Flicking the Vs: August 2011

Belize

I feel about Marie Sharp's the way that the NRA feels about guns: you will pry my Marie Sharp's from my cold, dead hands. I dis...

In my ideal world, I'd adhere to the maxim of owning nothing that I know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

However, in my kitchen, I have a stash of cookbooks from which I have only cooked a handful of the recipes they contain. Similarly, I regularly tear recipes out of magazines or print them off from websites. I've even been known to photograph recipes from a friend's recipe books on my phone for later use. In short, I'm a sucker for picking up an interesting or well turned out recipe, stashing it and promptly ignoring it.

All this has resulted in slabs of paper building up in my kitchen, bookended by folders spewing out tasty morsels of recipe.

Alas, most of these recipes I don't know if they're either useful or beautiful as I've never got around to cooking.

This dead tree madness must stop! I've decided to battle my way through the European cooking mountain: join me, friendly reader, as I tackle my fulsome stash of recipes.

This week's challenge has been making my way through all those recipes I've half-inched from the newspapers.

First up, Lindsay Bareham in The Times. (Bareham writes a recipe a day during the week. I would link back to her original recipe online, but it's somewhere behind a paywall.)

The recipe was for a Soupe au pistou, a French soup that bares a simiarlity to minestrone with a bit of pesto on top.

Bareham's recipe involved a lot of fresh veggies (onion, celery, courgette, potatoes, tomatoes and beans), canned beans (haricot or flagolet) and some pasta, topped with the pistou - a basil and pine nut sauce which you'll not be surprised to hear bears a passing resemblance to pesto. (There was parmesan in the original recipe, which I replaced it with a mix of nutritional yeast and that vegan Parmazano stuff).

Despite the promising list of ingredients, the end result tasted of bugger all: not surprising really when the only flavour – the pistou – was served as garnish, rather than a part of the dish.

Pistou aside, there was no herbs or garlic to pep things up and the recipe called for water not stock, leaving the soup a sadly flavourless, watery pot.

Verdict: one fewer recipe for my stash. Sorry, soupe au pistou, you don't make the cut. (Although left for a day and with some bouillon powder and a pound of parsley added, it served fine as a packed lunch).

Next up on my quest to thin down my recipe collection, a recipe from The Telegraph, and this time one I can link to: The new vegetarian: crisp spiced tofu with cucumber pickle recipe.

Not being an avid Telegraph reader (or indeed a Telegraph reader at all - it's a shite paper), I hadn't come across the New Vegetarian column (which by the looks of it is now defunct).

Based on the pickled cucumber (above) recipe, it's a column worth checking out.

I've made the original recipe a couple of times - it's sparky and refreshing and a proper winner. I've also tried swapping the red onion the recipe calls for for a few spring onion and omitting the water used, and it comes out even better.

Next time you've got something Thai or Vietnamese for tea, do yourself a favour and make some pickled cucumber.

Verdict: this recipe's a keeper. Despite coming from The Telegraph, this recipe's appeared in my house - and stomach - several times since I first made it. Maybe I"ll get around to that crisp spiced tofu too one day. Still, no rush, eh? I've only had that recipe for a couple of months.

cucumber

Cooking with newspaper: soupe au pistou and picked cucumber

In my ideal world, I'd adhere to the maxim of owning nothing that I know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. However, in my kitc...

Last week I paid my second visit ever to Mildreds. My first visit was with a friend and was marked by an expertly balanced Asian broth dish, a vegan cheesecake marred by unmasked whiff of too much inexpertly handled raw tofu and too much wine. (Although by the time I finished the latter, I'd long since forgiven and forgotten the cheesecake.)

Now, a couple of years have passed, and it was time for a return visit.

The early signs weren't promising – the initial waitress in charge of finding us a table approached us with all the grim determination you'd expect she'd muster up if being confronted with the prospect of an anal exam. Still, it did pick up from there – the succession of five waiters (five?!) that took our orders were nothing if not friendly and swift.

We decided to forgo starters and get straight down to mains – mushroom and ale pie for me, burrito for my other half.

We didn't however forgo wine, opting for a nicely dry and vegan Domaine St Paul sauvignon.

I'd been looking forward to my pie with glee – I am a sucker for stick to your ribs English cooking. Despite childhood dining marked with all too regular offal and mince dishes, I still have affection for pies, puddings and hearty artery-clogging Brit food: a mushroom and ale pie with chips and mushy peas was just what the doctor ordered.

Alas, the doctor didn't quite get his timings right – the chips were fresh from the fryer, the pie and mushy peas were lukewarm.

The pie was also not what I'd think of as a pie – more a slice of puff pastry cut in half with some (vaguely warm) sauce in the middle.

Had both the pie and the peas spent a bit more time making the acquaintance of an oven, all would have been well – peas were lifted by a tang of mint and the mushroom filling was dark and rich. But not warm. Dammit, they weren't warm.

(On the other hand, my other half was very keen on his burrito and praised it highly, though a single burrito with some undressed green salad looked a big stingy. Still, what do I know?)

Having consumed a massive, stodgy dinner, what I decided I needed was a massive stodgy pudding to fill any empty micron of space in my stomach.

I opted for the chocolate and raspberry truffle. The waiter, naturally, bought two spoons as my dining companion hadn't ordered anything.

That was a mistake. The truffle was that good, there was no way I was sharing that bad boy.

Rich, heavy, intense – a slice of thick chocolate mousse neighboured by some sharp raspberries and soya cream. The truffle was fabulous, but there was about twice as much as any reasonable human needed to be sated.

I needed half, but I wasn't feeling reasonable. I ate the whole lot. About two thirds of the way through, I hit pudding zero – the cake wall - the point at which no more dessert can be consumed.

Nevertheless, I couldn't stop eating it. I finished the whole lot and if I thought I could have got away with it, I would have licked the bowl too.

Because of that truffle, I waddled out with a chocolately grin, happy to forgive Mildreds its heat-shy, sub-pub-grub main course.

I'll be back to Mildreds. Only next time, I’ll have a pudding for starter, main and afters.

chocolate

Mildreds restaurant review - hitting the pudding wall

Last week I paid my second visit ever to Mildreds. My first visit was with a friend and was marked by an expertly balanced Asian broth dis...

london

Inamo restaurant review - Pan-Asian dining where playing with your food is encouraged

This isn't the first time I've been to Inamo. In fact, it's the third. So what's different about this time? This is the fi...

Meat substitutes: friend to the meatless or expensive tastebud-annoyer? Discuss.

Most vegans and veggies will probably have tried any number of them and have a couple of boxes knocking around in the freezer.

To my mind, meat substitutes work like this: some days, you see a new product that piques your interest. You give it a go, and wish you'd licked the sole of your shoe and then gargled with gravel for good measure - anything to get that funky taste out of your mouth. Sure, it doesn't happen often but when it does, it's gruesome.

I'm thinking here of Redwood vegan tuna style pate. It wasn't perhaps the sharpest buy out there - I wasn't a massive fan of tuna when I did eat meat, and that was such a long time ago, I've long since forgotten what it actually tasted like. Only, once I put the pate in my mouth, I knew instantly it didn't taste like that - if it did, no one would be eating meat in the first place. Ditto any vegan hard cheese substitute I've ever tasted.

Other days, meat substitutes come into their own. Those days are mainly when you're feeling lazy, or tired, or hungover. After a long week or a heavy Friday night, there's a time when you just want to fry something and put it between two slices of bread. Maybe with sauce, if you can work up the energy.

Those times, I'm quite partial to Vegideli fish-style fingers with a metric truckload of vegan mayonnaise. Other times, those crappy veggie fingers (the ones made of mashed potato, random veg and breadcrumbs) that you can buy a box of in most supermarkets for less than a quid hit the spot. Brown sauce optional. Then there's always the frankfurter option - my vote goes to Taifun tofu weiners.

But the winner for my money is Linda McCartney's sausages* - they're cheap, available everywhere (big plus) and they're pretty damn tasty (bigger plus).

Here's a recipe that gives Linda McCartney's sausages a big cuddle.

Sausages with roast fennel, red onions and tomatoes recipe

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

100ml white wine
100ml water
1 scant tsp bouillon powder
Smidge of Marmite or yeast extract of your choice
1 scant teaspoon of tomato puree
1 dessertspoon of olive oil
Two tomatoes, quartered
Two red onions, cut into eighths
One head of fennel, cut into eighths
One packet of Linda McCartneys sausages (the original, vegan ones)
One tablespoon of dried thyme

How you do it

Preheat your oven to 220 (or 200 if it's a fan oven).

Put the water, wine, bouillon powder, Marmite and tomato puree in a saucepan and simmer til the mixture has reduced in volume by about a third.

Once that's done, take the sauce of the heat.

Put the tomatoes, onions and fennel on a baking tray and pour over the olive oil and sauce. Sprinkle over the dried thyme, then mix thoroughly.

Bake in the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the vegetables are beginning to soften.

Take the veggies out, turn the heat down by 20 degrees and put the sausages on top. Return to the oven for another 20 minutes or until the sausages are cooked through.

Serve with juice-mopping-up bread.

(*By the way, if anyone from Linda McCartney's reads this - a few more vegan products wouldn't kill you would it? Kthxbai.)

fennel