Barbara and I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman at the Gagosian in Rome, including lots of previously unseen images – as if my day could have gotten any better! Then I had lunch, and it did.

We got a taxi to dal Cordaro restaurant, where my friend Rachel had recently had a good meal of sausages poached with beans and scarola (R writes about it here). I ordered the sausages, and then, at the behest of my waitress, ‘verzino con acciughe’ to sate a craving for something like puntarelle which was not in season; it is dressed the same, she told me.

Well, gosh, is all I can say. The modest-looking plate arrived and when I tried it I was transported, I was ecstatic, I looked around me, possessed: everyone else was having it too. So invigorated was I by the cabbage, that I ordered a half portion of pasta Amatriciana afterwards, too.

Next to us a vast wall covered in jasmine boomed out fragrance, and we sat in the abundant shade of grape vines in full leaf; I had drunk some red wine, etc. The waitress watched Barbara so I could go to the bathroom alone, too: such blessings!

Anyway, I made the salad at home few weeks later, guessing at the method – incredible! – and then again this evening – we wanted twice as much! It is a profoundly enlivening dish.

Cabbage in anchovy dressing

I did half a good-sized sweetheart cabbage for two of us as a side to pasta. It was probably all we needed but we both wanted more. I give instructions below for a whole cabbage.

Ingredients

1 sweetheart cabbage, tough outer leaves and stem removed with a small knife
6 anchovies, plus, if desired, 3-4 to add to the salad
2 good size cloves of garlic
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1/2-1 lemon depending on lemon
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt and fresh black pepper

How to make

Slice the cabbage very finely and sprinkle over 1/2 teaspoon of salt and mix it in.

Make the dressing: in a pestle and mortar, bash the anchovies and garlic until a paste with a pinch of salt. Add in the olive oil, then the lemon juice and red wine vinegar. Season with black pepper. Adjust salt, acids and oil to your taste.

Toss the cabbage with the dressing and allow it to sit for 5-10 minutes to soften a little in the dressing before eating.

I am doing two events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

This, with fellow writer Amber Husain, who wrote the brilliant Tell Me How You Eat.

And this panel with author and critic Chitra Ramaswamy, editor of The Skinny’s food magazine GNAW, Peter Simpson, and Ben Mervis, founder of Fare Magazine, talking about all things food writing and publishing.

Come! I’ll be around to chat after in the book tent.

Came to Rome yesterday with Barbara.

Spilled orange juice and lemonade. It splashed onto the rucksack of the traveller on the table next to me. I had been feeding Barbara and tried to take a careful sip from the overfull glass, and it went everywhere, onto both of us, too. She began to cry. The traveller wasn’t there. Just two women sitting opposite the bag on the same table. The bag-owner returned from the bathroom with his young son and turned out to be a nice boy, now man, who had been in my year at school. I apologised for spilling the drink and luckily remembered his name. We said hello and recalled our headmistress. His mother, one of the women on the table, had seen the headmistress in a little café out in the sticks after her retirement – working two days a week, apparently. ‘She never was very good at relaxing’, I said. They were travelling to a wedding in Spain and making a holiday out of it. He got busy, helping his son eat chicken wings.

While I was waiting for my food (a cheese and ham sandwich, which, it turned out, came with chips) the man on my right, a red beefcake with huge biceps began talking loudly across the aisle about how small his knife was. He was directing his comments to another commandingly large red-faced man, who was fat instead of muscly, and who was sitting with his immaculate young wife. She wore smooth tight dark grey gym clothes, with waist length blonde hair extensions, a pumped top lip and contoured, bronzing make up. The clothes were so smooth because her body was so smooth. She got up and went to fetch something. I had to make myself stop staring at her smooth ass when she walked by. The man next to me struggled with this too. She was so well turned out that everything in her orbit appeared rumpled and dirty. She returned to her seat.

‘Are they having a joke with this knife? Look!’ He held it up for the man opposite to behold. This man would agree, he seemed to think. He went on making more comments, for a bit. Perhaps, maybe he hoped, the wife would look too. She might see how small the knife was by comparing it to his biceps and forearms. The beefcake was quiet again. He photographed his plate took the burger out of the bread bun and placed it alongside a fried egg on another plate and began eating. He did not eat the bread. The man opposite put his hand on his wife’s leg and stared straight ahead, eyes unfocussed, as if he were looking at nothing. I decided to have some of the chips and put some ketchup on my plate.

A staff member came by and the beefcake challenged her about the size of the knife – ‘Is this normal, this knife?’, he asked, holding it up. I looked too and its blade was small and odd in shape. ‘It’s airport regulation’, she said, ‘They have to be that size’. Of course, it’s a knife, in an airport, I realised. He accepted this explanation too, more or less. Barbara began to cry again, I ate as much sandwich as quickly I could, did up my bra, noted that the orange juice and lemonade on my trousers had mostly dried and wondered vaguely whether there would be wasps in Rome who might be interested in my sticky leg. I put Barbara in the buggy and wheeled us away to find somewhere to change her before the flight.

Apples that keep their form

This is a method I have been using to cook apples and pears in the last few months so that they retain their shape and do not turn to mush – apples in particular. They can be used the basis of a crumble, or a pie, or just eaten with yogurt/ice cream/custard.

What I have been doing is a lazier version of how my mother Clare cooks apples so that they retain their shape, which she documented for me on my old blog and which I have pasted below :

The method ensures that they maintain their form, while at the same time being cooked all the way through. Dad provides photography.

(NB ‘cooking apples’ cannot be eaten raw - and thus require quite a bit of sugar, if you are using other types, adjust sugar. I am not sure if cooking apples such as Bramley variety are available in the US.)

text by my mum:

“For a couple of pounds of cooking apples.

Peel and core the apples, leaving in decent sized chunks – quarters for smaller ones and eighths for the bigger ones. While doing so, put them into a pan with an inch or so of water with a good squeeze of lemon to help keep them from going brown.

Rinse and put apples back in the pan with just a little water (1 cm max); several strips of lemon peel; 4 or 5 cloves; a sprinkling of cinnamon; a handful of sultanas if you have them, and 4 or 5 tablespoons of demerara sugar.

Bring to the boil on the hob and simmer for a minute or two, then put in a slow oven (c.130 degrees celsius) with a lid on for about 30 minutes, or until properly soft when pierced with a knife, but not turned to a mush.”

Eaten with:
Mum and dad eat this for breakfast with natural yogurt. I think they would be lovely with custard too.

Oven only method

What I have been doing is this – with various apple varieties and pears that have been in my veg box:

How to make

Pre-heat an oven to 130C fan. Into an enamel oven dish that is a size you can comfortably fit everything (but not so big that there’s lots of space around the fruits, as then things might burn) add peeled and cored chunks of apple and / or pear with a few tablespoons of soft brown sugar (sweetness to taste and depending on varieties used), 3-4 small pieces of butter, a teaspoon of cinnamon or 2-3 cloves, a few slices of fresh ginger if cooking pears, a small handful of whole peeled almonds and a handful of raisins or sultanas. To that, add a small amount of water, so it just covers the bottom of the enamel dish.

Cover loosely with foil and put in the oven and cook until tender, checking every now and then with a sharp knife to check the fruit is soft. If it dries out, add a little more water.

This method was the basis of the pear crumble I made a couple of months ago.

Quick Pumpkin, Chestnut, Chickpea and Rosemary Soup

Here is the version of the soup I have been making repeatedly this winter using fancy pre-cooked chickpeas and vac pack chestnuts. For the one I made in Rome I soaked and cooked the chickpeas – but I am currently working, writing my next book, and am 8 months pregnant, so do not have the capacity for a more longwinded version.

Ingredients

1 x 570g jar Bold Bean Queen Chickpeas and their liquid (available at Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s etc)
300g-400g pumpkin or squash peeled and cut into slices of around 2-3cm X 1/2cm thick
180g pack cooked chestnuts (Merchant Gourmet brand available in most UK supermarkets)
1 medium onion, diced
1 rib celery, diced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
a pinch of chilli flakes or 2 small dried Italian chillies
a sprig of fresh rosemary

parmesan, to serve

How to make

Heat 5 tablespoons of olive oil in a wide deep pan, add the onion and celery and a pinch of salt and cook gently until softened but not browned, around 6-8 minutes. Then add the garlic and rosemary and dried chilli. Stir for another two minutes making sure nothing burns. Then add the pumpkin and stir, then add the chickpeas and all off from the liquid from the tin, the pack of chestnuts and extra water so that the liquid sits around 1-2cm above all the ingredients. Simmer for 20 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender. Season with additional salt if desired.

Serve in bowls with freshly grated parmesan or if vegan, seasoned fried breadcrumbs. If you like, add a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and/or more chilli flakes.

Pasta with frozen prawns and crème fraiche

Inspired by my mother, who told me about an omelette she’d made for herself with the addition of frozen prawns while my father was away recently, I bought a bag. They have since been a source of several unexpectedly sumptuous-tasting meals when the fridge looked fairly empty. This pasta using the prawns and various odds and ends was very good. Sam also made us an excellent pasta with the prawns, dill, cream and lemon.

Ingredients

150g frozen cooked north Atlantic prawns
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 mild green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
1 medium tomato, diced
1 heaped tablespoon crème fraiche
a handful of greens, e.g. rocket or baby spinach
½ lemon, zest and juice
30g unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil

How to make

Put on a pot of water to boil the pasta (2 litres water, generously salted, for 200g pasta to serve 2 people).

Melt the butter on a gentle heat in a frying pan big enough to accommodate all the ingredients and the pasta. When the butter is melted, add the garlic and cook until fragrant but not brown, then add the green chill and fry cook for 30 seconds-minute and add the tomato and stir. Cook for another minute until the tomato begins to break down. Put the pasta on to cook.

Add in the frozen prawns and stir. Add a ladle of pasta water and simmer gently for a few minutes so they defrost and release their juices into the sauce. As the prawns are already cooked – you don’t want to have them on too high a heat or they will become tough. Stir in a tablespoon of crème fraiche, grate in a teaspoon of lemon zest, and simmer very gently for a minute or two. Then stir in the rocket or spinach until it’s just wilted.

When the pasta is cooked, reserve a ladle or two of water. Add in the drained pasta to the prawn sauce, and toss with the help of a serving spoon, adding a little pasta cooking water as you do so, until all the pasta is coated well and there’s some sauce in the pan. If it seems too dry, add more pasta water and keep tossing.

Serve immediately.

Chicken and Rice Soup

I made this when I was a bit under the weather and it was just the thing; I felt much better after eating it.

Ingredients

2 chicken thighs on the bone, with skin
1 fat leek or 2 smaller ones, well cleaned and sliced in half then 1cm lengths
1-2 carrots, peeled and sliced into thick ½ inch rounds
a generous seasoning of salt and freshly ground black pepper
a bay leaf
parsley – stalks to have in during cooking before removal and then chopped leaves to serve
2 handfuls of white basmati rice, rinsed

How to make

Place everything apart from the rice and parsley leaves in a heavy saucepan and just cover with water so it’s about 2cm above the contents of the pan. Simmer gently for 25ish minutes or until the chicken is cooked through, then add the rice and simmer gently for 10-15 minutes until the rice is cooked. If you need more water for cooking the rice, add some – cautiously though, as you don’t want to over-dilute the broth.

Remove the parsley stalks, bay leaf and chicken. Take the chicken off the bone, remove the skin, break into bite size pieces, and add back into the broth. Taste for seasoning and adjust. Serve with chopped fresh parsley and some Tabasco if you like.

Eating and Cooking Notes

I made Delia Smith’s quick flaky pastry (from her indispensable Complete Cookery Course) and used it to make mince pies to take to a chaotic and wonderful children’s Christmas service at a nearby village church – as well as some sausage rolls. I did not make the mincemeat myself (I hope to do so some time – my mother always does) but mixed in chopped almonds, lemon zest, a little chopped candied peel and a dash of brandy to a supermarket jar. The butter I used for the pastry was totally frozen and I grated it as per Delia’s method and it produced the most wonderful puffy, flaky pies and the filling tasted very good too. One person declared them the best mince pies they’d had! Sausage rolls were a critical source of food for various children at the church service, too – and I brought a bottle of ketchup with me for application in situ.

Pasta with small slices of crown prince squash, sage, sausage, garlic and chilli, cream, loosened into a silky sauce with pasta water and finely grated parmesan added at the end while tossing with the cooked pasta. I made a salad of mixed bitter leaves and orange to have with it, dressed with lemon juice, olive oil salt and pepper.

The dim sum chefs from Banquet Chinese returned from their several-months long trip back to China two weeks ago, and so dim sum was finally back on the menu. To celebrate and to make NYE fun despite not going out at night (we have a 1 year old child and I am almost 9 months pregnant) I booked a table at lunch with friends. We all feasted to our heart’s content, and Ursula had so a lot of fun dancing, chatting to waiters, and eating cheung fun and exquistely moist roast pork with crispy skin. (nb, my colleague Jonathan Nunn, founder of Vittles where I work as an editor, declared that Banquet made the best dim sum he’d had all year).

Last night I cooked Rachel Roddy’s lentils from her masterwork of a debut cookbook, Five Quarters - Recipe and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome. The time spent fastidiously chopping the leeks, carrot, onion, celery and garlic very finely was really worth it – as was keeping a keen eye on the cooked-ness of the lentils as instructed. We ate the lentils with sausages as Rachel does, and I made a salad with some very good lettuce from our veg box, dressed as I love to do, with a generous amount of lemon juice squeezed directly into the lettuce just before serving with olive oil, salt and pepper and tossed very well. I made the full batch of lentils for two of us so there was a good amount left over – and we will have more lentils this evening, warmed through and served with a baked camembert, some more sharply dressed lettuce, and my mother’s quince jelly.

I’ve been emptying the freezer of soft fruits bought in the summer and making jam: raspberry, strawberry so far, and blackcurrant this afternoon. Gooseberry next. I am having a baby, probably next week – and my mother has kindly offered to make some meals to freeze for when we are too chaotic and sleep deprived to cook, and so I had to make space. I love the Chez Panisse Fruit Book, and applied their method for the raspberry jam to the strawberries and was very pleased. I left them to defrost overnight with the sugar, so the sugar had dissolved prior to cooking.

I made this for dinner last night with the cabbage rice and we loved it. I think the meatballs would have been softer if I’d added a tablespoon or two of dried breadcrumbs soaked in milk (then squeezed/drained) – but I was going for speed and ease, so kept them very simple indeed. We both enjoyed the addition of celery to the passata for the flavour it imparted and for additional interest/texture. Passata makes a luxuriously textured sauce with very little effort. And if you buy a jar of salça and want to know what else to cook with it, let me direct you to the oeuvre of culinary talent Melek Erdal - whose lamb and chickpea recipe is one of my all time favourites.

Meatballs

600g beef mince
1 medium onion, peeled and grated
½ teaspoon Turkish pepper flakes (pul biber/Aleppo pepper) or other chilli flakes
salt and pepper

Sauce

700g passata
1 heaped tablespoon salça (or sundried tomato paste) mixed with a few tablespoons of water to break it up
2 ribs celery, finely sliced (1-2mm)
a pinch of pul biber (optional)
1 tablespoon olive oil

How to make

Pre-heat the oven to 180C fan/200C.

To make the meatballs: mix all the ingredients well using your hands. Form into golf ball size balls and place in a roasting tray that fits them all with a bit of space between each one.

Pour over the passata, the loosened salça or sundried tomato paste, scatter in the celery and drizzle over olive oil and another pinch of pepper flaks if you want more heat. Cover the tray with foil, and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 10-15 minutes.

Serve with cabbage rice (below) and sour cream.

While the meatballs were baking and then resting for ten minutes, I made this rice –

Cabbage rice

Ingredients

120g basmati rice
200ml water
1 medium onion, finely sliced
300g white cabbage, thickest bits removed, very finely sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
a grating of nutmeg, around ¼ teaspoon
2 cloves
2 x 40g pieces unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and fresh black pepper

How to make:

Melt one of the pieces of butter in a heavy lidded pan with the olive oil. Add the cloves and allow to fry for a few seconds and then the onion and a pinch of salt. Fry, stirring so it doesn’t catch for a few minutes until softening and translucent, but not brown.

Add the garlic and cook for a minute, and then the cabbage and nutmeg and another pinch of salt and some black pepper. Fry in the pan while stirring until the cabbage reduces in volume by about a half, between 5-10 minutes.

Meanwhile, gently rinse the rice in water 3-4 times. Drain well and add the rice to the cabbage with another pinch of salt, stir well, then pour in the water.

Cover the surface of the rice with a piece of baking paper/greaseproof paper and put on the lid. Turn the heat down and cook until the liquid has disappeared, check on it after 10-15 minutes, then break up the second piece of butter into a few pieces and place on the top of the rice. Put the greaseproof paper back on, replace the lid and leave on a low heat for another 5ish minutes.

Serve with meatballs in tomato sauce and sour cream.

Eating Notes

I made a fennel and potato gratin, with wafer thin sliced fennel, sliced potato (I used the OXO Goodgrips mandolin for both), with garlic, butter and salt and pepper in between each layer, then the dish filled with a mix of cream and milk and lots of parmesan on top. Very good!! We had it with sausages baked in the oven too.

On Friday last week I took Ursula to see the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College. A good day out! Free parking, free art, very good architecture (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon – the same who the Barbican and Golden Lane estates in London) and there’s a cafe inside. I had a sandwich and we shared a sausage roll, some fruit salad and Ursula had some frothy warm milk. Ursula was very excited by the accessible-height sink in the bathroom which meant she could stand and wash her hands using frothy soap.

Our neighbour and friend Maisie Dyvig made a lifetime best beef pie on Saturday. She used the recipe for beef shin pie from Margaret Costa’s book Four Seasons with some minor amendments: for the rough puff pastry, Maisie used YQ flour, changed the fats for the pastry slightly, and used lemon juice instead of vinegar as an acid. She baked it in a relatively shallow metal dish from Netherton Foundry, which was just the right size for a pleasing ratio between pastry and filling. The beef shin came from Sam Morgan who rears cattle on a small regenerative farm along the banks of the River Stour (you can order from his website). Maisie served the pie with with cabbage cooked à point, just tender, and some wedges of crown prince squash from her allotment. Maisie is building a bakery in the nearby town of Manningtree and I am incredibly excited to try her bread there when she opens.

Ursula was ill with a fever over the weekend and early this week so we were passing her between us and taking it pretty easy. I wanted to make a fairly basic meal a bit more fun and so added a few extra elements to omelette and homemade chips. For the chips I used both olive oil and some unsalted butter (as my mother does for roast potatoes) and salt. Around 10 minutes before removing them from the oven, I added a tablespoon of finely chopped rosemary to the pan and tossed the potatoes in them, also scraping up any bits of potato that had stuck in the process (more crispy bits). I made mayonnaise from a jar more entertaining by adding a finely chopped garlic clove and half a teaspoon of sweet smoked paprika (a retro move I haven’t done in a while). The omelette had grated parmesan and chives in the middle. I freshened up the plate with a mixed leaf salad dressed with the juice of half a lemon, salt and olive oil. These small touches added levity and additional pleasure to our plain meal.

For a hearty lunch on another day when Ursula was home from nursery due to her high temperature I made pasta using c. 300g of crown prince squash (rich, sweet and orange in colour) that had been growing old in the fridge. We sat together and I peeled and de-seeded the pumpkin and cut it into pretty small pieces. I boiled the pumpkin until just tender in salted water and then lifted out with a slotted spoon. I added more water and salt to the saucepan and cooked the pasta in the same water. While the pasta cooked I made the pumpkin sauce: I cooked two finely chopped garlic cloves in butter and olive oil with a few finely sliced sage leaves until fragrant. Then – still on a fairly low heat – I added the cooked pumpkin and cooked until taking on a slight colour. I added a ladle of pasta cooking water and simmered for a few minutes. Then I turned off the heat and added some double cream (around 4-6 tablespoons) and a few handfuls of finely grated parmesan, turned the heat on again, stirred and simmered gently for one or two minutes. Just before serving I added another ladle of pasta cooking water, drained the pasta, and tossed it in the frying pan with the pumpkin sauce to coat. I tasted and seasoned with salt and black pepper served with more parmesan and chilli flakes. Ursula did’t eat any (or indeed anything that day) but Sam and I ate it all!

After I had a scan at the hospital (I am having a baby in January) we stopped off at a shop I’ve had my eye on for a while. It exceeded my expectations and was a richly stocked larder for lots of different cuisines with fresh produce too and a hot cabinet with mutton rolls, samosas and vada pav. Sam was excited to find this DIY Bhel Puri packet which includes mini sauce pots.

Pear and Ginger Pecan Crumble

My mum brought over a bag of conference pears that I had ignored for a few weeks as I am not a big eater of raw pears; however I love them in puddings and last night when something sweet was required, I made the crumble below, which I really loved. The fresh ginger brought the pears alive and gave the dish a kick, and the darker sugar prevented it from becoming too sweet.

Filling

1kg ripe conference pears (I had around 10 smallish ones, or enough to cover the bottom of a baking dish), peeled, cored and quartered
5-6 heaped dessertspoons light muscovado sugar (a darker sugar is critical to this not being too sweet)
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced very thinly
3-4 hazelnut size pieces of unsalted butter dotted around
juice and sliced peel from half a lemon
100ml water

Crumble

6oz wholemeal flour (I used spelt)
2oz plain white flour
4oz unsalted butter, cold and cubed
good pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
2 tablespoons demerara sugar
75g roughly chopped pecans

How to make:

Pre-heat the oven to 180C (fan). Prepare the pears then arrange them in a baking dish (I used a medium falconware enamel dish) and add the sugar, butter, sliced ginger, lemon peel, lemon juice and 100ml of water and mix so evenly distributed. Cover with foil and bake for 15 minutes until the pears are quite tender but not fully cooked.

Meanwhile, make the crumble: in a mixing bowl, rub the butter into the flour using the tips of your fingers until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the baking powder, cinnamon, salt, demerara sugar and pecans.

Take the pears from the oven and remove the foil. There will be quite a bit of liquid in the bottom; that’s OK. Tip all the crumble over the top and spread out so it covers the fruit. Put back in the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes until browned and bubbling.

Serve with creme fraiche.

Roast pumpkin with anchovy cream sauce, chickpeas and salad

My partner Sam raved about this and ate every morsel from the serving dish. NB. variety is key with pumpkins and squashes as they are all so different. Crown prince is sweet, rich and nutty. A stringier, watery variety such as those often sold for Halloween will not work for this.

Ingredients:

2-3 thick wedges of unpeeled crown prince squash per person (I had 5 in total), around 1.5 inches at thickest point
1 teaspoon chilli flakes
1 tablespoon olive oil
sprig of rosemary
700g chickpeas (I used Bold Bean Co Queen Chickpeas ones – they are big and soft)
2-3 cloves of garlic, peeled

Sauce

150ml double cream
4 finely chopped anchovies
100g finely grated parmesan
1 cooked garlic clove taken from the pumpkin roasting pan, squashed

Salad

a bag of peppery salad leaves, mixed or rocket
juice of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil

How to make

Pre-heat oven to 180C (fan). Arrange wedges of pumpkin in a roasting pan (not too big) and toss with olive oil, a pinch of salt, chilli flakes and rosemary. Cook until fairly tender, around 20-25 minutes, then add chickpeas to the pan, a few tablespoons of their liquid, and garlic cloves and cook for another 15 minutes.

After adding the chickpeas to the roasting pan, prepare the salad and the sauce. Warm up the cream in a small pan and add chopped anchovies and parmesan and stir, allowing to melt, then bubble gently and infuse for a few minutes, while stirring. Turn heat off. Arrange salad leaves on a large serving dish, squeeze over lemon and add olive oil and a pinch of salt and toss well. Remove the pumpkin and chickpeas from the oven, take one of the garlic cloves out of the roasting pan and squash into a puree and stir into the cream sauce and reheat for serving. Arrange the pumpkin wedges and chickpeas on the plate with the salad and toss. Drizzle over cream sauce, with extra for serving.

Cod and Chickpeas

A really good and quick dinner last week made using one dish.

Ingredients

2 pieces of cod (I had skinless loin)
4 inches from a chorizo sausage ring, cut into 1cmx1cm dice
1 tin chickpeas and its liquor
2 medium tomatoes diced
1 small onion, sliced
2 large garlic cloves, slice
pinch of chilli flakes
120ml dry white wine
2 tablespoons olive oil

To serve: 2 wedges of lemon

How to make

Pre-heat the oven to 200C fan. In an oven dish (I used a terracotta one on this occasion), place the chickpeas and liquor, chorizo, onion, garlic, tomato, chilli flakes, white wine and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Put in the pre-heated oven for 20 minutes. Rub the second tablespoon of olive oil on the pieces of fish and season with salt and pepper. Stir the chickpea mix then put the pieces fish on top of the chickpeas and put back in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until cooked and flaking. Taste for seasoning and add salt as desired.

Serve with wedges of lemon and cooked spinach.

Eating notes (or more accurately, cooking notes)

I have made this pumpkin soup from GoodFood website twice and it was superb both times. I didn’t bother with croutons and pumpkin seed garnish and did finely grated parmesan instead with buttered toast on the side. As it’s such a simple recipe, a rich sweet pumpkin is essential. In the past I have over-spiced or messed around with pumpkin soup in ways that detracted from the beauty of the pumpkin. One of the times I ladled it through a sieve before serving which made it extra smooth. The second time I made it I used one onion instead of two, which I preferred.

A cooked breakfast plate I made myself for a solo lunch at home. I used a leftover baked potato to make wedges very quickly by frying them in the pan alongside the egg. I used a leftovers sausage too, cut in half lengthways and fried to make it crispy.

Some small plums came in the vegetable box delivery, and I halved and stoned them, put them in a glass oven dish sprinkled over a few tablespoons of soft brown sugar and a few tablespoons of water, covered with foil and cooked until soft and the sugar was dissolved. This method produced a delicious plum syrup. We ate them over a few days, with porridge and with Greek yogurt.

We ate roast chicken early in the week but then fell ill with a bug brought home by our daughter and it wasn’t until Friday morning that I did anything with the leftovers. We had only eaten the legs when it was hot, so all the breast remained. I removed the breast meat and set aside and made a stock with the bones, onion, carrot, leeks, bay leaves, 6 whole peppercorns and some leftover fennel in lieu of celery, which I did not have. I added water so the contents of the pan were just covered and some salt and simmered it for an hour and a half on a low heat after skimming some froth off the top when it came to the boil.

• Then at lunchtime I made a soup. I strained the stock, and added in new carrots, peeled and cut into thick rounds, one more leek in thin slices, and a few handfuls of basmati rice. I simmered this until the rice was cooked, then shredded in all of the leftover chicken breast and some of the jellied cooking juices and heated through until hot. I served immediately.

I made this butternut squash soup, with only one chilli in in case my daughter wanted to try it. It was excellent. I sieved it to make it extra silky before serving.

Plum pie! A shop that sells kitchen things and fridges in my town was closing down and I bought a small metal US-style pie dish half price, along with a mini whisk, a gingerbread man cutter, and a teapot. It came to £7.50! I made a shortcrust pastry (8oz of flour, 4oz grated butter, water) and made a double crust plum pie, arranging plums, sugar and cinnamon in the pastry base and then arranging the crust on top and glazing with milk and sugar.

A made a quiche for Ursula and some visiting babies - that Ursula loved. First I made a quick shortcrust pastry with 6oz flour, 3oz unsalted butter and some water. The filling was two eggs, a tin of tuna, 1/2 small tin of sweetcorn, a softened, finely sliced leek, some grated cheese and some creme fraiche. Baked in the same small circular metal pie dish as the plum pie. I cut out leftover pastry with a star cutter and rolled in some grated cheddar cheese and chopped chives and baked for 10 mins in case some of the babies did not want quiche. This turned out to be a good idea - as one baby ate c. 10 pastry cheese stars instead of quiche.

Slow baked rice pudding – also for the visiting babies + their parents – to the Moro restaurant method. 1ltr whole milk, 100g pudding rice, 70g sugar, 1 cinnamon stick, two pieces of orange peel. Add everything to a buttered oven dish and stir to mix. Bake at 140C (fan) for 1.5-2 hours. The milk emerges wonderfully scented and the top is bronzed. It’s quite a ‘wet’ rice pudding. The beauty of this is that it’s 5 minutes to prepare, then just sits in the oven while you do other things and emerges looking burnished and gorgeous.

Warming the figs with honey, vinegar and olive oil in this way adds a rich sweetness to the salad that is a foil for the bitter chicory and sharp goat’s cheese – and helps to produce an excellent dressing.

Ingredients

3-4 heads chicory, washed and dried, leaves separated
½ sweet mild onion, finely sliced
100g soft mild goat’s cheese
4 tablespoons roughly chopped walnuts and pumpkin seeds (I used a mix as didn’t have enough walnuts)

6-8 small ripe figs, halved
1 sprig of thyme
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
squeeze of lemon
pinch of chilli flakes (optimal)

How to make

Place the honey, olive oil and vinegar in a small saucepan with the thyme, a pinch of chilli flakes and a good pinch of salt. Turn on the heat to low-medium. Add the halved figs. Turn the figs in the gently bubbling liquid for a 3-4 minutes until they are warm through and softening. Turn off the heat. Remove the figs to a plate, add a squeeze of lemon juice to the liquid and then taste for acidity/sweetness/salt and adjust to taste; add more olive oil if it’s too intense.

Meanwhile, toast the walnuts and pumpkin seeds in a dry pan, taking care they do not burn.

Arrange the chicory in a broad shallow salad bowl or deep serving plate. Add the onion. Spoon over half the warm honey-vinegar dressing over the leaves and toss well. Arrange the warm figs on the top. Then spoons of soft goat’s cheese in between the figs. Sprinkle over the toasted nuts. Then add the rest of the dressing on top.

We had this for lunch with buttered toast.

Eating notes

On Tuesday I made merguez sausages on top of potato-tomato with onions (as per the recipe written up a few weeks ago), and it was fantastic. The merguez were not as large and juicy as the ones I bought from the butcher in France but had a really good flavour – like really good. I saw from the packet they are made with mutton. I added them to the veg box order from Riverford which I’ve been getting intermittently in the last few months.

I arrived first at the Ta’mini Lebanese bakery on Marchmont street for a meeting with writer and cook Melek Erdal about a very exciting project of hers that we are working on together (like omg Melek is a genius). I ordered a flat bread topped with kishk, tomato, onion & olive oil mix (I looked up kishk and found it was a fermented yogurt and bulghur wheat). It arrived hot on a tray sliced into four and had real depth and also freshness from the fermentation. When Melek arrived, she also got us a chicken wrap and commended the tenderness of the dough and the spicy green mayonnaise – it was also served hot and was generously proportioned. The bakery has a bustling canteen-y feeling, even though it’s small and are is open quite late; we chatted for two hours and could have stayed longer. The food was excellent but to drink I had English breakfast tea with fresh mint in – and they haven’t got this right – it's served in a tiny cup which ends up being too strong and not enough liquid.

Sam and I were yearning for really good bread yesterday so made a visit to Potting Shed bakery in East Bergholt. We arrived accidentally after the baker Rachel had closed, not realising she was still on summer opening hours – but luckily there was a small amount of focaccia and a loaf of bread, which was exactly what we were wanted. Rachel uses almost exclusively local flours and more generally, no white flour, even when making e.g. chiffon cake (which were long sold out when we arrived) so her baked goods all have rich nutty flavour. The focaccia with onion and rosemary was delicious. I am going to use some of the loaf to serve with Turkish eggs later today.

It was our anniversary earlier this week but we were both working (& I spent 6+hours on trains and coaches trying to get in and out of London after a tree fell on an electrical line) so on Saturday my mum took Ursula for a few hours and we went out for lunch at the Sun Inn in Dedham which manages (unusually) to be both a real drinking pub and great place to eat. We usually go there after a walk and sit in the bar drinking pints and eating rarebit or a burger (both served with superb fries), but we ate in the cosy restaurant area and I had whole plaice with girolles, peas, bacon and mashed potato which had had a rich and fruity wine sauce.

Last night I made a very quick soup with some borlotti beans I’d soaked and cooked on Friday intending to cook them with a pork chop for dinner – but we were very tired and had baked potatoes and baked beans instead. So yesterday, to watch the final two episodes of very jolly detective show The Residence, I made a simple borlotti bean soup topped with fried eggs and thin slices of the rosemary focaccia we’d bought in the morning, toasted. For the soup I fried 4 cloves of crushed garlic cloves and 2 small, dried chillies in generous olive oil until fragrant, added in 5-6 raw roughly chopped plum tomatoes and stirred for a minute or two, and then added half a finely sliced bulb of fennel and a sprig of rosemary. I then added the beans and plentiful bean liquor and simmered for 20 minutes (until the fennel was tender). I seasoned and served with fried eggs and the focaccia croutons on top. I would have added parmesan on top to serve, but we have run out.

First porridge of the season, which I made with water and serve with milk, a small dot of butter, a dark sugar of some kind, ideally dark muscovado, but currently we have soft brown sugar – and sometimes I also add cream, or toasted nuts. My ratio is roughly 1 cup porridge for 3 cups water and a pinch of salt cooked until the oats are completely tender.

Quick Parmigiana TV Dinner

This dish took me around 20 minutes to prepare and assemble, and then 20ish minutes in the oven. Hadn’t made anything parmigiana-like in ages and suddenly wanted it – this was saucy and delicious!

Serves 2
Ingredients

1 medium aubergine, sliced into 1cm rounds
1 courgette cut in half in the middle, and then each half sliced into 1/2 cm pieces (I used this as I didn’t have enough aubergine – no need to sub if you have more aubergine)
350g passata
2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
olive oil
1 ball mozzarella
75g finely grated parmesan

How to make

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. First make the sauce: add four tablespoons of olive oil to a frying pan with the sliced garlic and turn on the heat. When sizzling and fragrant but not brown, add the passata. Simmer, gently bubbling for 15-20 minutes.

While the sauce is simmering cook the aubergine and courgette – though check the sauce isn’t drying out and turn heat off if it is. Heat up a griddle pan on the hob. Toss the sliced aubergine and courgette in a bowl with 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil and a good pinch of salt to coat. When the griddle is hot lay aubergine/courgette slices across it, when marked with the charred griddle lines, turn over with a fork. Continue this, turning over until all the aubergine is both coloured by the griddle and softened inside. You will likely need to do it in two batches.

Assemble

As in the photo, I used a smallish but deep enamel oven dish. Check the seasoning of the tomato sauce and add salt and pepper if desired. Then spoon a bit of sauce into the bottom of the oven dish, lay over aubergine and courgette, then more sauce, then more vegetables, then more sauce – continue until you’ve used all the aubergine. Top generously with first a layer of grated parmesan, then the torn up mozzarella. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the top is browned.

Eat with grilled/toasted bread brushed with more olive oil and salt and rubbed with a garlic clove if you fancy it – I had supermarket ciabatta that I sliced and cooked on the griddle.

Note: if you don’t have a griddle pan, use the grill in the oven to cook the sliced aubergine on a baking sheet. Get it red hot and put the aubergine in one layer close to the grill and turn when browned. Then switch the oven to baking mode while you assemble the Parmigiana.

Cottage Pie

This is a straightforward cottage pie without any bells and whistles that I made most of while my daughter had an hour long morning nap – then we mashed the potato for the top together and I put it in the oven to bake for everyone’s lunch. She loved it and ate a big helping. Sam and I had it too alongside her, with ketchup and brown sauce on the side. We ate the apple cake (mentioned below with a recipe link) for pudding.

Serves 4
Ingredients

500g beef mince
150g lardons or smoked bacon, diced
1 medium white onion, peeled and diced
2 medium sized carrots, peeled and diced
100g peas
1/2 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
½ tin tomatoes (200g)
150ml water or stock
1 tablespoon olive oil

900g potatoes, peeled and quartered
100ml milk
75g butter + a bit extra to put on top

How to make

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Heat a heavy casserole on a medium heat and add the olive oil. Add the lardons and cook for 3-4 minutes so the fat begins to render. Then add the carrots and onion and fry until softening but not coloured, for around 5 minutes. Add the beef and break up and stir and keep stirring until all broken up and browned. Add the tomatoes, peas water or stock, Worcestershire sauce, generous black pepper and a pinch of salt (the lardons/smoked bacon will have imparted salt already, so leave full salt seasoning until later). Simmer for 40 minutes, taking care it does not dry out. Taste for seasoning at the end and adjust.

Meanwhile peel and quarter the potatoes, boil in salted water until tender. And mash with the milk and butter, and some salt and pepper to taste.

Spoon the mince mixture into an oven dish, and then add the potato on top, smoothing and then dragging a fork over the top – the ridges give bits to get crispy in the oven. Add a few dots of butter on the top.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until bubbling and browning on top. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before eating.

Eating Notes

I baked pork belly slices in a homemade BBQ sauce to this recipe I found online, served with mashed potatoes and cooking apples cooked on a low heat so they retained their shape to my mother’s method (but without sultanas). I had cooked the apples in this way to make a crumble and nicked two to have with the pork. The pork is baked with the sauce in a dish tightly covered with foil, meaning the pork effectively steams, leaving it very soft and with plenty of gravy. I did not grill the pork at the end as the recipe instructs, as I wanted it to be soft – and it really was. The BBQ sauce was not too sweet. Very quick to prepare, very easy.

I made this apple-stuffed cake today to a fantastic recipe by Benjamina Ebueh, which coped well with my not quite having everything on the ingredients list: I didn’t have ground or flaked almonds so added an extra 15g flour instead of ground almonds and I topped with some granola instead of almonds and apple. Also I had a mix of cooking and eating apples for the puree instead of just eating apples which worked well. I had no lemon so added a splash of water to the apples. We all (Sam, Ursula, me) loved the cake. It was straightforward to follow the instructions and turned out so well – moist, fruity, nutty, gently spiced. Could have it with yogurt or as an afternoon snack.

I made sort-of cheat’s Hainanese chicken in the rice cooker using the aromatics from Shu Han Lee’s recipe in Agak Agak (a favourite book), using chicken thighs, and with the sauces from her recipe too. I had to add a little extra time and liquid to the rice cooking time, but it worked well and the rice was delicious!

I’ve been making myself packed lunches to take to the library the past few weeks. This week my sandwich had sliced Emmental cheese, sliced ham, tomato, butter (both sides) and mustard. As well as a small bag of mini cheddars and an apple.

I made miso aubergine – I baked an aubergine cut in half lengthways, with deep criss cross scoring in each half, for 30 minutes. Then I brushed each half generously with a mix of white miso, vermouth (as I had no mirin!), brown sugar and a splash of toasted sesame oil and put back in the oven for another 20 minutes. I used the leftover miso mix on some small brown mushrooms and arranged them around the aubergine for the final cooking. We ate it with short grain rice and steamed chard, preceded by corn on the cob.

When working from home last week I had tinned tomato soup with grated cheddar cheese and buttered toast three times.

On Friday which is the day in the week that Ursula does not have nursery since childcare hours became available this month, I ate chips and a ham and cheese sandwich made by the local deli on the beach. The chips were from a fish and chip shop in my town that I have not visited before and they were excellent. Ursula just ate the ham from my sandwich; to my bafflement, she is uninterested in chips.

Two magnificent sponge cakes from two book launches - Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming and Nina Mingya Powles’s In the Hollow of the Wave. If you invite people to a party: give them cake!

We saw a family grilling merguez sausages at the picnic area of a service station in France and the scent of richly spiced lamb fat on the BBQ ignited an urgent desire for them – so when it was my turn to cook dinner for our friends, I knew what to do. I found a butcher selling merguez and bought two each and then used them to make a full-meal rendition of one of my favourite vegetable dishes – potato tomato – with the juices from the sausages seasoning everything and producing a delicious scant sauce. We ate it and drank rosé wine as dusk fell and bats whizzed past our faces.

Serves 6

Ingredients

c.1.2kg potatoes, peeled and thickly sliced
5-6 medium sized, ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced
1 large or two smaller white onions, peeled and thickly sliced
12 merguez sausages
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper

How to make

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Put the sliced potatoes, tomatoes and onions in a large roasting tray, add the olive oil, some salt and pepper and coat using a spoon to mix up. Shake the pan so that they level out, then put in the oven for 20 minutes. Prick the sausages with a skewer or the end of a knife and arrange on top of the potato mixture. Put back into the oven and cook for around another 20 minutes or until the sausages are cooked.

Serve with a green salad, and make sure each person gets a spoonful of cooking juices.

Eating notes

In other potato-tomato developments, I made a version where I poured in approximately 100ml of double cream ten minutes before the end of cooking, to great effect. This was with neatly arranged sliced tomatoes and potatoes interleaved with slices of garlic, salt and olive oil. The cream became scented with garlic and the fruity tomatoes cut through beautifully. We had it with roasted chicken thighs and green salad.

I co-organised an event to raise money for Palestine in the town where I live and made fattoush as one of the dishes at the picnic that was part of it. Deep frying the dried-out pitta in olive oil made all the difference to the taste. We raised over £1000 and it was good to see Palestinian flags flying in an Essex seaside town.

An immensely satisfying dish: sausages that you have browned and then cooked through in passata, served with small gnocchi tossed in the tomato sauce that has been enriched by the sausages. Finely grated parmesan to serve.

A perfect slice of greens and ricotta pie and salad with my agent at Cafe Deco to discuss my next book (a good place to go when you are not paying!).

Braised lettuce to this superb recipe by Woks of Life (buy their sensational book, too).

Together with my daughter Ursula I made Rachel Roddy’s recipe for a similar pie to that I’d had at Cafe Deco (subbing in some spelt flour as I ran out of plain) and I didn’t have the precise quantities of greens or cheese as Rachel but it is such a solid gold recipe it survived my measured meddling. At home we had it with a tomato salad with roasted peppers, diced white onion, capers, parsley, vinegar and olive oil (itself a modification of my friend Ed’s salad, documented here a year or so ago). Then I took a slice in to the library for my lunch, and it stood up well to being hurled around in my bag.

I made a Manchester tart after my partner said something about wanting a tart with custard and jam. I made it from a recipe I found online and now can’t remember, but it was not too hard to make and lasted superbly over a week.

I was reminded that Claudia Roden’s boiled carrot salad is one of the best recipes there is when I made it to accompany some couscous, olives and hard-boiled eggs for a weekday lunch at home.

We stayed with friends in the Loire region of France and at the market producers were selling locally made ‘crottins’ – small rounds of goats cheeses that I have previously seen on sale at Mons for about four times the price. I bought some (5 for 10 euro) and for lunch one day baked them as I remember seeing in the St John cookbook with cherry tomatoes, fresh thyme, garlic and olive oil (not sure if St John adds the aromatics). I had the oven a little too hot – next time I would have it more like 160C to go a bit easier on the young cheese – but it was delicious.

Fried Korean chicken and fresh cabbage slaw at a tiny and very popular restaurant in Paris called ‘Olive Chicken’ where we were stuck for a few days after losing a passport.

7am breakfast at Le Select in Paris – I love it. Everything is fresh, the juice, the bread and pastries, the silver jug of milk to mix your own hot chocolate – and if you get their full breakfast, it comes with 3(!!!) of the tenderest fried eggs you ever beheld (and fruit, and fromage blanc). I first visited after a famous writer told my friend Katherine and I that we should go, and that James Baldwin had been a regular. As well as having all the major French newspapers, they have a lot of children’s books in specially designed wall racks, which Ursula delighted in perusing.

After seeing the TV dinner of sausages and chips in Not Now Bernard and reading about going to eat sausages and chips in a caff in The Tiger Who Came To Tea – whereby Ursula learned the word ‘sausage’ – I gave her a cold sausage at breakfast the next day, which she ate most of, before adding the final pieces to her bowl of rice crispies, and force feeding them to my partner.

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Hot new anachronism

A last-minute meal with a friend is a creative prompt that I love. Familiar ingredients suggest a new configuration, or I suddenly make something I have not made before. Anyway, I have never baked a camembert before – what an old-fashioned pursuit! – but at the weekend I saw one by the ‘La Rustique’ brand in the supermarket and thinking about my week ahead of parenting solo, imagined myself eating it over a few meals with bread and salad, in a low effort kind of way. But then I invited a friend over at short notice with no thought as to what I would make until I’d put the baby to bed – I assumed I would make pasta – but then I remembered camembert in the fridge. I had the idea to bake it to eat with boiled potatoes, and knew that somewhere there was a ceramic camembert dish I’d once been given for Christmas. It felt like fate when I found quickly – and so I washed off the dust, squeezed in the cheese (which fit exactly - is there an EU law on Camembert dimensions?) added a sprig of thyme on top, covered it with the ceramic lid and put it in the oven. Then, when I was taking the potatoes out of the vegetable basket to peel and boil, I also found a few shallots, which I baked whole in the oven at the same time. There was just enough lettuce for a green salad and when I began thinking about a sweet condiment to compliment the sharp cheese, a jar of my mother’s rosemary apple jelly simply appeared in the fridge and I took it out.

On the table was a bowl of boiled potatoes with butter, a now-liquid baked camembert with thyme, a dish of soft sweet baked shallots in their skins with some fresh mint picked from a pot in the yard, a salad with some baby gem lettuce and the end of a cucumber dressed with Dijon vinaigrette, and a jar of rosemary apple jelly. The potatoes sort of collapsed into the melted cheese in the most delightful way.

Two lunches on the pier

I whisked two eggs with salt and pepper and some spring onion greens. I saw half a shallot left on the chopping board from a previous meal, so I sliced that up finely. I melted a knob of butter in a pan and added the sliced shallot, when it was softened, I poured in the egg. I sprinkled some cheese onto the egg in the pan. While it cooked, I chopped up some pickled jalapeno and coriander and mixed them with a heaped tablespoon of mayonnaise. I buttered one slice of bread and spread another with the mayonnaise mixture. I folded the disc shaped egg, now mostly set in half and then half again and put it into the sandwich, squirted over a zig-zag of sriracha, closed the sandwich wrapped it up in foil, put it in a bag with six cherry tomatoes, filled a bottle of water and walked to the pier. There, I ate it on a bench looking over the estuary – oof a yacht needs to tack and change direction before it hits the anchored lightship! It will never make it with that strong tide! – while listening to a Dorothy L Sayers Wimsey mystery. When I finished the sandwich, I walked to the ice cream van and had a Mr Whippy, no sauce, with a flake. And then I sat and had that, looking over the water. Then I walked over to the burger van and bought a cup of tea, milk no sugar, £1.60, and walked back to the bench and drank that. I took a call from my partner to assure me he arrived safely at his mother’s with the baby and that she had eaten a little food when they got there and that she would try a bread roll at one of our favourite pubs in all the world.

I whisked one egg with salt and pepper and some spring onion greens. I melted some butter in a pan and poured in the egg. I sprinkled some cheese onto the egg. Then I lightly toasted some bread and crushed some avocado onto one side of the bread with a fork. Then I chopped up some coriander and a tablespoon of pickled jalapeno and spooned it onto the avocado. I folded over the omelette and put it on the avocado and then closed it with the other slice of bread, wrapped it in foil and put it in a paper bag with some cherry tomatoes. I filled a water bottle and walked to the pier. I ate the sandwich listening to another Dorothy L Sayers Wimsey mystery while children dropped crabbing lines into the water in front of me on the pier. Then I went and got a cup of tea from the burger van, and then, this time, ordered an ice cream from the next door ice cream van with my tea in hand – I was eager to get back to writing. It was a different woman who made the Mr Whippy, and she gave me a very small portion. As I walked away, she began talking to her colleague about it, how she hadn’t given a big enough portion, she was new using the machine and they said Shh!!

Some further meals

Steak and kidney pie bought from a farm shop I’d wanted to visit for a while that I stopped off at on the way back from taking my partner’s forgotten passport to the airport. With steamed carrots, leeks and cavolo nero – added in this order, few minutes between each addition – to the steamer. Brown sauce and mustard on the side.

I deceived Ursula for the first time the other day. I cooked some grated carrot and broccoli with the passata, garlic and olive oil and then blitzed it up for a pasta sauce so she’d have more vegetables but they did not appear as themselves. It was very delicious actually – and she really liked it.

Borlotti beans that I soaked and cooked during the day while I was writing – and then on Sunday night I made pasta con fagioli with rosemary, carrot, onion, garlic, tomato and beans and macaroni. Served with olive oil, parmesan and chilli flakes. Ursula had it for her packed lunch twice at nursery and really took to it according to the nursery workers.

But then I made something even better very, very quickly for a friend and her son who dropped in last minute and who needed to eat within 30 minutes before of both the children went to bed. I fried two sliced garlic cloves in a generous amount of olive oil, added a sprig of rosemary and tipped in the rest of the cooked borlotti beans and their liquor. I added in around 10 cherry tomatoes and simmered until the tomatoes just burst. I served with olive oil and fresh basil torn in. Just wow so good. To my friend and her son’s bowl, I added a fried egg as per their request, but I had it plain.

I served it with a mixture of rainbow chard and cavolo nero, washed and then sliced and then cooked in a saucepan with the lid on firmly, with a tablespoon of olive oil, one whole garlic clove, unsliced and half a cup of water. After a couple of minutes, I turned it in the pan then put the lid back on for a few more minutes. It sort-of steamed itself. I drizzled olive oil on top, which is how my friend and her son ate it – he is not eating dairy at the moment – and I added grated parmesan on top of my greens.

For the baby’s packed tea at nursery, I cut up the pieces of meat from my leftover steak and kidney pie alongside the steamed vegetables from when I had it (carrot, leek, cavolo nero), put the pastry pastry from the pie on top and some sweetcorn in too. I was worried she might not like the pie so put some extra things in her packed lunch box -avocado and cucumber, and leftover pasta from her lunch – but the woman at the nursery said she loved the steak and kidney pie, which was exciting.

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Last time I visit the butcher

I stopped off at the butcher on the way home from dropping the baby off at nursery. I almost carried on going round the roundabout because of my general feeling of trepidation about this butcher (mentioned in my book Small Fires re sausages) but it was my partner’s birthday, and I didn’t have time to travel further to a butcher I like. I made my exit.

I walked in and there was one other woman in there as a customer and just one butcher working behind the counter – a mid-Wednesday afternoon lull. He was speaking about steak, telling her that the cheaper cut, rump, “nine times out of ten it’s no good”, guiding her towards sirloin or ribeye, more expensive per kilo. She was buying quite a lot of things and was unfamiliar with the butcher. “Do you do a monthly shop?” Yes, she said. She was buying meat to make quite a few meals. “Where do you live?” He asked. Only nearby, in B___, she said. “Well, we do delivery he said, so you can place a regular order, and we will bring it to you.” She seemed uncertain, he pushed on. She looked at me. If you’re only getting a few things go before me, I will probably ask lots of questions. I said I was just getting one thing and thanked her.

I am buying steak, I said. “Oh, you will have heard my whole spiel then”, said the butcher, who must be about the same age as me and has hair that is short, shaved at the sides and much longer on top, sort of slicked across. Yes, I said, and I want some rump. Could you cut a slice from the rump, about an inch thick? My mother always has this cut and then cooks it to be shared, I continued, by way of explanation. I felt I needed to bring in my mother as a decoy so that I was not disagreeing with him directly about what cut of meat to buy. Do you have a whole piece you can cut from? I asked doubtfully. I had been looking nervously at the scant amount of meat on display and couldn’t see any larger pieces or carcasses around. I had been faintly disgusted when he took some out of a vac pack freezer bag for the woman ahead of me. So their meat is frozen, I thought, or is it bought pre-butchered rather than breaking down a carcass in house? But he grinned and brought out a whole rump from under the counter and began to cut a slice with a large knife. He began saying “of course rump can be good, but just quite often when I’ve had it, it’s been tough” You’ve been burnt, I said. “More than once”, he said, emphatically, “but it’s lovely for a beef stroganoff, or a curry.”

I waited for my payment to go through, which made me realise just how much I had bought, perhaps it would stretch to a stroganoff another day as well as this birthday meal. As I turned to leave I saw several newspapers folded up on the counter. I recognised it as one that had been put through my door a month or so ago. Initially, given its name – The Light – we assumed it was a religious newspaper spreading the word. But when we looked closer, we realised it was something else: a far-right conspiracy-theory newspaper with a libertarian edge. It referred to itself as ‘a free truthpaper’. We looked it up. It was launched during the pandemic by an anti-vaxxer and expanded from there. On the inside page was an advert saying if you paid £25 they would deliver the magazine to 50 people on a street of your choice. Someone in my neighbourhood imposed this newspaper on us! It was well laid-out and edited professionally and contained a wild mix – antisemitic, transphobic, antivaxxer, deep state conspiracies and articles about the use of chemicals in perfume, the use of chemicals in farming, pieces on the lack of support for children with special educational needs, a re-telling of the history of physics that says Einstein’s importance was overstated, nuggets of ‘wisdom’ from Ayn Rand, much more.

I hadn’t seen the paper since we recycled it a couple of months ago and had mostly forgotten about it, but here were copies being offered to customers at the butcher’s shop. Later that afternoon I told my partner on the phone. I saw it when I had already paid, I said, making an excuse. I have been in to that butcher perhaps four or five times in the past six years and on each occasion, I have left feeling uneasy. I think the first time I went one of them said something to me like, “we don’t like outsiders around here” – sort of as a joke, but not a joke. And now I never need to go there again.

*

Anyway, I fried the steak, rested it well, and it was fine. It was a whole slice cut from a rump around 1-1.5 inches thick. That could feed 4-5 people so I cut it in two as there were only two of us, and we had some leftover. I am making beef stroganoff with the rest, with rice.

I am no steak genius but this is what I did: I let it sit with some rosemary and garlic and some salt sprinkled on for around 45 minutes before cooking. Then I rubbed in a little oil, brushed off the aromatics and put it in a very hot pan for 3-4 minutes until caramelised, then turned it and did another couple of minutes until it caramelised, added a knob of butter, basted it and then removed it from the pan and rested it for ten minutes. I sliced it up and put it on the table so we could share it. We also had Maris Pipe potatoes cut into rough chips and cooked in the oven and I made chard with olives in an anchovy cream sauce – providing general sauciness for the dish – and it was excellent.

After we had this fantastic chocolate marmalade cake to a recipe by Katie Smith that I baked in the afternoon.

Chard with olives in cream anchovy sauce

This is an excellent accompaniment to steak! Make it while the meat rests.

Ingredients

200g rainbow chard, washed and stems chopped into roughly 1-2 inch lengths and leaves torn (no need to dry the leaves the water will help cooking)
3 garlic cloves, finely sliced
6 anchovies roughly chopped
pinch of chilli flakes or 2 small dried chillies (optional)
2 tablespoons pitted kalamata olives
80ml double cream
40g unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil

How to make

I made this when the steak was resting.

Add the butter and olive oil to a deep-ish frying pan that can accommodate everything and turn heat onto low-medium. When the butter is melted add the garlic and chopped anchovies. Stir to disintegrate the anchovies. When the garlic is pale gold add the chilli, and the chard stems and leaves and a few tablespoons of cold water. Put a lid on so they steam in the pan, and stir every one and again to make sure it doesn’t catch. Add a little extra water if it dries out too much – you don’t want it to fry. When the chard stems are tender, remove the lid and turn off the heat. Then add the double cream, stirring in well. Then add the whole pitted olives and stir in. Taste for salt and adjust. Add some fresh black pepper.

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Three Allium Potato Salad and Fried Eggs

This is what I made for lunch yesterday and it was superb. Put on the potatoes to boil while you finish up your work (or whatever) before lunch, and after around 20-30 minutes make a dressing and fry a couple of eggs! We had a side of steamed sugarsnap peas and ginger cordial mixed with fizzy water to drink.

Ingredients
750g salad or baby potatoes (skin on)

Dressing
3 tablespoons mayonnaise of choice
2 tablespoons sour cream
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons roughly chopped pickled jalapeños
1 tablespoon jalapeno pickle liquor (or to taste)
1 small garlic clove, grated
greens from 6 spring onions, sliced into 1cm lengths

Garnish
½ mild red or white onion, finely diced

To accompany
Fried eggs

How to make

Put the potatoes in a saucepan with plenty of cold water and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil and simmer until tender. You need freshly cooked potatoes for maximum impact.

In a salad bowl that can accommodate the potatoes mix together all the dressing ingredients and taste for seasoning. Add salt and pepper to taste, or more pickle liquor if you wish.

When tender, drain the potatoes really well and add to the dressing. Toss it well, gently crushing a few potatoes to absorb dressing. Sprinkle over diced onion.

While the potatoes sit in the dressing for a few minutes. Heat up some oil or butter or lard in a pan and crack in an egg or two each. In this (extravagant) instance, I fried up two tablespoons of diced guanciale fat that needed using, beginning in a cold pan; when the fat was well rendered and the bits left were crispy, I cracked in the eggs.

Serve immediately with the potato salad.

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A Broken Freezer and Chia Pudding

The year so far in household disasters that have cumulatively felt significant:

Rats chewed through the washing machine hose so that it flooded the kitchen. All the sockets in the house began to fuse every 4-6 hours, 24/7. Rats chewed through wires to the newly installed kitchen lights so that they began to fuse whenever they were turned on. Water from the shower began to pour through the kitchen ceiling onto the floor. Rats broke into dry store of food, so we had to throw food away. The cutlery drawer broke. The toilet seat broke. The fridge-freezer broke.

With the addition that we have all been ill most of the time since January (and still are a little) and the baby has been sent home from nursery for c 40% of the time: so far, 2025 has felt, on a domestic scale, somewhat wearying.

This is the scale of what drove me reach madly towards a product from a health food shop with some kind of wild hope. This is to say: I bought chia seeds and goji berries and elderberry immunity gummies and nuts.

In my Chia Pudding Era

Here is what I did with the chia seeds and then dishes I’ve cooked to stop meat from the freezer going to waste (I had very recently done a pay day treat order from the Wild Meat Company, which, it turned out, couldn’t have been timed worse re the broken freezer.).

In the oven in a big roasting tray on a low-medium heat, I roasted a mix of seeds and pecan nuts, walnuts and coconut flakes, turning them with a spoon every few minutes until they were toasted. I left them to cool completely and then put them in big storage jars in the fridge.

In a lidded glass jar I mixed chia seeds and goji berries with milk (a ratio of 1:4 chia seeds to milk) and a teaspoon of maple syrup and stirred it, and then stirred again after five minutes and put in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, I’ve variously added to the jar: Greek yogurt, the roasted nuts and seeds, some berries or cooked rhubarb and a bit more maple syrup. We did this for a week or two, until the broken fridge made it too tricky to leave milk overnight. I just ordered more nuts and seeds. Also, almond butter was on sale in the supermarket and we have been enjoying it on yogurt; I will put some almond butter on top of my next batch of soaked chia seeds when I eat it.

The baby has been enjoying a tablespoon or two of the soaked chia pudding mixed in with Greek yogurt and peanut butter for breakfast.

Savoury dishes made with food from the broken freezer

Sausages taken out of their casings and shaped into balls fried then simmered with sliced mushrooms, broccoli, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, water, a little sugar and some cornflour to create some texture in the sauce. Eaten with plain rice and steamed greens.

Tamarind chicken from Agak Agak recipe book I bought myself last year – sublime. A magical sauce made from very few ingredients. To achieve sauce perfection, simmer it down substantially after the initial hour, and I added extra sugar than the quantity listed in the recipe (it says to add more to taste). To have with it I made rice cooked with water, coconut milk, and fresh ginger; the sweet coconut tempered the sharp tamarind sauce.

Boiled beef and boiled potatoes and carrots – as I made in Rome, to Rachel’s recipe, with a salsa verde that I made by blitzing together 5-6 anchovies, 2 cloves garlic, a tablespoon capers, a small bunch of parsley, then stirring in two tablespoons breadcrumbs, olive oil until it was a thick sauce, then lemon juice and vinegar, salt and pepper to season.

Bread and butter pudding to use up sliced bread from the freezer. Made to a recipe in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course book - an incredibly useful book; indispensable, I would even say. My bread slices were sized differently to hers, so I had to add extra milk, cream and sugar. It was delicious, but next time I would add even more liquid. And cottage pie. Sam made a ragu from beef and pork one afternoon and the next day I turned it into cottage pie with mashed potato mixed with milk, butter and Dijon mustard. I invited my one local mum friend and her son over to eat the cottage pie and bread and butter pudding with us for a stodgy lunch party. The two babies zoomed around together afterwards. My friend brought over the best homemade biscuits I have ever eaten, truly. Maybe even the best biscuits I have ever eaten! Sam felt the same – totally remarkable. I asked her the recipe and it’s ‘Stem Ginger Shortbread’ from an old Bakeoff recipe book; she sent me a photo of the recipe.

Duck, lentil, orange salad, with quick pickled shallots, rocket, and vinaigrette. Delicious! I was deep in sorting out the freezer and overwhelmed by things breaking in the house and bought a sachet of cooked lentils for this and they were great for this salad. I cooked duck breast skin side down, starting in a cold pan, for ten minutes until the fat was rendered and the skin crisp. Then I put the pan in the oven on a medium heat for 8 more minutes and rested well. It was pink. I sliced it and mixed into salad with rocket, cooked green lentils, a segmented orange, shallots soaked in vinegar, water and sugar for 30 minutes, and a vinaigrette (a tablespoon Dijon, a tablespoon wine vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked with olive oil to taste).

For a lunch I simmered the broth from boiling the beef with grated ginger, garlic and some soy sauce, and added sliced mushrooms, greens and heated slices of beef through in the broth. Then added cooked noodles. The beef still so soft! The quite plain but very delicious beef broth is so versatile - you can transform it with a few aromatics.

I made raspberry jam to the Chez Panisse Fruit Book recipe and blackcurrant Jam to the Delia Smith Complete Cookery Course recipe with some amendments made as per the Chez Panisse recipe for raspberry jam. Both very delicious though the raspberry is a touch more set than I prefer - as the freezer was not at all cold I could not get a plate chilled enough test the set of the jam.

Tamarind chicken again! With ginger coconut rice again – and thickly sliced cucumber, which was an excellent addition, adding freshness.

This was the last of the meals I made from the freezer. I managed to pass a few things to my mum to cook - she made a goat curry and froze it, pork mince noodles, and lamb patties from Claudia Roden New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Since giving up on the freezer I have cooked:

Egged and breadcrumbed fried aubergine slices dusted with parmesan, cooked spinach with olive oil, garlic yogurt, and tomato pepper olive anchovy salad made to this recipe.

Bucatini with a sauce of 5-6 chopped anchovies, two garlic cloves, 2 tablespoons tomato paste, all fried gently in 4 tablespoons olive oil, stirring and not letting anything catch, until the oil is red, then add chickpeas in their liquid and simmer while the pasta cooks, when it’s ready stir in a handful of pitted black olives, a handful of parmesan, and then toss with spaghetti and a ladle or two of pasta cooking liquid, tossing as you do, until saucy, serve immediately with extra parmesan.

Peeled and thickly sliced potatoes and onions cooked with old bay seasoning and some hot smoked paprika in the oven. Then I made a sauce with garlic cloves fried in olive oil, sweet smoked paprika, and 300ml passata. Then I fried eggs. I served the potatoes with the tomato sauce on top, a fried egg, sour cream, finely diced onion and red chilli and fresh coriander. Sam was in raptures.

Tuna melt made with tuna, a few tablespoons of finely diced onion, one of finely diced cornichon, diced green chilli, a few tablespoons of mixed grated cheese, a heaped tablespoon of couple of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise spread on either side of the bread, cooked in the frying pan with a weight on.

Sushi rice from the rice cooker with butter and soy sauce, steamed sugar snap peas, half an avocado, two hard boiled eggs, toasted black sesame seeds.

Baby food

The baby has been up and down recovering from vaccinations and fevers and antibiotics and teething so eating has been a bit patchy.

She has recent passion for hot cross buns with butter which have cheered her up when feeling down.

She had a lovely time trying sushi on a day out with Sam.

A recent successful baby dish: tinned sweetcorn blitzed and folded through mashed potato. Fried up as a hash in butter with tuna and spring onions.

She had fun eating cannellini beans with smoked mackerel, sweetcorn, spring onion greens and tomato with her fingers.

We had a companionable lunch eating scrambled egg with avocado and tomato together. Another morning for breakfast she ate most of my fried egg from my plate. She loves to point and make a noise indicating that she wants to eat something.

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Pizza Viola, an ordinary utopia

I have eaten something from Pizza Viola almost every day. It is a remarkable and ordinary place that every neighbourhood needs: inexpensive, better than it needs to be, and everyone goes there - food delivery drivers, parents and kids in prams, gas workers, kids after school, rockers, hungover people, drunk people, old people, people with dogs, solo diners reading comic books, us, anyone. My favourite kind of place is one where anyone walks in and feels OK.

It has a small takeaway space where you can dash in and out, with a narrow stainless steel counter on the right to lean on while you wait or for eating on the hoof. When you walk in there is a counter covered with sheets of pizza with different toppings, as well as cooked meals such as lasagna in foil trays for you to choose from. To the left on a tiered counter there are platters of cooked vegetables such as cicoria, chard with olives, stuffed roast onions, roasted potatoes with rosemary, roasted aubergine and peppers and more. There is a rotisserie with whole chickens and smaller pieces of chicken turning round and round in the heat. They offer to warm up all the food for you. On the wall behind the counter is a big varnished wooden sign with ‘Pizza Viola’ carved into it, and chalkboards with information about the price/weight of each flavour of pizza – so you know what you’re getting yourself into, financially.

The women behind the counter look at you to check how much you want, watching you look at the pizza: their knife hovers, moving along until you say ‘stop’, and then they make their cuts, ‘di più, meno, no, di più, di più!’. After heating the pizza in the oven, they offer to cut it up again into smaller pieces that can be easily held. The first time we went there a very old man asked them to cut it up twice - into dainty morsels - which they did, a size just for him. You could buy a piece of pizza that costs you one euro, or a big piece of one flavour that cost you ten, or an extensive feast of different flavours. You can cut your cloth to fit your appetite, or means.

Most people get pizza to have on the go, or take foil containers of dishes to eat at home – but next door to the takeaway there’s an empty space in the building and Pizza Viola have a few tables where you can take a tray and sit and eat sheltered from the weather. Our first visit was on the day we arrived and we bought one piece of white onion pizza, and one rossa with just tomato and olive oil, walked a few paces, placed the paper tray on a wall and ate it standing on the street, ecstatic.

Four women front Pizza Viola and each of them is perfect. They are indie rock-punk in style, they are welcoming to all, and they look after each person slightly differently – but they don’t overdo it, either. One of them gave my baby a piece of pizza bianca wrapped in a napkin, gratis. Another time one of them called the other out of the kitchen to look at her.

Pizzas and other food we have tried thus far (and I am sure I have forgotten something)

pizza rossa (more or less every day)
white with onions (more than once)
white with potato and rosemary (more than once)
white with pumpkin and provolone
white with courgette flowers, mozzarella and anchovy (more than once)
stuffed with bitter greens and olives
with thin slices of courgette
tomato, parsley and garlic (more than once)
aubergine, tomato and mozzarella
pizza bianca halved and filled with slices of porchetta
niçoise salad pizza!

smallish patties containing salt cod, potato and mozzarella
aubergine, pepper and mozzarella
potato and greens

roasted onion stuffed with breadcrumbs and parmesan
cicoria ripassata
cooked aubergine and pepper
roasted potatoes with rosemary

Pizza bianca cut in half and then filled with thin slices of porchetta, carved in front of us, which was very well seasoned and flavoured with hard herbs and garlic that were present but not overbearing, then stuffed by us at home with roasted peppers and aubergines, and with some mayonnaise from a tube: it was one of the sandwiches of my life.

Yet to try:

rotisserie chicken
meat patties
rice-stuffed tomatoes and with potatoes
–a dozens other pre-cooked dishes to take away and pizza toppings from the counter

Further:

We buy superb bread most days and lots of crostata from two young bakers and their mum at Nonna Epiro , located in mercato latino.

Home cooking

What makes home cooking feel so pleasurable and easy in Rome - while we have both been working and looking after Ursula – is the partial preparation or ‘processing’ of many ingredients by stallholders in the market. Pre-soaked chickpeas, pre-soaked salt cod, podded borlotti beans sold in bags, portioned pumpkin, perfectly sliced pieces of pork or chicken to make escalope, pre-made and bagged breadcrumbs, parmesan or pecorino freshly grated to order (to be stored in a sealed bag the fridge). Giving you the aromatics for a broth, for free, with purchase (celery, parsley, carrot and onion). Handing out a branch of rosemary.

Cooking is a collaboration with the people working in the market (mercato latino) - who also give out recipes verbally for their produce, which I have followed and which are really, really good, instantly becoming embedded in my repertoire.

On the first Friday in Rome I went to the market and bought salt cod and chickpeas to make soup. Both the salt cod and the chickpeas had been soaked by market traders, so the soup was easy to have ready by lunch time: I made salt cod and chickpea soup with croutons, to Rachel Roddy’s recipe, with the intervention from the women in the market who told me to add a rosemary sprig, which was a very good addition.

Melek Erdal’s flat beans cooked in tomatoes, topped with feta. With pork, very thinly sliced by the butcher at the market, breaded and fried. Immediately wanted to make Melek’s beans again!

Rachel Roddy’s chicken braised with grapes and boiled potatoes. Heaven, I love the sweet-sour sauce.

Leftover chicken and gravy, with potato patties I made mashing leftover potatoes with flour, egg and parmesan and coated with breadcrumbs and fried.

Braised fresh borlotti beans cooked with aromatics, then with cod baked on top in the oven.

Roasted whole wild sea bream with potato-tomato, seasoned with a little rosemary.

Beef brisket cooked in water with aromatics, served with whole carrots, boiled potatoes and salsa verde. Strongly reminiscent of a meal I had in Palermo in the winter of 2017.

A great sandwich: last of the boiled beef (so so soft!) reheated in its broth, Peperoncino mixed with mayonnaise on one side of bread, butter on the other then dipped briefly in the broth to moisten, brocoletti from last night heated up in the broth too, and then Parmesan.

Breaded fried aubergine slices (to Rachel’s recipe, but without the parmesan in the breadcrumbs, shaved on top after frying instead) and a favourite salad made to my friend Ed’s recipe.

Breadcrumbed chicken escalope with lemon, boiled chard and roasted potatoes.

Chicken meatballs to Rachel Roddy’s recipe, with mashed potato.

Potato-tomato with slices of onion, and with sausages cooked on top making for a *delicious* liquor.

Lots and lots and lots of fagiolini - fine green beans - which came into season when we were there and were piled up high in the market and restocked many times in the day.

Melek Erdal’s ‘easiest’ ever börek.

Gnocchi with cream and walnut sauce (as per the Elizabeth David recipe) with fennel orange salad on the side.

Filled pasta bought from the fresh pasta shop underneath the flat, with broth left from cooking the beef (did this on several occasions, also their tomato lasagne).

Mangoes chosen by the man on the market stall to eat on the day, often.

Pasta with sauce made from offcuts of saltcod and passata, as per the recipe told to me by the man who soaked and sold me the salt cod and chickpeas.

Chickpea, chestnut, pumpkin and rosemary soup - and variations thereof, often! Always served with olive oil and parmesan on top.

Potato tomato with steak and a small amount of sauce.

Two ingredient pasta amatriciana, as per the instructions from the woman in the market who sold us the pecorino.

Roast chicken and potatoes for our friend Olivia. I learned how to ask for a ‘plump’ chicken at the butcher for this, as Italian chickens are much more rangy than British ones.

Caesar salad with leftover chicken, with added treviso and fennel.

Stracciatella gelato bought in a polystyrene box from Freddo Gelato (a sensational place) and amarena cherries.

So many jam and butter sandwiches (my preference is wild blueberry jam) with the regional speciality of crustless, incredibly soft bread.

Feeding Ursula in Rome

Ursula was six months old when we arrived in Rome and eight months old when we left. Foods that she ate during our time there included:

Ripe kaki (or persimmon, or sharon fruit), a fruit that when fully ripe turns to liquid. They were sold ripe in the market. I broke them open and stored it in a bowl, covered, in the fridge. I mixed it with various things for Ursula’s breakfasts including:

Greek yogurt
Goat yogurt
Greek or goat’s yogurt and peanut butter mixed in
Blitzed with avocado and greek or goat yogurt and perhaps peanut butter

Variations of beans with things – borotti, chickpeas, kidney, white beans, blitzed or mashed with tuna and or greens, chicken, garlic, onion, tomato, various herbs that were lying around.

Hard boiled egg
Bread and butter
Boiled potato, mashed with butter and cheese and sometimes garlic or onion cooked with it and mashed in
Tiny gnocchi
Thinly sliced omelette in tomato sauce
Boiled and sometimes mashed pumpkin, sometimes with cheese and butter
Pizza rossa from Pasticceria Linari!
Various things that we ate, mashed or blitzed!

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Eating notes

Roast chicken,
potatoes, butter braised carrots’n’peas and leeks in white sauce

At the weekend I roasted a chicken for some friends: I rubbed the whole chicken with 1 rounded teaspoon of fine sea salt. Then rubbed it in a tablespoon of olive oil all over. I cooked it on the highest heat in the oven for 30 minutes, then a lower heat of 170C (fan) for around an hour further, then left it to rest for 30 minutes. I covered the breast with a square of foil after c. 45 mins.

We had peas and carrots that I cooked together in a way inspired by how my mother does it. I cut carrots quite small: halved lengthways, then quarter ways then into cubes of around 1cm length. I put them in a saucepan with a generous knob of unsalted butter c. 40g, 2-3 tablespoons of water and covered with a cartouche (a disc of greaseproof paper) on a low-medium heat. When the carrots were half done, I poured some frozen petit pois on top, replaced the cartouche and continue cooking until they were done. When the peas are almost done, I stir them all up together and seasoned with salt and pepper.

We also had leeks in white sauce that took several attempts as I kept getting caught up in talking to people and totally forgot I had just added flour to melted butter until I smelled burning. One of our friends had to stand over me as I did it a second time, as I kept getting distracted by other topics of conversation and almost burnt it again. I steamed the leeks then mixed them with the white sauce. We also had roast potatoes that I added under the chicken and tossed in the chicken fat after it had had the 30 minutes in the oven.

Our friend brought a delicious pudding of blackberries and pear cooked in frangipane, served with single cream.

Monday

For my lunch I mixed some leftover leeks in white sauce with a few tablespoons of grated cheese and a heaped teaspoon of french mustard, put it on a piece of lightly toasted bread with a bit more grated cheese sprinkled on top, and grilled it until the cheese was bronzing. I had it with a few sliced cooked beetroots seasoned with salt, pepper and olive oil.

On Monday night I made a chicken pie using leftovers.

First I made a quick pastry with 4oz grated cold butter, 8oz plain flour rubbed together, then added enough water to bring it together into a dough. I wrapped it in cling film and left to rest in the fridge for 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, I made the filling:

I sliced thickly and fried two large ‘portobello’ mushrooms tossed in a little oil and salt in a very hot frying pan and removed to a plate.

Then I softened two small sliced onions in the same pan in a generous knob of unsalted butter (30g). When the onions were soft but not browned, I pushed them to the side of the pan, and added a bit more butter and a spoon of flour to fry for a moment before adding the mushrooms back in, mixing it all together, then adding a glass of white wine and leaving it to bubble for a minute.

Then I added in leftover leeks in white sauce, 300ml hot chicken stock and handful of wild mushrooms that I rehydrated in the stock, 80ml double cream and the leftover chicken from Sunday. I stirred it all well and allowed it to bubble gently for a few minutes before leaving to chill – I put it in another metal tray and squeezed it into the freezer for rapid cooling for around 20 minutes!

I rolled out the dough into two squares (as I was making two small pies in Falconware dishes) then covered the pastry with cling film and put back in the fridge for 10 further minutes. Meanwhile I spooned the chilled filling into two smallish Falconware dishes. Then I laid the pastry on top, glazed with a mix of beaten egg and milk and added two holes in each pie with a knife. I baked for around 30-40 minutes until the pastry was bronzed. We ate one of the pies with boiled peas and have another for the next day.

Tuesday

Pumpkin, chickpea, chestnut soup

For lunch I made a soup with: onion, carrot, celery softened in olive oil with two small dried chillies. Then added 300g diced pumpkin (c. 1inchx 1inch), and a tin of chickpeas with its liquid and one extra tinful of water, and a frond of rosemary. Simmered for ten minutes then added some vacuum packed chestnuts and simmered for a further ten minutes. Seasoned with salt. Served with olive oil and finely grated parmesan.

For dinner we had the second pie! With buttered cabbage.

Wednesday

Rice and things
I made rice and served it with steamed pumpkin dressed with fermented bean paste fried in oil, then added chilli oil, soy sauce and black vinegar, ginger and garlic – a dish that from memory resembled the excellent one for squash in Fuchsia Dunlop’s fantastic cookbook Every Grain of Rice.

I also made -
Cucumber salad with sugar, black vinegar, soy sauce and sesame
Sliced smoked tofu in a sweet soy dressing
Hard boiled eggs

Then/
Baked bramley apples filled with currants, almonds, coconut, golden syrup and cinnamon sticks, with some water in the bottom of the dish.

In fact I ate most of this meal on my own as Sam was ill. We saved the baked apples till the next day to have with porridge.

Thursday

My lunch with mum who came over to look after Ursula in the morning – leftover pumpkin chestnuts soup. Ham, cheddar cheese, cucumber, toast.

For my dinner I had an oven pizza to which I added tuna and onion – and then a baked apple with cream.

Friday

I made a quick gentle pasta with two garlic cloves, finely chopped and fried gently in olive oil, then with half a sliced de-seeded red chilli, then 200g sliced chard added, then at the end I added in a few tablespoons of creme fraiche and served with a little parmesan (we had a tiny end of a piece left).

Saturday

Breakfast: bacon in naan bread with mango chutney, brown sauce, yogurt and a fried egg.

Sunday

Roast beef at the Anchor in Nayland in Suffolk after walking through the countryside with some friends and seeing John Constable’s altar piece in the church there. All very beautiful. (Message me up if you want a link to 3.16 mile circular walking route - I am an Ordinance Survey Map App obsessive!)

For dinner Meera Sodha Daily Dal, as made by Sam.

Monday (yesterday)

For dinner: rice from the rice cooker, fish fingers, curry mayonnaise, sliced avocado with soy sauce.

Eating notes for a baby

Ursula went to nursery with packed lunch and a packed tea as Monday is her full day at nursery: leftover roast chicken, leeks in white sauce mixed with a mashed roast potato, peas and carrots. Then tomato pasta with grated cheese. I put in two little bananas, a few cherry tomatoes, and in case she took against one of the packed meals, a meal pouch. Apparently she ate all the chicken! And ate lots of her tomato pasta.

For Tuesday lunch Ursula had a mini cottage pie that I’d made and frozen and and some sliced large grapes that our friend Holly brought over at the weekend. She has been loving the mini cottage pies.

Tuesday Ursula had our leftover roast chicken meal for her packed tea at nursery.

Wednesday was chaos as all the lights in the house were being replaced as around half of them haven’t worked for several years and we have been having power cuts to all the sockets every few hours for the last few weeks. There was no power to make anything for Ursula so I tried to feed Ursula an Ella’s pouch and various other cold snacks in the semi-dark in the sitting room. She didn’t really want to eat much.

On Thursday Ursula didn’t eat much breakfast aside from a bit of yogurt and blueberries. Refused potato and mackerel at lunch then I made her tomato pasta which she wolfed down a huge quantity. Sent home from nursery mid afternoon with a temperature. Wouldn’t eat tea. I tried a few things. Ate most of a hard-boiled egg leftover from dinner the night before an hour or so later.

Since Thursday Ursula has been been ill and has not eaten many proper meals since then apart from thick greek yogurt, sometimes with peanut butter mixed in. Blueberries sliced in half. A few halved tomatoes, and lots of milk and water. Sam made some more daily dal which we both ate and she had a tiny amount of with yogurt. This morning she had a half a boiled egg, a tiny amount of toast, and a bit of yogurt.

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Notes on last week

Tuesday

End of pasta pasta for two people

I supplemented our scant pasta supplies with some chickpeas making for a pleasing textural mix of starches.

160g leftover pastas
100g cooked chickpeas
200g chard, washed and sliced
4-6 anchovies, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely sliced
1 mild red chilli, de-seeded and finely sliced
c.80ml double cream
3-4 heaped tablespoons of very finely grated parmesan + extra to serve

I boiled the kettle and filled a pot with the water, salted it, and put in to boil 100g of orecchiette and 60g of fregola. Meanwhile I melted some butter in a deep frying pan on a gentle heat with two tablespoons of olive oil, 4-5 chopped anchovies, two cloves of sliced garlic and one sliced and de-seeded red chilli. I cooked this gently for a couple of minutes, so it was softened but not browned and so the anchovy had disintegrated into the fats. Then I added 200g washed sliced chard with a splash of water and stirred it around to coat in the aromatics and put a lid on to steam it in the pan. I looked every couple of minutes and stirred it to check it wasn’t catching. When it was quite wilted, I added in half a tin of chickpeas and stirred in well. I turned off the heat and added around 80ml of double cream, two small ladles of pasta water and a generous handful of finely grated parmesan, then put the heat on again low-medium, shaking the pan and stirring to incorporate the cheese, simmering for a minute and tasting for salt. Then I added the cooked pasta and tossed it all together thoroughly. I served with more parmesan and seasoned with black pepper.

Wednesday

Fun things with rice

I put on the rice cooker after Ursula had gone to bed and plotted a selection of jolly accompaniments:

2 cups sushi rice, cooked + unsalted butter and soy sauce to serve
1 pack smoked Japanese sausages (as in the image below)
200g cavolo nero, leaves stripped from the stems, salt, chilli flakes and oil (as per Felicity Cloake’s instructions)
seared portobello mushrooms in a ginger dressing (recipe below)

For the mushrooms:

2-3 portobello mushrooms sliced 3/4 cm thick
1 tablespoon oil
1 heaped teaspoon tablespoon finely grated ginger
1 small grated garlic clove
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon water
to garnish, sesame seeds and snipped spring onion greens

First, I put the oven on and followed Felicity Cloake’s recipe for cavolo nero chips tossed with olive oil, chilli and salt for crunchy savoury seaweed-like greens.

Then I sliced two big portobello mushrooms about half a cm thick and heated a cast iron pan really hot. I tossed the mushroom slices in a little oil and salt then placed them cut side down in the pan and did not move them for a few minutes until they were seared and caramelised brown on each side. I didn’t overfill the pan to keep it really hot. I cooked the mushrooms in two batches.

I made a dressing of: a teaspoon of finely grated ginger; 1 small clove of finely grated garlic; 1 teaspoon of light soft brown sugar; one tablespoon of soy sauce, a splash of toasted sesame oil a splash of water. I tossed the mushrooms in the dressing and left it to soak in while I cooked the sausages. Before serving I garnished the mushrooms with sesame seeds and a few snipped spring onion greens – though these were not essential.

Finally, I made ‘octopus sausages’ – that is, small smoked Japanese sausages, with two cuts in a cross shape going halfway up the sausage, tossed in a hot pan until the ‘legs’ curl looking a bit like an octopus. I began making this during the pandemic after seeing it on Midnight Diner, one of my favourite food-related shows.

We had the rice with butter and soy sauce (also a touch from watching Midnight Diner) and had some sriracha with the sausages.

Eating Notes for a Baby

We refer to Emmental as ‘baby cheese’ as it’s not too salty and grate Ursula little heaps of it to pick up with her fingers.

My mum made her mashed butter beans, tuna, onions softened in olive oil and spinach for her packed tea for nursery. She didn’t eat it on the day mum made it – she got sent home as a bug was going round. But the next day after a very good long morning nap she picked up fistfuls of it and ate almost all of it with a few halved cherry tomatoes on the side.

For her tea I made her macaroni with passata and cannellini beans, with red onion, garlic and olive oil and some mild cheese grated on top. I made enough to save some for her packed tea at nursery the next day.

For a breakfast I made her porridge, stirred in some pureed mango from the freezer which melted in the heat of the porridge, and added a tablespoon of Greek yogurt. She really enjoyed this and ate it next to me as I ate my porridge with dark muscovado sugar and milk. I loaded up her spoon, she picked it up and ate it, I did the same again until she’d had a good amount of the porridge.

For a lunch, I used up the rest of the tin of cannellini beans my mum used the other day and heated in a pan with some baby spinach and mashed it with a fork and stirred in a heaped tablespoon of hummus for flavour. She ate a decent amount of this with some sliced cherry tomatoes which she puts in her mouth, extracts the liquid form and then spits out the skin. She does the same with blueberries!

When we go swimming, I bring a bag of cheesy baby crisps to feed her while I change her for entertainment and energy.

Sam made us eggs scrambled with Turkish pepper and tomato paste, sliced green pepper, softened onion and served with yogurt and before seasoning with salt we gave some to the baby for breakfast and she loved it.

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Scones in Wetherspoons

I had a notion to make cheese scones to bring on an afternoon walk with the one ‘mum friend’ I made at the library baby group and someone else I know who just moved to her village; I set up the walk to introduce them. I thought they would get along.

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In the morning, I took the baby out for a walk to see if she would nap a little early, before her swimming lesson. She nodded off briefly, but when I got involved in a search for a lost dog, she woke up. From a distance I saw the woman who volunteers to organise the cinema volunteers, including me (I have yet to return since having the baby.) She was with a man I couldn’t quite see and who I assumed was her husband. She ran towards me and asked me if I had seen a black sausage dog, I hadn’t. A few minutes later as I was walking past the Thai restaurant which is closed for renovations until spring, listening to a New York Times podcast about Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel (they didn’t like the ending), I heard someone call out faintly have you lost a dog? I turned around and saw a builder. I said I hadn’t, but I knew who was looking for it, and phoned the cinema volunteer organiser. The dog trotted out of the restaurant and the builder petted him and picked him up. The restaurant owner also stepped out to ask about it, I said who was looking for it, he also knew her, said he was meant to see her last night at the cinema, but hadn’t. I was confused by the appearance of the sausage dog, which was black and glossy: the cinema volunteer organiser is usually out with a blonde-ish dog. I wondered if she had a new dog, if it was one of her daughters’ dogs, or if she had always had another dog I hadn’t somehow known about? I chatted to the builder who found the dog while we waited for her to arrive. I said he must be confident with dogs to have picked up one he didn’t know. I could hear the voice of the cinema volunteer organiser coming round the corner. It wasn’t her dog after all, she was advocating for a man who had lost his dog, leading the search. He followed behind.

Then I took the baby to a swimming lesson. On the way I anticipated the issue with cubicles that I experienced last time we came to the pool. There are a handful of cubicles with special tables on which to change a baby into or out of swimming clothes. People have taken to ‘reserving’ these cubicles by leaving their clothes, shoes and bags inside while they swim. Finding none were free, last week, I changed the baby on a narrow bench and fed her snacks to distract her from the discomfort of the situation as I extracted her from a wet costume. When I asked the receptionist what to do about this on our way out, she told me to move the other families’ stuff to the side and simply use the baby cubicle. But the idea of a stand-off with soggy adults and children trying to kick me and the soggy baby out of the cubicle they had marked out as theirs made me feel nervous.

After today’s swimming lesson ended, I did a tour of the changing rooms with the soggy baby in my arms and saw that all the baby cubicles had stuff left in them again. Holding on to the receptionist’s words, I went into a cubicle with a baby table where people had left their clothes and shoes. I did not move their stuff or even touch it; I put our bags on the floor and changed the baby on the table which made things considerably easier than last week. I rushed and did not moisturise the baby because I was worrying the people would come in from the pool to claim the space. There was a puddle on the floor where I stood to change the baby; I imagined the people seeing the puddle after we left and realising what had happened. When I put her down to get changed myself, she picked up a croc belonging to another child and began chewing it. I tried to prevent her doing this while dressing without taking the time to, for example, dry myself, etc.

After swimming we went to the supermarket to buy cheese and milk for the scones and I thought that as I had a pound coin, I would try the trolley with a child seat again having failed to figure it out last time, when the baby simply stood on the seat, and I couldn’t see where to put her legs. I failed again, as her legs were splayed uncomfortably wide to get her into the seat and she looked unhappy, so I carried her while pushing the trolley round and taking things from the shelves with my free arm. It was only when I had finished the shop that I saw I’d had her facing the wrong way and that her legs should be the opposite side, facing me. I turned her around and she looked very happy about being in the seat, and I lamented the shop was already over.

When we got home, I put a frozen homemade cottage pie in the oven for the baby and took out the weighing scales and my ingredients. Two types of cheese (red Leicester and cheddar) and chives, butter, baking power, eggs, milk, flour, etc. Sam would feed the baby lunch while I made the scones. I went to get the new bag flour out of the drawer and there was flour everywhere and chewed bits of paper. A rat had visited overnight! A pest man from the council had only visited yesterday to put down traps; evidently, the rat had not been caught. I threw the ratty flour in the bin and went out again to a smaller shop and bought another bag of flour and then made the cheese scones.

My friends got off the train, I told them about the rat and the new flour – though my mum friend, A, said I shouldn’t have mentioned the ratty flour and they’d never have known – part of why I like her so much – and we walked round the sea front in the sun which we had not seen for a while, and the ferocious wind which numbed my forehead, and left a voicemail for another friend to meet us in Wetherspoons for a hot chocolate. We took a detour to the charity shop where the others bought a top, some baby books and bedsheets, then ate the cheese scones in Wetherspoons and drank coffee while the babies crawled around the carpeted floor and also ate cheese scones.

I first began going here with A after library baby group. It’s opposite the library, and before the library closed for renovations, A used to come and sketch people there after the baby group. After we’d spoken a few times in the library she invited me to join her, which was very exciting.

On Friday afternoon it was full of people having lunch with their children and no staff members were bothered that we ate cheese scones out of brown paper bags that I’d brought in. There isn’t anywhere else in the town that is large enough for multiple prams and with easily accessible baby changing facilities. The coffee is so cheap and room is so vast that the bar is quite distant from where we were sitting – this branch of Wetherspoons effectively functions as a community centre. As we were leaving, we saw a rack of self-published Wetherspoons magazines, with the foremost headline saying: ‘Does Truth Matter? Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight’. My friend J informs me Wetherspoons chiefly use their in-house publication to settle scores.

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Eating notes

I made the cheese and chive scones to Felicity Cloake’s recipe in the Guardian. The next day we had them warmed up and buttered with fried eggs and ketchup and a cup of black coffee, very very good.

Twice in the last few weeks I have had soft goat’s cheese on buttered toast with sliced cooked beetroot from a packet and dill on top for lunch. The second time I made it I added pul biber on top. I ate it with peach iced tea made from a syrup from a French supermarket – that contains actual sugar. I bought a bottle of the syrup as all peach iced tea in the UK that is easily available has artificial sweeteners in it now, which I hate.

I went on my own for a very quick meal sitting on a bar stool at St John before my friend Mike’s book launch (just started reading and enjoying very much!). Brown crab meat on toast with half a lemon; a green salad dressed very well; a glass of light red wine; blood orange posset with a ginger biscuit. All excellent, apart from the toast underneath the crab which had been made some time ago and which was cold and tough. But pouring single cream into a posset is a revelation I shall be copying: how could it need more cream? you wonder at first, and yet..!

I have made three recipes from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course in the past week or so and have found them easy to follow:

• A leek and potato soup: far less potato in than I thought! I suppose the silkiness comes from that. Pleased to have had chives and cream at home to finish it off. Much, much less stodgy than Angela Carter’s version.

• A goulash, which I wanted to make after reading Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, which features goulash many times. With brown basmati rice, pickles, sour cream and dill.

• An apple and almond pudding which I made when I heard my partner’s train was delayed – very easy! Some cooked bramley apples on the bottom and a quick batter made with ground almonds (and no flour) on top and then baked. We had it with vanilla ice cream.

On a day when our mood was low I made Sam’s grandfather’s chocolate sauce to have on vanilla ice cream with toasted chopped hazelnuts on top. He emailed me the recipe about a year ago and it’s a diamond in my inbox.

Eating notes for a baby

Some meals we have made for Ursula recently

Meera Sodha’s daily dal served to Ursula with yogurt and grated cheese. (We also ate this without the cheese.)

Using a fork I mashed a third of a tin of butter beans with a tablespoon of tuna, the same of tinned sweetcorn, some snipped spring onion greens and coriander, an egg, and a spoon of flour. I mixed it all up, then dropped dessert spoons of it into a hot pan with olive oil and fried on each side. I put the fritters in front of Ursula with thick yogurt. She ate it.

For a lunch at home and a packed lunch the next day at nursery, I softened ½ a sliced red onion in olive oil, added a sliced clove of garlic, and fried a bit more, then added a few glugs of passata and simmered for a couple of minutes. Then I added in a few spoons of butterbeans. I mixed this with cooked pasta and divided half for lunch on one day at home with grated cheese on top, and half for a packed lunch the next day.

Made by my mum or me on various days: boiled potato mashed with wilted spinach, some tuna, butter and olive oil.

And a *hot new favourite!* Noodles with peanut butter sauce and broccoli, made by Sam. Boiled egg noodles mixed with a dressing of: a little ginger and half a clove of garlic grated, peanut butter, sesame oil, vinegar, a splash of soy sauce, and warm water from boiling the noodles to loosen. Boiled broccoli.

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Two ingredient pasta all’amatriciana

I bought a piece of guanciale in the market and the woman selling it asked if I knew how to cook Amatriciana. I said yes, but then asked for her recipe, seeing that she had one. Using Italian and English she said:

Remove the rind of the guanciale and cut it into small pieces. Put it in a pan with no oil and cook it on a low-medium heat until the fat is rendered and the meat is crisp. Then remove the pieces of meat and crispy fat to a plate, leaving the melted fat in the pan. Off the heat, add passata, or fresh tomatoes, or tinned tomatoes. Simmer and cook the pasta, then drain the pasta, add to the sauce mix well and serve with the guanciale and grated pecorino.

I added pecorino to my order and two days later (tonight) I cooked it. The sweet sharp tomato sauce was profoundly seasoned by the cured melted guanciale fat, and punctuated by crispy pieces of pork. It felt miraculous, a sauce so potent composed of two ingredients.

Ingredients

serves up to 4 people

150g guanciale
400g passata
grated pecorino (or parmesan) to serve

100g pasta p/p (we used spaghetti)

How to make

Put a large pot of water on to boil for your pasta. Cut the hard rind off the guanciale with a sharp knife and discard. Cut the guanciale into small pieces of 1/2cm x 1cm or thereabouts. The bigger the pieces the longer it will take to render the fat. Put the guanciale in a deep frying pan that can accommodate the sauce and the pasta. Turn the heat on to a low-medium, add the guanciale and stir occasionally as the fat gently sizzles and melts. It will take around ten minutes for the fat to render and the meat to become crispy. When most of the pieces are crispy and a generous amount of fat has melted, remove the pieces to a plate with a slotted spoon. Off the heat, add the passata to the melted fat and shake the pan. Put the tomato back on a low heat so it’s gently bubbling. Salt the boiling pasta water and add the pasta to cook.

Drain the pasta, add it to the tomato sauce and mix well in the pan. Taste for seasoning. Mix in half the fried guanciale. Divide the pasta between plates. Add the rest of the guanciale on top, and some grated pecorino or parmesan.

Note: One of the most exciting and convenient partially-prepared ingredients offered at the market in Rome is grated cheese. When you buy e.g. parmesan or pecorino, they offer to grate it for you and you can then keep it in the fridge sealed in the bag or a tupperware ready to use. I love it!

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On Sunday we had lunch at an old fashioned but not oppressive or excessively traditional fish restaurant in Rome called La Torricella where one of the dishes was beans and chestnuts. The small white beans were creamy and the starchy broth was rich but also plain and slightly sweetened by chestnuts. It was universally admired, especially by my mother who has never previously been keen on chestnuts. I have almost never cooked chestnuts from scratch; I did not grow up with them and am not very familiar with dishes that use them. However, after the success of the chickpea, chestnut and pumpkin soup using vacuum packed chestnuts last week, then the restaurant dish using fresh-cooked chestnuts, and the fact they are everywhere in the shops, I felt moved to try.

In fact the chestnuts provided the least of the drama.

I told the women at the market stall selling pulses that I would like some small white beans, and then some chestnuts - enough to make soup for two. They gave me perhaps 18 chestnuts and 500g small dried white beans. I began boiling the beans mid-morning, foolishly thinking they’d be ready by lunch. At 1pm they were fairly far along but not enough and it is never worth eating undercooked pulses out of impatience; I have done so before and it’s miserable.

So eager was I to get going on the soup that I scored, boiled and peeled the chestnuts and sweated down diced onion, celery, fennel (as I had no carrot) and garlic before I was sure the beans were done. I eventually abandoned the sorry situation to eat squares of onion and marinara pizza and new favourite ‘Lemon Soda’ for lunch when the beans were still crumbly and chalky at 1.30pm. When we returned from eating pizza and then a walk to the park the beans, which had been sitting for an hour or so in their cooling liquor, had become tender – and I picked up where I left off.

Sam said ‘I don’t think I have ever looked forward to eating a soup more’ after he hada a taste when I was cooking. After dinner he said ‘I want to get a cap made that says I love the soup’. Annoyingly, cooking the beans from scratch and using the fresh chestnuts was astonishingly good.

I cooked all the beans (500g) the women in the market sold me and had quite a few left after our soup dinner - enough to make the soup again. I simmered them in lots of plain water that I topped up a few times without salt so that I could feed them to the baby. I used some for the baby’s dinner mixed with one cooked chestnut, olive oil, butter and parmesan and then blitzed which produced made a marvellously silken texture. She ate it all. We are discussing what to do with the remaining beans. There could be: beans and garlicky greens on toast; beans in passata with a fried egg for breakfast; beans ‘amatriciana’ cooked with tomato, crispy fried guanciale and its rendered fat with pecorino on top (sam’s excellent idea); a different soup; beans and pork chop… etc.

White Bean and Chestnut Soup

Ingredients:

250g dried small white beans e.g. haricot, cooked in water until tender (will take a couple of hours) and c.400ml of their cooking liquid - enough to cover.
15-18 chestnuts scored with a cross with a serrated or sharp knife
1 red onion, finely diced
1 rib celery, finely diced
1/2 fennel bulb or carrot, trimmed and finely diced
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
1 sprig fresh rosemary
5 tablespoons olive oil

To serve:
extra virgin olive oil
finely grated parmesan
chilli flakes

How to make:

Before beginning: simmer the beans in plenty of water until truly tender, topping up the water when needed. Drop the scored chestnuts in a pan of boiling water and cook for c.20 minutes or until they peel easily and are tender inside. Peel when they are cool enough to handle but still damp as when the skin dries fully they are harder to peel. Some crumbled a little when peeled, but that just served to thicken the soup. Heat 5 tablespoons olive oil in a deep frying pan, saucepan or casserole. Add onions, celery, fennel or carrot and a pinch of salt and sweat for c. 10 minutes until soft but not browned. Add the garlic and cook for another minute or two, taking care it doesn’t burn. Add the beans and their liquor making sure the beans are covered by the liquor, and the rosemary. Simmer for twenty minutes. Add the peeled chestnuts and simmer gently for a further 10 minutes. If it gets too thick, add another ladle of bean liquor - you want it to feel still tangibly like a soup. Season to taste with salt. Allow to rest for 5-10 minutes before eating. It is happily reheated if left for longer (I cooked it before the baby’s bath and ate it an hour later when she was asleep!). Serve with tasty olive oil on top, and parmesan and chilli flakes to taste.

Eating notes

We ate squares of white onion and marinara pizza for lunch when I failed to cook the beans in time – from Pizza Viola, which I love. Plain onion pizza is so sweet and so delicious! Sorry to never have seen it in the UK.

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Chickpea, chestnut, pumpkin and rosemary soup

I’ve been approaching cooking this soup for a few weeks. At an agriturismo just south of Bologna on the drive to Rome they served a pumpkin, chickpea and porcini soup with chestnuts that was the best dish of the journey. Then I read that pumpkin and chickpea soup is quite typical for All Saints Day when I was investigating the public holiday (mainly to see if there would be anything specific in the bakeries). Then today on All Saints Day we had to buy food despite most things being closed due to our disorganisation – and found two vegetable stalls open in the market, one selling soaked chickpeas and pumpkin, and I remembered the flat we are renting has a pack of vacuum packed chestnuts in a cupboard. There was a box of fresh chestnuts in the market too but I am fatigued at the moment, and was on baby duty today, so time and energy did not permit.

Anyway, the soup was wonderful. Sweet, nutty, and rich but still gentle. We topped with parmesan, and for a vegan version we discussed the idea of using fried breadcrumbs with a little garlic – though sam said he also liked it with no cheese at all. I didn’t weigh the bag of chickpeas from the market so the quantity is a guess. I think around one 400g tin’s worth for 2 people.

Ingredients

200g dried chickpeas soaked overnight minimum 12 hrs, or a 400g tin + its liquid
200g pumpkin peeled and cut into 3mmX1 inchX 1inch slices (thin slices essentially)
100g pack of cooked chestnuts
1 red onion, finely diced
1 rib celery, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
1 small dried chilli or a pinch of chilli flakes
olive oil
a sprig of fresh rosemary

To serve:
parmesan or fried breadcrumbs to be vegan

How to make

If using soaked chickpeas: in the afternoon (or the morning if it’s your lunch!) drain the chickpeas and put them in a big pot with 2 litres of water and simmer for 1-2 hours or until tender. Keep the cooking liquid.

Heat 5 tablespoons of olive oil in a wide deep pan, add the onion and celery and a punch of salt and cook until softened but not browned, around 6-8 minutes. Then add the garlic and rosemary and dried chilli. Stir for another two minutes. Then add the pumpkin and stir into the onions, then add the chickpeas and a few ladles of their liquid (or all if from the tin) and the chestnuts. Break up a few of the chestnuts into smaller pieces with a knife. Add enough water so everything is just covered, liquid perhaps 1 centimetre above your ingredients. Simmer for 20 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender. Season with additional salt if desired.

Serve with parmesan or fried breadcrumbs.