A personal message

I think there must be something about blogging and social media, when it comes to my own projects, that intimidates me. In the last year, I have eaten and cooked a great deal and taken many photos of said food. I have even written about some of these experiences – for my eyes only. But something, for some reason, has stopped me from properly developing this blog.

The last couple of years have represented something of crisis phase for me, in which I’ve realised that my career and education have been going in a direction that I don’t feel represents me, and that I no longer believe in. I find things hard to walk away from once I’ve started. Cue two degrees in arguably the wrong subject area, and a job I’ve stayed in longer than I should. On a positive day, I could rationalise that these wrong decisions will ultimately equip me with enough self-knowledge to make the right one. But I’m not there yet.

Of all the things I’ve discovered that don’t make me happy, food is the constant that does. Cooking is a way of showing the people around you that you care for them. It’s the thing that brings people together in all settings: happy, sad and everyday occasions. It’s fundamental, it should be pleasurable and it connects us. Food is love.

I guess one of the important things about a blog, in terms of its appeal, is that the writer has a voice. I want this blog to be about food, not about the often-ridiculous things that happen in my life. But I am what I eat in quite a fundamental sense – food frames my life – so I wanted to try to offer up a bit of an explanation about why I haven’t blogged for so long. Hopefully, this will allow me to connect a bit more with the immediacy that blogging offers – that it requires – and to overcome whatever it is that’s been holding me back.  

Store cupboard lunch: mackerel, spring onion and cherry tomato pasta

I first made this dish a few months ago. Hungry one lunchtime, and not wanting to go out for a food shop I raided my cupboards to see what I could put together, and it’s been a staple ever since. Quick to prepare and make, and with whole wheat pasta being high in fibre, and the mackerel providing one of your recommended portions of oily fish, it’s pretty nutritious to boot. Any pasta will work so feel free to alter the dish to your convenience.

Serves 2

150 g whole wheat fusilli (I recommend Napolina – it has a smoother texture than some of the supermarkets’ own brands)
4 spring onions
Handful of cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 tin of mackerel
Extra virgin olive oil to dress
Squeeze of lemon

• Boil the pasta according to the packet instructions (brown can take a little longer than white pasta so it’s worth reading the packet!).
• In the meantime, chop your spring onions, quarter the cherry tomatoes and drain the tin of mackerel, breaking it into flakes.
• Once ready, drain the pasta. Mix in the mackerel and share between two plates. Scatter over the spring onions and cherry tomatoes. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, a squeeze of lemon if you have it, and season with salt and black pepper.

Smoky chicken and chorizo stew with red peppers and butter beans

This dish can be made as sweet or spicy as you like by adjusting the amount of chilli and sweet paprika you put in. Leave out the cayenne pepper if you’d like it less hot. For the paprika, I recommend La Chinata, which can be purchased at Brindisa in London’s Borough Market, or online at Brindisa.com. It’s gorgeously smoky and will transform your dish. I like to make extra when I do this dish and have a few portions left over to freeze. It’s great comfort food.

Serves 4

For the stew

2 red onions
2 cloves of garlic
1 red chilli
150 g chorizo
2 tins of tomatoes
2 red peppers
1 tin of butter beans
Couple of pinches of dried thyme
½ tsp sweet smoked paprika
½ tsp hot smoked paprika
Pinch of cayenne pepper
4 free range chicken breasts, diced

For the rice

300 g Brown long grain rice
1 tsp turmeric

Prep

• Dice the red onions and garlic
• Remove the skin from the chorizo and cut roughly into 1.5 cm cubes.
• Chop two red peppers into large chunks
• Dice the chicken

Cooking

• Heat a little olive oil in a deep frying pan and sweat the onions on a low heat for about 5 minutes
• Add the chilli and chorizo pieces to the pan with the onions. The chorizo will begin to release its juices and colour at this stage, which will add a lovely flavour to the dish.
• After 5 minutes, add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds to 1 minute.
• Add the tins of tomatoes to the pan. Fill up both tins with a little water and give them a swirl round, before adding the tomato water back to the dish, so as to avoid any waste.
• Add the peppers, butter beans and a sprinkling of dried thyme to the sauce.
• Season with the sweet and hot smoked paprika and cayenne pepper. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your preference.
• Leave the sauce cooking for about 20 minutes and then rinse your brown rice and add it to a pan of boiling water, adding the turmeric at the same time. Give the rice a stir at this stage, but not again.
• After the rice has been cooking for 10 minutes, fry your chicken in a separate pan until cooked through – about 10 minutes. Once ready, add the chicken to the tomato sauce and stir through.
• When the rice is ready, you’re good to go!

Gooey and rich chocolate profiteroles with a nutty crunch

I’m told if you’re precise with measuring your ingredients, choux pastry can’t go wrong, and – so far – this promise has held up! For the choux mix, I’ve recommended the Leith’s recipe here and the chocolate sauce is from Felicity Cloake. The hazelnuts are all me!

Makes about 18 profiteroles

Choux pastry

85g butter
220ml water
105g plain flour, sifted 3 times
Pinch of salt
3 eggs

Cream filling

600 ml whipping cream

Chocolate Sauce

150 g good quality dark chocolate, broken into pieces
50 ml whipping cream
2 tsp golden syrup
Knob of butter
Pinch of salt
Sprinkling of hazelnuts

• First, heat the oven to Gas Mark 6/ 200°C.
• Sift the flour three times with a pinch of salt. Put the water and butter into a saucepan and bring slowly to the boil. By the time the water is boiling, the butter should have completely melted. Once boiling fast, tip in all the flour and beat fast with a wooden spoon. It will begin to combine so that it leaves the sides of the pan and has a glossy finish.
• The mixture needs to be cool before the eggs are added so that the heat from the mixture doesn’t cook the eggs. You can speed this up if you wish by spreading the mixture out onto a cool plate.
• Beat the eggs and, when the mixture is cool, add the eggs a little at a time and beat vigorously. This is important to get air into the mixture as it is the steam from the air that allows choux pastry to rise; there are no raising agents. The mixture is ready when it has a soft dropping consistency – you may not need all of the eggs.
• Prepare a baking tray with some greased baking paper and dollop about a teaspoon of the mixture at a time, leaving room for the profiteroles to grow in size – about 3 cm apart should do.
• Cook in a heated oven at Gas Mark 6/ 200°C for 20–30 minutes, until golden brown. It is important that they are not too pale as otherwise they will become soggy later on.
• Prick the underside of each profiterole with a skewer and make the hole big enough for your cream nozzle or piping bag.
• Turn the oven off and put the profiteroles back in for 5 minutes, hole-side up. This will allow the middle of the profiteroles to dry out.
• When cool, whip the cream and fill the profiteroles. This dessert is best eaten as it is made but the pasty will keep out of the fridge to be filled with cream as a later point. Putting choux pastry in the fridge will make it soggy so it’s best only to fill those you are about to eat!
• For the sauce, put chocolate and cream into a small pan and cook on a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate has melted into the cream.
• Stir in the syrup and then butter. The butter will give the sauce a nice gloss.
• Pour the sauce over the cream-filled profiteroles and sprinkle hazelnuts on top. Yum!

Foodies Festival, London Clapham Common, 7-9th June 2013

Upon entry to the recent Foodies Festival, I was in a bit of a grump. My so-called VIP pass transpired to be eligible for redemption at only a small number of restaurant tents. I made a beeline for Jamie Oliver’s Barbecoa, only to be told that, instead of the two-course meal that the pass promised, my ticket was valid at the tent for just £2.50 and I must pay the difference. Apparently, there had been some miscommunication between the organisers and the restaurants. Not a great start.

Doing away with all pretence at frugality, I went ahead and ordered at Barbecoa anyway: a juicy pulled pork roll with a smoky barbeque sauce and a light, fresh coleslaw with red cabbage and spring onions. The sort of sandwich that sets an impossibly high standard for all other sandwiches and makes you look down at your empty plate with nostalgia and longing.

It was on my second trip to the Barbecoa tent (the first sandwich had been shared and I felt it necessary to right that particular wrong) that I met Paul from Donostia Social Club, a Basque-inspired street food van and pop-up restaurant. He was bringing a few of his dishes for the Barbecoa staff to sample. Eying a generous confit duck roll, a shout of: “Where’s that from?” escaped my lips before I even had the chance to contemplate any introductory pleasantries. This was followed by enthusiastic urgings from the Jamie Oliver staff to try DSC’s Iberico pork cheek. The dish in question: succulent pork cheek sourced from Salmanca, Spain, braised in rioja for 12 hours and served with celariac puree and seeded artisan bread.  The dish was so popular that I just caught the last serving of pork and, unfortunately, there was no celeriac puree left. But the pork and bread alone were a delight.

 

Unlike other street food vans relying on a high turnover and fast-food service, the atmosphere at DSC is relaxed and welcoming. I was encouraged to pull up a pew, sip on a glass of rioja and talk food while they cooked. Chatting about the origins of the restaurant, the enthusiasm of DSC for good produce and Basque cuisine was clear. The quality of the ingredients shone through in the dishes: vegetables are British and organic, the prawns are MSC-approved and duck is free range from northern France. After the farce of the VIP pass, my mood post-DSC was markedly improved! 

On the whole, it was an enjoyable festival. The chef demonstrations were great addition and seeing Mike Brown of Daphne’s whip up a super quick squid ink pasta with a food processor was a bit of a revelation. There were a few samples available throughout, but not as many as I’d hope for in a setting of this sort.  When I asked if I could taste some fudge before buying it, I was told that that particular flavour was ‘not on sample at the moment’, before the vendor turned away from me. In the world of fudge, where treats are purchased by weight, this refusal left a bitter taste.

My recommendations? If you go to another Foodies Festival this summer, certainly don’t bother with the VIP pass; Barbecoa is well worth checking out; and do try to catch Donostia Social Club somewhere near you. It could brighten your mood too.