heaven in small bites

People may complain (and they frequently do) that Brussels is not the most exciting city in Europe, but nobody could complain that it doesn’t have good restaurants.
Not only do even the small neighbourhood brasseries have excellent standards (I still regularly recreate a warm chocolate and cinnamon soup from one), but there is no lack of innovation and creativity in serving styles.
Although the ‘tapas-style’ or grazing menu has made its insistent way across the continent, it is not necessarily an easy one to get right. The temptation is to have too long a list of little things, so that the attention to detail that is key to making each individual dish different and satisfying is lost. In restaurants that avoid this pitfall, there is the danger that the ingredients and artistry required push the price up to the point that you end up paying huge amounts for tiny nibbles.
Le Fourneau managed to steer its way carefully between this Scylla and Charybdis, with just 15 principal dishes, four ‘indispensable’ and six ‘superflus’, although it’s hard to know by what scale of values haricot coco and potato with truffles is indispensable while a salad of baby spinach leaves is superfluous.
Everything comes either by weight (100g seems the base measure for things like fish or steak) or single units of itself, such as the lobster raviole.
Predisposed to like it simply because it was prepared to serve us ten minutes before the kitchen was due to close (three other restaurants had already turned us away - Belgian chefs like to go off duty at 9.30pm, and who shall blame them?), my companion and I were very taken with the high stools ranged along a bar surrounding a central table and viewing the kitchen. I would not care to sit at that central table myself, but it provided much entertainment after the chef had finally cooked his last bonne bouche.
A restaurant so expensively and minimally decorated in London would also be intimidatingly trendy. In Brussels the staff were of the highest competence but extremely friendly and helpful.
An amuse gueule of mousse de foie gras with quail was much lighter and less meaty than the description sounds, more like a savoury dessert in the mouth. My companion and I, having fought like sulky siblings over who got to order the best dishes, had a lobster raviole apiece, swimming delightfully in its cream sauce. This is the kind of dish that eaten in conventional quantities might give rise to nightmares, but in a portion that can be comfortably consumed in four forkfuls leaves one regretful that it is so small but ready to move on to turbot in butter sauce (heavenly) and carpaccio of tuna with mango (excellent but not as sybaritic as the other dishes). The only element that failed to strike a similarly high note was the papillote of langoustine with Thai basil, which came across as a half-hearted spring roll, minus the usual crispness of the vegetables.
This I supplemented with a perfect salad in petto, miniature little gem leaves with tiny bacon bits and croutons, leaving me ready to contemplate the dessert menu with much more than my usual enthusiasm.
The menu well repaid my interest, offering up a ‘panaché’ or smorgasbrod of delights. Melon soup, chocolate mousse, almond milk ice-cream and raspberry sorbet chased each other around my palate, spoonful by spoonful daring me to choose which combination I liked best.
The rich velvety darkness of the chocolate mousse was offset by the bitter cold of the almond ice-cream , while the clean sweetness of the melon balanced the tartness of the raspberry sorbet. Just another taste of chocolate to see how that goes with the raspberry, perhaps; although maybe the watery flavour melon would complement the thickness of the mousse. Another spoonful of bitter almonds to remind me of the scent of English 1920s murder mysteries… How can the raspberry sorbet taste so intensely of raspberries? And how can it all be gone already?
I was filled with envy of my companion who lives in Brussels and can go there every week if he so wishes, to discover what is so indispensable about ‘gateau de legumes, envie de soleil’ (does this mean that the vegetable cake sits on your plate, pining for the sun, or perhaps the sun is jealous of their summerry flavour?). When he actually told me about his next visit, when he inveigled his way far enough into the good books of the chef that the entire evening was spent accepting little offerings the chef had thought might tempt his palate, I turned green and started to lay plans to move to Brussels.

Serving suggestions, please

I work alongside a trade magazine for the drinks business. This means that there are often bizarre and wonderful beverages floating around the office, and occasionally I get offered a taste (although never of the vintage champagne, I've noticed!)

This afternoon, I was the only willing guinea-pig prepared to taste the chilli-flavoured beer. I had joined the general outcry of disgust when first told about it, but true to my principles was prepared to sip with an open mind.

The discoloured green chilli floating in it was not visually enticing, but it did augur well for the drink. This augury was not misleading, as it smelled and then tasted delightfully of fresh chillis, one of my favourite flavours. The next taste was just of a clean Mexican lager, and then finally a strong but not overpowering heat from the chilli.

My only problem with chilli beer is this: what would one drink it with? It's much too hot to drink with spicy food, but it would overpower most other meals. If I were ten years younger, I'd keep it in the fridge for drunken nights when I got home with a kebab, but I don't feel like going down that route any more.

Chocolate has a pleasing suitability, what with the Mexican connection, but I'm not sure what kind. Milk chocolate for the comfort and junk foodiness? Dark chocolate for cultural sensitivity?

Suggestions please!

Chicken noodle soup

[Note: this was supposed to be an apology for my refusal to back down and admit that I was wrong, but on mature reflection I have decided I was right, so it's a plea for forgiveness for being obnoxious instead.]

I am Jewish enough to think of chicken soup as a panacea for all ills, so when my Taste-tester had toothache, I rushed around armed with my pharmacopeia of chicken stock, noodles, chilli and coriander (I’m only Jewish through my paternal grandmother, which gives me leeway to make Thai-based chicken soup).
Despite pressure from the Taster to use reginette (wavy-edged, half-inch wide strips of pasta) I went with Sharwoods Egg Noodles, which I cooked according to instructions without salt. First mistake. Unsalted noodles are as uninteresting as any other unsalted pasta.
Then I assumed that the red chilli I had bought from Sainsburys would be very mild, so I chopped it all up and threw it into the stock at the very beginning. Second mistake. It was so spicy that I had to fish out most of it and add lots of lemon juice and fish sauce to tone down its fieriness.
The end result was not disastrous, but oddly unbalanced. It wasn’t too hot, but the lemon juice overwhelmed the delicate flavour of the stock, while the noodles were too bland to add any bite to the soup, which was also a bit salty in itself.
Because this was in the privacy of the Tester’s home (I am normally able to restrain myself from issuing searching critiques of my cooking when other people are eating it), I launched into an analysis of the problems and pondered the solutions.
I was enjoying myself, pontificating away as I considered the flavours in my mouth and imagined how they could be re-balanced, when the Taster jumped up and produced a book of noodle recipes for consultation.
For some reason, this eminently sensible action infuriated me, so I said scornful and illogical things about how pointless recipes were for such a simple dish, preached lofty ideals of allowing due weight to the sensory experience and ended up with almost a serious row on our hands.
His contention was that looking at other recipes would help me think about how I could improve my soup. I countered that it was futile to look at other people’s idea of what you should do with these simple ingredients in order to produce my own ideal. (Among other arguments against recipes that I won’t bore you with, and which anyway I would rather forget.)
In the calm light of day (and stuck in an oven-like office with only mind-numbingly dull work to do for the next couple of hours), I decided to be mature, climb down and look at alternative recipes for inspiration on how to improve my own technique.
And whaddayou know? The many recipes all aimed to achieve entirely different things with their chicken noodle soup, and were no help to me at all in thinking about my own recipe.

So here for the record is how I think I should have done it last night:

Chicken noodle broth for two

2 servings thin egg noodles
750ml chicken stock (I buy Joubere Organic stock when I don’t have enough of my own in the freezer)
a couple of scallions, chopped (reserve some of the green tips for garnish)
a stick of lemongrass, chopped into four cm lengths and bruised with the back of your knife
1 chicken breast, finely sliced
1 red chilli, sliced (and deseeded if necessary – the only way I know to find out if it is is to taste it, a risky strategy)
a squeeze of lemon juice
coriander, chopped

Boil some water, salt it generously and cook the noodles according to instructions. Meanwhile, put the stock, scallions and lemongrass into your soup pan and bring to a gentle boil. Add the chicken and cook till done, which should be only a few minutes. Just before it is done, add the chilli and the lemon juice, tasting to make sure you don’t overdo the lemon.
By this time the noodles are probably done. Strain them, refresh them in cold water and divide them between two soup bowls. Pour the broth over them, making sure the chicken gets shared out fairly. Add the chopped coriander and scallion tips as garnish.

Monaco - third circle of hell

I get no sympathy when I complain that I have to spend a week in Monaco for work, but believe me when I say it's horrible. Do you like crowds of loud rich people flaunting their yachts and their diamanté sunglasses, unbelievably high prices, a dearth of taxis and temperatures in the thirties? Then you would like Monaco.
I cordially dislike all of these things (and don't start me on the investment managers I was there to interview), so I don't care for the Principality. (And I am on principal opposed to royalty, so I don't like being in a place where there are photos of a singularly unappealing prince all over the place).
The positive side is the yearly press dinner held by a company that wisely chooses good restaurants and eschews talk about work in favour of jolly conversation. Last year it was held in the Chateau du Chevre d'Or, in a delightful village half an hour from Monaco. This year the venue was more convenient (being just on top of the conference centre) but still had fabulous views.
After a week of bright sunshine, the thunder was rumbling and the heavens had opened, so we couldn’t sit outside at Zebra Square, perched atop the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Luckily the excellent mojitos mixed up by the bar staff consoled us while the wait staff rushed around bringing in cushions from the terrace and preparing an indoor table for our party of 12.
I love restaurants that offer an amuse-bouche, a little something that the chef has come up with to keep you going (and amused!) while you decide on your meal, so I thought I was onto a winner when the waiter at Zebra Square produced and flourished a tray in front of us.
But we all did a massive double-take when we realised that the tray held two enormous fish (one dourade and one sea-bass), as well as a large lobster. One of my companions shrieked as the lobster waved a claw at us – this was the specials list.
Once we had been introduced to our food, we sat back and waited for the antipasto misto to appear. Bresaola and parmesan was excellent, although the chiffonade of parma ham was less than exciting (am I the only one who thinks Spanish jamon iberico is more than its equal?), as was the mozzarella and tomato salad. Making up for this was the pungent octupus salad and the fried calamari with a soy-based dip with an entirely unexpected chilli kick. All of these were served together on luxuriant beds of rocket, which got nibbled up as we awaited our main course.
None of us had been quite brave enough to demand the sacrifice of the friendly lobster, but my giant prawns were large enough to terrify a small child. With prawns, the rule is usually the smaller the sweeter, the larger the meatier. These were no exception, being very butch in flavour, but the rice and vegetables they came with did not live up to their company, being quiet and possibly subtle – next to the prawn monsters it was hard to tell.
Three of my companions had asked for the dourade to be served up between them, and it was reported to be delicious – it certainly smelt excellent – while no complaint was heard about the steak served variously rare and medium.
A couple of months ago, my low expectations of Italian cheese had been confounded by an excellent cheeseboard in a London restaurant, so Zebra Square’s ebullient waiter found it easy to persuade me that it was worth another try. Alas, my original opinion of Italian cheese – that it is soft and smooth and bland – was reinforced by the Taleggio, Dolcelatte and other unidentifiable smooth cheese that came in place of the promised Parmesan and Asiago.
Other diners claimed that their desserts (spiced pear compote, crème brulée, something chocolatey) were excellent. The final civilised touch came when the waiters cleared away the table cloth with the debris so we could sit over our coffee and liqueurs in comfort.
(Supporters of Italian cheese will be happy to hear that back in London, La Fromagerie supplied me with an excellent wine-washed Ubriaco that proves that Italy can produce something interesting other than Parmesan.)

Coronation Chicken

I thought it might be interesting for some people to see the recipes from the menu at my mother’s birthday lunch:

In some circles, (middle English Daily Telegraph-reading classes, I believe) , Coronation Chicken is no longer acceptable because it is such a cliché for the buffet lunch, but it is my mother’s favourite party food, so the birthday girl had her way. It is also entirely possible that it has been resurrected in the way that prawn cocktails and melon balls have recently been. “Ironically” - you have to say it like that, making little quote marks with your fingers to emphasise how ironic it is. I assume it was invented in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the UK, but would be delighted to be put right.

This is the recipe my mother uses, as copied from her hand-written cookbook:

Coronation Chicken, (Rita Cassels)

Rice salad:
1 lb rice, cooked and dressed with olive oil and wine vinegar dressing while hot. I add frozen peas at this point, then sweetcorn, celery, peppers etc.


Coronation chicken:
1 cooked, chopped chicken.

Sauce:
2 onions
2 apples
3 tsp curry powder
2 tbsp apricot jam
1 glass red wine
bay leaf
150ml chicken stock
3 tbsp tomato purée

To add when cold:
1/2 pt cream, whipped
5 tablespoons mayonnaise

Fry onions, add other sauce ingredients and simmer 20 mins.
Cool and then stir in cream and mayonnaise and chicken.
Decorate with grapes and toasted almonds and serve on ring of rice salad.

For silent vegetarians

The vegetarian dish was an old standby of mine from years ago when I was less ambitious in the kitchen and had more vegetarian friends. It is from a Madhur Jaffreyy cookbook originally, but I was introduced to it by a very silent tutorial partner at university, who had devised several shortcuts. Years of experiment led me to the realisation that the times given were based on rather tougher versions of chickpeas and bulghur wheat than I usually use, so I have further tweaked the timings and added a couple of extra twiddles of my own.

Charlotte Smith’s bulghur wheat with chickpeas and tomatoes:

4 tbsp oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tin tomatoes
1 tin chickpeas, drained
1/2 tsp + 3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
1 cup bulghur wheat
lemon slices
more parsley to garnish

Heat the oil in a large pan with a tight-fitting lid. Fry the onions until soft, then add tomatoes and cook for 3-4 minutes. Add chickpeas, 1/2tsp salt and minced parsley, and cook for ten minutes on a low heat, stirring gently. Add bulghur wheat, 1 cup of water and 3/4 tsp salt. Stir and bring to a simmer. Cover, turn heat down very low and cook for 20 minutes. Turn off the flame, remove lid and cover pan wth a clean tea-towel. Replace lid and let sit for ten minutes. Stir in generous amounts of freshly ground black pepper and serve garnished with parsley and slices of lemon to squeeze over it.

Granny Grene Chocolate Cake

I have mentioned the inevitability of the Granny Grene Chocolate Cake as a birthday cake elsewhere, so here is the recipe, adapted for cupcakes. If you want to make a layer cake, use two 8 inch sandwich pans, bake for 35 minutes and use 4 ounces of butter as a base for the icing, which goes in the middle, on top and ROUND THE SIDES.
In any case, decorate with Smarties!

Please bear in mind that the recipe is American - measurements are given by volume and the cups are a bit smaller than European cups. I recommend investing a small amount in a Tala measure - I use mine all the time.

Granny Grene Chocolate Cake
Cupcake version

1/4 lb butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/3 cup plain flour
1/3 cup cocoa
1 2/3 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
2/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla essence (optional)

Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, 350° C.
Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add dry ingredients, alternately with milk.
Put in bun cases - about one tablespoon of batter in each. Makes about 30 cupcakes.
Bake for approximately 20 minutes - or less, depending on your oven!

Chocolate butter icing:
Cream butter and caster sugar and add cocoa. Adjust amounts of cocoa and sugar to taste. You can add a liquid such as milk, cream, whiskey or whatever flavour you like.
I think about two and half or three ounces of butter is sufficient, then the amount of sugar and cocoa is entirely a matter of your own taste. You can substitute icing sugar for caster if you prefer smooth to crunchy icing.

Some people would recommend icing half the cupcakes with chocolate butter icing and the other half with orange butter icing, which is very simply butter and sugar creamed and flavoured with orange juice and a little orange zest.

A big birthday lunch

A couple of weeks ago, my mother turned sixty. Although she has always been vague about her age, this has never been due to vanity (she is even more vague about her children’s ages), so she decided to hold a party for the occasion.
Naturally I saw this mostly as an opportunity to gain experience in catering for large numbers. The main problem was trying to find out how large those numbers were, and then to work out what the appropriate scale of catering would be.
My mother invited everyone she knew, or at least everyone whose contact details she had, but was very vague about how many that was and even more so about how many were likely to turn up. It turned out that our original guess of something between 100 and 120, based on a number of rules of thumb and a wild stab in the dark, was not bad - 128 plates were used for the main course.
What is the biggest number of people you have ever cooked for? Up to about 12 seems to work by regular maths, where the recipe gives a good enough guideline. After that, the law of large numbers apparently takes hold and people eat different amounts and expect different choices to be offered.
Amounts for the canapés to go with the champagne were easy enough to estimate, as most recipe books give guidelines (we went with three per person, which was not inadequate), but once you’re into the main course, guidance is hard to find.
We went the cold buffet route, laying food out on trestle tables in the barn (my parents still live on the farm where I grew up). There were three main course options: coronation chicken, which my mother made, mixing it up in a huge black bin purchased for the occasion, smoked trout fillets, and a vegetarian option. My parents, who are abstemious types themselves, assumed that everyone would choose one of these and take a reasonably small portion. Just half the hundred available trout fillets available were put out and I was instructed to keep the vegetarian option small. Since to my knowledge just one non-meat eater was expected, I merely made enough for twenty.
The four salads I made in slightly larger proportions - enough for perhaps thirty each - and my mother at the last minute decided that, as a special treat for herself, she would make egg mayonnaise. In the couple of days running up to the party, everyone kept trying to lighten her load by offering to make the mayonnaise, until she pointed out huffily that she enjoyed this particular task. Adventurously, she decided to trust Julia Child’s unlikely instruction that eggs may be hard-boiled in large quantities in a pressure cooker. This worked extremely well, with just one cracking in a dozen of dozens, although the egg yolks did discolour, despite Child’s assurances that they wouldn’t.
I’m sure any experienced caterer reading this will have worked out already that we were cutting the amounts very fine, especially given most people’s propensity, when faced with three main course options, to take some of each. Luckily I saw the one vegetarian standing in line just before the last portion of chickpeas was taken, so I jumped her to the head of the queue.
The next course of raspberries and cream was simplicity itself to serve, although again the amounts were not particularly generous. Cream does not get whipped up in a trice, so latecomers had to put up with pouring cream, while the extra meringues that we afterwards found hiding in a tin would probably also have been welcomed. Twenty pounds of raspberries disappeared in approximately 15 minutes, which implies that our guests were not only appreciative but also very efficient in serving themselves in the not particularly spacious room where we had set out dessert.
Cheese went down very well with those who found it, although this was the one area in which we over-catered (it is no coincidence that it was also the only area for which I was solely responsible). I have written in more detail about the cheese in a separate post!
Finally, there was birthday cake. In my family, birthday cake is practically by definition a chocolate cake made to my grandmother’s recipe and decorated with Smarties. The only concession I have made to advancing age is to make the cake into cupcakes, which I think are more elegant to serve and eat, as well as providing smaller portions for those of us who no longer want to stuff our faces to the point of nausea.
So for my mother’s sixtieth, it seemed appropriate to make sixty cupcakes, especially as she had rejected the idea of candles. Then of course I had to double that to ensure that every guest could have one if they so wished. One of my sisters arranged exactly sixty of them to form the digits 60, although as we are not a family that are good at ceremony or co-ordination, greedy guests were allowed to start eating them before we had a chance to have a proper embarassing communal singing of Happy Birthday and appreciating all my hard work!

Food you don't want to eat

Dinner invitations (particularly business ones) are often accompanied by the query: "Is there anything you don't eat?" My answer to this has always been "Liver", on the assumption that no host would be so cruel as to serve kidneys or heart without warning. It's the combination of the almost bitter flavour and the grainy smoothness of the texture that is so unappetising; grainy smoothness is not an oxymoron in this case, because what is objectionable is the way that it melts in your mouth, coating it entirely with the tiny nodules of ultra-meaty dark flavour. Yeuch.
Recently (and partly inspired by Jeffrey Steingarten's 'The Man who Ate Everything'), I decided that I had to learn to love liver. Mostly I've been doing this by thinking how much I admire and respect Fergus Henderson of St John, whose motto "Nose to Tail Eating" does so much to amuse and disgust the fainthearted and weakstomached.
Last weekend I got to my local butcher's and realised that I didn't have any meals coming up that could legitimately involve delicious roasts or huge stews. Pondering the best cut for a single eater, I realised that a truly dedicated foodie would use this opportunity to experiment with liver. (And the advantage of doing this on my own would be that I could always throw it out and order pizza if it was too disgusting).
So I bought a small amount of lamb's liver, on the assumption that it would be less strong and liver-like than calves' liver, and took it home. An afternoon with my cookbooks produced mostly recipes for liver and onions or liver and bacon, most of which seemed to be predicated on the assumption that one likes liver (bizarre). I did find one recipe for sweet and sour liver, which sounded like it might be less offal than the others, so that was what I went with.
I managed to quell the nausea induced by handling the liver - just don't think about your own liver inside you, is my tip - and served up something that was definitely edible. Let's not get carried away here, the mushroooms that I experimentally fried with fenugreek, cumin and chilli were much nicer, but I didn't gag once while eating the liver. In fact, I might even consider trying again with a less cowardly recipe, but just don't expect me to salivate!

[This post is specially for my cousin Ed, who's not able to eat much at the moment. I thought it might be nice for him to read about disgusting food.]

Tea shop prejudice overcome

Pay no attention to those bleeding heart liberals who tell you that prejudice is a terrible thing that disadvantages those who are the misrepresented by it. Pay even less attention to those stony-hearted right-wingers who tell you that it’s ok to be prejudiced because only bleeding heart liberals care about the disadvantaged.
The reason you don’t want to be prejudiced is that it will blind you to unexpected opportunities and joys. My most recent example of a prejudice that could have led me to overlook a jewel came in the small Suffolk town of Sudbury, where a thirst for tea and a desire on my companion’s part for cake led us to The Secret Garden. Now, my experience of tea-shops in English market towns is that they offer stewed or weak tea, along with not particularly nice cakes, at rickety tables with uncomfortable chairs and with surly or incompetent service. This is a summary, you understand. It’s only in the best establishments that you get all of these together, but you can usually count on two or three elements. Never order coffee in such an establishment.
These places are greeted by English pleasure-seekers with cries of delight and described by them with tears of nostalgia afterwards. It’s like the English sense of humour and liking for waxy potatoes: incomprehensible to me.
The Secret Garden looked from outside like a perfect example of the genre,but inside turned out to be far otherwise. For a start, it seemed to be run by a pair of French brothers, and its chalkboard of specials made no mention of chips, although there was the possibility of an omelette.
The menu started promisingly, but not exceptionally so for London visitors, with assertions about fair trade, organic products and the option of soya milk, before listing the espresso-based coffee options.
Then it launched into a list of five different coffees available in a cafetiére, including tasting notes. Hot chocolate could be made either with cocoa powder (not a mix with powdered milk) or dark chocolate, the latter to be served with a home-made marshmallow.
Teas were categorised as blended, black unscented (seven varieties), black scented (two), green unscented and scented, white and oolong scented. In all there were 14 possible teas, not counting herbal teas and fruit infusions.
Emboldened by this lavish display, we decided to risk the food. Croque Monsieur Maison was toasted cheese (possibly Gruyère) with cured country sausage on toasted sourdough bread with a green salad. It was delicious, but not as good as my companion’s rillettes of pork, which came with similar toast and crunchy gherkins. Only stern reminders that I needed to taste it in order to be able to write about it (and a threat to sulk for the rest of the afternoon) bought me a bite of this. The rillettes were slightly smoother than I would have expected - more terrine than rillettes, perhaps - but the flavour was a balance of meaty and fatty, cut with a subtle amount of seasoning, just enough to bring out the flavour.
This gem among tea-shops is licensed. Although we didn’t feel that three o’clock on a sunny afternoon with a country walk ahead of us was an appropriate time for drinking, I would love to go back to try the select wine list, especially the Rivesaltes Mas Christine Roussillion. Who could resist the description: “tangerine marmalade flavoured wine made from late harvest Grenache Blanc”?
My prejudice against tea-shops in English market towns remains untouched,because this was so clearly an exception, but I am prepared to learn the lesson that you cannot tell where these exceptions will arise, and always be prepared to override prejudice in quest of unexpected joy.

Making friends with salad

An unlamented ex of mine used to declare “You make no friends with salad.” One of the many benefits of life without him has been learning how satisfying salad can be, in flavour, texture and sheer calorific satiety.
Beautiful weather last Sunday prompted my housemate to cancel a plan to go out for lunch, substituting an afternoon in the garden with chilled bottles of champagne and a table covered in salads improvised from the contents of the fridge. A Swedish-inspired concoction of prawns with cucumber, dill and yoghurt made a cool but filling central dish, while a bag of rocket tossed with the dressing taught to me by my father added greenery to our plates. The dressing is very simply 3 or 4 spoons of olive oil to one of vinegar (usually red wine, because that’s what I tend to have in the store-cupboard), with crushed garlic and salt and pepper. The key is to mix all of this vigorously at the bottom of the salad bowl until it emulsifies. Then you put the leaves in on top. Just before people are ready to eat the salad, you toss it vigorously until every leaf is evenly coated with dressing.
This seems to astonish people with how delicious it is, despite its simplicity. After years of blushing prettily at the compliments and thinking how clever I was to make such good dressing, I realised that the secret was simply in the emulsification and the tossing. It is fashionable to serve green salad naked with dressing on the side to be drizzled over the leaves on the plate. This results in lettuce dressed like a classical Greek maiden: quite a lot of stuff on the body, but so unevenly distributed that a great deal of naked flesh is visible. If your dressing is designed to balance with the flavour of the lettuce (and if you think lettuce has no flavour, you’re not eating the right sort), this is very unsatisfactory.
It is presumably designed to overcome the problem that leaves that sit around in the dressing room in full costume go limp and soggy, but surely any dinner too formal to have the salad tossed at table is formal enough that someone will be available in the kitchen to perform the task there? In which case, they can take the pleasure of tossing it in their bare hands as recommended by Nigella – a typically sensuous and inconvenient suggestion.
Conversely, most tomato salads benefit from being dressed ahead of time to allow the flavours to merge. Tomatoes from the Isle of Wight tomato stall in Borough Market dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and freshly plucked basil leaves rounded out our salad collection (you have to put the basil leaves on after the dressing or they go disgustingly brown and soggy). Inferior tomatoes can be improved out of sight by sprinkling them with sugar an hour or so before the meal, but if you can get good tomatoes, they will even convert a reluctant tomatarian like myself.
If you are determined to force a hearty eater who despises ‘rabbit food’ to accept that salad can be enjoyable, try a huge bowl of mixed leaves with a hearty dressing, croutons fried in garlicky butter, shavings of parmesan or chunks of goats’ cheese, crispy bacon bits, perhaps some toasted pine nuts or other seeds, slices of apple and any thing else that strikes your fancy. It is not exactly the delicate, healthy option that ‘salad’ calls to mind, but accompanied with fresh bread and butter it will satisfy even the most macho of eaters. It may even win you their friendship, if you really want it.

My most annoying cookbook (and a recipe for grilled salsa)

Supper tonight consisted of cucumber, yoghurt and dill salad, grilled tomato salsa and an improvised version of a vegetarian recipe that I had previously tried more faithfully and more successfully.
The original version is artichoke paste, spinach and Coolea cheese grilled sandwich – tonight I forgot the artichoke paste (blend artichokes, garlic and olive oil – simple and delicious!) and added grilled bacon. My first attempt had used Staffordshire oatcakes but there were none available tonight, so tortillas had to stand in.
Without the artichoke paste, and with tortillas being less moist than the oatcakes, the baked wraps were dry enough that the salsa was absolutely necessary.
The salsa was simplicity itself:

4 medium tomatoes
¼ onion
1 green chilli
1 or 2 cloves garlic
8 sprigs coriander
juice of ½ lemon
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

Char the first four ingredients under the grill, then peel the tomatoes and chilli. Put everything in the blender at high speed for thirty seconds, then stick it in the fridge until you’re ready to eat. Apparently it has to be eaten within a couple of hours, but the recipe book didn’t say why.
The grilling gives it a wonderful smokey flavour – you’ll never need to buy barbecue sauce again!
The (non) vegetarian wraps were inspired by the most annoying cookbook I own.
A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a cookbook called ‘Paradiso Season’, by an Irish chef called Dennis Cotter, whose vegetarian Café Paradiso in Cork is the Mecca for all Irish non-meat-eaters. Even devoted omnivores like myself can be persuaded to forego animal protein for a meal from the restaurant.
The book is beautifully produced, with mouthwatering pictures that give the lie to the idea that vegetarianism is perforce dull, and everything I have cooked from it has been delicious, but it is has occasionally provoked me into slamming it across the table in frustration and fury.
Not only does Cotter have a similar style to Nigel Slater (deceptively airy, but actually quite patronising and controlling), but the recipes are incredibly elaborate. This is a frequent problem with restaurant cookbooks – if you are cooking for large numbers and have sous-chefs, it may be no problem to prepare two sauces, pre-cook your pulses and spices, steam the vegetables, assemble the plated meal and garnish it beautifully, but if you’re cooking a simple meal for two, this seems like a lot of work. However, sometimes it’s worth making the effort for a grand meal, sometimes it turns out that the dish is improved by simplification (there’s a delicious hazelnut and squash gratin that really doesn’t need the Gabriel cheese and cream sauce he suggests) and sometimes it’s possible to work out a shortcut.
More annoying than the elaborateness is that the recipes are very slapdash. Whoever tests the recipes must be so used to cooking with Cotter that they forget that we mere mortals need to be told boring details like temperature and approximate cooking time. This means that one rarely gets the dish right first time, although it is usually nice enough even when done experimentally that one is prepared to spend another evening peeling roasted hazel nuts and reducing vegetable stock (don’t tell, but I usually use chicken stock.)
Other successful recipes I have tried from the book include a beetroot soup that is served with a shot of vodka floating in it and gratin of asparagus and blue cheese. The recipes are always mouthwatering to read and usually as good to eat, but the wear and tear on the cook’s spirits is incalculable.

Cheese boards

Cheese again – this time my hobbyhorse is galloping across the vast open expanse of the restaurant cheeseboard. Although the standard practice now is to offer a plate of cheeses in place of a dessert, with no choice allowed to the customer, there are still a number of restaurants that are prepared to maintain and serve a full cheese board.
This is probably trickier than it seems, not to mention costly, because not only does it entail making sure that you have delectable-looking pieces of a wide range of cheeses (wouldn’t you be put off by squodged scraps of cheese as always left over at the end of a family meal?), but to get full value from it, whoever serves the cheese must know what it is. Ideally they would know more than the mere name, but recent experiences leave me feeling that we must aim for the attainable.
At the Don, an established City restaurant, the cheese was kept on a respectable trolley with a marble top and in excellent condition, but the range was peculiar and the waiter who served it seemed to know rather less than nothing about it.
The cheeses I chose were Roquefort, Flower-Marie, Livarot and a ‘cloche’ that turned out to be goat’s cheese. Also on the board were a Coeur de Neufchatel, another strong French washed-rind cheese which neither I nor the waiter could identify, a small Stinking Bishop (or so it was alleged, although I have never otherwise come across a miniature version) and a hard English cheese that none of the staff could hazard a guess at. It might have been a very young Lincolnshire Poacher.
The waiter, who may have been on his first day on the job, first of all just wanted me to point at random; when I demanded more information, he sighed heavily and pulled out a piece of paper with most of the names scribbled on it. These he scattered at random and under his breath over the board and when asked to repeat them, he reordered the names in the hopes that somehow this would improve matters. While sympathising deeply with his predicament, I was disappointed to realise how little he was interested in the food he was serving.
Quite otherwise was a delightful experience at Giardinetto, a nouvelle Italian (what a bastard term, but I can’t think of a better) on Mayfair’s Albemarle St. It was an expense account dinner in an obviously expense account restaurant, but my heart had already been won by the sommelier who explained his practice of warming each glass with a drop of wine as part practical flavour enhancement, part ‘theatre of wine’.
Come dessert time, my companion said firmly that I would have the cheese instead (do you think I have acquired some kind of a reputation?).
The hitherto silent waiter brought an entirely Italian cheeseboard around. I confessed to knowing nothing about Italian cheese and threw myself on his mercy. Luckily it turns out that Italian cheese is close enough to other kinds of cheese that I was able to ask intelligent questions (what is that washed with?; isn’t that a sheep’s cheese?; that kind of thing) and while my companion chatted up the sommelier, myself and the cheese-maestro got down to it with the Talegino, the Parmegiano, the two varieties of Ubriaco and so forth.
He explained to me how he looked after the cheeses, how they were aging, where they were from and in some cases who had made them. The decision over what to keep on the board was obviously as agonising to him as that of which to try on my plate was to me. To my shame, I neither asked him to repeat the names of the cheeses so that I could be sure I had understood him or wrote immediate notes on them. All I have are the happy memories and a determination to return to try again.

Matchbox cheese

When I was a cheesemonger, we used to scorn people who came in and asked for low-fat cheese. In fact, I think we may have thrown one of them out of the shop, although perhaps we didn't actually resort to physical violence.

But these poor people were only seeking some kind of compromise between their desire for cheese and a desire not to look like a savoury version of Augustus Gloop. The cheesemonger party line on dieting is - well, actually, it's 'don't', but if you're in a tolerant mood, it's: try eating a smaller amount of better, stronger flavoured cheese. Parmesan is made with skimmed milk and has such a strong flavour that you're unlikely to want to eat an enormous amount.

I trotted out this platitude quite happily, being unconcerned about my weight, for years. Recently I have found it hard to do up the top button on my jeans, so I have been wondering about regulating my diet a little bit. While in the doctor's waiting room (unrelated reasons) I found a copy of Good Housekeeping that contained what seemed like a perfectly reasonable diet, until I realised that it wanted me to stick to one, single, MATCHBOX-SIZED piece of cheese per day.

I don't care if it's the finest Parmigiano Reggiano, straight from the silver-lined vaults of the banks of Parma and sanctioned by the most respected godfather in all of Cosa Nostra, I want more than a matchbox-worth of cheese! I'll just have to buy a new pair of jeans.

The morning after the night before

One of my favourite meals is breakfast the morning after the party. Several people have slept over; most of them are close friends, but there is usually at least one random guest who may as a result become a close friend. You have all pitched in and cleaned up the debris, and have reached the stage of a hangover when food is necessary. If done well, this communally prepared meal can revive sufferers, deepen bonds of friendship and, depending on your stamina, be the beginning of the next party…
This requires careful steering through the touchy feelings, physical weakness and general indecisiveness of the hungover. Cooking breakfast for a large number of people is always a logistical and management challenge, even more so than most cooking. Perhaps this is because people want very familiar things for breakfast, so experimentation is frowned upon, but choice is expected.
Eggs are a good example of this - breakfasters expect to be asked how they want their eggs cooked, and how many. If a range of options is offered, nobody will choose scrambled eggs, but you will be expected to fry and boil eggs to a variety of levels of hardness. This is a good moment to unleash your inner older sister and come over all bossy and controlling. Scramble all the eggs. They will be eaten with relish.
Sausages must be cooked slowly, bacon moderately slowly, tomatoes briefly and mushrooms with butter. They can all be kept warm in a low to medium oven - cover the meat to prevent it drying out.
Toast must be made on a rolling basis next to the table. This is an ideal task for delegation, as is the job of tea and coffee monitor.
Laying the table is also a task to be entrusted to others; if they forget things, let them be the ones to jump up from the table. Assuming that everyone concerned has a hangover and has probably been cleaning the house for at least an hour, there will be dissension among the ranks and a mutiny driven by combined apathy, irritability and pigheadedness is likely. If you are not certain of your ability to quell it, stay out of it. If someone stands in the middle of the kitchen, insisting that all the eggs be scrambled, let them. Get on with the rest of it and let go of the eggs. Anyway, this Violet Elizabeth Bott of the kitchen is right: the eggs should be scrambled.

Pink Food

In recent weeks, there has been a theme to the food I have cooked: it’s all pink. This is not intentional (unless it’s unconscious obedience to my godsister’s instruction to ‘embrace the pink’), but it has yielded some surprisingly good results.
In fact of course it’s just due to a surplus of two seasonal ingredients, rhubarb and beetroot. The rhubarb I have covered in sufficient detail elsewhere (although at some point I should tell you about the rhubarb ice-cream that was the highlight of the dessert menu at tapas restaurant Salt Yard), but the beetroot deserves a bit of attention.
In their first incarnation, the beetroot were just little dusty balls of muddy red, piled into a nasty plastic bag by their onlie begetter at the Marylebone Farmers’ Market. Normally I like talking to producers and am grateful for their advice on how to prepare their goods, but this woman was so monomaniacally firm about how I ought to roast the beetroot that I rebelled.
Carefully donning rubber gloves (I believe Lady Macbeth's problem was just that she had forgotten to do this before dealing with the crimson root vegetable), I peeled the little dears and grated them before mixing them with crème fraiche, a little bit of olive oil and lemon juice and some caraway, cumin and fennel seed, toasted and slightly crushed. This simple but intensely pink salad was so successful that one initially dubious diner offered to send photos of herself, Before and After, to the Beetroot Appreciation Society.
Cheered by this success, I improvised further. Inspired by the find of a half-price smoked chicken breast, I decided that what my life needed was smoked chicken and beetroot risotto.

Smoked chicken and beetroot risotto for 3
75g butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ onion, finely chopped
250g risotto rice (arborio, carnaroli, etc au choix)
1 glass white wine
some hot stock (I’ve never measured the amount of stock in a risotto, I just keep adding till it seems like the right texture and the rice is done)
4 baby beetroots, boiled, peeled and chopped into 2cm dice
1 smoked chicken breast, sliced
100g smoked Gubbeen cheese, grated
fresh chopped chives to garnish

Melt 50g butter in a heavy-based saucepan and gently fry the garlic and onion until soft. Add the rice and stir until it turns translucent. Add the wine and stir until it is all absorbed. Add the hot stock ladle by ladle, stirring gently each time until it is all absorbed. When the rice is almost cooked (in about 20 minutes) add the beetroot and chicken. When it is done to your taste (more or less al dente, more or less liquid), remove from the heat and stir in the remaining butter, cheese and chives. Season to taste.

When this recipe occurred to me, I pictured it the usual creamy white of risotto with pink splodges where the beetroot pieces speckled it. Instead it turned a wonderful, uniform Barbie pink, a colour that only a four-year-old girl could love, which is why the chives are so necessary to relieve the plastic colour.
The final incarnation of the beetroot (the woman who wanted them roasted obviously thought that I needed more pink in my life, and by golly she made sure I got it) was in a spinach salad with croutons and a delicious sheep’s milk yoghurt dressing. Delicious it may have been but the pernicious pinkness invaded it, clashing horribly with the red stalks of the baby spinach leaves. The man to whom I served this blenched at being asked to eat something so unmasculine, but to his credit only murmured a suggestion about adding the croutons last ‘so that they would look like something you’re supposed to eat’. I suppose if you had a nasty imagination, the soggy, ragged, dark pink lumps could be thought to resemble gobbets of raw flesh.
The final two baby beetroots – can you believe I haven’t come to the end of it? – sat in the fridge in their boiled state, developing some of the most exciting moulds I have ever seen outside a cheese cellar.

The beetroot madness may be over, but I have just found a recipe (in The Silver Spoon) for chicken in pink sauce. Can I, should I resist?

Picnic Cheese

Things have been too hectic for me to post in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I'd put up this piece, which I wrote last summer.

Most people, when they think of romantic food, think in clichéd terms of oysters and red wine. Slivers of truffle, pints of cream and chocolate to follow, with the occasional chilli for spice and strawberries for the romantic healthy eater.

However, I have neither a sweet tooth nor a soft spot for clichés, so the way to my heart is with cheese. The man who suggested cheese sandwiches and some wine by the lake in St James’s Park had got it exactly right. The only change to be made to his programme was that I insisted on supplying the cheese myself.

Choosing cheese for a romantic picnic is an interesting challenge. It can’t be bland, but it mustn’t be either too rich or too smelly. The cheese will set the tone for the occasion, and there may be implications to consider.

A deliciously runny Brie or a Stinking Bishop is a very sensuous thing to eat, dripping and sticking to your fingers. If you are definitely trying to seduce your fellow-picnicker, that’s a good idea. If this is just a preliminary exploration, and deliberately choosing a public place for your date may be a sign that you’re not ready to get too close, a firmer cheese is less likely to lead you into compromising situations.

The cheesemongers of Neal’s Yard Dairy were well up to the challenge I threw at them: choose me cheeses for a romantic picnic.

The big cheesemonger with the dark beard knew instantly what he thought was right: Parmesan. I said that, although Parmesan is indubitably the emperor of cheese, it might be too overbearing for a date.

My first choice was Flower Marie, which Beardy Cheesemonger loudly scorned. Luckily his contemptuous remarks were loud enough that his colleague overheard and weighed in on my side.

Flower Marie is a velvety white block of unpasteurised sheep’s cheese, with a furry coat, a soft creamy inside going slightly runny round the edges. Made by Kevin and Alison Blunt in Sussex, it has a very delicate flavour – sweet and creamy with just a hint of acidity in the aftertaste. I always think it tastes faintly of spring flowers, but that may just be an association with the name - the vegetal aroma is actually closer to new-mown hay. This flavour, suggestive of early summer and bats flitting through the twilight as the dew is falling, seems to me the quintessence of romantic food.

BCM suggested that my problem was that I had too feminine a notion of romance, and suggested a Chabis from the same cheesemakers. Chabis is a cute little button of goat’s cheese, but a bit too small to develop an interesting character: one ends up with too much of the rind and nothing else but a generic goats cheese mouth-feel coating one’s tongue and palate. Not good for the occasion, in my opinion; I find it hard to feel romantic when all I can taste is the faintly plastic pungency of goat.

To counter the accusation of girliness, I decided to pick a big hitter as the final complement to my al fresco cheeseboard. Doddington is produced in the Doddington Dairy in Northumberland by Maggie Maxwell - check out their excellent website at www.doddingtondairy.co.uk. It is a fruity Cheddar-style hard cow’s cheese, aged for 10-15 months in a wax rind until it achieves a subtler version of the crunchiness and punch that BCM yearns for in Parmesan.

Although it might also be considered a little overbearing, Doddington is one of the best hard cheeses around, if like me you prefer the fruity flavour to the nuttiness of Cantal or Keen’s Cheddar. The other advantage of hard fruity cheeses is that they go wonderfully with honey on white bread. Tearing a morsel off a fresh loaf, crushing your piece of Doddington onto the soft bread and adding a drop of sticky honey to the mouthful before either eating it yourself or offering it to your companion – that’s what a romantic picnic is all about. And if you can arrange for it to happen while watching the pelicans in St James Park, with the summer evening sun filtering through the fresh green leaves and a squirrel sitting a few yards away looking adorable, then perhaps you’ll realise that gooey cheeses aren’t the only ones that can lead you into a compromising situation on a picnic.

rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb

I had a huge hit Sunday night with this rhubarb and mascarpone tart - here's how:
Whip 250g mascarpone (or any kind of creamy cheesey thing, I guess) with a tablespoonful of vanilla sugar, put it in a pre-baked, cooled pie shell, and put stewed fruit on top. Easy-peasy.

Especially if you have stewed rhubarb sitting around from your failed attempt at rhubarb jelly (see previous rhubarb post). I mixed some of the non-gelled jelly into the mascarpone, but I don't think it made a huge difference one way or another.

The pastry was a recipe from a friend called Eithne - 175g flour, 40g icing sugar, pinch of salt, 75g butter, 1 egg. Blitz dry ingredients and butter briefly in the magimix, then add the egg and 1 or 2 tablespoons of water and mix even more briefly. Wrap the resulting ball of pastry in clingfilm (actually, it was more like bread crumbs, but I squodged it together) in the fridge for at least half an hour, roll out and bake at 200degrees, Gas mark 6, for 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown. This fits a pie dish 25cm across (10 inches or so).

The clever trick with the pastry that I learned this week was not to trim it around the edges until after it has been cooked. This means you don't have to deal with it shrinking.

For anyone still following the saga of the St Patrick's party menu, the rhubarb mascarpone tart is now the official pudding.

I promise I will track down a camera before Friday AND learn to post photographs to the blog!

Improving karma

I've always had terrible trouble making yeast bread. It turns out heavy and lumpen, the crumb heavy with tiny to non-existent airholes and no flavour to speak of, despite my religiously following all the instructions. So after numerous failed attempts, I wrote it down to bad karma and gave up the effort.

Recently however, I have been through quite a lot of life changes and have reason to believe that my karma may have changed. On impulse last week, I bought a cheap pizza dough mixture, thinking that if I were wrong and my karma left me with nasty pizza, it wouldn't matter much. I bought nice but not riduculous ingredients for the toppings - mozzarella di bufala, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms. (Anchovies and olives also went into the shopping basket but when it came to the point, the pizza looked full enough without. Next time.)

Just two ten minute provings were required by the recipe on the side of the packet, and it worked! Not the nicest pizza ever, but given the constraints (an unfamiliar oven, a too-small pan, the cheapness and nastiness of the mix, my family calling me just as I took the pizza out of the oven), it was a triumph.

So this week I decided to take the next step and make the pizza dough from scratch. I used extra strong Canadian flour from Waitrose and dried yeast. Jamie Oliver (in his first book) offered a fairly straightforward-looking recipe, although I halved it because there is no room in my freezer for the extra pizza bases he suggests making. I'm not convinced I got the yeast/honey/warm water mixture right, as it didn't fizz up the way I expected, and the final product smelt much too strongly of yeast. The proving was also underwhelming - I have never seen dough double in size, despite in this case putting it in the hot press. However, the resulting product was definitely not to be sneered at. It was a little heavy, and soft in the middle, but that should be remedied by the pizza crisping pans I bought yesterday, and possibly by rolling the dough a little thinner.

Next step: real bread!

PS the other thing that is affected by karma is yoghurt making. I have never had a problem making yoghurt at home in Ireland, but never once has it worked for me in England. I tried everything, even taking it to bed with me, but it just sat there being runny, sour milk. Yuck. Maybe I should try that again.

Rhubarb jellies

The rhubarb and muscat jellies taste absolutely delicious, but unfortunately they just barely qualify as 'jellies' because they are so liquid. Instead of little round quivering lumps, they turn out of the moulds as dispiriting puddles, slopping across the whole width of the saucer I have put them on.

I followed Nigella Lawson's recipe faithfully, and am furious that it was so unreliable, particularly because she is adamant that using sheet gelatine makes it foolproof. She is very rude about powdered gelatine, which I have frequently used with great success.

The only point at which I deviated from the recipe was when the oven-baked rhubarb yielded much less juice than she predicted, so I made up the difference with extra muscat wine. A couple of people have suggested that this may have affected the setting power of the gelatine, which would make sense.

So my question is: do I just assume that I can correct for this and go ahead and make jellies for the party? If it doesn't work again, will I be able to come up with an emergency substitute?

And a minor question: can anyone think of something delicious to do with seven little rhubarb and muscat non-jellies? I also have the rhubarb pulp, so maybe it should all go together with a farinaceous topping and be called crumble.