sageandthyme

The last entry for this blog aptly mentioned a friend’s maternity leave. Well I am four weeks into mine, with a four-week old daughter to lovingly care for. As you can imagine, cooking and creating wonderful food has taken rather a back seat, but as a routine develops with my daughter I can see there are windows in which I can ponder over my cook books and foodie mags and also get cooking. Tonight was one of those nights – my husband looked after feeding Elizabeth whilst I took charge of the kitchen.

I’m all for batch cooking and using one simple recipe to create several dishes. Tonight I made a Ragu Sauce – the ingredients are very untypical of this authentic Italian dish, but it is tasty and very simple to make. Tonight I served it with some Penne pasta and a green salad, but it would work very well served with a baked potato or as a base for an Italian style cottage pie.

Ragu Sauce
Generously serves 6

450gm beef mince
one large red onion
two courgettes, cubed
250gm mushrooms, chopped
400gm chopped tin tomatoes
10ml tomato puree
10ml red wine vinegar
10ml mixed herbs
400ml beef stock

Heat a heavy based saucepan on the hob. Add the beef mince and dry fry for 10 minutes allowing the meet to brown. Spoon off any excess oil. Add the onions and allow to soften for a further 10 minutes. Then add the courgettes and mushrooms. Cook for further 5 minutes. Then add the remaining ingredients, bring the mixture to the boil and then simmer covered for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. For the final 5 minutes, remove the lid to allow any excess fluid to evaporate.

I have become very lackadaisical recently and neglected my blog. I’m afraid that I have not got any excuses. The good news is that I have been to several restaurants and taken a lot of photos of different dishes that I have prepared and cooked over the last couple of months, that there will be numerous additions to this web page over the next month or two.

Back to the title of this entry You may well remember me talking about visiting St John for drinks with a friend before I headed off to the Clerkenwell Dining Room for a meal. I had the opportunity to visit St John twice in January within a week for two very different reasons.

Several months previous I was looking for a venue for a leaving do. My self set brief was good food with a twist, good wine and plenty of room to have a chat with a great group of people. Having perused the plethora of restaurant finding websites, I realised that I was trying too hard and look at the places on my eating out wish list. St John in Smithfield was not far from the top of the list and feeling the vibe and smelling the aromas of food on my previous fleeting visit whet my appetite and my curiosity even more. Luckily they had a private room with a large table to chat around and a feasting menu where we could pick and choose courses.

The good thing about St John is that it can satisfy the offal loving stalwarts and tempt the uninitiated into eating food that they would not normally go near unless it was for life or death reasons.

The instructions were simple - choose two starters, two mains and two desserts from the feasting menu and then it would arrive on big platters so that the group could help itself. There was one vegetarian in our party (well I say vegetarian - she is prone to relying on food that doesn’t bare any resemblance to what it was in a former life) and the advise was for her to choose what was available on the day. I will have to apologise here as I cannot remember the exact menu, but hopefully the list below will be enough to tempt you.

Starters:
Roast bone marrow and parsley salad
Langoustines with mayonnaise

Mains:
Roast beef on a trencher
White fish baked whole on white vegetables

Dessert:
Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese
Steamed treacle and pear pudding with custard

We all tucked into the food with great relish - the servings were very generous so it gave us the opportunity to try both dishes. I have to say that I’ve always been a bit put off by bone marrow as I think of those cringe worthy adverts that were shown in the 1990’s for a well known brand of dog food. I am now a complete convert. The taste of the marrow was out of this world. The idea was that you pushed the marrow out of the bone and smeared over some char-grilled sour dough bread, and then sprinkled over some parsley salad with a bit of salt thrown in for good measure. If there was not more food to come, I could have feasted on this one dish all night it was that good. The langoustines went down a treat and I thought that they did not need the mayonnaise with them.

The main courses were yet another delight. For those that are in the dark as to what a ‘trencher’ is - I will now enlighten you. A trencher is a thick slice of bread that is used as a plate. The beef dripping had been drizzled over it, so the combination of the medium rare roast beef and the trencher was sublime. The fish was just as good. I cannot remember what fish it was, but the vegetables (onions and fennel) had been braised to a sweet and silky accompaniment to the just cooked fish. By the time dessert came we were all feeling rather stuffed, so we ended up having the obligatory taste. The treacle sponge brought back memories of childhood for all and was even served upturned in the familiar pudding basin shape. The Eccle’s cakes were also very good and the lump of Lancashire cheese was so generous, one of the members of our group wanted to take it home.

I have to mention the vegetarian option. For starter it was a grilled Jerusalem Artichoke, watercress and red onion salad which went down very well. The main was a Berkswelll cheese, onion and potato bake which compare to what the ‘meat eaters’ were consuming seemed a bit unexciting. There was a comment made that it was too salty.

I also have to mention the wine list as I had the pleasure of sitting next to a fellow foodie who happened to have one up on me in terms of her knowledge of wine. I’m not too bad with recognising the new world wines, but the wine list at St John is predominantly French. Before hand when we chose the menu we also had a loot at their wine lists and went for a house Sauvignon blanc and a house Merlot / Syrah. These were not great so we had a look at the other wines on the list. The price rapidly rose, and the £32.20 that we paid for the Pouilly Fuisse increased the cost of the bill.

The waiters were very attentive and also had a good sense of houmour which added to the buzz of our night out. The bill came to just over £60 each - the wine obviously contributed to this amount, but in spite of this I didn’t think the cost was bad at all. We were there for over 3 hours, had the private room to make as much noise as we wanted in and most importantly of all - FABULOUS FOOD!

My second visit was the following week for lunch with a friend who had just started her maternity leave. The place was buzzing, but had more of a refined feel to it. I was pleased that it was not full of city types - there was a good mix of people. When the menu arrived I was very tempted to eat the bone marrow salad again. However, I managed to resist this delightful and mouth-watering starter - looking back I don’t know how I did it! We went for smoked cod’s roe on toast and salt beef, bread and green sauce to start. Mains were mallard and swede, and mackerel, beetroot and horseradish . We shared some potatoes and greens (wonderful seasonal brussel tops). The portions were generous for a lunch. The food was simply presented - my duck was the breast with a lovely gloopy dollop of mashed swede. My friend commented on how nicely the mackerel was cooked. The fillets fell apart, and horseradish was a perfect antedote to the oiliness of the mackerel. With a couple of glasses of wine and several bottles of water thrown in, the bill (just short of £60 for the two of us) was very reasonable.

I will be most certainly be coming here again - watch this blog!

A quick easy recipe based on a recipe with the same name in The Cranks Recipe Book that was published in the 1980's. These buns would be perfect in a lunchbox or just simply with a cup of tea.

Makes 12 buns

225gm plain flour
pinch salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
175gm butter
golden caster sugar
two cooking apples, cored and cut into smallish dice
one egg, beaten

Add the flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder to a bowl. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then add the sugar, apples and egg. Combine the ingredients well together and then spoon out onto a greased baking tray. Place in a pre-heated oven (190 degrees C, gas mark 5) for between 20 and 25 minutes. Transfer to a wire cool rack when the buns have cooled slightly.

If you want a tasty soup that requires minimum preparation, then this is an absolute gem. I made this soup for lunch in two stages. I chopped up the vegetables and put them in the oven on returning from the gym, had a long soak in the bath and then removed the vegetables from the oven and finished off the soup. You could easily make this soup in advance and re-heat when required. This recipe is based on a Weight Watchers recipe so it is good for your waistline as well.

Serves two

500gm tomatoes, quartered
two red onions, peeled and cut into wedges
one pepper, de-seeded and cut into quarters
one bulb of garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
Spray oil
300ml vegetable stock
15ml Worcester sauce
15ml Balsamic vinegar

Place the vegetables in a roasting tin and spray with oil. Place into a pre-heated oven (220 degrees celcius) and roast for 45 minutes. Remove the garlic from the tin and 'pop' the garlic out of their skins. Add this to a saucepan along with the rest of the roasted vegetables. Add the stock, Worcester sauce and Balsamic vinegar. Blend using a hand blender and then bring slowly to the boil.

Even though there is a chill in the air and the nights are drawing in fast, there is still the opportunity of eating seasonal salads. After eating lunch out in a rustic pub in Writtle, Essex, I was looking forward to a fresh and healthy meal in the evening. I've always found that smoked mackerel goes very well with watercress and orange - the juice of the orange cuts through the oiliness of the smoked mackerel nicely. I thought that I would through in the beetroot as an experiment. I thought it worked rather well. Make sure to buy beetroot that hasn't been pickled in vinegar. I served this salad with some new potatoes.

Serves Two
Small bunch watercress
Two oranges, peeled and cut into segments
250gm cooked beetroot, cut into quarters
10cm piece of cucumber, sliced finely
Small pack of smoked mackerel fillets
Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

Distribute the watercress, oranges, beetroot and cucumber between two bowls. Flake up the smoked mackerel fillets (removing the skin) and add to the bowls. Drizzle over some extra virgin olive oil.

Last night I was sitting down with a selection of foodie magazines and recipe books to plan the all important celebratory meals over Christmas. Yes - it may seem a little bit early to be working out the finer detail of the Festive period, but those of you who know me will be aware that I like things planned well in advance.

My neighbours cat came to visit, primarily to get out of the rain. After she had licked herself clean, she decided to give me a helping hand, until she lost interest and promptly fell asleep on my arm. I just could not resist the picture!

I will stop you right there in your train of thought. I am not going to promote the virtues of the processed virtually fat free sausage. Neither am I going to wax lyrical about the use of low fat spreads as a butter substitute.

Like most women, for most of their lives, I am watching my weight. I have always liked sausages, and since becoming a foodie, I have been privileged to become familiar with rare breed, outdoor reared pork that end up making a damn fine banger. The problem with this delectable food is that they are not particularly low in fat. If you couple it with its most obvious vegetable, the calorie cash register is clocking up excess pounds. It does not matter what variety of potato that you use, the sausage and mash dish does not work without lashings of butter and milk.

So, my plan tonight was to create the sausage and mash experience, but without the calories. Here is how I did it:

1. Firstly substitute the potato with another root vegetable that mashes down well with out the need for butter
2. Buy chipolatas rather than sausages - they are a lot smaller but taste just as yummy
3. Make sure your eating partner has a good appetite

The end result?

Swede and carrot mash (no butter) with a couple of oven baked rare breed outdoor reared chipolatas and a dash of gravy

What do you need?

Well to serve two - a small swede, three carrots and about 250 gm of chipolatas. The vegetables take about 20 minutes to cook. Drain them, then mash and add some seasoning. The chipolatas take about 25 minutes in an oven pre-heated to 200 degrees C (gas mark 6).

This dish takes no time to prepare and once it has been placed in the oven, gives you the opportunity to get on with other things until it is ready. This dish works very well with cous cous and a green salad.

Serves Two

One small squash, peeled, seeds removed, cut into 2cm dice
Three red onions, peeled, cut into wedges
Three garlic cloves, peeled
Two sprigs fresh rosemary
Olive oil
One 400gm tin cannellini beans

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Place the squash, onions, garlic and rosemary into a roasting tin, Drizzle with olive oil and season. Place in the oven for 45 minutes. Remove the tin from the oven. Drain the cannellini beans and then add to the roasted vegetables. Stir and turn into a serving dish.

It was my husband’s birthday just over a week ago and as has been the tradition since we have been married, I have cooked him a cake with a twist. Last year it was a pile of brownies and this year it was a pile of jelly bean decorated fairy cakes.

I have not made these cakes for years and after finding what seemed like a fool-proof recipe in Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat classic, I set about making them.

Fairy Cakes

125gm self raising flour
125gm softened unsalted butter
125gm caster sugar
2 eggs
1 - 2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
Few tbsp milk

For the icing
Approx 200gm icing sugar
Small back of jelly beans

Preheat oven to gas mark 6/200 degrees C

Line a 12-bun tray with paper cases. Put all of the ingredients except the milk in the processor, adding a pinch of salt and blitz furiously. Then pour in 2 tbsp milk and process again until you have a smooth, flowing cake batter. Then, using soon and a rubber spatula, divide it into the paper cased. Cook for 15 - 20 minutes and then cook on a wire rack.

To make the icing, follow the instructions on the side of the packet of icing sugar for the appropriate sugar to icing ratio. Spoon the icing paste carefully over the individual buns taking care not to spill it over the paper case sides. While the icing is still wet, place the jelly beans randomly over the cakes.

As you can see, this is my first blog article for several months. Over the last two weeks I have been getting itchy feet for putting my thoughts on food onto ‘paper’. What really inspired me to get my lap top out tonight was a visit to the BBC Good Food Show in London. This annual event is a foodies idea of heaven. Well that is what I was in - for the 5 hours that I was there.

The event was extremely well organised with hundreds of stalls to wander past and taste the epicurean goodies on show. There were opportunities to watch demonstrations from well known celebrity cooks. I watched a demonstration with John Torode who appeared to be nursing rather a hefty hangover. He cooked three dishes - maple-glazed baked ham, goat’s cheese and beetroot salad and leek, mushroom and gruyere pithilivier (a round puff pastry tart). If you are interested in seeing the recipes, they can be found in the December issue of Olive Magazine.

I was most impressed to see a number of meat product stalls where the meat had originated from humanly reared and rare breed animals. Probably the most well known is The Essex Pig Company also known as Jimmy’s Farm - the owner Jimmy Doherty happens to be a very good friend of Jamie Oliver. I ended up buying several packs of their Essex sausages and chipolatas that could be frozen for a future ’sausage moment’. They have a comprehensive website www.essexpigcompany.com . For those of you that frequent farmers market, Jimmy’s Farm hosts one on the first Saturday of every month.

Other favourite stalls were:

Label Anglais - As quoted by Gordon Ramsay in some literature “It was mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing: the best £10 I ever spent.” These outdoor reared chickens which are a hybrid of the Cornish Red and the White Rock are now delivered to his restaurants on a regular basis. They are local (yippee!) - based in Essex and have a website. For further information visit www.labelanglais.co.uk

Cornish Cheese Company - who produce artisan cheeses at their farm on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. They had copious amounts of their Cornish Blue to taste which is a full fat, blue veined cheese. www.cornishcheeses.co.uk

Copas Turkeys - The Copas family have been breeding turkeys the traditional way in Cookham, Berkshire for nearly 50 years. The secret of these delicious tasting turkeys is the two week hanging of the birds before they are prepared and packaged up for sale just before Christmas. www.copasturkeys.co.uk

If you are being careful with your pennies I would suggest taking your own food and beverages - I was somewhat aghast to find that a 500ml bottle of mineral water cost £1.80.

I left with a bag full of goodies vowing to return the following year.