Celebrity Eclipse – dining

Table setting, Blu
Table setting, Blu

My excuse for being aboard Celebrity Eclipse (see previous post) was the launch of Qsine, a new speciality restaurant. Each of the Solstice class ships has a clutch of four speciality restaurants at the stern end of the fifth deck. Murano, the flagship (sorry) restaurant which I covered last year, appears on each of the ships built so far, alongside Blu and the Tuscan Grille. Qsine takes up the space filled on the previous ships by Silk Harvest, a pan-Asian joint.

Chef Jacques van Staden, whose minute attention to detail is reflected in the décor, plates and even the staff uniforms in each restaurant, was at the head of the table to talk me through this very curious menu. Billed as “uniquely unordinary”, Qsine’s philosophy is all about food as play. Now, this approach isn’t really unique – I’m reminded of some of David Burke’s more frivolous moments, and Sam DeMarco’s frankly mental (and surprisingly successful) reinterpretations of American favourites. (You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten DeMarco’s Philly cheesesteak dumplings). But I like JVS’s take on it, not least because he seems so serious about making sure his diners spend a meal being anything but serious.

Enomatic machine, Wine Masters
Enomatic machine, Wine Masters

Qsine’s menu warns you something’s not quite normal here. It’s presented on an iPad, to start with, from which you will be able to order directly; and there’s no structured starter/salad/main business, just a solid block of text describing each dish. The dessert menu arrives on a cross between a Rubik’s cube and a Jacob’s ladder. It’ll take you a bit longer to work your way through than a standard menu because of the undifferentiated block of text you’re faced with, but the staff (“culinary tour guides”, insists Chef JVS), are here to advise you on the size of each of these sharing plates, and on which dishes will work well together. You’ll need their advice, because some of the dishes will serve two as an entire meal; others are much smaller. The staff know their onions, though, and will guide you through the menu.

Van Staden is determined you will have fun. There are no molecular techniques in use here, but there’s plenty of very curious presentation. Apparently, 75% of the tableware was commissioned especially for the restaurant and custom-built. I’d been running around the ship all morning taking photographs, and I was hungry. And I was a bit nonplussed to be greeted by a tray of strawberries which had been dipped and decorated to look like mushrooms.

Sushi lollipops
Sushi lollipops - the Dorito ones are at the back.

If I’m to be completely honest, my first thought on seeing what arrived on the table was that this feels just like the sort of restaurant a very imaginative and slightly malevolent nine-year-old might have come up with. There are cupcakes in a little tiffin box, with three piping bags full of different frostings to squizzle all over the tops, and a dish of toppings to sprinkle over, including pop rocks (which gave the lady next to me a horrible shock – she’d not encountered them before). Disco shrimp is a shrimp cocktail in a cone of glass that comes set on a bed of ice – but it’s ice packed with flashing blue led lights. There are sliders – tiny Kobe burgers on brioche – but these come disassembled so that you can fill yours with exactly what you fancy. Baby back spring rolls come to the table served in a nest of – you guessed it – springs. There are sushi lollipops, served on sticks and rolled in seasoning. Mine was rolled in benign black sesame, but I’ve spent the last few days wondering how the one that was rolled in crushed Doritos could possibly have tasted. There’s fish and chips for the English audience too – but it’s presented as little fried “popcorn” nuggets, and you can choose between malt vinegar and aioli to anoint them before you get down to eating.

Private dining room, Murano
Private dining room, Murano

So, clearly, Qsine isn’t offering up haute cuisine. But unexpectedly, the experience turned out to be extraordinarily good fun – I was prepared to scoff at the idea, but I haven’t giggled over dinner so much in a good long time. Outside the over-processed trilogy of meatballs (three fist-sized meatballs in different sauces), which I can’t see staying on the menu for much longer in their present form, everything we ate was well-prepared, and everybody at my large table ended up looking a lot more cheerful than they had when they came in, hungover after the previous night’s celebrations.

Potato salad, Blu
Potato salad, Blu

There are plenty of places to eat on the ship, and you’ll inevitably find that some suit you better than others. I enjoyed Blu, which is set up with a spa-type menu (there are also some stodgier dishes for non-spa-visiting partners) – macadamia-crusted scallops and lump crab risotto were particular standouts. And if you’re not a fan of buffet breakfasts, it’s worth heading down to the 5th floor cafe, where breakfast crepes are available for a small surcharge, alongside some good strong coffee. You can pick from the menu, invent a crepe from a list of breakfast ingredients, or, as I found to my very great pleasure, ask for fillings that don’t even appear on the menu – if you just want lemon and sugar, or fancy a particular kind of fruit, the staff will be happy to find some for you.

Jeff Koons sculpture, restaurant area
Jeff Koons sculpture, restaurant area

The logistics of providing food on a cruise ship were something I covered last year when I wrote about Murano, and they still create certain finicky problems that you might not even notice if you’re not a force-12 foodie. Every steak I encountered, flash-frozen and then defrosted very slowly under controlled circumstances, was curiously soft – and legislation that forbids the use of naked flames on board means that they have to be cooked on an electric grill. (I am not sure I enjoy living in a world where we can’t grill our steaks over a flame, but we can have seagoing glass-blowing studios.) In the gargantuan Moonlight Sonata restaurant, which seats hundreds, it’s hard for the staff to accurately control the cuisson of dishes, simply because so many are coming out at once – a long-winded way of saying “don’t have the fish”, at least if you find fish difficult when it’s overcooked. (That said, we had a few very good courses in the Moonlight Sonata restaurant, including an excellent celeriac soup, a seasonal salad with a fierce blue cheese and candied pecans, and a terrific little cone of dense chocolate mousse with lemon curd.)

There’s plenty of food on the ship that I didn’t get a chance to sample – there simply wasn’t time. If you find yourself travelling on Eclipse or either of her sister ships, and have a comment or tip about dining, please leave a comment – I’d love to hear from you!

Celebrity Eclipse

Pool deck, Celebrity Eclipse
Pool deck, Celebrity Eclipse

There’s no ship’s biscuit or pemmican in sight – but there is plenty of rum. I’ve just spent the weekend at the naming celebrations on Celebrity Eclipse, a cruise ship you might have seen in the news last week, when she staged an emergency rescue of British holidaymakers stranded in Spain by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano.

Eclipse is the spanking-new sister ship of Solstice and Equinox, which I travelled on last year for a press overnighter. This weekend’s trip was spread across two nights, giving me much more time to explore and enjoy the whole ship – and you’ll need at least that time to get to grips with this enormous floating resort. For those of us whose entire seagoing experience before these Solstice-class ships has been scabby old car ferries, the sheer size and gloss of something like Eclipse is a little overwhelming. There are nine restaurants to choose from (requiring a weekly bacon delivery that is measured in tonnes – you’ve got to love an organisation that measures its bacon in tonnes). There’s a bar for every mood – a wine-tasting room with Enomatic machines to make sure your glass is perfect; a club that’s like something from Captain Scarlet; a quiet, wood-lined cigar bar; a bar up by the pool where you can drink in your bikini; an ice-bar specialising in Martinis; a cocktail joint specialising in molecular techniques; a lounge like Star Trek’s Ten Forward. You can graze on coffee, crepes, patisseries, superb gelato (I recommend the coconut), hot dogs – you can shop in one of 19 boutiques, swim in one of three pools, bob up and down in one of six hot tubs, climb a virtual mountain in the gym or go and get your hair done in the spa. A three-storey theatre hosts a nightly acrobatics show and some variety acts, as well as talks about the ship and the destinations it will be visiting; there are live musicians all over the ship, and you’ll find something to every taste, from Manilow to Mozart, to sit and listen to for a while. There’s a small casino with table games with pleasingly low minimums and slot machines. Like Equinox and Solstice, Eclipse has a lawn club on the roof, with putting, croquet and quoits. And, for some reason which is still totally opaque to me, a glass-blowing studio. There’s so much to do that apparently, many travellers end up staying on board for their whole break rather than going on shore excursions.

Moonlight Sonata restaurant
Moonlight Sonata restaurant

I worked my way around tastings at several of the restaurants (not all of them – I was only there for a couple of days) – I’ll be posting pictures and notes on some of the food available later in the week. For my tastes, the 5th floor Ensemble Lounge and the 4th floor Wine Masters tasting room were the most attractive places to sit with a drink, partly because they’re rather more quiet and intimate than some of the other bars – if you like a bit more excitement with your Cuba Libre, head to the 4th floor Martini Bar, with its ice countertops and beautiful ladies in sequins, or to Quasar, the small and very spangly nightclub.

Accommodation on board is comfortable and surprisingly spacious; the staterooms have all been designed to pack in as much storage space as possible, and even in the smallest rooms you’ll find a desk, a decently sized settee and a superbly comfortable queen-sized bed that can convert into twins. Rounded edges on the beds and the other furniture maximise space in all the staterooms and mean there’s nothing to knock into when you stagger back from the club at three in the morning – and if you need a hand coming round in the morning, there’s a shower with body jets and a rain head to get you ready for breakfast. The cupboards are stocked with Frette dressing gowns, slippers, umbrellas, shopping bags, lighted make up mirrors, binoculars and a fierce little hairdryer, but we still found there was room for several suitcases’-worth of your own belongings in our Deluxe Veranda room. (Leave some space, though – there are, after all, nineteen shops on board to visit.)

Deluxe Veranda Stateroom
Deluxe Veranda Stateroom

There are several classes of stateroom – Celebrity have a run-down of the features of each on their website – most of which have a very private balcony with sun loungers and a sliding picture window. We found ourselves leaving the window open a crack at night to allow the sound of the sea inside and slept blissfully, being rocked gently by the waves. There’s great charm in being woken by a kittiwake on the balcony in the morning and drinking your first cup of tea on a lounger – I recommend it.

Part of what makes Celebrity so successful is the staff, who bend over backwards, forwards and sideways to make your trip a good one. Milk pods for the tea and coffee in the state rooms hadn’t arrived on time because the flight they were on had been stopped by the volcano (Eyjafjallajokull – I really ought to get used to spelling that, because I sure as hell can’t pronounce it) – and about two minutes after we rang to ask for some, a lady appeared at the door with four half-pint cartons for our fridge. There’s a smile on every face, and somebody polishing something around every corner – the place positively glistens. Every time we left the room, we came back to find a new surprise – some flowers, a tray of canapes, a bowl of fruit, a bottle of fizzy wine – I could get very used to being looked after like this.

Lawn Club
Lawn Club (a great spot for a glass of Pimms)

Eclipse is based in Southampton, the first of the Solstice-class ships to have a UK home port. Alongside the outside pools, which I found an absolute joy – I love swimming, and it’s particularly good fun when the pool is bobbing up and down in the sea – there’s an enormous enclosed solarium with another large pool, hot tubs and relaxation pods that you can snuggle up in with…a good friend, which means that even in British weather you can get some sun and swimming in the warm. The tea and kettles in the room are a nod to the UK clientele, and although the food on offer has an American bent, they’ve squeezed fish and chips onto at least one of the menus.

The best recommendation I can give the ship is in the fact that as soon as we disembarked, Dr W and I started to talk about which of the forthcoming cruises we should shell out to go on. Many thanks to Celebrity and Siren PR for putting us up for this inaugural weekend – and watch this space for more on the food later this week.

Sesame ginger chicken wings

My Dad always taught us that the best part of the chicken was the wings. The flesh in the wing is sweet from its proximity to the bone, delicate, and lubricated with plenty of flavour-carrying fat from the skin that covers it. Accordingly, we used to fight over the wings every time a chicken appeared on the dinner table, occasionally with our cutlery. Ours was a savage household.

Dad’s Chinese, and this is the kind of comfort food he used to rustle up for us when everybody else’s Dad was frying mince with baked beans. I used to take great pride as a little girl in helping out – slicing the garlic, chopping the ginger, carefully mixing the cornflour into some cold water, and watching, fascinated, as he whirled around the kitchen with a wok and a pair of chopsticks. You can’t beat the cosmopolitan nature of the food education my brother and I got from my parents: Mum’s wonderful meals were from Jane Grigson, the Roux brothers and Elizabeth David, and Dad’s all did something fabulous with soy sauce. Alongside lengthy gastronomic holidays in France, where my brother and I were expected to sit quietly for hours in restaurants with endless cutlery and a million cheeses while Mum and Dad bibbed and tucked (and we did – there’s still little I find as fascinating as my very own slab of foie gras), there were the frequent visits to Malaysia, where food is as important to the national psyche as football is in Britain. Back in the UK, there were regular and keenly looked forward to family trips to London’s Chinatown, which, at the time, was the only place you could find ingredients like sesame oil, chilli sauces and tofu – even ginger was sometimes hard to find in 1970s Bedfordshire. There were bribes of candied winter melon and sesame caramels for the kids, and Dad swiftly made friends with all the local Chinese restaurateurs. We met Kenneth Lo once at a garden party when I was about six. Dad didn’t stop talking about it for weeks.

While most wing recipes you’ll find will have you grill or fry the wings so they are crisp, this Chinese method will have you simmering them in an aromatic, savoury sauce. You’re best off eating these with a knife and fork; fingers will be a bit messy. The popularity of chicken breasts and legs, all neatly pre-jointed, means that there are a lot of surplus wings kicking around out there, and you’ll likely find that you can buy them very cheaply (I prefer the butcher’s wings to the boxes from the supermarket, because I’m more confident about their origin) – this is a good budget dish for the end of the month.

I like to remove the wingtips, which don’t yield any meat, with a pair of poultry shears, and use them to make stock. This isn’t absolutely necessary – if you’re in a hurry, leave yours on. And although my Dad would use a wok to make this, I find a large casserole dish a bit easier, not least because it’s an even depth and comes with a lid.

To serve two, you’ll need:

800g chicken wings
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon salt
2in piece of ginger
2 cloves garlic
12 spring onions, chopped and separated into green and white parts
75ml sesame oil
100ml soy sauce
Water
2 teaspoons cornflour
Groundnut oil to fry

Half an hour before you start to cook, sprinkle the salt, pepper and sugar over the chicken wings, mix well, and set aside.

Heat a couple of spoonsful of oil in your pan, and brown the wings on each side. You may need to do this in a few batches, depending on the size of your pan. When they are browned, return them to the pan with the chopped garlic, the ginger, cut into coins, and the white part of the spring onions. Keep stirring carefully for a minute until the garlic, ginger and onions start to give up their aroma – be careful not to break the skin on any of the wings.

Pour over the sesame oil and soy sauce, and reduce the heat to a low flame. Add water to cover the wings, stir to combine everything, and bring slowly to a simmer. Put a lid on the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, for 12 minutes.

Combine the cornflour with a little cold water. Remove the lid and stir the cornflour mixture through the dish. Continue to simmer until the sauce thickens. Stir through the green part of the spring onions, reserving a little to scatter over the finished dish, and serve with steamed rice and a stir-fried vegetable.

Tarte Tatin

Tarte TatinTarte Tatin is one of those lovely recipes with an attached aetiological myth. Back in the 1890s, the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel and restaurant in Loir-et-Cher (still open for business in 2010), had a kitchen accident when making an apple pie. Apples were left cooking an a mixture of sugar and butter for a little too long, and burned. Stéphanie Tatin, who was in charge of the kitchen, tried to save the dish by pressing a disc of pastry onto the ruined apples, and served the finished pie as a sort of upside-down tart. The hotel patrons raved about the resulting dish, a buttery, caramel apple classic was born, and the Tatin family ensured themselves fabulous advertising for their hotel forever.

These days, you can actually buy specialised dishes to cook a Tatin in. I have a Le Creuset Tatin dish which gets used for a lot more than tarts – it’s very dense and distributes the heat gently and evenly, making it great for gratins, shallow pies and other baked dishes. If you don’t have one, a frying pan measuring about 25cm in diameter will do the same job, but it needs to have an ovenproof handle – check before you cook that the length of the handle will allow you to shut the oven door.

You’ll need:

Pastry
170g plain flour
80g caster sugar
140g butter
1 large egg, beaten (I used two bantam eggs, but you’re unlikely to be able to find any if you don’t have a friendly neighbour with bantams, so use a large chicken egg instead)

Apple topping

6 sweet apples (I used Cox’s)
110g caster sugar
110g butter
Zest of 1 lemon

Prepare the pastry first, and let it rest in the fridge while you warm up the oven and prepare the apples.

Sieve the flour into a bowl from a height, and rub the butter in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, and bind with the egg. Depending on the weather, you may also need a little water to bind the pastry. Put the ball of pastry in a freezer bag and refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F.

Core and peel the apples, and cut them into eighths. Melt the butter and sugar together in your Tatin dish or frying pan over a medium heat, and arrange the apple slices neatly over the butter and sugar mixture in the base of the pan. Back on the heat, keep cooking until the butter and sugar begin to caramelise. You’ll see the brown caramel bubbling up through the apple slices. The apple slices must catch and darken, so don’t be shy about taking the pan off the heat – the brown caramel should be visible across the whole dish, which should take 15-20 minutes.

When the apples are ready, roll the pastry out into a disc the same size as your pan. Set it on top of the apples and use your fingers to carefully press the pastry into the dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, then put a plate over the top of the dish and flip it over, using oven gloves to protect your hands. The tart should drop neatly onto the plate. Serve warm, with lashings of cream.

Glass noodle salad

Glass noodle saladA friend complained the other week that there aren’t enough noodle recipes on this blog. So here, just for you, Andras, is a noodle salad.

The noodles in this salad are glass noodles, made from mung beans (the same beans that beansprouts…sprout from). Don’t be tempted to substitute rice noodles, which have a very different texture. You’re unlikely to find glass noodles at your local supermarket, but any oriental grocer will carry them – they are sometimes marked “bean thread” or “pea thread” noodles. Check the packet – the only ingredient should be beans, or bean flour.

Texture’s all-important in this salad. The moist crunch of the lettuce against the dry crunch of crispy shallots, the slip of the noodles and the dense pieces of chicken and prawn all add up to a world-beating mouthfeel. A Thai-style dressing, with herbs, fish sauce, palm sugar, chillies and limes, gets the tastebuds in every part of your tongue working. We ate this as a main dish; it’s great as a side-dish too. For some reason, this is one of those recipes which demands to be eaten outdoors, so consider making it for a picnic or to serve at a barbecue.

To serve two to three as a main course or six as a side-dish, you’ll need:

8 large, raw prawns
2 chicken breasts, without skins
1 tablespoon tom yum paste
1 iceberg lettuce
100g glass noodles
1 handful (25g) coriander
1 handful (25g) mint
Juice of 4 limes
3 tablespoons fish sauce
2 teaspoons palm sugar (substitute soft brown sugar if you can’t find any)
1 red chilli
3 banana shallots

Stir the tom yum paste into the prawns and leave to marinade while you prepare the noodles (about 10 minutes).

Pour boiling water over the noodles to cover, and leave for 5 minutes until they are soft. Drain in a sieve, rinse in cold running water and transfer to a bowl. Use scissors to snip into the noodles so they are cut into pieces about an inch long. Cover and refrigerate.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a very hot frying pan, and cook the prawns until pink. Remove to a bowl. In the same pan, which will have retained some of the paste, sauté the chicken until it is brown outside and cooked through. Remove to another bowl. Leave the prawns and chicken to cool while you prepare the crispy shallots and dressing – when you come to make the salad, they’ll be close to room temperature.

Slice two long shallots into very thin rings, and shallow-fry in a couple of centimetres of oil, stirring occasionally, until they are brown and sweet (10-15 minutes). Remove from the oil with a skimmer and drain on kitchen paper. Set aside.

Slice the third shallot in half lengthways, and chop very finely. In a bowl, mix it with the herbs, chopped very finely, the sugar, lime juice, fish sauce and finely chopped chilli. Stir the dressing into the chilled noodles. Chop the chicken into dice the size of the top joint of your little finger, and toss the pieces, along with any juices from the chicken, with the noodles.

Slice the lettuce, straight from the fridge, as thinly as possible, and lay it in the bottom of a large serving bowl. Cover with the noodle mixture, and arrange the prawns on top. Sprinkle the crispy shallots over the dish and serve, making sure that some of every layer makes it onto the plate.

Crackling wars

Roast pork
Award-winning crackling

An eagle-eyed commenter (thanks, Pills4MeNerves!) mentioned this morning that my roast pork recipe won a crackling cook-off at the Guardian newspaper’s Word of Mouth blog. Now, I wouldn’t normally boast about such things here, but given that my competition appears to have been Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith, Good Housekeeping, Delia Smith and Hugh F-W, I am dizzy with the joy of it all.

Here’s the recipe – I recommend that at the weekend you hot-foot it to the butcher’s, get your tea-towels and hairdryers out, and enjoy the rewards that only attention to detail and a preparedness to blow-dry meat will provide.

Braised ox cheek with gremolata crumbs

Ox cheek with gremolata crumbsI’ve never been completely clear on why we class cheeks, ox and pork both, as offal. There are no interesting organs here; they’re just muscle and fat, like every other cut of meat on the butcher’s counter. Perhaps it’s because they’re from the head of the animal, inciting a squicky reaction in some – a squicky reaction which I can guarantee those same people wouldn’t apply to a sausage, because they’re not very imaginative. The lengthy ban on the sale in the UK of any cuts from the head or on the bone during BSE made this inexpensive cut disappear for several years, which didn’t do anything at all for its popularity when it returned. You may have to order cheeks in specially at the butcher, but he should be happy to help you.

The meat in an animal’s cheek is tender, rich and basted from within with plenty of flavour-carrying fat. The same goes for fish; when I was a kid, uncles in Malaysia taught me and my brother that the finest bit of a large steamed fish is the cheeks, which we’d pop out with chopsticks and fight over. (A fish-head curry is a fine, fine thing.)

I’ve braised this cheek for hours in a very dense stock-based sauce, and sprinkled some crisp crumbs with herbs and lemon zest over to lift the texture and flavour. Eagle-eyed readers will realise that I’ve nicked the star anise idea, which also brightens the flavour profile of this dish very handsomely, from Bob Bob Ricard. The stock you use is very important, and should absolutely not come from a cube. A good home-made beef stock is essential here. You may find some ready-made alongside the dripping at your butcher’s, but it’s worth making a large pot of your own, some of which you can freeze, and including a roasted marrow bone, some shin or some tail to thicken and beef the stock up. (Sorry.)

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 carrot
1 stick celery
1 large onion
4 star anise
2 bay leaves
4 ox cheeks
500ml passata
500ml beef stock
500ml red wine
1 handful (about 25g) tarragon, leaves picked from tough stalks
1 handful (about 25g) parsley
Zest of 1 lemon
250g white breadcrumbs
Olive oil

Chop the onion, carrot and celery into rough dice. In a large casserole with a lid, sweat the vegetables in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil until the onion and celery are becoming translucent, but not taking on colour. Pour over the liquid ingredients and stir well. Slide the ox cheeks into the casserole with the bay and star anise, season generously, and bring to a gentle simmer.

Set the timer to 3 hours, and continue to simmer with the lid off until the liquid has reduced by about half. Pop the lid on and continue to simmer until the timer goes.

While the cheeks are cooking, prepare your crumbs – for maximum crispiness, do it towards the end of the cooking time. In a large frying pan, sauté the crumbs, moving all the time, in two tablespoons of olive oil until they are golden brown. Remove them to a small bowl. Chop the tarragon and parsley finely and zest the lemon. Stir the herbs and zest into the crumbs with a large pinch of salt and set aside until it’s time to serve the cheeks.

Skim any excess fat off the top of the casserole. Remove the star anise and bay, and discard. Use a skimmer or slotted spoon to fish the cheeks out of the casserole and rest somewhere warm while you pass the sauce through a sieve, using the bottom of a ladle to push the soft vegetables through. Bring the strained sauce back to a simmer.

To serve, ladle a generous puddle of sauce onto a plate, sit a cheek in the middle of the puddle and sprinkle the crumbs over the top. Mashed potato is the perfect accompaniment to this rich dish – you’ll need lots to mop up the delicious sauce. I also served some purple sprouting broccoli (it’s that time of year) dressed with lemon juice and butter, and sprinkled with some toasted pine nuts.

Piedmont peppers

Piedmont peppersThis recipe is based loosely around an Elizabeth David one my Mum used to serve up regularly as a cold antipasto when my brother and I were tinies. We couldn’t get enough of it, and I know he has his own version of the recipe too.

These peppers must be served at room temperature, when they are, unaccountably, much sweeter and juicier than they are when warm. The original version calls for bell peppers, but I’ve found that pointed Romano or Piquillo peppers tend to contain more in the way of fruit sugars and taste far better. (It goes without saying that the peppers you choose should be ripe – red, orange and yellow ones are all find, but avoid the green peppers when you go shopping.) If you have guests whose stomachs are made sensitive by peppers, advise them to peel the indigestible skins off before they eat, which should prevent any upsets.

This is a recipe it’s worth trying out on anchovy-haters, several of whom I’ve brought round using these peppers – not necessarily to a whole-hearted embracing of the anchovy, but at least to a whole-hearted embracing of it in this particular dish. The final result isn’t a fishy one, rather a deeply savoury, umami dish, full of sweet and buttery juices (you’ll use a lot of butter here – it’s worth it) to dip some good crusty bread into. If you love the sweet, fruity bite of a roast pepper (god knows, I do), you’ll find this is one of the best ways to showcase that flavour.

To prepare six peppers as an antipasto (how many you’ll eat depends on how much else you prepare, but you’ll find these disappear quickly) you’ll need:

6 Romano or Piquillo peppers
12 anchovies
3 plump tomatoes
6 plump cloves garlic
100g butter
olive oil to drizzle
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Cut the peppers in half lengthwise, discard any seeds, and chop each half into half again across the short edge. Lay the peppers out in a large baking tray (use two if you have to), the skin side down.

Chop the tomatoes into quarters and put a piece in each little pepper boat. Cut each clove of garlic into four fat slices and put one in each pepper, along with half an anchovy fillet. Cut the butter into small pieces and scatter them all over the dish. Sprinkle everything with a generous amount of salt and pepper, drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil over the whole dish and put everything, uncovered, in the oven for between 45 minutes and an hour until the edges of the peppers are browning. (The cooking time is imprecise here because a riper pepper will cook faster than a less ripe one – I find this recipe performs differently at different times of year and with different peppers, so you’ll have to use your judgement here.)

Remove the dish from the oven and leave it on the side, covered with a teatowel, until the peppers are at room temperature. Serve with plenty of the juices from the bottom of the dish drizzled over, and lots of crusty bread to soak them all up.

Bloggers’ dinner, Vinoteca, Smithfield, London

A brief picture post today, to ease myself back into things after the annual chocolate orgy. These are all from last week’s food and wine bloggers’ dinner at Vinoteca last week – many thanks to Niamh at Eat Like a Girl for organising it all, and to the guys at Vinoteca for the fantastic scoff. A really great meal, and it was good to see some familiar faces and to meet some new people.

Stand-outs included the purple-sprouting broccoli with anchovy butter (no pic, I’m afraid – it’s dark in Vinoteca’s private room, and not everything photographed well) and the gurnard salad. At this time of year, sautéed potatoes are dressed with fresh ramps (the leaves of wild garlic) and parsley – it’s good to see a menu packed with so much that’s seasonal.

Puntarelle, artichoke, buffalo mozarella, sultanas, walnuts
Puntarelle, artichoke, buffalo mozarella, sultanas, walnuts
Poached gurnard, cippolini onions, radishes, bortaga
Poached gurnard, cippolini onions, radishes, bortaga
Char-grilled old spot belly, chilli, lime, coriander
Char-grilled old spot belly, chilli, lime, coriander
Duke of York potatoes with parsley and ramps
Duke of York potatoes with parsley and ramps
Sticky ginger pudding, salted pecan and caramel ice cream
Sticky ginger pudding, salted pecan and caramel ice cream