Sing ho for the life of a bear.....

To business. Cooked up by the Gorgeous C....wild Irish mussels, in tomato sauce, with homemade tagliatelle.

In a word, superb.

Wow, that was weird. Formatting wise. Still. A double dish of sunlit deliciousness, eaten under the blazing sun of an all too rarely idyllic countryside.

Recipe. For the pasta, at least.

One of these is dead handy. In both life, and pasta making. This is an Imperia model, with slightly imprecise blades on the spaghetti cutter, annoyingly. Bought from Habitat. Still. Shiny and nice.

for the pasta dough

Roughly, 1 egg per 100 g of doppio zero pasta flour (Giorgio Locatelli recommends 500g of flour, 3 large eggs, plus two yolks, in the UK, a little drier in London than here methinks) - available from the best of Italy, or any good food store . In Irelands humid climate, I tend to use less egg than this. Make a volcano with the flour, sprinkle with a little salt, and crack the eggs into the well of the volcano. Using a fork, gradually break up the eggs and incorporate flour, a bit at at time, caving in the sides of the volcano as you do.

Eventually, the mix becomes thick enough to mix all the flour together. Working it into an elastic dough, as it begins to come together, stretch the top of the dough slightly, and pull it back towards you over the rest of the dough and press it in with the heels of your palm. Turn the dough often. Add flour as required, or, if the dough is too dry, dip your fingers in a bowl of water, and continue mixing. Repeat as required. After the dough has initially come together, work it with your palms for as little time as you can - too much stretching will break up the gluten.

Roll out the dough, to maybe a 1 inch thickness, and then clingfilm it, and allow to rest for 1 hour. Alternatively, cover it in a damp teatowel for the same time.

Cut up your dough into quarters (if using the Locatelli amounts), and roll it out into oblongs on a floured surface.

Your pasta machine should have two rollers with adjustable width - 1-5, 1 being the thinnest. Pass the dough through, dropping a setting each time you feed it in again.

For an extra smooth and perfect dough, double the pasta sheet back on itself twice, lengthwise, and pass through the same process, and, finally, redouble it twice, rotate the sheet 90 degrees, and pass it through again.

On the final pass, it's enough, for tagliatelle, to stop at the thinnest setting

Et voila.

For the mussels, clean them off with a good butter knife - something a little sturdy. The ivory handles silver service types that grannies are always laden down with seem to do the job properly. Simply, while holding the mussel in your left hand, cleanly chop at the base of any barnacles with the blade of the knife, carrying through and away from the mussel to make a clean lift. Quite gently, otherwise you'll crack open the shell of the mussel. Cleaning mussels is a lot like a good relationship. You gotta follow through when you're cleaning off the barnacles. I mant to stop at follow through, but it made no culinary sense.

This is extremely important. Extremely. Not doing this can kill your guests. And embarrass the hell out of the chef. If kept in water, any mussels that are open while submerged. Discard. They are dead, and busy building up toxins sufficiently virulent to ruin your day. After cleaning, put em back in water, and any that are open when you go to cook them, discard. Finally, any that don't open when you cook them. They're dead too. Discard em. If in doubt, throw it out. This batch was excellent, and we kept them all, but other batches I've ditched 30% from.

Each mussel will probably have a little straggly thread like clump poking out of the shell. Grip, and pull it out - easy to do by pulling upwards along the shell, following the shell opening, as it were.

Clean em, and plop the fresh and succulent little blighters in some water. Cook em up however you want.

The gorgeous (polkadotted) C did this with em....

Blogger ate my post, also known as....a rovin a rovin I'll go.

For no known reason, blogger ate my post. Again. Still. Whats time, effort pain and sweat between former friends.

Third time lucky eh. Eh?

Through gritted teeth....

Above, two photos culled from wild ramblings in the great Northwest. First, a clutch of hopefully luscious hazelnuts mere metres from the door of the gorgeous C. Due to ripen sometime in Autumn, a careful eye will need to be kept to beat out the birds and squirrels for at least part of the crop. Recipes for sugar praline, hazelnut chocolate, cakes, mousse and also sort of delectables are connecting in this raddled addled happy head of mine.

Second, wild strawberries lit up with their electric ripe red in the fertile hedgerows of Leitrim. An amazing taste, wild and intense, and so concentrated as to be almost artificial. Reminded me of chewits, bizarrely.

Finally,

a single almost ripe, wild raspberry. Perfection waiting to happen.

More to follow. If I can ever work out the hideous machinations of this infernal software. God may be in the detail, but the devil is in the code. And he seems happy to play dice with his universe.

The Glenlivet

Just a quick note about this particularly fine bottle of Scottishly amber and alcoholic ingenuity. It's a 15 year old bottle of The Glenlivet (not the French oaked version, I'm afraid), and a fine thing. It's a Speyside single malt, and a good, solid representative of the breed.

We cracked into this at work, at the end of a wearying week, with a somewhat informal tasting. About 10 people in total, with me wittering on quite knowledgelessly about single malts, Speyside characteristics, master distillers and the elegant architecture of the rounded finish.

I had been working quite hard. And I skipped breakfast and lunch. I was entitled to blather drunkenly.

It comes from the Glen of the Livet, and is fiercely proud of it's tradition and provenance. And trademark, sharing the valley with two other distilleries.

Still.

The tasting was without water, though a little water is often added to Glenlivet to open up the taste and aroma. But I'm nothing if not a purist. An arrogant, annoying, vindictive, and pretentious ponce of a purist. But a purist nonetheless.

It's quite a gentle whisky, quite sweet and comparatively syrupy in it's fifteen year old expression, with the taste developing from an initial burn to gentler notes of honeyed cinnamon and a little pepper. Other tasters have reported hints of lemon. Oddly, and, for, entirely unexpectedly, there's also quite a strong initial taste of butterscotch. The vanilla taste comes through more cleany, and develops in the aftertaste, underscored by the peppery taste and sensation creeping backwards over the tongues,which mellows a little too quickly for this age of whisky. At the very end it leaves with a slightly hazelnut kiss goodbye.

It's a fine thing to have in ones house. Shared in the staffroom amongst ten teachers at the end of a working week, it did fine service, ans met with universal acclaim. From whisky drinkers, from fine wine drinkers, from people who rarely if ever touch the stuff, and confirm bacardi breezer fans. All in all, a fine whisky to gently introduce almost anybody to the world of fine whisky. Nicely rounded and non threatening. Quite the opposite of how I felt to the guy who mixed his with a can of coke.

I had a wee dram with my father, in thanks to the gift of it from him. And a fine drink it was to toast an even finer man with.

Done and dusted,

Todays post, a recipe for baked Chicory, and fried aubergines, is brought to you by the letter C, the number "more than my goddamned life savings you sonofabitch", and a stack of drunkenly inappropriate behaviour.





Still, lets cut to the meat of this thing. Todays recipes are for Baked Chicory, and fried Aubergines.

Baked Chicory....

This dish was first cooked for me by a beautiful and quite cracked Swiss woman. Theres versions of it in the Silver Spoon, and its common in the North of Italy, in France and Switzerland. The Italian version uses parmesan, and the Swiss uses Gruyere, which, I think, is better.

Ingredients

Chicory, two pieces, stripped of the external leaves (reserve these, and chop up as a salad for the aubergines if you want.)

4 slices of ham. I used a traditional style Irish unflavoured baked ham, but prosciutto is perfectly good here - though a little delicate for the baking process.

About 300 ml of homemade Bechamel sauce.*

Gruyere, or parmesan.

A little olive oil, or butter.

Black pepper, nutmeg, salt and pepper.

*For a quick Bechamel, gently melt a knob of butter, say 50g, and when that melts, add in roughly the safe amount of sifted plain flour, whisking continually over the heat. Preheat somer milk, so that it can be added warm.

Gradually, whisking continually, add the milk little by little (to avoid lumps), allow the sauce to bubble slightly - the bubbling releases and activated the thickening starch, and allows the sauce to come together(if the sauce doesn't bubble, it will thicken up unexpectedly when you reheat it. Add enough milk - gradually, - until the desired thickness is achieved. Normally until the sauce will coat the back of a spoon, but for certain sauces I make it thicker, and certain, thinner. This can then be flavoured with whatever the hell you want. Just blackpepper and salt. Mature blue cheese. Gruyere. White wine....

This is the basic ingredient list for the simplest form of the dish. You can augment the Bechamel by adding white wine or vegetable stock in the oven dish.

Wrap your chicory in two slices of baked ham, or three of prosciutto. Preheat your oven to gas mark 4. Grease an ovenproof dish, with your butter or oil. Wrap the chicory in two slices of baked ham, or 3 of prosciutto. Normally I wrap the first slice so it overlaps at the top, and the second so it overlaps at the bottom. Lay the chicory in the greased dish, pinning the ham on with the weight of the chicory (lying on top of the overlapping ham).

Pour your bechamel over the chicory. Grate some nutmeg, some black pepper and grind some salt on. If using parmesan, grate on now, if using gruyere, pop the chicory in the top of the oven for 7 minutes, remove, and cover the top of the chicory with slices of Gruyere, and pop back in the oven.

Heres where it gets tricky. If not using gruyere, take the chicory out every 10 minutes of so, and braise a little with the bechamel to stop the ham burning. If you don't, it will.

Total cooking time should be around twenty minutes for small chicory, and it will retain some crunch. For larger heads of chicory, add more time, and cover with foil for the first 15 mnutes of cooking.

To finish, sprinkle with either gruyere or parmesan, and if necessary, quickly brown the topping under the grill.

Beautiful.

The second recipe is from Yotam Ottolenghi in last weeks Guardian Summer Salad supplement. Quite a lot of his recipes seem to be badly described, difficult to follow, and the quantities he gives are sometimes off. But hell. This one works quite well.

Ingredients

2 aubergines, 2 eggs beaten, breadcrumbs.

For the dressing

150g Greek yoghurt
100g sour cream (which I decided to leave out)

12 radishes, finely grated, and squeezed till just moist.

1tsp English mustard

2tbsp dijon

2 tbsp of good honey

2 tbsp of olive oil.

For the salad.

Leaves (I used rocket, some radish leaves, he recommends chard), juice of a half lemon, and black pepper.

Mix the sauce ingredients together, and season to taste. I added more mustard as I quuite like the slightly sour bite cutting throught he cooked aubergine. Cut the aubergines into 1.5 cm slices, or thinner. Too thick and the texture will be wrong. Lightly salt these acidic little buggers and leave them in a colander to sweat. About 30 mins. Tamp them dry - a little slat still on em is fine, but the juice is quite sour, so soak it up.

Dip the slices in the beaten egg, and then coat them in breadcrumbs, and pop them in hot oil to shallow fry, for 2 or 3 minutes each side. Remove 'em and leave 'em on paper towl to dry and cool.

Lay out the salad, and drizzle it with the lemon juice and grind some pepper over it. Lay out the cold slices, drizzle heavily with the sauce, and serve.

Feels like winter. Chocolate and chickpeas then.

First off...

thirty steps to chocolate connoisseurship, from the Guardian. Scroll down about a third of the way to hit the thirty steps.

I cooked up a wintry chickpea soup today, to cope with the terrible weather. This one is taken from "Made in Italy", and adapted slightly to my pantry.

To make the base, you'll need, a chopped stalk of celery, a sprig of Rosemary, some sage leaves, 2 bay leaves, and about 250g of chickpeas. If dried, soak them overnight and drain, if canned, wash thoroughly before use. 4 cloves of garlic, crushed.

Put everything in a pot, cover with about twice the amount of water as chickpeas, splash in a little olive oil, and bring to the boil. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes. Fish out the herbs, remove the chickpeas, and reserve the cooking water. There's no need to add salt at present.

Next, you will need about 150g of chopped pancetta (you can use streaky bacon if you are stuck, I used my home cured bacon), another stalk of finely chopped celery, and two finely chopped onions - 1 red. Heat up a skillet, add some extra-virgin olive oil, and gently fry off all of the above until they are soft. Should take 5-10 minutes. Add about two thirds of the chickpeas to this mix, and blitz them in a food processor until they are finely ground. Add the reserved cooking water to get the consistency you need - I added about 200ml to get a fairly thick soup.

To finish - fry off some small cubes of pancetta until golden brown. Chop up some rosemary and sage. Reheat the soup mix, and taste and adjust for seasoning. It should be quite salty already, from the pancetta. and plate it. Sprinkle with the cubed pancetta, the reserved chickpeas, and the herbs. Generously drizzle with olive oil. Grind some pepper. Serve with a plain bread, and olive oil on the side.

An authentic taste of Northern Italy, and a soup hearty enough to ward off the winter chill. Food for the soul, eh?

Sorry about the formatting. I have learned to hate blogger.

And thanks to Laura over at eat drink live. Check out her well formatted and photographed soup for a fantastic borlotti bean recipe.