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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feeling saucy?

For example:
Bungee jumping without a rope
One night stands without a condom
Roast pork without apple sauce

Now, sadly I don’t know anything at all about making very strong and yet bouncy suspension cords, or about the manufacture of latex based sexual protection, but I do now how to make a damn fine apple sauce, and I am more than happy to share this information with all of you.

Just one quick important note, this recipe is for an apple sauce to be served hot (warm) and not one to be kept in a jar for later. If you want to make an apple sauce that you can keep and eat cold later, then you should omit the butter from the recipe.

Take an apple …

… but not just any apple.

Bramley, Bramley, Bramley, and if you can’t get Bramleys (as I can’t in Barcelona) then you need to find a hard cooking apple with quite a high level of acidity. In most of Europe you can get a variety called Boskoop which work really well.

Get saucy

1. Peel, core and slice the apples, and put them into a small saucepan together with the water and lemon juice.

2. Cook over a low heat for about 15 minutes until the apples have softened and started to break down.

3. Cut the butter into cubes and whisk it, together with the sugar and cinnamon, into the apple.

4. Keep it warm until you are ready to serve.

Salmon from the grave

Whichever language you pick, the meaning is simple: Lax = Salmon & Grav = Grave.

Fishermen used to bury their salmon in the sand just above the high tideline, where it would cure and start to ferment slightly. Obviously if you bury something first you have to dig a hole or ‘grave’ first, hence the name.

Modern gravlax doesn’t involve finding a beach, but the principal is similar. Instead of digging a grave for your chunk of fish, you simply bury it in a mix of salt and sugar.

Why bury your fish?

Well, it cures it. The mixture of salt and sugar draws all of the moisture out of the salmon and what you end up with is a harder, slightly plasticiny bit of fish that has a more intense flavour than it started out with.

The taste is as good as, but distinctly different from smoked salmon, and it also comes with a few other fantastic bonuses:

1. It keeps a lot longer than smoked or fresh salmon.

2. The cost of making it is a LOT lower than smoked salmon for comparable quality fish.

3. You get to stand at your kitchen counter, basking in the praise of your friends, as you carve beautiful thin slices off of the block of salmon that you home cured.

Ingredients and variations

What follows is a very basic recipe, but as long as you keep the amounts of sugar and salt equal, you can play around a bit with other ingredients.

The size and thickness of the piece of salmon that you use really doesn’t matter. The only things that do matter are that it comes with the skin on, and that it is as even a thickness all the way through.

Dill and lemon zest works really well, and is probably the ‘classic’ recipe, but you might like to try adding different herbs or spices, or the zest of different citrus fruit.

Don’t think that you can only do this with salmon either, you can use exactly the same method to cure other fresh fish, like tuna or cod.

On to the entombing

1. Give the salmon a quick rinse and dry it very thoroughly.

2. In a bowl mix together equal amounts of salt and sugar.

3. Finely chop some dill and zest the lemon, add these together with a little bit of black pepper to the salt/sugar, and give it a good mix.

4. Cut a piece of clingfilm about two and a half times wider than your salmon and lay it in the bottom of the dish you are planning to use for the curing, with the sides left hanging out of the dish.

5. Pour half of your salt/sugar mixture into the dish.

6. Put the salmon on top of the salt/sugar and then cover it with the rest of the mix.

7. Wrap the remaining edges of the clingfilm over the top to form a parcel, and then put some weight on the top of it. A small plate with a couple of tins of beans works very nicely.

8. Leave it in the fridge for 24-72 hours. The longer you leave it, the deeper the cure will be, and the more plasticised the salmon will become.

9. Unwrap the salmon, and brush or rinse off the salt mix.

You can now keep it in the fridge for a few weeks with no problems, and it should be served in very thin pretty slices. Especially good with some little crostini and a glass or two of cava.

Mmmm, yummicini

“Cantu, Cantuccini,
Cantu, Cantuccini,
DON’T call us biscotti,
They are all biscotti,
But we are,
Cantuccini,
And we are yummy,
Yummi, Yummicini.”

Mmmmm, we love you Yummicini.

Now picture if you will, deli and cafe owners all over Europe and the US rubbing their hands with glee, and calling out in unison:

“Thank you cantucinni, you look so artisinal and hard to make, and you smell and taste so good. Now we can charge people whatever we like knowing that they have to have you, and that they will not realise your simplicity and make you at home. We can put one of you on a little plate next to coffee and double our prices.”

Well, I am sorry deli and cafe owners of the world but I know how easy it is to bake cantuccini, and mine taste better than those in most of your coffee shops, and I am going to share my secrets with the world!

Cantucci, Cantuccini, or Biscotti?

Biscotti is a blanket term which either covers all biscuits, or all twice baked biscuits, depending on who you ask. Since cantucinni are baked twice, they are biscotti whatever definition you choose, but so are other cookies.

The only difference between cantucci and cantuccini is the size of the biscuits. A cantuccini should be a mouthful, anythiing bigger is a cantucci.

Notes on ingredients

You will find recipes for cantuccini that contain additional ingredients like saffron and fennel seeds. There is no real reason not to add them, but I love these in just their simplest form.

The only thing I add that may not be strictly traditional is a little bit of vanilla sugar. I throw in a couple of teaspoons, removing an equal amount of the normal sugar from the recipe.

The key ingredient is obviously the almonds, and the only important thing is that they should still be in their skins. Any that have very broken or missing skin discard before you start.

Let’s bake!

Bake once …

1. Put the oven on to heat up at 200°C.

2. Put all of the ingredients except for the almonds into a bowl and mix them together well.

3. When everything is well mixed add the almonds and give them another quick mix. Don’t be too vigorous or you will separate the skin from the almonds (which you really don’t want to do).

4. Form it into a doughy ball and scrape it out on to a lightly floured worksurface.

5. Divide the dough into four equalish parts and roll each one into a sausage shape slightly shorter than the tray you are going to bake them on.

6. Put the sausages onto a lined baking tray, taking care not to put them too close to each other or to the edges of the tray (they will expand more than you think they will), and press down on each one gently with the palm of your hand to flatten them slightly.

7. Brush the tops with egg yolk and bake them for 20-25 minutes, until they are a golden brown.

… and bake twice.

8. Take them out and leave them to cool for about ten minutes. While they are cooling, reduce the oven temperature to 150°C.

9. Cut your logs on a slight diagonal into slices about 1cm thick.

10. Transfer your cantuccini back to the baking tray with a cut side facing upwards, and bake them again until they look well toasted.

11. Leave them to cool down and enjoy. With a glass of Vin Santo if you are being traditional, or with anything at all if you aren’t.

If you keep them in an airtight container then these cantuccini will easily keep for three weeks, if not longer. I’ve never really tested it, because they never last anywhere even vaguely close to that long.

Pune - the Indian Shrewsbury

A. It certainly isn’t anything traditionally Indian. It’s the Shrewsbury biscuit (also called Shrewsbury cakes), an English recipe that dates back to the 1500′s, and is apparently one of the bits of British culture that India decided to keep after colonisation.

I haven’t been to Pune (yet), but I used to love Shrewsbury biscuits when I was a kid. For some reason though they had dropped out of my mind, I had neither thought about them or eaten one for years.

Then at a flea market the other day I found a big bundle of old cookery booklets, magazines and newspaper cuttings all for sale for a couple of euros. Despite the fact that they are in four different languages and I only understand one of them, I had to have them. There, hiding away In a good housekeeping pamphlet on ‘cookies and biscuits’ from 1956 was a simple recipe for lovely Shrewsbury biscuits.

In truth the recipe was just a bit too simple, and the resulting biccies were not nearly as exciting as I’d hoped they might be, but they did set me off on a mission. A bit of research into recipes dating back to the 1600′s, a bit of experimentation, and an unhealthy amount of biscuits eaten later, and here we are with my recipe which gives fantastic biscuits every time.

Recipe notes

There is a stark difference between more traditional (c.1600-1800) and modern recipes for Shrewsbury biscuits. The old recipes all contain a high ratio of flour to sugar, probably because sugar was hideously expensive, whilst the modern ones have much more sugar than flour. This recipe uses equal quantities of both, because I think that if you add any more sugar the biscuits become too sweet and it overpowers the flavour of the lemon.

Original recipes also contained caraway seeds, whilst modern ones generally use lemon rind. I love them with lemon, but if you are a caraway fan, then you can easily substitute it in.

If you don’t have any rose water to hand, then don’t panic. Just skip that bit and add the butter as you would normally.

Let’s get biscuity

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C and line a baking sheet with baking paper.

2. In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and the sugar.

3. Beat the egg in a cup with a little bit of rosewater, and add it slowly into the creamed butter/sugar, mixing well as you do.

4. Sift the flour and add it to the mixture together with the grated lemon rind, then mix it well until it forms a stiff paste.

5. Turn the bowl out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out to about 4-5mm thickness, then cut the biscuits into circles (or whatever other shapes you fancy).

6. Bake the biscuits for about 15 minutes, until they are a very pale brown, then allow to cool.

The 1977 edition

Of course, once I’d got it home, it didn’t take long at all for the temptation to try one of these retro recipes to get the better of me. I don’t bake as much as I’d like to and don’t have a wide range of baking ingredients on hand in my kitchen right at this moment, so I had a flick through to find something fast, easy and containing only things that I already had in the cupboard.

Shortbread

Everyone loves shortbread, including me. In my case it might well be because I just love butter, I can eat it on its own, which other people regularly tell me is weird. So, I love shortbread because they are a good excuse to eat huge amounts of butter and not much else and not be told that I’m a freak.

The recipe that I normally use is completely different from the Good Housekeeping method. For one thing, my usual recipe contains semolina, and for another the proportion of butter to flour that I normally use is quite a lot higher. I was a wee bit sceptical about the end product of the GH method, but curious enough to give it a go.

The GH recipe

I haven’t changed the recipe at all, just dropped off a few of the ‘alternatives’, and rewritten it slightly into a much easier to follow form.

1. Preheat the oven to 170-180°C

2. Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl.

3. Rub in the butter and add the sugar.

4. Continue lightly kneading the mixture until it forms a dough.

5. Roll or press out the dough into a 15-18cm circle and put it onto a papered baking sheet.

6. Crimp the edges of the shortbread using your fingers and mark across it into six to eight portions and prick neatly with a fork.

7. Bake it in the oven for about 40 minutes-1 hour, until just coloured.

8. Take it out of the oven and cool it on the baking sheet. Dredge with caster sugar and break into portions when cold.

I like the the whole rustic handmade aesthetic, but if you prefer a properly round shape then of course you can use a 15-18cm sandwich tin, greased and with the bottom lined with greaseproof paper. According to GH you can also use a shortbread mould, which I’d never heard of until today. A quick google found one for sale at Lakeland, and now I want one!

The result

Despite my scepticism, what came out of the oven was actually pretty good. Not as good as the butter heavy semolina ones that I normally make, but a pleasant suprise.

The only real problem is that they were slightly burnt, which is odd because I had my oven at the bottom of the specified temperature range, for the shortest time listed, and with the fan off. The recipe is good, super quick and super easy, and the shortbread are tasty, just keep a careful eye on them in the oven and whip them out if they look like they are getting too dark.

As tasty as it is unpretty

Bigos isn’t either of those, it looks like an unappetising mess with lumps of fatty meat swimming in a strange brown water, and it smells like something you might run a mile from (especially while it is cooking), but the taste, oh the taste, more than makes up for it.

This is not something that you are likely to find on any fine dining menu, and it is tricky to imagine how you could present it to look like Michelin star food, but when it tastes like this, who cares.

Bigos and the bleak midwinter

The Polish winter isn’t the most hospitable climate in the world. Fields carpeted with snow and ice covered trees glistening in the crisp wintry air can be breathtakingly beautiful, but they aren’t the best conditions for growing anything very much.

The solution to the lack of fresh produce has always been to pickle, smoke, salt, and otherwise preserve fruit, vegetables, meats and fish.

Apart from the fact that you can’t find anything much fresh, there is also the fact that when it is 28 degrees below zero outside, you really want some meaty warming food inside you.

Which leads us neatly into bigos, a mixture of pickled cabbage, dried mushrooms, and smoked meats, which is very meaty and hearty and warms you right up right away.

A million variations

Like traditional food the world over, every grandmother and aunt in Poland will give you a different recipe (or two) for bigos, and everyone will staunchly defend the one that they ate in childhood as the best in the land.

I haven’t tried every variation of bigos in the whole of Poland, but since I love the stuff, I have tried quite a few. Of all those that I have sampled, my favourite comes from ciocia (aunt) Karolina, and the recipe that follows comes from her.

Some parts of the recipe may seem quite vague. This is due to the fact that the ingredients are so variable, and will take different lengths of time to cook every time you make the dish. After you have prepared it a few times you will learn to judge when it is and isn’t the right moment to add the next ingredient, or how long to simmer something for.

Notes on ingredients

Polish kapusta kiszona is very simply cabbage preserved in salt. In most of the rest of the world, what you will be buying is German sauerkraut. The sauerkraut is pretty much the same thing, but you should be careful to buy one without the anything added to it, i.e. carrots or white wine.

Both the pork and the beef should be tougher cuts of meat with a good amount of fat in them. If you have anything too delicate or too lean then it will disintegrate during the long cooking time of the dish.

You can use either smoked or unsmoked bacon, but smoked is better as it adds an extra dimension of flavour to the whole dish. Like the other meats the bacon should have a decent proportion of fat in it. Note that you need a joint of bacon, not slices.

The best ham to use is a pack of offcuts from your local butcher or supermarket, then you don’t even really need to chop it up later.

Ideally, the sausage should be lightly smoked, but if you can’t find one then any decent pork sausage will do.

In Poland, you would use grzyby leśne, which you’ll find in any supermarket and are a mixture of dried forest mushrooms. You can probably find something similar just about anywhere, but make sure that they are wild forest mushrooms and not something like champignon as they simply don’t have enough flavour.

Let’s do it then

1. Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl with enough warm water to cover them completely, and leave them to soak.

2. Fry the pork and beef in half of the fat until it is browned. Add the sliced onions, cover and braise until the meat is half cooked.

3. Squeeze the excess liquid out of the sauerkraut, either using your hands, or put it in a colander and press it down with a wooden spoon.

4. Put the sauerkraut and bacon together in a large pan with a little water, some allspice and the bay leaves. Bring it to the boil, and then turn it down and let it simmer.
   There are a couple of important things to note at this point. Firstly that the finished dish should be quite thick and not swimming in liquid, and that you will be adding wine as well as liquids from the mushrooms and the meat a bit later, so you should add just enough water now to prevent the cabbage from burning and allow the bacon to boil.
   Secondly, it is important not to add any salt to the dish at all until the cabbage is completely cooked, otherwise it will prevent the cabbage from softening.

5. When the bacon is half cooked, remove it, and leave the cabbage on the heat.

6. Strain the mushrooms, and cut them into slivers, then add both the mushrooms and the water they were soaked in to the cabbage.

7. Cut the cooked pork and beef, together with the bacon into medium sized chunks, and add them all together with the onions and any juices from the meat to the cabbage.

8. Cook over a medium heat till the cabbage and the meat are cooked through and soft. Sauerkraut has a tendency to stick, so it is very important not to use too high a heat, and to remember to give it a good stir from time to time.

9. While it is cooking, cut the sausage into half moon slices, and the ham into cubes, and fry them in the rest of the fat. When they are cooked, add them to the cabbage, together with the remaining spices and red wine.

10. Bring the whole thing to the boil, and then lower the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes.

At this point your bigos is finished and ready to eat, and it should taste wonderful. If you want to be really traditional and really get the very most flavour into the dish though, you have a lot more work to do.

(optional)

Traditionally bigos was cooked, cooled down and then reheated and recooled for seven days in a row in order to ensure the perfect mingling of all flavours.

11. After cooking allow your bigos to cool completely and then refrigerate it overnight.

12. The following day slowly and gently bring the whole thing up to the boil and then turn the heat down and simmer it for 10 minutes. Take it off the heat and let it cool completely before putting it back into the fridge for the night.

13. Repeat for another 5 days.

(end optional)

14. Drink either with shots of good quality frozen vodka or a bottle of the same red wine that you put into the bigos itself.

Liége cathedral - As pretty as the salad.

Liége is in the French speaking bit of Belgium, which makes it slightly simpler, because Flemish is just plain strange.

Anyway from the lovely city of Liége comes this salad (or so they call it, what is the definition of a salad anyway?). I can’t get enough of the stuff, we eat it whatever the weather, at any time of year, and anywhere in the world.

I usually make it a day after we had boiled potatoes and green beans for dinner and some are left. That means that the major part of the prep is done and the lunch can be on the table in about 5 minutes. Just in case your former dinner consisted of something else then here is the whole recipe:

Notes on ingredients

The proportions of the ingredients are really variable, and depend on what you have that day..

Sometimes the salad borders on vegetarian (when the very little and lonely bit of pancetta had been found in the fridge after all butcher’s shops had been closed), sometimes it looks like a bean field, because that is Emma’s favourite version. Enjoy tinkering then!

You can use any kind of bacon, but smoked works better, and gives a more flavourful dish. It’s not traditional, but also works well with pancetta, smoked sausages, or chorizo.

And so to work…

1. Peel your potatoes, cut them into good manly chunks, and boil them until tender in lightly salted water, and then drain. Be careful not to overcook them, as they will still be spending a moment in the frying pan.

2. Top and tail the beans, and if you feel like it, then cut them into pieces. I don’t bother to cut them, I like them long and lean. Maybe it’s because my wife is short and slightly round, and I think they contrast nicely? Boil the beans until al dente and drain well.

3. Put a large frying pan onto the heat. Anoint it with a drop of oil (and not much more as the lardons will exude the fat too) and throw the aforementioned lardons in.

4. While the lardons are frying, dice a largish onion (or if you are lazy or have a blunt knife, just cut into half moons) and add to the lardons. Reduce the heat and cook the two together until the onion is cooked, but not brown.

5. Season well with freshly ground pepper, then add the potatoes and fry all together.

6. When the potatoes are hot, add the beans and continue to cook for a couple of minutes until they are heated through, adjusting the seasoning to your taste.

7. Take the pan off of the heat and add a good glug of the vinegar. Give it a good stir so everything gets an even coating of salt, pepper and vinegar.

and then:

8. Throw it onto some plates, or just put the pan straight on the table.

9. Open a nice cold beer.

10. Drink to Begium.

11. Eat.

This is where you need a smellable screen.

You don’t actually have to write anything about how caprese tastes, smells, or looks, what it is or how to prepare it. A simple ingredients list is enough to get me salivating.

I ♡ Caprese.

You can scrawl it on a wall, sing a silly song about me and caprese sitting in a tree, I don’t mind, I’m not ashamed.

I’m also incredibly fond of social eating, of sharing things. I love mezze, tapas and finger foods. It’s partially the fun and joy of sharing many things, discussing them, passing them around the table, and partially the fact that I am greedy and curious, and like to try as many different things as I can.

So, what I really needed to find is a way to combine this kind of fingery foody way of eating with caprese, so that I could be full of happiness. I’ve found it, and now I’m sharing it, so that you can be all happy and shiny people too.

You can serve them as an appetiser, or just eat them as an evening snack with a couple of bottles glasses of nice crisp wine.

Notes on ingredients

You can use either grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes. They are very close to each other in texture and taste, the biggest difference is the shape. Use whichever you prefer, preferably whichever are more locally grown.

You can use any decent quality mozzarella, but I love mozzarella di bufala, it’s softer and creamier, slightly saltier and with a more robust taste than mozzarella made from cow’s milk. Sadly, it’s also more expensive and harder to find, but I really do believe that it’s worth the effort/expense.

Pick the most fragrant bunch of basil that you can find, and don’t chop it too many times as it bruises easily.

Let’s get skewered

1. Wash the tomatoes and chop each one in half.

2. Cut the mozzarella into thick slices slightly larger than the diameter of a tomato.

3. Pick large basil leaves and cut each one in half down the centre of the leaf.

4. Whisk together olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a ratio of about 4:1, then add salt and pepper to taste.

5. Onto each skewer, thread 1 tomato half, followed by a piece of basil, a slice of cheese, and then finish with the other half of the tomato.

6. Drizzle the dressing over each skewer, and sprinkle with a little sea salt.

Perfect for a sunny Sunday morning

The problem is that, like most people, I just can’t think of enough things to do with them. I might never have thought of putting them into a breakfast/brunch dish, but Mark Hix did and I love the idea.

Ham and eggs are very Sunday brunchy, and the addition of a few padróns, some olive oil and coarse sea salt turn it instantly into a very Mediterranean Sunday (or any other day) brunch.

Notes on ingredients

The really important thing here is the quality of the ham. You should use nice thick slices (about ¾cm thick) of a good cooked ham.

The eggs can be either ducks or hens, but should be large. As always, free range eggs not only are much more ethical but do taste much better as well.

What to do

1. Heat 2 tbsps of the olive oil in a heavy frying pan, and when it is hot add the padróns and fry them for about 3 minutes, turning occasionally.

2. Put a slice of ham on each plate.

3. Fry the eggs in a tbsp of the olive oil, drain, and put one on top of each slice of ham.

4. Divide the padróns between the plates, scattering them over the ham and eggs.

5. Sprinkle with some coarse sea salt and a little paprika.

Poland - home of the grey noodle.

szare – grey kluski – noodles Anki – by Anka

or Anka’s grey noodles

Yes, I know, but they really are better than they sound. Grey noodles (they aren’t actually all that grey) are a traditional Polish peasant dish. Anka is a gorgeous wonderful person who makes fantastic kluski (she is Polish, but not a peasant).

Moving on

So, what we are actually talking about here are noodles made of potato and flour. They differ from other potato noodles, e.g. gnocchi in the fact that the potato is raw when it is noodleised, and in the fact that they don’t contain any egg.

Just potato and flour might not make for the most exciting dish in the world, but these kluski are served with lardons of bacon, onions and sauerkraut.

Notes on ingredients

All of the stories and childhood recollections that I hear of this dish are of home grown and pickled cabbage, and bacon from grandmothers pig. It’s almost enough to make me weep that I’ve missed my chance to try it in that form, but the world has changed.
Slaughtering a pig is messy though, and pickling cabbage is a bit of a trauma if you don’t have to, so this easy modern version does have good points.

There aren’t a lot of ingredients to play with. The potatoes you use should be a starchy variety, and a smoked bacon imparts more flavour than an unsmoked one.

Przepis (the recipe)

1. Peel the potatoes, and then using a fine grater, grate them all into a large bowl. What you will end up with is a kind of potato pulp. Leave this to stand for 20-30 mins.

2. By now the potatoes will have given out a lot of water, and seperated into two layers in the bowl, with the potato pulp at the bottom, and the liquid on the top. Pour the liquid off, or ideally strain it through muslin, so that you are left with just the pulp. Don’t drain them too thoroughly, because you need some of the starch in the liquid.

3. Add the flour, and season well with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then, mix it together well using a balloon whisk, until you end up with a thick (and not very appetising looking) mass.

4. Bring a very large pot of salted water to the boil, if you don’t have a huge pot then use two, because the kluski won’t cook properly if they are too crowded together.

5. Use a spoon to form large noodles from the potato mix and drop them into the boiling water.

6. Boil them gently for about 5 minutes from the moment they rise to the surface of the water.

7. Drain the kluski thoroughly.

8. While the kluski are cooking, peel and finely chop the onion, and fry it together with the lardons in a little sunflower oil.

Now, either…

• Mix the bacon/onion mix with the kluski, check and adjust seasoning and serve immediately with sauerkraut.

or…

• Make sure that the kluski are well drained, and then fry them in a little sunflower oil, adding the bacon/onion at the last minute.

• Serve hot with sauerkraut.