The kitchen crusader

Mussels and clams and winkles, alive alive-o

2006-04-19T18:25:00.000Z

Ah. Five days on the West Coast of Scotland. No mobile phone reception. No internet. Not a single light to be seen from the windows at night. And a hundred yards below us on the beach, mussels and winkels in abundance to be picked, and clams to be ferreted out, and even one glorious, huge oyster.

We shopped in Fort William after getting off the sleeper and bought an enormous leg of lamb, some steaks, oxtail and a ritual haggis alongside plenty of veg and booze. We were amazed to find that, at the end of the trip totting up our spending, over five days we had only spent £50 each on food and enough alcohol to make us all into shrieking banshees by 1am every night. So a pretty cheap trip, and we ate very well - even if I do say so myself, having ensconced myself firmly in the kitchen and beating away intruders with a wooden spoon. And we had virtually nothing left to throw away at the end. Its amazing how economically you can eat if you actually cook every day and so use up all your leftovers.

Day 1: Pasta with proper tomato sauce for lunch, with salad
Roast lamb with roast potatoes, spring greens and salad for supper

Day 2: Bacon, eggs, tomato and beans on toast for breakfast
Winkles, then cold roast lamb for lunch with salad, braised leeks with tomato, cheese and a baked potato
Steaks with saute potatoes, stir-fried carrots and savoy cabbage, and salad for supper

Day 3: Mushrooms on toast with cheese for breakfast
Spaghetti vongole followed by a veritable vat of moules marinieres for lunch
Shepherd's pie, spring greens and salad for supper

Day 4: Toast and peanut butter and various bits and pieces for breakfast
Smoked salmon sandwiches, hot cross buns and oranges for lunch (half-way up a mini mountain)
Fried haggis followed by slow-cooked oxtail casserole (containing carrots and potatoes) with stir-fried savoy cabbage and leeks

Day 5: Smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, bacon and tomato for breakfast
Spaghetti with mussels in tomato sauce and salad with cheese for lunch
....and back home on the sleeper....

Don't you wish you were with us! Precious fat juicy clams picked off the beach, shining glossy winkles and so many mussels we cooked enough for about ten people. Oh so good. We even tried to fish for brown trout and I'm sure would have had success if we'd stuck at it longer, and there are nets to be cast over the mouth of little burns, crabs, lobsters, all sorts of hidden joys. I want to move there and live off foraged food forever.

Roast pork and turnips

2006-04-04T08:38:00.000Z

We've just enjoyed the leftovers of a rather successful Sunday lunch straight out of the legendary St John cookbook. Roast pork with turnips, anchovies and garlic. Off to the market on Sunday morning, before the rush, to pick up a generous (and not entirely cheap) joint of organic pork, and some turnips with their greens still intact from the Taj Stores on Brick Lane. The idea of dressing turnips with anchovies, lots of mashed roast garlic, parsley, oil and red wine vinegar sounds like it will end up very strong, but in fact the end result was delightfully subtle - a kind of mellow yet vaguely piquant warm salad almost, to go with a simply roasted piece of good meat. A few new potatoes tucked in around the pork at half-time and the whole thing was perfect for a Sunday lunch with beautiful April sunshine and showers playing outside.

The dressing is really utterly simple. For a generous three-person portion (around four medium to large turnips and their greens) I used half a tin of anchovies, a dozen roasted garlic cloves squished out of their skins, a decent glug of red wine vinegar and olive oil, and a fair handful of rough-chopped parsley. When the turnips are nearly done, add the greens (chopped into reasonable lengths), give them a couple of minutes and then drain thorougly before adding to the dressing in a nice serving bowl and letting it all mingle together.

Tonight, with the left over (delicious) cold pork, some salad and toast, I used up the last two turnips in the same way but cheated by not roasting the garlic and only adding one crushed clove to the dressing. I know Fergus Henderson would disapprove of the short-cut (as the only cookery writer who includes recipes taht take weeks to complete) but it worked pretty well to my simple tastes.

gnocchi and tomato sauce

2006-03-21T20:29:00.000Z

I've written about making gnocchi before, so I won't repeat the recipe. But tonight some left-over mashed potato and some tomato sauce from the freezer made a delicious supper without me spending a penny on it. And I remembered to take a photo of the gnocchi just to encourage y'all to do it...

There's nothing quite like homemade gnocchi - forget those glutinous bullets that come in vacuum packs - and there are hardly any simpler things. They take about ten minutes to make and two to cook. Do it!

pot-roast pheasant, red cabbage and mash

2006-03-20T08:29:00.000Z

In my newly co-habitating state, I have a renewed realisation of quite what a kitchen crusader (some might say kitchen bully) I really am. Certain little habits: from traits about how to cut up certain vegetables through to my general preference for being the cook rather than the bystander, reading or working while someone else takes control of the food department. The other night a risotto was on the cards, which was supposedly to be cooked by the boy (and he is capable of making a fine risotto, though taught to do so by me, I do believe). But even before any chopping began I had taken the whole affair right out of his hands.

I have an infallible sense of self-belief that I can cook virtually anything better than anyone else, and that other people will inevitably do something that they consider just fine but actually will ruin the dish to my refined tastes. I watch others 'disobey' my strict rules on certain things (how to make a pasta sauce being a particular fetish) and twitch uncomfortably, thinking to myself how they are ruining a perfectly lovely set of ingredients.

The only things I willingly delegate to the poor boy are roasts, and potatoes. I'm a rather useless cook of traditional roast potatoes for some reason - I can do a kind of Italian style roast new potatoes, in a tray with some jointed chicken and fennel for example, but not your real English ones, crispy outside, slightly caramelised around the edges, to go with a real roast joint or bird. He gets to make mashed potatoes a lot too - he's a better masher than me (more patient) as well as a more expert hand at all the other additives that go into making a fine mash. He's also carving out a niche for himself in the pudding department, as I generally can't be arsed to deal with that end of the meal.

But tonight was another classic kitchen crusader moment, as we got a pheasant out of the freezer for our Sunday supper. His suggestion about cooking it was kindly but firmly (and probably rather patronisingly) put down by me in favour of my much better idea - to pot-roast the bird nestled in a bed of braised red cabbage. And it was damn good, if you ask me. But I did let him make the mash.

A very odd collection of things

2006-03-11T12:43:00.000Z

Yesterday at the market in my lunchbreak, again contemplating supper, my eye was caught by far too many good-looking things. Bunches of baby artichokes, with long stems and leaves; mizuna; the dramatic scorzanera roots; bundles of raazor clams, their bodies lazily poking out like tongues onto the ice; langoustines. I resisted all those on the basis of economy, but I couldn't resist the purple sprouting broccoli, my absolute favorite vegetable. So good. And then on the fish stall, I saw cods' roes all laid out for a cheap price, and remembered the delicious recipe I'd read in 'guru' Slater's book for real taramasalata, so I bought one of those. Then cheese from Neal's Yard (we get a fantastic discount due to working in the same building) and an oak-leaf lettuce, and some beautiful rhubarb stems. I didn't want any meat after the previous night's poussin and quite a lot of eating out this week.

I didn't really have a plan for how all these things might hang together as a meal - it was just what I felt like tasting in my mouth. (By the way, on my way back to the office I think I actually saw guru Slater himself right outside our door, loading himself and a cake from Konditor and Cook onto his scooter. Does anyone know if he really does have a scooter? Anyway, he looked exactly like his picture.) I picked up a huge loaf of bread from Flour Power at 6pm, when everything becomes half price and they give you loads more for free, and I figured I would just sort it all out later.

Fast-forward a few hours to the incredible, soul-eating humger that descends after a couple of after-work pints without anything in your belly. Rushing home back into the kitchen, I open Nigel's book to the tarama and realise I've made a schoolboy error. Raw cod roes, not the smoked ones. Stupid! What to do? Starving, I throw them into a frying pan and saute them, then decide to go for a sort-of tarama after all, crushing them up with garlic, plenty of lemon and salt and pepper for a sort of spread. Meanwhile, the broccoli get briefly steamed, bread gets cut and toasted, and we descend on the table and cram everything into our mouths.

Actually, the weird cod roe spread wasn't bad at all. If I had been less frantic, I think raw onion would have been a better addition than the garlic - more tart and fresh. The broccoli was divine. We polished it all off and then recollected some calm. A salad was made, cheese came out onto a plate, red wine poured and we started to talk rather than just eat. But still, I forgot entirely about the rhubarb, so that is simmering away as I write now, ready for our lunch.

Poussins with tarragon, wild mushroom sauce, mash and spring greens (from 8th March)

2006-03-11T12:35:00.000Z

At the market in my lunchbreak, considering what to have for dinner, I found a row of poussins for £2 each. Rather a bargain, I thought. We had spuds and some lovely pyramidal spring greens at home, and in the Bengali supermarket on Brick Lane, of all places, I found a bunch of tarragon. I absolutely love tarragon chicken, and haven't had it for ages. In fact, I realised I hadn't eaten chicken at all for a long time, somehow it being displaced by cravings for wintry red meat, and then the craving for fish thaat comes when too much red meat has been consumed.

The poussins, with a generous amount of tarragon pushed under the skin, roasted up a treat in 40 minutes, and they were perfectly succulent, the legs pulling away from the body with ease. While the birds were cooking, I soaked a few pieces of dried porcini that I always seem to have hanging around, and while they rested, I stirred them and their liquid into the pan, scraping up all the yummy bits, making a rather classy sauce which made me feel very smart, given that my propensity to do anything other than spash a glass of wine into a sticky pan is normally nil. With a pile of mash (a little garlicky from a couple of cloves boiled with the spuds) and crunchy, bright greens, it was a super Thursday night supper, and as super-easy as it gets.

beef and chocolate (from 2nd March)

2006-03-11T12:26:00.000Z

Not together, I hasten to add. But rather, a sublime piece of beef, simply roasted, which was perhaps the most succulent and tender, melting piece of that animal I had ever tasted, with perfect roast potatoes and slightly crunchy braised red cabbage. The beef came from the countryside, hacked off from a vast slab of the stuff that the butcher brought round one Saturday to the kitchen door, and it was absolutely amazing. And then, it was followed by the baked chocolate pudding out of Nigel Slater's kitchen diaries, perfectly translated. The girls swooned. And the best bit about it? With the exception of the cabbage and a green salad, it was all made by the boy.

oatcakes

2006-02-26T13:49:00.000Z

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.

Spaghetti with savoy cabbage, potatoes and melting cheese

2006-02-23T22:31:00.000Z

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.

Roasted mackerel, cherry tomatoes and new potatoes

2006-02-05T19:55:00.000Z

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...

Cazzola

2006-02-05T19:21:00.000Z

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...

Roast pheasant with wild mushroom sauce, mash and puy lentils

2006-01-15T22:50:00.000Z

Sunday evenings should be all about digging in the freezer and cupboard and finding tasty things to cook up while lazing around in the pajamas that one still hasn't quite gotten out of. Especially if, like me, you're struggling with having horrible deadlines which are chaining you to your laptop and eating is pretty much the only thing (well, apart from impromptu drinking sessions after your football team wins 7-0) that makes life still worth living.

So I was really happy to remember that I still had a pheasant in the freezer. Perfect winter Sunday food. Time enough to defrost it, find a whole load of dried wild mushrooms that just needed to be eaten up, three large potatoes in the bottom of the fridge that also required consuming, and thank my domestic instincts for having lots of jars of pulses around.

It was a supremely good, simple and satisfying meal. Roasted the pheasant for half an hour, made a good wild mushroom sauce (sauted onion, mushrooms, mushroom juice, seasoning) and mustardy mash, dressed the al dente puy lentils with a little lemon and olive oil while the bird rested for ten minutes, adding the roast juices to the mushroom sauce, and voila. Salad for afters, soaking up the gravy left on the plate. And the best thing is, I was on my own, so I get the leftovers for a Monday supper - mash into potato cakes, cold partridge with hot reheated mushrooms, lentils as a salad with loads of parsley if I remember to buy any - I can't wait.

Leek and potato soup

2006-01-12T15:04:00.000Z

Why is it that home-made soups are always better than even the most superior restaurant/shop versions? I often get soup for lunch near work and (although it comes from Konditor and Cook) it is distinctly underwhelming almost all the time - too thin and too salty, as if to make up for the lack of substance in it - and also with way too much of whatever herb they decide goes, for the same reason. There is never any texture, which for me is the key thing about soup. Sometimes the soup tastes like it is just salt, pepper and herb. I think they cheat in ways that they would never do with their superb cakes, and use crap out of a tin for the rest, although I have no proof. They should have more pride.

Anyway, today I am working at home, so I got to make myself soup for lunch. Ah, how nice. It was so simple, and so good. How can anyone make those leek and potato soups that are all smooth and bland, when a semi-chunky textural one is so much better? and why do people feel the need to load the thing with cream and even cheese, until the fact that it actually has delicious potato and leek in it gets completely lost? My version went like this:

Finely slice a small onion and a couple of garlic cloves into thin crescents, and start to sweat in a saucepan while cutting up a couple of large potatoes into decent cubes (without peeling. I like the taste of the skin). When the onion is translucent, add the potato and sweat for a few minutes until the potato starts smelling nice and sweet, then add water, some Marigold powder, a bay leaf and a little black pepper. Bring to the boil, then simmer until the potato is pretty much cooked.

Meanwhile, cut up a leek along the diagonal roughly every half-inch or so. Add to the soup, but reserve a little bit of the leek to add raw at the end as a garnish. Simmer gently until the leek is soft. Then I just crushed most of the potato (which is already collapsing) against the side of the pan with the wooden spoon, so it thickens the soup but there are still some chunks around. If you were making a larger quantity you could blend it really quickly before you add the leek, just one or two pulses so it is still textural.

While the leek is cooking, finely chop up some raw ginger and the left-over leek as a garnish. I also found a small left-over smoked kabanos (Polish sausage) in the fridge, sliced that up and added it to the soup to bring a bit of smokey depth, which was really nice. When you are ready to serve, check the seasoning, then sprinkle the ginger and leek on top of the soup once you've dished it into the bowl. Delicious, homely, warming, textured, filling - what more do you want for a January lunch that takes about 20 mins from start to finish?

2006-01-02T22:42:00.000Z

Christmas debauchery

I never got round to, at the time, blogging the most extravegant meal that occurred over the Christmas break. It was a fantastic mixture of the rustic and the astronomically decadent - and what more does one really want from a meal? I have to admit to not having actually read any food blogs for a while (lack of time, whatever) and having a browse this evening I was struck by how fussy so many people are with their home cooking. It's home, guys, not a restaurant! why not cook the kind of stuff you never eat in a restaurant rather than create over-the-top confections that will never be as good as the real thing in whatever fancy joint you are imitating. I'm not going to name names (or, in the way of blogging, link links) as that would be mean, but I'm sure y'all know what I mean...

So, our rustic-decadent feast. What can you say to a meal where you start off with half a pound of two different kinds of caviar. Yes, that's one whole pound of caviar between four of us. Iranian Oscietra vs. some farmed French caviar. A tasting. On home-made blinis (my mother triumphed; they were light and fantastic) with nothing else. Just a tiny blini, a gloriously heaped spoonful of ice-cold caviar, into mouth, minor orgasm and repeat. Until you are reduced to licking the spoon and passing fingers around the tin. Washed down with neat Stolichnaya all gloopy from having been in the freezer. In the interests of anyone's research into caviar, the Oscietra was lighter in colour and subtler in taste, the French very black, tangier and stronger. All I can say is thank you to the nameless and incredibly generous friend of ours who brought the goods. We, quite obviously, don't have that kinda cash lying around.

But what we do have, hiding away in the cellar, is some damn fine wine. So, the next course; the rustic, in the form of boiled salt beef, a mound of crunchy quick-sauted shredded cabbage, and potato latkes, alongside the sublime (again, a double tasting) - a 1970 Chateau Montrose, and a 1983 Grand Puy Lacoste. Life is tough. Again, we tasted, savoured slowly, measuring the astonishing depth and fruit that both wines (especially the Montrose) still had. They were both still dark in colour and long, full without losing good leanness and acidity, complex, changing as time went by and absolutely delicious. We were quite astonished at how youthful they still tasted. My father, true to form, started telling tales of his old days roving around Bordeaux in search of fine wine for Adnams - including a lunch at one chateau with a group of friends, where course followed course and wine followed wine, until it had grown dark but the conversation still flowed. Apparently, noticing the time, the owner said something along the lines of why stop now and called out to his housekeeper 'Hortense, serve dinner!'. And the night carried on.

We finished with a fantastic fresh apricot crumble. Coffee, dark bitter chocolate. We joked about calling for breakfast, but in truth we were sated, savoring the tastes left in our mouths, ready to crawl into bed. I certainly had sweet dreams. Who needs fancy dishes and pretty drizzles of sauce when you can have a plateful of salt beef and a glass of 1970 Montrose?

Update: Good job we ate all that caviar. It's now been banned!

Pumpkin and split pea soup

2006-01-02T21:55:00.000Z

Back after the traditional Christmas over-eating and New Year's debauchery, it's a pleasure to get back to homely winter food. This soup is one of my favorites, but in the way of these things I'd somewhat forgotten about it until I was at my parents' house over the holiday and my mother made it. It's a recipe from Claudia Roden's book of Jewish food - a fantastic volume of ethnography as much as cuisine, delving into the history and myths of Jewish cooking from all over the world, each recipe accompanied by wonderful and scholarly notes.

This soup is, apparently, a traditional Sephardic New Year's soup - appropriate perhaps for this time of year, although obviously the Jewish New Year is in October not January. It is traditional to eat sweet things to wish in a sweet new year - honey, tzimmes, apples - and this soup is sweet and fragrant, warming and comforting, and festive to look at too.

It's an easy dish to make. Simply saute some onion, garlic, fresh ginger until soft, then add the split peas and plenty of water (though not too much - the soup should be fairly thick and you can always add more later), bring to the boil then simmer until the peas are pretty much cooked. Then add the cubed pumpkin (use a small, hard, sweet one with green skin, not a watery halloween-type one), a fairly generous amount of saffron, a cinnamon stick (or powder if that's what you've got), seasoning (a bit of Marigold powder doesn't go amiss) and a tiny bit of chilli, and simmer until the pumpkin is collapsing but not yet mushy. It's good with coriander or spring onions as a garnish.

The best bit about this soup is its texture - the bite of the peas and the soft dissolving chunks of pumpkin. You can squish some of the peas against the side of the pan if you prefer it to have a slightly smoother consistency. It's a thoroughly satisfying dish and I'm looking forward to having the leftovers already.

soup and mochi

2005-12-28T18:53:00.000Z

At lunch today my mother made a very traditional japanese New Year's food, which nevertheless I'd never had before. Mochi is a kind of rice cake that you get either fresh or dried - and traditionally is apparently eaten in soups around New Year. The dry stuff, which is what we had, looks like an inedibly rock-hard, dry square of fudge but then you put it in the oven or grill it, and it magically softens and puffs up, becoming something like a gooey ball of cheese with air inside it in texture, but obviously nothing like it in taste, which is a comforting toasted rice taste, a bit like the lovely sticky bits at the bottom of the pan when you burn it accidentally-on-purpose.

Altogether it looks quite strange - but is really delicious in soup, when you put it, a bit like a croute, in the bottom of the bowl before the rest of the soup is poured on. It is quite sticky and apparently, every year in the papers you hear about lots of old people who choke on their mochi.

Today we had it with a sort of Japanese variant soup with the strange furry potato-like things, carrots, tofu all diced, slivers of raw leek, ginger and fennel and little bits of toasted orange zest on top as a garnish. It was thoroughly heart-warming stuff before we set out for a good walk in the snowy fields. We didn't make our own mochi, of course, although I found lots of interesting links on my google search about how to make it and all the rituals. My mother bought it at Fresh & Wild...

turkey, turkey and more turkey

2005-12-27T22:49:00.000Z

Cooking with one's parents is always a difficult task, and for me one of the most taxing things about Christmas. I start off with all good intentions abou being a co-operative, silent helper, but the combination of that parental trait to always treat your offspring as though they are five with my generally bolshy kitchen persona is never a comfortable one.

I started off well, replacing any thought of Christmas presents with a basket full of food from London - cheeses from Neal's Yard (where I endured a 20 min long queue - why didn't I order in advance, given my office is literally above the shop?), Pierre Marcolini chocolate from Verde & Co (Jeanette Winterson's shop), coffee from Monmouth, potted shrimps from the market, oranges, pomegranates and sharon fruit from my local Bangladeshi grocers, and my mother's special request - the small furry potato-like vegetables whose name I know not, but which are common to both Bangladeshi and Japanese cooking. I even brought down one silly-but-actually-useful kitchen gadget for them - the mini Koala juicer for which I braved John Lewis on Oxford Street (better than Borough Market, surprisingly!)

But then, of course, I was incapable of doing anything else right. Being charged with helping make the stuffing for the turkey, I first of all took the approach of asking instructions for absolutely everything (how big to chop the onions, how many leeks to use) but even that couldn't protect me from being micro-managed over the production of breadcrumbs in the blender, and ticked off that I hadn't chopped up the apricots fast enough to add them at precisely the right point (not my fault! the crusader inwardly screams - as I had to chop up all the vegetables for HIS batch of stuffing as well).

Then, the next day it was my potato peeling technique that came in for unnecessary scrutiny. Then, I had a go at him for changing the traditional Christmas starter to something that I thought inappropriate and inadequate in quantity (two quails eggs per person, if you please. Two? at Christmas?). By the time that crusade had reached a grumpy truce (after obligatory Christmas door-slamming) it was time to eat...

Since then, the rest of the holiday has (touch wood) gone fairly peacefully as regards kitchen politics. I've basically tried to stay well clear, merely eating myself silly and not commenting on the slightest thing. Not even when he added coriander leaves to stewed mushrooms at dinner today (I have strong feelings about the correct use of coriander) or his (to my mind) over-wasteful trimming of the turkey leftovers.

Two opinionated cooks. One kitchen. Best shut up and keep munching.

After America: Coffee

2005-12-14T20:08:00.000Z

I just realised that I haven't posted a thing on this blog since I returned from the States. Today I just got an urge to write about one little food-related thing and perhaps it is apt, for my first post-USA post, that it should be on American coffee.

When I returned to England, I had a coffee soon after and it made me go crazy. I hadn't drunk a coffee that strong (and it was only a good filter coffee, not even an espresso) for so long, I got minor palpitations and felt rather light-headed. No wonder those early explorers were excited to discover this new drug.

So I didn't drink any coffee at all for perhaps the first month, instead becoming a very Englihs tea-drinker, with a cup every couple of hours some days. But as my life got busier and I got more tired, I started to consider the amount of caffeine in tea to be a bit inadequate, and began thinking about coffee.

I started having the odd filter from the wonderful coffee house just below my office - but they almost always remained half-drunk although I stopped feeling light-headed from this and they certainly worked, in terms of my alertness. Then, the other day I went to a meeting, was offered coffee and got crap instant coffee - weak and watery. I loved it.

I have a confession to make. I actually like American coffee better than the European stuff. Today, working at home, I've made two pots so far of watery coffee to glug down, like a continuous and mild drip, while I work. It's really great. I feel like a foodie heretic and I'm waiting for y'all to burn me at the stake.

Diner food

2005-09-11T19:10:00.000Z

On diners

On the road trip, we ate at a lot of diners. A lot of hashbrowns and eggs for breakfast, a lot of hamburgers for lunch. Following are some highly biased reviews of some of the principal food chains you may encounter along the interstates of America, and some of the other establishments that you may find yourself turning to if you, like us, follow the fairly well-trodden road-trip routes...

Chains

Waffle House. My favorite of all the chain diners. Others don't always agree. But for hashbrowns (tip: order them extra-crispy) and eggs, and coffee - at 4am drunk (think the Tom Waits song 'Eggs and Sausage') or at 10am hungover, or in the middle of the afternoon when the place is empty, Waffle House rules. The fantastic retro black-and-yellow decor, the open-plan allowing you to see the short-order cooks and allowing your waitress to not have to come round to the other side of the counter, just leaning over to pour your coffee or set your plates, the red padded banquettes, the tiles, the jukebox...I [heart} Waffle House.

I was shocked to find that Waffle Houses don't exist in the North, or the West Coast. So if you too are a fan of WH, be aware that for a lot of your road trip you will have to turn to the following instead...Also, check out the Waffle House Shrine and the blog of a Waffle House grill cook/. Awesome.

Perkins. This is a chain we found throughout the Mid-West/Plains areas. Pretty good. Decent value. Has pretensions to being a 'real' restaurant (you have to wait to be seated, they have carpets). Is pretty similar to Denny's (see below) but a little more 'upmarket' - has the same enormous pile of pancakes that comes with a breakfast combo. Their fries were surprisingly good - visibly related to potatoes - and we had a Perkins dinner that was also pretty tasty, for chain restaurant fare.

Denny's. Reliable, if soulless. I say that because I have an aversion to their graphic design. Decent breakfast combos in huge portions.

Wendy's. Onto the hamburgers. I don't know why people rate Wendy's. Their hamburgers are always super-dried out, as a result of being so thin, and they are kinda too expensive and small. Not my burger of choice, that's for sure.

Sonic. Like Waffle House, I have a weakness for Sonic that is nothing to do with their food and all to do with their retro design identity, the fact that they are 'America's Drive-In' and the novelty, to a Brit, of sitting in your car and that being called a restaurant. Also influenced by the beautiful photo Cynthia took of Lucy leaning out of the car window at her first visit to Sonic. I feel like Sonic is Southern, too. Didn't see many up north.

Hardees. I actually think Hardees is OK for a hamburger. They are fairly thick and juicy and do the job pretty well.

Krystal. Never, ever, ever eat a Krystalburger. Not only do they sound like a horrendous fusion of Nazism, methamphetamine and fast food, these small, square, burgers look as artificial as they are - which is a bad thing. I prefer my mystery meat and sweet bun to at least pretend to look like food.

McDonalds and Burger King. I don't visit these, for ethical reasons. Yes, I know, my ethics is totally flawed if I got to Sonic/Hardees, but still, allow me this one little concession...

Non chain restaurants

The Red Baron, Alpine, Wyoming. This place was kinda miserable, but wonderful. It was a grey drizzly day. They have a great logo and the teenage waitresses had great branded hoodies. They do a weird thing called a pastramiburger, which is a cheeseburger with pastrami on top. I like drive-ins, just cos, and I like smalltowns with teenagers with smalltown attitude: this place had both, so despite it being sort-of awful, I liked it a lot. You might come across this place if you drove south from Jackson Hole.

Mom's Cafe, Salina, Utah. Wonderful, real small-town diner. Famous, judging by the pictures on the wall signed by all sorts of minor celebs. Waitresses have great uniforms. We had full-on breakfast here, before tackling the 100 mile stretch of no services between here and Green River (see below). They did goood hashbrowns. A little pricey, but that's what you get for a locally famous breakfast spot.

Moab Diner, Moab, Utah. Good black-and-white decor. Way more 'diner' than all the other pseudo-new age joints in Moab, which I thought was a horrible town. Food was actually not as good as I thought it would be - their 'special' chicken sandwich was pretty much like grilled chicken. But we were grateful for diner food and not overpriced karmic salads, and they did salad as well, which pleased one of my companions who isn't quite as hooked on greasy American food as I am. If you are also stuck in Moab, just keep going till the end of town and you'll find it.

Ben's Diner, Green River, Utah. See picture below. Good Mexican-American diner food - huevos rancheros, etc. What this translates to in practice is white waitresses and Mexican cooks. Pretty damn tasty, if you ask me, and I love the signage and retro decor. If you are on I-70 going to Canyonlands/the Arches, drop by here - it's the first town (or last town, depending if you are coming/going) after the 100 mile stretch of no services after Salina.

Bette's Oceanview Diner. I'm not sure that I should include this as it's not really a 'diner'. I.e. it's a trendy hipster hangout, with all the retro fixtures and a kitch-upmarket menu. Specials include their pancakes, and fritatta, which just about sums it up. But they did do scrapple, and it was the first time I had this, so I guess it gets included. It's in West Berkeley, its expensive, it's really nice in a guilty bourgeois way.

Judging by this list, Utah definitely won out on diners. Weird. But of course, I haven't included the Alabama joints that I know and love - barbecue shacks, catfish joints, gas station diners....and writing all this has made me crave a hamburger! Mmm...where to now, on a Sunday afternoon...

2005-09-11T18:05:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of posts -again. The truth is, I was planning a good post on food while camping, as well as a post on diners, both based on my recent roadtrip, but at the end of the trip I got caught up with all the Katrina news and food seemed, well, a little bit of a self-indulgent thing to be writing about. But seize the day, really, and why not talk about food? so here's the first of two travel-related posts.

On the art of the campfire grill

I just recently drove, with two friends, coast to coast. We did a fair bit of camping, but we were determinedly minimalist with our arrangements - no gas-fired grills for us. Added to that the fact that one of our number has been gradually recovering from a non-meat-eating state to a carnivorous diet, and had never eaten a steak before...the scene was set for a number of epic, and comic, campfire grill experiences.

The first one was pretty well-organised. At the Badlands National Park, the store outside the gates had a very limited range of food to offer us, but we found frozen pork chops, sweetcorn, potatoes and bread (as well as salt and pepper - at this stage we didn't even have those condiments) and we had some apples and cherry tomatoes in the cooler as well. Our light-the-bag charcoal did the trick, the chops defrosted quickly on the hood of the jeep, we grilled apple slices to go with the pork and wrapped the potatoes in foil to baked among the coals (not done in time for dinner, but great for breakfast the next morning). All very civilised, sitting with nightlights at the National Parks' rather well-designed little picnic-table-plus-shade shelter, we had the grilled corn for a starter, pork and apple sandwiches, grilled tomatoes, and chocolate to finish...

Next episode - the Wal-Mart in Cody, Wyoming, just outside Yellowstone, furnished us with a surprisingly good-looking piece of beef with which we intended to introduce the steak-novice to the joys of rare, grilled beef. Alongside which we purchased some salad, zucchini, more bread and potatoes, ham and tomatoes, and the all-important mustard, with which we concocted good ham sarnies for lunch to make a change from the never-ending hamburger routine. But our planned beef feast was foiled by the weather. No sooner had we built a rather magnificent campfire and put our foil-wrapped potatoes in the coals to cook, than the heavens opened and we had to retreat to the car to drink beer and try to wait it out - a futile effort as it proceeded to rain almost constantly for the next twelve hours. We gave up, and baked potatoes with fizzy beer does not make for the most satisfying of suppers when you are freezing in the middle of the forest.

The next effort at cooking the beef, the following day by the Great Salt Lake in Utah, was scarcely more promising. A beautiful location, but horrendously windy, and our fire refused to light in any meaningful way. The park warden drove by in her little buggy and informed us that we had been 'having a picnic' for an hour and a half - and we hadn't even started to cook anything on the grill yet. Finally we got some sliced zucchini on, and then the beef. As the heat was so low, we left the meat in one big hunk to semi-roast rather than sliced as individual steaks - and then sliced it into strips afterwards to eat, dipped in grainy mustard. We managed to keep it rare on the inside and deliciously crusted on the outside. Happiness...

Then came birthday barbecuing in Canyonlands, Utah. The grocery store in Moab showed that we had entered a different world - they sold things like fish. It all worked out pretty damn well, with the fire lighting successfully and the food getting into gourmet (rather than slavering carnivore) territory - grilled trout with dill, potatoes, zucchini, salad, and Lindt chocolate for afters. Mmmm....And you even get a photo.

After this return to success on the fire-making and the food front, we started to get a bit more pro. Hell, we even bought a knife to cut food with, rather than using our penknives. Next camping was in Yosemite, where again, they food store was Californian in reach. We went for grilled spicy sausages (the smoked ones, so we didn't have to worry about them being underdone in the dark), baked sweet potatoes, grilled and skinned red peppers, spinach salad, and bread. All of which was doubly good because we had left-overs - which meant we got sausage, red pepper and sweet potato sandwiches for lunch the next day - a truly gorgeous combo if you ever have the urge.

From then on it was up-and-away, despite one thwarted camping plan for near El Paso (the heavens descending again). It must have been the curse of trying to cook beef again, but it did mean a lovely lunchtime grilling session the next day, where an innovation included slicing potatoes very finely and laying them between pieces of foil to saute/steam - a way quicker way of getting potatoes, and tasty to boot. We also grilled out on the beach in California - pork chops and apple again, this time also with sweet potatoes and salad, and marshmallow smores....ahhhh, finally! We had been missing the marshmallow experience.

And the final grilling of the trip came on the Gulf coast at the far eastern corner of Texas. It went perfectly. We had grilled pork, the new-innovative potatoes, grilled asparagus and zucchini, and two bottles of amazing wine from kind friends at Ridge.

Amazing, what you can cook with just oil, salt and pepper, and mustard. And everything tastes so very good, cooked so simply over a charcoal grill.

Scallops

2005-08-02T02:18:00.000Z

Oh dear. I feel like I have been terribly neglectful of this blog over the last couple of months. I'm sorry. I promise to post more often. Well, I will certainly because I am at the start of a six-week road trip all over the States so am going to be doing a lot of eating. And so I will write about it...and if any of you lovely readers who still actually read this have any suggestions about where/what to eat, any little secret places, please let me know! the route is meandering up from Savannah, GA (where I am tonight) to NYC to get my friends who are coming with me, then pretty much straight over to Berkeley, driving fast, then a slow meander back to Alabama via as many places as we can fit in.

Well, today was officially the first day of the road trip, and I did some pretty good eating.

Lunch was in Phenix City, AL, where I got mildly lost and then was quite pleased because it meant that I ate some really good barbecue. Believe it or not, I had not eaten barbecue yet since I got back a week ago, which is pretty amazing. Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the Smokey Pig, really good Boston butts (you can see them slowly smoking away behind the counter, and the smell of the wood in the parking lot tells you all you need to know about the quality before you even walk inside) which can be chopped, sliced or shredded as you like, good sauce (not sweet), and they put pickle and a good un-mayonnaisey slaw in their sandwiches. And they don't do fries! wow. But they do a mean Brunswick stew, baked beans, potato salad and other sides like that. The building is suitably low-key, really local, obviously very popular and well-loved. Just what you want from a local bbq joint.

Dinner was here in Savannah, at the Bistro Savannah which I passed by on my stroll around town and which was (I'm so sad) mentioned in my Rough Guide. Actually, I really wanted to eat at Garibaldi's, which is meant to be the best seafood in town and looked that way when I peeked in the window, but it was also very starched-tablecloths and I was alone, scruffy-looking and really didn't want to have to endure being eyeballed for my weirdness. I nearly got cross about that, thinking 'why shouldn't a single slightly scruffy girl be able to eat in a very smart restaurant' but then I thought again and really, I wouldn't eat alone and scruffy-looking in a lot of smart London restaurants which I love, not because I would think that they would look askance, but I would succumb to self-consciousness in front of the other diners. The exception is of course our beloved St John (either one) where I can eat on my own and feel utterly at ease.

Anyway, I digress...but my dinner was, well, I guess pretty OK. That's rather damning faint praise which I don't really mean. The place was nicely decorated, the staff were lovely and not at all put out by me wanting to eat on my own, the food was fine. Actually, my main course (seared scallops with green beans, mashed potato and saffron beurre blanc) did surprise me with its quality, mainly due to the scallops. They were incredibly huge (no sliced-in-half cheating here), very tasty and perfectly cooked - caramelised and a little crispy on the outside and juicy, nearly raw within. The beans and all the rest was just OK but the scallops did make me very happy. My house salad which I had as a starter was fine, but way too small. Guys, salad leaves are cheap, if you are so generous as to give me such enormous scallops, surely you can give me a few more leaves...

My wine choice was appalling, but it was totally my fault. Why did I decide to get a glass of Californian riesling here? I know why - I was hot and wanted that gorgeous, crisp, clean riesling taste to quench my thirst, but I forgot that I wasn't in a top NY/London restaurant and if they had riesling by the glass it was obviously not going to be any good. 'Nuff said. I peeked at the next-door table's food and it looked pretty good too. I don't think it was anything to really write home about (they sell themselves as Zagat's 'best place in town' or something - surely a mistake or it was a long time ago) but if you are in town and need to eat reasonably it does the job. They do have some decent wine by the bottle, I saw. Price-wise it's not that cheap (I paid $34.40 without tip for 2 courses, 1 glass wine and coffee) but I suspect that the horrible tacky waterfront places might charge you the same for infinitely worse food and service. You could have chosen a little cheaper options too, and the salad was way overpriced for what I got - the other starters looked much better value.

Right, tomorrow is another day!

Mustard and mutton

2005-07-11T13:18:00.000Z

My father always used to tease me because whenever we had cold leftover roast lamb I would always eat it with mustard. He used to say 'Mustard with mutton is the sign of a glutton'.

Well, I am still a glutton. Yesterday the boy cooked a most marvellously delicious leg of lamb for dinner (us and a couple of friends. He's the one who is good at cooking roast things, I'm useless at it.) Today I am mooching around the flat trying to work and eating cold lamb for lunch with Coleman's mustard, just like in my childhood. Heavenly.

2005-07-06T14:36:00.000Z

Just to let you all know, that my good friend and long-time fellow food adventurerBen Yeoh and I have started a new blog, reviewing restaurants, food shops and other things in London (mostly). It's called Food & Life. Please check it out - it doesn't look very pretty yet but it will do when I get a bit of time to do some designing on it! but there's already some content and much more coming soon. This blog will still continue (yes, even though I've been useless recently) with my home cooking and the rants and raves that I can't pretend are part of a review...

tea and cake

2005-06-29T04:47:00.000Z

Today I indulged a long-standing request from certain American friends to show them what a 'real English tea-party' is like. So, I gave a tea-party like no-one actually does any more...Since when has anyone in England actually had a tea-party that includes cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sandwich cake and jam tarts? Oh, but it was sooo fun...Yes, three types of sandwiches, scones, and the above-mentioned cake and tarts. I don't think I've eaten a jam tart since I was about five years old. They were good. So retro. So what you made when you had a doll's tea-party as a child.

Altogether the whole affair was like a kid's drawing of a house with a door, three windows, pitched roof and smoke coming out of the chimney - houses don't really look like that, ever, but it's so fun to play dress-up and pretend that's what life is really like. The only gripe I had was that my part of the US of A doesn't sell the kind of bread you really need to make those little sandwiches. But it was really funny to lay out such an absurdly elaborate spread for absolutely no reason and also, now I get to eat cake for breakfast for the next few days. (Which is a habit that reminds me of staying with Daniel in Israel, because for Shabbat breakfast there we always eat cake.)

The only recipe I'm going to write down here is for the scones, because I had to email my mother and ask for her recipe and I know that I have asked her for it in the past at least three times and somehow managed to lose it every time. So, from the horses mouth:

1) 8 oz self raising flour
2) about 2 oz vegetable margarine (which roughly is 2 of our serving spoonful)
3) one big or 2 small nice as possible apples (of course we use ours, but this time I had hard quite nice organic apples which I used) Chop to quite small pieces. I sometimes put them rough chopping the magimix, but yesterday I chopped, thinking that you might not have that sort of equipment.
4) Milk [she actually wrote 'yogurt (I use sheep's one)' which is a sort of weird genetic habit to do with my dairy allergies, but just use milk]
5) pinch of salt and may be a desert spoonful of sugar (I don't use it at all sugar, since we expect to have it with hedgerow jam or whatever)
and 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon
6) sesame seeds
7) handful, I mean palmful currants or raisins or even sultanas if you can't find any other ones or nothing if they are not handy....

start by turning the oven to VERY hot temperature, something like 450/500. This is essential for any scone making, it's got to be very hot.
put 1 in a mixing bowl with pinch of salt (people sieve those to fluff up, if you have a sieve) and cinnamon, add the margarine, rubbing in as you know you do the same way when making crumble top. Then add 3, 7 and about 5 fluid oz or half our mug amount of [milk]. Now, the dough is not very hard at all. kind of soft dough but not runny, you just have to see it is just about handlable, so careful about the water amount.

You sprinkle the flat surface with some flour, and you put out the soft dough on, I think you must have seen me doing, I make a longish log shape, and cut into 2 long things, and cut from the edge one by one and make whatever size you like, Then put them out on oiled (olive oil, margarine) and floured baking tray. Brush them with leftover [milk], or beaten egg, or olive oil (this is for sesame seed to hang on the top) and sprinkle the seed on top. Put them in HOT oven about 10 minutes.

These apple scones are the best thing ever. You will notice that the recipe is a bit japan-ified with the sesame seeds but that makes them really good. Cheese scones are another variation - replace the apple with grated cheese - and smell just amazing when they come out of the oven. They are totally nostalgic of my parents' kitchen in the winter. Sigh.

Tea-parties are fun. I have photos but due to continued absence of digital camera they will be posted later when I get the film developed...

2005-06-28T01:18:00.000Z

Santos has probably thought I got drowned in the Black Warrior along with my little black book. Because to my eternal shame, I have been holding on to it for over two months when I was meant to write in it and pass it on in two weeks. Bad Hana.

But now...I've done it, it is scanned in and will be in tomorrow's post off to Italy. Hooray. And here it is, for those of you who are curious.