Falafel

Ok, it's been ages since I've done anything here. Sorry. Don't know if anyone noticed anyway...

Anyway, I've developed a recipe from scratch, with a little development and I'm quite proud of it.

Most of the falafel recipes I've tried over the years have used whole chickpeas, either dried ones soaked or tinned and then mashed or whizzed in a whizzy whiz food processor thing.

From Ottolenghi to Anissa Helou, Claudia Roden to Greg Malouf, and I've always had trouble with them falling to pieces at the frying stage. Sometimes I've resorted to egg to bind them - inauthentic I know, but when faced with crumbling yummy and a rumbling tummy, needs must.

I've also often used those packets of dried falafel mix you can get from health food shops, supermarkets and Whole Foods. (There's a great one available from http://www.sharafsfood.co.uk/ who runs a great little cafe, Mirage, in Cheltenham.)

Reading the ingredients of some of these (though not Sam's from Sharaf's, his are special), I saw that some of these used breadcrumbs and chickpea flour rather than chickpeas. So I started experimenting...

It worked! Sort of; seasoning was off a bit, texture was a little heavy, so a few more tweaks and this where I am now with this recipe. Some of the ingredients seem a little odd, but try it, it works I think (let me know if you agree, disagree or anything-agree).

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Mashed potato pie

Thursday night's dinner left (surprisingly!) some left over smoked cheese mashed potato. Friday I intended to make some leek, potato and cheese pasties for lunch, a small portion of the filling already being ready in the freezer. So I thought to myself, why not combine the smoked cheese mash in to the pasties, the frozen filling being a little on the mean side.

Combining the two made a soft squidgy cheesey mess that was really too soft to make pasties with - I feel pasties should have a reasonable bite to the chunks of potato inside. So instead, pastry already made, I decided to make small individual open tarts and boy, did these work!

The mashed potato provided a creamy base to the leeks and potato chunks, thereby elimating the need for any sort of cream or egg base to the tart and the cheese melted into the filling to prevent the filling becoming too dry.

This is too simple a dish to provide a full recipe for, but as a guide, try this:

Leek, potato and smoked cheese tarts

Pastry, enough to line four small tart tins
Potatoes, a few, cut into smallish cubes and boiled
Smoked cheese, enough, cut into small cubes
Leeks, a couple
Cheese, non-smoked, a good basic Cheddar

Line four small tart tins with the pastry, prick the bases and chill for 10 minutes or more.

Mash about 3/4 of the potato, add the smoked cheese cubes, season and stir together.

Chop and soften leeks in olive oil without colouring them. Stir these through the now cooled mash.

Spoon the mixture into the pastry bases and top with the remaining potato and the Cheddar cheese.

Bake until the pastry is cooked, the top is browned and you can smell the smoked cheese.

Soup 3 - aka the best soup ever (this week)

I'm not sure if it was the flavour of the pumpkin or some other factor that made this soup the best ever soup ever (this week). It wasn't the usual gargantuan halloween pumpkin that makes as good eating as it does a handbag, but a small orange pumpkin, about the size of a childs head. The recipe had been hanging around for a few weeks and has been adapted from one by Shona Crawford Poole in Country Living Magazine, November 2007. Despite the whole head of garlic, this recipe isn't dominated by any one ingredient and has a great balance of flavours.

Roasted pumpkin and garlic soup

1kg pumpkin, cut into chunks
olive oil
head of garlic
curry paste, 1tsp good stuff - I used a new coriander & cumin paste I found at The Asian Spice shop
1l stock - I used that Swiss bouillion stuff
small tub (250g?) creme fraiche

Toss the pumpkin chunks in the olive oil and place in a roasting pan. Slice the top of the head of garlic, drizzle with some olive oil and wrap it loosely in foil and stuff it in amongst the pumpkin. Put it all in a pre-heated oven at 180C and roast for 30 minutes until its lightly caramelized.

Blend the pumpkin with the pulp of the garlic squeezed out. Add the curry paste, enough of the stock to get the consistency you like and the creme fraiche and blend well. Return to a pan and heat.

An artificial barm

In breadmaking, there is a historic tradition that runs parallel to brewing of using a barm for fermenting dough. The baker took the foaming froth from the top of the brewing beer, rich in yeast and malt, and used this to start a bread dough on its path to becoming a loaf.

Nowadays, the act of brewing is far removed from every day life and getting hold of some barm is near impossible. Modern alternatives have been suggested, such as Dan Lepard's in "The Handmade Loaf" where a good ale is heated to around 70C before whisking in some flour. When cool, some leavening agent such as sourdough starter is added.

I was surprise to learn that preparation of an alternative barm has been around for a long time. On Google books (again) I found a mention of Artifical Barm in "Martin Doyle's Common things of every-day life" (1857) where chapter 5 is given over to all things bread.

Page 25 lists:

Recipe by Professor Donovan for making Artificial Barm

Boil some sound potatoes until they are perfectly soft and just beginning to break into meal; reduce them to a thin paste with boiling water, add of molasses an eighth of the weight of the potatoes, and about the same bulk as the molasses, of good yeast; all to be well mixed and placed before a fire, if in winter. The mixture soon begins to ferment: when the fermentation is at its height, this yeast is fit for use.

Whilst I might try this one day out of curiosity, I think I'll stick to Dan's version in general - if nothing else, there's usually some left over beer.

Soup 2

Another soup in this occasional autumnal series of soup and today it is pumpkin and mascarpone soup from 'The River Cafe Easy Two' by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. The ingredients just shout "AUTUMN!":

800g pumpkin, cut into 2cm chunks
3 medium potatoes, cut the same
3 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 tsp fennel seeds
250g plum tomatoes (I used a tin of plum tomatoes)
500ml stock
salt, pepper
150g Mascarpone
Olive oil to finish
50g Parmesan

Using a heavy bottomed saucepan, put the pumpkin, potato, tomato and garlic in and cover with the stock, seasoning with salt, pepper and the fennel seeds. Simmer for 30 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Mash with a potato masher and serve with spoonfuls of mascarpone, drizzles of olive oil and shavings of Parmesan.

Soup 1

Inspired by lunch at the Griffin Inn and the onset of Autumn, the time seems right for soup. For tonight, as a starting point, we thought we'd revisit the French classic soup a'l'oignon. There are possibly as many recipes for this soup as there are onions in France, but we used one of several from the brilliant soup book, A celebration of soup by Lindsey Bareham. This is a pretty definitive book to turn to when you want a soup recipe. There have been others since but to me, this is the best soup book you can buy.

1 tbsp olive oil
40g butter
700g onions, thinly sliced
1 tsp salt
pepper
pinch of sugar
40g flour
150ml white wine
2l stock
3 tbsp brandy
slices of toasted bread
100-200g cheese (e.g. Gruyere, Emmental or Parmesan)

Heat oil and butter in a heavy pan with a lid. Add onions and cook very gently for 15-20 minutes. Remove lid, add salt and sugar and cook for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the onions a deep golden caramelised colour but not burnt. Stir in the flour and cook for a few minutes before adding the white wine and stirring through. Add the stock and bring back to the boil before simmering for a further 30 to 45 minutes. When ready, place the slices of toast in the bottom of soup bowls and top with the cheese. Add the brandy to the soup and serve over the toast slice in the soup bowls.

A recipe for onion soup from 1802 is relatively terse in its instruction as recipes of this period tend to be, unlike the title of the book; The art of cookery made easy comprising, ample directions for preparing every article requisite for furnishing the tahles of nobleman, gentleman and tradesman (second edition) by John Mollard:

Onion Soup.
TAKE eight middling-sized peeled onions, cut them into very thin slices, pass them with a quarter of a pound of fresh butter and flour till tender; then add three quarts of veal stock; make it boil twenty minutes; skim it, season it with salt, and add a leason; mix it well with a whisk, make it simmer, and serve it up.

Griffin Inn, Fletching

Faced with a sunny, autumnal October Monday, we decided to have a day off and go out for a spot of lunch followed by a stroll. Luckily Penjamin remembered a recommendation from friends for the Griffin Inn in Fletching, Sussex. I'd passed through Fletching previously and had eaten in another pub there but had not yet tried the Griffin, despite the high praise that is heaped upon it (Sussex dining pub of the year, The Telegraph, etc.)

As the weather was so clement, we got a table out in the garden, looking out over the supposed 10-miles of views. I tried the draft beer from Harvey's, which was as good as it should be, whilst Penjamin had the house Chardonnay, of which she ventured no opinion as she necked it.

For the food, I tried the "Bruschetta of wild mushrooms with some sort of cheese that I forgot", not an inconsiderable £8.50 for a single slice of mushrooms on toast. Penjamin had a soup of lentils with cabbage, somewhere around a fiver.

Whilst these are "gastropub" prices, the food was certainly a notch above the norm, probably on a par with the George and Dragon at Speldhurst. The bruschetta was a slice of good sourdough, grilled and toasted and piled with a heap of real wild mushrooms, rather than a handful of cultivated mushrooms bulked out with a few soaked dried mushrooms. The soup was a tomatoey broth with lentils and some strips of shredded cabbage. I feared the lentils might have leant it towards a thick stodge or the cabbage towards Eastern European peasant gruel, but it was an almost Italian light soup with the lentils and cabbage providing flavour rather than body. Still my bruschetta was better.

Lacking imagination of choice, for mains we chose the same, "Samosa of butternet squash with some sort of cheese that I forgot but different to the mushrooms on a bed of chard with some roast potato disks". This came as two large triangular pillows of filo pastry straining to contain volcanic pureed squash with some wonderful spicing. These sat atop the chard and the disappointingly overcooked and chewy potatoes. The samosas were fantastic and the chard faired well as a supporting pile of greenery. At £12-ish they had to earn there price which I think they did, leaving us both sated and the plates emptied.

It's not the sort of everyday pub (and these dishes were from the bar menu, not the a la carte which pushes the prices up another notch) unless you're a retired city gent with a penchant for large lunches and cricket, the ranks of which seemed to be filling the interior of the pub. Service was very good and the kitchens, visible as you passed from inside to the garden, were running full tilt with a large team of staff that goes someway to show that good food and service can be a fairly staff-heavy operation.

They also have an outdoor wood fired oven that sadly wasn't in operation on the day of our visit where they prepare roasts and, I hope, pizzas and breads.

Radio 4, The food programme

This Sunday's Food Programme on Radio 4 was a corker. Penjamin and myself were listening and as the guests, Henry Dimbleby and Anissa Helou, talked about mezze we just sat drooling and getting hungrier and hungrier by the minute. Henry Dimbleby, of the Leon restaurant chain was visiting a mezze festival in Lebanon. It sounded to me like he was visiting a place I've heard of before, somewhere up in the mountains where over the years a collection of mezze restaurants has grown up, centred around the Bardouni river in the Bekaa or Beqaa valley as it is variously known.

The other guest was a cookery writer who I'd vaguely heard of but not followed up on her writing until know. Anissa Helou is a writer and broadcasting regular on Radio 4 (Woman's hour, Veg talk, Food programme) originally from Beiruit but now based in London. Some of the recipes from her books are on the Radio 4 Food Programme website.

We weren't alone in the rumbling of our stomachs threatening to drown out the radio as when we visited friends that evening, they didn't require much effort to force us to join them in a dish of tabbuleh, the creation of which had been inspired by the same programme.

Tunbridge Wells biscuits

After I stumbled across this post about the Tunbridge Wells biscuits made by Romary's, I thought I'd do a bit more digging myself. Anne and her commentators, mention several references to them, namely:

• Tunbridge Wells Cakes, in 'From an English Oven' by Dorothy Gladys Spicer (1948).
• 'Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy' by Andre Simon (1945), the recipe is ascribed to Doris Lytton Toye.
• 'Cook and Housewife’s Manual' by Margaret Dods (1826).

Well, I've found another reference that could be added to this list at Google books. It's the first time I've tried using Google books and I'm very impressed with being able to dig out a mid-19th Century baking book held at the Bodliean library from my desktop.

Anyway, in 'The complete biscuit and gingerbread baker's assistant' by George Read (1854) there is a raft of references to Tunbridge biscuits and cakes. As in Anna's references, there are mentions or comparisons to Shrewsbury biscuits.

Page 44 lists:

Tunbridge Water Cakes.—3 lbs. of flour, 1 1/2 lb. of loaf sugar, 1/4 lb. of butter, and 10 eggs.

1 1/4 lb. of flour, 1/2 lb. of sugar, 6 oz. of butter; mix with milk or water, and a little orange-flower water.

Rub the butter in with the flour, add the sugar, and make the whole into a paste; roll it out very thin, cut it out with a plain round or scolloped cutter, about the same size as for Shrewsburies; place them on clean tins or buttered paper, and bake them of a pale delicate colour, in a cool oven.

Wafer Biscuits are similar to the water biscuits, and are derived from them; they have been introduced since the first publication of this work¹.

Ginger Wafer Biscuits.—3 lbs. of flour, 1 1/2 lb. of very finely powdered loaf sugar, 1 1/2 oz. of ginger. Mix into a dough with water.

4 lbs. of flour, 4 oz. of iceing sugar, 1/2 pint of milk, 8 eggs, 3 oz. of ginger. Mix.

8 lbs. of flour, 2 1/2 pints of cream, 4 eggs, 2 lbs. of very fine loaf sugar, 4 oz. of ginger. Mix in the usual way; roll the dough very thin on an even board or marble slab; dock the surface over with a captains' biscuit docker; cut them into round cakes about the size of Shrewsburies; put them on very clean dry tins slightly dusted with flour, and bake them in a moderately cold oven. When baked, they may be put in piles whilst hot, and pressed to make them flat and even.

Lemon Wafers—as ginger, substituting essence of lemon for the ginger.

Seed Wafers—the same, using caraway seeds instead of ginger.

Ginger Wafer Biscuits.—2 lbs. of flour, 12 oz. of sugar, 3 oz of butter, 3 eggs, and sufficient milk to make a dough. If very fine powdered sugar cannot be conveniently obtained, it should be soaked in the milk. The dough should be worked quite clear, and be of a moderate consistence. The addition of a small quantity of carbonate of soda, as much as can be put on a sixpence, will prevent their blistering during baking, but the biscuits will then require to be cut thinner. They require a great deal of attention in assorting them during the baking, and to be "double-tinned."

The book goes on to mention more recipes on page 48. These include currants and might be more like some of the other references to Tunbridge biscuits being like tea-cakes.

Currant Tunbridge Biscuits.—8 lbs. of flour, 2 lbs. of butter, 3 lbs. of sugar, 1 1/2 lb. of currants. 1 1/2 lb. of ground almonds, 8 eggs, 1/2 pint of milk, 1/4 oz. of volatile salt. Mix.

Roll the dough into sheets nearly a quarter of an inch in thickness, dust with loaf sugar, pass the rolling-pin over the surface again, and cut it into biscuits with an oval cutter, the same size as for lemon biscuits. Place on buttered tins about half an inch asunder, and bake in a moderately quick heat. The following mixture may be used instead:

6 lbs. of flour, 2 lbs. of butter, 2 1/2 lbs. of sugar, 1 1/2 lb. of currants, 6 eggs, 1/4 oz. of volatile salt, and sufficient milk to mix the whole of a moderate consistence.

Lemon Tunbridge Biscuits.—As the last; or use 8 lbs. of flour, 1 1/2 lb. of butter, 1 1/2 lb. of sugar, 6 eggs, 1 pint of milk, 1/4 oz. of volatile salt.

Proceed as for the last; or they may be made into small round biscuits instead of oval ones.

Ginger Tunbridge.—As the last, using 2 1/2 lbs. of sugar, 4 oz. of gound ginger, and 10 eggs, with sufficient milk to make a dough.

Seed Tunbridge.—6 lbs. of flour, 2 1/4 lbs. of powdered sugar, 1 1/4 lb. of butter, 6 eggs, a dram of volatile salt, and sufficient milk to make the whole into a dough about the consistence of walnut dough, with a few caraway seeds.
Roll the dough into sheets about a quarter of an inch in thickness, dust the surface with finely powdered loaf sugar during the rolling; cut into cakes with an eighth cake cutter, and dock them with a diamond carved docker. Place on buttered tins about a quarter of an inch asunder, and bake in a moderately heated oven ; let them be of light brown on the surface and bottom when done.

Given the quantities involved, I think they liked their biscuits. No wonder Mackie chose to settle in Tunbridge Wells.

1. The first edition was printed eleven years earlier in 1843.

You can never go back...

Recently trudging the streets of Paris again, looking for a bistro where a vegetarian might get something to pass as food for anight, we found oursleves back near a restaurant we went to the same time last year, Sabraj.

I should have realised my mistake, when we found the place. Remembering a restaurant for its decor and not its food and service should have told me something. Maybe times change or maybe I was a fool for not realising that copper and tin plate do not a restaurant make. That requires food cooked well, attentive service and atmosphere.

You could say they had some sort of atmosphere, four or five men stood mysteriously at the back while one waiter tried to do everything himself. The owner helped a little but seemed more keen to talk to the shady guys. While taking our order after a half hour wait, he yawned and looked elsewhere.

Food eventually arrived and I remembered why I hadn't remembered it before. Unfortunately the only sight of the wine we ordered was on the bill, but nobody seemed to be interested in taking any money or discussing it, so we left less money than the bill and walked out, never to return.