Get it minted

Journeying through the English countryside last weekend, one of the most adorably seasonal sights was that of the year's earliest lambs in the fields.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to think: 'Ahhh'.

But you might also find yourself thinking: 'Mint sauce, mint sauce'.

Because of course, that is what we Brits do with mint - eat it with lamb.

It's a culinary combination that the French notoriously pour scorn on. But that scorn doesn't mean that it doesn't work - and the mint also gloriously compliments the new potatoes and the fresh garden peas that constitute a really traditional English summer roast lamb dinner.

Indeed, with Easter just around the corner, roast lamb with mint sauce is what many people in the UK will be enjoying at the heart of their festive feast.

The perfection of the meeting of those ingredients can mean that we easily lose sight of other combinations that work just as well.

It was only a couple of years ago, for instance, while in Italy that I realised how gloriously the sharpness of lemon marries with the sweetness of lamb.

And lamb and mint are such an iconic combination that perhaps it sometimes means we also forget that mint can compliment a wide variety of other flavours.

Indeed, perhaps my mintiest memory came in Perpignan one Easter a few years ago, when we wandered into the weekly Sunday market.

We entered from the 'African quarter' to be met by the most astonishing scent from the vast, vast piles of the herb that were piled up for sale. It was intoxicating.

So okay, we might also think of mint as the basis for a tisane, with its ability to aid digestion, and as a friend to dark chocolate - particularly in the form of after-dinner mints - but it's potential doesn't end there.

Actually, the French may well be snobbish about mint, but it's hard not to wonder if that is, in part at least, a response to it being loved not just by the old enemy across the Channel, but also by the indigenous people's of the north African parts of its own former empire?

In Italian cookery, the Romans are fond of it - as are the Sicilians.

In Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, Elizabeth David points out that mint is related to basil and, where dried versions of the latter are required - particularly in North African cuisine - then the former can be substituted.

Noting that the Italians, like the English, love sage - and use it in large amounts - Mrs D observes that she is not such a fan and, indeed, suggests using mint instead.

In the rather fabulous and utterly fascinating Flavour Thesaurus – and here I must thank George for this unexpected present – Niki Segnit illustrates how mint can combine with a wide range of other ingredients, including chilli and oily fish.

So with that in mind, I tried a little experiment this evening.

Picking up a little salmon fillet on Broadway Market this morning, I marinaded it in some dried chilli, olive oil and lemon for a couple of hours, before heating a pan and popping it in with the marinade ingredients.

To that was added a little Maldon and some drizzling Balsamico – well, you have to have salt and vinegar with your fish – then the pan was lidded, the heat turned down and it was left for about 10 minutes.

I served it was sliced carrot and courgette, cooked in a little butter, olive oil and minimal water, and some basmati rice.

And then the big experiment. Serving up, I provided a small dish of dried mint as an option to try.

The Other Half tried some; I tried some.

It really does work and adds a nice little contrast to the sweetness of the fish and the heat of the chilli.

When trying, I also sprinkled some on my rice – and that was particularly pleasant.

Indeed, it made me think of Risotto! Risotto!, where Valentina Harris described the pleasure of perhaps the most simple risotto of all, a parsley one.

And it struck me that one made with really good, fresh mint would work just as well. I shall have to try it sometime, when my own crop of mint is producing copious amounts for harvesting.

But mint seems to be a perfect example of how we can become so used to an ingredient employed in a traditional way, that we don't stop to think how else it might be used.

Store cupboard risotto

Having arrived home yesterday and realised that what I’d planned to cook would, in reality, take too long for a week night, it became a question of store cupboard cooking.

There was no shortage of vegetables available, so after a brief rootle through Valentina Harris’s Risotto! Risotto!, I came up with a plan.

Since our return from holiday, I haven’t quite got the full compliment of essentials back in the kitchen.

I am woefully lacking in decent lemons, for instance. And the small remaining chilis from a packet are a bit wrinkly.

But miraculously, there were two shallots hiding away at the bottom of a salad drawer in the fridge, granting me the proper start to a risotto.

It had to be stock from a bottle, though, since there wasn’t time to defrost the final tub of homemade stuff.

So, into some olive oil went the finely chopped shallot, followed by some finely chopped garlic – that 1kg bunch I hauled back from France isn’t going to last very long at this rate – and then some sliced courgette. All was softened.

The rice goes in next and absorbs all the remaining oil. Then a good glug of white wine and, when that’s absorbed too, you can start adding the stock, a ladle at a time.

While that was going on, a few peas were podded, briefly boiled and drained.

I checked the seasoning. I thought about the flavour. And then the germ of an idea knocked on the door of my mind. One of the little pots I’d bought back from Roque Anchois was a cream of anchovy. This was exactly the sort of dish to add a good dollop to.

And it worked rather well too, adding a remarkably subtle layer of flavour to the finished dish.

All in all, not bad for something that wasn’t planned and was based entirely on what was actually in!

You say tomato, I say risotto

It might seem somewhat perverse, after my regaling you all with tales of The Great Train Croissant Scandal, to claim that, in reality, it was actually a bit of foodie weekend.

But such is the strangeness of life. It started on Friday night, with a very different version of that dish that regular readers will know I love – a risotto.

Having finally got around to ordering a copy of the shamefully out-of-print Risotto! Risotto! by Valentina Harris, I found myself fascinated to read of versions of this essentially simple dish, the like of which I’d never imagined.

One such example was a tomato and basil one.

Now as it happened, I’d found some decent-looking (and smelling) tomatoes the previous weekend – a beautifully varied selection, which instantly brought to mind Collioure.

The original recipe called for pine nuts to be toasted in a little oil at the base of the risotto, but The Other Half grimaced at this, so I adjusted for the sake of a quiet life.

First, take your tomatoes and skin, halve and deseed them. I always lie them on some kitchen paper for a while after that to drain properly. Chop roughly. Pop into a pan with a drop of olive oil, a crushed clove of garlic and some shredded basil, and gently cook down. Taste and season.

Since we’d done away with the pine nuts base, I chopped shallots and some garlic and sweated that in olive oil. Add the risotto rice and let that absorb the remaining oil.

Add a slug of white wine. Enjoy the aroma. Let the rice absorb that. Then, a ladle at a time, start adding vegetable stock (a chopped onion, carrot, some celery and some garlic, water, bay and thyme, simmered for 20-30 minutes).

About half way through – so after around 10 minutes – add the tomatoes. Carry on adding stock and stirring for around 10 minutes more.

Serve with more basil.

Not bad at all – really fresh and light. I was really chuffed with that.

The next day, as you already know, saw me traveling north to Leeds for business. But after a lengthy meeting, we adjourned to a restaurant in the city called Sous Le Nez.

There, gazing at the menu while the service created an almost painfully slow orbit around us, yet rarely coming close enough to have attention grabbed, the idea of a 'foie gras crème brûlée' attracted table-wide attention.

Never being one to fight shy of such challenges, I decided that that was going to inform anything else I ate that night.

It was exceptional. A very light foie gras mousse, with a lightly caramelised top, served with elderflowers & red wine jelly and melba toast.

It was a definite food orgasm moment.

Me being me, I opted for a second starter for my next course. In this case, ballottine of pigeon breast with apricots, wrapped in Bayonne ham and with an orange and beetroot salad.

Nice – albeit possibly a bit dry. Though the pigeon breast itself was beautifully cooked.

I served myself a few vegetables from our table’s selection, but these were a let down – another kitchen that doesn’t understand that al denté is not a synonym for ‘raw’.

The restaurant has an extensive wine list, and we had very light and pleasant Sancerre rosé, plus one of our group also suggested an Albarino, which is a white wine from Galicia that he’s familiar with. Very pleasant it was too, with a quite different flavour.

Dessert was simple for me – vanilla and white chocolate ice cream. Which was perfectly pleasant and nicely presented, but nothing to write home about.

So while not a perfect meal, one with some very enjoyable moments.

And the memory of that foie gras crème brûlée will stay with me for some time.

The next morning, I made sure I ate enough at the hotel for breakfast so that I could comfortably ignore the filled croissants on the train journey home, concentrating instead on filling myself with bitter coffee, while blubbing over The Sound of Music (not an easy film to watch on public transport, since I desperately want to join in).

Once back in town, with The Other Half not due to return until late evening, I nipped up to the tiny market in the nearby London Fields Primary School playground, and found a couple of bits including, joy of joys, some wonderful Bath Soft Cheese.

A small piece of cod fillet was sourced at Fin & Founder on Broadway Market and that was that.

I salted the cod for around half an hour, rinsed and poached it, ready to be served with a large dollop of homemade aioli.

Complicated food can be good. But food doesn’t have to be complicated in order to be good.

And then, after a week of seeing the sulphurous workings of News International revealed ever more clearly, I sat and watched The Sound of Music all over again, bathing in Julie dust to make the badness go away.

And that, as my boss said a day later, merely confirmed to her that I am actually a gay man in disguise.

The holiday count down begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice – and far from difficult or time-consuming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's hear it for the 'shrooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything was tasted and seasoned where necessary.

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

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

And that was not bad at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beside the seaside

Yorkshire. Day two. Or to be pedantic, day two and a half. And having breakfasted, we set off from the hotel with a firm plan of action.

This time, we boarded a train to York and beyond, skirting the North York Moors and finally pulling to a halt in Scarborough.

‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside …’

For all the sun – and it was a lovely day – there was a blustery wind coming off the North Sea. I had my leather jacket with me for the trip as a whole, but it was rolled in a bag for this trip. This was neither the time nor place to be swanning around in leather.

But a t-shirt with very short sleeves was taking things too far the other way and my arms were covered in goosebumps by the time we were halfway down the town’s main Clone Town shopping street.

An Edinburgh Wool Mill offered rapid relief in the form of a sea green sweatshirt – and then it was off again, cutting away from the crowds down a side street of far greater charm.

This brought us out near the top of the cliffs, near the Grand Hotel, with a funicular railway and the absolutely delightful Parlour Tearooms next door.

We took seats outside and ordered tea and cakes: in my case, a slab of tea loaf, moist with plump fruit and slicked with a generous portion of butter. Who says Yorkshire folk are stingy? We could gaze at the sea or over toward the remains of the vast castle that top the hill on the opposite side of the bay. Perfect.

The café itself harks back to years long gone, with a touch of humour in a painted window sign that proclaims “dogs and sprogs welcome”.

Wending down to the seafront, you hit a different world. All the gaudy sights and sounds of the seaside; amusement arcades, shops selling loads of kitsch (to which I am addicted) and, in Scarborough’s case, countless eateries offering fish and chips.

There was even a shop offering huge sticks of fudge – some with very peculiar flavourings. Not least amongst these was a Marmite fudge – and no, I didn't try some!

It’s rather tragic that, although Scarborough is still a working harbour, not one of those restaurants or cafes serves fish that has come inland there. There’s not enough stock in this part of the North Sea; the big catch for local fishermen is lobster, with something like 20,000 pots in the area.

Not that wandering around the small harbour itself wasn’t fascinating, particularly as it was a day when the camera barely shifted from around my neck, allowing me the chance, on one occasion, to rip off a shot of a gull as it flew out of a skip.

Looking inside after the bird had gone, there were masses of left-overs from fish that had rapidly been filleted. And the thought that struck home was the amount of waste – well, obviously not as far as the gull was concerned.

We ate at a café on the harbour itself. Run by a couple, we were warned that our lunch would take 10 minutes, as it would be cooked for us. That is absolutely fine by me.

And it was the best fish and chips I’ve had in many a year, since an afternoon a long time ago in Hull, although the cook explained that he gets his fish from the Faroe Islands – unfrozen. Wherever it came from, it tasted very good.

The batter was a dream: wafer thin and covered in a filigree of light crispiness that made me remember exactly why, as children, we rated scraps – the bits of batter left in the fryer, which could be bought by the bag for a penny – as such a treat.

The chips were not piled high, but they were hand cut and properly cooked. The mushy peas were fine and there were even slabs of bread on the side. Forget the slice of lemon that came with it – a modern affectation – all you needed was salt and perhaps the barest hint of malt vinegar on your chips.

It was a meal to relish.

Ambling further, I took the chance to photograph more gulls, who stayed put in their determination not to risk losing a spot near where a boat was expected to dock or where leftovers materialise from the sheds.

With time on our hands, we made a rapid decision to join a boat going for a trip out to sea, and found ourselves in the middle of another bit of history.

The Regal Lady was built in 1930 by Fellows & Company of Great Yarmouth for the Yarmouth & Gorleston Steamboat Company.

Originally called the Oulton Belle, she was a double-ended steamer that became one of the ‘Little Ships’ at the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, before being requisitioned by the Navy until 1946.

In 1954, she was brought to Scarborough and given her current name.

We sat out at the front as the boat chugged gently past the little lighthouse before hitting the first real swell.

A few minutes later, fellow passengers had fled inside as waves splashed over the prow. “Shall we go in?” asked The Other Half. On the basis that my hands were by that time attached very tightly to the boat itself and my stomach was debating whether having eaten beforehand was a wise move, I had no inclination to risk shifting my body, and besides, as I told him, I’d wanted something that would blow the cobwebs away.

Eventually, with the cobwebs fully departed, I edged inside, managing to crash an elbow into the thick plastic window of one of the doors. Fortunately, nobody noticed the rather large cracks.

Inside was quite surreal, like stepping into a 1970s pub, with customers perched on small upholstered barrels and shipping maps turned into tables, listening to ’60s pop hits and supping pints.

There was something rather Alan Plater about it: indeed, it could almost have been straight out of his wonderful Beiderbecke series.

We didn’t imbibe. And my stomach coped. Which couldn’t be said for everyone. A man nearby had a face that was bleached of colour even before his wife attempted to put his coat around his shoulders comfortingly.

Then he stood, lurched forward a little, put his hand to his mouth and vomited all over the place.

This was not apparently an unusual situation. One of the crew pottered nonchalantly out with a bucket and mop. The wife took the same coat into the tiny toilet, and was still attempting to scrub it clean when we docked again.

We ambled some more, wending our way up the steep streets until we were back in Clone Town and near the station once again. And then it was back to Leeds aboard a ridiculously small Pennine Express train, with a couple of outbreaks of bad temper as people discovered that, for whatever reason, seat reservations had not been prepared in the carriages.

Things happen – technical problems, shortage of staff etc – but the company really should announce to passengers that there’s been a problem, thus helping to avoid fractious outbursts as people accuse others of sitting in ‘their’ seat.

Being near the sea can never be a bad thing for me. And the day had moments of utter bliss – not least that tea loaf, the fish and chips and the gulls, from their skirling cries to their reluctance to flee the moment I pointed the camera at them.

By the time we were back in Leeds, the only thing to consider was dinner – and for that, we headed to the nearby Brasserie Blanc.

Given a big lunch – every last crumb of which had been enjoyed – the general feeling was that this meal would involve no starter. But that was a flawed plan, since it ignored the many enticements of the menu.

In the end, I opted for an asparagus risotto (lovely textures and tastes, with the asparagus itself served in three different ways: as a sauce, stalks slivered into the risotto itself and a couple of spears topping the dish), followed by a second ‘starter’ – superb Cornish smoked mackerel with cucumber and horseradish: perfectly-sized portions just bursting with taste.

And to finish, a dish of rhubarb and custard, topped with smashed cinder toffee – a delicacy that I’d forgotten about until we’d spotted some in York and then bought two bags in Scarborough in a fit of delighted nostalgia.

There’s a recipe in the Yorkshire Relish book I’d found in York that involves cinder toffee – indeed, it even gives instructions for how to make it.

Regional food is a thing to cherish.

A dish full of spring flavours

After such a long winter and with spring barely seeming to have sprung, we now seem to have leapfrogged most of the latter and landed straight in to the summer.

So the start of the Easter weekend meant a need to consider far lighter food than one might, just a few short weeks ago, have expected.

Perhaps it was predictable that, on a bank holiday, I woke barely half an hour later than I would for a working day. And once awake, there was no going back to sleep again.

So the coffee was brewed and Jamie’s Italy was dragged off the shelf in the hope of finding inspiration.

It followed after only a limited amount of pleasant browsing. A risotto.

Now, regular readers of this blog will possibly be a bit surprised at that, since I’m something of a risotto fan, but I’d spotted an idea for a really fresh, seasonal version of a dish that seems infinite in its versatility.

This dish used artichoke hearts, lemon and mint.

I had been meaning to go to Borough Market, but since that wasn’t due to open until noon, I pottered up to Broadway Market first with the aim of getting a few basics in. And it soon became clear that I could buy everything I needed today right there.

So, to the risotto. I didn’t follow Oliver’s recipe to the letter, using it as a general guide.

Take a large shallot and a stick of celery and chop them finely. Heat olive oil in a large saucepan and pop the vegetables in to soften.

To this was added a few finely chopped cloves of fresh garlic: lovely stuff.

Pop some stock (chicken or vegetable) in a saucepan and bring it to the boil.

When the vegetables are softened, add your risotto rice (I used around two small handfuls for two people – you don’t need a lot, just around 45g per serving) and let it absorb the oil.

Then add a glug of booze – Noilly Pratt or Vermouth are perfect. It’ll fizz and hiss and give off the most glorious aromas.

Let that absorb and then start adding the bubbling stock, a ladle at a time. You don’t have to stir every single minute, but you do need to keep an eye on it.

Check the seasoning and add salt and pepper as needed.

When that stock has been absorbed, add another ladle and keep on doing that until the rice has reached its capacity.

Now at this point, I usually give it up to 10 minutes with a lid on the pan and the heat turned down.

I had quartered four artichoke hearts from the deli and added these, along with a squeeze of lemon juice and some grated zest before doing just that, so that the ‘chokes had the time to warm through.

Once that’s done, add butter. I usually add a spoon of crème fraïche, but it struck me that, with the sharpness of the lemon, some sweetness would be a good balance.

Then all that remains is to tear some fresh mint into the mix, give it a gentle stir, and serve.

And that really is rather good.

Godless, but unafraid of the vampires

On a glorious evening, I let myself into the flat last night to find that usual junk mail included an eight-page leaflet that told me, in no uncertain terms, that this could not be a happy home.

A ‘happy home’, apparently, requires the hand of God in bringing a couple together in the first place (not lust or transitory pleasure: shucks); marriage is de rigueur, together with commitment to God (and actually being Christians), submission by the woman to the man, submission by the children to the parents …

Those who do not fulfil these criteria are, I’m afraid, doomed to the misery of the ‘unhappy home’.

You get the gist. This delightful little item had no return address on it, although it had been produced by some group in the US.

I think the very anonymity of whomsoever had paid to have it delivered (it can’t have been part of a mail drop paid for from the US, surely?) was what made me feel infintely more offended by it than I usually am by religious tracts, which simply go straight into the recycling crate, unread, along with the glossy fliers for pizza deliveries.

Someone wants to condemn others for what they perceive as immoral behaviour, leading – they conclude with utter certainty – to an unhappy condition, yet they lack the courage of their own convictions and do not say who they are.

So in a spirit of obvious misery, I donned my chef’s apron, put some music on and set about preparing a meal to lay before my non-spousal Other Half, in the hope that it might win me the odd brownie point with the Flying Spaghetti Monster (that’s the one dancing around on the other side of the sun with a giant chocolate teapot – not The Other Half).

After he had arrived back on Wednesday evening from a working sojourn in Liverpool, I’d come up with a dinner of pan-fried pigeon breasts, a mix of sautéed diced potato and croutons, some cannellini beans, artichoke hearts and a sort of jus of the meat juices and some raspberry vinegar.

Now it was tasty enough and, thinking about it, there was a reasonably decent variety of textures. But something about it left me dissatisfied.

Only yesterday did it dawn on me what the source of that was. The dark meat aside, everything was actually pretty colourless to look at, while it all looked a bit messy on the plate.

Now since I had guessed (correctly) that The Other Half would not have eaten fish while away – much less some oily fish – salmon was on yesterday's menu.

But what to do with it?

Last weekend, I’d seen some fresh garlic for sale on Broadway Market and, in a fit of excitement, bough two bulbs. Never having actually used the stuff before, they went into the fridge to wait until I had a clue.

Browsing around the food section of the Guardian’s website, I’d come across a recipe for ‘wet and wild garlic risotto’.

Now, I didn’t follow this exactly, but used my own usual method, simply starting off with a couple of chopped shallots, two cloves of dried garlic (the stuff we’re primarily familiar with) and most of a bulb of the fresh variety.

Then, with less rice than usual for a main course, it was routine. After about 20 minutes, I lidded the pan, turned down the heat and left it, while the fish part poached-part steamed.

But while I was doing my original preparation, I had peeled another four cloves of garlic. Two were chopped finely and went into a gremolata, together with a good handful of chopped parsley and some lemon zest.

The other two went through the crusher, to be mixed into a paste with a little salt and then whisked with an egg yolk before virgin oil was drizzled in to make aïoli. I have to confess that quite a lot of this was eaten straight after being mixed – such a fabulous taste.

I made both of these up before I started on the risotto, and since all the basic ingredients for that had been prepped at the same time and were in a dish, waiting, it suggested a rare level of kitchen organisation.

As the fish neared readiness, it was the matter of a moment to add a spoon of crème fraîche to the rice and let that warm back up.

But so to the presentation bit. Now that I’ve got chef’s rings, it makes doing rice really easy. You can, however, quite easily use a buttered cup: pack the rice in and then carefully turn it onto the plate and tap the bottom of the cup.

I made a thick line of gremolata on each plate, put the fish at an angle across that and then drizzled the beautiful, yellowy-green aïoli over that.

Now it’s easy when you do something like this to start to realise just what an art form in its own right is plating up – it wasn't perfect, but it looked so much better than the previous night’s dish.

And the taste was up there too. The garlic risotto was beautifully delicate and fragrant. The fish was quite mild (it was farmed), but the sauces gave fabulous bursts of very different flavours to the whole, and with garlic as a theme running throughout.

God might not be impressed to realise that I don’t think I’m unhappy – indeed, that cooking and eating that meal gave me real pleasure – but I suspect I need not fear any vampires for a couple of days at least.

An Italian job

It is one of those strange things that I find myself thinking of whole cuisines in terms of the season. Mediterranean food is, of course, not for the colder months.

Now okay, on that basis, I knew little of Spanish food until our first visit, around six years ago and at a time of year that was pleasantly warm, but I’ve been eating pasta since God was on the verge of getting the keys to the front door, without any sense of that being only for sunny days.

But with the weather lightening and my body demanding different food, Saturday morning brought with it an urge to pull A Taste of Italy down off the shelf and dip in.

The first idea came from beyond those pages – from memories of Venice, indeed: lamb chops, grilled and served with lemon.

For some reason, I’d never really thought about that as pairing, but since having lamb chops served that way, I love it.

So the big question was what to serve with it?

Browsing through the aforementioned book, I noticed something I’d not spotted before: Arancini di riso. In essence, balls of saffron risotto, breadcrumbed and deep fried.

‘Interesting,’ I thought. And The Other Half seemed to react in the same way when the book was shoved under his nose to solicit an opinion.

So that was all decided. I also intended to do artichoke hearts in a viniagrette as a first course – very Italian – but not veg from the olive stall. I tried preparing artichokes a couple of years ago – and ended up with nothing.

The risotto was easy enough to make: the usual base, with thyme and saffron added. And obviously you need to make it pretty thick and gloopy. Then it sits for a while to cool.

It’s a messy business shaping the risotto mixture into balls and then rolling in breadcrumbs, but not particularly difficult. I popped the plate into the fridge then to let them firm up a bit.

Then it’s simply a question of heating oil and giving them around four minutes to cook before decanting onto greaseproof paper and serving as quickly as possible.

The chops were simply grilled until the fat was beautifully crisp.

By the time I’d seen just how many of the Arancini di riso there were, I decided to forget the artichokes.

The chops were lovely – and so were the little risotto balls. Crisp on the outside and lovely and soft inside. Traditionally, when you’re rolling the rice into a ball, you poke your finger into it to make a little hole, before filling that with a piece of cheese and covering over with more rice (which reminds me of a German potato dish where you stuff a crouton inside a potato dumpling before cooking it).

But I did without this since The Other Half doesn’t do cheese – and, whenever challenged by people about this idiosyncrasy, points out, at length, that it’s milk that’s gone off and why would you eat that.

Later, it was a question simply of serving some fruit with more of the previous evening’s white chocolate mousse and caramel sauce.

Yesterday, since he was leaving in mid-afternoon for a conference in Liverpool, I’d planned to use more of the pastry that I’d made on Friday for another tart. I’d already got some finely chopped shallot, leek and tenderstem broccoli cooking gently when he announced that, with time having simply rushed past, he’d have a quick bacon butty.

I finished the tart after he’d gone, with eggs and milk and seasoning and – after the realisation that this was mine, all mine! – some Stilton.

Around 40 minutes later, it came out of the oven, all lovely a golden and smelling gorgeous. And there was a double delight too, as it dawned on me that whatever was left over would do for a packed lunch today – thus my great problem was solved (at least for one day), with only the addition this morning of a few anchovy-stuffed olives.

And the Italian theme will continue tonight – but that’s another experiment and another story!

Plenty of rhubarb, but no custard

It's probably a good thing that The Other Half is returning today from his jaunt to exotic parts – or Cardiff, as it's otherwise known – for the entire first round of matches on the opening weekend of the 2011 Rugby League top flight season.

What could have been a quiet girly weekend turned into something that might have had little volume attached, but was close to frenetic at times. I was knackered by last night, but pleasantly so, I think.

Everything got into serious swing on Saturday morning. An early visit to the market gave me the chance to chat with various people and make at least one intriguing discovery: Andy says that orders for hare have pretty much shot through the roof. It seems to be a trend. But just for once, I was able to offer a possible explanation of such a thing: of course, not huge amounts of people will have been able to taste Bruno Loubet's hare royale, but with it getting mentions all over the place and, indeed, being named main course of 2010 by Jay Rayner, hare has had a big publicity boost.

But my mission of the day was not merely to attempt to cast some light on things. At the Longwood van, I had completely confused Matthew with an email order for five lambs' kidneys and the same weight in braising steak. He obviously had a good idea what was intended for the meat, but would have expected that there would be far more beef.

I explained that this was my chance for a sort of revenge on all those insipid steak & hardly-any-kidney pies – and particularly the steak & just-one-small-piece-of-kidney pud at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese before Christmas: this was going to be the apotheosis of the kidney.

But all that was for Sunday: Saturday had plenty of other things in store.

Now while I might be neither mouse nor man, my well-laid plans still went awry when it became clear that there was no crab to be found on the market. Vicki explained that the weather had stopped a fresh catch. Instead, I opted for a squid and mused over cooking it with red chili and linguine.

Sadly – although not in some ways – Ed will be leaving La Bouche. Sad for us, but not for Ed. Having completed his doctorate (architectural history, if memory serves me right), he's got a brilliant post as a researcher at the National Portrait Gallery. All the best, Ed.

And so back to the kitchen.

First things first involved rhubarb, with Otto helpfully using the sheer force of her feline brain to will the juice to drip through the sieve for an individual syllabub, à la Sarah Raven, for that evening.

That done, a second batch went the same way, although it was six sticks this time, a little sugar and just a very little water. Here was one of the experiments of the weekend. I wanted to make little individual jellies – which promised to be fun, since I'd never used gelatine before. But I'd picked up enough from a video of Michel Roux using it to realise that it wasn't too scary.

Maybe not too "scary", but it still needs a bit of technical sorting out. I calculated half a sheet of the gelatine to my rhubarb juice (there was around 150ml). In the event, it wasn't remotely enough. I put a repeat off until Sunday. And in the evening, browsing through Kitchen Secrets by Raymond Blanc, I came across a dish where he'd used his famous tomato essence in four different ways. It included a jelly. I had the secret in my hands.

Using his calculations, I realised that I'd need 3 1/2-4 sheets of the size of gelatine I had for around 200ml of juice. This is what I tried the following day.

While the cooked fruit drained, I took two metal cook's rings and gave them each a base of cling film, tightly stretched over and up onto the sides. These were placed in a dish.

I wanted the jelly to be a tart compliment to something sweet and savoury, so was careful to taste and not over sweeten. The gelatine sheets need to be soaked in cold water for around 10 minutes. Then you drain them well and add them to warm liquid – but not boiling, as it could make the dish bitter. In this case, I warmed a little of the strained juice, then incorporated the squeezed gelatine, which melts really easily, and then added that back into the rest of the juice.

Blanc also explains how to get a "garnish" in a jelly without it all sinking straight to the bottom: wait for five minutes and then gently stir in whatever you want. It took longer for my jellies, but the eventual outcome was in the right direction, as drained and dried green peppercorns were added.

These were popped into the fridge to wait for use (of which more another time). But at the second time of asking, I'd got them to set and that was a victory.

Back to Saturday and more from the same Blanc book. This time, sugar was melted to a hard crack caramel in a large pan (how a proper thermometer helps!) and 200g of skinned hazelnuts were chucked in, stirred around, and then the whole lot was as quickly as possible spread onto a lined tray and left to set and cool.

When it's reach that point, it gets blasted into a paste in a processor: I have a small one, which just coped over a number of shifts. It didn't get very paste-like, so a little water was added, as per the book. This is a praline paste.

This is then mixed with lightly crushed cornflakes and pressed firmly into a tart tin or rectangular 'ring'. Or, if don't quite have that, use whatever will allow you to spread it quite thinly. Stick in the fridge and leave for at least half an hour.

Next, whisk a couple of eggs lightly. Bring some double cream and full-fat milk just to the boil, and pour onto the eggs, whisking to slightly cook them. Pour in chopped, good-quality chocolate and keep whisking until the chocolate is entirely melted and you have a lovely glossy mixture. Spread on top of the praline and cornflake mix and put back into the fridge.

It needs to be left overnight – and indeed, apart from a tiny taste, is waiting for this evening. A portion can be garnished with grated chocolate and even a single hazelnut that's been roasted and then dipped in caramel and quickly hung up by a cocktail stick from BluTac so that the caramel drips into a lovely, long 'tail'. The Other Half saw this in the book and responded with a comment about posiness. I haven't decided whether I'll try this, but I did buy a packet of BluTac on Saturday.

The point is, though, that the dipped nut aside, this is not difficult.

That was almost that for Saturday – except to prep a starter dough for some bread and actually make myself dinner. I decided to drop the linguine idea, but did the squid pan fried, in a risotto with red chili and actually with some Parmesan cheese (a first, given The Other Half's dislike of cheese).

It was enormously pleasing and soothing.

• For snacking during the day, I picked up some Stichelton from La Bouche, having read about a few days earlier on Raymond Blanc's blog, which is not only interesting on what Stichelton actually is – like 'proper' Stilton was before makers were forced to used pasturised milk – but also on the state of British cheese in general. And the Stichelton is absolutely lovely.

Food for thought on the telly

Before Christmas, BBC4 advertised a burst of nostalgia TV, with episodes of Fanny Craddock cooking Christmas food.

One review suggested that it offered a ‘nightmare before Christmas’ – although after watching just a few minutes, I prefer the Tim Burton version of that title.

She used cornflour in Christmas cakes, for goodness sake. Cornflour …

In a cold sweat, I scurried into the kitchen and leafed through various volumes in need of reassurance that cornflour was not a normal substitute for ‘proper’ flour.

And that’s without discussing her hyper-bossy persona (or the way she treated a host of people, including her husband Johnny).

Fortunately, this wasn’t the only foody offering on TV over the Christmas holiday. And nor was it the only culinary nostalgia.

Nigel Slater’s Toast, an autobiography of his first 18 years, was dramatised by the BBC and shown over Christmas.

Now I’m intending to read the book first, so didn’t watch it all. But there was enough to make an impression – and enough to produce a sense of horror not dissimilar to that created by Craddock and cornflour.

His mother apparently popped unopened cans into a pan to heat through. The toast of the title was often the only thing available after another culinary failure. Not that those were the only things that could do your head in.

And in a rare interview, published when the book was first published in 2003, Slater discussed his childhood.

“We were very second generation middle class,” Slater told the interviewer. “I had been brought up with all these things you did and did not do. You don’t talk at mealtimes, you don’t put your elbows on the table and so on.”

Dingalingalingalong!

Can you hear the bells ringing too? Decades before I made my first soup, I knew how to tip the bowl away from me and elegantly scoop up a little of the liquid, moving the spoon from front to back and then sipping. Quietly.

And what is it with elbows? Is that a peculiarly British thing or something more universal?

I wouldn’t say we had a rule of no talking at mealtimes, but I cannot currently dredge up memories of family conversations. What I do remember are paternal sermons. Or descriptions of my father’s day – including one where he’d seen a particularly gruesome traffic accident on the way home (thus dinner was late) and proceeded to describe it in bloody detail, even as my mother hissed at him to shut up as my sister got increasingly upset.

Decapitation didn’t seem to have affected his appetite and it didn’t seem that he could comprehend why it would affect anyone else’s. Either that or he simply didn’t care.

But thinking of those things, an idea emerges of a world where a whole raft of measures were deliberately deployed to stop food being a pleasure by making the process of eating such a fuss, dominated by rules about this, that and the other.

At one of my primary schools I remember a peculiar obsession with stopping children stirring their dollop of jam into pretty patterns in their sago/semolina/rice pudding. Why? What difference did it make? Surely the important thing was to eat it?

Slater has more interesting observations.

“It’s still not part of our heart and soul,” he suggests. Hardly surprising if such joyless rules have been widespread.

“We still over-compensate for the fact that our food has always been a joke. The French or Italians think nothing of going to a patisserie and buying a pudding for a dinner party or a ready-made salad, but here we have to make every thing ourselves, every last sodding cake. I still think we are using food as a class thing, to put on a show, rather than because we love it.”

That old Protestant work ethic again, anyone?

Well, to a point, perhaps. But Slater’s example also brings to mind a recent survey of home cooks in both Britain and France, which focused on how many bake their own bread.

Far more Brits bake bread than did their French counterparts, which was then held up as some sort of national victory to boast about. But the only thing that I think that it indicates is that the overwhelming majority of British people do not have a proper baker two minutes away where they can buy a beautiful, freshly-baked baguette twice a day.

Similarly, I’ve been inside French shops – I’ve shopped inside French shops – and most foodies here don’t have access to somewhere that sells a salad or a dessert that you’d be happy to serve at a party.

The last few weeks have seen the commercial TV channels absolutely heaving with adverts for party food, from the working-class Iceland to the middle-class Marks and Sparks. And honestly, it all looks dire. Otto would narrow her eyes and give me such a look of disdain if I tried to serve that sort of fodder to the cats.

What appears to pass for perfection in supermarket eyes increasingly appears to mine like anemia. The little pies that have been advertised, for instance, look awful – utterly bland. Only last week, when shopping down at Borough Market, I found myself marveling at the pies on sale at the Ginger Pig butcher – no two alike, with gravy having dripped out between the seams of the handmade pastry. Just the thought makes me salivate.

And around the corner is the stall that sells Mrs King’s legendary Melton Mowbray pork pies – a business that was started in 1853 and producing food that is still prepared from traditional recipes.

Proper pies, in other words. Pie has come to mean something cheap and substandard. And good pies can be so, so much more than that.

So I don’t think that making everything and not buying it ready-made is about class – well, not in the way that Slater means the word in that interview.

He also says that: “The British are not passionate cooks. We are a nation of recipe followers.”

Well, I guess there’s some truth in that. Maybe it’s not just me who is wedded to recipes. But then you have to learn from somewhere. And slowly – very slowly – I am reaching a point where I have a few dishes that I can now cook without recourse to a written text. Tonight’s risotto will not require reference to anything. And sometimes, when I’m cooking like that, I can be found in the sort of humour that has me singing out loud: it might not be cooking with ‘passion’, but it is cooking with pleasure and not as a mind-numbing chore or as a sweat-inducing chellenge.

That no TV cook (I hope!) would any longer suggest cornflour for a Christmas cake is a sign that we have progressed, I think. It could be argued that the sheer number of cookery programmes (and books and magazines) is another indicator of the same thing – although perhaps that merely illustrates the reliance on recipes that Slater mentions?

At this point, I find myself asking myself why it matters what the rest of the country is doing in the kitchen – surely it’s enough to know what I do in my kitchen?

The problem is that you can’t separate the general from the individual. If local shops have been wiped out by the rise and rise of the supermarket, then that impacts on me too; on the choice of foods that I have available.

There are rumours that Borough Market is under threat, with rumblings of discontent from stall holders who are being constantly shunted around the place, never sure from one week to the next where they will be doing business on market days.

They fear that the people who own the land want to force many of the small businesses out, to be replaced by trendy coffee shops etc. Does that impact on me? Yes – and on anyone else who already has to make an extra effort to travel to Borough Market for the choice that is available there and which is not available in supermarkets.

It happened at Leadenhall Market in the City, where all the old businesses, including a poulterer and a butcher and a miracle of a wet fish stall were driven out by a landlord that only wanted richer chains and franchises in place, and ratcheted up the rents, again and again, until those small, independent businesses had no option but to close.

I was talking to Stephane from La Bouche a few weeks ago. He was explaining how he used to have a business in Stoke Newington – before it was trendy in the way it is now. It used to be full of independent businesses, all thriving. And then the landlords got an idea and started whacking up the rents and driving them all out, to be replaced by endless franchises of coffee shops and chain eateries. He thinks that, give it 10 years or so, the same thing will happen to Broadway Market. It’s a depressing view.

Anyway, that’s why all this matters to me, personally. Because what happens generally has a direct affect on me and on the choices that I am able to make.

But let’s get back to Toast. By way of a complete contrast to that stultifying attitude to food and eating, there was a short but nonetheless interesting piece in today’s Guardian about the Roux restaurant dynasty.

Apparently, the only family arguments that Michel Roux Jnr can remember from his childhood were about how to make omelettes.

How French is that? And I wonder whether Nigel Slater breathed a sigh of envy on reading such a piece. I know I did.

Which gives us a rather nice link to Cinémoi, a new French film channel on cable (Virgin 445 and Sky 343, and currently free to view until 31 January), which screened an intriguing 2006 documentary, Cinema Goes to Dinner, by Anne Andreu.

I’m hoping it’ll be on again, because there was so much to take in and it was intriguing – although I found myself disagreeing deeply with the interpretation of Babette’s Feast, which saw the response of Babette’s guests as much more positive than I did.

But featuring interviews and clips from such films as Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie and Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, it’s fascinating because it also illustrates food and eating as an essential, vital part of life.

Somehow, all that stuff about elbows on the table and not speaking during a meal seems to be an effort to minimise the impact of that reality.

For Nigel Slater it failed. It took rather longer, but it failed for me too. Thank goodness.

Back down to Earth

When you get a new mixer, you have to use it – and use it quickly. The kMix was calling to me. And if an excuse was actually required, then our office tradition of birthday boys and girls providing cakes for everyone offered me the prefect one.

I had spent some time browsing books, wondering what to make, when I alighted on chocolate cupcakes in Nigella’s Domestic Goddess.

There is something about cupcakes that makes you expect sugary sweetness, that suggests cakes for children. But this recipe provides a satisfyingly bitter chocolate hit – very much a concoction for grown-ups.

The mixer makes life so much easier: creaming sugar and butter together, compared with the old-fashioned bicep-building slog, is a dream. It’s tempting to caress the beautiful machine as it hums away, fluttering your eyelashes at it flirtatiously, à la Nigella herself.

But setting aside such frivolity – it’s just a machine, woman: it doesn’t even vibrate as fetchingly as the washing machine – it makes light work of baking.

Once the brown sugar and unsalted butter are creamed (125g of each), you add two large eggs and beat that all in, before adding 125g of self-raising flour, plus a tablespoon each of cocoa and espresso powder. Then add 50g of melted dark chocolate.

Pre-heat your oven to 200g. Share out the mix into a muffin tray, lined with a dozen cupcake cases, and bake for 15-20 minutes (my notoriously awkward oven required 25).

Leave in the tin for a couple of minutes and then move to a cooling rack. When they’re fully cool, top with a simple chocolate ‘icing’ of 300g dark chocolate, 50g unsalted butter and two teaspoons of espresso powder, melted gently in a bain marie.

I would say that, sticking religiously to Ms Lawson’s measurements, there’s no way you can ‘pour’ the cake mix into the tray. It’s more a matter of plopping the mix in, a spoonful at a time. But that’s a minor complaint. And I didn't do as she suggested and "lop" the top off each little cake to make a flatter surface for the icing – there's no need (and it's wasteful).

The result was very grown-up cakes, with a light sponge and a very adult topping.

I baked two batches, in the full and certain knowledge that the office gannets would descend gleefully. I was not disappointed.

By Monday evening, it was very much a case of getting back down to Earth after the culinary pleasures of the weekend.

I’d picked up smoked haddock from Vicki on Saturday morning and poached it in a mix of water and milk, before letting it cool and then gently flaking the curving, milk-white flesh onto a plate.

I wonder if there’s anything much more soothing than smoked haddock? It has to be properly smoked, though: the stuff that’s dyed a deep colour is pretty much offensive. The only colour should be a slight blush of pinky brown, while the smoky flavour should be subtle and not overwhelming.

On to the risotto itself. Now, I make no pretence at my take being as good as the divine one that I ate at Brasserie Blanc in Bristol last month, but I decided to tweak and play a little this time, and by and large, I think it paid off.

I started by softening a chopped small onion in olive oil as usual, then added some shredded leek and some celery salt, and cooked it a little longer.

The Arborio rice went in and took on the oil, followed by a slug of Vermouth that fizzed away as it hit the pan. Once that was absorbed, it was the turn of the chicken stock that I’d been heating. A ladle of that and then, when that was absorbed, a ladle of the milky poaching liquor, and so on.

I added fresh thyme and, as the cooking neared its conclusion, green peppercorns. On the side, I was sautéing more shredded leeks.

With the rice having absorbed its maximum level of liquid, the flaked fish was added, a lid went on, the heat was turned down and it was left for around 10 minutes. No, that's not what you read in recipe books, but it's the only way I can get the rice to the sort of texture that I've had when I've eaten risotto in a restaurant.

Since The Other Half doesn’t like cheese, I don’t add Parmesan, but finish my risottos with some crème fraiche instead.

In terms of serving, the risotto is topped with the leek.

I liked most of this: there was a depth of subtle flavour to the risotto itself that was very pleasing, although I’d perhaps let it get a tad too sloppy. I was less pleased with the leek topping. I probably need to use less leek and fry it so that it adds a really crispy contrast. I shall have to look into this.

Earlier, I said that it was essentially a case of getting back “down to Earth” after the sophisticated pleasures of Bistrot Bruno Loubet on Saturday.

But while such dining is not an everyday experience, it’s interesting to see how it can inspire and influence. It may not sound like much, but perhaps my ideas of expanding on my usual basic risotto by using some fish-infused milk, adding green peppercorns and leek with the onion at the start was a response to such an experience and a desire to push my cooking a little further.

Whether it all works is, of course, an entirely different matter. But then again, not only is living learning, you learn by your mistakes.

Food to relax with and relish

Mission statements and restaurants are a curious mix: in the case of Brasserie Blanc in Bristol, it makes clear that the establishment isn’t setting out to serve haute cuisine, but ordinary food to be enjoyed with family or friends; that its philosophy is that of a brasserie.

Unpretentious it may be, but the food is still far from ‘ordinary’ – but then, that may say more about the food that we’re used to than the proprietor’s idea of ‘ordinary’.

To start with, the building itself is really rather special – not least as it stands in the middle of a rather bland and modern, up-market shopping square (which even has the obligatory seasonal ice-rink outside at present).

Originally an 18th century Quaker meeting house, and later the home of a registery office, it’s been very sensitively converted. Given a choice, I decided to sit upstairs. At a table that perfectly fitted the gap between a pew and the back of the front one (now replaced with a walkway), it offered a lovely view, right down and into the kitchen.

The vast wine rack could almost have been an old church organ (I realise that the Quakers don’t use music as part of their worship, but bear with me: it reminded me of many of the non-conformist chapels I’ve visited).

The music was low-key lounge jazz, avoiding muzak, but just taking the edge off the quietness.

I could sit back and enjoy the scene: staff bustling around – a form of synchronised waiting as they go about their work. They reminded me of watching the horses towing cannons at speed and appearing to barely miss each other in the Royal Tournament.

Good bread and butter were supplied, plus chilled water with a big slice of lemon. The latter was just the sort of touch that is appreciated and shows a bit more thought.

I was enormously tempted by the prune and Armagnac terrine, but with the main course almost certainly destined to be meat, it seemed like the perfect reason to try the starter of the day, a smoked haddock risotto. Now I’m sure that the terrine is wonderful, but I’m also sure that this was the right choice.

It was just sublime. Beautiful, natural smokiness from the fish; the rice was superb – grains still just distinct, but soft enough to have almost melded together; a lovely little egg, perfectly poached, topped it, and the buttery hollandaise complimented everything delightfully.

Unctuous and soothing, the sort of food that mellows and relaxes you … well, I could eat that every day, frankly. Nothing complicated, nothing pretentious. Just good food done superbly well.

And accompanied by a glass of Domaine St Jean de Conques Vin de Pays D’Oc, which was light and fruity, providing a nice contrast to the lush food.

For a main course, I opted for Dutch calf’s liver with bacon, sage, a smooth mash and a lovely dark gravy.

It came with fine beans – which was a small irritation because I know perfectly well that they’re not currently in season and seasonality is also something that the Brasserie Blanc brand proclaims. But I will say that they were perfectly cooked: how do you get fine beans that are cooked but still crisp? In other words, crisp but most definitely not raw, which is how the staff canteen at work so often serves vegetables. It’s clearly an art form.

The liver was lovely – very light, almost with a mousse-like quality. Puréed potatoes great – although I can’t say that I really spotted the sage anywhere. Bacon nice and crisp too.

For this, I chose a glass of Côtes du Rhône Château de Montfaucon: bold berry tastes, but not too strong for the lightness of the meat.

In some ways, this course was always going to struggle a little after the culinary orgasm of the starter, but it was good. Very good.

My waitress – a charming young lady who was unrushed and perfectly happy to answer questions or advise on the wine – allowed me a welcome respite before dessert.

Feeling pretty much stuffed by this time, I decided to go safe and ask for ice cream or sorbet. So what flavours were on offer?

The first thing I learned was that an ice cream or sorbet dessert means four scoops.

Well how can a girl refuse? I picked vanilla and chocolate ice creams, with mango and blackcurrant sorbets. When it arrived, with the little balls of frozen wonderfulness atop a crisp biscuit, just melting to reveal their true flavour and scent, and topped with yet another biscuit, it almost felt sacrilegious to destroy the delightful presentation.

But I made the sacrifice. And the sorbets in particular were fabulously flavoursome and refreshing.

As always, I skipped coffee – I can’t drink it after a meal. For some reason, it’s as if it makes my stomach over-heat and, in the dim and distant past, has been known to send me running to the ladies.

It was an enormously satisfying meal, the thought of which lingers and will doubtless linger for some time.

Nothing over-fancy; just essentially simple food done exceptionally well, and served in a very pleasant environment by good staff.

What more can you ask for? Well indeed. But while Brasserie Blanc's mission statement might seem rather unnecessary, the following night was to show very clearly just why such a restaurant feels the need to make a statement of intent.

Paranoia and profiteroles

Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History is proving to be a fascinating book – not just because the history itself is fascinating (I’m around 120 pages in, thus far, and the history is certainly fascinating), but also because the recipes are intriguing too.

It's probably no surprise to regular readers that, within a short time of starting the book, it had occurred to me that it might be really quite interesting to try salting my own meat at some stage.

And sitting in bed reading this morning, a 1968 recipe for salted, boiled beef from an Irish publication inspired me further. It was a recipe, I thought, that looked particularly interesting and particularly doable.

But it required, amongst other things, a “pound of course salt” and a little saltpetre. At which point, it dawned on me that there might be a problem.

Now saltpetre, as any schoolboy knows, is a vital ingredient in gunpowder as well as in salted beef.

‘Can you buy saltpetre in the UK these days?’ I wondered.

This sort of situation is what the internet was born for. So I Googled. And it appears, on the basis of what I could discover, that you cannot buy saltpetre in the UK any more – or at least not food grade and not if you’re an individual rather than a registered company wanting to purchase wholesale.

Now I’m perfectly well aware that the English are bonkers – and it’s frequently a bonkersness that I enjoy (often termed, a tad more politely, as ‘eccentric’ and more than once applied to yours truly), but there’s also a culture of bonkersness that grates.

Who is being protected from whom by such nonsense? The individual wanting to salt meat is suspect but a company never is? The individual is in danger from a chemical – but the company not?

Given that there are apparently a considerable number of ordinary household cleaning products that contain materials that can be used to make explosives, why such a regulation for this particular one, which has a very, very long history as an ingredient in preserving food?

Perhaps it’s partly an end-of-empire thing: a shrinking in on self; confusion, fear – even paranoia.

We do it with children too, increasingly wrapping them in cotton wool – oh, from the best of motives, no doubt, but also without considering the reality of the dangers they face: that child abuse, for instance, is far, far more likely in the home than as ‘stranger danger’ on the street.

Then we fill our homes with ‘antibacterial’ cleaners and other materials, without apparently considering the damage we actually do to our bodies' capacity to be effectively acted on by antibiotics when we really need them.

The latest TV advert promoting utter paranoia about germs/bacteria shows how awful, nasty things can get onto your conventional soap pump when you apply your nasty, germ-covered hand onto said pump to pump some soap out.

Ahhhhh! Can you imagine anything more terrifying?

Or illogical.

Because if you put a dirty hand on the pump to activate it, then your other dirty hand will be under it to catch the soap when it’s dispensed. Whichever way you do it, the soap goes into a dirty hand. But that’s the point, Because then, when one hand has pumped the soap out, it joins the other in the actual washing process – the process that removes the dirt and the germs.

The hand doesn’t go back and touch the germ-infested pump the minute it’s been washed (you don’t have to switch the pump off) – it only goes there again when you need to wash your hands again because they’ve got dirty again.

Unless you have obsessive compulsive issues – in which case, you might need some help, but not on the basis of a supposedly germ-infested soap pump.

Now obviously, the advert is aiming to exploit; to make money from the abject terror and ignorance that it builds on. The company has a nice, new soap pump to flog – one that doesn’t need touching, but which simply dispenses soap when it senses your filthy hands nearby. Strange to tell – but obviously entirely coincidentally – a quick check on a supermarket's online site reveals that this gadget is also considerably more expensive than conventional soap dispensers. And that's before you take into account the financial or environmental cost of the batteries that it requires.

We have schools that won’t allow children to play conkers – not because of ‘elf ‘n’ safety gorn mad’ (that’s a myth) but because of schools being terrified of litigation if a child is in any way injured.

This is all, quite simply bonkers.

I am delighted to report, however, that after searching further, I came across www.designasausage.com, a company that, among other things, sells “curing salt”, which is “easier and safer to use than ‘saltpetre’.” Setting aside the question of what, on the basis of the recipes I’ve seen, is difficult about using saltpeter or what is apparently unsafe (unless it refers to the more inconsistent results that come from using the rather ancient ingredient instead of other nitrates that are favoured now – but are probably no easier to find and, who knows how they translate in a menu), at least the job can be done.

I intend to order some and have a bash sometime over the forthcoming holiday.

In the meantime, today has been busy and very satisfying.

The rhubarb sorbet was finished early this afternoon – forking it around every half hour or so for three hours was hardly a major chore.

A French onion soup for lunch was perfectly tasty – although I always seem to forget, in advance, just how long it takes to brown enough onions for such a soup.

Dinner was from a recipe in Leith's Fish Bible: monkfish fillet cooked in a very light curry sauce, with coconut milk, sliced onions, a little garlic and sliced mango, and served with basmati rice. I’ve had the book for some years but have barely cooked out of it, finding it generally rather intimidating. Looking at it this morning, I found myself wondering why.

My confidence in the kitchen grows: the dish was very nice, although I adjusted the cooking time for the fish. The recipe said 10 minutes. I gave it nearer 30.

Increasingly, I’m finding that I give dishes longer – because if I stick rigidly to the times stipulated, it won't be cooked. Whether that’s partly to do with having a fan oven – which still confuses me when it comes to times – I couldn’t say with certainty. But it doesn't just happen in the oven – indeed, this was cooked on the hob.

In recent months particularly, I’ve realised that what is said on packet instructions or even in books can be misleading. For instance, risotto needs longer than recipes often claim – and I only really understood that after trying risottos in a couple of good eateries. They were not what I had previously understood by the phrase ‘al dente’. But okay, that could simply be my misunderstanding of something.

Pasta is another example: if I cook most dried pasta as per the packet instructions, it’s nowhere near as cooked as the pasta we had (and enjoyed) in Venice earlier this year. I’m going to assume that the Italians know what they’re doing when it comes to spaghetti.

Likewise the French. After not having any monkfish for some time, because, following instructions rigidly when I’d tried it, it always seemed quite tough, we discovered in Collioure and Port Vendre this year that in that region at least, it’s cooked rather longer.

But it's down to that confidence again.

However, the triumph of the day was my first ever attempt at making profiteroles – indeed, my first ever attempt at making choux pastry.

Okay, okay: they were not impeccably smooth or round, as you can see from the picture. I need to work on this – in the morning, when chatting with Ed in L’eau a La Bouche, he’d said that that is the really hard part and he’s dead right. But they were crisp and light, and the crème patisserie was not bad at all, though I say so myself. So on taste, I can allow myself great satisfaction.

I must give a little nod at this point to Bill, who blogged about making profiteroles at Ballymaloe a few weeks ago: bearing in mind his experiences, I concentrated particularly hard on making sure my filling was stiff enough, even though I wondered if I was risking it being too stiff at one point.

These, I admit, quite simply made my day. And now I'm pleasantly knackered as well as feeling pleasantly well fed.

Drowsy kittens and a fresh risotto

Last night was dominated by the kittens slowly but surely overcoming post-anaesthetic drowsiness – both of them leapt straight out of the cat basket, pushing the half-opened gate aside, Otto racing to the litter tray and Loki straight to the food bowls before checking out that their toys were all still in the right place.

Then the former sat down, just outside the bathroom, and simply went to sleep, clearly unable to keep her eyes open or even think much.

After a while, she tottered into the kitchen slowly – and then proceeded to sit in front of a food bowl and fall asleep all over again.

Eventually, when she sort of slumped down, stage by stage, until her nose was on the carpet, I picked her up gently and placed her on the sofa.

Loki, having pottered and clambered around, had also decided that a rest was in order, and opted for a more deliberate sit down and doze.

But this state of affairs didn’t last very late into the evening, and gradually things became a little livelier.

Boudicca, has seemed to be in a particularly tetchy mood in recent weeks. But the discovery that the kittens are girls may cast a little light on this.

The Other Half has apparently spotted her flehming in recent days – that’s when a cat opens its mouth and has their tongue slightly out, as if they’re sniffing. Which is what they’re doing – except that, in effect, they’re tasting smells.

So with the kittens starting puberty, and flitting in and out of phases of being in season, she’ll almost certainly have been able to smell this. And knowing that her feline flatmates were fellow females, and were on heat, does not seem to have best pleased her.

The Queen B herself though, has changed her behaviour in the 24 hours since they arrived home, returning to her bouncy routines with The Other Half this morning, and jumping up onto a bookcase in the bedroom, which now I think about it, she hasn’t done for some weeks.

Otto and Loki go back to the vet for a post-operation check on Thursday and then have their stitches out in about another 10 days. They are not going to pleased, though, by not being allowed out for another nine days. Boudi will be delighted to have the garden to herself again for a while.

But in the midst of all this, I managed to concoct a seasonal risotto that I thought I’d share with you.

Start heating your stock.

Finely chop some shallots and the stalks of some asparagus, then soften in olive oil.

Add your risotto rice and stir until the rice has taken on the oils in the pan. Then add a good glug of Noilly Prat (or Vermouth or white wine). The smell will be wonderful. Let that absorb, then start adding your stock, one ladle at a time, until you’ve reached maximum absorbtion. On average, this is around 20 minutes.

Now, pop your asparagus heads and some drained artichoke hearts from the deli into the rice mix, plus some torn mint leaves. Stir very gently, pop a lid on the pan, lower the heat to the minimum and leave for 10 minutes.

Take the pan off the heat and add a good tablespoon of crème frâiche. Warm it back up gently.

Take a heavy frying pan and get it hot. Drop in some wafer think slices of a salami (I had a cracking one with fennel seeds) and just let the frizzle up a little.

Dish out your rice mix, top with the salami and garnish with a bit more mint and some grated lemon zest for a really fresh spring risotto.

Time to give the tastebuds a lift

Right. That's it. Enough of this winter thing!

It's been a long one – and colder than for many a year and with far more snow, more widely distributed, than the UK has seen for – well, decades. And with more of the white stuff forecast for the coming days. I find my enthusiasm for the season fading somewhat.

My body wants a change. I can feel it in terms of what I want to eat. I'm not actually craving light salads yet, but I'm moving away from what might be viewed as the most obviously season hearty, comfort food.

The last couple of weeks have seen a binge on pasta: but not with heavy sauces. A couple of shots at one I love where you roast tomatoes, red pepper and red chili, then blend that carefully with some toasted ground almonds, adding a little virgin oil if you need to loosen it.

There's another sauce with roasted tomatoes, anchovies, sultanas and toasted pine nuts – it's Sicilian in origin, apparently.

Last Saturday, when The Other Half was gadding around in Yorkshire for the Rugby League, I made myself a dish with quality tinned sardines, sultanas, some dried chili and some pine nuts. And tomorrow, when he heads in the same direction, I shall quite probably open another can of sardines and do them with chili, garlic and fennel.

All dead simple, all quick, all cheap, all tasty – and all healthy.

But last weekend I roasted a chicken for the first time in more than a couple of months. The first time since the kittens arrived, indeed. And of course that afforded the opportunity to experience being thoroughly kittened when I was stripping the carcase to make stock on Monday evening.

None of our previous cats – nor Boudicca – have ever been bothered about chicken, whether in a prepared cat food or the proper stuff. With the Queen B, indeed, it seems to be her least liked meat flavour. Otto, on the other hand, seems to have set his stall on becoming a full-blown feline bon vivant. When I gave him and his brother some scraps to taste, he went bonkers – and even growled lowly at Loki, as if to say: 'This is MY chicken – not yours!'

After stock making, I took the opportunity to make risotto last night. And with plenty of meat left from the weekend bird, I decided to find a way of using some with this classic rice dish.

I have to say, I was delighted with the result.

Take a shallot or two and chop finely. Soften this is some olive oil, adding some chopped garlic and chopped celery as you go.

When it's good and soft – but not brown – add your risotto rice (a good basic guide is around 45g of raw rice per person). Keep stirring and after that's gained a nice translucence, pour in a glass of Noilly Prat. If you can't get that, use white Vermouth or even a dry white wine. The smell at this point is utterly divine – and just think of the flavour it's adding.

After that's absorbed, start adding chicken stock by the ladle – make sure you've had it warming on another hob, because you don't want it to cool down the dish. Stir frequently and, as each ladle of stock is absorbed, add another. It'll probably take around 20 minutes.

In the meantime, take a parsnip or two and peel it. When you've done that, use a potato peeler like the one pictured to cut long ribbons of parsnip.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Add the parsnip ribbons. As they soften, add some sage leaves and then a glug of the booze you used earlier and let it bubble away for a few minutes. Again, a great smell. Season to taste – plenty of fresh ground pepper is great.

Once your rice has absorbed all the stock it's going to, check your seasoning and then add your cooked chicken. I didn't dice mine, leaving it in pretty much in the shapes and sizes that had come when I'd torn it off a thigh bone. Let that warm through.

Then you could do the classic risotto thing of adding a knob of butter and some grated Parmesan, but since The Other Half hates cheese, I skip this and the butter and add a good dollop of crème fraiche instead. Then pop in around half your parsnip and sage and stir carefully.

To serve, pop the risotto on a plate or in a bowl and top with the remainder of the parsnip mix.

Still comforting, but pretty healthy, it tastes great, it's really easy – and it's a lot lighter than those classic winter warmers.