Dolmades

There are times when you really need a yiayia. Although my grandmother (the one who smelled of lavender) was once spotted singing and dancing to Greek folksongs in a paddock with one of her neighbours, she wasn't much of a cook. Definitely your go-to girl if you needed inspiration on interior design and colour schemes or needed something translated from about 6 modern languages or needed a bit of a cuddle but her "stirfry" was a symphony of shades of grey sludge and her pastry tasted handknitted.

So when I discovered that this house had 2 very extensive grapevines in the garden, I knew I was going to be feeling the absence of a big fat Greek grandmother.

Fortunately, the wonders of the internet have provided me with the next best thing to my own yiayia - Peter Minakis. I knew Peter the Greek wouldn't steer me wrong in my search for a way to preserve the vineleaves that were threatening to take over the entire garden. And he didn't - not only did he give his method for bottling the vineleaves in brine, but he also steered me straight to this very easy method of freezing them.

So there I was. A thick cigar of vineleaves in the freezer, a cold and rainy Sunday and no inclination to leave the house. Some further ferreting in the back of the freezer produced a tray of Welsh lamb mince and a tub of homemade chicken stock flavoured with saffron.

I read a bunch of different recipes before coming up with my own version.

Dolmades (made 7 fat main-course ones, would have been about 16-20 little ones for mezze)

1 bundle thawed vineleaves (about 14 leaves)
2tbs olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1tsp dried wild oregano
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1tbs pinenuts
500g lamb mince
1/4 cup rice (raw)
Grated zest of a lemon
salt & pepper
400ml chicken stock
a slosh more olive oil
juice of a lemon
1 egg
juice of another lemon

Saute the onion & garlic in the olive oil until translucent. Add the pinenuts, oregano and cinnamon & cook for another minute or so, then allow to cool. Mix the lamb mince with the rice and add the onion mixture with the grated lemon zest and a good seasoning of salt & pepper. Stuff the vineleaves (I used 2 overlapping for each parcel, because they were a main course), tucking the ends in and place them in a heavy-based saucepan. Any leftover mixture can be squashed into little meatballs and tucked around the dolmades. Cover with the chicken stock, a little more olive oil and the juice of a lemon, then simmer gently (lid on) for about 45 minutes.

At the end of the cooking time, take a spoonful of the liquid out of the pan and whisk it into the egg and juice of another lemon, before pouring it back into the saucepan and allowing it to stand for a few minutes to thicken.

Serve the dolmades with the egg & lemon sauce poured over. I served mine with some broad beans bottled in olive oil (Spanish) and some more of my fungi sott'olio (Italian). It tasted wonderful but it was a symphony of shades of olive. Maybe I did learn a few things about cooking from my grandmother.

Hix Oyster & Chop House

Last night we went to a restaurant I have been wanting to try for ages - Hix Oyster & Chop House. I've been reading reviews for months, and they all sounded right up my street - seasonal, British and largely meaty.

In fact, the reviews had sounded so good that I had suggested it to friends of ours when they were looking for somewhere nice to go earlier this year. They loved it, and have been back since, so it was the natural choice when the four of us were trying to choose somewhere really nice for a pre-silly season dinner.
We started - as all my favourite meals do - with champagne. First time in ages I have seen champagne saucers, instead of flutes! It was Waris et Filles, which isn't a house I am familiar with, but I did like that there is a daughter going into the wine business, after seeing so many "et fils" names. It wasn't as dry as I usually like, but it was very nice. Paul decided that he felt like beer, and had the very pleasant Chalky's Bite - named for Rick Stein's late lamented dog and flavoured with wild fennel.

I had a really difficult time choosing a starter - so many tasty options! But because I have the sense of humour of a 12 year old boy, I eventually chose the skate knobs deep-fried with caper mayonnaise. The word "knob" makes me giggle. These were very soft chunks of white fish - the cheeks, apparently - crumbed and fried to a perfect crunchy outside. The caper mayonnaise was a bit much; delicious, but it needed a bit more sharpness to cut through the richness of the mayonnaise. The gherkins are in a tartare sauce for a reason!
Paul had oysters - it is an oyster house - from the seasonal list and he was a bit disappointed. The 3 Maldon rock oysters were OK - maybe 6.5/10 - but the 3 (quite expensive) Colchester oysters were so awful he says he won't eat oysters for months. We'll see how firm his resolve is when we are at the Sydney Fish Market in about 6 weeks...

On the other hand, our friends were very happy with their starters.

A dish of Norfolk wild mushrooms with scallions was fantastic. A cute little ceramic hotpot was unlidded to reveal a big pile of steaming mushrooms in a range of shapes and sizes, with lengths of scallions throughout. It looked sort of Chinese-y, but the flavours were very European and autumnal. Very successful!
I think the pick of the starters was the heritage pumpkin, goat's curd and pickled walnut salad.

A pile of mixed leaves sat atop a thick slice of pumpkin - which I think had been roasted whole and then sliced and basted in a sweetish soy dressing. A quenelle of really fresh gorgeous goat's curd, slices of pickled walnut and a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds completed the dish.

I'm not the hugest fan of pickled walnuts. If I have one a year I am happy (particularly if that one comes alongside the Great Queen St beef burger on dripping toast...) but the flavours of the sweet dense pumpkin and fresh, milky curd went so well with the sharp pickle that I saw them in a whole new way.

As a main course, Norm and I had amazing Orkney lamb chump chops. I honestly never thought I would see the day when one single lamb chop was a meal! Normally when Paul barbecues them I eat about 4 (and only stop so that there will be leftovers for eating cold). But this lamb chop was something else again. Unfortunately the picture was horrible, so you won't get to see it! But it was easily the size of my hand and about an inch thick. It was served on a bed of perfectly caramelly roasted shallots and cloves of garlic, and it was just the right shade of pink in the middle.

Paul chose wild rabbit braised in cider. He quizzed the (very sweet) French waiter about the rabbit, to make sure that it hadn't been hanging until its head fell off. The waiter thought that was very funny and reassured him that it would be young and tender. And it was. There was a lot of cinnamon and sweet spicing in it; I thought it was delicious, almost like a tagine, but Paul thought it was a bit too sweet for his palate. He didn't have much luck last night!

Penny went for posh nursery food with pollock fish fingers and mushy peas. And when she asked for brown vinegar they brought it to her without raising an eyebrow, which is nice.

As side dishes we ordered some chips (very good), bubble & squeak (delicious) and fried green tomatoes. The tomatoes were battered and deepfried, and I think they should have been cut thicker - as it was there was a hard deep-fried carapace with the tiniest sliver of tomato in the middle.

Typically, only Penny and I braved pudding. As she's a Northern girl, and we are just past Guy Fawkes night, she couldn't go past the parkin with caramel sauce. This was undoubtedly the lightest, fluffiest parkin that has ever been seen - a spiced sponge pudding really.

I had a pear poached in perry, served with clotted cream. It was lovely! The pear must have been perfect to begin with, because it was perfectly tender right through to the core, with no mushy bits. And clotted cream is always good.

The wine list let them down a bit. There were very few bottles for less than £50 and a lot for extremely silly amounts of money, so we ended up having pleasant but average wines that really didn't do justice to the food.

The atmosphere was really good. Lots of white tiles - which apparently were traditional in old London chop houses - make it quite light, and complement the high ceilings. Impressively the acoustics are excellent, so there is a nice buzz but you can't hear what the people at the next table are saying and you can hear what the people at your table are saying. Quite a feat to create a place where you could have a romantic dinner without it being all hushed tones and plate scrapings, but at the same time you could have a fun dinner with a group.

All in all? It was good. Not brilliant, but certainly good enough to recommend and go back to.

Featured Foodies

Gloria from Cookbook Cuisine has made me one of her Featured Foodies - this is a fairly new feature that Gloria has come up with to introduce the bloggers behind the blogs. It's a great idea! So this is me!

Every Monday she features a different foody - so keep checking back to see who else she's shining a light on.

Thanks Gloria!

Antipasto di Siciliano - Cook the Books

Rachel at The Crispy Cook, Deb at Kahakai Kitchen and Jo at Food Junkie not Junk Food have joined forces to present a brilliant new food blogging event - Cook the Books. It's an online bookclub where - in addition to the normal bookclub features of talking about the book and drinking wine (although that might just be me...) we cook something inspired by our reading.

The first book off the ranks is La Cucina by Lily Prior. Murder, magic realism, quite a lot of sex and fantastic food in a Sicilian setting. A lot of the dishes that Rosa makes are rather more involved than was feasible for me. And the gorgeous, deeply flavoured sun-dried tomato paste that she and L'Inglese concoct so painstakingly requires rather more sunshine than you get in Hertfordshire in November.

I was particularly moved by the passage where Rosa transforms her grief over Bartolomeo into a houseful of food. She recounts all the different preserves and dishes which inspired me to have a go at preserving mushrooms - fungi sott'olio. I mostly followed this recipe but I used cultivated chestnut mushrooms and a handful of dried wild mushrooms instead of fresh wild mushrooms (which are a bit out of my price range). They only got a week to stand before I served them as part of a La Cucina-inspired Sicilian antipasto.

Some salami (store-bought, Calabrian with a lovely strong fennel aroma); some caponata, seasoned with cinnamon, sugar, white wine vinegar and capers; a bottle of fiano, which you would think would be overwhelmed by the vinegary flavours of the other dishes but stands up to it well, and some fried cacciocavallo cheese on rustic bread. The cheese, fried with garlic and oregano and sprinkled with a little white wine vinegar before scooping onto the bread, was delicious.
As a dessert, I made some pinenut and chocolate macaroons, taking some of the characteristic flavours of Sicilian food and turning them into a delicious, chewy biscuit. I started from this recipe but used 20g of chopped 70% chocolate instead of the cocoa, and 100g of demerera sugar instead of the caster sugar, and 1 whole egg.

Note well - do NOT attempt to get them off the baking sheet until they are completely cooled or you will end up with the crumbled mess on the left. Still - it was useful as a cook's perk. I intended to serve these with a bottle of aleatico - red Italian dessert wine - but they were so good with a cup of tea that we didn't get that far.

Blogger is giving me the shits

Blogger is currently buggering up all the photos that I try to upload, so I apologise for the current crap quality. Lots of people are reporting the same problem, so hopefully they have their code monkeys onto it and normal service will be restored.

Green peppercorn tofu

Last weekend I saw this fab-looking recipe for BlackPepper Tofu in the Guardian. It sounded fragrant and delicious, and a bit unusual due to the use of the butter in the sauce. My theory is that it is the Indian influence in Malay cooking that would inspire that. But of course I couldn't help myself and made a few little changes (one being that I can't believe 150g butter is right!)...

Green peppercorn tofu (serves 2)

400g deep fried tofu cubes
50g butter
5 golden shallots, peeled and finely diced
1 tbs crushed red chillies
8 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbs grated ginger
3 tbs crushed green peppercorns
A good slosh of soy sauce
1 tbs muscovado sugar
1 x 400g bag stirfry vegetable mix

Melt the butter, add the shallots, chillies, garlic and ginger, and sauté for about 15 minutes on low-medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the contents of the pan are shiny and totally soft. While you wait, crush the peppercorns, using a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder to a rough paste.

When the shallots are soft, add the soy sauce and the sugar, stir, then stir in the crushed pepper. Warm the tofu in the sauce for about a minute, then add the strifry vegetables and cook for a few more minutes or until the tofu and vegetables are hot through and thoroughly coated with sauce. Serve hot with steamed rice, if desired.

Bricklayers Arms

Yesterday it was cold and rainy so the question of lunch assumed additional importance. Not only did we want nice food, but we wanted it in cosy, atmospheric surroundings.

We settled on the Bricklayers Arms. We've often been to this pub, but have previously sat in the beer garden, watching the kitchen staff feed carrots to the horses who live in the paddock at the back and listening to the bumblebees in the hawthorn hedge. It's really, really nice.

I was a bit sceptical about eating indoors - previously when I have walked through the dining room on my way to the loo the atmosphere has been akin to God's waiting room. But the food is fabulous, so I was prepared to set aside my prejudices.

And rightly so. As soon as we walked through the door we saw gorgeous little individual cream and green pumpkins on most people's plates and we were quite determined that whatever was in those pumpkins was going to be our lunch. It turned out to be a daily special of butternut squash and pumpkin soup. Velvety, not too creamy, but absolutely delicious.

They serve really good bread at the Bricklayers - thickly cut slabs of wholemeal or white sourdough, with cute little white china dishes of French butter. It was just the perfect thing with the soup, but I had another course coming and didn't want to overeat myself.

Paul ordered local wood pigeon breasts with field mushrooms in balsamic reduction. The pigeon was beautiful - tender, dark, rich meat, perfectly complemented by the mushrooms and rich sauce. He had some dauphinois potatoes with it and it is not often you see him eat potatoes so happily!

I'd been craving a burger, and while a local pork & sage burger with applewood smoked cheese wasn't at all what I had in mind, it certainly satisfied the craving. The burger was flecked with quite large pieces of fresh sage - absolutely delicious - and the smoked cheese was just the thing. In a perfect world there would have been a couple of slices of onion on the burger as well, but you can't have everything. The chips served with it were hand cut and very nicely browned, but unfortunately the salad hadn't been properly washed and was a bit gritty. Maybe someone was too busy feeding carrots to the horses to care about the finer details?