Category Archives: Eating in

Posts on food and drink

Autumnal parsnip soup

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Parsnips

Isn’t it weird how comfort food is so rarely good looking? Often it’s some sort of stewy one-pot meal of indeterminate ingredients or maybe big piles of mash splodged onto a plate covered in a brown gravy. Never the less, they do have their own rare beauty.

The glistening fat on a slow cooked lump of lamb, oily worm-like noodles, pieces of aubergine that look unsettlingly like withered body parts. And swampy sludges of pureed roots and vegetables like this. Just looking at the thick greeny-yellow soup gently steaming away kindles a warm glow in my navel. Continue reading →

Venison chilli cobbler

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Venison cobbler on the plate

Visiting family in the USA was always a bit disconcerting when it came to mealtimes. Biscuits and gravy? Biscuits? A disturbing image of chocolate Hobnobs and Bisto comes to mind. Still, I’ve always been game for something different.

I quickly came to realise that everything wasn’t quite as it seemed. Biscuits and gravy was actually savoury scones with a creamy sausage meat sauce. Now how good does that sound? It’s now one of my favourite breakfasts. Continue reading →

Pheasant Chitermee: a spicy game bird

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Pheasant chitermee

Looking back at that sepia toned period, “when I was growing up”, I realise I had a pretty privileged time when it came to food. Every autumn we’d start eating game – usually pheasant – for dinner every week or two. It would invariably be casseroled in red wine, one of my step-dad’s staples when it was his turn to cook dinner.

Of course, being a typical kid, all I really wanted was egg and chips, maybe a mars bar for pudding. What was this game, this fresh fish and seafood? Give me deep fried fast food horror instead! Okay, so maybe I wasn’t that bad, but it was only when I grew up and out of home that I truly realised what a treat it was. Continue reading →

Chorizo with butter beans, onion and spinach

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Chorizo, butter beans and spinach

I didn’t encounter chorizo until I left home. And even then, for years it was just a slightly exotic scarlet salami you’d buy in Sainsburys. Never the less, I cooked with it, making red beans and rice or scissoring fleshy slivers into a tomato sauce.

And then, on my 23rd birthday I got taken to Moro, Sam and Sam Clarke’s Iberian-cum-Moorish restaurant in London’s Exmouth Market and had my first real chorizo. My first bite was smoky, spicy, piquant, eye-popping doesn’t even come close. I thought I knew what chorizo was. I was wrong. Continue reading →

Crab, chilli and tomato pasta

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Pasta on the plate

Fresh crab takes me right back to being a kid in Cornwall, sitting outside in the warm summer weekend mornings. My step-dad would come back from the fish shop clutching a whole paper-wrapped pink crab, like a chest of buried treasure. Together we would sit on the patio steps and break our way in, carefully picking out the succulent treasure inside.

The legs and claws would be cracked and piled carefully on a plate, a pile of briny building blocks. They’d be served with a simple green salad. The brown body meat whipped up with just the slightest squeeze of lemon and some Dijon mustard. A creamy piquant treat to dollop onto bread. Continue reading →

Spicy prawn, chorizo and tomato: a blast of Creole heat

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Spicy prawn and chorizo

Summer is hanging in there by its fingernails, clutching desperately at the fading light as nights start to close in. And you have to admire its gutsiness as temperatures remain stubbornly in the high teens.

This dish is an ideal way to pay some respect to the season, but also to bring some heat to your belly after dark. It’s bright, colourful and redolent of heady Latin nights. And, at the same time, manages to be warming and comforting. A dish for all seasons. Continue reading →

Beef ragu with linguine: the first of the autumnal dishes

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Beef ragu with linguine
There’s something about that first mouthful. Intensely meaty, enough oil to coat your tongue with a rich deep flavour. Very savoury, but with an underlying sweetness as well. There’s the slightest tang of decadence as the pleasure centres of your brain light up in oily delight.

If eating a slow cooked ragu sounds just a wee bit dirty, that’s because it is. There is nothing sophisticated or subtle about it. Slippery and sticky, strong and beefy, the moist saucy meat just slides across your tongue leaving wobbly-legged, dazed but wide awake taste buds in its wake. Pure gourmet porn, this is the sensuous libidinous mistress to haut cuisine’s sophisticated lady.

Continue reading →

Baked butternut squash, figs and cheese

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Roast squash and figs with cheese

You know what I like about this dish? It’s the contrasts, the surprises you get when you take a mouthful. Like the way the squash dissolves into a sweet caramel mush in your mouth, whereas the fig is slightly crunchy, almost vegetable like as it bursts between your teeth.

Throw in the salty cheese, a citrussy-sharp, sweet and slightly hot glaze and you have a melange of tastes and textures that really ought to collide messily. But they don’t. Sure, they clamour for attention, but all that taste and texture walks a finely balanced pathway, never straying. Continue reading →

Aromatic Thai style steamed fish

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Asian baked fish

There are times in the last three months that I would have crawled over broken glass for a taste of fish. If my right arm had been made of fish instead of meaty flesh (or should that be fleshy meat?) then I probably would have gnawed on that. That’s what a two-week diet of nothing but meat and potatoes does to a person.

At that moment, if somebody had produced a plate of steamed fish, I would have considered something close to a miracle. Hell, I might even have converted on the spot. But they didn’t, and I didn’t. Instead, that need just quietly grew. Continue reading →

Spicy Sichuan style partridge noodles

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Sichuan style partridge noodles

Never one to leave well enough alone, I’ve once again been tweaking and twisting, adding and amending. Often this is through store cupboard necessity, sometimes just sheer perversity. Whatever the reason, the results are always interesting.

Sometimes they simply don’t work (one memorable attempt to modify carbonara ended up with scrambled egg pasta), but sometimes they come out better than I expect. Substituting pheasant for chicken led me into a whole world of Indian game cooking, and maybe this’ll do the same for Sichuan food. Continue reading →