Convenience food – voluptuously

It’s Friday, it’s well gone 4.55pm (but it’s not Crackerjack) and the Voluptuous Manifesto is bloody knackered.

What happens then? I want to eat well – but I am seriously not feeling in the mood to spend an hour or more in the kitchen. Is there a solution?

Well yes – there is. And amazing as it may sound to readers of this blog, it comes in the shape of three cans and a jar.

I had thought about pottering off for fresh fodder, but by the time my shift was done, I was glazed of eye and dull of mind, and all I wanted to do was get home and slump.

We all feel like that on occasions. The question is, can you make a good meal – and I do mean a seriously, volutuously good one – from the store cupboard?

Well, it does rather depend on the cupboard, but here goes.

Set the oven to approximately 155˚C (fan).

From a jar, decant some sauerkraut into a pan, just cover it with water, and simmer for a good 20 minutes or so. If you want, add a clove or two, the odd peppercorn, a few juniper berries and a bay leaf.

Open a tin of duck confit. Lift up the legs gently and let most of the duck fat drip slowly off. Do not throw any of this fabulous stuff away: remember, this is the fat of the ‘French Paradox’.

Pop the duck legs in a dish and from there into the oven for around 15 minutes.

One of the things with this dish is that it is not going to spoil – you’re not easily going to ‘overcook’ it.

Go and have a sit down. Have a cup of tea or a glass of wine.

Then rinse and drain a tin of cannellini beans and a small tine of new potatoes.

Dry the potatoes gently with kitchen paper.

Then pop the potatoes, the sauerkraut and the beans either into the same roasting dish as the duck – or in another one that has had a little of the duck fat melting in it.

Give it 10 to 15 minutes and … voila!

There you are. That’s the easiest gourmet dinner you’ll cook.

The thing is, convenience food is not cheap. But on occasion, it can be perfectly good.

The tinned confit ingredients were simply duck, duck fat and salt. Exactly as it should be.

For the sauerkraut, just white cabbage and salt – again, exactly as it right.

Both are traditional preserved foods: sauerkraut, incidentally, is not pickled, but fermented – and in parts of Germany and eastern Europe, they swear by the liquid as a health drink.

I find myself drifting back to the post the other day about the noble porker: we have forgotten, it seems to me, about preserved foods – other than jams and chutneys.

And it's worth noting that such traditional foods as the confit and the sauerkraut do not come with instructions on the tin or jar: these are foods that it is assumed the cook will know how to use.

The potatoes and the beans may be a slight cheat, but in terms of what I used, the waters came in water only, with no added salt. The only thing, apart from beans and water in the cannellini, was salt, and you can easily rinse them.

If this seems to be a strange combination of national foods – a cross between France, Germany and Italy – well it’s not really. In a cassoulet, beans are as essential an ingredient as the duck legs, while choucroute garni, a traditional dish from the Alsace region, incorporates sauerkraut and assorted meats.

Sauerkraut is also to be found in the cuisine of northern Italy – it’s not just a specifically German speciality.

I would recommend that you get hold of German sauerkraut – Polish is available, but it is, generally speaking, rather rougher.

This is a dish that sates superbly. You could quite easily remove the potatoes altogether. One of the big things here is the mouth feel.

That may sound like a phrase that foodie snobs use – and it is – but it has an everyday meaning and significance.

How food feels in your mouth – how the very experience of eating feels – is one of the factors that influences how sated you feel.

And this is a dream.

Go on – seriously. Take your time and think about how it feels when you bite down, when you move it around in mouth. Relish it.

The mouth feel is a major reason why I like cooking tinned cannelloni in good fat – they become wonderfully unctuous.

Okay, it might not be something to do quite every day, but it is real, real food – and it is as easy as anything.

And by god, as the nights draw in, the leaves fall to the ground and the temperature plummets, it is like being snuggled in a gloriously soft cardi, and hugged by warm and adoring cats.

In a dish.

Now what on Earth more could you want than that?

The joy of real food

It's late on Sunday afternoon: in the oven, a leg of lamb is roasting away, in olive oil, rosemary and garlic. A culinary cliché, chef Rowley Leigh argued recently in the FT, but there are reasons for clichés - and often because they work.

Potatoes are being par-boiled and will finish off in the juices while the meat is resting, along with some similarly par-boiled florets of cauliflower and a small tin of cannelloni beans.

The smell as I sit writing is wonderful, with the promise of magnificent tastes to come.

But this, to me, is not simply good eating in the taste stakes, but there's nothing unhealthy about it either.

I noticed this morning that the media is getting excited again about fat people - more to the point, the obesity epidemic. It helps that Jamie Oliver was involved in the story, thus giving a celebrity angle.

As so often before, the subject allowed space for a rush of bigotry as well as some staggering displays of ignorance in the online comments sections of at least one publication - and experience says that it will not have been unique.

Condemning the overweight has not only taken on the scale of a national obsession, it seems to be the one remaining bigotry that you're allowed. People who would object to racism or sexism or myriad other isms suddenly seem liberated from such squeamishness when the subject of fatties raises it's heavy head, and freely burst out into tirades of nastiness.

But the same people are staggeringly ignorant too. They seem to think that weight is a simple issue: in effect, that it's just a matter of calories in and calories out. That the overweight are simply lazy and greedy.

Well, it isn't that simple. As more and more researchers are discovering.

In fact, it's more complicated than anyone really knows.

We know now that telling people to cut all fat is unhealthy and counterproductive. We know now that the advice to fill up with complex carbohydrates like potatoes and bad and pasta is flawed and actually helped people to pack weight on.

The French, as so often, provide an interesting comparison and some probable pointers. They don't have the same widespread problem - and yet neither are they a nation of gym bunnies. But they do walk more and aren't so obsessed with taking the car on even the shortest journey.

They sit down to eat properly - they don't eat lunch at their desks or dinner in front of the TV, which probably doesn't do much for the digestion.

Although some changes have occurred, they still, by and large, eat proper food - far less processed and fast food. And in one intriguing piece of observation, it's apparently been noted that even with eating at McDonalds, the French actually sit down and eat properly.

They don't have the snacking culture that we do.

Generally speaking, their food is a great deal better than ours - bread is just one example of an area where we fill our food full of rubbish.

There are also question marks over artificial sweeteners - just as there are over artificial fats.

But one thing that struck me about the level of debate is how much there is also an assumption that healthy eating means eating 'health food'. We seem to have reached a point where many people would not consider the meal I described above as 'healthy'.

Now I'm not suggesting that we want to start thinking of food in such terms - quite the contrary. A bit of real joy in eating would be a move in the right direction.

There is a nasty puritanism to those who rant, from the anonymous safety of their keyboards, where their own bodies cannot be judged, about the bad fat people. Similarly, there is an unpleasant puritanism and life-denying joylessness to ideas that to eat healthily, you have to forego anything that's actually nice and take on the attributes of an aesthetic.

The absurdity of thinking that the alternative to a diet of junk food is, say, 'whole foods' and no fats (say bye bye to that mashed potato with butter and cream) seems to be a perfect illustration of just how messed up the food culture in the UK is.

Before the lamb went into the oven, there was plenty of other culinary activity of a distinctly joyful type.

As planned, it was time for chutney: I opted for a pear one from Lynda Brown's The Preserving Book, using pears, a couple of onions, three tomatoes, some sultanas (instead of raisins), ground ginger, chilli flakes (instead of cayenne pepper, which I didn't have in), demerara sugar and, instead of cider vinegar, the remains of a bottle of Breton cider.

The only other change I made to the recipe was to skin the tomatoes first.

It took well over the two and a half hours to cook, but the smell was stunning and it developed to a really rich, dark hue. Now it's all packed into a jar and has been put away to mature for that festival at the end of the year.

With that done, it was onto the blackcurrant jam. A simple matter of the fruit, washed, with a little water, the juice of a lemon and some sugar, all brought to a bubble and then cooked vigorously for a good 10 minutes.

It was another lovely smell - and the taste is fine too. Blackcurrants have naturally high levels of pectin, so a jam sets really easily, while the lemon juice ensures that it's not too sweet.

Now I don't know about you, but that sounds a pretty healthy day's cooking to me.

Bottle it up

After what can, at its most generous, be described as a somewhat erratic August, September made a point of stepping out, fresh and bright this morning.

It soon clouded over, of course, but there are pleasures aplenty to be found at this time of year and the thought of them can make even such grey days brighter.

I have most of Saturday to myself, with The Other Half Yorkshire bound for Castleford’s final home game of the ordinary season.

So what to do?

This is, surely, the season of putting things into jars – and indeed, it’s the perfect time to think about chutneys and so on for the end-of-the-year jollies – it might be September, but I refuse to mention ‘that’ festival by name this early.

Indeed, if I do make chutney, it’ll actually mean that I’ve managed to be more advanced in my culinary planning than at any time previously in my life.

Within the last year, I’ve picked up a copy of Lynda Brown’s The Preserving Book, which is a mouth-watering volume of ideas for a wide variety of preserving styles.

So right at this moment, I don’t know quite what I’ll make, but it will be a pleasure all of its own to spend a couple of evenings browsing and musing.

But continuing the theme, I know that I want to make blackcurrant jam, so Saturday morning will probably see a raid on the local Turkish grocers that has these glorious, grown-up fruits on sale.

And then there’s the possibility of a rather big challenge: for some years, I’ve been trying to get my hands on some crabapples.

My maternal grandmother had crab apple trees in her garden, and every year, we’d collect bags of the fruit, to be made into a beautiful, clear pink jelly by my mother.

These absolute gems make a magnificent savoury condiment that’s utterly divine with good sausages – and other thing, of course. Well, that’s certainly my memory.

Finally, after so long, Mark, the organic greengrocer on Broadway Market, thinks that he can get me some this year.

But on one condition – he’s promised to ‘do me a deal’, on the basis that I’ll make sure there’s a jar of the finished jelly for him too, since he says he’s too busy to make his own.

I’m tickled pink. There is something so gloriously old-fashioned about making such an arrangement. It’s a market working at its best, on a genuinely human scale.

There are one or two other things that tempt me: I know that The Other Half, for instance, is rather hoping that, if I carry out my threat to render pork fat at home and produce my own lard – so that, unlike most shop-available stuff, it hasn’t been pointlessly hydrogenated – I’ll do it when he’s away.

Or perhaps that’s already quite enough for one weekend!

A right old kitchen binge

As this week draws to its close, I’ll be in the midst of four days (and nights) in Glasgow for work. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Four days and four nights of no cooking. That’s the sort of very simple stat that makes me realise just how much I enjoy my weekends in the kitchen these days.

And so it was with that at least partly in mind that I planned the weekend just gone to be a downright kitchen binge.

The first thing on the agenda was a spot of preserving. Specifically, since it’s January and the season of Seville oranges, a spot of marmalade making.

My mother used to make marmalade: when very young, I considered it quite clever to alliterate madly and describe it as ‘mummy-made marmalade’, which also flowed rather nicely. Well, as I said – I was very young.

But with it being the time of year for Seville oranges, my mind had been turning that way for some time.

It seems to be some sort of modern seasonal disorder. No, not making marmalade.

But for the last two Januaries at least, someone has been predicting the impending death of marmalade. Put it another way: some supermarket has been predicting the demise of that lovely stuff.

Through various searches, I found Dan Lepard’s 2010 Guardian article on the subject, in which he rather adroitly responds to this annual hysteria – and then offers up a recipe for Seville oranges.

But then my eye was caught by his footnote about other flavours. I have long liked lemon marmalade – even though, as far as I can recall, my sole experience of it has been the mass-produced stuff. My mind started moving in that direction.

So, on Saturday morning, off I went to Broadway Market – a visit that included a lovely chat with Andy at the game stall about Scottish food in general and Glasgow restaurants specifically; a passionate exchange with Richard at Wild Dartmoor Beef about proposed mass factory dairy farms; a conversation with Vicki about the prospect of David Beckham actually playing for Tottenham, and a gab with Max at La Bouche about … well, about all sorts of things.

At the organic stall, the lemons had some pale green splotches, so I asked the man whose stall it is (I’m afraid I don’t know his name, even though we’ve chatted many times and he's been enormously helpful), whether they’d be good for marmalade.

With a stony face, he informed me that they would be wonderful for lemon curd but that if I wanted to make marmalade, then the Seville oranges were there (pointing). Suitably chastised, I bought 540g of the oranges and a large lemon, and made my way home.

It takes little time to peel all the fruit using one of those y-shaped potato peelers. Then the fruit is roughly chopped and bunged in a large pot with a litre of water. Simmer gently for two hours, then pop a colander on top of a bowl, line with muslin and tip all your fruit and liquid into it.

The recipe says to leave for an hour – and not to squeeze. I didn’t squeeze, but I did leave it overnight. Tasting the liquid the following morning – I don’t think I’d realised just how bitter Seville oranges are.

First thing on Sunday (by “first thing”, I do mean when I eventually got up and after I’d had coffee – this was Sunday, after all) I measured the liquid and topped it up to 750ml. I weighed out 800g ordinary granulated sugar, popped this and the liquid into a big pan and brought to the boil.

As per the instructions, I watched for a temperature of 104˚ – oh, the joys of finally having a jam thermometer! – and gave it five minutes. Then, while I was waiting to see if a splodge set on a chilled saucer, it got another five minutes and, using the same method, another five as I tested a second dollop.

It was beginning to wrinkle, so the hob was switched off. You leave the pan for 20 minutes and then decant into sterilised jars. This really isn’t difficult stuff.

By the evening, it had cooled completely and set softly. I spread a bit of bread with some butter and tried a bit. Absolutely scrummy.

But man cannot lived by marmalade-making alone. So on Saturday afternoon, continuing my heavy-duty kitchen weekend theme, I made petits pots de crème. One of that vast range of French set custards, I flavoured this with chocolate.

For our main course in the evening, I’d bought some cod and grilled that: a good 10cm from a hot element and brushed with butter (that had been melted in one of those miniature copper pans – so there, Other Half: they have a use) and given about 10 minutes.

By that time, I’d taken three anchovies from a pack, dried and then blitzed them in my little Cuisinart, then added softened butter, mixed it all together and rolled it in foil to go back in the fridge to chill.

Grilled cod with anchovy butter: sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet the idea was from The Complete Escoffier, which makes it sounds considerably posier! Sticking with Escoffier, I served it with plain boiled potatoes, and then added some sautéed/steamed leeks on the side.

After I’d set the marmalade cooking on Sunday, it was back to desserts. This time, to celebrate the year's first forced rhubarb from Yorkshire’s ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, three sticks were cut into thumb-length pieces and gently cooked in orange juice, with star anise and cardamom pods until soft but still holding together.

These were popped into glasses and the remaining liquid boiled to a syrup, which was poured over. Leave to chill.

Later, some double cream was whipped with caster sugar and a glug of the remaining Banyuls until stiff, then popped on top of the rhubarb mix and put back into the fridge. This is a Sarah Raven recipe from her Garden Cookbook (apart from the Banyuls, fairly obviously), and I’m rather fond of it.

Our main course was shoulder of lamb, roasted with olive oil, garlic and lashings of thyme. When the meat is resting, decant a drained and dried tin of new potatoes (it’s a cheat, I admit – when the real new potatoes are out, I’d use them, par-boiling first), a tin of cannellini beans and four halved artichoke hearts into the oil, lamb fat, garlic and thyme. Pop back into the oven, turn the temperature up a tad and then leave until the meat is rested and carved.

Phew! But before that, there’d been lunch.

Ever since I’d got that batch of Michel Roux books over the festive season, I’d been building myself up to trying one of his pastry dishes. More to the point – trying some of his pastry.

Roux gives details for a flan pastry – but also for a pâte brisée, which he describes as more delicate and slightly harder to use than the other form of shortcrust. But I wanted to give this a go, since it sounded wonderful and was a new challenge: something slightly beyond what I’d done before in the pastry realm.

It was easy enough to mix with the Kenwood (which really is already coming into its own – thanks, Other Half). Plain flour, diced and lightly softened butter, an egg, a little fine salt and a pinch of sugar are creamed, before a very little milk is added to bring it together.

Once that's happened, you use your palms to push it forward just four or five times to smooth it. Then either use – or wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge or freezer. It'll keep for a week in the former and three months in the latter.

I rolled it carefully, nice and thin, and lined my tart dish, carefully pushing the pastry into each indentation on the side. That was then lined with scrunched parchment paper and filled with baking beans, before chilling in the freezer while the oven heated.

Blind baking done, the beads and paper are removed and it’s returned to the oven for a few minutes more for the base to dry out and cook.

At this point, I realised that it had shrunk a little and I had to patch at one point where I had clumsily managed to put my finger through into the space behind caused by the shrinkage. This needs to be remembered for future attempts. I trimmed the excess pastry from the rim of the dish at this point.

For the filling, I thinly sliced a large onion – the mandolin got another workout – and cut up some streaky bacon. These were cooked together and then spread carefully in the pastry case. A couple of eggs and some double cream were mixed up with seasoning and poured over the bacon and onion mix.

It had around 25 minutes in the oven. Tasty in general, the pastry was a dream of buttery crumbliness. Wikipedia may claim that pâte brisée is ‘just’ shortcrust pastry by another name, but on the basis of this, that’s far short of the point.

One thing that the weekend also illustrated was that it’s no wonder that I struggle with my oven at times. I’ve also got an oven thermometer after such a thing was recommended in the Roux brothers’ French Country Cooking.

It made its debut for the lamb – and I discovered that the temperature barely came actually close to what I had set it for.

I’ll keep testing – if only to make sure that I was not misreading something – but it does explain a great deal.

But that was the one ‘downside’ on a weekend that, if it didn’t quite leave me ready for my Glasgow adventure, did leave me with a very great deal of satisfaction and achievement.

Self preservation society

There are so many things in the food world that you imagine are complicated to make – or perhaps it’s simply that we’ve all got so used to buying them ready-made that we don’t consider actually doing it ourselves.

Preserving is one such thing – and now I’ve realised how easy it is – and how rewarding and how good the results can be – I want to do more and more.

For some time, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing my own duck confit, but had had no luck buying duck legs on Broadway Market (and you can forget supermarkets for such things).

If that sounds a bit extravagant, it should actually work out cheaper than buying them ready-made. I bought a tin of two a few weeks ago – it made a lovely mid-week supper – but the tin was over a tenner. This is a bit bonkers, really, since it’s essentially peasant food.

Nipping to Borough Market briefly, I picked up two very large duck legs for comfortably under £5. Okay, I needed to buy the duck fat too, but that can be recycled over and over for confit once I’ve got going and assuming I decided to do it again. So in other words, after an initial investment (still be cheaper than the tinned variety), my own duck confit will get cheaper and cheaper.

Using the recipe in Hot Sun, Cool Shadow by Angela Murrills (she also points out that there are as many views on how to make duck confit as there are people who make it and, France being France, it causes arguments about which way is best), I mixed course salt with black peppercorns, a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic and a couple of a bay leaves, and then rubbed it into the legs. Then they went in a bowl, were covered in cling film and spent the night in the fridge.

This morning – brighter, clearer and colder than it’s been of late – saw three jars of duck fat decanted into a pan and heated to shimmering, at which stage the duck legs were carefully submerged in the liquid fat, a lid popped on and the heat turned to a minimum.

Being big legs, they got around 90 minutes like that. Then, after being tested with a skewer, they were allowed to cool a little before being carefully lifted out and placed in a large – and sterilised – jar. The fat was then brought back to the boil and sieved into the jar, over the duck legs.

At which point: ‘Argh! I haven’t got enough fat to completely cover them!’ The end of the legs were uncovered. Fortunately, La Bouche is open on a Sunday, so I bolted up the road and they found me two small jars in a backroom. Saved! That was heated while I donned Marigolds and washed up a number of very greasy items, and voilà! Now the legs are safely covered with golden fat, slowly beginning to cool.

And so to the next part of the weekend’s preservation experiments.

Having opened a bottle of liquid pectin to save my quince and medlar jelly last week, I wanted to use it up. So I was contemplating all sorts of jelly and jams.

But once up on Broadway Market, I spotted some delightful mini plum tomatoes on the Isle of Wight tomato stall (which won’t be around for much longer this year).

Earlier in the week, I’d seen a recipe for a tomato and chili jelly online, but it slowly dawned on me that what would be better was a tomato and chili chutney – perfect for the forthcoming festive season.

Like so many other things, chutney is not something I’ve made before. So, with chillis in the house and two punnets of plum toms in my bag, I headed back to the kitchen via the internet, where I checked out further recipes.

The one that caught my eye was a Jamie Oliver one for ‘cheeky chilli pepper chutney’.

So I decided to use that as a guide. I took my tomatoes and halved and de-seeded them (around three dozen of the little lovelies), which also served to remind my newly scarred hands of the morning’s play-fight with Otto: ‘Ouch!’

After draining on kitchen paper, all the halves were placed skin side up on a foil-covered baking tray and placed under a hot grill (about 10cm from the heat source). Two red chillis were also halved, roughly de-seeded (there’s a point to chili seeds, whereas tomato seeds add nothing by way of flavour) and roasted in the same way.

It takes around 15 minutes under my grill, but you can easily tell when they’re done: the skins are charred and, in the case of the tomatoes, were already rising off the fruits as though trying to remove themselves. I removed all the skins, roughly chopped the chillis (the tomatoes didn’t need it) and decanted all the fruits into a bowl.

Then came a small onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, finely chopped and set to soften in a little olive oil. Improvising, I added green peppercorns (there was a jar in the fridge) and a couple of bay leaves.

When the onion and garlic were softened, the tomatoes and chillis went into the pan, with salt, a very roughly estimated amount of brown sugar and an equally roughly estimated amount of light Balsamic vinegar (one for dipping bread). And then it was all left to simmer away.

Still doing this on something of a wing and a prayer, I decided to consult Delia, the goddess of cookery basics. The Complete Cookery Course revealed that the key to knowing when a chutney is ready is that you can take a spoon through the mix – and it doesn’t instantly fill with the vinegar.

That stage was reached in relatively short order and the mix was decanted into a small jar. It’s cook’s privilege to test, of course, and on the basis of a licked spoon, it’s going to be gorgeous and with a very nice bit of heat.

Delia says you shouldn’t touch a chutney for three months: now it’s ‘only’ seven weeks until C*r*s*m*s, so it won’t have quite as long as she asserts, but at least by doing it now, it’ll have some time to mature a bit.

I look forward to some with cheese. And talking of cheese, last week I found something called Kidderton Ash in Waitrose. Courtesy of Butler’s Farmhouse Cheeses, this is a lovely, delicate goat’s cheese that’s dusted with ash before it’s skin forms. Very nice.

And my rapid sortie to Borough gave me the opportunity to pick up some wonderful Gorwydd Caerphilly and an aged Gouda: the latter is lovely and nutty – the damage to the reputation of Dutch cheeses by the plastic, low-fat (it’s beloved of dieters) excuse for cheese that is Edam reminds me of the damage caused to the reputation of German wines by Blue Nun and Black Tower.

But such delights aside – although never out of reach – it has been a very satisfying weekend on the preservation front. Now all I have to do is wait.

Of politics, baking and preserves

It was a pleasant morning in London – which was provident, since I did the second leg of my journey to work on foot. Traffic was snarled more than usual as commuters took to their cars, with swathes of the underground closed by strike action.

I don’t like the Tube (and avoid taking it unless absolutely necessary) and I don’t like RMT leader Bob Crow, but looking beyond the usual shrill headlines about how awful it all is, they have a serious case. Anyone who really believes that you can get rid of 800 staff without having an impact on service and safety is naïve in the extreme, I think.

One thing that struck me recently, given all the strikes in France (where they actually have a far lower density of trade union members than we do in the UK), was the explanation of one commentator that the French media in general doesn't play this infantile game of simply shrilling its irritation at the inconvenience. All the media, right across the political spectrum, actually bothers to consider the issues.

They might not agree, but they actually consider the issues.

Oh, to have a public discourse like that.

Anyway, just for once, I wasn’t nearly knocked down as I walked by some cyclist careering along the pavement and then getting aggressive when I challenge them as to why they think they can break the law.

But in general, the day felt as though everything was back to some form of normality after the excitement and work of the bake-a-thon.

As a direct result of my recent decision to join Facebook, Mary popped into the office on her way from Birmingham to a conference in Belgium – and took away her reserved slice of chocolate cake, plus a couple of pieces of bark, to eat on the way to that centre of chocolately excellence.

There is one donation to come in: a couple pieces of the bark remain, together with a little ginger cake, but we’ve already hit £81. So it feels worthwhile. Everyone seems to have enjoyed it too, which was every bit as important to me as raising the money. So a big thank you to anyone reading who helped and dipped into their pockets.

And the good things keep coming: after my medlar and quince jelly had failed to set at the weekend, an internet exchange with George prevented me throwing it away in a frustrated huff. He suggested adding some liquid pectin and bringing it back to the boil very, very gently.

I’d assumed – I don’t know why – that you couldn’t do that and that it was effectively ‘dead’ if it hadn’t successfully set straight away. But now it’s set nicely – not too solid, but with a hint of a wobble, and it’s lovely and clear and pink. So thank you, George.

‘If at first you don’t succeed’ applies to preserving too – and in more ways that I had imagined.

And as George also pointed out, although I’ve been thinking of the jelly accompanying meat, it’ll be perfect to eat with cheese – and as I really should have remembered from Les Trois Moutiers II. Indeed, the Spanish produce a much more strongly set quince jelly called membrillo to eat with cheese.

But much as I love cheese, I’m fascinated by preserves that you can serve with meat (or fish, for that matter). And with a bottle of liquid pectin now opened, I want to use it up before it goes off.

So with that in mind, I may pop to Waitrose this evening or tomorrow – they had some rhubarb in last week. After years of being nigh on impossible to get hold of – except perhaps within a very limited season early in the year, when it’s ‘forced’ it in big, dark sheds in Yorkshire’s ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ – it has been enjoying a revival.

I remain utterly convinced that rhubarb and chili will make a great combination for a savoury jelly. I’ve had a couple of attempts already, but haven’t yet got it right. The problem – which I discovered from Jane Grigson’s English Food – is that chili appears to negate the effect of pectin, so you need to compensate by adding quite a lot more than you would usually.

On the first attempt, I didn’t add anywhere near enough; it didn’t set at all and – not knowing what I know now – I threw it away.

The second attempt went to the other extreme, with a tasty jelly that was way too hard: it almost needs a hammer and chisel to extract it from the jar.

In the meantime, a survey is being sent around the office to see what we would like from the deli bar when we move to a new building next year.

Simples: please not such a preponderance of spicy dishes and please just go for a bit more simplicity!

I can't actually open the survey at present and have let IT know. Is there a plot afoot to prevent this foodie from commenting?

I shall let you know.

The bake-a-thon gets underway

“First line your springform tin” might well be the most complicated instruction in the English language.

Oh yes, it might sound easy, but by the time I’d finally managed to do exactly that this afternoon, there was rather more baking parchment lying scrunched and torn on the kitchen floor than in the aforementioned tin, while the air had turned a vivid shade of blue.

This was well into the weekend’s bake-a-thon, but I can only hope that it was the apotheosis of the project’s fraught moments.

In a fit of charitableness a couple of weeks or so ago, I’d decided to take up a challenge from Greenpeace to raise money for that organisation through ‘flour power’: “bake a cake, not the Earth” runs one of the slogans.

Thinking something along the lines of: ‘Eh? I can raise money by doing something I enjoy and by making things that other people will like’! I signed up.

It’s worth noting here that my colleagues have enjoyed previous culinary treats – homemade chocolate bark and truffles – so this wasn’t a wildly optimistic appraisal. Indeed, once the news was out in our department, the first phrase on several pairs of lips was: ‘It has to involve chocolate!’ Even with this weekend to come, there was a frisson of expectation in the office yesterday.

And I’d picked Monday because … well, because it’s a Monday and because it’s the first day of November, so everyone probably needs a little cheering up. Add into that equation that it sits between Halloween tomorrow night and Bonfire Night on Friday, and it seemed perfect.

After my recent chocolate tart trials and tribulations, I had decided not to make any of those: too much work for too small a return anyhow.

So the first thing I chose was a ginger cake, using my mother’s recipe and which I’ve baked a number of times over the years. It’s carefully written out (with imperial measurements) in a hardbacked notebook that I bought something like 30 years ago in order to copy down recipes before going to college. There aren’t even half a dozen pages full.

It seems funny, after what I was writing about yesterday, to be contemplating anything my mother baked. But as I said then, there has always been, I think, a struggle going on within her. Perhaps the fact that neither my sister nor I were ever asked to help her bake was her concession to that Wesleyan attitude: ‘bad enough to make things they’ll enjoy, but let’s draw the line at letting them enjoy helping make such things’.

Not that I don’t adjust her original recipe. For goodness sake, it calls for “marg”! In my version, that obviously becomes butter.

One of the points that Greenpeace make about ‘flour power’ is that, if you can, it’s nice to look for environmentally sounds ingredients – so, for instance, is the flour organic?

Well, my flour has not been organic: shopping for baking basics in Waitrose earlier this week, I realised that there was a choice between their own-brand organic flour, which comes from a number of un-named countries, and their non-organic flour, which comes from their own farm in Hampshire.

I opted for the latter on the basis that I knew where it came from and that it hadn’t racked up air miles – and that their farm is run to good standards in general anyway. Besides, if we’re doing food ethics, then Waitrose is part of the John Lewis Partnership and is, therefore, a co-operative. Which is good of itself.

The sugar is fair trade. So is the chocolate and ground ginger. The eggs and cream and milk are all from farmers on Broadway Market and are from livestock that is kept to the highest standards.

Butter is from La Bouche and is unsalted and French. Baking powder and bicarbonate of soda are from Waitrose (I have no idea of their provenance beyond that).

Anyway, part of these were bought this morning, at Broadway Market – the weekly trip also having to provide the ‘ordinary’ food for the weekend too.

I picked up excellent frankfurters from the German deli stall to make a sauerkraut dish from Stéphane Reynaud’s Ripailles: Traditional French Cuisine this evening: a dish that is really more German than what we think of as French, but such is Alsace cuisine.

There were parsnips and apples to blend together for lunchtime soup. Plus braising steak from Wild Dartmoor Beef for a Boeuf Bourguignon tomorrow evening – I’ll pop that in a marinade later.

But then, because the very best laid schedules of mice and men are only there for the overturning, I spotted punnets of something unfamiliar at the Chegworth Valley Farm stall. On closer inspection, it turned out to be medlars – a fruit that was very popular in England in Tudor times, but fell out of fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Now apparently, it’s possible to eat them raw, but only after the fruit has ‘bletted’ – or got almost rotten, as the man on the stall described it.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with them – although The Other Half, who was with me this morning, suggested a jelly – but decided that I couldn’t miss such an opportunity, so I picked up two punnets.

When we got home, the first thing I did after putting everything away was sit down in the garden with a coffee, a fag, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook and Jane Grigson’s English Food, to see exactly what to do with the medlars.

Sure enough, a jelly proved to be the obvious thing. The only question was whether to follow the instructions of Ms Grigson or Ms Raven. The main difference was whether one chopped up the fruit before simmering to release the juices – or not. In the case of the latter, Ms Raven urges readers to resist the temptation to break up either medlars or quince, and simply simmer them patiently until they spilt all of their own accord.

I opted for this version and – after quickly photographing the medlars with a couple of quince and a pumpkin – piled the medlars into a large pot, together with the pair of quince I’d bought last weekend, covered them with water and set them to simmer.

Then came the ginger cake – I doubled the ingredients (eggs, Golden Syrup, sugar, butter, milk, self-raising flour, salt and ground ginger) and also sifted the flour with the salt, although this isn’t mentioned in the recipe. Later, I used a skewer to test that it was completely cooked – and left it until it was.

Unfortunately, it didn’t come out of the tin cleanly – I probably should have buttered it lightly. However, the taste is good, so after letting it cool thoroughly, I’ve cut it into nice chunks – it’s almost more like a parkin, which is perfect for this time of year.

After lunch, it was on to the chocolate cake – and lining that springform tin. After I’d achieved that – thanks to instructions found on the internet – the actual mix was easy.

Set your oven to 180˚C. Take 80g good quality cocoa powder and mix carefully with 300ml boiling water. The add 550g light brown sugar and 250g butter and melt over a gentle heat.

Meanwhile, sift 400g plain flour with 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda and beat four eggs.

When the sugar, cocoa and butter have melted fully, let the mix cool a little before beating in the eggs. The blend in the flour, mixing carefully until you’ve got a completely even colour.

Pour into your lined tin and pop in the oven. It’ll take between an hour and an hour and 45 minutes. Mine took the latter before the skewer came up easily clean. Then leave to cool a little for about 15 minutes before carefully removing from the tin and peeling away the parchment. Leave upside down on a cooling rack to even out the shape. The sense of triumph was huge.

That’ll be finished tomorrow.

Dinner was easy. My adjusted version for two people goes like this: take a chopped onion and soften in duck fat, before drained sauerkraut, eight juniper berries and some bay leaves are added. The recipe mentioned cloves, but I substituted more of George’s celery salt.

Add stock or boiling water to cover. Pop on a lid and leave for around 40 minutes on a low heat.

After that, pop in some diced smoked bacon and leave for a further 20 minutes. Then add a glass of white wine and some diced potatoes and give it another half an hour. Finally, pop some frankfurters on top and leave for another 10 minutes. Serve with some good German mustard. Very nice.

Not daring to stop for too long, I diced the beef, tied the herbs into a bouquet garni, crushed four cloves of garlic and lobbed them all into a bowl, sloshed in a bottle of burgundy and covered the lot with cling film. It’s now in the fridge, ready for cooking tomorrow evening.

The medlars and quince have long been taken off the heat and are slowly dripping sweet juice through a muslin-lined colander. I’ll nip to the corner shop tomorrow for granulated sugar – they have plenty of pectin themselves, apparently, and don’t needed preserving sugar.

For the third summer running, I lost weight while we holidaying in Collioure. For the first year, though, I haven’t out it straight back on after returning to Blighty. I suspect it’s all these weekends in the kitchen – I barely seem to stop for breath!

Don’t let that fool you though – tiring it might be, but I love it too. But thank goodness the hour goes back tonight and I get an extra hour's kip!

Poetry and plums

It’s difficult to know why I was surprised, a year ago or so, to learn that Britain is the cloudiest part of Europe. It really shouldn’t come as a revelation.

Saturday proved blustery and gloriously bright (apart from a spell in the middle of the day, when it became overcast). Walking alongside the Regent’s Canal to Broadway Market, the overgrown bushes that push beyond the rusting railings on the non-towpath side are getting heavy with berries. The trees have yet to start turning, but the briskness in the air makes you anticipate the unfurling season.

In my schooldays, I was never a great fan of poetry – and that was made worse at the time by having Keats for more than one course.

But there was one Keats poem, which captures some of the colour and fecundity of the season, that was my exception proving the rule.

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


On the market itself, there was a plethora of apples, pears, dusky plums and voluptuous pumpkins.

It was certainly soup weather, but not quite time for a really thick soup, so for lunch, I used a recipe from Clare Ferguson’s Flavours of Provence (which I found in the Gard du Nord Eurostar bookshop in Paris, rather than in the south) for a vegetable broth with pistou – and this week, I used basil instead of last week’s parsley.

It added a real zing to the soup, which included onion, butternut squash, carrot, courgette, cannellini beans and a few fine beans.

While that was cooking, I halved a load of plums and popped them into the same weight of jam sugar in a glass bowl, then covered that with a tea towel and left it overnight.

It was a day when I scarcely seemed to be out of the kitchen for very long – although that was miles from unpleasant.

For dinner, I roasted a bulb of garlic and then mixed it with lightly crushed, par-boiled potatoes, melted butter, olive oil and seasoning and popped the whole lot back in the oven to brown up.

That’s a dish from Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – although she does it with new potatoes. I do too – but it works all year round and not just in the spring and summer.

Referring once more to Ferguson’s book, I halved a couple of large tomatoes that had been in for a week, and de-seeded them. Mixing a teaspoon of caster sugar, a teaspoon of salt, some ground black pepper and some nutmeg, you sprinkle the inside of the tomatoes with this, and then fill them with finely chopped shallot.

Get some olive oil really hot in a shallow pan and then pop in the tomatoes, skin side down. At this point, the recipe calls for garlic and herbs to be added to the pan, but I ducked out of that – I’d added some dried oregano and dried sage to the salt-sugar mix earlier.

Add a tablespoon or so of white wine (or stock or water) and then put a lid on and turn down to the minimum heat. Leave for 10 minutes.

After that, use a spoon and palette knife (a really good hint, this) to turn them so that the filling is face down, put the lid back on and leave for a further 10 minutes.

Very tasty.

With all that, we had salmon fillet, which I baked in a little white wine, covered with greaseproof paper and given 15 minutes on the lowest shelf while the potatoes were browning up.

And as if there wasn’t already enough garlic in everything, I made up some aioli – and taking another hint from Ferguson’s book, added a teaspoon of boiling water right at the end, which helps to stabilise the emulsion.

With a glass of plonk to wash it down – the Domaine Combes 2009 Saint-Chinian mentioned yesterday – that was, I think, very good fodder indeed.

Which brought us to yesterday itself – and jam making.

Now I’ve done some preserving before; or rather, I’ve attempted a jelly to go with meat or fish. It hasn’t been a disaster, but I don’t have the sense of it being an unmitigated success either.

With that in mind, I’d picked the easiest possible plum jam recipe from internet research in an aim for total foolproofness.

Yesterday morning, as I put a wash on and set the coffee going, I tipped the entire bowl of fruit and sugar into a large pan on minimum heat.

It took remarkably little time for the sugar to dissolve, and then it was simply a question of boiling vigorously for 10-12 minutes.

Then, however, it dawned on me that, although the recipe had said that the stones would float free, the skins was still attached and, at present, that would complicate consumption for me.

I should have found a way of separating skin and stones from the fruit before adding the sugar. Doh!

With the mixture beginning to set, I quickly sieved it into a jug and then poured it into sterilised jars (just two – 700g of fruit and the same of sugar doesn’t make a lot).

Now I’d thought it would be sensible to use jam sugar, but that might have been the wrong decision. It has set very firmly indeed – but apparently plums have a very high level of pectin, so perhaps that sugar, which also included additional pectin, was a bit much.

But stiff or not, the taste is wonderful, so it’s certainly not a wasted effort. I do feel, however, that I need to look for a book that is about the basic principles of preserving rather than simply a collection of recipes.

It’s a deeply satisfying thing to do – and there are so many flavour combinations, savoury and sweet, that I can imagine trying.

Later, I popped boulangerie potatoes into the oven for half an hour, which I then topped with a boned shoulder of lamb and gave almost an hour.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t cooked as thoroughly as it should be – even though the timings were considerably beyond that of the recipe (which was in French, from a magazine, so that was something of a triumph).

It raises the perennial problem of every oven being different – and of such dishes really (and traditionally) needing very long, slow cooking, often at temperatures below that to which modern ovens will go (the first time I can see an argument for ranges).

Not that it’s wasted: it’s all gone back in a pot and will be given a couple of hours – on the lowest heat possible – this evening.

But it was a timely reminder that things can go awry even when you think you’ve done everything right.

The red hot crucible of culinary creativity

After all the excitement of Friday night, it proved a most relaxing weekend, with some valuable time spent in the kitchen.

And a culinary project that I’ve spent years mulling is finally coming to fruition. The final thing is not there quite yet, but it’s moved a lot nearer.

It must be at least four years ago that I first had the idea. A close friend of mine, with whom I share the passion for food and cooking (he’s helped enormously with my culinary education, incidentally), had been making a pepper jelly, which went particularly superbly with pork sausages.

It brought back memories of the crab apple jelly that my mother – and her mother before her – used to make, and which we used in the same way. I’ve made efforts to get hold of some crab apples, but to no avail thus far. Another traditional English crop that is disappearing.

However, partly with that in mind, I’ve long had the feeling that a rhubarb jelly would work in the same way – cutting through sweet meat or fish. And that some chilli in it would work really well.

Finally, after years of saying this – and even being laughed at by a young couple when discussing the idea with the aforementioned friend during a bus journey – I have finally put such words into action.

I had done little reading, but knew that I had to add approximately the same weight of sugar as fruit and that lemons contain pectin.

So I chopped up my rhubarb, popped it in a pan with the sugar, a chilli and some lemon juice and cooked it, before eventually decanting into a sterilised jar and waiting. It refused to set.

Attempt two saw me try again, but adding the whole of three chopped lemons – pips, pith and all. It refused to set.

At this juncture, I tried a bit more reading. Memo to self: research never goes amiss.

Attempt three came on Saturday, after I’d sat up in bed that morning with a coffee and Jane Grigson’s English Food, trying to see if she dispensed any clues in the section on preserves.

And sure enough, the final preserves recipe (an early one from her daughter, Sophie) was a pepper jelly – and gave me the most vital clue. For some reason or other, pectin is negated by peppers, including chillies.

Once you know that, you can deal with it. I’d picked up preserving sugar a few days earlier – it has added pectin – and deployed that. Plus a whole lemon and a whole apple.

But what I’d also learnt was that my single-cook efforts were not enough and that I hadn’t realised just how much preserves really need to boil. Not simmer – boil.

This time, I started with all the fruit – and the chilli – and cooked briskly for around 20 minutes, then left it to strain for over three hours.

After that, I added sugar and seriously boiled it (losing some over the edge of the pan in the process). And I deployed the old technique of chilling a saucer and then seeing if a drop of the mixture sets on contact with it.

It took around 40 minutes, but it worked. And, decanted into a jar, this time, it actually set!

I tasted a little yesterday. It’s a decent taste, but with not enough chilli. I want more heat to come through (chillies fascinate me, as the heat isn’t the first thing you taste; it develops). I know now that, if I can get hold of some liquid pectin, I can adjust the taste – adding some lemon juice, more chilli and cutting back a bit on the sugar.

But what’s in that jar is good enough to serve – and will be available tonight with some poached salmon (alongside garlic-roasted and roughly chopped new potatoes, and asparagus).

The first victory in my first real culinary experiment has been won.