He's just showing off....

I'm feeling a bit poorly at the moment, and I don't have much of an appetite. Despite not being hungry, however, I've been pretty impressed by Martin’s output in the kitchen over the weekend. He seemed to be showing off for some reason, to be honest.

On Friday night he made falafels, or to be more accurate, taamiya. The distinction is that the former are usually made from chickpeas and hail from Palestine, Israel and the Lebanon, whereas the latter are Egyptian and made with dried broad beans. This Egyptian version is lighter, and the mixture holds together better, than the chick-pea variety. Here’s a recipe.
500g dried white broad beans, skinned
2 onions, very finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 big handful of parsley or coriander leaves, or a mixture of the two
2tsp ground cummin
2tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp baking powder
Salt, pepper, chilli powder to taste

Soak the beans overnight. Drain and grind them in a blender or food processor with the rest of the ingredients until you have a smooth paste. The smoother it is, the better the taamiya will hold together. Take lumps the size of a wallnut and flaten them between your hands before sliding them gently into hot oil. Deep fry in batches until brown, keep warm and serve with salad, bread, tahini paste, harissa, yoghurt or whatever else takes your fancy. (Use the same recipe with chick-peas if you must, but it won't be as good.)

Saturday’s dinner was carne en salsa, or “meat in sauce”. It’s a singularly unhelpful name for a dish which in theory could be made with any carne en any salsa; but there’s no confusion in the Alpujarra (which is the bit of Spain where M and A go when my sister Chutney and I are “on holiday” at the cattery). There it’s pork, almonds, garlic and a few other bits and pieces. To make it, fry 50gms blanched almonds and 50gms of white bread until light brown. Set these aside and brown a kg of pork shoulder (cut into large dice) in a casserole dish or pressure cooker, then add a tomato, a head of garlic, and an onion, each sliced through the middle, and half a bottle of white wine. You can add bay leaves, saffron threads, pimenton (hot or sweet, depending on your taste), maybe a mild, dried chilli or two, and salt and pepper. Cover and cook on a low heat for about an hour, (twenty minutes in a p.c.). Now fish out the cooked garlic and what’s left of the tomatoes and onions from the stew and put them in a blender with the reserved almonds and bread, plus two fresh cloves of garlic. Blitz to form a paste and pour back into the pot. Cook gently for another ten or fifteen minutes, adding water if it gets too thick. Check the seasoning and serve with potatoes, or just bread and salad. If you’d like to be more precise, there’s a good recipe for this in Casa Moro, the excellent cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark of Moro restaurant in Exmouth Market, London. (The Clarks spend time in the Alpujarra, too. I wonder if their cats “go on holiday” when they’re away?)

M followed the carne with Hugh Fearnly-Whitingstall’s granny’s bramley-apple burned cream out of The Guardian. This is nice and easy. You need some ramekins that will happily sit under a hot broiler or grill, or stand up to a bit of blowtorch action. Peel, chop and cook some apples to a puree with a bit of sugar or honey. Whip some double cream until it’s stiff. Put the cooled puree in the ramekins, top with cream to come just below the rims. Stick them in the freezer for a bit, then cover the top with soft brown sugar and put under a hot grill until the sugar melts and bubbles. Then cool them again and serve with a glass of desert wine. (It’s important to get the cream cold before the grilling stage, or it will boil up and you won’t get a nice brown surface.)

The clocks went back on Sunday, whatever that means. Last week I was eating breakfast in the dark and dinner in daylight, and now it’s the other way around. Martin made a paella with cauliflower and bacalao (salt cod). It had a satifsyingly fishy flavour and a lovely fragrance thanks to a generous pinch of saffron threads. (I sneaked a mouthful when the pan was bubbling away on the stove, and I was quite surprised to find I like cauliflower. I’m a cat, after all! But the cauliflower had a rather soothing effect on my upset tummy.)

Tomorrow is Halloween and M has bought a bag of fun-size for the trick-or-treaters, but none of them will come round and we’ll be getting diminutive Mars Bars and Milky Ways for dinner for the rest of the week. So don’t expect any interesting blogs until next weekend.