Little pots of silky lusciousness

Little ramekins of loveliness

As with pretty much anything else in life, if you stick with something, you will learn.

One of my earliest cookery books was Gordon Ramsey’s Passion for Flavour.

Having started cooking, I’d finally picked up his little book of pasta sauces that had come with two pasta bowls and some herbs in a Christmas gift from The Other Half.

Having nearly dazzled myself by managing a velouté sauce, I’d reached for the stars with far more complex dishes in a full book.

It gave us, without too much pain, venison with a chocolate sauce, and crème brûlée with roasted rhubarb.

Well, I say without “too much pain”, but the latter might have involved beginner’s luck, because when I tried it subsequently, the times when I produced something akin to scrambled eggs rather outnumbered the times I managed a silky custard.

At the weekend, however, I needed a recipe for a set custard, since I was making créme Catalan to finish a Catalan meal – Boles de Picolat – as the main, with olives, an anchovy paste (from Collioure), bread and a homemade tapenade to begin.

Créme Catalan is a close relative of the crème brûlée, but is flavoured with orange and has slightly softer texture than the more familiar French version.

Given that the basis is set custard, I decided to return – carefully – to Ramsey’s recipe. And there, I noticed something.

“When the cream mixture starts to boil and rise ...” says the recipe.

It struck me that this is the root of the problem: if the milk/cream is that hot, it’s more likely to scramble to egg mix.

I decided to try it slightly differently.

The milk and cream were heated, but not to boiling point, before being drizzled onto the egg yolk and caster sugar mix and stirred gently in.

Everything was then returned to a clean pan and heated through gently until it started to thicken a little, when the strained juice of a mandarin was added and the mixture was decanted into ramekins.

These were popped in a roasting tin with a little water, and baked in a low oven for around 40 minutes.

After that, they were chilled and went into the fridge over night.

Cometh the hour, however, my blowtorch had run out of fuel and the can I’d bought earlier in the day didn’t have the right fitment, so the only option was the grill.

Using caster sugar instead of anything heavier, I eventually got the tops caramelised – with the added benefit that the heat of the grill had gently softened and warmed the custard, which was very pleasant.

They were silky smooth, with a nice hint of citrus – no hint of scrambled egg.

The lesson, it seems, is not always to fret about cooking to the letter of a recipe, but learning to trust your own instincts and also your own understanding of what is going on.

The ramekins were served, incidentally, with a garnish of redcurrants and physalis – the latter of which was absolutely made for such a purpose.

Such lessons are handy – and today has seen a similar situation as I made a mandarin sorbet. Recipes seemed to have vast amounts of sugar, but I didn’t worry too much about reducing it – or at least the ratio of sugar to juice.

Around a dozen fruits were juiced and sieved, with a generous squeeze of lemon juice added.

To that was added a syrup of 250ml water and around 210 caster sugar that had been allowed to cool after the sugar had all dissolved.

This was then decanted into a box and popped in the freezer.

Take a fork to mix it thoroughly once an hour for about three hours, and then simply allow it to freeze completely.

So easy – and a perfect palate refresher.

And with that, the pre-Christmas prep moves into a new gear.

Mushroom heaven – and some cracking pork

If the miserable weather has made gardening difficult, it has made food no easier. The body wants a change – lighter foods, different tastes. But the continuing cold has had a different impact.

Over Easter, I experimented with an Italian approach: a first course of cauliflower, served with a drizzle of my very best virgin oil and some of last year's nasturtium ‘capers’, both of which added a lovely burst of pepperyness.

It worked really well and was followed with grilled lamb chops with lemon.

That’s a great way to enjoy vegetables – although, even more than with the traditional British way of serving your greens, it depends on quality. The ‘caper-style’ nasturtiums are really pleasing.

One of the advantages is that it’s so much easier to ensure that the vegetables are cooked precisely as you want them.

There was also a roasted chicken: done River Café style, cooked for three and a half hours: it was as enjoyable as ever, succulent and flavoursome.

For those who haven’t tried it before, the method is simple.

Heat your oven to 80˚C (fan). Place your bird the usual way up in as tight-fitting a dish as possible, stuffed with … well, whatever you fancy, really.

The recipe in River Café Two Easy suggests rosemary, sage and garlic. In this case, it was garlic, some thyme from the garden and a couple of getting-past-their-best lemons, quartered – simply because that was what was in the house.

You then add approximately 200ml of water to the dish and pop it in the oven for an hour.

After that, turn the bird over and cook for a further hour. Then give it a third hour back in its original position.

Take it out, massage butter into the flesh, season, add 100ml of white wine or vermouth – again, it can depend on what you have in or taste; and frankly, a little more water will ensure it’s cooked fine. And then place back into the oven, with the temperature now turned up to 170˚C, for half an hour.

Ridiculously easy – and wonderfully effective.

In what was rather an Italian weekend, a big pan of homemade minestrone proved once again how this classic, done properly, is comforting and tasty and hearty, yet it has a freshness about it too, that makes it perfect for such times.

If all the ingredients are fresh, it’s really an early summer soup, but frozen peas will do (blanched rather than adding straight to the pan and bringing down the temperature) and tinned tomatoes and borlotti beans also help.

The pancetta was British, incidentally, from Downland Pork. And very nice it was too, as are all their products.

And so this last weekend, the Italian theme continued.

On Saturday, it was time for mushroom heaven.

Perhaps few things are worse than mushrooms cooked so that they become rubbery. But mushrooms treated well are a thing of wonderful flavour.

So here’s an idea, adjusted and adapted from a Gordon Ramsey recipe to make it simpler.

Take a shallot or two, a stick of celery, a couple of cloves of garlic and a little red chili. Chop finely and cook gently in olive oil until softened.

Add either white wine or vermouth – or just stock.

If using booze, you need about a glassful, and then reduce by half and then add about another generous glassful of vegetable or chicken stock and reduce again by half.

If using just stock, use two large glasses full to start with.

In the meantime, take some dried mushrooms and rehydrate them in a mug of boiling water. Strain the mushrooms and add the liquid to the pan with the alcohol and stock.

Chop these mushrooms finely, together with approximately 400g (for two) chestnut mushrooms.

Strain the booze/stock mixture and return the liquid to a clean pan, discarding the flavourings.

Add the chopped mushrooms and simmer gently until cooked. To this, add a good tablespoon of double cream and heat gently.

Serve over tagliatelle, with plenty of chopped flat leaf parsley to garnish.

That is a heavenly dish of mushroomy pleasure.

And a simple a salad of endive leaves and segmented blood orange, with a straightforward vinaigrette, makes a perfect starter.

Not that that was the only Italian-influenced dish of the weekend.

For Sunday dinner, a piece of belly pork had been purchased from Downland.

In the morning, I pounded fennel seeds in a mortar, together with a couple of cloves of garlic, the zest of a lemon, and some dried thyme and oregano, before rubbing it into the scored skin of the pork.

Covered, that went back into the fridge to marinade.

Later, the oven was heated to 180˚C (fan).

The meat had coarse salt rubbed into the scores and was then laid in a dish with a large glass of white wine. Again, vermouth or plain water would work absolutely fine. Or, for that matter, dry cider.

It was cooked for half an hour before the temperature was reduced to 150˚C.

You do need to watch the liquid and add a little more if it dries out.

It was roasted for a further two hours before being rested in a warm place for 15 minutes.

In the meantime, scrape all the meaty fragments from your oven dish and either pop it on the hob or decant everything into a pan to do that.

If there’s a lot of fat, you can get rid of some of that, before adding a teaspoon of plain flour and whisking in.

Cook gently and add liquid as needed – either boiling water or vegetable water from anything you’re cooking as an accompaniment.

So Italian in one sense, but with a gravy that was 100% British – and utterly gorgeous.

The crackling wasn't quite crackling – you could pour boiling water over it before cooking (or adding the rub) but I decided against that. On the other hand, the meat was glorious: sweet and tender and wonderfully satisfying.

And to accompany, garlicky, crushed, roasted spuds, with sliced leeks on the side.

Easy food, but wonderfully tasty and just hitting the right notes for the weather.

Summertime in the autumn

It has been a crazy few days. There we were, slipping into the autumn, with long-term weather forecasts predicting a tough, cold winter – and one that will start early in October – and what happens?

Summer pops it's face back above the parapet and we find ourselves enjoying glorious sunshine and sizzling temperatures.

Yesterday morning, with condensation dotting parked cars and a bank of mist suspended just above the grass in Haggerston Park, the towering buildings of the City beyond seemed almost spectral in the stunning light. The day warmed rapidly and even the night was muggier than any in the usually sweaty August.

There are no complaints here at this reprise of heat and light, but nonetheless, it's had me in a spin on the food front.

There I was, having accepted the departure of summer and starting to relish the bounty of the new season.

We had watched from the office window at work as a white wagtail had stopped for a rest on the nearby sedum roof; a breather on its journey to Africa - the blustery weather had even been sending migrating birds off course.

I was contemplating roasts and casseroles, mushroom heaven, baking blitzes on chilled Sunday afternoons, warming soups and even advance preparations for That Festival at the End of the Year.

And then, in what might sportingly be referred to as a curveball out of left field, our crazy weather forced all that back out of sight, leaving me foundering around with a feeling that I needed to prepare summer dishes again - but with a completely changed larder.

So just what do you eat in such confusing weather? On Saturday morning, sitting outside in the garden in shorts, with notepad and pen, I leafed through Gordon Ramsey's A Chef for All Seasons, hunting inspiration.

It is, I realised – gazing with pleasure on page after page of food porn – not really that difficult.

Ramsey is not a cook who really go in for massively heavy dishes, so even his autumn dishes, making the most of the seasonal produce, are not overwhelming. Pigeon breasts, for instance, which I've been enjoying throughout the summer, would still be perfect now.

With a list drawn up, it was off to Broadway Market.

Then it emerged that Andy was not there with his game stall, which meant a rethink. And at the top end of the street, across the road from London Fields, was a scene of chaos.

It looked like someone had taken one of those huge bins and strewn the contents everywhere. Empty bottles and cans lay all over the place, behind a wide cordon of crime scene tape and police.

It seems that the heat had been bringing people out to party for the previous three nights. In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, it had turned from a boozy street party into someone more serious, as shots were fired and a woman was caught in the crossfire. She is in hospital. It was the third shooting in the borough in a week.

Good old Hackney. However trendy the area becomes, there are still the gangs and there are still the guns; and there are still youngsters with no apparent hope or self respect beyond what they believe such things offer them.

And like August's rooters and looters, torching people's homes and wrecking small businesses only a little further away, they don't give a damn about anyone else getting caught up in their spiral of self-hating and self-destructive violence.

Depressed, I turned away and tried to concentrate on the shopping, but was distracted enough that I forgot the butter and actually had to return a short while later.

Fortunately, an afternoon spent 'watching', via the internet, as Manchester City overcame the week's tribulations by beating Blackburn Rovers 4-0 away from home, cheered me.

But what were today's culinary solutions?

First, for lunch, a salad of endive, with wafer thin red onion, a small Cox apple, blushing pink inside when it was cored and sliced, shavings of Montgomery Cheddar, cob nuts and a dressing of lemon juice, virgin oil and honey.

Full of taste and textural contrasts, and a perfect celebration of English ingredients to mark both the end of British Food Fortnight and British Cheese Week. Seasonal, yet light. It can be done.

It was inspired by a recipe but didn't follow it to the letter – the Cheddar instead of blue cheese, and no blue cheese dressing, cob nuts instead of walnuts.

And the evening presented a similar opportunity. I had been intended to do Ramsey's pan-roasted cod, served on a bed of garlic potato purée, with ceps.

But there was no cod, so I picked up some of Vicki's beautiful smoked haddock instead and did a little adjusting.

In this case, I roasted the fish in a gratin dish, dotted with plenty of butter and covered in foil, at about 155˚C for 20 minutes.

The potato was cooked, pressed through the ricer and then had butter and good double cream beaten into it.

The ceps were thinly sliced and cooked gently in a little butter, before a good squeeze of lemon was added, the pan shaken carefully and then left to heat back up.

And that was pretty much that - except instead of adding garlic to the potato, I seasoned it and the ceps with a little of the truffle salt that I'd bought in Carcassone back in July.

All in all, it was scummy. And suitably seasonal but not too heavy. And also not simply taken straight from a written recipe.

For dessert, a combination of seasonal pear – and downright unseasonable (but English!) strawberries: a match that seemed to completely exemplify the situation.

Later, as The Other Half and I sat outside in the dark, smoking, neighbours enjoyed a barbeque while watching The X Factor on a portable TV. At least not all partying in Hackney is violent.

Pasta la vista, baby

A long time ago – almost lost in the mists of time – The Other Half gave me a Christmas present of one of those boxed, culinary gifts that adorn the shelves of supermarkets in the festive season.

In this case, it was two small pasta bowls – they’re more like soup bowls, to be honest – with ‘pasta’ written on the side in case you couldn’t work out what to use them for. They came with a couple of packets of spices/herbs and a slender volume of 10 recipes from Gordon Ramsey.

The message was clear: ‘stop boiling pasta to death after we get home from work in an evening when we’re both getting whatever we fancy to eat’. I didn’t attempt to feed The Other Half said ultra-soft pasta, but he hated the smell of it.

The bowls went in one cupboard, the spices another and the book went on a shelf somewhere.

Fast forward a few years, by which time I had started to get interested in food and started to try to learn to cook.

I picked up the little book, found it looked terrifyingly complicated, and put it down again.

A couple more years passed. But this time, when I picked the book up again, it didn’t seem anywhere near as intimidating and I set about trying one of the recipes. It was a velouté sauce to be served with scallops or salmon, and pasta.

This involved a reduction of wine and stock, and things that not long before, I’d have dismissed as beyond me. It was the first time I started to comprehend just what a reduction really achieves. It’s finished with cream to give a lovely, smooth texture.

The velouté (which I did with salmon) was a success. I tried several others over the coming months, including one with bacon lardons, rosemary, asparagus and cannellini beans (this was a breakthrough in terms of persuading The Other Half to eat any pulses) and one involving very lightly curried shallots, julienned carrot and wilted spinach.

And so it was that, last night, I returned to the book for an easy supper.

Did you spot that? Something that was once so scary is now an ‘easy’ supper. It was the velouté, with chopped mushrooms. Lovely.

Looking at the recipe again last night, it struck me just how much my perceptions got in the way of my doing things. The recipe is no simpler now than it ever was, but it requires no fancy skills or equipment. And the result is lovely.

Am I the only one who has become convinced, for whatever reason, that food is just too difficult? I’m glad that I managed to get past that stage, but I very much doubt that I was remotely alone.

Culinary aims for the weeks ahead

Having worked through last weekend – this is beginning to feel like a very long stretch now – I’m looking forward to a nicely extended weekend, starting on Friday.

And the obvious first thing to do on Friday is to get myself down to Borough Market, which then raises the very pleasant question of just what culinary projects to set myself for the weekend.

Something that’s been tempting me for quite a while if foie gras – not the paté, but the fresh stuff. And at Borough, there’s a stall that sell it. It’s not cheap, of course, but I am wondering whether to get some, eat a little myself for Friday lunch and then make the rest into a paté. We’ll see.

This weekend really does have to see a test run of consommé – I think I’m going to try a mushroom one, as it’ll be much cheaper than trying game. The main thing is the clarification, anyway.

I also need to tie down ideas for the big eating days – and then make sure that all my favourite suppliers are going to be at Broadway Market on Christmas Eve. I’m away the previous weekend and it’s getting dangerously near to needing to place orders and check such details.

But another project I now have in mind is completing the classic ‘French mother sauces’.

This is one of those fascinating pieces of information that I discovered when looking up something else – in this case, hollandaise, as a result of Friday’s risotto.

Apparently, these sauces are the foundation of classical sauce making. They are:

Velouté – done this via a couple of Gordon Ramsay pasta recipes;

Bechamel – done this too;

Tomato – pretty obvious;

Espagnole – done this too, for the sour brown shallot sauce that I serve with our Boxing day ham every year;

Hollandaise – not done this yet.

So, actually not very far to go on completing the ‘set’. Interestingly, I saw a definition online for a “more contemporary definition of mother sauces”, which was vinagrette, demi glace, beurre blanc, aioli/mayonnaise and sauce a la crème.

Now I’ve only ever tackled one of those – the aioli – so that leaves me with a whole new set of challenges in future.

But one of the reasons I want to learn hollandaise in particular is that it’s considered the key to béarnaise, which I’ve once with steak and would love to be able to make.

So, that gives me a series of things to think about – and if one thing’s certain, Borough will give me plenty more to think about.

Judging too harshly?

Google is your friend. So with that in mind, a quick search was made today for 'piping profiteroles' to see just how you get the best shape possible. But after watching a brief video of Gordon Ramsay making the little beauties, I have to say that I probably don't need to be too worried about the look and shape of my own first efforts yesterday. Indeed, I'm probably even more chuffed now. If it's good enough for Gordon, it most certainly should be good enough for me.

In a very general post today (which means that, if you persist and read through this, you'll get to more real foodie stuff), I also found myself wanting to highlight the news (I missed it yesterday) that McDonalds, Pepsi and assorted other companies are to be invited to advise the government on public health and nutrition etc.

Assuming it's accurate, I possibly was not alone in checking the date, but no, you haven't been in hibernation and it isn't 1 April.

Now, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know me particularly well – and let's face it, this blog isn't really very old – I was hardly the biggest fan of the previous UK government. Iraq/Afghanistan and civil liberties in particular could easily get me going. As too could the way that, under the last government's watch, size/weight became more of a stigma than at any previous time. Being fat was sometimes like being a single mother under the previous Tory administration – you were a scapegoat for many other problems.

I can go back a decade at least to pointing this out in print and suggesting that the attitude of government (together with health professionals/groups and elements in the media) had effectively created a bullies' charter.

So the first question that occurs to me is: are there greater levels of obesity now than in previous years?

Well, on the basis of observation (and you might gather from my previous comments that I'm almost painfully aware about the subject), I'd say yes, there are. I'd also specifically say (and this is based on memory, not science) that I seem to be seeing more seriously overweight children around than when I was at school.

The next question is whether that's a problem. Well, on the basis of what the medical profession tells us (and the stats they employ), then yes it is, for health reasons. It will reduce life expectancy, particularly for those who are seriously obese when very young.

There are also the political and economic issues: will there be a large enough and healthy enough workforce to pay the taxes that pay for any government expenditure? What will the impact be on the cost of health care if many more people have, say, type 1 diabetes?

Okay, so there are problems. The next question is whether those problems are the concern of the state. Few people would not consider the economic health of a nation to be a concern for government – and therefore anything that has a substantial impact on the economic health of the nation.

And if one has a state health system, then few would not think that government should be involved in that, too. After all, that's partly a matter of democracy and democratic accountability.

To be quite clear – I don't know the answers and I don't pretend to. I think (as I hope I've made clear) that the previous government's approach to the issue was flawed (and that of health bodies and the media).

But inviting fast food outlets and supermarkets to consider the subject? It's so surreal that the jokes are already flying: Dracula to run blood banks; Fritzel to run pregnancy advice; Sutcliffe to run women's refuges. You get the drift: I couldn't personally think up another one (too busy being gobsmacked) so I've had to quote the efforts of others.

To begin with, private companies have one ultimate duty – and that's a legal obligation, not a matter of choice – to maximise profits for their shareholders.

Which is fine and dandy – but how can that square with the public health in general?

A few posts ago, I wrote about Stewart Lee Allen’s In the Devil’s Garden: a sinful history of forbidden food.

As I wrote then of the book: "He had already discussed fast food, the culture of not cooking, of not sitting down to eat as a family, of TV dinners etc, and decided that such behaviours are not about pleasure, but quite the reverse, and are essentially part of a massive con by big business."

Allen quite clearly makes the point that people in the US have been 'trained' to think that time spent cooking and eating good food is time wasted. He states that, after all, it gets in the way of you spending time doing jobs you hate. I increasingly think that the same can be applied to the UK. Of course, it's not helped when few women (in particular) have the financial wherewithal to realistically be able to choose whether or not to work, particularly if they also want a family.

But as I also illustrated here, there is a con going on over the amount the good food costs, in both financial and time senses.

Can inviting poachers to become gamekeepers remotely change this?

One finds oneself asking further questions: we already know what privatisation did to school meals (just as we know what it did to hospital cleaning). Although many had campaigned on the issue for years (including the trade union UNISON, which organises in school kitchens), it took the celebrity glitter of TV chef Jamie Oliver to get anything at all done in recent years. And good for him for that.

But can we imagine what the input of supermarkets and fast food chains and such will be when discussion arise about school meals in future?

Okay – we can only "imagine" it at present, but I don't believe that you need to be a conspiracy theorist to see a conflict of interest here.

And so folks, for being really dedicated, here's today's foodie bit.

We were allowed to sleep late by the cats – and sleep late we really did. I'd ended up watching soft-classical musician André Rieu on Sky Arts until rather late, and then had a read in bed.

So we decided not to worry about lunch as such and simply get whatever we wanted. However, as of 4.23pm (now!) a pot is on the hob, cooking away.

I've gone for a rolled, boned shoulder of lamb this weekend. As per a recipe in my general French cookery book (the one that's been a Bible for some years now), I'm cooking it with carrots, onion, garlic, a bouquet garni (homemade and not a sachet), red wine from Roussilon, beef stock and some parsnip that I added off my own bat. Later, it will have a tin of haricot beans added. If I honestly believe that life is too short for one things, it's soaking pulses overnight and then cooking them for hours.

It'll take a while, but it'll still be an early dinner by our usual standards. And strangely enough, when reading Mark Kurlansky on salt, he had mentioned something that sounds exactly like this dish, and it's from Brittany. So there you go.

For anyone's who's interested:

Heat some butter and olive oil in a lidded casserole. Brown your boned, rolled shoulder of lamb in it and remove.

Pop in chopped onions, carrots (and parsnip, if you fancy my version – but keep the chunks decently large), plus four cloves of garlic, with each clove only peeled and halved, plus a bouquet garni. Sweat for around 10 minutes.

Add 250ml of red wine. De-glaze. Put the meat back in and add 250ml of beef stock. Bring to the boil, put the lid on, turn the heat right down, and cook for 1 and a1/2 to 2 hours. Check it – you know how you like your meat: and it's difficult to seriously overcook such a dish.

Then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot beans – and cook for another 15-30 minutes.

Great stuff, with the lamb almost melting in the mouth.

It wasn't all bad

Despite the best efforts of those wretched tarts to leave me feeling that the weekend was a culinary disaster, it was far from all bad.

There were two small tuna steaks in the fridge that had been bought in midweek but then remained unused. They needed eating, so I decided to try something a little different.

Using the basic idea from a recipe in Gordon Ramsay’s A Passion for Flavour, I decanted goose fat into a small pan, heated that and then added the tuna. There was just enough fat to cover. Phew!

You then allow the fish to cook for around seven minutes. In the meantime, I’d taken three large but getting-past-it tomatoes, and skinned, de-seeded and diced them for a concasse.

But on a day that, for the first time this autumn genuinely required the adjective ‘cold’ rather than simply ‘cool’ or ‘chilly’, raw tomato was not really on the menu, so I heated it gently with a little olive oil and some Maldon sea salt, making sure that it's held its shape and texture.

Served simply with bread and a dollop of the confit de thyme that I’d bought from the cheese stall in Collioure – made, as it turned out, by a British ex-pat who had gone to Roussillon to make a new life – it proved a very tasty lunch. The confit de thyme is a clear jelly, with a light taste – rather like apple, I thought. It sometimes seems to me that confit is a word that's used in all sorts of ways, making it really rather confusing: but whatever the etymology, it tasted jolly nice.

As I said, the day was cold. It had started brightly, with the cats all determined that we should get up as soon as it was light so that they could spend some time outside. This involves a concerted effort by all three girls – almost working together – which is never repeated on the following morning. It seems that on Sundays, our felines kindly allow us a lie in.

Given the declining temperature, it seemed entirely appropriate to contemplate the first erwtensoep of the season – a Dutch pea and ham soup, in effect.

As I've become more and more of a foodie, I've started finding it utterly fascinating how different countries have similar dishes. I know it's hardly rocket science when they're similar in terms of climate and produce, but it still intrigues me.

The UK of course has pea and ham soup, the Germans have erbsensuppe: the latter was made as erbswurst during the Franco-Prussian War; one of the very first instant food, invented by Johann Heinrich Grüneberg in 1867. Knorr still make it. Take that, Napoleon III and your infernal margarine!

In a similar vein, the Dutch have a dish called stamppot, which is based around mashed potatoes. Which makes me think of British bubble and squeak or the Irish colcannon. But let's get back to erwtensoep.

There’s actually three sorts of meat in the recipe I’ve got, but since there are only two of us, I skipped the pork chops.

After leaving some dried split peas to soak for a couple of hours, I rinsed them and plopped the lot in a large pot with some water to cover. It’s crucial at that stage to add the water, because the next thing you want to put in is a peeled, diced celeriac, and unless that goes straight into liquid, it’ll start discolouring very quickly.

Add a couple of peeled, diced carrots, some bacon you’ve cut into bite-size pieces and bring slowly to a boil. Then simmer gently for an hour and a quarter. You need to give it a stir occasionally or else the split peas, once they really start turning into mush, will stick to the bottom of the pan and make one hell of a mess.

At that point, add a couple of chopped leeks and some frankfurters that you’ve chopped into bite-size pieces. Leave for 15 minutes and there you have it.

Erwtensoep is wonderful cold-weather food – we almost lived off bowls of the stuff and glasses of gluhwein at New Year in Amsterdam nearly two years ago. With temperatures dipping well below freezing, it finally made me realise the point of mulled wine!

As for the soup itself, it’s traditionally served with an accompaniment of rye bread spread with mustard and topped with smoked bacon. The picture above was taken on that Amsterdam trip.

And after that little effort, there was enough in the pot to ensure an easy lunch for both of us yesterday too.

Which left last night's dinner. In keeping with the sense of darkening, cooler days, I made the first kidney turbigo of the season, crammed full of gorgeous kidney loveliness.

In other words, in spite of the best efforts of those delinquent tarts, it was actually not a bad foodie weekend at all.

A rather tart aftertaste

The last few days have been something of a tart nightmare. As I sit here now, shirt covered in so much flour that you’d think I’d been doubling as a giant’s rolling pin, I’m managing to type with fingers (and anything else remotely crossable) crossed.

Thursday’s citrus tart was a disaster. Yesterday’s chocolate tart was a disaster.

One of the things that strikes me, reminiscent of Julian Barnes’s A Pedant in the Kitchen, is a feeling that I know bugger all about what I’m doing.

That’s not simply the point that baking requires more pedantry than much else in the kitchen – you can’t hope to ‘get by’ without weighing and measuring properly, for instance, but also because, as Barnes revealed in that collection of a regular weekend column he had written for the Guardian that it’s also a sense of pedantically wondering exactly what a recipe means.

If it says to chop something ‘finely’, then just how fine is fine?

In the case of the last few days’ tart fiascos, I’m left trying to analyse just what went wrong.

Thursday was a disaster from beginning to end. Of my understood mistakes, the first was in not trusting my instinct over the pastry.

It had been in the fridge since I’d made up a batch for the previous weekend’s tart tatin. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I had been wondering why that pastry had collapsed and crumbled so much. Possibly it wasn’t mixed thoroughly enough. By Thursday evening, when I pulled it out of the fridge to thaw for rolling, there were some such doubts, and it had crossed my mind that I should bin it and start from scratch.

But ‘waste not, want not’, as the old adage goes. And I really do not like waste. So on I went, blindly baking a tart case that was more patchwork than a thing of well-rolled neatness.

After that, came the mistake of assuming that, when the Gordon Ramsay recipe read that ideally, the tart should be baked at the lowest possible temperature – but that most ovens barely managed below 120˚ – I thought that, since mine does, I should do exactly that and bake it at the lowest temperature. That didn’t work either: I ended up with an unset filling that was burnt on top.

Yesterday, I made a new batch of pastry. I took my time – even more so than before. The pastry case wasn't perfect, but better.

And then came the chocolate filling. I brought a combination of cream and milk just to boiling point and then poured it on the chocolate (70-odd % cocoa solids), exactly as instructed. Stirring vigorously, it was soon mostly melted, but some lumps stubbornly remained, so I popped the bowl over a pan with a little simmering water in it. Hardly dismal technique.

At the last, almost as though I turned away for a second and missed it, something happened and the mixture became lumpy – almost like tar. Hoping optimistically that it was still worth salvaging, I decanted it into the pastry case and basked as per the recipe. But when I'd finished, there was a sticky, oily liquid around the tart tin on the baking tray and, when I gently pressed the tip of my finger onto the filling, it came up oily too, flecked with brown.

Today, I took even more care. I whisked the cream and milk into the chocolate instead of using a spoon – absolutely as per the recipe. You add a beaten egg (or two, depending on the quantity) after that, before popping it into the pastry case. Everything seemed fine at this stage. The texture was fine – smooth and silky, if a little thick. Into the oven it went and I was feeling so much more optimistic. I licked the bowls in appropriately greedy fashion. Lovely.

And so I started writing this blog entry.

But when the tart came out, the same thing had happened as yesterday. Some time during the cooking, the texture had changed and, around the tart tin, was more oily liquid – although not as much.

I can only assume that something has split.

The recipe works – I've done it before so I know it does.

The eggs are as fresh as I can get. The flour is good quality and fresh. The milk and cream are fresh. So what is the issue? The chocolate seemed to be fine, but it's not the same chocolate that I've used before. Is that what's caused the problem with the chocolate tarts? But if so, why? If I don't know the answer to that question, can I avoid it happening again – or put another way, what do I need to do to avoid it happening again?

That's what I mean about pedantry: I lack the knowledge – the expertise – to be able to confidently analyse what has gone wrong, but I also have the sort of mind that is frustrated at not knowing precisely.

Still, at least today's pastry was an improvement.

And I shall be back.

All booked up

It has been a fun day in the book department, with a stream of titles arriving for me from Amazon, which is in danger of becoming my biggest vice.

First post this morning brought two copies of Judi Dench's new autobiography, And Furthermore – one of which is earmarked for my mother for Christmas – plus Finishing the Hat: collected lyrics (1954-1981) with attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim, together with The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man and Mark Kurlansky's Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world.

My editor took a slow look at this stack, ignored the last one and announced: "You're really a gay man". Well I suppose that's one way to look it.

This afternoon's post produced Cheese: A Global History by Andrew Dalby – my goodness, there's a whole mini library of such one-food histories from Edible – the 700-odd page History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Salt: A World History by Kurlansky (what price he does one on salted cod?) and In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen.

You see what I mean about my Amazon vice? It's just so easy – especially when they start picking up your 'trends' and suggesting things you never even knew existed before.

The food books were ordered as a job lot, after I dared to go looking for Kurlansky's book about salt: Amazon took a hint, saw an opening, and started suggesting assorted other food titles. The others were a response to assorted long-term interests.

Is it really gay to love Sondheim?

Anyway, rather later, back at home, I hauled out a cling film-wrapped ball of pastry that I'd made rearlier (one half of what I'd made for my small tarte tatinlast weekend). Inevitably, it needed a little thawing, but while that was happening, I re-arranged (yet again) my kitchen bookshelves to take all the latest additions to my food library, and listened to Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George.

Rather interestingly, I had spotted a story this morning on the Beeb about food and sound. It appears that sound affects how you taste food: fascinating. Although it cannot be blamed for the staggering blandness of today's lunch when, at a loss for what else to eat, I got a jacket potato from the deli bar (posh description for our staff canteen) with cottage cheese, and ended up salting it ludicrously just to give it some sort of taste. To think that I used to consume the stuff by the tub!

Of course, it does bring to mind Heston Blumenthal and his "construction of ’sand’, scallops, seaweed and foam", served while listening to sounds of the sea on an iPod in a shell at The Fat Duck. Perhaps he actually has a point.

But whatever, the Sondheim certainly seems conducive to cooking.

Anyhow, this is a Gordon Ramsay recipe – so I'm not going to reproduce it here in detail, since it's too complex.

But as an overview, you blind bake the pastry case, as is usual in such dishes. Then you take orange juice – and somewhat less lemon juice – and boil to reduce by half. Then you measure out caster sugar and beat with egg yolks (less than the recipe stipulates, because, as a total size queen, I always have XXL eggs and not medium unless I have specifically planned a baking session) and some grated zest of the lemons and oranges.

Let the pastry case cool, then fill carefully with the citrus mix and bake for 40 minutes or so.

I want a bigger kitchen: I need more storage space for all the sugars and vinegars and oils etc. And that's before I consider how much the kitchen is becoming my natural habitat and therefore obviously should be bigger. And I also want a mixer – one of those lovely retro – but bloody sturdy – ones, because that'll make life so much easier when I bake, although I have no idea where it could be stored.

In other words, I just need a bigger home.

However, baking is cooking for pedants: none of that Jamie Oliver stuff of just throwing in unmeasured ingredients. Accuracy is essential. Perhaps that's why I actually like baking as much as I do ...

But then again, what I'm doing tonight is certainly being done without a calculator.

So what else can I say?

Well, I've committed to fund-raising for Greenpeace's 'flour power' campaign, and my colleagues are already getting excited and demanding that whatever I cook has to involve chocolate: so I'm having a big think. Should I bake – as per the campaign title – or should I do chocolate, as my colleagues apparently want?

The citrus tart is still cooking – but otherwise, I think it's a question of: 'watch this space'.

When you can't win for trying

You could be forgiven for thinking that, if you announced to someone that you had just bought something rather special as a treat for that night’s dinner, there’d be some sign of approval.

Or perhaps that was my naive mistake: believing that, on arrival back from the market on Saturday, the news that I had purchased a piece of turbot – the ‘king of fish’ and a sort of once-a-year treat – would be likely to raise a hint of enthusiasm rather than an ambivalent shrug, a slight curl of the lip and the comment: “it’s not my favourite.”

In a demented fear of there being fuss later in the day, I dived into a sea of books: Leith’s Fish Bible, Larousse Gastronomique, Rick Stein’s English Seafood … reducing myself to a state of salivating mush, mentally grazing on recipes that I couldn’t even contemplate in reality since The Other Half absolutely wouldn’t countenance eating some ingredient or other.

Eventually, I found a Gordon Ramsay concoction that brought forth another: “Umm.” Only this one sort of rose at the end, which I took to being less ambivalent and more optimistic than the previous one.

So, because I’m still stupidly desperate to please and because I do actually make efforts to cater for the faddy eater, I then spent a great deal of time running around as though someone had lit a fire up my arse, in order to cook something far more complicated than I had intended.

It had been a case of seeing no sole (which had been in my mind) on the stall, but seeing turbot and thinking: “This would be a nice treat. I’ll cook and serve it simply with fresh, seasonal vegetables.”

Theoretically at least, he likes white fish.

Now I am aware that, last summer, we had a slight contretemps after I’d dared to serve a dish of plaice, grilled with butter, only to be told in no uncertain terms that it was “bland” and therefore, apparently inedible. So inedible that it went, uneaten, into the bin. The accompanying sulk did not, unfortunately, go with it into the trash.

So my initial thoughts had dutifully taken into account that turbot is not like eating a mouthful of birdseye chillies (not that The Other Half likes very much of anything as strong tasting as chilli), but most certainly could not be accused of lacking in flavour.

It's worth noting here that I really try to work around the faddiness; to cook interesting, varied food that is not overcomplicated but is also, generally speaking, healthy. Fish is usually a Saturday standard because I can get it pretty fresh and because it's healthy and a change. At maximum, we'll have fish twice in a week.

Menus are not based predominantly around my tastes – far from it. There's a great deal of food that I love that he wouldn't touch with the proverbial bargepole. I frequently ask if he has any requests: 99.5 times out of 100, a shrug is the nearest thing to any sort of an idea.

I raced back to the market and queued for around 20 minutes to get fish remains from Vicki, who did a double take on seeing me at the stall for a second time. Then there was tagliatelle and a load of stock and sauce-making ingredients. Back home, the fish carcasses (including heads), plus bouquet garni, a bottle of white wine, white peppercorns, chopped celery, garlic, onion, fennel and leek went into my biggest pot to make stock. Cook for around 25-30 minutes (no more or it can get bitter) and then allow to cool right down. I strained it was through a muslin-lined colander, and decanted and froze three pots after setting aside what I needed for the evening.

Empty the kitchen bin and take it around to the communal bins at the back, because I don't want all the fish remains stinking up the flat. Frequent washing of assorted utensils – and my own hands – with occasional applications of hand cream as the skin chaps.

Later, I cooked chopped shallot and asparagus in a little oil, before adding some of the stock and then wilting baby spinach in it. Then it was all puréed and pressed through a sieve.

The fish, which I had bought with skin on and un-filleted, since I was going to grill it, now required skinning and filleting. Which I managed, even though my best knife broke when sharpening, leaving me even more pissed off than before. Then a little oil was heated in a sauté pan and the fish pieces were cooked on each side for a round a minute, before more stock was added.

Spears of asparagus were cooked briefly. The pasta was cooked. A little cream was added to the sauce, which was heated gently.

To serve, the pasta was drained and plated, topped by the fish, with the sauce and asparagus spears around.

No complaints.

No thanks, either, mind. No positive comments. I had to nearly physically restrain myself from actually asking whether it was okay – almost begging for affirmation – even though I knew that it was a perfectly good dish, with good ingredients, cooked to a decent standard. I had to fight too, to concentrate on eating and enjoying my own meal and not fretting about his reaction or lack of.

And quite frankly, when I then managed to roast a piece of pork loin and produce cracking crackling on Sunday – and still received no comment for my troubles – not even a basic ‘thanks’ (although he did open a paperback at the same time as starting to eat) – it crossed my mind that no judge would ever convict.

I’m going to check the membership data and have a vote amongst this union of one – because I’m bloody sorely tempted to go on strike.

In essence, I cook because I enjoy it – not in order to win plaudits. But sometimes at least, a minimum of very basic good manners and appreciation would go a long way.

Sources of inspiration for inspirational sauces

A couple of years ago, in an article in the one of the more serious newspapers by someone suggesting that cookery books by TV chefs were all a load of rubbish, and what we all needed to do was bin our tomes of recipes and go and spend a year in France learning to cook properly.

Which is a lovely idea – well, the bit about spending a year in France learning to cook is a lovely idea. Trashing my kitchen library is not.

The central tenet of the writer's case was that we lack proper skills in the kitchen, and celebrity chefs and their books don't actually teach us anything, but end up collecting dust, never to be actually used.

Now of course I'm not cynical enough to suggest that the scribe in question – his name fails me and Google has failed me too on this score – was only trying to sell copies of the book he'd written about his year in France learning to cook, but that entire proposal is codswallop.

My own cookery journey started nine years ago, when I stopped dieting and started to eat without worrying about calorie counts. Over the course of about a year, I started to actually enjoy food. The natural progression saw me starting to take over the kitchen from The Other Half. And the crucial moment came when I went to Spitalfields Market one Sunday morning to return with a very nice piece of organic beef – only to realise that I hadn't a clue what to do with it.

Obviously I knew to put it in the oven and roast it, but at what temperature and for how long per however many grammes?

One course of action was open: I phoned my mother, who went and found a book from her own collection and read me the formula.

That week, I went and bought Delia's Complete Cookery Course. It remains on my shelf, a veritable Bible for exactly that sort of information. And she's got a good method for doing jacket potatoes too – much slower cooking time, and brush them with olive oil and then sea salt before popping them in the oven. I also employ her instructions for potatoes dauphinoise. And jolly good it is too.

There are people who consider Delia Smith to be boring – she inflamed some when publishing her three-part cookery course by including a section on boiling an egg – but Delia is trustworthy.

My next purchase was Jamie Oliver's Return of the Naked Chef. It's rather popular in the UK at present to lambast Oliver, not least for his faux cheeky Cockney persona. But he's made a wonderful contribution by making cooking seem fun. And indeed, I couldn't believe that I could make dishes that were modern, easy – and tasted good!

There are a few dishes I still do from Oliver's books (I added another three over the years): one involves marinading pork chops in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and rosemary. The instructions tell you to use your hands and massage the marinade into the meat. The first time I made it, I stood there, hands covering in oil and juice and garlic and herbs, grinning like a loon. I was finally the little girl who was allowed to get her hands messy. And there was something so earthy and sensual about it.

Then a slender volume that had been gathering dust for some years came into its own. Gordon Ramsay Pasta Sauces is a 32-page booklet that had come with two pasta bowls and some small bags of dried herbs in a Christmas gift set. It had been a present from The Other Half, frustrated doubtless by my former addiction to boiling a bowl of dried pasta and a bit of frozen veg to buggery as a post-pub repast.

It came at a time when I didn't even know – or care – who Gordon Ramsay was. And besides, the recipes were scarily complicated and looked far too posh for my taste (or lack thereof). The box was emptied, the contents stashed and it was all forgotten.

I did have a couple of cookery books in my pre-cooking days – three Good Housekeeping volumes that my mother didn't want, a Marks and Spencer book of salads, a vegetarian Mexican collection, a Schwartz Spices booklet (free with however many jars of spices) and a notebook in which to note down recipes. Over almost 20 years, it had had around five entries. Which might tell you something.

Then, one day, I decided to try one of Ramsay's pasta dishes. A velouté sauce for scallops (or salmon – the suggested alternative being what I served it with). So began an understanding of sauces – more to the point, of reductions. And the dishes in that little book are delightful: a sauce of very lightly curried shallots and carrot batons, with wilted spinach; mushrooms in a velouté – incredibly intense; another cream-finished sauce with lardons, rosemary, cannellini beans and asparagus (which also taught me that two minutes is sufficient time to cook those wonderful spears of flavour).

Also in my possession from around the same time is Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey. And although there are not a great many recipes I've done from that book or continue to use, one of the dishes taught me to make and use a beurre manié, a mix of flour and butter that is added at the end of a reduction to thicken a sauce.

The dish in question I do quite often – seared tuna steak (substituted for swordfish), served with a mushroom gravy. It might sound odd, but it works very well.

So between Ramsay and Stein, I've picked up some real basics of sauce making – and not just the mechanics, but some comprehension of why you do certain things and what they achieve. That is the sort of thing that inevitably leads to understanding why stocks are so important and why it's worth making your own. And thence to creating your own sauces.

I find myself using River Café Easy Two frequently, even if just to take inspiration and then adapt things to my own specific needs. The food is easy and light, with some great salads, soups and pasta dishes.

And it also has the best recipe for roast chicken that I've used, stuffing the bird with rosemary and thyme and garlic, cooking it very slowly at a low heat, and then finishing it by adding Vermouth to the dish for a final half hour at a higher temperature, while rubbing butter all over the skin. It's divine – and the carcass makes a fabulous stock.

It should be said that my favourite recipe book remains a tome of French cookery, authored by a team who only got their names mentioned on the inside back cover. And a little book of pasta dishes that I picked up for next to nowt in low-cost supermarket Lidl, which also has no author listed. But I've learnt so many actual skills from books by celebrity chefs – it's errant nonsense to suggest that they have nothing to teach us.

All of those have helped educate and draw me to a point where I can now appreciate the work of the UK's cookery goddess, Elizabeth David.

I have enough reference points and understanding to skills to be able to relish reading her books. And indeed, to be inspired by her work. If those muslin cloths arrive through the post by Saturday morning, I'll be trying out potted fish this weekend – the result of reading, with mouth watering, the section on potted meats and fish pastes in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

Whoever that writer was who suggested throwing away books by celebrity chefs because they have no real value – they teach you nothing – he was a fool. And he'd do well to actually try reading a book properly next time before claiming that the recipes in such tomes never work properly.

And I rather hope his own literary effort is languishing on the shelves of those remaindered bookshops. It'll save people having to take his own advice and trash the thing after wasting their money on it.

The joy of chocolate

There can be distinct advantages to being stuck in the house all day.

Here I am, still ‘guarding’ the flat, spending a second week working at home.

So the question arises: what does one do with one’s lunch hour?

Well, I had just the thing in mind. Some of Saturday’s sweet, vanilla-flavoured shortcrust pastry was still in the fridge, so it was the business of mere minutes to roll it out and line the tart tin while the oven was heating. Greaseproof paper and baking beans inside, and it was ready to go.

Next, halving the measures in yet another Gordon Ramsay recipe, take 200g of good quality chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids) and break it into a bowl. Heat 125ml of double cream with 75% water, until just reaching the boil, then pour onto the chocolate and whisk until it’s all blended.

The pastry case has had its basic cooking by now, so you take it out, remove the greaseproof paper and beans, and give it another five minutes on a slightly lower heat. Then give it another three minutes after brushing the pastry all over with a glaze of beaten egg yolk and water. Take out and set on one side.

Take a beaten whole egg and add it to the chocolate mix. Whisk in. Then very carefully pour the chocolate ganache through a fine sieve and into the tart case. Slide out an oven shelf and pop the baking tray and tin on to it. Top up the chocolate mixture.

Cook for 25 minutes, then turn off the oven and leave it for another half an hour. Remove and leave to cool. Then chill. Just before serving, dust with sifted icing sugar and cocoa powder.

Now that is the way to spend a lunch hour – and I assure you, it is absolutely divine!