British Hen Welfare Trust: happy hens make for yummy yolks


I often think about what exactly it is that draws me to food and food writing. Obviously, there is the fact that I am a glutton, greedy to sample anything and everything that can possibly pass my lips on this planet of ours. There is also the creativity that comes with cooking; I've always loved all sorts of creative acts - drawing, painting, writing, music - and food is perhaps the most unselfish creative act there is, in that it brings not only happiness to people but also fulfils one of the most basic physical human needs. What makes me love not only cooking and eating food, but also reading and writing obsessively about it, is the way it is fundamentally and inextricably linked with so many other things. Just look at the way the credit crunch brought about a huge change in the way people cook and eat, the way Jamie Oliver started extolling the virtues of back-to-basics cooking in a way that made people think twice before reaching for the phone to dial an expensive takeaway. Or the way our concerns with environmental sustainability have impacted on food, prompting a huge rethink in the way we catch and consume fish. Or the way food is so closely bound up with national identity, yet at the same time crosses cultural boundaries like nothing else; it is often said that the British national dish is now curry, a fact certainly evident from the dishes that have made the final of Great British Menu recently: coronation chicken, Indian spiced sea bass, masala-spiced monkfish. Food is not just something to be eaten as fuel; it is bound up with a whole host of sociopolitical, economic, and ethical concerns. When you hear the words veal, cod, bluefin tuna, farmed salmon, you are no longer listening to a list of appetising things for dinner, but a collection that invokes a whole host of issues that go far beyond the plate.


The same is true of eggs and chicken. I'd like to think that most people in this country are at least partially aware of the horrors of battery farming, though I am frequently confronted with examples that prove that, sadly, this is not the case. A friend of mine remarked that he doesn't care where his chicken has come from, provided he gets to eat it. This kind of thing shocks and disgusts me. Hens are crammed into cages, often with less space per hen than a piece of A4 paper, allowing them no room to move freely or stretch their wings. This creates an increase in disease, cannibalism, and odd pecking behaviours caused by boredom and stress. If you want more horrible details about the conditions in which your chicken and eggs are produced, read here or here. Hideously, it is estimated at 60% of the world's eggs are produced in these conditions. It basically amounts to torture, and yet it's sanctioned and taking place all around us.


What really surprises me about people who buy battery eggs is that they're barely any cheaper than free-range. Surely for about 30p more per half dozen, you could get eggs that don't come with such a horrible ethical burden. When it comes to chicken for eating, free-range chickens are often a bit more expensive than the pallid, blue-tinged, shrink-wrapped specimens on the supermarket shelves, so naturally people are inclined towards those without sparing a thought for the conditions in which the chicken was raised. I firmly believe this is an issue of supply and demand. Because, as a culture, we are obsessed with the idea that a meal is not a meal unless it contains meat, we are driven to purchasing lower quality, less ethical meat simply to satisfy our own demand for the stuff. Personally I would rather go vegetarian for a few days each week, then save up and buy a really gorgeous free-range chicken to roast for lunch at the weekend. What's the point in filling meals with tasteless, chewy, battery-farmed chicken breast just for the sake of having some meat involved? I'd much rather have a chicken that tasted of something and that I treated with respect, making the most of it for its chicken-ness rather than to fill an animal-protein gap that culturally I have been made to believe exists.

I don't want this to sound like a lecture, and I know a lot of people can't afford free range chicken all the time. But the simple solution, to me, is to just eat less meat and buy better when you can. That doesn't sound so difficult to me. If we didn't all buy this horrible stuff, consumers would stop producing it. M&S and Waitrose no longer sell battery eggs, a fact that makes me happy, and other supermarkets like Sainsbury's are planning to phase out battery eggs. However, there is another problem: while you can go free-range when buying boxes of eggs from the shelf or a chicken from the meat counter, you have no way of telling where the eggs come from in a lot of products. Mayonnaise, for example, and ready-meals containing eggs, like quiche. 3 billion eggs go into these processed food products each year, a third of which are imported, and even if Britain did ban caged eggs altogether, there would be no clear way of identifying which eggs were free-range and which were imported from battery farms. Hellmans recently started selling a free-range mayonnaise, though, which I suppose is a step forward. The government plans to phase out battery farms totally by 2012, but there is a lot of contention as to whether this will actually happen. Especially because I read an article recently saying there was a plan to bring back battery rabbit farming. Why on earth, given all the controversy over battery chicken, would you actually take the active step of implementing further horrors on other animals?

As the old saying goes, which came first: the chicken or the egg? I believe it is a case of putting the chickens first, not the need for cheap eggs.


For most battery hens, their life will be a miserable journey from cage to slaughter, once they have passed their peak egg-laying potential. However, the British Hen Welfare Trust, set up in 2005, is a charity that aims to give ex-battery hens a new lease of life. Each year they save approximately 60,000 hens from slaughter by giving them to people to adopt as pets. The BHWT was actually responsible for bringing about the Hellman's free range mayonnaise, and aims to educate people about the horrors of battery farming and what they can do as consumers to make informed choices regarding egg-containing products. Most importantly, they turn battery hens into happy hens, giving them up for adoption by people who can provide space for the hens to roam. If you don't have space for your own hens, you can sponsor a hen for a small cost to guarantee it a better life. I am incredibly keen to have my own hens at some point - you really can't beat fresh eggs, and it's not always apparent, but supermarket eggs may have been lying around for weeks before sale. I remember staying in Italy on a farm in Perugia a few summers ago, and eating eggs still warm from the chickens for breakfast. They're not only tastier, but also better for a variety of culinary usages - it's well known that only fresh eggs will poach properly.


My friend Laura recently adopted some ex-battery hens from the Trust, and I was lucky enough to be given some of their eggs to sample. I thought they were delicious; much more flavoursome than supermarket eggs. Laura tells me that now the hens have been out of the battery farm for a bit longer, the eggs are even better (I look forward to receiving another batch). The hens were a bit scrawny and decrepit-looking when she first got them, but she tells me that she has noticed "such a difference in their perkiness and featheriness already". You can see some photos here of the happy hens (Eliza, Matilda, Jennifer and Prudence), freed from their hideous prisons. I imagine it must be immensely satisfying to watch their journey from traumatised, brutalised animal into freely roaming, happy outdoor hen. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, too: happiness for the hens, and yummy eggs for the human. It also just goes to show that, despite a large part of their lives being spent in such traumatic conditions, a hen is not a worthless creature to be discarded afterwards. They are susceptible to habilitation, and I think it's great that charities like the British Hen Welfare Trust are working to achieve this. To transform a hen from a scraggy, tormented thing to a proud and splendid animal is something I envy all ex-battery hen-adopters.

So if you're reading this, I hope you'll consider changing your egg and chicken-buying habits if you haven't already. Think of poor Eliza, Matilda, Jennifer and Prudence. And if you are considering getting hens, definitely have a look at the BHWT's website - there's loads of useful information on there about getting your hens (they're free, but they suggest a small donation to help maintain the charity), caring for them, recommended vets, etc. There's also a lot of information about British free-range chicken farmers and the need for an educated, egg-wise consumer.

And, below - what better way to eat delicious, free-range, fresh eggs than poached on toast with a generous helping of smoked salmon? Guilt-free indulgence. Thank you Laura!

Peach and redcurrant cheesecake


You know that classic saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?" I would like to propose a new version: "When your moronic housemate leaves the freezer open all night, defrosting that beautiful punnet of redcurrants you bought at the farmers' market months ago and were saving for a very special dessert, calm the boiling torrent of rage threatening to engulf your very being and spur you on to unsavoury actions involving placing him inside a large block of ice from which there is no escape, and make redcurrant cheesecake". Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's a pithy enough aphorism to catch on. 



This cheesecake might, however. I am always one for looking on the bright side of life, and decided that instead of risking jail for murder, I would instead be glad that I had the opportunity to come up with a culinary use for these redcurrants. I'd always been planning to pair them with peaches, probably in a delicate and elegant French-style tart with pastry cream. However, there was one tiny issue with this: I'd also had a bag of egg whites in the freezer (I am a serial hoarder of egg whites - like a mad bag lady, just with bags containing jelloid chicken amniotic fluid, which - by the way - gains a rather creepy, alien-esque green tint to it the more you put in the bag). The egg whites somehow leaked all over the redcurrants - "zip-lock" bags clearly neither zip nor lock - and so I didn't want to use them raw just in case they were contaminated. They probably weren't. But I don't like the idea of giving my friends food poisoning. They would stop coming round for dinner and then I would have no purpose in life and would probably just cease to exist, disappearing without trace save for a freezer loaded with bags of egg whites.


On my list, then, of desserts involving cooked redcurrants were a peach and redcurrant crumble, a peach and redcurrant cake, and a peach and redcurrant cheesecake. The cake I had in mind would have been very similar to last week's Czech bubble cake, so I thought I'd try something different. The reason I decided on cheesecake over crumble is almost entirely aesthetic: cheesecakes look better in photographs. Tragic, I know. I've reached that awful food blogging stage where the photos are more important than the flavour. (Though they're not, really, because cheesecake and crumble are my two favourite desserts and either would have tasted great).


I make a lot of cheesecakes. To the point where now I don't even need a recipe; I can just go to the supermarket, buy some random dairy products and then combine them in a bowl to make something vaguely edible. This time I went a bit mad with experimentation and ventured into the 'Polish dairy' section of Tesco. I found curd cheese, something I had read Delia raving about for cheesecakes, and also peach-flavoured fromage frais. I wanted fromage frais for the cheesecake as a substitute for the creme fraiche I normally use, but couldn't find the unadulterated stuff. I figured peach would be perfect: all the peach flavour was there already - I was planning on topping the cheesecake with sliced peaches, but an extra layer of peachy goodness couldn't hurt.


Actually, it did hurt. I clearly forgot, in my haze of Polish dairy-related excitement, that I loathe yoghurt and all its manifestations. I told myself that fromage frais is a bit different - it has 'fromage' in the title therefore is really closer to cheese - which I love - than yoghurt - which I loathe to the point where, if I ever need to make myself sick, I just have to put my head inside a suitable receptacle and imagine eating a tub of yoghurt with a spoon. Unfortunately, one of the things I hate most about yoghurt is the artificial flavours you get, and as soon as I opened the peach fromage frais my gag reflex was fully deployed. Undeterred, I put it in the cheesecake anyway, sure that its artificial flavour would mellow out once it was cooked.


Ahem. It didn't. Instead it filled my entire house with the aroma of baking peach-flavoured yoghurt. However, I was still convinced that this hideous sweetness would be offset by the tart currants, so all would be well. The rest of the cheesecake mixture comprised eggs, curd cheese (rather like ricotta but much more dense and crumbly), sugar, a little vanilla extract and a squeeze of honey, along with the redcurrants. It looked beautiful when I took it out of the oven. Or, actually, a bit sinister, like a heavily bloodstained sheet. Having spent the morning in the library reading about bloody beds in Arthurian literature for my dissertation, redcurrant cheesecake may, in retrospect, not have been the best option for dessert.


I was going, as I said, to slice some peaches and layer them over the top. However, I thought the cake looked so nice with its splatters of bright red currants that it would be a shame to cover it up. Instead, I baked some peaches in foil with a splash of sherry and some honey until they turned soft and unctuous. This was a good idea, given the peaches were rock hard, as I expected they would be. Once cooked, however, they turned into fairly satisfactory specimens, and I served them alongside wedges of the cheesecake with a little of their juices drizzled over.




I'd like to try making this cheesecake again. The curd cheese was a bit too crumbly, it turns out. I think I'd go back to using ricotta or cream cheese, because the cake was slightly drier than I would have liked. However, the crumbliness did go really well with the tart juicy burst of the currants. The only issue was the peach flavoured yoghurt; plain fromage frais would have been better, because that faux-peach flavour really was quite overpowering. However, I think that is just my personal preference based on my hatred of yoghurt, because the others who ate the cake said it was really nice. The crumbly cake with the soft peaches is a nice texture contrast, though if the peaches were ripe I would probably have just chopped them and sprinkled them over the surface of the cooked cake. Definitely one to try and improve on, but as it is, pretty tasty. And not bad for an improvisation borne of a cold-storage-related catastrophe.



Peach and redcurrant cheesecake (makes one 18cm cake):

300g cream cheese or ricotta
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp honey
2 eggs
150ml creme fraiche or plain fromage frais (use peach if you like the fake flavour...)
One punnet of redcurrants (or raspberries)
Peaches, to serve

Pre-heat the oven to 170C. Beat together the cheese, sugar, vanilla, eggs, honey and creme fraiche/fromage frais. Fold in two thirds of the redcurrants and spoon into a greased and lined 18cm springform cake tin. Scatter the remaining redcurrants over the top.

Bake for 55 minutes or so until just about set all the way through - the inside should still wobble a little. If it is browning too much after half an hour, cover with foil for the rest of the cooking time.

Remove and leave to cool. Dust with icing sugar to decorate. If your peaches are ripe, simply scatter them, chopped, over the top of the cake. If not, halve them, wrap in a foil parcel with a splash of sherry or white wine and a drizzle of honey, and bake until tender, then serve alongside the cake.


Roast beef, truffled polenta and summer vegetables


I don't exaggerate when I say that I can count on one hand the number of times I have cooked beef. I've made a couple of beef stews; a gorgeous warming one with ale, carrots and onions on bonfire night a few years ago, which was the perfect antidote to standing around in the freezing cold to watch the pretty lights in the sky; this rather delicious tomato and pepper stew enriched with cinnamon and stirred into pasta ribbons; and a couple of weeks ago I made an improvised beef goulash for eighteen hungry Navy people. Tender cubes of lean stewing beef, in a rich tomato sauce with strips of red and green peppers, lashings of paprika and cayenne pepper, and dumplings. It was unexpectedly delicious, and inspired me to experiment a bit more with the humble cow. I don't know why I hardly ever cook beef; I think it's because it's a meat that you can't really experiment with, and by that I mean pair it with fruit. Anyone who's ever been cooked for by me will know that I adore the combination of fruit and meat, which is why I usually cook with lamb or pork. Beef doesn't really lend itself to such weird and wonderful combinations, so I usually assume it's 'boring' and steer clear.


However, having caught the beef 'bug' from the delicious goulash and a little bit of my boyfriend's roast at the pub the other day, I decided to give beef another go. Luckily, fate seemed to be on my side, as the butcher had an enormous piece of topside on offer. It was gigantic, over two feet long, weighing over three kilos, and a bit of a bargain. I struggled home with it and then had a think about recipes. Initially I had the idea of serving it very rare, thinly sliced, with truffle oil, parmesan and rocket, rather like the classic Italian beef tagliata. I was going to bake bread to accompany it, but eventually I couldn't be bothered and therefore the need arose for more carbohydrate. I was intent on using truffle oil somewhere in the dish, ever since I had an incredible starter of wild boar ham drizzled with the stuff in Italy in April. It goes very well with beef, I think - beef and mushrooms are a great combination, and truffle oil is just taking it one step (well, several steps) closer to gastronomic luxury; the earthiness of the truffles have a great affinity with the earthy, iron-rich flavour of good beef. Firmly set on an Italian interpretation, I decided to make some wet polenta infused with truffle oil, imagining that its richness and slightly grainy texture would match the tender meat perfectly.


I suppose the obvious thing to do with the topside would have been roast beef with all the usual trimmings, but we're nearing June now and the weather is (or was, at least) just too summery to start whipping up Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and thick, dark gravy. For that reason, I decided that some simple summer vegetables would be the perfect accompaniment; their flavour would bring freshness to the dish and their flavour wouldn't overpower the truffley aromas emanating from the polenta, or the richness of the beef. Tagliata and carpaccio usually pair very rare or even raw slices of beef (usually fillet) with a rocket salad; I decided to serve the meat with a peppery combination of rocket, watercress and spinach, to complement its deep flavours.



I roasted the topside on a bed of onions, sprinkled with a few thyme sprigs and some seasoning. It barely fit in my oven dish due to its enormous size, and there was something immensely satisfying about just sticking a huge piece of meat in the oven and forgetting about it, without having to slave over the hob for hours. The beef I just seasoned with coarse sea salt, black pepper and olive oil, rubbed into the skin. I read somewhere that patting the skin with flour helps it crisp up during cooking; it worked like a charm, resulting in the most incredibly delicious crunchy texture around the outside of the meat, with delicious little nuggets of sea salt. The best bit of all, though, was the 'gravy'. I didn't actually make gravy, just serving the beef with the roasting juices. All the fat rendered down from the meat into the onions in the roasting tin, turning them caramelised, sweet and tender. Spooned over the sliced beef they were absolutely incredible. 


The only slight issue I had was with the cooking of the meat. I don't know what happened - I timed it perfectly to result in rare meat, and it came out closer to medium. I guess my oven just runs hotter than it should, because I left the beef in for really the shortest time possible. I love rare meat and wanted it still bloody in the middle, but instead it was just pink. I was assured it was delicious, but to this day I am still very grumpy about this mishap and intend to order a meat thermometer as soon as possible to avoid future incidents. I suppose generally people don't share my love of meat that is practically still breathing, so cooking it to this stage is probably more socially acceptable.



This is a fairly simple roast dinner, and a perfect way of bringing traditional roast beef into summer. If you're not taking on the mad task of making a roast for nine people, you could use a smaller piece of topside or another roasting joint - fillet would work well too, if you can afford it. Thin slices of pink beef topside, summer vegetables (carrots, asparagus, peas and green beans) dressed with a little garlic oil, a creamy mound of rich polenta drizzled with truffle oil, and a watercress and rocket salad. The finishing touch - a spoonful of meltingly sweet onions and roasting juices. It has all the satisfaction of a Sunday lunch, but feels slightly healthier and much more appropriate for summer weather. The earthy truffle polenta works perfectly with the meat and onions, and the sweet, crunchy vegetables and salad provide a nice freshness. Delicious.


Roast beef, truffled polenta and summer vegetables (serves 10):

3 kg beef topside joint, ready for roasting
5 onions, peeled and sliced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed with a knife blade
A few sprigs of thyme
Olive oil
Coarse sea salt and black pepper
3 tbsp flour

500g quick-cook polenta
Water
Salt and black pepper
Truffle oil
50g grated parmesan
Vegetables, to serve (I used asparagus, green beans, peas and carrots)
Rocket and watercress, to serve

Pre-heat the oven as hot as it will go.

First, prepare the beef. Sprinkle the onions into a large roasting tin, add the garlic and thyme, and season. Rub the olive oil, sea salt and pepper into the beef and place it on top of the onions. Pat the skin with the flour. Put the beef in the oven and roast for 15 minutes. Then turn the oven down to 170C and roast for half an hour per kilo - this should give you rare/medium-rare meat, but if you like it very rare try 20 minutes per kilo - you can always put it back in, and remember it continues to cook while resting.

When the time is up, remove the beef to a board and cover with foil and a tea towel. Leave to rest for 20-30 minutes before carving.

To make the polenta (do this just before serving), bring 2 litres of water to the boil. Add a little chicken stock cube for extra flavour, if you like. Gradually pour in the polenta, whisking constantly, until it thickens. Stir in a generous amount of seasoning, and the parmesan. Spoon big mounds of it onto the plates and drizzle generously with truffle oil. Top with several slices of beef, drizzle with more truffle oil, and spoon over some roasting juices and caramelised onions.

Serve with your choice of vegetables, dressed with a little garlic-infused olive oil, or butter and salt, and a pile of rocket and watercress salad.

Baked mushrooms stuffed with triple-garlic risotto


This week Graziana from Erbe in Cucina is hosting Weekend Herb Blogging, and I have been cooking with not one, not two, but three new and exciting types of garlic. It started with the Real Food Festival, where I picked up a beautiful bronze bulb of smoked garlic. The intense aroma of this is just incredible; it has an immensely appetising quality to it. You wouldn't pick up a bulb of normal garlic and consider eating it there and then, yet the smoked variety has a sort of sweetness and mellowness to it that invites immediate eating (I wouldn't recommend it though). I was trying to think of the perfect recipe to showcase its wonderful qualities, when two more exciting ingredients appeared on my radar.



The second and third varieties are both products of a weekend trip to Borough Market in London. I always think Oxford's market is pretty cosmopolitan; you can find most weird and wonderful ingredients there (kumquats, salsify, loquats, granadillas, Jerusalem artichokes...). Yet the fruit and veg section of Borough Market never fails to delight me with some unexpected surprise. Back in February it was the sight of gorgeous yellow quinces, months after they'd disappeared from the market in Oxford; then it was the two fat teal I found at a butchers' stall there, having never managed to track down the elusive bird elsewhere. Last weekend it was the sight of huge bunches of wild garlic leaves and flowers.


I've heard a lot about the wonders of foraging and the merits of wild garlic (primarily through Masterchef winner Mat Follas, whose restaurant is actually named 'The Wild Garlic', possibly after a dish that helped to win him Masterchef and also because he's a keen forager), but have never got round to attempting to find some for myself, and I have certainly never seen it for sale anywhere. Yet it was there: delicate bunches of the leaves and flowers, that I would have mistaken for some kind of house plant had I not seen the sign. They looked like the leaves I would normally peel off my bunches of lilies before putting them in water. Intrigued and delighted by a new ingredient, I bought a bunch immediately. It went in my fridge for a few days, and I now understand why they say it's easy to forage for wild garlic: you just follow your nose. I think my fridge will retain the pungent smell of these leaves for weeks to come.


I thought my garlic-related surprises were over for the day, until I stumbled across a bunch of 'elephant garlic'. The first thing that struck me was its gorgeous purple and white colouring; the second its enormity. It looked almost like a comically exaggerated bulb of garlic. Equally intrigued by this curious product, I bought some. A little research informed me that it is milder than normal garlic, and can be eaten raw in salads. I just love the sturdiness of it, with its fat stalk and huge purple-skinned cloves.



There's probably nothing I enjoy cooking more than a good risotto, and it felt like time for one. It also seemed the obvious solution to an abundance of garlic; I figured the rich, creamy rice would make a perfect base for such diversity of flavour. I also had a bag of carnaroli risotto rice that I brought back from Vercelli in April, and which was recommended to me by the man in the shop as the best rice for risotto, so naturally I was eager to put it to the test (ultimately, I can conclude that risotto rice is risotto rice, and I think maybe I'm not quite Italian enough to appreciate the nuanced difference between arborio and carnaroli - apart from that Tesco charges twice the price of the former for the latter - but it was very tasty).



As luscious as I envisaged my garlic risotto would be, I figured it needed another dimension. Normally when I cook risotto I add something for texture, like bacon, mushrooms, leeks, or peas. However, I didn't want to distract from the diverse garlicky flavours. The answer came miraculously to me in the form of mushrooms. Initially I considered just frying some in butter and spooning them on top of the risotto, but then I thought that stuffed mushrooms would look much prettier. It would also enable me to take advantage of the beautiful flat cup mushrooms that I've often spied in the market here; they are so clearly meant to be the vehicle for some kind of gorgeous stuffing, and it would be rude not to oblige.



I roasted the mushrooms in the oven for about 45 minutes, drizzled with a little olive oil, seasoning, and some sprigs of thyme. The key to roasting mushrooms is to cook far more than you think you'll need; they shrink a surprising amount in the heat. They also turn golden and wrinkled at the sides and beautifully dark and juicy in the middle, and exude lots of delicious mushroom liquor. I added this to my risotto as well as the stock.


For the risotto, I used my normal recipe, but added smoked garlic instead of normal garlic. The stock was, in an impressively home-economic fashion, homemade chicken stock from the last roast I had. One thing that surprised me about this was how much salt I needed to add to the risotto to achieve the taste I'd consider normal. It makes you realise just how much salt is added to commercial stock cubes - slightly terrifying. Anyway, I finished off the basic risotto recipe with sprigs of thyme, lots of seasoning, grated parmesan, and my two other types of garlic. The leaves I finely shredded and stirred in, and the elephant garlic I finely chopped and sprinkled over towards the end of the cooking. Elephant garlic is apparently milder than normal garlic, though I nibbled a bit and it was still quite strong, so I let it cook in the rice and stock for a few minutes to take the edge off.



I spooned the garlicky risotto onto the juicy mushrooms, grated over a little more parmesan, and finished with a drizzle of truffle oil to really bring out both the mushroom and the garlic flavour. There's something about truffles that is reminiscent of garlic - and it's not just me that thinks this: my Flavour Thesaurus (a great book for any keen cook, by the way) agrees. The two work perfectly together, as garlic and mushrooms do. Even better when the garlic is incorporated within mounds of soft, starchy rice. I was worried the effect would be overpowering, but I think it was just right. If anything, in future I'd add a bit more of both the elephant variety and the garlic leaves.


I'm now hooked on the idea of wild garlic, and hope I find it again sometime soon. I'd love to try it in a pesto, simply tossed through hot strands of tagliatelle, and I have a few leaves left which I'm thinking of using to stuff or wrap around whole fish for baking. The rest of the elephant garlic I'm going to roast so its flavour mellows and I can spread it on bread to eat with some cheese. I like the simplicity of this risotto, though: a good way to showcase three exciting new twists on the humble garlic bulb.

Oh, and needless to say - this is not something to eat if you've any sort of romantic encounter planned for afterwards.



Baked mushrooms stuffed with triple-garlic risotto (serves 4):

12 large flat mushrooms
Thyme
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stick celery, very finely chopped
2 cloves smoked garlic, finely chopped
1 small glass white wine
A knob of butter
300g risotto rice
1 litre hot chicken or vegetable stock - keep it warm in a pan
About 10 leaves wild garlic, finely shredded
1 clove elephant garlic, very finely chopped (or use garlic-infused olive oil)
Parmesan for grating
Truffle oil for drizzling (optional)

First, bake the mushrooms. Spread on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, season, throw over some thyme sprigs and bake at 180C for about 45 minutes until very soft and juicy. Add any juices to the stock as you make the risotto.

For the risotto, saute the onion and celery until softened, then add the smoked garlic. Cook for a couple of minutes, then add the butter and let it melt before adding the rice. Stir to coat in the butter and cook for a minute or so before pouring in the wine. Wait until it is completely absorbed, then add a couple of ladlefuls of hot stock. Stir the rice until all the stock is absorbed, then add another ladleful. Keep doing this until the rice is almost tender - keep tasting it. If you run out of stock, supplement with boiling water.

When nearly done, stir in the garlic leaves and elephant garlic (or drizzle in the garlic oil). Grate in some parmesan, and season to taste.

Remove the mushrooms from the oven, arrange on four plates, then spoon over the risotto. Drizzle with truffle oil - or more garlic oil - and grate over some more parmesan.

Real Food Festival, 2011


A pervasive motif in Medieval and Renaissance art and literature is the memento mori, the 'reminder of death'. Whether a skeleton haunting the periphery of an oil painting or illuminated letter, or a dramatic literary death scene during which the hero nearly meets his end, readers and viewers were frequently presented with images and events designed to remind them of their mortality.

Times have moved on a little since then, and whilst we are still often reminded of the finite nature of our existence on this mortal plane, I would venture to suggest that where the medieval period had the memento mori, reminder of death, the 21st and 22nd century equivalent is the memento middle-class. This occurred to me as I stood in line at Earls Court a couple of weeks ago, surrounded by affluent Londoners avidly discussing the virtues of gluten-free granola and the undoubted superiority of loose-leaf white tea over teabags, waiting for the doors to open and allow me to rush forth into what is, unashamedly, a paradise for the middle-class food snob.



I don't mean this in a bad way. My memento of middle-classity frequently takes the form of my friends, family and boyfriend. "I cut my finger on a lobster claw :(" I once texted to the latter, who replied with the extremely apt observation, "that could only be a problem in your world". I pride myself on knowing the difference between vanilla extract and vanilla essence; I revel in the arrival of Alphonso mangoes from India, knowing no other variety can compare; I read the Guardian food section; I shun supermarkets where I can, favouring farmers' markets and local butchers/greengrocers; I prefer rapeseed oil to olive; the appearance of fresh samphire in the fishmongers last week set my heart racing...and I have never been to a kebab van or eaten fast food since I was fifteen.


I sound disgusting, the very epitome of food snobbishness that makes a lot of people rather irritated. Yet my only consolation comes from the aforementioned Guardian food section. My enjoyment of it is twofold: yes, I appreciate its often exciting and innovative recipes by chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Yotam Ottolenghi and Dan Lepard (who I am plotting to marry - just give me time). However, the real pleasure comes from scrolling down the online version to read the comments underneath the articles. I take deep solace from the fact that I bear little resemblance to some of these real middle-class food snobs, getting on their high horse about all sorts of things, from the provenance of pomegranate molasses to why anyone who buys farmed salmon is a demon in human form and should be swiftly despatched with a fish knife after being forced to ingest their own weight in salmon heads.


Anyway, the point is, going to a food festival may be perceived as the epitome of middle-class food snobbery. But once you set foot inside, you realise that pretension has nothing to do with it. Perhaps it doesn't need stating, but the Real Food Festival is about just that: food. Real food. None of that artificial processed rubbish that is so prevalent these days. Wandering around, I am always struck by the sheer amount of love and energy that goes into the hundreds of stalls lining the aisles. It's food at its best; not the kind of fancy, over-prodded stuff you find churned out of Michelin-starred kitchens, that often relies on fancy technique and too much faff to make it edible, but basic products made the best they can possibly be. Yes, you might have to pay a bit more, but for an annual treat it's definitely worth it, and a lot of the things I've bought from the last two festivals I am still using today.


This might sound obvious, but every year I am struck by how good everything tastes. I think I've become accustomed to the monotonous, bland produce churned out by supermarkets, or giant food corporations, because I always find at the festival that it's as if it's taken what I normally expect from an ingredient or a recipe, and improved upon it immeasurably. Maybe it's the small-scale production methods, maybe it's the fact that a lot of the businesses are family run, maybe it's just because more care goes into the food, but there's no denying that everything just seems to taste so much better. Of course, this could also be down to the fact that this is the one day of the year when I will eat everything in sight, including things I would normally abstain from (flapjacks, brownies, cupcakes, cheesecake, cookies, chocolate, cheese...) due to the fact that I am not blessed with the fastest of metabolisms. Of course a gooey chocolate brownie is going to taste damn good, when it's something I only allow myself to eat about three times a year (or three times a day, when I was doing my Finals, but that's a definite exception to ALL rules).


So, for some of the highlights. There was the beautiful stall of southern Italian produce, with its dried chillies and tomatoes hanging in huge abundant bunches, its great wheels of pecorino and fat logs of salami. It was here that I purchased a small piece of bottarga, at great expense. This is dried fish roe that is compressed into a block, and it's most commonly used grated over pasta. It's the marine version of truffles, and its taste is incredibly hard to describe; fishy, but not in an unpleasant way, it somehow manages to capture the essence of the sea in taste form. It tastes like the smell of standing where the waves meet the shore and breathing in the spray. I can't wait to try it on pasta.



I also paid a visit to Revolution Tea, a company I love and whose tea I only ever seem to buy at the festival on an annual basis, largely because it lasts so long. Each of their teabags makes four cups of tea - you can just keep reusing them. I asked why this is, and was told because the loose tea is of such good quality, rather than the powdery stuff you find in normal teabags. The teabags are also plastic rather than paper so can be reused. Apparently the Chinese have a saying: you give the first cup of tea to your enemy, the second to your friend, and the third you keep for yourself. I tend to keep them all for myself, but I do like the way the flavour mellows by the third cup. I was hooked when I tried the White Pear tea back in 2009, and have since fallen rather in love with Peach and Ginger, and also Citrus Spice. They sell a beautiful box of individual tea bag testers, which unfortunately was rather out of my price range. They have a website, though, and I'd encourage you to try their tea if you're a lover of the stuff. The White Pear is probably my favourite, in that it's so unusual. Who'd have thought you could get pear flavour into tea?


Another brilliant find was Zayti, selling arabesque street food. I was drawn in by the sight of baklava, and found myself purchasing lunch, which comprised Iranian walnut chicken (a dish which inspired my roast teal a while ago), aubergine-wrapped lamb rolls, bulghur wheat with pine nuts and caramelised onions, hummous, yoghurt, pomegranate seeds, and a colourful multi-vegetable salad. Although this came piled into one little box, all the flavours were beautifully defined and brought together by the hummous and yoghurt. It was one of the most delicious things I have eaten in a long time, and probably the most delicious (savoury) thing I tried at the festival. I believe it's a family-run company who are bringing modern and innovative takes of Middle Eastern street food to London. This is especially evident in their desserts: custard and apricot baklava, Turkish delight brownies, and pistachio and rosewater cheesecake. All utterly delicious. This is my favourite kind of food, and I could happily have gone back for seconds and thirds. I only wish they'd bring it all to Oxford; we need more Middle Eastern cuisine.



Also of note was Vanilla Bazaar, selling Madagascan vanilla products. I bought ten lovely vanilla pods, at a fraction of the usual supermarket price (for once, the food festival was actually cheaper), and also tried their amazing vanilla extract. Unlike the alcohol-based stuff I'm used to, this featured real vanilla seeds in a sugar syrup. It looked rather like tiny frogspawn, but don't let that put you off. It was delicious, ideal for making ice-cream or any dessert involving vanilla cream. Also good were Adlington, giving out tasters of smoked chicken and duck breast. I absolutely love smoked anything (incidentally, I also found smoked garlic at another stall, which I used in this aubergine dish last week), and the chicken was incredibly tender and moist.


I quickly found Bocaddon Farm Veal, who I've been a fan of since my first food festival for their delicious ethical veal. Last year I bought some veal and wild garlic burgers which I can confidently say are the best burgers I've ever tasted, and also some delicious Sicilian-style veal sausages. This year I went a bit mad and ended up with burgers, two different types of sausage, veal rump steak, and a little veal roasting joint. The burgers I ate last weekend, on the barbecue (wonderful), and I'm very excited by the rest. I also had to stop at Laverstoke Park Farm's stall for some of their buffalo products (like the ricotta I waxed lyrical about here). Once again they'd brought real live buffalo to the festival, but this time they were babies. Gorgeous.


I also marvelled at some truly beautiful feats of baking, including some rather gorgeous sparkly cupcakes that people were swarming around like flies with their camera phones. There were macarons everywhere, and elaborately-decorated chocolate truffles, and huge towers of snowy meringues, and beautiful centrepiece cakes, and brownies, and flapjacks...I bought a delicious blueberry crumble tart, and sampled most of the other baked goods on offer. I do always think, though, when I see this vast array of baking talent on display, that it must be so incredibly difficult to make a career as a small artisan baker. Everyone loves to bake, many people want to do it for a living; I can't imagine how hard it must be to set up a baking business and succeed, particularly as the standard of everything on offer at the festival was so high. How to set your own baked goods apart from the competition? I suppose glitter is one way.


Another product in abundance is the humble preserve. Jams, jellies and chutneys are absolutely everywhere. If it weren't for the fact that I possess enough chutney after the last two Christmas periods to be able to drown myself in it, I would easily have been won over by the gorgeous backlit display below. It was such an unusual and effective way of presenting a product that usually looks identical once put in a jar. The star anise pieces in the jelly second from the right remind me of flies preserved in amber. There were all sorts of wonderful and unusual flavours, incorporating things like rosemary and lavender, and also my favourite - quince jelly.


I also enjoyed Sloe Motion, producers of all things sloe. Gin, whisky, vodka, plus chutney, jam and truffles made from sloe berries. Their spirits come in beautiful purple bottles and taste absolutely incredible; a perfect fruity summer alternative to regular gin. Nearby I found Gower Cottage Brownies, which I've written about before. They genuinely are the best brownies I've ever tasted, managing that perfect balance between a crispy exterior and a gooey centre. The best part is they do mail order, so you can send someone a beautiful box of homemade brownies as a present. It's what my mum always does when she forgets birthdays and the like, apparently. She sent some to me when I was doing my Finals, and I'm sure they boosted my morale sufficiently to result in a First.



To top it all off, I bought my ticket early enough to get a free copy of the Real Food Festival Cookbook, which is fantastic. It features recipes from all sorts of chefs, from the big and famous to the lesser known, all of which emphasise high quality produce. I can't wait to try some of its recipes, particularly as I'm now equipped with some wonderful ingredients. I look forward to 2012's festival, and another opportunity to revel gluttonously in my gastronomic middle-classity.






Cheese for breakfast?


I was about to write "this barely even warrants a post, but...". Then I paused. That is entirely untrue. This definitely warrants a post, because a) it obviously inspired me to start writing one, and b) just because what I am about to write about is incredibly simple, it doesn't mean it isn't incredibly delicious. Sometimes the best food experiences are the simplest: eggs on toast; a really good grilled fish; a Victoria sponge cake; a loaf of crusty bread and some cheese. Today I made a sublime mackerel pâté by putting some garlic and herb cream cheese, some smoked mackerel, lemon zest and dill in a blender. Shockingly simple - too simple to merit a blog post - but a wonderful lunch. However, that is not what I am about to discuss.



At the Real Food Festival last weekend, I discovered ricotta. Sure, I've been eating and cooking with ricotta for years. It comes in a shallow round tub in the supermarket, with a peel-off plastic film lid, and always accumulates a layer of watery whey over its surface. Right? Except it doesn't. I've read many cookbooks that extol the virtues of proper, fresh ricotta, the kind you find in Italy. Unfortunately, I've never been lucky enough to locate it over here; it has remained an elusive treasure, and all of its good qualities - crumbly, fresh, much more flavoursome than the supermarket stuff - have remained unsampled, tantalisingly trumpeted by luckier chefs and food writers all over the country while I make do with my boring UHT variety.


Until a lady at the food festival (from Laverstoke Park Farm) offered me a little plastic spoon - I think it was neon yellow, the kind you get at ice cream shops in Italy - atop which perched a little clump of snow-white buffalo milk ricotta. One taste and I was hooked. How to describe it? Like cream cheese but with the texture of a good baked cheesecake. A very mild, milky flavour; a pleasant crumbling sensation on the tongue. It was utterly delicious. I've had a similar experience with the Laverstoke buffalo mozzarella before. I watched them making it at last year's food festival, twisting it into balls in a big vat of whey, while a huge buffalo looked on with pride (I like to think) from a nearby pen. The flavour was unlike any mozzarella I have tasted before, in that it actually tasted of something. This ricotta was the same: a dairy revelation. I took it home and pondered what to do with it.


The problem is, all of the ways I would normally use ricotta exploit its texture, but not its flavour, because the supermarket stuff has none. I didn't want to mask it with spinach in a cannelloni; I didn't want to serve it in a fruit tart to get lost amongst berries and their juice; I didn't want to bake it in a cheesecake, into unidentifiable sweetness. I kind of just wanted to eat it from the tub, unadulterated, maybe with a neon yellow plastic spoon.


I went for the next best (or more realistic) thing. I made bread. Soda bread, to be precise, because it's quick and easy and because its lovely nutty flavour I imagined would be perfect with the refreshing milky cheese. I slathered the bread with big dollops of fresh ricotta. I roasted some apricots with orange flower water, honey and sugar, because I thought their sweet, tart flavour would be the perfect partner to the cheese. I also had some strawberries in the fridge.

My breakfast last week comprised warm slices of this oaty, moist, buttermilk-enriched bread topped with creamy white curds and a dollop of tart apricot, or a slice of juicy strawberry. It was genuinely one of the best breakfasts I have ever had (and I experiment a lot with breakfast recipes). I just had to share its goodness. I would normally be averse to the notion of cheese for breakfast - I don't go in for that continental thing of eating cold meats and dairy first thing in the morning - but this is different. It is so contrary to any expectations of cheese that it barely fits in that category. In fact, it's more akin to spreading butter on your bread, with its incredible lightness. Delicious.


Incidentally, I have discovered that fresh ricotta is probably easier to make at home than boiled eggs. I can't wait to try it out and have this luxury more often. I also thought I'd share the soda bread recipe, which you can find here. I've made it twice in a week now, and it's definitely the best soda bread recipe I've found yet; it has a wonderful moisture that can often be lacking in bought versions or some other recipes.

A post about the Real Food Festival will be appearing soon, by the way. Just so I can have another opportunity to tell you all how amazing this cheese is.


Sumac and za'atar roasted chicken


This week Simona from briciole is hosting Weekend Herb Blogging, and I've been using two of my favourite Middle Eastern spices: sumac and za'atar. Sumac is made from the crushed berries of a small Mediterranean tree, and used liberally all over the Middle East, where it can be sprinkled over food or infused in water and used to flavour dishes, rather like tamarind. It has a sharp flavour, like lemon juice, and is used in the same sort of way. Za'atar is not a spice but a spice and herb mixture, comprising dried thyme or marjoram, sesame seeds and salt. It can sometimes contain sumac as well. One of my favourite ways to eat za'atar I discovered in Jordan, where they mix it with olive oil to form a vivid green paste which is then spread on rounds of flatbread, to form a sort of za'atar pizza. It's incredibly delicious; you wouldn't have thought dried herbs on bread could taste so good, but the olive oil gives it an almost buttery flavour. I could happily have subsisted off those little pizzas for the entire time I was there. Supplemented by some falafel, naturally. And baklava.



I'm quite fond of my jar of za'atar, having travelled with it through Syria and Jordan and then back to the UK. I stumbled across it in Aleppo, after spying a little nondescript shop on the corner of a street whose windows were full of these gorgeous jars, where the various ingredients in the za'atar mix had been layered atop one another. It was an effect reminiscent of those jars of coloured sand you can sometimes buy in touristy areas, where the colours are layered in stripes. I was captivated and intrigued, so ventured in to ask the stallholder what the substance was. When he told me, I immediately purchased a large bag. I already had some that I'd bought from the Moroccan deli in Oxford, but this was the real deal and I wasn't going to miss out. Particularly as I bought twice as much for half the price. As well as some huge blocks of olive oil soap, which I still have because I can't bear to use them. I was also informed that rubbing them on clothing keeps biting insects away, so I think I probably purchased them in a desperate bid to ward off the mosquitoes; they are drawn to my flesh as I am drawn to baklava.


It's hard to describe the flavour of za'atar; almost musky in a way, and much less pungent than simple dried thyme. I think it's the mellowing effect of the sesame seeds. The salt and sumac also give it a slight tartness, which means it's good for coating food to be roasted. I've had it on potato wedges, and also sprinkled over a bowl of homemade labneh (Middle Eastern cheese), but my favourite use is to scatter it liberally over roast chicken. 


This is a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe, and it's superb. It's also incredibly simple, but the end result is much more than the sum of its parts. I cook a lot, and some of the things I attempt can be quite complex and fiddly (the quail egg ravioli springs to mind...), so it's sometimes quite nice to cook something as easy yet as impressive as this. Jointed chicken pieces are marinated in a lemony, garlicky mixture for a few hours then covered in za'atar before being roasted in the oven. It's the kind of food I like serving to people; it's full of flavour, hearty, rustic, and pretty much guaranteed to please everyone. After all, it's essentially roast chicken, just updated with a moreish Middle Eastern twist. The sumac and lemon combination make it incredibly addictive; they have a sourness that works so well with the crispy chicken skin, and are simultaneously quite refreshing. You can get sumac and za'atar in supermarkets now, but your best bet is a Middle Eastern grocers, if you don't have the time, money (or suicidal streak, given the current political climate) to go to Syria.


The main reason I made this was because I'd been craving the crisp, herby skin of a roast chicken against the cool tartness of Greek yoghurt, ever since eating some incredible Persian food at the Real Food Festival last weekend. I hate yoghurt on its own, as anyone who knows me will be sick of hearing, but I don't mind it with savoury dishes, and it can be the perfect accompaniment to spicy roast meats. 


To serve with this, I mixed Greek yoghurt with grated cucumber and chopped mint, tzatziki-style. For the carbohydrate element, I went with bulgur wheat, mainly because I fancied a change from couscous and because I love its nutty, larger grains. I caramelised some onion slices and pine nuts to go on top, partly for decoration and partly because caramelised onions paired with roast meat can only be a good thing.


The crispy, tart skin of the roast chicken with the nutty, almost creamy wheat, the crunchy pine nuts and the cooling yoghurt is a beautiful combination. The best bits, however, are the onions and lemon slices from the marinade, which go in the oven on top of the chicken and turn sweet and crispy. The lemon mellows enough to eat, skin and all, and when you get a mouthful of chicken with a little bit of lemon slice the flavour is incredible, particularly because the tartness is heightened by the sumac. It's a real feast for the tastebuds, with all the tart, herbal, caramelised flavours in there, and an immensely satisfying combination. It's also guaranteed to please a crowd of hungry diners; there's a sort of barbecue element to the pieces of crisped chicken, charred in places, served with a simple sauce and big spoonfuls of wheat.

Incidentally, I served this lemon and mint cheesecake after the chicken; its creamy, tangy citrus flavour is the perfect complement to a rich meal.



Sumac and za'atar roasted chicken (serves 4):

1 large chicken, jointed into four or eight pieces
2 red onions, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
4 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp sumac
1 lemon, thinly sliced
200ml chicken stock or water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
2 tbsp za'atar

400g Greek yoghurt
Half a cucumber, grated
20g fresh mint, finely chopped

200g bulgur wheat
500ml water
2 onions, thinly sliced
A handful of pine nuts
2 tbsp olive oil

First, marinate the chicken. Mix the onions, garlic, olive oil, spices (not the za'atar), lemon, stock/water, salt and pepper. Add the chicken pieces, coat in the mixture and leave to marinate overnight or for a few hours in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 200C. Place the chicken and its marinade on a large baking tray, skin-side up. Sprinkle over the za'atar. Roast for 30-40 minutes until the chicken is cooked through.

Meanwhile, mix the yoghurt, cucumber and mint and set aside. Boil the bulgur wheat in the water until tender, then season generously. Caramelise the onions in the olive oil (this will take about 20 minutes), then add the pine nuts and let them colour. Spoon the bulgur into a serving bowl and spread the onions and pine nuts on top.

Serve the chicken pieces with the bulgur and mint yoghurt, and some chopped parsley scattered over, if you like. You can also sprinkle over more sumac and za'atar.

(Chicken recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's Ottolenghi cookbook)


Aubergine heaven


No, not the place where well-behaved aubergines spend their afterlife, but probably my favourite aubergine dish to date (although moutabal comes a very close second). It's recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi, so I should have known it would be brilliant, though I'm sometimes sceptical of his recipes because the ingredients seem so disparate, it often appears that they could never work together. I should never doubt him, after this triumph. It features aubergine baked into a luscious softness, rubbed with a spice mixture for deep flavour, served with a fruity, herby bulgur wheat mixture and a dollop of yoghurt. Initially it might not sound all that great, but I can assure you that this is delicious.



I made this because a "North African" dish had been requested, but I didn't want to cook meat. It's quite hard to translate the pungent, fragrant aromas of North African cuisine into vegetarian dishes, because often those spices need something very strongly-flavoured like lamb to stand up to them. I needn't have worried, because the smoky aubergine is the perfect match for this spice mix, known as chermoula. It features ground cumin, coriander, paprika, chilli (I used cayenne pepper), salt, preserved lemon, olive oil, and crushed garlic. I bought two magnificent bulbs of smoked garlic from the Real Food Festival at the weekend (more on that in another post), and this seemed the perfect opportunity to use them. Smoke and aubergine go so well together, and I wanted to heighten that sensation. I crushed everything together in a pestle and mortar to make a rich, terracotta-coloured paste reminiscent of harissa, that other North African spice mix.



The preserved lemon is a nice addition to the mixture; I have a jar on my windowsill that I made myself. They're incredibly easy to make: you just quarter whole lemons, leaving them attached at one end, then stuff them with sea salt, pack them into a jar, cover with boiling water and seal. After about three months they're ready to use, and are a typical ingredient in all sorts of Moroccan dishes. I remember seeing huge jars of them for sale in the souks in Morocco, and was immensely saddened that I was unable to bring back liquids in my hand luggage. It's hard to describe their flavour; much more sour and salty than a normal lemon, they lack the zesty freshness of an unpreserved specimen, but have a deeper flavour that adds a sour kick to all sorts of dishes. The classic is Moroccan chicken, green olive and preserved lemon tagine.


I slashed the flesh of the aubergine in a criss-cross pattern and rubbed the spice mixture into the flesh, rather like you would do with meat. After drizzling over some olive oil, they went in the oven for about 50 minutes, until the insides had softened into silky deliciousness and the skin had wrinkled. When they emerged, I drizzled them with some of my oak-smoked rapeseed oil, to add yet another layer of barbecue flavour. If I had an actual barbecue, this might have been the ultimate smoky meal. I'm not sure why the chargrilled flavour works so well with aubergines, but whoever discovered this might be my number one food hero. OK, number three, after Yotam and Raymond Blanc. Oh and Tristan Welch. And Michel Roux. And Claudia Roden too.


To adorn the aubergine, bulgur wheat. This is best known as the key ingredient for tabbouleh, which I lived off in Syria; it's a bit like couscous, but with larger, more irregular grains and a bit more texture. You can simmer it in water for about 20 minutes to cook it, but you can also soak it in boiling water for about 30 minutes, which is easier. I also soaked some sultanas with it, to plump them up a bit. To the wheat I added chopped coriander, mint, halved green olives, salt and pepper, spring onions, toasted flaked almonds, and lemon juice. This is delicious on its own, and I could quite happily eat it as a salad with no accompaniment. The sweet sultanas counteract the sharp olives, the almonds give a rich crunch, and the herbs provide a beautiful citrussy freshness.


I spooned this mixture over the warm aubergines, and finished it with a dollop of yoghurt. This brings everything together, providing moisture and also taking the edge off the spicy aubergine (though mine wasn't that spicy, because I was over-cautious with the cayenne...). This dish is an absolute delight. I think it's a textural thing: the slippery, silky aubergine flesh against the nutty bulgur with its bursts of sweet sultana and tangy olive, finished off with the creamy yoghurt and crunchy almonds. The best bit is the top of the aubergine flesh, where the spices have burnt on and formed a crust. If you're sceptical, I'd urge you to try this. If you don't like aubergines, you'll be converted. Seriously, it was so good. Also, immensely filling, considering aubergine is mostly water. If you have vegetarian friends, cook this for them and make them love you. If you've carnivorously overindulged recently, cook this for yourself and detox. If you're hungry, make this and satisfy your stomach. I cannot think of a single reason why you should not cook this dish as soon as possible.


The recipe, by Yotam Ottolenghi, is here.

Inspiration from Damascus: lemon and mint cheesecake


Last summer I travelled around the Middle East with some friends. The highlight of the trip was definitely Syria, a country I'd been longing to visit for ages, though without knowing precisely why. I was captivated by its heat, its chaos, the charm of its people, and - above all - its food. One of the many gastronomic items that stand out in my recollection is actually a beverage, which is unusual for me - I tend to only ever consume four drinks: water, tea, wine and gin. Smoothies sometimes, if I've made them myself to use up overripe fruit, and occasionally the odd sip of juice from my boyfriend's glass if he offers it to me, but that's about it. I don't go in for fruit juice, generally seeing it as unnecessary calories that could be better expended on a large piece of cake.




However, this drink was something else. The menu said, inconspicuously, "lemon and mint". I thought it sounded odd. I have yet to get past this weird habit whereby I read 'mint' in a menu and imagine the horrible, artificial flavouring of After Eights or mint choc chip ice cream. I always forget that fresh mint is one of my favourite herbs, possessing a gorgeous, sweet freshness quite unlike its synthetic equivalent. Needless to say, I abstained from ordering this drink. My friends, obviously not sharing my weird mint issues, ordered it. I then spent the next half hour or so staring greedily at their glasses.


How to describe it? It's essentially lemonade blended with huge amounts of fresh mint, so that the juice is flecked with pieces of the herb. It looks a bit like you're about to drink the contents of a lawnmower. Unappealing? Not when it's forty degrees outside and you've been walking around all day in trousers and long sleeves. This drink is incredible. I will boldly declare that it is the most refreshing thing in the entire world. You know how amazing lemon sorbet tastes on a hot day when you're feeling thirsty? The way the sweet-sour-cold balance revives you from the inside like an ice cube to the face? This drink is even better. The lemon-mint combination, coupled with a little sugar, revives and refreshes like a plunge pool after a sauna.


Now that the days are getting hotter here in Oxford, my dessert daydreams shift from crumble, cobbler and pie to ice cream, mousse and cheesecake. Feeling the need for something very refreshing, especially because I planned quite a rich main course, my mind suddenly wandered to that lemon and mint drink. I'm not sure why; possibly because I was considering lemon cheesecake but, being me, I wanted to jazz it up a bit, and my inner wannabe-Syrian (well, not at the moment, given the political upheaval and all) immediately screamed 'mint' at me. Well, it didn't scream, because I was in the library and that would have been inappropriate. By the way, reading a book called "Medieval Blood" and trying to plan a dessert are not activities that can be productively carried out at the same time. Unless you are a vampire with a sweet tooth.


Hotter weather also demands a shift from the classic baked cheesecake I'm so fond of to a lighter, more mousse-like version set with gelatine. This can also be served colder than the baked cheesecake, which I always think should be removed from the fridge about 20 minutes before serving to allow its lovely crumbliness to shine through. Because it's cold and mousse-like, there's somehow a much sharper, purer lemon flavour. It's essentially the closest you can get to the lemon and mint drink in dessert form, I think. Apart from perhaps a sorbet. But this is more enjoyable to eat because of its creaminess.


Another great thing about this cake is that it's surprisingly healthy. I made it using light cream cheese and Quark, which is a curd cheese that's virtually fat-free, but has the texture of smooth cottage cheese (I sometimes use cottage cheese, whizzed in a blender) so is ideal for giving substance to a cheesecake. I've never used it before but will be using it again, because it has a great texture. I mixed the cheeses together with icing sugar, and then put some lemon zest and mint leaves in a blender. Because my blender is inept, it didn't result in the very fine minty powder, almost pesto-like, that I was hoping for, but it was good enough to swirl through the cheesecake mixture.


To set the cake I used gelatine dissolved in lots of lemon juice. The mixture went into a tin that I'd greased and lined, and I'd scattered some crushed ginger biscuits over the bottom. I couldn't be bothered to mix them with melted butter to stick it all together, but this worked quite well, because the biscuits stuck to the bottom of the mixture anyway.


After the cake had set, garnished it with crystallised mint leaves. This was a brainwave I had while tearing up the mint and putting it in the blender. I'm not sure why, because I've never heard of crystallised mint leaves before, but a quick google assured me that they did in fact exist. I kind of want to keep an air of mystery about them, and pretend there's some immensely complex kitchen work required in their preparation, so my dessert seems all cheffy and impressive, but I can in fact reveal that it is nothing more complicated than dipping mint leaves in egg white and then in sugar. In theory, this sounds weird - how could dipping a mint leaf in sugar make it edible? Let me assure you: they are incredible. When I got a bite of creamy lemon cheesecake mixed with the crunch of the sugary mint, it was like being back in Damascus. Not only is the flavour incredible, it's a nice little surprise and the textural contrast is brilliant. A bit like the crust on a fairground doughnut; you can feel those sugar granules crunch. I also think they look absolutely beautiful, like the garden on a frosty winter morning.


This cake is the ideal thing to serve after a rich meal: it wakes up the tastebuds, it's light, and it's pretty easy on the waistline. I'm very proud of it; it had just the intense lemon kick that I wanted, without being too sharp - the heavily sugared leaves help with that. Think lemon sorbet, and that's the same sweet-tart balance you get with this cake. The only slight issue was that it didn't set as much as I like. Next time I'd probably use more gelatine - it just about held its shape, but when I removed the sides of the tin it flopped a bit and wasn't quite the impressive, mousse-like structure I'd envisaged. Which also meant it didn't slice brilliantly. But food should be flavour first, then presentation, and this definitely delivers on all the levels I wanted it to.


It makes me very sad to read about Syria in the news at the moment. Particularly because I worry that people who have never been there, or to the Middle East, will have their notions of this country and region tarnished by the unfortunate events of the present. I have never been to a place more friendly and welcoming than Syria, particularly Aleppo. It's a cliche to say that the Middle East is a feast for all the senses, but it is definitely true of this country. It has so much to offer, and for that reason I hope it sorts its problems out - admittedly for largely selfish reasons, because I really want to go back. But if you're reading this, and then you see the news tomorrow and hear about more bloodshed and chaos, I would ask that when you think of Syria, you think not of carnage and war, but of lemon and mint.


Lemon and mint cheesecake (makes one 20cm cake):

250g light cream cheese
500g Quark
200g icing sugar
5 lemons
30g bunch of fresh mint
1 sachet gelatine
90g ginger biscuits, whizzed to crumbs in a blender
50g melted butter
1 egg white
6 tbsp granulated or caster sugar

Grease and line a 20cm cake tin. Mix the biscuits with the melted butter and spread over the bottom of the tin.

Whisk together the two cheeses and the icing sugar. Place half the mint leaves in the blender with the zest of two of the lemons, then blitz to a fine powder (if your blender is better than mine). Stir through the cheese mixture.

Juice 3 lemons into a small pan, then heat gently. Sprinkle the gelatine over the top of the juice and leave for a couple of minutes, then whisk into the hot liquid, ensuring it is completely dissolved. Whisk this mixture into the cheese mixture, quickly, then pour into the tin and place in the fridge to set for about 4 hours.

For the crystallised mint leaves, simply dip the remaining mint leaves into the egg white and then into the sugar, on both sides. Leave to dry on silicon baking parchment - it's best to let the upper side dry and then to flip them over, so they're completely solid and sugary.

When ready to serve, decorate the cake with the mint leaves and some extra lemon zest.


Adventures with a KitchenAid mixer #4: piña colada cake


When a friend of mine has a birthday, my first thought is generally not "What can I buy them?" but "What can I bake them?" I'm a firm believer in edible, preferably baked, presents, mainly because I have a lot of friends who I don't know well enough to get them that perfect, "oh my goodness this is so me" present, and therefore it would just be a waste of money getting them something that they'll end up putting in a drawer and never looking at again. 

Actually, that's a load of rubbish. My main reason is entirely selfish: it gives me an excuse to hone my baking skills.




So, when a friend of mine announced that he was turning 23, I started thinking of witty and amusing themed cakes I could make. Unfortunately, all the ones I came up with were a bit too complicated, and I knew if I attempted them they'd turn out mediocre and no one would be able to tell what they were meant to be, which would have just been embarrassing for everyone. I was about to settle for my failsafe option, a chocolate fudge cake, when said friend's girlfriend, having seen my recent pineapple and coconut cheesecake, was reminded that "he loves pineapple". Done.



I spent a day idly pondering how to create a cake involving pineapple (obviously I did other things during this day, otherwise that would be approaching scary food-meditation) and decided to go for the coconut partnership again. Particularly because this bottle of coconut essence arrived in the post a couple of days ago, and spells the end to my dilemma of how to extract that real 'coconutty' flavour from desiccated coconut or coconut milk. It's incredibly strong; just taking it out of the bubble wrap it arrived in left my hands beautifully perfumed with coconut for several hours.



I decided to make a layer cake, mainly because I've never made one before and because they look impressive, and also because a single cake would have been too small. Initially I planned to sandwich the cakes together with coconut buttercream, but then I had a better idea. Pineapple curd. I have no idea where this came from; it literally popped into my head when I was doing something completely different, like making tea or writing an essay. I had no idea if it was even possible to create pineapple curd, but surely it couldn't be that different from lemon curd: juice, eggs, sugar.


A trip to the supermarket and a lazy ten minutes of stirring later, and I had a saucepan full of gorgeous, thick, sugary pineapple paste. I used bottled pineapple juice, so it didn't have a hugely strong pineapple flavour; if I were to make it again, I'd use the juice from a fresh pineapple. Like creme patisserie, the curd took me by surprise; I was stirring away at a big vat of juice, and then in literally seconds it thickened to dolloping consistency. Immensely satisfying. You can tell when it's about to turn, because scraping a spoon round the bottom edge of the pan results in a big lump of mixture on the end of it, and then suddenly the rest kind of congeals around it. Like I said, immensely satisfying.


For the cake, I made a coconut sponge based on a Nigella recipe. It uses desiccated coconut soaked in boiling water, which gives the cake a lovely moistness and crunchiness. However, I went one step better, and used my super-potent coconut essence. I was worried I'd overdone it, actually, as the kitchen was immediately filled with the smell, but it turned out just perfect. Naturally, the KitchenAid mixer was integral in creating a beautifully light cake batter.



I creamed together the butter (two whole packets...) and sugar, added the eggs (eight!), flour, coconut essence, baking powder, and finally the soaked coconut. It was a wonderful fluffy white mixture, whiter than any I've made before: I think it might be because instead of having to painstakingly mix the butter and sugar by hand, and get bored after a minute or so, I could just leave the mixer to do it, so it looked almost like meringue by the time I added the dry ingredients.


I baked the cake in two separate springform tins. One was 22cm and the other 20cm, which accounts for the dome-shaped end result. I don't have two matching tins. The smell wafting from the baking coconut was truly wonderful. After they'd cooled, I sliced them in half using a nifty device that my mum gave me for Christmas. It's like a cheese wire, but for cutting cakes in half - no faffing around with a big knife leaving an uneven result. It's even adjustable to suit cakes of different heights. Thank you, mum. I may have laughed at the apparent gimmickery of such a gadget, but I have eaten my words (and the uniformly sliced cake layers).


After spreading each layer with pineapple curd, I decided to add even more pineapple flavour by putting some thinly sliced pineapple slices on top of the curd. I didn't bother removing the tough core; if you slice pineapple thinly enough, it's just crunchy rather than tough and sinewy. I thought it would create a nice contrast in textures between the soft, buttery sponge and the tangy fruit.


Then for the part I had looked forward to most: smothering the entire creation in a thick coating of snow-white, coconut-laced buttercream. Again I used the KitchenAid to whip the butter (another packet...) and icing sugar together to form a fluffy, cloud-like mixture to which I added some more coconut essence and some desiccated coconut. I covered a spatula in it, and slathered it onto the cake. Slather is the appropriate word; a lot of buttercream went onto that sponge. I admit, I nibbled a bit to check the right ratio of butter to sugar, and coconut taste. And I may have licked the spatula clean. And the bowl. And the mixer attachment. KitchenAid are so considerate in providing you with a large surface area to lick clean.


It didn't quite look right when I'd finished. I'm not sure why, but it wasn't as I'd envisaged. I think it just looked too perfectly white and uniform. For this reason, I toasted some shredded coconut strips in a dry pan and pressed them into the buttercream around the sides. They looked great, especially the lightly browned bits, which stood out against the snow white cream. I also figured they'd give a nice crunch to the cake, along with the fruit inside.


Finally, the topping. I kept it simple, just covering the top of the cake with slices of fresh pineapple, and a few glace cherries. I'm not sure why; I think it's because traditionally pineapple upside down cake has glace cherries inside the pineapple rings. I used to make it a lot as a child, and maybe the association stuck in my mind. I think they look great; they add a startling burst of glistening colour to what is otherwise a rather pale cake. They also make it look like something from a 70s dessert trolley, which I think is fantastic. It's reminiscent of some sort of blancmange, or over-the-top gateau. There's definitely a retro feel to this cake. I didn't imagine there would be; it looked very different in my head, but I am so pleased with how it turned out. It has quite a wow factor, largely because of its enormity, but also because it looks different. Unusual. Tropical.


Obviously, taste is the important part. I initially declared to everyone at dinner that I wasn't going to have any of the cake, because I'd seen how much butter and sugar went into it. But curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to check that it was at least edible, and that I hadn't presented my friend with something likely to put him off his favourite fruit for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, this was my downfall. It was so. good. Even if I say so myself. The cake was as light as a feather, and the sweet, tangy pineapple filling a perfect accompaniment. The teeth-hurting sweetness of the coconut cream finished the whole thing off, particularly the crunchy coconut pieces.


I call this a piña colada cake, because it has all the flavours of that cocktail, minus the rum (although you can use Malibu instead of coconut essence if you like...but I'm not the kind of girl who keeps a bottle of Malibu in her kitchen...). The cream is there, in the buttercream; the freshness of the pineapple in the curd and topping, and the coconut permeates the entire creation. I'm really pleased with this. Its recipient was also pleased, I think. In fact, I think he thought it was from the restaurant initially, because I'd managed to arrive early and give it to the waiter to bring out with candles after we'd finished our main courses. If so, I'll take that as a big compliment. I managed to get a photo of the inside of the cake, with all its layers, but the lighting in the restaurant wasn't great, so it doesn't look brilliant. But you get the gist. It's also a hideously difficult cake to cut, likely to collapse at the pressure of a knife, but the flavour is all there.



Plus, it's deceptively simple to make, as long as you start early on the in day, or the day before. If you have a KitchenAid mixer (you lucky thing, you), you can let it do most of the work for you; leave it whirring away mixing the butter and sugar while you sort out weighing the other ingredients, or chopping the pineapple. The assembly part is probably the trickiest, but smothering on the buttercream is your reward. As is, of course, eating some of the cake.



Piña colada cake (makes enough for about 25-30 servings):

For the pineapple curd:

2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks
500ml pineapple juice
170g caster sugar
10 tbsp flour

For the cakes (recipe adapted from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess):

450g butter, at room temperature
450g caster sugar
8 eggs
1 tsp coconut essence (or vanilla extract)
400g self-raising flour
1 1/2 tsp arrowroot (or 50g cornflour)
1 tsp baking powder
100g desiccated coconut, soaked for an hour in 300ml boiling water

For the buttercream:

50g desiccated coconut
150g soft butter
300g icing sugar
1 tsp coconut essence (or 2 tbsp Malibu)

For decorating:

1 fresh pineapple, skin and 'eyes' sliced off and cut into thin slices
A large handful of flaked coconut, toasted in a dry pan
Glace cherries

First, make the pineapple curd. Whisk the yolks and sugar until thick and creamy, then whisk in the juice and flour. Transfer to a saucepan and heat over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until thick - this will take about 10 minutes, and it will turn suddenly. Don't get impatient and turn the heat up too high. Transfer to a bowl and chill in the fridge.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

For the cakes, cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, then add the essence. Fold in the flour, arrowroot/cornflour and baking powder, then stir in the coconut and its soaking water. Pour into two 20cm springform cake tins, greased and lined. Bake for 40 minutes, until golden brown. Leave to cool completely.

Slice each cake in half horizontally and sandwich together with the pineapple curd. Add some pineapple slices between each layer if you like. You'll probably have some pineapple curd left over; it's good on toast.

For the buttercream, whisk together the butter and icing sugar until white and fluffy, then stir in the coconut essence/Malibu and desiccated coconut. Using a spatula, spread the buttercream all over the cake in a thick layer. Don't worry too much about the top, as you'll cover it with fresh pineapple anyway. While the cream is still soft, press the flaked coconut into the sides of the cake.

Finally, decorate the top of the cake with slices of fresh pineapple and glace cherries. Do this at the last minute, as the pineapple might make the buttercream soggy.