Liver & onions

It's rainy and grim and despite all of the blossom on the trees (we think we have an apple tree in the bottom of the garden), it has been feeling wintry again.

So - a warming dish of liver and bacon. Served in a smaller portion than usual to fit the diet, with just a pile of greens instead of anything starchy. The asparagus is Spanish though... disappointingly, Waitrose had sold out of the British stuff by the time we got there.

Fry a sliced onion in a spot of olive oil until it is collapsing. Add some lardons of bacon and whole button mushrooms. When you have a good sizzle on, and the onions are really properly cooked but before they start to crisp, add your slices of liver. When they are almost cooked, add a splash of sherry or port or something. Swirl around the pan and onto the plates. Yum!

Eggs

I'm sure it will come as no surprise, but I eat quite a lot. And as a result, I weigh quite a lot. So in the run up to turning 35, I have decided it is time to shift a few kilos. In the past I have been quite successful on the Healthy Inspirations program, so I am back on that. This program begins with a 3 day "Healthy Quick Start" which is lots of protein and green veg and not much of anything else, which apparently prepares your body for weightloss.

I wasn't entirely organised to begin my Quick Start yesterday, so I fell back to plain boiled eggs for my breakfast. I do love a boiled egg, although it was something of a tragedy not to have buttered sourdough toast soldiers to dunk in them. These are Clarence Court eggs. We'd usually get the Old Cotswold Legbar ones, which have lovely pastel blue and green shells, but Waitrose were out last week so we got these rather magnificent Burford Browns. Such a lovely rich colour, both of the shell and the yolk.

Today I was better prepared, and made eggs and asparagus for lunch, to celebrate the start of the British asparagus season. The asparagus was so delicious! Even if you aren't bothered about your carbon footprint, or food miles, I have to say the flavour and texture of fresh, local asparagus is so superior I wouldn't buy Peruvian again. I will just been eating as much British asparagus as I can afford for the 8 weeks of the season. I wrapped a bit of proscuitto around my husband's asparagus, but "deli meat" is off the menu for me. A slick of hollandaise sauce would have been perfect, but as I am only allowed 2 eggs a day on this bit of the programme, I had to prioritise. Maybe next weekend.

The benefit of hindsight

Food memories make fools of us all. That is the hypothesis I have come to after many bloody awful curries in Britain. I now believe that the nostalgic Poms who wail about the delicacy and savour of a British curry are having the same sort of perverse flashback that leads me to think fondly of scrambled eggs sprinkled with sugar. Which were great, I swear.

So I was a bit worried when I decided that I really, really liked our new local Thai place. Was it genuinely good, or was I just addled after 2 years of sweet gloopy sauces clinging to the roof of my mouth? We took some friends, recently arrived from Sydney and well-travelled in Asia, and they pronounced that yes, it has the freshness, vibrancy and balance that we expect from good Thai food in Sydney.

That's all right then.

Tonight I had lovely limey, fish-saucey tom yum gung as a starter, with lots of lemon grass and kaffir lime leaf and galangal (handy hint - Thais eat with spoon and fork, so if something is cut bigger than the spoon, it is a flavouring that you aren't expected to eat) and then a grilled beef salad. My salad was delicious - lovely tender meat, crisp vegetables, balanced dressing. But I consider it a mark of the superior levels of hospitality in Thai culture that 2 different waitresses were very upset that I left slices of chilli on the side of my plate. They swore that they would tell the chef that his food was too hot. I hope I was firm enough in telling them absolutely not to, that the flavour the chilli gave was just perfect but that I can't eat that many slices of tiny, incendiary birdseye chillis. Because honestly, I will be crushed if we go back and they have dumbed it down to yet another sweet, gloopy sauce.

Seafood & Chorizo Salad (again)

Way back last August I posted about how good Rick Stein's squid and chorizo salad is - although I made a few variations to the recipe as written. Well, I still haven't made it as the great man wrote it, but it is still a firm favourite!

"Spanish" Food

This is a bit like "Mexican" food - very tasty, but possibly unrecognisable to a Spaniard. Last night we were discussing options for dinner and decided that if we were going to have a bottle of wine (in an effort to reduce calorie intake we aren't drinking alcohol during the week, unless we are at a restaurant) it should be a good one. So we went up the road to Salud where they have a cellar of very old Spanish wines at extremely reasonable prices.

In the past when we have been to Salud, we've erred by ordering a couple of tapas to start, and then not been able to do justice to the massive main courses. This time we decided to order just some tapas and pace ourselves.

The thing that struck me immediately (with my 5 days in Spain expertise) was how much bigger the portions were than the tapas in Spain. We ordered 7 dishes and we really should probably have had 5.

The fried calamari was lovely - so tender it was almost like boiled egg. The boquerones were also very good, but piled in a huge mound over shredded lettuce it was just too much. Pollo al ajillo wasn't as good as the one I made the other week. Excellent grilled sardines. Delicious chorizo cooked in wine. Fat garlicky mushrooms. A whopping plate of serrano jamon, a little dry and too thickly sliced. All stuff that you would find in bars in Spain, but somehow not quite as it would be done there - I think all of the garlic was ready chopped from a jar, for one thing.

Anyway, a very pleasant meal with a lovely bottle of wine. And a fascinating floorshow - the only other occupied table contained a pair of frumpy middle-aged women who discussed very loudly their roles as the sexpots of Rickmansworth. You wouldn't have thought they'd have it in them, but men bang on their windows every night. Fascinating eavesdropping.

Corned beef

I do try not to serve beige meals, but occasionally I impress myself with the colours on a plate. Tonight's vibrant green and orange are so very pretty.

When I moved to the UK I had no idea that corned beef was held in such poor esteem here - it is entirely associated with the cans of shredded not-sure-what (which my husband makes into a fab, comforting pasta sauce) and not at all with the corned silverside of Australian country Sunday lunches and brilliant sandwiches. Come to think of it, I must find out from my mother how she came to be such a proponent of the art of silverside without being Australian or a country girl... On the other hand, there is a great fondness and respect for the Jewish hot salt beef bar, and from where I sit, salt beef and corned beef are very much the same animal.

Tonight's corned beef was a small piece from a brisket that I cured according to a recipe in Preserved by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton. It's been sitting in the freezer for quite some while, and I am on a bit of a freezer-emptying jag at the moment, so I decided the time had come. With the other piece from this cure, it was a bit too salty, so I soaked this one overnight, before cooking it for 2 1/2 hours in fresh water, with a slosh of vinegar, a bayleaf and an onion spiked with cloves. I don't think the extra flavourings do anything much for the flavour of the meat, but they make the kitchen smell heavenly.

I am very lucky to have found in my husband a soulmate: someone who likes their parsley sauce thick as wallpaper paste, and with far more parsley in it than white sauce just like I do. It is so rare to find that I don't think I will be making parsley sauce for anyone else, ever. So, corned beef, peering from a thick blanket of sauce, with roast butternut pumpkin, some roast cloves of garlic and steamed broccolini. Yum. Nothing like the stuff in cans.

Not a triumph

If you use "scallops and black pudding" as your search terms, you will discover that matching the plump, delicate seafood with the richly spiced pudding is a pretty common thing to do - although the Riverford Organic Farmshop (not, I would have thought, on the cutting edge) thinks it is passe.

So for dinner tonight I dressed a pile of baby spinach leaves with a mustardy dressing, fried black pudding until crispy, apple slices until golden and tender and big fat scallops until nicely browned and put it all together on a plate. And you know what? Won't be doing that again. The black pudding and apple slices together were very good, but the scallops and black pudding had nothing to say to each other. Still, the picture turned out nice.