Nigel Slater's stuffed courgettes with dill sauce and mince

We had a delicious dinner last night, courtesy of ideas from Nigel Slater's new book - although I probably could have made something similar after reading one of his old ones.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Slater - it irritates me that he treats himself as one of the immortals in the Observer Food Monthly magazine that he edits. On the other hand, his journalism keeps him in the moment, and he's very good at reinventing the same ideas for a new day. So cook-your-own-veg was always going to be the topic for the next book (actually the next two, this announces itself as volume one).

Since his plot is a tiny London garden, and since he buys most of the veg he eats, he's aware that he's a candidate for Pseud's Corner, which results in some nicely self-mocking moments. But there's a little too much smugness, and this made me laugh out loud:

Watching someone you love eat a tomato you have grown yourself makes it more than just a tomato. It becomes a source of glorious, yet strangely humbling, pleasure.

I mean, per-lease ... who does he think he is?

Overall, A cook and his vegetable patch is good. After you've read the introductory pages, it's a book for browsing and consulting rather than reading straight through; it's arranged alphabetically by vegetable and/or groups of vegetable - lots of plants you'd like to eat and grow.

It's not quite sure whether to be a gardening book or a cookery book (and not quite so successful at blending the two as Christopher Lloyd's Gardener Cook). So there aren't always horticultural notes, but there are lists and lists of Slater's favourite varieties.

Here, for instance, is his list of chard (since there's still just time to sow one last row, something I should be doing right now):

Swiss Chard Classic variety with green leaves and very wide, flat stems. Sometimes known as silver beet.

Wavy Leaf What it says on the packet.

Rhubarb Chard Green-maroon leaves, vermillion veins and stems. Slightly less hardy than the others.

Bright Lights Green leaves with veins and stems of raspberry pink, blood red, saffron, orange and yellow. Similar to Jacob's Coat and Rainbow mixtures.

Oriole Deep gold viens, very dark leaves.

Fordhook Giant Large, flat white stems, curling green leaves. This is one to cook leaves and stalks separately.

Last night, I wanted to tackle the courgette and summer squash mountain that has been quietly stacking up here. So the new book was an obvious place to look for inspiration (it's definitely that moment of the summer when I'm literally fed up with my "usual" courgette recipes). Since the courgettes were to be the main part of the meal, I chose to make Slater's fruit and nut filling to sprinkle onto a dish of sliced squash, accompanied by a little mince fried to crispy nubbly delicious lumps (typical Slater, something he's written about before). And there was an interesting cold dill sauce to go with it.

I followed the instructions pretty accurately for the stuffing/topping. Next time, I wouldn't bother with the couscous, I'd just use breadcrumbs for a softer result.

















Fruit and nut filling for baked courgettes
for 4

1 onion, chopped
olive oil
50g fresh white breadcrumbs
50g dried apricots, finely chopped
40g pistachios, chopped
150g couscous
250ml hot stock
tbsp thyme leaves, chopped
grated zest of a lemon
tbsp chopped parsley
8 medium courgettes

Oven 180C

Pour the stock onto the couscous, add a glug of olive oil, cover with a plate for 10 minutes. Soften the onion in some oil; add the breadcrumbs, apricot and pistachios. Take off the heat. When the couscous has taken up all the liquid, mix in the breadcrumbs, herbs and zest.

Halve the courgettes lengthwise and put in a single layer in an ovenproof dish. Sprinkle on the stuffing, then cover with foil or greaseproof paper.

They'll take about half an hour, more if you've put in some slices of summer squash.

Dill sauce

Finely chop a small bunch of dill. Bash a clove of garlic and combine with 2 tablespoons of wine vinegar, 3 of olive oil, and 4 of yoghurt.

If you want to turn this into a sort of deconstructed traditional stuffed marrow, then cook some mince: Heat a little oil in a frying pan; when it is smoking hot, drop in pieces of mince and LEAVE THEM until they have crisped at the edges. Add dill, chopped garlic, lemon zest, chilli jam (or chopped fresh chilli). Turn the meat. When it's cooked through, add salt and chopped parsley before serving. Slater's recipe uses minced pork; I used minced beef because that was what I had.



PS I take some of this back: I've just spotted that NS no longer edits the Observer Food Monthly. But someone, maybe the telly critic, did describe him as God in last weekend's paper. Harrumph

Venetian spritz

The sun's shining hot today, perhaps we'll have an Indian summer, so then we'll need something lovely to drink ... and here's the method for making a Venetian spritz:

Mix

1 part white wine
1 part Campari
1 part sparkling water

Add

a little ice and a slice of lemon

There's masses more about this traditional treat from the Veneto at Living Venice. Thanks for the reminder, Nan

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

Killer scone recipe

Lettice asked for scones. I made these, following the recipe used at the Lanesborough Hotel in London. As you'd expect from somewhere so swank, this is an extravagent version of a homely classic ... but the egg makes a particularly soft dough - and uses up some of the glut we've got here. Well worth trying.

Rich scones

225g plain flour (I used 00 pasta flour, as it was all I could find)
2 tsp baking powder
40g butter
25g caster sugar
1 egg
100g full cream milk

Heat the oven to 220C (200 for a fan oven)

Sift the flour, add the bp, rub in the butter, then stir in the sugar. Beat the egg in the milk and add to the flour mixture. Gently gather it together into a soft dough, pat it out to an inch thick (you'll need a little flour on the work surface and your fingers), then cut into rounds. I made nine.

Put the scones onto a lightly floured baking sheet*, bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Eat warm.

* You could brush the dough with a little milk at this point, but I didn't bother


I found this in A Feast of Cooks (I bought it for Heston Blumenthal's Quaking Pudding)

Spiced plum sauce for roast pork

Back from Scotland to find a HUGE glut of plums, despite thinning the tree when the fruit set. The Victoria plums are good to eat, but can't begin to compete with the greengages on a neighbouring tree, which taste as sweet as any fruit I've ever eaten. So the gages are all being eaten where they grew, only the purple plums are getting as far as the kitchen.

I made this very good sauce to go with roast belly of pork (which I smeared with olive oil and chopped thyme, sprinkled with a little Maldon salt, then roasted for half an hour at 220C and an hour at 180 - great crackling, or, if not, then a quick blast at the highest temperature your oven will crank up to).

Plum sauce

15-20 plums
2 medium onions
2 dssp runny honey
1 tsp Chinese five-spice
3 cloves of garlic, smashed
1-2 tbsp chilli jam
a sprinkle of wine vinegar

Halve and stone the plums. Chop the onions. Place in a roasting tray with all the other ingredients. This needs about an hour at 180C, so it went into the oven with the pork when I turned down the heat.

Shepherd's pie with horseradish mash

Tessa made the most delicious shepherd's pie for dinner - tasty mince with a horseradish-tinged mash. You don't need me to tell you how to make mince, except to say that it's lamb for a shepherd's pie, beef for a cottage pie. Tessa uses more flour than I do, which makes a good thick sauce.

Horseradish mash

This amount will cover about 1.5kg of mince made with plenty of vegetables and put into a large shallow dish (say, 35cm x 25 x 5). It's enough for 10.

1.5kg floury potatoes, peeled and chunked
50g butter
3/4 jar creamed horseradish (around 120ml)
a little milk
100g grated Cheddar sprinkle over the top of the pie

When the potatoes are cooked, mash them with the butter until they're smooth (Tessa used a ricer to be sure there were no lumps). Beat in the horseradish and enough milk to give the mash a soft consistency for spreading.


When the pie is assembled, it needs about half an hour in a hot oven (180C). It's a great dish to make ahead when there are lots of people to feed ... and the horseradish really gives it an extra edge. Thanks Tessa

There's a heatwave where I live ...

... but I'm on holiday in Scotland, and it's been pouring with rain for days ....
























... so in Mull they have to put a tent over their washing if they've any hope of getting it dry!

Mussels, from farm to plate

Yesterday, Tessa and I went to the mussel farm at Loch Spelve to buy a big bag of moules for supper. I'd never been to one before, so was unprepared for the sight of a JCB pouring mussels onto a conveyor belt leading in to the packing shed. There, six or seven nimble-fingered people were sorting the shells - picking out the small or cracked ones, letting the rest go past and into a holding tank, before being packed and sent off to the mainland. Not many of the mussels are eaten in Mull - this is a lucrative cash crop, and the family-run farm is a reliable employer in an area where jobs are scarce.
























We put the money in an honesty box (in Edinburgh, half the mussels cost twice the price) and went home. Tessa cooked them like this:

5 kg mussels
5 medium onions
5 shallots
5 cloves of garlic
100g butter
2-3 tablespoons chopped parsley
375 ml water
375 ml dry white wine

Clean and check the mussels under cold running water. Sweat the finely chopped onion, shallot and garlic in a little of the butter. After about 10 minutes, add the parsley, water and wine, and cook for five more minutes. Add the mussels, clamp on the lid, and leave to steam over a low heat so that the shells open. Shake the pan occasionally. It should take about five minutes.

Strain the mussels in a colander, letting the juices fall into a saucepan. Reduce them down, then lower the heat and whisk in the butter. You can also add a little cream if you have some.

Put the mussels into a heated tureen and pour on the sauce, plus extra parsley.

The fresher the mussels, the better the dish. But you didn't need me to tell you that. Nor that Tessa's were delicious.

Old-fashioned parkin

At Beamish they were making Parkin the old-fashioned way:



































































Fabulous coal range .... and did you notice the bread oven to the right? If you want to make Parkin - a kind of north country flapjack - just mix the ingredients together, shape the biscuits (or spread into a tin to cut into squares when it's cooled), and bake in a hot oven. Mmm

A lighter crumble mix

Traditional English crumble mixture uses equal quantities of butter and flour, and a bit more sugar (say, 4oz butter, 4oz flour, 6oz sugar). Last night I put a lighter crumble topping on some very sharp stewed plums ... using ground almonds meant I could use less butter, and gave the crumble a pleasing nubbly texture too.

These were the proportions I used:

125g plain flour
85g butter cubed
4 tablespoons caster sugar
100g ground almonds

Blitz the flour and butter to breadcrumb texture, stir in the sugar and almonds. Put on top of prepared fruit (or some pre-stewed fruit) and bake for half an hour at 180C if the fruit is already cooked, longer if not.

No pic, this post is mainly for my reference

Yet more roast potatoes

The boys made roast potatoes for dinner last night. The theme was (clue: stars and stripes in roasting tin) largely American, in honour of their cousins ... a Golden Gate bridge, a Grand Canyon, a few Bart Simpsons, a Micky Mouse, a fabulous hamburger. Alfred tried to make a tractor with moving parts, but it wouldn't reassemble after the potatoes were cooked. They did, however, manage a working chest of drawers. My father was given an Eiffel Tower - much better than the one Horatio made a couple of years ago, this one was edible all the way through (the dogs wouldn't eat the earlier effort).

Once again, I got a flower with a hole in it, and we all know that roast potatoes with holes in taste sweeter .... if you don't believe me, I urge you to conduct your own tasting





































































Related links

A couple of summers ago, the boys were adamant that my "girlie" roast potatoes didn't quite cut the mustard, and so we ate them three nights in a row, while everyone put their oar in ...

The roast potato taste test
That's enough roast potatoes


and then, a little later, disaster struck the water supply, and I was reduced to buying Frozen roast potatoes

This week's girlie potatoes that started them off last night ...

Imam biyaldi -ish

My sister and two of her sons are visiting from California, so we're at least eight for every meal - more often, though, into double figures, and fetching chairs from all over the house, even when we're eating in the garden.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are a tangle of good intentions thwarted, but even so, there is lots of fruit to pick if you can find it in the jungle of untied plants. And so our salads have been beautiful.

















With so many in the house, food needs to be simple to produce - but with so many young men, it also needs to be plentiful. Last night, we ate roast chicken, roast potatoes, courgettes, and a simple imam biyaldi, which I made by splitting aubergines lengthwise, baking them in a hot oven for 20 minutes before smearing them with a tomato sauce made by cooking down the remains of a tomato salad. They went back into the oven for another 10 minutes or so.

For pudding, we ate Tartuffo - my pa, who is in his late 80s and no longer eats much, had thirds, fourths, possibly even fifths. It's Willie Harcourt-Cooze's recipe, and I made it with his Peruvian Black chocolate and lovely yellow Guernsey cream from the Berkeley Farm dairy on the Marlborough Downs. The pudding was stirred while my sister and I caught up with a year's worth of family minutiae ... it doesn't get much better. Except that tonight, my sons are going to cook the roast potatoes, always a good moment, and my father has ordered one in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

Related links

A couple of summers ago, the boys were adamant that my "girlie" roast potatoes didn't quite cut the mustard, and so we ate them three nights in a row, while everyone put their oar in ...

The roast potato taste test
That's enough roast potatoes

and then, a little later, disaster struck the water supply, and I was reduced to buying Frozen roast potatoes


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
Dry-bottled tomatoes

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

Cheese and olive puffs - and Evelyn Waugh's letter about Ld Glasgow's trees

Last night at supper, talk turned to the topic of thank you letters. I have just received a particularly effusive one from a friend of Horatio's: a real pleasure ... incredibly kind of you to provide such a feast both for supper and for breakfast ... no better place to be ... etc etc. This was regarded as both a very good letter to send to a mummy AND as a little over the top (but probably because it was written several weeks after the event.

Lucius was having none of it: Not interesting ... no point in writing a letter if it didn't say something ... bah humbug.

Here's his idea of a letter worth writing (mine too, although I don't think it would do as a bread and butter letter):

No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.

So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.

And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.

Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation.

And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.

So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.

This is quite true.

Letter from Evelyn Waugh to his wife, 31 May 1942

My nephews, who are staying, now face the prospect of writing two letters each, so that they please us both.


These not cheese puffs are what we ate with pre-dinner drinks, very good. It's from a recipe in yesterday's Guardian mag by the baker Dan Lepard; he calls them black olive gougères

175g drained Kalamata olives
1 large clove of garlic
1 tbsp chopped thyme (rosemary would do too)
50ml olive oil
150g strong white flour
3 eggs
75g grated parmesan, plus more when reheating

Blitz the olives, but stop before they turn to a mushy paste. Meanwhile, bash the garlic to a paste. Put this with the herbs and oil into a saucepan, add 125ml water and bring to the boil (no time at all). Tip in the flour, beat until it forms a ball, then add the eggs one by one, beating thoroughly each time. Lastly beat in the cheese (I used very strong Cheddar in the mix, parmesan to finish).

Using two teaspoons, scoop balls of the mixture onto a non-stick baking sheet and bake in a hot oven 200C (180C fan) for 15-20 minutes. Cool on a rack. Plate them and sprinkle with a little finely grated parmesan and leave until you are ready to put in the oven to warm through. (I found 120C wasn't quite warm enough to melt the grated cheese, so turned the oven up a little.)

Cold beef with lemon and thyme

When families gather together in the summer, the most convenient way to picnic is for everyone to bring a plate of food ... and even if there's no-one co-ordinating, there's rarely much duplication. Yesterday 11 families brought a picnic lunch to share at the lunchtime break of the school cricket XI v the old boys. First to go were the onion bhajis, made by the mother of the captain, who also made vegetable samosas. Quiche, crostini, dips, sausages, raw veggies, smoked salmon - all easily transportable summer favourites.

I made cold beef strips using rump steak, a really good standby when you need something that won't take long and will travel well. The trick is to marinade the meat after you cook it to give it flavour. Quick and delicious - it's just as good hot, too.

Steak strips with lemon and thyme

Choose a thick piece of rump, and trim away the fat. When it's at room temperature, brush it with oil and cook it on a smoking hot griddle pan so that it is rare. A couple of minutes each side should be enough - it will "cook" a little more in the marinade, and if you're eating it cold, it will also carry on cooking as it cools.

For one or two pieces of rump, finely zest a lemon, then squeeze half the juice. Add a handful of finely chopped thyme, lots of pepper, some crushed garlic if you like. For a picnic, put everything in a plastic box. Take a board and a sharp knife, and slice the meat when you're ready to eat.

If you're eating this at hot and at home, put the meat in a shallow dish and pour on the marinade; leave it for about 10 minutes - you'll have to turn it, as there's not much liquid.


Other good things to take to a picnic

Travelling beef sandwich
Superquick noodles

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.