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.

mackerel, and homemade pesto

2005-06-20T02:45:00.000Z

Fish...ah, fish...

One of the things I can't get hold of here at all is fish. So when I go out of town to somewhere with Big Shops I get very excited and buy lots of fish and stick it in the freezer because I never have time to cook it just then. And then I usually don't get round to cooking it for ages because I never have the foresight to take it out of the freezer in time to defrost for supper. And thus it was with the two mackerel I bought at the temple of Whole Foods in New Orleans.

Finally, however, on Friday I cooked my two mackerel. Now, I know they weren't at their best being frozen, and also I really wanted a proper grill to cook them on but I don't have one, so I roasted them instead. But still...they were good. I ate the first one as it was, simple with lots of lemon and a tomato salad, and I made the second one into fishcakes with mashed potato and some finely chopped onion. Yum. Fishcakes are good. They keep, too, and do mature a little with age (in a good way) so today when I had the leftovers, heated up in the oven, they were the perfect panacea to the rather alcoholic overindulgence that had occurred this weekend.

Then later today I made a little batch of pesto. I have a little basil plant, you see, which also journeyed back from Whole Foods with me. I can't stand shop-bought pesto (it's on the level of the shop-bought mayonnaise hate) but the real thing is obviously like manna from heaven. I remember the very first time I ever had real pesto, about four years ago, and realising that pesto is actually meant to be bright emerald green, not that puke colour that it is in those little jars. And that it's meant to be so intenesely scented that it practically knocks you out and you only need a spoonful to coat a whole pan of pasta.

(And yes, I have pine nuts here, and real pecorino to put in it...)

cabbage salad

2005-06-11T00:38:00.000Z

I wish I wasn't so forgetful. It's all too easy for me to forget about certain ingredients that I really like and to think that my meals have become rather boring, without realising that for some reason I'd just completely forgotten that things exist out there that I like to eat but haven't bought for a while.

Today, I had even forgotten about something I had bought from the shops - a cabbage. I really love cabbage. Someone had better keep reminding me of this, though, as the humble, self-effacing vegetable has a habit of disappearing from my diet. This particular cabbage I bought a few days ago because I had bought some real sausages at Whole Foods in New Orleans and I remembered that cabbage and sausages go rather well together. Then I put it in my fridge, ate nothing but toast and pasta for a few days and forgot about it...until today I got out those sausages, wondered why I didn't have anything to go with them, rooted around fruitlessly among old potatoes and turnips, and then a little lightbulb went off above my head.

Ah, the absolute bliss of that first mouthful of finely shredded raw cabbage, tossed with lots of lemon juice, a little olive oil, salt and a sprinkling of caraway seeds. I intended only to have a taster and eat the rest with the sausages (which as I write are sizzling in the pan) but it tasted too good and I have just polished the whole lot off. Welcome back, cabbage.

sweetcorn and a bacon sandwich

2005-06-06T19:23:00.000Z

It's good to know that maybe I'm an authority on something - someone searched for "my mayonnaise got runny" on Yahoo and got me!

potato salad and corn-on-the-cob

2005-05-23T01:40:00.000Z

Post pig-roast and all the accompanying business, and now that I am living alone in the vastness of Beacon Street, my culinary habits are returning to their idosyncratic norm. No flatmate to look aghast when I start chopping up fish heads, as I did last night, to make a fish soup (does no-one know that the cheeks are the best bit?) No-one to have to share my freshly made pesto with. No-one to think I'm strange to eat potato salad and corn-on-the-cob for dinner (no meat? what?)

I'm sorry, but despite the prominence of the dish in their culinary culture, American's don't know how to make potato salad. Mostly what they make is mush. What's the deal with the semi-mashed potatoes, the sour cream and mayonnaise, the weird other bits and pieces that they insist on putting in the 'salad'? It's definitely one subject that my food fascism comes out in full force on. Potato salad should have decent-sized chunks of slightly floury potato (each one probably big enough for two mouthfuls), should have real, homemade mayonnaise, and should not have anything else in it apart from optional fresh chopped parsley, perhaps a little bit of cripsy bacon and maybe some freshly boiled peas. Other stuff is definitely starting towards a different dish and one that probably should not include the mayonnaise.

You see, for me, potato salad is all about honoring mayonnaise. I can't stand the shop-bought stuff almost to the point of nausea, but there's few things I love better than home-made, butter-yellow, mayonnaise, a teensy bit bitter from the olive oil (a bitterness that is perfectly offset by the sweetness of potatoes) and sharp and fresh from lemon juice. There are family traditions, and this is one...although it didn't stop my father and myself having a full-blown row about the making of mayonnaise one summer lunchtime, just before our guests arrived to find us in stony silence at opposite ends of the kitchen. (This experience briefly jinxed my mayonnaise-making skills when in my father's presence - for some reason, every time he was around it curdled embarrassingly and I had to start again, which is perhaps the nearest I've got to experiencing the embarrassment of losing an erection.)

There are days when I will dream up an entire menu just so I have the excuse to make mayo. Y'all out there, it's not hard. Just get an egg yolk at room temperature, add a tiny bit of olive oil, whisk vigorously, add a little bit more, whisk, and so forth just going slow until you've got around a cupful off the stuff, which if it is stiff and not runny means you have passed the danger of curdling and can start adding more oil in larger dollops. At this stage you can add a little lemon juice if you want - it makes the thing looser and easier to whisk - or you can wait till the end to add it to taste. (This was the issue we argued about, and now, dear father, aren't you glad that I'm grown up enough to allow my readers both options!)

A single yolk is enough to make a good amount of mayo. Just keep adding the oil and reminding yourself that as it's olive oil it's not all that bad for you and it will soak up all those free radicals racing around your body. Or something. At the end season to taste, add some mustard if that's your thing, or the herbs. Then enjoy...

Spaghetti with tomato sauce, fresh basil and real parmesan

2005-05-13T00:35:00.000Z

Again, a lack of posts for which apologies, but for once this is not to do with a lack of decent food...I've been eating unusually well this last week thanks to a visitor from far-flung places who stayed overnight in Atlanta and knew what to buy there for me...so from DeKalb farmers market came a cornucopia of delicious produce which we devoured with glee.

I'd forgotten how good real shrimp could be - grey, uncooked ones sauted with a bit of garlic and chilli. And real mozzarella, and tomatoes that actually taste of something. Fresh goats cheese. Pak choi. Real lettuce. Kiwi fruit. Wine all the way from France, Europe. And also, it was so good to have people in town who actually care about food. So, smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfasts outside in the Alamo, picnics by the river, proper dinners in Beacon Street. Justine and Tom, you probably didn't think any of this was particularly civilised or abnormal, but it was a very long way from my usual solo and gone-to-seed life of snatched breakfasts and dinners, like tonight, with my laptop.

spaghetti with spinach, garlic and fresh grape tomatoes

2005-05-02T02:52:00.000Z

I realised tonight while cooking that it really has been a long time since I actually made myself a meal. Cheese on toast, or miso soup to cure my bout of fever doesn't count. I started to cook...wow, a couple of weeks ago, but got scuppered half way through my risotto by a last-minute dinner invite from a neighbouring Rural Studio-er. I still made my risotto as a side dish and brought it along, but somehow that's not the same a sitting down to a meal that you planned out from start to finish. So tonight's simple spaghetti somehow felt good, especially accompanied by a bottle of Volpaia Chianti that I had saved from a previous Atlanta trip for just such a moment...

breakfast

2005-04-28T14:28:00.000Z

Why when I go to an airport, do I always eat something really wrong and random? I perpetually seem unable to make a rational decision in those circumstances.

When leaving Alabama I'm always craving something I haven't eaten for a long time, and for some reason, the last couple of trips this has meant eating Chinese food in the airport, which is a really bad idea. Both times it has been disgusting. Why do I continue to do this to myself? and on the way back this time, I chose the worst possible sandwich from a range that contained some perfectly reasonable options. Why, oh why, did I go for the 'Cuban pork loin'? in this case, pork loin was simulated by ham+ chicken (I think) and some seasoning, which apparently was meant to evade my notice and trick my tastebuds into believing that it really was the loin of a pig.

Other eating adventures...getting to eat at the River Cafe twice in London, which had me cursing my damn jetlag/lack of sleep as it meant that my stomach felt somewhat over-faced; queasy and not capable of absorbing the amount of food I wanted to give it. Sad but true. I mean, the first time in three months that I eat at a world-class restaurant and what do I order? A salad. And only a salad. It was a beautiful salad, maybe one of the best ever, but still...I did better when we came back after work for a bellini and some antipasti, getting to nibble away at squid, beef carpaccio, asparagus and gulls eggs, and other delicacies. And I got to eat some beautiful cheese and ham of the sort that cannot be found for 300 miles round here. Yum.

I was amazed to see that the River Cafe was not full at lunchtime on a Monday. What are all you London-dwellers doing? They have a lunch deal that is 2 courses for 16 quid - an absolute bargain! Get down there.

pepper jelly and cream cheese

2005-04-10T20:42:00.000Z

The only place around here that really attempts to champion local food is the Thomaston Rural Heritage Centre, where the Rural Studio has, over the last three years, been building a fantastic new base for them. Their most famous products are their amazing, world-beating barbeque and their pepper jelly, which is made from green peppers grown in their own garden. The Rural Studio project for them includes a state-of-the-art new kitchen to make all these things in, as well as a cafe space where they hope to both feed the community and provide classes in cooking healthy, locally available produce.

Last night was the 'grand opening' of the new building (despite the fact that, in true RS style, it's not quite finished yet) and we were treated to a feast of not-very-Alabama food cooked under the supervision of the wonderful Mrs Kardous, mother of a student on the team and so devoted to the project that she has driven down from North Carolina every weekend for the last few months to help out with it, and to whom the gallery space in the new centre has been dedicated. Being of Syrian extraction, she concocted beautiful hummus and other dips, meatballs, and about a dozen varieties of fantastic sweets, a mix between the Southern and the Syrian (A sort of baclava with pecan nuts? Mmm! And we had the barbeque, of course.

We were all given jars of pepper jelly and watermelon rind pickles to take home, alongside the supreme marketing ploy, coozies emblazoned with 'Eat Pepper Jelly'. [A coozie (spelling??) aka huggie, is, for Europeans, something made out of foam that you put around your beer can/bottle to keep it cool.] So today I sampled the pepper jelly in the traditional way, with cream cheese (well, mine was a soft goats cheese, not the Philadelphia that everyone here would swear by) on top of a toasted bagel and I can tell y'all, it's pretty damn good. Actually strangely addictive. You can buy it on the internet via their website.

The next ambition of the indefatigable Gayle Etheridge, who runs the centre, is to start up a co-op grocery store next to the farmer's market shelter that the RS built a few years back. For the sake of all our diets, let's hope it happens...

2005-04-05T23:56:00.000Z

I've been eating rather well over the last week as a result of the influx of European visitors with refined tastes to redneck West Alabama. A trip to Atlanta airport with Quentin inevitably turned into an excuse to eat at a real, good restaurant with real wine, and then a trip to DeKalb Farmers Market in order to stock up on food for the parents, who I knew would not be content with eating at the Mexican and Buck's but would require cooking for in some way. Then they arrived laden with food from California - real cheese with oatcakes to eat it with, herbs, sourdough bread, organic salads, and best of all, a gift of half a dozen bottles of Ridge Wine from their previous hosts in the US of A. (These are the times I thank my lucky stars that my father is in the wine business.)

So we had real meals with more than one course, including that precious commodity of lamb (impossible to buy in this state), and real wine and real cheese and real chocolate with our coffee afterwards. Actually, we ate pretty simply, but for me it was an unusual civility to have meals with equally food-prioritising souls.

Then over to Butch's where him, his father and other friends had been cooking up an absolute feast of real Southern cooking. His father had done fantastic barbeque ribs and chicken and collards, Kim had made cornbread with crackling, Jessie had made great real baked beans, oatmeal bread, her grandmother's potato salad and peach cobbler, and Butch...well, he'd somehow gotten out of doing any cooking....But a feast it was, and only slightly sad because my foodloving father had taken ill (I blame my own cooking) and was holed up in bed unable to stuff himself like I did.

Then, back to the backwoods and it was straight to my bandmate Ted's twins' christening party, which was a remarkably upper-crust affair, complete with rather good catered buffet food and Bloody Marys. So I made sure to fill myself up well (staying long enough to get both lunch and dinner of leftovers) and then was donated a bag of leftovers to take home. Damn, Mondays are hard when lunch consists of smoked salmon with toasted bagels, baked ham and tomato salad with a Bloody Mary to wash it down.

bacon and eggs for breakfast

2005-03-27T16:17:00.000Z

Exciting food news this week - I have a teapot! I had been completely unable to find a teapot here so my kind friend brought me one from England....I'm in tea-drinking heaven.

Also, my little black book has arrived. I'm excited. I even took a picture of it with my friend's camera (mine is temporarily non-functional) but my new wireless connection has some weird firewall issues going on which has stopped me uploading it, so you'll just have to wait...

fajitas and dos equis

2005-03-22T02:44:00.000Z

I was sitting on Fajita Monday at the local Mexican pondering the lack of subject material for my food blog. It's not that I haven't been eating, it's not that I've been eating particularly badly, it's perhaps that I've been in one of those phases where I dont' eat anything that is either so spectacularly awful or so blazingly fantastic that I feel the need to rush home and write about it.

I've been making more lunches for myself, to eat in the sunny back yard with my rooster and duckling pecking around, but they've been mostly along the lines of a simple spaghetti, leftovers, noodles and miso soup, or something-on-toast. I've eaten out, but nowhere that I haven't already mentioned several times. I did have very good barbecue twice recently - at Thomaston as the reward for lifting about a hundred poop logs [RS nickname for large railway sleeper-type objects made out of compressed household waste) into place, and at Butch's Doonanny where his father barbecued about ten Boston Butts for eight hours and made his own special sauce. I've marvelled at a few strange things in the world of American food and even eaten deep-fried frogs legs (they weren't very good) along with catfish at one riverside fish place, and I ate at the one Japanese restaurant within a fifty mile radius, which was also not very good but made a welcome change from the catfish.

So my eating patterns have become homely and uneventful. But next week I get to go to Atlanta to pick up a friend from the airport. And that means a visit to the scary-but-alluring DeKalb Farmers Market. Hell yeah...

breakfast miso

2005-03-14T01:55:00.000Z

What a lovely surprise to get a package all the way from Guam with not only the promised CD from Santos but also a package of breakfast miso soup sachets, real ones with no English writing on them. Yummy, and just what I needed to assuage the hangover, no effort required. They have little pieces of dried tofu, seaweed and little dried spring onion rings in them, in case you were wondering. Thanks Santos!

it was one of those days when only spaghetti and tomato sauce will meet the comfort food quotient

2005-02-25T02:07:00.000Z

It's amazing what you can send through the mail and have arrive intact. I got a package of miso paste today - the real stuff, not the dried version. I'm excited.

motherly comfort food

2005-02-23T03:33:00.000Z

Somehow, with the kind of day it's been, I was craving homely Japanese food and with the recent food packages from my mother, I was in a position to indulge...simple stuff but somehow very nostalgic and exactly what I wanted. A salad of seaweed and thinly sliced cucumber, pan-fried tofu with ginger, garlic and lots of spring onions, dressed brown rice with nori to roll it up in with the tofu in a sort of improvised hand roll. Somehow, very nourishing and soothing, yet with the right amount of almost spicy freshness in the salad and the spring onions to zing up my taste buds. And followed with choclate from todays food parcel.

[Today was the zenith so far of motherly parcels - I received three, thank you mother!! chocolate, tea, gloves, lucky cat charm and a book of poetry which I read at lunch while munching on my take-out rib plate from Mustang Oil in my back garden.]

2005-02-20T23:16:00.000Z

On things I don't like to eat

The theme for this month's IMBB, set by Carlo of My Latest Supper, is things that you hate to eat/others hate to eat. Foods that are taboo, disgusting to one culture though delicacies in another, personal hates. Although untraditional by IMBB standards, this is an inspired topic - food as cultural icon in our multi-cultural age, the ultimate expression of our personality when we are all dressing the same, listening to the same music and so on. We all know someone who hates mushrooms or spinach, who forbids themselves to eat pork while happily getting drunk and stoned, who seeks out their traditional delicacies when away from home with a zeal unparalleled in any other aspect of their life. And my particular food hates, my food fascism, is at the heart of what I consider 'real food' and why I continue my love affair with cooking and eating. I am totally, voraciously omnivorous, with no body part or bug too disgusting that I've balked; yet there are certain things that I have never been able to bring myself to eat.

Allergies. I used to be allergic (or so I was assured by my parents and various doctors) to anything coming from a cow, milk and meat. This was apparently an inherited trait from my Japanese mother, who also has the typically Asian low tolerance for most alcohols (which I luckily did not inherit. My father's genes stood firm in that respect.)

While as a small child I am sure this allergy was probably real, I did not experiment much to find out if it was or not. Apart from the odd bar of milk chocolate on the sly, or biscuits containing whey powder, I didn't posit any serious tests as I was assured by my parents that the one time they had, as a baby, mistakenly fed me cow's cheese, the results wwere so horrific that I would certainly not want to try it again. The thing that I did somewhat empirically test my reaction to were the E numbers in sweets, and these can still bring me out in hot flushes, rashes and itches.

However, on reaching adulthood, I've tested myself much more, realising that there are many potentially delicious things out there for me to eat. I can now say that I am not at all allergic to beef, and I am hardly allergic at all to butter, milk and cream. I adore buttery croissants, creme brulee and creme caramel, and ice-cream.

But still, the smell of butter on hot toast, the thought of eating cow's cheese, milk in tea or cream on strawberries makes me feel absolutely nauseous. It's a visceral reaction to these ingredients when in an unadulterated form that I can't stomach at all. So although sometimes I force myself to eat some of these when in a situation that I can't really get out of (I've trained myself not to gag at buttered toast, for example, when I forget to tell the waitress at the greasy spoon to leave it unbuttered) the lump of cow's cheese is the one I have yet to conquer. I think this is because cheese was always meant to be the thing that made me most sick - the concentrated raw lactose bringing on an almost instant reaction like those I knew from eating bright green sweets. My friends tell me how much I'm missing by not eating lumps of Montgomery cheddar, and I wish I could order late-night pizza like everyone else. Though, when I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras exactly this situation (the late-night pizza) came up and I was starving, so resolutely ate my way through two slices, promising myself to stop if I felt the slightest symptoms of a rash. Nothing happened. It tasted OK, thanks to the blandness of commercial 'mozzarella'. So maybe I can start curing myself of that phobia too.

Processed food. As a result of having very food-conscious parents, I've always hated most processed food. Things like ketchup, salad cream, salad dressing out of a bottle or bottled mayonnaise make me want to retch. Ditto many processed meats (fake ham etc) and pretty much anything that comes out of a jar or can that 'should' be made from scratch. Although I love Heinz baked beans, so long as I don't smell them when they're cold.

But, now living in America, it's a different ball game. Although I still hate these things and would never willingly put them on my food, I find myself eating them. I eat hamburgers which have ketchup and mayonnaise on them, which repulses me, but somehow I still eat them using distraction techniques to make myself forget that they are there. I've eaten Hardees, Arby's, Sonic, even the sandwiches at Lou's on Main Street are loaded with all this stuff and although I always make sure to ask for no cheese, it became really boring to try and request leaving everything else out as well. I eat barbecue sauce, although I wish they put less on it and when I get the option of doing it myself, I use hardly any. American 'salad dressings' (ranch, thousand island, etc) make me nauseous but I've been known to grit my teeth and get through a salad, fishing out the bits which have been least contaminated. The tactic is to avoid looking too closely or thinking about what you put in your mouth. And with time it gets less difficult, which terrifies me. Am I losing my sense of taste discrimination? do all these things really have secretly addictive ingredients designed to break down my carefully constructed high standards?

Ethics. In England, I would never eat at a hamburger chain not just because the thought of ketchup-laden burgers makes me want to vomit, but because I can't stomach their ethics. The same for battery-farmed eggs, non-organic bacon, farmed salmon, anything from the major supermarkets - these are my truly taboo foods. Though of course, one's conduct is never exemplary - I would eat a fried breakfast at Pellici's without allowing myself to think where their eggs came from, for instance. But in terms of my own cooking and where I generally chose to eat out, ethics always won out even if it meant I would go hungry. It was a point of holier-than-thou pride.

Here, of course, these options don't exist. I shop at the Pig or Fuller's; I buy meat from the big brands that I know are causing untold amounts of harm because sometimes I just really need to eat meat and there is no alternative; I eat at Wendy's along with the rest of my band because otherwise I really will go hungry and, to be honest, there doesn't seem to be any point here in keeping up my ridiculous ethical stance when no-one else is. One hungry English girl ain't going to change anything. I hate myself for this, but yet I put my qualms aside every time I pick up a shopping basket or burn a few gallons of gas so I can shop at Super Target rather than the Pig. And I know that if I return to London, I'll be the same ethical fascist as I always was, grateful for a culture that allows me the option to choose what I eat.

Postscript. I've still never eaten Marmite, which I'm convinced I hate, although I love Twiglets.

2005-02-18T20:34:00.000Z

Today I will simply pass on to y'all the wise advice of my mother regarding miso paste.

"You talked about the lack of miso paste, so I decided to send 1. light coloured miso paste, sweeter and lighter 2. dark one, which is stronger tasting, more powerful. In Japan, there are so many kinds of delicious miso paste from all regions, and people treasure the difference, and blending them to suit the materials and cooking is a bit of expertise. So, when you like to use those, experiment the blending. Rough guidance is: When you like to use in soups, as miso soup with vegetables ie beans, okras, carrots, potatos, parsnip, leeks, pumpkins, and tofu (I don't think you have this there...), wakame seaweed etc. use lighter one with tiny bit of dark mixed. If when you like to do so called substantial meaty miso soup, as chicken bits added to vegetable mixture, or fish of some kind, use darker one with some lighter one. It erases too fishy or too meaty feel. Always just when you serve, sprinkle on it (not stir in)something fresh, as finely chopped spring onion, julienne of leeks, very finely sliced skin of lemon (well, if it is unwaxed), perfectly speaking of course 'yuzu' orange (I so miss this!). With meat or fish, ginger grated mixed at the last moment is good of course.

"Both soya sauce and miso are very tricky customers and the quality of cooking goes DOWN so much because of the misuse of those, which is usually the case unfortunately so often happening in Japan itself. Too much, too salty, too noticeable way of using soya sauce, when it is better very subtly enhancing the cooking, for instance. If you could tell me what kind of soya sauces are being available there, I could tell you more.....

"One thing which is very important you have to remember about miso paste. 1.When you like to use it, ALWAYS LOOSEN the mixture in warmish water, as if you are making soup, scoop a bit of soup liquid into a bowl and mix miso paste until smooth. Then pour that into the soup and heat it up BUT NOT BOIL. You take off from heat, just before it boils. Then all the lovely flavour of miso you do not lose (this was taught by my mother very strictly!). 2. Use it not too much, it is deceptively salty, and it should not be ever felt SALTY. You'll find out soon, if you start very gently, from small amount!"

Dearest mother, I do have tofu here (I don't know why they stock it in even my local supermarket, though not a very superior brand I'm afraid) so I can't wait to receive my miso paste parcel from you. Thank you!

omelette, sauted mushrooms and spring onions, and a hot roll

2005-02-17T19:07:00.000Z

I have free range eggs! from the mad egg man in Marion who has a yard full of chickens, via my friend Chip who I play bluegrass with, who gave the egg man a load of dirt from a bass pond he's excavating and was given about 3 dozen eggs in return.

So the eggy lunch theme from last week is being revived, and I must say there is nothing better (especially on an edge-of-spring day like today) than a real omelette, wobbly on the inside and golden outside. I don't know why but I have a slight antipathy towards stuffed omelettes and prefer to have whatever might have filled it as a separate side vegetable. Or, if they're going to be all in one pan, do it properly and Spanish style, all stirred together like scrambled eggs, or Italian style, in a fritatta with no fussing around making waves like in an omelette.

Anyway, a happy lunch. Now, back to work...

Pseudo-paella

2005-02-16T02:13:00.000Z

Well, what was I to do with my new saffron when I got home from work today? given the absolute lack of seafood for sale in Greensboro, much less anything to make an osso buco to go with a saffron risotto, it was to be a pseudo-paella concocted out of what I could find: some chicken, some prawns, my cherished risotto rice, red peppers and so forth. Plus, of course, my fish stock that had been waiting in the freezer for just such a moment. And although rather scratch, it was pretty good, nourishing to look at and to eat, warming and faintly luxurious for a weeknight solitary meal (I made enough for about four people, so that's my leftovers lunches for a week). Yum. And now my big barnlike 'house' smells deliciously of saffon, too. I guess, with my housemate returning from a week working on the Gates Project, saffron is the flavour of the moment.

fajitas at the mexican

2005-02-15T04:00:00.000Z

A beautiful package arrived today for Valentine's day.

A luxuriously huge box of saffron from Iran, via our Iranian friend Amir and my mother.

left-over roast chicken, asparagus and boiled spuds

2005-02-14T02:07:00.000Z

It's that time of year again when I feel terrifyingly of my age and background. That's right, when you read the Observer Food Awards and recognise all your stalwart haunts on the list. OK, so I hadn't managed to eat at Anthony's in Leeds, but every London-based restaurant, bar and shop is already on my 'regulars' list. Sad, huh! the nice middle-class foodie world. The only surprise is that Loungelover (winner of best bar) was written up as if it was something of a secret. Oh, I don't think so, not if you're a self-respecting twenty-to-fortysomething living to the east of the Blackfriars Road. But please guys, don't rush there all at once - its clientele has already become invaded by too many giggly blonde ad agency girls recently, and I would be very loathe to have to give up their cocktails because it got crowded out with OFM readers too. If, sometime in September, you see a dark-haired girl shooting you withering glances and hissing at her boyfriend, that'll be me trying to edge you out of my patch.

2005-02-13T23:41:00.000Z

Shopping in Super Target in the Black Belt. I cannot understand their product selection. Why do they not sell olive oil when they do sell De Cecco and Barilla pasta? why don't they sell any form of miso soup when they sell five types of soy sauce, mirin, nori paper and ramen noodles?

roast chicken

2005-02-12T02:14:00.000Z

Roast chicken, ah, the comfort food of all time. Actually, I meant to cook this yesterday but my kitchen is so damn cold that the thing hadn't defrosted at all by the time I needed to cook it...so it was my Friday night dinner (yup, it's a happening social scene here) tonight. But, to echo so many good food writers (Nigel Slater, Simon Hopkinson, the somehat dreaded Nigella) what is better than a straight-up roast chicken. I had some tarragon that I'd bought fresh and dried to stuff under the skin, some potatoes, garlic cloves and carrots to stick in the pan with it and a lemon up its ass. Heaven. And I get leftovers tomorrow. And I get to make stock, and already I can't wait to eat the risotto made with the stock.

On a side note, this is one of the funniest expressions of American eating I'ved read recently. What people eat for breakfast in this weird country. Cheese quesadillas? bagels with cucumber and cream cheese? Pepsi and cigarettes? hello America, wake up and be a freak. I'm always really bad at breakfast, except on the weekends where I'm totally English (baocn and eggs, etc etc. Kippers if I'm lucky.) In London this always meant I would spend a ridiculous amount of money on coffee and gorgeous croissants from somewhere like Monmouth Coffee. Here, it means if I'm lucky (or going straight to site in the morning) I have toast and peanut butter, a glass of orange juice (or water with soluble Vitamin C if I'm out/hungover) and tea. If I'm not lucky, or I'm going to studio first thing I get a bottle of water and an 25 cent granola bar from GBs Mercantile. It's about the healthiest thing on offer, as moonpies on an empty stomach don't really ever appeal.

japanese style eggs

2005-02-10T19:52:00.000Z

Sometimes the absolute quickest things you throw together for lunch when you're stomach's about to implode with hunger are the best. Like what I'm munching on right now - shredded cabbage and spring onions stirfried for a half a minute while you whip together three eggs, some soy sauce, mirin and sake which are then emptied into the hot pan, stirred around and tipped out onto a plate with a hot roll (out of the freezer, into the oven, warms in the time you take to cook the other stuff) and eaten all together with another spalsh of soy on top. Sort of Japanese huevos ranchos or something....and truly a 2 minute, autterly satisfying, dish.

venison casserole, braised cabbage with caraway and a baked sweet potato

2005-02-08T02:58:00.000Z

It's a Monday night and time for some real cooking because I'm on my own, so it's time for a solo person's meal treat. So into the freezer I delve, bring out some of the local venison I was given before Christmas, open my prized jar of juniper seeds that I managed to find in Tuscaloosa, the remnants of a rather dubious bottle of red wine left over from the other day, some carrots, celery and onion, one of my mothers stock cubes, let simmer until my stomach aches with anticipation and then pair with one of my favorite winter vegetables, cabbage with caraway seeds.

For anyone who hates cabbage, this is definitely the antidote - just braise briefly with a little oil, salt and the caraway, don't overcook and cook plenty because you'll want more. This is a bit of a genetic recipe, the kind that I inherited from my father who got it from who-knows-where, but I have a vague grandmotherly memory in there. It's so so good. Time for seconds.

Sometimes I feel deeply selfish that I wouldn''t actually cook this if I had friends round who I knew wouldn't appreciate it. That venison would stay in the freezer for another day.

lemon verbena tea

2005-02-07T22:50:00.000Z

Only my mother manages to make a parcel containing her home-dried lemon verbena look this wonderful. And who else actually writes 'home-dried lemon verbena (herb)' on the customs ticket?

For the record, her concern about my diet has led to three packages in the last week - this tea, four packets of organic stock cubes and a package of dried seaweed and tofu.

steak frites

2005-02-07T03:42:00.000Z

New Orleans this weekend was sadly not taken advantage of in the food sense as it should have been. Too much partying and chaos meant that trying to prioritise food on the general group agenda was not going to happen. Still, I did manage to eat some really good boiled crawfish and a decent roadside jambalaya.

Sometimes when you come home, all you want to eat is a decent steak and skinny chips, with loads of mustard to slaver over everything. Maybe it was the general paucity and shambolicness of eating over the weekend, but today was one of those days when the hearty and substantial, 'real meal' quality of rare red meat is what I craved. So tonight after watching the Superbowl, it's me, a steak and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Nothing if not classy.

seafood heaven

2005-01-30T22:52:00.000Z

What can I say, but when good food comes along it sure does it in quantity. A last minute invite to my friend Butch's house turned out to be definitely a food highlight of my year so far. We arrived just after dark to have oysters thrust in our open mouths, and that was only just the beginning. One of his brothers, who works in a restaurant in Florida, had driven up with an entire carfull of seafood - oysters, green-lipped mussels, crabs, bay prawns, the stuff I dream about here. So we had:

ridiculous numbers of oysters, raw and smoked on the grill,

mussels steamed with rosemary and garlic with plenty of bread to soak up the juices,

and the highlight, a huge cajun seafood boil of crab, prawns (shrimp to you Americans, I know), sweetcorn, carrots, red potatoes, onions and smoked sausage, flavoured with masses of herbs and spices thrown in the pot. The entire 5-gallon pan was drained and tipped out onto the table and we ate, and ate, and ate. So incredibly fresh, so real, so good.

Then we had cake made by Butch's mother, which was absolutely delicious and turned out to be another of those strange American recipes (I asked and it contained a packet of yellow cake mix, a pack of lemon Jell-O and four eggs, the 'just follow the rest of the instructions on the back of the cake pack'), and on the side there was his father's home-made barbeque pork and special sauce, and in the morning we had golden scrambled eggs from his hens. Why can't I eat like this all the time!

things from my freezer

2005-01-28T01:32:00.000Z

I never really kept a well-stocked freezer in London. Sure, I had frozen home-made stock and frozen peas, and some tomato sauce, but it was never really full. Here, however, it's another matter. I don't know whether it's my solo status here, the lack of a real social scene, the lack of food shops or what, but I've really discovered the uses of a freezer. I never have time to really shop and the shopping here is so uninspiring as to make that after-work visit to the Pig a chore rather than a delight. But with occasional gluts of produce finding their way into my hands, odd forays into the world of real shops and so forth, I now find myself more often than not cooking up at the weekend a whole array of things to decant into tupperware and serve in the week, and freezing many other things to boot.

The contents of my freezer at the moment are:
Tomato sauce (about 8 servings).
Pumpkin soup (about 2/3 servings)
Split pea soup(2 servings)
Fish stew (1 serving)
Fish stock (2 pints)
2 whole chickens
2 ribeye steaks
1 pack 'Italian' sausages
venison ribs
venison stewmeat
ground venison
venison cut for roasting
green peas
spinach
okra
french fries (for when all you want is a steak frites salade)

I surprise myself. Some might say, I'm old before my time. But, when most nights I eat alone and really all I want is something simple and fast, I'm so pleased to be able to give myself something homecooked and nourishing rahter than reaching for the cereal packet, like others I know.

megadarra

2005-01-24T01:49:00.000Z

Well, this I guess will have to be my entry for the beans IMBB. It's a simple dish, but given that the temperature today in my kitchen is around freezing point, it was about all I could manage, and exactly what I wanted to eat. It also sums up the essential qualities of the bean family - cheap, nourishing to body and soul, homely and divine in their simplicity. It's the poor man's food of the Middle East, known as megadarra, or mujadarra, or many variants of that word.

Nothing could be simpler - lentils, brown rice, onions, some spices. Sounds pretty boring - yet somehow it's one of the best foods. The key is the caramelized onions on top which somehow lift this dish to the sublime with their soothing sweetness, texture and intensity.

Basically, you put some brown rice on to cook with a bay leaf and salt, then finely chop an onion and some garlic and soften, adding plenty of ground cumin and coriander seed. Then add your lentils (ideally puy lentils, but ordinary brown ones will do), water in proportion (around twice as much water as lentils) bring to the boil then cover to simmer. Meanwhile chop up more onions into thin crescents (around half an onion per person) along with a bit more garlic, and saute slowly with salt in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. There's no way you can use a thin-bottomed one for this, much less a teflon monstrosity. They will cook down to a beautiful golden colour, sweet and soft.

When the lentils and rice are nearly done, add the one to the other to finish cooking (add more water if neccesary) and to blend the flavours. I tend not to cook them together from the start as they've got different cooking times, but they can be done together if you want to save washing-up.

Serve with the caramelized onions on top and a bowl of yoghurt mixed with peppermint on the side. It's so simple, yet somehow, for a cost of about a dollar per person, I can't think of something I'd rather eat on a cold Sunday evening.

PS. This dish is also really good as a side to grilled spiciy lamb chops, or just about any other grilled meat. It's also great the next day cold as a salad, with a bit of fresh coriander stirred in, for example.

fajitas...it's the local Mexican again, open for business

2005-01-18T03:01:00.000Z

It's a very small world out there. I tend to forget it is, because in Greensboro, Alabama, I never meet anyone who knows anyone I know. And whenever they ask me if I know such-and-such, I normally have to admit defeat. But in the world of blogging...it's quite a different matter. No sooner do I sign myself up for 1000 recipes' little black books than I find out that we have a friend in common, who was here at the Rural Studio a few years ago.

In the world of food, meanwhile, tonight we retreated to the Mexican as our 'house' (big tin warehouse) is sub-zero. Which means this blog entry will be pretty short as I've got to return my fingers to the warmth of my bedroom (only heated room). Actually the fajitas were pretty good tonight. Did the job, along with the huge margaritas.

pork and beans

2005-01-16T17:27:00.000Z

Well, the 'bean' theme is taking off and I couldn't pass by the opportunity to make real pork'n'beans - good American food with a nod to the St John cookbook which I got for Christmas. Plus it was a pretty chilly night and this kind of food is exactly what was needed.

This really is an amalgam of the 'beans and bacon' and the 'pork belly with lentils' recipes in the St John cookbook. I really wanted to follow the instructions for one of these dishes precisely but a lack of ingredients meant it was improvisation time. My only regret was that I wasn't organised enough to used dried beans soaked overnight, as the beans you get in cans here tend towards the mushy, but I restrained myself from stirring them in order not to break them up. Also, I have no idea what American names for beans really mean (navy beans? great northern beans?) so it was guesswork about that too. But it turned out pretty damn fine at the end of the day! The recipe went something like this:

Roughly chop one onion, peel a head of garlic (I like to keep the cloves intact so you get gorgeous gooey garlic nuggets), saute in the bottom of a big pan with olive oil. When they are softening and translucent, add a large tin of chopped tomatoes, a couple of bay leaves, some thyme and oregano, salt and pepper.

Meanwhile drain and rinse your beans (in my case, a can each of pinto, navy and great northern beans but I think the great northern beans dissolved too much), and brown your pork. I used pork neck that I got in the Piggly Wiggly, which worked really well as it had the requisite layering of fat and meat, and was really cheap which seems to me to be in the spirit of the dish. Don't chop up the pork, leave it in as it comes (trimmed if necessary) and just brown it with a bit of salt while the tomatoes reduce to a thicker sauce.

Then add the beans to the sauce, heat through, nestle your pieces of pork in the pan, then cover and leave on a very low simmer for 1 1/2 hours. If I had my le Creuset casserole dish I would put it in the oven for this stage, but as I only have the biggest pan to be found in the Dollar General which has a thin base and plastic handles, it sat on top of the stove.

By the time it's done, the meat will be wobbly and tender and beautiful, and the beans will hopefully still retain some bite. A bit of parsley on top does wonders and a green salad wouldn't go amiss for afters. Check out the thrift store crockery.

fried chicken and fries from Crispy Chick

2005-01-15T23:13:00.000Z

It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it sounds like it should be good, in a retro backwoods Alabama way. But no, Crispy Chick is a bad idea. It wasn't my choice - but Mustang Oil was vetoed by today's lunch companion, the venerable Johnny Parker, for reasons he did not care to share. I don't understand why Crispy Chick is black Greensboro (and white JP's) eating venue of choice, as it's truly horrible hormonally enhanced frozen and fried chicken, manky fries, nothing good at all apart form the fact that their sweet tea doesn't taste awful. I gave most of my chicken to Johnny's dog, Doofus, who ate it in the truck and slobbered all over me. Nice.

And it looks like there ain't going to be no Taco Tuesday for a while, as the local Mexican suffered this morning from one of their employees not knowing how to drive a stick-shift truck and putting it right through the front wall and plate-glass window. Pretty amusing. Especially when I went by later and saw they had all the tables and chairs out front and all the employees were sitting around drinking beer while some hapless workmen mates of theirs tried to sort out the mess. I should have got a photo but Johnny wouldn't stop the truck.

2005-01-12T04:36:00.000Z

Last night, following up on the bean theme I did make one of my favorite things, the spinach and chickpea spaghetti I've blogged before here. I thought of it as an entry to IMBB but alas, my camera ran out of battery just at the moment of photographing my plate, and you know that pasta can't wait to be eaten. So it's going to have to wait.

The history of this dish lies somewhere in the Southern Mediterranean. In Spain you often find spinach and chickpeas on the menu as a dish of its own. I don't know where my mother got the recipe from, but I do remember the first time it turned up on my plate and that she said she had just discovered it somewhere (as opposed to one of those dishes that's been part of your diet from birth).

If you have left-over sauce from this, it's really great the next day as the filling for a frittata/tortilla/spanish omelette/whatever you like to call that dish.

toast and peanut butter with tea

2005-01-11T00:46:00.000Z

The theme for the next Is My Blog Burning?, in which I've always meant to participate but somehow always missed the deadline, is beans. Oh no. How to choose between the multitude of wonderful dishes involving any kind of legume at all?

Is it megadarra, the Middle Eastern 'poor man's food' that is one of the great comfort foods ever? or cassoulet, daring the multitude of hardened opinions over how it should be made? or the green bean and rare seared tuna stir-fry I encountered once in Biarritz? or my mother's lentil soup? her butter bean soup? any of her soups (they all seem to include a bean)? or St John pork and lentils? or japanese sweet aduki bean soup and dumplings? or any of the million good things to do with a chickpea? The list goes on but I'm almost daunted by the size of the field.

Beans are great, beans are cheap, beans are nutritious, yet I'm irresistibly reminded of the song of the chefs in Britten's opera Paul Bunyan, where the two cooks can only do soup (Sam Sharkey) or beans (Ben Benny) and the whole camp becomes utterly tired of them...

2005-01-10T15:53:00.000Z

As an aside to the last post, see this post from Jane Galt and the inane comments about food poverty that follow. I put my oar in, of course, but some people had better get out of NYC and see how the rest of America has to shop and cook.

spaghetti with raw tomato and garlic sauce

2005-01-10T00:36:00.000Z

I went shopping today to stock up for the new semester. Super Target, I have to guiltily confess, but look here, there's no ethical shopping to be done around here for 100 miles. And even Super Target, which is the doyenne of the West Alabama shopping scene, is totally miserable. Not even free-range eggs, which every corner shop in London now sells. No free-range chicken, much less any other free-range/organic stuff. A meat section the size of a Tesco Express [extremely small, if you're unfamiliar with English superstores] and an even worse fish section with evil-looking, glowing, vacuum-packed prawns. Weirdly, no real parmesan although they sell rather horrible-looking pecorino, and in general, totally miserable American versions of European cheeses, all plastic and inedible. And I don't understand what happens to the rest of the sheep when the only cut of lamb they sell is a loin chop. Of course, if you want it frozen in a cardboard box ready to go in the microwave, you can get it.

America really needs to get its food situation sorted out. Nowhere in England are things this bad. Even a Tesco in Middlesbrough [grim town in the North of England] has a whole aisle of fresh vegetables, not just a miserly little corner. It's not rocket science why you're all obese, when even the well-meaning and food-obsessed like me have to try so hard to get anything real on my plate, that I almost give up and subsist on barbeque sandwiches. It makes cooking really boring, too, when you're never surprised by a new seasonal thing turning up in the shops. Sigh, moan, gripe, yawn.

it's back to the local Mexican...

2005-01-09T03:37:00.000Z

Back to Bama, and goodbye to fresh fish, varied vegetables and ethnic restaurants. For old time's sake, we go to El Tenampa for our back-home dinner, say hello to Jesus (the manager), Blair (the waitress) and the other staff. Then it's back home for green tea made in a saucepan (why doesn't rural America do teapots?), blogging and bed for my jet-lagged little self.

pot-roast chicken with winter vegetables and aioli, green salad

2005-01-05T09:08:00.000Z

Yesterday was a grim and miserable day - cold and rainy. Plus we were going to the football game in the evening so we needed a post-match meal that would warm us up again and could sit happily in the oven for the couple of hours we were going to be gone. Hence this sort-of amalgam of a St John-y boiled chicken with a more traditional pot-roast, the principle being to brown the bird all over, stuff it in a big pan, surround it with vegetables, almost-cover with water and lay two strips of bacon on its breast, leave in a medium oven for 2 1/2 hours.

Actually the weather wasn't that cold at the game, but we nearly lost (just salvaging a draw). Coming home, unfortunately the bloody thing wasn't actually cooked. I blame it on my boyfriend's oven, in my one it would have been done. But in his it was too low a heat (his isn't as fan-assisted as mine) so we had another half-hour of drinking beer and post-match deconstruction while we whacked the heat up for a bit. As a result it wasn't quite as perfect as it should have been, but nevertheless warming and soothing as only moist, poached-ish chicken can be. And turnips...what a joy. The aioli is the most obvious debt to St John where they always serve it with their boiled chicken and it goes very well indeed. Plus it's a great excuse to make mayonnaise, one of the most satisfying culinary alchemies to create.

rillettes d'oie, coquilles St Jacques aux champignons sauvages, un petit cafe

2005-01-04T11:34:00.000Z

Another meal with a bunch of wonderful food enthusiasts, this time in a restaurant in London. The company was assembled informally in honour of Sybille Bedford, legendary writer and in the best tradition of eccentric, forthright English women travellers, and consisted of her and her French companion, the actress Aliette Martin, and Jill Norman, formerly in charge of the food list at Penguin, and her husband Paul, along with my parents and me. Old-fashioned French food, old-fashioned French waiters such as I haven't seen for a long time (dinner jackets and bow ties and all), very good wine (ah, a 1990 Margaux, mmmm...) and lots of food talk chez Le Colombier in Chelsea. Sybille has just completed her latest (and possibly last) book, and Jill also has just finished a book on winter food. A sneak preview: apparently snails with spinach are the latest discovery.

My father met Sybille without knowing who she was over dinner a long time ago, and their shared love of travel and food has kept them going ever since. If anyone hasn't read The Legacy or A Visit to Don Otavio, you must. I was hugely flattered when she said that she had read what I had written on this website about eating alone, and that she felt exactly the same way about the joys of solo eating in strange places. My breast swells with undeserved pride.

potato, pea and courgette soup, cumin-crusted lamb, roasted tomatoes, aubergine sauce, roast fennel, couscous, sweet potato mash, pear tart

2005-01-02T23:15:00.000Z

It's really fantastic to go to dinner with friends who are also amazing cooks and excited about food. Last night at dinner with old Suffolk friends, so much of the conversation was about food - not just the fantastic spread that they produced for us but also food in America, food in the South, previous meals we'd had together, recipes we'd traded and their subsequent development, family trade secret recipes (being a Jewish family, it's cheesecake) and the famous Chestnut Cake Incident.

The Chestnut Cake Incident occurred when these friends came to dinner at my parents' house, when I was approximately four years old. The husband is a fantastic dessert and cake cook, and would always bring some amazing concoction to any dinner with us. This time it was a sweet chestnut and chocolate cake. I can remember it vividly, sitting on a plate on the chest in the hall where we eat, the pale-ish brown colour, the light smooth texture, the smell, the taste...

It made such an impression on me that I had to write a thank-you letter afterwards, and on it I smeared a little bit of the left-over cake to remind them how good it smelt. They still have the letter, but somehow Peter never found the recipe again for this orgasmically brilliant cake. So the search for the holy grail continues, and last night another version of the same cake appeared, that they had made the day before. It wasn't the same, we all agreed, although close...but a bit too chocolatey and not enough chestnut, a bit denser, a bit darker. But maybe with a bit of tweaking...

lamb and quince tagine, vegetable hotpot, couscous, salad and pumpkin pie

2005-01-02T07:08:00.000Z

The above was the menu for our New Years Eve party (blogged in full on my other blog here). Most of it, I hate to say, was cooked not by me but by my parents and my neighbours. However, the pumpkin pie was entirely the work of me and my boyfriend, faithfully following my instructions in the kitchen. We actually made two with a little bit of experimentation going on: the first exactly as the recipe said (mixing pumpkin puree, milk and spices with three eggs beaten whole) and the second with the eggs beaten separately - the yolks mixed in with the pumpkin and the whites beaten very stiff and folded in. The conclusion was that the second method is by far superior.

Everyone at the party thought one pie was mine and one my boyfriend's, trying to play us off each other, and I was very proud to be able to say that no, we collaborated! Unheard of in my kitchen-control-freak world, and no fights occurred either. It's fine when someone just does what you tell them to do...

PS. Witness the washing-up. Are we the only people left without a dishwasher, and am I the only person who rather enjoys bouts of drunken washing-up at 1am?

PPS. Another excitement: I got given the famous St John cookbook for Christmas. I can't wait to get cooking with it in Alabama, where weird bits of pig are easier to find than common vegetables...

taglierini with truffle, baked cod, jerusalem artichokes and fennel

2004-12-24T22:55:00.000Z

Back home to my parentals, the Christmas food thing really gets going. Not only do I not have to lift a finger to be fed fantastic food and delicious wine, but I also don't have to pay for it!

Last night I arrived at their house exhausted from shopping and travelling, to be fed roast spatchcocked chicken with paprika and lemon, roast potatoes and homegrown 'rainbow chard', followed by green salad, delicious cheese and homemade membrillo. Then by the log fire, it was lemon verbena tea with Japanese sweets made of chestnut paste stuffed into a candied yuzu. This morning I had buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup, followed barely two hours later (thanks to my excessively lazy getting-up time) by delicate vegetable soup rendered special by home-made chicken stock , and more salad and cheese. With a tea-time snack of more sublime Japanese sweets, it was on to a dinner which began with one of the most perfect dishes one could imagine.

One of the restaurants that my father is indirectly responsible for thought that they could persuade the good burghers of East Suffolk to pay for white truffle. Fortunately not many of them were willing to cough up, so there were some left-over truffles from the order, plus their mushroom supplier has been packing some complimentary black truffles into every box of wild mushrooms that they ordered. Don't tell the taxman, but somehow a few of these excess truffles ended up being grated over some suitably expensive taglierini on our plates this evening. Heaven, accompanied by a fantastic Barolo Meriame from Paolo Manzone (available from Adnams, of course!). The heady, hormonal scent of truffles and Barolo combined made me feel somewhat like Catwoman when faced with the catnip - nostrils twitching uncontrollably, hairs standing on end.

After such a starter, there's no point in trying to top it with the main course, so we had a simple but perfectly cooked baked cod with cherry tomatoes and black olive paste, baked jerusalem artichokes and roast fennel. I'm incredibly lucky to have parents so passionately committed and capable in the kitchen. It would not even cross their mind not to have a 'real' meal three times a day. Every time I read the latest newspaper poll showing that no-one has a family meal any more, I thank my lucky stars that since I was born, I have eaten beautiful, ritual meals with my parents, conversing and chewing, at least two courses every evening, a glass or two of good wine, tea or coffee afterwards, talking about what we put in our mouths and loving it.

smoked mackerel 'pate', grilled squid, red peppers and rocket, baked seabass with wild mushrooms, swiss chard and potatoes with parsley, etc...

2004-12-23T17:18:00.000Z

The first 'real' meal that I have cooked since returning to the UK (for which the shopping in the previous post was in aid of) came off well and was real fun to do. The joy of cooking for a dinner party when it's not squeezed in to the hour between getting home from work and everyone arriving. Take your time, be organised, set the table, don't forget anything, change your clothes...

The menu was as follows: to nibble on as a 'starter' (knowing all my friends to be perpetually late, making them all wait for the latest person before sitting down to eat is not an option), a smoked mackerel 'pate' (cheat's version), sourdough toast, grilled marinated baby squid with grilled skinned peppers and rocket. The cheating 'pate' is an instant version that I happened upon while combing the fridge one day for something tasty and instant and it's actually rather good. You shred smoked mackerel with a fork (discard the skin) and mix with a decent amount of sheeps yogurt, some lemon juice, finely sliced spring onion and plenty of black pepper. I sprinkle chopped parsley on top to reassure those who don't like their breath to smell of onions as the pasley magically neutralises the smell. The joy of this dish is it's really light and (dare I say it) healthy, yet full of flavour and very fresh.

After, it was a baked seabass with a wild mushroom 'sauce', boiled potatoes tossed with coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsely (somehow this makes all the difference to 'boring' potatoes both in taste and look) and braised swiss chard. The mushrooms (a mix of girolles, porcini, and 'cheap' chestnuts) were really a treat for me to buy myself. Stewed very simply with nothing but olive oil and seasoning, they were incredibly fragrant, justifying the extortionate Borough Market price I paid for them.

Then a simple green salad, and finished off with one of my favorite ever cakes - the summer fruits frangipani from Konditor and Cook. I'm sorry, I don't make my own puddings. I'm just not that passionate about sweet things to go to the added hassle. Plus, when at home with friends in a relatively informal way, I'd rather have a really good shop-bought cake or tart to go with coffee as we sit around and gab. Anyway, this one is so far more sublime than anything I could possibly make myself, though I hate to agree with Nigella's quote that is now displayed on all of their literature, that I have absolutely no compunction at my laziness.

Altogether, a damn good meal, sending us out into the night to continue to party at my friend's dj night with happy bellies.

2004-12-22T14:25:00.000Z

There is a nightmare called trying to shop for food for a dinner party using public transport and my bare hands to carry everything. It's not possible to buy sufficient food for a three course meal for six people and carry it home at one go, unless you make soup or something that relies on a lot of the stuff that bulks it out being on tap (water) or in the store cupboard (pasta and rice). And for me, pasta and rice and soup are just too everyday to be dinner party food. So I struggle around Borough Market simultaneously over-excited at all that stuff available to buy and totally stressing out at the fact that everything will be crushed by the time I get home and why can't they give me my fish in a carrier bag with a handle not a massive clear binbag type thing tied with a big knot. I end up having to take a cab home and still I have to go back because I couldn't manage to buy wine, olive oil, pudding, and various odds and ends the first time round.

How do you do it without a car/a boyfriend to help you carry it all? There's definitely a gap in the cookbook market for dinner party recipes that fit into two shopping bags.

herrings and pumpernickel, spit-roast belly pork with black pudding and baked quince

2004-12-21T20:37:00.000Z

Last night was my Christmas treat with my boyfriend (as if I hadn't been getting enough since I got back into town) at the Wolseley. Everyone knows that it's the best place opened in the last year or so, run by the guys who did the Ivy and the Caprice so well, perfect discreet service, perfect reliable food, the place to be seen, amazing huge old banking hall and Wolsely car showroom decorated with antique black and gold Chinoiserie, etc etc. All this and more: it is also extremely reasonably priced considering its cachet - one would pay similarly for a vastly inferior meal and experience in this town - and being bigger than the previous restaurants, it's also possible to get a table as one of hoi polloi. It's unshowy, sophisticated and glamourous in a perfectly discreet way, and does fabulous dry martinis.

I generally have considered the food here to be immensely accomplished but not 'bowl-me-over' standard - a standard which is more than good enough given how fantastic the service and ambience is. Maybe (I would like to think) it is the effect of having one of my cousins now installed at some lowly position in the kitchen), but last night I was very surprised by the quality of what came out on our plates. Our starters were good, both dishes I'd had before and were exactly as I remembered, accomllished but nothing more, but the main courses were exceptional, both because of very small touches. Continuing on my theme of ordering every restaurant item with 'quince' on it in order to feel my superiority in the cooking of this sublime fruit, I ordered the belly pork dish named above. The pork was delicious, each thick-cut slice at the perfect point between meeting the bite and melting on the tongue, and topped with a slice of black pudding. So far, so it should be, but the quince for once astonished me. Not just one variety of quince was present on my plate, but two - a classic slice of 'baked quince', crispy round the edges, sweet-sour and grainy, but also a perfect spoonful of puree, cooked longer and made sweeter and richer in the process but still with a tart edge. The surprise of finding more on my plate than I had expected was perfection - the quince for once not overflavored by being cooked with other things, and balancing perfectly the pork. Finally, someone in a restaurant can cook a quince.

The boy's Poulet de Landes a la forestiere contained a similar surprise. Filling his mouth with a forkful of the mushrooms that covered what he described as an 'amazing chicken', he also gave a look of surprise. Hiding in the wild mushrooms were some sweet chestnuts. To quote him, it was a 'masterstroke'. His only grumble was that the green salad wasn't as good as St John's. Well, maybe, but it was hardly anywhere near inadequate, and he's got a bit of weird taste in lettuces. All good stuff, and I got to feel grown-up and glamorous to boot.

sushi

2004-12-21T16:00:00.000Z

I've managed to eat sushi twice in the last two days. Yesterday was at Feng Sushi in Borough Market, which used to be a regular lunch spot of mine when I worked right above it. I was back visiting my old colleagues and partaking of our traditional spread of vegetable tempura, yellowtail sashimi, edamame, mackerel and salmon. It's all good, reliable stuff, and the staff are lovely, but what I really wanted was my quintessential London sushi experience at Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street, so today a trip down to Piccadilly gave me the perfect excuse to treat myself.

One of the great things about conveyor-belt sushi is you feel absolutely happy and normal eating there on your own. Kulu Kulu is typically London in that none of the staff or chefs are actually Japanese. A mix of Vietnamese, Malay, Korean, black British and what looked today to be a Hispanic of some sort turn out fantastic, cheap, fresh sushi and the assorted other items made from the offcuts of the fish, such as tempura of the tails and salmon skin maki, along with deep-fried chicken wings and other classic conveyor-belt fare. You can see them making everything, and I turn into a bit of a fanatic watcher of the conveyor belt, tracking down the fresh plates as they get turned out and following them round with my eyes until they are within my reach.

The best thing they do are their tempura prawn, salmon and avocado hand rolls. These are something where freshness and immediacy are absolutely of the essence - the whole thing reminding me rather of my father's description of Bacon du Bedat sandwiches in his book (sorry, another plug). The prawn should be freshly deep-fried, still warm but left to drain on kitchen towel just long enough so that not a hint of oil remains. The salmon should be slippery cold. The nori paper should be crispy, meaning the roll can't be left around long enough for the nori to get soggy.

I watched and waited as a plate of tempura prawns were pushed through the hatch. The sushi chefs were still at work on a huge batch of salmon, slicing and packing it into boxes for the different grades. I waited, drinking my green tea, snacking on cucumber rolls. Finally, one of them wiped down his board and his knife, laid out half a dozen strips of nori and assembled the rolls. I watched him put two plates onto the conveyor and prayed that no-one else had been paying attention. Success! I got the very first plate as it came within my reach. That first bite was absolute heaven. I made myself eat the roll slowly, savoring every mouthful of crispy tempura, succulent warm prawn, cool salmon and creamy avocado wrapped in tender rice and crunchy nori, resistant to the bite. A gulp of green tea and I was ready to face yet more Christmas shopping.

more, and yet more, later flowers for the bees...

2004-12-20T17:51:00.000Z

Autumn's overabundance so wonderfully described by Keats has come late to my tummy. In brief, in chronological order (luckily due to my huge laziness and late rising, I've been on two meals a day):

Full English breakfast at Story Deli - beautiful poached eggs, organic bacon, roasted tomatoes, mushrooms, sourdough toast...

Hugely decadent 'I cooked this, really' dinner all bought from the Fromagerie at Highbury Barn - fantastic real pesto with de Cecco spaghetti and marinated baby artichokes stirred in, goat cheeses and dry-cured French ham, a perfect tomato salad (the nearest I got to actually cooking was slicing them up, sprinkling them with thyme, salt and pepper and olive oil), moist and caraway-flavoured brown bread.

Pints of Pride, accompanied with good old English ranting (the art of passionate debate is one that America lacks).

Bacon sandwiches in bed with real English tea, sandwiched with sex.

Pints of Pride, accompanied with Arsenal-Portsmouth and shouts of 'Sol! my hero!'

Georgian (as in Russia, not next-door-to-Alabama) baked cheese and bean breads, followed with poussin in plum sauce, fried potatoes and spicy cabbage and carrot salad at Little Georgia.

More real bacon and egg sarnies. In-between bagels. Wyborowka vodka. Red wine. Mmmmm...

2004-12-18T19:16:00.000Z

The eating continues - yesterday with a boozy lunch, evening drinks and dinner.

Lunch was on the waterfront at Canary Wharf at the Gaucho Grill - always reliable, slightly decadent due to the ponyskin chairs though unextraordinary this time - but the position, with clouds scudding over the water and shafts of wonderful golden December light, more than makes up for a lack of fireworks in the kitchen. Still, my ribeye was well-chosen, tender, and cooked rare - a treat compared to the invariably well-done and pale steaks in Alabama.

I lurched off, slightly tipsy, to have tea with another friend, trying to avoid offers of cake and maintaining an effort at sobriety for a few hours, before heading off to the 20th anniversary drinks at Clarke's, West London institution and still holding the flame for women in the kitchen and up front. Headed up by wonderful women, the restaurant (and now, bakery and shop) continues its great set-menu policy and produces fantastic, classic food. The gathering, of lovely friends and many representatives from the food-related disciplines, had predictably beautiful canapes with the champagne - wonderful rare tuna, duck liver pate on toast, light and crisp cod croquettes and other goodies.

I tried my hardest not to indulge too much, knowing what a good dinner I was in for later...when we crossed the road to another landmark of London's restaurant renaissance, Kensington Place. Many items on the menu haven't changed since it opened - its signature scallops with pea pureee and mint vinaigrette (much imitated but never beaten), the seared foie gras and and sweetcorn pancake, the baked tamarillos with icecream. But it's all still cooked precisely and incredibly well. I had the scallops, perfect as usual, and then grilled mackerel, lentils and salsa verde, another classic combination. My only gripe: I know that some people don't like to see the head on their fish, but a mackerel, even if served filleted, should surely not be cooked filleted, thus losing most of that delicious moistness that makes that fish so delicious. I always slightly feel like I'm shortchanged if I don't get the head and tail on my fish, but that's probably just me - but the habit of grilling fillets really seems absurd for a small fish. Also the salsa verde was a little dry for my liking, especially given the slightly dry fillets - these are small concerns, though my expectation of this place is that these things should always be right.

For pudding I continued my testing of quince desserts, with the baked quinces and mascarpone. They were pretty good, more quincy the the crumble at St John, but still over-seasoned with vanilla and a little dry - maybe too long baked on too low a heat rather than the more cripsy-caramelised on the outside, moist on the inside that I might have attempted to achieve. But still, small gripes - we all left highly satisfied and smiling. Nightcaps were at Loungelover, which pretty much sums up what I can't get in Alabama - elegant, deeply decadent cocktails, the beautiful people, over-the-top decor and all within walking distance of home. I plumped for mint juleps, as a memory of the cocktail that I should be drinking in Alabama but of course, I could never find.

oh, so many good things...

2004-12-17T11:26:00.000Z

Back in the big smoke, the eating starts...with the first treat being lunch from Story Deli on Brick Lane - absolutely delicious Spanish tortilla, and pumpkin and roast garlic soup, which was actually only OK, too much cream for my liking. But good coffee (hooray!) and all the accoutrements of the new East End around me - skinny girls in legwarmers, Japanese boys in artful denim, rain dripping down outside.

And then in the evening, back to old haunts - St John Bread and Wine, where we managed to squeeze in before the Christmas party crowds turned up for their bookings. Oh, the joy. This place is so well-known that I shouldn't have to add more, but still the fact that there weren't more of us taking in a table which we had to vacate by 8.15 must mean that someone doesn't know. We ate: grilled pilchards (perfect, just the right seasoning and sprinkle of parsley), roasted jerusalem artichoke, watercress and beautifully sweet slow-roast red onion salad, snails in bacon, flash-deep-fried quail with aioli (how to describe that tender, juicy little thing except we should have ordered two ) and their perfect green salad, topped with chopped mint and spring onion and the simplest dressing. A glass of champagne to celebrate by return, and a bottle of red wine, and their fantastic bread to soak up all the juices from all the dishes (we got them squeaky clean!), and what more could I want? Well, as it happens, quince crumble and custard, which for me had slightly too much orange zest that overpowered the quince, but if they'd called it given top billing to the orange rather than the quince, I would have given it top marks. I'm always fussy about how people cook quince, as I have a rather proprietorial feeling towards the fruit due to its ritual significance in my childhood. So it was, all in all, a perfect London meal, prelude to a couple of pints of London Pride (oh, to utter those words again!) and then bed...

roasted salmon, sauted carrots with ginger and garlic, and brown rice

2004-12-13T04:26:00.000Z

Yesterday being the Pig Roast it was a round of typical Alabama fare - catfish and BBQ pork. If you are confused, the roasting of a pig is usually done only at the summer Pig Roast, where it is the responsibility of the second year students. After my total immersion, I think I am finally ready for a change from Southern cuisine despite its many virtues, and have started fantasising about going back to London and blowing a lot of money on food. St John...the Wolseley (where my cousin is currently cooking)...salt beef bagels...real coffee and croissants from Monmouth Coffee...free range meat from Borough Market...beautiful fish in Suffolk...

The problem is that unless catfish and BBQ are done really well, it's easy to get bored. The freezing conditions yesterday meant that the outdoor catfish lunch was barely even lukewarm and cold hush puppies just ain't my cup of tea. Though, would you believe, in honour of a) the Rural Studio's English director and b) the use of newspaper as a building material by one of the projects, they served it all in newsprint cones 'just like in England' (ie, no-one really knew how to fold a fish'n'chips cone and I got to show off. But isn't the point of the newspaper that it has to absord the grease of real chips? not the American kind? Anyway, I digress). Bobby Scott's barbeque isn't bad but I've eaten it twice this week, along with a Mustang Oil BBQ sandwich, and three meals of this stuff is too many for one week. It was with relief that I dug out a piece of wild salmon from the freezer today and cooked myself a real meal with no chalky white bread involved.

2004-12-10T04:55:00.000Z

OK, so this is pure self-publicity but I know I've got readers out there, and so I was wondering if any of you may vaguely like reading about me and the joys of Piggly Wiggly enough to nominate me for Accidental Hedonist's Food Blogging Awards best new blog category (I'm not eligible for any of the others, being new and all that). I know it's horribly egotistical but hey, you know, why not. This whole food thing truly does keep me sane during my total immersion into the West Alabama mud. I rather like the monasticism of only being able to shop at the Pig. It keeps it all fresh and makes simple things very joyful. A well-made risotto, gnocchi, a chance encounter with something seasonal and fresh - combined with the discovery of just how weird American ideas of cooking can be - keeps me happy and alive, nose in the air, scenting out more.

gnocchi with tomato sauce

2004-12-10T04:42:00.000Z

Last night's Christmas party fare offered some perfect examples of American cooking which to me is utterly incomprehensible but to others is, well, a really good idea.

Take the shrimp dip, for instance. Apparently this contained lemon Jell-O, as well as two tins of shrimp, tomato sauce, lemon juice, and mayonnaise. I mean, who actually thinks to put Jell-O in a dip? but everyone raved about how good it tasted and what a clever idea, I would have never guessed it had Jell-O in it, my goodness I'm doing that next time. I couldn't bring myself to even taste it after hearing the ingredient list. Shrimp should not be in tins.

And sandwiches with jam and ham? I don't understand, I'm sorry.

venison stew with mash and spinach

2004-12-07T03:51:00.000Z

This week's exciting new food is a freezer-full of deermeat that I have been given by Susan, who works at GB's Mercatile Store in Newbern after I asked her why it was impossible to buy venison here although everyone hunts all the time. She gave me two bags of stew meat, a roast, ribs and ground meat for burgers, and wouldn't let me pay for any of it. Apparently she's already got a deer and a half in her freezer, and expects to have a couple more before the end of the season.

So tonight I made a casserole with some of the stew meat, onions, carrots, mushrooms and plenty of red wine. It was good, although it could have done with a little more stewing, but we got impatient to eat. I couldn't find any juniper in the Pig or Fullers, which would have been my automatic choice of seasoning, so I put in a couple of bay leaves and a couple of cloves to try and achieve some of the same effect. The cloves were actually a pretty good choice, surprisingly. WIth some cayenne pepper it was warming and nourishing, setting us up for an evening of painting and decorating in preparation for the small art show/party we're having at the weekend.

2004-12-06T03:39:00.000Z

OK, so I'm not even going to pretend that this is a late entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday, but on one of those random loops through Google I fonud the following link to my lovely father writing on Riesling which was last WBW's theme. And in another shameless plug, I'm going to recommend to you all his fantastic book A Pike in the Basement, recently republished in a beautiful new edition by Eland Books (seems to be only available in this edition in the UK Amazon but here's a link to the US site with used copies of the original available. It's a fantastic Christmas present for anyone interested in food, travel or wine - and because he never sold very many copies, it's unlikely that you'll be duplicating anyone else's present. He writes about travelling worldwide, from sheep farms in Australia to Las Vegas to the Turkey-Iran border, eating and drinking and getting into scrapes along the way. Each chapter ends with a recipe and a recommended wine, and it has great woodcut illustrations. The title story, well, you'll just have to buy it - but it involves naked women....

beef and vegetable casserole with farfalle pasta and salad

2004-12-06T03:02:00.000Z

This to me is a typically American meal. Not that it was badly cooked or anything, but a casserole with pasta as an accompaniment? especially as the casserole had potatoes in it? It's all wrong, call me traditional. Plus, a beef casserole (or stew, as it was presented to me) should not contain red peppers and green beans along with carrots and potatoes - it's mixed messages. A red pepper and beef stew, with paprika and other Spanish-North African type spices, would be really good. Likewise a northern European root veg and beef hotpot. Green beans (french beans) should never be in a casserole but would be a really nice side vegetable. Plus the whole blue cheese as salad ingredient thing. Luckily my host had thoughtfully set the different salad ingredients in different bowls so I could choose to have it sans the blue cheese.

The really good thing at this meal were the candied pecan nuts (also supposedly a salad ingredient). I asked for the recipe. Sauted in butter with brown sugar, paprika, cinnamon, cardamon and black pepper. Crunchy and spicy, very good. Even in a salad.

mushroom risotto

2004-12-05T02:25:00.000Z

On a side note, why on earth is it so difficult to get leeks here? Last night when I was preparing the fish stew one of the friends I had over looked at my leeks (brought back from Atlanta) and sighed as deeply as if I had just started chopping up a truffle.

fish stew and brown rice

2004-12-05T00:49:00.000Z

Last night I was definitely glad to have food in the freezer. My mammoth fish-cooking day after going to Atlanta paid off, with a pot of fish stew in the freezer ready to heat up for myself and friends after a very long day's work. With the addition of some fresh leeks and good nutty brown rice, it warmed us up well against the cold that is both inside and outside my house. Simple fish stew seems to be something that no-one knows or thinks to make very much, despite the fact that its economy and ease would make it one of the most useful recipes. Basically the usual base of onions, garlic and some ginger, a little chilli, saffron if you have it, add the fish when the onions are softened, add lots of tomatoes, maybe a finely chopped red pepper (both skinned if you can be bothered), water or stock to cover, some leeks, season and simmer. Nothing very precise or difficult about all that. Any old fish will really do (I used cod cheeks and salmon offcuts) and it's a very satisfying supper that with a little jazzing up will do for the dinner party.

barbeque, candied yams, turnip greens and bbq beans

2004-12-04T00:28:00.000Z

Candied yams are a new thing to me. Sitting in a barbeque house in Tuscaloosa among some prize specimens of Americans with bellies larger than the tables they were seated at, I finally had a chance to give them a go. They're pretty good - cinnamon-scented, sweet but pleasingly not too soft. They'd make a really good dessert with some sheep's yogurt to lighten the dish up and mix with the syrupy juices.

sausage and okra casserole with rice

2004-12-03T05:25:00.000Z

Every week the Rural Studio provides us with a communal meal generally followed by a lecture or other event, at which everyone ritually complains about the quality of the food. Although I would never claim that it had any great culinary merits, the food that is cooked up by a local woman is rarely truly inedible and I do find the complaints about it slightly unjustified. It's filling, home-cooked and free and to my omnivorous mouth this makes it perfectly acceptable, especially compared to the institutional food I used to get in England (hall food at college, school dinners) which was wholly disgusting in every way, and generally totally processed.

Given my food-related scruples I do find it strange that on this one I'm one of the only people who quite happily fills my plate and scoffs it down. The only thing I can't manage is the horrible American 'salad' that generally also gets served - iceberg lettuce, those weird pre-peeled carrots that look like orange bullets, watery tomato and the worst horror of all, topped with grated 'Cheddar' cheese. The first couple of times I tried to pick out a few bits of lettuce and tomato from the bottom, uncontaminated by the cheese, but this was never wholly successful and now I just resign myself to a lack of vitamins at this particular meal each week.

back to the local Mexican: steak flautas and guacamole salad

2004-11-30T04:15:00.000Z

Eating in NYC was certainly wonderful - decadent, expensive, lovely. Actually, it was probably not more of any of those than a good week in normal London life, but coming from a town with, effectively, no restaurants (Mexican/steak/bbq joints not counting) it was culture shock and a treat.

We did the whole Thanksgiving turkey thing, which was cooked, bizarrely, by a friend of our hosts who turned out to also be a mutual acquaintance of mine from Suffolk. He apparently owed them a favour, as he turned up clad in a velvet suit, proceeded to prepare the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and giblet gravy, put the bird in the oven and then, after a couple of glasses of wine, left to have his Thanksgiving meal elsewhere. It all turned out deliciously, and was finished off with pumpkin pie, which our all-English party had to phone-a-friend to find out whether to serve hot or cold. Then lots of coffee and scotch (no Southern bourbon here) and our expat celebration was complete.

The most decadent part of our visit was certainly the impromptu jump out of a traffic-jammed cab into the Grand Central Station oyster bar for an oysters and Guinness lunch. But actually, if I lived in NY and worked nearby, I would probably go there far too often for lunchtime treats, a bit like I used to do at the bar of St John in London. Most main courses and sandwiches are really pretty reasonably priced, with some obvious bargains in the soup/stew sections, and utterly delicious, not to mention the surroundings. The small baby who was accompanying us also loved the whole affair, stuffing oyster crackers in her mouth and charming everybody, looking around with wide eyes and definitely not wanting to leave.

Other good things were eaten at the Peasant - good fashionable Italian food and good cocktails with which to while away the wait for our table. The only very strange thing here was that our waitress allowed us to all order main courses without telling us that none of them came with any side vegetables. Therefore missing out on fleecing us for more money, but also meaning that we were all rather gobsmacked when a bistecca the size of a dinner plate turned up for one of our party garnished with nothing more than parsley, and we had to rather hurriedly order some greens. Also, steaks the size of dinner plates are so ridiculously sized as to be slightly nauseating no matter how well they are chosen and cooked - and unfortunately this one was also not cooked rare as requested. After having waited a fair time for our food to arrive, however, no-one was going to send it back. My ossobuco with farro was very good, however, and the pannacotta also.

We had good New York breakfasts at institutions like Cafe Lalo (with ridiculously slow service) and Prune on E 1st Street, where I indulged another New Yorky craving of mine - lots of really good smoked fish from Russ and Daughters. and nouveau diner food at Relish Diner in Williamsburg. All very classic NYC but just what I needed in my belly to send me back to Alabama happy but slightly craving home-cooked food.

grilled goats cheese and mint sandwich

2004-11-25T19:03:00.000Z

Leaving the Black Belt results in an overflow of food-related moments and the spending of slightly absurd sums of money on eating. Travelling via Atlanta to NYC for Thanksgiving, we haven't even had the turkey extraveganza yet and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities for eating, and actually slightly nauseated by the overabundance of food - it's all too accessible, too easily bought rather than made oneself with effort and ingenuity making the unexpected out of the mundane. Shops heave with fresh vegetables, exotic herbs, every conceivable ingredient.

I eat roasted duckling in a restaurant where every dish contains at least eight or nine elements, not one or two and some clever seasoning. I eat sushi, which I have been craving for the last months, and it's somehow too normal, ordered by phone and delivered to your door. It's a huge treat but I feel slightly ridiculous making such a big deal out of it. We shop with friends for Thanksgiving trimmings in Fairways and I look at the piles of pak choi and french beans and the hordes of frenetic New Yorkers grabbing flat-leaf parsley, and think how absurdly lucky they are to have the money and the shops to spend it in on these items which are, quite frankly, luxurious. I have to grow my own flat-leaf parsley or rucola and I've obviously been in the South too long because I start to think that's the way it should be.

2004-11-23T05:01:00.000Z

Another major excitement this week was that a kind soul saw my Amazon wishlist item for a decent kitchen knife, my pining for my Global left back in England getting too much but my finances not really stretching to such an extravegant purchase. You know who you are - thank you very much! It's changed my life (or at least my cooking).

pumpkin risotto and green salad

2004-11-22T04:42:00.000Z

Another simple, yet satisfying meal courtesy of my trip to DeKalb. The small things I crave here - like the small, hard, sweet pumpkin which I roasted and made into risotto tonight. The only pumpkins here are the hugely swollen, bright orange ones bred solely for carving into jack'o'lanterns and putting on your doorstep. Pumpkin risotto has to be one of the most quintessential autumn foods - its sweetness and texture and colour, the chunks of pumpkin melting in your mouth and the slight bite of the rice. I make mine with chopped rosemary added at the beginning of the process, sauted along with the onions and garlic. Somehow pumpkin and rosemary go really well together and again, rosemary is a very autumnal taste - warming, fragrant, dark. With a green salad as a contrast to the sweet richness of the risotto, it's a simple meal that does everything I want from a home supper.

ribs, fries and slaw at...you know where...

2004-11-20T00:45:00.000Z

The seeming lull in cooking activity is deceptive. The most exciting food event of the last two weeks was my visit in Atlanta to the De Kalb Farmers Market, my excuse being to pick up my boyfriend from the airport. It's a strange place. For the English among you, this is nothing like the Borough Markets of the world. It's a huge supermarket, flying in food from all around the world, hidden in a massive anonymous-looking warehouse in an Atlanta suburb. Endless aisles of exotic vegetables, a huge fish and meat section, and shelves stacked high with the trademarks goods of the foodie middle classes - extra-virgin olive oil, couscous, tofu, spices, dried pulses, red wine. And also the mundane - boring red peppers, rather washed-out tomatoes, large white onions. They don't have free-range chicken, only 'farm raised, all natural' which as we all know is a euphemism and if you were in any doubt, the pallid white skin on the beasts betrayed their upbringing. It made me uneasy, shopping for 'real food' in this environment so redolent of the international food trade and all its excesses.

Nevertheless, I was excited by the fish section. Mainly, because they sell off-cuts, the pieces that normal people don't like to deal with. Especially exciting were the cod heads - 99c each - and the bluefin tuna offcuts - $1.49 a pound, as well as wild salmon offcuts and grouper. A steal, for great fish soups, stews, stir-fries and really good stock. So at the moment, I have a fish stew simmering on the stove, and a pile of bones from which all the meat have been cut, waiting for the one big saucepan I own to become free, so I can make a good batch of stock to freeze Considering the utter impossiblity of buying fish here in Greensboro, this is really exciting stuff. The offcuts section was frequented by Asians, who know that the cheeks of fish are the best bit, while all the white people shoped for tame skinned, boned fillets.

roast lamb, ratatouille, brown rice

2004-11-16T04:46:00.000Z

I got the rest of my Amazon test-drive food deliveries yesterday evening, after I'd finished dinner, so tonight was their testing ground. Sadly I got them all a bit late due to the parcel-delivering customs in deepest Alabama. These are that when we are not home (which is all of the delivery hours), the UPS man knows to deliver our parcels to Barnette Furniture down the road from where we sometimes get a phone call or, as last night, the owner dropping by to inform us rather than that little piece of card in the mailbox. All very well but unfortunately this time I was informed rather late and my leg of lamb which I was so looking forward to definitely did not benefit from the wait despite its careful packing in insulative foam, cold gel bags and so forth.

Nevertheless, it was still edible, roasted simply, and the real brown rice that I also ordered (good rice being one of my most insistent food rules) was just what I wanted - nutty, crunchy, especially when I accidentally-on-purpose burnt the bottom a little bit. Despite the lamb being past its best, I still find it amazing that a piece of meat can find its way to smalltown Greensboro through the vagaries of internet and UPS and still be even edible. And having not eaten lamb for two and a half months, it was a very welcome taste. The excitement of receiving packages of food through the mail is also unequalled. Amazon does a fantastic job, especially the wishlist service, which yields me surprises from friends and family just often enough. It does feel, as a reader has noted, rather like shopping at WalMart, but at least I don't have to feel guilty about burning up all that gas to get there and back.

home-made gnocchi and tomato sauce

2004-11-14T17:36:00.000Z

Having my memory jogged by making Nuccia's tomato sauce, and by hearing stories of gnocchi being eaten in London, today I made gnocchi with the left-over mash from last night (another good thing about cooking for one is that there's always plenty of leftovers). Having probably not made these for over a year, I wondered whether I might have forgotten how, but Nuccia's teachings were obviously deeply ingrained because they turned out perfectly, even if I do say so myself.

This is one of those recipes that is impossible to give quantities for. Break an egg or two into a pile of mashed potatoes (I made enough for two and used one egg) and mix up gently with a fork. Start gradually folding in flour, keeping a light touch. I couldn't possibly tell you how much flour goes in, except that when you've used enough the dough should be silky and hang together in a ball so that you can knead it very gently by hand. The silky feeling is what you want; too much flour and the dough will be hard and lumpen when cooked. It's really just enough flour to bind the potatoes into a coherent piece of dough and stop them dissolving while they cook. Then start shaping the gnocchi laying them on a floured surface. They swell up when cooked so make them small - the finishing touch with Nuccia was always to mark the surface with a fork so it looked stripy (holds the sauce better? makes the gnocchi less likely to fall apart when cooking?) so they should be about the size where a table fork will easily mark the whole surface, and not too fat. About the size and shape of a large broad bean.

Then dust them over with flour, boil your water, throw them in and they are done when they rise back up to the surface. Serve immediately - no waiting for anybody! The lightness of the dough makes homemade gnocchi totally different from the lumpen, heavy dumplings that go by that name in packages or bad restaurants. These should be light and smooth, and I think tomato sauce is really the best accompaniment, none of this cheesy stuff that people sometimes smother them with. These are so easy to make, and quick, I must remember to do them more often.

pan-fried chicken breast, porcini mushroom sauce, sweet potato mash, turnip greens

2004-11-14T03:10:00.000Z

Everyone always says how they hate cooking for one. For me cooking a really good meal just for me is one of life's greatest luxuries, as eating in a restaurant by oneself also now is, though the latter used to make me uncomfortable. I am home alone tonight and cooked just for me exactly what I wanted to eat, a proper meal (not just a quick pasta) and sat down and ate it properly with a glass of wine and a glass of water, salt and pepper on the table in front of me, and, in lieu of conversation, a good book to stop me from eating too fast.

Once I remember planning for myself a three-course meal because I knew my flatmates were going to be out. Jerusalem artichoke soup as a starter, if I remember right, then lamb chops, and as a dessert I think I had biscotti and poached apricots. It was the greatest treat - not to worry about pleasing everyone's tastes, not to have to have everything done on time or to have to wait for someone who was late for dinner - a sensation of sheer luxury that is all the more so knowing that no-one can witness my greed. Tonight's menu was planned around my new dried porcini from Amazon, which are actually pretty good. I'm getting into the turnip greens thing here too, for me slightly preferable to collard as they have thicker stalks giving them more crunch - some way to the texture of swiss chard.

Eating in a restaurant by myself was definitely an acquired taste as a result of travelling a lot on my own, but now I have lost all shame and love it the more for the fact that often staff and fellow customers are rather bemused by the appearance of a single girl wanting a table for one. Especially as then I tend to eat my way through a substantial part of the menu, not restricting myself in the slightest. In England I rarely do eat out on my own, except at local cafes or greasy spoons: the experience is definitely associated with travel. Reading a guidebook at the table in a foreign country, writing postcards with dinner, observing the eating habits of a different culture, striking up conversation with my waiter - these are some of my most vivid travel memories, located in falafel bars in Jerusalem, chic-chi neighbourhood brunch spots in New York, upper-echelon hotel restaurants in Iran and bistros all over France. No fellow traveller to worry about spending too much at a better restaurant, or to fret over the hygiene standards of a backstreets eatery. Just myself, able to eat exactly as I like.

lots of hot green split pea soup

2004-11-13T20:57:00.000Z

I bought a great new skillet today, fed up of using the thin-bottomed telfon-coated frying pans that 'came with the property', as they say. In the flea market here you can buy ancient very heavy cast-iron skillets for 10 bucks, already well-used and worn in with decades of frying chicken, bacon, pork chops and beans. This one will definitely push me over the airline weight limit but it's with me for life now.

I'm also happy because I've just made a big pan of tomato sauce to put in small containers and freeze, so when I come back starving from studio on a cold night I know I've got something to eat. Again, it's an inherited recipe that my mother learnt from Nuccia, the fantastic chain-smoking cook at Castello di Volpaia, a beautiful estate in Tuscany making wonderful Chianti and probably the best olive oil and wine vinegar. The owners became our friends when my father fell ill there while on a wine-buying trip about 20 years ago, and was nursed back to health by Nuccia. We have been to stay there almost every year since, and Nuccia has let me make my way into the kitchen at every turn. I learnt to make potato gnocchi with her, and risotto ai funghi, and eaten Easter lamb with artichokes, classic Italian pork scalopettes, potatoes with rosemary, and much much more. The bit that makes this tomato sauce so good is a decent amount of non-tomato stuff - onion, carrot (for sweetness) and some celery - long simmering, bay leaves, black pepper.

spaghetti with spinach and chickpeas

2004-11-13T02:26:00.000Z

In need of warming, comforting and tasty food after a hard day's work, I made the above - one of my favorite pasta dishes, and one that falls into the all-important category of 'sauce takes as long to make as pasta takes to cook'. I've streamlined the making of this dish into an extremely efficient process.

Chop an onion and plenty of garlic, put in a frying pan with olive oil and a pinch of oregano to soften. Put a couple of bags/big bunches of spinach [this makes enough for 3/4 but the sauce keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days and I've even frozen it before] into the pasta pan with a little water on high heat, steam quickly, then remove and put the pasta water onto boil. Drain a can of chickpeas and rinse. Put the spaghetti in to boil and stir the chickpeas in with the onions. Chop the spinach roughly. At about the time when you are impatient enough to test the pasta, although it quite clearly isn't done yet, add the spinach to the chickpea mixture and stir. By the time the spaghetti is done, the flavours of the sauce will have combined just enough and you're done. The key to this dish is plenty of garlic and plenty of olive oil. Ideally it would be finished with a good swig of extra-virgin just before serving, although Piggly-Wiggly doesn't provide such luxuries so tonight the basic oil had to do. It's also really good finished with some fresh chopped oregano, and sometimes I add diced fresh tomato right at the end too.

This always reminds me of home - my mother makes a fantastic version of this, and in the summer with the fresh tomato and oregano from our garden, it's great for an outdoor lunch with some green salad. In the winter with a glass of red wine, it is just what I crave as instant satisfaction.

As an aside, my first order from Amazon's food section arrived today - some dried porcini mushrooms. I'm a happy gal.

eggs, grits, biscuits, center-cut ham

2004-11-12T22:12:00.000Z

More good breakfast things today - a late one to celebrate finally getting my driving licence here. The Waysider in Tuscaloosa is definitely going to have a return visit. The best biscuits - fluffy and crisp on the outside and my first real grits. They're kinda weird to have with eggs and ham, as they remind me of pudding, but I got used to them by thinking of Japanese rice porridge which is also a savory dish. But the clientele in the Waysider on this Friday around 10.30am was a real pull. Incongruously groomed old ladies meeting for a gossip over their grits, old couples having a double date: the combination of hearty, inelegant food and twin-sets with Southern accents, with a scattering of the check-shirted working men that you would expect to find in such a place. Sort of like a really old-school London chop house, with that East End gentility bordering on roughness - a kind of Lyons Corner House of America. You could imagine having a great date there at a corner table, with a Southern railroad worker who had picked you up on your way home from teaching elementary school.

It looks like they do a mean lunch menu too - pot-roast, catfish, collard greens and field peas, corn, squash.

eggs, hash browns, sausage patty and biscuit

2004-11-11T19:22:00.000Z

Eggs in the USA:

For the first time here I ordered eggs. How do you want them? I was asked. 'Fried, please' I answered.

Blank look.

So no-one here talks about fried eggs! and scrambled eggs aren't really scrambled eggs, they're sort-of 'vaguely-stirred-around-while-being-cooked' eggs. And you can't buy free-range eggs anywhere in the Black Belt. I might have to get my own chickens. Though even with the artificially-coloured piggly-wiggly-eggs, last night I did manage to make a pretty good mushroom omelette, all runny in the middle...

BBQ ribs, fries and slaw from Mustang Oil

2004-11-10T19:57:00.000Z

What is it about the ribs from Mustang Oil that is so much more glorious than the ribs from any other heart-stopping artery-clogging Southern diner? How soft and melting yet crisp and chewy, not too much sauce, those melt-in-your-mouth layers of fat around the knuckles...And accompanied by the best slaw - fresh, crunchy, easy on the mayo, green with flecks of orange carrot and red cabbage, and those inimitable cajun fries. This is how dream-food tastes.

Today we hit Mustang Oil at just the right moment, early on, when the fries have just been cooked in preparation for the lunchtime rush and only a scattering of folk sit at the formica tables. Just after we sat down and started to eat, the place filled up with redneck men in grubby jeans, steel-toed boots and baseball caps, from the local metal fabricating company, the John Deere tractor centre, and a few farms and building sites. This place lives at the edge of glorious and worrying in its perpetuation of the stereotypes of Southern life. Grunts of ackowledgement are exchanged, the odd joke, the women behind the counter get to work shovelling chicken, ribs, cheeseburgers, the daily special (today: pork chop and gravy) onto plastic plates. We munch on through our ribs acknowledging the one or two men who we recognise (a local dairy farmer, the man who fixed the lights where we live) and chat to the tiny, wrinkled, slightly crazy old lady who cleans the dishes in a grease-stained Mustang Oil t-shirt and a pink hairnet, and a passion for the Auburn football team.

This gas station diner could not exist anywhere else - its name, its food, the severed stag heads adorning the walls, the battered pick-up trucks pulled up outside. If any of y'all are lost in West Alabama, head to Greensboro and eat the best ribs, fries and slaw ever at Mustang Oil.

smooth green split pea soup (tastes of home)

2004-11-08T02:46:00.001Z

Call me slow, but I only just noticed that Amazon has started a new section (currently beta-testing) selling food. It's utterly amazing. Not just dried/smoked/bottled things, but fresh meat, fish and vegetables. And what's more peculiar is that the price of their frehs vegetables, such as onions, tomatoes, pototoes or peppers, are actually cheaper than Piggly Wiggly. Admittedly, this is without the shipping charge, but nevertheless, I'm astounded. I'm not sure whether its wonderful or terrible that I could have vegetables delivered by UPS in 1-2 business days. What's even weirder is that half the stuff is from mainstream brands - Dole lettuce, Green Giant, Birds Eye. Does anyone really buy frozen Bird's Eye peas from Amazon rather than their local grocery store? (unless you live in the middle of Alaska, sure...)

Certainly, given my starved-of-produce state here, fresh meat and fish by mail is something I'm definitely going to be trying out - pictures of legs of lamb, whole lemon sole and yellowfin tuna have me salivating. Although I can't afford the organic stuff, I can't get ANY lamb or fish here at all, so anything is welcome. But what is going on with our crazy methods of food production whereby this is possible, yet for me to buy locally raised lamb, beef or chicken is impossible? Why do I have to get good fresh food flown in to me when I live in the middle of the countryside surrounded by fields? and why don't more people ask these questions?

curried sweet potato fritters and rice

2004-11-07T04:48:00.000Z

The last couple of days have been pretty good on the food front. Last night I even managed to have two dinners - I'd already cooked and eaten a spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, when Cara-Mae turned up to bake bread and make herself (and me as it turned out) a sort of cassoulet for supper. And today Cara-Mae and I had a lovely peaceful lunch on the porch of a tiny catfish diner near Mason's Bend - the typical soup from round here (chicken with small broad beans, green beans, corn and a tomato base with a little chilli heat), freshly fried catfish, hush puppies and fries.

Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook in people's houses - 'rich white people in town', as she put it. She grew up nearby in a family of 11 children, and was cooking for them from a young age, learning from her mother. All the black women here spend inordinate amounts of time at the stove, while the men occasionally tend a grill or barbecue. Willie Pearl had one of her sons working with her, serving and washing the dishes. 'He don't know to cook nothing', she observed.

Catching up on the press, this article is absolutely right - vanity and snobbishness are the only way to eat and keep (reasonably) trim. If you don't deign to eat a big mac then you won't get fat.

Risotto ai funghi and a green salad

2004-11-05T04:49:00.000Z

After election night tacos and post-election nothingness, tonight it's back to cooking, thank god. Risotto, one of my most loved foods, though this one has been a long time coming. First, it was impossible to find risotto rice, even in Super Target in Tuscaloosa where they sell that despicable pre-mixed dried rice and mushrooms, but not the rice by itself. After a birthday night conversation with fellow food fascist Frank, the German second year tutor, a packet of very good arborio was dropped in my lap one day in the computer room. Where he got it from I have no idea. Next, stock: it took some time to summon up the courage to buy and cook one of the dubious battery-farmed chickens from Piggly WIggly who swim in their plastic bags in a mixture of blood and water. But I took the plunge and was rewarded by some decent home-made stock. Last, the ingredients to flavour the thing - and I had to fall back on tight button mushrooms which after half an hour of simmering managed to grow some flavour. And cheese - well, you can imagine, it was Kraft shredded parmesan out of a plastic bottle. The saviour of the enterprise was some fresh parsley which I found hidden at the back of the vegetable shelf.

If I say so myself, it turned out remarkably well - al dente, flavorsome, fresh - though maybe my starved taste-buds were over-reacting. And mushroom risotto is the taste of autumn, which has suddenly arrived with piercing blue sky and chilly air. English friends tempt my with talk of pigeon and other game, and reading 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' makes me wonder why this lush land isn't offering me these joys, but still, my stomach is happy...