Autumn Graze

As some of you may know I am organising a seasonal food market at Northumberland Tennis Club, North Jesmond Avenue, Jesmond, NE2 3JU, on Sunday the 2nd October. It will be autumnal, exciting and full of food and drinks.

We have some brilliant people involved so far such as Ringtons Tea, Carruthers and Kent wines, Deli Fina with cheese and baked goods from The Feathers Inn, Terry Layborne's latest venture The Broad Chare Pub doing pub snacks and ales, The *TeaShed, Emily Botham with lots of brownies, Bels Flowers with fresh flowers and herb pots, Dough Works with fresh bread and drop scone making lessons for the kids, Cuddy Duck Chocolates, Little Miss Party Cakes, The Consett Popcorn Company, Olive Tree Charcuterie cooking up hot chorizo ciabatta rolls, Northumberland Cheese Company, Archers Jersey Ice cream will be there with their ice cream cart and Hotel du Vin will be cooking up a BBQ outside... There will be fruit, vegetables, fresh bread, cakes, macaroons, brownies, pies, pickles, pub snacks, teas, wines, handmade chocolates as well as a raffle full of fabulous foodie prizes...

Entry is FREE and there is lots of parking available at the tennis club. I hope as many of you as possible can come along to my exciting new venture! There will be lots to taste, try and buy... There are also still stalls available, so if you would like to book a place please just email me for details at annahedworth@hotmail.com

Roast French Beans, Cherry Tomatoes and Black Olives

I have received word from the allotment people that I have made good progress over the last year, it is however succeeded with encouragement to push on over the next year and get on top of the whole plot. So they spotted the bits full of towering weeds then. Damn.

I am currently inundated with courgettes, French beans and runner beans. The corn has actual husks, the Turks Turbans are about the size of golf balls and the cabbages look like they might just make it. There are flowers everywhere, sunflowers, nasturtiums creeping all over the place and fading sweet peas. I planted a dwarf sunflower that has loads of stems on each plant, there are so many that I have even picked a big bunch for the house. So there are plenty of things growing, just alongside so many weeds that I have trouble keeping on top of it all...

I'm planning on making Courgette and Lemon Jam and also a Spiced Courgette and Apple Pickle, that you will be able to buy on my stall at Autumn Graze on the 2nd October at Northumberland Tennis Club. Shameless plug... and I have to use up all the courgettes somehow...

And for the bag fulls of French beans this is a tasty little vegetable side dish I cooked up, it's great with a roast Sunday lunch. Simply roast French beans, cherry tomatoes and black olives together in a roasting tray with olive oil, salt and pepper. That's it. It takes about 25 minutes at 180°C. The beans soak up all the tomato juices and olive flavours, it's really delicious. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar before serving.

Provence

We arrived in beautiful sunny Provence after a long drive from the south coast of France, only having been lost a couple of times. The past few days have been spent sitting in the sun, surrounded by gardens, full of beautiful flowers, grapes, artichokes, figs tumbling all over the place and interesting looking lizards peering at you from in between the rocks. It's been a tough time...

We were staying with family, in the region of Vaucluse, in a lovely house surrounded by hills, vineyards, flowers, bees and sunshine. We visited a market in Buis les Baronnies with clusters of lovely stalls full of local produce, lavender, salami, cheese, garlic, spices, fish, beautiful pastries... The selection of salami on offer puts mine to shame, blueberry, mushrooms, cheese...

The evening of the suckling pig was a highlight, he turned slowly on his spit all day, being basted in butter and garlic, crispy and golden, served whole on a platter with the most amazing dauphinoise potatoes. There were cheese boards, veal chops, stuffed courgettes, delicately cured sardines, plum tarts and beautiful wine...

In pauses between eating we wandered round nearby towns and villages. Crestet, a tiny medieval village with its paths and alleys carved into the side of the hill, was full of nooks and twists. At the top we found a little café which looked out on what seemed the whole of France and beyond. I think we could just about see Italy...

Apple and Celery Salad with Walnuts and Mustard Dressing

I don't know what has happened to summer, one minute it is warm and sunny, the next we're in the middle of a monsoon. As I walked to work this morning it even felt a bit frosty, it was lovely and sunny but there was definitely a hint of autumn in the air...

This autumn will see the start of an exciting project for me, I am organising a seasonal market for small North East producers, growers and makers. 'Autumn Graze' will be taking place at Northumberland Tennis Club, Jesmond, on Sunday 2^nd October.

I have had a brilliant response and have lots of exciting people lined up to take part. The list is building, full of cakes, bread, flowers, wine, local breweries, cheese, pies, charcuterie, pickles, jams, tea, coffee, cookware, handmade chocolates. It will be a beautiful feast of a day, full of talented local people and lots of things to eat and buy, I'm looking forward to it a lot.

I will keep the blog updated with all the details, and please do get in touch if you are interested in taking part. Hopefully it will be the start of many more events to come.

In between planning markets, weeding and the day job I have still found time to slot in some time in my little kitchen. I made this salad last week for some friends and I. It is quick, fresh, healthy and delicious, a healthy take on a Waldorf Salad. The Waldorf Salad was first created in the Waldorf Hotel, New York, so perhaps this could become known as the Maybury Salad, after my little house... Or is that delusions of grandeur? I'll perhaps just stick to Apple and Celery Salad with Walnuts and Mustard Dressing.

Firstly chop 4 celery sticks into 1cm wide slices, make sure you keep all of the leaves and put both to one side. In a dry pan toast two handfuls of walnuts until they are toasty and browning, then add these to a bowl to cool down.

In a large salad bowl start to make the dressing. Start with the juice of half a lemon and add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and a teaspoon of English mustard. In a pestle and mortar crush a clove of garlic with half a teaspoon of salt until it is a smooth paste and add this to the dressing. Finally add 2 teaspoons of honey and some black pepper, and whisk everything together with about 4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. It will thicken and emulsify as you do so.

Peel and core 3 Granny Smith apples and cut them into bite sized chunks. Add them to the dressing, at the same time adding the celery, roughly chopped celery leaves and toasted walnuts. At this stage I also added some crumbled Manchego cheese. I have made it with and without the cheese and like both versions, so it is up to you at this stage.

The dressing is delicious, sweet, zingy, garlicky and works very well with the sweet apple, toasty nuts, fresh celery and creamy cheese. I will make this again and again I know already.

Summer Supper

The salami was ready, and the football season was starting with Newcastle playing Arsenal... So it made sense to put a shoulder of lamb in the oven for four hours while we went to the match, invite friends round to join us for supper, and unveil the long awaited salami...

The allotment is offering up courgettes rapidly and I have six large cauliflowers to get to grips with, so we only had to get some lamb and we were ready to go. I made some sweet lemon pastry and picked some blackberries from the Ouseburn the day before, which became delicious Berry and Mascarpone Lemon Pastry Tarts.

We may have got a bit carried away wearing paper masks of Joey Barton's face, at various points before, during and after supper. They had made their way home from the football match with us somehow, and resulted in us tweeting Mr. Joseph Barton photos of ourselves wearing them, and invitations to join us. Bizarrely he didn't show up?

We started with an Elizabeth David inspired olive tapanade with French bread for dipping, and the Homemade Salami. One of which was red wine and walnut, my favourite I think, the other was fennel and garlic, also delicious. They don't look very professional, more like shrivelled wizards fingers, but they tasted really good. I have been feeling apprehensive watching them hanging in the porch, worrying that they were going to be horrible, or worse still, poison me... But they were the right texture and smell, rich, meaty, full of flavour. It feels good to have successfully made them from scratch so I'm already planning the next batch.

The Braised Lamb was a beautiful centre piece, it just falls apart after braising in wine and stock for hours, surrounded by shallots and garlic. To accompany it I made some Mushy Courgettes, simply chopped and stewed with butter and garlic for half an hour. I used all three varieties that I am growing, yellow, standard green and ball shaped ones. I really should find out the name of these instead of constantly calling them 'green ball courgettes'...

The cauliflowers are a bit funny looking, in both shape and colour, but taste very good. I chopped the first one I have picked so far into small florets, and roasted it with cumin, salt, rapeseed oil, sliced red onion and chickpeas. It was lovely, I'm fast becoming a huge cauliflower fan, it was nutty and roasted with cumin, sweet onions and chewy toasted chickpeas. That took care of two cauliflowers, so I still have four more to cook, I had better start thinking...

We finished the evening with a bit more mask wearing, the Berry and Mascapone Lemon Pastry Tarts, some cheese that the kind guests brought, a bit more wine, toasts to Joey, toasts to the the lamb, toasts to the cheese and some impressions of Vic and Bob... I can't think a better way to spend a Saturday evening really...

Chicken Tagine with Caramelised Baby Onions and Honey

The Lake District was beautiful and sunny on Friday evening, sitting in the quiet of the valley watching the deer with their new bambi's was a lovely end to the week. It did rain pretty much continuously from then on in, but it was still a lovely weekend. It stopped long enough to light the bbq for supper, but also managed to soak us thoroughly while out for a walk. The mist was rolling down the hills dramatically as we left but even in bad weather it is still such a beautiful and relaxing place.

So it may be August, British Summer Time, in case you had forgotten, but I think this rainy windy day calls for something a little bit warming... I have mentioned Claudia Roden before, her book Arabesque is never far from hand in my kitchen. A taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, full of spice and flavour. My favourite section is full of Moroccon tagines, spiced with ginger and cinnamon, sweet with honey and perfumed with saffron...

Claudia uses a whole jointed chicken for her version of this tagine, but as I was only cooking for two I used boned chicken thighs. I find chicken thighs much tastier than breast meat, and for longer cooking times like this tagine, thigh meat is much less likely to dry out.

Start with 150g of shallots or baby onions. Pour hot water over them, in a bowl, and leave for five minutes to blanch. This makes removing the skin whilst keeping the onions or shallots whole much easier. While they are bobbing around in hot water finely chop a small onion and then cook slowly in a tablespoons of olive oil. Cook until soft, for about 5 minutes, and then add half a teaspoon of ginger, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of saffron. Continue to cook the onion and spices for a few minutes longer.

Chop about 300g of boned and skinned chicken thighs into bite size pieces, perhaps a bit more if you're really hungry. Add the chicken to the pan with the onions and spices, and when it is sealed all over add 150ml of water, the blanched onions with their skins removed and a pinch of salt and pepper. Leave the tagine to cook, on a medium heat, uncovered for about 20 minutes.

While the tagine is cooking you can prepare the couscous. It needs to be in a pan that can go in the oven. Use 100g per person, pour it into the pan and add the same amount of salted water to the couscous, cover and leave for 10 minutes. I used 200g of couscous to 200ml of boiling water with a teaspoon of salt in it. Fluff up the couscous after it has absorbed all of the water, it may have become quite a hard mass, but just break it apart with a fork until it is light and fluffy. Add a glug of olive oil and work it all through the couscous with your hands, getting lots of air into it as you do. Finally put the dish into a pre heated oven at 200°C for 15 minutes. Before serving stir a knob of butter through the piping hot couscous and fluff it up again. Claudia uses 20g of butter, but I think you can get away with a lot less, but just to your own tastes.

To finish the final stage of the tagine remove the chicken pieces from the sauce and set them aside, leave the onions in the pan to continue to soften. The sauce now needs to reduce and thicken up a bit. Add 2 tablespoons of honey and lots more black pepper, you need quite a lot to balance the sweetness of the honey. Just keep tasting it until it suits your taste. Turn the heat up a little and allow the sauce to bubble away and reduce by about half. Finally return the chicken to the pan to heat through for a few minutes.

Fill a bowl with a large scoop of buttery couscous and top with the chicken, sauce and onions. I sprinkled the top with some toasted sesame seeds, you could also use some toasted almonds roughly chopped. The gingery, cinnamon spice is lovely with sweet honey, spicy black pepper and soft onions. It is making me want to cook it again just writing this, I might have to wait until tomorrow...

Spinach and Chilli Pancakes

A little old man at the allotment gave me armfuls of spinach on Saturday while I was there watering. He's very kind, last time I saw him he gave me some rhubarb and planted it on my plot for me. Unfortunately this meeting led to a conversation about how the rhubarb was doing, which in truth is dead. I told him this... he is confident it will come back to life next year. I didn't tell him that it was my stepping on it that may have led to its death...

So I wanted to try these little spinach pancakes that are based on a recipe from the Ottolenghi book Plenty. I've been looking through their books a lot recently and want to get back into making more of their salads now that summer is sort of here...

To start you need to wilt the spinach in a pan with a splash of water, I used about 150g of Jesmond spinach... While that is happening add 55g of self raising flour to a mixing bowl, with half a teaspoon of baking powder, a free range egg, half a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of ground cumin, 75ml of milk and 25g of melted unsalted butter. Whisk everything together until it is smooth.

When the spinach is wilted transfer it to a sieve and squeeze as much water as you can out of it. Add the spinach to the pancake mixture, along with a finely sliced green chilli and 3 finely sliced spring onions. Finally whisk the white of an egg until it forms soft peaks and fold it into the mixture.

These amounts will make about four little pancakes. Heat a splash of olive oil in a heavy frying pan and then spoon in the mixture, a couple of tablespoons for each pancake. Cook for about 2 minutes on each side. They should be about a centimetre thick. You might have to do them in batches depending on the size of the pan.

Ottolenghi make a lime, chilli and coriander butter to serve with their version of these little green pancakes, which sounds delicious, but I opted for the healthier option and chopped a large handful of coriander into a couple of tablespoons of Greek yoghurt. I wanted to make something worthwhile with the spinach gift and they didn’t disappoint. They are lovely little green light pancakes with a hint of spice from the chilli and warm with cumin spice.

Homemade Salami

I have been reading a bit about preserving, combining salts, sugars and spices to make cuts of meat or vegetables last for months or years. It comes from the days before refrigeration, and although I don't have that problem I still think it is a good way of cutting down on waste if you have too many vegetables or cuts of meat that aren’t perhaps the best. I already need to plan what to do with the millions of courgettes that have begun to appear at the allotment, and am thinking about a courgette, apple, raisin and chilli chutney. So I have been interested to see how difficult it would be to make my own salami, a homemade air dried sausage... It turns out it's not that difficult if you have the right equipment... I'm already planning bresaola and potted shrimp as my next challenge...

Start with a pork shoulder on the bone, I used rolled, but I think getting the meat sinew and fat free might be easier with a boned shoulder. My joint weighed about 1 kilogram and I ended up with about 700g of chopped meat. You also need 200g of back fat, I was told by the butchers in the Grainger Market that you can't get it, I still haven’t worked out why, but he gave me a load of fat they had trimmed from another piece of pork, it was a bit short on weight, but hopefully it will be enough. I have since been to various butchers and found it really easy to get hold of if you ask in advance.

Slice the pork shoulder into pieces, discarding all fat and sinew, and then dice it so you end up with 1cm cubed pieces of meat, or smaller. This process takes a while, my knives weren't sharp enough and it did test my patience... but I persevered and got there eventually. When the pork meat is done also dice the back fat into small cubes of a similar size.

It is now time to salt the meat. I decided to do two different types of salami so I divided my meat into two bowls, half the meat and half the fat in each. The amount of salt is critical for the curing process, so you should weigh everything very accurately. You must add at least 25g of salt to every kilogram of meat. Each of my bowls weighed 422g so I added 10.5g of salt to each, Maldon sea salt that I crushed finely in a pestle and mortar.

Now it is time for the flavouring. I decided on one quite simple combination of half a teaspoon of fennel seeds, half a teaspoon of black pepper corns and a clove of garlic, all crushed to a paste in the pestle and mortar. The other became a bit more adventurous and also perhaps more French in style, with red wine and walnuts. I added half a teaspoon of black pepper corns, a couple of crushed juniper berries, a clove of garlic, again crushed to a paste and added to the meat, along with a handful of chopped walnuts and a splash of red wine. I mixed both of the bowls up to combine the meat, salt and spices thoroughly and put them in the fridge to mingle for a few hours.

Next comes the stuffing. I ordered 38mm natural hog casings for the job, a salted pig's intestine, and soaked them overnight to remove the salt and soften them up. They come bunched up tightly on a tube ready to pull off and pipe in the sausage stuffing. They don't smell very nice I warn you... If you have a mincer they often have a sausage stuffing attachment, or you can use a small sausage funnel or pack it by hand. I did not really have the correct tools for the job, lots of frustration ensued... It took a while to get the salami packed tightly without air gaps and lumps, but I got there finally and ended up with 6 salami in total. I tied up each end with string, tying the intestine into the knot so it doesn't slip through when you hang it. I have found on further attempts that cutting a length a bit longer than you need and stuffing by hand to be the easiest method.

Each salami needs to be labelled with its full ingredients and also its weight. This is important as you will know when the salami is ready when it has lost 30% of its total weight. Hang them inside for a few days while the skins dry out and tighten up. Then hang them either outside in a cage so wildlife can't get to them, and under shelter or in a draughty porch or garage. Mine are currently up in the roof of my porch... it smells quite meaty and garlicky every time I come in and out of the house...

So that is where I am at, they will be ready in 3 weeks, and I'm already looking forward to them. They may start to develop a dry white mould on the outside of the skin, which is ok, but patches of fur or coloured mould should be washed off as they develop with a weak solution of vinegar in water. I will let you know how they taste in due course...

And finally here is the finished article... It was better than I could ever have hoped, really delicious. Rich and deep meaty flavours. When I get some better equipment I will be starting on the next batch...