Tessa Kiros's Mozzarella in Carozza

My Dad has about five books by Tessa Kiros. Even by the standards of today’s food publishing, they’re beautiful: this one has a black velvet ribbon pagemarker. They are books for home cooks, and she relies heavily on her heritage – Greek and Finnish – and her home – Tuscany – for inspiration. She writes about the feelings of food, and its connection to place, as much as the food itself. Remind you of anyone? Yup, I can’t help feeling that Tessa would be Nigella, if Nige wasn’t (even) better looking, and better connected. 

Which isn’t to say this book is as good as How to Eat.  Like her other books, it’s OK, and definitely in the tradition of genuinely readable cookbooks. But the ‘must make’ percentage is low, and they’re mainly easy family meals. They’re totally in my wheelhouse, just not that tempting. Venezia: Food & Dreams contains lots of charming wiffle-waffle about the city (see also: the ‘Venetian Feast’ section of Nigella’s Feast for more) and lots of recipes which, truly, crop up in every book about Venice. Bigoli with anchovy sauce, risi e bisi, beef carpaccio, Bellinis. The monkfish lasagne sounded a right faff, as did the many pasta with seafood dishes. I’d make pasta e vongole every week, if there was an accessible, sustainable, reliable source of clams near me. But there isn’t, so I really wish it didn’t feature in EVERY vaguely Italianate recipe book.

Anyway, Tessa leaves me feeling melancholic. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be a big name slebby TV cook? But her glossy books, and lifestyle-pimping, make me think she does. And so I feel sad for her. Still, if Nigella ever goes full recluse, we’ve got her replacement good to go.

So, I made Mozzarella in Carozza (another extremely familiar recipe, which I once made, disastrously, as part of an ‘Italian Feast’ in Home Economics, to be served to teachers. I mainly remember that a small part of the ice cream maker fell off and got frozen into the ice cream, and we couldn’t find it). Surprisingly, Tessa doesn’t point out that this translates as ‘mozzarella in a carriage’. The ‘carriage’ is a deep fried white bread sandwich, made even more Elvisian by béchamel sauce, and an egg dip. My husband and I had one each and were utterly stuffed by them – both exhausted and exhilarated by the hundreds (thousands?) of extra calories ricocheting around our bedtime bodies. I recommend these only if you’ve just rotivated a garden by hand, built a wall, or birthed a baby. Actually, it would be a nice thing to make an invalid you were trying to build up. But this isn’t the 1800s, and I don’t know any invalids. Eat it with a salad, but don’t go thinking it will help.

Makes 2

For the béchamel:

2 tbsp butter
4 tbsp plain flour
125ml milk
nutmeg

1 large egg, beaten in a shallow bowl.
large handful of dried breadcrumbs (I make these by ‘blending’ a few slices of bread, then spreading them on a tray and sticking them in the oven at around 150 degrees for half an hour)

4 slices of whitebread
1 ball of mozzarella (cheap is better), sliced finely
a few shreds of ham (optional)

lots of mild olive oil, or veg oil

Make the béchamel – you know how, or you can look it up. I’m not your mum. Helpfully, you can do this well in advance, and use it cold.

Pour the oil in a large frying pan – I am too wussy to really deep fry on the hob, but the more you dare use the better, I’m sure.

Spread béchamel on all four slices of bread, right to the crustless corners.

Make two mozzarella and ham sandwiches, and pinch the edges closed.

Dunk them in the beaten egg, and then in the breadcrumbs – coating as thoroughly as you can.

Fry them in the oil, turning when golden brown. If you're lucky the face of a beautiful woman will appear in the crispy carapace (see pic below, right). Eat immediately, and then do a thousand star jumps, cackling.

Sri Owen’s Balinese Pork Satay

And now for something completely different. One of the great things about being all grown up and stuff, is that, without even really trying, you amass a proper selection of spices, bottles, and things, like tamarind paste. Suddenly, those Asian recipes, with their intimidatingly long list of ingredients require a trip to the cupboard, and not a bus ride to a nicer part of town that you can afford to live in, and a visit to Waitrose. The upside is that now I regularly cook delicious Indian food, and sometimes Chinese too. The downside is that I’ve become incredibly fussy about takeaways. On balance, it’s definitely more good than bad.

The Indonesian recipes in this book are long, and with much ingredient crossover with Indian and Thai food. I’m pleased to say the only things I had to buy for this pork satay was the meat (bog standard mystery mince, though, not tenderloin as Sri Owen specified) and the onion. Everything else was to hand. And it was flipping gorgeous.

I hadn’t really heard of Sri Owen, but the book convincingly sells her as a semi-doyenne of food writing in the UK. She writes interestingly about her experiences as a child (and eater) in pre-war Indonesia, as an ambitious young woman, and then young wife of an English academic, and then as an evangelist for Indonesian food in the UK and Italy from the 60s until today. And she presents an extensive selection of recipes for all occasions, including the famous rendangs and satays.

Much of it looked tricky – I don’t know where to get banana leaves, I don’t buy giant raw prawns on the grounds of sustainability, and the reliance on candlenuts (to be substituted with macademia nuts here) and peanuts ruled out many recipes in this nut-allergic house. But this pork satay jumped out at me on the grounds of mince! (frugal), tamarind! (got a massive pot), ginger! (so yum), and all kinds of ingredients  that I knew were going to be good together. Plus, pork doesn’t feature much in many Asian cuisines, so the change was tempting. Needless to say, pork doesn’t appear in much Indonesian food: this recipe is specifically Balinese. I am pitifully poorly travelled, so my food has to do it for me - how could I resist bringing the flavours of that luscious sounding island into a wet Wednesday evening in Streatham?

I deviated slightly from the recipe in terms of quantity and method (the only ingredient I didn’t have was galangal) – I didn’t use skewers because the mixture looked dangerously wet. I suppose next time (and there will be a next time) I should reduce the amount of spice paste, or up the meat. But this turned out seriously juicy, and I’m not sure I’d want to jeopardise that.

Serves two, generously, with rice. The amount of paste would definitely stretch to 500g, maybe even 750g of meat.

350 g minced pork
A small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ tsp chili powder (I don’t think more would hurt)
Knobble of ginger (you know how much you like)
1 lemongrass stalk
1 tsp coriander seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds
2 green cardamom pods
A shard of cassia bark or half a cinnamon stick
pinch of grated nutmeg
1 tsp of tamarind paste with 2tsp of water
1 tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp of low flavour oil (I used rapeseed)

Using a food processor, or stick blender, whizz all the ingredients other than the pork, into a paste.

Add the meat and stir to combine. Let the meat marinate in the fridge for as long as you’ve got.

About an hour before you want to cook, take the meat out of the fridge. If you’re going to use sticks you can either form meatballs and thread them on or mould the meat onto the sticks like proper satay (I bet this is trickier than it looks). Because my mixture looks a little wet and loose (I’m sorry) I decided not to risk them falling off the sticks – so they were just unthreaded meatballs.

Grill the meatballs for around 10 minutes, turning them, and brushing them with oil as necessary. Serve with rice, and an Asiany salad – I made a dressing of sesame oil, soy sauce, lime juice, and sugar. It wasn’t quite right, but it was in the ballpark.

Jose Pizarro - Seasonal Spanish Food

It’s not a good time for Spain at the moment. A quarter of the population are unemployed, continued membership of the Euro looks distinctly aspirational, and growth is a distant memory. Anyone who has been to Spain beyond the Islands and Costas will know what a fantastic and alluring country it is, and how dramatic the change for tourists has been, from a beach-only backwater to a country of distinct regions, cities, and cultures. My favourite memory comes from a village called Cazalla de la Sierra, in the scarily dry hills of Andalucia – while walking, we watched dozens of small black pigs fighting over the acorns we threw to them through a fence. It is the acorns that apparently give Jamon Iberico de Bellota, Spain’s finest ham, its beyond-Parma taste.

Despite recent troubles, Spanish food remains high on the foodie-consciousness. Restaurants like Brindisa and Moro established its cuisine in this country as distinct from the other great Mediterranean traditions – saffron, paprika, thyme, oranges, raisins…and lots and lots of lovely pork. Talking of Brindisa, this book is by its founding chef, Jose Pizarro, from the dry central Extramadura region in the heart of Spain. Tierra de Brindisa is one of my very favourite restaurants: if I have to choose somewhere to eat in Soho, I find myself going back there time after time (the fact you can book doesn’t hurt). So I couldn’t resist the recipe for one of my favourite dishes – Spinach with Raisins and Pine Nuts. This is how I did it for two:

Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Half a small onion
A small handful of pine nuts
Ditto of raisins
Two massive giant hands of baby spinach

Fry the finely diced onion in olive oil until golden but not too crispy.
Add in the nuts and raisins and fry til the nuts are also golden and the raisins swell up.
Right at the end throw in the spinach and toss thoroughly to coat, but barely barely wilt (I overdid it as you can see – at Brindisa the spinach is warm but not cooked). Season and eat as a tapa, or a side. It’s properly healthy but tastes indulgent and treaty.

We ate it, somewhat bizarrely, with Jose’s Pea and Mint soup. Both recipes came from the ‘Spring’ section of the book, and we ate them during a particularly dark and wet week in April. The soup had the twin advantages of tasting supremely springy, and including the comforting stodge of fried bread and Serrano Ham. A brilliant cupboard and freezer standby – even if you don’t have mint on your window sill.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
400g frozen peas
Chicken stock
Big sprig of mint
2 slices of nice white bread (I used Waitrose’s Rye and Wheat Quarter)
4 slices of Serrano ham – or Iberico de Bellota if you’re feeling ritzy

Fry the onion and garlic in the oil, until they are soft and translucent.
Add the peas, and stir to take the frost off, and soak up some flavour. Throw in some white wine or Noilly Prat if you have it.
Add enough stock to cover and let simmer for a few minutes. Pop the mint sprig in.
Meanwhile, heat some more oil in a frying pan, and when its hot, add the bread. Fry on both sides until golden. Then add the ham and let it frizzle up.
Blend the soup, and serve with the ham-topped bread.

I love this book – it’s a description of, and homage to, the traditional rural life of Jose’s parents, as well as a collection of very achievable dishes. It’s divided into seasons – great, except that the Summer section relies on amazing Mediterranean produce, which would be hard to find British grown in our summer. But still, I may be re-smuggling this one soon.