confidence and competence.

i have actually been neglecting posting here to the point i have a backlog of things i've been doing to tell you about. the spurt of great weather we've had has meant i've been spending my days in the garden, tearing up weeds, planting things out, filling pots, and generally physically exhausting myself with all things green. i won't bore you with the details but while i still have tons to do, i am well on my way to an exciting vegetable garden and tons of plot to plate cooking to ramble to you all about. my days are still going to be busy, as it's not an easy garden to work with given its years of neglect, but i've been evaluating very strongly what i put my time and energies into lately, and have decided to stop slacking with how behind i've got on writing about my food, since regardless of anything else, i find it thoroughly rewarding to reflect publicly on what is otherwise a very private part of my life. it's nice to have a record of things i've made and how they interact with each other, and it's nice to get feedback and responses on what i make, that would otherwise be limited to an audience of those who see it firsthand.

what i wanted to talk to you about today was a continuation of the yeasted baking i have been doing (which seems temporarily to have taken over from my breadmaking just in time for easter, which is awesome cos i dunno how i feel about that jesus fella but i like me a good hot cross bun). what was interesting in making those chelsea buns was the surprise with which i was taken in the eating. i have to say, i think writing about the things i make (and possibly discussing them with the person i write with) has inspired me to test my established comfort zones, and i've been really surprised with the results. the more i've written about things, the more i've pushed my luck regarding these comfort zones, although always in my repetitive 'build upon the previously made item' fashion. which is exactly what i did after the chelsea buns. in the spirit of experiment i leafed through a book i must have used once a week at university: nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess. while at university i used it very regularly, i mostly used it for the same things; the banana bread, the carrot cupcakes, and the lemon curd and mascarpone variant of victoria sponge are the three that spring to mind as the most-made. the yeasted baking chapter at the back however, was read, but untouched. and this is where i found, and promptly made, the recipe for these distinctly nigellan* over-the-top german-american buns, the perfect next step from my chelsea buns:

*if something can be hegelian, derridean, foucauldian, then something can be nigellan. shut up.

schnecken

for the dough:

500g white bread flour

50g caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

7g (1 sachet) easy-blend yeast or 15g fresh yeast (i used 10g dried yeast and will explain how within the recipe)

75g unsalted butter

150ml milk

2 large eggs

for the syrup:

125g unsalted butter

2 tablespoons demerara sugar

4 tablespoons maple syrup

3 tablespoons golden syrup

200g walnut or pecan pieces

for the glaze:

1 large egg

2 tablespoons milk

for the filling:

50g caster sugar

100g demerara sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon

combine the flour, sugar, salt and yeast in a large bowl (unless you're using dried yeast). melt the butter in the milk (here is where you add your dried yeast and let it activate if you're doing things the mitchell way) then beat in the eggs and stir into the dry ingredients to make a dough. knead for 10 minutes or 5 with a dough hook. when it's springy and satiny, form it into a ball, put into an oiled bowl, turn to coat, and cover with clingfilm. leave in a warm place for an hour until doubled in size. (notes for those who've been following my breadmaking, i obviously took the warm bowl and carrier bag route here, i try to avoid clingfilm where i can due to it's real unreusability)

start on the syrup: beat the butter until soft and smooth and add the sugar, still beating to combine. beat in the syrups and then divide this mixture between the holes of a 12-hole muffin tin. sprinkle the walnuts into the tin, too.

preheat the oven to 180 degrees/gas mark 4. when the dough's ready, knock it back, knead once or twice and then roll out into a large rectangle, approximately 60 x 30cm, with the long side nearest you. beat the egg and add the milk. glaze the dough, using a pastry brush, or your fingers.

mix the filling ingredients in a little bowl and sprinkle onto the dough. now, roll up from the long side and away from you, carefully and firmly (though not too tightly), keeping a firm sausage shape.

cut into 12 even slices, and lie each slice on top of the nuts and syrup in the muffin cups. leave to prove for about 20 minutes and when they're risen and puffy, put into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, by which time they should be golden and cooked.

place a roasting tin or baking sheet on top and turn the whole thing the other way up (you will need oven gloves and a degree of caution for this.) remove the muffin tray and dislodge any nuts that are still stuck in it, adding them, along with any residual syrup, to the upturned buns. leave to cool. et voila:

now. you do not need me to tell you how good these were. nor how sticky and excessive. butter, syrup, sugar, nuts, cinnamon, eggs and milk? they were sensational. and, given my family, gone, in a flash. yet another creation that i pulled out of the oven and experienced a heart stopping moment of surprise at. i am definitely enjoying testing my boundaries when the result is gloriously sticky, soft dough such as this. the recipe makes it sound much more like a faff to do than it actually is. in reality these took no more time than the chelsea buns, but are so much more over the top and show-offy. they also, it has to be said, provided the perfect antidote for seemingly everybody around me being on a diet, as is currently the case. i don't know about anybody else, but everybody else around me being constantly in denial and talking about steaming and weighing things and how many 'sins they're allowed a day? it makes me want to glory in excess. and glory i did, getting in a right mess in the process.

i shan't let it be so long before i post again, no matter how exhausted i am from lugging sackfuls of dirt and digging, as i still have so much more to talk to you about; including more preserving, finally getting my mitts on some rhubarb, and another dalliance with mr. yotam ottolenghi.

accidents and compliments.

well, again it feels like a long while since i posted here (i seem to be having real difficulty with coherent time-scales at the moment, everything feels like it's stretching out a lot longer than it ought). for those not in the know, i have been on a most pleasant trip down to see my former portsmouth cohorts, which involved excessive beer garden drinking followed by rowdying up the crowd at a burlesque evening featuring some of my favourite ladies, before moving onto london to spend two days in ed's company, again with the excessive drinking, but tinged with some seriously surreal moments, such as seeing a cyclist ride through knee deep water. it feels like i was away a lot longer (possibly in part to do with the needlessly long train journeys i experienced at either end; curse being a public transport idealist), and thus coming home to the midlands has felt like i've been away from the workaday rituals that usually get repetitive enough to do my head in, for enough time to render them close to my heart again.

one of those rituals, mundanely enough, is my wednesday night watching of masterchef with my mother and plenty of red wine. i have, actually, been particularly interested in this year's line-up because there is actually a vegetarian involved (as ed said, 'you mean they're allowed on?'). who so far, is still in the running, although last night i thought she was a bit cheeky for passing off one of the desserts in the terre a terre cookbook as her own. i mean, it's not like i go wild with the recipe variants or have posted much of my own stuff here, but it's like if you write an academic essay, you credit the people you quote, you know? especially if, say, you're on national television and armchair critics like me are watching, glass of merlot in hand. i might write a shitty letter to points of view, if it got on there i'd probably put it on my cv.

anyway, as per usual, where exactly, is miss mitchell going with her tl;dr set up? well, the week previous, they actually had a vegetarian episode, featuring none other than contemporary veggie posterboy yotam ottolenghi. if you'll recall i posted about my trepidation at using his pristine vegetarian tome, plenty, which i overcame on my birthday by giving the moroccan carrot salad page a nice coating of oil and spices? before realizing what my night's viewing was going to consist of, i utilized my new confidence to attempt and succeed at one of mr. ottolenghi's recipes. and then sat there smugly watching a load of omnivores freaking out trying to make recipes from the very same cookbook, then coming up with literally the most bizarre, unbalanced vegetarian dishes when left to their own devices. although, weird and unpalatable as some of the dishes created actually were, there was actually a moment when i nearly dropped my wineglass in shock at john torode and gregg wallace waxing lyrical about one guy's mushroom risotto being a brilliant idea for a vegetarian restaurant dish, like it was some radical idea. anybody who has ever been vegetarian for more than five seconds will know that 9 out of 10 restaurant menus concede to vegetarians only in the form of mushroom risotto. i think this episode of masterchef possibly undid any work vegetarians who take food seriously have done in positing the dietary choice as legitimate in the food world, by basically re-rendering it a complete joke.

it didn't actually stop me feeling superior, mind. watching people who are supposed to be better than you at something freak the fuck out about a recipe from a book you just used, or the thought of freestyling something with a dietary constraint you consider on a daily basis? it shouldn't bring a body joy, but the human ego has its dark moments, and it would be deceitful of me to pretend i'm any less suceptible to them than anybody else. so yeah, that episode of masterchef made me decide i must be a pretty sweet cook after all, not least because i watched it whilst full of the awesomeness that was:

Green pancakes with lime butter

250g spinach, washed

110g self-raising flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1 free range egg

50g unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cumin

150ml milk

6 medium spring onions, finely sliced

2 fresh green chillies, thinly sliced

1 free range egg white

oil for frying

for the lime butter:

100g unsalted butter, at room temperature

grated zest of one lime

1 1/2 tbsp lime juice

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp white pepper

1 tbsp chopped coriander

1/2 garlic clove finely chopped

1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes

start with the lime butter. put the butter in a medium bowl and beat it with a wooden spoon until it turns soft and creamy. stir in the rest of the ingredients. tip onto a sheet of clingfilm and roll into a sausage shape. twist the ends of the film to seal the flavoured butter. chill until firm.

wilt the spinach in a pan with a splash of water. drain in a sieve and, when cool, squeeze hard with your hands to remove as much moisture as possible. roughly chop and put aside.

for the pancake batter, put the flour, baking powder, whole egg, melted butter, salt, cumin and milk in a large mixing bowl and whisk until smooth. add the spring onions, chillies, and spinach and mix with a fork. whisk the egg white to soft peaks and gently fold into the batter.

pour a small amount of oil into a heavy pan and place on a medium high heat. for each pancake, ladle two tablespoon of batter into the pan and press down gently. you should get smallish pancakes, about 7cm in diameter and 1cm thick. cook for about 2 minutes on each side, or until you get a good golden-green colour. transfer to kitchen paper and keep warm. continue making pancakes, adding oil to the pan as needed, until the batter is used up.

to serve, pile up and add flavoured butter on top to melt.

it really was just as simple as that. i took on mr. ottolenghi's serving suggestions, one being to serve with seasonal leaves (in my case, the closest thing i could get to seasonal was some rather leggy looking but still admirably peppery watercress), and to amp things up by adding some grilled (in my case, slightly overenthusiastically so, but whatever, john torode wasn't coming round for dinner that night) halloumi. like so:

look at that. five pancakes, and four bits of halloumi how i am too small for my size tens these days is a mystery even to me. they were so, so good though. the only thing stopping me getting up and making more pancakes was how full of pancakes i already was, because otherwise i'd have been right back in the kitchen, frying away. speaking of which i didn't use even half the batter, so it went into the fridge and i fried up some more for breakfast the next day. the batter didn't even suffer from the standing, really. these little pancakes are brilliant, i may well have already found myself a classic go-to herbivore recipe (i have been looking intentionally to build a repertoire of favourites for a while, nothing's really clicked until this). they just tasted so...green. and light. and spicy. and they were pleasingly crisp with just the right moussey interior. and they weren't remotely hard to make, although if anybody ever mentions seeing that ottolenghi guy on masterchef, i'm going to milk the fact i make his recipes every now and then for literally all it's worth. hell, everybody's ego needs stroking sometimes. also, before i disappear off to create more chaos in my kitchen, it's worth noting that if there's any lime butter left it would be criminal not to use it on baked sweet potatoes. i'm a devotee of not wasting anything, so it suited me to use up the butter this way before a friday shift, but i was a bit taken aback by how good it actually was.

stranger than fiction

i'm back again, so soon, because yesterday's baking session had results so good i could barely contain myself, and also, because it made me think. and what do i do when i think? pour it out all over the internet. woohoo for being fully paid up generation y (i always feel journalists are missing a trick not doing a number with a question mark on that one, by the way).

so, in the second year i lived with my friend tallie, amongst others. she was a fellow literature student who understood my obsession with narrative, and perhaps, even before i did, my obsession with food, seeing as how weekly she'd come over to talk literature and receive/consume baked goods when i lived in halls. so, despite my protests of it 'looking schmaltzy and shit and having will ferrell in', she sat me down in front of stranger than fiction with the promise 'you will enjoy it, also it's got dustin hoffman playing an english professor in it'. i set my jaw and tried to hate it, and managed to for about five minutes before i gave up. it's funny and clever, and sad and sweet, and it's got dustin freaking hoffman playing an english professor (seriously whoever first let me watch the graduate has a lot to answer for). but the main reason i'm even telling you this story is because there's a character in it, ana pascal, played by maggie gyllenhaal, who has this reflective monologue about how during law school she got more satisfaction from providing food for her classmates than doing her assignments, that her cooking improved and her grades depreciated until she made the decision to drop out, and open a community bakery. she felt it was a less complicated and more democratic way to, as she put it, 'make the world a better place'. when i watched this film with tallie she gave me a little kick after this speech ended, and i looked over gravely, ready with a curt 'yes...i know...i know who she sounds like'.

two years on, after having dropped out of one masters in critical theory at the university of sussex and started taking my role in the hospitality industry seriously, two things happened to remind me of my then-annoyance at tallie's well-perceived link. one, being that on my birthday my mum bought me both flowers and flour, reminding me of this scene, and jogging my memory. and the second being a coworker, having sampled various baked things i've tried, including the buns i will tell you about here, turning to me and saying 'if you weren't so good at this i would tell you to go off somewhere and open a bakery'. it was an oddly jarring experience, being reminded of the memory of me two years ago. i remember then being very annoyed that my friends all had fantastic artistic talents and 'all' i did was cook; and i remember feeling tallie's words like a sting, as at that point i wasn't confident in my academic ability, and wanted desperately to be recognized for it. two years on, after the recognition came and i let it go because it didn't seem to matter all that much, i find all i want to do is cook, and serve food and drinks. i find that tallie was right. and i find, most of all, that not only do people recognize it as a talent, but they see it as a kind of warm, effusive talent; a talent that gives. i was never going to get that with lightly-read papers, no matter how groundbreaking.

anyway, onto the food (are we noticing that phrase becoming a sort of verbal tic?). yesterday i decided i wanted to make something sweet but i had a total block as to what and wasn't feeling like putting clothes on and leaving the house, so i perused my books and somewhat bare cupboards until i hit on the perfect solution in my (now thoroughly flour-coated) copy of daniel stevens' the river cottage bread handbook. i decided to combine my adventures with yeast with my desire to bake, and produce a batch of chelsea buns, so here's the recipe along with some process pictures i took along the way:

chelsea buns

550g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
50g caster sugar, or vanilla sugar
5g powdered dried yeast
10g salt
150ml warm milk
225g butter, melted
1 medium free range egg

for the filling:
25g butter, melted
100g caster sugar
200g currants

for the glaze:
50ml milk
50g caster sugar

in a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, yeast and salt, then add the milk, butter, and egg and mix to a sticky dough. turn out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and silky. return to the cleaned bowl, cover, and leave to rise for about an hour until doubled in size.

brush the base and sides of a deep 30cm square baking tin with a little of the melted butter and coat with a little caster sugar, shaking out the excess.

tip the dough out onto a floured surface, dust with flour, and roll out to a rectangle, about 60x40cm. brush the melted butter all over the dough to the edges, leaving a 2cm margin free across the top (long) edge. sprinkle with the sugar and scatter the currants evenly on top, right to the edges, but leaving the top margin clear.

press the currants into the dough, then, starting from the edge closest to you, roll up the dough to enclose the filling and form a long sausage. moisten the margin at the top with water and press to seal. cut the roll into 9 equal pieces. turn each piece on its end and press with your hand to flatten slightly, until no more than 3cm high. arrage in rows of three in the baking tin. they should just touch each other. like this:


preheat the oven to 200 degrees c/gas mark 6. leave the buns to prove for about half an hour until doubled in size again. sprinkle a little of the sugar for the glaze over them and bake for 20 minutes until golden brown.

warm the milk and remaining sugar in a pan until dissolved, then brush over the buns to glaze when you take them out of the oven. best served warm.

and the finished product:

just....look...guys. i actually squealed with delight when i took these out of the oven, i was amazed at how they'd turned out. that me of two years ago would never have believed that this kind of thing was within her skill level. my mum's audible gasp and hushed 'can i have one?' when she arrived home from work sealed the deal further, and my belief in having made the right choice on the food/literature balance in my life was further affirmed by my brother's plodding downstairs at midnight for 'just one more....but only if there's enough left for me to take one to work tomorrow.' in the eating, these buns were sticky, doughy, and, for the maker at least, thoroughly satisfying. i am definitely going to pursue this yeasted baking route, am thinking of trying some of the cinnamon buns in nigella lawson's 'how to be a domestic goddess' next. in hindsight, i'm glad tallie was right.

now back to our normal broadcast...

does anyone else find it oddly coincidental that ed posted a rabbit recipe just after i refuted the idea that my vegetarianism stems from a love of 'fluffy bunnies'? i tend to notice the tiny similarities in things, something perhaps heightened by the fact i've been devouring books voraciously over the past week; my lust for narrative seems to have doubled after my brief literary dry spell, and i'm sort of glad, actually, as i did worry that moving away from academia would dull my critical instincts somewhat. um, anyway, if i was possessed of a little less iron will than i am, that pasta (or more properly, pretty much everything ed posts) probably would have made me cave and turn back to eating all things dead and beautiful. i am, however, excellent at being stubborn even in the face of deprivation, a fact that many people who have been given the silent treatment by me will attest to.

i wish i had something a little more exciting to talk to you about today, but i guess the purpose of this post is really just a catch-all for the preserving and breadmaking i have been doing over the last week or so, a 'back to the routine' sort of roundup.
i kind of fell off the wagon in terms of preserving for a while. i think partly it has to do with how very pissed off i am that my preserving pan from amazon failed to show; partly due to my now reaching child-in-the-face-of-broken-promise levels of disappointment at the impossibility of getting any forced rhubarb (seriously, it is full-on 'but mummy i want to make pink jam and vodka!' kind of sulking, it's not pretty). in other words, i have been having a preserving tantrum, and have let my stash of jars and bottles grow without remotely thinking about what to put in them. however, this was brought to an end by the burst of life-laundry energy i get directly after celebrating my birth. i realized i still had a rather large amount of sloes in my freezer from my october picking, and they weren't going to turn themselves into anything. the sloes were what started it all, the preserving, actually. miserable about what at the time felt like my life falling apart (see for reference horrible breakup and masters quitting at the same time) i took to stalking the villages in my fake fur coat, restless for something to do. being also a bit of a nature freak at heart, when i stumbled on what i thought were sloes, i spent my evenings reading up on them online, consulting as many pictures and sources as i could, and set off the next day armed with as many tupperware boxes as i could to pick them.

my sloe picking adventure took me two hours, much of it taken up talking to an 81 year old lady who had stopped and decided to accompany me because it reminded her of being younger. and as she put it, talking to someone on her walk made her 'feel less lonely in the village'. i haven't ever seen that old lady again but i think if i do i will tell her that it worked both ways. that the pale girl in the fake fur with the tears-hoarse voice felt less lonely too, afterward. i ended up with a freezer drawer full of sloes, and after making four gin bottles worth, which aged and were ready just in time to hand out around christmas time, and get drunk on after heavy december shifts, i still had three or four tubs left in the freezer.

i don't know why i put off making more for so long, but i did. until the nagging from my mother reached monumental levels about freeing up freezer space, i put it off. the sloe gin recipe i use is from the cottage smallholder and i can't help but feel since they put up the recipe in it's entirety, it might be a bit remiss of me to print it here. so this is my sloe gin literally just after it was bottled (i ended up having to buy another bottle of gin and make more, as this used only half the sloes):

if you recognize these bottles you drink too much, so hats off to you, cos i definitely belong in that club too. i use plymouth gin in my sloe gin, as i find the fact it has orange peel and cardamom in it's makeup lend it a sweetness that marries very well with the sweet, almondy taste of the sloes. but i am a gin snob, so if you wanna use the overly citric gordon's, or, and here i shudder, cheap supermarket hooch, do it, just don't tell me about it, because i don't want to know. as you can see the gin takes a while to colour, but after several shakings over the course of a few days it purples up rather rapidly:

so yeah, see you in three months guys, when i'll be enjoying one of the best sloe comfortable screws money can't buy (you can decide exactly how intentional that pun was for yourselves). i will also definitely be trying repurposing the sloes with medium sherry as the recipe suggests, and since i've been raising my game work wise, expect more booze infusions to happen over the next couple of months as i bring my work home with me and turn amateur cocktail artist. because what's better than a ground-up approach to what you put in your mouth? it having the capacity to get you drunk, of course.

right, so onto my adventures in breadmaking. despite my birthday flatbreads success i have still been using the river cottage basic method for breadmaking, just in order to see how different flours behave. i decided to try my hand at spelt bread, and here are the results:

okay, so as you can see, i made smaller loaves, and only shaped them into rounds. why? because spelt is low gluten, so shaping and slashing it wouldn't really do anything. stevens recommends smaller loaves for a better rise, and i do everything he says, as we well know, so i obeyed. these little loaves were monumental with a quick homemade tzatziki to use up an excess of yoghurt, that i totally forgot to take pictures of. i would definitely work with spelt again, although not having stretchy glutens to guide me in kneading was a little unusual.

my next adventure in bread was a little more interesting. while out shopping my mother picked me up a bag of dove farm's malthouse blend; malted flour, rye, and oats. i tend to prefer to mess about with grain blends on my own, but i'm not going to complain about a family member uncharacteristically taking an interest in my cooking, so i decided to use it. having seen the softening effect of using half water, half yoghurt, in my flatbread making, i decided to use that as my liquid, but otherwise, the basic recipe and technique was not deviated from slightly. and look what i was rewarded with:

possibly my most aesthetically pleasing loaves yet. and they were perfect in the eating, too, light brown and studded with chewy oats. i gave one to aled at work, since he enthuses about my bread, and he was incredibly pleased with it. i am getting to the point with my baking where i feel i have mastered yeasts to a foolproof level; and am now pondering alternate methods of working with dough. possible ideas involve buns (it is after all nearly time for the hot cross variety to make an appearance), bagels, and moving on to the slightly nerve wracking environment of oil based doughs. in the meantime i am content to enjoy home made bread with home made soup and the best company i know in this village:

the soup pictured is a tomato based affair flavoured with garlic, onions, oregano rosemary, and fennel seeds, containing white cabbage, savoy, and kale, to clear out the fridge, basically. i just kind of improvised it and finished with oil and freshly ground black pepper. the book pictured is the best thing i've read in about a year. anyway, until next time guys.

Stuff happens...

So I was thinking the other day that most of what I've written here isn't rooted in much more than the sort of 'I fancied doing this, here it is' fashion I sort of bemoaned here.  Then I kind of half-arsedly stumbled into this one.  Not that it's revelatory or anything, just merely a demonstration of things happening to point me in a certain direction. 

Last Sunday, being roughly between both my parents' birthdays we went to lunch at Bocca di Lupo (I'd be lying if I claimed to not have anything to do with that suggestion.)  If anyone's failed to notice my adoration for this restaurant and chef Jacob Kenedy's food, he's seriously rivaling Theo Randall for being the object of dizzying, wide-eyed Fan Boy-ism.  And as I mentioned before, this was largely accidental as Amazon suggested I'd be interested in his book The Geometry of Pasta as I'd already bought Theo Randall's book.  Of course I was interested.  The book itself is fantastic.  It forgoes glossy Food Porn style pictures of the dishes that beg you to cook them, instead featuring wonderfully abstract illustrations of all manner of pasta shapes and varieties, half of which you've never heard of.  The recipes include a load which I think are the kind of dishes I think a lot of people don't expect from Italian cuisine, that aren't the sort of Summery, brightly coloured, quickly cooked dishes that are seemingly synonymous.  What was that about Pot Tossery being cynical about The General Public's Attitudes to Food?

So anyway, I stuffed myself to the nines with five courses.  Not quite Mr Creosote proportions, but if we hadn't skipped tea/coffee due to their coffee machine being broken I'm not sure if I would have been able to find room for whatever might have been offered in place of a waffer thin mint.  They were instead ferrying coffees from over the road at their deli counterpart Gelupo, which we perused as a matter of principle.  Now so far all my attempts at making pasta have been using Canadian strong flour as a substitute of Italian Tipo 00 flour.  Not that it would have been difficult to get the latter, given the number of fantastic Italian delis in Soho.  But anyway, with it looking right at me, I thought it high time I gave it a go.  So that's Part One of Life Impacting on What I Cooked out of the way.  That and I'm still breaking in my new Imperia pasta machine.  I'd make pasta so much more often if it didn't always leave so many egg whites to use up.  Not that so many eggs are used in every pasta dough recipe, but it's going to take a lot to drag me away from Theo Randall's.  It is now well and truly a comfort zone. 

So, Part Two.  And to be fair, this is fairly tenuous anyway.  But yesterday marked the opening of a new butchers here.  Apparently there used to be five butchers in this town, but for a long time now there's been none, and just the offers of shitty mini supermarkets which assume people only ever want to use about three different cuts of meat.  Much in the same way that they assume everyone wants asparagus in December and parsnips in June.  There was for a brief time the meat counter in the now closed down Farmer's City Market.  The fact that the children's gym on the floor above it is still open just infuriated me even more.  What a fantastic portrayal of the middle classes getting their priorities round the wrong way.  But anyway, the butchers is run by the people who ran the meat counter at the Farmer's City Market.  I said this was tenuous, and it literally is as going to a butchers on their first day of trade and deciding what to cook based on what they had.  Told you.

So what did I cook?  Based on Part One, I consulted The Geometry of Pasta and came up with Pappardelle con Lepre in Salmì, or Pappardelle with jugged hare.  I made do with rabbit instead, and also slightly changed it to incorporate some of my bacon.  The recipe calls for marinating the meat, along with virtually all the other ingredients in 'copious quantities of red wine' for two to three days.  I had to make do with merely a couple of hours.  Oh well, (spoiler alert) it was still bloody delicious.

Go massive ingredients list.  (This supposedly serves eight, I roughly halved it to feed three.)

800g dried, or just over 1kg freshly rolled pappardelle
1 hare (about 2kg)
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
4 bay leaves
1 sprig sage
2 sprigs rosemary
3 sprigs thyme
16 juniper berries, crushed to release flavour
8 cloves
8cm cinnamon stick
¼ nutmeg, grated
1 teaspoon crushed black pepper
2.5 litres red wine
400g butter, or 350g butter and 25g dark chocolate
4 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
grated Parmesan, to serve

Cut the hare into joints that will fit your pot (hacking it roughly into four sections will do; you can leave the liver and kidneys in), and marinate for two to three days with the vegetables, herbs, spices and wine in the refrigerator.  Transfer to a suitable cooking pot, add a pinch of salt and cook over a medium heat for 2½-3 hours at a gentle boil or ambitious simmer, until the liquid has reduced to about a cup and the meat is falling off the bone. 

Leave to cool until it can be handled safely - wear rubber gloves if you're impatient.  Drain and pick the meat from the carcass, breaking up any large lumps of flesh with your fingers.  Discard the bones, cinnamon stick and herb stalks.  Mix the meat and vegetables back into the cooking juices: you should have just over 1.5 litres of sauce.

When you're ready to eat, put the pasta on, and reheat the sauce over a high heat.  Add the butter and parsley (and chocolate if you want a richer flavour, though I normally make this sauce without), and stir to keep everything nice and emulsified.  At this point you can adjust the consistency, boiling the sauce down if it's too watery, or adding a little of the pasta water if it seems too thick, as well as tasting for salt and pepper.  Drain the pasta just moments before it is cooked to your liking, as it will continue to cook for the last minute as you stir it into the sauce, still over the heat.  Serve immediately with grated Parmesan and a glass of Barbera or a mighty red, more expensive than the one used in such quantity to make the dish.

Simple as that.  I fried a couple of thick slices of bacon, chopped, in a little oil as it releases a lot of fat, before adding everything else to the pan, and served it with my own hand-cut pappardelle.  Which is just a pretentious way of saying I don't have an attachment for my pasta machine for pappardelle, so had to cut it with a knife, hence the uneven, non-straight pasta.  The pasta itself was probably the best I've made yet, although pappardelle being my favourite pasta had a little to do with that.  The dough was more moist than usual, in fact as Kenedy says "it should be sticky enough to stick to itself, but not to anything else".  That said, it was no harder to work with than a slightly drier dough, I just had to be careful of it not sticking together too much when it bunched up having come out of one of the thinner settings on the machine.  The whole dish, aside from being quite rich thanks in no small part to the Fuck Ton sized knob of butter, was really deep in flavour with the cinnamon and nutmeg particularly coming through in both flavour and aroma.  I can only imagine how much this would be increased had I marinated it for the full three days having previously seen the effect of marinating pig's cheeks in red wine for a day for what was my second attempt at making ravioli. 

children on their birthdays

alright, so you've seen the first half of the two-days-in-the-making birthday meal. it would be remiss of me to leave you hanging in terms of the second half.

i would like to point out, actually, that nobody else in attendance was actually a vegetarian. this may not seem necessarily like a big deal to those not of the herbivore persuasion, but one thing i learned very rapidly after i gave up the flesh is that conversations about food turn very rapidly to having to justify yourself in a torrent of 'where do you get your protein?' 'give me a steak anyday' and 'what the hell do you eat anyway?'. so being able to cook a meal for people that actually impressed enough to actually prevent any of these questions was a personal triumph for me. the question of my vegetarianism did actually come up, courtesy of my talented musician friend corinne, who has known me since i was an insouciant, self destructive little teenager, and was a little baffled with trying to reconcile that with the green-conscience motivated young adult i've become. i think the question went somewhere along the lines of 'did you just decide you loved the fluffy bunnies then?'. i don't actually get into why i became a vegetarian unless i'm prompted by someone else, but people were very surprised to find that it has little to nothing to do with the moral objection to slaughter, and everything to do with environmental impact. i ended up explaining to them what a headache i used to be socially in terms of constantly label-scrutinizing, questioning, and arguing, in order to make sure what i ate came in line with my ethics about how food should be grown or sourced, and how it was easier, and actually less internal-conflict ridden for me to just give up eating meat entirely. this led to a fair few jokes at my expense about being basically an awfully polite 'hugh grant' vegetarian, which i'm cool with. especially when it's followed by talk of my food in excited, reverent tones. i think the kitchen is basically the only place where my ego isn't charlie sheen proportions, so i don't see any harm in sitting and basking in the praise.

so, let's actually get onto the food shall we? i think we'll start with the falafels. now, this is a recipe i started making semi-regularly in my master's year, when i was living above a one-stop convenience store and had perhaps the world's shittiest, tiniest kitchen. it was one of the few things i could make that pleased the whole household (there were four of us in total, and one girl was literally the fussiest motherfucker i have ever met). it got to the point where we'd be down the pub i worked in, and we all drank in, and someone would start talking about them and i'd end up inviting a whole bunch of people over for falafels later in the week. they were that good. and dare i say it, that easy. i've lost the recipe along the way, but it was originally written by simon rimmer, who if i remember rightly spoke of it as a recipe that, at the time of writing the accidental vegetarian, he considered a bit too 'wholefoods' to include, but upon a rethink and subtle shifts in tastes, had decided it was a recipe that deserved to be included in the veggie cooking canon. i couldn't agree more with him. i got it from one of his vegetarian features in delicious magazine, and here it is as i remember it:

falafels

2 x 500g chickpeas, drained, rinsed, and patted dry
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp plain flour
2 red chillies, chopped (in festing buildings i got into the habit of using whatever chillies lara had grown/whatever was in the fridge. the habit remains)
2 tbsp fresh coriander (original recipe said parsley but i cannot do parsley)
2 cloves garlic
zest of a lemon
sunflower oil for frying.

toast the cumin seeds and coriander seeds in a dry frying pan until they begin to release their scent and blacken slightly, which should take roughly a minute or two. grind using a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder.

place all the ingredients bar the oil into a blender and pulse until you have a smooth, thick, doughy paste. if the ingredients are being a little stubborn add the juice of the lemon, or some olive oil, to loosen things up, but you don't want things getting too liquid.

flour a surface and your hands, and roll tablespoons of the mixture into walnut sized balls. you should get about thirty. (note for the time constrained, you can make the recipe up to this stage the day before and the balls will sit happily in the fridge until you need them)

heat sunflower oil in a frying pan over a high heat, and fry the falafels in batches until browned all over, resting briefly on kitchen paper before serving.

et voila, a very bad, drunkenly taken picture of the falafels after the first attack on the pile had taken place:

but nevermind, you kind of know what a falafel looks like, as if you need me to patronize you by acting like you don't (excuses for my having drunk too much are my forte, by the way). like i said, this was after everybody's first attempt at the pile; there were four left before we embarked on our excursion to the pub, and there were literally none left in the morning. so i'd consider the falafels the success they always are. excellent.

so, the next recipe i found in my copy of yotam ottolenghi's vegetarian cookbook, plenty. now, technically speaking, this is actually the first recipe i have made from this book. this, my friends, is but mere technicality, as it is a compendium of recipes from his new vegetarian column in guardian weekend, and i have certainly made my fair share of those. i bought this book at the end of the meat-free month i did in october last year that was the beginning of this whole giving up meat thing, as a kind of 'here i go, being serious about things, let's make a gesture that inevitably involves a waterstones purchase' thing (i do it a lot. i got my copy of virginia woolf's a room of one's own that way when i moved to university, amongst many other books. yeah i'm pretentious fuck, it's my hot body, i do what i want). funny then, that i should only directly cook from it now. i think it has to do with the way the book is presented. it's so, i don't know, sparse and white and neat, in order to show off the riotous colours of the food; you kind of don't want to mess it up. but i never feel good about my cookbooks until they're covered in something from the kitchen, so i feel an overwhelming sense of relief at having a colossal oil stain over this recipe:

moroccan carrot salad

1kg carrots
80ml olive oil, plus extra to finish
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 tsp caster sugar
3 garlic cloves, crushed
2 medium green chillies, finely chopped
1 spring onion, finely chopped
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground coriander
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp chopped preserved lemon skin (i used mine)
40g chopped fresh coriander, plus extra to garnish
120ml greek yoghurt

peel the carrots and cut them, depending on their size, into cylinders or semi-circles 1cm thick; all the pieces should end up roughly the same size. place in a large saucepan and cover with salted water. bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for about ten minutes or until tender but still crunchy. drain in a colander and leave to dry out.

heat the oil in a large pan and saute the onion for ten minutes or so on a medium heat until soft and slightly brown. add the cooked carrots to the onions, followed by all the remaining ingredients, apart from the fresh coriander and yoghurt. remove from the heat. season liberally with salt, stir well, and leave to cool.

before serving, stir in the coriander, taste, and adjust the seasoning if necessary. serve in individual bowls with a dollop of yoghurt, a drizzle of oil, and some chopped coriander.

so here it is (picture taken the morning after, because in my state i forgot; also i left the yoghurt and oil seperate so people could finish theirs accordingly):

okay, so i'm always amazed at the colours of an ottolenghi recipe. i have yet to make one that hasn't rivalled a pucci-print beachtowel in it's brightness. this recipe was fantastic. i agree with one mr. slater in thinking that occasionally the ingredients lists makes you wince at their sheer magnitude, but that he does very exciting things with vegetables and flavour combinations. the smoke and the spice of this recipe perfectly meld with the sweetness of carrots, and i didn't even mind that i ended up eating it with slices of grilled halloumi for the next couple of days as it languished in the fridge, as this was a pretty perfect example of tarting up leftovers to make them feel new. it looks like there was a lot leftover but let me tell you, a kilo of carrots is a fuckload, over half of it is gone in this picture.

lastly, and i am kicking myself a bit here, because i completely forgot to take a picture of this before it all disappeared, is another recipe from plenty. it, again, used my preserved lemons, and was part of a larger recipe involving roasted beetroot, but i can't not include the recipe, purely because it was just so good (hence it disappeared so rapidly):

preserved lemon relish

2 yellow peppers

3 tbsp olive oil

1 1/2 tsp coriander seeds

400g canned chopped tomatoes (with their juices)

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 tsp sugar

3 tbsp preserved lemons (when i initially posted this i forgot to include them. well done me.)

3 tbsp each chopped parsley and coriander

salt and black pepper.

preheat the grill to high. use a small knife to cut around the stalks of the peppers; carefully pull out the stalks and the seeds and discard. place the peppers on a grill pan lined with foil and grill for up to thrity minutes, or until they are cooked inside and the ckins have blackened, turning them once during cooking. fold the edges of the foil over the peppers to enclose them completely, then leave to cool down. peel and cut into strips.

pour the olive oil into a medium saucepan, heat up and fry the coriander seeds for thirty seconds. add the tomatoes, garlic, sugar, and some salt and pepper and simmer for fifteen minutes. add the preserved lemon skin and simmer for 10 more minutes. remove from the heat and stir in the herbs and yellow pepper strips. allow to cool completely.

again, so gutted i didn't take a picture of this, riot of red and yellow that it was. i am definite about making this again, so i will take pictures then. i can see it being useful a lot over the summer (which i am more than wistful for, as despite being a vegetarian, i give some seriously good barbecue; ask anyone who has ever been to one of mine). it was incredible, sharp and sweet in equal measure, and, no surprise given it comes from a recipe involving beetroot, was the perfect partner for my beetroot houmous.

phew. so those are the big hitters from the birthday feast. honourable mentions also go to an improvised pine nut and cranberry spiced couscous, and some fat green olives i marinated in a dressing made from the flesh of my preserved lemons. given how bored i am with my social life right now, i'll start taking my requests for dinner invitations now. form an orderly queue, guys.

it's my party and i'll cry if i want to.

ok, it feels like a long time since i last posted, but i suspect that's more to do with the busy nature of the past few days than anything else (although, thinking on it, it has been about a week, which is very unlike me). i can only attribute this block in posting to the fact i've been overthinking food on an emotional and political level lately, due to the death of a friend from school last week. when i was a teenager i was hospitalized for quite some time due to depression, and i met this young lady on the hospital ward i was on, although we later attended the same sixth form. she, like many of the other girls i shared that time with, suffered from anorexia nervosa. last week i got to thinking about how i have moved on, and lived my life very differently since. granted, i still have my demons but they don't consume me in the same way they used to. and i've felt very lucky. because carly never got to escape hers. i thought about the things i remember of her, of revising together for our history a level, of me managing to get her to eat something in hospital (a willy shaped biscuit, actually, because i have never been very mature) to avoid her having to have a tube put up her nose, her at my 18th birthday party with all my other friends. i found pictures, and took some time to think about how much it actually just sucks that this disease, which is entirely culturally created, consumed a really sweet, intelligent girl. about how certain young women are so preoccupied with the cultural message of taking up less space in the world that they eventually opt out of it altogether. it made me think, as previously, as a young woman, i have mentioned how hard it is to blot out the noise of media and society and have a healthy relationship with food, my body, and self image, about those who don't quite manage to, and about how those of us who do tend to take it very much for granted. i was beginning to feel a bit guilty for my body politic creeping in on my writings here; but now i can't help but think it would be better to be as vocal as possible in every outlet possible about these things. this isn't just some theory exploration for the intellectual vacuum that is the university, this is the kind of thing that affects, and in the case of carly and countless other young women (and men), ends lives. so from now on i probably won't be apologizing for going off on gender-related tangents, because it isn't me who should be sorry.

anyway the reason the memory of carly just having fun, and being herself with other young people, on my 18th birthday hit me so hard was due to the other thing that was weighing on my mind. on saturday i was 23 years old. i have a bit of a love/hate relationship with birthdays; see for reference any other occasion that makes me take stock of where i am in life such as new year's eve, so i wasn't sure what to expect. i decided the best way to not sit around reflecting on things until i caved, hit the wine early, and ended up emotional pre-midnight, was to focus on cooking up a load of food for my guests. it sort of worked, i didn't hit the wine until gone six, and there weren't any tears until midnight. anyway, there was a lot of food, so i will probably have to spread this over the course of two posts, which actually makes a kind of spatial sense as i divided the cooking over the course of two days. anyway, before i make this post any more of a downer, let's get on to the point of this post, the food that saved my sanity:

flatbreads (recipe from daniel stevens river cottage bread handbook)

makes about 12

500g plain white flour, plus extra for dusting
500g strong white bread flour
10g powdered dried yeast
20g fine salt
325ml warm water
325ml natural yoghurt, warmed.

to knead by hand: mix the flours, yeast, salt, water and yoghurt in a bowl to form a sticky dough. add the oil, mix, and turn the dough out onto a work surface. knead until smooth and silky.

this was my liquids and yeast activating. it looked weird and erratic compared to the normal process, and took a lot longer to show any kind of action, so i was a bit worried that it wouldn't work, but i guess i should perhaps have expected the acid nature of yoghurt to slow down the process, i mean, it was flatbreads we were after here, after all.

shape the dough into a round, then place in a clean bowl. leave to rise, covered in a plastic bag, until doubled in size. deflate the dough, then if you have time, leave to rise for a second, third, even fourth time (this improves the dough but is by no means essential).

this is my dough after it's first rise. you can actually see from the shape of it that it was a lighter and looser dough than the usual bread doughs, as it seems to slump, almost incapable of supporting it's own rise. i gave mine three rises in total and every time it rose higher but became softer and in terms of touch, limper to work with.

tear off pieces the size of small lemons. shape into a round then roll out to a 3-4mm thickness and leave to rest for five minutes or so. this improves the finished bread dramatically.

meanwhile, heat a large, heavy based frying pan over the highest heat and set the grill to maximum. when the pan is really hot, lay the first bread in it. after a minute, maybe less, the bread should be puffy and starting to char on the bottom. slide the bread under a hot grill and watch your creation balloon. it is done when it starts to char on the top. slick some olive oil over it to finish. repeat to use all the dough.

so these are some of the finished flatbreads. they were such a monumental success that i didn't have time to take a picture until over half of them had gone. all my worrying about new techniques in breadmaking (and there was a lot of worrying, believe you me) was for nothing, as, even my mum remarked, i made making these little babies look effortless. that's right you guys, i'm one of those hateful people that doesn't do full on come dine with me style kitchen breakdowns, i just casually fry things off and sling them on the table like it's no big deal. even though these were a very big deal taste-wise. they were possibly the star of the evening. and despite bob's backhanded compliment of 'a kebab would be good in one of these', i think they were the unanimous favourite.

so if you're serving flatbreads, there's got to be something to dip them in, right? on to the next recipe:

Beetroot houmous (again, from the river cottage bread handbook)

1 tbsp cumin seeds
25g breadcrumbs

200g cooked beetroot

1 large garlic clove, peeled and crushed

about 1 tbsp tahini

juice of one lemon

salt and black pepper

toast the cumin seeds in a dry frying pan over a medium heat, shaking the pan almost constantly, until they darken and start to give up their fragrance. crush the seeds using a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder.

add literally everything into the blender and blend until you have a thick paste.

et voila:

i finished mine with a swirl of greek yoghurt and some toasted cumin seeds. i double batched this recipe, and used maybe slightly more lemon juice than i ought; and all in all i kind of wish i'd amped up the garlic, too. having said that i did think this was an excellent variation on houmous proper, and after summer 2010's great houmous challenge (wherein i tried several different variations, some downright odd; broccoli houmous anyone?) i feel qualified as an authority on the subject. which brings me nicely on to:

regular houmous (taken from kirsty's brain, after making 1-2 varieties of the stuff every week for an entire summer)

i eyeballed the quantities of my houmous for the most part, but the ingredients were as follows: one can of chickpeas, the juice of one and a half lemons, two cloves of garlic, a tablespoon and a half of tahini, probably about 50ml olive oil, and a generous dollop of greek yoghurt. why yoghurt, you say? well, it's not traditional but it does give a really good whipped texture. i have tried all-oil variations and all-yoghurt variations, and i have to say i feel like using half and half is the only way to go in terms of both taste and texture. anyways, it's just a chuck-it in the blender until you get a thick paste situation, again.

so here it is:

i finished it with toasted pine nuts, olive oil, and a sprinkling of smoked paprika. again, not strictly conventional, but having tried serving it all kinds of ways in my time, i have settled on this one as the best.

so, that's the first lot of recipes up, my next post will feature falafels, preserved lemon relish, a moroccan carrot salad, and a brief run down of other bits and pieces i improvised. plus probably a hefty side order of my ramblings and over-emoting.

Patience...

Bloody hell, it's nearly two weeks since I last posted anything here, so I'd better make up for it.

So the bacon is out.  I'll avoid any attempt at suspense (I mean, there's already been enough anyway, given it's been the best part of three weeks in the making) and flat out say it's just really damn good.  I'm sure that the majority of the credit must go to the quality of the meat as it doesn't feel like I've actually done much, except wait.  And worry.  As I've divulged recently, things that fall outside of the area where I can brush things off with a swift Oh, I Know What I'm Doing tend to cause me concern, some of it almost certainly unnecessarily.  I think to watch me in the kitchen I generally exude an air of I Know What I'm Doing, even if that is not always the case, but with my first foray into curing this has been conspicuous by its absence.  To the extent that after hanging it up I pretty much ignored it until I took it out of the cellar and transferred it to the fridge.  But my overly pessimistic fears were unfounded.  The balance between meat and fat through the belly is pretty much perfect as far as I'm concerned.  Having tasted some simply fried during the process of the first recipe below I wouldn't want to leave any future bellies curing for longer than this one was, as it was quite salty but not too much as the sweetness from the sugar underpins the saltiness rather nicely.  Whilst the meat is firm, it isn't as hard as I was expecting, so much to the extent that I can just about get some unevenly thick rashers from it for breakfast purposes just using a heavy cook's knife.  I must admit that when I first sliced into it I stood and admired it for a moment or two, as it does look quite fantastic.

Anyway, my anticipation was such that I wanted to cook things where the bacon was relatively predominant.  Whilst it would be perfect to add to other dishes to add flavour, or moisture from the fat, or to bulk up meat content, I felt I needed to see how it would command a dish.  For some reason, I've been struck with a bit of a cooking blank recently.  Maybe because I've been intentionally forcing myself within the confines of things where the focus is primarily on bacon as an ingredient (not that it usually would otherwise), but on top of that I've had virtually no inspiration, and I've been totally underwhelmed by pretty much everything I've considered.  So I suppose it was quite apt that I ended up falling back on what is seemingly the only structured element of my cooking, that being my interpretation of Penne All'Amatriciana which I make on actually quite a regular basis.  I've made it so often that it really requires no thinking on my behalf.  Before that, though, I went for another Do It In Your Sleep dish, risotto.  I've had some dried porcini left over ever since I overbought them for the Zombioli, which I'd always earmarked for a risotto of some kind.  It's one thing I think anyone can make, regardless of ability, simply because it can be adapted in virtually any way imaginable and still be amazing.  Added to which the beginnings of a good risotto are the sorts of things I always have lying around somewhere, so its reliability as a strapped-for-just-about-anything recipe is invaluable.  It's easy to make a good risotto, less so a great one, and this was actually pretty great.

Here's what I did...

40g dried porcini
150g shiitake mushrooms
2 thick slices bacon or pancetta
200g arborio rice
1 glass white wine
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
a good knob of butter
2 sprigs fresh thyme
4 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Put the porcini in a bowl and cover with 600ml of boiling water and leave to soak for about 20 minutes.  Afterwards remove the mushrooms and very roughly chop. 

Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a heavy based pan and add the onion and garlic.  Soften on a low heat for about 10 minutes, until translucent.  Meanwhile chop the bacon into pieces roughly the size of a postage stamp and fry in a frying pan until browned and some of the fat has drawn out.  Add both the bacon and the fat to the onion and garlic and turn the heat up.  Add the rice and stir to coat it with the bacon fat and cook for about a minute.  Add the wine and allow the alcohol to cook off, then add three ladlefuls of the porcini liquid.  Strip the leaves from the thyme sprigs and add to the pan.  Keep stirring constantly, and add more of the porcini liquid two ladlefuls at a time once the rice has absorbed all that was in the pan.  Continue this process for about 10 minutes, adding more liquid as it is absorbed.  It must never become too dry, or be allowed to stick to the pan.

Slice some of the larger shiitake mushrooms in two or three.  Add the remaining oil to the pan used to fry the bacon, and fry the shiitakes until slightly browned and softened.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add the chopped porcini and the shiitakes to the risotto.  Continue to add more liquid until the rice has become soft and pulpy, but still retaining a slight bit of bite in the very centre.  Add the butter and stir in to give the risotto a rich and creamy texture (having ridiculed American cup measurements last time round, I suggest it take heed from the 'good knob', a truly flexible measurement if ever there was one; a knob of butter for this purpose is as big or small as you want it to be).  Season to taste with pepper, and if needed, sea salt.

Sort of Penne All'Amatriciana...

3 handfuls penne rigate
About 12-15 pomodorino tomatoes
2 thick slices bacon or pancetta
1 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic
ground black pepper
torn basil leaves

Fill a large saucepan with salted, boiling water (pasta is best cooked while giving it plenty of space) and drop the pasta in.  Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the bacon until browned and the fat has drawn out.  Slice the tomatoes in half lengthways to expose the seeds.  Add to the bacon and fry for a few minutes until the juice from the tomatoes has reduced slightly.  Finely chop the garlic and add to the pan, along with the black pepper and basil.  Check the pasta and drain just before it is al dente.  Turn the heat off from under the bacon and tomatoes and pour in the pasta and stir in to allow the sauce to coat.

I previously claimed that this dish would not make for very interesting blogging, and yet now here I am going back on myself.  Not least, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out in The River Cottage Cookbook, recipes "will be extra tasty and extra satisfying if you use your home-cured belly."  Still, I do feel slightly disingenuous passing off such an easy thing to cook, but nonetheless I shall.  It takes as long to cook as it does to cook dried penne, about 11 minutes or so (although 30 if you're in a Butlin's self-catering chalet with The Bluntest Knife In the World and a shitty electric ring hob that has had all the heat gauge numbers rub off that's near impossible to tell actually how hot it is.)

I have previously only made this with back bacon and thought about how it might turn out using a higher quality substitute, yet in fitting with the whole cooking structure thing I have never actually got round to it, until now.  Using a much fattier cut of pork obviously results in more fat being released during the cooking, which in turn I found results in a much better sauce.  This was easily the best I've made this recipe, and I can't feasibly put it down to anything other than the fact I was using my own bacon.

Next up (after finishing off this belly, let's not get ahead of ourselves, here) I'm going to try the same curing process only with the peppercorns, juniper and bay flavourings to see how they impart during curing.  What is actually a large part of my relief at this working first time is that the conditions I've got for doing so are obviously adequate at the least.  Whilst I'll warn myself not to get too carried away, in my mind I'm already thinking and salivating about moving on to more complicated salami style curings.

small sweetnesses.

one of the oddest compliments i have ever had in my life was from a fuckbuddy who said the things he liked most about me were my 'small sweetnesses'. when pressed about what he was even on about anyway, he explained that my personality default of being somewhat brash and loud was undercut by little moments of being quiet and gentle that were total blink-and-miss scenarios. he has a point, but i think it was mostly the cocaine and the literature degree talking. still, the phrase has stuck with me for a few years, and i think the idea of delighting in life's 'small sweetnesses' is something i try to do when the general atmosphere of my life is pretty fucking rough. there've been a few in the past week or so, and they've kind of kept me going.

it started with a lemon. a lemon given to me by one of my regulars, an american septagenarian with a house in france (and oddly, coincidentally, also called ed), who i talk cooking and gardening with regularly. i'd given him some of my failed marmalade cake, and a couple of jars of the stuff, explaining the story behind the cake in the process. when he visited his house in france apparently he got thinking, and picked me a lemon from his tree, which he gave to me on the premise that i should retry the cake with my honey and lemon marmalade, telling me i shouldn't lose faith in my ability over one mishap because the cake was lovely. small sweetness, right?

i am actually sappy and sentimental enough to have taken a picture of this lemon, here it is...

and apart from changing the fruit, the marmalade, and the oven i used (fuck you top oven, seriously), i followed the original recipe to a tee, and it was a triumph this time. it looked a little something like this:

...which restored my faith in my ability admirably. there's a piece missing because my mum came in after a bad day after work so i put a piece of cake in front of her before i even said anything. i guess the small sweetness cycle is self perpetuating? the cake was amazing, and the lemon was really, really sharp, so the icing was even better on this one.

anyway, the other moment that made me smile that involved acquiring odd foodstuffs, also happened at work. after clearing up after a christening and spending most of the time talking to two little girls who took a shine to me and were following me about and 'helping' (tiny tots often do, it's the brightly coloured hair and penchant for behaving ridiculously), their mother bestowed a load of the leftovers on me to say thankyou. one of these leftovers was a litre bottle of jersey cream; thick, primrose yellow, and begging to be used in something decadent. i also had, stored away, a bar of green and black's espresso from christmas (i have barely touched the sugar stash from christmas; it's starting to perturb me that my sweet tooth appears to have lessened with age). what i did not have, was any inspiration to do anything exciting and innovative. but as we are learning with my endless repetition, food doesn't have to be either of those to be good. so i decided to make the truffle recipe i have been making since i was like, sixteen, that i'm sure i got from a newspaper if i remember correctly.

basically, i cannot remember the recipe for these properly. i had 100g of chocolate, which i melted in a saucepan over a low heat with 85ml of double cream, and a dab of butter. the original ratio was, i think, 275ml cream, 300g chocolate, and 25g butter, but i eyeball it these days. when it was melted, i left it for about three hours in the fridge, then rolled teaspoons-full into small balls, rolled them in cocoa and (pro tip here people) tossed them hand-to-hand to get rid of excess cocoa. these need to be kept in the fridge. also, for thorntons-goers who might be confused, these are french ganache truffles, as opposed to the lighter, sugarier belgian truffles most people know. they're darker, more intense, and, in my experience, impossible to turn down. i have used these to win friends and influence people in many walks of life, and i give them to almost everyone come christmas time. you can add booze, use milk, white or dark chocolate, infuse the cream, add booze, they're kind of unlimitedly customizable.

and the first thing i did with them? present my mum with a half dozen, cos she'd had another shitty day. and they were good enough to elicit a smile, so no small triumph. cos what have we learned here, apart from that two literature students shouldn't fuck, and i shouldn't internalize something someone said to me on coke? the small sweetness cycle is self perpetuating, that's the one.