A secret worth sharing

I’m breaking my own rule about food blogs without pictures. I did something fun and food related last weekend which I intended to write about here afterwards but as it turned out I was enjoying myself so much at the time I forgot to take any pictures, even dodgy fuzzy iphone shots. Still, I just cant go without writing something about it but I’ll keep this brief.

On Saturday I went to my first supper club, one of the last to be hosted by Aoife of MyHomeSupperClub (recently rebranded Jelly+Gin and organising other pretty cool pop up dining events if you’re interested). If you dont know what a supper club is just google it – others have already written long and interesting articles and I said I would be brief.

Tickets for most supper clubs sell out in seconds and I have been dying of excitement since I booked them a couple of months ago. I was excited but also equally unsure whether I would enjoy eating dinner in someone’s lounge with a table of strangers, but as you can probably tell it turned out well.

Maybe I got lucky with my dinner companions but it was very relaxed and not awkward at all. Of course nothing to do with the delicious green tea bubbly on arrival and several glasses of red wine after… mildly pished, ahem. Thankfully I didnt follow through on my cunning plan to nick the table cloth and pudding bowls which I took quite a fancy to.

Most importantly of all the tea inspired menu was delicious (chai pannacotta and rhubarb sorbet for pudding… dribble) and unlike a restaurant meal, I have a much better chance of bribing the chef for the recipes.

Unfortunately the next MyHomeSupperclub in May will be the last one for at least a while so I’ll have to go and try a few of the other ones in Edinburgh instead (probably a good thing as I think I would have got quite attached), but I just thought I’d write this short message to thank Aoife and her husband for their hospitality and let you know that the supper club is a secret worth sharing.

Just dont share it too far… I’ll never get tickets if you all start going!

Cake…Cake…Mark Greenaway.

I’m full of the back to work depression and too lazy to write this week but I had such a cornucopia of good cake last week, and one hell of a good lunch at Restaurant Mark Greenaway so I present you instead a dribble inducing week in pictures and urge you try out these three establishments at the earliest opportunity.

That is all.

Pear and Almond cake from Frederick’s coffee house  - great cake and a sunny spot by the window with a nosy view of the street below.

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Cake overload at French fancies with the Edinburgh Cake Ladies – seriously delicious patisserie and charming owners.

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And last but not least….

One seriously good lunch at Restaurant Mark Greenaway. How can the man not win Great British Menu!?

Wild Garlic Flat Breads

I promised to post some more wild garlic recipes… I made these flat breads on Saturday with a wild garlic butter roast chicken and potato salad for some friends.

As usual I got carried away serving and eating and forgot to take pictures of anything besides the flat breads. I cant bear to read a cookbook with no pictures to keep my stomach engaged while my mind is wandering over the words so I will apologise for the limited visuals here and you will have to take my word for it that the chicken was lovely too and worth trying out instead of the usual herb butter under the skin.

The wild garlic gives the flat breads a lovely pale green tinge as well as a faint hint of garlic flavour and stuffing the butter under the chicken skin leaves the meat beneath with the same gentle after glow of garlic rather than the overpowering bear hug of garlic you would get if you tried to put this much of the normal stuff into one dish.

The chicken needs no recipe – just stuff about 125g of wild garlic butter under the chicken skin  (garlic butter recipe, if you can call it that, is available on my wild garlic post for totalfoodgeeks.com)and roast as normal. I also stuff half a lemon up its deriere for good measure.

The basic flat bread recipe is adapted from one by Jamie Oliver for jalapeno flatbreads, also very good and basically idiot proof. When it comes to bread, I am the idot.

Wild Garlic Flat Breads

• 300g self raising flour
• 280ml greek yoghurt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp wild garlic, chopped or wild garlic pesto (pesto recipe also on totalfoodgeeks.com)

Mix the flour and baking powder in one bowl. In another bowl mix the yoghurt and wild garlic and add to the flour. Mix until the dough comes together, then turn out onto a floured surface and knead gently until smooth. Divide into 8 portions and roll each one out into a flat circle. Preheat a  dry frying pan over a med-high heat and cook each flat bread for a few minutes each side. flip them over when bubbles start to swell in the dough and the bottom is browned. You can keep them warm on a tray in a low oven while you cook the rest.

Something wild and garlicky…

My first post for the site is over on Total Food Geeks peoples!

… some more wild garlic recipes to follow here in a few days!

Stinky cheese and a Raspberry Cloud

I don’t know which I’d rather have… a wander round the goodies at a farmer’s market, or a wedge of really good cake.

The good news is I got both. I finally made it to Earthy Foods yesterday for a spot of indoor market shopping and lunch in their cafe, and since we were nearby we dropped in to Tea at 94 afterwards for a spot of cake.

These photos don’t need much explanation but if, like me, you think bliss is browsing mountainous piles of fresh veg, charcuterie, home made condiments and preserves and a deliciously stinky cheese counter (the cheese not the counter or the staff behind it I should clarify), then Earthy is worth a nose.

The market cafe downstairs serves some equally delicious lunch and some seriously good looking cakes. The only reason we chose to have our cake elsewhere was because it was a little draughty* so we started to get a bit chilly by the end of our meal but had I been in a slightly warmer jumper I would definitely have stayed for the chocolate cake. Next time… I’m on it.

So instead we rounded things up at Tea at 94 with a scone and a slice of Raspberry Cloud (a curious but tasty combination of pastry base topped with sponge cake and raspberry icing). This cosy little cafe isn’t as trendy or as busy as places like loopy lorna’s yet but personally I would rather get a seat, charming service and decent cake.

Nom nom nom…

* Earthy just advised me that their door heater is on the blink and hopefully fixed soon so don’t worry about an extra jumper if you plan to visit!

You can find Tea at 94 at 94 Buccleuch Street or on facebook or twitter.

The Earthy Foods website has all you need to know about their market shops and how to find them.

Where to start….

Where to start… its been busy at Chez Clarkson.

Despite my determined efforts to unglue myself from twitter and spend more time on my blog I managed to get side tracked again. In fairness we are putting our house on the market so the last few weeks have been given over to last minute decorating and spring cleaning and any spare time I’ve had I have chosen to do food related things rather than write about them! So this post is a random scattering of all the things that have been pinging around in my head lately but havent managed to make it to page because I was too busy holding a paintbrush and a pot of paint.

As a result of all my twittering, I discovered Total Food Geeks and last week I put down the vacuum cleaner and dragged Dawn to their open night for a couple of hours. TFG is an Edinburgh foodie community and a blog that shares all kinds of food related news and information (they word that a lot better if you want to have a look for yourself). The evening started with a rather traumatising/hysterical parking episode because parking in Edinburgh centre is hard enough at the best of times and the council happened to have decided to close George street on the same night but after much driving in circles and getting flashed at by other drivers (including a bus) we eventually found a space and arrived at Underdogs a little late. Because we were late and driving (i.e. only one glass of wine for Dawn and for me in sympathy), we didn’t really get into the full swing of things as planned but we did meet Georgia and Emily who started the group and were lovely and told us a bit more about what goes on. Just taking the first step towards meeting other foodies was a great event in itself and as soon as I assuage my guilt by drafting this post I will be writing up my details to join in the activities over on the TFG website (very excited and somewhat nervous about this but trying to limit the number of exclamation marks so you dont feel like I’m shouting at you). Next time though I am definitely taking the bus and hitting the vino!

(vino always requires a !)

Photo courtesy of the ladies from Total Food Geeks as I was too awe struck to snap my own.

One of the reasons I’m a little nervous about signing myself up for things like TFG is because I’m not a professional writer and the complete lack of enthusiasm for my last jar swap idea didnt exactly prove me otherwise. So I’m trying not to draw attention to it really, but I promised to share the marmalade recipe and we did actually learn a lot about what worked/didnt so here it is, accompanied by a picture of our dressed jars that we entered into the marmalade awards.

Jack n’ Toast? – seville orange with a dash of bourbon

Vanilla Ma’amalade – seville orange and vanilla for her Majesty

Paddington’s Special – good plain old seville orange (our silver award)

Update! I’ve just had to edit this paragraph before publishing it as although I thought we had won absolutely nothing, an envelope arrived in the post today announcing that we had in fact been given a silver for our novice entry and two merits for our other two! So we didnt actually win but I’m pretty proud nonetheless. And I will draw your attention to our choice of names… we thought we were extremely witty!

Vanilla Marmalade

We made two batches from different recipes and found that parts of each were the most successful so this recipe is a combination of the British Larder and River Cottage versions.

• 1kg seville oranges
• 1 vanilla pod, split in half and seeds scraped out
• 2kg granulated sugar or jam sugar (not the added pectin one)
• 2 litres water (2.5 litres made the marmalade difficult to set)

Scrub the oranges, remove the buttons at the top of the fruit, then cut in half. Squeeze out the juice and keep to one side. Slice the peel, pith and all, into shreds (we removed a little of the pith to get prettier slices). Put the sliced peel into a bowl with the orange juice and cover with the water. Leave to soak overnight or for up to 24 hours (we found the soaking made the marmalade taste much better and less bitter).

Transfer the mixture to a preserving pan (we put the pulp and seeds in a muslin bag and added them as well), add the vanilla bean and vanilla seeds, and the lemon juice. Bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Boil rapidly until setting point is reached, about 20-25 minutes. Remove from the heat. Leave to cool for 8-10 minutes then stir gently to disperse any scum. Pour into warm, sterilised jars and seal immediately.

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Now back to my commitment to writing. Ive been thinking about this blog, what I enjoying writing about and what is most useful to others who read it, and in addition to (hopefully) posting on TFG now and then I think I’m going to write more short posts in future as soon as I find things that I think are noteworthy, rather than waiting until I have a successful recipe to share. Somewhere between a twitter update and a full blown story.

So to start as I mean to go on…

I made this caramel cake yesterday from Dan Lepard’s cookbook Short and Sweet, but substitued almonds for hazelnuts and although I didn’t manage to entice the surveyor into having a slice while he was doing our home report (blatant attempt to boost property prices with baked goods I’m afraid), I’m quite glad because I have it all to myself now. The dulche de leche icing is the best part. You can get the recipe here and I recommend you do.

And last but not least, I have also booked tickets for Aoife Behan’s supper club in April.

The theme is tea.

Its my first supper club.

I am beside myself.

Almost wish I hadn’t shared it now actually. Best hit publish before I change my mind…

A jar swap

I have been quiet… quiet but not idle.

After the glut of Christmas, I couldnt face another mouthful of pastry, sugar or butter loaded baking so like many others I decided to take a week or two off from my self inflicted cooking challenges and writing and come back to it all after a detoxifying break.

Then Somewhere over the cold evenings of January I discovered twitter.

Well I say discovered, I joined twitter a while ago but I didn’t really get it at first. I couldn’t get past the weird short hand and disjointed conversations. And then I must have just found the right sort of people to follow because suddenly I could spend hours reading messages from other bloggers and bakers and twittering away in response. And that’s how I missed January.

The whole month gone and not a single post. And I barely noticed because I was so busy overloading on other blogs and food chat. In the process, I made some new connections with other bloggers (I say connections because I feel one can’t call someone a friend until you have bonded over a glass of wine or at the very least seen each other in the flesh but I am excited to have found them nonetheless) and discovered some really cool things happening in Edinburgh centred around food. Farm shops and markets, supper clubs, guerilla burgher munching, food geek get togethers (connections plus wine equals new friends!) and I’m following some other clever people/ projects if you are looking for twitter inspiration.

So before I get so comfortable over on twitter that I stop writing altogether I thought I better put my focus back to my own blog and what I’m going to do with February.

It’s supposed to be retox month, end of the diet, hello junk. I’m trying to stay on the wagon a little longer than that this year so I’ve decided to learn a new skill that means I can store up the calories and ration them somewhat. And hopefully I’ll win a prize at the same time.

Thanks to family, I got all the jam making goodies I put on my Christmas wish list and February happens to be marmalade month. Seville oranges are in season and the Marmalade Awards are taking place in Dalemain at the end of the month. So this month’s project is preserves and first, marmalade. My marmalade partner in crime is my friend Dawn who is also a marmalade novice so we are entering the competition together.

Recipe and results of our novice jamming to follow soon but first a challenge. Having a kitchen cupboard full of marmalade got me thinking and I’ve decided to try a project of my own. I’m calling on everyone to make their own batch of preserves and enter them into a “jar swap”. You can make any kind of preserve and enter it. Jam, vinegars, pickles…sweet, savoury… anything you want. At the end of the month I’ll put all the entries in a hat and give everyone another person to send a jar of their preserve to. So you give a jar and you receive one in return. Its a bit of fun and a chance to share with other bloggers across the country.

I also happen to have a spare copy of River Cottage Preserves, thanks to an over zealous christmas fairy, so I’m going to give that away as a treat for the best preserve. Just post a comment on my blog by the 4th of March with a link to your entry, keep a jar in the cupboard, and I’ll send you the name of the person to send it to at the end of the competition and choose the winning recipe.

Happy Jamming! ♥