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.