Culinary aims for the weeks ahead

Having worked through last weekend – this is beginning to feel like a very long stretch now – I’m looking forward to a nicely extended weekend, starting on Friday.

And the obvious first thing to do on Friday is to get myself down to Borough Market, which then raises the very pleasant question of just what culinary projects to set myself for the weekend.

Something that’s been tempting me for quite a while if foie gras – not the paté, but the fresh stuff. And at Borough, there’s a stall that sell it. It’s not cheap, of course, but I am wondering whether to get some, eat a little myself for Friday lunch and then make the rest into a paté. We’ll see.

This weekend really does have to see a test run of consommé – I think I’m going to try a mushroom one, as it’ll be much cheaper than trying game. The main thing is the clarification, anyway.

I also need to tie down ideas for the big eating days – and then make sure that all my favourite suppliers are going to be at Broadway Market on Christmas Eve. I’m away the previous weekend and it’s getting dangerously near to needing to place orders and check such details.

But another project I now have in mind is completing the classic ‘French mother sauces’.

This is one of those fascinating pieces of information that I discovered when looking up something else – in this case, hollandaise, as a result of Friday’s risotto.

Apparently, these sauces are the foundation of classical sauce making. They are:

Velouté – done this via a couple of Gordon Ramsay pasta recipes;

Bechamel – done this too;

Tomato – pretty obvious;

Espagnole – done this too, for the sour brown shallot sauce that I serve with our Boxing day ham every year;

Hollandaise – not done this yet.

So, actually not very far to go on completing the ‘set’. Interestingly, I saw a definition online for a “more contemporary definition of mother sauces”, which was vinagrette, demi glace, beurre blanc, aioli/mayonnaise and sauce a la crème.

Now I’ve only ever tackled one of those – the aioli – so that leaves me with a whole new set of challenges in future.

But one of the reasons I want to learn hollandaise in particular is that it’s considered the key to béarnaise, which I’ve once with steak and would love to be able to make.

So, that gives me a series of things to think about – and if one thing’s certain, Borough will give me plenty more to think about.

A sauce of pride

It was the first Broadway Market of 2011 this year – and a real pleasure it was too, as regulars, producers and retailers alike all greeted each other for the first time since the festivities.

There was a really enjoyable sense of freshness in the air – and that wasn’t just the blustery wind and the wannabe rain that kept trying to fall.

It was also a successful trip – and the results weren’t stored away for long before the cooking began.

All that caramelisation and Maillard reaction business that I mentioned yesterday cropped up again straight away.

For various reasons, I couldn’t see myself having the opportunity to try Bruno Loubet’s recipe for daube for some weeks, and that rather peeved me.

It needs a 48-hour marinade and, because I’d always simply assumed it was a dish to cook at the weekend, that sort of complicated matters. Or put another way, it meant that I’d have to do the initial preparation on a Friday.

But that’s further complicated by the question of where and when I’d be able to get the beef.

Loubet recommends either beef cheek or blade. Now strangely enough, those are not the sort of cuts that supermarkets sell, so it would pretty much have to be either a Broadway or Borough Market purchase.

Then I had a radical idea. If I could get the meat today, then I could do the initial prep after I’d done my shopping – and cook it on Monday evening.

As luck would have it, Richard of Wild Dartmoor Beef had one piece of cheek on the stall this morning.

I’ve not cooked cheek before, but you see at a glance why chefs would like it. It was a beautifully marbled piece of meat and, at just a fiver for 500g, hardly an assault on the pocket.

The recipe I’m using, which appeared at caterersearch.com, is more like brief notes than what most of us would consider a recipe.

Having got my ingredients ready, I found myself having to start filling in the gaps.

For instance, it doesn’t give an instruction for cutting up the meat or chopping the vegetables. And when it says: “Sauté the vegetables for the daube in oil until golden brown”, it doesn’t actually tell you whether that includes the tomatoes (and whether to skin them or not) or the bouquet garni.

On the other hand, when it says to cook the vegetables until they’re “golden brown”, I now have a better clue about why and how to do precisely that.

So, opting to include the tomatoes in that instruction, I prepared the vegetables, made up a bouquet garni, cut the meat into large pieces, put everything in a large bowl and then covered it all with the white and red wines, and added the Worcestershire Sauce too. It’s now sitting in the fridge, topped with cling film.

This really was a day of early prep. I also split eggs for making macarons tomorrow – apparently the whites age over 24 hours, helping make these delicate little gems.

Which left me with the question of what to do with the yolks.

There was some salmon in the fridge that needed using. It crossed my mind that a hollandaise sauce goes rather well with fish. Here was the big moment.

I roasted garlic and did crushed, garlicky potatoes. Then, feeling that I should make the effort to use the griddle pan more often, hauled that out for the fish and some thick slices of courgette, which were pre-boiled and then dried.

For the sauce, it occurred to me to use Delia – or even John Tovey’s very quick ‘cheat’ that she also includes in the Complete Cookery Course.

But no. If you’re going to do it, then follow the instructions in that Sauces book that you bought by Michel Roux for exactly this sort of thing.

Okay, it meant playing around a little with the amounts, since I didn’t want to use four, as per the book.

After finding that the end of my bottle of white wine vinegar was full of sediment (do I really use so little?) I reduced tarragon wine vinegar and water (ration of one to four tablespoons), with some ground white pepper in it.

That went into a bowl and was allowed to cool, before the yolks were added and whisked in. Then the bowl went on a pan with just a little water simmering away in it, and was whisked until it changed into a lovely thick, velvety texture.

You take it off the heat and start adding the clarified butter. It soon became clear that I hadn’t prepared enough butter. I rapidly melted some more and gave up being too concerned at clarifying it.

Aware that everything else was about ready, I decided that, for today, it would have to be too thick to pour. I gave it a squeeze of lemon juice and served up.

You really do have to keep whisking away as it heats – which is a little dodgy when you’re on your own in a kitchen and trying to do loads of other things. Amazingly, I’d just about managed to plan stuff that didn’t require too much time away from the whisk.

It might have been thick, but it didn’t split – and it tasted lovely.

Okay, the sense of achievement isn’t perhaps quite as high as after Christmas Day’s consommé, but it’s not far off.

There. I’ve done it. I’ve just about cracked another of the French mother sauces. I am seriously chuffed. And knackered!

Sources of inspiration for inspirational sauces

A couple of years ago, in an article in the one of the more serious newspapers by someone suggesting that cookery books by TV chefs were all a load of rubbish, and what we all needed to do was bin our tomes of recipes and go and spend a year in France learning to cook properly.

Which is a lovely idea – well, the bit about spending a year in France learning to cook is a lovely idea. Trashing my kitchen library is not.

The central tenet of the writer's case was that we lack proper skills in the kitchen, and celebrity chefs and their books don't actually teach us anything, but end up collecting dust, never to be actually used.

Now of course I'm not cynical enough to suggest that the scribe in question – his name fails me and Google has failed me too on this score – was only trying to sell copies of the book he'd written about his year in France learning to cook, but that entire proposal is codswallop.

My own cookery journey started nine years ago, when I stopped dieting and started to eat without worrying about calorie counts. Over the course of about a year, I started to actually enjoy food. The natural progression saw me starting to take over the kitchen from The Other Half. And the crucial moment came when I went to Spitalfields Market one Sunday morning to return with a very nice piece of organic beef – only to realise that I hadn't a clue what to do with it.

Obviously I knew to put it in the oven and roast it, but at what temperature and for how long per however many grammes?

One course of action was open: I phoned my mother, who went and found a book from her own collection and read me the formula.

That week, I went and bought Delia's Complete Cookery Course. It remains on my shelf, a veritable Bible for exactly that sort of information. And she's got a good method for doing jacket potatoes too – much slower cooking time, and brush them with olive oil and then sea salt before popping them in the oven. I also employ her instructions for potatoes dauphinoise. And jolly good it is too.

There are people who consider Delia Smith to be boring – she inflamed some when publishing her three-part cookery course by including a section on boiling an egg – but Delia is trustworthy.

My next purchase was Jamie Oliver's Return of the Naked Chef. It's rather popular in the UK at present to lambast Oliver, not least for his faux cheeky Cockney persona. But he's made a wonderful contribution by making cooking seem fun. And indeed, I couldn't believe that I could make dishes that were modern, easy – and tasted good!

There are a few dishes I still do from Oliver's books (I added another three over the years): one involves marinading pork chops in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and rosemary. The instructions tell you to use your hands and massage the marinade into the meat. The first time I made it, I stood there, hands covering in oil and juice and garlic and herbs, grinning like a loon. I was finally the little girl who was allowed to get her hands messy. And there was something so earthy and sensual about it.

Then a slender volume that had been gathering dust for some years came into its own. Gordon Ramsay Pasta Sauces is a 32-page booklet that had come with two pasta bowls and some small bags of dried herbs in a Christmas gift set. It had been a present from The Other Half, frustrated doubtless by my former addiction to boiling a bowl of dried pasta and a bit of frozen veg to buggery as a post-pub repast.

It came at a time when I didn't even know – or care – who Gordon Ramsay was. And besides, the recipes were scarily complicated and looked far too posh for my taste (or lack thereof). The box was emptied, the contents stashed and it was all forgotten.

I did have a couple of cookery books in my pre-cooking days – three Good Housekeeping volumes that my mother didn't want, a Marks and Spencer book of salads, a vegetarian Mexican collection, a Schwartz Spices booklet (free with however many jars of spices) and a notebook in which to note down recipes. Over almost 20 years, it had had around five entries. Which might tell you something.

Then, one day, I decided to try one of Ramsay's pasta dishes. A velouté sauce for scallops (or salmon – the suggested alternative being what I served it with). So began an understanding of sauces – more to the point, of reductions. And the dishes in that little book are delightful: a sauce of very lightly curried shallots and carrot batons, with wilted spinach; mushrooms in a velouté – incredibly intense; another cream-finished sauce with lardons, rosemary, cannellini beans and asparagus (which also taught me that two minutes is sufficient time to cook those wonderful spears of flavour).

Also in my possession from around the same time is Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey. And although there are not a great many recipes I've done from that book or continue to use, one of the dishes taught me to make and use a beurre manié, a mix of flour and butter that is added at the end of a reduction to thicken a sauce.

The dish in question I do quite often – seared tuna steak (substituted for swordfish), served with a mushroom gravy. It might sound odd, but it works very well.

So between Ramsay and Stein, I've picked up some real basics of sauce making – and not just the mechanics, but some comprehension of why you do certain things and what they achieve. That is the sort of thing that inevitably leads to understanding why stocks are so important and why it's worth making your own. And thence to creating your own sauces.

I find myself using River Café Easy Two frequently, even if just to take inspiration and then adapt things to my own specific needs. The food is easy and light, with some great salads, soups and pasta dishes.

And it also has the best recipe for roast chicken that I've used, stuffing the bird with rosemary and thyme and garlic, cooking it very slowly at a low heat, and then finishing it by adding Vermouth to the dish for a final half hour at a higher temperature, while rubbing butter all over the skin. It's divine – and the carcass makes a fabulous stock.

It should be said that my favourite recipe book remains a tome of French cookery, authored by a team who only got their names mentioned on the inside back cover. And a little book of pasta dishes that I picked up for next to nowt in low-cost supermarket Lidl, which also has no author listed. But I've learnt so many actual skills from books by celebrity chefs – it's errant nonsense to suggest that they have nothing to teach us.

All of those have helped educate and draw me to a point where I can now appreciate the work of the UK's cookery goddess, Elizabeth David.

I have enough reference points and understanding to skills to be able to relish reading her books. And indeed, to be inspired by her work. If those muslin cloths arrive through the post by Saturday morning, I'll be trying out potted fish this weekend – the result of reading, with mouth watering, the section on potted meats and fish pastes in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

Whoever that writer was who suggested throwing away books by celebrity chefs because they have no real value – they teach you nothing – he was a fool. And he'd do well to actually try reading a book properly next time before claiming that the recipes in such tomes never work properly.

And I rather hope his own literary effort is languishing on the shelves of those remaindered bookshops. It'll save people having to take his own advice and trash the thing after wasting their money on it.

Say cheese!

Apples. Little globes of infinite variety; deep red, mottled, orange, green; speckled or streaked; a solid mass of powerful colour. Dusky skins to be polished to a sheen with a sleeve.

Cut into firm, juicy flesh and find sweetness or tartness. Pips like tiny teak tears fall out.

And what do you eat these gems of autumn with? There's little better culinary companion than a chunk of cheese.

Apples are wonderful.

Cheese is just magnificent.

I have a problem. The Other Half doesn't like cheese. So I cannot use it in cooking for both of us. Imagine – he doesn't like cheese!

After my recent week in Brighton, when I didn't have any cheese for days, I've gone rather potty on return, unable to resist buying the stuff at various opportunities.

Currently in the house are the remainder of a wedge of Taleggio, a semi-soft Italian cheese (this is the first time I've tried it), plus some Comte and some Tombe Brebis from France.

But much as I love French cheeses in particular (plus good, properly aged Dutch Gouda and Swiss Gruyere, Spain's Manchego, Feta from Greece – a perfect match for new season broad beans in the spring – and Italian cheeses such as Mozzarella), the English have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to cheese counter. Well, at least they do if you can get past much of the rather plastic stuff that is sold in supermarkets.

Take Lancashire cheese as a prime example. I was introduced to this when living in Lancaster, in the north of the county. You'd go to the old Victorian indoor market and have the choice of three Lancashire cheeses: mild, medium – and 'tasty'.

Supermarkets, in their quest to find lowest denominators that have better profit margins, have taken the mildest of these and packaged it in plastic (heaven help!) and stocked it in the chiller cabinets with a flavour rating of two out of five (with five being the strongest).

Lancashire cheese, at its very best, should crumble wonderfully and should tingle on the roof of the mouth. It cooks well too. My mother used to occasionally take a small, round enamel dish, put a little milk in it, a slice of bread and some Lancashire cheese – the 'tasty' variety – on top, then pop it in the oven. The cheese would melt to a wonderfully stringy texture on the bread and over the sides into the milk.

Wonderful comfort food. Although of course, today, as with so many other things, cheese has an aura of luxury about it – a high-calorie, high-fat treat that shouldn't be indulged in too often. But then again , in our diet-obsessed age, when apparently over 90% of UK women are dieting at any one time, it's also worth noting that, when we give up dairy produce, considering it an unhealthy indulgence, we give up serious nutritional value too. It's no coincidence that dieting women have a lower bone density level than those not dieting – in cutting dairy produce, we cut calcium. Bring on the osteoporosis.

There's also the taste factor. Marketed for years as a low-fat cheese, the generic Edam you find lacks much flavour.

Flavour and fat have, in many foods, a strong link. Chicken is another good illustration: thighs are so much tastier than breast meat. They're cheaper too, as breast sells better – not least because it is perceived as 'healthier'. So what if you have to take the most flavourless foods and drench them in sauces, pastes and so forth to give them a taste.

Chicken thighs have the added 'complexity' of of mostly coming complete with skin and bone – but it's a doddle to rip the skin off before cooking (if you want) and it doesn't require a qualification in butchery to remove the bone if you want to do that too. A good pair of kitchen scissors make light work of that task.

But back to cheese. Goat's cheeses – little gems of tangy taste and texture – were just made for salads. And they work particularly well at this time of year.

Chuck some leaves on a plate. Take an apple or a pear, slice it and pop it on the leaves (you can make a pretty pattern with it if you want). Mix up a bit of simple dressing – virgin oil and fresh lemon juice with seasoning – and drizzle over at this point so that the fruit won't discolour.

Toast some walnut halves, slice up your goat's cheese and pop both of these on the salad. It doesn't get much easier – and the tastes are wonderful.

Do something similar with a good Stilton – it crumbles well for the job. Cheshire cheese, if you can get it, has a good crumbly texture too – it's a wonderful compliment to eating simply with an apple.

And then, of course, there is Cheddar. Over the years, I've decided that my favourite Cheddar is Davidstow. Indeed, if there's one foodstuff that, merely thinking about my mouth starts to water, it's cheese. I'm dribbling on the keyboard even now. And Cheddar doesn't sit around for long before it's opened. And then I'll nip into the kitchen for a surreptitious sliver every now and again, the tangy taste twisting my taste buds into a frenzy of pleasure.

So, even if I can't make hot dishes with cheese very often, there are still plenty of wonderful ways to enjoy this food of the gods, at any time of the day.