Creating still life – art in process

I live in a very small flat – with one Other Half and three cats – and this really is the main space that I have in which to create art. It’s essentially why I aim to produce original, small art for small homes – I know what living in a small space actually means!

And that’s also why my process for still life paintings is to photograph the subjects – and then paint from the screen you see here: I simply don’t have the room to set up a still life and then paint from ‘life’.

The roll of felt is used as my background because it absorbs the light rather than reflecting it back, as black card does, for instance, and I like painting modern subjects in a way that nods toward a more classical look. I love Rembrandt’s dramatic use of light and dark for a reason.

I do, however, have a plastic crate in which I keep basics with which I can create still life works. After seeing Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy last year, I realised that I was doing what he had done, collecting bits and pieces and then using them in photos, paintings or drawings.

For that reason, I call it my Matisse Box, because it echoes how one of my personal household gods carried ceramics and fabrics and more around with him to set dress paintings. Indeed, it inspired me to put these odds and ends together and to collect more.

This is a time-lapse of creating a still life for a painting.

The resulting painting hasn’t been done yet, but when it has been, it – together with others – will be available to buy at www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SmARTartByAmanda.

Brighton's Salt Room is a fine dining star

BBQ mackerel and accompaniments

It’s some time since, on a trip away from London for work, I’ve treated myself to a lone fine dining experience.

But in Brighton in June, the The Other Half and I tried a new(ish) restaurant on the seafront, The Salt Room, and back in the city for work this weekend, I booked for myself.

From that, you’ll be able to surmise that it was a good experience – but perhaps that was luck?

On Saturday evening, I was seated at a spacious table, with a view across the promenade to the Channel as night slipped in.

The Salt Room has a short menu – always a good thing ­– but nevertheless, it was no easy choice. There is little on the list that I would not appreciate.

That, of course, is where a nice dry sherry comes in as you browse and salivate.

I opted, in the end, for BBQ mackerel as a starter. Three slices of impeccably cooked fish – and you can easily taste just how fresh it was in the first place – came with a sea buckthorn curd, passionfruit, beetroot, slices of almost translucent raddish and a garnish of dill.

It looked beautiful and it tasted beautiful.

Partridge

The flavour combination might sound odd, but it was not: the curd in particular was a gorgeous revelation, the beet supplies earthiness, the raddish a spot of crisp bite and the fruit a little zing.

For a main, I opted for partridge with more beetroot, smoked bacon, kale, quince and a bread sauce.

Some might have also selected side dishes (a peculiarly British dining thing), but I had no need. Portion size was perfect for me and when food is like this, why change what the chef has designed?

Again, the beet added earthiness, if it was a little undercooked for my usual taste. The partridge was simply superb ­–­ moist and tender and with excellent flavour.

The bread sauce was a delight and the kale and bacon added textures and tastes to a thoroughly pleasing dish.

Both these dishes simply sang of autumn: bold, earthy flavours from excellent seasonal produce reminds the diner – if this is needed – why seasonality is not simply sensible, but a joy.

One of the joys of dining on your own is that nothing need come between you and mulling the flavours you’re enjoying – and that was certainly the case here.

Chocolate ganache

To finish, I opted for a chocolate ganache, with frozen blackberry meringue, compote and liquorice ice cream – another hit.

Blackberry – when not sweetened by processing – has a wonderfully tart taste and also simply reeks of autumn.

I enjoyed some Riesling Trimbach to accompany. The wine list is not particularly lengthy, but there are far more wines available by the glass than is often the situation.

The service is informal  and friendly, but also efficient and knowledgeable.

Back in June, The Other Half observed that he could not think of anywhere in the UK where he’d eaten, that was not Michelin starred, that was as good as The Salt Room.

A second visit did nothing at all to make me disagree.

To find out more and to book, visit www.saltroom-restaurant.co.uk.

A dish like your favourite cardigan

Pyracantha berries – nearly ready for the birds

We studied a number of the poems of Keats during my schooling, but with the exception of this first stanza of Ode to Autumn, from 1819, they made me gurn at the mawkishness of them.

This, on the other hand, had something sensual about it; something of the voluptuousness of the season.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mos’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

The third of the stanzas in that Keats ode deals with the dying of the year.

Looking back on it, I can see why I didn’t appreciate that bit of the work as much: for a teenager growing up in a family that was far too absorbed with death and guilt and sin, it was almost impossible to comprehend death as an integral part of life, and to see that the cycle of life and death and life again was what Keats was noting.

Actually, the whole poem is a beautifully evocative description of England at this time of year. Yes – there are even hints of such sights and sounds to be found and experienced in The Smoke.

The weather changed two days ago, with temperatures falling by such noticeable degrees that a scarf was suddenly in order for the mornings.

With the nights having already drawn in, we’ve arrived at the days when the cardi and slippers call.

The cardigan of the food world – the ultimate comfort food – is soup. And this weekend offered the perfect opportunity to get busy creating warming bowls of comfort.

Chopped onions and garlic, softening

Given that La Bouche has Roscoff onions in, it was an obvious leap to opt for the first French onion soup of the season.

You can certainly use other onions (depending on what you can find), but the point is to make sure hat you’re decent. It’s the point of the dish, after all, so you want some quality flavour.

But perhaps most vital of all, this soup needs time: it’s not the business of 20 minutes.

For two people, I took four of the Roscoff onions, peeled and chopped them.

Now Raymond Blanc suggests slicing, but since The Other Half grouches and says he prefers chopped, this is one occasion on which I will ignore the great chef.

I use a Le Creuset shallow casserole dish to cook this – it allows a far better ratio of cooking surface to onion than any other pan I possess and, of course, its heat-retaining qualities work wonders with such a dish.

So, chop your onions, plus some garlic (four cloves for the two of us).

Over a gentle heat, melt a generous amount of butter – and I do mean generous: 50g won’t go amiss.

When the last of the solids have disappeared into a pool of yellow, pop in your onion and garlic and spread it evenly over the base of the pan. And then let everything start to do its magic.

Slowly does it, remember: this is a marathon of love, not a sprint of convenience.

More colours of autumn

It can take a long time to start browning, but don’t be tempted to turn up the temperature beyond what allows the liquid butter to just – and only just! – produce the odd bubble. Quite apart from anything else, you don’t want to burn either the butter or the garlic.

Don’t be tempted to stir it too much either or it won’t brown.

Now if you really want, you can try a bit of a cheat here, although I’m not convinced of its efficacy. A sprinkle of sugar is claimed by some to speed up the caramelisation process. As I said: I’m unconvinced – and it adds a sort of sweetness to the dish that you don’t want. Given the time it needs, this will sweeten up gorgeously all on its own.

Fast forward and the onion has turned golden. Sprinkle a little plain flour over it and stir in gently. Let it cook through for a minute or so, and then start adding some white wine.

To be honest, I don’t have developed enough taste buds to be able to really notice what I use in such a situation, but I stuck with M Blanc’s golden rule and spent less than a fiver on a bottle, the rest of which was destined for further culinary deployment.

Once you’ve got the got the pan deglazed, add a little stock too (chicken or vegetable; fresh or a cube*), then a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves, cover and leave to simmer oh so gently for a good 40 minutes.

And that’s pretty much that. Check the seasoning – if you used a stock cube, you’re unlikely to need to add any further salt, but a grind or three of pepper will hardly go amiss.

French onion soup with gruyere croutons

To serve in the traditional way, you need a ‘crouton’ or two – no, not little cubes, but, to be strictly accurate, slices of toasted baguette.

Dish up the soup, place a crouton on top of each bowl and scatter coarsely grated gruyere cheese on top, before popping it briefly under the grill so that the cheese starts melting all the way off the bread and into the soup.

It goes without saying that there’s nothing wrong with using something like Cheddar if you can’t get gruyere, but the latter does have a nutty taste that matches superbly with the onion in this dish.

Of course, if – like The Other Half – you don’t like cheese, you do without this added treat or have a crouton spread with mustard.

Now sit and wrap yourself in the warm comfort of this wonderful classic.

It’s worth every moment.

* If you use stock cubes, I recommend Kallo’s Just Bouillon. Unlike most other stock cubes, it doesn’t use palm oil in the ingredients, and the production of this oil is doing grave damage to the habitat of orangutans, so it's a good one to avoid.

It's all in the game

Autumnal Hackney sunset

The weather has been so all over the place for the second year running that, according to some reports, English apples are only now appearing on supermarket shelves – a full three weeks later than normal.

But while the temperature may yet be clinging to levels that are unusual for October – and even producing an unwelcome mugginess – the days have shortened and, in London at any rate, a certain greyness has been the dominant theme of the last fortnight.

In the carpark at the back of Voluptuous Villas, the slender silver birches are yellowing fast, while leaves are starting to fall steadily.

That it is autumn then, can no longer be in doubt.

If apples and pears are now arriving – actually, I’ll let you into a little secret: English apples have been available on Broadway Market on a Saturday since early September – and if parsnips are but a frost away from adding their sweetness to our plates, then another thing is sure: the game season is upon us.

Back in June, when all anyone cared about was summer, given that spring had gone missing in inaction, a new book landed on my doormat.

Bruno Loubet’s Mange Tout offered a selection of recipes that perfectly fitted the long days and the rising temperatures.

As I mentioned here, the confited salmon with asparagus and green gazpacho is a delight and will be done again when the English asparagus pops its head above the soil next year.

But amid all the excitement over summer food, an autumn dish stood out for me from that early browsing: pigeon with cauliflower done two ways, and a blackberry sauce.

One of the delights with Bruno’s cooking is that, even when you haven’t heard of a dish or a food combination before, they always sound so completely natural.

It’s classic and modern all at once.

And so I’ve been waiting to try this one since we returned from France.

The first problem, however, was that Andy and Wild Game Co have disappeared from Broadway Market.

Not, I should say, of his own volition, but with various summer festivals offering him better seasonal business opportunities, it seems that the market managers said that he couldn’t take a break and then return in the autumn.

All of which is slightly annoying – not least since much game is seasonal. The pheasant season, for instance, only opened on 1 October.

Thankfully, Andy has been incredibly helpful, and we organised a way to get me a couple of bags of game. Most has gone in the freezer, although it won’t be staying there very long.

In many ways, last year was the breakthrough one when I finally learned how to cook some game decently, and I have no desire for that to be halted any time soon.

Anyway, the first dish was venison fillet, seared and served with roast veggies and some of the Balsamico drizzle that I swear by both for taste and making a dish look a bit more artful.

The veg in question were swede, carrot and sweet potato, roasted for 35-40 minutes at 200˚C (fan) with a few (drained and dried) tinned spuds thrown in late; all tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and dried thyme – a wonderfully earthy background to the meat.

The second dish was pigeon.

Now Andy supplies me with pigeon breast – to be honest, my butchery skills are not that good that I’d particularly like to attack a bird myself: the breasts are small enough that you don’t want to risk losing any.

However, Bruno’s recipe calls for whole birds, the breasts of which are cut off, while the carcass is used to make a sauce.

Bruno also starts his sauce with a shallot and a parsnip, and since we haven’t yet had the first frost, I am avoiding parsnips until they’re really worth eating.

So I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter, in other words, but started with a mirepoix lite of shallot instead of onion, carrot and celery.

You soften those gently - the first opportunity to do this in one of the Le Creuset saucepans, and what a difference that makes – and then add booze.

Bruno's chicken – before cooking

Now Bruno recommends port and brandy. Again, you can improvise a little – a small bottle of red wine isn’t going to cost as much as port and it won’t insult the final dish. And a miniature of brandy is more than enough.

Reduce, reduce, reduce – and then add stock and reduce again. It’s pretty classic sauce stuff. Strain and add the blackberries to cook briefly before serving.

In the meantime, you bring some milk to a simmer, letting it infuse with a few caraway seeds, before cooking cauliflower florets until tender, then draining and blitzing. Add a drop or two of the milk if you need to for a smooth purée. This has the advantage that it can be made early and then warmed gently before serving.

Mash up some juniper berries with salt and pepper, coat the pigeon breasts and leave them to absorb the flavours. The smell of doing all of this, incidentally, is wonderful.

Near the time, you reheat the purée, then slice the remaining florets as thinly as you can and dress.

Again, improvisation, since I didn’t have walnut oil. I used olive oil and, instead of red wine vinegar, some of my thicker raspberry vinegar, plus salt and red pepper.

To cook the pigeon is simple and a brief matter: just a couple of minutes a side in a hot pan with a drop of olive oil.

Now I have to point out, at this stage, that the picture in the book cannot be the real dish: the raw cauli, once dressed, is NOT going to appear as immaculately white. Hey ho – food porn is as generous with reality as the other sort.

But in taste terms there is nothing false.

This dish packs a wonderful punch. It is a superb combination of flavours and textures and, even if I couldn’t manage quite the studied informality of presentation as that photo suggested, it doesn’t look bad either.

Next up was Bruno’s roast chicken with a parsley, garlic butter stuffing.

Not a stuffing in the usual way, but one that is gently pushed between skin and flesh, meaning that the bird, in effect, self bastes. That was about as far as I stuck with that recipe, but again, wonderful tastes and aromas.

It’s a recipe that can also be used for a guinea fowl, apparently.

Which point keeps the game theme going.

It'’s not easy if you don’t have a specialist supplier or a local butcher that does it, but game is a wonderful meat. Well, lots of wonderful meats, to be rather more accurate.

If you’re worried about fat, then game is lean – and still absolutely bursting with flavour.

Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, we tried kangaroo for the first time: bought from the Exotic Meat Company (Gamston Wood Ostrich Farm) at Borough Market a few months ago, it was the result of a cull in Australia and had been frozen at source.

It was fillet and, as suggested above, as lean as anything. All I did was to bring it to room temperature and dry it off, and then sear it in a little olive oil, and serve with pretty standard veg on the side. Game really can be so easy and so quick.

And when flavour is so good and so strong, you don’t have to do a lot with it. It becomes a brilliant midweek meal.

There’s a moral to all this.

If you can, get hold of game in season and learn to cook and enjoy it. It’s plentiful on these islands, and there’s also plenty of variety.

And in spite of the UK’s history of deforestation and enclosure by the ruling elite – or maybe even also because of it – let’s not get caught up in a belief that game is only for them and not us.

As it is in France and many other places game should be for all of us. It’s great food – but not ‘posh’ food.

And before I forget to suggest it – get Bruno’s book.

Convenience food – voluptuously

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dry the potatoes gently with kitchen paper.

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

Give it 10 to 15 minutes and … voila!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is a dream.

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

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

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

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

In a dish.

Now what on Earth more could you want than that?

Comfort food required

After the unexpected encore of summer, autumn has returned. It's not simply a case of the shortening days reflecting the season, the temperature has now dropped.

Although it was beautifully bright at the end of the afternoon, it was more than a tad nippy. Waiting for a bus on Euston Road, my still-sandalled feet were jolly cold by the time we got home.

Which was the signal to change into the sort of comforting snuggly clothing I haven't worn in months - and prepare some equally comforting food.

We had popped into a small, local supermarket before getting the bus and, with the need for comfort and the desire for ease in mind, had picked up a pack of frankfurters. Everything else was already in the fridge and cupboards at home.

Sauerkraut is an acquired taste, but it's a taste we acquired some years ago on our first trip to Berlin.

It's easy enough to find in the UK these days and there was already a partly-used jar in the fridge.

It took me some time to find a way of cooking it that The Other Half enjoys, but the following seems to work.

Take your sauerkraut, rinse, drain and then squeeze it to remove as much excess water as possible.

Heat a little lard and very gently sauté the vegetable. At this point, I also added a peeled, cored and finely chopped apple, plus a bay leaf. Finely grated carrot is another good option and if you want to go for a really serious central European taste, then a few crushed caraway seeds won't go amiss.

Barely cover with water or chicken stock and cook very gently for 20-30 minutes, checking the liquid doesn't entirely evaporate too quickly. Season to taste.

The packet of franks suggested cooking in a microwave or grilling or frying. Better yet is the following, far more authentic method.

Pop them in a pan that's large enough for them to lie in. Cover with water and bring gently to boil - you don't want to split them - then put the lid on and leave, off the heat, for 10 minutes.

Serve with boiled potatoes and good German mustard - the first mustard I learned to enjoy, having come from a background that eschewed it, just as any other
Articulately strong tastes were eschewed (no horseradish either).

So, excellent comfort food and easy to cook. And sauerkraut afficionados will tell you that not only is it absolutely NOT pickled cabbage, but is fermented, it's seriously healthy too.

Indeed, there is a long history of the liquor from sauerkraut being consumed as a health drink.

There are inevitably questions over whether mass production methods reduce any of these health benefits - so perhaps sauerkraut should join the list of foods that I intend to try making myself?

Summertime in the autumn

It has been a crazy few days. There we were, slipping into the autumn, with long-term weather forecasts predicting a tough, cold winter – and one that will start early in October – and what happens?

Summer pops it's face back above the parapet and we find ourselves enjoying glorious sunshine and sizzling temperatures.

Yesterday morning, with condensation dotting parked cars and a bank of mist suspended just above the grass in Haggerston Park, the towering buildings of the City beyond seemed almost spectral in the stunning light. The day warmed rapidly and even the night was muggier than any in the usually sweaty August.

There are no complaints here at this reprise of heat and light, but nonetheless, it's had me in a spin on the food front.

There I was, having accepted the departure of summer and starting to relish the bounty of the new season.

We had watched from the office window at work as a white wagtail had stopped for a rest on the nearby sedum roof; a breather on its journey to Africa - the blustery weather had even been sending migrating birds off course.

I was contemplating roasts and casseroles, mushroom heaven, baking blitzes on chilled Sunday afternoons, warming soups and even advance preparations for That Festival at the End of the Year.

And then, in what might sportingly be referred to as a curveball out of left field, our crazy weather forced all that back out of sight, leaving me foundering around with a feeling that I needed to prepare summer dishes again - but with a completely changed larder.

So just what do you eat in such confusing weather? On Saturday morning, sitting outside in the garden in shorts, with notepad and pen, I leafed through Gordon Ramsey's A Chef for All Seasons, hunting inspiration.

It is, I realised – gazing with pleasure on page after page of food porn – not really that difficult.

Ramsey is not a cook who really go in for massively heavy dishes, so even his autumn dishes, making the most of the seasonal produce, are not overwhelming. Pigeon breasts, for instance, which I've been enjoying throughout the summer, would still be perfect now.

With a list drawn up, it was off to Broadway Market.

Then it emerged that Andy was not there with his game stall, which meant a rethink. And at the top end of the street, across the road from London Fields, was a scene of chaos.

It looked like someone had taken one of those huge bins and strewn the contents everywhere. Empty bottles and cans lay all over the place, behind a wide cordon of crime scene tape and police.

It seems that the heat had been bringing people out to party for the previous three nights. In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, it had turned from a boozy street party into someone more serious, as shots were fired and a woman was caught in the crossfire. She is in hospital. It was the third shooting in the borough in a week.

Good old Hackney. However trendy the area becomes, there are still the gangs and there are still the guns; and there are still youngsters with no apparent hope or self respect beyond what they believe such things offer them.

And like August's rooters and looters, torching people's homes and wrecking small businesses only a little further away, they don't give a damn about anyone else getting caught up in their spiral of self-hating and self-destructive violence.

Depressed, I turned away and tried to concentrate on the shopping, but was distracted enough that I forgot the butter and actually had to return a short while later.

Fortunately, an afternoon spent 'watching', via the internet, as Manchester City overcame the week's tribulations by beating Blackburn Rovers 4-0 away from home, cheered me.

But what were today's culinary solutions?

First, for lunch, a salad of endive, with wafer thin red onion, a small Cox apple, blushing pink inside when it was cored and sliced, shavings of Montgomery Cheddar, cob nuts and a dressing of lemon juice, virgin oil and honey.

Full of taste and textural contrasts, and a perfect celebration of English ingredients to mark both the end of British Food Fortnight and British Cheese Week. Seasonal, yet light. It can be done.

It was inspired by a recipe but didn't follow it to the letter – the Cheddar instead of blue cheese, and no blue cheese dressing, cob nuts instead of walnuts.

And the evening presented a similar opportunity. I had been intended to do Ramsey's pan-roasted cod, served on a bed of garlic potato purée, with ceps.

But there was no cod, so I picked up some of Vicki's beautiful smoked haddock instead and did a little adjusting.

In this case, I roasted the fish in a gratin dish, dotted with plenty of butter and covered in foil, at about 155˚C for 20 minutes.

The potato was cooked, pressed through the ricer and then had butter and good double cream beaten into it.

The ceps were thinly sliced and cooked gently in a little butter, before a good squeeze of lemon was added, the pan shaken carefully and then left to heat back up.

And that was pretty much that - except instead of adding garlic to the potato, I seasoned it and the ceps with a little of the truffle salt that I'd bought in Carcassone back in July.

All in all, it was scummy. And suitably seasonal but not too heavy. And also not simply taken straight from a written recipe.

For dessert, a combination of seasonal pear – and downright unseasonable (but English!) strawberries: a match that seemed to completely exemplify the situation.

Later, as The Other Half and I sat outside in the dark, smoking, neighbours enjoyed a barbeque while watching The X Factor on a portable TV. At least not all partying in Hackney is violent.

Let's have a bit of a harvest festival

Since we’re in the midst of British Food Fortnight, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do some serious British cooking – and also to consider just what 'British food' means in the 21st century.

Since I did roast beef just over a week ago – and what could be more British than that? – a portion of last Friday evening was given over to the question of what to cook this time around.

It was a football Saturday – and an early start – so there could be no sitting up with a coffee in the morning. The list had to be ready in advance for The Other Half to head to Broadway Market.

Jane Grigson’s English Food is, on such occasions, a fascinating read, with dishes from around the country – many of which you’ve never heard of in the first place and a substantial number of which have probably been all but forgotten.

You see the regional ingredients reflected in recipe after recipe – lamb in Cumbria, for instance, where sheep graze the hills from the rolling Lake District to the bleakness of the utterly inappropriately named Eden Valley.

British Food Fortnight was started, 10 years ago, by two vicars, who wanted to revive the tradition of the harvest festival. I've always relished the ripeness of the season, its fecundity, its sensuality and voluptuousness – and it was one of the parts of the religious year that most appealed too when I was growing up.

The fortnight itself, though, has changed since those early days and come to represent something more, but very much with a sense of the celebration of what we produce on these islands.

It was no surprise, though, to see food writer Matthew Fort tweet that supermarkets weren't supporting it or to read, in a column by Oliver Thring, that a Morrison's, sitting right next door to the orchards of Kent, is selling Chinese apples – although one suspects that even if they’d been selling apples from the garden of England, the fruit would probably have been halfway around the UK and back, such is the crackpottery of the centralised supermarket distribution system.

Living in urban areas, it’s all too easy to forget just what an agricultural heritage we have. The journey north by train is always an enjoyable reminder.

The sky above was as pale blue as my shirt on a beautiful morning. At times, the scenery could have been an almost chocolate box vision of England in the early autumn. Sheep and cattle rested in fields. Green hills rolled gently and an increasing number of the trees were wearing the signs of seasonal change.

Narrow boats dotted the landscape as the canals wound their way between the industrial conurbations, with ribbons of smoke drifting upward from slender chimneys.

There were signs of ploughing: bare soil marked with the patterns of agricultural machinery; stubble elsewhere, spiky in the morning light, like an unshaved chin. The occasional small, square church squatted amid neatly arranged gravestones.

Not that this is the only England visible from the train: there’s the manicured golf course that sits incongruously alongside a vast, belching power station, and cloned, modern rabbit-hutch homes within sight of the tracks too. Depending on the route, there is industrial dereliction: buildings with jagged, broken windows like screaming mouths, as forgotten as the productivity they once housed.

Slag heaps are slowly returning to nature. And at Watford, the journey passes by one of England’s new cathedrals, a vast shopping mall in which to worship the buying of things (except food, usually).

So what about the food?

Well, however many of the dishes from Mrs Grigson’s book might have gone out of fashion, one of the staples of British food remains abidingly popular – the banger.

Not, of course, that a love of sausages is limited to these shores. But unlike our Germanic cousins, for instance, we have managed to reduce the banger to a shadow of what it can be.

Things have improved a little since reluctant producers were dragged kicking and screaming into revealing on packets just what percentage of proper meat was in a sausage – as opposed to the delightfully euphemistic ‘meat derivatives’, which now have to be labeled as such.

But that’s not solved the whole problem.

Industrially made sausages are difficult to brown properly because the sheer scale of the production process means that the machines that make them have to be constantly cooled by water, which finds its way into the finished product along with the listed ingredients.

And that’s another big question – what’s in your mass-produced sausage?

Checking Ocado’s website, even the ingredients list for Daylesford’s ‘organic pork chipolatas’, we find: “Antioxidant: Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid”, plus sugar and sunflower oil.

Then there’s the matter of the right balance of quality meat to fat: yes, you need proper fat and no, sunflower oil does not count.

So there’s more than one reason for buying the best butcher's sausages you can find.

Sausages can be magnificent – but all too often we seem to forget this and treat them as ‘fast food’ in the worst sense of the word; as not being seriously good food that’s worth investing a little time and care in.

So when you’re ready to cook, don’t prick them – you’ll actually lose all those valuable juices that keep the sausage moist.

Heat some fat – lard is brilliant, dripping would be perfect for beef sausages – in a heavy pan and then cook on gently on a low heat, checking frequently. This helps to prevent the skins bursting.

It can easily take 30 minutes, so don’t expect to rush.

There were pork and leek sausages in the fridge when I got back from the football – and I cooked them as described, in the Le Crueset casserole, with a sliced red onion.

On the side – simple boiled spuds and carrot, with good butter. Nothing complicated – but it really doesn’t have to be.

I did, though, have a bit of a revelation the other week, realising that potatoes bought from the organic stall on Broadway Market actually had a different, discernible taste. So too did some new potatoes from the not-quite-organic stall that I’d tried a few days before.

It’s a surprise, because – like so many other people, I suspect – I’ve accepted, over many years, a sense of potato being potato being potato and, generally speaking, just padding. Well, with the exception of Jersey Royals. But I’d certainly never been so conscious of a particular flavour in a maincrop spud.

So the next time I’m on the market, I’ll have to check just what they are.

And in the meantime, I'll contemplate further how to celebrate the joys of the British harvest season.

It's a rum old game

Perhaps, in years to come, I’ll feel the same way about the arrival of autumn as I do about the arrival of spring, when I make a pilgrimage to find the earliest Jersey Royals and English asparagus, and sit there, grinning like a loon in celebration of this declaration of the end of winter.

In terms of food at least, autumn has plenty to offer – and not least among the pleasures of this time of year is the start of the new game season.

Game, as I mentioned last year, has become bogged down in England with ideas of class – it’s seen as posh food.

It’s different in Scotland, where – like golf – hunting has never been viewed as the sole preserve of the well-to-do. And it’s not just killing for sport either.

A move across the Channel, not just to France but beyond, north, south and east, offers a host of culinary cultures where hunting is far more egalitarian – and game an entirely democratic food.

But then again, most of these places still have ‘common’ land where people can hunt (and forage too): they never enclosed it and felled the forests in order to drive the people into the developing urban areas to become economically ‘active’.

Flying into Berlin takes my breath away with all the wooded areas so near to the city. No wonder the forest looms large in the German psyche. For me, I realise I’ve probably hardly even seen a wood worth the name.

But for the moment at least, let’s get back to game.

In an increasing spirit of welcoming the change in the year, I set about a midweek game dish to brighten the evening.

The game in question was pigeon breast, which isn’t seasonal – indeed, I’ve used it a number of times throughout the summer as the centre of a salad. But this was an attempt at a gutsier dish.

For two people, take a couple of medium onions and chop – not too finely, since you want to retain some texture.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and start to cook the onion gently. This is the time consuming part of the dish, but you want it to start to turn brown.

When it’s at that point, add a seriously generous glug of good, sweet sherry and (if you can get some) another of raspberry wine vinegar and continue to cook gently.

What you want is something that has the consistency of a marmalade. If it’s getting very dry too quickly. Add some more of your sherry and/or vinegar.

Taste – and season accordingly. And once it gets seriously thick, it’s very easy to pour off any excess oil that’s still visible from the start of the cooking process.

Cook the meat in a hot, dry pan – a minute and a half each side at most. Pigeon needs to be really quite rare or it gets very dry, but that’s a great contrast with a nicely caramelised outside.

Serve with the onion and sherry marmalade.

On the side, I added some simple basmati rice – and some shredded cabbage, sautéed in a little lard and then left to steam in the lidded pan for around eight minutes.

And that was not a bad way to welcome the season.

Bottle it up

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

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

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

So what to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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