Sunny lentil cakes with chilli and coconut

Sometime in the 1940s Lesley Blanch wrote a rather unusual cookbook for her time - Around the World in 80 Dishes. In it, she wrote this:

"...There is a popular misconception that southern food is rich and that southern passions run high. Nothing could be further from the truth. You must go to the north - the dark, ingrown, seething north of Ibsen household - if you want to find overwhelming passions and those rich nightmare-producing meals, which I feel may have been responsible for some of Dostoievsky's great flights. This north of the Karamazov's brothers, of Anna Karenina's ill-fated love, of Gosta Beling's Atonement, is the land of blinis and bigos, kouloubiak, and pickled herrings, sour cream, indigestion and introspection. The Mediterranean on the contrary, is all lightness - light food, light loves, air, sea, blueness and dalliance"

 And on this note, I decided to move away from the darkness and into the light this weekend with some lentil cakes. I don't absolutely agree with every word that Lesley wrote up there, yet I do admit that there is some truth in it. At this time of the year especially, Slavic food can be a bit dark and brooding. And I have been focusing on it a lot of late. I like to eat seasonally and I don't want to start pretending I'm in Greece in the the middle of July right now, because that would be weird. But lentil cakes... they are exotic and sunny - yes, easy to make - yes, versatile enough to eat for lunch and as a beer snack - yes (I put a pinch of paprika and a squeeze of lemon in my beer last night, Mexican-style), and they don't feel morally wrong to me, because the lentils are dried anyway. Then I had to decide what to eat with the lentil cakes for lunch

 

And I couldn't lie to myself any longer. What I really wanted to eat was this tomato salsa-esque salad with coriander, chilli and lime. Unseasonal unfortunately, but somehow much needed. As they say: "Everything in moderation. Including moderation". My quest for seasonality will continue this Winter, but my body needed some tomatoes today. And the lentil cakes were gorgeous - crispy on the outside and soft and flavoursome on the inside in a way that I didn't even anticipate. What I know is this: A combination of Kundalini, cats and spicy lentil cakes can bring light into your life if you choose to let it in

Ingredients

Red lentils, soaked overnight
1 red chilli
4 tablespoons dessicated coconut
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon turmeric
4 tablespoons flour
1 egg
Handful coriander, finely chopped
Salt
Oil for frying

Soak the lentils overnight, then drain and combine with all the other ingredients. Make little balls out of them, and keep adding flour until they stick together. Place them in plenty of hot oil and pat down, then cover and turn the heat down a bit. Fry for about 10-15 minutes on each side

Tomato salad with mint salsa

I don't know how familiar you are with the saga of my garden. I started off optimistic, then I realized a few things about myself, which was promptly followed by an overly pessimistic phase. Now, I am trying a different way, which does not involve growing vegetables. Basically, the only that seems to grow in abundance here is mint. I have masses of it

After talking to my friend Petey on Saturday, who told me all he's been eating lately are San Lorenzo tomatoes, I was inspired to make this salad for my BBQ. These aren't San Lorenzo tomatoes, but they were the best I can get, and this is really important in a dish so simple. The salsa is a large shallot, half a red chilli and plenty of mint, all finely chopped and covered in some virgin olive oil and sea salt. I allowed it to stand for an hour before covering the tomatoes in it a moment before serving. You could leave it for much longer if you have the time

This is not all we ate of course, there were BBQ spare ribs and sausages from Ginger Pig, as well as home made hummus and raw vegetables, but this salad, along with the spare ribs, was the highlight for me

Peruvian quinoa stew with salsa

I have recently joined Hackney Library, which has a surprisingly wide and varied selection of cookbooks. As I am embarking on the massive project of writing a cookbook myself, I'm really interested in reading other peoples' work, seeing all the many different ways you can approach this subject, learning what I like and what I don't. Although I have read three cookbooks in the past fortnight, cover to cover, there is only one which has actually inspired me to cook something - The Food and Cooking of Peru, by Flor Arcaya de Deliot

Perhaps it's the fact that Peruvian cooking is completely new to me. They approach ingredients in a completely different way to what I'm used to, which fascinates me. I mean, have you ever thought using quinoa as a base for a stew? I know that this is something that would never have even occurred to me had I not read about it here, but I'm really, really glad that I did. The recipe down there serves four

Ingredients

250g quinoa

1 litre water

250ml goat's milk

60ml olive oil

2 eggs, beaten

250g feta cheese

chilli powder

salt and pepper

tomatoes

spring onions

chilli 

lime juice

Combine the tomatoes, chilli, spring onion (all chopped) with the lime juice and some salt, to make salsa. Rinse the quinoa, then cover it with boiling water and allow to simmer, until the water has been absorbed. Slowly add the milk, stirring gently, then the oil and then the eggs. Finally, add half a teaspoon of chilli powder and sliced feta cheese. Cook for another 2 minutes stirring all the time, then serve with the tomato salsa. I substituted the normal milk for goat's milk, as (yawn) I seem to have developed a lactose intolerance after a bout of gastric flu. I won't bore you with the details, but, apparently it happens like that sometimes. Luckily, I can still eat cheese. I don't know what I'd do without cheese

Asparagus, tomatoes and parmesan

Sometimes, only the simplest ingredients in the most classic combinations will do... I found the recipe for parmesan and basil tomatoes in the Observer a couple of weeks ago, and wondered why I hadn't thought of baking them like this before - drizzled with olive oil and simply seasoned with (garlic) salt and black pepper, with fresh basil and grated parmesan for flavour. Since the discovery, I have eaten them like this about four times, so you could say that they're my current obsession. As far as obsessions go, they're definitely one of my healthier ones

Then, there's the asparagus. What can I say, as Carluccio  points out in his book "Vegetables", "the combination of the melted butter and the nuttiness of the parmesan is a simple one but nonetheless very, very good". I don't even boil the asparagus, I just let them stand in the boiled water for 15minutes while the tomatoes are baking

Be warned: If, like me, you don't have any bread in the house to mop up the juices, you may end up being completely disgusting and using your fingers, or even licking the plate



Polish tomato soup with rice - zupa pomidorowa

I have to be honest, I messed up the tomato soup. But it still turned out good. I spent ages cooking, tasting, adding ingredients to get the taste just right, and then I messed it all up by putting way, way too much rice in. The rice swelled more and more in the pan until it looked like some kind of a rice stew! So mum came to the rescue (of course) and made more soup base. Now my parents are going to be eating tomato soup for at least a week, but nevermind, I will give you the correct measurements below, and hope you won't be put off by my disaster story. The ingredients below will make 6-8 portions of soup

Ingredients:

2 litres water (or a big pan 3/4 full)

Chicken thigh

2 carrots

1 leek

1 parsnip

3 bay leaves

5 large juniper berries

1 tsp whole peppercorns

200g tomato puree

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

300ml single cream

1 tbsp sugar

2 tblsp dill

1 tblsp parsley

salt to taste (I used about 2tblsp)

Ground pepper to taste

50g of rice per person

My chicken thigh was frozen so I cooked this first, covering it with the cold water, bringing that to the boil, and letting it cook for 20mins on a low heat, before adding the peeled, whole vegetables (carrots, parsnip and leek), the herbs shown up there on that photo (juniper berries, bay leaves and whole peppercorns), as well as some of the salt (about a tablespoon). However, if your thigh is fresh, then you can cook all these ingredients together. After another 20mins with the vegetables cooking, I removed the solids from the pan. The leek and parsnip you can either discard or use for something else (a Russian salad would benefit from cooked parsnip for example), whereas the chicken thigh and carrots, we keep. You want to take the skin off the chicken and the bits of meat off the bone - they should be flaking off easily by now. The carrots, you want to slice into thin, round morsels. And stick both of these back into the soup, now adding the tomato puree and tin of chopped tomatoes, more salt and ground pepper, sugar, as well as the dill and the parsley (or you can just use one or the other, according to preference). Allow this all to cook for a further 5mins and then turn the heat off

Now you can put the rice on, in a separate pan - my disaster (down below) was as a result of using 100g of rice per person, if you half that, and use 50g, then the consistency will be just right. Above, is an example of what the soup should look like (and did once my mum had saved it). Once the soup has cooled a bit, after about 15mins, you can stir in the single cream. The soup and rice can now wait until you are ready to eat - they just need adding together and warming up