A foodie friday reviewing Sarah Raven's recipes on a Saturday

September and October mean apples, and I've been picking them at the allotment for weeks now. I have three apple trees, two are cookers and the other is a variety with the warmest, rosiest glow.

There's been quite a number of them, and I've been using them every which way I can.

So on my day off, it was time to hunt through my recipe books to make something different. I've already stewed pounds of apples ready for crumbles this winter and made a few apple cakes. But I wanted to make something different.


And I struck gold with this book from Sarah Raven, which was published back in 2007 I think....and I'm pretty sure I bought my copy about five years ago.

Now this what I call a generous cook book. And by that I mean, this is one of those labour of love books where the author has given we readers  her life time's experience of growing and cooking fruit and vegetables. This is not one of those  a hundred recipes a book if you're lucky type of thing ..one on a double page spread type of book. Oh no. It's not a fancy pants type of cookery book either, with long, infinitely long winded and show off recipes either.

It literally is full to brim of tasty, workaday recipes to make the most of the produce from your garden and allotment. And as I've begun to grow more vegetables and now have fruit trees, I'm discovering different sections of the book.


The first new recipe to try was celeriac and apple soup...another way to use up  apples. This is a pale, silky textured and comforting soup. The sweetness of the celeriac married with the sharp freshness of the apples worked really well for me. Unfortunately my other half wasn't so keen.

But he did like the next new recipe very much... ...a Kentish apple cake. Now, I've made a Dorset Apple cake before but never one from Kent, and it's quite different in method and texture.

Here's the recipe....

Ingredients
225g unsalted butter plus a little extra for the tin
350g self raising flour
1 tspn ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
110g of sultanas or raisins soaked for an hour in water
175g castor sugar
75g toasted hazelnuts , chopped
450g cooking apples such as Bramleys
grated zest of 1 lemon
3 large eggs
plenty of Demerara sugar for dusting

How to make

1.Preheat  oven at 180 degs /gas mark 4 and grease and line the bottom of a 20cm loose bottomed cake tin

2.Pulse the sifted flour, cinnamon, salt and butter in a food processor until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Put the mixture in a bowl and stir in the sultanas, sugar and toasted nuts

3.Peel, core and chop the apples and add to the other ingredients with the lemon zest. Lightly beat the eggs and put them in.

4.Spoon the mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake in the oven for one to one and a quarter hours or until firm to the touch. You may need to cover the cake with foil to prevent it from becoming too brown on top.

5.While it's still hot, sift over plenty of Demerara sugar, and let it cool in the tin or a wire rack.

As Sarah Raven says, it's a good cake for tea or you can serve it warm as a pudding with lots of thick cream. I've now tried both ways of serving...and both are equally as good!

The more I use this book , the greater is my admiration for the sheer breadth of recipes..and there are some lovely photographs by Jonathan Buckley.

Incidentally, you can still obtain personally signed copies of this book - Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook published by Bloomsbury  from Sarah's own website.

A day of fancying a fritter from the wonderful Yotam Ottolenghi

So, it's Friday again, which means I've been going through my cookbooks to try a new recipe
Something savoury I thought, something without meat.

Yotam Ottolenghi sprang to mind immediately, but then it was decisions decisions....which book of his shall I cook from? I have two, "Plenty" and "Jerusalem", and I love them both. What shines from every page  of both books is a strong narrative and a sense  of continuity though cooking. Many of the recipes have survived  turbulent times, and years of change for families and friends mentioned in the books.

Last night, I wanted something tasty, yet not too exacting. I flicked through the pages of "Plenty", and there it was, a recipe I've been meaning to make for ages. Leek fritters.

Ok, I have a feeling that some of you reading this may be turning up your noses at the thought of a fritter, even perhaps channelling your inner Lady Bracknell..."a fritter?" But at certain times they  can hit the spot in a very satisfying way. Especially when leeks are involved. Plus spices.

So let's begin shall we?

Ingredients include leeks, shallots ( I used onions), chilli pepper, spices, egg white etc.....

How to make

After sautéing the leeks and shallots until soft, you gradually add all of the other ingredients...and at this stage the mixture is rather sloppy, as you can see by the state of the bowl....

I made eight fritters, and I'll definitely be making these again. They're so creamy, light, and the subtle spices don't overpower the lovely flavour of the leeks.

I may have eaten more than I should have, even though they're quite filling. In fact I did eat more than necessary, but my defence is M'lud, I simply couldn't resist just another bite, and then another....

There's also a coriander sauce to accompany the fritters, but last night, I just sprinkled them with a couple of squeezes of a lemon, and that was just enough for me.

Another recipe from "Plenty" I tried for the first time was a salad ,which I first encountered at my friend Debbie's house. Oooh I did enjoy it...a beetroot, walnut and orange salad - on page 15 of the book, if you're interested. The earthy sweetness of the beetroot, the crunch of walnuts and olives, and the sharpness of the citrus made a delicious combination.

So I made it, and in our eagerness to dive in and eat, no photographs were taken, but trust me, again, this recipe is a winner. But then again, for me, all of Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes are....I've not encountered one that's a dud yet.

He's also in that rare band of chefs and writers who  establishes a real connection with the reader. Whenever I read one of his recipes, I feel hungry, I need to make it...and I somehow smell the finished creation before I've even made it.

There's only one other writer who makes me feel that way, and that's the wonderful Nigel Slater.
Alas he doesn't run a restaurant, but Yotam does ,and I can't wait to finally get down to London to visit one of them. It could be dangerous though, I might decide to work my way through most of the menu and get stuck behind a table, unable to leave or waddle back to the train. But hey, that's a risk I'm willing to take.

The complete recipe for leek fritters can be found here  http://www.ottolenghi.co.uk/leek-fritters-shop or in the book itself, which is so good, I refuse to lend it to anyone else.

"Plenty" by Yotam Ottalenghi ,published by Ebury Press, 2010.


 

a day of cooking the books...

 

Cooking the books? Who me? No, I've not been doing any creative accounting......I've been to London this week to visit my favourite  bookshop (apart from the Kibworth Bookshop mentioned here  http://thinkingofthedays.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/days-of-mooching-about-in-bookshops.html)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the bookshop that really  does cook the  books...every day in a test kitchen at the back of the shop.....and each time I visit I feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.  He was the behaviour theorist who realised that dogs could be trained to recognise that food was coming. A ring of the bell and they started salivating.

 

I'm like that, I start drooling as soon as I walk into Books for Cooks...always. The sight and smell  of over eight thousand brand new books about food....culinary memoirs, recipe books , the history of food....I'm in heaven.

 

 









 

 

Mind you there's enticing aromas coming from the back of the shop too..... wafting their way along the bookshelves.....

 

 

 

 

There's nothing more exciting than finding a really nice new recipe.....especially if someone has already tested it for you....and that's what happens here...every day, dishes from some of the thousands of books in stock are created. This time, they are...







 

 

 

 

 

Lunch service starts promptly at 12 noon..we are already sitting down. The laksa arrives...fragrant, with a freshness and zing about it, and we decide to order a glass of wine . Eric Treuille the joint owner arrives with a bottle of Cahors from his own biodynamic vineyard in France.

 

 



 

 

 

"It is cheaper this way"he says in an oh so sexy French accent and puts the bottle on the table. We look at each other....it's still very early...a bottle? But he's so charming, and we have the collective willpower of a band of vampires at a local blood bank. The bottle is polished off pronto.

We're enjoying ourselves , especially when bowls of the slow roasted pork with plum sauce and rice are put on the table.

 

Noisy "Oohs, aahs "and gasps of pleasure puncture the air -moist  pieces of pork with spicy rich plummy sauce are hitting the spot. It sounds as if we're auditioning to do voiceovers for a porn film.

 

 Then Laura and I watch in amusement as Suzie determinedly attacks the chocolate and sour cream peanut cake. She's concentrating, hardly speaking until the last mouthful. "That's really good" she says...high praise indeed from a laconic northerner.

 

 

 

 

 

By now there's quite a queue of people waiting to eat...Eric is expertly weaving his way around the tables, the queue, chatting away with everyone. It's buzzy and the place is packed so we make our way over to the till to pay for lunch and the books we've bought. Rachel takes our money...she's an American who arrived in London with her partner eight months ago. She came into the shop within days of being here and promptly asked for a job.

 



 

 

But that happens a lot at Books for Cooks apparently. Years ago Rosie Kindersley walked in, and Heidi the then owner offered her a job on the spot. Then Eric walked in one day and ...well, let's just say he didn't only get the job! He and Rosie hooked up, they bought the bookshsop and the rest is history.

 

Books for Cooks isn't just a bookshop..for me it's a foodie heaven. There's a passion, a warm welcome....there's cookery workshops upstairs..( I'd love to get to one of those soon) plus a series of adorable paperbacks containing all the favourite recipes tested in the kitchens....recipes that work and that are firm favourites of mine.

 

 

 

 

I can't wait to return......more details from here....http://www.booksforcooks.com/

 

To my other passion now, music. Today's track is nothing to with food, meals, or bookshops....it's what I'm listening to at this very moment ...such an under rated band,...Minus the Bear with Throwing shapes....

 

I love this song....reminding me of sunny days and sultry nights in Cottesloe, Western Australia.....a soundtrack to a magical time.....