There can never be too much food

    I am having dinner-party angst. Again. It must be that I am back to my old self then. Already. Three months spent trying to learn to let go, to ignore social conventions, to focus on the bigger things in life and here I am again, gripping the steering wheel, worrying about whether I should rush to the supermarket for extra duck breasts in case there isn't enough food.

    It sounds innocuous, doesn't it, the topic of how much food to serve one's guests? But as the subject of the longest trench war between the Neapolitan and myself over the past seven years (yes, longer even than the battle over how many pairs of shoes I could possibly need or why he is physically incapable of putting his morning cereal bowl in the dishwasher), it's actually a pretty major issue. To be perfectly accurate, however, I should probably rectify and say it's only been a prominent source of conflict between us for the past five years, because when we were still students we only served one dish: penne with vodka.

    Then we moved back to Europe. We got our own place. We got married. We bought china. We had our first grown-up dinner parties. And all of a sudden it happened. There wasn't enough food.

    I didn't get it at first. For several years I didn't get it. What on earth did he mean there wasn't enough food? Appetizer, main, dessert, sometimes even a salad squeezed in. That's plenty of food by my family's standards. I mean, that's like a Christmas meal in the house I grew up in. For my mom, a successful dinner party is one without leftovers. In the Neapolitan's family, an empty plate is the ultimate insult, a spit in the face of your guests. There should always, ALWAYS, be food left, he told me again and again. Even after second helpings I peeped? Yes. Even then.

    I still didn't get it. I fought him tooth and nail over it. Then I went to my first Neapolitan Christmas. There, between the seventh and eighth antipasto, I had the epiphany. There could never be enough food. I shamed my husband for years, it dawned on me. I'm still trying to make it up to him.

    Now I could tell you about the antipasto I made for that dinner party I was talking about earlier, the one for which I worried about getting extra duck breasts. On paper it sounded very good: round zucchini stuffed with fresh ricotta, amaretti and parmesan cheese. But the truth is it took quite a bit of effort and I wasn't impressed with the results. I can't tell whether it was because my zucchini weren't right (too bitter) or whether the slightly sweet stuffing didn't quite work in that case, but it would be a shame to share a recipe with you that I wouldn't make again in my own kitchen.

    So instead I decided to tell about something more seasonal: an original Brussels sprouts recipe. It would go marvellously with the Christmas turkey.

Brussels sprouts with chestnut and pancetta (serves 4)


500g trimmed and cleaned Brussels sprouts
100g pancetta (streaky bacon will do if you can't find pancetta)
40g butter
a dozen chestnuts


    Put a small saucepan filled with water on the stove and wait for it to simmer. In the meantime, make a small incision at the flat end of each chestnut (If you don't, they will explode). Then  cook your chestnuts in the boiling water for around 10 minutes. 
    While the chestnuts are cooking slice your Brussels sprouts very thinly, as for a cold slaw. If your pancetta comes in slices, cut it into matchsticks. Once your chestnuts have cooled enough to be handled but while they're still warm, peel them, taking out both the tough shell and the thin brown papery skin. Chop them up as you would walnuts.
    Put the butter in a pan and warm it, throw in the pancetta and let it sizzle for a few minutes on relatively high heat so it gets a bit crispy. Turn down the heat slightly and add the sprouts. Add a good grinding of salt and pepper and finally the chestnuts. Cook for about 10 minutes. You want the sprouts to retain a slight bite.

The recovery cake

 

Oh dear.

There's hardly a point denying it. I disappeared for a while. But rest assured you didn't miss much. I didn't cook over this prolonged absence and, to be truthful, hardly did much of anything else. The Neapolitan, bless him, took to Marks & Spencer prepared meals pretty well, making me doubt, in my darkest moments, the point of ever bothering to put anything on the stove that didn't come neatly packaged in a throw-away baking tray and non-recyclable plastic film.

So we ate cod in a crust of parmesan cheese and herbs, thai fish cakes with a ginger dressing, pork medaillons in their apple and sage sauce. It took very limited energy. Crack open the oven door, set the timer, crawl back to the sofa for a 15-minute snooze. You're done. A revelation. I started to understand why many of us no longer bother pretending to peal vegetables. Take those lovely, exotic thai fish cakes: I feel exhausted just thinking about shopping for the ingredients. Anyway, all I wanted to say is, M&S lovers out there, I get it now.

But guess what? The M&S near me is small. After a couple of weeks, we had eaten pretty much every single dish on offer a couple of times. I started to fear for the health of my marriage. The Neapolitan bit his tongue. I want to say it here for the record. Not a complaint was heard; not a sigh let out as I served him microwaved mushroom chicken soup for the fifth time in a month. Then, one Sunday morning, just as I was mulling making my way to a bigger M&S a couple of bus stops away, I walked into my kitchen and a miracle happened: I thought I could just about handle making a plate of linguine alla carbonara. And I did too, with a good grinding of black pepper and plenty of chili heat in the sauce, the way the Neapolitan likes it.

That, my friends, was a ray of light, the first sign of recovery.

Still, I didn't bake. Then this weekend we had dinner with friends, one of whom has turned vegetarian over the past year. We joked, we drank, we munched on chestnut and sweet potato cake, fake bangers and mash and a tiny tortilla stuffed with veggies. Then came dessert, always the main part of the meal for me. The Neapolitan and I shared an apple cinnamon crumble with some custard on the side. Now, I can be virtuous all you want at the start of a meal, but when it comes to dessert, I refuse to compromise. That puffy, brown crumble looked cute in its little ribbed porcelain dish, but it didn't cut it. It was dry, it was lumpy, it wasn't sweet nor crunchy enough. It had NO BUTTER. I didn't finish it. Did you hear that? Let me say it again. I didn't finish it. 

So on Monday night I baked. My inspiration was a ricotta pie my vegetarian friend makes every week. She likes to eat it for breakfast because it isn't too sweet and keeps well for a couple of days. I vaguely remembered her mumbling something about flour, ricotta and sugar over wine. Nothing else to do. As in the crumble, there was no butter, but in that case, it seemed natural.

Back in my kitchen I started having doubts. Shouldn't I put some eggs in? And how about something for flavour? Perhaps some lemon would work...oooooh I know, if I use lemon zest, I could then replace some of the flour with almond powder. 

So here it is. The recovery ricotta cake. It's nothing much but it's quick, simple and delicious. It won't give you headaches, it won't make you stressed. Think of it as a sun salutation: the warm-up before we can move on to bigger things.

Ingredients:

125g flour

One sachet of fast-acting yeast

125g almond powder

250g ricotta

3 eggs

1 organic lemon 

Beat the eggs and the sugar together until foamy. Add the ricotta and then the almond powder, the flour and the yeast. Throw in the lemon zest and the juice of half a lemon to thin the mixture. Pop in the oven at 180 degrees for 30 minutes. Let it cool for 15 minutes before you try to turn it.

Packed-lunch series 1: Lentils salad

Fancy yet another soggy ham-and-cheese sandwich? Sushi assortment? Nicoise salad?


No? I thought so. Me neither. No matter how buzzing the neighborhood around your office, after a few months, its lunch options get old.


Add to that the omnipresent recession headlines and constant touting of the virtues of thriftiness since our economies spiralled out of control and packed lunches start sounding like a very good iea.

It needn't be painful, long or boring. And it doesn’t have to be unhealthy either. Invest in nice stack of tupperwares. I find that having pretty and functional accessories helps to motivate me.

The only downside of the packed lunch, I will readily admit, is that I sometimes end up wolfing it down at 11 a.m. in front of my computer and then spend the afternoon trying to decide what would be the least unhealthy treat to buy from the vending machine.

The Neapolitan is even worse. He sometimes forgets I have made lunch for him and only remembers it when I ask him, mid afternoon, how it was. He then proceeds to have it as an '"afternoon snack." As you might imagine this is not helping his efforts to squeeze himself into a pair of dark jeans circa 1994.


But apart from its propensity to be devoured hours before lunchtime, you really can't fault the packed lunch, particularly in the summer, when it's easy to find a bench or a patch of grass in the sun where to settle down.


In the next few weeks I will post some of my favourite recipes for packed lunched here. Give them a go and let me know what you think.


PS: Generally the lunches I make don’t need to spend the morning in the fridge. Although my office boasts a tiny kitchen, its fridge is such a health hazard I believe it’s actually safer to do without entirely.

Lentil salad:
250g dry puy or green lentils
140g cubed pancetta
3 shallots or spring onions
250g baby plum tomatoes
Small bunch of parsley

Dressing:
1 tablespoon dijon mustart
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon of red or white-wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste


Serves 4.

Cover the lentils with cold water, bring to a boil and then simmer for roughly 15 minutes. When the water has evaporated, try the lentils. They should be cooked but retain some bite. It may be that you need to add another cup of water, don't be shy.

While the lentils are cooking, fry the pancetta in a small pan. You want it crisp and dark. Throw the excess fat in the toilet, not your sink, unless you want to clog it.


Cut your plum tomatoes in half. Dice the shallots and chop up the parsley. Wait for the lentils to cool down before mixing everything.

BBQ Weather

                                   

Do you know what the Brits call a 32-hour dry period? BBQ weather. And let me tell you something, I haven't eaten a lot of grilled meat this summer. So when the newspapers started erupting in 'BBQ Weather' headlines towards the end of the week, I made a plan. Not for a bbq, alas we don't have a garden here, but for a little excursion out of town.

                               

It recently struck me that we don't know much of the countryside near London despite having lived here for the last 5 years. I know, what a shame. I like to think that a lack of time and good public transportation rather than a shameful absence of curiosity lie at the root of the problem, but now that we have moved much closer to a big station, there is really no excuse.


So tomorrow, my friends, the Neapolitan and I shall go and explore the Chilterns, an "area of outstanding natural beauty" in Buckinghamshire, just 45 minutes away by train from our new address. You know how seriously I take new ventures, so I planned like a maniac. I registered to a walking Web site that offers maps, photos and directions to no fewer than 4,750 walks throughout the country, I dug up walking shoes and those light-weight rambling sticks, I enrolled a few friends and, naturally, I planned a picnic.


The traditional way of approaching an English walk would be to plan it around a pub. But it is our first proper walk outside of London and I couldn't determine from the instructions whether there would actually be an open pub on the way. Not one to risk losing my troops to starvation on their first outing I decided we shall eat al fresco. I have this vision of us, spread on a blanket in a field, drinking warm wine and munching on slices of salami in the sunshine.

Part of the vision also sees us eating sophisticated picnic food of the type always handsomely photographed in the Sunday papers. We shall thus have frittata, for once this confection of eggs and potatoes has cooled down, it's incredibly transportable, yet it retains an edge of sophistication that appeals. It's also a versatile dish in which you can incorporate any mediterranean vegetable you may have languishing in the fridge.

Pepper Frittata (for 6)
10 eggs
4 red peppers
100g grated gruyere or cheddar (keep an extra table spoon aside)
10 smallish potatoes or 5 bigger ones


Turn on the oven to its highest temperature. Place your peppers on a tray covered with aluminium foil and roast them in the oven until their skin has turned black and started blistering.


While your peppers are roasting, peel your potatoes and cut them in half. Put them in a pan of cold water and bring to a boil. Cook for a further 5 minutes, or until you can insert a fork without the potato breaking up. You want the flesh to still be firm.


Take out either a small lasagna dish, a round skillet or even one of these cake moulds with a bottom that detaches to help you turn them out in one piece. Butter the chosen dish.


Take your potatoes out of the boiling water and rinse them under a cold stream. Then slice them thinly, about the thickness of a CD case. Then lay half of them at the bottom of your pan.


Take your peppers out of the oven. Turn the temperature down to 180 degrees but leave the oven on as you will need it to cook your frittata. Rinse the peppers under cold water to cool them off. Pull out of the stem delicately, making sure to take most of the seeds with it. Peel off the skin. If you have baked them long enough it should come off easily. Slice the peppers in long strips. Cover your layer of potatoes with a layer of peppers.


In a separate dish beat the eggs until they turn pale. Season well and add the grated cheese. Pour half of that mixture onto your potato/pepper layer. Then start the whole process again. Once you're done, sprinkle some some grated cheese on top and put in the oven for 25 minutes.

Spaghetti alla bottarga

It's our last day in Sardinia. There I have said it. It's been a holiday full of the expected blissfully hot weather, tranquil beaches and perilous boat excursions with the Neapolitan at the helm, but also punctuated by unforeseen events, including a dash back to London, a missed flight and the getting to know of one of my husband's most cherished friend and her family.


Between long days at the beach --interrupted only by lazy lunches of tomato salad and fruit-- and dinners with friends all over the north of the island, there hasn't been much time to cook. 


And now there are only a few hours left to pack the half-used, sand-crusted bottles of sunscreen, the salt-stained beach bag and the unfinished lofty novel. So, as we say farewell, I wanted to share with you a wonderful pasta recipe that is one of the staples of Sardinian cuisine: spaghetti alla bottarga. 


Bottarga is a Sardinian delicacy of cured fish roe, often grey mullet, more rarely tuna. Sometimes called the poor man's caviar, it's also found in Southern France under the name of poutargue and in Spain, where it's known as botarga. 


In Sardinia it's sold in supermarkets, vacuum-packed, after it's been massaged by hand to eliminate air pockets, then dried and cured in sea salt for a few weeks. Once it's taken the shape of a dry, hard slab, it's coated in beeswax for keeping. I'm not sure how long it's supposed to last once opened but I have eaten it several weeks later to no ill effect.


You can also buy already-grated bottarga, but of course it doesn't taste nearly the same. The difference is even starker than that between just-grated parmesan cheese and the pale yellow powder one finds in tubs on supermarket shelves.


Perhaps the best thing about bottarga is how quickly it allows you to slam dinner on the table. Other than spaghetti with garlic and olive oil, I don't know an easier recipe.

Spaghetti alla bottarga (feeds four)
400g spaghetti
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
A bunch of fresh parsley
1 fresh red chilli


Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan. Throw in a generous handful of salt. Wait until it boils again and add your pasta. 


In another pan, gently heat up the olive oil and let the garlic cloves and the chopped chilli infuse it. It should take about 3 minutes. Then grate some bottarga over your pan. If you don't have a grater, just slice it very thin and then cut it again until it forms tiny squares no bigger than a grain of rice. Depending on your taste you may want between 4 and 8 tablespoons of bottarga. 


Fry the bottarga gently for a further 5 minutes, or about the time it takes your pasta to cook. Drain the pasta about 30 seconds before it's ready. Add it to the pan with the bottarga, sprinkle with fresh parsley, a grind of pepper and another tablespoon of bottarga. Mix well and serve immediately.

Amalfi in a new light

Amalfi, its picture-perfect port backed by 300-meter-high cliffs, its narrow, uphill main street bordered by crumbling, pastel-coloured buildings, its water so clear the anchors of the boats bobbing on the marina can be seen glinting several meters below.


But Amalfi also has a darker side, the one not flaunted on the brochures: its steady stream of screeching scooters, its swarming tourist shops, shelves caving under the weight of a hundred cat-shaped bottles of overpriced limoncello (a sweet lemon liquor), its long lines of buses clogging the main piazza, disgorging fazed, exhausted passengers aching for a gelato.


It’s one of the first places in southern Italy where the Neapolitan took me. On our most memorable visit we trekked all the way up the main road, along a small brook, to reach an antique printing shop where we had heard they still hand made paper we used for our wedding invitations. At the time I grudgingly agreed to it, observing only that it didn’t look very different from regular quality paper but cost three times as much. But when I stumbled upon the leftover invitations during our recent move, I was struck by the softness of the paper, its irregular edges, small details I didn’t appreciate four years ago, when despairing to finally do away with the party planning .


We were back in Amalfi on Monday, by chance. A missed flight to Sardinia and a day to kill on the coast brought us there. And am I glad we went back because, finally, I got it. I fell in love with it. Not in the head-over-heels way in which I succumbed to Sardinia after one look at its long stretches of beaches, one breath of its centuries-old pines, but in the way a previously dismissed suitor suddenly catches your attention and holds it.


In season, get there before noon and park on the pier (3 euros an hour), then head for the port and get on a boat to Santa Croce. It’s a 5-minute boat ride but it makes a world of difference. Once you arrive on this rocky beach inaccessible by car you can rent a parasol and two sun beds (15 euros for the day during the week). Call in advance if you would like to reserve one by the water and while you’re at it, make your lunch reservation at the shaded bar ristorante Santa Teresa.

Once your decollete has reached an appropriately pink shade and you have tired of slathering on the sun cream as you flop around your sun bed, go up the rickety wooden stairs to the open-air terrace of the restaurant. Order vino bianco con percoche. Trust me. You can’t go wrong with fizzy white wine in which a particular kind of bright orange peaches (percoche) have been left to marinate for a few hours.

Then it’s your call, of course, but before you make up your mind, take a stroll to the little carriages on which the fish and the vegetable appetizers of the day are laid out. On our visit, ensalata di polipo (octopus salad), cozze (mussels), little fried balls of dough speckled with sea weed and salt were all on offer.


We then polished off a steaming plate of spaghetti alle vongole (cooked very al dente,with clams, cherry tomatoes and a drizzling of olive oil), followed by a large sea bass on the grill and for dessert, a black forest cake and a ricotta and pear tart.

Off to Sardinia

The beauty of the British summer is that you can ignore it entirely. While the rest of Europe is busy debating the merits of air conditioning versus ventilation at the coffee machine, you’re happily traipsing the sales in search of a cashmere hoodie to wear at your neighbor’s bbq on Sunday.

In other words, summer has sneaked up on me once again.

In less than 24 hours we will be leaving-- via Naples where we will be making a brief stop to attend a wedding-- for my little spot of heaven, a rustic B&B on the Northern Coast of Sardinia. Marcello, its kite-surfing owner, his three gigantic dogs --more like ponies really--and a vagrant one-eared orange tabby nicknamed Farouk await us.

So do the many specialties of an island whose culinary traditions are rooted away from the sea --long a symbol of invasions-- and firmly into the earth. Cheese, meat, fruit and honey are the stars of the show really. For the first time we have opted to trade our simple room of washed-out wood and seashells for a small apartment in an adjacent building with a kitchen, so our friends and their little boy (the Puppone), could stay with us.

This means that while we will be touring our favorite restaurants, gorging on pane carasau (also called carta da musica), porchedu (roasted suckling pig), fregola (a sort of Sardinian couscous often eaten with seafood) and sebadas (a round pastry of unleavened dough filled with ricotta or fresh sour cheese and doused in warm honey), we will also be cooking at home.

The utensils will likely be few and should force me to embrace the key precept of Italian cuisine: buy fresh, fiddle little

Berry tarts

I don't like to admit it but I have been secretly petrified of summer-fruit tarts for my entire baking life. This fear, like many of my culinary blocks, is not rooted into a specific incident but was born instead, surreptitiously, from repeated encounters with soggy, insipid specimens. You know the ones. They come in different guises but share one overarching characteristic: insufferable blandness. Sometimes their sandy crust is smothered with thick, mustard-yellow custard, occasionally a gloss of jelly gives it an unnatural shine. Always, they're topped with unripe, aggressively sharp fruit.

But last week an innocuous stroll down Marylebone high street miraculously cured my fruit-tart phobia. Here's what happened, I was browsing the chunky, hand-painted ceramics at Emma Bridgewater, when I spotted a cake stand on the sale. I took one look at it and decided it was the cake stand that had been eluding me for years, neither too frilly nor too stark. I brought it home.

What comes next won't surprise you, I decided to bake something to show if off. The only problem was, I quickly concluded, any full-blown cake would dissimulate its best feature, the delicate leaf pattern on its plate. I concluded only individual tarts would exalt its beauty. And so one decade of fruit-tart phobia came to an end.

The secret of sweet pastry is to handle it as little as possible and let it rest in the fridge before you roll it out. Once you've spread it in your pie cases, flash freeze it to avoid it losing its shape upon baking.

To make 10 small tarts:


For the sweet pastry (known as pate sablee in French) 
250g (9 ounces) plain flour
125g (4 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter
150g (5 ounces) icing sugar
1 egg


For the filling
200ml (7 fluid ounces) double cream
125g (4 1/2 ounces, or half a standard container of the Galbani brand) mascarpone
50g (2 ounces) icing sugar

250g (9 ounces) raspberries
250g blueberries

Make your sweet pastry. You do not need a food processor, although I have heard it helps. I get on perfectly well without one. Put the flour in a mixing bowl and add the cold butter, cut in small chunks. Rub it with the flour between your hands until it's reached the texture of wet sand. Add the confectioner sugar and then the egg. Be careful not to overwork the dough, make two discs, wrap in cling film and let them rest in the fridge for at least an hour.


Roll out the dough, but not all at once. It's much easier to work with about a quarter of a disc at a time. Just roll it out a bit wider than your individual tart cases. You should get enough for 10 small cases with the quantities here but do not worry if you get less, it just means your cases were wider than mine or you like your pastry a bit thicker. Using a fork, puncture the bottom of each case a few times, it will help prevent it puffing up too much. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees, put the cases in the freezer for 30 minutes, then bake for 10-15 minutes.


While the tarts are baking, whip the double cream, mascarpone and later on the sugar in a mixing bowl until the mixture forms soft peaks. Once the tarts have cooled, spread the filling in them and top with your fruit. Keep in the fridge if you're not serving it immediately.

Cream-cheese brownies

There are days, we all know it, when only chocolate will do.

Surprinsingly, given how much I like baking, the cocoa craving rarely strikes me. No, when I long for something sweet, it is buttery, homely desserts I am irrepressibly drawn to: a pound cake, a tray of financiers or perhaps just-made madeleines, their warm hearts deliquescing as I dunk them into a glass of cold milk.

So it was a bit of a shock last week when I felt a sudden urge to make brownies. I tend not to bother with brownies because you can buy perfectly good ones from specialty shops (my favorites are from The Natural Kitchen, in Marylebone, although Leon makes a Middle Eastern version rich in orange peel and exotic nuts that is sometimes just the ticket). The other reason why brownies aren't a regular guest at my table is that, while I enjoy the first few bites, I often find them too cloyingly sweet to eat a full portion.

If you share that particular feeling, let me introduce to THE brownie recipe you have been waiting for. It comes, as is often the case, from my baking bible, How To Be A Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson. Presentable, these brownies are not, but the heart of cream cheese introduces a fresh, sour note that is the perfect counterpoint to their sweetness. You can eat these beauties at room temperature, or fridge cold, although I must warn you that the latter option somehow made my brain totally impervious to the satiety signals supposedly preventing us humans from eating ourselves into a sugar coma.


Ingredients:
125g (4 1/2 ounces) dark chocolate
125g (4 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter
200g (7 ounces) full-fat Philadelphia cream cheese in aluminium wrapper rather than plastic container (I used just and found it enough)
75g (3 ounces)plain flour
200g (7 ounces) caster sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or vanilla-bean paste
A pinch of salt

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees. Melt the chocolate, previously broken into pieces, in the microwave at full power (in mine it took roughly 1 minute). When the squares starts to lose their consistency, add the butter, also cut in chunks, and heat for a further 30 seconds. Mix well.


In a separate mixing bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar until the mixture is pale yellow and creamy. Add the vanilla extract/paste and a pinch of salt. Now pour in the chocolate/butter batter. Finally energetically beat in the flour.


Pour HALF the mixture in a 23cm square tin (easier for cutting the brownie into squares but obviously a round tin would work fine too). Then cover that layer of batter with thin slices of cream cheese. If you got the one wrapped in aluminium --unlike me-- the process will be much easier and you will get slices rather than great big lumps spooned out of the plastic container.

Cover with the rest of the batter. Put in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. The top should look and feel dry but a knife inserted in the heart of the cake should still come out sticky. Wait for roughly 10 minutes before cutting into squares. Don't worry about messing up the first slice. It's inevitable.

Mango Mousse

I love mangoes. They're, along with bananas, the only fruit I buy throughout the year, although I tend to favor U.K.-grown ones for environmental reasons. But apart from greedily devouring their sweet yellow flesh, standing at the kitchen counter, bags of unpacked groceries at my feet, juice dripping down my forearm, I never quite know what to do with them.

This state of affairs looked unlikely to change until I stumbled, in the course of the past few days, upon an avalanche of recipes for raspberry mousse. Now, I like raspberries. In fact, I like them so much --and they're so darn expensive--that I didn't immediately take to the idea of blitzing them into a puree. So I thought, why not try it with mangoes?

When an idea for a recipe strikes me, I usually need to execute it immediately. So I rushed down to the Indian corner shop and took a look at their mangoes. They were yellower, thinner and longer than the kind I usually buy, but the shopkeeper assured me I would be pleasantly surprised. And indeed I was.

This recipe makes about five individual mousses of the size of a largish espresso cup (as seen in the photo).The mousse is not very sweet and the mango taste, while delicate, is very noticeable so this pud is not a good way of making little people who dislike mangoes eat them, just in case you were thinking you might get away with it.

Ingredients:
Two mangoes
300ml double cream
2 egg whites
5g gelatine
2 tablespoons honey, agave syrup or sugar

15 minutes before you start, place a large bowl in the fridge to chill it.

Slice each mango in two. With a sharp knife, criss-cross the flesh. Peel off the cubes thus formed by sliding your knife as close as possible to the skin, as you would when preparing melon. Put the flesh into a food processor and reduce to a pulp.

Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form soft white peaks. Then, in your chilled bowl, whip your double cream. Be careful not to overdo it or it will turn into butter.

Dissolve your gelatine according to the instructions on the packet, usually in a few tablespoons of warm water. Once the gelatine has dissolved, blitz it in the microwave at full power for 15 seconds, just to be sure. Incorporate it with your mango puree. If you're adding sugar or agave syrup, now's the time.

Carefully fold in the cream, making figures of eight with a wooden spatula. Repeat with the egg whites. Place in the fridge until set, at least a couple of hours. Serve chilled.

Penne with broad beans and pancetta

What do you do when your parents are in town and you want to wile away the morning hunting down turn-of-the-century, hand-painted Italian terracotta vases in Notting Hill's antiques market rather than slave away in the kitchen to resentfully slam a roast on the table at 1 p.m.? You cook pasta.


Now, dear French readers, please look away now, for I must say this once and for all. We know zilch about pasta and understand none of its delights back home. Growing up, I ate pasta, on average, twice a year. I'm not kidding. And it was always exactly the same pasta dish: coquillettes with a knob of butter and a sprinkle of grated gruyere cheese. My mom's thoughts, summarized by her body language, were: 'Tonight, I gave up trying to feed my girls a healthy dinner. Honestly, I would rather serve them nutella on toast than pasta, but we've run out of that too.' Dinner would have been served with an apologetic smile if my mom were the type to act guilty.

Many years later, on my first independent trip to London, I roomed with an Italian girl named Anna for a few weeks. We shared a kitchen. She cooked pasta. Every. Single. Day. Eventually, I felt we had enough of a bond for me to tease her gently about her lack of skills in the kitchen, convinced there could be no other explanation for the monotony of her meals. She stared back at me, clearly bewildered. Then she explained, without a smirk, for she was too kind to mock my provincialism, that she had actually been cooking the same dishes her mother would have made back home: pasta with cherry tomatoes, pasta with tuna, pasta with chickpeas, pasta with zucchini and shrimp.....


And all I had noticed was that she was cooking pasta, oblivious, in my ignorance, to the incredible versatility of that miracle ingredient. You know the rest of the story, I eventually married a Neapolitan and, over the years (yes, it took years), overcame my prejudice against pasta. Today, I can hardly imagine what my cooking repertoire, robbed of it, would look like.


My parents, though, have undergone no such conversion, which is why I tend to make pasta when they're around, in an effort, perhaps, to awaken them to the refinement of many Italian pasta dishes. This recipe of broad beans and pancetta I like to cook on a weekend lunch, mostly because a nap feels wonderful afterwards. Serves four.

Ingredients:
500g (just over one pound) i unshelled broad beans (also known in the U.S. as fava beans)
150g (three generous handfuls) bacon bits from the butcher or Italian pancetta
100ml (2/3 of a cup) single cream
A good grating of fresh parmesan cheese
400g (1 pound) wholewheat penne


Put a large pot of water on the hob. Add salt. Don't be shy. You want the cooking water to be as salty as the ocean last time you accidentally swallowed a cup of it. That's so you don't need to salt the pasta later on, which Italians disapprove of.


Put another, smaller pot of water to boil.  Meanwhile, shell the broad beans. It will take a little while at first but you will quickly get the hang of it. Pinch the tip of the pod and pull it down along the seam that ties the two sides of the shell together. Slice it open with a sharp fingernail and take out the beans. Throw the beans in the smaller pot of boiling water and let them cook for 3-4 minutes. 


Throw the penne into the other pot. The wholeweat ones usually need 12 minutes. Give them one less as they will go in the pan with the bacon, cream and beans at the end and cook a bit further then.


Put a knob of butter in a small saucepan on medium heat on add the bacon bits. Once they're dark and crispy, after roughly 5 minutes, lower the heat and pour in the cream. Add a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper. Let it bubble for a few minutes, then add the broad beans.


Your pasta should be cooked right about now. Add to your saucepan and mix well. You're ready.

The Oxford carrot cake

Recipes often remind me of the first person I made them for. 


Years ago, I baked a carrot cake --which I think of as an iconic Anglo-Saxon dessert-- for Clemence, my sister's best friend. She had stopped to visit us in London on her way to Oxford, where she was planning to occasionally study and primarily perfect her knowledge of British ales for a few months. Before I sent her off to a shared student house where I had no doubt she would be eating beans on toast for weeks on end, I wanted to show her some good, old-fashioned baking love. She said she felt like something sweet and comforting but I thought a French dessert might strike an inappropriately nostalgic note. What I wanted, you see, was to send her off full of bold, American-style optimism that she would have a smashing time in Oxford. So I settled on a carrot cake.


I remember it requiring more effort than I expected, mostly because of the grating of the carrots (and my knuckles in the process) and the length of the ingredient list. Eager to use up the various spices I had bought specifically for that recipe, I baked the cake a few times in the following months. And then I forgot all about it. 

That is until my sister, on her recent visit to London, spotted a slice of carrot cake at one of the omnipresent sandwich high-street chains. She examined the packaging carefully, mulling the purchase, and then she absentmindedly mentioned that Clemence still talks about the carrot cake I baked for her years ago.


I cannot exaggerate the thrill her statement provoked. My humble carrot cake, years down the line, still living in the memory of a good friend. What more could a cook ask for? I don’t care about surpassing anyone’s recipe. I cook out of an overwhelming desire to make loved ones feel special. And there was proof, undeniable proof that, sometimes, it works. 


When my sister asked what the carrot cake fuss was all about anyway, I gently pried the cellophane-wrapped slice from her hand and put it back on the shelf. You watch, I said.


For 12 mini carrot cakes or 1 very fat loaf (Use a round pan if you feel like the batter won't fit in the loaf pan)


From Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie 


Cake:
285g (2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
285g (10 ounces) soft brown sugar
5 large eggs
170g (6 ounces) self-raising flour
1 generous teaspoon baking powder
115g (4 ounces) almond powder (any other kind of nut powder would work well, in particular hazelnut)
115g (4 ounces) shelled walnuts
1 generous teaspoon cinnamon
a pinch of ground nutmeg
1/2 a teaspoon ground ginger
285g (10 ounces) pealed and then coarsely grated carrots
Zest and juice of one orange


Icing:
115g (4 ounces) mascarpone
225g (8 ounces) full-fat cream cheese
Zest and juice of one organic lemon (better go organic there since you're using the zest)

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees. Beat the butter and the sugar together until the mixture turns pale yellow and fluffy. You can do this by hand or in a food processor, but I have also been known to use my Kitchen Aid mixer although it's not one of its standard uses. Separate your eggs and beat the egg yolks in, one by one, then add the orange zest and the juice. Stir in the flour, baking powder, almond powder and all the spices. Finally add the carrots and the walnuts.


Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form glossy white peaks (that is definitely better done with an electric whisk unless you enjoy wrist cramps). Then carefully fold the egg whites into your batter, making figures of eight with a wooden spoon. When the mixture is homogenous, scoop the mixture into your previously buttered tin and cook for roughly 50 minutes for the loaf (more like 30 minutes for mini cakes). turn it out and let it cool for at least 15 minutes on a rack. (otherwise your icing will melt as you spread it)


Get on with the icing. Beat the mascarpone and the cream cheese together until there are no lumps. Add the lemon zest and juice. Spread the icing on your cake (s) using a round knife or a flat wooden spoon. Decorate with walnut halves.