I keep photographing the wrong things. We’ve had some lovely, bright colourful things like roast new potatoes with watercress and orange and mustard as a sort-of warm salad, or comforting fried Polish sausage with apple and, err, more potatoes. But what have I stopped to snap? Beige food.
This is a riff on a celery sauce for chicken (I’d recommend chicken stock in the soup) from Niki Segnit’s Flavour thesaurus. Once a Victorian staple, I gather (the sauce, not the book). Key flavours: celery, lemon, nutmeg.
As with the Flavoursaurus, I turn to Jane Grigson’s Fruit book for inspiration with tired ingredients. At the moment we just coming into the village pear season, so I thought I’d try her intriguing ‘Italian pear pie, intriguing initially because it includes mixed peel.
Subsequently intriguing because the recipe is a bit ‘add some cinnamon’, ‘sprinkle over an unspecified quantity of peel’, ‘bake in a moderate oven’. And includes the measurement ‘2tbs’, which has me baffled, especially as it’s equivalent to 1 tablespoon.
Anyway, the end result is … OK. The pears weren’t terribly flavoursome, I don’t think, and she has you make a slightly strange icing that’s supposed to have rose water but I didn’t have it, so added some vanilla essence instead. And it’s very beige.
Look, this week I’ve even made chilli-roast broccoli look dull. (Broc, dried chilli, fennel seeds, lemon, garlic, generous olive oil, stirred through with bulgar wheat.)
But, a little bit of dull is no bad thing, given the circs?
Comforting, stodgy blandness.
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- 8oz self-raising flour
- 2 oz fat, melted (honestly, all that ‘rub it in to make breadcrumbs’ business isn’t always necessary)
- 1 egg
- Splash milk
- Small lump hard cheese
- Half a sharp apple, diced
- Half a red onion, ditto
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| Beige soup |
- A celery (the older the better)
- Cauli leaves (ditto)
- Fennel bulb (ditto)
- Anything else green you have lurking (broccoli stems, that sort of thing), onion, etc
- Stock of choice
- Fennel seeds
- Lemon zest
- Vermouth
- White pepper
- Nutmeg
This is a riff on a celery sauce for chicken (I’d recommend chicken stock in the soup) from Niki Segnit’s Flavour thesaurus. Once a Victorian staple, I gather (the sauce, not the book). Key flavours: celery, lemon, nutmeg.
 |
| Pear tart |
As with the Flavoursaurus, I turn to Jane Grigson’s Fruit book for inspiration with tired ingredients. At the moment we just coming into the village pear season, so I thought I’d try her intriguing ‘Italian pear pie, intriguing initially because it includes mixed peel.
Subsequently intriguing because the recipe is a bit ‘add some cinnamon’, ‘sprinkle over an unspecified quantity of peel’, ‘bake in a moderate oven’. And includes the measurement ‘2tbs’, which has me baffled, especially as it’s equivalent to 1 tablespoon.
 |
| Any ideas? |
Anyway, the end result is … OK. The pears weren’t terribly flavoursome, I don’t think, and she has you make a slightly strange icing that’s supposed to have rose water but I didn’t have it, so added some vanilla essence instead. And it’s very beige.
Look, this week I’ve even made chilli-roast broccoli look dull. (Broc, dried chilli, fennel seeds, lemon, garlic, generous olive oil, stirred through with bulgar wheat.)
But, a little bit of dull is no bad thing, given the circs?
These all (except the pears a bit) sounds delicious, so looks definitely aren't everything.
ReplyDeleteTbs. Tbs? I have nothing.