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…

SHF # 43: coconut lime cake with mango and mascarpone lime mousse

Like Helen, of the beautiful blog tartelette, I'm a big fan of anything citrus. So when she chose citrus as the theme of this month's Sugar High Friday, I couldn't have been happier. And I immediately got Harry Nilsson's coconut, one of my all-time favourite songs, stuck in my head. I first heard it when watching Practical Magic and I have actually watched the film again just for the song. It's sweet and silly and makes me laugh. I can thoroughly recommend this song, especially on a blegh and grey day. So, SHF. I wanted to make something pretty and tropical, and after going through some cookbooks, browsing a few blogs, and taking cue from the coconut song, I decided on a combo of coconut and lime with mango, in the shape of little cakes with fruit and mousse layer. Something I'd never tried before, but it didn't look all that difficult - baking a cake? I could do that half asleep. Chopping up some fruit? Easy peasy. And whipping up a mousse? five minutes' work.

For the cake base, I chose Delia's coconut lime cake. A bit risky, since I hadn't made this cake before, but I find that Delia usually delivers. And deliver she did. The cake didn't rise very high, but it turned out quite well - I knew I could trust our Delia. The mango, unfortunately, didn't deliver. Instead of the sweet juicy and orangey-yellow fruit I was imagining, I got a hard pale and rather sour mango. That will teach me for buying mangoes out of season I guess. I should have waited for those incredibly sweet small yellow Pakistani mangoes I will find at my local market in a month or so. But all was not lost, I added a few spoons of sugar and some vanilla bean paste, which made it ok. Not great, but more than edible.

For the mousse, I browsed Bea's and Helen's archives, but all the recipes I found had gelatine in them, and I have a very strong dislike for the stuff. A google search only returned gelatine-based mousses as well, so I took a risk, and luckily it worked. I used Helen's mascarpone lime mousse recipe, but left out the gelatine and the lime zest (another thing I don't like), without changing anything else. I figured, with the whipped egg whites and whipped cream, the mousse would set in the fridge. After all, my chocolate mousse and tiramisu set in the fridge, so no reason why this mousse wouldn't set either. And I was right, phew. It might not work in hot or humid climes though. I guess that's the one good thing about living in grey and temperate London.


Getting the whole thing assembled took a bit of fiddling, but wasn't too hard. Of course I started with grand plans: I had wanted to add a frozen cone with coconut yoghurt and mango purée, like this one, put a glaze on the cakes, and add a cilantro syrup. But in between all the weekend DIY, finally getting to meet our friends' new baby, and getting engaged (yes, after almost 12 years together S proposed), I didn't get around to executing all those grand plans. They will have to wait for another time. That evening, S and I cracked open a bottle of champagne and had a simple but lovely pasta dinner, followed by these cakes were our dessert. Surprisingly, S really liked it. Separately, the three components weren't great: the cake was a bit fibrey with all the desiccated coconut, the mango not ripe and the lime mousse not very sweet, but together they were just right. A sweet end to a wonderful day...

milk jam

About a month ago, I discovered Aran’s beautiful blog, cannelle et vanille, when she left me a comment. I instantly fell in love with her beautiful creations and photographs and luckily, she hasn’t been blogging for very long, so it didn’t take ages to read through her archives – lucky me, otherwise I would have been reading through the night. One thing immediately caught my attention and that was her milk jam. I’d never heard of it before, but it sounded intriguing and lovely.

Especially because vain little me wanted to bleach my teeth and my dentist had instructed me to only eat ‘white food’ for the two weeks it would take. No coffee, red wine, tomatoes, red peppers, strawberries … Of course after about a week I got incredibly fed up with eating cauliflower, rice and apples – we have a saying in Flemish that goes ‘they came out of my ears’, which I think pictures my sentiment quite well – and I was desperate for some variation. The milk jam provided just that; luscious, creamy, buttery and milky. Delicious! If you haven’t made it yet, stop reading and go make it right now. The recipe is here.

I have mentioned before I’m not a fan of gelatine, so I left out the gelatine and reduced it a bit more to compensate, to about 250g. It set to a very spreadable paste in the fridge. For my second batch (did I mention how delicious this is?) I had to use half and half milk (S drank all the full-fat milk) and I added some nutmeg. Out of curiosity I reduced it to 300g, which also worked fine. And for my next batch, I’m thinking coconut milk. Or maybe sweet massala spices…

breadcrumbs

It's a good thing I made that breaded cheese salad when I did, because yesterday evening, when I was looking for the breadcrumbs to top the cauliflower gratin I was preparing for dinner, they were nowhere to be found. Of course there was only one place they could have gone, I didn't even have to ask (but I did anyway, silly me).