Summer is not over! Even though it’s nearly October, we still managed to sit out until 10pm and have a BBQ. You can knock all this up in less than an hour after work.

Photo by Hannah!

Kentish cobnuts – lovely, milky and sweet at this time of year
Padron peppers (still available in Waitrose, don’t think I’ve ever seen them in any other supermarkets) – cooked on a frying pan on the BBQ in olive oil. Be liberal with the Maldon salt.

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Butterflied leg of lamb, Moro’s muslim mediterranean marinade (see below)
Moro aubergine and tomato pilav
Moro chickepea salad
Mint and cucumber yoghurt

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English strawberries, raspberries, meringue and yoghurt (we didn’t have any cream!!)

Moro Muslim Mediterranean Marinade

In my opinion, this is one of the best things you can do with a butterflied leg of lamb. The cumin and coriander comes through beautifully.

Juice of one lemon
Handful of coriander, roughly chopped
Two large cloves of garlic, crushed to a paste with salt
Two teaspoons of cumin, freshly ground
Red onion, grated
Black pepper
Olive oil

Butterfly the lamb and give it a good slashing on both sides to encourage the marinade in. Combine all ingredients and rub over lamb. Marinade for as long as you’ve got (I only had an hour and it was fine, but I didn’t put it in the fridge so as to encourage it along a bit).

Chickpea salad – ideally you’d cook your own chick peas but I didn’t have time. I’ve found that I much prefer the East End tinned chickpeas as they are plumper than the standard supermarket brand ones.

I’ve already complained on this blog about the lack of decent food in Selfridges, Birmingham.

So it was with some trepidation we stepped across the threshold of Rossopomodoro, a new pizza-pasta chain with some pretentions of authenticity in Selfridges Food Hall.

There is some expectation it might be decent. They name check Slow Food (not my thing but recognisably not a bad thing), and DOP and DOC (not the rapper) on their website and import both their flour and their mineral water from Italy. This is not actually very cool because both flour and water are abundantly available in England (someone let them know), but at least they are trying I guess.

Service is impressively nonchalant/horizontal, which is certainly authentic when I remember our holiday in Rome, the one where we ate about as badly as we could in England. But actually, bring the drinks over yeah?

Starter was burrata. This mozzarella “pouch” filled with cream and mozzarella scraps (thanks Wikipedia) is lovely and creamy. But presumably they didn’t make it themselves and it was £7. It was served with crap tomatoes and stale bread and a couple of anchovies.

By now I was beginning to despair of the meal entirely.

But – hang on.

The pizzas were … actually extremely nice.

A light, soft dough with a bit of char on the crust from the wood-fired oven. A tomato sauce that was zingy and light and tomato-ey (idiom copyright John Lanchester). Decent mozzarella in the correct proportions. It was … REALLY QUITE GOOD INDEED. Certainly the best pizza I’ve had in the West Midlands.

In the end I was so impressed that I forgot the bad things and we skipped away happily into the sunset.

I got excited that I had invented a recipe, and a search for “smoked potato dauphinoise” is a GoogleWhack. However I cannot stake my claim as a genuine food inventor, as there are hits for “smoked dauphinoise“. Damn.

Anyway, smoked dauphinoise – it came to me as I considered a partner for a brace of roast grouse. We know that smoked potatoes are nice, as is smoked mash. And indeed smoked ice-cream is very nice too. So why not smoked dauphinoise?

Listen carefully for I will impart two useful secrets now. One is for the best potato dauphinoise recipe – courtesy of Simon Hopkinson’s “Week In, Week Out” and the second is for the smoking modification. Naturally I did this on the Bradley Smoker.

Smoked dauphinoise

300ml double cream
150ml semi-skimmed milk
600g potatoes (I used Desiree, Maris Piper also work great)
One clove of garlic, bashed
Salt to taste
Ground white pepper
Ground nutmeg
Small knob of butter

Simon Hopkinson has a very canny way with this dish which takes all the pain out of it. Instead of waiting for it to cook from raw in the oven and ending up with uncooked bits of potato you start it off on the hob.

Firstly, peel and slice your potatoes about £1 thickness. Wash the slices under a cold tap to remove some of the starch. Dry thoroughly in a tea towel (this is important so the cream mixture sticks to the potato surface rather than being repelled by the water).

Mix the other ingredients except for butter (salt, to taste) together and add sliced potatoes in a flat dish. Make sure that the potatoes are all separated and coated in some cream mixture. Allow to infuse for a bit.

For smoked potatoes:

Put the dish of cream and potatoes into the pre-heated Bradley smoker, and hot-smoke on maximum temperature over oak for about an hour. Allow to sit around for an hour or two for the smoke to penetrate completely. Quite honestly the mixture won’t taste great at this stage.

For both types:

Then, add the mixture to a large frying pan or casserole and put over the heat until the cream has thickened significantly and the potatoes are nearly tender. If your hot smoker is very hot then you may be able to skip or foreshorten this stage.

Add back to a buttered baking dish and cook for 30-40 minutes in an 180C oven until golden on top and nice and wobbly.

Smoked or unsmoked, this is very good!

A solo dinner at the bar at Ondine, Edinburgh. Highlights were a few Loch Ryan native oysters – small but packing a decent iodine punch, so much more interesting than pacific oysters. Good smoked salmon, dense texture, quite mildly smoked but with some nice flavours in the cure (juniper, I think) could have been even more thickly sliced but there was plenty to go with good bread and the horseradish cream. Grilled langoustines were great, super sweet and coming with chips tasting distinctly of beef dripping (a good thing). I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the dill myself, but can’t complain really. Cheese was a bit dull. By no means cheap, at least you can see that money has been spent on sourcing excellent ingredients. Overall a really enjoyable meal made even more fun by getting chatting to an American couple who’s favourite TV show is also “The Wire”.