Bibliocook: All About Food

Friday afternoon was a good time to be at the inaugural Taste of Dublin event as blazing sunshine encouraged a cheerful and good humoured crowd to linger, sample and wander around a Dublin Castle courtyard crowded with stands and stalls. My €35 ticket (I managed to keep the dreaded Ticketmaster booking fees to €2 by buying from the Ticketmaster outlet in Stephen's Green Shopping Centre) entitled me to €20-worth of florins, the festival currency, but the sky was the limit as soon as you set foot inside the event areas. With sample signature dishes priced from €5 to €8, that €20 didn't last long and I've even read of people spending another €70 on top of that. I was well behaved though - after spending my first €20-worth, I just bought €5 extra - and, although portions were less than generous, I would have been hard pressed to find something I really wanted to spend more on. It doesn't have to be a taste of Dublin to be good.

As I had decided to avoid all restaurants that I had previously eaten in, the first of the stands to catch my eye was Gary Rhodes' much hyped (and not yet open) Dublin venture, Rhodes D7. For my first €5 I got a shot glass of tangy White Roasted Cherry Tomato Soup with a salty stick of Olive Bread. Good - but much too tiny. L'Ecrivan's contribution to my afternoon was Natural Smoked Haddock Linguini with Asparagus and Peas, Light Curry Froth (€5). Spaghetti had been substituted for the linguine and the thinner strands of pasta weren't as good at holding the intensely flavoured cream sauce which remained, in lonely puddles, at the bottom of my bowl.

After a few more circuits of the food stalls, I chose La Stampa's Braised Quail with Savoy Cabbage (€6). This was by far the largest portion I got so I took one of the few seats available to give it my fullest concentration. No matter how nice, food always suffers from being eaten while you stand, constantly juggling plates and bags. Although the wooden knife I was given was no match for the meaty portion of quail, there weren't many scraps left by the time I finished. The Town Bar and Grill's Strawberry and Cassis Pavlova with Mascarpone Cream was my summer-appropriate but not-so-grand finale. Although perfectly pleasant, there was little flavour from the promised cassis.

On the wine side of things, there were small samples aplenty with glasses of wine available from €4. The most interesting part of the day for me was meeting the passionate wine importers behind www.spanishwines.ie. Already selling to off-licenses and restaurants in Ireland, they've just launched a website selling these under-represented wines and a glass of their fragrant Guitian Godello (easily recognisable from its smart, art deco-style label) was a perfect drink on such a warm day and, I can only surmise, a great accompaniment to some tapas for a Spanish-style summer's evening with friends.

As a taster of Dublin restaurants, this event was exactly what it said on the tin although I don't know if I would be hurrying off to visit any of the restaurants that I sampled on the day. The Cellar Restaurant's fantastic looking Fish and Chips, served in a cone of paper with a dollop of mushy peas, nearly had me breaking my resolve to avoid familiar restaurants and I had to turn my back to avoid looking at the dishes produced by the much-loved Silk Road Café. Reports from my cousin, the Environmental Scientist, gave top marks to the White Truffle Risotto (also from the Cellar Restaurant) and Roly's Hot Chocolate Pudding. Although she got rained on during the Saturday afternoon session, she wasn't undaunted and already has a plan for 2007: "We'll have to go back next year (with rain gear, regardless of the forecast!) in a group of at least four, get there early, bag a table, stay at it and then get as much as possible from each place and bring it back for everyone to share!"

Although I did enjoy the afternoon's tasting, the most exciting thing was the sheer number - and variety - of people there, swapping tips on the best dishes, stealing forkfuls from each other's plates, sharing tables with strangers, enjoying the sunshine together. If you didn't manage to make it to Taste of Dublin, take Maman Poulet's advice and take the price of the ticket to your local farmers' market for good food and tasting aplenty.

In the summertime I love to cook quiches and tarts - although I do have to admit that I often cheat and use ready-made frozen pastry. When I've time to actually make the pastry as well as the quiche (all too often it becomes a trade-off), I use Susan Loomis' short, sumptuous and food processor-friendly recipe but, last Friday, with our Scottish ex-NZ Housemates coming round for dinner, there simply wasn't time. I ditched the idea of making the pastry but, while talking to our guests from the kitchen and getting some salad together, I did manage to give the onions enough cooking time so that they were meltingly sweet and a really good base for the rest of the flavours - pungent smoked bacon and sharp mature cheddar cheese.

There are undoubtedly thousands of recipes and interpretations for Quiche Lorraine but my recipe always has plenty of cream and the minimum of eggs. That means that the sweet, slow cooked onions, smoked bacon and cheese are nestled in a rich, voluptuous custard which wobbles slightly when cut. This is not necessarily a slimmer's choice for supper but it always seems to be an appreciated one. If you were being very frugal you could probably use less cream and more eggs - but then it wouldn't have that glorious custard which, after all, is the main point of a quiche.

A word about baking blind: there are many recipes that don't bother to pre-bake the pastry case before adding the filling - known as baking blind - but, all too often, I've found that it means the base is disappointingly soggy and undercooked. When you're making a quiche or tart, just roll out the pastry first and use it to line the quiche tin. Use tinfoil or greaseproof paper to line the pastry-lined tin and weigh it down with - if you're hyper-organised - ceramic baking beans or, if you're me, some dried beans, chickpeas or uncooked rice. (I store these and just reuse them when ever I'm baking blind. I've currently got a jar of very well cooked barley that I use.) Bake the pasty shell in your preheated oven at 190°C for about 10 minutes, take out the tinfoil/greaseproof paper and baking beans, and give it another 5 minutes in the oven. It is now ready for filling and baking immediately or you can set it aside and use it the next day. As well as baking blind, cooking your quiche on a preheated baking sheet (just put it into the oven when you're turning it on) will also help to avoid soggy bottom situations.

Continue reading "Quiche Lorraine for a summer supper" »

Ever since I saw Feast@Home by New Zealand food writer Julie Le Clerk I've been wanting to make the cake on the cover - a Chocolate Ripple Sliver Cake. But, every time I've re-read the recipe, I've realised afresh that I simply can't make it without an electric handheld mixer.

Now, I know that it's possible to cream sugar and butter together by hand, that eggs and sugar can be whipped to a light froth without an electric mixer, and that it's possible to beat egg whites into stiff peaks with just a hand whisk - but have you ever done it? Do you know how much it makes your hand and arm ache? And how damn LONG it takes?! The last time that I made a cake involving the creaming method - an Avoca chocolate cake when I was catering the Writer's hen party - my arm nearly fell off and I had to get the Boyfriend out of bed early on a Saturday morning to help mix. I don't think he was best impressed. So, ever since then, I've been taking the long path around any recipes that entail using an electric mixer. But I knew that I'd have to get one someday - there were just too many recipes in my must-cook files that were getting ignored otherwise.

So, last Thursday when I decided that I simply HAD to make Julie Le Clerc's Chocolate Ripple Sliver Cake for Friday night's dinner, I had no time to make a well-considered purchase, instead legging it into cheap household goods store Argos and picked up the Kenwood HM310 Deluxe Handmixer. I don't quite know what's deluxe about it, but - although the engine didn't sound too happy about mixing the chocolate part of the cake - it was still capable of doing the job.

While standing around the kitchen, beating the eggs/sugar mixture and waiting for it to turn "thick and pale" - it took so long, even with the electric mixer, that I would probably still be beating if I had tried to make it by hand - my mind and my eyes were roaming. I couldn't resist adding some freshly grated nutmeg, to compliment the cream cheese topping, and, given that I love the flavour of orange with dark chocolate, the zest of an orange got thrown in there too.

This was one of the first times I've had a suitably decadent recipe to make the most of the 1kg bar of Fairtrade dark chocolate (60% cocoa solids) that I got from the Connoisseur's Italian boyfriend who works in Amnesty and it was fantastic. It's amazing chocolate and is available from Amnesty's Freedom Café at 48 Fleet Street in Dublin's Temple Bar - a great place for a cup of (Fairtrade) coffee and panini, incidentally.

And the cake? Julie isn't joking - it is seriously rich. I easily got 16 slices out of it and we served with ice cream, strawberries and blackberries on the side, the Tax Advisor's contribution to last week's dinner. What little was left over after desert disappeared between that night's drinking and breakfast the next morning. It's always a good sign of a cake when there's nothing but crumbs left the following day. This is also a flourless cake so is perfect - given that you make sure your cream cheese is gluten free and, as far as I know, the Philadelphia brand is - you can happily serve it to all your coeliac and gluten-intolerant friends.

Continue reading "Julie Le Clerc's cake and a new electric mixer" »

Not long after food blogging first cropped up on my radar, I discovered Julie Powell's blog, the Julie/Julia Project. I thought the idea was great - to document her attempts to cook the recipes in Julia Child's classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just one year - but I didn't much like Julie's blog persona and I never went back. How times change. A couple of years later, I couldn't put down the book that she wrote, much of which was taken directly from her the same blog entries that had annoyed me.

While the episodic nature of her adventures in cooking and the concomitant tears and tantrums was - to me, at least, if not to many of her numerous 'bleeders' (Julie's name for her blog readers) - more exasperating than not, her book is far more entertaining than just the sum of its parts. Through her blog, Julie developed her own, very distinctive, voice and her account of the 365 days she spent cooking 524 recipes in her small apartment kitchen has also changed her life.

When Julie started the project she was miserable, an anonymous temp in a New York government office. Twelve months later, having, along the way, learned how to split marrow bones, kill lobsters without a second thought and cooked for New York Times restaurant critic Amanda Hesser, she was an online celebrity with a book deal. It's an online Cinderella story of the kind dreamed about by anyone who has ever wanted to turn their passion into a job and, for that alone, Julie has to be applauded. She's also deserving of acclaim for writing such a funny, exasperating and enjoyable book. Julie & Julia is well worth investing both money and time in.

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell is published by Fig Tree.

When the weather is good no one wants to spend time in the kitchen and, when the Boyfriend arrived home from the supermarket the other day with a large box of button mushrooms, I didn't much feel like frying them or using them in an omelette strognoff or making a mushroom stroganoff or risotto or any one of the thousand and one things I use mushrooms for. I normally prefer the meatier, large flat Portobello mushrooms but, after spending the weeks in Morocco poring over Claudia Roden's salad recipes in A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, I had an idea for these styrofoam buttons.

I'm not a fan of boiling vegetables - it's all too easy to overcook them and you lose so much of the flavour in the water - so I'm always on the look out for alternative ways of cooking them and I've read a lot about the à la greque technique (in the Greek manner), which is vegetables cooked in a mixture of oil and vinegar, or lemon juice, with seasonings added. Claudia's variation on this theme is called Mushrooms in Olive Oil. I threw everything into the pan quickly, simmered it until the mushrooms were tender and then we headed off to a nearby park to sun ourselves. Coming back an hour later, with some fresh crusty bread, the mushrooms made a delicious light supper. The mushrooms were juicy and well-flavoured, there was plenty of dressing to be mopped up and, with a chunk of crumbly cheddar, we were more than happy. A cool supper - or could be a good lunch - for a hot day.

Continue reading "Magic mushrooms" »

For anyone interested in reading a few more food blogs, there's a great article in last Friday's Guardian. Check out the best of the blogs, including several old favourites - Chocolate and Zucchini, 101 Cookbooks, Is My Blog Burning? and Food Blog S'cool. Well worth a look.

The Tax Advisor had decided to have another bring-a-course dinner party and, because the Boyfriend and I have plenty of space in our current Dublin flat - as well as small but useful items such as cooking utensils, crockery, chairs and a table - I volunteered us as hosts. Although there were to be eight for dinner, we decided to avoid having as many courses as last time, and limited it to just an opener, mains plus salads, and deserts. There were still the usual "who's cooking what " emails doing the rounds and, only being just back from our travels, I decided to make something Moroccan.

Having always treated couscous as a salad or accompaniment, it was only during our travels there that I realised it is a dish in itself. Couscous is both a basic ingredient - a semolina, synonymous with Moroccan food - and a dish, which is the semolina topped with a stew with the rich broth served on the side. In Morocco, the stew is often cooked in the bottom of a special two-level pot called a couscoussier (check out the cover of Nigella's Feast to get idea of what it looks like) while the couscous is steamed on top. I had hoped to bring a couscoussier home with me but the morning that the Boyfriend was looking at them he only saw terribly light aluminium ones so we decided to leave it. But there's plenty of other ways of steaming couscous - I often use the microwave and, if you've the oven on, it's as easy to land your tinfoil-wrapped dish of couscous in there until it's warmed through. And, when you've a kilo of raw couscous reconstituted - with six boys going to be in the house, I was having lack-of-food-fear on Friday night! - it definitely won't fit in the microwave.

A bit of scouting around brought me to Claudia Roden's recipe for Couscous with Spring Vegetables (from her current book, Arabesque) which I amalgamated with Paul Gayler's Seven Vegetable Couscous with Dried Fruits and Ras el Hanout (Mediterranean Cook) and several of my own additions - more spices, some tinned tomatoes, a chilli and just a pinch of sugar. Luckily our friend, the English Engineer, turned up just in time to painstakingly peel a bowl of defrosted broad beans. Offering to help in my kitchen often means that you get landed with the fiddly tasks that I don't have time to do! I'm a recent convert to broad beans but don't think that there's any point unless they're naked and vivid green rather than wrapped up in a dull, tough, indigestible skin. The broad beans peeled, they were chucked into a pot of aromatic broth along with six other vegetables to make up the magic (and traditionally Moroccan) seven vegetable combination.

Despite Dublin selling out of Pimm's because of this current stretch of glorious summer weather, we managed - courtesy of the English Engineer and his flight through Stanstead - to get our hands on a couple of bottles, making a suitably atmospheric opening to a very entertaining evening. As a matter of fact, we ended up having such a good time that some people didn't get home until Saturday evening - they still didn't manage to finish the couscous mountain though! Note to self: a kilo of couscous is more likely to feed 12-14 people than just 8...

Continue reading "A mountain of couscous" »

For anyone looking to experience some of the tastes, sounds and aromas of Morocco without having to travel too far, a Moroccan Market will take place next week, from Wednesday 14 to Sunday 18 June in Dublin's Wolfe Tone Park next to the Jervis Centre. Situated in Temple Bar Square last year, apparently the textiles, jewellery, pottery and - most importantly! - food were very popular. It's certainly worth checking out. More information is available on the Temple Bar Cultural Trust website here.

Lonely Planet's World Food Morocco
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Having travelled and eaten our way around Thailand and Malaysia with the respective versions of these small, incredibly useful books, I recently added their Moroccan edition to my collection. Dense with information on everything from food customs to street foods and including recipes for traditional Moroccan dishes like couscous and tagines, they're an invaluable resource while travelling. A mine of fascinating facts on argan oil, which is used to make the nutty breakfast spread called amalou; details of the ubiquitous mint tea and other drinks; regional variations in foodstuffs; and the utensils used in the Moroccan kitchen. A selection of great photos help you to identify ingredients and - Lonely Planet are nothing if not thorough! - it also has a dictionary of culinary terms, a glossary and useful phrases in both Arabic and French. As well as our well-used Malaysia & Singapore and Thailand books, the Lonely Planet World Food series also covers places like Portugal, Vietnam, Ireland (but, to the Boyfriend's disgust, no New Zealand!), Greece and New Orleans. An invaluable travelling companion.

La Cuisine Marocaine by Latifa Bennani-Smirès
I picked up an idiosyncratic English translation of this in Marrakech and - odd syntax and spelling aside - it is a very engaging book. Recipes for rghaïf and beghrir vie for space with details of how to make and shape pâtisserie Marocaine, the small, intensely sweet, rich and fragrant nut-filled pastries that are served with mint tea. There is little in the way of introductory detail about these and many other dishes although the methods are well explained.

The pick of the bunch...

A New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden
The grandmother of them all. This book - a reissue of Claudia's 1972 landmark Book of Middle Eastern Food - is not just about Moroccan food but includes dishes from across the countries of the Middle East, putting them firmly in context, both historically and geographically. Last year I took this book out of the library in Christchurch but, after reading just a few pages, knew that I had to get my own copy as there were so many recipes that I wanted to investigate. The introduction is a culinary history of the Middle East as Claudia tracks the techniques and ingredients that travelled in the wake of conquerors and oftentimes remained in situ long after their empires had disintegrated. Traditional stories, folklore and songs are dotted through the recipes, further enriching the text. There are more than 800 recipes in this book - and that doesn't count the frequent regional and national variations also detailed after the recipes.

The paperback is perfect for holiday reading although 1) it's important to avoid reading it when you're hungry and 2) it did make me long for my own kitchen to try out her recipes. Not as unashamedly greedy as Nigel, Claudia still manages to convey her infectious love for and interest in these dishes as well as her belief that food is all about family and friends. It's a bible for anyone who, like me, loves to cook with the ingredients of the Middle East - cumin and coriander, preserved lemons and lentils, fresh herbs and harissa. An absolutely invaluable book.

And, when you come home:

Get your hands on Greg Malouf's Arabesque for an important A-Z of Middle Eastern ingredients and what to do with them after dragging them from plane to train to automobile. Another book that I haven't read myself but which cropped up several times in my foodie research on Morocco is Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfert. Paula has a website here. New Zealand author Julie Le Clerc also has a wonderfully colourful cookbook called Made in Morocco.

Honey - Moroccan honey is the most un-honey-tasting honey that I've ever eaten. We often had it for breakfast, the rich caramel sweetness drizzled across English muffin-styled Moroccan pancakes called beghrir or the flaky, multi-layered rghaïf. Accompanied with a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a café crème, it made the perfect start to the day.
Spices - although I've been really happy with my old blend of ras el hanout from Greg Malouf's Moorish, I couldn't resist the chance of picking up some more to compare and contrast it with what I use. I also got turmeric, ground ginger and two types of chilli powder(at least I think that's what piment fort/piment doux means!).
Olives - a kilo of green olives in what the shopkeeper described as "piquante" flavouring and another half kilo of wrinkled sweet black olives. I loved how each meal in Morocco started with a small bowl of these olives and a basket of flatbread as we perused the menu. They never lasted long.
Dates - considering the variety and quality on offer, I was restrained and came home with only a half kilo of the sweet, plump fruit. One dish that kept turning up in the books that I read while travelling there was of a roasted fish, stuffed with almond-filled dates. Must try and keep a few true Moroccan dates to try out that recipe.
Preserved lemons - while picking up the olives and dates in a small shop near the Casablanca train station, minutes before we had to get the train to the airport, I couldn't resist getting a few of these glorious-looking lemons. This, despite the fact that I'd made a jarful from some organic lemons before I left Ireland! Another thing for the compare and contrast experiments, methinks.
Garlic - the small bulbs of garlic available in Morocco are much sweeter than the stuff that you can find on sale in Ireland. I love to use raw garlic but it can be very off-putting if, instead of gently cosying up to the other ingredients, it decides to loudly broadcast its presence. I brought some good quality garlic home from Paris and it lasted me ages so I couldn't resist grabbing a couple of bulbs in Casablanca when I got the chance.

Continue reading "Moroccan (foodie) souvenirs" »

After two weeks of sunshine and heat in Morocco we've returned to an amazingly summery Ireland - perfect for last night's sun-soaked family party to celebrate my Gran's 90th birthday.

Just in the door of our Dublin flat so sour milk has to be thrown out of the fridge, fresh supplies to be bought and the raw clay Berber tagine that we lugged through a couple of taxi trips, two flights, three airports and a pair of train journeys needs to be unpacked, along with assorted spices, dates, olives, tea, honey and god only knows what else from our travel-beaten rucksacks.

And then I'll have time to sit down and write about the meals, tastes and flavours that I've encountered during my time in Morocco!