Still Life With Spinach and Onion

It's not big and it's not clever, but I like still lives. I really like them actually.

Now that I'm giving it some serious thought I'm realising how many of my favourite paintings are still lives. I think what is so appealing is their quietness, they are calm and well, still. It's so lovely to take a moment to enjoy the details of a still life, I think they are the most peaceful of paintings, if not the most fashionable.

My Dad and I have chatted for a while about photographing some culinary still lives. We did some terrible photos of a butternut squash a year ago, I won't be sharing them here, they're nothing to be proud of. But we are quite pleased with our latest attempt, it is a good starting point. Watch this space....

Still lives elevate the mundane to the glorious. So it felt quite criminal to take a knife to my glorious onions, but waste not want not, I chopped, roasted, blanched and baked. Here is a recipe for spinach and roasted onion pastries. They are quite dainty and nice with a glass of wine, or as I had them in a packed lunchbox. May I suggest you take a few minutes out of your busy work day and eat your won personal still life lunch? It might not be as quiet as a painting, but it should be glorious.

Still Life Pastries

Makes a dozen

1 small red onion

half pt double cream

100g sharp cheddar grated

250g wholemeal flour

110g very cold unsalted butter

1 medium egg

2 bunches of spinach, washed and leaves picked

• Slice the ends of your onion and peel it. Roast in a medium oven for about 50mins, until it's lovely and tender in the middle, mmmmm slippery sweet roasted onion. It should be fattening it's so scrumptious.
• Let your onion cool down and slice it into slithers.
• Make your pastry in a processor by whizzing the butter and the flour until they look like breadcrumbs. Keep the power on and dribble in ice water until it becomes a smooth dough. If your name is Mark Jamieson, then YES pastry is that easy and you CAN do it.
• Put your pastry into the fridge for 30mins to get nice and cold.
• Blanch the spinach and once it's cooled squeeze out any access water. Where has all the spinach gone? It upsets me every time. Finely chop your pathetic remains of spinach.
• In a jug whisk together the cream, egg, cheese and a generous amount of good salt and pepper. Add the spinach, it will look less sad in there.
• Pre-heat the oven to gas 6 and get your pastry out of the fridge.
• Roll out the pastry to 3mm thick and cut circles of pastry that will fit into a 12-hole baking tray. Blind bake for 10mins, then another 10 mins not blind (what is that called? fully-sighted baking?).
• Place a slice or 2 of onion in each pastry case, then pour over the spinach mix. Bake for a further 20mins.

Announcing Our Winter Warmer Menu

Lucy and I have been trying out recipes and discussing winter vegetables for months now, but we have finally agreed on a menu for our supper club. The food is seasonal, vegetarian and uses the best British produce. We still have some places left, so let me know if you are interested.

Homemade Goats

with roasted beetroot

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

with a leek crostini

Wild Mushroom Pie with Walnut Pastry

kale with pine nuts and sultanas, celeriac and potato mash

Orange, Cinamon and Rose Water Salad

Chestnut Cake

with poached quince and molasses ice-cream

Tea and Coffee

£30 per head.

Bring your own wine.

We DO NOT charge corkage.

We are between New Barnet overground and High Barnet underground stations.

We encourage vegetarians and non-vegetarians to attend

A Beautiful Autumn Day and Apple Chutney

Now, bare with me, what follows is a little bit of happy gushing and at the end an apple chutney recipe adapted from Mark Hix's 'British Seasonal Food'. It's an easy, cheap and scrumptious recipe, it's worth getting to the end of this blog for.

Firstly though though let's talk about apples. Everyday I cycle past an apple tree in a front garden in Kentish Town. Since late August the tree has been weighed down by apples, everyday the branches struggle under the weight of what must be hundreds of fruit. The road in covered in a smear of apples where buses have squashed them. Forget strawberries, APPLES are our national fruit, they're so abundant throughout our Autumn and winter that we can afford to run them over (would you be so happy to run over asparagus or raspberries?) Best of all, everyone loves apples, it's just that some people forget that they love them and take them for granted a bit, myself included.

So this autumn I'm making a conscious effort to enjoy all things apple-y. A couple of weeks ago I went for a beautiful cycle on my bike, past the common, squinting in autumn sunshine. Just as I was thinking how idyllic it was to be peddling over bright orange leaves, I happened upon a man selling apples. He isn't normally there, but I'm very happy that he was that day. The apple man must of had 8 varieties of English apple, so I filled my basket, headed home and baked two dozen individual pies for a party I was going to that evening. The whole day was so blissful that I took some cheesy photos of apples in my garden to commemorate it.

This painting is the best way I could think to celebrate the apples. She's a real beauty and an old friend of mine from the National Gallery and I'm always surprised by her elegance. I would go as far as to say that she is my favourite female nude EVER! Woh, that's quite a statement.

She's surrounded by a voluptuous apples tree and yes her breasts are the same shape, size and colour as apples. If that doesn't make apples sexier than strawberries, then I don't know what does.

P.S. When was the last time you walked through an orchard naked? I expect it's been too long.

Recipe

This recipe is adapted from a Mark Hix recipe, I've added onions for an extra bit of savoury-ness and a small amount of chilli for kick. It's delicious with all the usual chutney-loving foods; cheese, cold meats, pies, curries etc.

2kg firm desert apples

550ml of good quality cider vinegar

450g of soft brown sugar

100g on sea salt

30g of black mustard (nigella) seeds

20g of peeled grated ginger

a pinch of cayenne

2 white onions

1 small medium heat chilli

• Roughly dice your onions and peel, core and chop the apples into 1cm cubes.
• Put all of the ingredients in a large saucepan and simmer for 30-40mins, or until the apples and onions have softened and broken up.
• If you are left with a lot of liquid at this point, then remove the apples with a slotted spoon and reduce your liquid to a syrupy consistency.
• Tip everything into a clean bowl, cover and leave it to stand for 3 days, stirring when you walk past.
• Pour sterilised jam jars and leave it for a further month to develop (just in time for Christmas).

Root Veg Rosti with a Friend Duck Egg (a supper club experiment)

My friend Lucy and I run a supper club, or rather we have had one supper club and we are going to have another in December. We really are new to the supper club game, very new. We tell ourselves that our naivety is part of our charm, but we didn't feel particularly charming when 3 of our guests failed to turn up after we (naively) failed to take pre-payments. Looking back I'm glad that was the only disaster, no food was burnt, the guests that did come enjoyed themselves and we made a new friend.

The experience was wonderful, we loved thinking up new ideas for our guests and although we had less diners than expected, it was great to share food with other people.

(Here is a little rant, brace yourself). I don't think Supper Clubs are just a reaction to the financial situation, they are a much-needed step away from the main stream. Local high streets, particularly in London, don't have independent restaurants, instead they have restaurants with no soul, menus that feel like adverts and uncomfortable seats. Chain restaurants on the whole don't foster memorable evenings and that is where Supper Clubs are stepping in and filling a void. (Sorry about that rant).

Anyway. We're getting excited about our next supper club (11th of December), it will have a very different feel and menu from our June Alfresco Supper Club. That's the fun of the supper club, thinking up new ideas and practicing recipes on trusted friends before the big night. It's just a hobby really, we don't make any money and we don't have plans to open a restaurant, but it keeps us out of trouble.

This recipe began life as one idea for a starter at December's 'Winter Warmer' Supper Club. It's quite simple because that's the sort of food Lucy and I love. We're not going to serve it at the Winter Warmer after all (it is probably a bit heavy to be part of such a big meal), but if I were going to serve it to guests I would probably tart it up a bit. Mr.F and I enjoyed it in it's simplest form with some garlicky spinach on the side. But if you do want to make it a bit fancier then may I suggest adding something from the following list; a few fried chanterelles, some toasted pine nuts, a shower of hard goats/sheeps cheese, a smear of tapenade under the egg or crispy shallots. Oh and a glass of prosecco, that always helps to make things fancier.

What is great about eggs is that they are self-saucing and it's hard to think of a tastier sauce than egg yolk. Mr. F has dreams of bottling the stuff, more on that another time. What is REALLY great about duck eggs is that they come with a bigger egg and therefore more sauce. Yum.

If you are interested in coming to our supper club then follow this link.

Recipe

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main

1 small parsnip, coarsely grated

1 medium turnip, coarsely grated

1 small swede, coarsely grated

1 large starchy potato, coarsely grated

1 sprig of thyme

4 duck eggs

Oil for frying

• Put the grated roots in a colander and sprinkle them with a teaspoon of salt, place it to one side and make a phone call/pluck your eyebrows/ have a small glass of wine - about 20 mins. After 20 mins squeeze out as much liquid as you can.
• Put you oven on it's lowest setting a put a plate in there to warm up.
• Heat 2 tbsp of oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Divide the vegetable mix into 4 portions and fry, flattening them with the back of a spatular. They will take about 5 minutes on each side.
• Once they are golden and crispy transfer to the oven to keep warm.
• Wipe your frying pan and clean and fry the eggs however you like them, I know how personal this is and feel free to poach your eggs if you're that way inclined.
• Place one egg on each rosti and enjoy.

Autumnal Generosity Cakes (or Spiced Quince Cakes)

I am lucky to have a very generous friend and colleague called Hannah, she is the sort of friend who will make you a cushion from your favourite fabric or buy you a g&t when you've spent all your money on a silly hat. Hannah never wants anything back, she is generosity epitomised. Last week Hannah gave me a bag of gold, well gold fruit anyway, 5 large quinces.

Here are 5 reason to love quince:

• Quinces are beautiful and ugly at the same time, like a handsome man with a sexy scar.
• Quinces smell like nothing you've ever smelt before, a cross between pear and bubblegum with a hint of mango.
• Quinces are a magic fruit that turns from golden to deep pink by the magic of cooking.
• Quinces are old fashioned and majestic, they make me want to paint Dutch-style still lives.
• Quinces are in season and will be until December.

If I were a fruit I think I would aspire to be a quince, they are pretty special with a rich British history, hard to get hold of but worth it. They some how manage to seem terribly exotic, but are as British as strawberries and cream. Having said that I'd quite like to be a pink gooseberry too. What fruit would you be?

I had never cooked quince before and had only eaten it in it's jelly form which I love with cheese. But I'm a bit sick of preserving at the moment, I really don't need anymore jars of things cluttering up my tiny kitchen. So I decided to make cakes.

The recipe below is a combination of several other recipes and keeps amazingly well, I made them on Sunday and had the last one on Thursday, it was still moist and soft, that's the magic of baking with fruit. This recipe provides you with 2 days worth of pudding, a poached quince to serve with cream on Friday night and an rich cake to have with a cup of tea on Saturday. You will probably end up with about 1kg of poached quince which will keep well in it's poached liquor for 2 weeks.

Quince has a pear-like texture which Mr. F hates, I think he must be mad. But since these cakes were born out of generosity I made him an apple version. If you aren't keen on quince, or you don't have a generous friend who gives you quinces, use a sweet apple. You won't need to pre-poach the apples, they will soften up in the oven.

Recipe

Makes 12 cakes.

FOR THE POACHED QUINCE

600g caster sugar

1 cinnamon stick

1 lemon, sliced

4 cloves

1 bay leaf

FOR THE CAKE

200g of unsalted butter at room temperature

4 medium free range eggs

200g dark brown sugar sugar

100g ground almonds

200g self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

300g of poached quince

• Put the cinnamon, lemon, bay, poaching sugar, cloves and 1litre of water into a large saucepan.
• Peel, quarter and core your quince. Do this as quickly as possible to prevent browning and drop them into the saucepan as soon as they are peeled. Now bring the pan to a simmer for 2 hours. The fruit will try to bob out of it's poaching liquor so put a plate on top of them to keep them down.
• After 2 hours check that they are tender, if not give them another 30 minutes of simmering.
• Once the quince in completely cold weigh 300g (cover the rest and keep in the fridge for up to 2 weeks) and cut a few slices from the prettiest pieces, place them in the bottom of 12 well-greased cake tins.
• Pre-heat your oven to gas 3.
• To make your cake batter, cream the sugar and butter with a wooden spoon until it is really light then add the eggs one at a time.
• Sift in the flour and baking powder, then fold in the ground almonds.
• Roughly chop the remaining quince and fold it into the batter. Fill the cake tins 3 quarters of the way up and bake for 20mins, or until a knife inserted in the centre of the cake comes our clean.
• Remove the cakes form the oven and allow to cool for 10mins before turning out onto a wire rack.