red pepper pilaf and postie problems

My first subscription copy of Country Living arrived this week (a Christmas present from Mum and Dad) miraculously intact - by which I mean, still in some form you could physically read, i.e. turn the pages, even if you didn't have opposable thumbs. If you can imagine the trajectory of my magazine from the printers in West Yorkshire in the UK to our little Alpine village 1500 km away, that's a lot of handling and you could forgive the odd torn or punctured packaging or dog-eared page. But the most dangerous leg of its journey, the critical stage which determines whether it arrives flat, as the publishers intended, or geometrically folded and creased like some origami composition, is the final two feet, the arm's length between the yellow Postman Pat van and our mail box.

The posties here in the country don't like to get out of the car (it's against their human rights or something), so rather than knock on your door and hand larger items to you, they bend and fold and wrestle them into the mail box. Two Christmases ago, a calendar measuring a square foot and featuring beautiful photographs of Scotland - clearly identifiable as a gift - was manhandled into a quarter of its size and forced so tightly into the mail box that it required a screwdriver to prise it out. It means having to be on postie alert on magazine days - and especially over the Christmas period.

This recipe for red pepper pilaf with chilli and cashews, featured in said mag, is a one-pot rice dish made with sweet red peppers and fiery chillis. I didn't have cashews to hand so I used peanuts (any nuts would work well I think) and I used a good squirt of Sriracha chilli sauce instead of paprika. Great as a starter or as a vegetable side dish with a main.

 

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

4-5 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 red peppers, seeded and cut into strips

12 oz/350 g long grain rice

handful of fine spaghetti, broken into small pieces

salt

1 tbsp smoked hot pimentón or sweet hot paprika or chilli flakes

2 hot green chillies, seeded and diced

4 oz/100 g cashew nuts, toasted

3-4 large red peppers, halved lengthwise and seeded

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion gently until caramelized and very dark. Push aside and add the pepper strips and fry until soft. Sir in the rice and pasta and turn in the oil.

Add enough water to cover to the depth of two fingers, salt, stir in the pimentón or paprika, turn down the heat and leave to simmer for about 15 minutes until the water has been absorbed and the rice is nearly tender. Stir in the diced green chilli and sprinkle with the roasted nuts. Cover with a cloth and leave for 10 minutes to settle and swell.

Arrange the pepper halves on a baking try and roast in the oven at a high heat until the flesh softens but hasn't yet collapsed. Heap the rice into the shells and place in the oven for another 5 minutes to heat through.

cabbage

I don't understand why cabbage has such a bad reputation. Granted, it has a strong cooking odour, but there are many wonderful things you can do with it: raw in coleslaw, or wrapped around creamy minced chicken in Asian cabbage parcels,

braised with bacon and peas, or added to a simple bacon and egg quiche.

But the following recipe, which I saw being made on a cookery programme on the telly round at the Sunday Club last weekend, transcends all of the above and is now my recipe du jour.

Chou farci au fromage - cabbage stuffed with cheese - uses three ingredients and all it involves is: blanching some savoy cabbage, placing a slice of bacon in a ramekin (so the ends fall over the sides), then a small cabbage leaf and a cube of cheese, then repeating the layers, finishing off by folding the bacon over to make a parcel and cooking in the oven for 20 minutes at 180°C/350°F.

I had a good hunch that that combination of flavours and textures would be sensational and as soon as I got home, I recreated it using serrano ham which I had in the fridge, and it was utterly, utterly delicious - the loud salty flavours of the ham off-setting the subtle earthy flavour of the cabbage and the savoury goo of the melted cheese. Fantastic.

an alternative Burns Supper and spiced poached pears

BB and some other friends were helping Mini-B vaccinate his cows yesterday (new readers of this blog could be forgiven for thinking that BB's profession involves working with animals!) after which we received an impromptu invitation to lunch chez le berger (the shepherd) and his wife, who recently moved to our village. It's such a comforting word, "shepherd", don't you think? -  like a pair of elasticated-waisted trousers or a soft baby blanket with a rolled-over satin edge for drooling on.

(It's also the protagonist of one of my favourite books The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho which I've just retrieved from my bookshelves and on the back cover the publicity spiel says: "Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever" - and as implausible and Disneyesque as that sounds, it did for me. It was after reading this book that I sat down and revisited my Great Ambitions and directly ended up living in a foreign country, doing up an old watermill with BB.)

BB called and gave me two minutes' warning before coming to pick me up - enough time to apply a slick of SPF 20 Piz Buin and pull on my wellies and a ski hat - and we were off, bottle of wine and a saucisson (won in the belote competition on Saturday night) in hand. When we got to the little wooden chalet, down a deep-rutted goat track rendered almost impassable by snow, eight of us sat down in the cosy kitchen at the ancient pine table - nicked and scarred like a thousand criss-crossing railway tracks - and mucked in peeling apples, chopping vegetables, slicing sausage, jiggling their cute seven month-old baby and keeping the tiny Border Collie pups away from the food.

While we were peeling chopping and jiggling we nibbled on thin slices of locally-made spicy saucisson flavoured with beetroot with our apéros - that cured, often horse-shoe-shaped sausage much beloved of the French. Then lunch began with a homemade pâté de campagne with big hunks of rustic bread and cornichons, followed by aromatic vegetable lasagne spiced with turmeric, cardamom, fresh ginger and garlic and then in an inadvertent (and  for me nostalgic) nod to the fact it was Burns Night, boudin noir aux pommes - black pudding served with caramelized apple wedges.

After cheese, coffee and digestives, we waddled off home, our cheeks suffused with the warm rosy glow of contentment.

I made these spiced poached pears the other day with some pears I found lurking at the bottom of the fridge, which BB said tasted "just as good, if not better, than tinned pears" - which I think was a complement.

smoked mackerel rillettes

Our skis are in for a service otherwise we would have hit the slopes again today, being another perfect blue sky day, so we took ourselves off for a walk instead and who should we meet but our little homunculus friend, Mini-B, coming panting towards us through the meadow. He's reduced to running everywhere now since the ice-cream van broke down at the weekend, when the side door fell off in the middle of the road in spectacular cartoonish fashion and the engine spluttered to a very full stop in a cloud of black noxious smoke. He had to order a taxi yesterday - one of those minibus things with a roof rack for skis - to deliver hay to his animals!

He was in a bit of a state because one of his calves had got her leg stuck in a hole in the cow shed and he needed a hand lifting her out. There was a suggestion that she may have broken her leg, so I declined to go along. I can't bear to see animals suffering, it makes me too sad - as if  someone's dropped a bag of marbles in my heart - but BB reported back that they had successfully lifted her out and put a cast on her leg and she was happily laying back in the hay watching repeats of Emmerdale.

It's quite hard to sex up pulverized soft tissue of mackerel for the camera - but what it lacks in the Top Modèl stakes, this pâté makes up for in robustness. A quick, no-nonsense, Hattie Jacques kind of pâté - and another one from Homes and Gardens.

Ingredients

Serves 6

5-6 smoked, peppered mackerel fillets

2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

4 tbsp horseradish sauce

2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce

handful of fresh parsley, scissor-snipped

Bend the mackerel fillets in half lengthways, skin sides in, bringing the ends together so that the flesh (on the outside) comes away easily from the skin. Discard all skin and pull the fish into chunks. Combine the fish, lemon juice, sauces and snipped parsley in a bowl. Mix, mash and blend roughly, using a fork. Smooth into a 600ml serving dish or 6 individual 100ml dishes. Smooth the top flat and chill for at least 2 hours or up to 4 days. Serve with buttered baguette slices or toasts.

egg mayo

I think I may have found a little studio to rent in Paris - "little" being the operative word - in the 8th arrondissement, on the same Metro line as Le Cordon Bleu. At the moment it's a toss-up between this apartment or sharing with a French artist and his 10-year old twins. I have this whimsical notion of lolling around an artist's studio in Montmartre wearing flouncy skirts and discussing existentialism whilst sucking on a Gauloises - but the bohemian won't allow me to have guests and since most of my family and quite a few friends are lining up to come and visit, I'm going to have to pass on the boho lifestyle.

Every Sunday we get a dozen eggs from Roquin, usually still warm and flecked with little bits of straw and other detritus. I could quite happily eat an egg, in some form, every day and egg mayo is one of our favourites. I like to add some snipped chives or spring onions or serve it in the shell with a sprig of dill and some lumpfish roe.

Egg mayo

Serves 2

2 fresh eggs

1 heaped dessert spoon of mayonnaise

2 tsp lumpfish roe (or caviar if you want to push the boat out)

Sprigs of dill

Toast to serve

Place the eggs in a pan and cover completely with cold water. Heat over a high heat until boiling then reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Cool in cold water, then slice off the top of the egg, being careful not to break the shell. Scoop out the egg, mash with a fork and mix with the mayonnaise. Fill the empty shell with the egg mixture and top with a tsp of lumpfish roe and a sprig of dill. Cut out rounds of toast using a pastry cutter, making a smaller hole in the centre for the egg to sit in.

help Haiti

It feels frivolous blogging about food when there's so much death and destruction in Haiti - but then, is not all blogging frivolous, unless it raises awareness or money for worthy causes? Every comment left on this blog raises $10 for the Haitian relief effort - so I urge you all to visit.

churros and hot chocolate

To escape the tedium of wading through crime scene-like photographs in Craigslist, we took ourselves off skiing yesterday for the first time this season. It was one of those perfect Christmas card days when everything's covered in a quilt of snow and white-embroidered trees dazzle under skies the colour of melted cornflowers, when the beauty of nature overwhelms and crushes your heart. There is no place I would rather be than on the ski slopes on such days.

After a few runs we stopped for hot chocolate. What could be more redolent of snowy mountain climes than hot chocolate moustaches? Unfortunately, what you get in mountain restaurants is an insipid watery brew made with cocoa powder, disguised with swags of canned whipped cream. So when we got home - tired and cold but euphoric - I set about making the real deal, with melted chocolate, and Spanish-style doughnuts for dipping.

This recipe comes from the February 2009 issue of Homes and Gardens and uses virgin olive oil for frying, but I found sunflower oil worked much better and I only used 2 or 3 cm in a frying pan. When the churros start to brown too quickly, turn the heat off and let the oil cool down a little so that the churros turn a lovely golden colour. I also added more chocolate to the hot chocolate to make it wickedly thick.

Churros

Ingredients

Serves 6-8

125 g salted butter in cubes

150 g plain white flour, sifted

15 g caster sugar or vanilla sugar

6 medium eggs, beaten

Virgin olive oil, for frying

Sieved icing sugar and a little cinnamon (optional) to decorate

Heat 250 ml boiling water with the butter in a deep, heavy-based saucepan for 2 minutes, uncovered, until the mixture boils, then tip in the sifted flour and sugar and beat hard over the heat for 30 seconds until it clumps together. Remove and cool for 2 minutes in a sink of cold water. Remove. With an electric, hand-held whisk, whisk in the eggs one at a time; the mixture thins, then gets thick again. Once all 6 eggs are added, spoon the mix into a piping bag with a rosette nozzle and chill for 30 minutes.

Heat 10cm oil in a medium heavy-based pan until a cube of stale bread browns in 20 seconds. Pipe straight or curly shapes of paste into the oil with one hand and chop off the paste using scissors with the other. Cook for 1 minute, then turn with tongs, cook for 1 minute more and drain. Serve, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon if liked, with hot chocolate.

Hot chocolate

Ingredients

Serves 6-8

250 g dark chocolate, chopped (ideally 70 per cent cocoa solids or higher)

300 ml milk

1 tsp ground cinnamon, optional

Combine the chopped chocolate, milk and cinnamon, if liked, in a large heavy-based saucepan and stir over moderate heat until the chocolate has melted. Whisk the mixture till frothy and keep hot chocolate on a low heat or set over boiling water before serving.