Roast peaches with Sauternes and lavender

Peaches, Sauternes and lavender - all ready for the oven

Sometime you get it right, sometimes you don’t. I’ve cooked a few blah recipes recently. Namely a disappointing almond sponge cake and a creamy rabbit, leek and mustard stew which frankly freaked me out. I managed to convince myself that it tasted “funny” and couldn't eat it. I think this is due to my nostalgic memories of my childhood pet bunny Shadow (whaaaa). Another culinary low light of late was a full on 3 hour recipe for an authentic Bolognese (made with 3 different types of meat and all). Despite all the effort the boyfriend’s verdict on it was “tastes like mince, as in mince and tatties”. Humph. Just when I was about to hang up my metaphorical apron and go sob into a packet of biscuits I pulled this little number out the bag/oven and all in the world was good again.

Flat peaches

Granted this is a very girly dessert but, without wanting to blow my trumpet, it is pretty interesting. Succulent white peaches, rich, sticky Sauternes syrup and the delicate perfume of the lavender. I think this would go lovely with some goat’s milk ice cream. If you don’t have any lavender you could substitute rosemary or thyme. I nicked the lavender from the flowerbed at the end of my street. My take on the English riots/rampage.

Lavender

Roast peaches with Sauternes and lavender

Oven set to 175 degrees celsius

Serves 2-4 depending on greediness and volume of ice cream consumed

6 flat peaches or 4 round peaches

20g butter finely chopped

2 tsp of demerara sugar

a glug of Sauternes, (75-100ml)

2 – 3 springs of lavender (ideally use the sprigs that are just beginning to open up)

Half the peaches and remove the stone, add the pieces to an ovenproof dish so that they fit snugly together.

Scatter over the butter and sugar.

Add a glug of the Sauternes so that the peaches are sitting in a Sauternes bath about 1cm deep.

Add the lavender to the Sauternes.

Pop in the oven for about 50 minutes until the peaches are wonderfully soft and the edges are sweet and crispy.

Enjoy.

Orzo pasta salad with peas, round courgettes and a few herbs

Orzo pasta salad with peas, courgettes and a few herbs

When I think of summer eating I have a strong image in my head and I’d like to share it with you if you don’t mind. Summer eating for me is light, fresh flavours, simple dishes and perfect produce. I dream of flat white peaches, dark blood coloured cherries, iridescent sardines, sweet crab and tender runner beans… I think of being in a lush, full country garden, bees and butterflies. It’s almost like a potager. I imagine a languid lunch eaten on white plates on an old wooden table, aged from years under the elements. There is flagstone paving that leads up a few steps into the garden beyond. Whatever food is eaten it is always enjoyed with something chilled and white, the glass is dewy on the outside where the cool wine has hit the warmed atmosphere of a late July afternoon. This image I have in my head is probably the result of indulging in few too many Rick Stein re runs recently. The reality of summer eating for me is sadly less romantic. I ate this salad for lunch 3 days on the trot in that darn windowless staffroom in Fife. A girl can daydream.

Orzo pasta

This is my take on a summery pasta salad. There are no rules, it is more of a framework than a recipe and works with whatever seasonal veggies you have in your fridge or whatever you like best. Think of this as a bit of inspiration.

Orzo pasta salad with peas, courgettes and a few herbs

Orzo pasta salad with peas, round courgettes and a few herbs.

Serves 4

300g of pasta, I used the pretty orzo

1 roasted chicken breast, shredded

fresh peas, shelled to give a handful or two

1 round courgette or 2 small standard courgettes, finely sliced

small handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped

couple of tablespoons of more flavourful herbs – I used mint and greek basil

few shavings of a hard aged cheese, I used pecorino

zest of 1 lemon

juice of at least one lemon

good glug of olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the packet, orzo takes about 7-8 minutes.

Drain the pasta and run it under cold water for a couple of minutes until cool.

Add all the ingredients to the pasta, taste and adjust proportions as required.

Season to taste.

Enjoy.

Raspberry sorbet with vodka and lime (foraging trip part 2)

Our foraging trip last weekend was just so nice. It was just great being away from the city for a few hours. I am always amazed by the marvellous goodies we find when we start looking out a bit more. It makes me think about how much we miss day to day, zoned out in our own little worlds.  We came across crab apples, watercress, wild cherries, pineapple camomile, orange birch bolete, sweet cicely, rosehips, hawthorn and wild strawberries. Our main bounty, however, was lots of ruby red wild raspberries. These are smaller and slightly more tart and intense than commercially grown raspberries which of course you could use in this recipe instead.  “Glen ample” is a wonderful raspberry variety – large and plump with a pleasant acidity. It is widely available in different supermarkets.

This recipe makes an intense sorbet which really is very quick and painless to make, taking about 20 minutes from beginning to eating. I served it in a little glass with a wee hit of vodka and some lime zest. This recipe works on proportions, 4 parts fruit to 1 part sugar, so whatever quantity of fruit you find/buy you can enjoy it in sorbet form.

Raspberry sorbet

600g raspberries

150g icing sugar

to serve – vodka

lime zest

Mash the raspberries through a sieve with a bowl underneath to catch the puree.

Discard the pips (unless you are more inventive than me and have a great use for them).

Add the icing sugar to the raspberry puree and mix.

Have a taste, you may wish to add more sugar.

Pour into an ice cream maker.

Leave to churn until the required consistency is achieved.

Enjoy.

(Note to the sister-in-law-to be, check out the glass, recognise it?)

Courgette and feta fritters (summer loving)

Courgette and feta fritters

“The twice bitten” has been going for a few months now. It has had a couple of thousand hits and has been read in almost 30 counties. I am in shock. Despite this I sometimes feel a bit awkward about the writing bit. It's not something I've done a lot of before. I'm finding it hard putting myself out there.

Coming up with the recipes and making the dishes is the easy part; I have been doing it everyday for the last 15 years. The photography isn’t too thorny an issue due to a 50 mm camera lens. It is the writing part I find tricky.

Round courgette, lemon and mint

Looking through the blogs I follow (Orangette, Michelle Humes and The Wednesday Chef et al) is wonderful but also a little tough. It is hard knowing that I'm not at their level, not yet able to convey so eloquently the thoughts and emotions that are so integral to their blogs. Not to mention their wit…I guess it is my perfectionist tendencies slipping through although I do realise it is unrealistic to expect to be as awesome as these guys after a few months considering they have been doing it for years.

Eventually I’ll remember that this blog was only meant to be a self indulgent journey. A process that might be fun and I would hopefully learn some new skills along the way. It would give me a chance to collect and develop new recipes; a catalogue of all the things we like to eat.

So here is the easy bit. This recipe embodies summer eating - tasty, simple and perfect with a wee glass of something chilled. Salty feta, creamy courgette and fresh lemon zest and mint.

Courgette mix

Courgette and feta fritters  - serves 2

Adapted from the Jojo Tulloh  for the Telegraph 

2 medium courgettes, grated

100g of crumbled feta

2 spring onions, finely chopped

zest of 1 lemon

8-12 mint leaves to taste

1-2 cloves of garlic, smeared to a paste

8 gently rounded dsp of plain flour

1 beaten egg

seasoning to taste

oil for frying

Salt (about 1 tsp) the grated courgette and leave for at least 15 minutes.

Pat the courgette dry with kitchen towel, maybe give it a gentle squeeze.

Add it the feta, lemon zest, spring onions and mint, stir.

Add in the beaten egg and flour, stir.

Season to taste.

The mixture will be relatively loose don’t worry.

Put a large frying pan onto a moderately high heat with a few tablespoons of oil.

Once the pan is hot add a heaped spoonful of the mixture to the pan and flatten gently to make a fat pancake shape.

Leave to cook for a few minutes until golden brown, flip over and fry the other side.

Continue this process, frying a few at a time till the mixture is used up.

Rest the fritters on some kitchen towel.

I served it with a simple green salad and some lemon wedges.

Enjoy.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino salad

The weather hasn’t even been remotely summery today but I'm keen to make the most of all the amazing produce that is available currently. Eating seasonally means that in the winter months our diet consists of lots of leeks and brassicas. Enjoyable, but after a few months the novelty can begin to wear off and the excitement of the summer vegetable cousins coming to stay starts to settle in. Oh yummy asparagus, broad beans, peas, courgette flowers….

Broad beans 

Broad beans remind me so much of summer. My grandpa had a small vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Tomatoes, little gem lettuce and raspberries were the main staples but he would often dabble in a season of this and that. Runner beans one year, broad beans the next. Walking barefoot on the hot, rough slabs down to the bottom of his garden then eating his home grown delights straight off the bushes is one of my earliest and most enduring memories. The year was punctuated by different crops and I think it is this that has given me an appreciation of nature and seasonality.

Broad beans

Eating by the seasons wasn’t something my grandparents and their generation thought about, it was just the way things were. They weren’t eating broad beans in June because it was a trendy, middle class thing to do. They did it because that was option available. Today, in our world of readily available non native food such as bananas, broad beans can be quite tricky to get hold of in their short 8 week window. Some supermarkets stock them but your best bet is greengrocers or farmers markets. I got some today and was determined to make the most of them.

Broad beans, pecorino sardo and crusty bread - hello lunch

I’ll always remember my Grandma telling me about her first taste of bananas. Transatlantic shipping recommenced after the Second World War and it was then that my Grandma had her first taste of banana. She would have been about 15. Today 95% of British household buy them on a weekly basis. They are available all year round in every supermarket. Not exotic. Not exotic at all. The Oxford dictionary defines exotic as ‘‘strikingly unusual”. I guess you could perhaps now argue that the broad bean is more exotic than the banana?  Even if you disagree, it is difficult to class a banana as exotic despite the average 5106 food miles it has traveled to arrive on our plates.

Anyways rant over.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Serves 2

300g of broad bean pods

2 handfuls of pea shoots

50g pecorino sardo shards

juice of 1 lemon

good glug of olive oil, nice and grassy ideally

salt and pepper to taste

Remove the broad beans from their thick pods and boil in salted water for 3 minutes.

Personally I tend to then remove the beans from their inner casing mainly because I find it too bitter. I will not judge you for leaving it on. It is your diner, not mine, after all.

Mix all the other ingredients together.

I served the salad on top of some crusty bread brushed with more olive oil and then griddled on a high heat till crisp.

Enjoy.

Tea time tabouleh

Tabouleh salad with grilled chicken

Food blog + gluttonous tendencies = expanding waistline.

TWO extra belt holes since Christmas to be exact.

Time for a lighter diner me thinks - tabouleh and griddled chicken.

nice sweet tomatoes - hooray

Butterflied chicken grilling away nicely

Tabouleh - serves 2

80g bulgar wheat

80g flat leaf parsley (aka a massive bunch)

the leaves from a few stalks of mint, finely chopped

4 finely cut spring onions

handful of nice tomatoes, in small cubes

juice of 2 lemons

very, very good glug of olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Pour salted boiling water over the bulgar wheat and leave for 10-15 mins.

Its nice when there is still a little texture to the grain i.e. don’t nuke it.

Drain, the run some cold water over the grain to chill it.

Add the cooked bulgar wheat to the other ingredients.

Stir and serve.

Enjoy.

Yogurt pannacotta (mark 3)

Yogurt pannacotta with elsanta strawberries

Mark 1 - Eventually I won the war with pannacotta. I'm not too proud to admit that the first time I made it the pannacotta was inedible. Quite an achievement considering the fact I will pretty much eat anything, drawing the line at the  “stuff” that comes out of the work canteen. To be honest I’m not too sure what went wrong last time. I’ve gone over it in my head like some broken hearted teenage girl. Maybe I neglected it? Maybe I did it all wrong?  Realistically I think it failed because I because the buttermilk that I tried to make it with was off.  It smelt acrid. Horrible stuff. Seems so obvious now.

Mark 2 – I had tried to freeze cream. It didn’t work. When I defrosted it, it was lumpy. To quote the Smiths “I was bored before I even began”. Pannacotta mark 2 was a non-starter.

Mark 3 - Third time I tried it with yogurt it seemed to work better. I wanted to keep it fresher than just set cream. Persistence paid off and I was able to bring a nice summery dessert over to a friend's for dinner. I was smug; I had won the pannacotta war.

This dish is unbelievably easy (despite my previous attempts). It took only 10 minutes to make. It needs a chum to accompany it, fresh strawberries like these “elsantas” were tasty or some roasted rhubarb would work equally well.

Yogurt pannacotta serves 4

2 ½-3 sheets of gelatine (depending how wobbly you like it)

285ml carton of double cream

300ml plain yogurt (2 yeo valley pots)

1tsp vanilla paste (or 1 vanilla pod, split and seeds scraped out)

4 slightly heaped dessertspoons caster sugar

Add the gelatine to a bowl of cold water, leave to stand for about 10 minutes.

In the meantime gently heat the cream in a pan over a medium to low heat.

Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.

Slowly increase the heat till the cream is just about to boil and has thickened.

It should be able to coat the back of a spoon.

Take the cream off the heat, squeeze the water out of the gelatine and add to the cream.

Stir until dissolved.

Leave the mixture to cool for a minute or two.

Be patient.

Add the yogurt and vanilla, stir in.

If you are a perfectionist, put the mixture through a sieve, otherwise pour the mixture into the 4 dishes.

Leave to cool for about an hour before putting in the fridge.

Once in the fridge they will take 2-3 hours to set.

To serve, dip the bottomof the pots in hot water for a couple of seconds.

Put a butter knife around the top of the pot to loosen.

Give it a gentle shake to get the air to the bottom and turnout on a plate.

Enjoy.