Bottle of cold water to last all day

UK residents: given that the segue from summer to winter took about 5 minutes on Friday afternoon to pass through autumn, this might not appeal. However it came in useful in Italy in 40 degree heat this summer.  

Here's a tip I picked up in Sri Lanka. If you want to keep a bottle of water cold all day, stick it in the freezer overnight to produce a giant ice cube.  It will melt gradually giving you icy water to hand. 

Italy: tomatoes good, coronation chicken bad.

As I start to write this post and recall my strong feelings towards the Italian tomato, I am wondering whether anyone has written a really good poem about a tomato.  There turn out to be a number.  In "I bought a pet tomato" Devang Gandhi wonders why his new pet can't catch a frisbee (derived from the banana version?).  The Washington Post posted a whole feature inviting tomato based poetry from its readers.  And over at the Poetry Showcase, Betty O'Neil notes that "Corporations can make their "ugly" tomato but when I bake I'll go farm to table."

After a week of Food Zombie behaviour in Italy (concentrated loafing alternated with preparing or eating meals), I firmly believe that an ugly tomato is a tasty tomato.  We spent 18 Euros on a weeks worth of amazing fresh fruit and veg from this grocer in Lucca, including a bagful of fresh porcini.

It was slightly miserable to return to the UK, where unless you have the luxury of an accessible farmers market, supermarket vegetables MUST LOOK IDENTICAL, come with 5 layers of packaging and little taste.  In contrast, the quality of the always-seasonal produce  in Italy is so high that you just need to throw things together to create an amazing meal.  In fact you could have zero technical cooking skills and provide gorgeous grub.  This weekend I heard a story about a friend of a friend this weekend who moved to Italy, spoke great Italian, was beautiful and lovely and was adored by all her neighbours. She invited them over for a party and served a range of traditional Italian dishes and salads. She also thought it would be fun to introduce them to Coronation Chicken, as you know a sweet curried chicken dish featuring almonds and raisins.  The HORROR! The Italians were aghast at such a strange dish, rejecting the combination of sweet, spicy and poultry as alien, outside their range and not to be touched.  Perhaps the UK's less strong food culture has allowed us to absorb the flavours and techniques of other cultures more easily.

So here are a few ideas for easily assembled dishes from an Italian repertoire:

The Ultimate breakfast

Jigsaw Caprese

Salad salad

Pasta pasta
Stuffed courgette flowers

Italy: Stuffed courgette/zucchini flowers

These beautiful courgette flowers can be converted into little parcels of joy by stuffing with really whatever you want.  Try:


- mix cream cheese/ricotta with a raw egg, toasted pine nuts, breadcrumbs, herbs, seasoning and maybe some other veg like roasted red peppers or aubergine.  
- Stuff a courgette flower with the mix and roast with a bit of olive oil lining the pan.  The egg will set the mixture on cooking.
-nb check inside the flower for critters! An extra unintended dose of protein?

Italy: pasta pasta

The tuscans sell a range of eensy weensy pastas for use in soups, pastine (see diagram below).  


Here, we were slightly using up ingredients and combined spinach and ricotta ravioli with some farfalline, grated and sliced courgette, ricotta mixed with lemon zest, garlic and pine nuts, green beans and thyme. It was reallllllly nice.

Italy: salad salad

To make: add lots of vegetables to a big bowl, mix, dress and eat.  Featuring in this salad:


-chicory. Lovely bitter leaf, traditionally served cooked in white sauce and ham by Belgians, here shown raw.


-radicchio. red sturdy leaf, again bitter and does well from cooking.  We found it served cooked with some parmesan as an accompaniment to local grilled beef.


- Red onion, raw, thinly sliced


- Courgettes finely sliced


- chunks of Pecorino (sheeps cheese, can be mild or aged)


- Borlotti beans, so very pretty and not out of a can. Sadly they turn from marbled white and pink to sludgy brown when cooked.

Italy: jigsaw caprese

I have no idea what these tomatoes are called, so I shall call them Jigsaw tomatoes.  They are the prettiest things since David Beckham aged 31.  Made up to the classic Caprese salad in the colours of the Italian flag: 

• Mozzarella (ideally from buffalo milk, mozzarella travels very badly so if you are being perfectionist you could get it from the UK eg Laverstoke)
• Tomatoes (ideally ones that taste of tomato, not polystyrene, so basically eat in August)
• Basil (what intelligent thing can I write here about Basil? um, how about this)

Italy: the ultimate breakfast

I failed to take a photo of the version of this breakfast that combined the peaches and figs with blobs of ricotta and honey. That, combined with the local bakery's tomato/courgette flatbreads was the ultimate 10am breakfast to last until the 4pm gelato. mmm.

 

Quick spicy chips

Very naughty, spicy crunchy chips are easy to do without having to resort to Nando's.  Firstly cut some potatoes into the right sort of size and cook them in gently boiling water for a few minutes. Then drain, leave the water to evaporate so that they are completely dry.

Separately mix a few teaspoons of cornflour with some salt, chilli pepper, thyme, and anything else you want (you could try cumin seeds, turmeric for colour, ground coriander).  Sprinkle the cornflour mix over the potatoes in a large metal bowl and shake to mix.

Then heat a few tablespoons of olive oil (no need to use the good stuff as the flavour will be lost here) in a saucepan until a crumb sizzles when thrown in the pan.  Throw over the chips, shake to mix.  Spread in a baking tray and cook until crispy, say 180 degrees for 20 mins.  A highly technical demo of this oil-on-potato action is shown below.

Everything soup

Do you remember communal living, student-style?  At Uni I shared a house with 5 guys and 2 girls. It was a Victorian house with 8 bedrooms that had been converted to a series of bedsits, so rather than having one big kitchen it had three miniscule ones. What this meant in practical terms was that the guys could rotate kitchens, creating apocalyptic destruction in each one before moving on to the next.  The guys were on a strict culinary schedule that ran something like Fishfingers on a floury bap / Richmond sausages with beans / chicken thighs. Peas were the only vegetable allowed.  Meanwhile the girls lived on cheap chardonnay.


Our standards of tidiness and hygiene were pretty low and I am still scarred by finding behind a chair at the end of term a mug. This mug had a floating ecosystem on the top of it, making it hard to work out what was underneath, which turned out to be stale tea (including teabag) with a rasher of bacon floating in it. Niiiiiiice.

Anyway it is with the bacon-tea-mould cuppa in mind that we cleaned out the fridge and made Everything Soup:


mushrooms - these are in fact a kind of mould and so it's a slight misnomer to call a mushroom mouldy. Nevertheless these had descended into the slime phase.  bin
radishes - interestingly these shrink when they go off, rather than go mouldy.  Small knobbly ones bin.  ok ones soup.
fennel.  brown but edible. soup
potatoes.  Never let a few sprouts sticking out the side prevent you from sticking it in the soup.
broccoli.  AOK soup.
peppercorns.  bought fresh from the Thai supermarket Thai Smile, when they go off they just dessicate into black peppercorns. soup.
Aubergines.  I would quite like to be catholic because then I could legitimately say 'sweet jesus holy mother of god'. bin.
Tarka Dhal leftover from takeaway curry. sustaining well. save.
Spinach.  back half of bag frozen solid, front half of bag looking good. save.

to make: put everything in a pot with stock, boil, blend, eat.  Garnish with whatever you fancy - in this case, back sesame seeds and some leftover coconut sambol from a takeaway curry.

What to cook for friends if you are hungover

Thursday night.  Dinner with two friends who like wine.  Start with Martinis. Drink lots of wine. Drink Calvados. Get Scooterman home. Mr Scooterman is very nice and interesting, originally from Afghanistan, makes me realise how indescribably fortunate I am in so many ways to be a woman living in England in the 21st Century. He is a liberal guy, got dumped by his last girlfriend when he encouraged her to continue her education and have a career. His sister back home wasn't allowed to stay in education beyond 16.  He thinks this is wrong and can't believe it when people have education and opportunities on a plate and choose to be lazy.  He's right.  Ironically half of his job is driving people who have drunk too much home, so I can't be the first person to be embarrassed by my alcoholic (and general) indulgence.


Friday night, friends are coming round, who also love wine.  Note to self: never schedule dinner two nights in a row with wine buffs.  The state of me from the night before means that my ideal menu would be as follows:
1. to start.  popcorn (salt), with marmite bruschetta
2.  main course.  spaghetti carbonara with mashed potato, and maybe garlic bread.
3. pudding. butterscotch Angel Delight with Mr Kipling's French Fancies on the side.
A scientific look at the menu above leads me to believe that I crave carbohydrate, salt, sugar and fat when I am hungover.  Also Vitamin b (in marmite) which I believe is depleted after a right pissup.


Now, I thought that might be a slightly embarrassing menu (although I wonder if it might be received with secret enjoyment) so I altered it as follows:
1.  to nibble:  Marmite cashews. awe. some.
2.  to start: porcini risotto. Still has key elements of seriously unhealthiness, but is dressed up like a posh dish. recipe below.
3.  main: tiger prawns a la plancha (grilled on a disposable BBQ) with home made mayo and potato salad and green salad.  This is an interactive dish, I can reliably inform you that a kilo of prawns for four people takes approximately 1.5 hours to get through and is probably slightly too many prawns.
4.  pudding.  chocolate and cherry tart with almond pastry.  Actually this was quite nice.  recipe below.


Porcini risotto

Dried porcini mushrooms are just as good as the fresh ones and about a zillionth of the price.  In fact I wonder if they might even be better as they lack the slight sliminess that real porcini can get (maybe I have been shopping at the wrong places). And the added bonus is that when you pour boiling water over dried porcini to rehydrate them, you get a readymade stock. 


So, for this risotto I fried some finely sliced leeks in a butter/olive oil mix and also friend the arborio rice with the leeks, for about 5 minutes. This 'toasting' of the rice pops the starch in the rice and makes it more receptive to the liquid when added.  Then, pour in the mushroom-stock gradually, every time continuing to stir until the liquid is absorbed, then topping up with more. After about 15 minutes, maybe more depending on the rice, it's cooked. Add the rehydrated porcini, chopping finely first.  At this point you add in as much grated parmesan, butter, salt as your conscience will allow.  You can also add all sorts of other things - shelled broad beans are particularly good, petit pois, oregano, whatever according to your taste but probably not tomatoes which would upset the creamyness.

Chocolate, cherry and almond tart
Ingredients (sorry I always forget to list ingredients, am not a very accurate cook).
For the crust: 
120g ground almonds
100g caster sugar
110g plain flour
175 cold butter cut into cubes
1 egg yolk
a splash of water


Put all these ingredients in a food processor and whizz until combined into a slightly cohesive (but not a ball) of pastry.  Press into a springform tin at the base and up the sides and bake at about 180 degrees for about 20 minutes to get your pastry case.

For the filling:
cherries
200g dark chocolate
4 eggs
75g butter
50g plain flour
80g caster sugar


De-stone the cherries, you could pre-soak in booze if you like.  Plop them on the bottom of the pastry case.
Melt the butter and chocolate together. Ideally you should do this in a bain-marie )in a bowl hovering over a saucepan of boiling water, don't let the water actually touch the bottom of the bowl). BUT you can sneakily do this in the microwave, just underplay it so that the chocolate is only just starting to melt. a minute will be more than enough.
Mix the butter/choc with the rest of the ingredients, give it all a good beating with a wooden spoon, pour over the cherries and cook at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes.  It might be a bit gooey on the inside which is not necessarily a bad thing. If you test it with a fork, as I did, then please note that the fork marks stay as you can see from my photo.


Enjoy and I hope your hangovers are better than mine!

courgette (zucchini!) fritters, a bit like souffle but easier

you need: courgettes, an egg, some milk, self raising flour, baking powder, frying pan, self control.


For the easiest courgette fritters ever that taste like mini little souffles, just do this:
1. Grate as many courgette as you fancy.  three small ones go with one egg.
2. look up courgette in the dictionary and find that it is the crazy English word for Zucchini.
Get the pile of grated courgette and squash either a dishcloth (clean and dry, but not precious) on top to squeeze out lots of moisture. For the less green version of this, use kitchen roll to extract the moisture.
3. mix self raising flour with the dry-ish courgette mixture, until it has a light coating all over.  For three courgette this corresponds with a sort of two-liberal-shakes-of-flour type quantity. Honesty it probably doesn't matter if you are over or under.
4.  Shake some extra baking powder over the top. Quantities? pah! whatever you fancy although maybe not less than a teaspoon, nor more than a tablespoon.  Bicarbonate of soda activates with heat to produce little bubbles, so will make your fritters fluffier but if you overdo it they might taste a bit weird.
5.  Add a selection of herbs/chilli/salt and pepper/cubes of cheese according to your taste. Slightly stale blue cheese works well, it's v salty though so watch that.
6.  Separately, in a jug, mix an egg and a generous splosh of milk.  Add this to the courgette mixture and stir through until it is a solid courgetty batter without a pool of runny batter at the bottom.  If there is a runny batter at the bottom, again it doesn't really matter that much.
7. heat a thick bottomed pan with a little olive oil and butter (as we know from previous posts the combination of a little of each is best as the oil stops the butter from burning and the butter stops the oil from smoking).  put a spoonful of the batter in the pan for each fritter and cook for about 5 mins on each side.
8 Try really hard not to eat them all, because when your husband gets back from wine tasting (where he promises he will have used the spittoon), he might want one.  Then accidentally eat them all and pretend you made up this blog rather than ACTUALLY cooking them tonight.

Lunch for 16 when its so hot that everything melts

[with apologies for terrible formatting - I really must move away from Blogger as a platform soon. Any suggestions welcome!]


This is England.  When it snows, it paralyses the country, when it rains no one notices because it always rains.  And on a small number of days - by small I mean approx 0.0027% - La soleil brille.  All shops selling ice, beer or sunglasses log their biggest revenues of the year.  And those of us at home cooking realise our fridges don't really work very well, because most of the time they don't actually need to. 

So today I was cooking for 16,  6 of whom were little people, and it was 32 degrees in the garden, and I found out that some things work fine in this situation and some things start well and end badly (meringue cake).  Lentil salads kept overnight in a fridge set to 'slightly lower than room temperature but not much' are ok, esp with a little blue cheese that you kind of want to get in amongst it.  Fennel also fares very well, being a sturdy kind of a vegetable, as do pre-boiled new potatoes.  Here is my grub recipe lineup for the lunch, with a temperature rating as follows:

one star *:  only cook if you have a fridge or will eat it straight away. Otherwise it will melt, collapse, grow bacteria or taste vile

two stars **:  can cook if you don't have a fridge, but it may be to your advantage to get your guests slightly drunk before they start eating

three stars***: seriously it really doesn't matter, just cook the damn thing.



Dishes for buffet-style lunch:
1) Barbecue leg of lamb ***.  I mixed up rosemary, a whole bulb of garlic, some smoked salt (YES its pretentious but it tastes good) and some olive oil in my trusty pestle & mortar, rubbed it on the lamb and put on the BBQ for about 20-25 mins.  Olive oil dripping on a barbecue can be hazardous and you will definitely need a glass of water on standby to hurl at the flames until that stops (side effect: volcanic ash cloud!). 


I had already got someone else to do the hard work with the lamb -  Perry, my local butcher who is also a commonwealth games-level boxer converted the leg of lamb to butterfly by taking the bones out.  Perry was once deboning a leg of lamb and his customer announced that he was a surgeon and had never seen such fine cutting, suggesting Perry might think about a new medical career.  So basically, get someone else to do this unless you really do want to, or you're a surgeon.



 
2) salads: lentil, red onion, mint, gorgonzola **.  Cook the puy lentils and then cool down by running some cool water through them.  Mix with fresh mint, thinly sliced red onion, a little gorgonzola, some lemon juice and olive oil, and whatever else you like (eg butter beans here).




3) salads: fennel etc ***.  finely slice a couple of bulbs of fennel, chop a cucumber, mix with lots of dill and a bit of yoghurt (greek probably) and some finely grated garlic if you fancy it.  But put the yoghurt on at the last minute.





4) salads: potato salad *** if mayo added at the end.  pre boil the potatoes, if you like.  Make some mayonnaise by whisking three egg yolks with some salt, mustard powder and a tiny but of vinegar. Carry on whisking (preferably electric whisk), as you add olive oil as slowly as you can. the recipe says a ridiculous amount of oil, 500ml or more, but in fact I added about 250ml and it was nicely eggy and perfect for a potato salad. Before adding to the potatoes I chopped loads of herbs very finely (in this case dill, tarragon and chives but any soft stemmed herbs will do) and also mixed in some rocket with the potatoes.


5) salads: mozzarella and tomato with basil*. Er, I laid out some mozarella and beef tomatoes. With basil.


6) pudding (a) - almond tart with raspberries***. Am saving up the recipe for next post!

7)  pudding (b) meringue cake*.  Cook a victoria sponge (in brief, weigh 4 eggs in their shells and weigh the same weight of butter, self raising flour and caster sugar.  Cream the butter and sugar with an electric whisk, then add a spoonful of eggy flour / floury egg to combine up to a batter.  Put in cake tin, try to smooth the top so that there is a dip in the middle, put in oven at about 180' for about 30 mins or until a fork comes out clean.  Then, whip double cream and use as a filling with strawberries, then on the very top add meringue that you made using the leftover egg whites from the mayonnaise. For the meringue (uncooked by the way), whisk eggwhites as hard as possible for slightly longer than you think you need to, when they start looking creamy rather than frothy. add sugar and whisk again for longer than you think you need to.  You should be able to sculpt Munch's The Scream in the mixture, ie it basically holds its shape with slight gravity effect. 

Marco Pierre White's Yew Tree: when the cat's away the Monday chef will play

I don’t normally go in for celebrity chef–branded restaurants, particularly ones where the proprietor has more books + restaurants combined than he (sadly never she) has fingers on his hands. However, a month-in-the-planning treat visit to the Yew Tree (proprietor Marco Pierre White) with two fantastic girlfriends was full of promise.

• Monday night, so an outside chance of NOT getting the table by the bogs TICK.
  
• Rural location so free of leather banquettes and Orla Kiely ripoff wallpaper TICK.
  
• Livestock and watercress countryside so good local ingredients TICK.
  

And to be fair, we had a really brilliant evening, although maybe not because of Mr Pierre White’s personal oversight of the establishment. Talking of which I am resisting asking google “Is Marco Pierre White’s surname ‘White’ or ‘Pierre White’? Why couldn’t he choose a middle name that is OBVIOUSLY a first name or surname?

Anyway so to keep it brief, we had some pleasant dishes in a lovely surrounding, with service that really did make our evening. But if someone were to challenge us to summarise our dishes in four words each it would go something like this:

· Mussels starter: pledge of no seasoning.

· Chicory, brie, red onion tart starter: Jus Roll, savoury jam

· Pheasant egg something starter: fair cop, very nice

· Steak and chips: crunchy chips fried 7x!!

· Fish stew: remember avoid fish Mondays

· Roast saddle and confit shoulder of lamb: inappropriately fussy, yet tasty

· Sticky toffee pudding: yum diabetes on plate

· Chocolate Chip muffin with mint choc chip ice cream: baked last Thursday perhaps?

The big controversy was the chocolate chip muffin. Strategy meeting: how should we overcome our Britishness and point out that £7.50 for a petrol station Galaxy muffin that had been left to solidify in the bottom of the Yew Tree aga for four days was Inaccurate Pricing?

My technique (not employed that often but important to resist being ripped off) is to turn it around (in a friendly way) to the person serving the table, for example “we’ve had a great meal but wondered if the bread might be a bad batch, only because we found this mouse head in it, what do you think?” or in extreme low quality-to-price ratio “tell me honestly, between you and me, if you had a pet dog, what would be running through your head just before feeding him this meal?”.

And, bless, our very diplomatic muffin-disgustingness question was met with “shall I bring some pouring cream for the muffin?” which was an excellent reply because it shut us up good and proper.

We have since heard that MPW himself has never actually visited the Yew Tree since he stopped living in the lovely 17^th century house in which the restaurant is run. In fact, rumour tells that he never cooks except when on TV, which is a shame. If his brand promise is fantastic cooking with great fresh ingredients, he has let the franchise-runners put money (£45 a head with not much booze!) above this promise, which will surely catch up with you in the end? Never mind, there is always the pouring cream to cover it all up.