Vegetarians, look away now!

We spent last week in the beautiful sitio real of La Granja de San Ildefonso near Segovia, a small but amazingly beautiful city around 100km from Madrid. Not only was the weather perfect but the speciality of the region is roast suckling pig. One restaurant even had a whole one sitting, a la Japanese restaurants except not made of plastic, in its window. Splatted piglet just doesn't entice. Unless you've eaten it before, when you know it is one of the most delicious meat dishes there is - moist, savoury, covered in flavourful crackling. But there's no denying it is not the most attractive-looking beast ever to arrive on my plate.

Is he a Real Man?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. This is going to lead to disappointment tonight one way or another, because this is what we're having for supper:
It's my very first attempt at quiche and either the Man is going to be disappointed because he's Real and will have to go supperless, or (far worse) I will be disappointed because he's not a Real Man!
Anyway, I'm very proud of my first attempt at 'savoury flan', which I based roughly on a recipe given to me more than ten years ago by my friend Jo.
I tweaked the pastry a little by swapping some of the butter for something with the sinister name 'Cookeen', which is made of something unspeakable but does make your pastry flaky.

Pastry:
5oz flour
scant 1/2 tsp salt
big pinch sugar
4oz chilled butter (or near relation) cut into small pieces
4-4 1/2 tbsp ice water

• Sift flour (oops, forgot to do that, never mind) and cut fat into flour.
• Rub in lightly with fingertips until crumbly.
• Sprinkle on water, one tablespoon at a time (use only as much as necessary) and bring together with a knife.
• As soon as it will form a ball, cover with clingfilm and allow to rest in the fridge for half an hour before baking blind for 20-25 minutes at 190 0C.

The filling I changed almost entirely from Jo's original. I added courgettes and red pepper to the original mushrooms and scallions, and beat goats curd instead of cream with the eggs. This meant it didn't have the heavenly custardy wobbliness of the best quiches, but it was slightly less hideously unhealthy and did have a pleasing tanginess.

Filling:
Dash of olive oil, dab of butter
1lb sliced mushrooms (courgettes, red pepper, whatever)
1tsp salt, 1 tsp lemon juice (two ingredients I entirely failed to notice when cooking)
3 eggs
1/2 pint cream (or a random amount of goats curd - probably not far off half a pint)
1 oz butter (also forgotten in my version - surely goats curd is an adequate substitute?)
Pinch of nutmeg, 1/8tsp pepper, 2 tsp Madeira (hello - who puts Madeira in quiche?)

• Cook onions in heavy-bottomed saucepan with butter and olive oil, then stir in vegetables, salt, lemon juice and wine.
• Cover and cook over lowish heat for 8 minutes.
• Raise heat and boil until liquid evaporates.
• Beat eggs and cream (or curd) with seasoning, then carefully stir the vegetables in.
• Pour into the pastry, sprinkle with cheese (where did the cheese come from? I never saw anything about the cheese in the ingredients list!) and dot with butter.
• Bake for 25-30 mins at 190 0C until golden on top and faintly wobbly.

Tarte Tintin - Bashibazouks!

The parents of one of the Man's colleagues have an orchard. Or possibly just an apple tree, but at any rate, they had surplus apples this autumn, which somehow made their way to my kitchen, just in time for me to try out the newly-discovered tarte tatin possibilities of my silicone-handled skillets.
Tonight I bumped into the reality that one should pay very careful attention to the instructions in a recipe, not just the ingredients list. My usual practice is very carefully to make sure I know what's on the list, then skim through the instructions, based on an (over-) confident assumption that I know roughly how to put things together.
This may be the case with recipes I've tried before. It's not so good with things I haven't ever tried before.
Tarte tatin recipes call either for halves of apples or quarters. I blithely sliced my apples much thinner, which had two disadvantages. The first is that it's much harder to squish them all into the pan (I failed - two tarts are better than one, luckily) and second the little pieces of apple effectively disintegrate while cooking in the buttery sugary glaze.
Luckily the unbelievably rich pastry stood up to the wondrously toffee-ish sauce that resulted, although the whole thing didn't look quite as beautiful as a proper tart like wot my mother used to make.
The second tart I made with a scone dough instead of going through the faff of a proper flaky pastry, resting the dough for ages in the fridge and so on. I haven't tasted it yet - it's destined for my work colleagues, but it looks yummy!

Nutty tart

Two simple mistakes and I ruined what could have been a masterpiece. The first was that I forgot to keep my pantry stocked, so when I came to make this hazelnut tart, I had no plain flour.
Not a problem, I thought. I'll use wholewheat flour. That'll be grand.
I'd forgotten the salutary experience of an evening at a local restaurant in Ireland where the chef had decided on a whim to make wholewheat pasta. He'd never done it before, but when our spy in the kitchen muttered that perhaps he should cook it longer than normal pasta, he simply screamed, threw a tantrum and fired her.
As a result we had to wait for our order for nearly an hour while the manager soothed the chef, then the pasta itself was inedibly thick and undercooked.
My wholewheat pastry was not quite so disastrous, but since the recipe originally made a very crumbly pastry, with brown flour it would have been impossible to do anything without the brilliant tip to roll it out between layers of clingfilm.
The other mistake was to follow the recipe too slavishly. It called for lemon zest in both pastry and filling. I don't like lemon flavoured sweets much, but I religiously zested two little lemons.
Nobody else complained, but the lemon note in the hazelnut filling to me was overpowering and somehow medicinal.
The big excitement was that there was enough pastry and filling left to make an ancillary tart. I couldn't find any mini-tart tins, so I used a frying pan, the first time I've dared put one of my lovely Analon Professional pans in the oven.
Apart from a minor incident where I branded my own hand with the handle, it worked like a dream. Tarte tatin next, I think!

Spaghetti? Squash?

One of the things I love most about food is how magic it is. Most of this is the kind of chemistry that happens when you boil an egg - clear liquid goo goes solid and white. When you add flour to melted butter and it forms a runny sauce, then you add liquid and it solidifies. You put cake batter into the oven and it disappears, leaving a cake in its place.

This is all magic where it feels like you, the cook, are the conjuror. You are the agent of the magic.

But even better is the magic the food has inside itself. One of my favourite examples is rarely available on this side of the Atlantic. It looks like a normal squash - big, round, a bit dull. You cut it in half - same story. Scoop out the seeds and bake or steam the squash as you normally would.

Then - ABRACADABRA and Hey Presto! - use a fork to scrape out the flesh of your boring yellow squash, which turns into noodles. Like so:

This is the spaghetti squash tossed with butter, cheese and basil leaves. No pasta involved.

Even the Man, who had traumatic memories of being forcefed spaghetti squash in a Winnebago overlooking the Grand Canyon age 10 admitted grudgingly that it wasn't as awful as he had expected.

Which is high praise.

I took the leftovers to work as my packed lunch the next day and was delighted to discover that it was genuinely nice, not just exciting because it's so weird.

The Scent of Melons

I have often wondered why there aren't more positive words for smells. There are lots of unpleasant words - stench, stink, mephitic, acrid, putrid - a few neutral or context-specific - pungent, earthy, sharp - and a handful of not very specific pleasant ones, such as aromatic and fragrant.
This is in spite of the power of smell to make us happy, to trigger memories, to influence us. People trying to sell or rent their houses are told to have a pot of coffee on the stove to make prospective buyers like the place more. Supermarkets are said to pump artificial fresh-bread-smell out to make shoppers feel hungry and make the place more appealing.
One sniff of fresh blackcurrant cordial and I'm back in my grandmother's kitchen, while the smell of hay transports me back to my childhood, hot and happy summer days bringing in the hay.
And walking past the fruit and veg section of our local Turkish shop the other day, I was seized by a scent of the most extraordinary beauty. It was a ripe Galia melon, which I bought and took home to put where I usually put a vase of flowers, and it filled the room with its sweet, soft, cool smell.

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.

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, Baker's man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.

Perhaps my parents sang this to me too often in my cradle. There has to be some reason for my compulsion to bake cakes.

Last night I decided my colleagues had gone too long with no cake or cookies, so I bought some blueberries and made Blueberry Streusel Cake from one of my favourite websites.

Streusel is a staple of American coffee cakes. It took me a long time to work out that coffee cake in American novels refers to cake to be eaten with a cup of coffee, not coffee-flavoured cake. They tend to be plain sponges with some keynote ingredient and the streusel.

It sounds exotic, doesn't it? It's basically just an aromatic and crispy crumble. It adds an interesting texture and a very pleasant, sugary-spicy flavour to an otherwise slightly dull cake.

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?

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.