Gastronomy Domine

Pause for thought

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:55:00 +0000

It's sunny, I have an unexpectedly free week, and I find I've got several half-formed recipes in my head to work over. I've decided to take a week away from blogging to catch up on some reading and sunshine, to slap aloe vera onto my angry-looking shoulders and to think hard about red wine - I'll be back at the end of next week.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, London W1

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:21:00 +0000

In London for a day of Ladies' Nice Things, my Mum and I had decided to take advantage of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon's (020 7010 8600) set lunch menu (£25 for three courses - cooking at this level is hard enough to find anywhere in the capital, let alone at this sort of price). There is little as good for the appetite as perching on the world's plushiest bar stools and looking over the open finishing kitchen as a synchronised team of young French chefs waltz around each other in pressed, white formation, whipping potatoes, peeling baby artichokes, and slicing truffles.

We'll start this one back-to-front, at the point where the bill arrived. We noticed the two glasses of champagne we'd opened the meal with (for what is worth celebrating more than a nice day out with your Mum?) had been omitted from the receipt, and called the server over to ask him to add them on. He didn't miss a beat, but said 'Not at all; if the champagne has not appeared on the bill, please accept it with our compliments'.

Good dining's not all about what's on your plate. Service, noise level, comfort and the beauty of the room (and this room is like a red and black-lacquered Japanese box with a living wall of leaves) all have their part to play, and here all those elements slot neatly together to result in a real joy of a restaurant. Robuchon, who was named Chef of the Century back in the 1980s by Gault Millau, has 25 Michelin stars divided between his neat squadron of a dozen restaurants in cities all over the world. I've eaten in the Las Vegas Atelier and the London one, and quality, style and service are absolutely consistent between the two restaurants.

Meals at l'Atelier are presented either as small plates which the diner can select tapas-style from the menu; as larger plates to be enjoyed as a starter, main course and dessert; or as a dégustation set (£110) of the smaller plates chosen by the chef. Some of these dishes have become famous in their own right and are always found on the tasting menu: the quail stuffed with foie gras; the mashed potato, which is 50% butter and whipped into a cloud of silk. Robuchon's cooking is of the voluptuously rich school that he was instrumental in founding after France's flirtation with nouvelle cuisine; your meal here will be smooth with butter and oils and dense with meticulous, slow-cooked flavours.

That lunch menu is a magnificent introduction to Robuchon's cooking; at any rate, I'm not sure I could cope with the richness of the dégustation menu at lunchtime. There are two choices for each of the three courses, and the menu changes with the day's market. Salmon rillettes were packed with dill and fresh horseradish (which is, incidentally, making an appearance on market stalls in Cambridge at the moment - local readers should head out and grab a root for a horseradish sauce recipe I'm planning for next week) - hot-smoked salmon whipped into crème fraîche, studded with fat jewels of cold-smoked salmon, accompanied by a sharp salad made from paper-thin slivers of fennel. Soups are always fresh and frequently thick with cream - my broccoli soup had a crouton floating on top, slathered with tapenade and a spoonful of sweet onion confit which reminded me of the French onion soup (so good I'm never ordering it anywhere else again) I had there back in March.

Razor clams are something you seldom see in British restaurants, and I always order them when I see them. They're a beautiful shellfish, large, sweet and tender to the tooth. These were from Colchester, superbly fresh; and had been removed from the shell, then gratinated with a leek fondue, butter-soft, and Parmigiano. Not a trace of the fine, sandy grit that almost invariably clouds razor clam dishes - and I was thankful for an epi of bread from the basket which staunched some of the butteriness. Patte noir chicken was roasted (I suspect the involvement of a rotisserie grill) to a lovely, butter-aided succulence with a mahogany-crisp skin. We'd asked for a bowl of mashed potato in addition to the lunch menu - even if it's not on the menu, they'll find some for you - and agreed we could happily live on the stuff, and possibly in it too.

Wine pairings are suggested for each dish, and we asked for a glass each - a 2007 Montlouis to go with my clams, and a Stonier Pinot Noir from Australia with the chicken. Both beautifully selected, the Montlouis reflecting the butter-sweetness of the clams, and the Pinot Noir really European in character - plenty of fruit, but closer to a Burgundy in style; lovely stuff. I got back from the ladies' (a dim spot in the excellent design - it's all very elegant, but the lights in there make you look like the living dead) to find my Mum happily launched on a second glass, which she claimed would help her pudding down.

A set of five slim slices from different tarts is a dessert that usually appears on the £25 menu. I'm not a huge fan of the signature dessert, a Chocolate Sensation (you are likely to be far fonder of chocolate than I am - I suspect it's a genetic abnormality, given that Mum's really not into it either). The Chocolate Sensation was the only dessert on offer with the lunch menu, but I asked whether they had the tarts, and five minutes later two helpings arrived, beautifully plated and for no extra charge. And that's absolutely typical of the service at l'Atelier. It's both graceful and gracious, and they will bend over backwards to help you - witness the business with the champagne. The tart selection has changed every time I've visited, but if you are lucky you might encounter the cinnamon custard on filo pastry or the puckeringly sharp lemon tart. Keeping seasonal produce in mind, there was a strawberry shortcake topped with three perfect fresh strawberries and a sort of raspberry clafoutis arrangement - and even chocolate agnostics like us decided the chocolate, caramel and hazelnut concoction, smooth and dense, was about as good as such things get.

Coffee here is great, but I'd suggest you walk the 100 yards to the Monmouth St Coffee House for my favourite cup of coffee in London if you can get off the barstool. (I am 5'2". I find such things challenging.) Mum was thrilled with lunch - I believe she's taking my Dad back to l'Atelier next week for a date.

Portobello and prosciutto open sandwich

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:55:00 +0000

A quick and dirty supper dish: with the help of a food processor, this one will only take you half an hour to make. I've set fat Portobello mushrooms, roasted with a garlic and herb butter and covered with crisp crumbs, on top of sweet slices of brioche, with a few paper-thin slices of prosciutto draped over the top. Easy as anything, and cooking mushrooms like this really brings out their curious meatiness.

I've used panko breadcrumbs, which are gorgeously malty and crisp, to add some crunch to the mushrooms while soaking up some of the herby, buttery juices. If you can't find any, just use some crumbs you've whizzed up from stale slices of bread in the food processor.

Look to serve each diner two open sandwiches. For each sandwich, you'll need:

1 plump Portobello mushroom
1 clove garlic
1 small handful (15g) parsley
1 small handful (15g) chives
1 small handful (15g) oregano
30g salted butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon Japanese panko breadcrumbs
1 thick slice brioche (make sure you get a variety without vanilla essence)
2 slices prosciutto
Salt and pepper
Dijon mustard to spread

Preheat the oven to 200°C .

Put the herbs, garlic, butter and lemon juice in the bowl of the food processor and whizz until everything is chopped and blended with the butter. Place the mushrooms, gill side up, in a baking tray, and dollop the herb butter mixture evenly on them. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with the panko crumbs, and roast for 20 minutes.

Toast the brioche and spread each slice with a little Dijon mustard. Lay a roast mushroom on top, drizzling over some of the pan juices, and top with two paper-thin slices of prosciutto. This is oddly delicious with a very cold glass of Pinot Gris.

Ambrose Heath's Anchovy Biscuits

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:07:00 +0000

If you've been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a few references to Edwardian savouries and a writer called Ambrose Heath this week. The savoury used to be a course served at the end of a formal English meal. Salty, umami and often highly spiced, the savoury was packed in by English gentlemen after dessert while they discussed hats and feudalism. A salty nibble was meant to cleanse the palate of whatever gelatinous pudding you'd just eaten so you could happily assault it with a cigar and too much port.

The savoury didn't survive the period of rationing during and after the Second World War (a period which rendered English food completely joyless - it's only started to recover recently). A grave shame, especially for those, like me, who lack a particularly sweet tooth; I'd far sooner eat a bacon sarnie than an ice-cream. Recipes for savouries are, these days, pretty hard to find, but I have several in a pre-war book by Andre Simon, and I couldn't believe my luck when I found a copy of Ambrose Heath's Good Savouries in a second-hand book shop last week.

Ambrose Heath was a prolific food writer: there are more than 70 books to his name. One of the first cookery books I owned was his book on sauces, which, along with his other books, appeals to the systematising, cataloguing part of my soul that lives somewhere on the autistic spectrum. His books are exhaustive and meticulous treatments of their subjects - there are multiple recipes with tiny tweaks for many of the dishes, alternative approaches and ingredient substitutions, and a lovely sense of a rather plump, happy man behind the pen. (And isn't that a gorgeous cover illustration?)

Most of the savouries in this book are based around salty ingredients like ham, bacon, anchovy or bloaters; they're usually spiced vigorously with curry powder or chutney, and are presented sitting on a fried crisp of bread, a puff of pastry or a hollowed roll buttered and baked crisp. This recipe for anchovy biscuits reads as follows:

To make the pastry for the cheese straws, Heath says you'll need:

2oz plain flour
2oz grated parmesan
2oz butter
Yolk of 1 egg
A dash of mustard
Salt and pepper

His recipe will have you rubbing the butter into the flour/parmesan/mustard mixture, binding with the egg yolk and a little water, then baking for ten minutes. I changed the method a little, freezing the butter for 15 minutes and shredding it on the coarse side of the grater into the flour/parmesan mixture (to which I'd added a teaspoon of Madras curry powder), stirring everything together with a knife and binding the resulting mixture with the egg yolk and some ice-cold water mixed with four anchovies pounded in the mortar and pestle. I rested the pastry in the fridge for half an hour before rolling it out very thinly, cutting out 48 rounds with my smallest cookie cutter, and baking at 200°C for 12 minutes until golden. Rub the mixture in if you prefer, but grating in hard butter will give you a puffier, crisper result. I left out salt and pepper - the anchovies and curry powder will provide all the salt and spice you need.

To make the paste to spread on top of the biscuits, I pounded four more anchovy fillets, 1 teaspoon of curry powder (Madras again - Bolsts is my favourite curry powder, but you should use your favourite brand/ferocity), 2 tablespoons of parmesan, 1 tablespoon of chopped capers (in wine vinegar, not salt, which would just be too much with the anchovies), 1 tablespoon of oil from the anchovies and 1 teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard in the mortar and pestle until smooth. This will give you enough to smear each biscuit with the tip of a knife - look to use a very tiny amount of the topping, which is strong and salty. If you are familiar with Marmite or Vegemite, you need to spread in about the proportions you would spread those on toast. Allow the biscuits to cool before spreading them or they will be too fragile to work with.

Pop the biscuits in an oven heated to 180°C for five minutes. The spread will go slightly puffy. Dress with a little parsley before serving warm. Rather than eating your anchovy biscuits at the end of a meal, I'd suggest you use them as nibbles with drinks - a very dry Fino sherry or a Dirty Martini will work beautifully against them.

Pimm's Fruit Cup

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:43:00 +0000

Summer in the UK is a fragile, short-lived and unreliable thing (yesterday, in flaming June, we had tornadoes and hailstones), so when the sun shines and the air is balmy, especially here in Cambridge, we tend to overcompensate slightly with garden parties, great strings of barbecued sausages, silly hats, flowery frocks and that sine qua non of chi-chi English outdoor gatherings: a few jugs of Pimm's Fruit Cup. A sweet, pinkish liqueur based on gin, Pimm's is available in every off-licence and supermarket in the country; and we mix it with lemonade and what bemused foreigners interpret as a fruit salad, kick back and proceed to get completely sloshed in the sun. There's a certain class thing at work here. Shakespeare in the Park? We drink Pimm's. Wimbledon? Pimm's. May Balls? Pimm's. Opera at Glyndebourne? Pimm's. We also drink it because it's delicious, potent and tends to render pretty 20-year-old students of both genders delightfully cuddly.

This fruity, aromatic, rounded cocktail base was invented by James Pimm, who ran a tavern in the City of London. He came up with the drink, based on gin with fruit, herbs and quinine, some time in the 1820s, soon finding it was so popular that he was able to produce it on a large scale to be sold to other taverns and clubs. It's been a popular summer drink ever since, although the amount of alcohol in the stuff has definitely been reduced by the company that now owns the trademark (Pimm's has in my lifetime reduced its alcohol percentage from 35% ABV to 25%). You can remedy this by adding a splash of gin to your cocktail.

Pimm's is a substance sadly missed by those who come to the university here for a year or so from overseas. When visiting friends we made at university who have since moved back to America or other Pimm's-free lands, we usually try to bring a bottle for them so we can all spend an evening reliving our glided youth. But I bear glad tidings for the overseas summer alcoholic. You can actually make the base mix for your Pimm's (which we shall now call 'fruit cup' - and indeed, Pimm's is not the only available brand; try Plymouth Fruit Cup for a rather more aromatic option, or Stone's Fruit Cup for a distinct ginger kick) out of a mixture of liqueurs you may well have in the drinks cupboard already - use 2 parts 40% gin, 2 parts red vermouth, 1 part Cointreau (or your favourite orange liqueur), 1 part sweet port and a dash of Angostura bitters. It'll be a bit stronger than the pre-bottled stuff, but it tastes very fine indeed. If you do decide to make your own fruit cup from scratch, Hendrick's gin, with its cucumbery overtones, really comes into its own here - and if you use Dubonnet for your red vermouth, you can award yourself the Queen Mother seal of approval; Dubonnet was her all-time favourite liquid.

You should build your drink in a large jug by gently muddling a small handful of mint in 1 part Pimm's or home-made fruit cup, then adding 1 part lemonade and 1 part ginger ale, with a good handful of soft English summer fruits, some sliced cucumber and fresh mint bobbing about in the jug with some ice. I like raspberries frozen into ice cubes, so they float rather than sink to the bottom initially - this means that you can arrange for some raspberries to end up in everybody's glass, and the freezing makes the cell walls burst, so once the cubes have melted, the liquid at the bottom of your glass will be syrupy with raspberry juice. Borage flowers (a blue flower with a taste reminiscent of cucumber) are a traditional addition, and look lovely in the drink if you can find them. One jugful will be enough for a lovely boozy evening for two.

Caramelised onion, horseradish and blue cheese crusted steak

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:24:00 +0000

Sometimes, you might find yourself in possession of a less-than-handsome steak. Now, if your steak is richly marbled, fat and nicely aged, I wouldn't recommend you do more than rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper - maybe a little garlic too - and grill it briefly. The pieces of topside I found myself with needed a bit more help, so I came up with this recipe.

I've been spending lots of time hanging out at the Polish deli in Newmarket recently - I've already told you about the salt pork and cherry juice, and I'm really enjoying the smoked sausages and pickled herring. I decided to sample some Polish horseradish (chrzan) after reading an extremely enthusiastic hymn to it in a book I was editing a few weeks ago, and found that if anything, the author wasn't giving it all the love it deserves. English creamed horseradish can be a bit wet and insipid, but this Polish stuff is fiery, sweet and intensely fragrant - just sniffing the jar caused hallucinatory roast sirloins of beef to parade before my eyes. Look out for it in your local Polish deli - some supermarkets now have a Polish aisle too. You might also be able to find a variant called cwikla, which is horseradish with sweet red beets. It's delicious, but it'll make the crust here an alarming pink.

The crust on this steak is soft and light under its buttery, crisp surface, and is full of flavours which make the very best of your steak. To make enough to crust four steaks, you'll need:

1 large onion
3 heaped tablespoons Polish horseradish sauce (or whatever you can find)
3 heaped tablespoons crumbled blue cheese (choose something strong - I used an elderly Bleu d'Auvergne)
100g fine, fresh breadcrumbs (just whizz white bread in the food processor)
100g butter
1 bunch (about 15g) chives
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

I also made some garlic-lemon green beans, which used the meat juices. If you want to make these too, you'll need:

100g green beans
2 fat cloves of garlic
Zest and juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Get the steaks out of the fridge well before you want to cook them to allow them to come to room temperature. Rub them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and set them aside. While the steaks are coming up to temperature, prepare the crust.

Cut the onion into very fine dice, and fry over a low heat in two tablespoons of the butter, stirring regularly, until the onion is a lovely golden caramel colour. Put the cooked onion with its butter into a large mixing bowl, and melt the rest of the butter in the onion pan. While the butter is melting, use the back of a fork to blend the onion in the bowl with the cheese - try to distribute the cheese as evenly as you can. Stir through the horseradish, then stir the breadcrumbs into the mixture, adding the melted butter bit by bit until you have a mixture that is still loose, but that holds together when pressed. Stir the chives through the crust mixture, taste and season. (If your cheese is particularly salty, you may not need any extra salt.)

Cook the steaks for a minute per side in olive oil in a very hot frying pan - just enough to sear them on each side. Remove to a plate, keeping the oil in the pan. Divide the crust mixture into four and press it into the top of each steak. (If you find you have some left over, you can just make it into a little rectangle and grill it along with the steaks for a cook's treat.) While you are working, some of the steak juices will come out of the steak onto the plate. Hold onto these for the beans, which cook very quickly, so you can do them as the crust grills.

Transfer the steaks with their topping to a grillpan and put under the grill for 6-8 minutes (or as long as you find your topping takes to go golden and crisp on top). Transfer to warm plates to rest for a few minutes before serving. I served this with some roast potatoes and more of that lovely horseradish.

To make the beans, warm the olive oil you seared the steaks in, and fry the garlic in it for a few seconds before tipping the topped, tailed and chopped beans in. Toss the beans around the pan until they start to turn bright green, then pour over the lemon juice mixed with the zest and the steak juices. Allow the liquid to bubble up and reduce a little, check the seasoning, then remove to a hot serving dish.

Asia – The Pan-Asian Dining Room, Regent St, Cambridge

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:17:00 +0000

Regular readers will know that I have always had a mild distrust of those restaurants which purport to specialise in the foods of more than one culture. You know what I mean - those places offering up dim sum alongside sushi, or Thai food with Japanese soba. So I went to Asia, up at the Catholic church end of Regent Street in Cambridge, with a bit of trepidation. (Full disclosure here - I'd been invited by the owners and got a free meal.)

Asia (the restaurant, not the continent) is smart enough not to try to do Japanese food, but explores Chinese, Thai and Indian foods in a very similar way to that you'll find in Malaysian cuisine, with food from all three cultures served up alongside each other - and thankfully, they do it all very well indeed. This is actually a combination of cuisines that makes really good sense. It can be a bit disconcerting ordering Indian and Chinese side dishes to go with a Thai main course, but once you get into the swing of things, the flavours - aromatic lime leaves here, Goan curry spicing there, oyster sauce and fermented beans over there - gel surprisingly well. Ask the very helpful waiters if you're trying to work out some good flavour combinations; they know the menu backwards and are very ready to help. Ingredients are fresh and, where possible (obviously, you're going to run into trouble sourcing mangoes in East Anglia), local.

It's a big space, and just avoids that hard-surface thing where restaurant interiors become loud and boomy. It's all handsome, contemporary dark wood and marble juxtaposed with Indian and South East Asian artifacts - a Thai screen, an Indian limestone frieze - and the odd bit of upholstery. It's spotlessly clean, it's a very pretty room to eat in, and the welcome and service, which was warm, friendly and helpful, didn't seem to be at all different from what the guests around us were getting. So far, so splendid - and did you know that Kingfisher, the Indian restaurant lager people, are also doing a very good fizzy mineral water now?

We opened with my favourite Thai salad, Som Tum, all green papaya, sour lime, savoury fish sauce and dried shrimp, with two fat prawns. Dr W went for scallops, and the restaurant must be proud of these, because they're stupendous and very unusual - sweet Scottish scallops, seared to a barely-cooked wobble with a coriander crust, served with salted yoghurt and, right out of left-field, olive purée. (They say the purée is Peruvian. No, I have no idea either, but it was good, and perfectly salty against the sweet flesh of the scallops.)

Mains are served individually, not family-style. This is not the Upton way of doing things, especially when everything on the table is so interesting, and we wanted to put the dishes in the middle so we could share. Waiters swished around elegantly as soon as I asked, conjuring hot, clean plates out of nowhere. And just as well too, because Dr W's Goan halibut curry in a lovely rough tomato and tamarind sauce was a firm, moist beast, so there was no way I wasn't going to eat half of it. We'd also gone for a dish of Kai Krob, a Thai chicken in pieces, cooked in a light, floury coating that was halfway between chewy and crispy - fabulous - with a good hit of sweetness and a scattering of intensely aromatic kaffir lime leaves.

Presentation's great here, such that we found ourselves remarking that one of the side-dishes (shitake and oyster mushrooms with home-made garlic chilli sauce and yellow beans) was much less pretty than the other things on the table, particularly the Bombay potatoes, all scattered with crispy vermicelli and punctuated with bright green coriander. But beauty's only potato-skin deep, and the Bombay potatoes tasted pretty ordinary, while those mushrooms (must have been the home-made sauce) had us wiping the empty bowl with a naan. A naan, I will have you know, that was studded with dates - if you get that Goan halibut curry, the date naan is a brilliant foil to it.

A short pause for hot hand towels soaked in eau de cologne. Rumpole of the Bailey once bit into one in a dark Chinese restaurant, mistaking it for a spring roll. You will know better.

The dessert menu is short, especially when compared to the pages and pages of mains and starters that go before, all divided up by origin and method (so tandoor dishes are listed on one page, classical dishes on another, noodles on another). To be honest, it was a bit of a relief; main courses and starters were so generous we were pretty stuffed by this point, and weren't up to hard decision-making. Dr W nearly went for something called Funky Pie, then changed his mind (if you go and order a Funky Pie, do let me know what it is - I'm intrigued), settling for Indian carrot cake (Gajar ka Halwa), all dense and moist and achingly sweet. I went for the crème brûlée, thrilled to see that they'd got the accents in the right place on the menu, and ended up wishing I'd had the saffron-poached pears instead - it tasted beautiful, but the acid from the mango had turned it into watery whey and curds under the crisp sugar crust. A single dud in an otherwise really enjoyable meal.

There are currently some promotions on the restaurant's website (click on the 'information' tab), which include a 10% discount for students. Without discounts, you're looking at around £5 for a starter. Mains start at £7.25 - the price rises steeply once you get into things like lobster, but starving students looking to impress attractive art historians should head on over, try for a table by the huge window so you can people-watch, tell them I sent you, and get ordering.

Gai Yang - Lao Barbecue Chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:33:00 +0000

I hope you read through the spatchcocking instructions yesterday (my spellchecker doesn't recognise 'spatchcocking', and suggests I use 'knocking shop' instead - honestly). If you didn't, have a quick look, then come back here. This recipe will have you marinating a whole bird in some extravagantly delicious paste full of lemongrass, chilli and coriander, then grilling it over hot charcoal. It's my version of a recipe that's originally from Laos. When I lived in Paris, most weekends found me face-down in a plate of sticky rice, Ping Gai (the Laotian term for what the Thais and subsequently the Brits call Gai Yang) and Laotian wind-dried beef at Lao Lanxang (105, Avenue Ivry, 75013 Paris). This is a handsome treatment of a chicken, aromatic, sweet and smoky from the grill.

The recipe is also found in the Issan province of Thailand, and has now been subsumed into the melting pot of Thai food, so it's in Thai restaurants that you're most likely to find it in the UK - but if you're intrigued by food from Laos (and you should be - it is fascinating and delicious), read Natacha du Pont de Bie's Ant Egg Soup, a foodie backpacking travelogue with a handful of recipes at the end of each chapter that takes you all over the little country, sampling marvels like silkworm grubs, river algae and bottled chicken. The book seems to be out of print now, but there are plenty of copies available second-hand at Amazon.

To marinade a whole spatchcocked chicken (enough to serve four with rice), you'll need:

1 stick lemongrass
5 green chillies
4 fat, juicy cloves garlic
1 large handful fresh coriander, with stems
1 in ginger, grated
1 tablespoon turmeric
4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 ½ tablespoons soft brown sugar

Chop the lemongrass, chillies, garlic and coriander coarsely, and put them in a pestle and mortar. Bash and squash until you have a rough, emerald-coloured paste, as in this picture. (Don't worry about squishing everything until it's completely smooth - you are aiming to break the cell walls to make an aromatic paste, and this sort of texture will be fine.)

Transfer the green paste to a large bowl, big enough to fit your chicken in, and add the other ingredients. Stir well to combine all the ingredients, and slip the chicken into the bowl, turning and spooning so it's well covered with the sauce. Refrigerate, covered, for 24 hours, turning occasionally in the marinade.

When you are ready to barbecue the chicken, bring your charcoal up to temperature and set the grill high above it. Ideally, the chicken should cook relatively slowly, to prevent the delicious skin from charring too much. The spatchcocked chicken will lie flat, which helps it cook evenly. Stand over your chicken as it grills, turning it every couple of minutes (again, this will help to avoid the skin from turning too black), and basting each time you flip the chicken over with the remaining marinade from the bowl. After 20 minutes, poke a skewer into the fattest part of the chicken at the thigh. If the juices run clear, you're done - transfer the chicken to a plate to serve. If the juices are still pink, give the chicken another five minutes and repeat the test until you're satisfied it's cooked.

Serve with rice and some grilled corn cobs, drizzled with lime juice.

How to spatchcock a chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:36:00 +0000

We've been promised something called a 'barbecue summer' by the Met Office this year, so I thought I'd go with the flow and bombard you with some barbecue recipes - I'm a big fan of charcoal. There's a recipe for a whole barbecued Thai chicken coming up tomorrow (here it is), but before you cook it, you'll need to learn how to spatchcock the bird (removing its breastbone and backbone) so that it'll lie flat on the grill to cook evenly. It's much easier than you'd think, and all you'll need is a pair of stout kitchen scissors (or, better, poultry shears) and a sharp knife - here's how you do it.

Start by putting the bird back-side up, feeling for the spine of the chicken and cutting with the shears or scissors immediately to the right of it, all the way along the bird. Snip through the ribs as you go - they're not very tough.

Repeat to the left of the spine and lift out the whole backbone. Don't chuck it out - pop it in a saucepan with the other bits you're going to be removing from the bird, and make stock.

Pull the legs apart and look into the cavity of the chicken. You'll see the arrow-shaped breast bone (the bit my knife is pointing at in this picture). Slip your knife all the way around it, loosening it from the surrounding flesh.

Pull the breastbone out of the bird (the whole thing - it widens and goes all the way to the end of the chicken). You might need your scissors again to release it from the breastmeat.

And you're done. Your finished chicken will be lovely and rubbery and foldy, ideal for marinating and grilling. Pop back tomorrow for marinade and cooking instructions.

A follower, not a leader

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:12:00 +0000

I've finally bowed to the inevitable and signed up to Twitter. I'm @Liz_Upton - come and say hi!

Samphire, scallops and black pudding

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:32:00 +0000

The samphire season has just begun, and with this in mind, we drove up to Norfolk at the weekend with a coolbag to try to find some at a fishmonger. Unfortunately, it being a Bank Holiday, everybody else and his mother had also driven up to Norfolk. The fishmongers were empty of anything you'd have fancied eating, as if picked over by piscine locusts, and every seaside town we encountered was so full of people that we gave up and decided to go for a hike into the bleak salt marshes near Stiffkey (pronounced 'Stooky') to get away from everybody. Picnic backpack hoisted aloft, legs encased in waterproof boots, we walked out about three miles until we found the perfect spot by one of the causeway bridges that punctuate the saltmarshes - flowing, salty water running through a sticky clay bed. This is perfect samphire territory, and sure enough, there were beds and beds of the stuff growing along the water margin. I scrambled down into the water, offering up a prayer to the makers of Gore-Tex, and picked enough, roots and all, to fill both our picnic napkins.

Samphire is a glasswort, sometimes called sea-asparagus. (See the picture below for a bowl of raw, cleaned samphire.) There are a few different plants which are called samphire - we're after the best-tasting variety, marsh samphire, which is a spectacular bright green, and grows in salty mud. The samphire Shakespeare mentions in King Lear was probably rock samphire, which is comparatively bitter. Marsh samphire has an assertively salty flavour reminiscent of oysters, and is tender enough to be eaten raw in a salad. (Dr W and I found ourselves snacking on it raw as I picked, straight out of the mud.) At this time of year, the samphire is young and tender - aim to collect shoots about the length of your forefinger, roots and all. Wrap them in a damp cloth and they'll keep nicely in the fridge for a few days. To prepare, just rinse carefully in cold water from the tap and snip the roots off with scissors. Older samphire may be a bit twiggy - use your judgement, and snip off anything that's not a tender tip.

If foraging's not your thing, Tig (who is extraordinarily good value on the subject of seaweed and other salty things) mentioned in the comments of an earlier sea-vegetable post that the Fish Society will send mail-order samphire to you, in season.

Samphire's at its absolute best with shellfish, so I grabbed a bag of tiny, sweet queen scallops from the supermarket and came up with this dish, which makes the most of the odd affinity pork has with scallops and samphire, sets them on delicious crisp discs, and marries the lot up with a beurre blanc flavoured with dill and Pernod. This looks and tastes most impressive, and while it's a bit of a faff to put together, it'll go down a storm at a dinner party, or served to people you love for a special occasion. To serve four as a starter or two as a main course, you'll need:

150g cleaned marsh samphire
200g queen scallops
4 slices white multigrain bread
150g slim black pudding (if you can only find the pre-sliced kind, buy 12 slices)
3 fat, juicy cloves garlic
100g salted butter, plus another 225g salted butter for the beurre blanc
1 shallot
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
3 tablespoons white wine
2 tablespoons Pernod
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon double cream
2 tablespoons freshly chopped dill

Preheat the oven to 220°C while you chop the garlic finely, and cook it in 100g of butter until it is a very pale gold. Remove the garlic from the heat. Remove the crusts from the bread and use a rolling pin to roll the slices of bread until they are squashed flat, then use a round cookie cutter to make three circles out of each slice. Dip the twelve rounds in the garlic butter, lay on a baking sheet and cook on the top shelf of the oven for 8 minutes, until golden brown. Put on racks to cool.

Cut the black pudding into 12 rounds, leaving the skin on for now. Fry it over a medium heat in the remaining garlic butter for about 5 minutes per side, until the outsides are crisp. Peel off the skin and keep the little rounds of sausage on a plate in a warm place while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

To make the beurre blanc, put the wine, Pernod and vinegar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the sliced shallot, the bay leaf and the peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce until there are only two tablespoons of liquid left. Sieve the liquid to remove the shallot, bay and peppercorns, and return to the pan off the heat. Get the butter out of the fridge and cut it into cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb.

Put the pan back over a low flame. Add a teaspoon of cream to the wine reduction and use a whisk to incorporate it into the liquid. (As I've mentioned in previous beurre blanc recipes, this addition of cream is cheating, but it does mean that your sauce won't split.) Whisking vigorously, add the butter to the pan, three cubes at a time. When they are half-melted, add another three, still whisking hard. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated and remove from the heat.

When the beurre blanc is nearly ready, bring the remaining garlic butter and fat from the black pudding to a frying temperature and fry off the scallops for two minutes, until they are coloured and just barely cooked. Steam the samphire for four minutes.

To assemble the dish, make a little bed of steamed samphire on each plate, and put three discs of bread crisp on top. Put a slice of black pudding on each of these, pile the tiny scallops into the middle of the plate, and spoon over a generous amount of the beurre blanc. Serve immediately.

Cassoulet

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:13:00 +0000

No photos of this one, since cassoulet à la Liz, once dished up, turns out to look totally unlovely; and I really don't want to scare you off, because it tastes divine. I hope you made the duck confit (I have cunningly recycled the picture here from that recipe) from a few weeks back, which, along with its fat, forms an important part of this dish. If you didn't, though, you can usually find tins of excellent Castelnaudry confit in good delis in the UK (I've also seen it in Waitrose).

Cassoulet is one of those social-climbing dishes, which began life as a French peasant dish full of preserved meats and dried beans, and now gets sold for vast amounts of money in swish restaurants. You can buy tins of cassoulet, but a cassoulet you have made at home is even better, especially in mouth-feel. It's a wonderfully warming dish, and it's fantastic to serve to friends; somehow it's an especially cheering and convivial thing to eat. You can serve it up as is, or with crusty bread and a salad. I've used Japanese panko breadcrumbs here, which are not at all French. I'm developing a slight addiction to them - wonderfully crisp, with a slightly malty flavour and a perfect balance between absorbency and crustiness, they're terrific for topping baked dishes or making breaded coatings for baked or fried meats. If you can't find any, normal white breadcrumbs, whizzed in your food processor, will be absolutely fine. If you're in France, try to pick up some of the wonderful long, white haricot beans (haricots blancs lingots) which are traditionally used in cassoulet and have an amazingly creamy texture. They're hard to find in the UK, so I have fallen back on standard haricots, which are a shorter bean. They are still excellent in this dish.

Thanks not least to Iris Murdoch (whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which contains a very stressful cassoulet incident, managed singlehandedly to put me off making cassoulet myself for about fifteen years), cassoulet has a bit of a reputation as a complicated, work-intensive dish. It's really not all that bad; most of the work is done by your oven, with you stirring occasionally to help the slow-cooked beans become tender and creamy, and while there are short bursts of frying, skimming and stirring, you can easily fit all the other things you have to do in a day at around the long cooking time. Packed with moist pork belly, fat duck legs and garlicky sausage, this isn't for days when you're worrying about your blood pressure - as always, my philosophy on these things is that the rush of endorphins you get when eating something that tastes this good more than cancels out any health negatives, and hey - I understand beans are good for you.

To serve six, you'll need:

500g haricot beans
2 large onions
2 sticks celery
1 carrot
5 cloves
1 bouquet garni
1 large sprig rosemary
1 large sprig thyme
3 bay leaves
6 fat cloves garlic
1 tablespoon herbes de provence
¼ bottle white wine
4 tomatoes, chopped roughly
400g slab pork belly
3 confit duck leg and thigh joints
6 garlicky sausages (if you can find saussice de Toulouse, they're traditional here, but any very dense, meaty sausage will be good)
Japanese panko breadcrumbs OR bog-standard white breadcrumbs to sprinkle

The night before you want to eat, soak the beans in plenty of cold water. In the morning, drain the beans, discarding the soaking liquid, and put them in your largest casserole dish (you'll need plenty of spare room in there for the cooking liquid, the other ingredients and the eventual swelling of the beans) with the bouquet garni, the rosemary and thyme, one of the onions, halved and studded with the cloves, the carrot, halved lengthways, one stick of the celery, two of the bay leaves and two of the garlic cloves, peeled and left whole. Chop the pork belly, complete with its rind, into 1 inch chunks, and add it to the saucepan. Pour over cold water to cover the contents of the pan by a couple of inches, and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface.

When the pot is boiling, lower the heat to a simmer and put the lid on. Ignore it for an hour and a half while you brown the sausages in a tablespoon of the fat from the confit in a frying pan. Remove them to a plate, and use the sausage pan to fry the remaining onion, garlic and celery stick, chopped finely, until soft, in another large tablespoon of duck fat. Preheat the oven to 180° C.

Remove and discard the herbs and vegetables (except the garlic and the bouquet garni) from the beans mixture and drain and reserve the liquid (now stock) from the casserole dish. Return the beans and pork to the casserole, adding the onion, garlic and celery mixture, the chopped tomatoes, the remaining bay leaves, the sausages and the confit duck legs. (Don't worry about scraping off any fat clinging to the legs - it'll just add to the wonderful texture.) Pour over the wine and add the reserved stock from the pork and beans to just cover the mixture. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring the contents of the casserole to a simmer on the hob and put it in the oven for two hours with the lid on, stirring every half an hour.

When the two hours are up, there should be no visible liquid; the whole cassoulet should have an even, creamy texture. Taste for seasoning - you will probably need to add extra salt. Sprinkle the top of the cassoulet with the panko crumbs or breadcrumbs, and cook for another 20-30 minutes with the lid off, until the crumbs are brown and the cassoulet is bubbling through it in places. Serve up, making sure everyone gets a bit of duck, a bit of sausage, and a bit of pork with their creamy beans and crusty top.

The Hind's Head, Bray, Berkshire, UK

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:04:00 +0000

Once a very quiet village about four miles from Windsor, Bray suddenly gained a lot of traffic around meal times when Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck (which you have doubtless heard of - it's regularly voted the very best restaurant in the UK, and fights each year with El Bulli in Spain for the title of best restaurant in the world) opened. Meal-time traffic, composed almost entirely of taxis from nearby train stations packed with salivating diners, has increased even further in the last five years, since Blumenthal bought the pub next door to the Fat Duck.

The Hind's Head menu is a showcase for what Blumenthal considers the very best of straightforward, traditional British cooking. Blumenthal's cooking at the Fat Duck (at £130 for the tasting menu without wine, you are going to have to wait until the ads on this site are paying a lot more before you can read about the Fat Duck here, so get clicking) is all crazy-wonderful, experimental, molecular stuff. I wandered over to inspect the menu on the day we visited the Hind's Head, and there was lots to appeal to the side of me that does the perfume writing as well as my foodie half. Oakmoss used as a flavouring, sprays of aldehydes, violet tarts, pine sherbert fountains - I breathed a heavy sigh and went back to the pub, words like 'straightforward', 'traditional' and 'British' boiling around in my head, convinced that I was bound to spend the evening wishing I was next door.

Sometimes I'm very happy to be proved totally wrong.

I think that the last completely uncritical review of a restaurant I wrote was posted here back in 2007, and I found it very difficult to write; roundly complimentary reviews of food make me sound, as I said back then, an unthinking and uncritical diner, and they are likely to be as boring as hell for you, the reader. (Un?)fortunately, the Hind's Head turns out to be another of these little bits of restaurant heaven. Even the menu prices were a delight, and the incredibly enthusiastic, very young waiter made our evening a real pleasure. I spent the meal looking for something to get ratty about, and I am proud to be able to give you one piece of fierce criticism. I do not like paper napkins.

Still and all - paper napkins in a pub are probably absolutely right, so you can probably scratch that.

This being a pub, you can grab a beer at the bar before you sit down. There's a short but good list of beers and a lengthy and very keenly priced wine list. We ended up with a bottle of 06 Bordeaux at £24 - it could have done with being cellared for a few years, but was terrific at the price. There are bar nibbles too - Scotch eggs made from quail's eggs, devils on horseback (prunes wrapped in bacon, secured with a toothpick and grilled - they're one of my favourite Edwardian savouries, and Blumenthal is very into his historical foods) and something called a Warwickshire Wizzler, which turned out to be a cocktail sausage which tasted as if it was made from the fatty flanks of angels, spiced heavily with sweet paprika. Our table of four spent a happy few minutes gumming our way through a selection of nibbly bits.

The menu presents you with a mixture of seasonal and traditional dishes. The asparagus is at its sweetest at the moment, and it was listed here with some free-range ham, cress, a dense Hollandaise and a rich, yolky pheasant's egg. (See the photo at the top of the page.) It was a simple and very generous presentation, which is precisely what you want with asparagus in May.

I ordered potted shrimp. Tiny, sweet, fresh, brown shrimp, peeled and poached in clarified butter with the traditional spike of mace and pepper, then set in a ramekin, were served just above room temperature with slices of brown toast. The butter was dense with flavour - had the shells and heads been used to flavour it? I've no idea, but I do know that this was far and away the best example of potted shrimp I've ever eaten. (The worst? That'll be the unseasoned, woolly pre-frozen white prawns in fridge-hard butter at Shepherd's in Pimlico.) I found myself unconsciously running a finger around the bottom of the ramekin when I'd finished. Dish-scraping was about to become a theme for the evening.

An excellent beef carpaccio, scattered judiciously with capers and shallots and dressed with a little parmesan, olive oil and lemon juice was a really lovely example of a dish that's often overseasoned; and a guineafowl terrine, gloriously spiced and seasoned, jewelled with pistachios, wrapped tightly in pancetta and served with shaved slivers of fresh apple and an apple compote, left a distressed Dr W scraping his empty plate with the back of a knife, trying to dislodge any remaining molecules of flavour. Starters over, all four of us started drumming at the table with our fingers to try to distract from the unseemly drooling.

The problem with a menu this good is that it's extraordinarily hard to make a decision. I went for the shut-eyes-and-jab-at-menu-with-finger approach, and ended up selecting a very dull-sounding main course - the T-bone steak - which I stuck with simply in order to try the sauce that came with it. This is a kitchen which has studied its classical French sauces, and the seared steak (a favourite cut, T-bone, with the softer tenderloin on the smaller side, and the tougher but more flavoursome strip loin on the larger) came with a little pot of sauce marchand de vin (butter, wine and dark beef stock), studded generously with little diamonds of rich, beefy bone marrow. Tipped over the steak, the marrow melted a little into the meat, the dense sauce so packed with flavour that thinking about it a few days later is giving me flavour hallucinations. I am alarmed to note that I found the whole thing almost viscerally sexy. Food shouldn't be this good.

The steak was accompanied with Blumenthal's famous thrice-cooked chips. (Fries for you Americans.) They're thick-cut, as pub chips should be, and boiled, chilled, and deep-fried twice. We ordered another bowl for the table - shatteringly crisp on the outside, and fluffy within. A good chip shouldn't be something to get terribly excited about (after all, Heston's chip method is very similar indeed to the one my Mum used when I was a kid), but the sad truth is that most English chips are, frankly, rubbish; it's very good to find some which haven't been frozen and shipped into the restaurant in giant catering bags.

Shepherd's pie with lamb shoulder, breast and sweetbreads was joyous. It arrived in a cast-iron cocotte, the top crusted with crisp potatoes. Inside was a dense, meaty, almost syrupy filling; the lamb breast gave the sauce a rich, jellied thickness, while the sweetbreads gave the whole an intense richness and a malevolent hint of offaly darkness. Happily, the friend who ordered this wasn't quite able to finish her very rich and generous portion, so her remaining pie filling was enjoyed by the rest of us, slathered all over those chips. This bowl got scraped clean too.

The serving and cooking temperature of foods, as we saw with the potted shrimp, is something that the kitchen here considers carefully, and salmon with shrimp and peas was cooked and served warm, not hot. The waiter made sure that the person eating it (James, who nearly choked to death on chillies in Montreal last year) was aware that it wouldn't come piping hot, and explained through one of Berkshire's biggest smiles that this is to ensure that the flavour is at its absolute best. I really like the service here. Befittingly for a pub, it's not very formal, but the staff are so enthused by what they're serving and by what's going on in the kitchen that their excitement translates to the diners. This was another seasonal triumph; more of those brown shrimp, sweet peas, flakingly moist salmon in a savoury marinade - simply gorgeous.

Chicken and leek pie, sitting in a sea of intensely savoury Mornay sauce thick with whole-grain mustard, was one of those dishes you could happily keep on snuffling down plate after plate of, until hustled out of the restaurant for revolting the other diners. Happily for those other diners, desert beckoned.

Blumenthal's a history buff, and the Quaking Pudding arrived with a little notecard (which I believe Ros has now pasted into her scrapbook) full of historical detail about wrapping things in guts and so forth. No guts were apparant here; Quaking Pudding was a delightfully wobblesome jellied milk pudding, a little like a panna cotta (and made in the same way, with milk and gelatine), flavoured with sweet spices like nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Unbelievably good (and far better than you could possibly imagine from looking at this photograph, which has an anticipatory thumb in the background) - I've been piling through my collection of old recipe books for a comparable recipe.

I'd seen Heston prepare his treacle tart with milk ice cream on television once (an exercise which ended with him milking a cow into a bowl full of liquid nitrogen). Utterly, unctuously, good stuff, crisp and squidgy all at once, with an intense, caramelised sweetness offset by a tiny sprinkle of fleur du sel. It was perfectly accompanied by the unassuming milk ice. And trifle - well, I wasn't allowed to try the trifle, which Dr W appeared to be trying to inhale.

All this, alongside a bottle of wine, several beers, a couple of cocktails, three dishes of nibbly bits, extra chips and a bowl of broccoli with anchovy and slivered almonds, still only rocked up at £60 a head. This is unbelievably good value for such exceptional dining, and it's a total delight to find that there's at least one restaurant in the country that's demonstrating that British food isn't all lung and slurry. All hail Heston - he's a one-man army changing the face of the British restaurant, and I hope you'll visit Bray soon to confirm it for yourselves.

A quiet week...

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:02:00 +0000

I'm away from the kitchen this week (and mostly, joy of joys, away from the computer), taking a short break in sunny Windsor. I have Malaysian noodle restaurants and Joel Robuchon to investigate in London, Heston Blumenthal's pub in Bray to visit on Thursday, and I'm on a quest to find any non-chain restaurants here in Windsor itself. Updates will be brief and even more sporadic than usual this week, but do keep tuning in; there are some interesting reviews coming up.

Flapjacks

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:34:00 +0000

I had an email a couple of weeks ago from a lady from Mornflake oats, asking if I'd like some samples. Now, I was a big fan of Mornflake as a kid, when the sixth-formers at school had a weekly stall in the dining room where they sold us teenies snacks of the very limited sort allowed by our health-fascist teachers. There wasn't much that was very good - nobody really liked licorice twigs, and I would sooner die than ever have to eat a carob bar again. Happily, there was one thing on sale I loved without measure - a muesli made by Mornflake with oat clusters, coconut, and chunks of candied papaya and pineapple. Infinitely better for breakfast than school gruel.

I suspect my waxing lyrical about a childhood affection for Mornflake pressed some buttons, because the next morning three cubic feet of oat products arrived on the doorstep. Since then, I've been happily munching my way through some really fantastic muesli (the Swiss style is creamy and delicious with the traditional Swiss addition of milk powder, the Fig and Apple is gloriously crispy and tastes divine), oatbran flakes (Very Berry, with strawberries, raspberries and cherries were Dr W's favourite) and porridge - microwavable single portions in packets, bags of rolled oats, and fine oatbran sprinkles for smooth porridges or garnishes. My cholesterol level is at an all-time low. Mornflake are a considerably older company than I'd realised; the same family has been milling oats for more than 14 generations, and they've just celebrated their 333rd anniversary, making them the UK's eighth-oldest company. The folks at Mornflake tell me that oats will reduce my appetite, keeping me slim and gorgeous (a recent study from King's College London has identified a hunger-suppressing hormone in oats, which, along with their cholesterol-squelching action appear to be almost sinister in their healthiness). They would also like you to know that a very varied assortment of people, including such luminaries as Tim Henman, Orlando Bloom, David Cameron, Kate Moss and Madonna, have gone on the record as being fans of porridge. I am not sure that this brings anything in particular to your own breakfast experience, but it may be useful for your next pub quiz.

Even after two weeks of artery-cleansing, appetite-suppressing, celebrity-endorsed oaten breakfasts, I still have a goodly portion of Mornflake's oaten bounty left in the breakfast cupboard. Happily, there's something really unhealthy and extremely delicious you can do with an awful lot of oats - make an awful lot of flapjacks.

Flapjacks are fast, easy and will make your house smell deliciously of caramel as they cook. To make 25, you'll need:

275g rolled oats
225g salted butter
225g demerara sugar
2 heaped tablespoons golden syrup

Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease a 30 x 20cm baking tin. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in a saucepan over a low heat, and stir the oats into the molten mixture, making sure everything is well blended. Pack the oats into the greased tin, pressing down with the back of a spoon to make sure the mixture is firm and flat on the top.

Bake the flapjacks for 35 minutes, until they are a golden caramel brown. (Overcooking will make your flapjacks hard and dark - 35 minutes will give you crisp edges and a nice squashy middle, but some people prefer a crispier flapjack, so adjust the cooking time to your liking.) Remove from the oven and leave in the tin for ten minutes, then use a spatula to mark the flapjacks into 25 squares. Allow the flapjacks to cool completely before moving them into an airtight tin (or cramming the lot into your face - I'll leave it up to you).

Chocolat Chocolat, St Andrew's St, Cambridge

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:33:00 +0000

I've wittered on at length here before about the sad fact that Cambridge is something of a food desert. Restaurant-wise, we could still improve a lot, but if you're a food shopper, things seem to be looking up considerably. Besides long-standing old favourites like the excellent Cambridge Cheese Shop in All Saint's Passage, the increasingly impressive offerings at the daily market, Origin8 (a deli where you can find some obscenely good pies and organic hogroast) and local village offerings like the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham (look out for Dan on The Great British Menu on the BBC) and the farm shop at Burwash Manor Barns, the city has just found itself home to one of the loveliest chocolate shops I've ever set foot in. This is a very splendid thing, and I hereby upgrade Gastronomy Domine's assessment of Cambridge's food situation from desert to leafy wetland.

Chocolat Chocolat (which is so new that it doesn't have a website yet, and so good that they named it twice) is on St Andrew's St, just by the entrance to the Grand Arcade. Isabelle and Robin Chappell have imported a sugary morsel of France to the city - Isabelle prepares Bayonnaise slabs of chocolate at her tempering machine by the window, Robin serves up what I am certain is Cambridge's best icecream (the Alfonso mango sorbet is rich, curiously creamy and made me consider driving the car over and stealing the freezer), and the whole shop ripples with gorgeously selected frou frou.

The main event is, of course, chocolate, and here you'll find tiny tongs and little wooden punnets which you can fill with hand-made chocolates from several chocolatiers, hand-picked by Isabelle and Robin. There are also chocolaty offerings from Dolfin, Bovetti and Willie Harcourt-Cooze - the Bovetti black mustard seeds enrobed in dark chocolate (there's also coriander seeds in milk chocolate and anis in white) and the Dolfin bar flavoured with masala spices are must-tries. Robin says that Bovetti's paté a tartiner (imagine Nutella, but approximately a thousand times nicer) sold out pretty much as soon as they opened, but more is on the way. There's so much on offer here that it'll take even the most dedicated chocoholic weeks to work their way through the whole selection - which is precisely as it should be.

Isabelle is originally from France, and alongside the chocolates, she and Robin have imported some sugary nibbles I've never seen on this side of the Channel before. Fight through the inevitable crowd of French students to get to the Carambars (a stick of caramel which should be familiar to anyone who's ever been on a French exchange), the chocolate-coated marshmallow bears and the utterly divine callisons. There are Cote Garrigue jams in flavours like lavender and Cavaillon melon; nougat straight from Montelimar, scented with rose, violet and pistacho; Anis de Flavigny cachous; Palets Bretons (the world's butteriest, most friable biscuit) and Madeleines from Commercy. Robin doesn't know it, but in promising Pain d'Epice (gingerbread - but so much better than what you're used to) direct from Dijon soon he made my heart flutter like a schoolgirl's.

I plan to head back as soon as possible to apply a further good, hard sugar shock to my pancreas. Chocolat Chocolat is one of the most exciting additions to the town centre I've seen in years - head over there as a matter of urgency if you're in town, and tell them I sent you.

Tom yum soup

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:08:00 +0000

Certain foods are perfect for times when you're feeling a bit under the weather. Depressed? You need hot wings. Exhausted and frazzled? Mashed potato. Hormonal? Chocolate cake.

Right now, I'm sitting here with a streaming nose and stuffy head. It's not swine flu, it's hay fever. And there's one sure-fire way to nip a stuffy head in the bud: tom yum. This hot, sour Thai soup is flavoured with some of the world's most powerful aromatics, spiked with tongue-numbingly hot chillies and should be served hot enough to melt your spoon. Fantastic stuff.

You'll need to make a trip to the Chinese supermarket for most of the ingredients here. To save yourself time when making soup later on, you can freeze any leftover kaffir lime leaves, chopped galangal and lemongrass in airtight containers.

To serve two, you'll need:

1 litre homemade stock - pork or fish stock both work really well here
1 tablespoon tom yum soup paste (available at Chinese supermarkets and some Western ones too)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 lemongrass stalks
5 kaffir lime leaves
2 inches galangal
2 small shallots
3 bird's eye chillies
1 tomato
1 carrot
12 fresh shitake mushrooms
8 fresh prawns (with shells and heads if possible - as usual, none of my local shops had any with shells on, which elicited loud cursing from me)
1 handful beansprouts
1 handful coriander
Juice of two limes

Wallop the lemongrass stalks with the end of a rolling pin until they are ragged, slice the galangal into thin coins, and remove the central stalk from the lime leaves. Slice the shallots finely, chop the chillies, dice the tomato, chop the carrot into julienne strips and slice the mushrooms. And breathe. Once you're done with the chopping, you'll be pleased to hear that you've done most of the work.

Bring the stock to a simmer, and stir through the tom yum paste and fish sauce. Add the lemongrass, galangal, chillies and lime leaves, and simmer for five minutes. Drop the tomato, shallots, mushrooms and prawns into the bubbling stock and cook for another five minutes.

While the tom yum is cooking, squeeze the juice of one lime into each of two soup bowls. Divide the raw beansprouts between the two bowls. When the five minutes are up, ladle the soup, aromatics and all (some people like to remove the lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal from the dish, but they will continue to flavour the soup once it's in the bowls) into the bowls. Garnish with generous amounts of coriander and serve immediately.

Fruit scones for cream tea

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:32:00 +0000

One of my sad, sad weekend hobbies is wandering around National Trust properties, buying a sack of books at the inevitable second-hand bookshop and then visiting the tea-room for a handsome cream tea, with fluffy scones, strawberry jam and plenty of clotted cream to slather on top. If you're in East Anglia, the exquisite Oxburgh Hall, where you'll find a number of embroideries worked by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, a priest hole you can clamber into and a very fine garden, has a really fabulous tearoom. Ickworth House (English wines, fantastic gardens, wonderful collection of fans) and Wimpole Hall (organic farm, hot-dogs made from the pigs you have just fed pig-nuts to in the barn) also do a very good line in cream teas - but to my mind Oxburgh's intimate tearoom, housed in the hall's old kitchens, complete with antique bread ovens and blue and white crockery displaying pictures of the hall itself, still takes the...cake. All the same, while it's nice to visit Oxburgh once or twice a year (those gardens change gorgeously in character over the seasons), I can't really justify driving an hour just for a cup of tea and a scone more regularly than that. Time to get baking.

I usually choose a pot of Earl Grey to go with my scones. So when, in the absence of a National Trust tearoom, I decided to prepare my own cream tea at home this weekend, I decided to use some very strong Earl Grey to soak the sultanas in before adding them to the dough. With a pot of tea, a jar of good strawberry jam (try Tiptree's Little Scarlet or Duchy Originals Strawberry) and some clotted cream (increasingly available in supermarkets and delis - if you can't find any, use extra-thick double cream rather than whipped cream, which has exactly the wrong texture), you'll find yourself in possession of one of the finest things you can eat in the afternoon.

A quick note on the egg in the dough. I was lucky enough to have a box of bantam eggs a neighbour had given me, and used two - bantam eggs are tiny, very yolky and rich, and two are approximately the same volume as a single large hen's egg. If you can find bantam eggs, I'd recommend using two in this recipe.

To make about 16 scones, you'll need:

225g plain flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
50g butter
25g caster sugar
1 large egg OR two bantam eggs
Milk (enough to make up 150ml when added to the beaten egg)
100g sultanas
1 large cup strong Earl Grey tea

Start by brewing the tea (make yourself a cup to drink while you're at it) and preheating the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the tea is nice and strong, pour it over the sultanas in a bowl and leave them to plump up for half an hour while you prepare the dough for the scones.

Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl, and cut the softened butter into it in little chunks. Rub the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

When the sultanas have had half an hour in the tea, drain them in a seive and add them to the flour mixture. In a measuring jug, beat the egg. Top the beaten egg up with the milk until you have 150ml of liquid, and stir it gradually into the flour mixture (you may not need all of it), mixing all the time with a wooden spoon, until you have a soft dough that holds together but is not sticky. Try not to over-handle the dough so that your scones are light and fluffy. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm, and cut out rounds with a 5cm circular cutter.

Place the rounds onto greased baking sheets and brush the tops with any remaining milk/egg mixture (if you have none left, plain milk will do). Bake for 10 minutes until golden brown.

These scones are at their very best served as soon as they come out of the oven, split in half, spread with jam and cream. Once cooled, they'll keep for a couple of days in an airtight tin.

Bruschetta al pomodoro - tomato bruschetta

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:39:00 +0000

Tomatoes and bread have an amazing affinity, from Basque slices of toasted sourdough rubbed with the cut side of a tomato, to British teatime tomatoes on toast. For me, though, a garlicky, herby Italian bruschetta is the very king of bread and tomato preparations.

There is a simple trick in making this sunny, fresh appetiser. You need to marinade the cut tomatoes with the aromatics and a hearty amount of your very best olive oil the night before you mean to eat - but that marinade should contain absolutely no salt. Salting the bruschetta just before serving means that the tomatoes' texture will remain firm and juicy. The oil will have absorbed a fabulous wallop of tomato flavour (no salt, you see, so the juices of the tomato won't all run out and separate), the tomatoes will be redolent with fragrant oil, herbs and garlic, and your tastebuds will want to shake your hand.

It's very important that you select tomatoes with the maximum flavour. If you've grown your own, these will be by far the best. Otherwise, buy tomatoes which are ripe and have been kept on the vine after picking. That glorious smell you get in tomato greenhouses is from the green stalk and leaves, and doesn't seem to make it into the fruit itself. If you buy vine tomatoes, they will be riper, and you can use the stalk in the marinade to inject some of that greenhouse flavour into the finished bruschetta. I've used some yellow tomatoes alongside regular red ones because it's pretty, but you can use any good, ripe tomatoes you can find.

To serve four, you'll need:

1kg vine tomatoes
2 fat, juicy cloves garlic
1 large handful basil leaves
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
100ml olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
1 ciabatta
Salt to finish

Chop the tomatoes into small bite-sized pieces, and put them and any juices in a large bowl. Crush the garlic and the herbs, and stir them into the tomatoes with the olive oil and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. Add the vines from the tomatoes, mix well, cover with cling film and refrigerate overnight.

When you are ready to make up the bruschetta (don't do this too far ahead of eating, or they will go soggy) grill slices of slightly stale ciabatta and cool on racks. Fish the stalks out of the marinade and discard. Heap the tomato mixture onto the slices with a tablespoon, sprinkle with fleur de sel or another crystalline salt like Maldon, and serve immediately. There are very unlikely to be any leftovers.

Duck confit

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:04:00 +0000

Confit de canard, the French way with duck which is cooked and preserved in its own fat, is unequivocally delicious. French tins of the stuff are scrumptious, and although pricey, not too hard to get hold of. But making your own at home turns out to be surprisingly easy, and it tastes even better than the store-bought variety (the magic is all in the herbs you use to cure the duck before cooking). Making your own also means that even when you've finished eating, you end up with lots of herby, aromatic duck fat to use in potato dishes, or even in another confit.

Because the meat is simmered very gently under duck fat, it remains extremely moist and tender, with a skin that crisps up deliciously at the click of a finger. I like mine served, totally unhealthily, with a great big heap of pommes Sarladais and a dollop of quince jelly. Redcurrant, cherry and the other duck-friendly fruits also work really well to cut through the richness of the confit.

To confit six duck legs (with thigh attached) you'll need:

6 duck leg joints, with thigh
3 heaped teaspoons salt
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
1 tablespoon herbes de Provence
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
Duck fat (enough to completely cover the duck legs when melted in a saucepan)

Crush the bay leaves, thyme, herbes de Provence and peppercorns very thoroughly with the salt in a mortar and pestle, and rub the pieces of duck all over with the mixture. Put the duck in a large bowl and refrigerate for 48 hours to achieve a very mild cure.

When you are ready to cook the duck, heat the oven to 150°C and melt the fat in an oven-proof casserole dish on the hob. Slide the duck into the fat as it liquefies, and when it starts to shudder (not boil), move the casserole to the oven. Cook for two and a half hours, or until the duck is tender.

Spoon the cooked duck and its hot fat into a large sterilised jar or crockpot, making sure that the meat is completely covered by the fat, which will stop oxygen and bacteria getting in. Seal and refrigerate. The duck will keep for a few weeks in the fridge (it is, after all, preserved) - it will also be tender, sweet and moist from being poached in that fat.

It's worth leaving the duck in the fat for a few days before you eat it, in order to allow the flavours to develop. To serve and cook to a crisp, remove the confit from the fat and fry over a medium heat in a saucepan for about 7 minutes per side, with a heavy pan lid weighing the meat down as you fry.

Iced sugar cookies

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:45:00 +0000

These little cookies are delicious, easy to make, fun to ice, and will keep for about a week in an airtight tin. What's not to like? Even I, who singularly lack artistic skill, a steady hand or any visual imagination at all, had a total blast making a big batch of these for Dr W's birthday.

You'll be using royal icing and flood icing to colour these in. Piped lines of royal icing make little reservoirs which you will later fill with flood icing - royal icing which has been watered down a very little to make it flow into the shape you've outlined. I like to use squeezy bottles for icing rather than an icing bag (much less messy). Bottles are available at most cookware shops for under £2, and they come with a plastic piping nozzle which is perfect for this job. The amount of icing in the recipe below should be sufficient for filling six bottles in different colours, first for outlining, then, with a little water, for flooding.

It's important to use food colouring that won't dilute and loosen your icing. Gel icings, which come in tiny round pots to be added to your plain icing with a toothpick, are simply brilliant. I got Wilton's set of eight gel colours from good old Amazon, and used a licorice pen (from the Elizabeth David shop in Cambridge) for black detail like eyes and buttons. Eight colours will probably be more than you'll need for any single project, and the pots, although tiny, last for a very long time; you only need the tiniest dot of colouring for a batch of icing. Make sure that you blend the colour with the icing as thoroughly as you can; you don't want any streaky bits.

Sugar cookies
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
230g vanilla sugar
230g butter
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Royal icing (see instructions below for flood icing)
1lb powdered sugar
5 tablespoons meringue powder (available at cookware shops and some supermarkets)
2 tablespoons water

Start by baking the cookies. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Sieve the flour and baking powder together and put to one side. Cream the sugar and the room-temperature butter with an electric whisk. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and continue to whisk until everything is blended together. Gradually add the flour mixture, beating gently until it is all incorporated.

Roll the dough onto a floured board and use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Lay out on greaseproof paper on baking sheets and bake for about 12 minutes. Leave the cooked cookies on the sheet for a few minutes to cool a little and firm up, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack.

While the cookies cool, make the icing by beating together the sugar, meringue and water with your electric whisk until the mixture reaches stiff peaks (this can take several minutes). The icing will keep, covered, in the fridge for a week, so you can make and colour it before making the cookies if you fancy. Colour the icing according to the instructions on the gel colouring pack. Divide the icing between squeezy bottles, and get to work piping outlines on all your cookies - make sure there are no gaps in your outlines for the flood icing to dribble out of later.

The piped icing should dry quite quickly, so you can start filling in with flood icing as soon as you're finished outlining. To turn the royal icing you outlined with into flood icing, add water a drop at a time and mix well until you have an icing just loose enough to flow when drizzled onto a flat surface. Squiggle flood icing into each outlined area, and use a toothpick to encourage it into the corners.

You can drop contrasting colours of flood icing into flood icing that is still wet to create certain effects. Make lines of wet icing and drag with a toothpick for a feathered effect; or try dripping a single drop of icing in a contrasting colour into wet icing for neat dots.

Edible sprinkles are a lovely, lily-gilding addition too. To stick them onto the cookies, wait for the icing to dry, then mix a teaspoon of meringue powder with a couple of drops of water, until you have a sticky paste. Use a kids' paintbrush to apply this meringue glue to the area you want to stick sprinkles to, and scatter the sprinkles over while the glue is still wet.

When the icing and sprinkly bits are dry, store the cookies in single layers between sheets of greaseproof paper in an airtight tin.

Aubergines with den miso

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Years ago, before I'd even met Dr W, I had a boyfriend whose sister-in-law was Japanese. She and I didn't agree on much, but we did agree that these aubergines (which she made every time I visited her house) are pretty sublime.

Takako used to make this using those lovely wee Japanese aubergines - the sort that leave you gasping with their visual similarity to eggs and explain the whole eggplant nomenclature thing (not obvious when you are 18 and the only eggplants you have ever met are purple and shaped like a torpedo). Happily for those of us without a supplier of dear little Japanese aubergines, this works very well with the purple sort too. Aubergines are a wonderfully meaty sort of vegetable. Although this works really well as an accompaniment, this lovely meatiness means that you can happily serve this dish as the main event, with rice and perhaps a salad dressed with some rice vinegar. It's also a good win if you have an unexpected visiting veggie, and, being one of those things you serve at room temperature, I think it's really, really good as part of a picnic. These do soak up quite a lot of oil, as is common with aubergines, but hell - it's not like you're making this dish every day. To serve two, you'll need:

2 medium aubergines
200g shiromiso (white miso)
2 tablespoons sake (Chinese rice wine is good here if you have no sake)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons mirin
6 tablespoons ground nut oil

As usual, if you're having trouble finding white miso, head for a large independent health food shop. They tend to have a bewilderingly good selection of miso, seaweeds, pickled ginger and the like. I have no idea why, given that most of the other nutty, protein-knitted, fermenty things masquerading as food that the health food shop I use sells are things I have no interest in ingesting at all. Boo hippies.

Start by slicing the aubergines into three lengthways. Slash the cut surfaces diagonally, without cutting all the way through the flesh, and without cutting the skin. Fry in the hot oil over a medium heat, turning halfway through, until the skin and flesh is golden brown, and the aubergine is soft.

While the aubergine slices are frying, make the den miso by combining the mirin, sugar, sake and miso in a small frying pan and bringing to a very gentle simmer, stirring all the time. Cook the sauce for two minutes and keep warm until the aubergines are cooked.

Move the cooked aubergines to a plate and smear the hot den miso all over their upper surface, making sure the paste gets into the slashes. Leave the slices to come down to room temperature before serving - for some reason, this dish is all the more delicious when it's cold.

Smoked salmon hash

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:34:00 +0000

A quick and dirty breakfast dish. This is just perfect for Sunday mornings in bed with a tray, the papers and a very good friend. This hash is all made in one pan, salty from the salmon, studded with tart capers and stickily sweet from the sweet potatoes. A good squirt of lime juice to counter that sweetness and a spoonful of herby crème fraîche - who could ask for more?

If you do plan on making this for breakfast, it's worth chopping the potatoes and making the crème fraîche the night before so you can operate on autopilot in the morning without having to go anywhere near sharp knives.

To serve two (with some leftovers - we like leftovers round here), you'll need:

3 large sweet potatoes (make sure these are the ones with golden flesh)
3 large shallots
250g cold-smoked salmon
1 handful chives (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
1 handful parsley (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
½ handful tarragon
200g crème fraîche
2 heaped tablespoons rinsed capers
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Start by making the crème fraîche. Just stir in the chopped herbs, keeping some aside to garnish the finished dish, 1 tablespoon of the capers, 1 raw chopped shallot and the juice of a lime. Set aside in the fridge and stir before serving.

To make the hash, dice the peeled potatoes and cut the remaining shallots into slices. Fry in a large pan over a medium heat in the butter and olive oil mixture, stirring regularly, until the edges of the potato pieces are caramelising and turning a golden brown.

Check that the sweet potato is cooked through (poke with a chopstick to test for softness) and tip the salmon and remaining capers into the pan. Toss with a wooden spoon until the salmon is all opaque, then sprinkle over the juice of the remaining lime. Check for seasoning. Spoon the finished hash into serving bowls, dress with the reserved herbs, add a tablespoon of the crème fraîche and top off with a fried egg.

New blogs, a competition

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:07:00 +0000

Some notices today. First up, there are two new blogs in the blogroll at the left of the page. South of France Cooking is written by David, a chef working in the hotel he part-owns near Carcassonne. It's full of recipes and tips on technique, and I'm finding it absolutely fascinating - drop in and see what you think.

Also on the new blog front, Cait and Jude in Anchorage are busying themeselves making good things like bouillabaisse, and hanging out in bakeries. Check out 907Eat, and marvel at the fact that you suddenly want to go on a culinary tour of Alaska.

Finally, my buddies over at Allrecipes are running another competition. This time, they're inviting you to post a recipe with a photograph on their site. The writer of the best recipe will win £500. Read the rules and enter here - and good luck!

Laverbread cakes

noreply@blogger.com (Liz) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:51:00 +0000

Laverbread is a real pub quiz question of a food. It's a Welsh delicacy, an iodine-rich puree made from simmering Porphyra laciniata, a purple seaweed, for hours. The resulting paste looks unprepossessing, but tastes fabulous. Like oysters, its flavour is redolent of the sea - to eat laverbread is to imagine yourself standing on a rockpool-surrounded beach, breathing the salty, ozone-thick spray.

I'm lucky enough to have married into a family full of food-loving Welsh ladies. Dr W's mum makes sublime Welsh cakes (little griddle cakes packed with currants) when we visit; she even has a special gas burner that lives in the cupboard especially for griddling purposes. (Yes, I plan to steal the recipe one day.) Her sister, Auntie S, still lives in Wales. Because she is totally fabulous, Auntie S sent a Welsh hamper to me here in the grim fens for my birthday. Alongside the tea blend, the Welsh honey, the plum jam, the whisky marmalade and the Caerphilly oatcakes lay a jar of pickled cockles and my first ever tin of laverbread. Straight out of the tin, it's unprepossessing stuff (see the picture below), but it smells tremendously seaside-y, and licking the end of a finger dipped into it confirms that it's delicious.

There are always pinhead-milled oats in the cupboard (I like porridge for breakfast), and a favourite Welsh application of laverbread is to mix the dark paste with fine/medium oatmeal to bind it and make it crisp, then to fry it in bacon fat and serve it alongside a cooked breakfast. I also added a non-traditional shallot to the mixture, which was extremely good, adding a base of sweetness against the iodine saltiness of the seaweed. (The shallot is strictly optional and not remotely Welsh.) Making these laverbread cakes took all of ten minutes, and they're among the tastiest things I've eaten in months. To make about eight little cakes (enough to serve two - you'll want four each because they're gorgeous) you'll need:

120g tin laverbread
50g fine/medium oatmeal
1 shallot
A couple of tablespoons of bacon fat

Dice the shallot very finely, and mix well with the laverbread and oatmeal until you have a thick paste. Form the paste into flat patties about five centimetres in diameter and a centimetre thick. Fry in the hot bacon fat in a non-stick pan for about three minutes a side, until the laverbread cakes are crisp and brown. Serve immediately as part of a cooked breakfast.