Remember to love your local market

Radishes, Paris style.

With The Other Half away for the weekend, following his beloved Castleford Tigers to Perpignan for their league game against the Catalan Dragons – an act of great personal sacrifice on his part – the opportunity presented itself for personal culinary indulgence.

And with a few days to eat nothing but exactly what I want, a Friday evening visit to Borough Market was the perfect way to get the weekend up and running.

This itself seemed apt, coming as it did just days into Love Your Local Market Fortnight: a time to promote real food and real producers; food that looks and tastes like proper food, and is sold by people, often, who produce it themselves, and certainly care about it.

Given The Other Half's tastes, the menus for such a weekend are easy: seafood and offal. Although not together. Obviously.

It started, on Friday evening, with scallops, pan fried briefly, with canellini beans, chili and lamb's lettuce. River Café Two Easy is the bible for these weekends.

Other purchases included asparagus, plum tomatoes, Jersey Royals and the first English strawberries of the year.

Borough was busy with, as ever, a combination of tourists and bright young things enjoying the start of the weekend.

The market prides itself – and rightly so – on being twinned with the legendary La Boqueria in Barcelona. The tragedy is that the London prices mitigate against everyone being able to use it. In that wonderful market off La Rambla, you'll see little old ladies carefully picking out produce. Not here, sadly.

Where good food in many parts of the Continent is available to all and considered a birthright, there is much more of a class divide in the UK, as with so much else.

Much the same can be said of Broadway Market, although not to quite the same extent: I know that I'm not the only local who shops there, although first thing on a Saturday morning, I'm always convinced that half the 'hipsters' sitting outside cafes with coffee have come straight from Hoxton nightspots with nary an encounter with sleep.

And on Saturday morning, it was straight to Matthew to see what offal he had, with a lovely piece of lamb's liver, thinly sliced, going into the bag.

Next up, fish.

Unfortunately, Vicki had nothing that I wanted, so Fin & Founder had to do the business. I bought a Dover sole and a squid.

"Shall I fillet it?" said the young man of the sole. I demurred. He seemed surprised and offered to at least trim the fins. I demurred again. He almost begged to be allowed to rinse it. I allowed him to do so.

My refusal to let him do anything with the squid appeared even more shocking. "It can make a mess," he offered rather lamely.

"Oh not if you do it properly," I returned, adding that I enjoy doing it - and that it's easy. I left with squid and sole intact in the face of someone who appeared to have the love of knife work that would have delighted a mohel.

Selection vegetables in Barcelona.

I understand that this is part and parcel of the Fin and Founder routine; that it's their way of 'adding value' (and thus helping justify their prices).

And of course there's also an expectation that many customers will lack the skills to prep fish.
Requiring no cutting at all, I also bought a handful of the season's first samphire.

Back at Mark's Ash Green Organics, which is increasingly becoming my go-to greengrocer, fine beans, a courgette, oranges and rhubarb were added to the mix.

The simplicity of approach continued with Saturday lunch. Jerseys were scraped and boiled, to be served with briefly boiled asparagus (four minutes – they were quite thick), and four slices of the liver, pan fried in a very little olive oil.

A 'gravy' was made by melting a teaspoon of redcurrant jelly into the meat juices while it briefly rested.

The only other things required are salt, pepper and good butter.

For evening, it was back to River Café and a recipe I'd tried before.

Take your squid, clean it and thinly slice.

Then take a courgette and cut it into matchsticks.

Octopus in Venice.

Previously, I'd made the mistake of grating the squash far too finely and it all but disappeared. This time, I just used a razor-sharp paring knife and cut it up that way. Salt these for about 15 minutes, then rinse and dry.

This is a very, very quick cook, so it's best to be a bit cheffy and prep all the ingredients first.

Thinly slice as much chili as takes your fancy. Thinly slice a clove of garlic. Juice and zest some lemon.

Get a pan good and hot, add a generous splash of olive oil and, when it's really hot, pop in the squid.

Stir briefly and then add the chili and a grind or two of black pepper.

Stir again, give it all a couple of minutes, then add the courgette and the garlic. Let it cook through – it doesn't take long – and add the lemon. Stir once, twice – and it's ready to serve.

The original recipe serves this with spaghetti, but I opted instead for some good, fresh baguette. It needs little or no added salt.

And it is a feast.

Sunday went a bit off piste in terms of plans, so I saved the sole for Monday and managed, incredibly, to do the best filleting job I've ever managed (it was quite large) and then grill the fillets and serve them with Jerseys and asparagus and fine beans to welcome home The Other Half.

Good food should be a birthright for all of us. And good markets, where you can get good, seasonal produce, should be available for everyone.

Fortunately, many places do still have them – and they're not the rather 'posh' ones like Borough or even Broadway.

Tomatoes in Collioure – I dream of them.

So make sure you love your own local market – you know it's worth it.

And now a tiny 'fession.

Earlier in this piece, I mentioned tourists at Borough. Well, I like to photograph markets too – both at home and abroad.

Markets are wonderful places. So instead of a couple of shots of liver or scallops on a plate, I decided to illustrate this piece with a very few, varied shots.

I hope you enjoy.

And perhaps more to the point – enjoy your own local markets.

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.

Italian food and an English garden

With each passing year, it seems as though my senses sharpen; as though, when we emerge from each winter, I'm raising my face ever more to the sun and snuffle, trying to scent the season itself, like Mole.

The weather forecast for today had predicted good weather early on – and then rain from around noon.

Awake by 7am, I headed down to Columbia Road earlier than in recent weeks. Haggerston Park behind us was almost empty, except for a couple of dog walkers.

Walking through, the low sun lit the horse chestnuts, their little towers of cream blossom; delicate, pink blossom contrasted wonderfully with the blue above, and birdsong filled their air.

It was simply glorious.

The market traders were still setting up. I was far from the only shopper – the tourists and families were absent, though: this early on a Sunday morning was when you could spot the rather more serious gardeners.

There was vivid colour everywhere, but insanely, I couldn't find any nasturtiums.

The stall where I'd bought two pots from around three weeks ago didn't have any, and everybody else gave me cause to believe that it was a act of plain daftness to be looking for such a plant at this point in the year.

In the end, I bought three packets of seeds for different types of nasturtium: tall, Empress and Tom Thumb.


Two more cape daisies (or river daisies, as they were labeled) were irresistible, along with another large pot of the daisy-like flowers I have already potted – in a plain, deep purple this time.

These latter daisies were intended for a tallish pot alongside the two mints and the rosemary.

All of them add wonderful colour, but daisy-type flowers also apparently encourage the 'right type' of insect visitors.

Three pots were sown with nasturtiums. And three more small plugs of catnip were potted with the one that had survived the attentions of Basil, Reggie and The Cat With No Name. This was no gamble, though.

Les from Halifax, who runs a gardening shop just off Columbia Road itself, had managed to find me two plastic cloches. With air vents at the top, they just fit over the catnip and rosemary pots.

So there - drug-nicking visitor cats and rosemary-chomping metallic beetles!

There had been a pot with grass in it next to the mints, but I wanted to move that over to be in catnip corner: the cats have been nibbling it (which was part of the reason for putting it in in the first place) but I didn't want it next to the mint, which needed spraying after starting to attract greenfly.

Amazingly, everything was potted, sorted and tidied by well before noon, even as the weather showed little inclination to do as the Met Office had decreed. The sky stayed blue, the sun stayed warm and the rain stayed away.

With The Other Half leaving in late afternoon for few days' work in Brighton, I'd planned an early lunch.

In this case, pasta with a sauce of dried porcini, sage (from the garden), garlic, chili, lemon and cream, with Parmesan to taste – in other words, for me. It was from the River Café Classic Italian Cookbook and it was yummy.

I had been hoping to make squid with courgette and spaghetti in the evening, but neither Vikki nor Fin & Founder had any: the seas have been too churny for squid in the last couple of weeks.

After a slight near panic, I pulled myself together, went back to Vikki and opted for the biggest lemon sole she had. And, keeping uo the culinary theme for the day, it went under a hot grill, brushed only with good olive oil and served simply with a sprinkle of fleur de sel and a spritz of fresh lemon juice.

Indeed, in something close to a properly structured Italian-style meal, I had simple (English) asparagus with a drizzle of my best oil and a few shavings of pecorino to start.

Such insanely easy food - it almost feels like cheating to call it 'cooking'. But trust me – it was magnifique!

Blue sky thinking

Parts of the UK are basking in sunshine this week - but the temperature has been climbing for a week or so.

When that happens, your mind starts turning away from the big, comforting dishes of the cold, dark months to lighter fodder for lighter days.

And then it's difficult to avoid thoughts automatically turning toward the food of the Mediterranean.

It's some years ago that I started becoming aware of southern Italian cooking, thanks in large part to River Café Two Easy. Without ever really giving it much thought, it became a favourite book - particularly turned to whenever The Other Half was out of town and I was cooking for myself and could eat things like squid.

Alongside very rustic soups, roasted meat dishes (the three-and-a-half hour chicken that I do comes from this book) are various pasta dishes - many of them striking even on the page because of their extraordinary simplicity.

Take the classic Sicilian combination of sardines with pasta. In that book, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers use filleted fish with garlic, flat-leaf parsley, dried chillies, pine nuts, raisins, saffron, lemon and, of course, good virgin oil, and serve it with linguine.

It's not far removed from the apotheosis of exactly that fish and pasta combination, sardo.

Actually, I knew the basics of this specific mix of flavours from an earlier purchase - a book of 32 Practical Pasta Sauces (no author listed) that I picked up for something like £1.99 in Lidl some years ago.

On the basis of cost per recipe, it's possibly the best value cookery book I have.

There's a nod toward sardo in its pages - although it uses fennel bulb, thinly sliced, instead of the dill-like herb that is so much a part of Sicilian cooking and grows alongside the roads of that island.

Otherwise, the only real difference is that it skips the saffron and raisins.

In Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Sicily, however, we get something closer to the real deal.

His Pasta con le sarde has the sardines, of course, but with anchovies too as well as the saffron. And "3 sprigs of wild fennel" of the sort (hopefully) that is now growing in a pot in my garden and which I was astonished to find on Columbia Road being sold as 'bronze fennel'. The raisins are replaced in Locatelli's version with the greater succulence of sultanas.

Okay, there are one or two other refinements: a little white wine here, some breadcrumbs and some chopped onion there, plus a small amount of 'strattu, a Sicilian type of particularly intense tomato purée. Or you can just use purée, since you're unlikely to find 'strattu anywhere outside Sicily, where making it is very much a community affair.

And if you haven't got wild fennel, you can use a teaspoon of fennel seeds, soaked in a little water.

But in those very Arabic ingredients of the nuts and the spice and the dried fruit, together with the chilli and the lemon and the really good oil, you start to get a sense of the island's history - and its cuisine.

Now close your eyes for a minute and imagine it all as fresh as it's possible to be, cooked and eaten under a blazing sun and a saturated, azure sky.

But back to that Lidl book: regular readers may remember a dish of roasted tomato, pepper and chilli, with toasted, ground almonds that has become a favourite. The nuts and the chillies suggest the south of Italy.

Another dish from the same book - actually described as a "Sicilian sauce" - combines roasted tomatoes, pine nuts, sultanas, anchovies and tomato purée.

Returning to River Café Two Easy' I've tried several more dishes - and often the ones with some crumbled dried chilli and lemon.

There's a lovely combination of squid, courgette, garlic, chilli, lemon, with olive oil and marjoram, that's served with spaghetti.

And another favourite of scallops, pan fried with chilli, garlic, borlotti beans, lemon, virgin oil and rocket.

Time and again, since starting to discover these combinations of flavours, I return to them at the first opportunity.

And the Locatelli book is expanding my range. He has a beautiful and ridiculously simple salad with chopped green olives and celery at its heart, plus finely-chopped mint, and finished with a simple dressing of red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, a little water, seasoning and virgin oil - and since it'll keep in the fridge for six months, it's not extravagant or wasteful to make a batch up even for one person.

Regardless of the currant weather, perhaps the emphasis on simplicity and quality ingredients that are the hallmarks of southern Italian cooking in general and Sicilian cooking in particular really is blue sky thinking when it comes to culinary matters?

An Italian job

The weekend began in conventional style: wakened early by a combination of my internal alarm clock, the light outside and the cats, I made coffee and hauled out various recipe books.

Elizabeth David's Italian Food had me reading of ricci (sea urchins) that taste of "the sea, iodine and salt" and should be eaten by scooping out the coral flesh with bread, but "within sight and sound of the sea, preferably after a long swim, and washed down with plenty of cold, local white wine".

You can almost smell and taste them and, if you shut your eyes, the picture that forms in your mind's eye is so tangible that it's almost possible to feel the salty air in the soft down on your flesh.

But this is Hackney; it is early March and the early morning was grey - grey with a vengeance.

At least concentrating on the matter of food helps lift the spirits.

The Other Half had defrosted the freezer, so it was clearly time to start making things to fill it up again.

Since he was off to the other side of London for a rugby league match in the early afternoon, and I needed bag carrying help, we headed up to Broadway Market together nice and early.

With Mrs D's evocative writings in mind, I was about to go all Italian.

Saturday evening was easy: roast chicken, done à la River Cafe Easy Two and which I've mentioned more than once. Three and a half hours and the best roast chicken I've ever produced – every time.

Yesterday, it was served with baby new potatoes that were boiled and then finished off in the oven, for the final half hour of cooking the bird, in olive oil and with fleur de sel and a spring of rosemary.

And then there was some cavallo nero, the Italian kale, which I'd not cooked before.

It was remarkably easy. As per the same book, you cut the cores out of each leaf, and then cook them for five minutes in boiling, salted water. Then refresh and drain. When you're nearing readiness, smash up some fennel seeds and dried chili, and slice some garlic, popping all that into a pan with olive oil and allowing it to cook before adding the leaves for a minute at the end.

Voila! Or whatever they say in Italy. The job was a good un.

In the afternoon, I'd concentrated on making nice things from a vast (and heavy) bag of lemons, plus a 300g bag of frozen, organic raspberries.

The latter went into a very easy sorbet.

The lemons - organic, unwaxed and from Sicily, which place seems to be cropping up more and more in my imagination at present - were unbelievably fragrant.

Zesting and juicing as though my life depended on it, I turned 15 into a sorbet, as per Felicity Cloake's Guardian piece here, while several others were added to a luxurious custard made with organic, unpasturised milk from a Jersey herd, plus unctuous double cream from another Jersey herd, and then popped into the freezer to form a gelato, a form of ice cream.

I haven't the space for an ice cream maker, but you really can manage without, as the four boxes now in the freezer will attest.

And the taste of the gelato in particular attests to something else - the merits of using the very best ingredients you can get your hands on.

The evening concluded with a double dose of Sicily: art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and chef Giorgio Locatelli continuing their cultural and culinary tour of the island. And then Montalbano, another episode of the Sicilian police procedural based on Andrea Camilleri's novels.

A fitting end to a very Italian start to the weekend.

And all after our little part of Hackney even managed to throw up a crime this week that would hardly have been out of place in Montelbano's Mafia-ridden world.

Looking out of the kitchen window as I prepped those Sicilian lemons, I could see across the road, past a block of flats and then to the Regent's Canal. On the far bank crime scene tape was visible, along with police officers.

There, earlier in the week, the torso of former soap actor Gemma McCluskie had been found floating. Her brother is currently in custody.

It was a striking concatenation of events and ideas, flavours and smells, light and darkness.

The start of a wintery weekend

Friends – it is the weekend. The time of the week when I sit down to start contemplating food – as if I don't do it at other times! But there are fewer distractions over the coming days.

I managed to get back to Broadway Market on Friday before Henry Tidiman, our rather good, traditional local butcher, had closed, and thus have something fresh for the evening to get things going with a bang.

Otto, who enquired about the food question the moment I walked through the door, was sated somewhat with a tin of sardine and mackerel from Waitrose – she had to share it with Boudi and Loki, of course, but it made them all a tad calmer.

They mostly eat biscuit, but I have to give in to feline demands occasionally. And this particular example of tinned food always looks so good when you open it – no brown 'mush' – that I'm tempted myself.

That done, it was down to contemplating exactly what to do with the chicken thighs that I had bought.

The temperature is finally fallen to something closer to what you'd expect in January, so it's entirely fitting to feel that need for comforting food.

I know some of you don’t like the cold, but two things strike me: first, when we had the foot and mouth crisis in 2001, it was due in part to having had a number of mild winters in the preceding years. A proper cold spell is needed to kill of a number of nasty things.

And second, before the more recent series of wintery winters, The Other Half and I had spent a new year in Amsterdam.

We’d bought thermals for the purpose – and needed them. But among a number of weather-related memories from that trip, a walk in Vondel Park on New Year’s Eve in the morning stands out: with the small lakes iced over, everyone had come out to play.

There were children and adults on ancient skates and sleds. It might have been a grayish day – high cloud, however – but it was joyous.

And after four days, I returned to London feeling really refreshed and invigorated.

Now, the arrival of genuinely seasonal weather also makes the prospect of sitting down to browse assorted cookbooks even more alluring.

I skinned and boned the chicken – really easy – and then cut it into strips and browned these in a little lard.

Removing to a plate, a diced onion took the place of the meat. When that had been softened, plain flour was added, cooked for a minute or so, and then the pan was deglazed with white wine and white wine vinegar.

Once everything was blended, there was a substantial squirt of tomato purée, a good amount of black pepper, an even better amount of a smoked paprika and some chicken stock.

The chicken went back in the pan, together with some sliced mushrooms and the shredded remains of a cabbage from a couple of days previously. And it was all left to simmer away, under a lid, for half an hour or so.

Once everything was cooked, it simply remained to add a couple of dollops of sour cream, stir in gently and reheat just as gently – and the job’s a good one. Serve with rice.

Yesterday morning it was cold – not a namby pamby southern cold, but cold with real frost and beautifully blue skies.

Cheered enormously, and with a list in my pocket, it was time to head back to Broadway Market, which is slowly returning to normal after the break over new year.

With bags full, it was back home and into the kitchen – after a break to provide Otto with the second fuss session of the day.

In this weather, soup is perfection.

Yesterday, I decided to do a River Café one – rustic and chunky, and as comforting as a big woolly sweater.

Diced butternut squash, chopped garlic, a chopped potato and a tin of tomatoes are added to a pan, together with a little light stock and some crushed fennel seeds.

The recipe says tinned tomatoes are fine – but to drain and not use the juice in the can. Now to me, that’s daft. I tin the lot in and rinse out the remaining juice – I don’t have tinned tomatoes with any junk added anyway. And then I use a little less of any other liquid.

Then let it cook. When the potato is done, mash gently. Serve with a drizzle of good, virgin oil, a dollop of Mascarpone and some grated Parmesan. Lovely.

In the evening, it was a return to trying to improve my fish cookery. Cod again – and I came close to messing it up completely – it wasn’t over-cooked, but I seem utterly incapable of turning fish from the skin side to the non-skin side when it’s been cooked initially on the former.

It doesn’t make things any easier – and it made me a lot swearier – when the skin simply stuck to the pan or came off on my fish slice.

Was the pan hot? Yes. Was the oil (rapeseed) hot too? Yes! The fish was at room temperature and nice and dry. You’d really think that something like that would be so simple, wouldn’t you?

We had some leek, some fine beans (a very rare concession to something other than season, UK veg) and some plain, boiled spuds, with butter and good lemon.

But even my annoyance at the less-than-perfect fish presentation, it was warming, comforting food.

If this weather keeps up, there’ll be more where that came from.

The Christmas gifts you really don't need

It’s getting to that time of year when people start considering gifts – gifts to buy for others; gifts they’d like themselves.

And of course, this is when companies start bombarding us with ideas for just that.

Food gifts might not rate as highly in the UK as they do in France – strange, that – but foodies are not entirely neglected here.

But some of what is on offer could blow you away.

Currently featuring high in the kitchen gadget TV advert stakes is a Cuisinart soup maker, £140 from Amazon at the time of posting.

Now, before you all observe that:

a) all you need to make soup is a pan, a spoon, a knife and a chopping board – with an optional hand-held blender

or

b) I'm becoming a grumpy old woman, let’s look at what such a shiny new toy would give you.

And the perfect place to find out is the reviews section of Amazon.

There, one reviewer wrote: “We have had our soup maker for about 18 months now, and it tends not to get used much any more, in favour of a simple saucepan followed by blending.”

Okay. Why would that be, then?

“The maximum soup capacity of just 1.4L means that a big family only get small helpings.”

So it doesn’t give you enough size flexibility. Is that all?

“… and, why on earth, with such a good basic design, did they choose NOT to give it automatic intermittent stir? The manual stir means one has to remember to stir at intervals, or it can quickly burn – especially during the initial very hot period. That propensity to burn is the downside of a very effective heater used to fry up ingredients before moving on to liquid addition.”

So you don’t save any time, then, because you have to watch it and you have to stir it when it’s busy – exactly as you would with the conventional method.

But there’s more:

“We had to return the very first machine as the ‘spigot’ which is the drive spindle is some sort of plastic, and it lost its shape very quickly. We have been very careful with the replacement, to make sure we don't put too much drive up into the blender chamber. We do not use it for ice-crushing, for that reason.”

So it broke. And as a result, you don’t feel able to use it for one of it’s intended purposes.

“… If we had not had that experience, we would be giving a 3 or 4 star rating.

“Otherwise, it seems certainly well-made, heavy motor and well-thought-out. So, when the MkII comes out with intermittent stir and 2.5L capacity, we will possibly replace.”

So, to recap: in essence, it gives you next to nowt over and above the conventional method of making soup, takes up a lot more space, is less reliable (pans, knives and chopping boards rarely have a bit of plastic that loses shape) and costs well over a ton. And yet you claim you’d get a bigger one if such a thing existed?

It’s only the other day that I mention the ‘Breville Antony Worrall Thompson VTP099 Gourmet Pie Maker’, with a recommended retail price of £47.99.

Also available is the ‘Professional Cooks Gourmet 4 Slot Electric Pie Maker for a mere £26.

Come on – can anyone name me the “professional cooks” who would use a machine like this?

You can get similar machines for cupcakes, and others that promise to make ‘flapjacks, cake bars and breakfast cereal bars’. There are machines for waffles and canapés too.

Most of these take the form of a clunky piece of machinery that opens up like a book and has the halves of assorted moulds in each bit.

Although there is also a Russell Hobbs “cookie maker” that bucks the trend by looking, frankly, more like something you’d find on the shelves of your local ‘private shop’ and intended for male enhancement.

But how many of these do you get? How much storage space have you got?

To be honest, I’m reaching a point where I’m beginning to think that coffee machines are largely an OTT way of doing something that can be achieved just as simply, with far less expense, far less space taken in the kitchen and no bits of machinery to go wrong or get messed up by hard water with a simple cafetière!

Indeed, perhaps it’s heresy, but is ‘instant’ coffee really so much more ‘instant’ than cafetière?

Take a 200g jar of Douwe Egberts “pure smooth” instant – that’s £6.59. Douwe Egberts “cafetière blend twin pack” is £5.49 for two packs of 250g each.

But one thing is for certain: soup makers of the world unite – you have nothing to throw off but your gadgets!

And here's some I made earlier – the proper way.

A version of a River Café Italian rustic soup: peel and slice a couple of cloves of garlic.

Peel and chop a couple of medium potatoes into dice no bigger than 2cm.

Peel and dice a butternut squash.

Put all these in a pan.

Add a tin of plum tomatoes. Rinse out the juice from the tin with hot water and add this too, along with enough stock to cover.

Add a few crushed fennel seeds.

Grind some black pepper into it.

Cook gently for around 30 minutes and test that the potato is cooked through.

Remove from heat and mash – you want it to still have plenty of texture.

Serve with a drizzle of good virgin oil and, if you want, a dollop of marscarpone.

There. Soup. Made properly. How difficult is it?

Food for in-between days

It may still be August, but it's summer in name only. The early promise of sun and heat has not so much tapered out, but generally proved to be a damp squib.

And with the nights seeming to lurch rather than draw in, it's increasingly difficult to play the menu game.

Sat inside, watching rain and cloud dominate the shortening days, instinct seems to demand comfort.

But if simple salads are hardly the order of the day, it's not yet time for chunky soups and hearty stews.

I had Friday off and wandered up to Broadway Market while it was still quiet, sitting down for a latte under cover and debating the food question.

In the end, I tried a Provençal recipe for lunch – red mullet, cleaned but with the liver intact and the scales still on, dampened and then sprinkled with course salt that is patted into the fish.

It's fried (according to my book) in a hot pan for one and a half minutes on one side and then turned carefully and fried for a further two minutes on the other side.

After that, you can sit with it on a plate and use your fingers to pull off the skin, which comes away easy with the salt-encrusted scales. The point is also to eat the liver.

Served with a simple persillade on the side, it smells divine. Unfortunately, the timings were not enough and it wasn't cooked properly below the flesh nearest the surface, so I didn't get to the liver either. But you really can pull the skin right off, easily and cleanly with your fingers.

Remember that I said I'm far from an expert when it comes to cooking with fish? Well, ya lives and ya learns. This is certainly worth trying again sometime, remembering the timings.

Given plenty of time, for the evening I tried something new. Making a bread dough with a little olive oil, it formed the base of a Catalan-style pissaladiere.

In essence, pissaladiere is a form of pizza from Provence, with a topping of onions that have been cooked long and slow, then a lattice pattern of anchovies and olives.

But when we'd had a version of it in Collioure at the end of our trip a year ago, the onion had been replaced with tomato. Which makes regional sense, in that the Catalans on both sides of the Pyrenees eat pan tomate – toasted bread rubbed with a cut garlic clove and then a ripe tomato, seasoned with a drizzle of olive oil and good salt.

Here then was a combination. And I'm pleased to say that, although no recipe seems to exist, it was a success.

The weekend proper left me with further questions. In the end, I bought a chicken and decided that, instead of my usual way of cooking such a bird, à la River Café Easy Two, I'd used another recipe from the same book that the mullet had come from, Flavours of Provence by Clare Ferguson – chicken with 40 cloves.

Now I've done this before, in the past. But not quite like this.

Previously, it had involved a fairly standard roasting, with unpeeled cloves scattered around. Well, that's how I remember it.


This recipe involves scattering a few anchovies in a roasting dish, together with some rinsed/drained capers. The bird goes on top, stuffed with masses of thyme (in my case, with some rosemary too, plus the remains of a left-over lemon and a few loose garlic cloves).

Rub it with a little olive oil (I used that from the tin of anchovies – waste not, want not and so on), season and add a bulb of garlic per person to the roasting dish.

Now Ferguson instructs that you cut the base off each bulb and then pop it into the dish with the rest of the bulb on top. This is a fiddle – not least when the stem of the garlic in the centre is so difficult to cut through that you risk all the individual cloves coming loose.

I made a cut in each to facilitate exchanges of flavour, but didn't try to cut them through fully.

Roast at 200˚C (ordinary oven) for 30 minutes – at which point, Ferguson says to remove the garlic, as it should be cooked. In other words, soft enough to squeeze out and spread on a piece of bread. No chance – well, not in my oven. So after turning the oven down (180˚C) I left it for longer.

The bird – and the author is calculating on one of around 1.5kg here – should then need around 35-40 minutes further. Which seemed to work fine – I even checked the internal temperature just to be sure.

Remove the chicken and garlic to a warm place and, on a hob, add a good glug of robust red wine to the juices and stir well. Add a couple of cloves of the garlic, squeezed from their papery skins and then pulped into the jus.

There's no need to add extra seasoning, as you already have the anchovies and capers. Just skim or drain the fat off and you're ready to go.

Serve – rather obviously – with good bread and the jus on the side.

And very nice it is too. In case you think that that amount of garlic sounds overwhelming, it becomes gloriously sweet and much milder when roasted like this.

For afters, I'd made creme Catalan earlier in the day – a set custard that's lighter than crème brûlée and flavoured with lemon, before being given a burnt sugar topping.

Not quite summer – not quite autumn.

The perfect sort of food for such in-between days.

A triumph, a semi-success and feline gourmets

Setting aside all the preserving, the weekend provided a semi-success and a total triumph on the cooking front.

The semi-success was Saturday night’s meal. Ever desperate to find ‘different’ ways of serving essentially simple foods – in other words, not every plate consisting of basic meat or fish in one third, basic starchy stuff in another and basic veg occupying the final third – I’d managed to come up with a somewhat more interesting idea.

The plan was to oven roast some fish and serve it with a small mushroom risotto and then some courgette fritters.

“Interesting” perhaps, but also a tad more complicated than what I was attempting to improve on.

I got cod – that was easy to roast, with a little olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. The risotto was easy too – I simply had to remember not to use as much rice as I would if it were intended as a main course in its own right. In this case, I used bottled chicken stock, heated gently with dried porcini it it.

I sautéed a few chopped chestnut mushrooms, added a little white wine and a squeeze of lemon to those.

To serve, I topped off the risotto with a little grated truffle.

All of which left the total experiment of the day, the courgette fritters. A courgette was grated, salted and left. But I then – for some reason or other – made the mistake of rinsing it, which then made it difficult to squeeze dry. But anyway, that was combined with some breadcrumbs and around half an egg, for make a rather sloppy mess.

It made four smallish balls, which were rolled in plain flour and then left to sit in the fridge for a few minutes until the actual cooking was advanced enough and the vegetable oil hot enough to fry the fritters.

Amazingly, with care I managed to get them each. into the pan in once piece. And they came out in that state too.

Not sure about the result, though: the taste was okay, but it was an odd texture; very light in a rather strange way – almost like fried soufflés, if that makes any sense.

So, generally, the meal was a success, but I remain unsure about the fritters.

Sunday was another game day. I picked up a pheasant from Andy on the market (and yes, there really was a conversation about ‘pheasant pluckers’).

Now I’ve not tried a great deal of feathered game before – except duck, really – and haven’t felt that, when I have, I’ve really cracked it.

This time, I used a River Café Easy Two recipe, browning the bird on all sides in butter and oil, and then adding halved garlic cloves and bacon, and then roasting it in Chardonnay. Now the recipe specified pancetta, but I had a pack of streaky bacon open, so I used that – and before popping it in the oven, put three of the bacon slices over the bird’s back.

It was basted a couple of times and cooked for longer than specified (my oven is a fan on, so times and temperatures have to be adjusted – the former is something I’m barely getting used to).

In the meantime, I cut the cores out of a load of savoy cabbage leaves, chopped them into strips and then popped in boiling water for around eight minutes. Drain well, and then sauté with more of the halved garlic cloves.

When the bird’s ready, remove and rest, pop the cabbage and garlic into the wine, and reduce a little. It was all served it with riced potatoes.

And that was my triumph of the weekend – the first time I’ve really felt that I’ve cooked game and it’s been really worth it: plenty of taste, but not dry.

Not that the weekend’s foodyism was restricted to the human members of the household.

For a late Sunday breakfast I had toasted a thin slice of bread, buttered it and added the contents of one of a selection of tiny tins of potted meat that I bought in Paris last July.

Otto, who would know from a mile away when I’ve opened one of these small tins, came hurtling through because she also knows that I fully intend to share it with her.

Later, she was determined to see what the soup of the day was too, despite its lack of meat. Not that that ever stops her.

But I can never forget how, when she came to us, I could feel the gaps between her tiny ribs, and her coat was like sheepskin: clearly, she was the runt of the litter who’d not been able to get enough of the teat. Neither her sister not Boudi are so interested in our (well, my) food – so bearing that history in mind, I am particularly tolerant. And besides, what’s the point of having ‘pets’ around the house if you don’t want to treat them as members of your family?

Fortunately, even my little feline gourmet didn’t seem bothered by the pheasant – although the evening was to provide a surprise when not only did she fancy some cheese, but Loki and Boudi also decided that cheese was on their menu too.

This, in the latter’s case, is pretty much unprecedented. Presumably she’d decided that, if the kittens were having something, she wasn’t missing out – no matter what it was!