Gastronomy Domine

Administrivia

2010-03-10T10:26:00.002Z

Blogger is stopping support for FTP blogs in a couple of months, and this blog happens to be one of them. I'm migrating the blog this week.

Hopefully, you shouldn't experience any downtime (I'm hoping you won't notice any difference at all). It's a big blog, though, and there are a bazillion links and pictures that I'm going to have to check, so the work will take me a few days. There will probably be no more posts this week - hopefully service should be back to normal on Monday.

Salt caramels

2010-03-04T09:56:00.004Z

It's funny how quickly we assimilate food ideas. Salted caramel was considered suspiciously French, a kind of extreme sweetie sophistication, when we first encountered it about ten years ago. Now it's all over the place - you can even buy jars of the stuff in the supermarket.

Salt caramels are still, as far as I'm concerned, a grown-up's sweet. Buttery, creamy and velvety on the tongue, the addition of some salt to the mixture lifts the flavour, bringing out the dairy smoothness in a way you just can't achieve in an unsalted caramel. A little extra salt sprinkled on top makes for a tongue-shockingly good contrast between sweet and salty. They're easy to make at home, and make a great gift. Try them as an after-dinner nibble - they're especially good with coffee. Home-made salt caramels are also a very good application for any interesting salt you might have lurking in the cupboard (the red salt in the picture here is Hawaiian volcanic salt I was given as a present just after I got married in 2004. Embarrassingly, this is the first thing I've used it in).

I like my caramel to have a hint of smoky bitterness. The best way to achieve this is to use an unrefined sugar in the recipe. If you prefer a lighter caramel, you can substitute another 150g of caster sugar for the light brown sugar below.

The usual boiling sugar warnings apply. Do not lick the spoon or dip your finger in the mixture until it has cooled completely. Keep an eye on the pan at all times to ensure it doesn't boil over. And your life will be made much easier if you use a sugar thermometer - if you don't have one, caramel at the hard ball stage should form a squishy ball that can hold its shape but can be squeezed by the fingers when dropped into a bowl of cold water.

You'll need:

150g caster sugar
150g soft light brown sugar
80g butter (choose something with a good flavour - I used an unsalted Beurre d'Échiré)
200g double cream
75ml golden syrup
1tsp salt, plus more to sprinkle at the end

Line a square cake tin (mine measures 20cm on each side) with buttered greaseproof paper.

Combine the caster sugar with 30ml water in a saucepan, and bring to the boil over a medium flame. Swirl the pan every now and then, and keep watching it until the sugar starts to change colour. It will quickly work its way from clear to pale gold through to a reddish brown. As soon as it hits the reddish brown point, remove it from the heat and wait for the bubbles to subside.

While the sugar is cooking, melt the brown sugar, butter, cream, syrup and a teaspoon of salt together in a separate pan and stir well. Pour the mixture into the reddish brown caramel and return to the heat with a sugar thermometer. Stir gently to combine the ingredients.

Bring the mixture to a boil and continue to simmer, swirling occasionally, for between 5 and 10 minutes, until the mixture reaches hard ball stage on your sugar thermometer (125°C, 260°F). Remove from the heat and wait for a few minutes until the bubbles in the pan subside. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin and cool for an hour or so until the caramel is solid. Cut into pieces and decorate each piece with a pinch of salt. Flaky Maldon salt is fantastic here - and if there's any Hawaiian volcanic salt in your cupboard, now's the time to use it.

Ham and pea pie with rough puff pastry

2010-03-01T11:32:00.003Z

There's often a home-cooked ham in the fridge here. Always the control freak, I like to be able to season and flavour my own ham for sandwiches, pasta dishes and what have you. A piece of smoked gammon simmered in some aromatics of your choosing for a few hours will always be better (and work out cheaper) than slices from the deli or supermarket, and is very little work - plop it into a pan, bring to a simmer, and leave for a few hours while you try on shoes or whatever else it is you fill your days with.

I'm still a big fan of the Coca Cola stock, beefed up with some aromatics, for hams - it's really worth a whirl if you've not tried it yet. Ginger beer is also alarmingly, counterintuitively good here. If you still can't stomach the idea, a ham is also delicious poached in water with a slug of wine, a few tablespoons of sugar, some onions, garlic and spices like cloves, fennel, star anise and bay. Experiment, and settle on what you like. In the recipe below, I'm assuming you already have a cooked ham at hand. For this sort of recipe, where rather than slicing the ham you will be shredding or cutting it into chunks, I really like a bacon collar. It's a less monolithic bit of meat than some of the slicing cuts, and has good marbling which helps push the flavour of the stock deep into the meat.

This recipe is all about the aromatics in the ham and in the bechamel sauce. Infusing the milk for your white sauce with shallot, bay, cloves, parsley, whole peppercorns and a stick of celery raises it from a rather boring binder and filler to something rather delicious and gorgeously scented. If you find this all rather a faff, bechamel freezes very well, so you can save time by making plenty and freezing it in boxes. (You can also freeze the infused milk before turning it into bechamel, bread sauce or other sauces - like the finished bechamel, it holds its flavour very successfully.)

Finally, the pastry. I've made a rough puff here to cover the pie (the amount of pastry below makes enough for two pies, and I haven't halved it because cooking with half an egg isn't very practical - again, this freezes well, or you can keep the extra pastry in the fridge for up to three days). It's very easy, deliciously flaky, and melts in the mouth. All the same, I won't hold it against you if you want to save some time and use some pre-prepared pastry instead.

Filling
1 litre milk
3 bay leaves
2 shallots
3 cloves garlic
12 cloves
1 stick celery
1 small bunch parsley
8 peppercorns
6 tablespoons flour
5 tablespoons salted butter
450g cooked ham (try a bacon collar if you can find one)
120g peas (fresh or frozen, depending on the time of year)

Crust
450g flour
120g butter
240g lard
1 egg, and 1 yolk to glaze
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
170ml water

Start by infusing the milk. Peel and halve the shallots, and stud them with the cloves. Put all the aromatics in a thick-bottomed pan with the milk, and bring very slowly to a simmer. Turn the heat off, put the lid on and leave to infuse in a warm place for three hours.

While the milk is infusing, put the pastry together. Beat the egg into a bowl with the sugar, lemon juice and water. Beat the mixture and chill in the fridge. Use your fingers to rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs, and chop the lard (also straight from the fridge) into pieces about the size of the top joint of your little finger. Stir it into the flour/butter mixture. Add the egg mixture bit by bit, stirring the mixture with a knife until everything comes together. Put the pastry into a freezer bag and rest it the fridge for at least half an hour, until you are ready to put the pie together.

Strain the solid ingredients out of the milk and discard them. Make the bechamel sauce by melting the butter and flour together over a low heat in a clean pan, and cook, stirring, for five minutes. Add the milk a small amount at a time, stirring sauce constantly as you go. The sauce will thicken as you work. Keep adding milk bit by bit until it is all incorporated, and the sauce is thickened. Don't add salt to the sauce; there should be enough in the ham to season the whole dish.

When you are ready to put the pie together, preheat the oven to 230°C (445°F).

To assemble the pie, chop the ham into bite-sized pieces. Put a layer of ham in the bottom of a pie dish, cover with a layer of peas, and repeat until you have used all the ham and peas up. Pour over the bechamel sauce until your pie dish is filled. Depending on the size of your dish, you may have some left over, but I'm sure you'll find something to do with it.

Cut the ball of pastry in half and put the half you're not using in the fridge or freezer.

Roll the pastry you are using out in a large rectangle, and fold it into three, as if it was a piece of A4 paper you are going to put into an envelope. Give the pastry rectangle a quarter turn, roll it out into a large piece again, fold into three, roll out and repeat four or five times. You'll end up with a sheet of pastry about half a centimetre thick made up of many layers. Lay the pastry sheet on top of the pie dish, cut the excess off the edges and pinch the pastry into place on the dish. Cut a large cross in the middle to allow steam to escape and brush with a beaten egg yolk.

Bake at 230°C (445°F) for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 200°C (390°F). Cook for 25 minutes, until the pastry is golden and the pie steaming. Serve immediately.

Bury black pudding hash with peppers and apple vinaigrette

2010-02-24T12:34:00.005Z

I've never really understood why some people get so squeamish about black pudding. I know, I know - it's blood, back fat and barley - but surely that's no more upsetting than the gubbins that goes into a standard sausage? Dr W encourages me to mention a chitterling and tripe-tastic andouillette he ate in Paris once, which, he claims, "tasted of bums". Black pudding is infinitely nicer.

My suspicion is that people recalling cut lips imagine black puddings to taste bloody and metallic. These flavours are absent from a black pudding, which is actually deeply savoury, delicately spiced (especially if you get your mitts on a particularly good one, like these from Bury in Lancashire), and, cooked properly, has a wonderful texture: crisp, sticky and crumbling all at once.

The Bury black pudding is, for my tastes, the most reliable and delicious you'll find in the UK, and many butchers and supermarkets all over the country carry them - you can also order them online from the makers. (At a supermarket, you're more likely to find one on the deli counter than the butchery counter.) They're seriously, seriously good; porky, plump and gorgeously spiced. The recipe is a secret, but apparently there's pennyroyal, fennel and all kinds of other good stuff in there. Do try to go out of your way to find a couple for this recipe.

To serve four, you'll need:

2-3 Bury black puddings
4 large potatoes (I used Kestrel)
3 large banana shallots
4 piquillo peppers
3 tablespoons bacon fat (use good lard if you can't find any and do some exercise tomorrow)
1 sweet apple
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
5 tablespoons walnut oil
5 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 teaspoon lemon thyme leaves, picked from stems
1 teaspoon honey
A few handfuls salad leaves
Salt and pepper

Chop the potatoes without peeling them into 1½ cm dice, and slice the shallots into rounds. Fry over a medium flame in a large pan using tablespoons of the bacon fat, turning frequently, until golden (about 20-25 minutes). Ten minutes or so before the potatoes are ready, fry the peeled, halved black puddings in the remaining bacon fat for five minute on each side.

While the potatoes and black pudding are cooking, put the peppers under the grill, turning every few minutes, until the skins are blackened. Put them straight into an airtight plastic box and seal with the lid while you prepare the other ingredients. The steam from the peppers will help to release the skins. Peel the peppers after five minutes in the box, discarding the skins and reserving any juices. Halve them and slice into strips.

Chop the apple into small dice and make up the vinaigrette with the vinegar, honey, walnut and grape oils and any juices from the peppers, with a small pinch of salt. Stir through the apple and thyme and set aside.

When you are ready to put the dish together, stir the peppers into the hot potatoes. Now, normally I abhor the chi-chi "towers of things on a plate" thing, but this is a recipe it suits well. So get out a large pastry cutter to use as a template, and pile the potato mixture onto a plate. Use a sharp knife on a chopping board to dice the black pudding roughly and heap it on top of the potatoes. Top with a handful of salad and spoon the apple dressing over the top. Serve immediately.

Rhubarb and custard cake

2010-02-22T12:15:00.003Z

There's one seasonal ingredient in the shops at the moment which puts a very jolly spin on February: forced rhubarb. I've been buying it at the market and the supermarket (for some reason, the market produce seems rather redder) to simmer with some sugar to go with yoghurt in the mornings, and with custard at suppertime. We also spooned it over pancakes on Shrove Tuesday - I'm sure I'll be sick of it soon, but we're not there yet, so I chucked some in a cake.

This recipe is based on one I found on Usenet in the mid-nineties. The original was very simple: a box of cake mix, a few handsful of rhubarb, some sugar, and some cream. This is my cake-mix-free version, which is just as quick to prepare. It's lovely and moist, has a fantastic rhubarb and custard flavour, and disappears very quickly.

I don't really understand why you'd spend the extra on a boxed mix, when it only takes a minute to measure out flour, butter, milk and sugar. This also gives your inner control-freak the ability to manage exactly what goes into your cake. A bit of googling revealed that the ingredients panel on a standard box of yellow cake mix reads:

Sugar, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters Of Fats, Monoand Diglycerides), Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphat E, Monocalcium Phosphate). Contains 2% Or Less Of: Wheat Starch, Salt, Dextrose, Polyglycerol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavors, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin, Modified Cornstarch, Colored with (Yellow 5 Lake, Red 40 Lake).

Personally, I prefer an ingredients list that goes like this:

250g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
125g softened butter
3 eggs
180ml milk
450g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-5 stalks rhubarb
1 pint double cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Sieve the flour into a large bowl with the baking powder and salt. Give it plenty of height, to get as much air into the flour as possible.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream the butter and 225g of the sugar together until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, with the vanilla essence, at a high speed. Add the flour and milk a little at a time, beating as you go, until you have a velvety, light mixture.

Use a spatula to spread the cake mixture over the bottom of a metal baking tin - use a non-stick one, or line with greased parchment. Mine measured 30x35 cm; if yours is smaller, that's fine, but be sure it has reasonably high sides and be aware that your cooking time may be a bit longer. Cut the rhubarb into small pieces and scatter it over the top of the mixture with the remaining sugar. Pour the cream over the whole arrangement and bake for 45 minutes.

Test with a skewer, which should come out nearly clean - if it's still sticky or liquidy when you shake the tin, give the cake another ten minutes and test again. The top will be cracked and golden. This cake is good hot or cold.

Cheese and chorizo baked potato

2010-02-19T12:27:00.003Z

I seem to be having a bit of a thing about chorizo at the moment. Blame this never-ending winter - a hot blast of smoke, paprika and garlic is surprisingly uplifting when it's this steadily grim outside.

This is a great storecupboard dish, and one that goes down very well with kids (if yours don't tolerate the heat of the paprika, substitute a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. You can also use good ham, preferably home-cooked, in place of the chorizo). This is fatsome and packed with carbs: it's absolutely not a diet dish. Cook it on a day when you've been yomping in the woods or chopping logs. To serve four, you'll need:

Four large potatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil
75g cream cheese
100g grated cheddar cheese
1 clove garlic, crushed into a paste
2 banana shallots, diced finely
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 chorizo ring
1 handful (about 25g) chopped parsley
1 large pinch salt, plus salt to rub on the skins

Preheat the oven to 200°C (450°F). Use your hands to rub the olive oil into the skins of the potatoes, and dredge them with plenty of flaky salt. I used smoked Maldon salt, which marries nicely with the other smoky flavours in this dish. Bake the potatoes for an hour and a half.

While the potatoes are cooking, chop the chorizo into small pieces and fry them in a dry pan until the fat is running. Set aside. Chop and grate the other ingredients.

When the potatoes are ready, slice them in half and, holding the potato in an oven glove, scoop out the flesh into a mixing bowl. You'll be left with a nice little potato-skin cup. Stir the cheeses (reserving a little cheddar to sprinkle over the top), shallot, garlic, parsley and paprika into the fluffy potato with a large pinch of salt, and when everything is well-mixed, stir in the chorizo and its fat. Pile the mixture back into the potato skins, and top with the reserved cheese.

Return the filled skins to the oven for another 20 minutes, until golden brown on top, and serve piping hot.

Marmalade

2010-02-15T13:16:00.003Z

I thought I'd missed the Seville orange season, which only lasts for a couple of weeks and starts around the end of January. I'd gone to the market in Cambridge last week, only to find they'd run out. Happily, another box turned up on Saturday, so I snapped up a couple of kilos.

Seville oranges are an unprepossessing fruit, knobbly and scarred-looking, and very puny when held beside the majestic, sterile, navel oranges in the next crate. But Sevilles sell out quickly for a reason. They don't just make gloriously bitter, perfumed marmalade; they're also a wonderful addition to recipes anywhere you might use a lemon, with their tart, fragrant juice.

Making your own marmalade is time-consuming; you'll need to set the best part of a day aside for the project. It's worth the effort, though - and my realisation that 14 jars of amber, jewelled preserves only cost me £7 (£3 for the oranges, £4 for the sugar) has left me full of self-righteousness. It's also a great pleasure to be able to manage the recipe yourself so you can produce your preferred thickness of peel and syrupyness. I like a dense, thick-cut marmalade, of the sort that you just don't seem to be able to buy these days. (So does my lovely Dad, whose name is on several of these jars.) A home-made marmalade, as you'll know if you've ever had one, is much, much tastier than the shop-bought version. I am a purist when it comes to marmalade, and believe it tastes its best when it's made with Seville oranges, sugar and nothing else. You'll find no additions of grapefruit, whisky or ginger here - if you want whisky with your marmalade, pour yourself an accompanying glass.

Two kilos of fruit will produce about 14 jars of marmalade. Split the mixture between large pans if you don't have a big jam pan (if you make a lot of preserves, a jam pan is a worthwhile investment). You'll need:

2kg Seville oranges
3.5 litres water
4kg sugar

Get out your jam pan, and simmer the oranges in the water for 2 hours with a lid on. Remove the fruit from the liquid and slice the oranges in half. Use a fork (and a friend with a fork if you want to get this done quickly, because this is a somewhat tiresome job) to remove the seeds from the centre and put them in a bowl. Put the now seedless pulp from the oranges in another bowl with any juice.

Put all the seeds in a small pan, cover with water and boil vigorously to release the pectin in them for ten minutes while you prepare the skin.

You'll be left with a pile of orange-skin shells. Chop them by hand to your preferred width - some prefer a very finely shredded peel. I like whokking great chunks. Combine the chopped peel with the pulp and put it all back in the water you simmered the whole oranges in with the sugar. Strain the seeds out of the little pan and add the resulting liquid to the marmalade.

Bring the marmalade, stirring initially to dissolve the sugar, to a rolling boil, with the lid off. After 15 minutes, dollop a teaspoon onto a cold saucer. Blow on it until it is cool and give it a poke with a finger to test the set. It probably won't be ready yet - you're looking for a wrinkly surface skin and a lovely amber colour. Test every 15 minutes. When you judge the set to be right (50 minutes/1 hour usually seems to be about right for a thick cut; shredded skin will come ready earlier) remove the pan from the heat, skim any scum off with a slotted spoon to prevent cloudiness, and pour into sterilised jam jars.

Chicken and chorizo risotto

2010-02-12T11:43:00.003Z

This is a very, very tasty use of all of those bits from a roast chicken that you don't get round to eating on its first appearance on the table. I rather enjoy stripping a cold chicken carcass after a roast: popping the oysters out of the underside, shredding the meat from a leftover leg with my fingers, and spooning any jellied juices into a bowl with the scraps. Now, those bits of chicken will serve to make a very fine sandwich with plenty of salt and pepper, but you can also make them work a bit harder as part of a rich, creamy risotto for supper the next day.

The quality of your chicken stock here is all-important, and the risotto will be much better if yours is home-made. I like to buy those very cheap boxes of chicken wings and pop them in a stockpot with the stripped carcass, some aromatics (bay, carrots, shallot and celery), a covering of water and a slug of white wine. You can make a handsome amount of stock like this, and freeze what you don't use immediately.

To serve four, you'll need:

As much meat as you can save from a roast or poached chicken (I had a whole leg and thigh, and scraps from the breast and underside, but you'll be fine with less meat)
1 dried chorizo ring
320g Carnaroli risotto rice
1 litre hot chicken stock
75ml vermouth
3 banana shallots, diced finely
2 sticks celery, diced finely
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
Zest of 1 lemon
75g frozen peas
60g grated parmesan cheese
30g butter
Salt and pepper

Chop the chorizo into coins, and each of those coins into quarters. While you cook the risotto, cook in a frying pan without oil until the chorizo is becoming crisp and the fat is running - once it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and set aside.

In a large pan, saute the shallots and celery with the bay and fennel in the butter until the shallots are soft, but not taking on colour. Add the rice and continue sauteing over a low heat until the rice is coated with butter and looks translucent. Stir in the shredded chicken meat and pour over the vermouth, and stir until all the liquid is absorbed into the rice.

Add a ladle of the hot stock and simmer, stirring until the stock is absorbed. Add another ladle of stock and repeat until all the stock is absorbed into the rice, and the risotto is thick and creamy, the grains of rice al dente. This should take about 20 minutes. Stir in the lemon zest with the peas and parmesan, and check the seasoning, adjusting to taste. Remove from the heat and leave covered for 5 minutes.

Remove the lid and stir the chorizo with its oil through the risotto, reserving a few pieces to scatter over the top. Serve immediately.

Joe's Stone Crab, Miami Beach, Florida

2010-02-08T11:32:00.005Z

I was, I'll admit, a bit nervous about the restaurants in Miami. A couple of American friends had told me that they found the food in Florida "unsophisticated" and "boring" - thankfully, this really wasn't my experience. (Outside the Disney parks, that is, where you will drive yourself mad trying to find something to eat that isn't a pretzel, a sausage of some sort or a funnel cake.) We found some really interesting, innovative eating in and around Miami - traditional American at Michael's Genuine, some great tapas with a very individual twist at Sra. Martinez and a simply astonishing bento box at Naoe, which I'll give its own post later on.

Joe's Stone Crab isn't exactly innovative, having been serving up the same stuff for nearly a hundred years, but it came highly recommended by almost everybody we spoke to. At the southern end of Miami Beach, it's easy to spot by the long line of Aston Martins and Ferraris queuing for the valet parking. The restaurant does not accept reservations. Your best bet is to visit mid-week, or you'll be looking at a two-hour wait for a table. We went on a Thursday lunchtime, and were shown to a table indoors straight away; there was a 30-minute wait for an outdoor table.

Joe's started out in 1913 as a seafood shack. It really came into its own in the 20s, when Joe Weiss discovered that the local stone crabs, previously passed over as inedible, had enormous, sweet, meaty claws. No, I have no idea how such a thing as a crab with giant claws might have come to be ignored by restaurateurs either, but that's the story. These days the place only opens in stone crab season (late October to May), and then offers a reduced service until August. The crab claws are still served cold with the original accompaniments: a sharp, mustardy mayonnaise, a vinegary fresh slaw, hash browns and roasted tomatoes or creamed spinach. There's also a large menu of other seafood, alongside fried chicken and steaks for the fish-phobic.

Despite those cars outside, the remarkable bling encrusting a lot of the women diners and the flotilla of designer labels, you don't have to spend a fortune here, although some care in ordering is required. At lunchtime, the restaurant is offering a recession-busting "Great Lunch Bailout" menu, with a coleslaw starter, three enormous crab claws (trust me - these are so rich you won't want any more), a positive Everglade of garlicky creamed spinach, a big patty of skillet-fried hash browns, the mustard mayonnaise, drawn butter, a slim slice of key lime pie and a coffee. The whole lot rolls up at $29.95.

I decided to embrace my status as a tourist, and wore the proffered bib. I'm very glad I did - the claws are ready-cracked, but I still managed to spray us both with liberal amounts of butter and crabby juices. A polite notice informed us that the recent cold weather (so aberrant that nobody in town seemed able to talk about anything else for the week we were there) meant that the meat from the claws may stick to the shell. It didn't, but this is still a messy eat. There's more here than you'll be able to eat; be careful to save some room for the excellent pie. The crab is the main event here, and it's downright fabulous - dense, sweet, rich and full of meat.

It's such a simple meal that I find I've little else to add. Head over if you have the chance to visit this gorgeous, sunny city, and don't bother exploring the rest of the menu. These crabs are something you won't find outside Florida, and they're a local delicacy so good that you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't snap up a few claws while you're there.

South-East Asian salmon curry

2010-02-03T12:01:00.004Z

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you'll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the "what's in the fridge" nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I'd bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet's a pest to cook with if you're not doing something very simple with it - too much moving around and it'll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don't bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you'll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

Dry prawn curry

2010-02-01T12:52:00.000Z

I'm back from a couple of weeks mixing business with pleasure in Florida. More on what we ate later on - for now, here's a recipe using a curry paste that sprang, fully formed, into my head while we were away.

I went out to Mill Road in Cambridge as soon as we got back to buy some lovely big prawns, still in their shells, at Sea Tree, a new-ish fish restaurant with the city's only non-supermarket wet fish counter on the far side of the railway bridge; and some fresh spice ingredients at Cho Mee, my favourite of the oriental supermarkets on the town side. It made the whole kitchen smell of South East Asia. Serve the prawns with some fried rice (mine was based around three diced lap cheong, or Chinese sausages, fried until crisp, with spring onions, chopped snake beans, sesame oil and soy, then proteined up with a couple of eggs) or some plain rice and a flavourful stir-fried vegetable.

To serve two handsomely, you'll need:

12 king or tiger prawns, shells and heads on
2 fingers fresh turmeric root (see below)
1 inch piece ginger
1 large shallot
3 large red chillies
5 fat cloves garlic
2 sticks lemongrass
30g coriander root
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
8 whole cloves
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 tablespoons soy sauce

You might not be familiar with fresh turmeric - it usually comes pre-dried and ground in little pots, by which point it has lost the greater part of its slightly bitter, prickly flavour and intense aroma. The picture here should help you identify it if you're in a shop that stocks ingredients like this (an Indian or oriental supermarket should be able to help you out). Those roots are about the size of your little finger. Be aware that the yellow of the turmeric stains just as badly, if not worse, than the dried stuff does - this is curcumin, an antioxidant that is supposed to be wildly good for you. It's also wildly yellow. So get ready for daffodil fingernails - they'll scrub clean eventually, but it'll take some work. I've also used the very aromatic roots of coriander from the same shop, which usually come attached to the leafy herb and are very inexpensive.

Use a sharp knife to peel the turmeric and ginger. Remove the skins from the shallot and garlic and chop the lemongrass into chunks. Put the lot in the bowl of a food processor with the dry spices, the chillies, the soy sauce (I used Kikkoman) and some flavourless oil. Whizz until you have a nearly smooth paste.

Remove half of the paste to a container, cover with more oil and pop in the fridge to use later on. It's worth always making too much curry paste - it hangs around for a week or so very nicely in the fridge, you can use it in plenty of different recipes, and it's infinitely less faff than making it as you need it. Put the prawns in a large dish and cover with the remaining half of the curry paste. Set aside to marinade for 45 minutes to an hour.

When you are ready to cook the prawns, heat some more vegetable oil (about half a centimetre's depth) in a large frying pan to a high temperature. Add the prawns - carefully, they'll sizzle - to the oil with what marinade sticks to them and fry without moving them around the pan until the top side, not in the oil, has turned pink. Add whatever curry paste remains in the marinade dish to the pan and turn the prawns over. The shells on the side which has been in contact with the oil should have opaque patches alongside the translucent pink. Continue to cook until the other side of the prawns has opaque skins and the curry paste is brown and sticky. Serve immediately - and if you're bold, you'll eat the shells and suck the good stuff out of the heads.

Cottage pie

2010-01-12T12:32:00.003Z

It's that stodge-craving time of year, and very few things fit the bill better than a handsome cottage pie. This one has an intense and rich filling, and it's blanketed with a generous layer of lovely, fattening mash. (In less apocalyptic weather, I'd use a bit less topping, but right at the moment I am mindfully using mashed potato as internal insulation from the biting cold.)

I've used veal mince here, from non-crated calves. It has a lighter flavour than beef, and it's less fatty, but you can substitute beef mince if you prefer it. The root vegetables add sweetness and earthy depth - this is a wonderfully wintery pie. To serve four, you'll need:

Filling
450g veal mince
1 large onion
1 large carrot
1 large parsnip
1 tablespoon smoked paprika (use unsmoked paprika if you can't find any)
2 bay leaves
1 thyme leaves, stripped from stalks
100ml vermouth
2 tablespoons tomato purée
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
200ml good beef stock
2-3 tablespoons olive oil

Mash
800g floury potatoes (I used King Edwards)
150ml whole milk
1 large knob butter
Generous grating of nutmeg

Chop the onion, carrot and parsnip into small dice. Take a large, heavy-based pan, and sweat them over a low heat in the olive oil until soft; the onions should be starting to take on some colour. Add the paprika, bay and thyme, and keep cooking, stirring all the time, for two minutes. Tip the meat into the pan and turn the heat up to medium. Stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan all the time, cook until the meat is browning nicely.

Pour the vermouth into the pan and let it bubble up. Add the Worcestershire sauce and tomato puree, then stir in the stock and a large pinch of salt (use all the fingers of your hand to pinch, not just finger and thumb). Bring the mixture up to a simmer and turn the heat down low again. Continue to simmer with the lid on for an hour, then remove the lid and continue to simmer for 20 minutes. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

At this point, you can put the pie filling in the fridge overnight if you have time. As with so many casseroled and simmered dishes, the flavour improves if allowed to settle and develop for 24 hours.

When you are ready to make up the pie, peel the potatoes and cook them as you usually would for mash. When mashing, add the butter, the milk and the nutmeg with a generous amount of salt. Put the filling in a pie dish and spread the mash on top. I like it spread in a sort of thatched roof arrangement, which is pure posing, but does look good. Make sure you mark your topping with a fork - this will ensure you get some nice crispy bits when the pie is cooked.

Bake at 180°C (350°F) for 30 minutes or until golden brown on top.

Crispy pork belly with bak kut teh spicing

2010-01-08T13:30:00.006Z

With what, you say? Bak kut teh. It's a Hokkien Chinese term which translates roughly as "meaty bone tea", and it denotes a particular herbal, scenty soup spicing which is traditionally meant to warm you from within. It's got yang, this stuff. So much so that my mother and brother won't eat it, because it makes them turn bright red and start sweating.

In a period when my village is only accessible over a hump-backed bridge coated with half a foot of sheet ice (it's been like this since before Christmas), red and sweating is exactly what I'm after. Hurrah for yang.

You'll find bak kut teh served regularly in Malaysia and southern China. Bak kut teh mixtures are available in the UK in oriental supermarkets, in sealed packs containing a couple of tea-bag style sachets. These sachets are preferable to the whole spices, which you also see sometimes in neat plastic packs - the whole spices can make your recipe a bit gritty. If you're making the traditional stew, just pop a bag in a crockpot with some rib bones, simmer for a few hours, and serve with rice or as a noodle soup with a generous slosh of soya sauce. It's hearty stuff - the traditional mixture includes star anise, angelica, cinnamon and cloves. This mixture is, somewhat eccentrically, close to what you'll find in a British Christmas cake.

The recipe below is not a traditional use of a bak kut teh sachet, but it's none the worse for that. Here, you'll be combining those spices with rice wine, several gloppy Chinese sauces, honey, spring onions and garlic, and using this stock to perfume a slab of pork belly. The belly meat is pressed under weights overnight in the fridge, then chopped and fried in a wok until it's crispy. I know, I know: but the long simmering will render a lot of the grease out of the meat, and sometimes the weather just calls out for fatsome, sticky pork.

I served mine with some sticky hoi sin sauce to dip, alongside a little of the stock, thickened with cornflour, to moisten the rice we ate with it. Hang onto the stock - you can freeze it and treat it as a master stock. I poached a couple of hams in mine, leaving them spiced and savoury but not overtly Chinese-tasting; it's back in the freezer now, and I have plans to poach a chicken in it next. This procedure may sound overly parsimonious to those used to stock cubes, but it's a method that produces a stock with an incredible depth of flavour, and you can keep using it indefinitely as a poaching liquid, adding a bit more water or wine and some more aromatics every time you cook, and making sure that every time it comes out of the freezer the stock gets boiled very thoroughly. There are restaurants in Hong Kong which claim that their master stock has been on the go for more than a hundred years.

To poach one boneless pork belly (enough for four, but be warned, this is very moreish) you'll need:

1 boneless pork belly, with rind
1 bak kut teh sachet
Water to cover the belly (about a litre)
150ml Chinese rice wine
5 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 anise stars
1 bulb garlic
6 spring onions, tied in a knot
Groundnut oil to fry

Stir the liquid ingredients together in a saucepan that fits the pork reasonably closely, and slide the pork in with the star anise, garlic and spring onions. Bring to a gentle simmer, skim off any froth that rises to the surface with a slotted spoon, cover and continue to simmer gently for two hours.

Remove the pork from the cooking liquid carefully and place it on a large flat dish with high enough sides to catch any liquid that comes out of the meat as you press it. Strain the poaching liquid if you plan on using it as a master stock. Place a plate or pan lid large enough to cover the whole belly on top of the meat (the skin side) and weigh it down. I used a heavy cast-iron pan lid and all the weights from my kitchen scales. Cover the whole assembly with a teatowel and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours.

When you are ready to eat, remove the pressed meat to a chopping board and use a sharp knife to cut it into bite-sized pieces, about 2cm square. Bring about 5cm depth of groundnut oil to a high temperature in a wok, and fry the pieces of pork in batches of five or six pieces until golden (this should only take a couple of minutes per batch). Serve with shredded spring onion and some hoi sin sauce with steamed rice and a vegetable.

Spatchcocked grilled poussin with capers and oregano

2010-01-05T11:30:00.003Z

I'll admit it - one of the motives in coming up with this recipe was in ensuring that the first word I typed on Gastronomy Domine in 2010 could be "Spatchcocked", a word which hasn't got any less fun since I last typed it.

It being just after the festive season, the shops are still full of meats a little beyond the ordinary, so my local supermarket has shelves full of lovely fatty bacon collars (three are in the fridge at the moment, waiting for a little boiling swim in some Chinese aromatics which will turn them into interesting hams); veal mince (superb in a cottage pie); turkey crowns (I walked straight past these grimacing); pheasant and venison mixtures for stewing; and poussins, ready-spatchcocked.

I really enjoy cooking a bird prepared like this. Cooking times are reduced massively by flattening a bird out, so the meat can be passed very quickly under the grill, leaving you with wonderfully moist meat. If your poussin hasn't been spatchcocked, it's very easy to do it yourself - there are instructions here for spatchcocking a full-sized chicken.

I just couldn't bring myself to go outside into the freezing winter with the barbecue, so I've cooked this under the conventional grill rather than over charcoal. If you're in a position to use charcoal here, please do - it'll be delicious.

Reckon to serve one poussin per person (try saying that after a glass of post-festive Prosecco - incidentally, Prosecco is a very nice match to this dish with its Italian aromatics). Some packaging will suggest that one bird will serve two. It won't. They're small, they're bony and they're fiddly to eat. Much better to serve a generous whole poussin to each person than to find yourselves squabbling over too little food. To marinade two flattened-out baby birds, you'll need:

75ml extra-virgin olive oil
Juice and zest of 2 lemons
1 bunch (about 15g) fresh oregano, chopped finely
3 tablespoons capers, chopped finely
4 fat cloves garlic, crushed
1 heaped teaspoon Italian chilli flakes (use more or less according to how spicy you fancy it)
1 teaspoon salt
A generous grinding of pepper

Mix all the marinade ingredients and smear them all over the poussins in a large bowl. Refrigerate for 24 hours with a cover, turning a few times.

When you are ready to cook, position the birds on a rack under a hot grill, as far from the element as possible, skin-side down. Spoon over some of the marinade and grill the non-skin side for about 12 minutes. Flip the poussins over so the skin is uppermost, baste with some more marinade, and cook for another 12 minutes, until the skin is golden brown. Check the meat is cooked through by piercing a thigh at the thickest part - the juices should run clear. if the juices are bloody, leave the birds under the grill for another five minutes and repeat the test.

Sprinkle the cooked poussins with a little more oregano, and serve with buttered rice and a sharp salad.

Christmas!

2009-12-17T13:20:00.003Z

Apologies for having had such a quiet week or two, blog-wise. As frequently seems to happen at this year, I am a bit low on batteries, and I'm not feeling brilliantly creative. All should be well again in the New Year - I'm off to Morocco tomorrow for the festive season, to enjoy some lovely recharging sunshine, snail soup and shish kebabs. And a lot of things cooked in pointy earthenware pots.

In the meantime, you're probably after some Christmas recipes. Fortunately, we have plenty of those around here. Here's the main event - a turkey recipe which is, uncharacteristically for turkey, so good you'll be tempted to cook it when it's not even Christmas. It's brined overnight, leaving it juicy and succulent (the juices will spurt when you prick the thigh to check for doneness), the flesh infused with aromatics from its night-long submersion. If there are too few of you to justify a turkey, try a roast duck with prunes and pancetta, which is just about as Christmasy as it gets with its port and cherry gravy. And here's a really fine ham for Christmas Eve.

You'll want some trimmings. Chipolatas wrapped in pancetta and stuffing balls always go down well, alongside some cranberry sauce and bread sauce. Try a maple-mustard glaze on your vegetables, or cook the cabbage/chestnuts side dish that's mentioned in the duck recipe above. And nobody can say no to a crunchy spiced parsnip.

You've probably bought your Christmas pudding, and you already know how to make mince pies. If you want something to drink alongside them, try some hot buttered rum (but beware - you'll inevitably drink too much, because it's hopelessly good). This is an especially good drink for those with cold fingers and toes. Mulled wine is another fantastic loosener-upper, and you'll find present-opening is even more fun with a glass by your side and a little plate of cherry and almond cookies.

Merry Christmas!

Sticky orange and almond cake

2009-12-09T13:24:00.004Z

This is just great for winter - a great blast of sunny orange flavour, but rather than coming from a delicious healthy glass of juice, it's mediated through a sugary cake, made amazingly moist and dense with ground almonds. Stodge is a very important mood-lifter in the dark evenings of December.

If you have visitors this Christmas who don't like Christmas pudding or Christmas cake, this is a very good alternative. It's rich, heavy and very luxurious in mouth-feel, and while a spoonful of brandy butter or a slug of cream might feel like overkill, it'd be a pretty handsome variety of overkill. If you do plan on making this for Christmas and want to kick it up a level, add three tablespoons of Cointreau or another orange liqueur to the orange juice you pour over at the end, when the cake comes out of the oven. Do not use Blue Curaçao, for obvious reasons.

You'll need:

250g salted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
50g plain flour
200g ground almonds
1 teaspoon almond essence
Zest and juice of 2 oranges
2 tablespoons icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line a springform tin.

Cream the butter and sugar together until they are pale and fluffy. (You really do need an electric mixer for this recipe, I'm afraid.) Beat the eggs and add them a tablespoon at a time to the butter and sugar mixture along with a tablespoon of flour, whisking as you go and adding more until the last batch is incorporated.

Fold the ground almonds into the batter and add the juice of 1 orange, the zest from both oranges and the almond essence. Stir the liquid ingredients gently and use a spatula to move the cake mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake for 1 hour, checking halfway through to make sure the cake isn't browning too quickly (if it is, just put a tinfoil hat on it). The cake will leave a toothpick pushed into the centre clean when it's ready. Remove from the heat, sprinkle over the icing sugar and poke little holes all over the top of the cake. Strain the juice from the remaining orange to get rid of any pulpy bits and spoon it evenly all over the surface of the cake. Cool in the tin for 20 minutes, remove to a rack and when completely cool, wrap carefully for a few hours before serving to allow the flavours to meld and the stickiness to reach a lovely peak.

Refried beans with salsa and chorizo

2009-12-03T13:30:00.004Z

This photo reminds me that the kitchen really, really needs painting in a colour that doesn't look like bloodless frogs.

Anyway. About the food. This is my slightly European-ised (and it's no worse for that) take on Mexican refried beans. You can serve yours in chi-chi little towers like this if you're feeling all...retentive, or you can just dollop piles of beans, salsa and avocado/crème fraîche on the plate however you fancy. I have a sense that life is probably too short for chi-chi little towers.

This recipe makes more in the way of beans than you'll eat at one sitting; you'll probably get two or three meals for four out of the amounts below. (The salsa amounts below are for one meal.) This is because the long simmering of the beans and the making of the sauce that flavours them is quite time-consuming, so it's worth making plenty and freezing the remainder before you mash them to cook quickly at a later date if you want to save yourself some work. To keep the chorizo crisp, you'll need to fry some up each time you make this (although you can, of course, leave it out, especially if you have a vegetarian to feed); chopping and frying the sausage is not so much of a hardship, though, given how good it tastes.

Refritos, despite the title of this post, doesn't actually mean 'refried', but 'well-fried'. These are really worth the effort; they're silky-smooth in the mouth, and intensely savoury: a billion times better than anything you might have had out of a can. Amazingly, they also do not make you fart. To make a large panful of beans for three meals and enough salsa for one meal, you'll need:

Beans
500g pinto beans
3 bay leaves
5 cloves
2 dried chillies
1 large onion
1.5l water
1 can tomatoes
4 banana shallots
6 anchovies (yes, even for anchovy-haters - see below)
1½ tablespoons smoked Spanish paprika
2 tablespoons chipotle chillies in adobo
Bacon fat or chorizo fat to fry
1 dried chorizo

Salsa
Six medium tomatoes (vine-ripened is your best bet at this time of year)
½ banana shallot
1 small handful (about 15g) coriander
A squeeze of lime juice
1 avocado
crème fraîche

Chop the onion into rough dice and put it in a large saucepan with the rinsed beans, bay leaves, cloves and water. Bring to a simmer, put the lid on and simmer for 2½ hours, until the beans are soft. Check during cooking to make sure there is plenty of water for the beans to swim around in, adding a little more if you think they need it.

When the 2½ hours is up, halve the shallots and cut them into half-moons. In a large frying pan, saute them in two tablespoons of bacon fat or chorizo fat (using these fats does simply astonishing things to the flavour of this dish, but you can use olive oil if they make you nervous or if you are not the sort of person who keeps jars of such artery-clogging things in the fridge) with the anchovies. The anchovies will melt and break down. They will not make the dish taste at all fishy - they just add an unidentifiable and delicious richness and depth to its structure. Keep sauteeing, stirring every now and then, until the shallots are golden. Add the tin of tomatoes to the pan with the chipotles in adobo and Spanish paprika, and simmer until thickened. Using two different kinds of smoked chillies may look like overkill, but they both have very different characters, the chipotles dark and chocolatey in their heat, and the paprika much brighter. Together they're fantastic here.

Add the thickened mixture to the beans pan with a tablespoon of salt (smoked Maldon salt is good, but isn't totally necessary) and return it to the heat, this time uncovered. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid in the pan takes on a texture like the sauce in a can of baked beans. You'll be able to tell when it's ready; it can take anything from 45 minutes to a couple of hours.

You can serve the beans now as a kind of baked bean. This is also the point at which you should stop to reserve two thirds of the beans for cooking later on. Set the third you are using for refried beans aside until you are nearly ready to eat.

For the salsa, just peel and seed the tomatoes, dice and mix with the diced shallot and chopped coriander, and squeeze over lime juice to taste. Chop a chorizo into coins, quarter each of these coins and dry-fry them until they are crisp and rustling in the pan. Set aside in a small bowl, reserving the fat for another go at the beans.

To fry the beans, eat 2 tablespoons of bacon or chorizo fat in a large saucepan until very hot. Mash the beans in their sauce with a potato masher. They shouldn't be completely smooth, but work at it until most of the beans are reduced to a paste. Dollop the paste into the hot fat. It will hiss and spit. Use a wooden spoon to stir the beans around in the frying pan, and keep stirring every couple of minutes until all the fat is absorbed and the liquid from the beans has evaporated to leave them thick and dense.

Stir the crispy chorizo into the beans and serve with a hearty spoonful of the salsa, some sliced avocado and a good dollop of crème fraîche. This makes a great meal on its own. If you're feeling greedy, it's also a brilliant accompaniment for a steak.

Nokka, Helsinki

2009-12-01T09:27:00.003Z

I've just spent a few days in Helsinki, where the chill and dark at this time of year is easily remedied by a stiff glass of hot grog, a spell in the sauna and a few handsome servings of fish roe. Romantic lunches in the half-light at Kappeli, the cast iron and glass confection on Esplanadi; strolling through the covered market with a smoked lamprey in one hand (many thanks to the friendly Finn who suggested I look out for some; it's the end of the lamprey season); watching the herring gulls pick fish from the harbour and sneaking them bits of disappointing cake (also from the market). The sun does make an appearance at the end of November, but it's not a sun you'll recognise, staying low and watery in the sky. The light does funny things to your body clock - suddenly I understand why the Finns traditionally eat supper so early, especially in the winter.

So we booked a nice early table at Nokka (Kanavaranta 7, 00160 Helsinki), a restaurant that came heavily recommended by a friend. Behind the Russian Orthodox cathedral (and very close to Bellevue, which I visited last year), the restaurant is housed in an old warehouse looking out onto the sea, all orchids, vaulted red brick and giant wooden beams. The ten freezing minutes of huddling under umbrellas that we spent getting there were erased by a punchbowl full of wintertime grog and a great view into the open kitchen, where casually blond chefs swished around efficiently. More blondes, speaking perfect English, Finnish, Swedish, German and plenty of other languages besides, provide some of the best-trained service I've come across in this country. This room is slick, it's stylish, and the food matches up to it.

Nokka's menu is built around impeccable local sourcing. There's a page at the front of the menu about the various fishermen, farms, herb-growers, mushroom foragers and so forth that they use; the lamb, apparently, is from somewhere called Snappertuna, which has to be one of the best place names ever. We ordered the four-course Helsinki menu at €59 - a six-course version is available for €69 for the very hungry. Everything on the plate is seasonal - a real challenge in a Baltic November, but extremely well-conceived, with root vegetables and squashes where you might look for greener things in summer.

We opened with a little cup of wild mushroom soup as an amuse. Mushrooms and other foragables like berries have a very special place in Finnish food culture, and really do pop up all over the place; I found a clump of chanterelles growing on the pathway up to the Orthodox cathedral. As is traditional in Finnish soups, our little cups were heavily dosed with cream - on the edge of being rich, but very well-judged in a portion this size, where you're only eating a mouthful but want it to be a memorable one.

Fish, especially herring, is what Helsinki's all about. This little fillet (picture at the top of the page) had been marinaded in a tart preserving mixture, then gently grilled to lift its flavour even more. The process had given it a wonderful texture - soft and a little crisp around the edges. Tiny dollops of pureed potatoes (the Finns are justly proud of their potatoes, which have exceptional flavour thanks to those long summer days of sunshine) were topped with a little fish roe - a surprisingly good combination, rich and gorgeously balanced between the nutty, salty roe and smooth, creamy purée, which I'm going to try to do something with myself when the Jersey Royals come in next year. Add a little fresh beet salad, some sweet, gently pickled slices of raw carrot and red onion and a handful of dill and chervil, and you've got one of the best starters I've eaten all year. It's refreshing to find a plate full of garnish where the garnish is actually meaningful - nothing on this plate would have been as good on its own as the glorious whole was.

Alhopakka duck breast next, with a cardamom sauce and straw-smoked, puréed parsnips. The duck's leg, confited and shredded, was pressed into the timbale you can see at the side of the plate. Again, everything on the plate was part of a well-conceived whole - the smoked parsnip purée marrying so well with the cardamom, which paired so well with the fatty duck, which worked so well with the turtle beans and apricots tucked beneath it. And this was a big portion - as the meal progressed, we noticed that some who had ordered the six-course menu at other tables were struggling to finish everything.

Cheeses arrived, just a brie and a comte, served with no bread, but with some toasted nuts and seeds and fruit jellies. (No picture. I was getting funny looks from an adjacent table.) Not as exciting or unusual as the evening's other dishes, but a nice opportunity to get our ducks in a row, as it were, before attacking dessert.

So many places do a warm chocolate cake with a melty middle that it's become a bit of a cliche. A very jolly one, though, which is made considerably more interesting by the addition of pumpkin (more puree!), some chocolate rubble and a handsome dollop of very dark, malt ice cream. It's been a few days and I still can't work out whether or not I actually liked that pumpkin, a little bland in texture against the richness of all the other ingredients, but it certainly worked to tamp down the sweetness of the dish.

I've one issue with our meal, and it's not really Nokka's fault. Duty on alcohol is so high in Finland that ordering a bottle of wine with dinner is a considerable expense, and you're not going to find anything you'll enjoy drinking for under €60 a bottle - more than we paid for all four courses. This also has a lot to do with the current exchange rate, of course, which is particularly horrible if you're travelling from the UK or US. (The pound and the euro are nearly equivalent at the moment, which in a city which starts out as pricey as Helsinki means you are basically precluded from doing any shopping at all.) So I drank a single glass of cava with this meal, where it really deserved a nice fat bottle of Burgundy.

Try Helsinki in November. It's quiet, the room rates are fantastic (I finally scored a room at the Kamp, the city's only five-star hotel, which came in at about €150 less per night than I was quoted back in April), and there's a strangely intense romance to the dying light. And lord, the food's fun.

Hot buttered rum batter

2009-11-23T12:40:00.003Z

For years, I thought I didn't like hot buttered rum very much. An oily smear of butter floating on a thin pool of rum-flavoured hot water - nobody's idea of fun. And then last winter, I saw someone in a restaurant at Lake Tahoe (Ciera at the Montbleu hotel - pricey but pleasant) drinking a creamy, hot, cinnamon-smelling glass of something wonderful. I asked the waiter what it was - hot buttered rum. I ordered a glass: rich and buttery, spicy, full of heat and kick from the rum, and silky smooth. How did they get it to emulsify in the glass like that? The waiter said he wasn't allowed to give me a recipe, but did say that the chef made it with a sort of batter he prepared using butter and ice cream, and kept it in the freezer. It's the ice cream which makes the mixture, butter and all, emulsify so pleasingly and creamily in the glass (or mug, if you're at home); and a tub you've made for yourself will keep for months in the freezer, so it's an excellent thing to have on hand for surprise guests. As far as Christmas/winter drinks go, this one's approximately 100% bad for you (do not do what I did last night and have four of them in a row if you don't want to feel a bit unwell), which unfortunately means it's also about 100% delicious.

I made up a few different sets of batter from recipes I found on the Internet. None of them really hit the spot; in common with a lot of American recipes, I found most of them very, very sweet and a bit bland, relying on the vanilla ice cream for much of their flavour. The recipe below is my take on things, rather less sugary than most of the US recipes. I've also used maple syrup along with soft brown sugar for its flavour; and I've spiced quite aggressively, especially when it comes to the nutmeg, which has a wonderful affinity with rum. Allspice, like the rum, is Jamaican in origin, and works incredibly well here. And don't save this mixture just for dolloping in your hot rum and water: as I write this, I'm drinking a lump of the stuff dissolved in a strong mug of coffee, and it's heavenly.

Things like this make winter a bit less grim.

To make just over a litre of batter to keep in the freezer, you'll need:

500ml vanilla ice cream
500g salted butter, softened
200g soft brown sugar
200ml maple syrup
1½ tablespoons allspice
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 whole nutmeg, grated

Let the ice cream sit at room temperature until it's the texture of whipped cream. (You can also make this once the ice cream is completely melted, but I prefer the lighter texture you can achieve using a half-melted tub.) In a large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream together the butter, brown sugar and maple syrup until you have a thick, fluffy mixture. Dump the spices on top with the ice cream and continue to whisk for about five minutes, until the batter is smooth and light. Transfer to containers for freezing.

When you come to make up your drink, just put a dollop of the mixture at the bottom of a mug or glass (I like about three heaped teaspoons in a small mug - your mileage may vary) and add a measure of rum with a small pinch of salt. The salt won't make the drink salty, but it will act to lift the buttery flavour. Pour over water straight from the kettle to fill the mug, stir until the batter is dissolved, sit down in front of the fire and get drinking.

Roast duck with prune and pancetta stuffing

2009-11-18T11:25:00.003Z

If you ever find yourself doing a Christmas dinner for just two people, you'll find you could do a lot worse than to roast a duck. It must be the weather and the dark evenings, but I've got a lot of time for some of the more Christmas-tending ingredients at the moment, which is how I came to stuff this bird with prunes, pancetta and allspice, alongside some Savoy cabbage lightly sautéed in bacon fat with chestnuts fried to a crisp on the outside (very easy - use vacuum sealed chestnuts or roast your own, fry them in bacon fat until gold and starting to crisp on the outside, then throw in the cabbage, stirring for a few minutes until it's all wilted and coated with fat), a great mound of mashed potatoes spiked with nutmeg, and a cherry and port gravy. Apologies for the picture quality. I'd been at the port.

If you are feasting, one medium-sized duck split between two people makes a spectacular and plump-making meal. The bird might look big when you buy it, but it'll lose a lot of mass when you roast it and its layers of fat render off. A duck's breasts are also much less muscular than a chicken's, so there will be less meat than you might expect - but you will end up with a nice big jar of duck fat that you can put in the fridge when you've finished, so it's not all bad.

I've stuffed the bird's cavity with a sweet and spicy breadcrumb mixture. It looks a bit dry when you pack it into the duck, but the bird will baste the stuffing with fat and juices as it roasts, and you'll find you have a savoury and tender stuffing at the end of the cooking time. We ate the lot in one go. This is a special meal for a special occasion - but I found that it's also perfect for an ordinary winter's Wednesday night when you're feeling all loved-up.

To serve two, you'll need:

Duck and stuffing
1 medium duck with giblets
100g soft white breadcrumbs
10 soft prunes
10 spring onions
150g pancetta cubes
1½ teaspoons ground allspice
A generous amount of salt

Gravy
Duck giblets
500ml water or good chicken stock
200ml port
200ml cherry juice
1 tablespoon plain flour
1 tablespoon soft butter
A grating of nutmeg
Salt

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Remove the giblets from the inside of the duck along with any poultry fat in the cavity - you can just pull the fat away from the body using your fingers. Use it to make gratons for a cook's treat if you fancy.

Saute the pancetta cubes (use lardons of bacon if you can't find any pancetta) in a dry pan until they have given up their fat and are turning crispy. In a mixing bowl, stir the cooked pancetta, with any fat, into the dry breadcrumbs, and add the raw spring onions, chopped small, with the prunes, quartered, and the allspice. You won't need any salt; there is plenty in the pancetta.

Stuff the mixture into the cavity of the duck, packing it in firmly, and seal the open end. Some sew their ducks up; I like to use a few toothpicks to keep the cavity closed, which is quicker and less messy.

Prick the duck's skin all over with a fork, rub the whole bird with about a tablespoon of salt and put on a rack in a roasting tin. (The rack is there to stop the duck from sitting and cooking in its own fat. If your rack is a very shallow one, be prepared to drain the fat from the bird a couple of times as it cooks.) Put in the hot oven, turning the temperature down to 180°C after 20 minutes. Continue to roast for an additional 35 minutes per kilo (15 minutes per pound). Rest for 15 minutes in a warm place, uncovered, before carving.

While the duck roasts, prepare the gravy. Begin by making a giblet stock (I used a home-made chicken stock as the base for the giblet stock, which might be overkill, but it did taste fantastic) by simmering the giblets very gently in 500ml water or good chicken stock for 1 hour in an open, medium-sized saucepan, skimming off any scum that rises to the top. Strain the resulting stock - it should have reduced by about a quarter.

Add the cherry juice and port to the saucepan, and bring the heat up a bit - it should be chuckling rather than giggling. Reduce the mixture in the pan by about half. When the duck comes out of the oven to rest, mix the flour and butter together until you have a smooth paste, and whisk it into the gravy in the pan over a medium flame. Keep whisking until the gravy becomes thicker and glossy. Grate over some nutmeg and taste for salt and pepper.

The duck will have a crisp skin and a light, savoury spiced stuffing. Slosh the gravy all over your plate and get tucked in.

Bombay new potatoes

2009-11-16T12:19:00.003Z

Here's the recipe I promised last week to use up the other half of that curry paste. I particularly like new potatoes in this sort of dry curry; their waxy texture and delicate flavour works very well against the aromatic spicing, and leaving the skins on helps them finish with a nice crisp.

600g new potatoes
Half of Friday's curry paste
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Flavourless oil or ghee to fry
Salt
Fresh coriander to garnish

If you didn't cook the peas keema, Friday's curry paste was made with 1 peeled bulb of garlic, 10 spring onions, 1 fat piece of ginger, about 5cm long and 4 green chillies. I used half of it for the peas keema and the other half for this recipe, which makes a fantastic accompaniment for the lamb and peas. If you're only cooking one of the recipes, either make up a whole batch of curry paste and freeze half, or just halve the amounts.

A few hours before you cook the meal, steam the new potatoes for 25 minutes, drain and leave in the saucepan to cool completely. When cold, chop them in half (or quarters, if yours are large).

When you are ready to start cooking, stir the turmeric into the curry paste. Bring a couple of tablespoons of oil or ghee to temperature in a large, non-stick saucepan over a medium flame, and sauté the whole fennel seeds in the hot oil for a few seconds. Add the curry paste (now bright yellow) and fry, stirring all the time, for a couple of minutes. Tip in the potatoes with a large pinch of salt and keep frying, stirring every now and then, for about 10 minutes until the potatoes are crusty and golden. Serve immediately. These potatoes are also extremely good cold.

Peas keema - keema mattar

2009-11-13T11:21:00.005Z

Since I made that rice pudding, Indian food, and especially the Indian food I used to eat at friends' houses when I was a kid, has been much on my mind. Here in the UK, the cuisine of India has embedded itself into the national consciousness - the Victorians were currying things from their new empire with glee, thrilled to discover a way to disguise the flavour of last week's mutton; surveys done nowadays have demonstrated that the nation's favourite dish is a Chicken Tikka Masala (something you'd never find in India - it's a dish that's evolved over here all on its own); my parents' fridge was never innocent of at least one jar of Sharwood's or Patak's chutney in the 80s. I remember with great pleasure visits to my schoolfriend Gayatri's house, where her Mum, an outstandingly good home cook, would make us saucepans full of sweet, milky masala tea, sneak us sticky, sugary halva while we played in the garden, and serve up about five different curries with rice when it came to mealtime, all different and all wonderful.

Peas keema was a regular feature on the lunch table. It's delicious - make plenty, because it freezes very successfully. I've made a curry paste which serves (with the addition of different spices) as the base for both this and the Bombay potato recipe I'll post on Monday, so hold out until then before you make this, or reduce the ingredients of the wet paste by half if you plan on cooking it over the weekend.

To serve four, you'll need:

1 bulb garlic, peeled
10 spring onions
1 fat piece of ginger, about 5cm long
4 green chillies (I used Thai bird's eye chillies - adjust amount and variety according to your taste - this amount is pretty spicy)
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
750g minced lamb
300g frozen petits pois
300ml stock
2 teaspoons garam masala
1 large handful fresh coriander (about 20g, if you're measuring)
Salt
Juice of 1-2 lemons
Flavourless oil or ghee to fry

Begin by reducing the white parts of the spring onions (reserving the green), the ginger, the chillies and the garlic to a paste in the food processor. Reserve half of this mixture to form the base for the Bombay potatoes, which go very well with this dish.

Crush the cumin and coriander finely with a mortar and pestle, and stir them into the half of the paste you are using for this recipe with a generous pinch (use all the fingers of one hand for this) of salt.

Heat some oil over a medium flame and fry the paste for a couple of minutes until it is giving up its fragrance. I like to use a wok with a lid or a large Le Creuset casserole dish for this dish, which allows you plenty of room to work in. Add the minced lamb and fry, stirring continuously, until it is browned evenly (about 5 minutes). Add the stock, turn the heat down to a very low simmer, and put a lid on. Leave to simmer for 30 minutes while you chop the green parts of the onions into pea-sized pieces and mince the coriander.

At the end of the 30 minutes, taste for salt and add more if you need it (you probably will - this dish can take quite a lot of salt). Stir in the garam masala, the peas and the chopped green parts of the spring onion. Continue to simmer for a moment until the peas are no longer frozen, and add the juice of one lemon. Taste again - you may prefer more lemon juice (I like mine very sharp and usually use the juice of two lemons). Cover and cook for another 10 minutes until the peas are soft. They turn a slightly unfortunate colour with all this cooking, but they taste fabulous.

Take the pan off the heat skim off any fat. Stir in the chopped coriander and serve immediately.

Blogger's lunch at Roast with Chapel Down Wines

2009-11-11T12:41:00.004Z

If you were on Twitter yesterday at lunchtime...and for much of the afternoon...you'll have noticed that four food and wine bloggers and I were furiously live-tweeting a lunch from Roast in London's Borough Market, where wi-fi had been laid on to encourage us to look like total nerds as we ate. It's a restaurant perfectly placed to make the most of the fresh produce from the market - the emphasis here is on seasonality and wonderfully British things like haggis, pork belly and black pudding. Matching wines were provided, at a rate of two with each of the five courses along with a beer and a welcoming glass of fizz, by Chapel Down Winery. I'll recap my tweets and pictures from the meal below for those not on Twitter - as noted on the day, I'm afraid the quality of prose and photography drops as I work my way through the wine. And read down to the bottom, because the restaurant is offering blog readers a special menu with wines if you can make it to Roast on November 24, and Chapel Down have very generously provided a special offer on a case of wine for you as well.

Something of an experimental post, this - it's the first meal I've live-tweeted. Let me know what you think. (It's likely to remain a rare event: eating with a laptop on my knee is something I'd only do at a restaurant's request or suggestion, 'cos it made me feel geek-tacular.) You can read more of my daily ramblings on food if you follow me @liz_upton.

Ensconced at Roast, gargling Chapel Down fizz. Expect quality of tweets to worsten as the lunch progresses - 2 pairings/course. 1:14pm, Nov 10
See @wine_scribbler, @foodguardian, @thewinesleuth, @eatlikeagirl and @msgourmetchick for more on this lunch 1:16pm, Nov 10
Smoked, dry-cured Loch Etive trout w crab cakes at Roast - trout outstanding. @wine_scribbler says shallots overpowering the wine - I like 'em! 1:33pm, Nov 10
@wine_scribbler I'm actually preferring the Pinot Reserve - and I'm not sure why I'm tweeting this, given we're sitting next to each other. 1.36pm, Nov 10
The smoked trout *was* a tricky thing to match wines with - next up, some haggis. 1:41pm, Nov 10
A bottle of Chapel Down porter has just appeared in front of me - currently 5 glasses on table...getting confused. 1:42pm, Nov 10
Bloody hell, this porter is good. Oak chips in barrel apparently - a winemaking tech and very splendidly spicy and tannic. 1:44pm, Nov 10
We're all making Black Velvets with the Chapel Down Vint Res Brut and the CD Porter. Delicious and also slightly shaming. 1:53pm, Nov 10
Haggis and oxtail on celeriac/spud mash. Heaven, especially w a Black Velvet!
Just been given an obscenely good slice of grilled black pud to sample. Ramsey of Carluke in Lanarkshire - superb. 1:58pm, Nov 10
Leaving the red undrunk. This is *highly* unusual for me. 1:59pm, Nov 10
...and we pause briefly while we collect ourselves. Jealously guarding my glass of Black Velvet from the v attentive wine waiters. 2:02pm, Nov 10
@foodguardian is having trouble liveblogging because of his "Fisher Price phone". I have no sympathy. 2:04pm, Nov 10
A wine made with the Bacchus grape (English) has just arrived. Rather excited. 2:09pm, Nov 10
I'm getting tuberose and rubber off this wine - Bacchus not a grape I know well, but v intriguing. 2:10pm, Nov 10
I lie - that was an 06 Pinot Blanc in an ident. glass. The Bacchus is actually weirdly sweet and unacidic - and v nice. 2:12pm, Nov 10
BTW, I think we should open a book on precisely when we are all going to be too pissed to continue tweeting. I say by course 4. 2:13pm, Nov 10
Roast's signature dish - pork belly w mash spuds and apple sauce. Hubba - look at that crackling. 2:23pm, Nov 10
Pork belly outstanding - soft, tender meat, killer crackling. And there's almost as much butter in this mash as at Robuchon. 2:25pm, Nov 10
Chatting to restaurant owner about these spuds, which I could happily *live* in. King Eds at the mo, but only because seasonal. 2:33pm, Nov 10 (On speaking to the chef later, I discovered that actually they're Maris Piper year round. Damn good, anyway.)
Christ almighty. Apparently, portions usually x2 this size - that pic was just the *tasting* portion (of which I ate ½). 2:36pm, Nov 10
Winemaker a bit unconfident about what's up next - UK dessert wines a bit difficult. This is pretty good, but more aperitif-y. 2:45pm, Nov 10
Spiced clementine custard w anise biscuits - pud like Grandma used to make. Chapel D Nectar gorgeous, but questionable match! 2:51pm, Nov 10
So I *really* like this Chapel Down Nectar, but not necessarily with food. The pannacotta underneath is fabboo. 2:54pm, Nov 10
You might notice that at this point in proceedings the quality of writing and photography is descending *fast*. Sorry. :) 3:01pm, Nov 10
And an 08 varietal English Pinot Noir. Chocolatey, dry, unoaked. Prolly my favourite of the Chapel Down wines so far. 3:07pm, Nov 10
Warm chestnut & pear cake w hot choc sauce. Melting, so excuse me while I eat. 3:18pm, Nov 10
Chef has emerged, with a light coating of sauce. 3:25pm, Nov 10
Chef's belly tips - Stanley knife, rub salt & lemon, C230 for 30 mins, then down to 165 for 3 hours. 3:31pm, Nov 10
...And I'm shutting the computer down now. Feedback's very welcome - how do you lot feel about live-tweeted lunches?

Roast and Chapel Down are offering a special menu with wine pairings for blog readers on November 24. They asked for our help in selecting three of these courses to point you at, and we ended up going for the menu below (with pairings selected by the folks at Chapel Down).

On arrival, a glass of Chapel Down Brut Rose
Ramsey of Carluke haggis with celeriac and oxtail sauce, with a glass of Chapel Down Rondo Regent Pinot Noir NV
Slow-roast Wicks Manor pork belly with mashed potatoes and Bramley apple sauce, served with a glass of Roast Bacchus Reserve 2007 (NB this will be the full sized portion, not the tasting portion from the pics above)
Spiced clementine custard with anise biscuits, served with a glass of Chapel Down Nectar 2007
Tea or coffee

With the wines, the menu will cost £44.50. If you want to book, call the restaurant on 0845 034 7300 and mention that you are booking for the Chapel Down Roast Bloggers’ Dinner on November 24.

Chapel Down are also offering readers a case of their Pinot Reserve 2004 for £99 for a case of six, including delivery to any UK mainland adddress. (A case usually retails at £150 plus delivery.) All you need to do is call the vineyard on 01580 763033, ask for Lizzie or Wendy and quote Blogger Offer.

Ouch

2009-10-29T11:22:00.003Z

My RSI's suddenly decided to flare up again - so I'll keep this necessarily brief! Unfortunately handling a knife and typing are both causing the joint where my right index finger meets my hand to resemble a boiled sweet, so I'm taking some time away from chopping board and keyboard until it goes back down again. Hopefully things will be back to normal next week; in the meantime, if you want something to read, I'll still be using Twitter, which is something I can do with my left hand!

Lo-Lo's Chicken and Waffles, Phoenix AZ

2009-10-26T14:21:00.003Z

There are flavour combinations out there that sound barking mad until you try them. Witness the blissful comings-together of Cheddar cheese and Christmas cake; chocolate and hare; fig and prosciutto; strawberries and Balsamico. But how do you feel about fried chicken, breakfast waffles and maple syrup?

As it turned out, I discovered that I felt remarkably good about the idea, so took the opportunity to drive down to South Phoenix, where you'll find Lo-Lo's (Lo-Lo has just opened another branch in Scottsdale, but it's the original restaurant just south of Downtown Phoenix that we're concerned with here.) It's a little shack of a soul food restaurant in an area full of hand-painted warnings about vicious dogs, barbed wire and abandoned cars. Park in the yard behind the restaurant, hurry around to the entrance on the other side of the building, grab a seat at a counter or one of the tables, and get to grappling with the menu.

The main event here is the chicken and waffles, and the menu offers you about a dozen different chicken/waffle combinations, like Sheedah's Special (a breast, a wing, a waffle), Lil Amadt (a leg, a thigh, a waffle), and Lo-Lo's (three pieces of chicken, two waffles). If waffles aren't your thing, there are grits or fries; and you can sample collard greens, home fries, candied sweet potatoes and other things of the sort it's very hard to stop eating, all of which come as part of those combos or as side orders - try the cornbread with honey butter, crisp on the outside and light as a feather inside.

We ended up visiting twice, so we could explore a bit more of the menu. Drinks, served in massive Mason jars, are really good fun - sweet iced tea, silky with so much sugar syrup that your eyeballs hurt; home-made lemonade; Kool-Aid (the red sort only); Cherry Pepsi (which sent me into a Proustian reverie about the cans of cherry cola in my prep-school lunchbox). The fried chicken in Lo-Lo's very delicately spiced batter is delectable, pressure-fried so hot that the coating comes out dry and perfectly crisp, the chicken inside moist and succulent. The fat is scrupulously fresh - enormous refuse hoppers out back for the old fat demonstrated that it's changed very regularly, and you can taste this in what's on the plate. Waffles are light and puffy, with a dollop of whipped butter and a little glass ramekin of maple syrup, which you'll find yourself sloshing all over everything on your plate.

Every table sports a squeezy bottle of honey and some Trappey's hot peppers in vinegar - the pepper vinegar is meant for your collard greens, but I found myself drizzling the intensely fruity, spicy liquor all over the fried chicken and everything else I was eating. The kitchen also produces something called Chyna's honey hot sauce, which tasted a lot like a vinegar-based hot sauce like Frank's blended with honey - we dipped wings in it and pronounced it just splendid. The fried okra in cornmeal is, I think, bought in frozen, which is a shame; that said, once doctored with some pepper vinegar we found ourselves ordering it twice, so perhaps the frozen-ness isn't such a disaster.

The atmosphere at Lo-Lo's is fantastic - we got chatting to neighbouring tables, found ourselves engaged in deep conversation with the waiters and bemoaning the UK's useless absence of chillies in vinegar. Ultimately, I'm rather relieved there's nothing like Lo-Lo's round here; I'd be having serious trouble fitting into my trousers if there was. But if you find yourself in Phoenix, you'd be mad not to go. This is food with real heart - you can see why they call it soul food - and it's more delicious and less expensive than anything else we ate in the city.