Revisiting the scenes of my youth

I've lived in London for an astonishing ten years now, so the miserable days when i lived out on the far-off reaches of the Central Line have more or less faded from my mind.
The one aspect of living in Leytonstone that was an unalloyed pleasure was the wonderful, wonderful Singburi Royal Thai Cafe.
Eleven years ago, Tony and Thelma bought a fish fry bar on Leytonstone High Road and started frying fish and chips. Tony, however, loves cooking the food of his native Thailand, so the regulars soon started to spend more on the red Thai curries or the phad thai noodles that were also available than on the boring old fish and chips.
So they ripped out the fry bar (but left the backlit panel on the wall above it, just covering it up with posters from the Thai Ministry of Food), bought some tables and chairs, moved the kitchen into a back room and set up shop as Singburi.
My housemates and I discovered it early and ate there regularly. The menu had all the usual Thai standards, done to an extremely high standard, and on quiet evenings, we would ask if Tony had anything special going on. Usually he would have picked up something interesting at the market and have put together some unexpected dish. Minced quail, sweet-roasted dried beef, massaman curry - even minced frog.
On busy evenings, we stuck to those menu dishes we knew were exceptional: tom kha gai (coconut chicken soup), gang paneang neu (a dry coconut beef curry), roast duck curry, phad thai. And it was never so busy that Thelma couldn't stop to greet us fondly, or come over for a giggly chat at some point. 
After a couple of years, I left Leytonstone, and soon thereafter lost all touch with the people I had known at that time of my life, but I never forgot Tony and Thelma. Every now and then, I would check online to make sure they were still going, and plan to go back there just to see if I had imagined how good it was.
Finally a couple of weeks ago, the Man and I drove over. We pushed open the door to familiar smells and Thelma - six years older but still as smiley - welcoming us in.
It was unchanged!
Ok, I realised on closer inspection that some of the chairs were new and the fish tank near the door has gone, but the weaver birds' nests still hang in the window with little toy koala bears clinging to them, the menu is unchanged (except for the addition of a specials board) and the food is just as good.
As we ordered, I realised Thelma was looking at me carefully - she slowly recognised me despite six years' absence and a lot of changes.
The crowning joy of the evening was that although the back-lit panel has gone, replaced by a wall of photos of jolly meals at Singburi (I even found a few old acquaintances), the very best Ministry of Food poster has been upgraded from blu-tak to frame. It is an artfully lit photo of rambutans with the caption: "Bushy, juicy".

It's just not pretty

What's the ugliest vegetable? Celeriac certainly has to be a contender, and it fails to meet my basic quality test: if it comes out of the ground, it should be a potato.
So what do with a hideous tuber that I don't like? Turn it into soup, of course, because I don't like soup anyway, so making it out of celeriac couldn't make it any worse.
A bit of vague googling gave me the courage to plunge in with a celeriac, ginger and carrot soup.


2 onions
some oil
4 carrots
1 medium-sized celeriac ... what - head? bulb? lump, I think
a chunk of ginger, about 2 cubic inches
1 ltr chicken stock approx (actually the full of one tub formerly used to hold biological washing tablets)
I chopped the onion finely, then gently fried in the oil while putting the carrots, celeriac and ginger through the grating attachment of my minifoodprocessor (thank you, mother-in-law!)
This I added to the onion, stirred it all up and then added the stock and left to simmer.
When all the veg was soft, I whizzed it up with my soup-gun and seasoned it.
Hmm, not offensive, but a bit dull.
So I decided to experiment a bit - remember tarka dal, for which the 'tarka' is a lovely spicey butter mixture? I melted some butter and added minced garlic and cumin. When that had foamed up and smelt delicious, I stirred it into the soup.
It worked beautifully, I'm happy to tell you, though it was even nicer reheated for lunch, with a splash of tabasco sauce to spice it up.

PS Don't ask about the new oven. Please, just don't ask.

Slow progress

Things have been quiet on the blog front for me recently. This is not due to lack of commitment but because we have been MOVING HOUSE. For me, of course, the main excitement of this is that we have a new kitchen. No longer a little windowless box with a crappy electric stove with only three burners working, but a proper room with a table and chairs, a breakfast bar (where I am now perched), two windows, and a five burner gas hob!
We had the hob installed about two weeks ago and are now waiting for a new oven because the door on incumbent was smashed by the previous occupant of the house. He told us he sat on it, but the fact that the outside glass panel is shattered and the bin next to it has a huge dent leads me to suspect he lost his temper and laid waste to things.
Moving house is very stressful. Luckily for me and my belongings, when I'm stressed, I just weep for a bit then have a cup of coffee and cheer up.
Anyway, expect more posts soon as I learn my way around the new facilities!

I can sing a rainbow

Colours seem to be strongly associative, so it often comes as a surprise that those associations can be relatively recent. Not long ago (like in the 1930s) it was thought appropriate to dress baby girls in pale blue and boys in pink or red, the stronger, more masculine colour.

Likewise, if asked what colour a carrot is, virtually everyone would instantly visualise the colour orange, but Victorian gardeners apparently would have been unfazed to see a dark purple root emerging as they pulled the bushy green tops.

Dark purple heritage carrots have become fashionable again, along with blue potatoes and other sillinesses. I don’t think the teeny-tiny yellow tomatoes I found in the market the other day are a heritage variety but even the tomato-averse Man gobbled them up.

Belated Solstice Greetings

My parents-in-law send and receive around 150 Christmas cards every year. Because they are artists, many of their friends are artists, so they get some lovely cards.
We have received a grand total of eight Christmas cards this year. But that's ok, because we don't send cards at all. Slightly quixotically, we send little Christmas cakes. This year, I even made the marzipan myself. 150 would be ridiculous, but we manage around 30.
The drill is make a square cake sometime in November, then at the beginning of December, cut it into little squares, which then get marzipanned, iced and decorated before being posted off to all our friends and relations. (Well, those for whom we have addresses. If you didn't get one and you think you should, send me an email!)
Unfortunately this year I cut the little square cakes carefully to fit the boxes we had bought without allowing for the extra double thickness of marizipan and icing. Luckily the Kitchen Accomplice noticed and sliced off the necessary slivers. She then had the inspired idea of crumbling up the resulting pointless pieces of cake and shaping the crumbs into snowmen, to be held together with marzipan, snowed over with white royal icing and decorated a la mode.This was the only one I saw being eaten, having lovingly but not very carefully transported it home to Ireland for a family Solstice celebration. You can see the decorations didn't really survive the journey.
I was afraid the poor little snowman's insides would be similarly messy, as we hadn't mixed anything into the cake crumbs to bind them together, but they were a triumph.

See? How cool is that for a Christmas card?

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?