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.