Lampwork bead making

At the weekend I drove up to Enderby and attended Diana East's Introduction to Bead making course - what a lot of fun! I learnt many techniques and made about 20 beads! This picture is just a few of them made into a bracelet.

Hay-on-Wye

Cheesy Chicken Schnitzel by Patrik

A little while ago I was contacted by Ronja from Pitaya Media to review their newest application for the iPhone, so with iPhone in hand I downloaded Parik's Easy Cooking. Brwsing thorugh the recipes I saw that they were divided into various catergories and levles of cooking skill (easy to advanced). They sll looked like they were quite quick too, so I pottered off to the supermarket and bought the ingredients for Cheesy Chicken Schnitzel - chicken, eggs, parmesan cheese, butter, oil and tomato sauce. It was easy to butterfly the chicken breasts and dregde them in a cheese egg mixture, but not so much stuck to my chicken, so I had a cheesy omlete too, by frying everything off in the oild and butter. The tomato sauce warmed in a separate pan and soon it was time to serve. We had made a potato salad with chives, pepper and celery to go with the chicken. It was tasty and easy to cook, and there are plenty more to try, though I'm not too sure about chocolate noodles, but hey, why not try it!

Evolution July - Turkey Herder pie

This month Helen makes Turkey herder pie:

'I promised Mel I’d do the foovolution (sounds like a kylie song!) in July and after trying very hard to come up with something exciting I failed and went for a variation on ‘Sheppard’s pie’ as that is what the ingredients screamed at me. (Can’t help it I’m just not good at savoury, cake I can do but savoury usually get a ‘well it’s edible’ response from he who does the shopping). So ‘Turkey herder pie was made on Saturday with the help (and I use this in the loosest sense of the word) of boy and girl. Mince featured in March and April and made a come back in the form of turkey mince influenced by the fact that I don’t eat mammals (it’s a dissection room thing!). So while the kids ‘cooked’ pasta for mummy’s dinner (e.g. chucked half a pack of dried pasta around the floor with diggers!) I proceeded to create tea. I think most things used have appeared before but this time they have ‘de-volved’ into a simpler form.

• New potatoes (bigish one bort by mistake by he who does the shopping) were cut up and put on to boil in their skins. (I could claim some sort of added fibre benefit but I just couldn’t be bothered to do any peeling!)
• Olive oil put in a pan and diced onion added to soften.
• 1 clove chopped garlic added
• Sliced carrot, courgette and diced yellow pepper and aubergine added. (Boy said yuk to every thing but the carrot and returned to his pasta)
• Pinch or 3 of mixed herbs added (Athenian mix)
• When all veges soft (ish) they were transferred to a waiting dish.
• More olive oil added to pan
• Minced turkey put in pan with 2-3 teaspoons of bisto best chicken. (paper from the bottom of the turkey mince also added as girl was wedging herself between my legs at the time.)
• Paper removed!
• When turkey cooked the veges were returned to the pan
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes and 1 teaspoon of smooth peanut butter were added.
• This was mixed well and put into an oven proof dish.
• When the potatoes were cooked they were drained and mashed with milk and a knob of butter.
• The potatoes were then put on top of the turkey and vege mixture using an ice-cream scoop. (boy will only eat mashed potatoes if they are in ‘scoops’.
• This was covered in cheddar (the mildest and most bland white cheddar available to mankind – boy will only eat this sort!)
• They whole thing was put in the oven (~200 degrees) till the top went brown and it was bubbling
• Served with cranberry ‘red’ jelly.

He who does the shopping said it was quite nice (which is praise indeed). The kids were less impressed, but then anything that isn’t chocolate or spaghetti hoops usually fails to impress them. Girl tried it but started to fling turkey chunks around the room. Boy did eat the cheese covered potato and red jelly. He tried a carrot but pulled the ‘yuk’ face, at least he tried it! I though it was fine. And so on to the next person………'

The Tower of Time

This afternoon we popped down to Perrott's Folly, near Edgbaston Reservoir. Its the last day of Yukio Fujimoto's Offsite installation for the Ikon gallery. He has installed 1111 clocks within the tower (which may be one of the towers that Tolkien used as inspiration for his Lord of the Rings trilogy). On the first floor just one clock sits on the floor ticking very quietly away, then up the circular stairs again and there are ten in a row, and you can hear them quite well, then up another revolution and there are one hundred in a square and there is a rhythm to the ticking. Finally on the last floor there are one thousand clocks. There's a holding room on the floor below as there's only space for a couple of people to stand in the room with the clocks now, and as you come out of the holding room and start up the stairs it sounds like its raining quite hard upstairs. This last room is also the most beautiful room, with decaying splendor and plaster reliefs on the ceiling. The clocks cover every surface and form a 'white noise', its harder to decipher any rhythm too. Great stuff, I recommend you go and see it, but they shut at 5, so you have about two and a half hours!

La Banca, Cotteridge

A new restaurant opened about a month ago, just down the road from us, La Banca in Cotteridge. I went with work a week ago, and thought it would be a good place to go with Mum and Dad, so we walked down to have dinner last night. The building used to be a Barclays bank and has be tastefully turned into a restaurant, retaining the old safes as features. When we got there it was already quite busy and so we were ushered upstairs to our reserved table. This smaller dining room felt quite private, and a million miles away from the hub that is Cotteridge with all the buses going by outside. Dad ordered us some very tasty wines (La Joya sauvignon blanc and a Verramonte Merlot) and we all had different dishes. I started with the Gigante pasta filled with ricotta and chard in a tomatoey sauce, then a very tender rib-eye steak with pepper sauce and finally a light tasty tiramisu. Great stuff, I recommend you have a try, and I hope they will continue the way they have started, with friendly waiting staff and lots of good reasonably priced food.

Chaddesley Woods

Dad has a book called Living Britain and having enjoyed our trip to Thursley common we had a look in the book and found various places to visit near Brum. So our first outing was to a Worcestershire Wildlife Nature Reserve at Chaddesley Woods. As soon as we arrived we could see there were lots of butterflies and we could hear lots of birds. Walking through the reserve we saw long tailed tits, buzzards and butterflies of many kinds, including the sliver filigree, which we were told by the passing butterfly surveyor is the biggest in Britain. What a super outing, and then we had lunch at the Jinney Ring too.

Weekend fun

Last Friday Nick and I went off to the Hampton Cort Palace flower show, enjoying the recycled orange juice cartons as plant pots and more, then on Saturday it was off to the Summer exhibition and Tas , a Turkish restaurant, before The Winter's Tale at the Old Vic. None of us new the story so it was all a wonderful surprise and the setting was beautiful - lots of candle lanterns for the palace. Then on Sunday we went to Thursley Nature Reserve to see the multitude of sundews that they have! What a weekend!

Marina Abramovic Presents......

On Sunday I dodged the rain drops to catch the train up to Manchester and after a little meandering randomly through the streets of the city centre found my way to the Whitworth Gallery for Marina Abramovic Presents.... part of this year's Manchester International festival. My friend, co-worker and current artist in residence Kira O'Reilly was one of the innovative artists selected by Marina to perform in this exhibition. The show will take place over the next 2weeks, with the artists all preforming for 4hours each day.
When I arrived I was given a white lab coat, containing a small paper cup in the pocket, and I wandered into a large gallery, the walls nude of the regular hanging and lit by the enormous picture windows down one wall, it felt a little like a gymnasium. Along the window lined wall there was a dais, putting me in mind of a catwalk/runway. Milling around were my fellow participants, all clad in white lab coats too. This uniform was good, it made me feel part of the crowd even though I had come on my own, as it seemed many others had, though there was also a large party of teenagers, most likely on an 'A' level art trip, who giggled nervously. A gong rang out and we were all instructed to take one of the camping stools from the back wall and line up in rows facing the windows. I was quite surprised to see that there must have been something like 200 people in the gallery and eagerly awaiting the start. Marina and 4 helpers, all clad in the lab coats, stood on the dais before us and Marina started to explain the ideas behind her exhibition. The idea of body or performance art had started in the 70's and she wanted to use it to get us to appreciate the little things and to become comfortable with our boredom. She talked eloquently for a while and then we got out our little cups to be filled with water and then took 10min to drink the water, not just snatching at it as may be what happens in our busy every day lives. Staring out into the park beyond the windows, allowing thoughts to drain away, I felt very relaxed in a 'yoga-esque' way. Then we looked into the faces of 3 strangers, appreciating their features and trying to remember them. I first looked at a young girl with lots of freckles, then an older lady with wrinkles and finally another young girl with her fringe in her eyes. Finally, we walked from the room, considering each movement as Marina chanted lift, stretch, touch, move, which to start with was very fluid but as time passed took on a weird quality that put me in mind of dictatorship, quite peculiar.
As we were released from the room an irregular pounding started up and an occasional scream/screech could be hear from somewhere else in the building, and these continued throughout the rest of the exhibition. We all dispersed into the surrounding areas and galleries of the exhibition. I first encountered Terence Koh dressed in white sitting on his heels staring out into the foyer, he moved very slowly and different emotions rippled across his face. I spent some time watching him and then moved on into the adjacent room where Nikhil Chopra stood in a pair of white baggy pants scribbled arcs of charcoal onto the wall. Through all of his movements he drew a charcoal line on the wall or floor. The floor and surfaces but not the walls were wrapped in brown paper, meaning as we walked through the gallery there was an audible rustling. At one end he had scribbled six foot high letters reading Sir Raja III, and around the room with brown paper parcels and a table with an opened parcel of charcoal sticks. He moved with purpose but also in a slightly frenzied manner. By the end he had covered much of the space and I wondered if the room would be set back to its untouched state or would continue on from here for the next day's performance.
The screaming sound was louder here, and as I passed into the next area by one set of stairs I came across Amanda Coogan in a yellow dress, poised on the banisters above a large 'haystack' which I found out must be made of crash mats or mattresses, for she screamed and then threw herself on to these. Then slid down from them and walked up the stairs again and to her perch. Through a glass door, I came into a room that smelled a little unpleasant, as the few people in front of me moved to the side, I could see a large triangle of shoes, singularly pointing towards the rear of the room, down the diagonal was a long long trestle table laden with earth, and my initial thoughts were that this is where the smell was coming from, but then I saw that atop the dirt was a pig's head at each end. Not that this was offensive in any way but it lent the air that smell of a butcher's shop, which I happen not to like very much. Rounding the table there were more shoes and a chair holding a pile of shredded paper. Walking on I found Alistair MacLennan sitting, dressed all in black, with a large black boot balanced on his head and two pairs of spectacles on his nose in front of closed eyes. He never moved, and when I returned later it seemed that he had stayed this way for the entire exhibition. The collection of objects and the stillness didn't connect with me as other elements of the day did, and I wonder what I couldn't feel/see.
The next room, also entered via a glass door, was full of the sound of untuned radios. Eunhye Hwang, with her long dark hair falling into her eyes, dressed in a peculiar combination of dark blue shirt, creamy stripy skirt and white kitten heels, was moving four radios emitting static noise around her body, allowing them to open up so that she was making changes in the depth of the noise. It was brilliant to watch and she moved with deliberate actions, involving the audience in her performance too. There was also a fridge in the room, with a plate of green jelly on top and a large radio, which I presumed wasn't on. Later on there was a large piece of the green jelly on the floor and a man was eating jelly from a plate and the artist continued to make her noise music.
I then went in search of the source of the clanging, finding muscly Nico Vascellari in black t-shirt and jeans at the bottom of a stairwell bringing a large gold coloured rock/piece of metal down on to a smooth stone. He was sat in a pool of dust, and had remarkably beautiful feet, coated in the dust. Behind him were a couple of microphones, and as he brought the rocks together a reverberation was heard and felt through out the building. The banging was incredibly loud, and I felt the need to put my fingers in my ears, but he had no protection. I couldn't linger too long as it did hurt my ears, but the feeling of the vibrations through the floor were good. In the stair well at the other end of the building I found Kira, slowly falling in a very controlled manner down the stairs. When I got there, she had made it down about a quarter of the staircase and was upside down sprawled across the hard stone stairs, wearing just a pair of black driving gloves and a bruise across her shoulder. From being upside down her face was a deep purple and she was deeply concentrating on her slow slow movement. The deep purple colouration really made it look like she had been falling down the stairs, in perhaps a nasty accident, but as she righted herself, still lying across the steps her face returned to a more normal colour. Then upside down again, I moved closer and she opened her eyes to look at me and I felt a great connection, that she was observing me too.
Going past Ivan Civic clad in black climbing a wall displaying a video of his return to Sarajevo after ten years, I went upstairs and came across Marie Cool moving from table to table and other areas of the gallery, where she was re-enacting sculptural pieces, rhythmically moving string or papers or piles of salt, or walking past a line of folded paper so that her movement caused it to wave in the eddies of the air. The light here was beautiful, filtering through high windows onto the white walls. This was a very tranquil exhibit, and in great contrast to the dark room I next visited. Here, I was first read the 'rules of engagement' by a lab-coated assistant, I was to go in and 'worship at the alter' or words to that effect. Inside was an auditorium in the dark, with only lighting around a plywood construction on the stage. There were several other people inside in a cue before this, and one at the top of the steps feeding a mouth through a small 'glory hole', this was all we could see of Fedor Pavolv-Andreevich, who was making a homage to Vitaly Titov who had lived for twenty days attached to someone else's body. There was a mechanical voice-over too. I felt uneasy, whether this was because of the language used to describe what was to happen or whether there was something more I don't know, but I made myself stay and was instructed to wash my hands and then given a price of card that indicated I should feed the mouth a piece of cheese and tell it a nursery rhyme. Never one to remember nursery rhymes I eventually dredged up hickory dickory dock and felt particularly foolish reciting it. Not a comfortable experience all round, whereas all the others were so.
Jamie Isentein was barely visible beneath a pile of sheep and bears skins, playing and Melati Suryodarmo had yet to make it through the visa system so this left one artist to see, Yingmei Duan, naked moved in a vulnerable way around a darkened gallery. May be because I had already seen many things I spent just a few minutes with her and then seeing I only had half an hour left made another circuit of the performers, until a gong sounded again and we were all gently ushered towards the exit. Relieved of my lab coat I wandered out into bright day light and hot footed it back to the train station feeling contemplative and relaxed. All the artists had looked weary by the end of the 3hours we had been observing them, and I wondered how they would fair over the next two weeks as the exhibition continues.

This little film is a time lapse of photos taken every minute over a 3hour period of the area where the hedgehogs are living in Sarah and Juul's garden. I tried to bait the area with a slug found trying its best to demolish some tomato plants, but it had other ideas and is seen speeding away at the start of the movie, the little hedgies are in there too, the best shot is right near the end!

Chocolate cells

After finding the 1696 article on medicinal uses of chocolate I was chatting with Kira in the coffee room at work. We got to a point where we decided that may be we should try feeding chocolate to adipocytes (fat cells), though now I can't remember what all the connections were. Naomi is an expert on adipocytes and kindly said that we were welcome to use some of these cells that she would extract from stored tissue. The aim would be simple, we'd incubate the cells in the presence of some chocolate and hopefully they would expand in size as they took in the fat from the chocolate. A nice circular idea whereby the cells, which had been discarded to remove 'fat' would get fed fat. Kira was also interested in embellishing them with gold or other precious objects. After some research I reckoned that the easiest way was to add so cationic gold (positively charged) that would adhere to the outside of the cells through an electrostatic interaction as the cells are slightly negatively charged. Rachel generously said we could visualise them on the scanning electron microscope (SEM) too, which meant we'd be able to see the gold and the structure of the cells.

So first off Kira and I spent the afternoon trying to get chocolate into solution. I had hoped that just warming it to 37°C would be OK but this had a tendency to sit as gloop at the bottom of the tube. After a lot of fiddling we decided upon grating some high cocoa solids content chocolate (85% Green & Blacks in these experiments but later Kira sourced some French 100% from Cortes Ingles in Valencia) and melting and mixing it into standard serum supplemented media.


Adipocytes in culture

Then Naomi kindly supplied us with some cells, but the transport between labs caused massive infection and they all died, so we decided to go to them and spent a couple of days over at Aston. We helped to process the tissue and extract the individual cells before adding the chocolate solution. We gave them an overnight incubation to see if they would take up any fat. The next morning the chocolate stimulated cells certainly looked different from the non-chocolate stimulated ones, but it was more that they had a fine coating of particulates rather than having swelled in size.

To add the gold we had to tether the cells. They were floating atop the liquid in which they were growing so using poly-D-lysine coated coverslips (making use of electrostatic interactions again) we captured the adipocytes. Once isolated we coated with the gold solution, taking only 10min, before fixing in preparation for the SEM. Further dehydration was required, as the SEM works under partial or near vacuum, before we could 'see' the fat cells. Rachel and I had a quick look-see under the low vacuum instrument before using the higher powered one over in the microscopy suite with Naomi. And ta-dah!!! We found lots of things, mostly bits of chocolate particulate but also a fat cells that had adhered and then subsequently lost most of its cell contents. It looked like the nucleus had been ripped from the cells, looking like a fried egg missing its yolk. Using back scatter electrons we could also see the gold - looking like constellations sprinkled across the membrane!


Whole fat cell missing its insides

So what does all this mean I hear you cry? Well, according to Naomi, its the first time anyone's tried to visualize adipocytes under SEM and hopefully we can use further experiments to characterise these cells. So from a scientific point of view this 'Friday afternoon experiment' has been incredibly useful. On other fronts, this has been totally mind blowing - I've never used such high powered microscopes before and seeing a cell in such high magnifications is really quite something, and add in the gold stars/sparkles and I'm very excited! So the cells didn't do what we expected, but then as Prof Einstein said 'If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research' and as such trying something different has brought out something new and exciting, not to say broadened all out horizons.


Magnification of the mambrane using back scatter electrons to see the gold labelling, like little stars

Fresh Garden Salad

To accompany or BBQ on Sunday I picked some pea shoots and borage flowers to go into the green salad, I just need the courgettes, cucumbers lettuce and beans to be ready at the same time and then everything will come from the garden!

Sylhet Spice Cuisine

My favourite curry restaurant in Birmingham - the Sylhet Spice Cuisine in Kings Heath - just yummy! This was Nick's fish dish on Friday night - complete with chilli 'green beans' ala Dougal on the Bramaputra!

Evolution June - Aku Shaak

This month the evolution baton passed to fellow food blogger Sabine of A lot on my plate who has summarized the progress so far and made a fantastic contribution with Aku Shaak - stuffed vegetable curry. Go and read her blog entry for more info!

Some lovely foodie pictures from our Gothenburg trip!

First potatoes

Today we dug up the first of our potatoes - variety rocket - that we planted back in February in a big pot in the garden. They were delicious made into a Spanish omelette!

Ireland surprise

It was Dougal's birthday at the weekend and Soazig organized a surprise - that we would all meet up in Dublin and spend the weekend staying at Ballyknocken cookery school. We couldn't have been more lucky, the weather was magnificent and the food was fantastic. Late on Friday night we tucked into tapas in Al's Diner in Wicklow and then snuggled down in the very comfortable hotel, to be greeted the following morning by the chucks and brilliant french toast at breakfast. Then a whistle stop tour of the region, calling in at Glendalough and Powerscourt. The back to the cookery school where Catherine created beautiful antipasto, potato and lemongrass soup, pork tenderloin with stuffing and polenta cake.



The following day we celebrated Dougal's birthday with another splendid breakfast, followed by a walk along the coast from Bray to Greystones, in the sunshine, we really didn't need lunch but had ice creams on the beach. Then to Bates in Rathdrum, behind a lively Irish pub, for a delicious locally inspired dinner - Wicklow crab ravioli, Dover sole, lamb and creme caramel with orange sorbet!



Our final day took us back to Dublin to the Guinness Storehouse and a little Guinness tasting, and to Trinity to gaze at the Book of Kells and the evocative Long Library.

Evolution May - Aubergines everywhere

This month Kira has taken the evolution idea to another level!

"I guess evolution had its dead ends and abandoned experiments, organisms that shifted and drifted into various and variable embodiments before environment and circumstances rendered obsolete, extinct and no more. I’m intrigued by the possible short term species that didn’t become more, longer and established. And that’s kind of how my May cooking evolution has been.

I was inspired to take the aubergine forward, but to find it a new circumstance and context, and likewise the ricotta. I fantasized about ricotta pudding, custards and pana cotta, and all kinds of recombinant aubergine/tomato type things but really I wanted to depart from that combo. It’s sturdy presence in cooking all over the world is there for a really good reason, it adapts to multiple favours and environmental factors, but I wanted another thematic to intrigue into June. Perhaps.

So my final dish was Aubergine, halloumi and asparagus, with lemon/oil dressing. Accompanied by Ricotta and dill Bread, and here are a couple of the species that also evolved along the way.

Baba Ghanoush
the aubergine/tahini combo – which was utterly divine with a crunchy green salad wrapped in a warm chapatti.

Here is a version slightly adapted (amounts scaled down) from Recipes for Self-Healing by Daverick Leggett, an excellent info/cook book on nutrition according to Traditional Chinese Medicine.

1 Aubergine
1/3 cup light tahini
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons of water
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.
2 tablespoon of olive oil
1/4 paprika
Coriander.

Cook aubergines under grill or in a hot oven until soft.
Scoop out the insides and mash.
Combine with tahini, garlic, water, and lemon and stir well.
Add salt and pepper.
Drizzle olive oil over and garnish with paprika and coriander.

I found it was even better after a night in the fridge, the flavours combined wonderfully.

Baked aubergines with coriander yogurt dressing

Adapted from
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1667/baked-aubergines-with-coriander-yogurt-dressing

I didn’t have cous cous so I used quinoa which worked fine.
I also scored the aubergine too deeply so I wasn’t able to preserve the skin to refill with the final mixture, so my presentation was not so pretty. It was an OK meal, again somewhat better once the ingredients could sit and combine. Interesting that.

Ingredients
1 medium aubergine
2 tsp olive oil
juice 1 and zest 1/2 lemon
100g couscous
300ml/1/2 pt boiling vegetable stock
85g ready-to-eat dried apricots, roughly chopped
4 sundried tomatoes in oil, drained and chopped
3 spring onions, finely sliced
25g pine nuts, toasted
pinch ground cinnamon

For the dressing
4 heaped tbsp Greek-style natural yogurt
2 tsp lemon juice
1 fat garlic clove, crushed
small knob ginger, finely chopped
small handful coriander, roughly chopped

Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5.
Leaving the stem on, cut the aubergine in half lengthways and score the flesh deeply with a sharp knife in a criss-cross fashion.
Place in a shallow baking dish.
Mix the olive oil and lemon juice then brush over the scored surface of the aubergine.
Season with freshly ground black pepper and bake uncovered for 25-30 mins, until the flesh is tender.

Meanwhile, put the couscous in a large bowl, pour over the boiling stock and leave to soak for 10 mins until all the stock is absorbed. Fluff up with a fork, then stir the apricots, tomatoes, spring onions and pine nuts into the couscous. Sprinkle with the cinnamon and toss well together.

Remove the aubergine from the oven and scoop out the flesh, taking care to keep the skins intact.
Chop the flesh and toss into the couscous mixture. Place the aubergine skins back in the baking dish and spoon the couscous mix into them, piling it up to
hold a generous amount in each.
Scatter any left over couscous mix around the edge of the dish.

Return to the oven for 10 mins to heat through while you mix all the dressing ingredients together - add a drop of water if the dressing is too thick. To serve, heap the loose couscous mix under the stuffed aubergines so they're propped up on a slant.
Drizzle over dressing and serve with mixed leaf salad.


Ricotta and Dill Bread (adapted from The Art of Handmade Bread by Dan Leopard)

1 1/4 cups (300 g) water at 68 degrees
2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast (1 packet)
1/2 c (125 g) ricotta cheese
2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups (250 g) bread flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 heaping T very finely chopped fresh dill
1 tsp olive or vegetable oil

1. In a bowl or pitcher, beat together the water and yeast. Wait for the yeast to get bubbly, and then stir in the ricotta cheese. In a large bowl, combine the two flours, salt, and dill. Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and stir to form a soft, sticky dough.

2. Rub 1 tsp oil on the work surface (I used a big cutting board) and knead the dough 10 seconds, ending with the dough in a smooth, round ball. Place dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover, and leave for 10 minutes. Remove and knead once more on the oiled surface, returning the shape to a smooth, round ball. Place it back in the bowl, cover, and leave 1 hour in a warm place.

3. Grease and flour a 9-inch loaf pan. Shape the loaf into a baton and lower it neatly into the prepared pan. Cover with a cloth and allow to rise for 1 1/2 hours, or until almost doubled in height.

4. Preheat the oven to 410 degrees. Dust the top of the loaf with flour and bake 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350 degrees and bake an additional 25-30 minutes, or until the top of the loaf is a shiny dark brown and the loaf has come away from the sides of the pan. Remove from pan and cool on a rack.


Aubergine, halloumi and asparagus, with lemon/oil dressing.

This is so simple but I really enjoyed the combination.
As it’s asparagus season, the bite of the fresh green worked well with the stodginess of the other ingredients. But it would also work with rocket or something equally green and zingy.

Amounts variable depending on how many and ones love of asparagus and halloumi.

Aubergine, 1/2 per person.
Halloumi cheese, 1/3 – 1/4 block per person.
Asparagus tips, as many as you can eat.
Olive oil
Freshly squeezed lemon.

For the dressing:
Olive oil.
Freshly squeezed lemon juice.
2 cloves garlic at least.
Chilli flakes.
Salt
Pepper
Honey
Whole grain mustard.

What to do:

Make up the dressing: I do it by taste, adding lemon juice to the oil, then adjusting, then adding a tiny bit of honey and mustard and a pinch of chilli, salt and pepper. I let it stand for a while to allow the flavours to meld.

Cut an aubergine in half and cut into long slices.
Paint each slice on both sides with a mixture of olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice with seasoning added.
Add halved cherry tomatoes.
Bake for 10 – 15 mins in oven at 180, turn half way though.
Alternative do on a griddle if you’ve got one, or fry.
Slice the halloumi cheese and fry in olive oil, remove to kitchen towel to soak up oil when done.

Steam the asparagus shoots for 3 minutes until tender but with some bite!

Wrap asparagus shoot and halloumi cheese in a slice of aubergine, add tomatoes, drizzle with dressing, soak up oils and flavours with a thick cut of bread.

Delish."

Milan

Last week I went to Milan for work and had a fabulous time eating all sorts of new things. I had a panzerotti for lunch - a sort of pasty thing filled with spinach and brie, the pastry was very light and almost tasted of doughnuts. Then for dinner we went to t Garba, sole with courgette flowers and pistachio cake for pud!! Very delicious.

Vanilla Oil and Peas shoots

I keep forgetting to blog about the weekend we spent in Newark - we were very decadent and in between painting and decorating we went out for lunch at Ann et Vin and for dinner at Cafe Bleu. Both were lovely - I quite fancy going back to try the tapas at Ann et Vin, though the pate I had for lunch was scrummy - Nick had to restrain me from licking the plate! We were lucky to get in to Cafe Blue - apparently they normally have a 3 week waiting list but managed to squeeze us in at 6.30. I now can't remember everything we had to eat but Nick's starter came with vanilla oil to dip his asparagus in and pea shoots. These were so pretty and very tasty, unusual for me and dedicated pea hater!! I may have to start growing some to put in my summer salads.