figs after easter

This post won't have anything to do with figs whatsoever. Or food for that matter. It's just that, when you do something so late that it's really no use anymore - say announcing the birth of a baby when said baby is four months old for example - in Flemish the expression for this is 'figs after easter'.

Our baby girl was born on 7 March, a week after her due date. At which point I was convinced we 'missed our window' and she would never ever come out. But that's a whole different story altogether. Delivery was smooth and easy (as was my entire pregnancy), the three of us settled nicely back into some kind of normal life at home and bébé is an absolute joy to have around. She's very alert and inquisitive, and it seems she will be as stubborn as her mummy. Having a baby is a lot of work though, especially when combined with renovating a house and planning a wedding (a combination I do not recommend by the way). It's not that I don't have time to cook or bake - I can't remember how often I have made my chocolate fudge pie in the last few months, it's the easiest cake to make and a real crowd pleaser - but having time to try out new recipes, write, photograph and blog is something else entirely. All the pics on our camera these days are of the little one. But I will try to change that, if only because the world should not be deprived of a recipe for a wonderful chocolate cake.

a weekend away, an easy dessert and nesting

Last month S and I decided to leave our dining room/building site and all the DIY as it was and go away for a long weekend - just the two of us, one last time before the arrival of our little one. So a week after the big snow - I do wonder how Britain ever managed to colonise half the world, when something as normal as snow in the middle of winter brings the entire country to a complete standstill - we set off for a relaxing countryside weekend. We found a lovely B&B in Happisburgh, Norfolk; a beautiful Georgian farmhouse and barn owned by the wonderful David and Rosie, about a half hour's drive from Norwich and only five minutes from the sea. We saw seal colonies at Horsey Beach, where volunteers were very happy to answer all our questions about the seals; had a nice walk at the Hickling Broad Nature Reserve; had a superb pub dinner in Ingham; and visited the grounds of Blickling Hall, which made us feel very Jane Austen!

Of course both S and I were a bit paranoid about me going into labour while away (even though I was still 3 weeks away from my due date) so we packed my hospital bag and baby car seat as well, just in case - we both reasoned 'if we take the bag, we won't need it, but if we leave it at home we will'. We decided to have dinner at the B&B the first night, so this tired pregnant woman wouldn't have to go out foraging for food at night after the long drive there. After emailing back and forth with Rosie about all the good things I'm not allowed to eat, we were served a delicious and hearty home-cooked meal, perfect for the cold February month. Dessert was either a sticky toffee pudding - S's choice - or lemon posset. Which I'd never even heard of before, but I like anything lemony and am always keen to try new things, so that's what I went for. A quick google didn't return much information, other than it seems to be a very old English dish and something about MacBeth. Of course I just had to try and make it myself at home, and I can tell you it is most definitely the easiest dessert in the world. All you need is cream, sugar and lemon juice. I would love to understand the chemistry behind it - when you add the lemon juice the mixture thickens instantly - but for now I'm happy having this recipe on stand-by should I need a delicious dessert in a pinch.

Which brings me to the nesting bit. Maternity leave is a wonderful thing: I'm cooking and baking a lot and even bake my own bread most of the time - that Kitchenaid mixer sure is getting a regular workout and S isn't complaining, as his dinner is on the table by the time he gets home from work. I've been having fun with some knitting and sewing projects (our sitting room now has proper curtains, yay), the nursery is all set up, and once in a while I even have time to meet up with girlfriends for coffee. And of course I've been nesting: scrubbing floors like there is no tomorrow, doing laundry like it's going out of fashion, re-organising the kitchen cabinets and wardrobes, cleaning out the fridge and defrosting the freezer, and then spending a whole day making soup and healthy meals to restock the freezer. Now the house sparkles, my laundry basket is empty and the freezer full, so all that remains now is put my feet up and wait for our little one to arrive. And maybe have another lemon posset...

lemon posset
serves 4

300ml double cream
75g caster sugar
juice of 2 lemons

Pour cream and sugar into saucepan and bring to boil, stirring constantly. Boil for three minutes while stirring continuously. Remove from heat and add lemon juice; mixture will start to thicken instantly. Leave to cool for about five minutes and pour in small glasses. Chill in fridge for a few hours, until set.

I added a layer of lemon curd at the bottom (I used Duchy lemon curd, but of course you can make your own) and decorated with a lemon peel curl. The posset would no doubt be even better with some lavender shortbread, but that will have to wait until another time.

sugar and spice and all things nice

Happy New Year everyone! Santa has been very good to me and brought me not only a subscription to the Donna Hay magazine, but also a Kitchenaid stand mixer! With a note from Santa saying I can now bake him lots of bread and cookies.

I haven’t had any time to use it yet though, S and I are still spending every spare moment doing DIY – I know, the story is getting really old now, but what can I say. S and I are both perfectionists, we want everything to be done properly. With my parents’ help, we did actually get our sitting room finished, decorated and furnished in time for Christmas. There is now a sofa, armchair, cabinet, tv, and even some pictures and ornaments above the fireplace. And we even managed to put up a Christmas tree. We don’t have curtains yet (the windows are still covered with newspapers, very classy) and there are some details to sort out, but the room is finished enough to enjoy spending time in there.

Now we only have the dining room to finish and we really want to get that done before our little one arrives. Yes, seems like I’m part of the baby boom in blogland. Must be something in the flour. Or the eggs. Less than two months to go now and only one more week until my maternity leave, so hopefully I’ll get some use out of that Kitchenaid before our little one makes her appearance and my days (and nights) get filled with bottles and diapers.

We’re trying to hold off on the pink (and plastic Dora/Bob/Disney/…) invasion for as long as possible, but a bit of sugar and spice never hurts. I baked these sugar and spice cookies for our antenatal class (pre-Kitchenaid), where they were demolished in the blink of an eye. I fully intended to make these cookies again for Christmas, in nice snowflake shapes with some icing swirls, but that of course never happened. They taste just as good though without any fancy shapes and go perfect with a nice cup of tea on a cold winter’s day.

sugar and spice cookies
makes 24

100g butter
1/3 cup muscovado sugar
1 tbsp mixed spice
1 cup plain white flour
1 egg, beaten
Demerara sugar

Cream butter and sugar together. Add flour and spices. Roll in a log and put in fridge for about half an hour. Cut off 24 ‘slices’ and pat those slightly out with your fingers. Brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with Demerara sugar. Bake for about 12 minutes at 150˚C. Enjoy.

a busman's holiday*

A few weeks ago, my parents arrived at our house for a week’s stay. But unlike Aran’s parents, they didn’t find lavender sachets under their pillows, or beautiful chocolate pistachio cakes waiting for them. Instead they found sanding paper, a heatgun, paintbrushes and tins of paint.

Just in case you’re wondering, of course we don’t make all our houseguests work for their stay – my parents had offered to come and help us out for a week. So, while S and were sitting behind our computers at work, mom and dad were hard at work in our house, leaving us with beautifully painted ceilings and woodwork when they returned home a week later. We still haven’t finished renovating the entire house, but at least all the big jobs are done and a few more weekends of painting and decorating should be enough to get us nearly there, so we can finally put up christmas decorations and a proper tree for the first time in years. Thanks mom and dad for helping us!

Until a few hours before my parents arrived, our house was completely upside down. Luckily I managed to make our guest room look decent enough for them to actually stay there, but with our big sofa stored on its side in our kitchen, I wasn’t able to do any baking at all, so no fancy cakes or desserts for the parents this time. To keep up with all the DIY, they needed something more substantial anyway, so I made a big pot of soup to get them through the week (and of course we cooked them proper dinners every night as well). It’s one of my favourite winter soups: hearty, warming and filling. I originally found the recipe in a 2002 christmas supplement of LivingEtc. (as a way of using up left-over turkey) but have changed the recipe quite a bit over the years. My version takes a bit of prep work, but it’s absolutely worth it. And it will keep you going all day when doing DIY.

spiced chickpea soup

1 large onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
10g cumin seeds
10g coriander seeds
40g harissa
2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes
500g dried chickpeas
1.5l chicken stock
2 chicken breast fillets
coriander

Soak the chickpeas overnight (8-10 hours) and then boil them for 2 hours. Dry roast he cumin and coriander seeds in a pan until they start popping and release their fragrance, then grind them roughly with a pestle and mortar. Boil the chicken fillets in water, when cool enough to handle, tear them by hand into small strips.

Fry onion and garlic in some olive oil. When the onion has softened, add cumin and coriander seeds and harissa and fry for a further 5 minutes. Then add chickpeas, tomatoes and stock and simmer for 30 minutes. Purée about half the soup in a blender, then add chicken and coriander. Enjoy.

And you could easily substitute dried chickpeas for canned ones and use cumin and coriander powder instead of seeds, to make it easier.

* I learned this expression from a neighbour only last month; when I told her my parents were visiting for a week to help us with the DIY, she said ‘oh, a busman’s holiday then’, meaning it wouldn’t be a holiday for them at all, but work.

a few short summer breaks...

… and a very looooooong blogging break. When even my mum remarked that it had been a while since I updated my blog, I knew it was high time I did something about it. It’s been a busy summer at casa v&c, with lots of little trips and a steady stream of visitors. And not much time for baking.

After a busy July, in which we celebrated S’s birthday (though we didn’t make it there this year, the good people of Paris put on a parade and fireworks especially for the occasion again), bought a car (after 7 whole years without, doing grocery shopping is suddenly very exciting), escaped to our friends’ country cottage (for a weekend of long walks in the woods), and lots of other things, we packed our bags for a quick trip to Greece, where we were graciously hosted by our friend G in his hometown of Piraeus.

It was our first trip to Greece, somehow we had never made it there before, and we finally got to see all the ancient monuments in Athens we had learned about in school. We also discovered why Athens is empty in August: because it’s HOT. So after a few days of seeing all the monuments – and seeking refuge in museums during the afternoons (great tip: museums in Athens have airconditioning!) – we did what every straight thinking Athenian does and hopped on a boat to one of the islands. Where it was still hot, but a beach, a warm sea and a cool sea breeze are an unbeatable combination for a perfect day.

Our island of choice was Aegina, less than an hour by boat from Piraeus, and home to a wonderful sweet shop: Aiakeion. All sorts of goodies there, so we picked a few of each: almond paste with gum mastic, sugared pistacchio nuts (the product of Aegina apparently) and of course baklava. All extremely sweet, but because of their being bitesized, just perfect. And still not as sweet as all the Moroccan sweets we had in Marrakech. Then there were also the many late and leisurely dinners, with the ubiquitous ‘Greek salad’ of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and feta, meat patties, wonderful baked aubergines and lots of olives of course. Strangely enough fish is scarce and expensive. I thought I'd be eating fish all week, but no.

Back home with recharged batteries (no sunshine or real summer in London) we hosted my parents for a week and we made it into a proper British week, with fish and chips (with mushy peas of course), a lovely weekend at our friends’ countryside cottage and a proper Sunday roast at the pub. There was also a wonderful dinner at Rules, one of London’s best kept secrets. It’s the oldest English restaurant in London, they specialise in game and even have their own estate where they shoot all said game.

In September S and I made a few trips to Belgium, for a big family reunion weekend and a friend’s wedding. And we spent my birthday in the lovely and quaint seaside town of Rye in East Sussex. Rye has lots of (expensive) antique shops, a nature reserve by the sea perfect for long walks, and lots of good fish restaurants. Having a car sure is wonderful and allows us to get out of London once in a while. It also means that, when we have to buy or rent DIY stuff, we can now bring it home ourselves, rather than having to organise and pay for delivery of everything. And DIY is all we've been doing the rest of the summer; currently S is sanding the downstairs floorboards, making a lot of noise and dust in the process. All the things we had in the living room are now stacked up in the bedrooms (note to self: stop collecting stuff and do a big ruthless spring clean); the only place in our house which is still sort of usable is the kitchen. Which means in the next few days, I'll bring my baking things out of retirement and will get stuck in making autumn goodies. Something pumpkin-y perhaps...

mmmmm*

coconut tapioca soup with mango sorbet, passion fruit, cilantro syrup and coconut tuiles

* that's Meeta's Monthly Mingle Mango Mania

Seems like I embraced all the relaxing and doing nothing of our June holiday for a bit too long. Instead of baking and posting, we spent our weekends catching up with friends, enjoying the sun (something that very rarely happens here, so whenever we do have a sunny day, I try to make the most of it), and going to Belgium for a friend's wedding. We also had a lovely dinner party with our Japanese friends S and A; last time they cooked Japanese food for us so this time it was our turn to cook. We made them Gentse waterzooi – a sort of fish stew from Ghent. Which didn't look very pretty, but tasted rather good. Which was a good thing, because we had never made it before and it could have all gone horribly wrong. I had warned our friends though, that if it did, they would have the choice between an Indian or Chinese takeaway. Or halal pizza.

For dessert I also decided to experiment, with a multi-component concoction. But even if the whole thing failed, the sorbet bit couldn't go wrong so there would be something edible for dessert at least. And fail it almost did. I had set my mind on one of Claudia Fleming's composed desserts: coconut tapioca soup with sorbet and some garnishes – something sunny and tropical.

I had never used tapioca before, so I tried the soup bit of the dessert the week before. British tapioca must be different from American one, as I ended up not with a soup, but a very thick custard. Yummy, but not soupy enough. During the week, I looked up some other recipes and found one on Steamy Kitchen that sounded promising. So promising, I didn't try it out beforehand. Big mistake. Nothing wrong with Jaden's recipe, it's just that I didn't know how to cook tapioca and there were almost no cooking instructions on the packet. I started off making the tapioca soup first thing in the morning and had to make it three times before I finally got it right! Soaking the tapioca in water for an hour didn't work, I just ended up with a big mush. Boiling it separately in water didn't work either. What did work in the end (lucky me) was combining Claudia and Jaden's recipes: I cooked the tapioca in milk, which gave me a thick custard, and later added a milk-water-coconut milk mix to thin it into a proper soup. Phew, crisis averted.

For the mango sorbet, I used those incredibly sweet, small and pretty yellow mangoes which I finally found at my local market. Unlike those sour, unripe ones I used last time. They're not cheap, but worth every penny. And they come nicely decorated with ribbon and wrapped in some tissue paper. All I did was add a bit of sugar and some lime juice, bang the whole thing into the freezer and stir it every half hour or so.

The coriander syrup takes no time at all to make and the tuiles I wasn't too fussed about: if they worked: great, if not: tant pis. Luckily they did. They didn't look anywhere as elegant and thin as Michel Roux's version, but good enough to serve to our dinner guests. Who loved the whole dessert, seeing as how they asked for seconds and even thirds...

coconut tapioca soup
adapted from Claudia Fleming's Last Course and Jaden's Steamy Kitchen

1/4 cup tapioca
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 cup milk

Bring milk and sugar to the boil, add tapioca, reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until tapioca pearls are soft (appx. 35 minutes).

plus:
1 1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 cup coconut milk

Bring water and sugar to a boil. When boiling, turn heat to low and stir in milk. When mixture returns to a boil, turn off the heat and stir in the coconut milk. Remove from heat, let cool to room temperature and chill in refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Before serving dessert, add this mixture to tapioca mix to thin as required.

mango sorbet
adapted from Tessa Kiros Apples for Jam

about 1.2 kg mango (as this sorbet basically is frozen mango, everything depends on the quality of the mangoes)
1/2 caster sugar
juice of 2 limes

Peel mangoes and cut into small chunks. Put in bowl with sugar and lime juice. Leave to macerate for a few hours. Purée everything and freeze.

coconut tuiles
adapted from Michel Roux Jr's Le Gavroche cookbook

1 egg
80g caster sugar
80g unsweetened desiccated coconut

Whisk eggs and sugar, until just mixed, add coconut and whisk until smooth. Spread out thin shapes on baking sheet (the back of a fork dipped in water works well for this) and bake at 160˚C until pale brown, about 12 minutes. Transfer to wire rack and leave to cool.

To assemble: ladle some soup into martini glass. Add a scoop of sorbet. Add passion fruit, some coriander syrup and finish with a tuile. Enjoy.

marrakech

Last week S and I escaped a grey and wet London for a warm and sunny Marrakech. We stayed in a delightful little riyad inside the old medina, right at the edge of all the souks and about five minutes walk from the central square, Jemmàa el Fna, or ‘la place’. I had read mixed reviews about Dar Mouassine, but it suited us just fine. If you like your every whim to be tended to then it’s not the place for you, but, if like us, you prefer a more relaxed atmosphere and do your own thing, I can highly recommend it.

our riyad, Dar Mouassine

I had heard about two restaurants, Le Tobsil and Dar Moha. Dar Moha used to be owned by Pierre Balmain and is now owned by a European-trained Moroccan chef who serves ‘Moroccan nouvelle cuisine’. At Le Tobsil, there is no menu, you just eat whatever is prepared that day and you pay a fixed price, which includes drinks.

the lively Jemmàa el Fna with orange juice,
spices & dried fruits, and barbeque stalls

We dined at Le Tobsil, but although we liked the live musicians and the food was absolutely delicious, we wouldn’t really recommend it. It is quite expensive (plus the bill cheekily mentions that service is not included), tailored exclusively for tourists and we both found it rather poncy. There wasn’t anything wrong with the restaurant at all, it’s just that tables strewn with rose petals, waiters decked out in a European’s interpretation of traditional Moroccan dress, and being brought the bill in a wooden box, which contained a little book with ‘the best restaurants in Morocco, isn’t really our thing.

After that, we decided to give Dar Moha a miss and just try some barbeque stalls and restaurants at ‘la place’. I wasn’t brave enough to try the out of the way hole in the wall places, but the places where we did eat had a mix of tourists and locals, so I figured we couldn’t go wrong. We tried various tagine and couscous dishes, barbequed meat and vegetables and of course some sweets. We also had an amazing lemon and olive chicken tagine, cooked by our riyad’s own cook Latifah. There seems to be a propensity for thoroughly boiled mushy vegetables, and the sweets were VERY sweet, but other than that we thoroughly enjoyed all the food we sampled.

rooftop view over Marrakech and the Koutoubia mosque (right)

Apart from sampling Moroccan cuisine and doing a bit of shopping (babouches, a leather pouffe, some bowls and spices), our big plan was to do nothing at all, and do it very slowly. Of course there are plenty of things to see if you want: a museum, palaces, tombs and gardens, but for us this holiday was all about relaxing. We did bring back the sun with us, but of course that didn’t last and now London is grey and wet again. Time to start planning our next holiday…