Maria's Sopa de Cenoura

One of the perks of travelling relatively often to the Algarve is that we get to sample some excellent Portuguese food. With more than 40% of the mainland's borders consisting of Atlantic coastline, the quality of seafood in Portugal is outstanding. When they say ‘fresh fish’ in the Algarve, they don’t mean that it was in a freezer truck for a week being brought to the city – they mean it was caught earlier that day, maybe even by someone the restaurant owner or chef knows by name, and brought straight to the kitchen. The fish is then grilled with the magical Mediterranean ingredients of olive oil and garlic. In what I’ve seen of Europe so far, Portugal has to be the place where I’ve had the best fish. The only other country in the world that can compete is Japan, but that’s almost 6,000 miles away…

Although I’m particularly fond of the seafood – probably because of my own coastal heritage – there are other much-loved dishes. One of my favourites is Arroz de Pato, a melting duck rice with almost-caramelized slices of chorizo. This is made by cooking the duck in a broth with vegetables, herbs and spices. The cooked duck is shredded, while the broth (with all the essence of the vegetables and the duck fat) is used to cook the rice. The rice and shredded duck are then layered in earthenware and finished in the oven, with slices of chorizo on top. I’m minded to try making this sometime. If I do, I’ll share a recipe.

Until then, though, I thought I’d have a go at something simpler (and far less calorific). Portuguese soups are another delight discovered on travels, and I picked up a recipe on my most recent visit. Most of the soups that I’ve come across feature some key ingredient with a base of potato, to give that cream textured finish: for example, green cabbage or kale for the famous Caldo Verde, and carrot for Sopa de Cenoura. This Sopa de Cenoura recipe is from Maria, a lady who joined my sister’s household last year to help look after the most-recently-arrived cherub. Maria told me the ingredients in Portuguese, so I hope I managed to catch everything!


5 carrots
1 courgette
1 potato
3 onions
3 cloves garlic
Some olive oil

1. Simply prepare and chop all the vegetables roughly, and boil them in water until tender. (Update: after a few tries, I've decided that best results are obtained by boiling in chicken stock, the salted variety or with salt added.)
2. Add a few good glugs of olive oil and boil for another 5 minutes.
3. Blend with a hand blender.
4. Season to taste.


That’s it. I realized, after making this at the weekend, that the quality of vegetables in the Algarve is pretty outstanding too – my supermarket vegetables couldn’t compete with the flavour that was coaxed out of the Portuguese ones. If your source of vegetables is like mine, I’d recommend adding a little bit of a stock cube or some bouillon powder at step 1. (I’d be interested to hear of the results if any of you tries this recipe with quality organic vegetables, sans bouillon.)

Serve with some toasted sourdough bread. For a true Algarvio experience, follow up with grilled fish, then a Bolo de Iogurte (yoghurt cake) with coffee.

To all our Portuguese friends and friends of Portugal out there, I'd love to have some recommendations of your favourite dishes to try on my next trip!

Love

Truffle

The Perfect Roast

I mentioned in my last post that Cinnamon had inspired me to try my hand at some Thanksgiving dinner classics. Having never so much as roasted a chicken before, and since there are only two of us at home, I wasn’t about to go the whole hog (or, to be precise, the whole turkey).

And so, thanks to a suggestion from Cinnamon, we made a small roast chicken on Sunday night. I also made gravy and stuffing to go with it, these being my favourite parts of a roast meal. To this we added some French pommes rissolées (courtesy of my husband) and steamed mange tout. The pumpkin pie I’d dreamed about didn’t make the cut in the end, because I figured that three new things I’d never cooked before were enough. An English treacle tart was purchased as a substitute.

Your eyes do not deceive you – I did admit above that I’d never roasted a simple chicken before. Roast anything had always sounded so complicated to me, having grown up with a cuisine that doesn’t use ovens. And I thought that my humble kitchen was way too small to attempt anything as ambitious as a festive dinner – all of that would be for when I had my dream kitchen.

But one of England’s heroes, Jamie Oliver, has made it so easy for restaurant-dependents like me. (Yes, Jamie’s stock is down in the market, but I still think he seems a great guy - he’s so positive and real.) Again on Cinnamon’s suggestion, I looked up his perfect roast chicken recipe and, putting aside all my excuses and fears of never-seen-it-done-before and kitchen-too-small, followed it. I was amazed at the result: the chicken was moist and flavoured perfectly with the bundle of herbs (sage, rosemary, bay and thyme) it had been stuffed with, and the gravy was bursting with the essence of the carrots, celery, onions and garlic from the roasting tin. With relatively few ingredients that you can pick up in any supermarket, I really did get a great roast chicken.

There’s a streak in me that often wants to have everything lined up before I can embark on something – I feel like x, y and z have to be in place before I can do a, b or c. But when is it ever enough? I couldn’t get a photo of the roast chicken to share with you, but here’s a photo of the humble kitchen with its 2 1/2 feet of prep space.

Maybe everything doesn’t have to be perfect before you can create something beautiful. That's what I learned from making a simple roast chicken.

Just in case you feel like attempting this before Christmas, you can find Jamie Oliver’s perfect roast chicken recipe (that's really what he calls it) here and the gravy recipe here. Here is the cranberry and chestnut stuffing recipe (although I’d recommend going easy on the cranberries; and pork and bramley sausages worked as a great substitute for the turkey sausage).

And experienced chicken roasters, please share with us your one best tip (like how to get the skin nice and crispy!).

Love

Truffle

Plane Food

Before I report on the wonders organised by Cinnamon for my visit, could I just take a moment to talk about airplane food? Seriously, here I am setting off on an exciting adventure – Carolinian barbeque, French crème bruléed by Le Chef and what not else – but before I can get to all of that, I have to be put through a trial. Panicky taxi driver to Victoria station, being asked for extra ID in the check-in queue (“purely routine”, she assured me twice – that’s what made it so suspicious…), and a Cantonese wayang diva at the check-in desk. When the meal service started, having laughed and cried at this comic strip that describes all too well the dining options on Transatlantic flights, I expected “beef or pasta” to look not very different from each other. However, I was surprised.

The last time I flew this airline, the pasta was overcooked and limp, drowned in a watery tomato sauce, and served alongside sugar-high inducing processed carbohydrates. This time, though, the pasta looked attractively liked it had been cooked in an oven, and the beef was juicy (and also free of fat and those weird tendony things that you normally bite into). Both dishes even came with – gasp – a salad! So, things looked like they’d improved. Until I took a bite into the carrot. I should’ve known when my husband said he was putting the salad aside for it to defrost…

So, the veggies didn’t pass my standards. But if you’ve read about my vegetable addiction before, you might suspect that I’d have come prepared. Last night, instead of going to bed early to recover from my cold, I spent a fair bit of time sautéing carrots, courgettes, asparagus and peppers, all in a little bit of olive oil. Together with some brown bread and a fillet of soy sauce salmon from Dr Oz’s book, I’m pretty much covered for this flight. Yes, I’m a bit sleep deprived from all the prep last night, but eating this way has its advantages. First, I’m not feeling overwhelmed by salt in an environment that’s pretty dehydrating as it is - I read recently that airlines add a lot of salt to the food, because taste buds don’t function so well at high altitudes, and they want passengers to think the food tastes good (although you wouldn’t have thought that was an objective airlines had in mind...). Secondly, I don’t have to wait the hours it usually takes the meal service to start. And finally, I feel like, with the prelude of all these veggies, I can enjoy that delicious Southern barbeque and crème brulee with that little bit less guilt!

Can’t wait, Cinnamon!

Love

Truffle

London boleh!

I’m trying out a modern-day media technique of showing you a photo of a pretty face (in food terms) to get you to read this post. It’s a dessert I had in Salamanca – a chocolate brownie with Incan gold (the head chef was from Peru)!

So back to my post. As you know, my most recent travels on the Continent were in Spain, where we were attending a family wedding. Now, I love many things about Spanish food (see here for evidence), but I also can’t deny that part of me that needs more than just meat for sustenance. And the Spanish don’t seem to have a very close relationship with vegetables.

This was part of the reason for my frustration during that week of travelling – everywhere we went, I had to make special requests for veggies. Often, our requests were greeted with looks that combined “Why would you want that…?” with “That’s not the way we do things here” and “I can see you two are going to be trouble…”. But I had to stick to my guns and not be afraid of looking like a weirdo as I persisted against the bureaucracy. It’s quite surprising, really, because I’ve always felt that Spain was the best country in Europe for customer service. (My husband explains the reason for this: “Spanish people, darling. They just start shouting.”)

And so, after a week of having to fight to get my greens, we flew back to London and ended up at our favourite restaurant on our first evening back. As we were seated at our usual table, I got a real craving for some fresh vegetables. You see, I’ve been reading this book on healthy eating (more on that later) that suggests asking for fresh cut vegetables instead of the bread they give you before the meal. The principle behind the eating plan is that your body will get to its ideal playing weight if you don’t get in its way with fake, processed and unhealthy stuff that upsets your body’s chemical/hormonal balance. A part of the programme is to eat lots of fresh veggies, which trains your body to want more (in the way eating lots of sugar sets it up to want more sugar) – hence my craving.

It is surprising how difficult it is to get the simplest thing on Earth that is in any restaurant kitchen. The restaurant’s duty manager looked more and more panicked as I explained that I would like some plain, cut vegetables please. Gamely, he went to the kitchen (in case Gordon Ramsay hasn’t done enough PR for his profession, I should just mention that head chefs and cuddly bunny rabbits have very little in common…). He came back and offered me a carrot soup that was on the menu. I jumped on the offer of carrots and asked if I could have just the carrots cut up. This time when he went back to the kitchen, I suspect he got thrown out.

I thought it just wasn’t going to happen, when he came back with a large oval bowl full of fresh lettuce, carrot batons, cucumber and radish. I was delighted, but he was still looking a bit sober. I realised why when he explained that the vegetables weren’t from his restaurant, but from the Lebanese place nearby.

I was impressed. People living in London often complain that things are slow here, you can’t get what you want, that service isn’t as good as in other parts of the world. However, I thought, where I had heard ‘no, no, no’ all week, I was finally back in a place where you could sometimes hear a ‘yes’. I appreciated how intelligently he had solved the problem, and I thought to myself that London could indeed do it (in Malay, London boleh!).

And just before anyone inclined to that reflex pulls out the Anglo-Saxon card from their Uno pack, I should point out that the duty manager in question was French. When I later explained to him my veggie-deprivation of the past week, he said he understood where I was coming from. In France, he said, in Michelin-starred restaurants of a bygone era, they would serve fresh, cut vegetables before the meal. The vegetables were of such good quality that they could be served on their own. And they would taste excellent. Just imagine the sweetness of those carrots and the fresh perfume of those cucumbers and lettuce leaves.

Incidentally, Cinnamon, there’s another reason you should keep going with the organic delivery!

Love

Truffle