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Sunday, February 26, 2006
what I ate last: oatcakes I don't know what's gotten into me recently. Baking, all of a sudden. I made cheese scones last Sunday and today, my first oatcakes. Next it'll be soda bread for breakfast every day...or maybe not... I scratched around the kitchen, slightly hungover, looking for something to eat for lunch and found not much - some lettuce for a salad, and a quarter of a nice tangy goats cheese but no bread or biscuits to eat it with. Being in a somewhat oaty mood at the moment (porridge is breakfast of choice) oatcakes occurred to me...and a quick google revealed that they should be easy and fast to make with what I had in the cupboard. And indeed they were spectacularly easy and quick and will definitely be repeated. The recipe is an amalgamation of various found online and my own common sense. The recipes all called for plain wholemeal flour and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, but the one thing I didn't have was the soda so I substituted half self-raising flour into the wholemeal and it worked fine. Briefly - 2oz oats (mine were jumbo so I whizzed them in the blender to make them a little finer), 2 oz wholemeal flour + the soda or 1 oz each wholemeal and selfraising, decent pinch of salt, mix in a bowl, add a tablespoon shortening/lard (I didn't have so used olive oil, again not a problem) and around 5 tablespoons boiling water, mix into a stiff dough, roll out fairly thin (1/8 inch-ish), cut out whatever shapes you want, bake in a preheated 200C oven on a greased sheet for 10 minutes. Couldn't really be easier. While they baked, I did the washing up, made a salad dressing, got out a plate and the cheese; and while the oatcakes cooled on a rack for a couple of minutes, I spun the salad, assembled and hey presto, instant yummy lunch and a successful new recipe for the collection. 0 comments permalink  
Thursday, February 23, 2006 what I ate last: Spaghetti with savoy cabbage, potatoes and melting cheese For tonight's supper I have my mother to thank, who sent me a clipping with the kernel of this recipe on it. A northern Italian concoction, and very delicious for this time of year, a satisfying supper on a cold February night. Potatoes and pasta might seem a starch overdose, but you need very little potato, just enough to produce a change in texture in the dish and to adhere deliciously to the melting cheese. You could probably use chard instead of cabbage but again, the texture of the savoy, with its bite and nutty, nubbly flavour is rather perfect. Its also an economical dish to make in terms of washing up. I started off by cutting the potatoes (only two small-ish ones, and I made what was probably enough sauce for two although I gobbled it all myself) into inch cubes and putting them in a big pan of water to cook. Then, in a deep heavy frying pan, plenty of rough-chopped garlic (I prefer it not so thinkly sliced that it burns but in thick-ish wedges) to cook slowly in olive oil with a few flakes of dried chilli. Then, shredding the cabbage, again not into thin strands but wide-ish strips, and dunking it into blanch with the potato for a few minutes. Then all of the potatoes and cabbage got taken out with a slotted spoon and added to the garlic to slowly absorb the flavours, the potato becoming slightly crushed in the process, while (lazy me) I cooked the spaghetti in the same pan of already-boiling water. By the time the spaghetti was al dente, the cabbage and potato were delicious, nearly caramelising around a few edges, and then all that was needed was to add a quarter of a pyramidal creamy goat's cheese crumbled into the mix, adding the spaghetti tossed with a little more olive oil, and letting it all warm and melt together before tipping it out onto a plate, covering with plenty of black pepper and tucking in. Yum. I ate it all before it occurred to me to photograph it, but it's a surprisingly attractive dish too in a homely way, the bright green cabbage strips intertwined with the spaghetti and the knobs of potato and oozing cheese adding variety and texture. 0 comments permalink
Sunday, February 05, 2006 what I ate last: Roasted mackerel, cherry tomatoes and new potatoes
 This Friday's Borough Market buys were huge bags of cherry tomatoes (about to go over the edge of saleable) for a pound, and a lovely Cornish mackerel, alongside some black pudding that I had for breakfast this morning and a huge globe artichoke. Mackerel is one fo my favorite fish - some people I know find it too strong-tasting, but I love its gutsy-ness, plus knowing that it's super good for me, being an oily fish and all. And they really are so pretty - the black stripes and rainbow lustre.Best, in my view, grilled or roasted as here in a hot oven, with oil and salt rubbed into the slashed skin. If you don't want your flat to fill up with fish-roasting smells quite so much, you can also wrap the fish in foil and bake it that way. I put the halved cherry tomatoes in the bottom of the pan at the half-way turning point, and had lovely but large-ish new potatoes sliced into pound-thickness rounds and boiled. Perfect Saturday lunch for salving my rather hungover self, being healthy, fresh, rich enough to be satisfying but with the slight tartness of the tomatoes to cut through, and the plain boiled potatoes adding a pleasingly wholesome touch. And followed, in a fit of greed, by the boiled artichoke - all of it, despite its hugeness - with half a lemon squeezed over it, hot leaves to peel off and suck while tuning in to the afternoon's sport on the radio... 0 comments permalink
what I ate last: Cazzola
 I'm a bit late in blogging this as actually, this was last Sunday's supper, inspired by Giorgio Locatelli in the Guardian, who gave the most meagre of instructions on how to make this dish but also made it sound utterly delicious and exactly what I wanted for a cold Sunday. I went off to the shops, buying a Savoy cabbage (one of my favorite vegetables - its dark, nutty taste unbeatable at this time of year) from the cockney Pete on Bethnal Green Road market (strictly an English root veg and greens man, sipping whisky from a hip flask, of indeterminate age between forty and seventy, always gives the girls a wink) and then went to Spitalfields to the organic meat stall. They didn't have the odd scrag ends of pig that Locatelli advises (ear, trotter, snout), these not appealing to the well-heeled of Spitalfields, but they did have ribs and I supplemented with belly pork, being probably my most favorite bit of a pig and one that I thought would go well with the slow-cooking recipe he described.I basically improvised, step by step during a day where the long cooking process chimed exactly with my house-bound pottering. Simmered the meat for an hour as suggested, skimming off the impurities, then browned it with some rough-chopped onions in my lovely Le Creuset, before adding a tin of plum tomatoes, half a bottle of white wine to (almost) cover, and putting the lid on for another hour. Locatelli suggests celery and carrot as well, but having neglected to buy these, I did without and the dish turned out delicious anyway. Then, chopped up the cabbage, steamed it and added to the casserole, and put back onto simmer slowly in the oven for another hour and a half, until the meat was deliciously wobbly and the winey juices had somehow gotten absorbed by the cabbage. It was absolutely delicious and thoroughly recommended. Poor man's meal indeed, I got three large meal-fuls out of less than a fiver's worth of organic pork and a 50p cabbage. If I wasn't such a greedy-pig it would have gone further, too. Heart-warming, improving with a day's age, given depth by the tomatoes and the meat falling off the bone in a sensual way. Locatelli advises polenta to go with - I didn't have any in stock so I did delicious toasted St John bread a couple of times, and simple boiled potatoes once. Apparently this typically Milanese dish originated from a Spanish princess who was married into the Lombard royal stock and brought this with her from Spain. Certainly it does have reminiscent touches of Spanish food, and the name is definitely related to 'cazuela', the Spanish for an earthenware casserole dish. Might it even have links to the Portuguese cabbage soups that they make with wonderful dark kale, and often bits of pork to flavour (as they do in the American South with cabbage greens)? Whatever, it certainly hit the spot on a wintry London day, filling my flat with sweet smells, and giving me something to look forward to at the end of the day, heading home from work knowing that I had this to heat up and savour... 0 comments permalink
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