Wholemeal flour from Lode Mill, Cambridge - and a loaf of bread

Lode Mill, a working, eighteenth-century water mill, is in the grounds of Anglesey Abbey, a Jacobean house near Cambridge which is built on the grounds of a medieval priory. The mill itself operates on the first and third Sunday of every month (subject to the water level), and is open to the public who can view the mill workings, and buy the oatmeal and wholegrain flour produced there. Saturday's visit to the winter gardens at Anglesey Abbey saw me buying up armsful of flour bags and quizzing the miller in enormous detail, all to keep you happy.

There has been a mill on this site since the Domesday survey, but the current mill is only about 300 years old. The building has four storeys; a ground floor; a stone floor where the mill stones are kept and operated; and two upper storage floors. This huge central shaft (the wheel you can see here is the spur wheel which drives the gears under the mill stone) is made from a whole sweet chestnut trunk; other wood in the mill building and wheels is seasoned oak, which, according to the miller, is as hard as iron.

There are four pairs of stones, each of which has to be dressed (cut with chisels) every ten uses to keep them sharp for grinding. The resulting flour is pushed from the outside edge of the mill stones and falls down a chute to the ground floor. It takes 30 seconds and ten tons of water to make 1 ½ kilograms of flour.

If you're using wholemeal flour for bread, it's a good idea to mix it with some strong white flour. An all-wholemeal loaf made at home can be chewy and dense; it's especially hard on very young jaws. (A primary-school aged Mr Weasel was, in an episode he recites every time he eats a sandwich, told off by a school dinner lady for hiding a homemade, wholemeal sandwich in his pocket; he wanted to get out of the dinner hall and play, but chewing the bread was taking so long his friends had left without him.) For one large loaf you'll need:

3 sachets instant yeast
30g honey
625ml water at body temperature
500g wholemeal flour
500g strong white flour
30g salt

Half an hour before you start, put the flour in a warm place.

Dissolve the yeast and honey in half the water. Put the warm flour in a large bowl with the salt and make a well in the centre. Pour all the yeast and honey mixture into the well, and mix with your hand until it's all soaked into the flour. Add the rest of the tepid water and continue mixing until you have a soft dough. Knead for ten minutes to develop the gluten in the dough; you should end up with a soft, stretchy mass. Return it to its bowl.

Flour the top of the dough and use scissors to score it; this will help it to prove faster. Leave it somewhere warm until it has doubled in size (an hour or so in a warm room), then knock all the air out of it, kneading for a couple of minutes. Divide the dough into six pieces, and form them into balls. Arrange the balls in a cake tin, flour them and leave the tin in a warm place again until the bread dough has doubled in size once more.

Put the tin gently (without knocking it about) in the oven at 225°C for half an hour. Check to see that the bread is done by taking it out of the tin and tapping the bottom; if it sounds hollow, it's ready. (Be careful; wholemeal bread takes a bit longer to cook than white bread does. Exercise judgement.)

This flour makes a lovely, malty bread. Enjoy it toasted with honey, and bask in the smell filling your house.

Anglesey Abbey gardens, Lode, Cambridge

Thanks again to Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen for organising Weekend Herb Blogging.

I spent Saturday morning walking around the winter gardens at Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge. The gardens are remarkable all year round, but the winter shrubs, the famous snowdrops (inedible, I fear, but extraordinary; there are more varieties of snowdrops at Anglesey Abbey than anywhere else in the UK) and the icy, misty walks you can take around the grounds make a sunny, late January/early February day the best time of year to visit. Weekend Herb Blogging was foremost in my mind, so I scurried around looking for plants I knew to be edible.

One of the first shrubs I saw was this witchhazel (Hamamelis). Witchhazel displays these remarkable flowers from January to March. The flowers are delicately scented and last a long time on the bare twigs. In extreme cold, the petals will close, so the flowers are frost-hardy and a real mood-lifter in the long cold months.

I'd love a witchhazel for our garden, but they don't like the very alkaline soil we have here. (The village we live in used to have a chalk quarry, and my garden comprises about a foot of decent soil before you get down to solid chalk.) They thrive in an acid soil; one of the best home garden specimens I've seen is in Mr Weasel's parents' garden; they live on the edge of a very peaty, tannic moor. Different varieties flower in oranges, reds and yellows. The yellow plant pictured is Arnold Promise - I'm afraid I wasn't able to find an identifying label for the red plant below. (If anybody knows what variety it is, please leave a comment!)

Witchhazel is not precisely edible, but it's used medicinally, and the Cherokee tribes used its inner bark, cooked down to a syrup, for healing wounds, soothing sore throats, and as an astringent. We still use it for its astringent properties these days, and you can make your own tincture by taking a few twigs in winter, before the plant flowers, scraping the bark off and soaking it for a few weeks in a half-water, half-vodka mixture. (Dilute the tincture again with two parts of water before using.) It's good dabbed on oily, teenage skin.

Viburnum is another plant which flowers on bare twigs in the winter, and here I'm luckier with my grotty soil; viburnum will do well anywhere as long as it has decent drainage. Surprisingly, the berries from Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn', with its intensely scented, pink flowers, are edible both raw and cooked, and don't taste at all bad. (You'll need two bushes if you want the fruit; viburnum is not self-fertilising.) It's the flowers I want this for, though; the scent from a viburnum bush in the winter will carry for metres in the cold air, perfuming everything around it. Dawn starts to flower in the late autumn and just keeps going until winter is over. I bought a very young specimen in the garden shop when we'd finished our walk; it's going in front of a laurel tree in the garden later on today. The plant (and its flowers) is hardy down to below -10°C.

The gardens at Anglesey Abbey are planned beautifully. After a winding walk through flowering winter shrubs and red-twigged cornus, you'll come around a corner into a stand of silver birch trees like something straight out of Chekov. The silver birch is an amazingly versatile plant; in Prague last year we saw tiny boxes made from the pressed outer bark, sap-scented and warm to the touch. (Removing this papery outer bark does not kill the tree.) The inner bark can be pulverised and used as a thickening meal. Birch tea is made from the leaves, and a medicinal tea from that resinous inner bark.

Sap from the tree is sweet and delicious, and the birch can be tapped like the maple, although too much tapping can kill the tree. In England, this sap was traditionally used to make beer. I found a recipe from John Evelyn's 1664 Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees and the Propogation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions (a good read if you are interested in 17th-century fencing techniques) for the beer, which, if you can get your hands on a gallon of birch sap, will be just as good today as it was 350 years ago.

To every Gallon of Birch-water put a quart of Honey, well stirr'd together; then boil it almost an hour with a few Cloves, and a little Limon-peel, keeping it well scumm'd. When it is sufficiently boil'd, and become cold, add to it three or four Spoonfuls of good Ale to make it work . . . and when the Test begins to settle, bottle it up . . . it is gentle, and very harmless in operation within the body, and exceedingly sharpens the Appetite, being drunk ante pastum.

More on Anglesey Abbey tomorrow. They've got a working watermill at the back of the gardens, where I had a very interesting chat with a miller and bought a sack of some flour ground on the premises. Watch this space for some excellent bread and discussion of the sharpening of millstones.

French onion soup

A friend of mine is visiting New York for work at the moment. I received an anguished message from him about a French onion soup he experienced at the Crowne Plaza off Times Square. I quote him in full, because it made me laugh.

'The soup itself is quite nice, but is plugged by a solid lump of melted cheese that is about the diameter of a Camembert, and an inch think. We're talking essentially an entire Camembert's worth of American plastic cheese. I don't mind a delicate top to the bowl, but you could have taken this out, chilled it, and made plastic cheese sandwiches for a hungry family of six.'

Poor him. (I am keeping him anonymous so he doesn't get any death threats from Americans fond of plastic cheese.) French onion soup isn't really that hard to get right, but not many restaurants seem to bother trying; the very worst I've ever had was, shamefully, in Les Halles, the old market district in Paris. Les Halles is meant to be the birthplace of French onion soup, and Le Pied au Cochon is meant to be a restaurant which specialises in the stuff. Ha. It's rubbish. The stock's insipid, the rubbery onions haven't been left to caramelise, and there's no booze in sight. The cheesey bread lid is mostly bread, and the whole leaves you with the sort of hurt feeling you get when someone you trusted has stolen your teddy bear and sold it to buy drugs. Avoid.

The cheese you use here is important, but you do have a choice open to you. You can do it the Les Halles way and use Camembert on your giant crouton, which is delicious and, when stirred into the soup, makes it creamy and cheesey and gloopy and glorious.

I consider we've been overdoing the soft washed-rind French cheese thing recently (I have discovered a local source of Epoisse, and that Tartiflette the other week had enough Camembert in it to keep your arteries busy for a good six months). So I went the other way with our croutons, and topped them with sweet, stringy Gruyere (actually Swiss, but who's checking?). Gruyere has a special affinity for the sweetly Madeira-caramelised onions in this soup; try it instead of Camembert some time and see what you think.

To serve six as a starter or four as a main course, you'll need:

3lb onions, sliced
1 small wineglass Madeira
2½ pints good beef stock or good consommé
Open-textured white bread (ciabatta or a French loaf) - 2 slices per person
1 slice Gruyere per piece of bread
3oz butter
Salt and pepper

Put the onions in a large, heavy saucepan with the butter, and simmer, stirring every twenty minutes or so, for longer than you think you should. You're aiming to cook these to a golden, caramel unctuousness. I didn't use a kitchen timer; I put the DVD of Ziegfeld Girl on and sang along with Judy, running to the kitchen occasionally to stir, until Lana Turner did her tragic thing with the stairs and the chaise longue at the end. (Those who are not Judy Garland fans can just set their timers for 132 minutes, but you're missing a treat.) The onions will have cooked down to a fraction of their original volume.

When your onions are done and you have spent a quiet five minutes being surprised at how Hedy Lamarr was able to look fantastic walking down stairs with fruit on her head and invent spread-spectrum communications without turning a hair, throw the Marsala into the hot pan with the onions and let it simmer away to nothing. Add the stock or consommé, turn the heat right down and bring slowly to a simmer again.

While the soup is coming up to temperature, prepare the croutons. Toast thick slices of bread (I used a grill pan to get good dark, charred lines on each slice), lay the cheese on them and put them under the grill until the cheese starts to brown.

Serve the soup with a crouton floating on top. The soup should soak into the crisp crouton, its heat softening the cheese. Slurp the lot quickly while it's still deliciously hot.

Beans on toast - with a twist

Beans on toast, you ask? Has she gone mad? Not at all. It's been a stressful week, and I need comfort food. This fits the bill perfectly. Baked beans straight from the tin - I can take them or leave them. But baked beans which have been worked on a bit, with the addition of a smoky bacon, lots of garlic and sweet fried onion, some darkly smoked chilis and gouts of black, glossy treacle or molasses are transformed to something beyond good. They become positively delicious.

I enjoy this dish with a lot of kick from the chilis. If you prefer a bit less heat in your beans, reduce the amount of chipotles in adobo you use.

Chipotle peppers are actually Jalapenos, smoked until dark and full of woodsmoke flavour. You can buy them either dried or in a jar with adobo, a rich, tomato sauce. (This is a tin I bought last year in America. In the UK, chipotles in adobo are available from the Cool Chile Company; Sainsbury's carry them in their exotic foods section. They're addictive. If you buy one jar, buy several, because you'll want more later on.)

You'll need:

1 tin baked beans
2 onions, sliced finely
12 rashers smoked, streaky bacon, diced small
6 cloves garlic, sliced
3 chipotles in adobo
1 tablespoon adobo sauce
1 tablespoon black treacle or molasses
large pinch salt

Saute the onions, bacon and garlic together in a medium saucepan with a large knob of butter until the onions are soft and the bacon is cooked through. Upend the tin of beans into the pan, and add the chilis and adobo sauce. Bring everything to a simmer, and add the treacle and salt. Stir well, taste to see if it needs more treacle or salt, and serve piping hot.

I particularly like this with toast cut into soldiers. It has been suggested that this is because mentally, I am about eight. I am ignoring these suggestions and going to play dressup-teaparty with the cats.

Yorkshire pudding

I've had a couple of emails following yesterday's post about roast pork, one asking what a Yorkshire pudding is, and one asking whether I can post a Yorkshire pudding recipe. I'm very pleased to get a chance to write about this; Yorkshire pudding is a traditional English roast meal accompaniment, it's delicious, it looks impressive if you cook it properly and tastes great.

Yorkshire pudding was historically served as a first course to fire up the appetite. These days you'll find Yorkshire pudding with gravy as a main course in restaurants in certain areas of Yorkshire, and it's presented as a crisp and delicious side dish in homes all over the country.

This is a batter pudding, but it is not the same as the American popover; the batter is less rich and results in a lighter, crisper and airier finish. Some people prefer to cook individual small puddings in muffin or fairy cake tins; others (my mother among them, and she makes some of the best Yorkshire pudding I've eaten) prefer to cook enough for everyone in a single, large roasting tin. The batter rises purely as a result of the air beaten into it expanding in the very hot fat and dish you use. You'll need to cook your puddings in a convection oven or in a single layer very high in a regular oven. Before doing anything else, heat the oven to a blistering 220°C. If you are roasting a joint, you can bring the oven up to this temperature for the last fifteen minutes of cooking, then remove the joint to rest while the puddings finish. To make four individual puddings you'll need:

75g plain flour
1 egg
75ml milk
50ml water
Salt and pepper
1 teaspoon of beef dripping or goose fat per pudding

Put a teaspoon of fat in each depression in the muffin tin, and put the tin in the oven to come up to temperature. Sieve the flour into a bowl with the salt and pepper, and use the unbroken egg to make a depression in the middle of the heap of flour. Break the egg into this well and use an electric hand-whisk to slowly incorporate it into the flour, adding the milk and water gradually as you whizz. Transfer the batter to a jug. (Some Yorkshire pudding batters need to stand after you've made them; this one doesn't, which is . . . pleasing.)

You need to work as fast as you can now; make sure you don't allow the oven or the pan to cool down at all. Quickly pour a quarter of the batter in each of the oil-filled depressions and slam everything in the oven again as fast as you can.

Twenty five minutes later, your puddings should have risen and turned golden. Serve immediately (a cold Yorkshire pudding will deflate slightly). These soak up gravy beautifully. Enjoy.

Roast pork with crackling

These days, it can be hard to find meat that hasn't been treated in processing with water and glucose to make it moister and heavier. Even when your joint of pork is free from these additives, it can be difficult to treat it in a way that results in a popcorn-crisp, crackling skin. When you do manage it, puffed, salty crackling is a delectable thing of wonder. The technique has a lot to do with using varied cooking temperatures, and absolutely everything to do with making sure the skin is prepared properly before it even gets anywhere near the oven.

Modern joints are harder to raise a crackling skin from than the joints I remember when I was a little girl. This has a lot to do with consumer demand for extra-lean, muscly meat, which just doesn't have enough fat to make the magic happen. Look for a joint with plenty of fat under the skin. This is a 2kg rolled loin: enough to serve six people with plenty for sandwiches later. Although convenient, rolled joints are also hard to make crackle, especially where the skin meets the roasting tin. Don't despair, though; you can still make it work with a bit of preparation.

The day before you eat, the skin of your pork must be dried thoroughly with paper kitchen towels, and scored well. Even if your butcher has already scored it, you will probably benefit from making sure the scoring is fine and regular, so you will want to add your own cuts to the skin. Use a craft knife on the cold skin of the meat (this is easiest when the skin and fat are cold and firm), scoring it in lines about half a centimetre apart. When the joint cooks, the fat will melt and bubble through those lines, crisping the skin it touches. Rub salt into the skin, as if the pork were somebody you are particularly fond of who is demanding a lovely exfoliating massage.

Now prepare to look slightly unbalanced in front of any visitors, and take a hairdrier to the skin of the meat until it's absolutely bone dry. Wrap your joint in a teatowel and refrigerate it overnight. (The atmosphere in your fridge is extremely dry, and this will help any more moisture to evaporate.)

On the day you cook it, rub some more salt into the skin, making sure it gets through the cracks where you scored it and into the fat. Put a bed of onions at the bottom of a metal roasting dish and rest the pork on top of it. Heat up a large knob of good pork dripping or goose fat (use goose fat in preference to one of those white blocks of lard) over a high heat in a small saucepan and pour the searing hot fat over the skin, then put the roasting tin in the oven at a very hot 220°C. After quarter of an hour, lower the heat to 180°C and cook the joint for two hours, basting every 20 minutes. Finally, turn the heat back up again for a final quarter of an hour - this should cause your minutely prepared skin to puff up and crackle deliciously. (Keep an eye on it and leave it in for a few minutes longer if necessary.)

Every family has its own gravy method, just like Tolstoy said. (Mr Weasel tells me that this is not what Tolstoy said at all. Pshaw. It's what he should have said.) While you rest the joint for ten minutes in a warm place, make gravy to your family recipe. Remove the carapace of crackling, carve the meat and divide the splintering crackling between the plates. Serve with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, green vegetables and apple sauce. Hooray for the old days.

Cold remedies

Mae Gabriel from Rice and Noodles asked me to join in another tagging exercise, this time on homebrew cold remedies. I'm delighted she asked; I very seldom get colds. This is not because I have a killer immune system. It's because I have a kitchen cupboard full of magic.

My first move on feeling a bit numb around the soft palate is to down a glass of water with twenty drops of echinacea tincture in it. I did read the studies last year suggesting that it doesn't work, but the office cold tends to pass me by every winter, so clearly something I'm doing is killing the bugs. I'm not going to stop glugging echinacea just yet.

Mr Weasel's Granny used to make a cough syrup at home which became known as Granny's Marvelous Mixture. I rang Mrs Weasel Senior to find out what went into it. You'll need:

Granny's Marvelous Mixture
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 knob (just under an ounce) butter
1 teaspoon vinegar

Melt the golden syrup and butter together. (Mrs Weasel Senior uses a bain marie over hot water; I put them in the microwave for thirty seconds.) Stir the mixture well and add the vinegar, then taste the syrup. The vinegar should catch the back of your throat while the buttery syrup soothes it. Add a little more vinegar if you feel you need it. I used cider vinegar; Mr Weasel's family always used malt vinegar. Whichever way you do it, it's surprisingly tasty. Mr Weasel and his sister used to run around after all the snotty, snivelling kids at school trying to catch colds so they could get someone to make them some Marvelous Mixture. He's currently sitting on the sofa dipping a spoon into it, licking it and making happy noises.

Honey made by bees which have collected nectar from the Manuka bush in New Zealand is supposed to possess remarkable antibacterial properties. It has a smoky, dark, slightly bitter caramel taste, markedly different from other honeys. Those who are regulars at the local florist will notice that the picture on the front of your pot looks a lot like Waxflower, which is used as foliage with a tiny, pretty pink and white flower in arrangements. The foliage has a beautiful, lemony scent. Clare from Eatstuff tells me that the two are related; both are members of the myrtacea family. (I had originally thought they were the same plant. This is what comes of living on the opposite side of the planet from the nearest specimen of the real thing.)

Manuka honey makes a really delicious cold remedy when mixed with the juice from limes and hot water. Limes are packed to the fruity gills with vitamin C. There's always a bowl of limes in our house; they're excellent in a gin and tonic, and while there is potential that I may have a slightly swollen liver, I certainly don't have scurvy. Add one and a half tablespoons of the honey to the juice of two limes, and top them up in a mug with hot water from the kettle. The curious kitten is optional.

Sickrooms, like kitchens, can get stinky. In our poorly ventilated kitchen, I use Armenian burning papers, traditionally burned to kill germs, to get rid of the pongs produced in cooking. They're magic - these scent-impregnated strips of paper have been produced to the same method for 500 years now, and remove smells magically. They're proof against raw onions, blachan (fermented shrimp) and all kinds of seafood. Armenian burning papers are available at Aedes de Venustas in America, and at Nature et Decouvertes in Europe. (Nature et Decouvertes is a hell of a lot cheaper.)

To use the papers, remove a strip and fold it accordeon style. Light one end with a match. The flame will die down immediately, and the paper will smoulder away to ash over about five minutes, releasing its powdery, incense-heavy smoke. It was believed that this deodorising smoke killed the foul-smelling miasma responsible for influenza, and removed dangerous damp from the air. It doesn't do either of these things (thank heavens for microbiology), but it does smell great, and it does a fantastic job of removing bad smells.

If your cold is still hanging around after all that, you've one last remedy to turn to: our friend garlic. Garlic has powerful antimicrobial and antifungal properties, and after you've chewed on a raw clove nobody will want to come close enough to give you a cold. Bruise a clove and steep it in a shot of vodka for a few hours. If you're not feeling brave, stir in a spoonful of Manuka honey before chugging it.

I'm meant to tag five people with this one. What do you do when you have a cold? This time, they're not all food bloggers - I think some of my perfume blogging friends might have something to add here too. Cait from Legerdenez and Great She Elephant: you're it. Food bloggers who can expect an email shortly are Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen, The Winemaker's Wife and Santos from The Scent of Green Bananas. Have fun everyone, and don't forget to use a handkerchief.

Best of Blogs award - voting has finished

Gastronomy Domine is a finalist in the Best of Blogs award (Best Cooking/Recipe blog). Voting has finished now - thanks to everybody who took the time to vote. There's now a jury vote as well, and my understanding is that the results will be announced at the end of the month. Please keep your fingers crossed!

Cha gio (nems) - Vietnamese crispy spring rolls

When Mr Weasel and I were living in Paris, we spent a lot of our time in one of the city's Chinatowns, along the Avenue d'Ivry. It's more a Cambodia-town or a Vietnam-town than London's Chinatown, which is full of Chinese people and food; France is home to many more Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people than the UK is, and this is reflected in the food.

One of my favourite Vietnamese dishes is these spring rolls, which are very hard to find in restaurants in the UK. Many cultures cook things wrapped in other things - there is the burrito, the Malaysian po pia, the fajita, the crèpe and . . . I suppose the closest English equivalent is the Cornish pasty. The cha gio stands head and shoulders above all of these - it' s got texture and flavour to beat them all to a pulp in any contest of wrapped-up-things you may choose to imagine.

Cha gio get their texture, both crisp and chewy all at once, from the rice paper skins they are wrapped in. You can find these in good oriental supermarkets, and although they're a little fragile when dry, they're very easy to handle and wrap with. The finished rolls are wrapped in lettuce and herbs, making them taste fresh and light.

To make about sixty cha gio, you'll need:

Rolls
225g cellophane (bean thread) noodles
4 carrots, grated
8 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
8 water chestnuts
1 dressed crab
12 raw tiger prawns, peeled and deveined
350g minced pork
1 onion
5 spring onions
4 cloves garlic
6 shallots
4 tablespoons fish sauce (nuoc mam)
3 eggs
15 x 25cm discs of rice paper (available in oriental supermarkets)

Sugar and water for soaking
Oil for deep-frying
Lettuce and mint leaves for wrapping

Sauce
4 cloves minced garlic
½ cup nuoc mam
¼ cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon chili oil
1 diced red chili

Soak the noodles in boiling water and set aside, draining and rinsing in cold water after 15 minutes. Put the mushrooms, water chestnuts, crab, pork, prawns, onions, garlic and shallots in the food processor and pulse until chopped finely. Use your hands to stir in the fish sauce, the eggs, the carrots and the noodles.

Fill a mixing bowl half-full with warm water, and dissolve about six tablespoons of caster sugar in it - the sugar will help the rolls brown and help the sweetness of the carrots come through. Soak a rice-paper disc in this until it's soft and pliable. Cut it with scissors into quarters. Place a dessert spoonful of the filling on the curved edge, fold over the adjacent corners and roll up, as in these photographs.


Deep fry the little rolls (I use a wok, which helps save on oil) until they are golden brown.

To serve, wrap each one in a leaf of lettuce with some mint leaves. Dip in the spicy sauce and do your very best to nibble delicately. Delicious.

Those visiting Paris should run, not walk to Kim Anh (51 Av Emile Zola, 15e, 01 45 79 96), where the nems are . . . pretty much as good as these, only you don't have to do all the work. (I lie. They're even better, and they're served alongside the very best Vietnamese food I've ever eaten.)

Five Food Challenges for 2006

Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen (also up for the Best of Blogs award - please vote if you haven't done yet) has tagged me with another meme - this time I'm to list five things I want to work on in the kitchen this year.

Knife skills
My knife skills are horrible. I'm fast, but I'm not very neat, and some tasks, like boning whole birds or filleting fish are only accomplished in this house with a maximum of mess. One problem here is my total inability to sharpen knives on a butcher's steel. I may give in to technology this year and buy a knife sharpener that you don't need an Olympic skater's degree of precision to operate.

Cakes
Regular readers will have twigged to the fact that I don't really have much of a sweet tooth. Mr Weasel does most of our baking, and I don't really enjoy cake-making that much; compared to a lot of what I cook I find the method very rigid, and I get a bit fed up with following recipes to the letter. I am not an obedient cook. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough at baking to be able to construct cake recipes in my head. This year I'm hoping to work on this, so by the end of the year I might just be able to make up some new ones.

Japanese food
I love Japanese food, but I don't cook much of it; I have to go to London to get a lot of the necessary ingredients, and there's a cultural subtlety to the cuisine that I need to read more on. Cooking in Japan (Nihon no ryori) is a blog that's relatively new to me, but extremely informative on Japanese food. I've lined up a few Emi Kazuko books to buy. Miso and dashi are lurking in the fridge, ready to deploy.

Wild foods
We moved into the countryside last year, and we're surrounded by woods and hedges brimming with interesting foods. Look out for more of this in the spring, when the elderflowers will be blossoming - honeyed elderflower fritters, elderflower cordial and elderflower champagne beckon. (The picture is of last year's sloe gin - you can see how the sloes' juices are seeping out and blending with the gin and sugar. This will be great when it's ready to decant.)

A new kitchen
A poor workman always blames her tools. Strictly speaking, I blame the people we bought the house from. They built the kitchen themselves, and were enthusiastically incompetent carpenters and designers. The cupboards aren't deep enough to fit plates in. Half of the doors have roughly carved flowers on them; they got bored halfway round the room and just painted flowers on the rest. The surfaces are about four inches higher than is natural or comfortable, the floor is covered with lino which seems to have been chosen for its startling resemblance to pitted industrial spillage, and the whole thing is tiled from floor to ceiling in a colour I like to think of as terminally-ill-frog green. (The agents' details said 'extensive splashback'.) Nothing is at a right-angle to anything else. Little tongues of Polyfilla slurp out of the edges of the units and the plug sockets. Still; it's a big room, and when we can get it all ripped out and replaced, it'll be fantastic.

Here's hoping I win the lottery this year.

This, I'm afraid, is where this meme comes to die. Everybody I might have tagged has already been tagged (I come to this rather late). It could be worse. Your kitchen could be terminally-ill-frog green.

Tartiflette

Please do not serve this to people on diets.

Tartiflette is a dish from the Savoy region of France, where they take their dairy products very, very seriously. Despite its extreme good looks and fantastic taste, it's not actually a traditional recipe - it was invented in the 1980s by the union of Reblochon cheesemakers as a way to popularise the cheese. Since then, it's become popular throughout the region, and different recipes have proliferated. This is my take on it.

At heart, and as the Reblochon cheesemakers intended, this is an absurdly creamy potato gratin with a whole cheese sitting on top of it. The nutmeg and thyme in here make the cheese sing, the rich Marsala makes the cream a velvety thing of beauty, and the sweet shallots and salty, smoked bacon infuse the whole dish. Serve with a salad and some crusty bread. (The salad is there so you can pretend you're eating healthily.)

Reblochon is hard to come by here, so I have used a Camembert. You can use any soft, washed-rinded, reasonably stinky cheese (an Epoisse would work equally well). To serve two for supper, with enough for lunch tomorrow, you'll need:

8 potatoes (I used Vivaldi, which are firm and creamy when cooked)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 pint crème fraîche
12 rashers smoked streaky bacon
6 shallots
½ wine glass Marsala
1 Camembert
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
Butter
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Chop the shallots into small dice, and cut the bacon into dice the same size. Saute in a little butter until the shallots are sweet and the bacon browning at the edges. Set aside. Peel the potatoes and slice them as thin as you can. (My new mandoline has made this the work of a couple of minutes, and I'm yet to injure myself on it, so I'm still recommending you go straight to the cookware shop and buy one. A plastic Japanese one is very inexpensive - mine was £5 - and works splendidly.) Arrange one overlapping layer of potato slices in the bottom of a heavy baking dish which you have buttered generously, then sprinkle over the thyme, a grating of nutmeg and half of the crushed garlic. Scatter over half of the bacon and shallot mixture, then spread half the crème fraîche over the top. Repeat with another layer, then put a final potato lid on the top.

Slice the cheese in half along its equator, and cut each half into quarters. Arrange the pieces on top of the dish. Pour the Marsala over the dish, dot with butter, season (don't use too much salt - you'll get plenty from the bacon and the salty cheese) and bake in the hot oven for an hour, or a little longer - test to make sure that the potatoes are tender. It's advisable to put a tray under the dish to catch any drips.

This is very rich. Make sure your salad has a tart dressing to offset the extreme creaminess of it all, and dig in.

Disappointing sushi

I became involved in a conversation yesterday about the horrible habit certain British supermarkets have of putting slices of smoked salmon on cubes of rice, and calling the results sushi. It got me thinking . . . and thinking . . . and thinking, mostly about where I could get my hands on some sushi, rightnowthisminute.

Fate smiled on me in the morning when my parents rang and asked whether we'd like to accompany them to Oriental City in Edgware (see this earlier post for address details and ways to get there). There's a big, Oriental food court there, and while I usually gravitate towards the Malaysian or Vietnamese stalls, there's also a stall called Japan Food which I hadn't tried before.

A sushi chef, knife in hand, napkin on head, was looking busy. I went to ask him whether he had any uni, and he nodded, but made it clear he didn't speak any English and pointed me at a lady in an apron, who took my order. So far so good. I asked for four kinds of nigiri sushi (nigiri is the kind of sushi which is made from a bullet of hand-shaped rice with a piece of raw or cooked fish, shellfish, omelette or other ingredients neatly placed on top).

Tobiko (flying fish roe), are a crisp, tiny orange roe which are salted and sometimes flavoured before use. Uni is fresh sea urchin. Unagi is a cooked, fatty freshwater eel, grilled in a teriyaki sauce, and I think I am probably safe in assuming that you all know what tuna (maguro in Japanese) is.

They had everything I wanted, which was cheering. It took them twenty minutes to prepare the eight pieces of sushi. This is a bad sign; the chef was working slowly, which is unusual in a trained sushi chef. Worse still - as you can see from the photos, the sushi on the plate was . . . messy. Tobiko had spilled off the rice and out of its nori (seaweed) wrapping, and the unagi didn't fit on its rice. This isn't usual. The presentation of jewel-like sushi nigiri is important, and it's a matter of pride for the chef. My chef was clearly not having a prideful day.

First, I took a tobiko nigiri. Not promising.This wasn't a good example of the roe; it was oversalted and had a lot of gaspingly obvious extra flavouring. (Good tobiko is flavoured where it's produced, but not with a sledgehammer and a shovel like this was.) The nori holding it on top of the rice hadn't been toasted to make it tender to the tooth, and it rustled around in the mouth like a salty Mars Bar wrapper.

Fresh uni is very delicious stuff; if you like the taste of the sea you find in a raw oyster, you'll love uni, which is firm but creamy, and tastes of sweet ozone and fresh seaside breezes. This was . . . fresh-ish. (I should have asked to see it before ordering.) Fresh uni is sweet, and it's paler than this. Mine was still seaside-tasting, but a little bitter, and darker than it should have been. Chewy nori again. Disappointing.

The tuna - blah. At least it was quite nice and fatty. It was pre-sliced (how long does it take a guy with a sharp knife to peel two rectangles off a slab of muscle to order?), and had been sitting around for a while, a bit damp. And a horror was lurking beneath it - the rice hadn't been mixed with the sugar and vinegar mixture that flavours it properly, and I got a mouthful of vinegar. I was beginning to feel seriously miffed.

Good unagi is one of my favourite things in the world. It should have been grilled moments ago, its hot fat crisping the skin and making the flesh tender, painted with a sugary-salty sauce and conveyed straight to the waiting mouth. This crisping makes the skin friable and easy to bite through.

I'll leave you to guess whether this was good unagi. You might benefit from some pointers: it was stone-cold. It was chewy. It was about as crisp as a well-sucked whelk.

All is not lost. Next month, I'll be visiting (and blogging from) an extremely good sushi restaurant in California, which does better and fresher sushi than any I've tried in some of the very expensive Japanese restaurants in London. I've started planning holidays around the opportunity to go there. Watch this space.

(For all you ever needed to know about sushi and quite a lot more, visit this absolutely excellent sushi guide from Randy Johnson, a fish-obsessing American who used to live in Japan.)

Weekend cat blogging - cheese

Thanks to Clare at Eatstuff for organising Weekend Cat Blogging again.

Here are Mooncake and Raffles relaxing to some karaoke. Raffles is pleased with his Diana Ross impression.

This week, we bought an Epoisse (an exceptionally stinky French cheese) and ate it for dessert. I wish I'd had my camera to hand - the kittens, normally not much moved by human food, made up their minds that it was a particularly sticky and inert kind of delicious mouse. We ended up giving them a small slice to stop them trying to dive into our plates - a slightly foolish decision, given they syrupy stickiness of a ripe Epoisse, and the horrendous smell of an Epoisse-y kitten who hasn't washed all the cheese off her shoulders a couple of hours later.

I leave you with a cuter picture. I found them dozing on the lovely Mulberry towel Mr Weasel's parents bought me for Christmas when I'd left it to dry on the radiator. Suits them, doesn't it?

Butterfly cakes

These little buttercream-filled fairy cakes were Mr Weasel's favourite when he was a kid. He's the baker in the house, and on getting home today he ran for the handmixer, claiming an attack of cake nostalgia.

He claims that being a computer scientist has given him an unparalleled skill for following instructions, and says this is why he's so very good at baking. I think he was visited by a buxom, greasy-fingered fairy-godmother with cake crumbs in her hair, a wooden spoon for a wand and golden syrup down her apron when he was in his cradle, but who am I to say?

The cake batter which makes the body of these is the same batter we used for the pink cakes at last week's party. You'll need:

Cake mixture
100g soft butter
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Beat the lot together with a handwhisk until pale and airy, divide between 18 cake cases and bake at 200°c for around 20 minutes, until golden. Use the Mr Weasel Aural Method to work out whether your cakes are done - listen to them when they come out of the oven (get close, but don't burn your ear). If the cakes are hissing and popping, they're not done. Put them back in for a few minutes and try again.

When the cakes are ready, remove them to a metal rack to cool.

While the little cakes are cooling, make a buttercream icing. You'll need:

Buttercream icing
175g soft butter (use butter you've left out for a while, not the stuff with added vegetable oil in tubs)
350g icing sugar
A few drops vanilla essence

Chop the butter into little pieces, and place in a bowl with the icing sugar and two teaspoons of water. Beat the butter and icing sugar together with an electric whisk until well mixed and pale in colour. That's it: piece of cake. (Hur hur.)

When the cakes are cool (important, this coolness; a warm cake may be crumbly, but a cool one will slice readily), slice off the top and cut it in half. Put a teaspoon of the icing on the cut cake surface, and put the half-slices of lid back on to look like little wings. Open mouth, insert cake and reminisce about children's parties.

Otak-otak - spicy Malaysian fish patties

This is a cold-weather otak-otak. In Malaysia, you'd be wrapping your fish mousse in banana leaves and grilling the filled leaves over a charcoal fire outdoors. In England in January, you're going to be wrapping it in home-made banana leaves (tin foil and greaseproof paper), and, unless you're the masochistic sort who doesn't mind hauling the barbecue out in the sub-zero night, dry-frying in a pan on the hob.

This recipe still shouts loudly that it's from Malaysia; it's packed with zingy spice. If you're somewhere where they are available, use the banana leaves and add some galangal and candlenuts to the sambal (the paste at the start of the recipe), and some slivered Kaffir lime leaves to the fish mixture - even if you're not, I think you'll find this surprisingly authentic. You'll need:

Sambal
1 ½ teaspoons blachan (fermented shrimp paste - available in Chinese supermarkets and from Seasoned Pioneers)
5 sun dried chilis
4 cloves garlic
2 knobs ginger
Zest of 2 limes
1 stem lemongrass
5 shallots
2 teaspoons turmeric

Fish mixture
6 mackerel, skin and bones removed
1/2 wine glass water
1 tin coconut milk
1 teaspoon sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons coriander seeds, roasted
Salt

Put all the sambal ingredients in a blender, and whizz until they're a paste. Set them to one side. This will pong - blachan is very strong, and when it's raw has a distinct and non-charming smell of dead things. Suspend your disbelief and keep cooking - it starts to smell better very soon. Remove your finished sambal to a bowl.

This sambal can form the base to a lot of Malaysian recipes - it's strong, and it's delicious. You can vary the amount of chili that you use depending on taste (I used a lot here - these are chilis that I bought in Malaysia last year, and they're not particularly strong). As you become more used to the flavour, you may find yourself wanting to use more blachan. It is very strong - I keep ours in the garage, in case I offend the in-laws.

Remove the skin and the spiky backbone from the mackerel. In Malaysia, this would be a threadfin - Sainsbury's don't carry threadfin, so you're stuck with mackerel. Any meaty, oily fish will work well. If you have two kittens, the skins will find a good home if you chop them up and stick them in a bowl. Put the flesh in the food processor with the water and blend until you're left with a pale puree.

Add the coconut milk, the sugar, the eggs, coriander and salt. Pulse until everything is combined, then add the sambal you made earlier and process until you end up with a thick paste.

Cut rectangles of foil and greasproof paper measuring 15 x 30 cm. Put a piece of greaseproof on top of a piece of foil and lay three dessertspoons of paste down the centre. Fold everything up carefully. It's not meant to be airtight; the packets are there to help your otak-otak both steam and grill, so you'll have a lightly steamed mousse with a golden, grilled bottom.

Put your little packets in a frying pan without any oil over a medium flame, and toast them for between ten and fifteen minutes, until the mousse is wobbly but firm. Serve with rice and imagine you're sitting in a Malaysian restaurant with zinc-top tables and dripping rainforest outside.

Sweet roast winter vegetables

Outside it's dismal. The garden is kitted out in a million shades of brown and dark grey. So how is it that vegetables at this time of year are so brightly coloured? Right now, I can buy fresh, dark red beetroot, bright orange butternut squash, and darkest green winter herbs like rosemary and sage. The vegetables in season at this time of year have an added benefit - they're full of the sugars they've been saving up all year, so they are sweet and delicious.

Beetroot is a much maligned vegetable. Unsurprising, really; I can't think of many things which benefit from being drowned in malt vinegar. We used to be served it at school, and God, it was revolting. The holiday in France when I was 9, where I was served a plate of crudites including some raw, grated beetroot, was a revelation. Beetroot in its natural state is sweet, juicy and earthy. If you're only used to the pickled stuff and you see a bunch on sale raw, take it home and experiment with it. You may give yourself a delicious surprise.

Whole bulbs of fennel are on sale at the moment as well. Sweet and fragrant, fennel cooks to a delectable crunch, and here, where it's roasted in white wine and goose fat, it's just beautiful. I've used sweet onions (Vidalia) - these onions are not as easy to come across in the UK as they are in America, but Sainsbury's are carrying them at the moment with a recommendation that you use them in salads. They're so full of sugar that they roast to a caramel perfection. I'm roasting a couple more onions in this than we're likely to eat tonight - they're excellent cold too.

To serve three hungry people or four preoccupied ones, you'll need:

1 butternut squash, quartered lengthways
1 bulb fennel
6 sweet onions
4 raw beetroots
1 bulb garlic
1 handful thyme
1 handful sage
1 handful rosemary stalks
5 anchovies
¼ bottle white wine (I used a Chardonnay)
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
3 tablespoons goose fat
2 tablespoons maple syrup
Salt and pepper

Wash the beetroot and cut the tops and bottoms off. Cut ends like this will allow the edges to catch and caramelise. Cut the squash into four lengthwise, and slice the fennel roughly (into about five pieces). Divide the garlic into cloves - don't peel them.

Peel four of the onions and trim the roots and tips off, then push a knife through them so they are nearly quartered, but still held together at the bottom. Stuff each nearly-quartered onion with thyme, making sure there's a good amount of salt sprinkled over the cut surfaces. Chop the rest roughly.

Put all of the vegetables into a baking tray with the anchovies on the bottom. The anchovies will not make the dish taste fishy, but they'll give everything a rich, dark background flavour. Pour over the wine and drizzle with whole coriander seeds, maple syrup and goose fat. Strew the rosemary and the thyme over the top and put in the oven at 180°C for an hour and a half, or until the edges of all the vegetables are golden brown.

The wine and juices will have made an alarmingly pink sauce. Serve the vegetables with some crusty bread to mop up the liquid, and drink the rest of that bottle of wine.

Clinical canapes

Being related to a doctor is a wonderful thing, but those of you who aren't can buy your own drugs paraphernalia at the chemist's. Nothing is guaranteed to concern your guests more than arriving to find you injecting home-flavoured vodka into a couple of giant punnets of cherry tomatoes.

These little guys are, by design, very sharp. Be sure not to have any vodka yourself before you start this; you'll need all your faculties clear and lucid in order to avoid spicy vodka-finger.

I made a Bloody-ish Mary base by mixing nearly half a small glass of unflavoured vodka with half a glass of lemon vodka, the juice of two limes and two teaspoons of wasabi. You need lots of spicing; only a little of the mixture goes to flavour each tiny tomato.

Carefully insert the needle at the place in the tomato where the stalk was attached. Squeeze down on the plunger gently until you can feel the little tomato swell and become stiff. Serve in a great big bowl, warning guests that these are not precisely tomatoes.

Here is an equally tasty option for needle-phobics. Unfortunately, I put this canape together after a few too many tomatoes, so it's not as pretty as the first batch was. The first seeded, skinned tomatoes were diced attractively. The layers were neat and not smeary. The baby basil leaves were not all oily. Still - it still tasted great, and they're very easy to make. You'll need:

1 loaf white multigrain bread, sliced
1 bulb garlic
1 pat butter
1 pot fresh pesto
2 tubs soft goat cheese
1 punnet tomatoes, skinned and deseeded
Basil

Simmer the chopped garlic in the butter for fifteen minutes until it is soft, and the butter is infused with the scent. Use a rolling pin to roll flat the slices of bread, and cut out fifty circles of the squashed bread with a cookie cutter. Brush each side with the garlic butter and bake in a hot oven for around 15-20 minutes until the little rounds are crisp and brown. Once they have cooled, you can keep the garlicky bases in an airtight box for a few days, and they won't lose their crispness.

Score the skin of the tomatoes in a little cross at the base, and pour boiling water over them straight from the kettle. This should loosen the skins so that you can peel them off easily. Chop them into four and throw the seeds away. Dice the tomato flesh.

Spread each crisp round with a layer of fresh pesto, a layer of goat cheese and a sprinkling of diced tomatoes. Garnish with basil and eat quickly to keep the crunch.

Newsflash

Gastronomy Domine has reached the finals in the Best of Blogs awards - voting will, apparently, start soon. Watch this space for more details.

Meanwhile, I've dropped some photos from the previous post. I'll replace them later (the originals are still on my camera), but for now, please imagine what meatballs would look like if blessed by the Extremely Good Meatball Fairy. They looked just like that.

Frickadellen - a fabulous meatball

Sometimes, the best recipes come about by sheer accident. This was one of them, and if you make anything from this blog this month, you really should think about making these moist little meatballs - they're fast, completely delicious and very easy. So easy I feel a little ashamed.

Frickadellen, a Teutonic cross between a meatball and a burger, are little patties made from white meats, usually veal and pork. I had been poking around in the fridge, wondering what on earth to do with half a bowl of olives, some randomly purchased vegetables and some bread which was on the verge of going stale, and came up with this. The results really had no business being this good. Clearly the little god who works the refrigerator light was smiling on me. Try making these the next time you feel the need to sacrifice a wilting lettuce and an about-to-burst tomato to him.

You'll need:

1 pack good sausages
1 egg
3 slices soft white bread
1 red pepper
6 spring onions
2 cloves garlic
½ cup olives
A grating of nutmeg
2 dried chilis
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 chicken breasts

Skin the sausages, and put them in the food processor with everything except the chicken breasts, and whizz until you have a rough paste. Add the chicken breasts and pulse until they're chopped roughly, mixed in with the other ingredients. Form round patties about the size of a ping-pong ball and saute (I used some bacon fat left over from breakfast's patented hangover cure, some very crispy bacon sandwiches). Turn regularly for between 10 and 15 minutes, and serve hot with rice and a salad.

The olives keep everything moist (use black or green ones preserved in oil, not in salt, and make sure they're de-stoned); the coriander seeds pop, full of flavour, in your mouth; the bread gives the meatballs a beautifully tender texture; and the red pepper makes everything sweet and juicy. Delicious.

My guilt at the easiness of preparing these meatballs was soon realised. I had a sneaking suspicion that food this good should involve suffering. It just wasn't my suffering - immediately afterwards, Mr Weasel, washing up, nearly chopped his thumb off on the Magimix blade. It now has three macho-looking stitches (administered by my Dad, a GP with a delicate touch and a good line in sympathy for the poor sod who has to live with his daughter). No photographs, in that I am hoping that you will want to keep coming back to read this blog, and I suspect you'll be put off by extreme clinical detail.

Happily (I think), Mr Weasel has said that he'd cheerfully chop most of the other thumb off if it means he can have these Frickadellen a second time. I think that's probably as good a recommendation as I'm going to get. Enjoy these, but be careful about what sharp-edged, curved bits of steel might be lurking under the bubbles in your sink afterwards.

Weekend herb blogging - garlic update and wedding rosemary

It's Sunday - time for Weekend Herb Blogging. Thanks to Kalyn for organising it again.

You might remember my day in the garden back in October, when I planted something approaching a metric tonne of garlic in the back garden. It's now grown leaves, and seems to be doing well - here is some of the garlic which went into beds, and the garlic which went into a pot (the idea here is that I should be able to compare the two in the summer and see which planting method worked better). They're doing very well - I've not had to mulch them, since garlic is frost-hardy down to about -10°C.



The larger plants among the shorter stems of garlic in the top picture are the gigantic elephant garlic. The plants will need fertilising in the early spring, when the bulbs in the ground will start to swell and grow. Can't wait until they're ready to eat.

Behind the garlic in the bottom picture is a pot of rosemary. Nothing too unusual about that, you might think, but this is, for me, a very special plant. The rosemary came from my wedding bouquet in 2004. I'd asked the florist for rosemary in among the roses and lily-of-the-valley to reflect the cooking I do - and when we went away on our honeymoon my Mum took the rosemary out of the bouquet (yes, that is me in the picture - if you look closely you can make out the rosemary in among the flowers) and was able to get it to sprout roots in some damp compost. She potted it up and gave it to us when we got back.

The rosemary is growing fiercely a year and a half later (a Spanish friend tells me that a strong rosemary plant outside the house means that there's a strong woman inside the house). I haven't cut any of it to cook with yet, and won't until it's a bit bushier. The plant is a brilliant reminder of a wonderful day, and it should last, carted around in its pot from house to house as we move, as long as I do.