Recipe: Seared Salmon Fillet with Orange & Juniper

This is lazy cooking at its best - no more than five minutes prep beforehand, and the cooking time is merely the two minutes it takes to sear the fish fillets on both sides. The flavours of Orange and Juniper are subtle but definitely present, and the slight bite of the citrus goes well with the oiliness of the salmon.

I generally serve this with a light green vegetable - more often than not julienne of cucumber, sautéed in butter.


For three.

Ingredients: 300g Salmon Fillet (skin on or off, as you prefer - I rather like the crispness of the grilled skin, but it takes a minute or so longer to cook); grated rind of one large Orange; 6-8 dried Juniper Berries, ground in an electric coffee grinder; 2 tbs Gin; oil, or Trennwax, for frying.

Method:

1. Slice the fillet into three pieces, and place in a shallow dish. Evenly scatter the Orange rind and ground Juniper over the Salmon, and pour the Gin over the top. Turn the pieces of fish over several times, to make sure the other ingredients are evenly distributed over the surface. Leave to sit until you're ready to cook them (as I've stated elsewhere, I'm no great fan of the benefits of marinading, but it is practical to get the Salmon to this stage some time in advance of cooking it, and you can certainly leave it like this for several hours or so)

2. Heat a griddle or heavy frying pan on the stove until very hot, and either brush it with Oil, or else spray with Trennwax (if using oil, be sparing - you don't want the Salmon to swim in it).

3. Grill the Salmon pieces two minutes or so on both sides - you can watch the salmon coagulating as the heat penetrates it, and turn it once the heat has clearly penetrated from the bottom to the middle. Lightly salt the Salmon pieces just before and just after you turn them.

Serve.

The Highspots...

...of the past ten days or so, have been many and varied. The covered market in the centre of Kiev, where babuschkas of all shapes and sizes hawk caviar, and fruit and veg, and smoked eel, and many many different kinds of smoked curd cheeses (which looked tempting, but not a good idea, since I suspected that they wouldn't pass the definition of 'liquids' that would be applied by the security gremlins at the airport... and I never, ever check baggage when I fly...). And the street market outside, which was the only place in Ukraine where I saw people shopping in any number - presumably a direct reflection of the current dire state of the Ukrainian economy (emphasised by the fact that just along the street, outside the Town Hall, the mayor of Kiev is selling his mayoral limousine, and it stands there, rather forlornly sporting a 'For Sale' sign on the windscreen...) In the street market, people wrapped up against the cold, were clustering around stalls which sold great sculptural slabs of gingerbread - I bought one as a dinner-guest offering to take to the Brancolis-in-London, where we were due to dine on the following evening - and metal bathtubs full of large, flapping, and still very much alive Carp. One man was trading from the back of what was clearly an army truck, piled to the gunwhales with large green cabbages, the earth from the field still clinging darkly to them, and he grinned broadly whilst offering plates of his homemade coleslaw....

Then there was dinner with the Brancolis-in-London: a majestic game pie, followed by what can only be described as the acme of steamed puddings...the lightest, most mouth-wateringly unctuous, and certainly the most delicious treacle pudding (with a splendid undertaste of orange) that I think I've ever eaten. Bar none. And a raft of cheeses, all washed down by a (blind) comparison tasting of the Brancoli's latest bottled vintage with a tre bicchieri from a tuscan house of some renown, but which was exactly the same blend of grape varieties. Fooled by the edginess of the San Giovese that was more evident in the commercially-produced bottle, I got the identification completely wrong - which was most gratifying for the resident wine-maker, and an indication of just how well we were being fed and watered!

The christmas windows of Sprungli in Bahnhof Strasse in Zurich were another highspot, piled high with festive chocolate creations, and a treasure trove of boxes of Luxembergerli coffee and chocolate macaroons worthy of any aladdin's cave. The french have done such a thorough job in the past few years of adopting macaroons as a french product - significantly as a result of the efforts of Pierre Hermé and his macaroon fantasies at Ladurée - that people seem to have forgotten these days that macaroons were actually a swiss indulgence long before the french got in on the act. Just as they did a couple of centuries I ago, I suppose, when vienoisserie pastries arrived in Paris in the wake of Marie Antoinette, and have been considered as 100% french ever since. No less delicious for all that...

And in my list of highspots, I can't leave out the glorious sunshine in Cannes, last week, when the temperatures soared, and walking along the Croisette without a jacket felt more like May than November. Lunch at the Majestic featured slices of Foie Gras (de Canard, but then I suppose you can't have everything) which set the taste-buds tingling - but in fact wasn't quite as delicious as the home-cured version that is a speciality of the Technical Department - and a healthy (for which read 'un-healthy') quantity of champagne of a more than respectable quality. The star of the week, food-wise, though were the blackberry macaroons that were served by the Hotel Martinez (yes, a theme emerges) which looked amazing, tasted sublime, and literally melted in the mouth. Truly, the platonic form of the macaroon!

The lowspot, in comparison, was a sandwich I consumed in Zurich airport. Without question, the worst sandwich I have ever eaten in my life. Even as I bit into it, I had my doubts - but this is the sort of thing which happens after too many flights and late nights and early mornings within too short a period: the system craves comfort food, and won't be denied. So, even after the unpromising first taste of doughy, cheese-flavoured bread, I ploughed on. Unwisely. The contents revealed themselves as a mélange of ingredients that were mostly unidentifiable, but which in general had a rather clammily organic quality, along with a generally unpleasant flavour of pickle and sausage. I ate it. I confess. And although it avoided fighting back in any obviously mechanical fashion, I somehow felt that it stayed with me for several days thereafter - which was not a positive experience.
Dear Reader, be warned: at all costs, avoid the sandwiches at Zurich Airport!

Back home to Italy tomorrow for a week... I anticipate autumnal sunshine and some serious work in the garden, which should be good both for it and for me.

Tonight's Dinner:

Tartlettes of Tomato, Thyme, and Gorgonzola.

Pork Steaks in Mustard Cream Sauce, served with Cavolo Nero, braised with Juniper.

Marsala and Prune Possets.

Recipe: Lattice-Topped Blueberry Tart

This was the recipe that inadvertently led to the discovery of '00' pastry - the benefits of which I've listed elsewhere in this blog: light as air; delicious; shrink-proof.....and additionally, it has a resilience which means it can be rolled very thinly (between two sheets of cling-film) without falling to pieces, and so has the virtues of being both economical (one eighteen ounce ball of pastry can be stretched to three, if not four, eight inch tart shells) as well as dietarily sound.

Anyway - enough tub-thumping...

This is excellent served either warm as a dessert, or cold the next morning with coffee. Either way, it won't last long, as one slice leads inevitably to another...

For one eight inch tart:

Ingredients:

Pastry: 8 oz butter, frozen; 10 oz '00' flour; approx 1 tbs water. (This makes enough pastry for several tarts, but I've never bothered to try and pro-rata it down to make a smaller amount; either you can refrigerate unused pastry and use it over several days, or else freeze it for future use.)

Filling: 4 oz Cream Cheese; 2 tbs Sugar (or Splenda); 1 Egg; 1 tsp Vanilla Essence; 8 oz fresh Blueberries ; 2 tbs Blackcurrant Jam (seedless); juice of 1 Lemon. Optional: 1 tbs milk or beaten egg.

Method:

1. Make the pastry:

• Using the grater disc on the food processor, grate the frozen butter into the processor bowl;
  
• replace the grater disc with the standard cutter, then add the flour, and process for five seconds or so;
  
• add the water through the feeder tube and continue to process for about twenty seconds until the pastry has 'resolved' itself into one homogenous ball. It shouldn't be at all sticky to the touch at this stage;
  
• remove the pastry from the bowl and give it a 'fraisage' - place the ball of pastry on the work surface, and push it with the heel of your hand in five or six increments down onto the work surface and away from you 'in a firm, quick smear of about four inches' (I'm quoting the late great Julia here...incomparable on this kind of technical detail);
  
• gather the pastry together into a ball, wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate to rest for half an hour or so;
• roll out enough of the rested pastry as you need to line a greased 8" false-bottomed tart tin.

2. Blind bake the tart shell in an oven pre-heated to 190 degrees C. Bake approx ten minutes with weights in, and a further five or six after the weights have been removed. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly.

3. Beat together the Cheese, Egg, Sugar (or Splenda) and Vanilla Essence. Spread this over the base of the baked pastry shell. Distribute the Blueberries over the top of this mixture.

4. Heat the Jam and Lemon Juice together in a pan until the Jam has melted, then spoon this over the top of the berries.

5. Roll out enough pastry to make a lattice top for the tart - either by cutting it into strips and creating the lattice by hand, or - as I always do - by rolling a circle of pastry and using a circular lattice cutter (it saves a huge amount of time, and the result looks a great deal better...). Once in place on the tart, brush the lattice with either milk or a little beaten egg, to brown as it bakes.

6. Bake 45 minutes in a 190 degree C oven, and leave to cool down for ten minutes or so before serving.

"00" Flour is amazing stuff!

I waxed lyrical about it several weeks ago, when I was rediscovering the joys of hand-rolled pasta...but since then it has also turned out to produce surprisingly effective short-crust pastry, as well. 'Surprisingly', because the point about "00" is that it has a higher gluten content than normal, and so you'd expect pastry made with "00" to turn out tougher and to be generally less of A Good Thing than otherwise. Not a bit of it....Recently, when making a lattice-topped blueberry pie (for which my more usual choice of phyllo was inappropriate) I got caught short on bog-standard plain flour, and had to dip into the "00" which until then was reserved for making pasta. The result was a short-crust par excellence - light as air, but with none of that irritating tendency to fall apart that short-crust has when at the very 'shorter' end of the scale. Not entirely trusting the result, I tried it again a week later, with exactly the same result.

"00" is more expensive than the standard alternatives....but not astronomically so; in Italy, we're talking 97 centesimi a kilo, as opposed to 62 or so....and I think the equivalent quantity is available in Waitrose for around £1.40. It's definitely worth the extra - just as carnaroli is worth paying more for than arborio when making risotto - the difference in result hugely out-weighs the extra pennies at the till.

----

This week, autumn has hit Tuscany with a vengeance. Apart from one day, when the clouds parted and thin sunshine made a half-hearted effort to dry the garden, it's been endless sturm und drang ever since we arrived a week ago....Thunderstorms night after night, and sheets of rain coming down with monsoon-like ferocity. I assume it is just local to Pisa, though, as the Arno seems no higher than usual - generally, when there are several days of rain on the trot between here and Florence, the river level in Pisa rises quite dramatically, and people begin to think of the famous floods in '66, when most of the bridges were swept away, and our entire quartiere was a metre or more under water... As it is, we wake every morning to the sound of water pouring relentlessly from the gutters, and a daily task is to sweep away a fresh inflow of leaves that have yet again carpeted the floor of the loggia overnight.

In the rare interludes between rain, the garden is taking on its autumn hues, when the pomegranate tree gradually turns a vibrant, acidic yellow, and the Caci becomes a rich burnt orange. I no longer have to fight to restore order to the chaos of creeper and climbing roses which densely coat the pergolas - I now have a three or four month break from that particular task - and instead am gradually putting the garden in its winter format. The Cymbidiums - budding nicely - and Cyclamen, and Gladiolus Tristis have all come out from their summer hiding places, and I managed to plant 100 white crocus bulbs on Sunday afternoon, before the heavens opened yet again...

Menus are changing along with the season, as the declining temperature and blazing fires turn the mind to the trencherman's hearty fare of roasts and pies and the sort of sticks-to-tiny-ribs food that keeps the cold well and truly out. Last night was cauliflower in anchovy sauce, followed by guinea-fowl pot-roast with celery and Marsala... Winter certainly isn't all bad!

Tonight's Dinner:

Lentil Soup

Fiorentina, with Endive Salad

Prune & Armagnac Tart

Recipe: Bitter Orange Souffle

An excellent dish! Light and delicious, simple to make, with wow-factor at the first mouthful and an aftertaste that lingers ...

Easy enough for any old midweek supper, and impressive enough to qualify for even the most formal dinner party, the soufflé base can be made several hours in advance (and covered with clingfilm while it sits, to prevent a skin from forming) leaving just the beating of the egg whites and folding-in processes to be performed mid-dinner.

For two.

Ingredients: 30g Butter; 20g Plain Flour; grated zest and juice of 2 Bitter Oranges, or of 1 sweet Orange and half a Lemon; 60g Sugar (or equivalent volume Splenda); 100 ml Milk; 1.5 tablespoons of Grand Marnier; 2 Eggs, separated.

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Make the Soufflé base: melt the Butter in a double boiler or zimmertopf; stir in Flour and citrus zest; add the Milk and cook over low heat for a minute or so until the mixture has thickened; away from the heat, beat in the citrus juice, Sugar (or Splenda), Grand Marnier, and finally the Egg Yolks.

3. Whisk the Egg Whites to form soft peaks, then fold the Whites into the Soufflé Base. Divide between two individual ramekins which have been greased or sprayed with Trennwax. Set in a roasting pan, pour boiling water half way up the sides of the ramekins, and cook 10-12 minutes in the pre-heated oven.

4. Sieve a light layer of icing sugar over the top of the soufflés before serving.

The highspot of this week...

...was lunch on Wednesday, in glorious sunshine, on a wooden platform built out over the edge of the Danube. Looking across the water towards the slopes beneath the craggy fortifications of Kalemegdan Castle, hundreds of water birds wheeled and dived and bobbed gently on the waves. Through the gaps in the planks, the water was visible flowing just two feet beneath our feet - gently slapping against the platform supports as it did - and all that was visible otherwise were the densely wooded banks of the river and the wide expanse of intensely blue sky. We feasted on calamari salad, followed by simply grilled 'Sander', the local fish, which is generally translated as pike-perch, and in texture is like an oilier version of bream. Accompanied by a rocket salad, and washed down with a bottle of chilled local white wine, it couldn't have been more perfect. I abstained from the aperitif of Rakija that was offered at the start- to be knocked back, in traditional style, from something that looks like an Edwardian lady's scent bottle - as I had an appointment straight afterwards with some bad-tempered Serbs, for which I thought I would would need my wits about me (they didn't like a decision they thought had been my responsibity, and were intent on 'persuading' me to change my mind - it had been, and they didn't. But in the course of the meeting, I began to understand how the Bosnians must have felt in the not-so-distant past....)

Other than that, the week had an increasingly surreal quality as it wore on.....starting from a presentation in Athens on Tuesday concerning development opportunities in Montenegro, given by a welsh-sounding serb who sported a hairstyle that wouldn't have shamed a Bee-Gee.....and ending up in a cold and damp Moscow at three o'clock on Friday morning, wending my way from a nine-hour stint at a party in the Zafferano Restaurant. Notwithstanding the sweetness of Russian champagne and the inexplicable pinkness of the Pinot Grigio on tap, I can state unequivocally that Russians certainly know how to party!

In between times, there was the occasional oasis of calm - most memorably when I went in search of an Athenian taverna I used to frequent in the seventies near the Evvangelismos Hospital, and found that it had been transformed in the meantime into an elegant and distinctly upmarket eatery. I sat in dappled sunshine for nearly half an hour under the elegant canopy of pleached limes that now shades the terrace, and indulged in Proustian recollections of afternoons whiled away in that very place consuming endless plates of fried cheese and bottles of Boutari. Times have certainly changed, and the price of the single glass I drank contemplatively on this occasion would have probably paid for an entire lunch for four back in those days!

Or there was dinner taken on Tuesday evening at Madera Restaurant in Belgrade - definitely more bizarre than serene. The food looked - and probably tasted - like an offering from one of the more adventurous issues of Good Housekeeping circa 1968; at the table next to me were two ladies who had clearly escaped from a Fellini casting (one, stylishly sporting a silver fox fur tippet, and the other with an exposed embonpoint that was of positively architectural proportions) and all this against the background of a piano and cello duet, who produced a superb rendition of, amongst other things, 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' . The cellist, I thought, was particularly good.

And now, two days in London, before disappearing off to the peace of Italy for an entire fortnight - which will be truly blissful! Yesterday morning, to the Queen's gallery, for the Breughel to Rubens exhibition. Most of the early portraits - Quinten Massys and Joos Van Cleve particularly - were spectacularly splendid...
On the whole, I think having the pictures might just about make it worth being monarch - although the rest of the job-package isn't particularly persuasive. Which is fortunate, really, when you think about it...

Tonight's Dinner:

Poached Eggs, on a bed of Spinach & Sprue.

Pork Tenderloin, roast with Star Anise, and served with Turnip Gratin.

Lemon Tarts.

Recipe: Ravioli with Parsley Stuffing

My favourite new pasta dish - and one for which I don't in the least understand its obscurity. I've yet to come across parsley-stuffed ravioli on a restaurant menu anywhere in Italy, and yet the flavour is great and the preparation couldn't be simpler. Maybe it's another of those things where its simplicity has meant that people have come to disregard it, and along the way they stopped noticing how good it actually is...

So much about cooking is efficient time-management. About ten days ago, the Brancolis came to dinner, in advance of us all going to the final concert in this year's Anima Mundi Cycle, in the Duomo (Arvo Part's Cantus for Benjamin Britten, and Renaud Capucon playing Brahms' Violin Concerto - both of which were truly excellent...). The fact that we lingered longer than intended over pre-dinner fizzy wine, and that the concert was going to start at 9.00 come-what-may, conspired to mean suddenly we were pressed for time....and from the moment of starting to roll the pasta dough to the point when bowls of steaming ravioli were placed on the table took exactly 30 minutes. Doubtless, some weather-beaten Nonna would have been able to do it in half the time....but I thought it wasn't a bad effort for a mere novice.

For Four*.

Ingredients: Pasta dough, made with 3 medium eggs and 2 cups of '00' flour, plus a generous pinch of salt and a teaspoon of olive oil(optional: you can also ad a sachet of squid ink if you want black pasta, and a slightly fishy taste to your ravioli) ; 250g ricotta; 1 cup loosely-packed fresh parsley; 1 piece of hard parmesan, about 1.5" cube, cut into small pieces; 1 egg; large pinch of Nutmeg; salt & pepper to taste.

Method:

1. Process all of the pasta dough ingredients together for thirty seconds,to give you a homogenous lump, that is not sticky to the touch.Let this rest in the fridge for half an hour

2.Place the parsley and pieces of parmesan in the food processor bowl and process for ten seconds or so, until decently broken down, and then add all the remaining ingredients and process further to make a thick paste. Check and adjust the seasoning as necessary.

3. Once rested, divide the pasta dough into quarters, and quickly roll each quarter ten times at the broadest setting on your pasta machine, turning and folding the strips as you go. Then, cut each quarter in half; cover the remaining pieces of pasta to stop them drying out, and take each of the eight pieces of dough through the six-stage rolling process, reducing the thickness between the rollers with each stage.

4. Once each strip of pasta has finished its sixth roll, lay it on a floured cloth and place a row of teaspoons of filling (five or six, depending upon the exact length of the pasta strip) along the centre of the strip. Fold the strip over on itself, and use a pasta wheel seal the length of the folded strip and to cut between the spoonfuls of filling, to create square ravioli about and inch and a half square.

5. Repeat with the remaining pasta and filing (I generally find I run out of filling while I still have some pasta dough left - enough for a fettucine starter the following day). Cook for about three minutes in a large pan of boiling, salted water.

6. To serve: melt a couple of ounces of butter in a small saucepan, and add to this a half cup of double cream. Heat through for about a minute, to thicken slightly, as the pasta cooks, and then use gently to coat the ravioli once they've been drained.