The robust London sense of humour was on display at Borough market last week, courtesy of the bloke selling Christmas trees.
Also of interest at the market, some fine-looking fungi for sale. I have no idea what puffballs are like to eat—mushroomy, probably—but they look impressive.
These pictures are hosted on my Flickr account. And it seems like an apt moment to plug my photoblog Clouded Drab again, since the photo on the front page at the moment was also taken at Borough Market.
Because there’s nothing more restful than a West Country accent. From the British Library collections, listen to a recording from 1956 of Fred Bryant, a retired farmworker from Stogumber in Somerset, talking about making cider.
The picture is from the V&A: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, ‘Apple’ (Malus pumila Millervar), watercolour, 1568-1572.
I was picking a few herbs to put in a stew earlier and realised I’d picked parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Yes, I do know that the song is a traditional one, but it’s completely associated with S&G in my head. Despite the fact that they pronounce Scarborough with an ‘o’ on the end.
The stew was nice, either way. I sweated down some shallots, half an onion, a stick of celery, a tomato, a couple of cloves of garlic and a green chilli in olive oil and butter with some of the herbs. In a separate pan I fried off some smoked pancetta, then some free-range rare breed pork sausages then some mushrooms. I combined it all in a casserole and deglazed the frying pan into the casserole with a bit of water; then added a rinsed-off tin of borlotti beans, some fresh chicken stock and some more herbs, brought it to the boil and put it in the oven at 160C for about an hour and ten minutes, the last ten minutes with the lid off.
Sausage casserole isn’t a dish that has very positive associations for me. It reminds me of student cooking, and students are, after all, cheap and don’t know what they’re doing. And, at least in my day, we all seemed to drown everything in tinned tomatoes.
But you learn as you get better at cooking is that for most of these dishes which seem naff or old-fashioned, it’s not the fault of the concept, it’s the execution. Use good ingredients, treat them well, and the result can be delicious.
The recipe that really brought this home for me was meatloaf. I remember on the sitcom Roseanne, she was always cooking meatloaf for her family, and that was exactly the image I had of it: blue-collar utility food. Convenient, cheap and easy; one step up from a TV dinner. And then, in a book of Italian cooking, I found a recipe for something called polpettone; a rich, mouth-watering concoction of beef, chopped salami, cheese, onion, peppers, herbs, garlic, but a meatloaf by any other name. And as American as it seems now, it seems plausible that meatloaf actually is polpettone, taken across by Italian immigrants and naturalised, just as the equally American barbecue ribs are Chinese. That meatloaf is in fact as American as apple pie.
Aside from displaying the various facets of my food snobbery, I do have a broader point: there is no excuse for boring food. The whole craft of cooking is to make food interesting. Most ingredients are fairly dull on their own: it’s the cook’s job to enhance the flavour that’s there and add more favours as necessary. Things like sausage casserole, fish pie, beef stew, and meatloaf aren’t inherently bland: they’re only bland if they’re made that way.
It’s a measure of how thoroughly miserable the weather has been that I just used the barbecue for the first time this year. But today it feels like summer.
I just did some lamb, tomato salad and potato salad. The lamb was marinated in olive oil, garlic, lemon and oregano for that Greek flavour. I came up with what seemed like quite a cunning trick for the salads, though: I boiled some Anya potatoes, drained the pan and left them sitting for a while in a French dressing (olive oil, wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, salt and pepper). Then I poured that vinaigrette off the potatoes to use in the tomato salad, and chopped the potatoes and mixed them with mayonnaise and a bit of parsley. That way the potatoes absorbed some of the flavour of the dressing, and the dressing got some extra savoury flavour from the potatoes. I don’t know how much difference it made to the tomato salad; it was certainly tasty, but you can’t go far wrong with tomatoes, shallot, fresh basil and some French dressing. The potatoes were really good though.
Then I made some Frozen Breakfast ice cream, which would be a bit more radical if my typical breakfast was eggs, bacon, chips and beans. Or even toast and marmalade. But my current breakfast of choice is yoghurt, oats and honey; I put that in an ice cream maker and it was yummy. The freezing seems to bring out the sourness of the yoghurt, which I quite like. I toasted the oats a bit first in a dry frying pan to add a bit more flavour (which I don’t do at breakfast time), but I don’t think it was strictly necessary.
I suppose you could call it frozen yoghurt instead of ice cream, but that seems desperately 1980s to me. And it sounds a bit joyless and health-foody, which wasn’t the point at all. I certainly didn’t use low-fat yoghurt, which I think is the devil’s work.
Mmm. Toast and marmalade ice-cream. Now that’s an intriguing idea. Made with lightly toasted brioche, maybe.
This recipe is my attempt to reconstruct a dish I had in Crete. I don’t know if it would pass the Greek grandmother test, but it’s probably close enough that she’d recognise what it was attempting.
Kolokithokeftedes [courgette balls/fritters/croquettes]
4 courgettes (zucchini)
3 spring onions (scallions), including most of the green bit
a clove of garlic
fresh dill
fresh mint
100g feta cheese
& plain flour and olive oil
Grate the courgettes, salt them, and leave in a colander for half an hour. Then squeeze out as much of the juice as possible.
Crush the garlic, chop the onion, herbs and feta, and mix it all together with the courgette. Season it (though remember the feta is quite salty). Form this mixture into little patties, flour them and fry them in olive oil. You can also just eat the raw mixture by the spoonful; it would make a nice salad in its own right.
A couple of notes: I pan-fried them in quite a couple of millimetres of oil; you could probably deep-fry them if you prefer. Handle them carefully and don’t poke them around too much, because there’s not much in the mixture to bind it together. Make sure there’s enough flour on them, because it helps them colour up and hold together. And make sure the oil is reasonably hot; you want the outside browned but the inside still green and fresh-tasting.
These were good, and certainly similar to the ones I had in Crete, though not quite the same, somehow. If I was going to change one thing I might put in marginally less feta, to let the green flavours come through better.
Well, I’ve been to the Hania Archeological Museum, the Cretan Folklore Museum and the Byzantine Museum this morning, so I’m all cultured up good. The Archeology is not doubt a pale shadow of what iwould have seen if the Heraklion museum had been open, but they had some nice stuff. The Folklore Museum was probably the most fun; certainly the most colourful, since Cretan textiles are very flamboyant. They taken a little house and absolutely packed it with tools, costume, knick-knacks; every conceivable aspect of everyday life from the nuptial bed to the threshing yard. Some of these, like the threshing yard, and illustrated with little models which have exactly the folk-art quality to go with everything else.
This afternoon I think I’ll do some flower ID-ing as preparation for the bio blitz, and take a few pictures.
I had some delicious kolokithokeftedes yesterday; the menu described them as ‘zucchini croquettes’ which didn’t sound that exciting, but they were made of grated courgette, cheese, dill and mint, maybe some onion, and they were delicious. Then I had some kind of slow-cooked baby goat which was also nice but didn’t excite me as much as the keftedes.
I was slightly disappointed in Heraklion to see that all the trendier-looking cafes advertised themselves as espresso places. I mean America and the UK needed the Starbucks revolution because our coffee was crap, but Greek coffee is delicious. I hope it’s not just becoming an old man’s drink.
Thanks to the very helpful municipal tourist office I have a couple of days birding planned – to the Aghi Triada monastery on Aktrotiri and Agia Lake. So that’s good; I was starting to worry about how much actual birding I would be able to do.