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endive, blue cheese and pear salad

20 Feb

pear and endive salad

My February kitchen has not been much to write home about. Though I resolved to try 10 new recipes from neglected cookbooks, I often end up eating leftover cake for supper (hurrah for being a grown-up) or a plain salad to balance out the cake (curses on adult responsability).

There was a whole mackerel roasted with lemon and a particularly nice dinner among girlfriends with beef, apricot and spinach meatballs simmered in tomato sauce – but that is all self-explanatory.

I can only offer this salad, in imitation of a wonderful Lyonnais bistro in St-Germain, whose address I will be not sharing (bribes notwithstanding) because it was too full and their seven-hour lamb was too delicious.

Endives can be jarring – too bitter, too teeth-squeakingly watery. But here, sliced as finely as coleslaw, they are the the star of the plate, crunchy but delicate, spotlit by a mustard dressing. Its subtle colours – cream, pale green. mottled blue – hide a wallop of flavour: bitter endive, sweet pear, sharp cheese. It is a wintery salad full of promise, for crunch and light and better things to come.

~~~

Pear, endive and blue cheese salad

serves 4 as a starter

4 large endives

2 crisp, slightly unripe conference pears

200g blue cheese

3 tbs olive oil

2 tbs lemon juice

1 tsp dijon mustard

1/2 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

a pinch of pepper

Halve and core the pears. Slice them and the endives as thinly as possible. Shake the dressing ingredients in a jar, toss most of it with the salad, add more to taste. Crumble the blue cheese over the top.

cauliflower soup with toasted hazelnuts

26 Dec

cauliflower, whole

The pile of books by my bed is getting dangerously high. Possibly because I am ignoring the worthy French literature in favour of Nigel Slater’s ‘The Kitchen Diaries II.’ If I am too tired to actually cook, reading his simple prose is a comforting substitute. His are recipes of happenstance, of successful improvisation. He knows food well enough to play with it, to strip it bare and  build it back up again.

I want to say it is “real food” but that carries shades of judgement, like “real women have curves.” Slater is honest: though he admits that there is a better flavour in soaked beans, he cheats when he is hungry after a day in the garden. (Girls come in different shapes and sizes and food is always real, whether you have the time and energy to kill and pluck your own pheasant, or you just want to trick out a can of beans.)

It is earthy practical writing, punctuated with the odd hymn to the perfect wok, to the spurtle (a porridge stirrer) that is delightful to read. Also, I adore his grumpy “the world doesn’t need another cupcake recipe.”

Though his baked potatoes with rillettes are high on my list, the book ribbon is marking his cauliflower soup. It is pure and hearty – no cream, he insists, as it masks the shy flavour of cauliflower, which is supported by bacon and bay leaf and pepper. To decorate, he saves a few florets before blending the soup smooth and toasts some hazelnuts with oil and salt.

I do not have any stock in the freezer – rarely ever do, since it is Parisian pocket-sized – but improvised with a few dried porcini slices and a parmesan rind. I think Nigel would approve.

cauliflower, halved

Cauliflower soup with toasted hazelnuts

serves 6 – from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries

1 enormous cauliflower

3 rashers good-quality bacon

1 onion

1 clove garlic

1.2 litres stock (or water + porcini + parmesan rind)

2 bay leaves

100g hazelnuts

1 tsp olive oil

salt and pepper

Cut bacon small and fry in its own fat until crisp and golden. Dice the onion and cook with bacon until translucent. Finely chop the garlic and add at the last minute so it does not burn.

Cut cauliflower in half, cut out the middle stalk and break the florets into small pieces with your hands. Chop the stalks small as well. Add cauliflower, stock and bay leaves to the pot and allow to simmer until the cauliflower is tender.

Remove bay leaves and a few florets for decoration. Let cool a little while you toast the hazelnuts in a small frying pan with the olive oil. When they start to smell toasty, go brown inside, they are done. Add a generous pinch of sea-salt.

Blend the soup perfectly smooth – be careful with hot liquid in a blender! – and add generous pinches of salt and pepper. Taste. Serve with the remaining whole florets and a few hazelnuts sprinkled on top.

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cucumber, melon and yoghurt gazpacho

9 Aug

Like most things in life, there is an easy way and a hard way.

You can throw an elaborate Sunday brunch for all your friends. (Menu may or may not include ridiculous impossible mushroom quiche; warm potato salad with gherkins and sunflower seeds; cucumber and melon salad with mint, mocha maracons, cream cheese brownies and peach cake with chili sugar.)

Bake frantically for three days between night shifts on chocolate duty at work, wake up early to clean apartment, painstakingly filter 3 litres of cold-brewed iced coffee.

Enjoy being a hostess, if a little like a pushy Italian mamma. Eat, eat, why aren’t you eating?

The next morning, drowsy and still a little full from all the eating, find just a bowl of wilted melon salad left over. Blend with a little yoghurt. Discover it to be delicious and refreshing, worthy of both a restaurant and a hangover cure. The downfall of the salad – a little too juicy between the honeydew melon and the cucumber – is a positive boon for a soup.

It is a beautiful pastel green, with a slight crunch. Sweet and cool, definitely a starter for a hot summer day.

Or, alternatively:

Chop some cucumber, melon and mint. Add a few cubes of feta, yoghurt. Blend and serve with a sprig of mint.

So, which way was more fun?

Cucumber melon and yoghurt soup

per person:

1/2 cup diced cucumber, seeds removed

1/2 cup diced honeydew melon

1/2 cup (125ml) natural yoghurt

a few cubes of feta cheese, preferably marinated with oil and herbs

mint leaves

salt

Deseed and peel melon and cucumber. Chop roughly. Blend with yoghurt and feta and some mint. (If plain feta, add just a drop of olive oil to the mix.) Salt to taste. Chill for a couple of hours. (Or stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes, blend again.)

Serve very cold with a few mint leaves on top.

cream cheese, cucumber and tomato sandwich on rye bread

9 Jul

One of my favourite stories. The moral is: books are good. Or books will get you bitten by a snake. Or, the best books have recipes in them.

Ready?

Once, on holiday in the south of France, an adder slid into the cool tiled house. It curled up like a family pet next to my dad, who was reading the paper. He looks down, calm, folds up the paper. Tiptoes out of the sitting room and shuts the door. While my mother screamed and stood on a chair like a classic cartoon – in another room entirely – my father went to get a spade and a pillowcase.

Because in my favourite children’s books of all time, about Frances the Badger, her greedy chauvinist friend Albert the Badger is really good at catching snakes. With a spade and a pillowcase. (He also likes to eat lobster salad sandwiches.)

Unsurprisingly, our snake is not up for pillowcase fun. It slides into a hole in the wall, lurks while the hole is filled up with cement, then eats his way out again. One sluggish white ghost-snake, belly full of cement, finally submits to the spade treatment. I think my dad goes back to reading the paper.

I wish he was still around to help me wrangle snakes. Or start my own business. Even just write a killer cover letter. I guess Albert the Badger and I will have to hang out instead. The book’s description of his normal school lunch is one which my father would have thoroughly enjoyed:

“What do you have today?” said Frances.

“I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread,” said Albert. “And a pickle and a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk.

And a bunch of  grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with.”

Do I need to tell you how to make a sandwich? The most important thing, from the illustrations at least, is the napkin and tablecloth, maybe a tiny vase of flowers. You set out all your elaborate lunch particles with care, try everything and make it all come out even.

 

Albert’s cream cheese, cucumber and tomato sandwich on rye bread

serves one badger

(cheese spread from the uber-healthy 101 cookbooks)

2 tbs cream cheese

1 tbs butter, softened

pinch salt / pepper

dash of paprika

1/2 tsp mustard

2 small pickles / gherkins, chopped finely

1/2 small shallot, also chopped finely

1 firm tomato

1/2 cucumber

2 slices rye or seedy wholegrain bread

chives for decoration

Vigourously mix the cream cheese and butter. Add salt pepper, paprika and mustard to taste. Stir in the shallots and pickle. Slice the cucumber and tomato as thinly as possible. Spread cheese spread over the bread, top with alternate slices of cucumber/tomato. Add a fine drizzle of olive oil, if you like, and a sprinkle of chives.

Optional: hard-boiled egg, tangerine, cup custard.

*This is us, in France. I am gnawing on a baguette, obviously.

smoked pepper mackerel with raspberry relish; fennel and orange salad

26 Apr

The disaffected baker youth are getting restless, shifting in their spots at the back of the class.

One of them wants to be a barman now, thinks it might be a bit more street. They all recoil from the draconian rules: they don’t want to take off their caps, giant headphones, piercings. Me neither, to be honest. The military atmosphere, lining up two by two to walk up to the classroom (in silence!)  makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

It was supposed to be about the cakes. But first we have to sit through science, technology, commerce classes. It might be interesting if it wasn’t dictation. We copy, word for word. The rebellious ones read the newspaper.

Last week someone started a fire in the bathroom.

Pastry school turns out to have downsides. Not all sunshine and sugar roses. At school, I get the real French experience. Pointless rules, a man with a moustache to shout at us, to call us idiots. (He normally uses a much more vulgar word than that.) My favourite classmate calls it ‘character building.’ She’s quitting at the end of year, with a much tougher skin than before.

But all this gives me an ‘in’: I get to work in a proper patisserie, alternating with school weeks. I get to try my hand at creams and biscuits and mousses, most of which I am allowed to taste. I get a qualification, albeit GCSE level, with which I can enter the job market.

I’m lucky. I’m still doing what I want to do. I have to jump through some hoops to get it. It’s just that sometimes, at the end of my day in the classroom, I dream about setting fire to all my school books.

And so, not much energy for real cooked food recently. Evening suppers are for rice pudding, peas and bacon, quinoa salads (thank-you, charming flatmate) and crisps. I can’t think of anything worth sharing…

Except for one lunchtime after a morning in the school labs. We made little coffee religieuses, supposedly nun-shaped pastries. (Only in France, right? That and the bicolour “divorce” cream puff.) So I needed something sharp and savoury and quick, preferably made from all the lurkers in the fridge. Something with colour, to make me feel like a person again.

Smoked pepper mackerel with raspberry relish; fennel and orange salad

(this isn’t really a recipe, but please humour me)

Smash a whole mackerel, smoked with giant crumbs of pepper, onto some buttered rye bread, or seedy wholegrain crackers. Heat a handful of raspberries with a pinch of sugar in a small saucepan just until they wilt and get juicy. Dot the mackerel with the beautiful scarlet relish.

Thinly slice a fennel bulb. Supreme an orange, squeeze the juice from what’s left over onto the fennel. Mix with olive oil, more pepper and fancy salt and call it a salad.

Serve your colourful foods together.

sweet spicy salty salmon fishcakes (simple salmon #2)

14 Apr

Nearly a year ago now, I wrote about another salmon supper. It was supposed to be a series. The next one in said series has a story about denim and irons. The last one was full of overly poignant memories.

This is just supper. Combining my love of all things pancake with a taste for faintly oriental dressing (anything that reminds me of gyoza dipping sauce, really) these fishcakes are cool and tangy and so simple.

Bright orange from the sweet potato, coated in sesame seeds. Salmon from a tin, or leftovers hiding in the fridge. A few minutes of mashing, squashing and patting into shape. The satisfying sizzle of oil. A salad with avocado and mustard.

Make with them what you will: add chopped fennel or chili, coat with fine breadcrumbs or oats or even shredded coconut. Swap in canned tuna or real potato, use paprika and sweet barbecue sauce instead of soy. Have an easy flavourful supper of your own.

Sweet spicy salty salmon fishcakes

makes just about a light supper for 2

1 large sweet potato

1 tin salmon (100g, drained)

1 shallot, chopped fine

1 spring onion, also chopped fine

1 egg

1 tbsp soy sauce

1-2 tsp rice vinegar

1/2 – 1 tsp fish sauce

a dash of chili

indefinite smount of sesame seeds

Stab the sweet potato all over with a fork and microwave on medium-high for 3-5 minutes. Turn it over once so it steams evenly.

Mix the egg, salmon, chopped onions in a large bowl. Mash the sweet potato (keep the skin on if you like) into the mixture. Add the seasonings and taste. Add more if necessary – they should taste sharp and tangy.

Heat a large frying pan on medium heat with just a drizzle of oil. Coconut oil is nice, olive will do. Tip sesame seeds into a shallow dish. Make six balls of mix (they will be quite soft and sticky) and press them into the seeds on each side. When the oil is hot enough to sizzle a drop of water, cook the fishcakes a few minutes both sides until the seeds are golden-brown and the middles nice and warm.

Serve with a crisp green salad and some edamame.

chevre chaud au bacon (the perfect goat’s cheese salad)

27 Mar

I did it again. I ate my lunch before I could draw it for you nice people. But you have to have a life before a blog. And besides, the false spring has gone to my head.

These few balmy days when the trees are still stripped bare, the warm sunshine and the lone butterfly brave enough to venture out are lulling me into a syrupy stupor. I know that it will rain again in April, that I will have to leave my hideaway in the south of France for self-important Paris, but for the moment I have a diamond patio and a plate empty of anything but radish stalks, so blissful denial is the way forward.

What’s more, I have found the perfect salad, the perfect lunch. I already knew radishes and avocadoes and rocket and fennel were happy partners, but they are made bistrot-worthy by the simplest addition: a pat of soft goat’s cheese fried in bacon. Ours came from a local farmer, ready wrapped.

(I just asked my mother for a suitable simile for the size of the goat’s cheese crottins – which means poop, by the way, confirming my longheld prejudice that the French are obsessed with crap – and she suggested “larger than half a crown, slightly smaller than an Olympic medallion.” Neither of which I have ever seen or will see, in all probability. Thanks, Mum.)

So, take a tub of soft goat’s cheese and form a little fat pancake per person, as much as you can stomach. Wrap it all over in a thin streaky bacon like pancetta so it’s nicely sealed in and fry in a hot frying pan until crisp outside and just warm within. Serve on a bed of rocket and raddichio (bitter to cut the rich cheese flavour)with slivers of fennel, circles of radish and chunks of avocado, lightly dressed. Eat with lots of French bread and pale butter.

(Our favourite local just caught us finishing our lunch, barefoot, at 4pm.  He wished us a bon appetit, but refused a slice of apple tart on the grounds that his top dentures are being repaired at the moment. He is the picture of health for 87, always in the same black beret and wire rimmed sunglasses. The magic of the southern sunshine and the robust Gascon diet.)

tarte aux pommes

28 Oct

Normandy is like Hereford. Apple trees everywhere, hemmed in by tall hedges. Black and white houses. Tractors that lumber past, farmers that raise a hand curtly to thank you for waiting. Bed and breakfasts on every corner.

Normandy is also like Mongolia. One particular bed and breakfast boasts four authentic Mongolian yurts, decorated with traditional rugs and even a fur hat. But the fur is unnecessary – the gas heater made the round tent stifling hot. All the novelties of camping in greenery, complete with genuine rooster alarm, but with a bed and a duvet and a picture of a camel.

Normandy is a piece of England, whence William the Conqueror, the first king to really organise our tribal country and to record our history, our defeat colourfully embroidered along 70m of the Bayeux tapestry. It is also a little piece of the war, the second, in a way that England will never be. Concrete bunkers and lookout points pockmark the countryside, intrude on the flat empty beaches.

For me, it was a lot of apples. The little homely ones in huge piles waiting to be made into cider or calvados (apple liqueur). Also the tarte normande, a simple apple tart with as much variation as the region itself. Neat slices overlay a crème pâtissière base. Or great chunks of apple under a light almond crumble. Or my favourite, the tarte fine: wafer thin slices snake across buttery puff pastry, just dusted with brown sugar.

This is the pastry school version: to start, all you need is good, light pastry. Then delicious apples – not flabby, floury ones. Not supermarket ones. Interesting ones.

Cook one of them with sugar and lemon juice to a perfumed mush and spread over the bottom of the uncoooked pastry. Slice the rest thin and overlap them closely – they will shrink a little in the oven.

Sprinkle with just a little crunchy granulated sugar. Bake for about 40 minutes at 180C. Serve with cider, whipped cream and a real fire. (Or a gas fire – in your yurt!)

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chicken soup with lemon, ginger and nam pla

7 Oct

Sunday was market day. Two pineapples, lots of lemons, a bag of carrots that went mouldy the day after, and a chicken, its head lolling grotesquely. Squeamish girls, we asked for the head and feet to be chopped off.

Sunday night we had roast chicken and leek tart. I boasted that I had not been really sick, stay at home miserable sick, for more than a year.

Wednesday the leftover roast chicken went in a pot with a red onion and a dodgy carrot. The tiny apartment was invaded by chicken stock, the scent of smug preparation. We thought of risottos, soups, pasta.

Thursday morning I got sick. Nauseous, head-spinning sick. At a creepy crawly pace I cut salmon slices at work. Whipped eggs and almonds. For once I didn’t want to taste the latest experiment: turmeric, pistachio and rose-water tart. I just wanted to go back to bed. To have someone make me chicken soup.

No-one made me soup. I went home early (was accosted by a creepy pony-tailed man who insisted on complimenting my breasts) and dozed off alone on the sofa.

I made me soup. I chopped onion and courgette, grated ginger. Skimmed the fat off the stock. Pulled the remaining scraps of chicken from the grey carcass. Stirred, slowly. I squeezed in half a lemon and added a tiny splash of soy sauce and fish sauce, nam pla, for flavour without salt.

It was clear if not pretty, a lemon slice floating on the surface. Light and bright and soothing. Just right (and just easy enough) for sad invalids. When I feel better, I might add salt and pepper, bulghur wheat or rosemary-garlic croutons, cherry tomatoes. Cream. Endless possibilities.

Chicken soup for sad, sick people

For the stock:

1 leftover chicken carcass (roast or not), a little meat left on

1 red onion

1 carrot

For the soup:

a little olive oil

1 red onion

1 courgette

1 inch ginger

50ml white wine

leftover chicken pieces

chicken stock

2 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp nam pla (fish sauce)

juice of 1/2 lemon

lemon slice, to decorate

Make the chicken stock: (Preferably the night before.) In a huge pot, place your chicken bones, hopefully with a little meat left on, onion and carrot. Fill the pot (at least enough to cover the chicken). Bring to a boil and then turn down to simmer for at least one hour if not two. The kitchen should smell satisfactorially chickeny. Let cool and skim off some of the fat on the surface.

Make the soup: Heat olive oil in a large saucepan. Finely dice the onion and courgette and grate the ginger. Sautee the onion until translucent, then add the courgette and ginger. Cook and stir every now and then until the courgette is nice and soft. Add the white wine and let most of it bubble off.

Now add enough stock to fill your saucepan. While it heats, pull any leftover chicken meat off the bones and shred it with your fingers. Add to pot. Squeeze in the lemon juice, add the soy sauce and nam pla. Let it warm to desired temperature, then serve with a slice of lemon.

If you are not sick – I hate you. But you may add fun things: croutons, parmesan, black pepper, creme fraiche, lardons.

 

 

 

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giant orange mushrooms

5 Aug

Time creeps past like the beetle crossing our drive, waving its stately black pincers. The minutes slow to a crawl, the hours speed past. Hours spent reading in the hammock end, surprised, by a call to supper. Long moments spent watching stars, admiring the clear band of  the Milky Way. In the bleached yellow farmhouse with the blue door all appropriate timetables dissolve.

Suitable activities include: identifying butterflies, making brioche, reading comicbooks. The evening aperitif is timed by the cows returning home for their own meal.

Mushroom hunting suddenly becomes a positively active and interesting exercise. Armed with baskets and sturdy boots, we squash leaves and peer under thorns. Compete to find the craggy brown cepes, neat girolles and above all the orange ones.

Amonita caesarea, funghi only fit for an emperor, that the French just call Oronges. Creamy gills, bright sunset caps. To be found under oak trees, near moss. Take them home, display them proudly on the ping pong table. Brush off any dirt and slice them thick, fry them in butter.

“Tastes like chicken,” says my culinary mother. Really? Actually, they do have a beautifully meaty flavour, a smooth texture. Mostly, a stunning colour. I could have eaten just a plateful of Oranges, instead of the freshly grilled lamb and merguez, foccacia, pinenut salad spread out in front of us. But one must be polite. And it was all delicious, of course.

Except for the cepes: having watched the cooking process and seen the tiny maggots squirming in panic out of the frying mushroom cap, I just couldn’t stomach the idea. My brother reliably assured me that they were very tasty, if not strictly vegetarian.

Orange mushrooms with butter and chives

~~~

orange mushrooms, collected from the woods

lots of butter

lots of chives

a dollop of creme fraiche

salt and pepper

~~~

Brush off the mushrooms cap and cut into thick slices, stalks and all. Heat a large frying pan over a very high heat and add a big chunk of butter. As it sizzles, add a single layer of mushrooms to the pan. Cook for a few minutes on each side, then transfer to a plate and cook the rest. Put all the cooked mushrooms back into the pan, sprinkle with chives, salt and pepper and stir in the creme fraiche. Warm gently for a minute and serve straightaway.

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