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.