A soothing and sensual lunch

Sadly I've got no work this week and but I've decided to maintain my morale by cooking (and indeed eating) some aspirational chow instead of eating bowls of mushroom flavour noodles naked on my own, in front of a laptop I'm going to whip up some fresh seasonal treats that should hopefully please both the mouth and the pocket.

I picked up a big ole celeriac (a variety of celery grown for it's fleshy, swollen base cf. Larousse Gastronomique) for 23p from the undignified scrum that is the discount aisle in Big Tescos.

I've banged the whole fleshy, swollen base through the coarse grater on my Magimix food processor, and stirred in some mayonaisse, mustard, lemon juice, capers and chopped gherkins to make a celeriac remoulade.

Nigel Slater likes to serve his with a some "paper thin slices of bayonne ham" for a "soothing, sensual lunch". Sadly I couldn't find any bayonne ham I substituted for a popular pork, liver and turkey sausage which came ready sliced, saving both time and money.

I would highly recommend "playing tattoos" with the sausage before serving. This helps bring the meat up to room temperature releasing more flavour whilst providing your skin with a little extra moisturisation and a pleasant aroma of industrial meat fat.

I think I like this one best. "Sailor style", I call it.

So that's what I had for lunch.

Liv-Lon

London:



Liverpool:


It's good to be back.

Thanks to Tessa for the joke.

Yo yo yo!

Our new chutney: live and uncut. Jars unbreakable, shatterproof (for safety).

Mad props to Delia Smith for the recipe! Big chutney love.

Hopefully if I write Ol Dirty Bastard down here this page will be the top google result for "Ol Dirty Bastard Delia Smith". I'm back!

Chainsaw handling course today!

Rhubarb Wine

Right. I don't want to shock anyone here but I'm going to come clean: I've not been updating this here weblog quite as often as I should have. I'm going to do something about this, I promise. In the meantime, here's a recipe for rhubarb wine.

Take 1 (one) truck full of rhubarb:

Decant into four wheelbarrows:

Chop:

Place chopped rhubarb in a suitable container: we used a spare water butt. If you don't have a spare water butt lying around why not pop round to your neighbours' property while he is away on holiday and see if he does? Scrub any algae from the inside with bleach but be sure to rinse carefully unless you want your rhubarb wine to taste like swimming pool.

Mash the 'barb with a half gallon sugar: we used brown sugar and hit it rhythmically with a forestry tool designed to remove bark from felled logs: I'm sure white sugar would be acceptable if you don't have brown.

Add a handfull of baker's yeast and cover with a mesh to keep the mosquitos out and a heavy log to keep anything else out. Leave until 1st September before decanting into jerry cans to store until next year.

And the taste? Well my notes from the vertical tasting reveal the following:

2008 vintage: strong rhubarb nose, sharp fruit notes, bone dry finish. Excellent afternoon refresher.
2009 vintage: tastes and smells like Danish Blue. Cloudy with a dense "island" of grey mold. Two may be related.

Photos of my kitchen

And our bedroom:

Toronto: a photoessay

Hey ho!

Hey ho! Just thought I'd dash you a quick missive about what's going on. I'm here: on an island in rural Canada living on a commune.

There may be a slight change in content and delivery as a result: principally because the nearest electricity is far away from the van in the woods where I sleep and partly because I'll be cooking and eating fresh, seasonal locally sourced organic food instead of offal, undercooked street food and spontaneously fermented corn/cactus beverages.

But we can still be friends! It will be fun: I'll finish telling you about all the weird things I ate on my holiday and then I'll start telling you all about the weird food I'm making other people eat. Won't that be fun? Won't it?

OK! The library opens again on Tuesday so I'll let you know what's what then.

Kisses.

Chicha time.

Chicha is a spontaneously fermeneted alcoholic beverage made from corn! Wikipedia tells me that sometimes the corn is chewed prior to fermentation as the enzymes in salaiva speed up the process. I didn't tell Kate that as we sat down to a foaming gourd a deux in a metal bar in Bogota's bustling student district.

Chicha has a strong, deeply unpleasant odour (dirty dishes/silage) so I was delighted with its relatively restrained flavour profile: the abundant "funk" and fizz of orange juice left unrefridgerated for an extended period tempered with a fruity mellowness reminiscent of peach stones. Unfortunatley it produced burps which smelt like Metallica B-sides mixed with hot seaweed so we just had the one.

Cunit