Garden update

Glorious weather!

Blossom everywhere you look: the nectarine and apricot trees have finished already, and the almond blossom is almost over; plum and peach is still getting into its stride, with pear, quince and cherry soon to follow..

The crocuses are done for the year - we had a great white carpet of them around the lilacs and camellias, beside the entrance walkway - although (perhaps a little strangely) the narcissus are still just on the verge of bursting into flower...hundreds and hundreds of them, lining the grass path which winds its way under the pine trees.

And everywhere, massed clumps of violets have appeared; they grow here naturally, and although we've had some each year in spring; this year, they've gone completely crazy..

Three magnolias are flowering generously, and doing so well that

I think I might get some more - of the slower growing varieties - to plant alongside 

the (still to be constructed...la Roma non era construita nel una giornata) new pergola beside the north lawn.

The doors to the garden stand open right through until nightfall, every day, which pleases the four-footeds enormously.

Tonight's Dinner:

Pork Casarecci

Roast Lamb, with Gratin of Courgettes

Chocolate Tart, with cassis sauce

And more...

The hot news this past week was from the Harvard University School of Public Health linking some death-related conditions with over-consumption of 'red meat' and 'processed meat'. John Humphries was giving some softly-spoken 'Food Scientist' (and yes, I do use that term with a clear curl of the lip) a remarkably easy ride about it on the Today programme - maybe he felt she was such a poor unfortunate that it would have been unfair to have properly grilled her about the vapid nonsense she was so confidently spouting. 

Anyway, in place of merely hurling insult - or, at the very least, before doing so - I was intrigued to look into the provenence of the headline-grabbing news. And the answer is that it came from  the 'American Health Professionals Study' and the 'American Nurses Health Study'. Why these? Well, the reasoning seems to be that people linked to the Health Industries would be more likely to fill in the forms year after year than an average citizen. Having actually looked at the forms, I suspect you'd have to be slightly um...unusual... even to subject yourself to this process...but, each to their own. The Nurses study was obviously composed of nurses, but the information in the men's study came from a combination of 29,683 dentists, 4,185 pharmacists, 3,745 optometrists, 2,220 osteopath physicians, 1,600 podiatrists, and 10,098 veterinarians (woof!). The form they had to fill in is here  http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/pdfs/94L.pdf

This is the 1994 version and the questions on meat are on pages 5 and 6. The questions vary slightly over time, but in 1994 the questions concerning meat consumption per month, per week and per day were as follows:

Chicken or turkey, with skin (4-6oz)
Chicken or turkey, without skin (4-6oz)
Bacon (2 slices)
Hot dogs (1)
Chicken and Turkey dogs (1)
Processed meats e.g. sausage, salami, bologna, etc (piece or slice)
Hamburger, regular (1 patty)
Hamburger lean or extra lean (1 patty)
Beef, pork or lamb as a sandwich or mixed dish e.g. stew, casserole, lasagna, etc.
Pork as a main dish e.g. ham or chops (4-6 ozs)
Beef or Lamb as a main dish (4-6ozs)

You can draw your own conclusions, but clearly the questionaire is very American in focus and assumes that hamburgers and hot dogs are an important part of the diet - as it should. I note also that pork is sometimes bundled with beef and lamb, and sometimes not, and ham is considered a red meat not a processed meat, and a slice of salami is considered the same as a whole sausage. And veal doesn't exist. Lasagne is a red meat dish but spaghetti bolognese isn't - Spaghetti comes under Breads, Cereals and Starches.

The study requires the respondent to state how much of each they ate during the last year.

  

Since I do all the menu-planning and associated provisioning in this household, I'd be better equipped than most, I suspect, to answer a question like that - and in fact, I know that even my answer would be no more than a wild (and probably wildly inaccurate) guess.  Do I know how many slices of salami I have eaten in the past year? Unless I'd turned vegetarian (as if!) and could confidently answer 'no', then the answer could be anything between 20 and 300. There's room in there for a pretty good margin of error...

This chart shows the relationship between the risk being run by someone having a portion of red meat every day, and those eating 2 or 3 portions every day. The upper chart A refers to men and the lower chart B to women.

Clearly, from the chart, those eating 3 portions of red meat a day every day are indeed at greater risk than those eating less.

Who are these people? Why are they eating so much meat? Do we know anyone eating 3 portions of red meat everyday all year long? What else are they doing to excess? Should we be told where they live and the places they frequent, so that we can take avoiding action?

Do we need to be warned against doing something we had no intention of doing in the first place?

As they used to say "GIGO". Garbage information in, garbage information out.

 Tonight's Dinner:

Salmon Mousse with Dill Sauce (that's 'Pink' rather than 'red', and 'fish' rather than 'meat' - although who knows how it might be classified by people indulging in health-related food research)

Pork loin (could be 'red', could be 'white', could even be 'cereal') with vanilla and garlic, pot roast in Coconut milk and stock; caramelised onions (in butter! even including a pinch of....sugar!!).

Tarte aux pommes (in cholestrol-rich instant-death-inducing pastry)

Sugar...the bitter truth

Now, here's a fascinating thing to watch.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

 It goes on for longer than it need (I stopped watching after about fifteen minutes or so, by which time I'd got the idea) and the lecturer has the deeply annoying tick of saying 'OK?' at the end of every sentence (somebody really should tell him...as they should also tell the newly-minted Duchess of Cambridge to stop smoothing her hair back approximately every five seconds - but I digress). The argument seems clear and unassailable: people eat too much because the food manufacturers are feeding them with drugs which stop their system telling them when to stop. QED. 

But I was additionally intrigued by said lecturer's reference mid-flow to a book produced many decades ago by a previously (to me) unheard of food scientist called Yudkin. The Slimmer's Cookbook. A copy of which I tracked down and purchased recently for the grand sum of one penny, on Amazon New & Used. It's amazing. This is the book I was looking for ten years and more ago when I was first experimenting with low-carb eating as a means of eating well without having to compromise on quality. Proper recipes - rather than the sort of sad apologies for recipes which are regularly churned out by 'home-economists'  in an attempt to make accessible the latest food fad on the market - all of which pass the low-carb filter. This was Atkins before Atkins had ever been thought of. A book I would have written myself....and perhaps in a way I have, in collecting together over the years my own reference library of 'proper' recipes which fit a low carb profile, many of which I've posted on here over time.

Time for a re-print, I'd have said!

Tonight's Dinner:

Will be courtesy of a small restaurant in Jersey. I leave for the airport in about an hour from now.

Cinnamon Meringue Nests

I was recently given a copy of the Ottolenghi recipe book, and although I confess I wasn't immediately grabbed by the contents in general (although I might come back to it at a later date, and discover riches beyond the dreams of actresses...you never know), I was struck by what, to me, was a novel way of making meringue. So, with only minor adaptation, I tried it. To great success.

Not for the faint-of-heart, or for anybody concerned about calorie intake - the amount of sugar in this recipe is rather alarming! -  this is definitely something for those occasions when you want a theatrical flourish, and can banish thoughts of the waistline to the following morning. The density of the meringue mixture is such that you can build a towering structure which will retain its shape perfectly as it cooks, with no worry that it might spread or topple or do any of those irritating things which are so depressingly familiar to cooks.

Another surprise about this particular recipe is the prevalence of the flavour of cinnamon, despite only using such a small amount of it. On this occasion, I filled the meringe nests with creme fraiche and raspberries (to balance the inevitable sweetness of the meringue itself), both of which have quite strong flavours ...yet the lasting sensation at the end of it all  - subtle, but certainly there - was of the cinnamon.

Apologies in advance to those of you who don't have a stand-up mixer. Ottolenghi says it isn't possible to beat the mixture hard enough or long enough without one, and that it just isn't possible to do it properly with a hand mixer. I can't comment - I wasn't interested to disbelieve him, so I didn't try.

For two large 'Nests'.

Ingredients: 100g egg whites; 70g Muscovado Sugar; 130g granulated Sugar; quarter teaspoon of Cinnamon.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 110 degrees C.

2. Put the egg whites and the sugars into a simmertopf or bain-marie, and heat gently for ten  minutes or so, stirring occasionally, until the sugars have dissolcved into the egg wite, and the mixture has reached about 45 degrees C.

3. Remove the egg-white/sugar mixtur to the bowl of a stand-up mixer (Kenwood, KitchenAid....whatever you have), and beat at high speed for eight minutes. It will firm up and increase in volume dramatically.

4. Fold into the mixture the Cinnamon, then put everything into a piping bag (I always piped meringue using a 'ribbed' nozzle, but that's just personal preference), and pipe two nests onto a baking tray lined with either greaseproof paper or a silicon mat.

5. Bake for between one and a half and two hours. Allow to cool, and preferably use on the same day as baking.

Keeping up with the Joneses...

not to mention the Schmidts, the Duponts, the Garcias, the Van den Burghs, the Holmquists, the McDougalls, the Llewellyns, and the Winckelmanns...

We, too, have snow!!!

Not exactly thigh-high, I admit...and in fact, by the time of writing, most of it has now disappeared (which I don't mind, one bit)...but still...

Snow!

Tonight's dinner:

Flamiches

Scaloppine, stuffed with Prosciutto and Fontina, breaded and fried;  Roast Celeriac.

Unmoulded Apple in aspic, with Rum & Orange; Vanilla Ice Cream.

How to make the perfect soufflé

Soufflés were one of the (relatively) first things I learned to make - after pastry, and crème patissière, I think. And certainly, I can remember about thirty years ago happily churning them out without a moment's thought, and often, when we were entertaining in the kitchen at Bankside, getting up from table mid-supper and getting on with soufflé production, without missing a beat in the general conversation. As with much else in those days, I learned from the late great Julia, in Mastering the Art...and, as with everything else that came from her instruction, the technique worked perfectly. (I've never been entirely clear how much that was Julia, and how much was Simone Beck, but at the end of the day, who cares?).

And then, over time, somehow I lost the knack. I'm not quite sure when...but I suppose I got hi-jacked by other people's methods and recipes (different temperatures, different base recipes, whether or not to use a bain marie, different ways of recognising the correct consistency of the mixture, different - but confident - opinions about everything...), and at a certain point I recognised that soufflés had become, for me, rather hit-and-miss. Which meant that I produced them less often, which meant that when I did they became even more hit and miss. Which was deeply frustrating, and basically kind of stupid....since I knew I used to be able to do it with my eyes shut. The final straw was the Larousse Book of Soufflés, which was one of the things under the tree for me this Christmas. Packed with wonderful-sounding things....except that when I tried the first of them, somehow instinctively I knew it didn't feel right, and when the end-result rose too high and then toppled over messily inside the oven, it was clearly time to take action. Following the time-honoured dictum that 'When all else fails, read the instructions', I decided to do just that, and crack open Julia once more.Which I did. January was significantly - and remarkably successfully - devoted to re-learning soufflés, and by the end of the period I felt as though I'd emerged from a bout of rehab, and all was once more well with the world.

The following method is for sweet soufflé (the method for savoury is different, and I'll post on that some other time), and is a basic recipe for Vanilla Soufflé, with variations thereafter for a number of different alternatives.

For two individual soufflés, in circular moulds 9cm diameter x 4 cm depth.

Ingredients: 11g plain Flour; 70 ml Milk (2.5 fl oz, if you're working in imperial - I switch between the two, all the time); 28g Sugar, plus 1 spoonful; 2 medium Eggs + one extra egg-white (if adding the extra white from whites you'e saved otherwise, and therefore need to measure a quantity, then one egg-white is approximately 30 ml); 1 tablespoon Vanilla Essence; a pinch of Salt; Icing Sugar.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Grease the inside of your two soufflé moulds.

3. Into a bain marie over medium heat, place the Flour, and add a couple of tablespoons  of the milk, to allow you to make a lump-free paste. Once the Flour has been properly incorporated, add the rest of the Milk, and mix together thoroughly with a hand whisk. Add the 28g of  Sugar, and cook for a few minutes, stirring from time to time, until the mixture has cooked and thickened. 

4. Remove the mixture from the heat, and beat in the egg yolks, one at a time. Allow the mixtrure to cool slightly, then mix in the Vanilla Essence.

5. In separate bowl, whisk the egg whites with a pinch of Salt, and when the whites start to stiffen, sprinkle a spoonful of sugar over hte surface; continue beating until the whites are stiff.

6. Mix a quarter of the stiff whites into the base mixture, then carefully fold in the remainder.

7. Fill the prepared moulds above the rim, and then run the side of a palette knife across the top of the mould, to scrape away excess mixture and to fill the moulds perfectly.

8. Run your thumb right round the edge of each mould, to create a small channel round the surface of each soufflé - this will stop the mixture from sticking to the mould, and allows the sides to rise vertically. Using a template (a piece of card or papaer, from which you've cut a circle about a cm in diamater less than the top of the soufflé) sprinkle icing sugar over the top of the mixture, to make a crisp skin on the surface of the finished product.

9. Place the soufflés in the oven, and as soon as you've closed the door, reduce the tempertaure setting to 180 degrees C.

10. Bake for eleven minutes. (This may take slight experimentation in practice, as no two ovens are identical, and ten seconds more or less can make all the difference with the finished consistency - you might find with your own oven that the best result is given by 10 and a half minutes, or by eleven and a quarter; for me, it's eleven.)

Serve. Immediately. And with pride. Best to put each soufflé dish on top of a folded napkin on each plate, as this stops the dishes from skidding around as the plates are taken to table.

The variations: For Coffee Soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla Essence with two teaspoons of Coffee Essence,  or better still, mocha paste;  for Praline soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla with two tsp of Praline Paste; for Orange soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla with the finely grated rind of one orange, plus 2 tbs of cointreau; for Almond soufflé, add to the Vanilla mixture a quarter tsp of almond extract, plus 90g of toasted ground almonds (you might need an extra egg white in this version, as the base mixture is thicker than with the other recipes, and so needs more beaten egg-white to lighten it.)

The Big Chill...

The lily-pond has been a sheet of ice for the past three days, although we haven't been having noticeable frosts - so I suppose the temperature must be all to do with the famous 'windchill factor'. It's enough for even the junior four-footed (who's choice normally would be to live outdoors, if he could) to come back inside, after only about three minutes' commmuning with nature - while his senior compadre merely peers doubtfully at 'outside', before politely looking up to indicate that No, he doesn't really think so, thank you.

I agree, and gardening has been put on hold for the time being. The locals, whipped by the media into a frenzy of concern, have been wrapping plants and shrubs in fleecy shrouds...and although I pondered doing it for some of the more tender plants, in the end I decided not to, since there were far more than I could wrap up that would be vulnerable if it got really cold (so, how to choose?)...and I wasn't entirely convinced about the threat, anyway. And in the end, I don't think it's been any colder than it normally is at this time of year, and already all those alarmingly low 'minus' figures have largely evaporated from the forecast - as I suspected they would - so it looks as though the panic should be over. The fleece-sellers will have done well from it, though!

The one thing we did decide to protect was the Madagascan Traveller's Palm in the courtyard - which isn't supposed to be this far north, at all - and the Technical Dept constructed an enormous bobble hat for it out of bubble wrap, inside which he rigged up a garden light , to keep the air slightly warm. And because the light is on 24/7, it washes upwards and casts a ghostly glow at night over the facade of the church behind, and catches the sculptural lines of the gothic windows. Rather splendid and mysterious...

Tonight's Dinner:

Courgette Soufflés.

Lasagne of Green Pasta & Guinea Fowl Ragu.

Apple and Orange crumble.