A Book of Mediterranean Food

I'm not going to wax lyrical about the book which bought a little of the warmth, colour and flavour of the Mediterranean to a cheerless post war Britain. I had never heard of the author until I was about 21 and become a mother, a friend gave me their old copy of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. I was enchanted. I still can't quite describe what is so bewitching about her books? Maybe her written instructions reminded me of my own grandmother's? Or is it the brief, simple and precise recipes and their lack of hyperbole? Maybe it's because it reminds me of becoming a mother and the early days of the most wonderful and fullfilling time, a time where I excelled in my new occupation and was spellbound with my beautiful baby daughter, I discovered motherhood and food. I was needed and I was blissfully content.

Food will never be written about in the same way again. Now cookery books are more about lifestyle with beautiful glossy photographs of stunning houses with perfect happy families blurred in the background. It's about selling the image.

In Mediterranean Food Elizabeth David wrote about food remembered from a time in her life, just before the war, when she was young and carefree. She wasn't preaching or patronising in her writing, she was just 'passing on' what she had seen, cooked and tasted. Most recipes are just a paragraph. No separate ingredient list, no temperatures, just 'quick' or 'slow' fire and no photos. It was honest, intelligent and very clipped writing, no pretence but just peppered with anecdotes and stylishy simple illustrations.

She didn't preach the 'chef's oath' which seems to have been taken by anyone who cooks on TV "I am passionate about food and only cook seasonal, local ingredients" I could scream every time I hear this mantra chanted by another 'chef' (ex model/actress/rugby player etc), it sends all my cringe nerves rattling; you're a chef, do you really think that we automatically think you use mouldy rotting fruit and veg to cook? Do we really care if it's local, surely all food is local to somewhere? It's like saying "Mm, I absolutely love breathing and use only the finest oxygen and carbon dioxide for my gaseous exchange"

I digress...., returning to the book in question, I have simply decided to cook every recipe in the book. I'm not trying to do a Julie & Julia, that would be naff and pretentious, I just need to get my act together with this blog and having a list of recipes to cook will make it a lot easier - I will have to cook what's written rather than remembering to photograph the occasional biscuit I may have been bothered to bake. It would also be really love to bring each recipe to life with a photo!

The first chapter is 'Soups' and the first recipe I will be cooking is Soup Au Pistou.....

Chelsea Buns

Sift 500g Strong Plain Flour with a teaspoon of salt (I warm the flour in the microwave for 30 seconds. Tip a sachet of dried yeast (7g) into the middle of the flour. Warm 300ml of milk and add to the flour with the egg. Mix together to form a dough, knead for 10-15 minutes until soft and springy.

Put the dough into greased bowl and cover with clingfilm. Leave for an hour to rise.

Knock back and roll out into a rectangle. Brush with 25g of melted butter and sprinkle with 75g of soft brown sugar, a generous amount of cinnamon and 150g of sultanas or mixed fruit. Roll up into along sausage and cut into slices - about 3cm.

Place slices onto a lined baking tray and cover with a damp tea towel and leave for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C or Gas Mark 5. Bake buns for 20-25 minutes.

Mushroom Fakecake

Every Saturday, once G has gone to work and I am alone, I make myself a cheese and mushroom pancake. It's definitely one of my favourite snacks and takes me back twenty years when I was pregnant with my daughter R and would visit Beaus creperie on shopping trips to Canterbury. This restaurant was run by the nicest people and the crepes were gorgeous, although cheese and mushroom was the best and I would always have two.

Disaster! Today I went to the fridge and there weren't any eggs! I had cheese and I had mushrooms....but no eggs. I did have some tortilla wraps in the freezer and, after frying off the 'shrooms I warmed the wrap up in the pan with grated cheese, threw on the fungi and the mandatory (ode to Beaus) dried herbs, salt and loads of pepper. It was crispier and I had to fold it to eat it, but it was good.

Accidental Cake

    A few months ago, rather than stretch the pennies and buy the posh vanilla in the brown bottle, I bought a smaller cheaper bottle...well that's what I thought until, whilst mixing brownie batter, a waft of Almond alerted me to my mistake - a smaller cheaper bottle of almond flavouring. I am quite generous with vanilla and so there was no hiding the almond impostor. Ah well, more cocoa helped a little.

Yesterday I decided to make vanilla cakes (I'm not using the C- word prefix anymore!) as I has promised G I would. Yes, you've guessed it, in went a gallon of Almond Flavouring! I was so cross with myself, I thought I had thrown the bottle away weeks ago and replaced it with Vanilla? No, it was still in the cupboard waiting to unleash it's unwelcome taint on the next bake. Now don't get me wrong, I do like almond and can easily chomp my way through the marzipan off cuts from the Christmas cake, but almond flavouring has it's place and the fakeness of the stuff I bought left your mouth in shock and can ruin anything just like an un-rinsed soapy cup which can ruin a perfect cup of tea and leave your mouth tasting like a super-clean toilet.

I was going to throw the batter out and start again, but I had made a lot of it and so the only option was carry on. With blueberries and some lemons lurking around the kitchen I added lemon juice to the batter and half filled a loaf tin, then a layer of the fruit and a generous swathe of Lemon Curd then topped off with the remaining batter. Baked off, cooled and then drizzled with hot lemon syrup. Not bad.

Bad Blogger makes Birthday Cake

I continue to be a bad blogger and an even lazier cook! I just can't get myself motivated. BUT I did take the time to make my mum a special cake for her 70th birthday.

Believe it or not I had to come up with a cake that was super quick and stress-free to assemble. As her birthday was on 27th December I would have to put it together so it would look good enough to serve at her surprise birthday party. This assembly would have to take place on Boxing Day as well as cooking a full Christmas Dinner.

I baked five chocolate sponges a couple of weeks before and stashed in the freezer. I bought some ready made fondant icing, coloured it and and formed simple roses and flower stalks which I stored in airtight containers (R helped with this). I bought a couple of packets of Betty Crocker frosting in case of an icing emergency.

Boxing Day and an emergency did happen as, with all that organisation, I forgot to buy any butter and so could not make the butter cream to cement the cake together!! Out came the Betty Crocker and the cake was assembled. I wrapped the cake in tissue paper to resemble that 'Florist's gift wrapped' look and tied with a huge ribbon.

Mum loved it.

Bad Blogger & Barcelona Bear

I can't believe it was February when I last wrote something on this here blog. I should get 3 points on my blogging licence and a £60 fine.

During the five years previous to the last blog I was working in a school kitchen as assistant chef, I still don't know to this day who I was assistant to because as far as I could tell I was doing ALL the work, but to be fair the 'Head Chef' did take ALL the credit, so I suppose the job was split evenly!!

Being in that kitchen (nervous shudder) reminded me off 'Barcelona Bear" - when I was about 27 I took my daughter to Barcelona to stay with a friend, one of our days out took us to Barcelona zoo, not a lush green expanse of man made savanna with herds of happy, well behaved wild animals doing wild animal stuff. No. Barcelona zoo was a more a vast concreted landscape that, if photographed from space, would look like the surface of the moon and confuse astrologers - it was cratered with lots of small pits into which was dropped and chained a single animal, mainly bears, monkeys and wolves. The pit, the worst place on earth any creature should be kept in, had driven each creature mad and had thus become the safest place on earth to house them. I remember the bear.

Poor old brown bear, chained deep in his concrete pit. We looked down on him and watched as he rocked back and forth, driven mad by by the same view of grey concrete which surrounded him, driven mad by the same routine of nothingness, no other bear friends to talk to, not even a bare branch to look at. His chains limited his movement so in the end he just stayed in the same spot. He was tatty and thin. He just rocked back and forth, back and forth.

Well that was me, Barcelona Dinner Lady, driven mad by the same stainless steel surroundings, my limited movement confined to the perimeters of the kitchen, the same daily routine and listening to the constant, incessant moaning and whingeing of the 'Head Chef'. All HC did was repeatedly moan "I'm so thirsty" "ooh, I've got a really dry mouth" "I'm sooooo thirsty" " I need a drink" etc etc....these procrastinations would continue for a couple of hours until someone finally made a drink,  HC would forget to drink and spend the following two hours whingeing about how HC had forgotten to drink the tea and how thirsty HC still was. HC would also moan daily and weekly abut toothache or hip ache but never make a point of visiting a doctor or dentist. HC would moan about being too hot, too hungry, too busy (?? too busy doing what ??? Moaning?? there was nothing else going on in HC's direction) It slowly drove me mad. In my head I was screaming SHUT UP!!!

In March I escaped and started my new career within a company, a much larger pit to roam around in, lots of interesting things to look at and plenty of other friendly bears to talk to. A much happier concrete crater. I am still scarred though, I haven't been interested in food or cooking since my lucky escape but am sure and hope it will come back....I just need  a break.


Please note the bears in the photo were not harmed. The photo was taken under strict Animal Welfare Guidelines and after the shoot the bears were then given a huge hug, rub down, fed some honey and returned to their safe and lovingly reconstructed natural environment!

Sausage & Chocolate Cake

It was G's birthday on Tuesday so I made a belated birthday cake. Seeing as he and his brother only eat food from 'Shades of Brown' food groups (chocolate, chips, chicken nuggets, sausages and burgers) I decided to play it safe and make a Sausage & Chocolate Cake.

It looks disgusting but the boys still ate it quite happily, even in the uncertainty of whether the sausages were real or not!!

Simply make a chocolate cake, cover with chocolate butter cream and scatter with cheapest sausages you can buy.....delicious!

Or do what I did and make sausages out of sugar fondant, twisting the ends in plastic and then paint them a sallow fleshy pink colour!