Warm corn salsa

This recipe comes from Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple. It is a really fantastic book and this former Masterchef winner and owner of the chain Wahaca really does know what she is talking about. The TV series accompanying the book is fantastic also, from her beautiful gappy smile, stunning Mexican locations, history and evocative food. Ever since I learnt about how Aztecs used to cut people’s hearts out while they were still alive (I was probably around 8) I have been obsessed with all aspects of Mexican culture. I love the silly movies set in Mexico like ‘From Dusk till Dawn’ and ‘Desperado’, Frida Kahlo, Like Water for Chocolate, songs with Mexico in the title (Down in Mexico, Mexican Radio) and the food, most of all. I distinctly remember rolling my eyes at my grandparents trying to eat fajitas with a knife and fork at the age of 10. Somehow if you don’t have salsa dribbling down your wrist, it doesn’t really count.

Apologies for the lack of photos on this one, I made it last night for dinner and was so impressed that I wanted to get it up here as soon as possible. If I make it again I will add some photos in. it really is a delicious salad, sweet, warm and spicy, smoky and fragrant with lime and coriander. Serve it with sour cream and some tortilla chips.

Ingredients

Approx.. 4 cups of fresh or defrosted frozen corn (not tinned)

1 onion, finely diced

1 or 2 green chillies, deseeded and finely diced

Cooking oil

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

Juice of 1 lime (sadly my limes had absolutely no juice in them so I had to use lemon, it still tasted great though)

Handful of fresh coriander, roughly shredded

½ teaspoon of ground allspice

Salt and pepper

Heat oil in a large frying pan and when its hot add the onion, chilli and corn. Sauté over a medium heat for about 5 minutes until the onion starts getting a little translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another 5-10 minutes until the onion looks cooked and the corn has taken on some colour. Add the allspice, salt and pepper, lime and coriander and cook for a minute or two more until the coriander has wilted slightly.

Couscous salad with fennel, herbs and walnuts

This salad is the first thing that I have cooked from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg Everyday! book. While obviously I should have boycotted this book on the grounds of the exclamation mark alone, its staggeringly positive amazon rating was reason enough to give it a go. Also, I really love the River Cottage TV shows, to be honest, I just want my life to be just a little bit more like River Cottage (and it might be soon :p). What I particularly liked about the season about vegetarianism was its honesty, and the wide-eyed enthusiasm of someone who really did seem to be thinking about what a meal that wasn’t a lump of flesh might entail for the first time in his life. I would like to add that I am not actually vegetarian, but about 75% of all of my meals are, possibly more. I think that might be why I like this book so much, and Ottolenghi’s Plenty – they aren’t written by vegetarians. What Hugh F-W rightly points out is that choosing to eat less meat and fish can have ethical and environmental implications over and above the ethical issues surrounding having to kill something to eat it.

I never really liked fennel until I tried a fantastic stew made by superwoman Becky with celery and lemon, and now I can’t get enough of it.  With the herbs, walnuts and lemon here it creates an incredibly complex, savoury and crunchy salad, filling and balanced enough to be a meal in itself.

Please make sure that you use whole spices, toast and grind them yourself – especially as the spices aren’t being ‘cooked’, they need to be toasted to bring out their flavours and add a real presence to the dish.

Serves 5 – 6

Ingredients

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

I teaspoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

300g wholemeal giant couscous, also called Israeli couscous, or moghrabieh

1 onion, diced

2 celery sticks, diced

1 fennel bulb, chopped, tops reserved

2 garlic cloves, crushed and finely chopped

1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped

a small handful of mint leaves

75g walnuts, lightly toasted (if you can be bothered) and roughly chopped

zest and juice of 1 lemon

extra virgin olive oil

walnut oil (optional)

Put the cumin, coriander and fennel in a dry frying pan and toast for a few minutes, shaking the pan to make sure that they toast evenly. When they are fragrant, tip them into a mortar and grind them into a powder.

Fry the vegetables and garlic in some olive oil a large frying pan for about 5-8 minutes. Fry them on a medium heat stirring often, so that they soften a little bit, but still have some crunch. Remove from the heat and add the spices and lemon zest.

Cook the couscous according to packet instructions in boiling, salted water – about 8-9 minutes. When it is done, drain it and mix it with the vegetable and spice mixture.  Allow it all to cool slightly, and then add the chopped herbs, walnuts and lemon juice, and season with salt and pepper. Before serving add a little bit more oil and lemon juice.

Interlude number one, the wish list

Hello readers. I’m not doing a recipe this time, I wanted to take a little break and go through my kitchen wish list with you. Somewhat in the style of the ‘any cook who wants to be taken seriously’ section in Kitchen Confidential – although I won’t be mentioning any squeezy bottles or mise-en-place organisers, that’s just a given.  If you haven’t read Kitchen Confidential yet, go read it. Anthony Bourdain is such a brilliant, anarchic writer, and once you get through all the sex and drugs, there is a bit of stuff about food too.

I started cultivating my kitchen wish-list when I realised that my kitchen-based fantasies were less about what/who I was doing (ahem), but rather what the appliances in the background were like – was there a retro red kitchen aid like in The Fabulous Baker Brothers? Or one of those American style humongous fridges with an ice-maker in the door? Oh you know that there was (wink wink).

So here is the list, and thanks to all my delicious facebook friends for adding their suggestions. Of course some of these things aren’t that difficult to get hold of, or that expensive, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Another microplane – microplanes are fantastic little things, like uber-graters. I already have one, with very small teeth that is perfect for zesting things, but I need one with slightly larger teeth that can be used for grating ginger and garlic, and chocolate. Ginger especially is such a pain in the arse to grate, and these things seem to work the best. They are very sharp, so be careful – I once grated my fingertip off with one, and couldn’t handle lemons or chillies for a week.

Rubbery spatula  -these are just the best things in the world for scraping cake batter or melted chocolate out of bowls – and quite fun to hit people with too.

Global knives – as many of you know I have a bit of an obsession with these, and they were first introduced to me by the wonderful Suzy. Of course as you know a really decent knife is probably the most fundamental thing you should have in your kitchen, and these are my favourite. Sleek Japanese steel, perfectly weighted and a little bit badass – they show that you are serious too. I don’t have any (yet) but I have used them before and they really really are that good.

Springy palette knives – for spreading buttercream on cakes in a swishy, effortless sort of way, and for lovingly spreading melted chocolate onto large marble slabs…which brings me on to…

Giant marble slab. Just the thing for chocolate work, or pastry where you need it to stay really cold. And also just looks so beautiful.

Cast- iron griddle pan – this is actually the next thing I will be buying for myself. I want a big one, preferably that will go over two burners on the hob. Just the thing for cooking steaks, lamb chops or fresh tuna – with perfectly charred and caramelised lines. I also love griddled vegetables – aubergine and courgettes especially – coat them lightly in olive oil and scorch on both sides, sprinkle with salt and serve at room temperature, maybe with more olive oil, toasted pine nuts and crumbled goats cheese. What I also love about these griddle pans, is that they are reassuringly heavy, if you have ever used one, you will know what I mean.

Pressure cooker – pressure cookers are magical. And people are afraid of them, which I don’t understand. I think that possibly back in the day they were all explodey or something. But the fact that it can cook food super fast is a very good thing for 2 reasons. 1) there just isn’t enough time in the day sometimes. 2) it can save the planet! Oh yes. I recently read an article about Wonderbags, which are like super-insulated beanbags which are changing the lives of people in the third world by drastically reducing the amount of fuel needed to cook something. With the wonderbag, food is heated up in a pot for 5-10 minutes, and then the whole pot is snuggled inside the wonderbag for a few hours, cooking in its residual heat. Pretty special, and a thoroughly good idea. But get this – using a pressure cooker, it would just be cooked in the 5 or 10 minutes. Simples. And you can get some pretty awesome retro-spacey ones at the moment that look like something out of The Jetsons. On the subject of saving the planet by the way, I have decided that Masterchef’s beloved blast chillers are of the devil. And on the subject of saving time/ money/ sanity, instead of a sous-vide, just use a ziplock bag in a slow-cooker, yeah.

Wood-burning pizza oven. Obviously, probably more for the back garden then the kitchen though. And lucky me someone has just offered to build me one. Now I just need to learn how to make pizza dough…

Small oven suitable frying pans. The kind that are all metal, and you have to wrap a dry tea-towel around the handle to get them out of the oven. For making tarte-tatins, and fritattas, and shakshouka, properly.  Shakshouka especially, so that the tomato sauce can cook slowly on the hob, and the eggs can set just right in the oven – and then be served just like that, on a heat-proof mat, with crusty bread. I have not met anyone who doesn’t like shakshuka, and there are some great recipes in Ottolenghi’s books and the new Hugh F-W vegetarian book (review coming soon). My recipe is here.

Large stainless steel bowl – for beating egg whites, nothing is better.

Silicone paper – for lining baking trays. As I have said here, and here and here, there really is nothing better for when making delicate little baked things.

Egg coddlers – another one of my favourite books, The Vintage Tea Party Book by Angel Adoree has a whole area of its breakfast section dedicated to coddled eggs. It’s a delicious looking poached egg delight, that just has to be made in a retro, patterned china little dish, preferably with little flowers painted up the sides, and a gold rim.

Tagine – this of course also comes with me wanting an oven with the capacity to cook this properly, like an aga, or my shiny new wood-burning oven in the garden (one can hope).  And it has to be a beautiful, painted all brightly coloured, warm and evocative of the delicious food-goodness on the inside (this means by the way that i will have to have two, as the painted ones are just for serving). Before I went to Morocco I just didn’t get tagines, they were just oddly shaped dishes right? But then when I was there I knew – the heavy ceramic and that iconic shape keeps them incredibly hot, and the stew gets heady and thick and perfect, and it just cant be recreated properly in a normal saucepan - although this one comes close.

So there it is, my kitchen fantasy wish list. I hope you enjoyed it.  Please let me know what essential things you would add to your fantasy kitchen. And don’t worry I will be back to recipes again very soon. I just found a great looking one for a giant couscous salad with parsley, fennel and walnuts, or  I might have another attempt at my chilli-polenta crusted potatoes. 

Sri Wasano’s Infamous Indonesian Quinoa Salad

Quinoa is one of my new magic ingredients. Making this dish was actually the first time I have cooked it, as with many other trends (such as leggings), I always seem to be a bit late to the party. But oh wow how brilliant it is. According to Wikipedia quinoa is a pseudocereal that is more related to beets, spinach and tumbleweed than other grains – messes with your head doesn’t it? What this means is that while you can cook it and use it in recipes just like its grainy equivalent (eg. Risotto, stuffed peppers) it is low carb, high protein, gluten free and kosher for Passover (not kitniot either).

This recipe comes from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook – I have mentioned before how much I love this book. In fact, it was my first ever cookbook. Its vegetarian, interesting and wholesome recipes, with hand-drawn illustrations and a whimsical style of prose.  I have tried this recipe before with brown rice as the recipe suggested, but actually I think I preferred it with quinoa – what it also has, which quinoa needs, it a whole lot of dressing. Quinoa tends to get pretty dry, but this salad does not, even on day two. The Indonesian style flavours are fantastic – the pineapple, chilli, garlic, soy combinations creates an incredibly complex flavour, with much more depth than the standard Chinese style sweet and sour.

If you do not have American cup measures, use a teacup. This recipe will give about 4 – 6 servings. I have scaled down the oils a little bit in the dressing.

2 cups quinoa

4 cups water

For the dressing –

¼ cup flavourless oil

2 ½ tbsp sesame oil (optional)

½ cup orange juice (I didn’t have this, and 1/3 cup lime juice instead)

1 or 2 medium cloves of garlic

1 tsp salt

2 tbsp soy sauce (or a little salt)

½ tsp crushed red pepper (I used 1 crumbled, dried birds eye chilli as they are pretty powerful, but I probably should have used 2 – this salad needs big flavours)

2 tbsp rice vinegar (or vinegar suitable for passover)

1 cup chopped fresh pineapple/ canned in juice (I used the canned variety, and added about ½ a cup of the juice)

For the salad –

3 finely sliced spring onions (whites and greens)

2 finely sliced stalks celery

1 can water chestnuts, thinly sliced (optional - I didn’t have these)

1 big handful beansprouts (not for passover)

1 cup roughly chopped roasted, salted, cashews

Put the quinoa in a large saucepan, bring to the boil and simmer with the lid on for approx. 10 minutes, and then leave off the heat with the lid on for another 5 – 10 minutes.  While the quinoa is cooking assemble the dressing ingredients in a large bowl, and add the hot quinoa directly to the dressing bowl and mix well. It will look like that there is way too much dressing to absorb, but don’t worry it will. Cover and leave to cool. Don’t add the rest of the salad ingredients until just before you are ready to serve it, so that everything stays fresh and crunchy.

Honeycomb-peanut chocolate bites

This is based on a Nigella Lawson recipe – that I saw on one of her TV shows Nigella Kitchen, one I think that was mainly created for screening in the US, and so I am not sure when it appears in the Nigella chronology.  In my last Nigella-based blog I said some quite negative things about her unnecessarily sexualised presenting style. While I do find it a bit too ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ sometimes, I really do think that she is great.  She is a fantastic writer and the recipes are lovely, and maybe there is something we can learn from her confident, real-womanly sexuality. 

A while back I read an interview with Nigella where she said that during the TV series she made shortly after the death of her first husband (the wonderful writer John Diamond) she was incredibly depressed, and regretted making the show – I think it was the Forever Summer one. Whenever I watch repeats of that show, and infact any Nigella TV appearance, I find myself scrutinising her, looking for any signs of her depression.  And of course I can’t see anything. This got me thinking a lot about the masks that people wear in public, and the way that most people ‘expect’ them to be worn. My flatmate Hannah told me a brilliant line the other day, to use in response to people who comment about the lack of smiles in others – please give me permission to experience my emotions. Obviously this is really hippy and probably not something you could say to most people, but there is such truth in it. Maybe we all need to be more open to others, to show them that we understand the ups and downs in life. And then maybe this emotional freedom will help people to repress their feelings a little less.

And this brings me quite nicely to the theme of this post – the wonderful combination that is salt and sweet. In the way that the best comedies have a touch of sadness, or Shakespeare’s sweet sorrow, experiencing that edge, or those tears, seems to make everything else that little bit sweeter. The combination of the two in food is just magical – fans of Thai food or chocolate-covered pretzels will know this one already. I recently had an amazing chocolate truffle that had been decorated with a few crystals of sea salt. As well as looking beautiful, the taste was just amazing. In a recent TV series Heston Blumenthal said that salt actually makes chocolate taste sweeter.

600g dark chocolate – broken up

200g unsalted butter - cubed

4 large crunchie bars – smashed up, with some big chunks, and smaller bits of rubble

150g salted peanuts

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a large bowl balanced on top of a saucepan of simmering water. Be careful with this so that it doesn’t seize – let it melt slowly. Once it is melted and shiny, mix in the crunchie pieces and peanuts. Pour the whole thing into a square foil-lined dish (roasting tray, cake tin) and leave to set. If you are very clever (which sadly I wasn’t) when the chocolate is half-set you could take a knife and score bar shapes in it - making it easier to break up later. Once it is set, cut the chocolate into bite-sized pieces and enjoy!

West African Style Kale, Pineapple & Peanut Stew

I made this dish about a month or so ago, and I have to say that it was one of the most surprising things have ever made. The dinner where it debuted was an interesting event, kind of an African-themed hamster wake. It was a great evening and a good time was had by all I think, and it was a very decent send-off for Coco the hamster.

African food is pretty new to me (apart from North Africa and South African Braai), but after a few of my friends have travelled there and raved about it, I looked into it a bit more. I found this recipe online after searching for kale based, vegan, West-African recipes, and it sounded so so weird and a little bit disgusting, I just had to try it. I was looking for kale recipes as I had discovered on a previous investigation that it is very popular in a range of dishes throughout the world. The recipe is from Mollie Katzen, so not exactly authentic – but as she is the author of one of my first and most beloved cookbooks The Moosewood Cookbook – I knew that it would be worth a try. And I was so right. Now I was really dubious, even as it was cooking I thought that it would be horrible. But then I tasted it, and it was incredible – DELICIOUS!!! sweet, savoury and spicy - flavour combinations that work so well together, in an earthy, hearty and totally new kind of way. This recipe is from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, I found it on the website www.veganconnection.com

Serves 4 – very easy. Serve on rice, or couscous, or with flatbread.

Ingredients

1 onion, diced not that small


2 garlic cloves, crushed

Vegetable or other flavourless oil, approx 1 tbsp

1 bunch of kale or Swiss chard (4 cups sliced)
 - I used about 1 and a bit bags of kale from Sainsburys – they are really large but once all the stalks had been picked out, it wasn’t as much as it seemed. Also remember that it cooks down a lot.

2 cups undrained canned crushed pineapple (20-ounce can)
- I used one regular sized can

½ cup peanut butter
- use a few tbsp of hot water to melt it

Generous shakes of Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce
 - you need to be able to taste the spice, as it balances the sweetness of the pineapple

handful chopped fresh coriander


salt to taste


big handful crushed skinless peanuts (if using salted peanuts then put less salt in the main dish)

2 or 3 sliced spring onions
(including the green parts)

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the onions for about 10 minutes adding the garlic about halfway, stirring frequently, they are lightly browned. While the onions and garlic are frying, wash the kale carefully, discarding large stems and any blemished leaves. Of the leaves are whole shred them into 1inch slices.

Add the pineapple and its juice to the onions in the pan along with a tablespoon or 2 of hot water, and bring it to a simmer. Stir in the kale, cover, and simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring a couple of times, until just tender. Mix in the peanut butter, Tabasco and coriander and simmer for a couple more minutes. Season and serve topped with crushed peanuts, chopped spring onions, fresh coriander and a wedge of lime.

Sweet and Sour Onions

This recipe comes from a fantastic book called ‘Jewish Traditions Cookbook’ by Marlena Spieler. While it may not have the beautiful prose and history of Claudia Roden’s book (officially one of the best cookbooks ever) it is concise with pictures on ever page, and recipes from all over the world. Marlena writes that this recipe originates from Sicily, and spread to Italy, Greece, Turkey and France when the Spanish took over Sicily and the Jews had to flee. I really do find it incredibly interesting how recipes and flavour combinations have travelled through the world as a result of Jewish history. Claudia herself has a fantastic story about Tunisian Jewish flavours linking back to Portugal and Livorno in Italy, by way of pirates, of course.

As this dish is best served at room temperature, it makes for an incredibly useful side dish – although I reckon it is probably even better when eaten simply with crusty bread and cheese, with little regard for table manners. Also apologies for some of the quantities given, I scaled up the recipe due to the fact that the little onions I found (Sainsburys shallots) come in 400g packs. It makes a fairly decent amount, one large panful. When peeling the onions, various sources recommend blanching them in a similar manner to tomatoes to get the skins off easily, but I just peeled them the regular way and it didn’t seem like so much hassle.

ingredients

800g small onions or shallots, peeled but whole

80ml or so wine vinegar (I used cider vinegar as I didn’t have any)

70ml or so olive oil

60g caster sugar (this is less than the recipe suggested, but you can add a little more if you have a sweeter tooth, for me though it was plenty.

5 tbsp tomato puree

2 pinches each of cinnamon and allspice (I didn’t have any allspice)

2 bay leaves

4 parsley sprigs (I didn’t have any fresh parsley so used some dried instead)

100g (ish) raisins or sultanas

salt and pepper

It really is this easy…

Put all of the ingredients in a saucepan with 500ml water. Bring to the boil and simmer uncovered for 45 mins or so, until the onions are soft and the liquid has thickened and reduced considerably. Remove the bay leaves and parsley sprigs, and season to taste with salt and pepper.