A (fish) bone of contention…

Politeness is the flower of humanity.
Joseph Joubert

I know, I know, I should have walked around the corner and bought my salmon from The Fishery on the High Street like I usually do. Not only would I have got a lovely piece of fish rather than the scraggy tail-end bits I ended up with, I also might have got a smile from Danny who owns the joint and shared a joke with his dad, Johnny, who seems to have been put upon this earth to increase the jollity of the masses. But what can I say? I was in a hurry, so I popped into Wholefoods on Church Street instead.

I just got Maggie Beer’s new book, Maggie’s Kitchen, and I was oh so keen to try her Salmon with Pea Salsa. All I needed were the salmon steaks and there they were in the chiller cabinet, not as thick as I’d like but hey, ho. I couldn’t tell if they had the skin on or not, so I asked a nearby assistant if they did.

Is that the merest suggestion of an eye roll, or is it just me being hypersensitive? Erm, no, I’m not. Apparently, I’m very stupid. ‘Well it doesn’t matter does it, as it only takes a second to take the skin off.’ She’s looking at me like I’m probably not to be trusted with sharp objects. ‘But I need it with the skin on,’ I explain meekly. More eye rolling (honey, you’ll get wrinkles) and much prodding of the packaging to try and flip the fish over. ‘There, it’s got skin, you can see it,’ she thrusts it at me and I’m sure she’s speaking a little slower to compensate for my dimness. ‘Perhaps they should put whether it’s skinned or not on the label,’ I brave. At this point, I am obviously a complete moron. ‘Why do you need that? When. You. Can. See. It.’ Hmmm.

I’d love to stay and explain that – in my 20 years of working around food, reading about it, writing about it, cooking it – encouraging customers to poke and prod at something as delicate as fish is probably not a good idea. But if I am to continue to enjoy the Wholefoods experience, I really need to get back to work to pay for it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great people filling the shelves there. The produce guy is lovely and you couldn’t buy shampoo from a more charming person than the German woman who’s queen of the natural remedies section. Forget the lavender oil, she makes me feel calmer just looking at her. But some of the others … As my friend Virginia would say, ‘I see we’re going to have to build an extension on that charm school’.

P.S. Danny, Johnny, please forgive my cheating heart, or wallet. I promise I won’t make the same mistake again.

Maggie Beer’s Salmon with Pea Salsa

Maggie Beer’s my Aussie food heroine. I love her bold flavours, passion for eating seasonally and must-make-it-right-now recipes. This salmon’s a winner – simple enough for a midweek dinner, elegant enough to place it in front of fussy guests without fear.

I came home to find my chervil had withered away and died – and in the recent combination of sweltering heat followed by torrential rain, even hailstones, who can blame it? So I hacked away at my seemingly invincible parsley instead and it tasted great. I think the salsa would also be good with mint in place of the chervil, a sort of posh mushy peas, but then I’m Northern.

4x140g salmon steaks, skin-on (Got that, skin on!)
Flaky sea salt
Extra virgin olive oil for trickling over the top
10g unsalted butter
Juice of 1 lemon
Chervil sprigs and lemon wedges to serve

FROZEN PEA SALSA
30g unsalted butter
Extra virgin olive oil, for cooking
2 golden shallots, finely chopped
¾ cup chicken stock
1 ½ cups frozen peas
1 sprig chervil
Flaky sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

You know how sometimes you say things aloud which should probably have remained in your head? I once announced on a radio show that ‘A day without peas is like a day without sunshine,’ something my friends tease me about to this day. I don’t mind really. Because it’s true.

For the salsa, melt the butter in a deep frying pan with a little olive oil over a medium heat, then add the shallots and sauté for 10 minutes or until translucent. Meanwhile, bring the chicken stock to the boil in a small saucepan.

Add the peas and chervil (or parsley, or even mint) to the shallots, then, when the peas have thawed, add the hot chicken stock and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and leave to cool slightly. Puree the pea mixture in a blender (or use a mouli if you have one), then season with salt and pepper if you like.

Heat a large frying pan over a medium heat. Season the skin-sides of the steaks with salt. Add a splash of olive oil to the hot pan, then cook the fish, skin-side down, for two minutes or until the skin is crisp and you can see from the side that they are cooked at least halfway through.

Season the other side of the fish with salt, then quickly wipe the pan with a paper towel, drop in the butter and, when melted, gently turn the salmon over, using either a palette knife or spatula. Immediately remove the pan from the heat, then leave the steaks to sit in the hot pan for five minutes. The centre of the fish should be just set or a little rare.

Place the salmon steak on each plate, then top each with a spoonful of pea salsa. Squeeze over the lemon juice, sprinkle with chervil and drizzle with a little olive oil, then serve with lemon wedges on the side.

TIP To get a nice, crisp skin on fish, warm the pan over a medium-high heat, add a tiny splash of oil, and then put the fish into the pan, skin-side-down. Then wait. Don’t poke and prod at it. When it moves easily, the skin is seared and crisp and you can turn it over easily.

Dogs, biscuits and birthdays

The only thing I ever miss about working in an office is those sentences which begin ‘Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened last night’. I love working on my laptop at the kitchen counter while something delicious bubbles on the stove, popping out to water my herbs in between emails, catching an old episode of Gilmore Girls over lunch. (Have you seen Suki’s culinary marvels – I consider it essential research. At least that’s what I tried to explain to my accountant when I attempted to include a receipt for the Special Edition Box Set with my tax return.)
Since we got Barney, I don’t even have to miss out on those water cooler moments. Each morning, you can find me in the park with a dozen or so people and even more dogs catching up on local scandal, swapping recipes, scribbling down film and book recommendations, sharing expertise on anything from computers to ridding your wardrobe of cashmere-crazed moths – all the while trying to avoid the ducklings in spring and the deepest, muddiest puddles in winter.
We are plumbers and teachers, opera singers and mums, actors and life coaches, social workers and publicans, decorators and gardeners…All sorts really, a bit like the dogs, who range in size from Toy Terrier to Great Dane. Mark, king of the dog walkers, is our glorious leader and Clissold Park’s answer to Cesar Milan. He loves the odd drink, an occasional cigarette and has a passion for the choreography of Matthew Bourne. Actually, what I wanted to write was ‘booze, fags and ballet’ as it scans so nicely, but that makes him sound like a lush with a tutu fetish. This may or may not be true, but he’s the one I phone at nine o’clock at night begging for a bit of doggy day care for the next morning and he always says yes. This is not something I ever wish to jeopardise. For one thing, Barney would never forgive me. And for another, Michelin-starred chefs don’t really care for scruffy terriers in their dining rooms.
Strangely, my park popularity seems commensurate with the amount of baked good I have about my person. (On a couple of slobbery occasions, this has included treats for the dogs too.) It’s my birthday today, so I thought I might make something sweet to eat with our take-away cups of cappuccino. The coffee’s so wretched you need something to take the taste away. Brake fluid would do it, but I thought Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Biscuits would be better.
Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Biscuits

This is one of my favourite recipes from one of my favourite baking books, Rose Carrarini’s Breakfast Lunch Tea: The Many Little Meals of the Rose Bakery. If you’re ever in Paris, do seek out this wonderful Anglo-French café. It’s tucked away on the rue des Martyrs, conveniently close to the Gare du Nord for refuelling before you get on the Eurostar.
I’ve doubled the quantities for the biscuits (25 wouldn’t have even got us close to completing essential discussions on the latest Hackney Council lunacy), so it was a bit of a struggle to get everything into my mixer by the time I added the chocolate. I just stirred it by hand and it was fine. At least I had no complaints and that park lot can be picky. They may, however, have had their critical faculties dulled by the sight of Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, doing an enthusiastic Hokey Cokey at his kids’ sports day which was taking place in the dog-free area at the time. ‘You put your expense claim in, expense claim out. In, out, in out, your career is in doubt. You flip your secondary residence and you shake it all about…’
Makes about 50

400g (scant 2 cups) unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
400g (2 cups) crunchy peanut butter
500g (2 ½ cups) soft light brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs
670g (4 ½ cups) plain flour, sieved, plus extra for dusting
2 tsp salt – I used Halen Môn vanilla salt as I love it with chocolaty things, but any salt will do
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
500g chocolate, chopped

The observant among you may notice a little bowl of raisins in this collection of ingredients. I’d measured everything out and realised I was 100g short on the chocolate, so added a few raisins to make up the weight. Not bad, but not chocolate…

Lovely Burford Brown eggs from Clarence Court

Make sure you keep the chocolate quite chunky. Use whole bars and chop them up rather than miserly chocolate chips.

Beat the butter with the peanut butter and sugar until light, then add the vanilla extract. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the bowl and beater between each egg. Fold in the flour and salt. Mix the bicarbonate of soda with two teaspoons of hot water and quickly add this to the mixture. Finally, fold in the chocolate. Try to stop yourself from eating too much of the dough.

Divide the dough into batches of about 300g (11oz). On a lightly floured surface, roll each batch out into a log about 4cm (1 ½ inches) wide, wrap and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours until hard. If you don’t want to bake it all at once, wrap the extra logs in cling film and freeze. You can cook them straight from frozen, just add a minute or two to the cooking time.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/ Gas mark 4. Butter your baking trays and line them with baking parchment. If you’re making the full amount, you’ll need to do this in batches, so only cut enough dough for each batch. Leave the rest in the fridge until you’re ready to bake them. Cut the dough into slices about 10mm thick (½ an inch) and place them well apart on the trays. Bake them for 10-12 minutes until pale golden – don’t overbake or the texture will be dry. Cool on a rack. Take to the park, to the office, anywhere a conversation is likely to begin with ‘Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened last night’.

Dinner, step by step

If there’s a person to whom Oscar Wilde’s quotation ‘I can resist anything except temptation’ applies more than it does to my husband Séan, I’m yet to meet him. It is possibly why he asked me to marry him after we’d known one another for only six weeks. It is also why, when I sent him to the farmer’s market to pick up a chicken, he came back with a chicken and a cut of beef called Jacob’s Ladder. He’d heard the butcher discussing a recipe for it with another customer and was intrigued. He is also a person who, when presented with two tempting options, he’ll take both. Just wrap ‘em up, thanks, I’ve got a bag (he’s an eco-hedonist after all).

Jacob’s ladder is a small rack of ribs from the forequarter flank extravagantly marbled with fat and richly flavoured. It’s also known as ‘short ribs’ or, more dramatically, ‘oven buster’ because it swells up when you cook it on the bone, giving you something which looks bigger once you take it out of the oven than when you put it in – not something you can say for grander, more rafinée cuts.

The Learmonth brothers from Stock’s Farm in Essex are always great with recipe advice, even when the queue is longer than the one outside Top Shop when Kate Moss introduced her first collection. I knew this was a great braising cut, though I have to admit I was a bit sceptical when Sean explained that to cook it à la Learmonth, we needed to sizzle it at 220C/450F/Gas mark 8 for 20 minutes then turn the heat down to 160C/325F/Gas mark 3 for THREE HOURS. Still, I do like a cut of meat that – with the introduction of a bit of seasoning and heat – does all of the work for you, so I was in. It’s also cheap (our bit cost less than £5), which appeals to my northern thriftiness.

I made a quick paste by grinding up some peppercorns, salt, chilli flakes and English mustard powder and mixing it with a slosh of olive oil then I massaged it into the meat. I put it bone-side down in a roasting tin, bunged it in the oven and gave it a little baste every now and again. When I lifted it onto its warmed platter to rest, the flesh was thick and tempting, raised high around the bones which had protruded from the flesh, flaring elegantly at the ends like heraldic trumpets. And it was delicious, meltingly tender, deeply savoury. Though I would say enjoying it at its fullest requires quite a bit of gnawing on bones, so it’s not for those who, as kids, didn’t jump up and down with delight when the Flintstones came on the telly.

How to make perfect roast potatoes

Mr Learmonth also promised Jacob’s Ladder yielded the best fat for roast potatoes. Obviously, in the interests of research, I had to put this to the test as there are few things in the world more wonderful. This is my technique for creating a perfectly crisp, golden exterior and a yielding, fluffy interior. It’s foolproof. It could actually be the reason why Séan wanted to marry me after six weeks.

Peel the potatoes and chop larger ones in half or even quarters if they’re huge. Bring a large pan of water to the boil, toss in some salt then the potatoes and parboil for 5 minutes. While they’re bubbling away, put a roasting tin into an oven preheated to 200C/400F/Gas mark 6, and put a ladle of the beef fat into the tin – you could use goose or duck fat instead if you like.

Drain the potatoes in a colander and allow to steam a bit so they lose some of their moisture. Next, put them back into the saucepan with a good sprinkling of semolina, fine polenta or cornmeal (thank you, Nigella, for this tip), hold the lid firmly on the pan and give them a good rattle to roughen up the edges a bit. Carefully remove the hot roasting tin from the oven and tip in the potatoes – they should sizzle as they go in the pan. Quickly give them a stir so they’re coated in the fat and space them out well in the tin. Return to the oven and bake for about 40-50 minutes, turning once or twice during cooking, until crunchy and golden. Sprinkle with a little flaky sea salt and there you are – potato heaven

Sautéed oyster mushrooms

Séan also found these great coral and chocolate oyster mushrooms at the Gourmet Mushroom stall. I simply sautéed a chopped onion in butter until translucent and soft, raised the heat and tossed in the mushrooms – adding a pinch of salt at this stage, encourages them to lose their moisture quicker. When they’d given up most of their liquid, I threw in a couple of finely chopped garlic cloves and stirred in a good dollop of mascarpone – this is what I had in the fridge, you could use double cream or crème fraîche. Then season with salt and pepper and throw in a few tablespoons of finely chopped herbs – parsley is good, dill is even better, but then I love dill.

Get stuffed…

One of the most joyful things about being a cook is that the smallest discoveries delight you. A special find can make your day. And these days that’s just as well, with our glorious Mother of Parliaments looking like crack whore, spewing out less than Honourable Members hell bent on venally redefining shamelessness in a way that makes Katie Price look like a particularly devout Amish sister.

As I walked past the little Indian green grocers on our high street, I was thrilled to see a crate of gorgeous, fat baby aubergines. So pretty and tempting, I couldn’t resist picking up a few handfuls, along with a bundle of perky curry leaves. When I went inside to pay, the gently smiling woman at the till explained to me how she stuffed them and baked them and it sounded delicious. Just the thing for dinner.

To be honest, our sharing of this recipe was largely done in the international language of mime and point. And I was delayed in writing it down as my short trip home became rather protracted due to it taking me 30 minutes to pay a cheque into the bank. (HSBC Stoke Newington High Street – one working teller and a seemingly permanently broken paying-in machine at 3.15pm, are you sure? No, I don’t want to buy travel insurance in Turkish, investigate an ISA, arrange to purchase a house within the framework of Shariah law, stock up on travellers’ cheques – I just want to GIVE. YOU. MY. MONEY. PLEASE. I’ve stood in shorter, more cheerful queues when I lived in Soviet Russia.)

So I hope I remembered it accurately. I probably didn’t, but it was good. And – note to Members of Parliament everywhere – I paid for it all myself. You should try it sometime.

Stuffed aubergines

Gosh, I sound a bit cross today. I’m probably just hungry…

I didn’t have any chillies – an uncharacteristic oversight on my part – and they would have been good in this dish. But given my present state of mind, I probably don’t need the extra heat.

Serves 4 as a main course

3 tbsps groundnut oil
A dozen or so small aubergines
1 tsp mustard seeds
2 onions, halved and finely sliced
2-3 curry leaves
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 mild, green chilli, deseeded and chopped (optional, depending on your state of mind)
A small ‘thumb’ of ginger, peeled and finely grated or minced
3-4 fat cloves of garlic, peeled and finely grated or minced
About a small teacupful of desiccated, unsweetened coconut
3-4 large, juicy tomatoes, grated (see TIP)
A small handful of coriander leaves, roughly chopped, plus a few more for garnishing
Salt

Cumin, cardamom and mustard seeds

Poppadommmmmmmm

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas mark 6.

Cut the aubergines from their bases to their tips and cut them again crossways, being careful not to cut all the way through the skin – you want a cross-shaped cut which allows you to open them up a bit. Warm 2tbsps of the oil over a medium heat in a large saucepan and sauté the aubergines for five minutes or so until they soften and browned a little. Put to one side to cool while you prepare the stuffing.

Add the remaining tablespoon of oil to the pan and fry the mustard seeds for a minute or so until they start to pop. Add the onions and sauté them until they soften and turn a rich, golden brown. (Unlike most European dishes, where we cook onions until they’re soft, sweet and translucent, lots of the flavour in Indian dishes comes from caramelising the onions.) Stir in the curry leaves, cumin, ground coriander, chilli (if you’re not as cross as me and you can take the heat), ginger and garlic and a good pinch of salt. Stir and cook for a few minutes until all of the onions are well coated. Add the coconut and tomatoes and stir until thickened a bit, then stir in the chopped coriander. Taste, and add a bit more salt if it needs it. Stuff each of the aubergines with a couple of spoonfuls of the filling and line them up in an ovenproof dish. Cover tightly with foil or a lid and bake for 50-60 minutes. We ate ours with basmati rice, minty raita and black pepper poppadoms. I feel more cheerful just typing that.

My little flotilla of aubergines, about to be launched into the oven

TIP
Look, I spend very few unhappy moments in the kitchen, but almost all of them have involved skinning tomatoes. Chopping onions? Mincing chillies? Gutting fish? No problem. Pile ‘em up. But tomatoes. All that cutting of crosses, boiling of water and preparing of ice baths seems a bit too like some kind of arcane pagan ritual to me. I mean, I just want to eat them, not sacrifice them on the altar of gastronomy. These days, I mostly grate them unless I’m doing something very refined. Just press a ripe tomato against the coarse side of a box grater and grate away – you get all of the pulpy flesh and, as you press, the skin is left at the end all ready for you to discard. And what’s a few seeds between friends, particularly on a week night?