Category Archives: herbs

marrow fritter, flatleaf parsley, shallots

Posted on April 16, 2013 by admin| 1 Comment

A wonderful new food magazine, Saffron, acted as a timely reminder for me to stop procrastinating and to get on and write this post. Published for the first time last week, Saffron is a meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated journal that promises much for the future. It caught my eye for many reasons, not least of which was a eulogy to those fantastic ‘forgotten’ fats, lard and dripping.

If you’ve visited my blog (and my Twitter account) before, you’ll know that I’m an enthusiastic advocate of those very fats, as well as of suet. I only wish I could readily get hold of flead to cook with, too, but that’s a mission for another time.

But here’s another glorious source of fat which is too often overlooked and discarded – bone marrow.

Rich, slightly sweet, and as melt-in-the-mouth as you could possibly wish for, marrow is a highly nutritious treat that every self-declared food lover should try. I particularly love these fritters, in which the simple addition of lemon zest both counters and elevates the fatty marrow into something quite sublime. Do try.

Makes 2
50g marrow from veal marrow bones (see below)
20g fresh white bread crumbs
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp chopped flatleaf parsley
1 tsp lemon zest
salt, freshly ground black pepper to taste

Take a handful of marrow bones (cut across the bone – ask your butcher to do this) and cover with hot water. Bring to a bare simmer and cook the bones for no more than 5 minutes.

Remove the bones from the pan and leave to cool slightly on a plate. After a couple of minutes, push the marrow out of the bones using a teaspoon or other blunt cutlery. It will be a bit messy, but you should be left with some decent lumps of usable marrow.

Combine the marrow with all the other ingredients until they come together and you can shape the resultant mix. Roll into fritters about the length of your little finger.

In a heavy-based frying pan, heat a little vegetable oil (not olive oil). Put the fritter into the hot pan, and fry briskly, watching all the time, until the fritter is golden brown all over – this will take seconds, rather than minutes. Do not over fry!

Serve with a salad of flatleaf parsley, finely chopped shallots, dressed with olive or rapeseed oil.

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Posted in eggs, herbs, meat, vegetables

wild mushroom and cob nut galette

Posted on December 17, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

With all the upcoming Christmas festivities in prospect, it’s time to make sure that everyone’s catered for. Delicious in its own right, but particularly perfect for a non meat-eater at Christmas, this mushroom and cob nut ‘galette’ is simple to make and full of seasonal flavours.

If you’re quick, it’s still possible to get hold of Kentish cob nuts for Christmas from Farnell Farm or Potash Farm. You can use hazelnuts instead, but cob nuts have a much richer, creamier, and – dare I say – nuttier hit that’s worth going the extra mile for. Similarly, although I prefer wild mushrooms, you can happily use other well-flavoured mushrooms instead, such as chestnut or portabello.

This recipe is a much simplified adaptation of one by the Irish food writer and restaurateur, Denis Cotter, from ‘Wild Garlic, Gooseberries, and Me’. If you want to try your hand at more unusual vegetarian food, or if you’re looking for a Christmas present for a keen cook, then I thoroughly recommend any of Cotter’s books.

Anyway, to the recipe… It may look a little fiddly, but it’s really quite straightforward and quick to make. Serves 4.

Ingredients
300g or so wild mushrooms, coarsely chopped
100g cob nuts, coarsely chopped
1 large celeriac, peeled
100g mascarpone
small bunch flat-leafed parsley, finely chopped
400ml red wine
200ml passata
1 tsp brown sugar
2 sprigs thyme
about 50g butter
seasoning, to taste

First, make the red wine and passata sauce. Put the red wine, passata, thyme, and sugar in a saucepan, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, and leave to simmer until reduced by half. Remove the thyme. Set aside.

Slice the celeriac as thinly as possible, and trim to the size and shape you want (mine were about 7cm squared). Shallow fry the slices, one at a time, in hot oil until tender and golden. Drain on kitchen roll and set aside.

In a large frying pan, heat a generous knob of butter until it begins to foam. Add the mushrooms to the pan, and sauté briskly over a high heat, until cooked and browned. Add the chopped parsley and 1 chopped sprig of thyme leaves right at the end of the cooking, and stir in.

Leave to cool slightly, and then add the mascarpone and chopped cob nuts, and mix in until properly incorporated. Season the mixture to taste.

Layer the galette, starting with a slice of celeriac, then a mushroom and cob nut layer, and so on, finishing with a slice of celeriac.

Reheat the red wine and tomato sauce, and whisk in a small knob of cold butter, so that the sauce becomes glossy. Carefully spoon it around the galette. Serve!

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Posted in dairy, herbs, nuts, vegetables

mackerel, fennel, pomegranate

Posted on November 22, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Mackerel may not be regarded as the most luxurious of fish – it’s not rare, delicate, or expensive – but that’s no reason not to put it centre stage. With its wonderful appearance – especially when the skin is cooked and turns various hues of silver and gold – and its meaty flavour and texture, it makes a delicious (and nutritious) highlight to any meal.

Because mackerel is a strong tasting and ‘oily’ fish, it needs to be balanced with acidity and fresh flavours. Fennel with mint and yogurt provide a good match, and orange and pomegranate bring both colour and citrus.

You’ll need, per serving:

One mackerel fillet
Half a fennel
A teaspoon or so of natural yogurt
Fresh mint, chopped – to taste
A few slices of orange
Pomegranate seeds

All you need to do is to shave the fennel as thinly as possible – a mandolin is great for this job, but a sharp knife will do the job just as well. Then add a little yogurt, no more than a heaped teaspoon, and mix it in. You want to barely coat the fennel, not slather it. Add some fresh mint to taste.

Put a small splash of sunflower or groundnut oil in a frying pan. Once the pan is good and hot, lay the mackerel fillet in, skin side down. Fry for 2 minutes, then turn the fish over, and fry for another minute.

Serve by placing a small mound of the fennel slaw on the centre of the plate. Lay the mackerel fillet on top. Decorate the plate with slices of orange and the pomegranate seeds in any way you like!

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Posted in fish, fruits, herbs, vegetables

an Autumn feast

Posted on November 20, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Autumn. It’s when we come over all ‘season of mists’ as the final leaves fall from the trees and the mornings start to have a distinct chill to them.

As we approach the end of November, summer and harvest festivals already seem a long time past. There are still several weeks to go until Christmas. And yet… it’s a wonderful time for the food lover, bringing as it does new crops of comforting fruit and vegetables alongside the last throes of earlier seasonal ingredients.

It seems an ideal time, then, for a celebration – a feast to brighten the longer, dark evenings, to make the very best of autumnal produce, and to mark a kind of midpoint between harvest time and Christmas.

I suppose ‘feast’ conjures visions of lavish expense, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Since we moved to our current house 2 years ago, I’ve been constantly surprised at how much we can grow (and I’m no expert!) for ourselves, and how much we save on food shopping expenditure as a result. We don’t have a large garden, but we’ve put in small fruit trees where we can, dug out a couple of dedicated vegetable patches, and planted a lot of herbs and fruit bushes in the borders.

Growing our own also means I’ve become even more aware of seasonality and the rhythms of the year, and how much better everything genuinely looks and tastes when it’s grown at the ‘right’ time. As I say, I don’t regard myself as a gardener, but I can’t imagine not growing my own now.

Anyway, enough talking, and more feasting. What follows is 3 courses, but I’ll be blogging about pre- and post-prandial nibbles and drinks shortly, just in time for Christmas! And for those who don’t eat meat, I’ll post alternatives to the starter and main course soon, too.

To start: pan-fried mackerel with fennel and mint slaw, orange, and pomegranate

Next: roast mallard with red wine-poached pears, roasted celeriac, parsnips, wild mushrooms, and sautéed kale

To finish: butternut squash, apple, ginger, and roasted cobnut trifle

If you want help with planning a garden design that will give you your own seasonal fruit and vegetables to feast on, it’s worth thinking about getting expert help. Floral & Hardy specialises in contemporary garden design and tailors gardens to meet the needs of the consumer. They take on many challenging gardens of all sizes and have an expert team who work out how to use space effectively.

With thanks to Floral & Hardy for their kind sponsorship of this post.

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Posted in birds, fish, fruits, herbs, nuts, vegetables

a summer salad

Posted on July 26, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

I don’t know about you, but I’m loving this glorious sunshine and – finally – the chance to enjoy some suitably summery salads, and the chance to make use of my veg patch crops, like this magnificent and intensely lemony red-veined sorrel.

I grow a number of varieties of salad greens, as well as some ‘usual’ summer vegetables (such as courgettes), as well as innumerable herbs. A few days ago, I put a few of these all on a plate, together with a hard-boiled egg, and some delicious lemon and garlic-marinated anchovies (kindly given to me by Lola Espana to try). While the anchovies are obviously not Kentish, I must admit that they combined beautifully with the rest of the salad, particularly the sorrel. You could easily use, say, mackerel, sardines, whitebait, or even sprats instead, if you want to use locally-caught fish.

So what went in the salad? Mizuna, wild rocket, courgette flowers, borage flowers, red-veined sorrel, egg, anchovies, croutons. And finished with a a generous drizzle of local rapeseed oil.

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Posted in eggs, fish, flowers, herbs

greengage, hyssop, and vodka sorbet

Posted on August 17, 2011 by admin| 4 Comments

Confession time. I’m brand new to gardening, apart from ‘helping’ my grandparents when I was a small child. Five months in – I started in early April – I’ve found that there’s nothing like planting a garden from scratch to make you learn quickly.

Hyssop is one of my new-found discoveries and joys.

Everything about it appeals to me (and, seemingly, to the local bees) - the deep green shiny foliage, its regal purple flowers, and its unique bitter mintgreen scent.

To cap it all, of course, I love the fact that I can use it for cooking.

To my palate, hyssop has a natural affinity with greengages – those luscious juicy green plums which we see so rarely. Happily, like a lot of soft fruit in these parts this summer, there appears to be a strong showing this year, and I’m doing my best to make the most of them. If you’ve never tried them, do please give them a go – contrary to the common perception, they’re not sour, but as sweet and delicious as any ‘normal’ plum, if not more so.

To make the sorbet:
1 large punnet (approx. 2lbs) greengages
sugar to taste, approx. 4-5 tablespoons (remember that freezing will lessen the sweetness)
150-200 ml or so of water
a couple of sprigs of hyssop
a generous splosh of vodka

Put all the ingredients except for the vodka into a large pan, and cover with a lid. Place over a low to medium heat for as long as it takes for the fruit to soften fully and release its juices, probably 15-20 mins. Turn the heat off, and leave the pan contents to cool.

Pour the cooled greengages into a sieve, along with the liquid, over the container you intend to use for freezing the sorbet. Gently push the solid fruit with the back of the spoon to squeeze some extra juice through, but don’t go mad. What remains in the sieve is now a delicious compote to eat with yogurt.

To the greengage syrup in the container, add your vodka. By all means be generous, but go carefully – too much alcohol will mean that the sorbet won’t freeze so readily. Give everything a good stir, and put it in the freezer to set. If using an ice cream maker, follow the manufacturer’s instructions. If not, simply take the sorbet out of the freezer every half hour or so, and give the mixture another thorough stir, taking particular care to break down the larger crystals at the edge of the container. The more times you can be bothered to do this – and I happen to find it mildly therapeutic – the smoother your final sorbet will be.

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Posted in fruits, herbs

radishes with summer savory butter

Posted on August 3, 2011 by admin| 1 Comment

As I type away here, the sun is streaming through my window and the temperature is already in the high 20s. It is, as the tabloids would have it, ‘a scorcher’. And on days like this, I have little inclination to get behind the stove. Anything I prepare has to be quick, tasty, and preferably cooling, too. After all, I’d rather be sitting outside with a glass of something chilled.

Crisp radishes, straight from the garden, make the perfect snack or appetite sharpener for a meal. And summer savory – with its inimitable scent, falling somewhere between rosemary, thyme, and pepper, as the herb expert, Jekka McVicar once described it – is the perfect accompaniment, especially when combined with a little cold unsalted butter.

Savory is a wonderfully versatile herb, and makes an refreshing substitute for salt and pepper. It’s a mystery to me why it ever fell out of favour, particularly as it’s easy to grow and attractive to look at. Try the tips scattered over salads, in meat rubs, or with egg dishes.

Or try this ridiculously simple combination: take 1 teaspoon of summer savoury tips, chop finely, and add to 50-75g (according to taste) of slightly softened unsalted butter in a bowl. Mash the two together until well blended. Spoon the butter out into a small sheet of clingfilm or baking parchment, and make a roll. Put into the fridge until cold and firm. To serve, slice and eat with freshly pulled and washed radishes.

Wash down with something equally chilled and spicy.

Use the leftover green radish tops in salads, or wilt them with a little butter, as you would do spinach. Or blitz them to make a more unusual addition to a pesto.

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Posted in herbs, vegetables

watercress and sorrel soup

Posted on June 13, 2011 by admin| 2 Comments

Now’s the time of year when both watercress and sorrel are in abundance and demand to be made use of. Not only do they taste wonderful, but – packed with essential vitamins and minerals as they are – they’re also fantastically good for us, too.

Hampshire is probably better known for its watercress, particularly during the Victorian era when street vendors sold it in bunches in London to customers craved refreshers to counteract the city’s smoke and dust – an astonishing 50 tonnes of watercress were sold in this way per week. But Kent also boasts a 300-year old tradition of watercress production at Wingham Well, just a few miles east of Canterbury. It’s from there that I get huge leafy bunches of the stuff, via my local farm shop. The sorrel comes from my garden – it’s incredibly easy to grow, even in the smallest space or pot.

This recipe combines the pepperiness of watercress with the lemony hit of sorrel to make a vibrant green summer’s soup, good either hot or chilled. Finish with rapeseed oil for a buttery note, or with cream or crème fraiche for a more indulgent version. I happen to like mine with oil, and accompanied by sourdough crispbreads with tangy cream cheese from Northiam Dairy.

Watercress and sorrel soup (serves 4)
1 large bunch of watercress
1 large handful of sorrel
2 shallots
2 potatoes, roughly diced
750ml – 1l vegetable or chicken stock, or water
a generous knob of butter
salt and pepper, to taste

In a large saucepan, heat the butter until it has melted.

Roughly dice the shallots. Fry them in the butter until they become soft and transparent – but not brown.

Add the diced potatoes to the pan, and cover the lot with water or stock. Bring it all to the boil, then reduce the heat, and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. Remove from the heat.

Add the watercress and sorrel to the pan, and leave to wilt for a minute or two.

Pour the lot into a blender, and blitz. (Pass through a sieve if you want a uniform colour and texture.) Season to taste, and finish with a drizzle of rapeseed oil, or with a goodly swirl of cream or crème fraiche.

This recipe also appears on the website of Peter’s Yard - the suppliers of the crispbreads I used.

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Posted in herbs, vegetables