The holiday count down begins

You could be forgiven for assuming that, with conference safely in the history books, life would return to whatever passes for normal. But that is not the case.

The production timetable is set out in such a way that we have only the week immediately after to get pretty much an entire journal out. Now this makes complete sense – it’s the issue with all the conference reports in, so members need it as soon as possible. But it’s still a busy week.

It was at this stage, four years ago, that I first realised how bone tired I am by now. We hadn’t booked a holiday, but had been thinking of taking a week in Barcelona.

I said to The Other Half: ‘I can’t do it. If I do a city break, I’ll run around with the camera like a total lunatic, wanting to do as much as possible. I need to sit still and do nothing’.

We were incredibly lucky, so late in the season, to get into a hotel in Collioure for 10 days. We’d visited before, but never stayed there.

It was the first time I’d ever had a real beach holiday. I took something like nine books, because I didn’t really think I could just still for all that time, doing nothing. It didn’t take long to discover just how wrong I was.

We will be back on the same beach in a few weeks, after a week making our way there on trains, via Bordeaux, Carcassonne, Foix and Villefranche de Conflent.

My food aims are already taking shape – well, food and drink, since we’re starting in Bordeaux!

It’s totally perverse, of course, to eat cassoulet in the summer, but one has to make sacrifices sometimes, and in a region that prides itself on that dish, I’ll find somewhere to give the real thing a whirl.

But there's a little time left before I get too excited.

The weekend's food plans dissipated in utter sloth. But a sea bass that I'd intended to use on Sunday evening was deployed on Monday – albeit in a different way.

In an à la River Café way, I par-boiled some new potatoes and then sliced them thickly. These went into an oven dish with olive oil and sliced tomatoes, to be seasoned and then topped with the filleted the fish, before a really generous squeeze of fresh lemon was added.

And then it was into a pre-heated (200˚) oven for around 12-15 minutes (check the potatoes with a knife to see when they're completely cooked).

Nice – and far from difficult or time-consuming.

Tuesday's risotto at the top was made in my usual way: sweat finely chopped shallot, celery and garlic in olive oil. Add your risotto rice and let it pick up the rest of the oil.

Give it a slug of Noilly Prat (or vermouth or white wine) and let the rice absorb that too. Then start adding the simmering stock, a ladle at a time. This was a home-made chicken stock, which was brought gently to a simmer with some more of the dried porcini from Lina Stores.

I'd picked up some lovely mushrooms at Sporeboys on Broadway Market on Saturday, so chopped a few of these and sautéed very gently in more olive oil. A little more of the booze and a squeeze of lemon juice were added, and it was left to gently cook through.

Once the rice has taken on the stock, add some chopped parsley and then the mushrooms and stir gently.

At this point, I added some more of the truffle butter I'd used last time and then lidded it, while I heated a little more oil in the pan I'd used to cook the mushrooms – and then fried two thin slices of 'shroom I'd cut off earlier.

Those, together with more fresh parsley, then topped the finished dish.

And not only was that not at all bad, it was very much another instance of cooking as therapy.

Perfect pasta with a Perpignan twist

If you Google ‘spaghetti’, the third result that you get, after ‘spaghetti bolognese’ and straightforward ‘spaghetti’, is for spaghetti carbonara.

It’s one of the most popular pasta dishes there is, but like so many other things in the world of food, there are plenty of different ways in which this dish with bacon and eggs is made.

A 20th-century arrival amongst the pantheon of great pasta dishes, according to Wikipedia, it’s traditionally made with Guanciale, an unsmoked Italian bacon that’s made with pig's jowl or cheeks. But if your local butcher or deli don’t happen to have any in stock, then worry not: pancetta or some generic lardons or some decent streaky bacon will do just fine.

Last night, I settled for some of the pancetta I'd bought at Lina Stores – opening it was a thrill, seeing such a beautiful piece of bacon was yet another cause to celebrate that trek to Soho for food shopping.

It isn’t common to find cream in the Italian version, although that does feature in versions in France, the UK, the US and Spain, amongst the other countries where it’s popular.

Another matter is that of cheese. As regular readers may recall, The Other Half does not like cheese, but he does like a carbonara as long as it is a cheese free zone.

Many recipes suggest adding cheese, not simply grated, as a garnish on top, but as an integral part of the ‘sauce’. In other words, you whisk the eggs and cream together and pop your grated cheese into that.


Which is interesting, since I’ve known The Other Half order a carbonara in a number of places over the years and I don’t recall him having to request that it have no cheese. I suspect that the restaurant norm is to offer cheese as a garnish.

As it happens, Felicity Cloake, writing recently for the Guardian, was exploring the question of just what makes a perfect quiche lorraine.

It shouldn’t have cheese in, which as Cloake muses: “makes the custard rather salty, which in turn detracts from the bacon, and distracts from the more delicate flavour of the egg.”

So presumably, you could apply much the same theory to a carbonara.

But once we get beyond the cheese question, the main technical issue is that of avoiding scrambling the eggs over the pasta.

There’s nowt wrong with scrambled eggs and pasta – it makes great pre-football brunch fodder – but it isn’t a carbonara.

The usual approach is to take that beaten egg and cream and, at the last minute, add to the pasta and meat after they’ve been removed from direct heat.

But there’s another way – one that we experienced at Le Grand Café de la Bourse in Perpignan a few years ago and have raved about ever since.

Take your pancetta and cut into strips or dice. (If you’re using ready-made lardons you have nothing to do; if you’re using streaky bacon, simply cut it into smallish pieces)

Heat a frying pan and pop the meat in. Don’t move it around too soon or you’ll prevent it from caramelising.

And don’t put it on a very high heat, because you want this to take a little time. You shouldn't need to add any fat if the bacon itself has plenty.

Once you know that that’s well on the way, cook your spaghetti.

When the pasta is cooked, drain and return to the pan. Add some cream. Stir.

Toss in the pancetta.

Put onto serving dishes.

Take one egg per person, crack carefully and divide the egg. Put the yolk back into half the shell and serve on top of the pasta.

To eat, simply take the egg yolk and pour onto the past. Stir.

It will be warm enough to stop the egg being raw, but without any risk of scrambling. And it gives the dish a fabulously silky texture.

And that is that.

The best spaghetti carbonara going – and almost ridiculously easy. The only thing that is vital with anything so simple is to keep the ingredients as good as possible – and it’s particularly the case here with the eggs.

And you certainly won’t want to play fusion games, as Delia has with her oven-baked risotto carbonara.

Let's hear it for the 'shrooms

Last week’s trip to Lina Stores in Soho produced, amongst other things, a bag of dried porcini, the like of which I have never previously known.

Dried mushrooms have become a store cupboard staple in recent years, but none that I have ever purchased in a supermarket have come close to the aroma of these.

I have an idea in my mind of mushrooms as autumnal food, but with the knowledge of having such superior ingredients around in mind, I decided that Tuesday should be a risotto night.

But the aim was to make this mushroom risotto just a little bit special.

So, stock was defrosted as usual and then warmed up with a handful of the new porcini.

Finely chopped shallot, celery and garlic were softened in olive oil, to be joined by Arborio rice.

A glug of white wine followed. Once that was absorbed, the process of adding the now-hot stock, ladle by ladle, began.

In the meantime, organic chestnut mushrooms were sweated down in a tiny amount of olive oil. White wine and lemon juice were added – just a little.

Everything was tasted and seasoned where necessary.

When the rice had absorbed the maximum stock (along with the rehydrated porcini by this time), the chestnut mushrooms were strained and added.

And then the denouement: I’d found a small roll of white truffle butter in the fridge that I’d bought before Easter and then forgotten. So instead of either the classic butter and Parmesan or my own usual crème fraïche, I took the pan off the heat and stirred some through.

And that was not bad at all.

I have, as it happens, just recently got a book on this glorious rice dish – Risotto! Risotto! by Valentina Harris. It’s not so much a question of needing the basics as being curious about all the differently flavoured risottos that she includes recipes for.

That was the result of a browse around Amazon leading me to this out-of-print books, which was available from a private seller.

In the meantime, on the basis of searches and purchases, Amazon seems to have decided that my core interests in terms of reading matter are currently politics/economics, Manchester City, food and Italy.

In terms of the latter, it seems that an interest in Italian food also translates into wanting to read umpteen books about the Cosa Nostra. I don’t.

Still, Amazon more than has its uses. It could be argued that this is a situation where ‘economies of scale’ works rather nicely – and certainly in a way that counters most chain booksellers these days.

Since Amazon can allow the reader to access hundreds of thousands of titles, rather than the more limited numbers in a bookshop – a number that is further limited by most chain bookshops (and other book retailers, such as supermarkets) only opting for the most obvious big sellers – you can end up finding things that you had no idea existed.

I don’t actually like the Amazon search engine much, because you seem to get so many results on an search, but the recommendation programme does produce some nice things.

The latest such discovery is a pair of books by Guardian food writer Matthew Fort, about his travels around Italy and Sicily (the latter a book on its own) on a Vespa. They apparently combine travel, food and history.

Now Fort is not some 20-something feeling all rebellious on his trendy wheels, so I expect something a bit different. I’m looking forward to them.

A culinary pilgrimage to Soho

More culinary exploration and adventures beckoned on Friday, with another day to myself on the cards.

It was all a question of whether to head to Borough Market – or to try something completely new and make my way to Soho for a foodie outing.

After much musing on the subject – lasting until I actually had to decide which bus stop to go to – Soho came out as the winner.

This was a chance to descend a little deeper into Italian food. First, there was time to have a coffee at Bar Italia on Frith Street. An expensive coffee, to be sure, at £3, but it was the best latte I've tasted by a country mile.

Having been past the legendary cafe many times, but never having been in, the time was right to break that duck.

It really is like stepping into a different world. A long, narrow room, football news on two television screens, mirrors, a wonderful jumble of decorations and bar stools at the narrow table around two walls. And then the counter, with chilled cabinets crammed full of cakes and paninis, and a vast coffee maker on top.

It was more than just liquid refreshment; it was an experience.

And then on down Old Compton Street to Brewer Street.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing a new book about Tuscany – recipes combined with writing about the area's produce – when I came across an article about a regional delicacy, Lardo di Colonnata. It's fat from the back of a pig, cured in salt and herbs in baths made of the Carrara marble that is mined nearby – the marble that sculptors from Michelangelo to Henry Moore have chiseled away at.

Have you ever heard of lard being quite so classy?

But in 1996, lardo was nearly sunk, when EU inspectors took one look at the way it was made, threw up their collective hands in horror, proclaimed it unsafe for human consumption and impounded tons of it. To think of all the people it must have killed down the centuries: it's a wonder nobody had noticed ...

Fortunately, the Italian slow food movement stepped in to fight this stupidity, and thus we still have lardo today, made in the traditional – the proper – way.

Days after first reading about lardo, I came across more in Jennifer McLagan's Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient with Recipes, and it made me determined to try to find some.

You can cook with it, but it's mostly eaten thinly sliced on warm bread or toast, which melts it.

An online search soon gave me the name of several Italian delis in central London, but one stood out: Lina Stores. And so that was where I headed.

It's a step back into the past: a delightful shop with a soft green livery (which looked almost impossibly retro when the bag was seen later against a red and white gingham tablecloth). Inside isn't exactly big, but it's a floor-to-ceiling heaven for foodies.

I dipped to smell the dried porcini in a whicker basket and found a heady aroma, which prompted me to pile some gently into a bag.

And then there was the deli counter itself, with it's tantalising selection of cooked meats and cheeses. And there, right at the front, was a piece of Lardo di Colonnata. On hearing that I'd never had it but come in search of exactly that, one of the staff offered me a piece to taste.

Wafer thin, creamily white and wrapping itself around a finger, I tasted. Utter bliss. Fabulously sensual and satisfying.

I left the shop with a piece, together with some pancetta, some pork sausages, a chunk of Pecorino and a jar of bottarga – grated sun-dried roe of the red mullet, which can be used as a garnish on pasta, and something else that I'd be hankering to try.

A little of the precious lardo was used to cook the sausages in the evening, serving them with cannellini beans that I'd cooked together with a small tin of plum tomatoes, and some gnocchi from a packet that had been in the cupboard for some time, waiting to be tried.

Not a difficult meal by any stretch of the imagination, but a tasty one. The sausages were excellent and the vegetables and gnocchi worked well too.

But it's going to be a long time before I forget that amazing first taste of Lardo di Colonnata.