Stamppot Boerenkool

I have only got potatoes and kale left over from this week's veg box, and next week's arrives tomorrow.

If I combine them with smoked sausage in a Dutch fashion I can make Stamppot Boerenkool. The same ingredients in a Portuguese stylee will give me Caldo Verde.

Now that the country is teeming with Poles I can select from a wide variety of charcuterie at the Sri Lankan shop at the bottom of the road. It is practically a Polski sklep these days.

Spuds, sausage and greens may be peasant food, but seasoned with my cosmopolitan, culinary suavity it combines a stroll through European history and culture with a treat for the taste buds.

Rösti

Possibly because we are off skiing this weekend I was inspired to make rösti last night.

Further, I got the dynamite notion of running the spuds through the juicer to give me shredded dry potatoes with minimum leg work.

This worked rather well, though I don't think I'll be trying fesh potato juice again anytime soon for all its vaunted health benefits.

I love it when a pan comes together

Looking in the fridge and the veg basket last night, I had two chicken thighs, a little German hock, an onion, a red pepper, garlic, some loose coriander and nothing much else. I've got rosemary in the garden as well, so - substituting the parsley with cilantro - Angela Hartnett's pot-roast chicken recipe from the previous day's Telegraph fit the bill exactly.

All I was short of was caraway seeds for the suggested side, but still it was serendipity indeed.

I've got previous with this type of thing, see Icons passim.

(You can't really go wrong with chorizo. I will probably include it as an ingredient if I ever bring out my own line of cosmetics.)

Cooking the books

I've stumbled on a series - strangely reminiscent of the moribund eat your way around the world in London - called Around the world in 80 dishes. It is in the Indescribablyboring.

Number 15, representing Wales is Bryn Williams' seared scallops, braised chicken wings, jerusalem artichoke and hazelnut jus. Just the thing after a hard day hacking anthracite from a seam.

In an unrelated development Microsoft alumnus Nathan Myhrvold's "Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking," is out.

Take one multimillionaire computer genius, a team of 36 researchers, chefs and editors and a laboratory specially built for cooking experiments. After nearly four years of obsessive research, assemble 2,400 pages of results into a 47-pound, six-volume collection that costs $625 and requires four pounds of ink to print.

I likes chips me.

Pull my ring

Unpacking the shopping yesterday, I discovered to my dismay that the can of corned beef I was shelving had one of these new fangled ring pulls.

I don't want a ring pull, I want an old school dangerous corned beef can; come to think if it, it is a tin can not a can.

When I was first fending for myself all those years ago I used regularly to come home, somewhat worse for wear, open a tin with the key (as illustrated) and then slice the top of my right thumb trying to get the meat out.

I imagine if you took my fingerprints you would see that I still bear the scars, but I'm nostalgic for the rite of passage.

Moving on, I cooked roast duck with berry sauce and celeriac puree last night, and very nice it was too. Merci, Monsieur Blanc.

Food for the mind

The Guardian presents - the best food books of the decade, in which we are presented with the best books of the noughties, as chosen by Fuchsia Dunlop, Jay Rayner, Rosie Boycott, Tom Parker Bowles, Allegra McEvedy, Matthew Fort and other leading food writers.

Let's see, I've got three of the top 10 on my shelves, and own half a dozen of the entire top 40.

McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture and The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World have been added to my Amazon wish list, though too late for Christmas. I'm particularly intrigued by the latter, "the solution to the dietary ills of the modern western world, he argues persuasively, is simple: forget about 'nutrition' and just eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants," which is exactly the way my thoughts have been turning lately.

Yum-Yum

I Googled a list of some of the more venerable contents of my fridge and cupboards yesterday, and by said engine's wondrous serendipity came upon prawn chowder with mashed potato. Very good it was too, with the broken bacon in the role played by salt pork in an old-school chowder, and the mashed spuds enhancing the texture.

I'm possibly not the trencherman I imagine however, as I had to buy a new belt on the very same day; all my others being too big. Taking the long view, and ignoring the snakes and ladders along the way, I've been getting more svelte at the rate of about an ounce a week for several years, and it gradually adds up.

In other food news:

Two Germans needed hospital treatment after they fought a pitched battle in a supermarket with salamis used as clubs and a chunk of Parmesan cheese brandished like a dagger.

The Kitchen of Dr Strabismus

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Inside a nondescript warehouse on a nondescript street of this Seattle suburb is a research laboratory that looks like it came out of a James Bond movie — had Q the gadget master been a gastronome.

Here Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and his company, Intellectual Ventures, pursue an eclectic array of speculative and potentially world-changing ideas — inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease. And here, along with the laser designed to shoot mosquitoes out of the air (a high-speed camera counts the rate of wing-flapping to ensure that innocent insects are not vaporized), is the best-equipped restaurant kitchen anywhere that never serves any customers.

Dr. Myhrvold exuded a Willy Wonka enthusiasm as he talked of the foods that came out of his industrial food dehydrator. “Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing,” he said.

At another machine, rose petals spun inside a glass globe. “This is basically a still,” he said. “You could crank the temperature up and distill alcohol. What we’re trying to do here is get an essence of rose petals.”

The yield would be a few fragrant tablespoons of liquid.

Around the corner, he pointed to two machines side by side. “Here’s our ice cream machine, and here’s our ultrasonic welder,” he said.

Had he used the welder as a cooking appliance? “Not yet,” he said, earnestly,” but we’re going to try it out.”

After all, an autoclave designed to sterilize lab equipment has proven culinarily productive — “It’s basically the pressure cooker from hell,” Dr. Myhrvold said — as has a 100-ton hydraulic press, for beef jerky.

Aren't we content here like this?

France has always been a nation of philosophers. Descartes contributed rigorous thinking. Montesquieu and Voltaire inspired democracy, and Sartre made it cool to despair. It was inevitable, sooner or later, that along would come Jacques Puisais, philosopher of taste.

When Puisais philosophizes about taste, as he has been doing for decades, he does not mean a red tie goes with a gray suit. He means the magic that happens when the right wine is married with the right food, when lamb chops are grilled over smoldering grape vines and baked apples are caramelized just so for lunch with friends and family.

But one should not misunderstand. The philosophy of taste as practiced by Puisais is not the windy lyricism of restaurant reviews or wine labels. It is an effort by a trained scientist and irrepressible epicurean to document what happens when people experience food and wine and to educate them about how to make it a more authentic experience that reinforces their human bonds.


......... read on ...........

Not the ideal reverie for Monday morning, but what can you do?

Comfort Food

Marcus Wareing does posh Jaffa cakes, and Heston Blumenthal does posh baked beans. We've already got DIY KFC, as the bomber and I build our repertoire of top-of-the-line, home-made junk food.

Last Sunday we reverse engineered salt and pepper chicken that we had eaten from a stall in Camden Market the day before, and very fine it was too.

This is how we do it

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/jul/24/kfc-secret-recipe-revealed

Luminescents

Applying principles from Heston B's Family Food the other night, I determined slowly to roast a chicken, turn the oven off at bedtime and then retrieve a perfect fowl in the morning.

Unfortunately I forgot and left it on, so I woke to a house pervaded by a perfectly foul acrid smell and a carbonised chicken.

Seeking freshness I tried Abbey Mills' Luminscents (whence previously I had not ventured) and was recommended may chang oil.

Apparently you can vapourise it by dropping a little onto the bottom of a warmed oven or by spreading a drip on a light bulb, but I bought a pillar oil burner.

I tried it out last night and it worked a treat.

That's a cracker

I can't remember where I got this tip, but a foolproof way to finish off your pork cracking is to remove the rind from the joint after cooking and stick it in the microwave for a couple of minutes.

It save all the aggravation of starting or finishing your roast a very high temperature.

By Royal Appointment

I made my own mayonnaise for the first time this week; whizzing it up in my mini chopper was no trouble at all to my surprise.

After it had lurked in the fridge for a couple of days, I improvised a coronation chicken (which was actually created for the Queen in 1953).

Coronation Chicken was invented for the foreign guests who were to be entertained after the Coronation. The food had to be prepared in advance, and Constance Spry, who also helped with floral arrangements on the day, proposed a recipe of cold chicken in a curry cream sauce with a well-seasoned dressed salad of rice, green peas and mixed herbs. Constance Spry's recipe won the approval of the Minister of Works and has since been known as Coronation Chicken.

I love the detail of Ministerial Approval.

Chippy

The bomber had a friend staying over the weekend, so more than two years later I applied myself to cooking perfect chips a la Heston Blumenthal.

They were a brilliant success beyond compare and I basked in the adoration of my eight year old critics.

I cooked from the recipe in my copy of Family Food: A New Approach to Cooking.

I've dug it up in The Times as well.

Check it out. Cooking three times and cooling in the fridge twice seems a lot of effort, but it doesn't really eat up a lot of the day if you are around the house.

Potsticker Dumplings

The Bomber (now officially the world's coolest child) has introduced me to Wagamama, which has replaced the Ivy as foodies' favourite restaurant according to the Telegraph.

When there he eats gyoza, "five steamed, grilled chicken dumplings filled with cabbage, chinese leaf, chinese chives and water chestnut. served with a chilli, garlic, sesame and soy sauce".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaozi.

Sounds like Potsticker Dumplings to me.

I think we need to visit Hoo Hing and add a home-prepared version to our repertoire if only for the sake of my bank balance.

Foodie

The sharpness of the lemon filling is perfectly balanced by the sweetness of the meringue.

Tim Hayward is right.

Stick to the ribs

I laughed to myself when I saw "The new rules for defeating cancer" on the front page of The Times last week because (with the excusable exception of breastfeeding children) I go at everything in their Do list and everything in the Don't list with equal vim and enthusiasm, and I'm not in the slightest embarrassed about drinking red wine with my steak.

So here, not that the world is crying out for them, are my guidelines for eating.

• Regardless of what you read about wonder foods, food is not medicine.
  
• Regardless of what you hear about junk food, food is not poison.
  
• You are an omnivore, eat a varied diet.
  
• Purchase and prepare fresh produce when you get the chance.
  
• Lastly, don't fret. Mark Twight has wisely observed that "weighing portions and counting calories and allowing food to rule one's life is just as much an eating disorder as sticking a finger down your throat".

Nice Pear

The New Ninja Bomber is a great fan of pears, so I've usually got a bag of them on the go in the house at any particular time. The trouble with pears though, is that they only seem to stay ripe for about five minutes before they start to go off. Here's the solution:

Peel the pears
slice in half length ways
remove the pips
lob in slow cooker
cover in red wine
add sugar, cinnamon, and cloves
cook on low over night.
remove the pears, allow them to cool and refrigerate.
sieve the poaching liquid, reduce over a high heat, and reserve.

They'll be quite happy in the fridge for a few days. Ideally, serve glazed with the sauce, plus whipped cream piped from that aerosol can you got in for your last sleepover, you saucy beast.

Baps, Cobs and Bakestones

As I've brought the New Ninja Bomber back to Wales for a few days over half term to see the family, I had bacon baps and coffee for breakfast. A bacon bap is the same thing as a bacon roll only better because it has a different name.

For lunch I would like to have a cheese and onion cob. A cheese and onion cob is the same thing as a cheese and onion roll, though it should strictly be aged for a few days in clingfilm behind the bar in order to render the cheese appropriately rubbery. (Was it only me who felt a strange complusion to bite Stadler erasers in school? You remember, the posh rubbers with the blue edged cardboard wrappers.)

For tea, bakestones rather than scones.

That clear?

Good.