Antonia Eats

Lunch

2012-01-10T14:14:00.001Z

You could do worse than pop into Brindisa London Bridge for a quick lunch. Even without Pisarro in the kitchen the quality is still good. A lovely dish of baby artichokes sautéed with onions, nuggets of crisp Serrano ham and topped with a black olive tapenade and chopped chives was a deliciously luxurious treat for an otherwise mundane Tuesday!

A pair of poussin

2012-01-08T22:40:00.000Z

Here are two recipes for poussin which are fun to do, if slightly unusual in technique. The results are definitely worth it. To be even weirder I've listed quantities for cooking just one poussin with each method, mainly because this is the way I experimented with them first. I did also salt bake six poussins in the oven, which worked very well. Just scale up the quantities for each bird. I found I only needed 3 kg of rock salt for the six poussins. Likewise use the peppercorn powder sparingly and don't feel you have to cover the bird - give it a good rub all over and that will be fine.

The overnight hanging is to dry out the skin a much as possible, so that it crisps up beautifully in its salty crust. I used some string and looped it a couple times around each wing before tying it around our hanging clothes rail. It was just high enough to be safe from our hungry cats, but low enough to give Ro a fright when he came home from work. If you are short on time you could even position a fan on a low setting in front of the bird, to help speed up the air drying process.

The hot smoked poussin idea came out of reading too many smoky barbecued ribs recipes and wanting to try out a relatively new gadget. Last summer we treated ourselves to a Cobb oven, to take to festivals with the promise of hot bacon sandwiches on cold, damp and hungover camping days. I couldn't resist also getting the 'smoker attachment' - basically a round cast iron box that you put wood chips into and place over the hot coals so they heat up and produce whatever sweet smelling smoke you have chosen. Smoking a poussin seemed a relatively easy way of breaking in the new equipment. And with what fantastic results! Next time I think I'll try a whole chicken, maybe jointed into legs, thighs and breasts...

Sichuan salt baked poussin

a fat little poussin
a teaspoon of Sichuan peppercorns
a teaspoon of black peppercorns
two teaspoons of shaoxing wine (sherry or white wine will also do fine)
about 1 to 1.5kg of coarse rock salt
two tablespoons of ginger or young galangal, very finely minced
three tablespoons of spring onions, white and pale green parts only also finely minced
two teaspoons of sea salt
a tablespoon of groundnut oil

Combine the Sichuan and black peppercorns in a dry frying pan together over a low flame. Keep an eye on the pan and shake it occasionally, making sure the spices don’t burn. Gently toast the peppercorns until they give off a lovely aroma, then take them off the heat and grind them up in a spice grinder or with a pestle and mortar.

While the spices cook wash the poussin, pull out any remaining bits of feather, trim off any fat still clinging to the skin around the cavity and pat dry with kitchen paper. Rub the bird with the wine and then the peppercorn powder. Hang the bird up in a cool dry place overnight.

The next day, ready your wok with all of the rock salt in it and no oil. Make a hole in the salt and place the poussin in breast side down. Pile the rest of the salt over and around the bird, so that most of the bird is completely covered and none of it is directly touching the wok.

Place the wok over a high flame for 20 minutes, covered. Turn the bird over, cover again and heat for another 20 minutes. This time don’t worry about piling up the salt or anything.

If you don’t have a wok you can put the poussin in a high sided baking tray and bake them in a preheated oven at 230 degrees Celsius.

While the poussin is cooking you can make the dipping sauce. Mix together the minced ginger, spring onions and the salt. Heat the groundnut oil in a tiny saucepan or by holding a ladle over a flame until the oil is smoking hot. Pour the oil over the ginger mixture – it will sizzle and smell delicious. Give the sauce a good mix and allow it to cool to room temperature.

Your poussin should be done after 40 minutes, but if in doubt stick a skewer into the thickest part of the leg and press a spoon against the leg until juices run out. They should be clear but if they are pink or red cook the bird for a few minutes more. Put the bird on a carving board and dust off any remaining clumps of rock salt. Let it rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

To serve, pull off the legs and using a sharp knife take off the two breasts and slice them into bite sized morsels. Dunk the poussin pieces in lots of gingery, oniony sauce and eat while the skin is still salty and crisp.

Mesquite hot smoked poussin

a fat little poussin
a dried chipotle pepper
a small shallot
a tablespoon of cider vinegar
half a tin of chopped tomatoes
a clove of garlic, peeled and sliced
two teaspoons of honey
a pinch of fresh or dried thyme
ground black pepper and sea salt

Soften the chipotle pepper in a little hot water for half an hour, then combine it with the shallot, cider vinegar and tomatoes in a small saucepan and gently simmer for another half an hour or so until the pepper is soft and the tomatoes have melted into a thickish paste. Mash everything together with a fork and mix in the garlic, honey, thyme, salt and black pepper. Taste the mixture – it should be smoky, sweet and spicy. Allow the marinade to cool.

Put the poussin in a zip lock bag, add the marinade and close the bag, keeping as much air out as possible. Squeeze and squelch the bird so it is covered in smoky sauce, then leave it in the fridge overnight, turning it over once or twice if you remember.

The next day set up your hot smoker with wood chips of your choice. Remove the poussin from the marinade and smoke it for 30 to 40 mins, depending on the heat of your smoker. Check if it is done with a skewer into the thickest part of the thigh as above.

Thursday lunch

2012-01-05T12:49:00.001Z

It's cold, windy, grey and miserable. So I'm having fried tripe with homemade ketchup for lunch.

Long live St John Restaurant.

Savoury pork ribs

2011-12-14T17:00:00.000Z

Ribs are one of the best antidotes to the cold weather outside and a thrifty way to indulge oneself during these double dip disaster days. My only gripe in the past has been how long it takes to prepare them if you intend to go the whole hog with a 24 hour marinade and a long, slow roast to tease the flesh gently from each bone. While I am a sucker for experimenting with recipes that have ninety nine steps, some days you just want to come home, fill your belly and dive under a duvet.

Hello Quick Ribs. Perhaps not quite the same as 48 Hour Ribs, but still pretty damn good. These are delicious on their own - hot, spicy and juicy. The vinegar and lime add a fruity sourness to cut through the rich, fatty meat, while sweet and savoury flavours are punctuated with smokey, almost bitter nuggets of darkened garlic. Dipped into the sauce they become an epiphany of pig and Asian flavours.

a small rack of pork ribs
a good sprinkle of cinnamon, paprika, sumac and cayenne pepper
four garlic cloves, roughly chopped
two tablespoons of soy sauce
two tablespoons of rice vinegar
the juice of a lime
half a tablespoon of palm sugar
sea salt ground black pepper
olive or rapeseed oil

Wash the rib rack and lay it meaty side down. Season this side with salt and pepper and then turn the rack over and place it on a sheet of foil, large enough to enclose the rack. Evenly cover the meat with the rest of the marinade ingredients, before sealing the foil tightly around the ribs. Put the package in the oven for 45 minutes, before opening up the foil and allowing the garlic to caramelise
And the sauce to reduce to a spicy sweet/sour stickiness.

Crabshakk, Glasgow

2011-11-29T20:39:00.007Z

On a blustery November evening splattered with hard pellets of rain, heaven is a place called Crabshakk.

Arriving windswept and forlorn, all thoughts of the unrelenting Northern chill were banished with the arrival of bisque.

I was told that lobster, langoustine and crab shells are slow roasted to produce a caramel-like marine marmite that is the basis of this deep, ruddy brown soup, enriched with tomatoes and vegetable stock. Wafer thin slices of crisp baguette also arrived alongside a pot of garlicky aioli, for dunking and floating. And like treasure at the bottom of the ocean the sweetest nuggets of lobster meat lay waiting to be unearthed. It was a cockle warming revival after a long cold day, and a magnificent start to dinner.

Next came delicate little white and brown meat crab cakes spiked with a little chilli and parsley, bound with mayonnaise and a sprinkling of panko crumbs, which seemed to disappear to form the crisp pan fried crust.

Finally, a dish of scallops and their roe, seared and served bubbling in a bath of anchovy butter with lemon and bread to dress and mop.

If you are ever in Glasgow any day except Monday (all good restaurants have to close sometime) try to go.

Crabshakk
1114 Argyle Street, Finneston, Glasgow G3 8TD

Romantic romanesco

2011-11-21T17:56:00.001Z

This alien looking vegetable a joy to photograph, but even more importantly it is absolutely delicious. Several years ago I first saw these trifid-esque brassicas in New York at the Union Square farmers market. Their delicate, pale green spirals caught my attention and started an unrequited love affair. I say unrequited because the things are so darn hard to find here in the UK! I can't wait to have a go at growing my own.

For the mathematicians or the trance kids among us romanesco is fascinating because the vegetable actually approximates a natural fractal. Each of the 'cones' are arranged in a classic logarithmic spiral and each 'cone' itself is composed on smaller buds arranged in the same formation. Like galaxies, hurricanes and nautilus shells, the romanesco's spiraling formation is really quite beautiful to look at. I was not entirely surprised when I found jewellery made from romanesco casts on display at the Collect exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery earlier this year.

My favourite way to eat romanesco is one of the simplest. Try to find a hard, sharp pecorino cheese, ideally a pecorino Sardo, but a creamier pecorino Toscano will still be delicious.

a romanesco
pecorino cheese
half a lemon
a really good quality extra virgin olive oil
sea salt flakes and black pepper

Bring a small pan of water to the boil. While you wait, break off individual cones from the romanesco and then slice them quite thinly from top to bottom. I like making lots of weird yet lovely shapes and leaving some of the tips whole so they look like little trees in profile.

When the water is boiling, throw in a couple good pinches of salt and then add the slices of romanesco. Cover the pan and keep the heat high. As soon as you can hear the water coming to the boil again immediately take it off the heat and drain under cold running water to stop further cooking. You could be super professional and dunk the drained slices into a bowl of iced water, but a cold tap will also do fine.

Scatter the romanesco over a large wide plate and squeeze lemon juice all over. Drizzle liberally with olive oil. Top everything off with shavings of pecorino cheese. You can use a vegetable peeler to peel off thin shavings of cheese, or just grate it finely with a microplane.

Season with salt and pepper and tuck in, probably with your fingers.

Prawn and pork sesame cakes

2011-11-15T22:38:00.000Z

When its cold and wet outside I feel like there are two very clear, very different options for what to eat. Either it's some serious comfort food, a good book, and a warm, enveloping duvet, or it has to be something with a good kick of chilli heat to drive the damp chill out of my bones. In the deepest darkest winters in New York I used to make a bowl of rice noodles each morning with coriander, bean sprouts and steaming hot beef broth, piled high with sliced bird's eye chillies. This was rocket fuel for the trip from my little downtown studio flat to the relative warmth of the subway and finally the office. Here in London the cold seems less bitter, but somehow wetter and I find adding something fried and crispy to the chilli mix is the perfect remedy.

200g raw shelled prawns
60g streaky unsmoked bacon, the fattier the better
two small shallots
two tablespoons of dried shrimp
one or two small bird's eye chillies
a pinch of flaked dried chilli
a tablespoon of fish sauce
plenty of ground white pepper
black and white sesame seeds
coriander leaves, to garnish

If you have a food processor, blend together all of the ingredients except the prawns and sesame seeds. Mince the prawns by hand (so they end up with a slightly coarser texture than everything else) and then mix well with the processed paste.

Have a bowl of water handy to dip your hands into every now and then. Take a small handful of the paste and roll it into a vague ball shape before pressing them into small, two-bite sized cakes. The water helps stop the mix from sticking to your hands. Ready a bowl with a shallow layer of the black and white sesame seeds. Heat a frying pan with about a centimetre of oil but don't let it smoke. Take a little cake, pop it on the sesame seeds and then add to the oil seed side down. It should sizzle gently, if not, turn up/down the heat. Continue with the rest of the cakes and fry each for a minute or two on each side until deep golden brown and beginning to crisp at the edges.

Drain the cakes on some kitchen roll before them piling onto a plate and scatter over some coriander leaves. Serve with the spicy lemongrass dipping sauce below.

Spicy lemongrass dipping sauce

You may decide to tone up or down the amount of chilli and chilli oil in this recipe depending on your taste. I find mine change with my mood and the weather, so I take a tiny lick of a sliced chilli and decide then how much to add.

three cloves of garlic, very finely chopped
a stalk of lemongrass, finely sliced and quickly chopped
the juice from a lemon
50ml rice wine vinegar
a tablespoon of fish sauce
two small bird's eye chillies, thinly sliced
a tablespoon of chilli oil, the Chinese kind with dark roasted chilli flakes
a tablespoon of palm sugar
two tablespoons of water
a good handful each of chopped parsley and either coriander or mint
ground black pepper

Mix together all the ingredients and taste, adding more palm sugar, water, chilli, lemon or anything else that you feel needs more representation in the sauce. It should taste additively sweet, tangy, hot and salty.

Jacob Kennedy’s guinea fowl cacciatore in wine and vinegar abruzzo

2011-10-26T22:13:00.008+01:00

This is not my recipe. However, in the spirit of this being a collection of recipes I want to remember because they are brilliant and because I want to use them time and time again, I am adding this. I hope Jacob Kennedy doesn’t mind the plagiarism. Well actually its not since I am attributing all creative credit to him. I hope whoever reads this may forgive the seeming lack of inspiration that apparently led me to post someone else’s recipes.

I can’t help thinking that all recipes are really someone else’s, in some form or another. I am sure that like scientists, cooks too may will have their 'Eureka' moments, but how many recipes are the result of reading bits and pieces from different places, wanting to try something you’ve seen or read or heard about, or wanting to recreate a memory of a wonderful dish? I tasted a watermelon, feta and mint salad once and it was so delicious I now make it every summer. My friend Tony makes it too and tells his friends it's his recipe. Originally I felt indignant – how dare he steal my creative genius?! But then, oh wait, I ‘stole’ it from someone else. And actually he made the damn dish himself, so it was his dish, his doing.

Recipes should be more like helpful guidance rather that dictatorial instruction. A way of doing things that worked for the author. If you like the author then perhaps the other ways he/she does things might be helpful to you too. Perhaps it is just that you happen to have the same sized hands and so your pinch is the same as their pinch. Or the words they write translate in the same way into your head as they do in theirs. That’s what I think should be called a good recipe. The only reason that I care who wrote it is in case I can find more good recipes from the same source. To this end territorial approaches to recipe writing seem rather futile.

What I really like about this recipe is the idea about adding vinegar to ‘lift’ the dense earthiness associated with most slow cooked casseroles, and using white wine instead of red, again to the same effect. I would never have thought about adding vinegar. Funnily I’ve been thinking more about vinegar recently, and verjus, citrus and other acids...Rene Redzepi seasons with salt and acid, rather than salt and pepper, and I think I am beginning to see why. But that’s another post...

Serves 3-4 as a main course

a guinea fowl, jointed into similar sized and large pieces, separating out the wings and other bony bird bits (I’ve also used pheasant which was delicious)
6 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
a medium sized onion, cut into small dice (it does not need to be to fine, this is a rustic dish)
a carrot, diced to the same size as the onion
two bay leaves
a couple tablespoons of plain flour (you can omit this, but it does help to thicken the sauce)
a couple of celery stalks, diced to the same size as the onion (you want roughly equal amounts of onion, carrot and celery)
three cloves of garlic, sliced
a generous sprig of rosemary, with all the leaves picked off the tough branch
80ml of white wine vinegar
200ml of white wine (I used a light Soave)

First make your stock. Take the guinea fowl wings and other un-meaty bits such as the spine and any bony parts left over after you jointed the bird, put them in a saucepan with a tablespoon of the olive oil and brown over a medium to low heat. When the wings and bones smell tasty, add half only of the diced carrot and onion, sweat for a few minutes with the meat and then add the bay leaves and enough cold water to just cover everything. Turn the heat up to get the stock boiling and then allow it to reduce while you prepare the casserole.

Heat a heavy based pot over a medium heat for a few minutes. Meanwhile toss the jointed meat pieces in the flour. Add the rest of the oil (five tablespoons roughly) to the hot pan and add the floured meat pieces, along with some salt and pepper. The meat will stick to the pan. Keep the heat on medium and allow the meat to brown, it will then naturally release from the pan and you can turn it onto its other side. Take your time doing this - 10, 15 minutes even. If the meat darkens too quickly turn the heat down. The idea is to produce a lovely deep brown crust on the skin of the bird, and to release a rich roasted aroma. All that flavour will transfer to the finished casserole.

When the meat is a deep bronze colour and smells roasted and savoury, turn the heat down a bit and add the rest of the carrot and onion along with all the celery, garlic and rosemary. Add a bit more salt and sweat the vegetables until they soften and turn golden. Add the vinegar and the wine and scrap the bottomof the pan with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula to dissolve all the dark caramelly sediment into the wine and vinegar. Finally add your boiling stock, straining it through a sieve first. You should have enough stock to cover the meat, if not add a bit of hot water to make up the difference. Once you have just covered the meat stop pouring over stock and keep the rest aside.

Let the whole thing bubble gently for about an hour. You might want to taste the meat and make sure it doesn’t get too dry. The sauce should thicken to the consistency of double cream – add some stock if it thickens too much. Give the pan a good shake every now and then to emulsify the fat and juices in the sauce, and a final shake before you serve. The casserole is ready as soon as the slow cooked meat is tender.

A big pile of buttery mash is a lovely accompaniment. We also pan fried thick slices of fennel and quince in butter and olive oil with plenty of rosemary and thyme, adding a glass of cider when the vegetables were browned and allowing the liquid to reduce to a lovely glossy syrup.

Pretty Purslane

2011-07-30T18:56:00.002+01:00

On a recent trip to Borough Market I came across an old friend I haven’t seen since my New York days, where many happy hours were spent wandering around Union Square Greenmarket, marvelling at the abundance of colourful, locally grown produce - Purslane. A healthy bundle was selling for half the price of a handful of basil. It was my best purchase of the day.

I've often wondered why purslane is not more widely available here; in London it rarely appears on restaurant menus, despite the current trend for unusual leaves and foraged foods. Yet the plant is jam packed with vitamins and minerals, as well as a surprisingly high amount of Omega 3 fatty acids, more than any other leafy vegetable. Move over mackerel? Well not quite - oily fish have four times as much of the same fatty acids - but still impressive.

Common purslane was once a regular feature of medieval kitchen gardens, The earliest known salad recipe, written around 1390, calls for purslane, along with parsley, sage, onions, borage, fennel, cress and rosemary. These days it can still be found growing wild in the British Isles, although according to forager Miles Irving it may be relatively scarce due to a dislike of frost. In the right conditions, a cosy vegetable garden for instance, it grows like a weed. You can eat every bit of it - stalks, flowers, leaves and seeds.

Its emerald leaves are reminiscent of lambs lettuce, but these are juicy, almost fleshy, rather than paper thin. There’s a slight slimy texture to them, like okra, which disappears when licked with olive oil, blending into a rich mouthfeel. I think it tastes like a cross between spinach, sorrel and aloe vera. Every bite is juicy and crunchy, with a light astringency that feels cleansing. Eating lots can give you that furry sensation on the back of your teeth you get sometimes from eating spinach.

I love purslane simply tossed with some lively, fruity olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. It's great with a lovely bit of lamb, or fish, or a whole load of tomatoes, off the top of my head. We tossed a big handful into a pan sizzling with olive oil, garlic, chilli and just cooked prawns and it was delicious - half raw, half wilted and tart enough to replace the lemon juice we would normally squeeze over.

Keep an eye out for purslane for sale, or even growing in a garden near you. If you find any please let me know!

Wood ear, jellyfish and prosciutto salad

2010-09-18T01:46:00.006+01:00

My wonderful Mum sent me a care package from Hong Kong last week of dried wood ear mushrooms. You can actually buy these in most Chinese supermarkets but the ones she found have been ingeniously ‘shrunk-dried’ into tiny packages the size of a matchbox. Add hot water and hey presto, enough lovely mushrooms for two portions of the salad pictured above explodes out of seemingly nowhere!

It reminds me of those magic towels I was given as a child, where a compressed capsule the size of a ping pong ball would unfurl into a generously proportioned beach towel with a little watery encouragement. It was the same principle, though the results were not quite as delicious.

This exciting gift dovetailed with my discovery of jellyfish that is packed in whole unsliced pieces and preserved in brine. Having found other pre-packaged varieties of jellyfish rather disappointing (the jellyfish strands lacked texture and were accompanied by the chemically taste of artificial preservatives) this was a real find. Once opened, the jellyfish requires a good soaking in clean water for 3-5 hours, but the results are the best I have found so far in London.
The salad below is a celebration of all things crunchy, bouncy, crisp and clean, with a little ham to add a savoury undertone. In Hong Kong I would use wafer thin slices of Yunnan ham, but Italian prosciutto works well too.

Ingredients:
about 250g wood ear mushrooms, rehydrated in hot water, then strained
half this amount of jellyfish, sliced into strips about half a cm thick
a stick of celery from near the heart (not the tough outer bits) sliced as thinly as you can into strips the same size as the jellyfish
a tablespoon of light soy sauce
a teaspoon of sesame oil
two tablespoons of rice vinegar

two thin slices of prosciutto, sliced into the same small slivers
toasted white and black sesame seeds

sea salt

Give the wood ear mushrooms a good shake to remove any excess water, or dab lightly with kitchen roll. Slice the mushrooms roughly into easy to eat strips. Toss all the ingredients together except for sesame seeds, ham and salt, then cover and leave to chill in the fridge for a few hours at least.

When the salad is cool and crunchy, toss in the prosciutto and sesame seeds and check that the seasoning is to your liking. I usually add a sprinkling of salt to lift the flavours without overpowering them with too much soy sauce. The finished salad should be lightly sour, quietly nutty, and above all full of lively, tasty textures. Devour with forks, chopsticks or whatever comes to hand.

Steamed fish, Cantonese style

2010-09-06T12:35:00.003+01:00

I adore this dish. The ritual of making it reminds me of being a little girl growing up in Hong Kong. Every night Mum and I would have a Cantonese dinner together. This was always of a bowl of clear soup, a bowl of steamed rice, and various little dishes of steamed or stir fried vegetables and meats. The dishes would vary according to season and whim, but there was always a steamed fish. I forget all of the names, but pomfret, butterfish and garoupa featured, to name a few. As a child I mostly recognised them as them as 'big bone fish' or 'small bone fish', a characteristic that was directly related to my enjoyment due to my underdeveloped skills at separating meat from bone with chopsticks, teeth and tongue.

To this day my ability with chopsticks is still outstripped by my enthusiasm when it comes to fish that has just been taken out of the steamer and dressed with a glistening combination of oil and soy sauce. Left to my own devices I resort to a knife and fork to separate the flakes from the bones, before using a spoon to scoop up mouthfuls of fish together with sauce and softened shards of chilli, spring onion and ginger.

You can use any fish at all for this recipe, I love sea bream, sea bass or red mullet. Ask the fishmonger to trim the tail and fins, and clean the fish but leave it whole.

You will need a plate large enough for the fish to lie on and a steamer big enough to fit the plate. If you have a big wok with a lid all you need is a plate stand, a metal ring with legs, and you should be able to accommodate most sizes.

Ingredients:
any whole fish, cleaned and gutted
a couple of spring onions, cut crossways into 2 inch sections and then sliced lengthways into thin strips like matchsticks.
the same amount of ginger, peeled and cut into the same sized pieces as the spring onion
about half the amount of red chilli, again cut into the matchsticks

Sauce:
half a tablespoon of groundnut oil
a slice of ginger
a small shallot, peeled and lightly crushed
two teaspoons of shaoxing wine
a tablespoon of light soy sauce
two teaspoons of dark soy sauce
a teaspoon of sugar
a small pinch of pepper
a teaspoon of sesame oil

Give the fish a good rinse to remove any remaining scales and other less tasty bits like guts still clinging to the insides of the fish. Pat the fish dry with some kitchen paper and weigh it before placing it on a plate. If the fish has been in the fridge then give it some time to come to room temperature so it is not too cold when you steam it.

Combine the spring onion, ginger and chilli shreds and pile them on top of the fish, before gently lowering the plate into a steamer with boiling water. Steam the fish according to the following timings:

Round fish – one minute for every two ounces
Flat fish – one minute for every three ounces

While the fish steams make the sauce. Warm the oil in a small saucepan until the ginger begins to colour, then remove it and the shallot and discard. Take the saucepan off the heat and add the wine, soy sauces, sugar and pepper to the hot oil, stirring to dissolve. Taste the sauce; it should be salty and sweet. Add more soy sauce or sugar if you prefer. Add the sesame oil at the very end.

Be sure to time the steaming carefully and remove the fish at exactly the right time. When the fish is cooked take the plate out and tip it gently over the sink to get rid of the juices in the bottom. Heat the sauce on a high heat until it boils and then pour it all over the fish, which should sizzle deliciously.

Serve at once, either with chopsticks for authenticity or a fish knife and fork for greedy speed.

Cool cucumber soup

2010-08-23T14:22:00.004+01:00

Serves 4

8 cucumbers, peeled
a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, or half a lemon, squeezed
a small clove of garlic, crushed
a small white onion, sliced into rings
2 teaspoons of olive oil
sea salt and pepper

Split each cucumber vertically and use a teaspoon to scrape out all the seeds. Chop the remaining flesh into chunks and process to a coarse purée. Pour the whole lot into a saucepan and set over a low heat to bubble and reduce. If you don't have a processor you can just chop the chunks up a bit more and heat them in the saucepan like that - it will just take a little longer to break down. Give the cucumber purée a stir every now and then and check it is not burning. Taste it too - if it tastes grainy and crunchy then it needs more cooking. The cucumber should soften, smooth out and thicken up, this takes about 20 minutes of gentle heat with little bubbles blip-blip-blipping away.

When you think the cucumber is cooked enough, pour it into a blender with the raw onion rings and crushed garlic in the bottom. Add a pinch of salt and pulse then blend into a smooth consistency. If you have one of those blenders where you can take the top off while its blending, then do that and slowly drizzle in first the vinegar or lemon juice and then the olive oil. Taste the soup and adjust the seasoning. It should be a tiny bit more salty than you like as this will lessen as the soup cools. When you are happy with the taste pour the soup into a serving bowl and chill until cold.

To serve, pop an ice cube into each bowl for extra chill (or you could put the soup in the freezer until its just starting to freeze) and ladle over the soup. Scatter torn mint and basil leaves over and serve.

You could eat this with crusty bread, or put some little dishes with chopped chillis, toasted seeds, fried bacon bits or anything else you fancy on the table for people to help themselves.

Trattoria Montalbino

2010-08-21T16:14:00.005+01:00

Here's a few more photos of lunch...

Trattoria Montalbino

Via Trecento 72
50025 Montalbino
Italy

Cauliflower truffle cakes

2010-08-21T14:28:00.007+01:00

Every time we go to Trattoria Montalbino there is a great debate on the way over what we

will eat. Bistecca with truffles, or just porcini? Carpaccio with truffles instead? Yes if its hot. Maybe coniglio (rabbit) with truffles instead for a change. The one dish that is always ordered is a starter of little round cakes made from cauliflower, topped with shaved truffles.

At first sight this is an unlikely favourite. It remains this way until you bite into the crisp, lightly browned shell, inhale the heavenly scent of truffles, white or black depending on the season, and savour a mouthful of the hot fluffy interior, with its slightly grainy texture and earthy aroma.

We have endlessly argued over what the ingredients are, and finally today the proprietors gave in; not only did they give us the recipe, they gave us a whole bowlful of batter to take home.

Measurements to come, once we have finished the bowl of batter and survived food coma...

1 egg, beaten

Cauliflower purée

Béchamel sauce, made with flour, butter and milk

Truffle oil

Parmesan, grated

Sea salt and pepper

Dry breadcrumbs

Truffles, if you have them

Preheat an oven to 200 degrees Celsuis.

Whisk the cauliflower purée into the beaten egg until smooth. Then add the Béchamel and do the same. Add truffle oil and a sprinkling of grated Parmesan to taste. The dry breadcrumbs should be added last as they will soak up all the juice and product a batter with a thickish consistency.

Spoon dollops of batter into a buttered muffin tin, then bake for 10 minutes or so. The tops should be firm and lightly browned, with a springy texture when poked with a finger.

Turn out the cakes and let them allow enough to handle. Shave over your truffles and serve - eat immediately while they are still warm.

Sibilla's chilli jam

2010-08-21T14:21:00.003+01:00

We ate thin slippery slices of marzolino cheese - smooth, creamy but acidic enough to not taste heavy, with slices of marinated cucumber and a dab of chilli jam. Completely addictive.

Makes several jars

200g chilli peppers
100g peppers, any colour
600g sugar, half brown half white
600ml white wine vinegar

Split all of the peppers in half, remove the stalk, pith and seeds and then roughly chop the flesh. Coarsely purée the peppers, either in a processor or by hand. Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar over a low heat, add the pepper purée and simmer until it reaches a syrupy but still pourable consistency. This can take about 45 minutes. Pour the jam into sterilised jars and seal while still hot. The jam will thicken further while it cools.

Use this as a condiment to add sweet heat to almost anything, as a dip, a spread, a garnish...you could even have it on vanilla ice-cream!

Bats in the bell tower

2010-08-21T11:42:00.002+01:00

We are currently sharing our bedroom with two bats who look adorable in the day.

Apparently a single bat can eat up to 3000 mosquitos in one night.

Why am I still getting bitten??

Marinated cucumbers

2010-08-21T10:26:00.012+01:00

I’m back in Tuscany, celebrating a glut of cucumbers and getting reacquainted with flavours that took a backseat during the winter months. Eating here feels like emerging from some kind of taste-hibernation, remembering forgotten pleasures and rediscovering dishes as though meeting old friends. None of the artisan tomatoes from farmers markets in the height of summer in London tasted as richly delicious as the sun drenched examples from Sibilla’s garden. We feast on them every morning, sprinkled with a little red wine vinegar, torn basil and a splash of fruity olive oil. Yesterday there was creamy sheep’s milk ricotta from the dairy to go with our tomatoes. Sitting in the sunshine listening to cicadas I wondered why anyone would ever want to eat anything else.

We used home-grown Italian cucumbers with quite a tough, thick skin and spiky nubbins, so peeling is essential, however if you might decide not to peel yours if their skin is thinner.

Serves four as part of a summer's lunch

3 cucumbers, peeled and sliced into rounds about as thick as a pound coin (roughly half a cm)
One medium sized white onion, peeled and sliced into rings as thick as the cucumber
A generous teaspoon of sea salt
Half a teaspoon of sugar
A small clove of garlic, crushed
Good quality white wine vinegar
Fresh basil and mint
Extra virgin olive oil

Black pepper

Combine the cucumbers and onion rings in a bowl large enough to let you toss and mix around your ingredients. Add the salt and sugar and mix everything up. Taste a piece of cucumber – it should taste a tiny bit too salty. If not add a bit more salt. Add the garlic, toss again, then pour over enough white wine vinegar to just about cover the cucumber. The salt will draw moisture out of the cucumbers and together with the vinegar this will be your marinade.

Cover the bowl with cling film and leave it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, just before you serve the dish, tear up a small handful of basil and mint leaves and scatter them over. Add a good splash of olive oil, grind over some black pepper and give the whole thing one last toss.

The cucumbers are lovely and refreshing eaten on their own, perhaps with a slice of cold roast pork and chilled glass of white wine. Or add them to chopped up tomatoes, and throw in some cubes of dry, stale bread for a more substantial panzanella-style salad.

Gentlemen Gourmets of London

2010-03-04T14:31:00.005Z

My husband-to-be is in the newspaper today! This was written after an evening with Charles Campion, a photographer and lots of boys at our house a few Fridays ago.

Gentlemen, take your places for a domestic feast

Charles Campion
04.03.10

I first met the Gentlemen Gourmets of London when researching my latest book, Eat Up! Britons are unfairly pigeon-holed as bad cooks but actually good home cooking is alive and well. Over 18 months, I travelled the country, dining in the homes of strangers — civilians all, no professional chefs.

The Gentlemen Gourmets, or GGoL, are an excellent example of the breed: good amateur cooks who are fascinated by and passionate about cooking. Every two months, they hold dinners at each other's houses. The head chef, creator of the previous winning dish, chooses the theme for the next meal and nominates five members, who cook a course each. At the end everyone votes for their favourite course and, with due ceremony, the grubby chef's jacket passes to the victor.

TV programmes like Come Dine With Me may have established the concept of the dinner party as a competitive sport but the GGoL are much more to do with jollity than fancy presentation. On the evening I am their guest, previous winner James Montgomery has chosen a Six Nations-themed menu.

“The first GGoL evening was held a couple of years ago and we got it hopelessly wrong,” says Montgomery. “Everyone served large helpings of filling food and we were all stuffed long before pudding.” Ronan Cantwell adds: “More often than not the pudding course wins simply because everyone likes a good pud. That gives crowd-pleasers like a decent chocolate cake an unfair advantage.” So saying, Cantwell has chosen a classic crowd-pleaser — an Irish rack of lamb — for his winning bid.

Adam Smith kicks off with ribollita, cavolo nero, good stock, cannellini and borlotti beans, tomatoes, carrot, a whiff of chilli; a lot of thyme is poured into an earthenware dish lined with wholemeal bread. This is a hearty Italian dish with adroit seasoning and good flavours.

Slightly soggy puff pastry over an almost redeemable rich mixture of leeks and bacon was a suitably squelchy starter from Ed Elias. The topping on Montgomery's English fish pie was inspired — a potato and celeriac mash with Parmesan. Cantwell's Irish lamb is perfectly cooked — pink and tender with crisp golden skin.

The accompanying jus, however, was salty due to over-reduction. Jonas Andersen's meticulous interpretation of crêpes suzette involved a sauce of orange juice and Grand Marnier plus some nibbed roast almonds.

I voted for the ribollita but once again pudding won and Andersen accepted the winner's jacket.

All the GGoL are able to cook, but what lifts their dishes out of the dreary dinner-party category is that they season food properly, so even the less successful dishes were a delight to eat. As Cantwell puts it: “Dishes that look nice do better but there is never any prissy stuff here.”

Eat Up! Seeking out the Best of British Home Cooking is published today by Kyle Cathie (£16.99).

See the original article here.

Jin Kichi

2010-02-26T00:37:00.008Z

mmmmm. Wow.

We just got back from Jin Kichi in Hampstead.

Tosaka, ogonori and wakame seaweed, in dainty piles, garnished with two thin slices of lemon.

The clean simple tasting dressing? White sesame seeds, ground to a paste, combined with rice vinegar, light soy sauce, salt, sugar, a little mirin, a bit of white miso and the all important - dashi.

Grilled skewers of ox tongue. Chewy, bouncy, succulently fat squares of beefy tongue, with edges charred just enough to give a crisp edge before biting into rich unctuousness. Food porn eat your heart out.

Fat, melting mini-slabs of toro (they feel like slabs on your tongue).

Chewy, even 'al dente' buckwheat noodles, served on a bamboo mat and eaten after being dunked in a savoury dashi and mirin based sauce, spiked with wasabi and spring onion if desired, and grated daikon radish available on request.

The owner hails from Hokkaido. All the staff were lovely.

mmmm...

Jin Kichi

http://www.jinkichi.com/

020 7794 6158 - you need to book.

The main reason for going to Copenhagen...Noma

2009-11-23T22:05:00.003Z

We started with a flurry of little treats.

A few biscuits topped with lardo and dried, tart blackcurrant powder.

A sandwich of thin toasted rye bread and crisp chicken skin with a smoked cheese and broad bean filling.

A pot filled with 'soil' (crumbled malt flour and beer toasted hazelnuts) and planted with baby radishes and turnips

And finally wavy slices of toast feathered with tiny herbs and flowers and dusted with dried apple cider vinegar powder.

That was just the beginning.

The 12 course dinner that followed was a spectacular celebration of pristine ingredients and unique preparations.

The most memorable dishes included -

Lobes of sweet, rich sea urchin harvested from icy Norwegian waters, scattered with frozen powdered dill and cream and spotted with balls of cucumber coated in cucumber ash.

Beef tartare, scraped from the fillet with a sharp knife, studded with grated horseradish and rye bread crumbs, topped with sharp wood sorrel leaves, to be picked up with fingers and dragged across powdered juniper berries and a tarragon herb cream.

And caramlised batons of salsify, cloaked in milk skin, nestled in inky black truffle sauce and topped with shaved truffles from Gotland.

Along with Arzak and El Bulli, definitely one of the best dinners we have been lucky enough to have so far.

noma

Strandgade 93
1401 Copenhagen K
Tel: +45 3296 3297
e-mail: noma@noma.dk

One reason why I love Copenhagen

2009-11-22T23:11:00.003Z

Where else in the world can you land and before you even set foot on local soil...

Order a hot dog, with all the trimmings. And a beer.

Welcome to Steff's Place, in Copenhagen airport's baggage reclaim hall.

These hot dogs were awesome after a tedious, delayed flight. The frankfurters are grilled until the skins blister and char a bit. Then the sausages are stuffed into buns that taste of nothing, so as not to interfere with the lashings of mustard, ketchup, sauerkraut and crunchy fried onion bits. We washed them down with a pint of pilsner, whilst idly keeping an eye on the carousel.

My mum loves hot dogs. A gaggle of well groomed Danish ladies tucking in next to us looked like they love hot dogs. The kids and their dads in the queue behind us looked like they loved their hot dogs too.

Every airport baggage reclaim should have a hot dog stand!

Squished squash soup

2009-11-15T15:04:00.013Z

The wonderful thing about squash is each type tastes noticeably different, from the creamy mild butternut to the denser, nuttier red onion and the rich, sweet kabocha. Its worth making a soup out of every variety you can get your hands on at least once, so it's a while before this recipe will start to get boring.

Serves 3-4

Ingredients:

roughly 800g cubed and peeled squash: butternut, kabocha, red onion or any others

a medium to small onion, chopped

olive oil

ground cinnamon

nutmeg

salt and pepper

Split your squash in half and scoop out all the seeds. Chop the rest into chunks, slicing off the skin as you go along, until you end up with pieces that are roughly similar and bite sized.

Place the onion and a pinch of salt into a puddle of olive oil in a saucepan, cover and set over a low heat. Let the onion sweat gently until it turns soft and translucent and then starts to colour and caramelise, this should take up to ten minutes or so.

Turn the heat up to high, add the squash, some salt and pepper and give it all a good stir. Pour over enough water to just cover the squash, cover the pan and bring to the boil. Let the squash bubble away for 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how much you have. You'll know its done when your cubes have melted into soft pulp.

Turn off the heat and blend everything into a soft, velvety consistency. Adjust the seasoning by adding little sprinkles of cinnamon and grated nutmeg to the hot soup, blending and tasting after each addition. Every squash is different and I find the amount of sweet cinnamon or fragrant nutmeg that I want varies each time so I prefer to add it at the end. Finish with freshly ground black pepper and more salt if needed.

I love eating this soup on its own in big steaming spoonfuls, then reheated in the following days and garnished with a dollop of crème fraîche, a scattering of paprika or cayenne powder and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Sardinian style cuttlefish stew

2009-11-15T13:00:00.001Z

This recipe was inspired by a beautiful baby octopus stew at Olivomare, one of my favourite restaurants. They specialise in Sardinian seafood - big bold flavours and perfectly cooked fish. Every time I visit I leave feeling euphoric.

Cuttlefish are one of seafood's unrecognised gems. They may look icky and covered in black ink at the fishmonger's, but you can get them cleaned - make sure to keep the tentacles! Gently simmered for an hour, cuttlefish is more tender than octopus, and tastier than squid.

This is one of those dishes that makes you sit back afterwards and just smile.

You can make shellfish stock easily from any shells - I used the leftover crayfish shells from our feast but prawns, crab, lobster if you've been lucky, or anything else will do fine. Just brown them in a saucepan with a large knob of butter until they smell delicious, pour over enough water to cover the shells and bring to the boil. I like to let the shells cool in the stock, then break them up with a wooden spoon and strain the whole lot through a colander and then a very fine metal sieve. Your stock will be a rich ochre colour and smell musky, like a concentrated shellfish bisque without any cream added.

Serves two for supper

Ingredients:

a small onion, finely chopped

a cuttlefish, cleaned by your friendly fishmonger, cut into large bite sized shapes

half a glass of white wine

about 500ml shellfish stock

a chilli, split in half

three tomatoes

a tablespoon of tomato purée

olive oil

lemon juice

flat-leafed parsley, roughly chopped

salt and pepper

First skin the tomatoes. Cut a cross in the base of each tomato. Keep the cuts as shallow as possible - you want to slice the skin but not the flesh. Bring a saucepan of water to boil, add the tomatoes and turn the heat down to very low. In about 30 seconds or a minute you'll see the skins start to peel away. Remove the tomatoes and put them into a bowl of cold water. You should be able to peel off their skins easily. Chop them coarsely and set aside.

Put the onion in a puddle of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot, cover and allow to soften gently over a low heat for five to ten minutes. Once the onions are translucent and soft, turn up the heat and add the cuttlefish along with some salt and pepper.

You want to sear the cuttlefish until it starts to smell fragrant and delicious, about five minutes or so. Then add the white wine, scrap the sediment from the bottom of the pan, and add the stock, tomatoes, chilli and tomato paste. Bring everything to the boil and simmer gently for an hour without a lid, allowing the sauce to reduce.

Finish the stew with a little lemon juice, just enough to make the cuttlefish sauce sparkle, and a scattering of chopped parsley.

Eat in big steaming bowls, with warm chewy crusty bread to mop up the juices.

Crayfish feast

2009-11-15T12:49:00.000Z

Ro and I spotted some live crayfish for sale at our local farmers market this weekend.

So we put them in a big pot with a bottle of pale ale and set the heat to 'high'.

When their shells turned red they were done. We tipped them into a big bowl, cracked their shells and ate them with salt and lemon.

Crayfish are sweet, tender and completely delicious.

Fruity fiery chilli sauce

2009-11-08T18:15:00.000Z

I am completely addicted to chilli sauce. Recently I made about a litre of the stuff and since then its featured in pretty much every dinner in some form. It's a brilliant marinade for spicy hot chicken wings, a dip for pizza crusts, a quick sauce for noodles, hell, I even had it on vanilla ice cream and it was awesome.

Making chilli sauce is simple enough, but the fun part is making it exactly how you like it. Whether it's fiery hot or mild, syrupy sweet or sour, a freshly made chilli sauce tastes bright and fruity, a world away from store bought jars. I'd recommend wearing rubber gloves when removing the seeds - not only do chillies stain your hands, but the compound that produces heat, capsaicin, lingers on your fingertips even after lots of hand washing. I found out the wrong way when I rubbed my eyes after making my first attempt at this recipe...

Ingredients:
500g fresh red chillies

a clove of garlic, crushed
an equal amount of ginger, peeled and grated
25ml of rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons of sesame oil
juice of 1 and a half lemons
1 tablespoon of sea salt

a few very hot chillies, like scotch bonnets (optional)

You'll need a food processor for this. You could maybe try using a stick blender - if you do let me know how it goes!

Slice the stems off the chillies, then split each one in half lengthways and remove all the seeds and white pith. Chop the chillies roughly and put them in a food processor with the rest of the ingredients, except for the very hot chillies if you are using them. Whizz everything into a pulp, then have a tiny taste. If the sauce is too mild for your liking start adding the scotch bonnets one by one. Mix thoroughly each time before tasting again, until you're happy with the result. Your chilli sauce should keep for a long time in the fridge.

Cobnuts

2009-10-07T14:48:00.009+01:00

Whoa, its been a while. September sped past in a haze of summer holidays and job interviews and suddenly it is officially Autumn. I can tell because the sky has become a low hanging ceiling of dense grey cloud for several days now, and the rain keeps coming, and coming.

On a better note this also marks the arrival of cobnuts. Cobnuts are to hazelnuts what Cox's Pippins are to apples - a cultivated variety. Young cobnuts have green shells and husks and taste almost milky, with a fresh acidity. These are the ones I like best, picked before they turn brown, when the nut dries and tastes more like the familiar hazelnut.

Crack open a bunch and toast them in a dry pan until they brown and smell inviting. Then drop in a small knob of butter to finish them with a sizzle. Tip the hot nuts into a bowl and sprinkle generously with sea salt. Eat them straight away while they are toasty hot. If you like, add some lemon juice and cayenne pepper to spice them up.

The best Kim Chi, at last

2009-08-21T12:35:00.007+01:00

After months of experimentation and kilos of cabbage eating, I finally have a kim chi recipe I am happy with. This probably sounds ridiculous, I mean, its kim chi, how hard can it be? Cabbage, chilli, garlic, ginger - mix it up and Bob's your uncle, right? Apparently with me, wrong.

With a vegetable as watery and bland as Chinese cabbage (really, its only redeeming quality is its crunch), a few flavourings go a long way, and for weeks I ended up with batches of Korean pickle that veered between having waaaay too much salt, sugar, chilli (creating 'Atomic Kim Chi'), ginger, garlic or any combination of these. You name it, I overdid it.

I have finally learned my lesson and realised that less is more, but the rate at which I am churning and fermenting kim chi at a rate is still being overstripped by how quickly I eat it. Want some crisps? Kim chi! Feeling peckish? Kim chi! Feel like breakfast? Kim chi! Hell, any time you feel like munching? Kim chi!!

My method is not the traditional way of preparing classic kim chi, but I think it suits modern kitchens as it is significantly less stinky than fermenting the cabbage whole in a cool dark place, with seasonings layered between each leaf. I'm no expert but I thought this was a pretty interesting round up of general kim chi related info.

Try to find Korean chilli flakes and fish sauce. You could substitue fresh or crushed dried chillies with no seeds, and Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, but the results won't be quite the same. I'm afraid I have no idea how to pronounce the names for the ingredients you need in Korean, but here's a picture - I showed a similar one to a nice lady in Korean supermarket and she was able to help.

You could leave out the daikon and/or the spring onions, but I think they both really add to the final flavour of the kim chi.

Ingredients:
1 large Chinese cabbage, approx. 1.25kg, cut into thick 5cm rounds, then quartered into squares
10% of the cabbage weight in sea salt, so 125g in this case
1 fat clove of garlic, crushed or finely grated
A small chunk of ginger (equivalent to half of the garlic), finely grated
3 spring onions, finely sliced
an equivalent amount of daikon, peeled and cut into 1cm wide batons
2 tsp Korean fish sauce
2 tbsp Korean dried chilli powder
1 tbsp sugar

Combine the cabbage and salt together in a large bowl, or two, and toss together until all the leaves are well salted. Leave the bowl(s), uncovered, for four hours. If you happen to be passing by give them a quick stir. Fill the bowl(s) with cold water and let the cabbage soak in the brine for one more hour. Try a leaf - it should be very salty, but not so salty it is unpleasant to eat. If you find the latter, drain the cabbage, rinse and soak in cold water again for half an hour or so before trying again.

Drain the cabbage and while it is in the colander push down on the leaves with your hands. You want to squeeze out some of the moisture. You will see the cabbage turns from opaque white to a more translucent clear colour as you squeeze. The cabbage should now be about half its original size, having lost about a third of its weight in salt water.

Put the cabbage into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients.

Now, using your hands, get right into the cabbage and squish, squelch and squeeze away so the dried chilli powder bleeds red into everything and the garlic, ginger and onion flavours are mashed into the cabbage and daikon. Take the time to do this thoroughly so that you really work the seasonings into each piece of cabbage. Wear plastic gloves if you don't like the garlicky, onion-y smell on your hands as it can linger a bit (I love it). Definitely wear gloves if you have any kind of cut, even a paper cut!

When it looks and smells delicious, taste a piece and then put the whole lot into an airtight container, seal and leave for up to a week or so, depending on the ambient temperature. Right now in my relatively warm London kitchen, three days is enough.

You'll know it's ready when your cabbage changes in taste and takes on a lovely sourness. The chilli might taste a little hotter, and all the flavours will have melded into one - kim chi!

A jar of Asian pickles, or four

2009-08-13T13:08:00.008+01:00

Its taken me a while to post this recipe because the very nature of it is always changing. I have finally realised that, rather than trying to produce the perfect brine immediately, this is something that has to evolve slowly over time, like a personality.

I have been eating pickles all summer long, while watchjng TV, for breakfast, dipped in chilli sauce, rolled into Vietnamese spring rolls, or to add a sour crunch into any recipe. In fact I'm eating them right now.

The beauty is, if you're not happy with the taste of one batch, you can change the seasoning and taste the difference in less than a day. Keep eating and changing the mix and you get a feel for how to achieve what you want. You can experiment with added a sliced fresh chilli, a spoonful of spices, some garlic, or anything else that takes your fancy. I have four jars of pickles now and each one tastes different depending on what I feel like.

You can use any crunchy vegetable. Daikon is my favourite as it soaks up the vinegar quickly, in just a day, and has a lovely crisp crunch and clear taste. I also like carrots although they usually need to sit for a day or two more. I bet you could use any radish, cucumber would be lovely, cabbage of course, just to name a few options. I have been so in love with daikon I haven't wanted to try anything else yet, but I will...umm...soon?

This basic recipe makes enough to fill one 850ml jar.

Ingredients:
300ml rice vinegar
300ml water
2 tbsp Chinese rock sugar
1 tbsp sea salt
400g daikon, peeled and sliced into finger sized sticks
2 tsp rice wine

Combine the vinegar, water, salt and sugar in a pan, cover and heat until all the crystals dissolve. Bring the liquid up to the boil then remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature, still covered.

While the liquid cools, put the jar and lid into a big pot of cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes or so to give them a good clean, then drain and allow to cool. Its best not to try pouring in cold liquid when the glass is hot as it could crack.

When everything is back to room temperature, pack the jar loosely with the daikon, add the rice wine and fill it with liquid up to the neck. Make sure all the vegetables are submerged in the vinegar before sealing tightly, then put it in the fridge.

The daikon only needs a day to marinate before it's ready to eat. This is when the fun begins - each time you eat, top the jar up again with more vegetables, taste the brine and add more vinegar, sugar, salt, wine or any other seasonings depending on your tastes.

Over time the pickling liquid takes on some of the characteristics of the vegetables you put it. I have one jar exclusively for daikon, and others are a mix of daikon and carrot. You can also add garlic, spring onion, chillis, Sichuan pepper, star anise, cinnamon, green peppercorns, or anything else that takes your fancy.

You could try packing the jars while they are hot and pour in hot liquid - this gives the pickles a more translucent appearence, different texture and stronger flavour. I prefer using cold jar, cold vegetables and cold pickling liquid as I find the taste is fresher, more raw.

This method of pickling is perfect if you eat the pickles fairly regularly, and is not meant for long term preservation. The pickles should always be kept in the fridge or they may spoil. Sometimes I find one of my jars tastes a little fizzy - the result of lactic bacteria fermenting the sugar in the liquid. It is not harmful, but if, like me, you don't like the taste, strain the liquid, bring it to the boil, allow to cool and return.

Mmmm....little crabs

2009-08-07T19:26:00.002+01:00

No recipe, just a bunch of teeny little crabs we caught, sizzled in hot oil and sprinkled with salt. Sort of seafood popcorn!

Juicy, salty, black bean clams

2009-08-07T18:56:00.001+01:00

My idea of how black bean clams should taste is so addictively delicious that it is heartbreaking when the actual dish I have made does not taste as I imagined. In my mind, you should have bouncy, juicy clams, scented with garlic and undertones of ginger, enlivened with the crunch of spring onions, warmed with chilli and spiked with salty nubs of mashed black bean.

I've tried making this before and often ended up with either an imbalanced sauce (too weak or overly salty) or over/undercooked clams. Finally I realised that trying to get both things right at the same time was too difficult. Instead I tried splitting them - there's an extra step in this recipe but I really think it helps give good results.

We used clams dug of of the sand on Pearson Island's only tiny pebble beach, rinsed and left in seawater with a spoonful of rolled oats for a day to purify.

1.5kg clams, large fat palourdes are ideal
50 ml shaoxing wine, or white wine/dry sherry
3 tbsp groundnut oil
5 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
2cm ginger, peeled and finely chopped
5 spring onions, thinly sliced, white and green parts separated
1 chilli, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed and roughly mashed
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
3 tbsp chicken or vegetable stock
1 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in a little water
Sugar

Put the clams into a dry wok or deep saucepan, add the wine, cover and steam over a high heat, shaking the pan every now and then, until the clams start to open. Remove opened clams and transfer to a covered bowl to keep in the warmth and moisture. Discard any stubborn clams that refuse to open after 10mins or so of cooking, and reserve the leftover liquid.

Heat the wok over a high heat until smoke rises. Add the oil, swirl then add the garlic and ginger. Stir fry quickly until they smell fragrant without starting to burn, then add the white spring onion and chillis and stir fry again until you can smell their aroma. Turn down the heat if they start to burn too quickly. Add the mashed black beans, then the reserved clam juice and the stock. Allow the liquid to come to the boil, taste and add the dark soy sauce bit by bit, tasting as you go. You may not need it all. If the broth tastes too salty, add some sugar, barely teaspoon as a time. The sauce should not be a little sweet and not too salty, depending on your tastes.

When the seasoning is adjusted to your liking, stir the cornstarch and water mix and add, then return the clams to the pan. Keep stirring and tossing for 5 minutes or until the clams are cooked but still juicy and tender and lightly coated with glossy black bean sauce. Add more water or stock if the sauce becomes too thick, and adjust the sugar and soy sauce balance one last time.

Scatter over the green spring onion slices and tip onto a large serving plate, scraping out all the remaining sauce and dribbling it over the clams. Eat immediately with your fingers, sucking the clam meat and sauce off the shells.

Melted marrow

2009-07-31T10:32:00.009+01:00

You may have seen enormous marrows at a market recently. Or perhaps like Sibilla you have been growing courgettes this summer and left the patch untended for a few days, returning to discover that your sweet little courgettes, left unpicked, have swollen into humongous Mr. Hyde versions of themselves.

"We'll feed them to the pigs." was our first reaction, but wait! These are summer squash, related to their winter cousins pumpkin and butternut, which are also capable of reaching gargantuan sizes. Surely there must be something we can do?

I am very fond of marrows now.

They do need some gentle love and attention, but you'll end up with the perfect comfort food. We ate this with roast chicken, braised rabbit and on its own in big steaming bowlfuls.

The trick is to separate the pale, creamy yellow flesh inside from the rest of the monster. Once cooked, marrow has a delicate, clear flavour than reminds me of Chinese winter melon and the consistency of softened butter.

First cut the marrow down into manageable sections and remove the dark geen skin with a sharp knife. These blocks can then be sliced into rounds and chopped into cubes. I throw away the spongey, seedy parts as I find them stringy and chewy.

Serves 6-8 as a side dish

Ingredients:
One or more marrows cut into cubes roughly 5cm wide and 3cm high, 2-2.5kg
5 large cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed with some salt
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
A cup of water

You'll need a big pot that can hold all the marrow, preferably heavy based. Generously cover the base with about 1cm of olive oil, add the garlic and sprinkle liberally with salt and ground pepper.

Add a third of the marrow cubes and then stir well until every cube is coated with oil and seasoning. Repeat with the remaining two thirds of marrow and finish with a final glug of oil and a scattering of salt and pepper. Pour over the water and cover with a tight fitting lid.

Place the pot over a low flame and forget about it for 45 minutes. When you lift the lid the cubes should be almost submerged in bubbling golden liquid. Give it another 15 minutes if not. Then remove the lid and leave the marrow to simmer for another 20-30 minutes, or until you can only see a little liquid left.

Coax the marrow into a large serving dish, or ladle into deep bowls straight from the pot. Eat with a spoon.

48 hours in Vancouver

2009-07-08T19:48:00.024+01:00

Sitting in the peaceful quiet of Pearson Island, breathing in pine scented air, it's remarkably hard to remember the sights, sounds and tastes of Vancouver city, where I was just a few days ago. So before the memory fades forever from my hole-riddled mind, here's a few notes from a city that certainly deserves several more gastronomic trips.

Given the brevity of my visit we set ourselves a tight schedule - first on the list, lots of local seafood, both raw as sashimi, and cooked, a little bit. Next? Well, it has to be Chinese, Cantonese style and finally, Jason's favourite spot in town.

First stop was Miko Sushi, recommended by Earnest for good quality, traditional sashimi without emptying your wallet in the process. Miko also offers a large selection of appetizers, many from the robata grill. Jason pronounced their grilled ox tongue to be the best he has ever tasted, for successfully delivering skewers of juicy, springy textured meat, lacquered with sweet-salty sauce and charred around the edges. Robata grilled chicken gizzards were almost as good, but definitely came second place.

We asked for locally sourced fish sashimi. Highlights included frilly fronds of mirugai (giant geoduck clam) that tasted sweet and buttery, generous slices of pale albacore tuna with a rosy blush and fat ivory slabs of toro, ready to melt on the tongue. Sockeye salmon was an almost violent orange-red colour compared to the ghostly tuna, and displayed none of the white fat seams characteristic of most salmon. It made sense that the taste was less rich, more delicate and quite gamey.

The next morning began with a late breakfast of Japanese hot dogs...yes really. The Japadog street cart is reputedly the closest thing to the real deal, outside of Japan. We shared a Terimayo, which is smothered with teriyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise, seaweed shreds and fried onions. Instead of the familiar sweet-hot taste found in the US original, this was more porky juices, mild mayo-savoury tang and briny finish, altogether pretty good. Add some tamago egg and you have the Japanese version of an English breakfast bap!

Go fish is little more than a shack, perched on False Creek fisherman's wharf, so near to the sea you could throw your chips in. A collaboration between Fisherman's Wharf and chef Gord Martin, the aim is to raise delicious awareness of local fish.

Wild with excitement, we ordered battered halibut and chips, white spot prawns in sweet and sour coconut sauce and tacones, soft tortilla cones stuffed with coriander, salsa, chipolte cream, 'Pacific Rim' coleslaw (white and red cabbage, sesame and pumpkin seeds, lightly dressed with sesame mayo) and tender albacore or just cooked oysters.

As our order arrived, so did the rain. Fleeing from the unsheltered plastic tables and chairs we took cover under Jason's car boot door. My favourite memory of the whole trip is sitting in the back of the car with my legs dangling over the edge, biting into chips so hot they burnt my fingers, peeling fat rosy prawns and munching tacones dripping with fruity Valentina hot sauce.

There was time before dinner for a quick aperitivo at Rodney's Oyster House, where I savoured a long awaited reunion with my beloved Kumamoto oysters and met some new bivalve buddies - plump, sweet Summer Breeze, the darlings of Vancouver Island, and crisp, briny Village Bays from East Toronto. These were washed down with a lemony 'Zydeco Stew Caesar', apparently Canadian for a Bloody Mary, made with clamato juice and garnished with a prawn.

If this is as appetitively exhausting to read as it is to write then I apologise!

Entering the Golden Ocean Seafood Restaurant was like walking into any decent family restaurant in Hong Kong, all chintzy decor, large round tables and Cantonese cacophony. The food was also just as good. Some say that San Francisco may have lost its edge, leaving Vancouver to be crowned the new capital of Chinese cuisine outside of Hong Kong. We ate roasted duck with glazed skin the colour of mahogany, delicate double boiled tilapia (zi4 yu3) soup, juicy pork and water chestnut patties and a quivering dish of steamed tofu, prawns and oyster mushrooms.

With one lunch left, it was Jason's noodle mecca or a plane straight back to London. On first glance, Sha Lin Noodle House looks like any other shabby cheap Chinese, except all the tables are full and frequently there is a queue. Separated from diners by glass panels, Beijing chefs twirl and pull fresh noodles, plopping them into boiling water and tossing others into bowls to be dressed with soup and sauce.

To make Jason's favourite noodle dish (zha1 jiang4 shou3 la1 mein4), freshly made noodles are essential for their chewy bite. These are topped with little nuggets of chopped pork shoulder in a musky yellow bean sauce and a pile of raw cucumber shreds. You can toss the whole lot together and eat it as it is, or add lashings of black vinegar, chilli oil and/or minced garlic (if you're feeling really strong).

We could have just ordered noodles and been satisfied, but as there was a large menu and a girl with a mission, we also ate translucent hot and sour potato slivers, Chinese cabbage shreds dressed in white vinegar, cool sweet potato starch noodles with sesame paste and black vinegar and fried spring onion pancakes.

Then we left for Langdale ferry.

This is by no means a list of the best places to eat, but on a budget it was pretty good. Vancouver magazine's Restaurants section was a useful resource. It seems to offer a fairly comprehensive list of restaurants, and also gives out annual awards - take a look at the 2009 winners.

Miko Sushi
1335 Robson
Vancouver, BC V6E 1C5, Canada
(604) 681-0339

Japadog
899 Burrard St
(604) 642-0712

Go Fish Ocean Emporium
1505 West 1st Avenue (at False Creek Fisherman's Wharf)
(604)730-5040

Rodney's Oyster House
Suite 405 1228 Hamilton St
(604) 609-0080

Golden Ocean Seafood Restaurant

2046 41st Ave W
(604) 263-8606

Sha-lin Restaurant

548 W Broadway
(604) 873-1816

Courgette parmigiana

2009-06-24T09:03:00.013+01:00

Served warm for lunch or bubbling hot for dinner, this dish is a great way to use up larger courgettes or marrows that appear at the end of the season, or if you find them lurking in your vegetable garden after going away for a week or so. You could use young skinny courgettes instead, but I find their flavour is so sweet I would rather shave them into long thin slices and dress them simply with barely a half clove of crushed garlic, some lemon juice, mint and olive oil.

The important thing to remember is to make sure, whatever the size, the slices are cooked until they are floppy and nicely charred. A cast iron grill pan is great, or a less heavy non-stick grill pan will work just as well. You just want the raised ridges to create those lovely charcoal lines that give the courgettes an added smokey flavour.

The consistency of the tomato sauce is quite key as it will affect how dry or watery the finished parmigiana will be. You can tell the sauce is ready when individual rising bubbles settle into one place and make a pleasant 'blip blip' sound. It should be thick enough to coat pasta, but still pourable.You could use only tinned tomatoes instead of the passata, but the sauce will need more reducing. In Tuscany there's a brand called Mutti who make an excellent tomato polpa (crushed finely).

I like to use a clear pyrex oven dish as it shows off the lovely red, green and pale yellow layers, but really any ovenproof dish will do, even a tall round one. The oval dish I used in the photo was 33.5cm by 22.5cm at its widest, and 6cm high.

Serves six as a main course, or many more as an accompaniment.

About 1.5kg of courgettes or marrows

425ml tinned tomatoes, crushed

750ml tomato passata

A small onion

Two level teaspoons of sugar

250g Parmesan

250g aged pecorino, or Corzano e Paterno's pasta cotta

A lemon, sliced in half

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Heat a grill pan over a medium to low flame. Slice the courgettes into rounds roughly half a centimetre thick. Sprinkle with salt to draw out some of the moisture. The pan is ready when it starts to smoke, brush some oil lightly over the pan and quickly add a batch of courgettes, enough to cover the base with a layer. Char the slices for 3-4 minutes on each side and brush a little oil on any that start to look dry. Try not to overdo the oil as the courgettes should steam quite happily and excess oil will make the final dish greasy. Allow the courgettes to cool enough to handle.

While you wait, chop the onion into fine dice and sweat with salt and olive oil in a saucepan over a low heat. Try not to let them brown. When the onion is translucent and soft, add the tinned tomatoes and passata. Add the sugar but do not season until the sauce is ready to avoid overdoing it. Give everything a good stir, bring it to the boil then simmer gently until the sauce has reduced to a thickish, but still sloppy, consistency. Season with salt and pepper to your taste and allow to cool a little.

While the sauce reduces, coursely grate the parmesan and pecorino and mix together. There's no need to bother with super fine cheese.

Brush your dish with oil and start with a thin layer of tomato sauce. Cover with a layer of overlapping courgette slices until no sauce is visible, then squeeze over some lemon juice and season lightly. Next sprinkle over a thin layer of cheese; you will still see bits of green underneath. Repeat with a layer of tomato sauce first and continue layering courgettes, sauce and cheese until everything is used up. The last layer should be a thick topping of cheese to blanket everything else.

The parmigiana can be prepared in advance up to this point. If you freeze it do allow it to defrost thoroughly first.

Season the dish one last time, drizzle over with olive oil and pop it into the oven. It should take roughly an hour, check after 45 minutes. The cheese topping should be melted, golden brown and bubbling. The dish will be very hot, and can sit in the warmer or a turned off oven without coming to any harm.

Serve as a side dish, or with a lemony green salad and crusty bread as a main.

Porcine perfection

2009-06-24T08:49:00.021+01:00

From Sausage Fest in Basel to a pork feast in Tuscany, Sibilla's birthday at Villa Paterno was a true celebration of all things pig. The spit roasted Cinta Senese adolescent in the photos was a gift from her half brother Tillo and the offspring of two Cinta Senese pigs serendipitously found wandering around his garden a few years ago.

This ancient breed of Sienese pig, native only to the Chianti region since at least the 14th century, is identifiable in life by white forelegs and shoulders (cinta is Italian for 'belt' in reference to this distinct stripe of white skin) and in death by an extremely high proportion of fat to meat.

Reared semi-wild on a diet consisting mainly of grass, chestnuts and acorns, both flesh and fat are highly prized, being rich, fragrant and highly flavourful. The Cinta Senese almost became extinct when farmers shunned the high production costs involved and opted to raise modern breeds of white pigs, seen as more economical and suited to today's market demand. Thankfully a few dedicated breeders in the Sienese Mountains refused to give up, and a recent revival of interest in Cinta pork has helped to prevent this unique breed from disappearing altogether.

Today there are roughly eighty Cinta breeders in Tuscany. With creatures this special it feels all the more important to ensure that not a single part of the animal is wasted.

Our little pig was spit roasted on Saturday night by Marinella's husband. Great chunks of fatty, tender meat and crisp blackened skin were piled onto wide shallow dishes and served with raw marinated courgettes, melted courgettes and courgette parmigiana, thanks to a garden glut of guess what?

Being me, I noticed that the head, split in two, was left untouched in favour of less intimidating cuts and pounced, like a cat. First the brains were scooped out and eaten with a sprinkle of salt. They tasted like an unctuous, creamy, mild pâté. Two halves of a tongue swiftly followed suit. Finally a pair of cheeks, soft and porky, smeared with a whisper of sweet and sour chutney. It was a heaven-sent dinner.

The nest day leftovers were boiled into a meaty broth, rendered for lard, crisped back to the last slivers of crackling and shredded for a cold lunchtime salad with sliced red onion, fennel, tomatoes and lettuce, combined with a lemony mustard vinaigrette to help cut through the fat embalmed meat. Any further remainders were given to Clare and Matilda, white, fluffy Maremmano dogs who's ancestry dates back to the same period as the Cintas.

In my mind it doesn't take much to recall the the musky sweet scent of Cinta fat. We cooled it to a creamy white consistency and used it for days later, in wild boar cacciatora, to baste a roasting chicken, and for spreading over toasted Tuscan bread, rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with salt.

Thrifty chicken liver pâté

2009-06-15T21:20:00.002+01:00

I have to be honest, the only reason I decided to make this is because I caught sight of tubs of frozen chicken livers being sold at Sainsbury's for a mere 44p.

44p! That's less than a bag of crisps! Add butter and a few other bits and you have a smooth, creamy, savoury pâté that could be elegant enough to be a dinner party starter, or a cosy supper with plenty of toast, maybe some cornichons, and a lemony, mustardy dressed green salad.

I like the taste of chicken livers, so I prefer to use less butter and more seasonings to create a balance of sweet, salty, herby and bitter flavours. Alternatively you could increase the butter by up to double for a milder, richer version. If you do this you may need a touch more salt. The trick is to keep tasting while you blend and season, until it is as you would like it.

250g chicken livers
whole milk
125g salted butter (or up to 250g if you prefer)
half an onion
a clove of garlic
2 tablespoons of port, or brandy
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
cayenne pepper
nutmeg
salt and pepper

Rinse the livers, pull off any white membranes and cut off any green looking bits. Put them in a small, heavy based saucepan with knob of butter. Pour over enough milk to just barely cover the livers, then heat very gently over a low flame, stirring every now and then and breaking up the livers as they cook until there are no traces of pink left. This should take 10 minutes or so, be careful not to let them form a crust or the finished pâté will be grainy.

While the livers cook, finely chop the onion and soften gently with butter and a pinch of salt in another pan. Finely chop the garlic (or grate it with a microplane - these are amazing for garlic, ginger, zest, to name a few things) and add to the pan. The onion should become translucent, stop before it browns. When the onion is soft, add the port or brandy and half of the thyme leaves. Strain the milky liquid from the livers with a fine metal sieve and add the to onions. Turn up the heat to medium and reduce the milk and onion mixture until it has the consistency of a thick sauce. Season with black pepper, a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper and the same again of grated nutmeg.

Combine the cooked liver and the seasonings in a food processor and whizz until smooth. Or you could push the whole lot through a fine metal sieve. Allow the mixture to cool abit so the butter won't melt when you add it.

When the mixture is cool, blend in the remaining thyme leaves and the butter in cubes and taste after you have mixed in about 100g. Now is the time to taste and add more salt, pepper, cayenne or nutmeg. The nutmeg should lend sweetness to the pâté, while the cayenne gives an undertone of warmth - don't overdo the cayenne as the pâté should not be spicy hot. If the pâté tastes too strong, add more butter.

Pour the pâté into a dish to set. This pâté will keep for a few days if covered and in a fridge. If you plan to keep it for longer, cover the top with clarified butter.

The best asparagus

2009-06-14T14:57:00.011+01:00

Hello hello!

I've been rather quiet on the writing front recently, partly due to distractions like job interviews, Mum coming to visit, and a trip to Switzerland to check out Giacometti, contemporary art and 'Sausage fest 2009'. The latter is an annual celebration of all things wurst that began with my delicate, elegant Chinese mother declaring her secret love of sausages when the Meijers were debating what to serve forty odd artists, collectors and exhibitors after a long day at Art Basel.

Every other moment in London has been occupied by eating asparagus.

Here's a few favourite ways for doing the same thing. The recipes are so simple it might seem silly to write them down, but as I could eat them every day for the whole short season without getting bored, I think they are worth mentioning.

Serves two as a starter, or one...

Asparagus with lemon and butter

My first asparagus of the season is always dressed with lemon and butter. Somehow, olive oil won't do, it almost tastes too floral. To me, butter smells of earth, grassy fields, dairy cows and rich indulgence. The lemon juice provides a lift, highlighting the sweetness of the spears. Finally the salt should have enough texture to give you that satisfyingly salty crunch when you bite down on the soft stems.

A bundle of asparagus, around 250g
A few thin slices of the best salted butter you can find, ideally English or Irish
Half a lemon
Sea salt flakes

Snap off the woody parts of the asparagus by bending each spear near the base. If the stalks are really fat and meaty, I like to shave some of the green skin off with a vegetable peeler, otherwise I don't bother.

Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil, salt liberally and add the asparagus, stems first. Its fine if some of the tips stick out of the water as they will steam nicely. If you have a steamer you could steam the whole lot instead, it only take about a minute longer, if that.

While you wait, smear a slice of butter over the centre of your plate(s) and sprinkle with salt and pepper. The asparagus takes 4-5 minutes, depending on the size of the stems. If you fish one out and cut off a piece it should have lost its raw crunch but not be mushy soft.

Drain the asparagus well to get rid of excess water. Before serving, rub with the rest of the butter, squeeze lemon juice all over, season again and eat immediately with your fingers.

Asparagus with balsamic vinegar

I was reading 'Comfort me with apples' by Ruth Reichl on the way back to London. Her description of eating asparagus, dipped in her first taste of 'aceto balsamico', stirred up such a craving I was fidgeting on the the plane, fantasising on the tube and rolling my luggage around Waitrose hunting for asparagus shortly after.

Use the best balsamic vinegar you can find or afford - it should be, in Ruth's words, 'thick enough to cling' and taste raisiny sweet, balanced with sour vinegar. Definitely avoid the mass produced versions that contain water, sugar, E numbers and colourings, choose one made in Modena and aged for at least twelve years. Riserva di Famiglia, made by Acetaia Dodi is a great option and available in small measures, perfect since a little goes a long way. Right now at home we have a matured balsamic vinegar from The gift of oil, which is delicious.

A bundle of asparagus, around 250g
Sea salt flakes
Aged balsamic vinegar, ideally Tradizionale or of a similar quality

Prepare and cook the asparagus as above. Pour the vinegar into something small and shallow like a soy sauce dish. Plate the asapargus, sprinkle with salt and eat straight away, dipping each stalk as you go.

Charred asparagus and prosciutto

A bundle of asparagus, around 250g
8 or so slices of prosciutto crudo, I like San Daniele most
Sea salt and black pepper

Parboil the asparagus for two minutes and drain them well. Brush the stalks with olive oil and finish them on a barbeque or a cast iron grill pan over a high heat. You could skip the parboiling, but it will take longer and you need to keep the heat medium to low to stop the spears burning before the centres are cooked. I like the contrast of soft stalk and smoky charcoal, which seems easiest to acheive if you boil them first.

Season the asparagus and eat while hot, winding half a slice of prosciutto around each stalk so the fat melts and the ham warms.

Honeycomb tripe salad

2009-05-23T17:38:00.007+01:00

I know that for most people, tripe is one of their least favourite foods, to put it mildly. It's associated with memories of gigantic pots of boiling stinkiness, force feeding in childhood, and acts of human unkindness. But I love it.

Maybe it's due to my Chinese upbringing and the constant encouragement to try suspicious looking foods, or just that the Cantonese cook tripe with such savoury, piquant sauces you'd be a lunatic not to like it. Nevertheless despite my fondness, until now I had only encoutered tripe hot, either 'a la fiorentina' (submerged in a sweet, smooth tomato sauce) or in dim sum. Cold tripe was a revelation.

We bought our tripe from an incredible stall in Florence's Mercato Centrale, called Nuova Tripperia Fiorentina. It specialises in all things cooked cow offal. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Sibilla and I thought we had found a small stall from heaven. Along with several different types of tripe, you can buy cooked trotters, snout, udder and uterus to name a few.

Feeling brave we bought a slice of udder (called poppa in Italian), procrastinated over cooking it, and finally seared it on a high heat with a dusting of seasoned flour. Sprinkled with lemon juice it was delicious, almost cheesy tasting. I know that sounds deeply wierd, but really it was delicious!

Serves two for lunch or four as part of lunch

300g cooked tripe, the one with a honeycomb texture works best, but any will do
Three large tomatoes, coursely chopped
Two sticks of celery, thinly sliced
Half a red onion, finely chopped
Juice and zest of a lemon
Half a tablespoon of red wine vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
A good handful of parsley, mint, or both

Slice the tripe into thin, bite sized strips. Add the tomatoes, celery and onion, then season well and toss together with the lemon, vinegar and olive oil. This salad is best eaten cold so leave it to marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

Just before you serve, roughly chop the parsley and mint, scatter over and toss again. The tripe should have a cool, crunchy texture, which is lovely soaked in its earthy, lemony sauce and given sparkle by brightly flavoured herbs.

Here's a picture of some tripe from Nuova Tripperia. As soon as I can persuade Sibilla to translate the Italian, or sit down with my Italian-English dictionary, I'm going to try the recipes on the website.

Courgette and mint ceviche

2009-05-23T17:13:00.005+01:00

Again this is best with small, sweet courgettes rather than the larger fatter ones that tend towards becoming marrow.

Serves four to six as part of a lunch spread

4 young courgettes
half a red onion, peeled and finely sliced
juice of a lemon
a good handful of mint leaves
a pinch of chilli flakes, crushed as finely as possible with your fingers or a mortar and pestle
olive oil
salt and pepper

Finely slice the courgette into paper thin rounds, or shave with a mandolin. Season with the crumbled chilli flakes, salt and pepper and toss with the red onion, lemon juice and a generous coating of olive oil.

This salad is even better if you have time to leave it for an hour or so to marinade. The acid from the lemon softens the courgette and onion, giving the salad an almost lightly cooked texture.

When you are ready to serve, layer the mint leaves one on top of another, roll them up into a sausage shape and slice into thin shreds, then scatter over the salad.

Baby broad bean Niçoise

2009-05-23T16:55:00.004+01:00

This salad is best with young broad beans that taste sweet when shelled and eaten raw. You could use larger broad beans, but it would be a good idea to remove their bitter outer casings first.

We made this with gorgeous eggs with deep yellow yolks from Marcello's chickens and served the chopped tomatoes separately as one of the group was not a fan.

Serves four as lunch or six as part of a bigger spread

Around 800g to 1 kg of shelled baby broad beans
Half a tin of pitted black olives
One tin of best quality tuna in oil, flaked
Ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
3 hard boiled eggs, quartered
Juice of one lemon
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Combine the beans, olives, tuna and tomatoes in a large bowl, squeeze over the lemon juice, season liberally and toss together with a generous glug of olive oil. Taste and adjust the seasonings, then scatter over the eggs when you're done.

Back in Tuscany

2009-05-23T16:42:00.005+01:00

Sibilla's farm, Corzano e Paterno, seems almost like a different world from the one I visited in March. The plants have burst into flower and the vegetable garden is an explosion of green and already producing courgettes and mange tout, having finished offering up a bumper crop of sweet baby broan beans. It is sunny with blue skies every day, with hot, lazy days and cooler, balmy nights.

Last week New Zealand shearers came and gave all the Sardinian milk sheep a haircut.

We have been cooking up a storm so here's a bunch of dishes we have been eating since I arrived....

The best gratin Dauphinoise

2009-05-09T14:41:00.007+01:00

I love how richly comforting and almost naughty this side dish is. We don't make it too often, but when we do the first sight of butter and cream and bubbling up round light golden discs and overflowing the sides creates an excitement that builds as the time passes. When the gratin finally forms a speckled golden brown crust it's ready. The first hot breath taken when the oven door opens washes over me like a blanket of reassurance, combined with buttery expectation and sweet with roasted garlic. I grab a steamful bowlful and a spoon, curl up, and ignore everything else in the world for a while.

A deep, round ovenproof dish would be ideal. I use a 17cm square ceramic dish with rounded corners and flat handles on either side which is great. It is 6 cm deep. Try not to use anything with less than 4cm depth as you want to end up with lots of overlapping potato layers, sandwiching seasoned cream and infused with garlic, rather than a paltry three layer pancake. The base will be soft and giving, the centre moist and almost chewy, and the top browned and almost crisp.

Serves four as a side dish, or two greedy people.

25g/1oz salted butter
One clove of garlic, peeled
Three large waxy potatoes, peeled and any eyes or discolourations removed
150ml double cream (you may use less)
sea salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius.

Rub about a half of the butter around the inside of the dish. Crush the garlic on a wooden board with flaked sea salt piled on top and the flat on a large blade pushed down to squash the clove and mash it into a salty, garlicky pulp. Smear this all over the base and sides of the dish, then season lightly with salt and papper.

Slice the potatoes into discs a few millimetres thick, like the thickness of a pound coin. I use a lethally sharp Benriner mandolin, which to me is worth every penny. Just be really careful not to cut your fingers; even Rick Stein managed to do this on one of his cookery programmes!

Layer the potatoes in the dish, with as few holes as possible in between. You might want to cut smaller pieces to fit awkward gaps but don't drive yourself mad - some space is good. It's really important that you lightly salt and pepper every new layer before starting a new one or the finished result will be bland.

Stop just before the top of the dish, push down on the potato layers one last time, and pour over the cream until the last layer is lightly coated. Pinch bits of the leftover butter and dot them all over the top. Season one last time, then put it into the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the kitchen smells wonderful and your gratin is golden brown and bubbling.

Photos to come - last night we finished this before even thinking about the camera...

Poussin and caribbean salsa

2009-05-08T17:16:00.004+01:00

Serves two with a vegetable side dish or salad

One fat poussin, spatchcocked
A few good pinches of chilli flakes
Juice and zest of half a lemon
A few cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Half a cucumber, peeled and seeds scraped out with a teaspoon
Two spring onions
A mild hot green pepper, seeded
A pinch of thyme leaves
Salt and pepper
Juice of a lime
150ml crème fraîche

If you have a mortar and pestle, pound the chilli with some salt and then add the garlic to make a thick paste. Otherwise crush the garlic with the flat of a blade and some salt and crumble in the chilli. Add the pepper, lemon and olive oil and mix together well. Smear the marinade all over the poussin and leave it in a bowl covered with cling film or in a clear plastic food bag for as long as possible before cooking. An hour is fine, four to six hours is brilliant. Turn and massage the meat if you happen to be passing by.

If you have a food processor, blend all the ingredients for the salsa but leave it a little chunky. Otherwise finely chop the cucumber, spring onion and pepper and mix in the other bits. Cover with cling film and leave the salsa to sit for one hour or more in the fridge.

When you are ready to cook, heat a cast iron grill pan over a low heat for at least ten minutes until the pan is hot and smoking. Add the poussin, skin side down and press down on the meat with a spatula so the skin gets lovely and charred. Cook the poussin slowly over a low heat. It will stick to the pan at first, but don't turn it over until the skin releases from the pan on its own. It should take 20-30 minutes to cook the poussin, turning once or twice. To check it is done stick a skewer into the thickest part of the leg and catch some juices with a spoon. If they run clear, without any pinky red blood, then the chicken is cooked.

Rest the poussin for ten minutes on a wooden board under some foil, then chop in half and serve, accomapnied with the bowl of salsa for dipping and smearing.

Photos to come...

Panna cotta with rhubarb compote

2009-05-08T17:09:00.001+01:00

This is so easy to make it's almost tempting to mess with the recipe and infuse the cream with ginger, or orange or something to add a twist. But I'm a classicist and there is something pure and lovely about a wobbly, light vanilla pudding, cut with sharp sweet rhubarb.

Actually I did try using marmalade instead of honey but it was a little too bitter...

Serves six

400ml double cream
200ml semi skimmed milk
2 tbsp caster suger
2 cm of a vanilla seed pod
just under 2 teaspoons of gelatine
5 stalks of rhubarb, chopped into bitesize pieces
2 tbsp honey
Water

You'll need six ramekins or small bowls

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.

Mix the rhubarb with the honey and about a tablespoon of water in an ovenproof dish and bake until the rhubarb is soft, but has not lost its shape, with a lovely pink sauce. Remove and allow to cool before refrigerating.

Combine the cream, milk and sugar in a saucepan (heavy based if possible) and set it over a low heat until the mixture starts to 'shiver'. This is the stage just before it starts to boil, if you see little bubbles rising up take the pan off the heat for a bit. Scrap the seeds out of your vanilla pod and add, along with the pod, to the saucepan.

While the cream is heating, put the gelatine in a small bowl in some hot water and let it melt. Spoon some on the hot cream into the gelatine and stir until well combined. Add a few more spoonfuls of hot cream and mix well, then pour the whole lot back in the saucepan and mix again.
Remove the vanilla pod and discard.

Divide the cream mixture between your six ramekins and allow to cool. If you're in a rush you can put them straight in the fridge but they will still need a couple of hours to set.

When you're ready to serve, just gently spoon chunks of rhubarb with their juices into each ramekin.

Sorry for the lack of photo, to be updated...

Norfolk nourishment

2009-05-05T09:51:00.003+01:00

Happy Bank Holiday weekend! We're just back from three blissful days in Norfolk staying with Tikki's parents the Newmans, who Ronan has declared are 'the most perfect hosts' he has ever stayed with.

I ventured off the coast of England in a sailboat for the first time. We rocked gently in the sunshine and ate soft boiled eggs with pastel blue shells gathered from Derek and Carolyn's Legbar chickens. This was followed with freshly picked Norfolk crab, dressed with lemon juice and homemade garlic mayonnaise.

Other gastronomic highlights included a whole roast goose, rich with sweet goose fat, and a barbequed leg of lamb, marinated in garlic, lemon, parsley and olive oil for a day and charred until crisp on the outside but juicy and blushing rose on the inside.

We ate asparagus from a neighbouring farm, Wiveton Hall, picked just hours before. I have never tried such fresh asapargus before and was not disappointed. As many food writers have proclaimed before me, it really was even more delicious for being just out of the ground. The stems were sweet as sugar, in stark contrast to the earthy, spicy chilli oil and sharp lime crème fraîche sauces that we drizzled on them.

Walking along the dramatic Norfolk cliff tops and then back along the Coast road, we stumbled on Jenny's crab shack, serving up cold crab and lobster with no seasoning whatsoever. No salt, no pepper, not even any lemon. It was incredible - sweet but indeniably from the salty sea.

Photos to come!

Wiveton Hall
Holt
Norfolk NR25 7TE
Tel: 01263 740525
Website: www.wivetonhall.co.uk

Jenny's Crab Shack
On the A149 Coast Road from Sheringham to Weybourne
Tel: 07818 608 439
Open seven days a week from now through till autumn.

Fergus Henderson's roast bone marrow and parsley salad

2009-04-24T20:44:00.005+01:00

It's no surprise to my friends that Fergus Henderson is something of a hero of mine. I can always be counted on to order the weirdest, offaly-est option on the menu, so Henderson's restaurant St John, with its 'nose to tail' eating philosophy, is something of a mecca to me.

On any given visit you might find chitterlings, squirrel, pig's head or ox heart, showcased simply and without fuss. Everything I have ordered there has been delicious. One dish that never leaves the daily changing menu is roast bone marrow and parsley salad, which you can also order at the bar with a cheeky pint of Breton cider. I see it as almost criminal not to stop in and do just this whenever I am within a one mile radius of the place.

Alternatively, if you have a sympathetic butcher willing to give you calf's leg bones, you can make this at home.

Fergus' recipe serves four. You will need teaspoons or long thin implements like a lobster pick to scrape the marrow out of the bone.

12 x 7-8cm pieces of middle veal marrowbone
a healthy bunch of flat parsley, picked from its stems
2 shallots, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 modest handful of capers (extra fine if possible)

Dressing:
juice of one lemon
extra virgin olive oil
a pinch of sea salt and pepper

a good supply of toast
coarse sea salt

Put the bone marrow in an ovenproof frying pan and place in a hot oven. The roasting process should take about 20 minutes depending on the thickness of the bone. You are looking for the marrow to be loose and giving, but not melted away, which it will do if left too long (traditionally the ends would be covered to prevent any seepage, but I like the colouring and crispness at the end).

Meanwhile, lightly chop your parsley, just enough to discipline it, mix it with the shallots and capers, and at the last moment, dress.

Here is a dish that should not be completely seasoned before leaving the kitchen rendering a last minute seasoning unnecessary by the actual eater; this, especially in the case of coarse sea salt, gives texture and uplift at the moment of eating. My approach is to scrape the marrow from the bone onto the toast* and season with coarse sea salt. Then a pinch of parsley salad on top of this and eat. Of course once you have your pile of bones, salad, toast and salt it is 'liberty hall'.

Taken from Nose to Tail Eating, A Kind of British Cooking, by Fergus Henderson

*At St John they grill long slices of white sourdough so it is crisp, chewy and attractively seared with black charcoal lines.

St. John Bar & Restaurant
26 St John Street
London
EC1M 4AY

Tel: 020 7251 0848

Launceston Place, April 23

2009-04-23T16:12:00.004+01:00

Just got back from lunch with Sibilla. Mmmm two restaurants in two days, I'm feeling extremely lucky, and a little giddy from the over-indulgence!

Launceston Place is my idea of the perfect neighbourhood restaurant, as well as being a culinary destination worth travelling for. If you live in London then I would urge you to go. Headchef Tristan, formerly of Petrus under Marcus Wareing, is incredibly talented and never ceases to surprise and delight with his own take on Modern British cuisine. Paired with friendly, relaxed service under Hadi Aknin's watchful eye the result is a leisurely dining experience that leaves one sated and soothed.

We took advantage of the very reasonable set lunch offer, £18 for three courses, I had duck salad with rillettes, pickled vegetables and wild herbs, braised beef chop with confit tomatoes and basil and a sticky, caramelised apple tarte Tatin that I could develop a very serious addiction for.

Launceston Place
1a Launceston Place
London W8 5RL

Tel: 020 7937 6912

Kiku, April 23

2009-04-22T21:43:00.004+01:00

Ronan is going to New York tomorrow for a long weekend. So as a pre-weekend treat we went to Kiku. Kiku is my longstanding favourite Japanese restaurant. No fuss, no frills, squeaky fresh sashimi and sushi.

Our favourite sushi has no name I know of. Its a gunkan, topped with sweet ikura (salmon roe) and a quail egg yolk. Ro doesn't even like eggs much. Its gooey, yolky, seaweedy squidge heaven. Brilliant.

There is a gunkan with tobiko (flying fish roe) and quail egg yolk that is called uzura no tamago. If anyone knows the name of the ikura version I'd love to know!

The best chocolate chip cookies

2009-04-17T18:37:00.006+01:00

This recipe is definitely the best I've come across so far. Any challengers to this for this title however are very welcome! I can't think of anything less arduous then testing chocoloate chip cookie recipes...

A few things I noticed:

The 36 hour resting period is apparantly crucial for obtaining the right balance of crispy-chewy texture. This is kind of wierd, as you either have to wake up really early one day to make the dough so you can bake in time for dinner after a day, or prepare the dough late in the evening and bake them for breakfast?! So my dough ended up 'maturing' for more like 44 and a half hours. The cookies were still crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside so I figure they were a success.
I also made mine much smaller - normal cookie size rather than the 6 inch behemoth, simply because I would eat the whole thing and feel ill...
The sea salt just before baking seems to be pretty important. My cookies were too sweet without, and extremely moreish with the extra sprinkling.
I had no vanilla extract and substituted half a teaspoon of vanilla seeds scraped from a pod.
I also tried this with half muscavado, half white sugar instead of the soft brown, which made my cookies even more toffee-ish.
I used normal plain flour, rather than half normal and half cake flour, and still got great results (apparently cake flour has a higher protein content and its starch content makes it more absorbent so the dough dosen't spread to the far corners of the tray during baking.)

David Leite's Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies, Adapted from Jacques Torres
Published in the NY Times in July 2008 - click here for the original article

Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours' chilling

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons
(8 1/2 ounces) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract
1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content
Sea salt

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.

Hearty cabbage and bacon soup

2009-04-07T09:21:00.000+01:00

A head of Savoy cabbage, or a any combination of cabbage leaves e.g. white, pointed, cavalo nero, January King
300g pancetta or unsmoked bacon, in rough chunks
Half an onion, sliced
A few sprigs of thyme
A good pinch of dried chilli flakes
Plenty of cold chicken or vegetable stock
A melting cheese you like to eat, so far gruyere and parmesan, taleggio, cheddar and emmenthal have all been successful additions
Half a loaf of white bread, ideally with a good crust and chewy grain, sourdough is great
A few fat garlic cloves
Salt and pepper

A large deep ovenproof pot is perfect for this. Render the bacon over a low heat until the fat runs out and the meat begins to brown and crisp. Add the onions with a pinch of salt and sweat until soft, golden and beginning to caramalise.

Add the thyme and chilli and season well. Go easy on the salt, especially if your bacon is smoked.

Chop the cabbage leaves roughly into large chunks and shreds, discarding any tough cores. Rinse the leaves in a strainer under running water, add them to the onions and bacon and turn the heat up to high. Cook, stirring constantly, until the cabbage wilts and starts browning around the edges, about 10 minutes.

Add the stock, cover, bring to the boil then simmer gently for half an hour.

While the cabbage is cooking, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Toast thick slices of bread and while they are hot rub both sides with the cut surface of a clove of garlic. Salt and pepper the toast too. Grate the cheese coarsely, or otherwise slice or break it up as best you can.

When the oven is hot and the cabbage is soft taste the soup, adjust the chilli to as hot as you'd like and season and/or reduce the broth if it tastes bland or weak. Once it's to your liking, top the soup with overlapping layers of toast, and then cover the toast completely with cheese. Season again and bake uncovered until the cheese is bubbling and brown and the kitchen smells wonderful.

Serve the whole pot at the table with a big ladle and shallow soup bowls, so everyone gets a good mound of cabbage and bacon, lots of spicy broth and a cheesy, garlic bready topping.

Oval chicken

2009-03-31T19:03:00.013+01:00

This is Ronan's recipe, created from his time living in Oval, where friends were always welcome and you never quite knew how many people might or might not drop in for dinner.

The beauty of Oval chicken is you can increase the number of joints and always have perfect, lemony, juicy meat with crisp skin. Its important to have a pan (or more) that will fit all of your joints as snugly together as possible.

Its so easy to do and univerally loved that we make Oval chicken all the time - for lazy evenings in, dinners with friends, relatives or picky eaters.

The quantities of seasonings are given as general guidelines only, go with what you think looks good to eat.

For two:
4 thighs, or 2 whole legs jointed into 4 pieces
6 fat cloves of garlic
6 sprigs of thyme (or lemon thyme or rosemary)
a pinch of chilli flakes
half a lemon
olive oil
salt and pepper
a glass of white wine

Preheat a fan assisted oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Find an ovenproof dish that will fit all the joints snugly with skin exposed and flesh hidden. Oil the dish, season the joints with salt and pepper and add, turning to cover in oil. Slice the lemon into quarters and place a segment underneath each joint along with a sprig of thyme. Tuck the rest of the thyme and the garlic cloves (unpeeled) into any remaining gaps between the chicken. Scatter over the chilli flakes and season again lightly.

Place in the hot oven for 20 minutes, it should come out sizzling lightly in the fat, with the skin just beginning to brown. Add enough white wine to come about halfway up the dish, being careful not to splash the skin. This will keep the meat moist while the skin crisps.

Return to the oven and lower the temperature to 180 degrees. Cook for a further 20 - 25 minutes until the skin looks crisp and brown.

Remove, serve and pour over the delicious juices. Salad is a great accompaniment, or little potatoes roasted on a rack under the chicken for the same time. We had purple sprouting broccoli, steamed for three minutes then tossed with butter and salted.

The best Kim Chi, at last

2009-03-24T19:13:00.020Z

After months of experimentation and kilos of cabbage eating, I finally have a kim chi recipe I am happy with. This probably sounds ridiculous, I mean, its kim chi, how hard can it be? Cabbage, chilli, garlic, ginger - mix it up and Bob's your uncle, right? Apparently with me, wrong.

With a vegetable as watery and bland as Chinese cabbage (really, its only redeeming quality is its crunch), a few flavourings go a long way, and for weeks I ended up with batches of Korean pickle that veered between having waaaay too much salt, sugar, chilli (creating 'Atomic Kim Chi'), ginger, garlic or any combination of these. You name it, I overdid it.

I have finally learned my lesson and realised that less is more, but the rate at which I am churning and fermenting kim chi at a rate is still being overstripped by how quickly I eat it. Want some crisps? Kim chi! Feeling peckish? Kim chi! Feel like breakfast? Kim chi! Hell, any time you feel like munching? Kim chi!!

My method is not the traditional way of preparing classic kim chi, but I think it suits modern kitchens as it is significantly less stinky than fermenting the cabbage whole in a cool dark place, with seasonings layered between each leaf. I'm no expert but I thought this was a pretty interesting round up of general kim chi related info.

Try to find Korean chilli flakes and fish sauce. You could substitue fresh or crushed dried chillies with no seeds, and Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, but the results won't be quite the same. I'm afraid I have no idea how to pronounce the names for the ingredients you need in Korean, but here's a picture - I showed a similar one to a nice lady in Korean supermarket and she was able to help.

You can leave out the daikon and/or the spring onions, but I like the flavour they add to the mix.

Ingredients:
1 large Chinese cabbage, approx. 1.25kg, cut into thick 5cm rounds, then quartered into squares
10% of the cabbage weight in sea salt, so 125g in this case
1 fat clove of garlic, crushed or finely grated
A small chunk of ginger (equivalent to half of the garlic), finely grated
3 spring onions, finely sliced
an equivalent amount of daikon, peeled and cut into 1cm wide batons
2 tsp Korean fish sauce
2 tbsp Korean dried chilli powder
1 tbsp sugar

Combine the cabbage and salt together in a large bowl, or two, and toss together until all the leaves are well salted. Leave the bowl(s), uncovered, for four hours. If you happen to be passing by give them a quick stir. Fill the bowl(s) with cold water and let the cabbage soak in the brine for one more hour. Try a leaf - it should be very salty, but not so salty it is unpleasant to eat. If you find the latter, drain the cabbage, rinse and soak in cold water again for half an hour or so before trying again.

Drain the cabbage and while it is in the colander push down on the leaves with your hands. You want to squeeze out some of the moisture. You will see the cabbage turns from opaque white to a more translucent clear colour as you squeeze. The cabbage should now be about half its original size, having lost about a third of its weight in salt water.

Put the cabbage into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients.

Now, using your hands, get right into the cabbage and squish, squelch and squeeze away so the dried chilli powder bleeds red into everything and the garlic, ginger and oniony flavours are mashed into the cabbage and daikon. Take the time to do this thoroughly so that you really work the seasonings into each piece of cabbage. Wear plastic gloves if you don't like the garlicky, onion-y smell on your hands as it can linger a bit (I love it). Definitely wear gloves if you have any kind of cut, even a paper cut!

When it looks and smells delicious, taste a piece and then put the whole lot into an airtight container, seal and leave for up to a week or so, depending on the ambient temperature. Right now in my relatively warm London kitchen, three days is enough.

You'll know its ready when your cabbage changes in taste and takes on a lovely sourness. The chilli might taste a little hotter, and all the flavours will have melded into one - kim chi!

Osteria di Passignano, March 21

2009-03-23T09:30:00.027Z

The Osteria is in the Antinori family owned Abbey - Badia a Passignano. Opened in 2000 with Marcello Crini at the helm and Matia Barciulli in the kitchen, the restaurant earned its first Michelin star last year. Its ethos is to showcase classic Tuscan cuisine, ideally complemented with Antinori wines.

Dinner was very good. Some dishes did not quite hit the mark, in particular it was a shame that the pasta lacked the delicate, silken quality that one would expect. As well as accolades, the pressure that is often associated with Michelin Guide awards can become an unhealthy influence on restaurants, for guests and staff alike. There is a long, hard road marked out for those wishing to rise through the ranks to achieve the celebrated three star status, but the stigma associated with losing just one star can be detrimental to a future success.

This is what I ate:

Le Nostre “Frattaglie”
Panino al Lampredotto
Animelle Croccanti
Millefoglie di Lingua e Verza

Our Interpretation of Offal
Lampredotto Sandwich
Crunchy Sweetbreads
Millefeuille of Tongue and Savoy Cabbage

Taglierini al Profumo di Timo, Colatura di Acciughe,
Briciole di Pane e Crema di Cavolfiore

Thyme Flavoured Taglierini, Anchovy Essence,
Breadcrumbs and Cauliflower Cream

Agnello di Latte:
Il coscio Stufato con Crema di Sedano Rapa
Il Carré in Crosta di Erbette con Flan di Asparagi

Milk Fed Lamb:
Stewed Gigot with Celeriac Cream
Herb Crusted Rack with Asparagus Flan

Goccia di Gelato di Lamponi
e Vin Brulé in Gelo su Succo di Ribes

Raspberry Ice Cream Tear
and Frozen Mulled Wine on Redcurrant Juice

Osteria di Passignano
Via Passignano 33
Loc. Badia a Passignano 50028
Tavarnelle Val di Pesa (FI)
Tel./Fax +39 055 8071278
Website: www.osteriadipassignano.com

Marinella's octopus salad

2009-03-22T16:26:00.013Z

Marinella lives in Sardinia. She comes to Corzano e Paterno every spring to help with the holiday cottages on the farm and your stay is not complete without her octopus salad.

An octopus is a terrifying thing to behold in the raw flesh.

If your octopus is fresh it should be frozen first to tenderise the meat. Put it in the freezer the day before, then leave it in the fridge overnight to thaw. Some fishmongers sell frozen or thawed octopus which is cheaper and a little less work.

The recipe below will serve four as a main course with crusty bread to soak up the juices, or up to eight as a starter.

1kg octopus, frozen then thawed
plenty of salt
a fat clove of garlic, crushed
a handful of parlsey leaves, roughly chopped
juice of half a lemon
1 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
75g pitted black olives
3-4 tender stalks of celery, depending on their size
4 medium tomatoes
salt and papper

Fill a large pan with water and bring it to the boil. Salt it heavily so it tastes like seawater, then add the octopus, cover and simmer for 40 minutes.

Remove the octopus and allow it to cool enough to handle. Cut the whole thing into large chunks the size of a good mouthful. You can use every part except the tough beak. Dress the octupus while it's still warm with the garlic, parsley, lemon juice, vinegar and olive oil. Leave aside to marinate.

While the octopus cools, put the black olives into a new bowl. Cut the celery into pieces roughly the same size as the olives. Slice the tomatoes in half, use a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds, then chop them into pieces a similar size to the celery. Add everything to the bowl with olives and toss together with salt and pepper.

When the octopus is cool add the vegetables, not before as they will cook and become mushy. Mix everything together one last time and you're done.

The Corzano e Paterno villas are available all summer long, if you're interested take a look at www.corzanoepaterno.it.

While you're here you can visit the dairy, eat unimaginable amounts of the cheese they produce and taste their delicious wine. If you mention my name when booking I might get brownie points (hmmm... and maybe some cheese?) from the Gelpke family.

Our favourite picture of the trip is of Rupert, who was very fond of the octopus.

Trattoria Mario, March 19

2009-03-21T10:47:00.003Z

Florence for lunch at Trattoria Mario. Its a tiny room with less than 10 tables covered in green checkered laminated cloth. We had excellent trippa fiorentina, tender soft tripe in a meaty tomato sauce with the consistency of silk, spiked with pepper. Bollito misto wasn't bad either, slices of boiled tongue and beef, parsley and olive oil sauce, piquant pickles to add sparkle.

The bill, including a carafe of red wine, salad and water came to just 20 euros.

Signs on the wall separating us from the chefs read as follows:

Qui si mangia insieme a quegl'altri dal 1953
Communal eating since 1953

L'osso della bistecca si ciucca con la mani
Eat your steak-bone by hand

01/03/1953 La bistecca si coce come ci pare!!!
The steak is cooked however the hell we want!!!

Noi i'brodo coi dado un si fa!!!
Stock cubes have no place here!!!

Noi i'congelatore un ci s'ha!! Qui non s'adopra la panna!!
We don't have a freezer!! We don't use cream!!

Trattoria Mario
Via Rosina 2r
angolo Piazza del Mercato Centrale
50123, Firenze, Italia

Tel: 055 – 218550
Web: www.trattoria-mario.com

A sauce for artichokes

2009-03-18T14:07:00.003Z

I am in Italy. It is the artichoke season and the Mercato Centrale in Florence offers a bewildering number of varieties. Should we choose the carciofi Romani from Sicily, tightly budded globes the size of an orange, only edible after long slow cooking? Or the thorny purple petaled Morellino artichokes from the Tuscan wildlands of Maremma, teardrop shaped and tender enough to eat raw?

We bought Morellini, removed their tough outer leaves, cut off their spiny tops and boiled them for about 20 minutes in salted water with half a lemon. You can also add the stalks, but peel off the tough fibrous skins first, once softened they are equally delicious. Cover all the cut parts with lemon juice while you work to stop them going black.

Here is the recipe for a sauce:

1 hard boiled egg
1 tin of anchovy fillets
a large bunch of parsley, chives, fennel and tarragon
150 ml extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
125ml natural Greek yoghurt
grated zest of half a lemon
juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Purée all of the above until you have a sauce with the consistency of thin mayonnaise. Adjust the olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper to taste.

Serve as a dipping sauce for hot artichokes petals, hearts and stalks.