Ar Jard sauce

You’ve tried this before – it’s the crunchy, raw vegetable relish served in many Thai restaurants. I served it alongside some sweet chilli sauce with Thai pork toasts. It’s very easy, and can be prepared in minutes, so if you’ve a little time, try shaping your vegetables. Somehow a carrot tastes about 300% nicer if it’s approximately flower-shaped.

The sauce is delicious with rich dishes like the pork toasts; it’s fresh, sweet and sharp, cutting through the intense savouriness of the little toasts. I didn’t use any chilli in this recipe, but if you’d like your sauce to be spicy, take a red chilli, shred it finely and add it to the rest of the vegetables.

You’ll need:

2 carrots
½ cucumber
1 shallot
1 cup rice vinegar (available in some supermarkets and all oriental grocers)
⅔ cup caster sugar

Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan over a low heat, and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside.

While the vinegar mixture is cooling, dice the vegetables into even-sized pieces. Exercise your artistic side if you like, and cut them into shapes. I cut mine freehand, but you can buy minuscule aspic cutters online and in kitchen shops – they’re like fairy cookie cutters, and if you’re like me, they’re pretty irresistible. Slice the shallot into thin slices.

Pour the cooled sugar and vinegar mixture over the diced vegetables. Serve immediately.

Thai pork toasts

Kanom Punk Na Moo, or pork toasts, are right up there with my favourite unhealthy Thai starters. If you’re not familiar with them, imagine a Chinese sesame prawn toast without the sesame and the prawns, but with a moist and fragrant layer of pork instead. The little toasts are deep-fried, which makes the bread crisp and seals the rich, savoury coating’s flavour in. Some recipes use prawn in the mixture with the pork, but this is as authentic, less expensive and really, really delicious. This is unusual in being a Thai recipe whose ingredients are pretty easy to get hold of in the UK.

It’s important that you use boring old supermarket white, sliced bread in this recipe. Your home-made, stone-ground wheat loaf may be delicious toasted for breakfast, but it just won’t work in this recipe; you need plain old white bread here. (There are a few things for which nothing but sliced white will do, including the fried bread which accompanies your cooked breakfast.)

To serve six you’ll need:

750g minced pork
6 tablespoons mushroom soya sauce (available at oriental grocers’ shops)
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour
2 handfuls minced coriander
4 chopped spring onions
6 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
8 slices white bread
Oil for deep frying

Remove the crusts from the bread and cut each slice into quarters.

Mix the pork, soya sauce, cornflour, coriander, spring onions, garlic, egg and pepper in a large bowl, using your hands, until everything is well blended. Use a spatula to press a tablespoon or so of mixture into each little piece of bread, cutting more bread if you need it.

Heat fresh oil to 190°C, and fry the little toasts in batches for six minutes each. That’s it; you’re done. Serve with Thai sweet chilli sauce and Ar Jard sauce.

Cherry clafoutis

This clafoutis recipe is great at this time of year, when cherries are in the supermarkets in superabundance. The punnets are enormous, and several places are offering buy one get one free deals – shop around for your cherries and make sure those you buy are juicy, dark and handsome.

Clafoutis is a traditional dessert from the Limousin region of France, made with fresh fruit (usually cherries) and a thick batter. I’ve made this dish out of season using cherries preserved in kirsch. It’s very delicious that way, but I can’t help finding a clafoutis made with fresh cherries just that bit better. Don’t bother stoning your cherries; they’re a pig to stone (although there is a tool you can buy to help), and the juice from the stoned cherries leaks into the batter. Much better to have a whole cherry burst juicily in your mouth, then spit the stone out, than have it sit there damply, having leaked all its lovely juice pinkly into the rest of the dish.

Credit is due here to Mr Weasel. This is my recipe, but he cooked it because I was busy swearing at a wok full of boiling oil – of which more tomorrow.

To serve six, you’ll need:

4 oz flour
3½ oz caster sugar
6 eggs
2 drops almond essence
½ pint milk
50 cherries (or enough to cover the bottom of your pan)

Preheat the oven to 210°C.

Grease your pan. I used a tarte tatin dish, which is about 10 inches in diameter. Put enough cherries in the bottom of the dish to cover it in a single layer.

Use an electric handwhisk to beat the sugar, almond essence and eggs together. Add the flour to the bowl and drizzle the milk into the mixture, whisking all the time until you have a smooth batter. Pour the batter over the cherries in the dish, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes.

When you remove the clafoutis from the oven, it will have puffed up, a bit like a souffle. Set it aside to subside for a couple of minutes, then dish it up. Serve with cream – and remember not to bite down on the stones.

Elderflower cordial

I love cooking at this time of year. Ingredients are quite literally falling out of the trees into my always-ready pan. Elderflower cordial, diluted with still or sparkling water, is the quintessential English summer drink. It’s also fantastic in many desserts with gooseberries; try adding some to the mixture next time you make gooseberry fool. It’s got savoury applications too, and is good in a chicken marinade.

I’ve recently discovered a very good Martini made with gin (Hendricks for preference), elderflower cordial, lemon zest and lots of ice. This recipe will make you plenty of cordial, so you’ll be able to experiment with it in cooking and cocktails all you like. It’s also joyously cheap, especially when compared with the cordial you buy in the supermarket.

Elder bushes are in flower in June, and you’ll see them all over the place, their flat, white flower heads on display. (You can also cook the flowers in fritters for a delicious dessert.) Pick, if at all possible, away from roads. Be careful that the flower heads you pick are fully open, but not starting to go brown; the plate-like head should not lose any flowers when shaken. Don’t take too many flowers from any one bush. You’ll want some in place to make elderberry and apple pie later in the year. Make the cordial as soon as you get home. The flowers lose their freshness quickly, even in the fridge, and start to smell like nothing so much as a horny tom cat. (Don’t let that put you off; the cordial itself tastes and smells ambrosial.)

To make around 2.5 litres of cordial, you’ll need:

2.5 kg sugar
35 elderflower heads (the plate-shaped mass of flowers)
2 litres water
3 lemons
100g citric acid

Put the sugar and water into a large pan, and slowly bring up to the boil, stirring now and then.

While the pan is coming up to temperature, remove the zest from the lemons and place it in a large bowl (big enough for all the ingredients) or a large pan. Slice each lemon into four and put the slices in the bowl with the zest and the elderflowers. Don’t wash the elderflowers, but do check there aren’t any little creatures living in among them.

When the sugar/water mixture is boiling, stir it to make sure all the sugar is dissolved, and take it off the heat. (It will be disgustingly hot. Be careful.) Use a ladle to pour the sugar syrup over the elderflowers and lemon. When all the syrup is in the bowl, stir in the citric acid and cover with a teatowel (or the lid if you are using a pan).

A note of warning – citric acid has, for some reason, been very hard to get hold of this year. Most chemists should carry it, and brewing supply shops and Indian supermarkets will also sell you packets. The chemists I spoke to this year said that the suppliers have had a problem, and this certainly seemed to be the case; I only found some in my fifth chemist. You need the citric acid as a preservative, so don’t try to make this without it. Tartaric acid (not cream of tartar) can be used instead. (**Update** When making my 2007 batch, I gave up on trolling around all the chemists in Cambridgeshire and ordered the citric acid online from Edict Chemicals, where it’s very inexpensive. Take a look – they’ve got some interesting food and household ingredients on offer.)

Leave the flowers to steep in the syrup overnight. Strain the resulting mixture through a square of muslin in a sieve the next day, and bottle with tight stoppers. This keeps well (especially in the fridge), but just to be sure, I like to freeze some for Christmas, when we all need to be reminded that there is a sun that’s not watery, and that the sky is sometimes blue. Drink deeply. It’s good stuff.

Best tomato salad

This tomato salad recipe is the perfect, sunny, flavourful accompaniment to long summer’s evenings in the garden, basking by the barbecue and drinking silly amounts of Pimms. There’s no cooking involved; just some slicing which is easily done with a glass by your side and the sun pouring in through the kitchen window.

If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself with a glut of tomatoes late in the summer. This salad is remarkable in that you can make it again and again, and it doesn’t become boring. It brings out the gorgeous flavour of the sun all those tomatoes have soaked up; the basil, oregano and sweet balsamic vinegar all work together to make your tomatoes platonically tomato-ish.

Use whatever tomatoes come to hand. This salad is really pretty with a couple of yellow tomatoes scattered among the reds, or with large and small-fruiting varieties mixed together. Here, I’ve used small vine tomatoes and some baby plum tomatoes. To serve four as a side dish (or two as a lunch on its own with some crusty bread) you’ll need:

20 small tomatoes (see note above)
1 shallot
1 handful basil leaves
½ handful oregano leaves
1 small clove garlic
1 ½ teaspoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons good olive oil
Salt and pepper

Slice the tomatoes and lay them out on a large serving plate. Slice the shallot into thin rings, chop the garlic as finely as you’re physically capable of, and scatter over. Roll the basil leaves into little tubes and slice them thinly to cut it into thin strips (chiffonade), and throw them over the salad with the whole oregano leaves.

Immediately before serving, drizzle the olive oil and balsamic vinegar over, and season with salt and plenty of pepper. Crusty bread will come in handy to mop up the juices.

Honey, pine nut and pancetta salad

We had some friends round last night, and I served this salad to go with the antipasti I’d lined up as a starter. I was so pleased with it that Mr Weasel and I are having it for supper again today. This is a gorgeous salad recipe. The sweetly nutty walnut oil is beautiful with toasted pine nuts (toast them yourself in a dry frying pan, watching like a hawk, or buy them pre-toasted from Waitrose), and the pancetta is gorgeous with a tiny amount of honey drizzled over.

Use a mixture of leaves, including some rocket, and perhaps some watercress. To serve four, you’ll need:

2 bags salad leaves
12 slices pancetta, dry-fried until crisp
1 small handful toasted pine nuts
4 tablespoons walnut oil
2 teaspoons honey vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
Pepper

Easy as anything; toss the leaves with the walnut oil and honey vinegar. Sprinkle the pancetta and pine-nuts over the salad, add a few turns of the pepper grinder, and using a fork, drizzle runny honey all over the salad. Serve immediately, or the leaves will wilt.

Praline

Almonds in a dark, crisp caramel aren’t just used in European cuisine. They’re a popular Chinese nibble (although the Chinese do not pulverise them as we do in Europe), and gosh, they’re good. Praline is what the European call the powder made from pounding the toasted almonds and caramel. try making the powder, and mix it into ice-cream, a creamy cheesecake topping, chocolate sauces or meringues. Alternatively, do what I did on Saturday, and gobble the crisp little almonds whole.

Chinese caramelised almonds usually keep their little skins, as in the picture. If you’re making European praline, you’ll need to blanch your almonds before you begin. Don’t buy ready-blanched almonds (white almonds with no papery skin). It’s very easy to slip the skins off yourself – just pour boiling water over the almonds, and when everything has cooled down, pop them out of their brown skins. Blanched this way, your almonds will taste sweeter and fresher.

For every cup of almonds, you’ll need:

1 tablespoon butter
4 tablespoons caster sugar
½ teaspoon lemon juice

Put all the ingredients in a non-stick pan. Keeping everything on the move, cook over a medium heat until the almonds are brown and toasted, and the sugar is melted and golden. Keep a careful eye on everything; the almonds can burn very easily. Add the lemon juice at the end to prevent crystals forming.

Turn the contents of the pan out onto a buttered surface. I use a cold, non-stick baking pan, but in Italy and France a marble slab is traditional. Allow the praline to cool at room temperature until it is hard and brittle, then break the almonds up.

If you’re planning to use praline as a powder, put the cooled almonds and caramel into a plastic food bag. Wrap this in a tea towel, and wallop the hell out of it with the end of a rolling pin. Praline powder will keep in an airtight container for a few days, but you’re unlikely to be able to resist eating it for that long.

Badger stew

A recipe book review today – it is too gorgeously hot to think about cooking, so supper is some barbecued sausages in a bun.

My brother, Ben, whose comments you’ll occasionally see on this blog, lives in Bordeaux, where he is a lecteur at the university. Ben hopelessly outcools me. He’s in a band called Beautiful Lunar Landscape – check out their official site and their MySpace page, where you can listen to some rather good music. You’ll enjoy it, especially if you like things like Jeff Buckley and the Velvet Underground. He appears above, the handsome devil, in an uncharacteristic suit (it was my wedding – I insisted), blowing uncharacteristic bubbles, accompanied by his extremely splendid girlfriend Katie.

Ben’s a foodie too. He asserts that his current aim in life is to consume every part of the pig. Ben – you are in for a shock. I have found a Chinese supermarket which sells the sex organs of the pig. Both varieties.

My birthday present from Ben and Katie (and I’m sorry it’s taken me such a long time to get round to writing this) was an odd little hardback book from France. Les cuisines oubliees, by Annie and Jean-Claude Molinier, is a glorious peculiarity; a book of recipes so old-fashioned or rustic that they’ve fallen out of fashion. I’m afraid it’s only available in French; fortunately, my French unaccountably turned out quite good, so when I read the recipe for Blaireau au sang, I had just enough vocabulary to work out that what I was reading was a recipe for badger in blood, and not a new and exciting plot to overthrow the UK Government.

The book’s full of this stuff. Beaver stew, coypu casserole, something rather dodgy-sounding with a cormorant, roast hedgehog, and a bear’s foot recipe which, say the Moliniers, can be adjusted slightly and applied to any baby elephant’s feet you happen to have hanging around in the fridge. There’s squirrel in a pot (peel and empty your squirrel); fox, which you are meant to leave, skinned, in a river for 72 hours before cooking because, frankly, fox doesn’t taste too great; and a magpie baked in clay.

This is a fantastic book. Sorry, Ben, but I’m unlikely to end up cooking anything from it; that said, it makes great bedtime reading, and is a marvellous tool with which to terrify impressionable French children. I’ll leave you with a translation of the recipe for badger in blood, which almost makes me wish I had a mantrap. (Clicking on the badgers will make them do exactly what you think they’re going to do. Turn the sound up. Today’s post is a multimedia extravaganza.)

To cook one badger you’ll need:

1 badger
1 glass of pig’s blood
1 small glass of armagnac
1 ginger root
1 bottle of dry, sparkling white wine
2 eggs
1 pot of crème fraîche
salt and pepper
500g forest mushrooms OR chestnuts to accompany
100g butter
oil

Eviscerate and skin your badger, and soak it in a fast-flowing river for at least 48 hours. This will help you to de-grease it more easily.

Once the badger is de-greased, cut it into pieces and brown it in a frying pan with butter. When the pieces are golden and stiff, flambée with the armanac, season and add a grated soup-spoon of ginger, fresh if possible.

Pour over the wine, and simmer gently for at least two hours.

At the end of the cooking time, mix the chopped badger liver (cooked beforehand in a little oil), the glass of blood, two egg yolks, a coffee-spoon of ginger and the crème fraîche, and pour into the cooking dish. Serve immediately.

This dish goes well with wild mushrooms or chestnuts.

Eat, Cambridge – Superfood salad

Places where you can eat well and inexpensively don’t proliferate in Cambridge. Fortunately, there’s a branch of Eat, a take-away sandwich, soup and salad shop I first discovered when working in London about five years ago.

At the time, I was working for an art dealer in Mayfair, and there was nowhere cheap to find lunch anywhere. I found an Eat concession in the (usually very expensive) food hall at Selfridge’s, and ended up visiting daily for the excellent and very fresh food, which costs no more than a Marks and Spencer sandwich.

Eat opened a shop in Cambridge (on Petty Cury) a couple of years back, and it’s always packed. Head upstairs and try to get a table by the window for a great view down Sidney Street while you eat your sandwich.

There’s an emphasis on food that’s healthy, with wheatless sandwiches scattered among the filled baguettes and chocolate bars, but no feeling that you should be eating the healthier options, or that eating healthily is a penance. Regular readers will be aware that a consumption of superfoods is not one of my priorities – this said, this Superfoods salad is one of the best thing Eat does, right up there with the hot sausage and mustard mash pie.

This salad is full of lightly steamed vegetables, which have been prepared carefully so they don’t lose any of their crunch or their emerald green. There’s calabrese broccoli in there, some fresh peas and broad beans, and butternut squash, which has been cooked to a perfect, toothsome softness and rolled in poppy seeds. Raw, sprouting seeds feature strongly, with a pinch of strongly flavoured, sprouting onion seeds scattered on top, and crisp baby beansprouts in the mix. A scoop of goat’s cheese, some toasted seeds, raw, shredded beetroot, salad leaves and a sharp dressing made with lemon juice finish the salad.

Of course, I ruined the health-giving properties of the salad by drinking a diet cola with it. Still – yum. If you’re near a branch, drop in and give them a try.

Chicken with fairy ring mushrooms

Waitrose usually carries at least one seasonal wild mushroom, with several on the shelves in the autumn. At the moment, it’ s mousseron mushrooms, usually called the fairy ring mushroom in the UK. (Not by Waitrose, though – perhaps mousseron sounds more tasty.) The fairy ring is a tender, round-capped, yellow fungus with a subtle but delicious flavour. It’s the mushroom you see growing in circles in lawns, and you can pick your own – but do be careful to check any mushrooms you pick in the wild in a good mushroom identification book. I’d recommend Peter Jordan’s Mushroom Picker’s Foolproof Field Guide.

Thyme, garlic and the slight tang of crème fraîche are gorgeous with these little mushrooms. They’re pretty tiny and shrink down further on cooking, so to eat them as an accompaniment you’ll need a few boxes of them. To make them go as far as you can, you can use the mushrooms to make a sauce. Like this, they’re wonderful with chicken. I was only able to find chicken without skin, so I wrapped pancetta around it to add a little fat and to keep the moisture in. If you’ve got good chicken breasts with skin on, you can leave the pancetta out if you like; just brown the skin well when you saute.

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 plump chicken breasts
6 slices pancetta
1 punnet fairy ring (mousseron) mushrooms
4 shallots, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 tablespoons crème fraîche
A few sprigs of thyme
Butter for sauteeing
Salt and pepper

Place a sprig of thyme on each chicken breast, and wrap pancetta around the breast, holding the thyme in place. You shouldn’t need to secure it; as the pancetta cooks, it will stop being flexible enough to unroll. Saute gently for about eight minutes per side, until the pancetta is golden-brown.

While you saute the chicken, melt some butter in another small pan and soften the shallots and garlic. When the shallots are transluscent, add the mushrooms and a sprig of thyme. Saute, keeping everything on the move, until the mushrooms are cooked and soft.

Add the crème fraîche to the mushroom pan, stir briskly until everything is amalgamated, and season. Put a pool of the mushroom sauce on each plate and place the cooked chicken on top. I served this with mashed potatoes, and a green salad with a sharp dressing.