Ways of Wild Garlic

Nobody is lucky to be in a lockdown. I think of families jammed into a small apartment at the top of a high-rise or people stranded abroad in hostels, unable to reach their homeland. There are those forced by circumstance to cohabit with people they might not ordinarily wish to or those without much contact at all with anyone. In any circumstance we must try to make the best of things, now more than ever.

Relatively speaking I am one of the lucky ones. I am in the countryside, surrounded by acres of open fields and woodlands. My parents’ house has a garden too. I am social distancing, like everyone, but with much more space.

And it’s Springtime. The hedgerows sparkle with the flowering gems of this season: periwinkle, stitchwort, dandelion, celandine, wild strawberry, vetch, bluebell, primrose, daffodil, herb robert, marsh forget-me-nots, coltsfoot. Among this colourful abundance is hidden other treasure too, evident not by its purple, white or yellow flowers but by its subtly pervasive scent.

Wild garlic. Not exactly out of sight either. On my walks I’ve come across whole pastures of the plant by roadsides, in forested glades and on grass verges. It is the perfect opportunity now to maximise the harvest of this ubiquitous allium in the kitchen. Members of the onion family are well known for building up immunity in the body and apart from anything else, it is a lesson on how to use the natural resources which are around us, rather than relying on produce from further afield. 

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In the spirit of community sharing I called upon friends and neighbours in the village to contribute their recipes, tips and ideas for making the most of this ubiquitous allium. This post will include I hope quite a comprehensive resource on what to do with this plant otherwise known as ramsons.

General preparation: Good overall advice from Jayne: ‘…wash the leaves thoroughly, snap off any harder stems…Wild garlic is best added towards the end of cooking the dish, so you retain the flavour and “bite” of the leaves…’ 

As Pesto: Probably the most common and versatile method. Easy to whizz up a batch if you have a food processor or blender. Experiment with ratios of wild garlic and basil, or just go with the former alone. Similarly try different nuts rather than pine nuts; walnuts seem to be a favourite alternative in the community. I also insist on  a squeeze of lemon in my pesto. You can leave the cheese out for a vegan alternative or if you want more of a French ‘pistou.’

Ingredients: wild garlic (big handful); pine nuts (lightly toasted in a pan); good grating of parmesan cheese; olive oil (generous glug); salt and pepper; squeeze of lemon. 

Method: put all ingredients into a blender or ground by hand in a pestle and mortar until you have a rough paste and everything is combined. 

Uses: so many: as jacket potato or sandwich filling; pizza topping or with cheese on toast; accompaniments to meat or fish; with spaghetti etc. 

In Soup: Another classic. Feel like a proper forager by adding some nettles. Follow the same principles of prep for these too.

Plenty of easy soup recipes on the internet and in cookery books. For example this one. Sara D suggests substituting wild garlic for the leeks and almond milk for the cream – ‘honestly totally delicious’ she says, and who am I to disagree. 

With Eggs: The garlic leaves fold really nicely into all manner of egg dishes. They can be a substitute for the spinach in Eggs Florentine, for example, if you fancy a posh breakfast. Why not I say. Otherwise as additions in scrambled eggs or an omelette they are ideal. One of my favourite things to do is make more spaghetti with pesto than I need in order to make a frittata the next day. 

You chop up the the remaining cold pasta, combine it with one beaten egg, more cheese (if you like a lot of cheese – I like a lot of cheese) and some salt and pepper. In a shallow pan melt butter so it starts to froth. Then, on the lowest possible setting, add the frittata mixture and flatten it out into a kind of cake shape. Now, don’t touch it for at least 20 minutes until you see the edges begin to crisp. Flip it over –  it should have a beautiful golden crust – then repeat on the other side. Super savoury and tasty.

With Rice/Grains/Pulses: Hannah says she added some leaves to a risotto. That’s a great idea. As Jayne recommends, putting them in towards the end is the best thing to do. Apart from risotto, we can experiment with other similar dishes and ingredients such as pearl barley, spelt and lentils. 

Jayne cooked up a fantastic feast of a sausage and wild garlic oven baked paella. ‘…it had carrots, celery, green beans, mushrooms, peas, chipolatas, chorizo, vegetable stock…paella rice and wild garlic.’ Got to get that recipe Jayne! Should work well without the meat too. 

Other Ideas:   Sara D made a version of Colcannon, the classic Irish dish of mash and greens, substituting wild garlic for the traditional kale or cabbage, which might even be an improvement on this online masterclass. 

It occurred to me the one thing that hadn’t yet been tried with the leaves was to wrap things. Certainly you can find specimens which are long and broad enough to contain fillings. In the spirit of experimentation then I set out to make a version of the Greek staple, dolmades. This is a dish of stuffed vine leaves, traditionally served as an appetizer. 

I harvested about twenty of the biggest leaves I could find to use as the wraps. I made a simple rice dish as follows for the filling, taken from the above link:

 “Place the rice in a colander and rinse with running water. Heat a large saucepan over medium heat, add 1/3 of the olive oil and the chopped onions. Sauté the onions, until translucent (but not coloured). Add the rice and sauté for 1 more minute. Pour in 2 cups of warm water and half lemon juice and simmer for about 7 minutes, until the rice absorbs all the water and is parboiled. Season with salt and pepper, stir in the herbs, remove from the stove and set aside to cool down for a while. This will be the filling for the dolmades.”

I used about 130g rice and finely chopped parsley as the herb. I didn’t want to make too much in case it wasn’t a great result. 

Once the mixture had cooled I began to make the dolmades. It was a bit of a faff, to be honest. After some trial and error – and some cursing – I found the best method was to make a cross of two leaves (which I needed to blanch under boiling water for a second to soften) and then place about a teaspoonful of the filling in the centre before wrapping the leaves over, one by one, to make an envelope. 

After this I followed the cooking instructions as before:

1. “Place the stuffed vine leaves (fold side down) on the bottom of the pot and top in snugly layers. Be careful not to leave any gaps between the dolmades to prevent them from cracking open when cooking.
2. Drizzle the stuffed vine leaves (dolmathes) with the rest of the olive oil and lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Place an inverted plate on top to hold them down when cooking and pour in enough water just to cover them. Place the lid on and simmer the dolmades for about 30-40 minutes, until the water has been absorbed and the dolmades remain only with the oil.
3. Remove the pot from the heat, remove the lid and plate and let the dolmades cool for at least 30 minutes.”

They turned out to be pretty good, if I say so myself. Worth having a go at and perhaps experimenting with fillings. A good way to use up leftover risotto or other such dishes.

I hope you’ve found some inspiration here. I’ll update the page if anybody wants to contribute. Amazing the resources on our doorstep if we know where to look. Keep it local and keep resilient. 

 

 

 

Life in plastic

I had a hankering for a vegetarian curry in the evening and some spiced apple sauce to stir into my breakfast porridge. I got off at the last-but-one subway stop to my apartment so I could buy the supplies I required: a couple of apples; a bunch of coriander; a sweet potato and cauliflower.

The picture below shows the amount of plastic used to wrap all the produce. Especially unnecessary are those styrofoam nets around the apples. I know, I know, keeping things in plastic keeps them fresh for longer. And plastic producing companies argue that it lightens the load for transit purposes, thereby enabling more products on fewer journeys, saving the world in that way. And the irony is that plastic is a good product. Cheap, durable and versatile, it has myriad uses, from the dashboards of millions of cars to the containers we use for our lunch boxes.

We’ve seen it too as a massive moving carpet of filth across the Pacific Ocean, choking up the water and the life within. We’ve read about tiny particles of the stuff that contaminate our drinking water supplies meaning serious health risks. Plastic, we can confidently say now, is bad news.

We can make lifestyle choices. We can carry around our own shopping bags and re-usable water flasks, we can try to shop in places which don’t offer plastic bags or drink without using a plastic straw. We can compartmentalise our waste so that plastics are deposited into the appropriate boxes where available. This is all good. We feel better about it all. We feel less guilty.

What? Wait, guilty? Where did that come from? After all, it’s not our fault that a very large percent of products are made of some form of plastic. The stuff is everywhere. As consumers, ourselves a product of the times, we are trapped into buying it. Life in plastic. It’s fantastic.

Because we are beings blessed – or cursed – with a conscience, we feel it being pricked with every news article, shocking docu-reveal and plastered image. That conscience leads us to question our own activities, we secretly blame ourselves for the predicament. And so either we forget about it all – someone will work something out won’t they – or we start to change the way we live our lives.

And the plastics industry helps fuel this sense of individual responsibility. Plastic is petroleum-based and an essential by-product of the fossil fuels industries. In response to the growing environmental crisis, a by-product of mass disposable consumerism, littering initiatives were funded by this industry who, having shifted the onus onto the individual to do something about it, did not cease the production of the damaging materials.

Nowadays, gratifyingly, it is more than just individuals who are taking action. Bill McKibben writes recently about the divestment of funds from carbon-intensive companies, signifying a huge realisation from a vast variety of former investors including, amazingly, the Rockefeller family.

Like the Pacific trash vortex, however, the real issues lie even further underneath the surface. It is, as William Catton points out in his groundbreaking work, Overshoot:

‘…easy to succumb to the temptation to vilify particular human groups and individuals …”if only those_____ weren’t up to their nefarious business…then history could resume its march of millennial progress…'”

The journalist and activist George Monbiot, while directing a lot of his ire towards those ___________ in power, is even more concerned with the insidious all-pervading nature of consumerism.  Whatever we consume, he says, is already too much. The planet cannot give us any more than it has. Richard Feinberg, of the Post-Carbon Institute, echoes this by saying we need to become ‘conservers, rather than consumers.’  We use too much of everything. A simple life, with dependence on localised resources, seems to be one of the solutions.

It is with this in mind I have made at least one serious resolution. That is to cut down by at least 75% my weekly intake of animal protein: meat, fish, eggs, dairy. This means that during the course of seven days I am allowed a maximum of five meals including some or all of these ingredients. Monbiot calls for total global veganism, his principal beef with animal grazing, however I am not yet convinced such an extreme is necessary. A collective cutting-down will itself have positive effects, as outlined comprehensively here. All food for thought.

With this new dietary regime in place, I will endeavour to be a bit more regular with my posts as I am forced into further experimentation very much out of my comfort zone. Experimentation also involves what to do with food waste, stuff I’d normally discard. To this end I have already started using sweet potato skins and apple peel, crisping them up in the oven with oil and cinnamon, for moreish snacks. I am also trialling the utilisation of rotten satsumas as compost for my window-ledge plants.

Happy to say while this post was being composed I was also working on a rather delicious warm salad which fit my new profile.

The inspiration was a roasted chick-pea soup I had for lunch the other day in a cafe near work. Roasted chick-peas eh? I could see them being the main player in a kind of lightly-spiced melange. The one I have fashioned and devoured included these ingredients:

• chick peas, two tins, drained
• one carrot, diced and left raw,
• one cucumber, ditto carrot
• one tomato, ditto above
• one head of sweetcorn
• broccoli
• mixed nuts and seeds (cashew, pumpkin, sunflower)
• ras-el-hanout
• smoked paprika
• coriander, one bunch, chopped

I roasted the corn and the pulses at the same time, although the former I wrapped in foil with some thyme, garlic rub and oil. The chick-peas I laid out on the tray, glistening with salt and more olive oil. Temperature 200 degrees. It all took about twenty minutes and everything was ready together. As soon as the pulses came out of the oven I sprinkled them with the paprika. Meanwhile I blanched the broccoli until tender in boiling water, chopping it up into florets. After scraping the corn off the husk I mixed it all up, throwing in the nuts and seeds – lightly crushed and toasted in a pan – and the herb. The final addition was the ras-el-hanout mixed with a little oil. As is my wont, I have made enough for a couple of meals.

On the pulse, with the grain.

One of the key things I’ve learnt about getting creative in the kitchen is that the process of making starts with what is absent. If I had a large, fully equipped kitchen and a well-stocked larder at my disposal I daresay I would never have started this blog.

Limited preparation space and minimal cooking facilities. The unavailability of many familiar ingredients. The effort it takes to source a fresh bunch of thyme. Into this mix I am now stirring the challenge to cut out as many carbohydrates as possible from my diet. It’s a weight-loss thing. I figured on this with a combination of regular exercise and less alcohol.

At least two of those are going pretty well. Where I have to get creative is to think of alternatives to the usual sauce-moppers and solid textures. No longer will my fall-back be a rustling portion of fried potatoes, glistening with salt. Same goes for that lunchtime convenience of two thick slices of bread filled with whatever I can fashion from the fridge contents. No takeaway pizza. Rice and noodles are also out, which excludes me from about eighty percent of the dishes in this country. I’m making an exception, as a once-weekly treat, of pasta, although I haven’t been as tempted as I thought I would be.

Creamed white beans

An inspiration which crept on at me one morning at work and which possessed me for the rest of the day until I could not wait to get on with it. It provided the base for slices of medium-rare sirloin and kale.

• tin of white beans (eg. cannellini)
• half a medium onion
• palmful of thyme leaves, chopped
• grain mustard, spoonful of
• stock – I crumbled in about half a vegetable cube to a jug of hot water
• cider vinegar, splash
• cream, about 50ml
• salt and pepper

It was the soothing prospect of this which had me salivating. The vinegar provided a nice sour note, cutting through the richness, although I guess white wine would have done too. I added the chopped onion to a hot pan lubricated with a little oil and then after a few minutes, added the thyme and mustard. Vinegar sloshed in next with the heat turned up to let it boil. Back on the simmer I poured in the beans, well-drained to get rid of that cat-food tin smell. The stock covered the beans and basically I let it bubble away for about fifteen minutes while the rest of the meal was prepared. Near the end the addition of the cream and another couple of minutes’ cooking thickened the dish deliciously. I could probably just be happy with a bowl of this some other time.

Spiced lentil soup

A good late-season warmer. At least a hand-held blender is necessary for the final emulsification.  I eventually made enough for about five separate servings.

• green lentils – I weighed in about four generous handfuls.
• chilli flakes, a pinch
• more stock, enough to more than cover all the ingredients – again, I generally just use cubes
• one big onion, diced
• garam masala, a good spoonful of
• one squash, cut up into chunks
• spinach or similar, thick bunch of
• cream, about 100ml

There might have been some other ingredients, but this was essentially it. Always starts with the onion frying in oil until soft. I threw in the spices and chilli fairly early on in the process. Then the lentils and squash were introduced and allowed to take on all the pan flavours. The spinach was wonderfully cold when I washed it under the tap. In it went. Then the stock, up to the boil, cook till everything was soft and in with the cream and, after a bit of amalgamation, the B L E N D. This was my lunch out of a thermos for the next three days.

Chickpea stew

Not meant to stand alone this one although I daresay it could. In this case it was the base for a couple of pollack fillets which originally I’d planned to cook separately but in the end just bunged in with everything else. This recipe is the bastard child of an Aldo Zilli creation. The appropriation is, as ever, my own.

• tin of chick peas
• medium onion, chopped
• capers, spoonful of
• chilli flakes, sprinkle
• stock, as for the beans
• one carrot, diced into small pieces
• bunch of coriander, chopped

Pretty sure Zilli uses sun-dried tomatoes in his dish. I compensated for the lack of those with the capers – the piquancy is needed in some way. The process remains the same. Onion and carrot, spice, chick peas, capers, stock, coriander, in that order. Cooked until most of the stock reduced to a thin flavoursome gravy. Particularly delicious contrast between the nutty pulses, still with a bite, the sweetened onion and carrot and the hint of spice.

No pictures for this post. How could I visually recreate the sensation of my splayed palm over the pan as it heats, or the squeak the spinach makes when the knife slices through it? How to replicate the rattle of pulses in the colander or the magical mingling of spices in the air? What photo can do justice to the longing I had for a dish of beans or the impatience over a pan of nearly-boiling water?

With toaster

One of the main stimuli for starting this blog was to see what culinary explorations I could make in the limited confines of my kitchen. As the title indicates I was possessed of only two hobs, a toaster and scanty preparation space. In past posts I’ve demonstrated quite effectively how one of my cupboards can act as a kind of proving drawer, something I will be turning to again as the weather starts to get colder over the next month or so. I have an oven too – a portable thing that sits on my fridge, replacing the microwave that came with the apartment and which is now in a bedroom cabinet, under towels. Best place for it.

This week I was to have my meagre equipment tested to its capacity as the hobs were put out of action by the chance discovery of a gas leak. With the kitchen effectively out-of-bounds and my hands restless to prepare some kind of meal I turned to the oven, to see what kind of supper I could fashion. I could bake. I could roast. Roast on toast? I had to do better than that.

My aim was to cook everything together so that it would all do evenly and to this end I decided to wrap it all in foil. Not sure what the science is behind this but I thought that by encasing the temperature would be contained moreover the combination of ingredients would meld into each other and at the end there would be a nice naturally made sauce.

I chose fish. Fillets of frozen tilapia I found at Twin’s. Never cooked with this fish before although I had eaten a much larger specimen at this restaurant in Chiang Mai and knew therefore it could handle some big flavours. I have also subsequently read an article listing the benefits and dangers of this fish, something I should perhaps have taken on board before buying it here. Well, I don’t have to buy it again.

So along with the fish in the foil I added:

• half of one onion, sliced
• handful of sun-dried tomatoes (with their juice), chopped
• scattering of capers
• twigs of thyme
• dustings on the fish of smoked paprika and ras el hanout
• yellow and green courgettes, half of one each, cubed
• salt and pepper
• drizzling of olive oil

I fancied a sweet-sour-savoury combination and also to see which flavours punched through the most. The fish lay on the bed of onions with the courgettes casually slung about over the top, thus:

What would I do about accompaniments? I could roast some potatoes on a separate drawer, but I doubted the machine’s capacity to cope with all of that and in any case I wanted to be a little bit more imaginative. What could I make that didn’t require any hob-or oven-work?

Couscous. I always forget about couscous. Silly when it’s such a super easy thing to prepare and also extremely versatile. I started to think what I could add to the grains once they’d soaked up the hot water. Something with some crunch. I decided I would sprinkle some seeds and pine-nuts on the bottom drawer of the oven, for literally ten seconds. Parsley could also be chopped in, then there would be a squeeze or two of lemon with a knob of butter and a little oil to lubricate. I’d thought about throwing in some sultanas too, but in the end forgot about them.

After about thirty minutes at about 190 – I am nothing if not imprecise – I unwrapped the foil. Coming on lovely, but I decided to uncover it for a ten-minute blast on a higher heat just to get a bit more colour going. Turned out nice. The onions hadn’t quite cooked through and in any case they were one of the more extraneous elements in the mix. If I do this again I wouldn’t bother with them, or else use shallots. The ras el hanout had also got lost; probably next time one not both of the spices or else experiementation with something else. But the courgettes still had a nice bite to them, the fish was meaty and juicy and, as I’d hoped, a delicious sauce had formed from the mingling spices,

Served on top of the couscous the plate had a very colourful, appealing aspect to it. The aromas were rich in different fragrances and it ate very well. As is my wont, I’d made enough for at least three meals and I can attest to its being equally good out of Tupperware off my knees in a crowded staff break area. Next time no tilapia though: what other fish could I use? I put it to you, dear reader.

 

 

 

Prove it

Twin hobs, toaster and an un-proven cupboard. Ever since I moved in to this apartment I’ve been intrigued by a certain fitting in the kitchen. The cupboard beneath the principal chopping area, usually used to house saucepans and most of my crockery, has behind it a radiator. Now I should say that I have no input in the heating situation in my apartment, as it is centrally controlled throughout the entire building. It is turned on in mid-November and switched off mid-March, virtually regardless of the outside temperatures. Beginning of the third month and the weather is getting milder, yet the heating pulses on.

Said cupboard, in its usual state

Well. The idea occurred to me relatively early in my tenancy this cupboard, as well as an invaluable storage space, could at times double as a kind of proving drawer for bread products, such as one finds in some ovens. The temperature within is consistently warm, about that of a disappointing bath. Never mind it’s taken me over two years to try this out (lack of oven a key factor), my enthusiasm for this blogging project has given me the oomph – aided by the dull weather on a day off – necessary for the experiment.

Waking up I was initially sceptical of being able to easily locate yeast within the environs  of my apartment. I live in a quiet and unfashionable district, well away from the expat communities who might have better access to better-stocked western-style supermarkets, and I didn’t fancy my chances of finding said raising agent in the local shops – although, thinking about it, that was shortsighted given its presence in various bread products, including these.

Never mind. I got to cycle down to my favourite local, run by a woman I will call Twin, and found a sachet. Bonus exercise. Recipes I read for bread call for, variously, strong, or hard flour. I bought a packet of something called all-purpose flour and, obviously, the proof will be in the eating….

Actually I had no idea what kind of bread I was going to make. My preoccupations lay virtually solely with the aforementioned experiment meaning, typically, I was more concerned with the process than the result. And yet. As I went about the morning, doing laundry, tidying up, ideas began to formulate, as they will. I thought about what I had in my other cupboards, and in the freezer, and eventually I had a picture in my mind. A picture of beef stew and flatbreads. Slow Saturday cooking.

The scene was set. Not only did I have the ingredients, the time and the methodology, I also had things to listen to. One of these days I will publish a post about the things I have on in the background while I am cooking. At the stove and the train window are my favourite places to listen, to music or other. Today I had albums by these old favourites and this marvellous new discovery as a soundtrack but, best of all, piping in from sunny climes over eleven thousand kilometres to the south-east, this. If there’s anything better than cricket commentary on the radio I don’t want to know about it.

Baking calls for some precise measuring. That’s what the baking people will have you think. I found a basic recipe and adjusted the quantities to fit a smaller amount because as much as I wanted to try this out I didn’t want to be eating flatbreads for the next seven days. Not having any scales I wasn’t sure of the flour-yeast-water ratios so improvised by using measuring spoons my mother had thoughtfully given me at Christmas – figuring out that 1 millilitre equals 1 gram.

To make the flatbreads a bit more funky I augmented the dough mixture with a good couple of teaspoonfuls of za’atar, and once everything was combined I placed it, covered, in the un-proven drawer….

….approximately an hour later, or could have been less, or more (I fell asleep), the dough looked like this….

A proven success!

Buoyed by my small triumph I set about the stew with zeal. The beef was cubed and sprinkled with smoked paprika, salt and pepper, before being quickly browned then removed so that the carrots, red onions, garlic, star anise, thyme and rosemary could jostle for flavour favour in the pan. Once these had softened I added a tin of tomatoes, some stock (a cube) and the beef again. Lid on, heat to a simmer. I rinsed and chopped some kale in preparation as obligatory green addition.

I still had to cook the bread. After a bit more kneading – I don’t mind that – I oiled up the baking tray and set the oven dials for fifteen minutes on the highest heat. Rolling the bread out proved (ha!) to be interesting. I used, first, a bicycle pump and then a hand mixer to achieve the desired stretched flatness. The pump gave a more even roll but was basically inadequate because of its appendages which didn’t permit a direct contact with the bread surface after the initial roll. The mixer did not roll evenly but was more generally efficacious.

While the bread puffed up in the oven I cooked the kale in salted boiling water and threw in with the stew, now ready. The flatbread turned out to resemble a piece of driftwood but, fortunately, tasted pretty good – crisp exterior and soft inside, with the za’atar taste nice and mellow throughout. A grating of clementine peel over the stew was a perky afterthought.

Nice and mellow sums up the day.

 

 

I Am The Hero

Leaving tomorrow for ten days so a quick inventory of my fridge’s contents: a potato; some old celery; herbs – dried bay, thyme, rosemary; palmful of button mushrooms; half a large onion; a third of a stale-ish baguette; one egg; block of cheddar cheese.

Nothing much to do with the egg unless I make a large potato cake and have a fried egg on top. There’s the issue then of keeping it for when I return. It seems to me that it won’t freeze well and, anyway, I don’t much fancy a big potato tablet today. The egg can wait.

It’ll be another soup then and, to this end, I have augmented my solid if unspectacular set of fridge-bottom staples with a leek from the greengrocer’s around the corner and a large clove of garlic from beside the stove. My one reservation in making soup is the lack of any handy stock. One of the reasons why my previous effort was so successful was the chicken broth used; I had the foresight to use the bones of a roast I had made for that purpose. I have learned how to make a scratch chicken stock, and I’ll include the features of that in a future post, but for now it will be a reliance on the flavours I already have, some careful seasoning and judicious use of a stock cube.

All this weighing up of what I have to hand, working out what it can be used for, puts me in mind of one thing, and then another.

At the beginning of many fantasy role-play gamebook series, most notably Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy line and the Lone Wolf sequence, the protagonist, the YOU, is given a run-down of what possessions he/she already has and what others, within certain and changing limitations, might be added at the outset of any particular quest as suitable supplements determined by their potential usefulness.

Typically, at least in the early Fighting Fantasy books, it was along the lines of ‘leather armour, sword and backpack’, plus provisions, and the adventurer got to choose one of three potions for boosting either of the Luck, Skill or Stamina values which made up YOUR profile. As the series grew, and different authors involved, so elements such as spells and other special features were included, depending on the type of adventure about to take place and the hero profile required. Early example of adventure sheet below, something of a blank canvas:

Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf was different in that the protagonist was always the same character, the titular hero no less, and so a progression through the books, which followed a linear narrative of sorts, meant a gradual acquisition (and therefore casting off) of various pieces of equipment, items, disciplines and skills. The books differed also in the sense they specified where the various pieces of equipment and items could be carried: in the hand, in the belt-pouch, in the backpack, and so on.

Cooking is a kind of journey, as is this blog, and it’s natural before embarking on any meal preparation to take stock of firstly, what one has, and, then, what one needs. Sometimes I wear an apron, and I carry a wooden spoon in one hand, knife to chop and slice in the other. Like today I size up what is available and make a dish on that basis, adding as appropriate.

This moreover is a new adventure, a new quest. In the recent past I might have been tempted to look contemptuously at the contents of my fridge and decide there was nothing worth using, or nothing I could be bothered to use. I may well have gone shopping, purchasing sundry other ingredients – the point is, this conglomeration of objects is what I have, so I should make the best of them. Just as I possess various skills and disciplines of my own that, in the past, I have not fully appreciated or utilised. In the gamebooks you learn to use what you have wisely, whether it be in your hand, in your belt-pouch, or even in your head; such care and respect does not necessarily mean a positive outcome, because some things are out of your control – the dice rolls against you, for instance – but, by arming yourself in the best way possible, by recognising what you have, you are at least better able to deal with things.

In the past few years interest in the Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy series, to name but two, has been resurgent, leading to reprints, greater discussion (especially online), electronic versions of the books for iOS and android, and much more. Joe Dever allowed almost the entire back catalogue of Lone Wolf to be republished online, here, to create a ‘lasting legacy.’ For Fighting Fantasy there have been various print runs, containing some, but not all, of the original set. The most recent seems to be dumbing down slightly, especially in terms of the artwork (an index of the original artists can be found here), and in if you have a mind it is worth scouring charity bookshops across the UK for the original series, some editions of which fetch a pretty penny.

Failing that there are now quite a few blogs dedicated to playthroughs of one or both series, of which the most readable and dedicated can be found here, here and here.

But I was making soup. To maximise flavour I make sure to give each ingredient enough cooking time before adding anything else. So I cook the potatoes, seasoned, gently in olive oil to brown slightly, then every other component in turn: the leeks and celery, washed and rinsed; onion and mushrooms, coarsely chopped; rosemary and thyme, finely: bay leaves, cast in. Water to cover with half a chicken stock cube crumbled in. I simmer until the potatoes have more or less dissolved then blend, before cooking down potentially to thicken more.

As in many of my attempts at the role-play adventures, I make a mistake, in this case forgetting to remove the bay before blending. This error has not led to instant death, I am pleased to say, and the results would have been worse had the herb been of the fresh variety, yet I am concerned the soup will be overpowered by its taste nonetheless.

The result is a light green and grey, gently bay-flavoured mellow soup which, jazzed up by some quickly-fried croutons and a grating of cheddar makes a more than satisfactory meal. The absence of proper stock is evident, as the overall savour is mild rather than robust. What I started with appeared a meagre selection yet, with some dedication and care, I was able to transform the ingredients into a tasty and hearty soup. Lunch made and a lesson learned (and barely a flicker of meat). Also, the day drab, an atmosphere more befitting to the making.

Becoming

The most interesting part of cooking is the way abstraction becomes concrete. One starts with a jumble of ingredients and perhaps half an idea, the idea based on one’s instincts born from experience. That experience may be first, second, or even third-hand; it may have come from one’s own previous cooking attempts, whether successful or less so, or it might have derived from a witnessing of a dish being created, or the discovery of a recipe in a forgotten magazine. The experience may have been passed down from another in the form of tips, or other half-formed ideas and inspirations. Whatever, experience comes as the instillation of eye-drops: blink and you’ll miss it.

So, with eyes opened, the process begins. And it begins with uncertainty. The what to do and maybe the how too. We have the raw materials and yet there is the lingering feeling that, despite whatever experience we bring to the chopping board, we have little idea how the dish will turn out. It is at this point a good idea to do one crucial thing: abandon all expectations. The glossy pictures in cookbooks are an ideal, but only that. Written recipes, too, are not infallible. There are many variables in the kitchen and one will do well to become familiar with the immediate environment and the tools therein. Whatever we end up producing will only be an approximation of that image or that set of instructions. Moreover that projection of an idea that became that picture is someone else’s ideal.

The uncertainty, the ‘not-knowing,’ is the game. When the lid goes on top of a pan filled with various textures and flavours and the flame adjusted to simmer mode one is left in the dark to some extent. What is happening under there? And the temptation of course is to tinker, to remove the lid and stir, stir relentlessly, disturbing the alchemy. A wiser man than me once said that trying to fight insecurity was like taking a flat-iron to the waves to smooth them down; doing that, you’re only going to rough them up some more. I’m learning to let the magic happen.

 

Today I took two apples. I mostly knew what I wanted to make, a kind of spicy apple sauce to go with a bowl of morning porridge. Cooking apples work best for this, because the flesh has that mealy quality which gives the final result a granita-like texture. However I didn’t have any, only two eaters I purloined from a hotel breakfast buffet, for this purpose. I chopped both finely and added to the pan: the juice and zest of a small orange; sprinkle of five-spice; two sticks of cinnamon; the grating of a toe-sized knob of ginger; star anise; a glass of water; sliver of butter; trickle of Chinese vinegar. Even when I make sweet things I want notes of sharpness, sourness or bitterness. On other occasions I have included rum, whisky, apple and/or cider vinegar, a lump of sugar and lemon peel. This is a recipe which changes constantly, depending what I have to hand and what comes to mind.

With a lid on I left it for about half an hour to reduce down and didn’t interfere at all. I decided it was ready once the entire apartment was suffused in a warm spicy fug. A  delicious spicy toffee-like sauce had pooled at the pan bottom beneath the fruit, which  had softened to the texture of mush yet still retained its form. I put it in a bowl and covered, to put it in the fridge for when I might need it, which, in the cold winter here, is often.

Everyone thinks it tastes daft

Today was a good example of how I go about things, kitchen-wise. A dollop of kitchen wisdom. How do I explain? It starts from when I wake up, or maybe even the day before, and I have a….taste…is too strong a word…an image, or, rather, a feeling….or, actually, it’s a combination of all these senses. Anyway, I know what it is I want to cook and eat and the idea possesses me to the extent I can think of virtually nothing else until the process is underway.

I sat down earlier to try and write. I wrote a bit. Then I got up and ironed some shirts, listening to The Wedding Present. I already had the notion of what lunch would involve, and yet, I needed a few things for the picture to be complete. Namely, some fresh coriander and some kind of greens. Bitterly cold outside but clear fresh air. There’s a large supermarket about fifteen minutes walk away which stocks a number of things I use regularly which otherwise might be difficult to obtain, like De Cecco pasta and properly sour yoghurt (A pot of which I threw into the basket, being unable to locate any coconut milk – the apron-wearing aisle monitor lady directed me to coconut water instead, although that might well have been because of my parlous grasp of the language).

Again, it’s one of those one-pot dishes I love. The kind of thing that needs equal amounts of adding, simmering and monitoring. This time it was a case of using up things almost festering away in the nebulous area of the fridge bottom. Where things get forgotten and rot. The half sweet potato I had intended to star had to be relegated to the role of something like a third-choice seamer, something to bolster rather than shine. Anyway I had celery as well, plus some oldish broccoli, courgette, carrot and a cupboard full of spices.

I kept the veg chunky and threw things in as they were ready. With those browning away, I tossed in crushed coriander and cumin seeds and grated in a knob of ginger. Then added spices – smoked paprika, garam masala, medium curry powder, turmeric. Again, I don’t go for exact quantities, although that turmeric needs a careful hand. Chick peas were the final addition. Water with a crumble of stock cube, bring to the boil and let the thing simmer away. I had some spinach, coriander, lemon, tomato and yoghurt on hand to finish the dish. I reckoned half an hour.

I was more or less right. Thankfully the curry hadn’t boiled down to an indeterminate mush, as can happen, and the additions of the aforementioned handy stand-bys at the end – the spinach rinsed and chopped, tomato and coriander the same, lemon squeezed and yoghurt folded in –  actually elevated what might have been sort of dull, worthy fare into a light, citrus-heightened, fresh-tasting meal with a deep and piquant undertone. Rather like a sprinkling guitar line over a punchy bass and drum bottom.

A success, and also my second vegetarian meal in a row. I’m not a vegetarian but I do think at least a few meals a week without meat can only be a good thing, for many reasons. This, actually, is part of the overall motive for this blog, to be more aware of the food I’m eating. I’m aware I have DONE A GOOD THING here, and, moreover, the meal was delicious. Enough, again, for a second – generous – helping.