Recipe: The Best Chocolate Ice Cream...

...bar none. According to the Technical Department, at any rate - and he considers himself something of an aficionado.Neither too bitter nor too sweet, with a velvet texture, and an undertone of vanilla which kicks the whole thing up a very definite notch.

I found the recipe, several years ago,  buried deep within the pages of a volume called 'Chocolate Passion', where it formed merely a part of an elaborate and overly-constructed dessert.  The rest of the dish left me cold - as did much of the rest of the book, in fact, with a lot of illustrations of rather indigestible chocolate concoctions that sat heavy on the stomach just from their photographs! Following Nico Ladenis' philosophy that the purchase price of any recipe book is justified by the discovery in its pages of only one recipe that enters your repertoire, though, I don't begrudge a cent spent on this one. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

For five servings:

Ingredients: 5 medium egg yolks; half a cup of sugar; generous pinch of salt; one and a quarter cups of cream; 1 cup of milk; 6 ounces of dark chocolate (coarsely chopped if in one piece; I generally use small chocolate buttons); 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract.

Method:

1. Heat the milk and cream in a bain-marie or simmertopf, along with all but two tablespoons of the sugar, and the pinch of salt.

2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar, until they are pale yellow in colour and leave a tail behind the whisk.

3. Add the liquid to the egg yolks, mix together thoroughly, and then return the combined mixture to the simmertopf. Cook over medium heat for about five minutes, until the mixture it has visibly thickened and will coat the back of a spoon.

4. Turn off the heat, add all of the chcolate and let it stand for 30 seconds before whisking the chocolate into the custard.

5. Remove the chocolate custard to a bowl, and whisk in the vanilla extract. Allow the mixture to cool completely, stirring from time to time, before churning it in your ice cream machine, and then freezing.

If the ice cream has been in the freezer for more than a couple of hours, remember to put it in the fridge to defrost slightly for about half an hour before you want to serve it.

Back from the Dead!

Phil lives, once more! 

Or, at least, 'Phil' is  how he's known in this house. More accurately, his name - or perhaps, his title - is a Jura Impressa F50. But he was christened 'Phil' within about five minutes of arrival, five years or more ago, when the first command he bleated at us was 'Fill Coffee', shortly followed by 'Fill Water' - only after which would he deign to produce two excellent cups of coffee (which is, after all,  his sole reason for existence). And downhill of those commands, we soon got an 'Empty Grounds'. He's a bossy little sod, when's all said and done. It's a little like living with Hal from 2001, except without the mellifluous good manners. Where Hal was all courteous helpfulness, Phil comes across as rather prissy and prim, and entirely lacking in a sense of humour. He is Swiss, so I suppose it's not surprising. Every so often, and generally without warning, he makes a series of odd noises, which I think are some sort of self-cleaning process - somehow, though,  it seems to be rather a personal moment (as though he's strenuously adjusting his knicker elastic, or worse) and not an activity to be shared. Time to hum loudly and look elsewhere, until he's finished.

Generally, I leave Phil to the Technical Department. It may be my imagination, but every time I attempt to persuade him to produce coffee, I get a refusal ...or, at least a refusal until I've done something for him, along the lines of filling something or emptying something, or closing some flap or other to his satisfaction. I lose patience with that sort of thing very rapidly. Oh, and he's multi-lingual - on one occasion TD went off to London for a few days and inexplicably left Phil set to operate in German. Which I don't speak. After the first attempt to have him produce an espresso for me had floundered against a stream of incomprehensible Deutsch, I had to resort to the time honoured cafetière instead, until the TD returned.

You'd think, from all of this, that Phil is more of a bane than a blessing. But nothing could be further from the truth. The coffee he produces is excellent. And endless. Practically.

The water here in Pisa, though, is very chalky. And at one point - on cup number 6,284 (he counts them all and keeps a record; I told you....he's Swiss!) just after we'd started to comment that the coffee Phil was making wasn't as hot as it used to be, he suddenly stopped altogether. He'd got furred arteries, and needed an urgent transplant. We were stricken; and so were many of our friends and relations...who looked in alarm at the semi-dismantled automaton in the corner of the kitchen and immediately asked what the matter was with him. And, as time went by, they'd arrive, and look, and ask if Phil still hadn't recovered? Which gives you some idea of how good his output normally is.

Technical Dept sent off for the relevant spare parts. Which were sent to London. And then got lost. So, a second lot were sent for. Which did arrive. However, it transpires that Phil needs a special tool to be properly taken to pieces, and this needs to be supplied especially. Otherwise, we risked terminal damage. So, special tool was ordered, and arrived. And it was only then that it became clear that the spare parts supplied were for a more modern model than our Phil, and so yet more spare parts had to be ordered. Which eventually also turned up....and then TD rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. And from the combination of the expression on his face, the growing pile of spanners and diagrams and proliferation of little glass bowls full of Phil's innards, the need for re-thinks and strategy breaks...and the fact that the task stretched over days (and days), without much sign of progress, it seems that the construction of a lunar module would have been childsplay by comparison.

And then, yesterday, in time for the start of the new year, Phil was finally reassembled, the last screw tightened on his casing, the appropriate buttons pressed and a cup held in place, and we had the first post-op tasting. Perfect!

So, to all Phil's fan club out there, we can announce that the surgical intervention has been a complete success. Anybody fancy a coffee?

Tonight's dinner:

Foie Gras (the last of the Boxing Day vertical tasting, where we decided that the poached version beat the salt-cured method by  a hair's breadth), along with Harry's Bar Bread Rolls.

Shepherd's Pie (the end of the Lamb loin)

Chocolate Soufflé Crêpes

Foolproof Roast Lamb...

 

Slow cooking in the oven is an absolute godsend for the harrassed host. In the place of precise timings and last-minute stress, this method means that the work is all done hours in advance (freeing up the time to be stressed about another course instead!). By the end of this past Christmas weekend - which, in practice turned into three consecutive dinner parties, interspersed with two consecutive lunch parties (a lot of fun, but....well, you know) - to be able to turn to this method for the main course for dinner on Boxing Day was an enormous help.  Painless, and entirely reliable. (One thing to remember, though, with this method is not to rely on your oven controls to tell you what temperature the oven has reached, but to put an oven thermometer in the oven alongside the meat and to take your readings from that - something I've learned from bitter experience!)

For one Lamb Loin (enough for eight servings):

 

1. Remove the joint from the refrigerator for long enough for it to reach room temperature, (about 3 hours before you want to start cooking). Then , using a blow torch, flame the joint all over to kill any surface bacteria. Season and tie the joint neatly. 

2. Pre-heat the oven to either 60°C (for medium, or pink lamb at the end of cooking) or to 65°C (if you prefer your lamb more cooked). Place the lamb in a dish with a piece of foil loosely laid over the meat, and cook for 3½ hours. (For those that like lamb really 'well done', set the temperature at  70°C.) If your oven has multiple settings, make sure to use the setting without the fan, as otherwise you risk the joint drying out. Once the joint has heated through, remove it from the oven and it can be 'held' until needed

3. 30 mins before serving, heat the oven to maximum. When the oven has reached maximum temperature, set the joint on a wire rack and roast until the outside is well browned, 10 - 15 mins. (If you have a gas grill or similar you can use this to brown the joint, instead).

4. Keep the joint warm while you have your first course then carve, season and serve on hot plates with a little hot sauce of your choice (I normally make a reduction of stock and red wine).

And so, this is Christmas...

The tree is dressed, and ready. The fridge is groaning (foie gras, curing in its salt; duck, boned and stuffed with lemon-butter and sage; bowls of mincemeat, fish stock, and sausagemeat prepped for rolls; venison pavés; sides of smoked salmon; fillets of sole...); the senior four-footed, as a Christmas treat to all, has just had a bath, and is looking disconsolately fluffy and smells wonderfully of shampoo; the house is filled with the heady aroma of sauce veneur simmering on the stove, along with the dulcet tones of Brenda Lee trilling 'Frosty the Snowman' (although I can see the post-modern ironic humour of that wearing thin rather quickly). Bread dough is rising in the kitchen, and enough puff and shortcrust pastry has been made to supply an army with sausage rolls and mince pies, in between actually eating.

The Belfortes are about to descend on us en masse, and after the Brancolis arrive tomorrow morning, we can embark on all the festivity stuff. This year the tree has been banished to the barn, with the idea that we rev up the wood stove and keep hypothermia at bay over present-giving with a combination of mulled wine and warm pastries. Fortunately, the forecast is for the day to be (wintry) warm and sunny...so we might just about last the course before somebody remembers that it's the middle of winter, and we're all about to catch our death.

Then, indoors again for lunch (tomato and pepper tarts; artichoke frittata; smoked salmon; salad; and an array of glorious french cheese, promised by the Belfortes), after which we're sending them all off on a scavenger hunt for the afternoon. They don't yet know this, which could mean we risk a minor rebellion - but in the absence of the Queen's Speech, we have to find something for them to do in the afternoon (and, more importantly, get them out of our hair, while we get on with preparing dinner, which is after all the main event of the day). And then.....dinner: devils on horseback (by popular request) before we sit to Sole Normande, followed by Venison (with sauce veneur), and finish with Grand Marnier soufflés. The Brancolis are supplying due and tre bicchieri bottles (Avvoltorre) to go with the venison, so we can indulge in a vertical tasting as we go. Not the last vertical tasting of the holiday, though, as, during dinner on Boxing Day,  we're planning to compare salt-cured foie gras with the poached variety.

By the 27th, they'll all have gone, the cupboards will be looking sadly empty, and we can allow ourselves to subside into midwinter lethargy. And the senior four-footed will be well on the way to recovering that eau de 'spaniel left out in the rain'  aroma that he particularly favours.

Tonight's dinner:

Mussel Risotto

Duck, boned and roast, with lemon-butter and Sage pushed under the skin; wild mushrooms; diced potatoes fried in goose fat

Aosta apple and orange tart.

Recipe: Tomato and Pepper Tart

The success of this recipe is all about concentrating the tomato flavour until it is rich and intense and edgy. A deceptively simple presentation, but when you go through the sliced tomato surface and get to the complicated combination of flavours beneath, it really is show-stoppingly good. I pefer to make it with phyllo pastry shells, which means the finished dish is light and more-ish - but a buttery shortcrust would work just as well, I'm sure.

For two individual tarts.

Ingredients: two pre-cooked phyllo pastry shells; three medium sized Tomatoes; 2 tbs finely diced Red Pepper; one small Onion; two Garlic cloves; a Bouquet Garni; 2 oz butter; Olive Oil; 1 tbs Tomato Paste; half a dozen Basil leaves, shredded; 1 tsp dried Thyme; Salt & Pepper.

Method:

1.Finely slice one of the Tomatoes (you want about twelve slices, in total), and put in a bowl with the diced Pepper; melt half of the Butter over low heat, then pour this over the Tomato and Pepper mixture, add a little salt, and mix together. Set aside.

2. Melt the remaining butter in the pan, with a little Oil. Sauté the onion, finely diced, for a few minutes until visibly softened. Dice the remaining tomatoes, and add them to the pan, along with the Garlic (minced), Bouquet Garni, and tomato paste. Cook, stirring frequently for a bout ten minutes, over medium heat, until the mixture has entirely collapsed and has lost most of its liquid - it should be quite thick at this stage.

3. Discard the Bouquet Garni. Check and add seasoning to taste, and stir in the shredded basil leaves. Divide the mixture between the two pastry shells.

4. Arrange the slices of Tomato (along with the diced Pepper) over the top of the Tomato mixture, to cover. Bake for ten minutes in a 180 degree C oven, until the slices are visibly dried out, and have started to colour at their edges. Remove from the oven, and drizzle a little Olive oil over the top of each tart, and sprinkle with the dried Thyme.

Venice in November

Crisp and sunny....and empty! Some tourists - inevitably -   around Saint Mark's ....but the quiet side canals of Dorsoduro and Canareggio were largely deserted, apart from locals en route to the market or else snatching a quick coffee and a minute or two of autumn sunshine. Venice was so quiet, in fact, that we actually went inside the Basilica, for the first time - always previously having been put off by the queues outside, and, seeing nobody waiting in line as we crossed the Piazza on Monday afternoon, we seized our chance and nipped inside. To a mess of drugget strips and guard ropes and signposts, the gloomy interior illuminated by pools of light wherever a dickensian prelate sat hunched over a cash desk, ready to sell access to some other part of the inner sanctum. We ventured inside the Treasury - three euros each - to find a rather tatty display of saintly body-parts encased in gimcrack and generally dented silver-gilt containers; all against a background of the low murmer of several hundred people all simultaneously observing the regulation 'silenzio'. We didn't stay long. Gennaro assures me that the place is magical by candlelight, for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I'll take his word for it.

Conversely, San Sebastiano, on Monday morning, and the dalmatian Scuola di San Giorgio, on Tuesday were quite spectacular. In the former, we'd gone specifically to look at the recently restored Veronese ceiling panels (in practice, I thought they'd been overdone, and the effect is clumsy) but the church as a whole is a gem...as is San Giorgio, with its painted ceiling,  and Carpaccio's panels of Saint George and Saint Jerome. We had both places to ourselves, and luxuriated accordingly. As was the case also in San Rosario, where the reflection of the sun on the waters of the Giudecca Canal outside shimmered over the foreshortened images in Tiepolo's incredible ceiling.

Otherwise, the Kieffer exhibition on the Zattere was impressive - great sheets of lead, suspended from a long rack, displaying the colours of minerals and decay - and we even managed to shoehorn ourselves into a poetry reading, on Monday evening, in a small gallery in the Ghetto, where Michael Glover's rather bland verse set off to perfection the sharp-tongued observations written and read by Philip Morre. 

And we feasted. An excellent lunch in La Zucca (just to the north of San Giacomo de l'Orio), and a pretty good one the day before at the Vecio Marangon, in Campiello Centro Pietre; dinner at Vini da Gigio was a bit ho-hum (and, not for the first time, it smelt of drains ....I think probably it can now fall off the list, as no longer vaut le detour) whilst that at Fiaschetteria Toscana couldn't have been bettered: a perfect risotto of clams and baby squid, to start with, and then deep-fried monkfish cheeks, all washed down with a memorable Gavi di Gavi, 2007. As we were leaving, La Signora bore down on us and - for some reason - starting talking with great animation of the celebrations being organised in Verona for her friend, Marcella Hazan's imminent (ish) ninetieth birthday - she appeared to think we might be on the guest list, but (sadly) I suspect she was confusing us with somebody else.

And then, of course, there were all the numerous and necessary halts along the way for coffee, and spritz,  and beer, and prosecco with which any trip like that has to be punctuated - on this occasion, most memorably on Sunday evening, when we emerged from a bar, to find a dense fog had suddenly descended, to swirl in eddies around the streetlamps, and along the edge of the canal....and then on Monday (brilliantly sunny, once more),   at the wonderful enoteca on Fondamenta Nani, which is packed in the middle of the day with venetians eating and drinking on the hoof, and all engaging in high-energy gossip at the same time.

Art, and ozone, and walking (and walking!) and food and drink....and,  before our train had even reached Bologna on the return journey, yesterday, I was out for the count!

Tonight's dinner:

Courgette Soufflés

Scaloppine alla Milanese (with prosciutto and cheese inside); braised fennel

Apple tart.

Robuchon - my book of the year

Yes, I know - the year isn't yet over. But I have no doubt whatsoever that my award for book of the year will go to 'The Complete Robuchon', which I've been working my way through, during the past few weeks. A lifetime's experience distilled into one authoritative volume. No-nonsense, spare, intelligent, and all-round excellent. There are no pictures - so not something for the coffee-table audience - and the recipes are well-structured and efficiently written. This is the sort of 'bible' to be compared with, say, Madame de Sante-Ange....and, dare I say it, it shows how far we've moved on since the late great Julia first published 'Mastering the Art...'. Just off the top of my head, new discoveries for me from Robuchon have been a splendid tart of tomato and red pepper - light and exquisite - a recipe for red mullet in saffron cream; a version of scaloppine alla milanese, in which prosciutto and cheese are sandwiched between the scaloppine; rabbit, roast in a mustard poultice; a cornichon sauce for pork chops; a different method for pintade au chou; porcini with broad beans....the list goes on, and I'm still only a third of the way through the book!

For anybody thinking what to give themselves as an early Christmas present, I can't recommend this one highly enough!

 Tonight's dinner:

Will be up at Brancoli, so I don't know what it will be; although I will be making an apricot and cinnamon cake to take as a guest-offering. And then, tomorrow we leave for Venice for a couple of days, so dinner will be the responsibility variously of Vini da Gigio and Fiaschetteria Toscana.