Five things I love this week #4

1. Tracklements Pear & Perry chutney. If you're feeling a bit jaded by the world of condiments, this is one for you. It's much lighter tasting than a traditional chutney, which I often feel can be rather overpowering in its flavour and end up masking the ingredient you want it to complement. Made with British pears and a 'generous dash' of Perry (pear cider), this chutney is lovely and sweet with a delicate fruity flavour and lots of nice textures - tender pieces of onion and juicy sultanas that burst in the mouth, plus a little kick from mustard, ginger and cinnamon. Tracklements recommend pairing it with salty cheeses like mature cheddar or Pecorino; I found it worked beautifully with a mild goat's cheese. I'd also suggest serving it with cold meats, particularly pork.

2. Café No. 8, York. My boyfriend and I stumbled upon this fantastic cafe/restaurant when we visited York back in October. I returned again last week, with fond memories of a truly gorgeous sandwich I'd eaten. It was no ordinary sandwich - the bread was a thick, doughy flatbread, encasing soft chunks of goat's cheese and marinated artichokes. The lovely oil from the artichokes soaked into the dough and covered my fingers, leading to many messy but sublime mouthfuls.

This time I had a sort of bruschetta featuring an unlikely combination of ingredients: goat's cheese, rhubarb chutney, lemon oil, and fresh figs. I'd never have thought of pairing all those together, considering it overkill, but it worked harmoniously and was so good. For dessert, one of the best cheesecakes I've ever had. The ratio of biscuit base to creamy filling was nearly 1:1, which is the holy grail of cheesecakes and one as elusive as it is wonderful. There was a thick, creamy topping, quivering slightly but still holding its shape, a topping of gooseberry compote - I bloody love gooseberries - and - it gets better - crumble. Thick shards of buttery crumble, scattered over the top. Just in case this wasn't decadent enough, the whole thing was drizzled with cream. I absolutely devoured it and am still thinking about it a week later.

So it's lucky that I'll be moving to York in October to embark on a three-year PhD. I have a feeling this place is going to be my regular haunt. If you're in the area, do visit - you won't be disappointed.

3. South African fruit. I was lucky enough to be sent a gorgeous hamper of plums and nectarines from South African Fruit recently. South Africa, with its Mediterranean climate and quality soil, has a thriving fruit industry that produces nectarines, peaches, plums, apples, pears and grapefruits. I've seen South African produce in shops and supermarkets but never really thought twice about it, until now.

The fruits arrived nestled in wrapping, beautifully cosseted and snug in their little basket. I could smell their perfume as soon as I opened the box. Normally a bit sceptical about imported fruit - especially plums  and nectarines which have a tendency to be a bit woolly and bland even when home-grown - I found these ripe, juicy, and fragrant. I usually like to post a recipe featuring products I've been sent, but I'm afraid in this case I didn't want to do anything more than eat the fruit. It was so delicious and perfect on its own that I couldn't bring myself to adulterate it in any way. Next time you're in the fruit aisle of the supermarket, have a look for the South African fruit and enjoy a little taste of summer in the cold winter and spring months.

4. Smoked quail eggs. I found these at the East Anglia food festival a couple of months ago and oh, are they addictive. Can't imagine a smoked egg? Imagine eggs and smoky bacon. There's all that rich, meaty smoky flavour, yet without the bacon. They're utterly fabulous and so moreish, giving a rich flavoursome bite to anything you pair them with. I used mine in a potato salad, with celery, dill, cucumber, broccoli and green beans, all in a tangy mustardy vinaigrette. It was one of the best impromptu meals I've ever made, with the eggs the real star of the show. If you ever see smoked eggs, or know someone with a smoking kit, get your hands on some and be amazed.

5. Thinly sliced fennel. Although not so cool when it causes you to lose the tip of a finger, fennel shaved wafer-thin on a mandolin is my current vegetable of choice for meals. I love coating it in a vinaigrette of olive oil, mustard and lemon juice and tossing with smoked mackerel and segments of blood orange, or with cooked salmon and pomegranate seeds. It's also wonderful mixed with thin slices of pear and pomegranate seeds - I ate this with a veal burger, and the combination was heavenly.

Prepared this way, with a little acidity to sharpen it up a bit, fennel is fabulous with all sorts of protein  - smoked fish (mackerel, trout and salmon), smoked meat, cooked meat of all varieties but especially lamb, beef and chicken, fish in general (oily or white) - and also with cheese (mozzarella, feta and goats' work particularly well). Add something to give it a bit of fruity bite, like orange or grapefruit segments or slices of apple or pear, and you have lunch or dinner in almost an instant. It has a pleasant crunch that makes it infinitely refreshing, and a lovely mild aniseed flavour that is the perfect foil to rich meat, fish or cheese. Plus its pale green tendrils look beautiful in salads.

Homemade sourdough bread

It's impossible to deny the rush you get from pulling a loaf of homemade bread out of the oven. It's the result of a potent combination of the seductive scent of toasted flour, the sudden burst of steamy warmth as the door opens, and - most of all - the sheer pride of having created something so appetising all by yourself. It's odd, really, that we should get so much satisfaction out of cooking something so simple, something that would have been commonplace in most homes less than a century ago but now has become a rarity in the domestic kitchen, such is the widespread availability of all kinds of ready-to-buy loaves. Bread, for me, is the ultimate harbinger of culinary pride. Nothing else makes me feel as much of a domestic goddess as pulling that steaming loaf from the oven.

Imagine, then, how much this domestic goddess feeling is multiplied when the loaf in question has been approximately seven weeks in the making.

I am talking, of course, about sourdough. The grand. The elusive. The tangy. The chewy. The best-enjoyed-smothered-in-scrambled-duck-eggs-and-smoked-salmon. Sourdough is the baker's Everest.

If you haven't heard of sourdough - now ubiquitous in certain parts of the country and certain types of restaurants, and a by-word for the nauseatingly foodie middle class (yes, of course I include myself in that categorisation) - where have you been? It's hard to describe this epitome of bready perfection, but you'd know if you'd tried it. It has a very dense, moist crumb, which is chewy and has a distinctive sour tang. As a result, it keeps for ages, which is one way of justifying its often high price tag.

The other way of justifying it is as follows:

Oh em gee this bread is bloody gorgeous. Who cares about money?

Perhaps the reason for its high price tag is that sourdough is not a quick and easy process. That distinctive crumb and sour flavour are the result of days, months, often years of fermentation. It's all quite scientific and I am not, but in a nutshell the bread is risen using a Lactobacillus culture rather than cultured yeast. The lactic acid in this gives it its sour flavour.

To make a sourdough loaf, first you need a sourdough 'starter'. This is a mixture of - usually - flour and water, though recipes vary, often including an acidic component like orange juice, pineapple juice or rhubarb. This is mixed together and left in a warm place, and every day half must be thrown away and replaced with fresh flour and liquid, which is called 'feeding'. Eventually - it can take days or weeks - wild yeast starts to grow in the mixture, and it will develop a lovely fermenting smell a bit like beer. When it doubles in volume between 'feedings', it's strong enough to raise bread and can be used to bake.

I still don't quite understand the chemistry or biology behind it, but it's kind of magical. You end up with something that can raise a huge loaf of bread, grown pretty much from nothing. Therein lies the satisfaction component.

What's also amazing is that when you use sourdough starter to make bread, you only use some of it. The rest you feed with more flour and water, and reserve for your next loaf. Which means that you can hear of some starters that are decades old, and that all the loaves you will ever bake are related, spawned from the same sourdough 'mother'. It's nature at its simplest and most incredible; and also its tastiest.

Sourdough for me has positive connotations that don't simply relate to its taste. I used to work for a chef who made the most incredible sourdough bread I've ever tasted; he introduced me to its addictive crackly crust and chewy crumb, and I never looked back. When I would start waitressing shifts after school, he'd make me sourdough toast and I'd eat it slathered with butter and sea salt and find myself in food heaven. I would watch him use this giant industrial bread mixer to knead the dough for the many loaves he'd make and sell in the restaurant, and marvel that each loaf got its own individual cloth-lined basket to rise in. I'd hear customer after customer oohing and aahing over the gorgeous, gorgeous bread, and we'd often have a waiting list because the loaves were so popular.

I was also wildly in love with that chef. But let's not focus on that. The bread was also great.

I began my sourdough starter at the end of February, using a recipe from this wonderful bread forum. I used orange juice as my liquid - the acid helps to get the yeast growing, as they prefer a more acidic pH - and rye flour instead of plain flour, as this apparently helps the yeast to grow too. I put this alchemical combination in a little plastic box and gave it the airing cupboard for its home. I fed it religiously every day, stirring it lovingly and silently urging it to turn into beautiful bread as soon as it felt ready.

I became the kind of ridiculous individual who goes on holiday and forgets to remind her mum to feed the fish, but leaves detailed instructions for feeding the sourdough starter.

After a few days it began to bubble and smell very yeasty, but then it seemed to die.

Alas. I was devastated. Where had I gone wrong? I was frantically posting in the forum trying to figure out what to do next. Fortunately, it turns out this is very common. There will be good growth for the first few days, but that isn't actually yeast - just bacteria common in fermentation. The mixture seems to die but will perk up after a while - mine took about a week and a half, during which time I nearly threw it all away and gave up, figuring that I just wasn't good enough to climb this baker's Everest and that I'd stick to buying my sourdough from a bakery.

How foolish I was. Fortunately, I persevered. There was then another issue - my starter had come back to life and was bubbly, but I was told it would need to double in size between feedings before it could raise any bread. It wasn't doing this at all. I was then told that this might be because my starter was too liquid - the bubbles would just burst on the surface instead of providing aeration to raise the mixture. So I added a little less water and voila - starter doubling in size between feedings!

It all sounds fairly simple when I talk about it now, but it was quite a stressful process. Being new to the whole thing, I had no idea what was causing the various states of my starter or how to change them. I came close to giving up on several occasions, convinced that this paltry mixture of water and flour that was smelling weirdly like banana was clearly just mulch, not a starter, and that I was not cut out for this crazy process.

So this is a lesson, dear readers. Never give up. Because if you do, you'll never experience the sheer euphoria of unveiling something like this from the oven. Even if it has been seven weeks in the making.

For my first sourdough loaf, I used an amalgam of various recipes from the internet - a risky thing to do, as bread is such an exact scientific process, but I couldn't find one that really made sense or fitted in with my schedule.

A word on schedule.

This is not a quick process.

From mixing the dough to taking the loaf from the oven, you're looking at about twelve hours, depending on how quickly your dough rises and if you can put it in a warm place to do so. However, the beauty of this recipe is that there's hardly any hands-on time. If you have a mixer with a dough hook, you don't even have to get your hands very dirty. All it requires is one quick knead to combine the ingredients, another to add the salt, then you leave it for four hours. Then there's a quick folding of the dough (all of 30 seconds work), an hour's resting, another folding, more resting, a final folding, and then the dough is ready to prove for the final time, into a lovely loaf shape. This takes about four hours. Baking takes all of 40 minutes.

So actually, you can mix the dough in the morning, go out and do whatever, come back at lunchtime to fold it, then do your other two foldings as and when you can over the afternoon, then leave it for the late afternoon and early evening to rise. It'll be baked and ready in time for dinner.

But what's even better is that, once the loaf is risen and ready to bake, you can just put it in the fridge until you want to bake it. So if you want it for breakfast or lunch the next day, do all your work at the weekend or your day off, and bake it when you have time. This refrigeration helps to intensify the sour flavour, too. Incidentally, the longer you leave a sourdough starter, the more the flavour improves. If mine tastes this good at seven weeks old, I can't wait to continue baking with it.

I hope that doesn't sound too complicated, because it isn't. The great thing about sourdough is that it's quite forgiving - because it takes so much longer to rise than commercial yeast, an hour or so either way won't ruin your bread. So if you have to rush out and delay your second folding or lengthen your proving time by an hour or so, it shouldn't matter.

Incidentally, get a bread proving basket. Not only are they the best idea ever, but they'll make you feel like a pro. I got given one for my birthday by a friend who clearly knows me very very well. It's a little oval basket lined with grey, dimpled cloth. If you leave your sourdough to rise just as it is, naked on a baking sheet, it'll flatten and spread out, which isn't what we want. Instead, tuck your ball of floured dough inside its little basket and watch as it rises into a perfectly formed oval loaf, which can then be gently tipped out onto a baking sheet and immediately put in the oven before it loses its shape. Honestly, I get so much joy out of seeing my little loaf tucked up in its basket, tentatively peeking over the top, and blossoming into a full-bodied wonder.

Once you've got a successful sourdough starter (and this forum is really great for getting started, especially if you need to ask questions of the other members, who are immensely helpful), you'll be set up for life. Because once the starter is at the stage where it can double in size between feedings, you can keep it in the fridge and just feed it weekly, instead of having to worry about doing it every day (it's not a pet, after all - we don't like to eat our pets). When you want to bake with it, remove it from the fridge, feed it, then leave it for 12 hours or so, then feed it again, so there's enough for the recipe and for a bit left over to make other loaves. You might need to do this second feeding in two installments if one isn't enough - space them out 6-12 hours apart. When the starter has risen and is very bubbly, it's ready to bake with and you can proceed with the recipe below.

I hope that doesn't sound complicated. It probably does, but once you get the hang of it it's a piece of cake. Or a piece of bread. I'm very new to this whole thing, but it seems to be starting to make sense now, and once you've actually baked a loaf all the mystery will disappear, to be replaced with only joy.

It's so easy, but the results are utterly spectacular. I've made this loaf twice now, and each time I've taken it from the oven I can't quite believe it's mine. It looks like the poshest of artisan bakery sourdough loaves, the kind you get in fancy restaurants to dip into fruity olive oil. The crispy crust and tangy, dense crumb I could eat for weeks and not get bored. Better still, it keeps for ages and makes absolutely fabulous toast. Toast with jam, toast with butter, toast with scrambled eggs, toast with melted goat's cheese and marinated artichokes, toast with mozzarella and parma ham...the possibilities are endless. Just make sure the bread is sliced thickly so you can appreciate all of its tangy, chewy goodness.

Give sourdough a go. Or just look at these pictures and be so impressed with my skill and ingenuity. Because I really am.

Have you ever tried to venture into the weird, wonderful and occasionally frustrating world of sourdough? How did you find it?

Homemade sourdough bread (makes one large loaf):

• 200g sourdough starter*
• 500g strong white bread flour
• 300ml tepid water
• 2 tsp salt

I use an electric mixer with a dough hook to make my sourdough, but you can try it by hand. Put the starter, flour and water in the mixer and use the hook to combine, for about a minute. Leave for 10 minutes, then add the salt and knead in using the dough hook (or your hands) for a couple of minutes.

Put in a floured bowl and cover with a cloth, then leave in a warm place (the airing cupboard is ideal) for about four hours or until the dough has doubled in size.

Place the dough on a floured work surface and spread out into a rectangle shape. Fold the right side over to the middle, then fold the left side over that - like folding a letter to go into one of those thin envelopes. Give the dough a quarter-turn clockwise and repeat, flattening it out and folding it again.

Put the dough, seam side down, back in its bowl, cover and put back in the warm place. Leave for an hour or so, then repeat the folding. Leave for another hour or so, then fold again. This helps get air into the dough which results in those lovely bubbles in the crumb.

After this third folding, place the dough - seam side down - into a clean, well-floured bowl, or a floured bread proving basket if you're lucky enough to have one. Put in the warm place for about 4 hours, or until it has doubled in size and risen to form a nice loaf shape.

Pre-heat the oven to 220C/210C fan oven. Place an empty oven tray in the bottom of the oven and get a jug of water ready. When the oven has heated up, get a baking sheet and very carefully tip your dough out of the bowl onto the sheet. Don't do this too roughly or the dough will collapse a bit and you'll lose all the lovely bubbles. Using a very sharp knife, make slashes in the top of the dough in a square shape.

Put it in the oven, and as you do so pour the jug of water onto the empty baking tray to create steam - this helps give it a lovely chewy crust. Quickly shut the door and bake for 20 minutes, then turn the temperature down to 190C/180C fan oven and bake for another 20 minutes.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.

*To get your starter ready for baking, have it at room temperature and feed it as you normally would - you probably won't have 200g at this stage. Then, around 12 hours later, feed it again to increase the quantity. After another 6-12 hours, feed it again (if you have enough by now, skip this second feeding). You should now have enough for the recipe, plus some left over for your next loaf. When it has risen and is very bubbly, it's ready to bake with.

Rhubarb, blueberry and almond baked oatmeal

(...or, "look, crumble for breakfast - but it's healthy!")

Sometimes I think that recipes shouldn't be allowed to tell you how many people they're supposed to serve. I wonder who those portion-control fascists are, that believe they have the right to dictate to us exactly how much of a glorious pan of food we are legitimately allowed to dole out to ourselves and devour with a clear conscience. I wonder why we allow ourselves to trundle on in this Nineteen Eighty-Four style existence, nonchalantly turning a blind eye as the food police worm their way into all aspects of our lives. No longer are we allowed to eat one of those big packs of sushi for lunch; no, the packaging tells us "One serving = half a pack" and then proceeds to blare out those guilt-inducing red and orange traffic light symbols that mean we couldn't enjoy scoffing a whole pack even if we tried, because those garish warning colours are now forever imprinted on our retinas, basically indicating that a single mouthful of the other half of the packet will send our blood sodium levels skyrocketing into stroke-inducing territory, and our arteries to immediately clog with lipids and refuse to let anything important - like blood - past.

Perhaps that's a bit extreme, but I do have a point, I think. Recipe serving guidelines are totally arbitrary, given that it's impossible for them to cater to the hugely diverse variation of appetites in our population. One of those packs of gnocchi you can buy in the chilled section of the supermarket ostensibly serves three or four; I once lived with a boy for whom it was merely a component of his lunch (the others being bacon and pesto).

My biggest irritation comes from those recipes that make wildly outrageous and vague claims like "serves 4-6". What does that EVEN MEAN? "Serves six normal people but four MASSIVE BLOATERS - if you only get four portions out of this luscious lasagne or sizzling stew, prepare to feel really crap about yourself, fatty"?

Yet I have to admit that I, too, conform to the pressure to tell the world how many people one of my (utterly fabulous) recipes will serve. 

And I'm ashamed to admit it, readers, but...

...sometimes I lie.

For example, my recent rhubarb crumble cheesecake. Incredible. Astounding. A work of pure creative genius. In a moment of mendacity I had the nerve to tell you that it serves six. Except this is a purely hypothetical and an estimate totally lacking in any factual foundation, because the first time I made it, I ate over a quarter by myself. 

So should I assume that all my readers share my rampant and sometimes indecent desire for that luscious menage à trois of cream cheese, rhubarb, and buttery crumble, and tell them that the cake serves four? Or should I - as I did - realise that I'm generally the exception to the rule and can cram far more dessert down my oesophagus than any normal human being should, and therefore give my serving estimate with that in mind?

The perils of recipe writing.

But really, there is nothing more disheartening than picking up a nice lunch-to-go from the chiller aisle of a supermarket (well yes, that is disheartening in itself, but read on for what's even worse), thinking it looks just right, size-wise, for the current black hole of starvation you're feeling in the pit of your stomach, and then seeing "serves 2" on the packet, or the nutrition information for "One serving (half a pack)". Firstly, is this just some sick ploy to make us all even more obese? Because I'm pretty sure no one in their right mind is likely to eat half a sandwich or salad or box of sushi for lunch and be able to leave the rest sitting on their desk or in the office fridge without it plaguing them, haunting them, and eventually driving them to crippling, dribbling despair that results in them clawing their way across the office floor with sweat pouring from their ears as they try to resist the repellent force-field around said lunch item that forbids them eating the whole thing.

The same goes for puddings. I picked up a lovely-looking sticky toffee pudding in Tesco the other day. Rustic. Gooey. Vaguely home-made looking, though that was clearly just clever marketing and it had actually been lovingly created by the mechanical hands of a piece of factory equipment. In China. It was packaged in one of those foil trays with a cardboard lid, like you get for takeaways. Thinking it'd be just perfect for me and the boyfriend, I was about to put it in the basket.

I should have done. Should have just done it. Got it over with. Thrown it in the basket and never looked back. 

But for some reason I glanced at the packaging (one thing you must never do: look at the nutrition information for a sticky toffee pudding), and lo and behold, there it was. The dreaded words. 

"Serves four".

Yeah, I thought. Four people who really hate life. Four children, maybe. Or four birds. 

I had to put it back. As much as I'm trying to resist the tyranny of the serving guideline fascists, I realised in that sad and sticky moment that I am their slave. They will always rule me. Always make me feel guilty about the sizeable amount I'm able - no, scratch that - I need to eat for lunch. Always make me cringe at the capacity of my stomach to squirrel away anything combining butter and sugar in very uncouth amounts. I hate them.

Anyway, you're probably wondering where this rather vitriolic diatribe came from. The reason I began this post in this way is that the recipe I'm going to tell you about today, by the wonderful Heidi Swanson (writer of the superb blog 101 Cookbooks and author of the inspirational cookbook Super Natural Every Day), has inflicted on me a similar sensation of unpleasant gluttonous guilt. The reason being that under the recipe I am going to tell you about, she writes these ominous words: "Serves 6 generously, or 12 as part of a larger brunch spread".

I can eat the whole thing in three helpings.

Which makes me equivalent, in stomach-expansion terms, to either two or four people. 

Which makes me, quite frankly, disgusting.

I can't help it.

This recipe is utterly incredible.

For good reason, it's become a widespread food blog classic, frequently popping up in different guises on the internet; I'd wager a large proportion of all the bloggers out there have given it a go at some point, either in its original form or adding some variation of their own. Heidi Swanson is a genius; I always marvel at the originality and creative flair of her recipes, and this is a case in point. It's simple but totally addictive and wonderful.

The original recipe uses bananas, sliced and used to line a baking dish, over which you scatter blueberries and then a mixture of oats, nuts, cinnamon, sugar (or maple syrup), salt and baking powder. Over this you pour another mixture of milk, egg, melted butter and vanilla extract. After a final scattering of more nuts and blueberries, it's ready to bake (salivating yet?). In the heat of the oven, the milk soaks through the oats and makes them moist and tender underneath, while the top sets to a crispy, crunchy crust. The juice from the fruit bubbles up around the crust, leaving those classic gooey, sweet, crispy edges so beloved of things like crumble, cobbler and pie.

It's basically a crumble, but without the flour or (most of) the butter. Soft, sweet fruit; crunchy nuts; gooey, chewy topping. I've made the banana and blueberry version three times now. Heidi's original recipe suggests walnuts, but I much prefer to make it with pecans, which are one of my favourite nuts and work so well with bananas. Walnuts I find a bit too bitter. 

Anyway, this is unbelievable. You'd never have thought such a simple idea could be so divine. I'd heartily recommend the banana and blueberry version, but I had a load of lovely Yorkshire rhubarb lying around so decided to try a version with that instead. I swapped the pecans for almonds, the vanilla extract for almond extract, and the bananas for chunky pink sticks of rhubarb. These softened in the oven, releasing their tart-sweet juice and perfuming their coating of oats with its syrupy goodness. 

I guess the reason this dish has won such a devout following is that it's basically a template for your mind and your stomach to run wild with. Change the fruits; change the nuts; change the vanilla to something else. Its basic make-up is something that cannot be beaten, an irresistible contrast in textures and flavours. Above all, it's wonderful breakfast or brunch food, designed to set you up for the day and still be healthy while tasting decadently like dessert. It also reheats well, so if you want to make it for just you (do it! DO IT!), you can keep it in the fridge and warm up portions in the microwave. It's actually even better after a couple of days, when all the flavours have mingled together. 

So I'm sorry, Heidi, but I really do question your suggestion that this could serve up to twelve people. It's just too damn good.

Rhubarb, blueberry and almond baked oatmeal (serves...er.....I'll go with four big breakfast fans)

(Adapted from 'Super Natural Every Day', by Heidi Swanson)

• 400g rhubarb, cut into 1-inch lengths
• 4 tbsp vanilla sugar (or caster sugar) 
• 200g blueberries
• 200g rolled or 'jumbo' oats (not instant oats)
• 60g almonds, roughly chopped
• 60g brown sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1.5 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 475ml milk
• 1 large egg
• 3 tbsp melted butter
• 2 tsp almond extract
• 3 tbsp flaked almonds

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Butter an 8in x 8in baking dish, or a similar-sized dish (I use a small Le Creuset one). Scatter the rhubarb over the bottom and toss to coat in the vanilla/caster sugar. Add half the blueberries. [If making the banana version of this dish, omit the sugar - rhubarb needs it because it's quite sour, but banana doesn't].

Mix together the oats, chopped almonds, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. 

In a large jug, whisk together the melted butter, milk, egg and almond extract.

Sprinkle the oat mixture on top of the rhubarb and spread out so it forms a fairly even layer. Pour the milk mixture evenly over the oats, and give the dish a couple of bashes on the worktop to make sure the milk is evenly distributed. Sprinkle over the rest of the blueberries and the flaked almonds.

Bake for 40 minutes or until the oat mixture has set and turned crunchy on top. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Quail in rose petal sauce with toasted pistachio couscous

"Tita wasn't there, even though her body was sitting up quite properly in her chair; there wasn't the slightest sign of life in her eyes. It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal's aromas."

For my birthday this year I was given the Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate. It was a present from two good friends of mine, chosen - I think - because it is very food-centric. It recounts the story of Tita, the youngest daughter of the De La Garza family, who has been forbidden to marry because Mexican tradition dictates that the eldest daughter must remain single to look after her mother until she dies. She falls in love with a man called Pedro, who marries her sister Rosaura out of a desire to be near Tita. This doesn't quite go to plan, and - as the blurb of the novel states - "for the next 22 years Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds."

The novel tells the story of Tita and Pedro through the medium of food; each chapter begins with a different recipe, and tales of Tita - who we are told has a "sixth sense" about "everything concerning food" - preparing numerous exotic and seductive dishes are interspersed with the story of her emotional life and her encounters with Pedro. There is a scene where Pedro stumbles upon her grinding toasted chillies, almonds and sesame seeds together on a stone, and is "transfixed by the sight of Tita in that erotic posture". Everything in the novel revolves beautifully around the domestic world of cooking and food preparation, intertwined with passion and romance.

From the way the book is written, you'd never guess that twenty-two years are supposed to pass from beginning to end. It's structured around the months of the year, a chapter for each, but rather than covering a single year we're supposed to assume that the 'March' that follows the 'Feburary' is in fact March several years later. Each month begins with a recipe. January features 'Christmas rolls' (ingredients: a can of sardines, half a chorizo sausage, an onion, oregano, a can of serrano chiles and 10 hard rolls), moving through April (Turkey Mole with Almonds and Sesame Seeds), July (oxtail soup), October (cream fritters: 1 cup heavy cream, 6 eggs, cinnamon and syrup) to December (Chillies in Walnut Sauce). 

All the recipes are utterly fascinating, exotic and wonderful; I particularly love the idea of the turkey mole with almonds and sesame seeds. In each chapter the recipe is featured because it bears some relevance to the emotions and situation of Tita at the time, or because the plot demands it. Feburary's 'Chabela Wedding Cake' (granulated sugar, cake flour, 17 eggs and the grated peel of a lime) appears because of the forthcoming wedding of Pedro and Rosaura.

I think maybe I enjoyed this book so much because I can relate to Tita in some ways; I often feel like my emotional life is inextricably bound up in my life with food. I don't mean that if I've had a bad day I'll devour an entire chocolate cake to cheer myself up, or that I comfort eat. More that I tend to remember significant or important episodes in my life via what I had cooked or eaten at the time, or that my cooking nearly always reflects my mood in some way, or that my state of mind is frequently governed by what I've cooked or eaten.

It is a wonderful, beautiful book. It's also rather surreal in places; I hate to use that over-used and rather vague term 'magical realism', but I think that's the best way of defining it. You're reading about something that appears to be a normal, realistic situation and then something utterly bizarre will happen. 

The best example of this is in the March chapter, where Tita's sister Gertrudis is affected in a surprising way by the dinner Tita has prepared: 

“On her the food seemed to act as an aphrodisiac; she began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs. An itch in the centre of her body kept her from sitting properly in her chair. She began to sweat, imagining herself on horseback with her arms clasped around one of Pancho Villa’s men: the one she had seen in the village plaza the week before, smelling of sweat and mud, of dawns that brought uncertainty and danger, smelling of life and of death. She was on her way to market in Piedras Negras with Chencha, the servant, when she saw him coming down the main street, riding in front of the others, obviously the captain of the troop. Their eyes met and what she saw in his made her tremble. She saw all the nights he’d spent staring into the fire and longing to have a woman beside him, a woman he could kiss, a woman he could hold in his arms, a woman like her. She got out her handkerchief and tried to wipe these sinful thoughts from her mind as she wiped away the sweat.

But it was no use, something strange had happened to her. She turned to Tita for help, but Tita wasn’t there, even though her body was sitting up quite properly in her chair; there wasn’t the slightest sign of life in her eyes. It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas.”

Gertrudis goes to shower, because "her whole body was dripping with sweat. Her sweat was pink, and it smelled like roses, a lovely strong smell." Little does she know that the scent of roses from her body travels all the way to the town, engulfing the solider she had seen the week before.

“A higher power was controlling his actions. He was moved by a strong urge to arrive as quickly as possible...the aroma from Gertrudis’ body guided him. He got there just in time to find her racing through the field. Then he knew why he’d been drawn there. This woman desperately needed a man to quench the red-hot fire that was raging inside her...

Gertrudis stopped running when she saw him riding toward her. Naked as she was, with her loosened hair falling to her waist, luminous, glowing with energy, she might have been an angel and a devil in one woman. The delicacy of her face, the perfection of her pure virginal body contrasted with the passion, the lust, that leapt from her eyes, from her every pore. These things, and the sexual desire Juan had contained for so long while he was fighting in the mountains, made for a spectacular encounter.

Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her on to his horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away.”

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that I am not the first to try and recreate the splendid 'Quail in rose petal sauce' that is the focus of the March chapter and the cause of such wild, tempestuous carnal urgings. I was honestly convinced I might be, and was so excited about this prospect, but of course there are various recipes from other bloggers out there who have given it a go. My attempts at original creativity are always thwarted by others in the blogosphere.

However, I should probably add a disclaimer before I go any further: I did, by no means, decide to make this dish because I was hoping a rippling, muscular, semi-naked Mexican warrior would gallop down to my house and whisk me off into the sunset on his horse. 

No, I...er...actually made it because I thought it sounded tasty. Like you're going to believe me. But honestly, I did.

This is a recipe that has poetry. Pedro brings Tita a bouquet of roses to celebrate her becoming the official cook of the house. Rosaura is not impressed and runs off crying. Tita, overcome with emotion, clasps the roses to her breast "so tightly that when she got to the kitchen, the roses, which had been mostly pink, had turned quite red from the blood that was flowing from Tita's hands and breasts". Not wanting to waste the roses, Tita remembers a recipe she was once taught involving pheasants. She adapts it to use quail, which is all they have on the ranch. 

"It truly is a delicious dish", the novel states. "The roses give it an extremely delicate flavour". 

Fascinated by the idea of using roses in a sauce of meat, and also by cooking with quail, which I've never tried, I just had to give it a go. 

The book gives one of the strangest ingredients lists I have ever seen: 

• 12 roses, preferably red
• 12 chestnuts
• 2 teaspoons butter
• 2 teaspoons cornflour
• 2 drops attar of roses
• 2 tablespoons anise
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 cloves garlic
• 6 quail
• 1 pitaya

There are very vague instructions as to how to make the actual dish, from which I was able to improvise a little and come up with my version.

It's actually a simple recipe, even if its ingredients are a tad bizarre. The sauce is made by frying some crushed garlic in a little butter and honey until softened and fragrant. To this is added a puree of cooked chestnuts and 'pitaya', which is more commonly known over here as 'dragon fruit'. I've seen them in supermarkets before and have eaten them occasionally - they have translucent white flesh full of little black seeds, that look rather like raspberry seeds. The taste is slightly sweet but generally a bit bland, which is why I don't really eat them. You also grind together anise and rose petals, and add these to the sauce, along with 'attar of roses' which I assume is rosewater or similar, and cornflour if needed, to thicken.

As I was making this, I looked at my Kenwood and I thought "this is the weirdest combination of things I have ever put in a blender". Roses, chestnuts, dragon fruit. Totally bizarre.

But, can I tell you something? It works. 

It's hard to describe the flavour of this sauce. It's rich and earthy from the chestnuts and garlic, but also quite sweet from the honey. There's a nice nutty texture from the seeds of the dragon fruit, which just lends it a slight mild fruitiness. Finally, there's the perfume of roses. I used dried rose petals for this rather than fresh - if you have roses in your garden that you can guarantee haven't been sprayed with anything nasty (hence don't use shop-bought), then go ahead and use fresh petals. Dried petals, though, can be found in Middle Eastern cooking stores and are rather lovely. I felt like I was cooking with confetti or potpourri.

Because rose is a strong flavour and one we don't generally tend to associate with edible things, you don't want to use too much. I added the rose petals bit by bit, tasting as I went. I didn't use any rosewater, as the recipe suggests, but the rose flavour of my finished recipe was very subtle, so by all means add a couple of drops of rosewater if you want it a bit more floral (only a tiny amount, though, as otherwise you'll think you're eating quail baked in soap).

I made a few changes to the book's recipe, adding chicken stock to make a runnier sauce that would soak into the couscous. I also used cornmeal (polenta) to thicken it, rather than cornflour, because it seems right with the Mexican theme. You could use either, depending on how thick you want your sauce. I also thought it needed something to give it a bit of sharpness, as it's quite rich - lemon juice would work perfectly, so I've included it in the recipe.  I didn't grind the rose petals with anise in a pestle and mortar, as the book says; rather, I put the rose petals in the blender with the chestnuts and dragon fruit, and I put two whole star anise into the sauce while it was simmering. If you have ground anise, though, either add that directly to the sauce (I'd suggest two teaspoons rather than two tablespoons) or grind with the rose petals, if you like. If you don't have dragon fruit, you could try adding a few raspberries instead, for the texture, or just leave it out. You could try other fruits in its place - peaches might work quite nicely, or pears.

I'd never tried quail before, apart from once at Yotam Ottolenghi's restaurant Nopi, where I had it smoked with an utterly incredible fruity sauce that I think had kumquats in. It was divine. I was almost as impressed with it the second time round. These plump little birds (serve 2 per portion) have delicate, tender breast meat and rich, meaty legs that are small and diminutive enough to pick up and gnaw on without looking like a wannabe caveman. They're not hard to get hold of - Waitrose sell them, and any butcher should be able to order them for you. There's something delightful about being served two tiny little quail, perky and burnished like mini roast chickens, all for you.

I served this on a bed of couscous mixed with toasted pistachios, because I had an inkling it would all work very well. I wasn't wrong. The sauce is quite sweet and rich, so really needs that earthiness from the toasted nuts to balance it out. Couscous is a perfect vehicle for the sauce and, although not really Mexican, seems to work with the textures and flavours involved.

This is a delightful dish. The sauce infuses the tender, flavoursome quail meat with its intriguing blend of flavours, and forms a lovely crust on top of the birds. It's addictive in its combination of flavours, a gorgeous blend of chestnuts, sweet honey, fruit and that light floral touch from the roses. The pistachios add the final flourish. This is exactly my kind of food: flavoursome, fruity, earthy, and served with couscous. I loved every minute of devouring it.

Best of all, it's not even very difficult, despite sounding a bit odd. 

This would make the perfect romantic meal for Valentines Day or some kind of special occasion, especially given its origins in the book. You could decorate it with real rose petals or roses, if you like. It's romance on a plate; it's exotic, exciting and unusual.

I  love the associations this recipe has with the wonderful writing of Like Water for Chocolate; like the book, it is romantic, sensuous and bursting with flavour and excitement.

Quail in rose petal sauce with toasted pistachio couscous (serves 2):

• 4 oven-ready quail
• 12 vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts
• 4 heaped tsp dried rose petals, plus extra to garnish
• 1 dragonfruit, flesh scooped out (omit if you can't find one, or use another fruit as suggested above)
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp honey
• 2 star anise or 2 tsp ground anise
• 250ml chicken stock
• 1-2 drops rosewater (optional)
• 2 tsp cornflour or 1 tbsp cornmeal/polenta
• A good squeeze of lemon juice
• Salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 150g couscous
• 3 tbsp pistachios, roughly chopped

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Put the chestnuts, rose petals and dragonfruit flesh in a blender and blitz to a puree. In a small saucepan, heat the butter and saute the garlic until it is golden and softened. Add the honey. Add the chestnut and rose puree along with the star anise and cook for a couple of minutes. Season well, then add the chicken stock and lemon juice, and simmer for another couple of minutes. Add either the cornmeal or cornflour to thicken the sauce. If using cornmeal, add it directly. If using cornflour, stir it into a little water first to make a paste, then add this. Taste - if you want more rose flavour, add the rosewater. It might need a little more lemon juice or salt to give it a bit of sharpness, as it's a rather sweet sauce.

Place the olive oil in a frying pan and place over a high heat. Brown the quail on the side of one of its legs for a couple of minutes, then flip over, then finally brown the breast side. 

Place the quail in a small oven dish so they fit snugly together. Season them well, then pour over the sauce.

Bake in the oven for around 20 minutes until the sauce is rich and bubbly, and the quails are cooked through - test them as you would chicken.

Meanwhile, place the couscous in a bowl and pour over enough boiling water to cover by about 1cm. Cover with a plate and leave to fluff up. While this happens, toast the pistachios in a dry saucepan over a low heat until fragrant. Fluff the couscous with a fork, season, and add the pistachios.

Serve the quails on top of the couscous, with the rose sauce poured over. Garnish with a few dried rose petals.

Cardamom treacle tart with poached rhubarb

Now, I'm a firm believer in not messing around with the classics. The saddest thing I have ever eaten was a 'deconstructed rhubarb cheesecake'. I had actually awaited it with great anticipation. Quite naturally, I thought this 'deconstructed' business would essentially mean 'more biscuit base', so I was definitely game for that. In fact, I was basically imagining a huge bowl full of biscuits mixed with butter, and maybe some creamy concoction alongside. There may have been a bit of salivation occurring.

Imagine my utter horror when I was presented with a shotglass full of rhubarb juice, and another containing a bland white creamy substance with a few stray biscuit crumbs strewn across the top.

I feed the birds in my garden more crumbs than that.

It was utterly, utterly vile. It must have been, because I am still sickened by it eighteen months later, and I told everyone who would listen (i.e. no one) for weeks after the dinner about my horrifying experience.

If you are going to deconstruct something as wonderful as cheesecake, why in heaven's name would you take the BEST BITS and diminish them? Cheesecake should not be presented in a shotglass. The clue is in the name: cake is something that, generally, does not often find itself encased in glass. A bit like...oh yes, cheese. Cheese is also something that should not be found in this sorry state.

A few weeks ago, Tom from Masterchef tried to present a 'deconstructed lemon tart'. It was met with widespread condemnation and ridicule, drawing such comments as "it looks like he made a lemon tart then dropped it on the floor". In fact, I don't understand how it could have looked like it did without being dropped on the floor. Does 'deconstructed' translate as 'poorly and unsubtly rescued'?

Or just 'guaranteed to dismay'?

I once watched Raymond Blanc, my husband-to-be (apparently he's also quite good at cooking and some people have heard of him) make a deconstructed crumble on his Kitchen Secrets show. It is a mark of how strongly I feel about deconstructed desserts (and about crumble) that even this wonderful man could not tempt me with his bowl full of summer fruits topped with a circular biscuity thing.

That, my friends, is not crumble. Crumble is not a biscuit. Crumble is like a biscuit that you've taken a sledgehammer to, and then baked. On fruit. So it oozes up sumptuous sticky juice around the edges. Bubbling voluptuously. Calling out to be eaten with a scoop of ice cream. Begging to be returned to for seconds, and possibly thirds, and then that thing that I like to call 'fourths' that is generally best eaten with a teaspoon, straight from the pot, pan or dish, after the meal has ostensibly finished and you're just 'clearing up'. With your mouth.

The gist of all this being that classics are classics for a reason. They're awesome. Don't mess with them. Don't put cake in a glass. Don't try and make geometric art out of a crumble. Don't drop your lemon tart and then add some weird coulis and other rubbish to make up for it.

But then what do I go and do?

I put cardamom in a treacle tart. 

Except I didn't put the tart in a glass. I didn't drop it, nor did I cut it out into a circle. I left it well alone. Apart from that teeny tiny little addition, I stuck with the classic.

And oh, my god. I can't understand why no one has ever done this before. 

My thought process for this recipe was as follows:

I really, really, bloody want a piece of treacle tart. Like, now. Sticky and oozing and gooey and dentally suicidal and cringeworthily full of golden syrup. Ooh, I made breadcrumbs the other day and stashed them in the freezer. Definitely an excuse to make a treacle tart - frugality is my middle name. Oh no, wait, it's Frances. Close enough. I also have some awesome rhubarb in the fridge. I reckon they'd go really well together - the sharpness of the rhubarb will cut through that intense syrupy sweetness and also look very pretty on the plate. Hmm...what else could I add? I like to think in trios of flavours, for neatness. Rhubarb and cardamom go well. Would cardamom work in the tart? It could either be sublime or a total failure. But then if you think about it, some of the sweetest desserts and pastries I can think of, namely baklava and other syrup-drenched Middle Eastern sweets, use cardamom liberally, and that combination of intense sugar and citrussy spice is heavenly. Surely it should work. We will see. Time to buy a whole tin of golden syrup, empty it into a bowl of breadcrumbs, add some eggs, put the whole lot in a pastry case, then ring my dentist and arrange for either a filling or false teeth depending on how much of this tart I eat.

I love the look and feel of a treacle tart fresh out of the oven. It's gorgeously golden and satisfyingly spongy, with a lovely burnished rim of caramelised sugar around the edge. It's rustic in the extreme and promises total joy with every mouthful. I would like to sleep on it, occasionally rolling over and taking small bites to soothe me when I have nightmares.

It's also catastrophically bad for you, seeing as it contains an entire can of golden syrup. But you're hardly going to be eating it every day, so who cares. Embrace the syrup. Not literally - it's a nightmare to clean. My camera is covered in the stuff. As, probably, is the lining of my stomach.

Anyway, my gamble paid off. This is the best treacle tart I've ever had.

The addition of cardamom is, I have to say, a stroke of genius. Plus I scoured the internet and I've never seen cardamom added to a treacle tart before, so dare I even venture that this might be an original idea?

Surely not. But I like to dream, so humour me.

It's sticky and sweet, but the filling doesn't adhere to your teeth because of the eggs beaten into it, which keep it light and almost fluffy. There's the juice of a lemon which, coupled with the citrussy, fragrant cardamom lifts the whole thing into that gorgeous sweet-slightly sour territory that is just so addictive. The pastry is light, crumbly and buttery, balancing everything perfectly.

Add some poached rhubarb on top (not, I should add, served from a shot glass) for a sweet tang and a contrast in texture, and you have one of the best desserts I've ever made, or even eaten for that matter. You don't have to include the rhubarb - the tart on its own is incredible and is perfect eaten with some cold cold vanilla ice cream to counteract its chewy sweetness.

Seriously, I cannot get over how good a treacle tart is with cardamom in it. I want to make it again, just to check I wasn't hallucinating and that it is actually as amazing as I think it is. Actually no, I want to make it again so I can eat the entire thing. It's reminiscent of all those syrupy Middle Eastern pastries, but even better.

I'm a firm believer in not messing with the classics...with this small and sublime exception. At least I didn't drop it and put it back on the plate.

Cardamom treacle tart with poached rhubarb (serves 8):

(Adapted from a BBC recipe here)

• 225g plain flour
• 110g very cold butter, cubed
• Cold water
• 450g can golden syrup
• 90g fresh breadcrumbs
• 2 eggs, beaten
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 1 heaped tsp ground ginger
• 10 cardamom pods, seeds crushed and ground to a powder
• 200g rhubarb
• 4 tbsp caster sugar

First, make the pastry. Blitz the flour and butter together in a blender (or rub together with your fingertips) until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the cold water, 1 tbsp at a time, until the dough just comes together. Tip out onto a floured work surface, form into a ball, then roll out to a thickness of 0.5cm. Line a 23cm tart tin with the pastry, letting it overhang the edges a little (you can trim them after cooking - it'll shrink otherwise). Chill for 30 minutes in the fridge.

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Prick the bottom of the pastry case with a fork and line with greaseproof paper. Fill with baking beans/dried pulses to weigh it down, then bake for 15 minutes until turning golden. Remove the beans and paper and bake for another 5-10 mins until crispy.

For the filling, mix together the syrup, breadcrumbs, eggs, lemon juice, ginger and cardamom. Pour into the case then bake for 30 minutes until golden and slightly brown around the edges. Leave to cool before dusting with icing sugar.

For the rhubarb, slice it into 1-inch lengths and place in a small pan with the sugar and a tiny splash of water. Simmer until it just starts to disintegrate. Check the sugar - you might want a little more if your rhubarb is very acidic.

To serve, slice the tart using a very sharp knife, spoon over a little of the rhubarb compote, and serve with vanilla ice cream.

Smoked duck, mozzarella and baby fig salad

How utterly gorgeous are these little baby figs?

I found them in M&S months ago, but dismissed them as the kind of gimmicky, ludicrous, overpriced fruit that I generally tend to avoid, preferring to buy stuff that's in season and hasn't been shipped from halfway across the world (exceptions: pineapple, bananas, and Alphonso mangoes). They were something like £2.50 a box, which for some reason at the time seemed an inordinate amount of money to spend on just a handful of tiny fruits that would probably prove tasteless, fuzzy and disappointing.

Then I saw them again the other day, and thought...what? Two boxes for £3? Three pounds. That is, in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money. I couldn't quite think why I hadn't just bought them before. Maybe because real, normal-sized figs were in season. Maybe because they seemed extravagant when I was still a student and not earning money. But now that I am, in fact, earning (some) money, they were just the treat I needed at the end of a long day.

Oh and I may also have just bought a pair of Russell & Bromley shoes...but let's focus on the figs. If only because they seem positively bargainous in comparison.

A fresh fig is just the thing for these grey sort-of-but-not-quite-Spring climes. If Hamlet were still alive, I venture he'd be saying 'The fig's the thing'. I just realise I wrote 'still alive', as if Hamlet were, in fact, once living and not the figment of Shakespeare's imagination. Hmmm.

Anyway, the fresh, sweet, crunchy bite of a fig is a welcome thing at the moment. As is its glorious dark pink flesh and perfect bulbous form. Even more so for being miniature - these baby figs are the perfect garnish to just about anything.

I've used them in a few recipes so far, but this one is definitely a highlight. I found some glorious smoked duck breast at the recent Feast East food festival in Cambridgeshire (more on other delights from there at a future date...), which again was something I'd usually dismiss as extravagantly expensive, but something about food festivals seems to turn me into an unabashed hedonist with an apparently limitless bank balance, so it was all OK. I bought it. Duck and figs are a classic and wonderful combination that I've worked with a few times, and adding a smoky element just makes it even better. This would have been lovely on its own, but I added some mozzarella. I'm not really sure why. I think my thought process went:

"Figs. Mmm, sweet. Good with creamy things. Like cheese. Ricotta cheese. Mmmm. But I always make a fig and ricotta salad. Need something similar. Milky and quite bland but still tasty. MmmmOZZARELLA. I love mozzarella. Haven't had it in ages. Would it go with duck? Hmm. I don't see why not. It goes with most cured meats, and that's basically what smoked duck is. Ooh I can't wait to tear apart that quivering globule of milky goodness."

Bear in mind this entire train of thought either occurred in the swimming pool or while negotiating Cambridge traffic on my bike. Unsure which. Neither are really appropriate, are they?

Now, I don't like salad without carbs. I don't mean dough sticks, Pizza-Express style. But something starchy and filling, otherwise there is just no point - I'll be hungry again in five minutes. For this element I tend to use either couscous, pearl barley, or lentils. Any of those would be great here, but I went for lentils - their earthy, knobbly texture is great with rich meats and also with sweet figs.

Puy lentils, cooked in chicken stock then tossed in a tangy mustardy dressing (I'm obsessed with mustard at the moment...I dress basically everything in mustard except myself), oodles of fresh lemon thyme (so great with figs), some rocket, those smoky slivers of tasty duck curled like ribbons on the plate, fat hunks of torn mozzarella sitting like little milky clouds and finally, those wonderful jewel-like baby figs.

I took this into work the next day and one of my colleagues peered over and said "Ooh, that looks very healthy. Are those lentils?"

I said "Yes - lentils, rocket, smoked duck, mozzarella and baby figs".

I could also have said, "Yes, I'm a massively middle class food snob, the kind that makes her own cheese and muesli and has six different types of flour in her larder, as well as a sourdough starter lurking in the airing cupboard."

Either, really. She replied, "Oh. I have last night's shepherd's pie."

So, if you happen to have some smoked duck and baby figs to hand, give this a go. It's a really delicious combination of flavours and textures, with the smoked duck the star followed closely by the adorable figlets. However, you could also use fresh duck breast, served pink and thinly sliced, or just something like Parma ham, or even bacon lardons. You could use fresh normal figs if in season, or replace with thin slices of pear or quince, or maybe grapes.

But I'd say, live dangerously. Go to M&S and buy a box of baby figs. They might make you smile. If they don't, try a pair of Russell & Bromley shoes.

I'm not going to post a recipe for this, because a) I don't really remember quantities and b) it's so easy that you could probably make it in your sleep. Though I wouldn't recommend that. Basically, you want to boil some lentils (around 80g per person) in chicken stock until tender but still nutty. Toss with a dressing made from 1-2 tsp Dijon mustard, 1 tsp balsamic vinegar, and 2 tbsp olive/rapeseed oil, and lots of salt, pepper and fresh thyme/lemon thyme leaves. Add a handful of rocket/rocket and spinach salad. Toss with strips of smoked duck, torn mozzarella, and halved baby figs. Eat.

For my mother: the mother of all chocolate cakes

Three layers of dense, dark, cocoa-rich chocolate cake. Interlaced with layers of silky, creamy dark chocolate ganache. The entire thing smothered in more ganache, lovingly applied and smoothed with a palette knife in an attempt to achieve a flawless, mirror-smooth finish. Like a chocolate ice rink. Topped with fresh, glistening strawberries pointing upwards like a delicious crimson mountain range, their peaks slicked with glossy apricot glaze to make them shimmer. Finished with bright green mint leaves for a hint of spring, and a dusting of snowy icing sugar. The concentrated aroma of cocoa, a product of the intense chocolate content, wafting in glorious seductive waves around this magnificent creation.

I made this for my mum, because she is awesome. 

Perhaps I should have bought her a nauseating card from Clintons with some soppy rhyme on, proclaiming her to be the ‘world’s best mum’. Maybe a matching keyring, or one of those disgusting little grey soft-toy bears clutching a blue heart (which, now that you think about it, is really creepy. Why is the heart blue? Is the bear secretly implying that although he loves you, he is going to asphyxiate you at the first opportunity, pluck out your wasted, oxygen-starved organ and thrust it out for the world to see?)

Maybe I could have treated her to a ‘spa day’, but to be honest I can’t imagine anything she’d enjoy less. Enforced relaxation is definitely not my mum’s cup of tea. I could have made her breakfast in bed, but she’d have looked at me like I was mad and worried about the crumbs. Besides, I wouldn’t have woken up in time. Maybe I could have bought her some more of the expensive Crabtree & Evelyn stuff that she likes, but to be honest I can never bring myself to pay their extortionate prices, because I used to work there when I was sixteen and get 50% discount, so paying full price as a pleb hurts me somehow. 

I could have bought one of those hugely expensive bouquets of flowers from M&S, but I know deep down mum would be thinking about what a waste of money it is, so buy expensive flowers when they still die like cheap ones. Thrift is practically her middle name. She’s got a glut of chocolate left over from Christmas (which always makes an appearance after dinner, no matter how full she proclaims she is, and how little of my lovingly handmade desserts she fails to eat because of said fullness), and I don’t really want to buy her jewellery because it’s not easy to pick something that’s exactly to someone’s taste.

So, naturally, I decided to tell my mum that I love her in the best way I know. With food.

There are many reasons why my mum is great. Not least that she puts up with me living at home, getting in the way and leaving my stuff everywhere. She doesn’t go too mad when I leave used (only for non-noxious substances like bread) freezer bags in the drawer in the name of recycling, which results in her using one for her toothbrush and it emerging covered in damp bread crumbs, all nestled into the gaps between the bristles and looking pretty vile. She allows my weird cooking experiments to sit in various places in the house (Christmas pudding still up in the loft, ‘maturing’, sourdough starter stashed in the airing cupboard, sloe gin ripening in the living room) and no longer really bats an eyelid when I announce we’re having something like octopus or pig’s cheeks for dinner. 

Generally, she’s pretty good at putting up with me. My first memory of severely disappointing her was, I think, from primary school. For some utterly inane reason completely oblivious to me now, I’d decided that the multicoloured screwdrivers we had in the science lab at school were so pretty that I just had to take them home with me (Mrs Messenger, if you’re reading this, I’m really sorry. Honestly. But they were so shiny...) Some of my friends also helped themselves to various supplies, and there must have been a phone call home because I remember my mum in tears at the outlandish antics of her normally so well-behaved daughter, clearly believing this was the starting point of a rapid, inevitable and deeply tragic descent into a life of petty larceny.

Well, it wasn’t, fortunately. But it was by no means the last incident involving me in trouble. A few years later, I found my email access blocked at school and I was hauled before several teachers and told I was a “liability”. The cause of all this outrage? I had sent - without really thinking about the implications and assuming that all the rubbish the IT department came out with about our emails being scanned and recorded was nonsense to scare us into meek and boring submission - an email to my then ‘boyfriend’ (in quotation marks because I was at this point fourteen and we all know that the silly hormonal whims of fourteen year olds cannot be legitimated by this term) describing my P.E. teacher as a “red-faced lesbian”. 

To this day, what I find absolutely hilarious about this episode is that the school knew straight away which teacher I was referring to. 

Anyway, my mum was summoned before the headmistress to be given an account of my shocking behaviour. I cycled home that day in trepidation, terrified at the reaction awaiting me, terrified at another crying incident like the one with the screwdrivers.

Instead my mum opened the front door, looked at me, and burst out laughing.

This is why she is awesome.

Naturally, I turn to her for advice on all the important decisions in life. Do these sunglasses make me look too much like an insect? Should I spend nearly £200 on a single pair of shoes? She was an invaluable help at seeing me through my first (and, consequently, most gut-wrenchingly terrible) break up a few years ago. Yes, obviously it was helpful that she put up with the constant weeping, wailing and proclamations that my life was over and that I’d never love again.

But what was most helpful was when she promised to buy me an Urban Decay eyeliner if I could go a whole day without crying. It worked an absolute charm, kick-starting me on the road to recovery and heart mending. I still have it. It’s gold. 

Then another eyeliner was promised if I lasted a week. Admittedly, that one took a lot longer to achieve, but I managed. It was blue, but unfortunately I had it confiscated at airport security on a trip to Barcelona. Should probably have realised that liquid eyeliner counts as a liquid, and therefore can’t go in your hand luggage. Sad times. 

There are other crises that my mother has seen me through. Like the time when I burned my hand so badly on chillies that I lay in bed desperately clutching a fridge-cold bottle of cider (I'm sure she was relieved to find out that I was simply in agonising pain, rather than the kind of teenager who sleeps embracing her liquor), moaning piteously and crying because it was so damn painful. It really was, though. It felt like someone had forced me to take a pan out of the oven without wearing oven gloves, and they were just making me hold onto it. She sat there with me, waiting for NHS Direct to phone back and confirm that no, I wasn't likely to go into anaphylactic shock, and enduring my self-indulgent whimperings. Eventually I fell asleep; no such luck for Mum, who had to wait for the nurse to call back and allay her(/my) fears.

There was a similar incident with a wasp sting on my leg that turned my left thigh into something resembling a huge, pink, quivering, gelatinous ham. It was approximately 70% larger than its normal size, throbbing and warm and mottled with alarming white spots. I'm pretty sure I sent her a gruesome photo to prove that I wasn't just making a fuss. 

Or the time I woke her up in the middle of the night having such a bad pre-Finals panic attack that I was completely and seriously convinced that I had gone into cardiac arrest and was going to die, vomit and explode simultaneously. Of course, none of these things happened and if they had she would have been unlikely to prevent them, but the moral support helped immensely. Though I still feel bad for waking her up.

I like to think I inherited my cake-baking skills from my mum, who has made us the most incredible birthday cakes every year until recently, when I think she deemed us too old (or maybe me being at university kind of put a spanner in the works). Each year, we’d get a birthday caked designed and decorated around whatever phase we were going through at the time. When I was seven, I was absolutely fascinated by ancient Egypt. The pharaohs, the pyramids, the tombs, the sarcophagi, the Nile. I even taught myself how to read hieroglyphics, which I now realise was probably why I didn’t have many friends in primary school. Mum made me a pyramid cake, white with little blue hieroglyphics drawn all down the sides. When I was obsessed with tamagotchis (oh come on, who wasn’t? OK, maybe I took it a bit too far. Especially because I had ten. All strung up on this one keyring that must have weighed an absolute ton to carry around. Real life motherhood can surely be no harder), I had a tamagotchi cake, meticulously researched with the screen an exact replica of a real-life one. Fortunately it was less noisy and demanding – the only thing this bad boy demanded was to be eaten. The cakes carried on over the years – Disney must have had a special place in my heart, as I had two Disney cakes consecutively. Yes, I was sixteen and seventeen. One was a magic carpet with little plastic Aladdin figurines.

I also attribute to her my academic success. Every year when it came to that grim time, exam season, she’d take me to WH Smith and we’d load up a basket brimming with coloured and flamboyant stationery – the kind of thing you’ll probably never need or use but really, really want anyway for the sheer frivolity of it. Colour coded. Heart-shaped. Fancy highlighters. It made revision so much more bearable, almost a joy.

Actually, it might be the fact that I’m capable of seeing revision as a ‘joy’ that is the reason for my academic success. But I’m sure the stationery helped. 

She also maintained that when one is doing exams, one needs ‘nice things’ to help them through it. So the desk was loaded with fancy stationery, while the fridge and larder were loaded with treats. From M&S, naturally. There were yum yums – those amazing long doughnut twists, which I used to love because I’d nibble off the flaky, crystallised sugar before eating the squidgy, sweet dough underneath. There was madeira cake, dense and sweet and crumbly. Crumpets, which I still consider one of the ultimate comfort foods. Probably a load of other vastly unhealthy and processed stuff which I now wouldn’t consider food at all, let alone comfort food: Frazzles, those bacon-flavoured yet simultaneously vegetarian crisps; plasticky white bread; doughnuts.

The treats, unlike the homemade birthday cakes, did continue well into my university career. The brownies sent the week before my finals probably prevented some kind of mental meltdown in the middle of Exam Schools. The enormous bouquet of flowers I like to think sat in my room and absorbed all the negative energy from my quaking anxious form. Yes, I realise that actually that is not scientifically possible and the only thing plants do absorb from the air is carbon dioxide, but I’m sure they assimilated a significant amount of pain and woe along with my bitter, suffering exhalations, trapping it in their pretty pink petals and thus preventing numerous crises.

This cake is quite a thing of beauty.

It's also the kind of thing I would NEVER normally make, being approximately 90% saturated fat. I'm also not much of a chocoholic, generally preferring fruit-based confections over the cocoa kind (not, I should point out, out of any delusion that they're healthier, just because I am a fiend for fruit of all shapes and guises). But I was reading last month's delicious magazine, and Mum pointed to the photo of this cake and said it looked amazing. I retained this information and decided to proffer the whole thing, in all its chocolatey, calorific glory, to her on Mothers Day. 

Is there an apostrophe in Mothers Day? If so, where does it go? Is it the day of every single mother individually, their uniqueness maintained, so Mother's Day? Or is it the day for all mothers, Mothers' Day? I feel it could be either. This is exactly the same dilemma I had with goats'/goat's cheese. Oh how these things haunt my poor tormented soul. 

Anyway, ramblings of my inner grammarian aside, this cake is very nearly epic. I won't claim it's really epic, because every time I hear that word colloquially massacred I can hear the rumblings of Homer turning in his grave. But it's quite a feat of engineering, though not that difficult to make at all. 

Three chocolate sponges - fairly straightforward but using buttermilk as a component, which is interesting - interspersed and covered in chocolate ganache. I've never made ganache before and probably never will again, because my arteries started to quiver in horror as I stirred together the block of butter, two-and-a-half bars of chocolate and pot of double cream in a bowl. Oh, wait. There was golden syrup in there too. 

OK, I say all that about how unhealthy it was and how I'd never touch it. But someone had to lick the bowl clean and there was no one else in the house, so...

Anyway, once the ganache has cooled and set, you can smother it - literally SMOTHER; if the cake was a human it would be blue and shrivelled - all over the sponges, which is great fun. 

The cake in the magazine was decorated with edible flowers, but I thought strawberries would look just gorgeous against the chocolatey backdrop. Plus the cake isn't actually that sweet - all the chocolate is at least 70% cocoa solids and the ganache barely has any sugar in - so I figured their sweet tartness would be the perfect foil. It was, and I'm glad I put them on, as I think the cake would need some sort of berry with it to complement the total decadence that is three layers of dark chocolate sponge doused in dark chocolate ganache. I glazed the strawberries with a little melted apricot jam to keep them glossy, shiny and inviting (Moroccan strawberries need all the help they can get, to be honest). The mint leaves were the finishing touch, to give it a bit of colour contrast. 

As I'm sure you can guess from the photos and my continual descriptions of chocolate smothering, this cake is divine. It is, as I said, not too sweet, which is a good thing I think as it allows the cocoa flavour to really shine. It's a great contrast in textures between the silky, melt-in-your-mouth ganache and the sturdier moist sponge. It also looks utterly, utterly fabulous, particularly with the strawberry decoration.

Be warned that it is very rich, very delicious, very chocolatey, and will serve a lot of people. I'd also recommend keeping it in the fridge between devourings. I think it should probably freeze quite well though, so fear not. Really, there's no excuse not to make this. It's spectacular and tastes every bit as good as it looks.

There is no better way of spreading love, I truly believe, than via the medium of calories. If that is true, then I must love my Mum an awful lot. Almost as much as she loved this cake, I hope.

Triple-layer chocolate ganache cake with strawberries (serves 10-12)

(Recipe by Edd Kimber, taken from  delicious magazine April 2012 issue)

For the cakes:

• 110g unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus extra for greasing
• 110g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
• 280ml boiling water
• 3 tbsp good quality cocoa powder
• 140ml buttermilk
• 280g plain flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 340g light brown soft sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 medium free-range eggs, lightly beaten

For the ganache:

• 225g unsalted butter
• 285g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
• 2 tbsp golden syrup
• 240ml double cream
• 2 punnets strawberries
• 4 tsp apricot jam
• Mint leaves
• Icing sugar, for dusting

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C. Grease and line three loose-based 20cm cake tins. Melt the chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water (don't let the water touch the bowl), then set aside to cool slightly. In a medium bowl or measuring jug, whisk together the boiling water and cocoa until smooth. Whisk in the buttermilk then set aside.

Using an electric mixer or hand whisk, cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy (about 5 minutes, though I left my KitchenAid happily beating away for ten). Add the eggs a little at a time, beating until fully combined.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Turn the mixer speed to slow and pour in the cooled melted chocolate. Once fully combined, alternately add a little of the flour and buttermilk mixtures, starting and finishing with the flour. Divide between the three prepared tins and bake for 25-30 minutes until springy to the touch. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Before making the icing, get the cream out of the fridge and allow it to come to room temperature.

For the ganache, melt the butter, chocolate and golden syrup in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, as before. Once melted, stir to combine and remove from the heat. Allow to cool to room temperature, and when it is the same temperature as the double cream, slowly stir the cream into the cooled chocolate (they must be the same temperature, roughly, or the mixture may seize and turn lumpy). Leave for 10-15 minutes until it has thickened enough to spread on the cake.

Place the first sponge on the plate you want to serve the cake on, and spread with just under a third of the ganache. Place the second sponge on top, then repeat. Smother the rest of the ganache over the cake, smoothing it with a palette knife.

Cut the leafy end off the strawberries so they'll stand upright. Arrange on top of the cake in the ganache, then leave the ganache to set fully (I left mine overnight, but a couple of hours should do the trick). When set, melt the apricot jam in a small ramekin in the microwave, then brush over the strawberries to glaze. Decorate with mint leaves and dust with icing sugar.

Serve to someone (or lots of people, preferably - this is one massive cake) you love, and make them smile.

Blackberry & rosemary glazed pigeon with mushroom and chestnut risotto

Look at those pigeon breasts. Don't they look like something you'd pick up in a neat vacuum pack from the butcher? Already filleted and trimmed and arranged so all you have to do is chuck them in a pan? All the hard work done for you?

Would you ever guess that they were the result of some extremely amateurish home butchery, mainly involving the hacking of pigeon flesh from bone using a small paring knife and - towards the end, out of frustration - a pair of kitchen scissors? Note to self: there is very little point in buying whole pigeons and not getting the butcher to take the breasts off for you. There's about as much meat on the rest of a pigeon as there is on my little toe. 

Kitchen carnage aside (there was a definite Lady Macbeth moment once I'd finished), these plump, juicy pigeon breasts - once separated from their owners - were the perfect choice to showcase a very special ingredient I picked up at the Feast East food festival in Cambridgeshire a couple of weeks ago.

You may have heard of the Gourmet Spice Company. They make all sorts of intriguing and unusual delights like lavender sugar, saffron and orange infused oil, citrus salt and fruit vinegars. Wending my way through the labyrinth of gastronomic delights at the festival, my attention was caught by their stall, proffering a comprehensive range of flavoured balsamic vinegars. 

You might not think about balsamic vinegar much. It's probably just one of those things in the cupboard (if you're like me you'll have at least three bottles, because for some reason balsamic vinegar seems to be the mandatory gift for someone you know is interested in food. Note to these people: for future reference, I'd love a KitchenAid ravioli-making attachment. Thanks). But when you're confronted with a dazzling array of flavours ranging from peach & nectarine and pear & cinnamon to fig & date and chocolate & vanilla, I bet suddenly balsamic vinegar is just the thing you've been looking for.

With that single glance at the little ramekins lined up, containing glassy pools of rich, dark goodness, whole wealth of culinary possibilities opened up to me. I stood there for a good five minutes, first trying a couple, then realising it was inevitable: I'd have to try the entire range.

The chocolate & vanilla vinegar had a gorgeous cocoa richness that I really, really wanted to try out in a sweet-savoury dessert. The fig & date was just begging to be used in some kind of Middle Eastern fusion cooking. Knowing that it would be a little bit extravagant to buy the entire range, I eventually settled for the blackberry and rosemary balsamic, a bestseller for good reason. It has a subtle sweetness from the berries and a beautiful fragrance from the rosemary, both of which couple really well with the fruitiness of balsamic vinegar (which is aged for four years to develop its complex flavour). I thought it'd be the most versatile in the kitchen, though I'm still longing to try the others.

I have multiple ideas for the uses of this vinegar, and I'm still in the mood for experimenting with it in the near future. This pigeon recipe arose from my love of pairing fruit with meat; blackberries work very well with game, and I've used them with pigeon before. Rosemary also couples well with red meat like venison; in fact, I was originally intending to use venison steaks but the butcher only had pigeon, so I settled for that. I thought the sweet-sour vinegar with the intense gameyness (why is spell checker telling me that isn't a word? How else is one meant to describe the pungent, iron-rich, earthy, slightly muddy taste of non-domesticated fauna?) of the rare pigeon would be perfect. 

I also had multiple ideas for how to serve the pigeon, all involving just salad and/or various vegetables, until I realised I'd be eating this after an intensive kickboxing class. Naturally, then, I turned to risotto. 

I've made mushroom risotto with pigeon breasts before, using wild mushrooms. I figured a comforting, starchy base of creamy, earthy rice would provide the perfect foil to the tanginess of the pigeon, which I planned to glaze in the balsamic vinegar and a little honey. I also decided to add chestnuts to the mix, mainly because mushrooms, chestnuts and game are a happy and inseparable trio in my head, and also because their sweet fudginess (again, apparently not a word, but it's the perfect description of a chestnut so in defiance of the Blogger spellchecker I shall leave it be) would give a little lift to all those deep flavours. I found some porcini mushroom stock cubes lurking in the larder that I've been meaning to use for approximately a million years, so they made up the stock for the risotto. They're amazing - instead of having to buy expensive dried porcini, soak them and use the liquid, you can just use these cubes. If you don't have any, just use chicken stock augmented with the soaking liquid from some dried porcini, which you can then add to the risotto, or use chicken stock on its own.

OK, I just have to ask this quickly as a (related) aside: am I the only one who thinks porcini mushrooms smell exactly like cat biscuits? Answers left as comments on this post, please.

A smattering of thyme and sage to evoke a pleasant woodland aroma, a little salt, a splash of white wine, and twenty minutes later I had a beautiful rich risotto. The pigeon breasts I marinated for a couple of hours in a mixture of the rosemary and blackberry balsamic, a little honey, some rapeseed oil and some salt and pepper. I pan-fried them briefly on each side, then deglazed the pan with more balsamic and honey to make a gorgeous jet-black syrupy sauce. This was poured over the pigeon breasts sitting atop their mound of risotto, where it pooled in the gaps between each individual grain of rice, delivering a delicious sweet-sharp surprise with every mouthful. 

As I suspected, this entire dish is just a perfect marriage of flavours. You have a really wonderful combination of rich, rare meat (I like my pigeon basically raw, though you can cook it a tiny bit more if you like - don't go mad, though, or you may as well eat a wooden spoon) with its sticky, tangy glaze, fruity and herbal and tangy. Then to counteract and balance this, you have creamy, earthy risotto with the dense bite of sweet chestnuts. Of course, you could use normal balsamic vinegar and add a little rosemary to the marinade and the glaze, if you're not lucky enough to possess some of this fabulous infused stuff. But if you're anything like me, you'll want to head over to the Gourmet Spice Company website and get your hands on these really unusual vinegars. They suggest using the blackberry and rosemary one in a goat's cheese salad, or drizzled over strawberries, both of which I imagine would be amazing. (Incidentally, I should probably say that I did in fact pay for the vinegar myself and am writing about it purely because it's great and I want to share it with you, not because I've been asked to.)

So there you have it. A fairly standard mushroom risotto, given an unusual and delicious twist with the help of one extra-special ingredient. And a pair of kitchen scissors. 

Blackberry & rosemary glazed pigeon with mushroom and chestnut risotto (serves 2):

• 4 pigeon breasts (or buy two whole pigeons and cut the breasts off/ask your butcher to do this)
• 2 tbsp rapeseed oil
• 4 tbsp blackberry & rosemary balsamic vinegar (or normal balsamic with 1 tsp chopped rosemary)
• 1 tbsp honey + 2 tsp honey
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• 250g chestnut mushrooms, finely sliced
• A few sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked
• 1 tsp dried sage/chopped fresh sage
• 150g risotto rice
• 1 glass white wine
• 1 litre porcini mushroom stock (or chicken stock plus 200ml soaking water from 15g dried porcini, mushrooms chopped and reserved)
• 100g cooked and peeled chestnuts, roughly chopped
• 1-2 tbsp truffle oil (optional)
• Finely chopped fresh rosemary, to garnish.

First, marinate the pigeon breasts. Mix the rapeseed oil, 2 tbsp of the balsamic, the 1 tbsp honey and a good grind of salt and pepper in a small dish, then coat the pigeon breasts in the mixture, cover with clingfilm and leave for as long as you can in the fridge (I left mine for about 2 hours, but overnight would be fine).

Next, make the risotto. If you're using dried porcini, soak them in 200ml boiling water for half an hour before cooking, then make 800ml chicken stock and keep warm in a pan. If not, make up the litre of porcini mushroom stock and keep warm in a pan while you start the risotto. Heat a little olive oil in a large frying pan or saucepan and fry the onion and mushrooms over a high heat until the mushrooms have released all their liquid and are starting to turn golden brown and sticky. Add the chopped porcini, if using. Add the garlic, thyme and sage and cook for another couple of minutes on a lower heat until the garlic has softened.

Add another glug of oil and the risotto rice, stirring to coat it in the oil. Cook for a minute, then pour in the wine and wait until it has been absorbed before adding a couple of ladlefuls of stock. Stir over a medium heat and wait until all the liquid has been absorbed before adding another ladleful. (If using porcini soaking water, add this first then carry on with chicken stock).

Proceed in this way for 20 minutes or so, stirring often and checking the rice for doneness - it should be tender with a little bit of bite remaining. You may not need all the stock. At this point, stir in the chestnuts and check the seasoning.

When the risotto is almost cooked, get a non-stick frying pan really hot then add the pigeon breasts, skin side down. Cook for 2 minutes then flip over and cook on the other side for another 2 minutes. Remove to a plate and cover with foil while you make the glaze. Turn the heat down and add the remaining balsamic vinegar and the tsp honey. It should bubble away - stir it well and let it bubble until it's thick and syrupy.

To serve, pile the risotto onto two plates, drizzle with the truffle oil (if using), then put the seared pigeon on top. Spoon over the balsamic glaze, garnish with fresh chopped rosemary, and serve.

Mini Simnel cakes

“I’ll go to thee a Simnel bring, ‘Gainst thou’ go’st a Mothering, So that when she blesseth thee, Half that blessing thou’lt give to me.” ~ Robert Herrick, 1648

Simnel cake is one of those things bearing a gastronomic heritage shrouded in mystery and myth. Its basic make-up, however, is widely accepted: a rich spiced fruit cake, lighter than a Christmas cake, with a vein of marzipan running through the centre and another layer on top, which is toasted (if you're smart/a pyromaniac, you'll use a cook's blowtorch for this...if not, you'll use the grill, and probably end up scorching it to cinders, as I've done on several occasions). It's usually decorated with eleven marzipan balls, said to represent the disciples of Jesus - eleven because, of course, Judas didn't really earn his place on the cake. More fool him. 

Simnel cakes have been around since medieval times. They are associated both with Easter and with Mothering Sunday, where young servant girls would apparently make one to take home to their mothers on their day off. Whether any of this is true, no one seems to know. What is clear is that this has now become as traditional Easter fare as the humble hot cross bun, and

I would hate to let a year pass without baking a Simnel cake.

I think perhaps it's the pleasing resemblance it bears to a Christmas cake, in form at least, but simultaneously the subtle differences involved. For one, I'm likely to be making and eating this cake in the pleasant balmy spring weather, when it's not getting dark at three o'clock and I'm not so inflicted with SAD that I feel like impaling myself on the Christmas tree decorations. It's more cheery in appearance than the dark, dense Christmas cake; that lively covering of toasty marzipan is just perfect for spring, reminiscent of daffodils, sunshine and Easter chicks. It's lighter in flavour, perfect for enjoying with a cup of tea, maybe even to be tentatively enjoyed al fresco, should we be blessed with some unusually warm spring weather. 

However, making a big fruit cake is a commitment. It needs love. It needs time. It needs strong arms to stir all that stiff dried fruit into an equally stiff buttery batter. It needs patience to decorate with marzipan, and nerves of steel to dare to place it under the grill and risk all that hard work literally going up in smoke. 

You know what doesn't really need all that?

Mini Simnel cakes.

These are wonderful. They combine all the best bits of a Simnel cake - dried fruit, citrus, spice, marzipan - but are diminutively lovely and require very little effort. Although they lack the wow factor of their more grandiose cousin, I think these beauties possess a little charm of their own. Particularly with their cute little marzipan decoration.

 I know a lot of people who claim to hate marzipan (my father included), when really what they detest is that thick, tooth-judderingly sweet layer between the Christmas cake and its icing. Cut marzipan into small cubes, fold through cake batter, and blast in the heat of the oven, and you have an entirely different product - something melting, pleasantly chewy, sweet and luxuriant. Add dried fruit, spice, and citrus zest, and you have something truly special. 

I was going to have one bite of these cakes just to test they were OK and worthy of my wonderful readership. Just one bite, maybe two - I ate rather a lot over the weekend and am attempting a 'healthy-ish eating' week in preparation for my holiday to Tuscany at the end of March (quick aside: YAY OMG I CAN'T WAIT). But when they came out of the oven and I spooned a little lemon icing over the top and finished with those tiny nuggets of bronzed marzipan...and I broke one open to photograph it...that was the beginning of the end.

They are so good. Incredibly light and fluffy, more so than you'd ever believe possible for a fruit cake (I suspect this was due to me allowing my KitchenAid mixer to give the batter a thorough beating for about eight minutes, on high speed...), with a hint of nutmeg and cinnamon and a dash of orange zest, and that plump, juicy fruit, and those molten cubes of almondy goodness. The contrast between the rich, buttery, crumbly cake and the light, zesty icing is amazing (especially while everything is still slightly warm). 

They are sweet and delightful. The crumb is really light yet moist at the same time, and there's a perfect fruit-to-cake ratio - not too sugary and crunchy, but not too bland and buttery either. Perfection.

So there you have it: Easter, made bite-size and easy. 

Mini Simnel cakes (makes 15):

(Barely adapted from this BBC recipe)

• 50g raisins
• 50g sultanas
• 80g currants
• 70g dried mixed peel
• Zest and juice of one orange
• 175g soft butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 300g self-raising flour
• 1 1/2 tsp mixed spice
• 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
• 5 tbsp milk
• 250g marzipan
• 150g icing sugar
• Lemon juice

Add the orange zest and juice to the fruit and leave to soak for an hour, or microwave for 2 minutes on medium power. Pre-heat the oven to 180C/170C fan oven and prepare two muffin trays with 15 paper cases.

Using an electric mixer, beat together the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, spices and milk - keep going for about 5 minutes, until it's really light and fluffy. Take 180g of the marzipan and chop it into 1cm cubes. Fold into the cake batter along with the soaked fruit. Spoon into the paper cases and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden and firm to the touch. Cool on a wire rack.

Break small pieces off the remaining marzipan and roll into little egg or ball shapes, about 1-1.5cm diameter. Mix the icing sugar with enough lemon juice to form a fairly thick icing - stir vigorously to get rid of any lumps. Spoon the icing on the middle of the cakes and top with the marzipan balls - two or three per cake, depending on how many you've made. 

Pairing food with Chablis: a four-course tasting menu

I was recently invited to take part in the Chablis blogger challenge, an initiative designed to get food bloggers who are not wine experts thinking about food and wine pairing; specifically, creating dishes to partner Chablis. As someone who knows very little about wine and even less about pairing it with food, I was intrigued and a little excited by this prospect. I love having something to give my cooking a focus; a particular ingredient to showcase, a certain technique to perfect, or a concept to follow, and this sounded like the perfect opportunity to take up a challenge and get a little bit creative.

Plus, there was wine involved, so why wouldn’t I say yes? As French chef Julia Child apparently once said: “I love cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food”. 

I received two bottles of Chablis in the post to help inspire the sommelier that I’m sure is lurking somewhere within me, just waiting to break free and dazzle the world with her quirky yet fabulous wine-and-food matches. The bottles were immediately labelled with ‘DAD, DO NOT DRINK’ stickers (a customary ritual every time I receive or purchase alcohol that I don’t want to find gone several days later), placed safely in the wine cupboard, and I was ready to start racking my brains for recipes that would showcase them to their full potential.

A bit of background first. Chablis is produced in the Burgundy region of France, in an area that was once covered by an ocean and now has fossil-rich limestone soil. Its viticulture was developed by Cistercian monks, and now over 300 vineyards exist in the region. 35 million bottles of Chablis are produced every year, and three out of every ten are sold in the UK. I found this quite surprising, seeing as I don’t think I’ve ever drunk Chablis before, nor have I really encountered it while eating out or working behind a restaurant bar. However, that statistic would suggest we’re not all as hooked on our Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc as I’d have thought. The wine is produced from Chardonnay grapes, and there are four different appellations: Chablis Grand Cru; Chablis Premier Cru; Chablis and Petit Chablis.

The first wine I received was Domaine Bois d'Yver Chablis 2008. This is a dry wine and a classic example of the Chablis style, described as possessing a ‘flinty’ quality, with apple and herby flavours. I was particularly interested by the story behind this wine: the vineyard is family-owned and, as of 2007, completely organic. Suggested food pairings included seafood, particularly oysters, and white meat in a creamy sauce.

The second wine was Chablis J. Moreau & Fils 2009. This is a younger wine and therefore slightly fresher, with an almost creamy, buttery roundness. It has aromas of pear and citrus, as well as floral, almost blossomy notes. It’s sweeter than the Domaine Bois and lighter, but is also recommended for seafood and white meats.

Both these wines are available at Marks & Spencer for around £12-13, and I’d especially recommend the J. Moreau, which was the all-round favourite in my family.

Unsure where to start devising food pairings for these wines, I turned to terrior, that elusive and nebulous concept that conjures up images of lush vineyards, terracotta-coloured earth, balmy summer days and luscious, fat grapes coiled seductively around gnarled, creeping vines. It seemed only natural to use the home of Chablis – Burgundy - as a starting point, and so I began a heady online adventure into the region’s cuisine; as with all areas of France, Burgundy has its own culinary specialities.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”, remarked Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a famous French gourmet who hailed from Dijon, Burgundy. Having found out what the Burgundy people like to eat, I could tell them what they are: undoubtedly happy, and probably quite fat. The region is blessed with pungent mustard from Dijon, ideal for cutting through rich meaty cuisine such as andouillette (intestine sausage) and various offal dishes; inky and mysterious blackcurrant Cassis, grown-up Ribena for making Kir or flavouring desserts; beef from Charolais cattle that ends up in the famous beef bourgignon; that peasant classic Coq au Vin, reputedly invented by Julius Caesar; and a wide variety of artisan cheeses such as Epoisses, Chaource, and various types of chevre. I figured it would be common sense to take some of these flavours and pair them with my Chablis, reuniting several wonderful products of the same gastronomically fertile region.

This, then, is my specially designed Chablis tasting menu, which sounds incredibly posh but is basically just a four-course menu of dishes that I think go very well with these wines. It is themed around flavours of Burgundy, given a modern twist, but the essence is simplicity, allowing the complex and sometimes delicate aromas of the wine to shine through. Chablis features quite prominently, both in the starter and dessert, as it seemed only right to inject an undercurrent of that lovely wine into the food to complement the drink. I hope you’re encouraged to give one or even all of these recipes a go, and to see if you agree with me that they’re a wonderful way to showcase this type of wine.

My starter is inspired by Burgundy cheese. It’s a common misconception that cheese should be paired with red wine only; in fact, white wine can be an excellent partner to many cheeses, allowing their complex flavours to feature without masking them with heavy tannins. I was intending to use Chaource, a cow’s milk cheese that is creamy in the centre with a soft white rind, similar to Brie. However, I stumbled upon something even better at the market. Affiné au Chablis is a cow’s milk cheese similar to the classic Burgundy Epoisses, but with an intriguing difference: it is washed in Chablis before its maturation period. The result is a gorgeous cheese with a pale orange crinkly rind and melt-in-the-mouth centre. Its aroma is much more pungent than its flavour, which is pleasantly creamy and nutty and possesses a slight sweetness from its bath of Chablis. I loved the idea of pairing a Chablis-drenched cheese with my Chablis wine; a match made in heaven.

To showcase this cheese, I used a classic Burgundy recipe: Gougères. Gougères are wonderful little cheese puffs; like profiteroles, but savoury. They’ve existed for centuries, evolving from a more primitive mixture of eggs, cheese and breadcrumbs, and are often served alongside wine as a canapé. Gougères are made with a basic choux pastry dough (butter, flour, water, eggs) enriched with cheese, and can be served hot or cold. When hot, they are delightfully crispy and burnished on the outside, while fluffy and molten in the centre. You can eat them as they are, enjoying their unadulterated contrast in textures, but I decided to go a step further and slice each steaming gougère in half as they emerged from the oven and stuff them with a generous slice of Affiné au Chablis cheese.

I made my gougères with a mixture of strong cheddar and Parmesan, but true Francophiles could use Gruyère or Comté. I added a generous amount of fresh lemon thyme and a pinch of cayenne pepper to cut through the richness of the cheese trio. They turned from blobs of sticky dough to wonderful puffed-up whorls of feathery pastry in the heat of the oven, possessing a subtle tang from the thyme and the cheese. Whilst delicious on their own, the combination of crispy cheese puff with a creamy, molten piece of Affiné au Chablis was heavenly. Imagine the ripest, creamiest, nuttiest, runniest Camembert or Brie you’ve ever eaten, or your favourite ever cheese fondue, and add tangy savoury pastry to it. An utter joy to eat.

These gougères paired wonderfully with the J. Moreau & Fils 2009. I was originally intending to tuck a small piece of caramelized fresh pear into each along with the cheese to take the edge off all that richness, but once I coupled the gougères with this wine I realized there was no need. The pear and slight citrus notes of this very fresh, floral, slightly sweeter wine pair absolutely perfectly with the onslaught of cheese, providing the necessary sugar, acidity and fragrance to cut through the creamy nuttiness. I was utterly blown away by the success of the combination, and it took a lot of willpower not to polish off the whole tray of gougères before I’d even started cooking the next course.

It’s sad that fish courses seem to be no longer a mandatory component of meals. We stick with our starters and dare not to ditch our desserts, but we seem satisfied with a single course in between. As a huge fan of fish, I couldn’t bring myself to design a menu that didn’t feature it in some capacity, particularly as white wine (including Chablis) and seafood is such a perfect combination.

I wanted to feature blackcurrants in this menu as a nod to Burgundy’s famous export, Cassis. Dessert wouldn’t be the right place, as they’re too acidic to pair well with wine. However, I suddenly remembered a recipe I’d seen in the Telegraph by Diana Henry last year, featuring salmon cured in a mixture of blackcurrants, Cassis, salt, sugar and dill. I’d never seen anything like it before and I’ve never seen anything like it since, but I thought it would be a fabulous way both to include Cassis in my menu and to involve fish. I scaled down the recipe rather a lot, only using two small salmon fillets rather than over a kilo of the stuff, and changed a couple of things, but essentially I owe my inspiration to her recipe.

Curing your own salmon sounds complicated, but it’s really very easy – you mix together the components of the cure, spread them over the salmon, wrap it tightly in cling film then put it in the fridge in a dish with some heavy weights on top. Over a few days, the salt in the cure draws the liquid out of the salmon and the weights squeeze it out into the dish, leaving you with firm-textured flesh and a simply gorgeous purple tinge around the edge of the fish. You can then just slice it thinly, like smoked salmon, and serve.

If you’re skeptical about the idea of salmon and blackcurrants, please don’t be. This is absolutely wonderful and really unusual. The colour alone, that fabulous purple bleeding of berries into fish, is worth making it for, and the flavour is intense and intriguing. There’s a hint of the zingy, almost grassy flavour of blackcurrants, a tang from the salt, and an underlying sweetness from the fruit and the sugar. It’s like the best smoked salmon you will ever eat, yet there’s no smoking required. 

I would serve this either au naturel, or with some good bread (thinly sliced baguette, perhaps, to carry on the French theme, or rye bread for a nutty contrast) and cream cheese mixed with a little horseradish. It doesn’t need any more to adorn it, as the focus is really on the delightful melody of flavours and textures. This salmon works best with the Domaine Bois Chablis, which provides a refreshing acidity as a counterpoint to its richness. I was amazed by how well the wine worked with the dish; it really complements the fish perfectly, enhancing its intense flavour while preventing it from cloying on the palette.  

My main course is inspired by a classic Burgundy dish, making use of a classic Burgundy ingredient: Dijon mustard. Rabbit cooked in a mustard sauce is a traditional dish from the region, and one I’ve made before. It involves braising a jointed rabbit in a mixture of cider, mustard, bacon, stock, vegetables and herbs until it becomes tender and delicious. You’re left with a rich, creamy sauce with a pleasant tang of mustard to cut through the richness of the rabbit meat.

However, this is a very rich dish, particularly if you make it with wild rabbit which is a lot more gamey than its farmed counterpart. I decided to take the traditional Burgundy recipe and make it lighter and fresher, a perfect complement to the lovely zesty Chablis wines. The result is a mustardy wild rabbit and wild rice salad with peppery watercress and caramelised Russet apples. 

The shredded meat from the braised rabbit is scattered over a bed of nutty wild and brown rice, which provides a lovely contrast in texture and flavour. You then have the tang of watercress to perk it all up, and finally some beautiful slices of Russet apple caramelised in butter and brown sugar to bring out their flavour. The sweetness of the apples marries perfectly with the very rich rabbit and the mustardy sauce, and the end result is a really unusual and delicious salad. I scattered over some toasted hazelnuts at the end for a little textural contrast.

I wanted to include a lot of sharp, sweet and peppery ingredients to contrast the richness of the meat, but this job is also admirably performed by the Domaine Bois Chablis. Its acidity and appley flavours provide the perfect foil to the strong flavour of mustard and rabbit, and you end up with a really harmonious pairing that works on every level. In fact, I’d suggest that this wine is mandatory with this salad; it really enhances the whole eating experience. You can make this delicious recipe with either wild rabbit or farmed rabbit, or if rabbit eludes you then try chicken thighs instead, but if using farmed rabbit or chicken I’d suggest adding a little less mustard as the flavour isn’t as strong.

My dessert is light, sweet, fruity and refreshing: the perfect end to a meal of bold flavours and the final chance to show off the complexities of Chablis. Pears poached in wine is a classic French dessert; not only that, it’s actually a classic Burgundy dessert, a fortuitous coincidence that I discovered while watching Raymond Blanc’s new show, The Very Hungry Frenchman (all in the name of research, of course, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I am certain my life will be a wasteful mass of despair unless Raymond proposes to me some time in the very near future). 

Instead of the normal red wine I decided to use Chablis (you could use Chardonnay, or any similar white wine if you don’t want to splash out too much). To the wine I added sugar, a cinnamon stick, cloves, bay leaves, sprigs of rosemary and some strips of orange zest. Into this heady mixture went some elegant, tapered Conference pears (I’m more of a fan of Comice for eating, but Conference are great for poaching as they hold their shape and look more slender and refined), which simmered for around half an hour until their grainy flesh yielded into sweet, unctuous, translucent softness.

The real finishing touch for this dessert comes not in the gorgeous poaching liquor which forms a syrup that can be drizzled over the pears, though this is delicious, but in the addition of a hazelnut crumble sprinkled over the top. Given the slight hazelnut notes of the J. Moreau Chablis, I felt hazelnuts would work perfectly in my dessert.  Pears and hazelnuts are also a fabulous combination, and the coupling of crunchy, buttery hazelnut crumble with the soft pears is wonderful. The dessert still feels light, but rather more indulgent for its addition of butter, nuts and sugar. 

I baked the crumble in a tart tin to make a whole crumbly hazelnut biscuit – the recipe makes at least twice the quantity you’ll need for the pears, but the biscuit is fabulous broken off into chunks and coupled with your afternoon tea or coffee. It’s a simple combination of toasted hazelnuts, flour, butter, sugar, a little cornmeal for texture, a hint of vanilla, and two egg yolks to loosely bind it and give it that crumbly quality. Snapped and scattered over the pears, it makes an excellent ending to a Chablis-themed meal, and the perfect partner to a glass of the fruity J. Moreau. 

Incidentally, you don’t have to make the pears if you don’t have the time or inclination – this hazelnut biscuit is utterly delicious served on its own in crumbly chunks with the J. Moreau, its buttery richness perfectly complemented by the fruitiness of the wine.

I really enjoyed coming up with these recipes. It’s been an interesting education in the world of food and wine pairing, as well as a delightful little mental voyage around the farms and fields of Burgundy. I have to say, I was wonderfully surprised by how well my dishes worked with the wines, given my lack of experience in such matters - it just goes to show that with a bit of an imagination anyone can create food to complement wine. The trick is to think about the flavours and aromas of the wine, and then try and echo or contrast these in the food. A nod to terroir also helps; it makes logical and gastronomic sense to me to reunite ingredients from similar regions; there's something pleasingly neat about the concept.

I hope these dishes have inspired you to give them a go, or at least to try these lovely Chablis wines, which I would heartily recommend as something a bit different for a special occasion. And if you can’t be bothered to cook anything to accompany them, get some good bread, some good cheese, and some good friends - the ultimate match for any type of wine.

(For the Chablis recipes discussed above, read on).

 

Lemon thyme gougères stuffed with Affiné au Chablis (makes around 20)

(Gougère recipe adapted from David Lebovitz)

One Affiné au Chablis cheese

120ml water

40g butter

¼ tsp salt

A generous pinch of cayenne pepper

70g plain flour

2 large eggs

2 tbsp fresh lemon thyme leaves (or normal thyme)

100g cheese, finely grated – a mixture of Gruyere, Comte, strong Cheddar and Parmesan is ideal

Pre-heat the oven to 220C. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment or a silicon mat. Mix the grated cheese and lemon thyme together in a bowl.

Heat the water, butter, salt and cayenne gently in a saucepan until the butter melts. Add all the flour and stir quickly until the mixture forms a smooth ball. Turn off the heat and let this rest for 2 minutes.

Add the eggs and stir very quickly and constantly to make sure they don’t scramble. Keep at it – the batter will turn from lumpy to smooth after a couple of minutes.

Add ¾ of the grated cheese and thyme mixture to the dough and stir well to mix. Place the mixture in a piping bag (or a sandwich bag with a 1cm hole cut in the corner) and pipe the dough into small blobs about 1.5-2 inches in diameter, leaving at least 1.5 inches in between each to allow room for spreading out.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese over each blob of dough, then bake for 10 minutes. After this time, turn the heat down to 190C and bake for another 20-25 minutes, until they’re crispy and golden brown.

Remove from the oven and slice each gougère in half horizontally. Place a small slice of Affiné au Chablis between each half. Place the stuffed gougères on a plate, garnish with a little extra lemon thyme, and serve with a glass of lightly chilled Chablis J. Moreau & Fils 2009.

Blackcurrant cured salmon (serves 4)

(Recipe inspired by Diana Henry's version, here)

This recipe can easily be adapted to serve a greater number of people – you can use larger salmon fillets from a fishmonger and just increase the cure mixture in proportion.

2 fillets of good-quality salmon (around 200g each)

80g caster sugar

50g coarse sea salt or rock salt

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

5 tbsp finely chopped fresh dill

120g blackcurrants

2 tbsp Cassis (optional)

Mix the sugar, salt, pepper, dill, blackcurrants and Cassis (if using) in a bowl, squashing the blackcurrants so they burst and release their juices into the mixture. Rub this mixture all over both salmon fillets.

Place one fillet skin side down (if you’re using skinless fillets, ignore that part) on a large piece of clingfilm and spread half the cure mixture left in the bowl over it. Place the other fillet on top, skin side up, and spoon over the remaining cure.

Wrap tightly in clingfilm then put in a dish. Find something that will fit inside the dish that you can place on top of the salmon – if using a round dish, a plate should work; if using a square dish, a small chopping board – then put it on top of the fillets and place several weights on top (you can use tin cans).

Place in the fridge and leave for 3 days. Liquid will seep out of the clingfilm – pour this away every day. By day 3 the salmon should have lost most of its liquid and firmed up. Unwrap from the clingfilm, rinse away the cure, then slice thinly and serve with your choice of garnish (cream cheese mixed with a little horseradish would be perfect), and a glass of Domaine Bois d’Yver Chablis 2008.

Wild rabbit and wild rice salad with mustard dressing, watercress and caramelised Russet apples (serves 6)

Don’t be put off by the longish ingredients list – this is pretty simple. You could use chicken thighs, or farmed rabbit. If so, use less mustard in the sauce – you can always add more at the end. You could also try replacing the wild rice with pearl barley or lentils. Any apples are fine for the garnish, but I like Russets because of their interesting flavour and because they’re less juicy than many other apples, so caramelise well.

2 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil

6 rashers streaky bacon, diced

1 rabbit, jointed, or 8 chicken thighs

1 carrot, roughly chopped

1 onion, roughly chopped

1 celery stick, roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely sliced

3 bay leaves

Sprig of rosemary

Several sprigs of thyme or lemon thyme

10 juniper berries, crushed

500ml cider

400ml chicken stock

3 tbsp Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper

4 tbsp creme fraiche or double cream

200g mixture of wild and brown rice

100g watercress (or a mixture of watercress, baby spinach and rocket)

3 Russet apples (or any other apple)

15g butter

3 tsp brown sugar

40g hazelnuts, roughly chopped and roasted in the oven for 10 mins until fragrant

Fresh thyme, to garnish

Pre-heat the oven to 160C. Heat 1 tbsp of the oil in an ovenproof lidded casserole dish and add the bacon. Once it starts to crisp, add the rabbit pieces (or chicken thighs) and brown well over a high heat. Remove and set aside, then turn the heat to medium, add the remaining oil, and add the carrot, onion, celery and garlic. Fry until golden and beginning to soften. Add the bay, rosemary, thyme and juniper, then pour in the cider and stock. Give the bottom of the pan a good scrape as the liquid bubbles away to release all the stuck-on caramelised bits, then return the rabbit (or chicken) to the pan and add the mustard and some salt and pepper. Put a lid on the pan and place in the oven, then cook for 1 hour and 45 minutes until the meat is tender and falling off the bone.

Remove the meat to a plate and put the dish on the hob over a medium heat to reduce the sauce. Meanwhile, once the meat has cooled slightly, shred it from the bones (be very careful as rabbit has lots of tiny bones which are deeply unpleasant to crunch down on unexpectedly). Once the sauce has reduced by about half, remove the bay leaves and tough herb stems, then add the creme fraiche or cream and check the seasoning. Return the meat to the pan and warm through gently, then set aside.

Put the wild and brown rice in a saucepan and add enough boiling water to cover by about 2 inches. Put a lid on the pan and simmer over a low heat for about 30 minutes until the rice is cooked but still slightly nutty. Drain and set aside.

Quarter the apples and remove the cores. Slice thinly. Heat the butter in a saucepan or frying pan then add the sugar. Saute the apples until golden and caramelised.

Divide the watercress between six plates and then top with the rice. Top the rice with a couple of spoonfuls of rabbit/chicken meat and sauce, then scatter over the apples and the toasted hazelnuts. Sprinkle with a little fresh thyme, then serve warm or at room temperature with a lightly chilled glass of Domaine Bois d’Yver Chablis 2008.

Chablis poached pears with hazelnut crumble (serves 4; makes enough crumble for more)

You don’t have to make both elements of this dessert – both the pears and the crumble biscuit are delicious on their own.

For the crumble:

140g hazelnuts, toasted in a hot oven and roughly chopped

150g plain flour

60g cornmeal or polenta

½ tsp salt

100g cold butter

30g brown sugar

20g demerara sugar

20g granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

Zest of 1 orange

2 egg yolks

For the pears:

4 conference pears, firm rather than ripe

1 bottle Chablis, Chardonnay or similar white wine

200g caster sugar

1 cinnamon stick

4 cloves

2 bay leaves

4 strips of orange zest

2 sprigs fresh rosemary

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm springform cake tin or tart tin with a removable base. Mix together the egg yolks, orange zest and vanilla extract.

In a large bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal and salt. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs, or blitz it all together briefly in a food processor. Add the sugar and chopped hazelnuts.

Add the egg yolk mixture and rub in with your hands until the mixture turns slightly sticky and crumbly. Pour into the prepared tin and press down very lightly around the edges, leaving everything quite uneven.

Bake for 40 minutes until crunchy and golden brown. Leave to cool in the tin.

Meanwhile, put the wine and sugar in a saucepan (taller rather than wider is ideal, so the liquid will cover the fruit) and bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add the cinnamon, cloves, bay, orange and rosemary and simmer very gently for a few minutes.

Peel the pears then place in the saucepan; the wine should just about cover them, but you can keep turning them if part is left uncovered. Simmer very gently for 15-25 minutes, turning the pears occasionally, until tender to the point of a knife (keep checking them – how long this takes depends on the ripeness of your pears). When done, remove to a bowl.

Boil the poaching liquid until reduced to about 200-300ml. Serve the pears whole or slice each in half lengthways, then sprinkle with a generous amount of the hazelnut biscuit (you can either break it into whole pieces and garnish the pears with them, or crumble it over the fruit). Spoon over a little of the poaching liquid, then serve either au naturel or with crème fraiche, cream or ice cream. This is ideal with a glass of Chablis J. Moreau & Fils 2009.

Bacon, pecan and maple syrup muffins

'Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon'  ~ Doug Larson, 1924 Olympic gold medal winner

No, don't worry. This is still me. This blog hasn't been taken over by an impostor. I'm not being held hostage somewhere chillingly remote while food-blog fraudsters take over Nutmegs, seven.

But yeah, I know. You probably think I'm going mad. That I'm not myself. My recipes are normally so healthy, so full of vibrant fruit and vegetables and sexy wholegrains. Only a couple of days ago I posted about my love for virtuous sugar-free dried fruit compote...

...and now I've created something that basically combines all the hallmarks of American gastronomic hedonism in a single muffin.

Interestingly, did you know that bacon dates back to Roman times? That a bacon sandwich is the nation's favourite 'guilty' food? That the phrase 'bringing home the bacon' possibly refers to an Essex tradition of AD 1111, where a noblewoman offered a prize side of bacon to any man in England who could honestly say he had had complete marital harmony for an entire year and a day? (Apparently in over 500 years, the prize was won by a grand total of...er...eight men).

No, I didn't know any of this either. It's remarkable how little we think about one of our favourite, staple foodstuffs.

I had the privilege of testing out some simply gorgeous M&S bacon, smoked over chestnut chippings and flavoured with juniper. You buy it in packs of thick, fat, meaty slices that actually look like they've been cut off part of a pig, rather than the horrible congealed slab of sticky mess that normally constitutes most packets of cheaper supermarket bacon. This stuff has a really lovely depth of flavour and a proper smokiness. It's pretty salty, so if you're using it for cooking I wouldn't add any extra salt. 

It's probably a little more expensive than your standard bacon, but actually I reckon you'd need to use less in a recipe because it has such an intense flavour (and clearly hasn't been pumped with water like a lot of the cheaper varieties), so it basically works out at the same price. Plus happier pigs are involved. Win-win.

The other night I woke up, completely randomly, at 3.30 am and suddenly the idea for bacon, pecan and maple syrup muffins popped into my head.

It kind of had to be done, really.

One of my students came round yesterday for a lesson and saw these muffins cooling on the rack. She said "wow, what beautiful cupcakes". I said, "yeah, they're quite interesting...they're bacon, pecan and maple syrup. Would you like one?"

She looked at me like I was insane, and without any hesitation said, "no." 

Not, "oh, that sounds...interesting! I'd love to but I'm still really full from breakfast", or "oh, I wouldn't want to deprive you of them", or "thanks but I'm a vegetarian". Just, no. 

I admit, it does sound a bit odd. But this combination works. These are obviously muffins on the more brunchy, savoury side - they're not going to compete with fancy swirly, glistening, buttercreamed cupcakes for the attention of one's sweet tooth. But the combination of salty bacon, fragrant pecans and sweet syrup is really irresistible, and a wonderful platform for anything you want to pair it with.

These muffins are an all-rounder kind of food. They're fabulous warmed up and buttered for breakfast or brunch. They're ideal served with cheese for lunch. I bet they'd be delicious dunked into a pea or vegetable soup, or served alongside a simple dinner instead of bread rolls. 

Or, of course, you could just pour over some more maple syrup and eat them whenever you like.

They're a simple muffin mixture (flour, eggs, milk, oil) to which I added a little cornmeal, partly for texture and partly because it's reminiscent of American cornbread, that brunch classic; I couldn't combine bacon, maple syrup and pecans in a recipe without acknowledging the clear influence of American brunch. I'm quite into adding cornmeal (or polenta) to baked goods at the moment - it adds a slight grittiness, but in an interesting rather than unpleasant way. 

Into the muffin mixture goes chopped bacon, fried until sizzlingly crisp and glistening with fat. Then crumbled pecans, toasted until fragrant, sweet and nutty. Then the glorious amber elixir that is maple syrup. Dark brown sugar gives an extra caramel flavour to the muffins that enhances the maple flavour. A little dried thyme and sage to give everything a lift, a little black pepper, and they go in the oven to emerge twenty minutes later warm, fluffy, salty, sweet, crunchy and wonderful.

This is basically American brunch in muffin form. Portable, neatly portioned, faff-free American brunch. You need to give these a go soon.

Bacon, pecan and maple syrup muffins (makes 12):

• 200g plain flour
• 70g cornmeal or polenta
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sage (dried or fresh)
• 1 tsp thyme (dried or fresh)
• A pinch of black pepper (or cayenne if you want to add an extra kick)
• 120ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 120ml vegetable oil
• 70ml maple syrup, plus extra for drizzling
• 4 rashers of bacon, finely diced and fried until crispy
• 60g pecans, toasted and crumbled

Pre-heat the oven to 200C/190C fan oven. Line a muffin tray with 12 muffin cases.

Mix together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, sugar, salt, herbs and pepper. Whisk together the milk, eggs, oil and maple syrup. Add this to the flour mixture and stir until just combined - don't over mix. Stir in the bacon and pecans, reserving a little to top the muffins before they go into the oven.

Divide the mixture between the muffin cases, then sprinkle over the reserved bacon and pecans. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown and firm to the touch. Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack, then drizzle each muffin with a little extra maple syrup. Leave to cool if you can, otherwise devour instantly.

Spiced dried fruit and blood orange compote

I have a curious fascination with dried fruit. Perhaps that associates me with socks-and-sandals-wearing health freak weirdos, but I don't care; I love the stuff. Not just your run-of-the-mill raisins and maybe dates or apricots, but other more overlooked fruits too. Prunes, often unfairly dismissed as a bit too virtuous, I find utterly squishy and divine, particularly simmered in a lamb tagine. I enjoy the crunch of a dried fig, with its sweet aromatic flavour and nubbly little seeds. Dried cranberries add a perfect sweet-sour zing to everything from porridge to salads. I relish the foamy sweetness of a dried apple ring and its slightly tangy flavour, reminiscent of Granny Smiths. Strips of leathery, golden dried mango are often far more promising than they look, delivering a gorgeous deep, sticky sweetness if you make the effort to sink your teeth in.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say I get a bit of a kick out of finding new and unusual dried fruits. Tragic? Perhaps.

Pears are something I'm rather intrigued by and have yet to sample. Blueberries and cherries are prohibitively expensive in dried form, even more so than when fresh, so I haven't yet managed to bring myself to purchase any. Dried pineapple - the proper stuff in ragged rings, not those artificial pastel-yellow cubes that taste like sugar and little else - is another one on the mental wish list.

I tried a dried strawberry for the first time the other day, in a packet of 'dried berry mix'. I have to say, it was vile and definitely one that has been crossed off said mental wish list.

I can see, however, why some people shy away from dried fruit. It can be quite strong, a bit too chewy, a bit musty-tasting. This is why you cook it, dear readers. You add some form of liquid, apply a little heat, and you end up with a completely different concept altogether. You end up with delightful sweet, squidgy morsels of fruity goodness that are oh-so versatile and oh-so delicious.

They taste like sweets...only they're good for you.

Dried fruit is excellent for perking up a lacklustre stew. Apples work well with pork in their fresh form; that's a given. But dried apple rings are also an unusual and lively addition to a pork casserole. Prunes are brilliant not only with lamb but also with beef, particularly oxtail, as my braised oxtail with prunes, orange and anise recipe shows. Apricots work well with lamb too, but also pork and duck, and sometimes chicken. The other day I stuffed some chicken breasts with cream cheese, thyme, toasted pecans and dried cranberries. It was gorgeous. Raisins or sultanas always make a good addition to curries or rice pilafs. The culinary possibilities of even the most basic dried fruits are endless; I can't wait to think up some ways to use things like dried mango, pineapple and pears.

This is a delicious way to use the more common dried fruits in a sweet, rather than savoury, way. When you think of fruit compote, fresh fruit usually springs to mind, but there's no reason why you can't make a gorgeous compote using the dried stuff. There's something a little bit magical about the transformation of dark, shrivelled morsels into plump, juicy globules of goodness.

I make this compote to top my morning porridge, but it would also be wonderful spooned over ice cream or served alongside a creamy dessert or a cake. I just love the contrast between the cold compote, which keeps in the fridge, and a piping hot bowl of creamy oats.

Dried fruit is simmered in a mixture of orange juice and spices until plump and juicy; you're left with a delightful sweet, sticky syrup full of tasty fruity pieces. I then add sliced blood oranges, which are still in season and which I am still obsessively hoarding due to my magpie-like culinary tendency to snaffle up anything shiny or pretty. These are both. Plus they have a lovely tang that complements the sweetness of the fruit perfectly. You can leave out the orange segments if you like, though - the compote is great either way. I keep it in the fridge, take out a bit every morning for my porridge, and add a sliced orange to it.

It's also pretty healthy, as there's no added sugar other than that from the fruit and orange juice, yet it tastes stupidly delicious.

OK, so this is barely a recipe and you're probably thinking "yeah, well duh...", but I love this compote so much that I had to share. If you've never seen dried fruit as anything more than those little Sun Maid boxes of raisins or the occasional dried apricot for snacking on, I hope this will make you a little more adventurous.

This is a very versatile recipe - use whatever fruits and spices you want, in whatever quantities you want. The basic premise is to poach them in enough liquid to cover them, until they turn soft and juicy. Use apple or cranberry instead of orange juice, add other fresh fruit rather than oranges...whatever you like.

Spiced dried fruit and blood orange compote (makes 6-8 servings): 

• 200g dried apricots, halved
• 200g prunes, halved
• 200g raisins or sultanas
• 150g dried figs, roughly chopped
• Orange juice (bottled is fine, no need for fresh)
• Water
• 2 tsp mixed spice (or a mixture of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, star anise and coriander seed)
• Sliced blood or normal oranges, to serve (one per person)

Put the dried fruit in a saucepan with a lid and half-cover with orange juice. Pour over enough water to just cover the fruit, then add the spice(s). Cover with a lid and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer very gently for 20-30 minutes until the fruit is plump. Keep checking as you may need to add more water or orange juice - you want there to still be some liquid syrup left in the pan when the fruit is juicy, and it absorbs more than you'd think.

Set aside and leave to cool, or serve hot/warm. When ready to serve, add a sliced orange per person, along with any juice left over from slicing, and stir into the fruit.

Persimmon and walnut spice bread

A quick bread is basically a baked good that rises without yeast. Think banana bread, courgette bread, that kind of thing - these usually involve baking powder and/or bicarbonate of soda to make them rise. I was confused because I generally wouldn't think of these things as bread, or at least they're bread in name only because they come in a loaf tin. To me, such goods are really classed as loaf cakes (yeast = bread, therefore no yeast = cake), but if you want to make them sound vaguely healthier by calling them a quick bread, I'm not going to complain!

I absolutely love making loaf cakes, which is what 'quick bread' is in my mind. I'll never forget the first time I performed something akin to alchemy by turning a black tangle of rotting bananas into something moist, fragrant, dense and delicious that could be sliced, liberally buttered and devoured on the spot. I honestly felt like I'd hit a turning point in my life, that from then on things were going to be significantly better now that I could make banana bread.

There really is nothing quite like the aroma of baking banana bread. I used to relish that moment when I realised my bananas were past the point where I wanted to eat them. I would wait patiently with great anticipation, enjoying watching them slide into oblivion, blacken and freckle and shrivel, and then I'd get out the flour, the butter, the spices and the milk and invite all my friends round for banana cake. It became a sort of ritual in my second year at Oxford. Just warm, having emerged from the oven only minutes before, perhaps flavoured with some cardamom, coconut or blueberries...you really can't beat it. I think it's the sweet, sweet taste of frugality, of letting nothing whatsoever go to waste. In these times of austerity (a phrase I hate so much that I can't believe I just wrote it), banana bread is just what you need.

Good for the budget and good for the soul. Good, even, for the waistline. The beauty of making loaf cakes is that you can get away with omitting most of the butter, instead using mashed fruit (fresh or dried - prunes and dates are particularly good) to add moisture and flavour. Loaf cakes are supposed to be dense, hearty and filling - you don't need to cream butter and sugar to lighten them as you would a fluffy Victoria sponge or a fudgy chocolate gateau. I only use 40g of butter in a whole banana loaf, but you'd never guess it from the taste - honestly. 

Yet a slice of loaf cake is far, far more satisfying for me than any fancy, fussy, calorie-laden creation. I defy anyone not to prefer a piece of just-baked banana bread over a panna cotta or a tiramisu or a silly tartlet any day. There's something pleasingly rustic about them; they demand to be hacked apart in thick, door-stop slices, slathered in butter and eaten without the necessity for plate or fork.

That, to me, is real food.

A couple of months ago when the markets were drowning in persimmons, I'd googled this interesting fruit and found a few recipes for persimmon bread. I'd read that persimmons can be used in exactly the same way as bananas when baking, and that they even have a similar flavour. 

Don't worry - I bet you're wondering what a persimmon is. Hardly anyone I know knows what a persimmon is. Yeah, I know, I should choose my friends more wisely. 

In fact, my boyfriend is convinced I've made the whole thing up and that this fruit does not, in fact, exist. So much so that he has now nicknamed this creation "Made-Up Fruit Bread". 

A persimmon is sometimes called a kaki or sharon fruit.

There are two types; you're more likely to be familiar with the Fuyu persimmon (see below), which looks like a bright orange tomato. It's small and squat, sometimes perfectly four-leaf-clover shaped, sometimes more round. It has a brownish green stalk and little leaves. The skin is quite hard, even when ripe, but the inside softens and becomes jelly-like. The texture is almost exactly like a tomato: harder skin, soft gelatinous flesh, but the flavour is somewhere between a peach and a mango. 

They are a joy to eat, with their mild fruity flavour and their lovely textural contrast between the crunchy skin and jelloid innards. They work really well thinly sliced in salads, perhaps with some sharp cheese like feta or some salty ham. If you've never tried one before, perhaps too scared or confused by their masquerading as orange tomatoes, do take the plunge. Let them ripen until they give easily when pressed, rather like a mango, then slice into wedges and eat.

A hachiya persimmon is much bigger, usually, with much softer, thinner skin. These can be unpleasantly astringent unless perfectly, wobblingly ripe: basically, you have to wait until it feels like a water balloon in your hand before you can think about eating it (which, incidentally, makes for transportation issues). These persimmons are better for baking with, because you can just chuck the whole thing - minus the stalk - in a blender when ripe and purée it to smithereens. It can now be used in the same way as mashed bananas. 

I had some hachiya persimmons a while ago that had started to become too jelloid even for my liking. Being the freakishly-organised wannabe home economist that I am, I puréed them and froze the pulp for a later use. I just had to try out persimmon bread.

This is a variation of several recipes I came across while researching persimmon bread; I added a few bits of my own and altered a few things according to my whims. I wanted something healthy enough to be eaten for breakfast (liberally slathered with butter, of course, which is why it had to be healthy to start with at least...), but also decadent enough to eat warm with a cup of tea mid-afternoon. I wanted something moist, fragrant, satisfying; everything a 'quick bread' should be. 

In the end I came up with a persimmon bread flavoured with warm spices, vanilla and orange zest, and enriched with crunchy, earthy walnuts and juicy sultanas. You need a bit of texture in a banana bread; walnuts or pecans provide the perfect crunch while really balancing the moreish sweetness of the bananas, so I was sure they'd work with persimmons. And who doesn't love finding a juicy, plump sultana or raisin in the middle of their cake? Only weird people. The loaf is enriched with buttermilk for moisture, persimmon purée for flavour and texture, eggs to hold it all together and a little sugar (brown, for the gorgeous caramel flavour) and butter just so it's still a treat. I used half plain and half wholemeal flour, the latter so it could lend its delicious nuttiness to the whole occasion.

It's ridiculously easy to make, but what's even more ridiculous is how much the smell emanating from your oven as it bakes will have you salivating. There really is nothing on earth more comforting or appetising, I truly believe.

I have to say, I was amazed by the result of this experiment. The bread came out beautifully. It developed a gorgeous dark crust peppered with walnut pieces, while lurking underneath was an incredibly moist, luscious, cakey interior. There was a definite nutty flavour from the wholemeal flour, complemented by the walnuts, but not so much that it didn't still feel like cake. The crumb was incredibly moist, no doubt a result of the buttermilk, fruit purée and small amount of butter I used. Best of all, there's a wonderful warm, autumnal current of spices and orange zest running through the whole thing. 

But the ultimate test was performed by my mother, who asked to try a 'tiny' piece, making me cut her the most ridiculous of slivers which is totally impossible to do with a cake this crumbly and moist, and then afterwards asked for another piece. When I grumbled, saying why couldn't she have just asked for a normal-sized piece in the first place, she remarked, "I was worried it was going to taste too worthy, but it doesn't."

So, there you have it. A healthy(ish) quick bread that you'll never believe is, in fact, quite good for you. I can recommend eating a couple of thick slices of this toasted for breakfast and spread with butter. It really is incredible. I actually enjoyed mine with some persimmon jam made for me by a lovely friend of mine who is currently living in St Petersburg, where apparently they have huge gluts of persimmons over the autumn. It has a really interesting, subtle sweet flavour that was delicious on the nutty, earthy bread.

Incidentally, if you can't find persimmons, another joy of this recipe is its versatility - you can use bananas instead of persimmons and basically whatever fruit, nuts and spices you like. I reckon cardamom would be wonderful, as would brazil nuts and dried apricots. Give it a go for a breakfast/teatime treat with a difference.

What are your favourite quick bread/loaf cake recipes? Can anything really beat a good banana bread?

Persimmon and walnut spice bread (makes 1 loaf):

• 2 large hachiya persimmons, puréed in a blender (or 2 large very ripe bananas, mashed)
• 3 tbsp melted butter
• 1 tsp good vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 80g brown sugar
• 100ml buttermilk, yoghurt or milk
• 150g plain flour
• 150g wholemeal flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1.5 tsp mixed spice
• Finely grated zest of 1 orange
• 60g walnut or pecan pieces, chopped (or other nuts of your choice)
• 60g sultanas or raisins (or other dried fruit of your choice)

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease and line a loaf tin.

In a large bowl, beat together the persimmon purée, melted butter, vanilla, eggs, sugar and buttermilk. In another bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and mixed spice. Add this to the wet ingredients and fold together with a large spoon until just combined. Stir in the orange zest, walnuts (reserve a few for decorating) and sultanas.

Pour into the prepared tin and scatter the remaining walnuts over the top. Bake for around 50 minutes until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean (or just about clean - it doesn't matter if you under-bake it a bit, as it'll just be even more moist and delicious).

Allow to cool if you have the willpower, and serve with lots of butter. It keeps very well and is wonderful toasted if you're not eating it fresh (though why wouldn't you?!)

Blood orange, olive oil and cardamom syrup cake

A couple of days ago, a man came to our house selling olive oil. Not just any olive oil - extra virgin, cold-milled, mechanically pressed, low-acidity, award-winning, Calabrian olive oil. This oil had been exported by the Barbalace family on whose farm it was produced, and a nice Italian man was going round Cambridge extolling its virtues and selling it for them. 

I guess that speaks volumes about what kind of neighbourhood I live in. The kind of place where people are likely to understand the subtleties of different olive oils, know their virgin from their extra virgin and appreciate the virtues of mechanical pressing. And, of course, pay a not-insubstantial amount of money to procure a three-litre can of this lovely product. No wonder I'm such a food snob.

Yeah, so I could buy olive oil from the supermarket. It would be fine, for cooking and the like. Who really notices the nuanced fragrance of olive oil once you've sauteed or fried a load of things in it, or used it in a dressing or sauce? But therein lies the problem. 

Olive oil, on its own, can be utterly delicious. But how often does one truly appreciate it? Unless you're savouring the product raw, unadulterated, just soaked into a piece of holey ciabatta or squidgy focaccia rather than as a cooking medium, you don't really savour all those fruity, grassy, silky flavours. I very rarely eat olive oil on its own; only, really, when at food festivals and faced with a huge array of oils to sample and bread to dip. The rest of the time I tend to forget about what a lovely thing bread dipped in olive oil can be. No need for balsamic vinegar to muddy the waters; just pure, mellow green oil. Lighter and tangier than butter, with all sorts of intriguing aromas, and a habit of making even the most boring bread taste wonderful.

So I tried the oil the nice Italian man was proffering, on a little piece of ciabatta, and I liked it. It was rich yet light, full of flavour and an enchanting grass-green colour brimming with life and vitality. With a product this complex and delicious, no wonder the Mediterranean diet is such a success. We bought a three-litre can of oil from him, and although it wasn't exactly cheap, I'd much rather give my (well, OK, my mum paid for it) money to a small family business in the south of Italy (which is far far poorer than the more industrial, touristy north) than to the giant gobbling corporate monster that is Tesco. 

If you're interested in the oil in question, you can find more information here.

Rather than squander this precious product in everyday cooking, I decided to make it one of the central components of a recipe. I've never tried baking a cake with olive oil before, but I've read lots of rave reviews about such things, and I was intrigued. I imagined it would lend the crumb a different texture to  that given by butter, and also deliver a subtle, fruity fragrance and silky mouthfeel. There's the added health benefit of olive oil being generally much better for you than animal fats. What's not to like?

I've also been hoarding blood oranges somewhat obsessively for the last few weeks. I can't get enough of their absolutely gorgeous colouring and their sweet, tart flavour. I use them in everything, and the fridge is currently brimming with my stash. Given that blood oranges also come from southern Italy (Sicily, to be specific), they seemed the perfect partner for my olive oil. 

It turns out this wasn't a startlingly original brainwave, which saddened me a bit. There are lots of recipes for blood orange olive oil cakes out there. However, one immediately sprung to mind. 

It's from one of my favourite dessert blogs, Pastry Studio, and I remember bookmarking it months ago when it first appeared. The recipe is for an olive oil cake enriched with semolina and cardamom, smothered in an orange and cardamom syrup, and topped with candied orange slices. Everything about this cake appealed to me: the use of semolina for texture; the soaking in syrup afterwards; the idea of using olive oil instead of butter; the addition of cardamom; the beautiful, jewel-like candied oranges. It just had to be done. Although the original used normal oranges rather than blood oranges, I thought the blood variety would add a gorgeous and dramatic dash of scarlet colouring.

The candied oranges are simple to make: you bubble together some water, sugar, honey (orange blossom honey in this case, for an extra fragrant orangey hit) and cardamom to make a syrup, then add thinly-sliced oranges. This simmers very gently for around 45 minutes until the oranges are soft, sugary and totally edible (rind and all), and the syrup has become enriched with all that delicious juice. This then gets poured over the finished cake, pricked with a skewer just after it emerges from the oven to allow all the syrup to soak in. Exactly like a lemon drizzle cake, but so much more sexy.

The cake itself is fairly easy to make. Instead of creaming butter and sugar, you beat the olive oil with the sugar. I was really struck by the vivid green colour of my lovely olive oil as I poured it into the bowl, and could barely wait for the cake to bake so I could try it. The only slightly fiddly part is separating the eggs, beating the yolks into the oil and sugar but beating the whites separately to stiff peaks, adding sugar to make a sort of meringue mixture, and using this to lighten the cake. Not that this is particularly tricky, but it's a tiny bit more work than using whole eggs. The oil/yolk/sugar mix gets added to flour, sugar, cardamom, orange zest, vanilla, yoghurt (I used buttermilk) and semolina (rather like polenta, it gives the cake a very slightly grainy texture which is just gorgeous), the egg whites are gently folded through to fluff everything up, and it's baked in the oven for about 25 minutes. 

I love pouring syrup onto a just-cooked cake; it's so satisfying watching it drizzle through the little holes made by your skewer, knowing that it's delivering a mouthful of intense, juicy sweetness. I left the cake to soak up its syrup drink overnight, then decorated it with the candied orange slices which I'd removed from the syrup. A scattering of slivered pistachios, a dusting of icing sugar, and voila: blood orange, olive oil and cardamom syrup cake.

This cake really is stunning, both to look at and to eat. The texture is really intriguing; so light and fluffy but with a slight crunch from the semolina. It reminds me a little of the orange flower polenta syrup cake I made back in the summer, especially because it has that slight floral fragrance from the orange blossom honey. It's rich with heady cardamom and orange, yet still clean-tasting and fresh. You can detect a subtle fruity note from the olive oil, but it doesn't overpower the cake. Everything is perfectly balanced, and when you get a mouthful where the orange syrup has soaked into the crumb and turned it sticky and moist, it's just heavenly. 

The only thing I'd change is using more syrup: I let my candied oranges simmer for a little too long so a lot of the syrup evaporated, so in future I'd reserve a bit more to drizzle over the cake for an extra-moist result.

If you're looking for a light, unusual and exotic cake, either for dessert (great with mascarpone or vanilla ice cream) or to devour with a cup of tea, this is it. It's not difficult, it's really exciting, and it tastes divine. I should know - I ate a quarter of it in one go (and we're talking a 22cm cake here, one that should in theory serve ten people). Thank you Pastry Studio for a truly stunning recipe (here it is again, should you want to emulate this orangey success).

Have you ever tried baking with olive oil?

Crêpes with goat's cheese, walnuts and caramelised russet apples

Pancakes were, I think, the first dinner I ever made for my family. I'm not sure what set me off on the idea, but somewhere during my childhood I was shown how to turn a simple mixture of milk, flour and eggs into something magical, ideal for stuffing with all sorts of delicious things. Every now and again, when the whim took me, I would ask my mum if I could cook that night. Naturally, she was always delighted and assented without further ado. I'd find myself at the hob flipping pancake after pancake, feeling a rather satisfactory sense of pride at the notion I was both giving her a break from cooking and getting to eat delicious fare at the same time. Perhaps the thrill of it appealed to my inner drama queen - the sizzling of the batter as it hits the hot pan and starts to set immediately; the theatrical flick required to flip the pancake in its pan rather than chickening out and using a palette knife; the frenzy of bringing crêpe after crêpe to the table, replenishing empty plates as soon as the last mouthful has been swallowed.

Back then, I would without fail stuff these crêpes - for that is what they were: the thin, delicate French kind, although my clumsy child hands probably made them far more dense and rubbery than should be allowed - with bacon and cheese. Just that - bacon fried until crisp in a hot pan, and loads of grated cheddar. I have to say, although it doesn't have quite the same finesse as some of the flavour combinations I come up with on this blog now, you can't really beat a thin, squidgy crêpe stuffed with crispy bacon and oozing, tangy cheddar.

But, of course, only half the pancakes ended up this way. The rest were always reserved for that happy fate, the destiny of most milk-egg-flour mixtures: a liberal sprinkling with pure white sugar, and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. 

You just can't beat it.

I used to have a very particular method of dessertifying my crêpes. I'd spread one out on a plate, then scatter sugar all over it. I'd then follow with lemon juice, until no white snowy patches of sugar remained - it was all saturated with sweet, tart juice. I'd fold the crêpe in half, and repeat the process, before rolling it into a cigar shape. No area remained untouched by my sugaring and lemoning activities. The result was a sublime mixture of squishy pancake, crunchy sugar, and juicy lemon. I'd find these completely addictive, sometimes eating four or five - and that was after the cheese and bacon feast. (If you're a lemon-and-sugar purist, try serving your pancakes with this incredible Earl Grey ice cream, as I did last year. The flavours work gorgeously together.)

However, in the spirit of doing something a little different for pancake day, here's what I made this year. 

Inspired by the deliciousness of caramelised russet apples, which I recently used in a wild rabbit salad, I decided to pair them with goat's cheese. This is a really underused flavour combination, but it works so, so well. The chalky tang of the cheese is perfectly suited to the soft, sweet apples. Add some crunchy walnuts for texture and earthy flavour, and a handful of crisp spinach leaves for a refreshing snap of greenery, and you have something that works perfectly nestled in the soft, pillowy curves of a light, golden crêpe. 

I used wholemeal flour for these crêpes, mainly because I wanted to use buckwheat but I couldn't find it anywhere, so wholemeal was the next best thing. It's great because it gives the pancakes a slightly nutty, stronger flavour, perfect for standing up to flavoursome fillings. 

Incidentally, I also discovered another amazing filling for crêpes this evening. Cook some mushrooms with a little garlic in butter over a high heat until golden and toasty. Pour in a splash of white wine, allow to reduce a little, then stir in a few spoonfuls of creme fraiche. Add some black pepper, salt, and fresh thyme, then bubble for a minute or so until you have a lovely creamy mushroom sauce. Spread over pancakes, top with grated Gruyere cheese or parmesan, then fold the pancake and devour. Aren't you just salivating at the thought?

But back to the main event. This is a wonderful and unusual savoury recipe for pancake day, ideal for lining your stomach in preparation for the inevitable sweet crêpes to follow. The combination is just beautiful sitting between those golden layers; it has all the right differences in texture, sweetness and tartness. Give them a go.

But obviously, make a double batch of mixture so you can eat the rest with lemon and sugar. That's what I did.

[For other pancake recipe ideas, see the first section of my Recipe Index]

Crêpes with goat's cheese, walnuts and caramelised russet apples (makes 4, probably enough for 2 people as a main course):

• 110g wholemeal flour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 large eggs
• 200ml milk
• 75ml water
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 3 russet apples (or any apples), thinly sliced
• Butter, for cooking apples and crêpes
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 200g soft goat's cheese
• A handful of spinach
• A handful of walnuts
• Fresh thyme leaves, for finishing

Sift the flour into a large bowl, add the salt, and make a well in the middle with a spoon. Pour the milk and water into a jug. Crack the eggs into the flour, then gradually whisk, slowly incorporating a little flour into the eggs. As you do so, add a little of the milk and water mixture. Continue whisking, gradually adding liquid and incorporating flour, until you have a smooth mixture - avoiding lumps is easiest if you use an electric whisk. However, you will get a more bumpy texture than if you used plain white flour, so don't worry about this. Add the melted butter at the end and whisk in.

If you have time, allow the mixture to rest for half an hour, or if not, at least let it rest while you make the filling. Heat the knob of butter in a pan and add the brown sugar. Add the apples and cook on a medium high heat for 5 minutes or so until golden and caramelised. Set aside.

Pre-heat the oven to around 60C. Get a large, non-stick frying pan or crêpe pan really hot and add a knob of butter. Swirl it around the pan to coat, or use kitchen paper to wipe it over the bottom of the pan. Pour in a ladleful of batter, just enough so that you can swirl it to coat the bottom of the pan. Cook for a minute or so, then check with a palette knife to see if it has formed golden bubbles on the bottom. If so, flip over and cook for another minute.

Make all the crêpes in this way. As you go, put them on a plate with layers of greaseproof paper between them and put in the warm oven, ready for filling.

When you are ready to fill the crêpes, simply spread the goat's cheese over half of each crepe, then scatter over the spinach, walnuts, caramelised apple slices and a sprinkling of thyme. Fold in half over the filling, then into quarters. Serve warm - you can put them back in the oven for a few minutes to melt the cheese, if you like.

Roast mallard with Seville orange sauce

Mallard is an underrated bird. It has several advantages over its farmed counterpart, duck. First of all, it takes a fraction of the time to cook. Roasting a duck will take you at least an hour or maybe two; mallard needs only about fifteen minutes in the oven, if that. Secondly, you can pretty much guarantee it's free range and has lived a good life, as with a lot of game. Thirdly, it's much lower in fat than duck but still delicious. And finally, it has a stronger, gamier, richer flavour than farmed duck, making it ideal for pairing with slightly more flavoursome, fruitier sauces. 

One thing you must know: never, ever overcook a mallard. Like pigeon, this is a bird that has to be served dark, at most medium rare, and preferably oozing a little blood. You may find recipes suggesting you can pot roast or braise a mallard for hours to tenderise it: please don't. Sear it in a very hot pan, scorch it in a very hot oven, then serve it pink and delicious. Otherwise you may as well eat your own shoes.

The last time I cooked mallard, I served it with quince and a star anise sauce. Quince goes beautifully with mallard, as with duck, but this time I wanted to try a more classic flavour combination. Duck and orange is a bit retro, and something I've actually never tried, despite it being almost traditional. I figured I'd put a seasonal twist on this pairing by using Seville oranges.

The woman in the greengrocers looked earnestly at me when I bought my two wrinkled oranges. "You do know those are marmalade oranges, right?! They're not for eating!" I nodded, as if it was obvious. Apparently there had been several instances of customers complaining about these extraordinarily sour citrus specimens. I can't help but be amused by imagining the facial expression of someone who's just popped a segment of seville orange in their mouth.

Instead of making the traditional marmalade with these, I thought they'd be a lovely contrast to the gamey mallard. Mallard, marmalade, they sound quite similar. Although you probably wouldn't put duck on your morning toast. I've used Seville oranges once before, in a cake with almonds, which was lovely. They're not the most versatile of citrus fruits, unfortunately, being both hugely sour and also containing about a million pips per orange, but fortunately that suits this recipe well.

I made a light, sharp sauce with the oranges, rather like a jus, if you wanted to be all fancy and Mastercheffy about it. This involved blanching strips of orange zest in boiling water twice, to remove most of the bitterness, then making a kind of caramel with sugar and white wine vinegar. To this I added chicken stock and the juice of the two oranges. It looked rather like melted marmalade in the pan, with those gorgeous marigold strips of zest and its light, tawny colouring. I roasted the mallard in the oven, having seared it first in a pan, and served it with the sauce, some steamed cabbage, and celeriac mash.

This sharp sauce makes a wonderful contrast to the iron-rich meat of the mallard, which stays moist and delicious because of the fast roasting time. The mash soaks up all of the lovely sauce while the crunchy cabbage is a nice texture contrast and, obviously, good for you. You could make this sauce with any orange, though Seville and blood oranges are good because they're slightly sharper. It would also go well with normal duck, roasted until crispy, or pan-seared rare duck breasts.

A wild twist on an old classic; seasonal, comforting and delicious.

Roast mallard with Seville orange sauce (serves 2, with sauce left over):

• 2 Seville oranges (or any kind of orange - blood oranges are good)
• 3 tbsp caster sugar
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 400ml chicken stock
• Olive oil and a knob of butter
• Salt and pepper
• One oven-ready mallard
• A handful of fresh thyme
• Mash and greens, to serve

First peel the rind from the oranges using a potato peeler. Slice this into long thin strips. Boil for a couple of minutes in a pan of water, then drain and boil again. Set aside. Bring the sugar and vinegar to the boil in a small saucepan, lower the heat and cook until it has turned a light caramel colour. Add the stock and boil for 5 minutes or so until reduced by a third. Add the juice from the oranges along with the rind, and keep warm.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C (190C fan oven). Season the mallard with salt and pepper. Warm a glug of olive oil and the butter in a pan and sear the mallard on all sides over a high heat until the skin has browned. Put on an oven-proof dish and place in the oven for 12-15 minutes (for rare to medium rare). Remove, place on a board and cover with foil. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before carving and serving with the sauce, some greens and mashed potato - garnish the plates with the thyme leaves.

Wild rabbit and barley salad with caramelised russet apples

One of the downsides of working so close to a rather foodie area of town (well, for Cambridge, that is - so basically anywhere that doesn't have a Pizza Express, Nandos and Starbucks right next to each other) is that I inevitably end up drawn there in my lunch break. I have to get out at lunchtime, get some fresh air, walk and clear my head. These things are necessary. What is perhaps not quite so necessary is going to the butchers and the oriental grocers every time. 

I can't help it. I hate walking without a purpose; even if my end goal is just to peruse aisles of weird and wonderful produce in jars, I need something to spur me on. Plus there is always something new and fascinating at the end of the tunnel: huge bunches of weird and wonderful Chinese greenery that I've never seen before; tofu in every conceivable shape, size and texture; giant bottles of soy sauce and other condiments; huge bags of rice, noodles and pulses. There's also stuff that's just downright weird, such as various undesirable bits of seafood or animal in big, bloodied bags in the freezer section. Still, I consider this my culinary education and I'd hate to miss out on it. 

I'm usually drawn to the butcher on the corner as well, sucked in by signs boasting about salt marsh lamb, or something that, out of the corner of my eye, looks suspiciously like a row of neat, plucked, oven-ready pheasant on the front of the counter. I don't actually cook that much meat, especially not red meat, but I'm fascinated by all the different cuts and animals you can get from a good butcher, and I'm always looking to try something new. A couple of weeks ago it was oxtail. More recently, it was wild rabbit.

I was pretty pleased when I caught sight of the wild rabbit on the butcher counter. Admittedly not pleased because of any aesthetic reason; skinned, jointed rabbit aren't particularly nice to look at, rather resembling something that has been prematurely plucked from the womb. However, they promised all sorts of tasty delights. I've read a lot about the virtues of wild rabbit: free range, obviously, and you're also doing farmers a favour by eating a pest; more importantly, it's meant to be a lot more flavoursome than farmed rabbit. Having only eaten the farmed stuff before, I couldn't wait to try the wild version for comparison.

I cooked my rabbit fairly simply, so as not to mask its flavour. I braised it in cider with some bacon, carrots, celery, onion, rosemary and juniper. At the end I added mustard, creme fraiche and parsley. We ate it with soft polenta, and while it was delicious, I have to say it was actually rather too rich for me. Wild rabbit really does have quite an intense flavour. The texture is reminiscent of chicken thighs and is lovely, while the taste has that rich earthiness you associate with stronger game like pigeon and hare. I really enjoyed the first few mouthfuls, but after that I was defeated by the richness of the dish. And that hardly ever happens.

As a result, there was rabbit meat left over. I decided to use it in a salad, featuring something a bit sharper, sweeter and more astringent to cut through that intensely rich flavour. This barley salad with caramelised apples was the result.

I absolutely adore pearl barley. I can't get enough of its crunchy yet tender texture and its nutty flavour. It works so well in winter salads - one of my favourites features roast squash, feta or goats cheese, chestnuts, bacon and sage. I often cook a huge vat of it and use it for various salads throughout the week, throwing in whatever is in the fridge. It's filling and hearty and can stand up to strong flavours, contributing an irresistible crunch of its own. I figured it'd be the perfect base for my rabbit salad, for all these reasons.

The apples were a bit of a whim. I had some russet apples turning soft in the fruit bowl, and there's nothing I hate more than a soft apple. Then I realised that they could actually work beautifully with the rabbit; cooking rabbit in cider with apples is fairly common, especially in France, so there was no reason why they shouldn't work sliced, cooked and stirred into my salad. I caramelised them in some butter and brown sugar first, to bring out their flavour so they'd stand up to the rabbit. Russet apples are beautiful things; I love their burnished, matt skins and their mellow, intriguing flavour. They are, I can confirm, even tastier when coated in butter and brown sugar. Then again, what isn't?

This salad was the simplest thing ever to assemble: cooked pearl barley, shredded rabbit meat, caramelised apple slices, some fresh thyme and parsley, and a little of the rabbit cooking sauce from earlier in the week. A good grinding of black pepper to lift the richness, and I had lunch.

A delicious, filling, comforting lunch, full of intriguing flavours. The apples worked really well alongside the rabbit, better than I could have expected. They provided a beautiful sweet tartness against the soft, rich meat and the crunchy, nutty barley.

I don't really need to give you a recipe for this, but here's the general idea. Adapt to suit you - use chicken instead of rabbit, if bunny boiling scares you; add extra veg if you like (spinach and green beans would be good); use wild rice or brown rice instead of barley. You'll end up with something delicious, unusual, and rather pretty.

Wild rabbit and barley salad with caramelised russet apples (serves 1):

• Leftovers from a cooked wild rabbit (probably 1 leg or the loin), plus a little sauce* 
• 50g pearl barley, boiled until tender but still slightly al dente
• 1 russet apple, cored and cut into thin slices
• 15g butter
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• A scattering of fresh thyme and finely chopped parsley
• Black pepper

Shred the rabbit meat from the bones. Be really careful to get rid of all the bones - some are tiny and may go undetected, until you bite into one resulting in a deeply unpleasant sensation. Mix the meat and sauce with the pearl barley, then toss with the thyme, parsley and a good grinding of black pepper.

Heat the butter and sugar in a small non-stick pan over a medium-high heat and add the apples. Cook until golden brown and caramelised, turning occasionally. Toss this with the barley salad. Sprinkle with a little more thyme and serve.

*(the recipe I used to cook my rabbit was basically this one from James Ramsden, but I added carrots, rosemary and juniper, and substituted creme fraiche for the double cream)

Spelt and seed bagels

Ah, the bagel. On a par with Starbucks for its ability to exude a highly contrived air of Manhattan-style chic and sophistication, the bagel is perhaps, after pizza and baguettes, the world's most iconic bread product. I remember thinking I was so cool the day I convinced Mum to buy me a packet of bagels from the supermarket, back in the days where the parents had total control over what foodstuffs were present in our household (other regular items I sneaked into the trolley included Frazzles, those ghastly yet so good bacon-flavoured crisps, and Yum Yums which, if you've never tried one, are like long twisty doughnuts with crunchy sugar icing and, sorry, where have you been living for the last god knows how long?)

I remember that first moment where the bagel emerged from the toaster, its glossy, firm exterior feeling slightly sticky to the touch, its crumb possessing a density quite unlike any other dough-based product I'd sampled. I remember slathering it with butter and eating it for breakfast, and wanting more - that subtle sweetness combined with the chewy crust was a new and addictive combination. But most of all I remember feeling grown-up, cosmopolitan, worthy of mingling with the cast of Friends - thus far my only real insight into the world of cool New Yorkers. The bagel was not an English muffin or a white roll. It was not even a baguette or a ciabatta. The bagel was beyond such rustic frivolity, whispering hints of urban sophistication and a well-heeled life lived amidst vibrant, bustling city streets. It was cool.

Looking back, I feel a bit silly. Bagels no longer possess that certain je-ne-sais-quoi  for me that they once did, perhaps because they are ubiquitous and often really rather inferior fare. I had a particularly disappointing experience with a acket of seeded bagels from Asda a few months ago. I'd always wondered what chewing my way through a cardboard box would feel like, and after forcing down one of those bagels I finally had my answer. Large companies seem to think that the word 'bagel' equates with the word 'stale', using the former term to pass off something that was perhaps once bread but now resembles an old boot. Just because it's called a bagel, doesn't mean you have license for it to be tough, mealy and generally deeply unpleasant. Just because bagels beg to be toasted, doesn't mean it's OK for them to be in a near cremated state before they get to the toasting device.

Homemade bagels are a revelation.

After reading this excellent post by one of my favourite food bloggers, thelittleloaf, I finally got round to trying out bagels at home. They've been on my to-cook list for years, but her post spurred me to action, particularly because I realised how little work is actually involved in producing these remarkable little breads in your own kitchen, and also because she too has had disappointing bagel experiences but assured me that the real, freshly baked thing is a different beast altogether. Oh, it really was.

The main difference between baking bagels and baking bread rolls is that you boil them briefly (very briefly - 10 seconds in total) in sugared water before baking them. That's what gives them that firm, chewy, glossy crust. It really is no more difficult than that. You make a basic dough of flour, sugar, water, salt and yeast, leave it to rise, shape it into bagels (no hidden art here - just poke a hole through a ball of dough with your finger or a wooden spoon), leave it to rise again, then boil and bake. The whole process can take under two hours in a warm place.

And oh, are they worth it. These bagels are quite unlike those dry, pappy things from the supermarket. The crust is gorgeously firm and crunchy, while the inside is soft and tender like freshly baked bread. I was really unsure how these were going to turn out, having only ever had mass-produced bagels before, but I'm a total convert. One of the best parts is that you can make sure the hole in the middle isn't too big, so you can actually spread fillings and toppings onto your bagels without them disappearing down that black hole of sadness. Another is the ability to customise your bagel - I can't wait to experiment with other flavours; a sundried tomato and black olive version is next on the list.

I used a mixture of spelt and normal bread flour in these, because I love the stronger flavour of spelt flour - you need a good taste to your bagel to ensure it stands up to those inevitably strong flavourings (smoked salmon, cheese, bacon, salami, maybe even some nutella...not all together, obviously). I also scattered the tops with poppy and sunflower seeds for added crunch and texture, and to make them look prettier. To get a nice golden, chewy crust I brushed the tops of the bagels with beaten egg after boiling and before baking, but this step isn't essential.

These are a world away from anything you can buy in a bag. I love the chewiness of the crust and the soft, yielding crumb. I love the smell emanating from the oven as they bake. I love flipping them over in their little jacuzzi of boiling water, watching the dough seize up and transform into something glossy and firm. I love the crunch of the seeds and the nuttiness of the spelt flour. I particularly love spreading them with cream cheese while still hot, before topping with a pink curl of smoked salmon and a scattering of peppery rocket.

Bagels have regained their coolness, in my eyes.

Do you have a favourite topping that you'd like to slather over a warm, freshly baked bagel? 

Homemade spelt and seed bagels (makes six):

(Barely adapted from thelittleloaf)

• 150g strong white bread flour
• 100g spelt flour
• 1 tsp dry/instant yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp oil
• 165ml warm water
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• Poppy and sunflower seeds

Put the flours, yeast, salt, tsp sugar and oil in a large bowl. Pour in the water and mix to a smooth dough. Knead on a work surface for 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic (or use the dough hook on an electric mixer). Put back in the bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place (an airing cupboard is ideal) to rise until doubled in size, about 1-2 hours.

When the dough has risen, divide it into six smooth balls. Cover these with the tea towel and put in a warm place for 20 minutes.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and add the brown sugar. Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Take each ball of dough and make a hole in the middle with your finger, gently stretching the dough out around it to form a bagel shape. Drop each one into the boiling water, leave for five seconds, then flip over and leave for another five seconds. Remove and place on an oiled baking sheet. Brush the tops of the bagels with the beaten egg, then scatter over the seeds.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown but still slightly springy to the touch. Eat while still warm.

Oxtail with prunes, orange and star anise

Sometimes you forget just how good certain things are. 

After a few days of snow and ice, you forget how wonderful it is to be able to walk freely along the pavement without risking life and limb, until you get to a non-icy patch and feel that delicious sense of liberation. After months of habitually using showers as your primary method of self-cleansing, you forget quite how wonderful long, hot baths can be until you have one. Bubbles and all. After cooking your own and your family's dinner every day for weeks, months even, you forget quite how amazing it is to just be called down from your room and find dinner on the table. You forget how anything tastes good if it's been made by someone else. After always cycling everywhere in the bitter cold, you forget how good it can feel to just get into a taxi, relish the warmth, and worry about the expense another time. 

That sensation of remembering long-forgotten luxuries in life is something to be cherished, I think.

Most of my moments like these relate to food. Every now and again I have a "Why don't I eat this more often?" moment. A moment of sheer, unadulterated gastronomic bliss, of total and complete satisfaction. Unfortunately, I can usually remind myself of the answer pretty quickly. It goes something along the lines of "Because if I ate this often, I would be the size of Asia".

I've had several of these moments recently. Tucking into a gorgeous, juicy, pink burger and chips from Honest Burgers in Brixton a couple of weeks ago (if you live near there - go. If you don't - go), I asked myself why I don't eat more burgers. Every time I devour a bowl of chips at a restaurant (the only time I ever eat them), I tell myself that I'd definitely be happier if I ate more chips. The same goes for things like cheese, biscuits (chocolate Hobnobs in particular), bread, and pastries. It's precisely because I don't usually allow myself such indulgent delights that they remain, for me, indulgent. Generally they lurk out of sight, off my culinary radar, safely out of the way of temptation. I carry on cooking relatively healthy things (though still delicious, mind you - I said relatively), blissfully ignorant of everything I'm missing.

But sometimes I am reminded just how wonderful certain foods and recipes can be. Of course, these are usually things on the slightly less healthy end of the spectrum. After a few mouthfuls, though, all my notions of moderation and restraint are lost to the winds and I am content to sit and revel in every bite, savouring something that is wonderful precisely because it is rare, that is familiar yet at the same time not; trying it again feels like an adventure and a new discovery.

Recently, one such experience involved a beef stew. I made the most incredible, sublime, utterly mouthwatering and amazing beef and ale stew for myself and my boyfriend the other week. It happened on a whim, perhaps the product of the rapidly declining temperatures outside, perhaps because for some reason we both kept talking about steak and ale pie (I imagine these two reasons are closely related). I braised juicy hunks of Aberdeen Angus beef with button mushrooms, baby carrots, red onions, shallots and celery in a mixture of beef stock and ale, throwing in a few thyme sprigs and serving the whole thing with leek and potato mash. 

I didn't intend to blog about it, but I keep thinking about it weeks later. It would be morally wrong, I think, to deprive the world of what is without doubt the definitive beef stew recipe. So watch this space.

Anyway, I bring that up (perhaps unfairly - I can't really go on and on about such a stew and leave you hanging, awaiting the recipe...but I have, so sorry) because it reminded me of how great beef can be. Red meat in general is something I eat very little of, mainly because it's not cheap and because I find it quite heavy, but after eating that stew I wondered why there is not more beef in my life.

In this spirit of cow-homage, and because I was still in awe of that stew, I decided to try something I've been intrigued by for a while: oxtail.

Oxtail is, quite literally, the tail of the cow. It is sold sliced into chunky, meaty rounds, bone in the middle and thick veins of fat and gelatine spidering out towards its edges. Because of the nature of this cut, it demands very long and slow cooking, to tenderise all those fibres and render the fat out. However, if you have the patience (very little actual hands-on work is required), you'll be rewarded with one of the most flavoursome and tender cuts of beef, a perfect melting stew for winter evenings.

I braised my oxtail, according to a recipe from Diana Henry's 'Food From Plenty', a cookbook I love. It involves cooking the meat in a mixture of red wine, beef stock and orange juice infused with bay, cinnamon and juniper. Towards the end, peeled baby onions and prunes are added to the liquid to soften and contribute their luscious sweetness.  I added ground ginger and star anise, because I wanted flavourings that would lift the intense meaty richness of the oxtail. This pot of bubbling gorgeousness sat in the oven for nearly four hours, and when I removed it the meat was falling apart and tender, and the sauce was rich, silky and unctuous, due to the gelatine from the meat.

The combination of flavours in this stew are fantastic - you get all that depth of flavour from the meat, red wine and stock, but the orange, anise and ginger give it a really intriguing aroma that sits well with the meaty strands of tail. It's not your average beef stew, but something far more exotic, reminiscent of a Moroccan tagine. I wasn't sure how the prunes would work, but I think they were the perfect partner to the beef - it's so rich that it really needs something sweet to take the edge off. The baby onions, which soften into little pearls of earthy flavour, also help with this. A scattering of parsley at the end to add a bit of oomph, a giant mound of creamy mashed potato (adding a little wholegrain mustard would be divine), and some steamed veg (I used carrots and Swiss chard) turn this into a hearty, wholesome dinner, perfect for the current cold snap. 

You could also serve this with couscous, bulgar wheat, pearl barley or polenta - anything to soak up that delicious sauce. I reckon pearl barley or bulgar wheat would be fantastic, because their nutty crunchiness would counteract the sweetness of the meat. 

Incidentally, if you're bothered about the fat content of oxtail (there is quite a lot, compared to normal braising steak), make the stew a day ahead and refrigerate it overnight. The fat will all congeal on the surface and you can just flake it off with a spoon. Also, leaving stews like this overnight is generally a great idea, as it intensifies their finished flavour and texture. A win all round, really.

If you haven't tried oxtail yet, I'd urge you to give it a go - it's incredibly easy to cook and immensely rewarding (don't be put off by the long-ish ingredients list below - you mostly just chuck stuff in a pan and let the oven get on with the rest). OK, so it is a bit more work to eat - you have to shred the meat away from the bone with your fork - but it's worth every bite. Most butchers should be able to order oxtail for you; they have even started selling it in Tesco. It's not as cheap as it perhaps should be, but I imagine this is because you only get one tail per cow, so they're not as plentiful as other cuts. 

Saying that, it beats a fillet steak both on the price front and the flavour front. 

Embrace the meaty tail,  snuggle up with a gorgeous bowl of winter stew, and remember just how good beef can be.

Oxtail with prunes, orange and star anise (serves 4 generously):

(Adapted from 'Food From Plenty' by Diana Henry)

• 1.2kg oxtail, cut into lengths
• Plain flour
• Salt and pepper
• Oil
• 1 onion, roughly chopped
• 2 celery sticks, finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 300ml red wine
• 500ml beef (or chicken) stock
• 1 orange
• 3 bay leaves
• Half a cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 10 juniper berries, crushed
• 1 large star anise
• 16 shallots or baby onions, peeled
• 20 prunes
• 2 tsp soft brown sugar (optional)
• 3 tbsp flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• Mashed potato or another chosen accompaniment, to serve

Preheat the oven to 150C/135C fan oven. Place around 4 tbsp flour in a large bowl and season generously. Toss the oxtail pieces in the flour to coat. Heat 2 tbsp oil in a large ovenproof casserole and brown the oxtail over a high heat until coloured all over. Remove and set aside.

Lower the heat and fry the onion and celery until soft and golden. Add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes, then pour in the wine. Scrape up all the bits that have stuck to the bottom of the pan (the best bits!)

Return the oxtail to the pan. Juice the orange and add all the juice to the pan along with half of the orange itself, cut into two pieces. Add the stock, bay, cinnamon, ginger, juniper and star anise. Season well. Cover with a lid and bring to the boil, then put in the oven and cook for around 3 hours until the meat is falling off the bone (leaving it in a little longer won't do it any harm - I cooked mine for 4 hours). Check every now and again to make sure the meat is still mostly submerged in the liquid - if not, top up with a little water.

After 1.5-2 hours, add the prunes and shallots to the pan, stir, and return to the oven for the remainder of the cooking time (if you add them sooner, they fall apart).

When ready to serve, check the sauce is the desired consistency - if it's too runny, remove the oxtail from the pan and reduce the sauce by boiling it. Try to fish out the bay leaves, anise, cinnamon stick and orange peel before serving. Check the seasoning and add the sugar if it needs it. Scatter over the parsley and serve the meat accompanied by the sauce.

Banana oatmeal waffles

Last night, it started snowing. Feather-light flakes were falling from the sky as my boyfriend and I left the house to walk to town for dinner. We lingered over dim sum - gorgeous cloud-like cha siu pork buns; sticky, ginger-spiced prawn dumplings; wispy fried taro paste croquettes with a creamy and delectable meat filling - for about an hour and a half. When we emerged, we found the snow whirling fast and furious through the air, and at least two inches on the ground. Fast forward three hours later to exiting the cinema, and I was sinking in snow halfway up to my calves. There was a sweet and beautiful silence all around as we trudged home, stopping for a childish detour to run madly over a pristine patch of virgin snow, tutting at people attempting to drive, and incredulous as we spied girls sporting bare legs and heels. (If you are one of those types, I honestly would love to know how you do it - email me).

Despite the bitter chill and the surprising effort required to walk for forty minutes in deep snow, I treasured that walk home. There was an eerie light in the sky, a ceiling of fluffy snow clouds stained with the glow of numerous street lamps. Cars made barely a sound, gently rolling and fumbling along; echoes of shouting and general weekend revelry were swallowed whole by the lavish carpet laid out by the clouds; everything subject to the capricious whim of mother nature. Sometimes I think we get ahead of ourselves in this modern day and age and need a thorough coating of snow to remind us that we are, in fact, very lucky to be allowed to remain on this planet, given that we are in fact completely at the mercy of forces beyond our control.

This morning, my garden and the surrounding houses looked like some feature from an old stately home that hasn't been lived in for years, where everything has been covered in dust sheets rendering it featureless, bleak, unrecognisable. My favourite part of snow is the flat light that comes with it, making the everyday seem otherworldly and allowing the landscape to sprawl on almost indefinitely in meandering white waves. Almost indefinitely, of course - it was broken everywhere I looked today by excitable children building snowmen and igloos. 

For breakfast, I made waffles.

Perfect winter fare, given their association with skiing and colder climes. There's nothing like a steaming hot waffle, replete with butter and sugar and smothered in something even more calorific, to warm you from the inside out on a cold day. 

These are not just any waffles, though - they're banana oatmeal waffles. Essentially, banana porridge in waffle form (and far healthier than the buttery Belgian kind, which seem a little too indulgent for breakfast, even when it is minus two outside). The recipe is a simple porridgey mixture of very ripe bananas (the kind I had to ask my parents not to throw away as they sat blackening and mouldering in the fruit bowl), milk, oats and cinnamon, plus a little flour, baking powder and an egg to help bind it all together and make it turn fluffy and lovely in the waffle maker. 

I served these with a generous drizzle of maple syrup, plus toasted pecans and some blueberries. If I'd had some bananas that weren't almost liquid inside their skins, I'd have sliced them over too. They were gorgeous - crispy on the outside but moist and fluffy within, with a delicate banana flavour. The crunchy pecans and tangy blueberries were a perfect combination, along with the necessary sweetness of the syrup (I didn't add any sugar to the batter, so they needed those caramel notes to lift them a bit).

I couldn't resist taking these outside and photographing them against the beautiful blank canvas that was my snowy garden. Naturally, my cat decided to take a great interest and get in the way. Fortunately at the last minute she decided that waffles weren't quite meaty enough for her feline tastes, though you never know with these animals - my other cat is a big fan of blue cheese.

It's been a real case of trial and error, experimenting with my new waffle maker (a Christmas present). The first batch I made were flabby and awful, as the heat setting wasn't high enough. They looked rather like greying, rubbery teatowels. Subsequent attempts were OK but had a tendency to go soggy as soon as they emerged from the machine, I suspect due to not leaving them to cook for long enough. Finally I think I've cracked it - cook them for longer than you'd think necessary to give a nice crisp exterior, then put them in a warm oven to stay hot. Serving them one at a time helps, too - stacking them up means the underlying ones go a bit soggy.

And of course, the key to turning an average waffle experience into a great one is simple: liberal amounts of maple syrup.

These are lovely - the slight banana flavour, the contrast with the crisp pecans and the sharp bite of the berries...just perfect for a snowy winter morning, accompanied by a large mug of tea and two hilarious cats whose attempts to negotiate the snow never fail to amuse, every year.

Do you have any favourite foods to cook when it's snowing?

Banana oatmeal waffles (makes about 6 waffles, enough for 2 people):

• 2 very ripe bananas, mashed
• 1 egg
• 100g oats
• 5 tbsp flour, sifted
• 5 tbsp milk
• 1 tbsp melted butter
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Toasted pecans/sliced banana/maple syrup/blueberries, to serve (I'd recommend all of them!)
• Icing sugar, for dusting

Pre-heat your waffle maker. Whisk together (preferably using an electric whisk) the bananas and egg, then add the rest of the ingredients. You want the batter to be fairly thick (a little thinner than it would be for American-style pancakes), so add more flour or oats if necessary, or milk if you think it's too thick. It's really a case of trial and error - if the first waffles don't come out quite right, adjust the mixture.

Spoon about 3 tbsp of the mixture into your waffle maker (how much you use depends on the size and shape of your waffle maker, but you'll probably know how much mixture yours takes if you use it regularly). Cook for 4-5 minutes until crispy on the outside. You can put the waffles in a warm oven while you make another batch, or cook them to order. Scatter with your chosen toppings, drizzle with maple syrup and dust with icing sugar, then serve immediately.

Waffle remains, in the snow.