Twinkle, twinkle, little tomato

Have I told you about my arbitrary garden? For Christmas I was given a lovely wooden windowbox, containing nursery-bought thyme and sage, transplanted chives, mint and rosemary and a completely rogue tomato seedling.
The thyme and sage fell early victims to my habit of forgetting to water them. The chives, mint and rosemary have survived but bear the ravages of the ordeal. The rogue seedling is trying to take over our flat.
The tomatoes have even turned a lovely dark red, so I decided to override my own mild dislike for the fruit (and the Man's much more deeply held belief that Tomatoes are Evil) and use them in supper.
This was helped by my having brought back from Ireland some lovely floury potatoes and sweet carrots from my uncle's garden.
A couple of sea bass fillets seemed like a good idea when passing the fishmongers'.
I did have a bit of a Ready Steady Cook moment when I considered the menu, but it turned out surprisingly well.
The outcome was grilled seabass with tomato and fennel coulis, carrot gratté and steamed potatoes.
The seabass I rubbed with salt and pepper on the skin side and honey, balsamic vinegar and pepper on the flesh side, then put skinside up under a hot grill for seven minutes. (Hat tip to Jane for the honey and vinegar idea)
For the coulis, I softened garlic and fennel seeds in olive oil and butter, then simmered the skinned and chopped tomatoes in the fat for about 15 minutes. Then (struck with inspiration at the last minute - never very convenient) I sieved the sauce and put it back on the heat to reduce.
Fresh garden carrots are so delicious and unlike bought carrots that I simply grated them very finely with a microplane grater and sprinkled some window-grown chives on them for the colour. This left them light, fluffy and juicy all at once, as well as allowing their sweetness to display itself to admiration.
The steamed potatoes I just steamed.
I thought the whole was excellent, although the Man was less than enthusiastic about the carrots. I think he noticed there were vitamins in them.

How does your garden grow?

The Kitchen Accomplice is very firmly a London girl, but even she enjoyed the freedom of my uncle's vegetable garden in Ireland.
We were staying with my cousins, who live in the comfortable half of the house, but with full access to the garden. There we dug potatoes and horseradish, pulled carrots and beets, collected cauliflower and cabbage, even courgettes.
In the greenhouse, we found perfectly ripe white peaches - one each - and some slightly less ripe ones that we peeled and puréed for Bellinis. Rich orange apricots and three final sweet raspberries added to our horde.

Wedding breakfast

My sister got married recently. Here is what she ate for lunch beforehand.



Don't you think that's the most inappropriate lunch for a blushing bride?

Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup

I am not a big soup fan in general, but recently I have decided to reconsider this principle.
One thing that inspired this was a delicious carrot and coriander soup made by my lovely cousin Lindis - I have spent some twenty years avoiding carrot and coriander soup, but this was so delicious I had to have second helpings.
I have also perhaps reached an age where comforting food that is nevertheless not hugely over-filling is a useful addition to my life.
So for tonight I made pea and basil soup.
Very gently fry a macedoine of carrrots, onions and garlic until soft (takes longer than you can imagine), then add stock and peas, and bring to a simmer. Add a handful of basil and season, then simmer for ten minutes before blending with the soup gun.
On my own initiative I crumbled in some 'Bulgarian sheeps' cheese' from our local Turkish shop (aka feta), which added the right salty note.
Yum!

If the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall we flavour the meat?

Happy Parisians sit in the street,
Talking of what they have ate and will eat
- that's me, or used to be.
I have always scorned people who were bored with food, uninterested, only treated it as fuel, not bothered about what they ate. Apart from one very brief period of trauma in my life, when I barely ate for about a week, and didn't regain my appetite properly for several months, I have always been interested in what I was going to eat.
Now, for some reason, I'm not. Not that I have lost my appetite, but food just doesn't seem very interesting. I get hungry, but I just eat the nearest thing there is that will satisfy the hunger.
My boss (I hope she doesn't read this) would be pleased, because I no longer spend half the afternoon at work dreaming about the evening's menu, but it's left my life feeling a little empty.
None of this is to say I've stopped cooking, but I just don't get enthusiastic about it at the moment.
Maybe it's the heat.

Pork chop but no pineapple

While discussing the limits and attraction of representationalism, Terry Eagleton asks: "Why do we take delight in an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop?"
My answer is: "I'm not sure, but I take delight in a pork chop itself because it smells like a pork chop. And tastes like one."
Tonight we had a very simple supper - grilled pork chops with a sauce made of mustard and sour cream, courgettes and mushrooms fried in garlicky olive oil, and steamed rice. It took twenty minutes to prepare and cook, kept warm without detriment for a whole half-hour while I did a phone interview for work (stupid Americans, why can't they work normal hours?), and tasted delicious at the end of it.
But no pineapple. Who eats pineapple on a pork chop, apart from Professor Eagleton?

Lemon balm sorbet for Sybille

I made this last weekend, my first ever attempt at making sorbet. It was remarkably successful, given that it was done at the last minute, with no special equipment and a tiny and overcrowded freezer to make it in.

Darina Allen's Lemon Balm Sorbet

For four people; small, delicate servings

110g sugar
300ml water
1 large handful of lemon balm leaves
freshly squeezed juice of 1 1/2 lemons

Bring the water, sugar and leaves slowly to the boil, then simmer gently for 2-3 minutes. Allow it to cool, then strain into a freezeable container and add the lemon juice. Put it in the freezer.

After this, the instructions will depend a lot on your freezer. Mine left it still completely liquid after 2 hours, so I went to bed. In the morning, it was fairly solid, but I scraped it up with a fork until the ice was granita-textured, then put it back in the freezer. I did this a couple more times during the day - it never got as hard again - and it seemed to be quite a nice texture by the end.

Optional Twiddles:
I added a small slosh of elderflower cordial at the same time as the lemon juice, but that's just because I like elderflower in practically everything.
Darina Allen suggests folding in a stiffly beaten eggwhite when it is almost frozen, but a) I don't know how you know when that point will be without spending hours opening the freezer to check every 15 minutes and b) it seemed to work ok without.
Lemon verbena would work just as well as lemon balm.

Those seventies housewives knew a thing or two

Luckily it didn't occur to me till after the fact that the cheese fondue is surely the dish of the film The Ice Storm. It's one of my favourite films ever, but mostly because it makes you not want to do anything the characters do EVER.
Anyway, we were having people to supper on a weekend when the Accomplice was around, so I asked her if there were anything she would like to see on the menu - Cheese Fondue came right back at me.
Then the Man said his favourite dish recently had been the vaguely oriental salad with lamb chez M+K last week, so we decided to do a carnivores and adults only course of Thai beef salad - Tigers' Tears, it's always called in fancy Thai restaurants. Pudding occupied most of the decision-making time. Creme caramel? Since I learned how to do it without a pressure cooker, I have been longing for another opportunity to show off, but we thought perhaps after cheese fondue, a rich cream and egg pudding wouldn't be ideal. How about a veggie version of my favourite fruit jellies - little clear mounds of jelly with sparkling jewels of raspberries inside?
Well, that's what it looks like if you make it with gelatine and raspberries. With agar agar flakes and blueberries, it looks like a misshapen grey rubber ball and tastes not dissimilar.
So back to the drawingboard, or rather the windowbox. My one gardening success this summer has been a pot of lemon balm, which turned into delicious sorbet. Accompanied by strawberries, this turned out to be easy and delicious.
You may be thinking this sounds like an extremely odd menu - cheese fondue, thai beef salad, strawberries with lemonbalm sorbet - and you'd be right, but it seemed to work very well.
The cheeses were Cotherstone and Ardrahan - it took a good half hour of consultation and tasting to find suitable vegetarian cheeses for fondue - and I think I overdid the white wine in the sauce, but it was very nice nevertheless. Following instructions in the Joy of Cooking, I tore a loaf of bread into bite-size bits to dip in it. Steamed broccoli was also effective, as were teeny tiny new potatoes but nobody touched the beautiful red and yellow peppers I sliced to scoop up cheesy goo.

Posting boasting

This is boasting by proxy - I'm showing off about what fantastic cooks my friends are. Friends of ours, M and K, invited us to dinner last weekend. M has been on a diet (they're getting married in seven weeks) so he's been starving himself for a while. And so, as you can imagine, he spent a whole lot of daydream time planning the menu.

After copious amounts of champagne, we started with a lamb salad - herbs and leaves and tender slices of cannon of lamb; then caramelized quail halves with carrots and pine nuts; sweetbreads (mmmmmm yum!); watermelon and feta salad; guinea fowl and fennel salad.
At this point, M and K weren't sure if we needed another course - we might have politely said 'no, no' if we hadn't overheard K saying earlier to M "Don't you think you've sliced the bellypork a bit thick?"

So we finished up with the most delicious spicy bellypork on steamed pak choi. Mmmmm.
Technically it might have counted as an Atkins meal, which I've always thought was anathema, but it was delicious from start to finish.

I'd say it's going to be a happy marriage!

Smoothie stiffie

I like to be inventive with the odds and ends in my fridge - sometimes it's not even very difficult to work out what to do with some leftover blueberries and some rather elderly yoghurt. Smoothies for breakfast - what could go wrong?
So I whisked them up with my magic soup gun and laid the breakfast table while the Man was still in the shower. Since that can be up to 40 minutes before he is ready to breakfast, I went off to do various other household tasks.
When we sat down to eat our muesli and drink our smoothies, the drinks had completely solidified. Not just got a skin on, as I initially thought, but turned into rather nasty crumbly blueberry cheese.
Why would that happen?
So we had to start the day without any superfoods at all.

How do you say it again?

Everything I've ever read about quinoa tells you how to pronounce it, so I'm not going to add my mispronunciation to the general melee.
I had always assumed it was horrible, or at least indigestible, just like all the other stodgy, worthy stomach-ache-inducing foods health fiends try to persuade one to eat. But recently Jane, a blogger whose taste I trust, said she had cooked quinoa for dinner just because she liked it.
That made it worth a try, so tonight I cooked quinoa and spicy tomato and mushroom sauce. The sauce was a little over-chillified and the Man is not keen on chilli mushrooms, so it wasn't an entirely successful experiment, but the quinoa itself turned out to be very nice. Flavour-wise, I couldn't rate it much higher than innocuous, but the texture was lovely - soft, nubbly seeds with crispy, crunchy elements.
The next stage is to try it out on the Kitchen Accomplice. If she likes it, it will be a valuable extension of our repertoire.

Creativity challenge

When I worked at Neal's Yard Dairy, one of my favourite dishes was Coolea cheese melted on Staffordshire oatcakes - this was easy to have for lunch given the ingredients were to hand and our only cooking equipment was a George Forman grill.
Ever since, I have a tendency to buy the oatcakes approximately every third time I go into the dairy. Unfortunately I don't have a grill at home, the Man is underwhelmed by the concept of pancakes and cheese for supper and the Kitchen Accomplice rejects Coolea cheese because it uses animal rennet.
So all too often, my lovely oatcakes sit in the fridge until I have to throw them out, unless I can delve deep into my creative impulses and come up with an alternative.
This is usually based on Cafe Paradiso's suggestion involving a rather elaborate artichoke and garlic paste, asparagus and Oisin cheese. I bypass a lot of that, delicious though it is, and just put some cheese, a vegetable such as spinach and perhaps some pesto in the roll.

Cast into the shade

I am feeling very mediocre cooking-wise at the moment. An impulsive foray into the world of macaroons resulted only in flat things that looked like dollshouse cowpats and refused to come away from the greaseproof paper.
In the same weekend, the Kitchen Accomplice made perfect double chocolate chip cookies, delectable raspberry sorbet and the most beautiful-looking pink grapefruit marmalade you can imagine (only you don't have to imagine, because here's a picture).
I console myself with the thought that at least I can do a mean roast meat, a feat that is out of her reach because she's a vegetarian.
At this moment, she is in the kitchen whipping up some more cookies. Yum, yum!

Granny Cooked

When my cousin Thomas was small, our mutual grandmother was concerned he was eating too much junk food. As a moral lesson, she trained her Pekinese dogs to do a new trick. You put a piece of food (they particularly liked bits of Victoria sponge) in front of them and said 'Junk food'. They would sneer. 'Crisps' - the same reaction. 'Burgers', 'chicken nuggets', 'chips' or 'biscuits' would all be scorned by Bangs or Azalea.
Then before the poor beast starved to death in front of your eyes, you would say 'Granny Cooked!' and the dog would gobble up the finally licit morsel.
I'm not sure Thomas really took this to heart as a lesson (although he is now a very devoted organic gardener and disciple of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), but I was much impressed.
Granny Cooked notwithstanding, there are certain convenience foods I still find irresistable.
Hash browns, curly fries, waffles - there's a processed potato theme here, I realise.
I have started stocking hash browns in the freezer for the Kitchen Accomplice when she gets in from school.
This week i also invested in Toastabags, thinking they would be good for preparing hash browns.
But when I asked how it had gone, the young lady said cooking them from frozen was quite demanding.
"The toaster had to be popped like 1200 hundred times just to defrost them. So then I put them in the microwave. And then I fried them." By then, I guess, she was certain they were dead, so she ate them.

Red velvet

Remember my valentine cake? Made (partly) out of red velvet cake? Well, I thought it was time to try out the cake properly.
It's a funny thing with baking soda and vinegar - surely they cancel each other out?
I used this recipe for red velvet cake - which I won't repost here - from one of my favourite baking websites.
The recipe calls for pints and pints of extraordinarily rich 'creamcheese frosting'. You make two normal layers of cake, then cut each laterally in half, so you have a four layer cake. That means four layers of icing - yum, yum! Although I must confess that my appetite for gooey icing seems to have been quenched somewhat with age.

Still, it looks good with the red stripes, doesn't it?

The Queen of Hearts

When I get home after work, I am greeted at the door by two furry kitties. They surge around me as I climb the stairs, squeaking their greeting.
On Thursdays, the feeling of welcome is hugely enhanced by the presence of the Kitchen Accomplice and the consequent delightful aroma of baking that greets me alongside the felines.
I'm not that much of a cake eater, but who could resist these tiny jam tarts? They didn't even last till supper time.

Bland, bland, bland

Although the Kitchen Accomplice loves spicy food, it is never a good idea to try pleasing her with curries, because she just compares it with her grandmother's and dismisses our poor efforts as 'bland, bland, bland'.
This is particularly sad for the Man, who is quite proud of his tarka dal (not in the least bland to my mind).
My plan is that we should have a cook-off - each of us has to produce a dal, to be tasted blind, all at one meal.
Given how competitive I am, it should come as no surprise that I am practising madly. Luckily this is a delicious and healthy meal - although I'm not sure I'd like to eat only this, I'm happy to eat it once a week.
For supper tonight, the Man requested "some green vegetable", a rare request from him. So I went for the greenest I could think of. Baby spinach leaves, washed and dried, then thrown into a hot pan where I had fried grated ginger, mustard seeds and kalonji (onion seeds).
This with basmati rice and tarka dal made an easy, delicious, balanced meal.
Here's the dal recipe I'm currently using - bear in mind that you can alter the spices as much as you like. The amounts given below feed four not very spice-tongued eaters.
PS the 'tarka' is the fried spice mixture that flavours the dal.

300g red lentils (masoor dal)
850ml water or stock
1 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp coriander

30g butter
1/4 tsp cumin seeds
1/4 tsp asafoetida

4 garlic cloves chopped
1 medium onion chopped
2 chillis chopped

2 tomatoes finely chopped
1tsp curry leaves
1/4 tsp chilli powder

1 tbsp garam masala
1 tsp salt
1/2 tbsp fresh coriander for garnish

Method:
1 Bring the water or stock to the boil and add the lentils.

2 Add the turmeric and ground coriander, stir and simmer for 20 minutes or until lentils are soft. Cook until the water is absorbed; if the lentils go dry and are not soft, simply add more water.

3 Add the butter to a large frying pan and cook gently with the cumin seeds and asafoetida for a few seconds, add the chopped onions and garlic and fry until the onions just start to brown. Add the chopped tomatoes, curry leaves and chilli powder and continue cooking for another few minutes. (This is your tarka).

4 Add the dal to the tarka and stir well.

5 Continue cooking and add the garam masala and salt (to taste) and stir in well.

6 The finished tarka dal should be soft and runny - if necessary, add more water.

7 Serve with a few knobs of butter on top of the dal and sprinkle the fresh coriander leaves on top to garnish. Serve with basmati rice or plain naan/chapatti breads.

It's not rocket science

Although pasta with pesto is an easy and not too unhealthy supper, my heart always sinks at the thought. Unfortunately, it's all too frequent a solution to the problem of what to feed the Man and the Kitchen Accomplice if no planning ahead has been done - all too regular a situation.
Last week I came up with an alternative, just a little bit less straightforward, significantly healthier and much yummier. Rocket pesto!
A packet of fresh rocket is easily available in local shops, as are walnuts. Vegetarian parmesan (a nod to Miss Picky, aka the Kitchen Accomplice), garlic and olive oil are stock store cupboard ingredients, as is a lemon.
Chuck them all in a processor or blender (grating the parmesan and juice the lemon), along with salt and pepper. Taste repeatedly to get the proportion right - we ended up putting in the juice of half a lemon and LOTS of olive oil to get it smooth enough.
One final twist - it was nice enough five minutes after making, but even nicer a week later - mellower, smoother, less bitter.

Ginger cookies for my colleagues

Some time ago, I was given a cookie jar for work. That is to say, I as a journalist was sent this cookie jar as a freebie. It contained some digestive biscuits, which I gave to my colleagues, and I have entirely forgotten who sent it.
Anyway, I keep it stocked with cookies of various sorts depending on whim.
At the moment, the popular vote seems to be for ginger cookies, made with ground ginger, fresh ginger and crystallised ginger (gingery!). I have just restocked the cookie jar with a mini-version of these, spiked with lemon oil, so they are just perfect for my boss, who is coming down with what sounds from the other side of the desk like a very bad cold.
Here's how to make them:

250g plain flour (I use wholewheat)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp star anise, finely ground
4 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp salt

50g unsalted butter
60ml black treacle
120g caster sugar, sifted
1 1/2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1 large egg, well beaten

150g crystallized ginger, finely minced
zest of 2 lemons

50g granulated sugar


Preheat the oven to 350F (180C, Gas mark 4). Line a couple of baking sheets with greaseproof paper and set aside.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking soda, star anise, ground ginger, and salt.

Heat the butter in a small pan until it is just barely melted. Stir in the molasses, natural cane sugar, and fresh ginger. Or put it all into a bowl and microwave briefly until butter is almost melted.The mixture should be warm, but not hot at this point, if it is hot to touch let it cool a bit. Whisk in the egg. Now pour this over the flour mixture, add the crystallized ginger (make sure it isn't too clumpy), and lemon zest. Stir until just combined.

Roll the cookie dough into small balls (1 tsp of dough each is what I normally go for - for bite-sized cookies, halve that). Now roll each ball in the granulated sugar until coated. Place balls a few cm apart on prepared baking sheets. Bake for 7-10 minutes or until cookies puff up, darken a bit, get fragrant and crack.

Makes about 4 dozen or so.

The romantic associations of tea-bread

I'm normally a staunch member of the 'Down with Raisins' fraternity, but there is one exception. Tea bread, which is really cake made with raisins soaked in tea, somehow persuades me it is acceptable. Perhaps this is something to do with having been introduced to it by a very close friend when a teenager - not a boyfriend (always so much less romantic than the imagination), but a boy nevertheless.

For years I carried his recipe for tea bread, written in his characteristically spiky handwriting, in my wallet. It was very slightly more complex than the one I use now, but came out very well too.

My current recipe has the beauty of extreme simplicity.

2 mugs dried fruit
1 mug brown sugar
1 mug hot black tea
1 egg
1 mug self-raising flour.

Soak the fruit and sugar overnight in the tea, mix in the egg and flour, pour into a greased and lined loaf tin and bake at 150 C, gas mark 2, for an hour and a half.

Unable to leave well alone, I add some pinches of spice - cinnamon and clove, even a pinch of star anise I ground earlier - but this is entirely optional.

The important thing is to serve it in thickly buttered slices. Yum!