Not so Much Soup as Miracle Cure

With Sternest Critic somewhat poorly over the weekend Sunday lunch was made with his delicate stomach in mind. Chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin; the Chinese swear by ginger for the upset tum; and noodles are one of the great comfort foods. Thus our lunch was chosen for its healing qualities as much as culinary.

That said, the stock was delicious, simmered for two hours with the pan packed with chicken joints, veg, ginger, star anise and dried chilli, the veg including two whole garlic bulbs (not cloves, bulbs - some of the last of our home grown) to try to purge the blood, or something. It wasn't just him comforted with the dish. Making stock is therapeutic for me. It can be rushed - grating the veg is one way to push things along - but if time allows shouldn't be.

Taking time means the scum from the meat can be cleared before the veg etc are added. Do that and much of the fat is removed too. A clear and flavoursome stock is a mini-joy.

More than any other cuisine that I have come across, Spanish food delights in the consome (still can't do accents). It makes a great light starter before their heavy main courses and even salads that tend to be far chunkier than we are used to. We went for the heavy and the light in one dish, the stock almost a background to a load of noodles, though as they are bland and the stock was pretty powerful, we lost nothing in terms of taste by it. And the boy was fit enough to face roast chicken in the evening, and go to school today.

It was economic too, the chicken - one thigh and two drumsticks cost £1.50 (it wasn't exactly a consome in the end, as I tried the meat and it had enough flavour to make it worthy of inclusion); the veg - three carrots, one onion, two garlic bulbs, chunk of ginger, three sticks of celery - maybe £1.25; and the three nests of fine noodles 40p. Allowing a generous 25p for dried chilli, two star anise and half a dozen peppercorns makes a total for a substantial dish and a miracle cure of £3.40.

A Whole Ham for the Hambone?

Though Ruth said I was being foolish to do so, I went early to Aldi to buy - on the day they were to be in store - one of their Serrano hams advertised at £49.99 with knife, stand and sharpening steel. For some reason (it being sold cheaper on the internet apparently) it was actually £39.99. Not surprisingly perhaps the one I got at 8:30 was the last then in stock, the store having opened at 8:00.

The ham weighs 6.5kg, so quite a bit to go at over the Christmas break. It will make life easy when we have friends and neighbours (who generally are friends anyway) over. I'm looking forward to the meat, but having a hambone with which to make stock is a massive bonus. For the next few days I'll be thinking of recipes for the scraps and the mis-shapes too as we try to cut see-through slices. Omelette, pizza, risotto, tiny cubes in paella...

As per a previous post, however, the simplicity of the thing appeals hugely too. Any of us fancying a snack or a quick starter will be able - with a bit of practice - to dig in. It does take practice, as we found pre-Joe when I brought a whole cured ham back from France, nestled among the wine that filled the boot at the end of every continental business trip by car. We had no long thin knife then, and so every other slice was too thick, chewed determinedly or cut up and used in stews etc. 

Cooking with the stuff is not, though, the real point of it. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity again: ham, bread, wine, salad, talk. And more ham. That's the point.

Why Turkey?

Like Santa Claus I have been making my Christmas list, though mine is concerned with stuff I need to get for our family celebrations. Top of that list is a turkey crown. Not a whole turkey, and certainly not a giant turkey that needs to have its legs removed if it is to fit in the oven (Pilkington family in Gorleston circa 1972). I go for a crown as we don't like turkey enough to face the revisits for a whole week after the big day. So why do I then buy turkey at all?

Tradition comes into it of course. We had turkey as kids, so it wouldn't feel like Christmas without it. But goose is far more traditional in the historic sense (happily, with two of my magazine articles currently in print on that topic, ker and indeed ching). In the USA a big ham is the done thing, turkey there being reserved for Thanksgiving (for those creeps trying to make it a British event, drop it please).

Maybe as happened with the move from goose in the late 19th century we will evolve away from turkey. We in this household also tend to have a small sirloin joint, done so the centre is still red raw. Other foods have come in as rather oxymoronic new traditions during my lifetime: panetone, panforte, and Stollen cake to name but three.

Happy those like us who don't have to endure real austerity at Christmas. But to go full circle, a whole turkey can be an austerity boon: sarnies, broth, curry, risotto, gratin, more sarnies, fricassee, stir fry, rissoles (so much nicer if called by another name - turkey cakes perhaps), soup... A freezer full of saved meat means it doesn't have to be an endurance course but can be spread over months. Almost makes me want to buy a big bird. Almost.

What's in a Name?

In a previous post I wrote about how cheese and onions, a favourite of my parents (when money was tight I now guess), would have been more popular with foodies if it went by a fancier name. The same thing occurred to me last night when we had a variation on steak and onions.

Good braising steak (from the excellent Stuart and Caroline Lawson of Cockerham) was simmered in a low oven for three hours, the accompanying onions cooking down to a caramelly jam. The whole mushrooms (stalks removed) on top added to the ham stock juices to make, when thickened with cornflour an hour before the finish, something that deserved to be mopped up with bread and was. The stovies served with it added another savoury layer. 

It was delicious, the flavour deep and brown and sweet. But how many foodies would seek out or cook something so simple, just three principal ingredients? In France, where their peasant cooking is still the basis for many meals, the majority would. Here, not many, though if it had been called Boeuf Lyonnaise (the inhabitants of that fine city love their onions) maybe a few more. 

We have happily gone beyond our monomania about French cuisine, and now depending on the way the wind blows tend to bow before Spanish, Mexican, Morrocan, Egyptian, Japanese...  It's great to bring in new dishes and ingredients, but sad if yet again we denigrate British classics. Which do not, however, include Brown Windsor Soup or Coronation Chicken. 

Feast, Cost and Value

I try to shop wisely, which is not necessarily to say cheaply. If cheap means tasteless, or past its best, or downright nasty, it's a waste of money. Last week I bought a 3kg ham for £12.50, quite an outlay but an absolute bargain:

Sunday lunch - the ham simmered with vegetables and herbs, plenty of thick slices in leek and cheese sauce.
Monday to Wednesday - an equally thick slice or two at breakfast for my son, who likes nothing better.
Monday lunch - ham in my sandwich.
Monday evening - some of the stock and about 250g of cubed meat used in a main course minestrone.
Tuesday lunch - a slice for my lunch with some cheese and pickles.
Tuesday evening - turkey salmi made with more of the stock enriched with Parmesan.

There is still enough for a sandwich this lunchtime and some end bits and scraps that will be added to a salad of some sort, or maybe saved to go on one of our Thursday pizzas, and more than enough stock for another soup.

The initial cooking took 160 minutes, actually more as I brought the ham to the simmer slowly and skimmed off the scum, so it was an investment in time. But the flavours that seeped into the meat made it easy to face so many times; such stock is a boon for any cook; and subsequent uses meant just minutes of prep, if that.

I saw an ad for KFC the other night. Family Feast (TM!) - 10 bits of sad chicken, various 'sides' that largely seemed to consist of the vaguely named 'fries' (are they potato or corn starch?), plus a few beans and some cobettes (what a vile word), and a bottle of fizzy drink. It cost significantly more than that ham.

Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity

I am re-reading Walden. Not a Scandinavian bloodfest (though like many my age I always suspected something deeply wrong about the Muppet Swedish chef) but Thoreau's account of and musings on his time spent in a cabin a mile or so away from his home-town.

Something in that struck a particular chord with me - his calculations about the food he grew and ate. As mentioned some time back in this blog, I am keeping a record of expenditure on and estimated value of food grown in our garden and allotment. Thoreau's was calculated to the nearest half cent, somewhat improbably. But what hit home from that information was how simply he lived - growing rye, potatoes, a little beet and so on, plus catching the occasional 'mess' of fish in Walden Pond, and a dish of purslane picked from the land on which he was squatting.

His calculations were as much concerned with how little time it took to earn or through his own labour to grow enough to live on, happy as he was to survive on a basic diet. The time left allowed him to think.

The title of this post is perhaps the most famous quotation from his book, a line I read last night that immediately made me think of the exact opposite that so many will be living through this Christmas.

We won't be having an austere Christmas in any sense, but I do intend to keep things simple. The traditional British turkey assault course on Christmas Day naturally, but otherwise keeping to the sufficient and unadulterated: an air dried ham that can be picked at for weeks (Aldi advertising a Serrano ham for £49.99 I think) kept in the cold of our conservatory; a cliche but still wonderful, Stilton and Port of an evening to stretch the time and conversation at the dinner table; my own bread; plenty of fruit; simple salads quickly made.

Thoreau was most contented when alone, feeling solitude facilitated his thinking. I love the company of my family and our friends (real friends, not FaceBook ones or similarly vague acquaintances). Talk - notoriously cheap I'm glad to say - with them over the table is a real luxury, and unlike Thoreau I feel such company engenders thought, which just as it was for him is another luxury for me.

Creative Austerity

Is it possible to be both creative and economical? Stupid bloody question really, as some of the world's great dishes are peasant in their roots, and thus made using the simplest ingredients. The mushroom lasagna I cooked the other night was not exactly simple, but it was economical, and it was the tastiest thing I have put on the table in months.

Mushrooms in place of a meaty ragu was an idea I'd been mulling over for a while, partly because I've committed to doing more vegetarian dishes. An interview with a vegetarian chef (she was making Christmas dinner lasagna) was another spur. Even plain button mushrooms are moist enough to help with cooking the pasta, a nice protein boost, and both cheaper and healthier than using beef. 

The milk for the bechamel was flavoured as ever with onion, carrot, pepper and herbs - bay, thyme and sage - so was packed with flavour already. I made the sauce, though, with about 50g of Stilton. Blue cheese goes well with mushrooms, and this made the sauce - stiff as behoves bechamel for lasagna - really special. 

The market-bought 'shrooms were just sliced and sweated in vegetable oil (plus a teeny bit of truffle oil from a bottle someone kindly bought for us last Christmas), then the lasagna was layered sauce, pasta, sauce, fungi, grated cheddar, pasta, sauce, fungi, cheddar, pasta, sauce, grated Parmesan. 

It cooked to cheesy brownness in 40 minutes at 180 Celsius, filling the bottom two floors of the house with appetite-inducing aromas, within which the few drops of truffle-oil played a surprisingly big role. Ruth was out at a leaving do (plenty of those at the university currently), but SC and I, having already prepared a plea in mitigation with a tomato and cucumber salad, finished all bar a mouthful, both of us tempted to seconds and thirds.  

Back-of-the-envelope calculations make the cost well under £3, and it was good enough and solid enough (unlike my ragu version) to have graced at least a gastro-pub table, if not somewhere more upmarket. It would have fed four with ease too. 

So yes, sometimes you can be creative and economical. Long-winded answer really. 

Unreal Christmas Cookbook VI

Celebrated as a celebrity, indeed the celebrity's celebrity, that woman whose gifts are beyond all knowing - Katie Price - has (not in any way) her new cookbook (which doesn't exist as far as we know, but truth is stranger than friction as she might say) out for the Christmas market. Imagine if we could unite her talents with those of Golum Best, Kim Kardashboardian, and Can'telle, what power would be ours?

Anyway, the book takes a new approach to food, and one that is quite refreshing in itself, and fairly entertaining, devoted as it is to which dishes, implements and sauces she would like to use on ex-husband and crap singer Peter Andre. The first chapter of near Proustian prose entitled 'I hate him, I really really hate him,' sets the subtle tone. It gets racier, however, the highlight for this reviewer the section on 'Painful places to put a skewer'.

One (non-existent) detail was annoying: in the space devoted to combat desserts she seemed incapable of deciding how big her vanilla bombes should be: in one illustration they are enormous, the next small, then bigger again, then huge... Whatever their size, the whipped-cream topping looked delicious.

The magazine Gab has paid over £35 for the serial rights to the book, the first instalment  'My Cookbook Hell - Katie Price tells all' will feature as soon as the current serial 'My Broken Nail Nightmare - Katie Price tells all - finishes.

Don't Waste That Pumpkin

How many of the pumpkins bought for Halloween actually get used for food? Even a good percentage of the many squashes grown on the nation's allotments probably get stuck in a bowl on the table as a nice natural decoration to be thrown away when they fall to bits. I felt very virtuous yesterday using a Turk's Turban squash as part of our Sunday roast extravaganza. And it was lovely.

The fruit, for such it is pedants, had been sitting in our conservatory for a month, picked to avoid being nicked before halloween, then playing the role of something I'd get round to eventually, which turned out to be yesterday.

Thanks to Nigel Slater, as ever fab ideas, annoying writing: I got the basic idea from his Tender Part 1.

The squash was peeled, cleaned of stingy bits and seeds, and cut into one inch dice (that's 2.54cm dice for those of a modern bent), then rolled in loads of crushed garlic, thyme from outside the back door, and Maldon salt (how very Middle Class is that?). Roasted (in a solid Le Creuset dish so piling exotic bourgeois onto solid Middle Class) along with the chicken and some red onions to make use of the oven it smelled fantastic, the outside crisping and garlicky the inside soft and melting.

This was another of those dishes that not only tastes good, but looks superb, a rich sunshine gold, something to raise the spirits at this time of the year when it seems to go dark about 15 minutes after dawn.

Student Survival - Shopping Tips

I am making a sort of personal cookbook for my son in the fervent hope he gets his grades and starts at university next year. The thought struck me while starting on that that shopping tips would be even more useful, given he can do quite a few dishes already, but has never yet done a supermarket (or other) shopping run.

So for what they are worth, and in no particularly logical order, my top tips for student shopping survival:

1. In supermarkets check out the 'ethnic' food shelves. You'll find rice, coconut milk, spices and plenty more that is appreciably cheaper than the same foods (different brands) on the next aisle.
2. Recipe bacon aka cooking bacon is a wonderful deal - the ends, off-cuts and errors not suitable for pretty packets. Same bacon, and often with big chunks perfect for stews. And who cares if their bacon butty is made up of mis-shapes?
3. Tinned tomatoes - buy the cheapest - basic, value, whatever they call them in your store. Some colour variation, maybe a tiny bit of skin, but no difference in taste or standard. Which price sounds better, 31p or £1?
4. Don't be put off by Aldi and Lidl's lack of fancy decor, they do good food and at low prices. Lidl's Parmesan is the best supermarket one I've found, and it is between 35% and 50% cheaper than the stuff from certain other big name places.
5. Markets can be brilliant for fruit and veg, much cheaper than supermarkets and ethically often great as veg tends to be local.
6. Chinese supermarkets are another source of good and cheaper ingredients. When I get the chance I buy noodles in them for about a quarter of the Sainsbury's price, and tins of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts for 60p to 65p compared with 90p.
7. 'Basic' peppers again are a bargain, just more interesting shapes than the dearer ones. They don't come from bad plants. They are not 'off'. 
8. If you buy veg etc in supermarkets, a quick glance at the bagged up price and the loose price per kilo is worthwhile. Mushrooms you pick and put in a paper bag are a good 10% cheaper than the plastic boxes. 
9. For meat if you can find a butcher's shop (or stall on the market) use it. They will do small bags of mince (ragu, chilli con carne, etc) where supermarkets tend to do 250g minimum. Meat as spice in a ragu needs 100g or less.
10. Don't buy the cheapest bread. Bread should be a pleasure, and the crappiest sliced rubbish is not. Same thing with 'mild' cheddar - and with the latter you need twice as much to get the same flavour as you have with strong stuff, so it's a false economy.
11. Buy in season, when gluts mean cheap prices. The other side of this is don't buy stuff flown half-way round the world - food-mile guilt and the freight adds to the price. 
12. Some 'specials' are worth going for, others not. BOGOF fresh foods risks the 'free' one (not free) going off, so you wasted money and resources. Tins, however, are good value as they keep.
13. Own brand works for simple things like rice, pasta and bread. A brand's price includes a hefty proportion of advertising spend and something for sharper packaging. Who cares?
14. Protein isn't just found in meat. Mushrooms, tofu, Quorn, and beans are good alternatives, and a lot cheaper.  

Any other suggestions?

Something More on Toast - Student Survival (Again)

I'm a great believer in simplicity in the kitchen, or the home kitchen at any rate. For a domestic cook it's clearly easier to get something quite basic right than to master some 13 stage three days of preparation grind your own hand-picked spices splendour. Though I love cooking I don't necessarily want to spend my whole day in the kitchen. I also think that in cookery as with children mixing paint and anyone unskilled mixing cocktails if you have too many ingredients you end up with brown.

The colour of my breakfast this morning was indeed brown, or at least grey-brown, but the flavour was wonderful. Four quite large mushrooms sliced, fried gently in a little butter till the juices ran, a tsp of plain flour stirred into the juices and cooked for a minute or two, then a bare sherry glass of milk stirred in and cooked until there was a shiny sauce that spooned onto toast was thick enough not to soak into it. Salt, pepper, eat. As with a previous post about a boiled egg I took huge pleasure in getting something as good as it can be, a very rare moment.

An aside: why does that sauce, made with flour, need only a brief simmer to lose the floury flavour?

As my son gets nearer to university age I'm thinking more and more about the sort of economic and simple dishes students should be able to cook. I think he will be able. Those creamed mushrooms, with more toast to fill the bottomless stomach of youth, would suffice for the day's lighter meal. And it would cost well under £1. Substitute two baked potatoes (one of the few things I cook in the microwave - quicker, cheaper, and no loss of flavour) for the toast and it's a substantial main course, still with intelligent shopping less than £1. How many students have the resources to do that, though, compared to the number living off supermarket pizza?

The World Must Know - Perfect Pizza

It seems odd to have learnt how to make perfect pizza dough from a Scot named Ron Mackenna while touring Michelin-starred restaurants in South West France. His portfolio career is as intriguing - he's a defence lawyer in Glasgow and restaurant critic for a national newspaper. But it is his family recipe that I have used recently to great effect (no criticism, which speaks silent volumes). The story behind the recipe is that his ancestry is part Italian.

Previously I used a bread-maker dough that included sugar and pretty much worked but didn't quite hit the spot. Ron's recipe is wonderfully simple, always a quality to be praised in cookery - if it works, and this does.

The ingredients: 500g flour (I use a roughly 50/50 mix of white bread and plain as the latter makes the bases crispier), 325ml of cold water; 13g of salt; a 7g sachet of dried yeast. To this after a few experiments I now add 2tbsp of olive oil to make the dough more elastic. Mix the ingredients well in a big bowl, knead for 10 minutes then leave somewhere warm to rise - the old double-in-volume cliche is a good marker. Divide the risen dough in four lumps and roll these out into pizza shapes then leave them for half an hour or more to rise again. Put on your toppings and cook in the hottest temperature your oven can reach - mine is 250 Celsius but it struggles to stay there.

On my birthday recently I thought I'd be lazy and bought two pizzas from M&S. They were disappointing in so many ways - badly seasoned, mean toppings with little flavour, but most of all the base was nowhere near as tasty and properly pizza-y as Ron's.

Pizza is a perfect Thursday meal, in two ways. Like half the country I do the main food shop on Friday, so by Thursday the cupboard may not be bare, but the lumps of meat tend to have gone - though there is always a tin of chopped tomatoes. That - drained - does for two bases, with additions that tend to include garlic, briefly sweated mushrooms, more garlic, thinly sliced onion, a few prawns left in the freezer, slivers of the last pepper in the fridge, a tin of sardines with the bones removed by the maker or me, slices of ham or salami, and if I have remembered mozzarella. Elizabeth David (great writer, great inspiration, huge snob) demanded minimalist pizza toppings, I dare to disagree - it is a using up meal, a making the best of stuff meal, but with judgement.

It's a Thursday thing too in that we always eat our meal in the lounge that day for some long forgotten reason. And pizza is perfect for that, Ron's perfect pizza making it even more so if that were not philosophically impossible.

Update: I tried this using the dough setting on my breadmaker, and it was better than my hand-kneaded version.

Unreal Christmas Cookbook V

Although it is difficult to be sure, we wonder if in Nigella Lawson's new (unreal) cookbook just (not in any way) out for the Christmas market we detect a reaction to her recent domestic problems and divorce from well-known contemporary art and profits collector, Thatcher acolyte and all-round good guy Charles Saaaatchi.

Take for example the opening dish which doesn't actually exist, (E)minced and boiled lamb's testicles (naturally served with a bucket of velvet double cream and smoothly whipped chocolate sauce). Or another: Roast crimson ox-heart pierced with a thousand pine-scented and magnificent cocktail sticks (with a full gallon of Cornish clotted cream and delicate yet firm and active chocolate shavings).

The cover of the non-existent book too gives a hint about her emotional turmoil, the divine Nigella's deeply decollete [still can't do the accents] nightie-cum-ballgown in black rather than her trademark red, matching the bear-fur coat draped around her perfectly. Those who have looked at her face in that picture say she looks very sad too.

Our favourite utterly imaginary recipe, however, is a little more relaxed, one dish so typical of her giving fans, statins reps and heart specialists everywhere hope that Nigella's despair is over: Warm and melting creme fraiche and dark and tangy yet subtle bitter chocolate tart with sculpted clotted cream topping to be served with unctuous butter and spring meadow milk chocolate sauce is an instant classic. Someone we know was so taken with it that they gave a brief strangled cry the first time they read her deathless prose. Another - deeply moved - had a catch in the throat when talking about it, though a third suggested it should be treated with caution. Some might consider rather stronger action more appropriate.

Due to Overwhelming Demand

A flood of comment, singular, asking for the recipe for the brisket mentioned in the previous post. As with so much of what I cook it's more method than measurements.

First have one bloody big piece of brisket, ours was just shy of 6lb, ready at room temperature. If I had been confident of my butcher locating flat-rib I'd have used that in place of brisket. Prepare a dry rub with a nice finely ground blend of spices, my own preference the other night being a tsp of peppercorns, a tbsp of coriander seeds,  two tbsp of cumin seeds, two whole star anise (anises?), a tsp of sea salt, three cloves and a tsp of piment de Jamaique as we say in Preston, or allspice if you prefer, and a tbsp of palm sugar. Rub this all over the beef as erotically as possible in the circumstances.

In a chicken brick or similar closed pot big enough (derr) to take the joint put some slices of carrot and onion in the bottom to keep the meet raised slightly, plus a few cloves of garlic. Pour in so as not to wash the meat clean of dry rub (derr again) enough boiling water to touch the bottom of the brisket, put the lid on and put into the oven preheated to about 180C, then immediately turn the temperature down to 120C and leave for about eight hours - it could actually have stood another two at least.

The end result is, or should be, easy to pull apart, the crust beautifully blackened by the spices rather than the heat.

Drain the excess juices off every two or three hours, but leave enough in to maintain the steaming-roast effect. After resting the meat for at least 25 minutes serve pulled into shreds with BBQ sauce or if you have time a reduction (how trendy) of the juices tweaked to your taste.

To be eaten in wraps or flat-breads with sauce, fried onions, dill pickles, red cabbage, friends and beer. Although as Malcolm Bradbury so astutely pointed out eating people is wrong.

While the Oven's On - One Flame Again

Being a mean beast who cuts things very fine (Ratty in Wind in the Willows) I don't like to use the oven for just one thing, especially as ours is one of those with a double-sized space one side and a mini version (only ever used to warm plates) the other. So I try to remember to include a few unpeeled onions to give the makings of a simple onion with cheese veg dish, some beetroot, or baking potatoes, or most often a gratin.

The one-flame cookery idea easily incorporates such economy, as why should one flame mean on dish only? Saturday's party (very enjoyable thanks) included a 6lb brisket dry rubbed with spices and sugar roasted at about 120C for nearly eight hours. That would have been a profligate use of the oven had it been just for one dish. So I also did a big potato gratin, loads of onions, loads of cheddar, slow cooked for two and a half hours, and a toffee-crumb apple and quince pudding, conscious assuaged.

Gratins are such a simple thing to do as I was explaining to hopefully-soon-to-be student Sternest Critic. What they do need is time and thus patience. It's not something to throw together for a quick snack. And they can be very cheap filler-uppers. That was secondary in my thinking for the bonfire bash for which its forgiving nature was uppermost in my thoughts: it was ready a good half an hour before I took it out, but didn't spoil at all (if anything the cheese got a nicer browning) for being left longer, and could have remained at that heat without damage for another hour. Again it could have been cooked at 180C and been ready in less than half the time.

It's also the sort of cooking I love - no recipe, just a basic idea and method. If you have to weigh the ingredients for a gratin you're trying too hard. Just peeled and sliced spuds and onions (the latter very thin), grated cheese, layered onion-spud-cheese  then repeated, a bit of salt and pepper, and cooking liquid (hot) which can be milk, milk and cream, stock or at a real pinch just water. The alchemy of baking turns these basic staples into a meltingly delicious whole. We have lots of celeriac on our allotment, another grateful for the gratin treatment, and parsnip likewise, so I have no excuse for not doing more and bringing in more variations as autumn turns to winter.

Bonfire Night Bash

For some reason not entirely unconnected to my date of birth we regularly have a party near Bonfire Night. There was no intention to make it an annual thing when we started, but it has become that way and I'm not complaining. Traditions can be enjoyable. Apart from anything else it gives me the chance to force a small crowd with no alternative sustenance to hand to try what I think should be eaten on such occasions.

One of those dishes is inevitably pumpkin-based, as we grow stupidly large ones for Halloween and then need to make the most of the flesh they yield. I bet that 95 per cent of all the pumpkins shifted by the supermarkets this week will make lanterns and nothing more, a sad waste. Pumpkin soup or curry, and almost definitely pumpkin pie will use some of ours, plenty more bulking out stews later on.

Another dish, and this is one with serious repercussions, will be Lancashire Pea Soup made with two boxes of dried peas and about a pig's worth of bacon ribs. Bacon ribs which have become expensive now, joining the ranks of lamb shanks and monkfish in my whinge-list. It's something I associate with Bonfire Night bashes, my Lancastrian-family-in-exile in Norfolk in the Sixties and Seventies adhering to such culinary traditions I guess more than those who remained in the county. Home-made bonfire toffee always featured too, made by my dad as the soup often was, and parkin (again, not shop-bought).

Maybe the third planned dish will become something my son will want to make a tradition of his own in the future. There's a good chance as his culinary ideal is large pieces of flesh. I'm nicking the Man v Food thing of a slowly-cooked dry-rubbed brisket served with BBQ sauce, the brisket ordered well in advance as it's not something always on the butcher's counter. The house on the day will be filled with the smell of herbs, spices, sugar and steaming-roasting beef.

Traditions start like that, being taken up without being purposely created. At my first university, which was a post-WWII creation and very wonderful too, some twit tried to make an instant tradition by having 'Fresher's Gate' painted over one small entrance beside a huge one. No takers, whereas borrowing refectory trays when it snowed, the polished wood becoming a perfect makeshift one-man sledge, certainly was adopted. Which may mean Sternest Critic goes for the pumpkin pie instead when he rules his own roost.

Unreal Christmas Cookbook IV

According to the publishers this is one of the culinary events of the decade, the book the most anticipated tome of the year. The owner and inspiration behind Boshbolics, the already legendary chain of Carolingian  restaurants with outlets that now spread from Chelsea to Chiswick, has finally after weeks of pressure agreed to provide her army of fans with the secrets of this magnificent cuisine.

A few selections from the book tell the story.

'When I first has a stopover at Carolingia's airport and tasted the food I knew I would have to dedicate my life to bringing this cuisine to Britain. It was a struggle until my husband who is a merchant banker gave me £1m as seed capital.'

'I'd like to dedicate this book to all the people who have helped me on this journey since mid-April, especially the design team.'

'For me it is still incredible that it's taken so long for Carolingian peasant classics like lamb's heart boiled with dried cod and preserved lemons to become established in this country. Bitkrep is just a wonderful blend of textures and flavours, and at only £35 for a portion with grey rice is a great way for ordinary people in Chelsea to get a taste for this unbelievable cuisine.'

The Complete Boshbolics Cookbook is now on sale for £45.

Serendipity and the Death of Creation

The title is my entry to this year's pompous and pretentious git awards [three time winner here]. But it does mean something, namely that the classic combinations of ingredients that cooks come to know can stop the arrival of new ideas. Don't get me wrong, I hate the sort of experimental cookery that pairs totally incompatible things - in my view at least - like steak and blackcurrants. Turbot and coffee foam (foams collapse the instant you touch them anyway and are the epitome of cheffy pointlessness) . It is good to try new directions though.

I thought about this while planning this evening's starter. We have just harvested the last of our beetroot before the slugs become interested in it, so I have about 4kg to use up in the next week or so, beetroot keeping well. Our hens are for some reason laying without pause at the moment, thus I have eight eggs to hand. Eggs, beetroot = to this cook a lovely salad with the cooked root, thin rings of raw onion, and slices of boiled egg (with or without anchovies - this evening with).

A bit predictable, almost an automatic choice. That won't take away from it being tasty and healthy, but there is a corner of my brain that says 'branch out', as I will need to do if the rest of the stuff is not going to be wasted.

Such default choices - or signature dishes as some would prefer - include seeing leeks, carrots and spuds in the rack and immediately thinking potage bonne femme. Again, lovely but not exciting. Or having chicken stock and mushrooms, which signals a risotto.

I don't always follow these obvious choices, but now I'm in my late thirties (the 25th year of that decade actually) they tend to rush to the front of the brain and try to crowd out other more creative impulses. At some point the consistency of such tried and tested things has to morph into boring, for me even if wife and son are too polite or hungry to say so. Yet.

Unreal Christmas Cookbook III

Victoria Beckham’s Food for the Stylish

We’re pretty sure this is unreal (it’s utterly unreal), just as we are generally convinced that anything where the word celebrity is used is the fantasy of some PR creative committee (do those last three words go together?). Perhaps like so much of Dallas (takes you back) and indeed celebrity culture (now those words are really incompatible) this is all a bad dream. But here goes. As the blurb promises, for just a few tens of thousands of pounds you can eat like multi-talented Victoria and other such multi-talented celebrities.

Multi-talented Victoria’s secret (hmm) is a disarmingly simple one: she employs a team of talented chefs (poor things, only one talent) who for example hand carve a variety of lettuce leaf, chicory and celery salads to her precise instructions, blending four drops of single estate Tuscan olive oil and one of rare vintage balsamic vinegar personally blessed by Pope Francis to dress them. A stylist then arranges each leaf according to a plan devised by the multi-talented Victoria herself! Start your meal with her fabulous pea soup, made with the freshest pea in Harvey Nicks and mineral water flown in from Switzerland, and end it with her witty take on the chocolate fudge sundae, a sun-warmed Revel garnished with half a cashew nut.

The beautifully photographed non-existent tome has images detailing how each dish is constructed, and is ideal for the hard of thinking, using less ink than one of multi-talented hubby David’s tattoos. This could completely change the way we think about food, or it could be so ridiculous that even the British public won’t go for it in spite of the planned TV series and the exclusive launch in Fatuous! Puerile! Vapid! and Brain-Dead! magazines this December. Like this book they don't exist either, but it's just a matter of time. 

The Vital Ingredient

If there is a secret society dedicated to rewarding the makers of superb lasagne I am in for a major windfall. I've not heard about such a group, but if it's secret I wouldn't have. Last night's effort was per Sternest Critic, not easily pleased in such matters, a personal best. And the ingredient that made it so was time.

I can make a lasagne from scratch in an hour, 40 minutes of that time being what it spends in the oven. But then the meat ragu has not had time for the flavours to cook down and blend, and the bechamel is not going to be bechamel but a plain white sauce.

Yesterday's schedule gave me free time in the middle of the day, when I prepared the milk for the sauce, heating it with a quartered onion, bay leaves pepper and nutmeg, plus chunks of carrot and celery, then leaving the lot to infuse for another four hours. After basic browning the ragu was simmered for about 45 minutes to dry it out - one recent version of the dish was more soup than solid - and again left for the flavours to mix and mature.

Time is clearly something in short supply for many - working from/at home and my own boss (if Ruth says so) I'm lucky - but surely not so rare that the vile Just Eat (fast food dross) campaign can be excused? Is it over the top to suggest our society is doomed if the fast-foodsters win? Yes. But still.

My conscience pricks me: there was another vital ingredient in the probably-not-award-winning lasagne, about 150g of cheese. Cheese in the bechamel, cheese on top of the meat layers, and a thick layer of finely grated parmesan on the top that came out of the oven at the Goldilocks moment.

Unreal Christmas Cookbook II

As we near Christmas it's time for another Nigel Slater creation to appear in a bookshop near you. Not sure if this one is out this year or next, but it does sound like another sure fire winner: let's hear it for Nigel Slater's Book of Comfort Food. Actually it should really be books, this being a seven-volume magnum opus featuring more than 3500 of Nigel's favourite favourite tried and tested recipes.

Volume the first (the cheeky little aesthete) is devoted entirely to mashed potatoes, the highlight among the 500 or so suggestions being his brilliant take on mash with gravy - you put the gravy beneath the mash, changing the dynamics of the dish entirely.

Bound in hand-tooled leather and using a font derived from an 18th century hermit's laundry list, and oh so thoughtfully sold with a trolley, this is destined to be a massive Christmas hit.

'It's the book I want for Christmas' - the world's strongest man

'Cookbook of the year - available at a special price' The Observer

'Where's my bloody forest gone?' Sven Svenson

Adult Toffee Apple

My thanks to Hattie Ellis, a food writer I'd never come across previously but whose recipe in The Apple Source Book (my how we laughed) was a winner this weekend. It it rare to come across something new and different that is both easy, quick (relatively) and utterly delicious. Her apple toffee pudding is all of those. 

I was looking for ways to use our bumper cooking apple crop, and this one fitted the bill perfectly, needing three large specimens. They are peeled, cored and chopped, then cooked with a little water until starting to soften nicely. I did this in the microwave in the dish destined for the oven later, with clingfilm over so they steamed. In a pan heat about 8oz of golden syrup, just warming it, then stir in 150g of white breadcrumbs and the zest of a lemon (carefully washed and abraded with kitchen paper to remove wax). Spread the sticky crumbs over the softened apple - I didn't get an even layer, and there were gaps, but never mind, next time I'd use a narrower dish. Into the oven already on (this is pretty forgiving as the oven started on very high as I'd been crisping crackling, then turned down to 180 degrees for this) and cook until the top was showing signs of crisping, about 20 minutes. The lemon (you could doubtless do without the zest but it would be a less noble dish) somehow made it seem slightly gingery, but the whole thing was excellent with Cornish vanilla ice cream. The sharp soft apple contrasted with the crisping sweet topping, the hot pud with the cold ice cream.

That Apple Source Book was bought to satisfy my curiosity about using different varieties for specific dishes, a load of writers contributing their suggestions. It helps if you can identify what apples you have.

We have two cooker trees, one the ubiquitous Bramley, the other an unidentified type inherited on our allotment yielding smaller but richer-tasting apples. Two mature trees produce a lot of apples in autumn, so finding ways to use them without repetition (hesitation and deviation?) is at the front of the culinary bit of my brain at present. Apple sauce, apple pie, apple crumble, apple tart, salads various, apples in porky stews, apples in instant relish... It's the courgette thing all over again. 

The Publishing Run to Christmas - Unreal Christmas Cookbook I

After the interest in last year's series of intercepted letters from famous cooks to Santa the massive secret organisation that is The Austerity Cook (think underwater HQ, mini-sub on our nuclear powered yacht, not knowing Kerry Katona) has been able to obtain previews of Christmas books accepted and otherwise by some of the same star names, though with plenty more besides, to be released to the world drip by drip up to the big day.

Watch this space. Now that one. This one again.

The first, as the publisher's blurb makes clear, is not in any way an attempt to jump on a culinary band wagon. So Stephen Hawking's Big Book of Cup Cakes is apparently something the renowned physicist has been working on for years. Cup cakes in part explain the nature of the universe, interest in them constantly expanding for no comprehensible reason. The analogy is closer too as nobody in this universe has ever actually enjoyed eating a cupcake, thus proving the existence of alternative universes from which the cakes clearly arrive, that version of reality including people who have managed to find some flavour in one of the foul over-decorated things. The Cupcake Theory of Time chapter demonstrates that time is both circular - the cakes return however many the deluded buy - and with a sticky out bit made of orange peel, though nobody has read that far into the book to understand how this can be.

Reviews of the work include Professor Brian Cox's, who said it was: 'Amayyyzing.' And Stephen's friend Homer Simpson added: 'Mmmm, expanding cupcakes.'

Just Imagine - Meat Free Christmas?

I am working on an article for Lancashire Life about the vegetarian alternative at Christmas. Imagine the impact in most British homes of the suggestion that this was to be a meat free Christmas. My son would be devastated, my father (if, contrary to his habitual threats, he makes the trip up here again this year) would pack his bag and return to Norfolk. My wife, however, would probably welcome the change and the implicit health benefits of cutting down on animal fats. But then she also welcomes my plan to buy in a whole air-dried ham as part of our festive fare this year.

The imagination requested in the title means more than those reactions though. The two chefs interviewed thus far have offered some clever ideas, and not just theoretical ones but dishes they cooked last year or plan to cook this year. A raw pudding; Christmas (veggie) lasagne; a wild mushroom and Stilton strudel...

My conscience is regularly pricked by the knowledge that we here eat too much meat - in the West in general, and this household in particular. When I cook vegetarian or near vegetarian dishes we are no less satisfied, our systems don't collapse (far from it in terms of what euphemistically we'll call digestive health), and we enjoy them.

Last night the bulk of our main course came from a huge range of veg, home grown and bought in, this being a vegetable soup along minestrone lines (though the stock was chicken from the carcase of Sunday's roast bird). For the first time in weeks I made my own bread, so that accompaniment had flavour. It didn't have imagination though, something that I clearly need to work on if I am crowbar more vegetarian food into our diet.

To fire that imagination I'm going to have to buy some veggie cookbooks - though anything that features brown rice or wholewheat pasta is banned - and visit a veggie restaurant or two, something that apparently today will be less painful than the last time I did so. That was in Germany on business, so quite a while back. The menu was dismal, and the least offensive offering was pasta with pesto. The pasta was in that state of soggy rigor mortis that comes when it has been poorly drained and left at one side for five minutes before serving; the pesto had no zing to it (I suspect it was from a long-open jar not freshly made). I was dining there because a week of large lumps of boiled pig (roughly how I'd define Germany's national cuisine) with boiled spuds had fired me with a need for something else. The pasta and pesto inspired a return to boiled pig.

Specialist Subject - Courgettes

If I ever get to go on Mastermind (too scared to ever try sadly) I have a choice of specialist subjects: Maigret; Wodehouse especially the Blandings novels - I have on my LinkedIn profile that I am the founder and Life President of the Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe Society, something that is nearly true - John Buchan, and bloody courgettes.

The courgettes one is a bit narrow, as it concerns ways to cook them. I love their fecundity, a good healthy plant producing maybe 30 fruits in a season. Look away and a twee little tube the size of a pencil is suddenly a marrow, flavourless and to my mind almost useless in culinary terms, but keep an eye on them and you have lots of healthy and tasty material to work with in the kitchen.

This year I have done plenty of sweet and sour versions, both Sicilian and Chinese. Last night we had courgette and cheese quiche (actually cheese and courgette the way it worked out, went a bit bonkers with the grater). I get requests for 'courgette muck', the sliced fruits cooked down in olive oil till they are a mush, then loads of garlic added for a minute or so before the lot is served on thick toast. They go on pasta either as the aforementioned muck, or cooked with chopped toms from a tin. Courgette soup is easy. Little ones straight from the plant slice well raw for salads. I've made courgette and apple cake. Courgette omelette. Ratatouille. Steamed whole they make a good vegetable course with soy sauce and sesame oil as part of a Chinese meal. Cooked with chopped apple in apple jelly and cider vinegar with a tsp of sugar to make a rapidly prepared relish to go with sausages. If all else fails they can be simply fried in slices and served as a vegetable accompaniment to a lamb chop.

The point of this post, if there is one, is that with such plenty you need to use imagination (and some good cook books) to get the most from your glut without driving yourself and those eating with you mad. It has been such a good year for courgettes, however, that I'm now reasonably convinced I am Napoleon.

Autumn Plenty

Keeping my journal of costs of growing stuff against value of what is grown has opened my eyes a little to the plenty we enjoy at this time of year - early October that is. On Sunday we had a harvesting session at the allotment that yielded a load of cooking apples picked with our stick of ultimate power (a telescopic thing with grabby fingers and a bag beneath them for picking fruit from tall trees), beet, kohl rabi, parsley, beans various including a second flush of broad beans, destined for pretend hummus; loads of courgettes, two massive and as it turned out sweet parsnips (typically we are not sure which of the three types planted they are), Swiss chard and a real bonus, a small punnet of very ripe raspberries.

Those berries joined some apples in a pie that was a real treat. The beans and parsnips went with roast chicken, and the courgettes filled a quiche rich with cheese that we'll eat tonight with a sharp salad made from some of the other produce. Veg soup beckons too when the chicken carcase becomes stock.

For the value I tentatively put down £10 the lot, a bit on the conservative side. And I left out of my calculations a massive pumpkin (about 30lb I'd guess) that is now drying in the garden greenhouse, safe from - we hope - robbers and vagabonds. The latter had visited our allotment shed, and those of many neighbours, but only a hunting-style knife had gone from one of them as far as we know. Per the police they are looking for petrol driven tools and booze. Happily we had decided against keeping our fine wines in the allotment shed this year.

As similar gits nicked a friend's prize pumpkin a few years back we picked ours for safety. It will have a fitting end too, both decorative and culinary for our Halloween/Bonfire Night party. How many pumpkins here are just for show? A sad waste as the flesh bulks out stews sweetly, and makes a particularly thick custardy filling for pies. The little ones are best for cooking, but we'll do justice to the giant one when we feed friends at the firework gathering. Having seen Sainsbury's selling pumpkins a tenth the size for £3 I don't think £10 would be far off, though feeding friends is pretty much priceless.

Money for Nothing and Your Chick Peas for Free

Except we don't grow chick peas. No reason to spoil a good title for that though (it's a Dire Straits line).

This morning I started a project that will last a year, recording expenditure on growing food and the value of food grown. It seemed logical to start when I put in our annual seed order via our allotment association. We get 50 per cent discount from King's Seeds, but the food ones still cost just over £25.

Any editors out there wanting an article based on this, please get in touch!

That was done on Friday. On Sunday we spent two hours tidying up the plot, weeding and removing plants that are past it. But we still harvested a huge amount: 2 x giant parsnips; 2 turnips; 3 beetroot; a sugar-loaf chicory; about a dozen courgettes and patty pans; loads of runner and French beans; some apples; parsley; kale; a large kohl rabi. Enough for the veg for at least three days, though they'll be topped up with odd things from the garden - a few ripe tomatoes suddenly appeared this morning, and we have lots of small peppers left on one plant.

Also on Friday I did my regular run to the chicken man for a sack of layers' pellets and another of mixed seed to keep our two birds happy for five or six months, an outlay of £16.50. They provide on average 1.33 eggs per day through the year, which in Sainsbury's (medium sized organic eggs) are £1.90 for 6. So we get £150+ of eggs for £40 of feed and maybe £15 of bedding etc. A profit margin that I would have killed for in my industrial marketing days.

I was reminded of how good our eggs were when I bought a tray of 36 small ones for £1.50 from the chicken man (I wanted to do some baking and to go large on scrambled eggs at the weekend). His birds are kept in big sheds, free to run about but not as far as I can see to get out. The yolks are an insipid beigey-yellow. Our pair, frequently let out to eat grass, insect eggs, worms, dandelions, wood-lice, the occasional frog if we are not quick to intervene, and even once the decapitated body of a mouse left by the cat, give eggs with bright yellow to orange yolks. Even when we can't supervise them outside (we have foxes over the stream from us) they eat our leftover starches, veg peelings, and any fruit that has gone over. The chicken version of the good life/Good Life, as we on a small and partial scale enjoy the human equivalent.

Health Food

I find health food shops depressing, their gaunt and dull-eyed staff often an anti-advertisement for what they are selling. Mood and mindset are so important in health, and a diet of grey lentils, brown rice and beige beans is not going to lift the spirits. But I was reminded this morning as I scraped the honey jar to make a dressing for Ruth's lunch how often I use food to try to combat illness.

That honey jar was depleted because one of my cold-cures - the whisky-all-in - has been used several times of late. SC who hates the taste of alcohol had such a dose of his cold that he consented to try one (it's a small measure of whisky, a big tsp of honey, the juice of a whole lemon, and boiling water to fill a cup). Generously he passed his germs to Ruth, who in keeping with her trouser-wearing status in this house acts like a man when she has a cold - a near death experience for her and anyone crossing her while she ails - so she had several of these bedtime panaceas. 

The same epidemic (bit strong for the two of them I know) needed my other cure-all, hot soup. This is preferably chicken, but as I had a load of ham stock to use we had three soups based on that as well as a couple made from fresh chicken stock. Or to be more accurate as regards the ham versions we enjoyed one potage (veg cooked in the stock zapped to a gloopy thickness, then chunks of ham added), one simple soup, and one of the spicy Chinese noodle things that could be a soup or a stew.

It is probably the heat that makes you perk up with both of these, though the vitamin boost can't hurt and with the drink the sugar rush is another factor. But the sentimentalist in me likes to think that a demonstration of love, which is what taking the trouble to make these things surely is, doesn't hurt either. Say ahh, but not I hope to the doctor.

Say Cheese

September means it is time for some serious preserve making. A variety of reasons prompt this urge: economy - six jars of jam for the price of a 1kg bag of sugar; quality - no artificial rubbish included in the recipes and the flavour of fruit rushes through; maybe a deep desire to protect and provide for one's family for the coming winter; and curiosity - there are things I can make that are hard or impossible to buy.

It was curiosity that pushed me to make cheese. Not milk cheese, but fruit cheese. I occasionally buy membrillo, the Spanish quince preserve that is served with cold meats or 'proper' cheese. It costs a fortune. So with a magnificent crop of quinces to use up I decided to make my own. Both of the quinces (magnificent is overstating things, but the tree is young so maybe next year...) were chopped small and simmered with about a kg of apples until really soft, then put through a jelly bag for several hours. The resulting liquid was just over half a pint, so a 1/2 lb of sugar was added to the reheated juice and stirred and stirred, spluttering gobbets of red-hot jam, until it was the consistency of hot tar.

I ended up with two ramekins of apple and quince cheese. The smell is great. One ramekin for eating now, one in the freezer to be used later as a treat.

There is something addictive about making preserves. It's easy to get carried away and make so much that you never use it. But tiny batches like that are a way to pass a dullish Sunday evening, and if they are something special all the better. And atheist that I am there is a certain appeal to the ancestral Puritan in me of making the best of what we are given. I have, however, decided against closing all the theatres in Britain, cancelling Christmas and banning Morris dancing, though I agonised over that last one.

The Kindest Cut

Preparing various dishes recently has brought home how the way vegetables are cut affects their taste.

That's something most cooks will be aware of as regards garlic - whole it gives a mild and deep flavour, sliced thinly it is somehow sharper, smashed beneath a blade it's pungent and fiery.

But it applies to certain other foodstuffs too, for example raw beetroot: grated it seems sweeter by far than when it is cut into the old pound-coin slices which emphasize its earthy side, and made into tiny matchsticks (I have a device like a peeler with teeth that is a faff, but safer than a mandoline) the flavour is halfway between those two.

I am not sure if this is some chemical effect, like what happens with the crushing of the garlic, or perception, or how surface area to weight influences what we taste (grated you maximize the surface area). Something to bear in mind when making up salads though. My wife this morning took to work something on the sweet side, grated beetroot and apple, a boiled egg cut up, and walnuts, dressed with Helmann's.

The apple beet and egg were all home grown, sadly not the walnuts, though one day... We planted a tree here when we arrived in 2000, and it is at the very start of giving nuts now. One last year (one) and two this, all nicked by squirrels, the bastards. They didn't get our cobnuts this year though, I tried one this morning - sweet as a etc. Some of them will be in another salad tomorrow, cut into small pieces and mixed with cheese, diced apple and the thinnest slices of raw courgette. Diced apple is apple-ier than the supersweet grated flesh, sliced courgette is nutty, to blend with the cobnuts.

I think about food too much.

Serendipitous Substitution - One Flame Fish Stew

Once a month or so in the  autumn and winter we have chowder as a weekday supper. Or dinner. Or tea, depending on class, pretension and region.

I am not a believer in strict recipes unless they are needed. Yesterday's chowder had kippers and basa as the majority of the protein, but lacking bacon (the shame) and with some chorizo to use up I added that, a happy circumstance as it gave a nice paprika spice to the dish. As ever it was bulked out with potatoes and sweetcorn, both of which like onions cook beautifully in the milk that forms a good half of the liquid.

We discussed as we always do if chowder is a soup or a stew - this one was definitely a stew - and if, with chorizo, it actually qualified as chowder at all. That takes me back to the point about strict adherence to recipes. Chowder is said to have originated as a one-pot dish cooked by fishermen (the word chowder derived from the French chaudiere, a big cooking pot or in modern French a boiler), with a bit of the catch, some spuds, bacon and onions cooked in water at sea. Some - me included - use milk plus stock now for the smoked fish version, not a luxury that those driftermen enjoyed, so it is already different from the pure original if indeed such a thing ever existed.

This is not to say that you can bung in whatever comes to hand, some discrimination is needed. My version includes garlic, red pepper and carrot, all chopped finely to cook quickly (the onions likewise, the spuds big dice), to add flavour, 'goodness' and a bit of colour. The chorizo helped with that too, the paprika sending the milk a rather fetching pink.

We All Become Our Parents - One-Flame Lamb Shanks

It is a sad fact of life that if we live to middle age we almost inevitably morph into models of our parents. Not completely, we are individuals, but in part. This for me is most noticeable in certain food habits, as the shared diet of my youthful years is the foundation of my culinary experience.

I felt suddenly like my father a few weeks ago when I found my self whingeing to the butcher at Booth's about the price of lamb shanks. They used  to be given away almost, but now cost between £3 and £4 each. Same with several other foodstuffs, like monkfish, crab, and sweetbreads (some butchers couldn't give them away, though that was ignorance on the part of customers). History is littered with such matters, with asparagus and oysters once the food of the poor, now very much the food of the comfortably off if not rich. My father constantly complains about the price of such items as lamb shanks, spare ribs, brisket and so on, as his mother did before him (she was eventually in her 70s banned from a local store for doing this once too often).

In spite of the price I did lamb shanks for us yesterday, braising them at 125 centigrade for five hours, the meat on a bed of our home-grown veg (turnips and kohl rabi for depth and bulk, carrots and onion for sweetness, herbs and garlic for interest). Doing my particular work (at home) I get the chance to try slow-cooking like that, able to keep an eye open in case things dry out. The results showed why lamb shanks are now expensive: meat falling off the bone, rich juices for dipping bread into, and slutchy heart-warming vegetables.

That was yet another one-flame (or pot at least, given the casserole was moved to the oven after meat and veg had browned) dish. I'm becoming increasingly tempted to miss out on cooked starch and rely on good bread (when I can find it), which makes life easy and with tasty loaves makes life more flavorsome.

One-flame Chicken Meal

This is a bit of a cheat in that the cooking starts over a flame then is finished in the oven, but it is one pot, and for those allergic to washing-up liquid that is important.

Sunday lunch this week was a lazy affair, as the weather was too glorious to allow for faffing in the kitchen. So while Ruth jointed a chicken I cleaned and cut up (all just picked on the allotment or garden) some spuds, thick spring onions now looking more like leeks, three small courgettes and a load of fresh herbs - bay, thyme, rosemary, sage, chives, plus a whole (tiny) head of our still greenish garlic.

The chicken was browned in olive oil in a big and solid roasting dish over a moderate gas flame, then the onions added, followed by the small chunks of spud (cut in odd shapes with no side more than an inch long), the thickly sliced courgettes and bashed garlic, and finally the herbs. As this needs liquid to cook the veg a tiny bottle of Babycham leftover from Christmas (Brandy and Babycham a secret seasonal pleasure of one member of the household) was poured in, and a bit of boiling water to top it up. Salt, pepper, bring to the simmer and put in the pre-heated 190 degree oven for an hour or so, taking the pan out twice to stir things about.

Protein, carbs, veg and flavour all in the one pot, with the juices forming a tasty gravy too.

A Tiny Piece of Perfection

Yesterday I cooked the perfect boiled egg. Actually I cooked two, one for my wife and one for myself. Not the greatest culinary feat ever, but very pleasing in its own little way, not least in that they formed the basis of our breakfast, and eventually of some debate.

Firstly, who is to define what constitutes a perfect boiled egg? Had my son been up at that time (not going to happen during the holidays unless fishing is in prospect) he would have pointed out that his perfect boiled egg is hard enough to damage plaster if thrown. These had soft but solidified whites, the very edge of the yolk had hardened, but the rest was liquid and cried out for toast soldiers (or peace women as a distant cousin dubbed them long ago).

Secondly, the comparative value of such small but perfect things. I maintain that I would rather have had that egg than a mediocre but exotic restaurant dish, just as I'd take a Hilliard miniature over any large scale piece of crap by Hirst. The egg would cost less than the Blumenthal crab meat and goat's testicle on rocket and pissenlit salad with dressing made from the distilled tears of a depressed cat, but cost is irrelevant here.

The method, by the way, as this is meant to be a food blog (and chefs have come to blows over their preferred ways of cooking boiled eggs): small saucepan of water brought to the boil, two medium eggs then added, wait till the water returns to the rolling boil, then start the ancient egg-timer going. Remove eggs when the sand has run out (wait a bit for larger eggs, remove earlier for small ones), place in egg cups and leave for a minute to firm up. Cut off top with knife (and like all sensible people I'm a Little-endian), add a few grains of salt and dig in.

Just realised that I left one important factor out of the above: the eggs were from our hens, so at most two days in the basket, and produced by creatures who along with their layers' pellets eat grass, worms, wood-lice (their favourite find), our salad discards, grain and if we don't rescue them in time the occasional little frog.

Humous (Be Joking?)

As these two things are not made with chick peas can they really qualify as humous (hummus, hummous and probably several other acceptable spellings)? Hence the pathetic play on words of the title. It does sound better than vegetable spread, though, an unromantic if more accurate name.

As so often the inspiration for these comes from the most excellent HF-W, whose books I return to regularly.

With a glut of broad beans to deal with on our return from hols - you can only freeze so many - I made a batch of something like humous: about a pound of podded beans were cooked (boiled for maybe eight minutes) and then skinned - the grey skin has little to offer in the way of pleasure or taste - to leave the little jade jewels that are far more appealing. Four or five cloves of garlic were crushed and added to them, then the lot zapped in the processor with a glug of olive oil (one glug being nine standard dribbles) along with a big pinch of salt, several turns of the pepper mill, and the juice of half a lemon, plus a tsp of cumin seeds that had been reduced to powder in the grinder and a tsp of paprika. Zap again until it looks nice and slutchy and it's ready to serve on toast, with a wrap or on its own.

Another current glut is beet, that before our hols was tiny, after has grown just beyond the tennis ball dimensions that are generally ideal. The process is the same, except the beet (three makes a batch) is boiled unpeeled so it retains the juice and colour for 25 minutes or more, until a knife-point enters easily.

Two slices of stale bread (crusts removed) are wetted with cold water and squeezed, then the pap added to the processor with a handful of walnut pieces and worked to a paste. The peeled beets are zapped with that paste plus olive oil, the juice of half a lemon, sea salt, lots of smoked paprika and two tsp of ground cumin, one of ground fennel seeds, and half a tsp of ground pepper corns. Garlic would be good, but as my wife prefers for diplomatic reasons not to stink out her office (and indeed the entire floor if I had my way with the quantities) that last lot was free of my favourite flavouring. Serve with a lemon slice to add some extra sharpness if wanted. Texture can be according to taste, just process the paste until a fingerful is to your liking - for me it cries out to have some coarse graininess to it, but a more sophisticated smooth style (sounds like a brain-dead late night dinner jazz programme) would only mean running the motor for another couple of minutes.

A bonus with both of those humouses (humae? humice?) is their fantastic colour, especially in the case of the beetroot version, like looking into a deep glass of rich burgundy. For those not used to much beet, your wee the next day will be like a watery version of the same, so don't call 111 or 999 when you see it.

One Flame Cooking - Student Elegance for Pennies

Personal circs meant I had to cook us a quick meal last night, and having four small lamb chops to hand I resorted to a de Pomiane classic: he was a doctor, nutritionist and gourmet in Paris in the first half of the last century, and his books are a delight of unpretentious sense and no little style. Check out a dramatised series of his French cooking in 10 minutes on You Tube.

The dish is simple: heat a wide and deep frying pan; sear both sides of four lamb chops (not neck chops or chump, which need longer), then turn the heat down medium-low and add the drained and rinsed contents of two tins of flageolet beans, four cloves of garlic chopped finely, a few (several) dabs of butter and a small glass of liquid - white wine, cider, light stock or water all fine (not red wine). Let this cook through gently for five minutes or so, then season and serve. It needs no spices or fancy touches, it's perfect in itself, the liquid, meat juices and butter make a sauce that must not be left in the pan.

With a roll or some French stick to dip up that juice you have a sustaining and tasty main course. The same thing works with good pork sausages, though they need to be cooked through before you add the beans etc, and as there's less meat juice the banger version requires more butter. The lamb dish for four would be about £5.50, with a large pork sausage each just £3.50.

As de Pomiane writes (and the actor playing him in the series shows), while that is cooking through you can make a salad to follow it, dressed with salt, oil and vinegar, slice a little cheese for each diner, and wash some fruit for pudding. The French btw don't share our obsession with cheese biscuits, enjoying un fromage is just that.

Four courses in 10 minutes, or if you offered a few slices of salami and a handful of olives at the outset it would be five. With just one pan involved. We had Parma ham and olives, the lamb and bean dish, a tomato salad with basil, and cheese, which eaten outside in tropical Preston with a large glass of wine was thoroughly enjoyable thank you.

So that's French elegance with little effort, and something that a student who shopped intelligently could do for friends for a special occasion. They could (should) bring the wine, or chip into the kitty for the ingredients. Or both.

What Tastes Good?

Eating the last of the British asparagus I'll get to taste this year made me think about cultural taste differences, as the French, Spanish and Germans all go for the flabbier white asparagus, that has to my palate an insipid taste nothing like the green stuff. There are innumerable other such differences of national opinion: the various rotten fish dishes that Iceland and Scandinavia offer are at the extreme end of the scale - as far as this Brit is concerned anyway; but then I never liked the bitter gourds that I tried in the Far East either; or the nasty Japanese sweets made with bean paste.

That is not to say that they aren't good, just that I for reasons of custom, upbringing, and experience found those gourds and bean sweets unpalatable. 

Our national tastes do change over time, however. Witness the shift from bitter to lager. Witness more pertinently as regards food at least the shift from salads where the only ingredients were lettuce, mustard and cress and cucumber, to the many bitter leaves you'll find in your supermarket pack today - endive, radicchio etc. Doubtless foreign travel has been one driving force; commerce another - add a bit of chicory to a salad bag and increase the price by 20p; simply being able to try these things is another factor. 

Which makes me wonder what we will have in store, as it were, to taste in future. There are many vegetables and fruits never seen here: young coconut I've never seen in Britain; Durian (thank goodness, musky flavour but it smells of sewage); Kalamansi, lovely little limes with a bit of sweetness to them; so many varieties of banana. 

Sadly as we add these exotics, and we doubtless will, we are losing much of our native produce. I'm working on a piece for Cheshire Life about local apples, and find there are at least 33 still around, though many lost already. Will I ever try a Withington Welter? Or a Millicent Barnes? In an ideal world we'd keep those and add the others. Variety is the spice etc. Happily some bodies are fighting to keep the old varieties, and more power to them. When we get to plant an orchard, as we one day hope to, it is the obscure ones - though those with reputedly good flavour - that we'll go for. Even there we have differences between nations, the Japanese fruit I've tasted so bland as to leave no taste memory at all - Golden Delicious (which the French actually like) a feast of flavour by comparison. 

It's All Kicking Off

From despair at how slow everything was in the kitchen garden and allotment to a sudden abundance in just two weeks. With the summer weather (worth noting again, summer weather) we are having to water lots of the crops, but that's a small price to pay for within the last two or three days a glut of strawberries and redcurrants - now seven jars of jam; the first small courgettes, tender enough to eat raw; loads of tiny turnips, our most under-rated vegetable; more lettuce than we can handle, so the chickens are happy; a pick of little artichokes for a starter; handfuls of spring onions nothing like the hard ones you get from supermarkets; and reasonable pickings of broad beans, again picked when small and tender and sweet. And above all, lots of new spuds.

We are not vegetarians by any means, but when you have veg that good there is less call for big lumps of meat.

We pick things young and tender, whereas commercial growers and outlets want to maximise the weight. Take those turnips: we have four varieties, each with their own characteristics. The purple top Milan are my favourites. Great raw in crunchy salads; as half-starch half-flavouring in last night's chicken dish; as a soup (creme a la vierge, lovely with small sweet roots, horrid with overgrown woody things that smell like school cabbage when cooked), or glazed to accompany a little lamb chop.

It's nice to have your menu dictated by the season too. A Navarin of lamb is now called for, with the broad beans instead of peas, and those little turnips stewed gently with new potatoes. Salads various, but the plain green (for which read green, red, bronze and pink with the different lettuces we grow) at least every other day. There is no reason to limit yourself to one salad with a meal when the crops are so full of flavour.

One Flame Super Student Soup

That's a soup for students, not made from, to be clear.

At a university visit with SC on Saturday the guided tour took in accommodation and a shared kitchen. I loved the community of the kitchen at my alma mater, though the very occasional disappearance of food from the fridge was annoying. As with my experience so today as regards the cooker - electric hob, doubtless to avoid yoots blowing themselves and others to bits.

A wonderful and easy shared meal if students band together to share cooking duties is a fish soup, easy, quick, nutritious and more than a bit virtuous. We had a version last week made with proper ham stock, but a chicken or ham stock cube (I avoid the fish and veg ones) is an OK substitute. Again this is really cheapo for four people, and there's just one pan to wash up.

In a large saucepan gently fry two chopped onions in oil. Don't let this brown. Chop the veg finely, they cook quickly and keep their flavour better. Add a selection of veg chopped finely: carrots are cheap and flavorful, so are turnips, maybe a Basics pepper or a courgette if there's a glut and they're cheap, plus two or three garlic cloves sliced thinly, and sweat them for two minutes. Boil 1.25l of water in a kettle and add this with two crumbled cubes (I like Knorr best), to the pan and up the heat until it reaches a bubbling simmer, then turn the heat down to maintain that simmer (easy with gas, a bugger tbh with electric hobs). Add either (or both) a couple of potatoes cut into small dice, or 100g spaghetti broken into very short lengths, and cook until they are just about done - about 10 minutes. At this point add your fish - cheapest in frozen packs of whitefish fillets or those bricks of pollock. When they are defrosted and cooked through, adjust seasoning and break up the fish into smaller chunks, then serve with bread and butter.

The economics: 520g pack of frozen whitefish fillets £1.75; vegetables if using Basics red pepper £1.25; spag 20p;  stock cubes 20p. Bread and butter according to hunger, but you can get excellent bread from Morrison's really cheaply - two small loaves for £1 so you can have white for most of us and brown for the saintly. Even with a ton of butter that's still going to be well below a fiver for four people.

If you want to push the boat out or play tunes with the idea a pack of smoked salmon bits for £1.50 added at the very end of cooking, or frozen prawns £2.25 for a 400g bag bunged in with the fish make this into a feast (that would actually feed six with another turnip, carrot and spud and half a litre more water). Or cube some 'cooking bacon' and add with the veg. Or throw in a few frozen peas or sweetcorn. This is more an idea/method than a recipe.

I wondered about mentioning that a dash of leftover cider would be good, then I remembered that this is meant to be for students, who tend not to leave much cider.

One Flame Student Survival - Curry for Pennies

The one flame idea partly comes out of my experience living in France for a year as an assistant, when I had a single Calor Gas burner on which to cook, and partly from the fact that the less washing up there is the more likely people are to make their own food, which means eating better than you would from the chippie, and brings a social aspect with it. So how about this for a student meal for three, a common number in shared houses?

Fish curry in 30 minutes, with the cost well below £1.50 each again. This hits the protein spot too, not easy for budget meals. It's not authentic, but it is tasty.

Use a large and deep frying pan, heated quite high. In a couple of spoonfuls of vegetable oil fry three sliced onions until they start to brown a little - don't turn your back - then add a red chilli cut fine (stand clear, it's pepper spray time), and an inch or so of root ginger cut into teenie strips, and turn the heat down to medium. After a minute for these to cook through add two cloves of garlic chopped fine, then pour in a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tsp of sugar, plus a tin of coconut milk. When this is bubbling gently add a pack of frozen whitefish fillets (cheapo and they're good, it's pollock - no honestly). Cook till they are beyond defrosted and into cooked, and gently break them up. At the end season with salt, pepper, and spices - buy a plastic packet of garam masala - nicer than 'curry powder' and it costs less - from the ethnic shelves for about 60p and it will last all year, this only needs a tsp. When it is all cooked through serve with basics pitta bread in place of far more expensive naan.

The economics: (all Sainsbury's unless stated, so Morrison's would generally be cheaper still) 520g frozen whitefish fillets £1.75; tinned toms (Lidl) 31p; coconut milk on offer now 50p; 3 onions 15p; garlic 8p; chilli 15p; ginger about 10p; 6-pack of Basics pittas 22p. Spices 3p. The lot for £3.29 give or take a few pence. And the fish alone gives you about three quarters of your protein GDA. A veggie version of this can be made easily and more cheaply still, substituting two 69p tins of chick peas for the fish (so for three that's less than £1 each).

Mean beast that I am I buy Lidl chopped toms in bulk - they won an Observer taste test a while back (or one of the other Sundays) and at 31p each are maybe 40 per cent cheaper than own brand elsewhere, and 1/3 the price of advertised stuff - and I dare you to find a difference in quality.

One Flame and Three Courses for under £1.50

Doing the university visit round with SC made me feel firstly terribly sad - it is only about three weeks since my first day at uni in 1977 - and secondly inspired to share a few things about student food survival learned - annoyingly - after my student days.

Student finances are tight. But however fun the cheapo fried chicken thing briefly is, most students not in fully catered accommodation want a proper meal now and again. There is something civilised and satisfying about sitting down at a table with cutlery and plates, the mealtime spreading before you. This got me thinking of how to do a de Pomiane (several courses very rapidly prepared) for not very much money, and with the one flame proviso. The first result is as follows, a three course meal for under £1.50, ready in about 10 minutes.

First step is get a big pan of hot water boiling - pasta for the main. Little pans don't do it. You want a big volume of water so when the pasta goes in the water is only below boiling-point briefly. Pasta done in water not yet boiling, or in too little, goes gluey.

Put spag for (hungry) one in the water, then prep your first course, tomato salad. One large tomato or two medium ones should be sliced quite thinly (easy with a serrated blade), the slices laid in one layer on a plate big enough for them all. Dress with just a couple of drops of oil per slice and a tiny bit of salt, plus pepper if you fancy. Add wafer-thin slices of raw onion, or garlic, to pep it up if you want, and to increase the vitamin C content. First course is done, but as the toms have probably been in the fridge, let them warm for a minute or two before eating, and this allows the salt to work too.

Grate a small amount of Parmesan - a little goes a long way. My tip is buy Lidl's for price and quality. This with a thin slice of butter and a crushed clove of garlic is your pasta sauce.

Eat the tomato salad, then when the spag is ready (don't buy quick cook, it's pointless and not as nice), about eight minutes, drain the water off (but leave it moist), and in the hot pan mix with your cheese, butter, and crushed clove of garlic (peel the clove, put it under a broad-bladed knife turned sideways, and thump it hard).

Pudding is an apple. Granny Smiths are tasty, crunchy, and you can get seven or eight for £1.50 if you look in the right place.

Not too much protein in this, though the cheese has about 7g, and the spag 11g, so roughly a third of our daily need, but I'll post another three-course cheapo menu later in the week to address that.

The economics: Two medium toms from Sainsbury's £1 pack with seven in cost 29p. 500g of own-brand spag £1, they suggest 100g for a main course, to fill up I'd say 150g at least so 30p. 10p for butter, and about 40p for Parmesan (200g for £3.75, so 21g for 40p - you need the flavour and the calcium). An apple for 22p. Garlic two cloves 4p. Half a medium onion 5p. Total £1.40.

Table of Content

My previous post was a whinge about how late this year's crops (excepting lettuce) have been, but this will be about success at last.

On Saturday we decided to have our first spuds of the year, just before June ended. It took several plants to make a dish of littlies, but the sacrifice in quantity later in the year was balanced by the fantastic taste of these blemish-free specimens. Simply boiled, salted and buttered they were perfect. No need to chew, they crumble moistly on the tongue.

In the same spirit we picked a few gobstopper-sized turnips and beetroot and had them raw with spring onion thinings, and raw broad beans the size of undernourished peanuts.

All that weeding is worth it. We have had nothing that tastes so good since last year's first crops.

First ice-cream of the season too, made with a sudden surge of gooseberries. The recipe was adapted from HFW's River Cottage Cookbook, and worked really well. Not one you'd want three scoops of, tart and strongly flavoured, but with a meringue to balance the sharpness the first tasting was lovely.

As per a previous post, I intend next year trying to calculate the cost of materials and rent etc on the allotment against the value of what we get from it, but how do you put a value on something as difficult to find and as delicious as gooseberry ice-cream? And on the lift such things give to your spirits?

Getting There

Normally by this time we are pretty much living off our allotment and kitchen garden. The foul spring has set everything back this year, so however much we look at the beet, turnips and potatoes we should be eating they are not yet ready.

Some produce has made it to the table. Lettuce as per previous posts has been plentiful, along with rocket, land cress, mizuna, mustards various and spinach. So no shortage of green leaves. I pulled a clump of shallots two days ago (still got it) to liven up a salad, and today made a gooseberry cake (brilliant recipe in Jane Grigson's Fruit Book) half of which went in making sure it was alright. We have had a couple of fennel bulbs.

The fact remains, though, that nature is struggling here this year. It brings home the danger that the change of climate (we now seem to have a wet season where once we had a summer) brings to this country and our ability to feed ourselves.

I hope that as regards our own food it is delay rather than disaster. And not just on economic grounds - fresh is so much better. In my opinion nothing in the world tastes as good as a plate of new spuds dug out of the ground less than an hour ago. Salt and butter and an appetite are all that's needed to enjoy them. A Michelin-starred chef would perhaps team them with aniseed, crumbled pumpernickel, banana ice-cream and orange-juice for his restaurant, but at his home would have them as we do.

Rick Stein

Most TV chefs, even the blessed Delia, I find hard to watch. I want to move Nigel Slater's fringe out of the way and tell him to get a bloody move on; cannot stomach the egos of Gordon Ramsay and Nigel Rhodes (have yet to hear a good word said about the latter by anyone who has met him either); Jamie Oliver has too many annoying mannerisms to list, plus I learned how to fry stuff ages ago anyway; and the popularity of the Two Fat Bikers and the surviving Hairy Lady defies my comprehension.

And finally the 'but'. I find HFW very watchable, and likewise Rick Stein. Maybe it's a cultural thing, they are both well educated for a start (but then so is Nigella Lawson, and I can't stand her cream and cleavage frenzies). Or the fact that green issues are at the forefront of their thinking. Anyway, I watched Rick Stein's programme on Mumbai this week and was inspired to cook a curry. Now the house has an all-pervading smell of curry spices (especially fenugreek).

Unsurprisingly given that it is the food of more than a billion people, most very poor, the curry is a great weapon in the austerity cook's armoury. Last night's was actually a prawn curry, so £2.50 for the king prawns, but the plentiful rice was for pennies, I bought the tin of coconut milk for 50p from the exotic shelves at Sainsbury's, added a basics red pepper and a couple of chopped onions, so pennies there too, made quickfire dal with a 79p tin of lentils and some garlicky spiced butter, and we had our fill for not very much. The spices again came from the 'ethnic' shelves, good-sized bags a fraction of the price of pretty Schwarz bottles, and JS naan breads at 80p were about half the price of Sharwood's.

The inspiring thing about Mr Stein's curry was that it was made quickly without in any way being thrown together. I didn't follow his recipe, though I did take his tip of frying my spices more than I would normally have done, with some liquid to hand to prevent burning. No complaints, and next to nothing left, so I think it was a success. When we are in Cornwall this summer if I bump into him in Padstow - we will definitely eat at one of his places - I will shake him by the hand.

A note of praise for Sainsbury's: a week ago I tried to make dal from yellow split peas. Soaked for 32 not 24 hours, they were boiled for the requisite 10 minutes, then simmered for 30 more; then another 30; then another 20, by which time we had waited for the rest of the meal long enough. The peas were bullets, utterly useless. I took the pack and some evidence next day as I was so annoyed, and they gave me my money back and a £5 voucher for the inconvenience.

Foams, Flutes and Filling Up

Yesterday we had as a separate course a plain green salad fresh from the garden. Except that it wasn't green or plain. Plenty of green in there, but with oak-leaf and other lettuce varieties included it had brown and purple too.

There can be few simpler or more perfect combinations than fresh lettuce and a sharp vinaigrette, the crispness of well-grown lettuce resisting any descent into sogginess. Yet which name chef these days would have the courage or humility to put them together without further adornment?

This prompts the further question, what do we actually want when eating out? Are we in a restaurant to be amazed at innovation, dazzled by technique, or to enjoy really good food perfectly prepared? There are other reasons for going to specific restaurants: fashion, being seen, bumping into the rich and famous and watching them assault their wife, to name but three.

Not forgetting the fuel aspect of the whole thing. Except plenty of chefs plainly do. On my recent Michelin-starred tour of Midi-Provence I only felt really replete at breakfast - nobody buggers about with that - and after the last meal of the trip, which also happened to be by far the best, and after lunch at an un-starred place. Though I am undoubtedly a bloody peasant, I am not solely concerned with filling up. But it should be part of the deal, part of the chef's skill and judgement. Diners should be satisfied with the standard, freshness, interest, tastes, combinations, contrasts, variety and volume of food.

Missing out quantity in a main meal seems like an orchestra without the brass and the percussion. Personally I can do without the flute (it's just a personal prejudice) which I'd equate to the stupid foams decorating cheffy dishes these days. I'd not be sad never to hear another twittering flute piece for the rest of my life, or to forego those foams forever.

And in case that seems to have nothing to do with austerity cooking, our massive homegrown lettuce and vinaigrette course maybe cost us 15p for the oil, vinegar and mustard.

All Together Now or One at a Time

With good weather we have the opportunity to eat outside, and our favoured way of doing this is for me to prepare a mezze, that is have a variety of dishes ready to bring to the table in one lot, to avoid traipsing in and out of the kitchen with floor cleaning and atmosphere breaking consequences. Behind that is perhaps the additional motivation that this manner of eating reminds us of Greece, hot sunshine and great simple food.

Yesterday, partly because we were too hungry to wait while the roast chicken rested, we opted for a la Russe, i.e. the more conventional series of dishes: pate on toast starter, stuffed peppers as a vegetable course, then the chicken with rice and mushrooms. The day before we had gone for the mezze, with about eight different things on the table at once, albeit in relatively small quantities, though the beef stiffado (that's posh for stew with peppers, paprika and oregano) was substantial.

So I had the chance to compare. The mezze was by far the more enjoyable meal, even though the chicken with rice was really tasty. It's the exchange of plates and bowls, the sharing aspect, and perhaps the informality that comes perforce with such activity, that makes the difference to mood. Of course that preference probably depends on personality. On business travels in my old career I loved visiting mom and pop and middle range restaurants, where there was no danger of maitre D snobbery and whispered conversations. Phillip's Foote restaurant in Sydney where you not only serve yourself but cook your steak yourself is one of the few places visited in those years whose name I recall.

A la Russe as the norm here only dates from the mid-19th century. It has practical benefits with hot food that you want really hot - if soup, casserole and some steaming baked pudding are all brought out together something will go cold before it's eaten. But if the heat of dishes (something about which we British can be maniacal) is not vitally important as is the case in summer, then for me it's all together now.

One Flame Cooking Super Rapido

Last night a combination of poorly child and electrical work meant I couldn't get to the kitchen till late, or late for us. Something rapid was thus required, and thanks to the rich stock from slow cooking a flat-rib of beef this was no prob. Stock skimmed of fat was heated through in a pan to which I added a drained tin of bamboo shoots, the few remaining bits of beef cut small, and two sheets of noodles (from a pack bought ages ago in local Chinese supermarket - bargain). Flavoured with soy sauce and five-spice powder and a brutally crushed garlic clove to give it a bit of depth it was ready in five minutes.

As the stock was rich and delicious so was the soup, which in a way was posh pot-noodle. If I'd had any in the freezer I'd have added sweetcorn for more fibre, but hadn't so didn't. Don't care, it was still really good.

Lidl Wonder

The supermarket Lidl gets lampooned by comics, though I wonder when for example multi-millionnaire Russell Howard last shopped in one. It's an easy target, the focus being on value rather than looks and gimmicks so attracting the less well-off as a large part of the clientele. Food writers, however, have a lot of positives to say about the store: on my recent press trip to SW France the topic came up and they received nothing but praise, with one of the five almost in need of counselling for an addiction. On last year's jaunt to Parma (never did get the freebie ham I was promised, never mind, life is a veil of tears etc) the same thing was discussed, with similar pluses (one wine highly recommended by a guy who knew his stuff).

It is the 'continental' goods that get the thumbs up from foodies: their Parmesan is absolutely excellent and inexpensive; lardons are equally good, chunky with a smoky flavour; and Black Forest ham is superb. On a mission to get their super-cheap and high quality paper goods yesterday I bought among other things the ingredients for tonight's aubergine parmigiana, so pretty healthy, great flavours, and economic.

2 x aubergines @ 40p each (top bargain)
1 x tin of chopped toms 31p
1 tray lardons (of 2 tray pack for £1.79) so 90p
Parmesan 50g (200g pack £2.89) 72p

Added to this will be a tsp of sugar, an onion or two finely chopped, several cloves of garlic likewise, and a spoon or two of olive oil. The lot still coming in at under £3 by my reckoning. If it is preceded by pasta with chilli, garlic and olive oil (I love the way Italian household meals tend to comprise two complementary dishes like that), the three of us will feed well, with three fine contributions to our five- for which here read seven-a-day.

The method is simple for anyone who cooks at all: peel and slice the aubergines quite thinly, salt if you wish but often these days that's not needed, bitterness in the fruits now much reduced. Blanch the slices for a minute in water acidulated with either a squeeze of lemon or a glug of wine/cider vinegar. Make a sauce by frying the lardons and onion, adding garlic as they are nearly done, then stirring in chopped toms and a tiny bit of sugar, cooking for at least 15 minutes, preferably a very slow simmer for 40.

In an oven-proof dish assemble: thin layer of sauce, layer of aubergine slices, grating of Parmesan, repeated until finishing with a good layer of Parmesan. Pop in a medium/low oven say 160 centigrade for about 80 minutes, though it is flexible and could cook (well watched) at say 220 centigrade in 35- 40 minutes, though the flavours won't have developed as well.

How Much for a Memory?

Anyone who has read a few of the posts here will realize that we are not living austerely. We try to make the most of what we have, which is plenty; to reduce waste; to grow many of our own vegetables; and to eat fresh foods freshly cooked, rather than rely on cook-chill crap. I cook and shop carefully because that is the way I'm made, not because we are skint. But when we feel the need to do so we push the boat out, and Friday was one such occasion.

Last year we didn't have a single BBQ as far as I can recall. The weather for the last two weeks has been so good that we have eaten half our evening meals outside, and on Friday I thought it was time to fire up the charcoal. We don't have a good butcher nearby, though Booth's supermarket is not at all bad. I headed instead for a farm shop about five miles away, knowing they would be likely to have T-bone steaks. They did.

If there is anything that cooks better on a BBQ than T-bone I have yet to find it. It helps that the fillet is tender to start with; the bone somehow keeps the meat moist; and the fat around the sirloin caramelizes superbly. You may start with knife and fork, but unless you are totally po-faced you end with fingers, gnawing at the bone.

Behind the extravagance was the thought that this was buying a special moment for us and our son. I have a terrible feeling that our climate has changed, with a mild wet season having replaced summer as it used to be. Let's hope that is wrong, but meanwhile nothing is lost by surfing this heatwave, beyond a rather eye-watering £34 for three huge steaks. Which is still cheap for a memory.