Tuesday, April 29

My mother just called for a quick chat (well, 30 mins plus is her idea of a quick chat) and asked for my recipe for garlic soup, which I’d made when she was visiting at Easter. There are many variations on garlic soup, some with bread, some with eggs poached or stirred into the broth. Mine is about halfway between simple and complex, omitting eggs. Here it is :

Garlic soup for four
Take four to six cloves of garlic, depending on size, remove any green bits in the middle and very finely chop. Put a generous pinch of saffon into a cupful of hot water and let it infuse.
Sweat the garlic in about six tablespoons of olive oil in a thick bottomed pan for a few minutes; keep the heat low, it must not burn.
When the garlic has softened, add the following: generous pinches of cayenne and paprika, the leaves from several sprigs of fresh thyme and some chopped fresh parsley. Stir until the spices have released their aroma
Add about 300grams of fresh breadcrumbs and stir until they have absorbed most of the oil/garlic mixture. It should be almost paste-like at this point. Add a tablespoon of tomato passata or chopped tomatoes and cook for a few minutes longer, keeping the heat low. Tomatoes aren’t vital, actually, and be careful not to use too much, otherwise you have a tomato soup, rather than a garlic one.
Add about 2.5 pints of water or light chicken stock and the saffron water. Stir it all in well, bring to a gentle boil and simmer for about fifteen minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
You could do as the French and omit the tomatoes and poach some eggs in the soup, making it more of a full meal. Or beat in some eggs as thickening, the Spanish way. If you stay with the tomatoes, some chopped fresh basil added at the end is good, but not essential. Either way, enjoy!

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Down to Surbiton to see old friends G and B, and their son L, an amazing, bustling ball of dark eyed, curly haired energy, demanding and giving entertainment all the time. Before and after eating a great fish pie (topped with cracked filo pastry, which works really well) and a fabulous tiramisu (the oldies are the best) we played football in the garden and Top Trumps at the table. B and L soaked each other with water pistols. And L spent ages sitting on Cathy’s lap, fascinated by her jewellery. He told us he had three girlfriends and I’m not surprised. I’d almost forgotten – my own sons being now both well into teenagerdom – just how much sheer fun a five year old can be. But demanding as well. He capped the day by, completely accidentally and inavertently, poking Cathy in the eye with a stick he was waving and she spent most of the journey home with a tea bag pressed to her eye. G and B were distraught and felt terribly guilty, but it was just one of those things. It didn’t spoil a splendid day and Cathy will live. I remember how my own son, Leo, aged 18months, had once jabbed me in the eye while I was bathing him. I could barely see out of it for two days and was still in pain a week later. Such are the pleasures and pains of parenthood.

The duality here had me thinking about how fascinating it is that some wines open up in the bottle, so they taste better the day after being uncorked. Last week, Cathy and I drank a bottle of Alchemy Shiraz Grenache 2006, an excellent wine by Aussie winemaker Linda Domas (Oddbins £8.99) over two nights. Full bodied and fruity driven, but with enough tannins and subtle spice to reign in the Shiraz on the first day; day two was a much mellower drink, more balanced with the Grenache even more to the fore and marginally better. Now on Saturday, I opened a bottle of Adnams Selection Chilean Estate, a blend of Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere. I was my licking my lips with pleasure, thinking that here was a terrific new world version of those blended reds from the south of France, with all the concentrated, robust, spicy, black-berry fruit flavours I love. The perfect pizza/pasta wine, although with it I ate grilled Italian sausages, some pepperonata and cannnelli bean mash, which worked perfectly. But, finishing the bottle tonight while catching up with the Sunday papers, it tasted a little, well, flat, by comparison. Still drinkable, but definitely past its best. Should have drunk it all in one go, I suppose. (Adnams £6.99)


Friday, April 25, 2008

You know how it is, you are feeling a bit ho-hum, not exactly down in the dumps, but not full of the joys of spring either. Then you open a bottle of something and, suddenly, life looks a whole lot better. This happened the other night – I broached a bottle of cold rose from the fridge, thinking of a glass or too as an aperitif before dinner. Yes I know I said earlier that I don’t oftend drink rose in April, well, there are exceptions to every rule and, in this case, I wa glad I made it. When I took the cork out, there was a distinctive ‘pop’ and I realised that this was a Vino Frizzante (okay, I missed the miniscule lettering on the label and it wasn’t the champagne-style cork normally found on prosecco). Rosata del Veneto is a fizzy pink from Venice, (well, the foothills of the Dolomites, rather than the island itself, where, to my knowledge, there is little room to grow grapes). I felt instantly on top of the world. As light and effervescent as an Italian operatta, as refreshing to the senses as the first sight of St Marks Square, this the kind of bottle we see too rarely in the UK – a cheapish and cheerful sparkling aperitif, or drink it, as the Italians do, with fish. £5.00 a bottle, if you order 12 from Laithwaites, otherwise £5.99. And at 11% alcohol, its easily quaffable.


Thursday, April 24, 2008

An annoying day. Trying to write an article for the New Statesman – well a supplement on crime (I used to be a crime correspondent, for the Birmingham Post and then the Independent, many years ago, and still keep a working eye on the subject) – and keep being interrupted by internet problems and my sons, who are at home because the teachers are on strike. Both need to revise for their exams, but need constant nagging to do so. The internet connection keeps slowing down, the telephone keeps cutting out and the television also froze, all of which prompted groans from me and frequent complaints from the boys. Tiscali, who just fitted a new wireless router, tell me that its because my BT hasn’t got room for them all, therefore the internet will be slower when the tv is on. I think I’m going to kill someone at Tiscali. This never happened with my Homechoice service (a good little company which got taken over by Tiscali.) Felt a bit fractious by the end of the day. To settle my mind, I went to swim 40 lengths and to console my spirit, opened a decent bottle of red this evening……


Tuesday, April 22, 2008

The weather is better now, and the need for those warming bottles of red wine to accompany the meat-based stews and roasts of winter and early spring are much less - although its only in the sultriest weather that I feel able to forgo my nightly glass of red.
I’ve got some very decent white wines in the house in preparation for a piece I’m writing for the Independent, so I thought it would be a good idea to try a couple of them with some nice fish. The excellent if pricy fishmonger in Muswell Hill had some fine looking gurnard, so I bought a couple. Gurnard was previously often only used to bolster fish soup or stocks but, when so many other species have been over-fished it’s getting the revisionist treatment by chefs and food writers and being seen more in fish shops. And rightly so, its an excellent fish, a bit like red mullet in texture. It works well with strong flavours, so I made a simple Medittereanean fish stew (well, the evenings aren’t that warm yet), using a stock made from the heads and tails and stockpot veg. I then sweated some onions, garlic, fennel, parslay and chilli flakes, added some white wine, some passata and let it cook for a bit. Added the drained stock, saffron, some small boiled potatoes, a few black olives and bubbled it for about twenty mins until the potatoes were almost done. Then I added the gurnards, cut into chunks and cooked for another ten minutes or so, throwing into some raw prawns right at the end. Terrific, big flavours, every mouthful watched from bowl to mouth by my cat, Fifi, whose paw occasionally, but almost without her appearing to notice, strayed towards the edge of the bowl. But apart from a few small morsels, it was too bony to give her a taste, because she’s getting on a bit (18 years…that over 80 in human terms) and I didn’t want to risk getting a bone in her throat.
Now, normally, with rustic, garlickly fish stews like this, I like ice cold, bone dry roses, but while that feels the right thing in the garden on a warm summer night, in April, gently chilled whites are called for. As an aperitif, My girlfriend Cathy and I finished off the Iona Elgin Sauvignon Blanc (Waitrose £9.99) from South Africa, a lovely, elegant, benchmark Sauvignon, full of grassy, lemony flavours, with plenty of depth and decent finish. With the meal we had a Farnese Pecorino 2007, (Laithwaites £7.83) made with the rare Pecorino grape (yes, I’d not heard of it either and its nothing to do with the cheese) made near Italy’s Adriatic coast. It’s an absolute stunner and winner of several awards. With just enough oak to make Cathy feel she was drinking a Chardonnay from her Australian homeland, it’s a full bodied wine, full of character and sufficient minerality to give it a nice crisp palate. It went magnificently with the fish stew. So, there you go, one unusual fish, partnered with one rare wine. Life’s not all about cod and chardonnay you know….