Green-lipped mussels

Dinner of linguine with green-lipped mussels from the Mersea Island Company Shed. Steamed for a few minutes in some butter, garlic, chilli flakes and white wine. Perfectly paired with a lovely summer evening. Windows open, salty breeze, mouthfuls of sea. Mmmmm.

Elderflower in the woods

Picked a bag full on the walk home from campus. Cordial steeping now... I can't wait.

Spicy tomato, chickpea and spinach stew

A regular: Moro-inspired stew of tomatoes, chickpeas and spinach. Aromatics: garlic, mild Spanish smoked paprika, cumin, ground coriander seeds and a bit of harissa. Sometimes some fennel or caraway seeds as well. With homemade sourdough bread for soaking up the leftover sauce. Really good with some chorizo through the sauce or sharp cheese crumbled on top as well.

pizza

if this making-pizza-at-home stays a regular, we're gonna need some bigger plates!

I re-discovered my favorite dough recipe, jamie oliver's, which comes down to this: mix 6,5 dl hand-warm water, 4 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon sugar and two 7 gr sachets of dry yeast. in a big mixing bowl, pur 1 kg strong flour and 1 tablespoon salt. make a little well in the flour and stir in the water/yeast/sugar/olive oil mixture. knead until the dough is soft and supple and feels alive. cover the bowl with a tea towel and let the dough rise in a warm spot for an hour.

toppings on the pizza above: a teaspoon of pesto mixed with a tablespoon of tomato passata, thinly sliced button mushrooms, prosciutto, mozzarella - and after the pizza came out of the oven, some pepper and a handful of rucola.

roasted beets and ricotta pasta

roast some new beets in a little package made from aluminium foil, put in some olive oil and thyme.

The art of baking bread (amateur rundown)

Well, that was 2011, and a happy new year to you all! As promised, today is for bread. Fortunately, the upside of our long break is that you have all fed your sourdough starters to a happy and healthy state, ready for some serious baking. Right?

So. What I’m not going to do is talk you through baking a bread. Really, there is just too much to say, and at the same time talking till the cows come home is just no use when the goal is to produce a nice loaf of bread. As with raising the starter, I think the best way to go is to pick somewhere to start and commit to looking up any problems you encounter or questions you have. Forums on bread-baking websites can be a huge help, and I would love to have a discussion here if anyone has questions or hints to share. What I will do is give a small list of things that would have been really helpful to know when I started baking. (Whether they’d have made a difference is another matter, particularly with regard to the fretting…)

So here goes: A Few Things I Have Learned, or: The Art of Baking Bread (Amateur Rundown):

1. Patience. There are so many elements that feature into what kind of bread you end up with, and you just can’t get them all right at the same time. It takes time to learn, and probably some barely edible breads (stock up on soup ingredients), but for me, anyway, a few adjustments along the way all of a sudden yielded a bread that totally blew me away.
2. Don’t fret about the stuff you can’t control. Sure, a wood-burning oven with massive bread stones and steam injection would produce a crust that would make you swoon. But your own shaky oven might surprise you. Make it work!
3. Don’t slavishly follow the recipe. Depending on your particular brand of flour, you may need as much as 10% less or more water. Start by holding back at least 10% of the water, and add more as necessary. This is a tricky one though, because sourdough is relatively wet; probably wetter than you’d think is right, and often practice is just as useful in being able to handle wet sticky dough as more flour. My guideline is to use just enough flour to make sure that I can ultimately shape the dough well. This means that the dough is still very wet and sticky when it has just been brought together, and just soft after kneading. If you’re done kneading and after resting the ball for a moment you still can’t pick it up without having it stick to your fingers, introduce some more flour.
4. I’m a convert to the slap-and-fold method of kneading. It works really well for sticky, wet, rye sourdough. There’s an amazing video here in which you can witness the transformation, by means of bare hands only, of a sticky blob into an irresistibly soft, supple, smooth dough. Bread magic!
5. I believe that getting better at shaping the bread has made the single biggest difference from the first bread I baked to what comes out of my oven now. It really makes the difference between a blob that just spreads out a bit further as it bakes and a nicely shaped loaf that is subject to the magical phenomenon of “oven spring”. Watch some videos that show you the tricks (I found this one helpful). Once you get the hang of shaping, it will also be easier to judge the consistency of your dough. Basically, you want to keep the dough as wet as possible without it being so sticky that you can’t get good surface tension on the shaped ball.

Sourdough miche bread

Get the recipe (and some gorgeous photos) here!

- Naomi

the perfect january lunch

And so we meet again in a bright new year. What have you been eating lately? I've returned to this chickpea lemon soup - I made it when I wanted a starter one evening, but liked it even more when I had the leftovers for lunch the next day. It might be the perfect january lunch, hearty and comforting and bright at the same time.

Chickpea Soup with Lemon
adapted from Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Heat some olive oil in a big pan and add a diced onion, a diced carrot and a couple of diced celery stalks. Let them cook on a low heat, until they are translucent and soft. Then add a minced clove of garlic, a pinch of cayenne pepper (or more, if you want to, or a crushed red chili) and a teaspoon of toasted, freshly ground cumin seeds. Let it all get comfortable for a minute, then add (the contents of) a (drained)* can of chickpeas. Then add 3/4 liter vegetable or chicken stock. Let it come to the boil, then turn the heat down and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Off the heat, blend the soup until it's smooth. Then add two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. Add more stock or water if you think it needs it, and check for seasoning.

Serve with some chopped cilantro on top, or (as I did) with a sprinkling of toasted cumin seeds and toasted sesame seeds. Just toast them together in a dry pan for a couple minutes, making sure they don't burn. The cumin seeds will burn before the sesame seeds do, so be mindful of that.

For some asian fusion, serve in a japanse bowl, alongside a chapati. Oh yes.

* Sorry about that. You know what to do with a can of chickpeas.

- Anne

Down to the crumb

For some reason, being busy and stressed always makes me want to make things. I guess the feeling of productivity eases the panic of having-still-so-much-to-do-and-not-knowing-whether-it-is-even-possible-much-less-when-the-next-opportunity-for-sleep-might-come, even if the thing produced in no way advances the goal that gave rise to the stress in the first place. In that frame of mind I have in the past few weeks made chocolate granola, cinnamon muesli and yoghurt, started up a sourdough culture and baked a few gigantic loaves of bread.

I was pleasantly surprised, actually, by the yoghurt making, which turned out to be dead easy and super satisfying. But the real revelation was the bread.

Let me back up here. I live in England. The English are obsessed. with. soft. bread. Sticky, flavourless bread. Palate-suffocating bread. Bread that can only be tolerated after toasting – and even then, barely. Bread that is mouldy before it even begins to go stale. Aisles upon aisles of extra soft white bread. But no decent loaf in sight. Ironically, what triggered my attempts to bake bread was finally finding a loaf that I did love: a sourdough rye bread from my veg box suppliers Abel & Cole. It wasn’t even that switching to it would have been unaffordable, but somehow this bread got me thinking. Perhaps I was just curious how sourdough gets made, and what the difference with a regular bread is, and then found out from the internets that starting a culture without all kinds of fancy measuring devices isn’t actually that impossible. Perhaps it came up in one of those BBC cookery programmes that are so nice to watch during dinner. I honestly don’t remember. But somehow I decided I wanted to give it a go.

Now there are really two elements to baking sourdough bread. Raising the culture, and baking the bread. Fun fact: you’ll have a new family member to take care of for several weeks before you even get to the latter stage at all. Yup, that’s a warning: raising a sourdough starter requires some serious patience and commitment. You will also have to get over the pain of throwing away substantial quantities of flour in the first month, unless you want to commit to feeding your household / office / workplace pancakes for breakfast every day for three weeks.

It’s all worth it.

There are a few different ways to start a sourdough starter, and if you’re interested in some live-action controversy you only have to google “wild yeast starter” and indulge in the results. Basically, a starter is just flour plus water plus lots of time, but depending on whom you speak to the best results are clearly obtained by kick-starting the culture by adding grapes or cabbage, or by substituting the water with boiled pineapple juice. The world of sourdough bakers is also divided into feeders and fridgers and freezers and many more exciting categories. Becoming a bread nerd is easy. Anyway, despite the oceans of information, so is establishing a culture. Just pick somewhere to start and commit to looking up any problems you encounter or questions you have.

So without further ado… here’s Naomi’s Rules for Starting a Sourdough Starter:

1. First, go look at these pictures here and here. That’s the goal. Four weeks. Drooling yet?
2. You need kitchen scales. Even if they’re just the £4 ones from Tesco. You’ll thank yourself. And this is coming from someone who has been baking cakes and pies for years and years without any measuring device beyond a warped plastic jug. Honestly, just do it.
3. Buy a large bag of wholegrain rye flour and a large bag of unbleached white flour (must be organic). Try to get fresh batches. (While you’re at it, get some wholemeal flour too – you’ll need it once you are ready to actually bake a bread.) Keep your flour in the fridge in a plastic bag (at room temp the oils will go rancid pretty quickly, gross).
4. Find a container that has transparent and more-or-less straight sides and a lid (an empty yoghurt cup works well). It needs to have space for the starter to triple.
5. Now for the action. The basic drill is this: every 12 hours, discard two-thirds of the culture, then “feed” 1 part culture with 1 part flour and 1 part water. Easy, huh? Ok, you need to have culture first before you can discard any. So the first day: mix 100g lukewarm water + 50g white flour + 50g rye flour, put in container, mark top of mixture with some tape (yes on the outside of the box) so progression can be checked. (I pretty much follow the instructions given here; they’re along the lines of how I ended up raising my starter, plus it’s the place where I got the recipe for the first bread that blew my socks off. The instructions are probably clearer there anyway. Fewer tangents, too.) It’s important that the flour is organic, because you want it to have yeasts on it that will mature and multiply and eventually raise your bread. (I always thought sourdough bread did not have any yeast, but it turns out I was WRONG!) Leave the mixture in a warm place (boiler cupboard) for 24 hours. After 24 hours…
6. …measure out 50g or 75g of culture and discard the rest (don’t be tempted to use it in the first few days – bacteria etc.). “Feed” the culture with equal amounts of water and flour. So take 50g starter, mix with 50g water, then mix in 50g flour (25g rye and 25g white). (Or 75g + 75g + 75g… you get the point.) Put back in its warm place.
7. You will now need to repeat step 6 twice a day for a month. That’s right. Four weeks of feedings, every twelve hours. Time carefully. (The good news is, you can start baking a lot sooner than that. Ten days or so and you should be ready to go. The other twenty days are just to get the starter stronger, but they do make a difference!)
8. Resist the temptation to judge your culture too soon. In the first few days, it might first rise a lot and then very little, or it may not smell very great. Just keep up with it for a few feedings and see where things land. If the mixture separates, develops a layer of liquid on top and smells of alcohol, it probably means you forgot to feed it. Just feed normally as soon as you can and don’t neglect it again.
9. After a few days, the culture should gradually start rising a bit more in between feedings. In a panic? See point 14.
10. Starter bubbly? Smells nice? Rises significantly between feedings, close to doubling in 12 hours? This should happen after five days or so. When it does, you’re ready to make some pancakes! Down to the recipe, go go go! (From this point onwards you can also switch to feeding with water and white flour only, though I still always use half rye.)
11. After 7–10 days of twice-daily feedings, the starter should be doubling (or almost doubling) in 8 hours. Congratulations! At this point, you can start baking bread with it. Make very sure, though, that you don’t accidentally use the entire starter for a bread!
12. After a month, the starter should be strong. If you wish, you can now put it in the fridge, taking it out to bake with and to feed every week or two weeks. Refrigerated starter may need one extra discard–feed–discard-cycle and some time in the warmth before it’s ready to be used for a bread. The starter will still rise and produce gas, so don’t put in too small a container, and put on any screw-top lids loosely.
13. I’d also put a back-up in the fridge: instead of discarding two-thirds of the starter when feeding, keep an extra 50g, feed normally, put in the fridge, and feed or replace every one or two months. (I usually just replace it every time I feed the main starter.)
14. If something goes wrong or doesn’t look quite right, just ask that pesky land shark (or Mr. Google).

Next week: the art of baking bread (Amateur Rundown).

Sourdough pancakes

The perfect way to make good use of starter that needs to be “discarded”. I always just eyeball the ingredients for these pancakes based on the consistency of the starter – so treat the recipe accordingly! Particularly, the amount of starter here is based on my 75g-routine and the leftover starter it produces – it could be any quantity. These pancakes can be made as soon as the sourdough starter is quite active, probably after five or six days. Until the starter is mature and very bubbly, the pancakes do need some extra help from another raising agent. Makes about five to seven American-style pancakes.

150g sourdough starter

1 large egg

about a tablespoon of sugar, maple syrup or honey

¼ teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (or baking powder)

some milk, if the mixture is very thick

cinnamon and/or ground ginger

Mix the starter with the sugar, maple syrup or honey, then beat in the egg. If the mixture is very thick, add a little bit of milk – keep in mind the mix will end up a lot lighter after the raising agent has done its work. The mixture should be easy to beat with a fork, but not very runny. Add the sodium bicarbonate / baking powder and leave for a few minutes. The mixture should rise, show a lot of bubbles, be very light and run off a ladle slowly. If it seems too dense still, add some more raising agent. Too runny, add some flour.

Pour about two-thirds of a large ladle of mixture into a well-seasoned or non-stick frying pan (I never use any extra oil or fat). The mix should spread out slowly into a circle (about 10-12cm / 4-5 inches in diameter) without losing all its height. Don’t mess with the cakes until the top is full of holes and almost dry. Then flip and cook till browned on both sides.

Some blueberries, ricotta and/or vanilla through the mixture are delicious too.

- Naomi

sushi bowl

dinner that's as comfy as my comfiest yoga pants, but that tastes better. also, considerably more nutricious. and more elegant.

sushi bowl
adapted from this recipe by the eternally magnificent heidi swanson.

ingredients
a cup of brown rice
4 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted
two sheets of nori
200 gr. firm tofu (I like the taifun brand tofu, 'japanese style'), cut in small strips or dice
an avocado, or half a cucumber
two teaspoons of genmai su (brown rice vinegar)
a tablespoon of shoyu soy sauce

cook the rice - put the cup of brown rice in a pan, and add two cups of water. bring to the boil, reduce the heat to the lowest flame, and let cook until the rice is, well, cooked.

meanwhile, toast the sesame seeds if you didn't buy them ready-toasted, and put them in a large serving bowl. tear the two sheets of nori to little pieces (immensly satisfying) and add those to the bowl as well. when the rice is done, let it steam off the heat. bake the tofu in a hot, dry frying pan, and slice the avocado or the cucumber into little slices. put the tofu and the rice in the bowl, and add the dressing of the genmai su and shoyu. heidi makes a wonderful citrus-y dressing for this, but on the kind of days when I ususally make this, those days where take-out lurks and I make this instead, I usually don't bother and just use the rice vinegar and soy sauce.

place the avocado or cucumber on top, and enjoy.

this is wonderful with japanese genmaicha tea, green tea with brown rice in it. that sounds strange, but believe me, it is wonderful - such a delicate yet strong flavour.

- anne

Dirty sticks and gnarly roots

Almost four months of veg boxes now, and I still get excited about opening the new box every Wednesday morning. And still almost every box has something in it that I’ve never cooked with before. This week, I had some red curly kale and surprise globe artichokes (as a replacement for leeks – nice deal!). Last week, there were dirty sticks and gnarly roots. And what do you know. They were delicious.

The dirty sticks turned out to be a vegetable more commonly known as black salsify. A first for me, but I’m hoping they will show up in my box again soon. The flavour of these couldn’t be more at odds with their appearance: they are delicate, mild, and definitely something special. Peeled and cooked the spears look like asparagus, and I think it was not just because of the visual resemblance that I thought they tasted like asparagus a bit as well. I had them with a piece of bavette steak I treated myself to, and the sticks had no problem holding their own against the grilled meat. Best meal of the week hands down.

The gnarly roots were Jerusalem artichokes. In the absence of smell as a guide you could easily mistake them for smooth-skinned ginger, but, much to my surprise, they actually did taste like artichokes, if rather less pronounced than their globe brothers. The most astonishing feat of these, though, was the hue they coloured the water over which I steamed them. One of the most stunning examples of that feeling that such a thing can surely not exist in nature. White flesh, no skin, and the water a bluish green of almost neon intensity. Fortunately the flavour was pretty out-of-this-world too.

Black salsify in a butter and lemon sauce

Inspired by a recipe in The Cranks Bible.

4–6 sticks of black salsify per person

some butter

juice of half a lemon

fresh flat-leaf parsley

First, peel the black salsify. This can be a bit tricky, since the roots tend to bleed a very sticky latex (only one of the dirty sticks gave me this treatment, but since I was stubborn and didn’t run the tap as I was peeling, it still took me five minutes to get the sticky residue off my fingers). Have a bowl of water with some lemon juice or vinegar ready, and immediately submerge every stick after peeling in order to stop it from going brown. Cut into 10cm pieces and boil or steam until tender but not bendy (5–10 minutes). Alternatively, if the sticks are thin, just give them a scrub, cut into pieces, boil or steam, then simply squeeze the root from its skin.

When the salsify is cooked, slowly melt a knob of butter with a bit of olive oil. Add the salsify, and a good squeeze of lemon, salt and black pepper to taste. Cook for a couple of minutes until the salsify is hot, then serve with the reduced sauce and some torn flat-leaf parsley sprinkled on top.

Super delicious with a mild smooth root veg mash and thinly sliced grilled steak.

Jerusalem artichoke salad with spinach and bacon

Jerusalem artichokes

a couple slices of bacon (back or streaky)

a generous salad bowl of spinach

a small handful of flat-leaf parsley

juice of half a lemon

Peel or wash the Jerusalem artichokes, then steam for about 10–12 minutes, until just tender. Crisp the bacon in a frying pan or on a griddle, an cut in slices while still warm (if you wait till they’re cool they’ll likely shatter). Wash the spinach and cut any very big leaves into smaller pieces. For the dressing, mix some olive or hazelnut oil, lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and pepper. For an extra citrusy kick, grate in some of the lemon zest. Cut the Jerusalem artichokes into thick slices and grill until they’re crispy on the outside (resist the temptation to move the pieces around as they cook). Mix into the salad and top with the bacon. Eat straight from the bowl with a fork only.

- Naomi

the granola type

when we started this blog, I promised myself it wouldn’t become the kind of blog where every post begins with an apology: “sorry for the lack of posts!” “I’m a bad blogger, I know.” but it’s been three weeks. sorry for the lack of posts, friends!

I’ve been making good use of my time though, by making about six batches of this granola. not that that took up all of the three weeks, in fact, actually preparing it took very little time. and then it just needed to sit in the oven for a bit.

time was also spent reading about this idea/challenge, to halve the grocery budget for the month, while still eating well - eating whole foods, lots of fresh veg, all the good stuff. I haven’t set myself such a challenge (yet), but it was interesting to see what kind of tricks people used to spend less money on food. the number one thing that everybody named: make a menu plan for the week. that way, you don’t buy food on a whim, and you’ll end up with less veggies in the fridge dying a slow and useless death. we've been trying it for a couple of weeks now, and it really works. it feels good to waste less (I hate chucking out food, but somehow it always just seemed to happen - going through the fridge and finding another lifeless paprika. or worse.), and frankly, to not always have to think about what we’re going to eat at the last minute. I can imagine it won’t work that way for everybody, that it might feel boring and inflexible - and there have been a fair few times when there has been a change in The Plan here. but there’s something about the easiness of even having a plan that’s working for me, right now.

the subject of money and the money spent on food is complicated and touchy. let me just say one thing: what I loved about the way heather writes about this budget challenge is the way she approached it, from the point of a sense of abundance rather than from the viewpoint of deprivation. making this granola might not be the cheapest food ever. but I sure like spending that money at the healthfood store better than giving it to Kellogg’s.

chocolate granola

adapted from here

heat the oven up to 150 degrees celsius.

mix 300 gr oat flakes, 65 gr chopped almonds, 50 gr spelt puffs (or rice puffs, or millet puffs, whichever are easily available to you) and 65 gr pumpkin seeds. spread out onto a lined baking tray.

in a small pan, heat up 1/3 cup water, 1/3 cup honey, 2 tablespoons soft brown sugar, 1 tablespoon butter or oil, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of real vanilla. let the butter and the sugar melt. then pour the mixture over the oat flakes, and stir to combine.

put in the oven for about 45 minutes. stir every once in a while, to make sure everything bakes evenly.

let cool completely, then decant into a glass container (or, in our house, in a huge old tupperware), and add 80 gr chopped dark chocolate and a handful of raisins.

this recipe is pretty adaptable. you can use 2/3 cup maple syrup instead of the water and honey, add some coconut flakes, experiment with the nuts or seeds you put in, maybe substitute dried cranberries for the raisins... enjoy!

- anne

Action to follow

Lots of things going on, but we haven’t forgotten about Anenna! Tomorrow two brand new posts. We can’t wait to be back!

Curry fest

It was a good night. Naomi was back in the Netherlands for a few days (she lives in Britain now), and the rest of the events unfolded naturally. We rounded up the gang of usual suspects, set a date, planned a menu, and started cooking. It felt comfortable in the way that a gathering of old friends feels comfortable - people you’ve known for years, people who’ve known you for years. You know what their story is, at least some parts of it, you remember who they were all those years ago. You can only wonder who they think you were all those years ago. And hope you (meaning we) will get together every so often for many years to come, and have a good night like this night was.

The menu

Pappadums

Mango chutney

Chick pea and pumpkin curry

Curry beef from Trinidad

Courgette and green pepper sabzi

Cardamom and lime rice

Chapatis

Carrot and sultana raita

Cucumber raita

Chocolate cake with tipsy cream and green chai

Curry beef – Trinidad

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Bible.

this dish, the aptly if a tad syntactically unexpected yet unimaginatively named ‘Curry Beef’, was a collaborative effort: I made the marinade, naomi cooked the dish. it sounds like a lot of work, because there are a lot of ingredients and the marinating and cooking take a long time. all the ingredients for the marinade you chop up in one go in the food processor, and during the time the beef is marinating, and later, simmering away, you’re not really doing much of anything.

in other words, try this.

for the marinade

6tbsp chopped onion

2 spring onions

2 large cloves of garlic

2tbsp parsley

2–3tbsp fresh coriander (cilantro)

1tbsp fresh thyme / ½ tsp dried thyme

some chillies (see recipe)

½ tsp ground ginger

for the curry

450g stewing beef

2–3 cloves of garlic

1tsp hot curry powder

500–900ml beef stock (see recipe)

1tsp ground cumin

2tsp amchar masala (ingredients below)

amchar masala (a lot of it)

4tbsp coriander seeds


1tbsp cumin seeds


4tsp black peppercorns


2tsp fennel seeds


2tsp brown mustard seeds (we used black)


2tsp fenugreek

preparing the marinade:

put the following in a food processor: 6 tablespoons chopped onion (I used two medium-ish onions), 2 large garlic cloves, 2 spring onions, already chopped in smaller pieces (just use the white and light green parts), 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley, 2–3 tablespoons finely chopped coriander (cilantro), 1 tablespoon fresh thyme, or ½ teaspoon dried...

I pause here, because we are at the chilli.

madhur stipulates ¼ congo pepper (handle with care) or 3 bird’s eye chillies.

so, 3 bird’s eye chillies to equal one fourth of a congo pepper? quite.

I used one pretty mild chilli instead.

where was I? so, as much chilli as you think you and/or your intended audience can stand, basically, and then ½ teaspoon ground ginger, ½ teaspoon salt, and some fresly ground black pepper.

add two tablespoons of water, and blend into a smooth paste.

cut 450g stewing beef up into 2½ cm pieces (madhur doesn’t say whether the pieces need to be 2½ cm square, or just strips - I cut the meat into squares), and place in a bowl. mix in the marinade, cover the bowl, and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes to 3 hours (we left it for, gasp, 5 hours. the meat did not complain, nor did we).

Then, the cooking. Over to Naomi:

First, make the amchar masala: dry-roast all the spices in a heavy-bottomed pan for a couple of minutes, cool, and grind in a spice grinder (clean coffee grinders work too). The amounts above make a lot of spice blend (keeps in an airtight container) and require a lot of grinding. Idling kitchen companions are a plus here.

Amchar masala ground, pour three tablespoons of vegetable oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Add two or three cloves of garlic, crushed to a paste with some salt. Stir through 1tbsp of hot curry powder, and carefully soften the garlic without browning (or, if you can stand browned garlic, follow MJ’s instructions and let it brown). Up the heat, add the beef with the marinade and stir for a minute, then let it heat through for ten minutes with the pan covered on a low heat (the mixture will be fairly wet because of the marinade). Then season with salt, and add 1tsp of ground cumin, 2tsp amchar masala, and 500–900ml of beef stock (or simply hot water). The amount of liquid to be added depends on how long you intend to let the curry stew for – for 90 minutes, as the recipe states, 500ml is about perfect; longer stewing means more stock (of course some can always be added later). Bring to a boil, then simmer with the lid on for at least 90 minutes, or longer depending on your cut of meat. Make sure the curry doesn’t dry out while stewing. Before serving, reduce the liquid until it’s thick and sticks to the beef.

Pumpkin and chick pea curry from Tender

This is the curry that started the Curry Fest planning this year. Not quite an Indian curry, but not really South-East Asian either, we thought. It was delicious though. We cooked the curry the night before, and added the coconut milk 20 minutes before serving as we heated it back up. Worked nicely.

400g tin of chick peas

2 onions

4 cloves of garlic

a thumb-sized piece of ginger

3 large stalks of lemongrass

2tsp ground coriander

2tsp ground turmeric (curcuma)

6 green cardamoms

2 red chillies

a pumpkin of about 750g–1kg

250ml vegetable stock

400ml tin of coconut milk

a tablespoon of yellow mustard seeds

a handful of fresh coriander leaves

Peel and chop the onions, and soften them on a low heat in a good splash of light vegetable oil (such as rapeseed or groundnut). Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger, remove any tough leaves from the lemongrass and cut this a bit more finely to avoid tough threads. Make into a paste in a food processor and add to the softened onions. Add the ground coriander, turmeric, lightly crushed cardamom seeds (minus the pods) and chopped chillies.

Cut the pumpkin into large-ish cubes (peel or leave the skin on, according to preference). Add to the pan, together with the drained chickpeas and vegetable stock. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the pumpkin is soft yet maintains its shape. (If you want to serve the curry the next day, here’s a good place to stop.) Stir in the coconut milk. Heat the mustard seeds in a bit of oil until they pop, then add to the curry. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the coriander leaves.

Courgette and green pepper ‘sabzi’

I have to give you the official name of this dish, because it’s too good: ‘Tori Aur Hari Mirch Ki Sabzi’. Oh yes. It’s dead simple and made for a nice veggie side dish. The recipe was, again, adapted from The Curry Bible.

Peel about 500 gr. courgettes and cut them into thick fingers, 4 cm long and 1 cm thick. Then take a green bell pepper, quarter it lengthways, remove the seeds and cut it crossways into 1 cm wide slices. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil (olive or corn) in a wok or a large frying pan, over a medium-high heat. Put in ½ a teaspoon of cumin seeds and ¼ a teaspoon brown mustard seeds. As soon as the mustard seeds start to pop (which could be a matter of seconds), add the courgette and the pepper. Stir and let them fry for 5 minutes. Then add 2 tablespoons of yoghurt, and cook until it has been absorbed, stirring all the while. Reduce the heat to low and add a tablespoon of chopped coriander and ½ a teaspoon of salt. Stir for a minute, then add a generous pinch of cayenne pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. Toss, and taste if the balance of flavours is to your liking.

The cayenne pepper and the lemon juice at the end is a shortcut – Madhur Jaffrey writes you can add them if you don’t have any chaat masala on hand. In the spirit of not getting too stressed out, we took this short cut. But if you have some time, do make chaat masala. You can use it on other veggies as well. To make it, mix together 4 teaspoons of lightly toasted, ground cumin seeds, 1½ tablespoons amchoor, 3 teaspoons cayenne pepper, 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, ¾ teaspoon black salt (I have never seen that in my life! has anyone here? what does it taste like?) and 1 teaspoon salt. Make sure to break up any lumps in the mixture. Put it in a jar with a tight lid, and store it away from sunlight and heat. If you want to use the chaat masala instead of the cayenne pepper and lemon juice, put ½ a teaspoon on the vegetable mix at the end.

Raitas, rice, pappadums

we made two different raitas, one with cucumber and one with carrots and raisins. two raitas might seem a bit much, but I knew there were going to be some people whose eyes would light up at the sight of raisins in the raita, and also some people who would be, shall we say, less pleased. and if you’re gonna make it a party, make it a party, you know? two raitas it was, then.

I usually don’t use a recipe for raita, but this time I did. sort of. that is, I read madhur jaffrey’s recipes for them, and followed her instructions for the amount of spices and salt, but I didn’t go so far as to measure the yoghurt or anything. still, it felt good to just be able to follow instructions without having to think about what I was doing too much.

Cucumber raita

first, roast some cumin seeds and put them into a spice grinder or a mortar & pestle. peel one half of a cucumber, and grate it into a bowl. add a teaspoon of ground cumin seeds, and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper. add a dollop of yoghurt, stir everything together, and check for seasoning. add some salt and pepper if needed.

Carrot and raisin raita

peel two medium-sizes carrots, and grate them into another bowl. add a handful of raisins, a teaspoon of ground cumin, 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, a good dollop of yoghurt, mix, and check for seasoning. you can always add some more yoghurt if you want to change the consistency. the raita I usually make is less ‘liquid’ than the ones you get in indian restaurants. questions of authenticity aside, and questions about the importance of authenticity aside, I like it better my way. but you may not.

Rice with cardamom and lime

depending on the rice you use, you may need to wash the rice before cooking. the best way to cook rice, for me, is to measure it in a glass or a mug, and then to add twice the amount of cold water. so, one cup of rice, two cups of water. cook rice this way often, and you’ll learn which cup in your cupboard will give you the desired amount of rice. as a point of reference, a good portion is usually 75 gr. per person. put the rice and the cold water in a pan, add 5 pods cardamom, and bring to the boil. once the rice starts boiling, reduce the heat to the lowest flame, and leave the rice to cook slowly until all the water’s absorbed. it completely depends on the rice you use how long this will take. when all the water’s absorbed, turn off the heat and let the rice sit and steam for a little while longer.

serve with a few wedges of lime alongside, to be squeezed over the rice à volonté.

Pappadums

the most convenient way of cooking pappadums is in the microwave. place the raw pappadum on a plate - as flat as possible - and put in the microwave for a minute. alternatively, heat up a dry frying pan, and let the pappadums cook and crisp up in there, making sure they don’t catch.

we served them as an appetizer of sorts, with very (very) good mango chutney alongside.

Chocolate cake with tipsy cream and green chai

We could have made kulfi or red bean ice cream or tapioca pudding… but somehow we both weren’t really up for anything quite Asian for dessert. Besides, chocolate had been looked forward to. So for dessert we had, once again, Kate’s Winning-Hearts-and-Minds cake. We served tipsy cream to go with it, inspired by Michel Roux Jr (hands up who misses Michel and Monica Galetti?). Ours was slightly sweetened whipped cream with a couple tablespoons of whisky. To remain somewhat curry-appropriate, our drink of choice was green chai (by Clipper – delicious).

Thanks for the good times, R, N, A, S and G!

- An & Na

breakfast

It is not my intention to reduce autumn to a cliché, a pile of pumpkins and apples and turning leaves. But apples do play an important role in my life these days. Don't look at me like that! They do. The breakfast I've been eating the last couple of weeks has been spelt muesli (with a little cinnamon, spelt puffs, dehydrated apple, sultanas and almonds in. I love the bulk section of my health food store) with a grated apple, yoghurt and a little extra sprinkle of cinnamon for good measure. Much like the breakfast Naomi wrote about in her first Anenna-post! A good cup of Earl Grey (or as some people, who shall remain unnamed here, call it: Early Grey) alongside is mandatory. And a good cup of coffee later on in the morning is a regular, too.

In the summer, my breakfast was cornflakes from that same bulk section, oat milk and some fruit. For that blissful week in France, it was a croissant and a piece of baguette with homemade jam, eaten in the shade of banana trees. I could have gotten used to living like that.

What do you guys do for breakfast? Do you do 'seasonal breakfasts' as well?

***

Another thing: this post inspired me greatly this week.

- anne

The first night of frost

First night frosts are expected soon, and according to all the experts, that means our chards, kales, cabbages and sprouts will be in optima forma any time now. Bring it on, Abel & Cole. I look forward to the first Dutch curly-kale-flecked-potato-mash-with-smoked-sausage meal of the season already. The leafy green winter veg debut of 2011, however, was for cavolo nero. Which, in fact, was a cavolo nero debut for me.

Cavolo nero is the super gorgeous veg you know from the cover of volume 1 of Nigel Slater’s Tender (what!? you don’t own, indeed you have never seen a copy of Tender? for shame!). Or as the mystery ingredient listed in the indexes of the River Café books. It comes in bundles of matte dark green leaves with a bubble-wrap surface. The flavour is a bit like curly kale, but stronger and quite sweet (apparently sweeter after the first frost). I liked it a lot. I cooked up the sauce below, took a bite to taste, and could have kept eating it straight from the kitchen processor (which would have been sad... but delicious). If you come across this black kale, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try, and this sauce is perfect for showing off the flavour.

PS. Be warned. When executed, this recipe will leave a trail of Very Green utensils.

Fusilli with cavolo nero and parmesan

From the River Café Cook Book.

a good bunch of cavolo nero

a clove of garlic, peeled, whole

fusilli / farfalle / conchiglie

olive oil

parmesan

Cut out the tough core of the cavolo nero leaves, keeping them whole otherwise. (Easy trick: fold the leaf in half and take out the stem in one cut.) Boil, together with the garlic, in salted water for a few minutes. Take out the leaves and garlic (keep the water for boiling the pasta), and pulse in a kitchen processor to a rough paste. If you dislike a strong garlic flavour, add only half the garlic at first, and more to taste. Add a good bit of olive oil and pulse until the green mess comes together in a thick sauce (how much depends on preference – more oil gives a smoother paste and, of course, a richer dish). Serve as a pasta sauce, topped with grated parmesan.

- Naomi

but not simpler

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
- Albert Einstein

This is more of an idea than a recipe, but I wouldn't want you not to know about it. I got it from Nigel Slater, of course, from his book Appetite. The idea is this: get some soft cheese, like a tallegio, or a brie, anything melt-y. Cut it in little pieces, and place those in a bowl. Boil some water for pasta, and steam some veggies (I like broccoli in this, and whole wheat penne). Put the veggies in the bowl with the cheese, swirl around a bit, add the pasta, swirl around a bit more, and the cheese will start to melt and form a bit of a sauce, with little nuggets of cheese remaining as tasty bites.

I think it's also in Appetite, though it may have been in The Kitchen Diaries, or somewhere else all together, that Nigel wrote about how not making too much of a fuss is what keeps him from getting tired of cooking. Yes. Sometimes I want a big to-do, a challenge, a complicated cake or a curry with 25 ingredients. But it's recipes/ideas like these that keep me from resenting going into the kitchen every night. Keeping it as simple as possible. But not simpler.

- Anne

Lemons plus cream equals angel piss

How can I not write about the weather? There I thought it was autumn, I prepared for it, I was ready. And lo and behold, it’s summer again! (“Lo” being short for “look”, in case you were wondering (I know I have). So that “behold” is a bit redundant, really. “Lo, it’s summer again!” would make just as much sense. Except summer must be felt, not lo’ed or beheld.) Anyway, it’s been gorgeous. 27°C, deep blue skies, shorts and sandals everywhere. It would be a crime not to celebrate. So lemonade it is. An in-your-face lemonade. A lemonade with a mean kick. A lemonade that doesn’t hold anything back. Perfect for the last days of summer.

And since I must be sensible, at least a bit, a second lemon recipe that will survive the inevitable cold snap. This one’s perfect for breakfast, regardless of the weather. Plenty zingy, make no mistake, but at the same time creamy and soft. It reminds me a bit of the recipe that started my love for lemons and cream: a children’s cookbook’s cream-and-lemon dessert that reportedly tasted “like an angel pissing on your tongue”. Very exciting pudding, that! This lemon curd is a bit more moderate, its kick slightly more gentle, but just as much of a treat, especially on a sleepy morning. So there. Two lemon recipes to zing away the last of summer and welcome autumn with a tang.

Whole lemon lemonade

Makes about 1 litre of squash, to be mixed about 1:5. Perfect with nothing but soda and ice. Or with a good shot of gin and lots of mint.

6 organic, unwaxed lemons

120–180g sugar (unrefined, but light in colour and not too coarse)

400ml water

Wash the lemons well. Cut into eights, removing the pips. Tip into a blender with the water and sugar (honey works too), and run for a few minutes, until it all has turned into a thick liquid. If the mixture has bits, strain through a cloth or sieve, or just leave as is, in case you fancy a chewy lemonade with a bitter kick. Sample, and add extra sugar to taste. Keeps in the fridge for quite a while.

And if the summer bug has really got you, challenge October and British tradition alike and serve with Pimm’s, strawberries, oranges, cucumber and mint.

Lemon curd

Does lemon curd sound like more hassle than you would ever put yourself through in the kitchen? Believe me, this is easy. And so, so good. Thickly spread on sourdough toast, spooned through yoghurt, or straight from the jar. It would almost beat the perfect breakfast. Almost.

4 organic, unwaxed lemons

150–200g sugar

100g unsalted butter

3 large eggs + 1 extra yolk

First zest, then juice the lemons (use a very fine zester, and make sure you don’t take any of the white pith). Simmer some water in a pan the right size to hold a heatproof bowl (the water should not touch the bowl). Combine the lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar and butter in the bowl, and whisk intermittently until the butter has melted. Whisk the eggs together, and add them to the lemon mixture. Whisk until combined, then simmer for another 10 minutes, or slightly longer, again whisking occasionally. It is possible to do the whole process over direct heat, as long as it’s very low and you keep stirring, but I prefer whisking rather than stirring the mixture, in which case a bowl is a much better vehicle than a pan.

Stir occasionally as the mixture cools, then spoon into sterilised jars, seal, and refrigerate. Keeps for a couple of weeks.

- Naomi

tempeh goreng

I got this recipe from a friend, and while it's supposed to be a dish among many dishes in an Indonesian rice table (I think), I mostly cook it when I eat alone, and take it as the main component of my meal, together with some rice and steamed vegetables. it's so, so easy to make, and yet cooking this still leaves me feeling I've taken care of myself by cooking something good. and tasty. tasty! unbelievably tasty.

strangely enough, I never really started eating tofu and tempeh until I wasn't a vegetarian anymore (I know... I know! what did I eat?). tempeh especially used to scare me a little. what do I do with it? how do I cook with it without the result being horribly like eating a sponge? the answer, of course, consists of two words: soy sauce. for those of you who are scared of tempeh like I was, try this recipe! you won't be disappointed.

to avoid genetically manipulated soy, I always buy organic (both the tempeh and the ketjap manis - indeed any type of soy sauce I buy).

tempeh goreng

thanks randy!

you can either start this recipe the morning of the day you want to eat it, or about 15 minutes before you want to eat it. both versions start the same, you cut the tempeh in small cubes of about 2 by 2 cm. then you can either put them in a bowl of water and some tamarind paste, and leave to marinate for the day, or you can skip that step. heat a generous amount of oil in a frying pan, and add the tempeh, a diced onion and a pinch of salt. fry until the tempeh is a deep golden colour, and the onion is starting to caramelize. add a minced clove of garlic and let that fry with the tempeh and onion for a minute. then add some demerara sugar (half-white organic caster sugar was what I used, beause it was all I had in the house, and it was just fine, but I can see how the caramel-y taste of demerara sugar might add a deeper taste to the dish) - a tablespoon or so, stir to combine, then add two tablespoons of good ketjap manis, stir again, then add a handful of (roasted, salted) peanuts, stir to combine, and enjoy!

- anne

It was (we may say) satisfactory

Sometimes, my veg box surprises me with the stuff I almost forget about; the things I cook while I secretly look forward to other vegetables I get to have later. I was excited for the aubergine and the red pepper in last week’s box – two pre-box staples that I now don’t eat so often any more. I looked forward to the baby leaf spinach. And they were good. But the best meal I had all week was a plate of steamed runner beans with butter and some chilli flakes. I still can’t believe how good it was. Or indeed why it was so good. I’ve had lots of green beans in my life, and never have been too excited about them. Enjoying these so very much felt quite spectacular.

Apart from veg box magic, the trick is definitely to buy very fresh beans and cook them for no more than a few minutes. And some proper butter, of course. They go with almost anything. Or with nothing at all.

Runner beans with butter

In my experience runner beans are best when very fresh; when they lose their snap, it can’t be recovered. Buy fresh, eat soon, and cook briefly.

a good bag of runner beans

delicious salted butter

some dried chilli flakes

Top, tail and string the runner beans, and cut into twos or threes (small enough to fit the pan or steamer). Steam in a small layer of water or in a steamer basket for 2–4 minutes. Take the beans out immediately as they turn bright green, and run them under cold tap to stop them from cooking any further. Add a knob of good butter, toss, and top with chilli flakes.

Zingy spicy version: let the butter soften a bit, then mix with half a chopped fresh chilli, grated zest of one lime and a finely sliced clove of garlic. Delicious with fish or seafood.

- Naomi

autumnal apple cake

so, in last week's post, naomi and I unknowingly wrote about exactly the same thing. we didn't know, we swear! we never quite know what the other is going to write until we publish our posts. it's one of my favorite moments of the week: hitting the 'publish' button and then immediately go read naomi's post.

anyway, goes to show how much great minds think alike, I guess. when we found out we had both written about that particular early september feeling of transition, we jokingly said we would this week both be writing about apples. so here you go, na! apple cake.

there's this cliché about the difference between cooks and bakers: cooks are intuïtive, they add a spice here and a spice there, they're going on their instincts and experience, they just throw things together: they are easygoing, go-with-the-flow types who know how to enjoy life in the kitchen and at the table. but they are messy, too. and experimenting for experimenting's sake can lead to some truly untasty food. bakers, on the other hand, never miss a beat. they follow recipes meticulously - they have to, because in a baking recipe, every little half teaspoon counts. bakers are clean, in control, and just that little bit boring. their measured way of working stands in stark contrast to the joy that is eating a good cake or pie or cookie.

like every good cliché, this one has some element of truth to it. of course, that every cliché has an element of truth is in itself the greatest cliché of all. anyway, measurements do matter. and going by taste is fun to do. but this cake proudly defeats the cliché. it was an experiment of sorts, and it worked! the other night, we had a friend 'round for dinner, and I wanted to make something apple-y for dessert. an apple crumble? yummy, but... I was in the mood for something different. and so made an apple version of nigella lawson's tried and true madeira cake recipe. it was good! it was good, people. cinnamon, apples and lemon zest. is all I'm saying.

oh, and you don't taste the nutmeg as nutmeg at all, it just brings a nice deep flavour to the cake.

do use organic butter, eggs and sugar if you can. if anything, it'll taste that much better.

autumnal apple cake

adapted from nigella lawson's 'my mother in law's madeira cake' from how to be a domestic godess.

ingredients:
2 apples
a little lemon juice
240 gr butter
200 gr sugar
the zest and juice of one lemon
3 large eggs
200 gr wheat flour
100 gr spelt flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
fresh nutmeg

preheat the oven to 170 degrees celcius. grease a tin loaf and line with baking paper.

peel and quarter two apples, cut out the cores and slice the apples into thin slices. put the slices in a bowl of water and some lemon juice, to keep the slices from turning brown. then crack on with the cake! cream the butter with the sugar and add the zest of one lemon. then, one by one, add the eggs. after each egg, add a teaspoon of flour. this helps with the stability of the batter. then add the two flours, baking powder, cinnamon, a good grating of fresh nutmeg, and a pinch of salt, then add the juice of the lemon and mix very well. put the batter in the loaf tin, and push the apple slices in the top. sprinkle with some more cinnamon and some sugar. put in the oven for about an hour and a half - but each oven is different, and each time baking a cake it is a little different. start checking after an hour.

let the cake cool down for at least 15 minutes, then enjoy!

- anne