Artichoke Bruschetta

Having passed my viva in November, I'm turning over a new leaf - or perhaps simply reclaiming old habits - to discuss good tucker again! Which starts with what's in my fridge at the moment: artichokes. I could eat them by the bucketload. I stare enviously at them in WholeFoods and other supermarkets I can't afford. I sometimes pick them up and wonder what life would be like if I could casually splash out and lay down big bucks for these crinkly green beauties. In my imaginary life I'd have a dog too. And heck, a car parking space. And a garden. I'm living the London dream.

Politicised Flapjacks

With a parental state visit occurring last week, we were prepping hard to pretend that we live like human beings. We did the hoovering, watered the houseplants, wiped and/or dusted all surfaces, and the plants on the balcony were either replaced or pruned to within an inch of their lives. The flat was sparkling but I wasn’t finished- what about food? My dad’s a coeliac, which means he can’t eat wheat. Now here’s where I get political: the government has decided to stop funding the special bread that my dad and countless others get on prescription from the pharmacy.

Dark Rye Crackers

You know when you go into a supermarket to buy a really nice packet of crackers and you find that you grit your teeth in silent fury as the ones you like the most cost £3.50 for a pack of 16? …Yeah? Anyone else get that..? [*pant, pant*] 

These are the kind of crackers I always opt for. It annoys me greatly that I buy them at all, that I’m playing into the hands of the man by buying them... I love crackers. I eat them a lot. But honestly, crackers are just flour and water. These take all of five minutes to weigh and roll out, then only need a quick spell in a hot oven. Hey presto, artisan crackers. Hipster crackers. Have them with a piece of cheese you bought in London which cost a mere four hundred pounds. Actually, I will. Dark rye gives a great nutty flavour and the addition of poppy seeds, caraway or sesame seeds adds to that- give them a go if you want to stick it to Waitrose.

Aloo Tikki Chaat

Despite having moved to London in August, I feel like I’ve hardly seen the city. This is down to a combination of factors; I’ve been working on my PhD (an alarming truth), I’ve been tired (thanks a lot, underactive thyroid) and like most PhD students I’ve been paranoid that going out and doing something for an afternoon makes me a bad person who is doomed to fail. But one Sunday morning, rather than sitting slumped in front of my laptop madly planning my research schedule in different coloured pens (and not actually achieving anything, of course), I went outside, crossed the river, hit up the Tate Modern, then walked to Borough Market.

Gluten-Free Mince Pies

With Christmas just a few days away, I’m off home back to Yorkshire. But I couldn’t arrive empty-handed. My dad can’t eat wheat- he’s one of those genuine coeliacs, rather than the hipster type you see nowadays. That said, hipster trends have opened up the gluten-free market no end. You can actually go in a shop any buy something gluten-free by mistake because it actually resembles real food.

Oxtail Soup

Everyone’s depressed and winter’s coming in. I’m not suggesting soup can solve much, but when I go back to Yorkshire I need it in my system to function. A big pan of something on the stove also warms the house up nicely. Coming back home makes me realise how blooming freezing I’ve been all my life; surely everyone ‘wears’ a duvet watching TV at night? Wait, you mean you don’t sleep in a hat?? I’m typing this while wearing a shawl for crying out loud.

Roasted Vegetable Salsa

There comes a point when you have to admit that autumn is coming. I’m not ready to think of winter yet, give me time for that... But when summer days start ending on a chilly note and you find yourself reaching for your stash of vests (everyone has one, right?), it’s time to adapt your food to fit. This is often helped on by supermarkets, who begin to stock basic ingredients that just don’t work as well as they did in summer months. Take tomatoes. They’re ripe and juicy in the summer, albeit for a price. By autumn, the packets that grace the shelves are full of fruit as hard as stones and just as tasteless. Luckily, salt, pepper, olive oil and a spell in a hot oven at everyone’s favourite gas mark (6, duh!) is enough to get the tastebuds excited again.

Spicy Fried Okra

About a year ago, I read about a little bar not too far from Leeds train station, called Bundobust, which served small Indian nibbly dishes. As part of our ongoing, but interrupted, culinary-veggie tour of Yorkshire eateries, I went to check out the place with my friend Caroline. Though we did that awkward thing of one of us waiting inside the restaurant, the other one waiting outside, when we finally found each other, we found that Bundobust served up some pretty good stuff, from pots of creamy black lentil dhal and rice, to the more interesting bundo chaat, a combination of samosa pastry, chickpeas, potato and relish. But the star was their okra fries, thin and crispy, in a chickpea batter, dusted with salt and mango powder.

Highs and lows of the Slow Cooker: Shin of Beef Chile con Carne

Working mainly from home means that from 4.30 pm each afternoon, I spend a lot of effort trying to resist the magnetic pull of the kitchen. In days of yore, I’d launch myself in there with gusto from about 3 pm to start crafting a feast for the family. However, that was when I didn’t have any responsibilities. None at all. But now I have an ever-growing reading list, and an upcoming PhD upgrade which isn’t keeping me awake at night, but still makes me a little nervous. In short, even my to-do lists are breeding, so I’ve been barring myself from the kitchen in order to get some work done.

A first time for everything: Marmalade

My parents eat a lot of marmalade. They like the dark stuff, not any of your Golden Shred nonsense. Real marmalade. Do young people eat marmalade, or even jam anymore? Breakfast, followed by a chaser of toast and marmalade, has been the standard morning routine in our house for as long as I can remember. Although seeing as I generally eat my body weight in potatoes, I’ve never joined in the marmalade ritual.

Fresh Ginger Biscuits

I think I’m allergic to history. I went to the National Archives for the first time a few weeks ago and caught a cold. Then last week, I went to the National Maritime Museum and now I have the flu. See what I mean? I’ll admit that both times I was more nervous than I should have been, which resulted in me being able to eat only a pear for lunch on one occasion. But still. It’s got to be all that history. Or maybe it’s the fact that I feel that I shouldn’t sneeze near archival materials, which inevitably makes me need to sneeze so badly! 

Crisps made in the Microwave, aka Magic Crisps

There is no savoury snack that I savour more than a crisp. Though nutritionists would need a lie down on hearing this, a fond childhood memory of mine consists of me standing by the side of our cooker as my mum cooked up thin slices of potatoes in a chip pan to make “crisps”. Yes, I was a chubby child but it was the nineties! Plus, my mum never really did anything like that, so it was a naughty, indulgent experience for both of us. In fact, I don’t even remember Amy being there, so perhaps the secrecy added an extra spice to our nocturnal proceedings. My impatient wait by the cooker as the oil came to temperature was nothing compared to the agony of allowing the cooked crisps to cool on a piece of kitchen paper. Sprinkled with salt and chewy in places, those crisps were divine. We’d eat them greedily as each batch came out of the pan and so never had enough for a bowlful.

Review: Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour.

With the news that I’m moving out in a few months, it’s time to buzz through the crap in the cupboards that I’ve left lying around the last few years and probe the forgotten depths of the freezer. Gone is the weird bag of dried mixed beans from the first time we went to the Otley Waitrose (pre-university, seriously). Used up are miscellaneous chutneys. Last weekend, the hour finally came to say farewell to one of my Mum’s impulse buys; a four pack of Lidl quails (I mean come on, just don’t buy food without me there, ok?). With the quails defrosting in the sink (and without my knowledge, a pheasant), out came a packet of yufka -essentially classy filo pasty- that I'd bought in December and frozen wonkily. Half a bag of chickpeas were soaked overnight and, having gone crazy in Leicester’s AMAZING fruit and vegetable market a few days before, there were also a lot of on-the-turn items queued up for a feast, namely tomatoes, cucumber, beetroot and weeny carrots. The avocados had succumbed to an early death and I was still recovering.

(Yorkshire) Tea Bread

I didn’t make this with Yorkshire Tea, but I am based in Yorkshire so there shouldn’t be a problem with the authorities, should they get in touch. Some good news; after a couple of years of grafting, I’m pleased to report that I’ve been given a place on a funded PhD! It’s a joint project between the University of Leicester and the National Maritime Museum and I am so very, very excited. Did I mention it’s on prison hulks? It’s on prison hulks. It’s got to be the coolest topic in the world, am I right? There’s this stupid little children’s book called “Victorian Crime” that I bought in a charity shop in Hebden Bridge during my home-schooling years; it’s full of amazing pictures and snippets of kids on hulks or getting hauled in by the police and I was completely obsessed with it. From there, I went on to a phase devouring Newgate novels, followed by an adoration of a series of books written by Andrew Pepper about an ex-Bow Street Runner called Pyke. This whole PhD project is just filling my head with stories but I really can’t wait to get back to some proper academic work. 

Grissini Torino, aka Breadsticks

You can keep Jamie or Nigella; Keith Floyd will always be my TV food hero. He’s downright bonkers and always just on the wrong side of tipsy; I watched an episode once where he was so drunk after cooking for a Rugby team that he slipped and dropped their entire meal on the way to the dinner table. Classic. Normally you can only catch snippets of his amazing programmes squeezed in between live slots on awful Saturday morning cookery shows. During a moment of sluggish TV watching I was therefore lucky enough to catch ten minutes of Floyd on Italy last week. In between complaining, cooking outside a grotty restaurant for a bunch of even grottier looking locals and catching nothing on a miserable fishing trip, the great man had time to whip out a huge newspaper-wrapped parcel of breadsticks and sing their praises. According to Floyd, Napoleon liked his “Grissini Torino” so much that he sent a man to Turin every week to pick up a batch, which he ate every morning before battle. They looked so good and sounded so crunchy that I immediately had to scout around to find an appropriate recipe. At last there was a chance to employ my Italian Level 2 Reading Skills! Italians across the net seem in agreement; the dough must be spiked with a gummy, moreish spoonful of malt extract.

Springtime Tomato Salad

West Yorkshire makes one very cynical regarding the weather. Living in the perpetual dampness that is the Calder Valley has made me expect rain at least once a day, regardless of what time of year it is. When spring starts to shine its first few feeble rays of sunshine, we are invariably left out. Weather reports are watched with hardened hearts and we can’t even watch Gardener’s World anymore because it’s so depressing. Time to start moving seedlings into deeper soil? You must be joking. Anything planted outside now would turn to mulch after a few weeks of being battered by our storms. On a rare day last week, however, we were blessed with a bit of sunshine; the high winds kept us on our toes but Mum-y and I still managed a foray into the garden, spending two hours attacking the overgrown mass of brambles and plants in need of a prune. When we were finished, the sun was still shining so I rustled up a spring lunch feast consisting of dips, flatbreads, cheeses and this tomato salad. If like us, you’re still in root veg mode when what you crave is a vibrant, zingy salad, then this will be enough to remind you that summer will happen… someday.

Gluten-Free Scottish Oatcakes

Since moving back home I feel this blog has taken on a theme; that of cooking meals my dad likes! I don’t have a problem with that; I’ve lost weight since moving, so clearly the meals I was making for myself in York –or should I say the endless stream of Pringles and blue cheese- weren’t doing me any favours. Living in the middle of nowhere means that a 2 mile round-trip walk, usually in the rain, separates me from indulging too much. Something anti-indulgence to me now is soup- it's the one thing in our house that never goes amiss and I make a lot of it. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that my Dad simply doesn’t eat lunch if there’s no soup. But I haven’t mentioned that he goes crazy for oatcakes- must be a Scottish thing! When I moved back, we had a hot July of oatcakes with goat’s cheese, made from a great little Midlothian recipe in The Scottish Cookery Book by Elizabeth Craig. I used coarse oatmeal bought randomly from the Baxter’s Soup Factory Shop somewhere on the Borders but when it ran out, any subsequent oatcakes I made had the texture of dust. Glutafin, who make the gluten-free flour we use, changed their white four mix recipe around the same time and now I have problems with lots of my baking. As a result, I’m turning to substitutions to help stabilise things and for this recipe, gram flour, with its nutty flavour worked as well as I’d hoped. Obviously if you’re on the oats-count-as-gluten side of the fence these aren’t for you, but non-allergy sufferers are free to use plain flour instead.

Bigos, or Hunter’s Stew

I really connect with Polish food. It’s rustic, seasonal and affordable, as well as being influenced by just about anyone who’s passed through at some point; notably French, Jewish and Russian cuisines. I know this is silly but it feels really earthy and spiritual somehow when I cook something Polish for dinner; I feel transported to a scarred land of wheat fields, cabbages, harvests and preserving. I want to go to Poland at some point to get the “peasant making delicious stew on farmstead” image out of my head; I’m sure that it doesn’t actually resemble a Bertold Brecht play. This aside, what’s most important to me is the food, and it’s really delicious. One café, Barbakan, situated on Walmgate in York was one of my favourite lunchtime spots when I was a student. Small, bustling and cosy, Barbakan really opened my eyes to the wonders of Polish food. Baskets of sourdough bread would be served alongside piping hot dishes of goblaki -stuffed cabbage leaves- potato and cheese stuffed pierogi -dumplings- or peppery, juniper-spiked bigos. According to my worn cookbook, The Polish Kitchen, by Mary Pininska, bigos is the national dish of Poland and was traditionally made with any food harvested from the land; game, juniper berries, mushrooms, all bolstered of course, by sauerkraut. See this as a base recipe to expand upon and make additions to; there is only one prerequisite, which is that you absolutely must make bigos at least one day in advance to let the flavours mature.

Zesty Smoked Salmon and Broccoli Tartlets

On a recent trip to Scotland in which she raided a well-stocked farm shop, my Mum picked up a packet of smoked salmon trimmings. I’ve heard of them of course and just assumed they were cheaper because they were scraps, which is true but holy moley, they’re also as smoky as anything! As the outer parts of smoked salmon, trimmings are exposed to the full whack of smouldering woodchips in the smokehouse. I actually needed to soak ours in milk for an hour to reduce the pungency but after that they were good to go! The default recipe for trimmings seems to be paté; which has never appealed to me. Equally sacrilegious when it comes to smoked salmon is the prospect of a quiche; if you buy it smoked, you don’t cook it! Come on, people don’t buy whiskey to flambé, or stir caviar into a risotto, do they? However, with my trimmings so unbelievably strong I had to make an exception to my rule, labelling them “tartlets” in the hope of getting away with it. Plus, the salmon was actually on the turn and cooking it seemed to be the best option. I’m sorry most of my recipes deal with semi-rotten foodstuffs from the back of our fridge; that’s what cooking’s all about, isn’t it?

Sprouty Side Dish

People associate sprouts with Christmas but my Dad wants them with every single meal in the winter months. He buys bag upon bag of them, silently depositing them in the fridge as wordless suggestions for me each week. Luckily, I’m a huge fan too and can eat them by the bowlful, even if he shouldn’t; sprouts are high in potassium, which actually interfere with his anti-rejection drugs! Apart from this risk factor, the primary problem with Daddy’s sprout consumption is that he’s a massive traditionalist and turns his nose up at anything other than a pure boiled “farty sprout”. My favourite take on sprouts is definitely the single cream and chopped chestnuts route but I decided to give this recipe a go because I was feeling guilty about a packet of marvellously rooty multi-coloured baby carrots I’d ignored but refused to throw out. It worked nicely as part of a hot buffet but would go really well as a side dish for dinner; try it with something gamey like pheasant or venison.