jackal10

400 plants of Chamomile Treneague have just arrived for a camomile and thyme lawn on top of the outdoor bread oven. As soon as it stops raining I'm outside to plant them at 3-6 inch spacings. The theory is to keep it quite dry so as to inhibit the grass. Frost date here is 1 June "Ne'er cast a clout till May be out" Meantime the greenhouses are full with starter plants: Tomatos, Chili peppers, cucumbers, pole beans red brussel sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli pumpkins, winter squash, basil, lettuce, pansies for bedding, Amaranth, sweet corn... Outside the radishes are coming, as is spinach, and chinese mustard. Potatos just showing through. Broad (Fava) beans up, but patchy - need to re-sow. Sweet peas are up, but no sign of the purple podded eating peas. The apple blossom is lovely but patchy. The Egremont Russet is full on, but the Ellisons Orange is not there at all. No buds even. Allington Pippin in between. The grass needs cutting, the herb garden tidying, and the clematis tying in. The cock pheasants stroll around crowing, and either doing battle or claiming ownership. The hens, meantime, come out for brief breaks then scuttle back to sitting on their eggs hidden in the brambles and the long grass.

You can't really make Borscht from cooked beets. Borscht is basically a good broth, coloured with the juice from cooking beets in it, and with sweet/sour overtones. Many variants though. Versions go all the way from clear consomme, hot or cold, via creamy soups (thickened with egg yolks) to meaty stews, one pot meals. Sour cream is traditional, or a boiled or fried potato and/or cabbage pirogi if you don't want to mix meat and milk. You could approximate by liquidising some of the beets and adding the strained result (the liquid, not the solids) to a broth (with or without chunks of meat and vegetables), with a good slug of vinegar and sugar. Add some julienne of the beets if you like, but primarily as decoration. Easy on the sugar, as the beets are quite sweet. May need a balancing amount of salt. Let it simmer a while to take the edge off the vinegar. Pre-cooked beets are traditionally eaten as a salad ingredient, usually with a fairly sharp vinegar dressing. Sliced thinly and deep fried they make good root crisps. They can also be roast.

Lynne Olver, editor of The Food Timeline (Morris County Library, NJ USA http://www.foodtimeline.org) has kindly pointed me to their web entry: Steak Diane History. In it she points out Escoffier's recipe for Sauce Diane: "Sauce Diane Lightly whip 2dl of cream and add it at the last moment to 5dl well seasoned and reduced Sauce Poivrade. Finish with 2 tbs each of small crescent shaped pieces of truffle and hard-boiled white of egg. This sauce is suitable for serving with cutlets, noisettes and other cuts of venison." and suggests it evolved from Steak au Poivre, traditionally propared at the table. The crescent shapes are because Diane is also Goddess of the Moon. The toast served with to mop up the juices should also be in crescent shape.

Steak Diane is not mentioned in Escoffier or in la Repertoire, so has no place in Cuisine Classique. Diane (Goddess of Hunting) is usually associated with game recipes, and garnishes and sauces involving game. Presumably one of these made the cross-over to beef. Hunters Beef, on the other hand is pickled and long slow cooked. The food timeline gives its origin as 1908, but with no justification. Steak Diane has the feeling of originating in a grand hotel dining room, and The Chicago Meat Authority give its origin as "Created at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, individual tender beef steaks are pounded flat, quickly cooked in butter and flamed with cognac. The cognac sauce is typically finished with sherry, butter and chives". However, the Copacabana Palace Hotel was only opened in 1923, and note no onion, mushroom, mustard or Worcester sauce in this version.. My guess is around the turn of the century, with a revival in the 1950s, fading out as front-of-house staff became deskilled plate-slingers.

Use the white linen tablecloths at the end of service. Wash in hot water plus a little washing up liquid. Rinse. Dry. A tablecloth is big enough to wrap round your hands and provide some protection, also avoiding fingermarks. If there is a stubborn deposit, soak the glass overnight. Decanters are rather more difficult. You can get special brushes, and a length of lavatory chain works well.

Tungpo "straw mat"pork, named in honour of the poet Su Tungpo.The story is that a passing Immortal flung a bit of straw mat into a pot of belly pork to give it it special fragrance. Not the version with peanuts, but a precise square of pork belly salted, blanched twice, long braised and then long steamed, so the fat and skin can be cut with a spoon, with smoothness, depth and clarity of flavour. Tender, sweet, tasty, rich but not oily. The surface is brown and yielding, and the underlying fat smooth and custard-like, the meat brown and tender,

IMHO a few days won't affect the wine. It would be worse if it cycled continously and quickly (say every 15 mins) between 56 and 78, mostly through agitation, but you won't notice the effect of a steady temperature. At worse may make the wine mature a day or so earlier, but if you can tell that over the period a wine ages, then you are bluffing. While the cellar is hot you will need to chill the whites before serving, instead of having them at cellar temperature Of course you worry about the dramatic effect. Ship the lot to me and I'll taste them all for you..

Best baked potato is rolled in clay then put in the middle of a campfire... The point is that the potato is ridiculously overcooked, so you get that delightful taste, and crisp crunchy skin. You can reproduce it in an medium oven, just cook for a long time - 3 hours say. Butter, salt, black pepper is all you need... Lesser potatos are just a sponge to sop up other food- melted cheddar, baked beans, chili...

Sticky Toffee Pudding Adapted from John Tovey and others. Do not eat when heavy activity is expected afterwards (wrong image - this belongs with the sourdough bread recipe, and ther is no way to delete it!) Pudding 6 oz Soft Brown Sugar 4 oz Butter 4 Eggs 8 oz SR Flour (I add extra baking powder) 1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda 2 T Coffee extract or instant coffee 8 oz chopped stoned dates ( I prefer raisins) 1/2 pt boiling water Butterscotch Sauce 1 lb Golden Syrup (Corn Syrup) 3 oz Butter 4 oz Soft Brown Sugar 1/4 pt Double (heavy) cream vanilla essence Pudding: Line a 9 inch cake tin with a couble layer of silicon baking paper. Preheat oven to medium/350F/180C/Gas 4 Cream the butter and the sugar until white, fold in the eggs and the flour. Sprinkle the bicarb over the dates (or raisins, or can be omitted, pour on the boiling water and stir. Leave for 5 mins, then mix into the flour etc to form a runny mixture. Pour into the cake tin, and bake for 1 1/2 hours until springy to the touch. Sauce: Mix all together, and gently boil for about 10 mins, stirring all the time. Pour over the pudding, and bake or grill until the top bubbles. Serve with lots of whipped cream. Keywords: Dessert, Pudding ( RG444 )

Ideally and properly the sauce should be an integral part of the dish, and part of the food balance. Unfortunately many customers in a restaurant (present company excepted) don't have the palate but want to be amazed, chiefly with something they can't do at home. Its all too easy to for a professional kitchen to squiggle two different sauces on a plate, and stick in a potato galette, the sprig of rosemary or a caramel hat (or all three), and send it out to the gullible. What did we do before squeeze bottles? edit: added the sprig of rosemary

Why would the chocolate bead? Its not like the filling has to be cold. You can use the mousse at room temperature. Fill with a straight coulis even, if you seal the shell with a bit of melted chocolate after. Are these deserts or chocolates?

shcrambled eggs... loaded with whatever comes to hand, lox, cheese, chives, cold baked beans, bacon...

The rules are complex,, but I believe that one of your parents must have British Citizenship. Its possible that your mother may have inherited that from her father (if she was not illegitimate), but I think she (or her parents) would need to have made that claim and held dual nationality. The rules for right to abode and work are different, as are the rules if your parents were Crown service.

I find them in my vegetable patch. You really only want to eat the young, blanched leaves, and it then takes the plant a couple of seasons to recover from having the top sliced off. You can propgate from offsets - leaves with a bit of root attached pulled from the outside. For some reason they do OK in my heavy alkaline clay soil, whereas globe artichokes struggle. They are occaisionally for sale in the equivalent of farmer's markets Cynara cardunculus makes a stately plant, good grey-green background to show off roses, for example. If left they produce Globe Artichoke like buds and flowers, also edible if picked young, but smaller than artichokes. If you leave them until the blue thistle head flower shows its too late, but then flower arranger of the household may like them. You can dry them for winter decoration, head down, so as to keep the vivid blue colour.

Bath Olivers have a very high fat content and coat the mouth. Good if you are selling wine, no so good if you are buying it. Also the current versions are somehow thicker and not quite as crisp as the ones before they moved factory. Chocolate coated Bath Olivers are, of course, perverted. Millers Damsel Wheat Wafers are my favourite. Others I eat cheese with: McVities Digestive close second, but not really a cracker Jacob's High baked Ryvita Dark Rye

a) The cardoons you buy should have been blanched first (wrapped in polythene or newspaper) to make them tender b) Cut off the barbs - you only wnt the central part of each leaf c) Braise, like celery, with onion and bacon..

I'd follow Steve's advise. Might be easiest to make (or buy) chocolate shells - pour tempered chocolate into moulds, let stand a bit then pour out. Then you can fill the shells with mousse at your leisure, por on a bit of chocolate to seal and hey presto. You can get non-stick rubber chocolate moulds in a variety of shapes...including spheres and berries

Cheesy leeks,especially leek pie Sliced finely lengthways and deep fried as a garnish Use a single layer as a wrapper or stuffed as cannelloni outer Coarse tops in the stockpot

Raspberry mousse: Depends on the effect you want Start with raspberry coulis (3 c raspberries, 1/2c sugar, whizz together, sieve). It's cheating use raspberry jam, but a bit of framboise eau-de-vie helps boost the aromatics. a) set with a sheet of gelatine, then foam; or b) Fold into whipped cream; or c) Whipped Egg whites and sugar (Italian meringue) and whipped cream. To coat in chocolate mould individual portions and freeze them first. To get a shine see the thread on tempering chocolate.

You could follow Ms Chu, and do a Diploma at Cordon Bleu

Dried rhubarb strips as a garnish or sweetmeat. Slice the rhubarb stalk lengthways into thin strips. I used a potato peeler for this. Put onto a silpat or non-stick silicon paper. Dredge with icing (confectioners) sugar. Put into a very low oven until dry and crisp.

Battenburg (four squares of coloured sponge enclosed by marzipan) Stuffed Monkey (Cinnamon pastry enclosing and almond filling) Black forest Gateau (chococolate and cherries) But greatest of all, at 11am or 11pm, with a glass of Bual... Madeira Cake (doesn't contain any wine but is a light lemon sponge made to go with a glass of Madeira)

I've never had the privilege of trying it, but Parker raves about the 1997 Quinta do Noval Vintage Port, giving it a perfect 100 points (maturity 2007+) (WS 99) The 1963 gets 99+ points, and there seem to be a few on offer on the web at around $200. I prefer them older, as it gives a chance for the spirit to mellow and marry with the wine, so this would be my choice. If you can find the Nacional, it is made from pre-phylloxera vines. Wine Spectator rates it 100 as does Fonseca 77,

Taramasalata Grilled fish eaten overlooking the warm sea at sunset....actually doesn't have to be Greek, but they do it very well...

The old fashioned Strawberry (or raspberry) mille-feuille is easy, spectacular and a crowd pleaser. Bake 3 pieces of flaky pastry. Unless you are an expert pastry chef, a good suermarket fresh or frozen pre-packed is OK, especially if you you incorporate extra butter by doing an additional "turn" Bake according to the instructions on the pack - 20 mins in a hot oven or so. Can use shortbread instead. Let them cool. Sandwich together with plenty of whipped cream and lots of strawberries. Dust the top with icing sugar. To serve cut with a serrated knife.