Broccoli Slaw

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I haven’t seen my lovely friend A in several months as she’s been Stateside sampling lobsters and fresh corn on the Maine coast, but thanks to the power of the Internet, she has managed to give me a truly fantastic gift in the shape of this recipe for broccoli slaw from Smitten Kitchen…

Fresh and simple, it re-invented the wheel somewhat for me in how I eat my favourite vegetable. I could eat broccoli with everything including breakfast, but I had never thought to try it raw until now. And it is revolutionary. It tastes fresher, less boarding house brassica in after taste and is addictively crunchy in texture. And of course, if you’re feeling lazy, it makes it even easier to get your 5 a day than getting the steamer out and playing the waiting game.

While I was immediately interested in this lovely sounding slaw, I also automatically started making plans to change the recipe. Deb suggests using her buttermilk dressing, but after my recent buttermilk disaster, I am steering well clear of the stuff until I can find a decent source. I was also perturbed by the amount of sugar and mayonnaise in it. If I’m going to eat raw veggies I want them to be super healthy (so that I can keep my fat intake for a nice cheese elsewhere). I also don’t like dried fruit in savoury dishes and find dried cranberries to be extremely expensive. And I didn’t have any flaked almonds…

So instead I made a dressing from live yoghurt with a big splash of cider vinegar and some salt and pepper. Creamy, yet tangy it goes beautifully with the broccoli and is low fat and easy while not creating any washing up as it can be mixed straight into the slaw. I then perked it up with some thinly sliced red onion, a handful of pumpkin seeds and in a flash of inspiration, some fresh pomegranate seeds. Super healthy and incredibly pretty!

And amazingly tasty! Those little jewels of pomegranate burst on the tongue with a explosion of sweet juicy deliciousness, the onion crunches with taste and the pumpkin seeds add extra taste filled texture to the mix of vegetables and the whole thing is just perfect!

I have made this six or seven times since getting the recipe just under a fortnight ago. I’ve eaten it on its own, with a steak, with a stew and with an avocado salad. I made it for the lunch at the most recent Invisible Food Walk and it went down a storm, even with the littlest walkers who loved the colours and textures. I just can’t get enough of this fresh feast and even though I will probably make myself ill by eating too much of it in the future, I can’t urge you enough to try this.

Make a big batch, knowing that it will keep well in the fridge and then amaze yourself by managing to eat it all in one veg-tastic sitting before having to make some more to satisfy the broccoli lust it will inspire!

Stuffed Squid…

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I don’t think Shirley Conran and I would get along. She thinks life is too short to stuff a mushroom and I seem to have a fascination with stuffing just about any food I can get my hands on. Stuffed cabbage leaves are a winter staple in my house, I loved my recent dalliance with a stuffed marrow and last Saturday I feasted on these amazing garlicky stuffed tomatoes as suggested by Nigel Slater. Having exhausted all the vegetables I can think of stuffing, I needed a new challenge…

And what better than nature’s very own windsock in the shape of a whole squid? Inspired by another Nigel Slater recipe from last week’s Observer Food Monthly and some stunning looking squid on my local fishmonger’s counter, I couldn’t resist.

After getting the fishmonger to clean the squid, my eye was caught by the last of the beautiful rainbow hued Bright Lights chard in the garden and I decided to base the stuffing around this. I also dug out the last of the wonderful breadcrumbs from the freezer from a stunning rye loaf from the Tebay farm shop to add a nutty hint of flavour to it all. A pinch of mace, a slug of olive oil and some lemon zest followed suit. But the crowning glory was the rest of the tin of smoked anchovies Mister North gave me for my birthday. These add a stunning depth of rich complexity to the already amazing umami taste of these fabulous little fish.

I combined everything and stuffed the squid as full as I could get it without ripping the beautiful soft flesh. The excess stuffing went round them and tentacles and I dotted them with the very last few Tumbler tomatoes from the garden before covering them in a rich tomato sauce made with the leftover oil from the anchovies and a few home grown chillies for a kick. Add in a splash of vegetable stock and it was ready to go in the oven for around 45 minutes.

It looked majestic when I opened the casserole dish. The tomatoes had intensified in the colour to a deep ruby red flecked with a hint of emerald from the chard and the milky white squid bathed in it like a less malevolent Moby Dick. It was so soft and tender from the long slow cooking that it was quite difficult to lift out of the dish without it falling apart. I served it with some of the Shetland Blue potatoes from the garden and well anointed with the silky soft tomato sauce and it was fantastic.

The squid cut beautifully and was delightfully tender with just enough of a bite to keep it interesting. The stuffing was umami and iron rich and the tomato sauce was sweet and tasted of the summer we didn’t really have. It was great with the potatoes to soak it up, but even with that, I had a lot of sauce leftover. I froze this to eat with pasta some night or to form the base of a quick fish stew.

I can’t think of a single flaw with this dish. Easy to make, perfect for using up odd and sods in the fridge in the sauce or stuffing and stylish enough to serve at a dinner party or as a Friday night treat at the end of a hard week. Try it with baby squid to cut the cooking time, because this dish is so good you’ll be driven to distraction waiting to taste it!

Quince Jelly

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After trying quince and rhubarb earlier this year, I have been somewhat fascinated by this most majestic of fruits, so when my aunt arrived around with 3lbs of them she had got from a friend’s tree, it was like Christmas had come early. Looking at these beautiful small golden orbs, there seemed only one contender for what to do with them and that had to be quince jelly!

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Algerian Heaven at Khamsa, Brixton

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The recent World Cup didn’t leave many people in England with a feeling of anticipation, but it did serve the useful purpose of introducing me to Khamsa, the newly opened Algerian restaurant in Brixton. The only Algerian restaurant around, it featured heavily in press coverage of the England/Algeria game and it became tricky to get a table for a while. But since Mister North was down this weekend, we thought we’d try and squeeze in and sample its home cooked delights.

This small, but perfectly formed restaurant just opposite Lidl on Acre Lane were able to fit us in for a 8pm booking on Saturday night and we went along, appetites whetted by a Caesar or two, keen to sample this underrated cuisine and bolstered by excellent reviews. We took a bottle of red as Khamsa is BYO and were pleased to see that we were made most welcome despite being early for our table.

We were seated at a corner table with a large Berber serving plate in the middle and North African style cushions on a bench to sit on. These are quite slippery to sit on and there isn’t a huge amount of leg room, so if you’re in need of a bit of extra breathing room, ask for one of the other tables when you book. This minor quibble aside, we fell on the menu eagerly and tried to decide what to order from the amazing sounding juice menu alone. There is such a delicious selection on offer that we kept the wine for later and chose the pear and basil and the spinach, cucumber and lime to cleanse our palates.

These drinks were freshly made before our eyes while we perused the food options. The starters consist of a large selection of salad dishes and can be ordered as 8 dishes for 2 people for £12. Despite there being three of us, we thought this would still be the best option as it allowed us to sample widely yet keep some room aside for the sensational sounding main courses. We checked that the portions were suitable for three and when assured that they were ordered the starters before deciding on our mains.

This gave us time to try the juices and make sure no one ordered the same main course since G and I had both gone for the same pear and basil juice. This was delicious. The pear was sweet and succulent with the slightly spicy hint of basil stopping it from being cloying. I found Mister North’s cucumber, lime, spinach and mint a bit too wholesome for me, but tasty all the same. Over our juices, he chose a beef stew with chickpeas and pomegranate and walnut couscous while G went for the Couscous Modern or a choice of chicken and lamb kebabs with merguez sausage and vegetable couscous on the side. My choice was a parcel of salmon with courgette and aubergine or hout fi razma.

Important decisions made and an impromptu language lesson later, we just had time to get settled before the starter arrived. Eight teardrop shaped dishes of brightly coloured vegetables, jewel like pulses and creamy dips with a plate of Berber bread on the side filled the table and we got stuck in without ceremony. Everything was excellent, but we felt that that the whole platter suffered slightly from being fridge cold which stifled some of the flavours a bit. But it is testament to the cooking at Khamsa that everything was still excellent.

For me the stand out dishes were the cooked carrot and cumin salad or zroudia amcharmia and the chakchouka modern or slow cooked onions with merguez sausage. The carrots were deliciously sweet without the slightly bitter aftertaste so many of them seem to have these days. They retained just enough bite and the cumin lifted them without overpowering. They worked beautifully with the meltingly soft sweet onion dish with its lingering kick of tomato and chilli. The sausages were fantastic, the coarsely chopped meat spiked with chilli and spices. We could have eaten a whole one each…

The other starters were good. A dish of lentils and green olives was a savoury revelation while black eyed beans soaked in olive oil were sensational. The baba ganoush and hummous were light, creamy and very tasty and went beautifully with the olive rich Berber bread. Only the ajhroum di felfel or roasted pepper salad and a vegetable couscous didn’t hit such high notes. The couscous was a little bit bland and the pepper salad bitter due to it mainly being green peppers. But overall, we were most impressed by the selection and left very little behind despite the portions being more than generous for three people.

We had high hopes for the main courses after that and I was certainly more than pleased with my salmon fillet. Steamed in foil, it was beautifully cooked, flaking with just the edge of a fork. It came on a bed of couscous and harissa and coated with a knockout good paste of aubergines and garlic on top and courgettes around the edge. It was light, tasty and full of flavour and I could see why the waitress had told me it was her favourite. I found it hard not to bolt it down in seconds.

Mister North was also pleased with his beef tagine. Meltingly tender chunks of beef and fat chickpeas came in a rich gravy that coated the beautifully bejewelled looking pomegranate and walnut couscous and left a lovely chilli tinged kick behind. G was less impressed by his main. The meats were generously portioned and very tender, but came served on enough couscous to feed about 3 people and with a rather bland vegetable stew on the side. He described it as the safe option and it definitely needed something like harissa on the side to liven it up. Other than this and the variation in sizes between the main courses, we were impressed.

Despite being perfectly replete, we heeded the advice on the reviews we had read and ordered a plate of pastries to try. The chef at Khamsa originally trained as a pastry chef at some of the finest pastry schools in France and it showed in every single crumb of our taster plate. We shared a vanilla infused number, similar to a doughnut and a syrup drizzled creation like a fig roll, stuffed with dates. We then tried individual pastries with the stand out being a date stuffed with a pistachio marpizan infused with basil and mint. I usually don’t like dates, but I regretted letting Mister North get this one!

We lingered over the pastries with a huge pot of Algerian mint tea and chatted with the staff. Khamsa is run by a husband and wife team who cook everything from scratch including the jams and condiments. Although the restaurant was busy and bustling, they both made time to speak to us to explain their food and ask how we had enjoyed it. They were so friendly and genuine we actually had difficulty getting them to give us change for a tip!

Our bill came to £69 in total for three of us or £23 each. Considering this was for a three course meal with tea and a fresh juice, I think this was excellent value. Mains range from £9.50 or so to £13.50 and although we drank the bottle of wine we brought, I think this meal would have been just as good without booze, making it even better value!

We loved the cosy intimate upstairs restaurant and thought the large downstairs room with scattered floor cushions and acres of space would be perfect for a party since you could get as raucous as you like. Everything was spotlessly clean, the kitchen in open plan and everything is freshly homemade. You’d struggle to get a table on a Friday or Saturday after 8pm, but luckily you can sample Khamsa at breakfast or lunch too as it is open all day. I’ll be nipping in here to try the rosewater scented coffee and a few more pastries as a North African treat next time I brave the utilitarian world of Lidl, but I’d recommend travelling for this one. It’s rare to find a well priced restaurant that combines good ingredients, well cooked food and such a pleasant atmosphere. Claphamites and Brixtonians should treasure the neighbourhood pleasure that is Khamsa…

Supermalt Cupcakes

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A recent blog post by friend Yoruba Girl Dancing about white people’s lack of love for Supermalt got me thinking. I love the taste of malt thanks to growing up with Veda bread and working in a diner as a teenager making malted milkshakes, so I don’t really mind Supermalt, although I do find it teeth-itchingly sweet. But having never sampled it until I moved to Brixton, it’s not really part of my repetoire and I would never buy it to quench my thirst. What about cooking with it instead?

I made these Coca-Cola cupcakes for my friend G’s birthday party a few weeks ago and was impressed by how easy they were to make and how incredibly moist and brownie-esque they were. I could see no reason why they wouldn’t work with Supermalt instead of Coke. Hopefully they’d be as moist as the Coca-Cola ones, but more like a cake crossed with Soreen…

The slight risk that they might just be disgusting meant I decided to make them over the weekend for a birthday party where I knew my friend C would be bringing some of her legendary lemon and blueberry cupcakes which would take the taste away if my baking experiment went awry!

The trickiest part of this recipe was finding a small enough amount of Supermalt. It tends to come in six packs and I had to go to several shops before I could get my hands on a single can of the stuff. Mission accomplished, I got cracking on the recipe. It is best to melt the butter, cocoa powder and Supermalt together first to allow it to cool slightly to minimise the chances of the egg curdling when you mix everything together. Out of interest, the amount of Supermalt (or Coke) required comes to about 2/3 of a normal can…

The Supermalt mixes takes about 5 minutes to melt and measuring out the rest of the ingredients does the same. Then you simply mix everything together, watching the batter going from thick and fudgy to soft and smooth by the time it is all mixed and combined. It’s one of the easiest cake recipes I know and it’s difficult to over-mix this batter so it’s a good one to do with kids. It’s also nice and thick for spooning into cases so great even if you’re a bit clumsy.

I used some new square cases from Ikea that are a cross between a bun and muffin case in size (and a rather fetching print to boot) and each one took two full dessertspoons of batter. Don’t overfill your cases with these cakes as they rise a fair bit and look better not overspilling the cases. Even with the slightly bigger cases, I got 18 cakes from this batter before popping them in the oven for about 25 minutes or until I remembered what was making the lovely baked smell in my flat…

While they were cooling, I turned my attention to making a frosting for the cakes. Last time I used the Coca-Cola buttercream suggested and found it to be incredibly sweet and a bit sickly even with a fizzy Cola Bottle for a touch of tanginess. This time I thought a cream cheese frosting would go down better. I combined two packs of full fat cream cheese with a splash of leftover Supermalt and two tablespoons of cocoa powder and found I had gone too much the other way and the frosting wasn’t sweet enough. In fact it had a bitter aftertaste that jarred somewhat. I abandoned the idea of adding more Supermalt and put a teaspoon of vanilla extract and about a tablespoon of icing sugar to sweeten it slightly and this time it was perfect. Light, creamy, slightly sharp and not at all cloying.

I left the cupcakes wrapped in a teatowel overnight and then my friend C very kindly frosted them for me the next day before I added a an extra blast of sharpness with some pomegranate seeds on top before serving them up to ravenous guests. And they went down a storm! I think they were much better with the Supermalt than the Coca Cola as they were less sweet and firmer and tasted more grown up with a bite of dark chocolate, but without losing the fudgy finish that sets these aside from the average chocolate cupcake.

If you manage to have any of these fabulous cupcakes left (I only had three) they also keep amazingly well wrapped in a teatowel to protect the frosting. They ultimately didn’t taste anything like Soreen cake, but were so good I’m glad I have a second spare can of Supermalt in the fridge to make these due to popular demand! Especially if I don’t have to go camping with them!