Is it me, or is it hot in here?

To answer my own question, yes, it is a trifle warm.  Not summer though, is it?  Not time for wearing shorts yet, is it, young man in the street?  Not really ideal temperature for flip flops, is it, silly girl on the tube?  Come on now, everyone, stop getting ahead of yourselves and accept it - it's still a bit nippy.  Yes, spring is on its way, yes, birds are tweeting, yes, I'm just happy as you are that the sun is shining a bit more and that the evenings are getting lighter, but really now.  No thank you, I don't want an ice cream.

While I may be tentatively edging towards lunchtime salads of roasted veg and pulses, or am starting to feel that my soup would be nicer made with greens rather than roots, dinner definitely still needs to be hot and bolstering.  It's February, it's still winter and quite frankly, I mainly want melted cheese.

Not in the morning though.  No no, morning is porridge time.  Inspired by the tweetings of so many foodies, I produced this little number to persuade my flatmate that getting up at 9am is not really one of life's hardships:

Raisin and cinnamon porridge, topped with demerara sugar and toasted flaked almonds

Yes, I was rather surprised that I thought of all this that early too.

Harking back to my previous post about wanting colour at this time of year, this old recipe popped into my head one evening: tomatoes simmered with garlic and chorizo, then stirred through penne pasta, along with mozzarella, parmesan and rocket:

And so the melted cheese begins...

Once a year, there comes that day when the stars have aligned so that you have sausages in the fridge, enough milk to make a batter and an after-dinner tea, and a lonely splosh of leftover red wine, only fit for onion gravy.  Then, and only then, is when you make toad in the hole in your lovely enamel Christmas present:

Sans gravy, which was basically a plate of brown stuff

All these delicious things aside though, there is one ultimate, one king of cosy cuisine.  The Baked Potato.  With Baked Beans AND Cheese AND Worcestershire Sauce.

Kneel down before your sovereign, wot is on your lap anyway, for all four of them art great

I ate it all.

Hey, Mr Hockney, try this on your palette

Ah, I do love a good pun.  Especially a really specific pun.  I read a review recently of David Hockney's current exhibition of landscape paintings at the Royal Academy, where the reviewer was desperately trying to find something wrong with an exhibition that she had clearly enjoyed - my favourite attempt at a damning comment was "it looks like what it is".  Oh no!  How awful!  A painting of something that represents the something!

Truth be told, I'm not a massive fan of modern art as I find that a lot of it is rather self-conscious and earnest.  You have to rummage around to find some joy in both the process of making art and in the end result.  However, two artists that seem to have this joy are Anish Kapoor and David Hockney.  Kapoor seems to be fascinated by the different ways you can make art and so many of his pieces seem to be an expression of this fascination - how big can I make it, how precise can I make it, how simple can I make it, how pure can I make it - and a whole room of his most recent exhibition at the RA was dedicated to little piles and shapes of colour pigment.  Hockney is famous for his use of colour, in wide, exuberant swathes of the stuff, lavishing it over massive areas of canvas.  So it is total genius on the part of the RA to stage his current exhibition over the months of January, February and March, precisely when we are all seeking colour, warmth and joy.

Hence my pun.  Hockney likes colour, he's an artist so he probably uses a palette, but hey, that sounds like palate, and a man's gotta eat, so he'd probably like this food because it's colourful.  Boom!  Clear as mud.

I was making a vegetable curry recently (from a Cinnamon Club recipe in an Observer Food Monthly magazine) and I was struck by just how much the vivid colours of the ingredients were cheering me up.  It wasn't just the smell of the spices, the promise of a warming, healthy dish and the satisfaction of making a curry from scratch that lifted my wintry spirits, but also the intense freshness of the colours:

Green globes from the Green Giant

Almost festive chillis and tomatoes, and earthy spices and ginger

Lush coriander and a lemon so juicy it reflects the light

The resulting bowl of zingy freshness

A few weeks later, and I was craving more clean flavours, but this time a little less curry-ish and a little more stir-fry-ish.  In actual fact, what I really wanted was just a plate of pak choi, but I thought that I should probably have something to go with it.  Apologies for the bad lighting, which has somewhat dimmed the perky pink prawns and sunny yellow baby sweetcorn that accompanied the green pak choi and mange tout:

However, not all joyful colour comes from healthy veg.  I still harbour fond memories of my yearly Christmas treat, although it already seems like so long ago that I was lured in by these shiny beauties...

Let us revel in our winter of dark nights and cold winds, for the colours of art and food shine all the more brightly against them. 

Thanksgiving/New Year - delete as appropriate

It is customary that when embarking upon a new year, one should look back on the outgoing year to reflect and muse on the events and happenings contained within it.  Suffice to say, 2011 was a humdinger.  Every year, I look forward to the coming twelvemonth, wondering just how much stuff will happen in what is really quite a short space of time.  2011 was stuffed to the gills with experiences that left me either rapturous or distraught - will 2012 bring the same vagaries of emotion?

My life has been irreparably changed by 2011 - leaving my permanent job and going freelance in June was one of the calmer incidents.  However, one thing remained constant, and I hope that will continue in 2012 and every year after that: the love and support of family and friends.

Cheesy, innit?  Prosaic?  Sickly sweet and sentimental?  Or taken for granted?

This post is dedicated to those with whom I have shared meals and who have cooked for me - a lesson in how food may be excellent on its own, but how it is infinitely improved by the conversation that accompanies it.

A curry in Whitechapel.  I had just returned from a hideous work trip - a post-rehearsal lunch with friends was a reassuring antidote:

Wine and a pint of sausage rolls for two at the BFI.  Alcohol and pastry soothes all heart pains.

A trio of 'things on top of dough', made by someone who doesn't let anyone in the kitchen when she's cooking.  However, her concentration results in:

Pizza and garlic bread

Asparagus tart

Mushroom tart/pizza/galette

Imagine my delight, then, when she invited me to her flat to cook TOGETHER in her kitchen.  It seems that I have passed the test - it's only taken me ten years.  But look at what a decade can produce:

Beetroot and garlic tart

Salad - with edible flowers

And the end to virtually every meal we have shared...

Crumble.  Doesn't matter what's underneath, as long as there's crumble on top.

So as the New Year settles in, taking us all with it, I also want to celebrate Thanksgiving.  It may be cheesy etc., but it is also necessary to do every once in a while.  Maybe I should do it in person as well as in a blog post.  Still, then you wouldn't have been able to see the pictures, would you?

Thank you everybody.

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.