Les Perez touchdown in London

Some dear friends of ours are visiting from Australia and last night I cooked dinner for about eight of us. Congregating around a big table with old friends with plenty of food and booze is most definitely one of the nicer things in life - my kitchen is too small for me to go all Babette's Feast, so dinner had to be a very simple affair.

With my ice cream maker in storage somewhere in Cricklewood, this summer I've been getting into cheats homemade ice cream. My mum used to make this in the late 80s by mixing some cointreau and a smashed up Flake with shop bought vanilla ice cream.

I made two types using some of the alcohol collecting dust at the back of our liquor shelf - the more we drink now, the less Jasmine T will have to hand when she starts mixing up her own cocktails. I have some Frangelico which I'm going to mix with chopped hazelnuts and Drambuie which I'm going to soak some raisins in before adding to the ice cream.

Cheats ice cream

What you need

2 large flat plastic containers

2L shop vanilla ice-cream (best you can afford)

couple handfuls chopped roasted hazelnuts

couple handfuls of raisins

3 tablespoons Drambuie

3 tablespoons Frangelico (hazelnut liqueur)

ice cream cones (less washing up)

The do

Place raisins in a bowl and add the Drambuie, leave to soak for a couple of hours.

Take the ice cream out of the freezer and leave out for around 10 minutes. Transfer the ice cream into the plastic containers add the ingredients and mix in with a rubber spatula. Put the lids on and return to the freezer.

You can do this with anything - fruit, chocolate, nuts. Just bear in mind that adding too much alcohol will prevent your ice cream from freezing.

For dinner (serves 8): boil up two packs of angel hair pasta, then 3 minutes before the pasta is ready, throw in a bag of frozen peas and half a bag of broad beans. In a separate small pan, gently heat a big glug of olive oil with some thinly sliced garlic for a minute or so. When the pasta is done, drain it, add the garlic oil, then toss the whole lot with the juice of a lemon, a handful of chopped mint, a handful of torn basil, two handfuls of parmesan and two packs of crumbled feta cheese. Season with olive oil, salt and pepper and marvel at the quivering mountain of steaming pasta before you.

Tunes
Alas I cannot swim Laura Marling

Lily Vs Chew Iron Chef

CHEW: A while back Lily and I did our weekly food shop together at Borough market. Lily came up with the bonza idea of Iron Chef-ing each other - buying each other an ingredient we'd never really cooked with before.

LILY: I went for the lazy approach, picking something for Chew that I'd often bought with good intentions just to watch shrivel into a moulding heap on my kitchen windowsill because I didn't know what to do with it: Jerusalem Artichoke.

CHEW: I'd always meant to give Jerusalem artichokes a go, but for some reason I never got around to it. So when Lily, with an evil glint in her eye, handed me a brown paper bag containing this knobbly root vegetable I was secretly pleased. Never one to step down from a challenge, I then made a beeline for the weird mushroom shop, where I knew I would find something that would really freak Lily out.

LILY: Chew managed to dig out something so impossible to get to know it didn't even have a wikipedia entry. The sign said Baba de Fratta, an exotic name for a limp bunch of tentacles, like the flailing arms of green sea anemone. The first bite was weird: crunchy, salty, grassy and juicy all at once. 'Good boiled in salads,' was all I could get out of the greengrocer.



CHEW: After a little Google action, I learnt a few things about this knobbly little root vegetable.
1. It has no link to the globe artichoke
2. It is also known as a sunchoke
3. Jerusalem artichokes cause huge amounts of gas (!)

My search results yielded some salads and soups but they all lacked wow-factor. I couldn't enter a cook-off with Lily and make plain old soup. Finally a recipe for Jerusalem artichoke souffle from the Riverford website caught my eye, mainly because I've never attempted a souffle before and it sounded fancy.

LILY:On d-day I was drooling all over Carluccio's (with my seaweed in my handbag) and I thought, hell's bells, I'll kick this thing with a fancy pizza. Thin crust with baba, gorgonzola, procini mushrooms and some truffle-infused dried berries (an idea I stole from my sister in law, Mish). Surprisingly, it worked, with the saltiness of the green matching the earthier porcini and truffle (although I am sure there are far less heavy handed ways of using this green to lend an interesting flavour).



CHEW: The big day. Lily and Adam are due to arrive in an hour's time. I get all my ingredients together and turn on the scales.
Nothing happens.
Flashing battery icon.
ARRRGHHH! Battery-operated scales seemed such a good idea. I should have known they would have a drawback.

Usually I would push on despite the setback but my limited knowledge of souffle making has taught me that precision is the key. All of a sudden it was meet-the-neighbours time. Maybe we should have done this years ago, but this being London we were afraid they'd answer the door naked with a machete. Five minutes later we knew one thing about all our neighbours - they don't own kitchen scales.

Time for Plan B. I sent my faithful apprentice to the local shop for some new provisions.

LILY:If I hadn't bumped into Mr Chew running around Sainsbury's Express like a headless chook (while I too scrabbled for forgotten ingredients), I would have been none the wiser to Chew's last minute kitchen dramas. Her Jerusalem Artichoke Dauphinoise was the ants pants, with the lemony artichokes offsetting the richness of the cream a treat. Better than its potato brethren I reckon.

CHEW: Lily really pulled out the big guns with her gourmet pizza. The crunchy/saltiness of the Barba worked in perfect harmony with the creamy robustness of the gorgonzola, and the truffle/berry combo was like a party in my mouth.

LILY:Chew's bloke -- vastly more patient and linguistically advanced than I -- did a more thorough google search at the dinner table and so we realised the actual spelling of my Mediterranean vegetable is Barba di Frate (friar's beard). And, yes, it does rate a mention on wikipedia after all.

IRON CHEF RECIPE 1: Jerusalem Artichoke Bake

What you need
3 big potatoes thinly sliced
a handful of Jerusalem artichokes thinly sliced
1 cup of cream
parmesan, grated
rosemary and thyme, chopped

The do
Preheat oven to 180
If you're short on time like I was, parboil the potatoes and jerusalem artichoke until semi cooked. Drain. Butter up an A4-sized oven tray and spread a thin layer of potato and artichoke on it. Splash on some cream, cheese, pepper a tiny bit of salt, then some of the chopped herbs. repeat twice. Finish off the top layer with a good layer of cheese and place in oven. It is ready when a fork goes right in and the cheese goes crunchy. Serve it like you never even heard of souffle - surround it with good green leaves and crusty bread.


IRON CHEF RECIPE 2: Barba di Frate Pizza

What you need

A pizza base (however you like it) and enough of the following to load it with:
Olive oil
Raisins or dried berries
Porcini mushrooms (wash and soak them as directed)
Fresh mushrooms – regular or you could go oyster or shiitake
A sloppy chunk of gorgonzola (be sure to lick the plastic wrap clean – it’s all about keeping your rubbish green)
Truffle oil
That crazy baba shit

Doing It

Turn your oven on to 210C. Brush your base with olive oil. Be sure to wash your porcinis good before you soak them cos grit is shit. Place the berries in a bowl then douse them in truffle oil and mix them all about. Clean your baba, chop off its roots, dunk it in salted boiling water for a couple of minutes then rinse it with cold. Slice the fresh mush thin and put it on your base, followed by baba (probably best chopped but I went big and flamboyant). Toss your berries and porcini on top with lots of fresh, grated pepper. Slop on some big wads of gorgonzola then zap it all in the oven for… ahem, this all happened so long ago I honestly can’t remember. But, you know, cook it till it’s pizzarific. And try to keep your mouth closed while munching.