Not as useless as you might think

There seem to be an insane number of articles on the net telling me to use my old corks to make a noticeboard, a trivet, to cover my walls, or make a cork wreath. Why on earth would I want a cork wreath?

I don’t want to do any of that because I have a sense of aesthetics, but I also don’t want to throw them all into the bin, so I’ve had a think/research, and come up with the following things that they are actually useful for, and that don’t offend my eyes.

1. Cook an octopus – Controversial this one, a lot of people, including a number of proffessional chefs will tell you that it works, and a lot of others will tell you it’s complete bollocks.

   The theory is that if you throw a cork into the pot when you are boiling squid or octopus, it helps to tenderise them and helps prevent them from going rubbery.

2. Make a stew – In exactly the same way as above, some people claim that if you throw a wine cork or two into a stew when you are cooking it with cheap cuts of meat, and it will help the meat to tenderise.

3. Give them to your cat – It’s hardly a great way of recycling as ultimately you still have the same cork later, but I have never met a cat who didn’t love playing with wine corks.

4. Use them as drainage – Chop each cork into a couple of pieces and put them in the bottom of plant pots to act as drainage.

5. Compost them – Whole corks will break down incredibly slowly, but if you chop them up into small pieces then you can throw them into your compost bin with no problem.

6. Clean a knife – If you have high carbon kitchen knives then it is easy to scratch them by using an abrasive cleaning pad. You can avoid it by putting some washing up liquid on a cork and scrubbing them with that instead. I know it sounds weird, but it works!

7. Start a fire – Keep old corks soaking in a jar of rubbing alcohol, or other highly flammable liquid, and then you can use them as firelighters to get nice and toasty in the winter, or get a summer barbecue going nicely.

8. Stop oil burning – I have no idea of the science behind this, and I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I have read the same thing in a few different places. Aparently, putting a cork into a frying pan will raise the burning point of the oil. Anyone tried it?

9. Make a fishing float – Pretty self explanatory really, isn’t it.

The smallest grains in the world

Ok, so I’m waving my arm around madly, but I reckon I’m probably in a minority here.

The thing is that I love Ethiopian food, which largely centres around injera, a pancake/bread that is traditionally made using fermented teff, and this has led me to do a little bit of research.

Umm, teff?

So called because teffa (ጠፋ) means lost in Amharic, and teff happens to be the smallest grain in the world, at about 0.8mm, with about 150 seeds weighing the same as onea kernel of wheat.

Teff is similar to quinoa, but because the grain is smaller it takes a shorter time to cook. Teff is gluten free, and is also super high in fibre, has more calcium than milk, and twice as much iron as wheat or barley.

I’m really not a fan of the term ‘super food’ but if there are such things, then this is surely a strong contender.

It’s a traditional crop in the highlands of Ethiopia, but it’s tricky, labour intensive and time consuming to grow, which means that most Ethiopians can’t afford to make injera from pure teff and end up mixing it with other forms of flour. Despite the fact that Ethiopia is an ancient civilisation, and this is really quite an ancient crop, we in the more affluent ‘first world’, who could all afford it have somehow not managed to hear of teff until very recently.

Nowadays though it is also being grown in Europe, the US, Australia, and South Africa, and whilst not exactly cheap is definitely affordable. It’s not the easiest thing to get your hands on, but you could try your local health food shop, or a quick Google will provide plenty of mail order options.

I can’t really recommend any suppliers in other markets, but in the UK you can get it from Innovative Solutions for a reasonable price.

And what would I do with it?

Apart from the obvious answer of make injera (recipe coming here soon), there are a surprising number of things that you might choose to do with teff. Grains are versatile, and teff is no exception, once ground down into a flour you can use it to make pastries, pancakes, breads and cakes.

You can also sprinkle it onto a bread, as you would poppy seeds or sesame seeds, throw it into a vegetable stir fry, or make a porridge out of it.

I haven’t experimented with nearly enough teff based recipes yet, but I’m planning on trying a lot more in the very near future.

This is not a lemon posset

It sounds like it should be some kind of golden furred rodent, scurrying through the undergrowth and nibbling on a pumpkin seed.

but no…

Almost disappointingly, the lemon posset is a super simple dessert that is really refreshing and creamy and wonderful.

Possetic history

So possets have been around (with the name posset) since the 15th century, but they have changed a bit since then.

Historically a posset was a drink made of milk curdled with alcohol, and then spiced. Whilst that doesn’t sound too great to me, it was considered as a general cure all kind of thing, and specifically sorted you right out if you were suffering from a cold.

Moving forward about 600 years, and the common usage of the word posset has evolved into something similar to a syllabub that is made up of cream and usually a citrus fruit, where the citric acid has the same curdling or setting effect as the alcohol used to.

The recipe

This is stupidly simple, there are only three ingredients and apart from the time for cooling it takes literally ten minutes.

If you can get unwaxed lemons then do, if not make sure that you wash them well in hot water before using them to get rid of as much of the wax as you can.

If you don’t have caster sugar then normal sugar should work fine, but it might be slightly grainy.

1. Wash the lemons well, and then juice and zest them.

2. Put the sugar and cream into a large pan and bring them slowly up to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 3 minutes. Take it off of the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.

3. Add the lemon zest and juice to the cream and give it a good whisk.

4. Pour the mixture into six individual glasses/pots/ramekins and put it in the fridge to cool for at least three hours, and preferably overnight, to set.

5. Serve it just as it, or garnish the top with a twist of lemon peel, a sprig of mint or a shaving of dark chocolate. Tastes especially yummy when served with almond biscuits.

He likes pasta a lot

I’m sitting in one right now in fact, not because I particularly want to, but because they have free wi-fi and a kids playground outside, the two key factors which let me get some work done.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the principle of an Irish pub abroad, why not export a winning formula. They are, in Ireland at least, fun and convivial places, with decent beer and a great atmosphere.

The problem arises from the fact that you can’t just export atmosphere. Lots of badly fitting wood panelling, a shedload of Guinness signs, some tacky ‘mementos’ of Ireland, a leprechaun here and there, and hugely inflated bar prices just aren’t enough to do it.

But that’s fine, there is always the food and drink to rescue them, isn’t there?

Well….

The Guinness is usually shite to start with. It’s not the easiest ting in the world to keep and pour Guinness well, and the vast majority of Irish pubs abroad seem either to not know how, or just not care. This wouldn’t be such an insult if they didn’t insist on charging you double the price of any other beer in the place for the bitterly disappointing experience.

Apart from that they always seem to sell the very worst of generic lagers and ciders. Fosters, Heineken, Strongbow, etc. I mean, come on, how hard can it be to stock a decent local beer?

Which brings us on to the food.

Now, I don’t know a lot about Irish food, but I’d like to know more. I would have assumed that sitting in an Irish pub would seem like the best place to try some of it, but I’d be wrong.

A random selection of items from the menu in front of me might contain:

• Chilli nachos

• Spicy chicken wings

• Cheese quesadillas

• Lasagna

• Chili con carne

• Spaghetti bolognese

• Chicken tikka masala

• Foot long hot dog

• Cajun chicken burger

• Chocolate brownie

There is nothing wrong with any of those dishes, but none of them is great either. If I want a decent curry I’ll go to an Indian or Pakistani, if I want a pasta based dish I’ll head to one of the many Italian places in the city.

Where are the stews, the soda bread, the amazing seafood and the potato dishes?

The Irish produce some amazing cheeses, absolutely fantastic cheddar for example. Why then, do the burgers here come with a slice of Monterey Jack, an American cheese?

Oh, and surely a splash of whiskey in the cream does not suddenly turn a dessert into something Irish?

And after all of that little outpouring I’d love to be able to say that I won’t be setting foot in another pseudo Irish hostelry anytime soon, but we all know I’ll be back for the wi-fi and the quietness of child. You can rest assured though that I won’t be eating while here.

"I'll never drink again"

Good morning after, and welcome to your…

Hangover |ˈhæŋˌoʊvər|
noun
1 a severe headache or other after effects caused by drinking an excess of alcohol.

But just what is wrong with you?

Very brief science

The biggest problem that you are facing is one of dehydration. Alcohol is a strong duretic, for every 250ml of a normal strength drink you swallow, you will expel about 800ml of liquid through urination.

This means that in order to have kept your hydration level the same you would need to have drunk 3.5 times as much non alcoholic fluid as you did alcoholic. I reckon it’s a fairly safe bet that this is not the case.

There are also, to name a few, congeners, acetaldehyde (the reason that women get worse hangovers than men), and glutamine rebound to factor in.

If you are suffering enough to have just googled ‘how to lose a hangover’ you probably don’t care at all about biology right now and just want to know how to fight it.

The scientific answers – What works and what doesn’t

Don’t dismiss science just yet though, because it is going to help you out now. There are some things that will not help you, no matter how much you think they are going to and then there are a few very simple things that really can help lift you up out of your current self inflicted misery.

Let’s start with the five things you might think are a good idea, but that you really DO NOT want to take:

1. Don’t take Aspirin – Alcohol thins your blood, and aspirin does exactly the same thing. Thinning your blood even more than it already is seems pretty unlikely to help you in any way. It’s also a gastric irritant.

2. Don’t take Ibuprofen – At least not if your hangover includes any kind of nausea. It might help your headache, but Ibuprofen is a gastric irritant and is going to make your urge to vomit even worse.

3. Paracetamol – Also a bad idea, they just make your liver work even harder than it is already having to.

4. Don’t drink coffee – It’s a very temporary pick up, but ultimately your biggest problem is that you are dehydrated, and caffeine is a duretic – this can only make things worse.

5. Hair of the dog. A drink will very likely make you feel temporarily better, but ultimately you are just prolonging your suffering.

And now for the five things that really will help you:

1. Eat burnt toast – It’s all about carbon, which acts as a natural filter. If you end up in an hospital emergency unit with alcohol poisoning they will pump your stomach full of a carbon mixture to filter the toxins. Burnt toast does this on a smaller and more comfortable scale.

2. Eat eggs. Eggs contain cysteine, and this breaks down the acetaldehyde which is contributing to making you feel like hell.

3. Get some vitamins – Especially B and C, but none of them are going to do you any harm. You can either take a couple of multivitamin pills, or drink fresh fruit juices.

4. Hydrate yourself – Drink water, or anything else you like as long as it does not contain caffeine, alcohol, or taurine (Red Bull) because these are all diuretics and will do the opposite of what you need them to do.

5. Replenish your levels of sodium and glycogen – You could do this with an isotonic sports drink if it is non-caffeinated, or you could just put a spoon each of salt and sugar in a glass of water.

and what works for me

What’s above is the conventional wisdom, these things should help everyone to get through a hangover as quickly and painlessly as possible, but…

… as we all know, everyone is different and what works for one person might not work for anyone else. So here are the things that always seem to work for me (in no particular order and without scientific explanations).

1. Bacon sandwich – A big sandwich filled with crispy fried bacon, with lashings of tomato ketchup and/or HP sauce.

2. Orgasm – I don’t know why it works, but nothing seems to help me lose a hangover like a good hard orgasm, this one is tricky if the person you share a bed with also has a hangover and doesn’t believe in the same cure.

3. Bloody Mary – It’s pretty much a generic cure for everything bad in the world, so why wouldn’t it work for a hangover.

Sun dried tomatoes for a Greek style pie

This simple Greek inspired pie seemed like it might do the trick, and it turned out to be better than I had possibly imagined.

Since then, I’ve gone back to this recipe a few times, not as an alternative to anything, but with it centre stage, because it is just that good.

It just ticks so many boxes, what’s not to love about it?

✔ Looks great
✔ Tastes fantastic
✔ Quick
✔ Easy
✔ Healthy (ish)

Notes on ingredients

This is a super simple recipe, there are only five ingredients, and to get the best out of it the ingredients have to be right.

Feta is PDO (Protected Designation of Origin), which means that if you buy it within the EU it must have been made from sheep or goat milk harvested in Greece. You could use a similar cheese made elsewhere, as long as it tastes and feels right, but really nothing else seems to be quite as good. Danish Apetina is made the same way, but it’s a poor substitute.

Feta should be crumbly and salty, it should not be made from cow’s milk, and it won’t be too cheap. Anything labelled as ‘salad cheese’ or ‘greek style cheese’ is just not up to the job.

Although it’s a Greek inspired dish, the sun-dried tomatoes don’t have to be from Greece. It really doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they are packed with flavour. Reduce the food miles and save some money by buying the best local sun-dried tomatoes you can find, or as local as you get if you live in the cold north somewhere. Having said that, the best sun-dried tomatoes I have ever eaten were from Gozo (Malta), and I would love to have some of them to try in this dish.

I’ve never made filo pastry because I’ve never had reason to. Shop bought versions are excellent, and it seems like a huge amount of work for a result that is unlikely to be much better. If you want to try though, then Vefa Alexiadou’s recipe is probably a good place to start.

The recipe

1. Put the oven on to heat up at 180°C

2. Cut any thick stalks off of the spinach and put the leaves into a large pan. Put a couple of spoons of water into the pan with it, and cook over a medium heat until the spinach has wilted slightly. Pour it into a colander and leave to drain for a few minutes.

3. Drain the tomatoes, but keep the oil that they came in, then roughly chop the tomatoes and put them into a bowl.

4. Squeeze as much water as you can out of the spinach, roughly chop it, and put it into the bowl with the tomatoes.

5. Add the eggs and crumble the feta into the bowl, and mix everything together well.

6. Brush the first sheet of pasty with the oil from the tomatoes, and lay it oil side down in a 22cm loose bottomed cake tin. The pastry will be too big for the tin and some of it will go up the sides and overhang. Repeat this with the other sheets of pastry with each one slightly turned around from the last, so that the sides are covered evenly.

7. Put the filling into the tin on top of the pastry, and then fold the hanging edges over, so that they meet in the centre. Scrunch them together at the middle and make sure that there is no hole, and brush the top with the oil.

8. Bake in the middle of the oven for about half an hour until it is crisp and golden.

Cut the pie into decent size wedges, and serve it with a simple salad.

It’s delicious straight from the oven or cold later, but the pastry will start to lose that lovely crispness if you leave it for too long.

Aren't they just yummilly beautiful?

Summertime, and the living is easy.

The moment to enjoy refreshing fruity cocktails, and also the moment when wonderful sour cherries are ripe and juicy.

I am sure that there are lots of different ways to combine these two things, and I am equally sure that many of them are fantastic. What I am not so sure of is that many of them could possibly be better than this one.

Sour cherry caipirinha is definitely one thing that I am going to be drinking plenty of over the next few weeks.

Take a caipirinha

For anyone who doesn’t know, the caipirinha is THE Brazilian cocktail. It’s super simple, lime and sugar muddled together, some cachaça added, and served over lots of ice.

Outside of Brazil, caipirinhas, along with mojitos, are by far the most popular cocktails in Barcelona, you can get them at every little bar, and so I do far too often.

Cocktail purists will of course maintain that anything that varies from the above is not a caipirinha, but hey, this version just adds one little ingredient.

Sour (or tart) cherries…

… are without doubt one of the best fruits anywhere. I defy anyone not to love them!

I’m not talking about bitter unripe cherries, but the varieties that are naturally tart. Some people might know them by the alternative names of ‘tart cherries’, or ‘pie cherries’. Whatever you want to call them, they taste amazing.

The only problem is that they have a really short season, so during the little bit of the year when I can get my hands on them, I throw them in everything I can think of. So far this week there have been caipirinhas and ice cream, and a lemon and cherry posset is coming soon.

Recipe

Apart from the fact that it contains the cherries, the big difference between this and a ‘proper’ caipirinha is the way it is served. Not over ice in a big glass, but shaken and then strained.

The ingredients listed are for one drink, but if you have a shaker of any sensible size then you can easily make two or three at once.

1. Take the pits out of the cherries, cut the lime into a few chunks, and put them together into a shaker.

2. Give them a good old muddle until everything is well mushed up.

3. Add a decent amount of ice and the Cachaça, and shake well.

4. Fine strain into a cocktail glass.

Extra note

This drink tastes especially good if you have a production line of attractive women in your kitchen making them in large numbers.

Cherries for rippley bits

You can make ice cream with just about any flavour you care to think of, and it is really quite difficult to have an epic fail. What is much harder than getting the flavour right, is getting a wonderful smooth texture, and for me, ice cream is just as much about the texture as it is taste.

The simplest way to make ice cream is literally to freeze cream with sugar, and that’s fine, but the way to get really smooth and lovely ice cream is to start with a…

Custard

Now, I have a bit of a thing for proper custard, made with very fat cream, egg yolks and real vanilla. It’s velvety and unctuous, which are just the qualities that I want in my ice cream, so what better place could there be to start the quest for seriously smooth ice cream than with my favourite traditional custard recipe.

The method for making the custard does not change at all, but the proportion of the ingredients does. If we want to turn the custard into ice cream then we need to add a lot more sugar because you taste the sweetness of the sugar less when it is at a lower temperature. There is also less egg than normal so that it doesn’t set too hard, and there is no need for any cornflour which usually works as a thickening agent.

Ripples

As stunning as a custard based vanilla ice cream is, it can be even better with a ripple of red fruit running through it. I’ve made my recipe deliberately quite sweet, so that I can throw in sour cherries, which just taste amazing. Sadly they have a really short season, but you could also use cranberries, or anything else that is a bit tart. If you want to use a sweeter fruit then cut the amount of sugar in the recipe by 10 or 20 grams.

Machine?

The recipe calls for an ice cream maker, partly because I have one, and partly because that is the only way to get a really smooth result.

Freezing things creates ice crystals. The more whatever it is that you are freezing is moving around, the smaller and more spread out those crystals will be. You simply can’t keep the mixture constantly moving and freezing at the same time without some kind of ice cream maker.

That doesn’t mean that there is no point in giving this a go if you don’t have one though, it just means that your results will be good instead of amazing. Start off by chilling your custard mixture over an ice bath to get it as cold as possible, then pour it into something wide and flat (as opposed to a deep bowl) and put it into the freezer. After about 40 minutes take it out and use a handheld mixer, stick blender, whisk, spatula, or whatever you’ve got, and give it a good stir around, making sure you break up the most frozen bits around the edges. Then return it to the freezer and repeat this procedure about every 30 minutes for the next three hours or so, and you will end up with a pretty good result.

If you live anywhere hot though, an ice cream maker is a great investment, they aren’t expensive at all these days, and just make it all so much easier, as well as giving a better end result.

and so to work…

1. Cut down the length of the vanilla pod, and scrape out the seeds, put both the seeds and the pod itself into a small saucepan, and add the cream to it.

2. If you don’t have a vanilla pod, or do but just don’t want to use something so expensive to make custard, then you can use vanilla extract without too huge a difference to the taste.

3. Put the pan onto the hob at a low heat and bring it up to just below simmering point.

4. While the cream is heating up, put the egg yolks and sugar together in a heatproof bowl, and whisk them together.

5. Take the vanilla pod out of the hot cream, and then slowly pour the cream into the bowl with the eggs and sugar. Keep on whisking it all the time that you are pouring in the cream.

6. Pour the combined mixture back into the saucepan, and put it back on a gentle heat. Keep whisking it as it heats, and as it reaches simmering point it will start to thicken.

7. Pour the custard into something that can go into the fridge, cover it with cling film (this stops a skin forming) and leave it to cool down for a while before you put it in the fridge for about 3-4 hours until it is completely cold.

and freeze!

8. Start the ice maker and pour the custard in slowly, then leave it to churn for about 30 minutes (depending on your machine).

9. While the ice cream is churning, remove the stones from the cherries and roughly chop them. About five minutes before the ice cream has finished throw the cherry pieces into the mixture, so that they get mixed through the ice cream without getting broken up too much.

10. If you can resist for long enough, put the ice cream in the freezer for about two hours to firm it up a bit before you eat.

A German port city

The other morning as I was merrily walking down the street to the market, I happened to pass both Burger King and McDonalds. I’d only been planning to buy some veggies, but by the time I got to the market, I had a newly formed mental shopping list:

• Minced Meat
• Bacon
• Cheese
• Bread
• Tomatoes
• Greenery
• Onions

and for what possible purpose might I have desired all of these things?

Burgers!

Not the strange little discs of pseudo-meat that you get from soemwhere like McDonalds, encased in the driest bread that they have managed to somehow conjure up, and with a piece of lettuce that looks as if you are the third person to eat it.

No, real meaty burgers, slightly pink in the middle, stacked up with salad and other bits and pieces and enclosed in a sandwich that is absolutely impossible to fit in your mouth!

In this particular case, beef, with slices of crispy smoked bacon, garrotxa cheese, rucola and and big tomato slices, all wrapped in ciabatta, and topped off with special sauce (NO, not that kind of special sauce).

And so, after negotiating La Boqueria without too many distractions, I arrived home with a whole palette of lovely things with which to construct my masterpiece.

And that was the hardest part already over. I don’t understand why people would buy frozen (or chilled) premade burgers when it is so simple to knock them up yourself and control exactly what goes into them.

It’s as simple as:

1. Create breadcrumbs from some old dry bread, throw in bowl.

2. Finely chop onion and garlic, throw in bowl.

3. Unwrap meat and throw in bowl.

4. Crack in an egg and season everything in the bowl

5. Get your hands in and give it a ll a good shuffle around, then form into flattish round shapes.

6. Set them aside and fry or grill when you are ready to eat.

Meanwhile you can make some pretty strips of crispy bacon in the oven, slice some cheese and tomatoes, cut the bread and whip up a tomato relish.

and just in case you were wondering…

There are some questions that bother you, they come back time and time again and irritate the crap out of you, until you can manage to answer them. You might even forget about them for years, but sooner or later, they will find you again.

One of mine was this – why are hamburgers called hamburgers when they are normally made of beef?

And just in case anyone else is as bothered by this puzzler as I was, I have done the research, and here is the (probably) definitive answer:

An observant German merchant somewhere in the 1800′s noticed that the nomadic Tatars who he travelled east to trade with kept meat tender by putting it in a bag underneath their saddles. As they rode the meat would become crushed and smashed to pieces, and they would then scrape it all together, add seasoning and eat it.

So, our merchant friend took the idea of this smashed meat back to the German port of Hamburg with him, where it soon caught on the idea of pounding the beef and then broiling it became popular.

The idea of this ‘Hamburg steak’ was then exported all over the place, most notably the USA of course due to the fact that Hamburg was one of the most important ports in Europe.

So absolutely nothing to do with ham at all, in much the same way as a frankfurter is not made out of a chap called Frank.

Shortbread - as Scottish as him!

They weren’t bad, but nowhere near as good as shortbread made with the recipe that I normally use. So I thought it would be a good idea if I shared that one as well.

I’ve been trying not to bake shortbread for a while for a couple of reasons.

1. They are just too bloody good, and I eat so many of them that I feel sick later.

2. They contain about a million calories per biscuit.

3. I found I was making them all the time, and really wanted to experiment a bit. After all you can only eat so many biscuits in one lifetime and you don’t want them to always be the same.

But, it has now been about half a year since I ate any shortbread at all, and the packet of butter in the fridge is calling out to me, so the time has come.

Shortbread?

Yes, y’know, the Scottish biscuits that are crumbly and buttery and come in packets with tartan and thistles on them.

They are neither short (in terms of height), or bread. The name comes from an older meaning of the word short:

short | SH ôrt| (of pastry) containing a high proportion of fat to flour and therefore crumbly.

They could also easily have been named for the short amount of time that they stay in your kitchen or on the table before they all magically disappear.

There is really not a lot more to say, anyone who has ever tried real butter shortbread must already love them. Anyone who hasn’t tried them, stop wasting time and put the oven on to heat up, and let’s:

Bake!

1. Put the oven on to heat up to 150°C.

2. Throw the butter into a large mixing bowl and beat it with a wooden spoon until it softens.

3. Add the sugar and beat it into the soft butter.

4. Sift the flour into the bowl and add the semolina, and mix it altogether until you end up with a smooth mixture that doesn’t leave any bits around the edge of the bowl.
   The easiest way is to start off with a wooden spoon and then use your hands as the mixture starts to come together.

5. Turn the mixture out onto a lightly floured surface and rol it out to the size of whatever you are going to bake it in (a 20cm diameter tin is ideal). Make sure that the mixture is pushed evenly right up to the edges, and prick it all over with a fork.

6. Bake it in on the middle shelf of the oven for about 60 minutes, it should turn a light golden colour and feel firm to the touch in the middle.

7. Take it out of the oven and while it is still hot, score it into 12 wedges.

8. When it is cool, cut along the wedge lines that you have scored and sprinkle some caster sugar on the top.

Eat and enjoy, especially good with an old fashioned cup of tea. Whatever you don’t consume immediately (not much) can be kept in an airtight container for as long as it lasts.

How big are these?

Since I’m not any kind of master baker this normally involves a recipe, and this is where the egg problem arises. Unlike most areas of culinary craft, where you can get by with a reasonable set of taste-buds, a bit of heart and a mere sprinkling of technical knowhow, baking is an exact science where changing quantities and ratios has a huge effect on the end results.

It’s easy enough to look through a book or hop onto Google and find a million recipes, and I have enough basic mathematical knwledge (and conversion charts) to muddle my way through ounces, grams, cups, sticks, or whatever other odd meausurements a recipe might decide to throw at me.

What, until recently, I had not thought to do however is to change the amount of eggs that I used depending on where the recipe came from. You (or at least I) would just assume that a large egg is a large egg, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

Globilisation and standarisation are constantly making our world smaller and bridging differences between cultures and societies, but it seems that this does not extend to eggs.

The difference between a large egg in London and a large egg in New York is not just the 5500km that separates them, but also about 10 grams, and if we wanted to compare it to a large egg in Australia then it all changes again.

If you are only using one egg in a recipe then it really doesn’t make all that much difference, but if you are using four or five then those differences start to add up.

So, for anybody out there who might be bothered by the whole egg size issue and wants to calculate how much egg should be going into their baked delights, I’ve put together this handy little chart showing the difference in egg sizes in different places.

Note: This chart only works for chicken eggs, duck and goose eggs have their own completely non-standardised sizing systems.

If you are using a very old recipe then you might find that you have egg sizes specified by a number. These are ‘traditional’ egg sizes, and I’m going to include a little table of these as well. Partially for completeness, and partially because I love old recipe books, and they come in handy.

He wouldn't be too happy about this

So, I know it is great just the way that it has always been, and therefore it probably doesn’t actually need any reinventing at all, but…

1. If you aren’t careful it can be more than a wee bit greasy, innit?

2. It’s never going to be the prettiest plate of food in the world, there just aren’t too many ways to make a piece of fried bread and a pile of beans look good.

3. I live by the Mediterranean, with easy access to some of the best ingredients on the planet and want to find a way to fit them into my brekkie.

My dilemma is how to address all of those issues, and yet still produce a plate of something that is both super yummy and stays true to the spirit of the Great British breakfast?

There are some obvious must-haves. Bacon MUST be there together with sausage, and for me tomato is another essential. I’m happy to skip beans and mushrooms, I like both but not necessarily as a breakfast ingredient, I do however like some kind of potatoes, be it hash browns, or fried chunks, or whatever.

Then comes the Med infusion, I want olive oil, garlic, some stunningly good spanish pork, and a bit of greenery wouldn’t go amiss either.

So one morning this weekend, I decided to have a play and see what I could come up with, that would taste as good as a greasy fryup, but be healthier and just somehow more in line with the rest of what I eat.

What I ended up with was:

• A basket of crispy bacon filled with a tomato, onion and garlic jam.

• Fresh Navaran chistorra (it’s a sausage) fried with green peppers.

• A young leaf salad, lightly dressed, with a fried egg on the top.

• Chunky potato chips, oven roasted with olive oil and plenty of Maldon salt.

So, I’m ready for the traditionalists to rip me apart for diluting the whole intrinsic nature of their good old breakfasts, but I don’t care. I love my new breakfast, and I think it is going to become a staple of my weekends from now on.

What a pretty leaf

It doesn’t really matter though because it keeps for quite a while, freezes well, goes well with all sorts of things, and tastes so good that you can eat it days in a row without starting to hate it.

It’s very red

Beetroot and cabbage and apple and cider, it’s all very red, all very wintry, and somehow feels all very Eastern European. It’s also very very good, and goes well with just about anything.

Red cabbage with apples is a pretty common recipe, and this is just a version of that with the addition of some beetroot.

There really isn’t a hell of a lot more to say about this dish, so without further ado here we go.

The recipe

IMPORTANT NOTE! – Don’t add salt at any point before the end of cooking when the cabbage is already soft, or it will never get tender.

1. Peel the first couple of leaves off the cabbage and throw them away, cut it into quarters, remove the woody stem part from the middle and then thinly slice the rest.

2. Half and slice the onions, then peel, core and roughly chop the apples and peel and chop the beetroots.

   Take care not to cut the apple into too small pieces or they will just break down and disappear completely during cooking.

3. In a big pan, put a layer of the cabbage on the bottom, then a layer of the onion, apple, beetroot, zest, sugar and mixed spice. Repeat with alternate layers of cabbage then everything else, until you have used it all.

4. Pour the vinegar and cider over everything, and cut the butter into a few pieces and put them on the top.

5. Put the lid on, bring it to the boil, and then turn it down and simmer over a low heat for about 45 minutes.

   You will have to control the boiling and simmering by ear, as you probably won’t be able to see the liquid at the bottom of the pan.

6. After 45 minutes, give it a good stir, bringing the contents from the bottom of the pan up to the top, and then put the lid back on and cook for another 45 minutes.

7. After this time the cabbage should be tender, but if it isn’t then give it another stir and cook it for a little bit longer. Once it is tender you can add salt if you want to, and it is ready to serve.

You can keep the cabbage in a sealed container in the fridge for a good few days, and it also freezes really well.

Spicey warming wintry wine

Mulled whine – A moan that you have been thinking about for some time.

Mulled wine – A delicious sweetened and spiced warm wine drink.

Obviously, we are far more interested in a tasty wintry alcoholic beverage than a little rant, so here we go:

Pan-European winter warmer

Mulled wine is a traditional winter drink, especially around Christmas, across huge parts of Europe. Most people would think of English mulled wine, of Scandinavian gløgg, or German glühwein, but close variations are also traditional in Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Italy, and Latvia.

So many millions of people can’t be wrong, can they?

No, and there are reasons why this particular drink has now been popular for thousands of years. Namely that it makes you all warm and cozy on the inside, is wonderfully easy to make, and tastes like liquid Christmas.

Notes on ingredients

One of the great things about mulled wine is that there is no set in stone recipe. What follows is the way that I like to make it after a bit of experimentation, but if you don’t have one of the ingredients then you can either leave it out or substitute something else in.

You can mull either red or white wine, although red is much more common. Whatever you use it should be reasonably dry and nice and fruity. I virtually always use red wine, but if you are trying white then a nice riesling would be a good place to start.

Don’t try and use a very cheap wine, if it tastes bad straight from the bottle, it will taste even worse when it is heated.

One final note, is that you don’t want to use an aluminium pan because the acid in the wine and citrus juice reacts with the aluminium and everything comes out tasting metallic.

So, let us mull

1. Peel the clementine, together with half of the lemon and lime. The peel should be in large pieces, and you should make sure that there is not too much pith attached to it, or it will turn bitter.

   Throw the peel together with the juice of the clementine into a large pan.

2. Add the rest of the dry ingredients to the pan, and pour in just enough wine to cover them.

3. Bring the mixture to the boil and simmer for about five minutes, stirring occasionally.

   The idea of this is to let all of the spices infuse into the wine. If we did it with the whole bottle of wine, then all of the alcohol would evaporate off, and we don’t want that!

4. Add the rest of the bottle of wine and a splash of brandy, and give it a good stir. Heat it until the wine reaches about 60-70°C, but don’t let it boil.

Done! You can reheat it as many times as you like if it starts to get cold, as long as you are careful not to let it boil.

Gin and champagne - can't be wrong!

Obviously I’ve been revisiting some of my favourites, and have invented a few drinks of my own, but mostly I’ve been working my way through a big list of classic (and less classic) cocktails that I’ve never tried before.

Some I like, some I don’t, but there are a few that are absolutely fantastic. The French 75 is one of these.

75?

mm. 75mm. The diameter of the shells of the French artillery gun that some people will tell you this drink is named after. Assuming that it was created in Harry’s bar, Paris, during the 1920′s

Others will tell you that it was invented in the US during prohibition, and yet others will have you believe that it is actually an English creation, again created shortly after the first world war.

I have absolutely no clue which one of these is the true origin of the drink, but I quite like the idea of it being named after the artillery shell, because it packs quite a punch, even though it is deceptively refreshing and easy to drink.

Notes on ingredients

It’s the FRENCH 75, so of course it should be made with champagne, but I live in Catalunya, so of course I make it with cava. Any decent méthode traditionnelle sparkling wine will do just fine.

The gin should be something with a decent taste of juniper to it. My personal favourite for a good everyday gin that won’t cost a fortune is Tanqueray, and it works really well in this drink.

Let’s do it

1. If you don’t have pre-chilled flutes then stick a lump of ice in one to chill it while you make the drink.

2. Put the gin, lemon juice and simple syrup together with plenty of ice into a shaker and give it all a good fling about.

3. Remove the ice from your flute, and strain the drink into it.

4. Top up with the sparkling wine and garnish with a lemon twist.