Me stirring the sauce for lunch

So my first day in Ethiopia has been spent visiting the homes of families who have been helped by World Vision. Wow. The stories told by the women I’ve met about how their lives have been literally transformed have been incredible. I’ve lots to say and lots to think about.

Today I was struck by how we’ve become desensitised to the significance of sitting down to a meal with other people. I’m talking about the way that people eat in front of the television, or indeed walking down the street. I recently ate a hamburger doing just that. Eating in the street is something that’s simply not done in Ethiopia. Mealtimes are very significant here; food may not be abundant but it is served with generosity, hugely so; I found myself having to refuse at one point today, I was just so full. Ethiopians do not eat alone, they share and also they feed each other, a practice called ‘gursha’ – scooping up a piece of injera plus whatever stews and vegetables are on it, fashioning it into a little bundle and feeding it to the mouth of your family/friend/neighbour/complete stranger.

Today we were invited into the home of a woman called Hannah, literally with open arms. Hannah is a lady who has had support from World Vision, meaning she has gone from literally living on the streets, to having a home, making a living offering a laundry service to people in the community and sending her children to school and college. Her daughter is now studying computer science, volunteers for the Red Cross and wants to become a doctor. Incredible.

Hannah preparing food

Red bean sauce

We arrive at Hannah’s house as she is cooking, her kitchen consisting of a small area for chopping, a work surface and several burners; it’s an excellent use of a small space. Onions and garlic sizzle in one pot, a bright red bean stew plops away in another. A bowl on the floor contains green chillies and potatoes, another a leaf that looks like a cross between spinach and chard. It’s thrilling. The injera is made out the back, in her storage room full of hanging pots and pans and she has a stack to ready to show (and feed) us (they last about 4 days before spoiling).

Storage room, where injera is also made

Injera

The smells tantalise and we sit down to eat; a huge plate of injera arrives, rolled up at the sides like giant cushions and topped with various dishes – it’s a fasting season (for the next two months, up until Easter, many people are Orthodox Christians) and there’s no meat but everything is so full of flavour I am surprised to learn this. There’s a real intensity to the food. Some of the red bean sauce we’ve seen her cook and *cough* I have ‘helped’ to cook by er, stirring the pot a bit arrives and is poured on to the injera; there’s a red lentil stew, potatoes, a yellow lentil dish, whole green chillies and, my favourite of all, the spinach like leaf, flavoured with garlic, onions and chilli.

Lunch!

We all dive in, tearing and scooping; everyone huddled around the small table eating with our hands. Every time we pause for even a single second Hannah asks ‘why you not eat?!’ She has no worries where I’m concerned; I can’t get enough. We feed each other as part of the ‘gursha’ tradition.

Then it’s time for coffee. The Ethiopians make some of the best coffee in the world and there’s a whole ceremony to go with it. First beans are toasted over a fire, the flames fanned with a brush. Suddenly Hannah rushes towards us with the hot pan, flicking water into it as it hisses and spits, steam everywhere; she wafts the pan under our faces to let us smell the beans – bit of a shock that and very dramatic. She then grinds them with a pestle and mortar while burning incense. We drink the finished coffee black with plenty of sugar and BOOM! It’s so strong, and so good. The Ethiopians never drink coffee alone, they will call neighbours around to share it; coffee drinking is when all the issues that need discussing get thrashed out.

Toasting coffee beans

Pounding the beans

The preparation of food here takes time and effort and is so central to cultural practices and economic survival. I share meals with friends and family often, but I wondered today how much the real importance of cooking for others and breaking bread has sometimes passed me by. Mealtimes, in a way, represent stability. A place to cook, a place to serve, a place to share. Hannah can now, thankfully, count on 3 meals a day for her family, when often it used to be just one. She is extremely grateful. ‘Take my kitten!’* She says, half joking. ‘In fact, take me! It’s the least I can offer!’
Tomorrow I visit a group of HIV positive women who are taking part in a World Vision Development programme to improve their lives and the lives of their families by making the Ethiopian staple, injera. I can’t wait to hear their stories.

*I almost took the kitten.

Top photo courtesy of Kayla Robertson – World Vision

I am currently in – you’ve guessed it – Ethiopia. As we descended into Addis Ababa this morning on an overnight flight, the ground looked like an undulating patchwork quilt of browns and greens, snaked through with curly rivers and the odd road. It looked pretty much how I’d imagined it.

What do you think of when you think of Ethiopia? For most it has an image that’s stuck in the 80′s – small children crying, malnourished, with distended bellies and big pleading eyes. There is still poverty here of course, but now Ethiopia has the fifth fastest growing economy in the world, the second in Africa. The country has changed at a staggering rate in the past 20-30 years and that’s why I’m here, to learn about what’s changed, and also what still needs to be done.

The charity who have organised the trip are called World Vision, and the campaign I’m here to write about is called Enough Food For Everyone IF. It’s a collaboration between many charities and organisations, who are working together with the aim of ending the global hunger crisis. As they put it, ‘the world produces enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food’.

As I said, this is a collaborative effort, and in order for the campaign to be a success it needs action on the part of millions of people around the world. If we can all do one small thing to change the way we buy our food or consume it, then the collective effect could be immense. I’ll be coming back to this in later posts.

So what will I be doing out here? Well I’ll be travelling to visit World Vision projects, such as a group of HIV positive women who are making injera, something I am very excited about. If you’re not familiar, injera is a staple flatbread, like a giant bubbly crumpet, made from a fermented teff or wheat flour mixture. All food is served on top of it and indeed eaten with it as pieces are torn off and used to scoop up food with the hands. It’s eaten at least twice a day here. As much as I’m excited about the injera however, I’m also keen to learn about some of the other foods Ethiopians eat; I visit Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurants regularly in the UK, but beyond the staples, I’m clueless. I expect many of you are too.

I’ll also be visiting World Vision health and agricultural projects, learning about how the country has developed since the famines in the 80s. There’s going to be a huge amount to think about. I’m excited and also kind of nervous. How will I feel seeing everything I’m about to see? Slightly guilty perhaps? Inspired? Sad? Elated? Shocked? I think it’s going to be a huge emotional merry go round.

Tomorrow is the first day of our adventure, and I’m the keenest of beans to get started. I just hope my words can do it justice.

Never have I felt more of a middle class tosser than when I stumbled in drunk one evening and exclaimed, loudly and with much enthusiasm, ‘LET’S SOUS VIDE A QUINCE!‘ I then proceeded to heat up the sous vide, put the fruit inside and promptly forget about it. Excellent.

Things that work sous vide, I’ve come to realise, are cuts of meat like pork belly which need long cooking to break down the gnarly bits. That said, I cooked a piece of lamb belly which I thought would work brilliantly and it came out like a big chewy piece of fat, which essentially, it was; the worst thing about that was the fact I’d invited five other people around to eat it.

Eggs work well, though I’m not sure I’ll be busting out the machine every time I want to eat one (read: I won’t); the most amusing bit  is when you crack open the shell and a poached egg just plops out.

Anyway, I’d not tried fish or seafood yet, and after hearing mixed results I decided to steer clear of fillets and go for something that’s notoriously difficult to tenderise; the octopus. I bought a ready frozen octopus, which immediately takes care of one step of the process (freezing helps to tenderise).

So I picked up a 1.5kg beast  for the downright shocking sum of £18. When I was in the fishmonger I heard someone shouting EIGHTEEN POUNDS! and then realised that it was me. I tweeted about this afterwards and loads of people answered saying helpful things like ‘I bought a huge one in Lewisham market for £2.50 the other day!’ but although I have fairly shonky standards on many things, I’m not sure I’ll ever begrudge paying a lot of money to know that I’m getting decent seafood. Still, octopus is expensive, FYI.

So it was defrosted, unpacked, hacked and re-(vac)-packed with some garlic cloves, parsley stalks and olive oil. I had intentions of dressing it afterwards with chilli, garlic, parsley and lemon, mainly because that sounded summery and I’m sick of winter. I cooked it for 4 hours at 85 degrees as suggested by many online sources. When it emerged however, the bag contained an alarming amount of red liquid. It basically looked like an octopus in a bag of blood. I e-mailed an on-line fishmonger whom I trust and he said that although octopus can leach some red liquid occasionally when over cooked, he’d never seen anything to this extent. He even contacted the executive chef at Brindisa (“they cook a lot of octopus”), who apparently had no idea either. So, how did it taste?

The answer is: I don’t know. Neither I nor my partner of equally strong stomach could bring ourselves to eat it (hungover? What? Me?). This fact coupled with some er, logistical issues (basically the octopus being in a different house to the one we were in come dinner time) means that I effectively pissed £18 up the wall, not to mention wasted a good octopus and that just makes me feel SICK, quite frankly.

So me and the sous vide are having a bad run; first the lamb, then the drunken quince incident and now the case of the bloody octopus. Bad luck comes in threes?

If anyone has any ideas about what went wrong then please do pipe up…

Last year I went to Georgia; a country I would never have considered visiting had I not been invited. As is often the way when one doesn’t expect these things, I completely fell in love with the place; the people, the culture, the wine and most of all, the food. Since then it’s been a mission to try and perfect recipes and also to seek out Georgian food in London. On the cooking front, khachapuri has been something of an obsession; it’s basically a cheese-stuffed bread, made with an incredibly salty Georgian cheese – we’re talking more salty than halloumi; being a complete and utter salt whore, I adored it. I lugged 6 khachapuri back on the plane with me and ate them, cold, for several days after my return, mourning their diminishing number with every bite.

Khachapuri in Georgia 

Also on the Georgia trip with me was Kerstin Rodgers, who took a similar liking to this supremely comforting  bread. We tried cooking a recipe from The Georgian Feast, an award winning cook book, but it just wasn’t right at all. We didn’t have the correct cheese but it wasn’t just that. Not the kind of people to give up, we got together recently to give khachapuri another try, using Ottolenghi’s recipe from Jerusalem. It worked a treat. I even managed to find sulguni in a Russian deli in Queensway (Kalinka), which I believe is one of the only if not the only place in London that sells it. They also sell Armenian cognac in bottles shaped like AK47s. One of those got bought, obviously; the last in the shop. When we requested to buy it the lady behind the counter got her walkie talkie out and started speaking frantically in Russian.

Oh how we feasted. Ottolenghi also includes a substitute cheese filling, and that also tastes really quite authentic. Read Kerstin’s post about our khachapuri making evening here; we tried just about every type of random cheese London had to offer (you’ll also get a story about my love life while you’re over there).

Sulguni cheese

Magnificent ‘Ajarian’ (boat shaped) khachapuri cooked in Kerstin’s Aga (and served on a very beautiful tray…)

‘Megruli’ (circular, stuffed) khachapuri, again cooked in the Aga

I also had great success cooking a recipe for BBQ pork and plum sauce in the summer; these spice rubbed skewers was everywhere in Georgia, grilled over hot coals in a pit in the ground and served with sliced raw shallots and a sour/sweet, dill heavy plum sauce. I was amazed at how authentic my plum sauce tasted; although our plums are completely different, the unripe ones we get in the supermarkets are perfect as they’re just as sour. A use for unripe supermarket fruit. Who knew?

Pork grilling in Georgia

The finished pork in Georgia

My Georgian BBQ pork

My Georgian plum sauce

Seeking out authentic tasting Georgian food in London has been much more hit and miss. First I visited Colchis, which is a kind of poshed up Georgian restaurant in Notting Hill;  each to their own, but having visited the country, that’s just the most bizarre concept and it didn’t sit well or indeed taste particularly good. My next experience was completely unexpected, coming as it did from the Pasha Hotel in Camberwell, where I spotted khachapuri on the menu in their Kazakh Kyrgyz restaurant. It was nothing at all like the examples I tasted in Georgia, made from a flaky pastry rather than a bread. It did taste rather nice however and I liked the idea of serving it with raw onion.

And so to my best restaurant experience yet: The Georgian in Clapham South. During the day it’s a somewhat run of the mill cafe serving the usual sandwiches and hot drinks but during the evening they serve Georgian food. I’ll be honest, they seemed surprised to see me when I walked in at 6.30 and a woman initially tried to speak to me in Georgian.

All the classics were there on the menu and I was properly excited. The khachapuri was rather good; nowhere near as oily as the real  thing (I really liked the supreme unhealthiness of the oil) but very tasty nonetheless. The best I’ve had in a restaurant by miles.

Pkhali are pureed vegetables mixed with walnuts, which are abundant in Georgia; we chose spinach and beetroot. They’re like a rich vegetable spread, intense with garlic and dotted with pomegranate seeds. In Georgia each ball is always studded with just one pomegranate seed, like a little jewel nestling in the top.

We stuffed ourselves full of traditional Georgian dumplings, called khinkali, which have very thick and rustic casings, filled with minced meats and their juices and heavily flavoured with black pepper. They take some careful eating; the way to do it is to hold them by the nipple at the top and carefully bite in. We ate them with a green chilli sauce, which was really fierce.

Dumplings with green chilli sauce at The Georgian

The Georgian is the best Georgian place I’ve been to in London so far and I want more people to visit because we were the only evening diners. At the moment they’re clearly frequented more for coffee and cakes which is sad, they ought to be serving many more of their excellent Georgian dishes.

I’ll continue working my way around London’s Georgian restaurants however; I’ve heard that Little Georgia is good. Does anyone have any favourite places?

Diet? January? Pah! I’m sorry but we need insulation during this snowy month and I’m all about blubbering up. Okay I’m actually going to join the gym as soon as I get paid. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks eating things like langos, an Italian feast and my own bodyweight in melted cheese at Forza Winter. Oh and after Forza Winter I ordered a pizza at 2am. And then finished it for breakfast. And then and then and then and theeeeen. So you see I need to cut down on the cheese intake and up it on the veg side of things, which is how this cauli tagine came about.

The cauli is one of my favourite vegetables, and the once poor, unloved brassica is now apparently back in favour. I’ve wanted to steam one whole for ages and it seemed perfect for the tagine; it would cook gently inside, picking up all the spiced aromas over and hour or so. It would also look pretty snazzy on zee table.

I streaked the top of the brain-like cauli with saffron steeped in water; a flavour I used to hate with a passion. I found it soapy and unpleasant. The most expensive spice in the world? Didn’t get it. Well, I did; it’s very laborious to harvest of course but still. I’ve come to like it through cooking Iranian food and although I still wouldn’t count it among my favourite flavours, it sure does look purdy and I find it fragrant when used with appropriate modesty.

The cauli was cooked in a rich, thick sauce of onions, garlic, tomatoes and a few dried apricots, with a dried lime for a sour note; dried limes are amazing, when plucked from the bag they smell like lime sherbet. Spices went in, whole and ground; the onions taking on a beautiful amber hue from the turmeric.

It took rather longer to cook than I’d imagined, which has been my experience with the tagine thus far. I predicted an hour – it was more like one and a half. We ate it with a minty cous cous and a yoghurty drizzle effort which was basically yog mixed with diced pickled lemon and some garlic, briefly simmered to take the fiery edge off.

A seriously satisfying dish and, all importantly, insulating. I felt sufficiently sleepy, particularly when curled up with a glass of red and some Attenborough on the laptop. In bed by half past nine. Result.

Whole Cauli Tagine (serves 4, I’d say)

1 whole cauliflower
2 tins chopped tomatoes
2 large onions, thickly sliced
4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 cinnamon stick
6 cardamom pods (I like cardamom, a lot)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 scant teaspoon ground turmeric
1 dried red chilli
Pinch saffron (optional and like, totally not necessary)
1 dried lime
Handful dried apricots (preferably Persian)

Start by heating up the tagine slowly. Add some oil, then sling in the onions. Let them cook slowly for about 10 minutes. Toast the cumin and coriander seeds in a dry pan until fragrant, then crush in a pestle and mortar with the dried chilli. Add to the tagine with the other spices and the garlic. Continue cooking for a further 10 minutes or so. Add the tomatoes and dried lime, plus the apricots. Let the sauce cook down for 20-30 minutes until it’s starting to look all thick and gooey and lush. Season the sauce with salt and pepper.

Remove all the leaves from the cauliflower then trim down the base so it’s all nice and neat. Place the cauli on top of the sauce. If you want to use the saffron, steep it in a little boiling water for 5 minutes then steak across the top of the cauli. Put the lid on and cook on a gentle heat for about 1 hour to 1.5 hours, depending on the size of your cauli. When it’s tender, it’s cooked.

Serve with herby cous cous (I used mint and parsley) and yoghurt with chopped preserved lemons and garlic which has been simmered to take the edge off, then crushed.

Sometimes life just throws you a bone. In fact, I think life must just be throwing me whole skeletons because I am one lucky lady when I sit back and actually think about it. The amount of really cool, properly geeky food people I know is just awesome. Florian is one of these people. I believe we first met over dinner at The Ten Bells. We then proceeded to organise a food tour of South London together in which we took 21 people (some coming all the way from Germany) to see the best of Peckham, Camberwell and Brixton. We did a restaurant crawl, cooked a meal together using ingredients we’d bought at Brockley Market, Persepolis and on Rye Lane. We lunched at Frog on The Green, visited the Brickhouse Bakery and had a tour of Brixton Market. Phew!

So anyway now Florian is involved with a company called wearethesauce.com, importing some incredible produce from around the world; at present, Campania (I WANT HIS JOB). He proposed we cook an Italian feast with the ingredients from one of the boxes and so of course I said yes please let me at it now now now now NOW.

We started with mozzarella in carozza, which didn’t quite work because I couldn’t bring myself to use shitty plastic bread with the awesome mozz. I know, I never usually have a problem with these things, right? Should have trusted my instincts. Good quality bread is way too sturdy and the mozz wasn’t able to melt inside. Still, bread and cheese, innit. Pretty tasty. I made a thinly sliced courgette salad (very seasonal, ahem), topped with chilli, basil, olive oil and the most incredible ricotta I’ve ever tasted. It had a slight smoky flavour and was rich and creamy; a far cry from that thin tasting shite we get in supermarkets.

We ate slices of cured meats alongside. A salsiccia spiced with fennel and a soppressata with an amazing core of pure milky white neck fat. Florian told me that he ‘almost cried with joy’ when he first cut into it.

Then, pasta with bagnoli truffles, mushrooms and shitloads of butter. Healthy. The truffles are different to more familiar truffs and are likely to divide palates. Raw, they smell like petrol and need cooking to mellow them down. We beefed the dish with portabella mushrooms. Intense.

Grilled sea bream for the main course, baked in the oven with spring onions, lemon and herbs, salsa verde and fennel on the side. For dessert, a lemon and ricotta tart with more of that incredible cheese and the juice and candied rind of fragrant Amalfi lemons; they really are famous for a reason. We burnt the top of the tart but hey, it was fluffily gorgeous underneath. I’d love to make an Amalfi lemon sorbet in the summer.

We ate and drank and ate and drank and laughed and chatted until late (Ish. Look, it was a school night, okay?). Good friends are the ones who bring you boxes of stunning ingredients from Italy, no? Oh, and let us not forget THE LARGEST LEMON IN THE WORLD*

* It is called a procida lemon and can be used to make BOOZE! The pith can also be eaten in salads! It’s a beautiful freak to be sure.

Visit wearethesauce.com to get your very own box of hard to obtain and truly exciting ingredients.

Courgette Salad with Ricotta and Chilli

2 young slender courgettes
1 red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
Approx 200g ricotta di bufala
Handful basil leaves, finely sliced
Lemon juice (preferably Amalfi), about half a lemon
Extra virgin olive oil

Slice the courgettes very thinly and lay out on a plate. In a small bowl, whisk together the lemon juice with 4 tablespoons of the olive oil. Sprinkle the courgettes with coarse salt and pepper. Sprinkle over the chilli. Crumble over the ricotta. Drizzle with dressing. Sprinkle over basil leaves. Serve.

So I’m having dinner with my Hungarian friend Gergely and he’s waving his arms excitedly in the air, getting all nostalgic for langos. During the conversation I get the impression very quickly that Hungarian food is all about insulating; it’s cold there in the winter, innit. Although apparently they eat it on the beach too so er, yeah. Basically a lot of the food seems to be rib sticking, fatty, carb loaded and in this case, deep fried. I am instantly all over it like a particularly vicious rash. It’s always good to talk about unpleasant physical complaints when describing one’s enthusiasm for food, don’t you think?

So on Sunday Gergely came to my house and taught me how to make langos and it was brilliant. He freaked me out by managing to get the dough to rise super fast in my rather cold kitchen, then we made sort of cow pat (sorry) sized discs of dough and plunged them into hot oil. A couple of minutes each side and they emerged golden and sizzling; is there anything more appealing than freshly fried dough? No, no there is not.

We’re not done yet though, because here comes the most important thing about langos – garlic water. The garlic water makes the langos special. It’s officially my new favourite thing and I have a lot of favourite things on the go right now. Basically you just get an absolute shit load of garlic and whack it in a jar with, you’ve guessed it, some water. Oh and a little bit of oil. You mix it together and the garlic kind of mellows but at the same time stays er, really strong. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway so you brush the freshly fried langos with the garlic water and the intensity of perfume created by the heat meeting the garlic is incredible.

Then it’s time to smear that dough with sour cream. I am assured that Hungarian sour cream is far superior and now of course I long for it. I had to make do with some regular stuff from Tesco Metro. Still, sour cream it was. To finish the langos, grated cheese. Yep. Oh and it absolutely has to be the shittiest cheapest most poorly produced ready grated cheese you can find, apparently. Gergely was very adamant about this. We bought some kind of basic stuff from Tesco and he instantly pronounced it ‘too good’.

Unsurprisingly I instantly fell in love with langos. It’s deep fried dough covered in garlic, sour cream and cheese FFS. We washed it down with Unicum which is like Hungarian Fernet Branca. I’d planned dinner afterwards. It didn’t happen. Gergely and his girlfriend rather impressively went straight on to dinner at Koffman’s. Respect.

Langos is the kind of food we should all be eating in January. Sod the diet, it’s cold and the Hungarians really know how to do food that keeps you warm.

You will however stink of garlic for 2 days.

Langos (makes loads)

1kg flour
2 sachets instant yeast
1 pint luke warm water
2 tablespoons sugar

Mix the sugar, yeast and water in a jug. Wait 5 minutes or so until the top is frothy, then mix with the flour to make a semi soft dough. Gergely did this with his hands. The dough should be really sloppy.

When the dough has doubled in size, oil a piece of foil, then add a drizzle of oil around the edges, which makes the dough come out of the bowl really easily (it is very sticky and won’t come out otherwise). Turn it out onto the foil, cut pieces and make little rounds, which are thinner in the middle.

Deep fry the fuckers.

For the garlic water and to assemble:

Mix about 10 cloves of garlic with a jam jar of water and a splash of oil. Leave for a couple of hours to infuse.

Thin the sour cream by whipping it with a bit of water.

To assemble, douse the langos with the garlic water, spread on sour cream and top with shitty grated cheese.

We did some crazy pimping with a bit of smoked salt and some fennel seeds, admittedly after we’d started on the Unicum.