Some of you might that mascarpone is perfectly fine in its own right and I wouldn’t argue with that but the occasional twist and turn never did anyone any harm in my opinion. I love mascarpone, it’s rich, creamy and versatile.
I suppose I use ‘versatile’ in many of the recipes that I write about but then I put that down to my profession. Cooking for me is also a business and I have to be business minded in the dishs I create.

But then we all have to be careful about the food we cook and as price is such an important issue for so many of us then the versatility of an ingredient becomes evermore important.
What I like about mascarpone is that it serves as a great base and easily takes on other ingredients but for now I’m sticking to two; oranges and lemons.

An spoon of orange or lemon scented mascarpone is a thing of beauty, no question. It reaches parts other creams can only dream of and it is so easy to make. I couldn’t say which one I prefer but I’d probably advise you to try the lemon first.
All you do is take a washed lemon or orange, maybe two and grate the zest on a fine grater.

Now take a pan and add a small quantity of equal parts water to sugar, a simple stock syrup and bring to the boil. Now add the grated zest, lower the heat and cook until the syrup has reduced, the zest is cooked and you have a thick, sticky syrup. Leave it to cool.

Take your mascarpone and add the syrup, zest and all to it. Get the ratio of mascarpone to syrup right, you want it to taste of the fruit, it should be right up there at the front, not lurking in the background.
All you do now is serve it with a warm pudding, tart, pancakes, whatever you want. Just don’t feel guilty about it!!!

Rice Pudding has become a bit of a favourite of mine in recent years, as a child I detested it, I blame it on my school days. I was, quite literally force-fed sago, pudding, semolina and rice pudding by irate sports teachers who used their stopwatches to time our lunch breaks.

Those dreadful lunches scared me for life, to this day I can smell the boiled cabbage, feel the sense of dread when the ‘dessert’ would arrive and remember feeling blessed for my Mother’s ability to cook proper homemade food.
Rice pudding is worthy of a second look so here’s a recipe which I’ve enhanced with the addition of plump, delicious prunes which have soaked in an orange stock syrup. I find infusing the milk with finely grated orange zest really gives the pudding a wonderful lift.

Recipe for Rice Pudding

225g (8oz) Short-grain rice
1.2 litres (2pints) Milk
100g (4oz) Caster sugar
2 Cloves
1 Star Anise
Zest of one orange finely grated
Pitted Prunes soaked in stock syrup

Combine all of the ingredients in a pan and bring to the boil, stir regularly. Simmer gently until the rice is cooked. Remove the spices. Place hot pudding in ramekin, arrange prunes over the top and push gently into the pudding. Sprinkle the top with Demerara sugar and place under a hot grill until caramelised.

Rice Pudding with Prunes

I mentioned the other day about putting more simple, easy to folllow ideas on here rather than some of my more elaborate restaurant dishes and here’s one that is very simple, cous cous with squid and chorizo.

I was thinking about how families have increasingly to balance their household books each week and how I could relate that to some of the recipes on here. With that in mind I went to my local supermarket and looked at what I could come up with that could be varied accordingly whilst being both cheap and healthy to eat.

I suppose cous cous is an ideal starting point. It’s very cheap, good for you and goes so well with any number of variations I believe every house should carry a bag of it. Personally I use plain cous cous and flavour it myself but there are some very good ready to mix ones out there if you haven’t got the time or confidence to do it yourself.

I bought a packet of ready-made lemon and coriander cous cous to try and it was perfectly fine. In the fridge I had some left-over chorizo sausage and in the freezer a packet of squid tubes. Now squid is very reasonably priced, it’s another very versatile ingredient but you could use other fish such as prawns or a cheap white fish.
So I made the cous cous as per the instructions; boiling water, cover, stir with fork and leave. Simple.
Into a pan went some olive oil, chorizo next to fry until slightly crisp, squid next for two minutes maximum, a little dried chilli, oregano and fresh lemon and straight onto the cous cous. Voila!!

Squid with Cous Cous and Chorizo

This post comes on the back of a recent walk around Tetney Blow Wells with my brother. It was a cold, still morning and wildlife was distinctly hard to find. Walking through the wood we were stopped in our tracks by the unmistakable sound of a woodpecker ‘knock, knock, knocking’ on a tree nearby. Now woodpeckers are far easier to hear than spot and possibly second only in the annoyance stakes after a kingfisher in trying to photograph.

As soon as it had started the knocking had stopped and once more we were alone in the wood. Following the trail through the wood my brother spotted a tree which had been all but decimated by a woodpecker and the damage caused was really quite alarming and worthy of a closer look.

Tree damage by Woodpecker

Woodpeckers tend to fall into two categories; insect hunters and sap suckers. The insect hunters are by far the lesser of the two evils for tree conservation, they look for insects in dead wood whilst sap suckers tear living trees apart in search for sap and the insects found in them and will return time and again making the holes larger and larger. This in turn attracts other visitors to the scene incurring more structural and bacterial damage by wood fungi and wood decay.

Insect eating woodpeckers will tap away at a tree until they are satisfied they have either eaten its inhabitants or there is no food to be found. The woodpecker has two useful tools at its disposal; its bill and tongue. The bill is used to tap away at the wood and make the incisions wherever it thinks bugs can be found whilst it uses its long, sticky tongue to grab at them with consumate ease. There is a definate double-edged sword about the woodpecker, when food is plentiful it will search out and eat bark lice and wood borers which are harmful to trees in their own right but when the food supply is low it will attack healthy wood and so undo all of its previous good work.

So listen out for your local woodpecker wherever you are for there is bound to be a species not so far away. Don’t just look into the trees though, find an ant hill and the chances are you’ll find a woodpecker.

Here’s a recipe for one of my all time favourite desserts; tangy, light and very moorish. It’s old fashioned, easy to make and just like my recent orange and date salad recipe is a perfect vehicle for other possibilities. I suppose the beauty of this dessert is in its simplicity, serve it with some clotted cream or mascarpone and it is perfection in a glass. I am introducing this dessert onto one of our menus in Spain next month, it is practical for the kitchen in question and for our customers visiting during the Spring and Summer months when the outside temperatures dictate the style of food we can serve.

That said I would suggest looking at some little touches here and there, some lemon verbena infused in the cream before cooking adds an old fashioned ‘Englishness’ whilst a ball of chocolate sorbet would add a touch of luxury. Fresh, ripe Summer fruits and a scoop of vanilla ice cream send the humble posset into another league altogether. This recipe serves six in medium sized goblets.

Recipe for Lemon Posset/Set Lemon Cream

900ml (1 and half pints) Double Cream
250g (9oz) Caster Sugar
Juice of Three Lemons

Boil cream and sugar and simmer for three to four minutes, add lemon juice, stir and simmer for three minutes. Allow to cool slightly before dividing between six glasses.
Allow to set in the refrigerator. Garnish with cream and fresh raspberries.

Lemon Posset

There is a beautiful orange tree on the grounds of one of our Spanish resorts which gets choc full of fruit and I wanted to do something which was very simple in order to fully showcase the fruit.
Desserts in Southern Spain should, in my opinion reflect the climate and one’s desire to eat food which is, by and large uncomplicated, easy to digest and refreshing.

A proper fruit salad can be quite special, a little bit of thought and it can be transformed into a perfectly acceptable restaurant dessert. There’s no room for food snobbery on this blog and I much prefer writing about good, simple food than complicated recipes which require chefs, time, money and space. I don’t mind doing the odd one for interest’s sake but I do believe the majority should be of some practical use to the visitor.

So here’s a plate of sliced oranges! It’s a little tip of the hat to Spain and is perfect for altering as you wish. The oranges can be replaced by other fresh fruit and the dates by other dried fruits, it doesn’t matter.
I started by removing the orange skin and adding them to a simple stock syrup of equal quantities of white sugar to water. Once boiled I left it to simmer and threw in a couple of cloves, a star anise, some stalks of fresh mint and a little cinnamon bark. I passed the stock through a sieve and onto a bowl of the orange which I had cut into even slices. A few dates were in there too and the stock would help to bring them back to life.

A few pine nuts were toasted but you could use walnuts or almonds, five or six fresh mint leaves were shredded finely and sprinkled over the cool oranges before a blob of vanilla ice cream finished it all off.
You could add a couple of drops of rosewater to your syrup for a bit of a North African vibe and you could also use a less sweet option as a base for some nice Greek feta cheese. Have a play around with it and see what you can come up with.

Spanish Style Orange and Date Salad

A sad day in the chef world today with the news of the death of Rose Gray, co-founder of the legendary River Cafe restaurant in London. Along with her great friend Ruth Rogers she made Italian food fashionable and, more importantly accessible for the home cook throughout the late eighties and up to the present day. Perhaps most famous for training amongst others Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame her influence stretched far beyond one or two celebrities.

The River Cafe’s food style had a great influence upon me. It said that food could, and should be served without fuss. As long as the ingredients were good and they cooked with care then there wasn’t much more to it. Rustic Italian food took on a new meaning to me because of their books and they would go on to be the benchmark of modern top quality restaurants throughout the nineties and beyond.

Rose Gray had a infectious enthusiasm for food, widely loved in the industry her influence will live on for many more years to come.

Rose Gray MBE
1939-2010

Kestrel’s are fabulous birds of prey, the day I grow tired of watching them hunt is the day I’ll give it all up. The sight of a kestrel hovering over a field is truly one of nature’s great moments and one I shall never take for granted.
I am lucky to live in a part of the world where ketrel’s are commonplace, Lincolnshire on the eastern side of England is home to rolling fields, woods and hedgerows which make for the ultimate hunting ground for not only kestrels but buzzards, barn owls, kites and falcons.

Kestrel’s are part of the falcon family, they can be found throughout Europe and only those living in the coldest of the northern european countries will migrate during the winter. They are a beautiful bird, quite similar to the much rarer Lesser Kestrel they are wonderfully marked with black, barrel-like swirls across their backs. The adult male has a grey-blue head whilst the adult female’s head is striped like its wing.

I’ve always found that the best place to see a kestrel is by looking at the tops of fairly low lying trees along the edges of country roads. More often than not they will have their backs to the road and be looking out over the adjoining field. Telegraph wires run a close second, these make excellent vantage points for them and once they find a particular one they like will return to that same spot over and over again.

Kestrel at Nocton Fen in Lincolnshire

Voles tend to be the kestrel’s favourite food, it will eat grasshoppers and lizards as well as small birds such as finches and sparrows but given the speed of these small birds the kestrel’s success rate at catching them isn’t particularly good. Mice and rats will be attacked but infrequently, kestrel’s don’t like large mammals which explains its varied diet. During the breeding season they can be seen flying low over fields they have marked as their own, twisting and diving aggresively as they call out to possible suitors.
Kestrels have a distinct, high pitched call which is repetetive and short but cuts through the quiet country air with an almost haunting effect.

Kestrel in Flight

A year ago I banged on about Tesco selling asparagus imported from Peru. Well I’ve been into my local Sainsbury’s today and guess what? They’re doing it too. Mexican and Peruvian asparagus for a store situated in the best county in England for aparagus growing.

Now I’m not going to go on like last time, you can read it for yourself! but what annoys me is the way these supermarkets keep advertising themselves as the saviours of fresh, local food. Sainsbury’s are particularly anal about this, they can’t wait to tell you about their ‘Farmer Giles’ Old Laxton Apple Chutney from Somerset’ which Jamie Oliver will tell you is great with ‘John Smith’s Gloucester Old Spot Pork Chop fed on Sage Infused Milk and Sun Kissed Hay’ but then they do this.

What then will be so special when our very own asparagus is ready in late May? Asparagus has such a short window in the calender year that moreshould be made of it but if you can eat it in February why would you bother? Sorry for repeating myself but I hate hypocrisy.

Sort it out Sainsbury’s.

Here’s a snapshot of how the Spanish bake a whole fish in a salt crust. Cooking fish in this way isn’t something you see too often outside of the Mediterranean and it’s a shame because it produces a really beautiful flavour.
Basically you take a whole fish such as a bass, grouper or bream, any thick fleshed fish, wash it and pat dry. Don’t skin the fish, just scale and gut it and then cover with plenty of coarse salt until the fish is firmly encassed. Make sure you begin with a base layer of salt to sit the fish on and once the fish has been covered sprinkle the top with water to help form a crust.

Cooking times will vary depending on the size of the fish and the temperature of your oven but a fish weighing about 1.5 kg will need a good 40 minutes. You will also need plenty of salt, between three and four kilos for a good sized fish. Once the fish is cooked the salt wil have set hard so be careful when you crack open the crust. Remove the fish, place on a clean flate and carefully remove the flesh from the bone. Serve with some spinach or other greens and a generus amount of hollandaise sauce and fresh lemon.

This blog’s good friend laura has written a fantastic post on salt baked fish, wonderfully researched I doubt you will find this depth of information anywhere else on the internet. Click here for the article and an all round brilliant blog.

Whole Fish Baked in Salt