Squid, chorizo and broad beans

It's not a stew, it's not a soup, but it is a tasty, summer-y one-pot meal that uses some fantastic fresh, seasonal vegetables.

Squid Chorizo and Broad Beans

1tbs oil
2 large squid hoods, cut into thin rings
200g cooking chorizo, cut into slices
a big handful of double podded broad beans (fava beans)
a tin of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 big handfuls of spinach, washed and torn a bit
5 baby courgettes, cut into slices
Juice of a lemon

Saute the chorizo in the oil until the red oil flows and the chorizo is crisp. Add the garlic and squid and turn in the oil for a minute. Add the broad beans, courgette and spinach, and as soon as the spinach wilts, add the lemon juice and serve in wide bowls with cheap red wine. Easy.

Cherry Pie for British Cherry Day

Last Saturday, the 18th of July was British Cherry Day. The British cherry is in dire straits at the moment: in the last 50 years we have lost 90% of our cherry orchards and we import 95% of the cherries that we eat. And those soulless bastards at my local council hacked down the ornamental double-blossomed cherry tree outside my house WHILE IT WAS IN FULL FLOWER. Arseholes. Paul tried to throw himself in front of the chainsaw but they got around him. They promised that a replacement tree of equal aesthetic value would be planted but since they have resurfaced the pavement, it is clear they were lying. But I digress.

To mark Cherry Day, I decided to make a cherry pie. Economics dictated that it was going to be a freeform pie - I couldn't actually afford enough cherries to fill my pie plate.

British Cherry Pie

500g butter shortcrust pastry
450g ripe British cherries
1tbs cornflour
3tbs ground almonds
2tbs caster sugar
1 egg
1tbs demerera sugar

Stone the cherries (which is a very messy business and made me feel like Dexter) and place in a bowl, trying to catch all of the juices. Sprinkle with the caster sugar and set aside for an hour, while the sugar draws some more of the juices out of the fruit.

Stir the cornflour through the cherries.

Roll the pastry out thinly into a circle. Brush the pastry with about half of the beaten egg and top with the ground almonds. Pile the fruit onto the middle of the pastry, scraping the juices on.

Fold the pastry around the fruit, leaving a bit in the middle to show the lovely colour. Brush the top with the remaining egg, and sprinkle with the demerera sugar to give a lovely crunchy topping.

Bake at 180C for about 45 minutes or until the pastry is beautifully golden.

Allow to sit for a few minutes for the filling to set up a bit. Serve in thick slices topped with very, very cold thick cream.

Meat Free Monday - Smoked Tofu and Broad Bean Salad

This week's meat-free Monday dish is again a smoked tofu one. I couldn't help it - it was so tasty! But I wanted to see how it would go with a different flavour palette.

So. Delia Smith's wonderful Summer Collection cookbook contains this lovely recipe for Fried Halloumi with Lime & Caper Vinaigrette. In The Guardian last weekend, Rosie Sykes created a homage to that dish - Fried Halloumi with Runner Bean Salad. And now I present my homage to the homage:

Fried smoked tofu with broad bean salad
(serves 2 as a light dinner)

1 block smoked tofu
cornflour for dusting
olive oil for frying
3 cups double podded broad beans
3 spring onions, sliced
4tbs lime juice
1 tbs small capers
1 tbs white wine vinegar
1 clove garlic
1 tsp Dijon mustard
small slosh of olive oil
black pepper

Cut the block of tofu into 4 slices, dust with cornflour and fry in a splash of olive oil on both sides until crispy.

Simmer the broad beans in water until tender, then drain and mix with the other ingredients. Serve the warm bean salad with the crisp tofu.

Blue cheese pannacotta with roast beetroot

This is much easier than it looks and sounds - very strong flavours and very rich! We had it as a dinner (on a weeknight, seriously, it is easy enough to make after work), but I couldn't finish my pannacotta and it made a really delicious snack spread on a cracker a couple of days later. It's a firmer set than a normal dessert pannacotta.

Using agar, a vegetarian cheese and leaving out the bacon, you would have quite an elegant dish to serve your son's new vegetarian girlfriend, to let her know she is welcome in your home.

In my family we always use white wine, garlic and rosemary in fondue, and I love those flavours with cheese, so I added them to my pannacotta.

Blue cheese pannacotta
Serves 2-ish

100ml dry white wine
1 sachet gelatine
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp rosemary leaves, chopped
2tbs sour cream
200g strongly flavoured blue cheese (I used stilton), grated
roasted beetroot
lettuce
walnuts
crisp bacon or proscuitto (optional)
roasted sesame oil
balsamic vinegar

Put half the wine in a small bowl & sprinkle the sachet of gelatine evenly over the surface. Set it aside for a few minutes to sponge. Put the rest of the wine, the garlic and the rosemary in a small saucepan, and bring to a simmer. Add the sour cream and gradually add the cheese, stirring constantly while it melts. Add the gelatine to the melted cheese mixture and stir until smooth - do not allow to boil.

Rinse a couple of ramekins out in cold water, pour the cheese mixture into the wetted moulds, cover with cling film and put in the fridge to set. I cheated and put it in the freezer for half an hour first to kick start it, then it only needed an hour to set.

Arrange your lettuce, beetroot and walnuts on your serving dishes. Sprinkle with a little balsamic and sesame oil. In a perfect world it'd be walnut oil, but I never have walnut oil on hand and I do have sesame oil.

Loosen the edges of your pannacottas with a palette knife and turn it onto your fingers, then place on the bed of salad and garnish with the crisp proscuitto.

Meat Free Monday - crispy smoked tofu with carrot salad

Here it is again - meat-free Monday. I don't know if it is becoming an actual thing, but still, I am running with it.

I'd come across a block of smoked tofu, and since I love smoked foods, I thought that would be a good foundation for the meal.

Crisp smoked tofu steaks with chilli sauce (serves 2)

1 block smoked tofu
Cornflour for dusting
Vegetable oil
2 shallots, finely diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp chopped red chilli (or less. Or more)
1 tsp grated ginger
2 tbs light soy sauce

Cut the tofu into 4 slices. Dust each side well with a little cornflour and fry until crisp in shallow, hot oil. Remove the tofu and drain on kitchen paper. Pour off most of the oil and in the small amount remaining, fry the shallots, garlic, chilli and ginger until soft and fragrant. Deglaze with the soy sauce. Add the tofu steaks back to the sauce and reheat for a minute.
I served it with Nigella's carrot & peanut salad - made with pistachios because that was what we had. The sweet, cool carrots were a very good accompaniment to the hot, spicy, salty, smoky tofu. The different levels of crunchiness from the crisp surface of tofu, carrot and pistachio also work well - very successful!

Making the best of it - hot tomato, basil & mozzarella

We hadn't been planning to eat at home. We thought a little wander out to a pub for a steak would be nice. But then we decided we were too lazy to leave the house.

I really didn't feel like pizza, so that meant we were at the mercy of the fridge contents. There were some rather limp carrots, half a butternut that had see better days, a couple of over-ripe tomatoes and some mozzarella that wasn't fresh enough to eat raw.

And a nice little rolled lamb shoulder.

The carrots, butternut and a couple of onions got tucked around the lamb, drizzled with olive oil and roasted. The tomatoes and mozzarella got sliced and sandwiched with (bottled) pesto and put in the other oven.

God I wish I remembered what temperature I cooked the lamb on, or how long it was in, because it was one of the best pieces of meat I have ever cooked. Perfectly tender and pink with a lovely crisp skin.

There was way too much melty mozzarella for the amount of tomato - it was delicious, but incredibly rich. I will definitely repeat this one, but with twice the number of tomatoes and less cheese.

The roasted vegetables were caramelly and nutty and just perfect. A delicious meal and the housewifely satisfaction of not wasting anything.

Rosé Wine Dinner

A couple of times recently I have mentioned The Crown, a pub we've taken to. Well one of the good bits about telling your friends about a place is that when they go, they chat to the management and the next thing you find yourself booked for promising-sounding rosé wine dinners.

We fronted up (slightly after the appointed time because traffic was a nightmare) to be told that everyone was "Out the back at the barbecue". Which sounded very promising. Seven other people were indeed out the back at the barbecue, well down their first glasses of champagne and surrounded by the debris of the first platter of canapes.

Rosie, the Innkeeper, quickly provided us with glasses of lovely André Roger Brut Rosé NV and topped up everyone else's glass. There was a lot of glass topping up over the course of the evening.

To go with the champagne were lovely little slices of ficelle, topped with grilled goats cheese with lavender and thyme oil. I may have to take back all the rude things I have said about lavender in food - the flavour was distinct but extremely pleasant. It was just what you would imagine a summer in Provence would taste like. There were also slices of cucumber topped with a smooth smoked mackerel pate, which was just lovely.

The chef, Mark Bristow, came out to have a chat about how he'd made the lavender and thyme oil, and to start cooking the fish skewers that we had as a first course. Which was pretty much our cue to move indoors.

We were all seated at a communal table, which was very nice. It just felt like a dinner party with people you don't know well. Although it turns out that the person sitting opposite me has read Foodycat (which made me blush profusely), so a big shout out to Fiona.

The fish skewers were OK - very moist but slightly overdone, so they collapsed a bit - but the sauce they were served with was amazing. A rich, slowly-cooked tomato and onion mixture, I would have happily had a plate of that with some pasta and left it at that.

The wines for this course were very pretty. I mean yes, of course they tasted good, but who really cares when faced with such lovely and different shades of pink? The one on the left was Les Olivades Rosé, Vin de Pays de la Méditerranée 2008, the one on the right was Château Unang Rosé, Cotes de Ventoux 2008.

Andrew, the wine rep, was very good value. He had clearly done the spiel more than once, but still managed to make it seamless and friendly. He ran us through glass- swirling and air-sucking and then left the poncery alone. I was having far too good a time to really pay much attention to the finer points of flavour and aroma, but I preferred the Les Olivades both with and without food.

The main course was a fabulous barbecued shoulder of lamb stuffed with tapenade, a fresh salad of red and gold tomatoes and some lovely little potatoes baked with peppers, garlic and rosemary. It was delicious. The lamb was just melt in the mouth, the tapenade wasn't too salty and there was a delicate flavour of cinnamon. There were too many potatoes and not enough peppers, but that would be my only quibble.

With the lamb we had Saint Andre de Figuiere Magali Rosé, Cotes de Provence 2007 (a magnum, which always looks fab) and Beaujolais Vieilles Vignes, Domain Boulon 2007. The rationale behind the Beaujolais was to show what other young, drink-now wines can be like. I didn't think either wine was a knock-out, but they were both pleasant enough and very well-matched to the food.

The cheese course was a nice Waterloo, with slices of barbecued peach, oatcakes and a Morgon. I like oatcakes, and the nutty flavour was good, but I think I would have preferred a thinner, crisper biscuit at this point in the meal. The Morgon is a more grown-up Beaujolais, with richer and more rounded flavours.

For dessert we had this beautiful creation. Not a cappucino - a rich, dark, bitter chocolate pot topped with smooth, unsweetened cream. Absolutely gorgeous. There was a slight roughness to the chocolate and my suspicion is that it was cocoa nibs. It certainly wasn't chopped nuts, which was my first guess, because the anaphylactic guest survived the experience. The shortbread was a revelation - not the slightest bit greasy but divinely buttery and perfectly short. The dessert wine was a Maury Mas Amiel 2005. I thought the wine worked very well - it had a bit of dryness but it was still sweeter than the bitter chocolate, so they supported each other nicely. It was a very nice way to finish a lovely evening. The hangover was thoroughly worth it.