Paris, autumn salads and wedding cakes
9 October 2023
This week
We are in an unusual time when the food writers are doing cosy meals for the autumn when the temperatures in London are going up to 23C and the skies are blue.
I’ve cooked from Diana Henry’s book ‘Roast figs, Sugar Snow’ etc, when my brother and sister-in-law came round, the ham and haddie here on the Waitrose website, and the pecan and pear upside-down cake but using blackberries instead of cranberries as I had some in my freezer. I also made the salad of pears, hazelnuts and Cashel Blue cheese, pictured above. All delicious. We’ve had our best ever crop on our 8 year old quince tree of 54 quinces; yes, we did count them. Now I’m going back to Roast figs to look for savoury recipes with quince. There’s only so much membrillo and quince jelly I can make.
Diana Henry has three hearty comfort food recipes for autumn, pork schnitzel with hunter’s sauce, meatballs with quince and chestnut (one for me to bookmark) and beetroot, apple and spelt salad with hazelnuts and pumpkin seeds
In the Times, chef Dom Taylor shares his recipes for his jerk chicken, curry goat and rum punch as well as dark rum and raisin pork belly and lemongrass, pimento and ginger baked sea bream. He was a Professional Masterchef winner and, in conjunction with Michel Roux, has his first restaurant, The Good Front Room at the Langham Hotel in London.
Nigel Slater’s recipes in the Observer for hazelnut meringues with chocolate and berries, plus an aubergine confit which looks interesting. I’ve never seen one before and will have a go this week.
Grape and bean salad by Honey and Co in the FT, made with roasted onions, grapes and a tin or jar of beans.
The Guardian has finished its themed issues which didn’t always seem to fit its stellar writers. Rukmini Iyer, who wrote the series of ‘Roasting Tin’ books is their new columnist with a series on weekday meals and, in her first column, does recipes for pea, tarragon and cream cheese tart, and sweetcorn fritters with halloumi, avocado and honey.
Ottolenghi is cooking with vinegar with harissa vinegar chicken with chicory, orange and paneer scramble with sweet pickled red onions and jalapeño hot sauce which might make a good present. There’s a Japanese keema curry with courgette fritters by Meera Sodha and Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for salted maple treacle tart.
Jose Pizarro does pumpkin pisto which is a soup and not a pesto made with pumpkin seeds as I thought initially. I have bought all the ingredients but didn’t get round to it because of all the cakes (see below).
Skye McAlpine in the Sunday Times does recipes for cakes with vegetables. I am not a fan of putting vegetables into cake apart from carrot cake. She makes a carrot and hazelnut cake, a sweet potato and chocolate marble cake and a spiced pumpkin and amaretto cake with a nice sounding icing made with buttercream icing laced with marzipan and amaretto.
My elder daughter promised a close friend that she would make her wedding cake and she roped in me to help. Yesterday, we had the official tasting with the happy couple. We had stretched the boundaries of our culinary expertise and made Swiss meringue butter cream for the first time with brown butter and lemon, and lemon and elderflower flavours. We made two different carrot cakes recipes, two different lemon cakes, lemon curd and raspberry curd. The winner, after much debate and much fun had by all, was my mother’s lemon Victoria sponge which is going to be sandwiched together with raspberry curd and covered in a very lemony Swiss meringue buttercream.
Books
Manju’s Cookbook by Manju Patel
in the Telegraph with a Gujarati feast of cauliflower and pea curry, okra and potato curry, dal, and banana frittersÂ
RestaurantsÂ
In the FT, Tim Hayward confessed to ‘being a broth head.’
In the Guardian, Grace Dent went to Palmito, a Latin American restaurant in Brighton, and said ‘it’s a tiny, semi-orderly explosion of flavour on the Brighton/Hove border, and reserving one of its 20 seats is already a battle, so nobody living nearby will thank me for visiting.’
In the Observer, Jay Rayner was at Fin Boys in Cambridge, a fish restaurant in Cambridge. and thought ‘It’s a restaurant driven by both an obsession with fishy detail and a profound instinct to feed. The result is completely compelling.’
In the Standard, Jimi Famurewa was at the new site in London W1 for Adejoké Bakare’s Chisuru, a West African restaurant and thought ‘she is still one of the most blisteringly gifted and original chefs in the city. She will only get better and better.’Â
In the Sunday Times, Charlotte Ivers went to Coq d’Argent and I thought it was more a feature about the City of London twenty years ago than a restaurant reviewÂ
In the Telegraph, William Sitwell reported that he was determined to enjoy Alexis Gauthier's new vegan restaurant, Studio Gauthier, ‘but the whole episode left me yearning for natural simplicity and that joy of actual food, cooked.’
In the Times, Giles Coren finally visited 64 Goodge St in LondonW1 after all the other critics have been, raved about it and reflected, ‘that with prices the way they are just now, you genuinely could not afford to eat out like this any more if you were not a restaurant critic. And you feel your readers’ pain that they are not. You honestly, truly do.’Â
Is this irritating or is it just me?Â
Travel
UK
The Cotswolds town of Charlbury has long been a haunt for the great and the good – now it has the hip hotels and restaurants it deserves in the Telegraph
Ten of the best pubs for autumn colour in the Guardian.
Europe
I would like to go to Paris to see the Rothko Exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton as described in the Times as I think it’s also the most amazing building and the Guardian has where best to enjoy autumn in Paris.
A micro guide on how to spend a day in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin’s coolest neighbourhood in the Independent. They think that this trendy quarter, and its sub-district of Oderberger Strasse, is the best place to stay on a Berlin city break. Baden Baden in the FT
The Times thinks that Sorrento, on the Amalfi coast in Italy, is at its best in winter. ‘It gets even sweeter, with year-round lemons and locals who swim in the sea right up until Christmas’
A guide to the Spanish port city of La Coruña in the Times which they deem a must-visit for ‘foodies, as it offers ‘unpretentious, reasonably priced fine dining, independent breweries and Europe’s longest promenade.’
