My first blog-post. Here goes and who knows what direction this venture will take? There’s an outline of why I am doing this on the About page.

In fact, this first post is a bit of a cop-out because it’s simply some highlights of dishes I have cooked in March. The idea is to practise how to post and to get me in the habit, although the upshot will be a post that is far too long! I am also conscious that I need to get better and certainly more consistent at my food photography. In any case, I don’t anticipate that anyone will be reading this until there are a few more posts up and we can cajole a few friends into taking a look…

Anyway, to the food.

First, a Fish-Free Niçoise Salad from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg. We sometimes have this as a midweek supper dish (with a few more potatoes, naturally), but on this occasion it was a simple starter.

It needed to be simple because it was followed by the far more elaborate White Fish Pudding with Prawn Sauce from Snow Flakes and Schnapps by Jane Lawson. This is an interesting book (one to review in the future, I think), but I sometimes find it frustrating. Given that it is a melange of Scandinavian and Northern European cuisines, I sometimes wish there was an intro to each dish to give some sense of the context and origins. Recipe intros are the sort of thing you don’t know you’ll miss until they’re not there.  The dish is more attractive than it appears here, and has a terrifically rich, fishy depth. I used pollock, and the recipe delivered up a delightfully light pudding that contrasted well with the deep richness of the prawn sauce.

Fish Free Niçoise Salad

 

Next, the sort of midweek dish that we have been cooking a lot in recent months – from the brilliant A Change of Appetite by Diana Henry. This is another book that will need a review because it is no exaggeration to say that it has changed the way we cook and eat, especially on weeknights. In this case, a Pilaf of Sweet Potato, Fennel and Mixed Grains – a combination of quinoa, bulgar and wild rice. Henry has an avocado ‘cream’ on the side, which may be one her few missteps – it’s not needed and I’m not even sure it goes.

A Peruvian evening next, from Ceviche by Martin Morales. We have had this book for more than a year but haven’t done more than dip into it. What I did do, though, was to make a big batch of Peruvian chilli paste to freeze in ice cube trays. That makes life easier because most of the recipes require the paste in one form or another – the book would have me make several variations on the theme, but life’s too short!

First was a ceviche – the classic one, for which we used bream. There’s a certain satisfaction in dropping fish into a marinade and knowing that it will be ‘cooked’ a few minutes later. And there’s the bonus of mixing the used Tiger’s Milk (marinating liquor) with Pisco for a fishy shot on the side.

After the ceviche came Confit Duck with Peruvian Green Rice. The rice is a real find but simple: a basic cooked rice combined with peas, sweetcorn (both frozen at this time of year), red pepper, chilli paste (of course) and a puree of coriander and parsley. It’s a nice base to the confit duck.

From South America to (vaguely) the Middle East. To start, a very typical Yotam Ottolenghi dish from Plenty More – Lentils, Radicchio and Walnut Salad with Honey. The beauty of this dish is that the walnuts are roasted in a mix of honey and chilli flakes – although in this case not the (expensive!) Manuka honey that Ottolenghi insists makes it special. It seems perfectly good with decent non-Manuka.

To follow, a first go at Saffron and Lemon Chicken from Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana. This book was a slow burn to start, but we have really enjoyed nearly everything we have cooked from it. The chicken is marinated in yoghurt with onions, saffron, lemon and turmeric (for once I had the forethought to allow overnight marinating). An incredibly simple dish, but the yoghurt leaves the chicken wonderfully moist. We teamed it with Ottolenghi’s Lemon and Curry Leaf Rice and Ghayour’s Fattoush Salad. The three dishes went together beautifully, and Ottolenghi is right: now we have cooked rice this way, we will use the technique time and time again, baking the rice in water with lemon, curry leaf and cinnamon rather than our usual methods of boiling or steaming.

The week before Easter we had friends for Sunday lunch; noticing that there is a ‘Save Our Roast’ campaign and recognising that we rarely cook a roast, we made that the reason – as if we needed one. Sadly, there are no photos of the main event, possibly because we were too busy sticking my finger back together. This is a shame because it was a stunning piece of beef – a bone-in sirloin from a 9-year-old animal from The Butchery in Bermondsey Spa (also in Forest Hill). I managed to cook it suitably rare (luck – together with some Fearnley-Whittingstall advice), and the quality of the meat was so evident, encased in fat that resembled butter in both look and texture. With the beef, we served roast potatoes and parsnips (a rare appearance for roast parsnips other than at Christmas), spring greens with anchovy butter, and sweet-glazed carrots.

We did get some photos of what came before and after. Nibbles of Fried Ricotta with Tomato Salsa and Ricotta-stuffed Mushrooms (both from Italy by Jamie Oliver) and then a Celery, Orange and Smoked Mackerel Salad (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in an old Guardian recipe) – we needed something fairly light and sharp given what was to follow.

If the beef was intended to be the centre of attention, in the end that accolade had to go to Tuula’s spectacular pre-Easter Bird’s Nest Meringue – mostly Mary Berry with a bit of Nigella thrown in.

Another midweek dish: Squash and Fennel Lasagne from River Cottage Veg. It’s a good dish for eating over more than one evening or for lunches (the photo was taken on the second evening).

There has been an awful lot of Ottolenghi in March. The choice of Quinoa and Wild Garlic Cakes with Salbitxada Sauce was driven by a wish to make good use of wild garlic leaves this season – usually I leave it too late.  As well as the quinoa and garlic leaves, the cakes have some red onion, green chilli, cottage cheese and cheddar. They were good – but I had forgotten the seasoning, which resulted in a little blandness. It wasn’t the first time (and no doubt not the last) that I found myself cursing Ottolenghi, this time when the cakes wouldn’t bind together in my hand; they did at least firm up  in the pan. The Salbitxada sauce was a good accompaniment: the cakes would have been too dry just with lemon, which the recipe suggests as an alternative. It’s a puree of pepper, blanched tomatoes, flaked almonds, red chilli and what seems like a lot of garlic but it doesn’t end up with too pronounced a garlic taste.

After the quinoa cakes came some brill, braised on a bed of matchstick potatoes, mushroom and minced truffle – a Rick Stein recipe from Fish and Seafood. Many of the recipes in this book are either replications or minor variations of recipes from his other books but it’s useful to have all the fish and seafood dishes in one place, there are additions (I think) and the variations tend to be improvements or at least updates now that other ingredients are more readily available. This dish was nice, helped by some really good brill from Sussex Fish at Borough Market. The recipe called for sliced cooked ham, but I used smoked bacon. This worked well, except that it overpowered the truffle paste almost to the extent of making it redundant. I suspect it’s an either/or. And I think I’d stick with the bacon in the future.

Alongside the fish we had some baby cavolo nero. I hadn’t used this before, but it was young enough to be treated like spinach, with a shade more cooking. In fact, I so liked the look of it we bought enough for three dishes in the week.

A first breakfast dish: on Easter Sunday we had Austrian Gröstl – an Observer recipe from Fischers of Marylebone. We have eaten the dish there, and this version didn’t seem a million miles away. But it’s not a breakfast to have every week!

And finally, a Vietnamese night, all courtesy of Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey. First (but without photos) Pondicherry Fried Mackerel – mackerel marinated in a (very) spicy yoghurt and fried. Simple and good. We had it with a spiced cucumber salad.

This was followed by Duck Braised in Spiced Orange Juice, baby cavolo nero with garlic and fish sauce (the cav nero instead of morning glory) and plain steamed rice. The duck is a really interesting dish. I am not a fan or duck and orange, but this really works and the orange is much less pronounced than you expect. As usual, we cooked enough for four (or maybe more…) so we got lunches out of the recipe too.

Well, that’s March. My first blog posting. And almost certainly my longest. I won’t be doing this sort of round-up again but instead hope to be able to keep up with the dishes as we go.