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We believe that the whole experience of reading about food and cooking should be as pleasurable and inspiring as eating it, and we want to help promote the people and places doing that best.
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Autumn Plenty
First, we have a lovely little soup book that we’ve been pestering the author about for some time. Fraser’s Fruit & Veg is a little greengrocer in Dundee – nothing special in that, you might think. However, when it opened its doors 4 years ago there wasn’t one greengrocer left in the city centre, not one. And as Dundee has something like the highest supermarket:citizen ratio in Scotland (*invented statistic alert*), the general view was that a dedicated greengrocer’s was no longer a viable business. Fraser didn’t buy it, and very soon he had turned his corner shop into a thriving community hub, selling a huge range of fruit & veg including produce grown specially for him by local farmers and gardeners. He began to sell weekly soup bags containing a recipe and all the ingredients for a batch of soup for 4 and, in his very charming, insouciant, just-knocked-this-together kind of a way, helped everyone from harried mums, OAPs and starving students to get a healthy, cheap home-cooked meal on the table. By definition, the soups are always seasonal (he bases each week’s recipe on whatever is best (and best value) in the shop that week) and always simple to make and easy to embellish – as Fraser says with a shrug, ‘it’s just soup’. Fraser’s Seasonal Soups is a collection of his favourite, best-selling recipes and a celebration of something we all feel in danger of losing, the thriving community shop. The book is beautifully illustrated by Jen Collins and is going to look a treat. Watch this space – Fraser’s Seasonal Soups will be hitting the shelves in November, and we’ll post some advance recipes up here over the next few weeks to whet your appetite.
We have also been spending time at Greenwich Market, which was established in 1737 making it the oldest market in the UK. It’s a wonderful place: get the river taxi from central London, then wander up past the Cutty Sark and the maritime museums and parks and into Greenwich itself. Between two pillars, hidden within a square of shops and restaurants, lies an old cobbled market filled with different traders every day. From motorbikes to antiques to kaleidoscopes to military memorabilia, the variety on sale is enormous. And that’s more than matched by the market’s food offer too. Again, the traders change every day but so far I’ve seen everything from Chinese hand-pulled noodles and Hungarian langos to Ethiopian samosas and an Iranian grill. The smells are incredible as you walk about. We’re researching a book that will pull together recipes from all those traders, pretty much an A-Z of the finest street food in London.
Oh, and one last thing: on Sunday 26 October you might want to check out Brixton Flavours. It’s a new one day food festival in Brixton featuring many of our very favourite restaurants – and Brixton-dweller & KP author Miss South is going to be in evidence also. Follow ’em on Twitter (@BrixtonFlavours) for updates and news.
We’ve some other pots on the hob as well, so as soon as they come to the boil we’ll let you know. In the meantime, happy cooking.
Rowan and Crab Apple Jelly from Cookie Cooks
Makes about 2 x 500ml jars of rowan & crab apple jelly
Wash the fruit well. Remove all the stalks from the rowan berries and put them in the pan with the quartered crab apples. Pour in enough water to come half way up the fruit, bring it to the boil, and then turn the heat down to a simmer and leave the fruit to cook, stirring from time to time. As it softens, use a large spoon to crush the fruit against the sides of the pan.
When everything is soft and mushy, turn off the heat and tip the lot into your draining material. A jelly bag makes this easy, but what I do is cover the top of a large pan with a muslin, and then tip the mush into it so the pan catches any drips. When all the mush is safely caught, suspend it over the pot and tie it up. We have tried this in many ways: hanging it on the back of a chair or tying it to the knife rack in the kitchen. Basically, you just need to hang it any place where you can leave a large bowl or pot beneath it to catch the juice as it drips through the bag. Leave it overnight.
In the morning, measure the juice in a measuring jug. You can squeeze the bag to get the very last remnants of juice out. This might cause your jelly to be cloudy, but as it’s generally used for cooking that doesn’t really matter. However, if you want your rowan jelly to be completely clear for a gift or just for perfection, don’t touch the bag. Now comes the maths. For every 500ml of juice you need 375g of sugar. When you’ve figured out your quantities, put the juice and sugar in your jam pan, heat it slowly until the sugar dissolves, and then bring it to a low rolling boil for 10 minutes. Test a teaspoonful on a cold saucer: if the surface of the jelly wrinkles when you push your finger on one end, it’s done. If it doesn’t wrinkle, boil it for a further 5 minutes and repeat the test. Leave the jam to cool for a couple of minutes, decant it into sterilised jars, and seal.
Buy Cookie Cooks by Melanie McCallum and Domenico del Priore here.
Recipes from Brixton Village official launch!
So, how are we celebrating? Things kick off on Thursday night with a launch party at Studio 73, who are hosting an exhibition of work by our illustrator Kaylene Alder. Beer from Brixton Brewery and Celia Lager, music from DJ Spin, it’s going to be fun. Then on Sunday we’re hitting the delights of Herne Hill Market, where there’ll be tasters, signings and a chance to chat to Miss South from 11am, then a talk by Miss South at Herne Hill Books at 2pm. So come and say hello!
The book will be widely available from Thursday night onwards, and you can always get a copy direct from us (free p&p in the UK) or a signed copy from the Brixton Blog shop. We’d love to hear what you think…