Serves 2

Blood oranges are still around as, thankfully, the Spanish seem to have extended the growing season these days. This is a spontaneous cocktail using my local rum, my favourite Triple Sec ‘High Fidelity’ which tastes as fresh as the orange itself and a single blush orange I had in the fridge, oh and the egg white from the pasta dish.

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When I first landed in London freshly up from Dorset with straw behind my ears, I didn’t know quite what to expect or whether I would last in the big smoke. After a few months working in the staff canteen at the Hilton I managed to get a job up the road at the Grosvenor House Hotel in the Ninety Park Lane restaurant with some of my college mates.

Vaughan Archer was the Head Chef at the time, then Anton Edelman took over before his move to The Savoy. The menus were written in French as were most menus in high-end London restaurants. At catering college we were trained in classical French cooking but this was way ahead of what we learnt at college both visually and taste. We were in the Nouvelle Cuisine era so the leading chefs in London and around the country were cooking refined French food in a very modern way with smaller portions that were intricately presented on square, hexagonal and black plates. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, except ‘wow this looks cool’ and the way forward as it was far removed from the food we cooked at college.

What I did learn though at college, and in my early London years, was how the way the menus were written, albeit in French, but how menus actually should be written with lots of ‘et’s’ and ‘avec’s’ and in the dishes, and ‘des’ in the dish titles, giving the customer (who could read French) an idea of what the dish was.

After a couple years at Grosvenor House it was time to get a bit more experience so I managed to get a job at The Dorchester with Anton Mosimann who, back then, was what is now known as a celebrity chef with books published, a TV show and probably the UK inspirer of Nouvelle cuisine. He also inspired Cuisine Naturelle in which no butter or cream or fat was used. It was challenging, but great inspiration to be working with the Master. What’s more, in the Grill room, where the English boys worked, we were able to write our own menus in English which was an inspiration and solid grounding for what I do today, and have done for a few decades.

My first Head Chef’s job was at Mr Pontacs in the City which was a couple of wine bars and a restaurant called The Candlewick. It was back to French cuisine and cooking a combination of what I had learnt under the two Antons, which, after four years put me in good stead for my role at Le Caprice, The Ivy, J. Sheekey and Scotts.

I’m going to have a shortish rant about modern day menu writing now. What’s happened? Where has it all gone wrong? Where has it come from ? Leaving out the ands and withs and provenance and simply writing a list of ingredients with commas in between... You may have seen the episode of the Go To Food podcast that I did on Instagram where I certainly did have a bit of a rant about this.

I wasn’t great at English at school, but I certainly taught myself how to write a menu properly. Having my own restaurants, I was buying great ingredients from small producers, farmers and fishermen and giving them a name-check shout-out on the menu when necessary. I’m not talking about a dish going into three or four lines which was a trend in the US years ago, with the farmer’s name and the farm’s name and the heirloom variety etc etc…that’s one step too far!

My old late friend Charles Campion once said “When I read your menus I know exactly what month I’m in, what I’m eating and how it’s cooked”. Charles was a great food writer and had a mind full of information about food, where it comes from and how it’s made. When writing my British Regional Book in pre-Google days I would often ask Charles who I should go and see that would be interesting and has a good story. It was a fun journey, with some great stories but sadly some of them are no longer with us. I think it’s time to write Volume 2 of British Regional Food some twenty odd years on with new incredible food and drink producers that I’ve come across.

It’s got to a point now where I think chefs give front of house a list of ingredients and they transcribe it as a dish of ingredients with commas in between. When I question it the response is always ‘that’s how menus are written now’! I know I’m old school and have a few years and restaurants of my own under my belt, but the words ‘lazy’ and ‘uninformative’ come to mind.

I mean, when you go to Europe you don’t get poulet, girolles, estragon on the menu do you ? Menus today look like a prep list instead of a menu.

Hand-dived used to drive me mad, I mean how else are you going to collect scallops from the sea bed? With your feet? ‘Lyme Bay dived scallops with guanciale and broad beans’ or is it ‘Hand-dived scallops, guanciale, broad beans’? Ummmm….

I saw a menu the other day that said chopped Dexter, Dexter what?

I don’t see Italian menus loosing ‘e’ or ‘con’ or French menus loosing important vowels to join up a sentence on a menu and I’m not sure they would. Anyway, rant over!

Cookbooks

Whilst sorting out my very old collection of menus, giving them a good dust off and binning the ones that may have been important research at the time some 30 years ago (but not now), I decided to knock up a couple simple dishes from the fridge and a cocktail to see me through the down sizing exercise. I will be posting those on Sasturday for you.

A bacon chop is a very fine piece of meat and Peter Hannan’s sugar pit bacon chops and ribs are even finer but you need to be in Moira in Northern Ireland sadly which is certainly and experience and worth visiting Peter’s shop the Meat Merchant.

A good butcher should be able to make or lay his hands on a bacon chop with a twist of the arm.

You simply grill or pan fry bacon chops like you would a pork chop with seasoning them.

For the pickle

Makes a couple 1/2 litre preserving jars

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I love nothing more than cooking on the hoof in new territory. Well, not exactly new territory. I’ve been to Sandbrook House a couple times with my now ex-girlfriend Gussie and her family. I must say, I do love the Irish - not that any of her family are Irish, but just being there - it’s great fun. It’s a great country with great people. The first port of call was to see my good friend Peter Hannan to organise a bit of Glenarm Irish meat in the form of sugar pit ox cheek… or Hixy’s sweet cheeks as Peter calls them!

On a trip to Moira to see Peter years ago he put something new and delicious under my nose - sugar pit bacon chops. They were so good, cured in salt and then several sugars and spices and just gently cooked until they almost fell apart. I asked Peter if it would work with ox cheeks and he said it probably would so the cheeks then went into the pit to cure. I cad a call from Peter a couple weeks later and he said they are on the way over…see what you think.

Peter is the master of meat, working with over 20 farmers who have farms on the Glenarm Estate. I once cooked a dinner with Clodagh McKenna, close to the Glenarm Estate for all of the farmers and their wives . It was the first time they had all sat in a room together and eaten their own meat. He selects the best beef from the farmers and ages the cuts in a Himalayan salt chamber and Peter is the only person who actually does this properly. You often go to pubs and restaurants and even butchers who have a meat display fridge with a few pink Himalayan salt bricks in and they claim that their beef is salt-aged, which, I’m afraid, is Bo$$ocks! It’s all just for show and doesn’t affect the meat in the slightest, unlike Peter’s long process that takes place in his salt-ageing chambers.

Our relationship began just after opening HIX Oyster & Chop House in Farringdon when I bumped into an Irish chap outside having a fag. He introduced himself and said “you have a good restaurant here with very good meat but I think I have something very interesting that you will like. I’ll ring you in a couple months”. Sure enough he did, and so over to Northern Ireland I went to see what he had been up to. Peter had spent the last couple of years experimenting with Himalayan salt for aging his Glenarm Estate beef. His experiments proved that a walk-in aging room lined with Himalayan salt bricks would kill off the bad bacteria that causes mould on the beef and encourages the good bacteria that helps the aging process. Today, many people still think it’s a good thing that dry-aged beef should be mouldy and taste of Stilton, but I know better.

I visited Peter regularly to see and taste the progress of the Himalayan salt chambers and on each visit he had added a new ageing room. A few years down the line I was about to open Tramshed in Shoreditch and as Peter was showing me the new ageing rooms, I asked how much he could produce, his reply was “how much do you need” and I replied “I’ll take the lot!”

Peter is also a very keen fishermen and has access to some of the great salmon rivers in the south and on one occasion he took some 100-day aged ribs of beef tot he riverbank - which is 60 days longer ageing than normal. You wouldn’t have known, and it goes to show how ageing in the salt chamber works in the meat’s favour.

One year the Hix/Hannan partnership took a turn to the race track and Peter told me he had bought a horse and was thinking of calling it ‘Hix Fix’. I was honoured that he had named his horse after our house cocktail and, god damn it, it won its first race and after that never raced again sadly.

Peter is always full of lovely surprises and I always look forward to our annual fish which is usually on the River Moy where I’ve caught fish every time.

Anyway, back to Sandbrook House where Peter had delivered the sugar pit ox cheeks which I served at dinner for 24 people with bashed swede or turnip as they call it in Ireland and Scotland and little strips of swede tossed in butter and wild garlic leaves. We started with cold smoked trout ‘Hix cure’ with delicious soda bread that Gussie made which was her painful task, as last year she forgot the baking soda and salt ! I made a classic prawn cocktail for second course which is always a crowd pleaser using good prawns and a punchy Marie Rose sauce sauce.

I finished with a buttermilk pudding with rhubarb which uses a common Irish dairy product which also goes into the soda bread.

One of my most satisfying things during the festivities is clearing out the fridge, in fact other people’s fridges, and making good use of leftovers that will potentially go to waste… as if I’m the Food Waste Inspector! Easter Sunday, before everyone got up, I thought I’d crack on and made bubble and squeak to go with Easter Sunday supper which was Peter’s sugar pit pork ribs with a piquant rhubarb and red onion sauce, with the leftover buttermilk pudding sauce, ox cheek cooking stock and garden cock broth, made with the leftovers of Bella Huddart’s home-reared cockerels which she’d made into Cock au vin. As I was making it, I could hear the rest of the cockerel family singing in the garden where they are reared. Anne the amazing house assistant was chuckling to herself when I told her what was in the garden cock broth!

Years ago, when I lived in Shoreditch, I would have the occasional fridge clearing parties and Chocolate martins would often appear at some stage of the evening. I’ve not made it for years, but when I do, it often gets tweaked with a new spirit or type of chocolate or flavouring.

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Easter seems to be all about chocolate these days and rarely do families sit down to an Easter feast with traditional fare like spring lamb. Lots of European countries have strong and interesting Easter traditions. I’m pretty sure that if you were to ask a child in the UK what traditional Easter fare is, they may well not say lamb or Simnel cake or fish on Easter Friday.

In France, some villages make a giant omelette to share amongst the locals which is a great and simple thing to share. In Poland and Hungary, young men traditionally splash water or perfume on young women on Easter Monday to ensure health and fertility. In Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland, children dress as Easter witches wearing old cloths and painting their faces. Weirdly, in Norway, there is a unique tradition where TV channels and newspapers focus on crime stories creating an obsession with murder mysteries. In Greece, eggs are dyed a deep red colour to symbolise Christ’s blood and here…we eat chocolate, hot cross buns and occasionally do decorated eggs rolling down hills! Although you don’t often see that going on these days.

These varying traditions across Europe highlight the diverse cultures blending ancient pagan rites with Christianity beliefs and I feel that some of these European celebratory traditions are being lost with the younger generation.

Later in the week i will be sharing my favourite Easter recipes to cook on the weekend, and a cocktail of course.

Books

Martini, a Memoir
by Frank Moorhouse

A great bed time read for Martini lovers or a book to read whilst having a martini, with history and martini origin stories as well as the odd classic recipe explained. After reading this you will have a different view of this classic, sophisticated drink that all good bartenders should know and relay to Martini enthusiasts.

Chocolate books

With a fairly substantial collection of books, over the years I’ve obviously collected a few books on chocolate. They don’t get used that often, but are there sitting on my shelf when I need a little inspiration.

European Festival Food
by Elizabeth Luard

Elizabeth Luard is one of my favourite food writers and I have all of the books she has written. European Festival Food is a particular favourite and a calendar of traditional foods of varying religions around Europe. It’s a great reminder of why we should be sitting together as a family or with friends to celebrate various festivals throughout the year.

Hix Fix
Serves 2

This was one of those cocktails that just spontaneously happened when I opened HIX Oyster & Fish House nearly twenty years ago. I had travelled down from my London restaurant HIX Oyster & Chop House and on arrival to restaurant my manager Jonny said “Try this new cocktail! Julian Temperley sent me these cherries in apple eau de vie”. Jonny had put a cherry in a Champagne coupe with a teaspoon of the liquor from the jar and topped it up with Prosecco. It was delicious and I noticed he had chalked it up on the window ‘Hix Fix £10.00’ I said “That’s a bit steep for down here isnt it”?… But I swallowed my words, as we sold over 20 that night and the Hix Fix was born. I adapted it to use British sparkling wine of course, using Rob Corbett’s Castlewood Vineyard sparkling.

By the way, these Champagne coupes which were famously used by Babycham and the coupes are sometimes called the Marie Antoinette coupe 32B cups !

2 Temperley cherries in apple eau de vie
2 measures of Castlewood sparkling wine to top up

Pour a couple teaspoons of the eau de vie from the jar of cherries into a large champagne coupe. Put a cherry in each glass and top up with sparkling wine.

Risotto with morels and wild garlic
Serves 4-6

Here, I’ve given you the recipe for a fresh mushroom stock using dried and fresh mushrooms but as you will see on the risotto video, the Star Porcini stock cubes are a crafty shortcut and certainly won’t disappoint.

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Yes, spring mushrooms! If you know where, or are surrounded by the right terroir, you may be able to gather some rare spring mushrooms like the highly prized morel, scarlet elf cups and St. George’s mushrooms, although I’ve not yet set my eyes on any St George’s this year, but I’m eagerly looking.

Now, morels, as some of you may well know unusually appear on wood chips and often in people’s gardens and driveways. Most people would ignore this highly prized and expensive morel if it showed up in their gardens or driveway, but mushroom aficionados would be on their hands and knees looking for more to fill their basket. I know I find myself focusing on wood chips wherever they may be at this time of year. You do, of course, find them in woodlands but my experience in the UK is to go foraging on housing estates! It’s more than likely that the wood chips that these morels grow out of are imported from Canada, as that is where the grow abundantly - often in woodlands where there has been a forest fire which for some reason seems to encourage growth.

Antonio Carluccio Goes Wild

I have fond memories of Antonio chain smoking and drinking whisky. He once invited me to dinner and produced ‘Polenta on the table’ where he came to the table and poured the soft, piping hot polenta on the table and ladled over the ragu. It was delicious and the first time I had come across this theatrical sharing dish.

Mushroom art

This is one of three large vintage book plates I was gifted. As a mushroom enthusiast these three large prints remind me of what I’m not picking, and should be picking!

Serves 2

In my ongoing quest to waste as little as possible the asparagus season throws up an interesting way to use asparagus ends that aren’t really useable for anything other than a stock. Neutral-ish spirits like vodka are great for infusing things and will take on the flavour much better than a strong heavy spirit, hence why gin takes on the botanical flavours - especially the juniper.

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Years ago, the British Asparagus season was short and usually lasted through May and June but these days our asparagus growers have managed to extend the season a bit either side of those traditional months. The Chinn Family at the Wye Valley often used to send me out their first crop in early March and although people used to criticise me, my response was surely that it’s better they are making the effort to extend the season and offer British grown instead of the cheap imports that flood the market. I remember years ago I did the Christchurch Food Festival and amongst the food stands on the high street was a stand by asparagus grower Dan Tanner from The New Forest Fruit Company, and as it happened I was doing a demo on asparagus so thought I would use their locally grown asparagus. Behind the asparagus stand was a deli so I popped in to see what local produce they had and to my horror they were selling Peruvian asparagus! Naturally, I asked why aren’t they selling local?

The Wye Valley growers have also managed to nail growing white asparagus in the UK which is a bit of a revelation as it’s normally only grown in Germany, Spain and France. I won’t give a recipe for white asparagus this week as the preparation and cooking method is very different than green.

Vintage asparagus dish

Another of my many vintage silver finds, an early 1900s asparagus serving dish which would have hot water in the base to keep the asparagus warm. I used to have a beautiful collection of Savoy silver asparagus dishes which sadly I sold. I wish I hadn’t now, but hey ho!

British Food was my second cookbook about 26 years ago which is now sadly out of print, but I do buy copies of my own books on eBay and often get a bargain!

This is a drink I started making some years back to take on shoots and fishing trips and is based on the classic bull shot which uses beef stock or consommé. My shells from crab, lobster and local prawns never go to waste and I always make a stock with them and simmer and concentrate it once strained so it takes up less room in the freezer and can be spooned out of the container frozen and reconstitute with water to use for soups, sauces or my favourite shooting drink.

Years ago, I did a dinner in Malibu with Archie from Black Cow Vodka and each of the four courses I prepared I made a cocktail using the waste. The shell shot was made using the shells and heads from local spot prawns and served chilled as we were in California unlike the hunting version which I make hot and serve it from a thermos flask but both tastes equally as good.

When you make the stock for this just follow the recipe below and don’t add any flour and just blend a ladleful of the shells.

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I’ve been sent a couple beautiful books in the past week. The first, from my friend Henry Harris called ‘The Racine Effect’ which is a collection of Henry’s favourite French recipes from his long and fantastic career in the kitchen. It’s a beautiful cover and full of great classic French inspired recipes. I always regarded Henry’s, along with Neil Borthwick at the French House, as cooking the best French food in London-if not the UK.

The Coastal Forager

The second book I received this week was The Coastal Forager by Mark Williams. Now this is certainly the best book I’ve come across on edible seaweeds and coastal greens. Whether you live on the coast or not it’s certainly a book to have on your shelf for seaside visits in the future and full of great photos and illustrations.

Vintage Kitchenalia

I bought this beautiful freshwater crayfish serving bowl twenty years ago and paid a good few hundred quid for it, not knowing it was from the late 1800’s! I was surfing eBay a couple years after for a pot for catching crayfish and it popped up again at a fraction of the price, which of course had to buy, as my theory is that a rare object like this may never be seen again, but who knows?…

Growing up near the sea in West Bay I have fond memories of prawning with my school friends at night off the end of the pier. Winter is the season for the local prawns, so you had to wrap up with several layers and waterproofs. Sometimes, a few hours only yielded a handful or so, but it was certainly fun and a good starting point in my wild food and fish journey. My Dad’s friend used to make up my prawn drop-nets and there was always free bait at Samways fish merchants which usually consisted of smelly fish or a kipper to attract the prawns.

The local Lyme Bay prawns aren’t huge and are sometimes called Billy Winters which my friend’s fish café is named after. Although they are half the size of a normal prawn they are certainly extremely fast, cooked in heavily salted water and eaten simply with mayonnaise and brown bread. That was my childhood supper after a few hours on the pier and well deserved - even if it was just a handful.

On my first trip to Tokyo about 30 years ago I was taken to a tiny ten-seater restaurant called Sushi Ken and the first dish was dancing prawns which were similar sized prawns to our local ones. They were fished out of the tank and served alive with a little ponzu. When you had finished them they would be bring back the shells deep-fried and sprinkled with sea salt flakes. I used to do the same at HIX Oyster & Fish House but with cooked prawns. I loved the look on the customers faces when they received prawns part two - two starters for one!

Serves 2

My friend and cocktail guru (NOT mixologist!…I hate that word!) came up with this cocktail using three great Temperley tipples. It worked a treat and the customers are loving it in Stephen Webster’s No Regrets Bar beneath his jewellery shop in The Burlington Arcade, London.

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I love this copper Pommes Anna dish that I bought from the great kitchen shop E Dehillerin in Rue Coquilliere in Paris. The shop is a must visit shop for copper and classic kitchenware and all that’s copper. It’s designed for the classic Pommes Anna which is sliced potatoes made into a deep cake with goose or duck fat and baked. You rarely see it these days on menus but it’s a great sharing potato dish to accompany various meat dishes and looks amazing with the clever design when you invert it onto the lid to serve.

My recipe for Pommes Anna is in my baking Book which you can now access online at ckbk

Must have Books

These two books by Richard Mabey and Roger Phillips have been on my book shelves for three decades and still stand out as great trustworthy foraging books with well taken photos for identification.

If you’re not a forager and don’t trust yourself in the wild then you can stay safe with the above cultivated ones in various recipes and make these alliums the main event like the plate of alliums as a starter, vegetarian main course or a sharing accompaniment or even a tapas or antipasti.

We tend to use onions and leeks and garlic as a base for stocks and soups, but they often deserve a creative place on the dinner table. I remember my Gran used to boil her first onion harvest of the year, make a humble parsley sauce which was delicious… and that was dinner.

In Tuscany last year we had a simple plate of sliced onions gently cooked in olive oil with vin agrodolce, a bittersweet wine vinegar which was so simple and so delicious on its own.

Alexanders were originally introduced by the Romans and they called it the ‘pot herb of Alexandria’. Every part of the plant is edible from the parsnip like root to the leaves, stems and flowers. They are abundant along roadsides and are I liken them to a wild version of Angelica.

I use them in both sweet and savoury dishes at this time of year when they are still fairly young and not too bitter. I made a ricotta cheesecake with them the other night for my first Sugrue Cellar Table with the stems chopped and cooked in a sugar syrup.

I dried and ground up the leaves with caster sugar and scattered it over the top.

Such an abundant and handy wild plant to have on your doorstep with a myriad uses.

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