The View from the Spaghetti Factory

… being, of course, Gaggia Acquisition Syndrome! And thereby hangs a quick public service announcement. The Croydon branch of House of Fraser are doing a special offer on the appropriately named Gaggia Classic, bundling it with an accessory pack for £199, which is an amazing deal. It’s very rare that you see a Classic in the UK for less than £250.

To be honest, I wouldn’t normally have gone for the accessory pack. We really don’t need another six espresso cups and saucers, we could have picked up a milk jug and chocolate shaker anywhere, and I’m sure the info on the Barista Training CD-ROM is pretty standard stuff. However, House of Fraser’s price for the Classic without the accessory pack? £299!

No idea if this offer applies to other branches or John Lewis, but if you’re after a decent coffee machine, I advise you to hurry…

Today, I ate a Wispa for the first time in… ooh, years. I had no idea that the original incarnation had been around until 2003, though. I always associate Wispas with the 80s and 90s, and thereby lies a slight Proust effect for me. Eating a Wispa will always remind me of university days; the freebies at Freshers Fair and everyone saving their wrappers towards the mugs that appeared in every campus kitchen.

One particular Wispa moment stands out in my memory. Emerging, shattered, from an all-night essay panic into a glistening summer morning, I went to the UEA campus supermarket in search of a sugary breakfast. A Wispa and a can of Coke seemed like the perfect quick fix for my sleep-deprived brain.

I started to question my rash choice only seconds after returning to my room, as the gaseous propulsion of the latter product ejected the former neatly into my sink.

Continuing a train of thought from the previous Dinnerlog post, it occurs to me that I don’t really know all that much about cooking off by heart. All those groovy, glossy celebrity cookbooks provide instant gratification without any deeper understanding of why the ingredients fit together… your only investment of time is the trip to the supermarket and the actual preparation. Yep, and I’m guilty on that count.

But still, as I mentioned before, I like the idea of knowing recipes off by heart, and then, through familiarity, having the confidence to play around with them. I also quite like the idea of having at least one instant solution for each major ingredient… sometimes you happen to be wandering through Croydon market just before 4pm and a wily trader persuades you to take that entire *box* of something-or-other off his hands for a quid or two, and then you get it home and think “so what the hell do we make with this?”… that’s what I’m talking about.

We got some fennel bulbs last week. I really love fennel, but I was bored of stewing it in stock or vermouth or eating it raw in a salad. I tried a recipe in our Anna del Conte book where you slice it, sauté it in butter, stew it in milk and then stir in cream and parmesan… very nice, but the milk always curdled and burned slightly, affecting both taste and texture.

As an experiment, I tried a little variation. Quarter and thinly slice the fennel bulbs and sauté in butter for a few minutes. Add just enough stock to cover and simmer until soft. Mash partially, stir in a dollop of creme fraiche and bloody hell, it works! Far less sickly than the cream/parmesan version, although I could imagine parmesan working in this version, too.

Sometimes, things I like coincide with other things I like. A coincidence of pleasantness.

I like eating and I like summer weather, so it was nice to end Sunday with the first al fresco dinner of the year, and Tuscan-style broad beans and ham seemed an appropriately sunny choice for the fine weather. Everyone should know how to make this… it’s one of those “ultimate comfort foods” that seem to account for most of the recipes I’ve committed to memory.

All you do is chop an onion and fry it slowly in olive oil with a handful of chopped parsley and the ham, which would be about 400g of prosciutto crudo if you’re doing it properly. Fry that together until the onions are squidgy and then add about 150ml of white wine and a couple of kilos (pre-shelled weight) of broad beans. Salt and pepper, cover and cook 20 mins and you’re done.

Familiarity with an old favourite means you can easily make adjustments to suit your needs. I find parsley a bit too bland unless it’s in huge quantities, so we used a handful of sage from the garden… it seems to add a flavour that seems more typically “Tuscan” to me. And I didn’t fancy blowing quite so much money on Parma ham, so we got one of those mini gammon joints from M&S and pre-roasted it (which would be prosciutto cotto, presumably). Damn good, anyway… especially when accompanied with some Jersey Royals coated in buttery sorrel mush and the rest of the wine.

Last week ended triumphantly for “Dr” Gillian McKeith “PhD”, but worryingly for those of us with the capacity for rational thought. The latest PLR statistics for public library borrowing in the UK show the Poo Lady’s books in first and third position in the non-fiction chart.

But what a difference a weekend makes!

Ben Goldacre’s hard work, both in the Guardian and on his own Bad Science blog, has finally paid off. After a tip-off by one of Dr Goldacre’s regular readers, the Advertising Standards Authority has now ruled that McKeith’s use of the title “Dr” is “likely to mislead”, breaching two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: “substantiation” and “truthfulness”.

Of course, she’s still perfectly entitled to claim that a single seed contains enough energy to create a full-size plant, or that chlorophyll can create beneficial oxygen in the gut, and no doubt plenty of people will still buy her books, watch her TV shows and believe every dangerous word she says. But it’s a step in the right direction…

Haven’t done this for a while…

Sometime last year I was at a family get-together sort of thing in Warwickshire. As it was an area none of us knew (it was chosen as a good geographical centre) I took it upon myself to hunt out a good restaurant for the evening. I found The Crabmill and we were rewarded with some splendid nosh.

I was particularly impressed with my main course, a butternut squash risotto topped with a slab of cod. Because of overfishing and pollution in the North Sea, I tend to avoid cod (especially in fish & chip shops, where it tastes like slightly fishy water) but this particular fish was clearly of a finer pedigree. What really grabbed my attention, though, was the risotto. Risotto is one of those satisfyingly easy-to-make comfort foods, but the Crabmill’s chef had done a damn fine job. I resolved to learn to make this particular variety of the classic Italian ricey stodge.

Time passed, and it was only when we found ourselves in possession of a perky butternut squash a couple of weeks ago that I remembered my plan. A search of the BBC’s recipe archive turned up a pretty close match. It’s mostly yer standard risotto recipe, which isn’t difficult, but I hadn’t thought of the pine nuts or sage. I also used one glass of Noilly Prat instead of the two glasses of wine… I like to use vermouth in risotto, for the slightly “herby” flavour it adds.

Topped with a slab of swordfish from the local fishmongers and… result! Possibly not quite as good as my memory of the one at the Crabmill, but some fine-tuning should sort that out.

So anyway… the reason I bought that “French Kitchen” book mentioned in the previous Dinnerlog is down to a long-standing tradition here (”here” in the offline sense, I mean). Way back when we were either impoverished students or impoverished just-graduates, I was wondering what we should do for Nicola’s birthday. Going out to a restaurant was out of the question, unless we went to one of our usual cheapo student haunts, which wouldn’t be very special. “No problem”, I said, “I’ll cook you a meal”.

My initial intention was just to make something *nice*, but I was surprised at the range of international cookery books on offer at (pre-fire) Norwich library. Concentrating on one country, I figured, would be fun, so I grabbed a particularly promising book on Mexican cuisine and headed, pen and notebook in hand, for some of the Fine City’s most obscure delicatessens. To cut a long story short, we feasted like Tory peers that evening and learned a lot about Mexican (not Tex-Mex) food in the process. Oh, and started a bi-annual tradition that still continues to this day, part of the fun lying in the birthday celebrant’s task of trying to guess where the food/drink is from.

This year wasn’t the first time we’d done France; we sampled the hearty northern flavours a few years ago. However, browsing the aforementioned book, I noticed quite a few recipes from the rural southern heartland around the Auvergne region and decided to explore that area. Here’s one…

Soupe aux Cerises (Cherry Soup? Not exactly!)

First of all, put 500g of pitted black cherries in a pan with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of kirsch. Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 mins. That done, slice a baguette thickly (this amount of cherries should do about 8 slices) and fry in butter until golden. Dust the bread with sugar and ground cinnamon and put at the bottom of a serving dish. Remove the cherries from their juice and pile over the bread. Now, blend half a tablespoon of flour with a little water and whisk this into the cherry juice. Bring this gently to the boil and thicken slightly before pouring it over the cherries and bread. Eat like you’ve never eaten before.

I like cookery books. Even the modern kind of glossy coffee-table lifestyle cookery books, written by trendy TV chefs and filled with luscious colour photographs of artfully arranged vegetables of the sort that only middle-class people in the South East have ever heard of. Those things are probably a major factor in the superficial, celeb-crazed dumbing down of our society, but meh… I like them.

So anyway, I’ve been really impressed by one I discovered just recently… The French Kitchen by novelist (not that I’d heard of her in that capacity) Joanne Harris. It has all the makings of a “lifestyle accessory for the terminally smug” cookery book, with sumptuous photos of quaint French markets and wily old Breton fishermen. But, but, but… it’s got some really cracking recipes, mostly derived from the author’s memories of her (French) grandmother’s cooking. Here’s my paraphrasing of one we made this evening…

Trout with Fennel (Truite au Fenouil)

Find a decent fishmonger and get yourself one gutted and cleaned (and beheaded, if you’re squeamish) trout per person. Lay them on an oiled baking tray and put to one side, while switching the oven on at Gas 4. Finely slice some fennel bulbs (in good supply at the moment), one small one per person, and grate about 70g of Parmesan (assuming two people).

Now, lay half of the sliced fennel in a large casserole dish, sprinkle half of the Parmesan over it and lay the rest of the fennel on top. Season each layer. Pour over a small glass of white wine and the equivalent amount of double cream (again assuming two people). Sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan on top and cover with foil or a tight lid. Cook in the oven for 50 mins altogether, but remove the lid/foil after 20 mins and put the trout in as well after 30 mins.

(Chronology dispensed with for the time being - I’ve been a bit busy to keep track)

I find my culinary urges change quite markedly as the seasons move from summer into winter and vice versa. With even the slightest hint of bright spring evenings, I’m all for zesty Thai salads and plenty of challenging flavours. At this time of year, though, it’s all about rib-sticking comfort foods and this is where (among other things) a year-long experience of Swedish food comes in handy as a reference point. Like, I imagine, many people of my age, I left home and started fending for myself around the time British supermarkets started to become more cosmopolitan, meaning that my generation was probably the first in a long time to conceive of meals being based around something other than the humble potato. We now have easy access to pasta, rice, noodles, dhal, bulgar wheat, cous-cous and even quinoa… all able to provide a solid, earthy basis for a meal. However, the Swedes can teach us a lot about the comfort food qualities of the potato. You just have to be prepared to throw cardio-vascular caution to the wind, forget your boiled/mashed/baked/roast preconceptions and be liberal with the cow products.

Swedish Comfort Dinner 1

Pytt i panna

Assuming you’ve recently eaten roast pork (any slab of pig meat should do it; even lamb or beef at a push) and have enough left for another meal, take it out of the fridge and cut into 1cm cubes, fat and all. Then grab some spuds. Anything, really, as long as they’re not new potatoes. For a good two-person feed with just enough leftovers for most of tomorrow’s dinner, a kilo should do it. Peel and cut into 1cm cubes. Do the same with two onions. Now heat a large knob of butter and a couple of glugs of oil in a big pan… fry the potato, stirring. I also throw in a teaspoonful of caraway seeds [later edit: a tablespoonful of dill seeds also works!] because I love them with potato (some Swedes may well do the same, but I don’t know for sure).

When the potato is golden, remove it with a slotted spoon (leaving as much oil in the pan as possible) and replace with the onion and meat. When the onion is soft and translucent, return the potato to the pan and heat the whole lot thoroughly. To share my blissful memories of eating this at the school I attended, serve topped with a fried egg and with pickled beetroot on the side.

Swedish Comfort Dinner 2

Jansson’s Frestelse

Or “Johnson’s Temptation”, in translation. I’d go for a bit less potato here, otherwise it overpowers the other ingredients… go for around 700-800g. This one’s a bit more labour intensive; you need to peel and cut the potatoes into little matchsticks about 0.5cm thick and as long as is convenient (mine usually end up being about 3-4cm long). Chop an onion and open a can of anchovy fillets and a small carton of single cream.

Heat a knob of butter and a slug of oil, then fry the potato matchsticks and onion until the potatoes lose their crispness. Add the cream, along with the same amount of milk (using the handy empty cream carton) and a generous grinding of black pepper. Cook the whole lot on a gentle heat for 5-10 mins. Now for the closest this blog entry is going to get to poncy culinary artistry… put half of the potato slop into a large casserole dish, arrange the anchovies evenly over the top, and layer the rest of the potato on top of that. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the whole thing, like the first snow of an idyllic Swedish winter, and bake in the oven (gas 4 or 5) for about 30 mins. Serve with cold ham and pickles.

Oh, and join a gym. You’ll thank me for it in the long run.

Monday

Morrisons “finest” filled pasta
“What’s in the fridge” sauce

Typical midweek food. The pasta was on special offer and quite nice, although the fillings (one Beef & Chianti, the other Chicken & Lemon) had something of a “squirted from a big machine” texture to them. The sauce was just a typical hacked together thing based on the Salsa di Pomodoro from Saturday except we added chopped peppers at the frying stage. I’m really into the red wine vinegar at the moment… usually, my default “easy pasta sauce” involves adding some vermouth just after frying onions/garlic/etc.

Tuesday

Erm… beer mostly

Well, not just beer, but we didn’t have a full evening meal as such. We met a couple of friends at the truly wonderful Royal Oak in Southwark and punctuated the excellent Harveys beer with a couple of bowls of chips. I’d already grabbed leftovers from the previous couple of days for lunch, so didn’t exactly starve…

Wednesday

Pad Thai

Although I’m a big fan of the sauce-heavy Thai curries, this stir-fried noodle dish is a particular favourite. I frequently eat it at Thai restaurants, despite it being quite an unadventurous choice, seeing as it seems to be to them what fish & chips or chicken tikka masala are to us. However, it’s the ultimate comfort food as far as I’m concerned.

It’s a little more awkward to make at home than the creamy curries, but the results (using a recipe not dissimilar to this one) were quite encouraging. I’m not sure I’d use the Sharwoods rice noodles again… they seem to go soft and gooey far too quickly. Might try standard wheat noodles next time; I’ve certainly seen those used in plenty of thai restaurants. I’ve no idea what the correct transliteration from the original Thai is, either… I’ve seen Pad Thai, Phad Thai, Paht Thai and probably a few others.