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Not actually addictive. Just close.

As a teenager, I had a friend called Melissa who lived just around the corner from my top-rate job at the Dairy Queen. Her parents would host fabulous parties in the summer, with everyone coming by for something for the barbecue. The kind of party where you knew hardly anyone there but you still felt perfectly at ease. The kind of party that would end far too late for you to get home at a sensible hour, so you would just know you would end up crashing on the floor. Which in this case was very good because Melissa also had MTV and an amazing collection of Lisa Frank stickers. So cleaning up a little after the party was totally acceptable as it was rewarded by writing the cutest pen pal letters in the universe while watching Kennedy host Alternative Nation and squirming when they would show Joe’s Apartment. But also I think those parties were the first place I learned to cook anything outside the confines of the kitchens of my immediate family or, indeed, the Dairy Queen.

I can’t remember who taught us how to make these, but I distinctly remember that mystery person was cooking something else at the table while giving us instructions at the stove: boil this, heat that, add some of that. It was crazy-cooking, I tell you. The kind of cooking that required no measuring spoons. I didn’t know what hit me.

But they were yummy. So I made them at home a few days later and everyone there agreed they where yummy. For a while they were that dish I was expected to make when we would have guests, and I must admit I have always thought it was pretty cool when people start to hope you’ll make something. (The Boy’s dad makes this rice in the summer and I go into mourning when it is too cold to have it any more…so if it’s a summer event and there’s not the rice…oh goodness, there will be disappointment. I just hope he is cool with that, because it is certainly meant as a compliment.)

I haven’t made them in ages, but when I read this I was taken right back to Melissa’s kitchen, so I went to get some little potatoes and try them again. They are still yummy. And they are actually even better reheated the next day, so perfect to have a few for dinner one day and a few for breakfast the next. And so easy:

*Wash small potatoes.

*Boil in skins until just soft.

*Heat a tablespoon of oil in a pan.

*Add the boiled potatoes (still in skins) and move around until coated in oil.

*Add salt, pepper and a handful of poppy seeds.

*Smoosh around in the pan until everything starts to go just a bit brown and crisp around the edges, then at that moment, stir in a spoonful of butter and mix around until all melted and absorbed.

*Eat.

And since I am still being a little nostalgic about France, it’s acceptable to pair it with this French-ish omelette (which I stupidly broke, so it is not very pretty). It is French because a) it is an omelette b) it contains a bit of Roquefort and c) it contains herbs de provence, which Ariel gave to us when she was living in Paris and I have used at least once a week ever since and still have plenty to go. Anyway, it was an ugly omelette but it tasted just like it did at the top of the mountain. Except it also had potatoes.

Super Sweet

Don’t you hate it when one bad experience ruins something for far too long? At some undetermined meal, an undetermined number of years ago, I tried a risotto and it was terrible. Really, really terrible.

For many years, I had the phrase ‘Oh no, I don’t really like risotto’ in my vocabulary. In a very polite tone, mind you. But I was quite convinced that I didn’t like risotto.

Then at some point last year, The Boy had the day off while I was at work, and he decided to cook something he had never cooked before. I came home to a house that smelled lovely, promptly got excited for dinner and then realised it was…risotto. And became terribly nervous.

Obviously I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, but after all, ‘I don’t really like risotto’. What’s a girl to do?

This is what: eat the flipping risotto and learn that you do like risotto after all. You just had the bad experience of eating a rubbish one in a restaurant that really should have been sent back to the kitchen, but being a risotto novice, you didn’t know this, and instead have spent upwards of five years of your life going around thinking you don’t like risotto when really: YOU DO.

Now we make risotto a couple times a month, just to remind me of my stupidity.

We are quite fond of one from the veggie Leith’s book made with courgettes and cheese, but I found myself with sweet potatoes and no cheese and this worked just fine. I am of the camp that you can do no wrong with sweet potatoes. I would eat them for all five of my five-a-day if it was allowed. But The Boy is rather paranoid about them currently, having read an article like this, and also, he thinks they are really too sweet for most dishes. But he ate this and didn’t complain. And more importantly, didn’t die. Which means I think I will make it again sometime, so I better write this one down.

Sweet Potato Risotto
(serves two people who are going to eat more than they really should, or more than two who know that there will still be food in the world tomorrow.)
3/4 cup (before cooking) risotto rice
1 cup white wine
4 to 5 cups very hot vegetable stock (no, I do not make stock. Unless boiling water + OXO cube = ‘making’ stock. It works just fine.)
3 sweet potatoes
salt, pepper, oregano and coriander
olive oil

*Wash the sweet potatoes and bake them until soft. Set aside to cool.

*Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan. Throw in the rice and mix around in the pan until covered with oil. Keep on medium heat until the grains start to become transparent (a minute or two). Reduce the heat.

*Start to add the liquid. Add 1/2 cup wine and 1/2 cup stock and keep slowly stirring. Set the temperature to just barely simmering.

*Then there is this lovely process of adding more liquid and stirring more. All very slowly. Like ‘bring a good book to read’ slowly. Or ‘practice your pirouettes on the kitchen floor’ slowly. If you just sit and stare at it, it may get a bit boring. Never fear. Just add little by little, stir it so it doesn’t stick and whenever it starts to get too thick, add more liquid.

*Once pretty much all the liquid is absorbed, add the salt, pepper, oregano and coriander. Keep stirring.

*Chop the cooled sweet potato into bite-sized pieces and throw into the saucepan. If the risotto is looking too thick or the rice isn’t soft enough to eat yet, keep adding more stock.

*That’s it. Put in bowls and eat. Try to come up with a good retort to ‘They are called sweet potatoes because they should be for dessert’, but fail miserably.

(Can totally be made without the wine—but seems to need more stock and a while longer to break down without it.)

Blueberries and a bit of spectacular

For the nine years I have lived in England, I have constantly been mystified by the sheer prestige of shopping at Waitrose. We seem to have a pyramid of the grocers in this country. I remember a professor (who, ironically, was British) discussing how in a town of not-that-many, Wal-Mart was the great leveller. Everyone in that town had to go into Wal-Mart now and then because it was virtually impossible to get some things elsewhere, as the town wasn’t big enough to support a giant Wal-Mart as well as smaller shops dedicated to each section of Wal-Mart’s wares. _I know this has long happened in so many towns, but unless you visit this place you will never quite grasp the wrongness in proportion of the supergiantmassive Wal-Mart to the town. All I can say is the CEO of Wal-Mart lived there once, and he decided to go back and leave his mark._ Anyway, this professor, in a voice that we all thought was terribly posh but now I know…wasn’t…said that if the Queen herself had lived there, she inevitably would have had to go to Wal-Mart, and if someone had declared themselves homeless in that town, they also would have had to go to Wal-Mart, and that both of these events would probably have several pages of coverage in the local newspaper.

From what I’ve seen here though, we don’t have that great leveller. And for a few years now, we’ve even had Wal-Mart (in the guise of Asda, which Wal-Mart owns). But there’s always been this pyramid of who goes where…not so much a leveller at all. When I first lived here I was a student and as a foreign student I wasn’t allowed to have a job, so I was basically more broke than I had ever been in my life. There were several places within walking distance to buy groceries, but most of the students went to Safeway. If someone had send me a card with some spending money, I might go to Sainsbury’s, as they had food I still missed from home, but it really was a special treat. A few years later I discovered the glory of the Marks & Spencer Food Hall, and I might as well have taken out a loan just to eat. I was convinced that there was no better food in the world and that everyone I saw shopping in there was leading a life of amazement and decorum. (Yes, it amazes me now that I was so obsessed by people’s shopping habits. Perhaps I missed my vocation in some level of grocery marketing research.) But after M&S, everything just hit a plateau. Surely there was nowhere to go from there.

It was only after that that I started hearing about Waitrose. Never having been near one, I was convinced that they would be exceedingly posh stores with everything organically grown and ethically packaged and everyone who shops there would happily pay ten times the price of anywhere else because it would really be so good as to be worth it. This was partly because the people I knew who did live near Waitrose shops were all spectacular people with spectacular lives and despite the professor telling me the Queen would shop at Wal-Mart, I didn’t believe that these spectacular people bought their groceries at anywhere less than…spectacular.

So the other day I went on a little journey to a fabric wholesalers in search of twenty metres of something that would make fabulous curtains, all at a price that would be lovely. When I found the wholesalers (where I did find some lovely fabrics at ridiculous prices), it was in true bargain-basement fashion, where a building has been gutted and the fabric has been thrown in, without worrying about increasing the overheads of the business with things like finishing touches. Just fine for what it is. But next door—as in sharing a car park – there was a….Waitrose.

Now clearly I had saved enough on my fabric that I could buy just one meal’s shopping at this store that promised to be nothing short of amazing.

But really? It looked just like the Safeway where I bought my bargains as a student in Brighton. Though the employees did offer a lovely level of chit-chat, there was no spectacular! spectacular! to be seen.

There were, however, blueberries on offer. And carrot and hummus sandwiches and raspberry lemonade. So yes, there are some lovely, lovely things. But I didn’t see anyone resembling the Queen. She must have gone to Wal-Mart after all.

And why record my silly obsession with the status of British grocery chains when I could tell you about this lovely blueberry buttermilk cake from Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros? Because everyone else has been making it too. So you can read about it here and here and here, just for starters. It is lovely, and indeed like a fluffy giant vanilla pancake with blueberries. I do believe you could even serve it to the Queen. Although I served it to two of my bridesmaids, which was just as good.

xlovesx

PS: Yes, I am saving Fortnum & Mason for a day that will need to be very, very special. I might need a new dress for such an occasion!

Hummus by Hugh

Diary, excuse the gap. This holiday was a bit of a last-minute-wonder-surprise. So for the week that we knew we were going, we weren’t eating a lot. You know, it’s just after Christmas and…we’ve been eating plenty. Enough that it’s probably going we will probably notice it while skiing and snowboarding. So a week of eating mostly fresh veggies and the odd bit of toast was just fine. After all, when you go to France, you don’t want to arrive overfull. Bringing us to the subject of…

French food.
Sigh.

I have only started to appreciate French food in the last couple years. There is much of the cheese. The most fabulous cheese. Cheeses, if I stand corrected. There seems to be plenty to keep the meat-eaters happy. But little veggie me is more impressed by crepes. Yes, they are just pancakes, but they taste. better. in. France. Especially at the top of a mountain. Especially after skiing down against the wind until you can’t feel the tip of your nose from the cold. Especially filled with hot cherries and Grand Marnier. Especially then.

This trip was the first time that we stayed in a chalet rather than a hotel, as had always been under the impression that you had to book all the places in a chalet…like it would be perfect with a group of friends but pretty darn expensive when it’s just the two of us. Ha. We were wrong. (Thank you Nedley for putting us right.) So we stayed with eight other people we didn’t know…but the best part was that pretty much all of our meals were cooked for us by our chalet hosts. So kinda like a B&B that serves afternoon tea and a four-course dinner, all at the top of a mountain. A very lovely idea indeed.

One of our chalet hosts was particularly excellent in the kitchen, and it’s pretty safe to say he knows how to cook a great deal more than the average twenty-three year old guy. So diary, consider a whole week’s entries summed up by a little record of what we ate at our little chalet, courtesy of Hugh’s Kitchen:
Afternoon tea cakes: banana bread (with no nuts…yay), chocolate sponge, white chocolate and raspberry cake,
Starters: homemade hummus, salmon rolls, waldorf salad, potato & leek soup, broccoli & roquefort soup
Veggie dishes: savoury pancakes, lentil cakes, fajitas, cashew filled pastry, mediterranean vegetables
Meat dishes: duck l’orange, pork chops, salmon parcels, chicken fajitas, beef strogonoff
Desserts: Raspberry Eton mess, pears in red wine sauce, lemon mousse, chocolate pots, apple crumble
Plus one evening of Savoyard specialties: raclette, fondue and hot rocks with crepes suzette.

Recipes linked look as close as I can guess…just a way of bookmarking for a day when we are feeling nostalgic and want to cook something mountain-like!

xlovesx

His turn

His favourite cookbooks are from Leiths, and this one is from their vegetarian edition. They are lovely books; huge tomes filled with a gazillion recipes. The index is fabulous. I just wish they had more pretty pictures.

I have a feeling that quite a few vegetarians have this habit…making a side dish into a full meal. This one would definitely be better as a side dish, but just this once it was fine. That’s probably because I don’t really think you can go wrong with parsnips.

I’ll see if I can get The Boy to guest blog sometime before the year is out. Until then, I’ll just report now and then. Like today, when he made parsnip mash with fried onions and brussel sprouts for lunch. I have to give him credit—I never realised brussel sprouts would fry, but they did indeed. But as he actually eats meat, he probably thought it would go nicely with roast beef. I’d probably be likely to eat it with…carrots.

A bit sweet

Sometimes it really comes down to the fifty-fifty split. This is one of those times.

It’s been so cold that when I ventured out for vegetables in the village today, I couldn’t move my fingers for a good fifteen minutes after being back in the warm. Soup suddenly seemed a lovely idea.

This was easy as could be but earned one thumb up, one thumb down. One small butternut squash (see? obsessed.) roasted in the oven for twenty minutes, then cooled, peeled and chopped. Four carrots chopped and boiled. Two onions chopped and fried. Then the whole lot thrown into a saucepan with chopped tomatoes and some vegetable stock, herbs and ginger and simmered until soft and soup-like.

Thing is, they are all quite sweet vegetables. And while I thought the sweetness was just fine with fresh brown bread, not everyone agreed. I tried explaining that it was dinner and dessert in one, but apparently that isn’t a desired trait.

Oh well. Moved to the lunch menu where I think sweet vegetables are just fine. Handy for cutting down on chocolate after Christmas. And very warm on days like these.

Inspiration and intent

This book changed my life over the past year.

I bought it as a gift for The Boy last Christmas. Somewhere along the line he had come to own one of Nigel Slater’s earlier books, Appetite and it was that book that introduced us to what is certainly our favourite meal. I will no doubt write about it later in the year, probably more than once, but suffice to say it is a meal that is impeccably simple and yet never out of place served to guests. That recipe got us both thinking.

See, when I met The Boy we inevitably got into the discussion of how I came to live in my little suburban flat, and I mentioned something flippantly about choosing it because it had a nicer kitchen than the other places in the neighbourhood. And that’s truth: I remember telling the estate agent that I was pretty much choosing on kitchen alone, as everything else was so cardboard-box-similar. So this made The Boy assume something: that I could cook.

In 2004, I could not cook. I could heat things up.

The shameful thing was that I honestly didn’t know there was a difference. At that point, I was perfectly convinced that things in boxes from M&S, heated correctly and served with impeccable presentation on my carefully chosen Ikea plates counted as cooking.

I had a lot to learn.

The Boy was not a masterchef. He was able to point out that my definition of cooking was wrong, and he had a bit more luck with following a recipe than I did at the time. So somewhere along the line, we started attempting a bit more cooking and a bit less heating things up. We messed up a lot along the way. But with heating things up (or indeed, take-away) as a back-up, it turned out to be not-so-scary. We started to find our little comfort zones. For all the fun I’ve been having with cupcake recipes over the last few years, The Boy has been doing the same with pastas and recently risotto. (I will declare from the beginning that we have very little hope of ever being a low-carb household, and we’ve decided it’s best to admit it and work with it. So pasta, cupcakes and a brisk walk around the park it is then.) But back to the book.

So I gave The Boy this book last Christmas because he was such a Nigel Slater fan. No extra special logic there. But it turned out that I was the one who would fall in love with this particular book. It is what it says: a diary rather than a traditional cookbook. A year’s worth of entries documenting what one well-known food journalist grows, buys, cooks and eats in real life. So a narrative format, with recipes thrown in here and there. And some gorgeous photos added in for good measure. (Another aside: the only way this book would be more amazing would be if it became a joint venture with Nick Bantock in a culinary Griffin & Sabine. But I digress.)

I tried my best to read the entries in season, though I could have thoroughly enjoyed reading it all in one weekend, like a brand new Harry Potter. By reading them in time with the calendar, I learned far more about what was in season, what was just about to be out of season and how herbs and spices do have a sort of seasonality about them. All sorts of good things to learn, little pieces of stories to amuse and recipes to top it all off.

I guess I just like everything to have a story, even my cookbooks.

Now back in my days of heating things up, I had a lot to learn. I still do. So much. But I have learned some basics, and more importantly, I have learned that I can really love cooking. It’s rarely a chore to me now. I still mess things up, but not as often as at the beginning. And yes, I know it’s schmaltzy, but I love that this is something we both enjoy. {It helps that we are both also big fans of eating.} We have learned enough that we are able to step away from cookbooks just a little. Even when we make something simple, we get excited when we put something together ourselves and it works. Look at us, we are the easily amused couple who get excited about dinner.

At least we are admitting it.

So thank you, Mr Slater, for Appetite and Kitchen Diaries and for so much inspiration. I hope you don’t mind that I’m totally stealing your idea and keeping my own personal kitchen diary for 2008. (If everything quickly disappears from the website, you’ll know that he did mind, I guess!) In my case, I am not keeping this because I am an expert and will share my ideas with the masses.

I’m keeping my kitchen diaries because it’s a life experience I want to record. I’m sharing it here because some of my friends share this newfound love of the kitchen, and if we help each other along the way, I think that would be brilliant. Someday it would even be nice to have them over for dinner.

Here’s to actual cooking this year. Cheers.

Squashed

Not long ago, we had a better-than-okay lunch at The Organic Cafe in Greenwich. It’s a funny little place, where all the tables and chairs are mismatched and very close together, but it is definitely vegetarian friendly, not stupidly priced and most importantly when doing a bit of Christmas shopping at Greenwich market: serving hot food.

I had the stuffed squash which was totally different than I imagined and yet just lovely. A butternut squash chopped in half, roasted and then filled with more roasted vegetables. I am prone to like anything that involves butternut squash, really, so it is perfectly logical for me to buy squash the next day when there are nice ones at a nice price, even though I had consumed a great deal of it not twenty-four hours earlier.

Today we finally got round to roasting that squash and assembled a different mix of vegetables to accompany it. Our verdict: theirs was prettier; this one tasted better. So I guess we’ll have to work on our presentation. We roasted an onion, a courgette and two parsnips along with the squash and added some black-eyed peas and chopped tomatoes and herbs. Hurrah for using the leftover Christmas vegetables! Once it was all put together (ish), I realised we have far too much cheese left from Christmas as well, so why not melt cheese over the top? Exactly.

I have to record for my (sometimes slightly stupid) self: this was way too much food for two people, and really could have made dinner for two plus a soup for two as the next day’s lunch. Perhaps next time I will think ahead. Perhaps.