... and roses too.

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.

Category: food (page 1 of 4)

Magic Lasagne (vegetarian)

Gah, life’s a bit shit now, isn’t it.

I guess I’m not the only one looking in my kitchen cupboard at the carb section for comfort.

So anyway. This recipe was devised a year or so ago, when things were Totally Fine but we didn’t appreciate it because we’re shitty human beings. And I didn’t get around to posting it, because I was too busy going out for cocktails and to galleries and parties and OMG I’m a terrible person and I want my old life back.

I’ve called it Magic Lasagne because it has a secret surprising ingredient that blew my mind when I discovered it.

It’s inspired by a vegetable lasagne that used to be served at a small Italian cafe in Brixton that doesn’t exist any more. It was called Bellantoni’s. The guys were lovely and the food was sublime. The first time I ordered this, I poked it with a fork, saw it was full of the secret ingredient, felt puzzled, then tasted it and WOW. Cherubs appeared, sang sweet songs about heaven itself, I cried with joy, and then put duct tape over my mouth so I couldn’t order a second portion for pudding.

(I should have ordered a second portion for pudding.)

So when I looked at the back of my fridge a year or so ago, and saw some sad-looking vegetables, I thought, hey, whatevs, I’m a Londoner, I can do anything I want, I’ll give this a go.

And it worked.

And it won my heart.

And now maybe it might win yours too, in this weird sad time where we’re all pretending that national PE at 9am and national choir at 5:30pm is a totally normal thing, the queen’s addressing the nation even though it’s not Christmas and people like me have taken up yoga.

FFS.

I love this because it uses up stuff I always need to use up. It’s way healthier than you’d think, because it tastes so comfort food, and you get a carb hit and there’s an ooh when you take it out of the oven, because lasagne, and everyone in your home needs that right now.

And now for the secret.

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Recipe: Courgette and lentil moussaka, after Rick Stein

Boo! The cold weather is back. We were so nearly through February too.

I hate February. It’s the month when new year’s resolutions crumble and fall, and yet spring still feels so far away. A cold, grey month with a backdrop of misery.

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Recipe: Hearty curried lentil and coconut soup

Brr! It’s getting cold now, even in the city. And the rain this past month has been welcome for the water table, but not so much when I’m out and about. (Rain, stop driving in my face please, that’s just rude.)

(Also I lost my coat. Or maybe left it at the dry cleaner’s. Can’t remember tbh and I didn’t like it much anyway. Stop nagging me, Christy, I’ll get a new one at some point.)

A couple of weeks ago, I fancied a hearty lentil soup for supper. Ted got all excited, thinking I meant a dal soup. I didn’t, but compromised, and as so often with compromise we ended up with something better than either. (Hmm, maybe there’s a lesson here for all of us, are you listening world?)

Things I love about this soup:

  • It’s a vegetarian recipe (well, vegan actually, but let’s not get too excited) that Ted, my meat-loving husband, is more than happy to eat.
  • It’s made of storecupboard basics, aside from the fresh coriander, which is optional – so no last-minute dash to the supermarket on a rainy night.
  • It will make you glow with warmth all the way from the top of your head right down to your new winter boots, which look great by the way – nice choice.

It also only takes about half an hour to get to the point where you can put it in the slow cooker and forget about it for a few hours. I love that – the flavours mingle together in this magical way, scenting the kitchen with the promise of tastiness to come.

via GIPHY

(Anyone else watching the Sabrina reboot? It’s all gone a bit weird, hasn’t it …)

So it’s one I put on at lunchtime and then leave to bubble away until supper. But you can totally simmer it on the hob for about 40 minutes (or until the lentils are soft).

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Recipe: One-can, Ottolenghi-style, cheat’s hummus

Hummus isn’t the kind of thing you can get passionate about, really, is it? Or so I thought until Simon, quite a few years ago now, dragged me to Hummus Bros for lunch. I thought he was being a bit weird, tbh – no one gets that excited about chickpeas.

Boy, was I wrong. Nutty, heavy on tahini, scented with cumin, it’s a completely different thing from the cold, beige pots of supermarket gunge – so I mainlined it once a week or so, and had major withdrawal symptoms when work took me elsewhere.

Thus, the search for a replacement recipe began. I looked at Ottolenghi’s (don’t you love Ottolenghi? His food, his writing, his determination to dirty every receptacle in your kitchen whenever you make one of his recipes) and it was deliciously familiar, but it involved so much faff (cooking chickpeas from dried – lovely, but for a simple lunch it just takes.too.long) and I ended up with about two litres of hummus at the end. (I mean, I love hummus, but …)

So here’s a cheat’s version. It uses one tin of chickpeas, so there’s no boiling for hours, and you end up with, hmm, about the equivalent of 2-3 supermarket tubs. That’s enough for Sunday pre-dinner snacks, then lunch on Monday and Tuesday. But it’s way nicer, and faster to make than popping to the shops.

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Recipe: Quite frankly the world’s best tomato sauce

There comes a time in every cook’s life, no matter how competent she thinks she is, when the holes in one’s repertoire start to show.

So it was with me and tomato sauce.

For many years, I’d got by with frying onions, adding garlic, tomatoes and herbs, and cooking it for a bit.

But none of these attempts resulted in the thick, savoury, hyper-tomato flavour that one gets from a simple plate of spaghetti al pomodoro in any half-decent Italian family joint. To be honest, it was all a bit … studenty.

So a couple of years ago, I embarked on a mission to fix this. But it proved much more difficult, with far more experimentation, than expected.

  • I tried Diane Seed’s, the ones from her otherwise completely ace book, “The top 100 pasta sauces”. (Surprisingly uninspiring.)
  • I tried Delia’s. (Too fussy.)
  • I tried Marcella Hazan’s, via Smitten Kitchen. (Delicious, but it’s got so much butter in it that there’s no way it can claim to be an everyday staple.)
  • I tried both the recipes from the Silver Spoon. (They were … fine?)
  • I tried Felicity Cloake’s allegedly perfect amalgamation of all the greats’ recipes. (It was not.)
  • I even tried the Mothership’s, but for some reason, mine never turned out reliably like hers.

Thus, a dead end had been reached.

And so it was that I found myself in Mark and Niki’s kitchen, telling my sorry tale over a cup of chamomile tea.

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5 gins reviewed: Bloom, Brighton Gin, English Rose, Silent Pool, Ely Gin

Mothers’ ruin. Or mothers’ delight, maybe. Delight in the Mothership’s case, certainly. A delight that her fabulous friends have been only too happy to enable. (Thanks, guys!) This has resulted in a rather fine selection of bottles in her personal collection.

Now, you may not know this, but the Mothership was originally a biologist, fully committed to the scientific approach. So when I suggested we nip through her gin library and do a comparative tasting, her inner lab geek kicked in.

Four gins were selected, eight teacups were produced and a *very* small tin of Fevertree “naturally light” tonic appeared on the table. Then we added a small bottle of Brighton gin, just to be sure. We then poured a little dribble (tiny! Barely anything at all) of each gin into a cup, then smelled it, tasted it and tasted it again with a little splash of tonic.

Scientific rigour at its best.

Our aim was to discover which one we liked the most; our method was careful and consistent; the results and conclusion are below.

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Recipe: Bahn mi: An inauthentic take on the real thing

Sometimes there are days when you want to be transported to somewhere else. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere far away from the sadness in your city. 

But maybe in these times, it’s a case of putting one foot in front of the other. Of picking ourselves up and being resolutely normal. 

Today I was determined that everything would be normal. 

So I started thinking instead about what I could cook to take us away from the awfulness of last night, and remembered I had a pork fillet in the freezer and a small jar of pork and green peppercorn pate in the cupboard. 

Which means one thing: 

Bahn mi. 

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Recipe: Asparagus and lovage pesto pasta 

I’m delighted to introduce Ted’s first appearance in the blog! He went to the farmers market today and found the first asparagus of the year – cause for celebration indeed. He teamed it with the most lovely homemade lovage pesto – his own delicious invention – and made us the most gloriously green spring lunch. I begged him to write up the recipe and he did. Here you go. 

What to do with lovage, the world and Joe want to know. It’s a vigorous herb which produces lots of big green fronds that look suspiciously like flat-leaf parsley. Unlike parsley, however, lovage is not mildly-flavoured. Its taste is not unpleasant – like a very strong celery leaf – but I’ve always struggled to know what to do with it as it always seemed like it would overpower most other flavours. So I’ve been left with a herb that grows unchecked and unharvested until it kicks out its flower spike in mid-summer and finally dies back.


Then, while gardening one weekend and looking again at the rapidly expanding lovage, I had a brainwave – what about making all those leaves into pesto? It turns out that other people have had the same idea and there are several recipes already on the web. See here and here

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Eating out: Kaboola Kitchen, Brixton

How hard is it to poach an egg? 

A lot harder than boiling one, and way more difficult than frying. Mine always end up with runny whites, or angry and rubbery from being overboiled. 

But today I had a chance encounter with a perfectly poached egg – well, two actually. 

It was one of those rushing-about, not-quite-ready, where’s-my-jumper mornings, with a pinch of tripping-over-the-cat. Then Ted helped me take a small mountain of parcels to Brixton post office, and after half an hour of battling the automatic machine (with help from a very lovely lady) the parcels were finally weighed, stamped and dispatched. 

What a relief. 

I needed coffee. I stepped outside the post office. 

As if by magic, this sign appeared:

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Eating out: Kuku Persian Kitchen, Brixton

So yesterday, Ted and I went out for breakfast, in search of something healthy. 

Nothing grabbed us on Coldharbour Lane (I miss the Phoenix so much) so we went into Market Row. 

Before we could even look at the temptation that is Express Café (best eggs in Brixton FYI) we saw that Kuku, the pretty new Persian place was open. 


“I wonder if they do … AAIIEE!” I said. Because who was inside, but Saja! Which of course she was, because who else would be running it, and how daft of me not to realise before. 

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