Frydmania

It’s 1993, folks…I am in Poland for the first time, and there’s lots to get used to, including snow on the ground for the first 6 weeks of our time there…and this strange green stuff they put on the potatoes. What’s that? Ah. Dill.

Dill began for me in Poland. I’d never come across it before then. Sure, I know it’s good with fish – I think I’d learned that, or at least about fennel for fish – but I just didn’t know how good it was. Is.

Dill is an unsung hero in the kitchen, and was (I think) the first thing that went on my ingredients list when I started planning this month’s posts. There’s proof for you.

So. Classic Polish lunch: soup for starters (always soup, all the year round – obviously the soup type can change). Second course: thin, breaded panfried chicken – think Wiener Schnitzel, which may be the inspiration, though I generally only had chicken rather than the classic veal.

What goes with chicken? Potatoes, of course. So you peel your potatoes, you boil then, you add some butter, and then…sprinkle over some dill. And if you’re lucky, you serve it with mizeria – literally, ‘misery’, though it’s anything but. Think tsatsiki, or cacik in Turkey – we’re talking cucumber, yoghurt, and more dill.

You don’t have to have the double whammy dill fest, but boy is it worth it. This is why people talk about dill pickles, because dill and cucumber are a tremendous combination. There’s a freshness, a grassiness, a little sweetness too. Add cucumber, with its crunch and clean taste, and they work so well together.

Talking of pickles, during that first time in Poland, I had only just got into pickles of that kind. I’d been put off by the knobbliness of the little pickling cucumbers. Luckily, someone in my German penfriend’s family pressed the point, that pickles are good – and very soon I was agreeing.

Part of the fun of pickles is all the ‘stuff’ in the jar: mustard seeds, and those fronds of dill. This intro stood me in good stead for Poland where pretty much any and every vegetable can (must!) be pickled. Blame the sandy soil, the colder winters – you want to grow all you can and preserve all you can.

So I grew accustomed to pickled vegetables, even at breakfast time (as part of ‘kanapki’ or little sandwiches, e.g. with cheese or ham), and cucumber pickles, bathed in dill, were part of these.

I clearly picked up the Polish vinegar preference at the same time – we’re currently working through some supermarket own cornichons and they’re Just Too Sweet.

Back to the pickles – although I don’t make proper pickled cucumber, I do a version of it with chopped large cucumbers and similar spices. It can be found in various cookbooks as Bread and Butter Pickles – the recipe I follow comes from Rose Elliott, ever-reliable vegetarian cook.

I have a deal with a friend of mine that I pass on a jar every now and then. And, while we’re on the subject of pickles, do think of adding these to potato salad (as advised by my former German flatmate).

Make the potato salad the day before, and serve with frankfurters (hot or cold, up to you). It’s the dill again, working with the potato – and the potato salad is SOO good the next day. Great Hogmanay dish, even if it’s not a particularly traditional one.

My Italian flatmate taught me how to make pasta al tonno – pasta, tuna and single cream. Wonderous dish, made so many times. Although it’s not in keeping, I’ve taken it in a Polish direction sometimes, with sour cream and a little dill.

The speckles of the dill on the creamy expanse of the sauce are lovely. And yes, it eats well too. You can add some mushrooms too, if you fancy – they rather like dill too. In fact, mushrooms, sour cream, dill – you can eat it on its own really. (I used to, too.)

Fairly recently, on my continued Chicken Quest (ie not just roasts, but different stews and so on), I tried a Nigella recipe for Coq au Riesling. Think chicken, bacon, white wine – and dill. In fact, having bought fresh dill for it, I then forgot it at the last moment.

Dan suggested it was generally good, but, mm, pepper? Pepper duly acquired, I remembered the dill, and in it went. Suddenly all the flavours went up a notch. Other ingredients – good, but the dill made the dish.

Then I dried the rest by hanging it up in the airing cupboard (feeling terribly houseproud and all that), and gained myself a potful of goodness: dried dill, to make another dish.

I’ll stop, I promise. Just go and buy some, and do yourself, and whoever else you cook with/for, a favour.

If cloves are mysterious, then cinnamon is musk. Sometimes it’s alluring, sometimes it’s a bit much. It’s immediately recognisable. I do rather like some musk in a perfume – and cinnamon has to be part of my ode to food.

Or, if you have a cold, cinnabod. This has been known to bring the youngest to fits of laughter and much repeating. And when there are Scandi-swirls of dough and cinnamon on the table, it allows for MUCH repeating of the word.

Growing up, the ubiquitous spice for baking with was mixed spice. It was what you needed for rockbuns, that complete stalwart in the home baking department.

Forget all images of rock cakes with the emphasis on ROCK – these are what you want when you come in from school, starving, and looking for instant tummy filling.

So, mixed spice it was. At some point, cinnamon must have made an appearance. I had (still have) a Winnie the Pooh cookbook which includes a recipe for cinnamon toast – ie sprinkle toast with mix of sugar and cinnamon.

Mind you, many of the recipes included honey, so I think I viewed it in general (including the cinnamon) toast as ‘Nice idea but…’

Years later, I had cinnamon toast in a cafe. Except, as cinnamon toast is rather beloved in the States, and the cafe was channelling US of A quite strongly, the toast was drenched in cinnamon.

Even for an aficiando, it was too much – I found myself coughing on the dust, trying to shake some of it off, and eventually giving up.

Better, then, the lighter touch of cinnamon and raisin bagels. If, like me, you rather like a mix of sweet and savoury at times, these are for you. They work with the sweetness of ham; the sharpness of a cheddar (imagine you’re adding a chutney, it’s just already built into the bread).

And with topping that are already sweet, they work just fine too – try cream cheese and jam as a particularly good combo. Fishy tastes not quite so good – maybe return to plain bagels for those. But otherwise – go forth and explore the contents of your fridge.

I remember trying a fairly early veggie recipe (ie early on in my veggie years) – kidney beans, tinned tomatoes, onions, separated by layers of parboiled potatoes and cheese. Great with sunflower seeds sprinkled on the top, by the way, before baking.

In making it, you would put together the beans and the tinned tomatoes, and add cinnamon. I loved the warmth and the spice to bring the two flavours together. (You may want to rethink the raw onions also called for in this mix.)

So when I read about pastilla, the famous feast dish of pigeon with layers of filo pastry, I was up for trying it because of the cinnamon. The icing sugar aspect – possibly a bit much at the end. I eventually got to try it in a restaurant in Paris – I may not have felt like I was at a banquet, but it was indeed a feast.

There’s many more to add to the list. Snickerdoodles, little balls of cake mix that you roll in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon before baking. Cinnamon is still part of the spice set for lebkuchen, and it’s the perfect addition to the ginger hit of gingerbread – it warms the citrusiness of the ginger, and mellows it out too.

Hot chocolate stirred with a cinnamon stick, for added flavour – I could probably do that. Most of the time, I just buy powdered, and have done with it.

But however you buy, use it – do use it. It may be familiar, but a little familiarity is also a good thing. Promise.

Imagine the scene. It’s cold – very cold. You’re tired. You’re under the weather with a heavy cold, and you are wandering around a large city. But quite frankly, you just want something to make you feel warm, and well. Enter the hero: risotto.

That was pretty much my introduction to risotto rice, back in December 2000. Our good friends had just moved back to Italy. We were on our first visit there, around new year. And yes, the cold was a bad one. Thankfully we chanced on a little restaurant still serving lunch, somewhere vaguely central in Milan.

Mindful of visiting the Po Valley, home of arborio rice, I thought I’d order risotto. Was that ever the best decision! I still don’t know exactly what went into it – I think some grilled radicchio lettuce, some red wine (Barolo? something like that), not much else.

But it was exactly what I needed. The heat was medicinal. The softness of the rice, still with a little bite, helped it slip down nicely. The red offered – and delivered – a warmth that permeated the fug of the head cold. I breathed easier. I relaxed.

I have a suspicion I’ve blogged on this before. But I am fairly unrepentent. Looking at my criteria for choosing ingredients, risotto rice has to make the cut. So here it is again.

Why wouldn’t I want to cook risotto again? And indeed, it’s one of our favourites at home. I love the ritual of making it. I don’t stand and stir it the whole time, as I probably should, but I find it soothing to make, wonderful to eat. (And most meals that can be eaten out of bowls do that for me, to be honest.)

I’m a big fan of theme and variation recipes – work out the technique, then switch in different ingredients. Risotto is a perfect dish to do this with – and it makes those ingredients go a long way. So you can even choose more indulgent ones at times.

So here’s my top three. The one I make most of the time is bacon and sweet potato. There is something very satisfying about the textures: crunch of bacon (I like to fry it to a fairly crispy stage), graininess of the sweet potato, smoothness of the rice. It can go well with butternut squash too (my earlier combination) but I think I’m pretty hooked on this version.

Number two: using up a roast, make it a chicken and mushroom risotto. If you’ve got leftover meat from the chicken, and you’ve made some stock from the bones (not hard), you’ve got everything to hand. You could add something different for veg, but as the chicken has more bite, I like something softer for veg. And chicken and mushroom: can’t go wrong.

Number three: a Jamie Oliver one, with prawns and peas. An instant freezer ingredients meal, and the final ingredients go in right at the end, so there’s a juiciness to both.

I remember now that I have also done one with different colours of peppers (traffic light risotto, anyone?), which works well with a nice vegetable stock. I’ve occasionally used strips of turkey too. It’s up to you if you spin a few more variants.

I have experimented with a pork mince and spinach one more recently (courtesy of the Two Hungry Italians TV series). I haven’t got it right yet, but I quite liked the notion of trying a mince in a risotto, so I think I’ll persevere. Needs a good amount of seasoning.

Only in recent years have I come across arancini – ‘little oranges’. The notion is that you make extra risotto, form it into little balls, and push some cheese into the middle, then shallow fry them off. The dimpled appearance of the rice balls looks a bit like oranges. The cheese definitely helps – though putting cheese into most things is a good idea, in my opinion.

So: plenty to be going on with. Some day, I’d like to try the Venetian classic, risi e bisi, made with fresh spring peas. I even tried to track it down on our trip to Venice one time, and had to conclude that it was out of season, and not to be had that time. I might even try some of the other risotto rices, but tend to stick to arborio. (Support for the Po region, and all that.)

Just make sure you’ve got your parmesan or grana to hand, and you have a meal that will make its way back onto the home menu, month after month. It does here, anyway.

See, I waited almost an hour and a half before writing again. But then, I’m on catch up – that’s what a night away does to the blogging schedule. But now I have had today’s late snack, I am entitled to write again: because of the ecstasy that is rhubarb.

Today’s rhubarb (no, I don’t have it daily, but I’m starting to think: why not?): rhubarb pie. Thanks, Coop discount pile. 50p for pleasure is well worth it, especially when there’s enough pie for two. Thanks for spotting it, Dan. The pie was a great companion to the later evening fruit tea.

So, you see, I was snacking, and plotting my post at the same time. How do you describe rhubarb? The acidity is part of it. But there’s a honeyed sweetness to cooked rhubarb too. It sat very well alongside pink grapefruit fruit tea (a new find – just in time for the supermarket to decide to stop stocking it. Rats.).

Rhubarb, when I growing up, was all about rhubarb crumble. A standard flour and sugar and marg crumble, nothing fancy. Sweetness atop, acidity beneath. Make sure there’s seconds of custard, won’t you? Oh, and make sure someone else has the skin from the top. Thanks.

It doesn’t hurt that the name also evokes Roobarb, the ever cheery dog of the 70s cartoons. Still love that manic theme tune. And, of course, Richard Briers doing all the voices.

Rhubarb, too, in sweet form: the vibrant pinky purple of rhubarb rock, with green in the middle. One of my primary schools was based conveniently close to a sweet shop.

Long before schools thought to limit the free movement of children at breaktimes, it was the work of minutes to pop to the shop and back. Sweetie necklaces were popular, but so too was rhubarb rock.

Later, in my phase of going to Germany to visit my penfriend, there was the magical time of the big birthday. Huge blow out lunch. An hour off, possibly to lie down in a darkened room.

Then it was kaffee und kuchen time (coffe and cake to you), and an expectation that you would try several. I hurriedly asked for recipes for the ones I liked the most.

And one was a rhubarb cake with a streusel (crumble) topping, which I make every now and then. It calls for a LOT of rhubarb. It makes a LOT of cake – a roasting tin full. Good for big parties.

Sometimes, I wonder whether some of my food likes are cookbook writer inspired. Nigella has clearly written extensively about her love of rhubarb. But any question of whether I was just ‘borrowing’ a like was stilled by the arrival of rhubarb and ginger jam, care of a certain Mr J of North Queensferry.

THAT jam. Oh boy. It went with us on a November holiday, to the cottage we found a few years ago, and continue to revisit at different times of year. The jam did all the things it is meant to do on holidays ie act pretty much like its own food group, finding its way onto bread, toast, plain cake, into yoghurt, and more.

I have tried maybe three or four times over to establish my own rhubarb grove in our garden. Dan’s mum has kindly provided cuttings. And every time, something gets to it. Don’t know if it’s the slugs or the snails. Or a cat with a stalk chewing habit.

Still, I hope some day to have my own rhubarb patch to further indulge the rhubarb tooth. And put aside a sufficiently large supply of jam. Here’s hoping.

I blame making pomanders, really. And mulled wine. And lebkuchen. But there’s a certain something about cloves. Whether whole or powdered, for eating, for drinking, they shout ‘Christmas!’ as loudly as any festive food.

Back to the pomanders. 1970s, 1980s, home made presents. Where would auntie or granny be without an orange, a loop of ribbon, and a fistful of cloves? I think I made them a few different times. (The link suggests orris root too, but it keeps fine as it is.)

The point is that the cloves and the orange combine to preserve each other, making a hanging thing to perfume your wardrobe. (Older female relatives may now reenter the room.) They do eventually go off, but they can last several years, if memory serves me. Red ribbon looks good (and rather Christingle too) but green might be festive too.

Part of the fun was going shopping for whole cloves. Not all of them would have the all-important central orb where the smell resides. Some would just have the stalk and the spiky top bits. If you pushed the cloves into the orange too hard, or gripped too tightly, the orb would explore, leaving you with pungent hands.

And that was all cloves was about, for a long time. Then you get to an age where you’re allowed a go at mulled wine. Look: there’s an orange or lemon jogging about in the hot liquid, stuck with cloves. (Or of course, buy the sachet, or the made up bottle of wine – no pressure. But the cloves still need to be there.)

Later, I started making my own lebkuchen. Another aspect of grandparents who had spent time in Germany: appreciation of lebkuchen, stollen, and more.

Now you can buy them in Lidl, which makes it easy too. But it is lots of fun making your own lebkuchen aka gingerbread, particularly if you have some biscuit cutters in shapes like hearts, bells, circles (for snowballs), stars, and so on.

Part of the recipe I use involves cloves. The real thing involved much more exciting things including some form of potash (I believe) but these still feel like the real deal. Put a timer on to get you through the beating the ingredients together – 20 mins hard labour to get the black treacle, flour and spices to become one.

One year I got my quantities muddled up. So keen was I to do lots (and indeed, encouraged by various family members who rather like them), I managed to overshoot double quantities entirely, and ended up quadrupling the recipe. It made for a VERY long afternoon of baking them all. But it was worth it.

The extra fun is icing them (really just dipping them in icing sugar and water mix). The sweetness of the icing is needed to offset the spice kick of cloves, ginger and cinnamon. Despite the stronger tastes, small children still hoover them up at parties, no problem.

Three kings, three gifts. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. I’d like to think that if there’d been a fourth, he might have brought cloves – their mysterious scent is part and parcel of Christmas.

And if he’d have brought a pomander, that would have eased the smell of the manger too, no doubt. And given Mary and Joseph something to take home after.