Wild garlic pesto does feel a cliché but when it is so delicious, why shouldn’t it be? Wild garlic, if you haven’t cooked with it yet, is a broad garlic flavoured leaf, slightly sour, and fantastic with anything creamy, cheesy and it is the best pal for the humble spud. It grows abundantly in the shade, white flours sprouting out in clusters on elegant stems, leaping towards the sunshine.

It is wild garlic season here, but near me we mainly have three cornered leek (often confused for wild garlic), which is too grassy for pesto. I tried to source some proper wild garlic, I cried out for secret sources – I WON’T TELL ANYONE, I SWEAR! – but no joy, I failed. I am deeply impatient, and I had a visceral need for the stuff. Praise the internet for intervening and saving my brain and wild garlic free larder, a very kind twitter friend sent me some in the post, and I have been playing with it ever since.

Three cornered leek, garlicky & oniony is lovely, but it ain’t wild garlic!

Wild garlic pesto is made in many ways. I chose almonds for body, 36 month aged parmesan for that perfect cheesy umami hit, a lovely fruity extra virgin olive oil with a hint of bitterness and some wild garlic. I played with the volumes, and while they suspiciously come to the same amount in grams, the volumes are different, and they work very well, with just the right garlic punch and shade of green. The oil may seem a lot, but it needs this as a minimum or it is too dry. It also helps keep it fresh, protecting it from the air. Hey, it is healthy too, particularly as unheated and retaining all of the goodness.  When using this pesto, I sometimes add more to thin it out or help it spread. Use your own judgement for yours.

As lovely as this is used in the traditional pesto sense as a dressing for pasta, it is great as a condiment elsewhere. This was lovely as a dressing for a crisp potato hash with bacon and eggs for brunch today, and beautiful on toast with some radishes.

It was one of those mornings. I was out of eggs – what, how could I let that happen?! – and out of coffee beans. I was staring glumly at a bag of Moomin coffee, a hasty Helsinki airport purchase, and wondering how nasty that might be and what I could have for breakfast. On my counter were some very brown bananas, barely a patch of yellow left. I had some buckwheat flour, but not a lot, and a bag of hazelnuts. I thought I might try a new take on banana bread.

It is worth buying bananas and letting them go really brown to make banana bread and pancakes. This is when they are at their best for cooking, rich and syrupy sweet. I never do this intentionally. I buy bananas and let them sit on the side. I feel guilty when I see them every day. I worry about waste, and then eventually they go completely brown, and they become banana bread or pancakes.

I love the flavour of buckwheat, I use it a lot. For pancakes, waffles, bread and now banana bread, the nutty flavour goes very well with the bananas here. It is gluten free as it isn’t actually a wheat, and as I used coconut oil too, this bread is dairy free also.

A quick word on coconut oil, I know it is being heralded as a new discovery and superfood, but you know, in Asia they have been using this forever, and in Asian shops it is very easy to buy, and much cheaper too (ok, so it isn’t extra virgin, but you know). Often in bottles, which in Asia wouldn’t be a problem as it being warm, the oil would be liquid. Here, I put mine in a pot of hot water so that it melts a bit and I can pour it. You can get jars too.

Once I discovered that coconut oil was a good butter substitute (I am lactose intolerant so I must take care), I started using it for fruit curds and in cakes that demanded to be dairy free. Texturally it is similar, unlike oils, and so it works very well. I should really share my lactose free life hacks with you some day. I have many! Of course you can use butter instead, if you prefer. Buttery bananas are good.

Lets crack on with the recipe, shall we? This banana bread is dense and fruity with nutty pops of hazelnut. It didn’t last a day in my flat, and I ate most of it. I am going to make more this weekend.

Enjoy – recipes now have their own page in my new website design, so that you can save and print the recipe on its own. PDF downloads are coming soon too. Both reader requests, and good onse I think! Let me know if there are any bugbears or things that you would like to see changed too!

Oh and you know what, the Moomin coffee was actually ok! :)

Buckwheat and Hazelnut Banana Bread [Gluten & Dairy Free Recipe]
makes one loaf

Ingredients

175g buckwheat flour
100g soft brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp good vanilla extract
4 very ripe bananas, mashed (mine came to 250g when peeled)
75g coconut oil (or butter if you prefer)
50g blanched hazelnuts, coarsely chopped

one loaf tin, I actually used a pie dish as I couldn’t find my loaf tin :)

Method

Preheat your oven to 180 deg C.
Mash the bananas and mix in the sugar and coconut oil. Beat with a wooden spoon until well combined.
Add buckwheat flour, a pinch of salt and vanilla and mix through until you get a well blended batter.
Stir through the hazelnuts and spread he batter into your greased tin.
Bake until a skewer comes out dry when the cake is pierced with it. Mine took 30 minutes, keep an eye on it from 25.
Lovely as is, hot, cold or toasted.
Enjoy!

Got the buckwheat bug? Here are some more buckwheat recipes to try:

Buckwheat Pancakes with Plums, Almonds and Honey

Buckwheat Waffles with Rhubarb, Apple & Candied Hazelnuts

Homemade Matcha Soba Noodles & A Recipe for Matcha Mari Soba

Love Bananas?! Me too! 

Black Sticky Rice with Banana & Coconut Cream

Banana, Coconut & Lime Bread

Chef Baka’s Banana Fritter Recipe (from Palm Island)

I never did love ketchup. I know everyone does. It is said to be the perfect combination of sweet, sour, salty and savoury, and tomatoes are one of my favourite ingredients, but I just find ketchup to be wanting, and something that is used to blanket other flavours not actually add to the dish. The flavour profile feels a bit two dimensional and dull to me, so I don’t have it in my pantry. Not out of snobbery, I love proper Asian instant noodles and all sorts of other things. I love good eating, and that comes in many forms, I am completely open when it comes to this. Continue reading

Good morning? Is it safe to come out? I have been in hiding, taking an enforced break, so that I could catch up with everything else (work, book writing, the small matter of publishing a book myself), for it was all becoming a bit overwhelming, and I was losing sight of myself. But I am back now, and I am not very good at taking breaks anyway. My break actually turned out to be an intensive whirlwind of writing, cooking and planning; plotting travels too, and lots to share here. Mainly in my pjs, but you can forgive me that. And maybe you are guilty of wanting that for yourself? 

I wanted to just indulge myself this morning, and write forever about Australia. One of my favourite places to visit, but not just me, the Economist listed four Australian cities in the Top 10 best places to live. I could easily live there, maybe even move in the morning for a bit, but London’s tentacles tend to keep me here. I love London, but you know, the weather, and everything is expensive, and I will likely forever have to rent. Sometimes, it grates. As it should. 

Australia, yes! But then I thought, maybe I should indulge & nourish you first? Set you up for a week of travel joy before I head to France, and share some more. I will share a lovely new waffle recipe, and then come back with stories, when you are comfortable and well nourished. For these are very good and healthy too. Continue reading

Pellegrino Artusi, Casa Artusi, The Art of Cooking Well in Forlimpopoli & A Recipe for Perfect Pasta Dough (Photo Illustrated)

Pellegrino Artusi is widely referred to as the father of Italian cuisine. Penning the first pan Italian cookbook, (self) published only 20 years after the unification of Italy in 1891 and in the language of the new unified Italy (which was the dialect of Florence), when he was 71.

Artusi’s cookbook, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, featured over 475 recipes gathered from Italian home cooks on his travels as a business man. 15 editions were published before he died 20 years later, with many further recipes added (finishing with 750).

Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well was predicted to be a commercial failure by Italian publishers at the time, and they refused to publish it, but it was a tremendous success. It has been in print since publication, and is in almost every Italian home. It has been translated into several languages also (it was translated to English in 1997). 200,000 copies were sold in his lifetime and many more in the 103 years since then.

(So, you know, the message being if you believe in something strongly enough, take a risk and make it happen. You never know, do you?)
Continue reading

Sweet! I want something sweet! And full of sunshine. I can no longer take the grey, grey sky that hangs so low over my head.

Friands remind me of Australia. Bright blue skys, rolling frothy seas, cliff walks, great breakfasts, and all of their wonderful cafés. We have many great Australian cafés in London now too, and the friands are popping up, but like everything, you really can’t beat making them at home. They are so simple and take a maximum of 10 minutes to prepare, and 12 – 15 minutes to bake. You will be stuffing your face with friands in no time, and your biggest problem will be trying not to eat them all.

I love a friand but I don’t need twenty of them squeaking at me from the kitchen – eat me! eat me! eat me! – 6 is too many but it is the least you can make so make sure that you can share them with someone, or some colleagues. Maybe you are not like me and have some self control, but I know that if there are 6 in the kitchen, then I can and will eat 6 of them. I will start with one, have a second, contemplate a guilty third, and from then on it is pure trauma as I try to battle their sirens call.

The recipe is simple. Based on the French financier, but using only egg white (which makes them so light), the friand is composed only of butter, sugar, egg white, flour and ground almonds with the fruit of your choice. I chose mango and lime today as there was the most gorgeous mangoes flirting with me from outside the window of my local Caribbean butcher. Divine. Lime gives it the perk it needs, and gives me that gentle hint of invisible sunshine, which I really need right now.

Friand tins can be hard to come by, use a muffin or fairy cake (cupcake) tin if you don’t have one. A financier tin will do nicely too.

Can’t eat dairy? Don’t worry! I tested a dairy free version too. It is super simple, just substitute the same amount of coconut oil for the butter, and the results are great. It would be very easy to make these gluten free too, as there is such a tiny amount of flour in there. Substitute the plain flour with the gluten free flour of your choice and off you go.

Enjoy!

Homemade gnocchi (another phone photo – my camera was stolen a few weeks ago so bear with me!)

Gnocchi were a mystery to me until I went to Italy. The ones that I had tried before (this was before I moved to London before you roar), were leaden and rubbery and I could never see what the appeal was. I mean, everyone else must be wrong, right?

Wrong. I was just eating crap processed gnocchi.

The joys of gnocchi were revealed to me for the first time at the tender age of 22 on a trip to Naples to stay with a friend, her Neapolitan boyfriend and his family. Andrea’s Dad (the Neapolitan), ex military and the most wonderful and tender home cook, cooked for us every day. 3 courses for lunch with wine, an aperitif, and then us Irish girls had to go to bed for a bit because we were not used to this at all. Lunch in Ireland before then had been one course at lunchtime with no alcohol and back to business.

Everyday, Andrea’s Dad got up early in the morning to head to the shop to get buffalo mozzarella, straight from Campania and fresh every day. The shop owner would depart at 4am to get the best and the freshest and we would have it for lunch, cut thick like steaks and weeping sweet milk. I was in food heaven. Andrea and Shelley said, this is nothing, wait until you try his pumpkin gnocchi. And I did.

The pumpkin gnocchi were tiny, tender and divine. Light as sweet puffs of air, they were so delicate and beautiful to eat. I was determined to make them at home and quickly discovered that these were tricky and took practice (my recipe for them is in Comfort & Spice).

I have since experimented lots, with potato gnocchi, sweet potato gnocchi, and all sort of others. The pumpkin and the potato are traditional and best. Such frugal offerings, 4 potatoes, a little flour and an egg will offer sustenance for days or for lots of people. My sister thought that she didn’t like gnocchi but I made these for her, and she proclaimed them better than those she had in Italy, which is very high praise (or lies). I am going for praise.

The trick here is in the technique. Imagine that you are making the finest pastry and use the lightest hands. Work quickly while the potatoes are still hot. Use floury potatoes only (I am in Ireland and used Golden Wonders which worked very well), and make sure you have a mouli or potato ricer to pass the potatoes through. A potato ricer will cost about £12 and will render the stubborn potato fluffy and soft. For best results pass it through a few times, I passed mine through 3 times, working as quickly as I could. The heat is important.

When cooking the potatoes, be careful not to push them too far. Floury potatoes are guzzlers and once soft, will take in as much water as they can, rendering them a sorry soggy mess. Cook them until you can pierce them with a fork and they still resist a touch without being too hard. Peel immediately, if you don’t have asbestos paws like me use a tea towel.

How to eat them? However you want. Make a gratin with cream and blue cheese and cover with a good melting cheese. Perfect winter fare. Or make a tomato sauce and serve simply with the gnocchi and some parmesan on top. I did this today, making a sauce which started with a sauté of very finely chopped rosemary, garlic and red chilli, then a tin of good chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar. I cooked it for a couple of hours adding water when it got too thick every now and then. The secret to good tomato sauce is good tomatoes, flavour enhancer (chilli and garlic), balance (vinegar and sugar), time, and a good sprinkle of sea salt.

They are worth the effort and don’t be dismayed if you don’t get them right the first time. Once you crack them, you will be thrilled with yourself, and so will your family and friends.

Recipe: Homemade Potato Gnocchi Continue reading

Green curry is misunderstood in many places outside of Thailand. Often perceived as a mild curry that you would give most chilli phobics (certainly in the UK and Ireland), it is often bland and dull, full of green peppers and mushrooms and to my mind, unless you are somewhere very good, not very interesting.

In Thailand, green curry is hot. Very hot and aromatic. Packed with flavour (which is the signature for most Thai food in my experience), you can choose the heat level you want if you make it yourself, so when we made this at the cooking school at the Khlong Lat Mayom floating market, we went for a compromise medium heat which was just perfect and not medium for our palates at all. Hot, so fresh and really delicious.

Seafood Thai Green Curry ingredients

Several things make this recipe flavourful: fresh homemade coconut milk and cream, fresh pounded curry paste (you must – so much better than shop bought), the wonderful herbs and aromatics, the fish pounded to a paste with fish sauce (which Thais use instead of salt on the table) and lots of chilli.

It won’t be possible to replicate this entirely outside of Thailand but I will suggest where you can make substitutions as you go. As long as you make the paste from scratch – this is key – you will have a great dish. Everything else is a bonus.

Enjoy – it is a fantastic curry. I have adapted this recipe, but it comes from Siri, so thank you, Siri!

Note: if I don’t suggest an alternative, the ingredient is relatively easy to source via Asian supermarkets – some are online too.

Recipe: Siri’s Thai Seafood Green Curry  Continue reading

As with most children, I was a fan of cake. All kinds of cake, except coffee cake. That, to me, was a filthy abomination. I mean WHY would anyone put coffee in a cake, especially for children? I couldn’t understand it. Cake was a place for jam, cream, ice cream, lemon curd, chocolate, lots of things, but definitely not for coffee. (I get it now before you try to persuade me I should try it :)

When I heard that we would be making banana bread in school, I thought that we were progressing down a similar path. We had cooked mackerel, and I was starting to become suspicious that perhaps Home Economics would not be fun after all. Despite growing up almost on the Atlantic shore, as a child I hated fish. Or, at least I thought I did. So, mackerel, then banana bread, I was losing faith.

What does banana bread even mean anyway? It isn’t really a bread, there is no yeast or rising process, but then there isn’t for soda bread either. It is made with baking powder, sugar, eggs, bananas, flour. Doesn’t that sound like a cake? But it really isn’t one is it? It can be light or heavy, depending on personal preference, but it is sweet and fruity. I was converted immediately. For me, banana bread is a delicious confusion, and I think I have improved it a step here with my twist.

Stepping back a little bit again – I should explain that I have been travelling for over 24 hours and am writing my mini banana bread missive from Kyoto so forgive me when I inevitably ramble, as I am – banana bread was brought back to the forefront of my consciousness when I visited Vancouver. It was everywhere, and in many variations. They love it.

Then more recently, in the Caribbean, I started thinking about the versatility of banana as an ingredient, and I have quite a few new recipes for you now that I developed last week, although I will spread them out over the next few months for I have no desire for this to become a banana blog, that would be a different thing altogether. I could call it bananas for bananas or something similar, but I won’t.

Back to my banana bread. I love coconut as an ingredient too. Occasionally fresh when I have the patience, and maybe a hammer, more often I use coconut milk or coconut cream, and occasionally dessicated coconut. Coconut oil is a great cooking oil which I use a lot too, and it is a decent substitute for butter in baking when you are cooking for somebody that can’t eat it. I have a curd recipe which includes it, I really must blog it here. Lime goes especially well with it, as does banana. It was a no brainer really.

I used a punchy little wrinkly lime from my local Indian shop. It had such sweet strong perfume, if you are in London, seek them out. If you can’t get them, don’t worry, a normal lime will do, just be sure to get a good one, as you don’t want waxed rind in your lovely bread. Dessicated coconut gives extra coconut flavour and texture and also lightens the crumb.

I hope you like it as much as I do. It is nice and light and zingy. Dairy free too!

Banana, Coconut & Lime Bread

Recipe: Banana, Coconut & Lime Bread

Ingredients

400g ripe bananas (over ripe work very well too)
juice and zest of 1 lime
160ml coconut cream (the small tins not the solid block, alternatively use the thickest part of a tin of coconut milk that has been allowed to separate by not agitating it)
100g dessicated coconut
200g flour
3 tsp baking powder
175g light brown sugar
generous pinch of sea salt
3 large eggs

loaf tin or cake tin (I used an 8 inch sandwich tin), buttered (or oiled)

Method

Preheat the oven to 170 deg C.
Whisk the eggs and sugar until they increase in volume and get a little creamier and thicker.
Sift the flour and baking powder. Mash the banana and mix with the flour, baking powder, and all remaining ingredients.
Pour into your prepared tin and bake until a skewer or knife comes out dry when pierced through. This will depend on whether you bake a shallow or deep cake but will take 55 – 60 minutes.

I have a new house! You may have heard me mention. Once, maybe twice, maybe more? I’ve moved in now and I love it, with it’s big kitchen, range cooker, bay windows looking out onto a little garden, full of yellow and pink flowers, bathed in swathes of light. I’ve yet to unpack but that didn’t stop us having friends around for a big Easter lunch.

The ground floor with the kitchen and living areas was perfectly respectable, but upstairs behind every door and one in particular (mine!) lay bags and boxes, the house’s unconscious, repressed memories of former houses and bad wardrobe decisions, pots and pans, condiments and kitchen oddities purchased for celebrating obscure festivals, I do love randomness in my life! So, we kept everyone busy downstairs, collaboratively producing a fine Easter lunch, interrupted occasionally by an Easter Egg hunt or a munch on some chocolate or a painted duck egg.

So, what did we do? We kept with tradition and had a succulent roast leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary with lots of crisp roast potatoes served with roast vegetables and a fresh bright tomato salad prepared by my flatmate and friends. I worked with my cooking partner, 3 year old Lola, making chocolate nests for mini eggs, heart shaped chocolate things with leftovers and dessert, a rhubarb coulis with raspberries and rosewater, intended for a fool, but with more fruit than cream it resulted in a half fool or a foolish. We also had some delicious Russian Easter Cake baked my a Russian friend. It was lovely and not unlike panettone.

The day before we had made lots of painted duck eggs, fun to make and delicious to eat, although, I can confirm that it’s easier to eat many chocolate eggs, duck eggs in swift multiples can move quickly from delicious to tiresome, even if they are the prettiest ones you’ve ever seen.

I hope you had a lovely Easter! It felt so close to Christmas for me, especially as I site here typing and eating chocolate and mini egg nests for breakfast. I need a purge or a detox. Or someone to take me away for the kitchen and the temptation, save me from myself!

Butternut Squash, Chickpea and Spinach Curry

This has been a great couple of weeks for festivities. Diwali, Halloween, Day of the Dead last week, and Guy Fawkes coming up. It certainly takes the bite out of the impending Winter!

I always like to celebrate anything like this with food if I can, hey, I don’t need an excuse I know, even if it’s just for me, or, better again with friends. Last week was busy but I did sneak in a dish that would in some way cover Diwali and Halloween, well, kind of.

Diwali being a Hindu festival is all about vegetarian food, particularly curry, snacks and sweets. As for Halloween, well, Halloween is about spooks and scary things, but also pumpkins, so I thought, why not make a veggie curry with pumpkin in? Or, in this case, butternut squash.

I had an ulterior motive, I felt I needed a few veggie days, or veggie meals at least. I usually have quite a balanced diet but lately I’ve been buying lunch out alot more than usual, and as I work so near to delicious Brindisa, my diet has been leaning heavily on the meat side. So, beans, veg, tomato and coconut seemed like a good alternative to a chorizo stew!

It’s very easy and very light. I made this on a weekday evening and it was absolutely manageable. The measurements are loose as always, feel free to experiment, it’s more about the spices and the flavours in the sauce. I used a small butternut squash about 6-8 inches high. The spice blend is very basic. I just used what I had in my cupboard. It works, though!

This will serve 4. I served it with steamed basmati rice. It keeps well, indeed like most tomato based dishes, tastes better the next day. Continue reading