The Sacred Art of Eating

As previously discussed, beetroot are fundamentally disappointing when they aren’t properly red. This was never more apparent than last week when we decided to make beetroot risotto. We’d seen a gorgeous picture in a recipe book at the Village Store, something like the one below (snapped by Renaissance Chambara), and were inspired. Only it turned out the beetroot we’d picked up were of the sneaky pink on the outside, white on the inside variety, weren’t they?

Not having our own recipe for beetroot risotto, we turned to the internet. For reasons of, I think time, we didn’t want to have to roast our beetroot first, so we plumped for this recipe from The Times, where you grate the beetroot and let it simmer in your warm stock, to be ladled across periodically and cook at the same time as the rice.

Our beetroot actually started out quite pretty, with the white inner stained pink by the skin resulting in almost candy-hued shreds of veg. I was imagining girly children’s party food….but of course, as the cooking went on, it went grey…

Grey is really a very unappealing colour for food. You’ll notice we took no pictures! However, this risotto was sublime. This was probably in no small part due to the rich addition of butter and crème fraîche (which, unlike mascarpone, we had in the fridge) and could probably be improved on further with the use of proper chicken stock (we don’t eat a lot of proper roast meat so we don’t often have BONES). I’m not sure I’m really getting across how scrummy it was.

Definitely worth repeating and hopefully, with the correct ingredients, worth showing off. Alternatively, with a little sculpting, we serve it on Halloween as Brains as the centrepiece to some sort of Zombie Dinner party. Actually, that’s a neat idea for the future….

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.

I tend to be of the ‘leftovers’ school of risottos, where any lone vegetables, final scrunts of salami or roast meat in the fridge or end-of-bags-of prawns in the freezer find a happy and multicoloured home together. I have been known in the past to make a mushroom risotto but such deviations tend to be short-lived.

I was round at Shona’s the other night and she served this WI tomato-flavoured risotto topped with rocket and roasted butternut squash. I liked it so much I cooked it myself, within the week!

The risotto itself ‘contains’ no vegetables or flavours, it is a simple fried up onion/stock cooked rice affair with tomato purée and bay leaf adding colour and subtle flavours. It is topped with fresh rocket (you can stir it through but I served it just draped on top as this was prettier) and roasted butternut squash. Preparing butternut squash is one of the dreariest jobs in the world and our knives weren’t very sharp at the time so I used half a bag of pre-prepped butternut squash and sweet potato. I always grab these at Waitrose when they are on reduced to clear and sling them in the freezer as for bulking out curry or serving with pasta they are worth their weight in gold in terms of convenience. We didn’t top with toasted pine nuts as Dougal is a) unsure about butternut squash at the best of times and b)not so keen on dishes with scatterings of pine nuts and I felt to combine the two might be a bit mean!

However the rocket on top is not to be omitted- we used lovely locally grown stuff picked up at The Village Store, although this week we’ve been on a bag of Lidl British Grown Unwashed Rocket and it’s pretty powy too. I have friends who grow it in their garden who say it is easy peasy, so why not give it a try yourself?
We are growing some little herbs from seed, including rocket, although I think they are sown too thick at the moment. But they are very pretty!

I was rather impressed with this dish. Easy (and pretty quick, for a risotto!) and tasty with interesting flavours. I think I’ll revisit this.

Yet again we’ve been at Leith’s Village Store, and yet again come home with some scrummy goods:

Broad beans, more peas in pods, and beetroot- this time the right colour! We scrutinised the beets on sale and noted that some were very pink skinned, whilst others were darker purple with the colour continuing up the stem, rather than green stems. The latter did not disappoint! But I digress.

I have never in my life cooked with broad beans. I figured the internet would see me right, and it did! In the end I arrived at the Good Food Website and baked Ainsley Harriot’s Broad Bean and Lancashire Tart. I’d only really bought broad beans to do for two, and this was a full sized tart, so we supplemented the beans with the fresh peas. I couldn’t get lancashire in Leith on a Sunday night, so opted for Wensleydale instead- I say opted but it was more a case of what there was in Co Op.

We invited LeCabinet and El Ferd round to share this with us; they brought some lovely cold white wine and didn’t mind at all that we were running a bit behind schedule. I’d not made pastry nor blind baked a tart case in about eight years (apart from a couple of abject failures recently) so this was a little testing at times, but turned out just scrummy. Left overs went into packed lunches the following day: delish.

For the third week running we visited the newly re-launched Leith’s Village Store on Saturday. In fact, last weekend we were there as volunteers, selling locally grown potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, peas, rocket, chard, lettuce, radishes, courgettes to the people of Leith. Each week there are more customers and therefore more stock for the following week. When we were selling we ran out of eggs (twice! We even sourced an extra dozen but they went in a flash) and so this week they had stacks of the things!

We also had the task last week of securing this beautiful hand-painted sign. It’s on paper (?lining paper) with strings through reinforced corners….but there’s nothing really at the Drill Hall to attach it to, so we had to use a lot of parcel tape to stick the strings to the stone….and hope….

Despite being a very blustery day it survived, yay!

Back to this week. I was pleased to see, for the first time, bunches of very fresh looking beetroot. (Frustrating that I was thwarted in my attempts to buy beetroot last week, but such is the nature of things). We also got some local grown rocket- 40g to be precise, how nice to be able to grab it by the handful and take as much or as little as you need! – as well as courgettes, broccoli and chestnut mushrooms.

On Saturday night we decided to roast the beetroot to have with pasta. I cast about on the internet for timings and came across this delightful VideoJug vid on how to cook beetroot. We didn’t have any thyme but basically followed their instructions. (I was also on the hunt for an Ottolenghi recipe for beetroot with maple syrup and sherry vinegar without success…found sweet potato though, will have to assume is the same!)

So. Step one, prep the beetroot.

Um…what?

I’ve seen stripey beetroot before. Looks dead exciting raw but if you cook it with regular beetroot it gets dyed and the effect is lost. I’ve seen golden beetroot before (although now I think about it I’m not sure what colour its skin is. Brown?) But white ?

It should be noted that externally, all these beets looked exactly the same. Very pink, compared with most beetroot I’ve seen, but nevertheless kinda normal. The first one I sliced into was tiny, about the size of a cherry tomato, and when I saw the white inner I thought “b***er, I’ve bought blimen’ radishes!’. But they smelled of beetroot. And when I hit a striped one I was more reassured. So we ploughed on regardless.

We roasted them in the oven glazed in, essentially, salad dressing. The smell that wafted through when D checked the oven at half time was glorious. Served over a bed of buttery spaghetti and some of the rocket, it all tasted fantastic.

Visually, we’d have been better with normal, red, beetroot. It looked a bit like roasted garlic or perhaps parsnip. Not the glorious contrasting colours I’d originally envisaged. Had it not been for the rocket this would have been close to a one-colour-meal. But it was just the two of us and it tasted great. And now I know; beetroot can be pink on the outside, white on the inside. And I wonder….is it really normal to be red, or have I simply been brainwashed by the supermarkets and the force of consumer expectation? Ach, it’s always been red when I’ve seen Ken dig it up out of the garden!

Two meals, two nights in a row, to give Dougal something to look forward to when studying and keep me engaged in the kitchen.

• Feta, Tomato and Pesto Tartlet
• Nigella’s Nectarine and Blueberry Galette

As you might be able to tell, I’d bought a packet of all-butter puff pastry but wanted it to do two nights. Seemed a bit much to scoff it all in a one-er!

The tartlets I created based on a bit of reading around on the internet. Pesto seemed to be the done thing to line the tart with, and we had a massive basil plant at the time, so I blasted some up in the food processor with pine nuts/parmesan/garlic/olive oil, which did the trick nicely. Then some halved baby plum tomatoes, loads of feta, and into the oven for a bit. Came out looking pretty foxy I think- I especially like the cutting on the diagonal!

Tasted pretty smashing too!

The following night, for pudding, I revisited Nigella’s galette, a hastily flung together pud, no poshness involved. Half the size of last year which made it look rather cute- but also the kind of thing you could polish off between two just fine! (I think we did still spin it out to a couple of sittings though).

We had no apricot jam (I think for the challenge I bought it specially, can you imagine?) but just the day before my mother had presented me with two jars of made-the-day-before raspberry jam (my favourite!) which I felt could hardly hurt the thing. So, pastry lined with a mixture of fabby dabby mummy jam mixed with cream, scattered with slices of fab nectarine (Waitrose Perfectly Ripe) and some blueberries out of the freezer. Again, bake for a bit and serve, well, however you like. We might have gone for greek yoghurt, I honestly can’t remember!

Which is the name of the album Dougal put on after tea and really nothing to do with the authenticity of our eats çe soir.

My dad had kindly gifted us some Gorno’s Merguez (the original and best, as far as I’m concerned) and it seemed fitting to serve them with something cous cous-y. I know nothing about cooking cous cous (I do occasionally have it for lunch but generally just make a crunchy salad, lots of peppers and cucumber and what not, and mix that through cous cous) so deferred to the internet. This apricot and almond couscous was really nice; despite starting out proper boot-leather chewy, the apricots were tender but still a bit meaty (probably literally, seeing as it will have been the addition of chicken stock which redeemed them!) and the toasted almonds added texture and crunch. Sadly we were missing mint which would have really lifted this but the lemony-ness helped.

The sausages were just grilled and tasted great. Some lemony courgette slivers on the side were a vague but directionless attempt at an appropriate vegetable- nice but not really the right result, and not enough of them either!

We finished up with a simple fruit salad of alphonso mango and scottish rasps. It may not be remotely North African but let me tell you, it takes some beating.