Jerk-Marinated Tilapia with Plantains and Tangy Fish Broth

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Susan

Last week I made Jamaican jerk sauce. As I explained in the blog post about that recipe, the traditional, and best, way to cook with Jamaican jerk is to barbecue – and by barbecue I mean slow cooking, indirect heat, and plenty of smoke. However it is winter, and I have neither a grill nor a garden. On a particularly nasty day last week, when it was cold and gray and an icy rain was falling, more than anything I wanted to eat food that would make think of warm weather (this is a recurring theme for me). Jerk sauce has such a lovely mix of flavours that it functions well as a marinade even if it’s not being used on the grill, and I was itching to give my sauce a test run, barbecue or no barbecue. So I decided I’d use it with fish. Continue reading →

Jamaican Jerk Sauce

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Susan

To those of you who read my blog with any regularity and/or know me personally, and who know of my ADDICTION to spicy food (I don’t think that’s too strong a word), it should come as no surprise that I have been obsessed with making, and perfecting, my own Jamaican jerk sauce. I should state a disclaimer: I have never been to Jamaica. But I’ve loved jerk seasoning ever since I first encountered a seriously fiery jerk paste while I was working in a spice shop at age 21. I’ve conducted exhaustive “research” on Jamaican jerk sauce; i.e., I eat jerk whenever I can and I try lots of different jerk sauces. London’s got a huge West Indian population, and during the Notting Hill Carnival, my favourite place to be is Golborne Road, where the food stalls are crammed the tightest, the air is so smoky from oil drum barbecues it makes your eyes sting, and you can get a plate of jerk chicken and rice and peas and plantains for £5. Continue reading →

Butternut Squash and Ricotta Gnocchi

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Susan

A lot of people are intimidated by gnocchi. With good reason, too – it’s hard to get gnocchi right. We’ve all had leaden, chewy gnocchi, and chances are we’ve even had them at Italian restaurants. Chances also are we’ve made them. I know that my first few attempts at making gnocchi were failures – either I overworked the dough, or I added too much flour, or I didn’t add enough and the gnocchi fell apart in the water. Yet that Platonic ideal of gnocchi has always been out there, tantalizingly: delicate, light, feathery-soft gnocchi that hold their shape yet yield at the slightest touch of a fork. I can (and do) make good gnocchi now, and there are tricks to it, which can be distilled to two basic rules. Continue reading →

Polish Sorrel Soup (Zupa Szczawiowa)

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Susan

Eastern Europeans have been foragers since long before ‘foraging’ became synonymous with Rene Redzepi and trendy $160 copycat tasting menus. I grew up in New York City, but my Polish mother has a Northerner’s intolerance for heat and a Pole’s love for woods and mountains and cold lakes to swim in. In the New York summers, when the humidity index crawled up to 95% and the air was thick with the stench of gingko and the sidewalks beat with a steady heat, my mother would escape to upstate New York with me and my sister, while my poor father commuted up on the weekends.

Carless, my mother would take us for walks through cow pastures and up grass-covered ski slopes into quiet woods of maple and pine. Continue reading →

Caramelized Shallot, Yam, and Coconut Soup

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Susan

I am sorry for the long hiatus since I last posted a recipe. I’ve been gallivanting around the west coast (Seattle to San Francisco) and cooked hardly at all (although I ate plenty). San Francisco is having a summery winter with unseasonably mild sunny t-shirt-and-flip-flop weather, but since my return to London this past Monday it has been FREEZING outside, and last night we even had snow. Soup weather I call this, when I’m not calling it something more unprintable. I’ve been craving a yam and coconut soup with a bit of tropical heat, but my complaint with such soups is that they often taste like holiday desserts – too light and sweet without any sonorous depth to round out the flavour. On a particularly cold day this week I trekked (i.e., took a bus) to the farmers market at Swiss Cottage. It’s wee, but one of my favourite veg sellers is there, and I came home laden with root vegetables and good ideas. Continue reading →

Polish Mushroom Barley Soup (Krupnik)

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Susan

This post is part two of the series that could be subtitled, “Delicious Things I Cooked Using Homemade Beef Stock.” About a week ago the Guardian food blog ran a piece on comfort food. It was a nice musey piece; good ‘food for thought.’ What defines “comfort food?” Certainly it means something a little different for each of us. I agree with Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall (the post’s author) that comfort food doesn’t need to be heavy stodgy stuff like shepherd’s pie, although I’m not totally persuaded that it can really extend to anything you’re in the mood to eat. I may be ecstatic about the beautiful salad I’ve just made, but that doesn’t make me want to call it “comfort food.” For me, sometimes comfort food is spicy Asian noodle soups like pho or Szechuan beef tendon soup. But usually when I think of “comfort food,” it is something that evokes a feeling of nostalgia. So I think I liked best what my friend Sabrina said, which is that comfort food is food that feels like a hug. Continue reading →

Braised Oxtail with Red Wine and Shallots

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Susan

If you’re anything like me, you keep the bones from any meat you’ve cooked and use them for stock. I’m a bit fanatical about this: after I ate the Hawksmoor Breakfast, I was so distressed by the thought of all the lovely marrow bones and carcasses from our feast going to waste that I asked for the bones in a doggy bag. (The servers were maybe a little more snarky about my request than they needed to be – but who cares? The stock I made from those bones was fantastic.) I’ve blogged about making white chicken stock, and there’s also a similar concoction called white veal stock made from veal marrow bones, but 99% of the time what I have to hand is beef bones, and I make a brown beef stock. Continue reading →

Winter Fava Bean and Fennel Salad

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Susan

On Tuesday I finally had a long-planned lunch date with the lovely Sabrina Ghayour in Brixton Village. Initially conceived as an outing for an Honest Burger (really good burgers are hard to come by in London), it morphed into a four-hour movable feast (hashtag: #Brixtonfoodcrawl). After a tasty lamb samosa at Elephant and a burger so blessedly rare it was practically mooing, somewhere in between sourdough donuts at Wild Caper and mussels at Etta’s Seafood Kitchen (a chilled out Caribbean café a far cry from the Tom Douglas eatery of the same name in Seattle), what did I do? I shopped of course. For food, naturally. Continue reading →

Sautéed Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Nigella Seeds and Orange

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Susan

It’s an exciting and wonderful thing to cook with a new ingredient for the first time. There’s that lovely thrill of discovery and invention. And sometimes, there’s a sharp ‘ping’ of recognition, when a new ingredient or spice turns out to be something unknown you’ve loved (unknowingly) for a long time. My exhilarating new culinary discovery (and long-lost unknown love) is nigella seeds. Continue reading →

Tomato-Garlic-Anchovy Sauce: A Sauce for Fish

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Susan

This recipe post was originally intended to be about what I made for lunch. But the sauce I made was so delicious (really!) that I decided it deserved its very own entry, lest it be lost and forgotten with the fried sardines. It’s actually a wonderfully versatile sauce, and although it’s particularly nice with oily dark fish, like sardines, herring, or mackerel, I imagine it would also be lovely served, say, as an accompaniment to grilled shrimp, or even with more delicate fish like cod or sole (perhaps for dinner, with some boiled new potatoes). You could even put it on bruschetta and serve it on its own. Continue reading →