Apple puree is a very versatile thing to have in your kitchen. Made by simmering peeled, cored, chopped cooking apples with a little water until they turn to mush, and then blending to a pale green foamy puree with a silky texture, it has a multitude of uses in cooking. You can add a little lemon juice and a pinch of sugar and turn it into a tangy accompaniment to roast pork. You could mix it with a little maple syrup and drizzle it over ice cream. You can use it, mixed with honey, cinnamon and vanilla, to coat muesli mix before baking to make homemade granola. You can cook it down to form a dark, thick spread that Americans call ‘apple butter’, which is delicious on toast. And you can also use it to make cakes.
Read morePear, cocoa, hazelnut and raspberry baked oatmeal
For me, mornings are the worst part of winter. I normally count myself as a guaranteed lark, reveling in the early hours of the day, but those early hours in the colder months of the year barely deserve the label ‘morning’. Mornings mean sunshine, beams streaming through the window and the promise of productivity and good things to come. Mornings don’t mean opening your eyes in darkness; the hazy, nauseating orange glow of streetlamps replacing real rays; the rasp of cold, clammy air against your skin as you tentatively reach an arm outside the duvet to check the time and remind yourself that no, it isn’t a mistake, it genuinely is time to get up despite the dark and the cold and the feeling that you might be turning into a hibernating mammal. Mornings shouldn’t mean having to shiveringly shroud yourself in a dressing gown to make the briefest of journeys between bedroom and bathroom, or turning all the lights on in the kitchen just so you can find the all-important switch on the kettle.
Read moreQuinoa salad with blueberries, toasted pecans and roast goose
There are some fruits that people are, generally speaking, fairly comfortable encountering in a savoury dish. Few people would bat an eyelid at a sliver of apple turning up alongside their roast pork, either in sauce form or maybe – outré prospect as it is – in thick wedges, roasted alongside the meat to soak up its delicious juices. Although a subject of mockery, ham and pineapple is a pretty established combination by now, whether it’s performing the ludicrous feat of turning your margherita into a ‘tropicana’, or in the form of a lurid golden ring of fruity goodness perched atop a fat pink slab of salty gammon.
Read moreFive things I love this week #8
1. Making my own marmalade.
I grew up around this process; my mum used to make her own every year, but since it started gathering dust in the larder because no one in our family eats toast any more, she has sadly stopped. I decided to pick up the orange baton and initiate myself in the mysterious world of the magical seville after spotting crates of them at the market a couple of weeks ago. I've made twenty jars since then, trying two different recipes. The first was a Waitrose recipe that infuses the marmalade with herbs - I used bay and rosemary. The oranges are simmered whole in water until totally soft, then the flesh scooped out and the peel shredded before the whole lot is simmered again with sugar until it sets. This is pretty easy and can be made in an evening, although I didn't slice the peel finely enough so it was chunkier than I'd have liked. The herb flavour didn't come through as much as I'd like, so I might use more rosemary next time, as it's so good with oranges.
Read moreSeared tuna steak with Asian-style persimmon and avocado salad
Few people seem to know what to do with a persimmon. In fact, most people I know have never encountered them before. They’ll either hear me mention one and say ‘what’s that?’, or they’ll glance over at it in the fruit bowl and look confused. I can kind of understand why: persimmons do resemble large, squat orange tomatoes, so seeing them nestled there amongst the bananas, apples and pears might seem a little odd (even though the tomato is, of course, technically a fruit). I explain the unique qualities of this fine fruit, tell them how good it is in a variety of dishes…and then of course they say ‘Oh right’ and promptly forget, assuming this is another of my mad fruit whims to be humoured and then quickly disregarded.
Read moreHow to turn a bird into dinner
When people ask me what my favourite thing about food is, I have an instant answer. Cheese, I say. (No not really). What I love most about food, and increasingly notice the more I indulge and explore my passion for this most fundamental of human drives, is that it's a brilliant social tool. Food can bring even the most unlikely people together. I first became aware of this when I spent two years in the Oxford University Royal Naval Unit during my undergraduate degree. Among the many arduous tasks this involved - sailing warships, trying to cook in a metre-wide sea-tossed kitchen while holding a sick bag to your mouth, shoe polishing, cleaning the ship's toilets, the unpleasant itch of mass-produced uniform, swabbing frozen decks without gloves in the middle of January - was the requirement to attend a fair few fancy dinners with various important naval personnel (OK, so not that arduous, really...until I tell you that I had to both wear and therefore learn how to tie a bow tie). Oh good, I thought. Small talk. My favourite.
Read moreFestive apple jelly
The word ‘jelly’ fills me with a little bit of horror. Firstly, it conjures up images of lurid children’s birthday party food, weirdly fluorescent transparent goo in odd shapes that wobbles under the pressure of a spoon or a fat youthful finger. I’ve never liked jelly or even tried it, as I recall; I think I’m afraid of the strange way it would feel in my mouth, not solid but not quite liquid either, trampolining oddly against the teeth. I have an irrational aversion to the stuff.
Read moreApple, cinnamon and sultana hazelnut crumble cake
Baking, in our culture, is so often inextricably connected with love. Family memories and relations are shaped around food; some of our fondest recollections of our mothers and grandmothers are perfumed by the heady scent of a baking pie or cake. Missing the closeness of home and the familiarity of domesticity is frequently couched in terms of our longing for a particular dish, and even parental ineptitude in the kitchen is usually recalled with wry affection. Childhood friendships are formed and dissolved over the sharing of cake and other baked goods: I still remember once refusing to speak to my best friend for a week because she stole my lunchtime flapjack and ate it. We bake cakes, bread, brownies to cheer up our loved ones or as a token of our affection; the humble combination of flour, butter and sugar has become fetishized in our culture to such an extent that we apparently believe there are few gifts more redolent of love than a homemade baked good.
Read moreBacon-wrapped pheasant with gin and quince gravy
Of all the preparation that goes into cooking a meal, there are some tasks that I enjoy more than others. Preparing food is often seen as a chore, particularly when compared with the relative pleasure of eating it, but I think any keen cook will agree with me that actually, when you really enjoy the process of working with food, you learn to relish some of the simplest kitchen tasks. Separating an egg, for example - there's something quite satisfying about rocking the golden globule of yolk from shell to shell, allowing the viscous white to trickle through your fingers into the bowl beneath. Rubbing butter into flour for a crumble, sending up delicious waves of buttery scent that hint at the promise of golden crumb forty minutes later. Melting chocolate over a pan of simmering water, watching as those dark, matt cubes collapse into a thick, glossy silken mass. Blitzing spice pastes in a little blender, watching a tangled mass of disparate ingredients harmonise into a powerfully aromatic paste of fragrant flavour.
Read moreFavourite food moments of 2013
The end of the year is a time for reflection. Nostalgia. Thoughtful musings about life, progress, achievements, goals, regrets. Vague notions of self-improvement and self-denial. Bittersweet pangs and spirited hopes. Tears. Smiles. Thinking through your emotions, considering your true self.
But, luckily, this is a food blog. This is the sort of place where I post a photo of some meat or a cake and say 'omg yum, best thing ever to go in my mouth', occasionally interspersed with hilarious anecdotes about my teenage self or mildly homicidal rants about slow people. This is not a place for the kind of sentimental rubbish we might normally associate with the year drawing to a close. PHEW, right?
Instead, I thought I would commemorate the end of 2013 with a brief recollection of my favourite food-related moments, and some nice pictures. Can't say fairer than that, I hope.
Read moreCaramelised bananas with toasted coconut
While I usually deplore the ‘food as fuel’ mentality, the mindless consumption of edible goods simply as an aid to increased productivity regardless of their nature, I have to say that I do sometimes treat the poor banana with such an attitude. Wolfed down between coming home from work and heading to the gym, practically inhaled as a pre-swim morning snack or gulped greedily every time I feel that familiar blood sugar slump, I rarely pay much attention to this humble fruit, carelessly exploiting it for its filling, sugar-rich, workout-boosting nature and ease of eating.
Read moreMalaysian-style chicken curry with pineapple
There are two things I absolutely must do whenever I go travelling to a new place. Number one is to take cooking lessons from the locals. All the better if this takes place in gorgeous open-air surroundings by a Vietnamese river amidst gardens of fresh lemongrass and Thai basil and a swimming pool for when the exertion of cooking all gets too much, as I was once lucky enough to experience in Hoi An, but any form of cooking lesson is hugely exciting for me, even if it’s just a street food seller taking the time to demonstrate to me how they make their delicious wares. If they let me eat said wares along the way, even better.
Read moreLove thy neighbour: apple turnovers
When I was about fourteen, I went to a cookery evening class at one of the local secondary schools. I can’t remember if my mother decided to enroll me for this or if it was voluntary, but as I enjoyed it quite a lot I suspect the latter. You’re probably waiting to hear that this was an inspirational turning point in my life, that it inspired my subsequent love of food and all things culinary, that those happy evenings still stay with me, recalled in a nostalgic haze, credited with the establishment of my life’s passion.
Read morePumpkin crêpes with caramelised apples and pecans
Everything turns orange in the world of food media around this time of year. You can’t look at a recipe without finding that pumpkin has been sneaked in there somewhere. Sweet or savoury, breakfast or dinner, between the months of September and December it’s almost guaranteed to contain the golden vegetable, especially if it’s come from anywhere near America (in which case it will almost definitely also include cinnamon).
Read moreRhubarb, strawberry and Cornish gin cobbler
There’s an obvious answer to the question ‘Why don’t people cook with gin much?’
The answer is, of course, thus: because why on earth would you want to cook with gin when instead you could do all of the following things with it, preferably in the following order:
1. Admire beautiful simplicity of bottle of gin.
2. Feel small thrill of excitement at the promise contained within said bottle’s glassy depths
3. Wonder if it is the right time of day to drink gin
Read moreMango, coconut and ginger cereal bars
I’ve had a box of cereal bars in my cupboard for over six months. It was a box of six when I bought it; six months on, five remain. The other day I looked at the sell-by date and had to throw them out, as they’d expired two months ago. Why had I purchased a box of cereal bars and only eaten one? The answer lies not, as you may think, in simple forgetfulness, or a discovered dislike for the variety I had purchased.
Read moreApple and quince crumble with damson ice cream
Damsons are a high maintenance love affair. You can’t just coast with damsons, putting in minimal effort for a lot of reward, like you can with a strawberry, perhaps, or a pear – all you need with these easy goers is, at most, a knife. They’re not a fruit to be popped carelessly into the mouth while reading the morning newspaper, or something to munch as a snack on the go. They’re not something you can half-heartedly throw into a cake batter for a sweet and sticky result, or toss into the smoothie maker for an afternoon pick-me-up.
Read moreGoose breast with honeyed figs; potato and celeriac cake
I have a secret. You can't tell anyone, because I've spent the last four weeks moping around in huge jumpers moaning about how cold and rubbish England is compared to Asia, rolling my eyes every time I see grey skies (so my eyes have basically taken up permanent residence in the back of my head, then) and huffing every time anyone seems pleased to live in this ridiculous country. I'd hate to be inconsistent. But...and I can barely bring myself to admit it...tonight I actually found myself enjoying the English autumn.
Read moreCrab apples roasted in sweet chai tea
There are some fruits that just provoke a standard, knee-jerk response in the kitchen. Glut of apples? Make apple pie. Lots of bananas? Banana bread. Been too enthusiastic with the pick-your-own strawberries? Jam, of course. Oranges mean marmalade, and blueberries pancakes. Rhubarb equals crumble. When my supervisor told me she had a surplus of crab apples, and needed recipe suggestions, her only stipulation was “Don’t say jelly.”
Read moreBali banana pancakes
The moments you remember most fondly from travelling are often not quite those you’d expect to recall or to take such a place in your heart. I have many wonderful memories from my recent trip to south east Asia: spotting an orang utan in the wild in the heart of the Borneo jungle; immersing myself in the sights, sounds and scents of one of Penang’s biggest hawker markets; snorkelling in turquoise waters off the coast of Sabah; walking through lush rice terraces in Java surrounded by papaya trees. And yet one of the moments I remember best, and that fills me most with a tranquil sense of happiness, is one that is comparatively trivial.
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