Wild Garlic Pesto

While I’m on the subject of wild garlic, this is a brilliant way to keep some beyond its season and is great for a quick and easy pasta dish or stirring through a casserole to pep it up a bit. It’s pretty punchy and should also help to keep those vampires at bay.

65g wild garlic

25g parmesan, grated

40g pine nuts

4 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper

squeeze of lemon

Place all the ingredients in a food processor and blitz until nice and fine. Check the seasoning and adjust if necessary, it takes a good couple of pinches of salt. Place in a jar with an airtight seal and pour of a little oil over. Store in the fridge until ready to use. This should keep for a month or so, if not longer.

Wild Garlic BBQ Buns

The blog has been a bit of a stranger to me recently as James and I have been riding a wave of excitement post us getting ENGAGED.  Our friends have been hugely generous and supportive and any liquid in our body has pretty much been replaced by bubbly deliciousness and our minds have been pretty hazy.  Things are slowly beginning to return to normal and we’ve just had a wonderful weekend of BBQing and enjoying the sun.

Last weekend I was up in Scotland for a friend’s wedding and as we walked from the church to the reception the path was surrounded by hundreds of wild garlic plants.  I hadn’t clicked that it was the season and I got completely over-excited, picked some right away and ate it.  As you can imagine, this gave me particularly fragrant breath throughout the rest of the evening.  Not so clever.  But it is so unbelievably delicious it’s impossible to resist it and I couldn’t wait to get back to London to start filling my salads and pretty much anything I could think of with the stuff.  I recommend you get yourselves to a greengrocer, there are only a couple of weeks left of the season so act now or regret it later…

Wild Garlic BBQ Buns

500g strong white bread flour

1 sachet yeast

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1 tbsp rapeseed oil (or olive oil)

6 wild garlic leaves, finely sliced

A small pot with two squashed garlic cloves, olive oil and some rosemary sprigs tied together with string

Place the flour, yeast, salt and sugar in a large bowl and mix to combine.  Measure out 300ml of lukewarm water and add the oil.  Pour this into the flour mixture and stir until a dough is formed.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes until it has become nice and smooth.  You can stop kneading when you form it into and ball and when you prod at the side the dough springs back out at you – if it’s still a bit reluctant, keep kneading.  Then place in a clean bowl and cover with cling film. Leave to rise until doubled in size, a couple of hours.

Finely slice the wild garlic and remove the dough from the bowl onto a floured surface.  Knock the air out and then start to work the garlic into the dough until it’s evenly distributed through it.  Shape into eight small buns and place on a dusted baking sheet.  Cover with cling film and leave for another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile heat up the BBQ, you want it to be hot, but not so hot that the buns will just turn to a burnt rock.   Place the buns on the grate and turn pretty frequently, brushing every so often with the rosemary brush.

Once the coals have cooled down a bit place the lid on and cook them right through, when you tap them they should feel crusty and sound a little hollow.  Remove and place them on a wire rack, either serve warm or cooled.  We ate them with some delicious rosemary and garlic marinated lamb leg steaks. Yum.

Skordalia and Home Grown Purple Sprouting Broccoli

It turns out that the garden did not miss me at all while I was on holiday, in fact, I’d say it positively thrived.  I guess things just want to grow and they go for it, which certainly makes my life easier.  The story wasn’t quite the same inside, I think I was lucky with all the rain going on outside, but when we got home everything indoors looked very thirsty – the tomato seedlings are still happy enough and the courgettes are just beginning to sprout.  The saddest thing of all though is that my chilli plant looks very depressed and I don’t fancy my chances at being able to revive it.

On to a happier note though, the purple sprouting broccoli I sowed last February (2011) is ripe for the picking and it’s delicious.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have been growing something for this long and for it to work and taste amazing – less bitter than any store bought stuff and much more tender.  Luckily, I’m just in time to plant some more for next year so I’m going to do it this week and I urge you ALL to go ahead and grow some yourself, it’s seriously worth it and nice to have something cropping early.

I remember Ottolenghi pairing Purple Sprouting Broccoli along the lines somewhere – I think at NOPI – with Skordalia (a greek dipping sauce) and it works a treat so I’ve stolen his idea for that and made some to go with this salad – the rocket was also from our garden, well the window box outside our bedroom, and it’s peppery and punchy.

I then took some inspiration from another great chef, Frankie at Luscious Organic, and threw in some hemp seeds which she had brilliantly combined with a salad I had there last weekend.  I didn’t realise how tasty they could be.  Here’s the recipe for the Skordalia:

150g potatoes, peeled and chopped

25g ground almonds

1 garlic clove, roughly chopped

1-2 tsps red wine vinegar

50ml olive oil

50ml extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a pan of salted water to the boil.  Add the potato and cook until tender.  Drain and then return to the heat for about 15 seconds to steam dry.  Place in a food processor / blender with the almonds, garlic and vinegar.  Blitz until you have a nice smooth puree.  With the motor running, slowly pour in the oils – as slowly as if you were making a mayonnaise – so it emulsifies.  Mine was still a little too thick at this stage so I blitzed in 50ml water to loosen it a little.  It should be a little thicker than mayonnaise.  Season and serve with whatever you fancy, in this case a steamed purple sprouting broccoli, rocket, cherry tomatoes and toasted hemp seed salad.  Yum.

Samphire, Glorious Glorious Samphire

If you’re cooking a bit of fish there are few accompaniments that are as good as some delicious Samphire. It’s super easy to cook, tastes of the sea and only takes minutes.  You really don’t have to do anything to it to make it shine.  Bring a pan of water to the boil and let it bubble away for three minutes, drain, serve and hey presto you have a delicious bowl of greens.  If you feel like pushing it a little further a squeeze of lemon juice, a bit of butter and some black pepper won’t harm it.  We had it last night straight up with some skate wings and a caper butter sauce – it truly was a feast.

It grows in the marshy land around the coast and is therefore plenty salty enough.  I got mine from the lovely Steve Hatt on the Essex Road, but all good fishmongers will have it in stock or will be able to get you some easily.

Oh, and on another note…the garden has been blooming in my absence, I’ll post a little update shortly.  I really think it’s a good thing for it if I leave it alone to do it’s thing.  So the more holidays the better really.

Smoked Springbok and Garden Fumblings

My lack of blogging of late comes with a very good reason, I’ve been too busy feasting myself on delicacies such as this:

An incredible fillet of rooibos (aka red bush) smoked springbok on delicious chargrilled sourdough with a celeriac remoulade, an incredible pear chutney and some unidentifiable berries.  Yes. I. am. on. holiday.  The other South African treats that have come my way have been in the form of orange infused ostrich, impala tartare, king clip, guava cherries and gallons of phenomenal South African wines.  The holiday will go on and I will continue to taste and experience as many things unique to my belly as possible.  I can’t wait.  Hopefully these tastes will inspire and infuse the recipes to follow on the blog over the coming months.  It turns out the South Africans know how to cook and have some truly brilliant ingredients at their fingertips.

Just before I sign off to eat some more delicious foods (sorry, I think one is permitted a little smugness when on holiday) I’d like to give a quick update on some rogue last minute seed sowing I hastily embarked on mid suitcase packing.  I attempted to start some courgette seeds inside – how they’ll do with a lack of water and attention, I don’t know, but better to try than not?  Maybe pointless?

Outside I threw down some dill seeds, I’d been advised that a shady area was good for this, so that’s where they landed.  I stuck some beetroot seeds into another pot, but saw a fox trampling all over them when I woke up at 6am over-excited about the holiday, so I hope that hasn’t deterred them.  It scared me enough and I’m a lot bigger than a seed.  Fingers crossed.  I sowed a couple of rows of rainbow chard, this failed last year, so I’ve gone with a different position (a bed vs a pot) and more morning light, a bit of trial and error here.

And then there were a couple of other pots I sowed something in, but the holiday wine is playing with my brain a little and I can’t be sure what that was, I’m assuming a lettuce of some sort, but I couldn’t remember the day after either so probably something I don’t like very much…  Oh and some carrots in another pot.  All this gives me something exciting to look forward to on the return from the holiday, even if it’s all a complete failure, I reckon I’ll still have some time to sow some more in time for a good summer crop of something in our tiny garden.  Time will but tell….

Chocolatey Breakfast Bites

There is no doubt that these aren’t a patch on Pain au Chocolat, but if you have some scraps of puff pastry hanging around they’re a pretty pleasing use of it. I had some left over from making a pie, so I piled up the scraps and wrapped them in cling film to use the next morning. It’s important to pile them up, in the same direction that they had been rolled in previously.

You will need: scraps of puff pastry, chopped chocolate, caster sugar, ground cinnamon.

Preheat the oven to 190c. Roll out the scraps of pastry on a floured surface into a long thin piece. Scatter over a good handful or two of chopped chocolate and then scatter over the caster sugar and a little ground cinnamon.

Roll up into a long thin sausage and then cut into small bite-size pieces, scatter over a little more sugar and cinnamon.

Place on a baking tray and bake for 15-20minutes, until puffed up and golden and the chocolate is beginning to ooze out. Serve them to some hungover hungry men and everyone will be a lot happier.

Pulled Pork Buns

The Americans know how to BBQ.  I’ve heard it said and tasted it before, but to see it in action is a sight to behold.  To use an American expression, they ‘kick our butts at grilling’.  We have the wonderful (and American) Van Carney staying with us and yesterday he set to work on a masterful piece of pulled pork shoulder.  Our ventless BBQ  (bought for £30 the weekend we moved in and decided rashly to host a BBQ)  is not quite up to standard, so rather than smoking the pork from the beginning, it was started in the oven at 3pm with the intention of being eaten at around 9.30pm – it was in there at a gloriously low temperature of 110c with a splash of cider vinegar and a little water for a mouth watering 6 hours.  The only attention it was given was a little basting every so often.

While that was in doing it’s thing, the BBQ was lit to work on an accompaniment fit for a king.  We’d pre-ordered Van some hickory wood chips online, which Van soaked and then threw onto some hot coals and smoked these beautiful plum tomatoes for half an hour or so, absorbing all the incredible depth of the hickory smoke.

The tomatoes were blitzed into a mixture of caramelised onions, lemon juice, honey, vinegar, chilli, paprika, tamarind paste, beer, coffee grounds and what Van described as anything deep, dark and delicious.  Then placed back into the pan that had caramelised the onions and bubbled down for hours to become a gloriously thick and smokey BBQ sauce.

Next up, the bun.  My turn.  On Van’s advice the perfect accompaniment is a Brioche bun, I hadn’t made any of these since college so it was a slightly interesting episode.  I made the crucial error of starting on a recipe without reading it through.  I got halfway and then decided to see what I had to do next which involved a couple of rises and an eight hour chilling time.  That wasn’t going to happen.  I turned the page to find a quicker brioche recipe which certainly would have been more fitting.  However, I had the startings of a dough which I had been pulling up and slapping on the kitchen surface for a good arm aching 10-15 minutes.  So I decided to try and amalgamate the two.  Luckily for me the melted butter and sugar that I added seemed to do the trick and they were pretty tasty little buns and looked the part too.

Once the pork had had its 6 hour slow roast it was meltingly tender so we pulled it off the bone (it was more of case of it falling off the bone) and relit the BBQ.

We placed the pork into a clean roasting pan and poured over some of the juices from the pan it had cooked in.  Throwing some more soaked hickory chips onto the hot coals to get up a good smoke we put the pork onto the grill and on with the lid.  It was there for about 20-30 minutes and really soaked up some amazing smokey flavour.

The last thing to top it all off was a coleslaw of red cabbage, onion, radish and gherkins – all tossed together with a little mayo, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

This was a feast that I will certainly be trying to recreate and I urge you to order some wood chips (I can recommend Cook Equip) and have a go yourself.

I’ve only had one BBQ as good as this and that was some incredible cherry wood smoked brisket with Van and family in Virginia last year.  I’m changing the way I BBQ, watch out Pitt Cue.