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.

When life gives you plums...

I had an early meeting at work the other day (yes, in the licensed trade I do sometimes still have to haul my arse out of bed in the morning, but not nearly so often as you 9-5ers). As I blustered in, I bumped into Lorraine, our cleaner and kitchen porter, who asked me if I liked/wanted some plums. I said yeah, and was immediately granted a bowlful, which perched next to me while I went through paperwork and projects with my training officer:




Now, that might seem like an odd little setup for a work meeting, I guess. But it makes more sense if you consider that my passion for food, gardening, and cooking is gaining repute throughout the village I work in and the community I serve. And that Lorraine's neighbours tree was fruiting at the time, so she had a huge carrier bag of the things with her. I'm often gifted with foodstuffs to 'make something with' at work these days, and I'm always happy to take it, and bring in some of the results to share with my coworkers and friends. I like the idea of food creating community, and community creating food.

So I cycled home, to leaf through my cookbooks and find something to make with the plums. I wanted something to fit the season, not too heavy or wintery, and bizarrely, the only thing i could find that didn't resonate with sitting down in knitwear in a heated house was Nigella Lawson's Winter Plum Cake, from How to be a Domestic Goddess. She calls it a winter cake because it's made with tinned plums (something I sort of shudder to think of, sorry to say) so I figured whipping one up with fresh plums would be enough to take the Winter right out of it. and that is exactly what I did, and here is my adapted recipe:

Not-so-Wintery-Plum-Cake

for the cake:
567g tin red plums (or the unweighed amount of fresh, stoned plums i had, which must have been about the 600g mark)
125g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
75g ground almonds
125g butter, softened
125g light brown sugar
2 large eggs (keep it organic and free range, people)
1 scant teaspoon almond essence
20cm springform cake tin, buttered and lined.

for the icing:
160g unrefined icing sugar
1-2 tablespoons hot water.

preheat the oven to 170 degrees c/gas mark 3.

Chop your plums. I went for 2.5cm dice, which seemed to be fine, although if you're worried about uneven distribution, chop them as fine as you see fit. Leave aside. Mix the flour, baking powder, and ground almonds. Cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs, adding a tablespoon of the flour mixture after each one. Beat in the almond essence, then fold in the rest of the flour mixture and the drained, chopped plums. Turn into the prepared tin and bake for about 1 1/4 hours, though check at 1 hour. When it's ready, coming away from the sides of the tin, take out of the oven, leave in it's tin to cool for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

When cool, ice with brown sugar icing, which you make simply by mixing the sieved icing sugar with water til you have a caramel coloured paste. pour over the top of the cake to cover thinly, not necessarily uniformly, and leave to drip, here and there, down the sides.

So here it is:

I was quietly proud of this cake, it's by no means an elegant confection, but it has the kind of country cooking charm that's totally appropriate to how I obtained it's principal ingredient. It tasted amazing; the plums were tart and contrasted beautifully with the marzipan-like taste and texture of the sponge; i'm not sure I'd bother making this with sweetened tinned fruit having tried it in this incarnation. It was the perfect unfussy cake to serve in huge wodges with mugs of coffee (some cakes are tea cakes, and some are coffee cakes; i don't make the rules; I just obey them). I took a slab of it down to work with me to share with my coworkers; and it went down a storm. Using cake to win friends and influence people? Maybe, but whatever works.

Greener Pastures

So I'm still in the throes of a non-cooking kind of cooking,. I'd make excuses, but it's oppressive here in the midlands, and I work in a polyester uniform so I am really feeling it. I have noticed since becoming vegetarian, that summer cooking is both easier and harder. You can't rely, any longer, on one centerpiece, say, a poached salmon or roast chicken, and quickly prepared, raw-or-almost-raw accompaniments to make a meal. You can, however, get dinner on the table far quicker, as vegetables tend to respond better than most meats to a preparation that is almost nil. I have been almost exclusively living on cute little yellow courgettes from my garden, grilled, fried, shaved raw into a lemon and herb dressing; chucked into pasta, quinoa or couscous. This is part laziness, part response to a glut, and part because it's really all I want to eat. I mean, I'm running around like a headless chicken behind a bar, cycling to get everywhere, and digging myself exhausted in the garden; the very last thing I need is food that weighs on me like a rock.

However, sometimes, surprisingly, I run out of courgettes. So I've been finding other, fussless recipes for something light but satisfying, and have reverted back to my student habit of big-batching bowfuls of the stuff and keeping it in the fridge for whenever I feel like grabbing a plateful. It's a kind of cooking and eating that satisfies my internal unstructured forager instincts, without me resorting to standing in front of the fridge repeatedly eating the odd bit of cheese, or olives, or whatever, and ignoring dinner (if left to my own devices long enough this is exactly the kind of behaviour I consider to be normal, and don't even act like you don't do it too).

Now that Ottolenghi and I are buds again, I've been hitting his cookbook up regularly. There are Plenty (you don't have to think I'm funny, but it helps) of recipes of his that use bunch after bunch of summer produce, to the point where I feel like I'm racing against the calendar to try as many as possible before the weather starts to turn and I find myself back in the season for funghi, winter squash, and roots. This one perfectly fits my current 'why make the kitchen hotter than it has to be?' mood, and might just be the best looking and tasting couscous I have ever eaten:

Green Couscous

150g couscous
160ml boiling water or vegetable stock
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground cumin
50g shelled unsalted pistachios, toasted and roughly chopped
3 spring onions, finely sliced
30g rocket, chopped

Herb Paste
20g parsley
20g coriander
2 tbsp chopped tarragon
2 tbsp chopped dill
2 tbsp chopped mint
90ml olive oil

Place the couscous in a large bowl and cover with the boiling water or stock. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, fry the onion in the olive oil on a medium heat until golden and completely soft. add the salt and cumin and mix well. Leave to cool slightly.

Next, make the herb paste by placing all the ingredients into a food processor and blitzing until smooth. Here's a picture of mine, whipped up in a measuring jug with my trusty stick blender:


One of the things I love most about Ottolenghi's recipe's are the use of colour-who could fail to smile at creating something such a deep, froggy, fresh-cut-grass green?

Add this to the couscous and mix everything together with a fork to fluff it up. Now add the cooked onion, the pistachios, spring onions, green chilli and rocket, and gently mix. serve at room temperature.

Here we have it:


Again, I totally love the use of colour; I really think the single-focus devotion to green is something to admire. This was ace eaten by the bowlful with a little bit of feta crumbled on top as a whole meal, but i think it would also totally work as a side dish for little burek or spanakopita, or any number of the Small Fried Things I like to cook on a regular basis. The flavour of the herbs and greenery in this dish is strong, almost medicinal, but in a good way, and totally enhanced by the pep of rocket, so I think it would make the ideal foil for cutting through salty foods, hence the feta. Another great point to note about this dish is it perfectly matched the grassy, slightly acidic New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that I seem to be drinking by the bucketload this summer. I thought it would be an okay bedfellow but it's turned out to be a match of marriage material proportions. And anything that's an excuse to crack open a bottle is a keeper in my book.

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.

About face

As I started writing this post before the last one, I was originally going to go on about how long it had been since I'd last posted.  As it is, a couple of weeks between posts seems relatively prolific given the time there was between the previous two.  But what will remain the same is that as this is going to be another meat curing post, I should start off by addressing the broken promise that I made after my last foray into this subject, my home-cured salami. (here for a quick refresh.) It's about four months since I actually made the stuff, approximately eight weeks of which was spent hanging in my cellar gradually hardening, slightly shriveling due to my overly cautious first approach to hand stuffing natural animal casings (or any other casings, come to that matter) leaving a bit too much space inside, and getting excited by the development of little white specs of mould.

Ultimately I think eight weeks was a bit too long.  The texture in the very middle is just about perfect - quite soft and giving.  When you slice it you can see the fat start to glisten (especially on the one that's sort of chorizo, but isn't really), and although it's a bit of an odd shape (license to be firmer with the casings next time, they're stronger than they appear) it actually looks like salami.  And also, they both taste really good, too, which of course is the most important thing.  The flavours are distinct enough, in one the fennel really comes to prominence, in the other the smoked paprika pervading and providing a vibrant red colour.

It is always tempting to just eat it straight up, but the flavour it has when cooked is pretty damn impressive.  Initially I just stuck some on a homemade pizza.  Do pardon my modesty if I say it was amazing.  (It was).  I also made something from the hip that was sort of based on Jacob Kenedy's Orecchiette with 'Nduja, a dish I had at on my second visit to Bocca di Lupo.  Mine basically consisted of salami finely chopped and fried with red onion and garlic, then adding some sliced aubergine and halved cherry tomatoes before tossing through some paccheri pasta.  It lacked the richening sauce from the wine and cream of the original dish, but the melted fat from the salami distributed a deep, winey, meaty flavour throughout, with occasional hits of fennel.  I think I may have to work on it and there's something pretty good in there.  I still have designs on cooking some variation of razor clams with chorizo, which hopefully will happen at some point soon.

So onto the second part, as I said, this belated salami update was only part of the parcel. 

I first came across guanciale in Kenedy's The Geometry of Pasta, where he describes it as "a fatty, porcine treat, hard to find but worth seeking out."  And if it's worth seeking out, then there's a good chance it's worth persevering with making your own for several months.  Guanciale is the jowl of the pig, or in simple terms, its face.  Cheek, specifically.  Pig's cheeks are amazing, one of my first attempts at making pasta was a pig's cheek ravioli where I cooked the cheeks for several hours until the meat fell apart but was able to come together as little lumps of pasta filling from all the sticky, gelatinous fat in and around it.    As a cut of meat it's at least half fat, probably more 65% - 35% fat to meat.  So of course I wanted to try curing it at some point, and it seems ideal for doing so.

Up to this stage all my efforts at curing have come with a reassuring helping hand from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but neither The River Cottage Meat Book nor The River Cottage Cookbook offers any sort of guide for curing pig's cheeks.  Neither does Kenedy's Bocca, a book which is so amazing on all other levels I shall forgive it.  So this is where the theory of doing things over so you know the basics well enough to be able to wing it on other things comes into play.  The sort of thing that someone impatient with a short attention span doesn't bother to do.  Like me.

Nonetheless, I kind of did that, but just used my one bacon curing as the basis.  I used the flavoured cure mix that I had been planning on using for the second round of bacon curing, which never actually materialised.  As a much smaller cut than a 2kg pork belly, I thought it must probably take less time to apply the cure in the initial stage.  As for hanging and air curing, I had a bit of a gander around the internet and found that Michael Ruhlman suggests hanging it for two months.  Michael Ruhlman co-wrote The French Laundry Cookbook (as well as Thomas Keller's other books), and was one of the disciples on Anthony Bourdain's pilgrimage to The French Laundry, so by association his opinion will do nicely.

Anyway, the cure mix was as follows;

1kg salt
1kg demerera sugar
25g ground black pepper
20 juniper berries, crushed
a few bay leaves, chopped

So I repeated the same process of applying a rub of cure mix each day for just under a week, then rinsing it off, patting dry and hanging, although whereas the bacon hung for about a week, this will hang for up to two months.  As of now, it's been up about a month.  I already can't wait for it to be ready, and it may be hard to resist temptation to take it down early at the expense of a bit more flavour maturation.

The prospect of my own pasta combined with unctuous, heavy, pork fat is quite something.  Whereas with the salami I pretty much made it just because I wanted to, and it was quite an obvious thing to cure and as such didn't really have anything specifically planned for its use.  With guanciale on the other hand, I'm already accruing recipe plans, all involving making pasta as well, so there shouldn't be much excuse to not go on and on about it afterwards.

Spice Girl.

If there's one thing I know about, it's my own mind. I've been with it all my life, and I deal with it every day, so if I weren't an expert, i may as well throw in the towel, right? Given my recent disappointment with the functionality of an Ottolenghi recipe, I knew that if I didn't make another one soon, I'd write off the recipes in Plenty as 'too difficult' as I internalized the bad mood I felt because of those impossible supermarket gigantibeans. So I played to my strengths, and found myself a recipe well within my comfort zone, which, as I have previously explained, is Indian style food.

I chose his double potato vindaloo. Now, the magnificent vindaloo is something much maligned in british culture, a curry seen as the 'hottest of the hot', and often ordered in a terribly unorthodox chicken guise by lager swilling red-faced middle aged dudes in a drunken test of machismo in indian restaurants. You don't need me to explain to you that in this context it's interesting cultural history and origin is often disregarded.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert, as a 23 year old english girl, on Indian cuisine, but I do feel it is only respectful and right to point out the often overlooked raisons d'etre of a dish that has suffered culturally in England mostly due to a seemingly wilful ignorance about food from other cultures. One of the best meals of my life was a vindaloo, a vegetarian one cooked for me by a hindu chef on a beach in goa, where i was staying in a hut made of woven palm fronds with a sand floor. I must have been about fourteen years old, and I remember the word vindaloo striking fear into my heart as I definitely did not have the spice tolerance then that I have now. I tried it anyway, and I'm glad I did, because while it was hot, it was also sweet and warming, and I'm sure if i was living that moment now i'd be anxiously taking notes in a painfully hip moleskine in order to recreate it, but young me was pretty much just concerned with eating it. I don't think it's a taste experience I could replicate, anyway, honestly speaking. i was probably a combination of the location, the sensation of the new, and a mood of feeling like things were good, that I don't mind admitting was largely absent in my teens.

Nevertheless, older Kirsty, armed with her books, her kitchen, and her painfully hip moleskines, still attempts to cook vindaloo. Later in life I learned that vindaloo is a dish particular to goa, a region colonized by the portugese, and so named because 'vin' refers to the vinegar used in the dish. 'aloo' means potatoes, referring to the other necessary component. It is apparently traditionally made with pork, but I have always made vegetarian versions in reference to my first experience of the dish, and because a curry containing potatoes is a logically solid vegetarian offering. It's 'hotter than hot' reputation is apparently a misguided one, as although the sauce is robust due to the inclusion of a lot of warming spices, it's not hotter than say, a traditional goan red fish curry. Usually I rely on vegetarian-ising a pork recipe from Camellia Punjabi's 50 curries of india (a really invaluable beginner's curry cooking source full of amazing information about everything) but in my endeavours to regain culinary confidence, and my joy at finding a sound vegetarian recipe, I jumped at the chance when i saw Mr. Ottolenghi's recipe. so here is my attempt at it (and no panics this time, pure success):

Double Potato Vindaloo

8 cardamom pods
1tbsp cumin seeds
1tbsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp vegetable oil
12 shallots, chopped
1/2 tsp brown mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
25 curry leaves
2 tbsp fresh chopped root ginger
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
3 ripe tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
50ml cider vinegar
400ml water
400g peeled waxy potatoes, cut into 2.5cm dice
2 small red peppers, cut into 2cm dice
400g sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2.5cm dice
salt
mint and coriander leaves to serve

Start by making a spice mix. Dry-roast the cardamom pods and cumin and coriander seeds in a small frying pan until they begin to pop. Transfer to a pestle and mortar and add the cloves. Work to a fine powder, removing and discarding the cardamom pods once the seeds are released. Add the turmeric, paprika and cinnamon and set aside.

Heat up the oil in a large heavy-based pot. Add the shallots with the mustard and fenugreek seeds, and saute on a medium-low heat for 8 minutes, or until the shallots brown. Stir in the spice mix, curry leaves, ginger, and chilli, and cook for a further 3 minutes. Next, add the tomatoes, vinegar, water, sugar, and some salt. Bring to the boil, then leave to simmer, covered, for 20 minutes.

Add the potatoes and red peppers and simmer for another 20 minutes. For the last stage, add the sweet potatoes. Make sure all the vegetables are just immersed in the sauce (add more water if needed) and continue cooking, covered, for about 40 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.

Remove the lid and leave to bubble away for about 10 minutes to reduce and thicken the sauce. Serve hot, with plain rice, and garnished with herbs.

So here is mine, served with a touch of yoghurt to cool its jets a little (sorry purists and vegans!), with white rice in a seperate bowl cos it was pretty saucy:


This recipe is probably as close as i am likely to come to that first experience of vindaloo. It was sweet, jam packed full of warming spices, and solid due to the potato content. Sweet potato is a bit of an unusual addition, but by this time i expect no less from my homeboy Ottolenghi. I actually think this recipe in particular is very suited to plenty as a book, a hybrid dish in essence, with European and Indian influence, it seems to mesh with Ottolenghi's 'citizen of the world' mixed heritage and experimental attitude. My confidence in working with his recipes is totally restored, as i knew it would be, working well within my comfort zones. This, like any other curry recipe, is great for my usual style of big-batching and living off things for a few days, a product of my odd working hours and dietary choice in a household of devoted carnivores. Why? because curries improve in flavour if left to sit for a day or two. The spices intensify and meld together more effectively. People who claim they can't eat the same dish two days running really should try indian cookery; sometimes it's like encountering a totally different dish the next day. Since my potatoes are almost ready to be harvested, I can see myself making this again in the not too distant future, but before i do i definitely want to have a bash at a very interesting looking potato tarte tatin that's also in Plenty. I mean, comfort zones are nice to retun to for a boost every now and then, but staying in them all the time would be the most boring thing in the world, wouldn't it?

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.