Beetroot salad

We've been eating seasonally for over a year now - easy in the summer, but it needs careful thought at this time of year. As we've got better at it, we've added more rules: positively no vegetables with jet lag, preferably raised in the UK, although trucked in from Spain at a pinch. We're not sure what to think about British veg raised under heated glass (this week's lettuce, after weeks without), or frozen veg (all that electricity), or cans, or commercially bottled produce. We're not yet ready to say that everything should be raised in the garden, but I am certainly planning a more elaborate veg patch this year. I am already more concerned with late summer and autumn plantings than spring sowings, because if you get the early sowings wrong, there's plenty of choice in the market. If you plant late in the autumn, then the winter salads aren't growing well enough to sustain the kitchen through the dark months - and that's what happened to us this year. My lovely saladisi, a mix of cut-and-come-again leaves, have not been strong enough to stand repeated pickings, and they would have been if I had sown them three weeks earlier. The kale, too, which stands outside the kitchen window, should have been in the ground a month earlier to make strong growth before the light faded - we won't be able to start eating them until late February. It's been a steep learning curve, and we're all fed up with squash and turnips.

So last night, I tried something different - a salad made from one of those vacuum packs of beetroot. The dressing was unusual, and suggested by a half-remembered recipe written by Angelika, who writes a blog called The Flying Apple from Vienna. Vacuum-packed beetroot are normally fairly bland, but this easy salad is bursting with flavour.

I LOVE beetroot - we used to have it every Wednesday at school, pickled in harsh malt vinegar, with a slice of corned beef and a dollop of lumpy mash. For years it was my favourite comfort food, although corned beef is now firmly off our menu (it doesn't actually say on the tin how much saturated fat there is, but when you look at it you see that it must be getting on for 50%). I know that beetroot is, for many, a horror food: at school the nuns used to keep us in until we had finished everything our plates - I never went to school on a Friday afternoon, because I couldn't, just couldn't, eat the slice of Edam. Elsie McArthur never went to school at all in the afternoons, because there were all sorts of things she couldn't eat. My friend DD was a picky eater, but managed to gain her freedom most afternoons by hiding the remains in her napkin or pocket. For obvious reasons she couldn't do this on beetroot day.

All this staring at plates took place in a huge Victorian glasshouse, with a beautiful tiled floor, which was set in the old walled garden of Friar Park, an extraordinary mansion on the edge of Henley on Thames which later became the home of the Beatle George Harrison. My memories of the house are vivid but patchy - try as I may, some parts of it I just can't visualise, although others are as clear in my mind as parts of this house in which I have been living for 20 years. We must have been hanging our heads over the revolting remains, because what I remember best of all about the glasshouse is the lovely floor.

But back to the beetroot:
Slice the roots in a 250g vacuum pack. Make a dressing with a little zest from an orange, a little of the juice, a teaspoon of chilli jam (or use Thai chilli sauce if you don't make this useful and delicious fresh-tasting cross between sauce and jam), and a few drops of chilli oil. Leave to infuse for 10 minutes or so, and strew it with a pinch of Maldon salt before serving.

Aromatic prawns

Horatio and I have just eaten the most delicious Sunday evening supper - I hesitate to call it curry, because that makes you think of chilli peppers, hot hot food, and the need for dahl, iced cold water, and yoghurt. We often eat something light and fishy on a Sunday evening, which generally translates into sardines on toast, with a little yoghurt, lemon juice, and some chopped spring onions (and that's what Lucius will probably make for himself when he gets back from playing real tennis at Merton). But Horatio is the only other person in the house who seeks out curry, and as we were the only two at home this evening, it was an opportunity too good to miss.

This is a kind of korma, but without the coconut, which we don't eat, because it is full of saturated fat (I still find it difficult to understand how a plant can make saturated fat). Instead, there are ground almonds to sweeten the sauce, which has an aromatic depth of flavour from six spices.

First, chop a large onion, and sweat it gently in oil with a couple of sliced cloves of garlic. This should take 20-30 minutes, and you'll need to add a little water from time to time to stop it catching. You want soft onion, not too brown. Put the rice on to cook (one mug of basmati, two of water, cook covered until all the water is absorbed, just under 20 minutes).

While this is going on, organise your spices. In a mortar, put the seeds from two cardamom pods, half a teaspoon of fennel seeds, two cloves, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and of ginger, and some freshly grated nutmeg. Bash it with a pestle until you have a sticky rich mess.

When you are nearly ready to eat (ie, when the rice is all but cooked), add the spices to the onions, give it a good stir, and add 250g prawns. Stir, then add 2 tablespoons of ground almonds, two tablespoons of yoghurt and a glass of water (120-150ml). Simmer for five to ten minutes, until the sauce has thickened to your liking.

Even the most adamant chilli hater couldn't object to this curry. I'll make it later this week with chicken or pork - either would be good.

Onion soup

What is it about soup and the New Year? Something light and cheap after the holidays, I suppose. This was lunch the other day - onions, a little bread, some left over cheese, slowly transformed into something greater than the sum of its parts, the sweetness of the onions complementing the savoury crouton.

Peel one large onion per person, cut it in half and then slice as finely as possible. Fry on the lowest heat in the least possible amount of olive oil, stirring every so often, for half an hour or more, until the onions are melting and beginning to brown. Then add liquid. This can be water or stock. Either will do. If it is water, then a little flavouring wouldn't come amiss - say, a little wine, perhaps there's some brandy left over from the Christmas cake, a little balsamic vinegar, any of those three bubbled up before adding water sparingly. Or stock, but only if you've made it. (I find this takes very little effort: say, two minutes twice, spread over several hours - washing up the pan takes more.) Simmer the soup gently for 20-30 minutes, until the onion is meltingly tender and all the flavours are amalgamated.

When it's ready, toast some bread, add cheese, grill. We used cheddar for the children, stilton for the adults.

Serve in shallow soup plates, and float the rarebit on top.

Variations would include adding thyme, or cinnamon, or nutmeg. But what makes this so delicious is its simplicity (it's hardly a recipe, more a reminder), so probably best not to try too many variations.

Lettice's mushroom sauce for pasta

Lettice made lunch yesterday, a delicious new pasta sauce adapted from Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feast, which she bought with her Christmas money a couple of years ago. It's the first time she's used it - but then, on Christmas Eve, Lucius finally let off the rocket he was given by Eleanor for Christmas 2005 (and, yes, it was worth the wait - it made a satisfyingly loud whoosh and went very high, and it is said to have taken an aerial photograph, but this has not yet been processed). This sauce is thickened with ground almonds, rather than cream or yoghurt.

Soak 10g dried mushrooms (porcini for choice) in 150ml water. After a quarter of an hour, squeeze them dry, and keep the liquid.

Fry a small chopped onion in a little olive oil until it is soft, but not browned. Add 300g sliced mushrooms (wild if possible, otherwise as interesting a mixture as you can buy). Fry for a couple of minutes, then stir in the soaking liquid, 6 tablespoons of milk, 25g ground almonds and a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley.

Add the sauce to pasta. AC's suggestion is open ravioli, using home-made pasta; we plan to do this one day soon, because making pasta is such fun, but in the meantime, we used this to dress bought pasta - those curly tubes, I think. Alfred refused to eat it. All the more for the rest of us.

Mulled wine for a Happy Christmas!

We had a party last night, for friends, neighbours, and relations. Twelve families, children of all ages, from five to 20-something, a few grandparents, parents getting away from last-minute chores. Lovely sound of happy chatter, the youngest children offering round things to eat - sausages, crisps, dips (I made a taramasalata, but it turned out too oniony for my taste), tiny baked potatoes, shavings of parmesan and of salami. And the whole house smelled of Christmas - spices from the mulled wine.

For each 75 cl bottle of wine (I used a merlot I bought from the Wine Society), add 75ml of sugar, 1 tsp of cloves, 1 cinammon stick broken into two or three pieces, the juice of one lemon and one orange (or, when it runs out, and you have to make more in a hurry, the juice of a couple of clementines). Stir until the sugar dissolves, then heat gently. In an ideal world, you should strain this into a jug - but we didn't have time.

Happy days!

A Christmassy pilaf

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

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

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

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

Marzipan

Amazingly, I made marzipan yesterday. Not something I've ever done before. Quick, easy, and much much nicer than the stuff in the packet. It's extraordinary how we have let the supermarkets make us think they are improving our lives, when the smallest effort to cook from scratch proves the opposite.

You need 250g of ground almonds, 250g of icing sugar, and one medium egg. You mix them together in a large bowl. That's it.

My children all say that they don't like marzipan. I gave them a little piece of the freshly-made home-made version, and they all said it tasted of almonds, in the tone of voice that suggested that this was a revelation. And they liked it.

I've got a packet I bought last year and didn't use. This is what it contains: sugar, almonds (25%), glucose syrup, colour lutein. I've got no idea what colour lutein is (except that I know enough gardening latin to work out that it is probably yellow), and I wouldn't want to use it in my kitchen. What a lot of sugar - and the fact that there's so much makes me wonder about the quality of the almonds they have used. The use-by date is June 2007 - I think mine will be eaten up by the middle of next week.

A really good squash risotto

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

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

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

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

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

Spicy squid stew

In yesterday's Times, there was a recipe by Lindsay Bareham for squid stew, in which she said that you could buy frozen squid in 1kg boxes in Waitrose. I've tried to do this before, egged on by Nigella, without success. So I thought I'd try again. No luck, but they did have some squid on the deli counter. I didn't use the Times recipe, except as the inspiration. This is what I did.


Chop a couple of onions and a stick of celery, and soften in olive oil. Add some garlic. At this point I crumbled in a dried chilli, which gave the finished dish a strong but not overpowering heat; Lucius and Horatio would have preferred it without, and that would be good too. Add half a glass of red wine and bubble up, then add a tin of tomatoes and some chunks of potato (I used a peeled floury potato, which I had to be careful not to overcook; waxy new potatoes would be better, but that's for next summer). Simmer for 10-15 minutes to make a rich stew.

Meanwhile, cut up a chorizo sausage into wedges, and fry them in a little olive oil. Pour the sausage and the oil into the stew.

Roughly cut 500g squid, leaving the tentacles intact, and add them to the mix. Cover and simmer for 5-10 minutes until they are cooked.

Chop some herbs and strew over the finished dish. Serve with bread (the slow but simple white loaf would be ideal).

Mushroom daube

This started when I consulted the blue River Cafe book because there were a lot of mushrooms in my veg box this week.

Fry a medium box of fresh sliced mushrooms in olive oil. Meanwhile soak a couple of handfuls of dried mushrooms in very hot water (you want to end up with less rehydrated mushrooms, so that they don't overwhelm the more delicate flavours of the fresh ones). When the fresh mushrooms are brown, put them in a shallow dish. Drain and reserve the water from the rehydrated mushrooms, and fry in a little more olive oil with some crushed garlic. When the garlic begins to brown, add the delicious mushroom water, and braise until most of the liquid has evaporated.

So far so River Cafe. It tasted so-so, so I added a little Marsala and boiled that down too. Much better.

Back to the recipe: stir the two mushrooms together, and add chopped herbs before serving.

Delicious, quick, and easy.

Slow but simple bread

This fabulous white loaf is a revelation - a beautiful ball of bread dusted with semolina, and with a light airy open texture that costs pounds in the supermarket. All for pennies, a couple of minute's work, no kneading - and eaten so fast that there was no time to take a photograph.

It came from a food blog I discovered this week, via the New York Times website. You have to sign in to the website, which is a bit of a bore, but once you get to the right page you'll find a little film of Jim Lahey from Sullivan Street Bakery explaining his method. The problem for UK cooks is that it's all in cup measures, so I've translated it into metric.


Put 360g of ordinary flour into a large bowl. I used my all-purpose flour, which is lovely soft Italian type "00" from Waitrose - the exact opposite of the strong flour you are "supposed" to use for breadmaking. Add 1/4 tsp of instant yeast and 1 1/4 tsp salt. Mix with 300ml warm water. It will be a shaggy, sticky mess. Cover the bowl (I used a plate) and leave in a warm place for at least 12 hours. Jim Lahey says 18-20 hours is best; I left mine for about 36hrs.

By this time the dough will look bubbled. Strew a little flour on a work surface and turn the dough out. Now fold it on itself a couple of times - this is a much gentler action than kneading. Cover with the upturned bowl and leave for 15 minutes.

Get a clean teacloth and strew it with a little polenta or semolina. Shape the dough into a ball, put it on one half of the cloth, and cover it with the other half. Leave this to rise for two hours.

Half an hour before it's fully risen, put a lidded casserole dish in a very hot oven - 230C if your oven will do it. The casserole can be metal, ceramic or glass; I used a small Le Creuset pan. You don't need to grease it, the bread won't stick. When it's really hot, and the dough is risen, take the pan out of the oven and turn the dough into it (don't worry too much what it looks like at this point), replace the lid and bake for half an hour. Then take off the lid and bake for 5-10 minutes more.


There are two reasons for the success of this slightly startling recipe - the first is that time replaces the need to knead; the second is that covering the dough in a hot pan is as close to a commercial steam oven as you can get in an ordinary domestic kitchen.

Timing is easy - mix the dough in the afternoon or evening, and bake in the morning.

Beef and prune stew

Last weekend, we had all of Lucius's colleagues and their families to lunch. 18 of us. Two tables, one for adults, one for children, presided over by Lettice, who was the only one of our four at home. Lucius said we should have stew, and this is what I made, slightly adapted from Tamasin Day-Lewis's Good Tempered Food. Next time I'd leave out the prunes, as the children didn't like them, and I thought they distracted from the rich tastes created by so many spices.

The amounts given here are from the original recipe, which she says does four. I multiplied by four, and there was tons left over (v useful in the freezer, we've already eaten some with another set of friends).

350-400g soft prunes, soaked in orange juice for a few hours
1kg chuck beef, cubed
flour
4 medium onions
garlic
celery

1 tsp each of:
coriander seeds
cumin seeds
cinnamon
dried ginger
cayenne


2 pieces of orange peel
2 bay leaves
stock or water

Slice the onions and soften in olive oil in a heavy casserole pan. Chop a little celery and some garlic, and cook with the onions for a minute or two. Add 2-3 tablespoons of flour. Add the meat (I do not bother to brown it, but if this is something you always do, then go for it). Dry fry the seeds and bash them in a mortar with the cinnamon and ginger (TDL is a purist, and does all four, but I am not, and it still tasted good). Chuck in all the spices, not forgetting the cayenne (you can put less of this, but, even if you don't like hot food, do put some in, because it really does add a depth of flavour). Add the drained prunes, orange peel and bay, and just cover with stock or water. Bring to the boil, and simmer for about an hour and a half.

This is better made the day before, so that the flavours can settle, and so that you can remove any fat that has risen to the surface and solidified. Serve with some chopped coriander or parsley, and harissa, which you can buy in the supermarket. TDL gives a recipe for it, and I will try it one day, but not when there are 18 people coming to lunch!

I served this with mashed potato, delicious canneloni beans (this season's - I bought them in France at half term, and they are so fresh they don't need soaking before cooking) which I strewed with herbs from the garden (sage, thyme, some tarregon which was particularly good), kale, and frozen peas, which were by special request of Lettice.

Some vegetable dishes

Stuffed celeriac

I made this on Saturday evening, to go with roast pheasant, and it was delicious. The inspiration was from an article in Saturday's Guardian by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but I didn't follow his instructions, because his version uses cream. Mine, using low-fat creme fraiche, is a definite improvement (sorry Hugh!), not just because there are fewer calories and less fat, but also because creme fraiche gives the finished dish a sharp flavour - tastier than the bland sweetness of cream.


Peel and slice one medium-sized celeriac - mine was about four inches in diameter, weighed 450kg (sorry about the metric/imperial muddle here!), and had been sitting in the fridge for a couple of weeks. The thinner the slices, the quicker this will cook, so it's worth taking trouble. It's easier if you cut the celeriac in half, so that the slices are D-shaped. Arrange in overlapping slices in a greased gratin dish.

Chop finely two cloves of garlic, one red chilli (fresh or dried, whichever you have to hand), 3-4 anchovy fillets, and the leaves of a large sprig of rosemary. Mix all this with 300ml of low-fat creme fraiche, and pour over the celeriac. Drizzle with a little oil, and put in a hot oven, 190C, for about 45 minutes.


Stuffed mushrooms

Ideally, you will have used anchovy fillets from a jar for the celeriac. I had to open a tin for this, so there were some left over. Not wanting to throw them away, or to have them making a greasy mess in the fridge, I used them to make a stuffing for mushrooms, which we ate for supper on Sunday evening. This is how I did it:

Finely chop one very small onion, and the stalks of four large mushrooms. Gently stew in a frying pan with 5-6 anchovy fillets and their oil (I'd use the whole tin if I was opening one). After a few minutes, add a little chopped garlic and cook for a minute. Add enough brown breadcrumbs to make a stiffish mixture. Mix in some chopped herbs - I think I used a little parsley, thyme, and some sage. Divide this mixture between the four mushrooms (which should be in an ovenproof dish or tin), pressing down well. Cover with a little white sauce, drizzle liberally with oil, and bake in a hot oven for half an hour, when the mushrooms should be cooked through and the stuffing heated through and brown on top. If not, put them back in the oven for a few more minutes.

This sounds a bit of a fiddle, and would be if you had to do it all at once. I always make "too much" white sauce, because it keeps well in the fridge, and is useful for this sort of dish, or to put on leftover vegetables. I also keep "fresh" brown breadcrumbs in the fridge, because they have myriad uses, because they keep well, and because I can't bear to throw away bread, particularly if I made it in the first place.


Parsnip crisps

This may not be what you were expecting to see in a kitchen dedicated to lower-fat, low-cholesterol cooking. I have come to see that the main thing to avoid is processed food, and making these crisps confirmed that in an unexpected way. They were fun to make, but it was time-consuming (about half an hour). If you only ever ate crisps you had made yourself, you couldn't possibly eat more of them than was good for you. I think home-made crisps may be an occasional treat here from now on - I enjoyed making them, while I chatted to my 14-year-old son Alfred, who was fascinated by the process. It was the sort of undemanding cooking that makes you feel like a cordon bleu chef. And they had so much taste that there was no need for salt. They provided a very good "crunch" as a side dish with our pheasant.

You need one large parsnip, a potato peeler, some vegetable oil, and a small frying pan. Cut thin ribbons from the parsnip, and fry them for a minute or two on each side in half a centimetre of shimmering hot oil. It is important that you fry them in a single layer (this is why it is time-consuming), and that you heat the oil up again between batches. Drain them on kitchen paper, and, when they are cool, store them in an airtight box.


Quick roast parsnip soup

There was a little parsnip leftover, horribly mis-shaped. I cut it into very small pieces and put it in a hot oven for a few minutes. When it was cooked, I mixed in an equal quantity of "leftover" roasted onions and pureed it with a little stock (although water would have done just as well). Ten minutes from start to finish,with two one-minute bursts of activity). Just enough for Lucius, who came in late for lunch after playing a tennis match.


Purple sprouting broccoli

This weekend we ate the first purple sprouting broccoli of the season, plain, because it was such a treat. But next time I may well chop in a little fresh chilli, or a little chilli jam, or fry some breadcrumbs with garlic and anchovy to strew over them. I love the seasonality of purple sprouting, the king of winter vegetables, and I look forward to it in just the same way as I look forward to the first asparagus in May.

Roasted parsnip soup

This is a quick, cheap and delicious soup, full of flavour (particularly if you use homemade stock, although you don't have to).

Peel and slice a couple of onions, put in a roasting tin and drizzle with a little oil. Roast in a hot oven for about 30 minutes. Cut a couple of parsnips into chunks, put in a roasting tin with a little oil and roast for 20 minutes. You are aiming to end up with similar amounts of the two veg.

When they are done, whizz them in the food processor with some stock - I used the pheasant stock I made last week with the carcasses of a brace of pheasant (£5 from the butcher), some onion, carrots and peppercorns.

Wonderfully warming on a rainy, thundery day like today.

Roast parsnips with mustard seed

My veg box had lots of parsnips this week ... this was a particularly delicious way to eat them:

Peel and cut 4-6 parsnips into even-sized wedges. Mix together 2tbsp olive oil, 2tbsp runny honey, and 1tbsp mustard seeds. Add the parsnips, making sure they are completely coated with this sticky mix. If there's not enough, add a little more oil. Empty everything into a roasting tin, and cook in a hot oven for about 40 minutes.

Spelt bread

Here is a FANTASTIC recipe for almost instant bread made with spelt flour, which was first brought to Britain by the Romans, and which has more taste than your average supermarket flour.

500g spelt flour
10g fast-acting dried yeast
a good pinch of sea salt
50g sunflower seeds
50g sesame seeds
50g linseeds
500ml warm water

Combine all the dry ingredients, then mix in the water. Pour into a greased bread tin, and bake for nearly an hour at 200C. Take it out of the tin and put it back in the oven for a couple of minutes.


This was in the Telegraph Magazine a couple of weeks ago, and came from Sybille Wilkinson, an Austrian whose husband Andrew grows spelt at Gilchesters Farm, Northumberland. Spelt grows nearly six foot tall, but doesn't fall over - modern wheat crops have to be given chlormequat, a chemical growth regulator which is supposed to strengthen the straw. In 2003 50% of 144 baked bread samples (in Britain) turned out to have residues of this chemical. It's a strong argument for organic, and for biodiversity.

A request ...

A sweet tooth seems to be common amongst food bloggers; certainly I get the most comments if I write about puddings (apart from the banoffee pie, which you all seem to have decided, probably rightly, was too disgusting to trouble yourselves with). We don't eat pudding all that often, but, even so, it's the area of our new diet which has consistently given me the most trouble. I'm stuck in a meringue / fruit salad rut.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask you all a favour ... can you give me your best low-fat pudding recipe? No butter, no cream, not too many eggs (although limitless egg whites), no coconut.

Thank you!

Banoffee pie

Alfred is very keen on bananas, and there was a bunch left blackening in the fruit bowl while we were away in Switzerland. I couldn't bear to throw them away, but Alfred doesn't really like them unless they're bright yellow. So I was pleased to find a recipe entitled 'healthy banoffee pie' in this month's issue of the Waitrose food magazine.

The difficulty we have with lots of puds is the piecrust problem, because most piecrusts, whether or not they are pastry, contain fearsome amounts of butter. This one solves the problem by making the crust out of nuts and dates. It's quite successful (although I have to admit, I didn't use the specified almonds, because I didn't have any and there were hazelnuts galore in the larder), but I think I will have to play with it some more to make it really good - somehow, the crust seemed bitty, even though I used extra dates to glue it all together. It's definitely worth trying, because it's got lots of flavour, and is very light.

*220g hazelnuts
*250g stoned dates
300g 0% Greek yoghurt
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
3-4 sliced bananas

Oil a large cake tin with removable sides. Blitz the nuts, then add the dates. Press this gooey mess into the tin. Freeze. Meanwhile, put the yoghurt into a shallow dish, sprinkle it with sugar and put it in the fridge. Assemble by putting the base onto a large plate (leave it on the base of the tin, otherwise you'll have a terrible mess), covering it with sliced banana, and adding the yoghurt (stir it lightly first, to make sugary streaks). You can decorate this with shavings of dark chocolate (use a potato peeler).

The recipe says that it should be served immediately, because the nut case will soften at room temperature. We ate half straight away, the rest the next day, and it was still delicious, despite its soggy bottom.

* the original recipe specified 220g blanched almonds and 180g stoned dates

Quick post about a quick lunch

All the children have gone back to their various colleges and schools, so today is the first quiet day of the year. I normally don't bother to make lunch when it's just me (there's nearly always something left over in the fridge, or fruit, or salad), but I've got a cold, and hanker after carbohydrate. I cooked a bowl of spaghetti, coated it in olive oil and the juice of half a lime, added some finely chopped coriander, then some of the fried anchovy crumbs which are now a permanent feature of my fridge, together with a little pinch of dried chilli seeds. Delicious. The key to fast food is a little preparation, carried out when you've got time and/or feel like cooking.

Lamb chops

Horatio asked for lamb chops for supper. We don't really eat chops any more, as they can be 50% fat; instead, I buy leg steaks, which are cut across the leg and have no visible fat, so need to be cooked carefully if they are not to end up the texture of cardboard. He looked rather suspiciously at them, and even more so at the chick pea puree I had made to go with them.

The thing is, I've been reading Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries. In some ways it's a very annoying book - I mean, what's wrong with a blog if you want to tell people what you're eating day to day, rather than make them wait over a year (especially if you're trying to get them to see the point of seasonal eating, you'd think doing it in real time would ram the point home rather more forcefully)? On the other hand, it's full of things you want to eat, that are just slightly nicer than the way you already cook them.

I didn't actually follow any of the recipes, but this supper was very definitely inspired by the Kitchen Diaries.

Chickpea puree
Rinse two tins of chickpeas, warm them through in water. Meanwhile, in a lot more oil than you would normally use, fry a chopped onion until brown, perhaps crisping at the edges. Blitz the chickpeas to a puree with the oil (but not the onions), some garlic and a little salt. Put in a hot dish and cover with the onions.

Fennel salad
Finely chop a head of fennel. Mix with equal quantities of rocket (or watercress) in a shallow dish. Grate the zest of a lemon over the salad. Make a vinaigrette with lemon juice and pour over the salad.

Grill your lamb. Meanwhile, fry up some chopped garlic and finely shredded mint, to go over the lamb when you serve it.


I thought this was about as good as supper gets, particularly the chickpeas. Horatio said it wasn't quite what he was imagining when he asked for chops: "I was thinking more, mashed potato and peas," he said. "Fennel, that's the one I don't like that tastes aniseedy." Lucius ate the chickpea puree dutifully, rather like a small boy eating his greens because he's been told they're good for him. Girly food, clearly. They loved the lamb, though.

Vegetables for lunch

The BBC website has a story today that new research at Imperial College London shows that eating lots of veg cuts blood pressure. Researchers studied 4,680 middle-aged people, and found significant benefits to eating vegetable protein. On the other hand, they didn't find evidence that eating lots of meat was linked to high blood pressure. So - plenty of veg, including lots of beans for the protein, some meat (with the visible fat removed), along with regular portions of oily fish. Puddings to be fruit-based where possible. More or less what we're doing.

Yesterday, for lunch, I had noodle soup. Just one of those small cheap blocks of 3-minute noodles. But it couldn't have been further from the salty, monosodium-glutamatey taste the manufacturers had prepared in a sachet to go with them. First I chopped and stir fried some spring greens with a little chopped garlic. Then I added some home-made stock I had in the fridge which I made at the weekend after we had roast chicken for supper. When the noodles were cooked, I stirred in some crabmeat which I couldn't resist when I went shopping in the morning. A squeeze of lemon, some pepper. Delicious. And it only took about a minute longer than opening the sachet over the noodles. Afterwards I thought that it would be one dish where tinned crabmeat would be perfectly acceptable.

Today, I had a stir-fry of more spring greens, lots of them, with some chopped garlic. When they were done, I stirred in a teaspoon of the chilli jam I made in the autumn, and sprinkled them with some re-fried anchovy breadcrumbs lurking in the back of the fridge, then squirted the juice of half a lime which has been sitting around on the worktop for several days. Really good, lots of flavours.

There were three key ingredients which made these meals quick and easy to prepare, all of them home-made, but none of them particularly time-consuming:

Stock is something I make automatically after we have roast chicken; it doesn't take long, I feel thrifty, the ingredients are all to hand, and it means there's no temptation to use expensive stock which comes in not very bio-degradable plastic pots (I don't use stock cubes any more, because even the best-quality ones have ingredients which I either don't understand or know I don't want to eat). To make stock, I remove any meat left which can be used for another meal; I put the bones in a large pan with any leftover veg (but not potato, because the starch clouds the stock). I put in some fresh veg if I have it - celery, carrots, parsley stalks - and a few whole peppercorns (mine are multi-coloured), occasionally, for a change, a couple of cloves. I cover this with water, put the pot on to simmer, covered, for a couple of hours. Or more if I forget it. Then I strain it, cool it, put it in the fridge, and when I start to run out of it, I go out and buy another chicken for dinner. The main thing is not to get hung up on quantities or even timing, just to do it, and then do it again better - which is to say, how you like it. Recipe books often tell you to reduce it; I don't bother, because it steams up the kitchen, and you quite often have to add more water when it's concentrated (especiallly if you're making risotto). Sometimes I'll reduce a little for a specific dish, and that saves a lot of trouble.

I've written about the anchovy crumbs before (you just blitz some bread, add a tin of anchovies, blitz again, then fry them up, and use them instead of cheese on pasta, in soup, as a crispy topping for tuna bake, or - well, with whatever could do with a little crunch and zip). Now I have discovered that anchovy crumbs keep very well in the fridge, and can be used either straight from the fridge, or refried. I shall start making them in bulk and keeping them in an airtight box (at the moment, storage is haphazard, although they don't seem to suffer).

The chilli jam was something I made in November, when I felt like cooking one afternoon; there wasn't much work involved, although I had to be around to watch it while it cooked down. I've just sent the last bottle to a fellow food blogger, so I'll have to make some more in the next couple of weeks, as I now can't imagine life without it for pepping things up. As I said earlier, I have stopped using stock cubes, so I sometimes need strong tastes to stir in to sauces - chilli jam makes a change from, say, Worcester sauce or Marmite, or even stock. I'm not techie enough to give you a link to the original recipe, so I'm reproducing it here:

"This is terrific chilli jam, better than any I've made before. It takes moments to prepare, and then not quite an hour and a half to simmer before bottling. This is enough for nearly three Bonne Maman jars.

"Blend 400g whole tomatoes, four chillies (seeds and all), six cloves of garlic, two small knobs of ginger (don't bother to peel them), & half a little bottle of Thai fish sauce. Put this in a saucepan with 450g ordinary sugar, and 8 tbsp red wine vinegar. Bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, finely chop another 400g tomatoes. Add them to the pan, and gently simmer for at least an hour, stirring occasionally. You have to judge for yourself when it's cooked, and it may well take longer than an hour to reach a set (it will set without trouble, because tomatoes are full of pectin)."

New Year resolutions - three tips for losing weight

Health and happiness for 2006.

Last night, for the second year in a row, I made positive resolutions, things to achieve in the coming months, rather than things to give up. But I have made one traditional resolution, and that is to do what it takes to lose the couple of pounds I am sure I have put on over Christmas. Last year we were at home, and it was easy to organise a low fat feast. This year, we were away, which made it more difficult. I shall go back to the strictest form of our diet, to the sheet I posted when I began this blog.I am interested, though, in how other people set about losing a couple of pounds, and so I would like to start a meme as I am sure I am not the only person in this position at this time of year.

Three tips for losing weight
1. Cut out saturated fat
2. Drink plenty of weak tea with lemon juice
3. Eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables

I nominate Zabeena to tell us what her three tips are

Happy New Year

We are in Switzerland, breaking all the culinary rules, having a lovely holiday, not taking photographs of all the delicious food we are eating, and preparing for a new year party this evening ... Happy New Year, and I promise to post more photographs in 2006.

Sticky Christmas meringues

I've just come back from a wonderful party given by Johanna the passionate cook, where I met a number of food bloggers. We all brought different biscuits, ate them (this after a delicious Austrian lunch of dips, sauerkraut and sausage, cheese fondue), and then swapped. I went with a boxful of meringues, and came home with a boxful of all sorts of beautiful & delicious biscuits. I made sticky Christmas meringues. This is how I did them:

Beat six egg whites with 375g icing sugar until it holds its shape. Meanwhile, chop 300g shelled pistachio nuts with 250-300g dates (I pulsed them in my Magimix, but you need to be careful not to make a puree, some texture is what you're looking for here). Fold this into the meringue mixture. When I made these yesterday, I used a tablespoon to make about 30 small meringues. Tomorrow I'm going to use this amount to make two big circular meringues (think Pavlova) which I will sandwich with creme fraiche and decorate with blueberries and icing sugar. Either way, they need about 1 1/2 hrs in a cool oven, 150C.

80:20

This week, I was watching Richard and Judy whilst clearing up the kitchen, and I heard an expression which encapsulates our way of eating - 80:20. Get it right 80% of the time, and don't fret about the rest. Then there's no need to be the kind of person who won't eat this and won't eat that, & it's all easy.

Soused herrings

Oily fish are, of course, something we should all be eating lots of, and I, for one, get fed up with variations on a salmon steak. So I was very pleased to see herring fillets on sale the other day, and snapped them up. I more or less followed Jane Grigson's recipe for Bismarck and rollmop herrings (I'm still not sure which are which, or what the distinction is). The result wasn't as good as I'd hoped. It was as if I'd used malt vinegar, when in fact I'd used a mixture of cider and red vinegars; and the fish itself had an overcooked texture after only four days. I should think the way to solve both problems would be to dilute the vinegar. At any rate, they don't have the melting texture I was hoping for, and which I know is achievable, because that's what I got at Heston Blumenthal's pub on Wednesday evening. Back to the drawing board.

This is what I did:

Soak 12 herring fillets in a brine made with 120g salt and 1.2l water. Two to three hours. While this is going on, make the marinade from: 600ml wine or cider vinegar (I was forced to use a mix of both, because there wasn't enough of either), 1 tbsp pickling spice (with dried chillies), some peppercorns, & 3 bay leaves. Bring this slowly up to a boil and then leave to cool. Drain the herrings, put them in a 1l Le Parfait jar with a sliced onion, then pour on enough vinegar to cover. Leave for at least four days.

I didn't roll them up around gherkin and sliced onion (which, now I come to think of it, is probably the distinction between a rollmop and a Bismarck herring). I wonder whether they would have been more tender if that's what I'd done. On the other hand, HB's herrings were clearly pickled flat, but his marinade was much gentler. I remember donkeys years ago (at least a couple of decades ago) pickling some mackerel fillets in home-made raspberry vinegar; I've often thought I should do it again, but couldn't remember how I did it ... pretty much as here, I should think (although I have some dim memory of baking them first in tea). It'll have to wait until next summer.

For Scandinavian, German and Austrian readers, this is probably a very routine recipe - some advice would be very welcome, even if you have to consult your mothers and grandmothers!

Looking back

The other day, on the way to London to see Eleanor's first play (a five-minute scene acted by fellow students at Central School of Speech and Drama who had also written five-minute plays, great and varied evening), I bumped into an old friend at Reading station. He told me that he had just got back his cholesterol test results - high, too high, but not high enough to be taking statins. I gave him the address of this blog, and told him to look at the first or second post, where there's a general explanation of the changes we have made to our diet. The whole conversation reminded me of how we started out after Lucius came out of hospital. No longer any idea of what to eat, but a determination to improve the diet. Pretty soon, people began to ask about what we were doing, and, after a while, the blog was born. Now I'd be lost without it, and, more to the point, all my recipes would be lost - this is the best recipe filing system I know, and I don't do any of that fancy indexing you see on so many beautiful blogs made by people more technically compentent than I could ever be.

But now I've been worrying that people think I'm being prescriptive about what to eat - the aim of this blog is to explain what we are doing, not to tell other people how to eat. I've just been re-reading some of my early posts, and find that it also functions as a record of the journey we have made since Lucius was ill. My attitudes to the food industry & to supermarkets have changed fundamentally, and there's no going back - anyway, it's more fun shopping at the market, and from small producers, it's something you can look forward to doing, which is not true of any trip to any supermarket I've ever visited. I still go to the supermarket, because - well you know why, all the usual reasons, convenience, cost - but I try hard to use local suppliers as much as possible.

Before going to the plays, I went shopping with Catrin and her 12-week-old baby, a mixture of boring things like light bulbs & stain remover and more fun things like baby clothes. We found a vibrant pink dress for Cecily to wear on Christmas Day, and then retired to the Peter Jones cafe for tea and cake. Catrin remarked, as I chose a piece of lemon cake, that it must be difficult to stick to a low-fat diet when out and about. I told her that what we decided from the beginning that our approach to food should not be neurotic, no refusing food cooked by people kind enough to invite us out, no fussing over menus. So we decided to be strict at home, in order that we could break the rules when we wanted to or needed to. It seems to work; neither of us frets about "breaking" the rules, yet both of us eat very little saturated fat overall. On the other hand, we eat lots of delicious food, and never feel as if we're "on a diet".

There's another thing about blogging, and that's reading other people's food blogs, full of enthusiasms and stories, wonderful pictures, interesting lives. This weekend, I'm going to a blog party, hosted by Johanna the passionate cook, and it will be great to meet some of the people who I have found so inspiring over the last few months. What an extraordinary world we live in!

Christmas plans

The idea of a low-fat Christmas sounds inherently horrible; if Christmas is a celebration, there should be feasting and plenty. The problem is that if you are serious about making a life change, then it needs to encompass all areas of your life. Last year was the first post-heart attack Christmas, and we were nearly 20 for dinner. No-one sitting at the table guessed that Christmas dinner was well within our rules, with, I think, the sole exception of the brandy butter. It took lots of research, and the usual amount of planning, but I really wanted to make our traditional Christmas dinner fit into our new way of eating, and without anyone feeling deprived.

Just one problem … I didn’t have a blog this time last year, I didn’t write anything down - and now I can’t remember exactly how I did it. So I’m going to have to do all that research all over again.

I expect we started with smoked salmon, probably on bread, and sprinkled with coarse black pepper and lemon zest. This year, I’m not going to bother with the bread, I’ll just fold the salmon onto cocktail sticks. Less filling, prettier, less conventional. All those fish oils really are good for the brain, for the heart, and for the taste buds.

Next – well, turkey, obviously, cooked upside down so that the juices run into the breast. Also a baked ham (easy to cut off the fat if you need to). There’ll have been cranberry sauce, bread sauce made with skimmed milk which is no problem whatsoever if you flavour it well with bay and nutmeg and cloves. Roast potatoes, clearly, and then lots and lots of veg – carrots, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, leeks, roasted onions (probably cooked in their skins, so that they steam, because all you have to do to prepare them is cut a little bit off the bottom so that they stand up straight), maybe some roast garlic. The key thing in a low fat diet is to regard the meat as an accompaniment to the vegetables, that way you get the balance right on the plate. I don’t think I did sausages, because, hey, isn’t there enough here already? I know I made a stuffing, it’s just that I can’t remember what it was; it will have been a departure from the normal sausage-based stuffing, because sausages are right off our menu, being pretty full of saturated fat. There are two options here, one is to say, it’s Christmas, I’m buying the very best sausages I can find (almost certainly at Henley farmers’ market, where you can buy them from the man who kept the pigs and then made the sausages) and we will eat them; the other is to research a really good stuffing recipe. I may end up doing both.

I remember very clearly that I decided not to make a Christmas pudding. None of us is very keen on Christmas pudding, so it wasn’t a big issue. I tried to move away from this particular tradition, but various guests said it wouldn’t be Christmas without a plum pudding. So I stood in the supermarket for a very long time, reading all the ingredients of all the puddings, until I found one which had a low fat content and a good lot of fruit. I made sure there were lots of little bowls of nuts and fresh dates dotted about the table, and that there were mandarins within reach of everyone. This year it will be easier, because I’m not cooking on the 25th itself, so I’m going to make a pudding which is a cross between meringue and Christmas cake. Recipe to follow when I’ve experimented with it. Meringue and fruit is the perfect low fat pudding, because the fat in an egg is all in the yolk; when you think of meringue and fruit, you tend to think summer berries, so Pavlova or Eton Mess. I am going to turn the whole thing on its head, and combine Christmassy soaked dried fruit with the meringue mix itself; it should cook into a gooey meringue. If it’s a disaster, I’ll just crumble it up into some fromage frais for a Christmas Mess!

We had cheese, too, the fantastically smelly Vacherin, which is made in the Alps from the milk which comes from the first spring grass which grows after the snow melts … if you’re not going to eat much cheese, you need to make it worth eating, and memorable. Cheese biscuits are a surprisingly fat-ridden product – we now use Matzos.


Here’s a recipe from Elizabeth David’s Christmas, which I bought last year to give my plans a boost (and which annoyingly began to fall apart the very first time I opened it, and which is now little more than a loose leaf folder of pages falling out). I didn’t do it, but it sounds ideal. It’s a great read, and full of unusual ideas, because ED didn’t enjoy Christmas, so didn’t feel the need to slavishly follow its traditions.

Rice and almond stuffing for turkey

1 teacup of risotto rice
60g sultanas
a big bunch of parsley
30g chopped onion
a strip of lemon peel
60g of shelled almonds (skin still on)
the turkey liver
60g butter (here I would use olive oil, judging the amount by eye)
juice of half a lemon

Cook the rice for 15 minutes in plenty of water. Soak the sultanas in warm water. Chop the parsley, onion and lemon peel, also the almonds. Lightly cook the liver in the oil, then chop it. Mix everything together, adding a little oil at the end.

ED says that the rice is flaky, light and dry when it emerges from the bird, because it isn’t bound with an egg. I would be very tempted to add an egg (probably just the white) to the mix, because it would make it much easier to serve and to eat.

Chips

Office dinner last night at the Hinds Head in Bray, Heston Blumenthal's gastropub. Lucky us. I threw caution to the winds and had thrice-cooked chips (yes, I know I am supposed to be telling you how we cut down on dietary fat, but you need to eat unsaturated fat, and, anyway, this is a way of life, not a diet which means you are allowed to break the rules occasionally, especially when not at home; also I started with soused herrings). I'd just been reading HB's ideas on cooking mashed potatoes (in Don't Sweat the Aubergine by Nicholas Clee) - 20mm slices, water at 70C for 40 minutes (yes, really!), potatoes plunged into cold water, reboil, drain, dry (yes!), push through a food mill, add warm milk, butter etc, warm through on a low heat, serve. Finally, eat. Me, I just boil up a few chunks, drain them, mash them with a little milk straight from the fridge. Fine. So I was interested to see if cooking chips in a similarly elaborate manner would make a difference (it tells you on the menu that they are cooked three times). And I have to say that, yes, it does. They were very crunchy, almost like roast potatoes, although they looked like chips. I'd have asked for the recipe, only this is not the type of eating we do at home.

Bean stew

This is instant winter-warming comfort food. It will be much much nicer when it turns into slow-cooked, fresh-from-the-garden, aren't-I-clever food, but that'll have to wait until next June. In the meantime, this is fine. It doesn't have to be open-a-tin instant, of course, you could make it from dried beans, and then it would taste even better. I wouldn't bother for just the two of us, but if I was making it in any quantity, I'd start from scratch (it only means thinking ahead a little, but we don't always want to be doing that).

Sweat a chopped onion in a little olive oil, garlic too, if you feel like it. When it's soft, add a can of chopped tomatoes, a drained can each of borlotti beans and of kidney beans, perhaps some dried herbs if they're not just dust in a jar. Bring it to a simmer, then add a bag of spinach leaves, cover the pan and cook through until the spinach has wilted.

There will be days when you have all the tins but no spinach; then you could add chopped parsley, or finely chopped spring onions, as it's definitely improved when there's something green in it. And, actually, more or less any old beans will do, too.

At this dark time of the year, when the days are short and shortening, it's hard to believe we'll ever be making bean stew fresh from the garden - podded and boiled, broad beans, borlotti beans, anything in between beans, cooked until tender then mixed with tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs from the garden, dressed with olive oil. Delicious - low in fat and low in food miles; apart from the olive oil, we're talking food inches. Still, that's a long way off. Perhaps, as a pagan gardener's article of faith, I'll eat this winter bean stew on 21 December, as the year turns and the days start to lengthen. I can't wait.

Artichoke dip

I'm always on the lookout for quick and delicious things to eat instead of cheese. After Lucius had his heart attack, we were told to limit saturated fats, particularly in dairy foods. Cheese no more than twice a week, and never eat a piece bigger than a matchbox. I thought it would be difficult, I thought it would be depressing. Actually, it's been neither. These days I probably eat cheese once a fortnight at most, and then I make sure it's something really good. But that still leaves a number of meals when we would have been eating cheese, especially if it's soup, which it often is on a Sunday evening, or a Saturday lunchtime.

I'm not sure where the idea for this came from. Drain a jar of artichoke hearts. Whizz together with an equal quantity (by eye) of fat-free cottage cheese. At this point I added black pepper and lemon juice. It was good, but a little overwhelmed by the lemon juice. Next time, I think I'd add a quick grating of lemon zest instead. Good on toast and with crackers. Keeps well in the fridge.

A culinary disaster

Well, I was reading the Sunday papers, and somebody mentioned moules and chips, that delicious staple of Brussels. So I thought I'd cook it up (McCain's oven chips are less than 5% fat, and that's the "official" definition of a low-fat food, although who decides these things I don't know).

Next day, I'm preparing the mussels I bought that morning in the supermarket. Lucius comes in and, sounding very disappointed, says, "oh, I don't really like mussels." Heartlessly, I tell him he can't have his favourite every day. (Do you know that wonderful New Yorker cartoon of a husband saying to his wife, "Not my favourite again"?) But pretty soon I find I've thrown away more mussels than I've put in the pan, and I begin to think that I don't want to eat the remaining few on the grounds that they are going off faster than I can cook them. So I chuck the lot, resolving to go and complain in the supermarket (which prides itself on its fish, and should know better). It is at this point that I realise there's nothing else fresh to eat.

I hunt through the larder (rather a grand word for a few cool shelves in the corridor outside the kitchen), and all I can find is a couple of tins of tunafish. The problem is that these days chefs and cookery writers have given up tinned fish in favour of fresh (mostly a good thing, but you can't use fresh for tuna bake - you know, tuna, tinned sweetcorn, mushroom soup, crisps on top, children's favourite fish dish). So I blew the dust off a wonderful book I don't use often enough, an old-fashioned book full of good things, Suppers by Claire Macdonald of Macdonald. Lady Macdonald and her husband used to run (perhaps they still do, but I haven't seen their advertisements in The Spectator for years) a hotel in Skye called Kinloch Lodge. I've never stayed there, but rather wish I had, because Lady Macdonald's books are full of unpretentious, tasty, welcoming food.

So, instead of moules and chips, we had Lady Macdonald's devilled tunafish (although I didn't do it exactly as I was told). I made tons of it, and used the leftovers in sandwiches, a distinct improvement on tuna mayonnaise, which is generally rather bland, and obviously out of the question for us to eat. You'll need tins of tunafish, an onion, milk, a lemon, and the rest you'll probably have anyway.


Devilled tunafish

Slowly cook a chopped onion in a little oil. When it's soft, add a little flour and make a white sauce with a pint of skimmed milk. When the sauce is cooked through, take it off the heat and add 2 tbsp each of lemon juice, dry sherry and Worcester sauce, then 3 tbsp tomato ketchup. Stir in the tunafish from three tins and warm through.

Meanwhile, whizz a couple of slices of bread in the processor with a handful of parsley and an anchovy fillet. Then fry this mix in a little olive oil until it's crisp and golden. Serve together.

Rubbish ...

I’ve been thinking about rubbish quite a lot recently, because I feel guilty about how little we recycle and compost. The other day, as I was struggling with the bin under the kitchen sink, I wondered what other keen cooks and food bloggers do with their rubbish. So I fired off an email, and got an instant response from Andrew of Spittoonextra, who lives just down the road from me. What can I say? Not only is he the food blogging beginner’s best friend, he’s also a keen recycler – he was the first in his street to use the new-ish recycling bins supplied by the council, and he used to sort through the bin of a rubbish flatmate who refused to recycle. What a hero!

Most of the rest of us are doing what we can, and feeling guilty that it’s probably not enough. Sam from Becks & Posh in San Francisco recycles diligently, but her Fred thinks it’s all a big sham. I think that’s the problem for lots of us – all those stories you hear about how it all ends up in landfill even if you’ve sorted it, or the thought that the main ingredient in glass is the energy required to make the bottle, which is lost the moment you smash it into the bottle bank.

Anne at Anne’s Food keeps her trash under the sink, lining the bin with used plastic groceries bags (that’s what I do). Her block of flats (in Stockholm) has a recycling room, where they put paper, glass, bottles and cans. She doesn’t bother with milk cartons, though, because she says she doesn’t have much rubbish, and “it just doesn’t feel very urgent.” She thinks she’ll feel differently when she has a family. Dagmar at A Cat in the Kitchen doesn’t have a recycling room in her apartment block (also in Sweden), so she throws out everything except newspapers and bottles, and she has to find places to take them. She says: “I don’t know many people at all who compost their leftovers or recycle empty cans, probably because we lack the possibility.”

It’s a tricky issue. In theory, I feel just like Andrew about recycling, but in practice I don’t necessarily have time, can’t always be bothered, and am sceptical about some of the claims. On the other hand, I am getting more serious about growing things to eat – it started with a few herbs, and now includes spinach, garlic, courgettes, pumpkins, melons, artichokes, beans and failed peas (the mice got them) – which means getting more serious about composting. I have a beautiful compost bin which looks like a beehive (people often say when they see it, “I didn’t know you kept bees”). I put some of the kitchen waste into this. It doesn’t rot down very quickly, and this is because I am playing at it, like Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon. And I’ve been worrying about putting non-organic waste into the compost because, for me, the main point of growing food is that it should be organic.

So last week, as well as starting this meme, I emailed Monty Don, who writes intelligently about gardening, and who presents the British TV programme Gardener’s World, to ask him whether the nasties in non-organic kitchen waste would get through to the compost. He sent me a very helpful and reassuring email back, and, although I don’t think my compost would necessarily pass the Soil Association mark, it’s better than not composting, and it’s probably good enough.

This is what he said:

Dear Joanna

Too much angst! The composting process will get rid of almost all toxins, be they man-induced or natural. Chuck anything onto the heap and it will come out the other end all organic sweetness and light. The secret, of course, is to compost it well so that everything is turned into that dry elixir of sweet smelling crumbly black loam.

Two things are the key to good compost

1) Shredding/chopping/mowing. This makes a HUGE difference.

2) Turning. Ideally once a month until it is ready - in our case three
turns and then a final turn 3-6 months before using.

Other than that just chuck it all on and let the bacterial and anaerobic
process do the rest.

Just one thing - why have ANY non-organic waste? Just buy organic.

Best wishes
Monty


So I am just off to buy one of those compost bins that is a drum you can turn with a handle, because, with the best will in the world, I am not going out in all weathers (or any weather come to that) to turn my compost heap with a spade.

Chilli jam

This is terrific chilli jam, better than any I've made before. It takes moments to prepare, and then not quite an hour and a half to simmer before bottling. This is enough for nearly three Bonne Maman jars.

Blend 400g whole tomatoes, four chillies (seeds and all), six cloves of garlic, two small knobs of ginger (don't bother to peel them), & 30 ml of Thai fish sauce (half a little bottle). Put this in a saucepan with 450g ordinary sugar, and 8 tbsp red wine vinegar. Bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, finely chop another 400g tomatoes. Add them to the pan, and gently simmer for at least an hour, stirring occasionally. You have to judge for yourself when it's cooked, and it may well take longer than an hour to reach a set (it will set without trouble, because tomatoes are full of pectin).

I like this best of all with crab cakes, but it's also good stirred into pasta, in sandwiches, with cold meat.

A St Andrew's Day feast

Just back from St Andrew's Day at Eton, to collect Horatio. He spent the morning playing rackets against Old Etonians, beating them 3-0, and then rushing on to play in a football match against yet more Old Etonians, beating them 4-2. I managed to fit in a quick visit to the art school on the way from rackets court to soccer pitch, where there was some stunning work. Horatio's series of three showed Churchill + bulldog, first in collage, then in print, then abstrcted into a huge oil painting, in which, by some magical & probably unintended process, Churchill looked rather like Mussolini. There was also an exhibition of late 20th century St Ives painters, so a chance to commune with Terry Frost, Rachel Nicholson, Hepworth, and best of all Patrick Heron. No chance of affording even the lithographs!

On the way home, I suddenly realised I had made no plans whatsoever for lunch. So, when we got home, I put on a tomato sauce (one large onion, a tin of good Italian tomatoes, the chopped remains of last night's tomato salad, some olive oil and the end of a bottle of red wine). Then I put on some maccheroni, nice artisanal pasta of the sort you can buy in Waitrose. So far so ordinary. Especially dull for those of us who don't eat much cheese, and prefer to save the notional allowance for savouring a little piece at a time (no bigger than a matchbox, no more than twice a week). So I blitzed the end of a sourdough loaf, added a couple of anchovies from the jar I generally have in the fridge, fried that in some olive oil. When it was crunchy, a grated on a little lemon zest and added a few chopped parsley leaves. I felt almost sorry for Horatio, topping his pasta with boring old parmesan!

Spicy chicken with dried plums

Here's proof that "low fat" food isn't boring - this is a good supper dish by anyone's standards, with the advantage of being quick and easy. Spicy but not hot.

You'll need some chicken breasts, prunes, and a little stock.

Chop an onion and sweat it in some olive oil; add finely chopped garlic just as the onion is beginning to brown. After a moment, add half a teaspoon each of turmeric, coriander, ginger and cinnamon. Slice three or four chicken breasts, add these to the pan. When they have browned, add a couple of large squirts of tomato puree (or the contents of one of those tiny tins), and 300ml of liquid, which can be water, chicken stock, veg stock, whatever you have to hand. The chicken will neeed to cook for 15-20 minutes. Add 150-250g prunes to this. If they are the expensive, half-dried sort, add them towards the end of the cooking time, as they will only have to warm through; if they are the cheaper ones, then put them in with the chicken; if they're really hard, it would be a good idea to soak them first (probably in the cooking liquid).

We ate this last night with broad beans in white sauce, boiled Shetland Black potatoes (very floury, quite tasty), and a tomato salad.


Last night there was a heavy frost, the heaviest so far this autumn, and as heavy as any we had all through last winter. We woke this morning to a whitened world. The thermometer showed two degrees of frost, despite being in quite a sheltered spot. This is what my herb bed looked like:

A little light reading for a cold dark winter day

The weather here has suddenly turned cold, we've had two or even three frosts this week, so I need to go out and deal with the blackened foliage of my dahlias. Not an inviting prospect. Instead, I've been reading essays by Elizabeth David, in Is there a Nutmeg in the House, and in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Inspiring ...

I'm almost ashamed to say what it has inspired me to do today - there were strawberries at the market, so I am going to make Sir Walter Raleigh's recipe for "cordial water" which he regarded as medicine for cleansing the blood, whatever that means. It's a summery equivalent to sloe gin, with strawberries and vodka. The only thing that stops it being really embarrassing is that the strawberries were grown in Berkshire (the next county) rather than air-freighted half way across the world.

I'm going to soak 1.4kg of strawberries in a litre of vodka, probably for 3-4 days, and then add some sugar. ED says she regretted omitting sugar. Can't imagine how it will taste, but it will make a good Christmas drink, and anyway I forgot to pick sloes last month.

Every time I pick up a book of Elizabeth David's, I'm entranced. She writes so well, and has such interesting things to say about food, particularly its history. I nearly always end up cooking one or two dishes. All the same, I have one major reservation about her, which is that I can't help feeling that her strong emphasis on food from France and Italy was partly responsible for the collapse of interest in traditional British food in the 1950s and 60s. On the other hand, we are a trading nation with long-standing culinary influences from abroad (think curry/kedgeree rather than "nasty greasy foreign muck") , & it was a time when our population was diversifying, with all that that meant for our country's cookery. And although she wrote a wonderful book about British baking, that came later, and was never so popular as the earlier books covering Mediterranean foods. Still, we can't lay all the blame at her door, and I suppose we should be pleased at the revival of the best of British cookery which has taken place over the past few years.


The other thing I did today in an effort to keep myself indoors was to add a counter to my blog. It took about three minutes.

Stuffed pumpkin

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

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

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

Stuffed mushrooms

Shirley Conran, mystifyingly, said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. It took a couple of moments, and they were delicious.

Cook one chopped onion in olive oil. Blitz 4-5 slices of good bread, then add some thyme, parsley, garlic, a tomato with the seeds removed (use a teaspoon), the stems of the mushrooms you are going to stuff, a tin of anchovies and its oil, and the cooked onions. Brown the mushrooms (I used four field mushrooms) on both sides, put them in a dish, cover with the stuffing, and bake in a hot oven for 20-25 minutes.

There's a bit of this mixture left over, and I am going to use it as a sort of rouille for the fish soup we are having for lunch. (I'm currently simmering a tomato sauce, and, when it's time to eat, I will add some sliced squid, a few prawns, and some scallops.)

Crab pasta

I love this, because it's delicious, because it's quick, and because it's a little extravagent without being indulgent. We had it for supper last night, following an avocado vinaigrette, which is Lucius's best starter.

Cook enough pasta for two or three people (one not particularly big dressed crab will stretch to pasta for three, and is not too much for two). Do not succumb to the temptation to use so-called fresh pasta from the supermarket - either used dried, which is both better and cheaper, or take time to make it yourself (a very rare but always enjoyable event in this house). Finely chop some spring onions and a red chilli pepper. Grate the zest of a lemon, then juice it. When the pasta is cooked, turn it in a little olive oil, add the lemon juice, the flesh of a dressed crab, and all the veg. Mix and serve.

Pumpkin risotto

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

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


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

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

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

14 in the house, so pumpkin, pork, lamb - but no oven!

Last week Johanna "the passionate cook" posted a recipe for roast squash bites with pumpkin seed pesto, and I thought it sounded good to eat. She published a photo of beautifully presented canapes of the sort I can never get right. So I simplified it, threw it on a plate, and three people asked for the recipe. With apologies and thanks to Johanna, this is what I did:

Pumpkin and pesto

Peel and chunk one butternut squash, put in a roasting dish, drizzle with oil and roast in a hot oven until cooked through. Meanwhile, dry roast 2 tablespoons of pumpkin seeds, and put in the food processor. Add an equal quantity by volume (by eye) of finely grated parmesan, and 4 tablespoons of oil. Blitz.

When the pumpkin is done and slightly cooled, put it in a single layer on a plate, and arrange the pesto over it in little dollops so that each chunk has some pesto on it. Spear a few of them with cocktail sticks and hand round.

Johanna specifies pumpkin oil, which I couldn't get in my local Waitrose, so I used something called Cool Oil, made by The Groovy Food Company, which my local Waitrose does stock and which I bought in a fit of keenness last year, because it's made with flax oil, hemp oil, evening primrose oil, and pumpkin seed oil, so it's rich in Omega 3, 6, 9. The trouble is, it doesn't taste very nice, and my search is for food which is good for us, and particularly healthy heart food, and which - most importantly - tastes good. But it was good in this dish, and it doesn't stain - Johanna says that pure pumpkin seed oil stains yellow. My nicest jumper got stained last weekend with saffron which I can't wash out ... on the other hand, it was delicious!


My oven still isn't working, so everything has to be cooked on a small hob (two rings, one big, one small) - tricky when we are so many. On the other hand, a great opportunity to cook new things. I got out the Moro cookbook - although I've read it, I haven't followed many recipes from scratch. This lamb (simplified) is a great one-pot dinner full of lots of flavours. I'm going back to the amounts for six, although I tripled this last night, and almost all of it got eaten.

Slow-cooked lamb with artichokes and mint

Slow cook an onion in olive oil until it's soft. Add 1.5kg neck of lamb cut into chunks. Brown the meat. Then stir in a little flour to thicken the sauce. At the same time add some garlic (3-4 peeled cloves), and some thyme (if it's from the supermarket, then chop it; if it's tougher and from the garden, then put in a small branch which you can retrieve later). Also some bay leaves, if you have them. Add 200ml dry sherry, let it bubble and cook for a couple of minutes, then barely cover the meat with water. Simmer gently with the lid half off until the meat is tender. After 1-1 1/2 hrs, add small new potatoes. When these are almost cooked, add a couple of jars of drained artichoke hearts to warm through, and a bunch of chopped mint.



Porridge for breakfast. Then we all had to build up an appetite for lunch, so ... Lucius carried on planing wood for a new ceiling he is making for our dining room; Lettice (15) went to county hockey training; Horatio (17) and Alfred (13) played on the PS2 (although in fairness they played football after lunch); Catrin fed her lovely new baby Cecily (7 weeks); and the rest of us went to the farmers' market in town.

Meanwhile, simmering in my biggest saucepan were two joints of pork in milk. I'm not sure whether we were following the recipe in Moro or the very similar one in the blue River Cafe book. Whichever, it was great, although the sauce didn't caramelise in quite the way described. This is what we did:

Pork in milk

Menna took the skin and most of the fat off two roasting joints of pork. Meanwhile, I bashed up some salt, mixed colour peppercorns and chopped thyme. This we rubbed into the meat and tied it up again. I browned these in oil, then covered the meat with milk. Neither of the recipes specified what sort of milk we should use, so I used what I had, which was semi-skimmed. I now think full fat would have worked better. I lobbed in a stick of cinnamon, some bay leaves, and a little lemon zest. This we simmered for 1 1/2hrs. We served it with mustardy mash and a courgette salad.

Lettice said there should have been peas as well. Catrin said she had cooked a chicken using the same method from a Jamie Oliver recipe. Either way, it was delicious, and there was nothing left, even though in the end we were only 11 for lunch, not 14.

Then we had homemade membrillo made by Bruce and Menna from the quinces in their garden with manchengo, a dry Spanish cheese, and wonderful rosemary and potato bread from the farmers' market. No need for supper.

A bit of a rant

Eating healthily has involved us in trying to turn away from the food industry at least some of the time; part of this means being more self-reliant - more cooking, some growing. Not on an allotment scale (I'm never going to grow maincrop potatoes), but a few life-enhancing fruit and veg (the melon experiment was a huge success, also very easy), and lots of herbs. So this year has been a turning point in the vegetable garden here - & now I'm keen to grow lots more, even though the mice got the peas, the broad beans got blackfly and I forgot to plant the garlic. I've found a terrific resource, The Real Seed Catalogue, run by a couple called Ben and Kate from their small farm in Pembrokeshire. They grow most of the seeds they sell, and they have really unusual varieties: I'm going to try an early Ukranian melon called, irresistibly, Collective Farm Woman.

Ben and Kate are on a mission - they sell books by the 70s self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, and they give instructions for saving seed even though it can't be good for business. They're not keen on the food industry either; they concentrate their dislike on the big seed companies. This is what they say - it struck a huge chord here:

"... real farming is a project that has been ongoing for millenia, but now in the height of our tiny period of cheap oil, we think we know better and have turned it into just another industrial process. Your loaf of bread should represent stored sunlight and water, but 90% of its calories come from oil these days - for the ploughing, spraying, fertiliser, transport. When the oil runs out, who will have the real seeds that can grow without it? Seed-saving is easy. You will get better seed, better food, and help preserve 11,000 years of work for future generations!"

The trick will be to see if I can carry on feeling inspired by this attitude, rather than guilty if I don't live up to it. It didn't take much effort to sow the parsley, and every time I cut some (most days), I'm not using one of those one-trip plastic boxes supermarket herbs are packed in. So that's a gain (and the parsley tastes better). Tiny steps, one at a time, and, like a toddler, I expect to fall down quite a lot. It's the best I can do.

Daube provencale

Today we were 11 for lunch. My oven's not working, so no question of a Sunday roast. Stew. This recipe is one I've used off and on for years, it's very easy and is full of complex flavours. The amounts here serve 4-6, but it's the sort of recipe that doubles up pretty easily, so I often use it for a crowd.

1kg braising beef - topside, shin, etc cut into thick slices (you can cook this in one piece, although obviously then it takes a couple of hours to cook, rather than an hour or so).
275ml red wine
3 tbs olive oil
2 crushed cloves of garlic
a branch of thyme (or a tsp dried herbes de provence)
100g bacon
1 onion, chopped
225g chopped tomatoes
a strip of orange peel
some anchovy fillets

Mix the wine, oil, garlic and herbs in a large bowl. Add the beef and marinade for at least a couple of hours, and up to two days. Soften the onion and bacon together in a casserole, add the beef & marinade. If you are very keen (and I'm mostly not) you could brown the beef slices before adding them to the dish; I'm more likely to do this if I'm cooking the beef in one piece). Add the tomatoes, anchovy and orange peel. Bring to the boil, and simmer on a low heat for an hour or so. OR put in a low oven (160C).

This is delicious with mashed potato. Today I served it with small new potatoes smothered in parsley; braised leeks; courgette and lemon salad; peas. Not very provencale, but easy and good.

Gravadlax cucumber

Last night I tried another of Sarah Raven's recipes. I expect she makes it with home grown cucumbers, but I used it to make a bland commercial cucumber taste of something. The flavours are exactly the same as in the gravadlax salmon I bought in Waitrose last week. Lucius said it was delicious, and I agreed although I thought there was too much sugar. I'm posting it because I'd like to make it again.

Cucumber and dill salad for four

1 large cucumber
85 ml wine vinegar (Sarah specifies rice wine vinegar, but I don't keep that)
115g caster sugar
some dill

Heat the vinegar and sugar until all the grains have disappeared. Thinly slice the cucumber (I used the potato peeler as for the courgette salad below, which, although successful, was not as successful as with the courgette, because cucumber is inherently more watery, less firm). Chop the dill and mix with the cucumber. When the vinegar has cooled, pour it on the salad, and chill for at least an hour. I peppered it at this point. Next time, I'd add salt to make the finished dish more sweet and sour (I use very little salt in my cooking, but I am happy to use it where I think it will improve the end result).

Sarah says you can chill this overnight; I chilled it for two hours, and it was quite watery by then. Next time, I would put the sliced cucumber into a colander to drain it for half an hour or so.

Courgette salad

Until I started growing courgettes, I wasn't that keen to eat them. The ones you buy in the supermarket don't taste of much, and they have a lot of seeds. The ones you grow (and see my post about melons, below, they really grow themselves) don't have many seeds, and do have a lot of taste (only the children still won't eat them). Today, I spent a lot of the day looking forward to supper, because I wanted to eat:

Delicious courgette and lemon salad

Use one courgette per person, and half a lemon per two courgettes.

Slice courgettes lengthwise using a potato peeler. This is a piece of equipment which has a place in my kitchen only because my husband and children will not use a knife to peel potatoes. I use a knife, as I'm not keen on gadgets. But I discovered today that the easiest way to slice courgettes thinly is with a potato peeler. It's quite wasteful, but I put the bits on the compost heap, and, anyway, there are a lot of courgettes.

Make a dressing with lemon juice and zest, olive oil and a little honey or sugar to sweeten. Salt and pepper, obviously. Add some toasted pine nuts (not too many, otherwise they'll end up in the bin, because the courgettes are the thing here). Also chopped parsley.

This recipe comes, slightly adapted, from Sarah Raven in last Sunday's Observer food supplement. I'm going to add a link to Sarah's website, because she taught me to garden. I went to a couple of her courses; very expensive, like her seeds and other stuff from her catalogue, but well worth it. In the case of her courses, she has given me the lasting gift of enthusiasm for the garden and gardening, plus the feeling that everything is possible - a hugely important gift. In the case of her seed etc catalogue, she has such a good eye that everything in the catalogue is worth buying.

I'd just like to say here that this is the first year I've ever grown parsley. We have a huge glut of it, so it goes on all sorts of things. I often go out into the garden with a torch to pick it. Sometimes I don't bother with the torch, and just go in the dark. You can smell the parsley. It has a strong smell, and it is juicy. It is nothing like the parsley you buy wrapped in plastic. It is delicious. It is worth growing. It is cheaper to grow it. I would now grow it in a pot on a windowsill if that was the only place I could grow it. And if I couldn't germinate it (this is the first year I've managed), then I'd plant up some of the plants you can buy all year round in the supermarket. And, yes, I'm talking about ordinary curly parsley, not the fashionable flat leafed stuff.

Melons from the garden

Last year, I grew - without any real effort on my part - a mountain of different squashes. They looked wonderful, I thought they were delicious, but the rest of the family quickly got bored of eating them. So this year, I thought I'd try to grow melons as well. I stuck a few seeds in some compost and put the pots on my study windowsill, and after a week or two I planted them out (probably April and May). I watered them a couple of times and then left them to it - it's a sunny bed, and we have heavy clay soil which retains moisture in that part of the garden, so things have to take their chances. I read an article about growing melons, describing horrendous amounts of work building a frame, pinching them out and tying them in. I ignored it. The melons rampaged over the bed, trailing in and out of the squashes, and over the lawn, an untidy but pretty promise of good things to come.

On Sunday, for lunch, we ate the first of them, as they are only just ripening. What's more, we ate them in the garden, even though it was the first day of October.



They were delicious, sweet, and contrasted wonderfully with the Parma ham. I'm definitely growing them again next year; I'm going to use the same method, only this time, I'm going to grow more, and I might put some in the greenhouse, which usually only houses tomatoes in the summer (although something tells me they'll be more trouble in a greenhouse, and I don't have much experience of growing things under cover). I'm sure that I would have got more melons if I'd done all the things suggested in the article, but about 25 from three plants isn't bad, especially for about 10 minutes' effort.

Saffron mash

Dagmar sent me saffron from the back of her kitchen cupboard, and I've had a very merry week reading cookery books to decide what to cook with it. I associate saffron above all with Cornwall, with the smell of the bakery in Market Jew Street in Penzance, and the beautiful golden cakes you can buy there. When we were staying at Prussia Cove, my friend Susan, who is a wonderful cook, once made us a delicious saffron-scented fish stew after an early-morning trip to the fishmonger in Newlyn. Elizabeth David's book on yeast cookery gives a recipe for a Cornish saffron bread - no good for us, because it's enriched with lots of butter, just like a brioche. The next obvious place to look is in Claudia Roden, because saffron is such a feature of Middle Eastern cookery: delicious-sounding rice recipes, which I will try another time, but I'm the only member of my family who truly likes rice. My elder daughter Eleanor, who is a drama student, was visiting, and her favourite food is mashed potato, so I decided to cook Simon Hopkinson's saffron mash, from his book Roast Chicken and Other Stories, which has recently been voted the best cookbook ever (astonishing - to him as well - because although it's good, you wonder how the voters forgot about E David, J Grigson, C Roden, etc etc etc). I hadn't made it before, and I thought it might make me feel more enthusiastic about the book (it worked). We didn't quite finish it, and the next morning, the fridge was delicious with the scent of saffron, so that I am now determined to remember to use saffron more often in my cooking.



Simon Hopkinson's saffron mash

900g floury potatoes, peeled
1 tsp saffron threads
1 large clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
200 ml milk (SH specifies creamy; I, of course, used skimmed)
200ml olive oil

Boil the potatoes. Meanwhile infuse the saffron and garlic in the warmed milk. Drain and mash the potatoes. Reheat the infusion and add the olive oil. Add the saffron to the potatoes and mix well (he suggests using an electric mixer, but I just carried on with the potato masher). Stand in a warm place for half an hour to let the saffron flavour develop.


PS just before writing this, we had homemade pizza for lunch, topped with a little tomato sauce, some anchovies, and a generous cutting of chopped parsley and chives added as the pizza came out of the oven. As I was eating it, I thought next time I might add some raisins and capers soaked in an infusion of warm water and saffron, a sort of homage to Venice and the spice route rolled into one! I also wondered about adding a little saffron into the pizza dough, but I can't help feeling that there may be a reason all the saffron / yeast recipes also include lashings of butter ...

Beetroot

This post is for my sister, who lives thousands of miles away in California, and who we don't see much. But - amazingly - she's just been over for three days, so last night I had dinner with her. At some point we started reminiscing, and we've done this so often that we now only need a couple of buzzwords to conjure up the memories. One of those buzzwords is beetroot, because we always had beetroot for school lunch on a Wednesday (what torture to give children exactly the same food each week!). The beetroot (soused in harsh malt vinegar) was accompanied by lumpy mashed potato and corned beef. When we were sent to a different school which sent us home early one day a week, we begged our mother to give us beetroot for lunch, and she did, accompanied by liver, another of our favourites.

Well I still love pickled beetroot, and so does my sister, but I much prefer the sweetness of baked beet, and I even like it raw. We often eat it, and it tastes nothing like the harsh sliced beetroot of my childhood.


Baked beetroot

Cut raw beets into chunks. I tend to use small beets, a bit bigger than a golf ball, and quarter them. Put them in a baking dish, add slithers of garlic, as many as you like, and some chopped thyme. Drizzle with oil (you don't want them sitting in a pool of oil) and mix until they are well coated. Bake in a hot oven for half an hour or so. Exact timings will obviously depend on the size of your chunks, but it's easy to tell when they're cooked, by piercing with a knife. This is good hot or cold. We eat it as a starter, with salmon, with chicken breasts & salsa verde, with lamb, or for lunch with bread and a little feta or goat's cheese.


Raw beetroot salad

Grate 4 small beetroot (c 725g). Finely chop a big bunch of coriander and of mint and add to the beet. Dress with the juice of a lemon. All this is obviously easier if you have a Magimix. Serve with 0% Greek yoghurt. I've adapted this from a recipe in Nigella Lawson's How to Eat.

What a lovely surprise ...

This week I'm taking part in a wonderful event called Euro Blogging by Post, in which bloggers send each other food parcels. It's organised by Andrew of www.spittoon.biz, who, amazingly, turns out to live down the road from me. When I got home from posting a parcel of quinces to a blogger in Austria, I found a parcel from Dagmar in Sweden on my hall table. It was like Christmas - so exciting, wondering what was in it. Dagmar has been reading my blog, so she thought of sending things which we could eat without feeling guilty ...



As you can see, there's rye crispbread, with lovely Swedish treats to put on them: smoked cod roe (in the little tubes), and herrings in mustard sauce. Now I can hear lots of English people thinking 'herrings in mustard sauce, ugh' - but they couldn't be more wrong. We ate them at my nephew's wedding in Stockholm earlier this month, and I am very keen to get a good recipe so that I can make them at home. There's also red tea flavoured with ligonberry and blueberry, which I'm looking forward to trying, and some of Dagmar's favourite sweets. AND there's a jar of homemade ligonberry jam, which I've left out of the photograph, and which I'm going to try at breakfast.

In the bottom left hand corner, there's a little packet of saffron from Dagmar's cupboard. I'm not sure what I'm going to make with it - perhaps a risotto, maybe some Cornish yeast cakes. But I'll keep you posted!

Thank you Dagmar ... you made my day.

Delicious fishcakes

I made these for supper last night, out of some leftover salmon and smoked salmon, adapting a recipe I often use for crab cakes. The salmon had been smothered in lemon zest after it was cooked, so the finished cakes were very lemony.

Mix and mash together 450g cooked salmon and smoked salmon. Add 50g Matzo meal, a quantity of chopped parsley and a little finely chopped chilli pepper. Stir together one egg, 2 tsp Dijon mustard, and a tablespoon of lemon juice. Mix this in with the fish, and leave to stand for at least half an hour. Fry in a drop of olive oil.

We ate this with a tomato salad dressed with olive oil and spring onions.

The courgettes have turned into marrows ...

... I know, I know, if you pick them daily then you get lots of little finger sized courgettes of the sort supermarkets air freight in from Kenya and sell for huge sums. The trouble is that whenever I say that I'm going to pick some courgettes, the children all groan together, and so the days go by, and the courgettes remain unpicked. The children were all out for lunch yesterday, and I could barely lift the marrow I brought in.

I peeled it, quartered it lengthways, took out the seeds (very few, so although it was big, it wasn't tough), the cut it into inch-thick chunks. I put it in a dish with olive oil, finely chopped oregano from the garden, and coriander seeds & black pepper roughly bashed with the pestle and mortar. Then I covered it in foil and baked it in a hot oven for about half and hour. Not even slightly watery; good enough for Vicky to ask for the recipe (although honestly compels me to report that her husband Edmund keeps an allotment, so I expect she has a glut of marrows too).