The Food Philosophy

Zuchinni Fritters with Broad Bean, Pea and Mint

2010-07-31T14:05:00.000Z

Do you need any more reason to get yourself a little patch of garden than beautiful baby zuchinni and their flowers? Looking at them makes me miss my little allotment. Somehow I have left it at just the point when things will be coming into flower and fruit.

Luckily these little beauties were waiting at the cottage in france...perfect for stuffing for a delicate, simple starter.

For this dish I used both the flowers and also the baby courgettes themselves. Where these courgettes were still attached to the flowers I left them on, but split the courgette up the middle to allow it to cook at the same rate as the flower.

For the stuffed flowers mix a large handful of mixed herbs - basil, tarragon and parsley - with a soft fresh goats cheese, and the yolk of an egg. Season well. Open the flowers gently and check for bugs, these can be dusted out with a pastry brush but try not to wash the flower unless it needs it as this may bruise it. Use a spoon to gently fill the inside of the flower, and close the petals around the cheese mixture. Whisk the white of the egg and dip the flowers and halved courgettes in this, then dip into a shallow bowl of sifted flour and dust off. Repeat this dipping and dusting again to get a good even covering. Heat a large frying pan with a good slug of olive oil and when it is hot add the courgettes, and then after a couple of minutes the flowers. Fry until golden brown, then transfer to drain briefly on kitchen towel.

These can be served on their own with a wedge of lemon, but I sprinkled over them shelled garden peas and shelled and skinned baby broad beans, as well as a healthy handful of chopped fresh mint. Wish a glass of chilled Riesling on the terrace this was perfect

Bordeaux, a little countryside, St Emilion, Caneles de Bordeaux

2010-07-31T13:26:00.001Z

A long lost post from a trip to France just before easter. This window for a Macaroon store in Bordeaux reminded me of a cross between something dreamed up by Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. I had to be restrained, and reminded that I'd already got my macaroon fix at Pierre Herme in Paris...

But aren't foie gras and milk chocolate macaroons exactly what the Mad Hatter ought to eat?

Rue des Remparts has some very overpriced, but beautiful, olive trees, along with my favourite place for breakfast: Pain et Cie. Wonderful bread and the best pralinee spread. Also, helpfully, the only place open for breakfast at 8am on a Sunday near the bus to the airport

Everywhere in Bordeaux, chocolate shops, cheese shops, flower stalls, and Baillardan, was readying itself for the easter rush, full of easter bells, and fish.

St Emilion, on the other hand, was readying itself to sell this years 2009 vintage.

Sensible people avoid the wine shops in the town, which by and large seem to trap you with a tasting and a hard sell, and do their buying either direct from the Chateau, or through the Maison du Vin in St Emilion. L'Intendant in Bordeaux also seemed to be knowledgable, non-pushy and free of the uninflated prices some shops were charging.

We weren't doing more than a little buying this trip, so contended ourselves with replenishing our stocks of wines we know we like. Oh, and the second wine from Chateau Montrose, La Dame de Montrose 2004, which came highly recommended, and I couldn't resist. Time will tell if this was a sensible decision or just an expensive one.

Pulled pork with fennel and citrus salad

2010-01-10T18:33:00.004Z

There is only so much soup and stew I can eat, even when there is as much snow as there has been in Oxford (above is a photo I took of the rather wonderful headington shark, looking all the more surreal for its dusting of snow). Sooner or later I yearn for something fresh, with bite, and hopefully crunch. So today I've been adding to my gas bill by slow roasting a pork belly, dry rubbed with spices, ready to tear to pieces for dinner. With finely shaved fennel, celeriac, red onion together with glistening grapefruit and clementine segments, and a healthy dash of chilli and lime, it looks like just the thing for the new year. I hasten to add that nothing about this was traditional, or culinarily authentic, but it was just the kind of satisfying, interesting thing I want to cook more of

New Years Slaw

one bulb of fennel sliced as thinly as possible
1/2 small celeriac cut into very thin batons
one grapefruit
two clementines
one red onion thinly minced
chilli finely minced
lime
salt

For the citrus fruit peel them with a sharp knife, taking the white pith away as well as the skin, then use the knife to slice out the segments of fruit, leaving the bitter membrane. You'll be left with quite a bit of flesh attached to the membrane, use your hand to squeeze as much of the juice from this into a bowl. With this remaining juice, and the onion, chilli and salt, make a dressing for the salad.

Pulled Pork

Pork belly (not sliced)
Salt
cayanne
cumin
coriander
fennel seeds
garlic bulb

Heat the oven to 200 oc
Score the rind on the pork belly (this helps the fat crisp nicely) and salt it liberally. Cut the garlic bulb in two and place at the bottom of a roasting dish. Rub the pork with the herbs and spices and place on top of the garlic, skin side up. Cook in the oven for 30 minutes, then turn the heat down to 160oc and continue to cook for at least another 2 hours, preferably 3.

Catching up

2009-10-07T08:32:00.009Z

The month of September didn't seem to leave much room for blogging. There was a lot of sugar used in my kitchen on jams, jellies and preserves, and a lot of digging to do in the allotment. October too was spent knee deep in mud, and November work related panic set in. December was a blur of fairy lights, forced paperwhites, evergreen wreaths, hazelnut caramels and an awful lot of mulled wine. Not to mention munching on manchego with my mother's homemade quince paste, and too many mince pies, clementines and slices of italian chocolate christmas cake. Divorced parents means two christmases, a beef wellington with dauphinoise potatoes for one, and roast goose with chestnut and apple stuffing and roast vegetables for the other. Desserts ranged from a wonderful figgy pudding, citrus and ginger fruit salad, to chestnut pudding and, I think best of all, warmed preserved damsons with hazelnut meringues and in which floated clouds of whipped cream.

The upside of being so tardy here is that I can now give the edited highlights, the recipes and meals that have stayed with me not just on the day, but a whole three months later. Perhaps not the way blogging ought to be done, but here goes.

Much of the work related panic in November was due to us taking a lovely break in Bordeaux and the Dordogne for a blissful few days. We got there via Paris which was engineered by me as a way of stopping to stock up on Valhrona Chocolate from the wonderful G. Detou on rue tiquetonne. I also ogled chocolate shop windows and ate the most wonderful crepes which started an autumn love of caramel beurre sale.

I played owning my own castle in Monbazilliac, which sadly is likely to remain a long-cherished dream for decades to come. I'm particularly in need of a bread oven and an apple store, not to mention a cellar of vintage Bordeaux.

There were about a million clementines eaten over December in our house

And because our flat is tiny (or 'bijou') we had no christmas tree but instead a lovely jasmine plant decked with silver baubles, which smelt divine

Between the family we baked three christmas cakes this year, my mothers recipe, Nigel Slater's, and a chocolate Italian christmas cake from the River Cafe. The chocolate one certainly had its devotees, but doesn't really fit the british christmas cake tradition. Its excellent for those who don't like traditional fruit cake, and as a change for those who do. My mother's recipe won out in the taste tests, and not because its the one she makes every year but because it was considerably moister. Which is not to say that Nigel's wasn't excellent, but next year we'll be making my mother's and the River Cafe chocolate one. Two christmas cakes is enough for any household.

Of course the stars of the christmas meals were the goose and the beef wellington, but playing a decidedly important supporting role were two wonderful salads.

The first figs baked at 200 oc with translucent strips of pancetta wrapped around them and then, when the pancetta was crisp, nestled on top of frisee, rocket and baby chard. The dressing for this was the fig juices, some very good balsamic and extra virgin, and a little pepper (there being enough salt in the pancetta). It was the perfect christmas salad; light, and yet rich in flavour, the hot salty pancetta with the sticky sweet fig and the earthy leaves.

The second was a traditional celeriac remoulade. Previously I have always spurned this, as I have all other salads which involved mayonnaise . I think this must be a lingering reaction to the school salad bar, and I think it still tends to be the right reaction when presented with salad drenched in mayonnaise. But it turns out that homemade mayonnaise is not only wonderful to dip chips in, or turn into aioli, but also to turn the humble celeriac into a thing of beauty. Clearly, everyone except me knew this, but for me it was a revelation. So in the last week I've made celeriac remoulade three times. It takes patience (especially as I lack a mandolin) but my knife and emulsifying skills are improving.

One preserve I will be re-making next year was the bottled damsons. Nothing so simple (far simpler than jam) but nothing so good. All that they required was to make a simple syrup, in which was also boiled a cup of damsons, a clove and a stick of cinnamon. This was then strained onto the uncooked damsons, which had been rinsed and put in sterilised jars. The lids were put on the jars (as per the instructions of whatever preserving jar you use) and they were then heated in the oven at 180 oc for half an hour. Three months later they were delicious with cream and meringues, but I'm sure the other jars will make their way into fools, pies and be poured over icecream as the year progresses.

'

These little bulbs were only thinking of making an appearance at Christmas, but now are putting a concerted effort into flowering for the new year. The pine boughs around them, however, have been consigned to the recycling.

Peach, Plum and Redcurrant Breakfast Bread

2009-08-31T10:48:00.008Z

A yeasted open tart for the changing seasons. Everything locally grown and picked except the peaches (the weather just isn't that good). The dough enriched with ground almonds, the plums, red currants and peaches drizzled in home-made red currant jelly. Baked in the oven in the morning, and then scattered with fresh red currants and a little sugar. A warm slice of this with coffee, or cold with a little creme fraiche, makes a wonderful breakfast.

For the bread dough:

400g strong white flour
70g ground almonds
325ml warm water
1/2tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
20g fresh yeast

About 1 kilo of fruit: I used a mixture of plums, peaches and red currants
1 tbsp red currant jelly

Mix the fresh yeast with the water and sugar and leave somewhere warm for 10 minutes to allow the yeast to wake up while you measure out the flour and almonds. Put the flour, almonds, salt and yeast mixture into a bread maker on the dough setting. Once the dough is made slice the peaches and plums into slices and mix with the red currant jelly. Roll the dough out into an oval and spread the fruit in the middle, skin side down. Heat the oven to 200 oc and leave the dough to rise again on top of the oven and away from any draughts. After 30 minutes, and when it is slightly risen, put the dough in the oven and bake until dark golden brown. There will be a little juice seeping out into the dough and the fruit will be beginning to catch on top, going a dark caramel. Take out of the oven, scatter over the remaining red currants and dust with icing sugar.

2009-08-05T11:12:00.004Z

Nothing is as perfect as the fruits of your own labour, and this little salad was the work of months. Some heavy digging to clear the ground, weeding and watering galore, and then a gap of months where we crossed our fingers and hoped. We planted these little tomatoes as tiny stalks in France in March, and then had to abandon them for the grind of daily life. How wonderful then that this neglect still bore fruit.

We planted poire jaune (yellow pear), tiger striped and moneymaker and baby plum tomatoes.

And the sun and occasional rain seemed to suit them...

The striped tiger tomatoes were probably our favourite: sharp and sweet all at the same time

And with produce this good cooking isn't needed: all these wanted was a little salt, pepper, olive oil and basil.

Warm baby artichokes with broad beans and mint

2009-06-02T14:00:00.000Z

Something of a hiatus I know, but somehow there hasn't been that much inspiring cooking happening in my kitchen recently. Sure, there were things I could have written about but they were all a bit so-so, even the ones there were beautiful photos of didn't taste all that great. That rhubarb and custard tart I thought would look so pretty, well, it turned out a little heavy. In part I blame the vegetable gap - there are only so many roots a girl can eat. But even that won't wash as we've had pretty little lettuce fronds and spicy rocket coming from our window boxes for the past two weeks, and the organic veg box is full to the brim of lovely bright chlorophyl. So I'm searching for cooking inspiration in my photos, and while searching I remembered all the cooking we did on holiday in France. Barely three weeks ago but already it seems like an age, and I don't think I shared photos or recipes. Best of all we've now caught up and broad beans are well and truly in the shops. In fact they are even growing in my window box.

My favourite is a dish of braised baby artichoke hearts with broad beans and mint. Every year I look out for the tiny little artichokes specially for making this, and it never fails to feel like spring when you eat it, be it as a side dish or a meal in itself.

a bunch of baby artichokes - at least two per person and the smaller the better. Really ideally no more than an inch and a half in diameter
a handful of mint
a handful of broad beans each - again the smaller the better.
shallots - one or two each
olive oil, salt and pepper
lemon
white wine

First up pod your broad beans, and if the beans themselves are any bigger than your thumb nail then you'll need to take the hard casing off them too. If on the other hand you can get your hands on immature broadbeans, about an inch or two long at most, then you needn't even pod them but can cook them whole like a french bean.
Now take a long impartial look at your artichokes. How beautiful they are, right? But you're about to get as close to gutting as you ever will with a vegetable.

First up chop off the top third to half of the artichoke. It may seem wasteful but these spiny leaves aren't good to eat. At this point you want to survey the state of the inside of the artichoke itself. If the inner leaves are pointy, or there a spiny hairs which form more than a soft down in the centre then your artichokes have reached a level of maturity not ideal for this recipe. You'll need to aggressively trim out the spiky leaves and the sharp hairs or you're dinner will be rather unpalatable. If you see soft translucent petal-like leaves then all is well.

Now use a sharp paring knife to cut of the outside green leaves. You essentially want to carve around the heart itself, removing the dark green fibrous leaves but leaving the base of them intact, which is a milky spring yellow.
Then chop each artichoke in half lengthwise. It will now look roughly like the one above. Keep each one in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon juice to stop discolouration.

Cop the shallots finely and cook them in olive oil until translucent but not browned. Add the artichoke hearts and a glass of wine and pop the lid on, letting it gently simmer for 15-20 minutes. When the artichokes are nearly cooked (they should still retain a little bit, like asparagus) add the broad beans. At the table scatter with mint,, and season with salt, pepper and lemon juice.

Hot Cross Buns

2009-03-30T16:56:00.000Z

I've been looking forward to making these. Last year they were lovely and I've been waiting it out until we're resepectably close to Easter. If I'd been organised I would have got these done for Mothering Sunday, as they'd be the perfect thing to wake up to. But I'm not, so instead they were afternoon tea for family who stayed the weekend with us.

Ferment Starter:

I large egg
215ml warm water
15g fresh yeast
1 ts sugar
55g strong white flour

For the dough:
450g strong white flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
90g butter
90g sugar
170g of currents or raisins
50g mixed peel
zest of a lemon and an orange

For the topping crosses:
2tbsp flour
a little milk
1 tsp sugar

For the glaze:
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp warm water

Use a large bowel as the starter will rise considerably. For the ferment starter whisk together the egg and water, then add the dry ingrediants and leave in warm place for 1/2 hour covered with a tea towel.The mixture should rise considerably as the yeast works its magic.

To make the dough you can add the starter ferment and all the ingredients to the dough to a bread machine on the dough setting. If you wish to knead it by hand then first rub in the butter to the flour, then make a well in the centre of the dough and add the zest, ferment starter, spices, salt and sugar. Draw the dry ingredients into the wet with your fingers until the mixture comes together then turn out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic. At this point knead in the dried fruit.
Now return the dough to the bowl and place it , covered lightly, in a warm places until it doubles in size (about an hour). When it has risen turn it out again onto the floured surface and knock back the dough. The idea is to lightly knock some of the air out of the dough so it lessens in size. Shape it into a ball an cover in a warm place for half an hour to rise again.
Finally turn it out onto a floured surface again and divide into 12 equal pieces. This is the point to return to the recipe if you've been cutting out work with a bread machine.

Shape the pieces into balls and place them on a well greased baking tray, with space between them. Flatten each slightly and score a cross in the top of each, then cover with a tea towel, leaving in a warm place to rest for about 40 minutes. Meanwhile mix together the topping for the crosses and turn the oven on to 240oc to preheat.

When the buns have risen drizzle the topping over the lines formed by the crosses. Out the buns in the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes until golden brown. To make the glaze dissolve the sugar in the hot water. When the buns are cooked remove from the oven and immediately brush with the glaze. The buns can then be eaten warm straight away, or cut in half and toasted later (in which case the sugar in the glaze is likely to caramelise a lot in the toaster so watch them carefully- they have a tendency to get brown rather quickly as in the photo above).

Spring has officially sprung... I went for a walk and collected big branches of blossom

Snow days

2009-02-20T12:46:00.001Z

This post is late - from a couple of weeks ago when Oxford was covered in snow. Most of us seemed to be hiding at home, schools were closed, and those of us who could make it into work were wishing we didn't live walking distance away. What was a girl to do, stay home baking?

Or bake, breakfast and then head out into the cold rugged up with hats, gloves and scarves for snowballs.

Cinnamon Buns

Many thanks to A. who lovingly translated this recipe for me from German. I then made a few additions or citrus and sultanas.

Cinnamon Roll Cake

1 packet of instant yeast
120ml Water, lukewarm
120ml Milk, luke warm
60g Margarine (plus some for spreading)
60g Sugar
1 Egg
1 Tsp Salt
480g Flour
zest of one lemon or orange

For the Filling:
2 Tsp Cinnamon
40g Sugar (Brown)
60g butter
2 handfuls sultanas
(you can also add handfuls of finely chopped apple or nuts such as walnuts)

For the Icing
120g Powdered Sugar
A few drops of vanilla extract
1 Tbsp Milk

Dough:

Work together all the ingredients into a nice, smooth dough, which should come away easily from the bowl. Then put it in a warm place and let it double in size. (this will take about an hour).

Filling:

Roll out the dough (about 76cm x 46cm). Spread margarine over all of it and sprinkle with the Cinnamon-Sugar mixture.

Roll up the dough from the wider side, and then cut the roll into pieces, about every 4cm. Put the pieces next to each other in a greased Springform. At this point you can if you like leave the dough overnight to bake in the morning in which case cover it with a cloth and leave in a fairly cool room or it will over-rise. Heat the oven and bake at 175°C for about 25-30mins.

Mix together the ingredients for the icing and drizzle it over the hot cake.

Beetroot and Goats Cheese Salad

2009-02-05T20:51:00.004Z

This is a lovely way of using up the masses of beetroot that are making it into my veg box at the moment. The sweet beetroot with the sharp goats cheese is great, and really wakens up the taste buds in the dead of winter.

4 or so beetroot
handful of parsley
goats cheese

Boil the beetroot with their skins on in salted water until just tender. Let them cool a little and then peel them and slice thinly. Drizzle a little olive oil over them, chop the parsley roughly, scatter it and the crumbled goats cheese over the beetroot, and season with a little salt and black pepper.

Valentines Day

2009-02-04T14:25:00.008Z

is fast approaching...

If I was in Paris I would like to wake up to something from Boulangerie Veronique Mauclerc

and a walk around Parc des Buttes Chaumont

Then I think I'd really have to go here

for a little bit of bit of cake and people watching.

Or even better to Gerard Mulot

Which would leave on the right side of the river for a stroll around the beautiful gardens at the Musee Rodin

And home to a bottle of something chilled and bubbly from here

But I'm not in Paris...

So I'll settle for something like this

Or a walk through the Botanical Gardens and down by the river

The Best Icecream in Paris?

2008-08-31T09:52:00.000Z

I had a little bit of a revelation over the last two months in Paris: Berthillion isn't the best icecream in Paris. In fact personally it doesn't even come close. Here are three places that do:

La Maison du Chocolat

Sure, not a big selection of icecream, but when you have a chocolate sorbet this good, who needs choices? And if you felt the need to veer off the path of pure unadulturated cacao, then the caramel with fleur de sel would be an excellent bet, as would the apricot with rosemary.

Eric Kayser

Icecream isn't the only reason you want to come here: the fruit tarts are pretty great too, as are the quiche. But the pistachio icecream knocks out any competitors. An iridescent green, and with little nibs of pistachio studded through the icecream, it is fabulous, rich and creamy.

Hediard

I haven't had a better fruit sorbet. They also have the benefit of being pretty competitively priced at 2 euros a scoop: this may be the best deal there is in Place du Madeline. My two favourites are the strawberry and the fig, neither is too sweet and taste purely and cleanly of ripe fruit. Come here for a kick of summer.

La Boulangerie Veronique Mauclerc

2008-08-30T14:51:00.000Z

This is simply the most beautiful little boulangerie in Paris. I've been here two months now, and I've eaten a lot of bread, from baguettes, via sourdough, to little brioche feuillette noisette, but this is the best. That's saying something. There are a lot of boulangeries in Paris. Chi chi little ones with gleaming stainless steel counters, so-so ones with baguettes that don't do it, bobo ones with cereals, snobby ones where you wonder if really a macaroon is that difficult to make (it is), but this beats them all. It is simple and honest and fantastically good. It lends itself to a lazy day and a late brunch. It is personable and relaxed. Sure, its way out, but then so am I. All the way out of Paris to be exact, past the peripherique and in Ile de France itself. Or Le Pre Sainte-Gervais. So for me Veronique Mauclerc is just a hop over the peripherique (or actually under), and into the 19th, at 83 rue du crimee. And yes, that may be a schlep for you, but its really worth it.

For a start it has a wood fired oven, and if you google it then you'll find that makes it only one of four in Paris, and its all the way out here because you can't move a wood fired oven. I was intrigued by the woodfired oven, to be sure, and of course, it makes the bread great, and different, especially if you add the organic flour and sourdough. But for me this isn't the selling point. Rather it is the obvious love and care which is lavished without pretension, on both bread and customer, which makes it simply lovely. Its homely and relaxed, while being stupendously good. You sort of wonder if they know how good...

We went for brunch, which is 10.90 euro (a veritable bargain in Paris), and comes with the choice of sucree or sale. Both involve tea or coffee, and orange juice, and the sucree gives you a choice of venoisserie followed by a choice of fruit tart, with a selection of sweet breads and jams, while the sale gives you a choice of quiche, followed by choice of fruit tart with a selection of savoury breads. We chose one of each, and both were excellent. One deceptively light chocolate croissant for me, a wonderfully rich slice of quiche with potatoes and reblochon for A. Then a chocolate, pear and walnut tart for me, and an apple and raisin tart for A. Great pastry, the chocolate pastry on the pear tart being a particular revelation. But oh the bread. For A. a great basket of sourdough studded with mushrooms (which was amusing because mushrooms are one of his only dislikes). But my basket of sweet breads more than made up for it. A chestnut flour, honey and hazelnut bread was a particular favourite, all deep and woodsy, but the walnut and raisin bread was also fantastic, while the saffron brioche with walnuts and orange flour water was light and ethereal. Neither of us was a fan of the chocolate, banana and pineapple bread, but that was more a personal preference. Of course we couldn't finish all this, but were very helpfully sent home with what remained.

I returned a few days later, in search of the chestnut flour bread with honey and hazelnuts. Though they didn't have the same bread I tried a much lighter chestnut floured bread with praline, all sweet and light and almost brioche. To go with it a savoury sourdough studded with a profusion of pistachios, hazelnuts and almonds, which was fantastic with goats cheese for lunch.

A few little things. Though they are open all through August and July, its best to call to check that they are serving brunch. We waded through some unseasonable rain to try brunch recently, only to find that the lady serving was all alone, and therefore unable to serve food to eat in. So check, especially if its raining and you were planning on warming up in front of the bread oven. Also, don't expect it to be anything but rustic: the first day we went they had run out of butter for the bread (not that it needed it), and you get coffee and lait chaud not expresso or cappuccino. But that is the charm of the place. On a sunny day Parc des Buttes Chaumont is just over the road and a beautiful little place to take breakfast.

Sunday Organic Market

2008-08-26T10:03:00.003Z

I have been remiss - I spectacularly failed to take pictures of my outing here. But it was lovely, so lovely that it reminded me more of little villages in the south than the hustle and brazen bustle of Paris. In fact it was really only the Parisian prices that reminded me where I was... Boulevard Raspail right in the 6th arronissement.

More misshapen but beautiful tomatoes have not been seen, in a rainbow of orange, yellow, green, purple and red, some diminutive, some huge and swollen like a bruise. Little bunches of onions, papery shallots, the wonderfully bulbous pumpkins and winter squash beginning to make an appearance, the last of the summer squash being sold off cheap. Wonderful milk, cream, creme fraiche and yoghurt, goats cheese and sheeps cheese and a comte which was sublime. These are just some of the many reasons you should go, shop, eat, and that I should have brought my camera.

Raspail Organic Market, between rue de Cherche midi and rue de Rennes
Sunday Mornings, from 9am to 2pm (earlier in bad weather)

Goats cheese and fig salad

2008-08-20T16:17:00.003Z

Not really cooking, not even really a recipe. But my time in Paris has been peppered with little things like this, be it a simple green salad, some lovely charentais melon, or a perfect slice of terrine.

I adore figs, and at home they are an expensive treat. But at 2 euros a kilo salad becomes a distinct possibility, and with a little mild goats cheese and a few walnuts lunch is complete. If you feel like it a drizzle of olive oil or, if the figs are not particularly sweet, honey go well, but really all a lunch like this requires is good bread, and perhaps a small glass of wine.

Courgette and Mint Salad

2008-07-13T13:36:00.003Z

I had a lovely afternoon wandering around the chocolate shops and patisseries in the sixth arrondisement yesterday afternoon. I meant to take photos, really I did. I was sure I'd brought me camera with me. So sure, in fact, that when it wasn't I panicked and reported it to the police as stolen, which made me feel very foolish when I came home to find it lying on the table. Foolish, but also relieved.

In the morning I had dragged myself out of bed, and to the market downstairs. It really tarts itself up for Saturdays, with flower stalls, more butchers, a lovely little cheese place and a stall heaving with olives that I meant to return to but forgot. Also it was packed, I presume in preparation for Bastille day on Monday, and there was a roaring trade in artichokes, asparagus and cherries. The stall that sells mainly herbs and salad had some lovely little courgettes, so I joined the elderly women to slyly sift through to find the smallest, most delicate ones. With a big bunch of mint and a bulb of garlic that was me set for supper.

I can't claim to have invented this, indeed a very good friend once cooked it as one of a number of warm dishes to eat over Sunday lunch, soaking up the sunshine and wine. It was, and is, simply brilliant. A lovely, light and very interesting dish which banishes all horrible childhood memories of courgettes cooked to oblivion.

I say salad, but really it could act as a side vegetable to some lovely fish, on its own or with a number of little plates to pick at as we did. I like it best warm, but it needn't be hot, and you shouldn't worry about it coming to room temperature over the course of the meal, or indeed as you cook the courgettes. In fact it is far more important to fry the courgettes in small batches in order to get the right texture to them, than to make sure its piping hot.

courgettes

garlic (about one clove per person)

olive oil

mint

Slice the courgettes lengthwise about half a centimetre thick. Heat the olive oil (be generous) and when it is sizzling lay the courgettes in the pan, spread out so that they do not overlap. If you put in too many, they will take too long to cook, and will turn out limp and insipid. Brown one side on a medium to high heat, then flip them and brown the other. You want a nicely coloured exterior, but not to cook them for too long: they should still have some bite. Cook them in batches, and as you near the end of the last batch, throw in the garlic finely chopped. You want it to cook, in order to take some of the fierceness out of it, but you don't want it black. Pour the garlic and olive oil over the cooked courgettes, season with salt and pepper, and liberally scatter with chopped mint.

Macaroni with Fennel and Lardons

2008-07-01T12:42:00.004Z

My idea of comfort food is pasta in any kind of creamy sauce. Be it a plain carbonara, mushrooms with garlic, parsley, or petit pois and bacon, liberal cream takes the worries of the world away. The market below my apartment had the sweetest diminutive fennel: two nestled in the palm of my hand and seemed an appropriate supper for one. Indeed it almost seemed a shame to slice them: if it were not the middle of summer I would have been tempted to braise them whole in cream, butter and parmesan as my father used to as a side dish for roast pork or chicken when I was a child. As it was the sweet aniseed of the fennel complemented the crisp lardons perfectly, and made what is usually a heavy dish lighter.

pasta
fennel
creme fraiche
lardons
thyme
bay leaf
comte

While the water for the pasta was boiling I fried a little pancetta until crisp with a bay leaf and some thyme, then added the thinly cut fennel. Into the boiling water (well salted) went the pasta, and when this was done, the fennel was cooked. A few liberal spoons of creme fraiche and some grated comte went in with the fennel, and then the sauce was ready for the pasta.

Paris...

2008-06-24T21:22:00.004Z

is where I'm living for the next two months. Proof see?

My first icecream of many was a sorbet from Hediard. The lightest, freshest, most summery strawberry sorbet a girl could wish for. And hard earned from a morning of lugging too much luggage (books, all books) from London.

After my walk through the louvre and tuileries relaxing on the steps at Place du Madeline amid a gaggle of American tourists was about all I could manage.

When the temperature starts to soar...

2008-06-09T12:22:00.004Z

It is searingly hot outside. Cooking is simply out of the question, and were it not for the fact that I have tons of work to do, I would be sitting in the shade, fan aimed at me, drinking lemonade and reading a rubbish novel with my feet stuck in a bucket of water. Unfortunately all that work means I'm just settling for lemonade and shade.

Lemonade

3 Lemons
A big jug
sugar to taste
ice

Juice two of the lemons, and slice the other finely. Put the juice and lemon in the jug, with water and sugar to taste, and lots of ice. If you want to make it more interesting a little lemon verbena torn roughly and popped in goes very well.

Globe Artichokes

2008-06-06T14:07:00.000Z

Globe artichokes beat jerusalem artichokes hands down. They may not be fashionable, but they're the best. Just as Jerusalem artichokes signal that you're in the dead of winter and there isn't much in the way of vegetables that aren't roots, globe artichokes hail that eating outside with your fingers on long sunny afternoons has arrived.

I'm boring with artichokes. I boil them and then serve them whole for everyone to peel off the petals to eat dipped in butter. This is no work at all for the cook, but a little taxing for the diner. Good conversation, good wine, or both are required. They are plenty of other lovely things to do with them, but I think simplicity is all. If you don't then there is a lovely recipe in one of the Moro cookbooks for artichoke hearts braised with peas, mint and sherry which is fabulous, subtle and interesting.

Friday afternoon and lots of reading to do seemed the perfect excuse for a solitary artichoke lunch with a glass of white bordeaux and a cardigan to keep away the chill outside.

To cook artichokes peak off any mangled outer petal, or any that look particularly tough and cut the stalk at the base. Boil a large pan of salted water, and add the artichokes. The time they take to cook varies enormously with size, anything form 20-45 minutes I find. They are done when you can easily peel off an outside petal, but the flesh on the inside of it still holds bite. I like a little pat of butter on the side of my plate, to smear the petals over, but a vinaigrette made with lemon is also good.

If you're not into Marmalade...

2008-03-15T16:10:00.001Z

...then Orangettes are the way forward. I got a lot of lovely bitter Seville oranges from Riverford, and since Marmalade only needs to get made every five years or so in my house, I've started making them into the candied orange peel needed for Orangettes. I'm a big fan of candied orange peel dipped in chocolate at the best of times, but the Seville oranges make all the difference. As in Marmalade, they give a deep, zesty taste which just isn't achievable with normal oranges. And of course it goes perfectly with good dark chocolate.

It raining outside was the perfect excuse for this kind of project.So I've peeled, removed the pith, and chopped the peel into fine strips, boiled it in water three times to remove too much bitterness, and boiled it again in sugar syrup until it was sweetly edible. The house is filled with an uplifting smell that reminds me of christmas, and I'm covered in a thin film of sugar (as is the kitchen).

But my orange peel is now drying in long stripes on the kitchen counter ready for dipping in tempered chocolate tomorrow.

Cinnamon Buns

2008-03-15T14:46:00.000Z

My mother used to make cinnamon buns for breakfast for us when I was a child with relative frequency. She'd use tons of butter, but convince herself they were healthy because of the brown flour she used. I loved them: there isn't anything as good as sticky cinnamon buns, and I'd hack the burnt buttery sugar globs off the bottom of the pan and spread them on. The one or two left over made an excellent mid-afternoon snack, especially spread with yet more butter and accompanied by a hot mug of tea. It's only now I'm older and life is filled with the hectic everyday chores of filling in applications and paying the gas bill that I realise quite how fantastic and organised it was to have hot cinnamon rolls ready for breakfast on a regular basis. Somehow when she made then I just tripped down the stairs and into the kitchen, and was not in the least surprised to find the table laid, coffee made, orange juice poured and the sweet smell of sugar.

Though A. is a dab hand with the expresso machine in the morning, he isn't a breakfast person at all. And when he is it's protein he's after not refined carbohydrate. Few people can eat there way through a batch of cinnamon buns alone, so until now I hadn't made them. But this afternoon the wind howled, and it rained all over my washing, and somehow all this added up to a deep desire to bake something warm and sweet and satisfying. So I halved the recipe. And it turns out I can make a pretty good dent on half a batch of cinnamon buns, even when eating alone.

(this recipe will make a full batch, but you can reduce the filling by half and bake half of the dough into plain bread rolls)

For the bread:
500g white bread flour
3tbsp of yoghurt
1 egg
75ml milk
200ml water
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp instant yeast
2 tsp sugar

For the filling:
125g of butter
4tsp cinnamon
50g of muscavado brown sugar
a handful of chopped walnuts
a handful of raisins

My breadmaker came in handy here. All the bread ingrediants simply go in and get kneaded on the dough setting (1 1/2 hours). Alternatively if you're making this by hand you want to add the liquids into a well in the dry ingrediants, stir until combined, and then knead thoroughly. Then let the dough rise for 1/2 hour and when its risen knock it back.

Once the dough is out of the breadmaker, or has been knocked back, you make the filling. The measurements here are rough - mum used her eye and so do I. So feel free to up the sugar, lower the cinnamon, and generally play around. Finely chopped apple makes a great addition, or you can use dried figs instead of raisins. Mix the sugar, cinnamon and butter to a paste. Roll out the dough into a long, thin rectangle. Smear the butter mixture over and sprinkle with the fruit and nuts. Now roll the dough up like a swiss roll, so you have a long sausage filled with a pinwheel of cinnamon butter. Seal the join with a little water.

At this point you can slice off rounds to create individual buns or join the ends of the sausage together to create a ring. Either way put the dough on a baking sheet, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rise for half an hour in a warm place. Heat the oven to 200oc. If you've made a ring you then need to slice into the ring almost to the centre all the way around, so you have a sun shaped loaf, and leave it to rise for 15 more minutes. If you've made buns they can go straight in the oven. Depending on the oven, and the shape of your buns, these should take 25-35 minutes. Make a cup of tea or coffee while you wait. When the buns are golden brown take them out of the oven. Leave them to cool ever so slightly (hot butter and sugar burns!) and then tear into them.

Birthday Cake with Raspberry Macaroons

2008-03-02T16:16:00.000Z

My best friends birthday was on Thursday, and as she loves Macaroons, particularly those from Laduree, I decided her cake just had to be decorated with them.

Now I've tried at various points over the past year to bake the perfect macaroon, but success has been elusive. They are currently my baking holy grail, but thus far I haven't even managed to get a recipe that gives consistent results, and I've tried a few.

I'll share with you the most successful recipe at the end, but first I have to have a little rant about Gordon Ramsey. Now, Ramsey is pretty successful over here in Britain, and mostly I like his recipes, but his recipe for Macaroons is just wrong. Not only did the results not look like macaroons (no feet see?) but they didn't taste like anything approximating a macaroon. While my trouble with most recipes was that I'm a perfectionist, and they didn't give me macaroons with crumbling feet and shiny tops, Ramsey's Macaroons tasted like eating cardboard. Perhaps this is the beginning of the fall of the empire...

All this macaroon baking meant the cake supporting them had to be pretty simple and quick to bake. A victoria sponge filled with more raspberries and cream seemed a simple foil for the macaroons, and countered their sweetness nicely.

So finally here is the recipe that (finally) worked for me. Worked so well, in fact, that now I'm getting excited about all the other flavours I can knock out. I based my recipe on one which appeared in The Times newspaper, written by Lucas Hollweg . In making raspberry instead of lemon, I omitted the lemon juice from the macaroons, coloured them pink, and filled them with a buttercream flavoured heavily with strained raspberry puree.

For the Macaroon shells

200g icing sugar
100g of ground almonds
100g of egg whites (roughly 3 egg whites - but weigh it!)
A few drops of pink food colouring to colour
20g of caster sugar

For the raspberry filling

200g of raspberries, pureed, and the juice strained from them
50g of butter
icing sugar to taste

Blend the icing sugar and almonds in a food processor until fine powder. Sieve into a large mixing bowl.

In a large, very clean bowl (copper is best) whisk the egg whites until they hold their shape. Continue whisking and start gradually adding the caster sugar. Once they are stiff and glossy (a little like shaving foam) whisk in the food colouring until combined.

Now mix a third of the whites into the almonds and fold into a paste (it will be quite thick, but the idea is to make combining the dry ingredients easier to do without loosing all the air. Now gently fold in the rest of the egg whites. You want a well combined, smooth mixture, but not too liquid, it should still be able to form a ribbon on the surface of the mixture.

Fill a piping bag, and pipe into 2cm rounds onto a silicone baking sheet. You can use a spoon but the shape won't be as good. If you macaroons have little nipples on the top use a wet finger to smooth them down to make sure you create a smooth top.

Leave the macaroons to sit at room temperature for 2 hours. Little skins will form over the top of the macaroons - DON"T TOUCH!

Now heat your oven to 130oc. When the oven has reached temperature, put a tray of macaroons at a time on the middle shelf, and bake for about 12 -15 minutes. After about 5 minutes you should see the little feet form at the bottom of the macaroons. This is when you know the recipe worked.

Once done remove from the oven and leave to cool on trays. You may want to play around a bit with the time, depending on the temperature of your oven. Remember, the macaroons shouldn't colour, so if they start going golden brown either your oven is too hot, or they've been in too long. Similarly, they aren't meriangue - you want soft insides, neither gooey nor overly crisp.

While they are cooling you can make the buttercream for filling them. Cream the unsalted (!) butter with the strained raspberry puree, then sweeten to taste. Once cool sandwich the macaroons together with a buttercream filling.

Macaroon heaven.

Chinese Potstickers

2008-02-07T21:56:00.000Z

The weather has been bleak recently: endless rain, and a grey dank sky. Uninspiring in fact. Life goes on, of course, as does cooking and eating, but not much of any interest had been cooked until I made these little dumplings on sunday. The recipe was culled from a number on the internet, and then made to fit with the contents of my fridge, and the shopping I had done before I looked seriously at any recipes. The result being that these are not very traditional, but they were nevertheless very good. I think they made a good approximation of the potstickers I have eaten in restaurants, but with the flavours playing a little fresher, which given the weather outside can only be a good thing.

With a bowl of boiled rice, and some steamed greens, what more could you need to perk you up?

A packet of round dumpling wrappers
200g of lean minced pork
4 spring onions
2 tsp of soy sauce
1 tsp of sugar
3 cloves of garlic
2 inches of fresh ginger root
1 tsp of sesame oil
Chicken stock or water
mixture of sesame and vegetable oil for frying

If frozen leave the dumpling wrappers to defrost for 3-4 hours.
Dice the spring onions very finely, and do the same with the ginger. Crush the garlic and add all three to the minced pork, with the soy sauce, sugar and sesame oil. Mix to combine.

Place a large teaspoon of filling in the centre of a wrapper. Moisten the edges of the wrapper with water a fold it in half to join the two sides. It should end up like a half moon shape.

Now keep going until you run out of wrappers or mixture

Add a little oil to a frying pan which has a lid. When the oil is hot place the dumplings filling side down and leave to cook until that side is dark golden brown. Do not turn them over. When one side is done (the pastry will not be cooked) add about 100ml of chicken stock or water (carefully as the pan will spit) and cover. Leave the heat on and let them steam until cooked through. This will take roughly 10 minutes, but check to see the pan is not boiling dry, and if it is add a little more liquid.

Serve with steamed greens and rice. I also like them with a dipping sauce made of finely chopped root ginger mixed with rice vinegar and half a tsp of sugar. But they are equally good just with soy sauce.

Gingerbread and Apple Muffins

2007-12-10T22:41:00.000Z

Nigella Lawson has a book, Feast, which has a number of lovely recipes of which these are one. Her recipe leaves out the apple and chopped crystalised ginger, but I wanted something to make the muffins a little moister, and having tried both with and without I prefer them with the addition.

Adapted from Gingerbread Muffins in Feast, by Nigella Lawson

250g self raising flour
1 tsp of baking powder
2 tsp of ground ginger
1 tsp of ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp of ground cloves
6 tbsp of vegetable oil
4 tbsp of black treacle
4 tbsp of golden syrup
75g of muscavado sugar
25g of caster sugar
150ml of milk
1/4 tsp of balsamic vinegar
1 egg
2 balls of crystalised ginger in syrup, very finely chopped
1/2 a cooking apple, very finely chopped

Heat the oven to 200oc
Sift the dry ingrediants together. Beat the egg in a separate bowl with the sugar until all the lumps are dissolved. Add the milk, oil, vinegar, treacle and golden syrup and mix to combine. Fold in the dry ingredients, being careful not to overwork the mixture; some small lumps may remain. Fold in the ginger and apple, then spoon into muffin cakes and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, or until they are risen, and slightly firm on top.

These keep well for a few days in an airtight container.

Cheat's Burger and Chips

2007-11-26T19:31:00.000Z

Every so often I go past a kitchen shop and get drawn in by the idea of a deep fat fryer and wander home dreaming of tempura, and onion rings, and battered fish, and chips. And, even though I know it is BAD and will surely lead to BURNs I attempt to convince A with my dreams of freshly fried goods. Which is the point at which he lists the terrible things that happen to people with deep fat fryers, a tale in which if you don't immerse some part of you in boiling oil, or burn your house down, the mentioned freshly fried goods lead to obesity, and heart disease. And in this way we have so far resisted temptation.

The downside of this is no fresh chips, double fried and crispy. So we have developed a way of cooking them which, though unlikely to ward off obesity and heart disease, is (or at least feels) marginally less dangerous than a vat of boiling oil. So we cut our chips from potatoes, skin on, making sure they are of even thickness. And then we whack the temperature on the oven as high as it will go (a measly 220oc), space the chips out on a baking sheet, and spoon on a couple of generous dollops of duck fat and shake them around to cover before popping them in the oven. 30-40 minutes later and hey presto, chips. These easily rival your average home-made restaurant chip (it may be the duck fat) though I admit they do not rival the wonderful chips at La Tupina in Bordeaux which double fries its chips in duck fat.

Anyway, we ate lots of these last night, with suitable lashings of fleur de sel and mustard (and ketchup for me because I am a philistine). They were great with the last of the beef burgers from our Riverford Meat Box and fresh bread rolls that A made, although as you can imagine both of us were rendered unable to move from the over-consumption of beef, potatoes, duck fat and bread.

Delia's Cottage Pie

2007-11-25T11:09:00.000Z

Our veg box last week had two swede in it, and what do you know, they're still malingering in my fridge. My only brush with swede is in my childhood in Edinburgh, where Burn's night is celebrated with haggis, neeps and tatties (neeps being another name for swede). They're boiled or steamed and served with lashings of butter, salt and black pepper, and maybe a little nutmeg if you're lucky. I'm not adverse to this, but I can't eat two of them like this, and getting haggis in Oxford may be a stretch. But I came across a Delia receipe for shepards pie with swede in it, so thought I'd try it out, substituting beef for lamb and hence turning it into cottage pie.

500g of minced beef
2 carrots
2 large onions
1/2 swede
a glass of red wine
thyme
a good handful of parsely
potatoes
3 leeks
a handful of chedder cheese

Dice the onions, carrots and swede into small cubes. Brown the onions with the thyme and some olive oil, then add the diced carrot and swede and cook for a few minutes. Transfer to another dish and turn the heat up high. Brown the mince in batches, then turn the heat down and sprinkle in a spoonful of flour, browning it gently in the fat from the mince. Add the cooked vegetables and the glass of wine and simmer for 3 minutes. Chop the parsely and add, taste the mince and season. Meanwhile boil the potatoes until tender and mash with a few knobs of butter. Season well.

Layer the mince at the bottom of an oven dish, and spoon the mashed potato over it to cover. Slice the leeks into rounds and cover the mashed potato with them, then sprinkle over with chedder cheese. Bake in a 180oc oven for 30 minutes.

Mussels with Chorizo

2007-11-24T14:38:00.000Z

I cannot take credit for the cooking of this, nor really the recipe (see Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook), but it was just so good, that it needed a mention. Everyone has those tired days, when you arrive home soaked through by rain, cold, shivering and fed up with life. Cooking is a far away dream but you think you might just be able to summon the energy to order takeout, though even deciding what you want to eat is a little beyond you.

I arrived home in just such a state a few nights ago and A. happily sat me down in the kitchen and cooked me this. The smell of the shallots and chorizo cooking was heavenly, and then the white whine bubbling away, and then a big bowl full of steaming mussels, with the chorizo and herbs jostling for space. It was really a wonderful meal.

1 cooking chorizo
a handful of shallots
1 1/2 kilos of mussels (well bearded)
a handful of parsley
two handfuls of coriander
a glass of dry white wine (and the rest of the bottle for drinking)
lots of crusty bread for dipping

Chop the onions and chorizo finely and fry in a little olive oil until the onions are translucent and the fat is coming out of the chorizo. Add a glass of wine and bring to the boil. Check through the mussels one last time discarding any that are open and do not close when tapped. When the pot is boiling add the mussels and pop the lid on. Chop the herbs. After about 8-10 minutes the mussels should have opened wide. Now chuck in the herbs, and serve in bowls with bread for mopping up the juices.

A note of caution. Buy mussels on the day you want to eat them, and don't store them in the fridge (most fridges are to cold and they will die), but wrapped in newspaper and covered in damp cloths. A few hours before you want to eat them empty them all into the sink and scrub (no soap!) off any barnacles and pull off any beard. Any mussels that are open and do not close when tapped are dead and should be thrown out.

Carrot Soup

2007-11-09T15:00:00.000Z

I spent the last two weeks in France, attempting to do some work and with A cooking me up all kinds of delicious things in the kitchen to fuel the study. The weather was crisp and clear, and the countryside around us as beautiful as ever.

It all seems a distant memory now that we are home, on this bleak Oxford day. I have that overtired feeling where I just want to wrap up warm and cook cosseting food thats gentle and cosy. A little carrot soup seems in order.

2 large Onions
6 large carrots
thyme
olive oil
4 garlic bulbs
salt and pepper
chicken stock

Slice the onions finely and then cook them long and slow with the olive oil and thyme, adding the garlic. When you have a rich colour add the chopped carrots and cover with the chicken stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer until the carrots are tender. Use a hand blender to get a thick puree, and season with salt and pepper.
This is best served with thick hunks of good bread spread with generous quantities of butter.

Brioche

2007-10-23T16:44:00.000Z

The light has definatly changed in Oxford: a warm autumnal glow in the evening and crisp, crisp blue skies in the morning. The air has changed too, its sharper somehow, and no matter how warm the late afternoon sun might be, it would be silly to venture out without a cardigan and scarf.

Sunday found me holed up at home, jumper and socks on and heating full blast to beat the chill, playing with yeast. Our new breadmaker whirred away as I type, knocking up a little brioche dough for me to play with.

Brioche

250g of strong white bread flour
75g of butter
3 eggs
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of fast acting yeast

All mixed together in the bread maker on the dough setting. My bread maker requires liquids to be added first, but some start with dry ingrediants. The dough was then shaped into pairs of large and small balls, popped small on top of large in greased moulds and left to rise for half an hour. It was then glazed with an egg wash before being baked at 200 oc until golden brown.

Few things beat the smell of baking bread on a cold sunday afternoon...and brioche only makes it better.

I had meant to take photos, but in the end ate most of the brioche before I got my camera out. The photo above is of the last lingering one, while below are the moulds I've just washed up, a little knackered, and not quite brioche moulds, but fitting the bill.

Months lost...

2007-10-01T21:47:00.000Z

Good intentions do not write blogs. August and September have been a blur, moving house being probably the most major upheavel. It sounds kind of lame when written down, but it meant that most of my kitchen spent its life in boxes for several weeks, and is only just emerging into my nice new kitchen. But on the plus side it now means I have an electric convection oven instead of the hateful gas one which plotted against me to ruin my baking at every opportunity. Not only that, but my kitchen is actually big enough to house a kitchen table, which is the fulfillment of what had become a surprisingly heartfelt desire (seperate dining rooms several doors away do not make for domestic bliss).

So, down to the cooking. In truth, I have been slaving away about 60 hours a week in a local deli, which has honed my chopping skills somewhat, but has meant that when I come home I tend to demand food rather than cook it. A has consequently been doing a lot of the cooking. So, although I pretty much missed the joys of redcurrents, blackcurrents, and the last of the raspberries, I'm looking forward to the figs, beautiful greengages and damsons which spell this time of year. Not only that but the winter veggies are beginning to appear, and s

Lemon Icecream with Strawberries and Raspberries

2007-07-11T15:15:00.000Z

I've been thinking of making something like this for a while now, but somehow never got around to it. I find I have far more recipes lingering in my head than I'll ever have time to cook, or people to cook for. A friend of mine is having us over for dinner tommorrow night though, and I offered to cook dessert. He's making pea and mint soup to start with, and then (weather dependent) some home made burgers and wedges, so this throwback to british childhood birthday parties seemed perfect, plus it fits in nicely with the fact that I'll be running around like a maniac tommorrow and so need something do-ahead.

Lemon Icecream

My icecream maker is out of action at the moment, so instead of a usual custard base icecream I made a pate a bombe with lightly whipped cream folded in. Pate a bombe is egg yolks whipped until they are light and frothy, and tripled in volume, with a hot sugar syrup beaten in so that the yolks cook. The heat of the sugar syrup cooks the egg yolks, while also trapping the air. Into this is then folded lightly whipped cream. As both of these mixtures contain a lot of air the resulting icecream acheives a lightness without the constant stirring a usual custard requires.

100g of sugar
50ml of water
250ml of double cream
6 egg yolks
zest of 3 lemons

Whisk the egg yolks until light and fluffy and at least tripled in volume. Meanwhile heat the sugar and water until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture reaches the boil. At this point pour it slowly into the egg yolks, continuing to whisk the mixture all the while, and keep whisking until it is cool.

Whip the cream lightly, and zest the lemons. Fold the zest and cream into the egg yolk mixture. Put in a covered container in the freezer overnight, folding occasionally. To serve, slightly thaw the icecream in the refridgerator for 20 minutes before serving.

I usually like to drizzle a little triple sec over strawberries before serving them, but with this icecream they really don't need it. A little lemon zest and sugar is perfect.

Madelines with Cherries

2007-07-11T08:21:00.000Z

These are inspired by Clafoutis, with a cherry imbedded in each tiny madeline, the stalk poking out as a handle ready to pop each one into your mouth.

I love madelines simple and plain, but a little fruit complements the light cake wonderfully, and, with the almonds, cherries are an easy choice. I played with a Gordon Ramsey recipe for madelines from his Just Desserts cookbook, increasing the ground almonds, reducing the flour, and using a little vanilla to flavour rather than the lemon zest he suggests. if you wanted to make them more dessert like, then we all agreed that a dash of kirsh in the madeline batter would go a long way.

Just warm from the oven these made scrumptious little bites.

75g of unsalted butter
80g of sugar
3 medium eggs
60g of ground almonds
60g of plain flour
a few drops of vanilla extract

Heat the butter in a little pan over a low heat until the solids seperate and then brown. Strain the butter to remove the browned solids, and set aside to cool. In another bowl whisk the sugar with the eggs until they are light in colour, and leave a trail when drizzled over the surface of the mixture. An electric beater is a godsend for this job. If you don't have one don't be tempted to give up at an early stage as this is what gives the madelines their lightness. Fold the flour and almonds gently into the egg mixture, being very careful not to knock out the air. Lastly fold in the cooled, but still runny, butter. Leave to sit for two hours. Meanwhile heat the oven to 190oc, and butter the madeline moulds. I used half the mixture to make plain madelines, and with the other half I made cherry madelines, but in little cake moulds rather than the traditional madeline mould.

For the plain madeline simply spoon the mixture into the moulds until they are two thirds full and bake untl golden brown. For the cherry madelines also fill the moulds until two-thirds full, but then pop in a whole, unpitted cherry with the stalk attached. There is no need to push it down more than half-way into the mixture: as the madeline bakes the mixture wil rise around it. Bake until golden brown. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for a few minutes in the moulds, then turn out onto a rack to cool more. They are best eaten warm, with a mug of tea or coffee, but can also be kept in an airtight container, in which case I like to just warm them slightly in a very low oven before serving them to take the chill off them.

Clafoutis with Plums

2007-07-02T12:26:00.000Z

I spent the last couple of weeks in france, recuperating from the stress of finishing my thesis.

Unfortunatly I missed the cherries by a couple of weeks, but there was a lovely bush of little yellow plums, a lot like greengages except for their colour. A little Clafoutis seemed like the best way to use the huge amount of fruit. Clafoutis is half way between a cake and a custard, with a golden top but a moist interior.

Traditionally clafoutis is made with cherries, but any fruit is very good with it, particularly stone fruit like plums, greengages and damsons, though I've made it with apples and pears before too. Fruit with big stones is worth de-stoning and slicing in half, but these plums were only slightly larger than cherries, so stoning them seemed a little labour intensive, plus my father always insists the stones add to the flavour when cooked.

Heat the oven to 210oc. Melt 60g of butter. In a bowl mix 80g of sugar, and 3 medium eggs. Add 300ml of milk, and 200ml of creme fraiche, and fold in 90g of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder, and last but not least the melted butter. Place the fruit in a shallow ovenproof dish and spoon the mixture on top. Bake for about 30 minutes (depending on the size of the pan) until the top is lightly risen and golden, still leaving the bottom moist and custard-like. Serve hot, either plain or with a dollop of icecream, cream, creme fraiche or yoghurt.

Pesto

2007-06-15T13:21:00.000Z

In the deli where I used to work making pesto was my favourite job. Picking over the basil in the sun was a lovely way to pass a quiet half hour. The ingrediant themselves are delicious: basil, olive oil, parmesan, toasted pine nuts and garlic. They add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Making basil at home isn't really something its easy to do unless you grow your own, or find a cheap and plentiful supply. My own basil plants got summarily slaughtered by a band of maurading slugs, but riverford had big bunches of basil, so I ordered a load and got stocked up with pinenuts and parmesan in preparation.

A. did a trial run a couple of days ago, with a pot of basil from tesco. Very good it was too so I followed his recipe, with the addition of a bit more olive oil to help it keep better.

4 cloves of garlic
80g of basil
50g of pine nuts
50g of parmesan
Olive oil to loosen

Toast the pinenuts until golden in a low oven, keeping a close eye on them as they burn quickly. Then grate the parmesan and add all the ingrediants to a food processor and blend until combined. To keep the pesto pop it in a jar, smooth over the top and cover with a layer of olive oil to keep out the air. The top of the pesto will oxidze a little and go brown, but will still be good to eat.

Duck with petit pois

2007-06-08T12:14:00.000Z

This is my father's recipe, adapted somewhat from an Elizabeth David cookbook if I remember right. He makes it with duck legs, but I decided to try it with a whole duck, making the confit slowly over the afternoon. The melting richness of the duck contrasts perfectly with the fresh spring peas. The whole duck works, although duck legs are easier to confit as turning them over is easier.

Take the duck out of the fridge and sprinkle with salt and black pepper. Leave for at least an hour, then sponge off any dampness on the skin with a paper towel.

Melt a tin of duck fat in a large casserole, and when hot add the duck, browning all over. Turn the heat down, or remove to a very low oven and, continue to cook for at least 2 hours, perferably more, checking every half hour, until the meat is tender. Meanwhile use the giblets, a onion and a bay leaf to make a little stock. Once the duck is cooked and tender take it off the heat. At this point strain off the fat and reserve for cooking at a later date. Remove the duck from the pan and place to one side. If you wish you can at this point cover the duck with the fat and keep it in the fridge for several weeks to reheat at a later date.
Dice an onion finely (or two if you have a lot of duck) and add to the pan the duck was cooked in. When the onion is cooked add a large quantity of petit pois, fresh or frozen, and the strained stock. Place the duck on top, skin side up to brown, and place in a high oven until the liquid is just beginning to bubble and the duck skin is crisp.

Season and serve with mashed potato.

Rhubarb with Creme Anglaise and Shortbreads

2007-06-02T19:37:00.000Z

I made dessert recently at my father's house, and we had a load of friends around for dinner. There were raspberries in the shops, and at first I was thinking hazlenut daquoise with raspberries and cream. But my brother was adament that he wanted to make creme anglaise, which I love, so we settled on triflesque layers of raspberries, creme anglaise and crumbled meriangues studded with hazelnut. The meriangue was sort of taking the place of the sponge and toasted almonds all at once, crumbled on the top of the creme anglaise. It was very good, but unfortunatly I made the mistake of going with the trifle theme and adding a dollop of whipped cream on top. Don't ask me why. As a friend of the family commented, it just took away from the beauty of the creme anglaise.

So when I got a load of rhubarb in the organic box this week I decided to keep it simple. Far too hot for crumble, but rhubarb compote, cooled and served with chilled creme anglaise and a plain shortbread seemed to hit the spot. No messing around, just good milk, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla pods. And a sharp rhubarb compote shining through.

I've been wanting to try out a new way of cooking rhubarb: roasting it in the oven. I can't remember which blog I read it on first, but its certainly been making the rounds. I was hoping it would allow the rhubarb to cook without breaking down into pulpy mush. My only worry was it getting too dry, so I popped it in a little le creuset pot with the lid on, on a low heat until it was tender. It worked pretty well, although I think I need to perfect the technique slightly: my rhubarb was a little overcooked and disintegrated on touch.

For the creme anglaise you'll need

6 egg yolks
500ml of milk - or equal parts milk and cream depending on how rich you want your custard
a vanilla bean
100g caster sugar

Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until combined and slighly paler. Meanwhile bring the milk/cream and vanilla pod to the boil. Once it has boiled leave to steep for a moment, then, when it is cool enough to handle, fish out the vanilla pod and split it lengthwise, using the point of a knife to get out the seeds. Pour vanilla pod, seeds and milk/cream onto the egg yolks in a gentle stream, whisking all the while to combine. Pour back into the pan and, on a very gentle heat cook until the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon. Now is the time for attention and patience. If these aren't your strong points then its a good idea to have a bowl ready to pour the custard into when it is done. You will notice it thicken slightly, to the consistency of double cream. If you start to get what appear to be small granules, or lumps, then you have overcooked it and the egg has seperated. Immediatly pour it into the bowl so it stops cooking if this is the case. Ideally though you should notice it thicken, perhaps slightly coating the end of the spoon as you stir the bottom of the pan. When it does this remove it from the heat and leave to chill.

My shortbread recipe is pretty much all in the eye now. I crumb good butter, caster sugar and flour together in rough proportions. Then I shape the shortbread into balls and pat it down with my fingers. It needs to be baked in a low oven, at about 140 oc until it is light gold in colour. I use about 300g of flour and 70g of sugar to 200g of butter. In this case I left the shortbread plain, but I often substitute ground nuts for some of the flour: ground hazelnuts are particularly good.

Plaisir du Chocolat

2007-05-29T08:38:00.000Z

I went back to Edinburgh this weekend to see family and found out that this lovely chocolatier has gone into administration, and, as of yesterday, is no more. It will be much missed, and Edinburgh will be the worse off for it. It was not a place I visited regularly, frequent trips being rather beyond my means, but on the occasions when I did go through it was thoroughly delightful. They served a range of different kinds of very good hot chocolate, my favourite being the chocolate expresso, a mixture of 70% chocolate and cream, and the hot chocolate with chillies, which was made with maybe 85% chocolate, and was wonderful.

Their cakes were also good, but best of all was their pastry. Thin, crumbling and delicious, I ached to make pastry like it. That said, very recently it had gone a little downhill, too thick, not crumbling and, dare I say it, a little soggy in the middle.

Their chocolates were truly beautiful, thin shelled creations with coloured cocoa butter prints on top. More importantly they tasted fabulous, and came in a treasure trove of flavours enough to make anyone weak at the knees. Lavander, pepper, green tea with jasmine were some of the more unsual, but wonderful pralines and salted butter caramels were also stand out.

I managed to get there in its last half hour of trading, and joined the many people paying homage by buying up the last of the home made chocolates.

Ironically, many of these flavours I will be trying for the first and last time.

Scones with Clotted Cream and Jam

2007-05-17T11:27:00.000Z

As the weather is dreak and damp it seemed appropriate to break my work with some baking. Scones are one of my favourite things for afternoon tea. Decked with golden clotted cream and jam, and with a big pot of steaming earl grey they are quinessentially english. The best ones use buttermilk, which makes them ever so light and lovely, but I made do with normal milk.

225g of flour
75g of unsalted butter
pinch of salt
2 tsps of baking powder
1 egg
50ml of milk

Firstly sift the flour, salt and baking powder together. Cut the butter up into cubes and rub it into the flour with the tips of your fingers as if making pastry.

Beat the egg with the milk and stir into the flour crumb. You want the consistancy to be pliable, but not wet and sticking to your fingers. Try and work the mixture as little as possible when you mix it, or the scones will be heavy.

Roll, or press with your fingers to form a round one inch thick. Use a cutter to cut the scones into rounds.

Place on a greased baking sheet and bake at 180oc until risen and golden.

Serve warm with generous amounts of clotted cream and jam. My favourite jam to have with these is raspberry, but strawberry is traditional, and rhubarb and ginger jam is fantastic.

Scones go stale very quickly, and are best warm out of the oven, so either make a small batch or freeze the leftovers and reheat from frozen. Not that leftovers is often a problem.

Birthday Cake

2007-05-15T14:38:00.000Z

It was a friend’s birthday a few days ago, and we all decided that in celebration of his advancing years we’d book a restaurant, get dressed up, and go out for the evening. I was on birthday cake making duty, which is something I love to do. The thing about birthday cakes is that they aren’t ever meant to be serious. Silly, celebratory and over the top is good, but pared down minimalism isn’t what is called for.

When I was little my mother would indulge my sweet tooth ad make layers of almond daquoise and fill them with a praline coffee cream for my birthday cake, decorated with piped whipped cream and swirls of caramel. Or icecream bombs with layers of different flavours. She even attempted a volcano for my brother, complete with fleeing lego figurines and fireworks.

Now I often make daquoise, or layered chocolate cakes for birthdays. They are easy to make for a crowd I find, so rich that all you want is a sliver of cake. But this time I decided to go down a different path: layers of sponge with cream and raspberries, decorated with merigangues and more raspberries.

Firstly I made a whole lot of meriangue and piped little meriangue kisses on silicone paper and baked them until they were almost completely dried out.

Then partly because I don't have a big enough cake tin to feed 30 people, and partly because it seemed like a fun idea, I made three sponge cakes in different sizes. At the last minute I split each into two and layered them together with raspberries and cream. Then I covered the whole lot in a thin layer of cream to allow the meriangues to stick, and covered the lot with little meriangue kisses and some plump juicy raspberries.

Simple, but effective. I got a bit worried about my sponge layers at the bottom sinking under the weight of those on top, but in actual fact they held up admirably, and the raspberries and cream kept the cake nice and moist.

Sea bass with samphire and pink fir potatos

2007-05-08T11:06:00.000Z

It has been a beautiful spring in oxford so far, unseasonably warm even. But these last days have given way to clouds and jumpers.

Spring in Oxford means May Morning, which I, liking my duvet too much, didn't make it to this year. Its traditional to stay up all night to watch the choir sing at dawn from the top of Magdalen tower, and in previous years I've attempted this, only to fall asleep an hour before dawn, and have to drag myself out of bed on half an hour's sleep to watch the choir from a cold, half lit lawn. Its a beautiful, though very weird experince. I've always watched it from inside Magdalen, where there is an eerie, pre-dawn feeling, and various students walking around in various states of semi-sleep. A hush descends as the choir begin to sing, and then we all troupe back to breakfast, or bed. In the last few decades a pretty crazy 'tradition' has grown up where people outside the college jump from the tall bridge into the few inches of water in the river. This is supposedly traditional, but seems a pretty recent phenomenon, and has resulted in a lot of broken bones, the drop being substancial, and the water not deep enough to break the fall, and crowded with old shopping trolleys. I can only assume its some kind of link in to the idea of kissing the dew. In Edinburgh, where I used to live, people do this, with a distinct division between the morning hymns that take place on Arthurs Seat, and the all night revelry of Carleton Hill.

Anyway, all these seem traditions seem to add up to a time of rebirth, a cleansing, a lusty celebration of the new year.

Which brings me to dinner.
I found some lovely samphire in the market, perfect just steamed with lashings of butter. Samphire grows on shorelines and salt mudflats and has a distinctive fresh crisp flavour. It starts to be available in good fish mongers at about this time of year, or you may see it growing near the sea.

Unsurprisingly its lovely with fish, so I got some seabass fillets that looked good to go with it

Plus there were simply the sweetest little potatos in the Covered Market, they were all eyes and ears, and thin-skinned elongated beauty. Anyway, I boiled them whole, and then slugged them with plenty of butter, black pepper and the fleur de sel I love so much.

The samphire, like asparagus, just requires gentle steaming or a few minutes in a pan of boiling water. Make sure to wash any grit off it well first though, and also don't add salt to the pan, as it tends to be salty enough already. In fact I wish I'd soaked my longer, as it was a little too salty for my taste. The sea bass I just pan fried with butter and served the lot with wedges of lemon.

This is my entry for A Taste of Spring, held by What's For Lunch, Honey?

Victoria Sponge

2007-04-30T13:50:00.000Z

Victoria sponge traditionally relies on the air beaten into the eggs to rise the batter, rather than a raising agent such as baking powder. Some recipes call for beating the egg yolks with the sugar seperatly from the egg whites, but I followed Michel Roux's recipe for a genoise, which is the french equivalent. This recipe whips the eggs together with the sugar, then folds in the flour and a very small quanity of melted butter. Although it seems from the various recipes I can find that the butter is not traditional, this is the way I remember my father making sponge cakes.

For those without an electric beater this recipe constitutes excercise rather than baking. It took my little hand-held beater 10 mintues to get the eggs and sugar to the right white fluffy consistency. Usually I'm all for hand whisking, particularly with meriange, but this would require some kind of team effort, a kind of pass the whisk relay. Egg yolks, unlike egg whites, are very difficult to get air into, and require a great deal more beating in order for them to double in volume in the way they need too.

Although I often bake, I tend to make cakes with butter in them, and often using nuts instead of flour. The weather being what it is though, it seemed like a good time to make a foray into the world of baking without rising agents.

It can seem like an impossible task when first looking at your ingrediants. Eggs, sugar and flour: is this really going to make a cake? But as long asyou aerate the eggs enough, and take care not to knock the air out when folding in the flour, its all good.
The one last temptation and potential pitfall is opening the oven door. I was dancing around the door, attempting to take sneak peaks through the glass, which was entirely futile as I'd placed them too high up to get a look into the tin. Because these sponges have no raising agent they are a lot more delicate and tempermental than normal cake. Like a souffle, if you shock them with cold air before they are cooked, they will fall.

4 medium eggs
125g caster sugar
125g of sifted flour
30g of melted butter cooled to room temperature but still liquid.

Grease a cake tin well and flour the inside lightly. Heat the oven to 190oc

Beat the eggs with the sugar until light, white and creamy. Thye should at least double in volume.

You may be tempted to give up when they look like this:

But keep going, they aren't ready until they look like this:

Then gently fold the flour into the eggs , being careful not to crush the air out. Lastly fold in the melted butter.

Place in the tin and bake for 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and springs back when pushed, emitting a faint hiss.

I cut my sponge into layers, and spread them with lemon curd, whipped cream and passionfruit pulp.

Wet Garlic and Cultured Dill Pickles

2007-04-29T23:16:00.000Z

Wet garlic is the new seasons garlic, a little premature, and with a sweeter, more rounded taste. Its leaves can also be eaten, gently sauted or raw for a more powerful kick. It came all prettily tied up in a bunch in our organic veg box this week.

My father had given me a pot of dill pickles to try. Instead of the normal added ingrediants these are cultured dill pickles, alive in the same way yeast is. Pickles are something I almost instinctively avoided as a child, perhaps because the first time I encountered them was bedecking an overdone hamburger, a sad and sorry little piece of pickle if ever I saw one. The pickle was ingrained in my food memory as soemthng distinctly unappealing until I was served a little homemade rillettes de canard with a side of pickled cornichons. Mainly because they were so miniture and cute, I tried one and realised what it was all about. Sharp pickle enlivens, cutting through the fat, bringing out the flavour of the meat.
Since then I hardly ever eat pate without pickles (pickled walnuts are also a favourite). The joy of pickle with potato was discovered at a friends house when she served a very rough mash, complete with chunks of pickle, onion and boiled egg. Comfort food at its best.

A little potato salad seemed an appropriate way to combine both. Potato salad , too, is something I only came round to when I realised that slathering it mayonaise was entirely optional, and that a healthy glug of olive oil did the job just as well. I'll eat most foods, but mayonaise is usually store bought and awful, something akin to eating flavourless and aerated oil. Homemade mayonaisse is almost an entirely differnt thing, great to dip a chip in, rich and tasty. Such mayonaisse though, is encountered even more infrequently that bearnaise or hollandaise, and its usually the stuff out of the jar, slathered on thick, that makes its way onto potato salad.

Wet garlic (or one clove of raw garlic and some spring onions)
Dill pickles
parsley
boiled potatoes
salt
pepper
olive oil

Chop the wet garlic and parsley finely, and the dill pickles a bit more coarsely. Its best to add these and the olive oil to the potatoes while they are still warm, as they seem to absorb the flavours better. Season with salt and black pepper.

Almond dacquoise with rose cream and strawberries

2007-04-26T08:41:00.000Z

Flowers add a delicate and subtle scent to all sorts of dishes. Here I have paired one of my favourite desserts with rosewater and a sprinkle of rose petals. Cooking is all about simple recipes that can be played with as the wont takes you. Daquoise is a perfect base for such desserts, being a meriangue flavoured with ground nuts. Both the type and quantity of the nuts used can be changed, giving a texture like crisp meriangue or delicate cake. Almond and hazelnuts are perhaps my favourite ways to flavour daquoise: hazelnuts go perfectly with raspberries while almonds are a more delicate foil for the first strawberries of the season.

The cream that sandwhichs the two together can be left plain, or embellished with fruit liquours, vanilla, spices, or in this case rose water.

The rule I subscribe to for meriangue and dacquoise is that each medium egg white requires at least 55g of sugar and ground nuts, of which 30g at least of this must be sugar. You can of course add more than 55g of dry ingrediants, and the more you add the drier, or more sandy, the dacquoise will be.

There are a couple of things which make meriangues and dacquoise much much easier. A good copper bowl for whipping your egg whites.

Mine came from Lakeland, but Mauviel also do one which also has a stand allowing one-handed whipping. Copper bowls aren't necessary, but they do help for anything which requires beaten egg whites, as the copper allows you to acheive fluffy clouds with the minimum effort. I also try and keep mine solely for egg whites, eliminating the possibility of pesking bits of grease getting through my sub-standard washing up and ruining my egg whites.

The other piece of equiptment is far more indispensible: silicone baking parchment. Again Lakeland, but increasingly more and more shops sell these. It allows you to forget about ricepaper, and that incredibly annoying job of teasing the meriangue off the baking sheet, all the while hoping it doesn't fragment into little shards in your hands.

3 egg whites
150g of caster sugar
50g of ground almonds
1/2 pint of cream
a drop of rose water
strawberries.

Whip the egg whites to soft peaks, then gradually add the sugar and continue whipping until all the sugar has dissolved. The meriangue should have a firmer consistency and get increasingly hard to whisk as you add the sugar. Fold in the almonds. Pipe or dollop onto the silicone baking sheet, or rice paper, and bake for about an hour (depending on the shape and size of the meriangues) at 100oc. When done the outsides should be crisp and they should peel off the parchment easily, but the middle will still be marshmallow like in consistency.

Leave to cool.

Lightly whip the cream until it is just holding its shape, and then fold in a couple of drops of rose water. Hull the strawberries. Spead the cooled meriangues with cream and decorate with strawberries.

Unfortunatly, we ate this before I got a chance to take a picture of the final product.

Fig and Saffron bread

2007-04-25T11:04:00.000Z

Yeast baking is something I struggle with. On the few occasions when I have tried it I tend to end up with something overblown and blowsy, with all of the integrity of those soft white floured baps bought in the supermarket. Whether my problem is the flour or the time I'm leaving it to rise for I don't know, but I've effectively given up. I don't have much patience for slaving over things which turn out substandard, when I can go and buy the lovely sourdough at my local deli. But for all that there is something to aspire to in bread baking, it seems the pinnacle of homely comfort and conjugal bliss. Not for nothing are those selling homes instructed to have their loves baking in the aga. Bread baking seems to me though to go rather against the grain: it seems designed to be baked in quantity, and with a frequency that the home cook cannot compete with. It baffles me why we don't have the sort of tradition that the french do, of having very good bakers, and going to them prior to every meal. Of course for a long time it was pretty much impossible to buy good bread in britain, and even now your average shop only sells the cotton wool variety, so perhaps this is what turned us into a nation of would-be bakers. Or perhaps it is the aga, and the long cold dark days which makes a loaf emerging out the oven such an integral part of the british home ideal. Whatever it is, its definatly there, this deep yeasty ideal.

While I simply can't be bothered to bake bread when I can buy better, I did discover in one of my fathers old books a lovely Polish recipe for an enriched fruit bread made from a yeast dough with butter, milk, egg yolks, saffron, brandy and dried fruits added. It is a kind of Baba, and is traditional at easter, a sort of carbohydrate and cholesterol blow-out after the trials of lent. Instead of currents and citrus peel I've complimented the saffron with dried baby figs and fresh orange zest. The quantities in the recipe would have fed all my extended family and friends, so I've scaled it down a bit, although I've also made it slightly richer than the origional version.

500g white bread flour
300ml of warm milk
1 packet of instant yeast (I cheated)
70g of butter
2 egg yolks
1 cup of dried figs
1 large pinch of saffron
1 pinch of salt
zest of and juice of an orange
1/2 cup of crysalised peel
1/2 cup of raisins

Sift the flour with the yeast and add the dried fruits. Leave the saffron to soak in the milk , then stir into the flour, add the orange juice and zest and kneed for 10 minutes. Kneed in the egg yolks one at a time. One you have a good pliable consistency to the dough, shape it into a rectangle. Melt the butter and brush onto the top of the dough, then fold the dough over itself into thirds. Repeat with the remaining butter. Leave the dough to rise in a warm place until doubled in size and then bake at 200 oc until done. It should sound hollow when tapped. Leave to cool slightly, then serve warm with butter.

This is my entry for this month's Waiter, there's something in my...bread

Rhubarb Crumble

2007-04-25T09:01:00.000Z

Rhubarb is beginning to be in the shops where I live, but unfortunatly the weather precludes anything as delicate as tarts or fools. Rhubarb crumble seems to be what is called for: a sharp enlivening interior with an almond crumble to protect against the cold mornings. It is one of those classic british dishes which sits happily on the divide between winter and spring. The tartness of the rhubarb is as likely as anything to wake us from our winter sloth, but the crumble stops it feeling too delicate and leaves that comfortably full sensation. Little wonder then that is often a mainstay of school dinners, and hospitals, a sort of institutionalised food which seems to have made a reasonably recent comeback. Not that those that cook haven't been cooking it for all these years, but rather it is suddenly acceptable as a potential dinner party dessert.

Its a strange thing, the dinner party dessert phenomenon. Chocolate roulade, mousse or profiteroles did the cookbook rounds not all that long ago, and there was a spun sugar phase in which little twiddles of caramel accompanied almost anything on a plate , very often a mint leaf to add insult to injury. But now we're going back to comfort food, in an effort to be homely and nuturing. So its perfectly acceptable to serve proper puddings, sticky and debecked with sauce and cream. Indeed there are a ridiculous quantity of recepies for crumble doing the rounds, often photographed emerging from the aga. I imagine that summer will bring us a sudden deluge of fruit fools and eton mess. Now I love this food, but it is simply crazy the way it gets written about, not cooked. Its ironic that while we're all reading about homely aga induced hazes of baking and stewing and preserving, we're eating ready meals.

How much better it would be if we thought of cooking in terms of techniques, not recipes.

The basic componants of a crumble are fruit which must be cooked, and a rough pastry. A good one requires you to vary the time the crumble spends in the oven depending on the fruit used, and a liberal hand with the butter in the pastry. Butter, remember, not margerine or soya nonsense.

oats
ground almonds
brown sugar
butter
rhubarb
apple

I like to use oats in my crumble, I think they give more texture and crunch. This may not be strictly accurate, but it is very good, and also avoids the problem of the crumble on top getting too soggy from the cooking fruit. The butter should be just rubbed into the oats, almonds and sugar, until it starts to form crumbs. depending on the kind of fruit you are using you may want to stew the fruit first with a little water. Rhubarb, however, has more than enough water, and if it isn't too woody it should be fine to just chop into cm think chunks and pop in the baking dish. Mine was more advanced in years than it really ought to have been, so I stewed it briefly beforehand. On top of this you want to sprinkle the crumb, then put to bake in a high oven. The time it takes will depend on the thickness of the crumble, and the fruit used. But a good indication is a golden brown exterior, and oozing fruit juices bubbling along the edge. If your crumble is particularly large, or deep, it is a good idea to poke the middle with something to check the fruit is cooked all the way through.

Lastly a few very gentle suggestions for pairings of fruit and topping.

In general, more gutsy, autumnul fruit such as plums go very well with hazlenuts. Lighter, more delicate fruit such as rhubarb or pears goes better with almonds. And of course there are some fruit which can stand up to anything, apricots, for instance. Similarly with choices of sugar and flour: more autumnal fruits can generally take a bit of muscavado sugar and lots of oats, but I wouldn't recommend it with peaches, where you want a very light, almost shortbread like topping so ground nuts and white flour should make up the bulk to the crumb, and I'd use a more refined sugar.

Baby fig compote

2007-04-16T18:32:00.000Z

By chance I happened upon these little greek dried figs in the greek deli near me. They are perfect, about the size of the end of your thumb and not too dry. I love figs, but often I find the dried ones in the shops too tough. With these ones the delicate flavour of fresh figs is not wholly gone, despite their wrinkled exterior.

I very simply simmered them with a little cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, vanilla pod and a glass of white wine until they were slightly plumper and softer.

And then I ate them with a dollop of greek yoghurt out in the garden.

Banana Bread

2007-04-03T09:34:00.000Z

The sun has become too much for my british constitution, I spent the morning with a migraine, and took shelter for the afternoon inside, indulging in some gentle baking.

This recipe was adapted from a Delia Smith one for a banana and walnut bread.

160g wholemeal flour
60g oat bran
4 tsp of baking powder
170g muscavado sugar
110g butter
2 eggs
3 bananas
1 pear
1/2 cup dates
1/2 cup of milk
2tsp of cinnamon
tbsp of honey.
1/2 cup of walnuts

Heat the oven to 180 oc
Cut up the dates and soak in the milk. Combine the oat bran, flour, baking powder, and sugar. Fold in the melted butter, and eggs. Mash the banana and peel and chop the pear. Roughly chop the walnuts. Add half the walnuts, the dates and milk, the pear and banana to the mixture and fold in. Spoon into a greased loaf tin. Sprinkle with the rest of the walnuts and the honey.
Bake for about 40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in comes out clean.

Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil salad

2007-04-01T05:14:00.000Z

This ihas become not so much a recipe, or even a salad, as a food cliche, and often a bad one at that.

But here is what it is all about.

Basil growing in the shade

Tomatoes

And more tomatos

Its only because I'm in australia, with the hot sun burning me and the grass, that this is worth making. Supermarket tomatos and limp basil would be pretty pointless. This is a dish that is about lifestyle, and wishing doesn't make it so.
But looking at the hardy, peppery basil growing in the semi-shade, and red and yellow tomatoes literally falling from the scorched vine it seemed hard to resist such an iconic dish.

The secret of food like this is not for wish for what you can't have. Which is why its almost silly to write about such things in a food blog, much less a recipe book. There is no point in pretty pictures and recipes of simple salads, when next to no one can get hold of the fresh, often sun-kissed, ingrediants for them outside a couple of months of the year.

With that in mind I offer a few suggestions for an equally satisfying, but more appropriate british salad:

Watercress, roquefort, ripe pears, and toasted walnuts
Goats cheese and roasted beetroot
Sweetheart cabbage finely shredded with apple and a lemon dressing
or for winter a bowl of chicory and sliced oranges

Mille Feuile and profiteroles

2007-03-20T17:07:00.000Z

A little sun and many good friends provided the excuse for a weekend of spring baking.

Raspberry Mille Feuile

Creme patissiere

4 egg yolks
2 cups of milk
1/2 cup of caster sugar
vanilla pod
1/4 cup of cornflour

puff pastry
fresh raspberries
1 cup of double cream

To make the creme patissiere beat the egg yolks with the cornflour and sugar, while bringing the milk to the boil. Take the milk off the heat and pour in a steady stream onto the yolks, gently beating to stop lumps. Pour the mixture back into the pan and heat, stirring continuously, until it reaches the boil. Taste to make sure the cornflour is cooked, and that it is sweet enough. Then leave to cool, allowing a little knob of butter to melt over the surface to stop a skin forming.

Heat the oven to 200 oc. Roll the puff pastry very thinly and cut into equal sized pieces. Each mille feuile will need at least two pieces. Place on a baking sheet and bake until the pastry just begins to puff, then place another baking sheet on top of the pastry to stop it rising and return to the oven for another 5-10 minutes until lightly golden. At this point the pastry may have sugar sprinkled on it and be returned briefly to the oven to caramelise, or may be left plain to be iced or dusted with icing sugar when cold.

Lightly whip the cream until peaks form and combine with the (cold) creme patissiere. Once the pastry is cold pipe the creme patissiere onto one piece, top with raspberries and lay on another piece. For those with architectural abilities another layer may be added, but my balancing abilities only run to one layer.

Passion Fruit Profiteroles

Since making about 500 profiteroles for a friends wedding many years ago I've perfected my profiterole making and baking. There are several tricks to perfect profiteroles. The first is to avoid baking the profiteroles in a damp room, or on a wet day, as they will absorb the moisture in the room making them soggy and lacking bite. The second is to prick a small hole in the bottom or side of the profiterole to allow the steam to escape, and return them to a very low oven (50-100 oc) for 5 -10 minutes to dry out. If you decide to make big choux puffs a small spoon must be used to remove the slightly undercooked middle instead of mrerely pricking them. The final thing is to only ever bake them on the day of eating them and to fill them as close to eating as possible. This may all seem fiddly and precious, but it makes them perfect, and the baking itself is easy for anyone to do.

Choux Pastry

1 cup flour
125g butter
1 cup of water
4 eggs

Put the water and butter in a pan and bring to the boil. Add the flour and mix vigourously to remove lumps until the mixture comes away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for a moment. Then make a well in the centre of the mixture and break in the eggs, mixing to combine.

Heat the oven to 180 oc
Pipe onto a well greased baking tray, taking care to leave space for the profiteroles to rise. If there are peaks from the piping pat them down with the back of a spoon dipped in water. Bake until risen and golden, then prick a hole in them and return to a low oven for five minutes. Cool them somewhere dry and leave to use until the last possible minute.

I filled these with the creme patissiere and cream mixture I have used in the mille feuile, adding the strained juice of 4 passion fruit. They were lovely, all delicate, creamy and fragrant.

Easter Chocolates

2007-03-18T17:20:00.000Z

I made my first mucky foray into the world of tempering chocolate today. Thus far my approach to chocolate making has been that they never last long enough to develop a bloom. However, my cute impluse buy bunny and chicken moulds arrived courtesy of Jane Asher today, and for chocolates this big it seems to make sense to spend the time to get a nice glossy finish.

Deciding on doing the minimum possible I went with the seeding method of heating half the chocolate until it is fully melted, and then adding the rest of the chocolate finely chopped, stirring until it melts. The result was a dismal failure, white bloom everywhere, and still a kitchen covered in chocolate.

So I've bitten the bullet and bought a chocolate thermometer. The nice thing about the process of tempering chocolate is that if you follow the instructions aboslutly to the letter you will have hard, glossy chocolate, that keeps and breaks with a snap. Its not making meriangues or custard, where it can all go to hell for no discernable reason. On the other hand there is pretty much no room for error.

You have to heat the chocolate to above 41 oc (but not above 50 oc) and then you have to cool it to between 31-2 oc for dark chocolate or 30-1 oc for milk chocolate and then add the seed chocolate and hold the temperature steady until you use it. So attention is required. The point is that you want certain crystals to form in the chocolate, these are smaller, and less easly melted, meaning firm glossy chocolate. The right crystals are the ones that form at these particular temperature ranges. So you heat all the chocolate to 41 oc, at which temperature all crystal strcutures in the chocolate melt, and then you bring the temperature down to the ideal range, and hold it there while crystals form. To aid this you add the seed chocolate, which is already tempered chocolate (which most bought chocolate is) in unmelted lumps. The crystals in this already tempered chocolate encourage the formation of more of the same kind of crystal, thus seeding it. This method works for any quantity of chocolate. I used about 2/3rds of the chocolate for melting, and the other 1/3rd for seeding.

The other difficult bit about this whole process of chocolate making which is vastly underestimated is molding itself. The chocolate needs to be thick enough to come out of the mold, and the mold itseld needs to be joined exactly so there are no unweildy overlapping edges. This was something that took me a few trial runs to get right. In essence, you need more chocolate than you think, and you need a steady hand when placing the sides of the mould together. Practise, in this case, makes perfect, but for someone as ill-coordinated as me a lot of practise is required.

The upside is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment when your first rabbit emerges intact and glossy from its mold. Strange pleasures for strange people.

In the end I made some plain chocolate rabbits and hens, and a whole load of chocolate eggs flavoured with different insides. The winners were the marbled white and dark chocolate eggs enrobed in pistachio nuts which I'd finely chopped. For the novie I'd recommend starting with solid chocolate eggs, and working up to chocolates filled with ganache and hollow chocolates.

Chocolate and Funding

2007-03-15T13:30:00.000Z

Its that time of year when funding applications are due for those of us trying to make thinking a paying job. For me that means the need for huge quantities of baking to relieve the inevitable stress and despair. I've stocked the house with a worrying quantity of green and blacks chocolate, ordered a whole load of bunny moulds from Jane Asher, and am ready to meet my doom. I have five days to finalise the application, and five days in which to bake and temper my way out of oblivion. I find fiddly little jobs like tempering chocolate are a much needed distraction when life hangs in the balence. In a very martha stewart moment I've even emptied the insides out of several eggs via a cunningly placed hole, ready for filling with yet more chocolate.

Its a very OCD kind of job, requiring pins and wooden skewers, and a lot more patience than I can usually muster. A is happy with it though, as it means I'm making scrambled eggs in the morning in a bid to use up the egg insides. Morning cooking is rare in our house, we're just not up to that level of domestic bliss.

I love these eggs. They are one of the best things in tescos (not that that is saying much). I've been in the habit of going into raptures about them to each new person I meet, extolling the virtues of the pale beiges and blues of the shells, the marigold orange of the yolk, the wonderful taste. Those few friends who didn't think me certifiable before certainly do when I get started on the merits of these eggs. I know no limits.

Organic Box

2007-02-26T17:24:00.000Z

Not long ago we started getting an organic vegetable box delivered from Riverford. The idea behind this was that it would provide

- less hassle
- interesting and seasonal vegetables
- fresher produce
- less food miles and packaging

It is something I now have a bit of a love hate relationship with. I love the produce (though have reached my parsnip limit- thank god for spring) but I can't help feeling a little smug and middle class. Its an issue I have about a lot of the more eco-friendly, ethical choices one can make. It often feels like I'm simply paying for them because they relieve a little middle class (student) guilt. And it doesn't seem fair that I get to feel morally superior to people who can't afford to eat differently. Although the organic box works out about the same as what I would spend in tescos on a similar amount of vegetables that is probably only because in tescos I tend to by vine tomatoes and charlotte potatoes. More to the point the price comparison does not come out well on, say, green and blacks chocolate, farmers market milk and butter, or free-range eggs. Once we get to organic ready meals the price issue has really got ridiculous, which is fine for me, because mostly I have the time to cook for myself. But that isn't true for everyone.

Its tempting to ask when food got so political, but its probably always been. More new is the idea that the food choices we make are moral choices. So buying organic equals good, not buying organic equals bad. The philosopher in me thinks that this is just too simplistic, and very confused from a moral point of view.

Organic produce from a supermarket may help you in that you aren't injesting pesticides and fertilisers on such a grand scale, but it doesn't guarentee less food miles, less packaging, or a fair price for the producer.
On the other hand non-organic produce from the famers market, or even the local grocer may well be less packaged, and have travelled less far, though its likely to have been sprayed. My point is that organic produce may well be a good choice from a self-centred point of view - I get to eat less pesticides - and may have some benefits in that land is not so intensively farmed. But it doesn't guarentee anything on what seem to me issues which affect everyone: food miles and packaging; much less guarentee a fair price for the farmer. These, it seems to me, are real moral issues, in that their outcomes affect others, not just myself. It seems to me that if we're going to get moral about food, we need to look at the complexity of the issues, because like most moral issues, it isn't simple. You only have to look at 'organic' salmon to see that.

Still, I think what makes me happiest about the veg box is not knowing what I'm going to get. I went to the farmers market yesterday and bought a big bunch of tightly packed purple sprouting. But it didn't make nearly as happy as the big box of surprises which arrived today. Lovely little tightly packed fennel, paper skinned shallots, brocolli, and leeks among the root vegetables.

And just like that all my doubts fell away...

Brownies

2007-02-25T17:17:00.000Z

After three days of rain, grey skys and feeling ill the urge to bake has set in. A made a lovely roast of navarin of lamb with lots of garlic and rosemary for lunch, so after a couple of hours of lying on the sofa in a sophorific state it felt like theright kind of wet afternoon for gently playing in the kitchen.

The excuse of a friends house for dinner (hence no need to worry about consuming the whole batch ourselves) was enough. So, after a hellish trip to the shops in search of quantities of butter and green and blacks chocolate I settled into mixing up a heart attack for my nearest and dearest.

They came out all squidy and gooey, perfect in fact. And then, I'm still not quite sure how, I dropped one side of the pan. Volcanic streams of chocolate came gushing from underneath the crust, and began pooling onto the work surface. My precious brownies! Now, one thing is clear when this happens: you have got the timing just right, there is a nice chewy crust and a molten (but not uncooked) interior. You can tell this because the pools of gooeyness on the work surface are too hot to handle, and also to liquid to handle. I resorted to spooning. It was sort of sucessful, but I fear may have disturbed the lightness of my brownies.

I console myself with the thought that they were perfect, and they still taste fantastic.

A last word about nuts. I love them in brownies, but you can tend to divide a room into likes and dislikes. Happily I think their place is on top of the brownie, in the crispy chewy bit. I think the middle should be unadulterated chocolate. As well as making the contrast between crunchy edges with toasted nuts, and deep dark interior, this helpfully marks out brownies as nut containing, or not.
So, if you like them add them. Hazlenuts are my favourite.

250g green and blacks chocolate
300g light muscovado sugar
250g unsalted butter
4 medium eggs
60g cocoa powder
50g flour
2 tsp baking powder

Heat the oven to 180oc. Grease baking tins. I use little silicone heart moulds mainly as they give the right ratio of gooey middle to chewy outside, but if baking in a large flat tin line the base with foil or greased paper.
Cream the butter and sugar together, meanwhile melt 200g of the chocolate in a bain marie and chop the rest finely. Beat the eggs into the butter and sugar once it has become light and fluffy. Allow the chocolate to cool slightly then beat into the butter mixture. Fold in the flour, cocoa and baking powder.

Spoon into moulds or tin and bake. The time will depend on the size of the tin, but check after 15 minutes for muffin size tins. The edges should be crisp, and the brownie will have risen slightly, but the middle should still be gooey, with definite wobble, but should not be raw.

Leave to cool slightly in tins or the will fall apart, but best eaten slightly warm from the oven.

Laprade

2007-02-15T14:12:00.000Z

Doesn't it look like beautiful! It was bitterly and unexpectedly cold. The plan was ill-conceived, being formulated the day after a heavy bout of Caparinah drinking courtesy of my brother. Nursing our heads, groggy and fed up of Oxford we planned our escape to Laprade. 'Won't it be freezing?' asks bleery eyed me, but A is adamant that he was there two weeks ago and it was a balmy 15 -17 degrees (his description of this as 't-shirt' weather should have set of alarm bells). Looking outside at the permanent rain engulfing Oxford this seems like a fantastic idea, we plan days of cycling off the foie gras, and nights of fires, duvets and confit.

Well, the food part goes according to plan, but, as swathes of France are covered with snow, schools and roads close and the temperature drops cycling, trips go out the window. I can't complain though, I get like a toddler in snow. As soon as it started I was out in the garden endangering my toes and fingers and snapping away. I even attempted a snowman but it was too powdery. A was defiant to the last and spent much of the holiday trying to convince me that table tennis was a winter sport, while shovelling snow out of the way of his cricket net so he could practise bowling. The passing french population greeted this with bemusment.

Mostly though, we stayed in, slept, cooked, ate, and made daily excursions to Aubeterre to stock up on bagettes, steak and confit. We cooked lots: seared duck breasts with grilled chicory and pan fried apple; confit de canard with petit pois; steak with shallots; beef bourgignon left gently simmering during a 15 km walk; goats cheese salads with chicory, pear and walnuts; sausage cassarole; rillettes with cornichons.

In short it was a fabulous, wintery and much needed break. Crisp walks and woollen socks made it perfect.

Blood Orange Jelly

2007-02-15T13:50:00.000Z

I had been waiting with anticipation for weeks when A finally made the discovery of blood oranges I was away. He left me but one lingering orange, a red bruise smack on the side of it, and a blush interior. And of course then they had all gone from the shops, and I sat there day dreaming of recipes when I should have been working.

I was picturing a tower of blood oranges bedecked with caramel and indecently oozing sticky juice.

Maybe a little passionfruit icecream on the side, little langues de chat, a crown spun sugar. Ahh, you see the flights of fancy? I cannot even make spun sugar...

Well, I've tinkered since last I daydreamed, and made a couple of little blood orange jellies for A and I to test drive. They were beautiful, light, sharp and vibrant red, with a little wiggle and wobble which was very endearing. But they needed a partner in crime, something creamy to soothe, and maybe even something cake-like for a delicate buttery bite.

So here is the culmination of much day dreaming, planning and juicing.

A blood orange jelly, caramelsed blood orange, almond madelines, and a slick of cream.

If I was more Delia I'd rant and rave about the do ahead preparation and slimming advantages of these recipes that make it a perfect dinner party dessert. But I just like it because its red, fun and tasty.

Blood Orange Jelly

I was going to go with the blood orange jelly recipe in Gordon Ramsey's 'Just Desserts', and just reduce the sugar, but annoyingly it didn't set first time, and had to up the leaf geletine count a little. Here is my somewhat adapted recipe:

400ml freshly squeezed blood orange juice
zest of one blood orange
2 tablespoons of caster sugar (or to taste, my oranges were tart and I like it that way)
3 sheets of leaf geletine

Moisten the geletine with a little water. Heat, but do not boil, the juice, zest, and sugar until it is warm and the sugar has dissolved. Bring off the heat and dissolve the geletine in this thoroughly. Strain into jelly moulds or pretty glasses. Put in the fridge (covered) to set. Unmould with the help of a hot damp cloth or bath of water just before serving

Chocolate oranges

2007-01-12T18:23:00.000Z

I have been meaning to make these all Christmas, but exams got the better of me. I had been planning on a selection of chocolate oranges, chocolate gingers, apricots stuffed with marzipan and caramelised hazelnuts. So when I found seville oranges I decided better late than never. The skins were firm and beautifully coloured, and the scent brings back christmas. Sevilles are usually used for marmalade, and I was tempted by that route but I'm not a big marmalade fan, and we still have a fairly large stock of jars from last year. Chocolate oranges seemed what was required to stave of that dull january feeling, even if they aren't so good from a New Year's Resolution point of view. The thick skins of the sevilles make them much easier to peel, although personally I like to remove some of the pith with a sharp knife to take away the bitter taste it sometimes has.
The tangy orange together with the richness of the dark chocolate is perfect after dinner with coffee.

Recipe

Seville oranges
400 ml water
400g sugar
200g good quality chocolate

Score the oranges into quarters and remove the peel. If the pith is very thick remove some of it with a sharp knife, leaving just a little white, and the orange skin intact. Cut the quarters of peel into slices about 1/3 of a cm thick. You can make them neat by chopping of the tops if you wish, but I prefer them a little rough the edges. Then add to a pan of boiling water and boil for three minutes, then drain, in order to remove the bitterness of the pith. This step should be repeated three times. It may seem enough to put you off a recipe, but if you keep the kettle on the boil, and keep refilling, its the work of moments.

Then bring the measured water to the boil, with the sugar, and add the blanched orange skins. Leave to simmer for 30-40 minutes, and then lift out and drain on a wire rack overnight.

The next day melt the chocolate over a bain marie ( a bowl suspended over a pan of water) and then dip the peel in and place on a sheet of foil or silicone to cool. You can double dip them the next day with an alternate kind of chocolate if you wish: try half dipping them in dark chocolate one day, and milk or white chocolate the next.

Chocolate Gingersnaps

2007-01-11T21:26:00.000Z

Ginger biscuits are one of the few baked things A likes. So now I'm in my post examing baking phase I decided to start with a variation on an old theme. These have crunch, but then smooth chocolate ganache inside. They make a very grown up ginger biscuit indeed.

1 (american) cup of flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp golden syrup
3tsp ground ginger

Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, ground ginger. Rub butter in with you fingers until you have a fine crumb. Mix in the golden syrup to form a paste.

Roll out the paste as thinly as possible, and cut into cookies.

Bake until light golden at 170oc.

Ganache

100ml double cream
100g chocolate (I used a 70% but any good quality chocolate, whether milk or white, would also be good)

Bring cream to the boil and pour over the finely chopped chocolate. Beat lightly with a whisk.
When cool spread one side of the cooled biscuits with ganache and sandwhich together. Dust with icing sugar or cocoa powder.

Foie gras realised

2007-01-04T14:35:00.000Z

The foie gras arrived as promised, and was pretty special indeed. A bottle of champagne washed it down nicely, and although the watercress was eaten as more of an afterthought than an accompaniment, it was a wonderful meal. Happily, there was more foie gras than either of us could eat comfortably, which always has a delightful feeling of excess about it. More and more I think part of the joy is the tactility of it: there is something wonderfully hedonistic about the slight film of foie gras one gets on ones upper lip when eating it on toast, and then there is the impossibility of eating it without getting it on fingers, and the stray breadcrumbs. Sure, knives and forks give you elegance, but nothing about this food is refined, except, of course, the price!

Dreams of Foie Gras

2007-01-01T17:13:00.000Z

A has made up for abandoning me on New Year's Eve and going to France without me by bringing back a veritable treasure trove of goodies. His parents have a house in the Charante, which is, as luck would have it, right in the heart of duck country. There is a great little market on sundays from where one can purchase the best rillettes de canard I have ever had. There's something deeply carnivorous about this rillettes which goes beyond the normal appeal of fat on hot toast. The duck is gamey and not too shredded, so there is bite as well.

Anyway, digressions aside he is bringing back a speciality from the same little stall. Foie gras du canard wrapped in smoked duck breast. I'm curious to see if the taste of the foie gras will be able to compete with the smoked breast. At the moment I'm having beautiful little daydreams about panfried apple slices and good country bread, or maybe even little raisin studded brioche.

This may all be slightly premature as said delicacy is still stuck in France, and has had to endure a 7 hour drive to the ferry, carefully cushioned by frozen bottles of water, and it won't get on the ferry until tommorrow morning, when, if all goes to plan, both it and my boy will be back.

Lemon Bundt Cakes

2007-01-01T15:55:00.000Z

There's something so pure and serene about little lemon cakes, soaked in lemon syrup. They give me an excuse to bring out my little bundt pans, and get the kitchen sticky with drifts of icing sugar.
This recipe is based around a weight of an egg cake, with a few additons.

2 eggs
caster sugar to the same weight as 2 eggs
butter to the same weight as 2 eggs
self-raising flour to the same weight as 2 eggs
4 lemons
2 tbsp creme fraiche
extra sugar to taste

Heat the oven to 180oc

Cream the butter and sugar together. Zest the lemons finely and add to the butter and sugar. Mix in both eggs, and then the creme fraiche. Lastly fold in the flour.

Grease the cake tins with butter and fill to half full.

Bake until the tops are golden and a squewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Juice the lemons and heat the juice with sugar to taste in a small pan until boiling. Prick the tops of the cakes with a fork and pour on the syrup. Leave to cool and then remove from tins and dust with icing sugar.

Chestnut Bouche de Noel

2007-01-01T15:31:00.000Z

I just celebrated Christmas with my family in the rainy dales of Yorkshire. Luckily my uncle saved us from a christmas without chocolate, and sacrificed the bars he'd brought from Boston to make this cake.

8 eggs seperated
240gdark chocolate (70% or more)
200g sugar
2 tbsp good quality cocoa (not drinking chocolate!)

1 tin of creme de marrons (chestnut puree), preferably unsweetened
1 1/2 pints of double cream

Heat the oven to 160oc. Line a roulade tin (or other square or rectangular shallow bottomed tin) with paper and grease.

Melt the dark chocolate in a bain marie (double boiler). Meanwhile whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until doubled in volume and pale and fluffy. Let the chocolate cool, but not so much that it sets. Whisk the egg whites until they stand in peaks and you could, if you tried, hold the bowl of them upside-down over your head. Now fold the chocolate into the yolks and sugar, and then into the whites. Fold in the cocoa powder.

Spread evenly in the roulade tin and bake until the top is just risen at the middle and has formed a crust, the inside will still be gooey. Cover and leave to cool in the tin.

Whip cream until it just holds peaks, and fold in the creme de marrons, if unsweetened sweeten to taste.

Spread over the top of the cooled roulade, and using the paper underneath as a guide, roll the roulade into a log shape.

Dust with cocoa.