Saturday 29 January 2011

Those beguiling aubergines


I mentioned a while back that aubergines were a little strange - not really solo superstars, but great when accompanied with things. Well, courtesy of Yotam Ottolenghi (again.. bit of a theme here - our friend Man About Perth gave us his book as a leaving present before he returned to .. Perth, and we're very grateful!), we had a shot at chilli marinaded aubergines.

Like the best of Ottolenghi's recipes, this one's a bit fiddly but totally stunning.

Big chunks of aubergine, seared on the griddle, then baked in the oven for about quarter of an hour. Goes without saying that olive oil is needed here to brush over the aubergine chunks.

Meanwhile, chop up some fresh oregano, coriander and chilli, mix with lemon juice and olive oil. Once the aubergine chunks are out of the oven, marinade them in the herbs and chili for about 2 hours. Serve at room temperature.


Oh, and the final touch - tahini paste mixed with a bit of water, lots of lemon juice, salt and pepper. Gorgeous.

Broccoli... then broccoli...

A light lunch. The most amazing thing it's possible (at least for now) to do with broccoli, courtesy of Yotam Ottolenghi. Blanch the broccoli (ideally purple sprouting) for 2 mins, plunge in ice cold water, meanwhile fry a sliced clove of garlic and a chopped red chilli. Dry the broccoli, toss it in olive oil with seasoning, then sear on a red hot griddle. Finally mix all up in a bowl with the fried garlic and chilli.

Should look a bit like this:


Ok, bit of a faff to prepare, but so worth it...

Sunday 16 January 2011

In Praise of Stephen King

Just finished reading Under The Dome, the latest from a long-time favourite of mine, Stephen King. For some reason that I can't quite explain, I've always had a real respect for his writing, probably ever since reading Pet Semetary under the covers as a young teenager being utterly terrified, then reading Misery while supposed to be revising for exams and being ... utterly terrified.

His latest, on paper, really doesn't sound as good as it turns out to be: huge unexplained (alien?) dome descends over small Maine town. Residents can't escape, go crazy, martial law comes to the fore, old grudges resurface and most end up dying horribly. Then dome mysteriously disappears.



But there's something about King's writing that is so good that even after 900 pages you just don't want it to stop... The thing is so long that King even publishes a map of the imagined town, and a full list of all the protagonists, like the great Russian novelists of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Am I comparing King to these greats? Actually maybe I am - although the veneer may be thriller / horror / gore, there's a lot he says about how people's deepest secrets, desires and fears seep out when circumstances change. The vilains of the book are all the kinds of folk who Raskolnikov runs into in Crime and Punishment - as archetypal and as disturbingly single-minded.

The portrait of small town America is not flattering, but at least it doesn't play to any contemporary political agendas; instead King's always spoken of Maine with that mix of love, respect, and the utter helplessness of someone who just can't leave his home town. When he's being elegiac he's magnificent (he's written pieces about Maine for the New Yorker); when he's in thriller mode you can't put him down; when he's in horror mode it's all you can do to turn away...

Go read Under The Dome - it's brilliant.

Saturday 8 January 2011

Happy New Year, Man About Brockley styleee...

Always fun to cook for people, I say. And what better occasion that when we have folks around for New Year. This year was fantastic - made some really good things (well, it's all relative I guess - I'm not quite at the level of my friends behind foodscape, for example...).

So, it's fun to learn how to do new stuff: this time the preparation started pretty early with dessert. Tired of buying lemon tarts, I set about making one from scratch (thanks to Donna Hay's Modern Classics 2)

So baking blind first of all...
Then making the lemon stuff, bain marie style

End result? Top notch. Very chuffed. Served with a red berry coulis on the day.


While all that was going on, I got the starter ready - spiced carrot & lentil soup. Gorgeous. It's all about the fried chilli flakes and cumin seeds, definitely. And of course carrots, lentils, veg stock and coconut milk..


The main course was insanely labour intensive, but absolutely worth the effort - it was an aubergine and squash moussaka.
To start with, bake the aubergines and squash in slices in olive oil and seasoning for about 20-30 mins. Aubergines are funny ol' vegetables - great for bulk, texture, and meatiness but just not really solo players. Interesting.


Then, while all that was going on, I made the tomato sauce - pretty standard stuff off tinned tomatoes, onion, garlic, sugar and more seasoning, letting it all simmer away for a while

Meanwhile, I gently steamed the spinach (there was so much of it, but as always, it reduces to so little...)

And finally, a bechamel, lots of it...

And all layered into a big dish and cooked for 40 minutes or so. One of the real highlights of the evening.

Served with a pilaff, and a celeriac and beetroot remoulade - just grated up with creme fraiche, mustard and olive oil.

Brilliant evening all round, although it went way way way too quickly and I mixed way too many drinks, but it was ace, and the dinner went rather well, I thought!

And in a little homage to childhood memories, during all the prep I had leftover pastry, so I made some little orange curd tarts with the spare, and some curd that's been in the cupboard for a while...

Happy new year, folks!






Picture Rails!

Another room pretty much done, and another significant pause in blog activity... I suffer from Blog Anxiety. I think this should be a medical condition, a bit like many afflictions that have been a little bit in the news of late. I guess another alternative is subscribing to so many blogs that you never have time to read them but really, really feel that you should...


Anyway. Our front room is looking ace, and I wanted to focus on one little bit of it that was a bit unique about this particular phase of our work - picture rails. The walls in this particular room were so wayward and wonky that our poor plasterer (absolutely top guy called Mickey - leave a comment if you want his details) had to do quite a bit of remedial stuff to make the walls straight.

All this meant that our beautiful picture rails had to come off and be put back up again...



Fortunately they came off really easily; the paint stripping however was a bit of an ordeal. Soooo many layers of paint. Best way to strip them was just a bradawl and some wood chisels. Very satisfying in a funny sort of way, taking them back to their original wood state. Beautiful. Made me think about the people who first put them up in this house and whether or not they had to cart all the wood for them using horses....




Once stripped, we then had to paint with copious amounts of primer (well, the stupendously helpful Lady About Southend did a fair bit of this..), then lovely white eggshell.

But of course, the trickiest bit was putting them back up - especially when the ceiling isn't that straight and you can't really find a straight line, even if the spirit level tells you otherwise... Some help from Man About Southend and a little trick from woodworking - the story stick. Oh, and of course the various bits didn't quite fit as they used to because the walls were now slightly differently shaped... So, sawing funny angles again - 60 degrees as well as the usual 45 degrees.




All in all pretty chuffed. Of course the best thing about picture rails is being able to move pictures around so easily - and (yay internet) people still make hanging systems for them.

Oh, and a quick nod to MsJane, whose fantastic photographs are now on our wall, and in the first picture at the top of the post...