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Although not normally known for brevity, just a little one for you today. Call it a nibblet (is that I sigh of relief I heard from somewhere in the back there?).

But there is plenty to come over the next few days, so fear not.

Yesterday was day one of ‘Mission Top Secret’ which I can’t talk about but might (or might not…) involve a cookbook that I might (or might not…) be writing with two rather fantastic chefs. More to follow.

I’m off to London in about an hour to sample some genuine British buffalo mozzarella made by former F1 world champion Jody Sheckter who has since swapped his Ferrari for a tractor and turned to organic and bio-diverse farming. Very exciting indeed. I shall report back.

In the mean time how about some homework? A while back I was given this book, My Last Supper by Melanie Dunea in which she photographs and interviews fifty of the world’s top chefs about what they would choose for their, you guessed it, last supper.

In preparation for a similarly themed post, what would you chose for your last meal on earth? Who would cook it for you? And who would you like to accompany you whilst you munch through the final morsels? I'd love to know what you'd pick so get in touch to help make this a fun and truly global feature.

Need some inspiration? You can watch Charlie Rose interview Melanie along with Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Tom Aikens and Marcus Samuelsson about their last suppers here, or just here:



Also, I know there was no Friday Nibble last week, I got a little sidetracked. This week’s will more than make up for it and will even include a killer recipe for cassoulet (that should offer some clue as to the featured item).

A bientot!

Elevenses and Solving the Credit Crunch with Cake

Much like knowledge, a little nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

Get too wrapped in thinking that life was better ‘back in the day’ and you start to forget that everything wasn’t chocolate boxes and roses. No matter what the right-wing press will have you believe, life is better now than it ever has been.

However, take off the rose-tinted glasses for a moment and there are still some aspects of bygone times that are just as appealing: train travel, picnics, cricket matches, slow food as the norm rather than a concept. And elevenses.

Elevenses is a notion that, along with Gentlemen’s Clubs, steam engines and cholera seems to belong to the past, to an age seen only in history books or episodes of Jeeves and Wooster (or Zimbabwe).

Elevenses don’t belong in an era of conference calls, celebrity perfumes and instant messaging.

But they should.

In fact, I have an idea: it should be mandatory for employers to provide coffee, tea and cakes and a fifteen-minute break at some point between 10:45 and 11:30. Actually, sod it, make it twenty minutes.

Hear me out on this one. Not only would it make the work place a far happier place (little things go a long way), it would also make the prospect of Monday mornings a lot more bearable, knowing that there was a steaming mug of coffee and a slice of Victoria Sponge cake just round the corner.

It would allow socialising and chatting and catching up and all those important human interactions to be done in a designated window.

It would foster a sense of community spirit and help to iron out any differences or bubbling animosities. It is hard to be angry with someone if they have cream running down their chin or chocolate round their mouth.

It would give employees a sense that they are being appreciated and not just being shafted by ‘the man’ in return for the privilege of a monthly paycheque.

Pretty soon, this happiness would start to spread from company to company, city to city, politician to politician, nation to nation and NGO to NGO.

The UN would be a different place altogether if they stopped for Sachertorte every day and imagine how much easier diplomatic relations in the Middle East would be if they knew there was a baklava break to look forward to in an hour?

For those that have to whittle everything down to a balance sheet - Happy people are happy employees. Happy employees are more productive and more productive employees are more profitable.

In short, it would make the world a better place.

The logic is flawless and my own projections (done on a spreadsheet, I’ll have you know) suggest that not only would the cake start to pay for itself after just a month, you would start to turn a profit (thanks to productivity going through the roof) after only six weeks. Depression, recession, credit crunch solved and a new era of world peace and harmony entered. All through cake. Here’s one to start with:



Recipe – Chocolate, Hazelnut and Coffee Cake
This is based on a Nigel Slater recipe which he, in turn, adapted from a Tamasin Day-Lewis recipe. It is awesome. Serves six.

125 grams of unsalted butter, cubed
125 grams of Demerara sugar
2 large eggs
A large shot of espresso
A heaped teaspoon of baking powder
125 grams of plain flour
100 grams of ground hazelnuts
125 grams of ground dark chocolate

Mix the butter and sugar together until they are fluffy and pale. Unless you have arms like Brian Blessed, I suggest you use an electric mixer. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat it all together.

Stir in the coffee then sift in the flour and baking powder. Using a spatula of some description fold the mixture together before adding most of the hazelnuts and chocolate. Hold some back for topping the cake.

Tip the cake mixture into a lined cake tin and pop into a pre-heated oven (about 180 degrees). It will take about an hour. You know its ready if you stick in a skewer and it comes out clean. Turn it out onto a wire rack and leave to cool for about fifteen minutes.

If you are feeling really decadent smear on some cream cheese mixed with icing sugar and cocoa powder.

Call someone, anyone, who enjoys cake. Brew some coffee, cut large slices and enjoy, smug in the knowledge that you’ve done your bit in fostering a new age of global harmony and happiness.

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Beetroot, Ginger & Chocolate Risotto

You learn something new every day, or so the saying goes. Did you know, for example, that the first meal that was eaten on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin was a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings (freeze dried, one would assume)?

Or that sperm swim faster after they have been exposed to caffeine?

Or that the largest beetroot ever grown was over 18 feet in length?

Or that it is near impossible to take a good photo of a risotto? Especially a risotto that I promised you good people a couple of weeks ago (you'd thought I'd forgotten, hadn't you?)

It’s true – no matter how appealing it may look on the plate, in photographic form it will almost always take on the appearance of lumpy aardvark vomit.

You could gild it with gold leaf, adorn it with asparagus and top it with truffles but under the lights and through a lens it will still look about as appealing as a jock strap salad.

We tried. We really did. But even the best photo we got wouldn’t have looked out of place in a crime scene report. So you’ll have to make do with this representation instead. And the best thing about beetroot risotto is the colour anyway. So sit back, use your imagination and take note. Recipe below.



It’s hard to write a definitive recipe for risotto. There are so many variations (rice absorbency, stock quality, stirring capacity) that I hesitate to make any assertions for fear I will end up with angry emails and comments.

Instead, use this as a platform, a launch pad, or a mere eyebrow-raiser. All I will say is that it is certainly worth trying and that there is true deliciousness hidden behind the vaguely bizarre veneer of the combination of ingredients.


The Ingredients – should serve four

Olive oil or butter (about 25g)
A pinch of bicarbonate of soda
A small onion, or three/four shallots finely chopped
Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped
A teaspoon of grated ginger
Four or five small beetroot, roasted in the skins (in a sealed foil package for about an hour), peeled and diced into teeny, tiny pieces.
Risotto rice (Arborio, carnaroli, vialone nano) – about 250g
A small glass of white wine or white vermouth
Chicken or vegetable Stock (impossible to say how much you will need but most likely about a litre), in a pan on a gentle heat.
The darkest dark chocolate you can find, preferably 70%+ cocoa solids

The method
You all know how to make risotto, right? You’re going to find this incredibly patronising if you are talked through each step in the manner of a sports teacher humiliating the fat kid aren’t you? Oh well, here goes:

Put the onion and garlic in a large, heavy bottomed pan along with the olive oil or butter. Turn on the heat (low – see here for why) and add the bicarb (this helps soften the onion and bring out the flavours. I learnt why here). Fry gently for 10 minutes, or until you have a delicious pulpy mass of onion and garlic. Add the ginger and stir.

Crank up the heat. Pour in the rice, stir and cook off for about a minute to start it toasting. Add the wine or vermouth. It should sizzle and give off a fairly potent steam of near pure alcohol. Stir again (can you see a theme developing?). Tip in the beetroot. Admire the colour. Go on, you know you want to. Stir.

The stock (which is in a pan on a gentle heat, right?) can now be ladled in bit by bit. Stir. Stir some more. When almost all the stock has been absorbed add another ladle full. Stir. Keep stirring.

Repeat the above until the rice is cooked – usually about forty minutes. By this point your arm will aching and you should have worked up a considerable appetite with all that stirring.

Spoon onto a plate, grate the chocolate over the top. Admire the colour once more and eat.

One final point – risotto should be soft, it should spread evenly and slowly over the plate like a slew of molten lava running down a volcano. You shouldn’t be able to slice it.

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Simplicity and Scrambled Eggs (and kittens)

Despite the infinite complexity of cooking, sometimes the hardest things to master are those that appear to be staggeringly simple. Many of the great chefs subscribe to this philosophy.

‘You can tell how good a cook is by how well he does the simple things, says Marco Pierre White in White Heat.

Thomas Keller’s eulogy to the quiche in his book Bouchon is a study in eloquence that manages to list the perfect attributes that all go into making the superficially simple bistro classic. Pastry and batter – this is all there is but it is ‘the essence of luxury, a great delicacy using the most common ingredients.’ A great quiche is, he says, ‘almost sexual.’

Where there are no trinkets or trifles, there is no-where to hide.

Daniel Boulud writes in Letters to a Young Chef of the importance of being able to cook a perfect omelette and how André Soltner would never look at a resume. ‘Instead he would say “make me an omelet (sic).” He figured he could tell a lot simply from watching the way the applicant beat the eggs, handled the pan and tasted for seasoning.’

But it is in the simple done well that true satisfaction resides. It’s my view that the greatest dishes contain no more than three ingredients: a chicken roasted with nothing more than salt and pepper, a potato fried in goose fat with a light dusting of sea salt, a slice of fresh bread containing flour, yeast and water, a wafer thin pizza topped with tomato, basil and mozzarella (OK, technically that’s four, but you get the point).

Scrambled eggs is one such dish. Done badly it is frustratingly disappointing – dry, hard, rubbery eggs cooked too quickly over a high heat or, heaven forbid in a microwave, unseasoned and anaemic in colour. This is not an appetising dish.

Done well, however, it is a wonder to behold. Contrary to residing orthodoxy, it isn’t a convenience dish. It is something to be nurtured and appreciated, cooked slowly and stirred into creamy richness.



According to the legendary chef Auguste Escoffier, eggs should be scrambled for forty minutes, lovingly stirred at regular intervals to prevent the formation of any hard lumps. While most of us don’t have such temporal luxury, ten to fifteen minutes should be enough to create a dish to behold.

Eggs, butter, salt and pepper are all that is necessary – no need for cream, milk or any other additions. If you have good eggs, and this dish is all about the eggs, let them shine.

Crack them into a pan, add a few cubes of butter and cook them over a low heat, stirring regularly until the butter melts into the eggs and they start to set. Don’t take your eyes off them, don’t stop stirring – this is the crucial moment. Most importantly take them off the heat before they are cooked, the residual heat in the pan will be enough to set them to the desired texture.

Season with salt and pepper (always salt eggs at the end of cooking, something to do with the coagulation of proteins), stir for one final time and turn out onto freshly toasted bread. Simple? Perhaps. Easy? Nothing of the sort.

Slightly off topic, but still on the subject of simplicity and perfection, the kittens are doing well. I look like I’ve taken up self-harm thanks to the vast number of scratches covering my arms and legs but they are so much fun that it’s worth every claw mark.

Pictures below.





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Making Marmalade

What’s the first image that bounces into your head when you think of oranges? Sun-drenched Floridian orange groves? A cool glass of juice on a warm summer’s morning? A Spanish hillside covered with dark-leafed trees punctuated with glistening fruits? A cold February day with the heaviest snow in almost two decades?



Well. Perhaps not the last one.

For most people oranges mean summer. They scream sunshine and refreshment – glorious bursts of evocative taste, that perfect balance of sweet and sour and a delicious onslaught of juice. But for one type of orange, much beloved by preserve makers the world over, the short season comes in the dead of winter.

Seville oranges are famed for their unique bitterness and unusually high pectin content: two qualities that make them ideal for making British-style marmalade – a bitter-sweet fruit preserve that is one of the best ways to start the morning. Smothered lavishly onto thickly sliced toast and served with a mug of steaming coffee, it is almost as traditional as the Full English (but significantly less likely to give you a coronary).

It is kick-start and a treat of the sort that makes getting out of bed a little less painful. Which is exactly what breakfast should do.

The Seville orange season is short which leaves a little window for making up a batch that should (hopefully) last you the year. Providing you don’t give away too many jars.

With the snow forcing the entire country to come to a grinding halt yesterday, we decided to do something productive, something that would make the house smell delicious and something that would make the prospect of getting up this morning a shade more appealing.

We already had a couple of kilos of oranges ready and waiting along with two lemons and a large bag of sugar but we hadn’t got round to turning this pile of citrus into something worthy of gracing a slice of toast. Yesterday, however, the conditions were ideal.

It was cold outside and a layer of snow was providing the surrounding countryside with a pretty and appealing blanket. After the obligatory walk, snow angel making and snowman building, the prospect of cooking up a batch of marmalade to warm ourselves up was made even more tempting.

It is a fairly laborious process but in a way that is both therapeutic and satisfying. After the vaguely leathery peel has been removed, it has to be sliced – it forms the main constituent of marmalade – and then boiled up with the juice from the oranges along with some water and the pith and pips housed inside a muslin bag (this is where that glorious pectin lies).



Other recipes are less time consuming, Nigella Lawson’s is possibly the simplest we saw but it was Nigel Slater’s from last weekend’s newspaper that we chose to try.

Once the peel has been simmered for an hour, or until it has turned translucent, the muslin bag is removed and in goes the sugar. The whole lot is boiled hard until the setting point is reached when it is decanted into sterilised jars, sealed and left to cool.

The great thing about making your own preserves is you can tailor it to your exact tastes. Want it sweet with tiny slices of orange peel that melt into your toast? Fine. Prefer a bitter, chunky marmalade to see you right until lunchtime? Not a problem.

We plumped for the latter and now have seven jars of delicious preserve just waiting to be spooned over thick slices of bread and melting butter. We didn’t wait long before diving in and despite the cold and the dark and the wind this morning, getting out of bed was that little bit easier knowing that we had little jars of sunshine ready to wake us up.



For the full recipe, see Nigel Slater’s page on guardian.co.uk

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