Pappardelle with Chicken Liver Ragù

I feel very lucky have grown up in a happy clan of 4 close siblings. There aren’t even five years to separate oldest (moi) from the youngest (H).

Obviously, between supermarket shops, school runs, on-tap medical assistance and missions across the house as peace envoys, Mum and Dad needed a hand occasionally. When my amazing grandparents weren’t available that help came thanks to a series of nannies, most of them memorable, though not always for the right reasons. One crashed the car and told me not to tell anyone…another used to stick her smelly feet in the bath my younger brother and sister were in and make them wash them for her. (Of course, we weren’t entirely blameless. At one stage, I’d say we were turning them over at a rate of one a month; the Von Trapp kids had nothing on us.)

However, in my book of nanny-villains, the worst of the lot made the very small H sit in front of his lunch for such a long time that he was still sitting there when Mum came home that evening. (I remember H being rather stoic about the whole ordeal; he’d managed to smuggle the bit of blanket that went everywhere with him to the table). Needless to say, she wasn’t there to apply the same rules to breakfast the next day.

But what, you may ask, was so bad that he couldn’t finish it?

Liver: normally edible in our experience, but she’d utterly nuked it. Not to mention the crinkled, sad peas scattered around the plate. Bad enough sitting there, tough grey like the sole of a shoe, H’s offal only got more… er… offal (sorry, irresistible) as the afternoon wore on. I’m not even sure how the 3 of us had managed to get ours down… Perhaps we’d conspired with the dog.

A whole 25 years later, I hope H has managed to get over what must be a crippling fear of liver at lunchtime. If he hasn’t, the BSG and I think we’ve found the remedy.

We think this is one of the best pasta sauces we’ve had outside a restaurant. You can find it in the marvellous Bocca cookbook by Jacob Kenedy (the best argument for the onset of summer I can think of):
 
Serves 2  (or 4 as a starter)

200g chicken livers
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
½ small onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped
150ml dry Marsala
100ml white wine (we used some leftover rose that was in the fridge)
1 tbsp chopped rosemary
2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
40g butter

Heat a wide frying pan over a high heat until very hot and smoking. Toss the chicken livers in a bowl with 1 tablespoon of the oil and some salt and pepper, then pour into the hot pan making sure they are in a single layer. Fry for a couple of minutes without moving, until well browned on one side. Turn and fry the second side for 2 minutes, then transfer to a plate to cool. When cool enough to handle, chop the livers finely, and keep the juices.

Sweat the onion, celery and garlic in the rest of the oil with salt and pepper in a small saucepan over a medium-low heat. When very soft (after about 10 minutes), add the chopped liver and its juices and fry for a couple of minutes until heated through. Add the Marsala and wine and cook at a very gentle simmer until the sauce is very thick (almost like a pâté) with a little oil risen to the surface, for at least an hour. Add about 100ml of water during the cooking if it starts to dry out. Stir in the rosemary and remove from the heat.

Cook 200g dried or 260g fresh pasta according to the pack and re-heat the sauce in a wide frying pan. Drain the pasta, keeping a bit of the water and add to the sauce with the parsley and butter. Cook everything together for a few minutes or until the butter has melted and the pasta is well coated. Serve with grated Parmesan.

Picture this if you will

Typos: the bane of many office emails but sometimes rather useful. On Friday, the BSG emailed to say that he was off to Bodean’s (I hasten to add that this was not of his choosing), but that he wasn’t even remotely hungary.

At the very same moment in an office across London I was in fact ravenous, so this random error led me to a favourite Hungarian food-daydream, goulash, and the extraordinary version that Jamie Oliver does using a pork shoulder, cooked slowly in a lidded pot with a mountain of sliced peppers and paprika until it falls apart at a mere glance. Clouds of fluffy rice and sour cream are all this needs to complete it, and if you are feeding many, it is relatively cheap. I am sure that the recipe wouldn’t be hard to find on the internet and it is well worth looking.

Having met our very pregnant but completely relaxed friend for a convincing – yet thankfully not labour-inducing - curry at the brilliant Mirch Masala in Tooting last week, thoughts are turning to core-warming foods. Indeed, central heating is essential at this time of year, when the temperature can plummet or rise sharply in a matter of hours. And I don’t mean the skin-desiccating, global warming stuff – though that can be rather helpful too – I mean these kinds of soul-filling, oven-and-pot-cooked dishes that lead you away from the watery crunch of summer salads and into the deep stew-ladle of winter.

Arriving in Norfolk on Friday and faced with a cold, dark house, the only thing for it was a warm fix, pure and simple – spaghetti and meatballs. A blend of minced beef and pork (the insides of good sausages, we were in a hurry), they were squished in our hands and rolled together with some thyme, browned off in a pan and added to some chopped tomatoes, port and garlic, before we even took our coats off. Left to stew for about an hour their brownness seeped into the tomato sauce, reducing it to a wonderfully jammy consistency, into which we mixed our cooked linguine and feasted, each mouthful inching up the internal thermostat.

Trout, usually a fish I associate with summer, was the cameo in our yellow-curry-laksa-type-thing last week, and we were surprised that this sweet delicate flesh stood up amongst all the spices and ginger – we’ll definitely repeating that recipe, over thread-thin rice noodles.

They are a stalwart of the store-cupboard, unlimited by the seasons, but in our house puy lentils don’t really come out in the summer months – I can’t imagine why, these nutty green pulses are completely wonderful. With them, the BSG made us a great supper; they were boiled, tossed immediately with chopped roasted peppers, paper-thin sliced red onions, and cherry tomatoes. These were dressed with red wine vinegar, olive oil and parsley, and topped with pan fried mackerel fillets, though you could easily use cold tinned/jarred fillets and stir them through the warmth. It is a perfect one-dish supper full of vibrant colours and fresh salt-sweet flavours; there was plenty so we discussed taking some for lunch the next day. Unfortunately we chomped the lot in one sitting. I defy you not to.

This week I find myself without my camera, my trusty sidekick, so words without pictures will have to do. Tell me this: would Postman Pat ever leave Jess behind on Mrs Goggins’ Post Office counter? No. (I’m not sure he’d go on strike either, but that’s for another blog…) For this careless act, I am rather ashamed.

However, I blame a triumph of taste over all other senses, as usual.

You know that it’s autumn when weekend lunches with friends get later, flirting with the dusk, and the red wine is already open when you arrive and unwrap yourselves. Our host on Sunday had warned us that, as there was an imminent inspection at her school this week, we weren’t to expect too much. Knowing Anna as we do, we didn’t believe her – as a cook and general host (and teacher I don’t doubt) she is of the most generous and caring variety, every bit of the feast she laid on for us smacked of this kindness, from the beautifully constructed canapés of toasted bruschetta topped with variations of avocado, bacon, goats cheese, tomatoes and peppers, the delicious roasted chickens surrounded by salads of every kind, through to the cakes warm from the oven; banana and walnut, drizzled with chocolate, and a crisp-edged apple cake, unbelievable. Unable to choose between accompaniments, I have to confess that my end of the table might have had custard (Bird’s, naturally,) cream AND Ben & Jerry’s with ours. In a nutshell, Anna lovingly fed and wined us into blissful submission, the day disappeared, and my camera was forgotten (yes, forgotten) in the postprandial haze.

No matter I suppose, meatballs, albeit delicious ones, aren’t very photogenic…

Food fast!

The BSG’s favourite place to indulge after we have, erm, indulged in a little too much wine of an evening (it has been known…) is a magical and very reasonable place on Upper Street called Tortilla. It does a quarterback of a burrito, with a choice of pulled slow-cooked pork, chicken, beef or veggies, different rices, glossy black beans, salsas and guacamole, not to mention the various dairy hits; sour cream, cheese…. Wow.

Everything is heaped onto a deceptively flimsy-looking flour tortilla, then neatly but firmly rolled (I don’t know where these people train, but they are pros) into a bundle of pure joy. With all the food groups literally rolled into one, we skip (run) the four minutes home, unwrap the foil and special paper, (which for some reason makes it even more delightful), and inhale it. It is a great treat, inevitably eaten too fast every time, and there are two branches in London, which has come over all Mexican of late. I suppose that this is more California-Mex, but it’s worth a try all the same.

The only problem with Tortilla is that it closes at 11pm – how very wise of them, keeping the rabble out - so when we missed it the other night, the BSG alarmingly close to tears, there was one solution: Spaghetti Aglio e Olio.

It is called aliolio in our house as there is usually no time to waste, and this is the quickest homemade fix imaginable (and far less expensive than the kebab you’ll find trailing up to your front door in the morning). This was just one of the joys that the Captain - a real-life aviator - brought into our lives while he was living with us. Apart from a good braai - he’s South African, they win at barbeques - other fine lessons he taught us include; what the many peculiar noises in planes are (I hated flying before), not to be scared of biltong, and that men can be chocoholics too. This recipe is brilliant for when you come home and there is nothing in the fridge. All you need is a clove of garlic, some chilli, dried or fresh, some olive oil and some spaghetti. We put chopped parsley in it too for a nod to greenery, and some grated parmesan at the end. When the pasta is cooked, drain it, leaving it to slick in a bit of its cooking water, whilst in a pan you heat up the chopped garlic and chilli in the olive oil to break out the flavours. Then throw in the pasta and parsley, mix up and serve. The flavours are intense – so perhaps not one for a romantic first date.

“So is that how you spell it then?” the BSG asked me, scratching his head as we gazed up at the white plastic fascia. I must admit, I thought I was on the verge of one of those epiphanies of long-held ignorance, like the flush one feels at discovering that after many years you have been singing the wrong words to a favourite pop song. Surely not, I had seen it spelt otherwise, pretty much everywhere else. B-A-G-E-L. Not here, here on Brick Lane it is beigel, and apparently has been since they started selling them in the vicinity in the mid 19^th century. Cool.

We had shuffled along the bricks on the idle tide of Sunday strollers, weaving our way past stalls selling some lovely things, juxtaposed with the latest stolen bikes, and what looked to be the contents of peoples’ houses. 24 Hour Beigel Bake does not look like much from the outside, but if queues are anything to go by, this was going to be as memorable as the BSG had told me it would. Don’t be daunted by the snake of people out of the door (and round the shop), it moves fast; the uber-efficient team make sure that the orders fly out. While we waited, we watched men carry slatted wooden trays of the doughy rings to and fro between boiler and oven in the busy back room. You can buy them plain to take home, with smoked salmon and cream cheese, tuna, salt-beef and other fillings. Before we knew it we were back out and blinking in the bright sunshine, paper parcels in hand. Packed with warm slabs of salt beef, gargantuan crunchy gherkins and the must-have slick of mustard these beigels made a delicious lunch on the go. They were wonderfully dense, chewy from their boiling, a little crisp on the outside from their baking – the gnashers really had to work. The glutton in me was screaming out for a second.

Off we trotted happily for a velvety coffee in a small yard off Columbia Road, surrounded by lovely materials and antiques, all at peace with the world. Little prepared were we for the tragic scene that was about to unfold. A contented tourist (and shouldn’t we be encouraging them to come back time and time again?), eager for his late breakfast after a busy morning negotiating the flower stalls had ordered scrambled eggs on toast, a fantastic choice I hear you say, high in soul-filling protein. SCRAMBLED EGGS – a choice of champions. Some mornings they sing with yellow joy atop crunchy buttered toast, others you know that, like a good friend, a good dollop of these will see you through until lunch at least…

Stop right there: this was something very different. A dry insipid mass, overcooked, pale alien-green – the pain in the man’s expression was palpable as he attempted to keep it down. I am not sure what those eggs had been through to get to the plate, but the ‘chef’ could have done with the same treatment. Collectively we gaped in horror as he soldiered on, having rashly refused both ketchup and brown sauce, which would no doubt have aided him in his ordeal. We left, so I never did see if he made it to the other side, but I should think that he took a taxi straight to the nearest airport.