Where's the culinary alchemy?

You may have noticed that the BSG has not been featured much lately, he has been too busy riding tandem bicycles, getting hit by booms on sailing boats and visiting physios as a result. I have asked him to stop shouting at Masterchef: The Professionals on the telly, to put down Nigel Slater's new book and to get back into the kitchen.
He is enjoying (if that is the right word) the copper pan I bought him at an antiques fair - something to do with good heat? Simple pleasures I suppose.

Pork you pine for

The other day, whilst minding my own business, I stumbled across this bombshell, and chose to take it entirely out of context. It was, after all, a headline on a discarded newspaper lying on the pavement, between a grubby chewing-gum mark and a cigarette butt: obviously whoever else had read this didn’t believe it either and had chucked the offending article away in disgust, without even waiting for a bin to come into view. I am pretty sure that in the unwritten rulebook of autumn, Sunday lunches are near the top. The one that we had at Tam’s house in Suffolk was a case in point.

Dare I say it, we had all slightly overdone the Moscow Mules (not to mention the wine and champagne) the night before, and her herb-rubbed shoulder of lamb, roasted directly on the Aga rack, its juices dripping over silky boulangère potatoes, was the edible equivalent of an almighty hangover-busting hug. To follow, a couple of dark plums plucked straight from the tree, some squares of dark chocolate and some velvety coffee took the Sunday blues far away, for a little while at least.

But where am I?

This was Suffolk, where it’s all about pigs and apples.

What luck to find, having cycled through the leafy tunnels to the local farm shop, that Saturday was Apple Day; cooked, pressed, toffee-d, brewed, these versatile and seemingly uncomplex fruits were presented and celebrated every which way. This chance to peruse was welcome as the day had started unseasonably warm. Each variety displayed differences in the look of its skin, perhaps due to how much the sun had touched it, which branch it had been on or leaf it had resided under: from emeralds to neon-greens, russets to coral pinks; sweet, tart, pink-fleshed, smooth or nobbly, these were all there for the tasting. The crisp acidity of the Lord Lambourne made it my favourite on the day, but I suspect that, rather like wine, it depends upon your mood and what you are going to accompany it with, if anything at all, that is.

So here it is: the pig section. And greedily on Saturday I had it twice. Lunch at the pub after a good morning’s activities had to be pub-like, if you know what I mean. So I opted for a ham sandwich with crisps and a salad, (well, an onion and tomato wedge, on the side). Boring? Not at all – for this wasn’t something you would apply the word ‘wafer’ or ‘value’ to, or perhaps even the word ‘slice’. Every uneven hunk looked like it had been shaved off with a chainsaw, dwarfing the bread that was trying desperately to contain it – the kind of meat worthy to be included in a ploughman’s lunch. Salty pink and delicious, I am afraid it had to be adulterated with the obligatory smudge of hot yellow English mustard.

This was a simple example of the sheer gloriousness of British fare which surrounds us throughout the year, and it is British Food Fortnight now until the 4^th October so we must celebrate it now!

The second porcine delight of the day was slow braised pork belly, taken from that sweary Ramsay man’s book Secrets, and it has prompted me to do more cooking from books. I would probably get into all sorts of trouble for reproducing it word for word here, so go and track down the recipe - this is the kind of dish you cook for someone who will then instantly fall in love with you. After cooking for a few hours in a mixture of soy sauce, sherry vinegar, stock and aromatics the meat only needed to be looked at to fall apart in a melting, treacly mass, atop a pillow of the creamiest mash you can imagine (the BSG’s heart soared at the discovery of a potato-ricer in the house). Alongside these glistened leaves of squeaky forest green chard, its rhubarb-hued veins a sharp contrast, its iron taste a welcome palate cleanser between shovelfuls.

Completely sublime are two words that fall embarrassingly short of doing this dish justice. I took no photos of it – there was no time to waste – but suffice it to say we all fell just a little bit in love with Tam on the spot.

Oh, and we (notably the BSG) couldn’t let perfectly good crackling go uncrackled…

No one puts Baby in a corner*

A little bird told me recently that, though indeniably delectable and certainly pleasurable, there is no nutritional benefit to sweet corn. Whilst I am not absolutely religious when it comes to healthy eating (in fact I am very much a believer in the ‘little bit of what you fancy does you good’ mantra) this made me feel a little bit sad about it. Surely something so redolent of sunlight and basic wholesomeness had something going for it? It is a vegetable, weren’t they all supposed to be good for us?

So, I decided to do some research on behalf of this long-loved hunk; I felt I owed it. My favourite food as a child, it was always reliable, slathered in butter, great fun, even when in haste you burned your mouth to get to it. When we were small, Mum and Dad would offer the luxury ‘on or off the cob’ service, dependant on our moods, or how many milk teeth were loose at time of eating (between the four of us kids, a few came out this way).

The BSG and I have had a hankering for the husks recently, so I was absolutely delighted to find that they provide good amounts of vitamins A, B3 and C, fibre and folic acid, though as the name suggests there’s a fair amount of sweet starch too. We will keep crunching, guilt free. Purists may say that melted butter is the only way to have corn, but my favourite is how they served maïs on the street in Chiapas in Mexico – boiled, slathered with a slick of mayonnaise, powdered with red cayenne pepper and some lime juice squeezed over. Extraordinary. Their season is right now so go and get them!

Saturday dawned powdery blue and bright, and the BSG and I had the perfect day. London was in a good mood, full again after the holidays and at its bustly best. A trot around Borough Market slapped our senses awake, followed by a walk along the river and turn around Tate Modern, before lunch at our favourite tapas place, Barrafina in Soho. There was a short queue so, to pass the time, we opted for a Cruzcampo, a welcome quencher and in a frozen glass no less, and some emerald pimientos de padron, charred and sprinkled with generous flakes of salt. Of these, one in every ten or so is a hot one – has queuing ever been so much fun? Don’t be deterred, the wait never lasts long, or, in this case, long enough.

Our friend and fellow food adventurer G joined us for lunch. If skiing were eating, he is far more of an ‘off-piste’ person than I am. Perhaps it has something to do with having resided in Japan; he and the BSG encourage one another. This time, however, we stuck mostly to the piste (there was some octopus), with gloriously oozy ham and cheese croquetas, pan con tomate, chorizo and watercress, and an utter mouth party; morcilla, a blood sausage, with piquillo peppers topped with a quail’s egg. You couldn’t eat a lot of these, but this size they are hugely memorable. We lucked out with an outside table, but sitting inside at the bar you can see how beautifully these simple dishes come together in the kitchen, each chef knowing their own role…they even have one devoted entirely to the tortillas, done in tiny pans, little wonder then that they are so delicious.

The lazy late afternoon was passed in the lovely Albion pub in Islington, followed by the pizza competition to end them all. We bought our (yes a bit white and ugly) bread machine last year amidst much doubt that it’d get used – not only does it churn out delicious crusty loaves on a regular basis, but it makes the springiest pizza dough you could wish for. I am not knocking the many fine pizza establishments in this city, but to my mind nothing beats a homemade one….I don’t think we have been out for a pizza since.

Three days on from the sun and it feels like a different season altogether; there is a chill in the air and today the sky is slate grey, the rain coming down in rods. Last night the BSG knocked up the first autumnal supper, a risotto made with bacon and radicchio finished with parmesan and sage, the result was pink and beautiful like a leafy woodland floor. Possibly the best risotto I have ever had…

Watching him with a glass of wine in one hand as he stirred away, had we known then the sad news that the legendary Keith Floyd was gone I would have insisted that the BSG cook it out on the balcony in a high wind and a bow tie. My photography skills don’t yet run to risottos, so I will have to practice in order to do them justice. “A loving close-up on this please, Clive…”

(*A tenuous title perhaps with regards to corn, but it is a very sad day and Patrick Swayze’s death cannot go without a mention: it is hard to get him into a food blog. I’m off to watch Dirty Dancing…)