Cha cha changes

There’s no doubt about it, spring has finally arrived. The windows are open and the mood in our kitchens is more optimistic and light than just a few weeks ago when we found ourselves stranded on a culinary desert island with empty wallets, heavy moods and night after night of bland suppers. We both slightly lost the will to be inventive with our stocks and deprived ourselves of flavour and colour for what felt like an eternity (could just have been a few days we can’t be sure!) We’re pleased to report this distressing period of food writer’s block is over and we’re full of the joys and flavours of spring, eager to launch some fresh new recipes for these lighter nights.

Having said that, the first salad of spring isn’t actually our own but it’s so damn good it deserves its own post. Last Thursday, the lovely Miss Lovell got six of us ladies together to toast the sexy new refit at Rosie’s Deli Café with a collaborative, after-hours supper amidst the wet paint and sawdust. We all brought something to the table–beer, fizz, cheese, three salads, bread, brownies and some amazing salty chocolate balls. This feast couldn’t have come at a better time, in the midst of our poverty-ridden dry spell, and one salad in particular was our salvation–like being given a sip of cool water after weeks of drought.

Grace’s Cha Cha Chicken Salad
The key ingredient for this salad is the Toasted Sesame Dressing (formerly known as Cha Cha Chinese Chicken Salad Dressing), a Kosher-Chinese special made by American company Soy Vay. I tracked it down here but, looking at the ingredients, you could probably make something similar yourself with a blend of sesame oil, sugar, vinegar, toasted sesame seeds, mustard and ginger powder.

Serves 6
4 skinless chicken breasts (or you could use leftover roast chicken)
1 iceberg lettuce, finely shredded
100g flaked almonds, toasted
Large handful chopped coriander
Half a bottle of Toasted Sesame Dressing (or your own blend as above)
One fiery red chilli, finely chopped

Cut the chicken into strips and poach in simmering water or steam for 10 minutes until tender and cooked through. Allow to cool and then finely shred with your finger nails (clean ones obviously). This is quite time consuming, but the finer the shreds, the tastier the salad. Put in a bowl and pour on the dressing, being sure to coat and turn the chicken. Cover and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours or overnight if you have the time. When you’re ready to serve the salad, put the chicken into a large salad bowl, add the lettuce, coriander, chilli and flaked almonds and toss delicately with your hands, being careful not to break up the lettuce too much. Serve with rice, noodles, bread or as part of a bigger feast and a cold beer is a must. Quite literally our saving grace.

Rosie

Fuul

The last couple of months have been frugal for the pair of us. Since excitedly sitting down to write and shoot our book, as well as plan madcap adventures for the latter stages of the year, our money matters have been sorely neglected. Eking out meals from leftovers and packets of dried pasta has become a reliable and money-saving technique but one which, when faced with an empty fridge, has left us culinarily and imaginatively undernourished. The need to create tasty and filling food on a busy work schedule has been met by using reliable cupboard staples: pulses that can be cooked quickly and combined with spices, shredded vegetables and roughly chopped herbs. January and February’s meals have been characterised – and fuelled – by lentil stews, barley salads and rice pilafs, and all of them have been ultra cheap and delicious.

Last night I opened the fridge to a tub of lebneh and wanted to think around it as just a condiment. I decide on a Syrian fuul – a tomato-y lentil stew with mashed fava beans, aubergine, cumin, lemon juice and parsley, crowned with a thick dollop of yogurty lebneh and scooped up with olive oil and pitta breads. It’s elusively unlike the memorable fuul I ate out there last year and yet it doesn’t disappoint with its hot and tangy flavours.

Serves 4 as a March supper with pitta breads

1 small aubergine, diced
2 handfuls red lentils
Olive oil, for softening and drizzling
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 medium white onion, peeled and finely sliced
1 tin fava or butter beans, drained (tinned chick peas as well, or instead of, will also do nicely)
1 tin plum tomatoes
Pinch of dried chilli flakes
3 dried whole chillies
1 heaped tsp cumin powder
1 cinnamon stick
1 lemon
4 tbsp lebneh or thick Greek yogurt
Handful of parsley, roughly chopped

Place the aubergine in a colander, salt well and allow to drain over a sink. Turn occasionally. Add the lentils to a saucepan of boiling water and cook until tender. Drain and reserve. Heat a little olive oil in a casserole pan and soften 2 cloves of the garlic along with the onion. Stir until just pale gold, then add the beans and tinned tomatoes, crushing most of them under a fork. Stir to combine and add the lentils along with the juice of half of the lemon. Rinse and wring the aubergine and add to the pot as well. Add both types of chilli and the cumin and cinnamon, bring to the boil and then return the pot to a simmer with a lid on, until thickened, for about 30 minutes. Stir occasionally and season if necessary. To serve, ladle into shallow bowls and top with yogurt. Finish with a little lemon zest, the remaining crushed garlic and lemon juice, parsley and your best olive oil. Stir everything together with toasted pitta breads.

Having said all this, I’m hoping this will be our last post on pot-cooked foods for a while as I know we’re ready to close the cupboard on winter and buy up spring’s greens and shoots for an altogether lighter, brighter kind of kitchen. Until then,

Ellie

Props, pancakes and professionalism

The dizzying heights of colour-coordinated prop house shelves were our backdrop on sunny Monday as we scoured for Salad Club-style crockery, cutlery and napiery for our first book shoot. Tempted by just about everything, and with no idea on how to scale back on the unnecessaries, we ended up whiling away a whole afternoon amongst rows of retro, vintage, ethnic, plastic, glass, wooden and enamel kitchen goods. It was like being in car boot heaven but without the crap.

The first Shrove Tuesday the two of us spent together was at university when a 40-strong mob of us took up arms with our ingredients. Rather than make any batter, we had an enormous food fight around campus that left us–and our dingy residences–caked in flour, eggs and Jif lemons. We do like to honour this tradition at Salad Club but there was no time for food fights yesterday as we were up at dawn to start shooting. We’re not allowed to let you in on any details but we can say that it’s looking bloody lovely and we’re very excited! Out of our long prop house search came images and tables that look just like they belong to us–a testament to all the clever people helping us to put each photograph together. And now that we’re edging out of winter, we’re looking forward to writing spring. We’ll keep you posted with our progress.

Because of our distractions, the business of batter had to wait until this morning. No groundbreaking new territory here: just a thin crispy pancake with freshly squeezed lemon and caster sugar. If I ever stray from this recipe things go wrong:

Makes about 8 pancakes:
4oz plain flour
1 egg
half a pint of milk
pinch of salt
pinch of baking powder
butter
lemons and caster sugar to serve

Measure the flour into a mixing bowl with the salt and baking powder, make a well in the middle and crack in the egg. Add a dash of milk and, using a wooden spoon (or a whisk for a less dense pancake), start stirring in small circles from the centre of the bowl outwards, gradually pulling in more flour from the edges until you have a smooth, thick batter. Slowly add the rest of the milk and keep stirring. Pour the batter into a jug and leave it to sit for a bit if you have time.

Melt a knob of butter in a shallow sided pan until bubbling, pour in roughly a ladle full of batter and tilt the pan around to spread it to the edges. When the pancake has crisped and browned on one side, toss, brown the other side and serve immediately . The first one of the batch is always a bit of a scrawny runt but if given enough love is usually perfectly edible. Keep going until you’ve had enough or there’s no more batter.

Things have changed a bit since those hedonistic days of Jif lemon fights. Not only do we use real lemons but we’re incredibly lucky to be working together at something we love. So, thank you all once again for the support and encouragement and Happy (belated) Pancake Day!

Rosie & Ellie

Year of the (crispy) Rabbit

While it may seem safe to remove one of those winter layers and turn the thermostat down, we’re still wrapping our food up tightly in blankets here at Salad Club. Like our tasty summer rolls from last week, hundreds of little devils on horseback for the School of Life on Monday evening and now, continuing the Asian theme with some crispy aromatic rabbit in pancakes to celebrate the Chinese year of the rabbit.

The idea for this recipe evolved over a few weeks. I’d been planning to confit some rabbit for a while in an effort to use up the surplus goose fat that accumulates after Christmas and as a surefire way of keeping rabbit meat, too often served dry and flavourless, tender and rich. While this plan was brewing, a persistent craving for duck and pancakes got involved and stumbling across the new year celebrations in Chinatown inspired me to swap feathered game for furred in this classic Chinese recipe.

You need to plan ahead for this as it’s quite a labour of love but the results are amazingly succulent and warming–ideal for an impressive and cutlery free meal with friends.

Crispy Aromatic Rabbit in Pancakes (serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a starter)

2 farmed rabbits, jointed
1 large jar of goose fat
For the marinade:
Big handful of sea salt
4 star anise
1 tbsp coriander seeds
2 tbsps Szechuan peppercorns
1 tsp cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
6 spring onions
Thumb of root ginger, sliced
6 tbsp Chinese rice wine
To serve:
Chinese pancakes
Hoisin sauce
Long slices of spring onion and cucumber

Blend all the marinade ingredients together in a food processor until you have a coarse paste. Spread over the rabbit joints in a deep baking tray, cover, and leave in the fridge overnight.

Remove the tray from the fridge the next day and scrape off any excess marinade. Melt the goose fat in a saucepan and pour over the rabbit in the baking tray. Don’t worry if it doesn’t quite cover the rabbit. Cover the tray with foil and put in the oven at 150ºC for an hour and a half to confit. Turn the oven off and allow everything to completely cool down. Then put back in the fridge overnight for the fat to solidify or you can proceed straight to the next step.*

Max your oven and pull each joint from the fat with tongs or your fingers (leaving some fat on the joints to help them crisp).  Arrange them on a shallow baking tray and roast on the top shelf for 20 minutes until crispy. Follow the packet instructions for heating your pancakes, get the hoisin, spring onions and cucumber on the table and let everyone assemble themselves one pancake after another.

Rosie

* You can keep rabbit confit in an airtight container, such as a kilner jar, for weeks.

Diversion Tactics

Sometimes, the best away around getting on with work is just not to do any at all. So it was on Tuesday, when we sat down to write recipes together, that we found ourselves distracted by the thought of lunch, and a lunch that that would take a long, long time to put together so that through making it, we could fool ourselves into thinking we were working. Introducing the Vietnamese Summer Roll, from long-time procrastinators, Ellie Grace and Rosie French.

Having bought rice vermicelli noodles and rice paper circles on a recent visit to China Town’s New Year celebrations, we cycled down to the market for a bunch of herbs, some iceberg, rice vinegar and prawns from our local Chinese supermarket. Back at home, Rosie chopped while I peeled prawns and soaked the rice paper circles in warm water, ready for wrapping.

Makes about 10 summer rolls, with dipping sauce

For the rolls:
A pint of prawns, shelled
Half a head of iceberg lettuce, finely shredded
A small carrot, cut into matchsticks
A packet of rice paper circles (marked especially for Vietnamese summer rolls)
A packet of rice vermicelli noodles
A handful each of mint and coriander, finely chopped
A handful of unsalted peanuts, roughly chopped

For the dipping sauce:
1 large red chilli finely sliced, with seeds
2 tbsps fish sauce
Juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tbsp caster sugar

Measure and combine the dipping sauce ingredients into a small dish or ramekin and set aside. Break off a section of dried noodles 2 -3 inches in width and boil until tender. Refresh under the cold tap and set aside. Peel the prawns, rinse and place in a bowl. When the vegetables and herbs are cut and lined up, start by soaking 3 or 4 rice paper circles in a bowl of tepid water, one after another, for 2 seconds. This won’t soften them immediately but as you plate them up, you’ll find that they warp and soften very quickly. As you pull each one from the water, it’s best to plate them between layers of tin foil or greaseproof paper to stop them from sticking. You can soften more rice paper circles as you go.

Using your outspread hand or a clean plate as a base, line up a few prawns at the centre of the paper. Pile a little lettuce, carrot, noodles, herbs and peanuts in a row below and fold the paper circle upwards into a roll, tucking the edges in after the first roll to create sealed ends. Continue to roll as tightly as you can – their gelatinous skins are tougher than they first appear – and allow the rice paper to seal itself together. When you’ve made several, stack them up and dip them!

Ellie

Breaking new bread

Now the business of book scribing is well and truly underway, we’re having to embrace the laborious acts of weighing, measuring and recording every little pinch, splash and handful going into our pots. As regular readers will know, we tend to be a bit slap dash–leaving room for a cook’s instinct and wide margins for error but our publishers, quite rightly, demand some precision. Despite our initial sulk, we’ve embraced our scales and cooking to the gram, litre and tablespoon is actually proving to be quite rewarding.  What better way to celebrate the fundamental science of cookery than to bake our own bread from scratch. It still amazes me that flour, water and yeast, when combined together in the right quantities and exposed to heat, can become something quite so delicious.

Back in November, thick slices of this bread were used to mop up the juices from a bowl of exquisite moules marinière in a family friend’s kitchen. I pleaded for the recipe and here it is. A food processor makes life much easier here but I don’t see why you couldn’t mix everything by hand. Although, if you’re lacking machinery, the soda bread below might be an easier option.

Wholemeal and granary boule.

Ingredients:
250g granary flour
125g wholemeal flour
125g strong white or spelt flour
350ml warm water
10g dried yeast
10g salt

Whizz all the dry ingredients together and gradually add the warm water until the dough has formed a solid lump that comes away from the blade and the edges of the bowl. Cover and leave to rise for an hour.  Pulse the dough a few times to knock it down then turn out onto a floured board. Bring the sides of the dough to the middle, turning as you go to form a round loaf. Sprinkle with some seeds (I chose fennel) and some flakes of sea salt and bake on a tray in a hot oven for 35 minutes. Served here with lashings of butter, a Tuscan sausage cassoulet and some hefty Italian red.

Later in the week and feeling peckish after a morning taking care of business in Ellie’s kitchen/office we turned to Hugh F-W for a classic soda bread recipe. With the addition of a few favourite seeds, Ellie mixed, kneaded and criss-crossed the dough effortlessly in about 5 minutes flat. After 45 minutes in the oven with a pink peppercorn and thyme studded camembert, lunch was served. Turns out baking isn’t that scary after all.

Rosie

Birthday Cake

Despite gaining only a little pleasure from baking cakes, I do love the smell of a rich, buttery birthday present rising slowly and peacefully in the oven. Nothing follows a morning of meetings and emails better than tuning in to a Radio 4 afternoon play while whisking together eggs, sugar and excruciating quantities of bitter chocolate. As darkness falls, the kettle goes on for a sustaining cup of Earl Grey and I find myself falling deeper into Mariella Frostrup’s purring discussion on audio books.

My tangle with puddings is well documented (see earlier posts for all things savoury). Where the cook’s instinct helps out when it comes to finding new marinades for legs of lamb, or dressings for new salads, puddings for us have been wanting of these natural, intuitive answers. There’s no knowing where to start in inventing a pudding (nor salvaging it) and no way of trusting what to do when putting a mix of flour, eggs and butter into a hot oven. The precision – the science – is so off-putting that I find it hard to marvel in the beauty of puddings; they are known to me as things that waste my time and make me fat (as well as aware of my shortcomings.)

No; much safer, much freer to run within the bounds that cover savoury foods, where odd bedfellows, anchovy and lamb, have met, or where basil and chilli are known to be friends. Puddings are just too full of the potential for error – custards too prone to splitting and pastries melting in too hot hands – for it to be fun. Everything in the pudding world seems a test of one’s nerves, a sugar-crusted balancing act of whisking skills, oven temperatures and burnt caramel. The fact that you can rarely eat the ingredients as they go in is just another reason not to bother, frankly.

So I’m very much hoping that the simplicity of this Easy Small Nemesis from the marvellous River Cafe Cook Book Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers is going to give me my confidence back. I’m also hoping that its success can be revived in other flourless cakes which seem to get rid of all the hassle of cake-baking, full stop. No more folding! No more knocking the invisible air from the bowl!

Preheat the oven to 120°C. Grease a 25cm cake tin and line with parchment paper.

Break 340g of 70% cocoa solids chocolate into pieces and melt with 225g unsalted butter in a bain marie. Beat 5 medium eggs and 70g caster sugar with an electric mixer until the volume quadruples.

Heat another 140g of caster sugar with 100ml water until dissolved into a light syrup. Pour the hot syrup into the melted chocolate and allow to cool slightly.

Add the chocolate to the eggs and beat slowly until combined. Pour into the cake tin. Put a folded kitchen cloth in the bottom of a baking tray. Put in the cake and add enough hot water to come three-quarters of the way up the side of the tin.

Bake in the oven for 50 minutes until set. Leave the cake to cool in the water before turning out.

Ellie

Woodcock on toast

Every now and then I feel like getting my hands bloody and cooking a meal totally from scratch, including all the gruesome stuff you would usually leave to your butcher. It seems only fair, as a carnivore, to go through this visceral process once in a while. My last home butchery contestants were a couple of wild rabbits. Stepping up to the plate this time was this elegant ménage à trois of Norfolk woodcock.

Woodcock on toast. Serves 3.

Pluck any stray feathers from the birds and remove their heads with a swift blow from a sharp, heavy knife. Discard*.  Leave the innards intact as they’re the tastiest bit – that’s coming from a serial offal dodger so trust me here!

Once plucked, season the birds and swaddle them in smoked streaky bacon. Top each with a knob of butter and roast in a preheated oven at top whack for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 160ºC, remove the bacon and return the naked birds to roast for a further 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, prepare for the gravy by roughly dicing the bacon and adding to a frying pan over a medium flame.  Remove the birds from the oven and scrape the innards into the pan with the bacon and a big glug of red wine. Squash everything together as you go to make a wonderfully rich and gamey gravy.

Toast or griddle 3 thick slices of white bread, spread with butter and spoon over the gravy. Divide the birds into breast and leg portions and lay them on top. Serve to some adventurous friends with lots of red wine. Where to for my next foray into the wild?

Rosie

*Some brutal traditionalists like to roast the head too, scoop out the brains and use the skull as a spoon with the beak as a handle. Feel free to follow suit if you’re keen but I wasn’t really up for it.

Happy new hummus

Hello all and happy new year! Christmas and its many distractions have rather got in the way of cooking and writing recently. The long and drawn out hangovers of the festive season, along with the good intentions of getting up from the sofa, mean that it’s taken a good few weeks to find my way back to the kitchen. It feels at this time of year that all I’m going in there for is a cup of tea and another sit down and I honestly can’t remember the last proper meal that I cooked, save for bowls of morning porridge. It’s been a relief to know I still possess skills, and have at last found time to enjoy and draw on the many cookbooks given to me in December. One of the things I’ve most wanted to cook since my Middle Eastern trip, and which rather helpfully crops up in Moro the cookbook, is ground lamb with hummus.

Typical of the Salad Club house style, this dish doesn’t rely on having large or unwieldy cuts of meat that need constant attention or complex braising, sealing or roasting times. It’s always our preference to add meat in small quantities to a mezze or tapas-like dish that can be shared and scooped with breads and forks, and which can be topped up from the pan when plates are bare. Not only is this is a straightforward, informal way of eating, but cheaper too as you simply don’t need to rely on large portions – meat here is an embellishment rather than the focal point.

Hummus with ground lamb and pomegranate. Adapted from Moro the cookbook. Serves 4

Since inventing a winning butter bean and rosemary hummus a while back, we haven’t touched any shop bought tubs or even the chickpea variety, come to that. It’s so smooth, creamy and cheap–there’s no going back.

Once the hummus is made, cut a pomegranate in half from tip to tail. Placing the cut side down in your palm and with your fingers splayed, use the back of a wooden spoon to beat the back of the fruit so that its seeds fall through your fingers and into a bowl. Pick through and discard any bits of fruit skin. Set aside. Cut a few strands of parsley leaves roughly and set aside.

Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a non-stick frying pan on low to medium heat. Finely dice 4 golf ball-sized shallots and add to the pan, stirring occasionally until sticky and golden. Add 1/3 tsp ground cinnamon, a pinch of ground cumin and a pinch of ground allspice, stir well and turn the heat to medium-high. Add 170g of minced lamb and use the back of a fork to break it up as it cooks. Season with salt and pepper and allow to cook through, until the mince is well separated and well coloured.

Spread a 3 or 4 spoonfuls of hummus onto a flat platter and smooth with the back of the spoon. Spoon over the lamb mince, top with pine nuts and a scattering of pomegranate seeds and parsley. Finish with a dusting of smoked paprika and serve with warm flat or pitta breads.

Ellie

Three Christmas suppers, some snow and a lot of oxtail stew

Hello everyone. Don’t worry, we haven’t frozen to death in our gardens, we’ve just been run off our feet with Christmas suppers and their attendant duties. Ever since last year’s excellent adventures in Brixton and Shoreditch, we’ve been looking forward to cooking up another Salad Club Christmas. This year we headed back East to celebrate the festive season with a series of banquets at Space in Between. There was a lot of shopping, chopping, driving, stewing, swearing, roasting, basting and mulling last week and we loved every minute! Thank you to Hannah and Laura at the gallery for letting us take over their kitchen and for waitressing so effortlessly and elegantly and sorry to everyone who missed out last night when our last supper of the year was very sadly snowed off.

Our two different Christmas menus this year featured melt in the mouth Iberico pata negra ham, Ellie’s slow roasted Lebanese lamb and giant cous cous tabbouleh, plum and ginger crumble, spiced pilaf with caramelised onions, orange and cinnamon pastel de nata and a rich and deep oxtail stew which goes a little something like this…

Smokey Spanish oxtail stew. Serves 6.

Like most stews, this one works best if you cook it the night before. It needs a long time in the oven and then, ideally, needs to cool in the fridge so you can skim off the fat easily before reheating.

Ask your butcher to chop 1.5kg of oxtail into large chunks. Preheat the oven to 150ºC. Coat the oxtail in seasoned flour and pour a good glug of olive oil into a pan big enough to hold the stew. Once the oil is hot, brown the chunks of oxtail all over then set them aside (you may have to do this in batches). Once all the meat is browned, deglaze the pan with a large glass of red wine and scrape off any meat that’s stuck to the bottom. Pour this liquid into a jug and set aside for later.

Turn off the heat and let a knob of butter melt in the pan while you slice 2 red onions and roughly dice 2 carrots. Turn the heat back on to medium and add a splash of olive oil to stop the butter burning. Tip in the onions and carrots along with a large chopped red chili (with seeds), 2 bay leaves and 2 star anise. When the onions and carrots are starting to soften, add 2 heaped teaspoons of smoked paprika and 1 of cumin along with a good squeeze of tomato puree and stir everything together.

Return the oxtail to the pan with the reserved juices from earlier, a tin of plum tomatoes and enough beef stock to cover all the meat. Bring to the boil, cover and put the stew in the oven. After 5 hours, turn the oven off but leave the pot in there until it has completely cooled down (if you turn the oven off before you go to bed it should be cool when you get up). Put the stew in the fridge for a few hours then spoon off the fat layer from the top and discard.

Return the stew to the hob, add some cooked pinto or butter beans and season well to taste. Serve in a big warm dish in the middle of the table topped with finely chopped thyme, garlic and lemon zest and a spoonful of Greek yogurt.

Now our last secret suppers of the year have been scoffed, plans are underway for more collaborations in the new year so we can be sure to keep everyone well fed through the winter. We’re also looking forward to getting our heads down and our aprons on to write our very own Salad Club cookbook. It’s been an exciting year and that’s very much down to you so thank you and Merry Christmas!

Rosie & Ellie x