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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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French onion soup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Beans on toast – with a twist

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

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

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

You’ll need:

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

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

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

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Yorkshire pudding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Roast pork with crackling

Cripes. Make that “Roast pork with award-winning crackling”. A few years after I wrote the post below, the recipe ended up being tested on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog, where it beat the competition hollow. This would be unremarkable it that competition hadn’t been Hugh F-W, Delia, Prue Leith, Good Housekeeping and Simon Hopkinson. Get to it with that hairdryer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cha gio (nems) – Vietnamese crispy spring rolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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Tartiflette

Please do not serve this to people on diets.

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

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

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

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

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

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

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

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

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Otak-otak – spicy Malaysian fish patties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sweet roast winter vegetables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Clinical canapes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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