Lighter food for lighter, brighter days

Fresh and light and satisfying

With the improving weather – thank goodness we’re actually having a spring this year! – comes the desire to eat differently; lighter.

And it’s also the perfect time to try a few new things.

There have even been days, with real sun streaming down, when it was the perfect opportunity to pull out the salad spinner and rinse off some organic lettuce and winter purslane, and serve a huge plate of both, drizzled with virgin oil and a thinner balsamico, and topped with cheese.

Blue cheese suits such a dish perfectly, but in La Bouche earlier recently, I’d tried one that was new to me.

Beenliegh is an unpressed, soft blue from Devon, made from organic, unpasturised ewe’s milk. It’s creamy and moist, and beautifully fresh and subtle.

Get the right ingredients sourced and food doesn’t have to be complex to be very good.

A number of evenings recently have seen a dinner that was, if not a direct recreation, then was certainly inspired by a Jamie Oliver salmon dish that I’ve recently discovered.

He takes halved waxy potatoes and quartered fennel bulbs and boils them for six minutes, before draining and drying over the steam.

Salmon with fennel, sweet potato and herbs

Then they go in an oven-proof dish with olive oil, parsley, mint and garlic for something like half an hour, before the salmon – with more of the herby-garlicky mix on it – is placed on top and it goes back in the oven for a further 15 minutes.

It’s a lovely, easy dish, but I think a couple of tweaks help.

Set your oven to 180˚C (fan) and prep the fennel as above, not cutting off the base so that the pieces hold together. Retain the fronds.

Finely chop your mint, flat leaf parsley and garlic, and mix with plenty of olive oil.

Jamie’s version sprinkles the herbs and garlic over everything and then tops with oil, but I think that my way does two things: allows you to coat the ingredients more thoroughly and also reduces the chances of the garlic getting a tad burned.

So, pop in your fennel pieces and mix, and then add some sweet potato that has been peeled and cut into large chunks, instead of potato.

Gently stir around to coat everything. Season with good quality celery salt (my addition) and pop in the oven.

Lovely wild garlic

After 30 minutes, place your salmon fillets on top of the vegetables, scooping some of the oily, herby, garlicky mix on to the top.

And back it all goes for another 15-20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.

Serve with a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice and some black pepper, and topped with the chopped fennel fronds.

The advantage of swapping the potato for sweet potato is that the latter is a vegetable rather than a starchy carb, so it makes the dish a two-portion one rather than having just a single portion.

Mind, if you use lashing of garlic and herbs, those add up too.

Anyway, it’s easy. And tasty – and healthy.

A couple of stalls on Broadway Market also had wild garlic last week, so I grabbed a good handful of that while the opportunity was there.

The English asparagus is here

Later, the leaves were shredded and blitzed together with some spring onions, chives, garlic, pine nuts, a little salt and a teaspoon of sugar, with enough olive oil to give you a good pesto consistency.

You could add parmesan, but I don’t, since The Other Half doesn’t like cheese.

And an ideal way to use some of this lovely stuff – which keeps well in the fridge in a jar – is to cook some pasta, drain and return to the pan, adding some of the pesto with a little double cream and re-warming gently.

You won’t need to use a lot of the pesto – it packs a serious punch.

Serve with fresh asparagus and peas and plenty of freshly-ground black pepper, and if you want, more parmesan.

A perfect, fresh and seasonal dish for a midweek supper.

And on a final note – and a slightly different one: this is worth reading about the cost of asparagus from Peru.

Ignore the slightly puritanical tone of  “lust for this luxury vegetable” etc, but the point remains that there are severe environmental issues created by a global market for a cheap, seasonal vegetable, sent half way around the world to fill – or create – consumer demand outside our own season.

Going German in the kitchen again

With the new year now well under way, it’s nice to find something different to eat.

Boxing Day left behind it a wake of ham: a boiled ham with sour brown shallot sauce is our one guaranteed Christmas eating tradition – and the only one with big left overs.

We started with ham, with jacket potatoes and pickles on the side – the pear chutney I’d made back in September was finally opened and proved to have lovely depth of flavour.

Then there was ham, egg and chips – with the latter cooked in dripping from Mary.

It's worth pointing out (again) at this point that real chips are just so, so much better than the frozen ones – and cooking them now involves no more hopeful cubes of bread tossed into the fat to see if it’s hot enough. This time, I remembered that one of my cook’s thermometers would tell me exactly the right moment.

Ham, of course, can go between slabs of bread. And it can sit on a plate with sautéed potatoes and carrots à la Robuchon.

These are sliced no thicker than 0.5cm and cooked gently for 25 minutes in a pan with butter, sugar, a pinch of salt and water just to cover, and topped with a disc of parchment paper that’s cut to shape and has four holes speared into it.

The disc is then removed and the cooking continued at a slightly higher temperature for a further five minutes.

And then there are the pickles again.

By which point, one is getting a tad bored of ham – thank goodness it’s now done!

And what better way to celebrate the end of something that started with a German dish – that sour brown shallot sauce gets a mention in Thomas Mann’s Nobel-cited Buddenbrooks – than with another German dish?

Indeed, some of you may have spotted that, for all my love of French food, lunch on Christmas Day was a bit northern European/Baltic in fashion.

Much as I am a Francophile in so many ways, the older I get, the more I feel a sense of northern-central European roots.

So today was the perfect time for herring with a bacon gravy – or Hering mit speckstippe as it is properly known.

It is a dish that I was introduced to some years ago by George, and it combines sweet with sharp quite beautifully. It's also enormously comforting.

Dice some streaky bacon – smoked or not, that’s your choice.

Take an onion or two and chop to similar-sized dice – not too small, because you don’t want this all to melt away.

Pop these into a pan with a little fat and cook very gently until they’re soft and caramelised.

When he ontroduced me to the dish, George suggested vegetable oil: I suspect he realised that, at that stage in my culinary development, lard would have been a step too far.

Serve over plain boiled potatoes and herrings decanted from the container you bought them in.

I used Mrs Elswood's sweet herring fillets (£3.99 for 500g). You'll often find them in the kosher sections of shops.

The bacon was unsmoked (12 rashers for £1.85). I used six.

I admit that the onions were a bit of a treat – I'd spotted Roscoff onions in La Bouche just before new year and bought a string; many chefs recommend them. Okay, not as cheap as your usual onion (they actually have AOC recognition in France), but boy, are they gorgeously sweet!

So was it good? Was it ever!

It's a magnificent, simple dish – but not one you're likely to find in any cookbook. And thus I have George to thank for telling me about it in the first place – and thus being allowed to spread the word.

I did some frozen peas on the side too, so that it provided two portions of fruit and veg for the day, plus loads of other goodies. And as illustrated above, it's not expensive.

But it really is a wonderful dish.

A melon and some very nice breasts

Sad to say, I can barely even think of food at present. Well, not much. Which may say something about the tiredness I reported earlier this week.

After a pleasant lunch at a local cafe, which was also very relaxing, we simply snacked for the second evening running last night.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. We had picked up bread on Thursday, along with some pâté, some sliced German sausage and some salad leaves (the live, still-growing type), tomatoes and radishes.

I had most of the weekend's food already plotted out - and the shopping was over and done with ease and really quite quickly.

We had a minor gardening binge too, with The Other Half cutting back the pyracantha that had got rather out of hand and was obscuring my sun.

So then it was time to sit outside. It's been warm without being muggy, and bright - albeit with cloud now doing what the pyracantha had done.

This has been my first attempt at writing on my iPad, using a free Moleskine app. It's practise for our forthcoming foray to France, when I hope to be able to post regularly, but without the need to lug a massive amount of kit around. In the meantime, it's worth working out just what I can do with this.

Tonight's food was simple.

I scraped and boiled new spuds, and when they were about half way through cooking, heated a small amount of good rapeseed oil in a frying pan and then added pigeon breasts and gave them plenty of heat.

They need about two and a half minutes per side, so I timed it to allow four minutes for a pan of freshly podded peas to boil.

This was all served simply with good butter for the vegetables and some hawthorn jelly, which has been sitting in a cupboard, unopened, for a good year.

The best-before date was last December. But best before dates are just that - not a dangerous after date. I opened the jar and found it in perfectly acceptable condition. Since I hadn't got any other jellies around that would compliment game, it as worth trying.

As it happens, the jelly was a perfectly good compliment to the meat, which is incredibly dense and very, very tasty.

I feel that I'm getting better at cooking pigeon breast. It's readily available on Broadway Market, is not expensive and can be prepared in a variety of ways. As I've mentioned before, it goes beautifully as the centrepiece of a warm salad.

But that has meant that I've been practising. And practise, if not having yet made perfect, certainly helps - not least as it builds confidence.

The oil that I used was Cullisse Highland Rapeseed Oil, cold-pressed by Robert Mackenzie in Ross-Shire. You can find out more at www.cullisse.com. I was introduced to Robert a few weeks ago by Andy, whose game stall is now selling the oil.

The hawthorn jelly was from Heavenly Hedgerows. To read more, visit www.heavenlyhedgerows.co.uk.

I also found an absolutely gorgeous melon at La Bouche - Max was laughing as I pressed it to my nose and inhaled the glorious perfume in a state approaching ecstasy. But that's when you realise just how good such fruits can really be. And it's the sort of thing that, even in my tiredness, excites me.

Easy peasy

It’s easy to think, when hearing the words ‘processed food’, of the sort of additive-laden ready meals that you can buy and pop into the microwave, to be ready in a matter of moments.

But processed food also has saving graces, from tinned pulses – a magnificent timesaver – to tinned tomatoes. For the latter, we have one August Escoffier to thank.

Frozen vegetables have a role to play too. Is there a freezer anywhere that doesn’t contain at least a packet of frozen peas?

But as good as frozen veg are and as good as frozen peas are in particular, they’re not the same as the fresh version.

Podding peas goes along with scraping new potatoes as two of summer's kitchen jobs that I find thoroughly pleasant. And the aroma that follows that first pop, before you even start flicking the perfect, emerald spheres into the pan, is wonderfully redolent of growth and plant life.

The taste and texture are different too. And as with so much other spring and summer produce, you don’t need to do much with them. Frankly, you won’t want to most of the time.

It’s simply a question of three to four minutes (depending on size) in boiling water and they’re ready. They’re undemanding in other ways too, only needing a bit of seasoning and some good butter.

As such, they demand equally simple ingredients to make a perfect meal: simple, but the best quality possible.

Since there’s nothing wrong, in culinary terms, with the obvious – there’s usually a reason it is – then today’s pan of peas was served with ivory smooth Jersey Royals and lamb chops, with the meat cooked under a hot grill for around six minutes a side, until the skin was crisp and golden.

The potatoes benefit from a slick of butter too, while whatever the French may say, mint is a wonderful accompaniment to lamb cooked this way.

It was a day for such simplicity.

I was late out for the shopping and, by the time I got home, it was hot and sweaty. The realisation that I’d forgotten a vital ingredient for tomorrow saw me spit a hair or two before heading back up the road.

With the street now utterly rammed, it was hopeless to try to rush. Musing that some good water biscuits would also be nice, I revisited La Bouche, leaving not just with biscuits, but also one of a batch of Saint-Marcellin cheeses that had melted so much that Max had had to put them each in a plastic container and, in entrepreneurial fashion, was offering at a cut price. Although even that wasn't enough for many people, who looked with suspicion on them, as though that state of ripeness was indicative of something bad.

A ciabatta was then sourced before I headed back home and began tearing the bread and scooping up the creamy liquid with it. Utterly gorgeous.

It was an afternoon when the flimsiest of clouds rippled across the sky like the sand on a damp beach. My first melon of the season was perfect refreshment. Just plain slices cut from the globe – another wonderful scent – and consumed greedily, as the juice trickles down the chin.

Food really doesn’t have to be complex to be as voluptuous as this.

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.

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.

The bake-a-thon gets underway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’ll be finished tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A touch of France in downtown Hackney

Now it probably isn’t the case in France, but it’s quite easy, on this side of the Channel, to get a bit evangelical about food. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for such ‘evangelism’, then foodies here would not have the same choices that they do, particularly given the swamping of British culinary life by supermarkets in the last 40 years.

Broadway Market has a touch of the evangelical about it – not in some sort of proselytising way, but simply by being there in the face of the un-relenting march of supermarkets, and Tesco in particular.

Before the market got underway, I could walk to at least three Tesco stores and two Sainsbury’s. Now, six years on, I don’t know what the figure for Sainsbury’s is, but you can double the one for Tesco.

It wasn't the easiest thing to get up and running. The council initially tried to block the market opening at all – despite their own quarter-baked ‘plans’ over some years failing to produce anything but further evidence of their own incompetence: on one notorious occasion, they tried to start up a Saturday flower market with just a couple of raggedy stalls – despite the presence, just 10 minutes walk south into Tower Hamlets, of the legendary Colombia Flower Market every Sunday!

Yet once the market was established as successful, the council tried to weigh in and take control. Fortunately on this occasion, they maintained their record of failure.

Obviously the market was set up for people to sell their produce – and make money. But there has always been an element of something else in the equation too: a belief in good food; in seasonality; in local produce.

Now local isn’t always easy when you’re in the middle of a big city like London, but it can mean at least looking at produce from within the UK.

Les Trois Moutiers is a small village in the heart of the Loire. Ed and Max, who work at the wonderful French deli, L’eau a La Bouche, on Broadway Market, had been there on holiday and had spent much of their time cooking, thrilled by the produce that they could find on the doorstep.

Thus was born the inspiration for an evening in September that aimed to showcase the very best seasonal produce, sourced from as near to the deli as possible.

Unfortunately, on that first occasion, we were sitting in a train, travelling back through France to Blighty.

But when they announced another such evening for yesterday, I decided to forego the City v Arsenal match (a sound decision, as it turned out) and go with The Other Half L’eau a La Bouche for Les Trois Moutiers II.

We had no idea of what we’d be eating until we arrived – the promise was an aperitif, followed by five courses, each with wine matched by Stephane Cusset, the owner of L’eau a La Bouche.

First up was a wild mushroom consommé – served with tempura mushrooms that were garnished with sea salt. The idea was to eat one of these battered, salty mushrooms and then a spoonful of the soup.

Now I am no expert on consommé – I’m struggling to think of another occasion when I’ve eaten it – and I know that at least two other diners thought it needed further reduction, but the taste hit when I took my first slurp was amazing: intense mushroom flavour; clean and unobscured by anything else. I watched The Other Half’s face as he tried (he loves mushrooms) and saw what I imagine was a reflection of my own expression from a few moments previously.

All the mushrooms came from a specialist mushroom stall on the market.

The dish was paired with a pinot noir – a full-flavoured but light red, with an almost smoky taste coming through: perfect for autumn.

After two courses, Stephane gave us a brief explanation of the first wines, which was really welcome. Indeed, the opportunity to try several wines in one session is something I’ve never done before: it was a fascinating learning curve.

The second course was Alder-smoked eel, with a small poached chicken’s egg, some wilted spinach and a little sausage.

Having built a smokery in a garden to do their own salmon for September’s meal, Ed and Max had asked market fishmonger Vicki to get them an eel. It was, they explained later, “touch and go” and her boat had only got one right at the last minute.

After a earlier practice session, when the eel had slipped everywhere as they’d tried to skin it, this had been smoked on Saturday night (Ed’s dedication to the cause was such that he was doing that instead of celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday – she got to come to the meal with friends though).

It was lovely. The eel was a good texture and the smokiness was nice and light; the sausage was crisp and tasty; the egg perfectly poached and the spinach just wilted enough – very nice combinations.

This was paired with a chardonnay – lovely and light, and developing well with honey coming through.

These descriptions of the wine are only my own impressions: I made a serious effort to really think about each one and understand what the tastes were. Even if I’m not going to write about something, my mind demands that I find words to describe something to myself, so that I can understand and categorise it better.

The main course was belly pork, with braised fennel and puréed potato, with a crab apple sauce on the side, itself topped with two candied fruits.

I was a tad worried about the fennel, given my dentally challenged state, but it was perfect and delightfully easy to eat. The pork (Old Gloucester Spot, from a south-west farmer, via Richard, a farmer himself who has a stall on the market selling his delightful Dartmoor beef) was excellent, with the crackling delicious (I managed to eat that too). The candied crab apples were a surprise delight – and a nod to Halloween.

The fennel and crab apples were apparently from the organic fruit and veg stall on the market.

I seem to have missed the latter being available, after looking for and asking after them for years. My mother’s mother had three trees in her garden and we used to get a couple of carrier bags full every year. My mother would make them into a clear pink jelly that went superbly with sausages.

Stephane provided a wine from Provence with this (explaining that matching wine to fennel is particularly difficult – presumably because of its aniseed taste). It had big berry flavours, with caramel to finish and was scrummy.

Then it was onto the cheese – at least the homemade quince jelly gave the cheese-hating Other Half something to eat with bread while I was noshing at the lovely selection.

I’ve mentioned before that I love Cheddar and that my Cheddar of choice is Davidstow. Recently, on a Saturday expedition to L’eau a La Bouche, Max had given me a taste of some Keen’s Cheddar. That went down well and, having bought some, I spent a week taking shavings off it so that they’d just melt in my (almost) toothless mouth.

On Sunday, we had a Montgomery Cheddar – and wow! Stephane commented when he was introducing the 2005 Bordeaux that went with it (“mostly from Merlot”), that it was a complex taste and – well, wow! Really nutty, but without being dry or too hard.

Then there was a bleu d'Auvergne (a classic French blue; lovely and creamy and with a nice saltiness); a Mont d’Or, a soft seasonal cheese from France (and Switzerland), which is made between 15 August and 15 March, and sold between 10 September and 10 May. Stephane has it in the shop now until just after Christmas. It was dripping off the side of the slate platter on which it was served – and was lovely spread onto thin slices of bread.

And finally, an Italian cheese that Max had bought back from a visit to his mother who lives over there: mild and very pleasant.

Fortunately, none of this was rushed and none of the portions were too big, so I managed to get through everything – including quite a lot of the cheese. I’d never tasted any of them before and all were lovely – with the Montgomery Cheddar a revelation.

And then dessert: a quince sorbet to cleanse the palate, followed by white chocolate and pistachio ice cream with roasted plums. Lovely.

The dessert wine was beautifully sweet – almost honeyish. I leant across to The Other Half and said: “Riversaltes?”

And then Stephane told us it was a 10-year-old Banyuls – and nodded in my direction. Not quite total recognition, but only a few miles out!

Ed and Max emerged to a round of applause – and to tell us a little about the ingredients and the process.

A few minutes later, chatting with a buzzy Ed outside, as he drew on a welcome fag, he explained that not only did the kitchen not have a range – after all, it was only designed with coffee shop catering in mind – it only has one hob, they’d had a power outage at one point and had even used a sandwich toaster as a second ‘hob’ at another stage.

For goodness sake – that’s about the level of the kitchen in the staff canteen where I mostly work, and they don’t manage to produce anything even remotely close to the same quality. Never mind that, the canteen staff are supposed to be trained and, as we found out on Sunday night, neither Ed nor Max are trained cooks.

What they achieved was excellent anyway – given all those considerations, it was bloody remarkable!

We waddled home; full, mellow and very, very satisfied. Les Trois Moutiers II had been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

A weekend back in London

Back in London, we're sliding gently into autumn. The nights are visibly drawing in and there's a nip in the air in morning and evening. Later, the bedspread will be replaced with the duvet: it's nearly the time to snuggle up on long evenings.

In such circumstances, the first soup of the season was welcome. After our return home last weekend, I spent quite a bit of Monday busily defrosting and cleaning the fridge and freezer. It was a chore I'd set for myself some time ago and, having let the contents decrease, I'd got down to the last two pots of stock. Both survived the defrosting process in a chiller bag, but both were used in the days that followed – one for boulangerie potatoes with pork sausages cooked on top and the other for a mushroom risotto.

So this weekend was always going to mean roast chicken and stock making. That in turn means celery – but as I'm a bit stymied at present in terms of muching on such food, a celery soup seemed the perfect way to use the rest of a big head that I found on Broadway Market this morning.

It was partly a case of mixing ideas. After softening onion and celery in oil and butter, I added just enough stock (out of a bottle, I'm afraid) to cover, and left to simmer for a while. Then I puréed the whole lot, but didn't strain it, so I was still left with some texture. Adding a little cream was all that was required then – although I also blitzed some parsley, garlic cloves and a few pine nuts, adding them to a squeeze of lemon juice and some virgin oil, to make a sort of pistou-style garnish for the soup, which gave it an extra zing and worked really rather well.

One of the things I did in Collioure, on the morning we began our journey back, was to buy a tablecloth – the first tablecloth I've ever owned. This might sounds like a pretty irrelevant thing to do, but it was perhaps oddly crucial to part of my plan to really bring back some Continental habits to little old Hackney. And however daft it sounds, transforming our kitchen in London with little touches from France increases the incentive to go and sit in there to eat instead of in front of the telly.

Last Monday then, I cleared away all our mutual modeling equipment and spread the table for the first time. It looks nice; the cloth is a bright yellow with a design of lavender and olives – a perfect reminder of the kitchen table in Collioure that we sat around most evenings.

Tomorrow night is going to be a Portuguese-style fish stew (basic recipe thanks to George). This starts with onion and some garlic, then stock, potatoes, carrots and some chorizo, the Spanish paprika sausage. Later, you add tinned chick peas and sliced leek late on, and top with a piece of white fish for the last 15 minutes. Easy, cheap, nutritious and tasty. And perfect comfort food for the autumn.

I'm making a couple of tweaks this time.

To start with, since I've made a point of getting some cod in today and salting it, I'm going to use some of that for this dish. And I'm going to garnish it with the remains of the pistou-style mix I mentioned earlier (I might try aioli another time, but the other is already made). I'm also not going to put potatoes in, because we'll have bread instead: Sundays are now another market day, so I go very French and get a fresh baguette tomorrow as well as today.

Indeed, bread is the biggest difficulty that exists in trying to do French-style (or even Mediterranean-style) eating (apart from tomatoes). The best bread I've found over here doesn't compare to what I was eating daily over there. But you do the best you can, and it's not impossible to avoid the tons of sliced factory bread that dominate shop shelves in the UK.

I'll also use Cannellini beans instead of chick peas, partly because the skins on the latter are a bit awkward for me at present. And I'll pop some black pudding in instead of the chorizo, because The Other Half would prefer that.

So, the Portuguese-style stew will become a sort of French-style dish – there are versions of black pudding all over the place and the Catalans do a very nice one. What's interesting from a personal point of view is that I'm increasingly thinking like this – adapting rather than being wedded to specific recipes. It's an enormously enjoyable thing to do.

Otherwise this weekend, it was with great pleasure that my scheme to get a local supplier of Banyuls appears set to work. I brought home miniatures of the lovely stuff – one for Stephane, the co-owner of L'eau a La Bouche, our French deli on Broadway Market – and one for Ed, a young man who works there and who has developed into a real food friend.

Both were delighted – Stephane was frankly astonished and promised to get a supply of Banyuls in. He asked if we'd actually been to Banyuls-sur-Mer and I was able to reply that we had last year, briefly. When I added that, for three summers now, we've stayed in Collioure, his expression – almost one of religious awe – said it all. I assured him that, in the five years since the deli opened – it was its fifth birthday this week – it has helped to revolutionise my eating habits and thus my life, so the present was entirely appropriate. He seemed utterly delighted.

Finally today, something a bit more serious. I frequently mention seasonality: I know I've done so from the point of view of taste countless times here, but I have also mentioned the issue of sustainability and the environment.

Here's a story on the damage being done in Peru by the production of asparagus for all-year-round eating elsewhere in the world.

Growing a crop that needs constant irrigation in a desert area – utterly bonkers. As completely insane as growing carnations, a flower that requires vast amounts of water – in Kenya.