Don't call me fattee

Fattee is a word often bandied around our house. Mostly because Pete eats absolute shedloads for his slight physique (keen cyclist) and I feel the need to match his appetite (also a cyclist, but I do about 20% of the miles he does).

Fattee is also a favourite leftover and larder meal that usually gets made on day 3 of roast chicken leftovers. The original recipe was from the first Moro cookbook and involves some slightly more lengthy and complicated processes. So this is my lazy cheat's interpretation for when you want to make something nice but don't have time to burn.

What you need (for two portions):
1 tin tomatoes
3 cloves garlic
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 medium size aubergine
100g long grain or basmati rice
small bunch of flat leaf parsley
2 pita bread
2 tsp pine nuts
150ml greek yoghurt
2 portions leftover roast chicken

You need to do a few things at the same time:
- make the tomato sauce - sizzle 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic and the chilli flakes in olive oil until slightly golden. Add the tin of tomatoes and the cinnamon. Allow to bubble away and thicken up.
- cook the rice, simples.
- cut the aubergine into 1 cm slices, and then in half again. Ideally you'd charr these on a girddle, but frying is fine too.
- toast the pita, then cut into strips
- toast the pine nuts lightly in a dry frying pan
- chop the flat leaf parsley
- mix the yoghurt with a crushed clove of garlic, maybe a little milk to thin, and some salt and pepper

Once those are all ready it's a layering job and you can decide whether you want to layer plates up individually or as a presentation plate. But you start with the scattering the pita bread at the bottom, then top with rice, spreading it out. Then add the chicken and the aubergine, spreading evenly. Then add the tomato sauce and top that with the yoghurt. Finally sprinkle the flat leaf parsley and toasted pine nuts. Then tuck in!



It might seem a little bit of a fiddly recipe, but all the stages are very easy and you can do multiple things all at the same time. The flavours work well - I always love tomato and yoghurt combinations, and there are some nice smoky notes from the toast, pine nuts and the chargrilled aubergine. It's an immensely satisfying dish and still impressive enough for visitors.

Happy, smoky, milky

Happiness is smoked haddock chowder. The smell and taste bring back some of my earliest childhood memories: a treat lunch at The Place to Eat on the top floor of John Lewis in Edinburgh, big glass windows with views down over Leith and over the Firth of Forth to Fife. I remember the smoky fish, the luxurious creaminess of the broth and the sweetness of the sweetcorn, and even when I went off fish later on, the smell of a smoked haddock chowder would always bring back happy memories.

Now that I'm well and truly back on the fish, I decided to pop in to my local fishmongers, the amazing Steve Hatt on Essex Road, and pick up smoked haddock for that purpose. I using this Channel 4 recipe as a basis, but upped the celery as I had quite a bit of that in already and I never get through it quick enough.

Making the soup was very easy, and the most fun bit was boiling the smoked haddock in the milk, which produced this amazing creamy, smoky milk foam that I couldn't resist dipping my finger in. MMMMmmm.



The soup was absolutely wonderful - it tasted just like it used to, so creamy and rich but not too heavy going. I thought the addition of extra celery worked well and would like to try it with fennel next time for some extra depth of flavour.

I love Christmas

I love Christmas, especially this one, as I now have a new camera thanks to my lovely boyfriend (and his parents), mum, dad and others. Woop. Early signs are that it takes a beautiful picture, so I'll be working on my photo skillz to up the standard of photography on this blog.

As is well documented, I love Christmas dinner. It's my favourite meal of the year, with so many happy memories evoked. It's evolved over the years: different faces at the table, different settings, new dishes (this year: parsnip and pear croquettes!), shelved dishes (where's the mashed potato and cauliflower and cheese? Rightly relegated!), new customs (the Christmas eve cut price turkey hunt). But I love it for its ritual, its bringing people together and it's slow, social celebration of culinary excess.

This year was a particularly excellent Christmas dinner. Our turkey was the best ever, so succulent and juicy. It was a Marks and Spencer's free range organic bronze feathered beauty that we picked up on Christmas Eve for a third of its original price. The turkey hunt is fast becoming a favourite tradition - my mum has us stationed at supermarkets across Edinburgh at about 3pm on Christmas Eve, waiting for the supermarkets to slash the prices of their top tier turkeys. It's a game of nerves: jump too soon and you pay over the odds, leave it too long and you could be left with nothing. We were very pleased with our turkey.

The trimmings are key, and I think we counted 12 different dishes on our Christmas lunch plate:





Turkey, red cabbage braised with apple, roast potatoes in goose fat, home-made cranberry sauce (with orange zest), carrots with orange, brussels sprouts, little sausages, chestnut stuffing, parsnip and pear croquettes, bacon, leek, bread sauce and gravy. My favourites are the bread sauce (milk slow-cooked overnight with bay leaf and a clove stuffed onion) and the chestnut stuffing (chestnut purée, bacon, onions lemon zest, abundant parsley, breadcrumbs, egg: baked), without which it just wouldn't Christmas at all.

On Boxing Day, my siblings and I walk to the other side of Edinburgh (via the Topshop sale, for our sins) to join my dad and his partner for a second Christmas lunch. My dad isn't mega keen on the whole roast dinner setup, so will often cook a Portuguese style dish. This year he made a very meaty cataplana (it typically has clams, prawns and white fish, but my brother really dislikes fish) with melt-in-your-mouth pork loin and top quality chorizo and black pudding in a rich tomato and wine sauce. It was delicious and went down nicely with the free flowing cava!



The food has been amazing and there's been much more too: home-made ice cream, chestnut cream whip, leftover combinations, brunch out with friends. I'm definitely feeling fooded out and ready for some nice fresh salads and fruit!

Rooftop one-pot

It's the end of the growing season on our roof terrace, though I can't quite believe the tomatoes lasted until November. It was definitely a learning experience: aubergines can be tough to grow, you need multiple courgette plans for cross pollination, tomatoes need a lot of water, if you grow carrots in a pot they'll be tiny...but still delicious.



On the day we harvested the last of our pot grown carrots I decided to cook a tasty one pot roast dish. I love cooking all the ingredients slowly in one dishes and allowing them to infuse each other. The best meal we had in Croatia was at a plush harbourside in Komiza on Vis, where we had beautiful tender white fish baked in a big dish with potatoes, carrots and copious quantities of herbs and garlic and butter and olive oil. It was so simple and so perfect.

In the absence of fish straight out the sea, I browned some chicken legs and thighs in garlic and olive oil and put in a pyrex lasagne dish, before adding some parboiled (3 mins at boiling) and then halved new potatoes with their skins on, a leek, lots of garlic and all of our lovely little carrots. Lots of olive oil and some knobs of butter, and then into the oven. After a while I added finely chopped rosemary, tarragon, basil (all out the garden) and flat leaf parsley and a splash off white wine. I covered in tin foil and baked for maybe another 30 minutes until it was the perfect combination of crispy roast, melt in your mouth buttery, herby bliss.



The meal was a perfect bridge of the seasons, with summer's fresh herbs and winter's warming root vegetables. Maybe I was just feeling paternal, but our baby carrots were particularly sweet and tasty.

Green, mean, linguine

One of the things I love most about this time of year is the appearance of fancy members of the cabbage family in our greengrocers. My particular favourites are kale and cavolo nero, kings of the cabbages. They both remind me of one of my favourite Portuguese dishes, caldo verde, a simple potato soup with finely shredded greens, topped with chourico and fruity, peppery olive oil. As a kid, I would crave for that rich, seaweedy, green taste but it was only ever to be had on holidays to Portugal.

I like my nice greens braised with garlic and chilli, Tuscan style. I like them in plain meals, where their sheer greenness is able to take centre stage. I recently made the greenest and meanest spaghetti with cavolo nero and it was totally delicious.

What you need (for 3 mains or 4 starters):
Big bunch of cavolo nero
4 cloves of garlic
300g spaghetti
Lots of extra virgin olive oil
Maybe some truffle oil if yr fancy
salt'n'pepper
parmesan

First, trim the leaves from cavolo nero and discard those woody stalks. Peel the cloves of garlic. Have a saucepan of water on the boil and blanch the cavolo nero and the garlic for four minutes, before draining and squeezing dry. Get the spaghetti boiling.

Transfer the cavolo nero and garlic to a food processor or, failing that, into whatever you use a handheld blender in, pour in some EVOO, and blend blend blend. When it has the texture of a firm pesto, season with salt and pepper and mix with the cooked and drained spaghetti until it's like a pan of bright green worms. If you are feeling flush, drizzle with some truffle oil.

Plate up, sprinkle generously with parmesan, and crack over some black pepper.



Mmm...healthy and delicious. It really works and tastes super fresh.

Pimp my pizza

I would love it if every evening is a culinary odyssey chez moi. It's not. I wish I had time to prepare a delicious meal from scratch, and I've been doing a lot more of that over the summer having slightly forgotten what it's like to work full-time, study part-time and try and try to have a social life too. When you get home at 8.30 after a full day at work, an hour's lecture and an hour's seminar, you want to eat something quick and easy.

One of my favourite easy meals is a pimped up ready pizza. This one is inspired from a pizza I had when I had to find a decent restaurant to take my Chief Executive and manager out for a meal at Labour party conference in Manchester in 2008. We ended up in a mid-range Italian called the Olive Press just off Deansgate. It wasn't the most exciting restaurant, but I had a very memorable pizza. The pizza was topped with crab meat, chilli, thin lengths of chargrilled courgettes, cherry tomatoes, coriander and a squeeze of lime.

It sounds like it was heavy with toppings, but it was actually fairly light. And the combination of flavours was amazing, so fresh, so fiery. A winning combination of Italian bases and Thai tastes.

So on some of those evenings when I'm too tired and hungry to cook a proper meal, I can whip a pizza out the freezer, layer it with prawns (also out the freezer) or a tin of crab meat, add chilli, cherry tomatoes and chargrilled courgette (sometimes I have some spare stock in), sprinkle some coriander over and, when cooked, squeeze some lime over it.



And then it's ready, and I am happy.

Some summer salads

Our (not so) new flat has a roof terrace with views of the City, and overlooks the domain of a family of urban foxes, some BBQ-happy hipsters, a building site and a small council estate. All very London. It has become a veritable jungle of vegetables and herbs growing in ports - courgettes, broad beans, aubergines, tomatoes, basil, mint, rosemary, tarragon, lavendar, salad leaves, carrots. With the recent warm weather we;ve been eating almost every meal on the terrace, whether it's coffee and croissants (to die for!) from Le Belle Epoque to evening meals with crisp white wine. The prospect of al fresco dining inspires summery cooking and I've been making up some nice salads for these balmy evenings.

One was a mackerel Nicoise style affair, with smoked mackerel fillets, served with broad beans, green beans, runny boiled eggs, etc. Play it by ear with quantities, but all you need to do is boil some new potatoes (and when they are almost done, add in the green beans and the broad beans and boil), chop up some cherry tomatoes and some gem lettuce, add the mackerel fillets, whip up a cider vinegrette with lots of pepper and mix it all together, topped with the runny yolked eggs and you have a very nice, healthy, summery salad.




With some green beans and broad beans left over, I re-jigged the salad idea, starting by frying chopped chorizo with onions and garlic, before quickly deglazing the pan with a splash of white wine. I boiled potatoes and added beans, beans and then some peas to the pan like last time. Then I mixed together the vegetables with the chorizo etc, shaved some Manchego cheese into the mix and served as a warm salad.



P.s. sorry about the absence of posts recently! Holidays, etc.

Marrow viewpoint

A while back I saw marrows going for cheap at Waitrose. Never having cooked with those fantastically oversize courgette-type-things I bought one whopper and then puzzled over what to do with it. A straw poll of foodies at work suggested I make some chutney with it and a quick flick through the Observer magazine revealed a recipe for a marrow and tomato masala. Perfect. So I made both!

The marrow masala was a great opportunity to put some of my newer cooking tools to the test. It required a homemade paste (my first ever!), which required my prized Magimix. Toasting the spices and mixing all the other fragrant ingredients (who knew paste involved so much garlic!?) was so much more satisfying than buying a little jar from the supermarket, and now I have my own super quantity of home-made paste to use for future easy curries.



I layered the ingredients in my le creuset cast-iron casserole dish: onions caremalising nicely at the bottom, big hollowed out marrow sections next, then whole plum tomatoes, tinned chick peas all around and butter on top. And cooked it slow and low for two hours. The end result was impeccably tender, fragrant and juicy. It reminded me a little of the baby squash dish at legendary Tayyabs - maybe not quite there on the spice front, but getting there.



So it was totally delicious and hopefully the start of adventures in curry from scratch. I've often thought that if someone said "You can go any cookery course in the world..." that I'd choose some strand of Indian cooking. It seems to be a whole art and science in itself and one which I enjoy immensely. My birthday is next week, so any places on cookery courses gratefully received!

Fishy Fridays

As part of my fish odyssey I'm using Fridays' traditional status as Fish Day to expand my skillz with cooking fish. So far that's included fish pie, paella and portuguese shellfish stews (yum). Last Friday I decided to cook tuna steaks in a Moro-esque style.

Tuna steaks in pomegranate with grilled fennel salad

You'll need:
2 tuna steaks
3 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses
olive oil
Salt'n'pepper
teaspoon of cinnamon

2 bulbs of fennel
Bunch of flat leaf parsley
sherry vinegar
Handful of coriander

Mix together the pomegranate molasses, two tablespoons of olive oil and the cinnamon in a bowl before adding the tuna steaks and making sure all sides make contact with the marinade. Let it marinade for a couple of hours if you can, but half an hour will be fine.

Start heating up a griddle pan.

While the tuna is marinading, chop the fennel top-to-bottom and douse in olive oil. When the griddle pan is smokin', throw on the fennel and let it cook til it is becoming translucent and is charred in the right places. Remove from the pan and put in a salad bowl. Mix up a dressing with sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper and pour over the fennel. Roughly chop some flat leaf parsley and mix into the salad.

Now it's time to cook the tuna. Ensure the griddle pan is still sizzling hot and place the tuna steaks on. Depending on the thickness of the steaks and how you like it, you could cook them for as little as one minute each side.



I served it with fried potatoes and a garlic yoghurt, which worked really well. I love the rich tanginess of the pomegranate molasses combined with the sultry saltiness of the tuna steaks, and the parsley and fennel with their own fragrant notes. It's amazing how a few exciting (but easy enough to find) ingredients can teleport you to Mediterranean holidays, al fresco dining, warm breezes, sea air... Speaking of which, I've just booked my summer holiday - two weeks in Croatia and Bosnia. Mmmmm.

Mexican, my way

When Guardian Media Group hinted that The Observer newspaper might be closed down to cut the company's losses, my heart sunk. Not because the Observer is a very nice Sunday paper, or even the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, but because it could spell the end of Observer Food Monthly (OFM), my monthly food and lifestyle bible. As a teenager I would flick through it, especially enjoying the supermarket product comparisons, strangely. So I was very relieved that OFM got to stay, while Observer Women, Sport Monthly and Music Monthly all wound up. And last weekend, the first 'revamped' OFM was on the shelves!

It was definitely a good edition with some interesting new columns and features, including Lunch with Mariella (Frostrup) - it was Alistair Campbell this month. But what inspired me the most was an interview with Thomasina Miers, the founder of Wahaca, and excerpts from her new book Mexican Food Made Simple. I've yet to cook any of the recipes, but it got me thinking of tasty Mexican inspired recipes to make myself.

Sweet potato and edamame tortillas

You will need:
3 medium size sweet potatoes
100g frozen edamame/soya beans (I buy mine from Japanese supermarkets)
Pinch of cinnamon
Pinch of allspice
Pinch of cumin
Clove of garlic
Small red chilli
Handful of coriander
Splash of soy sauce
Olive oil
Sour cream
Refried beans
Mature cheddar
Tortilla wraps

Peel and chop the sweet potatoes into 1cm cubes. Put on a baking tray, splash on a bit of olive oil, add spices and roast until soft inside and a little crispy on the outside (about 20 minutes). Meanwhile you would be bringing the edamame beans to the boil. Drain when they are ready and combine with the sweet potato cubes when they're ready.

Separately, mix up a de-seeded and finely chopped chilli, crushed garlic and roughly chopped coriander with the juice of a lime, a splash of soy sauce and a glug of olive oil. Pour over the sweet potatoes and mix together.

Now assemble your tortilla - heat it up first, under a grill preferably, spread on some refriend beans and some sour cream, add the mix, top with cheese, fold it up. Enjoy!


I liked the slight oriental tang to it, mellowed out by the sour cream and the cheese.

I enjoyed it so much that I made it again on Friday for friends, along with Wahaca's Pumpkin and chorizo, classic tomato salsa, avocado and lime slop and the usual toppings.



Every last morsel was wolfed down and guests were happy. The chorizo and pumpkin worked incredibly well and the sweet potato and edamame also worked a treat. I'm now excited to get a copy of the Mexican Food Made Simple and hone in my Mexican cooking skillz!

Fish pie

I have a strange history when it comes to fish. Some of the first solid food I had as a littl'un was fish. I used to adore shellfish - I remember greedily gobbling mussels, clams and prawns from my parents' Cataplana on holiday in the Algarve. But at some point, I can't remember why, I stopped liking fish and seafood altogether. For most of my life, I couldn't stomach the thought of the seas' fine produce, save for prawn mayonnaise, batter calamari and tinned tuna. I tried at various points start eating fish again, but it was only when I was in Montreal in 2007 that I plucked up the courage to order a moules frites.

On subsequent trips to Croatia and Portugal, I tried more and more fish and seafood. In Portugal the seafood was particularly good. We stayed in Sesimbra, a fishing village down the coast from Lisbon, where I ate razor clams, crabs, squid, sardines, swordfish.

And yesterday, after much craving, I made my first fish pie. I cycled over to Steve Hatt on Essex Road, which must be one of the best fishmongers in London. The fish is top notch, so fresh that you can't smell a thing, and Steve Hatt's young lads are incredibly jovial and helpful as they prepare your fish. When the guy serving me sussed I was making a fish pie, his eyes lit up and mentioned his envy to his colleague. Such is the love of fish at Steve Hatt's! They also had a great selection of fish and seafood, including the lesser spotted razor clam. I shall have to go back for some another time.

I decided on a Mark Hix recipe for fish pie, as it looked the most sensible and traditional of all the recipes that Google threw up. Start with the basics and then you can innovate! It was quite a process-y meal - lots of different pots and pans, sieves and collanders, but all of it made sense and contributed to a lovely, comforting pie in the end:


I served it with some dressed leaves and some steamed spinach with butter. The mashed potato and the fish elements probably blended together a little too much. This might because I didn't let the fish mix set for long enough. It was absolutely delicious though - just as homely, fresh and luxurious as you'd hope. The way that the recipe suggests cooking the fish (poaching for 2 minutes, then later cooking in the pie) had the fish just right. I used cod, salmon and smoked haddock (smoked by Steve Hatt himself!) and it was the perfect combination. Might have also been nice to have prawns in, but the tweaking and adjusting I can do next time.



The whole experience of making fish pie has definitely upped my confidence in cooking with fish and I am now ready, eager and willing to try out some more dishes. Smoked haddock chowder next? Mmmmm....

Casa Moro

I was lucky enough to receive Casa Moro for Christmas - it's even more beautiful than the first Moro cookbook, all turquoisey azulejos on the cover, more stories about ingredients and places. There's more of a Spanish leaning in this one, with detailed accounts of the Sams' travels through Andalucia and Morocco.

I tried making their their 'potato cakes stuffed with lamb and pine nuts', which sounded quite like the bombas picanté I enjoyed at Café Andaluz in Edinburgh over Christmas. The recipe involved making an aromatic lamb mince mixture with lovely herbs and toasted pine nuts, which would then be encased in a potato dough and fried. I use the conditional tense because I got flustered and totally screwed up the potato dough. I get stressed about fiddly bits of cooking and try to avoid complex pastry making and other fine-motor-skill-demanding processes. So I turned the dish into a 'middle eastern' Shepherd's Pie by putting the lamb mix in a casserole dish and topping with the potato dough! And it was wonderful - who needs fiddly little balls anyway?!

I served it with my interpretation of a dish I had at Café Andaluz - roasted cubes of parsnip and sweet potato, with chick peas in a yoghurt-tahini-parsley sauce. It was lovely and earthy, tangy, warming.



To make the lamb mixture fry some finely chopped onion in olive oil and butter. Once golden, add 300g lamb mince, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, some grated nutmeg, the ground seeds of 3 cardamom pods, 3 ground cloves. Cook for a bit longer before adding some toasted pine nuts, finely chopped parsley, a tablespoon of tomato purée and a splash of water to add moisture. Cook for another few minutes and you have a beautifully fragrant, exotic dish that will transport you far away from this grim British winter.

Big brunch

I hate breakfast for the most part. I've gone through almost every cereal brand there is, tried every topping on toast you could think of and experimented with all kinds of milk substitutes - oat, almond, soy, rice. And I've never settled on any one breakfast that I can sustain for any length of time. But one thing I can always come back to is french toast or eggy bread.

As a teenager, it was one of the first things I learnt to cook myself. I can't remember being shown how to do it - but my mum must have shown me at some point. My favourite topping is cooked apples, bacon and maple syrup. On weekend days when I wasn't working at Boots I'd put a CD on and leisurely go about pulling it together.

This is how I do it. For the eggy bread, beat together a couple of eggs and a reasonable splash of milk. Mix in some cinnamon. Get four slices of thick, soft white bread and dip them in the egg mix so that they're covered in the mixture. Heat up a pan with sunflower oil until hot. Fry on both sides until nice and brown.

Meanwhile, you'd have peeled some a big cooking apple, cored and diced it. Fry in another pan in butter. On the other side of that pan put in four rashers of bacon. Cook over a medium heat - adding a handful of currants and a generous pinch of cinnamon while you're at it. Once the apple is soft and the bacon crispy, spread evenly over the eggy bread.



Plop a couple of dollops of greek yoghurt and swirl some maple syrup over it and you're good to go!

Roasted love

Now that it is certifiably winter, there's no better excuse than to be cooking delicious roast dinners. One thing I've learned is that there are whole different worlds of roasting. Thinking about all the roast dinners I've had in my life, I can attribute different styles of roasts to different people. I'd say my mum's are French-inspired - real herbs, lemons and nice vegetables cooked alongside. My grandparents' roasts are much more traditional, served with lovely rich gravy and root vegetables, often straight out their garden. Mmmm.

When it comes to cooking a roast myself, I'm quite a fan of rubbing, marinading and then slow cooking. I tend to buy less classic cuts of meet - lamb and pork shoulders recently. I like grinding up spices - like cumin seeds or fennel seeds - with garlic, salt and chilli, and maybe paprika. Then cooking for hours and hours on a low temperature. I cooked a shoulder of lamb for 13 hours in anticipation of dinner last Sunday and it was just so, so tender and moist. The meat was literally falling off the bone as I took a knife to it, while the exterior was crispy and spicy.

Accompaniments matter too. I've been inspired by my recent visit to Moro and served recent roasts with braised cabbage topped with yoghurt and sumac. Celariac mash accompanied a pork shoulder...



...and a full Ottolenghi-esque mezze accompanied the lamb. I served it with roast potatoes and artichokes with lemon and olives, grilled peppers in green tahini, beetroot with yoghurt and dill, lemon braised fennel, and braised cabbage with yoghurt and sumac again. It was delicious.



I'm going to experiment with some other roasting styles over the Winter. I have the Silver Spoon and a friend recently gave me Ripailles, so there should be lots of new inspirations!

A taste of Kenya

At work I've been lucky enough to have been joined by a lovely Kenyan lady called Nancy on a Commonwealth Fellowship placement. Of course, much of our discussion has been of food, especially lunches. Together we've explored the difference between lasagnes from M&S, Sainsbury's, Planet Organic and Cafe on the Hill, we've delighted in worktime snacking on flavoured rice cakes and cake bars. We googled and googled for Kenyan restaurants in London and, shockingly, there ain't none. The closest we could find was a Ugandan restuarant in Tottenham Hale. Finally, on Friday evening, Nancy cooked Kenyan food for the team and I can taste those amazing flavours!



Nancy prepared:
A goat stew
A banana stew
A bean stew
Chapati
Ugali (Maize cake)
Sweet potatoes

It looked a little something like this:


The goat stew was my absolute favourite. I'd eaten goat meat before but not for a long time. It was so sweet and tender, with a rich, strong flavour. I can't understand why we don't eat more of it. The sauces were all fairly sweet and mildly spiced. There is a large Indian population in Kenya and their culinary influence is clear - chapati is served with most meals and the spice mixes are similar but subtler.

The bases of the dishes were mostly tomatoes, garlic and onions, before stock was added. Despite being fairly 'conventional' ingredients (bananas excluded, of course) but the flavours were distinctive and exotic. I guess that's the goat and the banana for you! Nancy wasn't able to get quite a few ingredients hat she wanted, even in the multicultural mecca of Finsbury Park. Ingredients, such as ground peanuts, would have showcased a completely different set of flavours if they'd been available.

If you're interested in trying to make some Kenyan food, visit this website

A little something Caucasian...

In 2007 I spent a month in New York following the end of my finals. I spent every day exploring different neighbourhoods and their unique culture and culinary offerings. One day I went to Coney Island and ate the famous hotdogs from Nathan's on the boardwalk. I walked along the other side of the Atlantic a few blocks and ended up at the other Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave known as Little Odessa. All the street and shop signs were written in Cyrillic characters and when I went into a CD shop I was greeted in Russian. My trusty Time Out guide recommended a Georgian restaurant.

It was the most surreal meal of my life. The restaurant was cavernous and plush, like an empty Las Vegas casino. We were the only people in the restaurant, though the waiters were loading up a massive banqueting table behind us for a diaspora feast.



We started with a kind of Georgian mezze and it was then that I fell in love with Georgian cuisine. Positioned between Russia and Turkey, the influences of both cuisines were beautifully present in the dishes. Copious amounts of dill, parsley and coriander were in the spinach salad, pureed beetroot, potato salad and med veg salad, with ground walnuts adding a earthy richness to the former and dotted with gem-like pomegranate seeds. It really was a flavour explosion.



We drunk traditional Georgian semi-sweet red wine - the vineyards are supposedly the oldest in the world and the wine is just so beautiful, rich, complex, ancient. Fairly typical in Georgian cuisine is to serve food at room temperature - for my main I had spring chicken in a walnut sauce, one of the most exquisite and satisfying thing I've ever tasted. All the while a singer sang hi-NRG Slavic ballads to the almost empty room, adding to the otherworldliness of this periphery of New York City.

London has a couple of Georgian restaurants. For a traditional meal, go to Tbilisi on Holloway Road; a restaurant I love so much that I will blog about it in its own right some point soon. Little Georgia near Broadway Market is also good, though a little bit lighter during the day. My mum gave me a Georgian recipe book for Christmas last year and I try and cook a mini feast every now and then.



Recently, with the aide my lovely Magimix, I was able to re-create the chicken satsivi (walnut sauce). I served it with rice and a salad of roasted med veg, dressed in red wine vinegar, fenugreek, ground coriander and lots of fresh herbs. Delicious. Recipe here.

Shroom safari

After a hectic week the last thing you'd want to do is get up at 8 O'clock on Saturday morning, travel for 1.5 hours across north and east London to get to Hainault in Essex and spend the morning getting drizzled on in muddy woodland. But yesterday was different.

I was, in fact, on a fungal foray; mushroom-picking. A friend from work who is also an avid foodie had been banging on since last October about the wonders of this mushroom walk lead by a local self-confessed mushroom anorak. Some of my fondest foodie memories are of walking through fields in the Scottish borders with my Grandad, picking massive, delicious field mushrooms. How could I say no?



About 30 other people also decided to spend this drizzly, but mild, Saturday morning in Hainault Forest in the pursuit of mushroom knowledge and mushroom. The guide knew almost every mushroom we found by site and advised on their edibility. This was my only consideration. We found fungi of all varieties, growing on trees, bright red, prickly, slimy, waxy, aniseedy. I was with six people I knew, so had to restrain my hunter-gather instincts and share my finds, but I ended up with a sizeable haul, including one oyster mushroom, one big parasol mushroom, one puffball, lots of butter caps and quite a few jews' ears.



They made for a tasty cooked breakfast this morning, sautéed with butter, garlic and parsley and then with a splash of calvados and some sour cream. Served on toast, it was a hearty, herby start to a day about town.

Baked happiness

When it comes to comfort food, nothing beats a spicy, Italian style tomato sauce. If, like me, you always have tinned tomatoes, olive oil, chilli flakes and garlic in, you can have it whenever you want, whatever the weather. I could eat it by the spoonful, without accompaniment. Sometimes I like to have it with penne, topped with basil and parmesan. Other times it is the making of a sausage bake.

But one of my all time favourites is the baked aubergine parmigiana. Gorgeous smoky aubergines, chargrilled, combined with this most sumptuous of sauces and heavenly expanses of parmesan cheese. And topped with mozzarella crispy breadcrumbs. Could you get any more comforting?!

It's an incredibly simple dish to make. For 4 people, you'll need two tins of tomatoes, one onion, three aubergine, one packet of mozzarella, garlic, parmesan, breadcrumbs, wine vinegar and basil.

First, chop the aubergine into 1cm slices across the way. Heat up a griddle pan with a little oil and cook the aubergines in batches so they have nice chargrill marks.

Meanwhile, finely chop the garlic and onion and, with a teaspoon of chilli flakes, allow to sizzle for a while in olive oil. Add the two tins of chopped tomatoes and allow to cook, uncovered for about fifteen minutes. Put a little wine vinegar at the end and tear up some basil leaves and stir in.

Once the aubergines are all done and the sauce has thickened put a thin layer of tomato sauce across the bottom of a lasagne kinda dish, then a smattering of parmesan, followed by a single layer of aubergines. Repeat these layers until you’ve used all the ingredients up, finishing with a little sauce and then cover in grated mozzarella. Top this with a scattering of breadcrumbs and put in the oven for about 20 minutes.



Once it's nicely browned and crispy on top, take it out the oven, let it cool a little, and serve in nice big wedges with salad and garlic bread. Ah!



Belissima! So simple, so easy, so happy-making.

Fig and Fennel salad

Not a great start to blogging to take another two week break. But I've been busy guvna, honest! I actually have. My job involves going to each political party's annual conference, staying for about 3 or 4 days at each, putting on an event, meeting politicians and other bigwigs, going to lots of events for interest, to ask questions and live off the endless spreads of canapes, fingerfoods and run-of-the-mill wines. I'm going to blog about all that jazz later. The super-extra time pressure is a self-inflicted part-time Masters which I've signed up to do alongside my full-time job. It's all going to get crazy!

Today, however, I'm going to tell you about a tasty meal I cooked a couple of weeks back before it slips my mind.

I was walking past the fruit'n'veg stall at Kentish Town tube when I was grabbed by a scrawled notice: "4 figs for £1". I picked up 4. Then I saw another scrawled notice: "2 fennel for 50p". I bought 2. I halved and griddled the figs, then sliced top-down the fennels and griddled them too. Meanwhile I roasted quickly some chopped walnuts, prepared some rocket, chopped some manchego cheese, threw the lot together and whisked up a sherry vinegar dressing. Mmmm...it was delicious, smoky, earthy. It looked like this:



I have a thing for 'posh' sausages. When I lived in Berlin, you'd think I'd have had plenty of brilliant sausages. But once you've tried the exciting sausages available in farmers' markets and better supermarkets in Britain, German sausages don't cut it. The sausages you get in the supermarket and from street stalls in Germany are so processed you'd hardly know there was meat in them.

While there are clearly many better sausages to be had than the Sainsbury's Taste the Difference range, my biggest weakness in sausages has always been their Parmesan and Pancetta blend. Any guest that came to visit me would ask "can I bring anything from Britain? Cheddar cheese? Irn Bru?". No. Parmesan and Pancetta sausages from Sainsbury's. I hadn't seen them in Sainsbury's for about a year and then spotted them at the big 'un in Camden and had to buy a pack. I cooked them and served them with the fig'n'fennel salad and some zingy potato salad too:



All in all, a lovely end of summer meal.

Red veg

I love going to Parliament Hill Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings and picking up some interesting veg for the weekend. Last weekend I bought a purple cauliflower and a bunch of beetroot.

Pete cooked a beetroot risotto - quickly becoming a staple in our house. Unsurprisingly, it turns out looking like a garish reddy-purple maggot slime. But it has a delicious sweet, root-y celery-like taste that you don't get from beetroot when you prepare it any other way. With added mascarpone, this is a perfectly lovely, rich, warming dish for a cooler end of summer evening.



We use the Times recipe, but with a little less parmesan.



The purple cauliflower went to good use in one of my favourite Ottolenghi salads: Chargrilled cauliflower with dill, capers and cherry tomatoes. The cauliflowers are very lightly parboiled - about three minutes - then flung into a smokin' hot griddle pan until they are nicely charred.



The dressing helps the magic of this dish - 2 parts olive oil to one part cider vinegar, finely chop some capers, add some crushed garlic, salt'n'pepa, some wholegrain mustard. There you have a very tangy jus for your salad.

Combine the charred cauliflower with baby spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes and pour over the dressing. Chop up a generous handful of dill and drop it in. Enjoy with toasted pitta bread. We served with lemon-y turkey breasts. Yum.