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The seasonal shopping basket: February

2012-02-02T23:10:24Z

I'm really excited to share this post with you, the very first in a brand new monthly series. I'm passionate about eating seasonal for lots and lots of reasons. Some of them BIG: the ecological, ethical and economic. Some smaller, at least in terms of controversy, taste and nutritional say.

On a personal level, as someone who lives in the city, I find that seasonal eating helps to connect me to nature. It makes eating different throughout the year, and on a slightly philosophical, somewhat morbid level, it reminds me that nothing is here forever. Not the year's crop of asparagus. Not one of us. Things are to be enjoyed while they last. Life, like the British asparagus season, is short!

If you live in the UK, here's what to buy in February to enjoy food at its freshest, tastiest and healthiest. And without lots of nasty air miles. The produce you buy outwith the supermarkets (and I hope that you will make a foray to some of your local indy retailers) will also help to support your local food producers, so doing your little bit towards preserving diversity on the high street and in the food chain.

Coming soon: the seasonal shopping basket

2012-01-26T07:59:30Z

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

2012-01-12T19:06:53Z

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.

Raspberry and chocolate financiers

2011-10-21T17:49:46Z

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.)

Polenta and orange shortbread

2011-04-27T12:30:55Z

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.

A tardy Valentine's dessert

2011-02-17T20:45:29Z

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.

Super-tangy Seville orange curd

2011-01-31T16:30:49Z

Easy, seasonal and sensational

It's Seville orange season! Well, it has been for a few weeks now but I've only just got round to exploiting it.

Available for only a few weeks - late December to mid-February - these bitter oranges are typically used for marmalade. As much as I love, love, love the dark, toffied kind that my Mum makes, it takes so much time and attention that I couldn't bring myself to make my own. We're talking a two-day process, with many hours spent bent over the rinds chopping them into fine slivers. Guaranteed to induce neck ache and irritability. Though I suspect Mum's considerable efforts have more than a little a to do with her super-size batches, to supply my Dad's year round jar-a-week habit. I'm not going to disagree with the commonly held wisdom that it takes work to sustain a long-lasting marriage.

Colston Bassett Blue Stilton

2010-12-18T00:14:17Z

Last week I made not just one, but two great food discoveries. A belter of a Blue Stilton and the perfect neutral carrier to gobble it up on.

The cheese, Colston Bassett Blue Stilton, was offered to me and a friend for tasting while buying some others at George Mewes, the new cheese shop on Byres Road, Glasgow. George, a chef for over 25 years, is hooked on perfectly matured, world-class Artisan cheese and stocks a great range from the British Isles, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. And the best bit of all: negligible overlap with Iain Mellis's selection, meaning 1) cheese choice in Glasgow's west end just got a lot wider, and 2) there's no need to pick and choose between one or other shop. The clever decision to stock a different range means you can maintain allegiance to Mellis's and support the newcomer.

Lavender ice-cream, Sicilian gelato style

2010-12-02T19:23:21Z

For years I've wondered how to make ice cream from milk. You know the startlingly white kind you had as a kid, usually from an Italian place, that dribbled more quickly than you could eat it, first down the cone, then onto your tightly grasping hand. Ice cream that you lick, rather than mouth or bite from the cone. Ice cream that is almost weightless on the tongue, that melts into sweet nothing in the heat of your mouth. Ice cream without cream or eggs, without the richness, or heavy, tongue-coating mouthfeel they impart.

But in more than ten years of curiosity, admittedly passive, I've never once seen a recipe for ice cream made with milk. Or had any idea how it's bound together. Until last week when flipping through my second Alice Medrich book purchase, Pure Dessert, I came across a recipe for Sour Cream Ice Cream. Inside a chapter celebrating the flavour of milk, in all its unadulterated simplicity and subtlety, the recipe uses a milk base (two parts sour cream, one part whole milk) thickened with a very little cornflour. Like true Sicilian gelato she says. So that's what I've wanted to make all these years: Sicilian gelato!

Muscovado, orange and pecan chocolate cookies

2010-10-31T14:01:44Z

X-rated chocolate strength, suffused with heady citrus, sexily smooth slivers of peel and chompy pecan chunks

These are adapted from a recipe by Alice Medrich, America's First Lady of Chocolate - Bittersweet Decadence Cookies - published in her truly wonderful book on chocolate, Bittersweet. It's taken me three attempts to get them just right, but requests to pass on the recipe came in well before that. In other words, the original is so brilliant that even slightly duff renditions or tampering will taste incredible.

Alice calls for "bittersweet or semisweet chocolate," US terms which didn't mean much to me, but the book's appendix revealed that they contain only 50-60% chocolate liquor (also known as cocoa or cacao liquor), basically pure chocolate in its liquid form consisting of roughly equal portions of cocoa solids (the dry, non-fatty part of the bean, cocoa powder basically) and cocoa butter (the fatty part). To use chocolate marked 70%, for a batch double that given here, she advised upping the butter by a tablespoon (15g) and the sugar by a quarter cup (about 52g). I had 70% and 90% in the house, love my chocolate strong and wanted to keep them as healthy as possible. So, against her advice, in went 70% to the batter and 90% for the chunks. Without the extra butter or sugar.