Frydmania

Friday night. Got to throw something together that will cook without needing much watching, while I take a deep breath and tackle piles of clothes various. Out of the cupboard and into the pot come chickpeas. Satisfaction guaranteed.

It’s probably been a bit of a chickpea week. Dan found and commandeered a three pack of hummus on offer at the Coop – that went down a treat. Ever tried editing a newsletter together, while one of you types and the other feeds each of you scoops of hummus on fingers of toast? Worth it.

I’d had red pepper hummus before, and like it, but the star of the show was hummus with added lemon and coriander. Lots of citrus, lots of tang. We kind of tried sharing it. (And clearly both went and snuck some at other times when we thought we were alone.)

I don’t know quite when it was I discovered chickpeas. I learned at school that Cicero meant ‘chickpea’. Hard work getting your way through his speeches in Latin. Easier eating chickpeas.

I do remember making load after load of hummus with a goblet liquidiser at university (said liquidiser had been used to make my baby food and was passed on to me when I was at university). Quick, easy, cheap, and satisfying.

Chickpeas are also part of my memory of our Italian friends’ firstborn. I made a stew of aubergine, chick peas and tomatoes, as something that could be eaten as and when time and babies permitted eating.

The dad told me that he went to visit mum and baby in hospital over a couple of days, came home and ate more of the casserole. Same every time. Good job chickpeas are comforting too.

Later, chickpeas were a treat – I paired them with tuna, as a slightly chunkier filling for baked potatoes, while in Poland after leaving university. There, they were an expensive supermarket addition, rather than my weekly market shopping, but worth it.

Dan doesn’t go for this combination, but I still like it – the dryness of the chickpeas goes well with the moister tuna, and the slight bite of the beans against the softness of tuna. Give it a whirl. Good alongside other salads too, in summery months.

I’ve tried making chickpea soup from scratch, following the recipe from Dear Francesca. Not the greatest success. Perhaps cooking dried chickpeas is not my thing. What I should consider is making my own falafel – that would get Dan’s attention for sure.

My ode to the nutty little bean is done. The hummus has run out. The evening veg and bean meal has long gone. But there’s still another tin of chickpeas in the cupboard for another day.

It’s the feast of St Nicholas today. Whether or not you put out shoes to be filled, I feel the need for a food item that is about Christmas. So it’s marzipan, because…do you really need a reason when it’s marzipan?

Just as there is a mackerel gene, there must also be a marzipan gene. Indeed, one of the chief proponents that I know of marzipan is my mother – proof.

To be honest, she doesn’t limit to Christmas – an ideal birthday is also one where your nearest and dearest make sure that chocolate covered marzipan makes its way to you. Niederegger, if you can, but just as long as it’s chocolate (oh all right then, dark chocolate, of course) plus marzipan, you’re away.

The reason I think of marzipan as to do with Christmas relates to my early childhood. My grandparents were in Germany at that time, and when I was nearly 2, we visited them at Christmas time. I believe there was something to do with a toy greengrocers as a present, and part of the greengrocers was little crates containing tiny bananas made out of marzipan.

Responding to the genetic marzipan pull, I gather that I fairly demolished them. And that has been my response to marzipan, where offered, ever since. On its own, inside chocolate, formed into lovely Christmas ‘fruit’ decorations, I know what to do.

Not being a great fan of commercial Easter eggs (more of a dark chocolate girl, you see), for a number of years my mum kindly and wisely gave me chocolate covered marzipan instead. No contest. Now I have to buy my own.

In the last couple of years, reading some Jasper Fforde, I was delighted to discover that, in one of his alternative universes (the Dragonslayer one, on this occasion), there were ‘pan-heads’: ie people who got high on eating marzipan. (I also discovered that the great man himself does not like marzipan. I guess no one’s perfect.)

While I don’t actually want to inhale marzipan, I do limit myself, knowing this weakness. It is probably a good job that icing and large amounts of fruit cake are added to Christmas cake, to slow down the ingestion of the marzipan element.

Find a child who picks apart Christmas cake to eat just the icing, and you will find me close by, politely enquiring if they wouldn’t mind passing the marzipan my way.  I will obviously eat the cake bit too, but then that’s cake, which equally requires eating.

A few years back, a work trip to Spain brought us close to Toledo, which has rather a thing about marzipan too. I even wrote a blog post about it. We certainly took photos of the shop window, with all kinds of things sculpted out of marzipan: including a model of the local cathedral.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t so keen on their version. Maybe it wasn’t as soft as the commercial marzipan we get in the UK. I ate it, of course, because it was marzipan, but I think on reflection that I like the German marzipan best.

But the other reason for marzipan now emerges: Battenburg cake. I am a huge fan of this. I used to be told off for taking it apart and eating it in sections: first the yellow sponge, then the pink, then (savouring it) the marzipan. If you could get in at the point of it being cut, you might even get an end bit. With even more marzipan.

So I was utterly delighted when a former work colleague of mine not only had the same birthday but also the same sensibilities when it came to Battenburg. It made for a very nice excuse for tea and cake together (with other colleagues too), and with much mutual agreement on the main event.

I also love the older word for it: Marchpane. One day I may even get as far as making some for myself – though it would help to live somewhere where almonds are cheaper.

Till then, I will make do with Christmas cake…oh, and stollen too. And if you do ever find any tiny marzipan bananas – ship some my way.

It’s cold. Finger-chillingly-indoors cold. I know we don’t live through particularly long winters (as in, we don’t have months of snow to contend with) but I am still feeling a little weary of cold. Time to think of warm weather ingredients: like aubergine.

The title of the post is how we tend to say it. It comes from a friend of ours, whose mum is called Jean. And I like a little wordplay to go with my ingredients.

Aubergine. How I love thee. Back in the days of being a vegetarian, I used to be embarrassed by how much I liked aubergine, but how it was…well, fleshy.

When they’re ripe, you might as well be biting into a small plump upper arm. Luckily the similarity stops fairly soon on when you eat them. I think I’d better stop on that analogy but it did cause a bit of vegetarian guilt at the time.

I remember making an aubergine dish for my dad. Response: that’s nice, would be even better with some meat…Still, I was convinced. My redoubtable great aunt had served me moussaka, admittedly with potato in, but also aubergine. Racy. Or so it felt at the time.

Cut to a stay in London with my uncle and aunt. She showed me how to make aubergine, tomato and mozzarella in the grill pan – further convincing as to its value. I still hadn’t got the hang of cooking aubergine for long enough, so it squeaked a bit when I bit into it, but I was on my way.

One of the things I used to like about aubergine was the little bit of ritual: the cutting, salting, weighting it down with whatever combination of dishes and heavy things. The trickle of juice once you unmoulded it, and washed it down. I don’t often bother with salting it, these days, but I still like the notion of it.

Later still: parmigiana. My Italian flatmate introduced me to many good things, and one of these was making parmigiana: really an oven baked version of the grill pan recipe.

I don’t often go the whole Italian route (sometimes shallow frying with egg and flour to add more crisp), but it is one of the wonderful tastes of early summer. (Or, as we say in Scotland, the first week of May.)

It took a while to taste really good aubergine. There was a memorable mezze meal at a Turkish restaurant in Edinburgh where we had Imam Bayildi (aubergine and tomato, cooked to an unctuous finish). I too would swoon (the name means ‘the imam swooned’).

I would still say that making moussaka is one of my ‘treats to myself’ meals. We have a Tess Malos cookbook from which I take my recipe: let’s just say that a little egg and nutmeg in the finishing of the white sauce is a transformer.

More recent aubergine extravaganzas include Contorni (I think it’s a Nigella ‘Forever Summer’ recipe): griddled aubergine wrapped around whatever. Something sharp like feta is a good foil to the aubergine, but you could equally spread it with hummus. As long as it has a bit of a kick, it’s all good.

The imam could have swooned, and said ‘Oh but Jean…’ if only he’d known. But he recognised a good thing when he ate the mighty aubergine. As do I.

I believe there is such a thing as the mackerel gene. The one where you open a packet of smoked mackerel, breathe in, and immediately feel both better and that you want to eat it all. Immediately.

Mackerel seems to be something that I am eating more and more. Not so much that I grow bored with it, or that I feel like I am singlehandedly threatening fish stocks. But it keeps reappearing on the menu at home, partly because it’s Good For Us, and partly because we all seem to like it in different variations.

Mackerel was part of my childhood, in the form of Kipper Pate, which most of the time was really made with smoked mackerel. It would sometimes come out at Christmas as a treat. Take the richness of the fish, mix with butter and cream, and spread on toast…that’s pretty much it. Ideal for parties, and a little goes a long way.

Later on, I rediscovered it in the soothing ‘thick soup’ that is Cullen Skink. Again, it’s meant to be another fish, smoked haddock, rather than mackerel, but mackerel does just fine. We particularly enjoyed a version where you buy peppered mackerel – you already have some salt from the smoking process, and the pepper adds a hit to lift the creaminess of the milk and the potato.

In my attempts to keep up the oily fish in the diet, I started eating mackerel in various guises as part of a take-in lunch at work. I don’t know that it was greatest for the breath, in an open plan office, but it did help you feel like you were having a proper lunch.

What next? Tinned mackerel, as a quick and easy sandwich option – just mash with a fork, and add to bread. Sometimes you can get it in tomato-y sauce, which adds some piquancy to cut through the richness of the fish.

For some reason, mackerel sandwiches alongside parsnip soup make for a wonderful combination of richness and sweetness. (And since Dan loves parsnips, it’s an easy choice all round.)

Last year, I came upon a Nigel Slater mackerel dauphinoise – think mackerel, thin slices of potato, cream, and baking it all. Add a little greenery for some tang – watercress would be great. I ate this and pretty much laughed out loud at how good it was.

The most recent find is a variation on this, from a different source: similar idea but substitute sweet potato and coconut milk. Actually, I do a mix of regular and sweet potato, along with the coconut and the fish. The sweet potato sludges down nicely, the regular potato keeps a little bite, and it’s great comfort food all round.

It may be the smoking process. It may be the mouthfeel of the fish. But it is a wonder – and it’s more of a sustainable fish than cod and other white fish.

Whether it makes you dance for your daddy or sing for your mammy, you know that you will want a little fishie of this kind. Now I just need to wait for the boat to come in again.

It’s December 2006. I have stacks of assignments for my counselling course. I also have chunks of annual leave to use up (gosh, leave! That’s definitely a while ago.). Cue extended Christmas break. And peppermint tea.

I had a former colleague who seemed to drink nothing but peppermint tea. She was very calm. And very kind. I was looking for a heated beverage that would keep me alert, but not be too many coffees. Peppermint tea sounded like a good idea all round.

When I make it now, I breathe in that smell that is both toothpaste-and-intense-sweetness. And smile. I am back in that holiday, not really a holiday, but it felt like it because I was off work for three whole weeks.

In the first week, Dan went off to work, and I stayed home and got on with the assignments. There were so many, it seemed, I could swap them round. When I got stuck with one, I’d go on to another.

And in the evenings, after Dan came home, we’d sit and watch Firefly. Don’t remember who made the recommendation. We loved it. Still do. Space AND cowboys? It’s been done more, recently, but I suspect that the particular style of dialogue – plus insults in Chinese – aren’t part of it. Their loss.

There was a wonderful rhythm to that week. Work, rest, drink tea. Often the tea would get ignored while writing, and I’d drink it luke warm, when the flavour intensified. The aroma was stronger, more insistent. Calming and strong, together.

I have also done the more Middle Eastern peppermint tea thing, once or twice. I love the silver teapot, the pouring the tea from a great height, the use of fresh peppermint. I find the insistence on lots of sugar more complicated. (Same deal with pre-sugared tea from an urn, back in my first stint in Poland.)

Perhaps I can work on the fresh leaves tea ritual at home, skip the sugar, and focus on the taste. I am not a spearmint girl at all – too many unhappy toothpaste incidents when spearmint is the flavour – so too much sweetness tastes of that.

But the energy of mint – that I can take. Particularly if it’s quiet energy. Just the thing for the darkest month, routinised behaviour, and the need for warmth. Cup your hands round a mug of peppermint tea, and you’re done.