Marrow Zanzibar

Years ago, an old family friend, the historian Christopher Hibbert, used to grow vegetables in our orchard, as he no longer had enough space in his own garden after a house move. Our daughter Eleanor, then at primary school, used to "help" him, but, really, she was drawn both by Christopher's charisma and his generous gifts of sweets.

The kitchen gardening was an extension of Christopher's interest in good food, particularly Italian food - he spent a lot of time in Italy researching various books (his guides to Rome, Venice and Florence are wonderful company in those cities), and he likes an Italian restaurant better than any other sort. Sadly, though, the allotment was too much of a struggle - rabbits, poor soil, deer, all conspired to make him give up our patch in favour of one in another friend's garden. Now I struggle with the same pests.

Christopher introduced me to the delights of tiny turnips, and he gave me this recipe for the courgette glut. It works with small ones, but is particularly useful for courgettes which have got out of hand. You may be fearful before trying this - it goes against the grain of modern cooking, which so often says you should barely heat vegetables - but, trust me, boiling the courgettes to death really does make for a delicious dish. I'm giving Christopher's original instructions, with my notes and observations below. I haven't made this for years, because I lost the paper he gave me - it came to light this week in a baking book I used to use frequently when the children were small.

Marrow Zanzibar

1 medium marrow
1 medium onion, chopped
1 crushed garlic clove
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp lemon thyme
2 bay leaves
6 cloves
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp salad oil
2 tbsp vinegar
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 dsp salt
bit of cayenne pepper
3 oz sultanas

Peel marrow, split lengthwise, remove seeds, cut into 1-inch cubes, put into saucepan and add all ingredients. Add enough water to cover the marrow. Stir mixture.

Bring to boil, cover with greaseproof paper and lid. Simmer in oven at medium heat for 60-90 minutes.

Serve as hot veg or cold as hors d'oeuvre.

I think it's called Zanzibar because of the cloves; the finished result is redolent of Venice and Scicily, and is particularly good if you like those sort of dishes but aren't too keen on capers. The cayenne gives that extra note which capers give in, say, caponata (two different cheat's versions I've blogged are here and here), so don't leave it out, even if you don't care for too much heat in your food (just used less); most of the heat is absorbed by the bland courgette, so your mouth doesn't burn.


Notes

You can use 5-6 courgettes rather than a marrow.

I don't have celery seed in the house as a rule, so I use 2 tsp celery salt and leave out the dessertspoon of salt which is specified later - which is, in any case, far more salt than I would ever use in any dish.

I used olive oil yesterday, because that was all there was in the house, but sunflower oil would be just as good.

Don't be too faint-hearted about the water - it vanishes. But I don't use the greaseproof paper, because I want to be sure that the water evaporates (and because it's a fiddle). And I made this at a gentle simmer on the hob for just over an hour - fine if you don't want to switch on the oven specially.


PS I'm reading Christopher's biography of Garibaldi, my interest having been sparked by a one-man show about the risorgimento we saw during the Edinburgh Festival at the Scottish Storytelling. Centre

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.

Quince liqueur

The distinctive and heady scent of quince transports me instantly to childhood and my grandmother's kitchen in 1950s Oxford. She used to make a delicious jam from fruit given to her by a neighbour, and it was a long job cutting the hard fruit into tiny cubes.

We have a quince in our garden, planted about 25 years ago by my mother-in-law, who used to put a few slices of poached quince into her stewed apple, rather in the way you might add a couple of cloves.

I make quince jam and jelly regularly, and this year, for the first time, I'm making quince liqueur - not to drink (although it's perfectly drinkable), but to use in my cooking throughout next year. It was a quick job, thanks to the Magimix, which made very short work of grating the fruit. I used Jane Grigson's recipe from her Fruit Book.

Quince liqueur

a one-litre preserving jar
3 quinces
60g caster sugar
about 600 ml vodka

Wipe the fluff from the quince with a dry cloth. Cut them in half so that they will fit into the feeder tube of the Magimix. Grate - yes, really, the whole fruit, skin, pips and all. The scented fruit will more or less fill your jar. Add the sugar, then the vodka, making sure that all the fruit is covered. Seal. Put in a dark place for a couple of months - there's no need to turn it.

This will need straining in December or January, at which point more sugar could be added. And then it will add a useful flavouring note to savoury as well as sweet dishes; quince is not only distinctive, it is also very strong - one quince on the kitchen table can scent a whole house.

Cheesy peasy pasta

Last month, at the Edinburgh Festival, we had lunch one day in the little cafe at the back of Valvona and Crolla, the great Italian deli. Pizza and pasta all round. The photo shows a delicious pea pasta dish which I ordered, because I love vegetarian pasta. This half-remembered dish was the inspiration for lunch on Saturday. Heart-healthy, quick, easy, suitable for one to - well, how big is your pan?

Cheesy peasy pasta for 2

2 handfuls of pasta
100g light Philadelphia
a little skimmed milk
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
a handful of peas
pepper
a little finely-grated parmesan

Start by boiling the water for your pasta (I used shells). Then, on a very low heat, melt the Philly with a little skimmed milk, enough to make the sauce liquid, together with the garlic. Put the peas on when you start cooking the pasta. Drain the cooked peas and add to your sauce; grate in a little parmesan for seasoning. Mix this into the drained pasta (you can use some of the cooking water to loosen the sauce if you weren't bold enough with the milk!). You could chop in a little mint, but it isn't necessary.

Quick crushed roasted potatoes

I am aware that, for a heart-healthy blog, there's been a recent emphasis on roasting potatoes. My family are all very keen on roast potatoes (although I'd happily forego them), and, I suppose, I keep on experimenting in the hope that I've found something both healthy and properly crunchy and delicious. My defence, therefore, is that I'm trying to crack this problem ... but it would be true to say that I also think that food should be joyful, and, in this house, that means roast potatoes.

I managed to blog about Nigella's squid without actually confessing that I now have a copy of the book of the TV series. This time I can't get away with it; the method you are about to read is in a show that has yet to be aired. (This week? next week? I've saved you the bother of all that irritating simpering.)

This is what you do: wrap little new potatoes loosely in a clean tea cloth, and bash them with the end of a rolling pin until they are all crushed open. Tip them into a roasting dish, toss in as little oil as you can manage, and roast them in a hot oven for about 35-40 minutes. (Nigella gets the cooking time down to under 10 minutes by frying them, but I think you'd really have to use a lot more oil, and, besides, you have to watch them.)

Notes:

I'm using a tea towel because I can't bear the idea that everything we eat involves plastic, ie oil, ie geo-political problems. This is a small start, and an easy one, because you don't notice a tea towel in the next wash.

If you have a large mortar, you could probably pestle them. Mine is too small, but I'm rather taken with this one belonging to David Lebovitz

The whole exercise is rather therapeutic

Shaken hot-water pastry

This recipe is so good, so staple, that I'm giving it again ... here, we ate it with onions, anchovies and olives - a pissaladiere - but it's infinitely variable, is quick, easy, delicious, and HAS NO BUTTER.

And for those who think that cholesterol-watching is a joyless activity, dooming you to eat horrible food, just a reminder that this is a real, traditional French recipe ... amazing, really, that it ever fell from our consciousness.

Shaken hot-water pastry

225g flour
1 tbsp caster sugar (leave it out if you're making something savoury)
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
4 tbsp mild salad oil
1/2 beaten egg
3 tbsp hot water

Put all the ingredients into a lidded plastic box and shake it for at least a minute. When you take off the lid, you will find a lumpy mixture; form it into a ball with your hands, and roll it out on a floured surface. The original recipe says this is enough for a 24cm tin, but I have made this a number of times, and find that it is rather too much for a 24cm tin, better in the next size up, because this pastry is better when it is very thin. You can use this straight away, no need to rest it.


As I said in my previous post on this pastry, the recipe comes from Geraldene Holt's French Country Kitchen, a wonderful book worth following up if you've never seen it. Actually, everything of hers I have is worth reading and re-reading, she is one of THE great cookery writers. It's amazing that she's not better known, but I suppose it has something to do with the recent ascendence of Italian cookery in this country, accompanied by the falling from grace - or at any rate fashion - of French food.

Quick squid salad

I dropped in to the butcher this morning to buy a steak for Horatio to cook for his supper while we're out dancing at a party. They had lovely whole squid, and I couldn't resist buying one for my lunch.

For years, I've used a Nigella method of cooking squid: you just dust the rings and tentacles in a mixture of cornflour and pepper (lots of it), then shallow fry in hot oil, and eat with lemon juice. Quick and easy, even when you're buying whole squid rather than prepared rings.

Nigella's just started a new series on television, rather irritating, but, even so, I can't seem to bear to miss it. Television, of course, devours ideas, and so the squid recipe has had to move on. Last week she rolled out her squid, as if new, using the same method, but, crucially, one more ingredient: semolina "for essential crunch" (2tbsp cornflour to 4tbsp semolina, plus pepper). Result? Something pretty soggy; delicious but soggy. Stick to the first, crisp, recipe ... here it is:

Salt and Pepper Squid for
from Nigella Bites

Oil - 1 cm in your pan
2tbsp Maldon salt
2tbsp black peppercorns
75g cornflour
500g squid, cut into rings + tentacles
lemon

Bash the peppercorns with the salt, add the cornflour, mix in the squid. Heat the oil until it's nearly smoking, then add the squid in a single layer, in batches if necessary. They take a minute or so, and probably won't need turning. Drain them on some kitchen roll before serving.

I don't generally bother with the salt, and I eat this on a bed of torn lettuce. Just don't bother with the semolina.

Organic fortnight: a post for the Prime Minister

It's organic food fortnight, and the Soil Association is running a campaign to highlight the fact that organic food is planet-friendly because it uses a lot less energy to produce. I'm sorry that's a little vague, although I don't think that "30% less" is any more precise ...

Here in the UK, our government is pretty bossy when it comes to telling us to turn out lights, install insulation, drive slowly &c - but it doesn't breathe a word about the benefits to the planet of choosing organic food. Indeed, it's actively hostile to the idea that organic food has benefits (you may think this article is a little out of date, but it was all I could find on the government website). Here, in the interests of balance, are a couple of links to websites that see value in organic foods - Sheepdrove, the farm set up by Peter Kindersley after selling his hugely successful publishing business, and a question and answer session from The Observer.

The Soil Association has a very funny little game (10 seconds max) you can play ... feed Gordon an organic breakfast. They're going to use the final tally of breakfasts fed to Gordon in their campaigning ... so what are you waiting for?



PS thanks Melanie

Butter-less pastry - & a fruit tart

This pastry is a revelation ... and, for those of you who think pastry can only be made with butter: this is a French recipe, a proper recipe. There are egg yolks and oil, so it's still not something to eat every day, but this is a real breakthrough for those who can no longer eat butter. And for those people who think that our low-cholesterol way of eating is somehow second best - this is really delicious and worth a try in its own right. Also, if you're not a natural pastry chef - and I never was - this is quick and easy, a definite improvement on bought shortcrust. All the virtues, then.

The recipe was discovered by clever Anna, in Geraldene Holt's French Country Kitchen, one of my most favourite of all cookery books. I've cooked and cooked from this book (but stupidly failed to spot this pastry), more than any other I own, I should think, and I've never been able to understand why Geraldene Holt isn't better known: she's at least as good as Jane Grigson, and considerably better than a whole host of well-regarded food writers. She writes out of real experience - in this book, her many years of summer living in France.

This recipe for shaken hot-water pastry comes from Mme Chalendar, who, GH notes, sells earthenware and stoneware kitchen pots in Lamastre.

225g flour
1 tbsp caster sugar (leave it out if you're making something savoury)
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
4 tbsp mild salad oil
1/2 beaten egg
3 tbsp hot water

Put all the ingredients into a lidded plastic box and shake it for at least a minute. When you take off the lid, you will find a lumpy mixture; form it into a ball with your hands, and roll it out on a floured surface. GH says this is enough for a 24cm tin, but I have made this a number of times, and find that it is enough for a larger tin, and rather too much for a 24cm tin, because the pastry is better when it is very thin. You can use this straight away, no need to rest it.

Plum tart


















If you are making a fruit tart, here's another trick, and I'm not sure if it come from Mme Chalendar or GH: mix 20g flour with 20g sugar and sprinkle it over the pastry base. Then add the stoned fruit halves (raw). The flour and sugar mix will effortlessly thicken the fruit juices to make a delicious sauce.

This tart needs 30-35 minutes in a moderate oven, 190C. When it's done, glaze the fruit with a little melted jam - I used the rose petal jelly I made last month, but anything would do, even a little sugar syrup if there's no jam in the house (especially if you have vanilla- or lavender-flavoured sugar). The first time we made this, we forgot all about glazing it in our excitement - it's the one in the photographs, so you can judge for yourself whether it's worth the bother, because glazing is fundamentally a cosmetic exercise. We didn't bother with the flour and sugar that first time, which was a mistake, as I think you can see in the photograph.

We ate this tart by candlelight in the garden. It's quick and easy, the sort of food you can cook ahead, either for a party or just because you feel like it.

This is my entry for this month's Heart of the Matter ... fruit and berries is the theme for September ... and Ilva at Lucullian Delights is hosting. The idea is to build a bank of heart-friendly recipes on the Heart of the Matter website, a resource for everyone to use, and one which would have been very useful to me in the days after my husband's heart attack. There's more information about how to submit here, and some guidance for those of you worried about heart-healthy eating.

Misr wot and injeera

This morning I visited a wonderful roof garden on an office building in the centre of Reading, where there's not much greenery. Not just any old roof garden, but a permaculture forest garden - in other words, a garden that has been carefully thought out and built to be self-sufficient, to require little maintenance, to feed (in many senses of that word) those that use it.

As it is September, the end of our growing season, the garden is overblown and untidy, but still full of life - amazingly, three storeys up, there are insects and birds (no slugs though, lucky them!). There were apples, pears, cobnuts, medlars waiting to be picked, we drank lemon verbena tea made from leaves plucked earlier from the bush. I was given some of this year's harvest of emmer, the earliest sort of wheat to be cultivated in the British Isles and which looks remarkably like barley at first glance. The next village but one is called Emmer Green, and it is thought to have been named after this primitive wheat. So I am lucky to have the chance to grow this rare plant, sourced three or four years ago from Newcastle University.

The roof garden was made five years ago by the charity RISC - Reading International Sustainability Centre - in order to get grants to pay for a new roof; the old one was leaking, and there was no money in the pot for that sort of expenditure. It's been a huge success, and is visited by groups of schoolchildren, as well as gardeners.

I've come away feeling hugely inspired to do more to make my garden self-sustaining: I've got a leaflet showing me how to make a very small but highly efficient machine (that's too strong a word, but I can't think of a better one at the moment) to make liquid feed out of nettles. Now I know you can just do this in a bucket, but have you smelt the resulting brew? And this way uses a little length of drainpipe which you hardly notice, and which has a lid (made of the bottle you keep the feed in).

Back down on street level, I noticed that the global cafe had been recently taken over by new management, and now specialises in Ethiopian food. Lunch sorted: misr wot with injeera. I've been longing for this food for a few years now (in the 1980s I spent time travelling in Somalia, Eritrea and northern Sudan); I didn't realise I could find it so close to home. Misr wot is a spicy lentil stew - I've now got a recipe, and will try it out one day soon and blog it. Injeera is bread, a sour flatbread, full of little holes on the top like a crumpet; this was made with wheat, it's far far better made with tef or millet, but it was wonderful to eat it again after decades. And Tutu, the chef proprietor, brought me a lovely traditional pot of coffee to end with.

Then over to the cricket club, where I saw Horatio take a wicket, then home to find that Lettice had scored a goal in her hockey match and won 4-0, that Alfred's team had won their rugger match; that England had won the one-day test series against India, the football against Israel to qualify for Euro 2008, AND the first match in the rugby world cup (apologies to Americans reading this for a blatant display of patriotism). Could it have been a better day?

A lighter Waldorf salad

At this time of year, my mother-in-law used to start making her regular winter salad of diced apple and celery garnished with walnuts and some thinned-down Helmann's. I loved it; I don't often make it because one of the very few things my husband really doesn't like is celery. Weekday lunches - if they aren't leftovers - tend to consist of things-he-won't-eat, in particular lentils and spices.

The apples in our garden are beginning to ripen, and I can see the Cox's orange pippins from the window of my study. There was a head of celery in the veg box this week. So I got dicing. It was only then discovered there were no walnuts. I was always going to tweak the classic recipe a little - we don't really eat much mayo in this house, for obvious reasons, so I was planning to use a lemon vinaigrette. The only nuts I could find were either mixed with dried fruit, so no good, or almonds, which didn't seem the thing. And so I looked in the fridge, where I found some freshly sprouted mixed seeds ... I'm never going to use walnuts again, it was that good. A fresher taste, but still nutty.

Light Waldorf salad for 2 or 3

2 small apples
4 sticks of celery
lemon juice
olive oil
some sprouted seeds - mine were a Riverford mix of aduki, mung, lentil, and chick pea, but any of those would do

Squeeze the juice of a lemon into a bowl (if you like your salads extra lemony, grate a little of the zest into the bowl, too). Core and dice the apple - leave the skin for its goodness, taste and roughage. Put the apple into the bowl, and make sure it is well coated with lemon juice as this will prevent the apple browning. Chop the celery into the bowl, add olive oil and seasoning. Mix well, then add a couple of handfuls of seed sprouts.

The Scented Kitchen, cooking with flowers

I've just read in Hannah's Country Kitchen an appeal for recipes for lavender jam, and it's reminded me that I meant to write about an unusual cookery book I bought in Scotland, The Scented Kitchen by Frances Bissell.

This is a book for gardeners, because most of the inspiration can be found in an English country garden - lavender, fennel seeds, hawthorn, marigolds, roses, violets, pansies, borage, carnations .... you don't even need a veg patch to get the most out of this book.

I found the book at Valvona and Crolla, the Italian delicatessen in Edinburgh, and couldn't put it down once I'd begun. This is a fresh approach to cooking, one which is at once old-fashioned and very modern. There's something very granny-ish about the idea of eating violet-flavoured food, and yet violet souffle seems made for the 21st century.

The recipes are easy to follow, but if you're anything like me, you'll use this book as an inspiration for improving dishes you already make, to help you range wider when thinking of flavourings. I would never have thought of making lavender sugar or lavender vinegar, and am glad that I now have both. The one recipe I did follow to the letter was rose petal jelly, a beautiful if barely-set concoction which is delicious on toast and which I have recently been using to glaze plum tarts.

Pork tenderloin with prunes

Here's a quick and delicious dinner, not too expensive either. It uses a whole tenderloin, something which is rarely seen in supermarkets, as they like to cut it up into what they call medallions. It is occasionally to be found in Waitrose, but it's more reliable to go to the butcher, where, if they're any good at all, they'll greet you like a long-lost friend after only a couple of visits.


for 3-4
one pork tenderloin
one or two onions
no-soak prunes (I used Agen)
some bacon lardons*
garlic
sage

Start by making a marinade for the pork: put two or three cloves of garlic, a handful of sage and a little salt into a mortar and pestle them into a paste. Then add some olive oil. Smear this mess over the tenderloin, and leave it as long as you can. This is something you could do in the morning to speed things up in the evening, or you could fling the whole dish together at the last minute, giving the meat only a few minutes to soak up the flavourings.

Slice one large or two medium onions into big chunks. Put them in a roasting dish (I used a French oval earthenware one, but I can't think of any reason not to use a metal roasting pan, except that the timings will probably be quicker). Fry some lardons of bacon until brown and mix them with the onions. Add a handful or two of no-soak prunes, and a little liquid - I used Madeira, but I could just as easily have used table wine, stock, or water. Put this into a hot oven, 200C, for 10-15 minutes, by which time the onion should be beginning to soften. Add the tenderloin and all its marinade, cover with tinfoil or dampened greaseproof paper, and put back into the oven for 15 minutes. Remove the covering to cook and brown for a further 15 minutes. Then rest the meat for a few minutes before carving.

We ate this with little roasted potatoes and a huge green salad.


* You can buy little boxes of prosciutto chunks in supermarkets, but I hate all that plastic waste and, anyway, the pieces are too small to be much use. I have recently solved this by buying a small but whole piece of bacon from the butcher (you can find it in a supermarket too, labelled as gammon joints). You can then cut thick slices to make large-ish cubes for soup, pasta sauces etc. Much nicer and no trouble - I can't think why we've allowed supermarkets to teach us that tiny cooking chores are such a huge problem only they can solve. Rant over - but do try it.

Slow roasted tomatoes

I've been slow-roasting tomatoes like there was no tomorrow ... or, more specifically, because we are fast approaching the moment of the year when there'll be no more tomatoes for those of us who try to eat only local and seasonal food.

Whichever recipe you are following, you start in the same way: cut your tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with thyme and drizzle them with oil. At this point, there's huge variation in ideas ... I've tried four or five different speeds, and the very best, Rolls Royce way to roast tomatoes, is to put them in the oven at 80-100C for 11 or 12 hours. This, of course, isn't always possible. If you don't start early in the morning, you'll have a very late night. If you start too early in the evening then you have to have an early start. So you can boost the temperature to about 120C and cook them for seven or eight hours. You'll quite quickly know how they should look when they're done, dried out but not browned - and you'll find they cook at different rates, depending on size and - possibly - variety & age.

Then, there are a number of options. Some people slip off the skins (best done while they're still warm); I don't bother. You can pack them in boxes or plastic bags and freeze them to use in soups and stews. You can put them into jars (with more thyme, perhaps a bay leaf, etc) and cover them with olive oil, then they'll keep for 4-6 weeks in the fridge, and the oil (surprisingly little) is deliciously flavoured for cooking later. Or you can sieve them to make passata (best frozen).

I keep a plastic box on the go in the fridge ... I pull them to pieces in a salad (lovely to mix fresh with roasted), I heat them quickly to have on toast for breakfast, I use them in sauces which need a flavour boost. I think they'd be great pulled apart and thrown over pasta with some oil and a few chilli flakes for a quick supper.

Really useful, delicious, quick, a fabulous way to use up a glut of tomatoes (not a real problem for us this year, sadly), and very eco-friendly.

HoTM 6: the very late round-up

Next time I'm away for a chunk of August, I'll get someone else to do the round-up - how can I have thought it would work? No, that wasn't it ... I just didn't think at all. And next time it's grilling, perhaps the round-up should be done by someone who can rely on a little summer sunshine, even in these times of weird weather. We haven't used our grill once this summer, and I'm not sure that we will now - my family is all in winter mode (I'm not), pulling on jerseys and muttering about open doors and windows. That's enough breast-beating ... there are some great recipes to try - and I have already promised to cook all of them as a kind of penance. Wrong word, of course, it will be my pleasure.










Katie at Thyme for Cooking has made wonderful Spanish roasted potatoes with allioli, a garlic sauce not unlike French aioli, only without eggs, which makes it perfect for HoTM. Katie also has a grilled chicken salad (and a photo of some very black sausages her husband cooked ...)












Gilli at So So Simple Food has a good trick to keep her Ultimate Chicken BBQ moist - soak it in brine for a couple of hours.










Chris was in the hairdresser flipping through the magazines when she got the inspiration for her wild mushroom linguine with grilled gazpacho sauce. You'll find details for cooking indoors or outdoors at Mele Cotte. She's also sent a recipe for grilled salmon with three vegetables.









Cookie Baker Lyn loves asking couples how they met. So you won't be surprised to hear that she calls her grilled seafood Happily Ever After Shrimp.










Sophie says that her Earthy fig, chicken and mushroom salad can be used as a basic formula for healthy grilling. She's a nutritionist, and often includes useful links in her posts at Mostly Eating.









Kalyn gets out her mortar and pestle to make the rub for her herb encrusted grilled salmon, which she says is one of the best-tasting salmon steaks she's cooked. As usual at Kalyn's Kitchen, there are full South Beach details for dieters, and plenty of links for further information.













Ilva, my co-host for Heart of the Matter, loves to grill, and has posted grilled sweet peppers with onion and thyme or peperoni grigliate con cipolle e timo. As always at Lucullian Delights, lovely clear flavours, and beautiful photographs.











The wet weather in England is no excuse: Swaha used her George Foreman grill indoors (in a heatwave) to make Rosemary-garlic-lime tilapia and Barbeque tofu. I'm not sure that my fishmonger stocks tilapia, but I'll definitely ask him. And Swaha discusses the concerns some people have with soy products.


So, lots of things for me to cook at the first sign of an Indian summer ... thanks for joining in, thanks for being so patient about the delayed round-up. And don't forget, September's HotM is fruit and berries ....

Homemade tomato ketchup .. & caponata-ish

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall gave this recipe in his column in the Guardian a few weeks ago, and, as I've never made ketchup before, I followed the recipe exactly. Even before we tasted it, I thought you could simplify this without loss of taste. So when everyone was lukewarm about it as an accompaniment to fish and chips, I thought it might be hard to use it up.

Not a bit of it! I've now discovered that it makes the most fantastic five-minute caponata, and since aubergine is my favourite summer vegetable, that's a bonus. To make the caponata-ish, cube the aubergine, fry in olive oil till fairly soft, add some of the ketchup, a few sultanas and some capers. Simmer for a few minutes. Best eaten lukewarm, if you can wait that long.

Back to the point, this is how you make the ketchup. It's a two part recipe, first you have to roast the tomatoes (I know a better way to do this), then sieve them. When you've recovered from this (does he have a machine? I just have a sieve, a wooden spoon, and aching arms), you simmer the passata with sugar and spice.

HFW's roast tomatoes

To make one litre, use about 2kg ripe tomatoes; the more flavour they have, the better the finished ketchup. Cut them in half, put them in a single layer on a roasting sheet, and sprinkle with finely chopped garlic (two or three cloves), some thyme, and olive oil. Roast for 45-60 minutes at 180C, until they are soft and beginning to blacken at the edges. Remove from the oven, and sieve to a pulp when they are cool enough to work.

HFW's tomato ketchup

one litre roast tomato sauce
100g soft brown sugar
100 ml cider vinegar
salt
one tbsp ground black pepper
pinch of mace
pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp ground coriander seeds
two bayleaves

Put all the ingredients into a stainless steel saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for about 45 minutes, stirring frequently so that it doesn't stick. It will gradually thicken, although it won't be as thick as Heinz TK. Check your seasonings, then bottle. It will keep for a month and more in the fridge.

Here's a link to Guardian Unlimited which has HFW's original piece, Reddy Steady Cook (there's an art to writing headlines that bad!)


Good, but not as good as Heinz TK; really useful to use as the base for a quick vegetable stew; really useful if you've got a glut of tomatoes, as a change from slow roasted tomatoes preserved in oil. Alfred said he'd like it to dress pasta, but I thought it might be a little too vinegary for that.


I've just bought an old government-issue book on food preserving, which gives timings for boiling pickles and preserves to give them a long shelf life and keep them out of the fridge. It may take a while to get the equipment together, but I'll post as soon as I've got something to report.

World blog day

Today is the 3rd world blog day. Even though I've been blogging long enough to have participated in the previous two, I only came across it today. The idea is that you introduce five new blogs, preferably crossing boundaries.

Here are some of my favourites, all worth a look:

Dean at Mostly Macro takes wonderful photographs of birds, insects and sometimes plants. His blog is a record of the wildlife he sees close to home, often in his own garden or on walks nearby. He is knowledgeable, and has opened my eyes to a world undreamed of - a world in which we can all share, because it's around all of us, if only we have eyes to see.

Venice Daily Photo is another blog I love, although sadly at the moment it's not so frequent. It's part of the daily photo movement of blogs, where people photograph their home town, however small or grand. The Venice photos are intelligent, interesting, quirky, often thought-provoking (the one of a huge liner overpowering the Giudecca canal springs to mind) ... above all, life-enhancing.

Pomiane is another blog I look forward to reading. Its author lives by two-week turns in London and near Pisa. The food is proper food, after the fashion of the French food writer Edouard Pomiane, and recipes are sometimes, but not always, given for the three course menu for "tonight's dinner" which often ends a post. Pomiane inspires you to do things properly - and I like the differences which occur from the change of venue.

Graham Rice is another blogger who moves from place to place. You may know his name as a gardening writer, sweet peas are his thing (I'm summoning up courage to ask for advice about why I have such little luck, but I suspect the answer is more digging). Transatlantic Plantsman describes his gardening life in Northamptonshire and Pennsylvania. He's really knowledgeable about plants, so it's always a joy to read, and there's often a tip about a garden to visit, or a plant to look out for. I also like the fact that he's made the leap from published author to blogger ;-)

I first came across Sue Cooks Wild when I met Sue in London. You should visit it just to see the wonderfully exuberant photograph on the masthead. It's great - full of life, some adventurous cooking (game and fish are recurrent interests), a bit of travel. Sue's sense of fun comes shining off the screen.

Slow roasted pork with plums

Yesterday, we were all busy ... Lucius was making a sculpture in the wood, the boys took Bruce down to the village for a game of cricket (we won, and Bruce took a catch off Alfred's bowling), Sam and Catrin lazed in the sun with their two tiny children, Menna, Anna and I went garden visiting .... and supper cooked itself.

The recipe is simple and infinitely variable ... you put your belly of pork into a slow oven for four hours. What you do in the way of flavouring can change every time you make it. At this time of year, like Fiona and Danny, whose recipe this is, I put it on a bed of Victoria plums, because there are masses of them breaking the boughs of our young tree (lucky us, what a great problem to have!).

As we were making a sauce with the plums and the juices, Horatio came in and asked about gravy. There's no gravy, it's plum sauce. Consternation. Call it plum gravy if you like. Disappointment. Why can't we have gravy AND plum sauce?

Over dinner, once he'd eaten a huge plateful, Horatio came up with a solution for making slow roasted pork with apple sauce AND gravy. Put a rack in the roasting tray, then put the apple slices, then the pork, so that the meat juices drip through the apples (making the apples even more delicious), and leaving juices with which to make gravy. What do you think? I think he's well on the road to becoming a food blogger!

Meanwhile, this is what we did yesterday:

Preheat the oven to 160C. Meanwhile, rub the pork belly with herbs, salt too, if you use that to make crackling (I don't, but each to his own). Put plums, as many as you have, in the bottom of the roasting tray, then place the meat on top. Put in the oven for four hours; turn it down to 140C for the last hour. When it's done, take it out to rest for 10-15 minutes, while you make the sauce. This recipe takes the same amount of time however big or small your pork is, because belly is such a thin cut ... I had to cut a little off the end of our huge piece to get it into the oven, and the smaller piece needed longer in the oven (because it was on the lower shelf).

First, pour the juices into a jug and leave them to settle. Next, ease the stones out of the plums (this is quick and easy, and best done at this point, because stoning the raw plums takes much longer). Pour the fat off the top of the juices (but not down the sink), then mush up the plums. A little wine, something to sweeten it, something savoury (especially if you didn't rub the meat with salt) ... it's hard to remember exactly what we did to make the sauce taste right.

We ate this with little new potatoes, caponata-ish, and a salad, again by candlelight out in the garden. There was a lot of rushing off to look at the moon through the telescope, and later, some people ate rhubarb and custard - the first we've picked from the rhubarb I planted last spring. I was in fast asleep in bed by then, but luckily there's some left over to eat with my breakfast porridge.

Thanks Fiona - great recipe, which contributed to a memorable evening!

Ideal food for a party - no fuss, no bother, really good, and pretty cheap. What more could you ask?

Beer bread

If we run out of bread, it's less effort to make a loaf than to go to the supermarket to buy another. Trouble is, I often don't notice soon enough, and then there's a crisis. Soda bread is what fills that gap (I'm making it sound as if I bake all our bread - I used to, but I've got out of the habit, and I'd like to re-acquire it). But soda bread is often quite uninteresting and bland.

This one, mixed with beer rather than water, is fabulous. Infinitely variable, very quick (under an hour start to finish), which was just as well this morning, when people started coming down to breakfast (porridge and toast) and there wasn't a scrap of bread in the house. It comes from Susan at Farmgirl Fare, who is also one of the three bakers who blog A Year in Bread, essential reading for anyone interested in improving their baking.

This recipe may be very irritating to almost everyone, because I've Europeanised the liquid and the temperature, but kept the American cups, because my sister brought me over a set from California when she was here in June. If you can't cope, email me, because I do know how to convert easily, it's just that I'm running out of time, I should be cooking lunch!

3 cups of flour - I used two of plain white (no need to use strong flour, but you can if you like) and one of malted (so lots of nice grains
1 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp baking powder
400ml beer (or beer and water mixed)

Mix it all together, pour into a large loaf tin, and bake in the oven for 40-45 minutes at 180C. Susan says you can glaze it with egg and water; I didn't bother.

This is infinitely variable - cheese, herbs, seeds, slow roasted tomatoes, onions ... probably not all at once!

We ate it with homemade marmalade, and I've come in here to blog it so as not to look irritatingly smug. Menna's thinking about cooking on holiday in a remote Alpine chalet, nearest shop down at the bottom ... she's going to make this bread, lovely fresh loaves almost on tap, without needing much attention, the better to devote herself to walking and reading.

Very easy lamb with olive paste

This is DELICIOUS, and so easy it's almost cheating. But not in the sense of going out and buying some horrible supermarket sauce and calling it cooking. This is posh cheating, and no-one will guess if you don't tell them. So long as you mix it up before they come. Which I didn't. It tastes of the mediterranean, of sunshine and the south.

The recipe came from Tamasin Day Lewis's Kitchen Bible, which I bought last week, and which is worth a look (although Anna says she's very annoying on TV, but I didn't know she did telly). As soon as I saw it, I knew I'd cook it this weekend, when we have a crowd of dear friends (who are actually relations), all of whom are wonderful cooks and appreciate good food, and all of whom are people I'd rather be talking to. This really is good food for a crowd. Quick too, in the sense of how much of the cook's time it takes, although it's in the oven for a couple of hours.

To each kilo of lamb, you need 200g of black olive paste. TDL specifies shoulder of lamb, but the wonderful butchers at Gabriel Machin in Henley said that neck fillet would be just as good but better value. So that's what I used.

Tip the meat into a casserole. Pour on the olive paste. Mix everything well, clamp on the lid and cook for two hours at 150C.

You'll get a glossy black stew, plenty of wonderful salty sauce - very grown up, and no-one would ever guess how little effort went into it.

We ate it in the garden by candlelight, with little new potatoes and two salads ... one was chicory (very prettily sliced lengthwise, I've never done that, clever Anna, stupid me) and watercress, the other lettuce and tomatoes, some fresh, some slow roasted. Wonderful.

Next time, I'll add a branch of thyme. When I cook it in the winter, I'll add a long long strip of orange peel.

Pissaladiere

No photo, because I slightly over cooked it, so it wasn't very photogenic ... but pissaladiere is the most fabulously easy lunch for a hot day, delicious and heart healthy, and perfect if you're fed up with pizza. Or if you're food-fad aware enough to have heard of white pizza.

Pissaladiere is a speciality of the French side of the Franco-Italian border, and is close cousin to the pizza, only without tomatoes or cheese. Sliced onions are gently stewed in olive oil, spread on a base, finished with anchovies and black olives, the saltiness cutting through the sweetness of the onion. It's a great choice for busy cooks, because you can get it ready while you're clearing up breakfast, then leave it for as long as you need to. When you get back to it, you're half an hour from eating, with about five minute's work to do.

500g ordinary white flour
2tsp dried yeast (I don't bother with the instant stuff in sachets, I just lob in the un-instant kind, & rarely bother to start it off with water first)
pinch of salt and sugar
dash of olive oil
300-350 ml tepid water
thyme

Mix all the bread ingredients, then knead it until it's smooth. You don't really need to flour the work surface (trust me), because it (and your fingers) will stop getting sticky as you knead it, and if you put more flour in, the finished base is not so soft. Put your smooth dough into an oiled bowl and cover it with a teacloth. The warmer it is, the quicker it will rise - so if you are making it in the morning to eat in the evening, put it in the fridge. At ordinary room temperature, it will take an hour or two to double in size .. but dough is very forgiving, particularly when you're not making a loaf with it, so if it rises too fast, just knead it a little, and let it rise again.

Next, slice a kilo of onions as thin as you can. If you've got a mandoline, use that; but if you haven't, a knife is just as good. Toss them in olive oil, and cook them as slowly as you possibly can in a wide pan (it needs to be good quality, with a thick heavy base, otherwise the onions will catch and burn). Give them a stir now and then, but, essentially, you can leave this alone for a long time.

Half an hour before you want to eat, put your dough onto a work surface and knead it a little, then spread it with your fingers into an oblong on a baking sheet. Spread over the onions, then decorate with a few anchovies and some olives (or dabs of black olive paste). Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with thyme. Cook as you would pizza in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes. (If you had the dough in the fridge, you'll need to get it back to room temperature before you can work it - about half an hour.)

I remember the first time I had pissaladiere, it was on a pastry base. That's obviously out of the question in a heart-healthy diet. I wasn't sure which was authentic, so I've just looked it up in Elizabeth David's Mediterranean Food. This is what she says:

This dish is one of the delights of Marseilles, Toulon, and the Var country, where it is sold in the market places and the bakeries in the early morning and can be bought, piping hot, by the slice, off big iron trays.

Get from a baker a piece of uncooked bread, pull it out and spread a baking sheet with it. Cover the bottom of a saucepan with olive oil. Add 2lb of sliced onions; do not brown them but let them slowly melt almost to a puree, which will take about 40 minutes. Pour the puree onto the dough, put stoned black olives on the top and decorate it with criss-cross fillets of anchovy. Cook in the oven. If bread dough is unobtainable, an excllent dish can be made by spreading the onion puree into a tin lined with .. pastry .. or thick slices of bread cut lengthways from a sandwich loaf. Fry one side lightly in olive oil, spread this side with the puree, put in a tin in the oven with a little more oil and cook about 10 minutes.

The flavour of the olive oil is essential to this dish.

So even if you're afraid of cooking with yeast, you've got no excuse!

Incidentally, this is something you really can do ahead ... you can cook up the onions a day or two in advance. I doubled the quantity of onions, and am saving the surplus for another delicious potato gratin tomorrow night. OR you could make the whole dish, cook it lightly in the oven, then reheat it when you're ready to eat. After all, that's what you're doing when you buy supermarket pizza.

And it's good for a crowd - either you can cook it in advance and then reheat it, or you can make it in the morning and assemble it quickly at the last minute.

Duck and delicious potatoes

Not much blogging going on here ... I've felt daunted by the weight of photographs which need sorting out since we got back from holiday, and also I haven't felt much like cooking. They don't much care for eating here - well, they don't really notice what they eat, unless it's pointed out to them, and then they're polite. So this evening, they were very polite, as they know I took a few pains with dinner. But then, before the last mouthful is eaten ... they switch on the radio to hear the latest on the cricket. Do I feel demoralised? Well, yes, on one level. But on another ... ladies and gentlemen, I give you ....

Duck and delicious potatoes. This is for 4 (both the girls are away)

Potato gratin with thyme and tomato

The potatoes are cooked in the oven, and they don't have any liquid or anything to cover them. I was panicking that they would dry out, the top layer would curl up and they would taste disgusting and dry. But no ... this is a piece of magic, a potato gratin dish with no calorific / fatty sauce, just the fresh and vibrant taste of its
four (yes, four) ingredients.

This recipe is adapted (that is to say, I forgot the main flavouring ingredient!) from a book I bought in the Oxfam shop in the Turl, Oxford, this afternoon, Under the Sun, by Caroline Conran. You know how they say most recipe books are kept for only one recipe? This is it - the rest is in every French cookery book I already own (lots and lots!). Just bear in mind that I left out the juniper.

450g onions
450g tomatoes
700g potatoes
1 large sprig of thyme
(6 juniper berries)
olive oil

Peel and slice the onions, and sweat them slowly in olive oil for about half an hour, until they are soft and just starting to turn golden. This should take 20-30 minutes.

When the onions are nearly cooked, peel the potatoes, and slice them very thinly, preferably with a mandolin (I bought one earlier this year, and although I don't use it very often, when I do use it, nothing else will do - and it's opened up a whole new avenue of cookery that was previously unavailable to me because I couldn't/couldn't be bothered to prepare food so meticulously. Mix them well in a little olive oil. Salt, too, if you use it.

Tomatoes - I used some of the tomatoes I've been slow roasting for the last week, just snipped a few into the layers. If you haven't been doing this (and I wouldn't blame you in the least, although it's pretty effortless and very delicious), then slice some tomatoes thickly and soften them in a frying pan with a little olive oil.

Layer the vegetables, starting and ending with potatoes, and snipping some thyme into the mix. Caroline Conran says to put a bay leaf in, but it didn't add any flavour, and just had to be fished out of the finished dish, so I wouldn't bother next time. (Btw, the bay is the green thing in the photograph that looks as if it might be a mange tout pea that's been accidentally dropped onto the wrong dish.) I forgot to put in the juniper (crushed in a mortar), and I plan to do that next time (Sunday, when we're 10 for dinner ... this was a dry run, because I panicked unnecessarily about the lack of liquid).

Put this, uncovered (see why I panicked?) in a moderate oven, ie 170C / gas mark 3 for one hour.

Duck ... grilled duck, because this is my one and only entry for Heart of the Matter's August theme - grilling - which ends today, and which I am rounding up. You should see my face, very red and embarrassed ... I've been away, it's been raining, I don't really do grilling (I know, Ilva was shocked, too!).

This is a way to render most of the fat off a duck breast, so that you can eat it even if you are following a low cholesterol diet. Just try very hard not to eat the skin, even though it no longer has much fat.

Heat a griddle pan until it's nearly smoking. Put your duck breasts on it skin side down. Cook them for 10 minutes without turning, pouring off the fat which is rendered once or twice during cooking (otherwise you'll have a nasty mess all over your cooker). When the 10 minutes are up, turn the breasts, then put them in a hot oven for eight minutes. Then take them out of the oven and leave to stand for 10 minutes.

In the meantime make a sauce. This one's good: mix 2 tbsp olive oil with 2 tbsp hoi sin and 1 tbsp honey, together with a splash of Marsala or Madeira.

Serve on hot plates. We had a beetroot salad with this ... made with those precooked vacuum-wrapped beets, dressed in olive oil, wine vinegar and plenty of Maldon salt.

This is my entry for HotM, the round-up will appear in the next few days - and then I promise I'll make every single one of the entries as long as the sunshine holds out before winter sets in.

Smiley faces

I have been feeling rather battered by a ridiculously unnecessary family problem, so when Charlotte of the Great Big Vegetable Challenge emailed to ask if I would make a smiley face out of vegetables, I went straight to the kitchen and got to work. Now I feel much better, although the problem remains. And, sorry Charlotte, I cheated - there's rather a lot of fruit in there.

Why don't you have a go? As Charlotte said: go on, you know you want to!

Meme: fantastic four

We've been back since Sunday morning, and I haven't posted - it's not just the washing mountain, I've fallen out of the habit of writing daily, slightly scarily, since I was only without an easy connection for a week. There's been plenty to blog about, too, and not just playing catch-up with our travels: last night's dinner was duck in lavender sauce - delicious, although not very obviously lavender-y.

Fiona at Cottage Smallholder has tagged me for the Fantastic Four meme, and I'm hoping this will kick-start a bit of renewed enthusiasm for blogging (although, if I'm honest, I think it's a lazy avoidance of the work involved in sorting out the photographs).

Five areas, four points for each. This is coming straight off the top of my head ... I'd do it differently tomorrow.

Four jobs I've had in my life:

1. the first job I ever did for money was mucking out a neighbour's stables. I was probably nine, or ten. I remember being paid 2/6d, but I don't remember whether that was per session or per week. Or even for a whole holiday's worth of work.

2. the first job involving PAYE and National Insurance was as an assistant in a clothes shop. They thought I was there forever, I knew I was only there for the summer holidays. I lasted about three or four weeks before I got the sack. I really disliked the owner, whose only interest was in money and who treated his staff badly. With all the arrogance of youth, I didn't trouble myself to hide my dislike. Surprising I lasted so long, really. The very nice shop manager still works in Henley, in a different clothes shop, and always gives me a cheery hello.

3. when I first went to live in London, I worked as a temp. My first temp job was as typist in the engineering department of the umbrella organisation for the independent television companies. All day I typed incomprehensible gobbledegook for a very nice engineer, who tried to explain what it was about. Years later, I realised that he was responsible for developing CEEFAX. There was a very good deli down the road, where I used to have lunch.

4. when I first went to Hong Kong in the mid 1970s, I worked as a very junior PR for the Miss World competition, which was being held there. The phones rang all the time, there was a frenetic atmosphere, the permanent staff looked down on us temporary staff (unsurprisingly, as we had very little idea of what was going on), and there was a lot of shouting - particularly when the woman who owned the competition arrived. What I principally remember about it was the total ruthlessness of every aspect of the enterprise.

Places I have lived:

1. I was brought up in Henley on Thames, a smallish market town in the Thames Valley, world famous for its annual five-day rowing regatta. I still live within a mile or two of the town centre, rather to my surprise, and am thoroughly rooted here.

2. In my early 20s I lived in central London, in various short-term flats. My favourite area was Pimlico, then a rather sleepy unfashionable village. There was a terrific Italian deli in our street, it was our corner shop. (I remember buying smoked cod's roe there and making taramasalata from a Robert Carrier recipe, none of us having any idea at all what it was, but everyone loving it.) Pimlico is "within the division bell area" (which means that MPs can install in their houses the bell which rings in the House of Commons shortly before a vote is to take place), so there were a few MPs living around, including one next door. One evening, when I had uncharacteristically gone to bed early, I was woken by a loud explosion nearby, then another and another. It was the start of the IRA mainland bombing campaign, that particular night directed against politicians. Life has never really been the same since in this country.

3. I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years in the mid 1970s, first in Wanchai, the red light district, where there were late-night triad fights, and where you might occasionally get propositioned by a drunken sailor. Later I went to live in a small fishing village in the New Territories, where I was the only white woman. I spoke kitchen Cantonese (mostly forgotten now), and haggled for all my food in the market.

4. I have lived, in short bursts, in northern Somaliland - a country quite unlike anything you have read in your newspaper. It is peaceful, well ordered, the only fully-functioning democracy in Africa. A little piece of my heart belongs there. The swallows you see in Greece during the summer spend their winters in Somaliland.

Four places I have been on holiday:

Hard to choose ... Brittany for years and years, both as a child and with our children (Erquy and the north coast, like Cornwall with better food - at least, then). Scotland, ditto (Hebrides, Edinburgh, Fife). Italy - mostly recently Friuli (by train, recommended). Suffolk (Britten-austere, rather than nouveau-Aldeburgh, such a shame). This leaves out some memorable holidays, places I love. Another time.

Four of my favourite foods:

This is SO hard.

1. Vegetables ... well, obviously you'd like me to be more specific, so I'll reach for my pin and say - broad beans.

2. Fruit - nectarines (but only because I'm eating them like crazy at the moment, now that the raspberries have gone over).

3. Oily fish, any really, but, if you press me, then clearly I'm going to say salmon when I might easily have said mackerel. What about kippers?

4. Now here is the moment when I have to decide whether I'm a vegetarian in my soul (although not in actual fact) ... and I rather think I am, because, honestly, I'd rather have a tin of anchovies in olive oil. Well, at least, that's if you count non-meat eaters as vegetarians, which probably you don't.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. In my garden. Although it doesn't look the way I'd like it to (and I'm never going to reach that nirvana), I love it ... the scents, the textures, the colours, the things to nibble at (I don't grow anything on an allotment scale). And I should be there right now, because the sun has suddenly, unexpectedly, started shining.

2. Reading a book under an apple tree. Preferably a good cookery book. Perhaps Centaur's Kitchen by Patience Gray, which has been sitting on my desk unread for quite a long time.

3. With Lucius at a performance of anything by Verdi, or perhaps Norma, by the Welsh National Opera, either in Cardiff (I haven't been to their new premises) or in Bristol.

4. In my kitchen, cooking something delicious for all my family and one or two best friends to eat for dinner. That's real happiness.


The last part of this meme is to tag four other blogs, always a hard decision, especially since some great bloggers don't "do" memes. Here are four I like, picked almost at random, except that yesterday I sorted out my feed reader, and these are in the category "blogs I read daily". David, a naturally inventive chef at Book the Cook. Hannah, like David a Masterchef finalist, who makes the most exquisitely decorated cakes you have ever seen, at Hannah's Country Kitchen. Sophie at Mostly Eating, who writes about the food she eats from her point of view as a nutrition scientist. And Amanda, at Figs Olive Wine, a beautiful blog from New York, where you'll currently find a recipe for slow roasted tomatoes which you preserve in olive oil.

Edinburgh festival, day 6

Our flat has broadband, but I can't make it work on my computer, although Lucius can make it work on his ... which means no photographs until we get home in a couple of days.

Today I have been looking at pictures. First I went to the Queen's Gallery at Holyrood Palace in Canongate. I didn't know what the exhibition was, but it never seems to matter when it's the Queen's Gallery, because she has probably the best fine art collection in the world, and employs good curators for the exhibitions. I'd never been to the gallery in Edinburgh, although I have often been to the one in London.

The exhibition was lovely - botanical drawings and paintings, together with birds and animals. The first room was entirely given over to drawings by da Vinci, and would have been worth the price of admission (£5) alone. In the last room, there was an even better treat, better because it was so totally unexpected and so totally up my street - botanical drawings by Alexander Marshal (1620-1682), a London gardener who lived during a time when there was an enormous increase in the plants available (to the rich). He collected them, and then he painted them - roses, tulips, daffodils, irises, a sunflower, hyacinths, auriculas, a Sevile orange ... all, wonderfully bright and fresh on the page, 150 pages, shared with other collectors, and eventually given to George IV. I suppose the modern equivalent is gardeners going out to photograph their gardens with their digital cameras - but the photographs of my garden in my computer can't begin to compare with Marshal's florilegium (isn't that a lovely word?). I'll post some pictures when I get home.

Then I went to the museum of modern art and looked at Picasso works on paper - drawings, etchings, lithographs, lino cuts, all the decades of his working life represented. It makes me wish I'd left time to see the exhibition of Picasso ceramics that's on here - especially when now, on our last evening here, I don't feel I've seen anything truly memorable at the fringe, although there's been some fun in some of the shows.

I also went to see the Richard Long exhibition. Last year, we saw Iain Hamilton Finlay at Inverkeith House, the exhibition space at the botanic gardens. Lucius Horatio and Alfred came out of that exhibition saying that it was pretentious drivel. I liked it, just as I like his garden, which I saw a couple of years ago. I like the work of Andy Goldsworthy. So I ought to like Richard Long, an artist working in landscape. But I didn't. All that obsession with circles - so what? And you find yourself asking, which is art, the circles made of twigs in a landscape (worthless), or the photographs of the twigs in a landscape (potential for sale)? I think that photographs of installations are fine and fun, but somehow not quite the thing ... so much less of a piece of art than Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, which I saw for the first time a couple of days ago, and which are so much better than their photograph. If you see what I mean. It's so easy to get pretentious discussing art.

Meanwhile, back at Holyrood, I had a fabulous slice of cake for breakfast ... raspberry and almond cake. Isn't that what we used to call Bakewell tart? The thing that was so disgusting at school with lumpy custard? This was DELICIOUS and moreish, and I suppose the difference is that the Queen's caterers use the best ingredients, whereas the nuns at my 1960s convent used the cheapest they could lay their hands on.

I've nearly finished Frances Bissell's book The Scented Kitchen. It's such a different way of looking at cookery that it's worth reading from cover to cover. It's so sad to be reading it in August, because even she recognises that it's really a summer cookery book, because you can't buy the ingredients in a shop, you need to grow them, or beg them from someone who grows them. I'm impatient to know if there's any lavender left in my garden, to make some lavender sugar. Basically, you make it just like vanilla sugar - drop the lavender into the sugar. Or, you can make lavender coloured sugar by grinding the flowers into the sugar. If you're going to do that (I don't suppose I'll bother, it sounds like a bit of a faff compared to dropping the flowers into the sugar!), you need one part flowers (detached from stems) to 10 parts sugar, and you grind it in a food processor. Best if you let the flowers dry out for an hour or two before you start, she says.

Time to go home, back to my real life - although next week I'm off to the West country for a couple of days ... Lettice is going on holiday to Salcombe with a gaggle of girls (all wanting to be away from home when their exam results come through), and I'm the one who's got to fetch them home. So I'm going to take a couple of days to get there, and visit some of the lovely gardens in Somerset and Devon that I've wanted to see for years, and which none of my family want to see. I also have a yen to visit Lyme Regis, although I imagine it's hugely busy at this time of year - I could have a French Lieutenant's Woman moment on the end of the Cobb, which, I'm told, is now covered in signs absolving the council of any responsibility in case of personal injury. Perhaps I'll give it a miss!

Edinburgh fringe, day 4

We've spent the last few days rushing from one thing to another. Our young seem to have an insatiable appetite for stand-up comedians, most of whom are pretty dire ... but they don't seem to mind, in fact, dire seems to be what they like - perhaps so that the jewels shine brighter.

Last night Lucius and I went to see Louis de Bernieres, the man who wrote Captain Corelli's Mandarin ... it was so dire it was good, if that makes sense - the evening had charm, if not talent. He played a lot of musical instruments rather badly (although nice pieces); read poems, some good some bad, also rather badly, because he has a rather slight voice; told terrible jokes, most of which he said had been given to him by Akker Bilk, the 60s jazz musician. And yet it was nice - mostly, I think, because he's obviously a nice man, and because he was obviously enjoying himself. But I did find it rather incredible that several members of the audience had been to last year's effort. Once was definitely enough.

We are just about to go to a musical called something like Tony the Blair Years, in which Iain Duncan Smith's son Ed (who was at school with Horatio) plays Alistair Campbell. It will, as always on the fringe, either be the best thing we've ever seen, or completely dreadful. There never seem to be half measures at Edinburgh, and the audiences are always optimistic!

In the mean time, we've been eating all sorts of delicious things at Valvona and Crolla's cafe (it's just up the road from our flat) - one unexpected delight was a pudding of good gorgonzola drizzled with honey (yes, really) and pinenuts. Fabulous.

In the absence of a kitchen, or any food to cook, I am reading a WONDERFUL cookery book (only a food blogger would read a cookery book on holiday, with no access to a kitchen!): The Scented Kitchen, by Frances Bissell. Cooking with flowers is the subtitle, and it has lots of things I can't wait to try. The trouble is that I should have been reading it in the spring. However, it will make ordering seeds easier this winter! I'll keep you posted about it in the next day or two. And finally post some more photos! I'm about to run out of time in this internet cafe ...

Edinburgh Fringe, day 1

Yesterday we had a day of rain rain rain, and running around in it from venue to venue, missing one another and generally not getting it quite right. Having said that, we saw some wonderful Korean gymnasts, a terrific magician called Pete someone, who hauled Lettice up on stage to help him with a trick, and who produced a beer bottle out of a hat which he then gave to Horatio ... this is what you get for queueing early to get a seat in the front row, but don't do that when it's stand-up or else the comedian will pick on you over and over and over again. That happened to Lucius last year when the boys dragged him to see a show called How to Butcher Your Loved Ones - I'm afraid I couldn't bring myself to go, and from everything I've ever heard, it was a good decision.

Food not great, which is a pity in this city ... coffee at Costa, lunch at Cafe Rouge (both British chains, okay but - well, this is a food blog), supper at an indifferent Italian restaurant where I had very good spinach and a plate of mushrooms because I wanted to get back to eating lots of veg ... why is that so hard anywhere except at home?

Last show of the day was a group of young comedians, one of whom, Jack Whitehall, was at school with Horatio and then went on to the school Alfred is now at. I remember seeing him steal the show in a minor role in a school play, so I thought he'd be worth watching - he was the last of the four, and much the best. Lots of witty jokes about combatting terrorism - but perhaps you had to be there.

Today, the others have gone off to listen to some music - I'm here quietly blogging, because I didn't know what time it was, and they didn't leave enough time for me to get there - I'm footsore, and walk much more slowly than the rest of the family, and it seems to be hard for them to factor that in. Never mind. I'm going to go and look at some pictures (Raeburn, Warhol, Picasso - the choices are amazing in this city in August). I think they've planned to see hundreds of other things, but I'm not sure what, and I'm feeling a little weary, so will probably come home after seeing Nick Mohammed, who we saw last year, who we thought was very funny, whose jokes we are still laughing at - and who Alfred imitates to complete perfection. Amazing that he hasn't been on TV.

Food ... I think I'll visit Valvona and Crolla today, too. And sort out a couple of photos.

Lunch at the Whitehouse, Lochaline

Now in Edinburgh, via the most delicious lunch at the Whitehouse, Lochaline on the Morvern Peninsula. Lovely flat ... two late-night shops opposite, and a baker, which, amazingly, opened for business at 11pm, having been shut earlier in the evening. I bought rolls for breakfast there, delicious soft baps to set us up for a frenetic day at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Yesterday started out leisurely, on the Fishnish to Lochaline ferry, then a tiny walk (so tiny that we stopped at the first available spot to finish the crossword puzzle!), and a stroll up the hill with our friends to the Whitehouse. This is a beacon of excellence in an utterly remote part of the British isles, all the ingredients sourced locally, and beautifully presented - in lovely unpretentious rooms, the plain tables laid with slate mats and linen napkins. Perfect.

The short menu is presented on a blackboard by a friendly waitress - it's the kind of menu where you want to eat everything, so it's really hard to choose. Fish for the adults, huge portions of meat for the young (you'd think we hadn't been feeding them all week!), all beautifully presented. As you can see from the photograph, I had the mackerel ;-) with what is called in that part of the world a prawn, but by the rest of the country a langoustine.

The great discovery for all of us was the herb sweet cecily, which looks like nothing so much as a miniature frond of bracken, and which tastes utterly wonderful, sweetly scented, an essence of summer.

Cured mackerel, an update

We ate the mackerel last night ... lovely soft flavour, better by far than smoked salmon, a real delicacy, and SO easy.

The other photos show the boys returning from clearing out the loch above the house where we are staying (mud, mud, glorious mud!), and my live brooch, which flew in threw the kitchen window and stayed on my shirt for about an hour, until Lettice said it spooked her out. I wish I knew more about moths, and could identify it.

Today we're off to Edinburgh, via lunch at the Whitehouse at Morvern, reached via the Fishnish ferry to the mainland. I'll keep you posted!


y