Bibliocook: All About Food

Our last Bibliofemme bookclub - for The Rum Diaries by Hunter S Thompson - was held at my flat on a rapidly-darkening autumn evening. The previous evening had been cold and dreary as I walked home from my webmaster course so I decided to start a soup, leave it sit overnight, and then finish it off as the girls arrived. I'd recently come across Julie Le Clerk's version of Harira in an old copy of Cuisine so this was a good opportunity to try it out. I had made a meatless version of this last year in Christchurch but this time round I had plans for a complete meal in a bowl, stuffed with lamb, lentils, chickpeas and, after a look at Claudia Roden's version of the fast-breaking soup, haricot beans.

This is really one of those soups best made the night before you need it as the flavour improves so much by the spices having a chance to infuse the other ingredients overnight. And that makes life a lot easier if you have people coming round too. All you have to do as your guests arrive (or while one of them hoovers the floor - many thanks to the Connoisseur!) is reheat the soup, put a few warmed flatbreads or pita breads on the table and a bowl of natural yoghurt and just let everybody help themselves. This cauldron of Harira fed the six Bibliofemmers as well as a hungry - and very outnumbered! - Boyfriend, everyone taking their own soup from the table to their seat where we alternately juggled bowls and the two babies that had also turned up. Filling, suitably autumnal and - most importantly - hassle free!

Continue reading "Harira for bookclub" »

In Berlin most of this week to present the Other Voices website at the Prix Europa internet competition. A total of 22 sites are nominated for the Exploration award, each of which has to give a half-hour presentation. Our area of the competition is fortunately limited to three days - long, intense and tiring but also incredibly rewarding. It's not often you get the chance to sit down with your professional peers to discuss and share concepts, ideas and inspiration from all over Europe. As for getting to see Berlin, forget it. The most I've experienced so far is through the window of the bus that takes us to Potsdam every morning or from a taxi speeding home through a hushed late-night cityscape. I've a free day on Saturday though - perhaps time to explore some markets, discover Berlin and, of course, have some close encounters with German food, for myself.

Update Sunday 22 October: And the winners were...the team behind the wonderful Fantastic Stories from Denmark. Many congratulations to Sidsel and Ole!

Well, after a few years of searching - plus 2½ never-ending months of frustrating to-ing and fro-ing with mortgage providers, solicitors and auctioneers - the Boyfriend and I have finally managed to take possession of a little country cottage, our Irish bach, in North County Cork. It is a typically small Irish cottage with a pair of small bedrooms upstairs. It could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as roomy although the current lack of furniture does make it feel slightly more spacious!

Last Saturday was spent scrubbing and scouring every surface before we spent our first night there so, as you can imagine, very little cooking was done. We brought a couple of Nigella's Dense Chocolate Loaf Cakes down with us (Cee at Kitchen on Clarendon has the recipe online here), for visitors and to encourage the cleaners' morale at low blood-sugar moments. All meals seem to have been eaten at speed as we listed all the things that we had yet to organise. My exploration of my new kitchen was limited to turning on the cooker to heat up some comforting Chicken Noodle Soup that travelled over from my mother's 15-miles-distant kitchen in a borrowed saucepan.

Luckily we bought a table and chairs with the house so, even if there wasn't much time for eating there was something to sit at and on. Even better, we've also acquired a damson tree (and a pot of delicious damson jam from the former owners), a few blackcurrant bushes, three still-fruiting apple trees and a half an acre of overgrown land, already complete with numerous inhabitants of the rabbit variety. Looks like the Boyfriend's dream veggie garden may have to wait until we figure out a way of dealing with the infestation. At the moment, as we will still continue to live and rent in Dublin during the week, it may be a little difficult to figure out how best to rid ourselves of the beasties. Rabbit Stew, anyone?

In yet another of my infrequent series of alerts about Irish food programmes, a new RTÉ Radio 1 show called Boiled, Baked & Basted started on Saturday night. It features chefs talking about the favourite and most inspirational cookbooks in their collection (Bibliochef, perhaps?!) and the first show has Paul Flynn of the acclaimed Tannery Restaurant in Dungarvan talking about books by Marco Pierre White, "scary hero" Elizabeth David, the esteemed list-topping Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson and two books that speak directly to my love of Middle Eastern food - The Moro Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark and Arabesque: A taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon by Claudia Roden. If you, like me, are interested in cookbooks (in my house you'll find piles of cookbooks by the bed, on the dining table, in the living room, and a row to reference on the kitchen counter) you'll find this programme very interesting.

Boiled, Baked & Basted is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Saturday nights at 8.30pm and the Paul Flynn show is also available to listen to online here. Incidentally, Paul Flynn is also the author of two cookbooks himself, An Irish Adventure with Food: The Tannery Cookbook and Second Helpings: Further Irish Adventures with Food, both published by the Cork-based Collins Press.

With the onset of cooler weather, the amount of cooking and baking in my house has increased, if not the recent writing about it. It's no longer torturously hot in our tiny kitchen if the oven is on and, as a result, I've gotten back into baking old reliables like Brown Soda Bread and our favourite Chocolate Flapjacks as well as trying out new recipes for Bill Granger's Coconut Loaf (especially good toasted), Peanut Butter Cookies (very moreish) from current favourite cookbook, Comfort by Michele Cranston and a zesty Lemon Poppy Seed Loaf that I decided to make in homage to the tasty muffins that I usually get in Dún Laoghaire from the California Market Bakery.

Weekend visitors have given me the opportunity to investigate some new vegetarian recipes, especially a Greek Bean and Pepper Stew using some enormous gigantes beans that nearly took over the kitchen after an overnight soaking, and our monthly bookclub is always a good time for thinking up a new soup idea and this time it's a meaty, bulked up version of Harira. I hope to cover all these recipes on the site soon but the webmaster course that I'm doing, a fast-approaching business trip to Berlin and a concurrent house purchase seem to be eating far more time than they should!

While at last year's Savour New Zealand, Australian chef Greg Malouf was just back from a month spent travelling and eating in Lebanon and Syria and he spoke enthusiastically about the book that he was writing with his former wife, Lucy, based on the time they spent there. Saha is the gorgeous end result. A beautifully designed book which is equally comfortable on your coffee table as in your kitchen, it comes across as a pure labour of love.

While Greg explores flavours from his childhood and finds new inspiration for his cooking, Lucy documents their travels and relates stories about the craftspeople they meet, the food culture and the history of both countries. He supplies the recipes - Green Beans Slow-Cooked with Cumin and Tomatoes; Grilled Tiger Prawn Shish Kebabs with Spicy Cracked Wheat Salad and Tomato Dressing; Crunchy Sesame-Pistachio Biscuits - while she furnishes the context.

Lucy writes in a very personal and honest way of their experiences, occasional misgivings and adventures in places like the Roman remains at Baalbeck and Palmyra, the legendary desert kingdom of Queen Zenobia. Her stories and the evocative images by photographer Matt Harvey are complimented by Greg's recipes, in chapters that range from Mezze Dips and Meat Mezze to Sweet Treats and Beverages. There are new ingredients - desert truffles, mastic, barberries - and some complex recipes but many of the dishes are easily managed and, after my success with Greg's yoghurt instructions, that recipe is set to become a staple in my kitchen.

Saha depicts a Lebanon still scarred, but recovering, from the ravages of the civil war that ended in 1990. People are hopeful about the future, Beirut is nearly reconstructed, tourists are starting to investigate the beauties of the country. Sadly, after this summer's shameful Israeli invasion, it is impossible not to wonder what has happened to the people and places that Greg and Lucy met and visited.

Also reviewed on Bibliocook: Moorish by Greg and Lucy Malouf