Crustless pumpkin pie

Squash is great for making deserts. It's rich and sweet while being still relatively low on the carbs, and besides richness and sweetness it provides texture and moistness to a cake or pudding. I've used it as a base for all sorts of things, from brownies to Christmas pudding. I've never actually gone the whole hog and made a pumpkin pie with it, though, and with this being squash season, I suddenly thought I'd give it a go.

I decided to go crustless this time. I used butternut squash, cubed and baked covered until soft with a little butter. I mashed this with ground ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, maple syrup and cream. Couple of egg yolks and then folded in the beaten whites. Dotted the top with caramelised pecans (soaked overnight, then fried for a couple of minutes in butter and sugar). Baked until set.

It might sound like a lot of sweetening, but actually it needed very little - probably no more than a couple of teaspoons of maple syrup and less than a teaspoon of sugar for caramelising the nuts.

Verdict: it tasted wonderful; however, there were certain issues. It was a little on the wet side; next time I think I'd roast the squash rather than baking covered to reduce the moisture a little. I think the egg-white-whipping was a mistake, on the whole; it contributed to the wetness and made the whole thing just a bit too soft - it didn't have that sticky custard-like texture. I might also try crème fraîche or mascarpone, or even ricotta, instead of plain cream.

Chicken with mushroom and tarragon

A supper with a vaguely bistro- or trattoria-lunch flavour. Chicken breast, baked. Put to keep warm. Quickly sauté a couple of mushrooms in butter in the same pan, a sprinkle of tarragon, dash of chicken stock, and a dash of sherry. Reduce and pour over the chicken (there was a bit more sauce than it looks like in the picture, by the way). I had it with some sautéed white sweet potato (ok, that's not bistro-style) and buttered savoy cabbage and carrots. Simple but very satisfying.

Spaghetti bolognese

Not real spaghetti, of course. Spaghetti squash.

I'd heard of spaghetti squash, but never actually tried it. It's not all that common in the UK. So uncommon, in fact, that when one turned up in my veg delivery, I didn't recognise it. I just merrily started cutting it up thinking it was some kind of courgette-like summer gourd. However, I quickly noticed the fibrous texture, googled images of whole spaghetti squash, and realised my mistake. I'd been planning a bolognese anyway, so this was perfect.

I baked the squash in halves for about an hour. It still looked pretty solid, but as directed I scraped at the insides with a fork. And... spaghetti! I would never have believed it. Actually, to be strictly accurate, it looks more like thin rice noodles in appearance, but even so. Even the taste was vaguely pasta-like, in a squash-y kind of way.

Fried cauliflower and mushroom on the side.

Bramley cider, danger

The apple tree in the garden has given us a bumper crop. It would be a considerably more bumper crop were it not for the efforts of the codling moth, but that's another story. I can't eat apples raw because of oral allergy syndrome, and there's only so much stewed apple one can eat, particularly if keeping the carbs relatively low. I made a batch of pickled apple, and loads I've given away, and I've even experimented with apple sauce as a hair wash (pretty successful, actually).



Even so, a lot still manage to end up like this:













Bramleys should in theory be good keepers, but not when they've been punctured by codling caterpillars. But then I thought, why not try fermenting them into cider?

I juiced the apples. There is a juicer attachment on my blender, but rather than figure out the instructions I just chopped the apples and pulped them in the blender, then strained through muslin. Quite possibly they'd have started fermenting on their own, but I added some water kefir starter (not the grains, just some of the sugar water the grains had been sitting in). More or less the same process as water kefir - a few days in a big jar, then bottled. You could drink it at any stage, but the longer it ferments the less sweet it will be - and the more alcoholic, probably.

Now, I've never been a huge cider drinker. Most of what you get in pubs, etc, is dismal apple-flavoured alco-pop, but a real, traditional, artisan cider is a completely different article. Just like with beer, actually, though it's harder to find a good artisan cider than it is a comparable beer. Beer is one thing I do definitely miss, but at least that's had the side effect of forcing me to seek out decent ciders.

Anyway, back to the homebrew. Traditional cider apples are a lot sharper than regular apples, but even so the bramley brew comes out surprisingly good. Plenty of flavour, though perhaps a little on the sweet side. I haven't a clue how alcoholic it is, but I'd guess it's definitely more so than water kefir.


So, a definite success. But - and it's a big but - for christ's sake don't use glass bottles. I've never yet had an explosion with fermented beverages, but earlier today I heard a loud, splintering crash from the kitchen. I dashed down, expecting to see crockery in pieces on the floor, and was greeted by a spreading pool of fermenting apple juice and numerous deadly shards from a former EZ-cap beer bottle. The first thing I thought was 'cool, an exploding bottle'. The second thing was, 'what if someone had been standing in front of it when it went off?' My blood actually ran cold.

So. Plastic bottles only from now on. Plastic isn't ideal for food storage, obviously, but it beats a shard of glass in the eye, or in the jugular. Alternatively, let it do the cask-conditioning stage (second fermentation) in a covered jug, or don't tightly seal the bottles - it'll still probably have a little carbonation. The issue is, I think, that with water kefir I always follow more or less the same recipe, so there's a known quantity of sugar. IE, there's only so much fermentation that can happen in the bottle because there's only so much sugar in there to ferment. Fruit juice is more of an unknown quantity. There was far more sugar in there, so the fermentation went crazy, creating more pressure than a beer bottle was designed to withstand.

Steak pitfall

This looks like a lovely steak dinner. A ribeye, nicely caramelised on the outside, with brussels sprouts and a few fried potatoes on the side.

But appearances, unfortunately, are deceptive. The steak had been in the freezer for a while. Not eons, but at least six months, and it had developed a distinctly stale note and some freezer burn. I don't think long freezing is necessarily a problem in and of itself. The issue, I think, is packaging. The steak wasn't vacuum packed, but in a sealed plastic tray exactly as purchased from the supermarket. Those plastic trays may be airtight, but they sure as hell don't stop freezer burn and substantial build-up of frost. I've used vac-pack meat, including steak, that's been in the freezer a lot longer than that, and it's been fine. Admittedly, in the case of ribeye the waters are slightly clouded by the fat content, which is always more vulnerable to going 'off', even in the freezer; but I've had this happen with rump too so it's definitely not just the fat.

So the lesson is, if you're going to keep meat in the freezer for longer than a couple of weeks, it's worth taking the time to package it airlessly. I've found simply using an airtight ziplock freezer bag works fine - just squeeze as much of the air as you can out by hand before closing the seal. It saves space in the freezer, too.

I ate the steak, though. It wasn't that bad.

Chicken liver

The latest in the ongoing liver campaign: chicken livers sautéed with onions, sage, and pancetta on the side, plus a bit of mash and buttered savoy cabbage. This was definitely the least challenging yet. The 'liver' flavour is definitely less noticeable in chicken liver than in other types; the grainy texture is there, but on the whole it was really quite pleasant. Progress!

Banana omelette

A variant on this. I caramelised the bananas, then proceeded with the omelette as normal, dropping them in as one would a savoury filling, with cream and a pinch of salt. More cream and a dash of maple syrup to serve. A weekend breakfast treat.

Gluten misadventure

I don't eat gluten. This didn't start as a deliberate exclusion; after a few years eating more or less Weston A Price style, I decided to cut the carbs. And low carb whole foods automatically left very little room for glutenacious fare - it was a kind of de facto gluten free diet. I noticed quite a few health improvements that I hadn't expected, and I won't go into these here except one - after some time I realised I hadn't had a single mouth ulcer. This was something I'd had all my life - not constantly, but now and then, especially if I accidentally bit my mouth or scratched my throat swallowing something sharp. Then I was more or less guaranteed to suffer for a week or two. From what I'd read about them over the years, aphthous ulcers are a disordered immune response, often to minor trauma, and this went hand in had with the other improvements I'd seen (allergies and autoimmunity). Googling mouth ulcers+gluten reveals a silent horde of others who have experienced the same thing.

So. A few days ago I got the first ulcer I've had in two years. One of those buggers at the back of the throat, which are particularly annoying because you can't apply the only treatment I've found that actually works (Canker Cover, a sort of gel patch that sticks over the ulcer and heals it in half a day - really). Sure enough, I remembered swallowing something scratchy a few days earlier, but I was puzzled - that's happened on numerous occasions over the last two years and no ulcer ensued. Then I remembered another thing that happened about the same time. I'd eaten in a hummus-type restaurant (social obligations, not my choice), and thought I could play it safe by ordering a Greek salad. This, when it arrived, turned out to be a dollop of green stuff from the meze selection - ie, chopped vegetables swimming in dressing. This inspired instant misgivings - what's in the dressing, for god's sake? - but I'd paid for it, so I started eating it. A few forkfuls in, my misgivings deepened. The odd kernel of sweetcorn was turning up. Not often enough for it to be a deliberate inclusion in the recipe, but very consistent with its being either leftovers scraped from another diner's plate, or detritus adhering to the single serving spoon that did duty for all the meze selection, which included all the usual suspects - couscous, bulgur, pitta, ful medame, etc etc.

At this point I stopped eating.

Now, I don't eat out all that often. When I do, I choose things that shouldn't have any gluten, but so far I haven't routinely asked if something is categorically gluten free. I wasn't seriously worried about the salad. Oh well, I thought, maybe I've eaten a tiny bit of gluten by mistake, I won't order salad here again. I didn't think much more of it.

However, the next morning I had a bit of GI distress, which is very unusual for me. (A case of mild constorrhea, if that's not TMI). This lasted a couple of days. I didn't think much of that, either. It wasn't that bad, and it didn't last. Then up pops this goddamned ulcer, and that got me thinking. If it had just been the GI symptoms, I wouldn't have connected it with gluten, but the GI symptoms and the ulcer, when I hadn't had a single ulcer in two gluten free years, and when before I got several in a year...

This a long and rambling story. The short version is that I'm pretty sure I got glutened in that meal. The ulcer is just too much of a coincidence. The GI symptoms are more interesting, though. GI distress was never a problem for me in the past - but when you've been eating a problematic thing all your life, I suspect that either you partially acclimatise, or you just get so used to the effects you don't know any different. I'm quite ready to believe that having not eaten any gluten for some time, my GI tract would be more likely to react strongly to a reintroduction.

Of course, it's probable that I've been inadvertently exposed to gluten at some other point during these two years without knowing it, and I haven't been aware of any symptoms. Possibly this happened not to coincide with any mouth-biting, though.

And of course I don't know for sure that I did eat gluten, and I don't know for sure that any of these symptoms were the result even if I did eat gluten. But I find it very interesting.

Anyway, I don't plan to ever intentionally eat gluten again. And I think I'll tighten up on restaurant meals, too. If it's the kind of place where you can ask if something's gluten free, I'll ask, and if it's not that sort of place, I'll just have a drink and skip dinner. The social element is kind of the hardest, actually - nobody wants to be the one making a fuss, and if you haven't got a recognisable medical condition to point to, people might think it's a fuss about nothing. But I have to ask myself - is being a compliant social individual really worth eating something you have reason to believe will harm you?

Fish gratin

I wondered about what to call this one. It's a strange concoction born of circumstances: I was dining alone, which does sometimes lead me to odd experimental hashes. I still had a fancy for fish pie, but also cauliflower cheese, which is another of those old fashioned comfort dishes (and this time something I really did eat a lot of as a child). Also I'd happened to impulse-buy a cauliflower this morning. Anyway, the idea of an unholy union of the two things started forming itself in my head, and I also had the idea of making a change from potato and topping it with rice. Wasn't really sure how it would turn out, mind. I parboiled the rice and cauliflower first, then plonked it all in a dish with chunks of raw white fish. Bit of cream and some cut up cheese on the top.

It looked, and in fact tasted, like a rather peculiar rice pudding. Not so surprising for the rice simmered in cream, I suppose, but more so for the cauliflower and fish; even they somehow tasted of rice pudding. It was strange, but not unpleasant. I do like rice pudding. Of course going the whole hog and putting jam on it might have been gilding the lily.

It's not something I'd serve for a dinner party, but I scoffed the lot in front of the TV.

Fish pie

Fish pie always seems like nursery comfort food, which is odd because it's not something I ever remember eating as a child. Not for school dinners, and definitely not at home. Nevertheless, it became a favourite after I started eating fish. The recipe has evolved over the years and sometimes varies, but I tend to do it like this: Sauté a little onion and celery in butter, add a dash of white wine or vermouth and let boil away. Put chunks of raw fish in the dish (this time it was haddock), then stir in the onion mixture, a good glug of cream, some chopped parsley and some grated cheese (not much, just enough for a subtle flavour). Top with mashed potato. The usual way with mashed potato toppings is to make the mash very squishy and buttery, and smooth it over in a homogenous, fork-fluffed seal. Or even, god forbid, to pipe it on with an icing bag in decorative little blobs and rows. I prefer to make the mash dry - no butter, for once - and rather than smoothing it on, drop it in bits and pieces. That way, you don't get a uniform seal, so excess moisture can evaporate as it bakes, and you get a crunchier, craggier top surface. I do shepherd's pie like that, too.


I tried a slightly new variant with the veg - I added a wedge of lemon and some chicken stock while they were cooking. Part of the ongoing bone broth campaign. It worked pretty well.

Salmon with beetroot

A slightly mixed bag of a dinner. Salmon fillets, fried, with a sort of
relish-y mess of sautéed onion, beetroot and lemon with cumin and dill. Beetroot is always good with salmon, and cumin with beetroot; I did wonder if all three together might be gilding the lily, but I was pleasantly surprised. The yellow stuff at the back was leftovers from another meal, an idea that was born out of a general plan to consume more bone stock. I sautéed an onion in butter, then added rice with a dollop of jellied stock, turmeric and black pepper. I wasn't expecting much from that either, to be honest, but it actually turned out pretty good. And some brussels sprouts. Butter on everything.

Pizza

Not pizza on a plate, this time. This was really a frittata, containing sundry veg and some crumbled feta, but it came out looking so much like a pizza I had to take its picture. Good, solid, stomach-lining fare.

Water kefir

For most of my childhood, my parents carefully followed conventional health advice. That meant whole grains and low fat - though since most of what fat there was, was vegetable margarine, that may have been a blessing of sorts. However, on the plus side, it also meant sweets and soda pop were strictly rationed. Pop was very much a treat, a few times a year, and evokes happy memories of hot summer holiday afternoons.

Of course, these days I drink regular pop practically never. Apart from the myriad health concerns, it just tastes absurdly and unpalatably sweet. But, especially in the summer, I drink water kefir, aka tibicos, on a daily basis. For those who haven't tried it, it's a kind of fizzy homebrew probiotic pop, made basically from a sugar solution fermented with water kefir grains - little slippery, translucent, self-propogating crystals. The process is actually very simple, once you get the hang of it. About ten minutes every few days keeps us supplied. It's also a great source of probiotics, being fermented by a colony of bacteria and yeasts.

What I mostly make is ginger beer. I use a mason jar that holds about 3 litres, and e-z cap beer bottles. It's a 2-stage process. First I whizz up a largish chunk of raw ginger in the blender with water. Then I strain it into the big jar with a sieve (the leftover ginger mush I use up for cooking). Along with this goes about an ounce or so of sugar. Any old sugar will do, though I tend to use jaggery or light muscovado if I've got it; the flavour is stronger and you get a few extra minerals. Half a lemon, or lime, or an orange, unsqueezed. And the grains (you can get these easily online). Top up to the brim, and leave for about 24 hours.

Pretty quickly the fermentation becomes apparent. There's a constant bubbling and sometimes the grains will float up and down in the jar, which is quite entertaining to watch if there's nothing on TV.

Then comes the bottling. The easiest way I've arrived at to do this is to fish out the lemon, squeeze it into a large jug, and then pour the rest of the brew into the jug through a sieve (to retrieve the grains). Then pour into the bottles, seal and leave out for another 24-48 hours. After that they should be stored in the fridge or somewhere cold, or they'll carry on fermenting and either burst a gasket or turn vinegary.

Depending on how much sugar you use in the first place, and how long it ferments, this formula ends up something like a sparkling, very dry, ginger ale. Not sweet and with a complex, slightly beery flavour; in fact, it also goes some way to making up for the lack of beer on a gluten free diet. I make a batch one or two times a week. Between batches, the grains sit in sugar water in a much smaller glass jar in the fridge.

That's the ginger beer version. You can make all sorts of varieties. Fruit brews are particularly good - complex, fruity and winey; I made one with wild blackberries that was absolutely ambrosial, like a beaker of the warm south. White grape juice makes something like champagne, and apple juice a dry cider. In this case, though, it's better to keep the fruit element apart from the grains. Just add a bottle of finished kefir, or some sugar water from the resting grains in the fridge, to the juiced fruit and then proceed as before.

Safety note: when I first started making water kefir, I read all sorts of dire warnings about exploding bottles. I've never had a problem yet, but it's certainly possible if the fermentation allows too much gas to build up - if you use a lot of sugar and leave the stuff out for too long. This sounds scary, but with common sense you shouldn't have a problem. My initial fermentation jar doesn't have a completely airtight lid, so that lets excess pressure escape at that stage. Failing that you could cover the jar, or jug, with cloth or kitchen paper and a rubber band just to keep the dust and flies out. For the second stage - the bottle conditioning - you can use plastic pop or water bottles. Beer bottles are designed to withstand some pressure, though. If you're making something about as fizzy as beer, you'll be fine. And you pretty soon get to know how fizzy the brew gets, and how soon. A good thing to do is, at least for the first few batches, to open the cap once or twice a day to see how the pressure is building. A huge gust as you open it and you know there's a lot of pressure. It's also as well to try this over a sink, as occasionally you might get a geyser fountaining out. In my experience though, this only happens with very fruity beverages.

Safety note no.2: some alcohol will be generated. I've seen estimates ranging from 0-2%. Personally, I'd guess from the taste and lack of intoxicating effects that it's on the lower end of that. Perfectly ok to give children, in my opinion, though to be absolutely safe you might want to avoid quaffing literally pints of the stuff before getting behind the wheel. Of course, you might want a more alcoholic brew, in which case you could try upping the sugar content and going for a longer fermentation. (You could also experiment with adding hops, I suppose. Traditionally these were used in beer for their antibacterial action - suppressing the bacterial growth in favour of the yeast, the yeast being the more potent alcohol-creators.) Be warned, though - letting the mixture get too alcoholic in the initial stage when the grains are still present could well pickle and kill them. Better confine the alcohol pursuit to the second stage, and bear in mind the need for caution with pressure build-up, as above.

Caramelised banana and eggs

I made this on a whim, for breakfast. One morning recently I had lightly fried eggs, on their own. I poured the remaining butter in the pan over them, and my partner, seeing the plate swimming in golden liquid, asked if I was having syrup on my eggs. That sounds naughty, I thought, but it's not a bad idea!

I caramelised some slices of banana in butter and a dash of maple syrup. Broke in a couple of eggs and let them cook slowly. Poured over all the butter and syrup, and a dash of cream. It was delicious - although when you don't eat much sweet stuff, it's amazing how phenomenally sweet a slice of fried banana can be. Not something to be indulged in on a daily basis, perhaps - though I used only half a small banana and maybe 5grams of syrup, so in actual fact it's not too terribly high on the carbs anyway.

Saffron cod

Very simple: a few sliced new potatoes, a tomato, plenty of butter, a couple of lemon wedges, water, white wine, salt, pepper and a pinch of saffron. Cook over a low heat until the potatoes are nearly done, then add cod fillets and cook for another 8-10 minutes. Take the fish out, if need be, to reduce the remaining liquid to a sauce. More butter.

I've often thought this would work well with chicken, too, but have never got round to trying it.

Date and walnut cheesecake

I'm quite a late convert to cheesecake. I grew up the the 1970s, when cheesecake usually meant an unholy amalgam of Philadelphia and Dream Topping, extruded onto a base of mumbled Rich Tea biscuits, chilled to death and served in sticky, unpleasantly cheesy, oversweetened bricks with the texture of soft bubblegum. It was years before I realised there even was such a thing as baked cheesecake.

Another great thing about cheesecake is that it's very easy to make gluten free, it's generally not too heavy on the sugar (and if you're making it yourself, you can put in as little sugar as you like), and it's high in lovely butterfat.

This version ended up quite a bit higher in total sugar than I'd usually make because of the dates, but even so it compares very favourably to the average dessert. The date and walnut was an experiment; it was a birthday cake for my partner, who's rather keen on old-school date and walnut cake.

Ingredients were 100g walnuts, about 150g dates, about 40g sugar, 250g each mascarpone and ricotta, 25g butter, 3 eggs, vanilla extract, and a dash of rum. (I soaked the walnuts in salt water for several hours to lessen the lectins, then dried them off in a cool oven).

Some time beforehand, put about half the dates to soak in the rum. Blitz the walnuts, the un-rummed half of the dates, butter and half the sugar in the food processor to a fine sticky gravel, press into the base of a 12-inch springform cake tin and give it about half an hour at 150C. Blitz the rum-soaked dates with a couple of dollops of the ricotta and enough water to make a thin paste, and set aside. Mix the remaining ricotta, mascarpone, remaining sugar, vanilla and egg yolks into a smooth cream. Whip the egg whites until relatively stiff, then fold into the cream mixture. Finally, fold in the date liquor - the aim is marbling, rather than blended, which didn't exactly work out for me. Tip the whole lot into the tin over the base, and bake at 150C for about 90 minutes.

Divided into 12, that works out about 230cal, 20g fat, 15g carb per portion.

Liver

The latest in my ongoing campaign to wean myself onto offal, starting at the shallow end with liver. Last time, it was lamb's liver, and I can't honestly say I enjoyed it. I tried it again, reasoning that if I blended it into a paté with various other things it would make the flavour a bit less aggressive. I was wrong. The other flavours - onion, garlic, pepper, a ton of dill - just seemed to somehow intensify the liver taste, rather than camouflage it. I got through the stuff, a couple of spoonfuls at a time over a few days at lunchtime, but it was an exercise in determination.

Nevertheless, after a couple of weeks off, it was time for round three. This time it was venison liver. I reasoned that since I don't like lamb that much (that's also something I'm working on), maybe lamb liver was a bad place to start. I let the slices sit in lemon juice for several hours before I cooked it, which allegedly softens the flavour. I fried it briefly - about 90 seconds each side in a hot, cast iron pan, then left it to sit off the heat for five minutes to finish under its own steam. Had it with onion fried with sage and pepper, and some strips of fried pancetta.

It was actually pretty nice. I almost enjoyed it. There were moments, when I wasn't thinking about it too much, when I really did enjoy it. Success!

Fried salad

Summer lunch is generally salad. Several days of dismal weather, though, began to wear down the most determined optimism. I could have made a soup, but I'd already begun assembling the salad ingredients when I found myself rebelling against the thought of eating something cold. So I just chucked the stuff - peppers, courgettes, tomatoes, red onion - into the pan with some olive oil. Right at the end I added shredded lettuce. Topped with some fried halloumi.

Breadless tuna melt

When making gluten free versions of things, something that quite quickly becomes clear is that it's usually what comes with the gluten that's what you really want. Like with pizza on a plate - the toppings are the star of the show. In the case of a tuna melt, the hot tuna with a base of onions and cheese soaking into it.

I put a layer of onion in the pan, piled on the tuna, mashed it out flat into a patty shape, fresh dill because I happened to have some, and a layer of sliced cheddar on top. It sat on a low heat for a few minutes until the cheese had melted. I scooped it onto a salad. It didn't hold together very well, but that was ok.

Butter

I love butter. Always have. When I was a child, it was all sunflower margarine at home, for reasons of health (huh) and economy, but whatever chance I got I would devour butter. My grandmother would not allow margarine in the house, and used to slip me morsels of butter in the kitchen, and slather it thick on my bread. During my semi-vegan years, of course, butter was scarce, relegated to the occasional binge-treat. These days I use it with a liberal hand. Cooking, and melted onto just about anything. Sometimes I even eat it with a spoon.

Of course, there's butter and butter. Generally we're pretty spoilt for butter in the UK - grass fed is easy to come by, even the cheap varieties. I like it salted, and I like the whey cream sort, and the cultured cream kind that's common on mainland Europe.

Out of curiosity, I decided to have a go at making some. All it takes is cream and a food processor, creme fraiche for cultured butter. Just bung the cream in and fire it up. A whisk attachment would be ideal, but my bargain basement food processor doesn't have one, so I used the blade.

I was surprised at how quickly it turned. Within half a minute it looked like whipped cream, then a few seconds after that it turned grainy, and a few seconds after that it was yellow solids collecting and liquid. Everything I'd read advised draining the liquid out periodically, so I dutifully did so; it gets very splashy very quickly, even with the lid on. This was, of course, the buttermilk, something I'd never tried, and which was surprisingly delicious - I'd expected something thin and whey-like, but it was rich and creamy, with a tangy, but not sour, flavour.

As soon as the solids start appearing, the butter is more or less done. You don't want to keep beating it until it's creamed, as if for a sponge cake, or starts melting. The next step is to wash it - turn it into a bowl, pour in a little iced water, and mash it with a fork. I would guess you could do this in the processor, using pulse. Drain and repeat. You could throw away the rinsing water, or you could do as I did, enthused by the buttermilk, and drink it. Repeat three or four times. Then carry on mashing the butter to get any remaining water out, add some salt if required, and either pat or roll into shape on greaseproof paper, or press into a pot or bowl.

Good lord, it was delicious. I shall certainly be eating this one with a spoon.

Steak and egg

This was a little thin steak

like you get in packs at supermarkets, not much more than a quarter of an inch thick. The problem is that they're so thin they're pretty difficult to cook to anything less than overdone, if you want any sort of browning on the surface. You need a very hot pan, or maybe they'd work on a charcoal grill.

But the big advantage is that you can keep them individually wrapped in the freezer and they'll defrost in half an hour. So you can have steak and eggs for breakfast, or lunch, on a whim. I did them a minute on either side, left them to rest while I did the eggs, and had them with salad and sauerkraut. Nice spring lunch.

Lamb with mango salsa

After yesterday's success with the salmon, I was inspired to apply the same principle to a lamb steak: a kind of variation on lamb chop with mint sauce. The salsa was basically the same but with mint and cumin added. It went very well with the lamb, though the salsa could probably have benefitted from more cumin and some lime juice.

A summery dish.

Salmon with mango salsa

Necessity was the mother of invention: there were only random things in the house and it was lunchtime. So, I ransacked the fridge and the freezer. The salsa was onion, chilli, lemon juice, salt and chopped mango, with desiccated coconut to take up the liquid. The salmon went on a pile of green beans and shredded beetroot sautéed with horseradish. It was actually pretty good. With some coriander in the salsa it would have been very good indeed.

Cauliflower risotto

Another thing that sounds alarmingly like a 'handy hints to save money in the kitchen' recipe - not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. It sounds a bit grim, but actually the idea was to replace most of the rice with cauliflower, to keep the carbs low-ish.

I love risotto, but I think the real star of the show is the butter, the cream, and the cheese. And cauliflower, apart from being a surprisingly good rice substitute, goes uncannily well with mushrooms. It brings out the earthiness - think cauliflower soup with truffle oil, if in any doubt. So I surmised that, even apart from the carb aspect, cauliflower might be a good ingredient in a mushroom risotto. Plus, we all know how well cauliflower goes with cheese.

It was pretty simple. Onion, celery, garlic, mushrooms, softened in butter; then a dash of chicken stock and white wine, a little rice, and precooked cauliflower. Proceed as normal, mushing up the cauliflower as you go and bearing in mind that less liquid will be needed because there's much less rice to soak it up. Deluge with cream and parmesan at the end.

It looked extremely authentic. You might guess from the taste, or the texture, that it wasn't a regular risotto, but not in a bad way - it tasted great.

Carb-wise, it worked out at about 25g total for a moderate, restaurant-size portion. That's not bad - way better than a regular risotto - but given that I could quite easily, in certain moods, have wolfed down twice as much, it is a little high. Without the rice, it would have been about 16g for that same moderate portion. I'll try it that way next time - but I suspect that while it will still taste great, it might not hold together so well. We shall see.

Sardine tapenade

It sounds a bit make do and mend, but it's delicious. Onion, garlic, mushroom, lemon, tomato paste, oregano, all sautéed in olive oil; chopped olives and capers, and canned sardines mashed in.

With a very very thin and crisp slice of sourdough rice toast.

Spicy fishcakes

This is one of those dishes that I used to make a lot, and then inexplicably just forgot about. I hadn't made it in months, at least, but then had the sudden fancy for it last night.

I use canned fish, usually mackerel, salmon or sardines. This time it was sardines. Mashed potato as a base to hold everything together. I've experimented with other things instead of the potato. Squash was ok, but not really right texturally and the flavour was too obtrusive. Yellow sweet potato likewise, though the flavour was good. This time I used white sweet potato, which was excellent - it had the texture of regular potato, and the flavour complemented the other flavours perfectly. I like white sweet potato a lot, but they're not so easy to find as yellow sweet potatoes. When I see them, I stock up.

Spices vary but it's usually coriander, cumin, ginger, chilli and turmeric. Some creamed coconut. Add to the mashed potato, with chopped onion, lemon juice and the fish. Fry in rissole shapes. I used the olive oil from the sardine cans.

It was really, really good.

Liver

For some time now I've been trying to get my head around eating offal. It's extremely nutritious - no other sources of coenzyme Q10 come close, for example - and also, I think it's only right that, having caused the death of an animal, one should use as much of it as possible. Plus, it's phenomenally cheap, given that most people are squeamish about eating offal these days.

And yet... there is that squeamishness factor. However much you know, intellectually, that it's a silly cultural prejudice, it's still there, and has to be got over. In my case, there's also the fact that I was vegetarian for a very long time. I've been eating meat for about ten years occasionally, but only on a daily basis for less than two, so it's still a learning process.

Nevertheless, when I was very young and my mother was cooking very traditionally, we'd have liver and onions quite often, and I actually remember liking the taste a lot. So that's something to go on, at least.

I've experimented with adding liver to things, with varying degrees of success (such as chicken liver in ragu bolognese; a little is good, more I found too rich). I think a good thing to try might be a paté, with other flavours and where the grainy texture won't be so noticeable. This time, though, I had another attempt at the old-fashioned way: liver simply fried in butter, with onions and gravy. When I've tried this before I've definitely overcooked it; it's been very strong in flavour and grainy in texture. This time I tried to go lighter but still I think overdid it a bit.

I had it with parsnip chips and cauliflower, and a stock and red wine reduction with dill and a dash of cream.

To be honest, it was still a bit of a mental exercise to get it down - even though, at the same time, I was aware that it did taste pretty good.

But I shall persevere. My goal is to be eating offal, and liking it, at least once a week.

Gluten free sourdough, #2

A few weeks on, and the last of the first attempt is finally gone from the freezer. So I had another go. This time, I used a sponge method: that is, I made an initial mix to a thick batter-like consistency and left it for twelve hours before adding the rest of the flour. I don't know if that made a difference or not. I left the final dough slightly wetter, anyway. I didn't bother with a final proof after shaping, given that - unlike with a wheat loaf - there is no pulling about of the dough from which it has to re-rise and recover. In the interests of improving the crust, I smoothed it as much as I could with wet hands and then wiped it over with a few drops of oil. Finally I slashed it. I also used a hotter oven.

The appearance was certainly a lot better: browned, and less sandy and desiccated. The crust was much better too, thinner and crisper. The flavour was very good. Complex and developed, although at 20-24 hours proving, the sour notes were more developed than I think a wheat loaf would have been at the same point, perhaps too much so for some palates. The crumb, while more open than last time, was still less open than I would have liked; it may be necessary to use a tin to achieve more lift and a lighter texture.

So: all in all better than last time, but some room for improvement!

Roast beef

Hereford topside, seared and then roasted medium well on a makeshift trivet of carrots. It was good.

Triple-fat yogurt

Of course, I wouldn't normally go anywhere near anything with half-fat, or low-fat, or anything similar in its name. However, in this case I mentally rebranded it as not half-fat créme fraîche, but as triple-fat yogurt: no thickeners or additives, just cream diluted with milk and cultured. Viewed in this light, it was a tasty and sustaining impromptu snack lunch, with some banana chopped into it.

Gammon hash

From the remains of a gammon hock, I pulled enough shreds of meat for a hash: onions, cabbage, grated swede and some potato, all fried in lard from the cooking water; the gammon crisped and mixed in and a fried egg on top.

It's not much to look at, admittedly, but it was delicious.

Gluten free sourdough

I used to bake sourdough bread all the time. I had a good homemade starter, a baking stone, and over a few years I really had the technique down. What I'd make for every day was a white couche/bloomer loaf, but I also made ciabatta, baguette, pizza, and English muffins. When I went low carb and then gluten free, of course all that had to stop; and while I used to enjoy baking at the time, I must admit I didn't really miss it. It was good to have the extra time.

I've found I don't miss eating bread, either, quite apart from the gluten and carby concerns. However, I have occasionally and idly wondered whether it would be possible to make a decent gluten-free sourdough, and so for the sake of experimentation, and for the sake of my partner who occasionally wants a slice of gluten-free bread, I decided to give it a go.

I looked at pre-blended gluten free bread flours, but these seem to include potato and tapioca flours as well as rice and xanthan gum. Now, these things may be fine, and they may be there for good reason - to improve the crumb texture, etc. However, I do have slight concerns with potatoes, and I don't know enough about tapioca (derived from cassava) to be sure whether I want to eat it. Also I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for the first attempt. So I went for a plain rice flour, and xanthan gum, which supposedly replaces some of the stretch and spring of gluten.

The next step was to prepare the starter. Sourdough bread is yeast-leavened, but it doesn't use regular cultivated, 'domesticated' yeast. It harnesses the wild yeasts and lactobacilli from the surrounding environment. To do this, you simply mix a few teaspoons of flour with enough water to make a batter-like consistency. The usual advice is to add a few organic grapes or raisins; this is for the sake of the wild yeasts that settle on the fruit, which is incidentally how wine ferments - these wild yeasts get crushed into the juice when the grapes are pressed. I didn't have any grapes or raisins, but I did have some organic dried apricots, so I bunged one of them in instead. Then you just leave it in a warm spot for a few days, each day adding a little fresh flour and water. The water, by the way, should be filtered, or boiled and cooled - if you use water straight from the tap, the chlorine will kill, or at least inhibit the growth of, those wild yeasts you're so carefully trying to nurture.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from the rice flour. However, within three days the mixture was bubbling and smelled very like my old sourdough starter. In fact, it was ready for use a lot quicker than I remember my wheat starter taking.

Once the starter is ready, you can mix the dough. I used a pound of flour and two scant teaspoons of xanthan gum, plus salt and olive oil. The amount of water to make a workable dough didn't seem significantly different from a wheat dough.

In consistency it was fairly different, though: pastier and less elastic. It didn't prove much like a wheat dough either; after 20 hours there wasn't much expansion, though when I slashed the surface it was possible to see pockets (the picture on the left is immediately after mixing; the right 20 hours later). The texture was still pasty rather than elastic so it couldn't be worked and shaped like a wheat loaf. I had to just kind of pat it into shape. I left it for a second proof in a makeshift couche; after a couple of hours it still hadn't visibly done anything, so I consigned it to the oven. I was so pessimistic, at this point, about oven spring that I didn't even bother to slash it. This, as it turned out, was a mistake. It did have a fair bit of spring, as the lunar cracked surface will attest.

And so the the vital question: how was the finished article? It actually tasted pretty good. I suspect you could eat it and not guess immediately that it was gluten free. Maybe not guess at all. At any rate, it tasted like something real in its own right, rather than a dismal imitation. And it held together very well, which was a pleasant surprise: gluten free breads are usually far too crumbly. It was dense, and moist, which wasn't necessarily a problem, though I would prefer a more open texture. But if the trade-off is between open texture and crumbly texture, I'd prefer the dense that doesn't fall apart.

A bigger problem was a dry, rough, unappetisingly pallid crust. A hotter oven might possibly have helped with this, as might spraying with water before baking. Aesthetically you might get a browner crust by brushing with sugar-water before baking. Some people brush with oil, but I've always found that gives a rather unappealing fried note to the crust.

All in all, though, I was very pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. Significantly better than any other gluten free bread I've tried, and a fraction of the price. I'll experiment further with the texture and crust issues next time, though given that I don't plan on eating it very often, it might be a slow process.

Fresh coconut

First: sweet potato and chicken soup with fresh coconut.

Second: stir fry fish with fresh coconut. I nearly called this 'dry fish curry', but as it was quite a random mix of spices (ginger, garlic, chilli, cumin, Thai fish sauce) I didn't. The fish was haddock.

Medallion steak chilli

In supermarkets you sometimes see beef labelled 'medallion steak'. This isn't a term you find on typical lists of steak cuts, and it's cheap, which facts together made me rather suspicious of the claim 'ideal for frying' on the packet. It looks to me a lot like skirt, or onglet, which can be served as steak but is inclined to be tough. In England skirt is more usually used for pies and the like.

Given all this, I decided to braise it, and as I fancied something vibrant I went for a tomato chilli. The usual drill - sear, brown the onions and spices, and immerse the meat in this mixture in a low oven all day. It was still quite fibrous, so I think it would definitely have been tough served as regular steak. It was also rather dry, so another time I'd up the cooking fat.

Moroccan chicken

This is something I make from time to time, usually using leg portions. Normally I brown the chicken, then subject it to the slow braise treatment with assorted veg and north African-ish spices (chilli, paprika, cumin, garlic, ginger, caraway, lemon). This time I'd planned to do it that same way, but events conspired to mean I had to do it more rapidly, in a hot oven. It wasn't as good; the chicken didn't have time to get really soft and fall off the bone, and the flavours didn't mix and meld so well. Maybe, too, because I was in a rush I forgot some vital ingredient. Anyway, it was perfectly good, but not so good as it could have been, which is always a disappointment.

However, all was not lost. There were some dregs of vegetables and sauce left over. I mixed this with some beaten egg and chopped spinach and made a sort of frittata for breakfast. Now that was good.

Almond pancakes

Shrove Tuesday. Pancake day. Given the day I thought I'd try this out; it's just ground almonds and eggs, and beaten egg white (because I happened to have an extra egg white lying about). Don't need any extra liquid as you do with regular pancakes.

I don't think it would be possible to make the traditional thin pancakes that cover a whole pan by this method; they come out small and thick like Scotch pancakes, though lighter and fluffier with the egg white. A nice breakfast, occasionally, with cream and blueberries and maple syrup.