BEETS | 16 JUNE 2011

I recently dated the purchase of my most favoured pair of work pants (trousers, obviously!) to sometime in the fall of 2003.  So needless to say, I am not the most up to date with the current trends, although said trouser manufacturer still makes that style of pant and so if you were being generous you could say my look is timeless.  It was therefore a great pleasure to learn from my friend/ex-landlord, Lavinia that my rooftop activities were very of the moment.  Yoga, you ask? It is certainly not warm enough here in London.   It is, however, pretty much perfect for growing vegetables.  Travel & Leisure or some other equally in the know magazine had just declared roof top gardening the thing to do.  So I am pretty pleased with myself. I love all my little plants and although I am only harvesting lettuce and kale right now I am eagerly anticipating the rest of the bounty.  Thus, my Abel & Cole box will still arrive with vegetables until summer is truly in full swing and I have no choice but to open a stall on Portobello Road to get rid of the surplus.  So between the lettuce from upstairs and the beets from the box, my favourite salad this year was born. 

OTTOLENGHI"S CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE | 8 SEPTEMBER 2009

If only the lack of blogging this summer would be the direct result of lack of eating.  Alas, it is not.  I not only ate my way through the summer but I have nothing to show for it except half a dozen pairs of jeans that don’t fit. I have therefore embarked upon no less than five attempts at dieting only to find myself in the South of France or other such environs where dieting is, indeed, impossible.  I welcomed the first of September, with its ever so slightly cooler breeze, as a new start, fresh beginning, or back to school if you will:  I have sworn off carbs!  And I haven’t been so bad, one French fry here and there but I have been pretty good.  So what to do when lovely brother and sister-in-law invite themselves over for dinner (I wish more people would do this by the way)?  Well there isn’t much else to do than whip out the Ottolenghi cookbook and start flipping through the pages of what can only be categorized as food porn. It’s not too difficult to put together a starter and a main course and avoid the dreaded carbohydrate but dessert is a different matter altogether.  Enter the flourless chocolate cake: pure genius.  As soon as I laid eyes upon this recipe I knew that it was meant to be.  Isn’t that cheating you say?  Yes, of course it is.  But were my guests to suffer because of my personal battle of the bulge.  I think not!  Does that mean I have full license to have chocolate cake for every meal until I finally gave away the rest to my housekeeper? No! But did I?  Yes! And with pleasure. 

PEAS WITH RICOTTA AND MINT | 21 JULY 2009

I wish I could say that I have a love affair with vegetables.  I desperately want to love them, each and every one.  But, alas, I don’t.  I have been trying to enjoy the most revered of all vegetables, the aubergine or eggplant, for the past year with no luck.  I hate it and that’s that.  Peppers also make me uneasy so that mixed grill vegetable plate is kinda out for me.  That said I have also been known to say that I hate peas; mostly because I find them annoying.  They remind me of that little song/poem: “I eat my peas with honey/ I’ve done it all my life/ I eat my peas with honey/ It keeps them on the knife.”  For me, that about sums up peas: evasive little fellows that are hard to eat.   Then I moved to England and was introduced to mushy peas, which enlightened me to the fact that I did not have a problem with the taste of peas just the format.   

CARROT AND WALNUT CAKE | 5 JULY 2009

I am not sure why, maybe it’s some sort of masochism, but I have been going all out on the dessert front recently.  I am still on a food lock-down and can’t even try the recipe as I go along but I have been committed to making cakes, tarts and desserts of any kind.  And, in turn, I am sharing them with you.  This is, of course, completely out of character as I don’t even have a sweet tooth and I have embraced a healthy lifestyle of reduced sugar consumption.  But still the urge to bake haunts me.  Perhaps it’s that I never really had the time to whip up a cake on a Wednesday afternoon and that this freedom has encouraged me into creating a dinner menu from start to finish.  I do cheat on hors d’oeuvres and buy cheese and crackers and the like but I have even entertained the idea making my own crackers. 

GRILLED VEGETABLE SALAD | 9 JUN 2009

The last couple of days in London have provided me with more summer than I had previously experienced over two full summers.   There is a lot of skin to be seen, on both women and men, for better or for worse.   For some reason 75˚F (I still operate in Fahrenheit but it’s 26˚C for those of you who don’t want to whip out the calculator) in London feels like 90˚ anywhere else.  Workers have wet wash clothes draped over their forehead, Good Samaritans are handing out bottled water in the Tube and pretty much every woman on the street has pulled out a summer dress (albeit usually ill-fitting as she hasn’t had the opportunity to wear it in over 2 years).  Although it appears my summer might end tomorrow (it says it’ll still be sunny but cooler), I wanted to impart one of my favourite and easiest (and healthiest) summer dishes.  The luxury of hot weather when cooking is that your guests (or just you) don’t mind side dishes and the like to be room temperature.  This salad simply made up of zucchini (courgettes), summer squash (oddly, yellow courgettes), scallions (spring onions) and sugar snap peas (same name on both sides of the pond I believe) requires little prep and it a great hit for barbeques as well as for dinner.

LEMON TART | 1 JUNE 2009

Considering I have devoted considerable time and effort to writing about food and then going so far as to post it on the internet for all to see, it might seem logical that I am comfortable in the kitchen and like throwing dinner parties.  Yes, for all intents and purposes, this is true.  That also means that the pressure to perform and put together something special is that much greater.  So last week, I found myself looking down the barrel of another dinner party and I went into a bit of a panic.  Not only was I feeling uninspired but my guests were to be my brother and sister-in-law, Lopo and Sandrine, and my father, Bruce, flown in especially from New York (not really but he does live in NY).  Family can and should be easy dinner guests but it was also the inaugural visit to the new flat and sometimes they can be the harshest critics (or so it seems but in my case it’s mostly self-inflicted, they are nothing but supportive). But I also felt tapped out.   I had exhausted all the really wowing dishes at previous dinner parties and I have avowed to not eat anything that is remotely tasty (see Detox days 2 – 7, I am sticking with it for a little while longer). 

So in the end, I chose to make a simple and healthy dinner followed by a kick-ass dessert.  This is where I pigeon-holed myself.  I had just bought a brand new tart tin and I had to use it.  I am the type of person who can hardly wait to get home before wearing newly bought clothes. I have even been known to wear them out of the store which is usually awkward for everyone as the sales clerk gingerly tries to remove the tag without cutting off all my hair or stabbing me in the neck. 

RAINY DAYS AT THE LAKE | 26 MAY 2009

Every year I try to get home for Memorial Day Weekend or the End of May Bank Holiday.  It marks the wedding anniversary of my father and step-mother, but more officially the beginning of summer.  It used to be a rather hit or miss weekend in New England; a scorcher or snowing.  Nowadays, given the glories of global warming, it’s usually pretty nice.  This year there were some blemishes on the forecast but all in all we were in for a good summer weekend.  That was until the wrath of the heavens unleashed upon us a tempestuous downpour of magnificent proportions.   Enough of the Shakespearean language, you are probably saying!  Well let me give you some background.  The house in Connecticut is a converted children’s camp complete with a theatre and corrugated tin roof.  It is the roof that makes for the flowery language.  When it rains the noise is deafening and downright frightening.  That said; there is also not much to do at a lake house when it rains except well, bake.  And so we did.   No one had planned on baking or anything less than hours upon hours of uninterrupted sunshine so we had to make due with what we had.  Banana bread was the target and it came out pretty well.  We had to figure out what to do during the hour it was meant to bake but when we came back the sun was setting over the lake as the mist rose and the kitchen was filled with the smell of banana bread.  Not a bad afternoon after all.