Roasted fennel with yoghurt dip

1.  Cut a fennel bulb lenghtwise in four and baste with some olive oil.
   
2. Heat a ribbed skillet and slowly fry the fennel on both sides.
   
3. In the meantime, crush three cloves of garlic, mix with a few tablespoonfuls of full-fat Turkish yoghurt, and season with black pepper, salt or fish sauce, and a generous amount of chopped mint or parsley.
   
   
4. Serve as the main for lunch, a starter for dinner, or an entry for a tapas feast.

Mole con chocolate y chipotle: Mexican chocolate and chipotle stew recipe

I am not entirely sure how I came up with this. I knew of the chocolate stew, the concept pops up here and there in Mexican cookbooks and food blogs. But then when it came down to cooking it, adding the tangy, smoky pepper known as chipotle, just seemed like the most natural thing to do. After all, both are Mexico's gifts to the world. My gut did not lie. The stew came out luscious and scrumptious, definitely chocolatey, yet savoury and spicy.

So here goes the recipe:

1. Briefly marinate bite-size chunks of organic free-range beef in freshly ground black pepper and fish sauce. Pat the beef dry with kitchen rolls and fry in a cast-iron pot with a bit of oil. Do it in batches, if necessary, to make sure that the meat gets nicely browned, instead of getting steamed in its own juice. Remove to a plate once done.
   
2. Slowly sautee crushed garlic, finely chopped onions and celery in the oil until golden brown.
   
3. Add the meat, red wine to cover, bring to a boil and let simmer until tender. 
   
4. Add a nice chunk of good quality chocolate (or pure cocoa powder) and some chipotle peppers to taste, as spicy as you prefer. Let bubble away slowly for another 10-15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
   
5. Serve on top of steamed rice and beans, with red wine to wash it all down. As with all stews, it tastes better the next day, but also benefits from sitting an hour or so on the counter before being served.

Mole con chocolate y chipotle - Chocolate and chipotle beef stew recipe

Nettle soup, done well

It's again this time of the year when foodies and those aligned with them start cooking foraged weeds. What used to be (really) poor man's grub, these days is a social marker of the educated classes. Now, I've seen and tried and number of nettle soups this year and, I hate to say that, people you need to get a grip. Just boiling leaves with random veggies does not do the trick, or any trick for that matter. That's what my 85-year-old farmer uncle cooks for his piglets, literally. Nettle has its own special flavour that, if served to humans, needs to be cherished, flaunted and taken proper care of.

So here I will share the proper nettle soup recipe, as it's been cooked in my family for at least three generations.

1. Pick a bunch of young nettle leaves, they need to be light green and with no flowers forming.
2. Remove the stems and rinse well in cold water.
3. Sautee in butter on a low heat.
4. Add chopped shallots or onions. Cook until soft.
5. Add a can or two of chopped tomatoes with juice. If too thick, add water.
6. Beat a nice large biodynamic egg and add into the boiling soup, as you stir it, making sure it comes out stringy, not cloudy.
7. Let it bubble away for a little while to let the tastes mingle.
8. Salt and pepper in moderation. Sprinkle a few drops of fish sauce to enhance the flavour.

This recipe balances the sourness from the tomatoes and the sweetness of sauteed onions to give the nettle a proper stage to show off its zing.

Old wives' tales (that are quite likely true):  

• Nettles are supposed to stimulate your liver to cleanse blood. 

• It is not recommend to eat too much nettle soup, not more than 2-3 times a year, naturally in the spring.

Split market: exactly where Diocletian used to grow cabbage

On the sunny Dalmatian coast of Croatia is where the Roman emperor Diocletian famously retired to grow cabbages. Inside and around his former palace sprawls Split's fresh market...

 

Splitsko tržište

Vietnamese beef and lemon grass soup: Canh Thịt Bò Xáo Sả

ietnamese cuisine is pure poetry in the pot. Their soups alone are celebrations of agriculture, flavours and wholesomeness. Don't believe me? Try this recipe: beef and lemon grass soup (Canh Thịt Bò Xáo Sả).

1. Finely slice some lean organic outdoor-bred beef and marinate in fish sauce, brown cane sugar and black pepper.
2. Sweat some chopped shallots in vegetable oil.
3. Add some pressed garlic, one crushed and chopped stalk of lemon grass and the meat. Gently sautee until the meat is cooked.
4. Add water and bring to a simmer.
5. Add some bean sprouts (and some noodle, if so desired). Simmer until ready to eat.
6. Serve with a sprinkle of chopped green coriander.

Kimia dates - best dates in the world

here are dates, nice dates and then there are great dates. At the lower side of the spectrum are those dry, unexciting dates from your local grocer or supermarket. Then there are dates with someone cute, kind and funny, who makes your heart skip a beat. And then there are Kimia dates: fragrant like wine, lusciously sweet, soft like set honey. As a lot of great food (and good people), they hail from a country from the US Axis of Evil, Iran. And truely so, Iranian gastronomy does sound like something favoured by very wicked folks: rose petal tea, chicken stewed in pomegranate molasses, saffron rice and black caviar. Yes, and Kimia dates for the dessert.

Clams, spinach and butternut squash soup recipe

  nspired by Korean jogae-tang clam soup, I made a few adjustments with some fantabulous results. 

1. Slow-fry some crushed garlic in some groundnut oil until golden.
   
2. Add clams, diced butternut squash, sprinkle with some fish sauce and fry a little.
   
3. Add water and bring to a simmer.
   
4. When all clams have opened, add roughly chopped spinach and simmer a little more.
   
5. Season with black pepper and fish sauce.

Lietuva salad - the latest in culinary nationalism

henever I try to cook Russian, my uncertain memories of what it should taste like tend to mix with the mishmash layers of culinary influences I have accumulated through the decades of living away from my erstwhile mothership. I don’t even know if any Russian actually eats it but for me this particular salad contains all the edible staples of Russianness so many are busy resurrecting these days: turnips, carrots, linen seed.

Ironically, it goes by the name of Lietuva salad because it also happens to be of the same colours as the Lithuanian flag. In fact, I am planning on suggesting the Lithuanian embassy here to adopt it as their national dish, kind of like Colombians did with their bandeja paisa.

 

Since I started my 5:2 regimen half year ago I find myself making it every now and then. First of all, it is super easy to make. Then it does contain both a modest quantity of easily digestible calories as well as a lot of crude fibre to help stave off hunger on my fast days. And, last but not least, it does taste mighty good, especially considering the bare minimum of the effort and cost it requires.

So here how it goes:

1. Grate some turnip and a couple of carrots.
2. Chop some parsley
3. Add some linen seed, a sprinkle of fleur de sel and a dash of pumpkin seed oil.
4. Mix vigorously by hand squeezing the juices.
5. Serve with a piece of rye bread.

Burns supper: haggis and deep-fried Mars bar

ondon is one veritable "travel dining without moving" destination. If you wait patiently enough dangling your feet in the flow, all cuisines of the world will come sailing by you. Just grab and enjoy.

It has been six years since I started thinking of going to Scotland. Besides the obvious tourist attractions, I was naturally curious about Scottish cuisine; so much the more that it did not seem likely to come across it anywhere outside its country of origin, even in London.

Well, turns out I was wrong. The time to enjoy Scottish food could not have come at a more appropriate time: the Robert Burns night, the celebration of the life and works of Scotland's dearest son, an 18th-century poet apparently responsible for, by crude estimate, half the Scottish poetry out there.

The centrepiece of what is known as the Burns supper, to which I was most kindly invited, was haggis. Contrary to the belief evidently widespread on the Stateside, it is not an animal but a sheep's stomach stuffed with chopped offal, oatmeal, onions and spices, boiled or baked in the oven. To many it may sound a very odd choice for a celebration meal, yet, just like the rumours of the rampancy of sheep-shagging in Wales, the many a negative review of haggis I had heard proved grossly exaggerated. Served with mashed potatoes and turnips ('tatties and neeps'), and traditionally washed down with copious amounts of whiskey, it is a straightforward, hearty and filling fare, a perfect match for the cold winter weather out there (the Robert Burns day falls on the 15th of January). 

Customarily, an eight-verse poem would be recited over the haggis before carving  it, we did with but the very first one, yet pronounced in an authentic Edinburgh accent (which made the meal ever more delicious):

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

By way of dessert, we partook in another Scottish tradition known as "deep frying ye ole bonnie Mars bar". It is very much what it says on the tin: dipping pieces of Mars bar into batter and deep frying them in hot oil. Whoever came up with this must have been a big fan of hot fat and sugar. Now I am the last one to oppose to sweet and high-calorie fat things, but some sacrifices are worth it and some are not. The hollandaise sauce is worth every whopping dollop of butter it is made from. Japanese tempura, feathery and crispy, is a highlight of one's meal as well as easy on the stomach. All the sugar you put into a rhubarb pie pays back manifold in terms of deep sense of satisfaction that hits you the second the pie hits your palate. Deep-fried Mars bars have none of those redeeming qualities. It is just as gooey, repulsively sweet and un-chocolatey as it is in its original form and shape. 

P.S. Apologies for the picture quality. I said it before and I will say it now: smartphones are shit as phones, shit as computers and shit as cameras. Good luck chasing your fave gadget's latest version.

Best Chardonnay ever: Quantum, Domaine Boyar, Bulgaria

ou know how tricky finding a good Chardonnay can be. That particular sought-after Chardonnay flavour, when tipped just a notch off the right balance can vary from obnoxious, as in many a New World brand too ripe from too much sun, to uninspiringly faint like in a French one from a bad year. Getting it just right requires a lot of skill and, even more importantly, time-proven knowledge of what a good wine should actually be like.

The only thing amiss in this Bulgarian Chardonnay brought back from a trip to, surprise, Bulgaria was its somewhat incongruous name, Quantum. Everything else was utter perfection: the balance of acidity, the understated smell, the bisquity nose, the round finish. In fact, practically every Bulgarian wine I have sampled was superlative or very close to it, reminiscent of the quality consistency and Olde-Worlde elegance of, who would have ever though, Chilean wines. At least when it comes t wines, the media-propagated image of horse-cart-riding and cabbage-munching uncouth and dim Eastern Europeans could not be farther from reality.

We paired it with a plain boiled Canadian lobster for one our traditional welcome-the-Americans dinners. Last two years we have dropped the "turf" part from the menu as an outdated and not really such a wise tradition and it works just fine.

Saffron rice.. wthout saffron

ave you ever been frustrated with saffron like I am? The pesky bugger may give that sought-after flavour to your Persian rice, yet it is so finicky in handling. It is never really enough to offer an ample, full-bodied flavour, it needs to be pre-chopped and pre-soaked before you even dare to use it, then the flavour so easily escapes when cooking, and to boot it does not even colour the rice uniformly, leaving it instead tantalisingly spotted here and there. 

Luckily, by pure chance, I have discovered a mighty alternative to it, giving everything we have been begging saffron to deliver for so long, as of yet to no avail. Ta-dam, here enters the perfect couple: dry dill and turmeric powder. By some strange twist of fate, when paired together, they produce the flavour identical to saffron, at a fraction of the cost and effort, The colour too, albeit lacking saffron's reddish notes, with the addition of dill's dark green acquires a depth, elegantly finishing off with the golden brown of the tahdeg (caramelised crust). 

I also truncate the elaborate Persian procedure in favour of the more  straightforward, yet nonetheless effective Asian steaming method. Few more tricks that make this saffronless saffron rice a hit with my discerning guests.

• Add butter generously. I use about 70 g for 11 handfuls of dry rice. Butter is good for you: French people eat a lot of it and don't get fat. Junk food, snacking and eating on the run  - that's what makes you fat, not butter.
  
• Add a dash of sea salt. Without salt, your rice will come out bland and boring. I use fish sauce because it gives an additional level of depth to the flavour, thanks to the naturally occurring MSG, which is not bad for you.
  
• When the rice has been brought to a boil, stir it up to make sure that the dill is evenly spread. Very important: do that while the water has not yet been completely absorbed into the rice. Thus you will ensure that the rice does not turn into a solid slab, allowing for passages for the steam to travel through it, which is how the whole shebang actually gets cooked.
  
  
• Once ready, fluff up the rice. At the bottom, you will find a deliciously caramelised crust, tahdeg. Serve it separately, it tastes like savoury cake. Don't drag our feet though: it's only good while it's warm. To make your rice fit for a celebration table, the Nowruz only being a couple of months away, mix in some finely sliced dried apricots or sultanas as well as pistachio or almond flakes.

Pkhali - Georgian answer to hommous (ფხალი)

 

hiz together in a blender:

1. A can of red beans (although my Mom would also use nearly anything veggie-like: boiled cabbage leaves, freshly boiled spinach, cooked beet roots, fried aubergines, etc.)
2. A handful of walnuts.
3. 1-3 cloves of garlic.
4. Half a handful of coarsely chopped parsley or coriander leaves.
5. A glug of olive oil.
6. Some salt (as I do, I use fish sauce)
7. A generous sprinkle of khmeli-suneli (ხმელი სუნელი), an indispensable Georgian mix of dried herbs, which is best made at home as supermarket versions are invariably inferior. Simply mix equal shares of dried mint, basil, marjoram, parsley, oregano as well as bay leaf powder, ground coriander seeds and black pepper. If you can get hold of dried hyssop and fenugreek leaves, by all means add those too.

Spread some on grilled bread and decorate with a sprinkle of pomegranate sauce (sold in Turkish shops as nar ekşisi) and finely chopped coriander leaves.

How to cook bulots (whelks) the French way

 have always bought bulots (whelks) in France. Farmed mainly in Normandy, these gastropods are well-fed, lush and always sold cooked - or so I thought as I had never bought them outside France. Until one late London afternoon I stumbled upon them in Brixton Market. Just when I lined up baguette, mayonnaise and white wine and got ready to eat them, quelle horreur, they turned out to be raw!

So, I had to add another survival skill to my collection: cooking whelks. This is how you do it.

1. First of all, soak your whelks in cold water for at least an hour. Tht way they will release their droppings into the water so you won't have to eat them.
2. For half a kilo of raw whelks you will need two litres of water, 50 g of salt, one bay leaf, a prig of thyme, a teaspoonful of white vinegar and a generous sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper.
3. Bring everything to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Allow to cool down in the resulting court bouillon.
5. Serve, just as I did, with home-made mayonnaise, baguette and white wine. This time I flavoured my mayonnaise with a paste made out of crushed anchovies, garlic and walnuts mixed with some Modena vinegar. A Parisian would hyperventilate and swoon but my Languedoc brethren and sistren will sure understand me!

How to improve hommous

 am not that dedicated to make hommous from scratch. However, the supermarket variety is just too dull and basic, the price of becoming Britain's favourite cupboard commodity.

A few add-ons I came up with never fail to land me adoration from my lunch/dinner guests. I am going to share my little secrets with you today. This is what I add to hummus to give it the extra zing-boom-bang:

• 1 tbsp of za'atar (Levantine thyme)
  
• a dash of Persian lime powder (failing that, lime juice)
• a glug of extra vrigin olive oil
• a sprinkle of garlic powder
• a wee tad of fish sauce for the naturally occurring MSG.

The quantities indicated are not precise because you need to arrage everything to your own heart's content. Good luck!

Samphire (also okra, fern and bamboo shoots) kimchi

he only reason why Koreans do not make kimchi out of  samphire is because samphire only grows in North-Western Europe. Should it favour East Asia too, I have no doubt it would have long been part of the gorgeous sanchae or sansai, wild vegetables commonly used to make pickles in Korea and Japan.

Last month I decided to correct this Mother Nature's oversight and made kimchi out of Norfolk samphire. Fresh, crunchy and naturally briny, it is perfectly complemented by ginger and pepper. Just follow your regular kimchi recipe, but use samphire instead of cabbage or daikon. Depending on how much you make, the amount of  ingredients will vary, so I will rather give proportions than exact quantities. You should make enough kimchi base paste to smother the main ingredient comfortably.

 Kimchi base ingredients:

1. equal quantities of minced garlic, fish sauce and minced onion.  
2. double quantities of rice porridge and gochugaru (hot pepper flakes, can be substituted with gochujang)
3. quarter quantity of minced ginger. 

Procedure:

1. Rinse samphire well and remove the woody parts. Cut into equal pieces.
2. Mix the kimchi base ingredients. Fold the samphire into the mixture.
3. Cover with a lid and leave to ferment at a room temperature for 24 hours. When bubbles start showing, the process has kicked off. Move to a cold place, ideally a few degrees above zero degree centigrade. A few days is normally enough to complete fermentation: keep checking until you are satisfied with the taste.

P.S. I also use bamboo shoots, okra, string beans, turnip, daikon (mooli) and fiddlehead fern (warabi or gosari) for my kimchi preserves. Bean sprouts are rather delicate in texture so they can be simply mixed with the excess of juice from already made kimchi and left overnight in the fridge. Kimchi out of bean sprouts and samphire do not hold long, so finish yours within a week or so.

Fields: Mediterranean flight of fancy in Hackney Central

he beauty of London is that here we have things that would never happen elsewhere. A combination of cultural lassez-faire attitudes, somewhat questionable excess of money, and diverse and dynamic populations snowballs into a milieu conducive to craziest, fanciest, most daring ideas and enterprises. 

Fields, an ostensibly unassuming restaurant in Hackney Central I visited the other day, is a shiny example of that. A brainchild of a Turkish Marxist historian passionate about food, it boasts a Mediterranean fusion menu craftily executed by a Maltese chef and a French sous-chef, and expeditiously delivered by a charming Spanish waitress. The effortlessly exquisite and refreshingly affordable wine list contains the best of all continents, save Antarctica. As I went through it, I noticed Argentina's vertiginously fragrant Torrontés, Chile's unwaveringly reliable Chilean Sauvignon Blanc as well as the best of Entre Deux Mer's whites and reds. Apparently, it was put together by another academic foodie, a Croatian/Bosnian lecturer from SOAS. Great food does take an intellectual effort.

A tableful of meze/tapas we shared between us proved a dinner in its own right:

• smoked fish platter: salmon and swordfish;
• smoked salmon stuffed with ricotta;
• beef carpaccio with sliced artichokes and herbs.

The mains included:

• whole chargrilled seabass marinated and stuffed with mint, fresh tomato, olive oil & lemon;
  
• what they claimed to be Salade Niçoise turned out to be a huge chargrilled fresh tuna steak on a bed of French beans, fresh tomatoes, olives, peppers, new potatoes, lettuce, red onions and boiled egg with wholegrain mustard vinaigrette;
  
• whole grilled sea bream arrived blanketed with stir-fried peeled shrimp and underscored with the chef's own creation, strawberry-and-mint sauce.

Surprisingly, these seeming culinary acrobatics yielded a very wholesomely delectable fare, with no whiff of Nouvelle Cuisine's studied trickery. The portions were generous and it took us an extra effort and extended time to tuck it all in. All fish dishes came with copious  amounts of  fresh lemons, nice  touch. Just when we thought we were about to meet Mr. Creosote's fate, a dessert sampler platter arrived, probably to illustrate the owner's leftist persuasion with an example of duped masses perishing from excesses of consumerism. How very decadently thoughtful!

Clams Breton style, recipe

Palourdes à la bretonne, or clams Breton style. Palourdes is the closest French word I could find to call these clams (they would be called coques, if they were ribbed). In fact, they are Vietnamese natives, known locally as Nghêu Bến Tre, quite a mouthful, so let's stick with palourdes.

This is also one of my improved recipes: normally, Breton style would mean aux lardons et oignons, with bacon and onions. However, a  long afternoon in St. Mâlo, Brittany, spent looking for mussels cooked that style, proved that locals have never heard of anything of the kind. I did not give up and went on to elaborate on what Breton style cooking should be like, which is how all "traditional authentic national cusines" were invented in the first place anyway.

So here's my take on nationalist mythopoetics:

1. Sautee a head of crushed garlic and three chopped shallots in butter.
   
2. Add 2 sliced leeks, a generous handful of Chantenay carrots, diced smoked bacon and stir-fry until haf ready.
   
3. Add 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of clams and continue to cook until the clams start opening.
   
4. Add a jar of double cream and a glass of dry Breton cider.  Picardian blonde beer or dry white wine can do too, although it will deliver a chink in the armour of this dish's authenticity.
   
5. Stir well, gently bring to a boil and simmer with the lid closed until the smell of alcohol goes. Did I say it: remember to stir every now  and then.
   
6. Douse liberally with freshly ground black pepper. No salt necessary as the clam juice and bacon are salty enough.
   
7. To be followed by a nice Breton dance:

Black capelin roe, aka masago (まさご）

ot just the only credible clean-up of the financial crisis aftermath comes from Iceland, but also Lidl's own take on faux caviar at a humble £1.49 a jar. Despite this review by The Daily Mail's own McDonald's sampling guru India Sturgis, capelin roe, known in Japan as masago, could be a good introduction to the world of fishy delicacies for the uninitiated. 

It could be, because, probably in a bid to "posh it up", Norprawn, the manufacturer, decided to "upgrade" the natural yellowish-pink colour to blueish black with the help of no less than four chemical additives: E141 (chlorophyllin), E150d (sulfite ammonia caramel), E151 (Billiant Black BN, banned in many countires) and E163 (anthocyanin). With the accompanying stabilisers E422 (glycerol, previously use as automotive antifreeze) and E412 (guar gum) and preservatives E202 (potassium sorbate) and E211 (sodium benzoate), this product contains a whole constellation of industrial  ingredients to make this "luxury-on-the-budget" offering a veritable chav fodder.

Lidl is truly a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, they offer solid cooking basics of very consistent quality for half the ongoing price. On the other hand, half of what they carry is plain vile and fit to make sure consumers won't live until retirement. Caveat emptor.