Frozen Planet

That's it.  The party's over.  After three years in my first ever flat in London, I have left Bermondsey for Balham.  Farewell to the rooftop garden, venue for last year's New Year's Eve party, complete with Chinese lanterns that threatened to land in the street; farewell to an ensuite bathroom, decorated with Fifties ladies for inspiration; farewell to the farmers' market down the road, home of Ted the Veg; farewell to the kitchen, witness to so many rushed and so many lazy breakfasts, the new-discovered joy of freelance lunches, solo, romantic and weekend guest dinners.

But hello to a garden with a veg patch, with the promise of summer parties and barbecues; hello to an attic room, destined for writing in fingerless gloves whilst eating apples; hello to a new farmers' market, waiting to be explored; hello to a kitchen with marble surfaces, ideal for pastry, a whole cupboard to myself and a conservatory for nurturing seedlings and tender herbs...

The move was blissfully simple, thanks to a strong new housemate to lift boxes and drive a car.  Indeed, the only challenge was to eat up all the bags of miscellaneous items in the freezer beforehand - chicken stock, lamb stock, half a wild boar belly, lamb mince, one egg white, breadcrumbs and some sweetcorn (yep, more sweetcorn).

Chicken stock was the base of a thank-heavens-it's-finally-cold-enough-for-soup soup, flavoured with butternut squash for a velvety bowl of winter:

Lamb stock and lamb mince joined together in an intensely lamby shepherd's pie - the photos looked a bit dull, so I'll show you a cottage pie in my next post.  I couldn't possibly put it in this one, no no, wrong theme innit?  However, I can definitely say that it is worth making your own lamb stock.  It's just as easy as making chicken stock, just save up and freeze any bones from lamb chops or cutlets until you have a decent amount to flavour a broth.  It made the mince taste even lambier, and I imagine that it would make a fabulous gravy too.

The wild boar demi-belly was a leftover from an attempt earlier in the year to make a 'fashion' Cornish pasty, i.e. any pasty that isn't properly Cornish and that faffs about with fancy ingredients.  The pasty turned out ok, but chopping up the belly was a fairly rank experience.  Raw wild boar absolutely reeks, and sawing through the fat was not a pleasant job.  The memory of this caused me to put off cooking the rest of the belly for six months - how could I get rid of that smell still lingering in my mind's nostrils?  But needs must, so I prepared it as quickly as possible, just seasoning it and whacking it in the oven:

Served with roast new potatoes, mashed carrot and a dollop of wholegrain mustard, it was a delicious mini-roast for one.  And the smell totally disappeared after cooking, much to my relief, leaving just a rather gamey pork flavour.

Inexplicably, I STILL had yet more flamin' sweetcorn to deal with, albeit removed from the cob before freezing, making it marginally more useful.  Another hunt through the recipe books uncovered a little dish from Rose Prince in 'The New English Kitchen', which is a good book for lots of recipes involving leftovers and making food go further.  As it also involved breadcrumbs, two bags were dealt with at once, providing me with a simple and quick supper of sweetcorn fritters:

Slightly 'caramelised', but still perfectly acceptable when wolfed down with some ketchup.

However, I was most pleased by what came out of that single, lone egg white.  Stirred, not whisked, with ground almonds, almond extract, a smidge of flour and some sugar (from Nigella's How to Eat) produced these beauties in less than twenty minutes:

Macaroons.  A comforting taste of childhood and just the thing to nibble on as a reward after packing yet another box.

So, that's one freezer and another year dealt with.  I look forward to seeing what another of each may hold over the coming months.

Merry Christmas dear reader, and a very Happy New Year.  May your fridge, and indeed your freezer, overflow with good things!

Lentils. They're not just for students.

If ever anyone mentions the word 'lentils', I cannot help but think of Neil from 'The Young Ones', constantly suggesting some nice lentils for tea, or of their after-effect on one's digestive system, as so ably demonstrated by SPG the Hamster whizzing round the room on the wings of his own flatulence.  I rather like this clip where Neil suggests eating lentils just for something to do, and the ensuing madness that comes from eating too many.

Which is rather a worry really, considering how many I'm eating at the moment.  Difficult times, economic climate, blah blah blah - we're all trying to cut back on our spending and for me, that basically means becoming a temporary vegetarian.  I don't eat meat unless it's good quality, good quality costs money, so for me, meat is a treat to be saved for and savoured.  None of this cheap, rubbishy, water-plumped, badly treated 'product' (it doesn't deserve to be called 'meat'), thank you very much, where you may as well have not eaten it as it doesn't really taste of anything.  Meat is for special occasions and in the meantime, veg do very nicely.

However, as with any kind of vegetarianism, be it temporary or permanent, you need to get some protein in you, even if there is a danger of self-propelled lift-off.  Probably thanks partly to Neil, lentils, beans and other pulses were left languishing on the shelf for aaaages - after all, what do you do with them?  Boil them?  Stick them in chilli?  Make soup?  Great, so that's three things.  Bored now.

First of all, mix them with nice stuff that you like.  Obvious really.  Inspired by a Waitrose recipe card (yep, another one), I roasted beetroot, cooked lentils in a stock with some herbs, made a sharp dressing and tossed the lot in with some crisp leaves, crumbling goat's cheese over the top:

Hurrah, a beetroot salad that worked!  Feta would probably work nicely here too, and roasted squash would be good instead of the beetroot.

I cook dhals quite a bit, and love them, but sometimes I like a spicy lentil dish that I can chew rather than slurp.  This Diana Henry dish (yep, another one) adds peppers into a spicy tomato and lentil stew-type thing, which is ace with couscous.  This stew freezes well too.

It's good to cook couscous with a bit of stock to give it more flavour and I've used Nigel Slater's idea of mixing sultanas and coriander in with it to liven it up a bit.  A raita on the side cools it all down - a nifty tip from good ol' DH is to grate the cucumber and then squeeze it over a sieve before stirring it in the yoghurt, so that it doesn't become too watery.  Nobody likes cucumber soup with bits of couscous floating in it.  At the very least, it's exhausting swapping a fork for a spoon.

Although it feels like I'm cheating you, dear reader, and Neil too, by casting lentils aside in favour of chickpeas, this dish was utterly yummy.  I had it for dinner one day, lunch the next and dinner tonight and I'm rather disappointed that there are no more leftovers left over:

Squash roasted with cinnamon, then joined by chickpeas, chilli and tomatoes for a bit more roasting, topped off with softened onions stirred with lemon and coriander.  Another DH mega-dish.

Houston, we are ready for take-off.

There are no good puns involving 'corn'

Now we're talking.  The clocks have gone back, it's barely getting light, I've already had soup - hello winter, you beautiful season.  Go on, chill my fingers, nip my nose, it only gives me a better excuse to warm up with stews, crumbles and all things carbohydrate.

One slight problem though.  One tiny confession.  I don't actually want stew and crumble all the time.  I know, what a shock, I'm so sorry, dear reader, I should have suggested that you sit down first.

Maybe you can forgive me if I show you one reason why?  Just one alternative to pastry, pies and potato?

All hail the mighty corn on the cob!

What a glorious vegetable.  (Is it a vegetable?  I think so.  Might be a legume or something.  We'll go with vegetable, if only from the definition that it is 'not fruit'.)  From this angle, it reminds me of those pictures you see of beaches on the Costa del Sol, all those bronzed bodies lined up to worship the sun.  

We are admittedly coming to the end of the fresh sweetcorn season, although I did check in Sainsburys before I wrote this and they are still selling them.  Their ones are already prepared though, which does deprive  you of the pleasure of stripping back all those fibres to see the corn all snuggled in there like so many tourists.  I bought mine a few weeks ago from the market, three massive ones for £2, which presented me with the opportunity of doing more with them than just boiling them and smearing them with butter and salt.

All ready to start consulting the indexes, I realised what I could do, what I needed to do.  I could use THAT recipe card.  The first one I ever picked up, from Yateley Waitrose in June 1999 and had never used - Sweetcorn Parcels with Creole Butter.

This involved making a butter with sundried tomatoes, red pepper, celery and chillies, chilling it and then spreading it over sweetcorn that had been baked in greaseproof parcels in the oven:

Um, yeah.  Not great to be honest.  It's already tricky enough eating bits of corn without trying to scoop up bits of pepper and celery in the same mouthful.  I can't say I wasn't disappointed after twelve years of waiting.  Still, onwards!

The next recipe was one from an Observer Food Monthly mag (only from 2009, what's two years?) for a quesadilla with courgette, chilli and cheese:

This was pretty nice, unbelievably quick to cook and made a soothing little supper - my brain and stomach fought to decide whether the amount of veg compensated for the melted cheese and frying the whole thing in oil, finally agreeing to disagree.

However, the nicest of the bunch involved just two ingredients:

Yep, they're classic for a reason.  Good ol' butter 'n' salt.  The only slight change here was using Heston's Smoked Salt from Waitrose, which was unutterably delicious - it tasted like I'd barbecued the corn without having to stand outside with an umbrella.

So there you have it.  Positively gleaming, twinkling in the late autumn sunlight, corn on the cobs really only need a bit of grease to make them shine - much like those holidaymakers.

A Warning - Don't Be Fooled by Sunshine

So it seems, dear reader, that not only did summer confuse the hell out of us all with its downpours and general inclemency, but now autumn seems to be doing the same thing.  "Oh, but it's been so lovely and hot and sunny," I may hear some of you exclaim.  I don't care.  I don't like it.

I want fog.  I want frosts.  I want to open my window in the morning and be able to smell that 'back to school' smell of cooling air and lowering temperatures.  I want soup.

I do not want, and I cannot stress this enough, I DO NOT WANT SALAD.

In that blasted heatwave of a couple of weeks ago, I was forced into making salad because of the weather.  It was too damn hot to make anything else.  I attempted to make it a bit autumnal though, using a Nigel Slater recipe involving roasted beetroot, pink grapefruit, mixed leaves (he said to use watercress but I couldn't find any that day) and some goats' cheese sprinkled over the top.  To look at, it's lovely, the beetroot making the grapefruit even pinker, the green of the leaves coordinating nicely with the pink, the white of the goats' cheese lightening it all - even the occasional curl of orange zest from the orange and olive oil dressing creating a little flash of neon:

Do not be deceived.  It was utterly, utterly foul.

The beetroot was undercooked (admittedly my fault), the grapefruit went all slimy from the olive oil, the goats' cheese coagulated into a vile slime from all the various liquids, I could have sworn there was grass in those leaves and the orange zest kept catching in my teeth.

This, dear reader, this is why I dislike hot weather in autumn.  I am not supposed to eat salad at this time of year.

I want soup.

Cooking with Nicky #1, #2, #3 and #4

It was around a year ago that I started this blog.  I haven't really written that much in it, the photos aren't spectacular (although I like to think that they might be getting slightly better as I take more of them) and I have no idea who actually reads it, but I've really enjoyed doing it.  Although sitting at a computer is sometimes the last thing I want to do on a weekend or after a day of looking at a screen, the sense of satisfaction after having actually written something, about putting my thoughts into a concrete (though virtual) form, never lessens.  So hopefully I will carry on writing about food for at least another year.

One of the effects of this blog is something I did not expect at all, which is that I have apparently acquired Knowledge.  Over the past year, I have frequently heard the phrase "you must know x about x foodstuff, you have a blog".  In all honesty, dear readers, I know diddly squat about food.  I have had no training, I've never taken any cookery lessons apart from those in my final year of primary school and I certainly have no qualifications.

Yet somehow I have started teaching a friend how to cook.  This makes total sense.

'Cooking with Nicky' did not get off to a particularly auspicious start.  After a request to 'learn more about meat', I started off by showing her how to make a quick pork dish - pork loin steaks served with a honey and mustard sauce, accompanied by mashed potato.  Not the best dish in the world when it turns out afterwards that The Student doesn't really like mustard.  And has since confessed not to really like potato that much either.  Still, onwards!

Lesson #2 went waaay better - everyone likes cake, so we were already on to a winner when I showed her how to make Nigella's carrot cupcakes with cream cheese icing.  Just look at the beautiful things that she created!  Oh, you can see why mothers cry when their children bring them something homemade...

Oh, the heart swells.

Heady with the success of Lesson #2, we bravely returned to meat for Lesson #3, to make Diana Henry's Pacific Lime Chicken.  Chicken thighs marinated in soy sauce, honey, sugar, lime juice and thyme, deftly manoevred with knife, fork and spoon so as not to actually touch anything that would remind The Student of dead flesh, were then roasted in the oven and served with a green salad.  So unbelievably easy (even with the manoevring) and so delicious.  I unfortunately did not take a picture this time, but I've made it myself before and it looks a bit like this:

Mmm, golden crispy skin.

Lesson #4 was rather impromptu and involved another chicken number, this time to use up some chicken breasts and veggies.  Now, I am not a natural rustler.  I am not one of those people who can always produce some amazing feast out of half a potato, some cold beans and an orange, declaring 'oh, I just rustled it up'.  Admittedly, my rustled dish will usually be edible (note the word 'usually'), but I feel a lot more confident with a cookbook by my side.  My mother would say that this is because of my upbringing - not that she always used a cookbook, oh no, the very opposite as she was a very ambitious rustler, hence me learning to cook 'to survive'.

So thinking what to do with chicken and vegetables, not the most taxing of challenges, took a remarkably long time.  Eventually, we plumped for roasting the veg in a dish, then halfway through the cooking time, smearing the chicken with sundried tomato pesto and sitting it on top of the veg to roast along together.  See, see how ludicrous it is that I should be teaching someone how to cook?!

And yet, I do.  Because she is lovely and humours my insistence on free-range chicken, my weird request to take the bones home with me to make stock and my kitchen fascism on the most efficient way to peel a garlic clove (flatten it with the heel of your hand first, the skin will pop off a treat).

Next lesson: more cake.  

Birthday treats for who - the cook or the cookee?

It is no secret amongst my friends that I absolutely, wholeheartedly love birthdays.  It doesn't have to be my birthday either (although that helps, I am an only child after all), as I love other people's too.  I'm not much of a shopper, I've never really been into massive amounts of clothes, shoes, CDs, make-up, and all that other stuff that fuels the wanderings of teenagers round and round shopping malls.  Obviously I still bought all that junk - what is teenage friendship if not a group of girls all carrying identical shopping bags? - but now the only forms of shopping that get me going are food shopping, book shopping and present shopping.

Until recently, I worked at a publishing house and basically got all my books for free.  I have over one hundred still unread on my bookshelf.  So book shopping isn't really much of a concern these days.  Food shopping is a constant, present shopping is a fairly regular occurrence, but the best thing about birthdays is that often you get TO COMBINE THE TWO.  Heaven.

Birthdays are a wonderful occasion anyway, but I am positively ecstatic when I get to cook for someone for their birthday too, whether by making a cake or a whole meal.  Imagine my joy then, when at the end of July, I was able to do both in one week.  Go on, imagine it.

The first birthday was that of someone whose knee has reached the heady heights of fame by appearing in this blog, so a meal of favourite foods was on the cards.  However, my planned starter of scallops was thwarted by them not being properly in season - the lovely Maximus Fishing at my local farmers' market informed me that they were too puny to eat, but that clams might be a good alternative.

Ooh, reader, was I chuffed with these.  I sort of guessed that you probably steam clams open in white wine, garlic and parsley, and mercifully, I guessed correctly:

Three apiece of these giant creatures was filling enough, especially with warm ciabatta dunked in a bit of single estate olive oil - I'd not done that before, but it was like adding seasoning without using pepper or salt.  Curious.  No idea how that works.

For the main course, I served up a version of number one on the favourite food list - chicken and chorizo paella with lots of glorious smoked paprika.  I quite like this picture as it looks like the chicken thighs are lurking like hippos in the rice and stock:

Unlike hippos, the chicken did not attempt to drown anything just for the fun of it, but instead obediently turned succulently tender after a stint in the oven.  Yes, the oven, not the stove-top.  Thank you, Diana Henry, for removing the temptation to stir paella.

Ta-da!  Triumph in technicolour!  (Or as technicolour as my camera-phone allows.)

Dessert was something not on the official favourite foods list, but this is something that the man in question cannot share when out in a restaurant unless it has been specifically pre-arranged prior to ordering, so I was pretty sure that it was a safe bet.  And anyway, who doesn't like chocolate cake?

Another thank you to Diana Henry.  This cake is phenomenally rich and it's quite hard to have a second slice, but you can just about choke that other one down if you pour a bit of cream over the top.  Tough times, I know.

For the second birthday, as my flatmate has someone who likes their knee, I removed myself from the meal zone and entered mere cake zone.  Although to say 'mere' to describe this cheesecake would not do it justice.  A baked confection as opposed to the more available chilled version, this is, according to Nigella, a New York cheesecake.  This cheesecake is one of the reasons why I would like to go to New York.

After a brief struggle to fit all the whisked egg whites into the same bowl as the combined cream cheese, creams, sugar and egg yolks, thus resembling a rather over-ambitious cloud:

...the mixture was then poured over the chilled digestive crumb base in the tin and then subjected to a baking procedure lasting about four hours, with various flapping about with turning ovens down, off, keeping the door closed and then opening it again etc etc blah blah blah.  None of this is important though, when you feast your eyes upon the creation that emerges:

Or, as in my flatmate's case, just feast your whole face.

See?  That's birthday joy right there.

Stiff upper lip, everyone, we'll get through it!

Oh, summer.  You tricksy thing.  Every year, those of us on this silly island think that it's going to be different.  Every year, we are surprised when the sun barely shines and we spend more time wearing socks than sandals.  Every year, the phrases "oh, and we had such a lovely spring" and "maybe we'll have an Indian summer" fall forth from our quivering lips as we hold back tears of disappointment.

Ah, but summer, you know what you're doing.  Day after day, you give us overcast skies, sunny mornings that turn to rainy afternoons and then suddenly, all at once, boom, SUNSHINE!  Hot, glorious sunshine, exotic blue skies over grassy parks, lushly green from all that rain - and sometimes on a weekend!  Then everything is forgiven and we revel in our lily-white legs, Pimms on the lawn and indolent afternoons.

Gone are the stews, the roasts and the crumbles of the colder months.  Even when it's still nippy, I refuse brattishly to cook anything resembling winter food.  Mercifully, although it may be raining, the weekend market stills provides enough of these to fill a salad bowl:

Such plenty would suggest jam, a clafoutis, a tart - or simply wandering into the kitchen, taking a handful and wandering back out again.

Of course, everyone has raved about these this year, and with good reason:

It's simply not an English summer without strawbs, whether with cream or without - may I recommend Cornish clotted instead of your usual double?

When I was growing up, a meal of cold meats, salads and my grandmother's magnificent curried prawns always marked a special occasion - Boxing Day lunch, my grandparents' wedding anniversary in June, or just a big family get-together - so I still feel like a meal of this kind is a treat.  There's an idea that because all the food is cold, it's quick and effortless to prepare, but I would say the opposite - people seem to make more effort precisely because of the lack of heat.  Look see:

That, to me, is a mini-feast full of treats.  Simple pleasures, you may say, but pleasures nonetheless.  Potato salad with cress (retro but classic), pate (no accents on this keyboard) and a salad of peach, mozzarella and prosciutto.  Basically equals yum.

So far this year, all of this has been eaten indoors.  There has not been a chance to say "oh, doesn't food always taste better when eaten outside?"  I know it's nearly the end of July, I know I've already seen 'back to school' things in the shops, but maybe, just maybe, there will be a weekend when we can do this again:

Obviously with full plates though.

I'm Easy for Meateasy (sorry Mum)

It's true though.

It is in a spirit of nostalgia that I write this post, for I write about something that no longer exists.  Something ephemeral, fleeting and over far too soon.  Dear reader, I am of course talking about that phenomenon, the pop-up.

Not just any pop-up though, oh no, a pop-up that pulsated with life and attracted a horde of loyal followers.  Alas, I came to Meateasy far too late, with time enough in my stupidly hectic calendar to go only once before it closed.  But, oh, what a 'once' that was.

(It is at this point that I must make a disclaimer.  You know the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, or something along those lines?  Not in this case, the pictures are truly dreadful, taken in semi-darkness on a phone, so please, let my words be your guide rather than pixels.)

I had heard tell of queues of over two hours to get in, as no bookings are taken, like some kind of initiation task - have you earned your place at a table?  Do you REALLY want this burger?  Do you?  DO YOU? - so I prepared a timetable that National Rail would be proud of, specifying almost to the minute when and where I would be meeting my dining companion so that we could charge to the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross to be at least in the first half hour of the queue.  It turns out that at just past six on a Wednesday, there wasn't much of a queue, just us.  Ace.

After an awkward moment with the door (me not being able to open the door, noticing a doorbell, "Ring Here for Meateasy", just like a proper speakeasy!  No answer of course, I just can't open doors), we made our way upstairs, following the sound of rockabilly to a large room, decked out in mismatched furniture, standard lamps with customised shades and a few rococo mirrors.  It could have been someone's living room, albeit with a fabulous bar in the corner that wouldn't have looked out of place in a swish gastropub.  Or a really awesome living room.

After receiving our instructions on the ordering process from one of the smiling Burgerettes, we found a table and devised a strategy for the next stage - you get the drinks, I'll get the food.  Boom, we were on fire.  My bespoke rum cocktail, an Orange Swizzle, all refreshing and dangerously quaffable, arrived in a jam jar:

A brilliant recycling idea, although I do wonder how much jam they must eat...

Alerted to my time-slot for ordering by the honking loudspeaker (certainly an efficient method on noisy evenings, but it kept making me jump), we chose from the menu that had been written on the walls - one cheeseburger, one bacon and cheeseburger, fries and onion rings.  All for about £20, which is not bad in this 'ere day and age.

Minutes later, our food arrived on paper plates - no namby-pamby cutlery here thanks, this is all you need at Meateasy:

Kitchen roll.  What a genius idea.  So much better than flimsy paper serviettes out of those frustrating dispensers - diners everywhere, take note.

The onion rings were unlike anything I'd ever seen.  I always thought that I quite liked onion rings, now I discover that I have been eating a pale imitation of the real thing.  Crisp and airy, the batter on these bad boys was so light, they almost felt healthy.  And the size of them!

What beautiful beasts, like savoury doughnuts.  Ah, the memories...

Enough of this waffling though, we all know that it's all about the burger.  Or should I say The Burger:

Unlike most commercially available patties, whether from a bar, a pub, a restaurant, whatever, this was the only one I have tasted that had the flavour of a homemade burger.  Cooked to pink perfection, the meat spoke for itself and its quality sang out.  We are talking proper, glorious BEEF here.  Argh, I kid you not, my mouth just watered then.  The plain white bun was soft and unobtrusive, a carby background to support the full load of meat, cheese, pickles and salad.  Meateasy makes it look so easy (ha, a pun), you wonder why so many other places get it wrong.

Yet now I must wait for my next Meateasy burger.  Like so many others, I will be patiently stalking the Twitter feed, on the alert for any hint of a return, hoping against hope that it will magically be this evening, this week, this month.  No doubt, on that first night, the place will be heaving and I can tell you now, I won't be politely ringing a doorbell, I'll be blasting my way in with a battering ram.

Boing!

"Spring is sprung, der grass is riz,

I wonder where dem boidies is...

Der little boids is on der wing, 

Ain't dat absoid?

Der little wing is on der boid!"

'Spring in the Bronx' there, to welcome us into this glorious springtime.  Hurrah for all things spring-y: sunshine, daffs, the first flush of green on the trees, root veg going out, softer stuff coming in, not forgetting all that rising sap of course.  I'm not going to 'ahem' or pretend that I didn't just type that, no point in being shy about it - let's face it, the clocks go forward and everyone starts to feel a bit frisky.  I for one am yearning to do this.  Seriously, I am one full skirt away from breaking into song every time I open the front door.

However, this is not a blog about friskiness, this is a blog about food, so I will now turn my attention away from the bedroom and towards the kitchen.  Oh, come on now, don't act disappointed.  You know where you can get that if you want it and it isn't here.  Besides, my mum reads this.

However, that does not mean that I am not going to get a bit excited.  Food is doing exciting things at the moment, at least in the seasonal fruit and veg world.  A bit like blossom, you spend ages looking out for the new stuff and poof, there it all is at once.  I try to buy the majority of my fruit and veg from my local farmers' market in Bermondsey, for many reasons: it's cheaper, it's tastier, I can buy only what I need, it's friendlier than a supermarket and I'm middle-class.  I spent ages last year pestering poor Ted, the veg man, about when rhubarb was going to arrive, so I learnt my lesson and kept quiet this year, instead just waiting for it patiently and then getting distracted by the wild garlic.  Dear reader, when I saw it, I actually cried "Wild garlic?!  Woohoo!"  Yup, out loud, in public, the works.  Hey ho.  

I had high hopes for my wild garlic - maybe I'd do a frittata with it, see what it did in a stir-fry, wilt it in a risotto, something along those lines.  But I forgot about it.  The poor stuff went all sad and droopy, so I thought I should humiliate it even further by pounding it with pine nuts and parmesan to make pesto:

Just look at that rich green!  Mashed with goats' cheese and stirred through linguine, with the addition of some roasted tomatoes, it made a fine dinner.  Blimey, it was strong though.  I reckon it's probably better to temper it with basil, rather than all garlic, it was a bit full-on otherwise.

I was rather thrilled by a weekend lunch of steamed purple sprouting broccoli, boiled eggs and buttered soda bread:

Those eggs are from the market too and you can definitely tell that it's boom time in eggland - look at the size of them, fairly bursting out of the eggcups!  And the colour!

That's definitely the best thing about spring food, the reminder that colour exists.  Here's that rhubarb I was talking about too, after cooking it with orange juice, brown sugar and stem ginger to go in an oaty crumble, served with thick, pale yellow Jersey cream:

Don't tell me you can't feel that sap rising now...

Beats, Rhymes, Mirth and...Brownies

Chocolate haunts my dreams.  I close my eyes at night and all I see is my hand stirring bowls of it: molten with butter, like a glossy pool; cascading into beaten eggs and sugar, spreading through the yellow mixture like a good-natured atomic cloud; unctuously smooth after the addition of flour, chunks of white chocolate rising to the surface with each stir of the wooden spoon.

How have these images lodged themselves on to the backs of my eyelids?  Why does the smell of chocolate still linger, ever so slightly, in my nostrils?  Baking four batches of brownies, decorating them to look like boomboxes, cutting and transporting them in an assortment of unsuitably shaped tupperware to a nearby pub, a procedure taking about five hours in total, will do that to you.

Five hours?  Never, I hear you splutter.  Dear reader, it's true.  Admittedly, whipping up a batch of brownies, even four of them, does not take long.  Ah, but when you have been given your first Real Live Commission as an 'event caterer' (now it's my turn to splutter, at my own arrogance), then it becomes a different story.  Especially when that commission comes with a design brief:

The Boombox Brownie.  A sweet treat fit to accompany a night of jazz, improvised comedy, hiphop and improvised rapping, staged by Marbles and Furniture at The Miller in London Bridge.  Looks easy, doesn't it?  Bit of chocolate, cut it to size, boom.  Er, yeah.

I didn't take pictures of the slightly dodgier realisations of the designs: the first batch when I made the boomboxes so big that I could only fit six brownies in a tin as opposed to the usual twelve; the second batch where the mixture rose so much that it engulfed virtually all of my carefully placed chocolate chips; or the third batch when I realised that you couldn't really tell the difference between the cooked brownie and the decoration.  Quite lucky I'd taken the day off work to do all this really, there may well have been tears at this point otherwise.

However, I think I finally cracked it with Batch 4:

See how it works?  Giant chocolate buttons as the big speakers (incidentally, I could only find giant buttons, not regular ones, sign of the times or what), white chocolate chips as the, er, smaller speakers (do these even have names?) and quartered cubes of white chocolate as the control button thingummies.  You can see why I was on food duty rather than having anything to do with the music side of things.

Then, ah, then, came the sweet smell of success.  A smell that filled my entire flat and which I am sure I carried with me for the rest of the evening.  To exaggerate the sections that would normally delineate a boombox (I wonder if 'delineate' and 'boombox' have ever been used in the same sentence before), to enhance the white choc chips and to suggest a graphic equaliser wotsit, I used some squeezy white icing to produce this:

Multiplied by about fifty, of course.  Ah, now you're understanding why it might have taken five hours...

But I mustn't complain.  I'm not complaining at all, actually, I was pretty chuffed with how they turned out and pretty chuffed to have been asked to do it in the first place.  And they did look really rather tempting all spread out on display (Batches 1, 2 and 3 are nearer the back):

All of them were eaten as well, which I reckon must be a good sign (although I should think the fact that they were free helped with that a smidge).  I even got a review!  A real one!  Right down at the bottom there!  "Sensationally gooey".  That's me, that is, I did that.  Hurrah!

Oh, and just in case you're wondering how much chocolate goes into making that many brownies, it's this much:

You'd think all of this would put me off chocolate for a while.  Alas, no.  I've written this whilst eating the remainder of one of those packets of chocolate buttons.

Restaurants - The Good, The Bad and The Ridiculous

I noticed recently that Zucca on Bermondsey Street was named one of Time Out's top 50 restaurants in London, so seeing as this is one of the rare occasions when I have actually been to somewhere on a list of this type, I thought that I would add my voice to the crowd, go all Observer Food Monthly on yo' ass and write a review.

Gosh.  Almost sounds like I know what I'm doing.  Ahem.

Admittedly, I visited Zucca quite a while ago, back in the autumn, but seeing as every time I walk past it the place is always full and the food looks so good I want to lick the windows, I don't reckon that it can have changed that much.  This restaurant is seriously brilliant, on so many levels.

Firstly, the service is spot on.  The staff are really friendly and attentive without going so far as to actually cut up your food and feed it to you, although our waiter nearly had a fit when we pointed out that he had brought us our wine without the water we had also ordered.  Bless.  Such service meant that our Sunday lunch in a restaurant full of couples, families and small children, usually a potent mixture destined to raise my hackles, was blissfully relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.

Secondly, the food is beyond brilliant.  I would almost go so far as to say that it could bring on a food-gasm, but that may be distasteful to some readers, so I will merely hint at it...

We started with a selection of Italian breads and some olive oil - not usually noteworthy, but this olive oil really is excellent.  Lovely and peppery, but without catching you in the back of the throat and making you cough inelegantly, I couldn't get enough of the stuff, so I was very happy to discover that they were also selling it for £10 a bottle, so I'll be buying some once my Spanish 'special treat' oil runs out.

Zucca does starters in a tapas style, with quite a long list of them to mix and match.  We went for a puntarelle salad and a plate of Parma ham with figs, drizzled with more of that oil.  Puntarelle is quite a bitter leaf, a bit like chicory in flavour, so a mouthful of that with the salty ham and the sweet fig was quite something.  My mouth just watered a little bit then, just at the memory of it, I kid you not.

To follow, my mother had monkfish and cima di rapa (which is a bit like broccoli leaves) and I had sea bass with wild mushrooms and salsa verde:

Ooh, mamma.  The meaty fish and the piquant sauce were just so good together, I don't know why I don't make this myself.  Oh yeah, because sea bass is annoyingly expensive and I'm not a chef.

We finished with coffees and desserts of apple cake and a panna cotta (my favourite Italian pud) with stewed plums, both of which were light and delicious, so that even after three courses, we felt pleasantly plump as opposed to heftily rotund.  All of this came to about £60, which is really not bad at all when you look at the quality of the food.  I read somewhere that the owners wanted to keep the prices reasonable so that locals would be happy to eat there, rather than pricing them out so that it was only suitable for business lunches and special occasions.  I really hope that they keep it this way.

So, that was obviously the good, but what about the other two?  The second, sadly, is a restaurant close to Zucca, just across the road in fact, at the Bermondsey Square Hotel.  Now, I love Alfie's takeaway - their chips are perfect, their fish is always beautifully cooked and they do something I like to call The Takeaway of Champions, chips with a half-bottle of champagne, total genius.  But the restaurant is just bizarre.  I went there a while ago with friends and started with a beetroot salad:

Now, I'm not someone who says "Oh no, that looks weird, I don't like it already", I actually love that stuff.  Funny little puddles of sauce, architectural piles of veg, I'm all over it.  So I was quite excited by all this colour and texture - did you see the blue things?  Pickled onion - wondering how to build a forkful of cheese with a slice of beetroot and then get some of that painted on sauce to get all the flavours together...oh, so disappointing.  It all just tasted cold and vinegary.  And I have no idea when they painted that sauce on as it wouldn't budge, so I have no idea what it tasted like.  

My spirits lifted with the arrival of my steak, looking all plump and juicy, but then promptly plummeted when I cut into it.  Admittedly, it was done to a turn, a really good medium rare, but I don't know how long they had then left it before serving as it was barely hot and the veg was lukewarm verging on cold.  Such a shame as it could have been so good.

The ridiculous is quite ridiculous and just a bit of a joke really.  I was in Frankfurt for work a few months ago and had to eat at the airport.  The night before, some of us had gone to a proper, non-touristy German restaurant where I'd had schnitzel for the first time, with fried potatoes and a fantastic sauce:

Woof.  It was mega, it was tasty, it was a heart attack on a plate, but damn it was good.  Could have had another one straight away.

The next day, I flew home but had to eat at the airport.  I thought I should probably have a Frankfurter, if only out of politeness, and was served something so hilariously bad, so laughably different from the night before, that I had to take a photo of it:

Still ate it though.

Ouf.

Does anyone else still feel full?  Full when you wake up, full when you go to bed?  My eating habits are all out of whack as well - it seemed perfectly reasonable over Christmas to have breakfast at about half past eleven, probably consisting of a satsuma, a cold sausage, a mince pie and a couple of dates.  I should be sick of stodgy food, dedicating myself to being teetotal and veering solely towards vegetables and steamed fish, but I'm not...maybe it's partly because I want to prolong the holiday feeling, maybe it's because it's cold and wet outside and I just want to eat loads of cosy comfort food.  Whatever the reason, I have some sausage and mash cooking behind me as I write this - to hell with tofu!

It is in a spirit of nostalgia that I write this post (nostalgia for something that only happened a couple of weeks ago), as I looked back at the photos I had taken over the feastive period.  (That typo is intentional by the way.)  There is something luxurious about cooking at Christmas, if you have the time and inclination, both of which I was lucky to have.  I started the day before Christmas Eve with this:

Inside that gold wrapping lies 180g of solid, pure cacao.  Not chocolate, so it tastes very bitter when you try it by itself without any dairy element or sugar added.  Also, without the wrapping, it just looks like a lump of brown stuff, hence the shinier version depicted.

After twenty minutes of grating (which is a really long time to be grating, it's lucky the rest of the recipe is easy, I was shattered), you get a chopping board full of chocolate:

Mix with some heated cream and sugar, chill it in the fridge, roll it into balls and boom:

Chocolate truffles, easy to make, ages to prepare.  Ergo, something to be made at Christmas.

If you're short on time though and want to bring on some meat sweats, you could do what I did for Christmas Eve dinner and marinade some pork ribs in whisky, honey and some other stuff that I can't remember in the fridge for a day and then roast them in the oven:

Phwoar.  Makes you drool, non?  

After bubbling up the marinade to create a glossy sauce and a gesture at health in the form of a spinach salad, I give you the finished item:

I believe that recipe was intended for 6-8 people, my mother and I ate it ALL.  Yeah, baby.  AND we had a mince pie afterwards.

Sometimes a mince pie is not enough for pudding though.  It's more of a snack really, isn't it?  Definitely not big enough to count as pudding, no way.  What you need to count as pudding at this time of year needs to be big, in a dish, out of the oven and either contains cream or you can pour some on it.  Now, this next picture shows a whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding in the assembly process - I thought it looked too nice not to take a picture of it:

Ideally, I would have taken another one upon its exit from the oven, all golden and puffed up, but I forgot as I was so focussed on getting it dished up and in my mouth.  So, ahem, this is it the next morning:

Now, either you can think that two people ate all that the night before while it was still hot OR you can think that two people ate some the night before and then sneaked some cold spoonfuls the next morning.  Your choice.

So yes, maybe it is a bit weird that I am writing about Christmas food in January.  Maybe it is a bit weird that I haven't taken down my Christmas banner yet.  But hey, not half as weird as the mincemeat crumble that I am about to make - yep, there's still some left...