Felicity Cloake

As anyone with an eye on twitter will know, I had a little photography lesson from the delightful Paul Winch-Furness last week. It was amazing (see above). And since then I have become absolutely obsessed with instagram. (Always late to the party, me. But sometimes that just means that all the crap wine’s been finished and the good stuff has come out.)

Anyway, I’m absolutely desperate to find out how to upload stuff from instagram automatically on to here, because at the moment, I have to email the pictures to my computer, and that’s a right old faff. I can’t believe WordPress doesn’t have a widget. Why is it ruining my life like this? What am I on this earth for if not to share artlessly bleached and randomly focused pictures of dinner with as many people as possible?

Once I’ve got over this disappointment, I might do a proper post. In the meantime, this is the pork belly with chilli and fennel that I cooked for Sunday lunch.

It’s nearly Christmas (although I won’t feel fully festive until next week – for now my nervous energies are entirely focused on a three-tiered chocolate cake I’m making for a wedding this weekend), and Christmas, as we all know, is a time for sharing. So I thought I’d bring my newest creation to the buffet of bountifulness – a bumper selection pack of all the recipes you need for Christmas Day, in ultra-modern Electronic Form. Yes, this post is a big old plug. Here’s a nice picture of some booze-soaked fruit to make you feel better about it:

If you have a kindle, or an iPad, or any other sort of ebook reader, you can rip open 15 recipes for the rather splendid price of £1.99, some of them based on the ones I did for the Guardian last year – although, taking shameless advantage of my belief that perfection is a fluid and culturally specific concept, somewhat revised (particularly the turkey one: I had a bit of an epiphany on that front after visiting the lovely Paul Kelly, Britain’s actual Turkey King) – and some of them brand spanking new.

• mulled wine
• blini
• Stilton soufflés
• prawn cocktail
• roast turkey
• stuffing
• gravy
• nut roast
• pigs in blankets
• sprouts
• roast potatoes and parsnips
• cranberry and bread sauces
• trifle
• mince pies and brandy butter

I’ve already used them twice myself this year (best to get into practice before the big day), and I ain’t had no complaints, if you get my meaning. Even the Family Cloake claim to be looking forward to sampling it on 25th… although my three-year-old niece has taken charge of the Christmas pudding. No doubt it will be the best bit.

Click here…

I’m working at the very lovely delicious. magazine this week, which is always fun – great magazine, nice people, an almost endless supply of tea (which, to a freelancer, is like a miracle) and more often than not, suitably delicious food to test – but today the shock of eight hours of solid work finally hit me, and I had to cancel the evening’s beer-tasting plans (I know, I know) and scurry straight home. Well, I say straight, although it was the first time I’ve ever been on a bus which attempted a u-turn at a major junction, which gave me ample opportunity to contemplate my dinner.

When a cold lurks, I always reach for intense flavours – chilli oil, fermented black beans, coriander –  but after mandolining half my thumb off last week in pursuit of a stir fry, I was prepared to go for something a bit less labour intensive – kale with chilli and garlic perhaps. But kale not being a Turkish favourite, that meant a trip to Whole Foods which, praise be, brought me into contact with the winter’s first purple sprouting broccoli, all the way from Devon. I love PSB. And I didn’t make the most of it last spring, because I was deprived of anchovies thanks to a muddle-headed decision to go vegetarian for Lent, so I lost no time in making up for it. Nothing complex – some Sharpham Park spelt that I’ve been meaning to try out for a while, tossed with a pungent mixture of sautéed garlic, anchovies and chilli, and of course, lots of broccoli. Followed by too much butterscotch Angel Delight won in the Coach and Horses quiz and saved for just such a miserably eventuality.

§Not really a recipe, but here’s a rough idea of what I’m going to be finishing off for lunch tomorrow…

1 mug of spelt, cooked in boiling water until tender (about 20 minutes), and drained
Generous shake of olive oil
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 anchovies, chopped
3 stalks of purple sprouting broccoli, chopped
Chilli flakes, to serve
Extra virgin olive oil, to serve

1. While the spelt’s cooking, heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium-low heat and soften the garlic and anchovies together until the fish dissolve into the oil (I often add some of the oil from the jar or tin to the pan too).
2. Turn the heat up and add the broccoli. Saute until al dente (or to your particular taste) – I often stick in some of the spelt cooking water once I’ve drained it to help things along – then tip in the spelt and a sprinkle of chilli flakes and stir to mix everything together well. Season (the anchovies are quite salty, but you never know) and scoff in a big bowl in front of Masterchef while feeling a bit sorry for yourself.

A couple of weeks ago, I took Monday afternoon off to travel down to Lyme Regis on a foraging expedition – mainly for whisky. Unfortunately, God punishes those of us who skive off in favour of boozing, and, as we travelled south, the weather took a distinct turn for the worse. Here’s the lovely Helen Lewis-Hasteley of the New Statesman, enjoying all the fun of the seaside. Anyway, undaunted, we set off on a foraging expedition with Mark Hix, heads bent low against the driving gale. We found sea spinach…

rock samphire…

…and sea kale. Amongst other stuff.

Thank God we then returned to Hix Lyme Regis, where I managed to score two helpings of Nick Strangeway’s superb Talisker-sodden sea buckthorn toddy

and steal the ‘recipe’. I’ve come across sea buckthorn before, on a trip to Helsinki a few years ago, where we juiced it and had it for breakfast. It’s pretty common on the east coast of England in particular – I’ve certainly spotted it a few times in Norfolk and Lincolnshire.

Back to those sea veg. Here’s an amuse bouche of a haddock Scotch egg with sea spinach – which could have done with some smoked fish for my taste.

And some tempura rock samphire, which was very good indeed.

After a brief break for hot baths and some quiet personal reflection on the Eurozone, dinner followed: red-leg partridge with elderberries and wood sorrel:

my favourite dish, Torbay silver mullet with Barra cockle and sea vegetables, which was wonderfully buttery – the salty, succulent shoots were excellent with the fish

then a Talisker whisky and walnut tart with local clotted cream, served with some superb cask-strength Talisker 25-year old.

Which Helen, Chris and I naturally dignified with the attention it deserved:

It was a fun evening – which has left me with two new resolutions. Firstly, to revive my long-cherished idea of a whisky dinner party, with matched malts for every course, as once experienced, never forgotten at Royal Lochnagar (a little drop of Talisker in the rock oysters, for example, knocks Tabasco for six) – and secondly, to make it up to Skye and visit the distillery for myself. It’s been a long while since that Patrick’s Day Bushmills trip. Oh, and I might extend my seashore foraging beyond the ice cream van in future.

Also, I somehow managed to come away with a Talisker umbrella. Which makes me very happy indeed.

Last week, I was gifted an enormous bag of quince (quinces?). They look a bit like bulbous golden pears, sweet and juicy – but bite into them and they’re butternut-squash hard, and as bitter as a Bramley.  The obvious thing would be quince cheese of course, but that would just be an excuse to buy more Picos de Europa. So, having consulted Nigel Slater’s Tender, I decided to make a “fragrant winter breakfast” – quince stewed with apples, lemon juice and sugar. Never one to miss the chance to set the scene, Nige describes it as one “for those winter mornings when the sky is white and a sugar-frost has caught on the spider’s webs in the garden.” It’s pretty good – slightly too sweet for my taste, and I might well substitute honey for sugar if I did it again – but much more solid than simple stewed apple, with an elusive floral flavour.

The other dish, which I made to take to a dinner party on Saturday, was less successful. The donor of the quinces, Alex, expressed surprise at the idea of of a quince crumble, although in retrospect, the problem was less with the concept than the recipe (not the execution, obviously). The recipe, for four, called for 1.75kg of quince, which needed to be softened in butter “in a large frying pan” – I’ve got a big Le Creuset, but still, they took an awful lot longer than Nigel’s upper limit of 35 minutes to soften. Once they’d finally yielded (although, it turned out, only in places) I sprinkled on a laughably small amount of almond crumble topping, made with chestnut flour in deference to the gluten-free one, then boosted it with hazelnuts in panic it looked a bit mean – everything about this recipe, including the amount of sugar, seems designed for a much smaller amount of fruit. Everyone was very nice about it, but it’s undeniable that the quince were rather fibrous and crunchy, as well as a bit sour, and there wasn’t enough bloody crumble. And I didn’t make Bird’s custard. Still, there’s always next year.

The weekend before last, we went to a wedding in Suffolk. (The exceptionally fine wedding cake is shown above, in a state of somewhat debauched disarray.) Thanks to rather a lot of rioja, it was necessary, that fine September Sunday, to walk two and a half hours to collect the car. It was sort of worth it though, because of the bounty of autumnal fruit in the hedgerows. Blackberries, obviously (every year I forget that the big juicy ones are always rubbish – go for the tight, pinched looking ones…)

Sloes, rosehips, damsons, and, most excitingly of all, because I wasn’t quite sure of myself when pointing them out, wet walnuts (obviously – fresh from the tree):

There were also some cute wee apples, which turned out to be utterly, inedibly sour (although, I think, not small enough to qualify as any sort of crab):

(Actually, I’m still gorging myself on the much more palatable apples brought back from Richard’s parents’ very enviable orchard at the beginning of the month:…although sadly the plums and the pears are long gone.)

Anyway, that was another weekend, another wedding. When we finally got back to London, with half a dozen squashed damsons and a couple of slightly frayed tempers, it was to find a foraged feast waiting, courtesy of some rather more diligent hunter gatherers. Alex and Jon presented us with a Sophie Grigson-inspired cobnut pilaff (cobnuts are always one of those things I intend to buy, and then never get around to cooking. Time is running out, so I’m glad I scoffed two helpings of this):followed (and served up, just in time for Downton Abbey), by blackberry crumble pie. And custard. Bird’s custard. Utter autumnal bliss.

 Last weekend was also East Anglian – north Norfolk this time. We held a Come Dine With Me competition on the Saturday night (yeah, I know how to live), complicated by some rather tricksy restrictions. First of all, no gluten or dairy. Or, not much at least. Secondly (and more importantly as far as I’m concerned), no anchovies or cauliflower – once I realised Alex didn’t like them, they were all I could think about. And lastly, everything had to go with a great big bottle of Dead Arm Shiraz a kind soul had brought us for our birthday in June… easy enough for the main course, less attractive for a starter, especially with no cheese allowed.

With no time to make a terrine, and no smoked meat in evidence in the village (a place so very down-to-earth it was easier to find gluten-free amaretti than pears), I was tearing my hair out, until I happened upon two mysteriously premature partridge in the butchers. Defrosted or not, they made an excellent salad with some watercress, garnished with local apples and walnuts caramelised in even more local honey, and tossed with a cider vinaigrette.

Alex had an easier ride with the main course, opting for roast lamb with rosemary, served with roasted garlic and a beetroot and horseradish bake. I’m not mad keen on beetroot without vinegar (you can take a girl out of the 80s…) but, with the intensely savoury lamb, it was rather nice. Not as nice as potato would have been though, obviously.

And Richard made some chestnut-flour brownies, according to a David Leibowitz recipe. For some reason, possibly the gas oven, possibly the vegan marge, they didn’t quite solidify. But they were very tasty in any case. Even tastier when I won. (Actually, Alex and I drew, but I scraped ahead by virtue of my beetroot-related stoicism. So, basically, I won. After that, how could mere fish and chips hope to compete?

Last weekend I found myself in Lucerne, writing a travel piece about that most Helvetic of cities (well, it calls itself a city. Apart from the surprising number of people hanging around on the waterfront with plastic bags full of booze – which became less surprising when we saw the price of alcohol – it seemed more like a prosperous and picturesque little town to this particular Londoner). On Sunday, we sneaked smoked ham rolls from the hotel breakfast buffet, and caught the early train to the edge of the Bernese Oberland – where, a good six hours, and about 700 meters upward later, I met this cow, which I hold directly responsible for this spinach dumpling dish at the Rathaus Brauerei (microbrewery), which, I believe, was described coyly as coming “with Appenzeller”:

and this spinach käsekuchen that sent me skipping heavily along the path from Meiringen (birthplace of the meringue, no less – but no sign of them at 8am on a Sunday morning, the godless hussies) to Grindelwald:

It looks burnt, but actually, it was just chock-a-block with spinach, and thus represented, for Switzerland, remarkably good value (I think it cost about £14. Say no more.) There was also the cheesiest sandwich I have ever not finished (even cheesier than Kappacasein’s alpine overload), and a moitié-moitié fondue, made from half Gruyère and half Vacherin Fribourgeois, with the result that, by the end of the weekend, I was starting to believe that it really was possible to eat too much cheese. It isn’t, of course – I was just hallucinating. Probably because of the cheese.

Other things we ate included some pleasingly delicate roasted veal sausages on sauerkraut, also at the brewery:

and an extraordinary dish I sadly forgot to record the name of; a vol au vent filled with veal and pork meatballs, grated apples and raisins, gilded with a slightly sweet cream and wine sauce.

I also spotted some wild strawberries growing in the shady, wooded path up into the mountains – they were good, but not as muskily aromatic as the Provencal ones the legumier used to sell for €5 a punnet.

And, of course, there was beer (and one slightly apricotty, fragrant Swiss white wine, a Grand Cru de Nyon) – banana-scented light ale, and a clovey weissbeer, and everything tasting better with a view…

Writing book is a bit like having a baby (I imagine). There’s the thrill of the conception – the sealing of the deal, you might say – the long hard slog of the first trimester (nausea, sleepnessness, an ever-expanding waistline), another three months of corrections and anxiety, and then – waiting. Eventually, all goes quiet (book at the printers) and you forget the waiting will ever end; a pleasurable period of stasis before the tell-tale twinges, the advance copies, the interviews – the book’s thrilling birth pangs. This, as any mother will readily point out, is where my analogy breaks down, because the publication process culminates in a great big party – and actual gestation culminates in… well, you’ve seen One Born Every Minute.

So, Perfect: 68 Essential Recipes for Every Cook’s Repertoire, was launched into the world last Thursday (although Amazon and Waterstone’s seem to have ripped it untimely the weekend before) with a bash at Mason & Taylor in London’sTrendyShoreditch. Nice beer (including an intriguingly dark and salty IPA on tap which a very kind barman ran upstairs to pour for me), fab food, by all reports – sadly I never made it as far as the table thanks to a lovely crowd of well-wishers and fans of free drinks. Great review in the Evening Standard as well:

‘One rather engaging cookbook is Felicity Cloake’s Perfect (Fig Tree, £18.99), a collection of her admirable columns in The Guardian, talking herself through the best version of various dishes, from poached eggs to Yorkshire pudding. It’s rather a brilliant idea, to try out versions of a recipe, from anyone from Delia Smith to Elizabeth David, before plumping for the one that works best. You need finely honed culinary instincts, an open mind and a capacious cookbook collection for the formula to work; Miss Cloake has them all.’

Miss Cloake eh? Fancy. Anyway, everyone has been really very nice indeed about the book – the design, the illustrations, and even the bits I did. Remarkably, as my dad pointed out on Saturday, clutching the Review section, Perfect even appears to have topped the Guardian bookshop bestseller list last week – wooHOO!

Next stop: baby number two? It would be nice for Perfect to have something to play with, wouldn’t it?

More on the book here…

OK, so I lied. One more gratuitous picture of piggy wiggies to whet the appetite for the porcine feast which proved such a joyous conclusion to Pig Day (see previous post for more on the live aspect of things).

First up was Gergely’s Hungarian take on … pig brains. Sauteed with onions, and served on toast with a sprinkling of paprika (of course) they reminded me of a creamier, yet more unctuous version of marrow. Sadly the magnificent pork pie wasn’t yet set…

but we did break out some of the chorizo prepared by the Sausage Experts

and, under Rachel’s direction, fried it in copious amounts of olive oil, then served it with incredible brown bread and a drizzle of honey 

and then there were the pork chops, whose two marinades escape me

and the barbecue ribs…

and the lung paprikash (as usual, with offal, I found myself thinking – this is fine, but really, why would you, when there’s stuff like this on offer…)

to say nothing of the magnificent trotter paella, which, coming at the tail end of such a spread, received rather less love than it deserved. I’d like to think the hardy overnighters enjoyed it for breakfast.

Oh yeah, and there’s the small matter of the eyeball. The butchers kindly left both Miss Pig’s blue sparklers staring out at the assembled company of carnivores, and the temptation was too much for Ben Norum, of Blue Tomato fame. Ignoring professional advice about the little buggers needing lengthy soaking, he whipped up a hasty batter, and deep fried them both. There weren’t many takers for tempura eyeballs. Except Ben, of course.

Then Alex reminded me of the tagline on my Guardian Word of Mouth profile: ‘she likes to think she’d try any food once, but then no one’s offered her an eyeball yet.’ Damned by my own pen – and duty bound by stubborn, mule-like pride to swallow the second snack of Satan.

you can tell yourself that’s a blue cheese arancini all you want, but obviously it’s just a pupil. And if you think that’s disgusting, imagine eating it.

Not my finest hour. But, having taken one for all, I can say with a good deal of authority, if you’re ever offered an eyeball, don’t bother. Just don’t. And if you insist, don’t, whatever you do, add salt.

Huge, and belated, thanks to Rachel, Donald, and everyone at Dingley Dell: next stop mutton Monday?