A useful weekend

Pottering weekends are ideal for playing in the kitchen. A tray of roasted tomatoes makes good seasonal sense right now, for adding to nearly anything you can imagine, as does a jar or two of pesto. Relishes, condiments, accompaniments. I’m rather fond of the delightfully old fashioned word tracklement. Said aloud, working your ear around those first syllables, it’s a beauty. Tracklements, condiments, call them what you will, they are the pepper and salt that make cooking, and indeed eating, exciting.

Mid week meals are made that much simpler by having a jar of this or pot of that, ready to spice up your cooking life. To transform staples into something new, something fresh. Preserved lemons are a constant in my fridge – I can’t imagine not having their cheery yellow-ness in there. They sit next to the last jar of Anglo-Indian chutney and another of seriously wobbly olive oil mayonnaise. I like these familiar things as much as anything else, but new jars are welcome, too. Here are three new additions to this year's collection.

Tomato pesto: At some stage during the 1990’s, the leathery sun-dried tomato, rightfully, fell out of fashion. The semi-dried tomato on the other hand, a softer and more luscious creature, has made a tentative comeback. Used judiciously, they can make a meal, and a girl, sing.

Roughly chop 1 bunch of chives (or the leaves of 1 bunch of parsley or basil) and whiz to a paste in a food processor with 2 cloves of chopped garlic. Add ½ cup of pine nuts and ½ cup of packed semi-dried tomatoes which you have snipped into smaller pieces with a pair of kitchen shears. Whiz again and trickle in 2/3 cup (about 150ml) of extra virgin olive oil with the motor running. Get out the Good Oil for this, especially if cheese ain’t your thing. Tip into a bowl and stir through ½ cup of grated pecorino cheese if you like and season to taste. Keeps for about a week if covered with a film of oil. Very useful.

Makes one jar. Purists may deny this little mixture the title of ‘pesto’, but does that stop me? In the words of someone I’m missing, no, it does not.

Beetroot, pear and ginger relish: I now add beetroot to my growing list of vegetal love. This beetroot relish is incredible with cheese despite the outrageous hue.

Set the oven to 180 C (375 F). Cut all but 2cm (3/4 inch) of the stalks from 400g (just less than 1 lb) of beetroot, wash them, dry them and wrap tightly in foil. Bake for 1 ½ hours. Meanwhile, peel and coarsely grate 3 pears, any kind, 2 onions and a thumb of fresh ginger. Put the pears, onions and ginger in a large, heavy based saucepan and pour in 1 cup (250ml) of white wine vinegar, a teaspoon of sea salt and 1 ½ cups of sugar. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Peel and coarsely grate the beetroot when ready and add to the simmering saucepan for a further 5 minutes. Spoon into clean, sterilized jars, seal and invert. Keeps for 4 months, unopened.

For the adventurous, the ‘Nori Condiment’ is a difficult thing to explain. In some ways, it could be described as a darker, muscular version of creamed spinach. Free of dairy, it’s lighter, too. But whereas a large dollop of creamed spinach on the side of nearly any plate I care to imagine is sheer heaven, a similarly sized serve of this wouldn’t be nearly as nice. It’s wonderful in its own, odd way; smooth and creamy, but not exactly pretty. I’m now quite partial to its Creature of the Black Lagoon shade of deep green, but then, perhaps things are just getting a bit eccentric around here. While I enthusiastically tackled the recipe, based on one in this book, The Artist was busy building a large nest with twigs in the backyard.

Tear 4 or 5 sheets of toasted nori into pieces. Cover with 1 cup of water in a small saucepan. Soak for 10 minutes. Heat the saucepan, add 2 tablespoons of tamari, 1 tablespoon of maple syrup, ½ a small onion which you’ve finely chopped and a crushed clove of garlic. Bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring often. Grate a small pile of ginger. Squeeze it hard over a small bowl to extract as much juice as possible. Discard the pulp. Add this juice and a few drops of toasted sesame oil, lower the heat right down and continue cooking and stirring for a further 10 minutes. Season to taste with wasabi or Dijon mustard. Keeps for 3 days, jarred and refrigerated.

Try it. I wouldn’t offer something this obscure without some ideas, so: it’s exquisite with potatoes (surprising yum), nice dolloped on egg-based dishes, and makes a great vegan, mineral-rich dressing for pan fried tofu. Think ‘sushi’ fillings and you can’t go wrong. I spread the last of it on crackers. Quite good – weird - but good.

A very useful day.

Autumnal tarts: Novel Food

‘You know darls’ said Jo, pausing to take another sip of tea, ‘I wish I’d not read Babs. Then I could have the pleasure of reading her all over again.’

Jo, my best friend, is a woman who knows an awful lot about literature. Babs is our affectionate, Australian-ized nickname for Barbara Trapido, a South African born novelist whose small output is as impressive and enjoyable as it is addictive. Quite simply, both women are stellar.

Trapido’s characters are sexy, clever and literate, often artistic. Set in and around universities and academia, she revels, absolutely, in the romance of bohemian life. In fractured families and unlikely pairings; the ugliness and beauty of language itself. ‘Reading her,’ Anthony Thwaite wrote in the Observer, ‘is rather like being bombarded by sequins’.

Juggling draws together four people: Sparky Christina and her brilliant but melancholy adopted sister Pam; the beautiful, powerful Jago and otherworldly, grey Peter. All are bright, gifted students, each in possession of their own share of demons. A chance meeting of parents on a railway platform binds them, inextricably, to one another. There is love, unexpected and wondrous in its scope, woven with ill-conceived mayhem and devastating consequences; family breakdowns intertwine with Shakespeare, jugglers and even a smattering of mathematics. Unlikely pairings done with considerable wit and skill.

Food offers insightful portraits. Doesn’t it always? Christina and Pam’s father, the extravagant, brash Joe, wooed their gentle mother Alice on a picnic of truly epicurean tastes. Both daughters are repulsed by their father’s choice of aphrodisiac on that fated day – squid and calves sweetbreads – and delight in recoiling with mock-horror as Alice obligingly recounts the tale. Christina’s subsequent, feisty vegetarianism throws down a direct challenge to her father’s impressive, carnivorous culinary skills.

Cooking is a little like juggling. It’s about concentration, balance and practice - small feats of culinary dexterity. It’s also, sometimes, about pleasing the people you feed, taking into account their particular needs and wants. So, drawing an admittedly very long bow, these little tarts, a juggling act themselves of sweet and savoury, are just right for an offal-free seduction. Portable picnic fare to tempt even the staunchest carnivore.

Roasted pear and rocket tarts – makes 4 individual tarts

For Jo. The pastry is based on a recipe in a favourite book, Nourish by Sydney-based macrobiotic chef Holly Davis. Iku, her iconic kitchen, is legendary among my friends.

For the pastry:
50g (1 ¾ oz) of sesame seeds
150g (4 ½ oz) of spelt flour
50ml (scant ¼ cup) pale sesame oil (not the dark stuff)
75ml (scant 1/3 cup) of boiling water
1 tablespoon of tamari or soy sauce

Toast the seeds to a pale shade of gold in a dry pan. Cool on a plate.

Sift the flour into a roomy bowl and mix though the toasted seeds. Whisk the wet ingredients together, ensuring they are well combined. Using a fork, gradually add the wet mixture to the dry. Turn out onto a clean, dry surface and knead for a minute.

Cover the dough and rest for 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200 C (400 F).

Roll pastry out thinly on a lightly floured surface to fit 4 tart tins, each with a removable base. This is a very forgiving dough – take your scraps, scrunch them into a ball and re-roll if necessary. Trim edges and bake for 15 minutes or until golden. Cool before filling.

The rest:
4 ripe but firm pears
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely grated
2 teaspoons of olive oil
Sea salt and pepper
Honey, for drizzling
3 handfuls of rocket (arugula)
¼ cup of almonds, roughly chopped
1 fat clove of garlic, chopped
½ teaspoon of sea salt
1/3 cup of olive oil
4 tart shells (see above)
4 tablespoons of soft goat’s curd cheese or labneh

Preheat the oven to 180 C (375 F). Quarter the pears lengthways, cutting away the cores. Place in a small baking tin.

Squeeze the ginger hard to extract the juice, as much as you can get, into a small bowl. Add the oil to the ginger juice, along with a little salt and pepper. Whisk. Pour this over the pears and toss them well. Roast for 45 minutes, turning each piece at least once to caramelise. Drizzle with a little honey.

Whiz the rocket, almonds, garlic and sea salt to an emerald green slush in a food processor or blender then, with the motor running, slowly trickle in the oil.

Cover the base of each tart shell with a spoonful of pesto. Break up a little goat’s curd and dollop as artfully as you like on top, no more than a generous tablespoon per tart, though. You don’t want to completely overdo it here. Arrange 4 pieces of roasted pear on top of each and dab with a little more pesto. Serve cold.

freshly made labneh

Simona and Lisa’s event, Novel Food, a wonderful mix of all things bookish and culinary is well under way. They're three chapters in and this is my, late, entry.

A risotto

Two Sundays ago, I sold the last bundle of books in retail for (hopefully) the last time. It’s official. I am now an ex-bookseller. Yesterday, the last, windy day of July, was my birthday. And my best friend, also an ex-bookseller, though she sensibly escaped many years earlier, flew down from Sydney for a few days of restorative dog-walking, tea-drinking and, of course, celebrating. A long and slightly sozzled birthday lunch on Friday at Vin Cellar was in order. How lucky I am.

A Saturday night in required something home-made and wintry for a dinner eaten on our laps, huddled around the fire. It’s not often that I would suggest a recipe for risotto here. Everyone has his or her own preferred style of preparation; his or her own preference for the type of rice used. Personally, Carnarolli works for me, but I refuse to enter the potential minefield of snooty rice arguments – plain old Arborio works pretty damn well too. So here, despite any misgivings, is a delectable, sloppy and oh-so-rich risotto, tinted a delicate shade of faded rose-pink. Just when you think it’s going to be too sweet, too soothing, the pungent cheese wakes your palate and the chives add a layer of freshness to each bite.

Dare I admit that I often use stock cubes in risotto? In my defense, I can enthusiastically recommend Marigold Swiss Bullion Powder, championed by many great cookery writers. So there, I’ve said it, thumbing my nose at tradition and awaiting a barrage of scorn. Do you think any less of me as a cook? While I’m at it, you might as well use the best mascarpone you can find – Elgaar Farm's organic one is beyond belief.

One final thing: if you’re concerned about animal rennet in cheese, do not use a blue unless you can be absolutely convinced that it’s okay by reading all labels. A stinky goat’s cheese will be different, but no less good.

Wine-poached pear and blue cheese risotto – serves 4-6
Adapted from a recipe in the magnificent Enjoy by Nadine Abensur. Serve with a salad of sharp-flavoured, bitter leaves, dressed like this.

5 ripe, firm pears
150ml of drinkable red wine
150ml of drinkable muscat or port
2 points of star anise
1 litre of vegetable stock, plus a little more
1 tablespoon of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 red onions, chopped
1-2 cloves of garlic, crushed
400g of risotto rice (use what you like)
150-200g of blue cheese, or 200g of equally stinky goat’s feta
4 tablespoons of mascarpone
1 bunch of chives, snipped
Pepper

Peel the pears, cut into eighths and cut away the cores. Place in a small saucepan with the wine, muscat and star anise and bring to a lively simmer. Cook at this pace for 10 minutes, then fish out and discard the star anise and set the pears in their cooking liquor aside.

Heat the stock or water in another saucepan over a very gentle heat and keep warm.

Melt the butter and oil together in a large, heavy-based saucepan over a medium heat. Add the onion and fry until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and fry for 30 seconds before tipping in the rice, stirring constantly, until the grains are well coated in the fat. Lower the heat. Pour in the stock, one ladleful at a time, stirring often and only adding more when the last lot is absorbed. Pour in the pears and their cooking liquor and gently stir until the grains are perfectly cooked.

Crumble in the blue cheese and, if you think the risotto needs more liquid, up to one more ladle of hot stock. Clamp the lid on tightly, remove from the heat and leave to rest for 5 minutes.

Serve in bowls, sprinkle with a generous showering of chives and top each serving with a tablespoon of mascarpone. Grind over some pepper and pass the grinder around for others to add a little more.

Roasted pears

Quartered, cored and rubbed with olive oil and salt.

Roasted with a little ginger and fat wedges of pumpkin until soft and well caramelised.

Pureed in a soup.



Good with other roasted veg, but just as good on their own. Sweet, juicy and succulent.

A Very Good pear cake

Recently Truffle posted a recipe for a pear and spice cake.

This is one of those dense cakes, more rustic than light-as-a-feather. Just the way I like my cakes to be. Ice cream to serve was suggested, but it’s hard to find a good one. Find one however, I did – a preservative-free rhubarb one, a blush-pink colour that looked rather good next to slices of the golden cake. If I could have just one more piece of cooking equipment, it would be an ice cream churn.

This is pretty much Truffle’s recipe with a few small changes here and there to suit what we had in the cupboard - and I hate mixed peel, so out it went. Truffle’s recipe uses 8 tablespoons of butter which I reckoned on being about 125 g and, seemingly, it worked.

Delicious still warm with ice cream or some plain, thick yoghurt swirled with a little cinnamon and the seeds scraped from half a vanilla pod. You could even add a drizzle of pure maple syrup to the yoghurt, just to sweeten the deal.

Pear and spice cake - enough for 8-10 servings

¾ cup of almond meal
½ cup of polenta
½ cup of plain flour
Large pinch of baking soda
Pinch of salt
2 heaped teaspoons of ground cinnamon
1 heaped teaspoon of ground ginger
½ teaspoon of allspice
125g of unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup of sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup of plain, thick yoghurt
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2-3 pears, cored and thinly sliced
Extra sugar for sprinkling

You’ll also need a spring form pan approximately 25cm in diameter, though Truffle suggests (wisely) that you could use a smaller one, in which case you will only need 1-2 pears. Grease it and line the base with baking paper.

Preheat the oven to 160 C.

Tip the ingredients from the almond meal through to the allspice into a large bowl and using a hand-held whisk, aerate the dry ingredients, whisking out any lumps. Set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and creamy (about 5 minutes). Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the yoghurt and vanilla and mix well.

Fold in the dry ingredients, mixing well before spooning into the prepared spring form tin and smoothing the mixture down (not too obsessively) with a spatula. Arrange the pear slices as artfully (or not) as you like on top. Sprinkle a little sugar over the pears and bake for 45-50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes away clean.

No photo of finished cake. It was all eaten before I had a chance to do so.

Truly, the mark of a Good Cake.