There are few things sadder than a ‘chilli con carne’ done badly. Soggy mince; a sour, acidic tomato sauce; bullet-hard kidney beans straight from a can; the overpowering musk of cumin powder…this is a dish that is surprisingly easy to massacre. Perhaps it has something to do with being a student staple, much like its mince-sharing partner, spaghetti bolognese. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it is often served, entirely unimaginatively, with a bland canvas of white rice. Or perhaps it’s because bad chilli con carne can be smothered in cheese and crammed into a burrito and thereby turned into something vaguely acceptable, so why bother perfecting the thing?
Read moreFive things I love this week #10
1. Hutong, the Shard.
I won a meal at Hutong after taking part in the Cote de Rhone Chinese takeaway blogger challenge a few months ago. Last weekend, we made the (for me, stricken by vertigo, terrifying) journey high up the Shard to indulge in a leisurely four-hour, multi-course lunch in the gorgeous surroundings of Hutong. Resplendent with red lanterns, carved wood and ornate ironwork, you feel like you're eating lunch in old Shanghai or Hong Kong. We started with a pot of jasmine tea and some beautiful, delicate dim sum (crab; lobster; vegetable and bamboo; wagyu beef puffs; scallop and pumpkin; and some unusual dumpling parcels filled with a savoury, delicious meat broth that were unlike anything I've ever tasted before). Next came crispy duck, carved ceremoniously at the table, its lacquered skin sliced through like butter and placed in neat, glistening rows on a plate for us to enjoy with pancakes and hoi sin. The cocktails were incredible, presented like little glass-held meals in themselves, decorated lavishly with fresh herbs and fruit and bursting with unusual aromatic Eastern flavours.
Read moreFive things I love this week #7
1. Lentil salad with roast butternut squash, blue cheese, cranberries and chestnuts. I made this to use up some leftovers: roast squash, a piece of Yorkshire blue cheese, and half a pack of cooked chestnuts. It was definitely better than the sum of its parts. I cooked lentils in chicken stock with some thyme, then stirred in the roast squash, some dried cranberries which I'd soaked in hot water, sliced chestnuts, and some lemon thyme leaves. I crumbled over some blue cheese, and had a delicious earthy autumn feast. It also works very well with feta, which I tried the next day. In fact, I think I prefer the feta version, but the only photo I got was the blue cheese one. This is possibly the most festive, yet healthy, dish you will find. Plus, isn't it pretty?
2. Lakeland St Kew Teacup hamper. I was very kindly sent this adorable hamper by Lakeland recently, and I just had to write about it. Largely because it comes in a wicker basket shaped like a teacup, which I think is a fantastic idea. I'm planning to keep fruit in it once I've worked my way through the hamper ingredients - it looks lovely on my kitchen worktop - although Lakeland also suggest lining it and using it for planting herbs, which I think might be the quaintest idea ever for a herb garden. If only we could grow tea in this country, I would use it for that.
There's always something special about a hamper, and this is a really good size if you don't want to confer on someone a gigantic wicker box that's too heavy to do anything but gather dust in the attic. It's neat and a refreshing change from your standard hampers full of cheese and chutney that no one will ever eat (I have a special cupboard in my kitchen reserved just for unwanted jars of chutney - it's not that I don't like it, but I don't eat it nearly often enough to necessitate several jars every December).
St Kew make biscuits, preserves and confectionery to traditional, old-fashioned recipes, and this little hamper contains two packets of biscuits, some strawberry and champagne conserve, and English breakfast tea. My favourite biscuits were the 'fabulous oatie flips' which, despite their rather quirky name, are a gorgeous cross between a hobnob and shortbread. Essentially, they taste like a vanilla-y crumble topping, and I devoured them at an indecently fast rate. Despite their inclusion in a hamper alongside tea, I would not recommend dunking them in your tea unless you want to lose all that buttery crumblyness to the bottom of your cup. Eat them on their own, and I defy you to stop at just one (okay, five).
The strawberries and cream shortbread is also delicious; rich and buttery with the sweet tang of strawberry pieces. It's an idea I've never come across before and rather like. This would make a great gift for lovers of afternoon tea, although one thing is sadly lacking from it: freshly baked, oven-warm scones on which to slather the delicious strawberry and champagne conserve while sipping a cup of St Kew English breakfast tea.
I suppose you can't really be over-critical, though - it does come in an excellent basket, after all.
3. My new bowl. It may seem a bit odd to be telling you I bought a new bowl, but this is much more than a bowl. This is about what the bowl stands for. I found it in the oriental supermarket just down the road from my new house. With one glimpse I was back in Vietnam, hunched over a table barely a foot from the ground, wedged into a tiny plastic chair more suited for children, with beads of sweat on my skin and condensation dripping from my forehead from the steaming bowl of noodle broth in front of me. The air was rent by the droning of motorbikes and sticky with September humidity, while the aromas of sizzling meat and fish wafted past enticingly to the background music of multiple blenders whizzing up condensed milk and fresh mango smoothies.
Although the bowl I purchased was (obviously) empty, I could practically see the golden, crystal-clear broth with its scattering of vivid green herbs and tangle of chewy, slippery rice noodles.
I ate out of several bowls just like this on my travels this summer. While I am very happy in my new life up north in the UK, not a day goes by where I don't yearn to be in south east Asia again, or feel painfully nostalgic for those beautiful, beautiful four weeks. It may sound stupid, but every time I sit on the sofa with this bowl full of rice and a pair of chopsticks (purchased in Saigon) in my hand, it eases the pain just a little.
4. Sea Island Coffee. I'm not a coffee connoisseur, but I really like this coffee from Knightsbridge-based Sea Island Coffee, which they very kindly sent me to try. This may be because it's Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee which even I, a die-hard tea drinker, know is one of the best in the world. I remember a friend of mine once bought me a bag of this exclusive, almost mythical substance for Christmas in my first year of university, back when I loved the stuff and before I converted to Yorkshire tea. It was possibly the most exciting present I received that year, and I treasured it, saving it for 'special' coffee occasions only. Needless to say, it was never shared with anyone else.
According to the website, this coffee has notes of dark chocolate and floral undertones. I'm not entirely sure I detected those, but it does have a delicious full, almost creamy, flavour, with a slightly sweet aftertaste. Grown on the Clifton Mount Estate in Jamaica, which has fertile soil, regular rainfall and cloud cover from the mountains, this coffee (mostly the Arabica Typica bean) thrives and consequently has such a sought-after flavour and aroma; it's often labelled as the champagne of coffees. It's not cheap, at £14.99 for a tin, but it would be a great present for the coffee-lover in your life (or for yourself, when you're having one of those days). It also won a Gold Taste award in both 2010 and 2012, which can't be a bad thing. Sea Island also sell numerous other types of coffee; for more information, and to read a bit about the estates behind the coffee, visit their website here.
I'll be hoarding this precious tin for as long as I possibly can. It goes without saying that if you come round for coffee, you're probably just getting the normal stuff while this sits ensconced at the back of my cupboard. Sorry.
5. Chaource cheese. If you're an avid reader of this blog (and if not, why not?), you may remember I wrote about my wonderful trip to Chablis last April. Although my tastebuds were extremely well looked after the entire time, and I enriched my life with the second-best tarte tatin I've ever eaten, one of the real highlights was the cheese course in a little rustic restaurant on the first night. Here I was introduced to Chaource, a typical cheese of the region.
It looks rather like a goat's cheese, with a white rind and a sticky creamy texture around the outside that turns almost crumbly in the middle. It also has the tang of a goat's cheese, but with the buttery texture of a Brie or Camembert - the best of both worlds. One of my mum's colleagues went to Chablis recently, and was lovely enough to bring me back a Chaource of my very own. It's delicious, and I can't wait to try it in a recipe or two - I think it would work very well with caramelised pears, or some dried fruit. If you can get your hands on this cheese - I reckon most good cheese shops would stock it or order it for you - then I'd heartily recommend it.
Banana caramel and coffee upside-down cake
I was recently sent an exciting new Nescafe Dolce Gusto Genio coffee machine to try out, and asked to create a recipe based around coffee - either something featuring coffee as an ingredient, or something that would be good with a cup of coffee. Naturally, I went all out and did both.
When I consulted my flavour thesaurus for ideas, a surprising number of ingredients cropped up that apparently pair well with coffee, the most surprising being beef (the combination of red meat and coffee is recommended as a dinner party dish for 'your most health-conscious friends'). I'd have thought that coffee would be a rather difficult ingredient to work with, because it is so bitter and complex in itself. Apart from the obvious - chocolate, cream, milk - I wasn't sure of any coffee pairings that would work. However, given its strong bitterness, coffee works quite well with ingredients that are naturally rich - nuts, for example, and flavoursome spices like cardamom. It's therefore a great base flavour for all sorts of decadent sweet concoctions; this is just one example.
My eye landed upon bananas in the flavour thesaurus. I noticed the twenty bananas sitting in my fruit bowl, and the answer to my coffee conundrum was obvious.
Well, obvious in so far as it needed to be a coffee cake featuring bananas. I've wanted to make a banana upside-down cake ever since I saw one of the contestants on the Great British Bake Off make an insanely delicious-looking banana tarte tatin, all gooey and dripping with caramelly goodness.
That was a particularly challenging episode, incidentally, to watch while hungry. Pastry, fruit and caramel? A trio of dreams.
While I cook a lot with bananas (bread, pancakes, porridge...), they are always mashed up. I've never baked or cooked them still in intact pieces, and something about the way they had softened and turned sticky and golden on that tarte tatin made me deeply eager to try it. I've never done that thing where you cut holes in a banana in its skin, stuff them with chocolate and barbecue it - every time I tell people this they're astonished it wasn't a regular feature of my childhood barbecues. This probably has something to do with the fact that barbecues were a rare feature in my house, because it took my father approximately a million years to get the barbecue to the stage where it was ready for cooking.
Bananas also undergo a rather exciting colour transformation upon heating, turning from pale yellow to a deep red colour; rather like quinces, now that I think about it. If anyone could enlighten me as to why this is, I'd be grateful.
I love the taste of coffee cake - my granny makes an excellent one - and I figured the two would make rather a nice couple. As with most upside-down creations, this requires that the fruit be drenched in a layer of caramel. The addition of coffee to the cake batter ensures that the caramel-banana pairing is not too cloying. While you might be sceptical about the combination of coffee and bananas, it's rather delicious - one is gooey and sickly sweet, the other slightly bitter and rich.
It's banoffee, but with coffee instead of toffee. But there's still caramel. So basically you get your banana-sugar hit, but with the addition of caffeine. Definitely a pick-me-up kind of cake.
I made a simple caramel mixture by melting together butter, sugar and cinnamon (bananas and cinnamon are fabulous together, as are coffee and cinnamon, so it just made sense). This was smothered over a layer of banana slices in the cake tin. On top went a simple cake batter made with yoghurt (gives it a lovely moist texture) and enriched with espresso coffee - I got to use the exciting Genio machine, which uses little pre-packaged pods so there isn't any faffing around with loose coffee; even for cappuccino and coffees involving milk, it all comes in a pod, plus you can make both hot and iced coffee, which is pretty clever. For someone like me who doesn't make enough coffee to justify buying a proper manual machine, it's quite handy.
Anyway, there is a little espresso coffee in the cake batter (but you could also use instant coffee mixed with water if you don't have access to espresso). This, along with good old brown sugar, turns it a glorious golden brown colour. It goes over the caramel bananas and bakes, while the caramel bubbles up and permeates the cake mixture, softening the bananas and turning them sweet, sticky and cinnamon-scented.
The result of this unconventional pairing is a fabulously rich, moist, earthy cake sticky with sweet caramel and chunks of gooey banana. The coffee flavour isn't too strong in the sponge (you could add more coffee if you want it stronger) but it gives it a lovely mellow, rounded flavour that works so well with the sticky chunks of banana. There's a delicious breath of cinnamon from the caramel that brings everything together.
Because I know this is important, here's a tip: the edge pieces are the best, where the caramel has run down the sides, so save those for yourself if you make this for a crowd.
While I won't claim that this combination of sugar and caffeine is health food, the sponge itself has very little butter in it (the addition of yoghurt both ups the moisture content and reduces the calories - genius), and the caramel not a huge amount either. You could probably skip the caramel and just sprinkle the tin with a little sugar before adding the bananas, and you'd still have a lovely cake that's not too heavy on the calories, if you're worried about that sort of thing.
It's filling and satisfying - the perfect thing for that mid-afternoon slump, with your cup of tea or coffee. It would also make a great dessert, served warm from the oven with some vanilla ice cream.
Banana caramel and coffee upside-down cake (serves 8-10):
- 50g soft butter
- 130g light brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 200g plain flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 tbsp strong espresso coffee (or 1 tbsp instant coffee granules mixed with 1 tbsp boiling water)
- 200ml yoghurt
- Pinch of salt
- For the banana topping:
- 2 bananas
- 40g butter
- 80g light brown sugar
- 1.5 tsp cinnamon
Pre-heat the oven to 170C. Whisk the butter and sugar together using an electric whisk until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and whisk in. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix, then add the coffee, yoghurt and salt, mixing to form a smooth, thick mixture.
Grease an 8x8in square cake tin, or a 20cm round cake tin. Slice the bananas thinly and arrange the slices in a single layer over the bottom of the tin, so they mostly cover it.
Put the 40g butter and 80g sugar in a small saucepan with the cinnamon, and heat until melted together. Pour this evenly over the bananas - you can use a spoon to spread it over them, but be careful not to dislodge the slices.
Pour the cake batter over the bananas and caramel, then bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Best served warm.