Let's hear it for the lemons

Has anyone else been watching Two Greedy Italians on BBC2 over the last few weeks?

Old friends Antonio Carluccio and Gennaro Contaldo went back to Italy to visit four areas and talk about the food. Okay, they don’t just talk about it – they cook and eat it.

But the trip is not one where gastronomy is a stand-alone motivation: they meet old friends and family, they share stories of their lives before leaving for the UK.

This is not about food in isolation, but about food as a part of life, of love, of family, of friendship. And what it achieves, starting with the title itself, is a sense of vibrancy and earthiness and sensual pleasure that is an absolute joy to behold. There is poignancy in places, but ultimately, this is a celebration.

And the food is simple and gutsy and full of bold flavours.

There was a scene in the second episode when the pair sat there eating lemons they’d plucked from a tree – peel and all.

Now that could leave a northern European quite shocked.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been drifting toward buying more organic fruit and veg than previously. I noticed with organic Jersey Royals that that the flavour was better.

And then there were the lemons I bought last weekend. A softer yellow, knobblier by far than any you’d find in a supermarket and obviously unwaxed. The aroma when you cut into them absolutely sang.

During the week, we squeezed some on pan-fried tuna and some on grilled lamb chops. Lovely stuff.

And when I opened a bottle of Sicilian-style lemonade (made in France) that I’d picked up as an impulse buy, it was a million miles away from most of what I’ve ever tasted that has been called lemonade.

I have a jar of preserved lemons in to try a couple of Morrocan-style salads from Rick Stein’s Mediterranean – that’ll be different. It might not be eating peel in the same way that Carluccio and Contaldo did in the series, but since I’ve never done it before, it’ll still be a whole new culinary experience.

Natives of Asia, lemons made their European debut near southern Italy, no later than the 1st century AD, during the time of ancient Rome, before being introduced to Persia and Egypt.

The first mentions of lemons in literature are in a 10th century Arabic treatise on farming, and trees were used as an ornamental plant in early Islamic gardens.

But it wasn’t until the middle of the 15th century that the first major cultivation of lemons in Europe began in Genoa.

In recent years, lemons have become something that I always have in the house. But I'm only just discovering that not all lemons are equal.

In a fit of lemony enthusiasm yesterday, I bought a load of the organic ones mentioned above.

First, the juice and zest of three went into a first attempt at gelato, the Italian ice cream that uses an egg custard as its base. It's not perfect: letting concentration slip for mere seconds, I barely saved the custard from boiling, and I need to work on the freezing process; it's a tad too icy. But the taste ...

The other thing I did, while The Other Half was biting his nails over a last-kick Challenge Cup victory for the Castleford Tigers at Wakefield, was to have another go at pasta.

Ravioli again, but this time with proper pasta flour – it's much finer. I used 125g of flour to one egg – and a few drops of chilled water. It was much more elastic – which is how you see it on TV – and seemed a little easier to roll.

The stuffing this time was a mixture of ricotta cheese, pine nuts, Parmesan, a little crème fraïche and lemon zest.

The pasta was thinner this time and I used an off cut to check when it was cooked, throwing that in the pan of boiling water with the ravioli themselves.

The sauce was simple – just some sage leaves fried in good butter and a squeeze of lemon to finish. That was not bad at all. Practice will improve my pasta skills, but it was good to try again so soon, while I still have ideas in my mind about what I did previously.

And if lemon had become an important ingredient for me in the last few years, it might just have moved into a higher pantheon of foods with the experimentation of the last week.

Comforting food for miserable days

With a swathe of basics and baking stuff ordered online, and due to arrive tomorrow, I can look forward to baking tomorrow evening – stollen and lebkucken, which I haven't got around to today.

In the meantime, I've stuck with a fairly easy menu this weekend, but it's comforting food that it's perfect food for facing down yet more miserable weather.

I did a little hopping on Thursday evening and picked up a couple of poussin – in essence, small, young chickens – as I remembered a Jamie Oliver recipe I haven;'t done for years.

Par boil some potatoes until they're about five minutes from being cooked. Drain well and mix with loads of sage leaves, olive oil, peeled garlic cloves and salt and pepper. Now stuff your birds (one per person) with as much of the mix as will go. Pop the rest of the mix in a roasting tin with the stuffed birds. Roast at 220˚C for 30 minutes. Then take some streaky bacon and cover the birds and carry on roasting for a further 15 minutes.

Take the birds out and leave them to rest. Remove as much fat as possible from your roasting tin, then pop in a glass of white wine while it's on a hob, and deglaze.

Serve. I just did some simple carrots with it.

That followed a River Café Easy Two soup at lunchtime, of tomato, butternut squash and potato, seasoned with crushed fennel seeds (and I added celery salt), which is then served with a drizzle of virgin oil, grated Parmesan and a dollop of Mascarpone.

Tonight's grub is marinading. Two hulking pork chops are sitting in a bowl with lemon juice, torn lemon skins, rosemary, peeled and smashed garlic and around 10 glugs of olive oil. I'll give it another hour and then peel and slice some potatoes, core and quarter some pears and scrub and quarter some parsnips. Then everything goes in a roasting tin – meat, veg, marinade – and cook at 220˚C for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the chops (mine will take an hour, I should think).

In the meantime, take some white bread, remove the crust and chop it up. Then blend chopped mint leaves, some medium mustard and wine vinegar until you have a sauce. Or cheat, as I do, and add decent ready-made mint sauce, plus mustard, to the bread.

It's brilliantly tangy to serve with the pork.

Both those Jamie Oliver recipes came from The Return of the Naked Chef – one of the first two cookery books I bought, around nine years ago when I started cooking. I've added more of Oliver's stuff to the shelf over the years, and I keep returning to them. I've used his stuff to learn to make risotto and even bread.

So much of his food is simple – often one dish dishes – without being pernickety. He doesn't, for instance, tend to write that you need half a teaspoon of some finely chopped herb or other: it's more likely to be a handful of something – roughly torn, if anything. And the results are the sort of bursting-with-flavour dishes that, back all those years ago, I could scarcely believe that I could produce.

Oliver gets slagged off by a number of Brits: which I find odd. No, you don't have to like him, but the vitriol seems strange for someone with genuine talent, who has served a real apprenticeship (he actually worked, amongst other places, at the River Café) and has gone on to make good food easy and approachable, to campaign for schools to feed children proper food and not chips and turkey twizzlers and to launch a series of restaurants that aim to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance to get a career in food.

Is it his very success that some people dislike? Perhaps it really does tie in to a rather British thing of building people up and then, when they succeed, trying to knock them at every opportunity. Depressing, though.

Well, at least the food is far from depressing.

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.

A Sunday in the kitchen

It’s Sunday, it’s the morning and I’m on my own for the day so, as Mr Gershwin might ask: what to do, what to do what to do?

It seems amazing that, even though I’m conscious of it now, I still get twinges of guilt if I’m not ‘doing things’ all the time – even when I have a day off work.

Cooking fulfils the need to ‘do things’ – and gives me an increasing amount of pleasure, so I don’t have to give myself excuses for spending time in such a fashion.

So what to cook today?

I have decided to try my hand at a different sort of bread – a date and pecan loaf. To start with, this means dealing with a different type of flour – granary – and then adding the dried yeast differently too; not by mixing it first with liquid, but by putting straight into the flour and salt, and then adding warmed milk and water.

Even after adding all of the specified liquid (and I am an Überpedant when it comes to measuring ingredients during baking), it’s not coming together completely. Fortunately, I’ve seen enough cookery programmes and read enough books to know not to panic and to simply add a little more warmed water.

Knead for about 10 minutes (at which point I realise the error of not removing my baggy, comfortable old sweatshirt first), until it’s a pleasingly elastic dough, then pop into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with cling film and stick into the airing cupboard.

An hour, and a few essential but boring chores later, the dough is ready to be knocked back and have the fruit and nuts added.

Eh? It’s like trying to cram a quart into a pint pot. At least, for such a seemingly impossible task, I’ve removed my sweatshirt first, and am standing in the kitchen with arms bared and just a t-shirt between me and the dough. It’s an elemental struggle!

I get as much in as I feel is possible, then kneed again for another couple of minutes before it’s rolled it into a ball, plopped it on a baking tray, covered in a clean tea towel and returned to the warm shelf above the boiler.

It might not be very Francophile, but Oasis makes a great driving accompaniment for such endeavour.

Amazingy, it’s almost 3pm when the second proofing is complete. Time flies when you’re having fun. A quick brush with water, a generous dusting with more of the granary flour, and it can go into the pre-heated oven.

Now, for the first time in what seems to have been a frenetic weekend, I’m going to go and sit down and have a read.

Some time later, the bread is cooked. But for all the magnificent aroma, you can’t eat it yet. Oh no, you have to wait to let it cool at least a bit. It’s a form of torture. And in today’s specific case, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as mad for a slice of ‘mere’ bread.

Thus comes the ‘Oh My God’ moment. Still warm, so the butter starts to melt invitingly. So sweet from the dates. Gorgeous. That’s three slices gone already.

More reading. And then: good grief! Where has the time gone?

It’s almost 6pm, but still light, since this is the first day of British Summer Time. It catches you out.

So to dinner. I’m continuing yesterday’s Gordon Ramsay mood, but this time with a dish from A Passion for Flavour: roasted salmon with a sweet and sour red pepper sauce.

To start with, that means softening very finely chopped red pepper and shallot in butter, together with some herbs. Now, partly because this dish is only for one person and not the four that the recipe is designed for, I’m adapting a bit. That and not having all the recommended ingredients.

I haven’t got any Noilly Prat, which chefs seem to love. Vermouth is the next best thing and there’s always some in the cupboard for risotto.

One of the herbs that I don’t have is tarragon, but since I have a French tarragon white wine vinegar, that can easily substitute for the plain white wine vinegar in the book. And one pepper (a red one) will to do instead of two red and two yellow. And today – what a crime! – it’ll be veg stock out of a bottle and not a proper, homemade vegetable nage. So there, Gordon! But thanks for the recipe anyway.

Ramsay has been on telly a couple of times in the last week, with new episodes of the US version of Kitchen Nightmares.

One can’t help but wonder why, if restaurant owners contact the production company to ask them to send in the gobby Glaswegian genius because help is required, so many of them are then so reluctant to take the advice that is dished out?

The pepper sauce has had the vermouth, the tarragon white wine vinegar and the stock added, been simmered for 20 minutes and then had the herbs removed.

Rice is now on and the oven heating for the salmon. For a Ramsay concoction, this seems really easy. All the sauce needs to finish it is a little more butter whisked in. The fish gets 10 minutes in the oven – nothing more required except to sit down and eat, with a glass of red wine and some Dean Martin on the deck.

Perhaps this is one of the most indulgent things that you can ever do – cook really good food just for yourself?

And on that note – cheers!

Terrific tuna

Here it is: today's tuna, with slivers of garlic and red jalapeno chilli inserted into carefully cut slits in the succulent flesh, and with rosemary added for even more flavour.

Then it was all ready to pop into a pot with loads of tinned tomatoes and juice, anchovies and capers. It was poached gently for about 30 minutes and then served with hanks of good bread.

Mmmmmm. That's why I like food.

And that's why I'm always bemused by the attitude in this country toward Jamie Oliver. This dish comes from Jamie's Italy. Now okay, the "pukka" stuff on TV might be a tad irritating, but his books make it easy to cook great food. Perhaps that's the problem? Maybe if he was 'selling out' like Gary Rhodes, who has taken to advertising spread that's had the fat stripped out of it, thus becoming gray and requiring colourings as well as flavour to be added to it – otherwise known as margarine – he'd be less of a target for so many people?

After all, the whinging about Oliver surely can't be jealousy at someone's success, can it?