eat big

Th L Chef - canned sardines

2012-02-19T16:56:00.000Z

I have never had any desire to buy or try canned sardines. I have never even considered going near them. They have never appealed to me, cropped up in recipes or been served up by someone else for dinner.

Until now.

For a bit of background, I have dodgy knees after several operations following a car accident four years ago. I have been warned that it’s highly likely as a result that I will develop arthritis in those joints, so I am determined to do whatever I can to prevent it. I have googled “arthritis prevention” and there isn’t much advice – but the advice on what to do if you already have arthritis mainly consists of telling you to get Omega 3 into your diet.

This fatty acid can be found in oily fish (mackerel, sardines, salmon for example) and some other foods. It’s recommended that you get a bit of this into your diet every week, so that is my current mission – to try and start that habit now so that in 40 years’ time my knees might just be ok. It’s worth a shot.

I’ve already started adding flax seed (another source of Omega 3) to my porridge in the mornings, and now I’m trying an oily fish recipe each week. I’ve got plenty of ideas for salmon, but what about the lowly canned sardine, which is cheap but full of all the Omega 3 you need? There must be a way of using them to make a tasty meal.

I came across a couple of recipes which I mixed together to come up with a sardine, tomato, caper, red pepper and basil pasta. It is an easy combination, quick to make and really just tastes like a tuna pasta sauce, if you’ve ever tried one of those. These quantities will give you two generous sized portions or three more modest ones. Maybe even four if you aren’t too hungry.

Put some pasta on to boil, and in a frying pan put a little bit of olive oil. Add a chopped clove of garlic over a medium heat so it doesn’t burn, along with a chopped red chilli. Let those soften and flavour the oil for a minute or two.

Then add two 120g tins of sardines (try and get the ones with their skins and bones removed) in tomato sauce, a large teaspoon of capers, and a finely chopped red pepper, along with half a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes.

Turn the heat up and let the mixture simmer away for a few minutes until the pasta is cooked before seasoning it with salt and pepper, then you can drain the pasta, mix in the sauce and tear a large handful of fresh basil over the top. Job done.

It may not sound that exciting, but if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get some oily fish into your diet without preparing mackerel fillets from the fish counter, this could be the dish for you.

The L Chef - soup club

2012-02-12T16:55:00.000Z

I have become part of an exclusive, members-only club. We meet once a week, take it in turns to use the microwave in the canteen, and discuss the benefits of different handheld blenders. That’s right – this is Soup Club.

I was asked to become the fourth member of this work-based soup club on the basis of this column – and despite my protests that most of what I do and write about in here is something that has gone wrong, they seemed to still want me.

Soup Club meets every Monday, so once a month it will be my turn to create something on a Sunday to bring in. So far we have had roasted sweet potato, a butternut squash, pancetta and chilli creation and parsnip and apple. I decided to go in with my best card – mum’s Thai chicken noodle soup. It was different to what we had been having each week, and one of my personal favourites.

I already had the carcasses of two chickens in the freezer, left over from a couple of roast dinners, so I started by making my own chicken stock with those.

Once the stock was done (it took about two hours of simmering), I threw in a chopped red chilli and a couple of thumb-sized pieces of grated ginger and left that to infuse while I chopped up other ingredients. (For a full recipe for how to make stock click here.)

I chopped up a chicken breast into small pieces and coated them in Chinese five spice, before pan-frying them in a little oil. I sliced up a small bag of sugar snap peas ready to throw in and then took a spoon out of the drawer to test the stock.

It blew my head off. It was really, really hot. Eyes streaming, I reached for a glass of water and panicked – I couldn’t serve this up! My soup club days would be numbered. I like a bit of spice, but this was just too hot.

But then again I wasn’t about to make a whole batch of fresh stock. I was going to have to do what I could to rescue it, and then keep my fingers crossed. I scooped out all of the chilli so that at least it wouldn’t get any hotter.

In went some fish sauce, and a tin of sweetcorn – maybe the sweetness of the corn would calm the chill down. I added the cooked chicken pieces, a pack of noodles, the sugar snaps, and a large handful of frozen soya beans. It was done.

I had another small taste and thought it had a little less of a kick. I just had to hope it would be ok the next day.

I warned the other three to bring a drink and watched nervously as they squeezed a wedge of lime over the top and took their first spoonfuls. Beads of sweat didn’t start appearing on their foreheads, they didn’t collapse on the floor, tears didn’t appear in their eyes. It was a success! God only knows how, but something had cooled the chilli kick down and actually it was perfect. Not too hot, but just enough heat to know it was there.

I live to see another soup club.

The L Chef - turnips

2012-02-05T16:25:00.000Z

Turnips may not be the most exciting of vegetables. But they are on my list of things-I’ve-never-cooked with, which I am slowly trying to tick off.

There are two types of this root vegetable. The crop of smaller ones are in season in early summer (April – July) and have a sweet, nutty flavour. The other type are the larger, coarser ones which you can get from August to March.

Most recipes for latter type just include them in a soup or stew, where they aren’t really the main ingredient. The poor turnip never seems to be the star of the show. And although I agree that it may not be that special, I think they are actually quite tasty. I came across a recipe where it is a little bit more celebrated for its peppery taste.

Cooking this little vegetable began, as usual, in the supermarket. At first I thought it was going to be a repeat of last week’s disappointment trying to find squid (which, by the way, on this trip to the supermarket there was a plentiful supply of. And they were British) as I scanned the shelves in the root vegetable area.

I think the problem was that I was looking for pink turnips, as I’d seen in a photo in a magazine. I couldn’t see anything matching that description, so I sighed and rolled my eyes and was muttering to myself that it shouldn’t be that hard to find turnips. Then I spotted them – little green and white stops peeking out of a basket on the top shelf.

So it turns out that they are not necessarily pink – the six little ones that I bought were white and green. I decided to cook them to go with a roast chicken dinner on Sunday evening.

While the chicken was roasting in the oven, I peeled the turnips and cut them into medium-sized chunks, before adding them to a pan of salted boiling water and boiling them for about eight minutes, until they were getting softer. Then they were drained and put to one side, ready for the second stage of the recipe later on when the chicken was nearly ready.

When the chicken only has about 10 minutes to go, melt some butter in a frying pan and add the turnip chunks, with a handful of smoked bacon lardons (or a few rashers of smoked bacon cut into small pieces). Fry these with a teaspoonful of caraway seeds on a medium heat until the bacon is crisping up and the turnips are getting some colour.

It will look like potatoes and bacon – in fact that is what my boyfriend thought it was when I served it up. But the turnips have a subtle flavour and work really well with the bacon and the caraway seeds, not to mention with the roast chicken, a few green veg and a spoonful of gravy!

The L Chef - difficulty finding squid

2012-01-29T15:00:00.000Z

In an effort to learn a new culinary skill and also to try and eat a diverse range of fish as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver told us to during that series of Fish Fight TV shows last year, I decided to cook up some squid.

I love a bit of calamari or squid when it is on the menu in a restaurant, but have never cooked with it. Even an incident at a buffet during a holiday in Hong Kong when I was little – where my big brother persuaded me to try eating a chicken leg by telling me it was squid – has not put me off this lovely cephalopod.

Hoping to buy some whole squid, I was all set to grapple with tentacles, pull out the quills and get covered with ink. And I had used a very handy website called whatsinmycookbooks.com to find some squid recipes in my cookbooks at home. You log in on this website, tell them what cookbooks you have, then if you search for an ingredient such as squid the website tells you what cookbooks that you own contain what squid recipes, and the page numbers, so you can go off and find them easily without trawling through the indexes of each book.

One mouth-watering recipe caught my eye – Jamie Oliver’s roasted concertina squid with grilled leeks and a warm chorizo dressing.

All I had to do now was find some squid.

This was easier said than done. I didn’t think there was a particular squid season but maybe I am wrong. I tried the fish counter at one supermarket, they didn’t have any. I drove down to my local fishmongers on Gloucester Road. They were closed. Finally I went to a second supermarket, which had some squid on the fish counter – but it was already cut into tubes, no tentacles or quills in sight, and was from New Zealand.

The whole point of eating diverse fish, and the whole point of the Fish Fight campaign, is to eat locally-sourced fish. I knew I was failing by buying these kiwi squid but there comes a point when you’re racking up a bit of a carbon footprint, driving around looking for what you’re after, and when you’ve bought the rest of the ingredients it is frustrating to return home without the main part of the dish. So I’m sorry, Hugh and Jamie, I failed – but I did try.

There’s the bad news. The good news is, the dish was really, really delicious and simple to make. I’ll have to try some squid later in the year when I spot it on the fish counter (I’m never that good at shopping like that though, as I like to plan ahead) and properly prepare it. But as it was, all I had to do was put one large knife into each of the four squid tubes, and use another one to cut diagonal slices into one side of it, with the other knife stopping me going through to the other side.

I put a griddle pan on the hob to heat up, and parboiled a small pack of baby leeks for three minutes in a pan of salted boiling water before draining them and dressing them with some olive oil and salt. They went on the griddle pan to get nicely marked on each side, before I put on a chunkily sliced fennel bulb (the herby tips were cut off and set to one side for later) which was also chargrilled on each side.

The veg was put to one side while I did the same with the squid tubes, dressing them in a little oil with salt and pepper and chargrilling them until they were marked on each side. Meanwhile, I heated a frying pan and added some olive oil and about 50g of chopped chorizo for a minute or two, before adding a small handful of rosemary and a crushed clove of garlic very briefly before taking the pan off the heat. I added a couple of tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and the juice of half a lemon to the pan, then this was poured over the veg.

Serve the dressed veg with squid and herby fennel tops on top, and a wedge of lemon on the side.

The L Chef - marmalade

2012-01-22T13:15:00.000Z

Matt had given me a preserving pan for Christmas and I wanted to give it a test drive. The problem is, at this time of year it appears it isn’t jam-making season because no fruit are in abundance. January is marmalade time, and for a short window you can get your hands on Seville oranges to make your golden toast-topping.

This is a problem because I have never liked marmalade. I WANT to like it though, and I thought that maybe if I tried making it myself mine would be so superior to shop-bought varieties that I would love it, or failing that I might be forced by sense of duty to eat it.

So I embarked on a marmalade-making mission, having downed my paintbrush in a satinwood fumes-induced haze and abandoned our semi-finished living room. Good old Delia led me through the process.

You start by putting water and the juice of a lemon into your pan, and then start with the oranges. These need to be squeezed, and the juice goes in the pan with the water and lemon juice. Then you get the pips out of the squeezed halves and put them into the middle of a muslin square.

The next step is to shred the orange zest. Delia says that you should quarter the remaining skin that you have, then finely slice it up and throw it all in, not worrying about any pith that remains attached because it will dissolve in heating the mixture.

I took one look at the massive bowl full of oranges that I had to shred the skins of, and thought that today was not the day for soothing repetitive cookery shenanigans which went on well into the evening. I wanted a shortcut. I pushed each of the skins, pith included, through a shredding attachment on my food processor and ended up with a big bowl of finely shredded zest and pith, which all went into the pan.

The pan goes on at a simmer, with the little muslin square of pips tied into a bag and hung from the handle of your pan (they contain pectin and you want as much of that as you can get).

Then you leave the pan slowly simmering, uncovered, for two hours – this is a good time to sterilise your jars.

Matt cast several concerned glances over the pan as he walked past it. I have to admit it looked unappealing – the pithy mush floating around did not look like it was going to dissolve. “Have you ever actually seen marmalade?” he asked. I made a furtive panicked call to my mum to check it was all going to be ok, and then told him I knew exactly what I was doing, thank you very much.

After two hours the zest should be soft when you squeeze a bit between your fingers – at this point you take the little muslin bag off and put it on a saucer to cool, then tip in about 2kg of granulated sugar (don’t bother with preserving sugar, this does just fine). Stir the pan with a wooden spoon over a low heat, making sure all the sugar is dissolved – you should be able to feel it on the bottom of the pan if it isn’t.

Then squeeze the muslin bag over the pan and watch all the gooey pectin come out. You then boil it all rapidly until it is ready to leave to set, and decant it into jars – I had managed to make no less than 13 jars of the stuff.

Thankfully during the boiling the pith did indeed dissolve, leaving a lovely clear marmalade with fine shreds of zest. The food processor method worked.

Matt says it is as good as his grandma’s, which I think is a compliment, but unfortunately I am still not a fan. Jam today, jam tomorrow, that’s what I say.

For the full recipe click here.

Things I haven't cooked with

2012-01-16T16:16:00.000Z

I've started a list of ingredients I haven't yet cooked with, and dishes I want to make. Above this post, if you're on the front page of my blog, there's a tab called "Things I haven't cooked with" - click on that. Please help me out with recipes and ideas!

The L Chef - mushroom puddings

2012-01-15T13:18:00.000Z

In preparation for my New Year’s Eve feast, I had thought about several vegetarian options for my token non-carnivorous friend who was going to be attending. Before I settled on a lamb tagine, accompanied by a veggie version for her, I played around with a little mushroom pudding based on something another friend had made me a few years ago.

She had served up little individual puddings where the outside was made from bread, a little bit like a summer fruit pudding or the individual apple charlottes I made and wrote about in this column a few months ago. The inside was a delicious mushroom mixture which was so tasty that I didn’t miss having meat on the plate at all.

It left such an impression on me that I’ve been meaning to recreate it ever since. I think it was her mother’s recipe, and I could have just asked her for it but I wanted to play around and see if I could come up with something similar myself.

First of all I made the mushroom filling – I chopped up a handful of chestnut mushrooms and gently fried them in a little butter, adding some chopped porcini mushrooms which had been rehydrated in some boiled water, which I also added to the pan. I let this bubble away and added some chopped tarragon and a good spoonful of crème fraiche, as well as some seasoning and some grated parmesan cheese. I set aside the creamy mixture to cool.

Next up was the bread “casing”. I used small stainless steel pudding moulds to cut out a circular shape of white bread that would fit in the bottom of it, brushed it with melted butter on both sides and pressed it into the base of the mould.

Then I cut rectangles of white bread to line the sides of the mould. I buttered these as well and pressed them one by one into the sides of the mould, making sure they overlapped each other and with the base piece of buttered bread. Finally, I prepared the top round piece and buttered that, ready to press into place when the mushroom filling went in. I repeated this for a second mould.

Then the mushroom filling went in, and the lid went on, and the puddings were put into the oven at 180C for about 45 minutes until the bread on top of the pudding was golden brown.

I carefully turned them out onto a plate, praying that they would stay together and not collapse, but they looked great – golden brown all over the outside and filled with the creamy mushrooms. These can be served with some green veg as a light evening meal.

Now that I’ve had a go at doing my own, I might just try and find out the “real” recipe and see how it compares because I’m sure I didn’t do it exactly the same way as the original. But I was pretty pleased with my experimental result.

The L Chef - new year's eve

2012-01-08T11:23:00.000Z

Somehow I managed to volunteer myself to host a New Year’s Eve dinner party last weekend. It all seems well and good back in November, or whenever it was that I had the bright idea to throw a party at our place, but on December 30 I couldn’t quite understand why I had done it.

After a hectic Christmas break and return to work, then reorganising the house (for the umpteenth time) in order to empty a room and paint it, cooking for 11 was the last thing I really needed. While my boyfriend tidied and cleaned the house ready for guests, and painted a patchwork of paint samples on the living room wall, I sat down to think about what I could cook that would not involve a repeat of our housewarming party earlier this year which saw me in the kitchen cooking (delicious) canapés until gone 10pm.

There also needed to be a vegetarian option. Luckily I was only doing the main course, and the starter, dessert and cheese courses were split between other friends who were coming along. It didn’t need to be anything fancy, but I wanted it to be finished before guests arrived so I could just serve up when I wanted to and not worry about cooking, and of course it had to taste a-mazing.

I opted for a lamb tagine, with a veggie alternative, served with couscous mixed with flaked almonds, chickpeas, apricots and harissa paste, a side of minty yoghurt, homemade flatbreads and a fennel and coriander salad, dressed with lemon juice. Sounds good, but in reality once I got in the kitchen I began to wish I’d done fish fingers and oven chips.

It was two days’ worth of cooking – we chopped up three lamb shoulders and mixed the meat with various spices including paprika, turmeric, cayenne pepper and cinnamon and then left that overnight in the fridge. It was a hell of a bowl of meat, and a sign of things to come.

The next morning I grated seven (seven!) onions in the food processor, chopped up garlic, a butternut squash, a couple of sweet potatoes and some celery. The pile of food to be cooked was mounting up, which obviously I should have expected as I was feeding 11. I looked at my little slow cooker – where I was planning to cook all this food – and knew there wasn’t a chance it would all fit.

Once I’d softened the onions, garlic, celery and some more spices in a casserole dish with some oil, and browned all the meat in a frying pan, I decided I would need to cook all this in not one, not two, but three batches, if I was going to do it in the slow cooker. That meant one during the day on the 30th, one overnight, and the final one on the day of the 31st. This had better be good.

Each batch went in – the meat, the onion mixture, some of the chopped veg, some chickpeas, chopped dried apricots, dates and sultanas, a tin of chopped tomatoes and some tomato juice as well as a little beef stock – and cooked for about eight hours. The house smelled amazing, and as the days progressed and the tagine bubbled away, I went to work and came back, did some painting and made some little flatbreads, I started to realise it probably was all worth it.

The guests arrived, ate, and enjoyed and all my thoughts of “should-have-done-something-quicker-and-easier” disappeared with a good glass of wine and lots of laughter.

A recipe for a version of the lamb tagine I made can be found here, and a recipe for the flatbreads is here.

The L Chef - meals for one

2012-01-01T20:48:00.000Z

After Christmas passed, I found myself returning back fromspending a few days with my family to an empty house - as my other half enjoyeda few more days off with his own. It was the perfect time to experiment with afew quick and simple, but comforting, meals for one that would keep me goingthrough a week of work until the new year.

What makes the perfect meal for one? I think it takes a lotof effort to whip up a gourmet dinner when you’re the only one sampling it. Ilearnt this when I lived on my own for a year, and it was very tempting toresort to beans on toast most nights - even though I do like good food.

I want to master a few good dishes - and I think that’s halfof the battle, mastering something. I don’t mean that it has to be complicatedand you need to practice lots, but even with something simple you need to beable to know exactly what to pick up from the shops and precisely what you aredoing when you get in the kitchen. Speed is of the essence, you want to be ableto employ the “bish bash bosh” approach and get it all in the oven without eventhinking about it.

Ingredients are also important - I never just want to halve,or even quarter, a recipe. It needs to be something where I can get all thecomponents without having a fridge full of half-used bags of vegetables orhalf-eaten pots of creme fraiche that end up never being used up. Although, ofcourse, you could just do a full recipe and eat leftovers all week.

With this as my starting point, I scouted around for a fewrecipes aimed at people cooking for one, and found a mouth-watering one for a“shepherd’s pie” for one. It takes a little work to get started, but then youcan wander off and shower/watch TV/write thank you cards for Christmas presentsfor 20 minutes before anything else needs doing.

First of all get a large potato baking – microwave it forten minutes and then bake it in the oven at about 200C for ten more minutes.

Meanwhile, get 140g of lean minced beef ready (split theremainder of the pack into similar sized portions and freeze). Fry half achopped onion in a little oil in a medium hot pan, add a crushed clove ofgarlic, then add the mince. Turn the heat up and keep stirring for about threeminutes until all the meat is browned.

Stir in 250ml beef stock, one teaspoon of WorcestershireSauce, a tablespoon of tomato puree and seasoning, then let it bubble away on amedium heat until it thickens up.

Once the potato is cooked, cut it in half lengthways andscoop out the potato flesh, before mashing it with a bit of butter. Put a fewspoonfuls of the meat mixture into the potato skin, which should be on a bakingtray, topped with a couple of spoonfuls of the mashed potato and some gratedcheese.

Bake for another 15 minutes until the cheese ismelted and golden, and serve with some green veg. Easy!

The L Chef Christmas special number four - mini turkey dinner for two

2011-12-24T15:17:00.000Z

My boyfriend and I go our separate ways for Christmas back to our respective families. But this year I wanted to celebrate together with a mini turkey dinner for two, before we packed each other off with bags of presents.

I wanted to do an easy roast dinner - the meal would finish off another day of decorating so it couldn’t be anything too time-consuming. But it needed the essential elements - roast potatoes and parsnips, Brussel sprouts and turkey. I decided against bread sauce because all the recipes needed a whole onion, and for two people a whole recipe feeding about six would be too much. The idea was not to have leftovers, and not to just use half quantities which meant, for example, that I’d have half an onion sat around in the fridge waiting to be used. And I don’t like cranberry sauce, so that was out of the question.

When I hatched my plan and mentioned it one evening, he turned his nose up at Brussel sprouts so I set myself the challenge of making them tasty, even in his eyes. So with those, I roasted them in a little olive oil for about 30-40 minutes on 200C until they started to colour and soften. About half way through the cooking time I threw in some bacon lardons which had been crisped up in a frying pan and then mixed with a bit of balsamic vinegar. I was quite pleased - this may not be the healthiest way to eat your greens, but it passed the taste test.

Next up, the potatoes and parsnips. I got some baby new potatoes and a sliced a couple of peeled parsnips in half and put them in a microwaveable bowl with a little water, covered them and microwaved them for about 20 minutes. In the oven I had a roasting tin with some duck fat which I had saved from a roast dinner earlier this year in the fridge, heating up nicely. I drained the water off the potatoes and parsnips and added them to the roasting tin, and roasted them for about 45 minutes, adding a tablespoon of runny honey drizzled over the top towards the end.

And then of course the star of the show is always the turkey. But I was definitely not going to be roasting a whole bird - I’m not even sure one could fit in my oven. And I avoided cooking a crown as well - instead opting for a not-strictly-Christmassy recipe using turkey steaks.

I bought two decent-sized steaks and flattened them out with a rolling pin, after laying them on a chopping board and covering them with clingfilm. The idea was that they would be rolled up with a tasty filling, which would also help to keep the meat moist. There’s nothing worse than a dry bit of turkey meat.

For the filling, I finely chopped a small red onion and gently sweated it down in a medium-hot frying pan for about three minutes. Then I added some salt and pepper and a handful of spinach leaves, stirring them in to help them wilt. Then the pan was taken off the heat, and a dusting of ground nutmeg was added, along with a large handful of grated (or finely crumbled) Cheshire cheese.

I spooned this mixture onto the turkey steaks, rolled them up and secured them in place with cocktail sticks, before browning them for about three minutes on each side in an oiled frying pan, and then putting them in the oven, covered in foil, for about 20 minutes. The spinach wilts and the cheese melts, and it’s delicious.

Add a little gravy and you’re done - a perfect mini Christmas dinner for two.

The L Chef Christmas special number three- Stollen

2011-12-18T20:45:00.000Z

Last Christmas I had my first encounter with Stollen. Somehow I had reached that point in my life without ever coming across the lovely Christmas cake. I tasted it at a friend’s festive drinks party, then had a second slice... and a third.

A year later, I was ready to have a go at making one of my own - that way I could eat as much as I wanted without feeling guilty.

A work colleague got wind of my plans to give it a go and gave me a recipe from an old copy of Good Housekeeping and a 25cm wide Savarin mould - a ring-shaped tin which helps you to make a cake in a donut shape, sometimes with a pattern on the top. Stollen is a traditional German cake, which is usually made and served in a loaf shape, but this recipe suggested using one of these tins to make it look a bit prettier.

For those of you who have never had Stollen before, it is really more of a bread than a cake, filled with dried and candied fruit and marzipan, and topped with icing sugar. I don’t have a great history of success with bread-making and in fact a lot of my cooking has been going wrong recently so I wasn’t feeling too hopeful, but I thought I would give it a go.

As well as the Good Housekeeping recipe, I consulted Delia Smith’s recipe and came up with a hybrid of the two. You will need to start this in the morning and be prepared to come back to it a few times during the day - it takes a bit of TLC to make. This recipe will not only fill a Savarin mould but also will make a smaller Stollen loaf, which you can freeze for another time.

You start off by making the bread dough and its filling. Mix three sachets (of about 6g each) of dried easy-blend yeast with 700g of sifted strong white flour - it’s normally labelled as bread flour.

Make a well in the middle of the flour and add 350ml of tepid milk, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, one and a half beaten large eggs (beat two eggs, then pour in three quarters of that), and 140g of softened butter. Mix really well, getting your hands in at the end to finish it off.

In another bowl, you want to combine 50g of mixed peel, 125g of halved glace cherries,175g currants, 175g sultanas and a large handful of chopped dried apricots. Add four tablespoons of dark rum and mix well. I then put this mixture in the microwave for 30 seconds - I’m sure I saw a Nigel Slater programme once where he heated a fruit/alcohol mixture to make sure that the fruit absorbed the liquid.

Then add the fruit to the dough mixture, along with two teaspoons of sugar and the grated zest of two lemons and mix it all again. It seemed to me at this point that the fruit was never going to be incorporated in the dough - it just seemed like there was too much of it. But keep going, folding the dough over the fruit and pressing it all together, until it gets there.

It will probably also seem quite sticky, and if it does add a little more flour until it starts to become a bit drier and more manageable. Then turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead it for about ten minutes until it is smooth and elastic, again add more flour if it is still too sticky.

Return the dough to the bowl and cover with cling film, then leave it somewhere warm. I put my heating on full blast and also heated my kitchen by turning the oven on for half an hour, to make a warm little cocoon in the kitchen to encourage my dough to rise. You need to wait until it is double its original size - probably touching the cling film and trying to burst out of the bowl. This might take a couple of hours. I watched eagerly and then made myself leave the house - I don’t think a watched dough will ever rise.

Next you need to knead the dough again for a couple of minutes and roll the dough into a long rectangular shape, that is about one and a half times the length needed to fit in the Savarin mould. Now roll out a 500g block of marzipan into a long sausage shape the same length, and lay it in the middle of the dough before wrapping the dough around it so that you have one long sausage with marzipan running all the way through the middle.

Butter the inside of the tin really well and fit two thirds of the dough sausage into it, and put the remaining third on a baking tray, brushed with some melted butter. Cover them with a clean tea towel and leave for another 45 minutes to rise again.

Then they are ready to go in the oven at 180C for about 45 minutes until risen and golden, when you can take them out and after 10 minutes turn the tin out onto a cooling rack. Dust with icing sugar and serve as fresh as possible, or sliced and toasted if it’s a few days old. If I can make it (as I did, with surprising success!), then anyone can.

The L Chef Christmas special number two - biscuit gifts

2011-12-11T11:46:00.000Z

Note to self - when making food-based Christmas presents, practice first. I think you can see where this is going.

My auntie was due to visit last Saturday, and I was all set to give her a bottle of our homemade sloe gin as a little Christmas gift. But I wanted to add something else, also homemade. I settled on biscuits. What could go wrong with biscuits?

I had bought all the ingredients, decided on a recipe, bought some little clear plastic bags made for giving biscuity gifts in and some ribbon to decorate them. I was going to make little lemon shortbread-style fingers.

But then the visit started falling apart. What with various family illnesses it was decided that the visit should be postponed. Oh no, I thought - who’s going to eat my biscuits? I compiled a mental list of where they could go - neighbours, work colleagues and so on. But I needn’t have bothered.

The recipe was fine, and to be fair the biscuits are very edible - but once again as is so often the case in my kitchen, I lacked in the execution and aesthetics side of the operation.

First of all you mix 250g of softened butter, 140g of caster sugar and the zest of two lemons in a bowl with a wooden spoon, before adding an egg yolk and 2 tsp of vanilla extract. So far, so good. Sift in 300g plain flour and stir it well.

The recipe said the mixture needed chilling. But it didn’t say how long to chill it for. I left it for about three hours while I pottered about the house and went out for a walk, only to return to what can best be described as a solid, hard brick of dough. The rolling pin could barely dent it.

So then that had to be left out for about 45 minutes to warm up enough to be rolled out. Lesson one - don’t chill for too long.

At this stage, the oven needs to go on at 180C. When it’s ready to roll, roll out the dough on a floured surface to about 1cm thickness, into a rectangle shape if you can. Cut it into rectangular “fingers” about 10cm long and 2cm wide, and then bake for about 16 minutes until the biscuits start to go a bit golden brown.

They will still be soft, so careful if you move them, but once they are solid enough move them onto a cooling rack.

When they have cooled right down, you can ice them. Mix 140g sifted icing sugar with five tablespoons of lemon juice and the zest of another lemon. Note the need for sifting. I saw that in the recipe and ignored it - who can be bothered to sift icing sugar when it makes enough of a mess as it is? That’s why I’ve ended up with little white lumps in my finished icing. Lesson number two - sift your icing sugar.

Then you dip your biscuits half in the icing. This is when things really started to - quite literally - fall apart. My estimation of 10x2cm, I have since discovered, is about double the size of what it should have been. So I had this great chunks of biscuit - which were already prone to crumble - being dipped in the icing, and breaking in half or falling to pieces as I stirred it around in the icing, before setting them to sit unhappily back on the cooling rack. Lesson three - if you aren’t adept at guessing distances or lengths, use a ruler. I’m pretty sure this recipe would have worked if I’d done them the right size.

The good news is they are delicious, and have kept me going all week as I painted our house on my week off.

The L Chef Christmas special number one - Christmas Krupnik

2011-12-03T15:35:00.000Z

The sloe gin I made back in October is nearly ready to strain, just in time to give in some pretty little bottles as Christmas presents. But my plan is to give not just one but two different Christmas bottled beverages this year as gifts.
I am stealing this idea from my big brother, who made me some krupnik – or honeyed vodka – a couple of years ago. I loved it, and in fact I think it was one of the best presents I have had from him. Not only was it delicious but it was beautifully packaged in a little glass bottle with a hand written label telling me how I should drink it. And I liked the fact that it was homemade, with love and attention – not just picked from a shelf or bought with a click online.
Obviously we can’t make every single present we every want to give (not if we have full time jobs, and lives to live), but I reckon a little homemade treat goes a long way in spreading Christmas cheer.
So I set about making my own batch of Christmas Krupnik at the weekend, having found a recipe online provided by Henry Besant, founder of worldwidecocktailclub.com. It is a Polish favourite, infused with spices and served hot or cold. Legend has it that it was created by Benedictine monks at a monastery in what is now Belarus, and apparently it was also used as a disinfectant by people treating Polish soldiers in World War Two.
It is very straightforward to make. You need a litre bottle of Polish vodka – the best you can afford – and pour it out into a saucepan. If you make multiple batches, prepare for the raised eyebrows when you put out your recycling on bin day, and there are several empties rattling around in your black box.
Add 500 ml of runny honey, two cinnamon sticks, three cloves, a teaspoon of ground nutmeg and an opened vanilla pod. You could also try adding peppercorns, allspice and orange zest, it’s up to you.
Heat the mixture gently until the honey is dissolved then simmer (without boiling) for about 20 minutes. Let it all cool then strain it through muslin into a bowl, before decanting into some small bottles – or one big one if you want to keep it all for yourself.
I used 250ml glass bottles with Grolsch style lids – you can get them online by searching for cordial bottles, or in cooking shops and some other shops. Decorate with ribbon, a label saying what it is and a tag with a serving suggestion, saying something along the lines of: “Serve with warmed cloudy apple juice and a dusting of nutmeg; add a dollop of double cream for a richer alternative.”
If you’re feeling particularly generous you could give it along with the ingredients needed to make it into this special drink – a bottle of cloudy apple juice and a pot of double cream, and maybe a nutmeg.
It is really, really good. Perfect for Christmas Eve. And Christmas Day. And Boxing Day…

The L Chef - homemade mayonnaise

2011-11-27T15:36:00.000Z

It may be more of a summery treat, but I’ve always wondered how you make mayonnaise. Somewhere in the back of my mind is a voice telling me homemade mayonnaise is much, much better than shop-bought. I have no idea who said it, whether they are a reliable source or if in fact I just dreamt it, but it was enough to make me want to give it a try.

All the recipes and online videos that I watched prior to making my mayo made me a bit scared – if you go wrong when mixing the basic ingredients, egg yolk, oil and vinegar, it can separate and not work out well. Normally when there are these kind of warnings, I do that thing which you’re not meant to do. There is little consolation in knowing that many other people have the same problem.

But in fact it all went to plan. I bit my lip almost constantly and barely breathed during the whole process, waiting for the big moment when the mixture curdled, but it didn’t happen. I ended up with lovely, delicious, appetising mayonnaise.

So how’s it done? I turned to Delia for this one, I felt she would know best. Put two large egg yolks into a bowl, then add a crushed clove of garlic and a teaspoon of mustard powder – this adds a bit of flavour but also helps to emulsify the mixture. Add a teaspoon of salt and a few twists of milled pepper, and mix together.

Place your bowl on a damp dish cloth, to stop it sliding around when you start whisking.

Now is the important part. Measure out 275ml of groundnut oil (or another flavourless oil) and add one drop, and one drop only, to the egg mixture. By a drop I mean about a teaspoonful. This is where you will make or break your mayonnaise. It is really important to whisk (use a balloon whisk and do it by hand if you want to exhaust your arm for the rest of the day, or an electric whisk if you have better things to do with your time) each drop of oil in, one at a time.

It may seem bonkers. It may feel like it will never end, but this is the only way to make mayonnaise that works. After a few minutes of the one-drop-at-a-time method, the mixture will start to thicken.

Then you can start adding larger drops of oil and keep whisking, until half of the oil is in. At this stage add a teaspoon of white wine vinegar to thin the mixture and keep adding the oil as you whisk. By this point you can use one hand to pour the oil in, in a steady trickle, as you whisk constantly.

When you’re done, add some more seasoning if you think it needs it. And you’re done!

If you do manage to curdle the mayonnaise, all is not lost. Put a new yolk into a clean bowl, and add the curdled mixture to that, drop by drop, then carry on as planned.

Serve with cold meats, in your sandwiches or with hard-boiled eggs in egg mayonnaise. Or, as I did, you can dip some homemade potato wedges into it for a posh version of chips and mayo. It really is better than the stuff you get in shops – it has much more flavour.

It will store in a jar in the fridge for a week, but don’t keep it past then – remember it contains raw eggs.

The L Chef - chestnut time

2011-11-20T16:01:00.000Z

It’s chestnut time. When they start appearing in the fruit and veg stores, or in posh supermarkets, I have in the past looked at them and moved on. I may be wrong but I don’t think we used to roast them in my house over and open fire when I was a kid, and the only exposure I’ve really had to them is in stuffing at Christmas.

But this year I wanted to have a go at using them to cook something. I found lots of different recipes – for sweet and savoury dishes – but settled on a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall number and made a couple of variations.

In contrast to some of my recent experiments (the terrible pumpkin pie episode springs to mind) this recipe, for a kale, chorizo and chestnut stew, really is one to cut out and keep. It’s so warming and flavoursome, you won’t be disappointed.

First you need to prepare your chestnuts – you need 500g of them. Cut a large cross in the skin with a sharp knife, and roast them for about half an hour until the skin peels back and they are cooked. I roasted mine at about 180C.

Then, when they are cool enough to touch you need to peel the skin off completely , including the thinner brown papery skin inside the shell. Don’t wait until they are completely cold, part of the “fun” is partially burning your fingers (a bowl of cold water nearby is a useful tool to dip your hands into), and the skins are more difficult to remove if they are cold.

Mine didn’t peel that easily, but I think I had failed to cut large enough crosses in them. Another method you can try is to drop them into boiling water for about four minutes – that apparently also does the trick.

Now fry off 250g of chopped up chorizo sausage and about the same amount of chopped bacon rashers or lardons until crisp and set to one side. In a large saucepan (the largest you’ve got) heat up about one and a half litres of chicken stock – ideally homemade if you have any in your freezer. Add the chestnuts for a couple of minutes and then remove them with a slotted spoon.

Mash about a quarter of them up and add them back in, then roughly chop the rest of them and add those too. Add the cooked meat, and two bags – about 360g – of kale cabbage. The recipe was for 500g but I think that is a crazy amount, as this is only a recipe for four portions. Remove any tough stalks before adding the cabbage, and shred it roughly.

Season it all with salt and pepper, try and stir the cabbage into the liquid and put the lid on for a few minutes until the cabbage is bright green and just cooked. Don’t overcook it. I also added a tin of cooked lentils to bulk it out.

Serve the stew with a drizzle of the orange oil from the chorizo pan. A perfect winter warmer.

The L Chef - risotto

2011-11-13T12:34:00.000Z

There is nothing like a good, buttery, cheesy risotto to warm you up on a cold winter’s evening. The delicious dish did not enter my life until a few years ago, when I was at university and one of my housemates made it quite regularly.

I watched him make it a few times, then I asked him to teach me, and I’ve never really looked back. I make a mean mushroom risotto (fresh mushrooms, wild mushrooms, a squeeze of lemon and some tarragon), a cheeky smoked salmon risotto (buy a pack of the cheap smoked salmon offcuts from the Sainsbury’s basics range and add some mange tout right at the end of cooking), and a to-die-for butternut squash and chilli.

It was film night at our house, and we had two friends coming over to watch a DVD – which they were having to bring, because all I have is Flashdance – while I cooked up a quick and easy meal. It has taken me a while to work out that I don’t have to make something complicated and impressive when having friends round for food. It just needs to taste good, fill you up, and go with a good bottle of wine.

This time I decided to make a bacon and pea risotto – I meant to throw in some mint from the garden as well and pretend we weren’t plunging towards winter and it was in fact spring, but I forgot. If you decide to make this, try adding some, roughly chopped. This recipe serves four.

Start by gently frying off a chopped onion, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and a few sticks of chopped up celery, in a glug of olive oil. You don’t want them to burn, so keep the temperature low and let them sweat for about five minutes.

Meanwhile, fry some chopped smoked bacon in another frying pan to crisp it up, ready to add to the risotto later – I think I used about 10 rashers, and used a pair of scissors to cut them down to size. Also boil your kettle and mix up a large jug of vegetable or chicken stock.

Now add 400g of risotto rice to the onion mixture and stir it until the grains are coated with the oil. Add a large glass of white wine and stir continuously until it has been soaked up by the rice. Then start adding your stock, ladleful by ladleful, as the liquid gets soaked up. Keep the heat down low and keep stirring with a wooden spoon.

It may be a bit boring standing there stirring, but the end result is worth it. You need to keep going for between 20 minutes and half an hour, adding stock as you go and some extra boiling water if the rice still isn’t cooked when you’ve finished all the stock. It is ready when the rice is cooked, but still has a bit of a bite, and the “sauce” around it is nice and thick.

Add the bacon in, season with salt and pepper and remove the pan from the heat. Add a large knob of butter and a large handful of grated parmesan, and a couple of large handfuls of frozen peas, then stir it through and leave with the lid on for a few minutes to make it even creamier.

Serve with some salad and make sure you finish first so you can polish off any leftovers in the pan.

The L Chef - how NOT to make pumpkin pie

2011-11-06T11:00:00.000Z

I had another disastrous day in the kitchen last weekend. It pains me to write about it. I debated not writing about it, because it went so wrong – but maybe telling you all about it will make me feel better.

When something goes wrong when you are cooking, there are several elements to the disappointment. You have wasted (insert relevant number here) hours of your life for something that has ended up in the bin; you don’t get to eat the tasty food you had been imagining; and in this case, you embarrass yourself in front of your mother-in-law and leave Sunday lunch without a pudding.

Might I add that in a day which otherwise consisted of painting a tiny downstairs toilet several times over, making this dish – the disastrous pumpkin pie – was the only thing I was looking forward to. I hope you can hear the violins playing.

Before you read on – be warned that this is a story without a happy ending. I have not worked out what went wrong and I was so put off by what I did manage to make that I think it will be a good few years before I have the stomach to try it again!

I was inspired to make pumpkin pie by my Canadian friend Erin, who had made an amazing one the week before. Great idea, I thought – I’ll make one when Matt’s mum visits. I asked Erin for her recipe but when it didn’t arrive in time I impatiently looked one up on the internet. What could go wrong?

I used readymade sweet shortcrust pastry and rolled it out to put in my tin, before pricking it with a fork and brushing it with egg yolk and baking it for 25 minutes without the filling. The recipe said not to use baking beans or “blind bake” it – but the sides of the pie case kept sliding down the edge of the tin, which I tried to solve by sticking extra bits of pastry on. That kind of worked, but didn’t look too pretty.

Then I had to get my pumpkin sorted. With a bit of extra research it seems I may have bought completely the wrong kind of pumpkin – you want one made for cooking, not the big ones grown for lanterns. They don’t taste as nice and are too stringy. I cut the pumpkin into chunks, sliced off the skin and microwaved it before chopping it into smaller chunks.

My recipe didn’t call for it to be pureed – but I think that must just have been a big mistake, because when my pie was done there were big, unappetising chunks of the stuff inside. Other recipes say you should blitz the pumpkin with a hand blender or similar.

This gets mixed with eggs, double cream, soft dark brown sugar, spices (all spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger and ground cloves) before being poured into the pastry case and baked for about 40 minutes at 180C.

But when I removed mine (and even after an extra 20 minutes of baking), the inside was just not set. Not even remotely. The top looked good, it looked set and how I thought it should be, but when you cut into it it was gloopy and liquidy – not light and fluffy and perfectly set like my friend’s had been. I made the mistake of tasting it as well, which has me pulling a face just writing about it.

What with shrinking pastry, pumpkin pieces and unpleasant gooiness, this was not a success. Was my oven too cool? Did I not have enough egg in the pie? Was the pumpkin too watery? I have no idea. And I’m not sure how motivated I am to work it out.

What it should have looked at. Made by Erin of Dove Grey Day

The L Chef - beer butt chicken

2011-10-30T20:49:00.000Z

The picture makes this dish look a bit odd, if not cruel, but I’m afraid it does make for a very tasty roast chicken. For reasons that will become apparent, this recipe – which I imagine was devised and named in America – is called “beer butt chicken”.

I’ve been meaning to try it out for a couple of years since seeing Jamie Oliver do it when he toured America for one of his TV shows. You can do it in your oven or on the barbecue – but you need a barbecue with quite a lot of space and a lid if you want to do it that way, as it needs to hold an upright chicken.

You basically cook the chicken with an open can of beer inside it, so it is lovely and crispy on the outside and moist and delicious on the inside because it has been steamed by the beer. I can highly recommend it – it was easy and tasty. And if you take a note of where I went wrong and got confused, you shouldn’t have any problems with it at all.

If you don’t like beer, don’t worry – it doesn’t leave the meat tasting of lager. But if you want to try a different version, you can try using some wine or a can of coke, or just some water in an empty can. One recipe I found suggested using a tin of baked beans with the label removed, and then serving the baked beans (enhanced by chicken juices) with the cooked meat.

I did mine in the oven, so I’ll explain the method for that. Set the temperature at 200C, and take your chicken out of the fridge while you make a rub for the outside of the chicken. A 1.5kg chicken should feed four.

You can use any kind of spices and seasonings in your rub – even just salt and pepper and a bit of butter if you want to keep it traditional. I mixed a few teaspoons of pepper, salt, fennel seeds, thyme, paprika, oregano, chopped garlic, sage and cayenne pepper in a pestle and mortar before adding some olive oil to make a Cajun-inspired paste.

Set that to one side while you get your chicken set up. Have a few swigs of beer from the can so that it is about half full, and if you want you can add something like a crushed clove of garlic to try and infuse a bit more flavour into the meat. Then lower your chicken’s cavity onto the can - you want it to look like it is sitting on the can.

I sometimes worry about myself. I’d like to think I’m a vaguely intelligent human being with a fair amount of common sense. And yet I spent a good five minutes trying, and failing, to cram the beer can into the wrong end of the chicken. I had nearly convinced myself that my chicken was just too small when I tried the other end and realised that I had been errantly attempting to put the can into the head-end of the bird. If, like me, the plucked chicken confuses you, take a look at the photo with this column to put your bird the right way up.

Once the chicken is sat on the can, put it into a roasting tin and smear the chicken with your spice paste, putting it inside and out.

Cook it on the very bottom of your oven for about an hour and a half – you will need to leave it for longer if you have a larger bird, just use normal chicken roasting guide times. You want it to be all golden and crispy on the outside, you want the meat to pull away easily from the bone and for the juices to run clear if you stick a skewer in.

Now all you need to do is remove the can – I found the easiest way to do this was to tip the chicken gently over onto its side in the pan. Cover the chicken on a carving board with some tin foil and leave it to rest for a few minutes while you prepare your accompaniment.

I served mine with salad and baked potatoes, but you can do whatever you want with it – the only thing you may not be able to do is anything that requires too much oven space as the chicken will take up most of the space in there, unless you have a huge oven or a two door one.

The L Chef - blueberry and coriander seed muffins

2011-10-24T14:30:00.000+01:00

I was given a book for my birthday which possibly has the most beautiful cover on my cookbook shelves. On the front of The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit is a colourful version of the “flavour wheel”, which is the basis for her book.

You can look up any of a number of different foods and find out what they go well with in cookery terms – for example banana and bacon, liver and fig, nutmeg and lamb. Some of the combinations are more unusual than others, and some sections contain recipes.

I wanted to give something new a go so I let the page fall open on the coriander seed chapter. I had some of them in the cupboard, so I scanned through the list for something to catch my eye. There was apple, coffee, and garlic, but I liked the look of coriander seed and blueberry.

She says coriander seeds contain a lot of linalool, a flavour compound with a woody, floral, citrussy quality which is a key component of synthesised blueberry flavouring. Then she suggests a little freshly ground spoonful of the seeds “can lend a fragrant background note to your home-baked blueberry muffins”. Bingo.

I found a recipe for blueberry muffins and gave this new flavour combination a go with some mini versions.

It’s very quick to throw together and cook. I managed it in a frantic hour before going to work one afternoon for an evening shift - fitting in eating my lunch, getting dressed and putting makeup on around mixing, sifting and checking the oven.

Preheat your oven to 190C, and put mini paper cases in a tin, filling 24 holes. Into one bowl, sift 125g plain flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, a quarter of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt.

In another bowl, mix up one egg, 60g of melted butter, 60g caster sugar, 50ml of milk, and the zest and juice of half a lemon. Fold the flour into the wet mixture with a spatula and then add about 100g of blueberries, which have been coated in a bit of flour to stop them sinking in the mix.

Then add about half a teaspoon of crushed coriander seeds and mix it in – trust me, it’s going to work.

Spoon the mixture into the cases and bake for 18 minutes – checking that the mini muffins are cooked by pricking them with a cocktail stick at the end of the cooking time and making sure it comes out clean.

My muffins came out a bit pale, but because they were cooked I wanted to take them out – and I was also running out of time. They tasted delicious – you could taste the lemon and the coriander seed wasn’t obvious but I think it made them really fresh and fragrant.

The L Chef - Hungry?

2011-10-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

Since writing this column I have been lucky enough to get sent a few emails giving me hints and tips about where I am going wrong, a few emails inviting me to cookery events and restaurant openings, and the occasional cook book.

One of these new books caught my eye recently. Hungry? has been produced by Innocent, the people behind the fruit smoothies you can get in the supermarket and have little woollie hats on the bottles in the winter.

The idea is that it’s a family cook book with recipes for healthy, tasty, no fuss food that your kids can help you make. Obviously then it is not necessarily directed at me, being childless (and if one more person asks if babies are on the way now that I have a house, I think I’ll scream) – but the book is really nicely designed and the recipes look fun and simple enough for a weekday dinner.

There’s an “alternative index” at the front where you can choose a recipe that suits you – for example recipes that take 20 minutes, recipes for “unexpected visitors”, and “a night on the sofa”.

I chose a recipe for sausage and squash mash to make last Sunday night, and wasn’t disappointed. Get your oven preheated to 200C, and then get your sausages ready to cook.

Put eight sausages in a roasting tin with two peeled and cored apples, cut up into eight chunks per apple. Spoon a mixture of a tablespoon of wholegrain mustard, a tablespoon of honey and a good splash of apple juice over the top. This can go into the oven for 25 minutes to half an hour, turning the sausages half way to make sure everything is coated, until they are cooked.

Meanwhile, cook a butternut squash and two sweet potatoes for your mash. The recipe says to boil them in a pan on the hob, but I like cheating with a microwave. Peel the butternut squash and sweet potatoes, chop them into chunks and get the seeds out of the squash, then put them in a large microwavable bowl with a bit of water, cover and microwave for about 20 minutes, stirring them halfway.

When they are soft enough to mash, drain the water and add some olive oil, salt and pepper and mash with a potato masher.

Towards the end of the cooking time for the mash, and when the sausages are almost done, you can cook your broccoli, which should only take about five minutes. Chop one head of broccoli into florets, and I also like to use the stalk by chopping it into chunks.

Heat some oil gently in a frying pan, then add a couple of sliced cloves of garlic and half a sliced red chilli, then throw in the broccoli with a few tablespoons of water and a couple of anchovies if you have any knocking around – they’ll just add a bit of flavour because they break right down.

Stir fry them until they steam through and are cooked, then serve the mash up with a couple of sausages and apple pieces, some of the cooking liquid from the pan and some broccoli on the side.

A fun take on bangers and mash, and not too tricky to make.

The L Chef - macaroons

2011-10-24T13:30:00.000+01:00

As I sat with my boyfriend watching a re-run of the TV show Baking Made Easy, I decided out loud that I was going to give macaroons a go. I spoke too soon, and as the section on macaroons went on it became clear that even though the presenter Lorraine Pascale made it look really easy, it was going to be a bit of a test. Matt turned to me with a grin, and said: “I can’t wait to see you try this.”

As much as I love to be calamitous entertainment in the kitchen for him, I would rather get it right. Done well these little “posh meringues”, as Lorraine described them, look so pretty. They are a little sandwich of two mini meringues, made with ground almonds, stuck together with jam or buttercream – and they are beautifully brightly coloured.

I won’t suggest it was easy. It was actually quite a stressful baking experience, not made easier by the electrics being off half the time leaving me cooking with a head torch (Matt was busy doing electrical work as we redecorate the downstairs loo) and the tendency of icing sugar to go everywhere.

The first step is to preheat the oven to 160C, then grind down 125g of ground almonds and 175g icing sugar to make it as fine as possible. I used a pestle and mortar, and then sifted it, throwing away any larger grains that were left. Cue the first clouds of icing sugar covering the kitchen.

Then whisk up three large egg whites with a pinch of salt until soft peaks start to form, then gradually add 75g caster sugar until it is thick and glossy, and some flavour extract or food colouring. I split mine into two bowls and did some red ones and some pink.

Now fold the meringue mix in two parts into the almond and icing sugar mixture and mix well. Cue the second cloud of icing sugar covering your clothes and getting in your hair!

You need to mix it together with a spatula until it is shiny and thick, before spooning it all into a piping bag. Good luck with this. Mine went everywhere, all over my hands, and was generally a nightmare. I would welcome any tips on the use of piping bags without it all coming out the bottom before you even start, and how to get it all in the bag. It seems to me you need about five hands.

Line two sheets with baking paper and pipe small rounds of the mix onto them. Lift the baking sheet up and tap it down on the work surface to get rid of any bubbles of air, and then leave them to stand at room temperature for about 15 minutes until you can touch them lightly without any mixture sticking to your finger.

Bake for 15 minutes. I left the door slightly ajar as Lorraine did, but when I took mine out and let them cool after 15 minutes they didn’t look like they had cooked underneath. I did some frantic last minute research and decided to put them back in the oven until they were more thoroughly cooked – apparently you should only take them out if they are lifting off the baking paper easily. Mine took about another 20 minutes.

Leave them to cool and make you buttercream by mixing 150g softened and well-beaten butter with 75g icing sugar (more icing sugar mess), add some food colouring and sandwich pairs of macaroons together with the buttercream before putting them in the fridge to set. Don’t do what I did and cool the buttercream in the fridge before using it to stick the macaroon halves together – it will go too solid.

The end result looked lovely, and although I have never had a “proper” one, I think they tasted alright. A lot of faff but quite a good outcome, and they were happily devoured by my work colleagues the next day.

The L Chef - sloe gin

2011-10-24T13:00:00.000+01:00

Strictly speaking this week’s column is less about cooking and more about brewing. But it all took place in my kitchen, so I reckon it still counts as an L Chef attempt.

Sloes have started appearing on hedgerows across the country – have you noticed them? Little bluey purple berries with a cloudy, dusty sheen on them. I’ve been watching some near me for the last couple of months, having been told to wait until at least September to pick them if I wanted to make sloe gin.

I have seen friends make this beautiful pink alcohol, and it seemed a shame to waste the fruit I see around my neck of the woods every year.

Apparently if you pick them too early they will not be ripe and will make your gin bitter. Traditionally sloes should be picked after the first frost in October or November, but these days I am told people pick them in September – as long as they feel ripe.

I took out a Tupperware box and filled it with berries – it was quite a relaxing and soothing experience which I hadn’t anticipated. I managed to collect about 700g. Now what?

It’s all about sloes, sugar and gin.

I have heard of several different recipes with different amounts of all the ingredients – and my friend’s mum even made hers without adding sugar, but I think sugar is needed to extract the juice from the fruit.

I have made three wine bottles full with my 700g of berries, and I used about 550g of caster sugar and a one litre bottle of Gordon’s.

But before you start making your gin you need to prick the berries with a needle – folklore has it that you shouldn’t use a metal fork unless it is made of silver but I’m not sure how much attention I would pay that. If you haven’t got the time you can put them in the freezer, where they should burst, or just bash them with a rolling pin or similar.

Once that is done you can put your sloes into a large jar, or as I did (because I don’t have a large jar that is suitable) use old wine bottles that you have sterilised. For the next bit you will need a funnel – or just do what I did and fashion one out of a cut up plastic cup. Divide the sugar between the bottles, and pour the gin over the top, before putting a lid on and giving it a good shake.

Now it’s a waiting game – and it still is for me. I can’t tell you whether my batch is a success or not for another few months.

You have to give the bottles or jars a good shake to mix everything up – some recipes say every other day and then once a week, but I liked the one that said “as and when you remember it is there”. A friend of mine also suggested leaving them in the footwells of your car, so they just roll around as you drive. Knowing my luck though, if I did that they would probably smash.

After three months you should be able to strain the liquid and keep it ready to drink, give as Christmas presents or store ready for a special occasion. Cheers!

The L Chef - mulled pears

2011-10-24T12:30:00.000+01:00

One of the delights of my new back garden is a huge pear tree. Since we moved in I have watched the branches droop down, heavier and heavier by the week with ripening fruit, until a couple of weeks ago they started dropping and were obviously ready to eat.

We have dozens and dozens of them, beautiful green and all sorts of sizes. I believe they are conference pears.

There’s only one problem – I don’t like pears. And although my boyfriend does, there’s only so many one man can eat and only so many times I can palm them off on neighbours and friends.

Having said I don’t like them, I don’t mind cooked pears – especially if they are in a tart and served with ice cream. So this week I set about preserving a little batch of fruit by mulling them, ready to serve warm over the winter months with some vanilla ice cream or crème fraiche, or perhaps in a tart of some description.

I used a recipe I found at home in my mum’s copy of The Complete Book of Preserves and Pickles – but I think you need double the amount liquid than they say in that recipe.

Out came three small glass kilner jars from my cupboard – I’m afraid I don’t know what capacity they are but they were enough to house a kilo of pears.

They needed cleaning up and then putting in the oven at 120C for half an hour to sterilise them, while I cracked on with preparing my pears.

Using a vegetable peeler, I peeled the skins off, leaving the pears whole and the stalk in place. You may need to cut some in half if you (like me) have a limited number of jars to pack the fruit into when it comes to that stage, but try and keep them whole if you can because they look prettier.

Then I poured a bottle of fruity red wine into a saucepan with 300g of caster sugar and heated it gently, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the sugar had all dissolved. Then I brought it to the boil, and cooked it on a higher temperature for five minutes – hey presto, a wine syrup.

I carefully lifted my sterilised jars out of the oven and pushed my pears into place, adding in some thin slivers of orange and lemon zest into each one, a couple of slices of fresh root ginger, about four cloves in each jar and a stick of cinnamon.

Then I ladled the syrup over the top, making sure that there were no air pockets and covering all the fruit. After closing the lids, but not fastening the clasps, I put the jars back in the oven for three hours to gently cook away.

After that they are ready to take out, have their lids properly closed and be left to cool on a tea towel for 24 hours before being labelled and stored away in a dark cupboard for a cold wintery day.

The L Chef - Damson jam

2011-09-18T19:36:00.002+01:00

This cooking malarkey is full of surprises. Whoever knew making jam was quite so straightforward, and satisfying? I am a convert – and as soon as I can work out how to smuggle my mother’s jam pan out of the house and install it in my kitchen (or alternatively fork out and buy my own) I might just spend all my free time jamming.

I went home for the weekend and decided to take advantage of my mum’s kit and wisdom, and make my first ever batch of jam while I was there. We bought a kilo of damsons from the local market and some preserving sugar - you can use granulated but the large sugar crystals in preserving sugar dissolve slowly and do not settle in the bottom of the pan - and headed home to begin.

I am lucky that Mum had all the equipment I needed – a very (very) big, heavy based pan, a stack of jars, some little wax discs to put on top of the jam when it is done and a funnel to pour the jam into the jars.

I put five little saucers in the freezer (more on that later), and my clean jars went into the oven at 180C to sterilise them. About 1kg of damsons makes about 2kg of jam, if that helps you to decide how many jars you need.

I put 1kg of sugar in a large metal bowl in the oven to warm up (this helps the sugar to dissolve quicker when you add it to the jam pan). Then it was time to deal with the fruit – I checked all the damsons to make sure they were clean and there were no leaves hiding in the punnet and then threw them into my mum’s (and previously my grandma’s) massive jam-making pan with 400ml of water.

They simmered away on a low heat until the fruit was soft – already the colour was looking amazing. At this point I poured the warm sugar in and stirred that in, simmering it for 15 minutes.

This bit is quite important– you have to make sure the sugar is fully dissolved. Coat the back of a wooden spoon with some of the mixture and check there are no sugar crystals, and also have a good scrape around at the bottom of the pan to check if it feels “grainy”.

Once you’re sure the sugar has dissolved you then put the heat up as far as it will go for ten minutes before removing it from the heat and testing to see if it is set. This is where the little saucers come into play. Get a small spoonful of the jam and put it on one of the cold saucers, then put it in the fridge for a minute or two. Push at the little jammy puddle with your finger, and if it all crinkles up then it is set.

If it doesn’t do this, it needs a bit longer on the boil so put it back on the heat for five minutes before doing the same test again.

Then it had to be left for 15 minutes to cool, before being poured (via the funnel) into the hot jars. You want them as full as you can get them, before putting a little bit of waxed paper on top and the lid, and leaving them to cool. Job done. If you’re lucky you will have a little bit left over which – oh dear – can’t possibly fit in a jar and will have to be eaten, warm, on a lovely piece of fresh bread. Yum.

Once the jars are cool, you can label them up with the contents and the date – and in this case, especially if you plan to give them as gifts, it is worth saying that they contain stones.

The L Chef - canapes

2011-09-11T14:10:00.000+01:00

With plans made for a (two month belated) housewarming coupled with very late birthday celebrations at our new pad, thoughts turned to drinks and food. Drinks were easy – a few bottles of wine, a couple of crates of beer, ingredients for Moscow Mule cocktails.

At any parties I have held before I’ve just done a selection of crisps, nuts and dips – if you were lucky you might have got some carrot sticks. But this time, I thought, after a year of doing “The L Chef”, I really should be making a bit of effort and doing some canapés.

I should have known it was a bad idea. I think I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t all going to go to plan – but by the time I realised this I had already been chattering away in front of confirmed guests about the delicious nibbles I was going to be creating. There was no turning back.

It all started well – I got in all my ingredients the day before and prepared all my dishes. I was making crostini with mozzarella, chilli and basil; cocktail sausages in soy, lime and honey; mini baked potatoes with cream cheese and chives and chicken satay skewers.

I prepped as much as I could – cooking the sausages and then marinading them in a mix of soy sauce, lime juice and honey; baking the little (small egg-sized) potatoes with a brushing of olive oil; mixing the chive and cream cheese topping; slicing up a couple of balls of mozzarella; slicing a French stick into little crostini rounds; and slicing four chicken breasts into long strips to marinade overnight in a mix of coconut milk, peanut butter, lime juice and zest, chopped chilli, garlic and ginger.

On the night I had made the crostini by toasting the little slices under the grill, rubbing them with garlic and oil and adding the toppings ready to serve cold, and I had skewered all the chicken strips. But all the rest needed effort through the evening. I poured myself a drink, and as the guests started arriving my repeated mad dash from the kitchen to the front door to the drinks table began.

I heated the potatoes in the oven then sliced them open ready for a dollop of cream cheese, while popping my head out of the kitchen to chat to our new neighbours.

The sausages went into the frying pan with some of the marinade for a couple of minutes to get nice and sticky, before being covered with toasted sesame seeds, while my better half gave full house tours – including the (empty) loft and shed.

But the chicken took an absolute age – there were about four batches of the skewers which needed grilling for six minutes on each side, and careful watching. My boyfriend took them out into the crowd of gathered friends, where I could hear him introducing them as “Bernard Manning’s chicken twizzlers”. The Moscow Mules had a lot to answer for.

Some friends kept me company in the kitchen, but by this stage some guests were already leaving and I hadn’t spoken to them. I was glad to turn the oven off and get out of there.

Don’t get me wrong – for once I can proudly say the food was great, and everyone was very complimentary. There were no reports of food poisoning the next day. But I spent half the night – until about 10pm - in the kitchen, when I should have been enjoying myself and speaking to my guests. I won’t be doing that again – crisps and dips all the way!

The L Chef - crab pasta

2011-09-03T17:33:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine once told me that after one too many “food envy” falling outs over romantic meals with his better half, they had made a pact that they would always order the same thing. That way she was never leaning over to have a taste of his plate, and he was never left feeling grumpy because he had missed out.

Food envy is an emotion I am well-acquainted with. The latest occasion was at a birthday meal a couple of weeks ago when I was treated to at The Oyster Shack near Bigbury in Devon. It’s one of my favourite restaurants, close to where I go nearly every summer for a holiday break, with brilliant fresh sea food and a relaxed atmosphere.

Anyway, I opted for a tuna steak and salad. I can’t even remember any more details than that – my memory is full of the taste, smell and look of a delicious bowl of crab pasta my mum had. I’ve seen crab pasta dishes served up and recipes in cookbooks and online, where they are all very similar – normally some chilli is involved but it is all quite simple.

But this was a bit different – there was of course the crab, the usual chilli, and some kind of citrus flavour, but it was with a really fresh coconut and tomato sauce. As I’d missed out on having a plate of it all to myself, I resolved to recreate it in my own kitchen.

After the palava of picking the meat out of a crab shell in a previous column, I opted this time for the lazy option of picking up some ready picked white crab meat from the supermarket fish counter.

First of all I gently fried off a crushed clove of garlic, a chopped red chilli and some grated ginger in some chilli oil (only because I’d run out of olive oil, not because I was trying to be clever) – just make sure it doesn’t burn.

Add to that a large handful of halved cherry tomatoes, and stir them every now and then with a wooden spoon until they are starting to soften up. I then added a tin of coconut milk, and a few teaspoons full of desiccated coconut to give it the coconut flavour.

This was all guesswork – I had to hope my palate had detected the right ingredients and my dish was going to turn out vaguely similar to what I had tried at The Oyster Shack.

Finally, I stirred in the (cooked) crabmeat into the sauce and zested a lime over the top. It was ready to serve when the crab was hot and the sauce was a bright orange colour. I spooned it over a bowl of spaghetti, squeezed a bit of lime over the top and was pretty proud of the result. Quite a tasty dish, even if I do say so myself!

The L Chef - blackberry and banana bread

2011-08-30T14:10:00.000+01:00

The latest from my Bristol Evening Post L Chef column...

What perfect timing – my birthday trip down to Devon coincided with blackberry bushes being full of ripe fruit ready for the picking. Everywhere I went there was more and more of the little berries. As easy as it is to pick one every now and then for a fruity snack, I wanted to collect more of them and try out a new recipe.

I made those little apple charlottes last week with apple and blackcurrant, and I’d eaten apple and blackberry crumble the week before, so I wanted to try and do something a bit different. I was feeling confident, and ready to experiment – a little.

Back in Bristol, I am in the middle of redecorating my new house and decided during my trip to the seaside that I should be bold with colour combinations – as long as I don’t do anything ridiculous, why can’t I try this colour with that one? Just because the magazines and the books don’t do it, why can’t I?

And the same attitude rubbed off on my cooking. I’m not talking Heston Blumenthal-level creative genius here, but just a bit of “why not?” and “I’ll give it a go”. I had blackberries, a box of which I had foraged in the sunshine one afternoon. But I wasn’t liking the look of all the recipes I found – most of which were variations on fruit crumbles.
A bunch of horribly overripe bananas (I like to eat mine still green, and the thought of eating an even remotely brown one makes me shudder from head to toe) caught my eye as I sat wracking my brains. Banana bread – that’s what I always do with the bananas I haven’t managed to catch before they got too ripe.

I did a little internet search for blackberry and banana bread, with no joy. Was this a bad combination, a stupid idea? No, I thought stubbornly, if there can be recipes for banana and blueberry bread (which there are) and the like, then I’m going to try blackberry and banana.

So out came my trusty banana bread recipe, and I beat together four mashed bananas, 75g softened butter, 110g golden caster sugar, 125g plain flour, 100g wholemeal flour, 2 tsp baking powder and two eggs. Then I added a small punnet full of freshly-picked blackberries, which I had coated in flour – this stops fruit from sinking to the bottom of the cake in the oven, apparently. It all went in a lined and buttered loaf tin and into the oven at 180C for 50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Let it cool before slicing, if you can wait (I certainly can’t).

It worked! Or at least, I think so. The blackberries were quite tart but I liked that, and they looked beautiful and pinky-purple after being cooked. Maybe banana and blackberries don’t go together that well in your mind, and maybe they aren’t a match made in heaven. But for a tea time, making-the-most-of-some-lovely-free-fruit cake, this worked very well.

The L Chef - apple charlottes

2011-08-15T12:16:00.000+01:00

If you’ve been down to the ss Great Britain recently, you will have seen its new kitchen – complete with a ship’s cook muttering away to himself as he guts fish, the ship’s cat waiting to catch a passing rat and bubbling copper pots.

The 1866 galley is the latest addition of the attraction, which has been inspired in part by the Victorian guide to running you household – Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. The people at the ss Great Britain got in touch and suggested I might like to make one of Mrs Beeton’s recipes to get a feel for 19th century cooking.

It was a lovely idea, until I started looking through some of the recipes, which you can find really easily online by searching for Mrs Beeton. Perhaps I started on the wrong pages, but I wasn’t able to get too excited about calf’s feet (or calf’s head for that matter) or carrots boiled for two hours.

It got a bit better on the desserts page of recipes, where I found a recipe for a traditional apple charlotte – which, if you don’t already know, is normally made by with a mould of bread filled with an apple compote.

The only thing was it was meant to feed five or six people and I wasn’t planning a dinner party, so I had to come up with a smaller version that would feed two. With a few tweaks here and there, Mrs Beeton ended up being the inspiration to my version rather than a recipe I followed word for word.

First of all I raided my mum’s larder for some small stainless steel pudding moulds, because I wanted to make individual puddings rather than one large one. I chopped up a large peeled and cored cooking apple which I had peeled and cored, and put it in a bowl in the microwave with a bit of butter, a heaped tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of water for about seven minutes, until the apple was well-softened.

Meanwhile I prepared the bread moulds. I used the metal moulds to cut out a circular shape of white bread that would fit in the bottom of it, brushed it with melted butter on both sides and pressed it into the base of the mould. Then I cut little strips, about 2cm wide, out of another slice of white bread, to line the sides of the mould. I buttered these as well and pressed them one by one into the sides of the mould, making sure they overlapped each other and with the base piece of buttered bread. Finally, I prepared the top round piece and buttered that, ready to press into place when the apple filling went in. I repeated this for the second mould.

By now the apple filling was done. I had intended to leave it as it was, but then I opened the fridge to put it in to cool and noticed a jar of blackcurrant jam – wouldn’t that be a nice combination? So I mixed a tablespoon or so of that in, and left it to cool.

Heat your oven up to about 200C, and when the apple mixture is cool pour it into the bread moulds, before pressing the final disc of buttered bread in place. They can go in the oven for about half an hour – just watch that they don’t burn. After this time they should be golden brown on the top, and hopefully they will also be nice and crisp at the sides and ready to serve. Don’t do what I did first time round and impatiently take them out too soon, so that they collapse when you turn them out.

Turn them out carefully onto a plate and serve with vanilla ice cream, cream or crème fraiche. A simple, tasty dish with a nod to Mrs B. *Visitors at the ss Great Britain on October 27, 29 and 30 can take part in “I’m a First Class passenger, get me out of here!”, an event challenging your taste buds with Victorian food.

The L Chef - a quick tagine

2011-08-14T19:55:00.003+01:00

A stay with the in-laws should be stressful enough, constantly having to be on best behaviour. You would think it would be sensible to avoid the extra pressure that comes with offering to cook dinner. But, without properly thinking, I dive straight in when my boyfriend’s mum is wondering what we should eat that night. “Why don’t I cook something up?” – the words are out of my mouth, and it’s too late to call them back.

Will it be a success? Place your bets now.

Before I have even started, I somehow manage to take on an extra challenge. Mum-in-law (who is lovely, for the record. In case she is reading this!) has bought some supermarket sausages, and the first pack she said were pretty disgusting – something to do with the skin being too thick. I suggest taking the skin off and using it to make some meatballs. There is, of course, the risk that they will still not taste very nice. Again, it’s too late to turn back now.

I decide to throw together a quick and (hopefully) easy Moroccan-style tagine, using the “meatballs”, chickpeas and dried apricots, served with some cous cous. I start by browning the meatballs off in a frying pan, in a little oil. It doesn’t go well. I could blame it on an oven and a hob I am not used to, but really it was my fault. I smoked out the kitchen as I burned one side of the first batch of meatballs. It was going well.

Once they were all satisfactorily browned, I removed the meatballs from the pan and softened a chopped onion and a couple of chopped cloves of garlic in there for about 10 minutes, before adding the meatballs back in with a tin of chickpeas (drained), a tin of chopped tomatoes as well as a tin’s worth of water, a chopped up aubergine, a large handful of chopped up dried apricots, and a large sprinkling of cinnamon.

Problem number two. This was far too much for one pan. I had to get another frying pan out, decant half the mixture into it, and bring both to the boil before simmering them for about half an hour. I was cooking for three people, but had managed to make enough for about six.

But, luckily for me, from this point on things started to look up. It all cooked very nicely, and while that was simmering away I cooked some cous cous with a bay leaf and some mixed spice added in to flavour it.

I nervously served it up. The sauce had thickened up well and it looked good – but would it taste ok? It was delicious – and that was the verdict from my boyfriend and his mum too. I think they were quite surprised, as it hadn’t looked too promising at the start. But after all of that, I ended up with a really quite tasty dish, which was also very easy to make. Success!

The L Chef - peach souffle

2011-08-06T19:54:00.003+01:00

Soufflé. It's a scary word for a hit-and-miss cook like me. It's a big, unknown world full of likely, if not certain, failure. Which is why, until writing this, I knew very little about the terrifying dish, which seems to get mentioned on cookery programmes in hushed tones. All I knew was that soufflés can be sweet or savoury, and that they rise... but normally something goes wrong.

But, with a bit of research, and some consultation with Delia Smith, I decided that whether the art of soufflé was tricky or not, it was worth a go. And more to the point - I'm whispering this, just in case the soufflé gods hear and I can never make one ever again - I'm not so sure that it really is that difficult.

Delia says: "The one and only secret of success in making a soufflé is to whisk the egg whites properly. Once you have mastered that, soufflés should never be a problem." She adds that they do tend to shrink away straight after you take them out of the oven, so serve them immediately.

Ok. So how do you whisk egg whites "properly"? Apparently it is all about knowing when to stop. Don't, as I have done in the past, become so mesmerised by the transformation from the clear egg white liquid into a beautiful, white, frothy foam that you keep going and end up over-beating it. Whisking gets air into the whites, making them expand in volume, but if you overdo it they just collapse. So, for soufflés at least, only keep whisking until they are stiff enough for you to lift the whisk out of the bowl and the egg stands up in soft peaks.

Soufflés are basically a few eggs, separated, with the whites whisked and carefully mixed back into the yolks, and with other flavours added. I decided to try a sweet version with peach added into the mix.

With the oven warming up to 180C, start poaching your peach. You only need one for this dish (which serves two people). Submerge it in a pan of boiling water and simmer it until you can stick a knife in and the flesh is really soft. When you reach this point, remove it from the water and finely chop the flesh, discarding the stone.

Whisk the whites of two eggs until peaks formed when you remove the whisk from the bowl. You can use a hand whisk if you want, but an electric one is a whole lot easier and quicker.

In a separate bowl, whisk together two egg yolks with 55g caster sugar. Add in the peach puree.

Now comes a slightly tricky bit - but again I think it is about knowing when to stop. Using a metal spoon, put a spoonful of the whisked egg whites into the bowl of egg yolk mixture. Gently mix it together. This should make it easier to fold the rest of the egg whites in. Spoon them into the egg yolks but by bit, gently folding the two mixtures together. It is not about thoroughly combining the two - you want to carefully mix them together without losing all that air you have whisked in. "Folding" means cutting the mixture with a spoon, then mixing it gently in a kind of figure of eight motion.

Now you just need to grease the inside of a small ovenproof frying pan with a bit of butter, spoon the mixture in and put it over a high heat for about a minute. Put the pan in the oven for ten minutes until the soufflé has risen. If you haven't overwhisked the egg whites and haven't overfolded them into the yolks, it should - touch wood - rise into a beautiful golden yellow-brown pudding, which you should serve straight away before it even thinks about sinking.

There are loads of recipes out there - Delia for instance has a cheese recipe and another for a lemony one. Don't be put off by the soufflé’s tricky reputation.

The L Chef - kohlrabi & "kochslaw"

2011-07-30T19:53:00.003+01:00

It may not seem like summer has really made much of an appearance this year, but it's just about warm enough to tell my brain it is salad season. But salad can get so boring if you stick to the basics - lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber. Dull, dull, dull. So I've been trying to experiment a bit and work on some different combinations to keep my tastebuds happy.

It was during my research for some new recipes that I came across an unusual looking vegetable - kohlrabi. Otherwise known as the German turnip, it's a green, cabbagey type creature which to me resembles the head of a cartoon alien with a few antennae sticking out. Raw, it tastes like cabbage or broccoli stems - so nothing particularly special but the novelty of it caught my attention. However, having found a salad recipe which used it (a take on coleslaw, given the name "kohlslaw") it has taken me several weeks to actually find it.

No supermarkets had it. Not even my local fruit and veg man stocked it, even with week after week of checking back. I had nearly given up hope when I wandered through the farmers' market in St Nick's and spotted it on one of the stalls. Then I had to try and remember what else I needed, but of course I couldn’t completely so I improvised and ended up with my own version of the dish, which perhaps (as a friend who tried it suggested) should be called "kochslaw".

I fell for a bunch of beautiful golden beetroot from the same stall, then picked up a red chilli, some spring onions, and some coriander. I couldn't wait to get them home and make it.

And it is really easy to do. You could do it by hand, but a food processor with a grating/shredding blade will make life much easier if you have one or can borrow one. First of all, chop the "antenna"-like stalks off the kohlrabi, and using a knife or peeler, take the skin off it. Then chop it into large chunks and feed it through your food processor so you end up with thin, long-ish shreds of it - imagine the shreds of cabbage in coleslaw.

Wash your beetroot (I used about four or five small ones, and this whole dish served four people) and tidy them up a bit, removing any of the hairy fibres still attached to them. You could use the more commonly found pink beetroot if you can't get hold of any golden ones, but get them raw, not cooked.

Then feed the beetroot through the food processor in the same way, then the chilli (after you have de-seeded it), and a few spring onions. Chop the coriander up and throw that in with the rest, mix them up in a bowl with your hands and squeeze the juice of one or two lemons over the top, mixing it in.

Whether you use golden or normal beetroot, this mixture should be looking beautifully colourful by now. All that is left to do is the dressing. In an old jam jar, mix together two tablespoons of soy sauce, two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of sesame oil and a couple of cloves of crushed garlic. Add some salt and pepper, put the lid on the jar and give it a good shake, before dressing the salad.

I served mine with some big fat juicy sausages and some raw baby spinach leaves and it was a big hit with the friends I served it up to. So if you ever spot an alien's head peering out at you from a shelf of vegetables, you know what to do.

The L Chef - artichokes

2011-07-23T19:46:00.009+01:00

This week was almost another complete disaster in my kitchen as I came to blows with artichokes. It was still mostly a disaster, but there were at least some redeeming moments.

It was a classic case of not enough research before launching into trying to cook something, as I picked up a couple of globe artichokes from the local fruit and veg shop (only 70p each), skim-read a couple of online recipes and thought I’d just have a go.

I won’t detail what I did that time round because it was utterly ineffective. I ended up with a pan full of what tasted like burnt wood chippings, and had a similar kind of texture.

I was determined to tackle this beautiful-looking vegetable again that week, but working hours dictated that I wasn’t able to return to my local fruit and veg man, so I had to turn to the supermarket aisles. I couldn’t find any anywhere apart from one not too far from where I live, and when I did I was disappointed to find that they were more than three times the price as the ones I had bought first time round – but it had taken me so long to find them that I reluctantly parted with my cash.

My boyfriend, who had been present for the first attempt, sighed when he spied them in the kitchen. But this time was going to be better – I had done my homework and had a better idea what I was up to.

As far as I could work out I had two options. The leaves and the bottom part of the flower – the “heart” – are all edible. But the heart is much tastier and “easier” to eat than the rest. So you can either remove all the leaves and so on and just cook the heart, which requires a bit more preparation, or cook the whole thing with slightly less work beforehand. I went for the latter option.

First of all, I sliced about an inch off the top of the artichoke with a bread knife, and then cut the stem off quite close to the base of the leaves. I removed some of the tougher outer leaves and then carefully spread the leaves apart to reach the centre of the artichoke where there are thinner, lighter coloured and pink leaves.

You need to pull these out and discard them, before scraping the hairy “choke” out with a teaspoon. Get rid of it all – it might take a few minutes.

Squeeze some lemon juice inside to stop it discolouring, then put the whole thing in a pan of boiling water with a clove of garlic and half a lemon and cook it for between half and hour and 45 minutes, until the outer leaves pull off easily.

You can eat it hot or cold. Serve it in a bowl and give everyone their own plate, with something to dip the artichoke in – maybe a flavoured mayonnaise, melted butter or a dressing of some kind. You eat the leaves by scraping your teeth along them to remove the flesh on the inside – but you will find that you discard most of the leaf.

When you have eaten all the leaves, cut up the heart and share – it’s the best bit.

So was it worth it? The honest answer is I’m not sure – but that is because of the disastrous attempt at the start of the week. It was tasty and “different”, and worth a try if you are intrigued!

The L Chef - vegan coconut ice cream

2011-07-17T13:40:00.000+01:00

“I’ve been given an ice cream maker,” came the message from my new-to-Bristol friend Erin. “Come over and help me experiment!” She didn’t need to ask twice.

I’d been thinking of trying to make my own ice cream for a while, ever since a friend of mine arrived with a tub of delicious homemade vanilla ice cream as a pudding offering for a dinner party I had. I was thinking of making some by hand – stirring it every couple of hours as it froze in the freezer– but a proper ice cream maker would be even better.

My brain went into overdrive thinking of all the amazing flavours we could try – chocolate chip, rum and raisin, fruity ones, combination ones – and my mouth was watering at the thought of a lovely, creamy scoop of homemade decadence. I found custard-based recipes, and simpler ones made with just cream and milk. So many to choose from!

What I hadn’t realised at first was that Erin is in fact allergic to milk – which forced us to do some research into vegan recipes for alternatives to the milk and cream usually used. It was fun trying to come up with substitute ingredients.

Chef and writer David Lebovitz writes about some of his own experimenting on his blog (www.davidlebovitz.com) – he tried soy milk but found rice milk worked better, so we decided to give that a go, along with some vegan, “dairy free alternative” cream Erin found in a local food shop made from soya beans, and some tinned coconut milk because the flavour we had settled on was coconut and chocolate chip.

First of all, Erin had left the bowl for her ice cream maker (which I think had cost about £25) in the freezer for about 12 hours. So when I arrived we were ready to get started. We toasted some desiccated coconut under the grill – watch it really carefully to catch it before it burns – and then put it in the fridge to cool, as everything that goes in the ice cream maker has to be cold before you start.

Next we mixed together a tin of coconut milk, 250ml rice milk, and a small 300ml carton of the lactose-free cream. We also threw in the chilled desiccated coconut, 100g milk chocolate chips and a shot of gin – alcohol is meant to keep the finished ice cream softer.

Then it is a matter of switching the machine on to churn the mixture for about half an hour, and then it is – supposedly – done.

But ours was still quite soft at this stage, so we put it into the freezer for a little while to firm up some more before having a scoop. It was quite sorbet-like in texture, I suppose because there aren’t the same fats that make normal ice cream really creamy, but it tasted great. Because there was no sugar added it didn’t taste too sweet, just really fresh and coconuty. The desiccated coconut and chocolate chips added some extra interest – if you’re lactose intolerant and can borrow an ice cream maker from someone, this is definitely worth a try.

The L Chef - meringues

2011-07-10T13:37:00.003+01:00

Who would have thought the simple marriage of egg white and sugar could produce such a fantastic result? I am talking, of course, about meringues. Beautiful, fluffy, crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside clouds of goodness, perfect with other sweet treats such as summer berries and ice cream. Mmmmmm.

I embarked on an afternoon of cooking at the weekend when I somehow ended up making about four different dishes simultaneously – one of these being an attempt at meringues.

Let this be a cautionary tale of 1) making sure you read the whole recipe before you start, but also 2) how sometimes you should ignore part of a recipe because you are the boss of your own kitchen, and breaking the rules can be fun.

I turned to Delia Smith for advice on the matter. The proportions are all quite simple – if you go old school with your measurements and use ounces rather than grams, it is one egg white per two ounces of sugar. Inspired by a recent restaurant experience, I wanted to give muscovado meringues a try, so I used 1oz caster sugar and 1oz light brown muscovado, and one egg white. If you’re not familiar with muscovado, it’s a type of unrefined brown sugar with a delicious molasses flavour.

Put your oven onto 150C. Once you’ve separated your egg yolk from the white and discarded the yolk (carefully!) get your electric whisk out and start whisking on a slow speed for about a minute (these times will need to be a bit longer if you are doing more meringues – this makes about eight small ones) until it looks white and frothy. Then turn up the speed a bit for about 30 seconds, before putting it on the highest speed until stiff white peaks form.

Now add in the sugar a tablespoon at a time, whisking on high speed as you go. Now you just need to spoon the mixture onto baking tray lined with some baking parchment.

At this point I was all ready to go, to put them in the oven for a bit and then take them out and let them cool ready for dinner. I hadn’t read the recipe all the way to the bottom.

Delia says to cook meringues last thing at night after everything else is done, because they need to stay in the oven after it is switched off over night. Two of the other things I wanted to make required oven cooking, so my plan was scuppered. My poor little meringues had to sit on the side in the kitchen for a good two or three hours, which can’t have been good for them, until everything else was done.

Once their turn had come, they went into the centre shelf of the oven for 30 minutes – as soon as they go in turn the temperature down to 140C. Once baked, turn the oven off and leave them inside to cool for at least four hours, or ideally overnight.

Unless, of course, you are like me and my friends I had over that evening. Unable to resist “just trying” one, we discovered that they are possibly even better when they are still just warm. One by one, we ate our way through the chewy wonders (which had turned out ok despite the earlier kerfuffle with timings), eventually putting together a little posh-looking dessert with some whipped cream and rhubarb baked in orange juice which I had also made that day. Only one made it to the end of the evening, to be left overnight as Delia said it should be.

The L Chef - stuffed aubergine rolls

2011-07-03T13:34:00.002+01:00

Although you will spot it in the supermarket all year round, aubergine is only in season in the UK from June until about October. Make the most of this beautiful, deep shiny purple vegetable with this really, really good recipe which I stumbled across by chance. If you ever find yourself with a vegetarian joining you for dinner and fly into a mad panic because you don’t know what to cook that will keep them and the non-veggies happy, try this.

This recipe is based on one by Simon Rimmer – you may know him from TV show Something for the Weekend where he normally ends up having to try and teach a clueless celebrity how to zest a lemon or chop and onion – and is entitled “stuffed aubergine rolls”. It is very simple to make, with just one time-consuming part to it. This amount will serve three or four.

Start off by carefully slicing two aubergines lengthways into 0.5cm slices. I couldn’t work out an easy way of doing this – and by easy I mean safe, and foolproof – so you’ll just have to be extra careful. I sliced off the top of the aubergine, then set it upside down on this small flat surface, starting on one side and carefully slicing off bit by bit. By the end I had a couple which were a bit “doorstop” in appearance, but when they were cooked it didn’t matter.

Now lay the slices out, and while a heavy griddle pan is warming up on the hob, brush the slices lightly with olive oil and give them a good dose of salt and pepper. When the pan is hot, put as many slices in the pan as you can fit for about two minutes on each side (make sure you do the other side with oil and seasoning before turning them) until they have golden brown stripes from the pan on each side. Take them out and put them on kitchen roll to soak up some of the oil, and work your way through the whole batch of slices. If you’re anything like me you will be tempted to roll one up and try it – beware they are really delicious and moreish, know when to stop otherwise there won’t be enough for the dish!

When this is all done, mix together a tub (about 150g will be good) or ricotta cheese, a couple of sliced spring onions, a pinch of nutmeg, and about 150g of chopped mozzarella. Lay all the aubergine slices out on a clean work surface, then put a teaspoon of the cheese mixture onto each of them at the fatter end of the slice. Roll each one up, starting from the cheese end, around the filling, and put them onto a plate with the seam facing down.
Now you can make a start on the final part – about 450g of cherry tomatoes need slicing in half and simmering in a little oil in a frying pan for about 10 minutes. Don’t stir them too much, try to let them keep a bit of their shape, and don’t use too high a heat. I also added a very little bit of water. Then take them off the heat, add a pinch of sugar and a crushed garlic clove, as well as some more salt and pepper.

Put a layer of the tomato sauce in an ovenproof dish, then put all the aubergine and cheese rolls on top, seam-side down, before topping it all off with the rest of the tomatoes. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes at 180C until the cheese melts and serve with a green salad.

If you really can’t live without meat, try adding some chopped chorizo to the cheese mixture, and if you like a bit of a kick like me then add some chilli into the tomato sauce.

The L Chef - pesky pigeons

2011-06-29T13:28:00.000+01:00

I love a visit to my small, local farm shop, looking at all the different cuts of meat and the different animals, game and other birds on offer. But with a loving upbringing, and the knowledge of exactly where your food comes from, comes some high prices. I don’t hold this against the producers – I fully understand why there are these charges, and the meat is definitely better than the quality you will get in your local supermarket. But sadly I can’t necessarily afford the fillet of beef or leg of lamb. Not regularly, anyway.

My meat-buying usually involves looking for cheap cuts or less popular meat, so a meat-fix doesn’t cost the earth. There is quite a bit of satisfaction in doing this – turning something lots of people would turn their nose up into something delicious. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

Sometimes it doesn’t quite happen that way. I’ve had a couple of wood pigeons sat in my freezer since autumn last year – I know, I know, this is bad. I kept meaning to cook them and never got round to it, until now when I am having a clearout of my freezer ready to move house. Wood pigeons are meant to be a perfect autumn meal, and here I was getting them out to cook in the early summer. Maybe this is why the dish went wrong – perhaps I had broken Wood Pigeon Law.

When I bought them I’d never cooked game before and these little birds had seemed to be a good place to start. They are meaty birds with a very gamey flavour and dark-coloured meat. Earlier this year I did cook another two of the birds which I had bought at the same time, slow cooking them all day in what was meant to be a sumptuous stew. But the meat turned out to be really, disappointingly tough. So this time round I thought I would try another method, and didn’t cook them for too long.

This time, I pan fried them in a bit of butter to give them some colour and then added them to a pot roast – some carrots, celery, bacon and garlic with a few herbs and some red wine. The saucepan went in the oven for half an hour, and came out looking great. In fact, the sauce was delicious. But yet again, my pigeons were horribly tough. We ate them, but it wasn’t very enjoyable.

Even when I have kitchen disasters, I have had reasonable success in working out what went wrong with a bit of recipe book-reading, internet research and asking around. But this week, despite my best efforts to work out what the problem was, I have failed.

A bit of post-disaster-meal research has left me confused – I am told in one recipe to cook pigeon slowly to tenderise the meat. In another, I am reliably informed that overcooking will make them tough. It may be that the age of the bird has something to do with it. I also read that young, tender birds (identifiable by their pink flesh) can be roasted, but older birds (with darker meat) will be better slow-cooked in a stew or braised. But what about my birds? Neither slow cooking for hours on end or a short half-hour stint in the oven gave me good results.

So what is the solution? Answers on the back of a postcard please.

Arch House Deli - South West Deli of the Year

2011-06-19T20:39:00.000+01:00

Well done to Clifton's Arch House Deli has been names top delicatessen in the South West and is now up for the title of Deli Of The Year 2011.
The competition is organised by Olives Et Al, an artisan food producer in Dorset, as a way of raising the awareness of delis everywhere.
“We are all really excited at being chosen as the top deli in the South West," said Arch House boss David Greenman. "There are so many great delis in the South West, I’m sure it must have been a difficult decision for the judges. It’s really rewarding to get this recognition for the work the team at Arch House Deli have been doing over the last 18 months in creating the type of deli we believe the people of Bristol want and deserve.
“During the voting stage it was fantastic to get such great feedback about our use of local products, the focus we put on tasting events and on adding an element of fun into the deli and café. Our diverse range of foods designed to cater for food intolerances and allergies was also mentioned and perhaps most notable was the fantastic feedback we received on the team at Arch House Deli and their knowledge and friendliness.”

Arch House Deli will now go forward as the regional winner for the South West to the UK finals which take place in London on September 5.

The L Chef - lemon polenta cake

2011-06-19T20:09:00.000+01:00

This week's L Chef column from the Bristol Evening Post -

Every now and then I end up with a box of eggs in my fridge and no desire to have an omelette, scrambled eggs on toast or poached eggs, no patience for meringue-making, and no idea how to make mayonnaise. This is when the electric whisk comes out, along with the big bowls, the weighing scales and the little measuring spoons – yes, that’s right. It’s baking time.

My mum makes a very nice lemon polenta cake a la Nigella Lawson which I had never tried making myself, so one evening this week I gave it a go. Nigella says it’s “a sort of Anglo-Italian amalgam” reminiscent of cakes in the windows of Italian patisseries and a classic English lemon drizzle cake. In this cake flour is replaced by polenta, or cornmeal, and ground almonds, which makes a nice change, and it is very lemony – because you simply can’t have enough of a good thing. Nigella suggests imagining what lemon curd tastes like in cake form – and you’re close to imagining what this cake tastes like. Tempted?

I have also seen variations on this recipe using limes or oranges which also sound pretty good, but I can’t get enough of lemons so this was definitely the version for me.

The recipe is mostly Nigella’s, but I did as my mum does and separated the eggs to make it slightly lighter.

Preheat the oven to 180C, and line the base of a cake tin with baking paper, then grease the sides of the tin lightly with butter. Beat 200g soft unsalted butter with 200g caster sugar until it is pale yellow and whipped. In another bowl mix 200g ground almonds, 100g fine polenta (I found my bag of it in the “foreign foods” aisle at the supermarket), and one and a half teaspoons of baking powder.

Now separate three eggs, and add the yolks bit by bit to the butter-sugar mixture alternately with the dry polenta mixture, beating as you go. Then, when all of that is mixed together, add the zest of two lemons. Now you can clean off your whisk if you’ve been using it already, and whisk up the three egg whites until peaks start to form. Carefully fold these into the rest of the mixture using a large wooden spoon.

Scrape the mix into your tin and bake in the oven.

Nigella says to bake it for 40 minutes, or until a cake tester or skewer comes out clean. But mine was still quite soggy in the middle after this time, so I would leave it in for a bit longer (although mine was perfectly tasty with a soft gooey bit in the middle).

Leave the cake in its tin and put it to one side on a cooling rack, while you make a lovely lemony syrup to go on top. Boil the juice of your two lemons with about 125g of icing sugar in a small saucepan, or simply warm them up in a microwave in a microwave-proof bowl. Once the sugar has all dissolved then it is ready. You could also add a dash of limoncello if you’ve got any knocking around. Then prick all over the top of the cake with a skewer (try not to make the holes too big and obvious) and pour the syrup over the top so it all soaks in and trickles down through the holes to keep the whole cake really juicy and moist. Leave the cake to cool in its tin, then slice up and fight your friends and family for a piece (or three).

The L Chef - devilled kidney disaster

2011-06-12T20:20:00.000+01:00

This week's L Chef column from the Bristol Evening Post...

This is not a column to cut out and keep in your recipe scrapbook – unless you have a section for “how not to do it” or perhaps one labelled “how to make something that will not taste very nice and in fact could make you feel a bit ill”.

I started out with good intentions. A couple of months ago a starter was served up at “secret” supper club the Blue Door Supper Club in Windmill Hill which I had never tried before – devilled kidneys on toast. I loved the tangy yet sweet sauce and the kidneys were delicious. I stored this memory up in my mind, hoping to recreate the Victorian breakfast dish in the comfort of my own kitchen one day.

I’m not fussy about trying offal and certainly don’t mind trying to cook it, no matter how slimy or bloody it is, so that wasn’t a problem. But things started to go wrong in this culinary mini adventure when the butcher didn’t have what I wanted. My kitchen helper/better half popped into our local butcher on his way home to pick up four lambs’ kidneys, but he only had two. He suggested two lambs’ kidneys and two pigs’ kidneys as a substitute, which were duly purchased for the princely sum of £1.50.

I had a feeling this wasn’t going to work out quite right – all the recipes I saw were for lambs’ kidneys with no exception. Pigs’ kidneys, I later read, are stronger tasting and they certainly didn’t look quite as nice as the little, perfectly formed (in what can only be described as a “kidney” shape) lambs’ kidneys. They were about twice the size, and greyer in colour. I chopped them in half to the same size as the lambs’ kidneys, unsure from the recipe I had printed off the internet whether I should cut the whole lot into smaller pieces or not. Answer – I should have done, but I didn’t.

The kidneys were soaked in milk for half an hour to take away the edge of their strong flavour, then soaked in a bowl of warm water apparently to stop them curling up when cooking, and rinsed in cold water. I used a mix of flour, paprika and salt to coat them, before melting some butter in a frying pan and frying them over a low heat for about 2-3 minutes on each side until golden brown. So far, so good.

Then I drizzled Worcestershire sauce, vegetable stock and some tomato ketchup over them – I forgot to add Dijon mustard so minus points there. The liquid was simmered for a couple of minutes until the kidneys were fully cooked, then they were served on top of hot buttered toast.

The one lamb’s kidney we each had was really nice – much softer and less chewy than the pigs’ kidneys. The sauce wasn’t quite as tangy as I hoped it would be – probably because I completely forgot the mustard. But the main problem was that there was far too much kidney on the plate – and most of it was the pigs’ kidneys which just didn’t taste as nice as the lambs’. I was left feeling a bit disappointed, and later a little unwell with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. One day this memory will fade I hope and I will try to make them again. After a bit of post-disaster research I now know that stronger tasting pigs’ kidneys might not be everyone’s cup of tea in this dish and might be better suited to casseroles. Also, when preparing kidneys you should make sure you remove any “skin” around the outside (this had been done for me) and cut them in half lengthways, so you are left with two kidney shapes. Then use scissors to remove the white fatty membrane inside. I hope you have more success than I do!

The L Chef - wild garlic foraging (again)

2011-06-05T20:17:00.001+01:00

This week's L Chef column from the Bristol Evening Post -

Finally, I found some wild garlic last weekend. Until then I hadn’t had much luck. I had looked once along the Bristol-Bath cycle path – which involved several stops along the way to clamber up banks – and one day driving through South Wales I looked out the window and there was a vast carpet of the green leaves and white flowers. But we couldn’t stop because it was a busy road with nowhere to pull over. People have kindly suggested their favourite places to find the wild relative of chives, and a friend even brought me a pot of some rescued from a rubbish heap in his grandparents’ garden. But it wasn’t until this cycling trip into Leigh Woods last weekend that I found my own little patch to harvest.

If you’ve never seen or looked for wild garlic before, believe this: you will know when you are near it. It absolutely stinks, surprisingly enough, of garlic. If you are walking through a woodland area and smell the garlicky smell, then look around you – you will either see a carpet of white flowers above wide, bright green leaves, or if you are late in the season as I was, the flowers will have lost their white petals and will look like little green sputniks. Pick a leaf and rub it between your fingers – if it smells of garlic you have found the right plant.

All you need are the leaves, so try and get away from paths and patches where a dog may have relieved itself and pick a carrier bag full of them before transporting back to your kitchen. My boyfriend was cursing me all evening because he put the bag in his rucksack to cycle home, and everything in there now smells of garlic. Give them a good wash, then decide what to cook.

You can use the leaves raw in salads, or to flavour other dishes – don’t worry, the garlic taste is actually quite mild. I found a recipe from Bristol’s Folk House Café for a wild garlic and nettle risotto, as well as plenty of soup recipes, when I searched online. But the one which caught my eye was a recipe from superb Bristolian vegetarian restaurant, Café Maitreya, which has a recipe on its website for wild garlic pesto.

Pesto and I have had a difficult relationship. It began with a tummy bug/food poisoning incident when I was left home alone at the age of 16 and cooked up some pesto pasta with a jar of possibly-gone-off pesto. Ever since I have avoided it as if my life depended on it, until about six months ago I tried making my own. That was a)quite fun and b) very tasty, and pesto and I kissed and made up.

Pesto is most commonly made from basil and pine nuts. But in a slight variation the Café Maitreya recipe calls for 250g of wild garlic leaves, 100g cashew nuts, the juice of a lemon, one and a half teaspoons of sugar and 150ml olive oil to be pureed in a food processor. It’s that simple. You will end up with a brilliant, almost fluorescent green paste which tastes deliciously fresh. The garlic is a really mild flavour and not as offensive as you might think. I added a couple of green de-seeded chillis to mine to give it a bit of a kick.

The recipe also comes with advice – if you make too much, it freezes well, so stock up while the last of the wild garlic is around. I served mine up with pasta and a green salad, but you can try stuffing a chicken breast with some, or mixing it into mashed potato.

The L Chef - cinnamon buns

2011-05-29T15:53:00.000+01:00

This week's L Chef column from the Bristol Evening Post...

It just has to be done. If I ever see Chelsea buns lined up on display in a bakery window, it feels wrong not to buy one. They were my childhood favourite (along with chocolate éclairs), and if I remember rightly they were first sampled on visits to my grandparents in Wales. I love the soft, doughy texture, but the best bit is peeling the bun apart, layer by layer, until you get to the core.

There have been a number of times in the last year when I have realised that something I love to eat is also something I might just be able to cook and I had a similar experience with these delicious baked treats. One day my boss brought in a box of cinnamon buns – basically Chelsea buns but without the currants – made by his baker extraordinaire wife.

Even though I knew that the boss’s wife was a much better chef than me (I’m not just saying it to be polite, she works in a cake shop) seeing them made by someone I knew gave me a dash of hope. I badgered my boss for the recipe. First of all you need to make a bread dough. Measure 450g of strong white bread flour into a bowl, then add a sachet of dry yeast (I used fast action yeast and it was fine), half a teaspoon of salt, 55g caster sugar, 55g of margarine, two beaten eggs and 230ml of milk. Mix with a wooden spoon, and then get your hands in there to start forming a nice big ball of dough. You will probably need to add some more flour if it is too wet, or add less milk to start with.

Turn the dough out onto a clean surface and knead it for about five minutes – time for a bit of stress relief. When it feels smooth and elastic put it back into the bowl, which you have greased with a little vegetable oil, and rub the oil all over the dough ball too. Cover with cling film or a tea towel and leave in a warm place for an hour, or until the dough has roughly doubled in size.

If, like me, you go back to check and you have forgotten what size it was in the first place, I found a nifty little trick which should help you decide if the dough is ready for the next step. Poke the dough gently with your finger, and if it rises back out very slowly or stays sunken in it is probably ready. Before you leave the dough to rise, if you poked it like that it would spring back immediately.

Now take the dough out of the bowl, knock it back to its original size and roll it out into a large rectangle, about 0.5 – 1cm thick. Butter it, as if you are buttering a slice of bread, all over, and sprinkle with caster sugar and cinnamon. Now roll the dough up so you have a long sausage shape, and cut into 4cm slices. Arrange these in a greased baking tin or on a greased baking sheet, allowing space around each one for them to rise. Cover the tray with a tea towel and leave at room temperature for about half an hour.

Turn the oven on to 190C, and when the buns have proved put them in to bake for about 25 minutes, until they have gone golden brown. Glaze them with icing or, as I did, a mix of 2 tbsp milk and 2 tbsp caster sugar heated up for a couple of minutes in a pan. Enjoy.

The L Chef - nice gnocchi

2011-05-22T18:11:00.000+01:00

This week's L Chef column from the Bristol Evening Post -

I don’t even know where this idea began. I must have just woken up one day and thought: “Gnocchi. Now there’s something I probably can’t make.” You may have noticed this trend in my weekly experiments, where I pick something that I don’t think I will be able to do have a shot anyway. Well guess what? I can make these little pasta dumplings, and if I can then you most certainly can too.

The fact of the matter is, it’s really very simple. Can you mash potato? Yes, of course you can. Can you chop some herbs? I think you might just be able to stretch to that. Can you mix aforementioned mash and herbs with some flour? Easy. And that is really all it is folks.

Who would have thought it? Pasta in general is a mysterious cooking beast for me consisting of special flour and a specialist bit of rolling equipment and not much success when I have tried friends’ homemade versions. (I know that is disloyal, but it’s sadly true.) But gnocchi for some reason seemed slightly more within reach of my blundering hands.

Is it bad that I hadn’t really even twigged that there was potato in gnocchi? I think when it comes to food my brain occasionally short circuits and just operates my jaw, not allowing my mind to mull over what it is that I am eating. To be fair to myself, my research has shown that not all varieties do contain spuds – some are made with semolina, some with buckwheat flour, some with eggs, some without and so on. But the ones I made were of the potato variety.

The first step of making your very own gnocchi – enough to serve four - is to boil 500g of peeled waxy potatoes, for about 15 minutes until they are soft and ready to mash. I have read recipes which insist that you must use a potato ricer to get the potato really fine, but I don’t have one and I couldn’t justify buying one just for this so I just mashed the potato very vigorously with a normal mashing implement. I also enlisted the help of a glamorous assistant (when I say glamorous, I mean wearing grubby-football-gear-wearing) to give it some welly. The verdict? You don’t need a ricer.

Meanwhile I chopped a handful of basil and measured out 200g of plain flour, which all got mixed into the mash with some salt and pepper with a wooden spoon. Then I got my hands dirty to knead the dough together, and when it felt slightly elastic and smooth I turned it out onto a floured work surface.

It was then rolled into sausages, and cut into small nugget shapes and pressed on one side with a fork. They didn’t look quite like the ones you see on Italian pasta counters (although I have never seen these, so in reality I am comparing them to Sainsbury’s versions) but they were close enough. These little dumplings got dropped into boiling water for about two minutes until they float to the surface of the water, and then drained before serving. Try them with shavings of parmesan, or a tomato-based sauce, or some pesto. Told you it was easy.

The L Chef - when meat meets beet

2011-05-17T18:04:00.000+01:00

My L Chef column from last weekend's Bristol Evening Post...

There’s something about beetroot. I love the deep dark purple of it and the way it stains anything you cook it with bright pink. I think it’s delicious served cooked with salad and goat’s cheese, sneaked into chocolate brownies (honest), or served with smoked mackerel.

I thought I knew beetroot so well, but I didn’t. Looking for some new recipes to use it in, I stumbled across a website called lovebeetroot.co.uk – yes, it really exists – and in a geeky kind of way I was fascinated. Did you know that the red pigment in beetroot is used to colour strawberry jam and ice cream? That in some cultures people believe that if a man and a woman eat from the same beetroot they will fall in love? That the Elizabethans prepared beetroot by wiping it with fresh dung before cooking it? That one of the earliest known benefits of it is its use as an aphrodisiac during the Roman times? No, I didn’t think you did. If you gain nothing else from this week’s L Chef column, at least you have picked up some useless trivia to use at dinner parties when the chef serves up a beetroot risotto.

Having been distracted by this website for far too long I got back to the matter in hand – finding a new recipe. No matter how much respect I have for the Elizabethans, I wasn’t about to start rubbing beets in a cow pat. But I would quite happily trust and follow any of Nigel Slater’s instructions in his lovely veg patch-based cookery. I found a clip from an episode I watched last year where he sat in someone’s allotment and made beetroot and lamb burgers, which looked divine.

With some quick notes made, I rounded up some ingredients and got to it. No quantities had been mentioned so I guessed. These quantities all worked out fine, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you experimenting if you want to.

In a big bowl, mix together 250g lamb mince, one grated beetroot, 100g cooked bulgur wheat, one finely chopped onion, two cloves of crushed garlic, a small bunch of chopped parsley and a teaspoon of cumin. Bind it all together with a couple of eggs and separate it into eight patties.

Put them in the fridge for an hour or so to firm up and make a little yoghurty side dish to go with them by grating half a cucumber and adding it to a bowl of natural yoghurt mixed with some chopped mint. When the burgers are ready to cook, ideally cook them on a barbecue but if that’s not an option turn your grill on or fry them in a pan on top of your hob – I found that about three minutes on each side worked. They will look disturbingly raw, but don’t panic and overcook them, it’s just the beetroot making them look really pink. Serve them with whatever you want – I made some crispy potato wedges from some sad-looking potatoes in my cupboard, or you could do a nice big salad, or some kind of couscous concoction. And don’t forget the deliciously cool yoghurt mixture. Nigel, I salute you.

The L Chef - British asparagus

2011-05-10T15:52:00.000+01:00

Here's my L Chef column from the weekend...

As a child, asparagus always seemed so unappealing. It was on my no-go list of vegetables along with Brussel’s sprouts, mushrooms, and for many years, salad. But it’s funny how your tastebuds change – now I eat all of these things and I really love some fresh, sweet British asparagus.

I read in a magazine at the very start of April, in a section entitled “four things to do this month”, that freshly picked local asparagus would start appearing before the month was out. I searched fruit and veg shops at every opportunity but the only bundles of the green vegetable I could find had been shipped in from far flung places. This would not do – I had set my heart on British asparagus, the more local the better.
I had all but given up, thinking that maybe it would be May before I could get some on my plate, when I was out with my mum one day in the Cotswolds and she spotted a little chalkboard sign saying “homegrown asparagus on sale”. I had been wittering on about it so much that she knew this would surely interest me, and pointed it out. I got very excited at this unexpected turn of events.
Not only was this British, local asparagus, but it was even better than what I would have bought in a fruit and veg shop in Bristol – I was able to buy some from the very farm where the vegetables had been grown.

I couldn’t wait to get cooking. You can put your asparagus in risottos, stir-fries and pies, but I like it very simple so that I can savour the sweet taste in all its glory.

The key thing with this veg, as with so many, is not to overcook it. I think I must have been put off somewhere in my childhood by a slightly overcooked portion, a little bit mushy and going grey-green. I love it still with a bite, bright green and barely even cooked.

The week after the farm shop discovery, I dined off my purchase twice, both times with very simple but delicious meals. The first thing to do is prepare the asparagus by getting rid of the woody ends. A trick I learnt from a TV chef is to gently bend each stalk, one end in each hand, and it will naturally break at the point where the woody end meets the tender part of the stalk. Discard the end bits.

To cook the asparagus I used a large frying pan with a little water, so the water is shallow rather than deep. Bring that to boiling point, add some salt and your asparagus for about two minutes, watching carefully so they don’t overcook – then test one of the stalks to check they are ready, and drain.
My auntie likes them just like that with some butter, eaten with your fingers. But the first of my two dishes was just a plate of the asparagus, with salt and pepper and some large chunky shavings of parmesan on top, which melts a bit as you devour the dish.

The second way I served it up was one which I had wanted to try for a while – boiled eggs with the asparagus as “soldiers” to dip in them. A colleague from work gave me some duck eggs from the birds in her garden at home so it was extra special – we had huge, creamy duck eggs with a lovely runny yolk and bright green stalks dipped in. What a treat.

The good news is, now that the British asparagus has arrived, it will be here until mid June, so make the most of it.

The L Chef - a bit of Easter lamb's liver

2011-05-01T12:00:00.001+01:00

This Easter I spent the weekend at home, alone, enjoying some peace, quiet and sunshine. Being alone (or should I say “abandoned”, by the boyfriend who counted me as a lost cause as I had several shifts to work and decamped down to Cornwall for a whole week? Me, bitter?!) there was no call for a huge leg of lamb or a big Simnel cake. But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy a few Easter treats. First and foremost was the tube of Mini Eggs which I had all to myself. And for that matter, any chocolate I could get my hands on. Secondly - much to my offal-hating dad’s disgust when I told him over the phone - was a few hundred grams of lamb’s liver.

I know it isn’t quite the same as a few juicy slices from a leg of the little tasty animal, but it was almost as good. And if you like being as thrifty as I do, you will love this bit of penny-saving – for 300g (two portions) of liver sliced up by the butcher, it was a fabulously cheap 79p. There’s only one, not very grammatically correct, word for that kind of value – “bargainous”.

Liver may be an acquired taste but I would argue it is worth acquiring – calves’ liver is generally considered to be the most delicious, but lamb’s is pretty good too, and both are good for pan frying whereas others are stronger tasting or different in texture and need to be cooked differently. I have enjoyed eating it in restaurants but never tried cooking it before, but it was relatively straightforward.

To inspire my first kitchen encounter with the rather beautiful, dark red glistening offal, I referred to a recipe for a North African dish called kebda in a book of brilliant frugal recipes written by Bristolian food writer Fiona Beckett – The Frugal Cook. If your butcher won’t slice the liver up for you and you have to do it yourself, make sure you do it quite thinly. Then you need to coat it in a mix of flour and spices – try 2 tsp flour, 2 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp of sweet paprika. I added a bit more paprika because I love the flavour of it. I have also seen some recipes suggesting adding chilli powder or some ground coriander, if you feel like experimenting.

The key to some really, really good liver is not to overcook it. If you do, it will become very unappetising very quickly. Get some oil hot in a pan, then place your slices of liver carefully into the pan. Leave them to cook and crisp up for about one minute and you will see blood appearing on the top side of the slices. Turn them over and cook for between one and two minutes more, then remove them onto two waiting plates. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into the pan, briefly put it back on the heat and then pour this over the liver.

This is great served with some flatbread and salad of your choice – anything from a green salad thrown together with ingredients you have knocking around in the fridge, to a snazzier Moroccan-style concoction of chick peas, coriander, sultanas, cous cous and lemon juice.

The L Chef - crabcakes

2011-04-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I wish I’d just settle for beans on toast for my dinner. I do, occasionally, of course – but not always on the days when I should. These were the thoughts running through my mind earlier this week as I drove from supermarket to supermarket in search of a crab. I had set my heart on making crab cakes loosely based on a recipe I had seen from Jamie Oliver – nevermind that it was Monday, and fishmongers were closed. Nevermind that I had no idea what to do with a whole crab once I found one.

I tried Waitrose first – I was in the area anyway and I thought it would be the best bet. No crab. None in Sainsbury’s either. I refused to resort to tinned crabmeat! Finally I tried Tesco, not anticipating success, but their fish counter had a lovely fat Orkney crab on display, whole and cooked, for a fiver.

Now the fun really began. Most of the electricity in my kitchen decided to pack in at this point in the day, so imagine all of the rest of this happening in the semi-dark. I had my laptop open with instructions of how to get the meat out of a crab, which was not the best idea as I kept having to go back and forth with crabby hands smearing all over the keyboard.

Picking your own crab meat is probably not for the very squeamish, but I think the averagely squeamish could cope – it isn’t too bad. Put the crab belly up on a board, and twist the claws and legs off. Lift the apron (tail) off and discard it, then you need to lift the body out – I used the handle of a spoon to help me. Get rid of the 10 grey, inedible spongy gills (“dead man’s fingers”) and the stomach sac, then cut the body which you have pulled apart from the shell into pieces so you can pick out the white meat inside with a sharp knife. Put the meat in a bowl, along with the brown meat which you can scrape out of the shell, and if it is a female crab you can also throw in the orange-coloured roe. Now bash the claws (I used a rolling pin) to get at the white meat inside them. I found that this made about 200g of meat.

Boil the same weight of chopped potatoes in a pan for about 15 minutes until they can be mashed, then drain them and add the crab meat to the pan, off the heat. Add some salt and pepper, the grated zest of a lemon, a chopped chilli, a couple of chopped spring onions and about two thumbs of grated ginger. Mix it all up, then shape into small cakes – my mix made eight, so enough to serve four with a large salad and salsa of some description. Put them in the fridge for a few hours, then when you’re ready to eat put some oil in a pan and fry them for about six minutes, turning them half way through. It may require a bit of a palava to get from crab to plate, but it was also quite satisfying – and of course very tasty.

The burger off! The Burger Joint, Cotham Hill vs Zulu Cafe, Gloucester Road

2011-04-19T20:56:00.000+01:00

Two burger joints. Two vouchers. A couple of weeks ago I went to Zulu Cafe in Gloucester Road - purveyor of exotic meats - and tonight I visited The Burger Joint in Cotham Hill. For Zulu Cafe I had a 241 voucher from Groupon and I had the same for The Burger Joint after boss @DanBurgerJoint invited his first 100 followers on Twitter to get the deal.

Zulu Cafe is an unusual place - the bar/serving counter is sheltered by a corrugated iron shack, there are huge wooden tribal-king-style chairs and the boss Paul Cook buzzes around chatting with all the customers all night. When we went - on a Friday evening - it was packed, but I have a feeling that was partly because many people were using their vouchers up on the last possible evening.

On offer are burgers made of everything from your usual chicken and beef to crocodile, bison, springbok and ostrich. There are also steaks and other dishes to be had. Zulu Cafe is BYO but if you forget there is an off-licence down the road which must do fairly good business from Zulu diners.

We were well looked after - the boss sat us in the window and joked that we should try and look like we were having a good time as we were an advert for the place being sat there, and I saw him sit down at other people's tables for a chat while he took their orders. In a word - a bit of a character. But it added to the experience - in so many places these days you get left to it, and sometimes that is what you want, but it was nice to have somewhere where you felt you could get to know the staff.

The food was tasty - I had bison and Matt had springbok with apricot. But the burgers and the portion of chips that came with them were pretty measly in size - not very generous at all. So the food was interesting, and something a bit different and unique - but unfortunately not a blow-your-mind meal. If you go, check out the massive freezers where you can also buy various exotic meats to cook at home.... including python!

Pic thanks to Bristol Culture

The Burger Joint tonight was comparable in price - you're talking around £6 or £7 for a standard burger and chips. As it was a delightfully warm, balmy evening, the windows at the front were wide open and sitting by them was (nearly) as good as sitting outside. And it was an excellent spot to people watch

I had a beef burger, with two choices of sauce thrown in for free as well as a side of chips, onion rings, salad or a few other options. My big bro went for a chicken burger, chorizo and (I think it was...) brie. I was really surprised when the plates came out - they were really generous portions - not huge huge, but hefty, if you know what I mean. Enough to very nicely fill you up. And the burger was juicy, the chips looked like they had been made on site. Good work.

Service here was friendly and efficient, not quite the same as Zulu Cafe but I don't think the boss was around. All in all, both places had their plus points but foodwise, The Burger Joint was a lot better and I would definitely go there again.

Souk Kitchen - Southville

2011-04-19T20:17:00.002+01:00

So I finally made it to Southville's lovely Souk Kitchen at the weekend (read more about them via this link). I had my other half and my dad in tow as we got a bite to eat before enjoying comedian Arthur Smith at the Tobacco Factory across the road.

When we went in at 6pm it was just us, but by the time we left at 7.30pm it was buzzing - not rammed but busy enough, especially good considering it was a Sunday evening. It was a great meal. We shared a Middle Eastern mezze to start with, and some flat breads with dips including a bright pink beetroot-based one, and a fragrant carrot and rosewater one. The mezze had hummus, a colourful salad (orange and pink!) olives, a couple of falafel-type things and so on. Very tasty indeed.

Next up, I had lamb kofte with some delicious flavoursome rice, dad opted for a lamb tagine and couscous and Matt had a chicken tagine with preserved lemons. They were all really, really good - although Matt (10 points to him!) said the chicken tagine wasn't as good as the one I make. Although this was lovely to hear, I suspect it wasn't true...

The puddings also looked fantastic but we were too stuffed to think about them. A great meal, good value, and a relaxed and friendly feel.

The L Chef - hot cross buns

2011-04-19T19:52:00.000+01:00

I love the months leading up to Easter, when hot cross buns are stacked high on the shelves at bakeries and supermarkets. But they were something that I had never considered making - for some reason they hadn’t entered my mind as something that a novice like me could rustle up. This all changed last weekend.

Armed with a standard recipe I went about making my own batch. The recipe called for dried yeast and said that “easy-blend” yeast wouldn’t work, but the only version I could find on the shelf at my local supermarket was the easy-blend, “fast-action” kind so I went with that. With normal dried yeast, apparently you need to put it in warm sugary water before you add it to the rest of your ingredients, to check that it is alive and ok to use. If it froths up, then you’re good to go. With the fast-action yeast, you don’t need to do this, you just add it straight in to the dough. I thought I’d give the fast-action variety a go, and it worked well.

Mix together 450g sifted plain flour, 1 tsp salt and 1 rounded tsp mixed spice in a bowl and add 50g caster sugar and about 100g of mixed dried fruit, or currants and mixed peel. Then make a well in the centre of the dry mix, tip in a 7g sachet of the fast-action yeast, 150ml of warm water, 40ml of warm milk (you should be able to dip a finger in it without it feeling too hot), a beaten egg and 50g melted butter. Mix this to a dough with a wooden spoon and then with your hands, adding more warm milk if you need to. Some recipes say to add some lemon zest here, but I didn’t have a lemon handy.

Now move the dough onto a floured work surface and knead it for about five minutes until it is elastic and smooth, before putting it back in the bowl, covering with a tea towel and putting it somewhere warm for an hour (an airing cupboard would do, or do what I did and warm your oven very slightly then turn it off and put the dough in there) so it can rise to about double its original size.

Then take it out of the bowl and knead it again, divide it into 12 balls and arrange them on a greased baking tray. I used a sharp knife to make a cross on them, then put the tray into a polythene bag (I used a clean bin bag with a couple of drops of oil in it to stop the buns sticking) to stop air getting in, and put the tray back somewhere warm for about half an hour.

To make the crosses, mix 2 tbsp of plain flour with 2 tbsp cold water to make a paste, which you can either roll into thin strips and place onto the buns or put into a piping bag and pipe the crosses onto the top.

Bake the buns for 12 minutes at 220C – keep an eye on them and take them out when they are golden brown. As soon as they come out, brush them with warmed golden syrup, or gently melted sugar and water (about 2 tbsp of each). You could also add about 2tbsp of freshly squeezed orange juice to the sugar and water mixture. They taste so good, and even if – like mine – yours look a little on the “rustic” side, you might find you like them so much you’ll never want to buy any again.

The L Chef - Nettle soup

2011-04-12T19:45:00.000+01:00

(Tastes better than it looks, I promise)

When plans were made last weekend for a Saturday bike ride along the Bristol to Bath cycle path with some of my friends, I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick some wild garlic. I had heard that the banks along the path are a good place to find the herb, so armed with a computer print-out of what it looks like (I had never tried looking for it before) and with a friend who knew what they were looking for, I set off, confident that we would be successful. I knew that I would find some if I could smell it – so I rode along with my nose in the air, sniffing deeply and getting a fair few funny looks as I did so.

But I didn’t smell any, and I didn’t see any plants that fitted the description. We stopped several times, scrambled up banks and slid down them, but it was always a false alarm. Mission Find Wild Garlic And Make Delicious Homemade Pesto had failed. There may well be some there, but my untrained eyes and nose did not detect it. I am told there is also some in Leigh Woods and in Barrow Gurney amongst other places so I will have to try again another day.

Seeing the glum look on my face, my friend James (who was the one I was banking on to help me find it) suggested an alternative plan. We had seen plenty of patches of stinging nettles – why not make some nettle soup? Again, this was something I had never done so he helped me pick a few handfuls of the young, top leaves from some nettles very carefully, using a plastic bag over his hand to avoid being stung. We had to do some more bank-scrabbling to get to a patch away from the path, in the hope that we were avoiding areas that had been watered by a dog.

He also called his mum for her nettle soup recipe and the next day I had a go at making some of my own. First of all, very carefully I washed the nettles (protecting my hands with washing up gloves) and removed any of the tougher stalks. I sweated one chopped onion in a pan with a bit of butter, then added the nettles to wilt down a bit before adding a bay leaf and some lemon thyme from my garden, one teaspoon of mustard and a dash of Worcester sauce, a few diced potatoes and 1.5 litres of stock. I had some frozen chicken stock with a hint of chilli in my freezer, so I used that. Simmer it away for about half an hour, then liquidise it, before adding some salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. I also stirred through a spoonful of natural yoghurt, but you can use cream if you want. I tentatively tried a small spoonful – unsure how it would taste and also worried that the stinging hairs on the nettles might attack my mouth and throat. But it was delicious, and although there was a kick of chilli, my mouth certainly didn’t get stung. There are lots of different recipes around to try – some even use wild garlic – so pick yourself some nettles the next time you go out for a walk (make sure you know what you are looking for) and give it a go.

April - what's in season?

2011-04-05T20:20:00.001+01:00

Where has this year gone? How is it April already?

At least it means we are leaving winter behind and heading into spring. Yesterday I bought myself a whole cooked crab and made some fishcakes similar to these and I confirm they were rather tasty.

Other things in season at the moment - stinging nettles! At the weekend I picked some nettles and made nettle soup for the first time ever, will be writing about that in my column this weekend. But if you can't wait til then, here's a Hugh FW recipe.

Finally for today, there is a lot of watercress around in the fruit and veg shops, so how about some of Nigel Slater's watercress pesto pasta?

The L Chef - ginger sponge battle

2011-04-03T10:56:00.004+01:00

Here's my latest "L Chef" column as appeared in the Bristol Evening Post column yesterday...

Last week I was served a delicious sticky ginger sponge by our friend down the road, Tom. It was dished up after a tasty dinner of paella, and served hot with some custard – it reminded me of a school dinner pudding, only ten times better. It was divine – perfectly sticky, soft, and a little bit crispy on the top. I was inspired to bake my own. When I asked him what recipe he had used, an email arrived with a link to it online but the missive included a caveat: “Just so you know, yours will never be as good as mine.” I suggested that this was fighting talk, and the reply came back: “Bring it.” This was war.

How could I make my ginger sponge better than Tom’s? I spent a couple of days pondering my battle plan. Then I saw a photograph posted online of some cakes on sale at the lovely Pear Café in St Paul’s – ginger, pear and chocolate. I decided to lace my ginger sponge with pear – surely this would give me the edge.

I was planning to take some of the sponge to my friend Sarah, who has just had a baby boy, and was telling me the other day that people keep bringing cakes over and she can’t say no. I therefore wanted to make smaller, individual cupcake sponges – some normal sized and some mini ones so I could take them to her when I visited and she wouldn’t feel guilty eating them.

Armed with the recipe – a Hairy Bikers special – I preheated the oven to 180C and put some cupcake cases in the tins. Here’s what to do - mix 200g self-raising flour, 200g sugar, one teaspoon of ground ginger and one teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in a bowl, then use your fingers to rub in 55g of margarine until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add one beaten egg, two tablespoons of golden syrup and 240ml of hot water and mix with a wooden spoon. I then grated two pears into the mixture and poured it into the waiting cupcake moulds and they went into the oven. If you want to use a tin to make one big cake, grease it and line it with greaseproof paper first, and it will take 35-40 minutes to cook. My big cupcakes took about 30 minutes, the little ones 20. Take them out when they are golden grown and the top is springy to touch. The time for the taste test had arrived. My other half was the independent adjudicator, having tasted Tom’s last week. I thought they were great, but could have done with some chunks of pear in them as well as the grated fruit, which made them lovely and moist but not very “peary”. His verdict? “Well, yours are better… but Tom’s had custard… so… I think Tom’s win.” Traitor.

The L Chef - sardines

2011-03-27T10:54:00.004+01:00

Here's my latest "L Chef" column as appeared in the Bristol Evening Post yesterday...

One of the things I feel I am, generally, a bit of a failure at in the kitchen is making the food I serve look as good as it (hopefully) tastes. I have been making an extra special effort over the last few months since writing this column, because there is the added pressure of knowing that I need a photo to go with what I write. But sometimes, no matter how much I try, how much pressure there is, or how closely I follow a recipe, the dish ends up looking like a dog’s dinner. My run-in with sardines was one of these times.

Let’s go about half an hour back in time – I unwrapped my beautiful shimmering silver sardines (four will serve two people), which had been boned and gutted. I was basing my in-season sardine dinner on a Jamie Oliver recipe, which calls for the fish to be butterflied. This gets rid of most of the bones, leaving only some small ones which are mostly safe to eat. Make sure the cut along the fish’s belly goes all the way to the tail, and then open the fish up on a board, skin side facing up, and press along the back bone with the palm of your hand to flatten it out. When you turn the fish over, you should be able to carefully pull the back bone out in one go with the other bones, and then snip it off at the tail (leaving the tail attached to the fish).

Now make a tasty paste to rub all over your fish – in a pestle and mortar bash up a teaspoon of fennel seeds, ½ teaspoon of ground ginger, ½ teaspoon of cumin, salt and pepper, the zest of a lemon and a few sprigs of chopped parsley. Add a glug of olive oil, mix it up and smear it all over the fish.

Now this is where it started to go wrong for me. I heated up a big heavy griddle pan on the hob, and then put my butterflied sardines into it, skin side down, and left them for two minutes. When it came to turning them over, their skins had all stuck to the pan. Realising it was all going a bit wrong, I kept going and cooked them for about a minute on the other side, squeezing them with some lemon juice. The photos in my recipe book looked beautiful – perfect, silver, intact skins on a platter. Mine looked rather different, skinless and falling apart. Next time (this isn’t the end of this, sardines, I will be back for more!) I might try leaving the pan to get even hotter, and might try brushing it with some oil.

Nevermind though – they may have looked terrible but they were delicious. I served them with a dressed salad of thinly sliced fennel, orange segments and sliced cucumber and some homemade potato wedges topped with a squeeze of lemon juice. The way I see it is that things like this happen in an (amateur) kitchen. But a) the food is normally still delicious and b) if you don’t try something new, you’ll never learn anything and will never get the satisfaction from the times when it does go right.

The L Chef - churros and chocolate

2011-03-20T09:51:00.003Z

Here's my "L Chef" column as it appeared in yesterday's Bristol Evening Post...

I love travelling to new places, and I love finding new food there – and trying to recreate it at home. In Barcelona last year, I overdosed slightly on “churros y chocolate” – long, thin donuts which you dip into a thick, hot chocolate sauce. They are ridged because they are apparently piped from a churrera, a syringe with a star-shaped nozzle. I read about this snack in a guide book and then dutifully tried them in every place that I could find making them. One word to describe this (not particularly healthy) dish - addictive.

A few months later, I squealed with excitement when I was given Nigella Lawson’s cookbook, Kitchen. As I flicked through I discovered a wonderful page, dedicated to telling me how to recreate this holiday dish in my own kitchen. I collected all the ingredients together to make enough to feed four people, bought a piping bag and set of nozzles and set about cooking up this little treat. I didn’t think the star shaped nozzle in my (cheap but cheerful) set was quite big enough, so I cut one of the other ones and made a larger round one instead.

First of all you need to get ready – working with hot oil I felt I needed to be even more organised than normal, I didn’t want to get flustered and knock the pan. First of all, mix together 50g caster sugar with two teaspoons of ground cinnamon in a shallow, large dish – you’ll toss your churros in this later.

Now for the chocolate sauce – melt 100g good quality dark chocolate, 25g milk chocolate, a tablespoon of golden syrup and 150ml of double cream in a saucepan over a low heat. As soon as the chocolate starts to melt, take it off the heat and stir it up, then keep it somewhere warm – I left mine on the hob over a ring that was turned off.

Then mix 125g plain flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of olive oil and 250ml of boiling water in a big bowl. Mix until you have a good dough, then leave it for about ten minutes, while you get your frying oil going. Concentrate for this bit, and you might want a helper. Nigella suggests using a small pan – one you would use to boil and egg in – and cooking the churros in small batches. I agree, this felt like a much safer and more manageable way of working with that amount of oil. You need to fill your saucepan about a third of the way up the side with about 500ml vegetable oil, and start heating it. When you think it is getting hot enough, lower a cube of bread in. If that sizzles and goes golden brown in about 30 seconds, it is hot enough.

Load up the piping bag with your dough, and squeeze short lengths of it into the oil carefully, chopping it off with a pair of scissors. You can do long ones or short – whatever you want. Only do three or four at a time and try to stop them sticking to each other. Don’t be alarmed that they sizzle a lot more than the bread.

Once they have turned golden brown, fish them out with a slotted spoon and put them on a plate covered with kitchen roll to blot the excess oil. They need to sit for five to ten minutes after cooking to let the inside cook through.

When that is all finished, serve up your chocolate sauce (you might want to reheat it a little) into individual pots, toss your churros in the sugar and cinnamon and put them on a plate with the sauce. Heaven on a plate.

Today's Crackerjack - Tart, Bordeaux Quay, and the Pump House

2011-03-17T11:35:00.000Z

Today's Crackerjack in the Bristol Evening Post includes....

A feature about dinner parties being thrown at the lovely Tart cafe in Gloucester Road,

A review of Bordeaux Quay,

And a review of the Pump House.

Plus a column from Mark Taylor about posh fast food.

The L Chef - pancakes anytime

2011-03-17T11:28:00.000Z

Here's my L Chef column as it appeared in the Evening Post on Saturday...

I love pancake day. For some reason, even though I am a big pancake fan, I very rarely have them – but I always try to make them on Shrove Tuesday day every year.

I love the fact that such simple ingredients – eggs, flour and milk – can make something so delicious and satisfying. And that they are so simple to make that even I can’t mess it up.

In spite of loud protests from my boyfriend (whose loyalties lie with large, thin pancakes plastered with lemon and about a ton of sugar) I wanted to experiment and try some different flavour combinations. I’m not talking about toppings, but actually putting different things into the batter.

Last year I made some little fat Scotch-style pancakes with grated pear in them and they worked really well, and this time round I had an idea to try some grated apple and ground ginger.

After asking a few friends for their favourite recipes I settled on a couple of other versions – apple, cinnamon and nutmeg and banana and honey.

I had three bowls ready, a plate keeping warm in the oven, and a big heavy pan heating up on the stove.

The batter I used serves about three or four people and is a mix of one cup of self-raising flour, one cup of milk and one egg, plus a pinch of salt.

I beat it all together until smooth, and then I split the mixture between the three bowls ready to add my different ingredients.

I split one apple between two bowls (grated – core, skin and all) and added about half a teaspoon of ground ginger to one and some ground cinnamon and nutmeg to the other.

In the final bowl I mixed half a mashed banana and a tablespoon of honey.

By now the pan was nice and hot, so I turned the heat down a bit because I wanted it at more of a medium heat, then spooned on small amounts of each mixture, making batches of about five small pancakes at a time. They only need about a minute on each side, until they have gone golden brown.

I normally serve them straight away and then sit down to have mine at the end, but this time I piled them high on the warm plate in the oven.

When they were all ready I served them with home made plain yoghurt and runny honey and some fruit on the side and they were even a hit with my other half, although he did insist that he was going to make his lemon and sugar version later in the week and that they were likely to be better.

Our favourite combination was the banana and honey, but they all worked quite well.

I think this could work with lots of different fruits including pears, different berries and so on, so have an experiment next time Shrove Tuesday comes around (or just make a batch today).

Eat big out of town - the one and only Fat Duck, Bray

2011-03-15T20:48:00.000Z

I am a lucky, lucky girl. For a couple of days ago I was taken out for dinner to celebrate my dad's 60th birthday at Heston Blumenthal's magical Fat Duck. It's somewhere I would never be able to afford myself so I was really excited to get the opportunity to go along. My brother had been tasked with calling up to book - I think it was two months before - as you had to call exactly a certain period of time before the day you wanted to go to book a table. He kept calling and calling - 200 times in all - until he finally got through.

I didn't really know what to expect, other than liquid nitrogen, snails in some form and possibly some bacon and egg ice cream.

The restaurant itself was very simple - a transformed little pub, not pretentiously decorated, comfortable and with a friendly atmosphere. Other diners leaned over to talk to you about your favourite dish, or laughed at our reactions to some of the more odd ones - it was not as stuffy as I would have expected. In fact it was the opposite - fun and relaxed. There were lots of staff buzzing around and chatting to us - often for our table of five there were three waiters/waitresses setting down our plates and lifting off lids each course.

There were no less than 14 courses, which were delivered over a three and a half hour period - it was amazing. We tried eight different glasses of wine to match the different courses, including a Japanese sake and dessert wines at the end, and watched wide-eyed as each dish was placed in front of us. Some of them were small, just a taste or an idea, and some were larger - but I was absolutely stuffed by the end of it.

Apologies for the course by course run down, but it was a special meal and deserves special attention!

1. Nitro poached aperitifs. A kind of gel flavoured with a drink of your choice - vodka and lime sour, gin and tonic, or campari soda. A spoonful of your chosen "drink" is dropped into liquid nitrogen by your table for a couple of seconds then scooped out and placed on your plate, as the waitress sprays a fragrance to complement it above your head and orders you to eat it all in one go. It melts in your mouth, dragon-like "smoke" comes out of your nose and your palate is suitably cleansed ready for the rest of the meal.

2. Red cabbage gazpacho. In a tiny dip in the centre of a large white plate, we were brought a little portion of Pommery grain mustard ice cream, with a bright purple gazpacho around the edges. It was a delicious mix, and just enough to get the tastebuds going.

3. Jelly of quail, crayfish cream. This was an awesome dish. We got a little bowl of chicken liver parfait, quail jelly and crayfish cream, with a little truffle toast. In the middle of the table is a big tray of oak moss, which the waiter pours liquid nitrogen on, releasing an amazing mossy, woodland aroma all over the table. At the same time we are told to put a little square of something on our tongue which fills our mouths with the same flavour. I loved it.

4. Snail porridge. A beautiful bowl of bright green "porridge" with Iberico ham and little snails out of their shells dotted over the top. Delicious.

5. Roast foie gras. The first time I think I have tried foie gras. A lovely, rich cube of warm foie gras was served with some konbu seaweed, a rhubarb puree on she side and crab biscuits. It was exciting to finally be getting to the hot courses!

6. Mock turtle soup. This was another brilliant piece of theatre. We were handed a little card explaining the back story from Alice in Wonderland of mock turtle soup, then a dish is placed in front of us with a little pile of calf meat and a perfect little egg on the side. Next to that we get a tea cup of boiling water. The waiter explains with a cheeky smile that he just bumped into the Mad Hatter and he asked him to give us each a gold watch - which he does. We have to dip our "gold watch" into the hot water and as we do so it dissolves, leaving a vegetable stock and floating pieces of gold leaf, which we are told to pour over the rest of the dish.

7. Sound of the sea. I loved the idea of this one, but not the flavours so much. We each got a board of cured fish, seaweeds, crushed fried eel "sand" and a vegetable stock foam - but the best bit was a large shell place next to us with a set of headphones, which played very the very relaxing sound of waves lapping on a beach as we ate our food.

8. The second fish dish was salmon poached in a liquorice gel - I had been a little bit thrown by the tastes of the last dish and passed this one onto my brother. It looked good though - served with vanilla mayonnaise and artichokes.

9. Anjou pigeon. This was a gloriously rich, flavoursome dish. The pigeon was perfectly cooked, and served with a liquified blood pudding and a risotto of spelt with "umbles"- more foie gras, topped with a pigeon heart.

10. Hot and iced tea. A brilliant science experiment. This was weird. We each got a clear tea cup placed in front of us very precisely and were told emphatically not to move it about, but pick it up immediately and take a large sip. The cup was filled half with boiling hot tea, and half with ice cold tea - it was bizarre. They had used some kind of gelling agent on the cold tea which stopped it mixing with the hot (that was about as much as I could understand of the explanation!)

11. And so onto the desserts. Galette of rhubarb started them off - a beautiful, crisp, thin ribbon of bright pink rhubarb was served with Neroli yoghurt and rhubarb sorbet.

12. The BFG. A towering rectangle of black forest gateau which melted in your mouth.

13. Whisk(e)y wine gums. I don't drink whiskey, but I liked this. We each got a picture frame set down in front of us with a map of the top of Scotland, and five little bottle-shaped wine gums flavoured with five different whiskeys including one (can't remember which) that was deliciously smokey, stuck on the corresponding location on the map.

14. Like a kid in a sweet shop. The final course was a pink and white striped pic'n'mix bag filled with goodies. A sweet-scented card explained them all - including coconut "baccy" - a tobacco style packet filled with dry shreds of coconut infused with the aroma of Black Cavendish tobacco; an "apple pie caramel" with an edible wrapper; and a tiny little envelope with a candy Queen of Hearts "playing card" inside. Brilliant.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. It was not just all the excitement, cleverness and theatre - the food also tasted incredible too. I was astounded by the waiters' knowledge - every question you asked they knew the answer to, as if they were the chefs themselves.

It may have been painfully expensive, but it was worth it - especially if you consider how much a night at the theatre and a meal and wine would cost. A night to remember.

The L Chef - mussels

2011-03-06T10:49:00.000Z

My "L Chef" column as it appeared in yesterday's Bristol Evening Post...

It’s a good job that mussels aren’t too pricey, that’s all I can say. Doing my best to eat what’s in season, I picked up a 1kg bag of them from my local supermarket last Saturday morning for about £3. They sat in my fridge until Sunday evening, when I had all my other ingredients lined up to make a Thai-style dish with them.

I started the process of cleaning and checking them all, putting them all in a big bowl of cold water. You’re meant to pull away any “beards” – clumps of hairy stuff that sprouts from the shells, give them a good scrub and check for dead ones. Ones that are tightly closed are ok, but any that are open could be dead. To check, tap them sharply against the side of the bowl, and if they don’t close immediately then they are dead and should be discarded. Also get rid of any that have broken shells, and any that float to the top of the bowl. Give the safe ones a few rinses and empty away the water to get rid of any sand they have in them.

I had a problem. As I looked down at my big bowl of mussels, about half seemed to be floating – which meant they should be discarded (although I can’t tell you why that is, I can’t find an explanation anywhere). And as I tapped the open ones, one by one, they stayed open – so they were dead and not good to eat either. It didn’t look good. The weekend before I had given myself food poisoning after trying an oyster, and I wasn’t about to risk it with these little shellfish. In the bin they went, and it was beans on toast for dinner.

It was only after this that I read mussel advice saying that you should always eat mussels on the same day you buy them, because they can die quite quickly and you don’t know how fresh they are. I think I had just left mine a day too long. Determined to do the dish the next day, I went back to the supermarket and bought another bag from the fish counter. One kilo will feed two people, even if you have to ditch a few.

This batch looked a lot better as I sifted through them that evening. It was all systems go. Once I had washed and checked them all, I tipped a tin of coconut milk into a large heavy-based saucepan on a medium heat, chucked in a couple of chopped red chillies (add to taste), a thumb of grated ginger, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, a tablespoon of fish sauce and some chopped spring onions. Once it was bubbling, I tipped the mussels in and put a lid on to steam them. As soon as the shells start gaping open, they are ready, and you don’t want to overcook them because they’ll just go rubbery. They will only take a couple of minutes to cook. When you’ve served them up, with lots of the cooking liquid to soak up with some fresh crusty bread, you need to do the second test – don’t eat any that haven’t opened fully. They were worth the wait – big, fat and juicy, and the liquid was delicious.

A lovely morning of Bristol fun

2011-03-05T19:18:00.000Z

With Matt and effectively-my-mother-in-law in tow this morning, I took in the delights of the wildlife photographer of the year exhibition at Bristol City Museum (this was my favourite pic); then made our way to the Weapon of Choice gallery in St Michael's Hill where my talented big bro is one of the photographers in their group photography show. In between we stumbled across an old toilet block on the corner of Woodland Road and Park Row which is being used as an exhibition space - as it happened Martin at Bristol Culture blogged about it a couple of hours later so you can read about it here.

Phew. After such a lot of culture we needed some refreshments so headed down the Christmas steps for a first explore of the (relatively) new Bristol Cider Shop which we heard about from a fellow diner at the Blue Door Supper Club last week. Bizarrely the same guy in the shop when we visited (he doesn't work there, we were assured!). The shop owner got us trying the different ciders they have on draught to work out if we were sweet or dry fans, and then we chose three bottles from the shelves with his help to take home for this evening - Perry's Redstreak Cider, some Black Dragon and a bottle of dry sparkling Severn Cider. He was very helpful and I can confirm as I sit with a glass of the Perry's by my side that the purchased beverages are delicious. There are loads on sale in there so if you're a cider fan check it out. Read more about the shop here.

Finally, armed with a Groupon voucher I bought last month for Swinky's Sweets in Park Street, we went for a drink and a cupcake there. I had a signature hot choc, mum-in-law went for a coffee, and we all shared a red velvet cupcake (chocolate cake dyed velvety red with a cream cheese icing) and a Rolo cupcake (chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a Rolo on top - needless to say Matt scoffed the Rolo, I didn't get a look in). It's a lovely little caff, pretty colours, nice atmosphere and lots of traditional sweets on sale.

Now you see them

Now you don't!

All in all a delicious and interesting morning in that part of town was had, before heading back to our 'hood for some more house viewings (why can't I be one of those people who finds house-buying "exciting" rather than something that gets in the way of a perfectly lovely weekend?!).

Yesterday's Crackerjack

2011-03-05T18:31:00.000Z

If you missed yesterday's Crackerjack in the Bristol Evening Post - here are some of the foodie articles that appeared.

There's a great feature on the Clifton Chilli Club, a review of the Whiteladies Planet Pizza, and a review of No 1 Harbourside (run by the same people who do the Canteen in Stokes Croft).

Click on the links above to take you to an online version of the story.

New date for the Blue Door Supper Club

2011-03-05T18:20:00.000Z

I can highly recommend the Blue Door Supper Club in Windmill Hill - and they have just announced their next date for March 31. If you're interested email them here.

This week's Venue

2011-03-02T17:53:00.000Z

Pick up a copy of this week's Venue - you can't miss it, it's got a brilliant bright red cover saying "Keep calm and save Venue" on the front - and you will be able to read a fair few good foodie articles. This could be the penultimate issue - so if you want to see more issues than that then consider pledging to get a subscription.

There's a bit about Jamie Oliver and what the neighbours think about his new Bristol venture, a chat with Josh Eggleton of the newly Michelin-starred Pony and Trap, a review of The Full Moon in Stokes Croft and The Richmond in Clifton.

Plus, check out page 11 for a 10 per cent off voucher for the new Bristol Cider Shop on Christmas Steps.

PS. you can also read an interview with me on something completely unrelated to food, page 19. (All about this.)

March - what's in season?

2011-03-02T08:00:00.000Z

I fancy something sweet and comforting. And warming, in this cruddy, freezing weather!

So, although strictly speaking this is not a "seasonal" dish, it is what I am craving at the moment. Our friend Tom cooked a version of ginger sponge cake when we went round for dinner last week and it was delicious, I am quite tempted to bake my own this weekend.

Here's a decent looking recipe , if you have any of your own let me know....

ANOTHER Bristol supper club

2011-03-01T22:04:00.000Z

Blimmin 'eck.

Bristol is breeding supper clubs like there's no tomorrow. Ta to Bristol Bites for tipping me off about the latest addition to our blossoming supper club scene (there's really no stopping Brizzle, and yet as far as I know nowhere else in the region seems to be going for it so much, not sure why?). Sally, the blogger behind Plein Comme Un Oeuf, has teamed up with a professional chef pal to put on the Full as an Egg Suppers.

They will be in Knowle, cost £25, and there are two dates to start off with - March 17 and 18. Email them to book a space. For full details click here.

An interview with....

2011-03-01T21:34:00.000Z

A little bit of fun here - check out the Number 1 Wino blog for an interview with... me! Mostly to read me blabbering on about Jamie Oliver, I'm afraid....

Review of the Blue Door Supper Club

2011-02-27T17:58:00.001Z

This is a little delayed - it was on Wednesday evening that Matt and I took ourselves south of the river to the Blue Door Supper Club in Windmill Hill. But I have been a busy girl and didn't want to rush this - I wanted to do justice to such a tasty and "prepared with love" meal.

We were both a bit nervous as we knocked on the door in the middle of a quiet street - well, I was ok actually but I think Matt felt he had put his life in my hands. And what the neighbours must think I don't know - 12 people turning up at the same time of the evening, twice a month, and emerging all together a few hours later looking very pleased with themselves.

Anyway, it all turned out to be kosher, and not at all a swingers club. We were shown inside the lovely home of Mr and Miss Blue Door, sat down at a table with four strangers, got out our wine and tucked into some amazing bread as Miss BD made sure we were all ok and Mr BD very calmly cracked on in the kitchen in full view of us all.

The last thing I had expected was a "proper" menu. With choices. I thought we would just have a plate of food put down in front of us - especially as we had already been asked if we were veggie, had allergies, or minded offal. But there was a blackboard with three starters, three mains and two puds to choose from.

I went for devilled kidneys on toast to start, and also stole a few of Matt's plate of sprats with garlic mayo. My dish was so, so good. The sauce was tangy and sweet, and there was a healthy serving of kidneys so my rumbling tummy started to settle down. Moving on to mains, I had oxtail, calves' liver, mustard onions and potatoes - again a superb dish. Not too much, but a decent portion packed with flavour, and everything perfectly cooked as far as I was concerned.

And then the desserts. I can't decide which course was my favourite, because each time I think about each one I think that that was the best. I had a rhubarb mess - a glass full of beautifully light pink rhubarby cream mess, with chunks of bright pink rhubarb, divine meringues (which I was later informed had been made with muscovado sugar) and almond brittle. I could have eaten a ton of it.

And that wasn't it - the meal was topped off with some Tunworth cheese and more bread (Mr BD currently works at brilliant bakery Mark's Bread) and then tea and coffee with beautiful little chocolate truffles with a subtle kick of crystallised ginger.

During the meal and afterwards there were plenty of chats with other diners, as well as Miss BD who was looking after us, and Mr BD sat down to join us for pudding. It made a really nice end to the evening, as I got a tip off that Portishead is good for samphire hunting (I wish I'd known this back in the summer!), the guy sitting next to me got advice on how to make the perfect pizza dough, and we just had a nice chat in general, finding out that Mr BD will soon be putting his culinary skill to good use in the restaurant at Clifton Lido. There was even time for a very odd conversation about pet tortoises, and whether they could live without their shell.

I know this review sounds very gushing, but I don't care - it was a brilliant meal, with great company, and another lovely all-round food experience in Bristol. Worth every penny (probably more) of the money I put in my "suggested donation of £20-£25" envelope at the end of the night.

For more info check out the Daydream Kitchen blog.

The Runcible Spoon, opening soon

2011-02-27T15:37:00.000Z

The new restaurant opening in Nine Tree Hill (see here for more info) has now got an opening date - the second weekend of March.

Just saying.

For any inquiries or to book a table call 07807305881 or email .

Crackerjack roundup - Jamie's Italian and The Muset by Ronnie

2011-02-27T09:09:00.001Z

Thursday's Crackerjack has an interview with Jamie Oliver's mentor Gennaro Contaldo, as well as a review of The Muset by Ronnie. And then on Friday, there was a review of Jamie's Italian in Bristol (which opens properly tomorrow).

Hungry yet?!

The L Chef - my first cheesecake

2011-02-26T22:07:00.001Z

Here's my L Chef column from today's Bristol Evening Post...

I always feel very guilty inviting myself over to my grandparents’ house, because my gran (you may remember her from my column about Welsh cakes) always wants to cook us lunch, or at least bake cake for tea. I called her recently to arrange a visit (they live in south Wales) with the intention of telling her that my brother and I were visiting, but she was not, under any circumstances, to cook for us.

It was all going so well, and then she mentioned two words – “roast” and “dinner”. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to remember Sundays sat round her table with the rest of the family when we visited or went to stay. So when we spoke the other day, whether she knew this was her secret weapon or not, she utilised it perfectly. I couldn’t say no.

But I decided I would make up for the moment of weakness by making a pudding to take along. In theory, this sounds like a great idea. But I was chatting to my mum about what I could make, and quite quickly realised that I don’t have a very wide repertoire of desserts-which-can-be-transported-along-the-M4-in-the-boot. “Cheesecake?” she said. No. “Some kind of tart?” Don’t think I’ve ever made one. For dinner parties I normally make little individual things. None of which would survive the journey. So not only had I committed to taking a pudding to my grandma’s, who I revere as the matriarchal cooking chief of the family, but it looked like I would be taking something I’d never tried making before.

The chosen experiment was a baked cheesecake. I asked around – speaking to friends, and putting an appeal out on Twitter - for tried and tested recipes, and got an email from Bristol chef Danielle Coombs (who has worked in several professional kitchens including Hotel du Vin and now runs a supper club and cookery lessons from her home). It was her recipe that I opted for in the end.

First of all, melt ¼ of a pack of butter and crush ½ a pack of digestive biscuits in a food processor, or by hand. Mix the butter and biscuits, add a teaspoon of cocoa powder (optional) and place the mixture in a lined springform cake tin, press lightly and chill until firm.

For the filling, beat 125g of mascarpone and 500g cream cheese until softened, add the zest of a lemon, three whole eggs and three extra egg yolks, and combine it all. Pour the mix into the cake tin on top of your chilled biscuit base and bake at 160C until it is set – about 30 minutes. I checked mine after 30 minutes and it still looked very wobbly in the centre, so I left it for another ten minutes and when I took it out it had cracked on the top. This is not the end of the world, but I have since read up a bit about it and I think it is safe to take it out when it still looks not very set in the middle, and it will firm up as it cools.

This chilled in my fridge over night, ready for its big day. I transported it in its tin, and took it out of my gran’s fridge 30 minutes before we were going to eat it. The side of the tin came away fine, but when I was cutting it into slices the base didn’t seem to want to come up very easily – in fact most of it stayed on the tin. But I think I maybe didn’t have quite the right tools to lift it out. Nevermind that though, because it was delicious and most of us had seconds. I served it with a warm berry compote which went really well with it.

The L Chef - baked eggs

2011-02-26T22:02:00.001Z

Another L Chef column from a few weeks ago which I forgot to put on here!

I don’t know quite what came over me this week, but I decided – for no particular reason – that I wanted to try cooking baked eggs. “Baking them, in their shells?” asked my boyfriend. “Won’t they explode?”

No, not in their shells. I wanted to try making “oeuf en cocotte”, which translated into English sounds slightly less intriguing – “eggs baked in ramekins”. I’d never eaten this dish before, never seen it made, but read an interview with a chef who had mentioned it. But when I started researching different versions of the recipe (bake the egg with leeks, mushrooms or smoked salmon underneath, and cream or Greek yoghurt on top etc etc) I came across something which looked even tastier. Unfortunately it didn’t have a stylish French name, or much of a name at all in fact. This one was “baked eggs”, or “Tuscan baked eggs” or “Italian-style baked eggs”, but essentially was a tomato based sauce with eggs baked on top of it. I know it doesn’t sound much, but all the photos made it look delicious.

So I set about creating my own version of each of this dishes instead of “oeuf en cocotte”. I reckon this could be served up as brunch, lunch or dinner. After reading several recipes and having a think about what I would like in it, I came up with this list of ingredients. Halve a red onion and slice it, and put it into a deep frying pan with a glug of olive oil, stirring every now and then on a medium-high heat on the hob until the onion is soft. Add about 50-100g of chopped chunks of chorizo, a chopped red pepper, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, a chopped red chilli, ½ tsp of cumin and ½ tsp of paprika. Give it all a good stir. Then add a tin of chopped tomatoes, or if you’re feeling posh a tin of cherry tomatoes, 1 tsp of sugar and a glug of red wine vinegar. Also add about half a tin’s worth of water, and a couple of teaspoons of capers.

Let that simmer away for about 10-15 minutes until it reduces down a little bit. Now for the eggs. I made this for one person, but the tomato sauce is enough for two so I froze half to use again, perhaps as a pasta sauce. I put the other half into an oven-proof dish and made two dips in it, which I then cracked two small eggs into. Season with salt and pepper and a bit of grated parmesan and put it in the oven at 180C for about 15 minutes – keeping a close eye on it towards the end because you don’t want it to overcook. You just need the whites to set and the yolk to be how you want it. Serve with some warm bread. So what to call this nameless (but deliciously conforting) dish? It deserves a better name than the uninspiring “baked eggs”. Going with the Italian theme, I typed “baked eggs in tomatoes” into an online translation website and hit the “English to Italian” button. Drum roll please, for the crude and possibly inaccurate translation… this recipe shall now be exotically known as “uova cotte con i pomodori”.

The L Chef - cauliflower curry

2011-02-26T21:54:00.004Z

One of my L Chef columns from the Bristol Evening Post a few weeks ago...

There are some beautiful, creamy white cauliflowers on the shelves in supermarkets and fruit and veg shops at the moment. Although you can get them year-round, they are in season this month so I wanted to make the most of them.

But what can you make with them, other than boiling or steaming them and serving them with a roast, or making cauliflower cheese? A flick through some of my recipe books suggested eating them raw in salads, cooking them in a frittata, a cauliflower risotto or some fritters – but none of those were quite what I was after. Then I saw a mention on the internet of a cauliflower curry, and on a cold wintry Monday night that was just what I wanted. I looked at a few different recipes and threw in a few ideas of my own to come up with this dish – which went down a treat.

First of all, take the outer green leaves off a large cauliflower and cut it into florets of roughly the same size, chop up an onion and chop up a couple of peeled potatoes into large chunks. Also chop a red (de-seeded) chilli, a couple of cloves of garlic and grate about a thumb’s length of ginger. Then fry the onion in a little oil along with the chilli, garlic and ginger, and add your spices – I went for 1tsp of garam masala, ½ tsp cumin seeds, ½ tsp turmeric, ½ tsp poppy seeds and the seeds from inside four little cardamom pods.

Give that a good stir before adding your potatoes and cauliflower, and coat the vegetables in the spicy onion mixture. Next I added a tin of coconut milk and a tin of chopped tomatoes, and a few blocks of frozen spinach (I find this really useful to add to curries, but you can use fresh if you prefer. Just save it until nearer the end of the cooking time if you do use fresh instead of frozen) and simmer it all for about 15 minutes, until the cauliflower and potatoes are all cooked, but not too soft.

While that is cooking, toast some cashew nuts in a hot pan, but be careful not to burn them, chop up some coriander, and cook some rice. Once the curry is done, stir through the coriander and the juice of a lime and serve it with rice, topped with some of the cashew nuts.

It was so full of flavour that I barely noticed it was a vegetarian meal, and it tasted really fresh. Every now and then I got a kick of a different spice – the cardamom worked particularly well. You could try adding different spices or seeds, depending on what you have; try toasting different nuts for the topping; or try serving it with the naan breads I made a couple of weeks ago. Delicious.

Review - Clifton Lido

2011-02-26T18:05:00.000Z

A top meal was had at the Lido in Clifton last night. Not only was there fabulous company with my favourite gang of lovely, gorgeous ladies, but the food was scrummy as well. It's also extremely relaxing to sit in that restaurant, looking out over a beautifully lit swimming pool outside.

We were spoilt with two boards of huge chunks of fresh bread to start with, and the in-the-know Aleisha ordered some green olives which were the best I have ever tasted. I didn't even know olives like that existed - they were huge, about the size of large cherry tomatoes, and the flavour of them was amazing.

My starter was Savoy cabbage stuffed with baharat spiced venison, sweet tomato sauce and yoghurt. Ok, the portion was tiny, but the taste of the dish was incredible. I've just looked up the spice blend, just to give you an idea of what it tasted like - it normally includes pepper, coriander seeds, cinnamon, cloves, cumin seeds, cardamom, nutmeg and paprika.

My main was a healthier size of portion - a hefty lamb shank tagine with cinnamon roast pumpkin and couscous. Polly (who had the same dish as me) and I high fived for choosing the best dish, and were left at the end wondering if it would be acceptable in this particular venue, once we had finished our meal, to pick up the shank bone and have a final nibble. We decided it wouldn't go down too well.

To round the meal off, we shared a few pretty colourfully painted glasses of ice creams - coconut and rum, pistachio and salted caramel. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

This week's Venue foodie offerings

2011-02-26T14:48:00.000Z

You may have heard that Venue magazine is closing - so to show it some support why not pick up a copy of this week's edition (the one that came out a few days ago). In it, there is a round up of 50 of the best places in Bristol and Bath to get your hands on a cheap meal, and a piece about how to cook a rack of lamb, Living Room stylee.

Yum.

Oldest chippy in the country?

2011-02-25T15:22:00.000Z

This week I went to a fish and chip shop in Kingswood - just outside Bristol - which claims it is the oldest in the country.

When I went to Maguire's at the Clock Tower, I was unleashed in the kitchen and got to cut my own piece of cod, batter it and fry it for my lunch. Maybe I've missed my vocation!

They reckon they are the oldest chippy in the UK - at least the oldest that is still going, and has been a fish and chip shop since it first opened. Others have said that the one on the Christmas Steps is older... but Maguire's insist.

You can read the full piece here - some quite nice detail on how fish and chips would have been done back in the day.

The Muset by Ronnie - review

2011-02-19T20:12:00.001Z

A week after I saw the sign in the window at The Muset in Clifton advertising it's pre-launch week, I was back there last night to sample the goods. It was a lovely evening, from start to finish.

For a start, the interior has been done out really well, it has a relaxed but classy feel. The staff were brilliantly charming - not cold, aloof and distant as you get in some places but friendly, cracking jokes with us and being incredibly attentive without being overbearing. When the waiter noticed I was unsure whether to go for the beef or the venison, he told me I should definitely try the beef; when another waiter noticed we had wolfed down our bread board within minutes (we were both famished after gym classes/tennis earlier in the evening) he offered us another one... free of charge; when we went to leave the restaurant I frowned at the pouring rain as I remembered I didn't have an umbrella and the manager whipped out one from behind the bar that a customer earlier in the week had forgotten, insisting that I take it. Even if the food had been awful, these true professionals made my evening.

But of course the food matched up. Don't expect huge portions of food - you'll get exceptionally cooked plates of classic cuisine, but not stacks and stacks of it. But that doesn't matter when the flavours are so gorgeous - and this comes from someone who is a big eater. For our starters I had a smoked aubergine puree, with goats cheese, squash and PX sherry - it was one of those dishes with lots of different little tastes dotted all over it and looked beautiful. Matt went for pork belly (the crackling was so nice I didn't get a look in) with clonakilty black pudding, chorizo and delicate sticks of apple.

For the main courses, I was persuaded by the waiter to try the roast beef - which was more like an incredible, melt-in-your-mouth fillet steak, with carrots and salsify and a cute little black pot on the side with an oxtail gratin with bone marrow. Matt tried the line caught Cornish bass, bean stew, mussels and rouille.

To polish the meal off we shared a dainty slice of green pistachio cake - which reminded me of my mum's lemon polenta cake - slithers of bright pink poached rhubarb, a kind of rose water syrup and yoghurt, with tiny, perfect meringues dotted over the top.

The only thing that I didn't like about the place was the music - it may seem a pedantic thing to pick up on but they had one Jack Johnson album on repeat all night, and sitting as we were directly under a speaker, this got a bit too much for me. Not only the repetition, but I think it was completely out of keeping with the rest of the experience. It seemed so incongruous. When I worked at a hotel in Greece, we used to play the same album in the beach front restaurant - The Muset is a much classier joint and I think it deserved better.

It should also be noted that a meal there will burn a little bit of a hole in your wallet (at full price our meal of two starters, two mains, one dessert, one glass of wine and a couple of soft drinks would have been £80) - but the food is good enough to warrant it. A good one for a special occasion, or everyday eating if you're loaded!

For bookings before February 28 (you get a 25% discount) call 0800 849 4411. After that it should be 0117 973 7248, but any problems visit the website for Ronnie's in Thornbury here.

A new date for the Chez Iza Supper Club

2011-02-19T19:34:00.000Z

News for supper club fans - the Chez Iza Supper Club in Clifton has announced its next date - March 19th.

More info here.

Review of the reviews etc in Bristol press today

2011-02-17T16:23:00.000Z

In today’s Crackerjack in the Bristol Evening Post, a few foodie things of interest (not written by me, I might add… so not just blowing my own trumpet!).

There’s an interview with Ron Faulkner of The Muset by Ronnie which is opening on March 1 in Clifton (but is semi-open at the moment); a review of pop up restaurant Mi Casa where I went at the weekend; plus a review of “the Kenny” aka The Kensington Arms in Redland. Also a few snippets of news including this - Papadeli in Clifton is to open a cookery school next month... hence all that building work that's been going on.

Also in the news part of the paper – there’s a piece about the new Jamie Oliver restaurant, which is due to open on February 28 in Park Street. mmmmm

In Venue there’s a review of the Arnolfini Café.

Enough to make you pretty hungry….

Luuurve Food Festival

2011-02-13T16:34:00.000Z

I had every intention to have a mooch down at the Love Food Festival at Paintworks today but then the rain came down in bucketloads. For some reason I was convinced that it was an outdoor affair and as much as I have been looking forward to it, I wasn't sure I could be doing with such awful awful weather. I was just about to write it off when I checked my Twitter account, and saw that organiser Lorna had tweeted a photo of the stalls.... INSIDE! I had completely made up the notion of this outdoor event. Hurrah.

So we headed down there and had the planned mooch, tasting something at every stall as we went. Beetroot bread, eye-wateringly hot chilli sauces, chocolate brownies, lemon curd cupcakes and so on. Lots of lovely stall-holders wanting to tell us all about their produce. Kids were busy making chocolate paintings and sewing little seed pots, and the cafe was full of cold and damp people who were warming themselves up with cups of coffee.

I was persuaded to try my first ever oyster. Katy Davidson of Mangez Moi Oysters was giving masterclasses full of little oyster factoids and ideas and as I listened to her explain a good BBQ technique (stick a few on the barbie, when they fizz at the opening they are ready and will have poached in their juices, add some tabasco and lemon and off you go) she shucked me a massive fat juicy one and squeezed some lemon juice over it. Matt laughed as I tipped it into my mouth - it was huge so I had to chew a bit, and then swallowed. Matt says I went bright red and looked terrified. It was... interesting.... but very tasty and fresh.

We picked up a couple of items from the Parsnipship - a vegetarian catering collective - to take home for our lunch. I opted for a bright pink "beetroot bomb" with carrot, parsnip, cumin, chilli, apricot, cashew nut, cardamon, ginger and breadcrumbs. 15 minutes in the oven at home - delicious.

Roll on the Spring Festival on March 26 and 27.

Mi Casa pops up on Bristol's harbourside

2011-02-13T16:17:00.000Z

As Matt, Bristol Culture and I left the Ostrich Inn down on the Redcliffe side of the waterfront yesterday evening, a couple of girls behind us said: "You like you're going to the same place as us." I couldn't work out how they knew where we were going, so I just looked at them slightly confused, prompting one of them to add: "You've got bottles of wine too, you must be going to Mi Casa."

We were indeed. Mi Casa was back in Bristol last night and the night before - the second instalment of Alexis John and Kristjan Bigland's pop up eatery. We walked from the Ostrich, with our bottles of wine at the ready (it was BYO) along the water's edge to a large scout hut roughly opposite the Riverstation. We were welcomed in and sat down at long tables, making friends with the people we were going to be sat next to for the evening and taking the atmosphere in.

They had decorated the place beautifully - alongside the displays of knots and sailing paraphernalia used by the sea scouts that usually use the hut, there were fairy lights and lamps draped in tea towels (sounds weird, but looks cool) and the tables were covered in brown parcel paper and dotted with candles. Wine bottle candle holders were plastered with the evening's menu, and everyone had their own copy on a plate in front of them to get our stomachs rumbling.

The artwork completed on "our night"

It was great fun. Forget the food for a second - it was more than just a restaurant. It was interesting being sat next to complete strangers and chatting to them, sharing from big platters of food in the middle of the table, and to top it off there were two artists at work throughout the evening on a massive mural. These two "freestyle artists" from the group Dirty Old Town had been brought in to add an extra element to the evening. On one wall we could see the piece of artwork they had completed the previous evening, and as our own meal went on they used red and black marker pens to create a brilliant piece to complement the evening, which with its North African menu had been dubbed "Rock the Kasbah".

The artwork from the night before

But back to the food. It was so delicious - to start with we had a beautiful mezze selection including falafels, lentils with coriander and pine nuts, a red cabbage, cucumber, almond and sultana coleslaw and, my favourite bit, some perfectly soft flatbreads. They all came on big wooden boards which we shared from in the middle of the tables. The flavours were so fresh and really reminded me of some similar food served up by the Cloak and Dinner crew last January.

Next up - lamb breast stuffed with cous cous, figs and preserved lemons, served with chargrilled slices of aubergine and a yoghurt and tahini dressing, and saffron and onion potatoes. Plus a cucumber, pomegranate and feta salad. Nom nom nom. There was plenty to go round, and even though the main was quite heavy and filling (not necessarily a bad thing) we managed to polish most of it off.

Kristjan and his wingman - "the most charming man" he said he had ever met - looked after the front of house affairs, while Alexis and her two female wingladies took care of the kitchen. Every now and then we got a glimpse of them in the kitchen, through the serving hatch, but they never looked stressed, always very much in control.

The dessert was a slice of an almond, pistachio, apricot and filo pastry tart, served with a very refreshing dollop of cream or creme fraiche and half a poached pear. That was more than enough for me, but the final course was a selection of fresh breads and Spanish cheeses - some Manchego, a milder cheese and a blue one whose names I can't remember.

All too soon the night ended - we filed off one by one into the night, leaving our suggested donation of £25 or whatever we wanted in a bowl. Read here for details of the next Mi Casa dates.

Cote, Clifton

2011-02-12T17:56:00.000Z

I know I'm a bit slow off the mark but a few weeks after its opening, I finally made it along to Cote in Clifton last night. It lived up to all the other reviews I have read. You walk in through some of those big thick curtains to keep the cold air out, and into a beautifully-done restaurant. It had a really nice feel - warm, busy and candlelit. There were plenty of staff looking after your every need - although our waitress got off to a confused start, asking us if we'd like "any desserts or aperitifs"? Matt and I looked, puzzled, at our menus - had we missed something? Had we misheard her? Was this a back-to-front dining experience? Then she realised her mistake and we all laughed about it and carried on.

I had three fat and juicy seared scallops to start with lardons and lentils - full of flavour and a perfect size. Matt had a little bowl of moules marinieres - again lovely and fat and juicy. All our food came very fast, but having said that we didn't feel too rushed. It took ages for us to choose what we wanted to eat because we could have had anything on the menu. Lighter mains like salmon fishcakes, mains including lamb shanks and fish dishes, a selection of steaks... it was a great selection.

For our mains, I had a fillet steak and Matt went for the seafood linguine. The pasta came with a generous helping of tiger prawns, mussels, clams and squid in a garlic, chilli and white wine sauce. My steak was -perfectly cooked, melt-in-the-mouth and came with my choice of sauce - a tangy Roquefort butter. It was served alongside a little pot of French fries and a small pile of watercress. Faultless.

I barely had room for pudding but couldn't resist something sweet to top it all off - I had a warm chocolate fondant with vanilla ice cream and Matt polished off a creme brulee.

It was a really great meal - you can splash out and spend quite a lot or stick to just a main course and not have to fork out too much. The service was great, food delicious, and with it being so full you know they must be doing something right.

News from The Muset by Ronnie in Clifton

2011-02-12T11:03:00.001Z

I was thinking the other day that it surely must be about time for The Muset by Ronnie to open... so last night I wandered past as I was in the area to take a look.

The proper opening must be imminent because in the window was this...

So... if you can't make out what that says, they are having a "pre-launch trial" from February 15 -27, book a table to get 25 per cent off your bill as long as you give them some useful feedback! Bargainous - my table's booked. Call 0800 849 4411 to get yours.

For more info on Ronnie's original award-winning restaurant in Thornbury (though no info on the new place), visit their website.

Indian banquet in aid of charity

2011-02-11T14:55:00.000Z

If you fancy a tasty Indian banquet, and want to help a good cause while you're at it, look no further than an event taking place in Bristol on March 5.

The Bristol and Bath Fundraising Group - a new fundraising committee set up as part of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign - are working together to support and further the work of the charity through fundraising in Bristol and the surrounding areas.

The work of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign is close to the heart of Bristol and Bath team leader, Khurm Arshad.

“My younger brother, Auzair, suffers from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy," he said. "It is a life-limiting condition and makes the simplest of tasks like eating and dressing impossible to carry out without care. There is currently no known cure for muscular dystrophy.”

In order to raise funds for research into Duchenne at Oxford University, Khurm and his team have organised an authentic Indian banquet at The Elmgrove Centre in Cotham.

There will be more than 12 traditional Indian dishes, entertainment, a cheap bar and more than 100 guests. Tickets are £25 per head.

The evening will also feature a raffle for £2 per ticket, with prizes donated by a variety of local companies. If you would like to show your support by donating a raffle prize, please get in touch with the team directly using the contact details below.

More info: Bar Opens at 7pm Seating at 7.30pm. Carriages at midnight. Tickets sold in advance. No tickets available on door.
Dress code: smart (Indian attire optional)

For further info contact: Khurm tel: 07920 746058 or email: bristol@muscular-dystrophy.org

The Runcible Spoon - opening soon...

2011-02-10T21:30:00.000Z

It was over a year ago, but my mouth still waters when I think about the "secret" dining experience I had at the Cloak and Dinner pop-up restaurant.

So it is fantastic news that some of those behind that venture have decided to open a restaurant just off Stokes Croft. The Runcible Spoon (of Owl and the Pussycat fame) will be opening up in the old Cafe Kino on Nine Tree Hill in March.

I've not had time to duck past there since hearing the news, but Bristol Culture has been - two lines of the Edward Lear poem are written on a piece of paper and stuck to the window as work is done to spruce up the venue.

The idea? Healthy, well-balanced, affordable modern British food. Locally sourced, of course.

The plan is to change dishes daily, and everything served there will be made on site.

The prices? Lunchtimes £3-£10 and evenings £5-£15 for a set menu of one to three courses. And I like the sound of this, thank you very much - Banquet night on Saturday - a single-sitting multi-course menu for £25 a head.

Check out the website for more info.

Today's Crackerjack and Venue's foodie-ness

2011-02-10T09:05:00.000Z

Well done to Mark Taylor for some excellent foodie write-ups in today’s Crackerjack in the Bristol Evening Post. I particularly like today’s edition because it is almost as if it has been written just for me!

First of all there’s a feature on pop-up restaurant Mi Casa – where I am going this weekend. Then there’s a review of the Blue Door Supper Club – where I am going in a couple of weeks. Interesting to see a review of one of Bristol’s successful supper clubs in the slot usually reserved for “proper” restaurants. (See what I've written on Mi Casa before here, and on the Blue Door Supper Club here).

There is also a review of Tiffins on St Michael’s Hill – Mark’s new local curry house.

Also out today is this week’s Venue – in there you will find a review of Cote (again, I’m going there in the next few days!) plus a piece by Tony Benjamin who is getting his hands dirty learning to make pizza at The Hill on Cotham Hill.

Finally, check out today’s Evening Post for a piece about two fish and chip shops – the Bishopston Fish Bar and the Argus Fish Bar in Bedminster – who are celebrating after claiming an industry mark of excellence.

New dates for pop up restaurant Mi Casa

2011-02-07T21:38:00.000Z

Pop up restaurant Mi Casa - which will be open for business this weekend at its Scout hut on the Harbourside - has announced two more dates.

It will be serving up delicious food (bring your own booze) once again on March 25 and 26 - just email here to book or find out more. Also check out their Facebook page - just search for "Mi Casa Pop Up Restaurant".

I will let you know what I think of this weekend's offerings once I have tried them, but how about this to get your mouth watering?!

Mezze

Carrot, cumin, mint, and feta dip

Red cabbage, cucumber, almond, sultana coleslaw

Labneh

Lentil, red onion, slow roasted garlic and tomato, pine nuts and coriander

Sweet potato falafel

Flatbreads

Main

Lamb breast stuffed with cous cous, dried figs, preserved lemon and mint

Saffron and onion potatoes

Aubergine, crispy chickpeas, yoghurt, and tahini dressing

Cucumber, pomegranate, parsley and feta

Dessert

Poached pear, almond, pistachio, apricot wrapped in filo

Spanish cheese

Love Food Festival - this weekend

2011-02-07T15:11:00.000Z

Don't forget, the next Love Food Festival is this weekend - February 13.

It will be open from 10.30am - 4pm at Paintworks in Brislington. Visit the website for more info.

The L Chef - a hearty stew

2011-02-06T22:52:00.000Z

Here's yesterday's L Chef column that I wrote for the Bristol Evening Post...

Hands up, who’s ready for the summer? I certainly am. But one thing that brightens up these cold winter months for me is cooking a steaming hot, hearty stew for hours and hours and filling the house with its delicious aroma. And of course, with a big stew there are going to be leftovers – which means I can tuck a few portions away in the freezer for another day.

This weekend I embarked on a bit of a stew marathon - two stews in the space of one day and one night. It wasn’t necessarily the way I had planned it, but when I went to do my big weekly shop at the supermarket I noticed a good deal on their bags of “seasonal veg” when I went to pick one up for the beef stew I wanted to make. A bag containing an onion, several carrots, a large parsnip and a swede cost £1.80, or you could get two for £2. Although I do try not to be sucked in by these deals, this seemed like a fairly good one, so two bags went in my trolley. I made a quick call to my mum to see what extra ingredients I would need for a version of an Irish stew, and picked those up accordingly.

There were raised eyebrows from my boyfriend when I returned home laden with huge amounts of stew veg, potatoes and diced lamb and beef. Especially as he was due to be working away that week – who on earth was I planning on cooking for, he wanted to know?

Out came my trusty slowcooker. In a pan on the hob I got things started for my beef stew by browning 750g of braising beef in a little oil, before adding a chopped onion and a couple of cloves of chopped garlic and stirring for about five minutes. Then a couple of tablespoons of flour went in, 300ml of beef stock and 300ml of red wine, a tablespoon of tomato puree, two bay leaves and some salt and pepper.

Once that was bubbling away I tipped the pan into the slow cooker, added my carrots, swede and parsnip along with a couple of large peeled potatoes, all chopped into large chunks about the same size as the meat. That cooked all day – for between seven and nine hours on a low setting.

While it was cooking I made some dumplings to go with it – by mixing 110g self-raising flour with a tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley and 50g of shredded suet. Mix that to a dough with a few tablespoons of cold water, adding it a little at a time so you end up with an elastic dough which is not too sticky. Split it into eight little dumplings.

After a day of cooking, it was time to turn the slowcooker up to its high setting, and stir in a couple of chopped leeks, before placing the dumplings on top and returning the lid for between 30 and 45 minutes until the dumplings were nice and fluffy. Some of it was served up for dinner and some went in the freezer, and then I started on the Irish stew which cooked over night in the slowcooker – but I don’t have enough space to write all about that one as well!

If you are a fan of freezing like me, you can also freeze some dumplings – just freeze them on a tray while they are still uncooked. *If you don’t have a slow cooker, preheat the oven to 180C. Follow the instructions above until everything is in a pan and bring the liquid to the boil. Transfer into an ovenproof dish and place in the oven for a couple of hours – you might need to add a little more stock if it starts to get too dry. Add the leeks and dumplings at the end for about 20 minutes.

Today's Crackerjack - including free wine!

2011-02-03T08:57:00.001Z

Some good bits and pieces in today’s Crackerjack in the Evening Post.

There are reviews of The Richmond in Clifton and City Café at the Mint Hotel near Temple Meads – both get 8 out of 10.

There’s also an interview with Darren Lovell of Souk Kitchen, where he talks about the “food journeys” they have got planned and I wrote about yesterday.

Finally, some wine news – Grape & Grind on Gloucester Road is holding a wine tasting event on February 24, £8 a head. And if you fancy a free bottle of wine at Cote in Clifton, pick up a copy of today’s paper and cut out the ad on page three of Crackerjack – offer lasts until March 3.

New dates at Montpelier Basement

2011-02-02T21:00:00.001Z

Montpelier Basement has announced a couple of extra dates. They are doing really well - getting good write-ups left, right and centre, so get in there quick if you want to book a place.

The next dates after Valentine's weekend (which is fully booked) are March 12 and 26. Email Dan and Elly here to book in.

Yet more Fish Shop news

2011-02-02T15:00:00.000Z

No sooner had I written that blog about Gloucester Road's Fish Shop news than I had an email from them about another exciting bit of information.

They have launched a "free fish lottery" - if you don't mind a weekly email from them with offers they have on, you could end up winning £50 of fish.

All you need to do is email here with Fish Lottery in the subject line, then you will be entered into a monthly draw to win the free fish. You will also get the weekly email, telling you all about their great deals.

And that is not all - I am told that the plan with this for the future is to offer a group buying scheme - for example, if 50 people on the "fish lottery" list sign up for a deal on organic salmon one week, they will order it in and you'll get a good price. This is because you get a better price when you order more than 25kg.

Sounds interesting...

The Souk Kitchen “Middle Eastern Culinary Tour”

2011-02-02T12:29:00.000Z

Some mouth-watering news from Souk Kitchen in Southville here.

The restaurant, which specialises in Middle Eastern market food, is hosting a series of evenings as a "culinary tour" of the Middle East.
Each month, they will showcase the finest cuisine of a particular country or region. Head chef Darren Lovell will bring the history of Middle Eastern cooking to life, sharing his knowledge of local cuisine.

The first event will focus on Iran (February 23) followed by Turkey (March 30) and Lebanon (date to be confirmed).

Tickets are £25 per person for each five-course event. To reserve a table call 0117 9666880 or email here.

Fish Shop events

2011-02-01T18:31:00.000Z

The Fish Shop in Gloucester Road are offering cookery courses with Bishopston Spanish chef Dolores Onna. Courses start from £30 and minimum groups size is £30. Read more here.

The shop is also restarting their popular fishing trips. Join them this February, Sunday 13 or 27, as they sail from Watchet in search of line caught bristol channel winter cod and whiting. To get in touch and book your place, click here.

Finally, they are looking for people to take part in Bristol's first Oyster eating competition to be held in early March. Entry costs just £12 and the winner will be the first person to shuck a dozen Oysters and a drink pint of Stout. To book your place visit the website.

Bristol supper clubs coming up

2011-02-01T18:18:00.002Z

Here are the next few dates for Bristol's supper clubs -
The Montpelier Basement (run by Elly and Dan) will be open for business on February 11 and 12. Have a feeling there aren't any spaces left, but worth a try - and if not get on their mailing list anyway. Email them here.

The Blue Door Supper Club in Windmill Hill has a date on February 23 and from the blog it looks like there might still be space.

The third Bishopston Supper Club will be on February 18. That one is full but they are now booking for March 11 and 25. Email here to book.

February - what's in season?

2011-02-01T17:58:00.000Z

Brrrrr.... can't wait to get out of this freezing weather and into the spring. But to cheer you up in these cold wintry months there are some lovely foods in season at the moment.

Make the most of the beautiful, white, creamy cauliflowers in some comforting cauliflower cheese (this recipe looks quite tasty) or try Yotam Ottolenghi's smoky cauliflower frittata.

My mum's been making the most of the oranges by making some marmalade (one recipe to try is Nigel Slater's).

Venison is also in season at the moment - I like the look of Delia's pot roast recipe here.

This week's Crackerjack - Mission Burrito, Bishopston Supper Club and Mangia Mangia

2011-01-29T16:12:00.000Z

Thursday's Crackerjack in the Bristol Evening Post had three good foodie pieces in - reviews of Mission Burrito in Park Street and Mangia Mangia in Cotham Hill, plus an interview with Danielle Coombs, who is behind the Bishopston Supper Club.

The L Chef - Naan bread

2011-01-24T18:21:00.000Z

Here's Saturday's L Chef column from the weekend in the Bristol Evening Post (every Saturday!)

Baking bread scares me – but at the same time it is something I would love to learn how to do well. It seems like such an art. There are so many different types to try, I don’t know where to start. Last weekend I was making a vegetable curry and I decided to have a go at making naan bread – an Indian style flat bread - for the first time.

I asked around for a good recipe, and some people told me that naan was quite difficult to make because you need to use yeast and a hot oven. But others said it was easy – who to believe? After a little research I think there are two ways to make it – with or without yeast. Traditionally – and I think in most curry houses – yeast is used, which makes it puff up with big “bubbles” in it. But there is a quicker, easier way of doing it at home by substituting baking powder for the yeast.

Filing all the recipes I was given away for use at a later date, I chose one written by a Bombay-born cook living in Newcastle, Maunika Gowardhan. The post on her blog, Cook in a Curry, made it sound very easy and reliable.

I was only cooking for myself, so I halved this recipe and it worked really well – but the full recipe will make four naans. For the full quantity, sift 250g of plain flour, 1tsp baking powder, 1 tsp sugar and ½ tsp of salt into a bowl. Mix 80ml whole milk (I used semi-skimmed as that’s all I had in my fridge, and it was fine) with 2tbsp vegetable oil in another bowl.

Add 2tbsp of natural yoghurt to the dry mixture and then gradually add the liquids, mixing all the time. It should start to form a soft dough, which you can get your hands into and start pulling together. If it feels too dry and it isn’t holding together well, add a tiny bit of milk, and if it is too wet and sticky, add a bit more flour. Tip the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead it for five minutes until it is really elastic and smooth. If you haven’t done this before, just use the heels of your hands to stretch out the dough, then fold it back on itself, turn it 90 degrees and then repeat. It’s a great stress reliever.

Put the dough back in the bowl, cover it with cling film and leave it somewhere warm for 20 minutes. Get your oven on to heat up now if it needs a bit of time, like mine does. You want the grill on medium-hot and a baking tray warming up underneath it. When the dough has had its 20 minutes, turn it out onto a floured surface and divide it into four, then roll each portion into an oval or tear drop shape with a floured rolling pin, with the dough quite thin – mine was about 5mm thick. Add your chosen topping – more about that in a minute – and prick them with a fork before putting them onto the hot baking tray and back in the oven for three minutes until they start to turn golden brown.

Pulling them out of the oven was a great moment – there is something so magical about freshly baked bread. The smell is delicious, and I felt so proud that it had worked, even if it was a very simple recipe. I topped mine with a bit of butter and then ate it with my curry, but the naan was definitely the star of the show.

You can put things into the dough mixture, and you can also add toppings. To put inside it, try chopped herbs like mint (which I used – it made it really fresh and fragrant) and coriander, or even try making your own Peshwari naan with ground nuts and raisins. You can put more herbs on the top, or Nigella seeds – I used poppy seeds, which are similar, for my topping.

For more of Maunika’s recipes, visit www.cookinacurry.co.uk

Amici - Cheltenham Road, Bristol

2011-01-23T16:09:00.001Z

I've walked past Italian restaurant Amici in Cheltenham Road countless times, and never been tempted in - it just never caught my eye. But last night I went there with a group of friends for a birthday meal, and the birthday girl had made the choice.

It was a mixed bag of an experience. Overall, we had a good time, lovely food and a hilarious waiter - but sadly the service was far from perfect. In Amici's defence, I spoke to lots of people at the table who had eaten there before in smaller groups and had a great time, no problems. But they seemed to really struggle with our table of 16.

Inside, the restaurant had a good atmosphere, it was cosy and friendly - although the music (Boyzone featured - need I say more?!) left a little to be desired. Our waiter was very entertaining, and won me over immediately when he complimented me on my Italian pronunciation of my order! He then explained that one of the words that described my dish - "porco" - could also be used as an insult, "for a very rude man", which is useful to know.

But the service was also painfully slow. Consider this - we arrived and sat down at 7.30pm, but one girl did not get her main course until about 10.30pm. The rest of us were famished enough when our own mains arrived, so she must have been about ready to eat her own arm. It was only discovered when the main courses were brought out for everyone else that she had ordered the saltfish special - and they had in fact run out of that in the kitchen. So she had to re-order, and it wasn't until we had all long-finished ours that her dish arrived. They did give her a couple of glasses of wine and the main course on the house - but it wasn't very impressive.

Having said that, the food was great. I shared two starters - a tomato, avocado and mozzarella salad and some calamari, then had a very nostalgic dish for my main. Whenever I used to go to a certain Italian restaurant with my parents, my dad used to have a breaded veal escalope Milanese and spaghetti and I used to copy him and have the same. So when I saw a similar dish on the menu (pork instead of veal) I knew I had to have it. It was really tasty - not particularly healthy! - but instantly took me back to being about 11 again. I also tried a few slices of other people's pizzas which were good too.

So... worth a visit? I think so, just not in a big party.

Cedars Express - Park Row, Bristol

2011-01-21T19:04:00.000Z

I have heard much about Cedars Express on Park Row - although not necessarily by that name. "The Lebanese" has become a thing of legend, similar to Magic Roll not far away on the Triangle. When we were at uni, friends would often pop in for lunch, but for some reason I never did.

I had my inaugural meal the other night when Matt and I needed a quick meal between finishing work and going to a comedy gig at the Hippodrome. It may not look much from outside, and is a kebab shop popular with late night boozy stragglers - but don't let that stop you from trying it.

Inside there are lots of Middle Eastern delicacies such as baklava all on display - and the food is good value. We pulled up a couple of grubby stools and had a delicious meal for £3.50 each - I went for a lamb kofte pitta and Matt had what he apparently has every time - shish taouk, which is tasty grilled chicken, also served in a pitta. Other options include falafel - or you can have some cheesy chips and other more "fast food"-style fare.

Mine came with salad, hummus and a couple of chillis and Matt's was the same but with a garlicky mayo instead of the hummus. All warm, in lovely pittas.

Not somewhere to impress your in-laws with, but worth a try at least once during your time in Bristol.

Today's Crackerjack foodie offerings

2011-01-20T09:40:00.000Z

Today’s Crackerjack in the Evening Post has some great foodie stuff from Mark Taylor – including an article I can’t find on the website so get a copy of the paper to read it in full.

In brief, it’s about five of Bristol’s top chefs joining forces for a series of culinary evenings. Nathan Muir (New Inn at Backwell), Toby Gritten (Pump House, Hotwells), Peter and Jonray Sanchez-Iglesias (of Michelin-starred Casamia, Westbury-on-Trym) and Josh Eggleton (Pony & Trap, Chew Magna, which won a Michelin star this week) will be holding this series of events, kicking off next Wednesday (January 26) at The New Inn and then the next ones are at the Pony & Trap (February 9), Pump House (February 23) and Casamia (March 9). Each venue’s menu will be different and chefs from each restaurant involved will cook a course. There are full interviews in Crackerjack, but for more information about An Evening with the Chefs at the New Inn, Backwell, next Wednesday, call 01275 462199. For the other events, call the individual restaurants: Pony & Trap (01275 332627); Pump House (0117 927 2229); and Casamia (0117 959 2884).

There are also very complimentary reviews of Blue Ginger in Whitchurch and the new French addition to Clifton village, Cote.

New supper club dates

2011-01-19T16:55:00.000Z

Some new Bristol supper club dates for your diaries...

The Bishopston Supper Club will be holding dinner number three on Friday, February 18 at 7.30pm. Email frommykitchen2010@gmail.com to book.
Menu TBC nearer the time but at the moment looks something like this - Celery and Stichelton soup, walnut crouton; Red mullet escabeche, potato salad; Milk-braised pork belly, Puy lentils; Rhubarb and orange trifle. Yum.

Montpelier Basement is holding an "anti-valentine" weekend in February - "We do believe in Love (Not luurrrve). But not the ersatz, corporate, set menu nonsense peddled by most restaurants on this date," say Dan and Elly. They are holding two rose-free suppers on Friday, Feb 11th and Saturday, Feb 12th. Expect up to eight courses of British, seasonal and local food, for £25. Email montpelierbsmt@gmail.com to book. And check them out in Venue this week - click here.