Low-carb paella

Bee Rawlinson - one of Neris & India's Idiot Proof Diet forumers - has worked with them to produce the Idiot proof diet cookbook. It's the ultimate fantasy really (well, my ultimate fantasy) - an enthusiastic amateur, busy raising a family and trying to feed them healthy, delicious meals while losing some weight, gets discovered and ends up with a book contract. Not as lucrative perhaps, but just as emotionally satisfying as the whole "writing in a cafe, ends up being the Harry Potter phenomenon" scenario.

I've met Bee, and I think she is lovely, so I ordered the book without having tried any of the recipes. And with little intention of following the diet. But on Sunday there was a whole big piece in the Sunday Times which included some recipes. I was intrigued by the low-carb paella recipe so I decided to give it a go (recipe is now behind a paywall - so removed).

I'm a lazy, lazy woman, so I didn't do the recipe as written - I browned the chicken and chorizo and then chucked everything in with it. Because I didn't brown the cauliflower to begin with, it gave off a load of liquid, so I think mine was a lot soupier than Bee's would be. I also used a bag of my trusty frozen seafood mix instead of live mussels and fresh prawns. But do you know what? It is absolutely delicious. Very filling, so there is a big tub of leftovers which will make me a wonderful lunch tomorrow. More power to Bee and the Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook!

Beef Vindaloo

I've never had any patience with the sort of Commando eating that takes pride in tolerating incendiary curries. I don't see the point in eating something so spicy that you can't taste anything, and I don't really see that kind of machismo as something to be proud of. But at the same time, I've always been fascinated by vindaloo. The combination of garlic and vinegar in the sauce sounded delicious, if only you could get one mild enough to taste.

Eventually I discovered Curry Express in Willoughby. For not much money, they would bring me a moderately-spiced pork vindaloo (I understand that because it is Goan, and Portuguese influenced, the usual Muslim prohibitions against pork don't stand - haven't figured out why most of the Indian cooks in Australia are Muslim), a polythene pouch of cardamom spiked rice and some naan. Lovely. In the absence of Curry Express, I've had to learn to make my own. One of my aunts gave me Camellia Punjabi's 50 Great Curries of India, which contains a fabulous amount of information on the hows and whys of Indian cuisine, as well as recipes.

I've made Camellia Punjabi's vindaloo recipe a few times, and tonight I think I have finally cracked it. The first time I made it, it was way too spicy, and yet too watery, because I hadn't read the bit that said she was using 200ml cups - an Australian cup is 250ml, so over the course of 4 cups of water that is a lot of extra fluid! Plus I hadn't appreciated just how mild a Kashmiri chilli must be, if you can add 15-20 of them to a dish. You can't do that with Thai chillies. The second time I made it was better. Tonight, I think I have mastered it. Maybe not authentically, but to my taste.

I used 6 dried Thai chillies, with a heaped tablespoon of paprika to make up the colour and texture. And I didn't fry the onions until really brown, but added the meat (beef shin) when they were still pale golden. They give up so much moisture that the meat can braise in the onion juices without extra water. I think in the end I added less than 1/4 cup of water. Anyway, after 2 1/2 hours cooking (less than I would usually give it, but I was hungry) it was gorgeous. The gravy was thick and rich, the meat tender and succulent and, while it was certainly pungent, it wasn't unbearably hot. Served it with Sainsburys Peshwari naan (because I love them), a dry aubergine curry and some lovely chilled muscadet. Success! And no machismo...

Langoustine Linguine

After our New Year's Eve meal, my husband started to get ideas about what to do with the rest of the langoustines. He'd envisaged a version of the garlic soup as a sauce for pasta, but I went in a slightly simplified direction.

Some good (Carluccio's) squid ink linguine, langoustines with olive oil (for the burn point) and some cherry tomatoes and a pile of sliced garlic, black pepper and a big pat of posh French butter. The almost-cooked pasta was tossed through the sauce and soaked up the sauce just how I planned. The only thing I would have had in a perfect world is just a few snipped chives for colour. A glass of cava on the side and it was a perfect Friday night supper.

New Year's Menu

Happy 2008 to all who sail in her!

We had a very pleasant, low-key evening last night. A continuous stream of good food, while we watched Poolhall Junkies - classic Christopher Walken.

The best single dish we'd tried in Switzerland was a creamy white wine and garlic soup, so my husband requested that as a starter for our meal. I did some research, and none of the recipes I could find sounded like what we had tried. There is a Spanish garlic soup that is the pre-tomato version of Gazpacho. There are American versions thickened with potato and roasted garlic. But nothing that would be creamy and luxurious and still contain a punch of almost raw garlic and harsh white wine. So I made it up as I went. I softened the white part of a leek in some butter, added 8 whole peeled cloves of garlic and half covered them in vegetable stock, then covered them in cheap chablis and simmered until the garlic was soft. I pureed it with a stick blender, then just before serving added a slug more wine, a dash of double cream and half a finely minced clove of garlic and reheated, seasoning with freshly ground white pepper. I wanted a garnish to add extra luxury to the meal (it was a celebration, after all) as well as relieving the pallor of the dish so I sauteed some langoustine tails in butter and garlic, stacked the langoustines in the bowl so their backs showed in the soup and sprinkled a little of the browned butter and garlic over the top. Delicious! My husband has raised the possibility of it reappearing (with lots more langoustines) as a pasta sauce, which I think would work really well. We drank more of the chablis with it.

For our main, we had pheasant. It had been partly boned, stuffed with pork sausagemeat and bramley apples (not by me) and barded with bacon. Alongside it in the pan I roasted chunks of butternut squash. Savoy cabbage sauteed in butter and sprinkled with nutmeg completed the plate. I'd been thinking about various sauces, but decided that anything more than the pan juices would be too many flavours. The bird was a little dry - I am still adjusting to a new oven - but the flavour was excellent. With that we broke out the good wine glasses and drank a stunning 2003 Gartelmann's Diedrich shiraz, from a lovely vineyard in the Hunter Valley. Fortunately we've got a few left, because it has plenty of life in it yet and we don't have much chance of getting any more.

The 2 best puddings I had in 2007 were the muscat caramel custard from 32 Great Queen Street and the plain pannacotta that we made in the cooking class in Florence. I've never made caramel custard before, so I was a bit nervous about giving it a try (and my husband eats dessert so rarely I wasn't going to be able to do a test-run). A friend, who also hadn't made caramel custard before had a go and it didn't work for her, so I decided that my safest bet would be a hybrid of the 2 desserts. I retained the quantities of cream and dessert wine, but set it with leaf gelatine instead of making an egg custard. It set too firmly - I should have used 2 leaves instead of 3 but it was still on the desirable side of rubbery. I'd intended to use a Rutherglen liqueur muscat, but ended up with a Bimbadgen botrytis semillon, so I should have added more wine to the cream, I think. I finished the glasses with a little float of more wine, and a marron glace. If/when I make the pudding again, I wouldn't use the marron glace - in my mind the flavour had gone really well with the liqueur muscat but was a bit too sweet and mealy for the semillon. I'd probably just use a Jules Destrooper almond wafer on the side instead. We finished the bottle of semillon, and saw the New Year in happily.

Switzerland

We've just spent 9 days in Switzerland. Stunning weather - 7 of those days were clear blue skies and sunshine, beaming down on snow and ice - but not really a high point on my culinary calendar. Had a few memorable meals: the bratwurst and rosti in the picture was everything you want from bratwurst and rosti; had a really delicious cheese fondue with slices of porcini mushroom in it in Geneva; had an extraordinary garlic and white wine soup followed by an enormous steak cooked on a hot stone in Wengen. But generally it has to be said that the food was pedestrian.

We were on half-board at the hotel, and I think that was a mistake. It meant we felt like we were wasting money to eat elsewhere, but the food at the hotel wasn't all that good. The "Gala Christmas Banquet" on Christmas Eve was a case in point.

Amuse Bouche
This was created by someone who doesn't understand the point of an amuse bouche. It is supposed to be a tiny, delicate mouthful to excite the palate and give an indication of the virtuoso cooking to come. In this case, it was a large triangle of soggy white toast, piled with pale green "avocado" puree that tasted of cream cheese and onion powder, surmounted by half a wrinkled cherry tomato.

Beef Carpaccio
The carpaccio had been plated so long before that it had fused to the plate, and could hardly be scraped up.

Carrot-ginger soup
A reasonable soup. Couldn't taste the carrot for the maggi seasoning and cream, but it was a pleasant enough puree.

Fishrolls with salmon on white sauce
A slab of white fish, a slice of smoked salmon, rolled up and served, as they say, on white sauce. Also prepared long enough in advance to give nice, withered edges to the fish.

Plum sorbet
Really good, although I think serving a sorbet in between courses numbs the palate and ruins your wine.

Back of calf with cepecreamsauce beside Williampotatoes and filled tomatoes
OK, so English was not the first language of the person who wrote the menus. A very small piece of tender, slow-cooked meat - possibly veal - smothered in a mushroom sauce that tasted like Heinz cream of mushroom soup and had no obvious porcini flavour. Williampotatoes turned out to be pear-shaped nuggets of reconstituted powdered potatoes, crumbed and fried. The half tomato was filled with mealy, mushy peas.

Filled roasted apple beside warm vanillasauce with marzipan, raisin, vanilla pudding
Baked apple on Christmas-appropriate lumpy custard. Filled with half a teaspoon more custard. No sign of marzipan, raisin or vanilla pudding.

Still, it was better than our final meal of vealbreast stuffed with a block of spam.

New Year's Eve

Clearly, I am jumping the gun. All the magazines are featuring Christmas cooking and I am sidestepping that and heading straight to New Year's Eve. You see, we are going away for Christmas, so I will have little or no say in what we eat for Christmas. But we are back late on the 29th and intend to stay home and eat something delicious to celebrate the New Year.

The tricky thing is, of course, that we will be left with very little time to shop for ingredients. So my feeling is that I order something fab over the internet and have it delivered before we go away, stick it in the deepfreeze and come home with nothing to worry about other than fresh veg and post-holiday laundry. My husband thinks that we will discover an amazing specialty on our holiday and will want to reproduce it for NYE, but I am not convinced.

Someone was telling me about smoked swordfish carpaccio, that they had in Venice. I think that would make a heavenly starter, simply with lemon and olive oil and maybe a little rocket. You can get smoked swordfish from Derimon Smokery in Wales, which would be quite an easy option. On the other hand, they also do smoked goose breasts, so I could replicate the smoked goose carpaccio I had in Florence... but I think seafood in some form would be a better starter. I'd love potted shrimps of course, but bizarrely my husband doesn't adore them the way I do. Either swordfish or shrimps would be lovely with champagne.

As the main event, I was vacillating between the Heal Farm multiple gamebird roast and a stuffed whole pheasant from Donald Russell, but I seem to have wavered for too long and the game bird roast is no longer on the Heal Farm site. So pheasant it will be! I think with puy lentils and chestnuts, and buttered cabbage on the side. My husband put in a vote for a roast rack of venison, so I might order one of them as well, to leave options open.

For pudding I am in no real doubt. The December Delicious magazine contains the recipe for the gorgeous muscat caramel custard I had at 32 Great Queen St a couple of months ago, so I intend to make that, with whatever pudding wine we intend to have with it. I might buy one of the intense Australian liqueur muscats, which would really sing with the dark caramel. As a slightly lighter option though, I am toying with the idea of making a muscat pannacotta using the method I learned in Florence instead. But the texture of the caramel custard was so good it would be a shame to miss it.

The trouble with texture

This is not a review of the new restaurant, Texture. It is just a pathetic whimper about how texture is no substitute for taste!

Last night, we went to a French wine tasting dinner at our local pub. Interestingly, all 4 wines on offer were red. Unfortunately, I have a heavy cold and couldn't actually pick wine from water by smell.

As a first course we could either have baked camembert in a box with crusty bread shared between 2 people, or a classic French onion soup. The cheese had a lovely creamy texture, and my husband said it was very pungent. The bread let it down - white and fluffy, not a bit crusty or countrified. The wine was a Chinon, quite thin and a very light red colour. Apparently it is quite good chilled as an aperitif.

Then there was beef bourguinonne with mash and veg. The beef was lovely - very tender and quite juicy - but there was no bacon or little onions in the sauce (so I think my way is better). The mash had just enough texture to it to be reassuring that it wasn't Deb (which I think is called Smash in this country); the veg (mange tout) were perfectly balanced between crisp and floppy. The wine was made from 100% pinot noir. A little more substantial on the palate than the previous one, but I was still getting nothing from it. My husband was diving into it, which leads me to believe that it was a very delicate wine. It certainly wasn't puckering my mouth the way the massive tannin-y shiraz I like does.

I think the kitchen made an error of judgement now, and decided to serve the pudding before the cheese. So out came what they called a pear tarte tatin and I would have called a fine tart. It really wasn't caramelly enough to be a tarte renverse; the pears were only lightly cooked and showed no sign of being upside down. But the pastry was short and flakey and the creme anglais on the side was the thickest custard I've ever seen without the aid of cornflour. There was a definite change in the wine served with this. I could feel much more of a syrupy texture and a blunt sugar hit on my tongue.

Going back to cheese was a bit odd. What I would have judged to be quite a young, chalky goats cheese tasted as mild as butter and I decided there was no point even trying the others. The wine felt thin again after the dessert wine and had a definitely acid edge. Since sauternes is so nice with blue cheese, I would have thought staying with sweet wines and maybe bringing out a fortified for the last course would have been a better move.

So, a very pleasant evening of textures with no flavour at all. Makes me wonder what on earth the pleasantly spicy kofta I'd had for lunch tasted like!