I adored these cookies when I was a child. We didn’t have them often – I imagine my mum considered them too sugary to make them regularly. I even remember her telling me she’d lost the recipe, and making her usual granola cookies instead. Continue reading
“It smells like Japan!” Lyra said when she walked into the kitchen. And so it did, that inimitable simmering dashi smell. We ate hijiki no ni mono pretty regularly when we lived in Japan. It was one of the only dishes Adam cooked and his main contribution to house meals.
Hijiki has a slightly liquorice flavour that works well with the carrots, and the chewiness of the fried tofu provides a contrast to the softness of the vegetables. It looks so pretty too… Continue reading
There are lots of recipes for Dorset apple cake around. Having tried a few, I’ve settled on this one.
This lovely cake is surprisingly light, fresh and lemony. I always make it with Bramley apples, liking their tartness and they way they become so fluffy when cooked. Plus we have a tree in the garden… Continue reading
When I worked in central London, it was necessary to employ various nurseries, childminders and nannies to look after the girls. Through trial and error, we learned that live-out nannies suited us best – and with two children, they worked out cheaper than a nursery.
Our nanny would arrive as I left for work, to spend the day with the girls, taking them to playgroups and parks, supervising playdates, and preparing their meals. So long as they cooked from scratch, I gave them free rein in the kitchen.
One Polish nanny in particular was an excellent cook. She would make the most wonderful soups for the girls, which she always served with stacks of thin pancakes. When she left us to start her own family, she kindly copied out those recipes the girls had become so fond of. This vegetable soup in particular has become a family favourite. It’s also a great way to clear out the vegetable tray before the week’s grocery shop. Continue reading
Like most schools these days, ours is a “nut-free zone”. While peanuts are their main concern, they have banned all nuts to be on the safe side. This has led to considerable confusion about what counts as a nut – are coconuts allowed? Pine nuts? Sunflower seeds?
Strictly speaking they are all seeds – peanuts, almonds, coconuts, sesame seeds, the lot… And which seeds are considered nuts depends on whether you ask a cook or a botanist.
It’s very different to my school days, when half the class brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches daily, and peanut butter cookies were standard lunchbox fare. Continue reading
I only recently learned the difference between caramel and butterscotch. Caramel is white sugar that has been boiled until it darkens, while butterscotch is made with brown sugar and butter. I’m a great fan of both, which is why I love these oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies. An oatmeal chocolate chip cookie is a fine thing, but to my mind these are even better. Continue reading
While traditional enchiladas are rolled, in New Mexico they do things differently. Lightly fried corn tortillas are spread with sauce and cheese and stacked together, and often served topped with a fried egg.
This is my take on stacked enchiladas. I don’t bother frying the tortillas, opting to bake the assembled stacks in the oven instead. While they are very nice with just the traditional sauce and cheese, I often add toppings to each layer – mushrooms and olives, usually – to give the dish more substance. It’s important to slice toppings thinly so they cook quickly and the stack melds together in the oven. Continue reading
I used to make sautéed potatoes quite regularly, but until recently I’d fallen out of the habit.
When one of the girls has a friend round after school, the accepted thing is to feed the child some dinner before they are collected at 6pm. Our family normally eats quite late, so for playdates I’ll usually cook a separate kids’ meal.
I play it safe on these occasions, ever since I made a little girl cry by serving her a bowl of chickpea pasta soup. Schnitzel, meatballs, pesto pasta, fish fingers and chips, sausages and mash are all good bets. Continue reading
Apple crumble is one of the first things that my mum taught me to cook, as I imagine her mother must have taught her. Crumble always on the menu at my grandparent’s house: apple, plum, peach are the ones I remember best. She would serve it with tinned milk, cheaper and more readily available than cream. While Britain excels in the realm of cream – the range on offer in Canada is far more limited even now.
I was surprised to learn that crumble originated in World War II Britain, when food rationing meant pies were off the menu. Women made crumbles instead to eke out their supplies of butter and sugar. Which leaves me wondering why my English-born grandmother was such a crumble queen – given that she emigrated to Canada in 1927. Continue reading
Since becoming a mum, I’ve cooked daily for my own children – and pretty regularly for their friends. It’s been a surprise to me how many of these kids like broccoli. I serve cooked vegetables with pretty much every dinner, and given a choice, most kids pick broccoli over carrots, peas or green beans. Even over corn – unless it’s on the cob. Continue reading
It’s taken a while, but the UK has finally embraced Halloween. For years, ours was the lone jack-o-lantern in the neighbourhood, and four or five kids might knock on the door all evening. Last night, we had more than 150.
These days our neighbourhood association publishes a “trick-or-treat trail” of participating houses, and crowds of little witches and ghouls traipse round the route. The high street shops get in on it too, decorating their windows and handing out sweets.
This year the local dentist erected some scaffolding outside their premises to create a raised platform, and grinned maniacally at the kids as they passed below, complete with smoke machine adding to the atmosphere. Halloween is firmly on the calendar now, it would seem. Continue reading
I am genuinely amazed at how much both my girls love kale chips – it’s like child catnip. I cannot leave a bowl unattended for five minutes and expect a single crumb to remain. It must be a super food indeed to get children squabbling over who has eaten more than their fair share of the kale. Continue reading
I love applesauce – such bright, cheerful stuff, and a great way to reduce a trug of apples from our trees down to size. Every autumn, I make several batches to freeze for the winter. Our apples are pretty tart, so I generally add some sugar, but it’s not necessary.
I always make applesauce in a pot on the hob. My mum used to make it in the pressure cooker. I’m not sure why, as it’s so quick to make, but she did. In one of my earliest memories, I was sitting at the kitchen table while Mum was making applesauce. There was a problem with the pressure cooker lid, and she called for my dad to help. Continue reading
This chickpea green bean salad completely transformed my previously poor opinion of bean salads. It’s nothing like the mixed bean salads – tough kidney beans, black-eyed peas, chickpeas, and mushy tinned green beans swimming in oily vinegar – that I always avoided at potlucks and salad bars.
The recipe calls for two separate dressings – a garlicky one for the chickpeas, and a gingery one for the green beans. If time allows, it’s worth making the chickpea part of the salad a few hours ahead so they can marinate, then doing the green beans when it’s almost time to eat.
While it’s not much extra work to make both dressings, sometimes I just make the green bean dressing, and toss it all together at the same time. Another Madhur Jaffrey recipe from my trusty World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking. Continue reading
As much as I love the flavour of rosemary, and as happily as it thrives year-round in our garden, I don’t actually cook many dishes that call for it. Roast lamb, beef stroganoff, maybe a couple of stalks in a tray of roast potatoes – that’s about it.
Which is why rosemary loaf cake was one of the first recipes I cooked from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be a Domestic Goddess. Continue reading
Baking the ultimate loaf of bread is an ongoing quest – and something I am a long way from attaining. Mostly, I make sourdough loaves, with varying degrees of success, depending on how long I’ve neglected my starter for. When I opt for the (relatively) instant gratification of a yeasted loaf, this Finnish rye bread (or ruisreikäleipä) is one I often go for. Continue reading
I’ve looked at this Ottolenghi recipe for chargrilled broccoli with garlic and chilli a number of times, but have never summoned up the enthusiasm to grill individual broccoli florets before today. Blanching, chilling, drying, grilling – it seemed a lot of trouble for a bowl of broccoli.
I don’t know what tipped the balance, but I’m really pleased I finally gave this dish a try. It turns out that chargrilled broccoli is delicious, especially tossed with sautéed garlic, chilli and slivers of lemon. And because I halved the quantities, it wasn’t as time consuming as anticipated. The original recipe comes from Ottolenghi, The Cookbook. Continue reading
These baked spiced plums are wonderfully easy to make – plus they make the house smell of mulled wine. Good hot or cold, they keep for a week in the fridge, and freeze well too.
Another recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How to Cook, I cut back on the amount of honey after making it the first time, as I found the sweetness masked the flavour of the plums. They are delicious served with a spoonful of Barbados cream.
Much as I’d love to add another country to my country list, there is no evidence whatsoever that the delicious concoction known as Barbados cream originates from Barbados. I’ve now learned that Barbados sugar is another name for muscavado sugar – the lovely, molasses-rich, dark brown sugar used in this recipe. However, the name applies only to muscavado sugar that originates from Barbados, while mine is from Mauritius.
The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat. I doubt she’d approve of my use of fat-free Greek yogurt, but the end result is plenty rich and delicious enough for me. Its tangy, creamy sweetness goes beautifully with cooked fruit and crumbles – I use it anywhere I would dollop a spoonful of creme fraiche or vanilla ice cream. Continue reading
I ate a lot of soup as a university student – particularly onion potato soup. This was mostly because it cost about $1 to make an enormous pot that I could live off for days. This leek and potato soup is pretty much the same soup, all grown up – just like me…
Butter instead of oil, leeks instead of yellow onions, and a splash of cream for the silky finish it brings. I sometimes add chunks of Polish sausage after puréeing the soup, which makes it more of a meal and adds a appealing smoky element to the flavour. But it’s not necessary – it’s delicious just the way it is. Continue reading
Tucked into the corner of my birthday veggie bag was something heavy, oval-shaped, and pale yellow. I lifted it out and laughed in happy disbelief – a spaghetti squash!
I adore spaghetti squash, and cooked with it all the time when I lived in Vancouver. But since moving to the UK, I’ve had it exactly once. When I arrived almost twenty years ago, it was very difficult to get any type of squash in the supermarkets. Over time butternut, acorn and kabocha squash have found a regular place in the produce section. but there have been less sightings of spaghetti squash than the Beast of Bodmin Moor. Continue reading
I seriously over-estimated the quantity of limes needed to make 30 litres of sayonara baby for my birthday bash. As a result, limes have been featuring pretty large in our meals recently. Vietnamese chicken salad, salmon phyllo parcels, caipirinhas of course, and still a towering heap of limes dominates the fruit bowl…
…which inspired me to make a lime meringue pie. After reviewing a number of lime pie recipes, I opted to include some lemon juice to ensure the filling was tart enough to balance the sweetness of the meringue and biscuity base. Four more limes down, fourteen to go… Continue reading
Mum made two kinds of grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. The first was a crappy, open-face sandwich that involved slapping a plasticky cheese slice on a slice of bread and melting it under the broiler. This was always adorned with a little ketchup smiley face.
The second kind involved two slices of buttered bread and real cheddar, and was cooked slowly in the electric frying pan until it transformed into crispy-melty-cheesy deliciousness. To my disappointment, we ate a lot more of the first kind… Continue reading
I wanted to slip this recipe for summer blueberry tart in before summer officially ends on Monday. We’re having a lovely September, but there’s no escaping the feeling of something ebbing away. The warning bite in the morning air, the lingering mists, the falling leaves. Even at midday, the sun no longer packs an espresso punch – it’s filtered coffee sunlight for us from now on… Continue reading
At the end of July, we decided to throw a party for my birthday in September. So we sent out a raft of invitations… and then pretty much forgot about it until last weekend when it struck us, “Ay caramba! We’ve got several dozen people turning up next Saturday!”
We had the first requirement for a successful party – lots of people – sorted. Which left the second requirement… a killer cocktail. Get lots of people drinking cocktails at the same time and a great evening is pretty much guaranteed. Continue reading
To my regret, I have yet to visit Indonesia. The closest I’ve managed to get so far is watching The Year of Living Dangerously – and eating delicious Indonesian dishes like gado gado.
Making gado gado is all about the preparation – boiling potatoes and eggs, steaming green beans, blanching cabbage and beansprouts, frying the tempeh, and achieving a perfect balance of flavours in your peanut sauce. After that, simply a matter of a few moments to pile everything on a plate and tuck in.
This black bean salad has a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a salad? A salsa? A filling?
When I worked in central London, I’d regularly pack this black bean salad for my lunch. It travels well and the flavours improve over time. I’d eat it as it is, maybe with some crackers, or use it to fill a wrap. It’s also good mixed with an equal amount of cooked quinoa or other grain.
This potato and spinach dish is what I call a dry curry – there is no liquid used in the cooking, resulting in no sauce. It’s an easy weekday, store-cupboard meal. I prefer it with fresh spinach, but frozen also works.
The original recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking, one of my all-time favourite cookbooks. Continue reading
My mother used to say, “use a new word ten times and it’s yours”. She applied the same method to teaching me to cook. When I was eight years old, she had me make baking powder biscuits ten times over a couple of weeks, until I mastered them.
Many years later, I still remember the recipe and adapt it to all sorts of things. I make them larger and smaller, thicker and thinner. I sometimes add cheese or herbs to the dough (cheddar and dill biscuits are particularly nice). I always save any bacon fat or chicken fat in the fridge, and it makes a delicious biscuit when swapped for the margarine. Continue reading
This spinach, date and almond salad from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook was all over the food blogs a couple of years ago. With good reason – it’s a stunner of a salad, and relatively straightforward to prepare.
Dates and onions are marinated in a little vinegar, chunks of pitta and almonds fried in butter and dusted with chilli flakes and sumac, before being tossed with baby spinach. I ottolenghed it up for my brother and his family when they arrived visited from Canada. Continue reading
I could live on soup, especially thick, puréed ones like this butterbean and tomato soup. Cooked butterbeans have a soft, floury texture, which makes them a great soup base, though I imagine cannellini beans would work here as well.
This is one of those dishes that tastes like more effort has gone into it, which I attribute to the addition of sundried tomatoes. The recipe comes from Rose Elliot’s Vegetarian Fast Food. Continue reading
I found this recipe for basil-lime sorbet in a magazine I was leafing through in the doctor’s waiting room. I thought it sounded interesting, and jotted it down. The first time I tried it, I didn’t much like it, but decided to try it again with Thai basil.
What a transformation… The liquorice-cinnamony Thai basil combines beautifully with the sweet lime syrup to produce a palate cleansing, mouth tingling, refreshing sorbet. I often serve it with strawberries, but blueberries also work really well. Continue reading
Grasmere gingerbread is something I make when supplies are running low. It has only five store-cupboard ingredients – and doesn’t even call for an egg. I came across the recipe in the Observer newspaper years ago, and remember they included two versions – one simple, the other slightly fussier. (I’ve since discovered the original recipes are from Jane Grigson’s English Food).
I tried the simple one first, and decided after only one bite that it was plenty good enough for me. The recipe is so easy, it sounds like the crust one might make for a cheesecake or square. But there’s definitely more going on here. The crumb is exceptional, with an initial give before you encounter a chewy resistance in the middle. Continue reading
The recoleta clericot is a clever cocktail, with a careful balance of tastes and flavours – bitter Cinzano, acid-sweet orange juice, delicate herbal notes and the alcoholic wallop of gin, the distinctive flat melon flavour of cucumber, and ginger ale’s dancing top note. I came across this recipe in Waitrose Food magazine a couple of summers ago, and we’ve been quaffing them regularly ever since. Continue reading
My mum would make these little mushroom piroshki at Christmas, where they were a welcome counterpoint to all the sweet treats. I have no idea where this recipe came from originally – I found it on a handwritten card in mum’s recipe box when I was gathering recipes for Fern’s Food. Continue reading
Somebody gave me a copy of Annabel Karmel’s Baby and Toddler Meal Planner when Nova was born. Once I got past the freezing purées in ice cube tray stage, I moved onto her recipe for macaroni cheese. I’m pretty sure it’s the only recipe I ever made from it, and have long since given the book away.
The squirt of ketchup in the cheese sauce is something I wouldn’t have thought of myself, and the crispy topping is a nice touch. I’ve always made my macaroni cheese with a good, strong cheddar – and all the many children I’ve fed this dish to have happily scoffed it down. I eat mine with a good dollop of Dijon mustard on the side.
This blueberry crumb cake is the first thing I’ve baked in the new oven. While I’m obviously very happy to have a new appliance, I was used to the old one’s idiosyncracies and adapted my cooking to accommodate them. It’s going to take while to suss out this new kid in town… Continue reading
I turned the too-soft butter beans from the other night’s dinner into this impromptu dip. You could easily make it with a tin of butter beans instead. Definitely one to make again – it will be a nice change from the girls’ regular lunch of hummus-olive-pitta sandwiches. Continue reading
I’m very surprised that we’ve made it to August before I made this chilled pea mint soup, especially as we’ve been enjoying such atypically sunny weather. This recipe is usually one of my summer staples.
I love cold soups, but I know they’re not for everybody. Happily, this soup tastes equally good served warm, and garnished with a sprinkling of fried pancetta cubes. Continue reading
Sri Wasano’s infamous rice salad featured regularly in my veggie years, when the Moosewood Cookbook was my go-to source of inspiration. The recipe sounded impressive, looked exotic, and tasted great.
I’ve always wondered who Sri Wasano was and whether the salad has any connection whatsoever to Indonesia. A two-minute web search uncovered an interview with author Molly Katzen. She revealed that the recipe was a version of a version of a dish someone she knew once ate in an Indonesian restaurant in the Netherlands – and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone called Sri Wasano.
While the list of ingredients seems long, the salad comes together quickly, the dressing is sensational, and the texture contrast between the chewy rice, juicy pineapple, and crisp vegetables is interesting (in a good way). If you’re concerned about eating raw beansprouts, blanch them in boiling water for a minute or so, then drain and refresh under cold water before adding to the salad. Continue reading
Ten More Bites 