Vichy carrots - and with a balsamic twist

Vichy carrots are a great way to use up old carrots. Simply slice them fairly small, put them in a pan with a knob of butter, a sprinkling of sugar or honey, and a little water. Cook on a high heat, shaking occasionally, and add more water if necessary. You need to be cautious with the water, because it should all have evaporated when the carrots are ready, covering them with a syrupy coating. When they're done, add some chopped parsley (I didn't have any).

And if you like, add a little balsamic vinegar before serving. That's what I meant to do for Lettice's lunch today, as she loves balsamic ... but I forgot. Hey ho.

Lamb with sundried tomatoes and basil

Here's a recipe for delicious lamb stew I made yesterday in the steam oven I am borrowing from Miele. Eleanor said it reminded her of a Thai red curry (without any spices). Definitely a keeper.

You don't actually need a steam oven to make it, indeed there'd be less washing up if you cooked it on your hob or in a conventional oven. But, for me, the surprise is that you can easily do this type of cooking in a steam oven .... and because the steam oven switches itself off when it's finished, you could put this together quickly in the morning and come home to find dinner ready to re-heat.

Lamb with Sundried Tomatoes and Basil

this is copied from a steam oven recipe supplied by Matt at Forever Better, but you could easily use a casserole dish and just keep on going on the hob

1 tbspn olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
900g lamb, diced
110g sundried tomatoes in oil, drained
1 tbspn dried parsley
25g basil
400ml vegetable stock
3 tbspns flour
seasoning, if required

1. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan. Gently fry one of the crushed cloves
of garlic and the lamb for 5 minutes to thoroughly brown the meat.

2. Meanwhile, place the sundried tomatoes with the second clove of garlic,
parsley, basil and vegetable stock into a blender. Blend to a coarse sauce.

3. Sprinkle the flour over the lamb and cook, stirring for 1 minute. Add the
sauce to the pan and bring up to the boil. Transfer the lamb into a solid steam
container and cover.

4. Put the container into the Miele steam oven and select Cook Universal,
100ºC with a time of 45 minutes. When the cooking is complete, check the
seasoning and adjust with salt and freshly ground black pepper as necessary.

Mostly I've used the steam oven for bottling tomatoes and steaming vegetables, which seem to taste more of themselves than any other way I've ever cooked them. Not unlike a microwave, but easier to use, more versatile, and no need to buy horrible plastic dishes. I also poached pears in wine with vanilla and cinnamon - fab, and an ideal recipe for the steam oven. The watercress soup was less successful, because I couldn't / didn't get the leeks soft enough before adding watercress and stock, so the resulting soup is pitifully thin after passing through a coarse seive.

There are definite advantages to using the steam oven - you programme it in two steps, and then you can leave it, because it switches itself off. I find, though, that it's a bit scientific for me: I'm an intuitive cook, I don't often follow a recipe properly. Part of it is that I'm learning, so obviously have to consult a manual at this stage. But it also requires a precision I cannot manage in my daily cooking.

I've still got a few experiments to carry out: I haven't yet steamed an egg, or defrosted anything. I want to prove some more bread dough, because today's batch hasn't worked out well, but that may be because I'm using a Miele recipe which didn't read right to me and which looks as if it's going to end in rock-hard bread (in which case I'll blitz it for breadcrumbs).

The verdict is - I want one. Because I'd like to bottle a winter's worth of tomatoes. I probably won't use it for conventional cookery, so it's going in the scullery, not the kitchen, and therefore doesn't have to be the built-in model, which will save a fair amount of money.

Thanks to Steph and to Matt at Forever Better for organising the steam oven trial, AND for providing me with everything I needed for yesterday's sample menu.

Related links

V simple method of bottling tomatoes in a steam oven

Other things to do with lamb

Lamb with dates and chocolate
Very easy lamb with olive paste
Nigel Slater's lamb chops
Lamb shanks - good for when you're busy busy busy and have hungry hoards to feed

Banksy at the Bristol Art Gallery

Nothing to eat at the Bristol Art Gallery, but plenty of food for thought ... various striking things about the Bristol Museum vs Banksy exhibition: there are a lot of jokes, there are a lot of people in the queue who don't normally visit art galleries, there are a lot of children roaring round the museum looking for Banksy jokes and finding other inspirations. Thoroughly recommended - Banksy will make you laugh out loud, challenge some of your perceptions of art and of the world, deflate any tendency to pomposity, and make you notice all sorts of things in the museum. It's not subtle, but it's great fun.

































This joke definitely got me thinking about the gleaners as real people; there's something a little lazy about romantising such tough lives. And who's to say you wouldn't want to sit down for a quiet smoke if that was your life?
























This is Banksy's version of the Angel of the North ... a southerner's view of Saturday night on Tyneside - but just as true of Bristol - we were kept awake much of the night by noisy young pouring out of a nearby nightclub and the university student union.
























You could say that this is simplistic, it was one of a number of works dealing with warfare and violence (eg a classical bust of Mars thrown in a bucket with some flowers next to a large painting of soldiers armed with flowers); if you don't agree with Banksy's pacifism, it's no good reacting pompously, because the next work will be a joke. Like this rather gory circus joke, which reminded me of various stories and poems I read to our children when young ..

(Jim) hadn't gone a yard when--Bang!

With open Jaws, a lion sprang,

And hungrily began to eat

The Boy: beginning at his feet.

Now, just imagine how it feels

When first your toes and then your heels,

And then by gradual degrees,

Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,

Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.

No wonder Jim detested it!

It's part of Jim, from Hillaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children, a poem all our children know by heart.

The lovely Edwardian museum has probably never seen anything like it; it's free, but you'll have to queue - there were several hundred people ahead of us when we arrived half an hour before opening time at 9.30 (on a SUNDAY). By the time we came out, the queue was twice as long, the people at the back were probably going to have to wait at least an hour, maybe more.

Very rich chocolate refrigerator cake

Half way to London for lunch with Eleanor the birthday girl, I realised that I had forgotten the birthday cake. So, as we were meeting in Piccadilly, Lettice and I popped into Ladurée and chose a box of macaroons to stand in until Friday, when she's home and can eat the one I made last night ... these are, from left to right: lemon, coffee, blackcurrant, chocolate, mint, raspberry, vanilla, pistachio. Beautiful colours, fabulous tastes, birthday extravagence.

This recipe originally came from my mother-in-law, and I have made it for years. When the children were small and took cake with them to school to share at elevenses, teachers often used to ask if I would make it. Very simple, very good, tiny squares are enough.

Very rich refrigerator cake

These quantities will make enough to use a dinner plate as a mould

250g digestive biscuits
125g butter
125g dark chocolate
65g sultanas
3 dessertspoons cocoa
3 dessertspoons golden syrup

Bash up the biscuits. It's better if they're not reduced to a fine tilth, the cake has a better texture if the biscuits are lumpy. But I've made it with crumbs from the food processor too. Use the end of a rolling pin.

In a large saucepan, melt all the other ingredients. The chocolate has a tendency to catch on the bottom, unless there's a film of butter underneath. When everything is melted, take it off the heat and stir in the biscuit crumbs. Then spread them out onto tinfoil. If I want it to look neat, I put the tinfoil onto a plate, and use that as a guide, but I don't always bother. Wrap in tinfoil (the easiest is to use a piece of foil twice the size of the cake, spread it in the middle, and then pull up the sides), and put in a cool place for an hour or two. Or make a day or two ahead.


PS here's a photo of the birthday girl taken at lunch, which we had at Nove in Sackville Street - a nice, unpretentious and not too pricey Italian just off Piccadilly. We were almost the only people there, what a shame

Nigella's chocolate mousse cake

It's the birthday season in this house. Lettice wanted chocolate cake, but not the "usual" one. So I made chocolate mousse cake, not quite following the recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess ... very rich and delicious, quick to put together. Tomorrow it's Eleanor's birthday, and she's ordered up a different chocolate cake - I'm just off to buy the ingredients.

Chocolate mousse cake
for a 23cm tin

350g dark chocolate
175g butter
8 large eggs, separated
100g muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tbs vanilla extract

Grease the pan. Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale and creamy. Stir in the vanilla and the coolish chocolate mixture. Whisk the egg whites until they are peaky, then fold in (best if you loosen the mixture first with one spoonful of white, but I don't always remember).

Pour the whole lot into your tin, then put the tin into a larger roasting pan. Put all this into the oven, then add hot water from the kettle so that you have an inch or two of water.

Bake for 50 minutes. The top should be dry, but the inside will still be gooey. Don't even think about removing this from the tin until it is completely cold. It will crack as it cools; if it looks too much, dust with icing sugar.













































Related links

Homemade vanilla extract
Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake
Nigella's fudge icing for chocolate cakes
Rich chocolate refrigerator cake
Dense chocolate loaf
Tartuffo - very rich, very delicious chocolate pud

Beef salad with capers and parsley

I've decided this year to cook my way through Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking, and I've started with this very good cold beef salad, which we ate last night for supper. ED gives this as the best use for the little bits left over at the end of a baked brisket, but I used the remains of a roasted silverside.

As she says, better made into a salad rather than reheated in a hash or rissoles - but who does that nowadays, anyway?

Elizabeth David's beef salad with capers and parsley

Slice your beef into ribbons. Make a vinaigrette dressing with finely chopped shallot, crushed capers, chopped parsley, red wine vinegar, olive oil and seasonings. If you are using curly-leafed parsley it should be finely cut, if flat-leafed, you can chop it quite roughly. Combine everything and serve.

Beechdean ice cream

We went to the Theatre Royal Windsor last night to see a very good whodunnit ... disappointing that it was only about 1/3 full - normally on a Thursday it's pretty full, so perhaps everyone was at home watching Britain's Got Talent. Hope there's a better turnout for Brief Encounter next week.

As usual, fantastic Beechdean ice cream in the interval .... reading the label, it's produced on a farm which is very close to home, as well as the theatre. What a treat.

When we emerged, the ferris wheel was lit up and still spinning furiously, but we couldn't work out whether there was anyone in it or not.

Dry-bottled tomatoes .... so good to eat, so quick to make

Forget everything I wrote about preserving tomatoes in brine - they're good, but you've got all that salt water to chuck. No, the most delicious way to preserve a tomato - beating slow-roasted hands down - is to bottle them dry with a little salt and sugar. Really fabulous - and you can just pour the contents of your jar into a saucepan and heat it up for an instant sauce.

You'll need 1tsp salt and 1/2 tsp sugar per 500g of tomatoes. You must pack them as tight as you can, because they collapse down to about the halfway line. Use sterilised bottles (10 minutes at 100C in the steam oven). Pack the jars, close the lid; 60 minutes at 100C.

If you don't have a steam oven, which let's face it, most of us don't (I'm borrowing one at the moment from Miele), you can do this using the slow-water method, the quick-water method, the oven method, or a pressure cooker. All more of a faff, because you have to be keen, and, above all, you have to be there. With the steam oven: 2 minutes' to pack the jar, and that's it - Ping! and it's done. No need even to worry about whether you can fit the result into the deep freeze.

Pictures soon ... I just wanted to get the method down before I lost the piece of paper with my notes.


PS if you want some details about the other methods, let me know and I'll post them ... this experiment with bottling/canning has involved consulting a big pile of books, so, for a few days only (before I forget), I am an encyclopaedia of knowledge about preserving tomatoes in a jar.

Related posts

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam
Preserving tomatoes in brine

Tasty tomatoes to grow

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Play date at the Miele Experience Centre
How DO you say Miele?

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.

Tomatoes preserved in brine

Miele have lent me a steam oven to play with: until a few weeks ago, I didn't know such a thing existed; now I'm trying to work out whether I want one in the imminent re-design of a corner of my kitchen.

I didn't find it very easy to use when I tried to make part of dinner with it, but it did cook the asparagus to perfection - cooked through without going soggy. It was partly my in-built dislike of reading the instructions, and partly that the oven requires a precision which does not come naturally.

But now I've begun experimenting with bottling - what Americans call canning (and what we perhaps ought to call jarring). Here the steam oven comes into its own, making the process the work of moments. First you sterilise the bottles (15 mins at 100C), then you fill them and put them back in the oven. Ping! and it's done.

I'm going to dry-pack the next batch, just as soon as I can get my hands on some decent tomatoes: peel and pack, sprinkling with 1 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp sugar per 500ml of tomatoes.

Brined tomatoes

The brine I used was made with 15g salt to 1.1 litres of water.

Put the tomatoes into wet sterilised jars; I used 500g Le Parfait, which hold about 350g of fruit. Pour on the brine and seal the jars. I cooked these at 85C for 55 mins. A perfect guess. (According to the Reader's Digest Food from your Garden, they'd have needed 60-70 minutes using the oven method.)


Related posts

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam

Tasty tomatoes to grow

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Play date at the Miele Experience Centre
How DO you say Miele?

Testing the new roof at Wimbledon

We left home this morning in a shower of rain, and arrived at Wimbledon in a cold blustery wind.

















We saw the new roof cover the centre court - eight minutes of stop-start - then watched Tim Henman, Kim Cluysters, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graff play doubles and singles.
























When we emerged .... yes, it had been raining. We were blissfully unaware that, for the first time, rain didn't stop play. (The roof was deployed for final testing, rather than to shelter the court.)

















Lunch was a decent but pricey sandwich, and filthy coffee; if you're heading for Wimbledon this summer, my advice would be to take your own food.

How do you stop bread going mouldy?

Some advice, please: how do you stop fresh bread going mouldy? I've found a very good webpage full of advice about using a breadbin (I probably should use more boiling water to keep the mould at bay), but I'm wondering what the bakers amongst you do.


I bake all the bread we eat, and mostly we eat it up quickly ... but not always, and then we occasionally find that a loaf has gone mouldy. We keep it in a terracotta crock (glazed inside but not out) which is covered with a wooden lid. I'd be happy to make a change to this arrangement, but I don't want to keep bread in the freezer.






What do you do? I'd really welcome your tips, especially if you bake your own bread ...

Related posts

Daily bread
Daily bread 2

Six seed rolls
Bread knots - another simple way to make beautiful and delicious rolls, using this dough, or your default dough

Yeast starter for bread - and the bread make your own sourdough starter

No-knead bread the famous NY Times recipe
Speeded-up no-knead bread and a different take on it

Yoghurt bread fabulous, easy, TRY IT
Quick oat loaf
Spelt bread - it's getting easier to buy this highly-flavoured flour

Anti-oxidant tea bread - I made this for my husband for a pre-surgery boost - delicious, too!

Yeast conversion - fresh/dried/quick

Things to do with stale or leftover bread

Panzanilla
Herb stuffing for roast chicken
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Anchovy toasts

Blueberry muffins

We've been eating blueberry muffins this afternoon. Lettice made them. This is how:

for 12 muffins

75g melted butter
200g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarb
2 tsp baking powder
100 ml yoghurt mixed with 100g milk
1 egg
200g blueberries

Heat the oven to 200C. Melt the butter. Combine in a bowl the flour, bicarb and baking powder. In a measuring jug, mix the yog/milk with the egg and butter, then lightly stir this into the flour. Don't overwork, and don't worry about lumps. Fold in the fruit, then spoon into muffin cases. (Nigella mentions the possibility of adding orange zest, but Lettice didn't bother.)

Bake for 20 minutes. They'll be golden and delicious. Eat hot or cold. We thought they'd be good made with raspberries, or chopped up strawberries. Lettice thought they'd be good with bananas; I didn't.


















Adapted from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess

Honey-seared salmon with noodles

Guest post from daughter Lettice, who cooked dinner for the two of us this evening. She's just back from three months volunteering in South Africa, and says she really missed cooking:


Just tried this recipe and it was delicious. Few things: i didn't use the bean sprouts (couldn't find them) we thought they/cold cucumber sticks/mushrooms would have been equally nice. Also the frying pan was too small, and everything went everywhere, so maybe use a deep set pan or a wok - which we have i just failed to use! The pan was also slightly too hot when i added the salmon so slighty too cooked outside/not cooked inside... just cook how you would normally cook salmon - not how the recipe says!

2 strips egg/rice noodles
2 tbsp sesame oil
2 thick salmon fillets, skinned and sliced 2 cm thick
1 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 bunch spring onions, sliced
100g spinach leaves

Cook the noodles; drain, add a little sesame oil. Toss the salmon with the honey and soy sauce. Heat a non-stick frying pan over a high heat and toast the sesame seeds until lightly golden. Remove from pan. Add half the oil to the pan; once hot, cook the salmon for 1 minute each side. Remove from the pan; keep warm. Add the remaining oil to the pan; fry the noodles, spring onions and bean sprouts. Add the spinach, seeds, remaining honey and soy mix. Toss until the spinach wilts. Sit the honey seared salmon on top of the noodles and spinach - serve.

Pains au chocolat

Very easy, very delicious, very fattening, very more-ish.

I used dark orange chocolate, and could have improved on this theme with some orange zest in the dough. Lettice said she'd like milk chocolate next time. They took little more than an hour and a half, and only five minutes of my time.

for 6 pains au chocolat

Put into the bread machine:

1/2 tsp yeast
250g strong white flour
2 tbsp vanilla sugar
2 tbsp butter
a pinch of salt
2 eggs beaten with 3 tbsp milk

Mix on the dough setting.

Knead the dough into a cylinder shape, then cut into six equal pieces. Roll each piece into a rectangle, put a square of chocolate in the centre, then fold the two sides over (as if you were folding a sheet of A4 into a long envelope). Place in a mini loaf pan (mine are 11cmx6 and 3cm deep). Leave in a warm place to rest and rise*, then bake for 10-12 minutes in a hot oven (220C).

Eat while warm. Mmmmm

* Mine had hardly risen at all when I put them in the oven after about 20 minutes' rest ... they were still light and airy, oven spring gave them their lovely final loaf shape


































Other enriched doughs

Hot uncrossed buns
Fabulous cinnamon rolls
Anti-oxidant teabread
Homemade marzipan - an alternative filling for brioche dough

Rabbit pie, anyone?

Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex

New bread knife

The other day, I tried to slash dough with my 30-year-old bread knife. The dough tore and needed more time to rise again. I went out and bought a new bread knife. Very sharp. Now the young can cut bread straight, and I realise their previous inability to do this was because of the tool they were using.

Now there's no problem slashing dough with a knife. I'm just worried one of us is going to end up in A&E.

Escape to Sussex

Suddenly needed to get away for a few days. This is the view from my room by the sea. Yesterday it was sunny, but I didn't have my new camera then. (After months of humming and hawing, took the plunge, bought a Nikon D90, fell in love with the first click.)

I went to Alfriston, to visit the Clergy House, the first building ever bought by the National Trust. Wonderful floor, made of tamped chalk hardened by pouring sour milk and leaving for a couple of weeks. Beautiful oak frames, and an oak leaf carved into one - the centuries-old decoration of a yeoman farmer, now used as the logo of the National Trust. The garden is beautiful, the productive parts much the best to my eye.


















Then to Much Ado Books, where the lovely proprietress slipped a teabag into the book I bought, so that I could enjoy reading it with a cup of tea ... I went straight back to the car and got the kettle out of the boot.

Cucumber and dill pickle

Last autumn, I bought The Wonderful Weekend Book by Elspeth Thompson - I am not damning it with feint praise when I say that it is charming, also much the best of the recent deluge of books on home-making for the nostalgic.

Elspeth gives a really wonderful recipe for cucumber and dill pickle, and I made a huge vat with the last of the cucumbers. I've been eking it out carefully, as it is so delicious. But now the first cucumbers have arrived in my vegetable box, so I can polish off the few remaining slices and make some more.

I didn't post this when I made it, because there were no more cucumbers (I don't really think it would be a good idea to make this with watery winter indoor fruits). It can also be made with courgette, although I haven't yet tried that.


Courgette and dill pickle
for four 450g jars

It always seems to me a miracle that something submerged in liquid can retain its crunch, but this does. And the flavours are great from day one, none of that leaving it to mature until Christmas that you have to do with chutney. I've found this is terrific with my usual lunch of leftovers, almost as good as chilli jam.

3 large cucumbers (or 6 courgettes)
2 large onions
50g coarse salt
450g soft brown sugar
600ml cider vinegar
1 tbsp whole mustard seeds
a large handful of fresh dill

Thinly slice the cucumbers and onions, and this is easiest on a mandoline. Layer with salt in a large plastic box, and weight down with a plate and some tins. Leave it four at least four hours, then drain and rinse in a big colander. You want to get all the salt out.

Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar, then add the veg, seeds and dill. Bring to the boil. After one minute, drain, reserving the liquid. Boil to a syrup (which will mean boiling off around one third). Meanwhile, put the vegetables in sterilised jars. Cover with juices, and seal. Keep in the fridge once you've re-opened the jar.


Other good preserves

Spiced apricot preserve this one is BRILLIANT for an instant gravy to go with roast pork
Roasted tomato ketchup very good for cooking
Home-made vanilla extract easy, and satisfies my need for the semblance of thrift
Rose petal jelly it will soon be time to make this, the buds are swelling - and it's pouring with rain at the moment, which can only be good for the roses


PS Elspeth has a new book about to come out ... she says on her blog today that it's already in some shops, so I'm hoping the postman will deliver my copy today

Yoghurt and lemon cake

I don't keep butter in the house when the young are away, which made it tricky this afternoon when I took it into my head to cheer myself up by making a lemon cake. But then I remembered Turkish yoghurt cake, and found a good recipe in Claudia Roden's Arabesque. It's a soufflé of a cake, no butter, not much flour, eggs, yoghurt and a lemon. Just the thing.

Turkish yoghurt cake - yogurtlu tatlisi

4 large eggs, separated
100g caster sugar
3 tbsp plain flour
400g Greek strained yoghurt
grated zest of a lemon
juice of a lemon

Beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale. Beat in the flour, then blend in the yoghurt, zest and juice. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff, then fold into the cake mixture. Pour this into a non-stick baking tin - I use a 23cm clip-ring tin which I grease with olive oil.

Bake at 180C for 50-60 minutes, until the top is brown. Eat warm or cold.


PS you can serve this with a syrup made with 150ml water, 25og sugar, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and the finely grated zest of an orange ... Claudia Roden says she doesn't bother, and neither do I.

PPS picture to follow - I meant to save this as a draft until the cake came out of the oven, but hit publish instead ... I've been a little distracted for the past couple of weeks, which is why I need cake!