Christmas specials

Not surprisingly, the whole family has had a great ffoodie time over Christmas. All our puppies are keen cooks and have been poring over their new cookery books in attentive silence. Heston Blumenthal is the new interest for s-i-l-to-be Matt. We were able to produce for him two books which HB refers to: Harold McGee's Science of Food, and Tom Stobart's Cook's Encyclopedia, both of which we acquired when we were about the same age as our children are now.

Anyway, I will start with a quick mention of a rare fruit which we harvested from a tree in a carpark sometime back in October. This is the mysterious medlar, a small brown appley thing which cannot be eaten till overripe - bletted, in fact. We kept these two last ones till this week. They taste like a marvellous tangy toffee, with a soft, caramelly texture. The large black pips inside are easily distinguished in the mouth. If you have space in your garden, plant a medlar tree. They only take up about 10' of ground and are an interesting and very tasty old fruit. These are each about the size of a walnut.

Our Christmas lunch was a dish of roast partridges - Matt used a Nigel Slater recipe to cook these 'in a pear tree' - where the soft sweet pears complemented the very slightly gamey taste of the birds. It was very successful. An accompaniment was red cabbage - home grown and absolutely delicious, prepared the day before and allowed to ripen in flavour. It included white wine, juniper berries, sugar, orange and lemon juice, and salt and pepper of course. Here are some of the stages of making:

Finally I will touch on the home-made bread again. I have now made my first sourdough bread. So pleased. The sourdough starter has prospered since I have been using only spring water, rather than the tap water which of course has some chlorine in it. YouTube provides many interesting clips on sourdough, mostly American. They all indicate much larger quantities than I used. Do not be afraid to experiment... after all, this was discovered in Ancient Egypt, thousands of years ago, and no doubt they used all sorts of different quantities and arrangements. I started with two tablespoons of rye flour and an equal amount of spring water. I added the last shrivelled little grapes from the vine in the garden, to bring in any yeasts clinging to their skins. I stirred every day, leaving the pot half covered. I added more flour and water in equal amounts if it looked a bit sluggish. I found it developed a horrible-looking bubbly scum on the top (that's fine) and sometimes a beery-looking liquid between the main starter and the scummy top. Sounds and looks ghastly but the smell is very pleasant. I was trusting to my nose a lot. When it's stirred up, it looks quite fresh and nice:

The bread is made simply by scooping a ladleful of this starter into the flour, adding the salt, oil and caraway seeds as usual and stirring together. I tried kneading it too, but to be honest, with rye flour, it doesn't seem to make much difference. It's just as good tipped straight into the baking tin. The ONLY thing is, there's a huge difference if you put in the right amount of water:

and if you mistakenly put in twice as much as you should, by mistake. Oh dear!

Silly me. I was using the River Cottage Bread book, which makes twice the quantity I was using, and followed the recipe instead of remembering to halve the amount. This loaf was just horrible, never cooked, couldn't be toasted. The birds had it for part of their Christmas feasts.

Dover Sole

Dover Sole is always an expensive fish, and one of my favourites for its sweet taste and extraordinary coherent texture. I think not many people know that unlike most fish which are best eaten as fresh as possible, the Dover Sole actually improves by being kept a few days. So we grabbed the opportunity to buy some from the 'Reduced' shelf in Sainsbury's yesterday. It was approaching some sort of Sell-By date so they were getting rid of it quickly, but actually it was approaching perfection.

Simply brushed with sweetish olive oil and grilled (remember to oil the grill wires before you lay the fish on). Turn it once to get the skin nicely cooked each side. Served with tiny potatoes dug fresh from the allotment. The skin of the Sole, though a bit scratchy, is absolutely delicious when cooked to a slightly crisp finish. This is sumptuous food, fit for millionaires.

Basil

One of the rapturous pleasures of summertime is the carefree use of basil - in salads and all kinds of dishes. It's that smell! Some think it catty, but for me it's grassy, minty, Mediterranean, fresh, zingy. We usually grow a few different varieties in the little walled garden here - purple-leaved, Greek or small-leaved, and the usual soft-leaved bright green annual.

This is the kind which you can buy in supermarkets. Unlike the other herbs on supermarket shelves, which frequently have no taste AT ALL, such as mint and chives, basil always comes up trumps with its unique fragrance. It continues with its powerful gifts for weeks just growing in its little plastic pot despite the cramped planting, and the lack of nutrients once you get it home. How often have you given your poor basil plant any fertiliser? Would you even know what to give it?

Unless we just eat all of it, our potted basil plants usually succumb to a blackening of their main stems and then wither and die. Then we have to go and buy a new one. But there are two alternatives. One we saw outside a small local supermarket in Greece this summer - a basil plant growing in a large pot like a shrub - about a yard high, robust, I should think a year or more old, and very happy as a perennial. It shows that we are forcing our basil plants to remain infantile, crammed altogether into one tiny pot when they would like to spread their roots and grow up. The other idea comes from Australia, where no-one buys basil in supermarkets. Instead, they root a few cuttings and plant them out in new pots. It takes about 2 weeks in summer, about a month in the cooler months. These cuttings are ready to plant out and I hope to keep them going all through the winter, each in its own largish pot, as long as I don't let them get too cold.

Red Peppers

I mentioned that one of our purchases in Carrefour in Calais was a bag of red peppers. They are of such a superior quality to what's available here, we always bring some back with us.

They are presumably grown under glass somewhere on the continent and there never seems to be a problem of supply in large, flat-sided fruits which are economical and stunningly beautiful to work with. This time we decided to de-skin them, for use in various other dishes. It's a simple matter to cut them into even, flattish pieces and grill them till their skins char. You can then peel the skins off, once they've cooled down. It's a bit fiddly, but pleasant and satisfying work, with the strong sweetish smell of the flesh as an added bonus.

You can then make them into a salad on their own, or incorporate them into pasta dishes, pates, or even preserve them in oil. You can make up an Italian tricolore salad with mozzarella and basil, too, which looks gorgeous. I've seen these squarish pieces cut into decorative shapes to decorate formal fish dishes, and you can also thread them onto kebabs. Having been only partially cooked, they need to be eaten quickly, and in any case kept in the fridge or with a vinaigrette to cover them. Here we made up a small batch to give as a present to a visitor.

Teal

Finding an interesting meal often depends on an instant decision: you see something on a stall, or growing somewhere, and you have almost no time at all to decide whether to embrace the opportunity or to say no and walk away. In this case, Andrew saw some teal for sale at a Christmas (!) fair, and bought them for £4.50. They are wildfowl, seasonal, small (about six inches long). They were cleaned and packed, ready to go, and he said 'Yes!

They don't take long to cook - in fact, better eaten in an undercooked state, but that may not please beginners. We roasted them in butter, with some sliced shallots, and served them for lunch, one each, with a very creamy mash made of home-grown potatoes and parsnip. The only way to eat this kind of bird is using your fingers... messy, primal, delicious, stone age, memorable, local, and quite cheap.

Oysters

I had become so used to affordable 'rock' oysters that I was astonished to find real wild native oysters on sale at our local fisherman's shop. These were £1 each. Huge. Delicious too.

One had mud in it, so we discarded it.

But this is luxury, fresh, local, stone age, something to tell your grandchildren about if you can get it.

While we're about it, I must mention that we are still picking figs from the garden (24 November!). They are a bit small and a bit dry, but still very edible and sweet. The birds are going for the ones at the top of the tree every morning.

Lunch and shopping for food in Calais

Of course there are hundreds of reasons to explain it but it's still experientally baffling that things can be so different just across the Channel in France where we went for lunch yesterday. For instance, at the Early Arrivals depot near Hythe there is a depressing row of burger-bars and no-one there, and in the Folkestone terminal we wasted money and hope on disgusting, burnt, expensive 'coffee' out of plastic 'cups'.
But once through the tunnel we were in a different universe. Looking back at England, the light clear and bright. Dover's cliffs were sparkling at us, as if we could reach out a hand to link up. So near, so far.
We had lunch - the three course menu for €28 - at Au Cote d'Argent, right by the sea. Service was impeccable. The table immaculate. I ordered fruits de mer and this was the equipment they brought me. Serious stuff and I used all of it.

It was a very pretty starter too...

I went on to have a roasted saddle of cod, which was cooked in salt and came with a marvellous delicate hollandaise sauce.

I had cheese rather than pudding though they had a choice of about ten freshly made local and pretty dishes. My companions had chosen Preserved Duck, and Waterzoi of Salmon and Cod, all with lovely sauces. All perfectly cooked. Incidentally, we had two little 'bon bouches' courses added to our meal, bringing a sense of luxury and occasion. Around us we could hear English people on every side, including families, business groups, young and old. Fantastic value and the Menetou wine was worth every cent of the extra €34...
We went to do some ffoodie shopping at Carrefour in Cité Europe - it's got even bigger and was practically empty.

We came home with a fresh crab, lots of organic farm butter, cheeses, a preserved duck breast sous vide (vacuum packed to last for several weeks), a string of fat garlic, a net of shallots, a bag of huge red peppers to roast, and some tinned lentils with sausage for an instant meal in the store-cupboard.

Shaggy Ink Cap Mushrooms

These delicious mushrooms grow on waste ground, road verges etc.
We were lucky enough to find two batches a week or so ago. We checked VERY carefully in the mushroom books to see they were safe... In fact they are described as 'delicate and delicious'.

As you can see, these are pretty distinctive, starting off rather egg-like and pushing up to this pointy dome with a slightly flakey, soft appearance. Once these mushrooms get too old, which happens quite fast, they disintegrate into a blackish inky mess, quite uncookable. But if you get them in the morning, while they are still firm and fresh, they make a wonderful dish.

In this case we chopped them up, melted butter in a shallow pan, flavoured it with some finely chopped garlic cloves from the allotment, and some black pepper, then fried the ink-caps till they were soft. They were absolutely delicious. And free.

Roman Army Bread made with Rye Flour

We're going off wheat bigtime. Spelt is a useful alternative, being an ancient and unmodified form of the same grain, with much lower gluten. You can get white or wholemeal versions. I've been using the so-called Roman Army bread recipe with spelt for years, but I started mixing half-and-half spelt and rye flours, which produced a tasty, slightly solid loaf.
This time I did it using all rye flour. This has no gluten, so you are relying on the yeast to do all the work, but it still just about doubles in size, and is very quick and easy.

1 lb rye or spelt flour
1 packet dried yeast
1 large teaspoon honey
14 fluid oz warm water
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons nice oil
1 tablespoon dried caraway seeds, optional.
Melt the honey in the warm water and add the yeast.
When it's frothing (after a few moments), add to the flour and stir in all the other ingredients. Mix thoroughly for a few moments. It's a very sticky mix.
Butter the inside of a large bread tin, make sure you have greased all the surfaces very well.
Put the mix into the tin, then put it into a warm place to rise. I usually put it inside a plastic bag, puffed up well away from the surface of the dough, pegged to keep it nice and draught-free.
When it's up to about the top of the tin, put it in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees for 10 mins, then turn down to 180 for a further 25-30 mins.
It should come out of the baking tin very easily. Dry on a rack, and cut when cold.
This bread is nutty to taste, dense in texture and can be cut in very thin slices. It keeps well, can be toasted (often needs a bit longer than usual in the toaster). You can taste the honey, almost all the ingredients are local or produced with integrity and passion.
I will get a sourdough starter going, and try this again without the pump-up effects of that industrial yeast. Incidentally, I am amazed that no-one produces a dried yeast based on sour-dough. If you know of one, please let me know the details.
PS My h brought home a sourdough rye loaf from the deli in Rye, baked by the fantastic Judges Bakery in Hastings. Here's a comparison.... I love their bread. You can see in this picture how their loaf (on the left)

has taken longer to rise and the texture is more evenly aerated and lighter. This is definitely inspiring me to work with sourdough rather than yeast.

Local smelt

It seems the seas have cooled down at last, so winter fish are in. We usually buy ours from Blue at Oare. Smelt are delicate little fish, once used just for garnishing grander species on the plate, or indeed just as bait. But they are so delicious, so pretty, and so fragrant when fresh it's a shame not to snap them up.

They have a slightly greenish tinge, and quite remarkably smell of cucumbers. A common way of cooking them is to dip in milk, dredge in flour and then gently fry them.

You can go on to marinade them in the oil with added fried carrot, garlic and celery, with a light vinegar - that is called an escabeche.
You may want to clean their tummies out before you cook them, but it can be done on the plate and it is a bit fiddly but worth it. The flesh is sweet and with an elusive flavour.