Pasta with blue cheese, bacon, caramelised pear and fennel

This is a pasta recipe that I need to rave about. It's bloody amazing. I ate it on the sofa, greedily, from a bowl balanced precariously on my knee, whilst watching Downton Abbey. The combination was almost too joyous for my delicate nervous system to handle.  

It's one of the best things I've ever made. It's the perfect comfort food dinner. It's surprising and wonderful. It has the perfect balance of flavours and textures. It can be eaten with just a fork. Starchy carbs are involved. It has a cheese sauce. There is bacon. All these are good boxes to tick, right?

I can't tell you how this somewhat bizarre combination of ingredients came about. It was a whim, and a mishmash of things I know work together, added to some other things I know work together. It was also designed with the express intention of using up leftover pears: thanks to my lovely box delivered from Fruitdrop, who organise fruit delivery in London and the UK, I have a glut of fruit that is likely to turn mouldy before I have a chance to eat it all. 

Pears are one tricky fruit - they are edible for about a day, but too early or too late and they are either rock-hard or floury in the middle. Should you feel they are ripening at an alarming rate, stick them in the fridge and use them in a recipe.

There are numerous uses for pears in my kitchen. I eat them pure and unadulterated, preferably when they're at the state where I need a plate to catch the syrupy juice. I stir them, chopped, into porridge along with jewel-like dried cranberries and liberal gratings of nutmeg. I fold them into a buttermilk pancake batter along with raisins and toasted pecans, to be smothered in maple syrup. I tuck them into a tin of roasting partridge, to be eaten alongside the crisp-skinned burnished birds. I toss them into a crisp salad with goat's cheese and walnuts, or caramelise them and stuff them into thin cocoa-enriched crêpes. 

This is a totally new use for pears. Pears and pasta? You think it's weird. I know you do. Don't lie to me.

But pears go with blue cheese. The salty cheese and their sweetness work so well. Bacon goes with blue cheese - this is a classic. Blue cheese and pears both go with fennel, adding saltiness and sweetness respectively to balance the sharp, aniseed freshness of it. I just decided to combine all these things in one mad, luscious plateful. 

I made a blue cheese sauce for the pasta, using a lovely new cheese called 'Yorkshire Blue'. I've just moved up to Yorkshire to start my PhD (it's terrifying and exciting simultaneously), and am a huge fan of all the wonderful local produce, so it just made sense to incorporate a nice Yorkshire cheese in this dish. You could, of course, use any blue cheese. This was stirred into hot penne pasta, where it clung silkily to the quills, glistening with salty promise. There were bits of crispy bacon. There were shards of soft fennel and pear, caramelised with a little brown sugar and olive oil in a hot pan. There were some walnuts, crumbled over the top for texture (because pears go with walnuts, and walnuts go with blue cheese and bacon - it's just logic, people).

I knew it would be good as soon as I stirred it all together, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how good. 

This is a taste sensation. You get the creamy, salty blue cheese sauce, which is wonderful in itself. You add the salty bacon - always good. But then the whole rich, salty lot is balanced by the deliciously crisp, sweet fennel and the even sweeter buttery pear. If you think fruit and pasta is just plain wrong, I urge you to try this. The pear is so soft that it clings to the strands of pasta and is barely noticeable as fruit; instead, it lifts the whole dish to something memorably sublime. 

This has gone straight to the top of my favourite pasta recipes, which is a difficult list to top. I'm pretty proud of it, and I would wholeheartedly beg you to give it a go, especially if you have a Fruitdrop fruit delivery and therefore some pears to use up. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Pasta with blue cheese, bacon, caramelised pear and fennel (serves 1, easily doubled):

• 100g penne pasta
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Half a medium bulb of fennel, shaved thinly on a mandolin
• 1 ripe but firm pear, cored and thinly sliced
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 2 rashers bacon (I used smoked), finely diced
• Half a glass of white wine
• 2 heaped tbsp creme fraiche
• 50g blue cheese, crumbled (I used Yorkshire Blue)
• Black pepper
• 1 tbsp chopped walnuts (optional)

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and add the pasta. Cook according to the packet instructions until al dente, reserving a little of the cooking water. 

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan and add the fennel. Cook for a couple of minutes on a medium heat until softened, then add the pear and brown sugar and cook over a high heat until the pear starts to caramelise. Remove and set aside.

Add the bacon to the hot pan and cook until starting to crisp up. Pour in the white wine and let it reduce by half, then add the creme fraiche. Cook gently until it starts to thicken, then add the blue cheese and black pepper. 

When the pasta is ready, drain and add to the sauce in the pan with a teaspoonful of the cooking water. Return the pear and fennel to the pan, and the walnuts (if using). Toss together and serve immediately.

Spiced ginger plum and smoked chicken couscous salad

My kitchen table is currently groaning under the weight of an enormous cardboard box packed with fruit. If you know me, you'll know this basically means I've reached my peak of happiness. Yes, I lead a life of simple and edible pleasures. There are three bunches of bananas (which are just crying out to be left to blacken and become prime banana bread material), a scattering of plump marigold clementines, several voluptuously tapered conference pears, and an abundance of round rosy apples. There are also some beautiful plums, deepest purple with a gentle white bloom. This delightful array was sent to me by Fruitdrop, a company that delivers fruit to workplaces in London and across the UK to help keep workforces motivated, healthy and productive.

There are, of course, many advantages to getting fruit delivered in this way. You're more likely to eat it if it's just there, rather than it involving a trip to the shops. I know too many people who work in offices and complain about the amount of junk food they eat, just because it's 'there' on someone's desk. A box of multicoloured fruits is likely to brighten up any workplace. It's good for you. The list goes on.

However, I was also thinking about the potential downside to having a huge box of fruit. This may not apply so much to offices, where each box (containing around 50 pieces of fruit) is shared between employees, but for someone who lives alone like myself, eating 50 pieces of fruit before it all goes mouldy is quite a challenge. I've been coming up with recipes, therefore, to use up any fruit that's going a bit past its best, to create something delicious, healthy, and much more eco-friendly than chucking the lot in the bin.

This is something I love doing - coming up with slightly novel (I flatter myself here, really, because there isn't much that is novel in cooking, ever) ways to use fruit that are a bit more exciting than just 'a pie' or 'a fruit salad'. It's so easy to consign fruit to the realm of desserts, yet it's an incredibly versatile ingredient in savoury food too, often bringing a much-needed freshness to earthy ingredients like meat, cheese or nuts.

For my first recipe, I wanted to use the lovely plums from my fruit box. Plums are one of the few fruits I don't experiment much with, simply because I know exactly how to get the best out of them - halve and stone them, put them in a dish with brown sugar and ginger in syrup, splash over some orange juice, then bake until soft, silky and oozing pink juice. The result is sensational spooned over porridge or muesli, but equally good with ice cream as a warming autumnal dessert.

However, the plum has a flavour suited both to sweet and savoury cooking. When unsweetened, plums can be rather tart, possessing a refreshing bite that partners well with meat, particularly game and red meat. I came up with this because I had some smoked chicken to use up (yes, OK, a frightfully middle-class sentence). Smoked chicken is one of those things that needs a lot of assertive flavours to go with it, because it's very rich and cloying on its own.

Enter tart plums, sliced and caramelised with honey, fresh ginger, and Chinese five-spice. The latter because plums are a component of hoi sin sauce, which goes well with duck therefore also chicken, and has a heady five-spice note to it. Ginger because plums and ginger are just meant to be. Actually I'm not sure this salad had any rational thinking behind it; it was very much a work of instinct and what I suspected might work well together.

Nutty couscous, savoury spring onion, deeply earthy toasted almonds for crunch, fresh lemony coriander, tender smoked chicken, tart juicy plums, and the bite of ginger and five-spice. This is fragrant and delicious, a wonderful combination of tastes and textures. It's a bit of an odd English-oriental-Middle Eastern fusion, with the coriander/couscous/plums. It is an ideal lunch for one, but you could also make larger quantities and take it to work for a few days - it's good cold too.

Incidentally, if you can't find smoked chicken, just use ordinary leftover cooked chicken. I also think you could happily substitute chicken for feta or goat's cheese to make this vegetarian.

Thank you Fruitdrop for the fruit, and watch this space for more fruit-based recipes!

Spiced ginger plum and smoked chicken couscous salad (serves 1, easily doubled):

• 50g couscous
• Boiling water
• Salt and pepper
• 1 spring onion, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp almonds, toasted
• 3 tbsp finely chopped fresh coriander
• 2 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
• 2 plums, halved, stoned and thinly sliced
• 2cm piece fresh ginger, finely chopped or grated
• 1 tsp honey
• 1/2 tsp Chinese five spice
• 1/2 smoked chicken breast, thinly sliced or shredded

First, make the couscous. Put it in a bowl, pour the boiling water over it to just cover, then cover it with a plate and leave for a few minutes. When ready, stir in the spring onion, half the oil, the toasted almonds and coriander (reserve some for garnish) and some salt and pepper.

Heat the remaining oil in a non-stick frying pan and add the plums and ginger. Cook for a minute (they should sizzle), then add the honey and five spice. Cook for another few minutes until sticky and caramelised.

When the plums are ready, stir them into the couscous along with the chicken. Garnish with the extra almonds and coriander, then serve.

Banana caramel and coffee upside-down cake

I was recently sent an exciting new Nescafe Dolce Gusto Genio coffee machine to try out, and asked to create a recipe based around coffee - either something featuring coffee as an ingredient, or something that would be good with a cup of coffee. Naturally, I went all out and did both. 

When I consulted my flavour thesaurus for ideas, a surprising number of ingredients cropped up that apparently pair well with coffee, the most surprising being beef (the combination of red meat and coffee is recommended as a dinner party dish for 'your most health-conscious friends'). I'd have thought that coffee would be a rather difficult ingredient to work with, because it is so bitter and complex in itself. Apart from the obvious - chocolate, cream, milk - I wasn't sure of any coffee pairings that would work. However, given its strong bitterness, coffee works quite well with ingredients that are naturally rich - nuts, for example, and flavoursome spices like cardamom. It's therefore a great base flavour for all sorts of decadent sweet concoctions; this is just one example.

My eye landed upon bananas in the flavour thesaurus. I noticed the twenty bananas sitting in my fruit bowl, and the answer to my coffee conundrum was obvious.

Well, obvious in so far as it needed to be a coffee cake featuring bananas. I've wanted to make a banana upside-down cake ever since I saw one of the contestants on the Great British Bake Off make an insanely delicious-looking banana tarte tatin, all gooey and dripping with caramelly goodness. 

That was a particularly challenging episode, incidentally, to watch while hungry. Pastry, fruit and caramel? A trio of dreams.

While I cook a lot with bananas (bread, pancakes, porridge...), they are always mashed up. I've never baked or cooked them still in intact pieces, and something about the way they had softened and turned sticky and golden on that tarte tatin made me deeply eager to try it. I've never done that thing where you cut holes in a banana in its skin, stuff them with chocolate and barbecue it - every time I tell people this they're astonished it wasn't a regular feature of my childhood barbecues. This probably has something to do with the fact that barbecues were a rare feature in my house, because it took my father approximately a million years to get the barbecue to the stage where it was ready for cooking.

Bananas also undergo a rather exciting colour transformation upon heating, turning from pale yellow to a deep red colour; rather like quinces, now that I think about it. If anyone could enlighten me as to why this is, I'd be grateful.

I love the taste of coffee cake - my granny makes an excellent one - and I figured the two would make rather a nice couple. As with most upside-down creations, this requires that the fruit be drenched in a layer of caramel. The addition of coffee to the cake batter ensures that the caramel-banana pairing is not too cloying. While you might be sceptical about the combination of coffee and bananas, it's rather delicious - one is gooey and sickly sweet, the other slightly bitter and rich. 

It's banoffee, but with coffee instead of toffee. But there's still caramel. So basically you get your banana-sugar hit, but with the addition of caffeine. Definitely a pick-me-up kind of cake.

I made a simple caramel mixture by melting together butter, sugar and cinnamon (bananas and cinnamon are fabulous together, as are coffee and cinnamon, so it just made sense). This was smothered over a layer of banana slices in the cake tin. On top went a simple cake batter made with yoghurt (gives it a lovely moist texture) and enriched with espresso coffee - I got to use the exciting Genio machine, which uses little pre-packaged pods so there isn't any faffing around with loose coffee; even for cappuccino and coffees involving milk, it all comes in a pod, plus you can make both hot and iced coffee, which is pretty clever. For someone like me who doesn't make enough coffee to justify buying a proper manual machine, it's quite handy.

Anyway, there is a little espresso coffee in the cake batter (but you could also use instant coffee mixed with water if you don't have access to espresso). This, along with good old brown sugar, turns it a glorious golden brown colour. It goes over the caramel bananas and bakes, while the caramel bubbles up and permeates the cake mixture, softening the bananas and turning them sweet, sticky and cinnamon-scented.

The result of this unconventional pairing is a fabulously rich, moist, earthy cake sticky with sweet caramel and chunks of gooey banana. The coffee flavour isn't too strong in the sponge (you could add more coffee if you want it stronger) but it gives it a lovely mellow, rounded flavour that works so well with the sticky chunks of banana. There's a delicious breath of cinnamon from the caramel that brings everything together. 

Because I know this is important, here's a tip: the edge pieces are the best, where the caramel has run down the sides, so save those for yourself if you make this for a crowd. 

While I won't claim that this combination of sugar and caffeine is health food, the sponge itself has very little butter in it (the addition of yoghurt both ups the moisture content and reduces the calories - genius), and the caramel not a huge amount either. You could probably skip the caramel and just sprinkle the tin with a little sugar before adding the bananas, and you'd still have a lovely cake that's not too heavy on the calories, if you're worried about that sort of thing. 

It's filling and satisfying - the perfect thing for that mid-afternoon slump, with your cup of tea or coffee. It would also make a great dessert, served warm from the oven with some vanilla ice cream.

Banana caramel and coffee upside-down cake (serves 8-10):

• 50g soft butter
• 130g light brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 200g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp strong espresso coffee (or 1 tbsp instant coffee granules mixed with 1 tbsp boiling water)
• 200ml yoghurt
• Pinch of salt
• For the banana topping:
• 2 bananas
• 40g butter
• 80g light brown sugar
• 1.5 tsp cinnamon

Pre-heat the oven to 170C. Whisk the butter and sugar together using an electric whisk until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and whisk in. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix, then add the coffee, yoghurt and salt, mixing to form a smooth, thick mixture.

Grease an 8x8in square cake tin, or a 20cm round cake tin. Slice the bananas thinly and arrange the slices in a single layer over the bottom of the tin, so they mostly cover it. 

Put the 40g butter and 80g sugar in a small saucepan with the cinnamon, and heat until melted together. Pour this evenly over the bananas - you can use a spoon to spread it over them, but be careful not to dislodge the slices.

Pour the cake batter over the bananas and caramel, then bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Best served warm.

California prune, broad bean, feta and pecan salad

Prunes are an unfairly overlooked ingredient. Perhaps this is because of their rather menacing appearance: prunes are dark, wrinkled and gnarled in comparison to their plump, sunny cousins - dried apricots. Apricots just look much more user friendly, with their fat, honey coloured flesh. They crop up in many more recipes and seem to be the 'go-to' dried fruit for a lot of cooks, perhaps after raisins or sultanas. I think prunes carry a lot of unfair associations with school dinners, health food, and elderly people. It's sometimes easy to forget that they are, in fact, just dried plums - nothing remotely ominous about that. 

Prunes have a huge amount to offer, both raw and cooked. They have a gorgeous rich stickiness to them that, in common with dates, I think makes them just as satisfying as a dessert. They have a real complexity of flavour, with notes of berry, wine, sometimes even chocolate. They are hugely versatile, working equally well in both sweet and savoury dishes - lending a sweet squidgyness to a chocolate brownie or tart, for example, or a bite of fruitiness to a rich lamb tagine.

Prunes are also pretty good for the health-conscious. They count as one of your five-a-day, are full of vitamins, and are low-GI so fill you up for a long time. They can also be used to great effect in healthy (but not boring) recipes - I make a delicious chocolate brownie that replaces the butter with prune puree, making it a lot more justifiable to eat several in one go. I've fed them to people who never guessed they weren't ordinary brownies (but mostly I've saved them all for myself). I imagine you could try a similar trick with general chocolate cakes, or other dark cakes. 

I was recently sent some California Prunes to try, and couldn't refuse given my love of dried fruit. 60% of the world's plum production occurs in California, where the environmental conditions produce fruit that ripens fully on the tree, resulting in a perfect sugar content and full flavour. The prunes are delicious; sweet, rich and the perfect moist, sticky consistency - I'm not a fan of those over-dried ones that resemble leather and have to be rehydrated before eating. These also came individually wrapped, which I kind of loved. They looked like sweeties...only substantially better for you! (Should you want some for yourself, they sell them in Holland & Barrett and Tesco.)

I was fascinated by one of the recipe suggestions that accompanied my sample: a salad of prunes, broad beans, watercress, feta and pecans. Given my love of unusual salad combinations and anything involving fruit (particularly with meat and/or cheese), I had to try it. I've only ever used prunes in savoury recipes involving quite rich meat before, never something light and vegetable-heavy, so I was intrigued. 

This is a surprising salad. I wasn't sure it would work, and in the end I was rather astounded by how tasty it was. There's a simple dressing of wholegrain mustard, honey and white wine vinegar - but I didn't have any of the latter so used lime juice, which was great. Watercress, mange tout and broad beans are tossed in the dressing (the recipe uses raw mange tout, but I boiled mine briefly to take the bitter edge off), then some chopped prunes, chopped pecans and crumbled feta. That is it. 

The result is a fantastic combination of textures: grainy broad beans, crunchy mange tout and pecans, soft feta and delightfully squidgy prune pieces. There's just the right balance of saltiness (from the feta), acidity (from the mustard and lime juice/vinegar), sweetness (from the prunes) and bitterness (from the watercress and mange tout). It's a really pretty salad, very nutritious, and very filling too. I'm looking forward to trying out more salad recipes with prunes in the future, maybe with some leftover roast chicken or lamb, and some pine nuts...

The original recipe is here, on the California Prunes website, along with a vast number of other tempting suggestions (I'm particularly excited by the prune, amaretti and citrus tarts, and the prune, pecan and celery stuffed chicken). My slightly altered version is below; adjust quantities if you wish - you might want lots more pecans, if you're a big fan, or more feta, if you like salty food, et cetera.

If you're sceptical, I promise you this salad is really delicious. If you can't bear the idea of a vegetarian meal, I reckon it would make a great side dish to chicken or lamb. 

Eat, enjoy, and give the poor prune a chance!

Prune, broad bean, feta, watercress and pecan salad (serves 1, easily multiplied):

• 100g frozen broad beans
• 40g mange tout, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp honey
• 1 tsp wholegrain mustard
• 1 tbsp lime juice (bottled or fresh) - or use lemon juice or white wine vinegar
• Salt and pepper
• Two big handfuls of spinach, watercress and rocket salad
• 15g pecan nuts, chopped (toast them first if you like for extra flavour)
• 50g feta cheese, crumbled
• 6 prunes, quartered

Bring a pan of water to the boil. Add the broad beans and cook for 5 minutes. One minute before the end, add the mange tout. When tender, drain well and set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the honey, mustard and lime juice with some salt and pepper. Add the broad beans and mange tout and the salad, and toss together. Add the pecans, feta and prunes and toss together before piling onto a plate. Serve immediately.

Clementine, rosemary and white chocolate mini muffins

We don't really tend to think outside the box that much with clementines. Unlike oranges, which permeate our gastronomic consciousness in all manifestations, clementines seem generally reserved, in the popular mindset, simply for raw eating, usually around Christmas. The few times clementines have cropped up on my culinary radar in other guises, they seem wildly exotic. I noticed cartons of clementine juice on the shelf in M&S a while back, which held a great allure for me simply because of its novelty factor. It is also, I suspect, a cunning ploy to charge twice the price for it because of said novelty; a bit like the fact that you can buy 'Pink Lady apple juice' and pay through the nose for the privilege of having a branded apple pulverised inside your carton.

Sometimes they crop up in baking - Nigella's clementine cake is justly famous around the world (and by 'the world', I mean 'recipe books and the internet', because that is my world), although I don't think it was Nigella who invented it; Claudia Roden has a version too, and versions abound everywhere under different titles and with a couple of ingredients added or tweaked.

The basic principle is always the same - boil clementines (or oranges) in water until soft, then smash in a blender with ground almonds, eggs, sugar and other good things to make a fabulously moist, orangey cake. Sometimes you see clementines in savoury cooking, but usually only where you'd otherwise find oranges - with duck, for example - rather than in any wildly novel pairing.

I've often thought that the clementine is the fruit I'm most fussy about. Sure, I like apples to be crisp without a hint of woolliness, but generally I find them edible in most shapes and forms. I like pineapple to be super-sweet without that mouth-puckering astringency, but I'll still tolerate it if it's a bit sour. Mango - ideally ripe and dripping with marigold juice, but I'll still settle for one rather firmer and with a hint of a chalky texture; these can be pleasant too, in their own way.

Bananas I enjoy when green (though my gran always swore these would give me headaches), but I'll still eat them riper than that, when really hungry. Soft fruit - raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries - is rarely inedible once given the room-temperature-and-sugar treatment. Papaya you can't go wrong with, really - I don't think the notion of an overripe papaya even exists in my consciousness. Pears can still be nice even if you've misinterpreted their state of ripeness; glassy and crunchy, they can be rather refreshing, albeit less perfumed and succulent than when truly ripe and dripping.

But the clementine? I reckon only 50% of the time a clementine gets it right.

I honestly believe I can tell a good clementine by sight. Sometimes I need the additional confirmation of picking it up, but generally I have a good idea how it's going to taste by how it looks. The skin should be quite thin, clinging desperately and lovingly to the flesh of the segments inside, rather than bulging out - this suggests lots of air spaces in between, which means the clementine has started to dry up and the segments are puckering unpleasantly. The best specimens are usually quite small, which means they are less watery and more full of sweet, tart juice. The clementine should feel swollen in the hand, bulging out against its skin, which should be taut and shiny.

I've had some really horrible clementines in my time. Nothing worse than biting into a segment to have your mouth filled with hideously flavourless juice, often with a slightly stale taste about it. Nothing worse than segments which are pale and puckered. A clementine should be tart, almost sour, but sweet at the same time. It should be irresistibly moreish - when you find a good batch, you should be able to contemplate eating eight in a single sitting.

A few weeks ago I was sent a box of such clementines by ClemenGold, a South African company specialising in exceptionally delicious clementines grown around the world. They have selection criteria for their fruit that are even fussier than I am: 48% juice content; 11% sugar level; acidity between 0.7 and 1.3%; each fruit containing no more than three seeds. This formula adds up to a clementine that is truly special, with just the right balance of sweetness and tartness. They're also easy to peel and virtually seedless, which is a bonus.

Apparently they're technically Nadorcott mandarins, though only the best get given the ClemenGold trademark. I'm still not entirely sure of the difference between a clementine, a tangerine, a satsuma, and a mandarin (can anyone enlighten me?) apart from the fact that mandarins are the ones you find in tins, and I think generally mandarins are a bit tarter than clementines. But they all get subjected to my sight-test criteria, and the same rules apply to them all.

When I say I was sent 'a box', perhaps 'a crate' would be more accurate. The most gigantic treasure trove of orange orbs arrived in the post, leading me to wonder if perhaps the company had mistaken me for a wholesaler. There must have been at least 200 fruits in said box. However, this may also have been a clever marketing ploy, because I was forced to distribute clementines to everyone I know so as not to waste them (much as I love a good clementine, even I am not a citrus-ingesting machine), and everyone who tried them was as wowed as I was. I'm pretty sure I must be single-handedly responsible for a spike in sales.

Should you wish to pursue these luscious orbs and inject a little edible sunshine into your own kitchen/mouth, they sell them at Asda, Morrisons, Booths (posh northern supermarket; can't wait til I move to York next week); Sainsburys and Waitrose. I bought some more yesterday, which are much larger than the original ones, but still have that excellent sweet-tart flavour, so I can (sort of) vouch for their consistency.

Should you ever find yourself in the privileged position of possessing a box of 200 clementines, I would obviously suggest eating them raw with gluttonous abandon, but if you want to do something a bit more creative, have a look at the recipe suggestions on the ClemenGold site, or do what I was just criticising (sorry for my gastronomic hypocrisy) and use them as you would oranges. In baking. In the form of mini muffins.

These are a simple cake batter, infused with clementine zest, a little honey, and some finely chopped rosemary. Don't ask me why; I just had an inkling that rosemary and clementines would work well together (and they do). I promise you it's not overly herbal or strange, just fragrant and delicious. The tops are smeared in a little molten white chocolate for added sweetness to complement the rosemary and citrus.

The best part is that they are tiny and adorable, with their little hats of white chocolate and clementine zest. This is also the worst part, because they are incredibly moreish and easy to eat in large batches, so you may hate yourself afterwards.

But it's nearly autumn now, and we need to fatten up for the winter, so here's a lovely clementine-inspired way of doing it.

Clementine, rosemary and white chocolate mini muffins (makes around 30):

(You can also bake these as normal-sized cupcakes, in which case the mixture makes 12)

• 150g butter, at room temperature
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 tbsp clear honey
• 3 medium eggs
• 150g self-raising flour, sifted
• Zest of 2 large clementines
• 1 tbsp very finely chopped rosemary
• 60g white chocolate
• Clementine zest, to decorate (optional)

Pre-heat the oven to 190C/170C fan oven. Line three 12-cup mini muffin tins with mini muffin paper cases (you may not need them all).

Beat the butter, sugar and honey together in a large bowl using an electric whisk, until the mixture is light and fluffy (about 3-5 minutes). Add the eggs and flour, then beat until smooth. Stir in the clementine zest and chopped rosemary.

Divide the mixture between the paper cases - a scant teaspoonful in each should do it - and bake for 10 minutes until just risen and slightly golden - they should be firm to the touch. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack.

When cool, melt the white chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water (don't let the bowl touch the water), then spoon a little over the top of each muffin. Finish, if you like, with a sprinkling of more clementine zest.

Good morning Vietnam: pineapple pancakes

I've just returned, jet-lagged and completely dazzled by my month-long trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I'll be posting more about my trip in due course, but for now I want to share a little post about breakfast, my favourite meal of the day; particularly when the day promises to be a hot and humid one full of stunning scenery, tasty food and Asian splendour.

Breakfast in Vietnam falls into two categories: what the locals eat, and what you find in all the hotels catering for Western palates. In the former category you have pho, the 'national dish of Vietnam', a rich meaty broth housing a comforting combination of slippery rice noodles, fresh herbs, and tender pieces of (usually) chicken or beef. (More on this in another post - I too, with my Western sweet tooth, was sceptical about the notion of noodles for breakfast, but I soon became a convert.) 

In the latter category, you have the usual suspects such as eggs, omelettes and baguettes, but also recognisably Western dishes given a bit of tropical flair, like these pineapple pancakes. 

I first sampled these pancakes at our hotel in Hanoi. I was a little sceptical, I admit, about ordering a menu item that simply read 'pineapple pancake'. Can you guess why? Yes, dear readers who know me and my boundless greed: because it was in the singular. One pancake is simply not sufficient for my morning appetite. A bit like I'm incapable of ever ordering only one scoop of ice cream, a habit that has earned me the somewhat unflattering nickname 'Triple-Scoop McCausland'. 

However, I persevered, because it's simply impossible to go hungry in Vietnam: should the single pancake prove insufficient, I thought to myself, I'll just go to the smoothie bar at the end of the road and get a papaya and coconut cream smoothie (as incredible as it sounds). Or get a plump, ripe mango from one of the many streetside fruit sellers. Or a baguette from the numerous French-inspired bakeries.

I was wrong to doubt our lovely hotel. A few minutes later I was presented with two fat pancakes, rather like crêpes but thicker, into which slices of pineapple had been pressed as the batter was cooking, resulting in sweet golden streaks of caramelised fruit. If you've only ever eaten pineapple raw, without subjecting it to the transformative treatment of heat, sugar, butter, and possibly a little vanilla, a splash of rum, a squeeze of lime or a sprinkling of cinnamon, then you need to sort your life out.

Pineapple when cooked transforms into the most utterly delectable, sweet, tangy, juicy mouthful. Combine this with a soft pillow of pancake batter and you have a dreamy plate of tropical sunshine.

I ate these beautiful creations again during our stay at Phong Nha Ke Bang national park (see photo below), my favourite stop of the whole trip and a place I'm sure I'll be telling you more about. Here I was given a plate of four, which was lucky because we'd just arrived from the overnight train and were feeling a little, well, ravenous (also sweaty, greasy and disgusting, but the hunger thing was the most pressing issue). They came rolled up into little cigars, each one boasting a golden and juicy centre of caramelised pineapple. This is what I've tried to recreate here.

This is a highly simple recipe, but one of those that is more than the sum of its parts. You make a simple crêpe batter (milk, eggs, flour), cook it into pancakes slightly thicker than the delicate French variety, then fill the lot with chopped pineapple that has been cooked over a high heat with a little butter, some brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a drop of vanilla. It turns sweet, jammy and delicious; a beautiful contrast to the thick and comforting squidgyness of the pancakes.

I made these three days after my return from Vietnam, to try and distract myself from what is a pretty bad case of post-holiday blues. I feel completely deflated, like I've been brought back to earth with a horrible bump (and actually, our flight landing at Heathrow was pretty bumpy). In many respects, England couldn't be more different to South-East Asia, and instead of relishing home comforts after a month of travelling, I'm starting to find them grating and alien, particularly where food is concerned.

Why do we happily pay around £20 for a meal in this country? After eating some of the best food of my life for under £1 in Vietnam, it genuinely pains me a bit to have to contemplate ever eating out in England again. Why do we have such gigantic dinner plates and therefore habitually scoff such enormous portions? No wonder we're all obese. Everything in Vietnam is served in tiny little bowls; not only that, but the rice comes out last, so you're mostly too full from good things like fish, meat and vegetables to contemplate ingesting nutritionally void carbohydrates.

Why do we eat with cumbersome and unwieldy knives and forks? Why do we cover everything in fat, especially cheese, when food can be so fabulously delicious without it? Why are we so obsessed with desserts and with sugar? Why is our 'exotic' fruit always rock-hard and underripe? 

I'm sure I'll be back to my usual self in a few weeks, but right now I just feel desperately sad, pining for somewhere on the other side of the world that has called into question everything that once seemed normal to me. 

On the plus side, though, there's nothing like a month away in exotic climes to put everything into perspective. Food, although probably my number one source of enjoyment in life, is far too frequently my number one source of stress, too. I have a tendency to get a little obsessive and perfectionist in the kitchen, constantly inviting friends over for lunch, dinner or breakfast and feeling that I have to present them with some Masterchef-worthy creation when deep down I know they'd probably be happy with a bowl of pasta and a cup of tea. I too often find myself rushing around town, making numerous shopping trips for ingredients because I know that the Asian grocers on the other side of town do better chickpeas than the supermarket, and the bread stall on the market does better bread than Tesco, and this fishmonger is better than that one, and panicking if I can't find a certain obscure ingredient that I deem crucial to the success of one dish, sometimes travelling miles out of my way to get it. 

It's had me close to tears on several occasions, usually when I finally make it to the checkout and there is a queue and my arms are hurting from holding a heavy basket and I'm contemplating how on earth to get everything home on my bike without it squashing or falling out, and then the final straw is when the self-service checkout refuses to work properly (when does this ever not happen, I hear you cry), and I start hitting things. I've driven myself mad trying to frantically write blog posts to various deadlines - many of which are completely self-imposed and therefore fundamentally meaningless - trying to take artful photos of my cooking when all I really want to do is just eat the damn thing, trying to think of new and exciting recipes to share with you all when all I really want to do is tuck into a big bowl of pasta with nutmeg and grated parmesan.

Phong Nha Ke Bang national park, my favourite place of the whole trip

Having a month off cooking and worrying about food shopping was utterly blissful. Savouring the simple pleasures of Vietnam, like a bowl of plain rice noodles with fresh herbs, or a perfect juicy mangosteen, or a delicious piece of tender lemongrass-coated chicken, has impressed upon me the madness of the way in which I live in relation to food. 

Food should be, primarily, something that brings joy, not stress and tears. I contemplated returning to cooking and food blogging with dread and trepidation during my final few days in Asia, asking myself what it was all for, whether anyone really cared, why I torment myself with all this for no apparent reason. I had wild ideas about giving up food and the blog altogether, about shutting myself off from the world of food magazines, food journalism, cooking TV; the faux-drama of things like Masterchef and Great British Menu suddenly seemed laughably trivial - crass, even - compared to the very real drama of fast-paced life in Vietnam. 

But then Sunday morning happened, and all I wanted was to get into the kitchen and to rustle up a batch of pineapple pancakes to remind me of my holiday. That's when I realised that, of course, food can be a wonderful thing, provided it is not taken too seriously. It is a means of reviving happy memories, of sharing experiences, of creating ties. It shouldn't be stressful or a source of anxiety, when done properly with just the right amount of care and good humour. 

I'm really writing this to myself, in the hope that I'll remember all these things in the future, when my basket is heavy and the self-service checkout isn't working and I still have to bike to the other side of town to get some pomegranate molasses from the Asian grocer before rushing home to see if my bread has risen and my home-made cheese has firmed up. 

However, I'm sure many of you out there will be able to relate. Then again, you've probably sensibly realised this already. I just needed four weeks on the other side of the world to come to this conclusion. 

So for that, Vietnam, and those pineapple pancakes: thank you.

Pineapple pancakes (serves 2 very generously, or 4 less hungry people):

• 200g flour (I used spelt flour, but ordinary would be fine)
• 2 eggs
• 600ml milk
• Pinch salt
• Butter, for cooking
• 1 medium pineapple, cut into small thin chunks
• 4 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• Icing sugar, for dusting

First, make the pancake batter. Sift the flour into a large bowl, then make a well in the centre with a spoon and add the eggs. Pour in a little of the milk then, using an electric whisk, whisk the egg and milk into the flour, gradually incorporating more flour as you add the rest of the milk. You should end up with a thin, lump-free batter. Add the salt and whisk again.

Pre-heat the oven to 120C. Heat a knob of butter in a large non-stick saucepan or frying pan until sizzling, then add the pineapple, sugar, and cinnamon. Cook over a high heat for a few minutes until caramelised and sticky, and most of the liquid has evaporated, then add the vanilla. Set aside and keep warm.

Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper, and get some more sheets of greaseproof ready for the pancakes. Get a non-stick frying pan or crêpe pan, around 25cm in diameter, very hot, then add a knob of butter and swirl it around the pan. Wipe off any excess with kitchen paper, spreading the butter over the base of the pan, then pour a ladleful of batter onto the pan - you want a pancake about 5mm thick.  Cook for a minute on one side, then flip over using a palette knife and cook for another minute. When done, place on the greaseproof paper on the baking sheet, then put in the oven to keep warm. Repeat with the remaining mixture, layering the pancakes between greaseproof as you go and keeping them warm in the oven.

When ready to serve, place a couple of spoonfuls of pineapple mixture in the centre of each pancake, then roll it up. Dust with icing sugar and devour, preferably with tea.

Nutmegs, seven is on holiday

Hello! Just a short note to say that this blog has been a bit quiet for a while, because I'm currently on holiday! I'm travelling the wonderful and exciting Vietnam and Cambodia and loving every minute, particularly (of course) the incredible food. So far we've been to Saigon, Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park, and Hue. I'm having the time of my life and don't want to come home, but when I do I'll be sharing delicious tales of my travels. I hope you're all having wonderful summers, even if you're not lucky enough to be where I am!

Greengage and honey compote

When, like the bee, culling from every flower/The virtuous sweets/Our thighs pack'd with wax, our mouths with honey/We bring it to the hive ~ Henry IV, part 2.

Honey is an interesting ingredient. I use it so frequently but I never really stop and appreciate it pure and unadulterated, for the complex and fascinating product that it is. While I frequently use dark brown sugar for the wonderful caramel notes it lends to recipes, I often find the flavour of honey diminishes during cooking, and its interesting flavours are masked. I'm not one for spooning the stuff over toast or savouring it straight from the jar with a spoon, Winnie-the-Pooh style. I feel I might be missing out.

There are numerous uses for honey in my kitchen. I use it, mixed with apple compote, to form a thick, luscious, gloopy mixture to coat flakes of oats and barley for my homemade granola

 before toasting them in a hot oven to result in glorious crunchy morsels. I stir a spoonful or two into a lamb tagine to lend a succulent sweetness that pairs well with the rich meat. I drizzle it, along with a dollop of wickedly dark and sticky pomegranate molasses and a splash of oil, over butternut squash and aubergine before roasting, to result in gorgeously charred, caramelised edges. I use it to sweeten a raspberry and vanilla cheesecake, to take the sour edge off underripe apricots while baking, to lend a luscious sticky sweetness to baked figs destined to be smothered in vanilla ice cream, and generally over any fruit that could do with a little sugary help in the oven.

However, none of these preparations fully enable the cook or the diner to appreciate the nuances of honey. Often it's used simply as a sugar substitute, and sugar would sit quite happily in its place. Yet just as there are multiple varieties of sugar, each possessing their unique colour, texture, flavour and aroma, so there are countless diverse manifestations of honey. 

It all depends on what the bees have been feeding on. The flower nectar they eat mixes with enzymes in their saliva, which turns it to honey. They deposit this in their hives; the practice of beekeeping encourages the bees to produce more honey than usual, so it can be collected and eaten. 

I've come across so many exciting types of honey in my food travels, from the rugged-sounding heather honey to the exotic orange blossom honey, thyme honey, acacia honey and the intriguing chestnut honey (this is fabulous and really unusual, but I'm reserving it for a future blog post, so watch this space). They all have their own colours, textures and fragrances. On a recent trip to York I found beautiful Yorkshire honey for sale in little tubs, with a layer of honeycomb over the top. There's runny honey, golden and amber-like, and the glorious thick set honey, ideal for spreading in pillowy waves of sweetness over toast. 

Honey has all sorts of fascinating qualities; it's frequently assigned multiple health benefits, depending on which variety you choose. It's also the only foodstuff that has an infinite shelf life, because of its high sugar and low water content. This low water content is due to the bees flapping their wings in the hive, which causes air movement and subsequently the evaporation of water from the honey. How clever is that? I never fail to be amazed at how mother nature has created, in the world of flora and fauna, a perfectly formed and abundant larder.

I spied some lovely greengages at the market this weekend, a bittersweet sign that autumn is rapidly approaching. Not that we've really had summer this year...but I won't turn this into a ranting arena for meteorological-based tirades against my beloved country, because I have more important things to talk about, like fruit.

Greengages are like little green plums, tart-sweet, soft and delicious. My favourite part is their skin, which is matt in places, shiny in others, and suffused with a beautiful bloom of palest jade green. They're one of the prettiest fruits to look at, I think, second only perhaps to blushing, ripe apricots. They range, like plums, from hard and crispy to quiveringly soft and jelly-like, depending on ripeness. I couldn't resist buying a bag, and figured I'd decide later what to do with them.

While sorting out some recipes I'd hastily cut from magazines and stashed in a pile on the dresser, I found one for a greengage and honey compote. I love compotes, as they really bring out the best in fruit, and are so versatile. I like mine spooned over a bowl of porridge or muesli.

For use in cooking you can get away with the cheaper supermarket honey, but when I'm going to use honey because I want to taste honey, I try and use something a bit better. I had a jar of Yorkshire honey in the larder, which has a wonderful rich aroma and actually smells and tastes like honey rather than just general sugariness. This compote required four tablespoons, which go into a pan with halved and de-stoned greengages. There's no liquid - the honey melts in the heat and the greengages release their own juice, which they stew in slowly for a few minutes, perfumed by a split vanilla pod that is tucked in among their delicate green curves. 

I don't normally add sweetener to my compotes, and if I do it's a tiny and barely perceptible amount of honey, so this was a rather different taste experience. I absolutely loved it. The whole thing is a perfect marriage of greengage and honey flavour. You can definitely taste the honey - its floral, caramel notes permeate the juicy collapsed fruit, which contributes its own tartness. I simmered the greengages until a few lost their shape and the whole thing became rather liquid, but if you prefer the fruits more firm just reduce the cooking time. Keep an eye on them, as they turn to mush in a flash.

The result of this is a wonderful golden ambrosial nectar. It's like eating honey, but improved with the addition of vanilla and delicious plummy juiciness. There are chunks of sweet, tender fruit immersed in a thick, rich syrup. It's also so ridiculously simple and takes all of ten minutes to make.

This would be fabulous served as a dessert with some cream or ice cream. You could go one further and spoon it over a moist wedge of almond cake, or a slice of vanilla cheesecake. It would sit prettily in the crusty hollow of a pavlova, or even make a wonderful topping for freshly-baked scones.

I, however, ate mine spooned over a bowl of hot porridge, along with some raspberries to balance the sweetness. A perfect cloudy morning breakfast.

Greengage and honey compote (makes 3-4 servings):

(From Sainsbury's magazine, no idea which issue)

• 500g greengages, ripe but still firm
• 4 tbsp runny honey (you can experiment with varieties - I reckon a thyme honey would be gorgeous)
• 1 vanilla pod

Halve the greengages and remove the stones. Place in a saucepan with the honey, then heat gently until the honey is liquid. Run a knife down the centre of the vanilla pod and add to the fruit, then simmer gently until the fruit starts to release a lot of liquid, and is on the point of collapse. This should take only a couple of minutes.

Remove from the heat and serve hot or cold, with cream, creme fraiche, ice cream, or breakfast.

Summer wine tasting with Cambridgeshire Wine School

I recently attended a summer wine tasting with the Cambridgeshire Wine School in an attempt to educate myself further in a field I know tragically little about. It was a great evening and a very painless introduction to the frequently daunting world of wine, run by the knowledgeable and friendly Mark Anstead. As well as learning a bit more about various wines, I also had a fascinating insight into exactly where your money goes when buying a bottle of wine (hint: most of it doesn't actually go on the stuff in the bottle), plus the opportunity to try a range of wine and food matches (the best involving chips, naturally).

We began with a Cava - the Jaume Serra Cava Brut Reserve (Spanish), which spends 15 months fermenting, longer than the usual minimum of 9 months. Mark told us all about the way in which they remove the resulting sediment from the wine - by gradually rotating the bottles over a period of six weeks, the sediment moves to the neck of the bottle. The bottles are then put in frozen brine to freeze the sediment, opened, and the sediment pops out - fascinating! The result is a pleasant biscuity flavour which I rather liked. 

Next, we tried a white wine - Joseph Mellot Green Bottle Sauvignon Blanc 2011 (Loire, France). The main interest in this lay in its plastic bottle - keen to reduce carbon emissions, the manufacturers use a plastic bottle that weighs only 58g, compared with 480g for glass bottles. This apparently reduces the carbon footprint by a massive 68%. Of course, there are image problems associated with wine in a plastic bottle, which is the downside, but it also means much less weight to carry if you fancy an alcoholic picnic. I wasn't a huge fan of this, apparently - I've written a little sad face next to it in my notes - but I remember we tried it with some goat's cheese, which was a really delicious match. Mark also recommended Thai food and tomato-based dishes, remarking that sometimes acidic food and acidic wine can pair rather well together, which surprised me - but I bow to his superior knowledge!

Third on the list, the Stella Alpina Pinot Grigio 2011 (Alto Adige, Italy). I really liked this wine, with its notes of peach and honey. It went very well with slices of roast chicken. Mark told us that this is one of the better Pinot Grigios on the market - those produced in the Alto Adige region are apparently better than those from the Veneto region. 

Fourth, the Tour de Belfort 2012 (Vin de Pays du Lot, France). This is produced by a small organic family business, using no pesticides, herbicides or insecticides, and harvesting by hand (resulting in low yields - I found out all about the harvesting process during my trip to Chablis last April). The wine is naturally filtered with no added chemicals. It contains a mixture of grapes: 35% Sauvignon Blanc, 25% Semillion, 5% Sauvignon Gris and 35% Chardonnay, the latter to create a fuller body. This got a smiley face in my notes, so I was obviously quite keen on it. Afterwards, another wine from the same producer - a rosé with delicious notes of almonds and vanilla. 

Next we moved onto the red wines - first, Domaine de Puits Beni, Morgon 2011 (Beaujolais, France). This was lovely with pork pâté and charcuterie - definitely the stuff of summer picnics - and had a light, smoky flavour. I preferred the next red though, the Peter Lehmann Shiraz 2009 (Barossa, South Australia), which had a more pronounced smokey taste and a hint of spice, though perhaps for me it would have been better suited to the winter months. Finally, we tried another Peter Lehmann wine - the Moppa Shiraz 2008, which was nearly twice the price but, in my opinion, worth it. It had a less smoky character with more fruity flavour and more body. 

All in all, I had a lovely and informative evening. I'd recommend the wine tastings to anyone in the Cambridge area - they're great for meeting people (over wine - what better way to meet people?), you learn a lot, and you get to drink a lot of wine. You can spit it out if you like, but I saw very few people doing this. As well as one-off wine tastings, Mark also runs various courses, some of which involve cookery and food-and-wine matching - have a look at his website for more details.

Thank you Mark for a great evening!

Grilled peach, feta and prosciutto salad

There are many noises that occur in the realm of the kitchen, several of which bring small glimmers of satisfaction to keen cooks like myself. The gentle fracture of an egg against the side of a bowl and the voluptuous gulp as it divulges its gelatinous contents down into the centre. The crisp snap of a knife halving a bulbous pepper. The rasping graze of a zester against the knobbly flesh of an orange or lemon. The mercilessly efficient scrape of a mandolin through the crunchy flesh of a root vegetable as it shaves it into wafer-thin slices beading with moisture. The whirr of an electric beater as it pummels a solid mass of butter and sugar into soft, billowing pastel clouds.

But surely - surely - nothing beats the searing fizz as moist flesh hits the arid heat of a griddle pan.

I love griddling things. I think this desire stems from that primal urge to make meat meet fire, the same urge that drives so many men to inflict salmonella upon their nearest and dearest while prodding possessively and haphazardly at a flaming barbecue and its contents. It's not just about that ultra-satisfying sizzling noise, either. It's also about those beautiful char marks you end up with on your chosen piece of meat, fish or veg; that telltale culinary barcode that guarantees a toasty exterior and smoky succulence within. 

Obviously few things are as satisfying to slap on a griddle as a large piece of meat. Steak works - for me I pretty much whack it down on one side, allow it a few seconds of sizzle, then flip it over for a few more seconds, and tuck into what is basically still cow rather than beef. I also love to griddle tuna or swordfish steak; again, eating it blue (or in the case of swordfish, pink I suppose). However, the griddle is not just for giant manly chunks of protein. It's also a great way of cooking sliced courgettes, so often condemned as tasteless watery mush by those whose only courgette experience has been badly-made ratatouille. Sliced into thin ribbons and chargrilled, they make a wonderful salad with some herbs, broad beans and goat's cheese. Aubergines are also good treated in the same way. 

The other day, though, I decided to go a bit wild with the griddle pan and throw on some peaches. After the success of my guineafowl and nectarine tagine, I started thinking of other ways to use peaches or nectarines in savoury cooking. I would grill them first, mainly to give them those sexy black marks but also to bring out their flavour. After tossing them in a little olive oil (to stop them sticking) and honey (to exaggerate the sweetness), they go sizzling onto the griddle pan where they caramelise deliciously, ready to partner with other things.

Peaches (or nectarines) are a fabulous addition to all sorts of savoury dishes, possessing an unobtrusive sweetness and texture that is a perfect complement to lots of different rich ingredients. Salty ingredients are always a good match for sweet fruit, so I decided to combine the peaches with prosciutto - and also some feta cheese for good measure - in what is a super-simple but colourful, healthy and fabulously delicious summer salad. The colours alone scream 'summer' (note that is simply 'summer'; the word 'British' does not come into the equation, because a 'British summer' dish is something like stew or pie).

I found smoked spiced prosciutto in M&S, which is fabulous and works extra well with these peaches, because its rich smoky flavour is nicely complemented by their sweetness. Add to this the salty tang of feta, the peppery crunch of rocket and watercress (dressed with balsamic vinegar) and the slight anise notes of fresh basil, and you have a really fantastic combination. Basil goes particularly well with peaches - I think its fresh, almost metallic flavour helps to temper their sweetness, and this goes for desserts as well as savoury dishes. 

I've tried this since with Parma ham and goat's cheese instead of smoked prosciutto and feta, and it was equally delicious. Basically, the combination of sweet grilled peaches, crunchy salad, soft salty ham and tangy cheese is utterly fabulous. I can't quite stress how fabulous it is, so hopefully the photos will suggest to you a lovely colourful summer dish that you are slightly intrigued by and really want to try. 

Try it. It's wonderful.

Grilled peach, feta and prosciutto salad (serves 2):

• 2 large peaches, ripe but firm
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tsp honey
• Salt and pepper
• 1 bag mixed rocket, watercress and spinach salad (or just rocket/spinach)
• A drizzle of balsamic vinegar (I use Gourmet Spice blackberry & rosemary balsamic)
• 80g prosciutto, normal or smoked if you can find it
• A large handful of basil leaves, roughly torn
• 80-100g feta or soft goat's cheese

Halve the peaches and remove the stone, then slice thinly and toss with the olive oil, honey, and some salt and pepper. Get a griddle pan really hot, then griddle the fruit on each side until each slice is lightly charred. Try not to overdo it or they will disintegrate. (Incidentally, you can skip this step if you can't be bothered/don't own a griddle pan - raw peach slices are still great in this salad).

Meanwhile, toss the salad with the balsamic and divide between two plates. Drape over the prosciutto slices, sprinkle over the torn basil, then add the peach slices. Finally, crumble over the feta or goat's cheese.

Five things I love this week #6

1. Jordan's Super Fruity Granola. To mark their 40th anniversary of making granola, Jordan's commissioned a 'Perfect Breakfast' survey to find out what us Brits consider our ideal morning. Nearly half of the 2000 people surveyed considered a bowl of healthy cereal their perfect breakfast, and needed an hour and five minutes between waking up and leaving for work to be fully relaxed. Favourite breakfast pastimes include reading the paper and watching the news, but it also gets more specific - being made a cup of tea by someone else and not having to wear a coat outside are also ingredients for the ideal weekday morning, while guaranteed threats to such a morning include a bad night's sleep, running out of milk, or stubbing one's toe. I can agree with pretty much all of these, except I like to make my own cup of tea - I'm fussy like that.

Apparently only a tragic 30% of us would refuse to leave the house without a healthy breakfast. That means 70% of the people out there are running around without having sat down to a proper breaking of their fast. I physically cannot comprehend such a notion. If I don't eat breakfast, I'm a danger to myself and others. Perhaps to combat this sad statistic, Jordan's have released two new tempting varieties of their granola: Super Fruity and Super 3 Seeds. I was kindly sent a sample of the former to try, which features sweet, toasty oats baked in honey and offset by a tongue-tingling mixture of pomegranate, raspberry and redcurrant pieces. I enjoyed it enormously - granola can often be too sweet, but this has just the right balance of sweet crunchiness and acidity from the fruits. They are really quite tangy, but the whole thing works together perfectly and will definitely provide the much-needed morning wake up call for the average Brit, who apparently snoozes for around 8 minutes after the alarm goes off before rising.

2. South African apples and pears. This lovely hamper arrived from the people over at South African Fruit the other day, so I've been feasting on delicious crisp Gala apples and Forelle pears, which I particularly like because I think you pronounce it as 'For Elly', therefore clearly this type of pear is destined to be eaten by me. It's nice to have some decent apples and pears to fill the gap before the English ones start to come into season in the early autumn. The Forelles have a beautiful blushing skin and sweet flesh. I quite like them in savoury dishes - they go very well thinly sliced and tossed with wafer-thin fennel, chopped mint, pomegranate seeds and a mustard vinaigrette to make a crunchy and zesty summer salad that works with all kinds of meat and fish. The apples I just ate pure and unadulterated - I sometimes find the Gala variety a bit bland, but these were really crunchy and juicy.

3. This photo, which my boyfriend took as I was making the filling for a treacle tart. The breadcrumbs sank to the bottom of the bowl, weighed down by the sheer mass of golden syrup, while the eggs and lemon juice formed a floating layer on the top. I love the way the syrup and egg are oozing down the side of the bowl. I can't quite explain why I like this; I think it's the rich amber colours and the suggestion of sheer sugary decadence.



4. Recovering from kitchen disasters. A couple of days ago I decided to make a cake for my mum. Specifically, this amazing lemon drizzle cake that I've made a few times and is just utterly perfect in every way (there's a reason it's received 1041 five-star reviews on BBC Good Food...). It is incredibly moist and buttery, with a gorgeous crunchy lemon tang from the sugary topping. Normally I double the mixture and make two at once, but this time I just made a single quantity. As I poured it into my loaf tin I was a bit worried that the tin was basically full and there would be no room for the cake to rise, but I casually dismissed it in my mind and stuck it in the oven.



Twenty minutes later, I was horrified to see batter overflowing from the tin in a volcanic fashion, pooling and baking on the oven floor. There was no way the cake was going to bake properly in that way. So I hastily pulled it out of the oven and scooped about a third of the still-liquid batter out of the baking cake tin and put it into another loaf tin, thereby breaking the First Rule of Cake Baking: do not open the oven door while it's cooking.

Predictably, the main cake sank horribly the middle. We're talking a proper crater, something that might appear if a small asteroid had hit the cake. The second, improvised cake came out pretty flat, as there wasn't that much batter to fill the tin. It wouldn't have been great as a cake on its own, because it had gone slightly crunchier and more biscuity, lacking the moist centre that makes its bigger brother so special.

Rather than throw it away, which I couldn't bear, I improvised. I cut it into cubes, put it into dessert glasses, and sprinkled it with sherry. I threw a few handfuls of juicy raspberries on top, then smothered the lot in thick cream. A sort of raspberry lemon trifle, with emphasis on the 'sort of'. I've never actually made a real trifle; this is probably the closest I will ever get.

But apparently it tasted great. What's more, it looked beautiful too - much more beautiful than in its flat cake form. It just goes to show that not all kitchen disasters are disasters - some are simply the wonderful origin of a new, unintended, but nevertheless delicious dish.

5. Getting ready for my new kitchen. I'm moving house in October, to start my PhD at the University of York. I have a lovely little house awaiting me, five minutes from the gym (with heated outdoor pool!) and - more importantly - ten minutes from some fabulous Asian grocers. Finally, I will have a kitchen that is entirely my own. No more sharing with horrible dirty people who leave my pans full of oil for fifteen days or casually leave the freezer open overnight. No more asking my friends to sit on upturned bins around the table because there are only six proper chairs. No more coming upstairs in the morning to find the cleaner has thrown away my baking parchment. Thank the lord.

Naturally, this means a quick re-evaluation of all the kitchen items I possess, and a shopping spree for further essentials (such as a Le Creuset teapot). Recently acquisitions include a sexy red Gaggia coffee machine and a Magimix food processor, which I found on eBay and was a total bargain. My little Kenwood blender, which struggles even to turn bread into breadcrumbs, is no match for this beast, and I am looking forward to putting it through its paces and making some blended delights.

Like I said, I can't wait to have a kitchen all to myself. It's going to be wonderful.

Banana butterscotch pudding

My favourite meals are always the ones I feel I've earned. I don't generally like admitting to this, because the notion of 'earning' one's meals is often associated with pretty uncool food-related neuroses, and just generally isn't very socially acceptable. I'd hate you to think that I'm not the kind of person who gets anything less than the utmost joy out of food and eating. Obviously, if you know me at all you'll realise that food not only brings me joy, but it is basically the life force around which my universe revolves. Food brings excitement to my otherwise mediocre days. The act of sitting down three times a day to consume it is always a pleasure. 

However, there are definitely certain circumstances under which I enjoy food a little more than usual.

Breakfast, for example, I find most enjoyable when consumed after I've made the gargantuan effort to get out of bed, don my swimming costume and head straight to the pool. This is best done seconds after waking, before my brain has time to fully register the madness of what I'm doing, and the fact that any sane person would be snuggling groggily under the covers, attempting to prolong that wonderful feeling of sleepy laziness before having to get up and be productive. I don't manage it as often as I'd like, to be honest, because I am not superhuman, but when I do occasionally find it in me to swim 1.5km straight after waking, the wonder of breakfast is multiplied tenfold.

There are hazards, admittedly. I often tend to eat twice as much for breakfast as I normally would if I've been swimming beforehand. There seems to be this giant bottomless pit of negative calories inside my stomach that requires a truly shocking amount of porridge/muesli/toast to bring it back to normal. 

In fact, I generally have a bit of an obsession with exercising before eating. The food just tastes so much better if you're conceiving of it as not just food but fuel, as battery-recharging goodness that can be wolfed down without guilt or self-loathing. This is probably why some of my favourite meals have been those consumed while skiing. I remember doffing my ski gloves last winter to tuck into a giant crepe bursting with cheese, ham, and a quivering, just-cooked egg. I can still practically taste it, and the memory fills me with joy. There's something about this sport that seems to make it OK to consume vast, vast quantities of carbohydrates and fat without any second thoughts whatsoever.

Oh, I know what it is. It's the hunger brought on by the sheer terror of plummeting down a mountain with wooden planks strapped to your feet. Whets the appetite somewhat.

This notion of earning food doesn't always have to be exercise related, though. A few weeks ago I fainted while having one of those super-simple pin-prick blood tests. Properly passed out on the poor guy who was doing it. I felt horrendous afterwards, even once the blood had returned to my face and my lips stopped being the same colour as my skin. That was creepy. But oddly fascinating; I've never looked at myself in the mirror straight after fainting before. Anyway, I staggered home (deciding, quite wisely I think, not to cycle on the very busy road home) and the first thing I did was to cut myself a thick slab of the lemon drizzle cake I'd made for my mum earlier that week. I hadn't eaten any of it as I knew how much butter and sugar went into it, and was attempting not to be fat. But after that traumatic episode, all concerns about my waistline went out of the window. I had two pieces. 

I told myself I needed it, anyway, to restore my blood sugar. Right?

Stress and sheer exhaustion are other factors that bring on this misguided feeling that I've 'earned' highly calorific foodstuffs. Last week I commuted to London to teach an English Literature summer school. It's great fun, but getting up at six every morning, cycling frantically to the station, sitting on the train for an hour, walking to school then teaching at a frenetic pace for five hours before repeating the commute in reverse definitely takes its toll. The most annoying thing is that after finishing a day's teaching I'm always really alert and buzzing (you kind of have to be, to keep up with a class of fourteen kids who at times seem to be cleverer than you), but by the time I've sat on the train home for an hour I feel like collapsing on the station platform.

This feeling gave rise to this banana pudding.

It's based on a recipe from one of my favourite dessert blogs, Pastry Studio. There it's termed 'Banana Sauce Cake', but in my eyes it's more of a pudding. The butterscotch element arises from the liberal use of dark sugar and brown butter, which lends it a gorgeous toffee-esque flavour.

I made this in part to use up a load of wrinkled black bananas which I couldn't bear to freeze. I normally peel and freeze them to use later in banana bread, but my freezer is already packed with them so I felt guilty about using up more space. Perhaps it's ridiculous that I couldn't just throw them out, as bananas cost about 10p each, but I loathe food waste. Seriously. If even the slightest morsel of food ever needs throwing away, I have to get someone else to do it. I physically can't bring myself to be the tipper of food into the voracious, gaping mouth of the kitchen bin.

The bottom of the pudding is a layer of sliced bananas. The spongey part is made rich, dark and delicious by using brown butter. For this you heat butter until it separates into white solids and yellow liquid, and then the liquid gradually turns golden, flecked with nutty dark bits that lend it this incredible warm, toasty, hazelnut taste (hence its French name, beurre noisette) and aroma. It's worth trying even if you don't intend to use it in a recipe: just sit and inhale the toasty butter. I guarantee it will make the world seem a better place.

To this is added lots of dark sugar, for a caramel colour and flavour, more banana, mashed, plus flour, egg, vanilla, milk, and other general cakey ingredients. You end up with a loose, golden batter, which you spoon over the sliced bananas.

But then magic happens. Seriously, it's a bit mad. You mix together a boiling, bubbling mixture of butter, water, molasses sugar (super-dark sugar that smells like coffee and Christmas and spices) and treacle, adding warm cinnamon and nutmeg (the banana's favourite flavours). You then pour this over the batter in the tin, being careful not to disturb it, then put the whole lot in the oven to bake.

Somehow, during baking, the liquid mixture soaks through the crumb of the sponge to saturate the cake at the bottom, pooling in luscious, toffee-scented puddles around the bananas and soaking into the pudding. It's like one of those self-saucing puddings. The top bakes to a chewy crunchiness, while the underside remains gooey, buttery, caramelly, and warm with the flavour of bananas, sugar and spice.

This was pretty much everything my exhausted (physically and mentally), world-weary self could have hoped for. It was rich, spongey, cakey, dense, sticky, gooey, buttery, sugary. Reminiscent of sticky toffee pudding in appearance and texture, only with more of a banana flavour. In future I might experiment with adding some dates and pecan nuts to the batter too, as I feel they could only improve it.

It's not a dainty pudding. It's not pretty. It's not really the most healthy, although there's actually very little butter in it, just rather a lot of sugar. But it's unrefined sugar, so that goes some way to making it better in my book. But the gist is that this is a rustic, hearty, proper pudding. It begs to be eaten with vanilla ice cream, which works so well with the hot toffee sauce and the sticky sponge that the recollection almost makes me want to weep with joy.

I most definitely, definitely earned this.

Although I probably didn't earn all three helpings that found their way into my mouth.

Banana butterscotch pudding (serves 4-6):

(Adapted from this recipe at Pastry Studio)

• 55g butter
• 3 very ripe bananas
• 150g plain flour
• 100g light/dark brown sugar
• 1 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 120ml milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 240ml water
• 60g molasses sugar (or dark brown sugar if you can't find this)
• 1 tbsp black treacle
• 15g butter
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg (or more if, like me, you're a nutmeg fiend)

Brown the butter. To do this, heat it over a medium heat in a small saucepan (one with a light-coloured interior is best, so you can see the butter changing colour), swirling occasionally, until the white solids separate out and the liquid starts to become golden with small brown flecks in it. (There's a nice 'how to' guide here). Remove from the heat.

Lightly grease an 8x8in/20x20cm square cake tin. Slice two of the bananas and arrange evenly over the bottom of the tin. Pre-heat the oven to 170C.

Mix together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a small bowl. In another larger bowl, beat together the egg, milk and vanilla, then add the third banana and mash into the mixture using a fork. Add the browned butter to this and mix well. Fold in the flour mixture until you have an even batter with no white bits of flour remaining, then pour this over the bananas in the cake tin.

For the sauce, put the water, molasses sugar, treacle, butter, cinnamon and nutmeg in a small saucepan and bring to the boil, whisking to mix it all together. Leave to cool for a minute or so, then pour this evenly over the cake batter. Don't worry if it looks like it's curdling the mixture a little. Immediately put the cake in the oven, trying not to disturb the liquid on top too much.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden and chewy on top and liquid underneath. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

Gooseberry meringue pie

For someone who didn't eat any of them, I have very vivid memories of school dinners. Although every lunch time I would, without fail, pile my plate with the same old combination of stale bread roll and sawdust-textured luminous grated cheese (which, naturally, came out of a giant wholesale sack), I paid great peripheral attention to the feats of gastronomy quietly occurring around me. 

I remember 'pasta Wednesday', when the whole school was treated to vats of waterlogged, flabby pasta with a dollop of ketchup-coloured sauce. I remember the ripple of excitement that passed through the lunch queue on the sporadic occasions that chips featured on the menu, even though they were inevitably tragic, flaccid specimens sporting a thin film of grease and possessing all the crunch of a waterlogged marshmallow. 

I remember the smell of 'minty lamb stew' that crept through the halls and corridors like a noxious green ghost, assaulting my nostrils with its foul barrage - an indescribably vile smell, despite the fact that lamb and mint are inherently good things - and how it looked in the serving hatch like a vat of gravy with grass cuttings floating in it.

I remember the cold pizza that appeared at the salad bar and was always sought after, despite bearing an exact resemblance both visually and gastronomically to an item of roadkill smeared over a wedge of polystyrene. I remember my friendship group's obsession with the green Granny Smith apples in the fruit box at lunch, and the anxious wait for the first person to bite into theirs and declare whether they were a good or a bad batch - the former possessing the correct amount of crispness and acidity, the latter eating about as well as a tennis ball. I'd say it was about a 50-50 ratio, for the duration of my school days.

I remember the giant wedges of flapjack that often graced the dessert plates, and were one of the only desserts I would eat. They were thick, solid, sticky, peppered with raisins and saturated with fat and sugar; thus, I loved them. I still remember a friend of mine snatching one from my hand and taking a huge bite out of it, for no apparent reason. I don't think I've ever quite forgiven her. 

Let's not forget the cornflake tart, which was some inexplicable creation resembling a treacle tart but using cornflakes instead of breadcrumbs. Today I wonder if one of the school cooks made it up for a dare/had run out of breadcrumbs/had a box of cornflakes to use up/was drunk/blind and/or deranged. 

I remember what it was that put me off school dinners for good; the reason why my lunch for nine years consisted of a decidedly un-nutritious mix of long-life carbohydrate and fatty, processed cheese. It was my first and only bite of a 'tuna and sweetcorn lasagne', which so repulsed me that I remember declaring my outrage to my mother that such an item was even allowed to exist. To be fair to my school, at this point I ate nothing other than cheese, bread and fish fingers, so it's unsurprising that their hideous pseudo-Italian pastiche repelled me.

There was also 'Eve's pudding', a classic school-dinner combo of uniform fruit pieces (apple, in this case), probably from a tin, nestled underneath a giant wodge of wobbly, chewy sponge. This obviously came complete with a puddle of lurid custard, seeping wetly into the crumb. There were, naturally, variations on this, sometimes using pears. There was apple crumble, now my absolute favourite dessert, but back then something I never touched, as - not registering on my food radar because it didn't belong in any acceptable categories (i.e. a species of bread, cheese or processed fish product) - I steered well clear and regarded it with xenophobic suspicion. 

I remember what a treat it was to be allowed a 'snack pack', only issued under highly strict conditions (forms had to be filled in) in dire circumstances - i.e. when you had a club or some other character-building extracurricular activity taking up your lunch break so were unable to make it to proper lunch. For some reason, these were always much nicer than the lunch served in hall. They also contained huge jam doughnuts, which were their main attraction. Sometimes, if you got to lunch really early and were very lucky, there might be a doughnut or two sitting proudly amongst the other lacklustre pudding offerings. Me being me, that notoriously picky so-and-so, I would nibble around the oozing jammy centre and then allow whichever of my friends had irritated me the least that day to finish off my sugary spoils.

Finally, I remember the lemon meringue pie. I remember this chiefly because I think it is the reason I now wear contact lenses. So blinding was its radiant neon yellow centre that my retinas have never been the same since it first graced the school pudding area. 

It wasn't even yellow. Not yellow as you might think of yellow. Not the colour of dandelions or buttercups. This was a colour that I have never seen in any natural shape or form. The closest I can come to describing it is that it was the exact colour of the light sabers in my Star Wars lego sets. The colour of a yellow highlighter, tinged with green, lurid and unabashedly luminous. Like nothing in nature.

Actually, I know how to describe it perfectly. Imagine a large vat of washing-up liquid. The vivid yellow-green kind. Now imagine adding an almost-equally-sized vat of gelatine to this liquid. Now imagine pouring the resultant viscous slop into a pastry case, and whacking a pillowy froth of quivering meringue on top. You have, dear readers, my school lemon meringue pie. 

I can only guess at its flavour and texture because, naturally, I never took a single bite. But I saw the way the tines of my friends' forks would cling tenaciously to that gelatinous neon interior, the way it would slice cleanly under the pressure of metal suggesting a texture reminiscent of Turkish delight. It glowed brightly in the dinginess of the lunch hall rather like a jellyfish loitering dangerously in the depths of the ocean, waiting to inflict its fake lemony sting upon the unsuspecting diner. I don't remember the meringue or pastry part, so preoccupied is my mind with this feat of engineering that was the green-yellow pie filling.

Despite this, I have an inkling that proper meringue pie can be a lovely thing. After all, I love pie, I love fruit, and I love meringue. Surely only good things can come of combining them all into one gloriously hedonistic and billowing dessert. 

I've been meaning to make a meringue pie for a good few years. I really thought it was going to happen this spring, when I was totally set on the idea of a rhubarb and blood orange meringue pie, filled with a wonderful bright pink compote of Yorkshire rhubarb laced with the astringent snap of blood orange zest. I never got round to it, but the idea has nestled at the back of my mind for months. Then, the other day, faced with a glut of gooseberries (I am so into gooseberries at the moment), I came across a recipe in the trusty Diana Henry's Food From Plenty for gooseberry meringue pie. It was obviously a great idea - gooseberries have a lovely sharpness to them that is ideal for counteracting the sweetness of a frothy swathe of meringue.

Making a meringue pie is a lot easier than I thought. Yes, you can get all fancy with Swiss meringue and cooks' blowtorches and the like, but this is a simpler, more homely pie that just requires the composition of various elements and then a bake in the oven. There's a simple shortcrust pastry case, enriched with only the tiniest amount of sugar to provide a lovely savoury biscuity crunch against the other sweet elements; there's a rich, textured and delicious filling of stewed gooseberries thickened with cornflour and enriched with egg yolks; finally, there's a brilliant white blanket of meringue draped lovingly over the entire creation, light and airy in the centre with a crisp sugary exterior.

The gooseberry filling I could eat on its own; thick with chunks of berry and possessing that gorgeous honey-muscat aroma that gooseberries enjoy, it is sweet-tart and delicious. The use of cornflour and egg yolks to thicken it means it's really rich and lovely, almost like a jam. I used a mixture of red and green gooseberries, meaning the filling came out a lovely pink-tinged colour. It could have been rhubarb after all.

While the gooseberry and pastry combination is delicious on its own, it needs the sweet meringue to take the edge off the sour berries. This is a real adventure in tastes and textures, with the buttery crunch of the pastry playing against the gooey, sweet-sour filling, all smothered in the light and fluffy meringue that takes the edge off the tartness and provides a delicious crunch where its edges have browned and crisped in the oven. 

I ate this first when it was still warm from the oven, but I'd actually recommend serving it chilled - keep it in the fridge and remove half an hour before serving. I don't know why it's better this way, but it just is - all the flavours seem to become more pronounced (which is odd, because usually the opposite is the case). It seems to improve with keeping, too, the filling becoming even more flavoursome. 

I'm pretty thrilled that my first attempt at a meringue pie was successful. And what a far cry from that lurid yellow creation that still haunts me.

What are your memories of school dinners? Are there any particular culinary horrors forever imprinted in your mind?

Gooseberry meringue pie (serves 6):

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

• 140g plain flour
• 80g cold butter, cubed
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• Cold water
• 750g gooseberries, topped and tailed
• 150g caster sugar (or more to taste)
• 4 tbsp cornflour
• 3 egg yolks
• 3 egg whites
• 175g caster sugar

First, make the pastry. Put the flour, butter and salt into a food processor and blitz until it looks like breadcrumbs. Don't overprocess it as this will warm up the butter. Add the sugar and blitz again for a second, then gradually add enough cold water to make the mixture start to come together - around 1-2tbsp. Tip it out onto a floured work surface and press into a ball, then wrap this in clingfilm and chill for an hour or so.

Meanwhile, make the pie filling. Put the gooseberries in a pan with 2 tbsp water and the 150g caster sugar. Cover and heat gently, stirring occasionally. The gooseberries will release a lot of juice; some will turn to mush while others will keep their shape. When they are tender, strain through a sieve, reserving the liquid, then put the liquid back into the pan and simmer until there is around 200ml left.

Take 4tbsp of this gooseberry juice and mix with the cornflour, stirring vigorously to remove any lumps. When it forms a smooth paste, put this back into the juice in the saucepan and add the gooseberries. Bring to the boil and stir; the mixture will thicken. Turn off the heat, beat in the egg yolks,  then pour into a bowl and leave to cool.

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Grease a 22-23cm tart tin with a removable base. On a floured work surface, roll out the pastry and use it to line the tart tin. Leave some pastry hanging over the edges so it doesn't shrink - you can trim these bits later when the pie is baked. Line the pastry with greaseproof paper, fill with baking beans and bake for 15 minutes, then remove the paper and beans and bake for another 10 minutes, so it is golden and biscuity. Remove from the oven and cool for a few minutes, then use a knife to trim off any overhanging pastry from the edges.

Put the egg whites in a clean bowl and beat with an electric whisk to stiff peaks. Add a little of the 175g sugar, beat again, then add the rest of the sugar gradually while whisking, until the mixture has the appearance and consistency of shaving foam.

Pour the gooseberry mixture into the pastry case. Spoon the meringue evenly over the tart, covering the pastry edges and all of the filling. Put the oven temperature down to 180C and bake for 25 minutes, until the meringue is golden on top. Leave to cool on a wire rack, then remove the pie from the tin (the easiest way to do this is to rest it on an upturned bowl or a tin can; the rim of the tin should just fall away, and you can then transfer to a plate and slide the base off using a palette knife).

Dust with icing sugar, and serve at room temperature or lightly chilled (remove from the fridge around 30 minutes before serving).

Guineafowl and nectarine tagine

One thing I love about cooking is that it's a constant learning curve. I've often found myself feeling nostalgic for my school days recently; being a tutor makes me envious of all these kids who moan about school and homework and don't realise quite how lucky they are. School gives you a purpose, a legitimate way to spend your day constructively, without having to actively put that much effort in. What you're learning that day is all decided for you; how to learn it is decided for you; the timeframe is decided for you. How I miss having my constructive activities scheduled in such a way. It's so much harder to fill your day constructively and positively when you have to actively think up activities to ensure this purpose is fulfilled. Even though I'm going back to university in October for my PhD, it's not quite as easy as just turning up to school, being entirely a question of self-motivation. Luckily my PhD basically involves reading kids' books about knights and damsels and witches, and occasionally incest, so it's all good.

Learning has always been what I enjoy doing. I'm only truly happy when I have a hobby or interest that caters for that, allowing me to pick up new skills and absorb new information. I used to be heavily into tropical fishkeeping, a hobby my mother deplored as not only is it expensive, it's also often very messy and time-, space-, and electricity-consuming. Oh, and stressful, especially when your fish start attacking each other or dying and you don't know why. Nevertheless, it was immensely rewarding, and I still have a pretty enormous aquarium in my room which I find very therapeutic. My best friend Laura (who is always harassing me for a mention in this blog, so I hope she's pleased to read her name here) enjoys this aquarium even more than I do; when she visits we sit in front of it like a TV, watching the fish cavorting merrily.

Everyone has a general field in life in which they excel, and mine is learning. I've never been a very practical person - for me, the practical side of fishkeeping was definitely less of a strong point than the theoretical side. I can talk to you until I'm blue in the face about the finer points of different types of filter, gravel, underwater plants, fish food and fish choices, but I once nearly electrocuted myself after disconnecting the filter and siphoning a good ten litres of water all over myself, the floor, and a live plug socket. Oops. 

I think this may be why my passion for food has lasted so much longer than all of my other momentary hobbies and interests. The ancient Egypt obsession that I nursed as a deeply uncool, straight-fringed seven-year-old has faded to the extent that I can no longer read hieroglyphics, and the love for small creatures that led me to keep and breed giant African land snails has pretty much evaporated (although on a rainy day if I see a snail wending its way dangerously across a busy pavement, in grave jeopardy of being trodden on, I will still always stop to move it safely to a grassy verge) - but I've been obsessed with food for a good five years now and it seems to grow stronger rather than weaker. 

Food means learning.

I am always reading about food, when I'm not eating it. I love absorbing new information about ingredients, methods, cultural cuisines. I have a frankly scary amount of random knowledge about food. 

Did you know that the reason rhubarb leaves your teeth feeling kind of furry and weird is because it contains a small amount of oxalic acid, which is present in large quantities in the leaves, meaning they are poisonous? 

Did you know that English pies were originally called 'coffins'? 

Did you know that the seeds of a papaya are an effective laxative? 

Or that grapefruits are so called because they grow in clusters on the tree, like a giant bunch of grapes?

I always feel a sense of accomplishment when learning a new culinary technique for the first time. The first time I filleted a fish, and the flesh didn't come away in ragged chunks leaving me despairing, I was aglow with satisfaction. The first time I made chocolate ganache, and watched as a selection of the world's most fattening ingredients transformed themselves from a runny, silky sauce to a thick, rich, spreadable paste, was pretty magical. The first time I made creme patisserie, feeling as the vanilla-scented milk started to stiffen under the pressure of the wooden spoon, I couldn't quite believe I had produced something that adorns those beautiful delicate French fruit tarts so beloved of cafe counters everywhere. 

For this recipe, I had to joint a guineafowl. 

My butchery skills are pretty limited, because like any sensible person I normally rely on the butcher for such things. If I buy a rabbit or chicken from the butcher, he can joint it for me. I listen anxiously to the swish of the cleaver as it slices through the air and lands with a sharp thud on the chopping board, a part of me always waiting with bated breath for the howl of agony as it misses and finds a live limb instead (fortunately this has never happened). If I want the breasts off a pigeon, I either buy them ready-prepared, or ask him to slice them off for me. If I want lamb shoulder diced and ready for stewing, a butcher's knife can accomplish this far more easily than I could with my humble kitchen knives. 

I've only really had to venture into the world of home butchery a couple of times before, when I wanted just the breasts off a pigeon or wild duck carcass. They're so much easier to cook that way and look much more attractive when presented on the plate. I gingerly sliced away with great trepidation, sure that I would end up with a bloody mess. When the breasts came away cleanly, leaving something that you wouldn't be dismayed to see on a butcher's counter, I was pretty thrilled. It took about half an hour, mind, and I had to use scissors a couple of times, but I was still pleased.

So when I bought my whole, plastic-wrapped guineafowl from Sainsburys, I knew I was in for a bit of trouble. No friendly butcher there to joint it for me, and my recipe required it in four pieces. Not to worry, though - I looked up Delia's instructions online for jointing a chicken, grabbed my sharpest knife, and started to hack through this yellowish carcass before me. It wasn't easy. I'm pretty sure my knife is now totally useless, as the cringing sound and feel of it attempting to slice its way through solid backbone and breastbone was not pleasant. I resorted to scissors at several points on this occasion, too. 

But, to be honest, when I had finally hacked my way through the poor bird, it actually resembled something I might have brought home from the butcher. I felt a great sense of lightness, like a major obstacle in my life had suddenly been lifted. It may sound silly, but I felt independent. I no longer need to rely on a butcher and his knife; if I have to, I'm perfectly capable of cutting a dead thing into pieces. You can't quite appreciate how much of a mental block I'd had about this before; as if, if I brought a fish home that hadn't been gutted or filleted, or meat that hadn't been diced or jointed, it was the end; it was unusable. It may seem totally silly, but there's a great sense of freedom accompanying the knowledge that you can conquer all these obstacles armed with nothing but a knife (and maybe a pair of scissors...). 

So, what did I do with my quartered guineafowl? I've had this recipe for guineafowl and nectarine tagine in my book of recipe cuttings from magazines for years, and finally got round to giving it a go. You know how much I love my meat and fruit pairings, and this one sounded irresistibly intriguing. I've never cooked with guineafowl before, and I've only eaten it a couple of times - it seems to be the knee-jerk option for 'posh' formal dinners at Oxford colleges, I think because it's easy to cook (treat it like chicken) yet it sounds exotic, even though it's basically chicken. It has a slightly stronger flavour than chicken, particularly the legs, which have a lovely rich gameyness to them. Because of this, it stands up well to assertive flavours.

So I bombarded my guineafowl with spices, rubbing it in a heady mixture of turmeric, ground ginger, cinnamon and cloves. It sat in this for a while, before I browned it in hot olive oil, sauteed an onion, then covered the lot in a bit of water and a dash of honey. This simmered until the fowl was cooked through, resulting in a shockingly yellow sauce from the turmeric, but one that was warm, fragrant and sweet. 

Then, the nectarines. These wouldn't look out of place in a pudding, actually, perhaps alongside sweetened mascarpone and gooey meringue (which now I really want to try). They're sliced, tossed in a little olive oil and honey, then griddled on both sides until attractively charred, which releases all their sugars and juices and makes them gloriously soft and sweet. They go into the guineafowl sauce for a few seconds, to impart their lovely sweetness, along with a dash of orange flower water, which gives a beautiful intriguing floral note. I threw in a load of herbs - parsley, basil, coriander and mint - to lift the rich, earthy sauce and to contrast with the sugary nectarines. Nectarines and basil are a perfect partnership, both in sweet and savoury food - I love nectarines in a salad with salty parma ham, torn basil and milky mozzarella. 

The first time I ate this, I left the guineafowl pieces whole. But the next evening, I decided to shred the meat from the bones and spoon over the nectarine sauce, which I think is a better idea - it's a lot easier to eat that way, and means you can get a proper mouthful of all the components without fiddling around separating meat from skin and bone. 

I served this with bulghur wheat - though couscous would also be perfect - and greens beans the first night, swapping them for a large tangle of watercress, rocket and spinach the next night. Either (or both) are excellent accompaniments. A handful of toasted flaked almonds is a delicious garnish, complementing all the flavours, while a final sprinkling of fresh herbs lifts the dish and gives it a lovely summery freshness. 

This might sound like an odd combination, but it's really lovely. The guineafowl, rubbed in spices, has a deep savoury flavour to it that is pleasantly complemented by the sweet, smoky nectarines and the delicious perfume of orange flowers. I also think this is a beautiful-looking dish (although my photos, taken al fresco just as an enormous thunder cloud was about to break overhead, don't really do it justice), perfect for summer days when salad isn't quite substantial enough and you want something warm, fragrant and exotic to lift your spirits to sunnier climes. 

Guineafowl and nectarine tagine (serves 3-4):

• 1 guineafowl, jointed into four pieces
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 pinch ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• Olive oil
• 1 white or red onion, finely chopped
• 2 tbsp honey
• 500ml water
• 3 nectarines, stoned and cut into eight slices
• 1-3 tsp orange flower water
• 1 tbsp each chopped mint, parsley, basil and coriander (or a mixture, depending on what you have)
• Toasted flaked almonds, to serve

Mix together the ginger, cinnamon, cloves and turmeric. Rub all over the guineafowl pieces and leave, covered, for at least an hour in the fridge.

When ready to cook, heat some olive oil in a large non-stick pan over a high heat and brown the guineafowl all over (it's easiest to do this in two batches). Remove to a plate, lower the heat and saute the onion until starting to soften. Then return the guineafowl to the pan, pour in the water, add 1 tbsp of the honey and some salt and pepper, then simmer for around half an hour, turning the pieces over halfway through, until the guineafowl is cooked through and the sauce has reduced. If it hasn't reduced enough, remove the guineafowl pieces and boil it for a bit, adding a little arrowroot or cornflour to thicken.

When nearly ready to serve, mix the nectarine slices with the remaining honey and a drizzle of olive oil. Get a griddle pan very hot, and griddle them on both sides until charred in places (you can also do this under the grill, but they tend to disintegrate). Add them to the sauce along with the orange flower water - how much you need will depend on the strength of the brand you have. It should taste and smell floral, but not too much or it will be like eating soap. Allow to warm through, taste and check the seasoning (it might need a bit more salt, as the fruit is so sweet), then stir in the chopped herbs, reserving a few to garnish.

You can either serve a whole guineafowl piece per person, simply pouring the sauce over it on the plate or - if you can be bothered - allow the pieces to cool slightly (keep the sauce hot), remove the skin and shred the meat using your fingers or a fork, then mix it all back into the nectarine sauce and ladle it onto plates to serve. I prefer it this way. Scatter with flaked almonds and the remaining herbs and serve, preferably with some couscous or bulghur wheat, and something green - green beans or a tangle of watercress are both good.

Gluten-free Challenge: Day Five

Let's talk a bit about risotto. Risotto is perhaps, I have decided, the ultimate gluten-free dish. This is because it's 100% naturally gluten-free. No need to make any changes or substitute any ingredients with inferior variations. No need to skimp on delicious creamy, starchy goodness. Take your basic mixture of olive oil, butter, risotto rice, onion and stock, and add to it whatever meat, fish, cheese or vegetables you like. The only thing you have to watch is your stock cubes, some of which may contain gluten in the form of various starches. I know that Marigold bouillon powder, though, which many chefs regard as the superior stock brand, is gluten-free.

If you know a gluten-free eater, make this for them. Don't let them suffer a diet of salads. Slap a big plate of creamy, gooey, chewy rice in front of them, grate over a mountain of cheese and a good grind of black pepper, maybe a handful of fresh herbs, and watch a glazed look of delight pass over their face. At least, that is always my response to a good risotto.

On my last day of this gluten-free challenge, I tucked into a plate of mushroom and bacon risotto, kindly made for me by my mum. I think this divine Italian combination of rice and stock has to be the ultimate comfort food. It's also incredibly easy to cook, and so versatile. I must have made at least fifty different types of risotto in my life, but these are some of my favourite combinations, and ones I would urge you to try if looking to inject some life and delight into a gluten-free diet:

Leek, blue cheese and bacon
Lemon, broad bean and ricotta or goat's cheese
Wild mushroom and truffle oil
Sausage and radicchio
Butternut squash, bacon and chestnut
Chicken, lemon and rocket

Apart from this lovely dinner, I pretty much ate the same as yesterday - porridge for breakfast; pasta salad for lunch, and an apple.

All in all, I haven't found going five days without gluten challenging at all. This may be due to the fact that I rarely eat that much of it anyway, but it was still a really interesting experiment, and has made me realise a few important things. Here is a little video to summarise my findings:

To celebrate the end of my gluten-free challenge, here's a list of some of my favourite recipe creations that are naturally gluten-free. There are even a few cakes on there!

Spiced dried fruit and blood orange compote, to be served on gluten-free porridge

Rhubarb, blueberry and almond baked oatmeal (use gluten-free oats)

Clementine and chocolate cake

Orange-flower, pistachio and almond polenta cake

Roasted loquat meringues

Vanilla and blood orange torta di riso

Smoked chicken and mango rice salad

Squid and chorizo salad

Cobnut, cherry and goat's cheese salad

Beetroot, blood orange and carrot salad with peppered mackerel

Cherry, smoked chicken and goat's cheese salad

Smoked duck, pear, goat's cheese and walnut salad

Grilled spiced sardines with fennel and grapefruit salad

Rare duck and wild rice with pecans and cranberries

Smoked duck, mozzarella and baby fig salad

Sweet and sour dhal with grilled aubergine

Mexican spiced chicken salad

Who says going gluten-free has to feel like deprivation? I'd say it should be an adventure!

Gluten-free Challenge: Day Four

In a bid to find a gluten-free alternative to all my favourite grainy lunchtime carbohydrates (couscous, bulgur wheat, pearl barley), I have fallen in love with buckwheat. Buckwheat, although it might look, cook and taste like your ordinary gluten-filled grain (and, of course, it has 'wheat' in its title) is actually a seed. In fact, it is related to rhubarb. It's not a grain and therefore is totally gluten free. You can buy it as flour, which is perhaps more commonly known - it's what the French use to make those gorgeous dark, nutty crêpes that they fill with savoury stuffings. This is ideal for a spot of gluten-free baking, although it has quite a strong flavour so is usually best 'diluted' with another more neutral gluten-free flour.

You can also buy it as groats, however, which is where it really comes into its own. 

These are a funny little convex triangle shape, looking at first glance a bit like giant, angular couscous granules. They can be cooked in the same way as rice - boiled in twice their volume of water or stock - to result in creamy, nutty pellets of deliciousness. They have a similar sort of chewy texture to pearl barley, but not as dense. In fact, the closest similarity is probably with cooked risotto rice - tender and starchy, but still with a little bite. You can use them to make a risotto, and you can even cook them in water and milk to make gluten-free porridge. Incidentally, they are also packed with protein and other nutrients, so not only are they a lovely comforting carb-blanket, but they are even healthy, and very low in calories for something so squidgy and delicious.

I like to cook them simply in water or stock, and then use them as the starchy, comforting, chewy base of a delicious salad. The first time I tried buckwheat, I made this wonderful salad from Sonia over at The Healthy Foodie. The combination was irresistible: sweet, chewy pieces of dried fruit coupled with toasted nuts and tangy goat's cheese. Buckwheat works so well in salads because it has a slight nutty flavour of its own, which means it can assert itself well against both sweet and savoury ingredients. 

For dinner this evening, I was really craving a favourite salad of mine: pomegranate-glazed roasted aubergine with couscous, mint, feta cheese and pomegranate seeds. Obviously, couscous was out of the question, but then I had the brainwave of replacing it with buckwheat.

I think I actually prefer it. Buckwheat has a creaminess that you don't get with couscous, which can be quite dry if not drenched in oil. It also has that deliciously moreish risotto-like consistency, so can easily be voraciously ingested, mouthful by starchy mouthful. 

To my base of cooked buckwheat, I added broad beans - I can't get enough of them at the moment, and wanted something green and something with a crunchier texture than the soft aubergine - chopped fresh mint (goes so well with aubergine), aubergines tossed in a mixture of olive oil, honey and pomegranate molasses then roasted until soft and squishy, crumbled feta, and fresh pomegranate seeds. I dressed the buckwheat with a little tahini paste, for added creaminess and because in my mind nothing works better with aubergine, and Dijon mustard, for a bit of a kick. 

Basically this was a salad born of my cravings and of what I had in the fridge or just thought might work well if I chucked it into the mix. It ended up being utterly delicious, a simple meal with simple ingredients that tasted perfect and wonderful. It's super-healthy, but in an utterly satisfying, starchy way. You'd never believe something gluten-free could be so creamy and delicious. I'd highly encourage any gluten-free dieters out there, if they haven't already, to give buckwheat a go - it could be the answer to that empty, couscous-shaped hole in your life, and is the basis for so many wonderful and versatile recipes. If I can get my hands on some buckwheat flour, which I've totally failed to do so far, though I've been trying for months, I'd be really interested to experiment with some gluten-free baking.

Other than this pretty and perfect plateful, my gluten-free eating today has been as follows: porridge with grated apple, sultanas and blueberries for breakfast; more of yesterday's creamy smoked trout pasta salad for lunch, with a nectarine; a post-teaching snack of a mango and a banana. I've had a great day, feeling very energised throughout despite desperately not wanting to leave my bed when my alarm went off early this morning. I wouldn't say it's a hugely dramatic difference, but I definitely feel cleaner and healthier somehow. It might all be in my head, but it's still a pretty good feeling. I'm not even that happy it's the final day of my gluten-free challenge tomorrow; in truth, there's nothing I've really missed.

Apart from couscous.

But now I have buckwheat, so even that doesn't haunt my gastronomic dreams any more. Hurrah.

Buckwheat salad with pomegranate-glazed aubergine, feta, broad beans and mint (serves 3-4):

• 3 medium or 2 very large aubergines
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses (or balsamic vinegar if you can't find this)
• 1 tbsp honey
• Salt and pepper
• 180g buckwheat groats
• Water
• Two large handfuls frozen broad beans
• 3 tsp tahini paste
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• 20g fresh mint, leaves shredded
• 100g feta cheese, crumbled
• Half a pomegranate

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Cut the aubergines into 1-inch cubes. Mix together the olive oil, molasses, honey and some seasoning, then toss the aubergine in this mixture and spread the pieces out on a baking tray. Season again and roast for 30-40 minutes until soft and sticky. Set aside.

Put the buckwheat in a pan, add 400ml water, bring to the boil and simmer, covered, for 10 mins. After this time, add the broad beans to the pan, cover, and cook for another 5 mins or so, until all the liquid has been absorbed and the buckwheat is tender (if there's any liquid remaining, drain it off). Mix the buckwheat and beans with the tahini and mustard, and season well.

Mix the buckwheat with the aubergine pieces and most of the mint. Crumble in the feta cheese. Using a rolling pin, bash the seeds out of the pomegranate over the bowl and combine gently. Serve garnished with the rest of the mint.

Gluten-free Challenge: Day Three

Today has been the perfect day for avoiding gluten. After the dismal monsoons of the last couple of months, Cambridge has suddenly been blessed with sunshine. Not just any sunshine; this sunshine has returned with a vengeance, angry at being barred by miserable and threatening clouds for weeks on end  and ready to show the citizens of this humble town what it's made of. With the result that the weather is swelteringly hot, and therefore it's completely impossible to entertain the notion of eating very much at all. It's definitely not a day to be craving a huge, freshly baked loaf of gluten-packed bread.


I had breakfast before it got properly hot, though, so my usual bowl of porridge didn't seem out of place. To be fair, I still eat porridge even in the height of summer, because it's delicious and the perfect blanket for all that ripe and ready summer fruit around at the moment. I still had some rhubarb left over from yesterday, so I had that on top with a large handful of raspberries and blueberries, both of which go deliciously well with rhubarb.

For lunch, I decided to try out some gluten-free pasta. In a pasta salad, though, to be eaten just warm or cold, rather than a hot, steaming plate of carbs. They are not the thing when you are hot and steaming yourself. I was intrigued to see if it tasted any different to normal pasta, being made with maize and rice flour instead of standard flour. It certainly looked the same in the packet.



I wanted a vaguely creamy sauce for my pasta salad, something with a generous kick of mustard to spice it up when eaten cold from the fridge. I get very specific cravings when it comes to pasta, you see. Then I needed some protein to bulk it out. Chicken, tuna or smoked mackerel would have been wonderful, but there was some smoked trout on offer in Waitrose, so I decided to use that. I also wanted a lot of nice green veg, for a bit of contrast and to make it a vaguely healthy option. Peas and broad beans work well in pasta salads, and go very well with trout. Finally, I added a couple of chopped hard-boiled eggs. I don't know if this is weird or not. I love eggs with smoked fish, but I don't know if that's a normal thing. But hey, it's my salad, so in they went. Plus eggs are good for you.

To this I added a dressing made with cream cheese, creme fraiche, lemon juice, salt and pepper, a huge amount of lemon thyme leaves (my favourite herb, and delicious with fish and anything creamy) and two heaped teaspoons of mustard. Not just any mustard - Tracklements horseradish mustard, from back in July last year when I went on an exciting tour of their mustard factory and received enough free mustard to last several years (literally - I've only used two jars out of six, and that's taken me an entire twelve months). Horseradish is normally perceived as solely reserved for beef, but actually it partners very well with rich smoked fish, particularly trout and mackerel.

Incidentally, I received a very nice email from Becky at Tracklements today, who informs me that all their products (apart from the Fruity Brown Sauce and the Beer Mustard) are gluten-free, and recommends stirring one of their chutneys into a bowl of quinoa or carmargue rice, adding some leftover chicken or lamb and some sultanas, and digging in for a wonderful gluten-free plateful. That's definitely something I'll have to try.



The result of my pasta experiment was a deliciously comforting plateful full of fresh flavours - crunchy, slightly bitter broad beans, sweet peas, the rich trout and eggs, plus the zingy lemony dressing that manages to be creamy and soothing yet sharp and exciting at the same time.

But I know what you really want to know is: does gluten-free pasta taste the same as normal pasta?

Yes! Yes it does! I have to admit I couldn't tell the difference at all while eating it. Perhaps if you ate it dressed with nothing more than good olive oil and seasoning, and were a connoisseur, you might be sharp enough to spot the difference, but I really didn't notice, and seeing as I usually like my pasta laden with other lovely things, it's certainly good enough for me.

Great news for gluten-free dieters everywhere.

To celebrate, here's a jaunty little video of me making the pasta salad.

After a banana, tea and medjool date snack (a repeat of yesterday), I went to my usual Tuesday kickboxing class. I noticed a huge improvement in my energy levels from last week, when I could barely lift my arms and legs and just felt horribly sluggish. This time I was bursting with energy and had a really great class. I don't know if it's the gluten-free diet or just coincidence, but I've certainly noticed only positive effects so far. It was doubly surprising given I spent most of today asleep in the sun, which isn't exactly great for boosting energy levels.


For dinner, I made a wonderful salad which I will be giving a proper dedicated post soon in the future, because it was just that good. Suffice to say that my mum had a few bites, then said: "If this is what being gluten-free is like, then I'm all for it."

It's a salad of smoked prosciutto, feta cheese, grilled peaches, green beans and rocket. Sounds an unlikely combination, but tastes like summer on a plate and is utterly wonderful. A perfect example of how a gluten-free diet can lead to the most imaginative and delicious recipe creations.



Creamy smoked trout pasta salad (serves 3-4):

250g short pasta shapes, gluten-free if necessary (I used fusilli)
2 large eggs, at room temperature (so they don't crack when boiling)
A large handful each of frozen peas and broad beans
150g light cream cheese
1 heaped tbsp creme fraiche
2 tsp wholegrain mustard
Juice of half a lemon
Salt and black pepper
A few sprigs lemon thyme
2 tsp olive oil
125g smoked trout fillets
Fresh herbs, to serve (optional)

Put the pasta on to cook in a large pot of boiling salted water, adding the eggs to the water. After 6 minutes, remove the eggs and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Add the peas and broad beans to the pasta, wait for the water to come back to the boil, then cook for 3-4 minutes (make sure the pasta doesn't overcook; this timing should end up with it just right). Peel and dice the eggs and set aside.

Mix together the cream cheese, creme fraiche, mustard, lemon juice, a generous amount of pepper and the leaves of the lemon thyme sprigs in a small bowl. Taste and check the seasoning - it should be quite sharp and lemony.

When the pasta and peas/beans are cooked, drain them, reserving a small cup of cooking water. Return them to their pan, then add the cream sauce. Stir together well, adding the olive oil and a little of the cooking water to loosen the sauce if necessary, then flake the trout into the pasta and stir again. Check the seasoning - you might want more lemon juice or mustard. Add the chopped eggs and stir together again. Serve hot or cold, sprinkled with fresh herbs, if you like (dill, basil, parsley and lemon thyme all work well).

Gluten-free Challenge: Day Two

One thing especially impressed itself upon my mind during this, my second day of eating gluten-free (for day one and the reason behind this gluten-free challenge, click here). That is:how incredibly hard it is to find food on the go that doesn't contain gluten. It seems that the pesky thing lurks everywhere, in the most unexpected and surprising places. Nor is its presence particularly well-labelled. To be on a truly gluten-free diet is exhausting, especially when it comes to grabbing a 'quick' lunch from a supermarket; it requires the constant checking of labels and analysing of ingredients, plus the inevitable and tragic disappointment of finding that basically everything you want to eat is cruelly denied you.

For breakfast today, I had a bowl of gluten-free porridge with some rhubarb compote and fresh blackberries. It was delicious; I love the combination of comforting, creamy porridge laced with the potent tang of stewed rhubarb, and the juicy burst of sweet blackberries.

I didn't have much time between doing various errands and starting work in the early afternoon. I definitely didn't have time to make something gluten-free for lunch, mainly because I wanted something a bit healthier than a gluten-free bread roll filled with whatever was in the fridge, which consisted of mostly cheese. So, naturally, I went to M&S on the way to work, my destination of choice for packaged salads, sandwiches and the like because they generally seem much more inviting than cheap and horrible Tesco varieties. Yeah, that's my excuse. Actually it's just because I'm painfully middle class, and never more so than when it comes to food.

My gaze hovered over all the attractive options, and I came pretty close to picking a few up before I realised: couscous, bulgur wheat, pasta salads were all out of the equation. Never mind, I thought, there are a couple of nice-looking quinoa salads, and I know quinoa is gluten-free. One check of the label, however, boldly informed me 'Contains: Wheat, Gluten'. Where this could possibly be in a salad of quinoa, feta and vegetables, I'm not quite sure. 

I went for sushi, one of my favourites. The components of sushi are normally pretty basic: rice, sugar, salt, vinegar, fish. So how on earth could the label tell me that there was gluten involved? I assume because of the soy sauce; perhaps you didn't know this, but soy sauce contains wheat. 

I was even more shocked, though, when I picked up a salad of edamame beans and sugar snap peas to discover that it contained gluten. Where was the gluten hiding?! Seriously? It was just vegetables! I can only assume that the little pot of dressing provided contained soy sauce or something, but I didn't want to eat a pot of vegetables without anything to season them. The same went for various other salads: mixed bean, Greek...all of them innocently concealing gluten. 

I genuinely found this quite surprising, and it also gave me a great deal of sympathy for coeliacs and those wildly allergic to wheat or gluten. There was nothing on the M&S shelf proclaiming itself to be gluten-free; I imagine for such sufferers, finding lunch on the go is a tiresome and frequently fruitless guessing game.

Fortunately - and this was a real stroke of luck - it happened that my favourite M&S salad, one I discovered recently and can't get enough of - didn't contain gluten.

It's a salad of wild rice, lentils, aubergine, peppers and celery with a garlicky dressing. Doesn't sound that great, and definitely doesn't look particularly appetising, being mostly beige and slimy-looking, but it tastes fantastic - sharp and garlicky, creamy from the roasted aubergine and nutty from the lentils and rice. It probably made my day discovering that I was allowed to eat this. I sat outside in the sun and devoured it with a plastic spoon, then had a delicious ripe white nectarine afterwards. 

Ripe nectarines are a rare thing, to be treasured when one can get their hands upon them. 

The M&S salad was not very filling, however. Especially not when one has been undertaking the tiring job of teaching fourteen rowdy 16-18 year olds for the afternoon. I had a banana and a medjool date (the fattest, stickiest, most toffee-like dates you'll ever eat, which is why I only had one - they're very satisfying) with a cup of tea (these dates have to be consumed with a hot beverage, to melt the sugar off your teeth!), before I went for a pretty gruelling run in the sweltering heat. 

Can I tell you a secret? It wasn't as good as the run I went for two weeks ago, which was fuelled by a substantial afternoon tea featuring scones, jam, clotted cream and a huge amount of caffeinated tea. In that respect, I don't think the gluten-free diet has given me a manic burst of energy all of a sudden, but the kind of energy one gets from floury scones is probably the bad kind that will give you a huge sugar low an hour or so later...I was just clever enough to go for a run before that low hit, while I was still high as a kite. I imagine the gluten-free kind of energy is more sustainable and keeps you going for a longer period of time. I still ran seven kilometres, so am not doing too badly without any gluten to sustain me.

Dinner this evening is an example of how - fortunately - some of the most delicious meals are naturally gluten-free. Instead of viewing a gluten-free diet as all about everything you can't have, it seems logical to me to embrace it, to find new and more exciting ways of filling yourself up than by simply gorging a vat of bread or pasta. To me, it seems about much more than simply swapping your bread or pasta for a gluten-free variety, which is a perfectly viable option but seems somewhat lazy and unimaginative.

Instead, I'm thinking about meals that are delicious, and coincidentally naturally lacking in any form of wheat whatsoever. These are the ones I'll be sharing over the next few days. You'll be amazed at how tasty some dishes are, despite the lack of a gluten factor. I tried a recipe from Diana Henry's Food From Plenty, for sea bream cooked Spanish-style. It's one that I've always skipped over before because it just looked too simple. I tend to shy away from simple recipes, favouring more unusual flavour combinations and ingredients. I'm now going to have to rethink my entire philosophy, because this was fantastic.

Sea beam, gutted and scaled (they were on offer in Tesco), baked in the oven under a thick blanket of breadcrumbs, smoked paprika, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and parsley. The olive oil and the paprika mingle to form a pungent, aromatic, shockingly scarlet oil that permeates and infuses the fish with its deliciously rich, smoky flavour - think chorizo but without the meat. The lemon juice adds tang, the garlic depth, while the breadcrumbs turn crispy in places and soggy in others, saturated with oily, smoky juices. The fish flesh remains deliciously moist, its creamy texture the perfect balance to the assertive bread topping.

I used gluten-free bread to make the crumbs, naturally. To be honest, I think that was all it was good for - the loaf had the texture of dry sponge. However, I did receive it in the post on Thursday, so it is probably just old, a result of my neglect. It would have been fine toasted, though, and I'm sure gluten-free loaves are much nicer when fresh.

I served this fish with boiled potatoes (yay for gluten-free carbs) and a lovely little salad of chargrilled courgettes, broad beans, green beans and basil, dressed with garlic olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper. It was the perfect green and crunchy partner to soak up all the delicious sweet and smoky juices from the fish. Such a simple meal, but one that is much more than the sum of its parts, and is a perfect recipe for a balmy summer evening.

It's now late, and I'm probably heading to bed soon. I feel pretty good -  nicely exhausted from running, and wonderfully nourished from my lovely vegetable-heavy dinner. Much better than if I'd eaten a giant bowl of pasta or similar, I'm sure.

Spanish-style sea bream (serves 4):

(Barely adapted from 'Food From Plenty', by Diana Henry)

• 4 sea bream, gutted and scaled
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• 50g breadcrumbs (gluten-free if necessary)
• 5 tsp smoked paprika
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 lemon
• 4 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Lightly oil a baking dish. Rub olive oil over the fish, inside and out, then season well. Lay in a single layer on the oven dish. Drizzle with olive oil and squeeze over half the lemon.

Mix together the breadcrumbs, garlic and paprika, and season well. Spoon this over the top of the fish, then squeeze over the remaining lemon and drizzle over some more olive oil. 

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, then sprinkle over the parsley. Bake for another 5 minutes, or until the fish is opaque and flakes easily away from the bone at its thickest part.

Serve with a salad (perhaps some green and broad beans) and some boiled new potatoes.

Going gluten-free for five days: Day One

I was recently invited to participate in the 'Making Sense of Sensitivity' Blogger Challenge, in order to help raise awareness of the newly recognised condition of gluten sensitivity. Unlike coeliac disease, there is no formal test for diagnosing gluten sensitivity, yet it is six times more prevalent than coeliac disease, affecting up to 6% of the population and causing unpleasant physical symptoms which are related to a heightened sensitivity to gluten in food. (For more information on the condition, click here).

As part of the challenge, I will be living gluten-free for five days, blogging about my experience and recommending delicious things to eat while on a gluten-free diet, while highlighting the potential pitfalls of cutting out such a prevalent food group.

I agreed to the challenge mainly out of curiosity; it does seem to be generally accepted nowadays that a huge amount of gluten in the diet is not particularly good for you, and I was keen to see if cutting it out completely would have any drastic effects on me. Eating toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and pasta for dinner has never left me feeling at my slimmest and healthiest, so while I generally try not to eat too much gluten anyway, I think I rarely go for days at a time without consuming any.

I was sent a booklet of recipes as part of the challenge, along with some gluten-free products (mainly bread and pasta, but also cornflakes, which I'm intrigued about). I'll be trying out a couple of these as well as suggesting my own recipes for a gluten-free diet, in an attempt to prove that living without gluten can be pretty painless.

I've also been sent a pretty stylish little video camera to record my experience, so expect Nutmegs, seven to be branching out into the world of video blogging!

Day One

In my head, most of the meals for these five days are sorted. I eat a lot of salads for dinner at the moment, which are naturally gluten-free anyway (unless, of course, I add a large pile of crispy, garlic-scented sourdough croutons, which has been a regular feature lately. Out with those, I guess). Lunchtime is slightly more tricky, in that my usual lunchtime staples, while healthier than bread, turn out also to contain gluten. No more bulgur wheat, pearl barley or couscous salads for me. However, I luckily recently discovered buckwheat and quinoa, both of which I love and work in a similar way to couscous, so that should be fine, and I have lots of lovely plans for those. Yes, I'm a bit of a health freak. But I promise you, they actually taste really good.

No, the real difficulty is breakfast. I'm not really a fan of bread for breakfast, because it doesn't fill me up and I end up starving mid-morning, so it's not quite as simple as just buying gluten-free bread for my toast. Normally I make myself a giant bowl of porridge or muesli, with lots of fruit. You might be surprised to learn, though, that oats are not gluten-free. This is because they're often contaminated with wheat in the milling process. My yummy homemade granola, then, which contains not only oats but barley and wheat flakes, is out of the question.

Fortunately, you can buy gluten-free oats. They're prohibitively expensive (£3 for 450g, as opposed to under £1 a kilo for my normal oats), but you can get them. Given that I use 100g of oats per bowl of porridge, I'd be spending a fortune on these if I were to live gluten-free in the long term. It's going to be gluten-free porridge for breakfast for these five days, though.

Except for today, which is Sunday. Sunday means special brunch, something more exciting than a bowl of porridge (although, tragically, to me even the most humble bowl of porridge is still exciting). Armed with gluten free oats, and some of the finest summer fruit in season at the moment, you can make this utterly delicious cherry, vanilla and apricot baked oatmeal.

It's a summery adaptation of my hugely successful rhubarb, blueberry and almond baked oatmeal, an irresistible cross between breakfast and dessert, rather like a fruit crisp but healthy. A layer of sliced marigold apricots bakes to a fragrant, jammy tangle of sweetness, while tart sweet cherries ooze their subtle perfume and scarlet juice into the mix. The milky layer of oats, bound with an egg and peppered with cinnamon, vanilla and a little sugar, bakes to a tender, chewy crust, crispy round the edges where the fruit juices have permeated it stickily. A scattering of almonds and some more cherries finishes it off, adding crunch and juiciness.

Incidentally, I call it 'oatmeal' because it's adapted from an American recipe, but it is basically baked porridge. Scroll down for the recipe, if you're interested.

I stumbled across another pitfall while making this - baking powder. It's incredible how many products that we take for granted contain traces of gluten; I realise I'm going to have to think very carefully about this over the next five days. Baking powder often contains corn starch, which means it isn't gluten free. However, you can buy a lot of gluten-free brands of baking powder. Even better, though, I discovered (via Google) that Tesco and Waitrose own brands don't contain gluten, and the former (which uses rice flour as its bulking agent) is what I happened to have in the cupboard.

I decided to experiment a little with the new video camera, so here's a delightful little 'how-to' video of me making this baked oatmeal for breakfast. I think Stephen Spielberg can feel pretty safe, however.

After tucking into a pretty generous portion of this for brunch, my lunch consisted simply of a nectarine and a pear. I think if fruit weren't gluten free, I'd be totally unable to do this challenge, as I eat a huge amount of the stuff every day.

If you need proof that a gluten-free diet needn't mean deprivation, look no further than my dinner this evening. Because, for the first time in approximately three months, the sun had actually come out, it seemed only fitting to celebrate by turning on the barbecue. We had some delicious barbecued sausages - I like them when they're black and crispy on the outside, because those carcinogens are just so damn tasty - along with a sweet, colourful tangle of roasted vegetables, a mound of salad, and jacket potatoes with a generous helping of cheese.

Not quite haute cuisine, but probably the most satisfying meal I've had in a long time. Just make sure, though, that if you're eating sausages on a gluten-free diet, they are suitable - sausages often contain rusk to pad them out, which contains wheat flour. Check the label, and if you can't get the gluten-free variety, choose some less processed cut of meat instead - a lovely steak, for example.

I didn't really notice any difference in how I felt today, probably because it's only day one and, as I mentioned above, it's not like I'm a gluten addict suddenly forced to go cold turkey. But I did feel pretty  good after that barbecue! Who needs spongy, tasteless, processed burger buns when you can have a lovely crispy-skinned jacket potato instead? No gluten in those bad boys!

Rhubarb, blueberry and almond baked oatmeal (serves 4-6):

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

• 7-8 large ripe apricots, sliced
• 300g cherries, halved and stoned (or 200g blueberries if you prefer)
• 200g gluten free oats (try and get the whole or 'jumbo' oats if possible)
• 40g flaked almonds, toasted
• 60g light brown sugar
• 1 tsp gluten-free baking powder
• 1.5 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 475ml milk
• 1 large egg
• 3 tbsp melted butter
• 2 tsp vanilla or almond extract

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 apricots over the bottom and add half the cherries.

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

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

Sprinkle the oat mixture on top of the cherries and apricots 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 cherries 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.

Blueberry and elderflower upside-down cake

[Just a quick - and excited! - note to say that I've been nominated for Best Food Blog in the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards 2012!]

I'm pretty sure that there has never been an occasion over the last three years when I haven't had at least one punnet of blueberries either in my fridge or freezer. I would hoard them obsessively during my time at Oxford, where they could regularly be found at the Wednesday market priced at a mere pound. Given that I've seen punnets fetching up to £4.49 in Marks & Spencer, this was a pretty bargainous find. (Luckily I have a mother who insists on blueberries with her morning muesli, so we now have a constant supply in the fridge, which I don't have to pay for - win). I'd stash them away for a later date, a date which actually rarely happened to be much later, because the uses for blueberries in my kitchen are numerous. 

I like to use them to stud a moist, squidgy loaf of banana bread, perfuming the crumb and creating sweet little pockets of purple. Continuing the banana theme, they also work well folded into banana pancake batter, or simmered gently in a pan until their skins burst and they release tart inky juices, which can then be spooned dramatically over a pile of pancakes. I also use them in every variation of this baked oatmeal I make - sometimes the chewy crust hides a hot-pink bed of tart, tender rhubarb, sometimes a comforting blanket of baked banana, and sometimes a marigold shock of jammy soft apricot slices, but there are always blueberries infusing their mild sweetness into that molten fruity puddle.

I like them folded through hot, bubbling porridge, engulfed in its nutty, milky blanket, sending ribbons of juice twisting through the creamy canvas like capillaries. They work well in this context with all fruits, but particularly - again - chopped banana, or grated apple. 

They're also rather good in savoury dishes, for example as a sauce for venison steaks, and sometimes I use them instead of pomegranate seeds to add a welcome burst of sweetness to a wild rice or couscous salad with shredded duck or chicken. 

Yet I rarely bake with blueberries. Maybe I consider them too obvious - I generally like to bake vaguely unusual things with tragically underrated fruits, such as rhubarb and gooseberries. In fact, maybe that should be my blog's new tagline.

'Nutmegs, seven. Baking vaguely unusual things with tragically underrated fruits.'

Catchy, no?

I was leafing through this month's delicious magazine when I came across Signe Johansen's recipe for blueberry and elderflower cake. It's taken from her latest book, Scandilicious Baking, and I was drawn in both by the title - a combination I'd never come across before, having only used elderflower with gooseberries - and the enticing photo, depicting a rustic-looking wedge of cake topped with a juicy, dimpled purple carpet of squishy berries. The colours really struck me - such an intense, vibrant blue-purple, a hue you very rarely see in food. 

Today, in need of a summery cake to combat the distinctly un-summery torrential rain occurring outside my kitchen window, I put on my apron, rolled up my sleeves, unearthed several punnets of blueberries from the freezer, and got to work.

This is an upside-down cake. The blueberries are scattered over the base of a cake tin, drizzled with elderflower cordial, left to steep while the cake mixture is made, then covered with a layer of batter before being baked. After its spell in the oven, you turn it over to reveal a beautiful purple topping that has soaked down into the crumb, as if the whole thing has been drenched wantonly in ink.

I made a few changes to Signe's recipe, using a sponge recipe that I came up with myself and always use in upside-down cakes, mainly because it uses a lot less butter than standard recipes but still tastes incredible, therefore I can justify eating more cake. (Right?) However, it actually relates pretty closely to her original, just with fewer eggs and less butter and sugar. I added ground almonds to my cake mixture, as she does, for a light texture and to help give a moist crumb. I also used spelt flour, as she suggests, because I think it lends a lovely nutty texture to the finished cake, which is a great contrast with the sweet, vibrant fruit.

This emerged from the oven everything I hoped it to be. The crumb has a really lovely mellow flavour to it, from the use of yoghurt in the sponge and from the almonds and hint of vanilla. It tastes robust, somehow, because of the spelt flour - subtly nutty, with a hint of biscuit about it. It has the perfect light, crumbly texture. The blueberries burst and drench the cake in their sweet juices, lightly perfumed by the elderflower cordial, giving a delicious contrast in both texture and flavour. Rich, earthy cake, and juicy, sweet berries.

Above all, I just love the look of this cake. It's so vibrant and joyful; just the thing to perk up a somewhat lacklustre British summer. The berries glisten in a jewel-like fashion; dark, inky and mysterious. Fresh from the oven, it is exquisite with a cup of tea in the afternoon - it's substantial enough to raise your energy levels and fill that sad gap between lunch and dinner, and it's not too sugary or sweet so still feels vaguely nutritious. It's also delicious served warm with ice cream for dessert.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I ate half of this entire cake in one day. That's how good it is.

Blueberry and elderflower upside-down cake (serves 6-8):

• 200g blueberries
• 50ml elderflower cordial
• 50g soft butter
• 2 eggs
• 150g caster sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 160g spelt flour
• 40g ground almonds
• A pinch of salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 200ml plain yoghurt

Grease an 18-22cm springform cake tin with butter (I used an 18cm tin, but a 20/22cm tin would also work fine, it will just give you a shallower cake). Tightly wrap a piece of foil around the outside edge of the tin to prevent any juices escaping. Scatter the blueberries over the base and pour over the elderflower cordial. Toss them together and leave them to soak.

Pre-heat the oven to 170C/160C fan oven. Put an oven tray under the shelf you'll be baking the cake on, just in case some of those lovely purple juices do escape.

Mix together the butter and caster sugar in a large bowl using an electric whisk until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Sift in the flour, baking powder and ground almonds then add the salt and vanilla. Fold in until you get a stiff dough, then mix in the yoghurt to form a soft batter.

Ensure the blueberries are arranged in a fairly even layer over the bottom of the tin, then top with the cake mixture. Bake in the oven for 40-60 minutes (a smaller tin will mean a thicker cake, which will mean longer in the oven) - it's ready when a skewer comes out clean, or when the top springs back when pressed and isn't wobbly inside.

Leave to cool for five minutes in the tin, then run a knife around the outside of the cake. Open the side of the springform tin, then put a plate over the top. Carefully invert the cake and remove the base layer of the tin to reveal gorgeous moist inky berries. Serve warm, with a cup of tea or some ice cream.