broccolini salad

Moving out of SE1 and into EC1 has meant bidding a sad farewell to Borough Market and a frosty hello to Waitrose as the nearest provider of groceries until I get my arse around to having a weekly box delivered. After avoiding all big supermarkets for two years it is frankly depressing. But a curious thing happened the other day. I found myself buying all sorts of fancy veggies the likes of which I wouldn't normally look twice at on a market stall. Broccolini might be de rigeur for some but I've never so much as given it a sideways glance before. And then there's the plate arrangement. Odd, very odd.

What you need for the salad

Broccolini spears
1 witlof
Lemon juice
Salt'n'peppa

Getting it on

Chop off the witlof stalk then discard any crappy outer leaves and the core. Separate, wash and dry the remaining leaves then arrange 6 to 8 of the bigger ones on your plate in the shape of flower petals if your posh heart so desires. Chop the rest into small pieces. Bring some salted water to the boil. Add the broccolini for two minutes, then drain and plunge into cold water to stop it cooking. Drain, toss with the chopped witlof, a bit of lemon juice and salt'n'peppa then arrange the broccolini mix on the witlof leaves.

For the pesto cream

I didn't want the hardcore oily richness of a regular parmesan pesto so I improvised.

A large handful of big basil leaves
A handful of pine nuts
A generous glug of olive oil
A generous glug of red wine vinegar
About 6 cornichons (optional)
A generous tablespoon of cream or yoghurt
Salt and pepper to taste
A squeeze of lemon juice

Getting it on

To make the pesto, all you really need to do is mix all the ingredients together in a blender. But I'd advise adding the oil, vinegar and cream/yoghurt a little at a time to taste until you achieve the desired tartness and creaminess. And hey presto, fancy pesto is all yours.

ravishing Ravioli and comely cupcakes

Guy dropped into our new flat on Saturday evening then we strolled to his for dinner. I say this because it's amazing to be able to walk between houses in London at all, it's so huge, rather than it being some sort of progressive dinner party (especially given all I offered by way of nibbles was a bag of twiglets).

When we arrived at Guy's he pulled out the kitchen stadium big guns; scrumptious potato, rosemary and parmesan ravioli with wild mushrooms followed by his signature dessert: cup cakes (this time, Lemon Four Ways). Adam and I waddled home trashed and very, very full.



Here are Guy's recipes, straight from the horse's mouth (with a few editorial changes so they make sense). It looks stupidly long but, remember, we are making pasta, sauce and dessert from scratch, people!! So deep breaths and leave your ADHD at the door...

Both the pasta recipe and filling were adapted from Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy: Food and Stories. You will get four decent serves.

For the pasta:

500gm strong flour
3 eggs
2 extra egg yolks
salt
Olive oil

Making it:

Make a well in the flour and mix in the eggs, first with spoon then your hands. I also then push a small hole into the dough and fill it with olive oil and knead for about 10 minutes until well combined. Cover in a damp cloth and sit for 30 minutes.

Roll out with a pasta maker (or rolling pin). Cut into circles to make ravioli pockets.

For the filling:

200gm potatoes
100gm paremesan cheese (grated)
100gm butter
Sprig rosemary
Salt and pepper to season

Making and cooking the ravioli:

Chop, boil, drain and mash the potatoes. Melt the butter with the rosemary sprig in it then remove the rosemary. Add the melted butter and grated cheese to the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper and combine. Fill the ravioli circles using either a mould or buy placing a blob of filling onto the centre of one side of your circle, then folding it over and pressing the edges together. Locatelli added a mint leaf to each ravioli which I did not.

You can make the ravioli ahead of time. Just cover them and put them in the fridge until you need them.

When the sauce is five to ten minutes away, drop the ravioli into boiling, salted water (a few at a time.) Let them rise to the surface then carefully ladel them out with a slotted spoon and place them in dishes.



For the sauce:

Olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
A few sprigs of fresh thyme
1 cup red wine
1/2 cup of veggie or mushroom stock
Salt and pepper to season
3 lots of fancy mushrooms. I chose enoki, oyster and some orangey ones (girolle). Choose them for looks. I like enoki as they taste great and have an interesting texture.
Grated parmesan to serve



Heat some oil, add crushed garlic, then the mushrooms and thyme. Add the more robust mushrooms first (enoki only go in for a few minutes at the end). Once the first mushrooms are starting to soften, add 1 cup of red wine, follwed by some stock and salt and pepper. Cook for no longer than 10 minutes so they don't shrivel too much, but enough to reduce and thicken the sauce.



CUPCAKES: LEMON FOUR WAYS



For the cupcakes:

125gm butter
125gm flour
125gm caster sugar
1 tsp baking powder
3 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs
Zest of two lemons

Making them:

Beat the eggs, sugar, lemon zest and vanilla together. Mix in the sifted flour and baking powder. Melt the butter and stir it into the mix. Divide the mixture between 12 cupcake moulds. Bake for 8 mins at 180C. (For a base cupcake recipe, omit the lemon zest.)

Once baked, I drizzled the cupcakes with lemon syrup (heat the juice of 2 lemons with 150g of sugar until the sugar dissolves) and then made a cut in the cupcakes and filled them with lemon curd.



For the frosting:

125 gm butter
small box of icing sugar (500 gm)
vanilla
Juice and zest of 1 lemon

Whisk all the ingredients together until fluffy. You can cut down on butter and add milk or water if it is too buttery.

It's a blood sport

It was brilliant to see the Guardian food blog, Word of Mouth, include us as their 'photograph of the week' on Monday. Not only is it a lovely thrill to have our topsy turvy little blog featured on someone else's website, reader responses couldn't have been funnier if we'd crafted them ourselves. One food forensics expert managed to gather the following from a single glance at our photo:

'It's not an English tart, its a French tarte. It's too big and sloppy and it has very little of the gooseberry about it. It's just a flanified tart, with stewed gooseberries on top.'

I'm not sure how Sarah Raven -- the originator of the Gooseberry Tart recipe in question -- would take to that. Another reader implored the Guardian to lift its game rather than publish 'mediocre photographs of people's attempts to cook recipes from the latest Guardian food monthly.'

So good we have decided to add a new column to our blog: In Praise of Lily & Chew. Please feel free to throw any mud pies our way and we'll add them to our honour roll. After all, 'nice' is so 1974. Even we know it's much more fun to anonymously bag the shit out of someone!

at home with two kittens and a squashed leg

Today, our home is a hive of activity with our two new kittens, Oscar and Rocky, and our good friend Natalie, recuperating after a road accident.

Nat's leg has been covered in dramatic bruises, and swollen like a Quorn sausage. Thankfully, it's a lot better than it was, and she is in the clear now. She sits on our sofa with her foot up, drinking Darjeeling tea like a princess, so we watched the most pointless film ever made, Marie Antoinette. The cakes looked nice though, which made us think about food.





This dish is inspired by one of the best things on the menu at Huong Viet, the wonderful but maddening restaurant on Englefield Road, N1.
It combines tofu, aubergine and dill - the dill takes a back seat in this dish and comes through in the aftertaste.



What you need
2 small eggplants, sliced 1 cm thick and halved
half a block of tofu chopped into big cubes
a third of a chili, thinly sliced
a few sprigs of dill, chopped
1 tablespoon of bouillon powder dissolved in a Chinese teacup of boiling water
1 small teaspoon of cornflour dissolved in a a splash of cold water
1 clove of garlic, crushed
Spring onions, chopped

The do
Splash some oil in a medium heat frying pan or wok. Add garlic, stir a few times, then add chili. Brown the eggplant. Add tofu, stock, dill and cornflour. Simmer until eggplant goes soft. The goal is to end up with some juice that you can spoon into rice. So if the pan goes dry, add a little more water and stock, mix well, and simmer.
Garnish with chopped spring onions and serve with rice.

The most amazing carrot EVER

Check out this carrot Guy got! Woweeee!!

A Gooseberry tart to warm a Glastonbury heart

I have never been happier in my kitchen than this past week; my clean, hygienic, well stocked, fully functioning kitchen. But then five days eating mud pie garnished with the fetid odour of fermenting portaloos will do that to anyone. Yes, I survived Glastonbury. A filthy, festering, fabulous, crazy escape from anything remotely resembling regular life. There was food, of course, including an astonishingly good range of veggie fare. But then there was cider (pear, apple or strawberry). As quick, regular hits of happy energy go when you are observing a fifth consecutive hour of torrential rain and you can't see your gumboot for the river of mud it's been sucked into, there really is no contest.



Upon our return to London I quickly set about restocking our nutrient depleted bodies with steaming greens and hearty bakes. But I also felt the urge to reach deep into my oven's potential and produce something so delicious it would wash away the memory of baby wipe showers forever. So I gave in to England's current obsession with the gooseberry, something I've never come across before let alone cooked with. (Which explains why I tried to eat one uncooked and I don't really recommend it. The fruit itself is quite sharp and tart, not dissimilar to rhubarb.) This recipe comes from the Glasto weekend edition of the Observer's monthly food magazine.



What you need for a Gooseberry tart

450g Gooseberries (I think you could substitute rhubarb or raspberry)
3 eggs
100g caster sugar
1 x 285ml pack of double cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the pastry

I'll give you the pastry as it appeared in the recipe. It did the job but was a bit crumbly so if you have a preferred sweet shortcrust pastry, go for it. You can get a good base from Tamasin Day-Lewis's book, The Art of the Tart.

150g plain flour
50g caster sugar
75g very cold butter (chopped)
1 egg yolk (mixed with a little ice-cold water)

How to make the pastry

Mix the flour and sugar together before adding the chopped, cold butter.
Pulse in a mixer (or rub with your hands) until it has all crumbled together.
Add the egg yolk and a little ice-cold water and mix it all together with your hands until it rolls into a neat ball.
Roll out on a floured surface and use to line a floured 26 cm tart tin. Mine fell apart a bit and I had to do a bit of cut and pasting but it all came out fine.
Leave in the fridge for 1/2 hour and preheat your oven to 180.
Remove the pastry case from your fridge and bake blind for 10-15 minutes by pricking the base, placing some ovenproof paper over it, then covering it with a layer of dried beans or rice before popping it in the oven.
Take it out and let it cool for a few minutes but leave the oven on. (You don't want the edges to brown much but you don't want the base gooey. If it comes out a bit too moist, remove the beans and pop it back in the oven for a couple more minutes.)

And for the filling

Wash, top and tail the gooseberries.
Mix the eggs, caster sugar, double cream and vanilla extract in a bowl.
Fill the slightly cooled pastry case with an even layer of gooseberries then pour over the egg mix.
Cook for 35 minutes (or until the centre is just firm.)
Gobble with thick cream in your most comfortable jim jams. For best effect, make sure you are warm and toasty inside while your mud caked wellies are in full view on the balcony outside.

Fresh tomato juice. The hardest thing to find.

It's Friday after work. My fella has been away all day drinking steadily at a work do, which I guess means I've got a lot of catching up to do, so it's just a well I'm desperate for a Bloody Mary.

I have all the ingredients I need to make this happen...except for the tomato juice. I stop in a M+S. Nope. Nothing. I decide to drop into the Sainsburys in Angel. Once inside, I realise that one does not simply 'drop in' to this supermarket that is the size of a small city.
After walking around in circles for 45 minutes picking up stuff I don't need, I remember why I'm there. I search for it in the juice aisle. Nothing. I ask the dude for assistance, partly knowing that he won't have the answer I need (I have already searched the chilled section high and low for this elusive nectar of the nightshades).
Wait! He begins walking with a sense of purpose - this could be it?? - I follow him as he leads me 2 kilometres from the refrigerators to the long life 100% concentrate juice.

The silent scream in my head is so loud I almost lapse into a coma.

I will not let Sainsburys get between me and my Bloody Mary. I purchase 2 packs of cherry tomatoes so I can make my own tomato juice.


MY BLOODY MARY EXPERIMENT

What you need
A big packet of cherry tomatoes
A food processor
celery
ice
tabasco
mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire, if you take it
wasabi

The do
Empty the whole packet of tomatoes into food processor. Blitz. It will go a pale, milky, reddy colour which is very disconcerting. Ignore this and continue regardless. Grab a cocktail shaker, add lots of ice, a few drops of mushroom sauce a splodge of wasabi, a double shot of vodka (for all the effort you've gone to) and a few shakes of Tabasco. Shake well.

Pour into a tall glass and garnish with celery.



Note: The celery is the only thing that gives this drink any cred. It tastes OK but consistency is wrong, wrong, WRONG. It's like someone was making a banana smoothie and accidentally added a whole lot of tomatoes and vodka instead.

Next time I'll just get the concentrate.

Simple Salad

Back when I had a TV I remember a show where a chef would pounce on someone in the supermarket then follow them home and cook a meal with only the ingredients he found in their shopping basket, fridge and pantry. Even if you ignore the stalking connotations it wasn't a particularly good show, worse when a friend told me the chef visited her work and allegedly sent the crew shopping to stock the fridge before recording the shot of him arriving to 'discover' the ingredients he was going to cook with. Wuss.

Discovery cooking pretty much sums up my entire culinary philosophy. Planning meals, writing a shopping list, checking a cook book in advance; these are all extremely foreign concepts. Which is why this salad I picked up from Summer in Toronto is such a winner with my fridge, especially at its most bare.

All you need to do is wash, dry and shred some iceberg lettuce then toss it with chopped dill, lemon juice, olive oil, cracked black pepper and sea salt. That's it. Iceberg always tastes better shredded and this dressing makes the little green strings sing. Combined with baked stilton mushrooms, this is a stupidly simple and tasty din dins.

EASY PEASY JAPANESEY

As Lily said, I've been pretty busy lately - but all work and no play doesn't have to mean crappy food. For those Melburnians out there, this dish is my rip-off of the one they serve at the Nudel Bar, and it has been my staple for the last few weeks.


Green tea soba noodles and avocado

What you need
Green tea soba noodles or plain japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles
Gari (pink pickled ginger)
a perfectly ripe avocado
good quality soy sauce or tamari
wasabi

The do
Bring a saucepan of cold water to the boil. Drop in a bundle of soba noodles (they usually come divided in neat little bundles, don't forget to remove the tape!) Boil for a few minutes until they are cooked. Drain and rinse with cold water. Drain well and pile onto a plate.
Cube half an avocado onto the noodles.
Serve with a blob of wasabi, gari and a small dish of soy for dunking the noodles in. Sprinkle with some black sesame seeds and sesame oil if you have it.

'Long time no eat' spicy roast tomato soup

No one wants to be on the receiving end of a blustering excuse so I'll keep the 'lack of post' slash 'repetition of tomato' apologies brief. First, Chew’s been working her head off and I’ve been moving house. So that's that. Second, I have more tomatoes because it just happens to be the season for them. Plus, Chew needs a hearty soup to help revive her hard yakka bones.

So… this little red girl is for whenever you are feeling like a jangling shell rather than a fighting machine and are after some boosting. I don't think you need any more veg than the tomato but I added some because my lovely house friend is of the opinion that soup doesn't count as food so I am obliged to make it chunky.



What you need

1/2 onion, chopped
2 lemon grass sticks (discard the hard outer bits and finely slice the rest)
2 green chilis, finely chopped
A little person's thumb of fresh ginger, finely grated (ie. not much but then I'm not a huge ginger lover)
1 large potato, cubed (or six little ones, halved)
1 zuchinni, finely sliced
A bunch of fresh coriander
6 big tomatoes (or more if you want)
2 garlic cloves
Miso paste or veg stock
Olive oil
Salt'n'pepa
Water to fill your soup pot

How it goes

Preheat the oven to 200c. Chop 2 of the tomatoes into quarters then toss them with olive oil and your potatoes in an oven tray (with some salt'n'pepa and a splash of red wine vinegar if you want). Squash, shell and roughly chop the garlic into quarters. Stuff them into the tomatoes then put the tray of veggies in the oven to roast for 15-20 minutes.

In a soup sized pot, fry the onion on med-low heat to soften with the lemon grass, chilli and ginger. After a few minutes, add the zuchinni and whatever other fresh veg you desire. When the onion is soft, add the diced tomato, water and miso paste (or veg stock). Add your roast veg and and their juices (swill a little water around the pan if need be). Bring the whole shebang to a boil then let it simmer like a grumpy old drunk for at least 30 minutes.

This is a real cleansing soup. If you've got some crusty bread, great. If you’ve got a crusty nose, you'll be whistling dixie by the morning.