Mount Athos pilaf rice

I was going to cook the Mount Athos pilaf rice yesterday, but discovered there were no eggs in the house. This recipe is subtly different from other rice and pea dishes, particularly in the treatment of the egg.

It comes from The Observer/Guardian's two-part booklet about the diet eaten by the Mount Athos monks, who, it's said, have very low rates of heart disease and cancers. The information in the booklets came from The Cuisine of Mount Athos, by Brother Epifanios, published in Greek by Synchroni Orizontes Publications. Judging from the interest I've had in these recipes, it's time for an English edition.

Peas with pilaf rice
for 8

1kg peas (frozen is fine)
200g rice
3 finely chopped onions
olive oil
an egg yolk

Blanch the peas. Leave in the colander. Gently fry the onions in olive oil in a large pan. Add the peas and rice. Stir. Cover with water (1:1.5). Add the egg yolk, salt and pepper, then turn up the heat until the mixture boils. Then simmer gently until the liquid has evaporated (about 15 minutes).

Related links

Mount Athos diet / chickpea patties
Chickpea patties from Mount Athos
Chickpea patties, an update
Chickpea mash
Nohutlu pilav
Houmous
A weblog about Mount Athos

Pink fish

Jean's Pink Fish is the most wonderful retro recipe, a real throwback to the 1950s and 1960s ... we may think it old-fashioned, but everyone fell on it at lunch on Sunday, even those who, like me, had never eaten Jean's version. Anna was amazed, it's not her normal thing at all - she made it to honour her grandmother, and was slightly embarrassed that it didn't go with the rest of lunch.

It's a tinned salmon mousse, with rice. I've had plenty of salmon mousse, but never with rice - surprisingly, a good addition; thrifty, too.

In the '60s, everyone used to have a ring mould; setting sweet and savoury dishes with gelatine was all the rage. By the 1980s, it was a forgotten art, and, soon after I married, both my mother-in-law and my stepmother passed me on their no-longer-needed ring moulds. I've used them intermittently, mostly for cakes .... but so intermittently that yesterday, where was the small one when I needed it??? I just hope I haven't given it to Sue Ryder or Oxfam! So I made my pink fish in a small loaf tin instead - not so pretty, but just as effective. I used to have a fish mould, but I can't find that, either - and you try buying one of those now: teddy bears, numbers, stars, hearts - but no fish!

Fish mousse became fish pate (I remember making one with a lot of lemon, and stuffing it back into the hollowed-out lemons), as we all discovered how fiddly it was to use powdered gelatine. These days you can buy sheet gelatine in just about every supermarket, so suddenly it's got easy again ... you just soak the leaves in cold water for a few minutes, and then, when you're ready, squeeze out the water, and slide them into your warm ingredients, whereupon they dissolve instantly.

Pink fish is a very useful starter, because you can make it a couple of days ahead, and it's a doddle, too (I did most of it one-handed while chatting to Menna on the phone). The basic ingredients are likely to be in your kitchen - tinned salmon, rice, yoghurt, tomato ketchup, Worcester sauce, tabasco. You use the tin to measure all the other ingredients, another plus.

Jean's version is delicious, and very much of its time - lashings of cream, mayo from a bottle (it had just been invented). I've updated it to make it lighter, and find that the finished dish tastes sharper, not so sickly sweet (all that cream). Next time I make it, I'll update it again, using fresh salmon rather than tinned, and fresh chilli rather than tabasco. It could also be made with lemony-herby flavourings rather than the chilli.

Jean's Pink Fish

1 tin red salmon
1 tin cooked rice
1/2 tin mayo
1/2 tin double cream
1/2 tin milk
enough gelatine to make it set (2 leaves for a small tin, 4 for a big tin)
tomato ketchup
Worcester sauce
tabasco
salt and pepper

Soak the gelatine in a little cold water. Meanwhile, drain the salmon and mash it in a little bowl. Put cooked rice into the tin and add it to the salmon. Pour the cream and mayo into the tin, then add this to the bowl. Mix well. Season with sauces. The tk will make it pink which is good, but will also add sweetness, which may become too much in this creamy version, so go carefully.

Now measure half a tin of milk, and heat this gently in a small pan (don't let it boil). When it's a little more than blood temperature, take it off the heat, squeeze out the gelantine leaves and add them. Stir, and when you're sure they're dissolved, add them to your paste. Pour it into your prepared mould (either grease it, or line it with clingfilm). This will take a couple of hours in the fridge to set, and will keep, well wrapped, for at least a couple of days.

You get the full '60s flavour of the thing if you make it in a fish mould, and decorate the resulting mousse with overlapping scales made from finely sliced cucumber. But you may be saved from yourself by the lack of a fish mould. In Anna's case it was a tribute to her grandmother.


Joanna's pink fish

1 tin red salmon
1 tin cooked rice
1 tin 0% Greek yoghurt
1/2 tin skimmed milk
gelatine (see above for quantities)
tomato ketchup
Worcester sauce
tabasco
salt and pepper

Follow the method above. I used a mixture of white rice and wild rice, because that's what there was, but I think that white rice alone would be a better bet, as the wild rice was quite assertive. Brown rice would be worth trying.

I definitely preferred the taste of this one - sharper, tangy-er. I suspect it would be really good made with fresh salmon, and I know that you could have fun changing the flavourings.


A small tin of salmon made enough mousse to fill a small loaf tin, which would cut into eight slices.


Last week Anna made Jean's original sauce for this, but she said it was too disgusting to eat: cream, tk, tabasco ... more of the same, in other words. I think it would be worth trying a green sauce of some sort - capers, vinegar, herbs. That's what I'll do this evening, anyway.


PS if you're one of the many people who have asked for Anna's passionfruit tart recipe - I'm going to phone her tonight to get instructions - they'll be here before the weekend, fingers crossed

Free Rice game

Just in case you thought this morning's post was too serious, here's a game you can play - and whenever you get it right, 10 grains of rice will be distributed through the UN. It's paid for by the advertisers on the site, and the idea is to improve people's English as well as alleviate hunger. It's called Free Rice, and it's horribly addictive.

Thanks to Culinate.

Stuffed quince with nohutlu pilav

This was our dinner on Monday night ... good, but in need of further tinkering to make it perfect; the quince lends sweetness to the mince, while the flesh which is left in the shells is surprisingly sharp.

It comes from Claudia Roden's Arabesque, a taste of Turkey, Morocco and Lebanon

Ayva dolmasi for 2

2 medium quinces
one chopped onion
olive oil
2 tablespoons pine nuts
100g lean mince (I used beef, but I think lamb would be better)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
less than 1/2 tsp ground allspice
salt and pepper

Bake the quinces whole in a moderate oven, 170C, until they are soft. This will take at least an hour.

Soften the onion in oil, the add the pine nuts and keep turning them until they are golden. Put the mince into a bowl with the spices, and work them to a paste with your hands. Add the onions when they are cool enough to handle, and work them in too.

Cut the quinces in half lengthways and remove the core. Spoon out most of the flesh, taking care not to tear the skins. Add this to the mince, and then press the mixture into the quince. Bake for half an hour at 180C.



Serve with pilau rice: I made nohutlu pilav, the chickpea and rice dish which was served by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror (who captured Constantinople in 1453) at the Topkapi Palace. A little gold ball in the shape of a chickpea was hidden in the rice, each guest hoping that they would be the one to find it. This version omits the gold.

Nohutlu pilav for 3-4

250g basmati rice
400ml homemade stock (better to use water than a cube, I think)
one small onion, chopped
half a tin (sorry!) of chickpeas, rinsed and drained

Bring the stock (or water) to the boil. Add the rice. Bring back to the boil, clamp on a lid and cook gently, undisturbed, for 15-20 minutes. Towards the end of the cooking time, you may need to check that there is enough liquid. You will know the rice is cooked when all the liquid has been absorbed and there are little holes all over the surface of the rice. Leave it to rest for a few minutes while you prepare the chickpeas. Gently fry the onion until soft and golden. Add the chickpeas and warm through. Stir this through the rice.


I love this taste of the middle east, although I think this particular recipe, again Claudia Roden, would be improved by the addition of saffron. Better than a gold nugget.

This autumnal, seasonal supper would be great for a party: you could prepare the quince ahead, giving it a little longer in the oven. The pilau could also be made beforehand, in which case it should be reheated, tightly covered, in a moderate oven for 15-20 minutes. Easy.

A Christmassy pilaf

We ate this with roast chicken the other night, and it was essence of Christmas - easy celebratory food with a hint of the exotic which is just right on a winter's night. And I got there by accident: normally, for this sort of dish I would use individual spices, probably cinnamon and clove, but I wanted to finish up what was left over from baking Christmas cakes last week, and the result was a much greater depth of flavour. The ingredients list says: cinnamon, coriander seed, caraway, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. No wonder.

Perfect to go with cold turkey on Boxing Day - five minute's effort, then 20 minutes to do something else before it's time to eat.

Chop and fry a large onion until golden in a little olive oil. Use a saucepan with lid. Add 100g pistachio nuts, & 100g of dried berries. I used a bought mixture of cranberries, blueberries and wild cherry, but any of those would do, or raisins if that's what was in the cupboard. Then add a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice. Stir all this round for a moment, add 500g basmati rice, and then add 750ml stock, bring to the boil, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes without lifting the lid.

When it's done, the rice will be at the bottom, everything else at the top. Mix it together and, if you are decanting it into a serving dish, scrape up the crunchy bits at the bottom and mix those in too.

A really good squash risotto

Finally, a pumpkin risotto to please Lucius, who doesn't like squash. Just as well, because I grew more pumpkins than ever this year, AND the veg box turns up one or two most weeks, so there's a bit of a pumpkin mountain in this house. If you don't much like the texture of pumpkin, which I think is the problem for many people, you can mash it into the rice. Lovely winter comfort food.

Making it is very simple, the usual risotto drill, using a lot of red wine, and adding baked pumpkin at the end.

Peel and chunk a pumpkin - mine was a lovely pale green one from the veg box. Roast in a hot oven for half an hour or so, until they begin to brown at the edges.

Gently fry some chopped onion in olive oil. Just as they are about to brown, add a little garlic. Add risotto rice, stir for a few moments, then bubble up a glass of red wine - put about twice what you'd normally use. Slowly add stock (I used a very rich pheasant stock flavoured with cloves, which almost certainly contributed to the success). When it's almost done, add the pumpkin, and some finely chopped rosemary (sage would be a good alternative here). You'll almost certainly need to add a little more stock, because this risotto is better for being pretty liquid. Stir in a little finely grated parmesan.

I planned to serve it with a little pesto-y mess made with the roasted pumpkin seeds, but they were too tough to eat, so we ate it unadorned. Next time.

Stuffed pumpkin

This is adapted from the blue River Cafe book, but Ruth and Rose wouldn't approve, because I didn't use the right pumpkin, and I didn't cook the potatoes specially, they were just there, in the fridge, left over from another day.

Halve a butternut lengthwise. Crush some salt, peppercorns and a dried chilli, using a pestle and mortar (these words, apparently, put people off cooking, but I find using a pestle a mortar curiously satisfying, there's something elemental about all that crushing). Smear the spices on the pumpkin and drizzle with oil. Bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, either cook some new potatoes, or take them out of the fridge. Either way, they should be diced quite small, coated in olive oil and liberally strewn with chopped garlic and thyme. Put them in and on the pumpkin, and bake for a further half hour, until it's all crunchy and slightly blackened at the edges.

Lucius said, approvingly, that he couldn't taste the pumpkin because of all the garlic. I have now used up the entire pumpkin mountain, and will try to incorporate orange food into our diet using something else. Stand by for some carrot recipes!

Pumpkin risotto

Yesterday I spent the day with Eleanor in London. We met at the Tate Britain, where the Turner prize exhibits are better than they have been for years. There's a wonderful & emotional video installation by Darren Almond based on a journey with the artist's grandmother back to Blackpool where she had spent her honeymoon. It is tender, beautiful and profound, time past and time present all in one room. There's also some sensational painting by Gillian Carnegie, including two completely black paintings of a wood, which, as you can see, don't reproduce very well. Then we moved on to look at the photographs of Roger Fenton, whose pictures of the Crimean war do not show battlefields but logistics, and whose British landscapes are as stunning as the best painting. We traipsed round a couple of the permanent galleries, and, on the way out, I noticed there was a small temporary exhibition of the montage work of John Heartfield, the German communist who consistently criticised the Nazis during the 20s and 30s, and who eventually fled to Britain. There were images I had never seen before (I'm a historian, and Heartfield's work comes up all the time when you're looking at interwar Germany). Powerful stuff.

We had lunch at The Ebury in Pimlico Road, which I remember from my 20s when I lived in Pimlico as a scruffy pub. Now it's been thoroughly made over into a chic restaurant, full of slightly terrifying women whose instinct is to boss rather than to nurture. The menu was good, although Eleanor laughed at some of its pretentiousness, especially the notion of crushed potatoes.
Whatever, the menu lived up to its promise, and I had a very good, smooth pumpkin risotto. Everyone laughed at me for photographing it - the waitress was sneering in an offhand kind of way: "I hope you enjoy eating it as much as looking at it." It's the kind of restaurant where they take the 12.5% service charge without worrying about whether or not they deserve it; I'm still old-fashioned enough to believe that a tip (or, more accurately, the amount of the tip) should be a matter of choice, depending on whether it's been earned.


So, pumpkin risotto for dinner, seeing as there were a couple of butternuts in the veg basket waiting to be eaten. I had to improvise, as all the recipes I read were for risotto with pumpkin chunks. They were also all flavoured with sage, and it was raining, so I didn't want to go out in the dark and wet to pick leaves. All squashes pick up spice flavours well, so I decided on cinnamon.

Gently stew one chopped onion in olive oil. Remove. Stew the diced flesh of one butternut until it's soft. Add a little of this to the onion; process the rest until it's smooth, adding liquid if necessary. Return the onion mix to the pan, add a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and enough risotto rice for three or four people. Stir, then add some white wine. Boil off the alcohol. Cook the rice by adding small amounts of hot water from the kettle. When the rice is almost done, add the pumpkin puree. Serve with flakes of parmesan, pepper, and toasted pine nuts.

That's what I did, because it's what I had. It would have been improved by the use of stock, but I didn't have any in the fridge, and I no longer use stock cubes because even the best ones are full of things I don't really want to eat. Using water was fine, although it would have been better if I'd gone out into the rain and fetched a couple of bay leaves to liven it up. It would also have been nicer if I'd chopped some parsley into it at the end, and that's what I'll do next time. Despite the limitations, it was good and creamy, with a little bit of bite provided by the onion and squash mix. It would also be good, and much less trouble, without making the puree.

Kedgeree

This morning I made kedgeree for breakfast. It took not much more than 10 minutes, and was delicious. As we were eating it, I wondered if, next time, I would remember how I had cooked it. And then it occured to me that if I blogged my food discoveries, I'd never lose them in the general household muddle that is my filing system. It would also make it easy for all those people who have asked about our new, post-heart-attack diet.

We try to eat kippers once a week. Living, as we do, as far from the sea as you can get in the British Isles, it is sometimes tricky getting hold of decent, undyed kippers. If we manage to get those (Tesco is our best source), I put them in foil in the oven for 15-10 minutes to heat them through without stinking out the house. We eat them on toast with tomatoes, either raw or also cooked in the oven. But, if we can't get decent kippers, and have to resort to dyed fillets, they're not so good cooked in that way, because they taste rather harsh. So ...

Kedgeree

I cooked one mug of basmati rice and a cardamom (split open) with two and a half mugs of water. Once I got the rice on, I put the 3 kipper fillets in a flat serving dish and poured boiling water over them. Then I chopped up 3 spring onions and a handful of parsley. When the rice had absorbed all the water (watch carefully, or it sticks to the bottom of the pan; you lose the bottom inch or so of rice astonishingly quickly, and you have to soak the pan for an hour to free it), I covered it with a tea towel while I drained and flaked the fish in the same dish. I added the rice, a small pot of 0% Greek yoghurt (150g) and the greens.

The yoghurt was much nicer than all that butter people generally use in kedgeree, because it gave it an edge. Half way through eating it, I thought that it would have been even better if I had finished it with lemon zest and juice. Next time.