Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's slimming diet

I've just come in from the garden, where I was sitting in an arbour hung with scented roses as night fell. When it got too dark to read, I began to count the sounds I could hear - birds settling down for the night, the muffled roar of a distant motorbike, the last plane in the Heathrow stack, a blackbird (the only bird in the garden not in its nest) calling to his mate to share a titbit. The stars began to come out in the unclouded patches of sky. The cat jumped off my lap to start his night's hunting - time to come in.

I was reading Hugh Fearlessly Eats it All, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I'm on the first chapter, a rant against the big and vested interests of the food industry. Some of it is funny, but overall it's a little tiring to read because of the strident tone. I was beginning to get slightly fed up with it, considering skipping to the next chapter, when I came across a rant against the Atkins Diet. It ended with Hugh's slimming diet. It's funny, it's healthy, and it's good advice. Here it is in full:

Hugh's anti-Atkins diet

This is principally a diet for energy and health, not weight loss, but serious fatties will probably find the kilos fall off. By rights I should earn billions for this, as it is guaranteed to keep you well-nourished and fit for the rest of your life. But here it is, gratis, from the goodness of my happy, healthy heart:

For breakfast

Eat a bunch of fresh fruit. Then, if you're still really hungry, have a piece of toast.

Mid-morning snack

Eat more fruit. Then, if you're still really hungry, have another piece of toast.

Lunch

Eat a bunch of veg. Raw if possible. If you're still hungry, have a sandwich (but not two), or a piece of chicken, or a lump of cheese (but not both). Eat with juice or water, not Coca Cola or Fanta.

Mid-afternoon

Have another piece of fruit. If it's a bad day, have a biscuit too.

Supper

Eat whatever the hell you like. If you're actually trying to lose weight, eat whatever the hell you like, but not too much of it.


It's very good advice, especially when added to the heart-healthy stuff about not too much saturated fat - limits on cheese, butter, meat, and, above all, processed food.

Pretend fudge

I'm not a great one for food substitutes - I always could tell Stork from butter, sweetener from sugar etc etc. But when I read a recipe for pretend fudge, I thought I'd give it a go, because Lucius really likes fudge, only, of course, it's banned because it's almost all butter.

I made this for Lettice's birthday tea, and everyone liked it a lot, but, I have to warn you, no-one thought it tasted like fudge. It lacked that grainy quality, for a start. But there were quite a few people who couldn't stop eating it, and not all of them were children.

Chris calls her recipe Easy Schmeezie M&M Fudge. I couldn't make that, because I didn't have any M&Ms in the house. I couldn't even make it how she did, because there wasn't quite enough chocolate in the house, unless I broke open the chilli chocolate, but I'm the only person in the house that eats it. So mine was a bit softer than it should have been.

Melt 300g dark chocolate with the contents of a 400g can of low-fat condensed milk. Or use a bit more chocolate (Chris's proportions were 12 oz choc to 14 oz condensed milk) for a firmer result. Mix thoroughly, and pour onto a well-lined shallow tin. Cool, then cut into squares.



































Thanks, Chris!

Quidony

Do you ever do that little word puzzle on the back of the Times, by the crossword? The one where you have three definitions for an obscure word, and you have to guess which one's right?

Yesterday, one of the words was quiddany. Does it mean, a) whosoever, b) fruit jelly, c) a suspect? I so wanted it to be fruit jelly, please let it be fruit jelly ... and it was: Quiddany, a thick fruit-syrup or jelly. Originally, and properly, one made from quinces. Adaptation of the Latin cydonia. 1695: "Sloes in the form of a Quiddany, or Marmalade."

Well, it's not mentioned in Elizabeth Raffald's cookery book published in 1814, even though she gives two recipes for quince, one boiled whole, the other for what she calls quince marmalade (& not a hint of another name). So I turned to the Oxford Companion to Food, where Alan Davidson gives several different spellings, none of them the same as in that little puzzle.

Cydonia turns out to be the Latin for Kydonia, a region of Crete where a strain of quince was grown, superior to the common strythion. This must be the one we grow, because the botanical name for quince is cydonia oblonga.

Davidson says that the various names for quince paste all come from ancient classical languages: In ancient Greece, quinces were known as apples of Cydonia, mela Kudonia. The French contignac, Italian cotognata, and Greek kidonopasto along with the 17th century English words quidony or quidoniac, can be traced back to this Greek origin. The Portuguese word marmelada (from which the English word marmalade is taken) and the Spanish membrillo derive from Latin melimelum (honey apple ..).

Davidson goes on to say that all these recipes preserved the quince in honey, sometimes with the addition of vinegar and spices. The same method was also used for other fruit and - wait for it - turnips. They were all put into the honey raw, and, after long storage, softened enough to eat. Only the quinces didn't soften, they just carried on being hard, so they were cooked to a solid gel (the first use of pectin). But it was a long time before other fruits were cooked ... actually, you can see that it's a lot less trouble just putting them into the honey and waiting for them to soften. I suspect the invention of jam came when two things were discovered: that (stored) cooked fruit is more delicious than raw, and that fruit stores more reliably cooked than raw - Davidson hints at this.

It's not the quince time of year here until late summer, although our quince tree has set plenty of fruit. Claudia Roden says in Arabesque that you can buy quinces all year round in Cypriot shops, but I'd have to go to London for that (and then there'd be a lot of agonising about whether or not they'd been air-freighted). I think they must be a year-round crop in Turkey, too, because, when we were there last spring for the total solar eclipse, I ate fresh poached quince every day for breakfast. Great start to the day.

Our quince tree is getting pretty ancient, and we need to replant ... can anybody recommend any particular cultivar? There seem to be quite a few, and I don't know how to set about choosing the best.

Kohl slaw

Well, we ate the kohlrabi last night. After a week of slightly dreading it, I can't now think what all the fuss was about: the taste is utterly familiar - like a cross between white cabbage and the stem of broccoli. Quite nice, really. It just looks as if it would taste disgusting.

I decided to keep it simple, partly because there were some middle-aged carrots which needed eating up besides the slightly-past-its-best kohlrabi. So kohl slaw. I wanted to keep the texture of the kohlrabi, so I cut it into matchsticks, then mixed it with fine chunks of carrot grated on the largest blade (more k than c).


















I made a breakthrough with coleslaws some years ago when I realised you don't have to dress them with mayonnaise. They taste much much better with some kind of vinaigrette - it's not just a heart-health thing. The dressing I made yesterday had lemon juice (and a little of the finely grated zest, too), grainy mustard, a speck of salt and a smaller speck of honey, all mixed up with some olive oil.

Next time there's a kohlrabi in the veg box, I'm going to make a gratin. I'd be happy to see one in the box, but, I have to say, I wouldn't go out of my way to buy one. And I probably wouldn't buy one in a shop if there was some other member of the cabbage family nearby. Do you think the reason they always turn up in a veg box is because they are easy to grow? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that question!


PS Thank you Holler, Shauna, The Cottage Smallholder, Ian, Amanda, Freya and Paul for all your suggestions about what to do with the cabbage monster!

Kohlrabi ...

Our weekly veg box from Riverford is a lovely, life-enhancing way to shop ... each week, you get a selection of what's in season in the UK, plus a few oddments from further afield (none of which has jet lag). The selection changes slowly as the weeks roll by, which makes it hard for the cook to get bored of cooking the same old stuff. Everything really does taste better - carrots, in particular, have never tasted carrotier, and people often ask me for the recipe when all I've done is boiled them and served them plain. Another advantage is that there's always something to eat in the house, however long it is since I've visited a shop.

I've only had two veg box problems: the wet garlic that looked just like spring onions (truly disgusting raw in a salad) - and this week: what ON EARTH am I going to do with the kohlrabi? As you can see from the photo, I've been putting it off all week, and it's no longer in the first flush of youth ... but I'll have to cook it tomorrow, because the next box comes on Tuesday.

Any suggestions gratefully received!


PS this is another post for Heart of the Matter 4, the blog for hsaring heart-healthy recipes and ideas - this month's theme is vegetables, entries by 22nd June, email them to me at joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk with the permalink ..

Pesto mash

We get through a lot of potatoes in this house. When we were engaged, several members of the family took me aside to tell me that Lucius didn't consider a meal to be a proper meal unless there were hot potatoes. This makes for a lot of last-minute work at a buffet party.

The problem is that everyone likes them done differently. Lucius likes plain boiled best, and roast potatoes. The boys also like them roasted. So do the girls, but they like little new potatoes in their skins cooked in olive oil with a couple of anchovies chucked in. I like those too. Eleanor likes mashed potato best, which makes Lucius pull a face, as he thinks it's a waste of a good potato. Lettice likes mash, too, but she likes it to have some sort of flavouring - olive oil, or grainy mustard, or pesto. I'd happily do without potatoes, although I do like the occasional bit of mash.

This week, Eleanor finished her final piece of work for her degree (drama and education), and came home to flop. So dinner was roast chicken with mash ("What, no roast potatoes?" said Alfred, indignantly). Plain mash. I make it with a good lot of skimmed milk, and the result is creamy, if that doesn't sound like a contradiction in terms.

I always make too much. On purpose. It's so useful to have cold mash in the fridge - to top a pie, to make farls of potato cake to eat for breakfast with bacon, or just to reheat. It can be a little forlorn, reheated mashed potato. But not if you mix it with pesto ... a great dollop of it, so that the mash is a lovely pea green. Then cover the dish, and put it in a hot oven for 20-30 minutes. Bliss.























I've posted this as an entry for Heart of the Matter 4, this time on the theme of vegetables. Also because a couple of people asked me what to do with pesto sauce once you'd made it. And because I wanted to say that the pesto I made this week is the most delicious I've ever tasted - because I've only ever eaten bought stuff before. Never again, if I can help it!

Heart of the Matter 4 - vegetables

Time to announce the fourth round of Heart of the Matter, and this month's theme is vegetables. They are the basis of the healthy eating pyramid. So just about the easiest thing you can do to help your heart's health is to eat more vegetables ... five a day, seven a day ... you know the drill! The trouble is, once you start to eat more veg, you can quickly get bored of them plain steamed / boiled - and, of course, for many people in the northern hemisphere, vegetables are often served smothered in butter, which is a definite no-no if you're at all concerned about your cholesterol.

So, we're looking for fresh ideas, new ways with vegetables - either as a side dish, or a main course. Lots of the so-called superfoods are vegetables. Quick and easy, or elaborate and sophisticated - you decide ... just so long as the result is heart-healthy. This is how my fellow HotM eventer Ilva at Lucullian Delights explained HotM last month:

If you feel uncertain about ingredients, check out Joanna's list here or the links here on the Heart of the Matter blog. Remember that you are doing yourself a great favour when you eat heart healthy food and if you participate in the HotM you do the whole community a favour because all the roundups are collected here at the HotM blog so that it in the end becomes a permanent recipe base to go when you need inspiration for your heart healthy cooking.


This time the roundup will be at Joanna's Food (as well as at Heart of the Matter of course) so please send the link to your entry to me joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk, the last day is 22nd June, please remember to link here and that we want only one-event entries.

Any thoughts?

A truly innocent smoothie

Those funny folk at Innocent smoothie are craftier than they let on. This morning, for breakfast, I followed their recipe for strawberry and banana smoothie ... it was delicious, but not quite as delicious as the stuff that comes out of the box - more apple-y, pippier, a lighter shade of red. It just happened that Alfred had cunningly sneaked an Innocent carton into my shopping trolley yesterday without my noticing, so we looked up the ingredients - not a hint of apple, 76 pressed grapes instead. Red ones, at a guess.

Strawberry and banana smoothie for two or three

One banana
14 strawberries (well, all right, a small punnet of strawberries)
the juice of an orange (mine came out of a carton)
enough apple juice to get to the thickness (or rather, thinness) you want

Whizz all this in your blender.


















As you can see from the photograph, I used apple juice from a bottle. It comes from Waterperry Gardens, one of my favourite places in Oxfordshire. I buy our apple juice there to give me a regular excuse to visit. It's as close as you can get to drinking an apple, as it comes from named varieties of apple, which means you can choose exactly how your juice tastes. Today's was Winter King, which is a little on the sweet side for my taste - I like the really sharp juices.

The smoothie was delicious, but the children said that Innocent's version was better, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Somehow, in their processing, they scrunch up the strawberry seeds. As you know, I'm not the biggest fan of industrially processed food, but I think that I'm prepared to make an (occasional) exception for Innocent. Or does that mean I've been "had" by their extremely slick marketing men?

Pesto

Look, I know you all know how to make pesto, but when I began this blog, it was so that I could easily find the recipes I use all the time - so this post is for me. Except there's one thing - can those of you that have been making pesto longer than I have tell me whether it freezes well?

I ordered a 200g bag of basil from my organic box this week, and it came yesterday - a huge bag of fragrant leaves. The recipe was on the bag ... only what blogger do you know follows a recipe exactly? This is not quite what was on the bag - quick, delicious, and in my fridge, because I don't want to waste it if it doesn't freeze well.

6 cloves garlic
200g pine kernels
200g freshly grated parmesan
200g basil
olive oil - a good lot
salt and pepper (at the end)

Whizz everything except the salt, adding the oil in a drizzle until you get a smooth creamy liquid. Add the salt and pepper when you've got the consistency you want.

You could do this in a mortar, if you wanted to spend a little time pounding ... a job for sitting in the sun, I think.

Mine's in a lovely jar, and I covered it with a little oil to stop it discolouring.



PS We ate some for supper, the little bit I couldn't fit into the jar, neat, to accompany our vegetables. Alfred thought it was slightly too cheesy, Lucius and Lettice said it was perfect. I thought it was a beautiful shade of green, and that made Alfred laugh.

Cakes for cricket tea

Harpsden Cricket Club have a fixture tomorrow - yes, that's right, tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon. It's against a touring club, and most of our players will be schoolboys (it's half term). Alfred was asked to play, but he ducked out of it, as he's pulled a thigh muscle, and he wants to be in peak condition for a game of house cricket at school next Monday. So, instead, he and I are making and serving cricket teas. I've made a mountain of cakes, and, as my freezer is already full, I'll be stuck if this game is rained off.

General instructions for cricket teas at Harpsden are to be found on our club blog, and they could well be useful for anyone having to do the teas for their club. We take it in turns to produce teas, and so there are huge variations in what's on offer - although we all stick to the format of sandwiches and cakes.

So far, I've never gone out and bought cakes - I like baking, and don't get the chance to make cake very often, for fairly obvious reasons: all that butter, all those eggs. Not the sort of thing we eat often any more in this house, although we certainly do on high days and holidays.

I always make Nigella's dense chocolate loaf cake, it's delicious, easy, and someone always asks for the recipe. Today I've also made a banana cake, because we seem to have quite a few that no-one's eating, and because it's Alfred's favourite. It's another Nigella recipe, from How to be a Domestic Goddess, the first time I've tried it. It's not so quick as my normal recipe, and I'll report back on whether it was worth the extra trouble.


Banana cake

Soak 100g sultanas in a little hot water. Melt 125g Flora and mix in 150g soft brown sugar. Put this in a big bowl (I used my Kenwood, but it would be easy to mix by hand), and beat in two eggs, then 300g banana (ie 4 small or 3 medium bananas). Once this is all mushed together, add 175g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp bicarb. (You can mix this up beforehand, OR you can put the flour in a heap on your mix, add the BP and bicarb and mix it in with the flour before beating the whole contents of the bowl. If you see what I mean.)

Pour into one lined 2lb loaf tin or two lined 1lb loaf tins (which is what I used), and bake at 170C for 1 1/4hr or 40 minutes, depending on size.

Cool in the tin. Mine looks just as good as the one in the book - but it's easy if you use that sort of liner.

The crab apple tree

This is the sad view from the kitchen this morning. It's been raining steadily and hard for at least 24 hours, there was quite a wind last night - and this morning, the crab apple was down. Twice before, when it was young, it was blown over by the wind, even though it's in quite a sheltered part of the garden. Then it was younger, and we pulled it back up. This time, it's too heavy to move, although the four of us tried. This spring it was particularly beautiful, its lovely single white blossom scenting the air a surprising distance. I shall miss it, probably more than any other tree in the garden.























My mother-in-law planted the crab 25 years ago, to provide shade for the garden table. We've eaten hundreds of meals under its branches, drunk numerous cups of coffee, glasses of wine. I once tried to grow a Mme Alfred Carriere rose up it, but it got cut by the mower and didn't thrive. The first photograph I ever had of Lucius shows him standing in front of it in his socks, ice bucket in hand. I feel pretty sentimental about that tree.


















Now, Lucius, who dug the hole and put the tree in it, who pulled it up when it blew down, is cutting it up with a chainsaw and Alfred is taking away all the pieces. I hope that a little log of it can be saved to turn a little piece of treen to use as a paperweight.




















So, no crab apple jelly this year. Time for change. And we'll have the pleasure of choosing another tree to shade our summers.

Pizza for lunch

Ultimate do-it-yourself convenience food: mix the dough whilst clearing up breakfast, put the tomato sauce on while making a mid-morning cup of coffee, get your son to roll out the dough whilst fishing toppings out of the fridge. Each task took between two and five minutes. This is something we'll be eating again over half term.

We used Doves Farm pasta flour. I thought it was delicious, but Alfred said it had a strong taste, and would prefer it if it didn't. I didn't use much salt, which was fine for me and Lucius, because we had anchovy, but I suspect less good for Lettice and Alfred.

We used virtually all the dough for four pizzas, which was slightly too much. Next time, with that amount of dough for four, I'd pull off a chunk to make dough balls ... we'll be doing that in a day or two, so watch out for the post.

Pizza dough

Mix 600g flour with two teaspoons of dried yeast (out of a tin), a little salt, a slurp of olive oil, and just over 300ml of warm water. Knead, either by hand, or in a machine (I used the Kenwood this morning). Leave in a warm place until you're ready. The minimum would be half an hour, if you were really in a hurry. I left ours for a couple of hours. If I was making it in the morning for an evening meal, then I'd have put it in the fridge until an hour or so before I wanted to use it. In other words, this is a moveable feast, and bread dough is very forgiving. Convenient.

When you're ready, cut the dough into five or six portions, shape into balls, and then roll them out flat on a floured surface. You can use a rolling pin if you like, but the pizza chef at Pizzeria Mama Mia in South Parade, Oxford (the acme of pizza parlours) uses the magic of his fingers, flying through the air.

Pizza toppings

You don't need me to give you a lecture on this subject. But I would like to say that I think less is more with a pizza, definitely better than huge quantities, especially when it comes to tomato sauce. I made a sauce out of five or six fresh tomatoes flavoured with a little red wine vinegar, some salt and sugar, and a pinch of dried herbes de Provence, cooked down for half an hour or so. Everyone added their own favourites:










Lucius had anchovies, a few mushrooms, mozzarella (the unappetising-looking sort that comes in a block, which is fine for cooking), an egg added for the last three minutes of cooking.










Alfred had salami, mushroom and cheese.










Lettice had mushroom and cheese.

I had sultanas (soak them for a couple of minutes in boiling water), capers and pine-nuts, plus the last of the cheese (I don't normally, but I have - alas - that mother's tendency to eat up the leftovers).










These need to go in the hottest oven you can manage. If yours will go as high as 250C, then they'll take five minutes. Mine doesn't (whatever it says), so they take six. This summer Alfred and I are going to build a pizza oven, so that we can have the pleasure of added wood ash.

Abby at eat the right stuff is organising an event called vegetables, beautiful vegetables, to celebrate National Vegetarian Week (ends today) - and this is the closest I can get to vegetarian in this house of keen meat and fish eaters. But at least we tried!

A seasonal dinner

Half term started yesterday, so Lettice and I went to the supermarket to buy something good for dinner. Alfred was out, so it was easy to choose fish and chips (Alfred is not too keen on fish, although he's very fond of chips). Lettice wanted monkfish, but there wasn't any, and the only other fish on the counter that didn't look tired was sea trout. That reminded me that Julia at A Slice of Cherry Pie is running a seasonal food event called In the Bag, this month using asparagus, sea trout, and spring onions. Well, we don't need much excuse to eat English asparagus in this house, and there were a few really big spring onions in this week's Riverford veg box.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty hazy about the seasonality of fish and meat. Veg, I can manage, if it's European. But fish? It's become a year-round commodity in our supermarkets, like avocados. And as I have no hope of growing an avo, I have no idea when they ripen around the world - although I have noticed that there are times of the year when it's impossible to buy a decent one, which, I suppose, means that they are out of season. Can anyone from outside Europe give me some information on this?

Simple seasonal supper

I boiled the asparagus, and we dipped it into oil - much nicer than melted butter, also less trouble for the cook. I bought some hazelnut oil at the Henley Food Fair, delicious but very strong, so we diluted it 50/50 with olive oil, leaving a hint of hazel.

I always cooked fillet of oily fish in the same way - smother it in grated lemon zest and coarsely ground pepper, drizzle it with oil, and cook it in a hot oven until it's just done, then leave it to rest for a few minutes before serving. Chips - well, I think it's hard to beat McCains oven chips with less than 5% sunflower oil. It's almost the only processed food I buy these days: partly idleness, partly the feeling that the cook deserves a few breaks here and there, and partly the certainty that I couldn't make them palatable without using a great deal more oil. And a green salad. Oh, and I forgot to put in the spring onions.

Then raspberries. From Sussex. I know - the whole English countryside is being covered in plastic. But they don't need heat, they're not flown in, nor are they trucked in from Spain. Pushing the limits of seasonality, but better than many other alternatives. Eaten, one at a time, from a communal bowl, so much flavour that there was no need for anything on them.

As I said, it hardly merits a post. And yet this simple supper was about as delicious as it gets.

Citric v tartaric acid in elderflower ..

My sister-in-law Kirsty says you can use tartaric acid as well as citric acid when you are making elderflower drinks, and I began to wonder what is the difference between them. It seems very feeble to be aiming at a healthy diet, and then not knowing anything about additives you choose to put in your food.

Tartaric acid (E334), like citric acid (E330), stops bacteria in its tracks, and they both also give a tart flavour to the finished drink.

I'm not any kind of scientist, so anything much deeper than this goes right over my head ... so much so that, after reading through the various links, I'm making a decision that would probably disgrace a primary school child - I am going to use tartaric acid rather than citric acid, because it seems to be used exclusively as a food and drink additive (it's used in bread- and wine-making), whereas citric acid finds its way into cleaning materials and shampoo, and is apparently the ingredient that does the damage to hair in Sun-in (have your children ever turned their hair green with the Sun-in / swimming combination? you haven't lived!)

The Food Additives and Ingredients Association website says it is produced in collaboration with York University, so I feel inclined to trust it as a starting point. The British Soft Drinks Association (yes, really) gives an overview explanation of the differences. But I'm not sure how much I trust it, because the funding for such a beautiful website probably comes direct from the soft drink giants, so here's Wikipedia on citric acid and tartaric acid.

They are both obviously tried and tested additives, so I suppose in the end, the best guide is taste, with ease of availability coming a pretty close second!

Elderflower syrup

This is the one you dilute with water. It keeps for ages in the fridge - I've still got a little of the last jar from last year, and it's as good as it was on day one. Some people put it into plastic bottles and freeze them, but my friend Vivien says that the nasties in the plastic leach into the liquid, so perhaps it's not such a good idea.

Whatever, this is simple to do, the sort of thing that makes you feel tremendously clever and together, when actually you haven't done very much at all. The effect has been slightly lessened by the sort you can buy in the supermarket, which really does taste like home-made, because it is home-made, but on a much much larger scale. But it's still worth doing, if only to save money (it's amazing what they charge for a bit of flavoured sugar water!).


















I've been making it for years, using a recipe that's been in my manuscript recipe book for as long as I can remember, so it's in imperial measures, rather than metric. The exact quantities don't much matter, because all that sugar and the citric acid keep it all sweet (in both senses) for years.

But when you've made it, don't just limit yourself to diluting it with water to drink on a hot day ... you can use the syrup to flavour gooseberries (just coming in to season), or apricots (the first from Sicily are just appearing in the shops now), or to make a sorbet.

Elderflower syrup

25 elderflowers, stalks removed
1kg sugar
2 lemons, grated, squeezed, and cut up
50g citric acid
1 litre cold, previously boiled, water

Put all the ingredients into a bowl in a cool place for two days. Stir occasionally. Or not. Strain and bottle. Dilute to drink. Keep in the fridge.

If you're impatient (and who isn't?), there's an alternative way to do this:

Quick elderflower syrup

Stir 500g sugar into a litre of water, with the juice of two lemons. Boil for about a minute, then add 10 elderflower heads. Remove from the heat, cover the pan, and leave to cool. When it's completely cold, bottle and strain.

The only reason I don't use this recipe (although I have made it in the past) is because it's a little more of a palaver.

Just make sure that the flowers are completely white - any brown and the whole batch will taste filthy (Sarah Raven says it makes it taste like cat's pee ... I wouldn't know!).

Elderflower champagne

No, it's not champagne, and it's not alcoholic, but I don't know what else to call it, because elderflower champagne is its traditional name. And if there's a cross French wine grower reading this, well, think of it as a homage from England - remembering that more than half the fizz grown in Champagne is drunk in England.

Elderflower champagne is completely different to the elderflower cordial which you can make - or, these days, buy in a supermarket. It's cloudy, naturally fizzy (perhaps there are natural yeasts at work, I'm not sure), and not unlike the ginger beer we used to make as children with a starter that quickly got out of hand as it doubled every time you made it (only without the ginger!).

My mother-in-law used to make this delicious drink every summer, in an explosion of sticky bottles. I make it once in a blue moon - I don't know why I don't make it more often, because it's very little trouble, and very delicious. I suppose it's all that collecting bottles for weeks beforehand.

Anyway, I'm giving you the recipe now, even though I haven't started on it, because the elderflower are coming into bloom all over the place. I'll dig out the recipe for elderflower cordial and post it before the season is over - although as you can see from the photograph, it's only just getting under way here.

Elderflower champagne

3 large heads of elderflower
1 lemon
750g white sugar
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
4.8 litres cold water

1 large plastic bucket

Pick three large heads of flower in full bloom. Make sure they're not going over (you can tell by the browning of the petals), otherwise the finished result will taste nasty and not at all flowery. Peel a lemon, making sure not to include any pith. Squeeze the juice. Put the flowers, the lemon peel and juice into a large clean plastic bucket, together with the sugar, wine vinegar, and water. Stir vigorously.

Leave for about 24 hours, then strain and pour into strong screw-topped bottles - fizzy water bottles are ideal. Don't fill them to the top. Leave in a cool place for two weeks. You may find one or two of the bottles explode; there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but it means you need to put them somewhere that the resulting sticky mess is easy to clear up. I think they're less likely to explode the cooler they are, and you can take preventive measures by just slightly opening the bottles from time to time to let off the gas - it's easier to see if this is necessary when you're using plastic bottles.

Drink cold. Great for a party on a hot summer's day. Oh, and by the way, it doesn't keep long - although it tends to disappear pretty fast.

Where did all that oatmeal go?

The everyday alchemy of baking ... you start with huge flakes of rolled oats ...























... and end up, with no real effort on your part, with a delicious close-textured loaf, not a sign of the porridge ...


















... and delicious toasted!


















Thank you Tanna ... thank you so much



PS Have a look at the Old Foodie's post about how we all fell for horrible mass-produced plastic bread ... how did we do it to ourselves? Why are we still doing it? Is it so very hard to bake a loaf?

Oatmeal bread

I think oatmeal bread must be more of a staple for Americans than it is here in the south of England. I'd vaguely heard of it, but never tasted it, and everyone I mentioned it to was intrigued. Yet when you read American blogs, they make it sound like an everyday event - indeed Tanna at My Kitchen in Half Cups even called hers ordinary everyday oatmeal bread extraordinary. She's right about the extraordinary: it's not like making any other loaf I've ever cooked! And it's good, too ... although, in truth, I'm not sure it's going to get everyday status in this kitchen. But it's good enough to make again (which I'm doing right now), it makes great toast, and the last crumbs were really good in my stuffed butternut the other night.

Tanna's recipe is here, but, as usual, I've changed it a bit, partly to simplify it, but mainly because I'm too impatient to do all that waiting until things cool completely, or are rested for the full afternoon nap. Also, I began to make it before I realised I didn't have the right kind of flour, so my first batch was made with spelt flour, all five cups. Very good, although the oats somehow made the spelt taste speltier (and it's strong-tasting to start with, I think you can probably have too much of a good thing). This time, I'm using Italian 00 pasta flour and wholemeal, 50/50, in the hope that we'll get more of an oaty flavour.

Unusually, I haven't translated the American cups into weights; instead, I used an ordinary sized mug, which is very slightly larger than an American cup measure, which is 250ml.

The most amazing thing is that there's no sign of the oatmeal in the finished result, which is a close-crumbed loaf. You soak the oats, and, after a while, they look just like porridge, the lumpy sort we used to get at my convent boarding school in the 60s. But there's no sign of an oat or even a lump in the finished result - the alchemy of yeast and heat, an everyday kitchen miracle.

Oatmeal bread, 2 loaves

* In a large bowl, measure out one cup of rolled oats. Pour on two cups of boiling water. Cover and leave to cool. It doesn't much matter if it's still a bit warm when you move on to the next step, although it is supposed to be completely cold.

* Add two tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon of dried yeast (Tanna rightly says it doesn't much matter what sort you use - I used the sort that comes in a tin, which is more normally mixed with warm water before being added to the flour). Stir thoroughly.

* Stir in two mugs of white flour. The mix will be very dry. Cover the bowl with a plate, and leave in a warm place for half an hour or more to rest.

* Mix half a mug of warm water, a little honey, some salt, and stir this into the bowl. Then add two mugs of wholemeal flour. The mix will be very sticky. (At this point Tanna also puts in flax seeds, and I put sesame and sunflower seeds the first time, none at all in today's batch.)

* Measure out another mug of flour, either white or wholemeal, and knead it into the bread. Tanna says to knead for 15-20 minutes, but I found five was enough. I think this would be a good dough to try the technique of repeatedly giving the dough a couple of turns then leaving it for 10 minutes (if you've never done that, do try, because it's amazing how the dough seems to knead itself, given time).

* When the dough is springy, cover it (you could put it in the bowl with the plate, or you could leave it in a ball on the worktop covered with a floured teacloth). Leave it for an hour or so - more or less, this is forgiving dough - partly, I think, because there's a lot of yeast in it.

* Heat your oven to 220C

* Divide the dough in two, shape the loaves and put them into two 2lb loaf tins. Tanna says to slash them, but, first time, I did this and watched the dough collapse like a souffle, so I'm not about to make the same mistake. This time, I've put them in the tins, slashed one immediately, before leaving them to rise, and left the other whole.

* Leave to rise - hard to give a time, it depends on how warm or cool your kitchen is (and you could slow this part right down by putting the dough into the fridge, although you'd need to bring it back up to room temperature before putting into the oven).

* Bake for 35-40 minutes.

* I'm intrigued by Tanna's comment that the bread ready when it measures 200-211F on a thermometer - but I think she uses the "hollow thump" method that breadmakers all over the world find perfectly reliable.



Tanna posted this recipe as homage to her mother; for me, it's homage to the web ... I would never have tried making bread with rolled oats if I'd found it in a book - this recipe is part of the wonderful on-going interactive conversation with like-minded cooks across the world that is my daily experience of food-blogging.

The scent of these sweet peas is almost overpowering

These lovely sweet peas were planted last year, and seeded themselves. They were in flower before I had planted out any of the seedlings I raised this year ... now they are in full flower. Matucana, aka Cupani's original, the mother of all sweet peas - and obviously tough as old boots, as well as being the most beguiling and sweetly scented of them all!

Stuffed butternut

This is that moment of the year that kitchen gardeners call the hungry gap - winter crops are just about over, but the summer crops haven't yet come through. And it's the moment of the year when subscribers to veg box schemes are most tempted to bunk off and buy something airfreighted from the supermarket.

Here, we've still got quite a few squashes to get through, so yesterday's supper was stuffed butternut. This sort of cooking is easy if you're free with the cheese, slightly harder when you're cutting right down on saturated fat. Regular readers of this blog will know that I often use anchovy instead of cheese, because it imparts the right savoury note without any hint of fishiness (and if you've never tried it, or think you don't like anchovy, I urge you to give it one go ... it's unlikely to be the last). The salty herby stuffing here contrasts with the sweetness of the baked butternut.

Stuffed butternut for 2

Halve the butternut, clean out the seeds and strings, brush with a little olive oil and bake in a hot oven for half an hour, until cooked through but not browned.
















Meanwhile, peel and chop two onions, and sweat them slowly in some olive oil. Towards the end of the cooking time, add a little chopped thyme, and three anchovies. When the anchovies have melted, take the mix off the heat.
















Meanwhile blitz some bread into soft crumbs. You will need to end up with roughly the same volume as the onion mix, so 3-5 slices (cut off the crusts), depending on the size of your loaf. Use whatever bread you've got (I'm assuming it's not a Mother's Pride type sliced loaf) - I used a homemade oatmeal loaf I will blog about next week, the first bread I've made for weeks. Mix the crumbs into the onion.
















At this point, you need to make the stuffing all stick together. You could use lightly beaten egg white, if you were being very strict about the saturated fat in your diet. Or a whole egg. Or you could add a little cheese - unusually, I had some in the fridge, so that's what I used. It was the end of a box of Philadelphia extra light, something I don't normally buy (I'm not very keen on "slimming" products - would you keep locust bean gum or carrageenan in your kitchen? That's what was in the Philly). I wasn't sure if it would cook okay, but it did. If it hadn't been there, the plan was to use 0% yoghurt, stabilised with cornflour (at the rate of 1 tablespoon cornflour to one cup of yog).
















Mix it all up, put the stuffing in the cavities, drizzle with a little olive oil, and bake in a hot oven for half an hour. Supper sorted. You could bake the pumpkin ahead; you could even prepare the whole dish ahead. Easy, delicious, heart-healthy food.

As we were eating it, it occurred to me that you could use oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs ... if you wanted to do that, you'd need to soak some in boiling water until they were cold (around an hour). Oats are particularly heart-healthy food, with the advantage of being a great deal cheaper than more fashionable, faddier superfoods.

This is my entry for Waiter there's something in my .. hosted this month by Jeanne at Cook Sister!