At Elizabeth David's Table: Her very best everyday recipes

Oooh, what we all wouldn't give to be at Elizabeth David's table. Sort of. Because I imagine she'd be really quite terrifying. 

What if she got you to do a taste test of some tomatoes, and you plumped for the ones from Tesco instead of the glowing fresh ones she'd picked herself under the blush of a Tuscan sun?

That would be so shameful. You'd never be able to eat a tomato again.

Here's my book review of At Elizabeth David's Table for Lovefood.com.

There will be a regular (probably monthly) review, so I'll post them as I go. 

I should find a way of archiving all my food writing on here, so it doesn't interrupt with the blog, but is still there. Any ideas how?

I'm on t'box right now, on Market Kitchen but I can't watch it because I don't have the Good Food Channel. A little annoying, but probably a blessing. I am on tomorrow too.

Lindsey Bareham's A Wolf In The Kitchen: Easy Food For Hungry People

Lindsey Bareham's A Wolf In The Kitchen was my second cookbook, and if I wasn't so obsessed with food it could well have been the last, because any cook in possession of it could feed him/herself and others quite happily, with plenty of variety and not an absurd cost, for years, a lifetime perhaps. 

My mother bought it me when I was at university. It wasn't just any university. Oh no. It was a university that hated its students so much it thought they should survive on the worst food in the country. A combination of hideous, inedible, overboiled shite pretentiously served en masse in a big fancy hall by

Hispanics (an event pretentiously known as "hall") and whatever you could cook on the one (sometimes two) electric plug in hob things provided to share between about twenty students.

They obviously thought we were far too interested in studying to worry about little things like EATING. Fools. That place was Cambridge. Boy it was crap.

Instead we fashioned our own diet.

There was no breakfast. We got up too late. Obv.

Lunch was an over-sized tuna and sweetcorn baguette from Peppercorns on Rose Crescent. Apart from the happy term I spent helping a medic out with his dissertation (I sat in a box pressing buttons next to different coloured lights for a fiver an hour). After which Rishi took me to Pizza Hut so he could eat the all you can eat buffet and I could have refills of Diet Coke.

Dinner, if we went to hall, was a big bowl of tortilla chips and two bottles of wine from Ha Ha's. Whenever we got to hall there was a queue, so we talked obnoxiously loudly for a while about how shite the place was, and how we wouldn't pay 10p for such crap (even though we already had, because you had to pay for all these awful meals up front), and then if the glares were too bad when we tried to push in, we went down the road to the bar where you got a bottle of vino and a plate of tortilla chips for a fiver before 7pm).

Or cartons of Covent Garden soup, if we were in a healthy stage. Preceded by a Mr Motivator video. Yes, a video. And yes: it was Mr Motivator.

Or we ate out at the Dome or Pizza Express. Massive spendthrifts of students we were. It was years later I learnt that everyone else was spending either the money their parents gave them or a student loan. I was the only dummy binning both and ending up in agonising debt. But then again, I did get to go on clubbing weekends around the country and drink the wine and eat the cake in Cambridge. Rather than either/or. Never really been an either/or person.

A midday fry up. Made with crazed control-freakery by AC to everyone's perfect specifications. She could get orders for nine different fry ups exactly right, for everyone, at the same time and all warm.

Sundays were white bread, ham and crisp sandwiches. Dairylea Dunkers. Washed down with white wine.

When we were stoned in Guy's room, we ate Sunbreak biscuits, or whatever his grandparents had packed in the latest food package.

When we were stoned in Jon's room, we ate whatever his mum had packed in the latest food package.

And then there was A Wolf In The Kitchen, from which, as far as I can remember, I cooked three things.

Sweetcorn fritters - still a favourite of mine. Though I usually make courgette fritters now.

Pea dhal with white fish. As you can imagine, a winner.

A lamb and apricot stew. Also great.

But I always looked at the book, and always planned to cook epic feasts. Did this book set the pattern for how I would treat each of the many, many cookbooks I would buy in the decade to come? Is there something deeper to be read into this, about making plans you never execute?

Or is it just about my greed being so intense that even I can't service it?

Who even cares. What I do know is that this is the best introduction to cooking anyone could hope for. It runs through quick dishes from Italy, North Africa, China, India and south-east Asia, with brief explanations (nothing too taxing for student brains). It isn't intimidating, but is authorative. Unlike Delia, who I do respect for her contribution to teaching us how to cook, and who this book recommends you read, there is nothing "teachy" about it. It's just: here's the food, cook it if you fancy.

The first thing it does is explain how to make yourself a proper tomato sauce, while most students were dicking about with those gross one-pot Dolmio things in little plastic saucers. And while most student cookbooks were suggesting a good way to feed yourself was to take three slices of plastic white bread, paste together with some of that putty supermarkets call "sandwich filling", and deep-fry the lot in a freshly-mixed Pot Noodle seasoned with mixed herbs.

I salute Lindsey Bareham. But at the same time it was nice to wake up knowing you could eat a fry-up, three Irish coffees, two Nadia's white and dark chocolate slices, a pizza, seven alcopops, a pizza/tortilla chips for dinner then chips at 3am, and not put on any weight.

Eat, Memory

Eat, Memory. It is such an obvious title, and such a good one at the same time. Everyone has memories they associate with food, and so often it is the food which helps them remember the rest.

This is what New York Times food editor Amanda Hessler was counting on when she launched her Eat, Memory column in 2004. She knew the context food brings with it: history, place and understanding. 

More importantly, how a person approaches, eats and remembers food can tell a reader more about that character than a hundred other pages, written in Hardy-esque cinematic description, might.

Ok, that's overdoing it. but it really fucks me off when people say they don't like Hardy because his sentences are too long and he goes into too much detail. It's a huge, epic, cinematic novel, people, not a fucking tweet about who's winning X-Factor.

Eat, Memory is a collection of these columns. The Memory is italicised because Hessler wanted her writers to concentrate on the memory the food evoked, not to go all schmaltzy over why cherry pies make them cry whenever they see one now, because granma used to make granpa cherry pies before he has his tracheotomy, and nothing has ever tasted quite the same for him since, etc. Zzzzzz.

You have Kiran Desai remembering the amazing cook from her childhood, so protective of his kitchen she never learnt to cook herself. Yiyun Li tells how a rancid-sounding orange drink was the height of sophistication during her teens in China, as one of the first western products to gain popularity there. 

A magazine editor called Heidi Julavits describes how she went to Japan to work out what to do with her life after college, and ending up losing herself in adzuki bean cakes, and the rest. 'I remind myself of the Zen-like quotation: "Emotional freedom comes with being aware of the certainty of uncertainty." I will go to Japan, I will be certainly uncertain and I will reach a higher plane of existence while eating amazing food,' she writes.

So, you see, Julavits, and most of the other columnists, have failed in this attempt to not get all nostalgic over the food. Hessler says in the introduction, "The food doesn't matter, really. What it evokes does."

Bollocks. What complete bollocks! Of course the food matters. I mean yes: without the food there wouldn't be the memory. So it facilitates the memory. In much the same way as if I broke my leg falling over on the way to the bus stop, I would remember that walk to the bus stop better than the other several zillion times I've walked to a bus stop.

But the food really, really does matter, in and of itself. Not necessarily because it was good food or special food, or because the writer knows a lot about food, or whatever. But because it was that particular food or meal which enabled the feeling described in each story.

One guy never eats dessert because he worked in an ice cream parlour one summer, shovelled the stuff down his greedy neck, and hasn't been able to face another sweet dish since. Which means that at least several times a week, if not more often, the guy is reminded that once upon a time he adored ice cream, and of the joy that eating it brought him. And now that joy is lost forever - and he deals with this all the time. He says he's content - like he's simply had enough ice cream. If that's the case, why does he now have to avoid all desserts? And anyway, who has ever had enough ice cream?

Food brings things up and it swats them down. It is and has to be part of everyone's lives. I know people who aren't interested in food very much at all, but they can't just pretend it doesn't exist. Even the odd inclusion of the guy who doesn't eat at all, which is a nice conceit an'all but doesn't entirely work, is about how the author finds himself so angry at the general greed of others that he stops eating altogether. The food here, again, is so important by what he chooses not to eat: steak, lobster, eggs and cream - dream foods, which he feeds himself on by dreaming about them.

Even the story I like best is my favourite for a nostalgic reason: it is a story by the travel writer Pico Iyer, Our Lady of Lawson, about how he lived in Japan without eating Japanese food - preferring to buy packaged shit from the local convenience store, Lawson. 

I like it because I went to Japan recently (you are saved a Japanese cookbook post because I'm of the opinion that sushi is one of those foods you go out and buy, not buy some nancy kit and waste time and good fish trying to make yourself. And no, I'm not trying to sum up a whole cuisine with the word "sushi". I hope you know what I mean). 

Anyway, Dave, the friend in Japan, is obsessed with the vending machines you find all over the city. These vending machines are on every corner and serve milky, sugary tea in screwcap bottles and bright pink pop in glasses with crushed ice. Unlike Pico, Dave eats Japanese food. He loves it. But there is something about the vending machines - possibly the sheer number of them and the fact you don't have to converse with them to get what you want - that works as some sort of comfort blanket for him in Tokyo. For Pico, the same was true of the Lawson convenience store, and it also taught him, through what it sold and the family who ran it, lots of stuff about Japanese culture. He says it is precisely because he is not interested in food that he is able to eat twice a day from Lawson, but if he wasn't, why would he always go there and not elsewhere? For him, food is ritualistic, as it is for many. 

And now I'm going to have my ritualistic glass of wine in front of the telly on a Sunday night. I don't even feel like it tonight, so I've tried to argue myself out of having it. But I cant.

PS. This is a nice book, but don't buy it. All the columns are up there online

Kitchenella, Rose Prince

I have been meaning to write about Rose Prince's Kitchenella for a while. I bought it soon after it came out in September, and have used it a fair bit, but seeing as my 'productive' days are in reality about as productive as Homer Simpson's Sunday mornings, it never happened.

You may suspect I have made a pathetic New Year's resolution (do we need to cap 'New Year' up as a rule? It does seem better that way) to blog more. Or rather to blog at all. You are right!! We'll see how long it lasts. It's thirsty work reading and cooking and eating, y'know. And I've forsworn the booze for all of January.

Kitchenella's subtitle is "The Secrets of Women: Heroic, Simple, Nurturing Cookery - for Everyone". Which is a bit of a mouthful. Like every other cookbook at the moment, it has a message. Because it has to. Cookbooks can't just be collections of recipes any longer. Or grouped simply around a season or a cuisine. No sirree - they have to be political, with a shouty, right on message, to differentiate themselves from all the thousands of other books, which contain recipes to make food with.

Except they don't, do they? Because all cookbooks have a bleeding message these days. Every single one of them. I'm a girl who likes a message, but let's face it, most people can't be bolloxed with one.

That's not to say I don't like Kitchenella. I really, really do. Although Prince's conceit of bringing cookery back to the home, the hearth and the kitchen sink, away from all those nasty boy bullies in big name professional kitchens, is not new in itself, she sidesteps associating women only with baking, over-frosted cupcakes and overeating.

Instead, she gives us a pleasing home cooking manual, split into 'Cheap', 'Kids', 'Fast', 'Slow', 'Bake', 'Special', 'Rehash' and 'Ahead'. The food is never complicated, but it is often quite special. And it is astutely contemporary - while Prince eulogizes her idyllic childhood and food experiences, and litters her recipes with many classic French skills, Mediterranean influences and a la mode cheap cuts, they're woven into modern recipes which most people will want to eat.

Prince has also written a proper book here, which looks at women's relationship with food and her own discovery of food and cookery through, in large part, her mother. Some of it does sound a little twee, but it also sounds honest. She references the cooks who have helped her learn her trade, and explains the whys and wherefores of getting the meat temperatures just right.

The most surprising thing about the book is that THERE ARE VERY FEW PICTURES but I STILL LIKE IT.

I mean, it's a bloody bold move to put a few images at the front of the book and then type and type alone over the following three hundred-odd pages. I suspect with more pictures I might have cooked more things from here, but I got over the initial disappointment after a few minutes of reading.

I learnt a lot from this book. Prince says to search out unexpectedly interesting finds in your local corner shop, which I already do in my great Turkish supermarket, but she points out these finds can be the centrepiece of a meal, not only a hurried snack.

The chapter on stews explains why meat has to be old enough to be stewed and why this can be hard to find these days, and so brings in the ethics of fast farming, which is good. Too many books, I think, focus solely on do-goodery type eating, which just makes people head straight for the nearest KFC.

She also gives a few lessons in stocks, braising, risottos, scrambled eggs and other everyday meal staples which we won't all have learnt at mother's knee.

What did I make? Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup, Spiced butter and yellow split peas, Warm tomatoes with oregano and feta and Coconut spiced soup with chicken. I'm aware these all sound quite like variations on a comfort eating theme a theme, but they're exactly the sort of easy lunch or dinner I want when I'm eating alone.

They also sound quite perfect healthy-but-not-miserable January eating, so I might make them again. No pics from me I'm afraid, as the camera was at the (bloody expensive) menders.

Perhaps the nicest thing about the book is that it is entirely multicultural, but seemingly without thinking about it. Prince jumps from Stifado to a Pot-cooked spring chicken, Moules frites, Gnocchi and a Pheasant curry. Lentils, spices, polenta....Eastern, American and English country garden influences mingle throughout the book, with a linguine here, a remoulade there, and lemongrass and chili all over the place. This is its real triumph.

I am making another resolution now, to try three new recipes from here this month. They might be:

Oxtail stew

Braised chicken rice with allspice

Mother's aubergines.

Nothing fancy pants.

Merry Christmas Delia!

I know it's absurd to be doing a Christmas blog in January, on everyone's first day back at work, when I haven't blogged in months.

But think of this as a preamble to Christmas 2011. Hell, we need something to look forward to!

And anyway, it's my blog so I can do what the fuck I like.

I just wanted to mention Delia's Christmas for a few reasons:

- I've had an excellent Christmas of eating, thank you very much.

- This was one of the first books on my cookery radar, and I remember very clearly watching the series with my mum. It was first published in 1994 so it must have been around about then.

- This was also one of the first books which I remember causing a massive social stir in cooking, at least among desperate, Delia-loving, dinner party-giving classes, who raided cookshops for the tins to bake her Little Sticky Toffee Puddings with Pecan Sauce in. My mum was too late.

- But mainly because, while doing Christmas foodage for 13 this year, it was the book my mum still referred to most, and it all worked - the cake, the mince pies, the pudding, the turkey. All moist and fat-laden and moreish.

- I even found a cheese straw recipe in there, to add to a selection of retro canapes I made for Christmas Eve dinner.

It just made me think that Delia, although she is Waitrose's new pin-up, has got a bit of a bad rap since that awful book a few years back about piling together pre-prepared shit and calling it cooking, when really she did sterling work in teaching a nation to cook.

I've never looked at her One is Fun! book, because it seems a bit tragic, but at the end of the day one is what I is cooking for, so I'm going to get hold of it.

Then, maybe, I'll check out her How to Cook series and teach myself to make some decent sauces and stop things burning without blaming it on my shitty oven.

That's all.

Turkey: food heaven

So I went on holiday to Turkey and was so consumed with stuffing my face with the amazing food I didn't stop for one moment to take you any pictures of it.

Instead I'll treat you to a few holiday snaps (let's face it, no one else is going to sit through them politely).

In short, Turkish food rocks. If there's one contemporary food trend we all know about it's taking fresh simple ingredients and not dicking about with them too much, and that's what they do in Turkey.

Istanbul turned out to be an Aladdin's Cave for greedy people, and for greedy people with a sweet tooth at that. Straight off the airport bus in Taksim Square I got myself a fresh pomegranate and orange juice and some warm roasted chestnuts. I had a discussion with a Turk about why I'd bastardised the pomegranate juice with orange, and claimed it needed some sweetness. I do believe that, but I also think that because pomegranate is so damn expensive in the UK, because of its "wonderfood" properties, I thought it would be too much just to go crazy and have a straight pomegranate juice.

Our first meal was something I'd choose for my last supper. A salad of chilis, coriander and tomatoes. A plate of super sharp and salty crumbled cheese, dotted with knobs of butter, came with one of those hot thin bread things that blows up like a balloon. It's called lavas, but you'll probably get by if you ask for balloon bread. Then came a gut-droppingly hot lamb kebab, layered with slices of hot oily bread to wrap it in and a charred aubergine, sliced in half so cheese and chili could be melted into its soft flesh. Joy.

Oops - missed out the bit about our first stop at a Turkish delight store. Hated the stuff (do you remember Fry's Turkish Delight? Jesus.) until tasted the real thing a few years' back. We had rose flavour, stuff with pistachio and hazelnuts in the middle, rolled in coconut...amazing. My sweet tooth even came out in one piece of it, which was gross, but didn't stop me eating.

Anyway, presumably you're after the book and the recipes. The book is The Huzur Vadisi Cookbook. I was on a yoga holiday [insert irony here] and the food was amazing and there was a bar too, which meant that despite five hours of yoga a day I came back fatter and as alcoholic as I was when I left.

As usual, can't really be bothered to cook any of this stuff, but the fact I ate it all while out there means I know it's good.

The first good things are a few salads which can be construed as wintry:

Carrot Yoghurt salad with Tahini and Walnuts

5 medium carrots

2 tbsps olive oil

3 tbsps yoghurt

3 tbsps tahini

3 tbsps chopped walnuts

2-4 cloves garlic

salt

1 tsp red pepper flakes or paprika

Grate carrots. saute in oil with some salt. Crush garlic and add to yoghurt. Mix the yoghurt with tahini, walnuts, half the red pepper and salt with the carrots. Melt rest of pepper in a bit of butter in a pan and drizzle over as a sauce.

Beetroot and Tahini Salad

6 beets

4 cloves garlic

4 dessert spoons tahini

4 dessert spoons lemon juice

4 dessertspoons olive oil

Roast the beetroot unpeeled in the oven in a bit of oil, at 200C for 45 mins or until soft. When cool, peel and grate. Add tahini, crushed garlic, lemon juice, oil and salt to taste.

Works as a salad or dip. Should make you feel healthy as the weather turns and everyone says they got one of those " the weather's turning" colds.

There's a tasty looking recipe for meatballs in a herby lemon sauce. Can't be bothered to write it all out here, but let me know if you want it. According to this week's papers, meatballs are just the thing right now.

I did make a couple of things from here. A grilled aubergine salad with yoghurt and cigar-shaped borek. Courgette, feta and dill fritters may be next.

Aubergine salad (more of a dip) - grill 4 large aubergines until skin crisped and insides soft. They're easy to peel if you hold them under a running cold tap, grip the stem and crack th skin off. Though you will probably burn your fingers at the same time. Mix together 4 tbsps each of olive oil and lemon juice, and mash the aubs in one by one until smooth(ish). Add in 4 tbsps yoghurt mixed with 4 cloves crushed garlic and a little salt.

The borek recipe calls for round sheets of filo pastry you can cut into triangles. I was sold rectangular sheets and couldn't quite work out how to make the right shape of triangle - you really need an isoceles shaped one or, as mine did, there will be too much pastry and it will suck up too much oil.

So: mash one packet feta in a bowl. Add 1/2 bunch each finely chopped dill and parsley and one beaten egg. The idea is to place one teaspoon of the cheese mix in the middle of the bottom of the triangle then roll it up so the tip ends up on the outside. Seal with a bit of water and fry in oil for a minute or so. Even if they turn out crap (mine were too oily, but still yum), they keep kids occupied for aaaaaages.

There is lots of great stuff to buy in the Spice Market, but I went overboard on the teas, which looked delicious (rose, green with ginger, green with jasmine, a gingery wintry mix) and they are all FOUL. Bitter, disgusting and undrinkable. The sun dried darker than usual apricots are amazing though.

Oh, I forgot to mention what I didn't pick up in Turkey: a man. Actually i didn't forget, but my newsagents were most disappointed that I hadn't come back with one. I'm not sure why it's any of their business either, or where they got the idea I was on holiday shopping for a husband, but they reliably inform me they know of two women who went to Turkey and came back with a husband. Did they read about these women in Take a Break? For the past few months they have asked me every week or so whether I have found a man yet. My accountant informs me I spent £1000 in their shop last year. I suggest they watch their step.

Teaching Dad To Cook Flapjack Green Tart Update

So the Green Tart has been cooked and eaten. I can report back that it was quite amazing. The pastry was buttery and flaky and the filling really quite clever - you're basically stuffing your face with all these healthy green herbs and therefore are allowed to feel virtuous, despite the fact they're sitting in a greedy eggy creamy mix.

I'm baking the Caramel Salties later for consumption tomorrow, so will report back, again...

...The Caramel Salties for the seal of approval from Nephlet Numero Uno, who pronounced them "yummy and chewy and lovely and chewy. And the dentist says I shouldn't eat chewy things which makes me like them even more."

His mother wasn't so keen on the salty aspect.

He also gave a Bacon and Egg Tart (made with bought pastry) a 10 out of 10, a grade he doesn't give out lightly, which his mother says she hasn't been awarded for a very long time.

Then I slaved over the Lemon Polenta Cake twice, because the first one fell apart and I knew AC wouldn't be accepting no crappy fall aparty sub standard birthday cake. My tips:

Grease the top and bottom, and perhaps the sides too, of your baking parchment WELL.

I could only find a revolting-looking block of cooked polenta in the supermarket, so I grated this into the mix.

Cook long and slow. Don't worry if the top of the cake is looking burnt, as - obviously - this will turn out to be the bottom of the cake. Put some foil or a baking sheet over it if you're gettin worried it is turning to a cindery crisp.

Going to cook some of these things with my cute old daddio tomorrow and write about it, so will post that then.

Which will add up to far too many posts about this one book. Whatevs.

Teaching Dad To Cook Flapjack

Ok, ok I admit it: I've been in a great big strop with this blog. How does one throw a strop with a blog? Turns out it works much the same as throwing a big old ranty ass strop with a person, but the potential success rate of the cold shoulder method is even more pitiful. In fact it is zero, hence my shameful return this sunny afternoon.

I was in a strop because I kept trying to write this post and the damn thing just kept on not saving it and losing it, making me feel like I was back in my first year of uni again (well, strictly speaking I only got the hang of a computer in my fourth year).

But I managed to leave the house for my Vitamin D hit today and so have charged up the bit of my brain responsible for bothering to blog. And in future I am going to "copy all' frequently and then it should be ok. Fucking better be.

Anyway, here it is. The top bit is old, the bottom bit new.

Cookery books, as you and I both well know, are as much about selling lifestyles as teaching you about cooking and revealing wonderful new recipes. And thank god, or otherwise what would be the point in buying endless new ones which, depending on the season, year and trends all spout very similar recipes for greedy full fat risottos, beetroot and feta/goat's cheese salads and variations on the sausage casserole theme?

Take the idyllic image above of Burgh Island, a teeny tiny spit of land off Devon famous for its art deco hotel, which you'll have seen in Agatha Christie. Or was it a Poirot?

Well now, this is the view (give or take a bit of neck-craning and excellent eyesight) that greets Miranda Gardiner when she packs her three children onto the school bus each morning from her beachside home in the village of Bigbury-on-Sea. Jealous? Me too. Better make that steaming with envy and inconsolable yearning that my front door opens onto disgusting overstuffed bins, some light fly-tipping, perhaps a jaded skaghead or two and, as of last week, blustering, head-swelling hayfever.

And not only does Miranda live in this beautiful place, her family has a Scandinavian summer house and her youth was spent hanging out in Sydney with her first love Diggory (now her husband), breaking into open air swimming pools for illicit swims and feasting on the sort of fresh, bountiful produce Brits pretend they're moving down under for when they know damn well they'll revert to the fried chicken habit two weeks after landing.

And yes, she's stuck out in the sticks, but that means she's surrounded by organic farmers and perfect little markets.

I hope this doesn't sound too much like sour grapes, because my intention here is to say what a lovely book Teaching Dad To Cook Flapjack (her first) is, both to accompany a good British summer if we have one, and imagine the good life and cook accordingly if we don't.

Anyway, your luck's in because since starting this blog first time around I've actually had chance to make some of the recipes. I'm a bit gutted I didn't take a picture of the beautiful Lime, Basil and Mandarin salad I made yesterday to go with my roast chicken. You'll have to imagine its lovely bright green and orange colours. I couldn't actually find any mandarins, so I substituted with an orange and half a pink grapefruit (even more exciting colour), and added some mint along with the basil because I had just bought some and I like it and it goes really well with basil. Then you sprinkle on some toasted pine nuts and a tablespoon of sesame seeds - and cucumber batons, which I almost forgot - then an amazing dressing of one tbsp of caster sugar mixed with one tbsp light soy sauce, juice of a lime and salt and pepper. Mmm.

I have Miranda's Green Tart waiting in the fridge for someone to come over and help me eat it. It is lots of fresh green herbs and pumpkin seeds stirred into a mix of two egg yolks, two eggs and 300ml double cream, but I've gone a bit easier on the cream.

So far the pastry case looks good. I try and use a different recipe every time I make pastry (see Rhubarb Tart and Madchester Onion Tart) to try and find one that works consistently for me. Miranda's is 180g plain white flour, sifted, whizzed in a food processor with 90g cold butter, cubed. When it's all blended and crumbly, add in two or three tbsps water to bring it together. Pick it up into a ball and chill for 30 mins. Then roll out (for 20cm tin), bake blind for 15 mins (putting something in to keep the damn stuff down...beads, chickpeas, rice, a saucepan), prick and bake for a further five, then slosh in your mix and pop it in for another 25 - 30 mins. All at 190/gas 5.

The pastry came together easily enough, but after I messed up the first attempt to roll it big enough, at the very last moment, it was quite tricky to keep in one piece from thereon, so the result is a patchwork affair, but has held together on cooking and isn't too thick.

Tomorrow I'm baking Caramel Salties for my nephew Olly's birthday. I think that's how he spells his name, it seems to change all the time. He and his sister also change the name of their guinea pigs at a whim, which I think is a bit mean. Olly is greedy but doesn't like overly sweet things. These are a sort of brownie cake and ode to posh salty chocolates, which I love. I'll let you know how they go down.

There now, that wasn't too painful, was it?

At least with Jamie we have some consistency

I've been away for a while. I think I'm back now. And I can't think of a better way to tend to the gloom of the first morning under Tory leadership than with an ode to Jamie.

Pictured above is the woman who taught me to share, give and have a social conscience. Yet she supports a party which does not have the same values. I can only blame it on misinformation, since my Mum and Dad are far more responsible citizens than most lefties I know. Fact. Apart from with those huge naughty burners in the backyard.

To be honest, the dude (Jamie, not Cameron) annoys the hell out of me. Yet the man's recipes do work, which cannot be said for every cook writing books, and he does good things, which cannot be said of many people at all.

Actually I didn't like him at all until all the Fifteen, school meals and Ministry of Food stuff. All that Naked Chef "Wurrrgghhhhhh, throw a wodge of that stripper hot chilli on yer bangers luv" bullshit was almost impossible to bear.

Yet I was proved wrong. (Yes - you have that in print). People can knock him for not managing to turn the entire country from turkey twizzlers to quinoa salad overnight, but he showed what could be done and taught a lot of folk a lot of stuff about cooking and health, which it's now their choice to ignore.

Better get on with it. Once he agrees to cook some la-di-dah banquet for the Cam-Vampires I'll have to strike him from my favourites.

So: the admirable Cook with Jamie (Michael Joseph, £26) is his comprehensive attempt at teaching anyone already interested in food what's what and how to cook it. A contemporary Delia's Complete Cookery Course (BBC Books, £12.99) if you will.

It is like an encyclopedia of food, but only the food you really want to eat. It covers all the basics for anyone who wants to take their cooking up a notch - what equipment to buy, how to understand flavours and textures and how to shop, which is particularly handy where fish and meat come in.

It includes salads, pasta, gnocchi and risotto, meat, fish, vegetables, desserts and some bits and bobs. He also gives some good chat on knowing where your flesh hailed from, which apparently cannot be said enough times. Even my flatmate, who doesn't eat red meat on account of it being made from animal, buys the cheapest misery chicken she can find. I think I'm close to giving up chicken and tuna entirely, then I could just announce this when people are cooking for me instead of feeling sick while eating the misery chicken dinner at the thought of all those poor, tortured battery chicks and wise old Mr Turtle who lost his life over a can of skipjack tuna.

I digress. But believe me, I am close to tears looking at his Black Angel Tagliarini with Scallops and Clam Chowder, Essex Girl-Style (Ah, the twattery knows not its own bounds. Give it up Jamie), knowing there is but smoked mackerel and eggs in the fridge.

I had to give up the cooking btw, as I was spending all my days cooking instead of earning money, and it turned out this wasn't a sustainable way of life.

Both the above recipes sound a bit posh, and indeed they are, but overall the recipes in here aren't. They just come out a bit special because Jamie bothers to up the ante on flavours. If you can bothered to put in a tiny bit of effort, you will be rewarded. Take this Asparagus, Mint & Lemon Risotto for example. It's the perfect spring dish. I make Nigella's Lemon Risotto often but it is much heavier and greedier and doesn't cash in on the yummy spring greens we have right now.

Ah, news just in that Theresa May is to be home secretary in this ludicrous coalition government. I am actually pleased with this. As pleased, at least, as one can be by a token woman in an otherwise shady set-up. And she is the home secretary for fuck's sake, a big job, so I will not resort to mentioning her name and her shoes in the same breath, like everybody else out there.

Jamie makes it clear that it only takes a little leap to swap your failsafe pasta sauce recipe for something more inspiring, such as Summertime tagliarini, with pine nuts, lemon and parsley. He makes salads exciting and desirable, demystifies cooking fish and the veg section will deter you from ever relying on plain boiled again.

There's advice on freezing and guides to herbs and spices.

I'm not sure Thatcher, were she still in her right mind, would know what to make of Jamie. On the one hand she would surely celebrate a society where flush youngsters can spunk cash on prime cuts of meat and four different herbs for a midweek meal. On the other hand, it might well all seem a bit, well, foreign.

Jamie is capitalising on the hard work of older chefs who began introducing the diverse flavours he uses to the UK years ago. If Delia encouraged us to consider pasta and Tiramisu staple dishes, largely thanks to Elizabeth David and Anna del Conte, then Jamie owes much to them and to Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey too, for providing an education on Middle Eastern and Asian flavours. In Jamie's hands they are normalised and feel at home on anyone's kitchen table.

These inspirations are as evident in the meat and fish dishes as they are in the salads, pastas and risottos (there is instruction on making your own pasta; given the easy availability of quality pasta, dry and fresh, if you're considering this I'd advise you forget about it and read this instead). Look for the Roast leg of lamb with aubergines and onions and the Pot-roasted Poussins Agro Dolce.

Time for a few pics. I pitched up at my mum's a few weeks ago dried out like salty olive left in a jar all on its own from a hen weekend in the nearby peaks, and sat and watched her prepare Slow-roasted pork belly with the sweetest braised fennel without lifting a finger to help. She said she didn't want me to and I think she was probably telling the truth.

Here's dad, ready to carve. Yes, he does indeed resemble both Danny Alexander, our new Scotland minister, and Charles Kennedy, the boozy former Lib Dem leader, but I'm not sure he likes either man.

And here's mum's brand new nine trillion pound seventeen oven Aga wot cooked the meat so slowly and meltingly

And here's some on my plate, lit up by the March sun

I was about to commend Jamie's website for its archives of every single one of his recipes, but we appear to have come a cropper with Pot-roasted Poussins Agro Dolce. Which is sort of good, because you'll have to go and buy the book, and all profits go to Fifteen. If you were stuck with just this book, and lacked any sort of imagination to think up dishes yourself, you wouldn't get bored for a long time.

He has too many other books to go through on this post, but don't get the US one. Even if you enjoyed the series, the book is not good.

I'm enjoying Jamie's romp through Europe on Channel 4 at the moment. Tonight he hit the French Pyrenees, uncovering the contented rural communities we might still have here had Thatcher not broken all our grèves with her iron fist.

Heston's In Search Of Perfection Or Absurd Recipes and satisfying Reading

When I began this blog, as one of my four followers may, or may not, care to remember, the point was to write about food writing.

Derivative, yes. But incredibly enjoyable.

I have since realised a couple of things:

1. I've been doing far too much cooking for anyone's liking.

2. I need to focus more on the delightful writing, and name my blogs accordingly for ease of reference in the future.

I might go back and rename some but I'm not quite decided on that.

I am decided though that making all these damn cakes and tarts has made me incredibly porky so from tomorrow I am going to give up food entirely and survive on a diet of food writing alone (she writes with one hand clutching a pie).

I will keep you posted on whether this works or turns out to be as impossible and dangerous as it sounds.

For now a frollick through Heston Blumenthal's In Search Of Perfection (Bloomsbury; £25) from 2006, which tied in with his TV series.

Look at the photo above. Look long and hard. No cheating.

You guessed correctly: it is a pleasing pile of perfectly cooked steak. A good fatty cut just as I like them (always go ribeye if you can; fillet is for girls and the clueless) and pink in the middle. I'd actually go more bloody, but that's just me.

So who'd have thunk it took 30 hours of cooking time, an oven thermometer, digital probe and blowtorch to prepare what takes most people a few minutes on a decent griddle pan?

It has to be Heston.

The conceit of three Michelin stars and Fat Duck famed Heston's In Search of Perfection is that he picks eight British classics - the food we eat most, not necessarily of British provenance - and goes in search of the ultimate example of each dish: eight earnest foodie adventures to track down the best ingredients and finest cooking methods so that we comfort-food loving civilians can cook up the ne plus ultra dogs bollocks version of our favourite food.

Or not. Because even though I swore to myself I would have a bash at at least one of the eight - Roast Chicken & Roast Potatoes, Pizza, Bangers & Mash, Steak, Spaghetti Bolognese, Fish & Chips, Black Forest Gateau, Treacle Tart & Ice Cream, even the bangers and spag bog are so darn complicated I decided any attempt to emulate Heston ran the risk of making me a very angry little cook indeed.

Instead I just revelled in his attention to detail, taking solace in the fact I'm not the sort of pedant who would faff about with these absurdly complicated recipes, which call for 50 Euro chickens (the famous Bresse chickens, mmmm), paint guns and soda siphons.

But what Heston has done here, in a book which is essentially just the obligatory spin off from the TV show, is rake up a little food history - what we Brits love eating and why - and remould it according to contemporary tastes and availability, and of course daft don't-try-this-at-home techno whizzery jiggery.

This makes it a great read for greedy types (though may I suggest you skip the actual cooking method bits).

Yet I'm not entirely with Heston's choices. I do love a pork out on proper fish and chips and pizza is my favourite "junk" food, but seriously, who would make this stuff at home?

No one, unless you're trying to entertain kids by scattering ingredients on a ready made pizza base.

And no crumble? Or fruit pie of any sort? But we do have a black forest gateau?

Anyone who enjoyed a slice or seven of this cake in the eighties or nineties knows full well it came out of a Sara Lee box, which itself had come out of the freezer.

Where is the roast beef and yorkshire pudding?

I am guessing the great man corrects these omissions in the follow up book, but what he does deserve a highly commended for is creating a hefty scoop of ultimate food porn. It's ideal as by-the-side-of-the-bed gluttony, split as it is into the eight self-contained adventures.

What's more, In Search of Perfection is as close as I'm going to get to the afterglow of a family Sunday roast chicken and treacle tart on this boring Tuesday afternoon, punctuated only by some crappy crudites and the low fat and low fun dinner I'm going to eat now, at six pm, because those crudites for some reason left me feeling rather hollow.

Will this rhubarb tart bring me eternal happiness then? (I did make three just in case)

not yet cooked but already delicious-looking

I'm not sure if now is the right time to write about rhubarb. It is in season, sure. And it's as beautiful as ever, bright pink as pink as pink candy canes and as sour and sharp as Dorothy Parker.

But Easter is over. The whole long weekend whistled down the wind. I'm clean out of chocolate and still no sign of the Messiah.

I am hoping that writing about rhubarb will return some cheer to an otherwise gloomy reality.

Rhubarb picking was not one of the favourite jobs in my family home. It was one of the least favourite jobs, because one knew while picking that the rhubarb would be baked in a crumble and eaten every Sunday for the foreseeable.

We were too little to know that rhubarb is a right proper treat. When it doesn't grow in one's own garden, a bundle of those stiff glinting canes is manna from heaven. That's how I feel about them now anyway and wrote about it in The Independent here.

I'm not ashamed to say I never made of the suggested recipes. But the lines from Monty Python's Rhubarb Tart Song must have hung around in my subconscious somewhere because that's just what I found myself making this weekend.

Apparently,

"Eternal happiness is rhubarb tart

A rhubarb what? A rhubarb tart!

A Jean Paul who? A Jean Paul Sartre!

Eternal happiness is rhubarb tart"

I chose Oliver Peyton's Rhubarb and Custard Tart from Observer Food Monthly February 2009.

As he didn't specify a pastry recipe, I decided to borrow from Lucas Hollweg's Blood Orange Tart recipe in The Times, substituting Stork for butter, which was a complete sloppy disaster. It also meant I didn't struggle on with the intention of making mini rhubarb and custard, blood orange and lemon tarts to be sliced up and served reconfigured on the plate as a whole tart of three flavours.

A bit Masterchef yes, and a lot over ambitious and stupid.

The tarts did bring me happiness, though I can't say whether it will be eternal or not. Nonetheless I highly recommend making the effort. Buy in some pastry or stick to your own trusted recipe.

Beautiful Becca seems to be enjoying her's at least

I assisted my friend AC in making this Rhubarb and Ginger Fool last week, also from Hollweg, who I rate very highly. I helped her by zesting a few oranges and sprinkling it onto the tray of rhubarb the night before her dinner. See below.

AC tells me it was a huge success but at the time she was worried the amount of orange going into it was going to overpower the lovely rhubarb. AC does all things properly and cooking is no excuse. She would not be fucking about trying to resurrect sloppy pastry. Uh-uh.

She's also rather amazing and treated me to a posh birthday dinner on Saturday at Marcus Wareing's two Michelin-starred caff at The Berkeley. I love her for many reasons but her ability to chat food with passion, precision and unflinching dedication is high up there.

Her commitment to good food is partly because she is partly French (the hints of Northern European in her are evident in the zeal with which she falls about fried food). I also suspect it was ramped up a notch or seven the time she made a crumble with salt instead of sugar. God that was funny. I wasn't even there and it still makes me titter.

You can read with envy all the luscious nosh we noshed on Sunday here (except the main was venison with the cutest mini beetroots and sour cream) and I'll highlight the Pan fried foie gras, yoghurt, rhubarb muffin top, ginger crunch, thyme cress. Here it is -

Oh how we laughed at the idea we needed extra muffin tops, and would pay top dollar for the privilege. And obviously eating foie gras is several steps beyond my ethical interests. Who's that coughing?

Next week I'm going to make Riverford's Rhubarb & Cardamom Fool, but instead of the fool serve the rhubarb compote with my secret white cheese mousse recipe, which I will un-secret for you. It doesn't sound wildly exciting, but boy, it is.