Nigel Slater – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: The Foodie Special

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Six Degrees of Separation

This month, our chain starts off with a recipe book: Jamie Oliver‘s The Naked Chef. I’ve used this and other books by Jamie Oliver as jumping-off points when thinking what to cook. But what I really like is a recipe book that’s a good enough read to enjoy even when not planning meals.

So that’s why I’m starting my chain with Rachel Roddy. I used to follow her when she was a food blogger, a young Englishwoman living in Rome. Then she wrote a book. Then the Guardian newspaper took her up. These days she blogs no longer. But I still use and enjoy that first book, My Kitchen in Rome, in which she talks about Testaccio, the working area of Rome where she lives, far from the tourist hot-spots. She writes about the daily market, her discovery of Roman foods and recipes, and getting to know those who help her on her culinary journey. It’s a right good read. With added recipes.

Nigel Slater is another food writer featured in the Guardian and Observer. I own just about every book he’s written: but today, even if it’s definitely not OK to start doing the Christmas shopping and enter shops where Christmas musak is already being belted out, it is OK already to have baked the family Christmas cake, I’m featuring his The Christmas Chronicles. It intersperses vignettes from his life with observations from his garden, his travels, his kitchen, his Christmas preparations with recipes for Christmas and the winter season generally. Like Rachel’s book, it’s a jolly good read.

The book which probably started many of us out on our cooking explorations is Elizabeth David‘s A Book of Mediterranean Food, first published in 1959. It doesn’t have the same story book quality of Roddy and Slater’s books, but it’s more than a list of ingredients followed by the instructions. She sets the scene, either with her own words or those of other writers, to explain the joy of say a family lunch, a Greek feast, the snail. She explains which ingredients are best, how you might make do, and when you must not make do. I no longer use David’s books as much as I did, but she’s the foundation on which so many later cooks and their books were built.

We’ll stay in the Mediterranean. I’ve written before about my entirely unrequited love affair with Commissario Guido Brunetti in Donna Leon‘s books set in Venice. In any one of them you’ll find evocatively described meals, family meals prepared by his talented wife Paola, or those taken in one of the neighbourhood restaurants he’s come to know and be known at over the years. Let’s pick on Trace Elements. A dying woman has an important message to relay to Commissario Brunetti about her recently deceased husband. Inevitably, she dies before she’s able to convey clearly what she needed to say. Can Brunetti and his friend and colleague Claudia Griffoni pick the bones out of all this? Inevitably, they can. Inevitably too, there are twists and turns on the way, and an intriguing ending. A classically satisfying tale, with meal time interludes.

Still in Italy – Sicily this time. Andrea Camilleri‘s Inspector Montalbano is reliably greedy. His housekeeper leaves him tempting suppers to enjoy when he returns from labouring over yet another murder. Local restaurateurs know him well, and keep their choicest dishes for him. All Camilleri’s books about him celebrate his love of food. It’s a long time since I’ve read one, so no review for this one: The Terracotta Dog.

We’ll finish with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie books, which my younger daughter read incessantly for a period when she was about 10. It describes the life and adventures of a pioneer family in 19th century America, and the simple business of living occupied much of their days. In Little House in the Big Woods, for example, we’ll be with mother and daughters as they bake bread, churn butter, grow vegetables, dry fruits, make pickles. Father may turn up with a fowl for the pot. It was a simple, tough and hardworking life lived by an energetic and loving family with a deep uncomplicated faith. As my daughter prepared for her teenage years in a rather different society, these books were her frequent companions.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a book post about food before, and I doubt if I shall again. But it’s been fun. Back to the world of fiction next month, for Eowyn Ivey‘s The Snow Child. Join in on the first Saturday in December with a chain of your own?

In which a Christmas gift has conditions attached *

We are a horribly traditional couple, and no role model at all for our grandchildren. If it’s jobs round the house that need doing, Malcolm’s your man. He’s a very handy plumber, and spending the morning fiddling with the electrics presents him with no problems at all. He’s good at what he does. I’m not even any use as the gopher. I’ll bring him the wrong sort of screwdriver, and am apt to confuse hammers and mallets.

Cooking however is a different story. I’ll open the fridge and plan a meal round whatever catches my eye or needs using up. I read recipe books for fun, but rarely use them whilst actually cooking. Spending time in the kitchen is relaxing for me. Malcolm requires a detailed recipe, and if he finds we’re out of some minor ingredient, the planned-for dish is hastily abandoned. In advance of actually cooking, he carefully lines up, measures and weighs all he needs, just like Delia Smith used to do.

So this Christmas, I’ve given him a present designed to remove cooking-related stress. Here it is: a whole book of dishes needing only five ingredients, and top of the best-seller lists as well.

Very meanly though, I’ve insisted that in return for the gift, he has to plan and cook a dish from it once a week.

He says he’s up for the challenge. Happily, he hasn’t given me a D-I-Y book in return. No home deserves my botched attempts at repair and maintenance. Instead, he’s given me this: much more my cup of tea.

Malcolm says I ought to call this post ‘The Poisoned Chalice’. I think that’s a bit harsh.

Dozens of plums, hundreds of plums ….

This is Gillian’s orchard. Her apples were more photogenic than her plum trees. Thanks for all this fruit, Gillian!

We don’t seem to eat jam any more. And gifts of English style chutneys, full of summer and autumn fruits and piquant with the inevitable malt vinegar sit reproachfully at the back of the food cupboard, uneaten and unloved.

There are only so many plum frangipane tarts you can eat, delicious as they are (thanks, Mrs. Portly!) Or plum cakes.

What to do with all these plums we’ve picked? Open freeze some for winter cakes and puddings? There, that’s sorted a kilo out. Now what?

Gathering greengages.

Well, perhaps we could make some chutney after all. Fired up with chillies and warming spices, they could make a decent addition to a simple winter supper. Finding a recipe that fits our bill is a task Google was made for. And here it is, courtesy of a blog new to me that I’ll be following with interest from now on, The Cottage Smallholder.

Hot spiced plum chutney

Author: Fiona Nevile

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 3 hours

Total time: 3 hours 30 mins

1.45 kilos approx of sweet plums
500 ml of white wine vinegar (don’t use malt or white vinegar)
4 chunky cloves of garlic sliced fine
175g of dried apricots chopped
600g of white granulated sugar
I lemon cut lengthwise into 8 slices and sliced very fine (ours weighed 100g)
1 large pinch of cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
7 red birds eye chillis sliced fine, include the seeds
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp of allspice powder
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp of balsamic vinegar
5 juniper berries
10 black peppercorns
1 tsp of dried chillies, chopped fine with seeds

The night before you want to make the chutney, stone the plums and put them in a large heavy bottomed saucepan/preserving pan and add the vinegar. Bring to the boil, cover and leave to cool until the next day.
Add all the ingredients apart from the sugar and the dried chillies.
Bring slowly to simmering point and add the sugar. Stir constantly until you are certain that the sugar has dissolved.
Bring the chutney back to a good simmer and, after an hour or so, add the dried chillis to taste.
Stir every few minutes to stop the bottom burning (this is a labour of love after all).
Eventually depending on the strength of your simmer, the chutney will start to thicken (more like very thick soup than chutney), stirring every 10-15 minutes or so. Test for thickness by putting a spoonful in the fridge for half an hour and take the saucepan off the stove during the test.
When you have a consistency that you like, very gently reheat the chutney and when it reaches simmering point pour into warm sterilised jars and seal with plastic lined metal lids. Leave for a month to mellow.
N.B. Don’t use cellophane jam pot covers as the vinegar will evaporate and you will be left with relics from a Pharaoh’s tomb after a few months.

We haven’t had the chance to taste the fully matured version. But this seems to be the business. Hot, fiery, with complex flavours that aren’t overwhelmed by vinegar.

Chutney bubbling away.

And if you still want another chutney, good old Saint Nigel delivers another spicy treat in his cooking bible, ‘Tender’

Nigel Slater’s hot and sweet plum chutney
. 750g of plums (about 1 1/2 pounds)
. 350g of onions (about 3/4 pound)
. 125g of raisins (about 3/4 cup)
. 250g of light muscovado sugar (1 1/4 cups)
. 1/2 tsp of crushed dried chillies
. 2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
. 150ml of apple cider vinegar (5 1/2 fluid ounces)
. 150ml of malt vinegar (5 1/2 fluid ounces)
. a cinnamon stick broken in two

Halve the plums, discarding the stones. Peel and roughly chop the onions. Put the fruit and the onions into a large heavy bottomed saucepan. Add the remaining ingredients. Bring the mixture to the boil, then reduce the heat to low. Simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally, for about an hour. (DO not forget to stir it occasionally as it may catch if you don’t and you don’t want that to happen!) Pour into hot and sterilized jam jars. Seal. Allow it to mature for at least a couple of weeks.

Now then. All you have to do is source your plums …. and get cooking.

The backdrop to all our picking activity. Not bad, eh?

Cauliflower please.

Those cauliflowers with their crisp, bright creamy curds look so enticing on the market stall at this time of year. They beg to be bought and transformed into something both appetising and full of goodness.

So often they disappoint . That bright white face displayed among all the cheery autumn colours of carrots and pumpkins, and the deep forest green of spinach and cabbage turns a sullen shade of oatmeal the second it’s introduced to a pan of boiling water. Leave it there a moment too long and it’s watery, tasteless and almost slimy.

But there are recipes in which it shines. On a miserable winter’s day after a few hours out in the cold, you can’t beat a plateful of good old cauliflower cheese made with lots of decent sharp-flavoured cheddar. You can get away with Cantal Entre Deux, but not the ready-grated Emmenthal that seems to be the default cooking cheese round here.

My next favourite is Rose Elliot‘s cashew nut korma – very mild indeed as far as curries go, but tasty and more-ish. I’ll adapt the vegetables to what I have in the house, but I’m always sure to include cauliflower. It’s a recipe I try to make a day ahead, because that way, the ingredients sit together in the pan and get very well acquainted overnight. By the time we eat them, they’ve become good and harmonious friends. And I get to use two of the chillies I’ve been carefully growing all summer.

There’s a bit of a theme emerging here: it’s all about comfort food. Perhaps because this week’s been unremittingly horrible. It’s rained and rained, the wind has blown, and then it’s rained some more. A fresh crunchy salad involving fine slices of cauliflower, enlivened by finely chopped herbs and a bright dressing simply wouldn’t hit the spot. Here’s the last suggestion, from Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume one.

A mildly spiced supper of cauliflower and potatoes

That potato and cauliflower dish bubbling away

Serves 4

Ingredients:

3 large onions
Rapeseed oil
4 cloves garlic
Ginger: a thumb-sized lump
1 tbsp. ground coriander-a tablespoon
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp.cayenne
1/2 tsp. ground turmeric
3 tomatoes (or 1/2 tin)
600 ml. water
3 medium potatoes
a large cauliflower
Handful unroasted cashew nuts
6 green cardamom pods
1 tbsp. garam masala-a tablespoon
150- 200 ml. crème fraîche
coriander-a small bunch

Peel the onions, chop one of them roughly, then let it soften with a tablespoon or two of oil in a deep pan over a moderate heat.
Halve and thinly slice the others and set aside. peel the garlic cloves, slice them thinly then stir into the softening onion. Continue cooking, without browning either the onion or the garlic.
Grate the ginger. These days I freeze ginger when I buy it, and grate from frozen. It’s so easy to deal with this way. Add to the onion and garlic.
Stir the ground coriander, cumin, cayenne and turmeric into the onion. Let them fry for a minute or two, then roughly chop the tomatoes and add them to the pan.
Add the water and bring to the boil.
Season with salt and a generous grind of black pepper.
Cut the potatoes into large pieces (as if for boiling) and add them to the pan. lower the heat and leave to simmer for fifteen minutes before breaking the cauliflower into florets and adding to the sauce.
Quickly toast the cashew nuts in a small non-stick frying pan until golden, tip them into the pot, cover with a lid and continue to simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes.
Meanwhile, fry the reserved onions in a little oil in a shallow pan till deep, nutty gold.
Whilst they are cooking, crack the cardamom pods, scrape out the seeds, crush lightly and add to the onions.
Continue cooking for five minutes or so, then, when all is gold and fragrant, remove and place on kitchen paper.
When the cauliflower and potatoes are tender to the point of a knife, stir in the garam masala (the spices in it are already roasted, so it needs very little cooking) and the crème fraîche. Simmer for a minute, then serve topped with the reserved onions and the roughly chopped or torn coriander leaves.

Cookery blogs I like

I’ve got a large collection of recipe books. Despite regular and judicious weeding, the shelves get heavier with every passing year. You know me well enough to realise that Nigel Slater gets a shelf all to himself, which he shares with my latest new cooking best-friend, Diana Henry.

In among are certain stand-alone favourites: Denis Cotter’s ‘Paradiso seasons’ – stylish vegetarian recipes from an Irish restaurateur: Pushpesh Pant’s encyclopaedic ‘India cookbook‘: a reliable guide to quick and easy suppers from Sandeep Chatterjee’s ‘Indian Vegetarian Cookery’: and ‘Persia in Peckham’ by Sally Butcher, a great book to browse through and read, as well as to cook from.

Yet for all that, I find myself increasingly visiting the internet when hunting for new ideas. Any page that is immediately greyed-out by a superimposed advert is banished without further ado. So is any recipe that comes expressed in the cups so beloved of Americans and Australians (A tablespoon of butter? Oh, please no.)

I’m likely to find what I want among the pages of my favourite food bloggers. And here they are, in no particular order. What they can all do is write, and communicate their pleasure in the dishes they make with me, their reader. Perhaps you’ll come to enjoy them too.

rachel eats

Once upon a time, just after I’d left school, I worked in Italy, in Florence. As an au pair living en famille, I had no need to cook, but I remember those intriguing food shops; corn-yellow chickens, feathered heads intact, hanging in long lines from hooks above the counter; vast wheels of parmesan, fragrant hard flakes dusting the counter from the last-cut slice; the salumeria, with dusky cured meats and salamis suspended from the ceiling, and piled into baskets. I remember thick soups of fagioli ad’oglio and the excitement of first eating such simple dishes as soft cushions of mozzarella dressed with tomatoes, olive oil and pepper. Mainstream now, but so exciting back in the 60’s. Rachel’s blog puts me back in touch with those days.

Rachel is a young English woman living with her small son Luca in the Testaccio district of Rome. I think perhaps she chooses to lives there, in Testaccio, as much as anything because of its busy daily market, with its stalls of just-picked vegetables and fruits, its fresh local cheeses and cured meats all sold by the people who’ve grown and produced these goods. Back home, she transforms what she’s just bought into simple tasty and achievable recipes which I always want to cook the second I’ve read about them. If ‘slow food’ is the motto you live by, Rachel’s your woman, because she’ll always point out that so many of the dishes she enjoys require time to develop a range of complex flavours, though otherwise not too much effort. Here’s the last dish of hers we enjoyed.

The Ordinary Cook…..

I think that Kath is the less-than-ordinary cook I aspire to be. Like me, she learnt from her mother – my earliest cooking memories are of helping to chop up candied lemon and orange peel for the Christmas cake, aged about 4. Like me, her cooking school was family life. Like me, she enjoys it when her children cook with her. Unlike me, she seems to be able to get away with cooking a lot of cakes and puddings: I like to make them, but taking 2 slices out of a whole cake before it goes stale isn’t a great idea. Kath is always keen to try things she’s never embarked on before, such as making her own butter. Any woman who provides a recipe for damson ice cream gets my vote. She’ll tweak a standard favourite and make it into something new: gooseberry and elderflower cheesecake comes to mind. There’s a lot of baking, but also plenty of ideas for inexpensive tasty main meals such as chorizo, lentil and bean stew. Good stuff.

Cook eat live vegetarian

Vegetarianism is by no means mainstream here in France. It’s seen as cranky, even. Outside the big cities, you’ll struggle to find a restaurant offering meat and fish-free main dishes (so take a bow, le Rendez-vous at Léran, for your daily vegetarian choice). On a domestic level, the vegetarian diet here tends to be … well …. brown. ’70’s retro, really. Lentils and chick peas, tasty items in themselves, tend to be offered without the revitalising additions of brightly coloured vegetables or zingy spices. How I long to thrust Natalie Ward’s blog in front of French vegetarian cooks. Here is what she says on her ‘About…’ page:

‘This blog is to share our enthusiasm for fantastic food with a world flavour. Using seasonal produce, grown locally where possible, we aim to excite with global vegetarian cuisine . Our inspiration comes from what fruit & vegetables we see growing while walking the dog in the “campo” in the morning and we hope to share some of the beauty of Andalucia in the process.’

She succeeds alright. She favours fresh, bright yet often quite complex flavours that excite the palate. Almost every recipe of hers that I have cooked has become part of my repertoire. It’s the sort of food I can make for non-vegetarians, who will have cleared the plate and asked for more even before they’ve realised that there’s not a mouthful of meat on offer.

I offer this recipe to those of you who despair over what to do with yet another mound of courgettes from the kitchen garden.

Marmaduke Scarlet.

I love London. Why wouldn’t I ? Visiting gives me the chance to stay with my son and daughter-in-law. It gives me chances to expose myself to ‘culture’ with big and small ‘c’s’ of all kinds. And I love shopping there. No not THAT kind of shopping. Food shopping.

I love to nosey round Lewisham, maybe beginning with a rich dark espresso at the noisy and friendly Italian delicatessen, crowded with members of the local Italian community; going on to the Turkish shop; the Polish and Latvian stores; the Caribbean stalls on the market. Then there are Indian stores, various kinds of African ……

Rachel Kelly, aka Marmaduke Scarlet enjoys London too. She lives there. Having a metropolitan address doesn’t stop Rachel from eating seasonally, from locally sourced ingredients, including the wild leeks from her own garden. She celebrates the cultural diversity of London, using ingredients which we poor provincials sometimes struggle to find. She asks herself why some things work best one way rather than another, and wonders how to be creative with those leftovers. She tells a good story. She loves Nigel Slater. She makes me feel hungry as I read her latest post. Really, what’s not to like? You could try this one, maybe.

David Lebovitz

I hardly seem to need to recommend this. I note that half the blogs I read already have him on their blog roll. A professional American cook and baker living in Paris, he writes wittily about his life in the city and as he travels Europe and the world. I wouldn’t think of visiting Paris now without checking first on the various food shops, bars and restaurants he recommends, and his recipes are worth a go too. Those Whole Lemon Bars: once tasted, never forgotten.

Cherries gone wrong.

It was my twin grandsons’ birthdays yesterday. One way for us to celebrate it here is to gather in the very last of the cherry harvest. In this topsy-turvy year, 14th June marked our first, not our last chance for us to harvest this year’s crop, helping friends in a village just down the road.

Oh, they looked good, those cherries! The tree was weighed down with luscious ruby fruits. Max got out a ladder for us to reach the ones way up towards the top, but even before we got to work, we could see that all was not as it seemed. Many cherries – most cherries – were turning brown and nasty or had already grow a furry coat, even before they’d fully ripened. As we harvested, we discarded more than we dropped into our buckets. After we’d done all we could, we only had two small buckets’ worth.

A tree. A ladder. Christine and I discuss a picking strategy

I pick.

Max picks.

Not easy, this picking lark.

And if you’re serious, you’ll need a rope safety harness.

And here’s Malcolm picking too. At ground level.

Then we went through our haul again: quality control. Our two buckets-worth became one. Christine complained that she couldn’t foresee getting more than a single clafoutis out of this lot. Normally she makes cherry jam, cherry liqueur, bottled cherries, cherry clafoutis and cherry pies till she’s sick of the sight of them. And what was worse, those cherries didn’t even taste of much. Engorged with water, the flavour was diluted and thin somehow.

They gave the lot to us.

Good cherries.

Bad cherries. And discarded stones.

Messy cherries. That’s the kitchen after a sorting and stoning session.

This morning, I got our cherries out of the fridge to pick them over before tackling that clafoutis. Overnight, almost half of them had gone bad. Saint Nigel, my unfailing kitchen guide, suggested an improvement on the traditional clafoutis recipe, and I followed it. The recipe was not a success. The batter was solid and heavy, and complemented by wishy-washy flavourless cherries, it was not a pudding to write home about.

Uncooked clafoutis.

Cooked clafoutis.

Clafoutis for lunch.

By the way, do you know the French for ‘it’s nothing to write home about‘? It’s ‘Il ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard‘. It doesn’t break the three feet of a duck. In other words, it’s nothing extraordinary, as a three-legged duck would certainly be.

Coffee and walnut cake – the failure

I knew it would end in tears. I should have listened to Nigel.

Malcolm’s favourite cake in all the world is coffee and walnut cake. So why not indulge him for his birthday? I made one a while back, and it was just as it should have been – rich and indulgent, with a moist crumb, but not too sickly sweet. How could I have forgotten that it was Nigel who delivered, as he invariably does, the Tips That Matter? I turned to another book, a BBC book for heaven’s sake, which is normally pretty reliable. My instincts told me it was wrong. The size of tin relative to the mixture, the heat of the oven – everything. But I decided to go for it in every particular: you don’t argue with the Beeb.

And of course I shouldn’t have done. The two layers were too thin to rise into a satisying mound of comforting coffee-infused sponge, the quantity of icing advised would have filled and decorated enough cakes to fill the WI stall at the farmer’s market. I was unimpressed. Malcolm’s being too polite to say so, but he did venture to point out that Nigel is King in this house, and his recipes should always be first port of call.

Here’s his recipe. I’ve just this minute compared it with the one I made. And would you believe, the two are all but identical? Extraordinary. Jut reading a recipe by Nigel seems to make it succeed.

It’s rare for me to follow recipes to the letter. Like Nigel Slater, I tend to adapt, substitute, tinker. So what I’ve learnt from this is that instincts are there to be heeded. If a recipe seems wrong, it probably is. For you, anyway. On that particular day, at least.

The failed coffee cake. It can't be all that bad. We'll eat it. — The failed coffee cake. It can’t be all that bad. We’ll eat it.

What to do with a Hallowe’en pumpkin

Hallowe’en. Pumpkin season. Every fruit and veg stall in the markets here will have red kuri, ‘le butternut’, or acorn squash at the very least, and there are those dedicated to selling nothing but the rich variety of squash, pumpkin and gourd you can grow here. Kalba gave me this butternut squash some 3 weeks ago, grown in their own garden.

ButternutOctober2012 002 — The butternut makes a bid to take over the fridge

It weighs in at more than 7 kilos. More than a stone! We’ve been chomping our way through it, but see how much remains. What’s worse: Malcolm has just owned up to not caring for pumpkin very much. How could he not like it? That comforting sweetness works so well with the saltiness of bacon, the heat and colour of chillies and oriental spices, or the fatty unctuousness of cheap cuts of meat and sausages. Well, his loss. Here are two of my current favourite dishes, both courtesy of Nigel Slater, from Tender, Volume 1, you may not be surprised to hear.

Nigel slater — A recent BBC photo of Nigel Slater

Pumpkin laksa

Nigel says this is for a cold night. Well, it is. But it’s also a fine thing to dish up on a hot day after a gruelling few hours physical labour. It looks complicated, but it isn’t. Take a deep breath and read it slowly: tackle the pumpkin, then the spice paste; the rest just falls into place.

Ingredients

350g. pumpkin, unskinned

coriander and mint leaves to finish.

For the spice paste:

red bird’s eye chillies, 3-4

garlic- 2 cloves

ginger, a thumb sized lump

lemongrass, 2 plump stalks

coriander roots, 5 or 6 coriander leaves, a handful

sesame oil, 2 tablespoons

For the soup:

chicken or vegetable stock, 600ml

coconut milk, 400ml

nam pla (thai fish sauce), 2 tablespoons

tamari, 1-2 tablespoons, to taste

the juice of a lime

100g dried noodles, cooked as per packet and drained.

Peel and seed the pumpkin and cut the flesh into large chunks. Cook in a steamer or a metal colander balanced over a pan of boiling water until tender. remove from the heat.
For the spice paste, remove the stalks from the chillies, peel the garlic, peel and roughly chop the ginger and lemongrass. Put them all into a food processor with the coriander roots and leaves and sesame oil and blitz until you have a rough paste.
Get a large, deep pan hot and add the spice paste. Fry for a minute, then stir in the stock and the coconut milk and bring to the boil. Allow to simmer for seven to ten minutes, then stir in the nam pla, tamari, lime juice, pumpkin and the cooked and drained noodles. Simmer briefly, add the coriander and mint noodles over the top, and serve in deep bowls.

And now for something completely different…..

Pumpkin and Apple fry-up:

either to accompany a meaty supper, or as a main dish in its own right.

Ingredients

a little butter

80g. fatty bacon

medium onion

650g. pumpkin flesh

400g. apples (Nigel says a desert variety. Mine were very tart, and I thought all the better for it)

a lemon

caraway seeds, a pinch

Melt a slice of butter in a shallow pan, cut the bacon into short strips and let them colour lightly in the butter.
Peel and roughly chop the onion, add to the pan and allow to cook with the bacon until translucent but not browned.
Cut the pumpkin flesh into manageable pieces and add to the pan, turning from time to time till golden in patches and almost tender.
Core and roughly chop the apples, but don’t peel them. Stir them into the pan and leave to putter gently until they are on the verge of collapse. Avoid stirring too much, which is likely to mash the softening pumpkin.
Finely grate the zest from the lemon and add it to the pan with the juice, the caraway seeds and a little salt.
But wait! Isn’t this what pumpkins are supposed to be for? My son obviously thinks so, and took this photo to prove it. Though he’s a dab hand at cooking too.

PS. Some of you have been asking about Danger Mouse. Well. He’s not a mouse – too big, too cuddly. He’s not a hamster, as we at one point thought. Long tail. He’s not a dormouse. Wrong sort of tail. And he’s not a rat. Too small, too cuddly. However, he’s continuing to be part of life here. He rises at about 8.30 p.m. and organises his furniture behind the skirting boards, shoving stuff about quite noisily. Then he knocks off and has a nap till we’ve gone to bed. During the night he dismantles the latest humane trap, and eats the bait. In the small hours he may come and scurry round the floorboards under the bedroom. Then he goes to bed until the next night. If he ever goes, I think I shall miss him.

Season of pumpkins and mellow fruitfulness

mushrooms and TSSBOct2010 072 — A few pumpkins on display last year at Belesta’s annual Fête de la Citrouille

Go to any veg. stall on a French market just now, and there’ll be at least one giant pumpkin. The stall holder will sell you a portion if you like, using a hefty cleaver to wrest a kilo or so of orange flesh from this magnificent vegetable. The market’s probably got at least one stall devoted to nothing but pumpkins: Turk’s head, musque de Provence, butternut, red kuri, rouge vif d’Etampes………

It’s not so very long ago in England that I’d be doing the rounds of all the supermarkets, the day after Hallowe’en, gathering up the last few Jack o’Lantern pumpkins at bargain-basement prices.

Jack-o'-Lantern — Jack o’Lantern dressed up for Hallowe’en

They’d been stocked for everyone to make their scarey Hallowe’en pumpkin faces with and that was all.

Hardly anybody used them to cook with (presumably not even the many Americans who live in Harrogate, with their apparent love of pumpkin pie), and Hallowe’en over, the unsold ones would be junked.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al have put paid to that, and now the English love pumpkins as much as the French always have.

Here’s an easy and long-established soupy stew from round these parts (though I learned about it from Nigel Slater) to warm you up after a chilly day in the Great Winter Outdoors.

Food Oct2011 005 — Hmm. We made short work of that.

When we first tasted it, we thought it nice enough, not earth-shattering though. It’s grown on us, and now we think it’s comfort food par excellence: especially those pillows of bread, soaked in scalding hot flavoursome juices.

Garbure Catalane

Toast thick slices of bread- preferably sourdough, and layer them up in a casserole or slow cooker with fried onions, garlic, marjoram, sliced skinned tomatoes, and thin slices of pumpkin. Top the dish up with seasoned water and olive oil and bake for an hour or two in a slow oven (or most of the day in a slow cooker). Take the lid off the dish for the last half hour or so and return to the oven with a crust of grated cheeses (parmesan is good to include in the mix, as it provides a welcome crispiness) for the last half hour or so. Or grill for a few minutes if you’ve been using a slow cooker.

Nigel Slater arrives in France

He’s here now. Not in person of course. But his books, nearly all of them, arrived with the removal van that brought much of our stuff over from England.

I love Nigel Slater. As a cook, I mean. He takes such pleasure in all the messier aspects of making and eating food, as I do. Greasy fingers from extracting those last little bits of chicken flesh from an already picked-clean carcass. Sticky hands from rhythmically kneading and transforming dough from a tacky, gluey lump into barrel-shaped silken responsive mass. Spoons and fingers to lick after a cake and biscuit-making session. Weirdly, I even enjoy, if it’s not TOO bad, the burning eyes I get when I absent-mindedly rub them after I’ve been chopping chillies.

During this kind of cooking session, Malcolm and I look at each other with mutual incomprehension. ‘Want to lick the bowl?’ I ask. ‘Ergh, no. Shall I get you some rubber gloves so you can keep your hands clean?’ He thinks I’m facing up with commendable fortitude to jobs on a par with sorting out a couple of messy toddlers after a glue-and-paint session. I think he’s missing out.

In the end though, it’s Nigel’s recipes I come back to. He rarely worries about precise quantities, tasting and adjusting as he goes till the dish seems right. But he does celebrate ingredients in their season. Here’s what I made the other evening from the remnants of one of Is@’s chickens, and a bag full of the spinach included in our panier of vegetables: I found the recipe in Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch, Volume 1

Chicken Spinach and Pasta Pie.

Nigel reckons it serves 4. I reckon 6 wouldn’t go hungry if they sat down to this lot.

spaghetti – 350g
cooked chicken – 500g (boned weight), roughly shredded
mushrooms – 300g
butter – a thick slice
olive oil – 3 tbs
double cream – 450ml
white wine – 2 glasses
spinach – 200g
parmesan – 140g + 50g

Cook the spaghetti in deep, generously salted boiling water. Drain and set aside. (A little olive oil will stop it sticking together.) Set the oven at 180C/gas 4.

Cut the mushrooms into quarters. Warm the oil and butter in a deep pan and add the mushrooms, letting them colour nicely here and there. Add the cooked chicken meat and then pour in the wine.

Bring to the boil, scraping away at the sticky remains at the bottom of the pan: they will add much flavour to the sauce.

Pour the cream into the pan, bring back to the boil and turn off the heat. Wash the spinach and put it, still wet from rinsing, into a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Let the spinach cook for a minute or 2 in its own steam, then drain it, squeeze it to remove excess water and chop it roughly.

Fold the cooked spaghetti, mushroom and chicken sauce and spinach together then stir in two-thirds of the grated parmesan and tip into a large baking dish. Scatter the remaining cheese on top and bake for 35 minutes until the top is crisp and golden.