The Ginger Gourmand

Smoked Mackerel with Celeriac & Beetroot Remoulade

2012-01-19T13:00:00.000Z

The root vegetable mountain that grows in my kitchen at this time of year can become a little tedious after a while. Don't get me wrong, I love root veg, but if I see another beetroot or swede this month I might just scream. Devising ways to make it feel like we're not eating the same root vegetable stews, soups, gratins and mash for the seemingly endless winter months has become a bit of a challenge.

Caramelised swede, onion & thyme tartlets, beetroot carpaccio with goat's curd & honey roasted walnuts, mini cheese & celeriac scones, beetroot, red quinoa & feta fritters and spiced roasted carrot houmous have all made an appearance but I'll be needing a bit more inspiration to see me through to spring!

This recipe made me feel like I'd been transported out the depths of winter - a little seasonal salad to accompany the smoked mackerel that was lurking in the fridge.

My wonderful fishmongers (Moxons) sell the most amazing whole smoked mackerel which I used for this recipe. It has a gentle smokiness, silky smooth texture and would easily feed 2 (gluttonous) people all for around £3. If you can't get hold of this sort of smoked mackerel it will work just as well with smoked mackerel fillets.

Ingredients

1 whole smoked mackerel

2 tbsp mayonnaise

1 tbsp crème fraiche

2 tsp Dijon mustard (or more to taste)

1 tbsp small capers (rinsed)

1 tbsp chopped flat leaf parsley juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 medium raw celeriac

1 small raw beetroot

Method

Put the lemon juice into a bowl. Either grate or finely chop the celeriac into thin matchstick sized pieces and coat immediately in the lemon juice to prevent it from discolouring. You don't want the celeriac grated too finely - it still needs to have some crunch. I use my trusty old handheld moulinex which I brought back from France a few years ago. Set the celeriac to one side.

In another bowl, mix the mayonnaise, crème fraiche and mustard together. Strain any excess lemon juice from the celeriac and discard. Stir the celeriac into the mayonnaise mixture. Add the capers and set to one side for up to 20 minutes.

Prepare the smoked mackerel - remove the head and tail and then slice through the body to make 2 or 3 large steaks.

Stir the chopped parsley into the celeriac remoulade, reserving a little to garnish.

Peel the beetroot and then grate or chop in the same way as the celeriac. Add to the celeriac remoulade. Do not stir it in or you will end up with pink remoulade! Just fold it through once or twice very gently.

Serve immediately with the smoked mackerel and some brown bread.

Mike+Ollie

2011-12-21T10:32:00.000Z

There's a fantastic little market over the hill in Brockley which has become a bit of a habit of mine. Every Saturday from 10am to 2pm you'll find a friendly bunch of local stallholders selling fruit and vegetables, speciality potatoes, flowers, free range chickens, game and a whole host of other meat, cheese, bread, cakes, handmade chocolates, fish, chilli plants, coffee and an ever changing array of food to eat on the go.

I like the fact that there aren't twenty odd stalls all selling the same produce, that the stallholders always have time for a natter and that I barely notice that I've easily whiled away a couple of hours browsing this tiny gem. First stop is always Dark Fluid Coffee, the newest artisan roastery and mobile brewer on the block, to top up my caffeine levels. A short black americano to start my shopping with a warm tingly glow. You may have to queue for 5 or even 10 minutes or more before someone is free to take your order, but good coffee takes time to make.

More often than not I trundle home laden with Kentish apples and pears from Perry Court Farm along with kale, leeks, cauliflowers and whatever else is in season to supplement my weekly Local Greens veg bag. I've been steering clear of the cheese recently (foolhardy I know...), but that hasn't stopped me gazing longingly at the Norbiton Cheese stall piled high with the likes of ticklemore, morbier, tunworth and epoisses. Last Saturday it was a lovely whole Mont d'Or that spoke to me - a tenner's worth of pure cheese heaven.

Now, if it's brunch or lunch on the hoof you're after, you'd have to go a long way to beat what Mike + Ollie have to offer. Mike and Ollie are two young chefs serving up affordable street food. But you won't find the regular fare of burgers, falafel, burritos and such like. Instead the ever changing menu reads like an encyclopedia of (often unusual) locally foraged foods that have been smoked, cured or preserved by Mike and Ollie themselves: fennel seeds foraged in Brockley, membrillo made from Crystal Palace quince, cobnuts, chestnuts picked in Greenwich, Brockley rosehip molasses... You get the picture.

My homemade Lebanese flatbread was loaded with smoked aubergine, local fennel, babaganoosh, red cabbage slaw, Crystal Palace membrillo and a whole host of other herbs, spices and seeds too numerous to mention. At first sight you might be mistaken for thinking that it's just a bit of everything thrown together with no thought but you'd be a long way from the truth. From chatting to Mike, I have no doubt that every single ingredient has been well thought out and included for a reason. It's an incredibly tasty work of art.

Every Saturday you'll find Mike and his amazing bike parked up at the market. You can't miss the tantilising smells wafting across the entrance to the market. If it's meat you prefer, there's plenty of that too: spiced slow cooked lamb, free range Suffolk pulled pork, middle eastern spiced lamb, potato and almond cakes...

Each Saturday Mike cooks up a soup (£3.50), a meat main (£5.50) and a veg main (£5.50).

Thank you to Toby Allen and Helen Graves for letting me use their photos of Mike at work and people enjoying the market in this post.

Brockley Market

Lewisham College Carpark

Lewisham Way

Brockley

SE4 1UT

http://www.brockleymarket.com/

Saturdays - 10am to 2pm

Mike + Ollie

http://www.mikeandollie.co.uk/
Wednesdays & Fridays - 9am to 4pm - Deptford Market

Saturdays - 10am to 2pm - Brockley Market

Cranberry & Orange Mincemeat

2011-12-13T18:00:00.000Z

Homemade mincemeat knocks the socks off anything you can buy in the shops. Fact. Luckily for me, in the past I've been gifted lovingly made jars of the stuff by friends and family. But this year as December approached the cupboards were bare.

So I set off in search of a recipe. The sort of tried and tested one that can't go wrong (but that I would inevitably end up playing around with because I can't help myself). I thought Delia might hold the key, but melted suet? What's that all about? Not for me.

Whenever I need what I'd refer to as a staple recipe (you know, things like simnel cake, shortbread, lemon curd...) to work from there is a handful of food blogs I tend to turn to. One of them is Gin and Crumpets written by fellow South East London dweller, Jassy. She writes recipes that work and ones that I want to cook.

Armed with her wonderful recipe for Apple & Lemon Mincemeat (and some advice along the way) I set about creating my own vat of mincemeat. For that is what I made, a rather large quantity of mincemeat to see me through the festive season. I haven't put mine into jars as I reckon it won't be in existence any longer than a couple of weeks, so it's currently residing in a large tupperware in my cupboard. But you could of course sterilise some jars to store it in or to give away as gifts.

Ingredients

1.2kg mixture of sultanas and raisins (I used Waitrose vine fruit mix)
300g dried cranberries
500g bramley apples (peeled & cored weight - approx 5 medium apples)
300g vegetarian suet
300g golden caster sugar
zest & juice of 3 oranges
zest & juice of 1 unwaxed lemon
200ml brandy
1.5 tsp ground mixed spice
1.5 tsp ground cinnamon

Method

Put the lemon and orange zest in a bowl, cover with boiling water and leave for half an hour. This will help extract any bitterness. I use a zester to remove long strips of zest, but if you haven't got one you can either grate the zest using a fine grater or pare the zest with a peeler (taking care not to take too much of the white pith which is bitter).

Mix the dried fruit (sultanas, raisins and cranberries) in a large bowl and pick over to get rid of any stems .

Drain the lemon and orange zest and chop. Stir the zest and all of the orange and lemon juice into the dried fruit.

Peel, core and coarsely grate the apples. Add the grated apples, vegetable suet, sugar, brandy and spices to the dried fruit mixture and stir to mix thoroughly. The apples go brown pretty quickly when peeled, so I did a few at a time, adding them to the dried fruits as I went along so that the lemon juice prevent them from going brown.

Leave to stand for a few hours, covered with a tea towel, returning to stir the mincemeat regularly.

If you are just making the mincemeat to use over a couple of weeks then it will keep perfectly well sealed in a plastic container. If you want to store it in jars to keep it for longer, then fill sterilised jars, seal and store in a cool dark place.

Use to make mince pies.

Huge thanks to Jassy of Gin and Crumpets for her mincemeat guidance.

Rigatoni with Crown Prince Squash, Cavolo Nero & Red Chilli

2011-12-05T18:30:00.000Z

There's one thing I know for sure - pasta consumption in our house has rocketed since we started getting an organic veg bag again.

Picture this...it's 7.30pm on a week night, the baby has just gone to bed, the fridge is full of the random assortment of vegetables that you can only have when someone else is choosing your veg each week, your tummy is rumbling and you want to curl up on the sofa, sharpish. What you need is a hearty bowl of pasta that's ready in no time and leaves you feeling (relatively) virtuous.

I think my love of the combination of kale and squash is probably inspired by Denis Cotter. He cooks the sort of good (vegetarian) food that I want to eat every day. Food that is a far cry from the apparently mandatory mushroom risotto or pasta served up as the meat-free option in many restaurants and pubs.

You don't need to use crown prince squash - any squash will do - I just happen to like the rounded, buttery flavour of the crown prince. Butternut squash would be a more than adequate replacement. The same goes for the cavolo nero (black kale). Although cavolo nero tastes best, you could use the more widely available curly kale or any other dark green leafy vegetable.

Ingredients

150-200g rigatoni (depending on how hungry you are)

1/4 crown prince squash (or 1/2 a large butternut squash)

1 leek

10-15 large cavolo nero leaves

1 red chilli (finely sliced)

3 garlic cloves (finely sliced)

2 tbsp olive oil plus 1 tbsp to roast the squash

salt & freshly ground black pepper

freshly grated pecorino or parmesan

Method

Peel and deseed the squash. Cut into 1 inch cubes. Season the squash with salt and pepper and toss in 1 tablespoon olive oil. Roast in a medium oven (approx 180 C depending on your oven) for approximately 20 minutes until tender and beginning to caramelise at the edges. You will need to check on the squash a couple of times and toss to ensure it roasts evenly.

Discard the outer layer (or layers) of the leek and then slice in half lengthways. Slice the leek into thin semicircles and wash thoroughly. Wash the cavolo nero, discard any thick stalks and slice the leaves into strips about 1cm wide.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions.

Heat a wide based saute pan over a medium heat. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and then the leeks. Saute, stirring frequently, for 4 minutes and then add the cavolo nero. Continue to saute until the leeks and kale are tender. Lower the heat, add the red chilli and garlic and continue to saute for a couple of minutes.

The pasta and squash should now be ready. Drain the pasta, reserving the cooking water. Add the squash, drained pasta and 3-4 tablespoons of the cooking water to the leeks and cavolo nero, then season generously.

Serve with plenty grated cheese.

Romanesco Cauliflower & Chilli Pasta

2011-11-30T16:46:00.000Z

Romanesco cauliflowers are like jewels. Pretty fractal emeralds which call out to me from market stalls at this time of year. They seem so rare and precious that I feel the need to do them justice; more so than any other vegetable. I want to show them off in the manner they deserve.

Small romanescos are magnificent steamed whole and served with a bechamel sauce which has had large chunks of stilton stirred through at the last minute (so that they're just beginning to melt but haven't yet disappeared...) and then topped with crunchy toasted pine nuts.

On a quest for a simple dish befitting the romanesco but a little less artery clogging, I paired it with chilli and garlic to make a substantial week night dinner. It's nothing new or inventive - there are probably a million similar recipes out there - but it's a hearty bowl of bejewelled pasta that makes me happy.

This will make enough for 2 hungry adults.

Ingredients

1 medium romanesco caulifower

1/2 - 1 red chilli (depending on how hot your chilli is and how much heat you want)

2 cloves garlic

2 tbsp good olive oil

200g penne or rigatoni pasta

salt & pepper

2 tbsp finely grated parmesan (or other hard cheese)

Method

Break the cauliflower into small florets and roughly chop the stalks into small pieces. Wash thoroughly. Finely chop the chilli and garlic.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Cook the cauliflower for about 8 minutes until soft but not falling apart. Remove the cauliflower with a slotted spoon and set to one side (don't discard the cooking water).

Bring the water back to the boil and cook the pasta according to the packet instructions.

In the meantime, heat a wide based saute or frying pan. Add the olive oil and then the cauliflower. Saute over a medium heat, stirring often, until the cauliflower begins to break down a little. Turn down the heat and add the chilli and garlic and season generously with freshly ground black pepper and salt. Continue to for a couple of minutes, taking care not to let the garlic burn.

Once the pasta is cooked, add it to the cauliflower, using a slotted spoon, along with 2 or 3 tablespoons of the cooking water. Stir in most of the grated cheese, reserving a little to serve (to make this dish vegan omit the cheese).

Celeriac Gratin with Caramelised Onions

2011-11-09T14:13:00.002Z

Over the summer I signed up to Local Greens - a not for profit weekly vegetable bag scheme providing seasonal veg from small organic or spray-free farms, which are as near to SE London as they can find. To keep costs down, customers collect their bags from local pick up points (in Camberwell, Herne Hill and East Dulwich), rather than have them delivered to their door. The idea is to use the minimum packaging and transportation so that they can pay the farmers a good price for their produce. One benefit for me is that the veg has often been picked 24 hours or less before it makes it to my plate.

The majority of the ingredients in this recipe came from my Local Greens bag a couple of weeks ago and I bought some gorgeous golden rapeseed oil from Bambuni in Nunhead so this turned out to be a thoroughly locally sourced dinner!

It serves 2 hungry (greedy?) adults or a family of 3 or 4 if you reduce the amount of salt you use. Perfect for an autumnal evening meal.

Ingredients

1 small celeriac

4-5 medium potatoes

3 cloves garlic (thinly sliced)

200ml single cream

Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Grated parmesan or other hard cheese (this is a good chance to use up any odds and ends lurking in the fridge)

For the caramelised onions:

2 tbsp rapeseed oil

2 onions (sliced)

3-4 sprigs thyme (leaves only)

1 tsp soft brown sugar

1 tsp good sherry vinegar

Method

Preheat the oven to 160C.

Peel and thinly slice the celeriac and potatoes (the easiest way to do this is in a food processor or using a mandolin, if you have either) and pop them straight into a bowl of cold water. Pat dry on a clean tea towel and then layer into a deep casserole dish, seasoning with salt and pepper and adding the garlic as you go. Pour the cream over the top and give the casserole dish a little shake to make sure it reaches the bottom layers. Sprinkle the cheese over the top (as much or as little as you like - I like a good layer!).

Pop into the oven for around 50 minutes to an hour, or until the potatoes and celeriac are cooked and browned on top.

Once the gratin is in the oven, put the oil and onions into a heavy based pan over a low heat. Cook the onions very slowly, stirring often, until they begin to turn golden brown (this will take around 30-40 minutes) and then add the sugar, thyme and season with salt and pepper. Cook for around another 5 minutes. Add the vinegar and cook until the liquid has disappeared. The onions should now be caramelised and a rich brown colour.

Serve the gratin with a spoonful of caramelised onions and a crisp green salad lightly dressed with sherry vinegar and cold pressed rapeseed oil.

A dish fit for a wedding!

2011-11-07T11:25:00.000Z

I'm not really sure when my fondness for smoked salmon developed. But develop it did. A treat for high days and holidays.

Somewhere along the line it became more affordable to me and I've made many things with it over the years from pasta sauces to terrines and quiches to pates. But when faced with some good quality smoked salmon there is no better way to enjoy it than as it is. Simple and unadulterated.

A while ago, the kind people at Forman & Field sent me some of their finest London Cure Smoked Scottish Salmon to sample. The Forman & Field founder, Harry Forman, devised this London Cure to show off the quality of his salmon rather than cloud it in smoke and they're spot on when they describe it as delicate, delicious and softly smoky.

I've rarely tasted smoked salmon this good and wanted to do something with it which would allow it to shine.

When Mr GG and I were planning our wedding a few years ago, good food and booze were (of course) fairly high up on our list of priorities. We worked with the caterers to plan our own menu which was seasonal and included a few of our favourite things (there's a song in there somewhere...). To start we plumped for Smoked Salmon with Blinis & Watercress. Simple and delicious.

So with the London Cure Smoked Salmon I decided to have a shot at making blinis for the first time and replicate this wedding dish to make a light lunch for Mr GG and I to enjoy with my parents and my (not so) baby brother. I followed Richard Bertinet's recipe (from his book Crust) for the blinis with a couple of tweeks.

Ingredients

For the blinis:

300g Dove's Farm Blini Flour
5-10g salt (Richard Bertinet uses 5g per 150g flour but you may want to use less)
300g milk
14g fresh yeast (or substitute with the equivalent amount of dried yeast - probably 7g)
4 large eggs (separated)
160g creme fraiche

The rest:

Smoked salmon (approx 75g - 100g per person)
Creme fraiche
Small salted capers (washed to remove salt and dried)
Watercress (washed and dried)

Method

To make the blinis begin by mixing the flour and salt in a large bowl.

Heat the milk in a pan until it is just about to boil, remove from the heat and add the fresh yeast. Add the egg yolks and creme fraiche to the pan with the milk and yeast mixture.

Add the milk mixture to the flour, stirring all the time, to form a thick batter. Cover and leave to rest for 1 and 1/2 hours until the batter has risen and looks bubbly.

Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks and fold gently into the batter. Cover and leave for a further 2 hours.

Richard Bertinet suggests cooking the blinis in oiled pans, but I found that the batter made better blinis by cooking them directly onto a dry non stick surface. Mum's simmering plate on the aga was best for this, but they also worked well cooked in a large non stick frying pan. Put spoonfuls of the batter into your pan (well separated so that they don't run into each other) and turn when the batter begins to form bubbles which will be around 30 seconds to 1 minute. Cook for the same amount of time on the second side and then leave to cool on a wire rack.

To serve, arrange some smoked salmon, watercress, a spoonful of creme fraiche and a teaspoon of capers on each plate along with 4 or 5 blinis.

If you have any left over blinis layer them between baking parchment and freeze in a suitable container.

You can buy Forman & Field's London Cure Scottish Salmon online here.

Off to market we go...

2011-08-09T21:56:00.007+01:00

This Thursday, 11th August 2011, I will have a stall on the Covent Garden Real Food Market in aid of the East Africa Appeal. I would love it if you are in the area and could come down to support this worthy cause (and keep me company if only for a minute or two...).

On the menu will be:

Savoury Lunchtime Fare

Leek & Cheddar Tartlets

Asparagus, Pea and Goat's Cheese Tartlets

Slow Roasted Tomato, Camembert & Thyme Tartlets

Sweet Homemade Treats

Blueberry & Almond Tart

Brownies

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Carrot Cake

All Butter Shortbread

Speculoos

Please help me sell everything and raise as much money as I can by coming and buying your lunch and cake to see you and your colleagues through the afternoon!

You can read all about my day as a market trader back in 2009 here.

The Magpie Cafe

2011-06-11T13:30:00.001+01:00

No trip to Whitby would be complete without sampling the fish and chips at The Magpie Cafe. But in all honesty I did wonder whether it was going to be another one of those places whose heyday has been a gone, yet is still pulling in the punters on its name alone. How wrong could I be?

Very. And to think that we nearly missed out because of that queue that trailed out of the door, down the steps and along the harbour front at lunch time on a miserable drizzly day in March.

The queue did put us off, but our stomachs got the better of us once the main lunch crowd had died down and we made a beeline to excape the rain.

There really is very little to say, apart from the fact that these were, quite simply, the best fish and chips I have tasted for as long as I can remember.

Haddock & Chips for me, Cod & Chips for Mr Ginger Gourmand and a whole heap of attention from the amazing waitresses for Baby GG. The service was second to none. Proper old school, no nonsense, friendly Yorkshire service.

My only slight criticism would be aimed at the mushy peas. They were a great consistency, good sized portion (I LOVE mushy peas), but sadly not quite there flavour-wise.

The Magpie Cafe
14 Pier Road
Whitby
North Yorkshire
YO21 3PU

Tel: 01947 602 058

Grandpa Urchin's Tunisian Orange Cake

2011-04-20T12:26:00.000+01:00

For my third cake this week I chose to make this deliciously sticky, sweet Tunisian Orange Cake which I (along with many others) fawned over when we tasted it at fellow blogger, Food Urchin's lamb in a pit extravaganza last summer. Sadly for poor Food Urchin, despite his best efforts to wow us all with his amazing-cooked-in-the-ground-for-10-hours lamb, it was his Dad's cake which stole the show.

So here is the recipe, reproduced with the kind permission of Food Urchin and Grandpa Urchin, for the most moist, sticky, orangey, lightly spiced cake you e'er will taste on these shores...

Ingredients

For the cake:

50g slightly stale white breadcrumbs
200g caster sugar
100g ground almonds
1 ½ tsp baking powder
200ml sunflower oil
4 eggs
finely grated zest of 1 large unwaxed orange
finely grated zest of ½ unwaxed lemon

For the citrus syrup:

juice of 1 orange
juice of 1 lemon
75g caster sugar
2 cloves
1 cinnamon stick

For the icing (optional):

The original recipe doesn't have icing, but I wanted to 'posh it up' a bit on this occasion. It really isn't necessary and you could just serve it as it is or with a dollop of yogurt or fresh cream.

2 tbsp freshly squeezed orange juice
125-150g icing sugar
zest of ½ unwaxed orange

Method

Line the base of a 20cm round and 5cm deep tine with greaseproof paper, then grease and flour the tin.

Mix the breadcrumbs with the sugar, almonds and baking powder. Whisk the oil with the eggs, then pour into the dry ingredients and then mix well. Add the orange and lemon zest. Pour the mixture into the tin, place in a cold oven and turn on the heat to 180C.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the cake is golden brown (mine took 45 minutes). Check with a skewer by inserting it into the middle, if it comes out clean it’s done. Cool for 5 minutes before turning out onto a plate.

Meanwhile, make the citrus syrup. Put all the ingredients into a saucepan and bring gently to the boil, stirring until the sugar has completely dissolved. Simmer for 3 minutes. Remove the cinnamon stick and cloves from the syrup.

While the cake is still warm, pierce it several times with a skewer, then spoon the hot syrup over the cake allowing it to run into the holes. Leave to cool. Spoon any excess syrup over the cake every now and then until it is all soaked up.

To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into the orange juice and zest and stir until smooth. Drizzle across the cake.

Coffee & Almond Cake

2011-04-19T09:23:00.017+01:00

The second cake I made yesterday during my week of baking was this Coffee & Almond Cake. It's based on Mary Berry's recipe for a Gateau Moka aux Amandes which is in her Ultimate Cake Book. It's a fantastic book with recipes for pretty much every sort of cake you might want to bake - along with the Readers Digest Cookery Year, it was one of my best charity shop purchases!

I followed the original recipe for the sponge, but made an all butter coffee butter cream and used a double shot of espresso instead of coffee essence. It's a simple, yet stunning, cake to make and perfect for afternoon tea and cakes in the sunshine!

Ingredients

For the sponge:

3 medium eggs
4oz caster sugar
3oz self raising flour

For the butter cream:

6oz unsalted butter
10oz icing sugar
double shot espresso

Topping:

6oz shredded blanched almonds, lightly toasted

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Grease and line a 9" round cake tin.

Whisk the eggs and sugar together with an electric whisk until pale and thick. The mixture should be thick enough to leave a trail. Gently fold in the sifted flour. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the sponge is golden and cooked through. Leave to cool, then turn out of the tin and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.

To make the butter cream, start by making a double espresso and leave to cool. If you don't have a coffee machine you could make a small amount of strong coffee in a cafetiere or use 2 tbsp coffee essence as Mary Berry does in her recipe, but I haven't tried the essence so can't vouch for it!

Put the butter and sifted icing sugar in a food processor and mix until smooth. Add the cooled espresso.

Once the sponge is cool carefully slice in half horizontally. Sandwich the two halves together with a little of the coffee butter cream. Then use the remaining butter cream to coat the top and sides of the cake. Finally, gently scatter the toasted almonds all over the top and sides of the cake.

Luxurious Lemon Cake

2011-04-18T12:29:00.027+01:00

I'm having a bit of a baking week this week and what a lovely cake to start with on such a gloriously sunny morning! Light lemony sponge, layered with lashings of lemon curd and creme fraiche, topped off with candied lemon zest. Perfect for Easter.

The recipe is based on a photograph I cut out of a magazine, probably a few years ago now, which I found stuffed in an old file of cuttings. I couldn't find a cutting of the method, only part the ingredients, so here is my version.

Ingredients

For the sponge:

250g unsalted butter
250g golden caster sugar
4 eggs
250g self raising flour
1 heaped tsp baking powder
zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
juice of 1/2 a lemon

For the filling:
200ml creme fraiche
350g lemon curd (homemade tastes best, but using a good quality jar of lemon curd makes this cake much quicker and simpler to make)

For the candied lemon zest:

1 unwaxed lemon
100ml water
100g caster sugar

Method

To make the candied lemon zest:

Start by making the candied lemon zest the day before. To do this, prepare long strips of lemon zest, either using a zester or by peeling strips of zest with a potato peeler and slicing finely. Take care not to peel off the white pith as this will make the candied zest taste bitter. Place in a pan, cover with water and simmer for around 10 minutes. Drain the zest.

Add the measured water and sugar to the pan and heat gently until the sugar dissolves. Add the zest and simmer gently for 10-15 minutes until the liquid has become syrupy.

Remove the zest carefully and place on a non stick baking sheet. Leave to dry out for 24 hours.

To make the cake:

Preheat the oven at 180 C. Grease and line the bases of two 8" sandwich tins. Beat the sugar and butter together then stir in the eggs, lemon zest and juice. Sift the flour and baking powder over the cake mixture and stir gently until combined. Divide the mixture between the tins and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden. If you test the middle of the cake with a cake tester or scewer it should come out clean.

Leave to cool before removing from the tins and placing on a wire cooling tray. Once cool, slice in half so that you have 4 layers of sponge.

Stir a little of your lemon curd into the creme fraiche. Then layer up the cake starting with a layer of sponge topped with 1/3 of the lemon curd, then 1/3 creme fraiche mixture. Repeat twice and then place the final layer of sponge on top. Dust with icing sugar and decorate with candied lemon zest.

Festive Speculoos in celebration of St Nicholas

2010-12-06T15:26:00.001Z

Way back when (so long ago I don't care to work it out exactly...), I spent an amazing 6 months living and working in Brussels. Now whilst I'm not a huge fan of typical Belgian cuisine (apart from those frites...they are mighty fine), on account of most traditional dishes being meat based, I do have ultimate adoration for their strong tasty beers, a piping hot waffle on a cold winter's evening, fine chocolates to die for and the simple biscuit which is the 'speculoos'.

Speculoos are spiced, crunchy biscuits originating in Belgium, Holland and (by some reports) Northern France. I came to know them when I lived in Belgium, not only do they accompany every cup of coffee you buy, they are traditionally made and given to children on the St Nicholas (6th December in Belgium). I remember fondly watching children run out into the street to greet St Nicholas as he passed on his sleigh handing out festive shaped speculoos, as excited as any child here in England on Christmas Eve.

Since then, the 6th December is a date that has always stuck in my mind and I've often spent a few days back in Brussels visiting friends and enjoying the Christmas Markets around this time. It's such a magical place to be in December with the markets on and around the Grand Place, the beautiful decorations and lights in Sablon and the best Christmas decoration shop I have ever been to in my entire life (worth a trip over there alone!).

So with the festive spirit in the air and whilst reminiscing about the good times, I decided this morning that it was about time I had a crack at making speculoos... There are many recipes out there which claim to be 'THE' recipe, but I settled on this recipe which I've translated into English and adapted slightly below.

Traditionally speculoos are made with 'cassonade' which is an unrefined dark moist sugar. The darkest sugar I had to hand was Billingtons molasses sugar which seemed to me to fit the bill nicely.

Ingredients

350g flour
250g butter (at room temperature)
250g dark brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground mixed spice
1 tsp ground ginger
1 egg

Method

Beat the butter, sugar and spices together until they form a thick paste. Add the egg and beat again until combined. Then sift in the flour and baking powder a little at a time and mix until you have a soft dough.

Split the mixture in half, wrap each ball of dough in cling film and pop into the fridge. the original recipe says for 12 hours, but those were 12 hours I didn't have to spare, so I just left mine for an hour or so.

Roll the dough out until it is about 3mm-4mm thick. As the dough is sticky (and to avoid using more flour), this might best be done between baking parchment or cling film.

Cut into rectangles or festive shapes and bake in an oven preheated to 180C for around 10 minutes. Leave to cool and then enjoy (with or without children!).

Something more important than food? Surely not...?!

2010-12-06T13:56:00.003Z

For what seems like forever, food has been the one thing that has consumed my thoughts, both day and night. As a small child I was once known to have thrown the table over when the nursery teacher didn't feed me fast enough. Then, when my ability to express my love of food became a little more refined, I would regularly (OK, probably daily) ask what was for lunch and dinner before I'd even started on breakfast. I've spent days, weekends, whole weeks just cooking, reading cook books, creating new recipes, blogging about food and most importantly feeding people.

Then a certain someone came along at the end of August this year who takes up pretty much my every waking second. So much so that I can't remember the last time I dipped into one of my favourite cook books! Baby GG (as he's affectionately referred to on twitter...) has now of course pipped 'food' to the top of the list of things I love...

At first I honestly wasn't sure I'd ever sit down to eat a meal again, let alone cook one, but as time has gone on I am managing to find a little time to cook again. And what better time with Christmas approaching - I might not have managed Christmas cakes this year, but mince pies are definitely on the baking menu next weekend!

Leek & Cheddar Tartlets

2010-05-24T17:45:00.003+01:00

Tartlets are so versatile - you can fill them with almost any vegerables and cheese you have to hand. There seems to have been a bit of a proliferation of 'caramelised onion and goat's cheese' tarlets served up as the token vegetarian offering in recent years (which not everyone is fond of...although I'm quite partial to a homemade one made with caramelised red onions and thyme), but this shouldn't put you off! Mushrooms work particularly well with pastry, especially in a thick bechamel flavoured with tarragon, garlic and brandy (like the Crank's recipe for Mushroom Lattice Tart), as does asparagus at this time of year. Other favourites of mine as the weather starts to warm up are tomato with either dijon mustard and gruyere or soft goat's cheese and thyme or fresh peas and broad beans with feta. All of which are great serve hot, warm or cold as part of a picnic.

I have made this version using the leek and cheddar combination a few times recently after picking up some lovely farmhouse cheddar whilst on holiday in Dorset. They're perfect for lunch or a light Spring supper accompanied by some English asparagus - especially in this gloriously hot and sunny weather!

Ingredients

For the pastry:

60z plain flour
3oz butter
2-3floz cold water
a pinch of paprika (or cayenne) (optional)
a pinch of salt

For the filling:

2 medium leeks (trimmed, washed and sliced)
1 egg
5floz mixture of milk and double cream (or just milk if you prefer)
4oz mature cheddar cheese (grated)
1 - 2oz butter
1 tsp mustard
salt & pepper

Method

Firstly make the pastry. Mix the butter and flour together (either by hand using your fingertips or in a food processor) until they ressemble breadcrumbs, then add the paprika / cayenne (if using) and salt. Add the water a little at a time until the mixture forms a soft dough (taking care not to 'over-handle' the dough). You may need more or less water which is why it's best not to add it all in one go. Wrap the ball of dough in clingfilm and refridgerate for at least 20 minutes.

To make the filling, start by heating a large knob of butter (at least 1oz) in a heavy based pan over a low heat, then add the sliced leeks. Saute the leeks for around 10 minutes until softened but take care not to let them colour. In the meantime, beat the egg and add the milk and cream (or just milk), most of the grated cheese (keep a little to sprinkle on top of the tartlets), mustard a pinch of salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll out to line 4 greased fluted tarlet tins. Return the tins to the fridge for 10 minutes (or longer - they can be prepared in advance). Blind bake the pastry cases for around 15 minutes at approx 190 C (depending on your oven). To do this, line the pastry case with a piece of baking parchment and fill the parchment with baking beans (or rice or dried pulses). Then remove the parchment and baking beans and bake for another 5 minutes.

Divide the leeks between the part cooked tartlet pastry cases and then pour over the egg, milk and cheese mixture, taking care to make sure the cheese is equally divided between the tarlets. Sprinkle the remaining grated cheese on top and put back into the oven at approx 180 C (depending on your oven) for 10 - 12 minutes until set and golden.

Rhubarb & Rose Tart

2010-05-10T14:00:00.001+01:00

I always begrudge parting with my hard earned cash for rhubarb. Especially in London where a mere crumble's worth is likely to have the bank manager come knocking. I'm used to getting it free you see as my parents have a fantastically prolific rhubarb patch. Alas, the 8 hour round trip to Derbyshire is a just a touch on the excessive side (even for good homegrown rhubarb)...

So when I spied some lovely fresh pink rhubarb in my local grocers a couple of weeks ago I couldn't resist. There had been quite a lot of talk of ways to use the new season rhubarb amongst some of my fellow food bloggers (good old crumble, fool, compote, muffins...) and what to match it with. I'm a big fan of stem ginger with rhubarb, especially in a layered fool, but Linda who writes the blog With Knife and Fork mentioned that she'd opted for rose water in her rhubarb fool. After some to-ing and fro-ing with Linda and Jan (The Ample Cook) over poaching methods and rose water I set to making this delicious tart.

Ingredients

1 quantity of sweet pastry (8oz plain flour, 4oz butter, 1oz icing sugar, 1 egg and 1 egg yolk)
4oz ground almonds
4oz butter
4oz caster sugar
1oz plain flour
2 eggs
4 - 5 stalks rhubarb
2 tbsp rose water
2 tbsp golden caster sugar (or more to taste)

Method

Make the pastry: I do this in the food processor, but if you don't have one mix the flour and butter in a large bowl with your fingertips until they resemble breadcrumbs, add the icing sugar and mix and finally, beat the whole egg and egg yolk together and add to the bowl. Bring the ingredients together with your hands to form a ball whilst handling as little as possible. Wrap in cling film and chill for at least half an hour.

Roll out the pastry to line a fluted tart tin (or several smaller tartlet tins), prick gently all over with a fork and chill again. Blind bake for around 15 minutes at 180 - 200 C (depending on your oven). To do this, line the pastry case with a piece of baking parchment and fill the parchment with baking beans (or rice or dried pulses). Then remove the parchment and baking beans and bake for another 5 minutes.

Whilst the pastry case is cooking you will need to poach the rhubarb. Wash the rhubarb well and cut into pieces approximately 1 & 1/2 inches long. Put into a wide based pan or casserole and add the 2 tbsp rose water and 2 tbsp caster sugar (you may want more or less sugar depending on your own tastes). Put the pan on the hob and poach the rhubarb for about 5 minutes. You want the pieces to be tender but not so cooked that they break down.

In a clean bowl (or food processor), make a frangipan by mixing the rest of the ingredients together (almonds, butter, sugar, flour and eggs).

Remove the tart case from the oven and fill with the frangipan mixture. Add the rhubarb pushing it into the frangipan mixture slightly. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until the tart is golden brown and the frangipan is set.

Serve hot or cold with lightly whipped double cream or clotted cream.

Showing off Sugar (Muscovado Custards)

2010-04-24T10:00:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago, the nice people at Billington's sent me some sugar to play with. I say play with because it's not really the sort of sugar you'd put in your tea or coffee but is more suited to a baking extravaganza (or possibly sprinkling on your porridge).

Now I've bought Billington's sugar on occasion before, but not for any reason other than the fact that it was what I needed at the time. I mostly bake with golden caster sugar and most bags of muscovado or soft sugars end up at the back of the baking cupboard and rock solid next time a recipe calls for them.

Billington's sugars are unrefined and undergo minimum processing. The sugar cane is cut, shredded and juiced and that juice is then clarified and crystallised. Nothing added and nothing taken away (unlike some brown sugars which are apparently refined white sugar coated to add colour and flavour...).

As luck would have it, the very same week I picked up a copy of the March 2010 edition of Waitrose Food Illustrated which had a feature spread about different types of sugar and their uses, along with a few recipes. This recipe for Muscovado Custards caught my eye as it called for both the dark muscovado and molasses sugar which Billington's had sent.

Although I followed the recipe to the letter (and allowed a little extra cooking time) they didn't set completely. The only thing I can think is that my eggs were a touch on the small side? Despite them not setting, they certainly showed off the sugar to its best. They were rich with a real deep, earthy sweetness. The sort that lingers on the tongue long after the mouthful has gone.

Ingredients

300ml double cream

75g dark muscovado sugar

25g molasses sugar

1/4 tsp salt

4 large egg yolks

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Method

Preheat oven to 150C.

Warm cream, both sugars and salt over a medium-low heat in a small heavy based pan until sugar has dissolved. Put to one side.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks and then slowly whisk in the cream mixture and vanilla extract. Strain into a jug and then poor into ramekins. Now, the Waitrose recipe says to pour the mixture into 4 x 120ml ramekins. Given how rich the custards are, you could probably get away with using smaller ramekins and making 6, but would need to adjust the cooking time.

Put the ramekins in a deep roasting tin. Pour boiling water into the tin until it comes to about one third of the way up the sides of the ramekins. Cook for 20-25 minutes until the custards are just set but still wobble slightly in the middle (they will set further on cooling). Remove from the tin and chill for at least 3 hours.

It is this final step where my custards didn't seem to want to play - they needed longer than the 20-25 minutes stated in the Waitrose recipe and then they didn't continue to set when cooling. They set nicely around the edges but two of them simply didn't set in the middle at all. So if I make this recipe again, I'll make sure my large eggs are just that - large - and that I cook them for a little longer, keeping my eye on them for when they set.

Chocolate & Orange Tart

2010-04-05T18:30:00.000+01:00

A few months ago I had the good fortune of being invited, along with a few fellow food bloggers, to an evening of chocolate tasting with the inimitable Paul A. Young at his quaint shop in Camden Passage, Islington.

A revelation! That's what the whole, marvellous evening was - a revelation. I've eaten my fair share of chocolate in my time, but I'm no chocoholic - far from it. I certainly don't go weak at the knees at the sight of a chocolate fondant like one friend I can think of, nor am I an habitual eater of the chocolate bars us Brits have a love affair with (if we are to agree with Jay Rayner's recent musings on the humble chocolate bar).

But for the first time I learnt what it is that I do like and why, what flavours work for me and what I'll be steering clear of in future. The winner by a country mile for me being dark chocolate made from Madagascan beans (in particular the Valrhona Manjari 64%) - fruity, mouthwatering (literally!), citrus flavours. Delicious!

Ever since then, having learnt the difference the type of chocolate you use can make to a recipe, I've been meaning to create a recipe to do Madagascan dark chocolate justice. A few weeks ago I finally got around to trying the confit orange recipe from Paul A. Young's recent book - Adventures with Chocolate - which inspired me to make this Chocolate & Orange Tart. The addition of a little orange zest to the sweet pastry works brilliantly with the rich Madagascan chocolate filling.

You can read all about the different chocolate we tasted that evening in great detail on my friend and fellow food blogger's blog Kavey Eats. We ate a LOT of chocolate...

Ingredients

Sweet Pastry

8oz plain flour
4oz cold unsalted butter (cubed)
1oz icing sugar (sifted)
1 whole egg
1 egg yolk
zest of 1 orange (finely grated)

Chocolate Filling

6oz single origin Madagascan dark chocolate
4 oz unsalted butter
2oz golden caster sugar
1 whole egg
2 egg yolks

Decoration

Confit orange peel (I used the recipe in Paul A. Young's book Adventures with Chocolate which worked really well)

Method

To make the pastry, mix the flour and butter in a food processor until they resemble breadcrumbs. Add the rest of the ingredients and continue to mix for a short time until the pastry forms a soft ball. Wrap the pastry in cling film and chill for at least half an hour, then roll out to about 4mm thick to line a greased 9 inch fluted tart tin and chill again (you can pop it in the freezer if you're short on time).

Put the tart tin on a baking tray and blind bake the pastry case for around 20 minutes at approximately 180C (depending on your oven). You can do this by laying a piece of baking parchment inside the pastry case and filling it with baking beans (or just some uncooked pulses or rice if you don't have the fancy baking beans). Remove the paper and beans and bake for another 5 minutes or until golden brown.

Whilst the pastry case is baking, prepare the chocolate filling. Melt the chocolate and butter in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water. In a separate bowl, beat the sugar, whole egg and egg yolks until pale and fluffy (the easiest way to do this is with an electric beater if you have one as it takes longer than you think). Once the chocolate and butter has melted, take off the heat and leave to cool slightly before mixing gently into the egg mixture until combined.

Once the pastry case is cooked, turn the oven down to 170C. Pour the chocolate mixture into the pastry case and bake for 5 – 6 minutes. Put the tart on a wire rack to cool. When the tin is cool enough to handle, remove the tart from the tin and leave on the wire wrack to cool.

Decorate with confit orange peel and serve with caramelised oranges or lightly whipped cream.

The worst thing for a food lover...

2010-04-05T18:07:00.003+01:00

...is morning sickness.

My life is normally filled to the brim with food. I'm the sort of person who has planned what's for dinner before I've even had breakfast. The stack of books next to my bed is made up of cookbooks rather than trashy novels. I can spend whole weekends in the kitchen cooking up delight after delight. My notebook contains a 'hit list' of must visit restaurants, cafes and food shops.

Yet at the back end of last year I found myself unable to stand the thought of food, let alone the sight, smell or taste of it! It was all I could do to force myself to eat anything vaguely healthy. For some reason, having spent years eating a healthy well balanced diet, I found myself eating anything in crispy crumb coating - fish fingers, spicy bean burgers, cheese and onion breadcrumbed 'things' from Marks & Spencer, ready made meals and a lot of Nairns oatcakes with cheddar (whilst dreaming of oozing, ripe brie, epoisses and stichelton...).

There were a few casualties of this seemingly never ending period of purgatory. The main one which remains is broccoli. Knowing that dark green vegetables are good for me I tried my best to subsitute some of the rubbish I was eating for healthy vegetables. But for the humble broccoli this effort (even coating it in a rich cheddar sauce) was all in vain. There was and is notihng that will entice me to eat this once much loved vegetable. I'm not even rejoicing in the arrival of the purple sprouting broccoli season. This makes me sad.

Eating out became impossible. Starting with the fact I don't eat meat anyway, my choices on a standard restaurant menu are already limited. Add to that the apparent desire of many chefs to create their, often solitary, vegetarian offering from one of the millions of cheeses a pregnant woman is advised to avoid. And finally throw into the equation me - a normally food loving woman with constant nausea who had lost all desire to eat and couldn't stay awake past about 7.30pm. A recipe for enjoyable evenings out this did not make...

But here I am, through the worst (depending on who you listen to...), nearly 22 weeks pregnant, back on my horse and raring to go!

Banana & Walnut Cake

2010-01-31T15:00:00.002Z

I don't know about you, but I for one can't stand eating bananas once they have even the slightest of brown speckles. The texture and flavour begin to change and, if I'm honest, they're then usually destined for the bin. But I hate wasting food, so this recipe comes in handy because the riper the banana the better the flavour of the cake.

It's based on a recipe which I hastily scribbled down from a magazine in a waiting room somewhere a few years ago. Well, I scribbled down the main ingredients and then, over time have decided on the quantities which suit me best. I like adding walnuts for the texture and because they work well with bananas, but you could add any nuts you like, or even sultanas.

It's a very moist cake so testing for when it's done can be a tad tricky, but it will continue to set in the tin once you take it out of the oven.

Ingredients

4 ripe bananas
4 tbsp light olive oil
4 tbsp natural yogurt
2 eggs (beaten)
1 tsp vanilla extract
8oz self raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground mixed spice (plus a little cinnamon if you like it)
3oz soft brown sugar
2oz walnut pieces (or more if you prefer)

Method

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, bicarbonate of soda, spice and sugar) together in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl mash the peeled bananas (I find a potato masher makes l ight work of this job) and then stir in the oil, yogurt, eggs and vanilla. Add the banana mixture to the dry ingredients along with the walnuts and mix well.

Pour the mixture into a lined, greased 1 litre loaf tin and bake in the oven at 180 C for 50 minutes to an hour until golden and well risen (I baked mine at 165 C in my fan oven). Depending on your oven, it may take a little longer as it is quite a moist mixture so test with a cake tester or scewer and also press gently in the centre to see whether it feels set. Leave in the tin to cool.

You can serve it warm with greek yogurt and honey as a dessert (or even afternoon tea!) or enjoy it just as it is with a cup of tea.

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup with Hazelnuts

2010-01-17T12:00:00.000Z

Jerusalem artichokes aren't the prettiest looking of vegetables and seem to be much maligned for their (to put it politely) gas inducing properties. But that's not to say that they can't be transformed from the knobbly roots that they are, into some delicious dishes.

I first came across jerusalem artichokes about 12 years ago when I was living in France but didn't get to taste them then as these topinomboux, which grow abundantly even in poor soil, were destined for animal feed. It wasn't until a few years later that I spotted them for sale in the greengrocers back in England that I bought some to make a wild rice, puy lentil and jerusalem artichoke salad. A lovely earthy salad, perfect for the winter months.

What I didn't know until recently was that the jerusalem artichoke is from the same family as the sunflower. Looking at the roots (which are cultivated as the vegetable we eat) I could be excused for not guessing, but it's easier to see the family ressemblance when you see the flowers of the plant.

Jerusalem artichokes lend themselves perfectly to a hearty winter soup and the addition of hazelnut oil and toasted hazelnuts raises this soup to something a little special and good enough for a weekend lunch with friends.

Ingredients

8 - 10 medium jerusalem artichokes
1 medium leek (white and pale green only)
1 medium onion
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 to 1 & 1/2 litres light vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1 oz butter
dash olive oil
salt & pepper
handful blanched hazelnuts (to serve)
hazelnut oil (to serve)

Method

Finely chop the oinion and slice and wash the leek. Add the butter, dash of olive oil, onion and leek to a large heavy bottomed pan or casserole (which has a lid). Heat gently over a low heat and then place a sheet of baking parchment over the vegetables and tuck it down to seal in the steam. Put the lid on the pan and cook very gently for abuot 10 minutes (checking and stirring regularly to ensure that the vegetables do not turn brown). Discard the baking parchment.

Whilst the oinions and leeks are cooking, peel and chop the jerusalem artichokes and then add to the pan along with the stock and bay leaves. Simmer gently until the jerusalem artichokes are cooked though.

Remove the bay leaves and then puree the soup until smooth and return to the pan with the lemon juice (add more to taste if you like) and season generously with freshly ground black pepper and salt if needed.

As the soup is warming through slowly, gently toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan and then crush slighty (I did this by putting them in a sandwich bag and bashing them with a rolling pin). Dish up the soup, drizzle with the hazelnut oil and scatter some toasted nuts in the centre of each bowl.

Serves 4 for lunch or 6 as a starter.

Mince Pies

2009-12-20T16:03:00.012Z

I learnt a couple of new things about mince pies yesterday from a wonderful lady called Jean who led our festive Dickens guided tour around the City of London yesterday afternoon. Firstly, instead of being round as we know and love them, way back as early as the 16th century, mince pies used to be oval shaped - like a cradle. Secondly, superstition has it that you should eat a mince pie on each of the 12 days of Christmas to bring you good luck for the forthcoming year. Now that shouldn't be a problem for me (unless the idea is that you need to just eat 1 each day for the good luck rather than 3 or 4 ...).

By this time of the year I've usually whipped out dozens of trays of mince pies for work, neighbours, friends and of course for us at home. But for some reason this year I've not really got around to it and can only claim a couple of dozen so far... I'm planning on making up for it over the next couple of weeks though!

There are many mince pie recipes out there, but I make them the way my Mum taught me when I was growing up - super simple with lovely light, flaky pastry. Some people use sweet pastry, but for me this is sugar overload with the already sweet mincemeat, so instead this recipe uses a basic shortcrust pastry made with white flora as opposed to butter which can be a touch rich. The advantage of course being that I can easily eat 4 in one sitting!

Ingredients

8oz plain flour
4oz white flora
3-5floz cold water
Mincemeat (homemade if you have it or good quality vegetarian shop bought
Milk or beaten egg to glaze
Icing sugar to dust

Method

Mix the flour and white flora together to form the consistency of breadcrumbs (this is really easy if you have a food processor, just be careful not to over mix). Then add the water a little at a time to form a soft dough. Depending on the flour you use you will need between 3floz and 5floz - I used Dove's Organic flour today and it needed about 3floz. Wrap the pastry in cling film (taking care not to handle it too much as this makes it dry and tough) and pop in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Grease your mince pie tins (just the same tins as you use for fairy cakes). If you prefer deep-filled mince pies you could use muffin tins or alternatively use some of those mini tins to make mouthful sized mince pies.

Once the pastry has chilled roll it out on a floured work surface to about 1/2cm thick. If you don't have a rolling pin you can always improvise with an empty wine bottle that you have washed and removed the labels from!

Use a 7 1/2cm or 8cm wide round fluted cutter to cut 12 discs. Gently place the discs into the mince pie tins and press down gently in the centre. Put a good heaped teaspoon of mincemeat in each one. Then use either a 6cm wide round fluted cutter to cut full tops for your mince pies or, if you have them, use Christmas shaped cutters like stars, Christmas trees and holly. If you choose the round tops, cut 2 small lines in the centre of each one to let the steam out whilst they're cooking.

Brush the tops with a drop of milk or, for a more golden topped mince pie, a beaten egg. To make your mince pies vegan use soya milk to brush the tops or if you don't have any, nothing at all (they'll still taste just as good!).

Pop the tray into an oven pre-heated to 200C for 15 - 18 minutes until the pastry is cooked and lightly golden. Leave to cool for a few minutes in the tin and then gently remove to a wire rack. If you can resist eating them there and then whilst they're still warm, leave to cool completely and then dust with a touch of icing sugar.

This recipe makes 12 normal sized mince pies.

A Taste of Autumn - Caramelised Shallot & Chestnut Tatin

2009-10-04T13:05:00.000+01:00

As the Summer begins to draw to a close and the sun sits low in the sky over the hazy landscape in the distance I feel a certain sense of contentment. Autumn is my season. All those wonderful colours as the leaves begin to turn golden, brown, russet, red. The perfect backdrop for the ginger haired amongst us. It's not just the colours I'm waiting for with eager anticipation though. There is a myriad of new, rich, earthy vegetables coming into season that I can't wait to start cooking with again - squash, leeks, chestnuts, parsnips, plums, wild mushrooms, figs, sweetcorn, kale...

At the beginning of each season as the fruit and vegetables begin to appear in the shops and markets there's that delicious transitional period of rediscovery. I dig out my cookbooks, search for new and different dishes to make the most of the produce that's not been around for a while. Last week saw roasted figs with gorgonzola and a honey dressing, roasted corn pudding in acorn squash (thanks to Heidi of 101 Cookbooks), corn on the cob dripping with butter and freshly ground black pepper, leek & gruyere tartlets and plum crumble.

That's just for starters. A drop in the ocean. The post-it notes littering the pages of my favourite cookbooks forecast a lot of time in the kitchen over the next couple of months. Why is Autumn so short?!

Last week Mat Follas, winner of Masterchef, who runs the restaurant The Wild Garlic and writes a lovely blog of the same name was touting for vegetarian suggestions for his Christmas menu on twitter. I like the fact that Mat asks people what they would want. He really values people's input - asking Guardian Word of Mouth readers to comment on his first menu for example. That way he canvasses opinion, encourages debate, gets some new ideas and (hopefully) comes to a much more considered decision on any number of things.

So with Christmas menus on my mind, and armed with some fantastic homegrown potatoes freshly dug up from FoodUrchin's allotment (which, I was reliably informed, made great roasties), I set about a Sunday roast for two. Chicken for Andrew and a seasonal veggie dish for me. Now, when it comes to a roast, I do not want to be missing out on those delicious roast potatoes, crispy roasted parsnips and lashings of gravy. I hate it when I go somewhere for a Sunday roast only to find that the veggie option is pasta or risotto. What's that all about? What can be so difficult about cooking something interesting and appetising and vegetarian to serve with the same veg as the beef, chicken or lamb?

With a truck load of shallots in my Abel & Cole delivery that I wanted to use up I decided on a savoury tarte tatin. I've made them before - a Tomato Tarte Tatin earlier this year with the first crop of the Summer tomatoes and a vegan Shallot & Wild Mushroom Tatin for Christmas dinner a few years ago when my Uncle and Aunty were visiting. All the talk of Christmas had whetted my appetite for chestnuts, so a Caramelised Shallot & Chestnut Tatin with porcini gravy it was.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

8oz plain flour
4oz butter
5 or 6 sprigs of thyme (leaves only)
5 floz water
salt & pepper

For the filling:

Shallots (I'm no good at remembering to weigh food before I cook with it but I reckon I used around 20 shallots)
Mushrooms (I used up a couple of handfuls of chestnut mushrooms which where lurking in the fridge, but you could use any mushrooms you like)
1 tin of chestnuts
1 - 2 oz butter
1 tsp muscavado sugar
a few thyme leaves
salt & pepper

Method

First make the pastry by rubbing all of the ingredients except the water together to form fine breadcrumbs, then add the water a little at a time until the pastry comes together (being careful not to overhandle it). If you have a food processor, put all the ingredients except the water and blitz for around 40 - 60 seconds and then with the blade running add the water slowly until the pastry forms a ball. Wrap in clingfilm and pop in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Peel the shallots. Heat the butter with a tiny splash of olive oil in a tarte tatin dish over a low heat (or another dish which you can use on but the hob and in the oven) and saute the whole shallots over the until they begin to brown slightly. Turn the heat up slightly and add the mushrooms, seasoning and thyme and cook until the juices which come off the mushrooms have evaporated. Add the sugar and cook for another couple of minutes and then finally add the chestnuts.

The mixture should cover the whole of the bottom of the tarte tatin dish. Roll out the pastry which has been resting in the fridge to about 1/2 inch thick and lay over the shallot mixture. The pastry should be a touch larger than the dish so fold the edges back and tuck well around the edges to form a seal and keep the moisture in.

Pop the tarte tatin in a medium oven for around 30 minutes or until the pastry is cooked and golden.

Slide a knife around the edge of the pastry to loosen. Put a plate over the dish and then carefully tip the dish with the plate held firmly on top over so that the tart is sat shallot side up on the plate. Remove the dish. Serve with roast potatoes, veg and your favourite vegetarian gravy.

N.B. To make this dish vegan, use vegan margarine (e.g. soya margarine) instead of butter in the pastry and use just oil (not butter) to saute the shallots for the filling.

Simple Pleasures at St John Bread & Wine

2009-09-28T09:00:00.007+01:00

I've been meaning to visit St John Bread & Wine for longer than I can remember but somehow I'd never quite got there. I've even had reservations in the past that I've had to cancel for one reason or another. The perfect opportunity to try again that I couldn't miss came when I was planning a day out to celebrate my husband's birthday at the end of July when it just so happened that St John Bread & Wine was a natural mid-point (at around lunch o'clock...) between Murdock's in Old Street (where I'd booked him a traditional wet shave as part of his birthday present) and London Bridge (for the train back to Frank's Bar in Peckham where we were meeting friends for early birthday drinks). I love it when a plan comes together.

St John Bread & Wine is the sister restaurant to St John, a larger restaurant in Smithfields, and is thought of as being less formal with a menu structured around sharing plates. The menu reads a bit like a timetable with dishes being available specific times throughout the day - breakfast, elevenses, lunch (with some plates available only from 1pm onwards and then, only until they run out, which they often do) and supper from 6pm.

It was a bright sunny day and the sun streaming in through the large windows which run along the front of the restaurant lit the dining room up. It's not a huge dining space, but the ceiling is incredibly high which means the room has a sort of warehouse feel about it. It was fairly empty when we arrived and never really filled up completely. I'd love to go when it's full - on a Friday night perhaps - to see what the atmosphere is like then, because it's unusual on a Saturday lunchtime. Not in a bad way, don't get me wrong, it's just a little quiet and empty. What's great about that is that you don't have to shout over the table next to you to make yourself heard! I can picture myself there with a bunch of mates, ordering more food and drinks as more people arrive.

I like the simplicity of the menu. You know what you're getting, like 'Peas in the Pod' or 'Hake & Samphire'. There's no messing around with poncy dish names on the menu here. They say it like it is. And the style of the food matches that no nonsense approach. The produce is top notch and so incredibly fresh. There's no need to dress it up. Many chefs these days talk about showcasing the fresh ingredients or letting the produce speak for itself. Here it's not just talk, they actually achieve it.

In addition to the printed menu (which changes twice a day), there are also specials up on the blackboards around the room. The wine list is good and varied, with many available by the glass (and also to buy and take home which is just what I did on my second visit a week later...). On this occasion we started with a glass of rose each and then moved on to sample some of the reds by the glass. Although it works out more expensive drinking by the glass it does mean you have the opportunity to try different wines, which I like. So many restaurants only serve a limited number of wines by the glass (and at often rather elevated prices) so this was refreshing to see.

We decided to order some dishes to share and then a meat dish for Andrew (it was his birthday after all). The first dish I chose was Peas & Ticklemore. Fresher than fresh raw peas, straight from the pod and thin slices of ticklemore cheese with pea shoots, herbs and a lemon oil dressing. The peas were crunchy and sweet. The cheese was very subtle and it's texture married well with the peas, leafy pea shoots and the viscous lemon oil (which had just a hint of natural lemon rather than being too citrusy or overpowering). A lovely fresh start to a meal and the portion size was perfect for two people to share.

We were undecided on our next choice (not an uncommon state of affairs for two of the most indecisive people to walk this planet). We fancied trying a fish dish, of which there were a handful on the menu, but with my forays into fish being fairly limited I wasn't sure whether I would like the cuttlefish which had caught our eye. After a conversation with the knowledgeable waiter who explained how the dish was prepared and what to expect from the cuttlefish, we did plump for it (Cuttlefish with Heirloom Tomatoes). It was the right choice.

Cuttlefish is not at all what I expected. Our waiter explained that it was braised, tossed together with a mixture of colourful heirloom tomatoes and dressed with a simple olive oil vinaigrette flavoured with fresh marjoram. The texture of the cuttlefish was unusual, but certainly not unpleasant. Nothing like any other fish or seafood I have ever eaten, it has quite a meaty texture. It was rich, slightly sweet and most definitely 'earthy' and took on the flavours of the braising liquor and the dressing. The tomatoes were much needed to cut through the richness of the cuttlefish, especially the green ones which had just the right amount of bite to contrast with the soft fish. I couldn't have eaten the whole plate myself, but then that's the whole point of St John Bread & Wine's concept of plates to share.

Andrew declared his Middle White Faggot & Peas to be simply delicious. He'd never had faggots before and wasn't entirely sure what to expect. He needn't have worried - the single faggot came sat on a bed of cream sweet peas with plenty of the faggot cooking juices. Hearty yet stylish.

Maybe it was the wine, or just the fact that when you're relaxing over a long lazy lunch you don't want it to end, but we both decided there was room for another dish before we considered the desserts. I'm so glad we did. Although simple (again), the Brown & White Crab served with toasted sourdough was good. There was plenty of both the brown and white meat - in fact there were some lovely big pieces of white meat which I tried to snaffle whilst Andrew wasn't looking. My only criticism would be that the toast was slightly too oily and could have done with being a dry toast to contrast with the rich crab. That certainly wouldn't stop me from ordering it again though.

The only real let down of the meal was the dessert. We both love all things almond and decided to go for the Raspberry & Almond Tart. Whilst it was OK it wasn't anything more than that which was a little disappointing. I've made many almondy tarts with summer fruits so perhaps I was expecting something far superior to what I can create with my own fair hands, but it just didn't deliver for me - there wasn't enough almond filling and the pastry was a little too thin and soft.

All in all, St John Bread & Wine was perfect for a splendid lazy weekend lunch. There is a relaxed feeling and service is calm, friendly and spot on when it comes to explaining the dishes. I could almost taste the dishes from our waiter's description of them! The dishes have a distinctive style which makes this a restaurant which knows exactly what it has to offer and does so sublimely.

I went back just 1 week later with my mum, for a second visit which confirmed my opinion that St John Bread & Wine is all about top quality, simple food. The Smoked Mackerel & Horseradish was just that - a large piece of delicately and naturally smoked mackerel with a small dollop of horseradish creme fraiche. Paired with a simple salad of lettuce leaves and herbs and Jersey Tomatoes & Wild Marjoram made for a second stunning lunch.

St John Bread & Wine Spitalfields

94-96 Commercial Street

London

E1 6LZ

Tel: 020 7251 0848

http://www.stjohnbreadandwine.com/

Smoked Haddock & Spinach Tart

2009-09-27T16:30:00.000+01:00

A big bunch of lovely dark green large leafed spinach turned up in my weekly vegetable box last Monday. The sort that has that really rich irony taste and which has some bite to it. A far cry from the baby leaves of the summer.

By Saturday it really was time to get it used up before it reached the point where it would only be fit to be chucked into the pot with the rest of the not-quite-so-fresh veg which make their way into soup at the end of the week.

My first thought was to make the Valentine Warner recipe I'd made a couple of weeks ago - Moroccan Spiced Spinach & King Prawns - which calls for these tastier, more mature spinach leaves. But then seeing Nick Nairn's dish using natural smoked haddock on Saturday Kitchen had me craving good smoked fish. For once I managed to leave the house and make it to our local fishmonger - Moxons in East Dulwich - before they'd sold out of everything (I usually don't have much choice, arriving after 4pm on a Saturday afternoon...) and picked up a lovely piece of smoked haddock.

The combination of smoked haddock and spinach is not a new one. It's a perfect marriage in my view - soft, flaky, lightly smoked fish and vibrant earthy leaves. The other flavours which work well are no mystery either and the one that leapt to mind on Saturday was cheese. And so a recipe came together...

We ate the tart warm and straight from the oven in the evening with some buttered samphire and then cold the next day for lunch with salad. I'm not sure which I liked best - the tart was more moist when it was warm, but then the pastry was certainly crisper when we ate it cold. Whichever way, it's a good early Autumn dish to eat when the days are still bright with that gorgeous big sun low in the sky.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

6oz plain flour
3oz butter
3 or 4 fl oz water
2 tbsp finely grated parmesan
1 tsp mustard powder
salt & pepper

For the filling:

12oz natural smoked haddock
10fl oz full cream milk (or half and half semi skimmed milk and cream which I did because I had both to use up in the fridge)
1 egg
a big bunch of large spinach leaves (thick stalks removed)
1oz butter
1oz plain flour
1 shallot (finely chopped)
pinch freshly grated nutmeg
salt & pepper

Method

Start by making the pastry. Blitz everything except the water in the food processor (or work together to make fine breadcrumbs by hand in a large bowl) then add the water a little at a time to form a soft, but not wet pastry. Wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for around 30 minutes. Then roll out to around 1/4 " thick and line a 9" loose bottomed fluted tart tin. At this stage I often pop my lined pastry case in the freezer for 5 minutes to firm up and reduce the risk of the pastry shrinking down the sides of the tin when you bake it.

Blind bake the pastry case for around 15 minutes at 190 C. Then remove the baking beans & parchment and bake for a further 5 minutes.

In the meantime, poach the smoked haddock in the milk (or milk and cream) in a shallow pan for 6 or 7 minutes. Pop the fish onto a plate, remove the skin and any bones and then flake. Reserve the poaching liquid.

Roughly chop the spinach and wilt in a non stick pan, making sure to stir to prevent the spinach from sticking. Put the wilted spinach in a sieve. Once cooled slightly, squeeze to remove as much liquid as possible.

Saute the shallot in the butter until soft. Add flour, stir to combine and then cook out the roux for a couple of minutes, stirring frequently. Add the warm poaching liquid and whisk until smooth. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Once cooled slightly whisk in the beaten egg and then stir in the fish and spinach.

Put the fish mixture into the pastry case and bake at 180 - 190 C (depending on your oven) for around 25 minutes until slightly golden and cooked through. Serve warm or cold.

Not Aunty Lisa's Top Houmous Tip

2009-09-27T09:30:00.003+01:00

We eat a fair amount of houmous in our house. It's a super quick pre-dinner or lunchtime snack to whip up from the tins and jars lurking in the kitchen. With sticks of carrot, celery, cucumber, whatever is knocking around in the bottom the fridge really, it's a healthy snack too.

There are some days though, when I'm making a Middle Eastern inspired banquet for example (you know the sort of thing - falafel, tabbouleh, broad bean and preserved lemon salad, sumac roasted aubergines...), when I want my houmous to be a bit 'special'. On these occasions I've experimented with adding more olive oil than usual, adding a different olive oil or by sprinkling toasted pine nuts on top before serving. All with good results.

But whilst I was staying with my littlest sister in Newcastle a couple of years ago we decided to go for some food at the Flatbread Cafe. There you can choose to order a Bedou Feast of 3 dishes and a freshly made flatbread which we both did and then shared everything. Besides all the other mouthwatering dishes they have (including the Cucubita with pumpkin, chestnut and sweet potato and a fantastic Chana Dahl), we were bowled over by the houmous. There was something about it that I couldn't just put my finger on... It was smooth, light and so incredibly tasty. A delight!

As you can imagine, like every determined home cook, I scurried away to try to recreate it at home, wondering about the quality of the chickpeas, the way in which the chickpeas were cooked, the flavour of the olive oil, the balance of the other ingredients... All of these things do have a huge impact but the smooth texture continued to elude me. It wasn't until I was staying with Not Aunty Lisa a year or so later that I learnt a little trick that turns my everyday store cupboard houmous into the something special I'd been looking for, without the rigmarole planning in advance and cooking dried chickpeas or having a glorious earthy olive oil to hand.

It's as simple (albeit time consuming) as popping the little skins off each individual chick pea. It really does make a difference. And whilst I can't be bothered to do it every time I make houmous, I enjoy it all the more when I have gone to the effort.

Ingredients

1 tin chick peas (drained)

1 dessertspoon light tahini (or more if you are a big tahini fan)

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 clove garlic (crushed)

salt & pepper

2 or 3 tbsp good olive oil

splash of water (if needed)

Method

Pop the chick peas out of their little skins. This is quite simple to do but will take time - I find it best to do it with the distraction of the radio or TV so I don't notice the time passing. Or I delegate this part of the process to unsuspecting friends or family.

Add all the ingredients (except the water) to a food processor and blitz until smooth. You may need to add a little water to reach your desired consistency or you can add more olive oil.

Chocolate Brownies

2009-09-21T17:17:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago my Mum and I spent the day selling our homemade goodies at the Covent Garden Real Food Market where one of our best sellers was our chocolate brownies. They flew off the stall like little hot cakes!

Now I've never been a massive brownie fan. For starters, I'm generally more of a savoury person - I'd much rather go for starter and main and skip the dessert (unless there's a good cheese board of course in which case I'd be sure to leave room for that). Added to which I'm not a huge lover of chocolate cakes or desserts. Don't get me wrong, I love a few squares of quality dark chocolate but you'll rarely find me choosing a chocolatey pud. I much prefer something fruity.

So it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I first had a go at making chocolate brownies and even then I had no intention of eating them... I always make cakes to take to work and share with my colleagues on my birthday and this particular year someone asked me if I was any good at making brownies. Never one to turn down a challenge where food is concerned I set off on finding (and perfecting) a good brownie recipe.

Now, family aside, I know of two queens of baking whose tried and tested recipes never fail - Mary Berry and Sue-L. As anyone who visits the BBC Food Message Boards will know, Sue-L 's prowess in the world of baking is much revered! Where better place to start than with her brownie recipe? I know everyone has their own interpretation of what a brownie should taste like - some like them with nuts added - but the bottom line is that a brownie needs to be squidgy on the inside. And believe me, these little beauties are! They went down a treat at work, so much so, even I ate one and have been making them for people ever since.

Sue-L's recipe has a little vanilla extract which I haven't included here. I think whether you need it or not very much depends on the type of chocolate you use and your own tastes, but that's a story for another blog post altogether as my recent chocolate tasting with the chocolate master himself, Paul A. Young, taught me...

Ingredients

200g butter
200g good quality plain chocolate (as Sue-L says, 70% cocoa solids makes the best brownies!)
600g golden caster sugar
4 large eggs
250g plain flour
4 tablespoons cocoa

Method

Preheat your oven to 180C (170C fan assisted).

Grease a rectangular roasting tin or oven proof dish which measures approximately 8" x 12" (20 x 30cm) and line with baking parchment (not greaseproof paper as this will stick to the brownies!).Melt the butter and chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water. Make sure that the bowl doesn't touch the water inside the pan and be careful not to let the water come into contact with the chocolate as this could make it all go horribly wrong.

Cool the chocolate and butter mixture slightly and then stir in the caster sugar. Whisk the eggs and add then a little at a time, making sure they are well blended before adding more.

Sift the flour and cocoa into the mixture and beat until smooth.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin. It may take up to 50 minutes to cook, depending on your oven, but you don't want to over cook it or your brownies will be too dry. To get the right consistency the mixture needs to be just cooked, so start testing with a cocktail stick after about 40 minutes – there should be moist crumbs clinging to the cocktail stick, but not wet batter.

Cool the brownies in the tin slightly and then mark into pieces. Depending on how big you want your brownies to be, this mixture will make between 15 and 24 pieces. It is fairly rich though so you may just want to make mini sized brownies, in which case you could make 32 pieces.

Leave the brownies in the tin until they are completely cold, then turn out onto a board and cut into pieces along the pre-marked lines.

Bank Holiday Madeleines

2009-09-12T10:17:00.002+01:00

Every time I'm rooting through my baking cupboard to find something or other Andrew seems to spot the madeleine tin. Not the loaf or bun tins...always the madeleine tin. This is usually accompanied with a friendly jibe about how long it must be since I last made madeleines - have I made them since living at this house (where we've been for over 18 months)...?! The answer is probably no. So over the August bank holiday weekend, after two very full on weeks at work which left no time for eating and sleeping, let alone cooking, I decided to get back in the saddle by cooking up an Ottolenghi inspired feast on Saturday evening and a lazy bank holiday breakfast in bed for my (clearly deprived) husband.

Instead of my usual (and preferred) method of making it up as I go along, I decided to follow the recipe in my much loved and well used copy of French Regional Cooking (by Anne Willan and the Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne) which I picked up at Oxfam a few years ago before our Bourgogne-Odyssey (that was the holiday when it rained, a lot, and when I managed to used around 8 packs of butter in 10 days on my cellulite inducing cook-a-thon).

Well, when I say I decided to follow the recipe that's not strictly true. I'm not the world's greatest recipe-follower. I tend (unless it's a Denis Cotter recipe) to make my own little adjustments as I go along. Today was no exception, although I did follow the method word for word!

Freshly baked, warm madeleines with a cup of Williamson Earl Grey. Lovely.

This recipe makes around 16 madeleines.

Ingredients

2oz plain flour
1/2 tsp banking powder
2oz caster sugar
2oz melted butter
2 eggs
zest of 1 orange
zest of 1 lemon

Method

Whisk the eggs and sugar until thick and light. Add the orange and lemon zest. Sift the flour and baking powder and gently fold into the egg and sugar mixture in three batches. When the last batch of flour is almost mixed in, add the melted butter and fold in quickly and lightly to retain as much volume as possible.

Chill the batter for 20 to 30 minutes in the fridge. Heat your oven to around 230C (I heated mine to around 210C in the fan oven). Brush your madeleine tins with a little butter and then sprinkle with flour and knock the excess out of the tins.

Fill each of the madeleine to around three quarters full. Bake for 5 minutes then reduce the temperature of the oven to 200C and bake for a further 5 - 7 minutes until the madeleines are golden brown.

Transfer the madeleines to a rack to cool (or alternatively eat them all whilst they are still warm and skip lunch...).

A Day in the Life of a Market Trader

2009-08-31T17:25:00.005+01:00

I hung onto the giant parasol to stop it flipping over and Mum made sure the fruits of our 12 hour stint in the kitchen were all safely under cover as the rain lashed down and gale force winds swept through the Covent Garden piazza. Bottles from one stall came crashing down and talk of closing the market had us panicking about what we'd do with all the stock. Then, as if nothing had happened, the wind dropped, rain stopped and the sun came out to dry our red and white bunting and bring out the punters.

All in a day's work for a market stall trader... But we are no ordinary stall holders. No siree! Don't get me wrong, me and mum both have plenty experience of baking for the masses and mum has done a million and one 'big cake sales' for charity, but nothing of quite this magnitude. A stall in the local church hall is one thing. A full day selling our homemade cakes, tarts and jams at Covent Garden is another. I guess what we were out to achieve was that (usually uncoveted) 'one hit wonder' status (OK, maybe we had some idyllic pipe dream that this could be a rosy future...!). For us, this was a couple of days off from our day jobs to do what we love best - cook - to sell the fruits of our hard work and, in the process, learn about the 'selling side', have some fun and meet a few people.

Not long after I started blogging I joined the UK Food Bloggers Association (UKFBA) - a place for UK food bloggers to connect with each other. Sometime in the Spring when Julia Parsons, who founded UKFBA, first mentioned the UKFBA stall on Covent Garden Real Food Market there was talk of nominating our favourite producers to man the stall every Thursday throughout the summer. This was soon given short shrift as my fellow food bloggers came forward with plans to sell their own homemade wares - lavender & honey bread, chutney, lemon curd, tamarind ketchup, keema lollipops, carrot cake, Irish soda bread, jams, muffins in all shapes and sizes, tarts, quiches and brownies galore!

I have to admit that I hesitated to sign up. Much as I liked the idea, I work full time - how would I find time, could I do all that on my own and (above all) who would calculate the amount of change due (not me, that's for sure...!). It was only when I mentioned it in passing to Mum when we were cooking up a feast for Dad's 60th in May that the idea of taking the stall one Thursday became reality. As many of the other bloggers who have done a stint on the stall will undoubtedly agree, it's so much easier with two!

The Covent Garden Real Food Market is a weekly market that runs every Thursday through the summer. For the most part, the stall holders seem to have stalls on other markets in London, like Borough Market. There's a nice feel to the market which I am sure would be much livelier on a sunny Summer's day... In fact when I popped down to see Rejina (Gastrogeek) and Signe (Scandilicious) a couple of weeks' ago the sun was shining and people were swarming around the market. What a difference a touch of sunshine (and two charming and beautiful bloggers-come-market-traders) can make!

The best part of it all for me was the full day spent cooking away at our own pace in my kitchen, preparing the lemon drizzle cakes, carrot cakes with cream cheese topping, blueberry and almond tart, leek and gruyere tartlets, redcurrant jelly, peach and amaretto muffins, pecan tarts, stem ginger biscuits, lemon curd, tomato and goat's cheese puff pastry tart, white chocolate and raspberry muffins, traditional all butter shortbread, apricot and vanilla jam and our best sellers...chocolate brownies.

The big day itself was undoubtedly hard work. The rush to set up and get everything laid out and labelled up got the adrenaline going though and that saw us through the best part of the afternoon and helped us weather the storms. It was great to meet all the wonderful people who popped down to say hello and the compliments, including the one from the lovely American woman who came back especially to tell us that our carrot cake was the best carrot cake she had ever eaten (and, she assured us, she had eaten a lot!), made us feel pretty good. But as the day drew to a close and the temperature dropped we were certainly ready to sit down, have a beer and reflect on an intense couple of days' work (oh, and flog a few more jars of jam in the pub and then at our post-market dinner at Ganapati in Peckham!).

I did say never again when my feet where aching the next day....but I can just see our lovely homemade mincemeat, jams, gingerbread and Christmas puddings going down a treat on the Christmas Real Food Market!

Meringue Success!

2009-08-09T19:44:00.001+01:00

Meringues have never been my forte. I've made meringue roulades with some success (apart from that time when I welded the sticky sugary mess to the baking paper about half an hour before friends arrived for dinner). But I've never mastered the art of the beautiful simple meringue. It's not that I haven't tried , or at least had the very best of intentions of using those egg whites which I carefully put into a plastic tub in the fridge...

I found myself with one such little tub full of egg whites last weekend after our bake-a-thon for the UKFBA stall. Determined not to waste them I called Mum (who needs recipe books when your mum is but a telephone call away...). Her advice was 2oz caster sugar for each egg white, a capful of white wine vinegar, a tea spoon of cornflour (which I didn't have), beat the egg whites until stiff and then beat in the sugar a spoonful at a time until glossy. Armed with these pearls of wisdom I set to work making plain meringues and (inspired by my recently purchased Ottolenghi cook book) some blackberry swirl meringues to use up some blackberries which were lurking in the back of the fridge.

When I posted my photos on flickr last week, @goodshoeday who writes the blog With Knife and Fork asked me what the secret to good meringues was. Like me, she'd never managed to make perfect meringues like you see piled high in Ottolenghis. Jubilant from my recent success I promised to blog about them. I'm not saying they will be just as good next time. But for once, I made meringues I could be proud of so here's what I did. Let me know if they work for you!

Ingredients

4 egg whites
8oz caster sugar
1 tsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp cornflour (I didn't use this because I didn't have any, but I'm told it's good for meringues which are nice and gooey in the middle)

Method

Set your oven on low - around 100C (I set my fan oven at 90C).

Unless you're Popeye after a good dose of spinach, the best way to make meringues is with an electric hand whisk or the balloon whisk on your mixer. Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Then, with the mixer still running, add the sugar a spoonful at a time, making sure it's fully mixed before adding the next spoonful. Eventually the egg and sugar mixture will turn thick and glossy. Add the white wine vinegar and the cornflour and mix thoroughly.

Grease and line a baking sheet with baking parchment. Put big serving spoonfuls of the meringue mixture on the baking sheet and bake for at least 1 and 1/2 hours, until the meringue is crispy and cooked through.

Quite a few people seem to be foraging for blackberries at the moment and the blackberry swirl meringues are perfect to use up the last few blackberries which haven't made it into jam, crumble or tarts...

Blackberry Swirl Meringues

Make some blackberry coulis by blitzing a handful of blackberries with a tablespoon of caster sugar. Pass the coulis through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.

Take half of the meringue mixture above and add a large spoonful of the blackberry coulis. Don't stir it in or you'll just end up with purple meringues! You only need to give the mixture one stir with the spoon so that the meringue mixture has that 'raspberry ripple ice cream' effect.

Cook in the same way as the plain meringues, although they may need a little longer because of the extra liquid.

Blackberry Eton Mess

We ate the leftover meringues in a blackberry eton mess - whipped double cream, broken up meringue, leftover blackberry coulis and fresh blackberries. It's not a pretty dessert but it tastes damn fine!

More Gingers, Vicar? Summer Berry Cheesecake

2009-08-09T16:00:00.001+01:00

Alas, we were pipped at the post in the Viewers' Choice Award by the lovely Helen and Lizzie - the Go Go Gin Girls. Huge congratulations to them!

Although the Nom Nom Nom 2009 competition is finished now, I couldn't possibly leave you with no recipe for our dessert of Summer Berry Shortbread Cheesecake...

Ingredients

For the shortbread:
6oz plain flour
4oz butter
2oz golden caster sugar

For the filling:
zest & juice of 1 lemon
zest & juice of 1 lime
300g cream cheese
150ml double cream
115g caster sugar
summer fruits (raspberries, strawberries, etc)

For the raspberry coulis:
Handful raspberries
1 tbsp caster sugar

Method

Combine the shortbread ingredients until the just come together. Roll out to 1/2cm thickness and cut into rounds using a 8cm straight edged cutter. Carefully lift the rounds onto a greased baking sheet using a palette knife. Bake at 180C for approximately 15 minutes until they are a pale golden brown. Leave to cool on the baking sheet and then transfer to a cooling rack.

Mix the cream cheese, lemon zest and juice, lime zest and juice and sugar. Whip the double cream and stir it into the cream cheese mixture. Cover and chill for at least 30 minutes.

Make the raspberry coulis by blending the raspberries and sugar together using a stick blender and then pass the puree through a fine seive to leave a smooth coulis. Put to one side and prepare your summer berries - leave the raspberries whole and slice the strawberries.

To build the dessert put a tiny blob of the cream cheese mixture in the centre of each plate and place a shortbread round on top. Then add a good tablespoonful of the cream cheese mixture, some summer berries and a teaspoon of the coulis. Repeat with another shortbread round, cream cheese mixture and summer berries. Finish with a swirl of raspberry coulis around the plate.

It's a lovely dessert for a summer's evening with friends because you can make each element in advance (even the day before) and then just layer up the desserts at the last minute. Enjoy!

More Gingers, Vicar?: Sea Bass with Aubergine Caviar

2009-07-27T22:24:00.002+01:00

Please vote for us - More Gingers, Vicar?

The idea behind this vibrant main course was to prepare something which was not too heavy and would leave plenty of room for dessert. There's nothing worse than a 3 course meal where you get to the end of the main and have no room for pudding - where's the fun in that?!

Our Nom Nom Nom 2009 main course of Pan-Fried Sea Bass with Aubergine Caviar was based on a Gordon Ramsay recipe we'd both seen in a magazine a couple of years ago. The ingredients and vivid colours just shout "summer"!

Ingredients

4 fillets of line caught sea bass

Aubergine Caviar:

2 large aubergines

4 sprigs fresh rosemary

2 garlic cloves

good olive oil

salt & pepper

2 tomatoes (skinned and deseeded)

1 tbsp good quality balsamic vinegar

3 tbsp pepper sauce

fresh basil leaves

Pepper Sauce:

1 red pepper

1 yellow or orange pepper

2 shallots

2 garlic cloves

olive oil

2 tbsp white wine vinegar

200ml vegetable stock

tarragon

basil

Method

Start by preparing the aubergines. Slice the aubergines in half lengthways and place them into a roasting tin, cut side up. Score some holes in the aubergine flesh and stuff with slices of garlic and rosemary. Drizzle generously with olive oil and season. Roast in the oven for at least 45 (until golden brown and cooked) at 180C.

To make the pepper sauce, saute the peppers, shallots, garlic and herbs in about 100ml olive oil for 10 minutes or until softened. De glaze the pan by pouring in the white wine vinegar and letting it evaporate which will only take a minute at most. Add the stock and simmer for about 10 minutes until the stock has reduced.

Remove the cloves of garlic from the pepper sauce and liquidise the sauce until smooth. To get a really smooth sauce, pass it through a sieve.

Next you will need to finish the aubergine caviar. Remove the garlic and rosemary from the aubergines and scrape the flesh out with a spoon. Chop the flesh and add to a bowl with the chopped tomato flesh, balsamic vinegar, pepper sauce and basil. Adjust the seasoning to your taste.

Wash the sea bass fillets and score the skin diagonally. Season both sides. Heat a pan and then drizzle a little olive oil on the sea bass skin. Add each fillet to the pan skin side down and hold each one down with your fingers or the back of a fish slice for about 30 seconds. Cook for around 2 - 3 minutes on each side and then stand to one side.

Whilst you are cooking the fish you may want to reheat the aubergine caviar and the pepper sauce.

To serve, place a couple of large spoonfuls of the caviar in the centre of each plate, place the fillets of sea bass on top of the caviar and drizzle the pepper sauce around the plate. We served this with buttered spinach, but you could use your favourite seasonal vegetable.

Food for Sharing

2009-07-26T12:34:00.004+01:00

Our Big Lunch went off with a bang! What a fantastic day. Even before we'd all sat down to eat together at our long mish mash of tables up the middle of our street we felt like it had all been worthwhile. I caught up with neighbours who I wave to most days and met others who I had honestly never seen before despite them living only 10 doors away. Everyone brought the most amazing homemade and homegrown food - lettuces, tomatoes and courgettes from peoples' gardens, Sri Lankan pastries, huge bowls of colourful salads, sundried tomato bread, tarts and quiches, soups, cinnamon whirls (why oh why did I not get my hands on one of them...?!)... We had magic tricks, a clown on stilts, middle class dub from the back of a morris minor courtesy of Sly and Reggie, giant jenga and a lot of talking. And the rain stayed away!

I wanted to make food to share and also to test out my brownies ahead of my turn on the UKFBA stall at the Covent Garden Real Food Market on 30th July 2009! So I decided to make some vegetarian salads which would go with anything and Delia's Tomato & Goat's Cheese Tart which is not only the simplest tart you can make it is also super, super tasty.

Delia's Tomato & Goat's Cheese Tart

Ingredients

1 pack all butter puff pastry (you can make your own, but are there really enough hours in the day?!)
750g tomatoes (thinly sliced)
150g soft goat's cheese
2 cloves garlic (crushed)
fresh thyme
olive oil
salt & pepper

Method

If you have the ready rolled pastry then just unroll it onto a lightly oiled baking tray. Otherwise, roll out your pastry into a rectangle measuring approximately 15"x12". With a sharp knife, mark a line about 1/2" from the edge of the pastry all the way around without cutting right through the pastry. This allows the pastry to rise at the edge.

Mix the goat's cheese, garlic, seasoning and a good handful of chopped thyme leaves. Spread onto the pastry base. Layer the tomato slices in lines on top of the cheese mixture, overlapping as you go. Drizzle with a little olive oil, season with salt and pepper and lay some thyme on top.

Bake in a medium oven (approx 170 - 180 C) for around 50 minutes to an hour, until the pastry is cooked and the tomatoes are starting to crisp at the edges.

Allow to cool slightly, then cut into slices and share with family, friends or neighbours!

For the salads I chose a Tabbouleh, which is light and fresh and goes really well with most things, including the Tomato Tart, and a potato salad. Potato salads tend to be the sort of thing most people like - a crowd pleaser. This particular recipe is one that I have made for years ever since reading Delia's recipe for Anya Potato Salad in her Vegetarian Collection. It's a good solid vegetarian cookbook - not my favourite, but one that covers so much day to day food and food for entertaining that it spends most of its time in my kitchen rather than on the bookshelf.

Tabbouleh

Indredients

200g bulgar wheat
1 small red onion
large bunch of flat leaf parsley
750g - 1kg tomatoes
1 lemon
olive oil
salt & pepper
1 clove garlic (optional)

Method

Cook the bulgar wheat and leave to cool. I do this by putting the bulgar in a small pan, covering with cold water, bringing it to the boil with the lid on and then I turn the heat off and let the steam do the rest.

Make the dressing in the bottom of a big serving bowl by whisking the juice of 1 lemon (this isn't set in stone - use less or more depending on your own taste), salt, pepper and crushed garlic clove together, then whisk in the olive oil. I always find those little 'wonder whisks' are perfect for making dressings as they help the ingredients emulsify which is what you want from a good dressing.

Finely chop the red onion and add it to the dressing.

Chop the tomatoes into small pieces - around 1cm square and pop them in a sieve over a bowl to drain off any excess juice. You can put them in juice and all but I find that it sometimes makes the salad too soggy. Slice the parsley as thinly as possible starting at the leafy top and going all the way down to the stalks. Slicing the parsley this way is something I learnt a few months ago and really makes a difference to the taste.

Mix all the ingredients together with the dressing and red onion and it's ready to serve. It keeps well for a day or so which means you can make it in advance if you need to.

Anya Potato Salad

Ingredients

2kg Anya potatoes
5 or 6 shallots (finely chopped)
chives
1 dessertspoon Dijon mustard
1 dessertspoon balsamic vinegar
1 dessertspoon white wine vinegar
4 or 5 dessertspoons olive oil
salt & pepper

Method

Cook the potatoes in salted water, drain and put to one side.

Make the dressing by mixing the salt, pepper and mustard together in the bottom of a big serving bowl. Add the balsamic and white wine vinegars and mix with a wonder whisk (or a fork if you don't have one). Then add the olive oil and whisk until emulsified. Put the shallots in the dressing.

Once the potatoes have cooled slightly (but are still warm) add them to the dressing and mix. Sprinkle with chopped chives and serve either warm or cold. Again this can be made in advance, but the chives are best if you sprinkle them over at the last minute.

More Gingers, Vicar?: Summer Gazpacho

2009-07-22T22:08:00.015+01:00

Please vote for us - More Gingers, Vicar?

There's little more summery than beautiful ripe tomatoes like these from The Tomato Stall on Marylebone Farmers' Market. These beauties were sweet and packed with flavour - just perfect for our Gazpacho starter for the Nom Nom Nom 2009 final.

Gazpacho is a cold Spanish tomato soup which originated in the southern region of Andalucía. It is a perfect refreshing summer dish, especially on a hot sunny day. I can picture myself now sat outside in the garden, the sunshine beaming down, a glass of chilled fino in my hand and a small bowl of vibrant, fresh gazpacho in front of me... (if only the summer would come back to London!).

I'd tried gazpacho in the past and never been particularly enamored with it. That was, until I spent 2 weeks in Andalucía earlier this year. If you have the best, fresh, ripe ingredients it is simply delicious. And what's more, it couldn't be simpler to make.

What better way to kick off our seasonal summer menu for the Nom final?!

Summer Gazpacho

Ingredients

1kg tomatoes
1/2 cucumber (we used a lovely organic spiky one on the day
1 sweet red pepper
1 yellow or orange pepper
1/2 red onion
1/2 red chilli (or more if you prefer your gazpacho to pack a punch
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp good quality sherry vinegar
100ml good fruity olive oil
1 tsp muscavado sugar (you may need more or less depending on how sweet your tomatoes are
worcestershire sauce (to taste)
salt & pepper

Method

Roughly chop the tomatoes, peppers (seeds and stalk removed), cucumber, red onion, garlic, red chilli, olive oil, sugar and vinegar. Put it all in a blender and blend until it's as smooth as it will go. Put a seive over a bowl and seive the soup mixture to remove all the skin and pips - you will probably need to push it through with a spoon.

You should be left with a smooth soup which you can season to taste with salt, pepper, worcestershire sauce, more sugar (if needed), etc.

Pop it in the fridge to chill until you are ready to serve.

If you like the sound of this recipe please vote for us in the Viewers' Choice Awards. It's really simply - you just need to go to this page on the Nom Nom Nom 2009 website and vote for More Gingers, Vicar?

The Big Lunch

2009-07-18T16:07:00.009+01:00

In less than 24 hours we'll be hanging the bunting, setting up tables, bring the food out of our kitchens and sitting down to lunch with our neighbours. It's been a fair few weeks in the planning. 3 mail shots, 1 gathering (and quite a lot of Pimms...), 1 meeting with the Council, countless emails and here we are!

The guys at the Eden Project came up with a great idea to encourage people right across Britain to get to know their neighbours - The Big Lunch! The idea is that the people of Britain to stop what they're doing and sit down to lunch together on Sunday 19th July 2009 for no other reason than to join together in one great big street party. So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. Between now and then I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for decent weather...

If the idea behind it all is for me to get to know my neighbours then I'm pretty much on track. When I first contacted everyone on our street to find out whether they fancied joining in the fun I probably knew a dozen or so people on our street. Now I can pretty much name check everyone. In London that's no mean feat. Many people don't even know their immediate next door neighbour.

One of my neighbours, Joy, will celebrate her 50th year living on our street this year! Apart from short spells in Islington and Bristol, Joy has lived in this area all of her life and remembers well the street parties to celebrate VE Day in 1945. How amazing is that? Here we are in 2009, 64 years later, getting together for another street party and I can't wait to hear from Joy whether she thinks it matches up!

Steve Bridger who writes the Big Lunchers Blog wrote about Joy's story yesterday and you can read it here.

But for me it's not just about meeting everyone. It's also about the food! I absolutely adore cooking for other people. There's nothing better than spending time and effort making something, however simple, that people enjoy eating. So, for my contribution tomorrow, I'll be making Anya Potato Salad, Tabbouleh, a Tomato & Goat's Cheese Tart, Brownies and Shortbread. I'd better get cooking...

What I Ate: Roasted Beetroot & Puy Lentil Salad

2009-07-18T15:31:00.007+01:00

I'm always hungry when I get home from pilates. It's such hard work! But I'm not great at organising myself to make lunch when I get home on a Saturday, especially if Andrew isn't around. For some reason Saturday lunch always ends up being a grab and run affair squeezed in between pilates and shopping and washing and doing all those things I didn't have chance to do during the week. Which is wrong seeing as that means that one of my two 'this is my time' lunches is always a non-event. That's not the way it should be surely?

Today I guess I was fortunate to find good leftovers in the fridge which I could craft into a tasty lunchtime salad. Roasted beetroot left over from making Lebanese beetroot salad on Thursday evening, some cooked puy lentils (the rest of which went into a puy lentil tabbouleh with grilled halloumi earlier in the week) and flat leaf parsley which was beginning to wilt.

Ingredients

2 roasted beetroot (peeled)
1 spring onion
3 tbsp cooked puy lentils
a handful of chopped flat leaf parsley
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
1 dessert spoon sherry vinegar
2 dessert spoons olive oil
salt & pepper

Method

Make the dressing by mixing the mustard with some salt and pepper in a bowl, add the vinegar and combine, then whisk in the olive oil. Finely slice the spring onion and add to the dressing with the lentils, sliced beetroot and parsley.

If you haven't got roasted beetroot lying around in the fridge then you can roast them by washing, wrapping in a foil parcel and popping them in a medium oven for an hour or so (preferably whilst you've got the oven on for something else!).

A super simple, earthy salad. It would work so well with some goat's cheese or goat's curd but alas the goat's cheese in my fridge is destined for a tomato tart for tomorrow's Big Lunch street party!

Nom Nom Nom 2009: Coming a close second...

2009-07-15T20:39:00.018+01:00

Please vote for us - More Gingers, Vicar?

I think it was the Summer Berry Lemon Shortbread Cheesecake that did it. Clinched us that coveted runners up spot that is. Crisp, butter shortbread. Smooth, citrusy cream. Uber fresh English strawberries and raspberries, bang in season. Tom Aikens said it was great. Great. A Michelin starred chef thought our dessert was great! How cool is that?

I'd like to say that I arrived at the Cookery School on Little Portland Street relaxed and in plenty of time for the finals of Nom Nom Nom 2009 - 'the Masterchef of Bloggers'. But I would be lying. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have absolutely no sense of direction. Spin me round 3 times on the spot in my own house and my parents used to say I'd be lost. My Nom team mate - Chris Dreyfus of More Tea, Vicar? - assured me it was simple. Come out of Oxford Circus tube, head up Regent's Street and turn right. But the map on my blackberry said something else. So I followed it. I found the street alright (eventually) but how does 15b not come anywhere between 1 and 30? Well on this street it doesn't. I was about to call home for Andrew to laugh at me and guide me in when I spied the distinctive purple sign. It was only 9.30am on a Sunday morning. How am I supposed to do anything at that ungodly hour?

Nom Nom Nom is a fun competition for bloggers, writers, photographers and food enthusiasts. It’s a cooking contest that takes places over one day and sees eight teams of two shop for ingredients and cook a three-course meal that is then judged by a panel of experts.

I shall admit to being more than a little excited. I've never cooked under pressure before and I usually cook alone (the obvious exceptions being when I cook with my Mum or with Not Aunty Lisa). Yet here I was about to embark on cooking an unfamiliar menu with someone I've only known (if you can call meeting face to face about 3 times 'known') for a few weeks.

After a much needed breakfast of the most delicious freshly baked cheese scones, first stop was Marylebone High Street and the Marylebone Farmers' Market for ingredients. What a choice! But with only £40 to spend on quality produce at central London prices we had to spend wisely.

The brief was to cook a 3 course meal for 4 people that was simple, sexy, sustainable and seasonal. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, one course had to be a cold course - no cooking allowed. What better time to cook with seasonal ingredients in England than in the summer?! Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, peas, broad beans, strawberries, raspberries, everything berries....

After hours of planning, deliberation, recipe testing, consultation and ingredient sourcing (or perhaps over a couple of email exchanges and a drunken night in my kitchen), Chris and I devised our Sensational Simple Sexy Sustainable Seasonal Summer Menu!

Starter Gazpacho with Goat's Cheese Crème fraîche

The recipe is here.

Main Course Pan Fried Sea Bass with Aubergine Caviar

The recipe is here.

Dessert Summer Berry Lemon Shortbread Cheesecake

(recipes to follow soon...)

If our escapades in my kitchen during our trial run were anything to go by it should have all gone horribly wrong... Chris tried to flood my kitchen with gazpacho and, having got the quantities mixed up in the shortbread, I ended up making enough biscuits to feed most of my colleagues the following Monday. But it was remarkably calm. In fact the whole kitchen was calm. Eight pairs of amateur cooks beavering away, stopping only to have a quick chat or take photos for our blogs, and all managing to plate up just in the nick of time before the cries of "Stop Cooking". OK, so maybe there were a couple of moments when panic nearly set in, like when the judges came down to watch and talk to us whilst we cooked. Talking intelligently to and putting the final touches to our dishes at the same time was no mean feat!

You know what? It's exhausting work. Added to all that adrenaline, it wasn't until we all sat down together to share the leftover food that we realised how tired (and if we really admitted it to ourselves, nervous) we all were. The judges seemed to take forever as we waited with bated breath...

I think Chris was quietly confident, but I was totally bowled over when we were announced as the Runners Up!!! And proud of us both! The judges are all experts in their fields and they liked our food. You can read all about it here.

Having tempted your tastebuds with all of this talk of food, there is one little thing we'd love you to do for us and that's vote for More Gingers, Vicar? - VOTE HERE!

There is a serious side to all of this and that's to raise money for Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organisation, working in 43 of the world’s poorest countries. Its vocation is to save lives, especially those of malnourished children and to work with vulnerable populations to preserve and restore their livelihoods with dignity. There are some fantastic prizes to be won in the Nom Nom Nom raffle in aid of Action Against Hunger. Please spare £5 or more to support this worthwhile cause.

Did I mention that Tom Aikens loved our dessert?

What I Ate: Summer Pasta

2009-07-14T21:57:00.011+01:00

A few people have asked me recently why I don't blog more about what meals I make on a day to day basis. This is something I chatted to Kerri of Dinner Diary fame about at a fantastic Italian wine tasting event organised by Dan of Bibendum recently. You see, Kerri and Stephen's blog is slightly different to many of the other food blogs out there in that they write about almost everything they eat. Not just the highlights and the meals out, but pretty much everything (including tennis shaped pasta in honour of Wimbledon...) 365 days a year.

For me though, the truth is that (1) I didn't think anyone would be interested in my 'thrown together' week night dinners, (2) Monday to Thursday food for me is generally healthy vegetarian sustenance rather than fancy things to write home about and (3) I simply don't have enough hours in the day.

But they're all just excuses, so here goes!

Whilst sorting through some of my photos yesterday I came across this one of a pasta dish which I make in various different guises once the fresh spring vegetables begin to make an appearance each year and heavy pasta sauces no longer seem quite right. It's super simple and really tasty. You can make it with any Spring or Summer vegetables you have lurking in the fridge (or freezer). The photos are from one I made during the short (but oh so sublime) English asparagus season in June this year, but you could add any bright, fresh, seasonal vegetables (peas, green beans, broad beans...).

This first one is for some very good friends of mine who have asked me (several times...) for inspiration for weeknight meat-free meals. They're not veggie, oh no, they love their meat, but they're looking to eat less of it sometimes and eat more vegetables on a daily basis.

Ingredients

Pasta (wholemeal if you're feeling particularly virtuous)
Selection of seasonal vegetables (here I used courgettes, frozen broad beans and asparagus)
Small tomatoes (halved)
Black olives (pitted and halved)
Spring onions (finely sliced)
Olive oil
Garlic
Feta (cubed)
Salt & Pepper

Method

Pop a pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta and add the pasta once it has come to the boil. Slice your vegetables and steam until al dente (courgette slices, broad beans, etc only take a couple of minutes).

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and add the spring onions and garlic and saute gently for about a minute. Add the steamed vegetables, tomatoes, olives, cooked pasta and a couple of table spoons of the pasta water. Season with a little salt (remember the olives and feta will be quite salty) and black pepper. Add the feta and serve immediately.

Wine Tasting Jolly Olly Style!

2009-07-09T21:30:00.001+01:00

You know it's not going to be a stuffy wine tasting when the session starts with high fives all round. But who could expect anything else from the inimitable Olly Smith?! He's loud, vivacious, colourful and (as I came to learn) a genuinely top bloke.

I'm a big fan of Olly's no nonsense, open style. He talks about wine in everyday language that people understand. He makes wine tasting accessible for everyone, not just the wine buffs. Which is good for me. I know what I like but rarely push the boundaries to see what else is out there that might take my fancy.

So it was that, on one of the hottest days of the year, I found myself in a giant dome (or Obi Wan Kenobi's living room as Olly would have it), slowly roasting, at Tapas Fantasticas 2009 - a free festival celebrating Spanish tapas and Rioja wine which ran over two fun-filled days in Brick Lane Yard, London.

The first slot of the day can't be an easy one. It was 12 noon and I'd only just managed a slice of toast for breakfast. I certainly hadn't quite got into the swing of the whole event. But the high fives set the tone just nicely. A bit of frivolity is a great way to kick start a Saturday in the sunshine.

We kicked off with the Marques de Caceres Viura 2008. A great drinkable wine. Fresh, zingy and appley. In Olly's words "yum-tastic". Great with paella or just on it's own on a hot summer's afternoon poured over a load of strawberries and ice.

Next up was the Campo Viejo Rosado 2008. This is a super modern rose. It's pale in colour and smells of roses and summer fruits. The blurb is right when it says that it would be perfect with summer salads, but I'd probably go for it as an aperitif on a balmy summer's evening.

Elena Adell, the winemaker for Campo Viejo, calls herself a homemaker-winemaker and declares a love crocheting and designing small items of clothing. How random is that?!

For the reds we stepped up a price bracket or two. Olly declared of the Baron de Ley Finca Monasterio 2006 which is 80% tempranillo - "I rather like this one!". It's a rich wine which has been aged in French oak for 18 months. I'm not sure £14.99 for a wine which Olly thinks tastes of cola cubes will be one I'll be buying regularly, although the 7 Vinas Rioja Reserva 2004 from the same vineyard was pretty special.

The Reserva and Gran Reserva wines are more savoury and the CVNE Imperial Reserva 2001 was definitely drier on the tongue but the wine lighter in body. Apparently that means it's like spiderman's costume - light but strong.... The 10% graciano grape gives the acidity.

By the time we reached our final wine we were running way behind schedule. It was time to sup up our glass fulls and any spares knocking around, finishing with the Marques de Murrieta Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva 2001. At £36 this can only be described in my books as a 'Christmas Wine' - something you get to push the boat out for and drink but once a year! It's quite a leathery wine, but one that's also sweet and spicy. This one wasn't for me and certainly not at that price.

Most of the wines we tasted are 'ready to go' wines. They have already been aged and, unlike the more classical wines of Bordeaux for example, they don't need ageing (or in some cases are best not kept for long) - a great thing if you're useless at keeping your mitts of the wine on the rack at home.

All that on one slice of toast...I headed straight for the tapas (and another glass of rose...)!

A Tweeter's Tale

2009-07-03T17:00:00.005+01:00

On a sunny Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago I found myself heading along the towpath from Camden Lock in the direction of Regent's Park in search of the good ship Finale - the Guardian's Word of Mouth Taste of London festival fringe (or #tastefringe in twitter speak) HQ for the weekend. Armed with a Guardian press pass, my camera and an empty tummy (I even skipped breakfast for the occasion), the plan was to descend on Taste of London to eat and drink the day away, all the while reporting 'on the hoof' to anyone who cared to read my 'tweets'.

For those of you uninitiated into the world of twitter, it's a social networking and mini-blogging service through which people keep in touch by giving updates (or tweets) of 140 characters or less. It's highly addictive.

So I set forth, along with my comrades, to Regent's Park to fulfill my mission of eating. Lots. Completely altruistic on my behalf! I did it all for the lovely people at the Guardian of course...

Bearing in mind I ate for about 5 hours pretty much non-stop, I would bore you to tears if I repeated it here. So instead, here's a potted version of my day as a journalist. You can read more about my escapades gate-crashing the chef's kitchens in my piece for the Guardian's Word of Mouth here.

First stop was Launceston Place with it's 'taste of the seaside'. The potted devilled brown shrimp and crab which was served in a seashell on a bed of pebbles was one of my favourite dishes of the day. The rest had a lot to live up to! It was rich and unctuous - the small serving was just perfect. They are really passionate about presentation and the emotions you feel not just from eating but from the whole experience.

Dessert came in the form of the rhubarb ice cream which you may have seen on the great British Menu when Tristan Welch's suped-up Mr Whippy machine was causing him some serious grief. I nipped behind the counter to see take a closer look at it in action. Apparently (or so I am told) it's not like a normal Mr Whippy machine, oh no, this is a super duper ice cream machine. I'm not quite sure why, but it did churn out a perfect rhubarb ice cream whilst I snapped away - perfectly tangy rhubarb which went zing on my tongue. The real deal comes with custard ice cream and crumble topping too, but according to gastrogeek who had one, it was a touch on the too-creamy-not-so-amazing side.

There were a couple of things, looking back on the day, which were a touch out of the ordinary. The first was the order in which I ate. A normal meal will go something along the lines of savoury, savoury, sweet. Depending on where you are from, there could be post-sweet savoury in the form of cheese, or not. It was therefore a tad unusual to switch between sweet and savoury depending on what was served next. It is entirely possible that this had a bearing on which dishes I liked more than others - can you really pick up the subtlety of crab after eating rhubarb ice cream?

The second, although unusual certainly in Western society, was actually rather natural and humbling. From the outset, I shared dishes with my fellow tweeters (the chocolate sensation at L'Atelier de Joel Robouchon springs to mind) but it wasn't until later in the afternoon, sat around a big table in front of L'Anima with gastrogeek, moreteavicar, Tim Hayward and Francesco Mazzei, that I realised that fuelled with our desire to taste the food, we were not only digging in and sharing the food, we were also sharing our cutlery. And why not?

As well as being packed full of great restaurants, there were also producers, some of whom were ever so friendly and (more importantly) ginger. We received a little tweet from Paul A. Young offering free chocolates to bloggers and tweeters so we headed off on a little jaunt over to Paul's feast for the chocolate lovers' eyes stand for a chocolate tasting. Oh boy! I had never even heard about Paul's chocolates before, let alone tasted them. I did the polite thing though, I held back from the smash and grab on the free samples and snooped around taking a few photos of my eating companions for the day (gastrogeek and moreteavicar), chatting to Paul about his chocolates and about his lovely gingerness. Then, when the temptation overwhelmed me I went straight in for the kill with a pecan praline... Nothing I can say will do this (or, by the sight of moreteavicar weak at the knees as he bit into his salted caramel) justice so you'll have to go and buy some to see for yourselves.

Paul suggested Bryn Williams at Oddette's, which serves good British food, might be a good next stop. Well, what he said was, go and speak to Bryn, mention me and he'll give you some grub. Sure enough, a friendly Bryn (looking more than a little worse for wear, water in hand and clearly suffering from the excesses of the previous day!) doled out plate after plate of his fine simple food. As gastrogeek snuck away to a corner to devour her lamb (which she professed to being pretty amazing) I tucked into a plate of simple fresh crab. A good helping of both brown and white crab meat. Was that my third crab dish of the day? The menus seemed to be rather crab-centric.

One of my favourite desserts of the day came in the form of Bryn's simple lemon posset with strawberries and basil was great, proper summer stuff. It's just cream, sugar and lemon juice, simplicity itself and made by a friendly, approachable, great chef. So good it was gone before I'd taken a photo!

It was about then that I did a spot of kitchen-crashing again to take a peek at what was going on behind the scenes at Theo Randall's place. Theo was all smiles, but didn't have time to stop and chat, so I squeezed myself into a little gap alongside the 'pass' and chatted to him as he kept his beady eye on a couple of dozen scallops with chillis and datterini tomatoes and two pans of pasta on the hob. No mean feat in the sweltering heat in there. What a lovely man!

Theo is passionate about his ingredients - had I not been busy snapping away as he cooked and chatted I'm sure I could have written a short thesis on the origins, flavours and uniqueness of the datterini tomato. His kitchen style was calm and collected. There was a sense of ease in everything he did and, maybe I caught them at a good time (if mid-lunchtime rush can ever be a good time), but it was simple methodical clockwork in there. None of the shouting and swearing that TV programmes would have us believe is the norm. It was whilst I was chatting to Suse (the editor of the Guardian's Word of Mouth) over a glass of red back at the good ship Finale and recounting the best bits of day that this experience transformed itself into my piece for the Word of Mouth.

The scallops were pretty damn fine!

One place I was keen to try after Michele Caggiane at Galvin at Windows recommended it to me as one of his favourite two Italian restaurants in London, was L'Anima. Who could miss Francesco Mazzei bounding around and chatting to customers in front of the L'Anima stand? His energy and enthusiasm was contagious and soon we were seated, prosecco poured and the dishes began to arrive. We'd hardly started eating and Tim Hayward was raving about how good the food was.

My particular favourite was the Frisella with tomato and mozzarella. This wasn't any run of the mill tomato and mozzarella salad... It was probably the finest mozzarella I have ever tasted, milky, soft, melt in your mouth, piled with tomatoes, onions and basil on top of Puglian ring shaped bread. It sounds simple and it is. Good, honest, hearty food. The sort of food I'd be eating every day if I had such wonderful ingredients.

Two other fantastic puds which are worth a mention are the strawberry and hibiscus bellini with a warm strawberry and vanilla doughnut from The Ledbury and the raspberries with fromage frais mousse and verbena granite from Pied-a-Terre. Both were light and summery but had a twist that set them apart - the hibiscus in the bellini and the verbena granite. Genius.

Finally, when we thought we could eat no more, moreteavicar whisked us off to Viennese bakery Demel’s for sacher torte. By this point I really had no room left whatsoever, but after watching them carefully prepare the next batch - coating the sponge in apricot, mixing the chocolate, pouring the molten chocolate over the sponge - I had to have a taste at least!

I meandered back to #tastefringe HQ sated, exhausted and pondering on the life of a tweeting reporter.

You can see the rest of my photos from the day here.

Red Quinoa & Black Bean 'Chilli' Salad

2009-06-26T15:20:00.008+01:00

I've been a quinoa (pronounced keen-wa) convert for quite some time. Not only is it a complete protein in nutritional terms, which is great for non-meat eaters like me, but it's also actually rather tasty. It might not look it - it's a pale grain like any other and I have to admit that I wasn't completely taken with it the first time I tasted it plain (although it does have a strangely moreish nuttiness). But once I began to experiment with it, mostly in salads and pilaf, I decided it was pretty good stuff. Added to which I feel rather virtuous when I eat it because of its goodness!

OK, technically it isn't a grain. Despite the Incas, who considered quinoa to be sacred, calling it chisaya mama (the mother of all grains) it is apparently a wannabe-grain (or psuedograin as the experts would have it). A grain-like crop. It has been a staple food source in the Andean region of South America for thousands of years but it seems that it's significance for our modern diets (and in particular vegetarian and vegan diets) has only received increasing attention over recent years.

Whilst shopping in Paris last month I spied a packed of red quinoa which I had read about, but never seen before. I snapped myself up a little bag and brought it home to London to try out. Actual recipes for red quinoa proved to be far and few between so I came up with the idea of using Mexican flavours to create a red quinoa chilli salad...black beans, corn, red chilli. I served it with guacamole and tortillas, but to be honest, the guacamole overpowered it a bit so next time I think I would make a side salad with the avocado instead (and use less lime!).

Here's what I did:

Ingredients

150g red quinoa
1 tin black beans
1 small tin sweetcorn
1 sweet red pepper (chopped into pieces)
2 spring onions (finely sliced)
2 x cloves garlic (I used new season garlic)
1 x red chilli (finely chopped)
Juice of 1 lime
Rapeseed oil

Salt & pepper

Method

Cook the red quinoa. I do this by washing the grains in cold water, putting them in a dry pan for a couple of minutes until they start popping slightly, then covering them with water and simmering with the lid on for around 10 minutes until cooked but still with some bite.

Make a simple dressing with the lime juice, oil, seasoning, garlic and red chilli. Add the cooked quinoa, beans, sweetcorn, spring onions and red pepper and stir to serve. Some freshly chopped herbs may also work well but alas I had none...

Restaurant Review: Galvin at Windows

2009-06-24T22:30:00.009+01:00

There's something incredibly decadent and indulgent in treating yourself to a long, lazy lunch on a weekday when everyone else is at work. Even more so when you choose Galvin at Windows for your special treat!

Last Friday I'd taken a day's holiday to forget about the world of work and start my weekend off with a bit of 'me' time, which in my case invariably involves food, a glass of bubbly and, well, maybe some more food.

Armed with a good book in case I got bored (which I didn't) of staring out over London from the 28th floor of the Hilton on Park Lane, I made my way in good time for my 1.30pm reservation at Galvin at Windows. Of course, I managed to get lost (which is rather difficult seeing as all I had to do was walk from Marble Arch down Park Lane, but, if you know me, is no surprise - I'm not known for my sense of direction) which meant I arrived bang on time.

I was a little apprehensive about going to such a grand restaurant on my own. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not averse to eating alone when there's noone around to join me, but I'd never done the starched white table cloth and attentive service thing alone before. I really need not have worried. In fact, I'd do it again in a jiffy! There was no little table in the corner out of sight of the other diners for me (as I had feared). After a warm welcome I was shown to a table in amongst the other diners and, incidentally, right behind another solo diner - a gentleman who, I am told, eats there alone about three times a week and who certainly seemed to be a part of the Galvin family.

I could have gone for the Credit Crunch Lunch, but as I was treating myself, I didn't want to limit myself to 3 choices (although they would have been more than adequate!). Instead I'd opted for the Twitter Menu - the Menu Prestige plus a glass of champagne for £48. Not cheap that's for sure, but well worth every single one of those 4,800 English pennies...

My glass of bubbly arrived as I settled back to peruse the menu and grazed on some deliciously light olive sourdough (I say grazed...I'd polished the whole lot off before the end of my main course). Before I'd even had chance to decide what I wanted to eat, I think at least 4 people had asked me if I was OK. I certainly wasn't neglected, but perhaps a touch smothered at first...

My starter of seared Scottish scallops, crispy peanuts, curry oil, cauliflower puree & braised leeks was, quite simply, divine. Perfectly cooked, sweet scallop and velvety cauliflower puree. The crispy peanuts were unusual but worked well with the other flavours and the crunch added texture and lifted the dish. My only criticism (if I was really scrabbling for one) would be that the baby leeks were a tad difficult to cut so I had to hone my eating-things-without-looking-silly skills.

For mains I had toyed with the idea of the fillet of braised turbot over fresh peas, girolles, braised gem lettuce & light jus gras, but the 'jus gras' is made with veal stock, so on the waiter's recommendation I went for the 'lighter' seared fillet of wild sea bass, braised fennel, tomato & sauce vierge. I'm not sure whether his recommendation was based on his view that I needed to shed a few pounds or that I might be a lady who lunches for whom light is the key. Whichever way I was happy with my choice, with one exception - the coriander shoots. Why, oh why are chefs obsessed with these micro shoots? They look pretty and add some vibrancy, granted, but the overpowering taste of coriander (which to some people tastes like dirty wet pet hair smells) is too much. So, having scraped them all to one side of my plate I continued - with each forkful some tender sea bass, crispy skin, sweet tomato flesh, salty black olive and the simplicity of a good quality vinaigrette. It was light as the waiter had promised. And simple. The choice of a vinaigrette over a heavier sauce was genius and one I plan to replicate at home this summer. All washed down with a glass of Chablis.

Just as the waiter was about to take my plate away I realised there was lovely juice left so promptly mopped it up with my last scrap of the sourdough. Delightful.

Next stop - the dessert menu. Now, had I not been dining alone there would have been no competition. The tarte tatin. I'm going back at some point just to taste that beauty! Before I could make my mind up, Michele (the Restaurant Manager) offered me a tour of the kitchens which I jumped at. It amazed me how calm it was in there - I guess I had expected shouting and crashing and banging Ramsey-style. We stepped out onto a balcony out the back of the kitchen to a view which is out of this world. As Michele and I chatted about work/life balance and the best Italian restaurants in London we gazed out over Buckingham Palace to the right, the City ahead and Crystal Palace in the distance. It was breathtaking.

On the way back to my table I asked the chefs on the dessert section what to choose and received a resounding vote in favour of the strawberry panacotta with wild strawberries. Oh my were they spot on! The plate looked so pretty and summery - a small rich, smooth panacotta topped with strawberry jelly with the most amazingly intense flavoured wild strawberries on the side. Every mouthful was a joy. It was my first taste of wild strawberries and I was amazed at how something so small can taste so good.

By now I felt right at home and could have settled in for the afternoon! Coffee came in the form of a double espresso (followed by another which rendered me useless and on a caffeine high for the rest of the afternoon) served with salted caramels, madagascan truffles and chocolate coated raspberry jelly truffles. They looked exquisite! Just to be sure that the raspberry one was as good as I thought it was I had to ask for some more and prepared myself to have to be rolled out of there.

It was a truly memorable lunch for all the right reasons - amazing setting with the views over London, attentive and friendly service and damn fine food!

A final note to Fred - you must do the tarte tatin competition and count me in!

Damage: £48 twitter menu (3 courses from the menu prestige plus a glass of champagne and coffee & chocolates)

Galvin at Windows
22 Park Lane
London
W1K 1BE
Tel: 020 7208 4021
www.galvinatwindows.com

Restaurant Review: Ganapati (Peckham)

2009-06-19T09:31:00.025+01:00

Well, aren't I the lucky one living so close to Ganapati?!

Having gone to school in and lived near Manchester when I was growing up I was never very far from the curry heaven that is Rusholme. These days people seem to refer it as the curry mile but that sounds a bit too much like a 'strip' of bars in some cheesy tourist trap abroad for me. What I know now is that having grown up so close to such a wealth of good restaurants I was spoilt. Finding curry that lives up to my high expectations has not been easy and every time I have a not-so-good curry it puts me off trying again for a while. Which is a shame because I love all things curry and there are so many truly vegetarian options that it's perfect for me...

There is a plethora of Indian restaurants in the East Dulwich area and everyone seems to have their own favourite. But which one to try? I could have tried the ones which seem to be recommended most on the East Dulwich Forum or started at the top of Lordship Lane and worked my way down, but to be honest since we moved here the majority just haven't appealed. We've had some good take aways from The Indian Dining Club in Sydenham which has a good choice of vegetarian dishes (which aren't just huge chunks of peppers swimming in an oily tomato sauce...) but it's not the easiest place to get to from where we live without a car which rules out having a beer.

I've known about Ganapati for quite a while, but it wasn't until I read Helen's review on her Food Stories blog that I finally got around to booking a table last Tuesday evening.

Ganapati serves South Indian home-style and street food, the likes of which you would find being dished up in the homes or served on the stalls by the side of the roads in Southern India. They have a short (but more than adequate) menu which changes regularly and boasts a large number of vegetarian dishes, in fact the majority of the starters are vegetarian. Great for non-meat eaters and omnivores alike.

Andrew magnanimously let me choose all of our dishes for us to share (probably because I was like an over-excited child in a sweet shop when I saw the menu!). We started with the Vegetarian Street Snacks - 2 Mysore Bonda (spicy potato balls fried in chick pea batter) and 2 Parippu Vadai (patties of ground chana dal with ginger, curry leaf and green chilli) which came beautifully presented on a banana leaf and shouted 'Eat Me'! Perfect for sharing. My favourite were the spicy Parippu Vadai which looked a bit like mini flying saucers. They were highly spiced and so moreish. I had high hopes for the Mysore Bonda which looked so pretty, but I felt that the potato mixture inside lacked a little heat (although that could be because I ate the Parippu Vadai first).

Our other starter was the Masala Dosa - a rice flour and lentil pancake stuffed with spicy mashed potato and served with sambar and chutneys. The dosa was huge! The potato stuffing was lightly spiced and worked well with the sambar. I made the mistake of putting too much of the red chutney on my first mouthful and it nearly blew my head off. Lesson to self - try the chutneys first!

I have to admit that by this stage I was beginning to feel really rather full...but I pushed on to our mains of Paneer and Peas Masala (paneer in a tomato, onion and green pea masala) which came served with pickle, thoran and a Keralan Paratha and Pumpkin, Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry (a vegetable dish cooked with chana dal in coconut milk and spices with fresh coriander) which was served with thoran, pickle and raitha. The large chunks of paneer came in the most glorious masala sauce. Quite often paneer is lost in dishes or is rubbery and tasteless. These pieces had taken on the flavours of the masala, were moist and a delight to eat! This was my favourite of the mains by far.

The Paratha was simply amazing. I've never had paratha (an unleavened bread cooked on the griddle or tawa) before so I have nothing to compare it to, but then I don't need to as it was delicious flaky, rich and buttery bread which went perfectly with the Paneer and Peas Masala.

We upgraded our plain boiled rice for Curd Rice (Sona Masori rice and yoghurt tempered with mustard seeds, curry leaves, ginger and green chilli) which was lovely on its own but, aside from the sourness of the yogurt which was refreshing in contrast to the heat of the curries, its delicate spicing was a little lost amongst the spices of the other dishes.

I only wish I'd had more room to eat more! In fact I think I'd go back just for the thoran.

Damage: £30 for 2 people (plus beers)

Ganapati South Indian Kitchen

38 Holly Grove

London SE15 5DF

Tel: 020 7277 2928

www.ganapatirestaurant.com

The Underground Restaurant

2009-06-14T08:46:00.042+01:00

Well, what can I say? What an amazing evening...

You may have heard by now about the latest London phenomenon of the so called 'pop up' or 'underground' restaurants... They've been around for years in other parts of the world and so too here in London, but this year seems to have seen a proliferation of these 'secret' eating places, where home cooks open their doors to complete strangers and serve restaurant quality food in return for a 'contribution'. And everyone seems to be writing about them.

The Underground Restaurant is one such restaurant run by MsMarmiteLover. I say restaurant with some hesitation...technically speaking a restaurant is 'a public premises where meals or refreshments may be had' (which this is not). A more apt definition (even if it isn't endorsed by the Concise Oxford Dictionary...) might simply be 'an eating place'. Whatever it is, I wonder - is the Underground Restaurant a dinner party masquerading as restaurant or a restaurant masquerading as a dinner party...

We set off on the mighty trek from South East London to Kilburn a tad later than we'd hoped. There was no way I wanted to be late. I'd been looking forward to this all week. As is always the way in London, wherever you want to go at the weekend is usually the most difficult place to get to and yesterday was no exception thanks to the closure of the Jubilee Line. But, 2 trains, 2 buses, 1 tube, a bit of walking and nearly 2 hours later we were knocking on the door of the Underground Restaurant 5 minutes ahead of schedule. Our wonderful waitresses for the evening, Ali and Lenny, welcomed us in, fostered Kir Royales on us and left us to choose our seats at one of the pretty tables set up in what is usually MsMarmiteLover's living room.

It was a bit like being first to arrive at a party. I drank my drink too quickly and wandered to the kitchen to find out what was going on. I think I expected the kitchen to be a scene of carnage but in fact it was surprisingly calm. And tidy. I introduced myself to MsMarmiteLover and Shuna - guest chef for the evening - and tried not to get in the way (well, not too much). The kitchen with its wonderful aga was a hive of activity and it was great to have a first glimpse at what we were about to eat.

I wandered back to the 'dining room' and introduced myself to the other diners. It soon got to the point where we had to sit down - there just wasn't enough room to stand in and around the tables with 32 people (the most so far I think MsMarmiteLover said). We were joined on our table by the lovely Jo, Sarah, Becky and Kirstin who made excellent dinner mates for the evening. And that's the whole point of this...it isn't just like going to eat in a restaurant with your husband, wife, friends, colleagues. It's like going to a great big dinner party where you don't know any of the other guests. You sit at a table with people you have never met before and that is a crucial part of the whole experience. It's refreshing.

To kick us off, Ali came round with a huge platter of parmesan and poppy seed biscuits. Small rounds of rich, buttery biscuits packed with parmesan which had been rolled in poppy seeds. A lovely accompaniment to our aperitifs and much needed to put me on until the starter was served.

With our kirs finished, a £10 raffle ticket 'won' us a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Not one we would have chosen ourselves, but a tasty wine that drank well...far too well!

The starter was something I'd never heard of let alone tried before - goat yogurt granite with caramelised pine nuts, preserved lemon and basil. Wow. Totally innovative and great to be served something different, something I'd never have thought of making. The cool, icy granite worked perfectly with the caramel flavours of the pine nuts and then, every so often, you'd come across a tiny piece of the preserved lemon or basil which was a little surprise on the tongue. It was served with seed crackers which, whilst lovely, weren't the perfect match for me - I think I would have gone for a plain cracker or a savoury biscuit.

The atmosphere was lively and friendly. The whole evening had a very 'communal' (if that's the right word) feel - I chatted to the girls on our table, the people on the table next to me, lots of people on the balcony and whoever I stumbled across on the way to and from the kitchen (where I couldn't resist disappearing every so often to see what was going on behind the scenes!). You wouldn't get anything approaching this sort of an atmosphere in a restaurant unless you booked the whole place out and filled it with your friends. Ten out of ten.

Next came a huge plate of salad - endive, wild asparagus and pea cress with a lemon and mustard dressing - from which we served ourselves. The bitterness of the endive (one of my favourite lettuces) contrasted well with the sweet wild asparagus, which was a simply lovely vegetable. I don't think any of us were particularly dainty in eating the long thin slippery stems!

Main course was Melanzane Parmigiana - melt in the mouth aubergines, a rich tomato sauce and a healthy portion of melted cheese. It's not the sort of dish you see on restaurant menus very often (although The Greenwich Union do a nice one) and by all accounts that's because of the labour intensive aubergine preparation involved (which judging by MsMarmiteLover's twittering the night before was a little wearing after batch three hundred and fifty nine...). It wasn't a particularly pretty dish but my word did it pack a punch. Aubergines are one of my favourite vegetables - so versatile for vegetarian cooking as they can form a centrepiece for those who miss the 'meat' element of a meal or, as they did here, blend perfectly with other ingredients. One of my dining companions had never eaten aubergines before but she loved the dish and will be going back to Scotland as an aubergine convert!

Finally, to round off the meal we were treated to Shuna's inventive dessert of Profiteroles with Bay Carnoli Rice and Strawberry Salad. What a treat! Light aga baked profiteroles filled with a creamy rice pudding flavoured with bay leaf piled on top of a salad of super fresh strawberries with herbs (there was definitely tarragon and rosemary in there). Goodness knows where Shuna's inspiration comes from but it works. I watched her lovingly chopping all of the strawberries by hand before adding her herb mix. This is the sort of dessert that I've never seen on a restaurant menu but would love to!

As the evening began to draw to a close, some diners drifted away and MsMarmiteLover came to sit with her guests for a good old chin wag. She has seemingly boundless energy - photographer, food blogger, mother, home cook, restaurateur, the list goes on... I wonder does she ever sleep?!

Before we knew it it was midnight and any chance of making it back south of the river by public transport long gone so we ordered ourselves a cab, said our farewells to our fellow diners, the lovely waitresses, our hostess and her guest chef and headed homeward feeling warm and fuzzy, well fed and thoroughly happy. How many places do you go out to eat where you kiss everyone goodbye before you leave...?

Damage: £25 contribution & Wine Raffle £10 per ticket

The Underground Restaurant
http://www.marmitelover.blogspot.com/

Matilda (the kitten worthy of a champagne cream tea...)

2009-06-12T10:38:00.012+01:00

A Celebratory Cream Tea

2009-06-08T18:00:00.023+01:00

We became the proud owners of a beautiful little black cat yesterday and to celebrate her arrival I decided a champagne cream tea was in order! I've been fancying a cream tea for a while - I think it's the first sign of sunshine that does that...the decadence of spending lazy summer afternoons eating light buttery scones with lashings of jam and cream. Apart from the cream I don't suppose a cream tea is particularly cat-friendly and there wasn't any sunshine to be had yesterday as the rain poured down in torrents. But it was certainly fairly decadent to be sitting around sipping champagne and eating these little beauties!

Now it seems that even something as simple as a cream tea can cause great debate... What flavour jam? What sort of cream? Cream or jam on first? How do you pronounce 'scone'? Fruit scone or plain scone?

Cream teas originated in Devon where it is customary to split a freshly baked scone, cover each half with Devonshire clotted cream and then spoon strawberry jam on top. It has to be a plain scone, proper clotted cream (none of your whipped cream nonsense) and strawberry jam. Sounds about right to me, but with one exception...tradition or not, I like to spread my jam on first and then I can spoon on as much clotted cream as my scone will take. I'd rather have just the one scone with serious artery clogging quantities of cream than two sparsely coated scones.

And so it was that we found ourselves eating cream teas, drinking champagne and feeding the cat clotted cream off a teaspoon on a cold and miserable Sunday afternoon in June.

Ingredients

8oz self raising flour
2oz butter
1oz caster sugar
1 egg
3fl oz milk
2 teaspoons baking powder

Method

Mix the flour and butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then add the sugar. Beat the egg, then add the milk to the egg and mix. Add the egg and milk mixture to the dry ingredients slowly and stir to form a soft dough. You might not need all of the egg and milk mixture so don't add it all at once. Kneed lightly and then roll out to around 2cm thickness on a floured work surface. Cut into 5cm rounds and put onto a greased baking tray. Brush the tops with milk and then bake in the oven at between 200C and 220C (depending on your oven) for around 15 minutes or until golden.

Leave to cool slightly and then serve with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

For the record, it's pronounced like gone (not bone)...

Restaurant Review: Le Timbre (Paris)

2009-06-05T19:58:00.009+01:00

A beautiful sunny Friday in Paris and a pretty much faultless long, lazy lunch at probably the smallest restaurant I've ever been to - Le Timbre.

In the couple of weeks leading up to our long awaited weekend staying with family in Paris I seemed to find myself way too busy to do any restaurant research whatsoever. Seriously unimpressed. So all credit for finding this little gem of a restaurant goes to my husband...

Le Timbre is a stone's throw from les jardins du Luxembourg in a little unassuming side street. It is, as it's name suggests, tiny. At best there's room for only around 20 people to eat at any one time and even then fitting everyone in at their tables is an intricate business. The minuscule kitchen with its solitary chef, Chris (originally from Manchester), is in full view of the restaurant so you see all of the food being prepared. We had the table closest to the kitchen which suited me as I could not only watch Chris at work but also have a quick chat with him and the waitress when they had time to spare (which to be honest wasn't all that often...).

We kicked off with a glass of the crémant d'alsace whilst we pondered the short, but varied menu (and whilst I translated everything for Andrew). A good start. Feeling nicely rounded at the edges we ordered and decided to go for wines by the glass. Not cheap (with the current rather poor exchange rate) but well chosen and, given that this is a capital city restaurant, certainly acceptable. I have simply no idea what we drank though...probably too much!

The service was friendly, relaxed and knowledgeable. You can ask about any dish and get a response in French or English. I don't eat meat and there was nothing on the menu without meat (even the fish dish) but that was soon sorted with a quick conversation with the waitress and the chef.

I started with the tartine d'anchois aux oignons caramelisés. I wasn't quite sure whether it was going to be superb or a total flop. Thankfully it was the former. So simple - crisp toasted bread, plump tangy anchovies and sweet sticky onions. Who would have thought that the anchovies and caramelised onions would work so well together?

Andrew went for the soupe de poisson a l'estragon. Rich and deep in flavour but unfortunately a little lost on a man who has no sense of smell.

For mains, they kindly substituted the feves au lard which were supposed to be served with my filet de dorade with some mousserons poêles. The bass was perfectly cooked with crispy skin(no mean feat in my limited experience...) and, although the little mousserons which were sauteed in butter and garlic weren't supposed to go with the fish, they did. I was so busy enjoying eating it that I completely forgot to take a photo! Andrew's main course of magret de canard aux mousserons poêles was (apparently) also top notch. Now some people may find it odd for me as a non-meat eater to put a photo of meat to put a photo of a meat dish on my blog, but I don't have an issue with Andrew (or anyone else for that matter) eating meat and I'm sure some people reading would quite like to see what his dish looked like, so here you go...

When it came to dessert there was no contest. We'd seen it pass by on the way to another table before we'd even ordered and decided we just had to leave room - mille feuille du timbre. Three layers of crispy, sweet, flaky pastry interspersed with thick, rich vanilla custard. Sublime. Quite simply sublime. Go, just for this simple, yet luxurious dessert.

In short, it's 'intimate', so much so that you feel like you're eating in someone's living room, but all the better for it. And the food is good - very, very good. A fellow northerner knocking the socks of his Parisian and international diners. Good on him.

9.5/10 (but be prepared to bang elbows with your neighbour!)

Damage: 32€ for 3 courses and wines from 4€ per glass (we had 3 courses each, 2 glasses of crémant, 4 glasses of red, 1 glass of something sweet and sickly and a bottle of sparkling water and the bill came in at around 100€)

Le Timbre
3 rue Sainte Beauve
Paris 75006
01 45 49 10 40

Stichelton & Potato Blinis with Purple Sprouting Broccoli (ITB)

2009-05-31T22:14:00.014+01:00

It seems to have been a bit of a weekend for recipe inventions chez The Ginger Gourmand... I spotted Scott & Julia's monthly In The Bag challenge a few weeks ago and with two of my favourite foods - blue cheese and broccoli (I had in mind the purple sprouting kind...) - I decided to give it a go.

It's late (for me!) on Sunday night - tonight is the deadline and I have to be bright and bushy tailed ready for work in the morning so I'll make this brief.

I've been contemplating what I might make for a couple of weeks, but because I've been away for the last 2 weekends I've not had any real 'playing in the kitchen' time. So it wasn't until around 7pm this evening that I began rooting around the fridge for the ingredients to make my Stichelton & Potato Blinis with Purple Sprouting Broccoli...

The first blini was more the size of a small pancake and the flipping stage was a little hairy but the next few were much easier (with hindsight I could make them a touch smaller) and worked a treat. Rich blue cheese goodness in a super light blini topped with lightly steamed purple sprouting broccoli and slow roasted tomatoes. I'm not sure blini is the right word though... They're like a cross between a potato cake and a savoury ricotta cake - extremely light and fluffy but with the depth and substance of the starchy potato and the blue cheese kick every other mouthful.

The Stichelton was a good choice. I'd ummed and ahhed in the cheese shop on Saturday over my choice of blue cheese, but decided on this one because it had the sort of buttery texture I was after. I wanted the cheese to be firm enough to stay in little pockets in the blinis when cooked, but soft enough to melt a little into the blini mixture. I also think it's a lovely alternative to Stilton on a cheeseboard - our local deli stocks it and offered me some to try a few months ago when, as usual, I couldn't make my mind up which of the lovely cheeses I wanted to buy and I've been hooked ever since. I think a Stilton or maybe even a Blacksticks Blue would work quite well in this recipe too, although anything too soft, like a Gorgonzola would probably just melt into the blini mixture too much.

I like them. I'll be making them again!

Ingredients

250g (ish) potatoes
100ml milk
4 eggs separated
100g blue cheese (the stichelton worked brilliantly) cubed or crumbled
75g plain flour
salt & pepper

small vine tomatoes
olive oil
purple sprouting broccoli

Method

Start by putting the tomatoes in an ovenproof dish with some salt, pepper and a glug of olive oil. Roast for at least 30 minutes in a low oven (I did mine at around 130C fan assisted).

Boil the potatoes in their skins until cooked. Drain well and leave to cool. Peel the potatoes and mash. Mix in the milk and then the egg yolks and seasoning. Then beat in the flour. Whisk the egg whites until firm and then fold into the potato mixture. Stir in the blue cheese.

Heat a little butter and olive oil in a frying pan and then put a couple of large serving spoonfuls of the potato blini mixture into the pan. Fry gently until set enough to flip. You'll need to be fairly confident when flipping the blinis otherwise they'll end up in a bit of a mess. Cook until golden brown on both sides and set in the middle.

In the meantime, lightly steam the broccoli and then pop into a frying pan with some olive oil and seasoning and cook over a low heat for a minute or so.

Serve the blinis topped with the broccoli and some roasted tomatoes. I also drizzled over some of the tomato cooking liqueur I had left over from my tomato tarte tatin last night.

A Taste of Summer - Tomato Tarte Tatin (WTSIM)

2009-05-31T08:27:00.033+01:00

This month's Waiter, there's something in my... challenge from Johanna at the passionate cook is Bistro Food (see the round up here). I've had my eye on this monthly challenge for a while now, in fact since before The Ginger Gourmand was born, but I wasn't too sure about this particular challenge... Bistro food for me conjures up lots of hearty meaty dishes and very little in the way of veggie-friendly food, so I was a little lacking in inspiration at first. But just because something isn't a 'bistro classic' doesn't mean it can't be bistro food!

There are various ideas about where the term bistro came from... The online etymology dictionary says that it came from the French word of unknown origin which was originally Parisian slang for "little wineshop or restaurant". It is commonly said to be from Russian bee-stra (quickly) picked up during the Allied occupation of Paris in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon when troops were said to have shouted this at the French waiters to serve their food more quickly, but according the etymology experts this, however quaint, is unlikely. Another guess, they say, is that it is from bistraud (a little shepherd), a word of the Poitou dialect, from biste (goat). What do seem to be clear are the modern day culinary connotations of the word bistro - good, yet simple, moderately priced food served fairly swiftly in a relaxed informal setting (and in my view - with a nice glass of red!). By its very nature it's the sort of food which is either quick to prepare (steak et frites) or which can be prepared in advance in large quantities (cassoulet, onion soup) so that it can be served quickly when an order comes in.

After giving it some thought I finally settled on the idea of a tart or a savoury tarte tatin in some guise or another. A savoury twist on the classic French dessert. A dish that can be prepared in advance and then served cold, hot or simply at room temperature with a simple salad which fulfils the 'quick' element of the definition. The ideas which sprung to mind were a deep filled onion tart with slow cooked caramelised onions which almost melt in the mouth or a lighter, fresher shallot and thyme tart tatin, but both of these felt a bit too 'wintry' for a late Spring dish. I know the brief doesn't say that the dish needs to reflect the current season, but with the lovely sunny weather we've been having it's good the ring the changes in what we eat to reflect the approaching Summer!

Before going to Paris last weekend, I had pretty much decided on a simple tomato and mustard tart - similar to something I used to cook when I lived in France a few years ago. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend a lot of time living in the countryside on a small holding where pretty much everything we ate came from the land (vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat for those who ate it...). I learnt a great deal about basic French home cooking and this particular tomato tart is one Danièle and I made one day - it's basically pâte brisée, a thick layer of Dijon mustard, grated hard cheese and then a layer of thinly sliced tomatoes tucked under each other to form a seamless layer. I have several different recipes I like, including one inspired by a Delia Smith recipe which is basically a layer of puff pastry, a layer of garlic-y goat's cheese goodness and a thin layer of slow cooked tomatoes - perfect for picnics and parties.

I was all set to make my tomato tart when, last weekend whilst staying with family in Paris, we ate out in a little place in Le Marais which served a tomato tart tatin for which, I am told, this place is known. It was good and hit the spot, but the pastry, which was quite brioche-y, wasn't quite my thing. So there was born the idea for my first ever entry for 'Waiter, there's something in my...' and last night's dinner - Tomato, Gryuère & Mustard Tarte Tatin.

For me it fits the bill of being something that is simple, tasty, can be served quickly and goes wonderfully with a glass of red! Perfect for a quick lunch in the sun or a late supper with friends.

Ingredients

200g plain flour
75g butter
25g finely grated gruyère
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
fresh thyme
salt and pepper
3 - 4 tablespoons water

800g - 1kg large vine tomatoes
olive oil
1 teaspoon soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
dash of red wine vinegar
salt and pepper

Method

Make the pastry by mixing together the flour, butter, cheese, thyme, mustard and seasoning in the food processor and then gradually add the water until the pastry binds together. It might not need all of the water so be careful not to add to it all at once. Form the pastry into a ball, wrap in clingfilm and pop it into the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes or until you need it.

You will need enough tomatoes to fill your tarte tatin dish (mine is 7 1/2 inches in diameter across the base). Skin the tomatoes by scoring a cross on the bottom of each tomato and then plunging into boiling water until the skin starts to split. Pop the tomatoes into cold water and then peel the skins off and discard. Slice each tomato in half, remove the little green core and put the tomato halves into your dish, rounded sides down. Tuck them in quite tightly so that when they reduce down when cooked there will be no gaps.

Whisk together a couple of glugs of olive oil with the red wine vinegar, sugar, thyme leaves and season to taste. Pour this mixture over the tomatoes and pop them into the oven at around 160C (fan assisted) for around 30 - 40 minutes until they begin to reduce down. If there is a lot of juice place a sieve over the tomatoes to hold them in place and pour the juice into a little pan and put to one side.

Roll out your pastry so that it is an inch or two larger than your dish and place it over the tomatoes. Tuck the pastry in around the edges to make sure the tomatoes are sealed in. Bake in the oven at 190C (fan assisted) for 40 minutes or until the pastry is golden and cooked through at the edges where it is thickest. Leave to cool slightly.

Reduce the juice which you poured off the tomatoes by bringing it to the boil and simmering, then sieve out any seeds. Turn the tarte out onto a plate and brush the tomatoes with the reduced juice.

Serve hot, warm or cold with a crisp dressed salad (my dressing for this lettuce was 2 dessertspoons olive oil, 1 dessert spoon white wine vinegar, salt and half a clove of garlic finely chopped).

Cooking with Mother (Blueberry & Almond Tart)

2009-05-20T14:00:00.002+01:00

I spent last weekend at home in the beautiful county of Derbyshire to celebrate my Dad's 60th birthday with him and some of my family. There is always lots of talk of food when I'm with my mum and plenty of cooking too and this weekend, given its celebratory nature (!), was no exception. But by late afternoon on Saturday, although we'd been shopping for fresh ingredients for our main course for dinner, we hadn't decided on a dessert. We'd toyed with the idea of a rhubarb and almond tart as there's plenty rhubarb growing in the garden but just hadn't really got around to starting anything...

We eventually gave ourselves a kick start by making a batch of sweet pastry in the food processor, which we stuck in the fridge whilst we waited for further inspiration... It came in the form of frozen blueberries from the depths of the freezer and a jar of Mum's delicious homemade Bramble Jelly - a Blueberry & Almond Tart!

Mum makes fantastic jams, chutneys and marmalade (I can't vouch for the marmalade as I am not a fan, but Andrew tells me it's divine), my favourite being her blackcurrant jam - the 2006 batch. I'd never had her bramble jelly before and I noticed that I wasn't offered a jar to take home from the depths of the jam cupboard in the garage...no guessing why - she's keeping this one all for herself and who can blame her! It's quite simply delicious.

When it came to rolling out the sweet pastry, it wasn't having any of it. So in the end we gave up and just squished and pushed the pastry into the tart tin, plugging the tears and holes as we went along, before popping it into the freezer to chill. After blind baking it for around 20 minutes in the aga and another 5 minutes or so without the baking beans, we left it to cool slightly before slathering bramble jelly in the base of the pastry case, pouring over a generous amount of frangipan mixture and then adding our now defrosted blueberries.

By this point I think we (or at least I) had consumed a couple of glasses of Leffe and a glass of champagne so there is no chance of me remembering how long we baked it for but I do remember eating it. It's up there with my pear and almond tart that's for sure. The pastry was light, buttery and crumbly, without disintegrating completely when trying to pick it up on a fork, and the almond-y frangipan goodness worked well with the sweet bramble jelly and the slightly sharp, juicy blueberries. I'll be stocking up on frozen berries and nice jam ready for any unexpected guests this summer!

Ingredients
1 quantity of sweet pastry (8oz plain flour, 4oz butter, 1oz icing sugar and 2 eggs)

4oz ground almonds
4oz butter
4oz caster sugar
1oz plain flour
2 eggs

Jam (we used Mum's bramble jelly, but any good quality jam, like Bonne Maman blueberry, would be fine)
Blueberries

Method

Make the pastry and chill for at least half an hour, then roll out to line a tart tin (I used a 12 inch high sided fluted tin) and chill again. Blind bake for around 20 minutes (without the beans for the last 5 minutes or so) at 180 - 200 C (depending on your oven). Make the frangipan by mixing all of the ingredients (except the jam and blueberries) together.

Spread as much jam as you like over the base of the part cooked pastry case (you'll need a good layer), then pour over the frangipan mixture and dot blueberries all over the mixture, pushing them into the mixture a little. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until the tart is golden brown and the frangipan is set.

Enjoy a large slice with good company (or alternatively hide yourself away with the whole tart and eat the lot).

The Real Food Festival 2009 (London)

2009-05-13T19:45:00.008+01:00

The Real Food Festival is no gimmicky over-hyped food show teeming with sales people selling big name brands... It's sold as "the biggest producers market you've ever seen" and for the most part it is just that - a bit like a giant farmers' market. I have to admit that I was a little reticent about going to another food show at Earl's Court. The last couple of food shows I've been to there (as you can probably tell from my opening gambit) have been a letdown to say the least. Apart from the wine sampling of course! So it was with a little trepidation that I booked tickets for the Real Food Festival, wondering whether it would live up to my expectations... It pretty much does what it says on the tin - the producers are there en masse manning their own stalls and, in many cases, are more than happy to tell you everything there is to know about their particular cheese, vegetables, cider, bread, fish. For the most part these aren't smooth talking sales people looking for a quick sell. Certainly the people I chatted to reared or made their produce with their own fair hands, so not only were they knowledgeable about what they were selling, they were enthusiastic and looking to tell the world about what it is they produce. Good on 'em I say!

The idea behind the Real Food Festival is to showcase small producers who wouldn't normally be able to afford a stall at a food show. Graham of Connemara Smokehouse was telling us that with the cost of the big shows, plus the 'hidden extras' (£17 to hire a rubbish bin?!), transport and hotel accommodation it just wasn't worth their while as, not only would they not make any profit on sales at the show, they have to be away from the business for 3 or 4 days which also takes its toll on the smaller producers.

The other 'cost' element which Graham talked about was the cost of providing free samples to show visitors. I have to say that when we arrived we were really put off by the hoards of people crowding around the stalls, not all were there to talk to the producers or learn about their products, but some simply to take samples and walk away. Now I know the idea of a food show is to have the opportunity to taste what is on offer (particularly as people have paid an entrance fee) and I have no problem with that - of course I taste what interests me - but there surely there is a limit? Providing samples costs the producers a fair amount of money and it seemed that some people sampling had no intention of buying the produce and were just looking for a free feed.

Apart from the million and one cupcake and tea stalls (neither of which are to my liking!) that was the only downside to the whole lazy afternoon we spent wandering around stocking up on tasty morsels for the rest of the weekend. These are some of the highlights of the show for me:

Simon and Laura Thearle at Hunter House Farm produce artisan cheeses with raw unpasteurised sheep, goat and cow's milk. Laura was more than happy to spend a good 15 minutes telling us all about their cheeses and how they are produced. They rear and milk their own flocks of British Milksheep - a breed which were nearly wiped out during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2002 - and Polled Dorset Sheep, British Alpine and British Toggenburg Goats and Dexter Cows on their farm and then make their handcrafted cheeses in their own dairy. These distinctive cheeses are made to their own unique recipes and are named after some of their first animals - matching the character of the cheeses to the animals' personalities!

Our favourite was Kelsey (in the foreground of the picture) - a robust smooth textured cow's milk brie which only gets better with time. We have high hopes for the piece we brought home...!

I think my vote for the most passionate producer at the show goes to Graham Roberts who owns and runs the traditional family Connemara Smokehouse business, specialising in smoked wild salmon and tuna, with his wife Saoirse. The smokehouse, which is perched on the water's edge at Bunowen Pier in County Galway, was founded by Graham's parents in 1979 using a smoking kiln that was first commissioned in 1946. I remembered Graham from the very first BBC Christmas Good Food Show which I went to with my parents in 2005 when Mum had indulged us with a side of smoked wild salmon for Christmas Day breakfast and so, after starting to eat fish again recently, I was keen to try some of the other products that the Connemara Smokehouse has to offer. After a good 20 minutes chatting to Graham and Saorise and learning about the traditional methods of smoking which they use. Graham fillets all of the fresh fish himself after which the fillets are salted and left for 8 to 10 hours before being smoked over beech wood shavings for another 8 to 10 hours. The result is a product which is vastly superior in flavour and texture to much of the smoked fish I have tasted before. No wonder there's a chap in France who bulk orders 200 sides of smoked salmon with this colleagues every Christmas!

When we arrived at the Ashridge Sparkling Vintage Cider stand it was much later in the day and everyone was looking more than a little weary. We tasted the Vintage Sparkling Cider first which was dry and crisp with a long apple-y finish. Drier than we expected actually. We also tasted the Devon Blush which is essentially a posh 'cider and black' (!) but that lacked the flavour of the vintage. I like the Aspall Peronnelle Blush which is of the same ilk so it's not that it's not my kind of drink, it's just that after tasting the vintage it simply didn't compare.

Ashridge cider is made from 100% apple juice from well established Devon orchards where there are around 20 different varieties of cider apples. It's made using the traditional méthode champenoise - a process which takes around 3 years. So at £8 a bottle it's not bad really... One thing I've learnt from the Ashridge website since I got home from the show is that apparently there is evidence that secondary in-bottle fermentation began, not in Champagne, but with ciders in the Forest of Dean in the 17th century. This type of cider was held in high esteem in many quarters and was often the preferred alternative to French wines. I wonder...

La Mare Jersey Black Butter is something I've heard of before but had no idea what it was. Well, quite simply, it's Christmas in a jar! It's has the consistency and texture of a jam or chutney with all the flavours of Christmas pudding and yet it tastes buttery. An unusual alternative to chutney with cheese.

There was a whole section of the show about produce from Jersey (Andrew also had oysters and said they were some of the best he's tasted - I'll take his word for that...) and La Mare Wine Estate was one stall.

There was also a Jersey Royal Potatoes stand. They seem to have had a bit of bad press over the last few years and I have to admit that I've been one of the first to not only mourn the demise of the Jersey Royal but to openly voice my criticisms. As I stood in line waiting for my solitary potato smothered in Jersey butter and some Cornish sea salt I wondered whether I was wasting my time...but no, for the first time in a few years I had a Jersey Royal that tasted just how they used to! From what I understand, the inferior Jerseys we've experienced recently have indeed been grown in poly tunnels as suspected and that, combined with the fact that the producers have not had control of the packaging and storing of the potatoes has meant that when we rush to buy our first Jerseys of the season, we're not getting what we hoped for and expected. The trick, apparently, is to wait a little into the season when the 'proper' Jerseys show their faces so maybe now would be a good time to give them another go? The producer we spoke to said that they are also taking control of the processing and packaging back off the supermarkets so maybe that will also make a difference? I'll certainly be buying some if I see them this weekend.

As I've mentioned before, I haven't eaten meet for 18 years and for long periods have been vegetarian. But from time to time I cease to be veggie and go through phases of eating fish and when I do, I like to know where my fish is coming from. Fish4Ever's strap line is "Good canned fish - now and in the future...". They are all about 'fair fish' - small boats that land fish straight from the catch, decent working conditions, fair trade, sustainability, supporting artisan fisheries, no added nasties....

Action Against Hunger is one stall that I hope everyone at the show went to and supported. Action Against Hunger is an international network committed to saving the lives of malnourished children and their families in over 40 countries worldwide. They asked producers to contribute food products which they then filled bags with and 'sold' for a minimum donation of £15. There were some decent things in the bag, but that's not what it's about. Thousands of people came through the doors of Earl's Court of the weekend looking for delicacies to tempt their tastebuds when nearly 1 billion people worldwide suffer from hunger. We shouldn't feel guilty about enjoying our food, but when we're spending so much on tasty tit bits at a show like this what's an extra £15 or more to help people who have nothing to eat?

One of the last stops of the day was at The Tomato Stall where we were beckoned over to try the delicious mini plum tomatoes from the Isle of White. They're not cheap these tomatoes but they are well worth every single penny we paid for them. Bursting with flavour just like I'd grown them in my own back garden.

All in all it was a good afternoon out. Would I go again? Probably not next year unless the line up of producers changed significantly because I've seen what they have to offer and have kept the details of the ones that interest me. But maybe in a couple of years when I've forgotten all about this year's Real Food Festival and I'm ready to rediscover it again!

Get to know your Neighbours!

2009-05-13T08:16:00.003+01:00

The guys at the Eden Project have come up with a great idea to encourage people right across Britain to get to know their neighbours - The Big Lunch! The idea is that the people of Britain to stop what they're doing and sit down to lunch together on Sunday 19th July 2009 for no other reason than to join together in one great big street party.

I think this is a great idea! It's not that some of us don't already know our neighbours or that we couldn't organise an event to get to know each other off our own backs, but in reality how many of us do that??? OK, we might wave hello, stop for a quick chat or even pop in for a cup of tea from time to time, but in some areas people don't even know who lives next door to them, let alone futher down the street. I'm sure it's not because we don't want to know our neighbours or that we don't care, simply that many of us lead busy lives, move house more frequently than people did in the past or maybe we're just shy...

What better way to overcome all of those barriers and spend some time with the people who live so close to us than to share the enjoyment of sitting down for lunch together. It might just be the impetus some of us need to do something with our community. As The Big Lunch puts it:

"Wouldn't it be great if for just one day we remind ourselves about all that is good about us and bring about a moment that ignites a spark?"

For me the idea behind The Big Lunch is all about everyone coming together to share in a day of fun and frolics and contributing what they can, be that homemade food, music, wine, homegrown vegetables, M&S ready made nibbles, entertainment or simply good company. Eating brings people together and I for one am planning on getting involved and hope that my neighbours will join me!

I live on a lovely little street in London which has 25 houses and I'm lucky enough to know quite a few of my neighbours already. But I don't know them all...YET! Come the 19th July I'm hoping to meet them all! So far I've had a great response to the little notes I put through everyone's doors over the weekend so the ball is rolling...

Watch this space for updates!

New Ways with Sumac

2009-05-06T20:27:00.004+01:00

A fair while back I was given some sumac by a friend who is a fellow food lover. It has (and I hope I'm not in trouble for admitting this...!) sat in the cupboard with my other spices pretty much unused apart from the off sniff to see if would go with some concoction or other. Basically, I'd never really found an inspiring use for it until I came across this recipe - Sumac Spiced Aubergine Schnitzel with Tabbouleh.

Sumac comes from the berries of a bush that grows wild in the Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East. The berries are dried and crushed or ground to form a rich red powder which is used as a souring agent, in the same way that some cuisines use lemon. Sumac is often used to flavour grilled meats and fish, or mixed with yogurt and served as an accompaniment to kebabs. But, before this recipe, none of the recipes which use sumac which I've come across have been vegetarian and, not ever having cooked with sumac, I wasn't quite sure how to use it so it lingered at the back of the spice cupboard until now!

This is another really good recipe from The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia (which I've blogged about before) which, most importantly, works. Basically, it's a great big super tasty aubergine steak with a crisp crumb coating and I'm a huge fan of aubergines so it's great to find a new way of cooking them. It has all the flavours of the Middle East - parsley, mint, sumac - and works perfectly with the Puy Lentil and Feta Tabbouleh (shown in my photo above) which is also in The Modern Vegetarian. Here is my version of Maria's recipe (I changed some of her quantities to suit our tastes):

Ingredients

120g flat leaf parsley
20g mint leaves
4 tomatoes (finely diced)
1 small red onion (finely diced)
150g puy lentils (cooked)
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
50g feta cheese

(the original recipe also included 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon)

Method

Slice the parsley as thinly as possible starting at the leafy top and going all the way down to the stalks. Repeat with the mint leaves. Combine the tomatoes, onion, lentils, herbs and spices and season. Dress with the lemon juice and oil. Stir in the feta just before serving.

Having never followed a recipe for tabbouleh of any sort before (just making up my own versions) what Maria says about slicing the parsley made perfect sense! "It was Anissa Helou who first showed me the art of making tabbouleh. The secret of this beautiful dish lies in the way you chop your herbs - they should be lovingly sliced, very finely, to produce thin slivers with a minimum of bruising". The taste and texture of the parsley was exactly how I've tasted it in tabbouleh which I've eaten in restaurants but I'd never realised that the way in which you chop the parsley that makes the difference. It really is worth giving that parsley some loving attention because it does add to the dish in a big way!

It is slightly different to many of the main course vegetarian recipes I generally cook as it's made up of two distinct component parts, almost like you would have meat or fish with side of salad or vegetables. But I think that's a good thing because it may well inspire me to create similar veggie dishes where the side dish would go equally well with meat for Andrew.

Update: I remembered that after friying the aubergines in the crumb coating I put them in the oven for a short time (maybe 5 minutes) to finish cooking and crisp up some more. Whilst you can't prepare the aubergines too far in advance and leave them uncooked (the bread crumbs would go soggy!), you could probably prepare them to the stage of having fried them and then reheat in the oven when you need them which makes them perfect for entertaining.

The Best Pudding in the World Ever!

2009-05-04T11:06:00.000+01:00

This pudding was inspired by a recipe in a Spanish cookbook which I read in the bookshop recently... We are great fans of anything containing almonds, marzipan and amaretto (liquid marzipan as it's known in our house!). So a dessert which combines all 3...well, we couldn't contain ourselves!!! It's rich, sweet and simply delicious. It really doesn't need anything to accompany it but Andrew isn't his mother's son for nothing and he chose a good glug or three of cream to go with his dishful.

I'd suggest eating this pud on an evening when you're having a salad for dinner. Whatever you do, leave plenty room because you'll need it...

Ingredients

6 dried figs
50ml amaretto liqueur
unsalted butter
250g brioche (thickly sliced)
4 egg yolks
250ml double cream
200ml milk
50g caster sugar
100g marzipan

flaked almonds

(I'm afraid my measurements might not be 100% exact as I didn't write them down as I went along...but it's not really the sort of pudding that needs the measurements to be precise...if you like more figs for example, just add more!)

Method

Roughly chop the dried figs and put them into a pan with the amaretto liqueur and simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the amaretto has evaporated and the figs have plumped up (you can use more if you like or, for a non-alcoholic version try apple juice in place of the amaretto).

Butter both sides of the slices of brioche and tear or cut into large cubes. Mix the brioche, figs and cubes of marzipan and put into a buttered ovenproof dish (my dish was approximately 6 x 8 inches). Mix the liquid ingredients (eggs, milk, cream) with the sugar and pour over the bread mixture. Cover and leave to one side until you are ready to bake.

Bake at around 160C for 30 minutes. Then sprinkle a handful of flaked almonds over the top and bake for another 10 minutes.

Serve warm.

Not Mr Kipling's Cherry Bakewells...

2009-05-01T10:04:00.017+01:00

My husband has an odd (in my view) obssession with Mr Kipling's Cherry Bakewells...those full-of-transfats-sweet-sickly tarts topped with thick icing and half a glace cherry (which he picks off and doesn't even eat!). Only when he's ill though. Which I guess makes them some sort of comfort food for when he's feeling under the weather. As you may have guessed from my tone, I'm not a fan... Even worse despite the name association, these little tarts are such a far cry from the traditional 'tart' which originates in Bakewell (Derbyshire) - Bakewell Pudding.

Usually I will humour him and buy him a pack, but last weekend when he was stuck indoors recovering from an operation and uttered those little words "cherry bakewells" I decided enough was enough. Instead I put my mind to baking some little homemade almond and raspberry tarts. I couldn't find a specific recipe in the books I had to hand so set about making some sweet pastry whilst I figured out the quantities I needed to make an almondy filling for the tarts.

They turned out just lovely...

I'm even thinking that this weekend might see a variation on this recipe to include some lemon zest and juice in the filling and lemon curd in the bottom of the tarts instead of raspberry jam!

Ingredients (for 18 tartlets)

Sweet Pastry
4 oz butter

8 oz plain flour

2 oz caster sugar

4 egg yolks

Filling

jam (I used raspberry)

4 oz butter

4 oz caster sugar

2 eggs

4 oz ground almonds

1 oz plain flour

flaked almonds

Method

Make the pastry by combining all of the ingredients - I do this in my food processor but the 'traditional way' is to rub the butter and flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs and then add the sugar followed by the eggs and mix until the pastry comes together. Wrap the pastry in cling film and chill in the fridge.

Roll out the pastry and cut into rounds to fit your bun tin (I used my deepest bun tin which is probably half way between a normal bun tin and a muffin tin). Be careful not to tear the pastry like I did or you'll end up with sticky jam welding your little tarts to the bun tin! Fridge them for at least 20 minutes.

To make the filling, beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, then the ground almonds and flour. Put a teaspoon of jam in the bottom of each pastry case and then top with a big spoonfull of the filling mixture (the pastry might shrink a little and the filling will rise so don't fill too full).

Bake for around 10 minutes at 180C, sprinkle some flaked almonds on top of each tart and then bake for another 5 minutes or until set and golden brown.

Carrot Pancakes with Houmous and a Feta Salad (Maria Elia)

2009-04-26T18:10:00.013+01:00

Last weekend was another weekend filled with trying out new recipes. Maria Elia's Carrot Pancakes with Houmous and a Feta Salad looked ideal for lunch in front of the Bahrain Grand Prix.

I wasn't keen on the idea of the orange in the watercress and feta salad. Fruit in salad (apart from my mum's grapefruit, chickpea and watercress salad) is not my thing. In fact I'd made the salad and was dishing up when I decided that if I was following a recipe then I really should trust the person who wrote it...so the orange went in at the last minute, and am I glad it did! It lifted the whole dish and really wouldn't have worked without it. Although the recipe looks like it has lots of steps it not that complicated really. The flavours work brilliantly - earthy roasted carrot in the houmous, light spices in the 'pancakes' and the zing of the orange with the peppery watercress in the salad.

I'll make it again, but the carrot pancake batter needs to be lighter. I'll work on that (like I've been working on my vegetable bhajis ever since my mum recited her 'estimated' recipe over the phone to me sometime last year) and some days I might manage it and others...maybe not.

Just leave the feta out of the salad to make this vegan.

Another triumph with Purple Sprouting Broccoli

2009-04-25T01:35:00.029+01:00

I LOVE purple sprouting broccoli. It's a permanent feature in my fridge at this time of year and, arriving as it does at the end of the Winter season, it gives a little glimpse of the change in cooking styles from the hearty root vegetable dishes to the lighter, fresher meals of the coming Spring and Summer months. As with English asparagus during its short season, I like to make the most of it, so much so that I think that secretly Andrew is glad when it disappears again from the greengrocers...

It has a unique flavour which really needs showing off... One of the nicest and simplest ways is to serve it lightly steamed and then tossed with red chilli, garlic, olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice either as part of an antipasti type plate or as a side dish. I was about to include this in my meal plans for last weekend when I remembered a recipe in the Early Spring section of Paradiso Seasons by Denis Cotter - Purple Sprouting Broccoli with dried tomatoes and garlic on a corn pancake of leeks and puy lentils, with a rosemary cream. The title says it all...in fact I think it wins the prize for the longest recipe title of all time!

I bought Paradiso Seasons a few years ago knowing nothing of Denis Cotter or his famed vegetarian restaurant in Cork, Ireland - Cafe Paradiso. The recipes in Paradiso Seasons, which won ‘Best Vegetarian Cookbook in the World’ at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Barcelona in 2004, are (as the name suggests...) split into seasons, with Spring divided into Early Spring and Late Spring. If you try to eat local produce, when these seasons fall will undoubtedly depend on where you live and I find that here in London we can sometimes be a week or two ahead of my home county of Derbyshire for example.

The recipes in Paradiso Seasons are the sort that I tend to choose on a Saturday morning whilst flicking through a few cook books with my morning cup of tea and then spend time leisurely preparing for a special weekend dinner. It's not that they're complicated or difficult recipes to cook, just that many of them have several different component parts and, above all, I take great pleasure in spending a few luxurious hours in my kitchen pottering away and creating something special for dinner! My dream, which almost goes without saying, is of course to eat at Cafe Paradiso at some point in the future. I've never been to Cork but I hear its a lovely city to visit, so I have my eye on a weekend away and, what I expect would be, an amazing meal at Cafe Paradiso!

So, the recipe... The purple sprouting broccoli is the star of the show and, as Denis Cotter says himself, the rest of the dish is there to enhance and support this star ingredient. The result is actually quite a light dish (despite the cream sauce) which is perfectly balanced, both in tastes and textures and also as a vegetarian meal. The rich cheesy leek and lentil mixture wrapped in a thin lightly spiced corn pancake works well as a base for the mountain of lightly cooked purple sprouting broccoli. Don't be tempted to leave the rosemary cream off the plate...it complements both the pancake and the broccoli which for some reason amazed me as, whilst I would put rosemary and cream with the pancake ingredients of leeks and puy lentils, I would not have expected them to be such good partners for broccoli and tomatoes. Instead of dried tomatoes, I used semi-dried tomatoes in oil which I already had in the fridge, but I think they were a little too soft and broke down too much, so I'll seek out some dried tomatoes for next time (and there will definitely be a next time!).

(Denis Cotter has kindly said that I can reproduce his recipe here so watch this space for an update...!).

Lovely Food with Lovely Friends

2009-04-19T23:51:00.019+01:00

Some of our loveliest friends, who we don't get to see so often because they moved from London to Leeds a couple of years ago, came to stay this weekend with their beautiful baby girl. I wanted to treat them to some lovely food so that they could relaxed for once...

I spied a really interesting canape recipe on The Passionate Cook's blog a couple of weeks ago and it was just the ticket for an informal help-yourself-to-how-much-you-fancy (or the-boys-eat-the-most-and-we-all-fight-over-the-last-few) starter - Mini-Corncakes with Avocado & Lime Salsa. Super simple to make and I really liked them. They'd go down just as well at a swanky canape and champers evening as they would at an afternoon in watching the footie with some mates.

(my picture isn't the best...but then we had been in the pub all afternoon before I even started cooking...!)

Our main course - Chilli and Rosemary Aubergine Parcels with Smokey Mash- was a recipe from the latest addition to my recipe book shelf - The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia (who used to be Head Chef at Delfina in Bermondsey, London). It's my second favourite vegetarian cook book ever (Paradiso Seasons by Denis Cotter currently wins hands down...) and I've been slowly cooking my way through it for the past couple of weeks since I bought it. I mostly cook my own vegetarian creations, but every once in a while I find a cook book which inspires me to follow the recipe to the letter, and this is one. This recipe is inventive, different and, above all, it works perfectly. I'm not sure if I can publish the recipe here (I've tried to contact Maria Elia to ask her permission but so far no luck) so for now here's a photo of the finished dish to wet your tastebuds...

I know what you're thinking...how do you top a starter and main course like that...???!!! Well here's how - with my much perfected lemon tart...

Lemon Tart

2009-04-19T02:00:00.011+01:00

On a rainy day on holiday in France during the Rugby World Cup a couple of years ago I did a lot of cooking and baking. We got through over 5 packs of butter between two of us in less than 2 weeks... Needless to say I couldn't get into any of my work clothes on my first day back in the office after the holiday!

One recipe that I had time to perfect (and share with the lovely couple who we rented our holiday home from) was my lemon tart. Lemon tart is probably my most favourite dessert (apart from Mum's Pear and Rum Flan which one day I know she'll make for me again when she finds the recipe...), but whilst it can be glorious - sweet crisp pastry filled with with smooth, tangy, lemony goodness - it can also fall far short of the mark. Having time to perfect my recipe with good rugby on the TV meant I didn't mind so much that it was raining outside...

Ingredients

Sweet Pastry
150g unsalted butter
100g icing sugar
350g plain flour
2 eggs

Filling
275g caster sugar
4 eggs
2 egg yolks
190ml double cream
juice of 2 lemons (or 3 if they're not so juicy)
zest of 2 lemons

Method

Make the pastry by combining all of the ingredients - I do this in my food processor but the 'traditional way' is to rub the butter and flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs and then add the sugar followed by the eggs and mix until the pastry comes together. Wrap the pastry in cling film and chill in the fridge. Roll the pastry and line a loose bottomed fluted tart tin and put that back in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

In a clean bowl, mix the eggs, egg yolks and sugar. Then add the cream, lemon and zest.

Preheat the oven to around 190C and bake the pastry case with greaseproof paper and baking beads for about 10 minutes. Remove the paper and beads and bake for another 5 minutes or so. Reduce the oven to 150C and pour the filling mixture into the pastry case. Bake for 35-40 minutes until set.

Jerez

2009-04-04T12:16:00.074+01:00

Jerez is the place to go if you love sherry...

A little odd then, that as two sherry-virgins we planned a whole two week holiday around a visit to Jerez! But isn't that what a holiday is all about? Going somewhere new, seeing new sights, soaking up the culture and...above all (for me at least) sampling the local food and drink. When I travel there is nothing I like more than learning about the local produce and cuisine, trying out the bars and restaurants, shopping at the markets and recreating dishes I've seen or read about back at our holiday apartment. Each time I go away I learn something new and come home ready to use the new ingredients and styles of cooking I've seen on my travels - crostini, panzanella and caponata from Italy, the perfect tarte au citron from France, Oxford Blue and Simon Weaver's Organic Brie from the Cotswolds...and now, salmorejo, pimenton ahumado, oloroso dulce...

Back to the sherry... Jerez de la Frontera is the home of sherry and one of the three towns in Andalucia which make up the 'Sherry Triangle'. After reading Heston Blumenthal's article "The Hungry Traveller's Guide to Jerez" in Delicious a couple of years ago, Jerez had been on my hit list of places to visit and it didn't disappoint. Most tourists seem only to visit Jerez for a day, or two at most, but we were there for a little over a week (which seemed to amuse the man in the tourist office). Before we arrived we had great plans of a trip to Cadiz on the train and hiring a car to visit Cordoba and some of the typical Andalucian 'white villages' but when it came to it we ended up spending the whole week in Jerez...

Popping my Sherry Cherry!

It's not just about the sweet sherries your granny drinks like Harvey's Bristol Cream and Croft Original. Sherry (or Jerez, or Xerez) - the generic name given to these fortified wines unique to this area of Spain - are as varied and complex as other wines (some would say more so...). Fino is a light dry dry sherry drunk young and chilled. Manzanilla is a matured, slighly salty tasting, fino typical to Sanlucar. Amontadillo is darker and more robust. Oloroso is fragrant and complex - sweet oloroso makes a perfect dessert wine whilst the drier oloroso is great in cooking. Then finally, there's Pedro Ximenez, which is dark and syrupy, in fact some of the ones we tasted were oddly akin to Buttercup cough syrup!

Before arriving in Jerez I had never tasted any sherry other than the sort of pale cream sherry which was the preferred tipple of my grandparents' generation. Time to pop my sherry cherry came on day two of our holiday at El Gallo Azul - one glass of chilled fino and I was hooked! (Until my first 'fino-hangover' a few days later after which I drank considerably less of the stuff). Not only a perfect aperitif, it also drinks really well with seafood and tapas (stood at the bar of course!).

We visited two of the bodegas for which Jerez is famous during our stay - Bodega Gonzalez-Byass and Bodega Pedro Domecq - learning about the production of sherry, the most important part of which is the ageing process and in particular the solera and criadera system, whereby the young wines are gradually blended with the mature wines.

The Gonzalez-Byass tour was an 'all singing, all dancing' tour and, although very touristy, it was really well conceived and great for those of us who knew nothing about sherry. Tio Pepe is their best known brand and the tasting of this light fino are fairly generous at the end of the tour...! What I did find interesting was that the American oak barrels in which the sherry is stored are used by Gonzalez-Byass 30 years and then for another 20 years to store their brandy, after whch they are sent to Scotland where certain whisky producers use them to store whisky for the final 20 years of the barrels' lives.

We had a far less 'touristy' tour of the the Pedro Domecq bodega which is now American owned. The buildings and gardens are beautiful here and the tour guide willing (if a little difficult to understand). There were only four of us on our tour which meant lots of opportunities to wander off and take photos of the barrels and buildings.

Food Heaven

Whether you are looking for a mid-morning snack, fresh fish from the market, a meal with friends or tapas with a cold beer stood at the bar you are spoilt for choice in Jerez. There are so many places to eat and drink and watch the world go by! We snacked, ate and shopped at so many places that I'd be here all night if I tried to list them all. So, for the highlights...

For fresh vegetables, fruit, fish and friendly market sellers, head to the Mercado on Plaza Esteve. You can spot the best stalls - they're the ones with 10 old ladies queueing up to be served. What a delight to be able to sample some early summer alcachofa (artichokes), habas (broad beans) and esparrago (asparagus) after the endless months of root vegetables in England!

After all that hard work shopping at the market, weary feet need a rest and they don't need to go far to find it... If it's breakfast time then La Vega also on Plaza Esteve is the place to go for churros - sugar coated long thin doughnuts which are bought from the man who cooks them fresh at the back of the cafe. You'll see lots of people eating them - groups of women in the cafe, school girls congregating outside - but I have to say I wasn't a big fan. To me they tasted like savoury (slightly salty even) doughnuts dipped in sugar which was an unusual combination. Whether you like them or not, they are best eaten with the hot chocolate which, for chocolate lovers, is heaven. It's just melted chocolate in a cup really!

For an early aperitif, Bar Pampero, a spit and sawdust bar right outside the market is perfect for a fino (or three) and some delicious little green olives. We idled away a good hour or so sitting here in the shade watching the world go by one lunchtime. The bar is mostly full of men of all ages - mostly in groups or looking after their children or grandchildren!

Top 5 Eateries

Bar Juanito (c/Pescadaria Vieja - just off Plaza Arenal): Go for lunch on a sunny day and sit at one of the brightly coloured tables outside. Order the 'infamous' artichokes!

Bar La Moderna (c/Larga): The best papas alinas in town!! On a weekend evening this place is packed out with a total mix of people. Head there to soak up some atmosphere, propped up at the bar with a beer and a plate of the papas alinas.

Bar La Medina (in the Zoco de Artisania): A lovely setting for a lazy lunch (and it will be lazy...they're late starting service even by Andalucian standards and then will only serve what is actually ready...!). Great staff who are happy to recommend something typically local for you to try.

La Marea: We stumbled upon this place one fino-fuelled evening because it looked lively and atmospheric...and full of locals (always a good sign?!). Go for plates full of fresh seafood and funny looks from said locals when you haven't got a clue what you're doing and you speak only about 5 words of Spanish!

Bar Las Bridas (Paseo de la Rosaleda 4): There isn't really a menu here (although they'll give you one if you're struggling). Just grab a table and then let the owner show you what is on offer that evening. It's only a 10 -15 minute walk from the centre of Jerez and worth every step - try the gallo empanado (john dory goujons).

The Best of the Rest

Most days we wandered around the narrow streets in the different districts of Jerez which was a great way to get to know the city. It also meant that we stumbled across the Zoco de Artesania (Handcraft Market) where there are three floors of small shops selling artisanal products from Southern Spain and North Africa - beautiful handpainted pottery, brightly coloured throws and Moroccan tea glasses. Set in the middle with a lovely big terrace was Bar La Medina where we ate lunch a couple of times.

We spent a lovely hour or so wandering around the Alcazar in the sunshine. The best bit for me was the Camera Obscura where you can see everything on the streets below in amazing detail as well as the vineyards and sea in the distance - 20 minutes of looking around the city without having to walk anywhere!

Finally, for a bit of luxurious relaxation on our last day, we headed to the Hammam on c/Salvador 6. The idea is to start off in the warm pool and then alternate between the hot and the cold pools, staying as long as you can bear it in the cold pool (not very long in my case...!).

We stayed in a perfect spot on Calle Francos in a beautifully renovated apartment which (most importantly!) had a lovely big living space and dining table as well as a well equipped kitchen (http://jerezapartments.co.uk/).

Review: Bar Juanito (Jerez)

2009-04-04T11:26:00.012+01:00

We ate lunch at Bar Juanito (c/Pescadaria Vieja - off Plaza Arenal) on our first day in Jerez. It's a lovely restaurant set in a little alleyway leading off Plaza Arenal. We sat outside at a little table with a brightly coloured tablecloth and pretty green chairs. Bar Juanito comes highly recommended in lots of guidebooks and it well known for its artichokes which, whilst very tasty, weren't as mind blowingly good (if artichokes can ever be mind blowing!) as I'd hoped. They were served warm in a house specialty sauce - plain and simple which let the artichokes speak for themselves. We also ordered a tuna and pepper salad which was fresh and light, although a touch too much of the local Vinagre de Jerez for me. The waiter recommended the hake which was done in a very light batter and cooked to order - fresh, light and very tasty! We consumed a fair bit of the house vino tinto which was extremely palatable (isn't anything after 2 glasses at lunchtime?!) - served from the bottle at the table.

All in all it was a good lunch and a popular spot with locals and tourists alike, but maybe after everything I'd read my expectations were a bit too high...!

Review: Bar La Moderna (Jerez)

2009-04-04T01:52:00.003+01:00

We'd read about this bar in a guide or article somewhere which said what a great bar it was with a lively atmosphere and a varied clientele, where families with children, young couples and businessmen in suits all rub shoulders in the afternoons and late evening. But when we first wandered past thinking we'd stop for quick drink it didn't look at all welcoming with it's rather shabby decor and dark interior so we gave it a miss wondering whether we'd found the wrong 'La Moderna'.

Thankfully, on the Friday evening towards the end of our week in Jerez we decided to give it another go, when it was our first stop on what turned out to be a great night out! People were spilling onto the street in front of the bar, there were still families with young children sat at the few tables by the open front of the bar when we arrived after 9pm and lots of people seemed to be stopping by to greet people they knew who were sat there enjoying the warm evening.

We ordered a couple of beers and stood outside for a while before venturing in to find ourselves a spot at the bar to order some tapas - papas aliñás (a salad typical of the Cadiz region with potatoes, spring onions, tuna and eggs) and croquetas de bacalau (salt cod fritters). I had my camera with me to and for some reason that night everyone wanted their photos taking so I obliged - everyone was so high-spirited that I didn't want to refuse (nor was my 10 word Spanish vocabulary sufficient to explain that I wasn't a photographer by trade...). We eventually managed to get ourselves some bar stools and sat up at the bar conversing with the waiters in sign language and pigeon Spanish and English and wished we'd found this place earlier in the week.

La Moderna is a great bar with super friendly staff. If you can wrestle yourself the to bar, elbow your way in and catch the attention of one of the waiters to order a beer or a fino and then stand there and soak up the lively, happy atmosphere. Yes, the decor is past its best and no you probably won't get a seat, but even if you only stop by for one, make sure you order the papas aliñás (the best we tasted in Jerez) and have a chat with the waiters.

Review: Bar La Medina (Jerez)

2009-04-04T01:51:00.010+01:00

We didn't know this bar was here when we came to have a look around the Handcraft Market (Zoco de Artesania) but seeing the tables set out in the sunshine we deicded to stop for a bite to eat. We speak very little Spanish and the friendly waiter didn't speak much English so when he said that he'd just bring out some food that was typical of the region and we'd made it understood that I don't eat meat we sat back and waited to see what arrived...

First was a big plate of papas aliñás (with plenty of fresh spring onion) which was tasty - the potatoes were firm and waxy and the dressing well seasoned. It's a dish that traditionally contains hard boiled eggs and, as I don't eat eggs (they make me feel poorly...), it can be difficult if the eggs are chopped up so small that I can't pick them out - this was OK but Andrew ended up eating most of it. Then came two little bowls of Salmorejo, one with some chopped jamon de serrano and the other (for me) without. Salmorejo is a soup made with tomatoes, bread, oil, garlic and vinegar which originates in Cordoba. It is similar to gazpacho, but much thicker because it is made with more bread. It was a great introduction to this cold soup which I later ate in many different guises, both warm and cold. Finally, our waiter brought out some freshly fried cazón en adobo - beautifully fresh bite sized pieces of cazón (dogfish) in a light and perfectly seasoned batter. I was so taken with these little 'fish nuggets' for want of a better term, that I recreated them back at our apartment a few days later.

A perfect spot for a long lazy lunch in the sunshine and if, like me, you don't speak much Spanish then just point at the plates of food heading for other tables that take your fancy and ask for the same - you won't be disappointed!

2009-04-03T13:30:00.002+01:00

Inspired by an amazing recent holiday in Andalucia, my food blog (which has spent a very long time stuck at the 'thinking' stage) has finally made its first tentative steps from the drawing board to reality... Like most of those great new ideas I have whilst relaxing on holiday it nearly didn't happen, but here I am and I glad it did!