Sweet, sweet as can be

You may remember my soup resolution - I haven't managed three times a week yet, but we did have soup twice last week. The second was a very elaborate sweetcorn and red chilli chowder, which I made with six ears of fresh corn.
Sweetcorn always astounds me in how it lives up to its name, although I'm not convinced it's always a good thing how sweet it is. Sometimes it feels a little as though it's just sweet and nothing else, but the soupcorn was actually very nice. The chilies did not add a lot of spice, but they look very pretty. The most noteworthy aspect was that the very floury potatoes I used remained in rather firm cubes rather than getting nice soft and raggedy round the edges like I expected.
Next: cream of spring onion soup.

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?

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.

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.

Feeling alive

When I was about ten, I had an impassioned argument with my father about which was better, strawberries or raspberries. At the time, I couldn't understand how anyone could fail to accept the supremacy of strawberries, so sweet and juicy, warm from the sun.
Hot, sticky hours picking raspberries for my grandmother had left me prickled by the canes and covered in horrid little orange mites. I had no time for raspberries.
I am now older and wiser and understand the appeal of these ruby concatenations of seeds. Oranges may not be the only fruit, but if I had to choose one fruit as the epitome of true luxury, it would be the raspberry. Eating good raspberries in the sun is one of the greatest pleasures in life.
At my mother's birthday party, I heard a middle-aged man, indistinguishable from the farming neighbours with whose children I went to school, say as he popped a single berry into his mouth: "Ah, you always feel truly alive when you eat a raspberry." The truth of this impressed me greatly, although I felt the poetry in it was less surprising when I learned that the speaker was award-winning playwright and novelist, Sebastian Barry, not one of our neighbours who left school at 14.

Signs of summer

I am always impatient for the seasons to change. I love the liminal, the edge seasons of spring and autumn, but what I like most is the changing, spying signs of a difference, leaves, flowers, fruit, that weren’t there yesterday. A tang in the air as autumn approaches or the realisation that the watery sunshine now has some power in it.

One of my favourite signs of summer is the creamy white blossom of elderflower. Even in London it paints the gardens, parks and hedges a lovely green and ivory, scenting the air with its particular sweet powdery smell.

For the last five or six years I have gathered elderflowers in Abney Park Cemetery, a nineteenth century burial ground for non-conformists, penultimate resting place for the likes of William and Catherine Booth, Generalissimo and consort of the Salvation Army, several prominent abolitionists and (my favourite) Victorian menagerists Frank and Susannah Bostock, commemorated with a gorgeous marble lion. It is now maintained as wildlife reserve (butterflies, not lions)and yields a wonderful crop of blossom if you don't mind making polite conversation with suspiciously idle young men with very tight t-shirts.

The elderflowers I bring home and make into elderflower cordial, with which I make cocktails and ice-lollies and give to friends and family to drink the taste of summer.

Elderflower cordial
3 1/4 lb sugar
2 1/2 pints hot water
25 heads of elderflower, picked on a sunny day
2 lemons chopped
2 oz citric acid (this can be bought in many places,including my local Turkish grocery where it is labelled ‘lemon salt’)

Pour the water over the sugar and stir until dissolved. Add the rest of the ingredients and let stand for two days (or more, if convenient!). Strain through muslin and bottle.

I use the kind of glass bottles that have ceramic lids held on with thick wire. In hot weather, I have known plastic bottles blow their lids off, sending sticky stuff all over the entire flat. It comes off easily with water, but before you get it all, you’re already invaded by ants. Sigh.