Food Stories has been predominantly recipe (not restaurant) focused this year. Creating is what makes me feel happiest inside, it turns out. So here are my favourite recipes of 2011, followed by the most memorable guilty pleasures; it would be terribly neglectful to exclude the latter, I think, as it’s surely clear by now that I’m quite partial to a filthy (probably pork-based, definitely artery-shuddering) snackette, or four.

1. Egg Yolk Ravioli (top photo)

It took three attempts, but I eventually nailed this recipe and was rewarded with some of the most decadent pasta I’ve ever eaten; a quivering yolk coddled by a ring of spinach and ricotta, ready to ooze headlong into a sauce that is made almost entirely from melted butter. Crushed pink peppercorns and purple basil made it one of my prettiest plates of 2011, too.

2. Piri Piri Chicken

2011 was the year I got even more into BBQ. Come drizzle, hail or sunshine, I was out there guarding that Weber, tongs in hand, bucket of meat on standby. We worked our way through jerk; brisket; brats cooked in beer; pulled pork and an obscene amount of wings (more on those later) but one of my favourite recipes was this piri piri chicken, inspired by a local takeaway. The combination of charred chicken (for piri piri must be charred), feisty chilli and tangy vinegar sauce made this one of my hits of the summer.

3. Boston Baked Beans

These rich and smoky Boston baked beans are thick with molasses and packed with nubs of smoked pork belly. They’re about as different to regular baked beans as you can imagine and they rocked my world.

4. Baghdad Eggs

I first came across Baghdad eggs in Jake Tilson’s brilliant cook book, ‘A Tale of 12 Kitchens’. This combination of  onions, sharp yoghurt and spiced butter on eggs is now my favourite weekend brunch.

5. Daim Bar Ice Cream

I visited Sweden this year and re-discovered Daim Bars. They went straight into ice cream. I watched my boyfriend devour the remains of this, straight from the tub with a spoon, after which he lay back, clutching his stomach, moaning “I feel siiiiiiick”. In a good way, you understand.

6. Ham Cooked in Coca Cola with a Rum and Molasses Glaze

The only way to make this sticky-sweet ham any better would be to pull great big hunks off it, stick it in a sandwich with some deep fried pickles and…oh, wait a minute.

7. Hickory Smoked Hot Wings 

After my first batch of home made hot wings, I wanted to do a variation and decided to smoke them using hickory wood chips, before dousing them as usual in Frank’s Hot Sauce and melted butter. Come to mama.

8. Smoky Aubergine and Lamb Pide

Pide are like a pointy Middle Eastern version of pizza. I based the recipe on my ‘Peckham Pizza’ (based on lahmacun). The topping is an intense paste made from spiced, minced lamb and the flesh from a charred aubergine. Garnished with chopped pickles and herbs, they’re lovely eaten as is, or wrapped around some salad.

 9. Pork Pibil Tacos

This pibil was made with pork knuckles and smothered in achiote paste – a wonderful ingredient which simply has no substitute. The tacos were spicy, drizzled as they were with a sauce made from orange juice, onion and scotch bonnet chillies.

10. Sausage Rolls with Apricots and Whisky-Caramelised Onions

And finally, a seasonal entry at number 10, my new favourite sausage roll recipe. Onions were slowly, slowly caramelised then bubbled furiously with whisky before going into these sausage rolls along with some dried apricots. The sweetness worked so well with the sausage meat and I’ve had great feedback from people who’ve made them this Christmas.

For the guilty pleasures, I’ve exercised some restraint (most uncharacteristic) and narrowed it down to five:

1. Baked Gnocchi with Gorgonzola and Spinach

Sneaking in on 3rd Jan was this rather naughty dish I made for my boyfriend’s birthday dinner. Home-made gnocchi baked in a sauce of Gorgonzola and cream, with a little spinach thrown in to ease the guilt. The gnocchi goes crispy on top while remaining gooey and soft underneath. A cardiologist’s nightmare.

2. Wedge Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and Candied Bacon

Candied bacon is definitely one of my top guilty pleasures of the year, so much so I wrote a whole post about making it and using it. I have fond memories though of this ‘salad’ garnish, chopped candied bacon sprinkled over a river of blue cheese dressing and crunchy iceberg.

3. Deep Fried Pickles

Everyone went mad for these in 2011. I stuffed mine into a sandwich with coca cola ham and hot sauce. Then I had a lie down.

4. Meatwagon Burgers

I’ve followed Yianni’s journey from his van in Peckham, through #Meateasy in New Cross and now to Meat Liquor via The Rye. The latter has to be the most convenient and dangerous burger vending situation ever in existence if the state of my waistline is anything to go by. The Rye pub is opposite my house you see and for a few glorious months I needed to do little more than hop over the road to get my fix. Now they’re gone and Meat Liquor is in central London. I could cry.

5. Eggy Bread and Candied Bacon Sandwich

In at number 5: the sandwich of shame. I had candied bacon to hand and I’d just made eggy bread. It had to be done, see? We felt the guilt after eating this but damn, it was good. Sick, but good. If you’re into sandwiches, I’ve written a post about my top 5 here.

Phew. No wonder I need to lose weight. The diet inevitably starts er, tomorrow but until then I’ve got a Ginger Pig rib eye with my name on it. Happy New Year everyone. Thank you for reading and here’s to a tasty 2012. Cheers!

I say this every year so I may as well say it again: it’s never too cold for ice cream. If you disagree with that statement, may I suggest that you turn up your central heating.

I’m always on the look out for new flavours and the inspiration for this one came from a bag of mini Daim that I picked up for my colleagues at Gothenburg airport. I’d forgotten how good they are and as always when I find myself enjoying something sweet, I immediately thought, ‘this could be good mixed into a shitload of frozen custard’.

It was very good indeed; a smooth ice cream with lots of crunchy, burnt-butter-caramel and chocolate pieces. It’s basically a posh McFlurry. Phwoar.

Daim Bar Ice Cream

600ml single cream
6 egg yolks
100g caster sugar
4 x full size Daim Bars

Whisk the eggs and sugar together until light and fluffy (this is easiest in an electric mixer). Heat the cream until almost boiling (watch for little bubbles forming around the sides) then pour the cream over the egg mixture in a thin, steady stream, whisking all the time.

Pour the custard into a clean saucepan and heat gently, stirring constantly until it thickens slightly to coat the back of a wooden spoon. It is important to do this gently – if you overheat it, the eggs will start to cook and you’ll get little blobs of egg floating about in the mixture.

Decant into a bowl and cover with a piece of greaseproof paper, pushing the paper right down to cover the surface of the custard (this it to stop it forming a skin). When cool, chill for half an hour in the fridge.

Pour into an ice cream maker and churn. While this is happening, take a rolling pin and bash the (unopened) Daim Bars into pieces. Set some pieces aside for serving and add the rest to the ice cream towards the end of churning.

I love frozen yoghurt almost as much as I love ice cream, which you’ll know, if you’ve read this blog before, is rather a lot. Natural yoghurt is one of the top ten ingredients I couldn’t live without, up there with the high and mighties like butter and herbs. I eat it strained and spread on toast; in curries and with curries; in dips; slaws; through rice with pickle, or just plain from the tub, dolloped on ripe, honeyed chunks of mango.

Last night I turned to it again; the past couple of evenings have been cloying and muggy here in London and I needed the sharp, bright tang of frozen yoghurt. Despite fro-yo being surprisingly rich given that it’s just, you know, yoghurt, it boasts natural sourness, making it fresher and lighter than ice cream and much more desirable, to me at least, in the stickiest of weather.

This basic recipe consists of just yoghurt and sugar, plus any flavouring or embellishment that takes your fancy. I had a jar of sour cherry jam knocking about, so I stirred in a couple of tablespoons for a Middle Eastern flavour reminiscent of heady Arabian nights.

Sour cherry frozen yoghurt

2 x 500g tubs full-fat Total natural yoghurt (Total is my preferred brand as I find it creamier than most)
75g caster sugar
2 tablespoons sour cherry jam

Mix the yoghurt well with the sugar. Transfer to an ice cream machine and churn until frozen. Decant into a tub and swirl through the jam. Freeze for an hour or so before serving.

That’s 3 different types of mango, not 3 individual fruits. I’m into combining different varieties of the same ingredient to maximise flavour, such as 2-garlic soup and this cheese and onion tart which uses 3 types of onion. While browsing around in Peckham the other day I noticed the variety of different mangoes available. I usually stick to Alphonsos when making sorbet but these other types were so cheap I couldn’t resist; basically because they were so ripe they were on the edge of going off. Perfect for making sorbet.

I wondered if the 3 varieties (help in identifying them please; there are thousands out there, I got confused) would combine to make one super-intense mango flavoured sorbet. The answer to this question is a whopping great yes. My boyfriend and I ate half the tub the first time we opened it which only leaves the other half for tonight. I am uncomfortable with the thought of being without the sorbet.

There’s something about mangoes which make them better than other fruit for sorbet-ing; they give a very silky-smooth texture which is more like ice cream than sorbet. Extremely satisfying. It’s relatively healthy too, using only 100g sugar. The rest is pure fruit and lime juice.

I should say that I made this in my shiny new Cuisinart ICE30BCU ice cream maker, which Cuisinart kindly sent me to try out (I’m a total whore when it comes to accepting kitchen kit for review). My old ice cream maker was a Magimix Le Glacier 1.1, which did my head in, not least because it had a tiny yet essential part which I (and loads of other people) lost on a regular basis. The Cuisinart model is large in comparison, but with a welcome sturdyness. It also has only 4 parts, large parts, which are easy to fit together. The bottom bowl still goes in the freezer but when it’s on, the bowl turns, not the paddle. This makes it much less likely to break. It takes no time to churn. In short, I love it. And that’s not just because it was free. If you don’t believe that last bit, you can see what I said about the free breadmaker.

So there.

3 Mango Sorbet

Er, 7 mangoes like the ones above. Sorry I didn’t weigh the flesh. The mangoes in the middle are the ones you would easily find in supermarkets, to give you an idea of size. Quantities won’t matter too much though, just get yourself a variety of mangoes.
3 limes
100g icing sugar

Scoop the flesh from the mangoes into a blender. Add the sugar and lime juice and blend. You could then pass the mixture through a sieve to remove any fibrous bits but I didn’t bother. Tip into an ice cream machine and churn until frozen.

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, tip the mixture into a freezer-proof container and freeze. After a couple of hours, remove from the freezer and blend again. Freeze again. If you have time, repeat the process once more.

This recipe was inspired by my student days; vodka watermelons were very popular around that time and we spent days force funnelling the things until they were suitably saturated with the cheapest liquor we could find. A supermarket ‘basics’ brand or Glen’s being our budget poison of choice.

My tastes are a little more sophisticated nowadays (I said a little) and I’d like to tell you nothing but the finest went into this recipe but the truth is that the end of a bottle of Smirnoff was languishing so I used that. The vodka flavour wasn’t exactly pronounced though so my advice is as follows: get yourself a decent bottle then add a wee slosh on top of the sorbet in the bowl. Total refreshment, with a punch. Phwoar.

Watermelon and Vodka Sorbet

1.2 kg watermelon (that’s how much mine weighed after I’d removed skin and seeds)
3 tablespoons lime juice
200g caster sugar
3 tablespoons vodka, plus extra to serve
A few slivers of mint leaf, to serve (optional)

Cut the watermelon into wedges and remove the flesh from the skin with a knife. Chop into large slices and do your best to remove the seeds (the mixture will be passed through a sieve later so don’t worry about a few stragglers).

Put the watermelon chunks in a blender with the sugar and lime juice and blend to a liquid. Now pass it through the sieve into a bowl. Try to push as much of the melon pulp through as possible, not just the liquid. Churn the mixture in an ice cream machine until sorbet-like. Mine took about 20 minutes but my watermelon was well chilled, it could take half an hour.

To serve, let it rest out of the freezer for a good 10 to 15 minutes, otherwise it will just break up like a granita when you try and scoop it. Dribble a little vodka into the bowl and scatter on the mint, if using.

Brown bread ice cream might sound weird but it’s actually one of the best flavours ever invented. Fact. Crumbs are caramelised in the oven with brown sugar and butter until gooey malt; the edges crisp and the centre remains soft so the final effect is like Ben and Jerry’s cookies n cream with chewy, dough-like pieces flecked throughout.

I got thinking along the lines of toast and jam; lots of nutty caramel from the crumbs and a ripple of sweet (high-fruit) raspberry jam running through. This is about as old English as it gets: a Victorian recipe with a ripple in it. Gawjuss.

Brown bread ice cream with a raspberry jam ripple (I used Keiko’s recipe as a starting point)

4 medium egg yolks
45g caster sugar
1/2 tablespoon vanilla paste (I used Nielsen-Massey vanilla paste from a jar but you can use half a vanilla pod or a little vanilla extract)
80g crust-less wholemeal bread (make sure it doesn’t have any seeds)
1 teaspoon cornflour
250ml semi-skimmed milk (use whole if you want to but I don’t think it necessary for this recipe)
40g butter
50g light brown sugar
250ml double cream
High-fruit raspberry jam (not too much sugar basically), for rippling

Preheat the oven to 180C

Whiz up the bread to make crumbs. Melt the butter then mix it with the crumbs and light brown sugar. Spread this mixture out on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes, until the crumbs are crisp. They may remain a bit soft and chewy in the middle but this is a good thing. Allow them to cool completely then break them up into crumbs again; make sure to leave some big bits.

Pour the milk into a heavy-based saucepan, add the vanilla paste and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and leave for 15 minutes to infuse.

In an electric mixer or in a large bowl with a hand whisk, beat the egg yolks, sugar and cornflour until thick and pale. Pour over the hot milk very slowly, whisking constantly. Return the mixture to the pan and cook it over a very gentle heat, stirring all the time. After a while the custard will begin to thicken slightly; when it coats the back of a spoon it is ready. Cover with a cartouche of greaseproof paper and leave to cool.

Stir the cream into the custard, tip into an ice cream machine and churn until thick. Stir the crumbs into the mixture, churn for 5-10 minutes until ready to serve. If you let your ice cream get too thick before you’ve added the crumbs, just stir them in by hand. Tip your ice cream into a freezer proof tub. If your ice cream is rather soft at this point, stick it in the freezer for an hour before adding your ripple. To add the ripple, take a tablespoonful or so of the jam and put in a bowl, mix it very well with a spoon to loosen it up. Put dollops of the jam on top of the ice cream and use a skewer to create a ripple effect.

A few weeks ago I went on a foraging walk around the green bits of Peckham (yes, there are green bits) and came back with a load of sloes and rosehips, not a load of wayward hair extensions and chicken bones as the cynics among you might expect. The walk was led by a lady called Penelope who is known locally for ‘Pickling Peckham‘ (it’s an ‘urban foragers guide’). She is very knowledgeable about the local fauna and although most of the good stuff was gone, I’ve noted some of the spots she showed us for next year.

When I looked around for rosehip recipes, it seemed that all anyone ever did with them was make a syrup. Would it work as a ripple through ice cream? Oh yes, yes it would. The flavour of the hips is something like a cranberry but more aromatic; swirled through a basic vanilla ice cream it’s heavenly. I warmed through a little extra syrup and drizzled it over the ice cream to serve. Saucy.

Rosehip Ripple Ice Cream

First, make your syrup. I used Hugh F-W’s recipe here. Basically you just need equal quantities of sugar and rosehips, plus some water and a clean tea towel or muslin to strain the syrup. I’ll repeat the recipe here in case that link stops working (in halved quantities, which is what I used to get the 2 jars of syrup you see in the photo above).

500g caster sugar
500g rosehips (picked over, stalks removed and washed thoroughly)
A clean tea towel or some muslin
Water

Bring 1 litre of water to the boil in a saucepan. Roughly chop the rosehips and add them to the water. Bring back to the boil then remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 30 minutes.

Line a colander with your tea towel or muslin and set it over a bowl. Strain the rosehip mixture through it, squeezing to extract all the liquid. Set the bowl aside. Return the rosehip pulp to the saucepan with another 500ml of water, bring to the boil, take off the heat, then leave to infuse for 30 minutes .

Strain through the muslin or tea towel as before then return all the reserved syrup to a saucepan. Bring to the boil and boil until the volume has decreased by half. Remove from the heat.

Stir in the sugar until dissolved, return to the heat and boil hard for 5 minutes. Pour into sterilised jars.

To make the ice cream

I found this recipe in a book which accompanies a John Lewis ice cream maker. I made it in my Magimix with no problems. It’s a very easy recipe that doesn’t require you to faff about making a custard. It instead makes a soft ice cream not unlike an old school ice cream van variety.

225ml whole milk
450ml double cream
125g granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Put the milk and sugar into a bowl and stir with a whisk until all the sugar has dissolved. Stir in the cream and vanilla extract then cover the mixture and refrigerate for an hour if possible. Turn on your ice cream maker and pour in the mixture. Churn until you have a soft ice cream. Pour into a tub then freeze for a few hours until it has firmed up slightly (if you try to ripple it when too soft the ripple will just blend in too much).

When you have a firmer ice cream, drizzle some of the rosehip syrup over the ice cream and stir through to create a ripple effect. I drizzled a little extra warmed syrup over to serve.

Next time, I might try making a sorbet from the syrup first for a thicker ripple.