Semolina Bread

This is an Italian recipe bread, made with semolina. Yes, real semolina.

I went mad in the supermarket and bought a huge sack of this, which is not ground as fine as flour but is just very fine semolina. It makes exceedingly wonderful bread. Of course, you may not be able to get this in which case Italian semolina bread flour which should be a pale yellow in colour will work just fine.

I'm never really sure if it's worth giving out recipes for bread. This one uses a strong wheat flour biga fermented overnight as a starter and fine semolina as the making up cereal. It needs a really hot oven. I made a lot, and although I could scale the recipe down it then starts to become fiddly with a gram of this and a pinch of that. If you're really keen to know what I did leave a comment and I'll update.

Confusion #2

Something of a mixed up muddle of a dish but it tasted good.

Warm Puy lentils mixed with store cupboard standbys; tinned sweetcorn, pickled roasted pepper, olives. A small shallot chopped fine and handful of delicious sweet local walnuts, the gift of a friend who visited during the week. The dressing was a little soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and a good grind of pepper.

The Point

As usual I've gone into a flat spin at the expectation of the arrival of the Alpha male on Friday. It's been a long month without him.

Consequently, my mind isn't really focussed on the food and although I had polenta disks, Berber spiced pumpkin and artichoke tips to make a poncey and photographic stack for tonight's meal, actually I can't bring myself to assemble it and have instead been living on strong coffee and the occasional crisp sandwich to ward off the possibility of fainting.

However, since I'd spent nearly a fiver on out of season asparagus, I was motivated* to steam that to be served with a vinaigrette dijonnaise. To replace the pumpkin a glass of the somewhat ambivalent Tunisian wine, Sidi Brahim, which is nearly the same thing may help to calm my shattered nerves.

Service is going to be a bit erratic for the next few days. Hope to get back to normal by the middle of next week.


* ah Love, where have you gone?

The Star of the Show

These knobbly looking things are called Jerusalem artichokes, or sometimes Sunchokes if you are on the American continent. They are easy to grow, simple to cook and quite tasty to eat, with a flavour all their own, but they have a flaw that makes them all but unusable. They contain a form of sugar, inulin, that most people are unable to digest. This leads to a side effect of uncontrollable flatulence. Since I've grown some, I thought I'd better make a meal with them before Mr. Stripey Cat arrives at the weekend. Such are the benefits of living alone.

There are lots of recipes for these difficult tubers. I particularly like a Turkish one where they are simply simmered with oil and lemon juice but a pot full of that might just be too much for me to finish up on my own by Friday. A good way of getting a taste of the vegetable without overdoing it is to mix them with mashed potatoes.

Clean your jerusalem artichokes and cook them in their skins until they are completely soft. You'll need a ratio of about 1 artichoke to 3 medium potatoes.

You can cook them in the same pan as the potatoes but if they're large they may take longer than the spuds to cook. Mash your potatoes with plenty of oil or margarine and then squeeze the soft insides of the artichoke into the pan and mash it all up together. It will keep warm for while in a covered dish in the oven if you need to prepare other things to go with them.

I served mine with some tofu triangles simmered in a beer and onion gravy. I put a tad too much white pepper in the gravy but you can't tell that from the picture.



Happy farting!

Soup and Crackers

A big bean broth made with the biggest white beans I could find, some chopped courgette, shallots, tomatoes and herbs and a good vegetable stock.



My favourite way of using up scraps of puff pastry, marmite palmiers. You can also make 'straws' from the same ingredients. Savoury, crispy and delicious.

Pumpkin Tarte Tatin

Apple Tarte Tatin is a very well known dish and there are numerous recipes for it, many claiming to be the original or correct version. There are also lots of variations using different fruit and some savoury combinations. This is a sweet pumpkin interpretation. It's not at all bad.

You need a very thick hob and oven proof pan for best results but you can use a saucepan to make the caramel and a baking tin for the pie. Please be very careful with the hot sugar, it can burn you badly.

You will need;

pumpkin, peeled and cut in thin slices
sugar, plenty to cover the base of your pan - 3 or 4 tablespoons
margarine or vegan butter, about a tablespoon.
some puff pastry, ready made is fine, or another crust of your choice.

Put your pan on the hob and add the sugar. Over a medium heat allow the sugar to heat and melt. As it melts it will turn golden in colour. You can stir it a little to spread the heat and avoid hot spots. As soon as it is all gold, turn off the heat and mix in the marg. or butter. If you're using a separate baking dish then grease it and pour in the caramel. Swirl it around to cover the base.



Arrange your pumpkin pieces neatly over the caramel. Remember they will be visible when you serve the pie so try to make a neat pattern. Don't make more than two layers of very thinly sliced pumpkin. You can sprinkle on some cinnamon or nutmeg or your favourite pumpkin spice if you like now.

Roll out your pastry and cut a generous sheet to cover the pumpkin and tuck down around the edges. Remember the caramel will still be hot, so take care.



Cook the tart at about 180C or a little hotter for abut 30 or 40 minutes. You want lovely golden pastry and the fruit to be cooked underneath it. When you take it out of the oven, it should look like the picture above, all puffed up and with the caramel sizzling around the edges.

Get a serving dish with a lip to catch the sweet juices and big enough to entirely cover your baking dish. With oven gloved hands place the serving dish upside down over the pie, then pick up dish and pan and invert them so that the pie drops out into the serving dish. If it sticks a few taps on the bottom and a little patience should bring it out. Any bits of pumpkin stuck in the pan can be popped back onto the tart where they belong.



The caramel will run down over the tart and into the server, which is why it needs to have a lip. The tart is delicious served warm or cold with cream. I served mine with some of the banana ice cream that I like to make, you can find the recipe here.

Patates Yahni Me Elies

Patates Yahni Me Elies - Potato Stew with Olives

This is a recipe that has been shared in my circle of friends for longer than I really care to admit to. It's a great dish for parties, easy to prepare and can be made with store cupboard ingredients and staples. The fact that we're all still making it after ...mumble... years is a measure of just how delicious it is.

Because it's so good for crowds I'm going to give you the full quantities for 8. I made just a fraction of it for myself but leftovers are easy to heat up and taste just as good or it can even be eaten cold with a dash of lemon juice.

Olive oil
1.5 kg potatoes, peeled and cut into bite sized pieces
4 large onions, sliced thinly
10 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped
150ml wine (you can use red or white, I prefer red.)
2 tsp dried oregano
750g chopped tomatoes, tinned or fresh
150g black olives, pitted and rinsed, whole
2 tbsp olive paste (use olive tapenade if you have it, if not mince some more black olives finely)
Parsley

Heat oven to 190C/375F/Gas mark 5.

Put a big splash of olive oil in a frying pan and and sauté the potatoes for five minutes - in batches if necessary. They don't need to cook through, just have the rawness taken off and a little colour added.

Remove potatoes from pan to an oven-proof dish large enough for them to lie in a shallow layer. Use a slotted spoon so the oil is left in the pan. Sprinkle the whole olives over them.

Add more oil if necessary, and saute the onions, garlic and chilli for a few minutes. Then add the wine, tomatoes, oregano and olive paste. A little black pepper doesn't go amiss but be careful with salt as the olives will be very salty. Cook for a minute or two, then pour this sauce over the potatoes and olives in the baking dish.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour until potatoes are cooked through and tender. Top up with water or wine if it gets too dry during cooking but you won't need much. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and eat.

It is possible to make this almost oil free, by parboiling the spuds and using a minimal amount of oil in the sauce but where's the fun in that!

Jacket spuds by the Fire

A very simple supper using the wood fire to cook my jacket potatoes. We usually serve this supremely comforting food with coleslaw and baked beans (and sometimes killer cucumber pickles and a few other things but beans and coleslaw are essential). The coleslaw is just some more of the Cherry Coloured Coleslaw from a few days ago using a white cabbage mixed with the red one this time. The beans, well, we're in France.

It is possible to buy Heinz baked beans here but I refuse to do so on principle. Instead I used an imported can of Peeled Ful from the Iranian grocer's shop in Motspur Park. Ful are basically broad beans and a staple of Middle Eastern cooking. Ful in tins is exactly equivalent to British baked beans but for a different culture. They're also rather good.

I ate so much I thought I would explode, but that's o.k. once in a while.

Rice Rolled

I made makisushi. Nearly everyone reading is likely to have tried this already at home so I'm not going to re-invent the wheel for you here but I thought a few notes about what I did might be of interest, particularly if you're in a place where Japanese ingredients are hard to find.

Firstly I used a short grain brown rice. I wanted to do this because it's a little more nutritious than the white and these rolls would inevitably form a major part of my food for a couple of days. To make sure the rice was tender and cooked quickly I soaked it for 12 hours before cooking. It's still not quite the same as rolling authentic Japanese white rice but it worked.

Then I had no sushi su, the vinegar mix used for seasoning the hot rice before it's rolled. This is very easy to make at home; the basic proportions are by volume:

9 measures of rice vinegar
3 measures of sugar
1 measure of salt
1 measure of mirin

However I had to substitute for the rice vinegar with cider vinegar. This is much stronger than rice vinegar, more acidic, so I replaced 3 measures of vinegar with water to reduce the acidity. I also cut right back on the salt, which I regret now from a taste point of view but wanted to be healthy, and I had no mirin. To give it that slightly raw alcoholic fragrance I used a teaspoonful of Cuban white rum but there's no doubt mirin would have worked better.

Gently heat the ingredients together in a thick bottomed pan until the sugar and salt have dissolved, no need to boil. This keeps quite well so you can make more than you need and keep the rest in a clean jar in the fridge for next time.

I had no pickled ginger. Root ginger, the younger and more tender the better, is easy (if frightening) to slice on the mandoline into very thin wafers. Use a little of your sushi su to cover them and allow to marinate for several hours. I made a small jar of this too, to see me through the next couple of weeks.

Not perfect, but it helped to satisfy my cravings for the exotic in this rural backwater of France.

Gardener's Soup

The summery weather of the weekend has left us. Now it's overcast and a little windy, much more autumnal, but there are still plenty of vegetables left to harvest in the plot. I made soup.



This is a mixture of red and green lentils, mung beans, pot barley and split green peas. I buy it as ready mix, a sort of slow food convenience package but it's easy to make your own favourite version with what you have in store. Choose pulses and grains that, like these, will cook in about the same time.

For this sort of wholefood soup it really helps if you can put the dried goods to soak for a few hours before starting the cooking, everything is softened and ready to go and the final dish seems more digestible for it. So put a couple of handfuls of mix in some clean water and leave to soak for at least two hours and ideally six.

An hour before you want to eat, start the soaked mix cooking. You can either cook it in its soaking water or do as I do and drain it, replacing the starchy soaking water with fresh. Add a vegetable stock cube and bring it all to a boil. Simmer for twenty minutes while you prepare the vegetables.



Although you can substitute any vegetables you like in this, the selection I chose today worked really well. I had some celeriac, carrot, potato and a small beetroot. The potato is a variety called Shetland Black, a heritage potato which is really floury. It has blue rings inside naturally and isn't going off! I also used a large clove of garlic, finely sliced.

Cut everything into small cubes no bigger than a pea. When your pulses and cereals have cooked for 20 minutes add the vegetables to the pot and bring back to a simmer.

There is no added oil or fat in this recipe and no need for extra seasoning if your stock cube is, as mine was, a bit salty, but taste it to test and add a sprinkle of salt and pepper if you think it needs it.

When the vegetables are cooked, you're ready. Ladle into a soup bowl, get some crusty bread to dip and tuck in.

Florentine Parasols

Parasol mushroom caps on a bed of spinach with a rich tarragon flavoured bechamel sauce.

This didn't really work as I intended so I'm not going to bother with the recipe, but it was such a pretty idea and photographed so well I thought I'd put it up just to record the effort.

Déjeuner sur les légumes

Such lovely summery weather today that a salad is entirely appropriate.

Couscous with avocado and black olives, supported by radishes, shallots and leafy greens from the garden in a lemony french dressing. Eaten by the vegetable patch under the blazing sun with a glass of good red. Bliss.

Fun with Foraging

Anyone who reads my other blog will have noticed I've become obsessed with wild fungi at the moment. Today I was lucky enough to chance upon some of the most edible of wild foods, the Parasol mushroom.



It's hard to mistake these for anything poisonous in Europe but if you're lucky enough to find some, check with someone who knows or a good book before proceeding.



The parasol mushroom has thin, delicately flavoured flesh which does not discolour when cut. Because its flavour is so mild it should be cooked quickly without other flavourings, and because it is so tender it's ideal for making into Fritters or Tempura if you're feeling fancy.

My favourite tempura batter is made with beer, a fine light lager for preference with just enough flour whisked in to make a thin creamy emulsion.

Brush your mushrooms off (or wash if they are very dirty) and remove the stalk. Divide the caps into quarters and dip into the batter. They're very light so you'll need to spoon the liquid over to get a good covering.

Deep fry in nice hot oil (not smoking, of course) until the batter is just turning golden. Lift from the oil and drain, salting immediately they come from the pan.

Because I'm very taken with the concept of wild food I decided to serve these on a bed of chickweed, which is currently running riot in the cleared patches of my vegetable beds. Cut a nice bunch, lightly dress with a few drops of sesame oil and use as a bed for four or five pieces of Parasol Fritter. Serve with a wedge of lemon. Makes a lovely starter for an autumn themed dinner party.

The Long Baguette of Lunch

Radish, Tomato, Avocado all sliced and layered into a baguette with Aubergine caviar as a spread.

Cherry Coloured Coleslaw

So many leftovers and cooking experiments have seen me overeating for the last few days. For supper today then I decided to go raw and vegetable.

This coleslaw is made with red cabbage, carrots, apples and shallots all grown here in our garden.



I grated the vegetables fairly finely using the very scary mandoline. It's a great tool but last time I used it I cut myself so I was being extra specially careful today.

Then I mixed everything together with a dressing made of 1 tbsp. soy mayo, a Bjorg branded one that I don't like much, a small pot of soya yoghurt, a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard, a pinch of salt and a splash each of cider vinegar and soy sauce. Not very exciting or innovative but quite healthy and guess what, enough for leftovers tomorrow as well!

Not really Nachos

I was trying out the recipe for corn chips from the excellent Mas du Diable site. The chips have a lovely taste but I didn't really pull off an impressive execution. They stuck to the foil, browned unevenly and took longer to cook than expected, probably due to my temperamental oven.

To serve with them I'd made a Salsa Verde, tomatilloes, avocado, garlic, lemon juice, the works but then wondered if I could use up some of my leftovers - that Colby uncheese is still hanging around and will have to be binned in the next couple of days.

So I give you Nachos, of a sort at any rate. Corn chips, layered with Salsa Verde, Spicy Tomato Ketchup and Colby uncheese warmed through...



It all tastes surprisingly good, but I'm not expecting to win awards for presentation or photography today. Dear me, no.

Not a food post at all

If you've arrived looking for seed swaps, my bad, the post you are looking for is not here.

Try The Catstripe - Seed Exchange. See you there!

Three Sisters Chowder

A warming soup made with the vegetables of the Three Sisters growing plan, pumpkin, beans and sweetcorn. I'd love to be able to say all the vegetables were grown here but the deer (or possibly the stray dog) ate my corn, which was already pretty stunted from poor soil and hail attack early in the season so I had to take recourse to a tin.

Prepare your beans. I have undried shelling beans from my climbing haricots at the moment which just need to be parboiled for a few minutes before use. If you are using dried beans then you will need to soak them and cook them until soft before starting. Or you could use a can! Observant viewers will see I had a couple of bean pods still tender enough to include whole but they're not essential.

Chop up an onion finely and sweat in a little oil. Add cubed pumpkin pieces - I used a variety called Melonette Jaspée de Vendée, a small fruited very sweet pumpkin but whatever you have will do - a couple of handfuls for two big bowls of soup, so you won't use a whole fruit. Stir around in the oniony oil and then add hot water to cover. Allow to simmer, 15-20 minutes, until the pumpkin is soft. Whizz up with the hand blender to a creamy smooth stock.

Add your beans and corn and bring back to a simmer for a few minutes. As I said, I used tinned corn but it would be infinitely better with the grains freshly cut from a sweet milky cob. Season with salt and pepper. Enjoy.

Lomo Saltado

It was a comment made on A Vegan called Bacon that started my research into the Peruvian dish, Lomo Saltado. Somehow I'd never come across it before but once I read about it, well, I had to have it.

Lomo means back in Peruvian Spanish and the Peruvians don't really seem to mind what sort of back they make jump* for this dinner although beef is most often mentioned in the literature. So, since they don't mind, I'm not going to retitle this No Lomo Saltado, it's just Lomo Saltado made with a small back of tofu.

Imagine a saucy stir fry rich with tomatoes, onions and herbs mixed with a large portion of chips and served with rice. The gravy from the tofu moistens the chips, the rice stretches everything out so it's not too strong. Isn't that just delicious? You'll be making it for yourself within a week I guarantee.



I won't give you quantities. This would have been plenty for two served with rice. I didn't have any rice because I'm already overloaded with leftovers but I ate the lot and I may die.

Slice some firm tofu thinly and marinate for half an hour in some soy sauce, a splash of vinegar and a few drops of sesame oil.

Meanwhile make some chips. I made thin french fried style but chunky chips might have been even better. Cook until crisp and then drain well and keep warm.

In a lightly oiled pan sauté some onions, a little garlic and a few cumin seeds. Add the drained strips of tofu and stir fry until the tofu is browning. Add a chopped tomato or two and some finely sliced sweet pepper (I didn't have any and used a handful of immature chillies but make sure they're not too hot if you do this) and stir again, then toss in the rest of the marinade to make a sauce. Stir in some chopped green herbs, parsley and coriander to taste. If it's a bit dry add some water, tomato juice, ketchup diluted with water, whatever to make sure there are few spoonsful of sauce lapping around the tofu and vegetables.

Pile your chips on a plate, top with tofu stir fry and pop a portion of white rice on the side. Total gratification will be yours.

*Originally in this post I had misremembered the name as Lomo Saltando, Jumping Back. In my mind that seemed quite reasonable, like a French Sauté. After I checked, nothing makes sense any more but see Soja's comment which explains everything!

It's my party

and I'll cry if I want to.



This rather splendid beast was the present that my son and his father gave me. I used it for the first time today and it is good. If I had to find a fault it would be the rather weedy and difficult to control toggle switch which I feel sure I will break before too long but it should be easy enough to replace.

With it I made a batch of the Colby Uncheese from the Uncheese Cookbook as quickly as you like and very effectively.



I just wish it could have helped me with my birthday cake which turned into a sorry mess of a thing. Still, it tastes o.k.



And so another year commences...