Chicken, Mouse, and one amazing lady

A very nice surprise yesterday: a punnet of heirloom toms in my Abel and Cole box. So pretty.

I came across a tempting recipe on the Gourmet website last week - this week I was determined to try it. The original ingredients for the cilantro almond chicken are here; I altered it slightly to reduce the quantities.

First I got a couple of Leckford Farm chicken breasts from Waitrose - and bloody good they are too. They got poached in a splash of white wine, some water, a bay leaf, celery, a carrot, an allotment onion and black peppercorns. While that was simmering sweetly, it was time to put the sauce together. First, toast a handful of slivered almonds under the grill, watching them like a hawk, or dry fry them in a saucepan (same hawk qualities needed). Put them on a plate to cool. Mix 3 tbs sour cream, 3 tbs mayo, juice of a lime, a finely chopped jalapeno pepper, a couple of cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. Add a handful of chopped coriander and add the cool almonds.

Gently mix in the shredded chicken and there you have it. It was lovely, but next time I think I'll try it with half sour cream and yoghurt rather than mayo. The warmth of the almonds and the heat of the pepper is a great combination.

I had one chicken breast left, and dug out Angela Nilsen's Ultimate Recipe Book for her fabulous take on Coronation Chicken. I cooked this last summer and it was a revelation: a retro classic that fully deserves its place in the UK food hall of fame. To go with the spicy chicken sauce, I went for a cooling couscous, with spring onion, almonds and a spritz of lemon juice. One of the reasons I love Angela's recipe is her introduction - she rang the wonderful Marguerite Patten to ask for advice.
Marguerite is now in her 90s, and is as resolutely helpful and polite as she's ever been. She cooked through the second world war, showing people how to make the best of rationing, then was one of the first tv cooks when television arrived. She's published heaven knows how many recipe books and popped up on the 1940s House (Channel 4) a few years back to give handy hints on wartime tea treats. I love her We'll Meet Again - a collection of hair-raising WW2 recipes. Why is this wonderful woman not a dame? She's a national treasure.

Meanwhile, on the home front and for all Mouse fans, here's my girl in her summer quarters. Mouse has a number of sleeping stations dotted round the house. Her winter residence is a basket on the landing on top of the hot water pipes. In the summer, she prefers this fleece-lined Ikea basket in the study.

Mouse says: Enough talk already. Some of us are trying to sleep.

Udderly amazing

Walking home from Tottenham Hale tube station this afternoon, I spotted these incredible alien cloud shapes - here they are above Broad Lane. Giant blobs that looked like they were the outer layer of some vast canopy...back home, I turned to my trusty Cloudspotter's Guide (a wonderful book, if you haven't got it). And here they are: mamma clouds, named after the Latin for, yep, breasts. 'At their most dramatic, they look like a field of smooth, globular udders,' says Gavin Pretor-Pinney. They form under all sorts of clouds, but they're biggest and best under Cumulonimbus, storm clouds. Given today's stair-rod rain, that sounds about right.

Nut loaf

I love nut loaf. I remember in the 70s and 80s when one of the worst insults you could throw at vegetarians was to talk in sneering tones about a roast dinner that substituted a glorious hunk of meat with what? Nut loaf. How could anyone eat this stuff? was the incredulous undertone. Well, I'm a meat eater and I love a good nut loaf. It used to be pretty frugal, but nuts are pricey these days so I look on it as a delicious nutty luxury. Normally, I use the nut loaf recipe from The Greens Cookbook, but Simon Rimmer has different take on it in The Seasoned Vegetarian. I had a sudden pang of nut loaf fever yesterday at work, and a quick google brought up this recipe from Simon.
Once I'd secured my mushrooms, I headed for home, fairly sure that I had most of the other ingredients, or suitable substitutes. Yep, no carrot but an allotment yellow courgette would, I reckoned, add the necessary veggie moisture. No hazelnuts, but some rummaging in the cupboard yielded pecans, walnuts, a few whole almonds and an unopened bag of mixed nuts.
Instead of Parmesan, I used my Rye Harbour Sussex Charmer cheese. And a teaspoon full of chipotle sauce took the place of Tabasco. One thing that worried me a bit about the recipe was the quantity of breadcrumbs - a whopping 150g, moistened with milk and a beaten egg. But I put my trust in Mr Rimmer and cooked on.

You need a BIG bowl to take the final mixture, and I was a bit doubtful if it would really all fit into a 2lb loaf tin, but it does, just, with a bit of pressing and squidging. It goes into a medium oven (gas mark 4) for an hour.
It's a very beige beast and smells great. Whatever you do, don't do what I did: I took the loaf out of the tin before it had cooled down, and the poor thing collapsed in the middle. So I crammed it back into the tin and left well alone.

Which is why it looks a bit sunken and wobblesome in the middle. Mr Rimmer, I owe you an apology for doubting you. The loaf is light, a little bit chewy, nutty and lovely.

Storms and an Open lunch

It's one of those British three-seasons-in-a-day. Mouse woke me at 0700 demanding breakfast, and it was already grey with the occasional flash of hot sunshine. So I headed up to the plot early, hoping to get in a couple of hours' work before the rain arrived. I took my camera only to discover, once I was there, that the battery was flat. Huh. The newly-planted broad bean seedlings are all doing well, there are tiny fruit on the squash plants, and the tomatoes are thriving and full of fruit. I tied in all the new tomato growth, weeded, watered the shed plants, and found I had the first crystal apple cucumber!

I got home just before the first heavy shower. Rang Q, who was now on the plot and soldiering on with weeding the empty onion bed, and heard that he's had swine flu - the first person I know to get it. Thankfully, he's fine now.

Back home, I did some tidying in the garden. This is the dill that I bought from Walthamstow farmers' market a couple of weeks ago - growing very well. Next to it is the squirrel-proofed Sicilian rocket mix.

Here are my Amish toms - already developing their beefsteak ribbing.

Then it was time to make lunch and settle down in front of coverage of the Open championship. I have no idea why I like watching golf but it's become a bit of an addiction. And this Open has become a real thriller. Go Tom! Go Ernie! Anyway, back to lunch. First up, a beetroot salad with an Ottolenghi-adapted dressing of maple syrup, peanut and olive oil, sherry vinegar and garlic. I've added the last of the Barkham blue, rocket, sorrel and radish sprouts.
Then I fried up some of last night's lottie potatoes in walnut oil.

Add a scotch egg pasty and there you have it. (And the pasty tastes even better today.)

Mouse is not too impressed with the golf and has settled down to some heavy duty snoozing.

The scotch egg pasty

There's a brilliant idea in the August Good Food mag - scotch egg pasties. Instead of deep frying the assembled scotch egg, you wrap it in pastry and bake it. I liked the idea so much that I nipped over to Stoke Newington farmers' market first thing to get some Muck and Magic sausagemeat. I spotted these fabulous sweet peppers and had a great chat to the lady from Stour Valley lavender farm - last December I bought some wonderful marrow chutney from her. I liked it so much that I returned to get another three jars as Christmas presents. She also sells lovely lavender and lemon marmalade. Another market purchase was some sweetly swollen purple goosegogs, and some beet from Sarah Green.
A quick stop at Fresh and Wild over the road (except it's not Fresh and Wild anymore) to stock up on cheese and olives, then back home to get cooking.

There's something oddly satisfying about de-skinning sausages...into a bowl they went, together with a handful of breadcrumbs and oregano, chives, parsley and sage from the garden. A good squish and that's it. The original recipe calls for shortcrust pastry, but I'd got a pack of the puff variety in the fridge. It also recommends medium eggs - but I think small would be better. Having hardboiled your eggs, it's assembly time.

The recipe suggests lining the pastry with the sausage mix, then putting your egg on top before folding the pastry up and over (a la Eddie Wearing) and crimping, but this was tricky with my larger eggs. So I tried another method.

Encasing the egg, as for scotch eggs, was a bit more successful. There was some pastry and sausage meat left over, so I made some mis-shappen sausage rolls. Then they all go into a hot oven (gas mark 7) for about half an hour.

Here are the sausage rolls...

...and here's the oddly shaped pasty. Tasted good though! I think these would be even better made with quail's eggs, except I'm sure someone told me that the quail's eggs in supermarkets come from caged birds, which is a horrible thought and out of the question as a purchase. I'll have to do some research on the matter. I'd also love to make them with Simon Rimmer's veggie alternative to the scotch egg - he replaces the meat encasement with a falafel type shell.

Supper for a cool summer's day

It's not exactly the barbeque summer we were promised, and yesterday's downpour had me yearning for a pasta supper. There was a chunk of lovely Barkham Blue cheese in the fridge, left over from my Rye Harbour trip, and broad beans from my veg box. Time to combine the beans with my favourite and easy-peasy blue cheese sauce.

This is so simple and so delicious, and the original comes from an old Fratelli Camisa cook book. Simply pour double cream into a saucepan and add your small chunks of blue cheese. I first made this with Gorgonzola, but it's grand with Shropshire Blue, Devon Blue or - most heavenly of all - Beenleigh Blue. Add a good grinding of black pepper and heat gently until the cheese has melted. Then it was time to tackle the beans.

These were whoppers, so after a few minutes in boiling water, I drained them, dunked them in cold water and nipped off the tops with a thumb-nail so that the inner green beans popped out. Into the sauce they went to heat through. Meanwhile, the pasta was reaching tenderness. Once drained, it joins the sauce and gets gently stirred in.

A final shaving of parmesan over the top, and my supper was ready, with a hunk of Turkish olive bread to mop up every last smear of the savoury sauce. Yum!

The best chicken (and the first potatoes)

I spent all morning on the allotment (and forgot to take my camera). After trimming, weeding and sowing beet, spinach and rocket, it was time to dig the first potatoes. Here they are, my first buried treasure of the season.

On Friday, Big Bro and I dashed over to see Todd, soldier turned farmer and purveyor of the best chicken I've ever tasted. The chickens - Sassos - spend their lives at Wickham Manor Farm near Winchelsea. Todd is a member of the Slow Food movement, and the chickens taste full of a happy long life.

I first came across the chickens at Marylebone farmers' market, but you can also find them at Rye farmers' market and, I think, another London venue. Sadly, Todd doesn't have a website, but if you chance across him, buy that chicken!

My normal procedure is to roast a la Simon Hopkinson - season, whack on some butter then pour over the juice of a lemon and push the lemon halves into the cavity. Yesterday I added some tarragon from the garden.

Here's the chicken after I'd demolished it for yesterday's supper.

In winter months, bread sauce is essential, but in the summer, I turn to Claudia Rodin and her tarrator sauce. It's a mix of walnuts, soaked bread, garlic and olive oil - as ever with my favourite recipes, it looks like wallpaper paste, but it tastes wonderful. Rodin suggests it as an accompaniment for veg or fish, but many years ago I discovered how well it goes with roast chicken.

It keeps well in the fridge and I often scoop it up neat by the fingerful.

Looking ahead to tomorrow's lunchbox, I made my fave noodle sauce, based on an Ottolenghi recipe.

My noodle sauce

2 tbs rice wine vinegar

zest and juice of one lime and one orange

1 tbs grated ginger

1 tbs of jaggery, if you've got it, or soft brown sugar

2 tbs sesame oil

2 tbs peanut oil

1 tbs chilli jam

1/2 tsp salt

Mix well with a whisk.

Now you're ready to add to noodles (soba are my choice but egg noodles take this treatment well too).

To the noodles I added some thinly sliced radish, spring onion and red pepper, pine nuts and cucumber. Tomorrow I'll add some coriander and mint.

And some sprouted radish - I used to be very sniffy about sprouts, but in the past year I've been converted to the these yummy little plants. To the right is what Thomson and Morgan call 'salad mix', but there's not detail on the packet as to what the seeds are. No matter, they taste hot and very green. These are only four days old - a brilliant way to get cheap and easy greens.

Rye Harbour

I spent a wonderful day with Big Bro yesterday, in his haunts of west Sussex. After scooping me up from Battle station, he suggested we pick up picnic provisions for a lunch at Rye Harbour reserve. Excellent idea. So it was off to Great Park Farm , an enchanting nursery and farmshop.

First we had a nosey round the plants - a lovely selection of shrubs and perennials. Big Bro and I showed admirable restraint in not buying anything.

The farmshop is everything you'd hope for: bags of produce grown on the farm supplemented by local cheeses, meat, preserves and bread, with the odd favourite (Patchwork pates) from further afield. We stocked up with local ham, Sussex charmer and Barkham blue cheese, Somerset brie, Lighthouse Bakery bread, spring onions, radishes, and Big Bro grabbed a couple of bottles of Fentiman's ginger beer. Then we made a mad dash over to Todd at Food Fore Thought to buy a couple of what I think are the best chickens in the country. More of the chicken later.

Back at BB's house at Rye Harbour we added to the picnic with some sprouted alfalfa, Kent tomatoes and cutlery. BB hoisted his unfeasibly large viewing implement and we were off through the town to the start of the reserve.
Rye Harbour reserve has to be one of BB's favourite places on earth - when I ring him, he'll often say, in a dreamy voice, 'I'm on the reserve...' The reserve is a triangle of land - the top of the triangle is Rye, and it spreads out to Winchelsea beach at one point and the mouth of the river Rother at the other. I swear there's not a plant or bug that Big Bro doesn't know.

This is wild carrot - BB showed me the very centre of the flower which is the only bit of red among the frothy white. The flowers were covered with metallic green insects. BB pointed out some other wild relatives of our modern veg - parsnip and fennel.
The path leads down along the Rother, with the odd World War 2 concrete battlement dotting the landscape. The reserve is the largest shingle habitat in Europe, with a unique ecosystem. BB has spent a happy spring and summer watching wading birds raise their young.
These Sussex cattle were grazing quietly in the sunshine. Something I'd been looking forward to was snacking on the marsh samphire - otherwise known as glasswort. Here it is growing amongst sea purslane. BB had got permission from the warden for us to sample the glasswort - it's a tiny succulent plant that's crunchy and tastes of the sea. An excellent appetiser.
Another edible plant that grows all over the reserve is sea kale. After flowering, they're covered in green bobbles. BB says greenfinches love them.

Near the mouth of the Rother, there are WW2 gun emplacements: thank god we never needed to use them.
We were now very near the point where the Rother meets the sea. Small fishing boats were returning from work, heading back to the harbour.
We finally settled down on the shingle shore for our lunch, having worked up a fine appetite. BB set up his spotting scope and scanned the horizon for huge container ships travelling from Rotterdam to British ports. He found one, bobbing up and down on the swell. The sea was very fierce on the shore and it got a bit chilly when the sun went in - it was one of those English summer days when you need t-shirt AND fleece, just in case.

We swigged our ginger beer and toasted a fine day out.