The salad diaries, vol 1: Greek Salad (12 days to Italy)

It’s twelve days until I go to Italy. Now being a girl, that translates to: it’s twelve days until I have to squeeze myself into a bikini and reveal my pasty and untoned body to the world. This is not good. No doubt this will result in a lot of huffing and puffing from many readers and I will admit that I am not proud of this reaction to what is unequivocally an exciting and delightful prospect, but it is an honest reaction. And, what’s more, it’s the reaction of a good proportion of the female population. What this boils down to is this fact: I have 12 days to do something practical about this worrying circumstance. Plan of action: gym and salads.

Hove Champagne Festival

Champagne is one of my favourite things. So you can imagine my delight that Hove is hosting a celebratory festival in which I can revel and practically bathe in my favourite drink. So, this is just a quick note to draw your attention to the Hove Champagne Festival that is taking place next weekend (4-5th June) on Hove lawns. All kinds of lovely things will be happening there, including tutored tasting sessions and live music. And in addition to the 50 or so different champagnes available to sample and buy, some of my favourite Brighton restaurants will be in residence to ensure that we don’t drink ourselves into oblivion.

Them be:

• Riddle & Finns (whom I love, love, love)
• Sam’s of Brighton, and
• Seven Dials.

Awesomeness.

Even more awesome is the fact that the lovely Graphic Foodie has managed to secure you all a discount through her website. So go here and get the code. Tickets start at £12 (before the discount).

See you there I hope. I’ll be the one grinning like a Cheshire cat from ear to ear. Did I mention, I love Champagne.

A surprisingly unlazy dinner: Roasted tomato and ricotta risotto

The other day I popped into Tesco (not my usual shop of choice) to pick up something quick for dinner. I had intended to go for something super lazy, perhaps even just opting for a can of baked beans for my jazzed up beans on toast (you’ve got to love baked beans). However, to my delight I noticed that they’ve started selling pick’n’mix tomatoes, which is an absolutely genius idea and one I hope Sainsbury’s will nick. As my husband utterly revels in anything tomatoey, I immediately resolved to abandon the lazy dinner I had planned and make him a special dinner treat of roasted mixed tomato risotto.

Crossing fingers and toes for gruyere soufflé

Part of the point of this blog is to get me to cook things that I don’t usually, for whatever reason. One such thing is cheese soufflé. Perhaps it’s my of a fear of failure or perhaps it’s because whenever I’ve thought of doing it, I’ve been cooking for friends and it feels like too big a risk: what if they don’t rise? I couldn’t possibly serve deflated soufflés to real people (real people being any one other than Sven or me)! Shocking isn’t it? I recently realised that the reason I don’t experiment too wildly with flavours or mess around with classic recipes is because to me food is all about feeding people (hence the name of the blog). I can’t take the risk that the food I put down on the table might be anything but delicious. I’m stopping slightly shy of saying food is love, but you get the picture.

My chilli brings all the boys to the yard: the chilli challenge

  

When I innocently tweeted recently that my chilli brings all the boys to the yard, I did not expect the Spanish inquisition. Congratulating myself on the pleasure of taking leftover chilli into work for lunch, my fervour was heightened when a girl in the office kitchen actually commented, whilst drooling, that my leftover chilli “smelt amazing”. I knew it did, but I self-deferrentially and demurely thanked her and went back to my desk to write a gloat-tweet. I had not foreseen that I would be called out on my wild claims.  

A childhood memory relived and crab linguine

I know that in many of my posts I have referred to my childhood as an inspiration for the idea or recipe (like when I made chutney or in reference to my mamma’s lasagne), but food to me is all about nostalgia and I personally have been so influenced by my childhood experiences of food. Most of my strongest food memories have involved seafood. One of the very earliest memories I have is winkling on the Dorset coast. My entire family armed with buckets trawling the rock pools for periwinkles, before boiling them up and using a pin to tease the little mantles out and dipping them in vinegar.

F&G Eats… Residence Pop-Up Restaurant

It’s Brighton Fringe time (yay!) and as part of the festival this year, Brighton has it’s first ever pop-up restaurant. If you’re not sure what a “pop-up restaurant” is then it’s basically a temporary restaurant that “pops-up” for a limited time, causes a bit of a stir, then disappears back into the ether before our short-attention-spans get tired of them. Perfect for our trend-based society, they are throw-away restaurants that can be put up and pulled down, leaving the owners free to start again. They’ve been all the rage in London for a few years now, but Residence is Brighton’s first (as far as I know!).

F&G Eats… Pho

About a month ago a friend emailed me excited as a kid at Christmas because he’d found out that Pho was soon to be opening in Brighton (next to Jamie’s Italian). I resolved that as soon as it opened I was going to get myself down there to give it a go. So the day after the official opening and on the day of the election, Sven and I hurriedly cast our vote before going to try out the newest addition to the eateries of the South Laines. Pho already has three sites in London at Clerkenwell, Great Titchfield Street and Westfield Shopping centre, but the Brighton restaurant is their first forray into the world outside of London.

Originality be damned: when spring springs, you just want asparagas and lamb

This is one of those situations I have mentioned before where I, in my first year of blogging, reserve the right to do the obvious thing. The fact is when the winter coat goes into the loft and you really feel that spring has sprung, you just want asparagus and lamb. We have been conditioned in Brighton to equate these two ingredients with the resurgence of the sun. After months and months of dreary winter, of hearty stews and warming pies, suddenly one day you will discover you don’t need your scarf and will wish you had put your sunglasses in your handbag. And on that day, on that very day, you will find yourself putting some lamb chops in your basket and checking to see if the British asparagus has timed its arrival to perfection. And when that day comes, I say originality be damned…

F&G Eats… Recipease

About a year ago Jamie Oliver opened his shop-cum-cafe-cum-cookery-school, Recipease,  in Brighton.  The shop in the front sells Jme products and ingredients, bakery goods, wines and takeaway meals that you can cook yourself at home. Originally you could also pop in and make more-or-less the same meals yourself using ingredients and recipes laid out at little cooking stations, but I guess that wasn’t really very successful because about 6 months ago they replaced the cooking stations with tables and started serving breakfast and lunch instead. I liked the idea of the little cooking stations, but I have to admit that I never ever went and cooked something so there’s no surprises that they packed that in. 

The main attraction of Recipease (in my humble opinion) is the cooking classes that they offer on a range of skills, from tutorials in specific dishes through to how to cook the perfect steak right through to more advanced skills such as filleting fish or deboning chicken. Like a roving reporter who diligently covers all angles and gets all facts before running her story, I thought I ought to dabble in both food and classes before reporting back to you. Here is the low-down on breakfast and the “easy to learn” lessons.