Salt is a miraculous ingredient, not merely for its ability to accentuate flavour but also for its magical preservative qualities. Often these meet in glorious harmony and create something truly delicious.
December has a smell all of its own. Cloves. Pine logs. Satsumas. Cracked walnut shells. Cinnamon. Brandy. Cold blushed cheeks. A warm, sweet perfume rendered stronger by bolted doors and closed windows and lengthy dawns and early nights. Darkness it seems, accentuates the scent of December.
But for all that warmth and spice, for me, it is the smell of preserved fish that does the best job of summoning the ghost of Christmases past.
Jannson’s Temptation: from a shoot by @Photolotte for Verve Magazine issue two out now, featuring my column on Swedish food
The quince is a neglected fruit. Tough skinned, rough fleshed and inedible when raw it has never been grown commercially in this country. And yet there is something tempting about its shape, its scent and its awkward nature.
It is the ice queen of the fruit world: curvaceous. Perfumed. Attractive. Alluring and aloof.
For the next two days Alex will be appearing at the BBC Good Food Show Scotland at the SECC in Glasgow – he’ll be demonstrating some culinary skills alongside Tim Kinnaird, Dhruv Baker, Lisa Faulkner and the rest of the Masterchef team.
“Join us in celebrating Scotland’s rich food heritage at the BBC Good Food Show Scotland. Packed with celebrity chefs (including Gordon Ramsay, James Martin, Tom Kitchin and Michael Caines), a tempting variety of local produce and plenty of entertainment including the arrival of MasterChef.
Don’t miss the Scotland Food and Drink Regional Village where you’ll find Scottish producers from the Highlands & Islands, to the South West and East to West, offering distinctive produce from these areas with a rich variety of fish, meat, game and fresh vegetables.”
If you’re nearby, pop along and say hello!
Click here for the Masterchef Live timetable of events
Sometimes the created memory is more powerful and endearing than the actual. Just over 12 months ago three recent friends were enjoying cool Indian beers in the thick air of a Rajasthani evening. It had been an intense few days culminating in the cooking of a banquet for a Maharajah.
Not bad for three amateur chefs whose escapades had been caught on camera and six months later would be relayed to over 8 million people via the medium of television.
Here is where things begin to get a little blurry around the edges. Perhaps it is because of the surreality of what came before – and after – but more likely it was the beer and the exhaustion. The true extent of the blanks that my little mind has filled in will never be known but that doesn’t matter. Even if what I remember may be partly imagined, what transpired as a result of it is real. Very real indeed.
It is with great excitement that I can reveal the details of the inaugural Cambridge Cookery School Supper Club.
On October 21st I’ll be cooking a specially designed menu, complete with wine matches on the theme ‘parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme’. Precise details are a little secret but the menu has been finalised as follows:
Rosemary shortbread, goats cheese, fig and honey
Scallops, parsley, mushroom and bacon
Pheasant, sage, beetroot and butternut squash
Chocolate and thyme
As well as the promise of an excellent dinner I will be on hand to answer any questions you may have, talk you through the courses as they’re being cooked and offer some neat tips and tricks along the way.
Places are strictly limited so be quick. To book your seat click here…
Breaking news: It’s here at last – The Masterchef pop-up restaurant has been finalised and is coming to London. From 5th-16th October we’ll be taking over the kitchens at Meza in the heart of Soho and cooking up the best dishes from the series. Dhruv will be behind the stove for the whole run and myself and Tim will join him for service 7th-9th and 14-16th. Special guest chefs – all Masterchef alumni – will be announced shortly. To book your table click here. Look forward to seeing you there!
The store cupboard is the heart of the kitchen. With sensibly stocked shelves the answer to the question ‘what shall we have for dinner?’ never requires too much thought or effort.
When time is short, energy levels are hovering around empty and the shops are closed or too far away, the store cupboard is the saviour. It is a humble and low maintenance part of the kitchen requiring little attention for maximum return. Read More…
I’m really pleased to announce that from October I will be teaching a series of classes at the Cambridge Cookery School which is moving into a brand new state of the art location next month (very close to the station so just 45 minutes from London…)
This is an exclusive chance to learn some great techniques and recipes including preparing wild food, going ‘beyond the fillet’ and ‘cheffing 101′. All classes will be hands on with very limited numbers so be sure to book early.
Exact dates are yet to be confirmed but you can register your interest on the Cambridge Cookery School’s website right here
I look forward to seeing you there.
Tomorrow the wonderful Observer Food Monthly publishes its list of the top 50 cookbooks of all time.
It has already made public numbers 50-11 which you can read right here, but is keeping tight-lipped on the top ten.
Chosen by a wide and varied panel of industry experts from food writers to chefs, the list thus far is gloriously diverse incorporating such recent delights as David Chang’s Momofuku Cookbook and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty (both present in my own collection and certainly deserved of a place in the list) to more obscure tomes from as far back as the 16th century.
As an unrepentant food nerd and shameless cookbook collector it got my brain a-thinking as to what I would put in my own list. It took some careful consideration and judicious culling (sorry, Grant Achatz) but after much deliberation here’s what I came up with. Please do share your thoughts below – I’d love to know if there are any glaring omissions… Read More…
The beetroot is a real chef’s ingredient. It lends itself to creativity more than any other vegetable thanks, in part, to its immense versatility.
You can prepare it in any one of countless ways: soups, salads, pickles, gels, spheres, jellies, crisps, soufflés, sorbets and ice creams to name but a few. What’s more the cosy, earthy sweet flavour of beetroot lends itself to a multitude of flavour combinations – some classic, some unusual.
Last year’s Masterchef champ, Mat Follas, left this year’s crop of hopefuls with a tough act to follow.
His restaurant, The Wild Garlic in Beaminster, Dorset, has only been open a year but has already had the critics positively effusing with praise and is consistently fully booked – no mean feat for any eatery let alone in these stringent economic times.
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Since leaving the world of the office behind two and a half years ago and starting off on the long road to self-employment as a writer, Radio 4 has been something of a near constant soundtrack to my days. It is minimal effort companionship that never fails to inform, educate or entertain – sometimes all three at once. I am proud to say I adore it.
So when a call came through from one of R4′s producers asking if they could record a show right here at our own house, it didn’t take me long to decide. Myself, Charlotte and the team from On Your Farm spent a delightful day exploring the culinary treats we had grown or foraged from the local hedgerows before heading back to the cottage to cook up a tasty summer lunch.
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Here it is. I do hope you like it. All blog entries, recipes and news – of which there is much to come – will now be posted right here so please update your bookmarks accordingly. There are some very exciting projects in the pipeline so watch this space…
In the mean time, feel free to browse away, I particularly recommend the new recipe section.
If there is a food more maligned than the doner kebab then it remains unknown to my palate.
Long the butt of jokes and the final resort of a hungry lush as he or she stumbles back home from the pub via a neon takeaway, the poor kebab as we know it in England is far removed from its original form. Read More…
It is amazing where slightly drunken conversations can lead. In this case the answer is Dorset. To Mat Follas’s Wild Garlic restaurant, to be more specific.
It is the British Barbecue Championships this weekend at Jody Sheckter’s Laverstoke Park Farm in Hampshire. I’ll be heading down on Sunday 4th July to watch how the professionals do it – Valentine Warner, Tom Parker Bowles and Jun Tanaka, amongst others will be trying to impress a judging panel including Matthew Fort, Raymond Blanc and food critic Charles Campion (who I’ve had the pleasure of cooking for. He liked it). Looking forward to seeing you there!
We had Radio 4 here yesterday to record an edition of ‘On Your Farm‘ which will be broadcast on Sunday August 1st. Early. Really early. If you value your sleep it will also be on the BBC iPlayer.
On June 24th I will be guest judge at the World Aeropress Coffee Championships at Caffe Culture, London Olympia. The competition kicks off at 3pm. Come and say hello and taste some great coffee as well.
I feel some caffeine induced insomnia coming on…
Phew. It’s all over.
Three days in a food fanatic’s fantasy world and my first real taste of doing shows with a proper live audience and everything. Just brilliant.
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I'm Alex Rushmer: writer, chef and Masterchef 2010 finalist. Welcome to my little corner of the Web. Why not get a cup of tea, snuggle down and make yourself at home?
