The ever changing view from my window…..

Cooking, for me, is a calming and enjoyable experience. 

The apartment we live in has 28 windows running around three sides of our upper floor, so wherever I stand I can see the city below us. I love to work at a bench, kneading or chopping, grinding or mixing and being able to see all around me. The preparation of food can be a meditative experience as I stand and work and gaze out, soothed by the everchanging view of the unpredictable British weather. 

Because we are so high up and have so many windows, the views are amazing. I love seeing the seasons change and perhaps the most beautiful time is dawn…. 

 

……..the sun rising through the mist that swirls around the trees below us is one of my favourite sights. 

 

Sometimes a stormy dawn will fill the sky with vibrant colours contrasted against grey and turbulent skies…. 

 

… and a bright dawn fills me with happiness 

 

In the winter the snow reflects the light back, brightening the morning. 

 

Even on grey and rain filled days the apartment is filled with light. There’s something so cosy about being inside, in the warm, when the rain lashes against the windows. 

  

And the bliss of being inside when the snow piles up on the sills outside while you are inside, surrounded by warmth and the smell of something wonderful cooking. 

I do love living here. Not one day is the same as another and each day’s view is different.

Soon, though, the change is going to be more dramatic and you will be treated to a new and very different view from my window. 

The Bear and I are off, embarking on an adventure that will mean a total change in the way we live, the things we see and the food we cook and eat. I have to do lots of sorting and packing and sharing out the things we can’t take with us… there’ll be chances for everyone to win DVDs and cookery books. And I do mean everyone. Some things I give away will have to be sent to UK people only, simply because of the postage costs… but a light weight DVD? Well I am sure I could afford to post that almost anywhere. 

In six months time or so, we will be living on the other side of the world as the Bear will be working for three years in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And I will be going with him. 

 

The Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur 

Imagine the difference in the views…..imagine the difference in the ingredients and the cooking…imagine the fun we will all have.  

The Bear has been to Kuala Lumpur many times and took the following pictures they  will give you an idea of the vibrancy, the colour and the busy bustling city…. 

                         

Traffic in Kuala Lumpur 

  

Beautifully illuminated fountains in Kuala Lumpur 

                

The KL Monorail 

 

The skyscrapers really do seem to scrape at the sky

… and it’s not all traffic and building… there are palm trees and beautiful fountains everywhere.

Things change all the time and I know this is going to be a big change but that’s  good.

Change is exciting and I hope you’ll enjoy the changing views and changing food and recipes with us.

Potato Focaccia

One of the big loves of my life is reading. I can do without television quite easily but I could not manage if I couldn’t occupy myself with something to read. I have shelves groaning with books and magazines are stacked in piles… I have an  eReader so I can read when I can’t carry piles of books with me and when I can’t read, (because I’m driving, say) I listen to audio books. So maybe it’s not reading? Maybe it is that I don’t need the visual stimulus of pictures… I just need the words and my mind fills in the gaps.  So, maybe I should say one of the big loves of my life is writing.. that is, writing done by others.

It has to be good writing though, so that I stay interested. I will, honestly, read almost anything, from any genre, but as you’d imagine a big part of my reading involves food – cooking it, eating it, growing it, preparing it… telling stories about it.

I have shelf after shelf of cookery books. When I’m in the north, I love to sit in that chair, with a cup of green tea, steaming quietly beside me as I read recipes or books on food writing –  from Brillat-Savarin’s “The Physiology of Taste,  or transcendental gastronomy”  – he, who famously wrote, “tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are” and described the first version of what became, in essence, the low-carb diet. Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) believed that white flour and sugar made you fat and prescribed protein rich meals. If you haven’t read him yet and you’re curious you can read it for free online, thanks to the University of Adelaide or on Project Gutenberg, or, you can do as I did, and buy a copy.

I love reading modern cookery writing too and I have shelves of that in the apartment… that’s a picture of the shelves when I had only half unpacked and there’s 132 books there. The shelves are full now. Those shelves are half way up the stairs and I sit there, leaning against the wall, reading whatever takes my fancy.  Probably my favourite book of all time, MFK Fisher’s The Art of Eating, an anthology of all her works is on that bottom shelf  and I regularly take it out and start reading it again. There are  fascinating books that the Bear finds on his travels and brings back for me because he knows I will love them. He found Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking when he was travelling through the USA and I know I wouldn’t have stumbled on that easily but it is now one of my dearly loved books. He also brought home the wonderful Ruth Reichl’s  Comfort me with Apples and that started me on a search through Amazon for more books like that.  The whole point of it is, I love to read something that makes me think, that captures my imagination and makes me explore just what it was they felt, what they tasted and what it meant to them.

When I’m not reading books, I’m looking on line and reading blogs and searching out great writers there, too. I was reading the fabulous Gin and Crumpets and something she wrote made me stop and think….it made my mouth water. Potato Focaccia, or as she says, a fancy chip butty. Who doesn’t like a chip butty? Well, apart from Brillat-Savarin and his purely protein meals, but he’s long gone, so it doesn’t matter…

A soft and savoury focaccia with potato…. perfect. Imagine how that tastes…

Gin and Crumpets had used, so I surmised from the photographs, smaller potatoes than I had and she’d left the skins on. I had a bag of my favourite Rooster potatoes  (excellent all rounders, good as either chips or mash or roast) so I washed and peeled 250g of them and cooked them in gently simmering water. You need them still to have some body about them as they are going to be cooked again on top of the focaccia, so don’t boil them to death.

The next thing was to start on the focaccia so 350g of strong bread flour was mixed with one 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast, a teaspoon of caster sugar and two teaspoons of Maldon sea salt.

Four tablespoons of olive oil and roughly 150ml-200ml of lukewarm water need to be added to bring it together into a loose dough.

If you haven’t got a mixer with a dough hook, just use your hands.  Drop it onto a floured board and upend the bowl over it to stop it drying out. Let it rest for a few minutes.

Then knead it… you’ll feel it change into a beautifully bouncy, smooth and silky dough.

You need to roll it into a smooth oval

And then lie it on a silicone sheet, ontop of a baking sheet and brush yet more lovely olive oil over it.

Lay a loose piece of clingfilm over it and leave it to rise gently. That depends, of course, on how warm your room is but it shouldn’t take too long.

Start the oven pre-heating to 210°C or 410°F and check the potatoes.

They should be tender so drain them and leave them to cool and then have a quick wipe round while you are waiting…

A sprig of rosemary would be good to add, so strip the leaves off the harder stems and chop them lightly.

By now the potatoes are cool enough to slice without burning your fingers…

I drizzled the oil over the potato, in a bowl, so I got an even covering and each piece was glistening, then laid them on top of the puffy dough, sprinkling it all with the chopped rosemary and a sprinkle of salt…and into the oven it went.

Just under half an hour later and this emerged… golden and glistening, smelling deliciously sweet and savoury – you know just what I mean…

The focaccia bread was light and aerated and the potato on top? It was heavenly… it really was like the best chip butty ever. The taste? The taste was sublime. The potatoes were soft with that sweetness that comes from being cooked properly and then baked, the salt and the rosemary made it savoury, the focaccia was warm and delicious. People looked at it, sniffed it and then tore at it…all of them saying how wonderful it was.

This is what you need to make for parties – it’s warm and delicious and it will to help soak up the alcohol and keep people happy and cheerful….

…this is what you need to make it when there’s just the two of you and a bottle of wine to share as you curl up on the sofa….

… and you need to make it when there’s just you, needing something to sustain you through upset or cheer you through gloom or give you a much deserved treat on a cold Saturday night.

This is heaven.  Really, it is.

Beans, yellow tomatoes, sage and sausages

Right then, I said, as I was surrounded by a tumbling wall of tinned tomatoes and beans, we really need to get through some of that store cupboard.

When I go shopping I will often pick up tins of tomatoes or beans because you can always make a meal, very quickly, from them. You never know when people may suddenly arrive and need feeding, or when you really just can’t face going to the supermarket at the end of a long day at work. I like to plan ahead – after all, what if there is a crisis and we are trapped, at the top of our apartment building,  with only the contents of the kitchen?  I need to be sure we can eat , at least. What if the shops are suddenly and mysteriously emptied of everything? I’d better have stuff in that won’t go off. Be prepared is my motto. The thing is, I’d kept on doing it and we were now reaching a shelf overload situation in the larder.

I’d gone into the larder to get some stuff out for baking and realised that the wild and fanciful imagined crises had not happened, unexpected guests had not turned up without warning but with an empty belly and I had managed, after all, to shop on a pretty regular basis and provide meals for the two of us without using the stores of beans and tomatoes. I noticed all that because there seemed to be a wall of tomatoes and beans blocking my way to my baking tins.

The fact that it was a pretty substantial wall, many tins deep made me think that I really ought to do something with them. The thing about beans and tomatoes is that you can do so much… the butter beans, softly mashed, make a quick and lovely alternative to mashed potato, the tomatoes can be used in the rich and soothing Tomato Rice soup or to make a ragu base for the indulgent, quick and easy lasagne, or in the vegetarian squash and goat’s cheese lasagne. The cannellini beans can be transformed into the Bear’s very favourite, Italian derived Beans on toast. I have borlotti beans and haricot beans, I have plum tomatoes and yellow tomatoes…..they were all just waiting for me. They were all just waiting to fall on me, apparently.

I decided to delay the baking session and make something to eat instead from the cans that were now falling off the shelves because I had balanced them precariously, one on top of another, after every shopping trip and then tried to shove them to one side so I could get at my shortbread mold. Falling with a clatter and bouncing off my bare feet. So… beans and tomatoes…..

Yellow tomatoes….

I’d seen these and thought I would have to try them… and now, it seemed, I was going to do it. They would be a change from the richness of red plum tomatoes…. I had some fresh sage as well.

So, two tins of cannellini beans were also removed from the now collapsed wall of tins and I looked around to see what else I had. The baking could wait for a while. I was going to make something for supper.

I love sage – not only the smell of it and the depth of flavour it adds to a dish (perfect with pork or tomatoes) but I also love the beautiful softness of its leaves and the delicate colour. All of which will disappear in cooking, I know, but I do like to rub it between my fingers and appreciate its soft silkiness and the smell as it bruises….

I had plenty of fresh garlic, too.

The first step, as with so many dishes, is to soften a chopped onion in a little oil. Adding salt makes the onion soften gently and release its flavour as it turns translucent. If you don’t add salt you are more likely to end up with bronzed, fried onions.

The next step is to open your tins of beans and rinse off the gloopy liquid surrounding them – this will be a mixture of the water they were packed in and any stray bits of starchiness from the beans themselves.

Toss the beans in the soft and glistening onions and add some chopped sage.

And then… those tomatoes. I’d not seen tins of yellow tomatoes before and I’d been curious to find out what they tasted like. They were certainly yellow. A beautiful, vibrant, cheerful yellow.

How pretty they were! They tasted nice too – sharper and yet sweeter than a tin of red tomatoes. Almost a cleaner taste in a way – you know how red tomatoes have a rich deepness to them? These seemed lighter, but just as flavourful. I added them to the beans, sage and onion.

I’d been at the  Farm shop and they had been doing Italian style sausages – what this means is that they were sausages with some red wine and fennel added so I reckoned they would be perfect with my beans and tomatoes. While the beans and tomatoes cooked together, I started frying the sausages.

And look how gorgeous the beans and tomato was!

Those sausages fried beautifully, with the red wine helping make that deliciosuly sticky and brown, glistening skin.

The tomato and beans were a light and delicious mix and the perfect base to serve the sauasages on.

I fried some sage leaves separately – just quickly – until they were crisp.

It was the perfect mouthful – the softness of the beans, the sweet sharpness of the tomatoes and the meaty richness of the sausage….. Delicious. Quick, simple, inexpensive. What more could I want?

Well, I could want the larder to be tidy … but at least three tins had been removed. That’s a start, right?

Honey and Muscat Wine Jelly and Salt Water Crackers, for blue cheese.

One of the many great things about being married to the Bear is that we can sometimes manage to travel to lovely places together. If he is going to a conference and has air miles that would pay for my ticket, it’s the perfect opportunity for me to go too and then we extend our stay so that we can explore and have a little holiday.

Our last trip was to Argentina  (OK, so he was flying Business Class and I was in the cheap seats at the back but I did get to make new friend, Maria and we have stayed in contact ever since) but at the end of the conference we set off and explored the north of the country..

We saw the amazing Iguazu Falls that act, in part, as the border with Brasil

They stretched for miles and miles… so many falls, so much water….

….and we even walked out, on a perilous walkway, getting drenched as we looked up at one section of the falls above us. I have to say that this will stay with me  as one of the most memorable and astounding sights of my life.

We travelled up the Andes on a train, the Tren a las Nubes , so high that I got altitude sickness

and was given coca leaves to roll into a ball and put in my cheek to absorb the coca….the train hostesses hand them out and spend their journey with their own rolls of coca leaves tucked into their cheeks. The effects of the coca minimise the worst of the symptoms of altitude sickness and here, everyone chews and sucks the leaves.

The train company also makes coca tea  to help, but in the end, I had to have some oxygen. I suppose it was a big change for someone brought up at sea level.

But the view? That was worth it. I sat quietly and gazed at the mountains falling away below us.

We hired a car at the top and drove down through the mountains, gazing at the beauty of the red earth desert

and headed to Tucuman, where the parents of our friend, Natalio,  lived…

All of that had been organised by his wonderful mother, Perla, and it allowed us to see the real Argentina. We wouldn’t have known about the Falls or the train journey, nor the wonderful villages we passed through on our days of driving. When we got to Tucuman and met Perla and Leonardo, we were shown the most incredible and generous hospitality. We were treated to barbecues and evenings of drinks and empanadas  (something I am certainly going to make in the future) and had the most fantastic time. I really think our time there was one of the best holidays we’ve ever had.

There’s no way we could have managed to see so much without Perla organising everything and we swore that when she came to England we would try and repay her, just a little bit, for the outstanding efforts she made for us.

On the flight home, I passed the time thinking about what I could possibly cook… I wanted to make her a special meal. I had it all sorted in my head by the time we landed. All I had to do then was wait for her to say she was coming to the UK.

And then the call came! Perla and her sister were coming over and I had bagged the Saturday night to cook for them.

I planned to end the meal with cheese and crackers and I had seen in the Australian Gourmet Traveller Annual Cookbook of 2008 a really interesting way of doing it….This is probably my favourite food magazine ever and luckily my sister, who lives in Sydney, sends it to me every year. When I read this issue I was stuck, with the Bear, in Melbourne airport, waiting for a delayed flight to Tasmania. In the nine hour delay, I read every word and then imagined cooking most of the recipes. This one, however, stood out.

Honey and Muscat Wine Jelly to serve with blue cheese and Salted Water Crackers… and I would be making the honey jelly and the crackers. It was to be served with a blue cheese…..  That would be something special to end the meal with, I knew it….. A soft and sweetly quivering jelly made from honey to spoon onto crisp water crackers, scattered with sea salt, to eat with blue cheeses.

The first thing to do was to make the honey jelly….

And the first part of making the jelly was to soften the gelatine leaves. You’ll find packets of these in the baking aisle of the supermarket – I use the Super Cook Platinum Grade – and three of these clear, hard sheets need to be soaked in a bowl of cold water.

While they are softening, mix 250 gm of clear, runny honey….

…. with 100 ml of a sweet dessert wine (you can serve the rest with the cheese course)  and 60ml of water.

Heat it over a medium heat, stirring gently until it simmers.

By now the gelatine leaves are soft and you can lift them out of the bowl and squeeze the excess water out of them before adding them to the gently simmering honey and wine mix.

The gelatine dissolves almost instantly, so stir it round and get your prettiest jelly dishes ready

Choose the prettiest things you have because they are going to go onto the table…

All you have to do now is strain the jelly mix into the bowls…

… and then put them to set in the fridge for at least three or four hours.

The easiest thing to do is to make this the day before so you are quite certain everything has set to a soft and quivering jelly. But how easy is it? Maybe twenty minutes work? If that?

Now, of course, you must make the crackers…

I decided to use the finest flour I have, my ’00’ pasta flour, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got that. Any plain flour will do.

Add two thirds of a spoon of baking powder to 200g of the flour and a teaspoon of sea salt  and stir round to get an even mix.

Mix 30 ml of vegetable oil (remember those cough medicine measuring cups? They are ideal for small quantities like this)  with 120ml of warm water and add it to the flour mix, to make a dough.

Knead it lightly until it is smooth

And then cut the dough into 16 evenly sized pieces.

Then, you take each piece and roll it flat …….the Australian Gourmet Traveller suggested until it is a 2mm thick oval, but that wasn’t working. Oval? That required more rolling skill than I had and anyway, I liked the look of the oddly shaped crackers that were emerging. There’s no way they could be mistaken for anything manufactured by professionals ………..

The oven needs to be pre heated to 200 °C or 400 °F and while that gets to temperature, whisk up an egg white and then brush those rolled out pieces of dough.

They look artisinal, don’t they? Let’s not mention the fact I couldn’t roll out the dough neatly…..

Prick them all over with a fork

Then scatter them all over with sea salt, before putting them in the oven for ten to fifteen minutes until they are golden and crisp.

You’ll have to do them in batches but it’s not a big deal… they cook so quickly you can have one batch cooling while another cooks. Once they are cool, store them in an airtight plastic box, where they will be perfectly all right for up to a week.

See? Another thing done in less than an hour. Pretty good for what will be a marvellous course….

And then it was Saturday, time  for dinner with Perla… and Sylvia her sister, Nat and Lenka , Jaume and us….

We ate and we drank, we laughed and we toasted each other for getting here, for being friends, for getting engaged, for getting promoted, for having a Saturday night together and anything else we could think of until finally it was time for the cheese course.

The jelly was soft and quivering and the smell of the honey and muscat wine was sweet and aromatic

I’d got a selection of blue cheeses and piled them on a cheese plate with grapes

There was Roquefort and some amazing British ewe’s milk and buffalo milk cheeses

The crackers were crisp and golden…

And with a morsel of cheese, a spoonful of jelly piled onto a piece of the cracker… it really was the perfect mouthful.

The combination of sweet and salty flavours, the softness of the jelly and cheese and the crisp snap of the cracker were wonderful.

And you know what? I was happy… I had done what I could to welcome Perla to our home as she had welcomed us to hers.

And you know something else? This was easy. Try making it yourself. Your guests will be pleased and you will feel proud. It can be made the day before (always a plus point in my book)

It’s simple and delicious. And a perfect ending to a lovely evening.