Viewing entries tagged
feta
It’s suffused with herbs and umami spring onions, and laced with tongue-tingling sour barberries, sharp and salty feta, and warming toasted walnuts which add necessary texture. I add chilli, too, which means that every bite is an avalanche of flavour.
Kuku is high in protein, and basically carb-free (if that’s your thing), and really filling, too. I’ve adapted this one from a more traditional Persian recipe (where this dish originates).
These exist in that tender interior, crunchy exterior, no-man’s-land between a scone, and a biscuit. I tried something similar at a hotel in Turkey, where at daily afternoon tea they produced thick, golden and extremely savoury kashar cheese cookies. As kashar cheese is a little harder to get here in the UK, I subbed in a mix of mozzarella, pecorino and feta, and they turned out beautifully. They’re umami, and slightly salty, and the cheese caramelises on the outside in a way that’s reminiscent of a toasted cheese sandwich.
They’re extremely easy to whip up, and work perfectly as a savoury treat at afternoon tea, accompanying a bowl of soup, or with cheeses, membrillo paste and a handful of fresh baby tomatoes.
150g butter, very cold/frozen
75g fresh mozzarella
75g semi-stagionato pecorino (or parmesan, if you can’t get hold of pecorino)
60g feta
1 ½ tsp double cream (or milk if you don’t have any double cream to hand)
250g plain flour
10g nigella seeds
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp caster sugar
large baking tray, lined with baking parchment
6cm diameter cookie cutter (feel free to use a different size if you want larger/smaller cookies, but bear in mind the baking time will reduce for smaller cookies)
1) Preheat oven to 200°C.
2) Take the mozzarella and press it between two pieces of paper towel to squeeze out as much liquid as possible.
3) Using the coarse side of a cheese grater, grate the cold/frozen butter, mozzarella, pecorino and feta into the bowl of an electric stand mixer or a large bowl if making by hand. The cheeses may crumble a little unevenly but don’t worry too much about striving for perfection, they just need to be broken down into small pieces. Add in the double cream and stir together.
4) In a separate medium sized bowl, whisk together the flour, nigella seeds, salt, baking powder and caster sugar until evenly mixed.
5) Pour the dry ingredients into the bowl containing the cheeses. If using an electric stand mixer, fit it with the paddle and mix on a low-medium speed until the mixture just comes together. If making it by hand, stir with a wooden spoon until a crumbly dough is formed. Take care not to over mix as this will stimulate the gluten in the flour, and break down the butter too much, making the cookie tougher and less tender. If the mixture is too dry (climate/room temperature can affect this), add in a tiny bit more double cream but be careful not to add too much – the dough should be slightly crumbly.
6) Lightly dust a clean surface/board with flour. Tip the cookie dough on to the surface and pat it together until it forms a disc. Roll it out to an even thickness of 1.5cm. Then use the cookie cutter to stamp out the circles. Place them on the baking tray at least 4cm apart (they won’t spread much).
7) Place in the oven and bake for 12-15 mins, until the top and base are golden and crunchy. You can serve these warm or cool. NB, they keep for up to 3 days stored in an airtight container at room temperature. Or you can freeze them for up to 6 months in an airtight container.
I feel immense joy when I see canapés floating along the horizon of a wine-soaked room. Salty, crunchy, flavour-filled bites to pop into your mouth and stave off hunger. But in reality, the canapés path is far more obstacle- laden. Here are a few of the typical scenarios that I have endured, or have watched others enduring:
The following will help you steer clear of the above pitfalls: small, savoury and succulent, these are the perfect canapés. Indeed, they are suitable for consumption at any time. They are crisp on the outside and soft and light inside, flecked with molted feta and cheddar, and with a hint of the more exotic nigella seeds. This recipe makes 18 but I would urge you to double it as they are so addictive. They are also ridiculously easy and quick to conjure up.
NB. these can be made gluten-free by simply substituting spelt flour with gluten-free)
Ingredients
100g sour cream
2 tbsp milk
80g mature cheddar cheese, grated
80g feta, roughly diced into 0.5cm cubes
50g unsalted butter, cold and roughly diced into ¾ cm cubes
200g white spelt flour (can substitute with plain flour or gluten-free)
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp nigella seeds
[optional: ½ tsp cayenne pepper]
1 egg, beaten, to glaze
1 large baking tray lined with greaseproof paper
Method
1) Preheat oven to 200°C. In a large bowl by hand, or in a food mixer fitted with a paddle, briefly mix together the sour cream, milk, cheddar, feta and butter. Pour in the flour, baking powder, salt and nigella seeds (and cayenne if using), and mix until just combined into a dough. You may need to knead the dough by hand very slightly for it to come together.
2) Place dough onto a floured surface, pat into a square and roll it out to roughly 2.5cm thickness. Slice the dough into nine squares, like a noughts and crosses board, and then slice the squares diagonally to form 18 triangles.
3) Arrange the triangles on the baking tray, leaving at least 3cm between them. Brush them lightly with the beaten egg and place in the oven to bake for 15-20 minutes until golden on the outside. They are best devoured immediately or on the day of baking.
Adapted from Honey & Co's "Food From the Middle East" recipe for Bouikos
A Rolls Royce pulls up neatly against the curb, a proud, gleaming red. The G-Wiz rattles up next to it, and executes a perfect piece of perpendicular parking. Enter the Range Rover: mud-spattered but in control, it slides in next to the Rolls. Then the Mini arrives, honking to assert itself. The Volvo lines itself alongside the Mini, together with a school bus crammed with screaming children, and a battered black cab. Then a newly licensed Uber decides to swing his Prius into the fray. He nudges the tiny G-Wiz which crumples against the Rolls Royce.
The Roller hoots with disgust. This in turn alarms the bus driver who lets go of the hand brake and slides diagonally into the Volvo, crushing itself up against the Mini which then overturns. The police car rushes in to clear a path, bouncing off the heap of crushed metal. It surges forward and, much to the surprise of all the drivers, ends up on top of the Prius.
With much shattered glass, screaming, and whining, thick black engine fluids drip from one car to the next, like the tahini molasses mulch pooling into the thyme-infused ricotta. A slug of red-spiced scrambled eggs slips out of the copper pot into the macerated cherry-topped ricotta.
Vanilla butter smears itself against the dollop of oily harissa which mixes into the citrus- and basil-infused tomatoes. A lemony chunk of poppy seed-coated cucumber slides into the pot of strawberry jam.
“What would you like to try next?” I ask my dining companion, as I work out how to play this game.
“Just give me two minutes to think,” he mumbles, frowning, as he tries to climb out of the pothole of mezze-induced confusion. “Ok, the halloumi please”.
I shuffle through the tiles, terracotta bowls, mini jars and copper pots to dig out the halloumi, which, surprisingly, turns out to be deliciously golden and molten. He lifts up the clay pot of lamb kofta to do a mid-air switch over, but in doing so the feta is upturned into the lemon curd, and the basket of bread - pitta, sesame-coated milk bread, and some other flatbread - plummets to the floor, its contents scattering under the table opposite.
At this point, the cheery and oblivious waitress arrives at our culinary game of Rush Hour with our bulgar and honey roast butternut squash and pomegranate salad. Conversation turns into a balloon debate: which dishes to sacrifice, which to keep. We end up handing them all over to make space for the salad. My plate is a quagmire of sweet, sticky, ricotta, honey, meaty harissa mulch, echoing the chaos of my brain and palate.
We look up to recover from the tumult, and find ourselves staring into the cartoon eyes of a loin- clothed Neanderthal and a pink-cloaked witch proffering pomegranates. Not encouraged by the decor but urged on by greed, I try a couple of mouthfuls of the salad. It is fresh, sweet and nutty - far more balanced than any of the preceding dishes. Full, but with mouth, mind and stomach in turmoil, we leave the dark wood and neon enclosure that is Firedog - a supposedly Aegean restaurant, but one for which I doubt Odysseus would interrupt his travels.
Food: 4/10
Price: ££(££)
Ambience: 4/10
Loos: 7/10
Suitable for: nightmares, a place to go where everywhere else is booked
Over volcanic hills, swinging round vomit-inducing hairpin bends in the gravel tracks, we drove. Across the timeless, verdant countryside we whipped our car, through countryside which had bubbled up thousands of years ago and stayed the same - until we found the ivy-embraced, craggy little farm which was threatening to crumble into the landscape. Behind the building, little puffs of white sheep scuttled in the distance. A bucolic idyll.
Then I opened the car door and stepped out.
The air was noisome, salty, and thickly perfumed with urine, stale sheep’s wool and rain-dampened hay. Milena waddled out of the house. She came closest to the embodiment of a Horacian hag I’ve ever witnessed. She beckoned us over to the farmhouse and to cross the threshold protected from the weather with a muddy flaxen rag. Her rugged face remained humourless. As we moved closer, the intoxicating stench intensified to migraine-inducing levels.
Blinded by the darkness and the stink, it took a while to adjust until. Eventually we could make out shelves upon shelves supporting waxy rounds in various shades of yellow. Milena waddled closer to us, now bearing a heaving barrel splashing out sheep’s milk. It was fresh from that morning – she woke up every day at 6 to milk the ewes. The curds in the barrel were similar in appearance to something a baby might have regurgitated. She scooped them up and dolloped them into curved wicker moulds, her hands gnarled, stubby and deeply mottled with purple knotted veins. In their curved, rib-like shape they had adapted to her craft. She pressed the curds into white, curdled mulch that wobbled in the moulds. After much squeezing and puffing she tipped the substance out of one of the moulds to produce a quivering and uncertain, nude, white, ricotta peak. The other, a pecorino-to-be – our future round of pecorino - she set aside to coagulate.
We returned a couple of weeks later to pick up our pecorino, for which Milena extorted a princely sum (and only then did a smile play at her lips). She instructed us to let it ripen for 4-6 months until it had reached its requisite level of maturity. And so it rested in our kitchen, weeping oil and dispersing its urinous, hay-like scent: a little, coagulating piece of Tuscany. It eventually reached vintage state, rock solid, and flavour fortified to the max. (It was tasted and eaten by me with a sense of obligation rather than pleasure. It turns out I prefer the pasteurised shop-bought version after all.)
Tenuous as it may seem, when I left Berner’s Tavern a couple of weeks ago, I found my opinions to be rather similar in state to the freshly born pecorino cheese – swirling and raw and mildly uncertain. So instead of writing about it immediately, I let my thoughts settle and ripen over time until I had something more definite and salacious to carve up to be consumed by the reader. My experience left me pulled in multiple directions.
Since we could only get a very late booking for the restaurant, my dining companions and I had booked a table in the Punch Room bar beforehand, located, like Berner’s Tavern, within The Edition Hotel. We called to warn the bar that we would be about 20 minutes late, only to be notified, upon arrival, by an unsmiling blonde that our table had been given away. This was vaguely reasonable, except that they were incapable of providing a concrete time for when we might get a table. An hour later we were led into a bizarrely half-empty bar. The timing would not have been an issue had a similar situation not occurred at dinner - this time, their fault. Hypocrisy was in full swing: we made sure to arrive on the dot for our booking at the restaurant. Alas, the table was not ready – so, like many restaurants who wish to exploit their customers by sending them to the bar, Berner’s Tavern followed suit. We ordered drinks expecting the table wait to be brief. Alas, it was not. We waited 45 minutes – an appalling amount of time. There was no compensation. And no apology. The unrepentant manageress seemed to think that the honour of bestowing a “booth” table upon us would mollify us. Funnily enough, it didn’t – in stark contrast with the paradigm set by Le Caprice where truffles were brought to our blissfully unaware table at the collapsing of a soufflé in the kitchen. At Berner’s Tavern, however, customer care does not appear to exist. The charm and grandeur of the painting lined, high-ceilinged cavern is simply not enough.
In terms of food (when we eventually got round to it), Berner’s Tavern lacks the precision and care of Atherton’s other venture, Little Social (read review here). My beetroot- smoked salmon was good, but lacked thought: pretty, thinly sliced, delicately smoked salmon with the crunch of macadamia and radish. However, much needed acidity was overlooked, and the promised lemon purée failed to make an appearance. One dining companion was satisfied with his prawn cocktail and the other’s Moroccan lamb was warm and delicately spiced.
Berner’s Tavern prides itself on its grandeur, celebrity restaurant status, and accomplished chef/restaurateur at its helm. Thus its pedestalled position makes it open to scrutiny. Call me a pedant, but pluralising the already pluralised Italian pasta, ‘orecchiette’ to ‘orecchiettes’, is poor.
The dish itself wasn‘t bad and the ingredients created a pleasant umami flavour. However, it needed something extra to tie it together, and it also arrived inexcusably lukewarm. My friends were satisfied with their dishes, though – the macaroni and cheese with braised ox-cheek and bone marrow and brioche crumble was a particular success.
Unfortunately, the tardiness of the meal and poor customer service meant that dessert was not sampled. The manager did come over at the end to apologise, dealt us his card, and promised it would not happen again. He offered us an unwanted drink on the house, but it was too little, too late.
Suitable for: business meetings, celebrations, friends, family, smart dates
Price: ££££
Food: 5.5/10
Ambience: 10/10
Customer Service: 2/10
Loos: 9/10
Superfood
Line breaks: super|food
Pronunciation: /ˈsuːpəfuːd/
Culina definition: ‘superfoods’ – a marketing ploy term assigned to natural ingredients which have been neglected on shop shelves for a while and could do with a PR boost. They have nutritional benefits similar to many other natural ingredients and have the potential to reduce the risk of disease if you consume at least your body weight in said superfood in under an hour.
Cauliflower, pomegranate seeds, quinoa and walnuts have all ridden the calculated PR wave to health fame in the last few years, and indeed that is possibly why they have drifted on to my kitchen shelves.
Ignoring their “superfood” status, they are particularly delicious when combined.
This salad sits at the other end of the spectrum from the straggly, limp green leaf type.
It is crunchy, sweet, umami, nutty, juicy, and looks resplendent studded with glistening pomegranate jewels.
It’s also ridiculously quick to whizz up and can be prepared up to a day in advance (sans dressing, and refrigerated).
Recipe
Ingredients
100g quinoa
220g cauliflower
180g pomegranate seeds (1 pomegranate approx.)
200g feta, crumbled
100g walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped
50g fresh coriander, finely chopped
Dressing
10g garlic, crushed
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp tahini
8 tbsp natural yogurt
6 tbsp lemon juice
Method
I wandered into my favourite greengrocer yesterday in search of inspiration, and came out laden with half the store. Amongst the wooden crates I found the most beautifully vibrant baby carrots and blushing, freckled pomegranate orb.
Although lentils and carrots are usually associated with comfort and winter, I used fresh orange and pomegranate jewels to lift them to a lighter, more summery dish.
The carrots are poached in orange juice and maple syrup until juicy and softened and the liquid has reduced to a golden caramel. They are then roasted until sticky, slightly charred and a little withered, but dense with succulence and depth of flavour. The caramel is turned into a citrusy dressing to drench the lentils, with the sweetness balanced with the salty kick of feta.
Ingredients
200g puy lentils
2 tsp vegetable bouillon stock
1 litre boiling water
400g baby carrots
Juice of 3 oranges (15 tbsp)
5 tbsp maple syrup
¼ tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 ½ tsp lemon juice
1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
¼ tsp salt
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
2 oranges supremed (i.e. segmented with skin and membrane removed)
100g feta
140g pomegranate seeds (half a pomegranate)
20g fresh coriander, roughly chopped
Method
I often spend summers in Italy. In the evenings, when the vine- ripening summer sun begins to soften and the incessant squeak and rattle of the plough eventually dies, I usually clamber up the nearby hill, meandering across the crest. On one of my walks, I headed towards the nearby palazzo, along the path bordered by Cyprus spears.
Lizards basking in the heat still held by the pale ochre walls scuttled away at my footsteps, and a green shutter creaked in the mild breeze.
The knobbed tree in front stood with its arms filled with waxy green dewdrop-like figs, nodding gently like a recently metamorphosed Ovidian nymph. I reached to tug at a branch, and a cluster melted softly off it. The pink juices dripping down my fingers, I gathered two handfuls and made my companion fill his pockets with the good intention of bringing some back for others to try.
As so often happens, the thoughtful food gift didn’t reach its destination (I ate it), but I went back the next day, and the next. I was converted from someone with a slight aversion to figs to an obsessive.
This salad combines the earthy lusciousness of figs with caramel to add depth and sticky sweetness to the dish. This contrasts with the fresh tanginess of oranges – blood oranges are currently in season so are fantastic to use – and the saltiness of the feta and peppery rocket leaves.
The dressing is fresh, sweet, salty and savoury, tying all the elements together.
Ingredients Serves 2 (or 4, as a side)
8 figs, halved
50g caster sugar
juice of 1 orange
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp pomegranate molasses (substitute with balsamic vinegar, if necessary)
¼ tsp salt
2 oranges, peeled and sliced into 1/2 cm discs
100g rocket
100g feta, sliced into ½ cm cubes
Method
Inspired by Ottolenghi
In MasterChef Australia (I’m not a fan of the British version) risotto is known as the “death dish”. The judges groan whenever a contestant confesses that he/she will be serving it. And quite rightly so, as the results are invariably sludgy, glutinous, crunchy, solid, watery, bland, or resembling something a woman in Ancient Rome might have used as a face pack.
It is often also the go-to dish for restaurants under pressure to include a vegetarian dish in their repertoire, and this is often disappointing, too, for two reasons:
1.) All too often it becomes a stodgy double cream and rice porridge. In a traditional risotto recipe there is no cream – the creaminess is achieved through breaking down the starch by stirring the grains with a good quality stock. And no, this isn’t difficult at all. Don’t believe the hype surrounding the pitfalls; it is really a very simple dish to perfect.
2.) In some unwritten chef rulebook there exists the heinous concept that risotto can only be married to butternut squash or mushrooms. It’s not that I dislike either of these, but that I’m just crying out for some more original combination.
Risotto doesn’t have to be made with rice either. I use spelt (or farro) instead for numerous reasons: it has a lower GI, has a nuttier flavour, and has a more interesting texture. It’s also a hundred times easier to cook well. Obviously, it isn’t strictly ‘risotto’, but the idea is similar.
Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter (15g)
2 medium onions, finely chopped
25g (about 8 cloves) garlic, crushed
2 tbsp sundried tomato paste
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp thyme (fresh or dried)
½ tsp chilli flakes
Grated zest of ½ lemon
¾ tsp smoked paprika
500g passata
250g pearled spelt (or farro)
750ml boiling water
3 tsp vegetable stock
80g toasted pine nuts
1 tsp lemon juice
100g feta
Handful of coriander, to serve
(Serves 4)
Method
