Delhi belly

So – I’m back from the wedding in Delhi. I made a horrible mistake while eating in India – I had some salad. It appears the salad was washed in something a bit more . . . natural than what comes out of the tap in Cambridgeshire. My stomach has spent the last few days trying bodily to escape from its housing, and as of this moment is making interesting treacly noises. As a result, you’re not going to get as food-centric a post as usual, because I’m finding food a bit difficult to contemplate right now.

Food plays an important role in the various Hindu wedding ceremonies we took part in over the last week, quite apart from providing necessary nibbles at all the parties that these involved. This meant that I ended up in a New Delhi branch of Pizza Express, of all places, singing karaoke Eagles in duet with my father-in-law over slices of Veneziana pizza on Thursday night. (I did not photograph this. You all know what pizza looks like.)

Friday lunchtime saw a ceremony welcoming the groom and his family to the bride’s family. We sat with the groom (Mr Weasel’s cousin) on the marble floor of a hotel room, where a priest and the elders of the bride’s family witnessed his intention to marry the bride – apparently this served as a kind of certification in the days before codified marriage licences. He was presented with symbolic gifts, including a silver coin for prosperity and a coconut clad in a close-fitting silver casket for fertility. He was showered with rice to symbolise nourishment, and ghee (clarified butter) was burned in a small lamp to feed the sacred fire.

Fresh flowers, symbolising beauty, were scattered and the members of the party were given a vermillion bindhi (dab on the forehead) and a piece of mauli (holy red thread) around the wrist as blessings. The men’s bindhis had a couple of grains of rice pressed into the damp vermillion for fertility. Halwa (crushed nut sweets) were also handed around as part of the ceremony, gilded with edible silver foil.

That evening, we were invited to the mehndi ceremony, where the hands of female guests were painted with henna, which stains the skin. A man rubbed my hands with citronella oil and piped henna onto my palms using a paper cone like a tiny icing bag. The patterns on my hands eventually turned a dark red, and are only starting to wear off a little at the fingertips now, four days later. The patterns are merely decorative and don’t symbolise anything, although the bride’s patterns include the initials of her groom, and it’s said that the darker the pattern, the greater her mother-in-law’s love. (A cousin of the bride suggested rinsing my hands in lime juice and sugar to deepen the colour – a South African friend who had mendhi at her own wedding swears by daily application of Vaseline to keep the colour dark for longer. I’ve done both.) A buffet of curries and the fatal salad were served to the guests – I’ll write more about the food tomorrow when my stomach and my the food I’m writing about don’t seem quite so viscerally linked.

More food symbolism came into play on the day of the main ceremony, where handfuls of rice were kept at the ready. The groom rode a white horse (a remarkably placid horse, given all the fireworks and flash photography), followed by a very well-dressed brass band and men carrying glowing lamps. My sister-in-law, as the nearest female relative of his generation, threw turmeric and rice on him, and then threw more sweets and some rupee coins into the road beneath the feet of the horse, to banish evil spirits. His family and members of the party danced in front of the horse, keeping him from leaving the place where his new wife was waiting.

Flowers were everywhere. Darkly-scented Persian damask rose petals were fired from firework drums, the crowd threw more rose and marigold petals, all the guests wore marigold garlands, and the stage and bowers where different parts of the evening’s ceremony were to take place were strung with thousands of stephanotis blossoms.

The groom was welcomed into a pavilion by the bride’s female relatives, and painted with a new bindhi. He was joined on a throne on a platform by his bride, and they exchanged rose and stephanotis garlands to cheering from the crowd. They then went to a smaller canopied area, where the marriage was blessed, and where they walked seven times around a sacred flame.

We’ll get back to serious discussion of curry tomorrow, when my stomach has settled enough to contemplate it. India was truly remarkable; we made some new friends and learned plenty of new things. In the meantime, I’m feeling enormously privileged to have been to this really remarkable wedding, and wondering whether it would be practical to marry my husband again so we get to play in all the flowers.

Food Court, Oriental City, Edgware

*Update – Oriental City is threatened with closure. For more details and what you can do to help, see this post.*

Edgware. Those who know London will not be moved to thoughts of big white plates glistening with chef-ish morsels when they read that word. They’ll think about the the Edgware Road in NW9 as it passes through Barnet and its artery-clogging choice of dodgy kebab shops and the now, sadly, rebranded Munchy Burger, whose logo used to be an anthropomorphic burger with sinister, rolling olive eyes and a lolling tongue made of cheese.

First impressions can be deceptive – Edgware is not all threatening burgers and ancient doner kebab. Hidden about 300m from Colindale tube station, behind a branch of Asda, two car parks and a Mercedes showroom, is a giant Malaysian mall which appears to have been transported wholesale, Star Trek style, from somewhere in deepest Kuala Lumpur. There are shops selling manga toilet paper holders, a place where you can buy an antique Chinese kang to sleep on and a porcelain monkey with LEDs in its nostrils, bonsai shops, a harshly-lit shop selling mysterious pieces of plastic with Japanese lettering, a live lobster emporium . . . and a proper Malaysian hawker centre, or food court, where you can pretend you’re on holiday for the afternoon and eat accordingly.

You enter the scrimmage of tables, hang around until you can find the seats you want, and then order as many or as few dishes you like from any of the twenty-odd Malaysian, Tamil, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese stalls clustered around them. On ordering and paying, you will be given a ticket with a number on. When your number flashes, your meal is ready. We went with plenty of change in our pockets and a large appetite.

Today we decided to concentrate on Vietnamese food from a stall on the mall side of the food court, along with some Chinese favourites from the roast meats stall pictured at the top of this post. This is a good place to take children. It is important that they realise that the the undifferentiated chunk of brown stuff on their plate was at one point a duck with a hook in its neck.

About £10 a head is enough to eat yourself silly here. I got some cha gio – the Vietnamese crispy spring roll, sometimes called nems. These are, to my taste, pretty superior to the Chinese variety. Their skins are made from a kind of rice paper, and their fillings include the glass noodles I cooked with the other day, with crabmeat, pork, carrot, different mushrooms, beansprouts, shallots and nam pla, that salty, fermented fish sauce which is used in much of South East Asia instead of soy. It is savoury and salty, and not fishy. I bought some of the rice paper skins in a Vietnamese supermarket in Paris a while ago – these are time-consuming but not difficult to make at home. (Another thing to add to the list for future posts.)

The cha gio are fried in a wok until crisp, and served with lettuce and mint leaves. (The mint in the picture above is Thai mint, a tender and sweet leaf which doesn’t grow very readily here in freezing England. When making these at home, I use whatever mint comes to hand from the garden.) A lettuce leaf and some mint are wrapped around the crisp little rolls, the whole ensemble is dipped into nuoc cham, a sauce made from nam pla, sugar, chili and lime. The rice paper wrappers, once fried, are crisp and chewy all at once, and the taste reminds me to ask Mr Weasel to bury me with a bottle of nam pla in order that I’m completely happy in heaven.

I needed something else to dip into this stuff – Banh Xeo, a kind of rice-flour and egg cross between an omelette and a pancake, flavoured with turmeric and filled with crisp beansprouts, prawns and marinaded pork. This too is served with lettuce and herbs to wrap and dip. The plate-sized disc (whose name, charmingly, means ‘happy pancake’) is fried in a hot wok until crisp, and folded gently around the filling. This one wasn’t the best I’ve had from this stall (the best was sublime, and I’m going to keep trying until they do it again); this pancake was a little wet and more oily than usual. Perhaps the wok wasn’t hot enough. It was still pretty darn good, and now nestles somewhere just to the left of my liver.

Mr Weasel opted for Bo Luc Lac (Shaking Beef), a lean, fried, steak dish served with a sweet, soy-based, garlicky sauce. This is served on a bed of Vietnamese salad which is made from mooli and carrot, in a mild, sweetened, rice vinegar, and Chinese leaves. We’re always amazed at the quality of the meat here – this dish was made with a gloriously tender piece of fillet steak.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Delhi for a family wedding, which promises to be larded with squishy, sweet Indian things. If the hotel’s promised broadband turns out to work, I’ll be updating on the hoof. I am equipped with a suitcase full of medication for every conceivable stomach upset – I hope I don’t need any of it.

Dim sum at Taipan, Milton Keynes

Forget paper, gunpowder, tea and umbrellas. China’s greatest contribution to my personal culture is dim sum, a meal traditionally eaten for brunch. It’s made up of an array of tiny dishes of little stuffed buns, fried morsels and steamed goodies, all artfully presented, perfectly delicious and the optimum size to pop effortlessly into a lazy weekend mouth.

Dim sum translates from the Cantonese as “to touch the heart”. For us it’s always something best shared and enjoyed with friends and family. This weekend, we went to Taipan, an excellent restaurant located surprisingly in the jungle of concrete and traffic controls that is Milton Keynes. The owner informs me that their new chef is presently doing something very wonderful in the evenings with garoupa and other fish considered delicacies in Hong Kong but relatively unheard of here – I’ll have to pop back in in a few weeks to check it out.

We rolled up with my parents, who live nearby enough that we can pretend we’re not driving fifty miles just for lunch, and set about the dim sum menu (presented here as a list of numbers, menu items and boxes to tick; three or so dishes per head should be sufficient, but we usually seem to tick more) with gusto. We then asked the manager if we could have the black bean crab (not dim sum, but an evening restaurant dish) as well. It’s an excellent time of year for crab, and the one which arrived at our table, steamed, segmented by the chef and stir-fried in a glossy black bean and pepper sauce was full of rich red roe, tasting of the sea. The sweet meat came away from the claws and legs we cracked open cleanly, with a minimum of the slightly revolting sucking which everyone in my family seems to start doing the moment we think nobody’s looking. We puddled the meat in the sauce.

Dumplings started to arrive in the bamboo steamers they were cooked in. Clockwise from the top, these are chiu-chau fun guo (peanuts, garlic chives, pork, prawns and shitake mushrooms), prawn and coriander dumplings (whole and minced prawn with herbs), and crystal dumplings (pork, water chestnuts, bamboo shoot, prawns, and other vegetables). We ate these with fresh chilis in soy sauce. A chili sauce and a chili oil were also on the table.

Each of these dumplings is wrapped in a rice flour skin, which becomes transluscent when steamed. Texture here is as important as flavour, and the different meats and vegetables which go to make the fillings were cut evenly into tiny pieces. The crystal dumplings in particular have a beautifully fresh crunch.

This dumpling is a bao, a fluffy, steamed bun made from a yeasty, white flour dough. This particular bao is filled with char siu, a barbecued pork in a rich red sauce. (An excellent char siu recipe used to be found at Shiokadelicious, which, to my horror, doesn’t seem to be around any more. Perhaps Renee got a recipe book deal. Fortunately, Jessica at Su Good Eats makes it to a similar recipe here.)

This particular bao is about half the size of my clenched fist. (I seem to clench my fists a lot these days.) When we visit family in Malaysia, one of my favourite breakfasts is one of these buns (but a larger one, perhaps the size of Mr Weasel’s muscular clenched fist), stuffed with char siu or perhaps with a gingery chicken mixture, or a paler pork in garlic. We really miss out here in England, where our closest equivalent is the dry-as-dust Cornish pasty. Don’t expect a recipe for one of those any time soon.

Nuggets of turnip paste rolled in XO Sauce and fried until the outsides are crisp arrive. Each is the size of a grape. Turnip paste sounds very un-prepossessing in English, but is actually a light savoury cake made of grated mooli (Japanese radish), rice flour, preserved Chinese meats, dried shrimp, ginger and other spices. It’s always fried or baked until crispy – this presentation makes it even crisper and lighter, while the XO Sauce underlines the flavours already present in the paste. My friend Wai’s mother makes a wonderful turnip paste at home – I must ask her for the recipe.

I am delighted that the waiter has decided to put this dish next to me. I cunningly hide it from everyone else behind the teapot.

More dishes arrive. Unfortunately, despite my best effort with the teapot, the family is swooping in with chopsticks faster than I can take photographs now, and I need to get in there too if I’m not to be denied my rightful dumplings. I manage one more photograph; a chive dumpling (pork, chives, garlic, soy and spices) which is first steamed, then pan-fried to get this crisp finish. These are garlic chives, which presently I don’t grow in the garden; I think I have a packet of seeds somewhere, so hopefully you’ll get to see some in the summer. They’re thicker than normal chives, and have a pronounced garlic flavour.

Several dishes later (I’ll have go back to Taipan in a few weeks and do a follow-up post so you can find out about the rest of them) we admit defeat, and waddle from the restaurant into the gaping maw of Milton Keynes, where I need to find some shoes for the wedding we’re going to in India in a few days. Thank God your feet don’t get noticeably fatter when you eat your own bodyweight in dumplings all at one sitting.

Weeping Tiger

It’s a chromosomal abnormality passed on by my father (Chinese by way of Malaysia); every week or so I find myself subject to an overwhelming craving for oriental food. One kitchen cupboard is kept full of Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese condiments, including seven kinds of soy sauce, numerous sticky brown things in jars, hermetically sealed packets of blachan (the stinkiest thing in the house, but completely necessary in a lot of Malaysian and Thai dishes), dried fungus, four different kinds of dried noodle, four kinds of rice (not including the two risotto rices in the other cupboard), lye water, pork floss, fish floss, rice wines, black and red vinegars and some mysterious tins which have lost their labels. This is all in order that this craving can be assuaged any time it hits, as long as I’m in the house.

The craving thumped me between the eyes this time when we were expecting some friends. Weeping Tiger, a Thai beef dish, would hit the spot, with some Chinese noodles for some stodge. I took a good-sized piece of sirloin steak per person, and rubbed each well with kejap manis, an Indonesian sweet soy sauce.

I made some Nuoc Mam Gung – a sweet, salty, strong sauce made from raw ingredients. I put a peeled piece of ginger the length of my forefinger, two peeled limes, four cloves of garlic, half a stalk of peeled lemongrass, two birds eye chilis, four tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fermented fish sauce – I use Squid Brand, a Thai premium brand, because it has a fabulous label) and four tablespoons of caster sugar into the Magimix, and whizzed the lot until I had a sauce. If you follow this recipe, you may prefer to use less chili; taste the sauce when it’s out of the blender and see whether you think it needs more lime juice or fish sauce. You may want to add a little water if you find it too strong.

After the sirloins had marinated for half an hour, I grilled them in a very hot, stovetop grill-pan, keeping the middles pink (about two minutes per side). The steaks were then sliced very thin and placed, still warm, on top of a crisp salad with grated carrot, Chinese leaves, cabbage, shallot, mint leaves and coriander leaves. The nuoc mam gung I’d made earlier was drizzled on top – delicious.

This dish is notably lacking in carbohydrate. To remedy this, I made a very simple garlic cauliflower noodle stir fry which my Dad used to make regularly when my brother and I were little; real childhood comfort food.

This dish needs pea thread noodles – a very thin noodle made from mung beans. These noodles are one of my favourite kinds; they’re thread-thing, transluscent and glassy, and they don’t go slimy in sauces. I broke off half a packet and made them soft in boiling water, then drained them and rinsed them under the tap in a sieve. At the same time, I took eight dried shitake mushrooms and put them in boiling water to rehydrate. When they were soft I sliced them thinly.

To serve four people, I broke up a large cauliflower into bite-sized florets. I stir-fried six roughly chopped cloves of garlic in very hot groundnut oil, added the cauliflower and mushrooms after about a minute and stir-fried that for another three minutes. I then added a pint of chicken stock (I usually keep home-made stock in the freezer, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a stock cube if you don’t have the time), half a glass of Shaosing rice wine, about three tablespoons of mushroom soy and the same amount of light soy. I then put the lid on the wok for four minutes. Lid off, noodles in, taste, add more soy sauce. (I also add half a teaspoon of MSG at this point, which will doubtless cause gasps of horror from my Mum when she reads this; sorry Mummy.)

I thought my Chinese food craving had been squashed for the week. Unfortunately, writing this meal up has made it come back again. Time for a pork floss sandwich.

Lunchtime update:
Emails and comments have been arriving asking what the hell pork floss is. It’s not something I shall be cooking for you, since I don’t want another bout of RSI (this is a dish which needs several hours’ constant stirring); besides, it’s one of those things I always fill suitcases with when returning from Malaysia. There’s an excellent post at Umami on pork floss, which I commend to you.

Pork floss is, simply, lean, lean pork cooked with spices, sugar and sauces until the muscle fibres come apart in a dry, flossy mass; it melts in the mouth and tastes beautiful. It’s a gorgeous garnish, a delicious snack and one of my favourite things.

Full of beans – Part 2

After a night and a day of slow steeping, the cream and yolk mixture I made last night has gone a hazelnut-brown. I strain it to get rid of the beans (the mixture was already thick from the warmed-through yolks, and has been made thicker by the acidic coffee beans), and churn it in my new ice cream maker. (This is almost a complete disaster, when I fail to read the instructions properly and get the turning on/adding liquid in the wrong order. A bit of fierce scraping with a silicone spatula sorts things out.)

Until now, I’ve made ice cream in a plastic box in the freezer, beating it with a fork frequently as it freezes. The ice cream churn results in a much softer, creamier texture.

The sweetness of the mixture is toned down a bit once the ice cream has been frozen. We eat it in happy silence – I wish I’d made more.

Full of beans – Part 1

More friends are coming over tomorrow evening. One, Chris, is a man fuelled entirely by caffeine – his heart does not beat; it percolates. I’ll start on some whole-bean coffee ice-cream this evening, which I’ll churn while we’re eating tomorrow. After a day and a night of steeping, the custard the ice cream is based on will be rich and strong.

Why whole beans? Well, the resulting ice-cream comes out very rich, and very smooth, without an acidic edge. An overnight steep means that the ice-cream still has a strong coffee flavour.

I use a whole bag of dark-roast espresso beans, and pour over a litre of whipping cream. God; this already smells fantastic, and I haven’t even done any cooking yet. The cream and coffee beans go in a thick-bottomed saucepan (mine is a Le Creuset pan); make sure yours is thick so the bottom of the cream doesn’t scorch. I bring the cream and coffee slowly to a simmer, and remove the pan from the heat.

While the cream and coffee are warming up, I beat 225g sugar with six egg yolks using a fork, making sure not to beat in too much air. This will make the custard very sweet, but for some reason, ice-creams usually taste less sweet once frozen, so you need to be quite generous with the sugar. The yolks at this time of year are a beautiful orange.

When the cream has been scalded, it is poured over the yolks and sugar, stirring all the time to avoid scrambling them. When everything is well-mixed, it all goes back in the saucepan on a low heat, and is stirred gently until the yolks thicken the cream.

Now the mixture is put in a mixing bowl, and left on the counter until cool. I’ll put it in the fridge before I go to bed, and leave it there until dinner time tomorrow. The beans are already giving up some colour and lots of flavour to the custard – I’m looking forward to tasting the final mixture tomorrow. This one’s going to be good.

Everything stops for tea

I married Mr Weasel not just for his charm and good looks, but also for the fact that he does the washing up, sharpens a knife like a pro, and has parents who live in Ilkley, a beautiful town in Yorkshire which boasts one of the best teashops in the country.

High tea is a tradition which has clung on boldly in Yorkshire, when the rest of us are spending our Saturday afternoons eating crisps in front of the television. When we visit the family, we are usually treated to a huge table on a Saturday, piled with scones, curd tarts, jams, toast, cakes, muffins – and endless cups of excellent tea.

Betty’s Tea Rooms are a strange thing indeed in a town fifteen miles from Leeds, Leeds being full of the sorts of places footballers eat. Betty’s is an old-fashioned teashop of the kind you read about in dismal Somerset Maugham stories about margarine and the death of hope, but without the death and the margarine. Betty’s is emphatically not dismal. Betty’s is a glorious beacon of lightly browned carbohydrate and gloopy, gloopy, sweet sauces.


I should remark at this point that the quality of the photographs in this post may be a little . . . rubbish, since I loathe and detest wandering into restaurants, tea rooms, bars and cafes and pointing my camera at things. I am half-Chinese, and I become terribly paranoid that people are casting me in their heads as a strangely grumpy-looking Japanese tourist when I pull out the camera. This leads me to try to photograph things in secret, which isn’t a recipe for good pictures.

Nobody wanted to go to Betty’s. We’d already eaten enough lamb to keep a (smallish and reasonably delicate) rugby team nourished and warmed for the day at lunchtime, and it hadn’t gone down. I bullied my mother-in-law and husband into accompanying me with the promise of cakes.

Cakes there were by the dozen. Beautiful, jewel-like cakes; the sort of cakes you expect to see lined up in a Paris branch of Hediard or Laduree. Gleaming counters of the things stretched as far as the eye could see; cakes laid out in glistening rows on cool marble, topped with shining, jellied fruits, palpitating curds and elegant piping.

My mother-in-law and Mr Weasel perked up.

Betty’s was opened by a Swiss confectioner in 1919; the first branch was in nearby Harrogate. The company has stayed small, keeping its few tearooms in Yorkshire while marketing its teas around the country as Taylors of Harrogate. The staff wear starched white aprons and black skirts, and the tearooms themselves have a real sense of 1920s’ style. The menu still has a Swiss influence in this unlikely place, the savouries menu featuring rosti with raclette and other good things.

We weren’t up to another main course, and Mr Weasel was refusing to eat anything at all (he is watching his figure in order to be able to consume more curry before erupting out of his swimming shorts when we visit India next week), so decided on a brown bread ice-cream sundae (ostensibly for me, but ultimately gargled, swilled and slurped in the most part by Mr Weasel, who was hungrier than he thought) and a custard slice for his Mum.

Brown bread ice cream is altogether more wonderful than it sounds. I seem to remember Sainsbury’s trying to sell it a few years ago; they stopped because not enough people were brave enough to try it. A shame. It’s glorious stuff. At its simplest, it’s a really good vanilla ice-cream with roasted breadcrumbs, caramelised in demerara sugar. It’s got everything; crunch, sweetness, a toasty mellowness from the crumbs and a lovely contrast between the melting ice-cream and the friable crumbs.

The sundae was enormous. It was also pleasantly uncomplicated; just glorious ice-cream in one flavour, crushed pecan nuts, broken amaretti, a glossy, buttery toffee sauce and some cream. Two pecans on top vanished somewhere while my head was turned photographing a custard slice.

Tea arrived. We’d asked for a pot of Darjeeling (which was described on the menu as being a tippy pekoe; I am not a tea expert, but it was extremely good) and a pot of Lapsang Souchong. Each came in a silver-plated pot with a handwritten label on the top, explaining which was which. We were given one little silver strainer per pot, lemon slices, cold milk and hot water to top the pots up with.

While the tea was cooling, we got to the important task of eating. This photograph of the excellent custard slice is slighly blurry because I feared expulsion from the family if I didn’t hurry up and let my mother-in-law eat it. She sliced it in half laterally, ate the base with a little custard and then ate the fondanty top with some more custard, all the time informing me that it is very easy to lose weight when you just put your mind to it. I do not know how she stays so thin.

I am rubbish at cooking patisserie. It’s fantastic to go somewhere to eat things you can’t cook yourself, making Betty’s one of my favourite places to eat in the country.

Full of sugar and love for our fellow man (especially if he is a Swiss confectioner), we staggered back up the hill to the house, where a vast spread had been set out, involving cheese scones, hams, a block of cheese the size of my head, pickled shallots, a loaf of bread and a big jar of pickle. I worry I will not have room for those curries next week.

Spices and niceness

I don’t know how authentic any of the Moroccan food I’ve eaten is. Certainly, none of it has been consumed in Morocco – I’ve eaten in plenty of cous-cous restaurants in France, though. There’s an undercurrent of very particular, seductive spicing that runs through all of the tagines and cous-cous dishes I’ve had there.

That undercurrent is Ras al-Hanout, which is Moroccan for Top of the Shop. It’s a blend of spices which varies from maker to maker, but which usually contains about twenty different ingredients, including nutmeg, lavender, nigella, cardamom and other good things. A pre-blended Ras al-Hanout is available in the UK from Seasoned Pioneers (Sainsbury’s carry their dear little foil packets in its exotic foods aisle), and it’s extremely good; the list of ingredients on the packet includes lavender buds and the rose petals you can see in the picture.

I’ve got some friends coming round for dinner, and they love complex, spicy foods. I rub the Ras al-Hanout (with some extra coriander, cumin and nutmeg which I’ve ground in the mortar and pestle) into some lamb neck fillets, brown them, add some diced aubergine, garlic and tomatoes.

If they want spicy, they’re going to get spicy. I’ve got my hands on some Scotch Bonnet chili peppers, which are among the hottest chilis you can buy in the UK. (They get 100,000 – 350,000 points on the Scoville scale; this is obscenely hot.)

I’m not going to slice one of these chaps open, because it’ll kill everybody who tries to eat my lamb. I drop one, whole, in with the tomatoes; it should infuse the dish with its heat in a more gentle way than it would have if I’d cut it open and unleashed its seeds. Much of the heat of a chili pepper is in its seeds and in the white ribs which support them inside the fruit. These are delicious little peppers, but they need treating with a great deal of respect if you don’t want chemical burns.

While the lamb simmers, I roast some Borretane onions, which Sainsburys are doing at the moment in their Taste the Difference range. These are tiny little onions, about the size of a ping-pong ball, which roast to a beautiful, caramel sweetness. I put them in an enamelled, cast-iron baking dish, tuck thyme, oregano and bay leaves from the garden in among them (I nearly tuck in a nicely washed snail, too, but that’s another story), and slather them with literally heart-stopping quantities of butter and fat from a duck I roasted a couple of weeks ago. (This is not Moroccan. This is just tasty.)

After an hour at 180c, the onions are sizzling in their papery skins, ready to be popped out and smeared on some bread, along with their buttery juices. The aubergine and tomato have melted into a spiced sauce for the lamb, which is tender and fragrant (and not very photogenic).

Tagged

I have been tagged by the Great She Elephant. This, apparently, means that I have to let you know twenty random facts about me. You’re only going to get the food-related ones – I am both obsessively private, and intent on keeping this blog on topic.

  1. I am seriously allergic to lobsters. Only lobsters; not crabs, langoustines, prawns, shrimp or other crustaceans. I’ve ended up unable to breathe, having adrenaline injected into my bum, twice as a result of this. It causes me untold woe, for nothing is nicer than a fat lobster in buttery juices.
  2. I ate ants eggs in an E-San/Thai restaurant in Cambridge recently, and thought they were absolutely delicious. Merely watching my gleeful crunching caused my dining companions serious intestinal disquiet.
  3. I regularly got atrocious marks in my end-of-term Home Economics reports. This was because we lived opposite the teacher, whose greengages, raspberries and gooseberries I used to scrump, and who also took my class for needlework. My poor marks were my reward for theft and grotty sewing skills.
  4. When at boarding school in London I used to save up my pocket money and spend it all in one go on dim sum at the New World.
  5. I inherit from my Chinese dad a passion for foods which are both salty and sweet at the same time. I pour salt on apple crisps, and sugar on chevda from the Indian supermarket.
  6. Part of the reason we bought our house was its location. It’s next door to a pub with a restaurant that serves scallops with samphire, local meats, a brilliant bread pudding and local beers. Sorry. I’m not telling you where it is.
  7. I lack a sweet tooth. I’d rather have starter than pudding, thank you.
  8. Coming home from abroad leaves me a nervous wreck, due to the vast quantities of food I’m usually smuggling through customs. It is amazing to see how many jackfruit chips you can fit around your flip-flops.
  9. I have not yet come across a food I would not eat. (I do not include such things as Bernard Matthews’ Turkey Ham in the category of ‘food’.)
  10. We are going to Delhi for a wedding in a week and a half. I am not excited about the Taj Mahal. I am excited about the curries.
  11. Foie gras is one of my favourite things in the world. When I was a kid, my parents took me and my brother to stay on a goose farm, where gavage was carried out daily. The geese seemed to enjoy it, and I’ve never had any qualms about eating the results.
  12. There are things I like to eat that I really shouldn’t. Step up, Dairylea Dunkers. The shame is nearly intolerable.
  13. There is a jam jar full of MSG in my spice cupboard.
  14. When I was a child, I used to eat paper to relax.
  15. Now I’m an adult, I cook to relax.
  16. My grandmother once caught me licking up the honeydew deposited by aphids in her greenhouse. I was unapologetic.
  17. I adore caviar, but I’m not sure whether it’s because it tastes so good, or whether it’s because it’s so expensive.
  18. There are currently enough bits of duck confit in my cupboards to construct ten Franken-ducks.
  19. I once drank a bottle of tequila dry with a friend, aided by a salt pot and a carrier bag of limes. By the time we’d got to the bottom, passed out and woken up again, the agave worm was missing. We’re still not sure who drank it.
  20. I try to make my husband do all the washing up.

Apparently I need to pass this misery on, so I am tagging my brother, who is blogging furiously from Bordeaux, where he has moved in order to ingest more cassoulet, and who is, I think, likely to respond with his own twenty things through ties of brotherly love. Right, Ben? I will also tag my very dear friend Helen (flattery will get me everywhere), who will, I hope, forgive me. Helen doesn’t get to cook much; she lives on a boat. Come around for dinner, Helen.

Smoked mackerel gratin

At work, my lunchtimes are regularly spent gossiping with friends over a pub baked potato. There is nothing wrong with baked potatoes; indeed, a baked potato can be a thing of wonder (something I hope to demonstrate in the coming weeks). The pub baked potato, however, is a sad, microwaved thing, whose cheese has been melted under heat-lamps as it waits to be served. More often than not, this means that the salad which has been shoved on the side of the plate is melting too.

Salads shouldn’t melt.

So. It’s time to rehabilitate the potato.

I love gratins; especially at this time of the year, when it’s getting cold, there is nothing nicer than lovely, starchy potato which has absorbed its own weight in scented milk and cream. You can make a whole meal of a gratin by adding extras – I had some smoked mackerel from Spinks in the fridge. A mackerel gratin is just the thing to start me feeling good about potatoes again.

I start out by infusing 240ml of milk with some thyme, a bay leaf and some parsley from the garden. This is a great application for the woody flowering tops of the parsley I can’t use to garnish (and which I should remove to make the leafy part of the plant more bushy). They’re very fragrant, and are perfect for this. I also add some celery leaves from the centre of a bundle in the fridge, a crushed clove of garlic, a clove, three peppercorns, a quartered shallot and some salt. The milk comes to a simmer and is taken off the heat while I slice the potatoes.

It’s important to slice the potatoes very thin. I wish I had a mandoline – a device to slice vegetables very evenly, and very thin. I make a mental note to go to the kitchen shop soon.

Slicing the potatoes thinly increases the surface area that’ll be exposed to the wet ingredients, and so increases the starchyness of your finished gratin (your sauce will be thicker); it’ll also result in a crisper finish. I layer them in a thick-bottomed, enamel dish, which has been buttered to within an inch of its life. One fillet of smoked mackerel goes on top of this, flaked, and then a final layer of potato goes on top.

I strain the infused milk through a sieve, then add 350ml of double cream to the herbs and spices that are left in the sieve, and simmer that on the stove too. The potatoes, fish and fragrant milk are covered with tin foil and put in an oven preheated to 220c. (Yes, I know I have sloshed milk all over the counter. And everything looks strangely glaucous because the light in my kitchen is atrocious and I have to use the flash.)

The house begins to smell very, very good.

Once the cream has come to a simmer, I remove it from the heat, and strain it into a jug with a tablespoon of grainy Dijon mustard. Twenty minutes later, most of the milk has been absorbed into the potatoes. I pour over the cream, sprinkle a little finely grated parmesan over the top, dot with butter and return the dish to the oven, without the tin foil. (I love my Microplane grater; I spent years sweating over grating solid chunks of parmesan, but I got a Microplane after I saw one being used in an Italian restaurant and asked what it was. It also does a beautiful job of pulping garlic and ginger.) I’m careful not to add too much parmesan; it’s there to flavour, not smother.

The gratin sits in the oven for another 25 minutes. When it comes out it is crisp and golden, and the creamy sauce is bubbling gently between the slices; the underside is golden too, and there is a soft, smoky layer of unctuous, creamy potato and mackerel in the middle.

This is how autumn food is meant to be.

Thankfully, I do not own a heat lamp, so the (bagged) salad is crisp and does not go wet and stinky on me.

Those particularly interested in the lore of the gratin, and the reasons for the wonderful, lactic taste that all of this messing around with potatoes and cream produces, should go directly to Amazon and buy everything Jeffrey Steingarten has ever written. This will not only inform you in wonderful, systematising detail about the miracle that occurs in your gratin dish, but will keep you implausibly happy in the bath for as long as it takes you to read it all, and then for the half hour (turn the hot tap on at this point; things will be getting a little clammy) it takes you to bemoan the fact that there isn’t a third volume.