Viva La Roma

Rome! The Eternal City! The centre of a globe spanning civilisation! Bringers of aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health, etc.

Having prepared for a weekend visit in the most highly intellectual way (intensive review of all the Asterix books, especially Mansions of the Gods), it was important once on site to apply that high-brow culture-seeking mode and *not to get too distracted by the food*. Yeah, right.

Where to start? Perhaps with a lunch at Obika, a slightly incongruous name for a mozzarella restaurant (surely Japanese? but no) that has a sister in Selfridges, London. I had not realised that Mozzarella was so varied or so delicious - the key according to our brilliant hostess Judi is that this cheese does not travel well, so the closer to the Buffalo farm you are, the better. Here is evidence of our greed:


Before and after. on the nearest platter: smoked, 'stronger' and 'mild' Mozzarellas di Bufala Campana DOP, Stracciatella di Burrata and Ricotta di Bufala. It turns out that Buffalo Ricotta is heaven in a little dish.

That evening, with barely 4 hours for digestion, on to the amazing enoteca (wine bar) and restaurant (restaurant) [name to be inserted here when I can remember what it was called] in groovy party district Trastevere. A big thank you to Heroic Host Kevin for parking the car a trillion miles away after we realised that every single person who had ever complained about Roman traffic was in fact correct. While waiting for our hero in the enoteca section we got a chance to get stuck in to the array of local wine samples in gargantuan glasses. This brings me onto the subject of how much more sophisticated Romans are than Londoners, winning the following competitions hands down:

• appearance 1: Shoes appropriate to outfit, not to surface on which person is walking ie 5 inch heels on cobbles is fine.
• appearance 2: always imepccable makeup, even to the extent that old makeup is actually cleaned off off the day before, before applying new (thick) layer the next day
  
• appearance 3: WBWJEBTBONB (wear black, with just enough bling to be obviously not british)
• Milk. know it's place. If you drink Capuccino after the morning coffee break, you are proposterous. Expresso only.
  
• Quantity of wine drunk per person while out to dinner. Judi, on a previous visit to this establishment had been chastised by the sommelier for ordering a second bottle of wine between four. They had had a drink beforehand in the enoteca section which had been policed, sorry, noted by the sommelier. We kept it tidy and managed to restrict ourselves to several pre meal tasters, one bottle of reaaaaaly nice Barbaresco and 4 glasses of different, chilled, red dessert wines, which is v civilised.

Anyway, if you should find yourself in [what the &&*** was it called again] then definitely order the wild board papardelle dish which has gone straight into my top ten dishes ever.

A really posh meal should always be counterpointed with a local normal one and the next day Maccheroni delivered us the best two lunchtime primi platti you could hope for. Calorie count now 5 squillion in 2 days.

Just a little chilli in the pomodoro
Just enough Porcini in the tagliatelle



And finally, for a hat trick of Roman Foodie recommendations, you should not miss Franchi's Suppli ('telephone balls', so called because the mozarella inside the warm rice balls is meant to stretch out like telephone wires). Buy them at the counter, eat them standing up, and try not to buy a lifetime's supply of Pecorino or brasaola from the counter around the corner.

And now for that week long starvation detox thing.....

FAR too sophisticated to accompany cheese on toast

Hello World! I've had my head down at work the last couple of weeks, which has also resulted in far too much hotel or dial-in food and no blogging. So, today, a yearning for something green combined with something comforting (rainrainrainrainrainrain) resulted in this lunch, made of an incongrous north African-feeling green beans dish and horseradish cheese on toast.


For the beans: cook the beans (not too much! should be crunchy still when you finish cooking them, perhaps only 3 mins in boiling water). Drain and rinse in cold water.

Ideally use a high-rimmed frying pan (eg wok) for the next bit. Mix some ground almonds, whole roasted almonds, chili flakes and salt and cook over medium heat until it starts smelling nice. At this point, hurl the beans into the frying pan, mix around until coated and warm and serve.

I shall not give you instructions on how to make cheese on toast, apart from a suggestion that a layer of horseradish, mustard, marmite or chutney goes down nicely under the cheese.

Temporary milk solutions for cups of tea?

I have a question for those of you who are experts in hot drinks. I haven't had caffeine for maybe 13 years and so while I can go through the ritual of making cups of tea for someone else, they aren't the greatest cups of tea. I am a human version of a Nutrimatics Drinks Dispenser from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

So. in our household where MB is a big tea drinker (something to do with coming from Yorkshire) but neither of us are regular consumers of milk, he is frequently presented with the following choice. Cup of tea with either:
-no milk
-something that used to be milk but is now closer to cheese
-strawberry yoghurt, which was made from milk originally

I recently proposed that a sensible option could be to make some ice cubes from milk, and upon making the tea, drop in a frozen milk cube. Et voila, perfectly fresh milk every time and also a cup of tea at just the right temperature for drinking, rather than burning the tongue. The response: expression on face as if I had suggested going to work in a cardboard dress; words out of mouth 'don't be ridiculous'.

My question is, has anyone tried this? can anyone suggest an alternative that is not UHT? Thank you, from an ignorant non drinker of hot drinks.

My favourite salad. Pretty as a picture.

Notice to those from the North American region: courgette = zucchini.

Firstly you need access to some good courgettes.

Good courgettes:
Can actually be attributed to some kind of growing environment like your friend's garden or an overpriced organic shop.

Bad courgettes:
Presented in more than two of packaging from a large supermarket. Gives you the sinister feeling they have been drilled out of acrylic in an industrial prototyping machine.

To make the salad:
Ideally, gather some yellow and green courgettes. Young ones so that the central bit with the seeds is firm. Simply top and tail the courgettes, retrieve your favourite potato peeler and peel strips off each courgette. You should be prepared for the double delight of an incredibly satisfying sensation as the peeler zips through the vegetable, and the surprisingly attractive result, which I might call a perfect little parallel line of nature's pigment if I was being pretentious. Talking of which did you know that the M25 was build on a bed of shredded Mills & Boon Books. Sandy Toksvig said so on the radio so it must be true.

Anyway. If you aren't eating the salad immediately then you could store the strips in cold water in the fridge. Don't dress the salad till it is on the table, in front of hungry people. When ready, mix a dressing from:
-1 lemon, juiced
-1 teaspoon sugar
-olive oil
-shredded fresh mint
-salt, pepper
teaspoon Dijon mustard

Enjoy!

Huxley's Spanakopita

This recipe was not invented by any of the Huxley family. However it was eaten last night against the background of a debate about which Huxley had done what. So, in case you had forgotten, some of the most well known Huxleys are::

• The anatomist/biologist/medic Thomas Henry Huxley, who lived through the mid 1800s, is referred to as 'Darwin's Bulldog' because he was a key supporter of his theory of evolution. Having been exposed through junior medical apprenticeships to poverty in East London, he then studied medicine, anatomy and physiology. A role in the Navy allowed him to study invertebrate biology and he was made a fellow of the Royal Society at the ridiculous age of 25. Not only a great scientist but also a great influencer of education and the humanities. Lots of info at the wikipedia site (yes I know, wikipedia is not the most intellectually rigorous way to gather information but it's a very useful summary)
  
• His grandson Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World (which I am ashamed to say I thought I had read, but haven't, it was 1984). The origins of 'is-ness' is Aldous Huxley's mescaline-fuelled Doors of Perception. I cannot possibly embarrass myself by writing another word about Aldous Huxley when my mate Jake has done his PhD on the guy.
• Important if you are into neurophysiology or biophysics: Andrew Huxley, also a grandson of TH and I think brother of Aldous, who with Alan Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize for describing the action potential - the miracle of electrophysiology that means you can both read and comprehend this blog, and click away from the page because it is becoming too geeky.

Anyway this Spanakopita is also named after Huxley because it is a minor evolution from the traditional kind, adding courgette into the centre and including an additional layer of olive paste/tapenade. Some traditional versions don't have cheese at all.

Ingredients (serves 4/5/6 as a main course or lots at a party in bite size pieces)
500g - 750g spinach according to taste (in this photo I used 500g). You can buy good frozen spinach, if so then defrost and squeeze as much water out as you can. If fresh then wash it, wilt it (microwaves were made for this) and again squeeze it as much as you can.
3 small courgettes, diced
2 onions
2 slabs of good feta
dill or oregano
filo pastry (you could make your own but really the shop bought stuff is so good you would clearly be mad to do so)
butter/olive oil
olive paste/tapenade

to make it:
1. chop the onions into fine slices and sweat them down in a pan with a little butter and olive oil until they are cooked through. I recently had a revelation on this - putting the lid on the pan and turning down the heat actually works better than a high heat uncovered.
2. add the courgette and cook for a minute, add the spinach, herb and chopped up feta. stir till well blended, season and set aside to cool down a bit.
3. get your baking dish. I used a silicon square one, which was useful at the extraction-from-baking-pan stage which I usually balls up. brush with butter/olive oil and build up about 4 layers of pastry, bushing each one. Then spread a layer of olive paste/tapenade and build up another 4 layers. Then, add your spinach mixture and top with the same layer formation
4. cook in a non-fan oven for about 30-40 minutes until it looks cooked. It's good cold, too.

Scotch Egg for the cricket

My lovely friends Will and Milla have an annual cricket match in September. It's the perfect balance between competitive play and crap people being allowed to have a go too. Naturally I am only using the C word with reference to myself, everyone else is county-class. My partner and I's 12 runs were offset by -15 points with three of our balls being caught. And that was despite the kind butterfingers of our field. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun.

At this annual picnic, everyone brings their own lunch and I thought I might experiment with some cold meats. Firstly I had the opportunity to use my friend Charlie's home made CK sauce. It turns out that if you coat chipolatas with this spicy and apple sauce and cook them so that you get a sticky crispy coating, the result is unfortunately too delicious to actually make it to the cricket match the next day. Be warned.

Next, the Scotch Egg. Having debated with Charlie (of CK sauce fame) and his girlfriend Jess whether sausagemeat or minced pork is the better medium for scotch eggs, I can confirm that sausagemeat is excellent but must be handled correctly. You could could make your scotch eggs like this (or..if you try minced pork please let me know how it goes?)

1. boil some eggs so that they are soft boiled. Plunge immediately into cold water and peel. If you leave them to cool not only will they overcook but you might get that weird blue line around the yolk
2. get some good butchers sausages and extract the meat from the casing. I mixed extra sage into mine, you could mix any herbs in or even other ingredients like apple, parmesan cheese, whatever takes your fancy.
3. wash your hands and leave them wet. Form in your left hand a thin slab of sausagemeat, gently drop the egg onto this slab and start making another slab to go over the remaining part of the egg. I found that the loosely-packed sausagemeat worked well after the cooking - the one that I packed more tightly ended up looking like this:
4. As you can see I got all poncy and rolled my good egg in some pine nuts. I know they are a bit 1990s, food style-wise but that doesn't stop them from being delicious.
5. bake at 180-200 for about 20-25 minutes

i heart old kitchen scales

Part of the recent Cullen experience was going back to a simpler kitchen. Going cold turkey on my cookbook-and-kitchen-gadget addiction turned out to be fun. As well as finding out that fan-free ovens are in many ways better than fan ones, I got to play with a traditional set of kitchen scales. If you are doing the same, don't forget to perform an initial balance. To do an accurate baseline balance, you will need 5 tablets of swiss souvenir Tourist Schokolade and half a cherry tomato.

Rhubarb Souffle: aesthetic #fail

Before and After

It was a lovely idea. I had some rhubarb and I had a halibut dish to follow and thought 'hmmmm a rhubarb fool is a bit of a cliche, and I have some eggs to use up. I wonder how the fibrous rhubarb would cope with the texture of a souffle?' One google stop later and I found that Gordon Ramsay had a recipe from the F word that I could try. Looked like a piece of cake.

So the basic idea with a souffle, in my limited experience is:

1. make flavoursome sauce, based on a basic roux sauce (savoury) or custard (sweet)

2. mix this with whisked egg whites

3. DON"T OPEN THE OVEN DOOR WHILE IT"S STILL COOKING. I REPEAT, KEEP THE OVEN DOOR CLOSED.

Clearly, number 3 was the equivalent of placing the proverbial big red button in front of me. The one that said 'don't press me'. I had scaled up from the 15 minutes in Gordon's recipe to 23 minutes for a twice-the size one, when I took a quick peek and immediately shut the door. The thing about electric, fanless ovens, is that while they don't misbehave on some items (cakes, bread), they are not so forgiving for impatient idiots who refuse to obey the basic instruction for cooking a souffle, that the temperature must be consistent throughout the cooking process.

Anyway if you (joyfully) have an oven door that you can see through, do try this because it tastes really good, but make sure you cook it for someone with a good sense of humour as it could look like this, not like the infuriatingly perfect version that Gordon R's food stylist created.

here is my quick recipe, for full detailed instructions, and indeed the actual quantities, I refer you to Monsieur Le Ramsay.

1. make rhubarb sauce. Rhubarb is one of a small number of food items that have specifically evolved the quality of being perfect for microwave cookery (the other main one being spinach, oh the washing up saved as it wilts in the plastic packet). Chop up your rhubarb into small pieces, pour over some lemon juice and sugar and nuke until it collapses, stirring every 30 seconds or so. This won't take long, 2-3 minutes probably. make too much and save the rest in your freezer. Anyway, put the rhubarb sauce in the fridge while you make the custard.

2. Make custard. Whisk together 2 egg yolks, a teaspoon of cornflour and some sugar. Separately, heat in a pan the milk/cream combo. When it is scalded, i.e. when it is just about to boil (watch carefully. This is generally about the same time period as a pear being ripe, ie 0.22 seconds), pour this slowly onto the egg yolk mixture, whisking rapidly.

Return to the heat and heat-and-whisk over a very low heat until it thickens. For a thicker custard, add more cornflour.

3. Mix the custard and rhubarb to make one rhubarby custard.

4. Whisk the egg whites. Strangely, older egg whites work better so its a good way to use them up. When they are stiff enough (can you create a cool mountain of foam and it stays?), fold in the rhubarby custard.

5. put in a suitable container, grease the inside with butter and ground almonds or sugar if you like - it will make life easier when the washing up comes.

6. pour in the egg mixture

7. STEP AWAY FROM THE OVEN DOOR! mine needed 30 minutes at least - a 3 person size.

Please share your success secrets if you can do this better - thanks! Z

cullen scallops with grapefruit and radish

Aha, I hear you think, she must mean Cullen Skink? Well yes, I am indeed at the end of my holiday in Cullen, Aberdeenshire, home of the famous creamy smoked Haddock Broth.This week, the town has an identity crisis. Cullen thinks it is the Caribbean, with one additional layer of clothing, and Speyside Malt instead of Rum cocktails. The golf course has two holes that involve teeing off either up a cliff or down a cliff. We even had dolphins. Scotophiles, please add Cullen to your list of beautiful places.

One of the many joys of this seaside town is the fresh-off-the-boat and brilliantly priced fish and seafood. Shopping trips to Eat Mair Fish in Buckie had me rack up a bill of £12 for eight fresh juicy scallops, a haddock, and two whopping fresh dover sole (soles? Grammar check needed) and separately half a halibut for £8.



Still engrossed in my copy of The Flavour Thesaurus (which I am sad to say came on holiday with me), I discovered that grapefruit and seafood are apparently dream pairing and put together this dish which adds purple radishes. Might I say that this is one of the best trios since sage, pumpkin and pasta, the three little piggies or Bananarama.

Ingredients
Scallops. Super fresh ones please. I allowed 4 per person. As a starter. Ooooh the gluttony.
Pink Grapefruit
Radishes, ideally purple ones
Half an egg yolk per 2 people
Butter and olive oil (a generous splodge)

To make it:
Firstly, operate on your grapefruit so that you have skinless segments. I allowed quarter of a grapefruit per person.
Secondly, slice your radishes really really thinly. Say about 4 radishes per person. Plop in the same bowl as your grapefruit.

In a pan, heat your butter and olive oil together until foaming. Add the scallops and cook at as high a heat that your butter will allow without burning. After a few minutes pour off the oil/butter into a separate container and carry on cooking the scallops with less fat so that they will crisp on the edges. Don’t overcook! Allow 4-5 minutes on each side maximum but less if you can cope with semi-sashimi texture.

Put the scallops to one side to rest. Pour the grapefruit juice from the container of wedges into the butter/olive oil mix, which should now hopefully be quite cool. Mix with a fork so the mixture really is cool. Then, beat in half the egg yolk. Pour this mixture into the warm pan and cook, beating well, for a couple of minutes until it becomes thick and glossy. Serve with the scallops and grapefruit/radish salad. Preferably, in a setting like this:

Edinburgh - a food and drink paradise (between shows)

Epic. In the last 1.5 days we have seen the following shows:
Shappi Khorsandi (charming and enjoyable rather than belly laughs)
Quasimodo (intense, 15 minutes too long, and quite funny in retrospect even though it wasn't meant to be)
Daniel Kitson (oh. my. god. life changing. kill for a ticket. laughed 157 times and wept 8 times, the last time in a slightly uncontrolled manner. I never weep in anything, not Bambi, not the Neighbours wedding, nothing.)
Susan Calman in conversation with others from the festival (funny, charming, relaxing after Kitson)
Dig for Victory (hmmm. There's always one. Some nice ideas, executed as if for their mates after the pub, D- for effort)
Bo Burnham (dumbfoundingly brilliant, slightly uncomfortable, don't want to mention how young he is but it's part of the package. When he went off on the Hamlet soliloquy I actually didn't want him to stop.)
Idiots of Ants (that's more like it! Clever, fun, and they had put a lot of effort into it)

At this point we rolled over and collapsed and bailed on the midnight-2am Best of the Fest. Among all this, who would have thought that we would have time to fit in some ****ing amazing cocktails at Bramble (at 5pm..whooop...we are so not in our mid-to-late 30s, man) and an unbelievably good meal at Wedgewood.

Firstly, Bramble. After a few minutes in this underground drinkers heaven, it is very easy to forget that it's actually daylight outside. If you live in Edinburgh this is probably not usually a problem, as it very rarely does have daylight outside. My Ginger T, pictured here in a teacup-stemmed glass hybrid, was meticulously assembled by this lovely gentleman, let's call him Scotty because we can't actually remember his name, from the following ingredients:
Hendrick's Gin
Battersea Quinine Cordial
Freshly squeezed lemon juice
Ginger syrup (home made!)
Hibiscus jam
egg white

Scotty was very interesting on the subject of bitters. At Bramble they have 60 different types of bitters, most of which they make themselves by stewing fruits or other flavours with ridiculously strong (illegal?) alcohol. he gave us some peach, celery and other bitters before we started to see double and retreated to the snug area at the back for a quick power kip.

After the next show, on to Wedgewood. My lovely Edinburgh-based doctor friends, and foodies extraordinaire, Jim and Sarah, had given it a formidable trailer. Run by a couple - her front of house and him in the kitchen - it probably seats 30-40 people, every one of whom looks very happy to be there. Ms Front of House is terrifyingly good at her job, at the tender age of about what appeared to be 18. Legend tells of a night where the Royal Mile had a power cut and she arranged free flowing drinks and taxis to take all of her punters to an alternative restaurant not affected by the outage.

Wedgewood is pretty keen on good ingredients. They forage for salads, mushrooms, etc, and we had a lovely salad of things that hadn't grown in Poly Tunnels. Aaaaaah the food. A menu to die for, the four of us had to coordinate choices so that we could all eat off each others plate (imagine a tasting menu but achieved through lack of table manners). Here is a low quality photo gallery of our meal, including:
Sole with broccoli puree, goats cheese and chorizo. the goats cheese sounds like a suboptimal addition to sole but worked very well - very chalky in texture and there was only the tiniest bit of it.
Veal with fondant potatoes.
Rhubarb trifle, including perhaps the richest ever home made custard.

I could really live in Edinburgh, apparently, my friends say, it is this sunny all year round....

What do you cook for colleagues coming for a working lunch? Urk!

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. We all had to meet in West London and that's where I live. So, I suggested that we meet at my place where we have a big kitchen table around which to have our creative discussions. And we'll meet at lunchtime so I will rustle up something to eat. Brilliant. Simple. PANIC!

Firstly, I am not known for my tidiness. I am blind to kibble (as defined by Philip Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). Since MB has been up a European mountain my Floordrobe has been growing faster than dividing bacteria in a warm, damp, protein flooded petri dish. I hadn't actually realised how much he has been clearing up after me. So, firstly a most unusual bout of cleaning and tidying to bring my abode to the standards of Normal People Who Actually Keep A Tidy House.

Secondly, what to cook for lunch? Something that doesn't interfere with a meeting but doesn't involve sinking to frozen, pre prepared or ordering in? Something that screams 'highly professional and intelligent person who didn't even need to think about how to address the nutritional needs of those at the meeting? So I went super easy:

ingredients:
sweet potatoes
mushrooms
marsala
spring onions
blue cheese
salad

1. put a little olive oil and marsala in a pan, add chopped mushrooms and chopped spring onions. cook. add blue cheese.
2. serve over roast sweet potatoes with salad.

Top tip for cooking mushrooms: they need water, not oil. A little olive oil helps the flavour but mushrooms will suck up as much oil as you give them, but if you just flick a little water or wine on frying mushrooms then they will break through to a nice cooking thing. I am having some difficulty explaining this concept but try it and you will see.

How not to cut a lime

Call me pedantic but I really do care about the best method of cutting a lime. There is a right way and there is definitely a wrong way. South East Asians know how to cut limes. Next time you are at a Thai restaurant, check it out.

It is all about the geometry of the lime (limometry?). The little parcels of juice run like muscle fibres through the fruit. The casings for these parcels are pretty tough and trying to pop them by hand is a high-effort way to extract the juice. Think about it, you wouldn't crack an egg by squeezing it in one hand? So, if you cut across these fibres then the juice just flows out. In pictures:

the wrong way to cut a lime - segments












the right way to cut a lime - across the lime avoiding the core, so you decapitate the little fibres inside.

A perfectly composed breakfast. Composed by someone else

This morning, an early morning drive to Heathrow where MB (my beloved) is off to do some kind of crazy mountain climbing thing in Switzerland. So on the way back I decided to kick off my Pink Ticket week by stopping at the High Road Brasserie for an indulgent lone breakfast with the newspaper.

Can we quickly divert into a rant about the floor at this Brasserie. It is deeply deeply groovy, the kind of cool that you resent, because others who are less cool will notice and copy it, and soon it will be prolific, and it will become overblown like leather banquettes, and it will be listed in the 'Going Down' section of the colour supplement, when all it really was was a thing of beauty. By the way I am pleased with my prolific use of Oxford Commas in that sentence.

Anyway I ordered a smoked salmon bagel and when it arrived it was a composition of sheer delight. Smoked salmon, creme fraiche, lemon, capers, the nice bits from the middle of a red onion and a toasted bagel. Apologies for only remembering halfway through that I was writing a food blog, but here is a photo of the plate for your enjoyment. Yum.

Non-food. Amazing Rev!

I have just watched the entire first series of Rev., the amazing BBC series, in one sitting. It was completely entrancing, charming, incredibly funny, thought provoking, moving and to my atheist mind the most compelling argument for a religious life that I have ever seen.

Tom Hollander is Adam, the adorable, intelligent, devoted, flawed and often daft vicar of a run down East End church. He navigates the community side of religious life in a very Unholier than thou way, showing more than once that profanity is so much more impactful when spoken by someone wearing a dog collar.

His realistic relationship with the amazing vicar's wife and solicitor Alex (actress Olivia Colman) leaves us realising that forgiveness is surely the most important part of a relationship. In the final episode, Adam minesweeps his way through a Vicars and Tarts party and starts to flirt with.. and then dance at ..the attractive local headmistress. Hundreds of people around the country must have watched her deal with her drunk vicar husband and thought 'yes, that IS the way to deal with my other half acting like a total prat'.

I would like to see Dawkins/Hitchens review the series... and PLEASE BBC can we have a series 2.

Vogon cheesecake

Dr Evil has been sent to distract you from your new healthy eating regime. He is here to wave a little package of evil supersugarstimulus in front of you. Resistance is useless, as Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz would say.

I made this HobOreoNobFudgeApricot cheesecake to feed 7 friends on Wednesday night. There was a slab left over which everyone refused to take home. I am hoping that is because of Temptation, not Disgust.

the topping:
500g cream cheese
500ml double cream
a dollop of marscapone
2 tablespoons sugar
a half measure of gelatine, made up in warm water
grated lemon zest from 2 lemons
some chopped up bits of fudge

the base:
a pack of oreo cookies
half a pack of hob nobs
50g butter

on top
Apricots, sliced in half and grilled with a dab of sugar/butter mixture on top so they caramelise (or not, in my case).

to prepare:
1. whip the cream. mix with the cream cheese, marscapone, sugar, lemon zest. It should be a bit sloppy. Prepare the gelatine according to the instructions on the packet and mix. Chp up the fudge pieces and scatter and stir in.
2. prepare a springform tin by putting cling film over the base, with enough left at the sides so you can slide the cheesecake off when needed.
3. put the oreos and hobnobs (to non UK residents these are oat based biscuits available at any retailer. ginger biscuits also good for this) in a bag and hammer with a bottle or rolling pin until broken into small pieces. Or, put in a blender.
4. Melt the butter and pour over the biscuit crumbs, mix and then press into the base of the tin over the cling film
5. pour in the cheese mixture and chill. Add Apricots before serving.
6. eat, one small slice at a time. If you eat too much of this I promise that you will feel really ill.

Cheesecake is the ultimate modular recipe, the fruit on top could be anything - rhubarb, gooseberry, peaches, blackberries, anything. My preference is to have something tart rather than supersweet to contrast with the richness of the cream and the base. You can also put anything in the cheesecake mixture itself. If cooking for children why not be ridiculous and put in Heroes or a layer of jelly.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention Mojito

At my friend Blairsie's party this week (she just did the Tour de Force and raised over £5k well done!!!) I saw my old friend Gus and met his brilliant new girlfriend Julia. Julia and I prepared a cocktail of vodka, lemon juice, ginger beer and chopped up pieces of rocket (arugula) which tasted really quite good. Here is the worst ever photo of the drink, and a surprised looking Gus.

Skinned sweet potatoes look like turds

Sorry to lower the tone a bit, but seriously, look at this photo and tell me they don't....

On Eggs and Geekery.

Ask a French person what an egg means to them, they will say breakfast. Ask an American, they will say cholesterol. Ask an Englishman and he will say constipation, that's how the myth goes.

A brief post on the difference between the perfect scrambled egg and the perfect fried egg. Eggs have chemistry. Egg whites are mainly protein (mostly albumin) and of course water. The albumin protein can be teased into different structures by any cook, for example a towering mass of foam or a slightly bouncy solid. Egg yolks provide us with a chemical gadget for making emulsions. Lecithin will hold the chemical hands of water- and fat-based substances to perform a culinary marriage. Think custards, zabaglione, hollandaise and the rest.

So - on making scrambled eggs this weekend I was remembering a top tip given to me 20 years ago by someone who was a breakfast chef at Claridge's. He said:
- for perfect scrambled eggs, add NO MILK. add the eggs to the pan and cook the eggs as slowly as you possibly can.
- for a perfect omelette, whist two eggs in a bowl with a spoon of water, again NO MILK. Heat a pan to as high a heat as it can stand, add some oil and butter when it is hot, swirl round the pan and immediately thrown in the eggs, muddling at first and leaving to settle. The whole process of cooking should take under a minute.

This incredibly simple trick does, I admit, provide the best possible eggs. The scrambloids (family name) taste like they have a mound of butter in them when they don't, which is also a nice trick. Enjoy!

A rustic pasta dish

I have spent the last few days perving over my new cookbook, the Flavour Thesaurus. Food geeks beware - only get this book if you have some time to spare. Imagine every core ingredient that you use with some regularity, cross referenced against every other ingredient on the list, each time with a recipe, a cultural tidbit or a science lesson.

Here's the Guardian review of the book.

So anyway, I am reading the anchovy section wondering what to combine with some anchovies, and as it goes through almonds...hard cheese...vanilla..etc, etc, I get to broccoli and anchovy. This sauce is a traditional Italian pasta sauce.

ingredients:
anchovies, broccoli, chilli flakes, olive oil, capers, peas, other bits and pieces as desired, pasta.

Pre cook the broccoli and peas, making sure you have quite small pieces of broccoli. Lightly cook the chilli flakes in warm (not hot) oil. Then soften the anchovies in the oil and add all the ingredients except the pasta. Cook the pasta, mix the sauce. Easy Peasy.

Barley oat and Wensleydale bread

My lovely-gorgeous-and-better half and I had a wonderful weekend away in the Yorkshire Dales quite soon after we met. Of all the things we saw there - the rolling hills and dales, the friendly people, the extensive availability of technical walking gear, the sheep, the cows - the highlight was visiting the Wensleydale creamery at Hawes. Sort of like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but with cheese.

It is hard to define what the character of Wensleydale was before Wallace and Gromit made it their Cheese of Choice. Apparently the Wensleydale creamery was struggling before the plastacine pair from Wigan came along. Perhaps their apricot-impregnated version of the cheese had been consigned to the same category as babycham, frozen black forest gateau and cheese+pineapple hedgehogs. But, if you are up close and personal with Wensleydale you will find it to be the most versatile and friendly cheese. A bit salty, mild, good for crackers with a pungent pickle, for crumbling over pasta, and plenty more.

So, this morning I decided to bake a barley oat loaf and include some Wensleydale. The flour is a combination of wheat flour, barley flakes and flour, and some linseeds. In the UK you can get it under the Doves Farm brand. This bread ended up tasting delicious but you could barely identify the wensleydale, so do be robust and put some good old chunks of it in there, say the size of a die (as in, plural, dice).

Ingredients:
500g barleycorn flour
1 tsp easy yeast
a little salt and sugar
9 fl oz water. Well that's what the pack said, but this turned out to be too much so add 7 floz first and work your way up.
Some olive oil
Wensleydale!!!!

instructions:
1. mix it all together and knead for as long as you can be bothered (if for some reason you are feeling cross with someone, ten min of kneading should have you restored to a pleasant new happy mood).
2. leave it in the bowl to rise for about an hour
3. the most satisfying bit. punch it! If you want to give someone a small gift, invite them to punch it. It's really very satisfying. The air will all fall out of it and it is ready to knead for another ten minutes. Then place it in the receptacle that you are going to bake it in. I have no loaf tin and so went for a silicon brioche mould. Leave it in the new receptacle until it has started to rise again, say quarter of an hour.
4. Bake at 200 degrees C for about 30-40 minutes. It's ready when if you knock it on the outside, it sounds firm and hollow.
5. Eat and Enjoy!

We served it with some octopus (not Paul) and smoked salmon:

Macaroons of varying success

Everyone loves a Macaroon. They are now officially cooler than cupcakes, although possibly slightly less cool than pop cakes and perhaps on a zeitgeist par with whoopie pies. But here's the thing, it turns out not everyone can make them like La Duree. Here is an attempt with some top tips gathered from many other blogs, whose addresses I have shamefully lost but will credit when/if I re-find them. Picture: cup of English Breakfast with lemon curd macaroon.
ingredients:
175g icing sugar
125g ground almonds - in an ideal world, made from blanched almonds that you have blitzed yourself
3 egg whites, ideally at room temperature and slightly older rather than fresh
75g caster sugar food colouring

oven: 140 (no fan), 150 (fan) what to do:
1. Make sure that you have baking paper, or ideally one of those teflon sheets that were invented by NASA so that astronauts could overcome all their sticking/bakery issues. It is wise to do this BEFORE you start cooking, as otherwise you might do an emergency dash to find that the three local shops don't actually stock it, then have to cycle to Sainsburys looking like someone just tipped a bag of icing sugar onto your head. Just a thought.
2. Blitz the icing sugar and ground almonds together in a food processor. Set aside.
3. In a big, clean bowl, whisk up the egg whites with a pinch of salt and pinch of cream of tartar, until they stand up on their own in any shape that you demand of them, except perhaps the Sagrada Familia. At this point whisk in the sugar, the egg whites will become glossy. At this point you can mix some food colouring in or divide the whites to colour them differently.
4. Mix half the almond/sugar mixture into the whites, then fold in the last of the mixture. At risk of pointing out the obvious, if you have halved the egg whites then halve the almond mix.
5. Put the mixture into a piping bag. You can use a freezer bag and cut a hole in the corner when you are ready to pipe it out. It is at this point you will realise that eggy sugary almonds have the same texture as superglue mixed with sand, so if you are a big cack-handed you might want to put the bag into a bowl to stand it up with an open aperture. It will go everywhere and does not come out of your clothes.
6. pipe into small 'plops' (the technical term), say the size of a 50p piece if you live in the UK, so about 3cm across. leave enough space between the plops. mine looked like this when piped, basically really badly spaced.
7. Leave for a few moments so that they form a slight skin, this should make them smoother on top. put them in the oven for about 10-15 minutes, watch them carefully through the oven door, trying not to fall asleep as you do it (watching pain dry not dissimilar).
8. take them out! et voila!

or this is what they look like if you are less adept (with food colouring too)



Filling
Choose any filling you like, the filling is basically where the flavouring comes from. Traditionally, buttercream (softened butter mixed with icing sugar), or you could use fresh cream if serving immediately, or jam, lemon curd, hell how about marmite or melted marshmallows, whatever takes your fancy. Here are some ideas;

• mashed banana (mix with lemon juice)
• tea-infused buttercream
• lemon rind mixed with buttercream
• rhubarb jam
• rosewater buttercream

etc etc please add your favourite flavour in the comments (is there anyone out there yet?!)

Summer garden supper for Dad's birthday

I bought some amazing crab this evening. White crabmeat, freshly plucked from a Cornish crab this very morning. Clearly the person doing the plucking was also CEO of a FTSE 100, the best plastic surgeon in LA or a London electrician; gramme for gramme it was approx the same price as antimatter (which according to this website costs $1.75 quadrillion an ounce ha ha ha http://tinyurl.com/3x5z9ye). Anyway I made a salad bed from chopped up chicory and avocado mixed with a tiny bit of lemon juice and chopped mint. I then piled the crab on top, trying to create the illusion that as if I was richer than Carlos Slim Helu and had bought the whole pack, rather than half. This is what it looked like.

Not a bad prelude to barbecued halibut served up with some herby garlicky pernod butter (credit to the Fishmonger's Kitchen in Shepherd's Bush). with barbecued baby gem and one of those salads with a load of veg thrown in.

For the salad, red cos leaves mixed with bits of cooked-then-rapidly-cooled broccoli and french beans. Also baby courgettes sliced really thinly with a potato peeler. Yum and vaguely virtuous.

Spelt and apple muffins

I made these muffins when I had a peach and a nectarine reaching the pivotal millisecond when fruit goes from edible into festering mould. I used up some apples too, made a batch, and some went in the freezer for Future Breakfasting Opportunities.

Here's what I used:
spelt flour - about 250g. You can mix up some spelt with some plain, if you like.
2 apples
1 peach
1 nectarine
some stem ginger from a jar, chopped up into small pieces
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
120g butter (well I didn't have enough so I made up with olive oil)
100g light brown sugar, can substitute some with with ginger syrup from the jar
50ml milk
200g plain yoghurt

Forget those uber complicated versions of muffin recipes. This works just fine: mix the dry ingredients together, the wet ingredients together, then mix wet and dry.

Chop up the fruit into small pieces and mix with the flour and sugar. Melt the butter in the microwave and mix with the olive oil (if using), the eggs, yoghurt, ginger pieces and milk. Mix the wet and dry ingredients, but not too thoroughly, just a very quick stir. Plop spoonfuls into cases in a muffin tin. Do NOT I repeat NOT be persuaded that greasing a tin will actually work, I pretty much guarantee you will be scraping burnt bits off for days and not actually getting a single whole one out of the tin. Unless you have one of those weird NASA designed silicone trays, as yet untried in this house.

Bake in an oven at about 180' until they look dark brown on top and just not sticky in the middle. This will vary according to how pumped up your oven is, in mine it took 20 mins or so.






They look a bit dry but they taste pretty good. And spelt comes from a health food shop so must be good for you, right?