Post-hummus perfection

I have been trying to make perfect hummus for YEARS. Every incarnation has had some sort of problem - too thick, too much oil, too garlicky, too bland. I've tried various recipes and that yielded no success either. Last night I went completely off road and I finally stumbled on a winner - it's a total bastardisation of how hummus is usually made, but hey, it tastes good so who cares?

What you need
A hand blender with food processor attachment, or a food processor
1 can of chickpeas, drained
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 clove of garlic chopped
1 tablespoon tahini
olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
some boiled water
salt

The do
In a frying pan, heat a tablespoon of olive oil and fry the garlic for a 30 seconds on medium heat, throw in the spices and drained chickpeas. Fry for a little longer, moving the chickpeas around the pan coating them in the oil and spices. When it starts to smell nice and spicy, take off the heat and transfer into the food processor. Add the tahini, a generous pinch of salt, a glug of olive oil, lemon juice and a splash of boiled water and blitz until smooth, adding more water as needed to achieve the right consistency. Taste and add more salt if needed.

This is great with some salad, tomato and halloumi in a wholemeal pita pocket.

Tunes
IRM Charlotte Gainsbourg

Simply the zest: Part 2

It's been about a week and a half - the snow has melted and been replaced with grey skies and drizzle, and my jar of Ottolenghi lemons haven't gone mouldy like I thought they would.
The next step is to firmly squish the lemons down into the jar getting as much juice out of them as you can.



Then add a few sprigs of rosemary, a big red chili (I split mine down the middle because I thought it would look pretty) and the juice of six lemons and then top it off with a thin layer of olive oil to stop mould growing on top. Now I have to leave them to mellow in the yellow for another four weeks...

Simply the zest: Part 1

Tonight I spent a snowy evening indoors watching 30 Rock. After plowing through most of season one, I was feeling a bit Liz Lemon-ed out...so I decided to take the lemon theme into the kitchen and try out Ottelenghi's preserved lemon recipe.

I've the done the first part: cut a cross into 6 unwaxed lemons lengthways (stopping short 2 cm from the bottom so the lemon is still intact). Stuff each lemon with 1 tablespoon of sea salt then seal them in a sterilised jar.
Now I have to let them mellow for a week. Watch this space...

Fasta pasta

With all the projectile vomit and poo in our house these days, there hasn't been much time or inclination for cooking. Sadly our frozen food supply has run out and the novelty of take-out has worn off - so I've ventured into the kitchen and whipped this up in about 10 minutes, which is almost as quick as picking up the phone and ordering a margarita pizza - and it's much healthier too.

What you need
2 portions of thin spaghetti (I used Barilla no 3 spaghetti)
200g ricotta
Half a lemon
2 handfuls of cooked lentils
1 big bunch of spinach
2 cloves garlic thinly sliced
olive oil

The do
Put the pasta on the boil as per instructions. Chop the spinach. In a large shallow pan on medium/high heat , stir-fry the spinach, lentils and the garlic until the spinach wilts, then take off the heat. By now the pasta should be done. Drain and add pasta to the spinach mixture, toss and add a few good lugs of olive oil. Crumble ricotta over the top and squeeze lemon juice over the whole mixture. Season with a little lemon zest, salt and pepper.

Hello spinach

This morning on my way to work I was waiting at the pedestrian crossing at the end of my street. A cyclist rode past and said "konichiwa". This happens to me randomly at least twice a month without fail, although occasionally "konichiwa" is replaced with "ni hao". I guess sometimes people just really want to say hello.
Here is a Japanese-inspired spinach side dish - the traditional version comes sans lemon but I've thrown it in because spinach and lemon are a match made in heaven.

HORENSO-GOMAAE with a lemony twist

What you need
1 bunch of adult spinach
2 tablespoons good quality soy or tamari
1 teaspoon of mirin
1 wedge of lemon
1 pot of boiling water
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
Sesame seeds
bamboo sushi mat


The do
Wash the spinach, and place the whole bunch into the boiling water. After a few minutes, drain. Rinse under cold tap, then lay the spinach across the sushi mat so some stems fall on the right side and some on the left. Roll the mat up like a cigarette and then squeeze firmly over the sink to get rid of the excess water.



Carefully unroll the mat and transfer to a chopping board. With a very sharp knife cut the spinach roll into segments and lay in a small dish.
Combine the mirin, soy, sesame oil and lemon. Pour over the spinach and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

A quick iron fix

It's been quite an international week here at Lily and Chew! With all this jetsetting, the immune system can take quite a hit when jumping from different climates and nothing is better for you than some dark leafy greens. Proper big spinach is hard to find if you are relying on the big supermarkets - it's just so unfashionable at the moment. This weekend at the farmer's market I managed to score two big bunches of Popeye's vegetable of choice at a much more manageable size than the mega spinach I bought a few weeks ago.

For a quick iron fix - chop it up, throw into boiling water for a few minutes. Drain, crumb some feta over the top and give it a generous drizzle of good olive oil. A squeeze of lemon and some pepper and you're done. I'm going to eat mine with some of Carter's leftover homemade pasta.

blueberry and rose, gimme some of those

There is no humanity. On Saturday Australia's future was full of promise. This week I discover Bindi Irwin has released a rap song. I cry for our fair land, I really do. Closer to home, I suffered my own personal setback last weekend after a footpath flew into my face and took out my chin. The damage: a couple of hours in A&E and three stitches. Klutz. Desperately in need of fluffy loveliness, I duly baked a batch of blueberry and lemon cakes with rose icing.

The base recipe for this is lifted from the Guardian Guide to Baking. They call it 'the easiest cake in the world', totally ludicrous if you are familiar with my nan's Frankie's Cake, which I doubt, so believe me when I tell you it has nothing as fancy as sour cream or even butter in it. Incidentally, if the amount of butter in this recipe freaks you out, when I plumped the quantities with blueberries it made me a decent sized cake (18 cm round) as well as eight cupcakes. (The recipe recommends a 20cm round tin.) So unless you are planning on a heaving solo face stuffing, a lot of butter goes a long way.



What you need for a blueberry and lemon split-chin-on-the-mend cake
200g unsalted butter, softened
250g caster sugar
2 large eggs
200g sour cream
300g plain flour
3 level tsp baking powder
grated peel of one lemon
one tub of blueberries
Squeeze of lemon juice

And for the rose petal icing
50g icing sugar
100g cream cheese
rose essence
A little butter
candied rose petals and sparkly pink bits for decorating
Squeeze of lemon juice

Making it
Butter and line the base of your tin with non-stick baking paper. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add the lemon rind and eggs, one at a time, and beat well till combined. Beat the sour cream and lemon juice into the mixture then sift in the flour and baking powder and beat it through. When it's all mixed, fold in the blueberries.

Spoon the mixture into the tin or cupcake tray, heat the oven to 180C (160C fan-assisted) and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (15-20 mins for cupcakes) or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Cool the cake while you make the icing. Beat the cream cheese, icing sugar, squeeze of citrus, a few drops of rose essence and butter together (it may help to sit the bowl over hot water so everything mixes properly) till smooth. Slide over your cooled cake and sprinkle with lovely bits. Best served with fresh peppermint tea and a peachy grin.

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.

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.

I remember you, lemony ragu

It was some time around 2.30am on January 1st, 2005. I was perched on a bar stool at 'inoteca, a little Italian joint on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow. The festive buzz was all around and I was gurgling away with pished contentment, waiting for a final indulgence after a night full of ‘em; we’d kicked off the night with a glittering cabaret performance from Eartha Kitt and seen in the new year slurping cocktails while Adam DJ’d at Ding Dong. But there was one more little treat left to make this the specialist…

Just to back up a bit: Adam and I were on our 'let's pretend we live in New York' holiday and, for maximum effect, we'd rented an apartment on the lower east side for two weeks. It was a few doors down from 'inoteca where, a few nights earlier, I had discovered my food obsession of the moment: a plate piled with mushroom ragu and creamy lemon polenta. Soft, tart, juicy, sweet, zingy – mmmmmmmm.

So, returning to New Year's Eve and the fact we'd found 'inoteca still open when we were on our way home. Adam had quietly crept away as I enthusiastically explained my must-have craving to the maitre d’ type person, along with the kicker that I really wanted to take it back to bed rather than eat at the restaurant. While loopy-hour take-away may not have been the 'inoteca staple – the joint seemed kind of fancy – rather than shoo me out the door, kick me to the curb or, worse, ignore me, the guy was impressed with my zeal for his ragu. He happily elbowed a little space at the bar and sat me down with a tasty glass of wine. There I waited, merry as could be, for my plate to be made.

And so it was that Adam and I slurped on our first meal for the year – in our PJ’s, sitting in bed in our temporary Manhattan apartment, sipping champagne and taking in the sounds of the city. Blish.

What you'll need

3 large or 6-8 small shallots, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
A few fresh sprigs of thyme (rip the leaves off the stalks)
2-3 cups of chopped mushrooms (I used enoki, button and shitaake, but any small mushies'll do)
Butter
Olive oil
1 lemon
2-3 cups veggie stock (I was out so used miso paste & vegemite instead, which worked fine)
1/2 cup of old red wine
Salt & pepper
Polenta (I used 125g for 2 people)


For the ragu

Fry the shallots and garlic in olive oil, careful not to brown or burn them (stir regularly). Once they are soft and transluscent, add the mushies and thyme. Stir on med heat for a minute before adding the wine. Stir in a teaspoon of butter (optional) and the stock and turn the heat up to med-high. All you need to do now is reduce the liquid so let it bubble away, stirring occassionally.

For the polenta

You can do the polenta while the ragu is reducing. For 125g of polenta, you'll need the grated rind of one lemon, 1/4 of its juice, about 600ml stock and a spoonful of butter (if you ain't vegan). Bring the stock to the boil. Stir in the butter and add your lemon rind and juice. Reduce the heat then pour in the polenta at a steady stream, stirring repeatedly. Let it cook on medium heat, stirring like a vigilante. It should only take five minutes. You want it kinda on the sloppy side, so don't do it too early or it'll firm up while it cools. When it's done, turn the heat right down and leave the lid on.

When the ragu has lost most of its liquid, plate up.



It might not look so flashy but the combination tastes brilliant, with the smooth, tangy polenta a perfect foil for bitey red mushies. And even though I’ve never been able to perfectly recreate the harmony of the original, the flavour always takes me back to our first dinner of 2005 and that little patch of NYC we happily roamed for a fortnight.

Oozing and gooey, just like the other VD

Some people might think it no coincidence that Valentine’s Day and Venereal Disease share the same initials. Apart from the fact that they are equally horrible, both can mock us, drive us to despair or make us feel silly and hate people. It's easy to opt out of a commercial scam but I can't dismiss its sentiment altogether, this idea of expressing hope for love on a rainy day in February. There is but one heart-plumping answer: food.



Just read this lusty missive written by my friend Joan (who you can visit here):

Conjure luscious creaminess in your mouth along with Italian provenance and you may think of (no, not that) you may think of gelato. But forget that. For a truly scrumptious creamily mouth-coating oral experience, it has to be risotto.

Risotto: plump, warming, tongue pleasing and piquant. Good risotto is the reward of patience; the outcome of a relationship between the rice and the chef. The stirring of each granular pearl so that it becomes infused with butter, wine, stock and a medley of ingredients. Slowly cooked, it is a dish best eaten slowly, and in good company.

Risotto often presents as modest in appearance but, as mother said: don’t be fooled by appearances. The first forkful will seduce you and how sublime to know that satisfaction will assuredly follow.



What you need:
Arborio rice
An onion (or leek or shallots) and garlic
Ingredients of choice: just about anything goes in a risotto. For this one: mushrooms, green beans (or spinach), fresh sprigs of thyme, almonds (slivered) and lemon (one)
6 to 8 cups of veggie stock and white wine (one cup for the stock, one for you)
A very generous block of parmigiano reggiano
Patience: At least half an hour to cook alone, stirring always. It’s best to have music and a glass of wine by your side at all times.



How it goes:
Heat the stock and wine together to just simmering and leave it that way
Finely chop your onion (or leek or shallots) and garlic and soften them in olive oil over medium heat (add a little butter if you like)
After a few minutes add your thyme and arborio rice (1/2 to 3/4 of a cup for two) and stir it so that it is coated in oil and starting to go transluscent. Do not let it brown or burn – death to risotto if you do.
Add grated lemon rind, slivered almonds and a squeeze of lemon juice. (If you had long cooking veggies, e.g. pumpkin, now would be the time to add them.)
Ladle in a cup of liquid – or enough to cover the rice.
When there is more mush than liquid, add more stock. Repeat for 10-15 minutes.
Add your softer chopped veggies (mushrooms, tomato, beans or asparagus) and keep doing the stock thing.
After another 5 or 10 minutes the rice isn’t really absorbing much liquid anymore. Try a granule to make sure it is firm but not chewy.
When it’s good, add a handful of grated parmesan, some pepper and a couple of tablespons of butter.
Stir rapidly to mix everything together and get it extra creamy.
Turn off the heat and let the risotto sit for a few minutes before serving. Sprinkle with shaved parmesan and cracked pepper.
Eat naked by candlelight and lick away any spills.
That’s amore.

And who better to opine about having love on your side than Dusty Springfield...

Dusty Springfield - Just A Little Lovin' mp3 download
Dusty Springfield - Breakfast In Bed mp3 download