Recently in Ingredients Category

It's Jersey Royal time but not all is not well in the kingdom of the popular tattie. Over the past few years, the trend in Jersey has been to move away from the traditional method of farming, which involved covering the ground with seaweed to a less labour intensive method where phosphates are sprayed onto the fields. Connoisseurs among you will have noted the lack of flavour in the past couple of years. However, there is at least one farm where seaweed is still used to fertilize and flavour the potatoes and where they are still picked daily by hand and immediately dispatched to wholesalers. Chefs keen to get hold of these rare specimens should contact Chef Direct on 01275 474707, while punters looking for them will have to make the trek to the company's Taste shop in Barrow Guernsey near Bristol.

It's getting near festival season. Will you be gathering round a campfire with a man called Racoon and his bonga drums at Glasto? Breaking up some popper-high sixteen year-olds from a bout of knuckle-meet-face introductions at Reading? Dressing up like a six foot stick of rock at Bestival and crying because your parents still don't know the truth? Or will you, like party livewires Yoko Ono, Seal and Chris Martin (pictured left ushering a journalist who said his grandmother "liked Parachutes more than La Viva La Vida" towards the exit) be savouring the real talk of festival season. Yes, it's that time of the year in which we - and by "we" I mean people who walk down the Sainsbury's meat aisle just as a short-cut to the soya milk shelf - celebrate everything non-meat based. Hurrah - or at the very least a weak-limbed air punch - for National Vegetarian Week (sponsored by Cauldron Foods)!

Despite the wholly unfounded and snobbishly closet cynicism I'll be listing some great veggie recipes, veggie book reviews and anything else veggie related this week. To check if there is anything gonig on near you, visit the Vegetarian Society's website here.

 

That I can't promise I'm afraid. They certainly will have been picked by someone, whether or not it was by gamboling nymphs I can't say. But take one look at the dish pictured (from Fulham Road  rstaurant Feng Sushi) and you probably wouldn't mind if they'd been picked by a 30 stone IBS sufferer on the way out of a sauna, so long as they'd been washed.

Spring is the a great time for edible flowers: show diners what they've been missing the past six months, lift them out their SAD and keep the manic depressives on the good side of breakdown with the old plastering-over-the-cracks technique of bright colours and nice smells.

For a full list of edible flowers visit this very useful site.

Also I'd better mention this "Don't Press Hot Iron to Face"-style disclaimer: don't go picking flowers that might have had pesticides used on them, unless you fancy a date with Mr Stomach Pump.

Was the venerable MJ singing about sea beet? Probably not. Has he heard of sea beet? Probably not. Have you? Hopefully.

For those who enjoy beeting it - in the cleanest possible sense - there's good new: grisly bearded foragers in souwesters and waxed hats are harvesting the coastal plant as we speak. For professional chefs, it's available from Chef Direct (01275 474707) for £8/kg.

The coastal weed is the wild ancestor of common vegetables such as beetroot, sugar beet, and Swiss chard and a tasty. It's around from April to October and it's best to use the smaller top leaves in salad and the bottom leaves as a vegetable, boiling then buttering.

Mark Hix has got a cheeky recipe for sea beet and wild fennel soup with crab here.

Gulls eggs - now around

Sea beat - spotted

Sea trout

Wild garlic

Wild black bream - just started

Lemon sole - great value

Morels - the only mushroom worth touching at present

AVOID: Squid - silly prices

What's this? A fricking frommelier you say?

Sommelier + fromage (cheese in French talk) = Well. You do the maths.

It's nice to see that, with unemployment nearing the two million mark and press reports suggesting one in five are nervous over their jobs, Le Bouchon Breton in Spitalfields is doing its own little bit for the economy by paying some dude to look after their cheese.

The guy in question is the fanstatically French named Jean Claude Ali Cherif, whose job, so the press release goes, is to look after the 40-plus cheeses on the Breton trolley: "making sure the cheese is served at its best and at the right temperature makes all the difference, good storage and regular checking ensures each cheese is brought to life ready for the customer".

Anyho, the guy must obviously know his cheese or he wouldn't have a full-time job dealing with the stuff, and if you'd like to bask in this reflected knowledge old Ali Cherif is putting on a monthly cheese masterclass. The hour long cheese-chat is priced at £50 and is being held on the following dates:

Breton Cheese Master Class Dates for 2009
6-7pm Tuesday 31st of March
6-7pm Tuesday 28th of April
6-7pm Tuesday 26th of May
6-7pm Tuesday 30th of June
6-7pm Tuesday 28th of July
6-7pm Tuesday 25th of August 

About a year ago I was romping through God's own country - or Yorkshire to those of us who possess all our own teeth - and it was effing everywhere. I'm talking about wild garlic, or ramsons if you prefer. So i started wolfed a load of it down and repelled all form of human, animal and vampire for the next two to three hours.

For the next month if you see a bit of wild garlic, probably in woodland near a lovely old patch of bluebells, chances are you'll see a whole host of it. If you're unsure, give it a whiff, and if it smells of a Frenchman's breath you've got the right leaf.

It's a personal highlight of Spring and a gem of an ingredient with a whole host of food - lamb or venison for example - or great just as a spring-time broth. How to harvest it, use it and pretty much everything you could hop to know about the plant is available from this excellent blog post two years ago from the ever interesting Food Fun blog.

There's a ray of light breaking through winter's dying clouds right now, so keep your eyes open and try it with gurnard in this recipe, another from Oliver Peyton's excellent National Cookbook:

Pan-roasted red gurnard with wild garlic and clams

500g small clams, such as carpet shells
2tbsp vegetable oil
1 shallot, finely chopped
100ml dry white wine
8-12 red gurnard fillets with skin, weighing 600-700g in total
2tbsp plain flour
30g butter
100g St George's mushrooms or oyster mushrooms, sliced
100ml whipping or double cream
400g wild garlic leaves or baby spinach leaves

Serves four

Gurnard is the T-bone steak of fish. Chunky like halibut and monkfish, it has a
strong enough flavour to hold its own against the pungency of the garlic in this
dish. The season for wild garlic only lasts a few weeks, so go mad with it when
you can. It's powerful, but it doesn't linger on the palate like garlic cloves do.

1. Scrub the clams clean under cold running water. Discard any that
are open, or that do not close when tapped on the work surface.

2. Heat a large saucepan until hot, then add 1tbsp of the oil and cook
the shallot for about 2 minutes. Add the clams and wine, cover the
pan tightly and cook until the shells open, which will take about 5
minutes. Lift out the clams and set aside, discarding any that are still
closed. Strain and reserve the cooking liquid.

3. Dust the fish fillets with the flour on the skin side only.

4. Heat half of the butter in a flameproof casserole and cook the
mushrooms for about 3 minutes or until soft. Add the cooking
liquid from the clams and boil to reduce by half.

5. Heat a large frying pan (or two pans) over a medium heat and add
the remaining oil and butter. Season the fish and cook, skin-side
down, for 2 minutes. Turn the fish over and cook for 2 minutes.

6. While the fish is cooking, add the cream to the mushrooms and
boil for 1 minute, then place the clams in the pan and top with the
wild garlic. Cover and cook for about 2 minutes or just until the
garlic leaves wilt.

7. When the fish is cooked, turn it over onto its skin side again and
remove from the heat. Serve the mushrooms, clams and garlic in
four warmed bowls, topped with the gurnard.

Fish of the week

Prices per kg:

Large Mackerel £5.95
Sardines £4.50
Megrim Sole £7.50
Lemon Sole £8.50
Sprats £3.50
Grey Mullet £5.50
Bass 1-2kg £10.50
Smoked Cod Roe £18.50

Source: Chef Direct
01275 474707

Meat

Wood Pigeons
Mutton all cuts
Sirloins and Foreribs
Ox Cheeks
Pork all cuts

For prices click here

Source: Chef Direct
01275 474707

Fresh

Spring has definitely arrived... in Egypt. The proof is that the first pricy, but super zingy-fresh new wet garlic bulbs are here. As usual they're small and contain very tiny cloves. But because all but the outer skin can be sliced or chopped into salads, sauces and cooked dished, they are not too fiddly to use.

Things are warming up a bit in Spain and Italy, too. It shows in the quality of the leaves on their bunched beetroots and bunched carrots respectively. The Beetroot leaves are good enough to serve as greens and the carrot tops make an excellent garnish and can be added sparingly (too much can impart bitterness) to soups and stocks.

Cavalo nero (Italian Black Cabbage) is also a good choice at the moment. The dark, crinkly leaves are superb added to minestrone, made into pesto, shredded and deep-fried or simply steamed and tossed in olive oil.

Christmas is far enough away to start enjoying super-healthy Brussels Sprouts again. They are thriving in this cold weather and are sweeter than they've been for years, Brussels tops have made a return to form and our red Brussels tops are simply wonderful.

In Fruit, cape plums are good, but maybe not up to their usual standard due to some cold, wet weather in the South African growing season. There are still some good apricots, peaches and nectarines coming in.
Source: 4°C
020 8558 9708
www.4degreesc.com

 

Is this the ultimate insult to the consumer or clever profiteering of a corporate institution?

Yes, the Marks and Spencers jam sandwich hit shelves a while ago for 75p a double slice.

"But I can make that for 10p at home with some soggy white bread and average jam and i wouldn't have to stare a ill-tempered and menopausal checkout lady in the face," you may say.

Quite, quite. What can you do? It's consumerism gone mad.

For the record, the Real Food Festival have also weighed in with their two cents as well:

The M&S jam sandwich:  Philip Lowery, Director of the Real Food Festival comments: "It's hard to work out who has lost the plot more when looking at the launch today of the new M&S jam sandwich; the store themselves for promoting this as a credit crunch lunch priced at 75 pence, when anyone could buy these ingredients for less than 10p and prepare it themselves in a matter of seconds, or the people who will inevitably buy this product for believing that everything in their so called busy lives takes precedence over preparing simple, healthy, nutritious food. On balance, I'd say M&S, who really ought to know better."