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).

Long silence ...

... I was rather put off my stride by a comment made to me by someone who was asking about our diet. I said we followed advice to try to eat seven portions of fruit and veg a day, and was told firmly that half the world didn't have that much food. So I've been thinking about that, too. And in the bigger picture, this is a diet which is sustainable, because the more veg you eat, the less meat you eat, and meat is the most wasteful food in terms of world resources - I can't remember the figures, but you need to grow a lot of grass and/or cereal to produce one kilo of beef. The other part of the equation here is trying to eat food that is in season, rather than food which is flown half way round the world, tasting of very little at all. And that thought leads me to the next recipe, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Cookbook, for courgettes - well, in my case, more of a marrow, since no-one picked them while we were away.

Essence of courgette

Thinly slice the courgettes, and put them in a wide-based pan with some olive oil and a little garlic. Sweat these over a very low heat until they are all collapsed and there's no water in them. They shouldn't be allowed to go brown. Bash them up a bit, and eat them hot as a veg, or room temperature on bread or toast (ie bruschetta). HFW has several other things to do with this mixture, but, as they involve cream and a lot of cheese, I am not going to post them. However, I am going to see if I can adapt them, and will keep you posted (there are going to be a lot of courgettes over the next few weeks ...).



Sweet and sour aubergine

Make a tomato sauce with onions, garlic and tomatoes - I generally make quite a bit at once, because it's useful as it is on pasta, and it is useful as a short cut in daily cooking. It's just chopping and then slow sweating for an hour or two. Meanwhile, chop the aubergine into cubes, salt them, and leave them in a colander for an hour or so. I don't always bother to do this, but it definitely means you have firmer, "meatier" pieces of aubergine in the finished dish. When you're ready, rinse and squeeze the aubergine, and put them in a pan with some olive oil and brown them. Turn the heat down and add some tomato sauce, and here you have to decide what type of dish you want to end up with - I like it to be not too tomato-ey, because I don't want it to end up like ratatouille, but Lettice prefers it with lots of tomato. So I put in quite a lot less tomato than aubergine. At the same time, add a good lot of dried mint (and it really is better here than fresh mint), some chopped parsley, some red wine vinegar and some sugar. Yesterday, with a 2 aubergine mix, I put 2tsp dried mint, 2 mugs of chopped parsley (another post-holiday glut), 3tbsp vinegar and 1tbsp of sugar. Sweat it slowly for 15-20 minutes, until the aubergines are cooked.

This is good at room temperature. And if you've got some stale bread, you can toast it, break it up, and put it in the bottom of the serving dish.

Next time I make this, I will probably put in a little crumbled dried chilli.

This recipe is adapted from Claudia Roden, and the adaptation makes use of the tomato sauce that was already in my fridge. CR starts with onions and garlic, moves on to aubergine, and then adds tinned tomato and seasonings.



I've got lots of other things to post soon, because I've been away in Sri Lanka, eating a lot of different vegetable curries, and delicious salads. I find I am less and less interested in eating meat, because vegetables offer so much more variation of taste and texture. So I am rather pleased that what is sustainable as a personal diet is also a more sustainable diet for the planet.