A Moveable Feast

Unusually for London (unless you’re an Arab prince) our mutual friends, John and Anna Maria, have a cinema in their basement. Sunday nights there are a matter of watching a quirky old movie from the comfort of ancient sofas before moving upstairs to eat, drink and talk about the film (and a whole lot else) far too late into the night.

Last week we saw ‘Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment’. It was my turn to supply the food, and, as I wasn’t sure how many people might turn up, I brought a pot of my favourite lamb tagine. All I had to do was heat it up and served it with some precooked wholegrain cous cous. For afters we had chocolate sorbet with freshly sliced oranges.

Low Fat Lamb Tagine

Lamb, beef, kid, game or chicken, any meat will do for this fragrant North African stew, just so long as the pieces are allowed to simmer slowly into a melting tenderness.

For a lamb version, the most important thing is to chop out as much fat as possible before you begin cooking. Too many recipes suggest using boned shoulder meat, but removing the fat from that cut is time consuming and can reduce quantity by a quarter or more! Far better to look for diced lamb pieces from which it’s easy to cut the odd bit of fat, or neck fillets which are already very lean. Also, I can never have too many vegetables in my stews, so I always ra

id the vege box and add any stray bits I find there.

1 kg lean lamb.

1 tbsp olive oil

1 onion

8 carrots.

3 parsnips

5 sticks celery

½ tsp ground saffron

½ tsp cayenne pepper

1tsp ground tumeric

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp tomato puree

2 cinnamon sticks

2 tsp orange flower water

12 dried apricots

8 pitted dates

A handful of chopped parsley

Remove as much fat as possible and cut the lamb into 4cm chunks. Peel the carrots & parsnips, and cut into thick lengths. Chop the celery into large bits and peel & slice the onion. Heat the oil in a large, thick bottomed pan and cook the onions & celery over a low heat for about 5 minutes. Stir in the lamb, remaining vegetables and spices and add just enough water to cover the lamb. Bring to the boil and stir in the tomato puree. Reduce the heat and simmer very gently, with the lid half on, for about 1 hour (or longer if the meat is still

a bit chewy). When the meat is tender, add the apricots with the honey, orange flower water and a little seasoning. Simmer, uncovered, for about 20 minutes until the gravy looks like a thick soup. Add the dates and simmer a few minutes more. Scatter with chopped parsley and serve with wholegrain cous cous or brown basmati rice - cooked in stock if possible- to which (if none of your guests are nut allergic) you might add a crunch of chopped and toasted almonds.

Chocolate Sorbet

Forget dairy and eggs, the witchy thing about the smooth finish of this sorbet is you might really think you're eating ice cream. Something to do with the high chocolate content, I suppose, and the trick of boiling the syrup really hard before adding it to the chocolate.

30g white sugar

650ml water

250g best dark chocolate (min 70% cocoa solids)

1 heaped tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp liqueur (optional)

Dissolve the sugar & water over a low heat. Bring to the boil and bubble for about 5 minutes until the syrup looks like glossy satin.

Break the chocolate into a large, heatproof bowl with the cocoa. Gradually pour in the hot syrup, stirring until the chocolate has mixed to a smooth gloop. Leave to cool. When the mixture is completely cold, churn in your ice cream maker until thick and fudgy (my machine takes about 40 minutes, but check your maker’s instructions). Transfer to a freezer container and - if you want to – stir in your favourite liqueur (I used Cointreau to go with a side dish of sliced oranges) remembering that the alcohol will effect a softer, less frozen consistency. Store in the freezer and serve with seasonal fruit or crispy biscuits or both.

Note: this sorbet melts very quickly, so keep it frozen until the very last minute.

Keeping meat-eaters happy without too much fat

I may have been a caterpillar in a former life - I'm always happiest when chomping my way through something green and leafy. Unlike Aisling, who is a cheerful carnivore and a brilliant meat-cook, I wouldn't really mind if I didn't eat meat at all. But I know that for anyone who loves meat, a low-fat diet can be a real penance - and if you have that person in your life, the trick is to find ways to make them feel they've had the full caveman experience without consuming too much, either in fat content or in overall quantity.

Now you may think it's odd to nominate pork, if you're looking for a lowish fat content, but it's all about the cuts you choose. Pigs are bred much leaner now, and if you look for a farm pig that has had a happy life and run about a good deal, and you go for the tenderloin, the fat content is just about the same as skinless chicken - miles lower than the fat content of the good cuts of beef. Yes, tenderloin is pricey, but you don't need very much of it, and no one is better at making small quantities go a long way than the Chinese.

This Chinese pork is light, delicious and very satisfying. You can eat it with any sort of noodles, of course, or with rice, but it's also delicious as a starter or main served piping hot on a cold lettuce leaf (I told you I was a caterpillar) or a bed of warm rich shredded cabbage. (One word of warning, though - almost all Chinese food is very high in salt, so if that is a consideration, don't use this recipe.)

One tenderloin fillet (usually around 400g) will serve six for a starter, four for main. You will need:

400 g pork tenderloin fillet, trimmed and chopped as finely as you can
2 tbsps oil, probably corn oil or nut oil
200g dried porcini or other mushrooms, well soaked
2 cms ginger, finely sliced
2 garlic cloves
2 tsps sugar
2 tbsps each of soy sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin sauce
large handful of fresh rocket, roughly chopped
chopped spring onions
a little sesame oil

Pour boiling water over the dried mushrooms and let them stand for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, in a wok or other wide pan fry the garlic and ginger in the oil, just for about half a minute, then add the pork. It should be chopped very small; in a hot pan it will only take a few minutes to cook. Then add the drained and chopped mushrooms, the sugar, the three sauces (don't use any other salt as there's already plenty in the soy sauce) and cook for another few minutes, adding a little of the mushroom water if the mixture is too dry. (To be more authentic, at this point you could stir in some cornflour as a thickener, but personally I don't like that slightly slimy effect so I don't.)

When the pork and the mushrooms are cooked, turn off the heat and chuck in the chopped rocket; stir it in loosely - it doesn't need to cook, just to wilt in the heat of the mixture. If you like, you can drizzle a little sesame oil and scatter chopped spring onions over the top, and serve as I suggested above - on leaves for a very lean effect, with noodles, or with rice.

What to do with mackerel?

If, like me, you have seen the film "The End of the Line?", you may be feeling thoroughly confused about fish. I used to love shopping for fish - all those shiny rows of delicious and fragrant things, poised beautifully on their bed of ice- but now I find myself standing in front of the fishmonger's counter and staring at it, totally baffled. For any one who cares about sustainability, all certainties seem swept away - so many of our most familiar and most delicious fish are endangered now, or farmed in vaguely disgusting conditions.

But there's always the lowly mackerel. They really are plentiful - I remember only a few years ago the children pulling their rods out of the sea near Teignmouth with five or six mackerel squiggling on the multiple hooks every time, and that hasn't changed. No one has yet suggested that there's any scarcity.

In cooking and eating terms, though, mackerel's a bit of a problem. It's an uncompromising taste, and it doesn't lend itself to many recipes. Very fresh and simply pan-fried, perhaps rolled in oats, and eaten with a squeeze of lemon, mackerel is great - but that's about it. Other ways of cooking it seem hard to come by. Here's one, though, that is a bit more unexpected. It's mackerel that is cured and pressed, rather than actually cooked, by the same method that makes gravadlax of salmon. It's eaten cold, so it's a perfect starter or lunch dish, but it's chunky enough to serve as a main course with potatoes, salad, whatever.

As with any cured fish, you need to be sure it's really fresh. That's not so hard with mackerel - it smells quite strongly even when first caught, so if your nose tells you it is a little overwhelming, it's not good enough.

Get fillets, with the skin on. Start the day before, or the morning before a dinner, as it takes a while to marinate in the curing mixture.

For six:

Six mackerel fillets

3 heaped tablespoons sea salt

3 heaped tablespoons granulated sugar

1 heaped tablespoon green peppercorns

2 bunches dill

All you do is to grind the peppercorns roughly, and mix them with the salt, the sugar and the dill roughly chopped, stalks and all. There's so much oil in the fish that you don't need anything else.

Line a low dish with cling film, and put a layer of curing mixture in the bottom. Lay the fillets, skin side down, on top, then put another layer of mixture over them, rubbing it well in. Wrap the whole lot up in the cling film.

Now find a way of putting weight on top of your packet of fish, to press it down quite hard. A board that fits inside the dish would be perfect: put a pile of cookbooks on top of the board, if you have't any old-fashioned weights. Now put the dish in a cool place for anything between 12-24 hours (longer is better), and once or twice turn over the packet of fillets and pour off the oil that will have accumulated in the bottom of the dish.

When you're ready to eat, take the fillets out of the marinade and rinse them in cold water to get rid of excess salt - and then go for it. Lime is nicer than lemon, if you want to squeeze something on them - but the ideal thing is a mustard/dill sauce or a very nippy dill mayo. I often cheat by taking a good shop-bought mayo and tarting it up with a bit of plain yogurt, lots of chopped dill, a spoon of grainy mustard and a big squeeze of lemon.

Irish Soda Bread

Made without yeast, fat or eggs, homemade soda bread is one of life's simple pleasures. When I was a child in Ireland, my mother - like everyone's mother - seemed to make it every day. Brown or white, in loaves or scones, it took no time to mix, its fragrance greeting us as we walked in from school, promising a hot slice or two slathered with butter and jam and later, enjoyed as backup to homemade soup, cheese, smoked fish, bacon and eggs, pate or a mayonaisey salad. The last of the bread made breakfast; anything left after that went out to the hens.
Many years later, after my mother died and we'd all left home, my father took on the bread making. He had never cooked and was incredibly messy, but his scientific mind soon had him experimenting with every aspect of the process, from varying quantities of flours or buttermilk to oven temperatures and additional ingredients. By the time he had found what he wanted (and even my mother might have agreed his brown soda bread was even better than hers) his kitchen was coated in a permanent layer of sticky whiteness. As for quantities, like every Irishman he liked his soda bread freshly baked, so he simply cooked a whole soda cake, ate one quarter on the day it was cooked and froze the three remaining sections separately to thaw and eat over three more days.
On visits home, I often asked my father to write down his brown bread recipe. He never did. But I remember his strict routine on bread making days, visiting the kitchen in his dressing gown to turn on the oven, measuring out the wholegrain brown flour with a tablespoon of sesame seeds, then leaving them to grow plump in buttermilk while he showered and shaved.
My father claimed the fattened wholemeal and seeds were his secret. After that was just a matter of tipping the wet brown flour into the sieved white flour and bread soda, mixing all into a soggy dough and getting the cake in the hot oven without delay. That, as far as he was concerned, was that. A good time to read his newspaper and wait. He never did master the cleaning up.

Preheat your oven to gas mark 7/ 200 C

2 mugs of the best stone ground brown flour you can find
1 mug white flour
1 level tsp bread soda/bicarbonate of soda
A good pinch of salt & a grind of pepper
1 tsp sesame seeds/ 1 tbsp porridge oats
1 tsp sugar (optional)

Bread soda starts to fizz the minute it's wet, so success lies not only in the quality of your flour but in the speed and lightness with which you mix the buttermilk and get your loaf in the oven.

If you have time, soak the brown flour & sesame seeds in a little buttermilk for 30 minutes or so. Sieve the white flour with the bread soda, seasoning and add the sugar. Using a knife, quickly mix it into the brown, adding as much buttermilk as you need to make a sticky, puffy dough. Scatter a little white flour over the dough, roll it into a loose ball and transfer to a floured surface. Pat it into a round cake about 6cms high and cut with a cross about 2cms deep. Scatter flour on your preheated baking tray, brush a little buttermilk over the cake and bake in the centre of the oven for about 30 minuted or until you can hear a light drumming sound when you tap the base with your fingers.

For white bread, mix only good white flour, bread soda and salt with the buttermilk.
For a tea time version called 'Spotted Dog', mix in a level tablespoon of sugar and a handful of raisins & sultanas before adding the buttermilk.

ice cream for choosy children

A late summer evening on Aisling's balcony, still warm enough to melt the ice cream. This is one that I make for discriminating grown-ups - it's delicious enough for anyone - but it is a godsend for children with allergies, or who need to watch their tums, because it has no eggs and no dairy at all. It's really just a frozen smoothie, but the banana gives it a creamy taste that makes it taste as if it's full of forbidden good things.



And it's incredibly easy to make:



for 6 you'll need 6 bananas, 400g raspberries, the juice of two ornages and four tbs honey.

Peel and slice the bananas and put them with the raspberries in a bag in the freezer, overnight if possible, but 3 hours will probably do it. Take the bag out and let it defrost for an hour, then just blend the whole lot together - the fruit with the honey and orange juice (and grate in a little of the zest too, if you like). Then re-freeze. That's it!

Organics, food miles, and other tricky questions

From Jan

Saturday morning, sipping coffee in the garden. I love it when it's early and quiet, the weekend stretches ahead, and my thoughts turn to - well - food. Look at all this stuff I grow and tend: hydrangeas spilling over the grass; roses still blazing; a vine already turning with tinges of autumn; tall white japanese anemones nodding on their stems. But why can't I eat any of it? Only the pots of herbs contribute to the kitchen.
Aisling is quite different - she has an allotment that runs the Garden of Eden a close second, with all sorts of wonderful veg and fruit. It's hard work, but a supply of perfectly fresh produce picked just hours earlier is the best thing for any cook.
Especially for any cook concerned about health, allergies, organics and the planet, as well as taste. The rest of us dither in front of the organic vegetables counter in the supermarket and wonder whether it's really worth paying double for those carrots; or worse (as happened to me the other day) we find in a local health food shop a tray full of miserably shrivelled beetroot, coated in soil as if to prove its bona fides, which promised to be unimpeachably organic - but had originated in Chile.
What on earth - pun definitely intended - is the point of sending root vegetables (and their dried mud) right across the globe and selling them with an air of self-righteousness just because they contain no chemicals? It's totally mad. These things grow right here. Apart from the fact that their nutritional value will be so much reduced by the amount of time they've been sitting in some cold store, the question of food miles is a really serious one for the environment.

So - organic or not? Local produce versus food that has clocked up frequent flyer points? Cooking involves all these moral choices, as well as concerns of health, quality and taste. Life is complicated . . .
What we've decided to do in the Choosy Food recipes is to leave the choice to you. Call that a cop-out if you like, but our own view is that freshness, using local produce wherever possible, and a concern for the way things are grown or reared matter to us more than a few chemicals. So if you want to use entirely organic produce for our recipes, that's great, but we won't tell you to. We will, though, urge you to find out about the origins of your food, especially meat. Animals that have had a good, free life and a humane end. Eggs that were laid by a bird free to move around. Fish that isn't as endangered as the leopard.
It quickly becomes clear that these big questions about food are the big questions about the world itself, and we can't solve them all. But we can ask about the meat we buy, go to farmer's markets and buy from local growers whenever we can, plan our meals round food that's in season. Best of all, I suppose, would be to plant a row of beans in among those roses. I'll have another cup of coffee and ponder those good intentions.

Mango and Salmon with red peppers

Ripe mango with fresh organic salmon is a marriage made in heaven. I've noticed the fragrant Thai spicing gets even more subtle if this dish is prepared in advance, covered and refrigerated for up to 24 hours. I remove it from the fridge about half an hour before the meal and serve it with brown basmatti rice cooked with a couple of cardamon pods and a tin of coconut milk added to the water.



2 large mangoes, peeled and cut into thick slices
A pinch of sea salt
Juice of 1 lime & 1 lemon

6 skinned organic salmon fillets, cut lengthways in thick slices
2 tbsp olive or sunflower oil
2 fennel bulbs, quartered and thinly sliced
2 peppers, red and yellow, sliced
2 shallots, peeled & sliced
2 garlic cloves,peeled & sliced
2 dried kaffir lime leaves, finely crumbled
2 lengths of lemon grass, finely chopped
1 large red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
5 cm fresh ginger, peeled & chopped
2 tbsps nam pla fish sauce or light soy sauce
3 tbsps white wine vinegar
5 tbsp hot water

To serve: some fresh mint, chopped
1 bag of small mixed leaves

Pour the citrus juices over the sliced mangoes, add a pinch of salt and set aside.

Heat the oil in a wide, thick bottomed frying pan (preferably with a lid which you'll need for the last 5 minutes of this recipe) and fry all the aromatic ingredients for about 2 minutes. Add the sliced fennel and peppers and cook for 10 minutes.

Add the vinegar, fish sauce and water and simmer for another minute or two.

Add the fish , tucking it under the vegetables to sit flat on the floor of the pan. Cook for a scant 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover the pan and let the fish go on cooking for about 5 minutes. Uncover and leave to cool.

To serve, divide the leaves and mango slices between six plates, top with equal shares of salmon, vegetables and the cooking juices. Offer a steaming bowl of coconut flavoured rice on the side.

Choosy Note: This is brilliant looking party dish to lay out on a big meat dish in all its colourful glory.

Carrot, Citrus and Pomegranate Salad

A colourful crunch of fresh fruit and vegetables jewelled with pomegranate and tossed with a zing of south east Asian dressing.

6oog carrots
6 spring onions
6 clemantines or 7 satsumas or 3 navel oranges
6 radishes
1 pomegranate
1 bag of crispy leaves
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp freshly chopped mint leaves

2cm fresh ginger
1 lime
2 tbsp olive or avocado oil
1 tbsp groundnut or sunflower oil
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice or sherry vinegar

To make the dressing: peel and finely grate the ginger into a small bowl. Stir in the soy sauce & oils. Add the juice from the lime and 1 clementine or satsuma. Whisk in the vinegar, sugar and a little seasoning to taste.

For the salad: peel and top the carrots and either cut into fine matchsticks or grate on the biggest gauge of your hand grater or food processor. Finely slice the spring onions and radishes and add to the carrots. Peel the clementines/satsuma, remove as much membrane as you can and slice into bite sized chunks. Mix with the carrots then tip the dressing over the whole lot. Add the chopped mint and mix well. Halve the pomegranate, break into smaller pieces and poke out the seeds, discarding all white bits. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan and reserve.
When ready to serve, divide the salad leaves between separate plates, top with the carrot mixture, sprinkle with pomegranate seeds and toasted sesame.

Jelly without gelatin

from Jan:

Jelly (jello if you're American) is suddenly in style -it's the perfect dessert for anyone who is gluten or lactose intolerant or has an allergy to eggs, it's completely fat-free and salt-free, and it tastes light and fresh at the end of a meal. There are so many possible flavours and things you can add, so it's easy to turn it into a sophisticated enough pud for supper parties. Dress it up with fruit; team it with meringues, honeyed yogurt, a bowl of berries - whatever you like - or let it stand alone. It looks pretty and tastes great, and doesn't make your guests feel guilty; it also has the (essential) advantage that you make it in advance.

But there's one drawback: gelatin, which is made of animal bones, is obviously out for vegetarians, and even for happy carnivores it can seem a bit of a problem. In the days of the panic about BSE, gelatin worried many people (what on earth was in it?) - and then there's that overpoweringly rubbery consistency it has. I just don't like it much, truth be told.

So here's an idea I've worked on for non-gelatin jelly, using agar agar. This is a natural gelling agent derived from seaweed that comes from Japan, and it's pretty easily available these days - not only in health food shops but also in good supermarkets. It looks a bit like old-fashioned soapflakes, and when you start to dissolve it in boiling water it separates into globby bits like tapioca (if you can remember that!) - but persevere. It makes a gentle springy gell, not a strong rubbery one, so you probably won't be turning your jellies out into spectacular moulds shaped like the Albert Hall - but who wants to do that anyway? Better to put it into glass bowls or glasses and serve it like that. Here's a recipe for a jelly that is definitely grown-up, and very summery: Pimms jelly

Serves 6

4 heaped tsps agar agar
150ml water
100g caster sugar
Juice of a lemon
175ml Pimms No 1
500ml sparkling lemonade
handful of mint leaves, torn
400g strawberries, chopped small
strips of cucumber peel

Add the agar agar to 150mls of water and boil gently for 10 minutes, stirring well (it sort of explodes into little translucent grains), then add the sugar and lemon juice and stir to dissolve. Cool this mixture slightly before adding the Pimms and the lemonade. Then allow the jelly to cool further (setting the pan over a bowl of ice will speed things up), stirring occasionally, until it is beginning to set; then stir in the chopped strawberries, torn mint leaves and a few very thin strips of cucumber peel. Don't put these in earlier, or they will float to the surface. Place a couple of small cucumber strips in the bottom of individual glasses or dishes, pour in the mixture and allow to set in the fridge for several hours, or overnight.

Flour and Butter-Free Chocolate Cake

Whether you serve this as a cake or a pudding, the absence of flour and butter will press a lot of avoidance buttons and confirm the rumour that everyone's a chocaholic.

5 eggs
175g caster sugar
175g best black chocolate
2 tbsp boiling water
1 punnet fresh raspberries or mix of berries
150 ml double or whipping cream
A little icing sugar to finish

Heat your oven to gas mark 6/200C/400F

Grease 2 sandwich tins and cut two discs of greaseproof or non-stick paper to fit inside each base.

Prepare a bain marie or sit a heatproof bowl in a small saucepan half full of boiling water.

Separate the egg whites and yokes into two bowls. Beat the egg whites into stiff peaks and set aside. Beat the yokes with the sugar until the mixture becomes thick and pale.

Break up the chocolate and melt in your bain marie, stirring constantly until the chocolate is runny but not so hot it begins to cook. Gradually pour the runny chocolate into the yokes, beating all the time until all the chocolate has been added. Thin the mixture with a tablespoon or two of boiling water. Fold in the beaten whites.

Divide the mixture between the sandwich tins and cook in the center of the oven for 25 minutes. Leave in tins to cool.

Just before serving, knife around the edges of the tins, tip out your sponges and sandwich them on a wide plate with whipped cream and most of the fruit. Place a few more raspberries on top and dredge with a little icing sugar.

Choosy Note: For a lighter filling, try a half-and-half mix of cream beaten with thick Greek yogurt. For a totally low-fat option, spread the two sponges with best raspberry jam before piling on the raspberries.

Prawn and Radish salad with Green Beans

Crunchy vegetables and seeds, juicy shellfish and the spikiness of chilli with lemon juice make this an exciting starter or light lunch dish.

400g French beans, topped and tailed
225g cooked and shelled prawns
12 fresh radishes
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
1/2 red chilli, finely chopped
2 tbsp walnut or hazlenut oil
1 tbsp sunflower or groundnut oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
Coarse sea salt

Cook beans in boiling salted water until barely tender (about 4 minutes) Drain and cool in cold running water.

Toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot, non stick pan with a little sea salt, stirring constantly for a minute or two. Slice the radishes thinly. Blot the beans as dry as possible and mix all together in a serving bowl with the chilli, pumpkin seeds and oils. Refrigerate until you're ready to eat.

To serve, add the prawns, radishes and lemon juice to the bowl, toss and serve.

Choosy Note: If prawns are a no-go area, substitute their salty sweetness for chunks of smoked fish or ham.