A walk to Limehouse and some crabby business

I'm on holiday at the moment, and tomorrow's Kent adventure meant that a stomach reducing walk was in order. My first thought was a walk from St Margaret's to Hertford, but Hertford friend Ian was otherwise engaged, so Plan B was the Lea Valley Walk from home to Limehouse. I've done this walk several times before, and it's a gentle seven or eight miles down to the mouth of the Thames.

Just past Ferry Bridge, this huge narrow boat came chugging past. About a mile on, I wondered if David was around - he lives on the narrow boat Essex Buoy.

But it looked shut up. David must be busy working. The walk is almost all towpath along the Lee and Stourt canal. It's an odd mixture - for most of the walk there's enough green to keep the human London softly at bay. But every so often, there's a reminder of what we get up to.

I rather liked this graffiti, while deploring the spelling. Still, patched up, it would be a good slogan for a food blog.

For quite a while, I was walking past the site of the Olympics, but it was hard to get a decent picture. Here are the lock gates at Old Ford Lock, deep into Hackney. And just around the corner...

...clear site of the evolving Olympic stadium, just visible above the canal. I can't wait. I'm a big athletics fan and I've been glued to the Berlin World Champs this week. I signed on to volunteer for 2012 as soon as we won the games.

This sums up the walk for me: cranes sprouting like improbable flowers above the vegetation. You're never more than a literal stone's throw from some wharfs or houses. As I walked, I wondered how nature would take this route back. I'm reading The World Without Us, and it seems that Earth will get along pretty well minus humans. If we don't get our climate act together, this will all be under water.

Around noon, I arrived at Three Mill Island. It's a lovely collection of buildings, including what was once the largest tidal mill on the Thames. Shortly afterwards, you get to the Limehouse Cut, a couple of miles away from Limehouse. Sadly, this is the most boring part of the walk, unrelieved by any greeness. But the curve into Limehouse Basin is great.

And all at once, you're into the flowering of modern flats and stowed narrow boats. And then over to Narrow Street and a clear view of the Thames in its full majesty.

This walk always reminds me how huge the Thames is to the east: a world class river.

I followed the Thames path round to Canary Wharf and slumped on a grassy knoll to scoff my pesto pasta. Then it was back home, mostly overland, via the Docklands Light Railway and a train from Liverpool Street.

And at home I had a pot of crabby goodness waiting. Last week, my Abel and Cole box arrived with a flyer promoting the yumminess of crab from Seafood and Eat it. Enough persuasion already - I love crab, so put in an order for brown Cornish crab. It arrived this morning and I've been mulling over the possibilities. Then I pierced the plastic pot and stuck an eager finger into the goey browness: fab. There's a Tamasin recipe I've memory marked and this was the occasion to use it. I've adapted the quantities for the amount of crab meat.

Little Crab Custards

Mix together 110g crab meat, 2 beaten eggs, 210ml double cream, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, a knife tip of cayenne, 1 tbsp Parmesan, a good pinch of salt. Pour into ramekins, or in my case, the lovely soup dishes I bought on a walking weekend on the Isle of Wight.

These will go into my Remoska for half an hour...let them cool for 15 minutes then serve with toasted sourdough bread and some watercress and orange salad. And some tomatoes...my allotment bushes have provided a fantastic harvest.

Pontack part 2 and a lovely curry

First up, the second half of making the Pontack sauce...the elderberries and vinegar emerged after four hours in a very low oven. Out with the potato masher to ease the last bit of moisture from the sieved berries. The spice mixture is black pepper, mace, cloves, allspice and a knob of fresh ginger. Pam's recipe calls for shallots, but I substituted with a couple of sliced red onions.

Into the pan it all goes, for around half an hour's simmering. Then you strain again, return the clear liquid to the pot and boil hard for five minutes. Then leave to cool and bottle up the purple liquor. It tastes fruity and vinegary and not quite like anything else. I'll use it to pep up beef stews - Pam says it's also good with venison and liver.

I had planned a mushroom and stilton pie for supper, but as it actually felt like summer yesterday, I changed my mind and went for a favourite recipe adapted from a Vicky Bhogul special, from her book A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji. I love Vicky's writing and recipes. This one is based on her Green Masala Roast Chicken Breasts. The original is fab - but I fancied an egg and potato curry with allotment pots.

A mild summer egg and potato curry

2 green chillis (more if you're not into mild)

1 tsp ground turmeric

2 tbsp whole coriander seeds

2 tsp garam masala

4 cloves garlic

2 spring onions

a thumb sized knob of fresh ginger

3 tbsp yoghurt

2 tbsp oil - I use groundnut

1 tsp salt

Roughly chop your chillis, garlic and onions and bung these, plus all the other ingredients, into a food processor. Whiz. You end with a masala that looks like - yes! - wallpaper paste. But it smells fab.

Boil your potatoes - I used about six medium sized Shetland Black - they're a wonderful purple colour. You have to watch them carefully at the end of the cooking time as they are very floury and tend to break up if you're not quick to whip them off the heat. In another pan, hard boil three eggs. Then put the masala in a pan, add the halved eggs and the potatoes and heat through. Serve with freshly chopped coriander.

Pudding was part of my foraging haul - blackberry and apple crumble. I used to loathe crumble because we got it three times a week at school. And it was a very nasty crumble. But I'm slowly coming back to it after many years of avoiding it like the plague. I stewed the garden apples very gently with a bit of butter and some golden castor sugar. Once they were done, I just bunged the blackberries on top to soak up some of the heat from the apples.

My crumble mix is flour, butter, sugar and ground almonds. Into the oven at gas mark 4 for around 40 minutes. Serve with fresh cream. Yep, I really am coming round to crumble.

Preserves day

Up early this morning at the start of my preserves day...I snapped up Pam Corbin's River Cottage Preserves handbook as soon as it was published last year, but failed to make one of the most intriguing recipes - Pontack sauce. It's a mixture of elder berries, vinegar and spices. So I hiked up to Tesco to get cider vinegar and sugar, as I was planning a repeat of last year's fabulous blackberry vinegar too.

There's an elder tree in the garden, so armed with a plastic bowl and secateurs, I grabbed several bunches of berries and gently squidged them off their stalks. Next door neighbour Tom is has other plans for the berries - he's going to make some wine.

The first stage of the Pontack involves a very slow cook of the berries steeped in vinegar, so into the oven they went. Meanwhile I was on to stage 2 of the day - off to the Paddock for blackberries. The Paddock is a lovely little nature reserve tucked off Ferry Bridge Lane, and last year the blackberry crop was superb. It's pretty good this year too, but the first thing I spotted was sloes.

I think sloes are normally more a September crop, but there were quite a few ripe berries which I bagged to put in the freezer. I spotted some by the allotments last Sunday, so I'll gather more tomorrow and make sloe gin during the week. On to today's main harvest...

The berries looked really good. But I'd stupidly forgotten that nettles love growing round brambles and I was wearing sandals. But stung toes and scratched fingers make it feel like you've really worked. I picked for just under an hour, visiting my favourite bushes. And I noticed that my hands smelled faintly of vanilla - not a scent I'd ever associated with blackberries before.

Back home, there was a pleasant vinegary smell coming from the oven. My bramble harvest weighed in at 1.5 kilos - brilliant! Pam's fruit vinegar recipe calls for 1k of fruit which is steeped for 5 days in 600ml cider vinegar. You just press the fruit gently so that the juices mingle with the vinegar. I'll do a later post on what happens next.

The allotment toms are ripening beautifully - they look so pretty. The tastiest are the orange ones - I'm kicking myself for not transferring the labels into the ground. The mini cucumbers are doing well too.

Out in the garden, my oriental lily - an impulse buy from B&Q - is heavenly. Smells divine and the flowers are magnificent.

Plot news

The sun really came out and beamed on us yesterday, and I spent all morning on the allotment. My tomatoes are finally beginning to ripen - I think these are Golden Berry: having carefully labelled all the seedlings, I didn't transfer the labels into the ground. But these guys were soft and acid and sweet.

I was thrilled to see that the squash (Japanese varieties) have really taken off. Here's the biggest nestling behind a flower.

The courgette Tricolour is also doing well, but it's determinedly yellow in fruit.

The runner beans (Red Rum) are going great guns: at the top right of the picture, you may see a bumble bee making its approach.

Q and I made a big potato harvest - lots of Charlotte and Burgundy Red. The only problem with digging potatoes is that the ground throws up lots of biting soil bugs (thrips?) which make a beeline for me. So I'm happy but very bumpy and itchy.

Go east with Rick

I've been loving Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey on BBC2, and at the end of last week I got hold of the book. Looking for something tasty that I could make without schlepping over to ThaiSmile in Hammersmith for provisions, I landed on gado gado. I've eaten this before but never made it. The key is the spicy peanut sauce, and I knew I had peanuts, palm sugar and shrimp paste in the larder, so it was out with the pans.

The sauce kicks off with an allotment onion, kashmiri and red chillis, shrimp paste. Then it's in with the sugar, coconut milk, a couple of peeled toms and the blitzed peanuts.

Time to add lime juice. The only ingredient I didn't have was kecap manis - a very sweet and sticky soy sauce. So I substituted ordinary soy and an extra bit of sugar. The sauce is lovely - nutty, salty, sweet and sour from the lime.

Rick recommends that the salad be a mixture of textures: soft and crunchy. For part of the 'soft', I used hard boiled quails eggs. I was delighted to find that Clarence Court do free range quails eggs, and I got hold of some in Waitrose. They are so pretty!

Part of the 'crunch' is my first and wonderfully mis-shapen garden mini cucumber. Home grown is so much better than shop bought with these watery veg.

Another home-grown addition is the first of my potatoes grown in bags - I love the jewel colours of these beauties.

Finally the whole dish came together, with lettuce, a peach left over from the Coronation Chicken, sprouted rocket and coriander from the herb garden. Very tasty indeed. Thanks, Rick!

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.