Delicious ideas to borrow from a pop up restaurant

Now, I know that pop up restaurants were very fashionable and it has become almost as fashionable to knock them but I have come to them late. When I say them, I actually mean just one that has started in the last month in Deptford, Mike and Ollie. They have been serving up wonderful concoctions at Deptford and Brockley markets and have now introduced a supper club element.

Quite apart from being delicious and a great way to meet like-minded locals, it was also a source of inspiration for future home cooking sessions.

The pickled quince was delicious served with pork belly on toast and I intend to recreate it using Nigel Slater's recipe if I can find quinces easily enough at this time of year - they were foraged by Mike in Crystal Palace before Christmas I believe.

Enough for 2 medium-sized storage jars.
750ml cider vinegar
400g golden granulated sugar
3 medium-sized quinces or 4 smaller ones
12 juniper berries
8 black peppercorns
a bay leaf
Pour the vinegar into a stainless-steel pan. Add the golden sugar, juniper berries, black peppercorns and bay leaf and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down to a merry simmer.
Peel, halve and core the quinces, cutting them into six lengthways. Lower the quince into the simmering vinegar and leave the fruit to cook for 15-25 minutes, until it is soft enough to pierce effortlessly with a skewer.
Lift the soft fruits out with a draining spoon and lower them into clean storage jars. Pour over the liquor, then seal and leave to cool. They will keep for several weeks.

Another revelation was pickled rhubard with mackerel. These were whole forced rhubard stalks and their tartness were delicious, off setting the salty fatty taste of the mackerel.  I shall try this recipe from www.platethrive.com  which seems to offer the best combination of sweet and sour:

Ingredients
• 1 1/4 cups apple cider vinegar (I suggest using raw and unpasteurized apple cider vinegar, such as those by Bragg’s or Eden Organic)
• ¾ cup filtered water
• 1 cup maple syrup or honey
• 1 ¼ – 1 ½ pound rhubarb, thin stalks if possible (about 1/2-inch thick)
• 1 ½ inches peeled ginger root, peeled and thinly sliced
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 1 tsp whole allspice berries
• 1 tsp whole fennel seeds
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 4 dry chili peppers



Directions

1. Place vinegar, water, and maple syrup/honey in a saucepan over medium heat. While mixture heats, cut rhubarb stalks into lengths that fit inside the jar with approximately 1-inch headspace (about 4-inches long if using a pint jar). If your rhubarb stalks are much thicker, slice them in half or quarters so they are about 1/2-inch x 1/2-inch before cutting into 4-inch lengths. Set rhubarb aside.
2. Divide cloves, allspice, and fennel between the jars. Then place rhubarb stalks inside, tucking sliced ginger, chili peppers, and cinnamon sticks between the stalks.
3. Pour boiling vinegar mixture over rhubarb until jars are full, leaving about ½-inch headspace and making sure rhubarb stalks are fully covered. If you have leftover brine, save to use for salad dressings or other pickling projects. Screw on jar tops and let cool on kitchen counter until approximately room temperature. Then place in the refrigerator. For best flavor, let sit for 1-2 weeks before consuming.

makes about 2 pints or 1 quart

Delicious recipe for creamy pasta with purple sprouting broccoli

What a treat. After a series of late nights working, Tom took pity on me and cooked.

Clearly, the recipe (a Nigel slater one) was selected by me and the PSB (purple sprouting broccoli) were harvested by me at the weekend but he DID cook it.

The magic ingredient in the sauce is anchovy. For those who are unsure about this fish just remember it adds a salty quality without being over-bearable fishy.

250g PSB/ young greens
250g pasta
30g butter
2 cloves garlic thinly sliced
4 anchovy fillets chopped
250g creme fraiche
170g gorgonola crumbled

For my liking, I would have reduced the butter and cream content and used low fat cheese to make this more waist and heart healthy.

Three things to do with broccoli

Top tip: Bulk bake to add variety and stop you feeling like you're eating a mountain of the same vegetable.
I harvested my first broccoli at the weekend.  While not as big as the giant cauliflowers that were grown on a neighbouring plot (and were also left to fester and rot) it was pretty impressive and I decided it would make 3 decent meals.

The first dish was an easy mid week meal and a variation on a Nigel Slater recipe - broccoli in an holandaise sauce. I cheated on the sauce and used a packet and served it with runner beans mixed with onions and bacon. I am a firm believer in bacon jazzing up any vegetable.

The second meal was a broccoli and bean bake based on a recipe from The Great Allotment Cookbook.  I used cannellini beans instead of butter beans as it was all I had in the store cupboard and added horseradish and mustard to give it a bit of a kick.  I served it with a dollop of Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall's courgette 'glutney' (love that name!).

1 onion finely chopped
300ml milk
2 tbsp flour
1/2 teaspoon herbs
425g beans, rinsed and drained
tbsp of horseradish and mustard to taste
150g broccoli divided into small florets
8 cherry tomatoes or 4 full sized, chopped
1 tbsp of tomato paste
1 tbsp cheese
50g breadcrumbs
Preheat the oven to 180 C. Soften the onions then add the flour, milk and herbs and bring to the boil. Once sauce is boiling, reduce the heat and cook for 3 minutes or until thickened. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, horseradish and mustard and salt to taste.  Add the beans, broccoli to the sauce and bring to the boil. Pour into an oven proof dish. mix the breadcrumbs with the cheese and put on top of the broccoli mixture. Cook for 20-25 minutes until the sauce is bubbling and the breadcrumbs are beginning to brown.  Here is what it looked like before I added the breadcrumbs and cheese.

I also prepared a twice baked cheese souffle as a friend is coming on Friday and i thought I'd serve it with a sharp green salad.  Souffles are not nearly as scary as they are made out to be if you follow the steps. 

Twice baking also means that you can cook it ahead of time (and even freeze it) and then just reheat it when friends are coming round. It's much more fun to socialise with them than worry about egg whites and souffles rising.
I used a recipe from the Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook.

75g butter, softened
150g broccoli (avoid thick stalks but some thinner stalks are fine)
25g flour ( I used wholemeal for fibre)
150ml milk (semi or skimmed is fine if you're watching your fat intake)
50g mature cheddar (the stronger the better), grated
3 large eggs, separated
2 tsp of mustard, powder or British (brings out the cheese flavour perfectly)

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Grease an oven proof dish (you can also do 4 large ramekins) and place a circle of baking paper on the bottom (though mine got tangled up and I had to remove it and the souffle still came out of the dish OK).

Finely chop the broccoli along with any small stalks until it resembles chopped herbs. Melt 25g butter in a frying pan and fry the broccoli until just softened. Remove from the heat.

Melt another 25g into a saucepan and stir in the flour. Cook while stirring for 1 minute. Remove from the heat. Stir in the milk bit by bit, then return to the heat until the mixture boils and thickens. Remove again from the heat.

Stir in the broccoli, mustard, grated cheese and egg yolks and mix well. whisk the egg whites till stiff and fold in with a metal spoon.

Pour into the oven proof dish and cook for about 30-40 minutes until risen and browned. Allow to cool for 10 minutes. Cover and chill till ready to serve. Or you could freeze it at this point and it will last up to 6 months. If you do decide to freeze then let it thaw in the fridge overnight and then cook as below.

When ready to serve, preheat the oven again to 190C. Put the souffle on a baking sheet. Melt the remaining 25g and brush over the top. Sprinkle with a little Parmesan and bake for 20 minutes until warm and crisp.

Useful resources: books

26.07.10
It is not just food, plants and land that I am greedy for. I obsessively buy books and magazines to help me learn more and find new ways of growing and cooking produce. My current measure of if a book is a good cookery book is the variety of courgette and potato related recipes it offers.
Some books defy classification into gardening or cooking as some have cleverly combined the two but tend to skimp on detail for either.

Both
Food from your garden and allotment (Reader's Digest)
- Billed as all you need to grow, cook and preserve your own fruit and vegetables, this is a very comprehensive compendium of fruit, herbs and vegetables. It is excellent on how to grow and care for your plants and for this rigour we can forgive it's brevity on how to cook the produce – besides other books cover this more extensively and with better credentials. What it does have is an excellent section on preserving fruit and vegetables with a good variety of recipes. It goes into the difference between pickles, relishes and chutneys and even has a section on making wines – my own personal new area of focus. NB suggests a 3 bed rotation system)
Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook – Kathryn Hawkins
- Recipes ordered by course rather than vegetable
- One Swiss chard recipe – Swiss chard with sweet spice
- 4 courgette recipes (with eggs and chorizo, summer veg and pesto meatball pasta bake, tagine of chicken and autumnal vegetables, and muffins)

Cooking
Delia – The Frugal Cook
Delia – Kitchen Garden
- How to grow the plants (with advice by Gay Search) and some recipes by Delia
The Cook's Scrapbook (Reader's Digest)
- A return to traditional recipes organised like a cook's notebook with wisdom on seasonality, growing tips and a strong section on preserving and game
The Great Allotment Cookbook (GAIA)
- Comprehensive and laid out by season – courgettes here are classified in Autumn despite me enjoying the onset of our glut in mid July
Tender – Nigel Slater
- Very comprehensive and inspirational cook book devoted to vegetables – I can't wait until his fruit volume comes out (though it will frustrate me as I don't have all those lovely fruit yet).
- Excellent on Potatoes and Courgettes – chard recipes are limited
Using the Plot – Paul Merrett (noticed it has been renamed to 'The Allotment Chef' in paperback version)
- A humorous book written by a chef taken with the passion to be self sufficient. Pleasing to see that others have similar challenges when starting out and definitely reliable on the recipe front – very good on variations on the crushed potato theme
The Ration Book diet – Mike Brown, Carol Harris, CJ Jackson
- Going right back to basics – the original driver to get Britain growing and self sufficient. Based on newly discovered science about nutritional values and a desire to reduce dangerous importing of food from the colonies, the British government encouraged the home front to a) waste less b) grow more themselves and c) cook more healthily.
- This actually is now mirrored in our desire to not over-cook vegetables, to move to a more vegetable based diet rather than eating red meat, to grow food organically (though mechanisation, fertilisers and pesticides meant that women found the arduous job of farming easier and more productive) and to eat locally and seasonally
- Good recipe for Nettle soup and nettle champ
Perfect preserves – Hilaire Walden
- Good for using up gluts through jams and chutneys
A Greener Life - Clarissa Dickinson Wright, Johnny Scott
- Old school skills includes a section on preserves and foraging (possibly more useful than spinning and butchering)

Gardening
Allotment Gardening – Kevin Forbes
- Pocket sized and hard backed – should survive the rigours of the plot well
Your organic allotmenteer – Ian Spence, Pauline Pears
- Sensible approach and comprehensive without being preachy
- Four bed rotation system recommended (potatoes put with squashes & tomatoes)
- Good on green manure
Alan Titchmarsh How to Garden series – Vegetables and herbs
Dr Hessyan series
– Very good, reasonably-priced specialised books on vegetables and fruit. Also with compact pocket editions.