Lamb chops with pickled peppers

There's a fabulous blog called Single Girl Dinner. If you're not already aware of it, and following its fabulous author, Jessica, on Twitter, then you should do. One of my favourite posts discusses one of the upsides of eating along (indulging your own, ocassionally odd, tastes), in the context of a her mother's sole eating habits.

Jessica's mother's favourite single dinner was liver, as was my mother's. Usually stroganoffed. Utterly disgusting. However, I did manage to acquire some tastes from my mother. One of the most noticeable is my love of meat-on-the-bone: all the fatty, crispy, over-done or extra-juicy bits that others sneered at. During my vegetarian phases, I rarely miss the meat itself, but I do miss the fat, and the unctuous gloop of proper meat stock.

This is originally one of my Mum's recipes. I think it did get cooked for the family, but I always think of it as her dinner, not our dinner. The rest of us (I admit that my fat and crispy bits adoration came later) politely  sawed our way round the bones, peeled off the fat, and left them on the side of the plate. Mum ate the fat and nibbled away at the bones. Here's her handwritten recipe:

I've cut the number of ingredients to make it easier, and less wasteful, to produce for one person. The mushrooms and the sundried tomatoes are gone.

I've also replaced the jar of mixed peppers with some of my homemade pickled peppers. The recipe can be found in Diana Henry's Salt, Sugar, Smoke, which I urge you to buy. I did not count myself as a preserving person (I don't really like jam, for one thing) until I had this book, but now there are jars of all sorts lurking in my cupboards. The pickled peppers are incredibly quick and easy to make, last forever, and go well with all sorts of fatty meats or rich cheeses. But if you don't have any, do as Mum did, and use a couple of peppers from a jar together with some balsamic vinegar.

Lamb Chops with Pickled Peppers

2 lamb chops, rib or loin, whichever you prefer. I've used rib, as I think they're more elegant and they also have more fat on them.
2 pickled peppers
1 tin of borlotti beans
2 tbs mint sauce

Trim any extra fat (beyond the amount you want!) off the lamb chops. Score the remaining fat into little diamonds so that it will crisp up well. Drain and rinse the borlotti beans. Drain the pickled peppers and slice into strips.

Heat a small frying pan until very hot, and then place the lamb chops in, fat-side down. Fry for a couple of minutes until the fat is crisping up well and coloured deep golden.

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a small saucepan, and tip in the beans, peppers, and the mint sauce. Pop on a lid and leave over a medium heat to warm through.

Flip the lamb chops onto one side and fry for about 1 minute 30 seconds on each side, until browned. This will give you a medium-rare chop; if you prefer your meat well done then give them an extra 30 seconds to a minute per side, lowering the heat to stop the outside from burning.

Tip the bean mixture onto a plate, and top with the lamb chops. Serve with plenty of kitchen roll for mopping the fat and juice off your fingers/face.

A single breakfast

Breakfast is a key part of our coupledom. Almost without fail, Saturday morning is a lie-in with a cup of tea, then a bacon sandwich and coffee. Sometimes we talk about eating something other than bacon sandwiches - scrambled eggs, sausage sandwiches, waffles maybe - but we never actually do these things. The bacon sandwich is an ingrained ritual.

There are occasions, though, when I'm on my own for breakfast. Weekends when the boyfriend is away, or midweek days off work in the August lull. On these days, I have an entirely different ritual: the croissant and the coffee.

Ideally, this is a summer ritual. To my mind, one of the most calming things in the world is to sit in the morning sunshine, listening to birds and the movement of air and the world starting to shift, with a good croissant and a good coffee in hand.

The coffee part is fairly simple, although it's taken years for me to find my perfect coffee (currently, the Kenyan AA from Cardew's in the Oxford Covered Market, but I'm open to persuasion). It's ground only as and when I need it, in a Krups burr grinder, set to a slightly finer setting than you should use for a cafetiere. I like sludge at the bottom of my coffee. I then pop a heaped dessertspoonful into a small cafetiere, add water about 5 seconds off the boil, and leave for 3 minutes. It then gets decanted, into a large thick Denby mug, with a generous glug of cold milk.

The croissant is harder. Maison Blanc are the best I've found so far. But I've been reading Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery lately, and discovered that croissants are a form of enriched yeast dough puff pastry (I thought they were just puff pastry). And a friend gave me some sourdough starter a couple of months ago. So far, I'd only made bread: but what if I could make my own croissants?

Luckily, I wasn't the first person to have thought of this, although it seemed that most people added either extra yeast, or a chemical raising agent (baking powder/bicarbonate of soda). I did find one pure recipe, though, courtesy of someone called LeadDog at an American sourdough collaborative blog. This is essentially their recipe, with some timing edits and more details on the folding stage.

The easiest way to get your own starter is to ask a friend for some of theirs. If that fails, then you can make your own, but I'm not the person to advise you on that!


Sourdough croissants

For the initial dough:
140g ripe starter (i.e. starter which has been fed recently and is bubbling actively)
280g milk
60g butter (salted/unsalted/whatever's in the fridge)
15g sugar
480g strong white flour
10g salt

Later:
250g unsalted butter
1 egg

Bring the milk to a boil then leave to cool back down to body temperature. When you can dip your finger in, and can't feel the liquid around it, then it's ok. Bring the butter up to room temperature.

Weigh the starter out into a large mixing bowl, then stir in the milk, followed by the butter and sugar. Mix in the flour - at this stage it will be a sticky mess - and then the salt.

Tip the mixture onto a well-floured worktop, and knead for 5 minutes or so. You want a mixture that is holding together well, and which looks smooth even when stretched. Tip this back into the mixing bowl and leave at room temperature overnight, or for around 10 hours. For me, room temperature is about 20 degrees celcius at the moment.

The next morning, take the 250g pack of butter out of the fridge and leave for a couple of hours. Roll it out between two sheets of greaseproof paper until it's about a centimetre thick, then pop it back in the fridge or freezer to harden - this should take around 30 minutes.

Tip the dough onto a well-floured worktop again, and knead very briefly. Roll out to just over twice the size of the sheet of butter - i.e. if you have a square that's 6 inches x 6 inches of butter, you'll need a rectangle of dough around 13 inches by 7 inches. The aim here is to place the butter on half of the rectangle of dough, then fold the remaining half over, sealing in the butter. I hope that makes sense.

Once your butter is safely sealed, gently roll the entire package out until it's about 12 inches x 18 inches. No need to be precise. Then fold the top third of the dough over the middle third, then fold the bottom third over both of these. You're aiming for something like a letter-folding process. The roll the dough out again, and repeat, but this time aim to have the folds at 90 degree to the previous ones, so your layers are going in a different direction. Then pop the parcel back into the fridge for around an hour, to cool the butter and relax the dough. Make a cup of tea and read a couple of chapters of your book.

You can repeat this as many times as you like, until you get bored. I did three pairs of rolling and folds in total, and got fairly good thin laters; I'd definitely consider doing a fourth in future.

Finally, roll the dough out and cut into triangles. You'll need to decide at this point how large you want your croissants. If you want them big (weekend sized), then you're aiming to make eight. For small, weekday, croissants, you're aiming to get twelve. I found the easiest way of doing this was to roll the dough out to as large as my rolling pin permits (around the 12 x 18 inches mentioned earlier, coincidentally), cut it into two or three rectangles, then roll each of these rectangles out again into a square of roughly 12 x 12 inches. Each square can then be cut into four triangles.

I then rolled each triangle out a little more, stretching the tip opposite the longest side. Those of you who enjoyed Pythagorus at school will be having a great time right now. Start rolling up the longest side, up to the tip, then curl the two points round to make a crescent.

Leave the rolled croissants to rise at room temperature for around 4 hours. Heat the oven to 220 degrees celcius.

Mash the egg up, and brush it over the croissants. Mine didn't look very risen at this point, so don't panic. Pop them in the oven for 20-25 minutes and you get these monstrosities:

Pasta Pesto

I am reliably informed that, before my sister moved in, my recently-acquired brother-in-law ate pasta and pesto every night for dinner. I'm taking that as in indication that it is the quintessential single person food, and hence a massive omission from this blog.

Pasta with a spoonful of pesto stirred through is now so mainstream that the word "and" can safely be elided from its title without any confusion. But it's not exactly a recipe, it is? Hardly worthy of a blog post, and somehow unrewarding: no achievement, no nourishment, a vegetable oil lake left at the bottom of the bowl.

Having recently returned from a fortnight in Sicily, I determined to try harder. Homemade pesto was the way forward. And, having committed, I was shocked to find it's really easy. You can bash up a portion in significantly less time than it takes to actually boil the pasta.


Real pesto

I think everyone has very personal tastes in what they want in a pesto. I like garlic.



1 small clove of garlic, or half a big clove
50g basil
25g pine nuts
2 tbs or so of good quality extra virgin olive oil
25g parmesan

100g spaghetti, to serve.


Put the spaghetti on to cook. Toast the pinenuts until lightly browned all over, and put to one side to cool.

First pop your garlic clove in a big mortar, add a large pinch of salt, then crush to a paste. Next, add your basil leaves (you'll probably have to do this in a few batches) and likewise crush. Third, pop in your cooled pine nuts, and crush lightly - a few little bits of nut in the smooth paste are quite nice, I find.

I am being very strict about the order here. If you add them in a different order your basil won't crush properly, so do be careful.

Stir in the olive oil, adding more if needed, so that you have a loose paste but one that doesn't seperate out if left for a few seconds.

Grate the parmesan and stir in.

Drain the pasta, keeping a decent few spoonfuls of water, and return to the saucepan. Tip in the pesto and lift (in a salad tossing manner) to coat each strand.

Top Ten in Oxford 2013

A year between posts, and this one isn't even a recipe.

Another Oxford-based food blogger recently published a list of his top ten restaurants in Oxford this year. I disagreed with his choices and so I was challenged to come up with my own list. I disagree in principle with the concept of "top tens": there's a compunction to include places that might be slightly sub-par simply to make up numbers. High Fidelity is an excellent lesson in this respect: top tens are used as a substitute for real conversation; as the film progresses and the narrator's situation becomes more serious, the top tens become less and less important, and real conversations become properly valued.

On top of that the ranking system often isn't explained. Are they personal favourites? Are they best for food, or for service, or for atmosphere? Or are they simply near to the writer's home, and therefore convenient? For me, a full-length (by which I mean at least 500 words) review will always hold more value than a headline-grabbing top ten.

That said, here are my favourites:

Al Shami

 The best Lebanese in Oxford, and one that (in my fairly wide experience) could definitely compete at a national level. Particularly impressive is the wide range of vegetarian meze, as well as their bravery in putting some less traditional meats on the menu. I haven't dared try the brains yet, but the raw lamb kibbeh nayeh is excellent: refreshing and delicate in an unexpected manner.

Atomic Burgers

 As far as I'm aware, the only restaurant (now a mini chain!) in the country where the focus is on what goes on top of the burger. There's a rash of Gourmet Burgers/Byrons, and now London is even facing the invasion of New York's Shake Shack, but Atomic are merrily carving a path of their own. It's also great fun: popping candy in your milkshake; Thunderbirds videos on the wall; burgers names after 1980s film characters...

Chiang Mai Kitchen

 I nearly excluded Chiang Mai on price grounds: I never really feel I'm quite getting value for money here.That said, the food is mostly authentic, some is excellent, and all is well-spiced. It's served in the delightful setting of an Elizabethan townhouse and ex-prison, creating an intimate atmosphere, and it even has a decent wine list.

Door 74

 If I ever decide to open a restaurant, it would be very like Door 74. There's a reassuringly short menu, making it clear that all the food is cooked from scratch for each individual order, rather than being pre-prepped then re-heated or "finished" on demand. It's also one of the most romantic places I know for dinner, with its twinkly lights, small size, and unobtrusive service. It's also stupidly cheap.

Magdalen Arms

 I avoided the Magdalen Arms for ages, disliking the amount of hype it had received, mostly from London-based writers and bloggers. Unfortunately, when I finally visited, it turned out to be as good as they'd all said. The Magdalen Arms can easily compete with the London gastropub scene both in terms of the innovatativeness and the flavour of the food, as it should given it's run by the folk behind "the first gastropub" in the UK, the Anchor and Hope. The sharing dishes are always particularly interesting.

My Sichuan

 Intestines. Ears. Tongues. Oh, and last time I glimpsed into the kitchen they had entire storage boxes filled with dried chillis. Somehow, out of all that, have come some of the most interesting, exciting, and downright delicious meals I've ever eaten. It's not for the fainthearted, but if you're bored with lemon chicken and beef in black bean sauce, come here for some real Chinese food. The flavours will knock you backwards, pump you full of endorphins, and then soothe you back with delicious meaty fattiness.

Rickety Press

 The Rickety Press calls itself a gastropub, but both the food and the greenhouse setting are far too elegant for that label in my view. There are some standards here (onion and goat's cheese tarts, burgers, fishcakes) but also some more ambitious dishes, all in a fairly modern British range. Everything, though, is cooked with an exacting precision and presented stylishly.

Sojo

If My Sichuan sounds a bit too much for you, then Sojo might be just right: still pushing boundaries but with a few more recognisable dishes. The service here is excellent, and the waiting staff are experts in identifying a customer's comfort zone, then pushing them to order something just a little bit more different, to surprise and delight them.

Turl Street Kitchen

 TSK, together with Oxfork (mentioned below) and now the St Giles' Cafe (also mentioned below) is at the forefront of a new hyperlocal trend in eating out, which in my view is unmatched almost anywhere else in the UK. That was reflected in the view that the Sustainable Restaurant Association took when asked to review TSK by Giles Coren. On top of all that, the food is in line with the latest trend for nose-to-tail eating. Oh, and it tastes really good.

Yeti

 I'm really sad that there isn't an Indian restaurant on this list. Oxford has plenty of good Indian restaurants, but nothing that stands out from the crowd, and definitely nothing that could compete with, say, Birmingham or Leicester. But we've recently acquired a rash of something else from the subcontinent: Nepalese restaurants. It all started with Everest (which doesn't appear here for the simple reason that I haven't eaten there!), and we now also have Yeti and Kadai&Naan. The flavours are really interesting, playing a lot more in the bittersweet/aniseedy range, and using a lot more dried spices than normal Indian food. Yeti also has the most welcoming service I have ever encountered.

And finally, three who didn't make it into the list because they're not quite traditional restaurants:

Olives

 Best sandwiches in Oxford. They're not cheap, but then when your baguette contains an entire ball of buffalo mozzarella, who's complaining?
 
Oxfork

 Best breakfast (to be accurate, by the time I get out of bed, it's more like brunch) in Oxford. As with TSK, hyperlocal sourcing combined with good British food traditions. The range of veggie options is particularly welcome.

Pukeko

Best coffee in Oxford - and it's a tough field. This is a very personal choice, as everyone likes a slightly different flavour to their coffee. Honourable mentions also go to Zappi's, Quarter Horse, and Missing Bean.

And one more who I suspect will make this list next year, once they're fully up and running with a regular menu and regular evening opening: St Giles' Cafe. The owner has really done his research, spending time working in several Oxford restaurants and discovering some of our best suppliers, before setting up on his own. Particularly of note is that they make all their own bacon and sausages - and you can tell.