Coming soon: the seasonal shopping basket

A new series of monthly posts

Want to eat in rhythm with the seasons, feel connected to the passage of time in nature and to your local place? Want to enjoy food at its very freshest and tastiest, to support your local producers, so helping to preserve diversity on the high street and in the food chain? Don't want loads of air miles and unnecessary packaging on your purchases? 

Then this new series of posts is for you. From February, I'll be posting a short monthly article on what's in season that month. Posted at the beginning of each month, each post will cover not just fruit and vegetables, but also seasonal fish, meat and game and wonderful, smelly artisanal cheeses.

Please come join me in the joys of eating seasonal!

Chorizo stovies

Stovies are an old Scottish dish traditionally made with the fatty leftovers from a roast of beef. Or beef dripping if you couldn't afford a joint. Cheap and abundantly cheerful, I associate them with Hogmanay as my Gran always had a vatful on the stove for serving after the bells. Great for staving off drunkenness and fuelling first-footers into the wee small hours. But equally great for a simple dinner any night of the year, winter or otherwise. Eating them at Hogmanay simply reminded me how good they are, and a friend asked for the recipe. So Laura, here it is for you.

I first made this chorizo version over ten years ago, to bring in 1999 or 2000. Tired of the sheer hard work involved in hosting a typical New Year's Day dinner (jaded and green-complexioned from the previous night's partying), I was looking for a lazy yet special option. Stovies scored three plus points: supremely simple, plate-lickingly tasty and festive. But they lacked glamour; unless already initiated into the joy of stovies, I doubted my guests would be impressed at the prospect of a plateful of fatty tatties.

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Raspberry and chocolate financiers

These are inspired by a wonderful matcha teacake that I learned to make while doing an internship this summer with William Curley, award-winning pâtissier and Britain's Best Chocolatier for no less than the last five years (Academy of Chocolate 2007-2011). 

William and his Japanese wife, Suzue, are both trained in the classic French tradition which makes for a pâtisserie marriage made in heaven: besides being world leaders in pâtisserie, the Japanese aesthetic blends beautifully with the French. I felt extremely privileged to spend a couple of weeks with the team, and learned more in eight days in their kitchen than from all the courses I've done in the last two years combined! (Though I'm aware I could never have hacked it in their kitchen if it hadn't been for those courses.)

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Polenta and orange shortbread

Check this out for a pâtisserie-loving opener of anorak proportions: the 'short' in shortbread refers to the length of the protein molecules from the flour. Just as for pastry, biscuits and cakes, you want those protein molecules to be short, thereby providing a tender, yet crumbly and crunchy crumb. This is in contrast to bread, where you want the two flour proteins, gliadin and glutenin, to join together and form gluten, a long protein molecule that lends structure, moisture and chewiness. Great characteristics in bread but not at all what you want in shortbread.

The type of flour, or flours, and method used to make shortbread are all about trying to facilitate shortness. Basically, keeping gliadin and glutenin from getting together and forming pesky glutens. Do that and you're most of the way there to a finished biscuit with a crisp, dry snap that melts into wonderfully rich, buttery-flavoured sandy crumbles.

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A tardy Valentine's dessert

As the saying goes, I'll probably be late for my own funeral. I know I don't need to provide any explanations on here, but I've had a lot going on and, between one thing and another, I ended up missing the all-important pre-14th February deadline.

Having put quite a bit of thought into an appropriate pudd (one that also happened to be my very first attempt at a plated dessert with several, complementary components), I was pretty gutted. All that prep and no final result. So, with a little bit of tweaking, I've decided to post up my idea regardless. As another frequently trotted out saying goes: better late than never. And anyway, who needs a commercial entity as an excuse for a dreamy dessert. There are another 364 days of the year for spoiling your loved one with sweet indulgences. In fact, it's debatable you even need a romantic other. One of the great advantages of being single is that you can keep pudding all to yourself.

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