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Food picks of the week

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:06:23 GMT

Festival In The Sky, Edinburgh

At first, the idea of eating your lunch suspended 100 feet above Edinburgh on a 22-seat platform-cum-dining-table sounds like nonsense. The calibre of chefs involved with Festival In The Sky, however, may make you think again. The cold courses served during the standard half-hour airborne sessions, such as bilini with smoked salmon mousse at breakfast, or pressed pork and caramelised shallot terrine over lunch, have been designed by former Le Gavroche head chef, Steven Doherty. Doherty is now chef-director at Cook School Scotland, who are co-ordinating the FITS food. The guest chefs, meanwhile, who will actually cook certain dishes on the platform, include such Michelin-starred names as Tony Borthwick (Plumed Horse) and Geoffrey Smeddle (Peat Inn). It will be a meal to remember, if only – with those guest chef tickets costing £97.50 – for the gaping hole it leaves in your wallet.

Princes Street Gardens, Sun to 31 Aug, from £32.50, visit festivalinthesky.com

Tony Naylor

one9seven, Lewes

Chef-turned-journalist turned chef-patron Stuart Ferguson, and his wife Sue, run this newcomer to the burgeoning foodie scene in historic Lewes. Serving from breakfast till dinner, one9seven is a relaxed kinda place, stylish yet homely. Ferguson's cooking style is wacky and experimental modern British with airs and jellies aplenty. It's not a case of style over substance, though, with ingredients diligently sourced within a 15-mile radius. Try a signature starter of parmesan custard pot with Marmite soldiers or a prawn cocktail smoothie; it might look like a strawberry milkshake but its creamy textures work perfectly against a cooling cucumber and lettuce jelly. Move on to mains like lamb's shoulder shepherd's pie, garlic purée, confit tomatoes and garden mint jelly, and finish with a pleasingly retro, intensely flavoured dandelion and burdock espuma.

197 High St (Tel: 01273-479713) price per head £30

Carina Murphy

Café Luc, London

Ensconced on the site where Eat And Two Veg gave the ideal of the vegetarian brasserie its best shot, Café Luc brings us a more classic European version: this is steak tartare and beef fillet territory. The food is good, at times excellent. Organic chicken with pappardelle, wild mushrooms and champagne is shot through with bright flavours, while a vegetable marinière and basil pesto sauce really brings scallops to life. A Mediterranean influence on the menu isn't always so successful: a nicely steamed sea bass is totally overwhelmed by the accompanying exotic fruit salad. The other problem is the Café's schizophrenic attempt at sophisticated casual: it wants to be an informal, continental, open-all-day eatery, yet the prices and fussy service lend themselves to a fine dining experience, leaving customers unsatisfyingly stranded inbetween.

50 Marylebone High Street, W1 (Tel: 020-7258 9878) price per head £34

Martin Skegg

Wine: Cool whites for hot days | Victoria Moore

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:02:57 GMT

When the summer sun finally comes out, so should an invigorating white wine

There are many good things to drink when it is hot. This summer, my freezer has never been without a good stock of ice cube trays filled with leftover Moka espresso. I add the frozen cubes to cold milk to make iced coffee, and had been packing a flaskful for work every morning until I realised the presence of a Thermos (plus glass plus brightly coloured straws) on my desk might suggest to my bosses that I consider myself to be under expedition conditions merely being in the office. Still, iced coffee, so much more refreshing than the hot version, is good at home before you set off. On a sticky afternoon, I relish the smoky edge of a cup of lapsang souchong. And at a party in late spring, I also tried a genius non-alcoholic cocktail. It was made by bartender Alex Kammerling using pink grapefruit juice and elderflower cordial topped up with soda – you can juggle around with the quantities until the balance of sweet and sour suits your taste – and was so good it kept me from the perilous third martini of the night.

And then, of course, there's wine. Blind River Sauvignon Blanc 2009 (£12.99, Oddbins; 13% abv), from New Zealand, is having another good year. This is a white that grabs you by the eyeballs. It smells of passion fruit, and though you'd have to be very discerning to notice that 10% of it is barrel-fermented, the oak adds layers of flavour and gives it a fuller feel in your mouth. The Chilean Casa Silva Cool Coast Sauvignon Blanc 2009 (£12.95, Averys; 13.5% abv) is a complete contrast. One of the new breed of cooler-climate Chilean SBs, instead of tasting of green capsicum and sugared, stewed gooseberries, it is herbaceous and nettley, a cool, sparkling blade rather than a cannon. My bottle was actually a little too nettley and almost painfully linear because it was reduced, but once I'd poured it into a jug and swilled it round with a few copper coins, it emerged as graceful, steely and proud as a good sancerre.

Thomas Mitchell Marsanne 2008 (£6.99, or £5.59 by the mixed case, Oddbins; 13% abv) is a good, cheap Australian house wine, bright, fresh and with a hint of mango. Try it with oily fish, say swordfish barbecued with a squeeze of citrus. Last, Yalumba Y-Series Pinot Grigio 2009 (£7.49, Co-op; 12.5% abv), another Australian, leans towards being Alsatian (as in from Alsace, not the big dog) in style: it is very gently spicy, with the slightest waft of an almost musky perfume, as if you've caught a familiar perfume on a warm breeze and then lost it again. Definitely one for the garden.

victoriaxmoore@gmail.com
Photographs: Fullstopphotography.com.

Family life

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:04:49 GMT

Readers' favourite photographs, songs and recipes

Snapshot Thanks for this precious picture

This is to the unknown man who took this photograph. You probably don't remember this at all. It was a sparkling cold, sunny day by the entrance to the Coronation Gardens, just opposite the Roundhay Fox pub in Leeds. It was 3 October last year. You were leaving Tropical World. I asked you to take a picture of Mum and me. You said you were no expert and I said what people always say: "You can't go wrong, just point and press."

What you probably saw were two women, alike in looks and 20-odd years apart in age. You would have seen the turquoise blue of what Mum still called her "windjammer", her defiantly red hair, her smile, which I recognise as that curious mix of her dad, Charlie, and her mum, Bella's, smile. You might even have glimpsed Mum's spirit, her love of life.

What you probably didn't notice was the way Mum was propped up against the wall. She looked as if she was perching, relaxed. In fact, she was leaning against me, clinging to the wall, the wheelchair somewhere in the background. You didn't see her slippers, the Velcro-ed maroon velvet flaps semi-fastened over toes curled by 12 years of Parkinson's disease. You didn't see the way the drugs she took every day had reddened the rims of her eyes. You didn't see the way something as trivial as a urinary tract infection had unravelled her life.

And what you couldn't have known was that this is the last photograph of Mum and me together. Fifteen weeks ago, the manager at her care home rang, his voice shaky. "June's died," he said, and everything changed.

In a couple of weeks it will be my birthday. Last year, I wrote Mum a card listing what I know about my birth: that I was conceived in love near the Buddha's footprint on Adam's Peak, in Sri Lanka. That in the last days of pregnancy, X-rays incorrectly suggested Mum was carrying twins. She was driven down the steeply winding road from Nuwara Eliya to Colombo where I was delivered – singly – by caesarean section. That my dad was staying at a friend's house on one of the tea plantations in Talawakelle, so absorbed in listening to Dvorák's New World Symphony and reading Nevil Shute's On the Beach that he forgot to visit Mum and me until I was four days old.

These are stories told and embroidered over the years. But it is the photographs, the 12 balsa wood boxes of slides, that hold most of our family memories. Yet for all the thousands of images, I can number only three or four just of Mum and me together.

Perhaps because of this, I have for years embarrassed my husband by asking complete strangers taking photos of each other if they want me to take their picture together. I know how hard it can be to ask. And I know how often the photographer is missing from the memory captured by the image.

So to the man who took this last photograph of my lovely mum and me at Rounday park last autumn, I just want to say thank you, for finally putting us both together in the picture. Jane Maitland

Playlist The cycle of life comes round again

Beethoven's Symphony No 7 in A major, second movement, Allegretto

The Sounds of the Seventies version, a synth-mash of strings and Casio keyboards, an orchestra pretending to be Freddie Mercury under the influence of Beethoven. It crackled out of the cassette player of our purple Ford Cortina, a sad song for our sombre cruise across the Pennines. It was 1976.

Grandma's died, Dad said, she won't be standing on the doorstep in her apron and pale pink glasses, ready to embrace you with a "Why, Pet!" and then curl you towards the parlour table flowing with cakes and home-baked goodies. She's died.

The clouds fled past the window. Dad was driving slowly and silently. She was your mum, I thought, and you must be very sad, sad like this music. The orchestra played its synthesised sorrow, and I wondered if Grandma was up there in the clouds with the sun and the wind, and I felt sad too.

Thirty four years later and it's my turn now. I'm taking my children to my dad's funeral. Grandad's died, I told them. He won't be hiding behind the door whistling, he won't jump out and give you a big hug. He's died.

I stare at the sky above the A1 as we drive north in our green Audi estate. We're playing Beethoven's Seventh, the second movement, on the iPod, but we're making do with the London Symphony Orchestra version, because Sounds of the Seventies has long been consigned to landfill. But it's the same tune, and as I listen I'm back in the Cortina, watching the clouds and thinking of Grandma. I stare at the sky above the A1. Your son's on his way, I tell the grey clouds, and the strings soar and it makes me cry all over again. Rachel Watson

We love to eat Angels on horseback

Ingredients

Baked beans

Poached eggs

Small children are easily pleased. This dish was first served to me by my grandparents. I'm sure it was my grandad, a tiny man with a big laugh, who gave this dish its name. As soon as I heard it, I was enchanted and never wanted to eat anything else.

The baked beans were the horses who seemed to gallop around my plate in their sea of tomato sauce. The two poached eggs on top were the white-robed angels. My grandparents would let me stir the beans and, a few years later, even break the eggs as well, which I would do with great trepidation.

My mum brought me up on a diet of homemade wholemeal bread, sugar-free biscuits and home-grown vegetables. I adore this kind of food as an adult and I'm full of admiration for her now. Yet as a child, I felt hard done by and longed for the lurid prepackaged foods that my friends ate. Only once did I convince her to make angels on horseback. I'd been ill and hadn't eaten for days, so she could hardly refuse. However, it just didn't taste the same. I suspect she used reduced-salt beans.

I was stunned to see angels on horseback on a restaurant menu recently. They turned out to be oysters wrapped in bacon. I think I prefer the simpler version. I have them for breakfast occasionally and I always think of Grandad as I eat them. Alison Reynolds

Comté and polenta tart recipe | Yotam Ottolenghi | Vegetarian | Food

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:02:54 GMT

A cheesy short pastry tart with a surprise up its sleeve

Adding polenta to short pastry, be it sweet or savoury, makes the "biting" experience more exciting. Serve with something fresh and sharp, such as a radish and lettuce salad dressed with lemon and garlic vinaigrette. Serves six to eight.

For the pastry
170g plain flour, plus extra to dust
60g quick-cook polenta
20g finely grated parmesan
140g unsalted butter, fridge-cold and cut into cubes
50ml water
A pinch of salt
For the filling
200g comté, grated
150ml crème fraîche
150ml single cream
3 eggs
2 tsp nigella seeds
¾ tsp each salt and ground white pepper
200g chopped Swiss chard, cooked for a few minutes in olive oil (or spinach, washed, wilted and drained)

In a food processor, work all the pastry ingredients except the water to fine crumbs, add the water and mix until it starts coming together – if it's still very crumbly and dry, add a tiny splash of water and pulse again. Tip out on to a work surface lightly dusted with flour, and work until the pastry comes together. Gently roll it out into a roughly 5mm thick round disc. Lifting the pastry with a palette knife, turn it around as you roll, then use a rolling pin to lay it in a deep, 24cm fluted tin. Cut off any excess hanging over the edges and use the offcuts to patch up any gaps. Chill in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Place a circle of greaseproof paper on top of the pastry case, fill with baking beans and bake for 20 minutes, until just golden. Remove the paper and beans, and bake for another 10 minutes, or until the pastry is cooked through. Remove from the oven and reduce the temperature to 150C/300F/gas mark 2.

While the pastry is cooking, mix together all the filling ingredients except the chard, then pour into the cooked tart case and dot with spoonfuls of chard. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the tart is just set and golden. Leave to cool for 10 minutes, remove from the tin and serve warm or at room temperature.

• Yotam Ottolenghi is chef/patron of Ottolenghi in London.

Restaurant review: Zucca

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:03:53 GMT

Hard on the heels of a good Italian in north London comes a restaurant worth crossing the river for

184 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 (020 7378 6809). Meal for two, including wine and service, £75

You wait ages for a good, reasonably priced, achingly hip, modern Italian restaurant, and then two come along at once. There are, naturally enough, various things to separate last week's Trullo at London's Highbury Corner and this week's Zucca, on that tight knot of streets near London Bridge where smart young things without children live in apartment spaces without walls. Trullo had a youthful vibe; Zucca feels like Trullo's grown-up brother – it's what the latter would have looked like if they'd had fat investors wanting a piece of the action. It is a clean white space of clean white tables, big windows, concrete and metropolitan attitude, constructed by professionals. It looks, I said to my companion, like the canteen for a smart architectural practice, and then recalled that this was exactly how its inspiration, the River Cafe in Hammersmith, started. The staff are older than at Trullo, their hair cuts a little sharper, the menu a little longer, the kitchen a little more open, the better to watch the cooks taste every dish as it goes out.

What unites them is quality and price. They are each other's ying and yang, separated only by Old Father Thames. Zucca's big selling point is a lengthy list of antipasti at astonishingly good prices. A generous plate full of carpaccio of sea bream, for the princely sum of £4.15, came dressed with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice and curls of fresh red chilli. It had us debating the meeting point of Japanese and Italian food.

Baked hunks of beetroot, long-roasted shallots and soft goat's cheese was both pretty and rich. The most indecently indulgent of the lot, however, was a plate of the vegetable from which the restaurant takes its name – zucca is the Italian for pumpkin – soft cooked, chipped and lightly battered. For £3. Oh my. If I lived nearby I would sneak in for a plateful every day, until I was the size of an apartment block rather than a mere house.

There were just two pasta dishes, one of which, wide pappardelle with peas, lemon and a snowfall of grated Parmesan, had run out by 8.15pm, which suggests pretty poor stock control, but the servings going past us looked irritatingly lovely. The other was exactly the same as at Trullo last week: skinny threads of taglierini with brown shrimps and courgette, a beautiful fusion of an English ingredient with Italian principles. Zucca's was as good as that at Trullo – silky egg-yolk-yellow pasta, nutty little shrimps, a ripe starchy liquor – though at £6.50 it was £2 more expensive for the starter portion. Which is what white walls, acres of shiny glass and older, more plentiful and more seasoned staff costs.

A veal chop, with crisp, caramelised fat and a heap of well-seasoned wilted spinach, was a simple dish full of simple virtues. Another of curiously meaty squid, chargrilled and curled, sprinkled with red chilli and laid on borlotti beans was equally good. The only duff notes were rather ordinary desserts: a slightly overset panna cotta with roasted peaches, and a more than slightly over-baked almond and cherry tart. But when the bill stacks up as it does here – helped by a wine list with lots of choice in the teens – such a thing is merely a vague disappointment rather than the bloody outrage the too-standard three-figure bill engenders.

So now north and south London have access to great Italian food. To those outside the capital who want to moan that there is a world beyond London, I could say that the city is witnessing a massive explosion in restaurants. But the real reason for the outbreak of London reviews involves one of my kids, a raging infection, the brilliant services of the NHS and a lot of time bedside. (He's fine now.) Frankly, for anybody wishing to rage at me for being metro-centric, I regard this as a get-out-of-jail-free card. And the restaurant reviews as a blessed relief from far too much canteen food. After all, man cannot live by paninis and packets of crisps alone. Normal service out-of-London will resume shortly.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place

Parsley cheese scones recipe | Dan Lepard | Baking | Food

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:02:55 GMT

An easy-peasy cheesy delight from our master baker

I've lowered the fat and increased the flavour, fibre and moistness in these easy-peasy cheesy scones – good for picnics. Makes eight to 10.

75g rolled oats, plus more for the top
50ml buttermilk
1 large egg
50ml sunflower or corn oil
1 large bunch parsley, leaves picked and finely chopped
5-6 spring onions, finely chopped
200g mature cheddar, coarsely grated
350g plain flour, plus a little extra for shaping
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
Beaten egg or milk, for brushing

Put the oats in a saucepan with 150ml water, bring to a boil, then spoon into a mixing bowl, stir in the buttermilk and set aside to cool for 30 minutes.

Once cool, beat in the egg and oil until smooth, stir in the parsley, spring onions and cheddar, then add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix into a soft dough.

Cover a baking tray with nonstick paper, or sprinkle it with flour, and heat the oven to 220C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7. Flour a worktop, pat the dough to about 4cm thick and, using a sharp cutter, cut out 6-8cm rounds. Place these 4-5cm apart on the prepared tray, brush the tops with egg or milk, sprinkle over a good pinch of oats and bake for 15-20 minutes, until puffed and golden.

danlepard.com/guardian

A musical accompaniment

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:45:00 GMT

Do you find a soundtrack can enhance your enjoyment of eating out? What's the worst you've had to endure?

Like many home-workers, I've got a 'local' I occasionally repair to for lunch. It's useful, now and again, to be able to get away from the keyboard, not have to worry about whipping up food or cleaning up afterwards and just sit, immersed in thought.

My local is a cheap and cheerful family-run sushi joint. They do great set lunch, greet you with a smile and tend to leave you, politely, to your contemplation. They also have the most agonising soundtrack known to man. When the the US Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms besieged their compound in Waco Texas, they played rock music over speakers in an attempt to break the spirits of the Branch Davidians within. I've always assumed they used something like Bon Jovi, but they didn't have access to a single, stretched tape loop of The Carpenters' greatest hits. In Japanese.

I've worked in enough restaurants to know that the staff simply don't notice the music after the first few shifts. This is fortunate because there's not a great deal of variety. An establishment obeying the law will either have an expensive "pub play" system where a monthly fee covers performance rights for recorded music or they'll have a very limited selection of playlists usually compiled by a DJ in consultation with the proprietor to "reflect the brand" of the restaurant. Either way, the staff don't get much choice.

I bounced for a while in an unspeakable Tex-Mex hole that kept eight CDs of twangly guitar rock, to which the floor staff seemed entirely immune. The crew, the usual international mix of students and travellers, must be all over the world now, being, I hope, entirely useful members of society. They're probably not even aware of how deeply programmed they are. They have no idea why, when Miserlou comes on their local radio station, they suddenly smell coriander, hear the distant sizzling sound of a cast iron fajita dish, and catch the evanescent whiff of tequila vomit. I like to imagine them all out there, schoolteachers, doctors, traffic wardens and fishermen, all twitching like the neurasthenic nightclub vets they really are.

Once a year the boss would introduce the Christmas compilation to the cycle. We could handle Phil Spector's festive offerings but several tracks, notably the novelty arrangements of carols barked by dogs, would stop them dead in their tracks, inexplicable rage passing behind their eyes, and inexplicable randomness would occur. Who could fail to be moved by the sight of a punter being dragged across the bar by an enraged 5'6" barback and kicked unconscious to the strains of Silent Night yipped by a corgi?

But why do they do it? Why do restaurants feel the need to give us a soundtrack at all? It's been posited that the Hard Rock Cafe, the original noise-themed restaurant, hung all that memorabilia on the walls so punters on dates would have something to talk about, and then turned up the music so they wouldn't have to. In other venues, tinkly new-age lift music is intended to impart an air of calm, alongside the ubiquitous fibreglass buddha and pointless bowls of floating petals. Antonio Vivaldi, putting quill to vellum in 18th-century Venice, could hardly have dared dream that the high points of his oeuvre would one day be used to make mid-range cafes in university towns seem "a bit more classy".

I admit, I've been to one or two places with pretensions where the combination of the thick carpet, the sepulchral hush of the dining room and the priestly demeanour of the waiting staff has grated - and I've been forced to sing under my breath. Usually, out of a sense of loyalty to my favourite, uncomplicated local, it's a phonetic rendition of Close to You embellished with wow and flutter.

Do you find a soundtrack can enhance your enjoyment of eating? What's the worst you've had to endure?

Beanz meanz canz? Heinz to sell plastic jars

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:17:08 GMT

After 115 years, Heinz is to offer its baked beans in screw-top plastic jars for the first time

Devotees of baked beans will soon be able to save themselves valuable seconds – not to mention the agony of lacerating their fingers on jagged cans – as they prepare their favourite food.

After 115 years, Heinz is to offer its baked beans in screw-top plastic jars for the first time. The 15cm-high resealable fridge pack, which holds 1kg of beans, will go on sale in September and will feature a see-through measure on its side showing how much is left inside.

The new packs, which have been designed to fit on a fridge shelf, contain the equivalent of more than two of the 415g standard tins of beans.

"Bean lovers tell us they want to enjoy the beans as they like and in portions that suit them," said Paula Jordan, marketing director at Heinz.

Those who enjoy a more leisurely approach to the preparation of beans on toast can rest easy as the new packs will be sold alongside the familiar tins.

The American company has been selling its beans in tins since 1895 and introduced them to Britain on the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in 1901. The company now sells 442m tins a year in the UK.

Heinz is not the only company to repackage its products in plastic: Lyle's Golden Syrup did in 2002, with Marmite following suit four years later.

In 2004 Heinz spent £5m amending its black and blue cans so that they bore the logo Heinz Baked Beanz. The orthographical makeover was intended as a tribute to its 1960s advertising slogan Beanz Meanz Heinz. The wordplay was dreamed up in a pub by an ad man, Maurice Drake, in 1967. In 2000, it was voted the best slogan of all time by a panel from the British advertising industry.

Cooking with children recipes | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall | Food

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:03:01 GMT

It's amazing what even quite young children can achieve in the kitchen, and the summer holidays are the perfect time to let them find their culinary feet

As a kid, the long summer holiday represented seemingly endless possibilities for aimlessly messing about. What bliss. Often, the fractionally more purposeful messing about took place in the kitchen. Mum was remarkably relaxed in giving me access to her armoury of pans, bowls and knives – though usually all I required was the rotary whisk, to knock up yet another soft mountain of Angel Delight.

I did get a little beyond that. In fact, I became quite the junior pastry chef. Under Mum's guidance, I learned to knock out very respectable black forest gateaux, profiteroles, lemon mousse – classic 1970s sweets to follow her avocado mousse with prawns and beef wellington. We were a dinner party double act – except I never saw my creations being consumed, because I was in bed by then.

Cooking is still our rainy-day activity of choice in the summer hols, only now I'm the one dishing out ingredients, finding the right size bowl and wondering if I'll have to do all the washing up. When Mum's here, of course, she'll take over supervision, so I can sneak off and do a bit of real nothing. And I'm reminded that I used to cook with her mum, my granny, too. Eggs, flour, sugar, butter, etc… Is there any better glue for holding together the fabric of family down the generations?

My kids are not so resolutely sweet-toothed as I was at their age, so with the right kind of cajoling and suggestions, I have an outside chance of getting a remarkably well-balanced meal cooked for me. Chloe, 14, likes making huge vats of beans – from scratch, soaking dried beans, boiling them, and making a lovely sauce from onions, tomatoes and a bit of spice. They last for days. Oscar, 11, likes knives (understatement), and his skills and enthusiasm can be happily channelled into veg prep. Freddie, seven, does nothing by the book and is averse to taking instructions, but has taken to the blender (supervised) and is surprisingly adept at transforming fruit from our garden into purées that can be drunk as smoothies, served with ice-cream or pancakes, or frozen into lollies.

It's impressive what even quite young children can achieve – small hands do very well at rolling today's falafel or picking herbs from their stems. For kids who like to follow instructions, all this week's recipes deliver, while for the more independent-minded, they're starting points for experiments. The falafel, for instance, make terrific mini veggie burgers. Mix in cooked beans or peas, and spice it up with curry powder, too. And toss cooked or tinned beans, or cubed avocado, in with the salad, or chop its ingredients smaller to create a lively salsa.

All these dishes together, customised or not, make a lovely summer holiday family meal. And even if not all the kids are entirely enamoured of all the savoury items (are they ever?), the sundaes will surely leave no one disappointed.

Three quick dips

Serve one or more of these instead of hummus with the falafel, and or with a pile of fresh raw veg crudités: • Purée or mash cooked cannellini beans with a little minced garlic, a slug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of cumin. Add some finely chopped parsley, if you like.

• Drain cooked spinach and squeeze out the excess moisture. Chop finely or pulse in a blender, and mix with cream cheese, grated parmesan, black pepper and a grate of nutmeg.

• Mix thick yoghurt with a tiny amount of crushed garlic, a little salt and pepper, and plenty of chopped herbs – chives, plus either dill, coriander or mint work well.

Falafel

Delicious warm, but also great cold. Serve in flatbreads or pitta with salad for a main course or with a yoghurt dip for a snack. Makes about 14.

200g dried chickpeas
1 small onion, chopped or grated
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 small bunch parsley, stalks removed, leaves finely chopped
1 small bunch coriander, stalks removed, leaves finely chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
¼ tsp chilli flakes (optional)
Salt
2-3 tbsp plain flourGroundnut oil (if frying them)
To serve
Pitta or flatbreads
Lettuce, shredded
Spring onion, finely chopped
Red peppers, finely sliced
Hummus or tahini (or one of my quick dips above)

Put the chickpeas in a large bowl, add cold water to cover by at least 6cm and soak overnight. Next day, drain, tip into a food processor and pulse the uncooked chickpeas, onion and garlic until roughly combined. Add the herbs, cumin, chilli (if using) and some salt, and pulse to a coarse paste. Sprinkle the flour over the mix and pulse until it comes together roughly into a ball. Put into a bowl, cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours.

Roll the mix into balls about the size of walnuts (slightly damp hands will make this job a bit easier). To bake the falafel, heat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6. Line a baking sheet with lightly oiled baking parchment, put the balls on the tray so they're not touching and bake for 20-25 minutes, rattling the tin halfway through. To fry them, pour 8cm of oil into a deep, heavy-bottomed pan (it shouldn't come more than a third of the way up the pan) and heat to 180C (that's the temperature at which a cube of white bread turns golden in less than a minute). Fry in batches until golden, about four minutes, remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

Roll up in flatbread or stuff pitta with some falafel and salad, and serve trickled with tahini thinned with hot water, spoonfuls of hummus or any of the dips above.

Tomato and sweetcorn salad

This easy, quick salad is colourful and tasty. If you like, tumble some rocket through it, to add a little fiery bite. Serves four as a side dish.

2 sweetcorn
3 large, ripe tomatoes, cut into 1cm cubes
1 shallot, chopped
1 handful coriander or basil leaves
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp red-wine vinegar (or the juice of ½ lime)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

There are three ways of preparing the corn. If you grow your own and it's very fresh, add it raw. Slightly older corn is best lightly simmered or barbecued – to simmer it, remove the husks and silk, plunge the corn into boiling water and simmer until tender, about five to 10 minutes, depending on how freshly picked it is; drain, refresh under cold water, then stand upright on a board and run a knife down the sides to remove the kernels. To barbecue it, peel back the husk, pull off the silk, wrap the husk back around the cob and tie at the top with cotton string. Soak in cold water for 15 minutes, then grill over the coals, turning frequently, for 12 minutes. Leave to cool, then cut off the kernels as for boiled corn.

In a bowl, mix the corn kernels with the tomatoes, shallot and herbs. Trickle over the oil and vinegar, toss gently, taste and season.

Berry sundaes with chocolate sauce

An indulgent treat. It's fun, if messy, to assemble a bowl of berries, whipped cream and nuts, pots of ice-cream and a jug of sauce, and let everyone put together their own pud. Serves six.

200g strawberries, hulled
200g raspberries
3 tbsp caster sugar
For the sauce
200g dark chocolate, broken in pieces
150ml double cream
2 tbsp Golden Syrup
To serve
Vanilla, strawberry or chocolate ice-cream
100ml double cream, lightly whipped
1 small handful toasted almonds or pecans, chopped (optional)

Halve large strawberries lengthways and leave small ones whole. Mix in a bowl with the raspberries and sugar, and macerate for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the sauce. Put the chocolate, cream and syrup in a heatproof bowl, place over a pan of barely simmering water (the water shouldn't touch the base of the bowl) and stir gently from time to time, until everything is melted into a smooth, rich sauce. Keep warm over the pan until you're ready to use it.

Layer berries, ice-cream and cream in sundae glasses, and finish with a trickle of sauce. Add a sprinkling of nuts, if you like.

• Visiting the south-west over the summer holidays? Join us for A Taste Of River Cottage, where children under 12 get in free; rivercottage.net for details.

Food for Fort: Unbreakable cafetières, small joints and condensed milk

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:03:02 GMT

Please help a clumsy coffee drinker. Plus what's the best way to cook a little bit of beef and how can I make my favourite lemon tart and still boycott Nestlé?

I have been making and enjoying a chilled lemon tart for years, but since our family boycott of all things Nestlé, I've been unable to buy the condensed milk needed. Do you know of other brands?
When I was at school, every now and then I'd buy a tiny tin of condensed milk. I would pierce a hole on either side of the top, then lie on my bed with the tin balanced precariously against my nose, so the condensed milk would flow gently into my open mouth. Such bliss. A brand called Fussells was my preferred choice, because its flow was better suited to this form of gastronomic indulgence. Sadly, it was bought out by Nestlé some time ago. But never fear: Sainsbury's and Tesco have Farmlea condensed milk for 99p, Asda sells Tropical Sun condensed milk for £1, and then there's Cadbury's Marvel condensed milk, which I'm reliably informed is sold at larger branches of the Co-op at around £2.05.

Can you get indestructible (perhaps plastic) "glass" for a three-cup cafetière? I keep breaking them, especially at work. I don't think they were designed for clumsy people.
I've lost count of the number of cafetières that have exploded, shattered and otherwise been destroyed at my hands over the years. So much so that I eventually abandoned it as a method of making coffee. Had I discovered the range of "unbreakable polycarbonate" cafetières made by Le'Xpress earlier, things might have been different. Denny & Sons have them – a three-cup one costs £8.99 – as well as a range of stainless steel cafetières at around £12.99. Alternatively, try Coopers Direct, who sell the Le'Xpress stainless steel three-cup jug cafetière for £11.24.

What's the best way to cook a small joint of beef weighing, say, 1.5kg? My recipe books and my internet searches all talk about much bigger joints, and say to put it in a very high oven for 20 minutes, then turn down the oven for the rest of the cooking time. But a small joint would be well on the way to being cooked through at the first stage, and I haven't been able to adjust times satisfactorily.
Aha, this is just the case for the ultra-low temperature roasting method. You'll need to invest in a good meat thermometer and, possibly, an oven thermometer, too (built-in oven thermostats are notoriously inaccurate). The other thing you need to bear in mind is 52C. When your meat thermometer shows your piece of beef has an internal temperature of 52C, then you know it'll be nice and rosy inside. Turn on the oven to the lowest possible setting, ideally 75C (around gas mark ?). Rub the joint all over with vegetable oil and season. Pop it into a roasting tray, slip it into the oven and cook until the internal temperature reaches 52C – this should take somewhere between two to three hours. That may seem a lot of trouble, but it isn't really, once you've got used to the idea – it's not as if you're actually doing anything, after all; it's just a matter of giving yourself a bit more time than you're used to. When the beef has reached the magic temperature, heat a tablespoon of butter in a frying pan until it starts to foam. Place the joint in the pan. Cook for few minutes, spooning the butter over it all the time. When one side has browned, turn the meat over and repeat on the other side. Leave to rest for 10-15 minutes, and your joint of beef will be pink and perfect.

• Got a foodie question for Matthew? Email food.for.fort@guardian.co.uk

My family values: Giorgio Locatelli

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:05:00 GMT

The chef and restaurateur talks about his family

My grandfather lost his electricity company during the war after his brother, a partisan, was shot by the fascists. Afterwards, he was given some money by the government and just after I was born, he bought a big plot of land and built a hotel. Slowly all the family moved into it.

When I was six or seven I really wanted to be a waiter like my cousins and brother. Because I was tiny and noisy and without teeth I was sent to the kitchen and so I grew up with the chefs. I was comfortable there and I've cooked all my life. I can't do anything else.

My parents wanted me to go to school and be a doctor or a lawyer. We had four chefs and they were tragic sometimes. This was the very old, drinking generation, so my parents were a bit scared of me turning out a crazy drunk, off the rails. But then it turned out well so they are very proud, actually.

One grandfather was a very simple man who couldn't even write, but my father's father was a hydroelectric engineer born in Milan. He was a wise man and I think he felt the loss of control during the fascist time. People would come to him for advice but you couldn't talk to him about his brother. He went to pick up the body when he was shot and he would cry about that. He was the only man I'd seen cry in my family until he died and my father cried at his funeral.

When somebody wanted to leave the hotel it was a tragedy, they took it so personally. Oh my God, when I left to go to Switzerland at 16 or 17 my aunty didn't speak to me for two years! My dad was the only one who advocated that you left and my mum understood but my aunt wouldn't let go.

My parents never asked us to do anything they wouldn't do themselves. When London was hit by snow my washer-ups couldn't come in because of it. We decided on a schedule where everybody would do one hour of washing up. To me it was natural to put my own name in – it didn't cross my mind that I wouldn't do it myself.

I have two children. Jack, 20, is from my wife Plaxy's previous marriage. I met him when he was two and even though I am not genetically his father I feel that he is mine – the way he behaves, the things he does, he is my son. He has an unbelievable palette and will eat anything. But sometimes he drives us crazy because he's with his friends and they want a McDonald's, but he says, "Come home, I'll cook you something." I have to get him out of bed to clean up but I'm proud that he doesn't like junk food.

My daughter Margherita (Dita) is 13 and I thought for years, why did this happen to me – to have a daughter who is allergic to so many foods? She was exposed to food from being a tiny little thing and the doctors think that was what caused it, too much too early. She had eczema to the point that she nearly died of blood poisoning at two. She ended up being hospitalised for a month. It was terrible.

Dita loves this business and maybe she will follow me into it. I don't want to impose it on her but you can see that she's completely at ease here with the people. Put her on the phone and you would have no idea she was 13.

I think Dita learned the social side here at the restaurant, with her mother and me. This is our "house". OK, we don't know the people who come here but we make them feel comfortable. This is the way I am. It's a good advantage in life if you can make people feel comfortable.

Nigel Slater's crab salad, radish salad, and peach salad recipes

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:04:55 GMT

Can't stand the heat, but don't want to stay out of the kitchen? Then turn off the oven and tune into simple cold meats, marinated fish and summery fresh fruit

It is as if everyone has packed up and left. Everything is still. No cars, no voices, not even the usual comforting hum of a city at night. The heat this summer has been unusually oppressive and has reduced my kitchen to little more than somewhere to wash a lettuce or slice a tomato.

Cooking is what I do; the daily ritual of preparing food to sustain, to please and to share. But it is too hot to even think of switching the oven on. The kitchen is an inferno by mid-morning. What is giving me pleasure right now is pulling watercress out of bowls of ice-cold water; cutting crisp, prickly skinned cucumbers from the plant outside the kitchen door; squeezing plump and quivering balls of snowy mozzarella out of their plastic pouches. Finding ways to satisfy my need to "cook" without lighting the oven or switching on the gas hob has become a preoccupation.

As a "winter person" who prefers a layer of frost to the glare of the sun, this weather should be torture, but I have rather taken to preparing food barefoot, to swinging open the fridge and reaching for yet another lettuce from the salad crisper or biting into my second chilled peach of the day.

A wooden board of cold meats, sliced paper-thin and set around a pile of shredded radish has been lunch twice this week. The overblown radish was pulled from the garden, grated and tossed with sliced cucumber and coriander leaves. Eaten with a small platter of fish (marinated anchovies, raw scallops, crab and marinated mackerel) got me excited enough to repeat the arrangement the next day. The mackerel had soaked overnight with lime juice, vinegar and crushed coriander seeds; the crabmeat was spiked with nuggets of red chilli, shredded lemongrass and basil leaves; the scallops were sliced and tossed in olive oil and lemon. Nothing could have been simpler.

The next day involved a salad of white crabmeat, cherry tomatoes and coriander leaves. This was eaten with the thinnest of breads – a sort of carta da musica affair from the deli where the bread is almost thin enough to see through. The finer type of crispbread is a more accessible substitute. We snapped the wafer of bread into sharp-edged pieces and used it to scoop up the crab and tomato salad.

The two salads were part of a week of producing cool meals for hot days. Appetite tends to calm down in the searing heat. I seem to be replete on a lot less food than when the weather cools down. This allows main dishes so light as to be almost frivolous, but it doesn't quell my need to end each meal with something sweet. Peaches, apricots and figs have been the main sweet treats this last week. Sadly none of these were from my own garden. And of the fruit I brought home none is particularly improved by cooking.

The British season is on the way. A raspberry or loganberry sauce is an effective dressing for peaches, or indeed nectarines and apricots, that you have brought to perfection then chilled for a good hour or two in the fridge. I slice them thickly then toss them gently in a dressing made from liquidised raspberries or loganberries, leaving the seeds in to give something to contrast the soft fruit. You could add a little framboise, but the fruits around now are probably heady enough without the addition of any form of alcohol.

This feeling that the summer is going on forever can't last much longer. Early yesterday, about 6am, I distinctly detected the faintest sniff of autumn in the air. It pains me to say it, but days of barefoot cooking are numbered. I guess we should make the most of them while we can.

A little crab, tamarind and tomato salad

A spicy little number with a refreshing quality that prevents the crab from being too rich for hot weather. Good with cucumber salad, or as something to scoop up with large, crisp lettuce leaves. Serves 4 as a small, spicy salad.

1 tsp yellow mustard seeds
80g fresh ginger
1 red chilli
1 heaped tsp of tamarind paste
3 tbsp roughly chopped coriander leaves
juice of 2 limes
1 tsp of palm or caster sugar
2 medium-sized tomatoes or 8 cherry tomatoes
250g white crabmeat

Place the mustard seeds in a shallow pan and cook them over a high heat until they start to pop. Set them aside in a mixing bowl.

Peel and grate the ginger into the bowl then add the halved, seeded and finely chopped red chilli. Stir in the tamarind paste and coriander leaves.

Put the lime juice into a small bowl and stir in the sugar until it has dissolved. Tip into the ginger mixture then cut the tomatoes into small dice and add to the bowl with the mustard seeds. (You can seed them, but I find the salad more refreshing if I leave the seeds and their jelly in.)

Lastly, fold in the crabmeat very gently. Don't overmix, which will result in a soggy salad. Spoon on to curls of crisp lettuce leaves and serve.

Radish, cucumber and sweet herbs

The heat of the radish, cut very thinly, is a clever partner for cool cucumber. This light, crisp salad is perfect for serving with fish or shellfish or for eating on its own with crispbread. Serves 4 as a side salad.

½ a cucumber
8 radishes
1 small bunch of dill
4 sprigs of mint
6 stalks of coriander
juice of a lemon
½ tsp sumac
sea salt flakes

Lightly peel the cucumber, removing only the outermost layer of skin so that the cucumber glows bright green. Slice into quarters lengthways then into thick slices. Put in a mixing bowl. Wipe and slice the radishes as thinly as you can, then add them to the cucumber.

Finely chop the dill fronds, mint leaves and coriander and mix together. Add to the cucumber with the lemon juice, sumac and a generous crumbling of sea salt flakes. Chill for an hour before serving.

Peach, cherry and loganberry salad

Effortless. Truly ripe peaches are the only ones for this treatment, which also works with apricots. Serves 4.

4 ripe peaches
150g cherries
200g loganberries or raspberries
6 mint leaves
3 or 4 tbsp mineral water

Chill the peaches then halve them. Remove the stones, slice the fruit thickly into a serving bowl. Stone and halve the cherries.

Put the berries and mint leaves in the bowl of a food processor and blitz till smooth with just enough mineral water to make a thick sauce. Spoon over the peaches, toss gently, and leave for 15 minutes or longer before serving.

Email Nigel at nigel.slater@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/nigelslater for all his recipes in one place

Restaurant: Ganapati, London SE15

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:02:57 GMT

A great little Indian near Del Boy's patch – is that only for fools? No way, says Bob Granleese

You know when a friend says, "I've found this great little place – you really ought to try it sometime"? And you give it a go, only to discover it's as jaw-droppingly inept as the Gerrard-Lampard midfield dream team, if not quite as overpriced? Then you can probably imagine my scepticism a week or so back when a friend greeted me with the dread words, "I know this amazing south Indian" and followed that social minefield of a testimonial with the even less alluring, "It's in Peckham."

I wasn't falling for that one again – not on my own, anyway – so insisted said advocate put his money where his mouth is, not least so there'd be someone handy to slap with a floppy paratha when his great discovery turned out to be stupendously so-so.

Peckham Rye rail station only added to the apprehension – the word "rough" doesn't do justice to the area's particular charms – but there-after my expectations started going pear-shaped. A few yards from the rail track, you step off Del Boy's patch and on to the kind of leafy side street where you wouldn't be surprised to bump into Jerry Leadbetter. Blimey, Peckham's got a posh side – who knew? And in the heart of this suburban splendour, at what looks like a one-time corner shop, is a smart little restaurant with a smattering of tables outside. Indoors, it's all a bit 21st-century nouvelle hippy, complete with the obligatory dreadlocked white guy front-of-house – plain wood tables, green and terracotta red walls interrupted by mirrors and lairy images of south Indian deities, plus a backyard where diners fight for elbow room with a brute of a banana tree. Not too shabby at all, this.

But fledgling raised spirits were soon put back in their box by my friend's declaration that the kitchen was run by one Claire Fisher – hardly the most reassuringly subcontinental of names to have in charge of your curry. Oh well, in for a penny…

But what's this? A cheerfully helpful waitress brought poppadoms with pickles – and not any old pickles, either: all four (mint and coriander, tomato and mango, beetroot and a properly punchy garlic) had clearly never seen the inside of a catering-size wholesale jar. Those crackers were followed by "vegetarian street snacks", two deep-fried mashed potato balls of commendably non-oily fluffiness and a pair of chickpea patties with a pleasing, nutty crunch. Four beautifully fresh sardines, marinaded in chilli and tamarind, came simply fried and atop thinly sliced red onion. And crab thoran was such a happy marriage of crab meat, onion, ginger, spices and grated coconut that we started bickering over the last scraps. A crisp, fruity £26 alvarinho from the top end of a short, thoughtful wine list helped restore relations.

If the first courses were revelatory, what came next continued the theme in spades. Nagore lamb kurma with coconut rice was grown-ups' comfort food, with a dark, gently aromatic sauce that spoke of long, slow cooking and was as far removed from the traditional luminous orange high-street korma as James Corden is from inspiring a fit of the giggles. Chaliyar prawns, served with plain rice and a dry veg curry (a neat touch that balanced the lavishly sauced shellfish), were firm and sweet. "And that gravy has a lovely kick, just the right side of over the top." Lamb olathu, however, was "a bit rogan josh. Tasty, but ordinary compared with everything else." But even this disappointingly one-note and over-spicy dud had its upside, being accompanied by a paratha of such flaky, buttery moreishness that I couldn't help myself coming over all like that woman on the Marks & Spencer TV ads: "This isn't just a paratha. This is a Ganapati paratha…" Jesus, it was good. So much so that we promptly ordered two more.

A stickily sweet Indian pudding was out of the question after that lot, so we shared a watermelon sorbet cleverly enlivened by chunks of crystallised ginger, while I contemplated asking the kitchen to whip up some humble pie massala as a takeout, so badly had I prejudged this gem of a curry house. The thing is, you see, I've found this great little place. It's in Peckham. You really ought to try it sometime.

bob.granleese@guardian.co.uk

twitter.com/bobgranleese

Berger & Wyse

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:02:00 GMT

The enemy within

Ideas for modern living: sitopia

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:04:55 GMT

Food for thought about shaping our world through food…

Have you ever thought about what food really means? Ours is the first society in history to take food for granted – to treat it as something to be made cheap and convenient while we get on with "more important" things. Industrial food systems have made feeding ourselves seem easy, but when you factor in all the externalities – fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, desertification, pollution and obesity, etc – it becomes clear that "cheap food" is an expensive illusion.

Feeding ourselves healthily, equably and sustainably remains our greatest challenge – one that will, above all others, shape our future selves, society and planet. Food's influence is already to be found in our cities, landscapes, work patterns, social lives, domestic routines, politics, economics and ecological footprint. Food already shapes our world – so why not use it as a tool to shape a better one?

If we choose we can create sitopia, or food-place (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place). Unlike its counterpart utopia, sitopia is achievable. Indeed, we already live in a version of it, albeit a bad one, made by the likes of Tesco, Monsanto and Walmart. But if we were to harness food as a tool, we could create a better sitopia, closer to the sorts of places and societies in which we actually want to live. What they might be like is up to us – and that is the point. Food's influence is so profound that it is practically synonymous with life itself. That makes it far too powerful to be left in the wrong hands.

Carolyn Steel is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (Random House, £8.99). Visit theschooloflife.com