Inside/outside living. But mostly inside

One of the results of losing all perspective in John Lewis while doing my wedding gift list the other day, is that now I have two of everything; one slightly less nice than the other one. But still, I have got two of most things - some things which you don't even really need one of. And yet, I haven't got a kettle, because it broke two days ago and I've been having too much fun boiling water in an egg pan for tea to go and get a new one.

Not really. Just too lazy. They don't sell kettles in Waitrose; at least, not in my Waitrose.

We've managed to only end up with one barbeque though and it's sitting outside, pristine and unused because by the time I've got home from the shops with barbequing supplies, it's raining so hard that the neighbours' cats are sailing little boats across the patio.

And so it was on Saturday. I bought a large rack of spare ribs by chance from the Farmer's Market in the hope that at some point this week we would have a sunny evening and barbeque them up. But no. So last night I decided to do them in the oven instead, to at least try out an easy-looking barbeque sauce I found in The River Cottage Meat Book.

It was brilliant and went like this:

2-3 large garlic cloves
1 level teaspoon salt
1 tbsp English mustard
2 tbsp soft brown sugar
2 tbsp tomato ketchup
1 tbsp soy sauce
ground pepper
2-3 tbsp of vinegar

1 Combine everything except the vinegar in a bowl. I was unable to do this without making a giant mess but you might be able to be tidier. Add the vinegar last, stirring in between 2 and 3 tablespoons of it until you get an emulsified sauce

2 Spread over your rack of spare ribs. Leave to marinate for as long as you can, turning and re-spreading if you're in that kind of mood. An hour's fine - all day is even better

3 Cook on the barbeque for 10-15 minutes or in the oven for 20 minutes at 210C

To go with it, I made some sweet potato wedges with a lime and lemongrass creme fraiche dipping sauce, a recipe from Plenty, Ottolenghi's new book (brilliant but entirely vegetarian... I mean, not that that's a problem or anything!!!!! You probably already knew that - but I didn't because Ottlenghi: The Cookbook, wasn't.)

For the wedges

Cut your sweet potatoes into 8 segments (people eat about 1/2 a sweet potato each as a side) and lay on a lightly greased baking sheet. Sprinkle over salt and dab with more oil of your choice (either olive or ground nut) and bake at 210C for 25 mins

For the dipping sauce

Combine a few tablespoons of creme fraiche with the juice and rind of 1 lime, a pinch of salt and 1 very finely-chopped small stick of lemongrass. Although this was nice, it was a bit pudding-y and next time I'm going to do it with yoghurt

I ALSO, because I was a bit hyperactive yesterday, made a rice salad, out of Ottolenghi: The Cookbook.

This is how I did it, which is not faithful to the exact recipe, but it was really nice:
(for 2)

40g quinoa
40g camarge or red rice
A handful of shelled pistachios
1 small onion, chopped
zest and juice of half a large orange
salt and pepper
about five dried apricots, chopped
2 tsp lemon juice

1 Put the grains on to boil for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, toast your pistachios on a baking sheet in the oven at 200C for 8 minutes. I know this sounds like a stupid hassle but it's worth doing as they don't taste of much otherwise. Fry the chopped onion very gently for about 10 minutes.

2 Once the grains, nuts and onions are cooked, combine everything a bowl and serve; you may find you need to add quite a lot of salt. You're supposed to wait until this gets down to room temperature but mine was sort of warm. It was still nice.

I've only just now realised, looking at the photos, that I made an entirely brown and orange supper. Christ... there's always something.

A nice thing to do with rhubarb

So by now it's possible that you have a lump of Delia Smith's Quick Flaky Pastry in your fridge and you're, like: "I can't eat any more sausage rolls."

If that's the case, you might like to take advantage of there being rhubarb around at the moment and making one of these pastry rhubarb thingies.

It's as easy as it looks and it is nicked off Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers - in the episode where he wanders into his garden and yonks out of the ground a hundredweight of rhubarb, like that's how he goes shoppping for stuff.

Anyway. Roll out a square of pastry and cut the rhubarb into lengths. Arrange in a row along the pastry and cover generously with sugar.

You could also brush it with butter if you wanted. Put in the oven at about 200 for 25 minutes and serve with creme fraiche I suppose. I floured my baking sheet before baking the pastry because I am neurotic about things sticking to the bottom.

You can variagate this thing however you like: I think next time I might mush my rhubarb up a bit in a pan with some sugar and a splash of water, to make a rough compote, then spread that on the pastry and then bake it, just because rhubarb all in a row like this can be a bit stringy.




p.s. As you can see - my camera is working again!!!! It's a miracle and all thanks to advice passed on to me through Facebook and Twitter. Who said the internet was shit?!

Sweetcorn fritters

My husband has a mania for our garden at the moment. It started after we got married, when he decided that in order for him to be a good husband he ought to plunge headlong into actual husbandry and create for me a large herb garden to facilitate my cooking. "You can take pictures of it," he said, hefting his spade into a neglected border, "and post it on your blog."

I have so far resisted putting up pictures of my new herb garden on here because until I had one, I DESPISED anyone who did. Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers made me gibber with fury every time he drifted into his giant garden to pick a huge handful of mint out of a charming terracotta pot or drag some rhubarb out of a raised bed, or pluck an entire roast dinner from his Ottolenghi plant.

"Who has that?" I would scream at the telly. "Who has that in London? Fuck off, fuck off. We all have to go to Waitrose for our chervil you smug bastard." But I would keep watching, because Nigel is God. (Although his piece on making a pork pie in the Guardian Magazine the other week wasn't nearly as excellent or instructive as my post on the matter - see "a pork pie for Giles" for reference and you can email me with questions. Eat that, Nige.)

Anyway what was I saying? Yes, herbs. Okay so I have a herb garden now. I am now one of those insufferable people who says things like "Oh daaaaarling just pick some rosemary, mint, parsley, coriander, sage, bay, thyme (lemon and normal) and chervil from your garden to make a herb rub and it will make your roast chicken simply divviiiiiiiiiiine." Only I don't say things like that because then I'd have to shoot myself.

Or not shoot myself because I don't have a gun. I'd have to do something awful with one of the really excellently sharp Global knives I got as a wedding present from Becky B (one of my occasional readers. She is quite shy but an excellent cook).

Doing up the garden has nearly killed my husband. He jammed his thumb by mistake onto a raggedy nail, which sprung a copious and bloody leak for about two days. The other night he was bitten on the ankle by some unidentified creature and it all swelled up and went gross. (What bites one in an English garden? A spider?) And then, in reaching for a spade he trod backwards onto a pot and then stumbled into another one and thrashed around like that for a while, bellowing like a bull being branded, before collapsing onto the steps, his face a tragedy mask. What with all that and various other incidents, he looks like he's been recently mown down by forty stampeding horses.

I am trying not to bang on about my new herb garden, but I thought I ought to explain why there might be an abundance of multiple herb-bundles of things in recipes in the future. Until the snails get it all, of course, and then the frost finishes off what weedy stumps remain. In which instance I'll be grumbling about the lack of interesting herbs in Sainsbury's Locals once more.



Sweetcorn fritters inspired by The Riverford Farm Cookbook. No picture because my stupid camera is on the blink and I can't tell you how depressed I am about it.

1 can sweetcorn
65g plain flour
1 egg
1/2 tsp sugar
About 60ml milk
1 handful of coriander
1 large chilli, chopped (seeds in if you're a heat freak)
1/4 red onion OR 1 shallot, roughly chopped
1/2 tsp baking powder
salt and pepper
1 lime
1 tbsp creme fraiche - if you have it, don't worry if you went all the way to the shops for sweetcorn and came back without creme fraiche

1 Put the sweetcorn, chilli, a few strips of lime zest, salt and pepper, onion and coriander into a blender and PULSE, rather than whizz, until everything is sort of bashed up a bit, but not pureed. This is because if you leave the sweetcorn kernals whole, they're not as easy to manipulate into a fritter. There are a lot of people who are going to disagree with me about this.

2 Make up the batter by sieving the flour, baking powder, a good pinch of salt and a few twists of pepper and sugar into a bowl. Then crack in the egg and half-mix it into the flour. Add milk splash by splash until you've got a thick batter and then blob in the creme fraiche. Not so thick that a spoon leaves a permanent streak if you pull it through the mixture, but not so it's like soup either.

3 Add the sweetcorn mixture, give it all a stir and then cook as you would a thick pancake - they take about 2-3 minutes either side. My advice is to make one tester pancake and then adjust the seasoning based on that. You may find that you want to chuck in a lot more lime zest, coriander, salt or whatever into the mixture. Sweetcorn is quite an overpowering flavour and you may need to beat it to death with bit of extra chilli.

Pastry

A lot of cooks will, in a bid to be folksy and relaxed, express horror at the thought of making your own pastry - particularly puff pastry. "There's a lot of wonderful pre-made pastry you can get from shops," they always say. "Just make sure it all-butter and you're quids in."

Well, no. I say NO. If you are going to make something that requires puff pastry (sausage rolls, a savoury pie) you might as well  make it yourself if you're not going to just go to Greggs and buy some sausage rolls or a savoury pie.

What these cooks are thinking is that you're going to make puff pastry in that fiddlesome crazy way, where you individually sort of layer very thin bits of pastry together, half-glued here and there with an egg wash. It takes about six years to do and goes wrong all the time. So yeah - don't do that.

But DO do Delia Smith's, now very famous, Quick Flaky Pastry, which is not, I admit, the dictionary definition of puff pastry, but it does the job extremely well. You have probably seen Delia do this on telly, or read about it in one of her cookbooks. But I am here to tell you that it's just brilliant and that you ought to give it a crack one day.

So here is the recipe - although Delia is so evangelical about it that if you wait long enough she'll probably come and shout it through your letterbox.

225g plain flour
175 butter
pinch of salt
water

1 The way this recipe works is that you grate frozen butter into flour. I don't know why it works but it does. So how you do this is really up to you. I always have frozen butter in my freezer because I am an insane hoarder and hate running out of things. But if you are normal, get any old pack of butter and measure out 175g, then wrap it in foil and put it in the freezer for at least an hour.

2 Sieve out the flour and sprinkle over your pinch of salt. Then retrieve the frozen butter from the freezer. Unwrap it so that there is a bit of foil left on the end for you to clutch onto while you grate the other end into the flour. Grating frozen butter into flour is not nice at all, it really isn't. It's like your fingers are going to fall off and it's very hard work. And from time to time you worry that your fingers are so numb that you might accidentally grate them and not feel it. But keep at it, like the trooper you are, because it's worth it. The grating gets easier as the butter melts towards the end. But do not be tempted to do this with warmer butter to make it easier - the butter must be frozen little curls of fat, not long strips like you're grating cheddar cheese.

3 So once that's all gone and you're looking at your hand like "Speak to me....!" distribute the butter round the flour with a knife until it's all coated. Now add water, small sloosh by small sloosh, until you get a dough. If you want to be really smart about this, used iced water.

4 Bring the dough together, but don't mess it around too much with your hands because, as well all know, dough doesn't like getting warm, then chuck it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

And there's your dough! I used this last New Year to make a really fantastic chicken and ham pie and yesterday made a lot of sausage rolls to take on a picnic.

So, here is the dough just before it goes in the fridge. Note the bits of butter distributed around the flour - it's supposed to look like that, not all smooth and even and glossy like bread dough.

This is how I made my sausage rolls. You just get a lot of high-quality sausages and slice open the skins to retrieve the sausage meat. You may find a better way to construct your sausage roll than this but this way worked fine.

Just remember that you MUST seal your sides of pastry with egg wash. Milk or water won't do. Also brush a bit of your egg wash onto the top of the rolls before they go in the oven (220 for 25 minutes).

I would also recommend either greasing or flouring your baking sheet before you lay the rolls out, otherwise they will probably stick to the sheet and you'll have to yank them off and that will put you in an incredibly bad mood.

What exactly IS espresso powder?

Best question of the week comes from Erin, who asked me to explain espresso powder, which I used in the coffee and walnut cake below.

Espresso powder is not coffee grounds, but like instant, freeze-dried coffee - Nescafe, Gold Blend or whatever - but it's only for making espresso. YOU CAN GET IT IN WAITROSE but you have to look quite hard. The tin I've got was, I think, the only kind they sell in WR, it's called Percol Espresso and you can find it in amongst all the other instant coffee stuff.

(Sorry no photo but my camera keeps flashing an "ERR" sign at me and refusing to take pictures.)

Alternatively, if you have any kind of espresso machine, you can make up any quantity of espresso needed in a recipe (usually a cake, but Nigella does some wacky Breakfast Banana Smoothie thing that requires it aswell) using your machine.

We have an espresso machine but as you've all guessed, it's sitting in the cupboard under the counter top occupying the space left by the deep-fat fryer (cellar).

Coffee and walnut cake

I am the world's most prolific hander-out of unsolicited advice. All you need to do is ring me and reply to my "How are you" with "Oh, I'm okay, coming down with a bit of a cold," and I'm off:

"Oh you must buy First Defence immediately," I will say. "It works retroactively, so just take it whenever - it shortens the life of your cold, you know. Alternatively a raspberry leaf on your head. Hot water and honey. Lemon. My advice is to take a few days off work. Go to bed as soon as you feel that tickle in the back of your throat, shut the curtains and sleep for 24 hours. It's a miracle cure. My advice is to put your out of office on your email and then you can relax and get better. Paracetamol every 4 hours. Time it - put on an alarm. Every four hours. Honestly, it's a miracle cure. Anyway do all of that and you'll be better. Ring me in the morning. Nice talking to you, bye."

And it's not just health. Buying or selling houses ("Oh don't wait for the market to do anything, buy when you need to and sell when you need to. People who try to play the market always get shafted."), boyfriends, ("If he's not dropping hints about marriage after 18 months, move on"), families, ("Oh, you can only have the relationship with your mother that you can have. Don't idealise it and you'll never be disappointed.") diets, pets, make-up, skincare, haircare - I've got a fucking answer for everything and force it on everyone, unasked.

I'm trying not to, I swear to God. I wrote a thing the other month for a magazine about friendship and read a lot of stuff about how to be a good friend and how to be a good listener. And one of the top tips for being a good friend was to not hand out unsolicited advice. The other top tips, if you're interested are:

- Don't interrupt
- Don't garnish your friends' story with a story about something similar that happened to you
- Don't go "mm hmmm" all the time
- Don't finish people's sentences

I do ALL of these things, ALL the time. It's a miracle I have any friends at all. Oh wait, I DON'T.

I don't know why I have to hand out advice all the time, I should really not - mostly aswell because I'm almost always wrong. And it doesn't come from a place of love, it comes from a place of meddling.

For example, I have to restrain myself from going round to my sister-in-law's house with a bottle of Aveeno and some 8-hour cream for her boyfriends hands, which are very cracked from doing a lot of gardening. (I dispensed this miracle cure recipe last weekend but I can tell it has not been acted on.)

And the temptation to ring up some friends of mine who are swapping their large-ish flat for a miniscule flat in London and a house in the countryside (they've got two children! Who aren't going to get any SMALLER) in order to give them a jolly good lecture is, at times, overpowering.

The only thing I can console myself with is that I know that I do it and I know that it's bad. I am trying to do a thing where I only hand out advice if someone specifically says "What do you think?" Then I take a deep breath and talk non-stop for 1 hour. But no-one ever says that. No-one cares what you think they should do. They just want you to nod and smile and say "Oh, I am so sympathetic," and then tell a joke.

Which brings me to coffee and walnut cake. I was feeling a bit scatty today while I was making it and I used plain flour instead of self-raising flour. But rather than throwing the bowl against the wall and storming out into the garden to kick over some flower pots and then starting all over again, I sprinkled over the mixture 1 tsp of baking powder. And the cake came out better than, I think, any cake I've ever made.

So there we are: if you ever use plain flour instead of self-raising flour by mistake, sprinkle over 1 tsp of baking powder. Just don't ring me up and say you're not feeling well.



Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall's coffee and walnut cake, interpreted by me

Makes one small loaf - 7in x 4in

2 eggs (weigh these and then use the same amount of flour, sugar and butter. Mine weighed 119g.)
119g flour
119g butter
119g sugar
0.5 tsp vanilla essence
1tsp baking powder
50g walnuts, roughly chopped
1 tbsp espresso powder dissolved in .75 tbsp hot water

1 Beat the butter until it's creamy and then beat in the sugar until pale and fluffy.

 2 Then beat in one egg at a time. Mine curdled to buggery but it didn't make any difference to the end result. You can in theory add one tablespoon of flour after each egg to stop it from doing this

2 Fold in the flour. Stare at the recipe and then stare at your flour packet and scream "FUCK!!" then reach for some

3 Baking powder. Add 1 tsp, sieved so there are no lumps and mix in. Add the vanilla essence, coffee and walnuts

4 Pour into your cake tin and then bake at 180C for 30-35 mins or until the top is firm.

Mexican pork belly

I wish this was something that I'd come up with, but in fact this episode of Recipe Rifle comes to you from the letter E, the numbers 5 and 7 and James Ramsden, the food blogger and ACTUAL TRAINED COOK  who contacted me keen to do a recipe swapsie. I gave him a recipe for a baked potato and he didn't laugh!! I don't know what to make of that. Find him at www.jamesramsden.wordpress.com

Anyway, here is his extremely exciting-looking pork belly thing that I would make if only I knew how one skins a hazelnut.

Take it away Jim:

Mexican pork belly with coriander and hazelnut salsa


The problem with the cheap cuts - beef shin, lamb shoulder, pork belly - is that they are imbued with a sense of winter. These gastropub staples seem good only for slow-cooked and sticky stews, broodingly dark braises, and melting roasts. Give a cook any one of these cheap cuts and their reflex will be to start prepping a mirepoix, setting the oven to 170C and scratching around for the half-drunk bottle of last night's plonk.

It's unsurprising that this is the case. These cuts are fatty, and in winter we want - we need - fat. By summer we've had just about enough of rich food and root veg and we yearn for grub that pings and hums with herbs and citrus and chilli. But this shouldn't mean these cuts are redundant all of a sudden. Lamb shoulder, diced and marinated with yoghurt, cumin, chilli, mint, garlic and lemon makes perfect kebabs for barbecuing. Ox cheek, braised sympathetically in bourbon and shredded with herbs and spices becomes a breast-beatingly epic filling for enchiladas.

This pork belly is a crowd pleaser in the way that watching Jordan get mauled by a panda would be a crowd pleaser. Aside from the skinning and boning of the belly (which you could ask the butcher to do) it requires little effort on your part. I did it for 20 people which a whole belly (6-7kg) will serve easily. If going the whole hog then up the cooking time to 3 hours.


Serves 4

1.5 kg piece of pork belly, skin and ribs removed
A bunch of coriander, finely chopped
Zest of half a lime
Zest of half a lemon
Olive oil and pepper


For the salsa

A bunch of coriander
Juice of a lime
A red chilli

1 clove garlic
A small handful of skinned hazelnuts
Olive oil, salt, pepper

Mix together the coriander, lime and lemon zests and olive oil. Rub over the pork belly, season with pepper, and leave overnight.

To make the salsa/pesto, blend the coriander, lime juice, chilli and hazelnuts until smooth, pouring in olive oil as you go until you've got the right consistency. Season with salt and pepper, cover and refrigerate until needed.

Remove the pork from the fridge a good hour before cooking and preheat the oven to 180C. Season generously with sea salt and roast the pork for 1 1/2 to 2 hours and rest for 20 minutes. Alternatively roast for 1 1/2 hours before finishing on the barbecue for 30 minutes. Serve with the salsa and a salad.