Just Add Maple Syrup

Halve, smear with olive oil and salt and grill for twenty minutes to half an hour until squishy…

Book of the day – Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

This is a beautiful book – I felt bad exposing it to the chaos of the kitchen as I worked through a couple of their recipes but despite the pretty pages and coffee-table decoration appearance,  this book has some very solid content. Rich in stories, advice, methods and a love for the sub-continent, this book will give you itchy feet that at least can be appeased by getting your teeth into some of the recipes. Discover Pakistani Pulao (a curried rice dish) and North Indian dhal – travel through Nepal before deciding whether it’s Bengali fish or Sri Lankan spices that will take your fancy.

That is, if the Goan sunsets and other fabulous images don’t have you booking a one way ticket…

Having recently picked up some atta flour I wanted to try their chapati recipe. It’s always satisfying to tackle and somehow succeed in making some kind of bread, flat or otherwise.  Atta flour is a strong durum wheat flour used for making many Indian flat breads, it’s got a rich brown colour and flavour and is very strong. You can replace it with regular whole wheat flour if needs be but I was surprised at the difference the atta flour made. The chapatis turned out to be quite easy to make if you don’t mind getting a little hot and flustered in the kitchen. Also, best not to have any feeling in your finger tips. Tossing them about the pan as they bubble and bake requires a willingness to get a little burned! They’re best served warm but they keep their crunchiness as they cool and are great for scooping up curries and sauces. The fresh peanut and coriander “chutney” (see below) is a pretty good smeared on top of a warm chapati and served with drinks as an alternative canapé.

Ingredients
250gr atta flour (or whole wheat)
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon salt

Making

In a bowl, add the salt to the flour and then slowly add the water to form a dough. Knead well on a floured surface until you have a smooth tacky dough as you would for any bread. Then cover (wrap in cling film) and leave to rest for at least two hours. If you put it in the fridge take it out a half hour before you intend to use it.  Divide into small pieces – you’ll get about 15 or 16 from this amount of dough and shape into small balls before flattening and rolling them into thin “pancakes” using plenty of flour to keep the dough from sticking. Heat some ghee, butter or a little oil in a flat pan or skillet before cooking each one.  Cook for only about 30 seconds on each side – until they start to brown and bubble. Quickly keep flipping them before moving onto the next one.  This is where the numb finger tips help. They take no time at all and resist leaving them too long on the heat as they become tough.

Keep warm until serving time.

Quoted in King Lear, samphire is not a seaweed but a sea plant, that smells strongly of the ocean and is also known as the poor man’s asparagus. On a pilgrimage lunch to Moro in London, samphire with a garlic aioli and sea trout and other delights involving lentils proved more then worth the Euro-Star ticket. Amazing. So I seek out this vibrant green sea creature at the fish-mongers or wherever they are selling fish and grab a handful.

Buy as you need , it does not keep.

Making

Steam for about 5 – 10 minutes depending on your taste and before serving toss in a hot pan with a little melted butter and chopped garlic.

Take this recipe and remove the cherries…and add whatever you feel like….smoked duck breast, feta, cream cheese, broccoli, sun dried tomatoes, spinach, ricotta, tofu…

It’s still cherry season. Inspired by Syrian food and having eaten devoured my way around the better part of the country last year it seemed the time to attempt a savory cherry sauce…

Despite most Parisian shops displaying evidence to the contrary it is possible to find them for less then 3 euro a kilo. Never having thought much about the potential of cherries, eating my way around Syria on holiday last year changed my mind.  The northern Syrian city of Aleppo boasts a specialty dish that has infiltrated every eating house in the country – lamb, either a kebab or perhaps meatballs, served with a hot, dark, thick cherry sauce that is delicious.

Spot the cherry sauce?

The countryside surrounding Aleppo is famous for a particular type of black cherry which is smaller and a little sour. They bloom in spring time and the fruit is plentiful. Hence the ubiquitous lamb with cherry sauce dish on every menu…
Sissi House, a relatively upmarket Aleppan restaurant in the old Christian quarter was my first taste of the cherry lamb experience. Al Khawali in Straight Street in Damascus was another. The more innovative and modern Naranj, and for me the best, (albeit upscale for Damascus) restaurant does a less traditional version of the Aleppan cherry kebab as well as an extensive menu of all kinds of Syrian traditional delights given just a touch of a modern makeover.  This restaurant has a retractable ceiling, a touch of Beruiti glamour and truly good food. Reservations essential and never dine before nine!

Saha – A chef’s journey through Lebanon and Syria - the cookbook previously discussed here - has a cherry sauce recipe. I made very much my own version of it the other night and impatiently devoured it cold with cheese the following day. Not exactly the most authentic of first attempts but a decent, versatile sauce nonetheless. Next time it will be duly served hot with spicy lamb. This is a great little compote to serve cold or hot.

Note: Another recipe can be found here on a great blog, recently discovered - Anissa’s – she has a great sophisticated and authentic cherry kebab and sauce recipe here.

Ingredients

1 kilo fresh cherries – pitted, not too ripe

250ml chicken or vegetable stock

1 teaspoon white pepper

1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon nut oil for frying

1 tablespoon butter

1 half teaspoon cinnamon

Optional – some Greek yogurt or crème fraiche for serving when serving hot

Making
Soak the pitted cherries for about an hour in enough water to cover them. Heat the nut oil with a little butter, add the diced garlic and fry until golden and soft. Add the cherries with their soaking water, the pomegranate molasses, and the white pepper. Simmer on a very low heat with about 250ml water or stock for about 45 minutes. Add half a teaspoon of cinnamon before bringing to the boil until most of the liquid burns off and you’re left with a thick dark sauce. It will be quite reduced. Take off the heat and either serve immediately hot with lamb cutlets or spicy lamb meatballs. Otherwise leave to cool and chill overnight to serve it with cheese.

What to do with a kilo of cherries?

A spicy cherry compote is one thing you could do (and I did)  but that’s for another day. As it is picnicking and cherry season, a little love for a traditional French grandmother cake is in order. Clafoutis is an old-school cake which comes from the Limousin region. It’s also very easy to put together.  I dare not play around with such things and so this recipe is straight (well, not exactly but…) from the latest edition of the ever trustworthy Cuisine et Vin magazine. The debate about whether or not to leave the pips in the cherries seemingly rages on in certain parts of France, probably where they haven’t much else to do. I left the pips in. Who has time to take them out unless it is truly called for?
Those in the know (and at the centre of the aforementioned debate) say leaving them in gives a better flavour. Who would I be to argue with this? However, you really need to watch your teeth. And that’s coming from a pip swallower…

Note: This recipe could be taken apart and its crepe-like batter used to make all kinds of sweet and/or savoury treats. Think broccoli, tomato, peach, smoked duck, ricotta, bacon, feta, roasted vegetables…

Also – did you know? When in the Auvergne region of France, the clafoutis is known as a Milliard and is often made with other kinds of fruit.

Ingredients

100gr sugar + 20gr for the pan

4 eggs

about 500gr dark coloured cherries (enough for a layer along the bottom of your pan)

Leave the nuts in. It’s tradition. Just warn your eaters first…

350ml (or 35 cl) milk

150 ml (or 15cl) pouring cream

75gr flour

(A little kirsch liquer is usually added too)

icing sugar for dusting afterwards

Making

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C, grease a baking tin. Don’t worry too much about the size or depth.

Beat the eggs into the sugar and add the flour little by little. Add the milk and cream and mix well.

Layer the cherries (leaving them whole if you wish) onto the tin and sprinkle the bottom of the pan with the leftover sugar. Pour the batter over the cherries gently hopefully leaving them in position. Bake for about 30-35 minutes until just golden on top. When done sprinkle with icing sugar and serve warm. Also good when chilled.

Paris. The tenth arrondissement – foodies beware….The rue Faubourg Saint Denis holds a few off-beat treasures.  From Julhes with their cheeses, exotic mustards, gourmet deli and never ending wine tastings to the coffee bean man just up the street  (Brulerie Lanni) and his giant roasting machine passing by the Passage Brady and the Kurdish sandwiches, you could spend hours here snacking and discovering.

On a recent wander hunting cardamom pods and other random pantry staples, I picked up some lemon grass powder in the Passage Brady.  A key ingredient of Thai, Malay, Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine this pale green grassy  powder has a long history and is potent, lemony, sweet and tart in your nose.

Here’s a basic flour-less chocolate cake with a playful side. Use agave instead of sugar for a more healthful cake and a different kind of sweetness.

The basil plant on the window-sill is inviting, demanding to be added to everything. I figure a solid chocolate cake can be played with, dark chocolate can always take a little flavouring. I recently had sesame chocolate and Darjeeling tea flavoured chocolate. Amazing. Especially the sesame. To be exploited in an upcoming dessert recipe – tea, dark chocolate and sesame…

Flourless chocolate cake with lemongrass and fresh basil

Ingredients

125 gr good quality dark chocolate
100 gr unsalted butter and some for greasing
half teaspoon salt
150 gr sugar – or 1 cup agave syrup
1 cup finely chopped fresh basil leaves
3 eggs50gr cocoa powder
1 generous  teaspoon of ground lemon grass powder (available in good spice stores or Asian good stores)

Making

Pre heat the oven to 180 c. Line and grease a cake tin. (about 8 inches – not too big or you’ll have a rather flat cake!)

Melt the chocolate and the butter over hot water stirring constantly until smooth. Add the salt and set aside.

Beat the diced basil into the sugar and add this to the chocolate mixture.  Add the eggs one at a time mixing constantly.  Then  fold in the cocoa powder slowly mixing until smooth. Stir in the teaspoon of lemon grass powder at the end.

Pour the batter into the tin and bake for about 20 minutes then turn out onto a rack to cool. Serve warm with a sprig of fresh basil.

In 1972, after coming to power via a coup the year before, Idi Amin decided to expel Asians  from Uganda and repossess their property.  Those lucky enough to have the right to get the necessary papers to go to England, after having come to Uganda under British imperial rule, ended up facing life as exotic strangers in a new country that perhaps did not live up to expectation. Already the fact that there was a sizable population of people of Indian heritage and origin living in Uganda hints at the potential complexities of the culinary history of the region.

We have entered the era of  the  foodoir – the  combination of memoirs and recipes, a term I only just spotted in the latest review of food books by The New York Times, is fast becoming a literary staple of sorts and there are any amount of them out there often the result of a successful blog or a wonderfully international childhood. They’re more often then not a good read as well as a source of quirky recipes and a little food history.

The Settler’s Cookbook was written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Born in Uganda in the fifties, the author refers many times in the book to her memories of the country as lush, green and “openly sensuous” bringing back to me my own memories of a brief visit to southern Uganda a few years ago for a weekend on a lake in a small eco-lodge where we were served “Irish potatoes” and roast chicken and the people were as open as the endless colourful flowers around us.  It reminds me too, why it is important to always be ready to go to the ends of the earth if only for the weekend. It’s always worth it, it feels like a lifetime and what you learn in that weekend will remain with you.

This book is much more then a foodoir; it’s a great snapshot of a woman’s life, her perceptions, her life as a Wahindi growing up in the sixties and seventies in Uganda, obliged to go and live in the UK in the seventies and the realities of being a young Asian in Thatcherite England. Interspersed with stories of her family, a candid account of her marriage, its breakdown and her career are her family recipes – often written in such a way as to make it clear as to what kind of mood one may be in when one would tackle a particular dish. the ingredients range from the curious to the exotic to the ordinary.  Each one seems to be the result of an incident be it international or familial and the anecdotes surrounding them are often inextricably linked to the food eaten at the time.

Many recipes reveal the influence of the British over their colonies and the resulting dishes that often led to a Victoria sponge enlivened with saffron and lime juice or the promise of a Cadbury’s chocolate bar after school. The insipid nature of British cooking fascinated many of those  who came into contact with it in Uganda and so these personalized recipes themselves reveal a lot about the imbalances of relationships between the nation that was still seen as imperial and superior, the Asian merchant class and the Ugandans themselves.

What I’m most curious about is getting my hands on a copy of St. Andrew’s Church Woman’s Guild. The Kenya Settlers’ Cookery Book and Household Guide (Nairobi, 1928). Mentioned in The Settler’s Cookbook as being of use during their home economics classes at school where the girls  learned how to cook British food that to them tasted like “milky newspaper”, there apparently was an intriguing back page of “useful Swahili phrases” such as how to say “You have stolen the sugar” and ” You are free every day from 2 to 4…” which is wonderfully revealing and I’m off now to search for more colonial cookbooks….

La Pièce Montée – our wedding cake, May 2009.

Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of a cheesecake…

A mix of local and French cheeses served not only as the traditional cake but also as a midnight feast for wedding guests whenever they took a a break from the dance floor not to mention snacks and supper for about three weeks after….

Following up on Sunday’s flat bread dough.…use it also to make a healthy pizza. Once you’ve made  your dough and are ready to roll, brush the edges of the rolled out dough with maple syrup or honey or agave syrup should you have some on hand.

Blanch some fresh broccoli in a little boiling water with some fresh coriander leaves and chopped garlic for a few minutes until cooked but crisp. Let it cool.

Sprinkle the dough liberally with chopped tomatoes, feta, the cooled broccoli and some zaatar and black pepper. Bake in a hot oven for about 15-20 minutes. Done.