not the kind of place which would inspire anyone not within walking distance to proclaim, "hey, let's go there for the evening!"

However, Franklin's, perched on said corner, is the kind of place which should make people want to come to Kennington. Once you're off the busy street it's calm and classy, without being fancy - subdued colours, matching modern prints adorning the walls, simple paper tablecloths and cute thistles instead of flowers.

The menu is changed daily, presented on a printed sheet of paper (as above - apologies for no better photos - I forgot to take my camera!). It's that rare thing - 'modern British' which really is modern British - made with local, seasonal produce, creative and yet with references to older times and traditions.

You know how you don't know what you've got til it's gone? Well, also I think sometimes we also don't know what we've lost til we find it again. In this case, good service. It's so long since I had genuinely good service in a restaurant that I think I had forgotten what it is. Not just polite and efficient, but genuine enjoyment and involvement; basically making it a profession, an artform, rather than the lowly service job it's often treated as. Both our waiter and waitress were helpful ad knowledgable without being patronising, friendly without being overbearing and enthusiastic without being fake.

This was just one aspect in which you could tell someone had had a vision of everything this restaurant should be and had made it. You could see it in the homemade bread and the good, sweet butter (attention to detail!), in the careful decoration, and not least in the food.

I had two starters, as last time I had a proper meal out I could barely even make a dent in my main course - better to err on the side of the caution and make sure there's room for pudding. It was the right thing to do. After the stuffed squid and breast of lamb I was quite full and not in need of pudding at all, although of course I couldn't say no…

But back to the starters; the squid was a tiny bit rubbery, as squid can be, but I don't think it was the cooking, just its inherent texture. The stuffing seemed pretty simple - tomato-y and chilli-y - but somehow had much more depth than I would have imagined, so that every mouthful was as bright and fresh and interesting as the last.
The breast of lamb was presented somewhat peculiarly - five cuboid fingers, crunchy in breadcrumbs and fried, aside a spoonful of obviously homemade piccalilli. Again, it was packed with flavour; like the 'lambness' had been distilled, and was rich and delicious, nicely complemented by the sharp piccalilli.

B had potted mackerel with toast. Not too dissimilar to a mackerel pate - more chunk and oily and with a slightly more subtle flavour than the smoked variety. The aged sirloin that followed, accompanied by wild mushrooms, was humungous - no other word would do. A solid, substantial slab of meat. It wasn't the best steak I've ever sampled, but pretty damn good (one slight quirk - the waiters don't ask how you'd like it cooked as the chefs want to do it their way. I guess that's fair enough that they want you to eat it how they plan it - which luckily was medium rare, but most people are just used to being able to have steak to their taste).

So, completely stuffed, we recklessly decided to ignore our moaning bellies and sample the pudding menu too. I can't refuse an apple crumble, and wasn't let down by their very apply, crunchy, muscovado-flavoured version (with extra-thick cream; almost like clotted) and B discovered a new ice-cream flavour - quince, which tasted a bit like mincemeat to me, or something kind of spicy, but very nice all the same.

The only downside to all this was that unaccustomed to such quantities of rich food, our stomachs somewhat incapacitated us - you know that completely too full feeling, where you just have to rest and let your body concentrate itself on digestion?

But, questionable gluttony aside, it was a 5-star meal; and a restaurant I would certainly like to go back to, even if I didn't live just around the corner.

NB - we paid £67 for three courses each, with drinks. They do a set course lunch Monday to Saturday until 5pm which is very good value at around £11 for two courses or £15 for three.

This is yum

2006-10-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

I've been having a bit of a love affair with feta recently. Somehow the sharp, salty creaminess seems to be the perfect candidate for a number of culinary vacancies - finishing off a sandwich, melting onto toast, making up a simple salad.

This particular salad is the latest reason why I adore it. It's nothing special, no fancy ingredients, or techniques. But it is yum...

Feta, Avocado and Fennel salad

It's just that:
Feta (cubed)
Fennel (sliced)
and Avocado (ripe and cubed)
with a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprinkling of salt and pepper...

What Valerie did next...

2006-10-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

Shortly after I first came to London (almost exactly six years ago as it happens), I started a mental list of 'London things I want to do'.

I can't remember the bulk of them now, but I do know one was to have breakfast in Patisserie Valerie.

Patisserie Valerie sits on Old Compton Street, and every time I was going one way or the other along that busy Soho thoroughfare, I made sure to slow down and allow myself the childish pleasure of nose-to-glass cake-gawping... The window under the awning is always full of magnificently frilly chocolate creations; cakes upon which dancing girls of icing shake multiple skirts; hosts of fruit tarts; a plethora of pastries; outrageously decadent gelatined creamy creations... It's a wonderland.

It wasn't until about two years ago that I actually managed to tick that ambition of the list though. One morning, Shelley and I were in town at just about the right time for breakfast and just about the right place for Valerie's.

So we entered the narrow little room and settled ourselves in a dated looking table near the back. I had poached eggs on toast, I had some fragrant tea, I had the thickest hot chocolate I've ever had, and if memory serves correct, I washed it all down with one of the preposterously pretty fruit tarts. Shell was a willing accomplice in gluttony, so between us we sampled a fair proportion of the menu, including taking extra cakes with us (in a pleasingly salmon pink box) 'for later'.

It was everything I had thought it would be.

Later, I had reason to have briefer and less exciting dalliances with other branches of the small chain. Cream tea on a winter's day, and various little tarts bought here and there. A treat to be sure, but with none of the magic of the original Soho branch.

Most recently Little Sister Saucepan and I sat down for a post-shopping pot of tea at the Kings Road branch, and proceeded to wait 20 minutes to have our order taken. After we'd waited another 5 or 10 for the tea, with no apologies forthcoming, we walked out and took our custom elsewhere.

So it's with mixed feelings that I greet the news that Patisserie Valerie has been sold (or at least enough of it to matter). It has been acquired by Risk Capital Partners of which Luke Johnson, already chairman of Channel 4, and now also of Valerie's, is a member. Johnson has been involved with the development of Belgo, Pizza Express, Strada and Giraffe, and is evidently expecting Valerie to follow the same style of domination.

According to the Times, "The first outlet [of Patisserie Valerie] opened in Frith Street, Soho, in 1926, when the Belgian-born Madame Valérie decided to introduce continental patisserie to the English. It moved around the corner to its present location in Old Compton Street after those premises were destroyed in the Blitz.

"The decor of the site is a holdover from the 1950s, complete with Toulouse-Lautrec cartoons. Since 1987 Patisserie Valerie has been owned by the Scalzo brothers, Enzo, Robert and Victor, who have turned the business into a chain of 11 cafés, all in London, including three franchised outlets.

"The sale process is understood to have been sparked by a difference of opinion between the eldest Scalzo, Enzo, and Robert and Victor, who are twins, over the best way forward for the business."

It seems to me that this recent development is in many ways but a consolidation of what was already happening. Although the Old Compton Street original seemed to retain much of its charm and integrity the process of branching out was already producing paler versions, cliches, clones. And now there will just be that many more of them.

I can't get that misty-eyed for the old Valerie, because I have only known it since it started expanding, and no doubt it will be a reliable-enough place to stop for an (expensive) cup of tea and a confection, as chains tend to be. But what chains can't provide is the magic and mystery of a place with its own history, which the original little VAlerie still clung on to.

No doubt also it will be a valuable asset for Mr Johnson, but I for one will endeavour not to contribute to his profit, and look instead for more exciting, singular little places - places to put on a wishlist, to aspire to, not to pass by with the same 'see it a million times' nonchalance with which we must view 90% of our modern high streets.

Oriental-ish Fish

2006-09-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

There are some days when, upon returning from another day of existential pondering over what precisely you are doing trapped in front of a computer crunching meaningless data, you just crave some order and satisfying neatness in the kitchen.

On days such as these, you might feel like chopping things into sharp little sticks, and heaping them in smart little piles, before distributing them in terrifically neat parcels... The order of the veggies on the chopping board will ease the ache of day-to-day tedium in your temples and restore a certain calm to your being.

If such is the case, you might want to consider making a dish such as this. It's nothing fancy; a little bit Supermarket magazine actually - a 'Speedy Supper' kind of thing. But it was exciting for me, as I'd never cooked salmon in a foil parcel before (really? yes, really!). And besides, I was feeling a need for some soothing chopping and ordering of the aforementioned variety. As added benefits, it turned out to be not only pretty easy but also perfectly satisfying and tasty.

I'm calling it Oriental-ish because I make no claim to authenticity - the ginger, chilli, garlic, lemongrass, coconut and coriander are I imagine a westernised impression, a bastardisation if you will, of real Thai food.

But, it was damn good, so I'm happy enough with "ish" fish!

Oriental-ish Fish

for 2 parcels

2 salmon fillets
2 sticks of lemongrass
clove of garlic
knob of ginger
1 or 2 red chillies
1 red or yellow pepper
1 spring onion
1 carrot
(substitute other veg that can be cut into batons if you prefer)
handful of coriander leaves
1/4 block of creamed coconut
1 lime

to serve: thai fragrant rice and pak choi (or green veg of your choice)

* Preheat oven to gas 4-5
* Cut all the veg, the garlic, ginger and chilli into thin strips
* Divide 1/2 of the strips between two large sheets of foil. Bash the lemongrass sticks a little and add one to each sheet
* Skin your fillets, salt and pepper the fish
* Place fillets on top of veg on foil and top with remaining strips
* Pour 500ml boiling water on the creamed coconut block in a little bowl and stir until dissolved.
* Now, fold up the sides of the foil square a little bit so the coconut mix won't escape
* Pour enough coconut in to nearly cover the fillet, then crimp the sides of the parcel together so it is all closed up
* Place on a baking tray and pop in the oven for 20 minutes
* Meanwhile cook your rice and veg - I cook all rice the same and it seems to work - measure the rice out in a cup (approx 50g per person). Add exactly twice the amount of water (in volume - use the cup again). Put a lid on. Bring to the boil. Turn down as low as possible. Now leave for 20 minutes - DO NOT TAKE THE LID OFF until done. It should be sticky and fluffy and perfectly done (however this is a basmati method, so I'm always surprised when it works on other varieties. Don't blame me if it burns - maybe I have always fluked cooking rice!)

* To serve - open the foil parcels and put in all on a plate. Top with a handful of coriander leaves and a good squeeze of lime.

It's alive!

2006-09-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

OK, I know I've posted a lot of fruit recently, but I promise this will be the last of that little un-anticipated series. I just can't help but share with you the bounty I found in the garden when I last went back to my parents' house.

Hidden pumpkin babies peeking out from the compost heap!

Showers of alien-looking blackberries next to the back fence!

A chandelier of crunchy apples!

Victoria plums diving off the trees every time the wind blows...

To me, being amongst green and growing things is a pure and unadulterated pleasure in itself. But when those growing things bear food, alive in the earth which nurtured it, it's doubly good.

Of Biscuits and Blogging

2006-09-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

So I made some Anzac biscuits from a recipe I copied out of a BBC collection of recipes one rainy afternoon in a bookshop somewhere.

They were a little burnt round the edges but thick and oaty and golden-syrupy; satisfyingly different to any shop-bought biscuits.

They went down well with a cup of tea, and they went down well with B.

But I looked at my amateur photos and I considered the unadulterated recipe with its six simple ingredients, and I felt slightly disappointed in these honest, humble, plain chunks of biscuitness.

They weren't, you see, blog-standard food. At least not in my eyes. And with work and studying and so on it's not so often nowadays that I get to really make any food. And without home internet currently, it's even less often that I get to post.

So I've been fretting. It is my wont, as concerns projects and so on. I always want them to be something that it inevitably will not straightaway be. I have a lamentable lack of patience with these things...

But, what negates all that silly fretting is that I am really enjoying having a blog. And what I am enjoying about this project is that I am now actually doing it, rather than just planning it, and although at the moment the reality does not live up to the plans, it is by going through these starting stages that I will achieve what I initially envisaged. By cooking more I will cook better and by writing more I will write better.

So, I'm going to blog the slightly burned and not terribly inspired biscuits. They aren't anything super special, but they are good, and they are another brick in whatever I am building here.

Anzac biscuits
(Makes 20)

Preheat oven to 180C (160 for fan oven), gas 4

Put in a bowl:
- 3 oz oats
- 3 oz desiccated coconut
- 4 oz flour
- 4 oz caster sugar
and mix

Melt together:
-4 oz butter
-1.5 tbsp golden syrup

Stir dry ingredients into wet ingredients gently

Put dessertspoons of the resulting mix on buttered tins about 1" apart

Bake for 8-10 minutes and cool on a rack

In praise of the greengage

2006-08-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

The greengage is a curiously overlooked fruit. I suppose against the big, bold, sumptuously fragranced and summer-coloured stone fruits – the peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots – it doesn’t shout much for itself. It looks small and, well, green… unripe perhaps the uninitiated might think.

But those who overlook this little verdant fruit are missing out. For me, it is one of the best summer fruits, one of the fruits closest to my heart.

We have a greengage tree in my family home, but unfortunately it’s rarely ever borne more than three or four tiny but perfect fruits. It’s feeble effort has marked the greengage in my mind with the anthropomorphic characteristics of a plucky survivor, an under-achiever, a shy, retiring, struggling kind of fruit, unlike the plentiful Victoria and purple plums which rained down from the trees either side of it.

And maybe because the fruit were so rare, it made them all the more precious. Each summer would only provide me with one or two sugar-packed emerald mouthfuls.

Putting all that sentimentality aside though, I truly do think this is a king among fruit. It’s just so packed full of its particular summer taste; so perfect in its balance of sugar and tartness and flavour.

The supermarkets can’t really do it justice, but luckily London is blessed with a multitude of small fruit and veg tradespeople, who man little stands on many busy streets. So just a short walk from the office I can buy half a pound of greengages for 60p, and even if it’s grey and miserable like today, I can stand amidst the grime and bustle of the city and be wrapped up in a little sunshiny world as I pop each little gage straight out of the paper bag and into my mouth.

A little extra information…

The fabulous Wikipedia tells me that:

“The Greengage is an edible drupaceous fruit, a cultivar of the plum, Prunus domestica 'Reine Claude'. It was developed in France from a green-fruited wild plum originally found in Asia Minor. It is identified by its small, oval shape, smooth-textured flesh, and ranging in colour from green to yellow, grown in temperate areas. They are known for their rich, confectionery flavour that cause them to be considered one of the finest dessert plums.

The name 'Reine Claude' is after the Queen-consort of King Francis I of France. "Green Gages" were imported into England from France in 1724 by Sir William Gage, 2nd Baronet of Hengrave, from whom they get their English name. Allegedly, the labels identifying the French plum trees were lost in transit to Gage's home in Bury St Edmunds. Soon after, Greengages were cultivated in the American colonies, even taking a place on the plantations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. However, their cultivation in North America has declined significantly since the Eighteenth Century.”

I heart cherries

2006-08-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

Mmmmmmmm...............

It's hot and I have big fat juicy shiny sweet cherries.

Life is good.

Good company

2006-07-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

"Hmmm", said the walnut bread to the curly lettuce, "the two of us make a pretty good pair, don’t we? With your crispy freshness and my rich nutty denseness. But I’m just wondering whether we wouldn’t benefit from another friend or two?"

"You’re right", said the curly lettuce to the walnut bread, "I do think a slice of tart goat’s cheese, brushed with manuka honey and grilled to bubbling perfection would sit just beautifully atop your rich nutty denseness."

"Oh yes!", cried the walnut bread, "how perfect. And then, imagine, a shower of shining pomegranate seeds, to contrast with the creaminess..."

"And", added the curly lettuce, "just the briefest splash of vinaigrette."

And both lettuce and walnut bread sighed at the happy creation of gastronomic delight.

And thus was born one of my favourite speedy salads of the summer...

Marie’s Goat and Pom Salad*

Several leaves of roughly torn lettuce on a plate (I prefer the curly type with its bright green, crispy and tasty base)

One slice thickly cut, toasted walnut bread

Atop which, one slice goat’s cheese, brushed with honey and grilled

Scatter over a handful of pomegranate seeds

A light balsamic dressing (just olive oil and balsamic vinegar) completes it

*thus named because this one was really little sister saucepan’s creation

... and the Delicious Doggy DooDoos (Birthday Cake Part Two)

2006-07-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Following on from my last post, did you notice those little things around the edge of the cake?...

Because there’s a little part of me that thinks birthdays aren’t complete without something of a chocolate nature, I decided to accompany my lemon and berry cake with some little treats I had been meaning to try for a long time, since seeing them on the magnificent Chocolate and Zucchini: Biscuits Chocolat et Feves de Cacao

I’ll refer you to Clotilde for the recipe (click link above)… My only modifications were accidental – I couldn’t find plain cacao nibs, so used chocolate covered ones (a tasty whilst-baking snack I found…) , and I somehow forgot to get cocoa powder in my rush to bake all this in secret, so just substituted flour. The result was still plenty chocolatey enough for me – these are just the right amount of bitter and sweet for me; nicely darkly chocolatey. The somehow heavy lightness, the cute bite-sizeness and a strange compulsion to distinguish whether this is a cake or a biscuit means you really can’t stop at just one.

I added raspberries too, as I had some leftover from the cake. This, I decided, was a good addition. The bites can be a little bit dry so the moist berry in the middle was the perfect foil.

The Crazy Canine Choir Cake...

2006-07-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

It’s one of those happy serendipities that people seem to enjoy and appreciate homemade cakes as much as I like planning and making them. I sometimes feel almost guilty receiving thanks and praise when I truly feel the pleasure was all mine – it’s such a treat to have an occasion to bake for.

So it was with B’s birthday. Not long was it since I had read the latest Australia Vogue Entertaining and Travel and salivated over the lemon and berry cake Jo Miller and Juliet Robb shared in the story about their Long Track Pantry in Jugiong, New South Wales that there was this perfect opportunity to try it out.

I’m a big fan of cakes which use ground almonds, and a big fan too of citrus flavoured cakes, so this already had me sold on two counts. The addition of jewel-like and summery raspberries clinched the deal.

It’s a pretty easy recipe; one of those ones with melted ingredients which you can whip up conveniently quickly. I burnt mine at the edge a tiny bit but it didn’t matter an awful lot. I planned to do a lemon syrup to drizzle over and leave to soak in the day before, but in the event it was sticky and lemony enough already, so me not getting round to it was not too much of a loss.

Dense, crumbly, soft and moist, with tart sweet fruit flavours this is a cake for summer days or a taste of summer on not-so-summery days.

As for decoration it would have been a crime to cover the berries or detract from the lemon-ness with icing, so I opted for a cast of cardboard cutout dogs, a canine choir, to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in speech bubbles (B being rather a fan of dogs). Though I do say so myself, I was pretty chuffed with my inventiveness and the slightly absurd effect, which continued to make me smile the whole hour I waited for the birthday boy to return home.

Berry and Lemon Cake
(makes 1 x 20cm cake)

1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ cup ground almonds
185g butter
1 cup caster sugar
¼ cup lemon juice
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 cup raspberries (or seasonal mixed berries)

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm cake tin.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, then stir in ground almonds.

Place butter, sugar, vanilla and lemon juice in a saucepan and stir over a low heat until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved.

Gradually mix butter mixture into the flour mixture until just combined

Then add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition

Pour batter into prepared tin and evenly distribute the berries on top (I attempted to spell out B’s initials, though it went a bit lopsided in cooking…)

Bake on middle shelf for 40 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle withdraws clean.

Leave cake in pan and leave to cool on wire rack for 10 minutes, then remove from tin and leave to cool completely.

A good way to spend three hours

2006-07-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

I loved making bread-hedgehogs when I was little. Breadgehogs. My mum would mix and knead the dough and cut off bits for each of us to shape. In between shaping bread rolls into pigs or tortoises or the aforementioned prickly ones, I would sneak bits of bread dough into my mouth, ignoring warnings that it would make my tummy hurt, enjoying the squishy yeastiness. And then we got to eat our little creatures, with their sometimes burnt spikes and snouts and tails.

I got back into breadmaking in my teens, experimenting with recipes out of Laurel’s Kitchen and Stan and Floss Dworkin’s Bread Book. This time the kneading was my own and the results all the more exciting for it. I still vividly remember a rich wholemeal loaf with eggs and oil and sugar in that tasted like heaven and had me crowing with pride to the rest of the family, who were not quite as impressed as I.

In Haringay House Two I got into a habit of baking enough for one loaf and several rolls to freeze, which saw me through the week. I don’t seem to get the time to do that now. You need three full hours from start to finish.

The whole process is so full of satisfaction though. Mixing the dough, rolling up your sleeves and using all your body weight to push and pull and twist and pummel. Slamming it down on the side, working out daily rages as you work the dough. Feeling it change in your hands, become more pliant and welcoming. Seeing it risen and full of life, punching it down. Smelling that belly-warming smile-inducing fresh bread smell, seeing the steam rise from the first slice that you always chop straight out of the oven, even though you think you should wait a bit. Butter melting on soft crumbs, the crunch and chew of a good crust. And that perfectly sated fullness that shop-bought bread just can’t supply.

My favourite faithful stand-by bread recipe is one for French bread from Laurel’s Kitchen. Laurel uses half wholemeal and half white flour, but I prefer just wholemeal. I measure in cups, and I’ve used many different ones; I don’t own a measuring cup. A smallish mug or tumbler should do, or if you buy an individual small pot of yoghurt, that works well too.

Laurel’s French Bread

1 cup natural yoghurt
1 and a half cups warm water
6 cups flour, plus some for dusting board and hands
1 sachet (grams?) dried fast-action yeast
Any additions you want – my favourite is walnut

Mix the yoghurt with the water – it wants to be about the temperature of your hand. Too cold and the yeast will take too long to wake up and rising will take much longer, too hot and you’ll just kill them off.

Pour the yeast in and mix around a bit.

Add three cups of flour and mix in with a spoon.

Add the final three cups of flour and get your hands dirty – use your fingers to mix it into a dough.

Turn the whole lot out on to a floured surface, rub dough off your fingers, and flour them well.

Knead for about 15 minutes, until the dough is feeling nice and pliant and is smooth with tiny satiny wrinkles in it.

Put in a big oiled bowl and cover with a damp tea towel. Leave to rise for about one hour or until it is twice the original size. Test for readiness by gently pushing a finger in. if the dough bounces back it can rise some more. If the dent stays, it’s ready.

Punch down the dough – literally punch it in the middle to knock all the air out. Then give a second knead, just for a couple of minutes this time. Add any additions at this stage.

Shape it – I flatten it into an oblong, fold the two outside quarters (lengthwise) into the centre line, and then fold in half. Then pinch the edges together to get a short fat baguette shape. This means you don’t need a loaf tin.

Put on a greased baking tray, or loaf tin if you prefer, and again leave to rise until twice its size. Put straight in to a preheated oven, about gas 6, for 40 minutes or until brown on top and hollow sounding when knocked on the bottom with a knuckle.

Enjoy.

If you can't beat them... stew them

2006-07-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

What is it about supermarkets and fruit? Do they imagine that I purchase plums because I can not work out where to buy cricket balls? Do they think I am going to test the quality of my nectarines by dropping them from a three-storey building? Maybe they believe I want to use apricots as missiles to scare away neighbourhood cats digging up my gardens...

Ok, or perhaps it is just to do with such boring issues as shelf life and profit margins and transportation. Whatever, they seem universally unknowledgable of the concept of 'ripe'.

When I can I'll buy my fruit from markets, or the stalls on the streets who can manage to procure fruit that actually smells and feels like fruit... But more often than not it's late when I'm shopping and I'm in a big refrigerated building with a basket.

Peaches and nectarines do often ripen if left on the side, but I ended up last week with a punnet of plums threatening to chip my molars.

So, not too confident that they would ever reach the luscious maturity they should have been allowed to, I decided the only way forward was breaking them down.

Halved and stoned, I popped them in a pan with a cinnamon stick, some orange peel and a sprinkling of brown sugar. After 30 or so minutes they succumbed to the gentle heating and were bubbling happily, soft and fragrant, in a fabulously pink viscous sauce. (NB - a note of caution, don't go and watch Big Brother whilst they are on, unless you have a big saucepan and a very low heat - otherwise your hob, as mine, may end up looking like a fantastic vermilion swimming pool).

As it happens, this compote was the serendipitous answer to my breakfast woes - with yoga before work, I don't have time to breakfast at home. A pot of compote and a pot of thick greek yoghurt in the work fridge means I have been able to easily fill my belly every morning with a summery fruity bowl of pink and white. yum!

Mmmmm... edokko!

2006-02-22T04:27:00.000-08:00

I had my first raw prawn yesterday. It was a mouthful of slightly strangely sweet, smooth silkiness. It was part of a platter of assorted sashimi at Edokko, a small Japanese restaurant tucked away on Red Lion Street, in a quiet corner of Holborn, central London.

I liked the place as soon as I walked in. Or in fact sooner, because the two glowing scarlet lanterns hanging outside reminded me happily of paintings from childhood books. Inside, through a curtain and a door, there's little wooden booths, bar seating round a refridgerated cabinet full of fresh fish, pretty blue and white cushions, warm lighting from the paper lanterns and a smiling waitress ready to greet you (or at least there was when we went).Sitting at the bar (this was the only place we could reserve; the tables evidently go early, although both options are good) we started with the aforementioned sashimi, prepared in front of us by a silent, silver haired chef. The plate, and everything we saw emerge from his deft hands, was an aesthetic triumph - a magnificent sculpture of immaculate looking chunks of carved fish flesh, grated radish and elegant garnish.I'm no sashimi expert, so I can't place this in any grand scheme or rate it against any recognisable arbiters. But to this sashimi virgin, it was superb. We had tuna, salmon, sea bream, sea bass and the aforementioned prawns. The tuna in particular had a subtle meaty flavour that I enjoyed, but all of it was delicious - a soft, pure kind of texture and delicate taste, that I found left me with a strange contented satisfaction quite unlike the 'full' feeling I'm used to getting on eating more earthy foods. The prawn was a revelation.

We followed the sashimi with a mixed tempura plate – slices of aubergine, courgette, sweet potato, and some gigantic prawns, encased in a light batter. A more filling dish than the sashimi, it was tasty and fun biting in to each bubble-cased package, but not as revelatory as our first course.

I was smitten again with the dessert – but more for my eye than my mouth. The green tea ice cream which accompanied its red bean and vanilla cousins, was the most gorgeous shade of green. It tasted pretty cute too – just like green tea. The red bean though was a little bland, and the vanilla no more than a mediocre vanilla ice cream.

B was intrigued by a strange fruit squashing ritual going on to our left as we finished dessert, so we enquired of the waitress what she was making. It was Shochu – a kind of Japanese spirit, which was being served for some Japanese businessmen behind us with a preserved plum and some warm water. So, interest piqued, we tried one too. I liked the big red floating sun in the glass, and the liquid itself was smooth and subtly flavoured, except when you get to the dregs, and all the salt of the plum surprises you. With lemon – as we tried it afterwards – it was refreshing and clean. We started, by the way, with a small pitcher of warm sake – I love warm sake (although apparently the warm stuff is common and you should drink the quality stuff cold). Then we cut through the grease of the tempura batter with a couple of dry asahi beers – both perfect complements to their accompanying courses.

As we left, the table of Japanese businessmen (the clientele is predominately Japanese – a good recommendation) were being served a fourth or fifth round of shochu and appearing in increasingly good spirits. My spirits were in good form too – full of the delights of raw prawns, warm wooden décor, pickled plum drinks, beautifully hued ice cream and the unfaultable service. In fact, as B commented, the only thing we could fault edokko on was playing Kenny G. An offence, for sure, but given the rest, one we can forgive them for.