Bagels, olives, the sadness of spring, rockstar stories.
Recipe of the week:
Mini bagels. These are tiny but substantial canapés for parties. You can make them in advance, and put them together just before the party, so they won’t go soggy. And who doesn’t like a bagel?
These are better than supermarket bagels which must be toasted to be even vaguely ok. Here is the link to the recipe.
Ingredient of the week:
I’m a self-confessed ingredients freak (the only other person I’ve met who is as obsessed with ingredients as I am is Nicola Carter-Lando of souschef.co.uk, now that’s a business I wish I’d started).
I’m a great believer in a properly stocked pantry. I love pickles and condiments. If every dish needs a balance of salt, fat, acid, and heat, then having the right jar in your cupboard will deliver that.
I’m going to start with something obvious: olives. Kalamata olives are brilliant in a spaghetti sauce (one of my mum’s recipes), delivering a meaty flavour to the tomato. I love those Spanish tins of anchovy-stuffed olives, the salty umami punch of flavour perfectly designed for l’aperitivo hour. Lidl at one point was doing a deal (a big tin for a quid)and I bought an entire case.
My favourite olives are small and green: the Spanish ones are called manzanilla. Turkish, Calabrian, Greek crushed or cracked green olives, often flavoured with lemon and garlic, are really tasty.
I’ve cured my own olives. My parents had a bush of them, not even a tree, in France. I left them in salt water which I changed every day for 10 days. Then I packed them in a jar of olive oil and left them. A year later I had the most delicious olives.
I’ve tried growing them in London- I have a very sunny terrace. After buying a small tree in Portobello market, nothing happened for years. One year, irritated, I decided to severely cut back the branches. To my surprise for the first time I got blossom and by the end of the summer - a handful of actual olives. They were tiny though, and despite curing them, they were bitter and woody.
You can use olive leaves as a tea, it delivers a stringent but pleasurable drink.
I was recently bought a large jar of boring green olives. To make them more exciting, I cut up a couple of lemons (I also had a cedro left over which I used, hence the large amount of pith you see in the photo), some cloves of garlic and packed them in olive oil. You must make sure the olives are completely covered in liquid or they will go mouldy. I’m leaving them to marinate for a few weeks. After eating the olives, I can use any olive oil leftover in a sauce or as a salad dressing.
Ophelia pic of the week:
I’ve kept some of my daughter’s baby clothes. Here Ophelia is wearing a vintage Gap dress, next to a picture of my daughter wearing the same dress.
Sienna had a mini-me doll with an identical dress but lost it on the way back from the park. I lived in Paris at the time and spent hours looking for it. I even did posters for the missing doll. Parisians aren’t very nice most of the time, but they soften when you have kids, so people were helpful. Alas it was never recovered.
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