February 2006 Archives

Dal - also known as Dhal - is one of my favourite comforting winter meals. On a cold evening when you've got wet through on the walk home and don't feel like leaving the house again, it is enormously reassuring to find that there's a packet of red split lentils and some spices in the press and a few onions and garlic looking lonely in the vegetable rack. There are as many recipes for dal as there are vegetarians in the world so if you don't have the exact ingredients mentioned below, don't worry. The split lentils, onions and garlic are absolutes here but you can play around with all the rest.

If you don't have the coconut milk - admittedly the one ingredient that drew me to this particular recipe in the first place - you could fry some chopped onions, chilli and sliced garlic with cumin, turmeric and coriander, add the lentils and some stock or water and simmer until they turn sludgy. It was Nigel Slater and his The 30-Minute Cook that taught me about the wonderful propensity that red split lentils have to turn into delicious mush with about twenty minutes cooking and some vigorous stirring with a wooden spoon. I've never looked back.

If you don't add the onions and garlic to the lentils while they are cooking, you can make - as in the recipe below - a spiced butter, known in India as baghar or tadka, to perfume and flavour the dal. Clarified Indian butter - ghee - would be ideal but, in its absence, I normally use a mixture of vegetable oil and butter. In her Easy Entertaining, Darina uses all vegetable oil which is perfectly acceptable but I have to admit loving the sweet savoury-ness of butter with the earthy lentils. Even though it may be winter outside, the weather lifts when you're eating this spicy dish. Especially if you eat it with naan breads that you've made yourself...

After mourning the lack of good pumpkin in Ireland, I've discovered an alternative option - squash! Now, there's a terminology question here. What is the difference between squash and pumpkins? I think it was Stephanie Alexander's Cook's Companion that made the point that all squash in Australia (and New Zealand) are called pumpkins. My own understanding of the difference between the two is that a pumpkin is a rounded vegetable, like that used by Cinderella to get to the prince's ball, while a squash can often be a different shape. That's no hard and fast rule, however!

In New Zealand I usually bought the crown or Crown Prince variety of round pumpkin. It had rich orange flesh underneath a very hard grey-green skin, made gorgeous Pumpkin Soup and, as long as you kept it in a cold place, it lasted very well. Here in Ireland I haven't seen any crown pumpkins as large or as proud as those that I regularly and cheaply bought in New Zealand so my attention has turned to squash, particularly the easy to find butternut type. Butternut squash have a hard yellowish beige skin, covering sweet orange flesh, and are shaped like a pear with a long neck and very bulbous end. They are much easier to peel than the iron-skinned crown pumpkin and I am able to substitute them for pumpkin in all my soup recipes.

For my first time cooking butternut squash, however, I wanted to try something different so I dug out my copy of Denis Cotter's A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking and leafed through it until I reached the pumpkin and squash section. His recipe for Roasted Butternut Squash with Chickpeas and Cumin (chickpeas, mmm...) caught my eye and, with a few adaptations - more chickpeas, especially, that's what I cooked for my first pumpkin/squash dinner in Ireland. Better get some more before they go out of season...

If you want to read more about these versatile vegetables, Elisabeth Luard has a wonderful piece on the Waitrose Food Illustrated website.

Before I started reading/reviewing these books, Anne Willan was unfamiliar to me but, as soon as they arrived, her name started to crop up in my reading with increasing regularity. An American by way of Yorkshire, Willan established La Varenne, the prestigious Burgundy-based French cooking school, in 1975. For those who haven't the time or money to study with her, she has also written an impressive number of cookbooks, ranging from Dorling Kindersley's Perfect series (Perfect Chicken Dishes, Perfect Chocolate Deserts, Perfect Appetizers etc), last year's useful A Cook's Book of Quick Fixes to the more personal in From My Chateau Kitchen.

How to Cook Absolutely Everything and Best Recipes for Absolutely Everything are, however, work manuals rather cookbooks to gloat and glory over (see Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking or Unwrapped: Green and Black's Chocolate Recipes for examples of those!). How to Cook..., in particular, is very instruction book-like, laid out with photographs of food at various stages of doneness with accompanying text that explains details of colour and texture. It originated, as Willan points out in the introduction, in her kitchen: " 'That looks done to me,' I said one day as a student lifted a roast chicken out of the oven. And then I thought - how do I know? Cooking is a skill learned by experience, and nothing is more difficult than judging when a dish is cooked just right." Although she states that smell, sight, touch, hearing and, finally, taste, are all important in determining when food is ready, Willan does a surprisingly good job of communicating this through the visual images and text in this small (well under 200 pages) book.

With chapters ranging through eggs, pasta, desserts, meat and fruit, there's a wealth of information here for both inexperienced and veteran cooks. The chapter on sauces, for instance, covers - amongst others - stocks, gravies, hollandaise, mayonnaise and vinaigrette alongside sweet sauces like pastry cream and fruit coulis. The meat chapter has useful instructions on how to use a simple thumb test for firmness - as in comparing your thumb muscle's resilience to that of the food - as a way to judge how well a piece of meat or fish is cooked. It sure beats having to cut into a piece of steak in the pan to see how bloody it is. The images which accompany grain pilaffs and risottos are similarly helpful and it is always useful to compare your mental image of how a food looks when it is cooked with actual pictures of the real thing. Each section starts with a paragraph on the method of cooking, as well as tips on appropriate seasonings and remedies for technical problems.

Willan does includes several recipes so that readers can experiment with their new-found knowledge (in the apple section, Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin looks particularly good) but there just aren't enough, especially when you get to the chocolate mousse and ganache sections in the desserts chapter. For those associated recipes - Chocolate Mousse with Raspberries and Pecan Truffles - you have to go to the companion book, Best Recipes for Absolutely Everything. As Best Recipes... and How to Cook... are so complimentary to each other, I don't understand why Quadrille Publishing didn't publish both books in the one volume. How to Cook Absolutely Everything is both educational and interesting but it is frustrating to have to go search for recipes in Best Recipes for Absolutely Everything. Only two stars out of fivce - it could have been more.

How to Cook Absolutely Everything and Best Recipes for Absolutely Everything by Anne Willan are published by Quadrille Publishing.

It might be a bit after the date but I don't think it's too late to offer my congratulations on hearing the news that New Zealand's Cuisine magazine has been judged Best Food Magazine in the World at the Gourmet Voice Festival in Cannes at the end of January.

When I arrived in New Zealand I was at first bemused by the range of food magazines on sale. It didn't take me long, though, to realise that Cuisine was head-and-shoulders above the rest. I loved the mix of features, information on local producers and things in season, evocative photography and, most of all, their attitude to FOOD. It introduced me to writers like Ray McVinnie, Genevieve McGough, Julie Le Clerc and Lauraine Jacobs, many of whom also cropped up at Savour New Zealand. One of the first things I did when I arrived back in Ireland was to fork out for a subscription to the magazine and I regularly reference the Cuisine website. Just as well - all my last year's Cuisines are packed away in a box somewhere in Christchurch!

The Gourmet Voice Awards, which aim to reward and promote professionals involved in food and drink communication across all media, awarded Cuisine a gold Gourmet Voice trophy – one of just four golds awarded overall. It's undoubtedly a great publication but which came first? The quality magazine or the nationwide interest in food? And where have we in Ireland gone wrong? New Zealand is a country which constantly gets compared to Ireland. It has a similar population and, in places, a similar climate. Not too similar, however. There's a decided lack of vines in the midlands and the people at Athena Olives in Waipara, where I spent a day olive picking, were very surprised that we don't have olive trees in Ireland. Perhaps it is our reliance on imported fruit and vegetables that strips us of the interest and pride in cooking? After being able to buy such a range of local produce in Christchurch I was amazed to see how much of the organic fruit and vegetables on sale at the Temple Bar Market was imported. For a small country, New Zealand does punch far above its weight in the food world, both in producing and in consuming creatively. We're not doing too badly - I am always encouraged when I read Darina Allen's weekly letter in The Examiner - but we've a long way to go before we've the kind of food culture which would support a publication like Cuisine.

Last week we were going to one of the semi-regular dinner parties hosted by our friend the Tax Advisor. The Tax Advisor loves to host - but he doesn't cook. For years now he has been hosting these dinner parties in his city centre apartment while the other guests come bearing food and dishes and, on several occasions, spare chairs!

For the first dinner in his new flat, there were eight guests. This time there was no point in bringing spare chairs as the Tax Advisor doesn't have a table. Or many plates. Or any serving spoons. Or a sharp knife. So, faced with such a lack of utensils, I decided to cook the dish that I was going to bring for dinner at home the night before. As a couple of the guests are vegetarian, it gave me an opportunity to work on one of my favourite meatless recipes from last year - Chickpea and Tomato Curry.

A trawl through the Asian Market on Dublin's Drury Lane furnished me with a large bunch of spinach - I had decided to turn the curry into a Chickpea, Spinach and Tomato Curry - and I got a similarly generous bunch of fresh coriander at Middle Eastern shop Spiceland, along with the tinned tomatoes. My spice cupboard was well supplied with all the ingredients for an Indian curry (mainly from the Boyfriend's previous trip to Spiceland) and, as usual, I had soaked too many chickpeas (from more local Middle Eastern shop Al Khyrat in Rathmines) the previous night.

I cooked the curry, from start to finish, in my large cast-iron casserole dish, which also had the advantage of being transportable, adding the garam masala, spinach and coriander at the Tax Advisor's flat when it was reheating (I forgot the lemon!). I also forgot the natural yoghurt that I normally serve with this although I did remember to bring a large pot of cooked basmati rice which turned out perfectly fluffy despite me:
1) not putting enough water in at first
2) adding more then having to take the pot off the heat to take it across town
3) forgetting about it when we got there, and then
4) landing the whole pot in the oven to warm up.
About the only thing that I did right was in following my rule to not stir the rice AT ALL. Basmati rice seems to be very good natured as long as you don't mess with it.

We got round the lack of a table by spreading a picnic rug on the floor and laying the feast on top. There was rather a lot of food with my curry only one of (approximately) eight courses - an assortment of Indian starters, bruschetta, asparagus wrapped in Parma ham, vegetarian fajitas, sherry trifle, French pastries with coffee and delicious sangria to finish. Richly replete, we all rolled home - until the next time the Tax Advisor decides to summon us to a co-operative dinner party...

When I started Bibliocook in New Zealand almost a year ago, there weren't that many NZ food blogs. Barbara at Auckland's Winos and Foodies was in contact early on and I've since enjoyed reading her posts about Real Mexican Hot Chocolate, pumpkins, wine and books - I have to especially credit her with introducing me to remarkable Australian chef Gay Bilson. On one of my regular wanders over to Winos and Foodies I suddenly realised that there was a list of new food blogs on her side nav. After spending a couple of hours wandering around their sites, I now introduce you to several of the (blogging) foodies in NZ...

My first introduction to Ursula Ferrigno was through a book called Bread (published by Dorling Kindersley) that she co-wrote with Eric Treuillé, the owner of London shop/haven Books For Cooks. It's an eminently useful publication with, as is the Dorling Kindersley way, plenty, almost too many, illustrations. This became a much-used publication in my kitchen - especially when the Boyfriend appointed himself official bagel-maker! - and so it was with great interest I turned to Ferrigno's latest book, Trattoria: Food for Family and Friends.

Fortunately publishers Mitchell Beazley don't go in for the totally step-by-step, picture-at-each-stage idea. Trattoria is more atmospheric than the dictatorial Bread but the quality of the recipes doesn't suffer from that. Ferrigno has published several other well-regarded Italian cookery books and she certainly knows her stuff. Each recipe starts with a paragraph where she talks evocatively about the ingredients used, the history of the dish and the area that the food is associated with. The emphasis throughout is on fresh, regional and seasonal food and, while Ferrigno celebrates tradition, she is not hide-bound by it.

Ferrigno includes recipes from and little histories of some of her favourite trattoria, tempting the reader to visit Italy as well as cooking its food. The book is sumptuously photographed by Francesca Yorke - the dishes, as well as the people, produce and landscape - and will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in Italian food. All I need now is a map so I can plot my gastronomic tour of Italy!

Trattoria: Food for Family and Friends by Ursula Ferrigno is published by Mitchell Beazley.

Before I left Ireland in 2004 I heard great reports about a new Vietnamese restaurant in Dublin's Temple Bar. As it happened, the Boyfriend and I were hoping to visit Vietnam while either journeying to or from New Zealand but this never happened. Since my return, the regular mentions of in the cookbooks, magazines and websites that I read have piqued my interest so I jumped at the chance to take the Boyfriend to dinner in Hô Sen last night.

The restaurant is right behind the Central Bank, in what was the wonderful but short-lived Panem restaurant (fortunately their cross-Liffey Panem café still continues to produce the most wonderful coffee, chocolate-stuffed brioche and filled focaccia breads at 21 Lower Ormond Quay). A freezing cold night at our backs made us glad to arrive at the welcoming restaurant and we were glad to settle ourselves indoors at a table simply dressed with both chopsticks and western cutlery, wine glasses and paper napkins. We were even happier with the large bowl of prawn crackers and Nuoc Cham, Vietnamese dipping sauce, that was on the table for us to nibble as we perused the menu. And there was a plenty for the perusal - 16 starters, salads and soups headed up an extensive menu that also included two dozen mains along with a selection of side dishes, rice and noodles.

A couple of glasses of iced water arrived on the table as we browsed - an appreciated gesture - and, when the waiter saw that we hadn't quite made up our minds, he took our drink order and left us to decide without pressure. Having loved the Huia Vineyard Gewürztraminer that we had with our Indochine meal in Christchurch, we went straight for the Kendermanns Gewürztraminer from Germany on the wine menu. It was a pleasant but unremarkable wine - we would have been better off with a few bottles from the boxes of Tiger Beer that were arriving out to a large neighbouring birthday party.

Seeing as both Darina and Rachel have recently been assuring the readers of their cookery books that it's become very fashionable to entertain at home instead of going out - that, and the fact that the Boyfriend and I finally have somewhere to call home - we had some friends round last week after work for hot chocolates. It was a bitterly cold evening as I made my way home from work so I decided to supplement the hot chocolates with some soup.

With just 20 minutes before my guests were due to arrive, I crossed my fingers and opened the cupboard doors. After a quick scan of the ingredients available to me, and with one eye on the clock, I decided to merge two recipes. The first was a Roast Tomato and Lentil Soup that Judith Cullen had cooked at a Christchurch cookery demonstration but, having neither the time for roasting tomatoes nor cooking lentils, I took the idea of that recipe and added it to my speedy store cupboard saviour, Fran's Best Lentil Soup. A tin supplied the lentils and, if the roasted tomatoes were not available to me, I could at least substitute some decent Italian tinned plum tomatoes picked up on sale earlier in the week at The Best of Italy on Dunville Avenue in Ranelagh. No fresh thyme either this time round but, as this is supposed to be a store cupboard soup, it's probably not so bad to use dried.

Luckily, while getting milk for the hot chocolates, I had already picked up some decent Brown Soda Bread on the way home. We served mugs of the soup with thick slices of the bread and plenty of good salty Irish butter. A warming opening for a relaxing evening of hot chocolates, cookies and lots of chat.

Nationwide is a thrice-weekly Irish television show which consists of a collection of pieces on life in the country. Covering art, music, photography and - to my delight - food, it's the kind of programme much loved by grannys and parents who believe that RTÉ is altogether too Dublin-centric. Although I don't have a television, I keep an eye on the foodie side of things through the Nationwide website as they've been particularly good at highlighting artisan producers. I've mentioned it before in relation to the Fergusons of Gubbeen and last Friday's show also had a couple of pieces worth checking out.

Since coming back to Ireland I've been hearing a lot about the Good Things Café and Cookery School down in Durrus, West Cork. It crops up in the Bridgestone Guides as well as Georgina Campbell's The Best of the Best and I've also been impressed with owner Carmel Somers' avowed obsession with local, seasonal, organic and free range ingredients. Being in an area where customers are few and far between in winter, she's also started a cookery school and that was the focus of last Friday's interview.

The show also featured Sarah Hehir and Emily Sandford of Cocoabean Artisan Chocolates in Limerick. Despite my post about their chocolates in December, I must admit that I still haven't got round to trying some of their fabulous-sounding flavour combinations. And it's not often that I procrastinate about chocolate tasting!

The piece on last Wednesday's programme about traditional butter-making is also well worth a look, especially as Jean Beattie gives instructions for making your own butter at home in a jam-jar! First making my own bread, then cheese. What's next? Perhaps butter...

Coming back from New Zealand, I keep getting told that "staying in is the new going out" and this would seem to be borne out by the publication of both Darina Allen's Easy Entertaining and her daughter-in-law Rachel Allen's Favourite Food For Friends within a few weeks of each other in late 2005.

While Rachel's book is a perfectly acceptable selection of recipes if you're interested in cooking for friends at home, Easy Entertaining is a far more comprehensive tome. Darina has gathered over 250 recipes that cover everything from three-course dinners to tapas and one-pot suppers and this book is full of excellent ideas with plenty of modern twists on old standards. There's nothing too complicated here for kitchen novices but entertaining experts will be definitely be pleased with the variety on offer - Spiced Chicken and Red Peppers with Orzo, Tomato and Coconut Milk Soup, Martha Rosenthal's Red Lentil Dahl are just a few of the recipes I currently have bookmarked in my copy.

While I would avoid the section that deals with party games, Tom Doorley's advice on picking wine and drinks is very useful although I was rather annoyed at his use of sterling prices instead of euros.

Easy Entertaining is, however, a book that you will return to again and again, whether you have the excuse of cooking food for friends - or you just want some innovative dishes to cook for yourself. Rachel may be flavour of the month at the moment but she has a long way to go before I'd turn to her before Darina.

Easy Entertaining by Darina Allen is published by Kyle Cathie, €25

Ilva at Lucullian delights - an Italian experience tagged me for the Common Cold Remedies Meme. This was started by Raquel over at Raquel's Box of Chocolate when she asked what people do when they have the sniffles - and to pass on any remedies. This is a particularly good time of the year to be investigating ways of killing a cold but - fortunately - I've not had this problem yet. That doesn't mean that I don't know what to do, however...

When I start to get that throat-scratchy, stuffy-head feeling of a cold coming on, Echinacea and food are my first lines of defence. I've been known to cook my reliable Chicken with Garlic and Lemon albeit with lime, instead of lemon, and using masses of chilli and fresh ginger with the garlic. Actually, most times that I feel under the weather, chilli, ginger and garlic are remedies that I rely on. Chicken Noodle Soup is another winner when I'm not feeling good but, when I can't quite manage to drag myself out to the shops, this Lentil Soup is a storecupboard winner. The recipe actually comes via an ex-housemate's mother and, over the years, was passed on to all inmates of 13 Richmond Hill. If you can manage to shuffle into the kitchen you can make this soup and lace it with extra garlic if you're feeling under the weather. It's so simple that, if you have a tin of lentils on the shelf (a must in my kitchen!), it can be whipped up in a matter of minutes. Thyme is an optional extra - if you have it, great. If you have fresh thyme, even better. If you don't have it at all, that's fine too. This is a terribly forgiving soup - just the thing you need to make you feel better. Comfort in a bowl.