small island canteen - the food diary has changed names!

Hello dear friends and readers, please visit my NEW blog domain, same blog, new name.

www.smallislandcanteen.blogspot.com

Thank you so much for all the support so far, here's to a sunny future on the small island of my dreams...

I will close this account in a few weeks, please follow me on the new blog for more morish recipes.

x Nicole

The Coochie Island Canteen

The word coochie has some sexy connotations, of the feminine variety, but this post is named after an idylic island I have been internet stalking on Australia's real estate websites. It is just off the coast of Brisbane, Coochiemudlo Island, Coochie to the locals. It has a smattering of houses, where the local kids have to catch a ferry (free) to get to the mainland schools. It's beaches are perfect: white sand azure blue ocean no concrete promenades or hired umbrellas, just a backdrop of peeling gum trees, ants and blowies and dusty paths that turn to sand that snake from backyards to the sea.

I am imagining living on Coochie, my kids playing outdoors, racing around on their bikes and flip flopping around with dirty toes and icy-poles and freckle-faced mates, hanging about the Coochie Kiosk, shells in their pockets, wet bum-marks from dripping cossies on cotton shorts. I though I might open a little canteen, (that opens Friday to Sunday breakfast through to cocktails and tunes) and get the national press (and The Selby??!!) excited by my Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern home-style cooking, the chic yet unpretentious decor (is that an oxymoron?). Queensland food-lovers will flock for a piece of heaven on the weekends - a gastro destination - they can eat, share plates, lick fingers, go to the beach for a swim or lie-down, then come back before the last ferry with salt-caked skin and oceanic smiles for a chilled beer or fizz and some really good music. It will be called: Coochie Canteen.

So there we have it - my dream. I'm starting with this blog, collecting and sharing recipes that may one-day make it on the menu. So, welcome to new readers and old alike to the (virtual) Coochie Canteen. I will try and share my favourite tunes with you too, just like the frustrated DJ I am, along with the recipes that are making their way to our plates.

Coochie may be a word for a place from where we all came - well, I am taking back the feminine in cooking - as a mother, a lover, a wife and woman - I cook to nurture, and yes, sometimes to seduce, to celebrate, to cherish, to help those I love grow.

This recipe was given to me by a beautiful woman, Handan, who is living in Manchester but is originally from Turkey. It epitomises the kind of food I love. It is familiar but exotic, hearty but not too rich, sexy but homely, comfort food that is elegant enough to impress friends with. It is a Turkish pasta recipe and goes something like this.

Handan's Turkish pasta with puy lentils, beef, cinnamon and garlic yoghurt 

for the sauce

3 tbsp olive oil
1 large brown onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
300g ground organic beef
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 bunch curly parsley, finely chopped
2 tbsp tomato concentrate
3/4 cup vegetable stock
1 cup dried puy lentils (cook as per pack instructions ie: @40 mins in water seasoned with a bay leaf, some carrot ends, celery, until firm but not crunchy)
sea salt, pepper
500g shell-shaped pasta - or other dried varieties that have a nice hollow to cup the sauce, penne would be fine

for the garlic yoghurt

1 cup Greek yoghurt
1 clove of garlic, crushed and squished with a little salt until a paste
a squeeze of lemon juice
a little splash of olive oil

method

Fry the onion in olive oil on a low temperature in a heavy-bottomed fry pan, stirring frequently until the onion is a deep gold but not burnt. Remove the onion from the pan, set aside.
Add a little more oil and fry off the ground beef - as much as you like per person - I tend to use less rather than more, 50 to 100 grams a head. As the beef begins to brown, season with the cinnamon, cayenne some salt and pepper and add the parsley (save a little for garnish). Next, add the tomato concentrate, the stock and puy lentils (you could use the pre-cooked variety from the supermarket but I would add them right at the end of cooking so that they don't get too mushy). Turn the heat up to get it bubbling. As the fat starts to rise to the top, turn the heat to very low, cover the pan and let the sauce cook on a gentle simmer for about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile make the yoghurt sauce by combining the yoghurt, garlic, lemon juice and oil. Set aside.

Cook your pasta in a big pot of boiling water, seasoned with a teaspoon of salt. Cook as per packet instructions - al dente!

Once the pasta is drained add the sauce, mixing the two well so that the little shells get their fill of meaty sauce. Serve drizzled with the garlic yoghurt and some extra parsley if you like.



Ps: sorry to anyone who read this post when I was debating name changes for the blog and had rushed in to calling it Coochie Canteen - I'm having second thoughts, so it stays as is, the food diary, for now. But a new name is imminent - I need a more catchy domain name. x

Polenta on the run

Speaking of easy lunches (see last post), this plate of crunchy pesto polenta fingers with cherry tomatoes and parsley took about 5 minutes to make.

It tasted sublime - the polenta was a ready made one I bought exactly for this kind of day - when I had literally 10 minutes to make and eat lunch but felt like something warm and tasty. The mellow polenta was soft and unctuous, the pesto had browned crispy bits of pinenuts and cheese, it was sexy-oily but not greasy, the parsley and tomatoes cut clean through the fruity olive oil and salty pesto. It could make a good starter for a dinner party and is definitely on the menu of my virtual (one day maybe) cafe.

I sliced the polenta and fried it in a tablespoon of virgin olive oil and another tablespoon home-made pesto I had in the fridge. I cooked it till bits of pesto went crispy and some stuck to the polenta, turned the slices carefully and then added some quartered cherry tomatoes. I cooked further till the tomatoes had collapsed and released some juices. It didn't need salt as the pesto was well seasoned. Finish with that antiquated king of herbs - curly parsley.
I was alone, so I licked the plate.

Lunching on lentils in the holidays

During the holidays having people in the house every day - namely my husband and children - I have to think about lunch in a more formal way.

When alone, I usually rustle up some avocado toast or a biscuit and fruit. I rarely bother to actually make anything which involves excessive cutting or seasoning, mostly because I eat breakfast at 10 and only get hungry again around 2 and then it seems too close to dinner to make a fuss.

But when Gareth is home I will make us lunch. Around noon he gets hungry and starts pacing, slicing onion to eat standing up in the kitchen with picky little bits of cheese and so I think about eating myself. I also find people standing up to eat irritating - if you're going to eat, sit down for goodness sake. I am not however content with a corner of cheese. We always have nice things in the fridge and cupboard, so I challenge myself to create something easy but tasty - the two necessities of a good lunch.

This puy lentil salad is made with those pre-cooked lentils you can buy, not the mushy tinned variety, but the vacuum packs - and are perfectly nice for a quick family lunch.

I chopped up some sundried tomatoes and red onion, quartered and halved hard-boiled eggs and added a mixed leaf bag we had (it had those fine matchsticks of beetroot in it, so grated raw beetroot would be lovely if you have none in your bag). The dressing was simply cider vinegar, sea salt, a little whlole grain mustard and extra virgin olive oil. I think it could have done with lashings of chopped curly parsley (my new favourite herb - so much more cinnamon-ny than flat leaf) but we had none. You could also add toasted walnuts.

I put some flat tortilla breads in the oven with garlic and oil and a sprinkle of this Italian seasoning for fish I bought in Lidl in Sicily (it is a truly beautiful mix of dried oregano, rosemary, salt, marjoram, fennel, thyme and coriander).

And voila! A holiday lunch.

No more turkey

I really don't like turkey, and this year, after cooking about 10 full Christmas dinners already for print and TV advertising, I am fed up with the sight and smell of it.

I have been basting these massive birds with their own hot fat from the back of removal vans on suburban London streets, in photo studios and in my own kitchen for testing, for the past three months. I have roasted at least 15 kilos of spuds in 5 litres of goose fat and peeled a small mountain of brussel sprouts. I have learnt how to make perfect parsnips (par boil them before roasting) and perfected the art of a golden finish to the turkey, without resorting to painting it with Marmite (food stylist trick here) - as natural is the new fake in advertising.

So, enough.

I am taking a break this week, catching up on this blog, getting my new website up, relishing in some new tunes I bought as Christmas presents but cracked and have claimed for myself (Alt J, Tinariwen, Ben Howard) and keeping up with the many spidery scribbles on the calender: 2.30 Wednesday, River's class party (take treats), Tuesday pm, Phoebe choir (pack dinner), Thursday - Phoebe bulb planting (pack wellies), Friday - toy day (nothing precious) etc.

And eating biscuits with coffee at 10.30am.

Despite myself, I baked this weekend. My first ever raging success with chocolate chip cookies. An excess of top-quality vanilla extract and 80-something percent dark chocolate bashed randomly are the winning elements I think.

Best-ever chocolate chip cookies
(Why not wrap them up in brown paper and twine and give to those school-run parents you always love chatting to but never see outside the gates, or work-mates you spend half your life with but don't know what their lounge-room looks like or those friendly local shop-keepers who make you feel part of a community - as a DIY Chrissy pressie. Cheap, easy, personal, delicious. Makes @18)

150g unsalted butter, melted
150g golden castor sugar
1tbsp golden syrup
1 egg
2 tsp best-quality vanilla extract
300g organic plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
100g high-grade dark chocolate, bashed into little chunks

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 190 Celsius. Line two greased baking trays with grease-proof paper.

Whisk the butter and sugar together until creamy and thick, then add the golden syrup, vanilla and egg.

Now, using a wooden spoon, stir in half the flour and then the chocolate chunks until fully combined. Then add the rest of the flour.

The mix can now be kept in the fridge for up to a day or you can spoon dessert spoon dollops onto one of the baking trays - only put one in the oven at a time. These cookies don't really spread, so leave some space between them, but don't worry too much - they stay put.

Cook for about 10 minutes or until lightly golden - or you can open the oven after about 7 minutes and squash them to flatten if you like those thin, big cookies. (I leave mine a bit fat and chewy).

Cool on a wire tray - give, eat, enjoy.

****NB: I have anew website and as a part of the change, this blog is moving with my site, I will post full details of the change and hope you can join me in my new, sexier format.

Merry Christmas friends

Nicole  xxxx

Apples and leaves

Autumn's beauty always takes me surprise. I dread the loss of summer so keenly that my misery seems settled for the long haul of cold, till next June at least. Then, one crisp afternoon the air is smelling of burning wood, the outrageous golds and reds of trees are illuminated by the cloudless sky and I feel the tingling of a kind of enlightened joy; like in the outward thrust of summer something was missing, that now is returning - a welcome home-coming of the soul.

The red gold and green of new season apple skins like the fluttering butterfly leaves. Apples and leaves.

 

England goes pagan for the apple in October. Shrugging off the supermarket straight-jacket of pink ladies in plastic tubs all the way from New Zealand - Britons flock to quaint harvest festivals to quietly praise and wonder this humble fruit. Old ladies in cardies hold court at stalls taking slices from heritage apples with their paring knives as eager children greedily eat the juicy nuggets asking for more like they're coated in toffee. 

And they are the best apples I've ever tasted.

Speaking of folksy, wholesome things, I recently got my hands on a copy of  the excellent magazine Kinfolk - a guide for small gatherings. With the bag of apples River chose from the harvest festival, I knew I had to make something special, so I tried this recipe from the mag, substituting the original pear to apple and with a few tweaks here and there. The combination of herby rosemary with honey-sweetened apple and almond is lovely; a sophisticated treat. It's sugar and gluten free too.

Apple, honey and rosemary tart

For the pastry:

5 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/3 C honey
1 1/2 C ground almonds
1 tsp fresh rosemary leaves finely chopped
pinch of salt

For the apple compote:

2 cups of peeled, quartered and sliced apples
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 bay leaf
2tbsp honey

Method

For the pastry:

Pre-heat the oven to 180 Degrees C
Mix all ingredients in a bowl until well combined - add a little extra almond meal if it feels too sloppy, you want a mix that is still moist but also able to be picked up and moulded.
Using your fingertips, press the dough into a buttered, loose-bottomed tart tin (mine was 20cm and I had some spare dough, you could also make small tartlettes).
Make sure the dough is as even as you can get it and about 2cm in thickness. Press holes into the surface with a fork.
Place the tin on a larger baking tray and put on the middle shelf of the oven.
Check after about 10 minutes - poke some more holes in the dough if it is bubbling up too much.
Cook a further 5 minutes or until the case is deeply golden.
Allow to cool - it is quite fragile, so be careful when releasing from the tin.

For the compote:

Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil.
Turn the heat down to just below boiling and cook for 10 minutes until the compote has thickened and the apples are soft but still in shape.
Pour into a jar and cool to room temperature. If cooking ahead of time you can keep it in the fridge for a couple of days.

When ready to serve, scoop the compote into the pastry shell.
It's delicious with some plain Greek yoghurt.

Easy food

Here's some shots I did with a talented young photographer, Mr John Latham, using only daylight in a garage out on some country road somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool.

I kept the recipes simple; baked egg and steak, garlicky mushrooms on puff pastry with watercress, the last of the summer nectarines and plums grilled with sugar and vanilla. Easy food with a British bent.

 Infact, the recipes are so simple I am going to talk you through them:

For the steak and egg

Remove your steak/s from the fridge for about 15 minutes before cooking to get the meat closer to room temperature, season well and rub with olive oil. Crack egg/s into lightly greased small oven proof dishes, like mini flan tins, season and bake until just set for about 10 mins on 200C. (You can fancy it up and season them before cooking with fresh thyme or rosemary salt or chilli flakes with celery salt or smoked paprika and a splash of olive oil etc etc) Get a fry pan nice and hot before putting the steak in and cook for about 4 minutes on one side before turning, adding a knob of butter to the steak and cooking on the second side for a further 4-5 minutes. Remove from the pan and rest for a few minutes before serving with condiments of your liking.

For the mushroom tart

Chop a whole lot of different mushrooms up - like a punnet of chestnut, 1/2 punnet of button and 1 punnet of shitake, and fry in a large hot frypan with olive oil and a knob or 2 of butter. If the pan dries out before the mushrooms are golden and browned add a little more butter or oil to the pan. As the mushrooms release their juices, toss them around and season with plenty of sea salt (mushrooms adore salt) and a few grinds of pepper. Then, when you are about half-way through cooking the mushies add 2-3 cloves of garlic that have been finely chopped and the leaves off 4-5 thyme sprigs. The mushrooms are ready when they have caught some colour - a golden hue with some properly brown bits too. Place a sheet of puff pastry onto a baking tray and pile the mushrooms on, leaving a frame of pastry around the edge. Bake on 200C for about 15-20 mins or until the pastry is golden. Serve with some watercress dressed with lemon and extra virgin olive oil.

For the nectarines

Stone and half nectarines and plums (you can use peaches, add raspberries...) and sprinkle generously with castor sugar and the seeds of 1 or 2 (if your feeling flush) vanilla pods. Put the emptied vanilla pod skins on the tray too - it looks good when serving and shows off your culinary generosity. Place under a hot grill and watch for the sugar to start extracting the fruit's juices, bubbling and caramelising - about 10 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

 

 

Grapes on a plate

 

 

In a largely domestic life, in a country without civil war, with my health, my children happy, my husband loyal and with money enough in the bank, these grapes looking pretty on a plate makes me smile.

 

What a luxury, to stop and notice their perfect tense skins. To choose a fetching purple plate to put them on. To waffle on about it here. What a blessing that I can concern myself with the details of my life in such a languid manner. To contemplate pomegranates.

 

 

 

 Some may call it boredom, but I choose to see it as a return to nature and simple pleasure.  

 

And how simple is it really? Equilibrium is often hard won. I struggled for a long time, I fought myself and strived and fell, dancing high and crawling low and then spent years shrinking from the image of my younger self with her tumult and pleas for love.

 

But now I want to face the past with the same strength that I give to my present and the calm I will for the future. It's all in the way I choose to see it. So, I'm putting my troubled girl on a purple plate. Yes, she made mistakes and didn't know her own worth, but she was also ripe and sweet and contained within her the perfect seeds of creation.

 

Be kind to yourself. This, of all my mother's wise advice, is the most comforting and profound. She says this to me on the phone, far away in Australia, as I ring her with bad dreams and regrets. Be kind to yourself darling. It's like an instant balm, and I realise that I have been judging myself harshly, that I have let my mind obsess and fret over things that miraculously are healed by a shift in my perception - a shift to kindness.

 

It was my wonderful mother's birthday yesterday, shared too by my dear friend Rhonda - a lovely synchronicity. These September 28 women are a force of nature: energetic and smart, creative and pragmatic, competent to a fault, honest and wry and always up for a party. Lucky me to have them both.

 

I catered for Rhonda's party last night. Writing in this in bed is a nice antidote the the hours of wine quaffing, deep talking, giggling and lounge-room dancing. Here's one of the plates I made based on a recipe from Hugh-Fearnley's Three good things on a plate leaflet that came in the paper one recent weekend. Sweet roasted pumpkin melds with lush abandon into the soft folds of ricotta and is given a bit of resistance with salty air-dried ham.

 

 

 

 

Hugh's roasted pumpkin with ricotta and prosciutto

(Serves 4)

 

1 1/2 butternut pumpkins, peeled, de-seeded and chopped into big chunks

3 cloves garlic, skin on and lightly bashed

5 or so thyme stalks - reserve some fresh leaves for serving

2 tbs olive oil plus a little extra virgin olive oil to serve

100g ricotta

8 slices prosciutto

salt and pepper

 

Method:

 

Preheat oven to 190C/gas 5

Put pumpkin in a roasting tin. Add the garlic and thyme to the tin. Add oil and season well with salt and pepper. Toss so that pumpkin is coated with oil.

Roast for about 40 minutes or until the pumpkin is getting nice brown bits and is soft - stir halfway through.

Discard the garlic and thyme and allow to cool.

Put the pumpkin on a large platter (or individual plates) and dot with the ricotta.

Tear the ham over the top and sprinkle with fresh thyme leaves, a splash of extra virgin olive oil and another twist of pepper and sprinkle of salt for good measure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back!

Can you guess where I've been?

Holland!

Well, it was a while ago, but that's my excuse for not having posted for so long.

So, here's some of the food that's been gracing our table, starting with the best cake I have ever made, a raspberry cream cheese crumble cake - three distinct textures in one cake. The first is a springy almost chewy sponge, then dense smooth baked cheesecake topped with a golden crumble punctuated with zingy raspberries. It really is very special.

(Please excuse Instagram photos, it's my new plaything - I will get back to the proper camera soon, and Instagram does what it says - creates instant pictures, that have allowed me some spontaneity and a sense of freedom and inspiration to get back to sharing recipes on this blog)

 

Next up is a Sicilian style pasta inspired by my main man Yotam Ottoloenghi with roasted cauliflower, tuna, pine-nuts, saffron and raisins that I served with a salad of wild rocket and the last of the summer figs. I love cauliflower cooked this way - with a dash of olive oil, some salt and pepper and roasted in a hot oven for about 15 minutes. I first had it at Mr Wolf, the fab pizza restaurant and bar in St Kilda, Melbourne. I also put it into paellas and cous-cous salads, it would be great as a mezze plate topped with a garlic, yoghurt and tahini dressing.

 

 

Raspberry and cream cheese crumble cake

2 1/4 C flour
3/4 C sugar
zest of one lemon
150g unsalted butter, cubed
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
small pinch of salt
3/4 C plain yoghurt
1 egg
1 1/2 C fresh or frozen raspberries plus 12 for topping

For the cream cheese:

220g cream cheese
1 egg
1/4 C sugar
juice of 1 lemon

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 180 Celsius
Grease a 20cm cake tin with butter, line the base with greaseproof paper.
In a food processor, blitz the flour sugar and butter until crumbly, reserve one cup of mixture for the crumble top of the cake.
Put the rest of the mix in a large bowl and add the baking powder, baking soda, salt, yoghurt and egg. Mix with a spoon or spatula until well combined then fold in the raspberries.
Pour the mixture in the tin and smooth the surface to make even.
Beat the cream cheese with the egg, sugar and lemon juice, spread over the mix in the tin.
Sprinkle the reserved crumbs on top and dot with the extra 12 raspberries.
Cook for 1 hour until your cake tester comes out clean.


Tuna, saffron and cauliflower spaghetti
(serves 4)

1/2 a head of a medium cauliflower, cut into small florets
3 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper
2 tbsp raisins or currants
pinch of saffron - powder or threads
splash white-wine vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 red onion, finely diced
2 stalks celery cut on angle into 1.5cm slices plus leaves pick and reserved
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
250g spaghetti
50g pine nuts toasted
1 tin tuna in olive oil, oil drained
Parmesan grated to serve

Method:

Get the oven hot, 220 Celsius.
Toss the cauli in one tablespoon of oil and season, put on a baking tray and cook till golden, about 10-15 minutes.
In a frypan, warm the rest of the oil and cook the onion and celery till soft, about 8 minutes.
Add the raisins or currants and the saffron, sugar and vinegar, let it sizzle and release the pungent vinegary smell, add the cauliflower and garlic and saute for a few minutes.
Meanwhile boil the pasta in salted water until al-dente. Drain and add to the sauce along with the pinenuts, tuna and celery leaves.
I serve it with Parmesan but some people turn their noses up at cheese on seafood pasta...

Summer in Sicily

 I am waking each morning wanting to be back, to open the door of our little farm house and to breathe in the fragrance of figs, green, earth and distant sea, to say good morning the skinny cats mewing at my feet for sweet milk from the cereal bowls. I want to be thinking about what to wear to the beach, where I left the sunscreen, how long we have until it gets too hot to bear, to wake and be in Sicily again.

Two weeks we've been back and I am mourning, my moment in the sun was all too short and Sicily spun some magic on me; her promise of an elemental life, made steady by the ocean, kept true by the rugged rocks, glowing fine with fresh fruit straight from the trees.

Old men still buy their picking ladders from the back of a truck on a dusty Sunday road, fine wine is grown then sold in plastic bottles from great vats in tiny shops that offer you a glass with your tuna and artichoke panini, a man selling onions the size of melons sleeps in a hammock hung between lamp-posts in the mid-day heat, caramel-skinned gods and goddesses of all sizes and ages flaunt their bodies with grace and ease, sipping espresso at the beach cafe.

We stayed on an organic farm, our hosts, Fabio and Annarella, welcomed us into their lives with immediate and natural abandon and we spent many evenings under the stars with them and their friends and family eating pasta and drinking wine then limonchello, the children playing happily outside as cicadas and Euro pop from the kitchen radio soundtracked our conversations.

Our Sicilian friends were philosophical about their lives, hoping to join young idealists like themselves together with an intricate and ever-expanding bridge of land-care, organic farming, intimate agriturismo, musical happenings, pop-up restaurants in mamma's kitchens and modern art. I was in awe of their energy and their motivations seemed less fuelled by ego than an authentic longing to partake in the unique opportunities that economic and spiritual realities offer them.

Cooking with food that has been ripened under the sun, picked and sold within days and without packaging and micro-managed marketing was refreshing. I couldn't get enough of my small blue-tiled farm kitchen, getting herbs, lemons and figs fresh from the garden, splashing Fabio's incredible olive oil on everything. Even Lidl in Sicily was a revelation - chunks of their smoky panchetta made their way into my pastas, they sold increadibly cheap but good wine, fresh raviolis and fat wedges of Grana Padano, the fruit and vegetables were restricted to seasonal and local supply, and, heaven! Italian tuna in olive oil sat beside saffron and tapenades. And that was the budget supermarket.

Here's some snaps and a recipe, that quite frankly should only be produced on Fabio's farm with figs from his tree and oil from his olives after a day at the beach with some Avola red to hand, but failing that, make sure the figs are ripe and soft and your oil is the best quality you can afford.

Prosciutto con melone  - sweet melon sits beside soft salty ham, perfect with chilled wine in a nutella jar

Annarella's salad with cherry tomatoes, fine sliced garlic, roast red peppers, basil and olives - dress with olive oil and salt

Fig, rocket and Grana salad
(Cooking for Italians is a bit daunting, like trying on swimwear with Giselle, but Fabio's mamma coo-ed appreciatively at this salad I made one night. It was a gratifying moment.)

A few handfuls of rocket
3 figs, sliced
shavings of grana padano
fabulous olive oil, white balsamic and salt to dress

that's it.