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.

quite contrary

things are really starting to happen in the scrubby little excuse for a garden i'm carving out for myself at casa mitchell. it's still very much a work in progress, but all the arse-busting work i did in spring is starting to show rewards. i've got pods on my pea and broad bean plants, i've already eaten my first lettuce harvest, and i keep getting handful after handful of rocket to scatter over just about everything. my small scale herb garden is thriving. the latest success story is my perpetual spinach plants. perpetual spinach is not spinach proper, it's a member of the chard family that behaves in a very similar manner to spinach, in that you can't really tell the difference apart from the plants being hardier. i have two plants, and about say, once a week i nip out and harvest a couple of handfuls of leaves about this size:

i've been starting to pretty much plan what i cook around this weekly harvest, so reliable and prolific as it has become. part of me is intrigued to see how long my plants will keep giving if i keep them well cared for. they're sure enough not showing signs of slowing down.

while it would be easy to get lazy and just start wilting spinach into everything, like i did when i was a student and reluctant to waste any of one of those supermarket pillow packs of baby leaves which i seemed to buy every week; i have been trying to cook things that let the natural flavours of this spinach come through on their own. because if you're putting in the time and effort to grow something yourself, organically, it doesn't make sense to just chuck it any old where. not to mention that home grown produce seems to taste so much more of itself than its industrially raised counterparts, and it would seem a bit of a disservice to it to let it get lost in amongst too many other ingredients.

my most successful endeavour with my spinach so far has been in coupling my growing-to-eat obsession with my other obsession: yeasted baking. i decided, after making the pizza dough recipe from the river cottage bread handbook, that i wanted to try using the dough for calzones, and since in a calzone the filling is protected by folded over dough, there's no risk of wilted spinach scorching at the high temperatures necessary to bake the dough. so i kind of improvised this little number, and was mighty pleased with the results:

spinach and mushroom calzones

half a batch of river cottage pizza dough
1 ball mozzarella, roughly torn (contrary to what food snobs will tell you, using mozzarella bufula campagna is entirely unnecessary in recipes in which it will be melted and is not to be the primary flavour, but buy organic, yeah? unethical dairy production is way more grim than unethical meat farming)
four large field mushrooms, slicked thickly
about 150g spinach, very roughly chopped
two gloves of garlic, finely sliced
1-2 sprigs of thyme (i used lemon thyme from my garden)
olive oil
rye flour for dusting
salt and black pepper

so obviously, apart from the pizza dough prep, which needs to be done about an hour in advance, this recipe is super easy. before you get started, preheat your oven to as high as it will go, with a heavy baking tray or baking stone in it.

heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and brown your mushrooms, adding the garlic and thyme after a minute or two. and you shouldn't need me to tell you this, but the less you move your mushrooms and the more space you give them, the better they'll be. nothing pisses me off more in the kitchen than having an obsessive stirrer keeping me company and not leaving things to just be. just give the pan the odd shake to flip the mushrooms about so they brown evenly.

when pretty much done, add your spinach to the pan, stir it in, season with salt and pepper, and turn the heat off. the spinach should wilt pretty damn quickly. and it'll look a little bit like this:


leave it aside for a minute while you roll/stretch out your calzone dough. now, i just made two here, but i think if i made it again, i'd divide the dough into three, maybe four, because the ones i ended up with were absolutely massive, and while i have a mega appetite, i struggled with one. you need to roll out your calzones into rough ovalish rounds on a surface dusted with rye flour, size not mattering as much as the fact you're aiming for about a 5mm thickness.

assembling your calzones requires speed more than anything else, so they don't get soggy. dust a rimless baking sheet with rye flour, place one of your ovals on it, scatter your filling on one half, along with some of your mozzarella, fold over the other half, and crimp the edges up with you thumb and forefinger. slide straight into the oven and the heat from your baking sheet or stone will get to work on the base before it has time to get soggy. repeat with the rest of your dough.

they take ten minutes to cook, roughly, and come out looking like this:


not the prettiest (yeah yeah, i'm just gonna stop making mention of the fact i'm totally slapdash on presentation, i think we all get the point now, don't we?), but basically awesome. one of 'em leaked a little bit, but it wasn't really the end of the world in my opinion. mine ended up so big i didn't have anything with the one i ate for dinner, otherwise i might have been tempted by some of my rocket alongside it. and despite the bold flavour of the field mushrooms i'd used alongside it, the whole thing turned out pleasingly spinach-y, and will definitely be making a reappearance on the casa mitchell dinnertable again. especially if my perpetual spinach keeps flinging out leaves the way it is at the moment.

kneading stability.

it has to be said, that when my passion for something gets reignited, it gets reignited big style. so, even though i have been delving into sourdough, and in the process trying to cultivate patience and structure in my life (not to mention endeavouring to set up a kind of legacy narrative in my cooking for the future) i haven't been able to keep myself from playing with yeast in other areas.

do you ever wake up in one of those moods where you just want something to do, to occupy your time, but you're not sure what because you're pretty much bored with everything? i do. all the time. in fact, when it comes to days off my default states are either having loads of things to do and being really excited about them all to the point of just not feeling like there's enough time in the day, or a kind of listless 'oh god, i just wish i had something to DO' state. when i get into one of these states i tend to latch on to the first thing i can think of to do, which usually has something to do with my kitchen. and given that all my reading and idea-collecting recently has been to do with yeast, it was bound to be something to do with dough.

i decided to make pizza. now, this is not the first time i have made pizza, my pizza making career stretches from being a tiny tot putting toppings on pre-made bases with my little brother at my childminder's, to making my dough according to the recipe of theo (bloody) randall, when his collaboration with pizza express was feautured in delicious magazine (something i perused avidly throughout my university life, and would still recommend now to those not of the herbivorous persuasion). now, while there are definitely such things as wildly inauthentic pizzas, let's face it, unless we're talking plastic-wrapped supermarket monstrosity, it's pretty hard to create a bad pizza. nonetheless, in my attempt to become Yeast Queen Of The Universe, i turned to my personal flour-covered bible, the river cottage bread handbook, for my dough recipe. and unless something comes along that subsequently blows my mind, i'll be sticking with this recipe in future. it needs to be noted however, that because i was just cooking for myself, as is normal in a house full of inadventurous carnivores (no one ever suffered from lisa simpson syndrome as much as me, i swear it), i halved the recipe, which still left me with leftovers. but since leftover pizza is absolutely a good thing, i'm not going to complain.

so, here is what i gone done and did:

pizza dough

(makes about 8 small pizzas)
250g strong white bread flour
250g plain white flour
5g powdered dried yeast
10g salt
325ml warm water
about 1 tablespoon olive oil
a handful of coarse flour (rye, semolina, or polenta) for dusting.

mix the flours, yeast, salt and water in a bowl to form a sticky dough. add the oil, mix it in, then turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. knead until smooth and silky. shape the dough into a round, then leave to rise in a clean bowl, covered in a plastic bag, until doubled in size, which should take an hour.

while this is going on you may as well make your tomato sauce, which i also got from the river cottage bread handbook:

roast tomato sauce

500g tomatoes (i used a mixture of cherribelle and sungold)
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and black pepper

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c. halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, in a roasting tin. mix the garlic with the oil, pour over the tomatoes, and shake the tin a little to distribute the oil. season with salt and pepper. roast for 30-45 minutes, until the tomatoes are soft and slightly charred. rub through a sieve into a bowl. you'll end up with something that looks a little like this:

when your dough is risen, you can get on with shaping and baking your pizzas.

preheat your oven to 250 degrees c or as high as it will go, with a baking stone or tray inside.

to shape your pizzas, take a lime-sized piece of dough, and roll it 5mm thick on a surface dusted lightly with coarse flour, keeping it roundish, but not worrying too much (unless you can do the fancypants twirling the dough thing, there's no structural benefit to a round pizza gluten-wise, so if you're anything like me, the unnecessary aesthetic fiddling is so beyond not worth it it's not even funny). lay the dough on a rimless baking sheet which you have dusted with coarse flour, add your toppings, and slide onto the hot baking sheet in the oven.

the pizzas are done when the dough is blistered and the cheese is lightly bubbling. which in a domestic oven takes about 7 minutes. i could get two on a baking tray at a time, and therefore did, so i cooked my four little pizzas in two batches. they came out looking a little something like this:

the toppings i chose were mushrooms fried in oil and lemon thyme from my garden, finely chopped rosemary, also from my garden, finely diced taleggio, vegetarian parmesan, pine nuts, and, after they had come out the oven, a scattering of rocket leaves, also from the garden. i'm going to leave you to guess how much i ate, and how many were left over.

these pizzas were made all the better in the eating by the fact i used produce grown by my fair hand on them. i'm already dreaming up other combinations with the stuff that's currently growing like the dickens. i'm thinking a garlic and sharp young goats cheese pizza bianca with a scattering of lightly blanched broad beans after baking, or a feta, spinach, red onion and pine nut combo. authentic? no. likely to taste amazing? yes. i'm also going to experiment with how well this recipe translates to the genius that is the calzone, so expect reportage on that endeavour sometime in the near future. especially given the regularity with which i keep waking up restless and annoyed and seeking kitchen activity at the moment.