strawberry and cream dreaming days

Another perfect summer's day today - one of those long, blue, strawberry and cream dreaming days when you want to lie in the grass staring up at the sky - and I did briefly, until I remembered my meringues were in the oven!

This has to be the best summer dessert of all time - Eton Mess.

 

 

sphagnum moss heaven and friture

I went up to the Col du Coucheron this morning into the forest to collect some sphagnum moss for my hanging baskets. I love sphagnum moss. The earthy smell and the spongy texture just make me want to lie down in it and go to sleep. The last time I visited my friends Mung and Neil in the Azores, we had to wade through a field knee-deep in it to reach the top of these waterfalls ...

Sphagnum moss heaven!

This year I'm planting tomatoes in my baskets. I ordered tumbler seeds on the internet which are supposed to produce "attractive clusters of fruit on trusses that trail down from all sides" and yield over 4 lbs of small, cherry-sized fruit. I line the baskets with the moss first then add a plastic liner cut out of an old compost sack, some broken-up terracotta pots for water retention and fill up with compost.

 

 

Today friture was on the menu - fresh whitebait dusted with seasoned flour and fried in corn oil until just crispy. Don't overcook them or they'll taste like dried-out, burnt chips (fries) and not taste of fish at all. Serve with lemon/mayo/chopped parsley/garlic oil and eat with your fingers.

steak pie and cockney rhyming slang

I was a vegetarian for many years a while back, and whenever the subject of what we missed from our carnivore days came up, my fellow veggies and I were unanimous that we would sell our souls for a bacon roll - or a steak pie.  A steak pie can make you do crazy things you know. My sister the journo likes to remind me of the time (in my veggie days) when I cracked and bought a steak pie supper from the chip shop on Byres Road, devouring it like a wild animal, before practically holding her at knife point until she promised not to tell anyone. More recently I've been known to drag unwilling friends round more than a dozen pubs in Edinburgh at lunchtime in search of a pie and a pint. And it featured in the weirdest reply to caution and charge I've ever heard. A client, arrested outside a chip shop for illegally possessing a firearm, told the police: "It wasn't a gun. It was a steak pie"!!!

 

 

I'm surprised I haven't attempted to make one before. I think the pastry puts me off - I'm intimidated by pastry - but when I saw a recipe for steak and kidney pudding on Delia's website (endearingly subtitled  "Kate and Sidney", if you can Adam and Eve it from the earnest Delia) I thought it was high time I tried. (Actually, Delia directed by Guy Ritchie might be a good bobble hat and scarf.)

I ended up not using Delia's recipe because it required steaming for five hours and I only had two hours before we got in a right old two and eight from hunger, so the pastry recipe - which was lemon squeezy and turned out so well I couldn't believe my mince pies - is from Good Food magazine and the filling I just cobbled together. Jurassic.

 

Recipe

aubergine fondant with tomato confit and avocado coulis

I used to wonder why celebrity chefs with award-winning restaurants would write cookery books disclosing all their secrets. The answer is, of course, that they don't. The recipes in these books are vague approximations of their Michelin starred creations and turn out looking nothing like the accompanying photos. Some ingredient or technique has been omitted - unlike Delia's "take a brown, free-range egg weighing 25.3g in your left hand" approach. (I came across one of her vinaigrette recipes the other day and she actually tells you to put the lid on the screw-top jar before shaking - lest you forget!).

Joël Robuchon is one such chef, but his ideas (using paper-thin slices of turnip instead of pasta in ravioli of langoustine) not to mention his presentation (a vegetarian Scotch egg  pierced with a miniature pipette of chorizo oil), are inspired, but I have to do a lot of experimenting to arrive at a good result. 

The method for aubergine fondant with tomato confit and avocado coulis failed to tell me when to sieve or liquidize or use white pepper instead of black (you don't want black specks spoiling the aesthetic of your silky smooth avocado coulis), but I got there in the end.

This is a stonker - yet so simple. It's the marriage of different textures, flavours and colours that's genius.

 

Recipe

apple rose tarts and the veal stock challenge

 

I was flicking through Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook a couple of weeks ago, looking for something to do with the wild boar that a hunter friend had given us, when I came across a recipe that called for demi-glace.  Demi-glace is basically veal stock that's been highly reduced then strained and reduced again with shallots and red wine, resulting in a rich, dark mother sauce with an intense caramelised favour. I often make my own chicken and fish stocks, but when it comes to veal, I've been put off by instructions like "simmer for eight to ten hours" and "skim frequently". But I found a recipe that promised I could make a decent brown veal stock in under four hours, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I ordered 3 kilos of veal bones from my butcher, wildly guessing that they would cost me no more than €5, but when I went to collect them two days later, he said: That will be one hundred euros please Madame.

One. Hundred. Euros.

There was a split second (after I picked myself up off the floor) where one half of my brain said: What the ....? while the other half was reaching for my wallet - the half that appreciates the value of veal stock, no matter what the price. But then he gave me a wink, pushed his pencil stub behind his ear with the two remaining stubby fingers on his right hand and said: Just kidding. For you,  gratuit.

Back at home, I tipped all the bones into two lightly oiled baking trays, mixed through some tomato paste and left them to roast in the oven until browned. While the bones were roasting I peeled and roughly chopped some carrots, onions and celery and roasted these in another oiled baking tray until evenly browned and caramelised. Then I threw everything into my biggest stock pot, covered with 5 litres of cold water, added some sprigs of thyme, a couple of bay leaves and a few whole black peppercorns and left to simmer for three and a half hours, skimming from time to time.

So far, on course for my simple and delicious, velvety veal stock.

But I hadn't reckoned on that most extreme of kitchen sports - straining.

The recipe instructed me to do this as many times as I could stand (up?) and I was disappointed, given my diligent skimming, to see thick legs of grease running down the sides of the empty pot after my first straining manoeuvre. I washed the pot (using industrial quantities of washing-up liquid to dissolve the fat) and repeated the process eight times, cursing the still lardy pot (which by this time was nearly running out the door) and the diminishing returns of my precious liquid. At this point I gave up and decided just to bag the damn stuff and be damned, poured what was left (precious little) into two poly bags and went to put them aside ...

... when whoosh, the bottom of one of the bags split open and the contents splattered all over the floor and down the kitchen units.

Veal stock. Don't try this at home.

Today I made these apple rose tarts which I serve to guests with panna cotta and apple purée and apple and cinnamon sorbet - my trio de pommes. You can watch how they're made on this video link. They're dead easy and look and taste fab.

crispy aromatic duck - a last request

I've read that chefs often discuss over a drink late at night what their last meal would be, as a way of finding out some essential truth about each other. Apparently the majority pick something simple and homely and reminiscent of their mothers. Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, of famed El Bulli restaurant, would go for pan-fried green asparagus with olive oil and sea salt. English chef Jamie Oliver, a big bowl of spaghetti. And acclaimed French chef Jacques Pépin, a good piece of bread and some good butter. Good bread and butter has to be pretty high up on my list too. We are fortunate to have two excellent artisan boulangeries close by (one of which makes arguably the best baguette in France) and when we bring the bread home in the morning, still warm and squishy and spread it with a bit of unsalted butter, there is something so satisfying and soothing and uncomplicated about it that it's hard to imagine anything better. 

But my "death-row meal", as my pal Mung and I call it (and for both of us it's the same), would be crispy aromatic duck with pancakes. For this I would crawl over broken glass just to lie in the shadow of someone preparing it. 

I can remember the first time I had it, in a little Chinese restaurant next to the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, the guest of two hotshot lawyers and their gangster client. I was a rookie solicitor at the time and I was wearing a navy blue wool suit and dramatic red lipstick, and I don't know whether it was the fanfare with which the whole crispy fried duck arrived and was expertly shredded at the table with two forks, or the tantalising aromatic smells of ginger and spices, or the frisson of excitement (fear?) at being in the presence of a gangsta, but I ate with audible relish and declared it the best thing to have ever passed my lips.

This version by Ken Hom calls for a long marinade and steaming but don't be put off by the long preparation process. The steps are all straightforward and can be done a day in advance. The crispy skin and moist flavoursome meat wrapped in a pancake with shredded spring onion and cucumber and a smear of Hoisin sauce is cosmic.