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Stuffed Peppadew peppers

Stuffed Peppadew peppers
Stuffed Peppadew peppers

They sell something very similar to these in one of my local delicatessens, but rather more mayonnaise-y – and they sell them for about £1 per pepper, which is a simply amazing markup when you consider that a whole jar of the things, unstuffed, will only cost you about £2.50. Add a small can of tuna and a few ingredients which you probably have in the fridge already, and you’ve got (if you’re making them at home) a very inexpensive and very easy canapé, which you can make well in advance of any party you might be serving them at.

I spent years under the illusion that Peppadews (a brand name rather than a botanical name) were some sort of fruit which wasn’t related to the chilli. I think that perhaps I was a victim of some 1990s marketing. They’re actually a round chilli pepper, which grows in the Limpopo region of South Africa (cue chants of “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo river” from all those of us who absorbed Kipling’s Just So stories at our mothers’ knees), and is processed to remove the seeds, then preserved in a sweet pickling mixture. Removing the seeds reduces the chilli’s heat, and it also leaves a nice, tidy hole in the top of the chilli which is just right for pushing stuffing into.

You want something salty, savoury and assertive in a stuffing here, that won’t get overwhelmed by the sweet and strong fruitiness of the chillies. Tinned tuna and capers are a really good match here. To fill a jar of little chillies (which will serve 4-6 as a nibble with drinks), you’ll need:

1 jar Peppadew peppers
1 small can tuna
Juice of ½ lemon
1 heaped tablespoon crème fraîche
1 stick celery, cut into tiny dice
½ shallot, cut into tiny dice
1 tablespoon capers, drained
2 heaped tablespoons chopped parsley

Easy as anything: just mix everything except the Peppadews thoroughly in a bowl, and use a teaspoon to stuff the peppers with the mixture. Chill before serving.

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Smoked salmon and laverbread canapes

CanapesThe fine folks at Kinvara smoked salmon sent me a big goodie bag full of their organic Irish salmon last week. I get through quite a lot of smoked salmon at home (damn the expense, it’s full of brain-feeding, joint-lubricating goodness), and I was enormously and very pleasantly surprised at just how good the Kinvara fish was. The smoke is a gentle one, letting the flavour of the salmon itself sing, and the firm slices of fish have a robust and delicate flavour all at once. I don’t mention all the foods I get sent to try on this blog, but this one was a doozy, and I’ll be ordering more from them (smoked salmon by post – how splendid is that?) shortly.

Something this good deserved a special-occasion recipe, so here, just in time for the next party you host that’s posh enough for canapes, are some classy little nibbles to impress your boss with.

To make 20 canapes, you’ll need:

100g smoked salmon
50g pancetta cubes
1 x 125g tin laverbread (for more on laverbread, see this post – I am charmed by the fact that my spellchecker suggests that what I really wanted to type here was “weaverbird”)
75g medium or fine-milled oatmeal
1 large onion
1 jar salmon roe
1 jar lumpfish roe (or caviar, if you really want to push the boat out)
250g crème fraîche
Bacon fat (you really should be keeping a jar in the fridge; it’s amazing stuff for adding flavour) or olive oil to fry

Dry-fry the pancetta in a large, non-stick frying pan until golden, and remove to a mixing bowl, keeping the fat it has released in the pan. Chop the onion finely and saute it over a low to medium heat until dark gold and sweet. Dice the salmon and add it with the onion, laverbread and oats to the pancetta bowl.

Use a spoon to stir the mixture until everything is well blended. If you want to serve these canapes in the evening, you can prepare the dish up to this stage earlier in the day and refrigerate the mixture until you are ready to assemble them later on. Use your hands to make 20 little round patties from the mixture, and fry them in a couple of tablespoons of hot bacon fat or olive oil until golden, turning once (about ten minutes).

Arrange the crisp patties on a serving dish, and put a dollop of crème fraîche on top of each one. Spoon some salmon roe on half of them, and some lumpfish roe on the other half. Serve warm.

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Halloumi wrapped in vine leaves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.