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.