Confessions of an English Foodie

A White Trench Coat, Paris été 2008

2008-08-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

A reflection emergent, recurrent, and finally crystallised by an Olafur Eliasson interview and a fruit-splattered white trench coat:

The level of narration in Paris is perilous. Well aware though I thought I was of this city's literary and imagistic past, and how likely it would be that its representational history would somewhat displace each present moment lived in these streets, (aware, how could I not be, listening to France Gall and pattering through La Rue des Ecoles in pumps?), an incident, several components - a paperbag full of mirabelles, a white peach, a white trench coat - dashed any supposedly ironic distance I thought to possess.

Let us retreat back into narration. August, Jardin du Luxembourg, a young woman is reading, dozing, kicks off her shoes and curls cat-like in a pale green iron-chair. A novel idea! She has with her a ripe white peach and a paperbag full of mirabelles, bruised and honeyed and overripe. She plucked, she ate; earth felt the wound. As did the trench, whiter than the white peach, item 3 of her representational notions of this city. And so, in the most messy and juice-laden of ways, her internalised narrations are splattered with the real - inconvenient, sticky, (tasty though) - and she scuttles into a cafe to wash the stain from off her white coat, irksome sign (splatter) that one cannot entertain such idle representational fantasies, really, if one likes to eat.

Summer cooking hasn't progressed much beyond improvised salads, fruit scoffed out of the bag, and lazily opened packets of smoked salmon or trout. At a push, a filet of something fresh and salty from the sea, briefly marinated in olive oil and seasoned with coarse pink sea salt, dill and finely crushed red chilli. The recipe below depends, as ever with such simple recettes, on the quality of the ingredients.

Tomato, Cucmber and Redcurrant Salad

6 small tomatoes

1 small cucumber

1 spring onion

handful fresh parsley

handful fresh basil

several mint leaves

5 or 6 short stalks redcurrants

dressing:

100 ml natural yoghurt

drop pomegranate molasses

drop extra virgin olive oil

squeeze fresh lime

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Finely slice the cucumber and spring onion with a microplane, or by hand. Fennel could be a good addition here if you have a bulb knocking about. Roughly tear the herbs, discard the redcurrants stalks, and quarter the cherry tomatoes. Combine in a bowl. Roughly whisk together the dressing ingredients in a small bowl, and dress the salad. Eat immediately, then lounge in the August sun, sated and content.

Strawberry Fields; a cautionary tale

2008-07-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

On the first July morning of the year, in the beautiful, oppressive light of a choked summer day, a young Foodie – nomadic of late – found her wish-fulfilment in the strawberry fields of Vermont. Strawberry picking; a projected myth of childhood, of which she had heard, then dreamt, and which she imagined would have been her summer pastime of youth, were she a free-range country bumpkin, and not a city-dweller, raised as she had been in the toxicity of a crazed metropolis. Imaginings of a charmed existence, as follows: strawberry picking; feeding sugar lumps to the family horses; makeshift tree houses with cobbled together pulleys to bring beverages up to those between the branches above.

Yes; she felt exceedingly sorry for herself, glancing over the woods and meadows of a lost youth (she did not see the sundry insects, which pester and hum about the ears of country peoples; she could not imagine the very same landscape as it would be six months later, hostile and barren, buckling under three feet of snow; she did not consider how far it was to the nearest tobacconist, museum, or cinema. No, here and now, scanning the landscape, she rejected (she makes a dismissive gesture with her right hand, like so) the unremitting consumption, the nicotine, nosh, culture, that sustained her urban existence). Yes; she took her deprivation rather seriously; glanced at her urban pallor with disdain; likened her woeful fate to that of a battery-farm chicken (whispered a prayer to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall in all his chivalric glory).

A farm on the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont; here she could pick strawberries ad nauseum, or ad her back breaking anyway; here, she could stain her prim city clothes with strawberry juice; here, she could wipe her brow from the sweat of hard labour, shoo away flies and curse the heat, and feel bathed in the humble country glory of the manual workforce; here, that is, until she sped off in an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned house to potter and make jam in an air-conditioned kitchen, with Velux windows.

Yes, she would make jars full of strawberry jam; her only preserve against the faint ridiculousness that wafted about her, alongside the billows of delusions and projections; her only preserve, and here she smirked at the pun, and here she sealed the lids on her jam jars and made fiddly labels and displayed them in artfully rustic arrangements (yes, she thought, she was beginning to grasp this ‘country’ aesthetic).

The following morning, on one of her meticulously planned country excursions, she tripped on a stile, broke her knee, and therefore, (by a feat of masterful syllogistic reasoning) came to the conclusion that actually she could not smuggle her dozen jam pots past Customs.

(Or that is how it would have ended had the writer of this cautionary tale been a little crueller, and not quite so jocund having glutted herself on some rather good strawberry jam on toast for breakfast).

I include two recipes and advice from Nigel Slater below; I haven’t altered the text at all, as his guidance is, as always, faultless. The original page for the recipes is here.

A traditional strawberry jam

A fairly light set jam. I keep this in the fridge, which thickens it up slightly.

1kg strawberries

800g granulated sugar

the juice of a large lemon

Wash and hull the berries. Keep the small ones whole, and halve or even quarter the large ones. Put them into a stainless-steel pan with the sugar and lemon juice and bring to the boil. Boil rapidly for 15 minutes, or until the fruit is starting to look soft and translucent.

Skim off the pink froth that appears on the top then spoon into the sterilised jars, seal carefully (see below) and leave to cool.

A less sweet jam for eating immediately

The jam I make is high on fruit, low on the sweet stuff. I bring it to the table still warm from the stove, a pretty dish of it with a faint pink froth on its brow. It won't keep. It is not meant to.

750g strawberries

125g granulated sugar

a squeeze of lemon juice

Rinse and hull the strawberries, but don't dry them. Pile them into a stainless steel or enamel pan with the sugar. Roughly crush the fruit with your hands or a fork then place the pan over a low to medium heat. Stir occasionally for 15-20 minutes, spooning off the pink froth as you go. The jam should be thick enough to fall slowly from the spoon, like syrup, but nowhere near thick enough to set.

Pour into a bowl and serve with scones, (where it will drip down your fingers), or slices cut from a sponge cake, spoon over goats' yogurt or allow to cool and stir into a mess of whipped cream, fresh berries and crumbled meringue.

A few notes on sealing

It is absolutely essential that you prepare your jars correctly if the jam is to keep. You can either warm the thoroughly washed jars in a cooling oven, thereby sterilising them, or you can immerse them in boiling water for 10 minutes.

Either way the storage jars must be both scrupulously clean and warm when you pour the hot jam into them. Seal the jars with a disc of waxed or greaseproof paper that you have cut earlier.

The transparent jam covers that can be bought in kitchenware shops and supermarkets should be applied whilst the jam is still warm so that they shrink over the top of the jar and create an air-tight seal.

more summery fare:

101 20 minute dishes for inspired picnics

nigel slater's quick summer dishes

yotam ottolenghi's cold yoghurt soup

carrie's french picnic tart with potato, red peppers, sage and gruyere

the independent's 50 best summer recipes by top chefs

...From whose bourn no traveller returns

2008-06-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

Cape Cod; the undiscovered country of the Eternal Summer House. 'Undiscovered country' - there is a smack of death about it. A murderous comfort, which finds its expression in slacks and starched white linen shirts; in amiable men who will always appear about twenty years younger than they actually are; in the fluorescent nylon swimsuits skimping inches of bored and brazen teenage flesh. Certainly it is Edenic - if Eden were truly so colourless and with such fastidious gardeners. Never has one breathed so deeply, cleanly, slept so well, etc.

We are yet to voyage out to Martha's Vineyard. After four years, the place seems now part memory, part the furious fabrications of the imagination. I cannot but feel it belongs rather to the order of fiction - it is far too overwrought, too laughably quaint (twee; pittoresque; saccharine and so forth) to belong to any concrete world. There will be pink varnished doorknobs and trellised terraces, rimmed in white.

On Saturday, a seaside party. Thick coral tongues of smoked salmon, daubed with dill and sour cream.

Edward Hopper is the dominant lens through which one sees New England. Without his paintings would I have registered this environment less richly - that is, somewhat baldly? Oscar Wilde was being more than provocative in The Decay of Lying. 'Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.' And so I walk around agreeing with him more and more.

The people are terribly nice here.

need a drink?

Heidi's Blackberry Limeade

Deb's Tart Margarita

Molly's Melon Made Sippable

David's Cosmopolitan

Carrie's Homemade Limoncello

...And her Lychee Martini

I eat the air, promise-crammed

2008-06-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

Something too much of life. In the riot of summer mornings, impressions, heaped upon one another, are resistant to assimilation. Spring's temperance and slow, lilting rhythms have ceded to the season of insanity. The disparate images of summer posess the quality of hallucinations. I awake to find my cousin squatting by the freezer, sun-drunk, cursing the heat. She presses frozen vegetables to her back; later she is smearing honey on her limbs to soothe her tender skin.

The garden blossoms violently; at dusk the moths hum drunkenly in clumps around the lamp.

An overwrought mind bends experience to its own rhythms. Even here - and here is Cape Cod, Massachusetts - I can't attune myself to the stasis of the rural idyll; Cape Cod's manicured lawns, gingerbread houses, old-world village streets, are twisted out of shape by my disquietude. It makes me think of what Alain de Boton writes in The Art of Travel: when we dream up our holidays, we forget that wherever we go, we take ourselves with us. Escapism escapes us. Nature is unexpectedly susceptible to the impositions of an agitated mind; our self-asserting subjectivity seems to me more forceful even than the natural transfigurations of the seasons.

With such a nomadic existence of late, there's been little cooking lately. So I'll share with you a salad good enough to have survived a couple of weeks in memory - and that must be a good sign.

Broad Beans baked in Greek Yoghurt, Coriander and Preserved Lemon, in a Rocket and Alfafa Salad

I cannot urge you to make this salad enough. Admittedly, any recipe with 'alfafa' in the title sounds suspiciously like it should be followed by (shudder) 'wheatgerm'. But don't mistake this recipe for health food fodder. It is simply delicious; subtle, complex, moorish - everything you would want from a salad. Alongside some good bread, this could easily be lunch for two or three.

1kg fresh broad beans (unpodded weight)

4tbsp greek yogurt

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 quarter of a preserved lemon, peel only

3 spring onions

palmful fresh coriander leaves

palmful fresh mint leaves

3tbsp sunflower seeds

alfafa sprouts

wild rocket

freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 250C. Pod the broad beans (1kg pods should yield roughly 300g unpodded weight) and blanch for one minute in salted boiling water. Drain the beans and rinse with cold water to prevent them from cooking any longer. Finely slice the spring onions, fresh herbs and the preserved lemon and mix together into the Greek yogurt. Stir the olive oil into the yogurt mixture, and season with black pepper (no salt, the lemons provide all the saltiness you need). Tip the blanched broad beans into a small, deep earthenware pot, stir in the yogurt dressing and scatter the sunflower seeds on top. Bake for roughly 15 minutes, until the top is just beginning to brown very lightly. While the beans are cooking, place the salad leaves and alfafa in a large salad bowl. Combine the cooked beans with the salad, tossing well, and serve immediately.

this week digested:

Hopper's America, in Shadow and Light

Hannah & Martin: Courtyard Theatre

A Winter's Tale: William Shakespeare

Cy Twombly at Tate Modern

A Writer's Diary: Virginia Woolf

Belike, then my appetite was not princely got

2008-06-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

PRINCE HENRY Faith, it does me; though it discolours the complexion of my greatness to acknowledge it. Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer? - William Shakespeare

At the risk of sounding rather earnest (come to think of it, blogging in itself risks this anyway), I've been reflecting on the seeming resilience of the ascetic ideals which have long been pervasive in antique literature, scripture and - in this age of devout image idolatry - are now given new life in trashy prime-time television. I've been thinking, naturally, primarily of asceticism in relation to food. Unfettered appetite is most glaringly identified with sin in the symbolic apparatus of the Adamic myth; think of Eve, whose scant bite of that forbidden fruit caused tremors of incontrovertibly apocalyptic gravity; Eve, whose want of restraint expelled future generations from Eden; Eve, to whom we owe our mortality, our industry, our adversity. Sprung from that cursory sketch in biblical narrative, this dying generation, unlucky heritors of original sin, must suffer the most severe of all scriptural retributions: in the unweeded, postlapsarian garden of television scheduling, Gillian McKeith frolics unimpeded. The overweight atone their sins. Divine retribution ensues. Thou shalt not eat cake.

So indelible are the imaginative and theological structures surrounding sensual pleasure that we graft moral paradigms onto the body and its sensations instinctively, almost unconsciously. We perpetuate ascetic ideals in accepting the premise of restraint as morally covetable. But the original telos of asceticism - the search for a higher, unwordly spirituality - now seems deflected onto our devotion to a new God; The Perfect Body. We hurry to purchase our diet pills in the vain hope that we may be remade in His image. Perhaps all this has been thrown into starker relief since I left Paris temporarily; that mythic and entropic land of the bon viveur. I'm not by any means suggesting the French are any less enthralled by the size-zero, almost Platonic Ideal of beauty mass-reproduced by the media. Yet there - and perhaps there is after all some degree of cultural entrenchment to their joie de vivre - food seems less implicated in this heady cocktail of self-abnegation, Christian guilt, and a slavish devotion to the image. And apart from this, there is the inherent darkness of asceticism as identified by Nietzsche; as a means of attaining mastery over the self, over others; and often, in the hypocrisies of institutionalised religion, as a means of exhibiting the "trappings" of inner purity. In Nietzsche's most acute distillation, he identifies ascetism as humanity's compulsion to strive after something: man "will rather will nothingness than not will".

While we seem to have exorcised the banishing of our sexual appetites sometime during the languorous, marijuana-fuelled hours of the sumer of love (as Christina Aguilera's incisive social critique reminds us), we are yet to extricate greed from this quagmire of moral referentiality. Secularised we may be, but the morality encoded in ascetic doctrine impregnates our language furtively. Just smell the zeal surrounding the revelation that television presenter Fern Britton "confessed last night that her dramatic weight loss is down to a GASTRIC BAND - and NOT exercise and sensible eating". "I was in awe of your new shape," writes someone on the NoW website, "but really you are a cheat ... you just fell off your pedestal. I'm disappointed." In this context, Raef's allegedly disdainful comment on The Apprentice - "Women who are size '16-32' are size '16-32' for a reason. They love cake." - is far more benign than it may at first appear. "They love cake" is happily innocent of snarky moral insinuations, free of the self-righteousness which deifies the self-restrained and demonises the hedonistic, free of a near-religious vocabulary glutted with words such as "confess", "pedastal", "awe". Just how long will we continue to perpetuate the notion of appetite as somehow morally unpalatable?

Confessions of an English Foodie. Perhaps my blog title was more charged than I thought.

Amaretti Biscuits

I thought, appropriately, since much of this week's post reads just like a defense of gluttony, that I'd share some of my favourite baking recipes with you. I'm not as confident a baker as a cook; it's true that baking is more conspicuously a question of chemistry than cooking appears to be, and it requires a more slavish adherence to measure, timing and temperature. What in cooking could be a question of just a more cumin-y hummus or a less - though it would still identifiably be hummus - be as flippant with flour and what comes out of the oven most certainly won't be bread. And yet this reluctant baker has still worked her way through an alarming number of sweet indulgences. The two recipes that follow are unapologetically lavish and rich; magisterial even. I never, never imagined myself as the sort of person who would be baking their own amaretti (admittedly I said the same thing when making my own granola; when making my own chutney; when baking bread, making pasta, making ice cream...Ok, maybe I am that sort of person after all). Yet these are deceptively easy to make - leaving them overnight to dry out is about the most demanding it gets - and let's face it, sleeping isn't all that much hard work, really. These are infinitely, infinitely better than those prettily wrapped confections imported here from Italy. Before I start doubling all the adverbs in my enthusiasm, here's Giorgio Locatelli's wonderfully (wonderfully) rewarding recipe:

makes about 35 amaretti

25g roasted hazelnuts

125g blanched almonds

100g apricot kernels

500g caster sugar

120g egg whites

icing sugar for dusting

Crush the nuts and apricot kernels finely in a food processor. Add the sugar and egg whites and process until the mixture all comes together. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag. Line 1 or 2 baking trays with waxed paper and pipe the mixture into rounds on them, spacing them out well. Dust liberally with icing sugar. Leave for 12 hours so that the mixture can dry out slightly. After this time, they will have formed a 'skin'. Pinch the biscuits lightly with the fingers to break this and give a knobbly appearance. A good half hour or so before you are ready to bake the biscuits, preheat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4, then bake them for 11 minutes until light golden.

Nigel Slater's Pistachio and Orange Blossom Water Cake

This is the only cake I make on a truly regular basis (hard luck that my best friend is allergic to pistachios). I even made it as part of my birthday feast in Wales last year (which resembled, let me tell you, a reenactment of La Grande Bouffe, though we exploded in a less visually spectacular way). There is something glorious about the saffron-hued, orange scented wet cake mixture - almost like handling liquid sunshine. The rose petals to decorate are, as these things always are, optional - I've used pistachios caramelised in a rose-water sugar syrup before, and it was sublime, though all that gets unnecessarily fiddly.

250g butter
250g caster sugar
3 large eggs
100g shelled pistachio nuts
100g ground almonds
zest and juice of an unwaxed orange
1 tsp of orange blossom water (or rosewater if you prefer)
60g plain flour
icing:
100g icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 160° C. Line the bottom of a non-stick 22cm cake tin with baking parchment. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating continually. Blitz the pistachios in a food processor until fine, then add, along with the almonds, to the creamed butter mixture. Add the zest and the juice of the orange and the orange blossom water. Finally, fold in the flour. Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 50 minutes, covering the top lightly with foil for the final ten minutes. Check that the cake is done by inserting a skewer, it should come out quite clean with no wet mixture stuck to it. Leave it to cool in the tin before turning out. To make the icing mix the icing sugar and lemon juice together until smooth and drizzle over the cake. Decorate with whatever you fancy. Leave the icing to set and then serve and enjoy!

Two links for other Nigel classics: Orange, Honey and Polenta Cake and Pistachio Yoghurt Cheescake ...

this week digested:

The Second Plane: Martin Amis

Paradise Lost: John Milton

The Apprentice

Cariad and Caryatids

Bridget Jones of the banlieues: Faïza Guène

Henry IV, part II: Shakespeare

A footnote, and some recipes rescued from electronic obscurity

2008-06-03T00:12:00.000-07:00

Today's dinner was startlingly elegant in its simplicity; the product of spontaneity and a rampant hunger; an appetite to eat, not cook. Fresh broad beans, meadowy green, their pods defiantly crisp and engorged; mild, coral trout smoked in dill; bottle-green fresh olives. I boiled the beans briefly, then seasoned and mashed them with lemon zest, a squirt of juice, and the faintest drizzle of some herby oil (mint; basil) I had left over in a yoghurt pot from last night. It is a rare treat when ingredients taste so vividly of themselves. We finished with a handful of walnuts, hastily shelled, fingers splaying as we teased each half out of its shattered cradle.

Lettuce, Pea and Asparagus Soup

Lettuce is absolutely wonderful cooked; braised in chicken stock with garlic and thyme; quickly sautéed with fresh herbs and wild garlic leaves; or, as below, in a summery soup, served hot or chilled. If you stumble across any fresh lovage, it's an excellent addition here.

2 lettuce

500g fresh or frozen peas

2 bunches asparagus

strips of zest and juice of 1 lemon

1 celery heart

1 large onion

1 leek

3 cloves garlic

bunch parsley stalks

bunch basil stalks

palmful lemon thyme leaves

2 tbsp olive oil

vegetable stock

Finely chop the onion, celery, leek, garlic and herb stalks. Gently fry with the strips of lemon zest and thyme leaves until soft and melting, but not coloured; around 10 minutes. Tip in the asparagus, roughly chopped, and the lettuce leaves, sliced, and fry for a further 5 minutes. Pour in the peas, straight from the bag if frozen, cover with vegetable stock and bring to the boil. Season, and leave the soup to simmer and bubble lazily for 10-15 minutes. Blend until smooth, check for seasoning, and serve.

Apple and Parsnip Soup

This honeyed and complex soup has the distinct privilege of being adored by anyone who tastes it. Though I've completely forgotten where it came from...

500g parsnips, peeled and roughly diced

2-3 large Russet apples, weighing 400-500g, peeled, cored and roughly diced

60g butter

1tsp ground cumin

1¿2 tsp ground cinnamon

1tsp fenugreek seeds

1¿2 tsp chopped root ginger

1tsp curry powder

60ml cider

1.2 litre vegetable stock

90ml double cream

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2tsp toasted cumin seeds to garnish

Gently cook the parsnip and apple in the butter together with the spices, in a covered pan for about 5 minutes, giving them the occasional stir and not allowing them to colour. Remove the lid, add the cider and vegetable stock and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper and simmer gently for about 15 minutes until the parsnip is soft. Blend in a liquidiser until smooth and strain through a fine-meshed sieve. Bring back to the boil, add the double cream and adjust with a little water or stock if it's too thick. Serve in hot soup bowls and sprinkle with a pinch of cumin seeds.

Baked Sweet Potato with Herbed Cottage Cheese and Shredded Beetroot

serves 2

It may seem absurd to offer a recipe here for what is basically a jacket potato, yet people rarely bake its sweeter relative. The trick is to bake it for a good hour and a half, until its skin is blackened and bursting with sweet, caramel flesh. The cottage cheese and beetroot partnering has that health-food hippie circa 1970 feel to it; it's why I love it.

2 large sweet potatoes (250-300g each)

200g cottage cheese

fresh herbs (basil, mint, dill)

a dash of extra virgin olive oil

2 small beetroot, peeled

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the sweet potato; while it is still damp, roll it in a generous spattering of sea salt. Bake in a very hot oven (220-250C) for a good hour and a half, until it is ready. To assemble the topping, chop the herbs finely and mix them into the cheese with the tiniest dash of oil and some seasoning. Some lemon zest would be good, if it's to hand. Grate the raw beetroot and set aside. Rather than slicing open your potato, whack it open with the side of your hand; I'm only quoting Nigel Slater here, and his assurances that this is the trick for a perfect fluffy spud interior are good enough for me. Top with the cheese and grated beet; eat.

overheard online:

"Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy..."

"To climb the steps of the New York Public Library, past the stone lions guarding its entrance and into the monumental reading room on the third floor, was to enter a world that included everything known..."

"...And finally: when in doubt, obfuscate. History shows that you will be given the benefit of the doubt as long as you do it in French"

"...Sometimes it feels like we've walked into the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, but I think that’s just paranoia."

"...the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness."

"Essentially, we all got waylaid razzing that truly unlovable white elephant on Seventh Avenue and missed the point ..."

"August, rapacious. Akihabara wears the heat like a suit lined with pointed daggers..."

"And yet - food is life"

2008-05-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

Cooking is as much about constructing a home as providing for one. When the natural rhythms of a family are interrupted - through sickness, through separation, through any number of afflictions - feeding each other, eating together, becomes a restitution, a recovery of something lost. For the cook, the manual preparation - stirring, sifting, folding... - can be an exit route from an otherwise overly cerebral sensibility. The truth of this hits me in my first few hours back home from a second home. My first impulse is to cook, despite the rather sad and depressed state of our fridge, groaning as it is with sackfuls of unloved and overripe carrots and pears. To transform these four walls in their nakedness into a home, there must be something over the gas hob, faintly bubbling, giving up its enticing aroma. The smell of baking infamously whets our sexual appetites. Yet the less provocative, soothing redolence of something savory, sustaining, arouses an altogether different carnal desire. In the face of 3 kilos of rather wimpish, English home-grown carrots, and the mass exodus of all my spices from London to Paris, I mustered up - with a little effort and imagination - this startling orange soup. It makes a welcome change from the Covent Garden Carrot & Coriander soup that, in an odd feat of cultural exchange, is mysteriously ubiquitous in France.

Comfort food need not be an anesthetising bowl of blankety starch; it has far more to do with memory. Madeleine moments are inexplicably arresting, a seductive marriage of sensual memory and nostalgia. A relived sense-impression, released and isolated from the chronology of our lives, splices us from the present. Its physicality is startling, though the scene may only partially be reconstructed; a face, a laugh, a tablecloth bloodied with wine.

Paris-London. I came home, sore-footed, to a midnight tea, raspberries, oatcakes and a last, nostalgic gauloise for the life I have left behind, and curled up in front of an episode of Nigel Slater's A Taste of My life with Nigella Lawson. I think would be somewhat exposing to wax lyrical and throw superlatives around irresponsibly, but for the full half hour I was grinning like a fool, sharing a somewhat artificial intimacy with two people who are for me - and this, worryingly, is not empty rhetoric - demigods; watching them eating, talking, laughing together in gluttonous abandon. Two of the three recipes that follow are in homage to these two cooks (somewhat amusingly close in their nomenclature), whose recipes and writings are so intimately bound to the living history of this family.

Spiced Carrot and Tahini Soup

1kg organic carrots

1 onion, finely chopped

scattering of coriander seeds

palmful allspice berries

2 dried chillies, crushed

2tbsp tahini

1 litre stock

toasted sesame seeds

1 tbsp flavourless oil, such as rapeseed

1 lemon, halved (optional)

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Toast the coriander and allspice in a dry non-stick pan, then grind in a pestle and mortar. In a deep casserole, gently fry the onion, coriander, allspice and chilli in the rapeseed oil for 10-15 minutes over a low heat, until all is fragrant and the onion is a light gold. Whilst the onion is cooking, grate the peeled carrots in a food processor, or, if you're feeling masochistic, by hand. Tip the carrots into the onions, and fry for a further minute. Pour in the vegetable stock, bring to the boil, season with salt and pepper and simmer for 20-25 mins. With a handheld blender, blend the soup until reasonably smooth, and check for seasoning. A spritz of lemon may do the trick. Serve in deep bowls, garnished with the sesame seeds. Some warmed flatbread on the side, rubbed with olive oil, would be just about perfect here.

Nigel Slater's Pot-roast Pheasant with Celery and Sage

This is superlative with a simple wild rice pilaf, prepared with lemon zest and scattered with toasted pine nuts. A rocket salad for afters - perhaps with a parmesan dressing - would be just the thing to mop up the gamey juices from the plate.

a pheasant - plump and oven-ready

butter - 2 thick slices (80g)

garlic - 4 large, juicy cloves

celery - 3 large stalks and a few leaves

(new potatoes - 12 smallish - if not serving with the pilaf above)

sage - 6 decent-sized leaves

white vermouth such as Noilly Prat - 250ml

Set the oven at 180C/Gas 4. Wipe the pheasant and remove any stray feathers, then season it thoroughly with salt and pepper. Melt half the butter in a deep casserole, one to which you have a lid. You want it hot enough to brown the bird but not so hot that it burns too quickly. Put the bird in the butter, letting it colour heartily on all sides. Whilst the bird is colouring in the butter, you can peel the garlic, trim the celery and cut it into short (2cm) lengths, (wash the potatoes and either halve them or slice them thickly, depending on their size). When the skin is a rich gold, remove the bird, pour away the butter and wipe the pan with kitchen paper (the trick is to wipe away any burned butter but to leave any sticky goo stuck to the pan). Melt the remaining butter (and add the potatoes, letting them colour lightly). Then introduce the garlic, celery pieces and the sage and celery leaves and season with salt and pepper. Pour over the vermouth, bring to the boil, letting it bubble for a minute or two, then return the bird and any escaped juices to the pan. Cover with a lid and transer to the oven for thirty-five to forty minutes. Remove the pan from the oven, take off the lid and gently split the bird's legs away from its body, nicking the skin with a knife as you go. Return the bird, legs akimbo and without a lid, to the oven for five minutes. Remove the legs, then remove each breast in one piece. Put a leg and a breast on each of two warm plates, then divide up the potatoes, celery and their juices.

Parmesan Biscuits with Sesame and Nigella Seeds

The prime reason for loitering in Baker&Spice, though the French are far more fluent in the art of free dégustation. If you make them yourself it's the cook's birthright to cheekily taste (or scoff) these golden discs fresh from the oven...

makes 40-50 biscuits

335g plain flour

300g 24-month aged parmesan, freshly grated

300g unsalted butter, chilled

1/3 tsp cayenne pepper

1 1/2 tsp maldon salt, ground fine

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

1-2 tbsp cold bottled spring water

1 egg, lightly beaten

2 tbsp sesame seeds

2 tbsp black onion seeds (nigella seeds)

Put the flour, freshly grated Parmesan and chilled diced butter in a food processor with the cayenne, salt and black pepper. Whiz to a crumb, then slowly add the cold water through the feeder tube until the dough forms into a ball. Scrape out on to a lightly floured surface and roll into a cylinder. You will cut the biscuits from this, so size the roll accordingly. Cling-wrap tightly and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight. Brush the cylinder with the beaten egg and roll in the sesame and nigella seeds to coat all over. Wrap and chill for a further hour. Preheat the oven o 180C. Cut the cylinder into 5mm slices and lay these on non-stick baking trays, leaving at least 2cm space around them. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Orangette's post from 6/11/2006 has a recipe for cheddar crisps which looks absolutely heavenly as well.

"In fact, I was slightly embarrassed when I wrote How to Eat. People would say something about it and I would say, Oh, it's just a food book. Somehow I felt it it didn't quite count. My father and my brother were political brains... and I ended up writing about egg whites. And yet - food is life." - Nigella Lawson

The perfume and suppliance of a minute

2008-05-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

« Multitude, solitude; termes égaux et convertibles par le poète actif et fécond. Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée » - Charles Baudelaire, Les Foules

It's raining in Paradise. Spring's flirtations are over, no more than a parenthesis in the passage of the seasons. The light is dewy, prosaic; all is daubed in grey. Soaked feet tread in puddles, fracturing reflections of a charcoal sky. I meet an American girl with a green umbrella in a café this afternoon; she smokes all my cigarettes; mispronounces my name; tells me Paris is a city to be alone in. Quite, I think, ruefully eyeing my empty cigarette pack. She is right, of course; to be alone is the peculiar privilege of the Parisian. Cafés are filled with tables-for-one sipping their coffees and leafing through the daily paper. The city gives itself up to the solitary wanderer; admits no loneliness. The crowd - a city's disparate congregation - swells and feeds on unfamiliar faces, sounds wordless hymns for the religion of the individual. Exchanged glances between strangers objectify - (commodify - fetishise) - their objects; the crowd resembles a shop-window in this free-market of individuals.

Later, in a more literal market-place, the seasons seem transfigured in the stalls of the commercants. Spring's fruits linger; fresh beans, starch-swollen, in their pods; wild asparagus, pale, cream and wavering; come-hither punnets of blushing red fruits. Cooking offers itself as a corrective for seasons gone amiss. Laden with shopping bags, I stumble home, through the pockets of watery mirrors gathering on the pavement. Indoors, the spectacle of rain and thunder rages behind the windowpane; I take cover and read, sprawled on an unmade bed, plucking grapes off their tangled vines, alone.

Wild Rice Salad with Broad Beans, Asparagus, Pine Nuts and Pecorino

Paradise on a spoon. Really.

2 cups wild rice

500g bunch asparagus

1kg broad beans, unpodded weight

2 handfuls pine nuts

150g pecorino sardo

handful wild rocket (optional)

6-8 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2-3 tbsp extra virgin pine nut oil

juice and zest of 2 lemons

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat a little groundnut oil in a casserole. Using a vegetable peeler, remove some strips of lemon zest from one of the lemons, being careful to avoid the bitter white pith. Gently fry the lemon peel in the oil for a minute, then tip in the rice. Fry, stirring, for a further minute; add three times its volume in water, plus the juice of the peeled lemon, and bring to the boil. Salt the water and keep at a rolling simmer for 40 minutes or so. While the rice is cooking, steam the asparagus until just tender; boil the broad beans in unsalted water for 5-7 minutes. Place both in a large salad bowl. Finely grate the pecorino, then combine in a bowl with the olive and pine nut oils, the juice and zest of the second lemon, and a pinch of sea salt and black pepper. Toast the pine nuts in a dry non-stick pan, and tip into the salad bowl with the steamed vegetables. Once the rice is cooked and the grains are beginning to split, tip the rice into the salad bowl, and toss with the dressing until well-coated. Serve either warm or at room temperature; if you decide to add the rocket, wait until the salad has cooled thoroughly.

Fresh Haricot Beans with Chervil and a Lemon Thyme Vinaigrette

If you cannot find lemon thyme, substitute the zest of a lemon alongside some regular thyme. Temperature is not of the essence here; serve it warm, at room temperature, or chilled.

850g fresh haricot beans, unpodded weight

bunch fresh chervil

3 cloves young garlic

small bunch lemon thyme

5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cook the beans in plenty of unsalted boiling water for 25-35 minutes. You don't want to risk undercooking them. Meanwhile, crush the garlic cloves with a good pinch of salt in a pestle and mortar. Add the lemon thyme leaves (you could throw the stalks in with the beans while they boil), and continue crushing to form a vibrant green paste. Add the olive oil and check for seasoning. Finely chop the chervil and set aside. Once they are tender, drain the beans and fork out any wayward thyme stalks.

Dress with the lemon thyme and the chopped chervil while they are still warm.

Steamed Asparagus with Parsley and Feta

This is one of those recipes born of the desire to 'waste not, want not' and be proverbially thrifty with leftovers.

1 bunch fresh asparagus

4 tbsp parsley dressing (see post)

80g or so feta

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Trim the asparagus of their woody ends. Roll them in sea salt and black pepper, then steam until just tender but still retaining some bite. Dress with the parsley dressing, crumble over the feta, and serve.

Lentil and Chestnut Soup with Lemon, Parmesan and Chilli

The culinary equivalent of a bear hug.

250g puy lentils

300g cooked and peeled chestnuts

3 cloves young garlic

2 medium onions

handful porcini mushrooms

2 parmesan rinds

handful lemon thyme

pinch dried chilli flakes

2 litres vegetable stock

juice and zest of 1 lemon

groundnut oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat a little groundnut oil in a deep casserole. Add the onions, finely sliced, and the garlic cloves, crushed, and gently fry over a low heat with the lemon thyme leaves for ten minutes or so. Rinse the lentils in a fine sieve, and tip into the onions. Fry for a further minute, then cover with the vegetable stock. Toss in the parmesan rinds, the dry porcini, and the chilli flakes. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 20 minutes. Add the chestnuts, and continue cooking for a further 20 minutes. Once the lentils are tender, season the soup with salt and pepper. Fish out the parmesan rinds. Using a handheld blender, purée the soup briefly; leave the texture rather chunky - one of the delights is finding a sweet chestnut half intact floating in your soupbowl. Season with the zest and juice of the lemon at the table.

this week digested:

Sontag's Son

Richard Serra au Grand Palais

Le Spleen de Paris (Petits Poèmes en Prose): Charles Baudelaire

Ateliers d'artistes de Belleville

Contempt: Alberto Moravia

Paesaggi Urbani: Franco Fontana

Prenez soin de vous: Sophie Calle

"Taking a line for a walk"

2008-05-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

If there is some blueprint to my wanders through this city, it is imperceptible. My steps - like a series of false notes - trip up, zigzag, redouble, manifest a marked disinterestedness in form, shape, structure. Iain Sinclair writes of our traces in the city as a series of runes - a hidden alphabet of movement, the submerged language of the urbanite. I am more inclined to think of my Paris jaunts as free verse; following a (non-)discipline of their own, resistant to meter, shy of direction. Culinary inspirations and ideas occupy the same territory of chance. To bring several ingredients together on a plate is often a geographical and cultural trespass. Novelty and nostalgia seduce us both. Inspiration comes laterally. Every meal has its footnotes.

Brown Rice Salad with Orange Zest, Wild Rocket and Toasted Hazelnuts

500g brown basmati rice/red carmague rice

strips of zest from 1 lemon

3 cloves

1 cinnamon stick

5 green cardamom pods, lightly crushed

2 handfuls wild rocket

handful toasted hazelnuts

zest of one unwaxed orange, cut into strips

juice of half an orange

juice of 1 lemon

groundnut/other flavourless oil

extra virgin olive oil

handful fresh flat-leaf parsley

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Lightly fry the cinammon, cloves and cardamom pods in the groundnut oil for a minute; tip in the rice, and stir to coat for a further minute. Add just under twice the volume of water (you could add the orange juice from the other half here if you like), bring to the boil then season with salt. Cover with a lid and leave to simmer for 20-25 minutes or so. Once cooked, place a teatowel under the lid and leave to rest for five minutes. Drizzle the rice with the olive oil while still warm. Once cooled, combine with the wild rocket, hazelnuts and orange zest strips. Dress with the citrus fruit juices and an extra drizzle of olive oil. Check for seasoning, and scatter with the chopped fresh parsley just before serving.

Buckwheat Pilaf with Parsley, Walnuts and Pomegranate

This is loosely inspired by Casa Moro's wonderful Winter Tabbouleh - a recipe that I've used over, and over, and over again. This is a much pared-down version; a tabbouleh for when you've neither the time nor inclination to chop herbs and vegetables ad nauseum. I've replaced the bulgar wheat with buckwheat - an Eastern European staple, and often used in Brittany as a flour to make delicious Galettes de Sarrasin. The buckwheat, served warm and simply coated with the parsley dressing, has enough body and savour to be served alongside poultry or meat as an alternative to rice. The quantities will yield considerably more of the parsley dressing than you will need. It will keep well for a week in an airtight jar (use later to dress, say, tomatoes, as below), covered with a layer of olive oil.

2 cups buckwheat

2 large bunches flat-leaf parsley

zest of 2 lemons

200ml extra virgin olive oil

2 handfuls walnuts

seeds of 1 pomegranate

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

other good additions:

a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes, halved

finely sliced spring onions or chives

shredded mint leaves

a good squeeze of lemon juice

shelled and cooked fresh broad beans

radicchio leaves

crumbled feta

unsalted pistachio nuts (in place of the walnuts)

Toast the buckwheat in a dry pan for a couple of minutes until it begins to smell nutty. Add just under twice its volume of water, bring to the boil and salt. Leave to cook for 15-20 minutes over a medium heat, covered with a lid. Don't disturb it too much whilst cooking. Whilst it is cooking, make the parsley dressing. Whizz the parsley leaves in a food processor, adding the olive oil in a constant stream. Decant into a tub, season well with salt, pepper and the lemon zest. Once the buckwheat is cooked, place a teatowel under the lid and leave to rest for 10 minutes. Tip into a bowl and dress with enough parsley dressing to coat the grains generously. Leave to cool. Combine with the pomegranates and walnuts, lightly toasted in a dry pan. Adding several of the other ingredients - the broad beans, mint, lemon, spring onions, say - will remake this salad in the image of spring.

Broad Bean and Dill Hummus

The only liberties I've taken here (Nigel Slater inspires a somewhat slavish devotion in me) is to add lemon zest and adjust the quantities a little. Like Orangette's Chickpea Salad with Lemon and Parmesan, this is one of those recipes which relies on mercifully few ingredients (though it may pain you to hear their quality really is key).

1kg fresh broad beans, unpodded weight

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

juice and zest of half a lemon

palmful fresh dill

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Blitz the broad beans to a paste in a food processor, adding the olive oil in a constant stream. Add the dill; blitz again. Tip into a serving bowl, and season with the lemon zest and juice, sea salt and black pepper.

this week digested:

Still Water (The Thames, For Example): Roni Horn

Reflections: Walter Benjamin

Helio and I in London: Caetano Veloso

Lights Out for the Territory: Iain Sinclair

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

Taking a line for a walk: Paul Klee

Hand to Mouth: Paul Auster

You must believe in spring

2008-05-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

The nervous, kinetic rhythms of production fill the flat. 01.28 on a Sunday evening and I lie awake, lips locked onto a cigarette, empty gauloise packets strewn everywhere. Phillip Roth's The Breast lies finished at my bedside table; a shock of violent purple flowers splays out of an enameled vase; before it, propped up, a postcard of Robert Adams's South from the South Jetty; a deserted coastline, implausibly static; grey, white. Outside, the sky, gently deepening in its stain, falls to indigo; an airplane strays from the moon, leaving two tracks of white, a railroad in the sky.

Spring is often written of as the season of potentiality; the prelude to summer; a suspended breath. The sun flirts and reveals herself awhile.

This afternoon I passed through the arcades encircling Place des Vosges; stopped for a Berthillon hit of vanilla and coffee ice cream; puffed at an unwanted menthol. An hors-série edition of Le Monde lay open on the table; its headline, Israel: the unrealised dream.

We are celebrating (or perhaps I should find a more ambivalent verb) the anniversaries of two dates etched into the French consciousness; May 1968 and the foundation of Israel. For some reason, Zionism and Jewish history are pored over here as a surrogate collective history. The mythologies of Israel/Palestine circulate in the journals of Paris kiosks; the novels of Aaron Appelfeld, Amos Oz, David Grossman, lie alongside writings by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean Clair, and Jean Baudrillard in the city's librairies. Amos Gitai is trendy (!) among cinema students here. MK2 heralds the Nouvelle Vague of Israeli cinema; newspapers baptise 1948 as Israel's Original Sin; the French press casts a caustic eye on the chronicity of war in the Middle East. The disorientated soliloquy which closes Gitai's Kedma - delivered by an aging, Polish Jew swaggering in and out of the peripheries of the frame - feels as pertinent now as it did then to a warring, inchoate nation.

Later that afternoon I was an Israeli girl swooning at Algerian patisseries on the rue Saint-Maur; I bought several, and ate them later on the terrace with a friend, our fervent political talk fuelled no doubt by more sugar than can be healthy on any spring afternoon.

Dressing for just about anything (tomatoes, just-steamed asparagus, sourdough bread...)

Seek out, if you can, a really excellent extra virgin olive oil - a King Midas in a bottle green jar, if you like - cloudy, grassy, and green. To be eaten on a terrace, in the early-summer evening sun.

2 cloves fresh garlic

handful fresh basil (preferably small-leafed)

2 sprigs fresh rosemary

juice and zest of 1 lemon

100g green olives, pitted

extra virgin olive oil

palmful fresh dill

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a pestle and mortar, crush the garlic cloves with a good pinch of salt to form a paste. Add the basil leaves, and continue to bash away until their heady oil is released. Add the rosemary and the pitted olives, and crush until you have little feeling left in your arm. Add the olive oil, lemon juice and zest to form a fairly liquid green slush; season well. Finish with a palmful of freshly chopped dill. The dressing keeps well for several days.

Aubergine Salad, tweaked for Springtime

The rosemary is an unusual (and geographically unlikely) addition here. Don't be too laissez-faire with the turkish chilli. Serve alongside a dollop of cooling tzatziki.

3 large, purple-flushed aubergines

3 cloves young garlic

3 tbsp dry harissa

scant pinch turkish chilli flakes

2 tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary

zest of 1 lemon, juice of a half

3 tbsp tahini

groundnut/other flavourless oil

extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 250C. Bake the aubergines whole for a good half hour, until the skins are blackened and they are soft to the point of collapse. Even better, if possible, do this on a charcoal grill. Place the aubergines in a sieve, pierce the skins, and leave for half an hour for the bitter juices to run out. Scoop out the flesh and discard the skin. Heat the groundnut oil in a pan. Add the garlic cloves, whole but crushed, and fry gently for a couple of minutes with the rosemary. Add the aubergine flesh, harissa, and chilli and fry on a medium heat for five minutes until the mixture has dried out somewhat and begins to catch on the pan. Season well with salt and pepper, then scoop out into a working bowl. Add the olive oil, tahini, lemon zest and juice and check for seasoning. Leave to cool and serve at room temperature, with plenty of bread.

Lemony Hummus

2 x 350g jars chickpeas in jelly

tahini to taste

2 tbsp (or more) sumac

2 amalfi lemons and their zest

extra virgin pine nut oil

extra virgin olive oil

handful pine nuts

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the chickpeas and blitz them in a food processor. Add the rest of the ingredients - save the pine nut oil - and taste for balance and seasoning. It should be lighter than your average hummus - its earthiness lifted by the citron zest and sumac. To serve, drizzle with the pine nut oil and scatter with just-toasted pine nuts. It won't last long.

this week digested:

The Art of Poetry, No. 17: W.H. Auden

Ghosts of a childhood past: Rachel Whiteread

My father, My lord

Sankai Juku, Ushio Amagatsu

The Curtain: Milan Kundera

Nouvelle Vague et lame de fond: Kijû Yoshida

Ne Me Quittes Pas: Jacques Brel

The Breast: Phillip Roth

19ème: Mussorgsky,Liszt, Schoenberg

carnet d'adresses

La Bague de Kenza

106, rue Saint-Maur

Paris 75011

La Cocotte

5, rue Paul Bert

Paris 75011

Promesse

2008-05-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Tea usurps my faux-parisienne identity like nothing else. A strong cup of Assam in the morning, a splash of milk, does more to confirm my London roots than my accent anglais at its thickest and most glaring. Yet I have strayed - in spirit - from this projected English tearoom, this vignette of Earl Grey, scones, clotted cream and jam. Not only is the Pompidou Centre hosting a retrospective of Kijû Yoshida films right on my doorstep (to be seen in pyjamas, what else?), but I have discovered two wonderful local sushi places, both in the Marais. One, in Le Marché des Enfants-Rouges (the homemade sesame ice cream is a revelation); the other, Allo Sushi, on Rue Cloche Perce, far too small and far too popular for its own good. St. Jacques sashimi, California Printemps rolls...it's not the sushi I'm going to rhapsodise over.

The last time I had green tea ice cream was in a ridiculously bobo tearoom in Tribeca, New York, several years ago. White Chocolate and Green Tea ice cream, served by the half-litre (this is America), melting perilously in the mid-August New York fog. Yet Paris's offering - unadulterated, clean, refreshing - served alongside a glass of warm sake, is perfection. Incidentally, both ice creams in both cities were devoured in the company of the same friend. Somehow, I feel, the symmetry becomes this faux-Japanese bobo tearoom very well.

This afternoon, after a brunch feast of Bacchian kill-me-now proportions, we awoke from our siesta on the terrace to green toast. Let me re-phrase: we awoke to a tartine spread with green tea marmalade. Don't ask, just trust. And run to Pain de Sucre to get some.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Macarons au thé vert / Green Tea Macaroons

translated from www.kusmi-cooks-tea.com

80g ground almonds

140g icing sugar

10g thé vert à l'amande*

3 egg whites

20g granulated sugar

30g crème anglaise

50g unsalted butter

3g thé vert à l'amande*

Preheat the oven to 160C. Combine the icing sugar, ground almonds, and green tea (crush the tea until you obtain a fine powder). Whip the egg whites, gradually sprinkling in the granulated sugar, then add the tea mixture above. Knead until you have a smooth pastry, then over an electric oven plate (covered with aluminium foil), divide into small rounds. Cook for 12,mins in the preheated oven. Combine the butter and green tea, then gently add the crème anglaise. Once the pastry is cooked, dampen the oven plate under the aluminium foil and leave the pastry to rest over it for several minutes. Place a teaspoon of green tea cream between each pastry disc to form the macaroons.

*available from Kusmi Tea

For you the city thus I turn my back / There is a world elsewhere

2008-04-27T05:31:00.000-07:00

It's been several months since I've last written. Since February I've been living in Paris, a city written about almost to the point of annihilation and I felt somewhat hesitant to add to what seems like an endless repository of others' thoughts, ideas, reflections. A few months in, my impressions are somewhat more sedate, my senses no longer in an unrelenting state of agitation. Paris is a city of consumption. Consume culture; literature, art, cinema. Walking through the streets of this city is to be in a state of wide-eyed ivresse, so much seems its beauty inassimilable. Most likely it is still in part novelty, which disrobes much that is usually invisible to us.

For the moment I shall limit the scope of this first entry to recipes; I am, after all, unashamedly gourmande, and have negotiated my way through this city largely led by my (worryingly insatiable) appetite. My local market - le marché des enfants-rouges - sells iranian dates by the kilo, dark, toffee-ish organic dried apricots, unshelled fresh walnuts (to be perilously forced open without a nutcracker). In the infancy of spring there are young broad beans, scarcely bigger than a fingernail, gariguette strawberries from Brittany, long, piano-player fingers of green and white asparagus, and startling bunches of rose-flushed, crisp white radishes. The Moroccan vendor trades a pitcher of saccharine thé à la menthe for two gauloises; l'estaminet du marché serves chilled cucumber and mint soup in glass jars.

Hardly A Recipe

2 ripe, firm tomatoes

a few basil leaves

several cloves of young garlic

extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Crush the garlic cloves in a pestle and mortar with a good pinch of salt to form a paste. Tear in the basil leaves, and continue to crush until they release their oil. Whisk in enough olive oil to make a startling, bottle-green slush; season well with salt and pepper. Slice the tomatoes thickly, drizzling over the basil dressing. Leave - if possible - for fifteen minutes to warm in the early summer sun, until the flavours have married and deepened. Eat, tomato juice dribbling down your chin.

Spring Salad of Broad beans, Radicchio, Green Beans and Pomegranate

750g young broad beans, no bigger than a fingernail (unpodded weight)

good handful green beans, topped and tailed

1 small head radicchio, leaves separated and roughly torn

seeds of 1 pomegranate

juice and zest of a lemon

extra virgin olive oil

a palmful finely chopped chives

handful flat-leaf parsley

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Remove the seeds of the pomegranate and place in a large salad bowl, being careful to remove all of the bitter white pith. Pod the broad beans and boil for several minutes in rapidly boiling, unsalted water. Over the same pot, if you like, lightly steam the green beans, rolled first in salt and pepper, until tender but still retaining some bite. Once both beans are cooked, refresh them by submerging them quickly in cold water, then tip into the bowl with the pomegranate seeds, raddicchio leaves and the roughly chopped herbs. Finely grate the lemon zest into the bowl, squeeze in the juice, then drizzle generously with a herby, grassy olive oil. Check for seasoning, toss, and serve immediately.

Both salads were eaten outdoors in the first tentative attempts of the year at al fresco eating (half and hour later and it was raining). April is the cruellest month...

Sehnsucht

2008-01-22T08:06:00.000-08:00

I look upon spaghetti like a long-lost lover. Ever since I abandoned the pesto-penne rituals of my past, pasta has all but disappeared from our supper plates. As the abused daily standby of my youth, it was little more than a dull, starchy affair, its taste blunted by the endless reiteration of habit. I had all but forgotten its allure (though admittedly Nigel Slater's lemon linguine has jolted my memory once or twice in the past few years), until several days ago, when, standing in a holier-than-thou organic health food shop, a stash of wholewheat durum spaghetti caught my eye. I have always been suspicious of wholewheat pasta as an undue bastardisation of sorts. But curiosity won me over and it turned out to be pleasingly nutty and deeply satisfying; just the thing to rescue a bunch of leeks from a sorry end in a god-forsaken forgotten corner of the fridge.

So here it is, as I imagine Nige would probably say; 'an elegant, delicious pasta supper to soothe and delight.' (Somewhat worryingly, perhaps, he has become the disembodied, mysteriously omnipresent narrator of all my culinary enterprises).

Wholewheat Spaghetti with Grilled Leeks, Parmesan and Jammy Lemon

250g wholewheat spaghetti

6 young leeks

good-sized hunk of parmesan

1 amalfi lemon

extra virgin olive oil - something grassy, heady and unfiltered

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Trim the leeks of their course outer leaves and ends and rinse thoroughly to remove any grit. Steam for ten minutes. Roll them in a little sunflower oil, sea salt and black pepper. Grill, turning once until appetisingly charred on all sides. On the same grill, griddle the lemon, halved, for five minutes or so until the cut edges are charred, and the flesh soft and jammy. Place the leeks in a bowl with a generous drizzle of olive oil, the juice from the lemon, and a handful of grated parmesan. Check for seasoning. Cook the pasta in plenty of salted boiling water until al dente (around 8 minutes), drain, and toss with the dressed leeks and an extra dash of olive oil. Serve with plenty of parmesan to grate at the table, and freshly milled black pepper.

A certain slant of light

2008-01-19T07:49:00.000-08:00

It is a grim January day, and dawn makes a mockery of our vain hopes for succour and warmth. All night the wind threw itself aimlessly at the windowpane, and by the time I fell asleep birdsong sounded in the dull sky. In the dim cacophony of a dark morning, I long for spring. Spring mornings swagger with the promise of languorous hours spent sprawled on the green grass, the air thick with pollen. The last dregs of vanilla ice melt into little pools on the curves of our spoons.

I'm struggling to find similar charm in winter. Only cooking seems to tease me out of listlessness as the chill sets in. These recipes may help fend off the darkness, if only for a little while.

Venison Sausages with Onion and Madeira Gravy

recipe adapted from Nigel Slater's Appetite

8 good-quality venison sausages

4 large red onions

10 juniper berries, lightly crushed

palmful thyme leaves

a wine glass of dry madeira

250ml stock - vegetable or chicken

grain mustard

thick slice unsalted butter

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a heavy roasting tin, melt a little butter over a moderate heat. Add the sausages, lowering the heat slightly to keep the butter from burning (you could add a drop of sunflower oil as well). Fry them gently, letting them colour, turning them over now and again. While the sausages are colouring, peel and halve the onions, then cut each half into six wedges. Once golden, remove the sausages from the tin onto a plate. Add the onions to the tin with a little extra butter, turning the heat all the way down. Preheat the oven to 180C. Let the onions soften for twenty or twenty five minutes, stirring occasionally, until they have turned a deep gold and are tender enough to crush between your fingers. Add the juniper and thyme, turn up the heat and pour in the Madeira and stock. Stir, letting the gravy thicken. Season with salt, pepper, and a tablespoon or so of the mustard. Return the sausages and any escaped juices to the tin and place in the oven. Timing will vary slightly, but after around forty minutes they should be done; glossy and unctuous and cooked to perfection.

Roast Butternut Squash Mash with Chestnut and Thyme

1 large butternut squash

1 jar cooked and peeled chestnuts

fistful fresh thyme

thick slice unsalted butter

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 230C. Halve the butternut squash and scoop out the seeds and stringy flesh from the cavity. Peel if desired. Cut into the smallest chunks you can bear to, without losing your sanity (or a finger), and place in a roasting tin. Tug the thyme leaves off the stalks, and toss both into the tin. Scatter with the butter, crumbled, season with the salt and pepper, and roast for twenty minutes. Tip the chestnuts into the tin, shaking them about in the herby butter, and continue roasting for an extra twenty to thirty minutes or so. Retrieve the thyme stalks, then mash the squash and chestnuts in a sturdy serving bowl (add a little butter, if you like). Check for seasoning and serve.

In which she discovers she cannot spell 'cinnamon'...

2008-01-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

With deadlines looming, this blog should most definitely not begin here or now. Yet with my customarily loose grip on both the here and the now, this is probably as fitting a moment to begin as ever. My objectives in brief;

1) to finally record in a systematic, organised (!) fashion the everyday meals and recipes which otherwise invariably recede - are indeed, devoured and demolished in nothing short of a physical sense - into dim memories.

2) there is yet to be a 2). whatever happens, happens.

To compensate for the distinct lack of objectives, here is the recipe for a wonderful dinner devoured scarcely two hours ago.

Slow Roast Chicken with Saffron, Madeira, and Orange.

1 chicken, preferably free-range or organic

2 unwaxed oranges

400ml dry madeira

3 tbsp olive oil

4 fresh bay leaves

1 head of garlic, cloves separated but unpeeled

3tbsp sumac

good pinch saffron strands

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 160C. Place the chicken in a snug-fitting heavy casserole with a lid. Massage with olive oil and season well with salt, pepper, and sumac inside and out. Toss in the bay leaves, roughly torn, and the garlic cloves. Cut one of the oranges into eighths, and toss into the casserole as well. Finely grate the zest of the second orange onto the legs and breast of the chicken, then squeeze the juice into the casserole. Pour in the madeira and submerge the saffron threads in the liquid surrounding the chicken. Cover with the lid and place in the oven for two hours. After two hours, remove from the oven and preheat the oven to 230C. Take this opportunity to prepare to roast any accompanying vegetables on the rack below. Remove the lid from the casserole, return to the oven and continue cooking for 45 mins at 230C, by which time the top of the chicken will be golden, the flesh melting, the liquid suffused with saffron and bay and the oranges tinged to the point of caramel.

Serve with accompaniment of choice - something velvety and starchy - such as...

Butternut Squash Mash with Cinnamon

1 large butternut squash

80g unsalted butter

freshly ground cinnamon (you can do this in a coffee grinder, or even - at your peril - with a nutmeg grater)

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Halve the butternut squash, scoop out the seeds from the cavity, and dice roughly into smallish pieces. Place in a roasting tin with the salt and pepper, dust with the cinnamon and dot with 50g of the butter. Roast in a preheated oven (230c) for 40-45 minutes or so (if serving as an accompaniment to the chicken above, place in the oven for phase two of the roasting). Tip the roasted squash into a sturdy serving bowl and mash (or rather, smash) with the remaining 30g of butter, check for seasoning, and serve.

A green salad would be good, too.