Sweet and Savoury treats

Today we are "confined to barracks" by the snow. My planned trip to Edinburgh failed to materialise because my flight was cancelled - part of the major disruption at Heathrow airport, which I'm sure you all heard about.

Snow on the roof-tiles : a study in symmetry

In circumstances like this we did what any sensible people would do: spent the day cooking and eating! To be fair, most of the cookery was done by Jane (my turn will come at Dinner time: we're planning to have Mixed Game hotpot, with Spring Greens, which is very much in my department); my role during the morning session was to record the proceedings...

First on the agenda was a batch of Mince Pies. I'm not going to provide a recipe for this very well-known item. Suffice it to say that contrary to what its name suggests a Mince Pie does not these days contain any mince (as in "minced meat"), although in its original form it did. Apparently the spices used in these things were originally added to disguise the strong flavour of some rather rank meat remaining from animals that had been slaughtered a couple of months previously, at the beginning of Autumn! A modern Mince Pie is a sweet item - basically a pastry casing filled with "Mincemeat" which is made with suet, or vegetable shortening if you prefer, dried fruit and spices, usually moistened with brandy or another similar spirit. In Britain, the Mince Pie is traditionally eaten at Christmas-time, accompanied by Brandy Butter.



After the Mince Pies were done, Jane made a batch of Palmiers.

The Palmier is made from puff pastry in a distinctive shape said to resemble palm leaves, or perhaps an elephant's ears. It is normally made as a sweet item, but can also be done as a savoury. On this occasion Jane decided to use some of our home-made pesto from the freezer to make savoury Pesto Palmiers. This technique works equally well with a filling of cinnamon & brown sugar; any type of jam; sundried tomato paste; tapenade; grated hard cheese; or even Marmite - pretty much anything you like really!

Stage 1. Roll out some puff pastry to form a long thin sheet. Spread the pesto over the pastry

Stage 2. Roll up the pastry from both edges equally, to form a long thin sausage shape, and cut this into discs about 2cm thick and lay them flat on a baking sheet covered with silicon paper.

Stage 3. Bake at about 200C for about 15 mins (keep an eye on them to ensure they don't burn. They need to end up golden coloured, not dark brown). This is what the finished product looks like:-

We had a few of these at lunchtime, served as croutons with a bowl of French Onion soup. It was a fabulous combination! [Note added the next day:- These Palmiers are also good with today's soup - Tomato!]

Tomato soup with Pesto Palmiers

That's it for today folks, now dinner beckons...

Snow Scenes - Vol II

The snow has returned to our part of the world with a vengeance. Today it snowed really hard for about three hours, and with the ground being so cold the snow has settled immediately. Some of you may have seen on the News that Heathrow airport has been closed for much of the day - which is a pretty rare occurrence -- and we are only about 25 miles from Heathrow. My forthcoming trip to Edinburgh (supposedly starting tomorrow afternoon) is looking even more under threat. Today, fortunately, we don't have to go anywhere, so we are staying at home and admiring the scenery.

This speaks for itself I think

Shall we eat in the garden tonight, Dear?

My Volvo is probably feeling perfectly at home in these conditions

Even the compost bin looks appealing in the snow

Bay tree decorated for Christmas

Rosemary - a Mediterranean herb!

And I don't even have a cat...

Mark's Oriental Chicken Soup

I am very fond of soup - both eating it and making it. There's something therapeutic about soup. It somehow manages to be soothing as well as nourishing. Ask anyone recovering from an illness what they most fancy eating when they start to regain their appetite, and nine times out of ten it will be Chicken Soup!

Here's my recipe for an oriental-style chicken soup.

Ingredients (serves two)
1 litre best chicken stock - preferably home-made
1 chicken breast, skinned, lightly poached, and sliced
One 2.5cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and cut into very thin matchsticks (Juliennes)
1 medium-sized chilli -- as hot as you like -- de-seeded and roughly chopped
100 grams Beansprouts
3 Spring Onions, finely sliced (don't discard the green bits!)
A quarter of a Chinese Cabbage (What we in the UK call "Chinese Leaves"), coarsely shredded
[Unfortunately I couldn't get Chinese Leaves this time, so I substituted the inner leaves of some Spring Greens]
2 medium-sized mushrooms, thinly sliced
100 grams thin Chinese-style egg noodles
A pinch of 5-spice powder
Salt and Pepper

Method

• Put the stock in a large pan, together with the ginger, chilli and 5-spice powder, and a fair bit of salt and pepper (You could also add some garlic if you like, though I find it easily overpowers this soup.)
• Bring to the boil, then turn off the heat and allow to cool
• Leave for about an hour or so, to allow the flavourings to infuse into the stock
• Cook the noodles as per manufacturer's instructions, rinse in cold water, and set aside
• Shortly before serving time, prepare the other ingredients, while warming up the stock
• Fill some large deep bowls with the other ingredients, in this order
• Chinese cabbage
• Noodles
• Chicken
• Mushrooms
• Beansprouts
• Spring Onions 
• When the stock is piping hot, pour it into the bowls - hopefully there will be enough to cover everything without "drowning" it!
• The hot stock will quickly cook the vegetables, without making them go mushy, and warm up the chicken and noodles
• Serve immediately

What could be easier? It's very healthy too -- lots of veg, but no added fat.

Graffiti Restaurant, New York

In March this year Jane and I went over to New York for the wedding of our daughter Fiona to Juan Fernando Nunez. Actually it was the the first of their TWO weddings -- a complicated situation, difficult to explain. Simply put, Juan got posted from New York to Geneva, potentially throwing into disarray all the previously-made plans for a wedding in upstate New York in June, so they decided to have an official wedding at City Hall in Manhattan, and stick with the arrangements for a big family occasion in June, despite the fact that not only relations and friends, but also Bride and Groom would have to fly in from different continents!

Anyway, we stayed with Fiona and Juan in NY for a couple of days, and they took us round to eat at some of their favourite restaurants. One of these was the unique Graffiti restaurant at 224 East 10th Street [See their website http://www.graffitinyc.com/], run by the very unconventional Jehangir Mehta. His cuisine is showcased in a book called "Mantra - The Rules of Indulgence", which is a highly desirable object in its own right, even if you have never eaten in the restaurant.

Turmeric Yorkshire Puddings

Graffiti is the smallest restaurant I have ever eaten in. I think it seats about 12 people. You sit at tiny high tables, sharing with whoever else happens to be in. You cannot have "your own" table. The decor of the place is shall we say, eclectic. A mixture of things from all over the world, as far as we could tell, and all delightfully unpretentious - the place-mats on the tables were pages from a Chinese-language newspaper! The main emphasis of the restaurant is on the food and drink and not on flashy decor. Even the exterior of the restaurant is very low-key: we had some difficulty even locating it.

The chef / proprietor, Jehangir, was incredibly welcoming. He greeted us (and treated us throughout the meal) as if we were old friends. When he discovered that Fiona and Juan were to be married the next day he provided us all with champagne, on the house!

The food was absolutely exquisite, although served in very small quantities. The way it was presented was as communal dishes for all members of your party to share. Each dish was delivered separately (the kitchen was so small I think they could only manage to cook one dish at a time), and the staff explained in great detail what the dish was, and often how it was made. I don't remember exactly what we ate, and I have been looking at the menu on the Graffiti website to remind myself. The trouble is, I now want to go back there again! If my memory serves me right, the dishes we ate included (but were not confined to):-

Chilli pork dumplings with grapefruit confit
Graffiti burger, with fingerling potatoes and chipotle mayonnaise
Duck portobello confit, with mustard onion gratinee
Warm truffle almond strawberries, with black pepper ice cream
Three cheeses (I forget what they were -- but they were GOOD!)

Jehangir Mehta's style is certainly not conventional. He challenged all our preconceived ideas about flavour combinations, but I have to say, all his dishes worked really well, and there was nothing that we ate that we disliked in any way.

I have no hesitation in saying that if you ever find yourself in Manhattan, you really should try to find the time to visit Graffiti!

Birds - a sudden influx

Please can someone tell me what this bird is? I saw lots of them at the top of Blackcomb Mountain, near Whistler in Canada, whilst on holiday earlier this year...

Actually, that was just a ploy to get us onto the subject of birds...

Today my garden has been teeming with birds. I don't know why there have been so many; it's not as if I have put out any new and particularly attractive food for them. Because I was conscious that there was a greater than normal amount of bird activity today, I decided to list the different varieties I spotted:

1. Robin  - very annoyed by the influx of interlopers to "his" territory
2. Blackbird - chirping furiously - also apparently considers my garden to be his
3. Thrush - looked panicky; evidently startled by the masses of other birds today
4. Bluetit - tiny and acrobatic, perching delicately on the flimsiest of twigs
5. Great Tit -  several of them - the most frequent visitors
6. Dunnock - shy and wary, flitting around mostly on the ground underneath the bushes
7. Collared Dove - a pair, as usual. They're a very devoted couple!
8. Goldfinch - a huge flock of these; maybe 20 at once, which is really unusual. Normally only see 1 or 2
9. Jay - a very wary and nervous visitor. Swoops in for a quick take-away morsel
10. Magpie - probably 4 or 5 - noisy and aggressive as ever
11. Wood Pigeon - dozens of them, as always (surprised they haven't attacked my cabbages - everything else has!)

Most of these were in the garden simultaneously, or within a very short period at about 0930!

Other birds I frequently see in my garden (but not today):-
Chaffinch - there are usually plenty of these around
Greenfinch - occasional visitors in Winter
Nuthatch - only see these three or four times a year
Green Woodpecker - more often heard than seen
Spotted Woodpecker
Wren
Starling
Jackdaw
Long-tailed Tit - usually arrives in a flock of maybe 10 or 12
Sparrow - not sure which type (probably House-Sparrow)

Defeated? Never!

I despair of ever getting any Winter cabbages. In late July I sowed some seeds of the "Tundra" cabbage variety. When they germinated, I kept only the best ones, and potted-up eight, which I thought would be plenty for my small plot. Four seedlings eventually went into each of two of my raised beds.



14 August


Since then, these cabbages have been through a whole series of trials and tribulations: the young seedlings were attacked by slugs (one didn't survive); they were attacked by caterpillars (three were stripped down to little more than bare stalks); they were buried and squashed under several inches of snow (which broke off many of their leaves)...

The latest in the series of assaults they have had to endure is that of the foxes. This is not a one-off event. Over a period of several weeks, the foxes have attacked my fleece covers again and again in their eagerness to get at what lies inside. I have repeatedly done my best to repair the damage - replanting the dug-up cabbages (several times); patching the ever-deteriorating fleece with odd bits and pieces, trying to plug the holes. I've been fighting a losing battle. Sometimes it has just been a question of re-planting an uprooted cabbage or two...

Other times it has been more serious. This is the scene that greeted me today:

Fleece ripped to shreds

Cabbages flattened, uprooted, leaves broken off

I was ready to lose heart. I actually dug up the remains of the four Tundra cabbages in this bed

 ...and put them in the compost bin. I then sat down, rather dispirited, to write this blogpost, and then I had second thoughts. Maybe, just maybe, those cabbages would survive one more re-planting if only I gave them a chance. The brassica family is a resilient bunch and I ought to let them have a try. So off I went to rescue the plants from the compost bin. I tidied them up as best I could and re-planted them again (very deeply). The fleece was completely beyond redemption, so I resorted to the netting I had used earlier in the year. This won't provide any protection from the weather, but I'm hoping it will keep the foxes off. Maybe at the weekend I'll be able to buy some more fleece (and put it on over the top of the netting?)

Re-planted and netted

The three remaining Tundra in the other covered raised bed are looking marginally better, though with all the constant re-planting they have endured they haven't had much of a chance to form any heart! I may end up using their leaves as "Spring Greens" or simply as an ingredient in some soup...

At least I haven't given up yet! We gardeners are a persistent breed.

Lesser-known ingredients: Argan oil

A short while ago Jane won a bottle of Argan oil in a competition. Prior to this we had not been much aware of this product. It is quite expensive to buy in the UK - hence the fact that it was being offered as a competition prize - and you seldom see it in the shops. I suppose you could get it in an upmarket Deli, or perhaps in Fortnum & Mason or Harrods!

I did a bit of research on Argan oil and found that it is produced from the fruit of a tree that grows predominantly in Morocco. It is used for a variety of culinary, cosmetic and medicinal purposes. Truly a Wonder product! If you look closely at the label of our bottle you will see that it is billed as "Huile du siecle" (Oil of the century). [Double-click the photo to enlarge it]

Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry for it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argan_oil

On one of my training courses recently I had a delegate whose family is from Morocco, and he told me that the Moroccan government subsidises the production of Argan trees, because they want to boost the export of the oil, which presumably is more or less unique to Morocco. He said (not sure if this is true...) that the government will give each person a free plot of land as long as they commit to growing Argan trees on it.

Wikipedia tells me that "For centuries before modern times, the Berbers (indigenous people of Morocco) of this area would collect undigested argan pits from the waste of goats which climb the trees to eat their fruit. The pits were then ground and pressed to make the nutty oil used in cooking and cosmetics. However, the oil used in cosmetic and culinary products available for sale today has most likely been harvested and processed with machines in a verifiably clean and sanitary way." Sounds interesting - a bit like that "Civet Cat" coffee that you can buy.

Anyway, we have used the oil for culinary purposes, not cosmetic. You can evidently use it in circumstances where you would use your best Extra Vigin olive oil -- i.e. perhaps in a salad dressing, but not just for frying!
It has a taste that is different to olive oil. Hard to describe, but definitely "Middle Eastern" rather than European. Does anyone else use this stuff, or know about it?