I am re-reading Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection (Bloomsbury, 2006), and thought it would be a tiptop idea to kick off with a really dense enquiry into fabulous British food.
But yesterday (Friday), the most mundane of foodie porn dropped through my letterbox and, reader: it made me very happy.
The BBC magazine olive is the John Lewis of recipe porn. It is parochial, pedestrian, middle England and middle class. It is everything a design-conscious city chick does not want in a magazine. Look at the layout: it's all over the place. A mishmash of recipes and colours on every page and, on first glance, nothing whatsoever that screams "desirable".
Apart from that honking great chocolate cake.
On a cooking spectrum, olive and Heston are so far apart they are unaware of the other's existence. The horizon is between them godammit. Yet, just like John Lewis, once you take a closer look you realise that there is a lot of good shit in there. It's all very reasonably priced, totally possible to prepare without cordon bleu training and there is some great photography hidden among the clunky design.
I love olive. I took out a subscription at last year's Good Food show to get the freebie, these pretty pretty Joseph Joseph mixing bowls I'd been hankering after for a while. I haven't looked back. My mum even asked me if I'd nicked off with one of her issues last time I visited.
Seeing as you ask, I was at the Good Food show as a professional rather than a punter. The so-called good food there was on a par with a suburban Christmas market. I live in central London. I don't need to pay £30 and travel to Olympia to get my hands on some artisanal bread.
But I had been offered the chance to take part in something called the Invention Test, which meant cooking blind from a box of ingredients for MasterChef judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace, which I'm going to boast about now.
I had thought ahead and reckoned I could whip up a passable risotto in this time. A chef friend assured me thirty minutes were too few, but when I saw the ingredients provided - one salmon fillet, paneer, mint, watercress, little else as far as I can remember - I couldn't think of anything else to make.
So I set to the risotto, hindered somewhat by the spotty oik-cum-cookery student who was supposed to be helping me with things like getting water. The plan was to make a lemon and parmesan risotto, stolen from Nigella and practised beforehand, and stir through some watercress and mint before serving.
Posh former winner and champion of Mexican food Thomasina Miers seemed a big fan as she did her rounds. And I stirred and stirred and stirred. I'm quite a lazy cook and very clumsy, but give me a challenge and competition and my focus becomes razor sharp, even while explaining to Andi Peters (no, no idea what he was doing there) what I was up to for the cameras.
I knew I was surrounded by ringers. In fact, I don't think a single one of the contestants was a regular member of the public and not a hack. Next to me was Thomasina's editor from The Times who, lo and behold, made it through to the final three.
Bitter, moi? No. In the final moments my focus disappeared and was replaced by a crazed food ingénue who thought it a fine idea to plop a blob of poached salmon atop my cheesy, glistening, gooey risotto. Arrrghhhh!
Torode refused to touch the salmon, saying the skanky white foam oozing from it meant it was overcooked. Wallace wondered why I'd massacred the dish with such a foolish move. "Would you put a steak on top of a pile of pasta?"
No. Fair call guys.
But I did come home with the ultimate prize - this subscription to olive. I'll run down my favourite bits: the shopping/trends/news pages are useful and on the money. The fact in April they include Bettys of Harrogate's utterly brilliant chocolate badger is testament to this.
Poke about inside and there are some reviews of flash cocktail bars, a nice producer story on organic milk, the great pro vs punter column where a food critic and random reader test the same restaurant, and - the juice - some fucking brilliant recipes.
First up: Shallot soup with watercress purée. A straightforward dinner party winner, if one were to ever bother hosting such a thing...
Look at these lovely colours: so spring-like, so rustic, so French country kitchen chic all at the same time...so....so....so cream, blue and green. And what a tasty full green and gentle duck egg blue.
Me likey.
Should you want to actually make this soup: take 10 large, peeled and sliced banana shallots (banana shallots? me neither) and cook in 40g butter for 10 minutes over a gentle heat, with three cloves of garlic (sliced) and a few sprigs of thyme. When translucent, add two peeled and diced potatoes and cook for another 10 minutes until the potatoes begin to soften. Season generously. Pour in one litre of veg or chicken stock so the liquid barely covers the ingredients, add three bay leaves, bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft. Add 200ml double cream and bring back to the boil. Remove from heat.
Take out the thyme and blend the mixture with 10g butter. Push through a sieve if you want a smooth soup. Season and reheat to serve.
For the yummy looking watercress purée, fry a small diced onion with one clove of garlic (sliced) over a gentle heat for 10 minutes. Add 150ml double cream and reduce by half. Blanch three bunches washed watercress in boiling water and then immediately put it in ice-cold water. Remove, drain and dry thoroughly. Blend with the onions and a little of the reduced cream, adding the cream until you have your purée consistency. Season with salt, white pepper and lemon juice.
Buy French getaway on the Ile de Ré. Sand down all the furniture and paint roughly in pale blue. Nip into Zara Home for coordinating serving dishes. Find appreciative friends and serve pre-beach afternoon with a Giardini Falanghina 2008 from Puglia (Saino's, £7.99), which I would put a link to but it's not available online, so you'll have to make do with this tip from The Daily Telegraph instead.
There is also a decent article by one of my favorite food writers Joanna Blythman, whose books will no doubt be honoured with a blog of their own soon, about what phrases like food miles, food security and peak eating actually mean.
I'm so greedy I even turned a degree in International Relations into an opportunity for me to investigate food. Watch out for the snippets of dull but worthy political foodiness I will feed you subliminally amidst the plates of sausages and Sachertorte.
What I don't like about olive, is that as a BBC magazine, even though technically part of the Beeb's apparently untouchable commercial arm, it seems to be overly concerned with fairness, giving equal exposure to all the major supermarkets. So equal, I wonder if they employ someone to count the references in each issue. Granted, they want to make sure readers whose only food shops within a 40-mile radius are Tesco's can make the recipes (so that's 90 percent of us then), but screw fairness - just show me where the best nosh is.
On that note I'll leave you with a pleasing bit of retro food imagery taken from a piece on indulgent British puddings from Canteen: steamed syrup pudding, blackcurrant jelly and rice pudding with jam. They've got a lovely book coming out next week so I'll have a look at it as soon as.
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes please.
Say it like it is.
PS: I'm really quite worried about tomorrow's issue of Observer Food Monthly (OFM). It's my favourite magazine but the whole Observer re-launched last month. Maybe it made the best of its decimated staff and pagination, but basically it's a bit crappy and has scrapped all my favourite bits. OFM has a new editor, Allan Jenkins, who edited the Obs mag (which I'm not going to link to now it's scrapped the horoscopes) for ages (before last week, when it still had the good stuff in it), so we should be ok. Fingers crossed.
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