Dal, that gorgeous spiced lentil soup, is one of those dishes that I revert to on a cold day outside. When I want something full flavoured that requires little attention, something that I can make a big batch of, and eat for the next couple of days, treasuring every bowl. It is also one of the most frugal bowls of food that you can eat. Just pulses, water and spice and some garlic. In season, I add chopped tomato too. If I have it in the fridge, I will add some fresh coriander. Curry leaves are wonderful with dal too, fried a little with the spices. Dal is one of the dishes that I make when I don’t have the time or the inclination to get to the shop, so I work with what I have. To make a meal of it, I add a boiled egg on top, better still gorgeous perky quails eggs, boiled until just set with the yolks still soft.

I use moong dal for this, occasionally chana dal. I prefer moong dal as it is mushier when cooked, whereas chana dal tends to hold its shape. A combination of the two works well too. This time I added some pumpkin, well a kabocha squash to be precise. I love the rich deeply flavoured orange flesh, and the gentle creamy texture it acquires when cooked through. Some coconut milk gives it a layer of richness and mellows it out.

Recipe: Pumpkin & Coconut Tadka Dal

Ingredients

makes enough for 3-4 bowls

200g moong dal
200g chopped peeled pumpkin
1 tsp turmeric
200ml coconut milk
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp brown mustard seed
2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 chilli, finely chopped (and extra milder ones for decoration if you like, as I did)
light flavourless oil like groundnut or sunflower, coconut oil works too

Method

Cover the dal and pumpkin with water in a sauce pan, ensuring that the water covers the dal to an inch higher than it. Add the turmeric and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and allow the dal to simmer gently. It will take about 20 – 25 minutes to cook. Top up with water if you need to, a little at a time.

About 10 minutes in, toast the cumin seeds in a dry hot pan for about a minute. Grind in a pestle and mortar or spice grinder.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in the frying pan and add the garlic and chilli for a minute. Then add the ground cumin and mustard seeds and fry for a couple of minutes. Turn the heat off.

When the dal is almost tender, add the coconut milk and stir through. Allow to cook further. When the dal is tender it is ready. Season to taste with salt and black pepper. The black pepper is important as it enhances the absorption of curcumin in turmeric, which is a natural powerful anti-inflammatory agent and anti-oxidant. It tastes good too.

Serve the dal with a teaspoon of the spices and garlic (and some extra chilli too if you like, fry it first). Garnish with whatever else you fancy as per the blurb at the top.

Enjoy!

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)

Corn with Lime & Chilli Butter and Feta

This morning something joyful, simple and full of flavour. I was thinking about corn, how wonderful it is and quick, and remembering how I had had corn in some Mexican restaurants. With a fresh tangy crumbled cheese on top, and of course, a kick.

I am working on a whole slew of BBQ recipes this week, and some sides are warranted, so let us start here. Working with what we have, instead of a Mexican cotija cheese, I use feta. Feta, a Greek cheese, is protected, and can only be called feta if it is the traditional cheese produced in specific areas of Greece from sheep’s milk, or sheep and goat’s. You, of course, know it, and it is widely available in supermarkets. The real stuff is aged for a minimum of 3 months resulting in a salty firm & crumbly cheese with a bit of a tang. Imitators pale by comparison and sometimes taste odd, but there are some fantastic British & Irish sheep’s cheese you can use too. Like Irish Knockalara (from my home county of Waterford).

Corn, well that is simple enough. Buy whole corn that is fresh and still luscious and moist, not dry. Preferably with the green husks still on as they keep it nice and fresh. Good juicy limes and a fresh bouncy chilli. As hot as you like, I went for a fresh jalapeno. Continue reading

Sunshine Rice & Eggs

Sunshine rice! Cheesy, isn’t it? But why is cheesy a bad thing when cheese is just so good? Shall we try and reclaim that? Like I was doing with Like a Girl when I decided to title this blog Eat Like a Girl . Which is now the subject of a viral advertising campaign, I notice, which is a very good thing. As Like a Girl is, and it is something to be proud of. Now, lets work on cheesy. Or, maybe we have other things to do? Like finish books and things. (Yes, nearly there with Project: BACON, and more on that soon!).

I looked at my breakfast this morning and thought, oh, that looks like a gorgeous perky sun, within another one peeking cheerfully from inside of it. And so, a sunshine breakfast was declared, and devoured.

The rice was leftover from my dinner the night before (pan fried mackerel with habanero, curry leaf & lime butter sat on top of it, that recipe soon, once I have tested it again). It is fairly speedy to put together though, and you should cheer your breakfast table with it so I will share the rice recipe here too.

I like to use short grain brown rice which is tense, fat and nutty, but really any rice would do here, so go with whatever you have in the cupboard. Turmeric gives it the underlying golden hue. I use turmeric because it is delicious (in small amounts though, and especially when using fresh turmeric), but also because it is so healthy. With anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties, I hope that turmeric can somehow offset some of the more unsavoury habits of mine. Sweetcorn gives it further acute pops of yellow, spinach, finely shredded and added just as you turn the heat off, freshness and texture. I freshened it up by frying it in some extra virgin olive oil with some lovely diced ripe tomato and chilli. When hot and toasty, I cleared some holes, and fried some eggs in each. One egg per person is enough for me, but if you need more, go for it.

Enjoy! And do tell me what you have for sunshine breakfasts? :) Continue reading

Rigatoni with Bolognese Style Ragu & Crispy Kale

Can you handle another ragu recipe? So close to the last? I ate this ragu several days in a row last week, which is normally something that I am loathe to do, but this was so delicious and utterly more-ish, that I couldn’t resist it. It has a little twist too. Normally ragu is served with parmesan, but I chose something else, also intense, oven crisped kale with paprika and sea salt, for a wonderful textural and flavour contrast. It is something that I do quite often, I have blogged about it before too.

One of the things that I love about Italy is their adherence to tradition. They love their recipe rules and stick stringently to them. Very much so. Do not break the rules! They eat so well as a result. Who wouldn’t want to be Italian?

One of the good things about not being Italian is that I can come home and absorb all of the different influences and stories and concoct something new. I can make something inspired by tradition, but not wedded to it. Italians, I know you are shrieking, but without this attitude my beloved Spaghetti Corkese would never have been born. I think you might even like it! Nor would today’s dinner, with the wrong pasta shape and a Bolognese inspired ragu that was a little too wet to be Bolognese, and that I finished with cream before topping with crispy kale.  I know, cream. Cream! But you know, delicious.

The rigatoni was the wrong pasta shape but it was a lovely one from Gragnano that I bought in Italy (the best dried pasta comes from there). It was there, and it was the perfect size tube for the ragu to snuggle and hide in. The cream was my Irish and indulgent take on finishing a ragu with milk. Just a lick of cream gives each portion a decadent texture and roundness, and when cooked in, you may not even know it is there. Now that I have done it, I am fairly sure that one of my favourite Emilia Romagna trattoria ragus was finished like this.

The recipe is based on the ragu that I made with Walter in Bologna. Walter is from Lazio and we cooked a ragu based on the one that his father taught him, but adapted so that it was Bologna style. I made it a little Irish, I think, but it is still more authentic than most you will get outside Italy.

Try it. Enjoy it. Make lots and eat it all week. And make lots of the crispy kale, as you won’t be able to stop eating it. Unless you don’t like kale, of course!

As the Italian say, cook with love and passion. Which I translate as: enjoy it, give it time and patience, and be tender. Continue reading

Piri piri is the name of a chilli, and also a sauce containing it. Piri piri chicken (also called peri peri) is a terrific dish made using the sauce, and, er, a chicken, found in Portugal and Southern Africa, and increasingly everywhere else, thanks to Nando’s. I am not comfortable eating the Nando’s one though, as the chickens are barn reared and I think they could do better. I mean, why not? They are in a perfect position to raise standards rather than do the minimum to meet them.

I have had piri piri in many places. Portugal (the Portuguese brought the chillis back from Africa, and also brought them to Goa), where the piri piri tends to be a chilli oil which is liberally brushed on a rotisserie chicken. I have had piri piri in South Africa too, where the sauce tends to be thick and fruity, with spice as well as chilli heat. I have also had piri piri from Mozambique, not in Mozambique but in Maltby St in London, where Grant Hawthorne aka African Volcano makes immense piri piri pork sandwiches and sells the marinade, sauce and rub too (details on African Volcano stockists on his website too).

I love a dish with a mish mash history just as this, it is fun to trace it and work on it, until you get the one that is perfect for you.  Whenever I taste something that I really love, I want to know how it works. How can I make it at home? How can you make it at home? We don’t live in Africa, so how can we make it with the ingredients that we have available to us? Lots of questions. I have had piri piri on the brain.

Continue reading

I have been in Toronto for almost a week and I have learned a few things. Happily this trip coincided with fiddlehead season, again, so that was a treat. And I now see that everyone in Toronto is even more obsessed with kale than they were before. Green kale, purple kale, cavolo nero, baby kale for salads and kale juices (offensive, sorry, I tried and it was like drinking bile. Might work with some apple?). There are kale cookbooks, the Indian restaurant I am sitting at right now in Toronto airport has a kale salad but with an Indian twist. It is endless, and that is good, infernal stomach rotting juice aside, for kale, generally, is a very good thing. Especially when crispy.

(Mmmmm, crispy!* Now there is a word that polarises as much as kale. But I like crispy, even if incorrect and so I shall keep using it).

So, you all know I love bacon. I mean who doesn’t, at least who doesn’t that doesn’t have religious objections to it? I have never heard of anyone trying bacon and declaring it a terrible thing. When you hear stories about bacon, it is almost always that people ate it when they shouldn’t, just because they could no longer resist. And how could they? So, when concocting recipes for my recent sandwich feature, I thought a BLT will have to be in there, but what if it was with a twist, that made it even better? And so the BCKT was born. That being the Bacon, Crispy Kale & Tomato Sandwich. OH YES.

Continue reading

Chicken soup for what ails you – but not as you know it! [Recipe]

So, I told you all about my curry eggs cold smasher the other day. Yes, it is a cracker, but it didn’t smash my cold quite as quickly as I wanted to. So, there was nothing for it, I had to call in the reserves: chicken soup, with a twist.

There is scientific evidence that supports the notion that chicken soup is in fact Jewish pencillin (as it has always been said to be). It tastes great too and is not too traumatic a recipe for when you are poorly, as long as you have a chicken in the house. I didn’t but a friend kindly brought one round for me and so I was set. Continue reading

Eggs poached in homemade curry – perfect for a cold

Singapore was great. My first visit, I was greeted by a vibrant and very friendly city that is obsessed with food. I ate what I could, but never enough. There are so many different dishes to try. I am heading back quite soon on a stopover to complete my list. Which is lost, but more on that in a minute.

As great (and brief) as the trip was, it didn’t end well. My phone, with so many of my photos, all my notes and recorded interviews was MIA. I left without it and have had no luck tracking it down. When I got home my flatmate asked if I had a cold and I realised, fark, I do! I had put it down to hay fever the previous days. I don’t like to moan – especially on here – but after a night of absolutely no sleep and a stonking head cold, with a missing phone, and falling behind with work as I can’t think straight, I feel like crap.

But, there is a solution. There always is. Cosy pjs and a cupboard raid rendered a lunch that I could actually taste, and one that is healthy too. My first thought was turmeric, I need to have it, it is so good for many things, being anti-inflammatory and great for all things intestinal like stomach pain and bloating. It is particularly good for colds too and one of the annoying things about a cold is not being able to taste anything, so I decided that a good, simple and bolshy homemade curry might sort me out. Or ease the torture for fifteen minutes, at least. My second thought was eggs. Eggs are brilliantly comforting and speedy too. They are also terrific in a curry.  Continue reading

Hot Wings with Blue Cheese Sauce (Recipe)

Some days demand chicken wings. Today is one. The best bit of the chicken for snacking on, the skin to flesh ratio being somewhere in the region of can-solve-most-of-lifes-problems, chicken wings are also very reasonable. Even in my local posh butcher, a kilo of lovely free range wings costs just over £5.

Everyone should have a recipe for hot wings in their repertoire. So easy and so gorgeous, spiked hot crisp wings dipped into a soothing cool blue cheese dip is all that you have ever wanted after a bad day. Or any day. Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce is what makes the wings sing, you could make your own, and it is the kind of thing that I often do, but in this case, truly, Frank’s have done all the work and made a great sauce. So, like every other hot wing fanatic on the planet, I use that.

They take little work. I roast the wings until the skin is just crisp, prepare the hot sauce which takes, oh, 2 minutes, then douse the wings in the sauce before returning to the oven for a little bit. Then I prepare the dip, which again is very complicated, ridiculously easy, a mish mash of strong blue cheese with natural yogurt, blended until they yield, and embrace each other.

Easy, and perfect for January blues, right? Enjoy.

Recipe: Hot Wings with Blue Cheese Sauce Continue reading

Homemade Raised Waffles

So hopefully you have all got your waffle irons right now, and are ready for some waffle slinging action. I have another waffle recipe and it is a cracker.

The US and Europe have distinct culinary influences. I never heard of Julia Child until I was obsessed with cookbooks, well into adulthood, and foraging for inspiration amongst culinary bookshelves. I grew up with Darina Allen, and later other grand dames like Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey and Elizabeth David. In the US, Julia Child was the first port of culinary call for most, and similarly their different cultural influences point to different everyday recipes, which brings me neatly to the raised waffle, or waffle at all, in fact.  Continue reading

Remember , remember the Mo of November. Moustaches aren’t just for hipsters, you know.

Movember has swung round again, and while I can’t grow a moustache to support them – quiet down the back! – I did get involved in the #mofoodfight, a fun video cook off to generate interest in and awareness of Movember, and their new book Cook Like a Man: The Ultimate Cookbook for the Modern Gentleman (priced at a ridiculous £5.98 on Amazon right now, and a very reasonable £9.99 in the shops).

I dragged my carcass to a studio at way too early o’clock of a morning (hey! I am self employed, I don’t get up before 7am, you know), and it wasn’t long before I was cooking on camera with Pete Brown, maestro of beer and cider and all things in between. Continue reading

I am up to my oxters in bacon and pork belly, testing recipes and cures for my next book, Project: BACON, and making bacon boxes to send to people who subscribed for them. Something had to give, and today, it was me. I stole 1kg of the pork belly earmarked for a cure that would transform it into chilli bacon, and roasted it instead.

I needed it. I had too much wine last night and I am pretty fragile (er, maybe hungover) today. It is a typical routine really: work hard, play hard, fall over, roast some pork belly. I love the stuff and it is so comforting. I have two pork belly recipes in Comfort & Spice, and one is a slow roast over 6 hours, but at 11am I decided that I wanted it and I wanted it NOW so this is the quicker version which results in a firmer meat, and not a tender yielding meat that results from the slow roast.

A few years ago I was going through a pretty intense pork belly phase. I am a little obsessive and I get hooked on ingredients or dishes for weeks (or even months) at a time. Right now, I am in the waffle zone (I now have 3 waffle irons and am working my way through recipes, which I will post some of soon). People joked that I ate nothing else, and I thought, that I probably should snap out of it and explore some other things. Which I did. However, the results of it are quite a few pork belly recipes on this here blog and I joke that every Sunday there is a pork belly stampede (there is – lots of people come here for my straight forward roast pork belly recipe on that day alone).

I often roast pork belly with lentils and I wanted to do that today. But I was too lazy to go to the shop (well, truthfully, too lazy to get out of my pjs to go to the shop), so I worked with what I had and I loved the results. I had some evita apples that I bought at the farmers market at the weekend. Small, crisp and sweet, but with a slight tang that worked brilliantly when in the pork fat and juices for ten minutes. Cavolo nero was also roasted alongside, at this time of year it is less velvety but still good, and the earthiness went well. Marcona almonds, tossed through the slightly mushy apples, cavolo nero and fat and meat juices finished it off. It was lighter than with the lentils, and I will definitely be roasting it like this again.

Enjoy!

Recipe: Roast Pork Belly with Apples, Cavolo Nero & Marcona Almonds
Continue reading

Gird your loins, there is another chorizo recipe coming through. But this one is fabulous – even more than the others – even if I do say so about my own recipe my very self. Hey! It is chorizo week after all. Self declared and right now confined to, er, one London household, but I think this thing could get really big, you know? No? But I want to talk about onions too.

Onions. So important, yet so traumatic. One slice, and that acid sting stirs up and before long there are tears running down my face. Sometimes it drives me crazy (shakes fist at the sky!), other times I almost enjoy the gentle release and relish in the temporary sadness. Sadness is ok you know, as long as it is not ever present.

I thought that chopping onions in my food processor might ease the pain, but no. A small London kitchen has nowhere to hide from an onion ambush. And really, it is ok. Onions are onions, and a culinary war wound are those tears that rumble by. I will never be that person wearing onion goggles (although it is so bonkers, I have been tempted).

Would you like a juicy onion fact? I promise it won’t make you cry. And it is a lovely geeky one! Yes? Well you know why onions sting so? It is because sulphur is released as you chop onions and these mix with your innocent salty tears to form a light sulphuric acid. MY EYES! No wonder they sting so. But it is worth it.

Now, what brings this ramble on? Chorizo jam, my friends. Chorizo jam! You know of my bacon jam (it brings happiness to many a home and my breakfast table too) but chorizo jam, well this is new, at least here, and it is about time that I shared the recipe with you, forbidden as I am from sharing my current Project: BACON discoveries (with the many new bacon jams, bacon cakes, cookies, ice creams, suppers, cocktails, sweets and other joyful bacon things), until the book comes out next Spring.

Chorizo Jam in progress

This is good, very good. Joy in a teaspoon. It gives a deep savoury rumble to anything you add it to, with a hint of sweet spice too. The chorizo and onions are already sweet but the honey gives more, the sherry vinegar some throaty sourness, with some chillies floating on top, all sitting in a sticky cider caramel created by the slow gentle cooking down of the cider with the honey.

Note: you need a pan with a large area to make this, like a good large frying pan. This is essential to getting the stickiness that results from the slow caramelisation of the jam.

How to eat it? In a toastie, on its own, with cheese, stuff things with it (chorizo jam chicken kiev? HELLO). I made scotch eggs with it by mixing it with sausage meat. The possibilities are truly endless.

Chorizo Jam, getting nice and sticky (but not yet sticky enough).

RECIPE: Chorizo Jam
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Recipe: Judion Bean & Chorizo Stew

Did someone declare it chorizo month? Was it actually me? I fear it was, and my fridge is full of the stuff. I bought lots of gorgeous cooking chorizo to bring home to my siblings a few weeks ago and in my rush to the airport forgot to bring it (sorry, if you are reading this, but it tasted really good, ahem).

My office / pantry / chaotic-room-full-of-stuff has lots of randomness purchased in London’s aladdin caves and brought home from my travels. So does my room. So does the kitchen. Every crack and cupboard is rammed full of something or other. Opening a cupboard door may result in an injury or it may provoke a gentle surprise when I am hit in the head by something fabulous that I forgot was in there. My task right now is to sort the whole mess out, which makes for great cooking.

Some of this mess right now is beans. Bags of them. Little ones, big ones, black ones, purple ones, speckled ones, white ones of all shapes and sizes. I love beans. All kinds. Spanish markets have a fantastic selection, and I went a bit crazy at the market in Seville loading my suitcase with all shapes and sizes. I am still making my way through them. Joyfully.

For this recipe, I pulled out my bag of Judion beans. Ta-da! Enormous and creamy, the skins are thick and the taste rich (for a bean). Beans are best cooked from dried, I find tinned and most jar ones soggy and limp. Why suffocate them for so long and kill the joy? It doesn’t take much effort to soak and boil them. They are best cooked not long after you have purchased them too, as they get quite tough as they age. These cooked quite quickly after an overnight soak, which is a testament to the quality of the produce at the market in Seville, as it is sometime since I bought them.

Cooking chorizo is soft and luscious. Spiked with paprika and creamy with fat, it goes with everything, but with these gargantuan white beans they are perfection. Have a look for some in your local deli, and failing that, you can buy cooking chorizo online from Brindisa (you can buy the judion beans there too). It is one of my favourite ones.

This is a great dish for this time of year and can be made in advance and served later for friends. It tastes better later too, so if you are organised, this is even more of a winner.

Recipe: Judion Bean & Chorizo Stew
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RECIPE: Roast Feta with Tomatoes, Oregano, Chilli & Red Onion

My return from Greece last weekend was chaotic, to say the least. I woke up feeling far from fresh and very sleepy. I had with me a stockpile of Greek ingredients: feta, fava, oregano, extra virgin olive oil and vinegar. I wanted to play.

I invited a friend round for dinner. I had spent the day making eclairs (recipe on My Daily) and had already eaten four before I dialled in my eclair SOS. Save me from myself, come immediately, I just can’t resist them, I plead. So we had a backwards dinner, eclairs to start, while I pottered around the kitchen playing around, a glass of Santorini Assyrtiko wine keeping me company.

I made several dishes that night, and will share this Roast Feta with you now. I was thinking of the Santorini tomatoes, tiny and intensely sweet having grown on that arid volcanic soil. I hadn’t brought any with me, but I did have oak roasted tomatoes from the Isle of Wight Tomato Stall, a regular from my culinary arsenal. They are so intense and sweet, and require no work, as it has all been done for you. They are brilliant for veggie friends too, and work really well in a veggie carbonara, as they have all of the umami intensity that bacon does (trust me, they do).

This dish is very simple and barely requires a recipe, but there are a few things you should pay attention to. Buy good and proper Greek feta, it is protected so once it is called feta you will be fine but beware of fetta or similar. Proper feta is just made with sheep and goats milk, with no cow, and has a wonderful sweet, sour, salty flavour. Also use the best extra virgin olive oil that you can afford.  If you are investing, you might as well go Greek, given the recipe that you are using it for. If you can’t get the Tomato Stall tomatoes, roast some good cherry tomatoes at home yourself under a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil at 150 deg C for about half an hour.

RECIPE: Roast Feta with Tomatoes, Oregano, Chilli & Red Onion
Continue reading

Sausage and Sage Frankenara – via a ropey photo from my phone

It is not my intention to wind up the purists (well, occasionally it is) or the grammar police (cough), but sometimes I do. I consider myself a bit of a purist too, and I am both intolerant and intolerable about some things, but then sometimes, I veer so wildly off course and discover a delicious, happy and impure ending, that I can’t help but embrace it with joy.

That is where I found myself this evening. I have had a bit of a traumatic week (which I will fill you in on another time), and I am in Ireland, away from home (even though it is home, and that is confusing).

Home (another ropey photo from my phone)

I had bought sausages on arrival (I love Irish sausages and always have them when I am home), and I was starving. I was looking out the kitchen window at the driving rain and the grey sky but also at my sisters herb garden and the wild enormous sage bush. I thought of the sausages and ooh-eeee wouldn’t they be lovely together?

Then I wondered about a carbonara. A silky smooth sauce made from a simple egg yolk and some pecorino or parmesan. If I chopped the sausages into small chunks and got them nice and brown and served this frankenara* with a very simple garnish of lots of sage leaves, crisped whole in some butter. The die was cast.

I usually make my carbonara with spaghetti but all I had was penne, and this works very well too. It took such a short period of time to prepare. Use simple sausages that taste of pork and maybe a little white pepper as Irish sausages do, a good large egg will give you the best yolk for the sauce, fresh sage and some good pasta too. The sausages that I used were Clonakilty Ispíní (ispíní – ishpeenee – is the Irish word for sausage), which have such a strong fond taste memory of my childhood they are instantly soothing when I eat them. They are a small sausage and are very smooth, not like the crumbly sausages that are more common now. You can buy them quite easily in the UK too in most major supermarkets and some butchers too. 

Enjoy and if you like this frankenara, you will probably like Spaghetti Corkese, another one of my frankenstein pastas, and a popular one too.

*frankenara = a frankenstein approach to carbonara

Recipe: Sausage & Sage Frankenara Continue reading

Spending so much of the spring out of the country means that I have a lot of catching up to do, both with friends and with restaurants. Hello, London! Let us get reacquainted. I am BACK. I love the summer here and I love getting out and about and enjoying it.

This is mainly enormous fun, but it has some down sides. The occasional hangover and the need for something soothing sometimes wakes me like a siren. You know how it is, especially in London. Have a great night, miss the last tube, struggle to get home, and wake up feeling fragile, but hopefully still a little giddy from all of the fun.

I need some restorative food solutions for these situations, that I can balance out when feeling a little less frenetic later on (in the interest of feeling healthy and achieving my current aim, fitting into that favourite red vintage dress of mine). These fritters are one. This is not health food (of course not). At least not for the physical body. For the soul after a night of too much of a good time, these fritters are a rescue remedy.

The recipe is pretty flexible, but this time there was sweet and soothing fresh corn, slivers of intense yet delicate ham and the pop of a fruity tomato all nursed by a gentle batter spiked with a little chilli and eased out with some aromatic basil. If I have leftover pumpkin, I find it works brilliantly here (without the tomato) and courgette is brilliant too. If you have had a particularly big night, you might want to throw some great gooey cheese in there too.

These are deep fried, but you know, that is ok every now and then. I would suggest essential. You could shallow fry them but you wouldn’t get the great fluffy ball or texture. So, deep fry, drain well and leave on kitchen paper to get something life affirming to soothe your head. I really believe that an occasional blow out is essential, to clear out the cobwebs and put everything in perspective. So get on your dancing shoes and make sure that you have the ingredients for these for the morning after.

Enjoy!

Deep Fried Pasta Snacks with Manchego & Paprika

Who doesn’t like the crispy bits on the top of a mac ‘n’ cheese? They are my favourite bits. The crispy bits of anything frankly, and I must be honest, I have a real problem with crisps. If there are any in the house, I just can’t help myself. From the toxic orange cheesy corn snack to swish expensive Spanish crisps fried in extra virgin olive oil, I am helpless when in range. So, I rarely have them inside the front door.

Some days however, when I am controlling my access and there are none in the house, I still want some or something / anything to snack on. This has been a life long problem, and I first tried to make crisps when I was a child from the left behind small potatoes in the field in front of my house. I wanted to replicate exactly what I had had from the shops so, after a few efforts I was disappointed, and stopped.

As an adult I have had a lot more success. The small child inside me rejoices, and the adult who would really like to fit into that lovely red vintage dress of yore ponders while tucking in. Last week I made purple potato crisps which were a massive hit (the photo here is from my instagram feed – a lot more gets posted there than ever makes it here so make sure you follow on instagram, facebook or twitter).

Purple Potato Crisps on Instagram

I haven’t just made snacks with the humble spud. I have experimented a lot. I love leftovers, and I love trying different things with them. It may not be possible to polish a turd (nor should you eat one), but leftovers can be so much more glamorous than the original dish, once the original dish was decent to begin with. Taking risks with leftovers is no big deal, they are there to play with anyway (and also, finally, to eat), so years ago in university I looked at a plate of leftover spaghetti and fried it. And that was it.

I soon found out that this is far from an original idea, the Italians do it (pasta fritti), the Maltese do it (called froga which is like a leftover spaghetti frittata). I have a recipe for an omelette with leftover papardelle with ragu in my first book, Comfort & Spice, too. Leftover long pasta lends itself brilliantly to an omelette, you should try that. Added to this, instant noodles are simply cooked noodles deep fried to extrude the water and dry them in order to preserve them, this works really well for pasta too, and you can keep your fried pasta snacks in an air tight container for a while.

I say this is a great leftover dish, but the reality is that I often cook the pasta to make this at home. Fried pasta is a fabulous crispy snack, with each shape giving a different result. Here I have used large round pasta shape which lends itself well to frying. Don’t use cheap pasta, just because you are frying it. Good ingredients make good eating, so use the best you can get.

You can use lots of different toppings – good melting cheese grated fine and used sparingly works well and dried spices and chilli too. I had some lovely manchego and some smoky Spanish paprika so I gave this rendition a nice Spanish twist.

I don’t have a deep fat fryer, so I just fill a large deep frying pan with oil to about 2 inches. You could do this in a sauce pan too but fry in batches, making sure that the pasta is in a single layer with room to mooch about or it will all stick together in a gloopy mess. A thermometer is useful and helps get best results, but it is not essential. Continue reading

Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream

Hello everyone! Are you enjoying the sunshine? Yes? No? It is a little hot isn’t it.

Not that I am moaning about the heat, I am not. It is mainly joyful except from oh, 10am to 6am, when I drag myself around like a sloth, but this is not the fault of the heat. It is the fault of my rental apartment which has no air con. For when do we ever need it except for a week or so in the summer.

I need it now, and I don’t have it. I don’t even have a fan (I am working on that). So without all of this, what am I to do but to obsess on ice cream, icy drinks like granita and allow myself an occasional snooze, just so, you know, I can deal with it all.

Lets start with ice cream. Frozen custard, that is all it is. The custard is proper custard, home cooked, and not the Birds variety which as a child I used to adore (and is simply coloured and flavoured cornflour).

Real custard fills me with fear. Fear and dread and a mild panic. Why so? Well in school home economics it was communicated to me that it was very easy to screw up and curdle the eggs, and that it should be done slowly in a water bath and that it would take approximately a very long time. I remember stirring anxiously with a wooden spoon, terrified of a yellow fleck of curdled egg (my world was much smaller then). It was delicious but I vowed to never do it again and went back to Birds.

No more, the fear is gone (long gone, I have been making it happily for years now). It is a little painful in that you must take great care, but it is very do-able. The first ice cream I will share with you is one of Nigel Slater’s, his Vanilla Ice Cream, a classic egg custard with some lovely vanilla grinning through. The ice cream is perfect and as a classic vanilla ice cream should be, rich, cool, sweet and aromatic. I think it is the perfect start for a week of ice cream exploration.

I also have recipes of my own, several in my book, lots enriched with cream, some with no eggs at all. One with bacon and another with honeycomb, one with both. I will share a few more with you here this week. I will share the custard love. Bring on the granita and sprinkle the sorbet for summer here and it is freaking hot. So lets deal with it. Here we go.

Note: I use an ice cream machine for these recipes. A worthwhile indulgence if you are an ice cream fan. I use the Gaggia Gelateria because I can make ice cream without planning or without need to freeze the bowl. I have been using it for a few years now and, yes, it is £££ and large and a little noisy, but it is a great home machine and also, speedy. I recommend it. Continue reading