It’s been a quiet few weeks on the cooking front at my house. First there was the reappearance of Mr Badback who took a while to pack up and leave even with regular yoga sessions and more recently I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of entertaining Ms Sorethroat and her brood of Jnr Cough and Fever. My tastebuds can’t stand the sight of the little brats so they packed up and left along with whatever energy levels had remained after limping about town with a sore back.

So it would be right to say that it hasn’t been fun. Especially after I took advantage of feeling a little better the other day and went a little fresh produce crazy at Paddy’s Market in the hope that I’d be able to get into some serious cooking over the weekend. Alas the mushrooms slowly shrivelled in their brown paper bag and the organic chicken livers I had planned for a little ‘Becks & Posh‘ treatment mutated into something unslightly. Thank goodness I had some sense to wrap the chorizo tightly and placed it in the corner of the fridge - I might be able to work with those tasty looking morsels when the time comes.

The only thing I could eat were some sweet tasting imperial manadarins and lavosh bread, when all I wanted was some chicken and corn soup. Alas no Cantonese grandmother in sight so we had to order in some pho which hit the spot. I didn’t know what was worse; a sore throat and a permanent headache or an appetite but no tastebuds. Pure agony I tell you.

To entertain myelf I’ve been reading through some cookbooks and also emails from a few travelling friends and family. One such email was from my dear friends Saada and Wayne who are spending a month in Italy. Her last email went something like this, after I requested a list of what they had sampled thus far;

so far we have sampled….

- whole deep fried artichoke in Rome
- best ever pizza in Rome sold by weight (fresh porcini mushroom & rocket, pomodore & basil pesto infused with enough garlic and proscuitto and buffalo mozzarella)
- Giant tortellini rabbit ragu sauce
- Florentine traditional steak
- gelati, gelati, gelati in every flavour including cinnamon!!

ill tell you more about it later and show you the food pics too

lots of love
XX
Saada

Nice no? What’s nicer (well if I wasn’t eating my way around Italy) is the weekend before my dear friends left we had dinner at our place (Beetroot gnocchi in a truffle & sage butter sauce, Chicken with Four types of mushrooms and Apple Pie - if you care to know) and Saada brought her copy of Tessa Kiros’ new cookbook Apples for Jam, which she so kindly left with me so that I could spend a little while drooling over the gorgeous picture of simple food, read the sweet anecdotes about food, family, children, memories and fall in love with each chapter - all of which are colour coded.

After a while of interchanging between sleep, knitting, honey-lemon tea and Apples for Jam I started to feel a lot better. It didn’t feel like agony that everything I ate tasted like cardboard because my other senses were enjoying themselves with the colourful bounty with each turn of the page.

This afternoon I made the Lentil rice (featured on page 297 in chapter Brown) because it seemed like the most appropriate thing after a few days on a liquid diet. I didn’t have any green lentils (nor am I lucky enough to be on holidays in Le Puy en Velay to procure a small package of puy lentils), so I used some green split peas which created a nuttier texture to the rice. My favourite part of this recipe was preparing the aromatics; red onion in four tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil cooked until “golden and sticky looking” and followed by two cloves of ground garlic, ground cinnamon, sweet paprika and ground corriander - sweet and and earthy. The parsley was replace with dill and I took on board the author’s suggestion of serving the rice in a bowl with a dollop of yoghurt and fresh lemon juice. It was a good choice because the flavours weren’t overly powerful, but subtle enough to entice the tastebuds back from their vacation and also hearty enough to de-plonk myself from the couch to go for a brisk walk under the grey clouds - sans backpain and sorethroat.

In the food themed dictionary which sits in my brain the words moist, tart, indulgent and divine are accompanied by the photograph of chocolate & cherry brownies you see above.

For me, brownies are brownies only with the delicious marriage of nuts and fudgy chocolate, but this creation from Green & Blacks cookbook of sweet and savoury chocolate recipes called Unwrappedtakes the humble brownie and tarts it up with cherries. The book itself is a must for any chocolate lovers as there are 100 or so recipes which cover breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and all the in betweens. The chapter names make for a magical read with headings such as Melting, Licking the Bowl, Mystical, Wicked and Abracadabra, where the brownie recipe can be found. If you use their chocolate, it is an added bonus seeing as Green & Blacks were the first organic chocolate company to come out of Britain and have worked tirelessly with cocoa farmers for an equitable business and quality products.

But to the task at hand - chocolate & cherry brownies…

The original recipe calls for dried cherries, but I didn’t have any in the house on Saturday morning, so morello cherries were used instead. I must say that having used dried cherries for baked goods in the past, these worked much better for the kind of fudgy result you want in a brownie. Draining the cherries from their burgundy syrup helps, as does lowering the suggested amount of sugar. As you can see from the photograph above, this didn’t prevent the regulatory cracked top layer from appearing.

Chocolate & Cherry Brownies
From Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipes: Unwrapped - From the Cacao Pod to Muffins, Mousses and Moles

• 300 g unsalted butter
• 300 g dark chocolate (minimum 60%, broken into pieces)
• 5 large eggs
• 400 g granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 200g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 100 g of morello cherries