Retro recipe: Russian salad

By: Mrs Robot

Growing up, I didn't know a single kid who liked salad, because if you were British, working class and growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, salad meant lettuce, cucumber and tomato, maybe radishes if you were lucky, all sitting sliced and separate on a plate. As for dressing, salad cream was your lot. This is, of course, a generalisation. Mr Robot's mum was working class but adventurous. He still remembers the cold baked beans she once served up as part of a salad. However, my point remains: nobody liked salad. They were, like the boiled veg served up in winter, the things that padded out your actual food, which was potatoes and meat.

Now I am in my forties, and somewhat fat, and get a weekly organic vegbox, all of which is making me realise one thing: I need to eat more salad. I've learned to enjoy it more over the years anyhow, but over the next few months I'm going to make a conscious effort to be more adventurous with my salads and get more pleasure out of that weekly vegbox. I've decided to kick off with a classic, Russian Salad.


I first encountered Russian salad as ensaladilla Rusa in Spain, served as a tapa. It seemed pretty much to be potato salad with some tuna in. After a bit of googling, I've learned that Russian salad started out as salat Olivier, a very posh salad made in 19th-century Russia by one Monsieur Olivier, which has undergone all sorts of changes over the years, becoming a staple celebration dish in Russia. Nowadays it's pretty much a 'shepherd's pie recipe', by which I mean everyone has their own version and they're all definitely different while being recognisably the same thing.

I based my salad on the recipe in 1080 Recipes, a classic Spanish cookbook. (Phaedon publishes a translated version.) That recipe contains simply peas, carrots and potatoes in mayonnaise. I included a few pods of broad beans in mine, because we've been getting loads in the vegbox lately, and some tuna, because I've only ever had ensaladilla Rusa with tuna in and it would feel wrong without it. I left the veg fairly chunky, and didn't over-flake the tuna, and the result was absolutely delicious. 1080 Recipes suggests putting prawns in, which would also be delicious. This looks like a perfect salad to make in winter too. Is there anything not to like about it? No wonder it's become a classic, in its many forms.

Recipe: Simple salmon salad

By: Mrs Robot

It's probably a little late in the year to blog this recipe now, but I thought I'd put it up anyway. It's a dish I came up with on my own, but I've seen similar things all over the place. I'm pretty sure Mi Mi Aye has one in Noodle!, for example.

You will need
The salmon (recipe will do one or two servings)
A salmon fillet per person
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon each chopped garlic and ginger.
(I cheat and use the Nishaan ready-pulped ginger as it's brilliant stuff, but there's no substitute for fresh garlic, the ready-chopped stuff in jars has lost its punch.)

The salad
Noodles – egg or soba are best; I used soba in the version in the photos.
Carrot
Spring onion
Light soy sauce
Sesame oil

Mix together the dark soy sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger in the bottom of a flat dish, then lay your salmon fillets fleshy-side-down on top to marinate. The longer you leave this, the more the marinade penetrates; half an hour is a good time to leave it.

I haven't given quantities for the salad because how much I make depends on how greedy I'm feeling and how much of each ingredient I have in the house. You want the salad to be half noodles, and a quarter each spring onion and carrot.

Cook your noodles. As soon as they're done, rinse them with cold water and pop in a bowl. Cut the carrot and spring onion into matchsticks about two inches long. Toss it all in with the noodles, dress with a slug each of light soy sauce and sesame oil, and toss it again. The dressing helps to stop your noodles sticking together.

To cook your salmon, put it fleshy-side down in a hot pan and cook it halfway through, then turn it over and finish cooking it on the skin side.

Bung salad on plate – you can sprinkle on some sesame seeds if you have any in the house, just to look pretty – then put the salmon on top.

Tasting France. Part 1: The Artichoke Peril

By: Mr Robot

 In my head, I'm something of a Francophile. 

I think of France as a place we love, my French is only slightly more awful than my Spanish, and it was I, after all, who educated the cheesemonster that is Mrs Robot on the difference between Brie and Camembert, for goodness sake. I like to think I'm a moderately proficient shrugger.

So it was an appalling reality-check to realise our last trip was about 15 years ago. Fifteen years! How did that happen? Resolved to do better, I quickly booked a week in Paris (coming soon) and began my mission to cook my way through The Taste Of France. As already noted, it's a book we've had for years but I don't think have ever used in anger.

Where to start? Mrs Robot's recent dalliance with The Root Canal Man limited my options to fairly squishy stuff, and Riverford had kindly popped a couple of globe artichokes in our vegbox. So with that as my starting point I decided to kick off with an extravagant four-courser.

Le Menu

Artichauts Farci

Omelette a la Piperard

Loup de Mer "Auguste Escoffier"

Creme d'Homere

Stuffed Artichokes

I've you've never tried dismembering an adult artichoke, I urge you to give it a go. Only then will you understand the enormous satisfaction of NEVER EVER doing it again.

I'm kind of wishing I'd videoed it: I have no doubt it'd be a YouTube sensation with lucrative sponsorship deals rolling in from providers of medical supplies and mouth soap.

Suffice to say that after 90 minutes I had two tiny tiny bits of rapidly browning artichoke, a knee-high pile of discarded alien skin, and some excitingly arterial spray patterns across the ceiling.

From there, though, it was splendid. The forcemeat called for a mix of pork and veal, but having not planned ahead I couldn't get the veal, so substituted it with chicken thigh - much as I imagined an Anjou farmer might.

The meats are mixed with mushroom and a little double cream, and stuffed in the artichoke cavity.

This, in a stroke of genius, is wrapped with bacon to hold it all in, before being lightly browned and then simmered in half a bottle of white wine.

The artichoke tastes amazing, despite it all, and stuffing is both delicate and rich. The reduced wine has soaked into everything, bringing acidity and balance. It's real treat. 

I'm not doing it again.

Omelette a la Piperade

I've commented before that egg dishes seem tragically undervalued in Britain.

The Spanish Revueltos makes an art of scrambling, and the French do the same with omelettes. A good Omelette Fine Herbs is an extraordinary, revelatory experience.

This Pays Basque dish is your standard omelette filled with the sunshine: tomato, bell pepper, garlic, chilli, bay and thyme that have gently fried together for a good half-hour.

It's all served up with slabs of fried ham on the side.

I know what you're thinking - I'm buggered if I'm taking half an hour and three pans just to make an omelette. Well you should.

Sea Bass in Lettuce Leaves "Auguste Escoffier"

Yes indeed, we're in the big time now. There's no lengthy narrative or anecdote about the great man here: it just pops up, quite casually, in the pages of Provence between beef in red wine and (god help us) a recipe for artichokes.

It immediately put me in mind of Keith Floyd, which probably has poor Escoffier spinning in his grave, bringing simple things together with booze and cream to make a surprisingly sophisticated and happy dish. 

Incidentally if you're one of those people inclined to pull faces at the thought of cooked lettuce, I'm disappointed in you. Go and eat Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's lettuce risotto, and come back when you've grown up.

So, a stock is made with all the grim bits of fish (I had some langostine paws kicking around too - go me) with your regular stock veg and white wine.

The fish himself is cut into biggish pieces (to fillet or not? I did), dusted with flour and lightly fried for a couple of minutes each side. 

Then the brilliant bit. Blanch the lettuce leaves, wrap one or two around each piece of fish, and simmer really gently, with softened shallots, in the stock, some white wine and vermouth for a few minutes.

Finish with a splash of cream, naturally.

If the gods are kind you haven't overcooked the fish. The lettuce is soft but still light and fresh, and is a great carrier for the rich, slightly sweet sauce.

It's beyond my skill to make this thing look elegant, especially when it's my bloody dinner and the last thing I want is cold fishy lettuce, but that doesn't matter because all the elegance you need is on your palate.

Wine and Honey Cream

We're off to the Languedoc for pudding. At a casual glance I imagined it to be some syllabub-type whipped affair for serving in a tall glass (or possibly a jam-jar with a handle for those in Shoreditch). I still think that's a jolly good idea, but it ain't this.

Instead we have more of a baked custard, the kind of creme you find under a brulee: honey and wine are simply whipped up with eggs, cinnamon and lemon peel and baked on a low heat for half an hour, then left to cool. 

With typical style, I forgot to make a caramel for the moulds so they looked a bit anaemic when turned out, but you can't fault the taste.

I mean, wine and honey - if you're going to quibble with that, all I can do is shrug.

All images (c) PP Gettins

The Spicery Spicebox - Tunisian Fish Stew, Saffron Pannacotta with Rhubarb

By: Mr Robot

It was my Birthday recently, and Mrs Robot kindly gave me a 6-month subscription to The Spicery spiceboxes. This consists of pre-mixed spices, freshly ground (no stale cupboard dwellers!) and sent out each month, giving a couple of set recipes each time.

I came across The Spicery some time ago so was intrigued to try it. I confess I was a little ambivalent about the concept. I feared it straying too far towards the cake-mix / DIY ready-meal approach that we try to avoid: how far is it really from, say, a jar of curry paste or packet noodles? Not that they can't be wonderful things of course, but you're probably not going to develop much as a cook by using them.

On the other hand, if it's bringing just the required amount of an ingredient you won't use often, that can only be a good thing (especially since our spice cupboard is already a disaster zone). And since I don't control what I get, I could see it being a good way into things I might not choose to cook otherwise. Perhaps this would offer a jumping-off point into new worlds, or at least give me a bit of a nudge.

Fish / Rhubarb Klaxon!

So I signed up for the adventurously named Discoverer box, hoping to be pushed into new exciting areas and forced to try things I tend to skim past in the cookbooks.

Well it's a good job I took that approach. As regular readers may know, I'm generally underwhelmed by fish, and as a child was traumatised by Gran's indescribable rhubarb.

So my box turning up with the makings of a Tunisian Fish Stew and a Saffron Pannacotta with Rhubarb was a bit of a chin-scratcher.

Well, I wanted to be pushed...

The box contains nice little recipe cards with a variety of spice packets (plus a freebie Indian BBQ mix, ta muchly), and happily the fish recipe is more involved than I'd expected. This bodes well.

Fish lumps in chermoula

First up there's a chermoula seasoning to be rubbed into fish chunks before frying it off. Then there's a spice mix to go into the stew, started with onions, carrots, courgettes and tomato with olives and ultimately the fish added later.

Stoo

Then there's a blend of herbs to flavour couscous and chickpeas, and finally harissa spices to be blitzed up with charred (and jarred) red peppers - though no doubt the truly dedicated could blowtorch their own at this point.

Harissa Hot-Hot-Hot

So that makes a decent-sized shopping list and to my mind takes it a fair way outside the ready-meal scenario, and importantly there's scope for the inept to knacker it up - not least effectively double-cooking the fish, which I'm pleased to say I managed with panache.

And you know what? It was really good. Rich and intense stew, and although I found the chickpea couscous slightly bland a good dollop of nose-burning harissa set everything right.

The Pannacotta was the real excitement though. As already noted it demanded the dreaded rhubarb (which, spookily, the vegbox had turned up a few days before), on top of which I've never tried making pannacotta and only rarely eaten it, since I tend towards the Brown And Sticky school of puddings.

New best friend

Well it was a delight. Extremely simple to make, this pack just had a few strands of saffron, and a mix of spices for the rhubarb.

The rhubarb was outstanding and all my fears evaporated. Heavily sugared (never thought I'd say this, but possibly too sweet? Just a smidge?) the spice mix was full of black pepper and cardamom, producing a loose jammy, intense, fragrant, fruity goo.

I loved it.

I loved it so much I've invented the word "rhuplay" for my new hobby.

The saffron pannacotta itself was just too easy, so will become a staple of mild showing off. Even allowing for my hamfisted delivery it looked sophisticated and was highly satisfying in the mouth. If there's any complaint here it's that the saffron got a bit lost in the face of that massive rhubarb, but that's very minor.

Needs practice, you say? Curses...

Undoubtedly there is a degree of cake-mix-cooking here, but it's significantly more engaging than that. There's a little effort, but only a little, for a very good result. It's (just about) possible to wrong, so there's pride to be had at the end. I can see it being great for the beginner, the nervous or the short of time.

Personally speaking, my hope for a bit of inspiration and a gentle hand to guide me off the path of habit have been entirely fulfilled. If the next five boxes are anything like this I'll be very happy indeed.

Top Tip: save serving blushes and turning-out-faffery by making your pannacotta in a nice cup

All images (c) PP Gettins

Note: We have no association with The Spicery and there are no freebies or favours - Mrs Robot paid for the subscription with her own hard-earned cash, though being a gentleman I couldn't tell you how much.

Wright Brothers, Spitalfields, London

One of the restaurant's two entrances.

By: Mrs Robot

London, where the streets are paved with gold!

Or rather, London, where the streets are lined with restaurants and I never have the slightest idea which ones are going to be good and which bad. Luckily, when I went to the Big Smoke on Wednesday for the press preview of the British Library's 'Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination' exhibition (full review on Crinoline Robot) I was meeting Mi Mi Aye for lunch, and she picked the restaurant. I'd anticipated a trip to City Caphe but she suggested Wright Brothers - somewhere I'd probably never venture in on my own. I accepted.

Now, I have a love/hate relationship with seafood. I'm not a fan of massively fishy flavours. In fact, after broccoli cooked in a sauce that was roughly 50% chillies and 50% catbreath in Burma, I couldn't bear anything fishy for days, which was a bit of a sod in a country that uses fish sauce as a basic condiment. However, I do like sushi and sea fish, and figured if I was going to go to a fish restaurant, it might as well be in the company of someone who really knows their fish. Plus, if you never try anything new you'll be eating baby food for your whole life, and there'll be enough time for that when I'm 103 and toothless.

My first impressions were that the restaurant - we met at the Spitalfields branch - felt really welcoming. Probably because it had a bar, and that's always a good start where Mr Robot and I are concerned. In fact, the whole place, with its wooden floor, wide marble bar, brick floors and cool atmosphere, had a pleasingly informal, publike feel, though most pubs don't have tanks full of lobsters and crabs swimming around.

Mi Mi's fish platter - lots of whelks and cockles as well as oysters.

Mi Mi and I decided to eat at the bar, perched on leather-topped stools. You could have different sorts of dishes - giant seafood platters, portions of individual types of seafood, smaller plates, and things from the specials board. It's a great way of doing things as fish can be expensive, and this way if a group of people goes everyone can find something to suit their budget.

Fried baby squid, brown shrimp and prawns.

Mi Mi made up her own seafood platter as she likes oysters. I opted for one dish with fried baby squid, prawns and brown shrimps, and one of mojama. I always love the puntillitas (baby squid) when we have it in Spain, so it was a treat to get it over here, and I'd never tried brown shrimps or mojama but had always wanted to. To be honest I wasn't taken with the texture of the shrimps, which you eat shell and all, though I'd known that might be a problem for me when I ordered them. When you order something completely new, there's always a risk it might not be quite to your taste. Certainly they seemed extremely fresh and were beautifully cooked. Dipped in the garlic mayonnaise, they were jolly tasty, and I ate the lot anyway. The squidlets and prawns disappeared fairly rapidly too...

Mojama - Spanish air-dried tuna. Tuna ham, if you like

The mojama was lovely, not too soft or too chewy, and perfectly complimented by tomato, caperberries and flat-leaf parsley.

There was a really nice pudding selection, but both of us opted to have stichelton cheese and grapes instead. I am a fiend for cheese, and it was really good, with plenty of blue and a good, earthy rind.

I really enjoyed my trip to Wright Brothers. It's not the sort of place I'd have chosen, and it can be refreshing to step away from the norm and try something very different. I'd go there again, but I'd probably keep it as a lunchtime place. It'd be perfect on a hot summer day. I don't really appreciate seafood enough to luxuriate over a costly seafood platter on an evening out, though if shellfish and finnyfish are your thing, you'd probably adore it.

The trouble with fish

By: Mr Robot

I have numerous issues with fish.

Firstly my Mother was freaked out by it. Despite a lifetime in nursing she somehow found the texture and smell of fresh fish appalling (as opposed to, say, as a midwife manually extracting and burning placentas) so fish was hardly a relished ingredient when I was growing up.

Even though we lived on the Norfolk Broads and had a fish van each Friday bringing it fresh from world-famous Cromer - No. So fish cooking was largely done by my Gran, on which there will be much, much more when I can bring myself to deal with it.

Secondly fish is, qua protein, rubbish. Nutrimetrically it probably ticks boxes you never cared about until big pharma told you to panic about it (*cough* Omega-3 *cough*) but as Something For Tea is utterly lacking in the key respect of texture. I want to chew my dinner goddamnit. I'm constantly baffled that vegetarians don't eat fish because as far as eating goes it's a damn sight closer to overboiled carrot than a lump of cow, sheep or pig.

[I do realise how dreadfully Top Gear that sounds, and would like to apologise.

But I can't]

I have eaten and enjoyed fish on many occasions, but the times I haven't followed up with some sort of land-based product on the way home can be counted on the fingers of one fist.

Thirdly, it's hideously expensive. I freely admit this is my own fault in that anything involving less than a pound of meat counts as mere scooby-snack. So while A Fish is relatively inexpensive, try getting half-a-kilo of flesh off the bugger and see how your wallet feels.

And before you get all Hugh F-W on me, yes food should be expensive. I do pay £15+ for a chicken and eye-watering amounts for pork that's so bloody worth it you won't believe until you try. But the £/satisfaction ratio for fish is extremely poor (see above). Texture of soggy Spam at the price of muscles will never rate well on my spreadsheet.

Finally and fundamentally, it's hard to get. We have an outstanding butcher in Walter Rose and veg is largely organic from Riverford, or from a small local greengrocer. But for fishy we're basically reliant on stupidmarkets, which nobody wants. Walter Rose do in fact supply fish but since they (quite rightly) won't have it thrown away or sitting in freezers, you need to order it in advance. I'm just not that organised.

Never mind everything else, give me a proper local fishmonger and I'll be in there every week spending inadvisable amounts and building my cookery skills enormously. But there isn't one and I can't and THAT is the trouble with fish.

All the above notwithstanding, I have much-loved cookbooks where I've done pretty much all the meat but no fish (Tom Kerridge, Uyen Luu and Thommi Miers/Wahaca to name but some) hence I'm feeling the need to go off-pais. So expect fish in future but don't be surprised if I bitch about it.

There are no images (c) PP Gettins because, well, read the damn thing

Morito book talk with Sam and Sam Clark

By: Mrs Robot

Last night we went to a talk by Sam and Sam Clark to promote their latest cookbook, Morito, organised by Bath bookshop Toppings. It took place in one of the churches. Both of us adore Spain and Spanish food, and we already own the first two Moro cookbooks. Of course, the Clarks don’t stop at Spain, their food encompasses a lot of other Mediterranean cuisines, but it always has strong ties to Spain and most of their other dishes work well alongside their Spanish ones - hardly surprising when you consider the Moorish influence on Spain’s food.

Morito is named after the Clarks' newest restaurant, where the method of dining isn’t based around the usual three-course structure. Instead people get a range of dishes all at once and pick and choose between them. (If you’re thinking ‘like tapas’, let me smack you. You don’t share tapas. Sharing is more akin to Greek mezze or Muslim Mediterranean ways of enjoying a meal.) Anyway, lectures on the consumption of tapas aside, it’s a jolly friendly and sociable way of eating, less formal and great fun. The recipes in Morito are therefore designed for this style of eating.

When we arrived we were given a Rebujito cocktail (a really refreshing blend of lemonade, manzanilla sherry and mint) and a Gilda. A Gilda is made with olive, anchovy, silverskin onion and pickled chili (hence its name; the slender shape of the chill was thought to resemble Rita Hayworth’s legs in the noir film Gilda!).

Put the blame on Spain, boys...

We both hate anchovies.

No, we both hated anchovies.

Last night we loved them. I don't know if it was because of all the salt in the olive, or the vinegar in the onion, but somehow the combination on the cocktail stick worked. We may have to rethink our position on the fishy horrors. I never thought I’d say this about anything containing anchovies, but I could have eaten more of those tapas. !Ay, Dios de ma vida!

The talk was fairly brief. He-Sam started off, and seemed unused to giving talks, which I found quite nice; they both came across as genuine, approachable people. To begin with they talked about almonds, and little dishes of almonds got passed round, then about making the red pepper tortilla from the book, and tortilla got passed round.

Do want!

I really liked the tortilla, but Mr Robot prefers his to be traditional, with potato and onion only. (He didn’t give me his piece, though, oh no.) There’s a courgette tortilla recipe in the book, and I’ll definitely have a go at that as we end up with heaps of the things as they arrive in our Riverford vegbox each week during summer. The veggie-packed tortillas are basically pastry-free flans, and will save me faffing around making flan cases when I get into work.

As the talk went on, both Sams seemed to relax and settle down more, and it was really good to hear about their approach to food and to running a restaurant. Not for them the building of brands (though they seem to have managed that anyway!) or the trappings of celebrity chefdom, they just like cooking and exploring food. They’re very down to earth, and that’s reflected in their style of cooking, which is fuss-free, without fancy foams or spheres, just good and earthy. It was a really enjoyable talk.

This was delicious

The Mr or I will do a full writeup of the cookbook once we’ve made a fair few things out of it, but on a read-through it looks like we’ll be using it a lot.