Tomatoes stuffed with blue cheese

Stuffed tomato!

So, a while ago, I experimented with stuffing leeks with blue cheese, with the stuffing mixture adapted from Ottolenghi's fantastic stuffed onions.  I thought the leeks were a little tough but I really liked the stuffing mixture, so I decided that I'd use it again, this time for stuffing tomatoes.

I scooped out the insides of nine tomatoes and left them upside down on some kitchen towel while I dealt with the filling, get them as dry inside as reasonably possible.

Hollowed out tomato

Hollowed out tomatoes

The stuffing was slightly different this time to the time with the leeks, because of having slightly different ingredients on hand but was broadly similar:  two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs, 6 finely chopped spring onions, three cloves of garlic finely minced, 300g of Danish blue, a handful of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of mustard, a glug of olive oil and salt and black pepper.

Stuffing

Tomatoes ready for stuffing

Tomatoes ready for stuffing

I then stuffed the tomatoes and baked for 20 minutes at 200 degrees C.

Cooked stuffed tomatoes

Verdict:  very nice, though probably more of a starter than a main course (unless you serve with something else - we had garlic bread with them).  If you want the tomatoes to be more roasted, it's probably worth baking them for longer (which probably requires putting the tops back on them so that the stuffing doesn't get burnt or baking them for five minutes or so before stuffing them.) We quite liked them at the level of roasted they were, though.

Cooked stuffed tomatoes

Cookbook review - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage Veg Every Day

I really like this cookbook.  It's not my natural style - Ottolenghi is more my wavelength, multicultural, complicated, lots of flavours - it's simpler but what I love about it is that the recipes are straightforward but still original.  I love the sweet potato and peanut butter gratin, the leek and chestnut risotto, macaroni and peas.  A couple of the recipes, most notably the chachouka recipe (but also another - I think the risotto) had slightly strange quantities - it said that it would serve four but, even with bread on the side, barely sufficed for two.

In general, I sort of feel that the directions and quantities and so on aren't totally precise, it isn't sensible to follow the recipes completely blindly.  I don't mind, though, I'm more than happy with any cookbook that gives me one or more recipes that make it into my everyday repertoire and this has given me three - and there are still a few recipes in there that I'd like to try.

I'd recommend this one - it strikes me that it would be a particularly good one for omnivores who are experienced cooks but who  want to acquire a couple of good dishes for vegetarian dinner guests as it isn't too scary.

Cookbook review - Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cooking

Marcella Hazan's books do what they say on the cover - they teach you how to make classic Italian recipes the traditional way.  Marcella is not an innovator.  Experimentation is not encouraged.  Sample comment, "Fresh basil is a must.  Some people may be tempted to supplant it with parsley, but is in no way an acceptable substitute."  Well, that's me told.

However, if you're not from an Italian background, her books are extremely helpful in grounding you in traditional Italian techniques which you can then use as a basis to experiment with.  For instance, it wasn't until reading her long rant about the quality of tomatoes these days that I tried making pasta sauce with good quality Italian tinned tomatoes rather than with fresh tomatoes and found that she's quite right, if you can't get good quality fresh Italian plum tomatoes, you are better off with good quality tinned Italian tomatoes.  My pasta sauces have never been the same again.  Of course, she'd still disapprove of me because I can't seem to find San Marzano tomatoes as she recommends but have to make do with Neapolitan.  Her sauces - particularly the gorgonzola one and the tomato one with lots of butter and an onion which you take out and discard - are extremely good and, often, employ techniques that I would just never have come up with on my own.

In general, her recipes make me realise that I need to let the main ingredients shine when cooking Italian food and fight my instincts to overcomplicate by adding more and more spices/herbs/etc. Both books are dominated by recipes with meat but there's still plenty of good stuff that doesn't have meat and, to be honest, they're worth buying just for the sauce recipes.

Overall, very much recommended.   But there's no way she'll ever persuade me away from my beloved garlic press.  Sometimes, I even substitute parsley for basil. 

Risotto

I've been messing around with risotto for years now and I think I finally have what I think is the perfect risotto.  I don't so much have a recipe (as lots of things can go into risotto and taste lovely) as a number of tips:

1. I'm not someone who is generally precious about pans, I know some people are all about their Le Creuset and cast iron stuff and whatever but I'm not.  But I've tried risotto in a big frying pan and that didn't work well because the grains of rice at the edge ended up overcooked, I've tried it in a wok (I thought maybe that would be good as it would keep all the rice together and so cook it evenly) but that was too thin and got the risotto too hot, in the end it turns out that what you need is a good old fashioned thick bottomed saucepan.  
2. You don't - in my view - need risotto/arborio/paella rice, pudding rice is just fine and is a bit cheaper.
3. There are various recipes out there that cut out the tedious spooning of the stock element and bake it in the oven or just put all the stock in to begin with.  These sound appealing but, having tried a few, it just doesn't taste right.  They don't manage to get that creaminess that you can get from risotto done the traditional way.  Done right, the traditional way makes it so creamy that you almost think you must have put some cream in there.  Essentially, you add the stock at such a pace that the rice is always moist but is not actually boiling in liquid.
4. Try not to get the pan too hot - even if you're using a good thick bottomed pan, it can still happen and then the rice starts to boil in the stock which makes it not come out so well.  If possible, use your smallest hob on its lowest setting.
5. Think about what vegetables you're using and whether it's worth cooking them separately to avoid them getting too soggy - in my experience, it's well worth, for example, frying mushrooms up in a separate pan and adding in at the end.  With some vegetables, you can put them in but you want to wait until the dish is part cooked to avoid overcooking - for instance broad beans and peas.
6. Start off with a bit of butter rather than oil - just tastes a lot better.
7. Sherry is a nice alternative to white wine, if you have it, I think it has more depth of flavour to risotto.
8. While we're on the subject of sherry/white wine, I find that it's good to add this at two points:  after you've toasted the rice in the butter, adding it straight away before any stock; and drizzling a little in right at the very end
9. If you're adding cheese, add it around half way through - a point you recognise after a bit of practice, when the outside of a grain of rice is soft but the inside is still very hard.  I think gruyere is by far the best cheese to add, though others can work too.
10. I find this hard as I naturally want to add LOTS of different things to everything but, with risotto, it's best to keep the spicing fairly simple - garlic, salt, black pepper are perfectly sufficient.  Fresh herbs are nice to add at the end too, though, particularly a bit of parsley.  A squeeze of lemon is nice too.
11. Similarly, it's worth being a bit restrained as to the number of vegetables you add - don't just chuck everything you have to use up in there as the dish starts to lose focus.  I try to stick to two vegetables at most and often I'll just put one in.  
12. If it doesn't seem to be cooking and you're getting bored of ladling in stock, don't lose your patience and just dunk lots of stock in, it's really annoying to end up with too much liquid in there.  The risotto will just suddenly towards the end get really creamy and that makes all the effort worthwhile.  It is, however, definitely worth preparing yourself for the time it takes - it usually takes me around 45-50 minutes - get someone in the kitchen to chat to you or a book or have some kitchen tidying to do.
13. Enjoy!

Restaurant review - The Gate, Islington

For many years, my favourite vegetarian restaurant in London has been The Gate in Hammersmith because of its wonderfully creative and inventive food.  Far too many vegetarian restaurants are of the lentils and wheatgrass shots variety and so it's fantastic when one isn't.  I've never had a bad meal at The Gate, the only two bad things that I have to say about it are:  it's in Hammersmith (which isn't very convenient for me); and it's not got the best atmosphere, the tables are all crammed in and it looks a bit like a cafeteria.  One time that my lovely husband and I went, we were so close to another couple that it was deeply uncomfortable - they sat in silence glaring at one another for the whole meal except, at one point, one of them said to the other "I didn't think this was how we'd be spending our anniversary."  Ow.  Offputting.  Hard to carry on a cheery conversation about three inches from them. 

Anyway.  I was, therefore, thrilled when I heard that they were opening a new restaurant in Islington - Islington is much more convenient for me and, also, I figured that they might fix the problem of the tables being too crammed in together.  While, obviously, Islington is indeed more convenient for me, unfortunately seemingly they couldn't resist the temptation of cramming a few more tables in so you are still quite close to other diners when you eat, much more so than in most restaurants.  The atmosphere is a bit nicer though, less opressively white and cafeteria like.

We went during their first week of being open so perhaps this is just teething problems but the service was somewhat erratic - the first waiter we had showed us to our table and then left us without menus for about ten minutes before I caught the eye of a different waiter who seemed rather confused that we had no menus.  After that, the service was lightning fast, to be honest, a bit too fast.  I realise I'm sounding a bit like Goldilocks here but I promise you, I'm not really particularly picky about service.  I just quite like there to be a break of some sort between courses - our mains arrived literally just as I was finishing the last mouthful of the starter which was fine this time as we were both quite hungry anyway but I do, in general, prefer my meals out to last longer than an hour.  I think, next time, I might be inclined to wait until we've eaten starters before ordering mains.

Still, the main reason why I went was the food, which was - as per the Hammersmith restaurant - lovely.  As well as the usual things, they have mezze so we went for 3 mezze for £10 as a shared starter - I loved the artichoke tempura and the couscous fritters (particularly the sauce they came with), but the mushroom pate wasn't that exciting.  The portion sizes were a little on the small size - worked fine as a shared starter for two people who wanted to leave room for their mains but I'd avoid ordering some as a meal in themselves, unless you have a very small appetite.  The main courses were terrific - I had the corn cake which was beautifully put together, lots of different flavours, just the way I like my flavours, my lovely husband had the couscous encrusted aubergine which was also very nice.  Next time, I want to try the risotto cake with lots of mushrooms.  We were too full for pudding, another one for next time.

apple muffins

Yummy apple muffins

I don't bake much (because I am a little scared of ovens) but I wanted to take something into work after having been away for a week and a half and, also, I recently bought muffin tins so I decided to bake some apple muffins to take in, using this recipe.  I am not very good at following recipes exactly so I added a bit more apple (because apples don't come in 100g packages!), and a lot more spice (as well as doubling the amount of ground ginger, I also added ground cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla essence), dusted with a mix of ground cinnamon and brown sugar after baking, and they came out pretty well - if I do say so myself!

Mixture pre-baking

Folding in the chopped apple

I think, for my tastes, they weren't quite sweet enough - I think, probably, because I think of muffins as a dessert, not as breakfast food - so, next time, I might add a little more sugar.  I think some peanut butter would also be nice in them.  And maybe some dates..

Gujarati kitchari

I notice from my stats page that a lot of people seem to come here searching for a Gujarati kitchari recipe, I think because of this post about kosheri which references the differences between it and kitchari.  I feel a bit bad about these people who must be very disappointed to think that they've found a recipe for Gujarati kitchari but have actually found a post rambling about an Ottolenghi recipe and its similarity to a Gujarati recipe that I don't give!

So, I thought I'd post about Gujarati kitchari.  It's such a simple recipe that it barely qualifies as a recipe, really, but here we go.  The purpose of kitchari is as an alternative to rice or Indian bread products (chapati, thepla, puri, nan, paratha, etc) to have with shak (curry), it is a bland backdrop to the star dish.  I love it - it is easy, comforting, versatile (I will come on to what you can do with the leftovers).

Essentially, kitchari is split lentils (split mung beans are traditional but other split lentils work too),  rice that soaks up a lot of water (pudding or risotto/paella rice for preference but ordinary basmati rice is ok in a pinch but isn't as satisfyingly stodgy), ghee/butter (or oil if you really don't have ghee/butter or are vegan), cooked up together.  You can make it in a pressure cooker if you're in a hurry (but remember that the point is for it to be cooked well and end up slightly mushy, so set it for longer than you would usually for lentils or rice; you can use a slow cooker if you want to make it overnight; you can do it on the hob (in about 30-40 mins).  I don't have a pressure cooker so I usually make it in the slow cooker or, sometimes, on the hob.

Photo from http://www.learningherbs.com/

You want equal quantities split lentils and rice (I do this by just alternating handfuls of each, roughly you can expect that each person will eat two handfuls worth if kitchari is your only starch or one handful worth if you're also doing bread of some kind) and about a tablespoon's worth of ghee/butter per handful, plus about half a teaspoon's worth of salt per handful.  Then, using your chosen method - hob, pressure cooker, slow cooker - you want to cook it until it's really very cooked and the lentils and the rice are kind of one amorphous blob.  The consistency is that of porridge, really.  I'll put up a photo of my own next time I make it but in the meantime the photo to the right indicates the consistency that you're looking for.

It's good to make shak with it that's more on the liquidy side so that the juices run into the kitchari and make it nice and tasty.  In particular, tomato shak is lovely with this.  It's made in the same way as normal shak but with a few changes:  it needs a bit of sugar (about a teaspoon for every eight small tomatoes), it needs more garlic than normal (I'd add six cloves to shak for 3-4 people), a bit of lemon juice is good in it, as is coriander, and sev sprinkled on top is fab.

I never worry if I've made extra kitchari because it's pretty useful in the leftover department.  You can eat it on its own with natural yoghurt for breakfast - when it plays the role of porridge, you can curry it (following the instructions for shak, just with kitchari instead of vegetables), you can make a great Indian left over dish called muthia with it (which I'll post about properly another time..)

Lemon curd ice cream

Yummy lemon curd ice cream

We have a terrific ice cream maker and are always on the hunt for ice cream recipes to make in it.  We ran across this one for lemon curd ice cream that seemed almost too simple to be true - buy lemon curd, double cream and a lemon, insert into ice cream maker and then eat delicious ice cream?  OK, then!  It really is that simple and it is very tasty.*  Next up for us, using the same recipe with lime curd.  What could possibly go wrong?

*It is very rich, though, I think it would probably work best as one scoop with another dessert (apple pie perhaps?  or ginger cake?) rather than on its own as we had it.

Leeks stuffed with blue cheese

Mmm, leeks

I really love Ottolenghi's stuffed onions, as I've posted about before, so I figured I might try doing something similar with leeks.  So, I did.

I cut the leeks so that I had the outer circles so that I could stuff them as long tubes, then - as the Ottolenghi recipe does with onion shells - boiled them in white wine and stock
for five minutes.

Leek tubes

Leek tube

Because I'm silly, I forgot that I'd need a larger pan than usual and heated up the stock and white wine in the pan I usually use for the onions.  I'm lazy about washing up so, rather than pour it into a large pan, I just put the leeks in the small pan anyway and turned them upside down after five minutes to do the other ends.  If you are less silly, you might just want to use a larger pan..

Less than sensible leek cooking method

While that was happening, I made some stuffing: finely chopped inside bits of the leeks, two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs, three small tomatoes finely chopped, about 300g of Danish Blue crumbled, 100g of Gruyere chopped, a teaspoon of mustard, a glug of olive oil, three cloves of garlic finely chopped, salt and black pepper.

Stuffing

Stuffing close up

Then, I stuffed the leeks and put them (cut side down) in the buttered pan, put enough of the stock and white wine over them to cover the base comfortably and baked for 25 minutes on 200 degrees C.

Stuffed and ready to go

Stuffed and ready to go

The result:  nice, but the leeks were a little tough, I suspect that they'd be nicer if boiled in stock for a little longer. There were a few leek skins that didn't quite fit in the oven dish so I did those as little parcels in another pan and, actually, these were much easier to get out of the dish than the long tubes were so I think that's another lesson for next time!  The stuffing was delicious, though, and I'm very tempted to use it again in other contexts - e.g. I might try stuffing onions with it next time..  or tomatoes.

Cooked leek tubes

Cooked leek parcels

We've experimented with vegetarian cottage pie over the years and we make it differently pretty much every time.  A few days ago my lovely husband made a particularly good one by:

Mmm, cottage pie

Chopping a couple of onions, frying them for a bit, adding some chopped carrots until softened, then some frozen soya mince, some frozen peas and sweetcorn, a tin of baked beans, some gravy granules, salt and pepper, topped with sweet potato mashed with more salt, pepper, mustard, and a bit of cheddar cheese on top.  Baked for about 20 minutes on 200 degrees C.

Other things that can be nice in the filling:  lentils (particularly dark lentils), black-eyed beans, kidney beans, marmite, finely chopped celery.  It's basically quite hard to get pulses + soya mince + gravy sauce topped with mashed potato very wrong.

Cottage pie released to a plate

Cottage pie still in its cage

Earliest food memories

I enjoy interviews with people that focus on food, like this one which got me thinking about my earliest food memories.  I don't have a single memory that I can pick out as my first, just a few different associations.  All centred around a general feeling of strangeness.  Growing up as a vegetarian in an Indian vegetarian family in the '80s, in non-Indian areas, was... interesting.

I remember the cashier at the checkout of a supermarket looking at the aubergines they were buying in some confusion and my parents having to explain to her what they were.  I remember being laughed at for putting salt on salad (what my parents did), I remember struggling to explain in English what we ate at home.  Being bilingual really brings home to you that different languages just can't directly translate into one another because they reflect different views of the world.  The same word, in Gujarati (shak), refers to uncooked vegetables and also curry (because what else would you do with vegetables?!).  On the other hand, Gujarati does have separate words for hot (as in temperature hot) and hot (as in spicy).  It also has separate words for cooked and uncooked rice.

I remember so many fundamental differences between the things that my family ate and how they ate them and my friends' families.One of the most exciting bits of the year food-wise, in my family, is mango season.  My parents got excited by mangoes and pineapples and melons and papayas.   My family would put a load of different dishes in the middle of the table and people could take what they liked.  For my family, vegetables weren't something to have "on the side", they were just food, part of food, normal for adults and children.  I was a teenager before I realised that anyone thought that children didn't like vegetables.  The vast majority of Gujarati food is done on the hob (I can literally only think of one Gujarati dish that happens in the oven - ondwo) rather than in the oven and I always found it weird that my friends' families would use their ovens so heavily (my parents use theirs for storage - seriously!)  I also remember being a bit bemused by the concept of recipes - for my family, the unit of measurement is "a handful" and the idea of doing spicing by anything other than eye would just get you laughed at.

I remember a lot of curiosity from people at school and elsewhere about what we ate and how we ate it and I remember finding it so hard to explain things.  Actually, there are some things that I still find hard to explain.  Like with shak, I remember trying to describe it to someone at school and having them just totally confused by the cooking technique:

- "So you fry it all?" 
- "No, you just.. cook it"
- "But there's oil in there, so that's frying"
- "But there's also water"
- "So you're boiling it, I see"
- "But no, because there's not THAT much water and also there's oil and tomatoes and other stuff"
- "So... you're saying you're sauteeing it?"
- "I don't know what that means"

*headdesk*  I think the fundamental issue is that you can't describe one cuisine with the words of another very succinctly.

These days, I cook food from a variety of different cuisines, but I still have a general love for cooking on the hob, a slight mistrust of ovens, a love for lots of clashing flavours, I always spice by eye rather than measure, and - of course - I never let mango season go past without buying a box or four.

Mmmm, mangoes

Restaurant reviews, Newcastle upon Tyne: Blackfriars and El Coto

Was in Newcastle this week and sampled a couple of the city's many restaurants.

Newcastle is pretty

The first was Blackfriars, set in a medieval former Dominican friary, the place has a lot of atmosphere.  This always makes me a little nervous, I tend to assume that restaurants in lovely settings won't always bother going the extra mile with the food but, in this case, that fear was unjustified.  The restaurant makes a genuine effort with its vegetarian options and both of the main course options looked very tempting - one involving mushrooms and truffles and the other involving smoked fried goats cheese.*  Perhaps inevitably given my fondness for cheese, I went for the latter and it was extremely good - I've never had smoked goats cheese before and I really liked the flavours.  

The river has pretty patterns in the mud

I don't usually say this as I don't have much of a sweet tooth but the best part of the meal, though, was the pudding - sticky toffee pudding with salted caramel ice-cream and honeycomb.  Just gorgeous - the sticky toffee pudding was indulgently sweet, the salted caramel ice-cream was genuinely salty enough to provide the requisite contrast, and the honeycomb added an interesting texture on top.  To add to my enjoyment of the pudding course, unlike a lot of restaurants, Blackfriars has a decent range of pudding wines, including one that I'd not seen before - a Pineau Rouge de Charentes, a blend of grape juice and Cognac, which I enjoyed.  Overall, I'd definitely come back here if I'm ever passing through Newcastle again.

*The menu on the website seems to have changed now - presumably to their spring menu but the new vegetarian options also look nice.

And there are sands nearby and seagulls

The other restaurant that we tried was a tapas place called El Coto, which we went to largely because we both quite like Spanish food but it's rare to find one that has good vegetarian options.  The service was a tad on the surly side - we got told off for not waiting in the deserted bar area to be seated, despite there being no evidence that anyone had noticed us lurking there or would notice, the waitstaff took quite a while to take our order, etc.  But the food was pretty good. The portions were huge, in retrospect going for three tapas each, plus bread to share, was a bit too much food.  I had tomatoes drizzled with garlicky, herby, olive oil, which was lovely (and which I plan to try to recreate at home sometime), chickpea and spinach stew which they'd spiced with cloves (I think) which gave it an unusual flavour that I liked, the mushrooms in white wine were slightly disappointingly soggy (I think mushrooms are sometimes hard to get quite right), unusually for me as I'm not that into bread (apparently this is a Newcastle theme..), my favourite bit was the olive bread that they brought us, lovely and fresh and just the right consistency. 

My companion reported much the same - that two of his three tapas were really good but one was slightly disappointing.  So, overall, I'd say this one's worth going to if you really fancy tapas but, if you're only in Newcastle for one evening, I'd definitely recommend Blackfriars instead.  That said, if they ever expand to London, I'd definitely go there from time to time.