How to catch the Man

Many moons ago, I was at an exceptionally boring conference in Monaco. The one bright spot was a flourishing flirtation with an old acquaintance, who bought me a bottle of Becks in Jimmy's Bar, the most over-priced and unattractive venue I ever hope to drink in. €56 for two bottles of beer!
We speedily left for more amusing pursuits, but I promised to repay him back in London. The retirement of my Monegasque debt was done in a delightful Turkish fish restaurant round the corner from where I lived.
After a very pleasant evening, I suggested he should walk home via my house, where I had some leftover homemade cheesecake to be eaten.
He has since told me that this cheesecake was the decisive factor in paying me serious attention.
It's very, very simple.
Crust:
3 oz melted butter
8 oz biscuit crumbs (I use gingernuts and sometimes even add some ground ginger)
Mix well, then press firmly into the base of a 10 inch (26 cm) springform tin and put in the fridge.

First layer:
2 beaten eggs
12 oz cream cheese (340g)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice OR 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

Beat these ingredients together until creamy, pour into the tin and spread smoothly over the base. Bake for 20 mins at 190 0C (gas mark 5). There is a frantic note in my personal cookbook to the effect that the tin should be put in the oven ON A BAKING TRAY (or it leaks and makes the oven filthy).
It should still be wobbly and jiggly when you take it out. Allow it to cool to room temperature.

Second layer:
Heat the oven to 220 0C.
1 1/2 cups sour cream (350mls)
2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt

Beat this well, pour carefully on top of the cheesecake, which has probably got a few gaping cracks in it - ignore those. Put the whole thing in the hot oven for five minutes.

When it comes out, you must chill it for at least six hours, ideally several days.

Only serve to single men if you are prepared to deal with the consequences.

The perks of the job

I have mentioned before that my job has certain perks and that I take shameless advantage of the culinary ones.
The latest was outstanding. I was invited to a dinner at the chef's table in Gordon Ramsay in Claridges, with the head sommelier (a champagne specialist), a delightful Italian waiter called Lello, the head chef, the senior sous chef and various other functionaries dancing smiling attendance on us.
Course after course arrived, each with its own carefully chosen bottle of wine. Highlights include the bacon, egg and chips that constituted the starter: parma ham, a poached quail's egg and the most extraordinary "chips" made out of chickpea flour. The illusion of the worker's caff was completed by the bottle of red pepper ketchup. Fortunately they drew the line at the mug of tea.
Fortified by this, we set out on a tour of the kitchen.
Let me remind you that this is a top end restaurant in the middle of the dinner service. All six of us were conducted through the sweating, shouting arena, past unbelievably hot stoves and a kitchen brigade of some 15 people dedicated to producing each dish looking perfect and coordinated so that each element - garnish, meat or fish, sauce and vegetables - arrived on the plate piping hot when the waiter was ready to take it from the pass.
And yet they managed to produce welcoming smiles for us as we asked fatuous questions and ooohed and aaahed about how hot it was or how fast they were working.
Back at the table, the head chef asked for volunteers. And this is how Kimberley, Gill and myself all ended up learning how to plate up the fish course in a real chef's kitchen.
(Tip: it helps to have fingers that don't get burnt easily).
It probably wouldn't be kind to go into too much detail about the venison wellington with truffle potato puree, or the bottles of Condrieu or Pouilly-Fumé that contributed so much to my reaching a state of euphoric stupefaction by the end of the evening.
The carefully selected cheeseboard we can pass over, as the Sachertorte with blackberry sorbet, but I must just mention the little balls of hazelnut icecream they produced on request. Mmm.

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!

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.

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.

Summer menu

One of my discoveries this summer has been how well Berkswell cheese goes with asparagus. Berkswell is an English sheep's cheese, a little like Manchego. It is mild and sweet, like most sheep's cheese, with a subtle nuttiness that means its flavour flows into that of the asparagus without a harsh contrast like that of Parmesan.
Tonight I was taken with the idea of simple luxury, so we had asparagus and Berkswell risotto, flavoured with summer truffles, and a peach and feta salad. Eaten in the late evening sunlight, filtered through the green leaves of the trees surrounding our airy flat, it was hard to imagine a better way to celebrate a beautiful summer evening.
Accompanied by an Australian Semillon, very faintly sparkling and tasting of toasted almonds and honey, it made for a luxurious but light supper.

Cheese Dreams

When I was little, we often used to have melted cheese on toast, which we called Cheese Dreams. There is a smidgin of truth in the theory that cheese gives you nightmares: apparently eating cheese just before going to sleep can increase your amount of REM sleep, during which you dream. This does not alter the proportions of normal dreams to nightmares, but if you are prone to bad dreams, they are presumably more likely to happen after eating cheese. If you usually have harmless or enjoyable dreams, eating cheese before bed seems like a good idea.

Don't mention the S-word

One of the greatest cheese debates is whether it matters if you make the cheese with raw or pasteurised milk. Food safety and taste are the two main heads on which people argue, but in the case of cheeses that are PDO (protected denomination of origin), it may in fact be a business issue.
I recently tried a new unpasteurised blue cheese. Not just new to me, but an experiment on the part of its makers, it is called Worksop Blue. It is an interesting cheese, not because it is particularly delicious, (the makers are still working on perfecting it), but because it is a possible source of contention with a powerful special interest group.
The little placard that gives information about it in the cheesemongers has a special notice on the back, where only the cheesemongers can see it, warning them not to mention a certain traditional English blue cheese in connection with Worksop Blue.
Stilton is one of a baker’s dozen of British cheese that have the sought-after PDO status, and its definition includes the rule that it must be made of local milk, pasteurised before use. Anything that is not pasteurised is not Stilton and cannot be sold as such.
I’m not sure if the cheesemonger who said he was afraid his enemies would report him to the Stilton Cheese Makers Association, but the fear of what can be done with a cheese iron and a length of cheesewire kept me from enquiring further.

My dog has no nose. How does he smell?

The morning after a delightful evening at which my wine-writer friend supplied the drink and my affineur friend the cheese, I opened the fridge to get butter for toast. Even though the fridge door was only open for perhaps thirty seconds, this was long enough for an invisible fume of dank, drain-like smell to escape, hover a minute or so in the kitchen, then wind its poisonous way through the flat to the bedroom, where it woke up the Man quicker than I’ve ever seen him come to consciousness on Sunday morning before!
The cheese, wrapped though it was in several layers of waxed paper, was not asleep.
What is the relationship between smell and taste? The theory is that we have tastebuds for just five flavours: salt, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. All the other delicate arrangements of flavour that we experience while eating are actually through the olfactory bulb in the nose.
If this is the case, why do we experience the smell of so many food stuffs as so different from their flavour?
As a child, coffee seemed repellent to me to taste, but I used to go out of my way coming home from school in order to sniff the air next to the coffee stall on the market. Durian fruit is notoriously bad-smelling, but pleasant to eat. And cheese can smell like a teenage boy’s gym kit but be absolutely delicious.
I think (and this is based on nothing more than personal observation and wild speculation) that there must be some change in how we perceive things that are inside our mouths. The smell may be the same, so the olfactory experience is technically the same, but it is now combined with a mouthfeel (cool, salty, fattiness in the case of cheese) and our expectations of the sensation is altered.
By this latter, I don’t just mean that we expect the époisses to taste good, but that it fills our sensory horizons so we no longer have a standard of non-smell to compare it with. When I worked in the cheesemongers, many customers (not all under 8) would wrinkle up their noses on entering the shop and perform amusing mimes of themselves vomiting at the smell. If they didn’t immediately flee in fits of laughter, we were always able to cure their nausea. A taste of cheese, ideally Montgomery’s Cheddar, would instantly dispell the tyranny of the air heavy with the aroma of dozens of cheeses.