HOLIDAY COOKING

Stress-free holiday cooking has been a goal of mine for years. I used to devour every article and blog that I could find, giving advice on getting organized, planning ahead, staying relaxed, and enjoying the holiday. Frankly, the best advice on relaxed holiday preparations is purely psychological: not minding seems to be the healthiest way of coping with all of the annoying, niggling, and sometimes catastrophic events that life can throw your way.

I've tried every possible method of stress-free holiday cooking: elaborate do-ahead charts with tick-boxes; oven-ready meals provided from posh shops with fool-proof instructions attached; plain and simple "I don't care" meals with nothing to do but microwave, etc. The fact is: I love cooking, and love family feasts, but if I do too much I get stressed and fractious, and if I do too little I feel sheepish and a little guilty.

My advice for stress-free holiday cooking? Pick your battles wisely. Concentrate on your favourite element on the menu: something you can cook really really well, in your sleep, with your eyes closed, and with your hands tied behind your back. I'm rubbish at baking: I don't go there. Putting enormous stuffed poultry in the oven at 4.00a.m. just plain worries me: I don't go there either. Sliding things under poultry skin and anything involving basting regularly rarely gets my attention as that's just the problem: paying attention. I have the attention span of a very young child, and get distracted easily by things like opening Christmas stockings and hunting for Easter eggs.

SO: the following is my contribution to the challenge of holiday cooking. This Easter I personally will be preparing the most beautiful bung-in-the-oven roast Bronze Turkey Crown (www.gressinghamduck.co.uk ), with braised leeks, ginger & brown sugar-glazed baby carrots, and the following magical stuffing casserole. Woolley Park Farm (www.woolleyparkfarm.co.uk) is a fantastic local supplier of poultry in Bradford-on-Avon.

Stuffing casseroles don't go in the bird. Treat them like a side dish (big plus, here: you can re-heat a sausage casserole, whereas you shouldn't re-heat stuffing that's been inside a bird, because of bacteria issues). These casseroles can be made well in advance and re-heated gently, covered with foil and spritzed on top with a little spray cooking oil to prevent sticking. They incorporate sausage, and fruit, and veg, and bread, all together in one dish. The Midnight Fridge Raiders will thank you, as they make the most marvellous leftovers when sliced thickly and stuffed into a turkey sandwich. If you are visiting friends or relatives, and are asked to bring something, bring this. It travels really well, chilled and covered, all in one dish, and doesn't take up too much room in somebody's else's busy kitchen, when you reheat it.

The origin of this particular recipe came from THE SILVER PALATE NEW BASICS COOKBOOK, and was an elegant dish involving dried sour cherries, hazelnuts, port, and all manner of good things. I've streamlined my stuffing over the years, and it changes every time I use it, based on where I am and what looks good in the shops.  (I've actually lost the recipe now, as I tore the pages out of the cookbook and brought them to Tivoli in my luggage, from whence they did not return). I personally don't use nuts, as my son is allergic; they do add a nice bit of crunch. So, without further ado:


MOVEABLE FEAST CATERING COMPANY STUFFING CASSEROLE (Serves 6)

PRE-HEAT OVEN TO 190C.

Ingredients:
2 chopped yellow onions
1 stalk of celery, chopped finely
1/2 c. dried apricots, chopped
1 tart red apple, unpeeled, cored and chopped
fresh or dried thyme, to taste
6 cups stale bread, cubed into 1" cubes
6 pork and herb sausages, skinned (or equivalent bulk pork sausage meat) broken up into bits
1/2 c. chicken stock
olive oil for frying
(1/2 c. chopped walnuts or pecans)

Method:
Fry onions and celery gently until wilted.
Add  sausage meat and brown, breaking up into smaller pieces with a spoon
Place ingredients in a large bowl, add bread cubes, fresh and dried fruit, nuts if using, and herbs
Gently stir to combine and add stock as needed to moisten, if your bread crumbs are really stale.
Lightly grease a casserole dish and add the stuffing mixture. Cover with foil and refrigerate until ready to use, or:

Bake, loosely covered, for 30 minutes, uncover, and cook 15 minutes more. This is a very forgiving recipe if you've timed your bird wrong: it can rest happily. Make sure it is piping hot when you serve it.

HAPPY EASTER!

Global Grazing

I’m sitting here at my kitchen table, having lunch and fiddling with our desk globe. 

It’s an elegant little globe, Portugese, deep Mediterranean blue, inlaid with semi-precious stones, delicately cut into the shapes of continents. The latitudinal and longitudinal lines crisscross the globe in gold.

I’m having Mexican- style guacamole on Sardinian flatbreads, and sipping homemade Italian sweet pepper soup. As I spin the globe around, I trace with my finger across the latitudinal lines from Central Italy across to Southern California, where I was raised. Rome and Los Angeles are on a par with each other, half a world away.

It’s a popular misconception that all Californian food is Mexican

As I’ve mentioned before, America is a big melting pot of cultures and tastes, and so my inspirations really come from all across the globe, Italy included. For example, a popular attraction in Southern California is Venice Beach, with it’s bridges, canals, and white sandy beach. It was inspired by Venice, Italy, with its long, sandy Lido.

I’ll be in Italy soon, writing to you from my grazing tour. My shopping list for the villa where we’re staying would not be out of place in an American supermarket, and as I look up in my food guides what produce to expect in the regions I’m visiting, the foods are just as familiar as in the Central Valley of California.

Once, when I was in a beach café in Positano, on the Amalfi coast, I was served an enormous bowl of fish stew, which was a speciality of the house. I was expecting my first child, and feeling a bit fragile. When the dish arrived, I was confronted by the heads of several fish, staring soulfully at me from their soupy grave.. THAT you wouldn’t see in California: fish heads!

Here, for you, my ’fusion’ soup recipe

To celebrate Spring and the sunny produce of Italy and California. It is a rich terracotta colour. A crumble of English, or Italian, blue cheese, would round it off perfectly. (Karen at Bloomfields greengrocers found some enormous, glossy, fabulous red and yellow sweet peppers for me.  Don’t use green peppers for this recipe; it’ll turn everything a vaguely khaki colour).The Sardinian flatbreads are from M&S: (Pane Carasatu from Giulio Bulloni)

SWEET PEPPER SOUP (serves 6)

4 large red, and yellow sweet peppers, cored, deseeded, and chopped roughly
2 medium plum tomatoes, cored and chopped roughly
1 stalk celery, trimmed and chopped roughly
2 cloves fresh garlic, diced
1/8 cup  vegetable stock powder ( I use Marigold brand organic Swiss vegetable bouillon)
¼ cup olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

METHOD:

Sautee vegetables on a medium heat in the oil until soft, about 10 minutes.
Sprinkle over the stock powder and stir to combine.
Add about six cups boiling water and stir again. The amount of water used depends on the size of the vegetables you are using. Use your own judgement.
Simmer for 20 minutes.
Allow the soup to cool slightly, and then remove the solids from the soup with a slotted spoon, and process in a food processor, with a little of the cooking liquid, until all vegetables are pureed.
Return the puree to the saucepan with the soup, and simmer for another five minutes.
Season to taste with salt & pepper, and garnish with crumbled blue cheese if you wish
BUONA MANGIATA! (Good eating)

The Hunt for Burrata

Mozzarella gets such a bad rap.

For many people, their only encounter with mozzarella is to wade through a slightly yellowish, gummy dairy mass, designed to glue selected toppings onto a delivery pizza. Mozzarella is often seen in the high street shops, grated and bagged, or cut into bricks and vacuum packed, destined again as a go-between for cardboard-like pre-packed pizza bases, and chosen toppings.

Discerning restaurant diners may come across water buffalo mozzarella from the Campania region of Italy: pungent, with an edgy, tangy finish. Italian water buffalo look so exotic, and baleful. Their origins, and their existence in Italy, could spark heated discussions throughout the duration of a long Italian meal.

But burrata? Ohh, burrata.

Burrata is the unsung hero of the cheese world, made from either cow, or buffalo, milk. I ferreted out a fabulous, special source of fine Italian cheesemakers, deep in the Wiltshire countryside, when I went on a hunt for a local supplier.

The Basics: Burrata means ‘buttery’ in Italian. It is a by-product of mozzarella preparation. Thrifty Italian cheese producers use every scrap of their product, and burrata is produced when the end scraps of mozzarella production are filled with double cream,  and tied neatly into a small parcel. A typical portion would be about 125 grams.

I use burrata in many ways, in sweet, as well as savoury recipes. Imagine cutting into a perfectly poached egg, allowing the sunshine yolk to trickle gently down your plate, and you will begin to see the delights of burrata. Burrata has the same texture and consistency of a poached egg, so when you use it in a dish you have the combined delights of a firm outer casing, and a rich, runny interior, to accompany other elements in your dish.

DE LUCA MOZZARELLA COMPANY

An organic, family-owned mozzarella producer, is busy making traditional method cows’ milk mozzarella, burrata, butter, ricotta, and provolone products, from their dairy farm, tucked away in a peaceful corner of Bishopstone, Wiltshire. We went to see mozzarella and burrata being made, proudly guided through the process by CLAUDIO SARFATI, artisan cheesemaker.

It was so peaceful when we arrived, more than you’d expect from a rural farm. Claudio explained why. The calves are allowed to stay with their mothers. There was a level of contentedness in the animals that permeated the farmyard. I promise you, the little calves were smiling at me! It was utterly entrancing. (My youngest has just gone off to university for the first time and I’m suffering from ‘empty nest syndrome’, so it was lovely seeing these little animals, so relaxed, with their mother by their sides).

Claudio then led us towards the cheese-making facility: a most delightful little thatched converted outbuilding, and positively Turneresque. He opened the door and suddenly it was like the Tardis inside: thick clouds of steam hung from the ceiling, half-concealing enormous steel vats of milk, being tended by the artisan cheese makers. An extremely petite, and extremely polite, lady came forward, asking Claudio some questions in quickfire Italian. I stared, speechless, at the giant cauldrons of cheese product, and this unexpected mix of new and old methods.

DE LUCA MOZZARELLA is an organic farm, and uses ‘Bio-dynamic’ methods of making cheese. On their website, they describe the method as “…a combination of science and artisanal recipes, integrating the traditional values of Italian cheesemaking with the local best organic cow milk, from the English countryside….”

The tiny lady disappeared into the steamy room and quickly re-appeared with tubs of freshly-made cheeses, still warm from the vats in which they were made. This included an enormous mozzarella ball floating in a brine bath, a tub of thick, rich, creamy ricotta, and my beloved burrata, fat and shiny, tied smartly with a blue tie.

I carried them carefully over to the car, my head filled with all sorts of plans for my new acquisitions. We thanked Claudio for the tour and left, completely charmed by this integration of old methods and new ideas. In this photo I have prepared a fruit, burrata, and chocolate board. Try dipping fresh cherries into dark chocolate fondue, then add creamy burrata and salted cashews. Claudio recommends using walnuts, as they are more Mediterranean and lower in calories. Tell us what you think in the box below.

For more information:
Website: delucamozzarella.com
Email: info@DLM.com 

Rosemary Barron, Food Writer

Rosemary Barron sits quietly by the wood burner, nibbling pitta bread, gazing at the glacial February weather through the window of The Greek Taverna in The Sun Inn.

She is a striking woman with a sweep of silver hair and elegant wardrobe, reminiscent of Christine Lagarde. Rosemary is forthright and articulate, confident in her subject, and delights in discussing the world of food. She smiles as I tell her how glamorous her life sounds, travelling around the world, writing about food and food cultures. When we hear from her, it’s often a fabulous postcard from Romania, or Crete, and when we meet up it’s usually sandwiched between food writing journeys and deadlines to be met, for her publisher.

Flavours of Greece

Her culinary classic, FLAVOURS OF GREECE, is still in print after 27 years, and was written at a time when there were very few English language books on Greek cookery, and none on Cretan cuisine.

“It’s very difficult to earn a living now as a food writer” she explains. “We don’t have the outlet for our work, that we used to have.” 

By this she means the increasing challenges that magazines and newspapers face to keep publishing, and the perpetual struggle of the literary community to compete with the readily available flow of content online.

Over a traditional Greek lunch, book-ended with taramosalata and saganaki starters and finished with pungent Greek coffee, Rosemary takes us through her culinary journey, from a California branch of Williams-Sonoma to her current place as a top-ranked writer of cookery books and articles.
In addition to her impressive body of literary work, and writing Greek cookery books, Rosemary founded and ran the Kandra Kitchen cookery school for six years, in Crete and Santorini. She is a frequent contributor to FOOD AND TRAVEL MAGAZINE.

Rosemary’s culinary career began in an unexpected way. 

Armed with a British teaching credential, she arrived in California and discovered that she was not permitted to teach without a local qualification. Happily, she met up with Chuck Williams, founder of Williams-Sonoma, who quickly gave her a job  demonstrating their top-of-the-line kitchen equipment to the food-curious, who poured into the legendary food emporium, keen to out-do each other with their culinary achievements. Rosemary, a qualified educator, and blessed with a natural articulacy, excelled at demonstrations, and soon found herself teaching culinary skills to the customers.

Her love of, and keen interest in, Greek cooking, allowed Rosemary an outlet for her teaching skills in her favourite part of the world, and Kandra Kitchen Cookery School was born. “Greek food is made for company, “ she explains, and extols a cuisine that is ‘classless’. You can go into any café, taverna, or estiatorio in Greece and find a cross-political demographic from all walks of life, eating the same food in the same establishment.  But food is an ephemeral product: it has a shelf-life, and is designed to be consumed: the best way to preserve and promote cookery skills is to write about it. Thus Rosemary’s literary career began, as she wrote books and article about the foods she found in Crete, and the dishes she was producing in the cookery school.

“Who are your heroes?” I ask her. 

Not surprisingly, she gives me an eclectic list of the world’s top culinary chefs and writers: Patience Gray, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Rowley Leigh, Jeremy Lee, Robert Carrier, and Sally Clarke, to name but a few.

For new home cooks, she recommends turning to the classics for inspiration, and advises beginners to “attend a cookery school, be prepared to make mistakes, and work out what you like.” Putting your stamp on your own cooking means deciding what works for you, and honing and clarifying your personal mark on the food you prepare. “Food is knowledge, but cookery is a skill and needs practice” she states, and very much encourages learning by doing, over and over again, until the skills you aim for are second nature.

I ask her how to find safe, accurate information about food, online. With the onset of the food blogging culture, research can be a bit of a minefield. “There is a lot of food snobbery and fear of food now”. It’s important to use common sense and decide what you like, rather than be led by trends and fads in food. When sourcing information online, look for credentials at the bottom of the article, and check if a blog is a  sponsored post; this tells you that your author has been paid to promote a particular product, which would have an effect on the content. Ultimately, use your own common sense. If what you read feels logical, then it probably is sound advice. Trust your gut, and use your head.

I ask Rosemary where she thinks the food journalism industry will be in five years’ time and she looks at me, bemused. It’s a difficult question to answer. “Whatever we do, we’re hard-wired to look after ourselves, so cooking is good for us”. There will always be a need for education and understanding about food, but the methods by which we learn about food and nutrition are changing, perhaps forever. It’s a credit to Rosemary’s skilled authorship that her Greek cookery classic is still in print after nearly three decades, and still commands a place in the culinary world, which is filling up fast with television cookery shows, online blog and vlog-posts, and the onslaught of social media.

Eat, enjoy, learn, be inspired: a journey into the world of food can be a fascinating adventure.

For Rosemary Barron, an unexpected change of job has led to a vibrant, colourful and far-reaching career which spans the globe and continues to grow daily. For information on Rosemary’s latest project, read below.

FLAVOURS OF GREECE, published by Grub Street (London) is available through AMAZON, retail price £18.99.

Rosemary has had seven Papers published by the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery, and has been published in DECANTER, BBC GOOD FOOD, BON APPETIT, and CUISINE (U.S.).

Rosemary’s next project is as a lecturer on a Gastronomy Tour, with Martin Randall Travel. GASTRONOMIC CRETE: Ambrosia and diaita (diet) from land to table. This  9-day tour celebrates Cretan gastronomy, from ancient to modern, country simplicity to epicurean sophistication. Find out more. 

Meet Marcie, proprietor of Moveable Feast Catering Company

I grew up in America in the 1960’s and 70’s, on the Southern California coast, when interesting changes were taking place in the eating habits of Americans.

I remember being terribly excited by the Moon Landing, and the subsequent production of “Pillsbury Space Food Sticks”: brown, stick-shaped nutrition-packed things, wrapped in foil, supposedly emulating the energy-efficient and exotic diet of our Men in Space. I remember lunchbox staples such as Dole mini fruit cocktails and chocolate puddings, with  flip-top lids, whose metal pots weighed down your lunchbox,  but blissfully  masked the taste of slightly warm, tinned, tuna mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread, which were the healthy bits.

"Hungry Man"

T.V. dinners were all the rage. I had a favourite, chicken-based ”Hungry Man” t.v. dinner every time  my parents went to the Light Opera and booked a baby sitter. It had a chocolate brownie in the dessert compartment – which I adored – but there always was at least one pea, or square cut carrot, imbedded in the brownie: desperate, escaped convicts from the vegetable compartment next to it.
Like many of my classmates in High School, I worked in the tourism sector, chopping onions and making French Fries at Jack-in-the-Box drive through restaurant, and McDonalds. I was working in McDonalds when the first McNuggets appeared, and we were required to suggestive-sell this new product to each customer with the following phrase:

“Good afternoon. Welcome to McDonalds. Would you like to try our new Chicken McNuggets today?”

A man in a large chicken costume stood in front of the till and gave away free samples (he didn’t have to say anything). Often, customers were stood standing in front of me, struggling to remember a precariously large order from memory; the suggestive-selling sentence usually brought them to their knees, and the order was forgotten.

I loved beach barbeques

Particularly chocolate and marshmallow S’Mores, meticulously toasted using unpainted bent wire coat hangers, and always dusted with a slightly gritty layer of beach sand. Seafood was plentiful on the menus in the local Marina. My father suffered terribly one night after a rather large “Surf ‘n’ Turf” meal, consisting of lobster and steak on the same plate. We decided the next morning that this combination really was gilding the lily.

The influence of Alice Waters

As I grew older, the influence of restauranteur Alice Waters, in the San Francisco Bay Area, began to infiltrate California diets, and a trend towards fresh, locally sourced produce began to emerge. We began to relish the enormous supply of incredibly fresh, beautiful produce, grown practically in our back yards, and readily available throughout the calendar year in our enormous, air-conditioned supermarkets. Salads began to flourish, and become meals in their own right. Dips and crudité and fresh fruit puddings replaced the “things-with-pineapple-chunks-on-a-stick” mentality of the 1950’s cocktail party brigade. The proportion of meat-to-vegetables on a plate began to alter, and the meat – or poultry - element in a recipe became proportionally less, as people tended to try and reduce their red meat intake, and increase their fruit and vegetable intake.

When I was little, in our back garden, we had a big swimming pool, avocado and lemon trees, and a large pomegranate shrub in the front driveway. I didn’t appreciate back then, what a rare and beautiful thing this was. (I used to toss the lemons up in the air, at dusk, to attract bats, or throw them across the lawn for my Scottish terriers to catch. They both had little bleached beards below their mouths, stained by the juice of a thousand lemons). I’d love to grow these plants in my Wiltshire garden today, but I don’t think they’d survive a British winter.  I didn’t learn how to cut open a pomegranate until about a month ago; I certainly never ate them as a child. But today, I can celebrate the arrival of the first forced rhubarb from Yorkshire, relish the freshest new Jersey Royals, and tender asparagus from the Wye Valley.

Mexican Cuisine, and Tex-Mex fusions, soon became popular in Southern California.  Scandinavian influences became popular in the Pacific Northwest. America, on the whole, is such an enormous melting pot of cultures and inspirations, that pretty much anything you see on a plate in a Californian restaurant can have its roots in an immigrant diet from another country.

Bringing Californian cuisine to Wiltshire

It’s been such a delight bringing the colours, tastes, and seasonings of California Cuisine to Wiltshire. Of course today, many more people have a better understanding of the concept of air-miles, and the buy fresh, buy local, campaigns, which are spreading throughout the nation. I’m interested in where our food comes from, and who provides it, and I love to hear the stories of my suppliers, and the disparate journeys which have led them to bring their products to this town, and to my catering company.

From Space Food Sticks to Cobb Salads: what a journey! What incredible progress in one lifetime. I’m fond of saying that California Cuisine tastes like a holiday, and to me, it does. It takes like sunlight and fresh air and healthy living, and I intend to spread this around, wherever I go.

RECIPE: S’MORES

1 x box Graham Crackers, or Digestive biscuits
1 x bag large marshmallows
2 x 500g bars Hershey milk chocolate cooking squares, or equivalent
1 x wire coat hanger, unpainted, unbent to create one long toasting fork with a hook on the end
1 x campfire, mellowed to embers

METHOD:

Skewer as many marshmallows as you dare, onto the improvised toasting fork.

Gently brown over the embers, rotating frequently. ( Some people like a nice, evenly browned, lightly puffed marshmallow. Others prefer a flaming carbon-infused creation, in which the crispy black outer coating separates from the molten, sticky interior, giving you separate bites of crunch and cream. Many children are too impatient to wait for very long, and prefer to eat their marshmallows unscathed).

When the marshmallow is cooked to your preference, make a sandwich using two Graham cracker slices for the bread, insert four chocolate squares inside, and slide the gooey toasted marshmallow into the middle. Eat carefully: the marshmallow will be hot and sticky. When you want another one, ask for “S’More”!