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.

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.