The Sacred Art of Eating

As previously mentioned, D and I volunteer at The Village Store, a volunteer-manned food stall held at Out of the Blue with the aim of reducing Leithers’ carbon footprints by giving them the ability to buy yummy produce on their doorstep.

There are various things I love about being involved. I’ve met loads of new, like-minded people. I recognise more people around Leith now- customers of the stall. We’ve had a couple of great wee social events with the other volunteers. But one of the most fulfilling things for me is that every time I turn up to the stall, either as a shopper or a volunteer, I am made to think. What is there this week? How can I cook it? What will go with what else? It’s just so different to turning up to a supermarket knowing that red peppers and mangetout and sweetcorn and tomatoes and onions and broccoli and sweet potato and butternut squash will all always be available.

The stall’s produce is properly seasonal. There’s nothing flown in from Peru or Thailand- at a push stuff comes from that far-flung England place but generally everything comes from within an hour of Edinburgh. This means that, since June when we started, there have been shifts in what’s on the stall. At the beginning there were Kentish cherries- and fantastic wonderful Scottish Raspberries. I brought home broad beans and peas to pod. For the first time in my life I cooked with gooseberries!

Now, though, the summer fruits have gone and we’ve moved into the wonderful colours of Victoria Plums, of pumpkins and squashes and even, yes, local long red peppers.

We pretty much always have mushrooms and so D and take some every week. The last time we volunteered there were little bags of Sage for sale. Since an inconsiderate neighbour/neighbour’s builder killed out sage bush in the garden I was happy to buy some. (I’d planned to do pork chops à la this or this but have yet to make it to the butcher’s). That night before going to a party we had a speedy tea of pasta with the mushrooms, fried up in olive oil (in which I’d crisped then removed a few sage leaves) with garlic and pancetta, with cream and loads of fresh snipped up sage added right at the end of cooking. Not so healthy, it’s true, but awfy good!

I also picked up some long red peppers. They looked like what I’d call Romano peppers although weren’t sold as such. They got roasted in the oven with a filling of puy lentils (cooked and then frizzed up with a bit of garlic) lemon juice and mozzarella. Inspired by a Waitrose recipe I’ve followed properly in the past. I flung some cherry tomatoes in the roasting pan alongside them and used the soft tomatoes and a tiny drop of cream left from the day before to make an unctuous sauce for some pasta on the side. Gorgeous and scrummy!

This seems a better way of cooking. More real, more in touch with where I live and what’s going on around me. If you are in Leith and haven’t made it to the Village Store yet I genuinely encourage you to come along. As well as the fruit & veg & ecover stall I help with there is Greener Monday (think eco deli- chutneys and marinades and honey and chocolate. Plus some beauty/homewares made with wax from the Bee People) and Jo Jo’s Danish Bakery and often the Cheese Man (whose name I do not know) and the incredible Tinker Tailor Mending & Learning Service. 10-2, every Saturday. It’s simple but lovely. What’s your excuse?

We had a wee party on Friday night; I felt the need to mark the end of my freedom before returning to Medical School this week, and we haven’t had a proper ‘big’ party in ages. As it turned out, this was not a ‘big’ party either, September seems to be the holiday season for the childless professional (or Friday night is the new staying-in night?) and we little more than a score of guests. Nevertheless it was one of the nicest parties I’ve hosted.

We didn’t actually do all that much food, partly because of expected low turn out, but largely because life got in the way of the preparations. So we went for low-stress, easy prep options.

This glorious frittata is one of the suggested flavour variations from Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food, a book we are rather fond of. The frittata itself is easy peasy to make, but I think what wins it for me is how beautiful the curling slivers of roasted peppers from a jar (given a wee fry first to bring out the flavours) look. Easy to eat with your hands too. This was a nine-egg-er…clearly we need a smaller pan or I need to master a proper Spanish tortilla (recipe recently received via Hélene) if I am to ever make one to a decent depth.

There were also little cocktail sticks of red or orange baby plum tomatoes, a chunk of seasoned mozzarella, perhaps a leaf of basil and in some cases, a twirl of proscuitto.

Whilst I wasn’t best impressed with the ready-made puff pastry Tesco had on offer (it’s just not Waitrose; no all-butter stuff to be had. Try not to think about the ingredients of the no-butter-puff-pastry) these little pesto, sundried tom and goats cheese tartlets managed to hit the spot. I probably should have rolled my pastry a bit thinner and cut some of the tartlets a bit smaller, but I was working against the clock a bit.

It wouldn’t be a Hare party without crudités. I didn’t buy peppers on my party shopping trip as I was sure we had both red and orange in the fridge. We had only orange and so the crudités were looking distinctly Hibernian (with celery, runner beans and cucumber providing a green and white striped effect) until I adorned the plate with a spray of (exquisite) cherry toms on the vine. To accompany there was a plain and a herby Southfield Dip, although curiously these proved far less popular than they usually do (hence the inclusion in our roast veg pasta the other night).

There was also the previously mentioned flourless choccy cake (I’ll be making that again!) and some foxy ‘Edible Peat’ made by the lovely Richard Bell. Something of an experiment, it combined dark chocolate, shredded-wheat style cereal and a peaty Whisky (Lagavulin 16, I believe, but there was discussion that a Laphroig 10 would’ve been better suited). This is all melted together and, once set, cut into chunks using the type of tosg favoured by your village and then nibbled, at intervals. On the first one, you think ‘hmm, not sure that works’. Then you realise you’ve eaten a second. And a third. Then you have to step away for fear of making a pig of yourself. These aren’t particularly beautiful and as such did not get the attention they deserved. For that reason in future I would probably make a point of serving them- with coffee at the end of a meal, perhaps- rather than leaving them for opportunistic grazing.

We’ve been living the party life this weekend. I’ll post about the rest of the food later, but want to celebrate here my first success at ‘proper’ (which is mostly to say, intended) gluten-free baking.

One of our guests,  Chris, and gluten, do not get on. By his admission this comes from a process of elimination rather than rigorous diagnostic testing but I’m willing to take seriously anyone who is capable of wholly giving up pizza and Falko and 85% of commercially available sausages and beer. It goes without saying that all my guests should feel equally catered to in food stakes; I do not make one forlorn vegetarian ‘choice’ and so equally, I was not going to have a token GF dish.

Frittata are nowadays something of a house staple and neatly covered the savoury side of things, but I wasn’t sure where to look for sweet nibbles. A chance post from Nigella.com sent me off on a puddingy direction. The website- which has quite a number of recipes for free anyway- is doing a cook-along thingy and Flourless Chocolate Lime Cake with Margarita Cream is this week’s recipe. I reckoned that adding lime to chocolate cake might be a departure too far (and we didn’t have any tequila, so margarita cream was essentially out) so made only the cake,  sans lime juice.

This is almost certainly the first time I’ve cooked anything overtly-flour free, despite intending this summer to try out Cannelle et Vanille’s soaked lemon and poppy seed cakes for a colleague who is both gluten and dairy intolerant. So I was nervous about how it would work out- visions of thin chewy cowpats danced before my eyes. However I was really pleased with this cake. It possibly ought to have been a little lighter (I managed to whip my eggs&sugar till it doubled in volume, rather than the triple in volume requested) but the dark fudginess created could easily have been the intended texture. It certainly looked exactly as expected (lovely crackly top), which is always gratifying. Tasted great too.

In exchange for care-free foods, Chris brought amazing camera skills. His Chrisdonia flickr stream really is a thing of beauty; the two pictures in this post are his. He is also charming company, and I hope to have the opportunity to cook him many more gluten free experiments in the future.

Before going to the Opera last weekend (fnar fnar) with-but-not-with my parents, we met up for pre-theatre tea. We tried out Spoon Cafe Bistro (fairly recently moved to the glorious big bright first floor space on the corner of Nicolson Street and Drummond Street). The decor had me absolutely tickled; our table had been embellished with a map of France (D and I had been agreeing only that week that our current flat (unlike 5 Caley Place) has a sore absence of maps); there were random bits of old furniture about the place; gorgeous sweetie-paper-coloured big light shades and so much light flooding in through the lovely old leaded windows. The last time I was in that space it was a rather dull Chinese Buffet. I sincerely hope that Spoon lasts years and years and years- please do check it out, and perhaps one day we shall bump into each other there!

But it wasn’t just beautiful; I am not that fickle. We ordered from the pre-theatre menu (largely because fewer choices makes for easier decisions!) and every single thing we had was a hit. D said he could have happily eaten his starter of ham hock terrine for all three courses. Everyone but me had a roasted onion tart for their main which didn’t look so exciting but which was absolutely scrummy. The boys had an intense (?too intense) dark chocolate tart to finish, whilst Liz and I had Lemon Pots de Crème with langue du chat biccies. These were exquisite (I am running out of superlatives here!) and beautiful.

Okay, so they need to invest in some new napkins (or abandon them altogether) but, seriously, love. Dougal and I were in L’Escargot Bleu’s wee shop a few days later and it was all I could do not to buy half a dozen yaourts just for the pots. All as part of some aspirational attempt to transform myself, my cooking and my photography into that of Cannelle et Vanille. Hey, we can but try, right?

About a week ago we took delivery of a sack of Aberdonian home-grown veg; most was grown by our pal Emily but some was grown by her neighbours, who, in a fit of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses grew a whole bunch of veg then realised they didn’t like veg and gave it to Emily. Double Veg!

There was a courgette, some toty wee beetroot, a neep, and something we were informed was a swede.

A bit of looking around on the internet seems to suggest that what the Scots call a turnip is what everyone else calls a swede, and vice versa. So perhaps this is a ‘turnip’? In any case we don’t really know what to do with it. The neep (purple) is going into a curry (at least that was the plan, but I think that plan also involved me cooking it tonight, hmm).

We went with Chris Scott’s advice: Root veg? Roast ‘em. Which worked really nicely for the beets and the courgette (willing stand-in root veg). But the white thingy above? Came out really bitter. Not nice.

Our veg was roasted with olive oil, lemon juice, smoked garlic, thyme, and a wee touch of butter. We combined it with our pasta with some left-over Southfield Dip from our party last night. Creamy and delicious (apart from the white alien!) with some lovely East Lothian runner beans on the side.