raise the steaks

No photo for this one. Just warning my Mum who likes a photo to cheer her along through the technical bits.

Sunday afternoon, an empty brain, train leaving in 15 minutes and a guest who doesn't like sauce. What to cook? What could Waitrose Chichester offer a harassed consumer?

I instinctively reached for a few salad things and a reduced price 'frying steak' of unspecified cut. It all nobly lasted the journey back to London, whereupon I DELIGHTED myself with this low-effort, but ever so rewarding meal. You can probably tell that I speak as much with surprise as self-congratulation.

I prepared everything bar the steak as soon as I walked in the door, and the prep was really very minimal.  The steak takes only a couple of minutes at the last moment, so is even less drama than cooking the potatoes.

• 3 adequate tomatoes, sliced*, arranged elegantly over a jumble-sale-bargain-plate and drizzled in Spanish virgin olive oil, from a picturesque tin. Seasoned.
• Too many new potatoes, boiled with a few mint leaves: drained, and dashed with a spot of oil.
• Ruby baby gem lettuce, roughly torn or chopped so the big leaves are in 2 or 3 pieces, arranged over a shallow dish. Bunch of spring onions - or scallions as they are sometimes, pleasingly, called - diced and scattered over; chopped mint and fresh red chilli also evenly decorated about. Half a lime squeezed over, a thin drizzle of oil, if you feel so inclined. Grind some medium-coarse pepper over the meat.  Now sear the steak until appealing without and soft pink within. Rest 5 mins if you can wait, whilst recalling that the meat will continue to cook. So. Don't mis-judge that. Slice thinly - across the grain if you please - into long strips and drape over the salad.

Self-congratulate. Masticate. Celebrate.

* horizontal, which is my OCD only way of slicing them.

summer supps

Still obsessed with fattoush, I naturally made it king of the table when Herb, Al and PJ came for a summery supps.

Its attendant dishes were very basic, but heavy on summer flavours: lemon roast chicken, mint new potatoes, rocket and orange salad.

To keep our hunger at bay to begin with, there was soda bread with oil and za'atar to dip into, and olives and gins... then lovely bubbly from Al.

And after we were sated, beyond really needing anything more, we still found a place for chocolate pots and cherries, with almond and apricot tart from Al and Herb again (via Konditor and Cook), and Turkish nuts and dried fruits from PJ.  No one, but no one wanted coffee, despite having two fresh bags from Monmouth at the ready!

But the most zingy, happy dish has to be fattoush. Incidentally, you can do anything with it should you have left-overs: stir through cold, leftover rice; put with pasta and chicken; cram into a pitta with falafel.  The apricot tart was breakfasts for a few days, and I am still enjoying the coffee ... along with the afterglow of a wonderful evening in good company.

fattoush fetish

Sometimes I have such a good time that I actually get jealous of myself.

I might taste something delicious and think 'that is so wonderful, I would LOVE to have that every day until I get sick of it'.  Then I realise that I made it, and that there is no restriction on when or what I eat and that, in short, my heart's desire was just granted.

Can anyone else be as lucky as that?

After a sustained but unsuccessful campaign on the national supermarkets I finally found the spices sumac and za'atar in the restaurant Comptoir Libanais which, it transpires, also sells Middle Eastern ingredients.  I had been impatient to make Fattoush, a fresh, zingy salad, which looked as if it could be different enough to feel like I wasn't eating yet more tomatoes and cucumber.

To sustain me while I prepared the salad, I ate Mallorcan sobrasada on oat cakes, with a spot of Oloroso sherry, standing on one leg, leaning over the sink.  As is my glamorous wont.

In a model of time-efficiency (I'm so jealous!) I put soda bread in the oven, along with some chicken thighs rubbed with oil and za'atar: whilst they cooked, I took a well-earned shower.  As my friend Anun said, so delicately, of hot weather and body odour "by noon, I am AWARE of myself".

Emerging like a bespectacled Venus from the waves, I found the bread baked to perfection - no room for modesty today - and the chicken thighs begging for a basting.  I appeased them, saucy wretches, and cracked on with the salad.

I started out following a recipe - of COURSE Nigella, of COURSE 'Forever Summer' - however I sort of lost myself in the salad drawer of my fridge and this is what I actually put together:

• 2 plump tomatoes, diced
• 1/3 cucumber, diced
• about 6 skinny spring onions, chopped big and rough
• a handful of radishes in quarters
• a very few baby gem leaves, torn. Almost tempted to say don't use these.
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 3/4 teaspoon sumac
• pinch salt
• a little glug of virgin olive oil
• juice of half a lime
• mint leaves, shredded

With the first mouthful I unravelled and nearly had to telephone someone - anyone - to tell them about it.  It is the taste equivalent of dazzling.  It is 'fresh' cubed.  It also leaves you with terrible garlic / onion breath.

I gathered myself together, put a roast chicken thigh* and quarter of soda bread onto the plate of fattoush, and ate fast.

*Something for the more sleazy eater: the chicken leaves a lot of za'atar-spiced oil/fat in the roasting dish which you might like to mop up with your soda bread. Do consider it...

Mallorcan munchies

Day 2 on this highly populated desert island and there is already a routine. Ham and bread is the routine, though it is by no means unvaried.

That international favourite supermarket, Lidl, was open on a Sunday and provided chorizo salame, jamon Serrano, Lomo, jamon al corte (cooked) and others. For a varied diet, I also chose some aged Manchego-like cheese and fruit. 

In another supermarket the wonderful ham counter, dangling with whole cured hams, quite took my breath away. I did a quick, mental calculation as to how many books & clothes I would have to jettison in order to fit a bulging jamon beauty into my suitcase (and would customs allow it?): sadly, not possible this time.

Breakfast, then, might be cereal or seeded bread and cheese, and fruit and coffee, eaten to this view of palm trees, pool and sea.  Lunch could be Ham Various with avocado or tomatoes, accompanied by a perky San Miguel. And ice cream.

Evening meals so far have been resolutely calamari-based, however a reluctant foray into the salad section means that tonight we will be navigating choppy Ham And Salad waters.

As I said: a routine, but not without variation. I don't see myself getting bored any time soon. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to cool down with another dip in the briney...

birthday treats

I invented my own birthday breakfast tradition a while back. Each year I think I will deviate from it, but then the lure of cherries, strawberries, raspberries - with granola and yogurt, or some bread and cheese - and always a little espresso, pulls me back. What could ever be better on a newborn summers day?

This year the berries were from the Bloomsbury farmers' market. The cherries were from the enormous and fertile tree in my neighbours' garden, its branches so wide and the boughs so laden, that at least half lists over onto my patch.

The weather was straight from a Laurie Lee poem.

Lunch was a surprise, and I love surprises. We sat in the open window of Randall & Aubin in Soho, refreshing ourselves with champagne and oysters. Such pretty little soft oysters, tinged sunrise-pink with shalotty-red-vinegar. I have so often passed this place and peeped in to see the (to my imagination) terribly sophisticated diners, sitting in the cool shade; how novel to now be inside, looking out of the open windows into a sunny, dusty street.

As if this didn't sate my senses enough, we then lounged over some tapas in Blacks. I say tapas, but you know it involved a chorizo scotch egg just oozing red pimento oil, with a rocket jumble of salad; olives, bread, oil. I was grateful for the bitter little espresso which jolted me awake from the lounging reverie I had fallen into, as we draped and murmured amongst threadbare and lumpy sofas, in an old townhouse in the middle of a working day, in high summer.  

I needed three hours with my girl friends and a stiff gin in the dusky evening, just to come down from the sensory high of the day.  Magical.

lunch al desko #2

The success of the ripe, warm tomato and damp mozzarella pairing continues, unabated.

I baked soda bread and took it to work wrapped, cooling, in a tea towel.  One quarter of the bread is perfect for lunch: salty and wheaty and filling.  I liked this even more than yesterday's lunch with oat cakes.

My soda bread recipe has somehow knocked down to the following:

• 200g wholemeal strong flour
• 120g white strong flour
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• some salt - quite a bit, really; maybe 1 or half a teaspoon of flaked maldon salt
• carton of buttermilk, usually around 280ml

190 degrees and 30 minutes.

I am such a tiresome organiser that I even measure out all the dry ingredients the night before, so that of a morning I just turn on the oven, mix the buttermilk into the dry ingredients (very briefly, not even kneading it) and bung it in the oven while I take a shower or fight with flimsy contact lenses.  It is very telling that putting lenses in my eyes takes more swearing and fight than making a loaf of bread.

lunch al desko

Warm, ripe tomato and cold mozzarella, with only scrunched salt flakes and olive oil for company. Oat cakes alongside.

Then chocolate Guinness cake, a few days old, and therefore more moist and sticky: even better than when it was first baked.