Nigel's fry ups
"The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much." Nigel Slater Uninspired as usual of late, I did my own kind of lucky dip by just picking a page from Nigel Slater's Tender volume 1 - and came up with A fry-up of pumpkin and apple to accompany a meaty supper - well why not I thought. Another enticing recipe title that sets a scene. I thought he might have some more fry-up
Jun 22
Lucky dip - Kubbeh hamusta
"A recipe that adapts to its environment, but never forgets where it came from." Elli Benaiah/Beyond Babylon There are so many tricky and just picky issues about this particular recipe. It comes from Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalem - a word that evokes a whole range of emotions these days - mostly not good. Although Sami Tamimi - a Palestinian and Yotam Ottolenghi - a Jew of mixed heritage, are no longer official business partners in the Ottolenghi empire,
Jun 19
Titbits
titbits - " a small piece of interesting information, or a small dish of pleasant-tasting food" Cambridge English Dictionary I'm a bit late in the day with this so it's a this and that kind of post. With today's title titbits - sometimes spelt with a hyphen - tit-bits and by the Americans as tidbits. Which you might think is just because of pronunciation, but apparently has something to do with a long-ago root word of 'tyd.' But I won't go there today. When I looked up ti
Jun 18
Cauliflower cheese soup
"It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it." Nigel Slater Often I have a vague idea of what to do for dinner, and then I either go with what is to hand, or search around my cookbooks and the net to find the answer. Today I thought I should probably use the last bit of cauliflower that I have in my fridge before it goes off completely - small brown spots are already appearing. And when vegetables are getting to that stage, then soup is the answer. There is some leftov
Jun 16
A surprise mushroom bourguignon
"I always argued that most of the things people thought they liked about meat they actually liked about the sauces and braises and spices they were cooked in" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen Last night we were invited to dinner at my son's house - for a French mushroom dish - his wife told me - when the invite was issued. A lovely surprise in itself but the meal was also a delicious surprise. I should say here, that although my younger son does indeed cook quite a lot, he most
Jun 15
Breadsticks or grissini - maybe ficelles?
"Bread - the founding food of civilisation ... the two plus two equals five of culinary evolution" Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Not that breadsticks are what we first think of when we think of bread. But then as he goes on to say - bread has many forms: "Bread is also like humanity itself. We come in many different shapes and sizes colours and guises, yet underneath the skin/crust, we're all made of the same stuff. And the trick of achieving happiness and harmony is surely
Jun 13
Lardy cakes
Lardy cake isn’t lardy cake if you hold back." Kimberley Killebrew/Daring Gourmet The lardy cake above is my inspiration today - it's Tom Hunt's version of this traditional British cake from The Guardian - and now having searched the net for variants - one of the best I think. It came from a link in Felicity Cloake's Guardian Feast newsletter, in which she was bemoaning the loss, or at least scarcity of traditional British bakery treats such as this. Potentially unhealthy,
Jun 12
Spanish-style - well any '-style'
If you have read yesterday's post, you will know that this is one of two dishes that I am currently considering for our lunch on Saturday. It's from the delicious. book More Please, by Valli Little, and for some reason I assumed that it was a Spanish dish. And so today, I was going to 'research' this Spanish dish and do one of my kind of analyses of a traditional dish. However, when I checked my Spanish cookbooks - Claudia Roden and Robert Carrier being the authors - and al
Jun 4
Rediscovering Valli Little
"our sincere thanks to a woman who changed the landscape of Australian food." Jane de Graaf/Nine On Saturday I'm doing lunch for our lunching friends. We take it in turns to cook lunch every month or so. So I am in early planning mode, and have started looking for inspiration. I decided my starting point would be winter and so I began with Delia and Diana Henry - as I mentioned yesterday. Diana was a bit of a disappointment and Delia did have a couple of things I thought
Jun 3
Dutch babies - neither Dutch nor babies
"dramatic, rumpled crepe-like pancakes will always be more exciting than undramatic, unrumpled crepes" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen This really began with an Ottolenghi newsletter but since I started with a quote from Deb Perelman, I thought I might as well start with her recipe Extra billowy dutch baby pancake - because it's just the basic recipe. And in a way that's all you need to know about this. It's a sort of a cross between a crêpe and a Yorkshire pudding, in that i
May 31
Nice - a word and a place
"By 1926, nice was said to be "too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness." [Fowler]/Etymonline I have no idea now where my inspiration for this post came from, but I think it began with the word rather than the place - very different things - and yet, maybe that quote is indeed apt. for both of them. We shall see. Above is my very last sight of la belle France,
May 27
Supper and how to write a recipe
"Supper is simply the comforting end point to which the whole day has been leading." Bee Wilson A subtitle to this post might also be "why I love Nigel's recipes" What's the connection with supper? Well I'm down to my last few bookmarked pages in Nigel Slater's Tender volume 2 so today I decided to deal with one of them which is a recipe entitled "A supper of courgettes, tomatoes and basil" - to which I shall return - but it's also one of the reasons I love his recipes - t
May 26
No pastry? Try potatoes, rice ...
"Very Easy and very cheesy" Erin Jeanne McDowell/Food 52 Today's Happy Foodie newsletter featured a whole lot of quiche recipes, which was sort of coincidental because of yesterday's galette. So I checked them out - there were ten of them and two of them were unusual in the sense that their pastry enclosure was - well I guess you would say - 'not normal'. I was intrigued and started rambling the net to find other ways of making a case for your quiche - or your tart. Now I
May 23
Friday pastry fun
"There is never enough crust." Nigel Slater Somehow or other it is now almost a tradition that Friday is for pastry - usually a quiche. It is also true that by Friday I am using up leftovers, or even leftovers of leftovers. Like today. Pastry and leftovers offer an infinity of possibilities, and a fun challenge. Behold today's challenge. What absolutely has to be used is the tiny bit of leftover vegetable toad-in-the-hole in the front. Actually the vegetables only cons
May 22
Empty food containers
"For a moment you are fully present in your life, clear about the value of every last bit of it." Tamara Adler I'm still working through the pile of books on my desk and have come to another one - like David Chang and Nigel Slater - which has so many yellow stickers poking out of it that it will take me some time to deal with it. So I don't see that pile diminishing any time soon. So I decided that rather than deal with the book as a whole today I would just deal with one o
May 20
Variety
Variety - "a number of different types of things, especially ones in the same general category." Dictionary.com "Variety is the spice of life" It's late in the day so, in spite of the fact that a blog entitled Variety might actually be a quite an interesting idea, today I'm just doing a bits and pieces kind of post. A variety of things - recipes, information, disvcoveries ... But isn't it interesting how many proverbs and sayings are food related? The above rather gloriou
May 19
Polpette al limone from Sicily
"Please don't eat the lemon leaves" Massimo Mele/Gourmet Traveller It's a dismal day, and so I just decided to do an ordinary 'dish of the day' kind of thing, picking another kind of meatball from my meatball book Around the World in 80 Meatballs. This time I picked a Sicilian recipe Polpette al limone - meatballs with lemon. No picture in the book and no recipe online, but having now exlored a large number of options online I think there is no need, because really this is
May 18
What am I to do with David Chang?
Today is the day I finish with this book which has been sitting on my desktop for a long time now, with lots of yellow stickers pointing out of it. Only two remain, and so it's decision time after a last post. Do I keep it, pass it on to my daughter-in-law who may find a use for it or put it in the street library? I think I'll eliminate that last option. It's too good for that. Because really my indecision comes down to just two things. First - I confess I am not hugely i
May 16
A classic in so many ways
"Along the way I was reminded of a kind of cooking which, in the pursuit of the new, I had all but forgotten. And I fell in love with it all over again." Jay Rayner/The Guardian This is a lucky dip post. David picked out the large format revised copy of Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World and the page I randomly chose included a recipe for Coq au vin - accompanied by a short essay and this old-style arty photograph of the dish - well the ingredients. Although now th
May 15
Today's challenge - persimmons
"I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love." One of my Saturday dinner guests brought me this gift - a big bag of persimmons. She did this last year as well and I think I made chutney then. She also gave me a pot of her home-made persimmon jam. Now I have plenty of chutney and plenty of jam in my pantry - indeed I have so much jam it is also stored in the laundry. So I think it would be foolish to make more jam and chutney. So what to do with
May 14