YBF 2012 Award

A Young British Foodie…

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YBF 2012 Award

I’m not sure which I’m more excited about: still being able to say I’m young (just shy of my 35th birthday) or being able to announce that I won the Young British Foodies Foodwriting Award 2013!

A joint winner along with Helen of Food Stories, it was a real honour to be nominated alongside her and Sam Muston of The Independent and all these fabulous people; plus I never say no to canapés and a few free drinks!

Meeting Yotam Ottolenghi was a highlight too, so I think this is a great time to announce that I’ll be joining him and other authors such as Mary Berry at Ebury Publishing. I haven’t crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s on the project yet, but I think you’re going to love it…

Before then however, I’m delighted to say I’m writing and editing the forthcoming Recipes from Brixton Village cookbook through KitchenPress. Publishing in Spring 2014, it will be featuring recipes from all your favourite restaurants and traders in Brixton Village. We’ve got exclusives from Fish Wings and Tings‘ codfish fritters, Kaosarn‘s green curry and Lab G‘s salted caramel ice cream amongst others. (I sense Jay Rayner will be after a copy the minute it’s hot off the press.)

Kitchen Press logo

I’m getting used to calling myself a writer these days since I’m signed with an agent and everything. The fantastic Caroline Hardman at Hardman and Swainson is representing me and handling my wide-eyed wonder at all this beautifully!*

I’ll be continuing to blog here and at the Brixton Blog and at risk of sounding a bit like I’m at the Oscars, I’d just like to thank everyone who has been reading at both sites. I love sharing my cooking and writing with you all. Your feedback and comments are fantastic and a real pleasure to read.

Mister North and I will definitely be keeping up our working relationship, and I’m hoping we might even have time to see each other at some point too! He’s also got all kinds of exciting design and photography projects going on around food, which hopefully you’ll get a chance to see at some point soon.

I don’t know about him, but I’m slightly overwhelmed by how far the blog has come in just under 4 years that I think I need a cuppa and a biscuit followed by a lie down so we can keep going!

*Caroline can be contacted at Hardman Swainson.

Autumn Sesame Slaw

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For some reason the word ‘slaw‘ seems to enrage people who demand to know when we stopped just saying ‘coleslaw’ and muttering about hipsters. I, for one, welcome the arrival of slaw. It tends to mean freshly prepared vegetables filled with colour and flavour instead of that limp mayonnaise-sodden white and orange woodchip style salad of the 80s and 90s. If hipsters have made that occurrence less likely, then I’m all for it.

This recipe is definitely a slaw. There’s no cabbage in it so it can’t be coleslaw by that token. It’s a bright mix of kohlrabi, beetroot, carrot and apple, packed with flavour and a colour reminiscent of soon to be falling leaves. Lightly tossed in tahini and yoghurt and scattered with sesame seeds, we ate a batch of it in a friend’s garden on the last summer night of the season and then I tucked into more on the first cool wet day we’ve had. It worked perfectly for both.

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No Fuss Gnocchi

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gnocchiI think everyone who has ever met me knows how I feel about potatoes. Pretty much a full food group in my life, I am never without a bag of spuds. My idea of treating myself is to buy a different sort for each recipe and mull over the merits of Anyas, King Edwards, Desirees and Kerr Pinks. I’ve even grown my own and spent hours on the internet trying to find the elusive Yukon Gold. I’m either slightly obessive or painfully stereotypically Irish.

So imagine how pained I was when I went to buy a bag of bog basic white spuds last week and they were a mindbending £2.40 for 2.5 kilos. At the rate I consume potatoes that’s bumped my shopping budget up to a point where there’s just not much wiggle room. I had two options: stop eating potatoes or find a cheaper option.

Obviously I went for the latter and decided to play around with the bag of Sainsbury’s Basics Instant Mashed Potato I bought a while back as a cheaper gluten free alternative to breadcrumbs and batter. 125g of dry mash and 150ml milk and 425ml water makes 695g of mash, meaning one 250g bag costing 49p makes well over a kilo of mash.

Unfortunately I have bad memories of instant mash from school dinners where it came served in uniform scoops with a oddly powdery texture. It needed so much butter that it would be heartstopping in cost and health consequences. So what was I going to do with my mountain of mash now?

Older, wiser and more versed in the potato dishes of the world, that’s an easy one. I’m going to make gnocchi with it. And potato bread. Then I’m going to marvel at how quick both are and how I suddenly feel like one of those home economics teachers from the 70s by telling you this.

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Mango Lassi Frozen Yoghurt

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mango lassi

London has been hot and humid recently. The kind of weather where I stop daydreaming about dinner for once and imagine cold showers and ice lollies instead. I’ve been drinking ice coffees to cool down and rather than cooking in the evenings, standing over the kitchen sink trying to keep the juice of a chilled watermelon or a sun ripened mango from running down my front.

Mangoes are one of the finest flavours in warm weather. Sunshine turns them into something really special, and it’s a joy to suck the flesh from the stone inside while holding it in sticky hands sitting outside. But few things are more refreshing than the subcontinent classic of a mango lassi.

Sweet velvety mango puree with creamy chilled yoghurt and the tiniest dash of salt cools any day or any curry down beautifully and I can’t get enough of them in Indian restaurants. I can never get them quite right at home though usually. The yoghurt isn’t thin enough for drinking consistency and if I water it down, I lose the flavour of the mango. But this heat had me determined to crack the code.

And that answer came with the recent discovery of buttermilk in the local Polish shop. I think we all know I’m totally and utterly obsessed with this ingredient and it’s a total fridge staple for me. The Polish stuff is a lovely loose consistency and I knew it would get the texture just right if I mixed it with the yoghurt. It did and I’ve been starting the morning with a glass of this amber nectar.

It put me in mind of how I’ve always meat to try making frozen yoghurt again after an ill fated attempt a few years ago where it frozen so densely, it took about an hour to defrost enough to chip a spoonful out by which time we’d eaten the dessert it went with and moved onto ice cold beers instead. Perhaps the buttermilk would sort the texture here too?

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Oi muchim, courgette flowers & boiled rice

Heat me up, melt me down: cool Vietnamese & Korean chilli favourites

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Oi muchim, courgette flowers & boiled rice

As you might’ve noticed, it’s been hot. Very hot. And when it gets hot, I want food which both heats me up and cools me down (as the Shirley Lites almost sang). You could plot a graph showing a direct correlation between outside temperature, and my yearnings for salads and chilli. When we were growing up (and unexposed to hot, spicy food) I didn’t fully understand the concept of hot food actually cooling you down. I’ve come to appreciate it more over the years, and now many of my favourite foods in hot, humid weather are liberally laced with chillies.

My first chilli experience was… instructive. When I was nine, I watched a chilli-eating contest on a BBC TV programme called ‘Zoo 2000‘*. They made it all look fun and easy, so I went to the fridge and took out a green chilli I’d previously spotted. Biting off a decent chunk in one go, my  reaction to the subsequent heat caused the rest of the family to dissolve with mirth.

What turned it from a minor distraction into a family legend, though, was our dad laughing in that slightly condescending way adults can do, then eating the other half in one go. He probably thought my young palate was overly sensitive… but when he turn scarlet and grabbed the milk bottle from my hands to douse the fire within, comedy reigned. I learned two things that day: to treat chilli with respect, and that milk tempers capsaicin better than water. One reason I prefer lassi to beer in a curry house.

Anyway, weather like this tends to suppress my appetite, so an array of light but spicy food is perfect to nibble on. Recently I’ve been enjoying two of my favourite different south-east Asian dishes, each with a bit of fire in them. Hope you enjoy trying them out.

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