The Centre Cannot Hold.

I haven't been doing much cooking at all lately. I could pretend it's the summer heat, that I've been busy at work, that other things have gotten in the way; but actually I've just been really down at heel and not really doing anything at all. I occasionally get into a headspace, when things get difficult and I feel directionless, where I just stop. It's like going into shutdown to preserve energy; I just about manage the essentials of living like going to work and getting dressed in the morning, but that's really about it. Which explains why you haven't heard much from me lately. I've been busy drinking gin and staring into space as a kind of complementary activity to the life-evaluating that is constantly going on in my brain at the moment.

I actually made the recipe I am going to tell you about today a week ago, maybe even two. I was given some beautiful, huge, pale green courgettes by my American friend Ed (who seems to be getting regular shoutouts in pretty much everything I write about food these days). I've been eating a lot of courgettes of late, since my garden is producing tiny, beautiful bright yellow ones every other day and pretty much every restaurant meal I've eaten has involved them in some way, so I wanted to deviate a little beyond my usual approach of grilling them and eating them with oil, salt, and lemon juice. I mean, it works superbly well, and is a brilliant minimum effort way of plot-to-plate cooking in under ten minutes, but I wanted to try using courgettes in a way that felt more substantial for a change. So, I turned, as I seem to be doing with rapidly intensifying frequency, to Ottolenghi. I know this blog is basically in danger of becoming Kirsty rhapsodizing about every single recipe in Plenty; but I wouldn't do it if the recipes weren't so good. He has a lot of courgette recipes, but I plumped for this one:

Pasta and Fried Courgette Salad

150ml sunflower oil
3 medium courgettes, cut into 5mm thick slices
1 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
100g frozen baby soya beans
50g basil leaves, shredded coarsely
15g parsley leaves
75ml olive oil
250g strozzapreti (which Ottolenghi oh-so-generously suggests you can sub for any short interestingly shaped pasta, handy if you're a hick from the sticks like me)
grated zest of one lemon
1 1/2 tbsp small capers
200g buffalo mozzarella, torn by hand into chunks
salt and black pepper

Heat up the sunflower oil in a medium saucepan. Fry the courgette slices in a few batches, making sure you don't crowd them, for 3 minutes, or until golden brown on both sides; turn them over once only. As they are cooked, transfer to a colander to drain. Tip the courgette slices into a bowl, pour over the vinegar and stir, then set aside.

Blanch the soya beans for 3 minutes in boiling water; drain, refresh under cold running water and set aside to dry.

Combine half the basil, all of the parsley and the olive oil in a small food processor bowl, adding a bit of salt and pepper. Blitz to a smooth sauce.

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water to the al dente stage; drain the pasta, rinse under a stream of cold water and leave to dry. Return to the pan in which it was cooked.

Pour the courgettes and their juices over the pasta. Add the soy beans, basil sauce, lemon zest, capers and mozzarella. stir gently together, then taste and season with plenty of salt and pepper. Before serving, stir in the remaining basil.

So here's mine:


As you can see it's your typical Ottolenghi colour and ingredient fest, but actually it might just be the nicest pasta salad I have ever eaten. I don't say such things lightly, since my early teens I've been something of a pasta salad fanatic, and positively fume at the horrendous crimes committed in their name by supermarkets and thoughtless cooks. I like mayonnaise as much as the next person, but I'll pass on eating a bowful of it, ta. The vinegar on the courgettes is actually a stroke of genius; it brings out their natural sweetness and lets them really sing; which is no difficult feat in a dish with strong flavours like capers and basil going on. On that note, I would suggest the the mozzarella provides a kind of respite for the palate with it's milkiness, but I wouldn't say the dish would suffer any huge loss for its omission if there was a necessity to veganize it. If my courgette harvests continue at the rate they are I think this recipe will likely become a bit of a fridge mainstay until the end of september, as it keeps pretty well.

All That Glitters

Even as someone who would undoubtedly rather be cooking than doing anything else, I have no trouble admitting that it's sometimes very difficult to cook in summer. When it's hot outside, there are so many other things that demand your attention; the garden, work being busier, people suddenly feeling a lot less like sitting inside watching dvd boxsets all day. Not to mention the fact that it's quite frankly, too hot to want to be stood over a stove all afternoon. So I tend to find in summer, that I eat things I can throw together quickly, composed primarily of raw ingredients. Probably not even interesting enough to be termed salads, for the most part. Not exactly the kind of thing people want to be reading about; although it keeps my tumblr followers in 'Things I Ate' pictures. If they like that sort of thing.

Nevertheless, there is one form of cooking that will keep me in the kitchen, and that, my friends, is baking. While I was compiling our snazzy new Recipe Index, I noticed the alarming amount of baked goods I actually churn out. I say alarming, only because I was alarmed that the number is only, realistically, about half of what I actually bake, since i haven't included repeats of recipes. My hand is near permanently glued to the whisk, my devotion to the ritual of ingredients so strong that when making lemon drizzle cake, I looked at Ed like he was insane for suggesting the creamed butter and sugar had 'probably been beaten enough', and I had the gall to correct Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's directions on how exactly to add eggs and flour. Ed's 'I think this has risen more than last time' elicited only a wry smile from me. Of course it had. We'd done it my way. It's taken me half a year's worth of reflection on exactly what I cook and when to realize that baking is so second-nature to my day-to-day routine, that it's so ingrained and habitual, that at the tender age of 23 I already have something of the cooking traditionalist about me. Which means I have a cooking tradition. Which means I can be proud. and proud I certainly am.

Tradition, however, gets stale quicker than baked goods left on a countertop uneaten. So it was with a mixture of fear and excitement that I embarked upon my first trials of the recipes in Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache. The reason the recipes in this book are so deviant is because rather than using butter in her recipes, Eastwood uses grated or pureed vegetables. This is ostensibly for dietary purposes, something I inherently disapprove of (especially since the book is so unsubtly marketed toward women), but I figured, hey, I won the book, and finding out new things about the properties of vegetables will be a learning experience my baking could benefit from. So after carefully deciding which of the recipes I'd dogeared in my initial reading to make, I whipped out the cheesegrater and got busy:

Courgette and Chamomile Cupcakes

Makes 12

2 medium, free-range eggs
120g caster sugar
finely grated zest of 1/2 a lemon
200g topped, tailed, peeled, and finely grated courgette (I used a yellow one from my garden)
5 camomile teabags (I used pukka's chamomile and vanilla blend; and I buy most of my herbal teas from them, not because i necessarily buy into ayurveda, but because they're the best tasting ones I've found)
150g white rice flour (all the recipes in this book are wheat free but lazybones like me can sub plain white flour)
50g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt (i don't often salt my baking, unless it's chocolate, so i ignored this)

for the icing:
3 tbsp strong chamomile tea (use one tea bag and 100ml boiling water)
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
160g icing sugar, sieved

you will need:
a 12 hole muffin tray
12 cupcake cases

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c/gas mark 4. line the muffin tray with the paper cases.

in a medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar for 3 minutes until fluffy and pale. first add the lemon zest and courgette, and give it a whisk until fully incorporated. Next, tip the chamomile out of its teabags (it comes out as a fine powder) into the egg and sugar mixture, and add the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, and salt.

once all are well mixed in together, ladle the mixture evenly into the cupcake cases so that it comes four fifths of the way up the sides. Bake for 30 minutes.

Remove the cupcakes from the oven and cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes.

To make the icing, mix the chamomile tea and lemon juice with the icing sugar in a small bowl until you reach a white, paste like consistency. Ice the cupcakes with the back of a spoon (dipping the spoon into the surplus tea makes it easier)

So here are mine:


Note that I couldn't resist trialling the edible glitter I got in the same Iron Cupcake Victory as the book. I sort of angsted about these while they were baking. I wasn't entirely sure they'd have the same rise and great texture I'm normally so proud of in my baking. But my doubts were assuaged, as these little beauties came out just perfect. The texture of the crumb was actually really springy; and the courgette and ground almond kept it moist. They tasted amazing; the chamomile flavour was a lot more pronounced than i thought it would be, even in the icing, and since i have something of a fetish for the more floral flavours, I was in cake heaven. i took some down to work, upon which kayleigh, my kitchen manager exclaimed that she wants these as her wedding cakes (despite not being engaged), and my American friend Ed deciding that these were excellent enough to brag to half the village about. I'm still answering questions about them when I turn up at work now. I'm looking forward to trying other recipes from this book in the near future, as there are countless other techniques using vegetables i want to try; like using parsnips or beetroot to make fudge, and using aubergine in a dense chocolate torte.

In which Ed has a barbecue and gets two racks of ribs...

The weekend before last I had a barbecue.  As you might have guessed, I'm really not the sort of alpha-male douche-bag who couldn't tell his arse from his elbow in a kitchen but as soon as the mercury stretches past 15° wheels out the barbecue and takes complete control because there's fire involved and that's what men (manly men) are supposed to do.  No, in fact I'm far better within the luxurious confines of a kitchen where you can have four things on the go on different heats at the same time rather than just a temperature gauge of either 'red' or 'white'.  But, you know, barbecues are awesome, right?

So, what do you get when you come to a barbecue of mine?  Plenty awesome things, of course.  Sod sausages and burgers (which are fine in their own right), but ribs is really where it's at for proper barbecue.  So I asked my butcher for two racks of baby back ribs, and prepared them thus.

Spice rub
2tbsp smoked paprika
2tsp celery salt
2tsp ground cumin
cayenne pepper
ground ginger
ground toasted Sichuan peppercorns
ground cloves
ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together and rub over the surface of the ribs and leave in the fridge overnight.

According to Barbecue Sauce Folklore, I should have at least one Secret Ingredient.  But I don't.  Certainly not of Planet Terror proportions, but then I didn't have hoards of the undead to content with whilst making it.  I don't have a Secret Ingredient, not least because I've already told several people what's in mine, but also because there's not really anything in it that anyone might conceivably never think to put in a barbecue sauce.  Except maybe root beer, but even then my inspiration for using it came from an episode of Man v. Food (which is probably the greatest food show on TV.)  Also I'm not selling it, so it doesn't really matter.

Sauce
1 medium onion
3 cloves garlic
6 tbsp tomato puree
5 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp worcester sauce
4 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp cider vinegar
3 tbsp root beer
2 tbsp molasses sugar
1 tbsp chipotles en adobo
2 tbsp olive oil
1 star anise
1 piece mace
2 tsp mustard powder
2 tsp smoked paprika
2 tsp celery salt
2 tsp ground black pepper

Finely chop the onion and garlic and fry in the olive oil with the mace and star anise in a pan big enough to hold all the ingredients until the onion and garlic have softened.  Add everything else and cook on a gentle heat for about fifteen minutes.  This was left overnight with the mace and star anise left in to infuse. 

Set the oven to a low temperature, about 100°C.  Put the ribs in a roasting pan and crumble a few tablespoons of molasses sugar over the top.  Pour about 100ml of water into the bottom of the pan, cover with foil and cook in the oven for between 1½ and 2 hours until the meat is cooked through, but not overdone.  The water will create steam inside the pan, while the sugar will caramelise on the surface of the meat. 

Take the ribs out of the pan and coat the top side with a liberal amount of barbecue sauce and finish off on the barbecue for about five or ten minutes, depending on how hot it is.

Now my fondness for seafood extends to barbecues as well.  As a lot of seafood really doesn't need much time at all to cook, barbecues are great.  Last summer I barbecued some prawns that were about the size of a small domestic animal which were fantastic, along with some squid, which you only really need to wave at the barbecue and it's done.  While I was planning what to do I found a recipe for prawns ideal for barbecuing in Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple.  These were just marinaded overnight in several generous spoonfuls of chipotles en adobo whizzed up with some onion, garlic and a bit of water, then barbecued until they turned pink.

I've been wanting to cook razor clams for ages now.  In fact I only got round to eating them for the first time in Barcelona in May, firstly an unfortunate stop in a harbourside tourist trap resorted to after the initial guide book recommendation being hideously beyond standing room only (crouching on the floor room only?) and the hilariously titled Bar Fanny being ominously deserted.  They were about as rubbery as anything you'll ever eat.  At least we did discover an amazing ice cream shop a few yards away in which to continue the Search For Amazing Pistachio Ice Cream.  Secondly, and thankfully, the tapas joint Kirsty and I sort of stumbled across retrieved them fully into 'Oh, actually these are just really incredible' territory.  So when I went to the fishmongers to get prawns and saw a fat bundle of razor clams lying there, obviously I got some as well.  As far as cooking them, I just threw them on the barbecue and put the lid on and waited for the shells to open, then liberally covered them in a mixture of olive oil, lime juice, garlic, chilli and parsley.  I think by then the barbecue had started to die down a bit as they could have done with being cooked over a higher heat for a bit less, but still, they weren't quite up to the Taller de Tapas standard, but then these were about twice the size.  They still tasted sea-salty and fresh...

As well as these I did some aubergines and courgettes, thickly sliced lengthways and brushed with oil and lemon before barbecuing (before any of the meat/seafood went on), a now obligatory focaccia, and what is possibly the best/easiest thing to do with potatoes for such an occasion.  Take some large potatoes (doesn't need to be any specific type, but Maris Piper works fine as Generic Potoato of Choice.)  Slice in half lengthways, then cut each half into three or four wedges, depending on size.  Put in a roasting pan and cover liberally with olive oil, sea salt and ground black pepper.  Smash a few cloves of garlic under the blade of a heavy knife and stick in the pan, along with a few sticks of rosemary.  Roast in a pre-heated oven at 200°C for roughly an hour, or until golden.

I had also planned to do some cous cous using some preserved lemons I found lying around and toasted pine kernels and some other things, which I managed to totally forget about.  I also chargrilled and skinned some romano peppers the night before and left them in a jar with garlic infused oil, which I also totally forgot about.  Even with those in mind I had wondered whether or not that little lot was going to be enough, even though I don't have any Italian ancestry.  Obviously it was plenty, with enough left over to fry up some aubergine and courgette with some romano peppers and toss with some paccheri pasta the Monday after.

So overall it was a splendid barbecue.  Alas Esteemed Blogging Partner was being held against her will by Evil Corporate Pub Chain International, so couldn't come and make more types of bread and make it some sort of combined Pot Tossery showcase.  Large quantities of superlative beer was drunk (and all put on my Noble Green loyalty card, haha), and the neighbouring shitty street party where some two-bit pub band knock out hideous Blues Brothers covers wasn't too intrusive as they all seemingly became distracted by David Haye's tickling contest.