Feeding of 5k in Trafalgar Square

Lunch was an elegant protest in a flurry of snow in Trafalgar Square. Delicious fruit smoothies, vegetable curry, all the fruit you could find. Supermarket waste. And all of it would otherwise have ended up in landfill. Not even composted.
























This lovely fruit made thousands of smoothies, full of goodness. Why don't supermarkets TRY selling less-than-perfect fruit, and see what happens? Why don't they give the rest to homeless charities. And COMPOST whatever's left.














































They couldn't give these grapes away fast enough. No stalks, so no good to the supermarket, apparently. Daft world: I spent a few minutes earlier in the week taking grapes off their stalks to put in a sauce. But even if they don't want to sell them, they should at least PUT THEM IN THE COMPOST.
























Then on to Heywood Hill to pick up a book they'd found for me; and a walk round Shepherd Market. Heywood Hill really is the most life-enhancing shop, laid out a little like a library in a private house, and full of well-chosen books, both old and new. Always lots you want to browse, some you want to buy. Nancy Mitford used to work there; now there's a helpful young man called Ben, and a bevy of girls in the room at the back.
























And home, to find the house looks like this:

Spaghetti with mussels

Lettice and I went to the market this morning. I found damsons and Kent cobnuts; Lettice found mussels. We ate them for lunch - quick, easy, delicious.

Cook the mussels as if you were making moules marinière. Cook the spaghetti. Soften a few halved tiny tomatoes in a frying pan with some oil (and perhaps a little basil). When everything has finished cooking, serve it together in hot soup plates: put the spaghetti in first, next the tomatoes, then the mussels, then the soup. Fabulous.


PS a kilo will easily do four people served this way

Alfred's pancakes

Lettice and Charlotte made pancakes for lunch. Just because they could. I'm not sure what they did (apart from melt Mars bars to go on them), but this is Alfred's killer recipe:

Alfred's pancakes
for about 6

(please forgive the indecisive metric/imperial nature of what follows)

100g plain flour
pinch of salt
1 egg
1/2 pint of milk

Mix all these ingredients together until there are no lumps. Leave it to stand for half an hour. Just before you start cooking your pancakes, add a splash of fizzy water, enough to make the batter the consistency of single cream.

Egg and bacon tart

I made a classic bacon and egg tart at the weekend (aka quiche lorraine, but I'm English). Utterly delicious, but the pastry - well, it wasn't as good as it could or should have been, and I need some help, as this has always been a weak area in my cooking.

The problem was that I was afraid of putting in too much water (which causes shrinkage), so I think I didn't put in enough, and so it didn't come together into a smooth paste, but was a sandy mess that had to be pressed into the tin. It was short and delicious, but only held together because I coated it with egg white after blind baking - essential for a custard tart, but I used the whites of two eggs rather than one.

Does anyone have a foolproof method for making shortcrust pastry? Or some tips? I'd be really grateful.

In the meantime, here's the recipe for the egg and bacon filling .... the simplest ingredients creating more than the sum of their parts. Not sure why we always give the French credit for this, because it's a classic of English cookery too. (Although Elizabeth Ayrton says in The Cookery of England that the 18th century English version had a pastry covering. Too rich, I think, for modern tastes.)

for a 23cm / 9" tin

6 rashers of smoked bacon
300ml double cream
2 eggs and two yolks
pepper
mace is the traditional flavouring, but I don't have any

Cut and gently fry the bacon - it's important to use smoked bacon, even if you normally buy unsmoked (which we do), otherwise the tart will taste insipid. Don't overcook it, you want soft pieces, not crisp ones. Spread over the bottom of the cooked pastry case (which, when ready, should have been brushed with egg white and given a further minute or two in the oven). Whisk the cream, eggs and yolks, pepper, and pour over the bacon.

Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes, then, when it's brown but not burnt, turn the heat down to 160C for 10-15 minutes. Leave it to rest for five minutes before serving.

Related links

Two ways to make pastry without using butter - which I find much easier, as well as lighter eating
Shaken hot water pastry
Olive oil pastry

Quick mushroom sauce for pasta

When I chop vegetables, I go for speed. When Lettice chops them, she takes enough care to end up with uniformly small cubes. Her Caprese salad ends up almost like a salsa, little cubes of cheese and avocado with finely diced tomato. It's good; it may not be the slices you expected, but it's good.

This is the pasta sauce she made for lunch: utterly delicious - the pieces were so small they barely needed cooking, which gave everything a fresh taste. Mine would have been chunky and clunky (and taken longer to cook).

Lettice's mushroom sauce

Finely dice onion, sweat it in a little olive oil. Meanwhile, get to work on some tomatoes and some mushrooms. When the onions are soft, add the vegetables, plus a splash of Marsala and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Cook briefly - certainly no longer than it takes to cook the pasta. Adjust the seasoning and stir into the drained pasta.

Quick mushroom tart

My computer has crashed and I fear the hard disc is broken ... this lovely tart from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Mushroom handbook cheered me up at lunch. I made it with wildly different amounts, and it made a delicious lunch for my parents with some Charlotte potatoes and a tomato salad. Thrifty, too - impressive-looking in individual portions, but inexpensive to make. Sadly not with foraged mushrooms, I haven't yet found any in my usual spots.

Mushroom tart

Pastry - bought puff is the easiest here.
100g mixed mushrooms per person
a little chopped garlic
fresh breadcrumbs made from half a slice of white per person
grated zest of half a lemon
grated parmesan
chopped parsley
1 beaten egg

Roll out the pastry - either into one big round, or several smaller ones for individual portions. Place on a baking sheet and rest in the fridge.

Gently fry the mushrooms in a little oil (perhaps with some butter too). When they are nearly cooked through, add the garlic and take off the heat after a couple of minutes.

Meanwhile, blitz the bread with a small lump of Parmesan and a handful of parsley. Stir this fragrant green mess into the mushrooms.

Arrange the mushrooms onto the pastry, leaving a clear band of pastry round the edge to puff up. Brush the edge with the egg.

Bake for 20 minutes at 180C.

Serve hot or cold.

No pic ... no time, I made this in the five minutes between getting back from the station (dropping off Eleanor who had to go back to London) and my parents arriving with Lettice, who spent the morning playing hockey. I used bought pastry - it would have been just as quick if I'd had the wit to make the pastry as we were clearing up breakfast. Hey ho

Sweet potato rosti

Frugal food involves using up every last little bit - and is often much more delicious than extravagant food. This sweet and crunchy rosti is a case in point.

Tuesday lunch always involves clearing the fridge and the last of the veg box before the new one arrives. There were several tiny sweet potatoes to eat up (and, in truth, they were just beginning to look shrivelled).

So I peeled and grated them, together with a couple of small potatoes and a small onion. I put the resulting mess into a colander for half an hour, squeezing it every so often to force out the moisture. Fried for 15 minutes or so in a non-stick pan with a little sunflower oil - I pushed it around for the first 10 minutes, then formed it into a cake and browned one side to a crisp. Lettice ate it with a little mince that needed finishing, I ate it with chilli jam and some Greek yoghurt. Green salad. Yum.

I'm SO glad that this week's box also contains sweet potato.

Wholegrain challenge: millet loaf

Thanks to everyone for making suggestions for the wholegrain challenge. There's wholewheat pasta in the larder, waiting to be cooked, and Olive Oyl sent me this recipe for a terrific millet loaf, really delicious for lunch today, and very easy to make. More than anything, I feel confident now that I can rise to this challenge (even if I don't manage every meal!)

Millet loaf

200g millet
400g water
2 grated carrots
2-3 grated courgettes
1 chopped onion
1 crushed clove of garlic
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp sunflower seeds
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tbsp soy sauce

Dry roast the millet until it's smoking and just beginning to turn brown, then add the water and bring to the boil. Simmer for 20 minutes, adding more water if necessary. Leave to cool for 15 minutes. You want to end up with a sticky texture which will hold everything together.

Gently fry the onions, then add the spices, garlic, carrots and courgettes. Cook down for 10 minutes or so, then add the seeds.

Mix the millet and vegetables together, and add the soy sauce. Press this into a greased loaf or cake tin. I used a lovely Le Creuset paté form I was given decades ago, but I could just as easily have used a smallish cake tin. Press it down firmly, and bake for 25 minutes at 200C. As you can see, it turned out perfectly - I left it for about half an hour, so that it was lukewarm when we ate it.


















This is delicious with tahini sauce. Olive Oyl says salsa works too, and I will try that tomorrow, as there's some left over.

Tahini sauce

Put a couple of spoons of tahini in a bowl. Add the juice of a lemon and stir. At first, it will become alarmingly stiff, but loosen it with a little water, until you get the consistency you like. Add a little crushed garlic if you'd like.


Links to related posts

Whole grains challenge
Ballymaloe brown bread
Poached barley with herbs
Quick oat loaf
Oatmeal bread
Stuffed butternut
Oatcakes (with smoked trout paté)
A plain spelt loaf
"Instant" spelt loaf from Gilchesters farm, Northumberland


Links to people who've helped with this challenge

Meg Wolff at Becoming Whole has written a really useful post on whole and cracked grains ... and thanks to Charlotte at Great Big Veg Challenge for the link, and also for this tip: quesadillas made with whole grain tortilla have a better texture than the white flour tortillas.

Olive Oyl doesn't have a blog, so I can't make you a link, but here's the whole of her really useful comment on my wholegrain challenge post:

I too shared your dread about wholemeal pasta but I PROMISE that once you start you will consider white pasta the equivalent of Mothers' Pride bread. Wholewheat pasta can take really strong flavours, lots of garlic, anchovy, strong tomato sauces, your lentil sauce. A good compromise is "semi-whole" which is good for much lighter sauces or salads.

Tabbouleh (bulgar) is very easy, fab with fish and a good salad to keep for a few days in the fridge. Millet, super grain, good as porridge, also makes a good "loaf" or burger.

Another book recommendation!...."Healing with Whole Foods" - Paul Pritchford, a HUGE tome, the recipes can be a little austere and the eastern medicine bent may not be your thing but, it is the most fantastic reference book if you interested in food, nutrition and health.


Links to the whole grain challenge

Culinate - where it all began
How to eat more whole grains - also at Culinate

Polenta with mushrooms

Here's something cheap and easy to make ... you just have to get organised and start early - but that's good for calming the household, especially the cook. This is peasant food made with ingredients with a long shelf life, so once you've got them in, you're not too far away from a delicious meal. Carnivores don't feel deprived (not even my rampant meat-eaters); if you were economising, or making this for vegans, I think you could flavour the polenta with sage or rosemary rather than parmesan.

I wish I had a photograph to show you, but ... I did have one problem with the polenta: when I grilled the slices, they stuck to the grill, rather than making photogenic black stripes. Was that because this is a very lightly set mixture (much less cornmeal to water than instructed by the packet)? The grill was certainly smoking hot, and would have made stripes on a piece of meat or fish? Any advice in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

The sauce was originally conceived with fresh mushrooms, but when I went to fetch them from my veg box, I found that the little box which I thought contained mushrooms was in fact full of lovely sweet grapes. So I used dried mushrooms instead. It meant that, instead of making the entire sauce in the morning, I only got as far as sweating the onions and soaking the mushrooms. But finishing the dish only took about 10 minutes.

Polenta
enough for 4, with leftovers

140g quick-cook polenta
75g parmesan
salt and pepper
oil

Bring 1.5 litres of water to the boil in a large pan. Take it off the heat and swirl it with a wooden spoon, then slowly pour in the cornmeal, swirling all the while. Once it's smooth, put it back on the heat - gently, but even so it will bubble and spit at you (I don't generally bother to wear an apron, but for this it's not a bad idea). After about 4-5 minutes it should be thick and creamy. Add the grated parmesan (I blitzed it in the food processor, as it doesn't matter what it looks like), plenty of salt and some pepper.

Oil a large shallow dish, and pour the mixture onto it to cool. You can't do the next step until it's completely cold, so this needs to be done ahead - in the morning for supper, one evening for the following day. It's the sort of straightforward task that can be carried out alongside other cooking, and so easy to fit into a busy life.

When you are ready, cut the polenta into shapes: rounds, fingers, triangles, diamonds. Heat a grill pan if you have one, brush it with a little oil, cook the polenta for 4-5 minutes each side. If you are luckier than me, you will get black stripes. You don't need a grill to cook these: I heated some perfectly satisfactorily in a non-stick frying pan lightly sprayed with olive oil.

I've just heated up the trimmings and spread them out onto a plate; we'll have them for lunch tomorrow. And I gave some to the cats, as they were longing to try it!

Mushroom sauce

onions, one per person
dried mushrooms, a handful per person
flour
pepper and nutmeg
a little wine if you have it

Soak a couple of handfuls of dried mushrooms in boiling water. Recipe books say 10 minutes is enough, but I find the longer you soak them the better they are: best of all if you soak them until the water is completely cold (in other words, start in the morning if you're cooking in the evening; but it's the work of moments).

Finely chop the onions. I made rings, because they are so pretty, but any shape will do. Sweat them slowly in a little oil. (You can stop at this point if you like.) Add a little white flour, I used less than a dessertspoonful for 3 onions and two handfuls of mushrooms (you want a sauce which has some body, not too runny, but not stiff). Mix well. Season with pepper and nutmeg. Drain the mushrooms (reserving the water) and add them to the pan. Stir around for a bit, then add some wine if you have it, red for preference. If you don't, no worries, just start adding the soaking water. Either way, add enough water to make a loose sauce. Simmer for 5-10 minutes until the flour is cooked through.

Serve with polenta on the side, on hot plates if you remember.

And this is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging , started by Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen, and hosted this weekend by Ulrike, of Kuchenlatein

HFW's saltfish and parsnip rosti fishcake

I haven't tried this recipe yet, but I intend to. I copied it out of Anna's copy ofHugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish on Boxing Day, with a black crayon onto an old airmail envelope, the only writing tools that could be found. Now I'm in danger of losing the envelope, so I'm posting to keep it safe: I'm unlikely to buy Fish until I've given away a few more recipe books :)

I've never cooked saltfish, though I've meant to ever since I ate it at the end of a long day's train journey from Brittany to Lyons to fetch my (then) 10-year-old daughter, who had been staying with friends in the French Alps. I volunteered for this break from our family holiday because I wanted to go to a museum in Paris during a two- or three-hour pause in the journey, and because I wanted to visit the Jean Moulin Museum in the old Gestapo headquarters in Lyons (I was studying 20th century French history at the time). But it was August, and both were shut. I'd also taken the wrong book: one about the history of the English landscape - singularly inappropriate when every time I looked up I saw the markedly different French landscape.

But dinner that evening was magical: in a little street restaurant, not on the tourist map, hardly any choice, and starting with a saltfish puree - oily, garlicky, almost worth the hours and hours of solitary journeying.

It used to be a trek to the next town to buy any interesting fish, but now the butcher is my wet fishmonger, and the supermarket in my village stocks saltfish, so there's no excuse - except my lingering suspicion that I'm going to be the only person in the house who will actually want to eat anything I make with saltfish. And Elizabeth David - SO discouraging about making brandade de morue at home.

Saltfish and parsnip rosti fishcake

for 4-6 as a starter, 2-3 main course

1-2 parsnips (250-300g), grated
1 small onion
100g rehydrated* hard salt fish (or 200g lightly salted white fish fillet) cut into 1 cm cubes
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
rosemary, finely chopped
1 beaten egg
oil for frying

* to rehydrate saltfish, soak for 48 hours in cold water, changing it twice daily (and HFW says that it's important to taste - I think he means the water, but perhaps someone with a copy of the book can enlighten us?)

Mix everything together. Heat the oil, drop in handfuls, squashing them to a cake 8cm in diameter and 1 cmthick. Fry gently so that they don't burn, but enough that they heat through to the middle - 5-7 minutes. Flip, brown the other side, rest on kitchen paper. Eat hot with a green salad.

Doesn't that sound good? That's why I didn't want to lose it!


Related posts:

Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food
Would you like me to give you a recipe book?

Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food + lentil stew

Would you like me to give you a recipe book?










There are too many recipe books in this house, so I'm giving some of the surplus away to readers of this blog, one by one, to ease the pain. Last week, I asked who would like my spare copy of Jane Grigson's Fish Book. I'm giving it to Helen at A Forkful of Spaghetti, a new London-based blog. It was really hard to decide (although not quite as hard as deciding on this week's book), and in the end I thought I'd give it to someone in England, because I thought people from other places might have trouble sourcing some of the fish, and you know how we're all locavores now.

This is what Helen said:

When I was 'getting into' food in my late teens, I used to read Jane's columns and recipes in the Observer from time to time until she died. I always liked her clear style of writing, and her evident enthusiasm for food - and her equal enthusiasm for sharing her amazing knowledge.

For reasons I can't now remember properly, I never got around to buying any of her books - I think it's probably because I was moving around a lot in those days, and was trying to keep my 'baggage' to a minimum.

All these years on, and speaking as someone who adores fish, it's fantastic to see fish making a 'comeback', championed as it now is by the new breed of celebrity food writers, such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

But Jane got there first, didn't she? Quite simply, I would love this book because I love fish, and even now, I can't think of many people who wrote better on the subject than Jane. Since I don't have any of her books, this would fill a very shameful gap on my kitchen shelf!


This week's book is another duplicate - and I'm horribly afraid that every single one of you already has a copy, because it's a real classic, hugely popular, and this particular copy was a magazine giveaway. I can't do better than to quote from the blurb on the back:

Real Fast Food contains over 350 recipes and suggestions which show that food in a hurry can be creative, delicious and nourishing ... all the dishes can be ready to eat in 30 minutes or under - less time than it takes to heat up a ready-made supermarket supper.

Real Fast Food was Nigel Slater's first book, a huge bestseller despite the lack of pictures. It's hard to remember now what a sensation it caused in 1992, because it was so influential. I'm not very keen on Slater's later books, but this one is fantastically useful: there are everyday ingredients (no problem about things in cans), there are endless variations on a number of themes (eggs, canned fish, bread etc), there's a strong can-do feel about it, you don't have to be an expert to make a good supper out of what there is in the fridge.

This is what I'm going to cook for lunch (p 207):

Lentils with tomatoes

100g brown lentils
1 bay leaf
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 chopped onion
1 chopped fresh red chilli pepper
400g tin plum tomatoes

Wash the lentils in a sieve under running water. Cook them with the bay leaf and a tablespoon of the oil in boiling salted water for 15 minutes. Drain them in a colander.

Meanwhile, fry the onion in the remaining oil for about 5-7 minutes, until soft and golden. Add the chilli and cook for a further minute or two. Add the drained lentils and the tomatoes with all their juice, salt and pepper. Simmer gently for 10 minutes and serve hot.

Once associated with slow-cooking, the lentil, which cooks to perfection in 15-20 minutes and sometimes less, is good snack material. Sometimes I boil them with a bay leaf and a little oil, then just drain them and smother in soft butter and black pepper. How to feel indulgent on 30p

That last paragraph is typical: first a recipe, then a fuss-free way to vary it.


So, if there's anyone out there who doesn't have a copy of this excellent book, email me (joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk) and let me know why you'd like it, and I'll pick a winner, and post it off. All I'd like you to do in return is write a post about the book, linking back here.

Related posts:
Would you like me to give you a recipe book?
Pasta with braised lentils
Lentil soup with ruby chard
Beetroot and lentils
Dhal
Lentil salad with homemade cheese

White pizzas with fennel seeds

Lunch yesterday and today was white pizza, no cheese. Less is more.

I made the dough yesterday morning, using 300g strong white flour, a slug of olive oil, some salt, 170ml of water, half a teaspoon of quick yeast and a couple of teaspoons of fennel seeds. One half went into the fridge overnight, the other straight onto a pizza tin.

Sicilian-ish white pizza

This was topped with a few sultanas (softened for a while in a little hot water), some large capers, and three or four snipped anchovies. A drizzle of oil - c'est tout. When it came out of the oven, I covered it in chopped parsley.


















Roasted onion white pizza

This pizza was liberally covered with roasted onions: I won't say they were "left over" from last night's supper; I deliberately made enough for two meals. Lots of pepper. When the pizza came out of the oven, I could have added some Greek yoghurt, or chopped parsley, but I didn't - I wanted the sweet taste of the onions oozing into the lightly-cooked dough.


Just one thing - I'm almost embarrassed to confess: I made the dough in a bread machine, which I bought at the beginning of the week. Richard Bertinet would be very surprised to hear that his highly-enjoyable course drove me to buy one of these machines which he so despises.

Sort of Waldorf salad

This is a variation on a salad I often eat for lunch during the winter months, and which I invented when I found there were no walnuts in the house. These days I always use sprouted seeds, because I prefer them to the more traditional/authentic walnuts.

Generally, I dress this with oil, lemon juice and zest. Today, I wanted to use up the end of a pot of 0% Greek yoghurt, so I squirted in a little Heinz salad cream, which made a really delicious dressing, surprisingly so. However, it could just as easily have been a little chutney, or soy sauce, or horseradish.

Waldorf-ish salad
for one

One Cox's orange pippin (or half a larger apple)
One stick of celery
A handful or two of sprouted seeds

2 tbsp 0% yoghurt/fromage frais
a squirt of salad cream


Chop the apple, leaving on the skin. Cut the celery finely. Add the sprouted seeds. Mine were a mix of aduki, mung, lentil and chickpea, but any will do. Place in a shallow bowl, and dollop over the dressing.

Related post:

A lighter Waldorf salad

Baked scallops

Lettice and I were on our own for lunch - Lucius was playing in a real tennis tournament, the boys ate early before rushing off to play hockey. So we treated ourselves ... just how much, we realised when we started to eat: this is a simple dish which transcends its ingredients.

We used a small bag of frozen scallops which have been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months since I impulse-bought them. And we used crumbs made from the last of the bread I brought home yesterday from my day's baking with Richard Bertinet. The crumbs on the top make a pastry-ish lid; the ones on the edge crisp up and provide contrast to the creamy texture of the lemony sauce in the centre. I don't think this would work with Mother's Pride.

Baked scallops for 2

6 scallops with their coral
20-30g fine fresh breadcrumbs
lemon zest and juice
coarsely ground black pepper
olive oil

Heat the oven to 250C. Grease a couple of small shallow dishes. Put the crumbs into a bowl, mix in lemon zest and pepper. Add the scallops and toss them until they are completely coated with crumbs. Arrange carefully on the dishes, making sure that the fish is completely covered with crumbs, and that there are a few round the edges. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the two dishes, then drizzle with oil.

Bake for 15 minutes. Leave to settle for a couple of minutes before eating.

This could be a starter or a light lunch (we ate it with raw beetroot salad). Next time, we're going to make it with mussels.


















There's something pretty similar in Nigella Lawson's new book, Nigella Express ... but her version is heavier, less heart-healthy, using butter, and there's no zest, which seems a wasted opportunity.

Related link

Scallop and chorizo salad