Clinging on to Summer

Autumn is, without a doubt my favourite season.  I love the changing colour of the trees, the chill of the morning air, the first day you can see your breath, and most of all, the golden evening light.  These are the days I want to spend my whole life outside.  As soon as autumn rolls around I feel rejuvenated, refreshed and ready for whatever happens next.

This year, however, autumn hasn't followed its usual pattern.  Yes, the leaves are falling, and yes it's getting cooler.  The light of the evenings is still as golden as ever, and yet it's not giving me the same amount of pleasure it used to.  My yearly love affair with the season isn't as thrilling as it used to be.  Instead, I feel very restless.

It took me a while to figure out why I felt like this, but it was actually quite simple.  For the first time in my life, autumn doesn't mean back to school.  I've graduated, and so have no new term to throw myself into.  I have no coursework deadlines or exams looming.  The only thing stretching out before me is my life.  My future.

This prospect is, of course, far too terrifying for me to comprehend, so in the logical manner I usually conduct myself in, I simply refused to acknowledge the end of summer.  This appeased the restlessness, and the fear of what-on-earth-do-I-do-next abated.  A little.

And what better way to immerse yourself in somewhere you are not, or something than does not exist, than with food?  The dinner that follows is my meagre, but rather successful, attempt to create summer within my flat.  Sure, me and my guests were wearing woolly jumpers as we ate, and we had to try to ignore the fact it was dark at seven, but as we ate a long, slow and shared dinner, with bright, warm flavours, drank plenty of soft, warm wine and huddled round the expanse of candles (as much for warmth as they were for decoration) it felt like summer.  It felt like a holiday, and life paused, just for a night.

An Inauthentic Borek
makes six

six sheets of filo pastry
200g grams of feta
one egg
a big handful of flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
salt and pepper
150g butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 200c

Crumble the feta into a bowl.  I like to use my hands to mash it up a little.  Then crack the egg into the cheese, mixing with a fork.  When it is mixed - it won't be perfect - stir through the parsley, salt and pepper.  You only need a little salt, but a healthy amount of pepper.

Lay out the first sheet of filo and brush all over with the melted butter.  Lay the next sheet on top, and brush that with melted butter.  Lay another sheet over the top, and brush.

Cut the filo into three long rectangles.  Spoon a little of the feta mixture onto the short end of the pastry and roll, folding the sides in to contain the filling.

Repeat until you have six cigar-shaped parcels.

Lay on a baking tray and brush all over with more melted butter.

Bake for twelve to fifteen minutes, or until the pastry is golden and crisp.

good served with a little tzatziki 


Prawns with Harissa and Feta
enough for four

olive oil
four cloves of garlic, finely chopped
three big teaspoons of sugar
a tiny, thumnail sized piece of ginger, finely chopped.
a large glass of white wine
six large vine tomatoes, roughly chopped
two teaspoons of oregano
two teaspoons of harissa
one tin of peeled cherry tomatoes
400g raw tiger prawns.  If peeled, fine.  If not, peel and reserve the shells.
200g of feta, crumbled into chunks.
5 spring onions, thinly sliced.
the juice of half a lemon

Preheat the oven to 220c


If you happen to have the shells of the prawns, place them into a saucepan with a little olive oil.  Let them caramelize slightly before pouring in the wine and letting it reduce.  Then strain the wine into a jug, jar or bowl, whatever you have around, ready to use later.

Warm the oil in a big, oven proof pan,  I use a cast iron casserole, over a low to medium heat.

Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two, then add the ginger and the sugar.  Leave for another two or three minutes, without stirring, before pouring in the wine.  Turn up the heat and let the wine bubble for a few minutes.  Then add the fresh tomatoes.

Let the tomatoes cook and steam in the wine for about five minutes before stirring in the oregano and harissa.  Pour in the can of chopped tomatoes and leave to simmer for a good twenty minutes.  Have a taste and make sure you like it. It should be saucy rather than a stew, slightly spicy, and slightly sweet.  Keep in mind when seasoning that the prawns will add sweetness, the feta will add saltiness, the onions freshness and the lemon will keep it sharp.

When the sauce is delicious, thick and slightly syrupy, toss in the prawns, and scatter over the feta and spring onions and slip it into the oven for 3-5 minutes.  The prawns should be just cooked and the feta slightly browned.

Finish with a squeeze of lemon and serve with some crisp lettuce leaves and warm bread.

My new favourite cake

Oh there has been a lot of work going on in my household.  As Christmas fast approaches, the first term slips away and essay deadlines creep up.  I’ve got a good ten thousand words to write before the year is through, and, considering that the festive period is my favourite thing ever, I am trying to get as much done as early as I can.  Although, in theory, this is a sensible plan, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out on my favourite part of the year, and as much as I try to think that this is the last year I will have academic work to do over Christmas, it is hard.  When the monotony of my schedule gets too much, however, I have developed a foolproof plan to rejuvenate myself.  I go on a wintery walk, stop off at a few shops and delis, get home, and bake a cake. This cake is one I am very proud of.  Firstly, it fills the whole house with a gingery delicious aroma is better than a tree for conjuring up some festive cheer.  Secondly, it tastes even better than it smells.  It is light and moist, slightly crumbly and just a little bit sticky, with crunchy caramelized almonds and a sweet sticky glaze.  A good cake.  A really good cake.

Ginger Cake with Caramelised Almonds

60g butter

125g golden syrup

60g ground almonds

75g self raising flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 heaped teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

100g caster sugar

a pinch of salt

125ml milk

1 egg

Preheat the oven to 170°c and grease and line a loaf tin.

Melt the butter and golden syrup over a low heat.  When it’s melted remove from the heat.

In a big bowl, mix the almonds, flour, soda and spices until they’re all well combined.  Stir the sugar through, add the milk and the egg, and mix well.

Gradually add the melted butter mixture stirring until everything has mingled.

Pour into the tin and bake for 50-55 minutes.

Make a ginger syrup by melting 125g of sugar with 125ml of water with 1 tbsp of grated ginger.  Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes.  Spoon some syrup over the cake whilst they’re both still hot.

When it’s cool, make a little glaze with icing sugar and water, and pour over.  Toast about two handfuls of flaked almonds in a saucepan; watching them, they burn so easily.  Then add about a tablespoon of caster sugar and cook until it has melted and coated the almonds.  When they are all looking sticky and caramelised, spoon them over the cake.

Date Night

Dating is a bit of a mystery to me.  Sure I’ve been on a few dates, and more often than not, meeting up for coffee or a drink is a valid way to get to know someone.  When I am asked to dinner, or lunch, however, I get really nervous.  There’s the usual, what am I going to wear?  What if he doesn’t come?  What if he hates me?  What if I hate him?  How am I going to leave?  These questions are date questions, regardless of the setting.  Going for a meal however prompts one more question, one very important and difficult question: what am I going to eat?  I am a messy eater under the best of circumstances.  I get food on my dress almost every time I eat, and I get food on my face a surprising amount of the time.  I’m just not an attractive girl to be around whilst there’s food, so one of the key concerns for me on a date involving eating, is to try and choose the tidiest thing to eat.

There are the obvious ones.  Spaghetti and noodles are definitely off the table.  Pizza’s ok as long as I can use my knife to cut bit-size pieces; I’ve too often been the victim of stringy cheese.  Burgers are a no.  Sushi is a no.  Anything needing chopsticks: no.  I’m not bad at wielding them, but usually, if I slip up, my dinner will be in my lap.  Salad is a huge no, those deadly leaves are always flicking vinaigrette on my face, dress, and hair, and I don’t want to spend the whole night scented with a garlic and lemon dressing wafting from my person.  Garlic is obviously contentious.  I don’t mind smelling of garlic if he does, but I have a friend who, although he loves eating garlic, cannot stand the smell, and you never know how the person sitting opposite you feels about it.  I once read that there is a state law in Minnesota declaring that you’re not allowed to go to the cinema within five hours of eating garlic. Perhaps the person I’ll be eating with is a supporter of that law? 

The thing is, though, I usually get so nervous by the very idea of eating in front of someone who I don’t know that well, I turn up either so hungry I’ll eat anything that comes with mashed potatoes, or too nervous to eat more than soup (dangerous: so many things can go wrong). All my deliberations are, therefore, thrown out of the window.

When I am cooking for a date, however, I am most definitely in control.  There maybe a little added pressure on whether he’ll like my cooking or not, but generally I’ll cook something that’s going to make me happy, and if it doesn’t make him happy, well, he’s not the man for me.

So when cooking for a man this weekend, I was feeling, although still a little nervous, more confident.  I picked something I could eat with a spoon (my weapon of choice) and out of a bowl (higher sides to catch any splashing).  Made sure there wasn’t any nuts (he’s highly allergic, and I’d already made a joke about killing him) lit some candles, made a playlist and felt pretty much ready to go.

It turns out, however, that there was one thing I probably should’ve thought about a tiny bit more.  When I refused to let him eat until I’d photographed his bowl, I was met with a some-what puzzled look.  I had, of course, neglected to mention that I write a blog about my cooking, and that comes with photos and stories.  I told him in the end, as an explanation, but I didn’t tell him what it was called.  If I’m not happy with him knowing I’m a messy eater, I’m really not happy about him knowing about my neurosis surrounding being a messy eater, or in fact dater, as I have so coherently chronicled here.

Pig and Beans

enough for about four people

five sausage sized chorizo, in chunks

eight chipolatas

six rashers of streaky bacon, chopped

one onion, chopped

two small leeks, chopped

two carrots, chopped

four cloves of garlic, finely chopped

a large glass of red wine

400ml tomato passata

two bay leaves

one can of butterbeans, drained and rinsed

to finish

juice of half a lemon

a handful of chopped parsley

a large handful of coarse breadcrumbs

Heat the oven to 200c

In a heavy casserole pan, fry the sausages and chorizo in a little olive oil until they've got some colour and the fat is beginning to run.  Remove from the pan and set aside.  Fry the bacon in the same oil until crisp, and remove that from the pan too.

Turn down the heat and cook the onion, leeks and carrot with the garlic until they're all soft.  Add the wine, stir and cook for a few more minutes.  Then add the tomato.  Throw the sausage, chorizo and bacon back into the pan with the bay leaves and the butterbeans.

Leave to cook over a gently heat for twenty five minutes.  After that, you can remove from the heat and put in the fridge for a day or two if you need

Otherwise, stir the lemon juice and half of the chopped parsley into the pan, cover with breadcrumbs and put into the oven for another 25 minutes.

Serve with the rest of the chopped parsley sprinkled on top, and perhaps a green salad.

Baking in protest

I haven’t cooked anything lately.  Absolutely nothing.  I would like to be able to say that it’s because I have been so busy.  But the fact is, I haven’t been doing all that much.  I should be busier, however I’ve been a permanent state of nervous energy.  That kind of insatiable energy you get when you know there are a thousand things you really need to be doing, but you can seem to sit down and get on with any of them.  And unfortunately, cooking is one of the things that I don’t feel like I absolutely need to be doing, so my oven has been neglected.  Cooking isn’t the only casualty of my back-to-school frenzy.  My knitting is untouched, my sewing machine hasn’t escaped its dust cover in weeks.  My sourdough starter has died, and is yet to be replaced.  My kitchen table is, instead of a tablecloth and candles, littered with lecture notes, half read books, articles with random yellow lines over the things that maybe, could be, important to remember.  My notebooks are already, three weeks in, almost full of reading notes.

I have been trying to find some kind of routine by which I can manage all my reading, all my lectures and find the time to cook, but I still haven’t found it.  Today though, after four weeks of reading every day, I can’t face those notebooks.  I refuse to look at those articles, because, today, for the first time, they stir in me nothing but resentment.  It’s not that I don’t love my course, I’ve always enjoyed learning, and reading, but never before have I felt this strongly that you can definitely, definitely have too much of a good thing.

So I went on a walk.  Got a coffee outside.  Sat in the park with a blanket and a novel.  I enjoyed Autumn, my favourite season, the way it should be enjoyed: outdoors.  But as the afternoon chill set in, I set off in order, not to cook, but instead to bake.  To bake some golden, warming biscuits in celebration of the arrival of my beloved Autumn, eat them with a big mug of tea, or perhaps a good glass of wine, some scones made during a burst of energy last night, and refuse to even think about work, at least until tomorrow (the scones were made from this recipe here with golden sultanas).

Just a note: these would be extra good with three to four balls of chopped stem ginger, and a spoonful or two of the syrup from the jar.  Unfortunately, after a long and tiring hunt for stem ginger, the rain defeated me.  But they are delicious without.

Ginger Biscuits

Makes about 24 big biscuits

100g butter

200g light brown muscavado

1 big tablespoonful of golden syrup

300g plain flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

3 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 beaten egg

demerera sugar

Preheat the oven to 160°c and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

Over a low heat, melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup.

While these are melting, sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate and spices together in a big bowl.

Pour in the melted ingredients and mix well.  It should have a sandy consistency, with no major lumps.  I like to do this with my hands, but I’m sure a wooden spoon would work well too.

When everything’s combined, add the beaten egg and mix until the dough is holding its shape.

Roll ping pong sized bits of dough into balls and flatten slightly on the baking tray.  Sprinkle with a little demerera.

Bake for 13 minutes, or until they are just starting to colour.  They will still be very soft when you take them out, but they’ll firm up as they cool.

A really very good cabbage soup

The leaves are definitely turning and the sun is noticeably lower in the sky: this is autumn.  And so, not even the mild battering I received from the wind yesterday could stop me from gathering together the ingredients for a big, chunky soup.  The curly kale is just beginning to fill up the shelves, so ribollita was an obvious choice.

I’ve wanted to make ribollita for quite a while.  Every cookbook I open, I see a recipe for the soup.  Food From Plenty, the Acorn House Cookbook, they’ve all got one.  Not to mention the Hugh and Nigel recipes in the guardian over the past couple of months.  So I has to make it, simply because I couldn’t quite understand what there was to love so much about a cabbage soup.  I mean, I love cabbage in a soup, but, there’s something in me that always wants to add a bit of pig.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s bacon, sausage, chorizo or ham hock, more often than not, when I ’m using cabbage, I crave a bit of pork.  But, living with a vegetarian, I don’t think things would go well if I slipped a little pancetta into my sofrito, so I don’t.  But I just wanted to say, if I could, even with this big and delicious ribollita, I would.

Another reason I decided on ribollita is because I had a bread baking date with a girl who lives in my block, and although most recipes call for stale bread, or ciabatta, I didn’t think we could really go wrong with bread fresh from the oven, and it was really very good.

So, with all my ingredients and the garden in shadow unthinkably early, I set about soup making.  I understand theat ribollita literally means ‘reboiled’ but I rarely have the foresight to make something for the next day, so I just made as much as I could fit in my pot, and cooked it very, very, very slowely. We’ll reboil the leftovers today, so that’s when we’ll eat proper ribollita, but for now, well, it’s a very delicious cabbage soup, I guess.

Ribollita

For four

Two leeks, chopped

Four carrots, chopped

Three sticks of celery, chopped

Three cloves of garlic, finely chopped

One tin of chopped tomatoes

One tin of cannellini beans

500ml vegetable stock

400g kale

Parsley leaves and stalks, separate, but finely chopped

In a big pan, over a low heat, warm some olive oil and cook the leeks, carrots and celery very gently for about 20 minutes.  Turn the heat up slightly until there’s some very, very gentle caramalisation and cook for another 15-20 minutes.

Add the garlic and chopped parsley stalks and let them all cook for about ten minutes.

Add the chopped tomatoes, vegetable stock, kale and beans and cook for another 20 minutes.

Place a slice of bread, toasted or not (depending on desired sogginess) in the bottom of a bowl and ladle some soup on top.

Serve with parsley and a glug of olive oil.