North and south on a plate

Boles de picolat

It seems almost impossible that only just over a week ago, the days were still sunny and hot, with humid nights.

It’s perfectly possible that such weather could return to grant us an Indian summer, but at present, it feels very much autumnal.

The nights are lengthening and the days shortening. The tipping point cannot be far away.

As we emerged from the British Museum on Friday evening at around 7.20pm, it was already pretty much dark, and rain was pitching down.

It didn’t stop until the following morning, yet there was something comforting in hearing the rhythmic pattering outside as I curled up in bed later.

The temperature has dropped and, while it’s not actually cold, it’s a lot cooler. The weekend saw more rain and some pretty blustery wind, largely grey skies, and the first signs of yellowing leaves on the two tall, slender silver birches in the carpark.

When all this is happening, the last thing you want to eat is salad.

I had already contacted Longwood Farm early last week, deciding that a slow Sunday afternoon cook was perfect and could easily be done again.

This time, it was shin of beef and beef kidney for a Vlaamse Stoverij, the Flemish dish that we first ate in Bruges 18 months ago.

The meats are diced and sautéed, followed by onion, carrot and celery. Everything goes into the big Le Creuset pot and is topped with three bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and a slice of bread, spread on one side with mustard.

Then it’s all covered with beer, lidded, and popped into the oven.

I stuck with the 160˚C (fan) from last week’s casserole and cooked it for approximately four hours.

Shin has to be cooked for a long time so that all the connective tissue beaks down, but it’s a cheap and tasty cut – and not one you’ll easily find in a supermarket.

And that was pretty much that.

But if Sunday’s dish evoked northern Europe, and that fluid region where the northernmost part of France meets the south of Belgium, Saturday’s food was all of the south.

I have cooked Boles de Picolat before, but only from that sort of point where you’ve never tasted a dish and are, ultimately, guessing what it should be like.

After our experience at Le Marinade, I decided to give it another whirl.

As with so much traditional food, there is no one cast-in-stone way of doing it.

Between French-language Catalan recipe books and a recipe postcard, I have five recipes – and all are different. One even calls for a small cup of coffee to be added.

The nearest coffee came to my version was the mug beside me as I spent an amiable hour or so studying the recipes on Saturday morning. After that, the books were put away and I worked from the memory of that meal in Collioure, taking a general sense of all the written recipes I’d looked at and combining it with the fact that meatballs are something I consider myself rather good at.

Figs, raspberries, blackberries, cream

So, for two of us, I used 400g of mince.

Now it should have been a mixture of beef and pork (some recipes also use sausage meat or substitute it for the pork), but since no pork mince was forthcoming, I stuck with beef, without too much sense of major loss.

Two small slices of bread were soaked in a small amount of milk and then added to the meat, together with an egg.

Normally, I don't add milky bread or eggs to meatballs – they do not need it to bind – but these ingredients do help to make a particularly light meatball, and the Le Marinade experience suggested that this is what you want for Boles de Picolat.

The flavourings that were added were a good shake of smoky paprika, a little cinnamon and slightly less ginger. You just want a hint of spice to come through.

Once thoroughly mixed together and shaped into balls, these are rolled in plain flour and browned in olive oil.

Okay, I don’t usually flour my meatballs either, but when the mixture is this soft, it helps with the initial cooking. One of the recipes, clearly aimed at rather inexperienced cooks, offered a ‘tip’ in a sidebar, explaining how to four your meatballs by rolling them on a plate of flour. Rocket science.

Once browned, set the balls to one side.

Add a little more oil if you need, and soften a diced onion and some finely chopped garlic. I added a stick of finely chopped celery too.

Give it a very, very large squeeze of tomato purée – we’re probably talking half a 100g tube here – and stir gently into a little warm stock (I had a small jar of defrosted homemade chicken stock that was perfectly okay).

To all that, add some dried mushrooms, a cinnamon stick, some ground black pepper and some finely-chopped flat leaf parsley. Pop the meatballs back, lid it and cook gently for about half an hour.

At this point, test for seasoning and add salt if needed, then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot or cannellini beans, and some drained green olives. Pop the lid back on and give it a further 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with the broth, and top with more finely-chopped flat leaf parsley.

And that is that: easy and very tasty.

I might not seem as obviously ‘southern’ as, say, a ratatouille or a bourride, but it is every bit as much indicative of a region that includes mountain country as well as the coast and the plain.

Perfect Sunday brunch

As a fusion of north and south though, a quick Nigel Slater dessert of figs, served with clotted cream and a scatter of raspberries would take some beating – perfect at this time of year, and you could easily substitute blackberries for the raspberries depending on taste and availability.

The final food note for an autumnal weekend that is worth a mention is the joys of a decent home-cooked English brunch late on a Sunday morning, after a delicious doze snuggled beneath the covers.

Downland’s marmalade sausages and a huge, halved tomato were grilled, while tinned (sorry) mushrooms were cooked in butter.

Three eggs were scrambled in more butter and were served on real fried bread – cooked in lard, in other words.

The only other addition was HP sauce.

North or south, it’s good to remember that, even as you mourn the passing of summer, autumn has many glories and pleasures to offer.

A walk into the hills, and a couple of good meals

 Colliore below, Roussillon coast beyond

After more than a fortnight in which we’d only dined out in an evening twice, we went a bit bonkers in the final week of our stay in Collioure and did so three times.

But this story starts a little bit earlier than you might expect.

Back in May, The Other Half made the trip to Perpignan for the game between Les Dragons Catalans and his beloved Castleford Tigers. The sacrifices he makes!

On the basis that I’d enjoyed a few days on my own the month before, gadding about in northern Germany, he took a day longer than usual – and used it to take the train to Collioure.

Boles de Picolat

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a grim, rainy day, with no opportunity to sit on a beach. The south of France, like most of western Europe, was hardly exempt from the long winter and the non-existent spring.

But before he returned to Perpignan, and after visiting the chateau to see an exhibition there (I’m not quite the only culture vulture in the house), he’d visited a brasserie that we had not tried before on our joint visits.

In large part, the reason that he picked Le Marinade was quite simply because it was open.

Sitting at a small table just inside, with a view over the damp square onto which backs the tourist information office, and from where August’s Fêtes de St Vincent is officially declared open by the mayor, he perused the menu – and realised that it offered a regional speciality that neither of us had tried before: Boles de Picolat.

Créme Catalan

This is Catalan meatballs, and he was most impressed.

During our second week, we were contemplating lunch one non-beach day, and thought that it might prove the ideal thing. But unfortunately, it was almost the end of the day’s lunch service – which is actually a recommendation, when you think about it.

But, early last week, when we had nothing particularly in for the evening, and I was feeling less inclined than usual to contemplate cooking – let alone actually doing it – I suggested that we sauntered along to Le Marinade and see if we couldn’t get a table.

We had no trouble with that, and sat down with a very specific meal choice in mind.

Graphosoma lineatum

The Boles de Picolat was excellent. The lovely meatballs – very light and with meat that had been very finely minced indeed so that it was close to a paté – came in a tomato and pepper sauce, with mushrooms and olives.

This is a top notch Catalan dish.

As a pure coincidence (I'm sure) there were several German diners around us. Does a menu with meatballs draw the northern Europeans? Anyway, I'll be cooking this at home soon, so watch out for the recipe.

In the meantime, after our main course, The Other Half tempted me toward the créme Catalan.

Gnarled vine

Now I utterly adore a créme brûlée, but I’ve only had the Catalan version once before, some years ago, in Barcelona.

The main difference is that it’s flavoured with orange. But my memories of it were also that it was staggeringly rich and very heavy, and that, me being me, after a fairly heavy meal, it was too heavy for my insides.

The Other Half, however, is a connoisseur of crème Catalane, and he assured me that, in Pays Catalan at least, it’s much lighter.

Sisal

On the simple grounds that it was the obvious choice to conclude a specifically Catalan meal, I decided to give it another go.

And I’m very glad that I did. Texturally, this was as light as a yogurt. The orange came through nice and clear, but there was also a hint of warm spice behind it.

All in all, it was a very, very good meal, and a rare opportunity to taste some authentic, rustic Catalan cooking.

The second eating out of the week was a case of going back to Le St Elme, after a five-hour walk in the hills left us feeling that home catering was beyond either of us.

A few words about the walk itself: we took the road out of the village and into the hills and vineyards that Le Petit Train Touristique takes – only of course, we were rather slower.

We had been entirely sensible and made sure we had water, bread, cheese, charcuterie and some fruit, had dressed sensibly, and took our time.

Mind, I had the camera with me so it also became another photo safari: I been becoming more and more fascinated by the scenery, by the plant life and insect life.

Fort St Elme

There was a red and black striped, beetle-like insect on just one of the many varieties of thistle-like plant you find. A Graphosoma lineatum, I learned later.

There were more blackberries growing wild.

There were occasional sisal plants – tall as trees and towering alone or in small groups.

There were cork trees with some of the bark carefully stripped. It grows back, so can be harvested for use in the local wine industry, making any use of plastic ‘corks’ seem even crazier. We knew from previous visits that the hills behind the village were first planted with vines by the Phoenicia, some 3,000 years ago, after they’d discovered that Port Vendre was a deep safe port in a storm.

Dead flower head

There were also, of course, lots of vines bearing lots of grapes. Some dusky, some pale, some glossy black. The harvest is coming soon in an area where they make some magnificent wines – and in particular, a wide array of delightful rosés.

There was vast sprays of wild fennel – but without any of the small snails we’d seen in Salses. And so much more.

There was even – dare I say it? – another fort. Dagommier this time; built just the right distance from Fort Elme for them to lob shots at each other.

It’s been in disrepair for some time, but recently, regional artist Marc-Andre 2 Figueras bought it for a single euro and has found funding to do it up. What he’ll do with it remains to be seen, but it’s got to be better than the rather dangerous relic that it was.

Grapes

We’d decided on that day for a walk because the forecast was for some cloud – in other words, it would be better walking weather. But as we neared Fort St Elme, the sun started seriously breaking through, and we could enjoy an incredible view of Collioure below us and the entire Roussillon plain beyond.

We sat down for a while for some fodder, only to watch in amazement as a rather large ant decided that it was going to take a fallen flake of bread and, come what may, cart it off to the nest. An ant – big by British standards certainly, but still an ant – carrying this piece of bread crust that was, by comparison with it itself, huge.

We carried on, passing Fort St Elme itself, and moving on.

We’ve done the route a number of times in that little tourist ‘train’, but this gave us time to stop and look. And even to think that, next year, we might be able to manage the walk to one of the higher hills beyond, to Madeloc. How ambitious Collioure makes us!

Fennel and a path and open sky

From there on, it was relatively easy, as we followed the road spiraling gently down toward Port Vendre.

But as walkers, we were able to break away and head more directly toward Collioure – although not much more directly.

There was a path over a hill beyond the road, and we took that. In the end, it took us little nearer our destination, but it was nonetheless enjoyable and felt pleasantly deserted.

By the time we got back to Collioure itself, we’d been walking for approximately five hours – and I really didn’t much like cooking or even contemplating what to eat.

And another Collioure sunset

So we went to Le St Elme and The Other Half enjoyed a steak, while I tucked into gambas and chips.

We were pleasantly tired – and also absolutely ravenous.

It might not be the greatest food in town, but it was perfect for what we needed.

And that’s the tale of two of our eatings-out – and one excellent walk.

And it’s also arguably a perfect illustration of why we self cater: the options. They’re beautiful.

A turnip for the book

After a week in which the suddenly-darker evenings and the equally sudden cold had conspired to make the thought of hibernation an enticing one, came a weekend of unexpected triumph – and fair old bit of learning.

It started, as all weekends should, on Friday evening. In this case, the penultimate episode of this year’s Gardeners’ World on the BBC was the inspiration.

It was only the second edition I'd caught since getting going on my own little patch, generally imagining that it would have little of interest or use for someone with an urban patio of approximately three metres by nine.

But this one featured presenter Monty Don gathering leaves – and explaining how it’s worth bagging them up to keep for next year when, as leaf mould, they’ll provide little nutrition, but wonderful structure to soil, which is particularly good for bulbs.

There you are. In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent money on buying compost for the bulbs, and here was a suggestion of how to use something that needs getting rid of anyway.

The forecast for the weekend was sun on Saturday and rain for much of Sunday. And sure enough, Saturday dawned bright and sunny and cold.

After the week’s trip to Broadway Market, I set about a number of tasks – starting with the leaves. There were a few in our own little patch, trying to hide beneath and behind pots, but the wind had swept many, many more into insouciant heaps in the carpark at the back.

It was an easy job to fill a garden sack, which then had a couple of small snips made in it to ensure that the leaves don't get waterlogged.

That done, it was on to stripping out the tomato plants, which were looking rather sad, with the few remaining spilt, unrippened fruits and bedraggled leaves. We didn’t do badly from the tomatoes, but like so much else, I'll know more next time.

And then it was out to the back and to my Schleswig-Holstein patch of ground in the carpark itself.

After finding only dolls house-sized carrots in recent weeks – and there should have been edible baby ones in September – plus no hint of turnips or swedes, I had given up any thoughts of a harvest and was set simply to clear that patch.

But then, as work began, I found a human-sized carrot! Okay, it wasn’t ‘big’, but it was as large as anything you’d see in those pricey packets of ‘baby veg’ in the supermarket.

A few more – smaller, but still edible – also emerged. I was nearly skipping around in excitement.

And better was to come. Because while the swedes really had failed to do anything whatsoever at all, there were small turnips popping above ground; an assortment of shapes and sizes, but all of them cream, topped with a rich, dusky purple.

Excitement squared.

What followed, of course, was the question of what to do with this unexpected harvest: not quite enough for a portion of veg each with our main meal, but demanding to be eaten at the first possible opportunity.

In the event, I’d been planning to try my hand at Königsberger Klopse – a form of German meatball/dumpling that I’d first tasted in Berlin a few years ago.

Mimi Sheraton’s The German Cookbook (which even has a look of scholarliness) had come down from the shelf in consideration of the weekend’s food and, while contemplating frickadellen – the good burgers of Germany – my eyes had landed on her klopse recipe, memory was triggered and the decision made.

After spotting a rather majestic purple kohlrabi on the market, if’d been considering that as a side dish, but my own root veg were calling.

I’m not used to cooking turnips. To be honest, I’ve eaten them so rarely it’s difficult to recall why I decided to sow some. But sow some I had  and now, at long last, they were ready.

The packet had seemed to suggest that we’d have had baby turnips available by the time we arrived back from France at the beginning of September – a thought that, at the time, had produced mouthwatering ideas of a French dish of roast duck and baby turnips.

But once they were in my hands, inexperience meant I was fretting that, with growth having been so slow, they'd be tough if not downright inedible.

But first it was a matter of preparing the klopse.

First, take some mince. Now personally, I’m afraid I tend to ignore amounts when making meatballs: it’s one of the few dishes I now have enough practice at to know how much I need.

So I know that approximately 300g of mince will be fine for two of us.

In this case, that was half and half pork and beef. Tradition allows that it could be a third each of these two, plus veal, but pork is a must.

Take some breadcrumbs – I suppose about a coffee cup full for that amount of meat (goodness knows that that translates to in weight) and mix with the meat. Add two or three finely-chopped anchovies, a finely chopped shallot or two, some chopped parsley and a little grated lemon.

Then add an egg. I don’t normally add egg to meatballs or patties – you don't need it in order to get the mixture to hold together. But in this case, it made sense: the klopse I remembered from Berlin had a very light texture and would benefit from the egg.

In that went. Everything is mixed thoroughly and then, with moist hands, shaped into balls.

I do love how Sheraton almost screams at her readers at this point, warning them not to taste the mix for seasoning because there’s raw pork involved. Would anyone actually do that?

And this is hardly a new publication, with health and safety panic, but one for a US audience, originally published in 1965.

The next step is to take some beef or veal stock and bring it to boiling point.

Cue the fun of defrosting stock quickly – then finding there wasn’t enough beef stock, so having to rapidly defrost a jar of chicken stock and add that.

Yes, I could have used a cube, but even though I’ve finally traced an acceptable veg stock cube (and one that doesn't involve the farming of palm oil, which is damaging orangutan populations), there is a world of difference between a mass-produced stock and a home-produced one. Whatever Marco Pierre White might claim (for money).

And when you’ve bothered to buy decent ingredients, it seems frankly daft not to use the best stock you can.

Once a large pan of shimmering liquid had been brought to a boil, the klopse went in for 15 minutes.

While that's cooking, chop an onion finely and start to cook it in butter. Once it’s browning, add plain flour and mix to cook through and make a roux.

Now at this point, Sheraton would have you add this mix to the stock to thicken, and then continue cooking the klopse in it for a further 15 minutes.

But it seemed easier to let the klopse continue as they were, simply taking a ladle of stock at a time to thin the sauce.

Five minutes from the end, add some capers. And if you want, at the end, pour in some sour cream – a Bavarian addition.

On the side, straightforward boiled spuds – and then the veg, grown by my own fair hands.

I washed off soil carefully, and topped and tailed everything. Then it all simply went into a small pan to boil until tender, with a few peas added to bulk it out.

The klopse were light and satisfying – Sheraton’s tome will not be gathering as much dust in the coming weeks and months.

Unexpected as anchovy and lemon are as ingredients in northern European cookery – they seem its antithesis – they blend well here and don’t dominate.

And so to the turnips: well, they could have done with another two to three minutes – such is my lack of experience in cooking them º but oh my goodness, the taste!

That will be amongst the freshest vegetables I’ve eaten and honestly, there is a difference. There’s a natural sweetness you can barely imagine, together with a complexity and depth of real taste that, in its ability to surprise, is indicative of how much we have become accustomed to blandness on our plates and in our mouths.

The little taste of carrot wasn’t to be sniffed at either.

One thing is certain: my little turnips were an unexpected triumph – and they will most definitely be on the menu again for next year.

Getting passionate about meatballs

I love meatballs. There are no two ways about it – I love them: it's as simple as that.

And not just because meatballs are great food – which they are – but because it was one of the first things that I really felt that I could make well.

That was thanks to a recipe that my friend George gave me: a version involving paprika and sherry, and with the nuggets of tastiness cooked together in their sauce with small potatoes.

I've tried other versions since and those too have worked, and I still regularly cook that Spanish-style one. But tonight, it was meatballs with a tomato sauce and pasta, and for the first time, it was cooked without as much as a single glance at a recipe book and absolutely no recourse to the scales or a jug or anything else to measure with.

So, here's what I did.

For two people:

Take around 150g of pork mince and 150g beef mince. To these add, one thick slice of stale bread that has had the crusts removed and been blitzed into breadcrumbs.

Add a good teaspoon or two of paprika and around the same of dried oregano.

Meatballs don't need to have egg added – this is a myth (and the same goes for burgers too). Thankfully, this was a hint that George included with that recipe and it's never served me wrong. After mixing together the ingredients, keep your hands just moist and roll into balls about the size of a walnut. The above quantities gave me 10 and a baby one.

Gently heat some butter in a large sauté pan. When it's starting to foam and you can smell that lovely aroma, add the meatballs. Don't move them around; let them caramelise. When one part is done, turn them gently and so on, until they've got a lovely, golden surface. Remove to a plate.

Next, add a chopped onion, a chopped stick of celery and a finely chopped clove or two of garlic to the pan and soften gently. If you need it, add a little more butter or some olive oil, although apparently it's also a myth that adding olive oil stops the butter burning – but that's why you need to go gently (thank you, Raymond Blanc).

When all this has softened, add a tin of plum tomatoes (preferably ones in their own juice). If you only have a tin of complete ones in the cupboard, just cut them up roughly in the pan.

Rinse the tin out with hot water and add that (no need to waste that juice and no need for any stock). Check the taste and add salt as required. Grind in plenty of black pepper, add some more paprika and a little touch of dried chili, then a good squeeze of tomato purée.

Next up, a glug of milk – yes, you read that right. Tinned tomatoes are great – no less a culinary luminary than Escoffier championed them – but they can be a touch acidic, so the milk will counter that, and you won't even notice it. Finally, a teaspoon of brown sugar.

Stir it all gently – and taste again – bring to the boil and add the meatballs. Cover and turn the heat down to a minimum. Give it 20 minutes.

Then cook your pasta. I used linguine, with a recommended cooking time of 11 minutes. But since visiting Italy last year, the realisation has dawned that such timings do not actually produce pasta as you find it there. It might be supposed to be al dente, but in Italian reality, that doesn't seem to mean what is produced when you cook something for the time listed on the packet. Or not in my experience.

So it needs a minute or three more. While that's happening, take the lid off the meatballs and sauce, and turn up the heat.

Take a colander and rinse it under hot water before decanting the pasta in it to drain. Plate up the pasta.

By this time, the sauce will be velvety smooth, with chunky bits. Blanc says not to cut onion two finely if you don't want it to melt away but to give you some texture.

And that is that.

The meatballs were light and the sauce full of layers of flavour – the paprika really adds something. That was a darned good dish.

And if I loved meatballs before, I think it's even more the case now. Because cooking like this – without a recipe, without scales – is what Nigel Slater talks about. Now, finally, with some real knowledge and understanding, and some experience, I can cook with passion rather than simply by rote.