Labneh

Labneh in a cheesecloth
Labneh about to be unwrapped

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be feeling somewhat bloated and liverish after Christmas and New Year, so I’ll hold the roast goose recipe back until later in the week when our gall bladders have all recovered. I was racking my brains for a nice easy recipe to start the year with – something that’s simple to prepare, and has few ingredients, but that tastes great and will impress guests or a picky family. How about labneh, a soft “cheese” from the middle east, made in your fridge from thick Greek-style yoghurt?

Greek yoghurt is thicker than the sloppy variety by virtue of having been strained until much of the whey drains out, leaving you with a richer, thicker product. Labneh takes the process further, continuing to drain until almost all of the whey has gone, and you are left with a thick, sharp-tasting ball that looks like soft cream cheese. It’s not a true cheese because rennet is not used in making it, but I like to use it where you might use something like Philadelphia – and when it’s made by the method below, with fresh garlic, you’ll find that it’s a mighty fine substitute for Boursin, richer, denser and without the dusty dried garlic taste you get in the packaged stuff from the supermarket. Labneh is a great addition to a cheeseboard, either in a chunk on its own or in a bowl, splashed with olive oil. Experiment by adding herbs to the garlic: for a Turkish flavour, try some dill and chillies; chop in some mint with the garlic for a Greek platter.

My Mum made the labneh in the pictures at Christmas as part of a cold supper. It’s fantastic wherever you’d use cream cheese or with crudites, and great crumbled over rich middle-eastern dishes, especially those containing lamb; I’ve got a cheesecloth full going in the fridge at the moment which is destined to be spread on crusty bread and served with a Greek-style lamb shoulder.

You’ll need:

400g Greek yoghurt (make sure that you choose a version without emulsifiers or thickeners; I like Total)
1 large pinch salt
2 cloves garlic, chopped as finely as possible

Labneh
Labneh straight out of the cheesecloth

Line a sieve with a boiled cheesecloth, and put it over a bowl to catch drips. You can also use a boiled kitchen towel if you don’t have a cheesecloth – an old linen one which has been washed many times will be softer and easier to work with.

Stir the yoghurt, salt and garlic well in a bowl to make sure everything is well combined. You can leave the garlic out if you want a plain labneh; the garlic gives a lovely fiery kick to the finished cheese. Pour the yoghurt mixture into the lined sieve, bring the corners and edges up to form a bag around the labneh and twist together. You can secure the twist with string if you like, but it’s not really necessary.

Put the bowl and sieve into the fridge and leave the labneh to drain for between 24 and 48 hours, squeezing the bag every now and then. The cheese will be a pleasant, creamy texture after 24 hours, and leaving it for longer will make it even stiffer, and harder to spread.

To keep your labneh in the fridge, cover it completely with olive oil in a bowl. It will keep for two weeks, but I bet you won’t be able to stop yourself finishing it much sooner than that.

Halloumi wrapped in vine leaves

Halloumi wrapped in vine leavesI had a very nice halloumi and vine leaf nibble with drinks at 6 St Chad’s Place, a bar in London (a place I can’t recommend to you with my hand on my heart – it’s so appallingly noisy that you can forget meeting your friends there, because you won’t be able to hear them speak; the chips are frozen; and they made my very pricey Dirty Martini with olives in oil, which floated repellently on top of the gin). The halloumi was excellent, though, so I’ve come up with my own version to be eaten in the quiet calm of my own kitchen, with a Dirty Martini made properly with brined olives and a little of their juice.

Vine leaves and halloumi are excellent with this particular drink because they are both preserved in brine, like the olives; prepared with some aromatic herbs, sharp chilli and herby honey they go down very nicely indeed, and make a good supper dish or a posh nibble to serve with cocktails. To make 12 little packets of flavour (enough to serve three as a main course with some bread or couscous) you’ll need:

2 blocks of halloumi
12 large vine leaves
1 large red chilli
3 tablespoons runny Greek honey (thyme honey is great if you can find it)
1 tablespoon chopped marjoram

Any given pack of vine leaves will contain a mixture of sizes – you should be able to find at least 12 big ones in there. Discard or freeze the rest – piddling small vine leaves aren’t very useful.

Rinse the vine leaves beneath a cold tap and dry with kitchen paper. Chop the chilli into 12 slivers. Slice each block of halloumi into six pieces, and lay each piece on a vine leaf as in the picture above, with a piece of chilli on top. Fold the vine leaf around the cheese as in these pictures:

HalloumiHalloumiHalloumi
Heat a large, nonstick frying pan without any oil over a medium flame. Twelve little packets fit snugly in my largest pan, but it is unusually big, so you may find you need to cook in two batches or use two pans. Carefully place each little halloumi parcel, the side with the open leaf edges down, in the hot pan and cook for four minutes. The hot cheese will have sealed the edges, so you can be less careful when turning the parcels. Cook the other side for another four minutes, and remove to a serving dish.

Drizzle the honey evenly over the halloumi and sprinkle the oregano over the dish. Serve piping hot.

Kofta kebab

We fancied lamb for Easter, but didn’t feel like a roast. The answer came with the weather forecast; it was a gloriously sunny weekend, so I hauled the barbecue out for its first kebab recipe of the year.

This juicy, spicy kebab, also called a kofte kebab, is great served with a selection of mezze-type spreads, salad and pitta bread. I made hummus and tzatziki (just a tub of yoghurt with a generous handful of chopped mint and very finely chopped raw garlic), and a big bowl of aubergine caviar. Cooked over charcoal, the kebabs are deliciously smoky, but if the weather isn’t up to it you can cook them under the grill.

To make about eight kebabs you’ll need:

500g good-quality lamb mince
2 medium onions
4 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 large handful fresh parsley
1 small handful fresh mint
1 large egg
Salt and pepper

Grind the cumin and coriander roughly in a mortar and pestle with a teaspoon of salt. Put the spices, herbs, onions, garlic and the egg in a food processor and blitz until everything is chopped. Add the meat and blitz again until everything is well-mixed. (Don’t completely purée the meat – aim for a reasonably rough texture.)

Form handfuls of the meat mixture around bamboo skewers. (The skewers make the kebabs really easy to turn and move around on the grill, as well as holding things together.) Grill on a hot barbecue or under the kitchen grill for about ten minutes, turning regularly. Serve immediately.

River Farm Smokery, Bottisham – home-made taramasalata

This sticky pair of sci-fi slippers isn’t some poor creature’s lungs. It’s my supper – a beautifully smoked chunk of cod’s roe from River Farm Smokery, a couple of miles outside Cambridge. Dan, the smokery’s production manager, contacted me a couple of weeks ago and whetted my appetite with a pack of some exceptionally fine smoked salmon. I dropped in on Thursday and bought a selection of the fish on offer in the smokery’s little shop. (I shall be back shortly to throw myself upon the meat counter and the smoked olives – everything I came home with was seriously, seriously good.)

Cambridge and Newmarket readers take note – this place is on your doorsteps, and if my experience is anything to go by, you don’t know it’s there. Dan keeps a blog about the smokery, on which there is a handy map, so you have no excuse. The shop also carries a really thoughtful range of delicatessen products, and if that’s not enough to convince you, the glorious smoked salmon actually costs less than it does at the supermarket.

Dan showed me around the smokery; I’ll go back soon with a camera. Hot and cold kilns, thick, fragrant tar, bags of oak chippings, eels, olives – and my God, the soft, downright seductive smell of all that smoke. Someone should bottle it and sell it. (It is my sad duty to report that Stilton cheesemakers have done the same and are trying to market the smell of feet as a ladies’ perfume.)

Alongside the smoked salmon, trout, eels and an excellent mackerel pate were more unusual offerings, including these roe – peeled and released from their tough skins in this picture, so you can make out the mass of tiny eggs. Dan says that he sells a lot of these roe for spreading as they are on toast. I decided to use them for taramasalata. Some taramasalata recipes will tell you to soak the whole roe before peeling, but I didn’t find that necessary with these, which weren’t over-salted. If you are in Greece, use pressed, salted grey mullet roe. If, like me, you have never seen a pressed, salted grey mullet roe, go with the smoked cod’s roe. It’s fantastic.

To serve four, you’ll need:

  • 4 slices white bread
  • ½ cup smoked cod’s roe, skin removed
  • 1 clove garlic
  • ½ red onion
  • Juice of 1 ½ lemons
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • Black pepper to taste

Grate the onion and garlic and put in the food processor with the bread, roe, pepper and lemon juice. Whizz until everything is smooth, and with the blades still whirring, dribble the olive oil into the mixture in a thin stream, as if you are making mayonnaise. When everything is amalgamated, transfer to a bowl, and refrigerate for half an hour for the flavours to meld. Serve with strips of pitta bread and raw vegetables. The taramasalata will keep in the fridge for around a week.

While you eat, consider the fact that despite the pink roe and the red onion, this is not remotely as pink as the factory-processed stuff you’ll get in supermarkets and, sadly, in many restaurants. There’s a reason for that. It’s called food colouring. Oh – and Alban, who asked me for more quick recipes, should be pleased to learn that he can make this in under half an hour, so no more excuses; get cooking.