Designed for a Simple Life

The simple life - what is that?

I’ve always been a planner. If I go on holiday, I like a packing list drawn up a week before at the latest. If I throw a party or have people over I need shopping lists, menus, music playlists, invite lists … it’s a pretty big list of lists. So the challenge for me is not throwing a fabulous party, but making it effortless.

The latest party I’m planning is a sale launch party at our Wapping Wharf shop. It might be business, but much of our heart and soul goes into that: many of our customers are friends and the connections we’ve built over the past few years are really important so I’m looking forward to it as much as a social as a work event.

When you want inspiration on effortless multitasking, look to busy mums.

“Grab some pasta, get a bag of salad, open a bottle - people just care about the company.” 

This is my sister’s advice on entertaining and I’m trying to take it to heart. We’ve got several new gourmet food lines in from Nicholas Vahe at the moment so I’ve designed a menu around opening jars and bottles. I can’t say that it’s been completely simple, but the food prep list is considerably shorter than normal.

Below is the first recipe for a simple carrot dip. We’ve designed the menu to be largely plant based for all our Vegan friends - this one, it turns out, is great on toast with some avocado or chickpeas. We’re serving it in filo baskets to make it easy “finger food”, but a crostini would be just as good.

The Fig1 Summer Sale Launch Evening is on 11/7/2018 6-9pm. RSVP by email for places.

Carrot, Cumin and Coriander Dip

Ingredients

500g organic carrots, peeled and cut into rounds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
30ml Olive oil
30ml water
Pinch of salt
Small bunch coriander leaves

Place all the ingredients except the coriander leaf in an oven dish. Mix well and cover with foil. Bake at 180 degrees centigrade for 40 minutes, then uncover, stir, and bake again for a further 40 minutes or until the carrots are starting to soften (they don’t have to be completely soft).

Once cooled, place in a food processor with the coriander leaves and blitz until smooth. Add some extra olive oil, water and salt to adjust the consistency and to taste.

Frittering Time Away

In the world of retail, your annual calendar can go quite awry. January trade shows are full of
Christmas stock, we're about to take a trip to Copenhagen to buy spring and summer stock from Rice, and this week on Monday we put up a tree, had a feast and took it all down again in one day for a magazine photo shoot I was asked to help style with props from the shop.

In the here and now it is, of course, harvest time and whilst I was chatting to Kirstie, the photographer, and Lia, the journalist, on this photo shoot we discussed school harvest festivals. Apparently canned goods ready to be donated to food banks are "trending" at harvest festivals - a great charitable idea but canned goods rather misses the point of harvesting things to me. Harvest festivals are about the time of food abundance we get now as crops are bought in from the fields - about being in touch with the seasons; how food is produced, stored, shared and celebrated. All those things and, of course, making loaves which look like sheaves of wheat with mice climbing up them. And squashes. Lots of squashes.

But Kirstie, it turns out, isn't at all keen on the eating of squashes, claiming they taste of nothing whilst she does concede they look quite snazzy in an Autumnal picture. So in an attempt to convince her, I have written a recipe designed to make you want to eat those beauties as well as look at them. After they've adorned the harvest table at school, try taking them home and doing this to them. We'll skip over the fact that this recipe is designed to make them taste of mint and feta, rather than of themselves. And don't worry - if you go squash crazy and buy more than you can stomach - if the beauty of these beasts overcomes you and you strip the greengrocer clean of them - you can always spray paint them silver, tie a red bow on top and shove it on the Christmas table when we get there. You can't deny they look good.
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By Mark Fletcher

Squash and Feta Fritters

For the Batter

100g plain flour
Pinch of Salt
2 eggs
200ml semi-skimmed milk

For the Filling

500g squash, grated
125g feta, crumbled
25g mint, chopped
2 shallots, finely diced
1 tbsp sunflower oil or vegetable, plus extra for frying

For the sauce

200g Greek yoghurt
25g mint, chopped
juice 1 lemon
1 clove garlic, crushed.

Make the batter first as it's best left to rest for 30 minutes. Put the flour in a bowl. Whisk the eggs with half of the milk. Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the egg / milk mix. With a balloon whisk or fork slowly pull the flour into the egg mix as you whisk so it forms a smooth batter. Add the rest of the milk to thin the batter.

Next make the sauce by simply mixing all the ingredients together.

Finally, add the filling ingredients to the batter and mix through. Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat until it starts to smoke. Then add three or four table spoons of mix to separate corners or the pan to form the fritters. Fry for 2 minutes then turn and fry for a further 2 minutes. Put the fritters in a low oven to keep warm as your fry the next batch.

The Ancient British Art of the Pub Supper

Friday night is the traditional night for a post work trip to the Hatchet and Knuckleduster for a Campari and Soda (or your local variation on pub name and beverage). But as the friends we like to mull over the week with are all obsessed with food, there is also a long standing tradition of The Pub Supper. This consists of having something planned for supper and preferably cooking slowly in the oven so that you can gloat to your hungry compadres about the delicious feast which awaits. As the drink bites, so you find you can wax more lyrical about what juicy, succulent dish you have dreamt up.

Ingredients:
For the marinade:
1 medium onion
50g / 2 inch piece of ginger, peeled
1 medium green chillies
Small bunch / 80g coriander
6tsp garam masala or curry powder
4 tbsp greek yoghurt

To be marinaded
4 chicken thighs and 4 drumsticks
1 bulb fennel
3 carrots
6 banana shallots
1 green and 1 yellow pepper

Blend all the marinade ingredients together in a blender. Chop the vegetables into large chunks, mix together, preferably the night before to give it a good length of time to marinade. Cover with foil and pop the lot in the oven at 180 degrees centigrade for approximately 2 hours (this is a deep oven dish so takes quite a while to cook through to the centre - if you spread it out in a shallower and wider dish it could take less time).

If you are back from the pub in time, remove the foil for the last 30 minutes and give it a stir to brown things up. If not, eat it as it is, served with a spoon more of yoghurt.

Frankenstein's soup: what to do with your pumpkin entrails.

Traditions always seem more important as the winter closes in. As the light diminishes so the rhythms of the year, marked by the round of festivities, seem to get louder. Towards the end of a hectic day working, I ended up excited like a child to quickly carve some pumpkins and put them on the front doorstep ready for the local trick or treaters. My Pinterest and Twitter have been full of classy, refined ways to decorate a pumpkin for the last week - all in neutral tones, fitting in with contemporary room schemes - but I wanted to hack away at some orange coloured flesh and make something fun and traditional - an approach I felt pleased with when one 8 year old announced that my efforts were "awesome". 

But I am a fraud - when it came to what to do with the pumpkin entrails, I went with something far away from tradition. The trouble is, I just find pumpkin bland, and so I decided to throw lots of flavour at this pile of pumpkin gore. The image of Thailand might conceivably be as far away from what we think of as a traditional "Halloween"  as The Seychelles are from Lapland, but they sure know how to throw flavour at food in Thailand. And so my traditional pumpkin has been abused like Frankenstein's monster, and turned into a creation which neither the Thai people nor our own would recognise as traditional. Now I am just waiting for a lightening bolt to see if it comes to life.

Ingredients:

1 large onion

25g butter

1 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic

1 red chilli

3 sticks celery, sliced

1 large carrot, sliced

2 tsp red curry paste

The flesh of 1 medium pumpkin

Half pint chicken stock

Can of coconut milk.

Bunch of coriander, leaves finally chopped and stalks chopped separately

1 leek

1 tbsp fish sauce

Melt the butter over a medium heat with the olive oil. Add the onion and garlic and soften for 5 minutes. Add the chilli, then the carrots and celery and stir in. Add the red curry paste and keep stirring until all the vegetables are coated. Finally add the pumpkin flesh, chicken stock and corriander stalks. Simmer for 20 minutes, adding more water as necessary until the pumpkin flesh is soft. Then add the can of coconut milk and stir through.

While the soup is cooking down, I fry the leeks separately in olive oil over a medium heat, turning regularly. This is because I then whiz the rest of the soup with a hand blender before adding the leeks in whole. I think that food is partly about presentation and texture, and the green of the pieces of leek contrast a bit with the rest of the soup. Once I've mixed in the leeks I season and add fish sauce to taste - beware that the fish sauce is salty in itself so don't overdo the salt - it will depend on your stock how much you will need.

The Mother of Invention

With an audience looking over your shoulder you always do things differently. One of the things I enjoy most about writing this blog is that it encourages invention - encourages me to try new things so that I can write about them.

From an early age I have always loved cooking - a love passed down from my mother, but developed over the years by experimenting on friends, wanting to try new things, by travel, by growing vegetables and by many other aspects of my life. My Grandmother and mother both always kept food notes - their own treasured recipe books with ideas passed from friends to each other. In a day before 24 hour cooking channels and abundant celebrity chefs, ideas and recipes were cooked up, passed on, and often passed down a generation in worn and stained notebooks. Writing this blog sometimes reminds me of those ways of doing things: writing things down is a way of formalising ideas, making you think longer and harder about what you are doing and making something ready to pass on.

Tonight's supper might still be considered a work in progress. I'm not sure if it is cooking or an adult version of kids making lotions and potions in the garden. I've thrown coriander, sugar, lime juice, mustard, sugar, root ginger and toasted cumin seed in the blender, blended it together and then slowly added sunflower oil whilst the blender whirls to make a thick, gloopy dressing. We have the very final tomatoes and runner beans at the allotment at the moment, and I wanted something to go with a quick prawn curry. One of the best curries I ever had was a prawn Jeera, packed with cumin, and I guess my thoughts have been wandering that way, but I also like the crunchy tomato salad that is often served with poppadoms. With this in mind, I have blanched the beans and very finely chopped a shallot and some celery. I have diced the tomatoes and I am going to mix this with some of my invented dressing, tasting as I go, and hope that somewhere in there my child-like attempt at making lotions and potions will actually turn out to be rather magical and worth the effort put in to growing the tomatoes in the first place.

Picture Credits
Geronimo pasta bowl by Bliss Home
Acacia wood chopping board by House Doctor

Welcome to Autumn

The last of the tomatoes and beans are available from the allotment and garden still at the moment, but the skins are becoming a little tough on the tomatoes. My big sister invented this smoked haddock and tomato stew one year when we were all supposed to be dieting, but although it is an extremely healthy meal, it feels anything but a diet food with it's warm, rich flavours. I love this smoky stew as a welcome to Autumn – using up some of the harvest time produce, the smoky flavours hark forward to bonfires and fireworks. Pretty simple and one of those dishes you can chuck different things in, basically it is a fresh tomato soup in which you poach some smoked haddock chunks.

Basic Quantities for Ingredients (vary as available):

15 ripe tomatoes; 2 medium onions; 2 cloves garlic; 1 stick celery; 1tsp smoked sweet paprika; 1 cup stock; 0.5 tsp cayene pepper; handful of green beans; 300g smoked haddock; 1/2 a can of chickpeas to serve 4.

As with a lot of dishes, I start with finely chopped onions and garlic, which I sweat down in olive oil until they are soft. I then like to add a teaspoon of smoked paprika to bring out the smokiness and a teaspoon of ground cayenne for a bit of a kick. I then add finely chopped tomatoes (I rarely bother skinning them – it is a rustic dish and seems a waste of time if you are chopping them anyway). I add stock, wine or water depending on what I have in the fridge – I often add some very finely diced celery too as it is a good flavour enhancer. I cook it down for half an hour adding water as necessary to make it the consistency I fancy. A good long time cooking brings out the sugars in the tomatoes even if I do have to keep adding water Ten minutes before I want to serve, I add half a can of chickpeas and some green beans, then for the final 5 minutes, cubed smoked haddock to cook through.

If you've got potatoes going over, you could add those instead of the chickpeas, or add leek or carrot earlier in the cooking, but the basic idea of a smoky tomato and fish stew makes one of the best welcomes to Autumn, and I find myself regularly coming back to it at this time of year.

Picture features:

Ceramic two-tone Portugese tableware by Rice of Denmark

Backgroud: Copper lidded storage jar by House Doctor

Foreground: Acacia Wood chopping board by House Doctor