Ribs!

There are times you want delicate flavours, and there are times you want big flavours. And Saturday night, to my mind, is a big flavour night. There is a fashion right now for beef short ribs, and it's been something I wanted to try. I once had a slightly unfortunate night in Bodean's when I ordered beef ribs and they turned out to be like something from the Flintstones and not very easy to eat.

Beef short ribs though are a different story - and they are much more satisfying to eat than pork ribs, which seem like a lot of work for not much pay-off. Beef ribs need long, slow cooking and there is something about barbeque flavours which seem to be perfect. The US tradition of long, gentle barbeque that is, not the English tradition of hot searing which leaves the outside burnt and the inside raw.

Jamie Oliver's America book provided the solution although his recipe called for beef ribs in a piece but it worked beautifully with cut ones. I hadn't seen beef ribs before (I've had a sheltered life) so wasn't sure what to expect, but they were magnificent, with huge hunks of beef attached.

Cooking them took 7 hours, although the actual involvement I had to have took about 15 minutes, which is the kind of cooking I can get on board with.

Start by brushing the ribs all over with American mustard - I used French's.

Then, make a rub: for 1.2kg of ribs I used 1.5 tbsp sweet smoked Paprika, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, a generous grind of black better and 1.5 tbsp of corn oil. You could also add some chilli powder but I don't really like hot hot so left it out and can't believe it was any the worse for it. The mix was rubbed all over the meat, including the bone side. Put them bone side down into a roasting tin. And that, is it. Into an oven at 130 for 5 hours.

Stage 2 - just before the 5 hours are up, mix 1.5 tbsp demerara with 1.5 tbsp honey, a knob of butter, a splash of water and 1/2 a beef stock cube. (Annoyingly, Mr Glutton had made some beautiful beef stock in the week and I couldn't find it otherwise I would have used that instead). Heat until all is mixed. Take the ribs out of the oven and set aside.

Roll out some heavy duty foil and pour on (carefully!) the marinade. Lay on the ribs meat side down and wrap the foil over them to make a little parcel. Wrap in an additional piece of foil, then put back into the oven for 1.hr 15 mins.

When that time is up, drain of any fat/liquid in the pan, unwrap the ribs and put them back in the pan unwrapped, meat side up. Turn the heat up to to 140 and cook for another 50 mins.

Take out of the oven and rest on a board for about 15 mins.

I made some coleslaw with white cabbage, red onion, granny smith apple and carrot - dressed with mayonnaise and wholegrain mustard.

So, it's not everyday that I boast (no, honestly) but I have to say, these rocked. Dark, thick crust of sweet, chewy meat, soft and pink underneath. Perfect with the cool, crispy, fresh slaw. We're already planning when we can make them again but it does take some planning as it isn't everyday that I'm in house for 7 hours tbh. I think it would be better in a piece, but sure the butcher won't mind and, next time I also think I'll make a double quantity so I can shred the meat and make po'boy sandwiches the next day, with loads of pickles and a good slather of mustard. Right, must make some brekkie as I am now starving.

Lots of love, GG.

Eat to live, live to eat

It's all been a bit quiet on the GluttonGirl front of late, I know you've missed me. I started a new job in January which seems to combine long hours with a long commute, a combination which brings me much joy, so cooking and eating has been about speed, ease and what I can get at Asda, as opposed to sourcing ingredients lovingly.

The last few months have been about, for the first time in many years, eating for fuel, eating to live, getting something on the table which is quite nice and tasty and not the same thing as we ate last week. And when you shop in small inner city supermarkets, rather than nice ones with lots of choice, or independents, or the market, you become reliant on chicken thighs, sausages and pork chops. All of which I love but after a few months aren't really setting the culinary world on fire. So I've kept quiet of late, but times, they are a changing.

I've missed cooking for sheer pleasure, I've missed browing cookbooks (and lord knows I've no shortage of them), I've missed hunting out things I haven't eaten before, I've missed going to the butcher, the greengrocer, the Spanish deli, the Mexican supplier. I'm luckier than most people - GluttonBoy manages a super-nice deli in Clapham (Macfarlanes in Abbeville Road, if you happen to be passing) so I've got easy access to some good meat, cheese and deli. I particularly recommend the chorizo.

So, with Spring and all the good eating it brings now here, I can't wait to get started. I've ordered a couple of new cookbooks - Scandilicious and Claudia Roden's new Spanish book - to get through.

And I'm starting tonight - pork belly roasted on a bed of potatoes. Imagine how sticky and porky those potatoes will be from being roasted underneath some fatty pork. And if there are any leftovers, they're going in a crusty roll for my lunch tomorrow, smeared with some meaty pan juices. That's some good eating.

Counting your life in cake spoons

GluttonBoy are currently enraptured with a programme on the Food Network, called Ace of Cakes. For those with better things to do than scroll up and down the outer reaches of the EPG, Ace of Cakes follows the fortunes of an 'edgy' bakery in Baltimore, called Charm City Cakes. Their USP, if you like, is creating cakes that are big, look like something amazing or are wacky. They achieve this with a lot of fondant and, often, making cakes that have no edible cake in them whatsoever. It's not what I'd spend £1,ooo on, personally, but what strikes me as interesting is that in the US people seem to mark more occasions than birthdays with a cake. All kinds of parties, gatherings and celebrations call for a baked creation and that is something that, as a greedy person, I applaud.

Like many work places at the moment, we're keen on baking and so keen to find any excuses for a cake (and to stop work for a moment to shove it down our faces to be honest). This week saw the departure of a my dearest work colleague, who is emigrating to Australia. She has been my work bezzie for many years, despite taking time off to shove out two strapping infants, so while this was clearly an occasion for her to celebrate, it was making the rest of us feel very sad face.

Clearly though, cake is a good thing, so I decided to whip up a pavlova (Australian, see?) and complement it with some scones bought from the local Tesco. Naturally, as I was doing it quickly after work, I didn't have enough sugar so made it half and half caster and dark brown muscovado, then lavishly covered the fractures (and there were many, I dropped it) with softly whipped cream and some dark, sweet strawberries. I had thought about using passion fruit to carry through the tropical theme but surprisingly Tesco Metro had run out.

While the pav didnt make me feel less sad face, it was delicious. The muscovado added a little whisper of burnt sugariness which worked well with the sweetness of the cream and the fruit. A friend suggested using banana rather than strawbs (in which case I'd add them underneath the cream) and drizzling the cream with caramel, which I think is inspired. Caramel out of a tin (Carnation) for example, or dulce de leche if you want to be fancy, would be fine, but a slightly burnt-tasting butterscotch, made with salted butter, would be good too. Anyway, if you want to make the pav, here's the recipe:

Preheat oven to 170C

Put a sheet of greaseproof paper onto a baking sheet

Whip four egg whites until stiff

Whisk in 250g caster sugar or a combination of caster and dark muscovado until stiff peaks

Fold in 1tsp wine vinegar and 2tsp cornflour

Shape into approx 20cm round and put in oven, turn it down asap to 140C.

Turn oven off after 1hr, 15 mins and leave in oven to get cool

Enjoy - will help mend a broken heart if much loved colleagues are leaving the country...

Lots of love

GG

Christmas in October

As I've mentioned before, I work in PR and years ago worked in the fashion/lifestyle sector. Due to the vagaries of publication lead-times, Christmas articles (gift guides, fashion) are put together in July/August in magazines. Consequently, I start thinking about Christmas some time in June.

Now, as befits someone whose husband suggests should have an epitaph of 'she bit off more than she could chew', I like to do things myself. I have never hosted Christmas at my house, due to family being spread far and wide, but that is probably no bad thing as I suspect I would be run ragged making a wide variety of breakfasts, nibbles, drinks, sides, main course choices, desserts, afternoon tea nibbles and accompaniments. Both gluttonboy and I think that, while we love Christmas day food, the best day of all is Boxing Day buffet. And by buffet, I mean not only the formal meal that is placed on the table at a set time, but also the general fridge grazing that occurs - every time you walk past the fridge (and for some reason that is OFTEN) you hack of a slab of meat, garnish it with some kind of pickle and shove it in your craw, chased with a slab of yule log and a handful of preztels and washed down with a Snowball, whatever the time of day.

Of course I always make a pudding and a cake. The latter has to be made with peak-style royal icing and my late mother in law's decorations, which have, to be frank seen better days. I will leave the cake saga for another day but suffice it to say, things aren't always what they seem.

I also love making pickles and chutneys and make a variety to eat/take to family/give as gifts. This means that from October onwards the flat has the taint of boiled vinegar. This year I have also made a plumbrillo for the first time, which I'm itching to try with some tangy British cheeses on the best day of the year.

Currently, the pineapple chutney is simmering away and I'm loving the thought of this with some thickly cut ham on a crusty roll (and the Christmas holidays, with the shops mostly shut, is a time when part-baked breads stashed in the freezer really come into their own).

I've also got the Christmas cake fruit soaking in cream sherry. The recipe calls for Pedro Ximenez but tbh, an Pedro Ximenez that doesn't end up in my glass is a waste, so cream sherry it is. I plan to also use the sherry in my mincemeat and christmas pudding, thereby creating a little bit of a theme this year.

On the pressie make is is whisky and caramel sauce, a meat rub and possibly some Turkish Delight vodka. Now I love making alcohols but again that is story for another day. It is at this time of year that I am most grateful for having: a garage, a spare fridge (in the garage) and a freezer (in the garage). And also grateful for being greedy, and having greedy friends and family - how boring would Christmas be if it was just about pressies and not about stuffing yourself silly wiht the ones you love.

Gluttongirl's Pineapple Chutney:

2 pineapples, peeled, cored and cut into chunks

2 large tart eating apples, peeled, cored, finely chopped

2 red onions, peeled and chopped

300g sugar (I used a mix of ordinary granulated and dark muscovado as that was all I had in the cupboard, but in retrospect, I like the idea of a tropical treacliness of the muscovado with the pineapple)

2 tsps turmeric

2 tsp mustard seeds

2/3 star anise

2 cinnamon stick (1 tsp ground cinnamon if that's all you have)

2ooml cider vinegar

Shove everything in a large pan, bring to the boil and simmer vigorously (not boil so much) until a thick, gloopy, gorgeous mess. Turn off the heat for a moment, and you should be able to draw a spoon across the pan without it immediately filling with vinegar.

Jar quantity is a bit variable, but makes about 1kg - might be less. I tend to prefer using smaller jars as I think no-one uses a massive jar that quickly and it'll spoil. Also, I love finding a jar of a favourite vintage at the back of the cupboard. It's a pretty yellow colour so makes a nice gift and ask you can imagine, it goes well with ham.

Enjoy!

GGxx

Food and family

So some people see food and fuel. And I feel sorry for them. In our (Jewish, of course) family, we ate to celebrate, we ate to commiserate. We provided food because it's hospitable. If there's one thing all the women in my family have in common, it's that we feel we've let people down if they leave our house without wanting their stomach pumped.

So I recently got back in touch with an estranged branch of my family- a half-sister, three nieces, a nephew and a great-nephew. It's all been a bit weird but really positive and has made me very happy. So one on my new nieces held a bbq and invited us - my sister and her partner would be there, my niece (obvs) who I've met before and her partner (who I haven't), his parents and various other friends, as well as a niece I hadn't met before. It's fair to say I was pretty nervous about it really so I did what I always do - bake something to take (peanut butter brownies). And off we trooped to deepest Essex.

And you know what, it was great. And I have genuinely never seen so much food at a barbeque. Delicious sausages from a local butcher in Suffolk, ribs, burgers and really tasty jerk chicken. I am not a huge fan of hot food but niece's partner had taken his mum's advice and made them both subtle and plentiful There were platters upon platters. His mum had also made Jamaican dumplings, which I can only describe as a slightly sweet dough, fried. I ate about 20 of them and eventually gluttonboy had to stage an intervention to stop me eating the whole tray.

So what's the point of this? It's that people share values and it is one of life's pleasures to share time with people whose values you share, even if you don't have much in common apart form that. And the pleasure of sharing good food with nice people you enjoy being with and getting to know is surely one of the nicest pleasures of all.

GG

Hunkering in a Bunker

Unless you're on the sort of holiday where you don't even read four-day-old copies of the Daily Mail, you will have noticed that many places in London were, last week, under seige from 12 year olds equipped with a PAYG blackberry and their older sister's scarf wrapped around their head, intent on robbing a pair of Nikes from Footlocker.

I live in Peckham, which is very much the South-East London badlands at the best of times and last week we were even more front line than usual, which resulted in the Tesco Express next door being boarded up for a week, plus the one a 5 minute walk away. My local big supermarket was also closed for a time, and the main street through Peckham was also closed to both traffic and people on foot. Which, all in all, has caused a fair bit of inconvenience, shopping wise.

What has this got to do with food? Well more than you'd think. As we have the little Tescos so close by and only a small fridge, we only shop as and when we need it. We don't have a freezer and aren't eating pasta/rice so have fewer store cupboard options. So when the shops locally are shut and the only ones open are the corner shop, what do you eat?

Post-riot, I had long-life madeleines for breakfast. GluttonBoy had a Mars muffin. For lunch I had a pot noodle and a packet of crisps. How quickly the norms of civilisation break down, right?

Which brings me to the main point. If there's one part of cooking that gives me endless amounts of satisfaction, it's preserving. A row of jars, neatly labelled and ready to be distributed while wearing a floral pinny and a self-satisfied smile, fills me with warmth and, have to be honest, some smugness.

This is a peak time of year for the jammy jammer. I particularly love preserving fruits you can't find in the shops. Damsons are a particular favourite and find themselves in jam, chutney and also some kind of white spirit, usually voddy or gin. Tbh, after the last chutney batch which took me HOURS to take the fricking stones out, I now usually sling them in a kilner with some sugar and gin and hope for the best.

I also love greengages with a passion and my nice local greengrocer in Herne Hill is overrun with them. Six jars of slightly runny jam are now ready for eating. Of course strawberry is the classic, but unless you have access to a PYO it can be a bit expensive. But the pleasure of serving homemade jam with homemade scones is pretty priceless. We bought a flat last year, largely for two reasons - it had a garage and there's an apple tree in the communal garden. Apples have ripened early this year and each neighbour recieved a jar of spiced apple chutney as a little treat. The look on their faces was worth the lingering smell of boiling vinegar.

Now I'm not saying that a shelf-ful of chutneys will keep us in rations if we need to pull up the drawbridge, but preserving appeals to a deep sense of self-preservation which, in these times of instant gratification, can help us all feel a bit more grounded and rooted.

GG

Village People

Now there is nothing that GluttonBoy and I like more than a bit of fine dining - a starched tablecloth, a highly trained and synchronised front of house crew, the theatre of the presentation of the dishes at table. But regular readers will also know that we also love a bit of rough- Meatwagon burgers at the pub next door, mac n cheese in front of the telly, fish and chips at the beach.

In the UK it sometimes feel like you have to be in one camp or the other. One of the reasons we love reading Saveur magazine from the US is that it celebrates home cooking and dirty (in the nicest way) cooking as well as cheffy cooking and a fancy resto.

So GB and I haven't seen much of each other of late, and with a Sunday in front of us and weather a bit unpredictable, I persuaded him to accompany me to Brixton Village. Despite only being a hop, skip and jump away, we don't often get to Brixton but we'd both been hearing tons about Brixton Village online. We're always late to the party but in case you don't know, BV is what the old Granville Arcade (a rundown, 1930s covered arcade) has become. It is home, possibly most famously, to the Thai restaurant Kaosarn, reviewed glowingly by the Observer's Jay Rayner and, most excitingly to me (as I love ice cream more than almost anything else) a artisan gelateria called Lab G which purports to offer an amazing salt caramel variety (I should also say I love salt caramel more than almost anything else too).

From the entrance we found, it didn't look promising. Happily, we couldn't have been more wrong and spent the next hour with a look on our faces like we'd found the promised land. It's a mix of great food shops and mini cafes/restos... some not much more than a couple of enthusiastic owners and a bench or two. Honest does burgers and triple cooked chips, Cornercopia has a cafe on one side doing really seasonal modern Brit/Euro food from brekkie to early evening, Agile does pizza/calzone and there were a few coffee shops, a cake place, a sweetie shop, a bunch of Colombian grills and probably lots more that I can't remember. And of course Kaosarn.

I'll be honest, I've never been a huge fan of Thai. I don't really like spicy food and if there is one foodstuff I'd ban if I was in charge it would be coriander. But I'm quite bossy normally so let GB decide for once and I'm super-glad I did, because it was delicious. I had a chicken Pad Thai and it was incredibly light and fragrant. GB had lamb mossoman - the lamb was so tender you could cut it with a spoon, the sauce was sweet and light and full of flavour. Neither was especially hot and I am partcularly glad to report that the coriander was large and on top of the food so easy to pick off and discard. It's also family run and the ladies were hugely friendly and we can't wait to go back. I really want to try an Honest burger but really, if I'm going to eat a burger I'll go next door to Meatwagon so I think Kaosarn is the one for me at the Village. Not bad for a coriander hater.

So, ice cream, the point of the visit. They were out of salt caramel, which I don't mind as it means I'll HAVE to go back and so I went for panna cotta - happily one of my top-5 desserts. Creamy but not heavy in the way premium ice cream brands are, fresh, sweet, creamy. I wanted to wolf it down and in fact I did. There, I said it. I wolfed it down and I will be back for more without any question at all.

BV also has some great shops - vintage women's and menswear, interiors, young designers. It's a fantastic initiative which, while it has clearly brightened up a much unloved and rundown area, is so much more than a wishful-thinking initiative. And welcome much more than local hipsters, especially with children. Its not worth supporting just because it's a right on thing to do, to support local traders, but its worth supporting because they offer a unique proposition - good food, good places to eat and drink, nice things to buy, a fun place to do it, a buzz you want to enjoy.

With love

GG