‘And then I ate a big sandwich’ – A date with a Francesinha

There are few things in life that cannot be improved by the addition of a big sandwich. Having a bad day? Eat a big sandwich. So drunk that you had a bit of a ‘disco nap’ on a big sofa in the pub while accidentally revealing your knickers to the world? (NOT THAT I HAVE EVER DONE THIS OF COURSE) Alleviate your crippling embarrassment by eating a big sandwich. So hungover that it feels as though a hungry hungry hippo is rampaging around your skull and you never want to see daylight again? Hell yeah, you need a big sandwich. So convinced am I by this theory I’ve decided that, if I ever write an autobiography, I’m going to name it: ‘And then I ate a big sandwich’. It just fits.

So, when Mr. McMc’s Portuguese colleague invited us out for a francesinha a few weeks ago, I responded to her email so quickly that I think I gave my wrist whiplash. For the uninitiated, a francesinha comprises two pieces of toasted sandwich bread filled with three different kinds of meat – ham, linguica (cured sausage seasoned with garlic and smoked paprika) and thinly cut steak. This is smothered in melted cheese and a tomato-beer sauce, served with fries and washed down with lots of Super Bock. (Apparently francesinha means ‘little Frenchy’ in Portuguese, as it is adapted from the French croque monsieur. This explains its etymology in a bit more detail.)  It is immense, it is intense, and in Portugal it is the kind of meal you eat before you go out dancing all night. How could I say no?

I admit, before I tried one for myself, I was slightly worried it was going to be the kind of gut bomb that lies heavily on your stomach and sinks you into a state of epic lethargy. I spent my day prepping for the event in the way that a prize fighter trains for a bout – no carbs, lots of water, a gigantic salad for lunch and no snacks (if you don’t count the revolting strawberry fondant chocolate I misguidedly ate for elevenses). I even refused the offer of bread and olives when I arrived at the restaurant. This was a decidedly GO HARD OR GO HOME situation.

The Francesinha money shot

When my francesinha arrived, it didn’t look like much – just a cheese toastie swimming in sea of tomato sauce. Then I opened it for the money shot and saw the meat. SO MUCH MEAT. Put it this way – if one slice of bacon a day is enough to cause cancer, then eating this has probably shaved a good five years off my life. My favourite component was (perhaps unsurprisingly) the linguica sausage. Grilled to perfection, it snapped pleasingly to the bite, releasing huge bursts of smoky garlic flavour. I could happily have eaten a sandwich made with just that and nothing else. I wasn’t so keen on the steak – it was slightly overcooked (probably from being covered with the sauce) making it a bit tough for my liking. While this is a ‘sandwich’, it’s not exactly the kind of thing you can pick up with your hands. You end up sawing great hunks of the thing off with a knife and fork and eating them in delightfully messy, oozing bites – the rich fatty hit of the meat being offset by the sharpness of the tomato-beer sauce. And, in a fit of inspiration, I decided to be really dirty by sticking the accompanying fries in between the slices of bread for some full-on carb-on-meat-on-carb action.

A few tasty Super Bock’s to wash it all down with

Despite all my fears, once I’d eaten my francesinha, I immediately wanted another one. I also understood why Portuguese people delight in eating one before they go dancing – after one of these, it feels as though you could take on anything (and I imagine they work brilliantly as a booze sponge). As it was, I had to alleviate my cravings with lots of Super Bock, a few glugs of Portuguese dessert wine, and many, many pasteis de natas (small Portuguese custard tarts). But I’ll be back to take it on again at some point in the (near) future. After all, it’s a big sandwich. And life is always better when you know where the next big sandwich is coming from.

I ate my francesinha at Café Porto on Rodney Street, Liverpool. However, if you want one, you do need to call and request it in advance.

Turkey Meatball Curry

When do you do when you feel as though your life has descended into chaos? OK, so chaos might not be the best term for it, but in the past few weeks I’ve managed to bag myself an exciting new job, quit my old job, become very very very nervous, then very very very excited. While the stress levels are nowhere near those I experienced before my wedding (where I infamously was forced to run laps around the outside of my office a few days before the ceremony in a futile effort to calm the eff down) I do feel a bit like I’m on an emotional rollercoaster at the moment – I turn the corner and my mood dips into trepidation with a side order of anxiety about being up to the task and then rises again into total euphoria about what the future holds. I must say, it’s all getting a bit exhausting.

So, I do what I always do in times of stress. I make meatballs. I’ve spoken before about how meatballs make the perfect comfort food, and (with the possible exception of cake), I’ve yet to find any other bite-sized food stuff which makes me feel so zen. Perhaps that’s why this blog is full of the things. After all, they’re easy to make, even easier to eat and they’re (usually) a better form of stress relief than drinking a large bottle of red booze and kicking a lamppost.

This Turkey Meatball Curry isn’t exactly the kind of thing that you can just whip up after a hard day at work. It involves blending, rolling, resting and rather a lot of simmering. But the end results are totally worth it – warm from the whole cinnamon stick and cardamom pods used in the sauce, slightly spicy and utterly delicious. I made a gigantic pot of this and feasted on it for days – from wrapping up huge messy scoops of it inside hunks of flaky naan bread, or dished over a bowl of steaming white basmati rice with a pile of carrot salad on the side. While you can eat it right away, it tastes even better the day after when all the flavours have settled and mingled together.

TURKEY MEATBALL CURRY (Serves Four)

Curry recipe adapted from BBC Food.

For the meatballs

• 500g turkey mince
• 2 tbsp breadcrumbs
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp ground coriander
• 2 tsps ground cumin
• 1 tbsp garlic paste
• 1 small red chilli, finely chopped
• A small handful coriander leaves, chopped finely

For the curry 

• 1 large onion
• 6 garlic cloves , roughly chopped
• 50g ginger , roughly chopped
• 4 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• 2 black cardamom pods
• 2 green cardamom pods
• 5cm cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp chilli flakes
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp caster sugar
• 400g can chopped tomatoes
• 1 pint chicken stock
• A handful of fresh coriander, chopped finely, to garnish

Make It!

Make the turkey meatballs:

• Put the breadcrumbs in the bowl of a food processor, add two tablespoons of water and combine until the mixture turns sandy.  Add the rest of the meatball ingredients, season with salt and pepper, and pulse the food processor until the mixture looks chunky.
• Wet your hands, and fashion your meatballs. This mixture should easily make around 26 teaspoon-sized balls (hurr). If these are too many for you, freeze half to save for later. Allow the meatballs to rest for at least an hour, although the longer you leave them to rest, the better they’ll taste.

Make the curry sauce:

• Roughly chop the onion, transfer to your food processor, and add 3 tablespoons of water. Pulse the onions a few times until they form a chunky paste. (If you don’t own a food processor, coarsely grate the onion with a box grater into a bowl – there’s no need to add any water if you are doing this.) Tip the onions into a small bowl and place to one side.
• Put the chopped garlic and ginger into the same food processor and add 4 tablespoons of water. Blitz until smooth and spoon into another small bowl. (Alternatively, crush the garlic to a paste with the flat end of a knife and finely grate the ginger.)
• Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed pan over a medium heat. Combine the cumin and fennel seeds with the cinnamon and chilli flakes and add to the pan in one go. Swirl everything around for about 30 secs until the spices release a fragrant aroma.
• Add the onion paste.  It will splutter in the beginning, but fry until the water evaporates and the onions turn a lovely dark golden colour – this should take about 7-8 mins. Add the garlic and ginger paste and cook for another 2 minutes, stirring all the time.
• Stir in the garam masala, turmeric, and sugar and continue cooking for 20 seconds before tipping in the chopped tomatoes and the black and green cardamom pods. Continue cooking on a medium heat for about 10 minutes without a lid until the tomatoes reduce and darken.
• Reduce the heat to a low simmer and gently add the meatballs. Cover, and let simmer for 40-45 minutes, turning the meatballs every ten minutes or so. Sprinkle with chopped coriander and serve.

Butterscotch Cake

There’s been a serious lack of cake around here recently. Although, if I’m being perfectly honest, there’s been a serious lack of anything around here recently. Despite a New Year’s Resolution I made to myself to post here once a week, I’ve been suffering a serious bout of ‘cooking block’ recently (it’s a bit like writer’s block, only with more washing up at the end of it.) While I’ve attempted to alleviate this by baking cake-after-cake-after-cake, none of them have been right. A Blood Orange and Lemon cake which involved simmering the fruits whole before blending them into a pulp resulted in a concoction which was lip puckeringly bitter. (It ended up being dumped in the bin while myself and Mr. McMc attempted to whistle the last post.) A Red Wine and Chocolate cake was OK, but slightly too chalky and dry to share with the class, while the hastily snapped pictures I took of it made it look like a gigantic disintegrating doorstop covered in splooge.

Finally, in a last ditch attempt to create something anything which was vaguely dessert-based for Easter dinner, I hit upon the idea of a Butterscotch Cake comprising of an ethereally light vanilla sponge coated in a layer of thick butterscotch.  It was simple, it was delicious and it didn’t require me to grate, boil or pulp anything that could fly out of my mixer and hit me right between the eyes (you may laugh at this, but – real talk – the other day an uncrushed lump of muscovado sugar flew out of the bowl of my KitchenAid and whacked me right in the forehead. I would have found it hilarious if I hadn’t been so shocked.) It was perfect – an addictive slice of buttery, caramelised sweetness which might just be one of the best things to ever come out of my kitchen.

I’d suggest serving it for afternoon tea accompanied by genteel finger sandwiches and tea served out of china cups, but I found that it was best eaten messily with my fingers while watching episode after episode of Community in my pyjamas. And while I’m not entirely sure my blogging mojo has fully returned, it was certainly nice to welcome its brief return with a saucepan full of butterscotch.

BUTTERSCOTCH CAKE (Makes 8 generous slices and 16 slim ones)

For the sponge, I used a mixture of demerara and golden caster sugar which added a nice caramel note. If you don’t have any demerara sugar, just use 150g golden caster sugar. The butterscotch recipe is adapted from Smitten Kitchen (have you bought her recipe book yet? You really should you know.)

You will need:

For the cake

• 150g unsalted butter
• 75g demerara sugar
• 75g golden caster sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 150g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt

For the butterscotch sauce

• 125g unsalted butter
• 109g muscovado sugar
• 1118ml double cream
• 1/2 tsp sea salt, plus more to taste
• 1 1/2 tsps vanilla extract, plus more to taste

Make It!

1. Bake your cake: Heat your oven to Gas Mark 4/150°c. Grease a medium sized springform cake tin and line it with baking paper.
2. Beat the softened butter and sugars together until they look light and fluffy. (You can do this with a wooden spoon if you have super-strong arms, but you might prefer to use an electric mixer for this bit.) Add the eggs, milk and vanilla essence and whisk again. The mixture should be thick enough to drip off a spoon and leave a trail in the bowl.
3. Sift the dry ingredients together. (I always use a trick I learned from Delia for this which involves holding the sieve at chest height to ensure that the flour gets a good airing as it falls down into the bowl.) Add the flours to the wet ingredients and gently fold the mixture together until everything is just combined. You don’t want to do this too roughly as then the sponge will lose some of its light airiness.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared tin, and smooth out with a spatula. Bake for 25 – 30 minutes until golden and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the side while you get on with the important business of making the butterscotch sauce.
5. Make the butterscotch sauce: Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over a gentle heat. Add the sugar, double cream and salt and whisk together until well blended. Bring to a very gentle boil and cook for about five minutes, whisking occasionally.
6. Remove from heat and add one teaspoon of the vanilla extract, stirring to combine. Dip a spoon in the sauce and carefully taste the sauce to see if you want to add additional pinches or salt or splashes of vanilla. Tweak it to your taste, whisking well after each addition.  Leave the sauce to cool for a minute until it has thickened slightly.
7. Remove the cake from the tin and place on a (large) plate. Pour the butterscotch sauce generously over the cake until it is fully covered. If you have any sauce left over, I highly suggest eating it straight from the pan with a large spoon until you feel a bit sick.
8. Once the cake is cool and the butterscotch sauce has hardened, slice the cake and serve with coffee. Leftovers can be kept in an airtight tin for up to five days (but trust me, it probably won’t last that long.)

On Food Blogging & Perfection

Spilled Milk image taken from Seamark’s Flickr photostream and used under Creative Commons license

I’ve not had the best of weeks in the kitchen. On Monday, I attempted to make the Slow Cooker Black Bean Ragout from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, but accidentally ended up overcooking them, meaning that I was left with a gigantic pot filled with tasty bullets of failure. Then, to add insult to injury, I spent an hour making a cake which involved boiling and pureeing oranges (and giving Mr. McMc a headache through intensive use of the food processor and KitchenAid), then – at a delicate stage in the baking process – took my masterpiece out of the oven to check if it was done and promptly proceeded to drop it on the kitchen floor. Not only was I left with a flat disc of orange scented gelatinous ooze, but I was also left with a mountain of washing up. Sometimes a girl just can’t get a break.

To be honest, I’ve had a lot of these days in the kitchen – times where the scant cooking skill I have decides to fail me and I can’t cook a thing without all hell breaking loose. But when you blog about food, you hide all of that. You’re always striving for perfection – that perfect cake, that perfect picture, the perfectly written recipe that will draw readers in and get those all important page clicks. No one really sees all the work that goes on behind the scenes – all the burnt fingers, soggy pastry and scrambled curd. I’ve lost count of the amount of things I’ve made which have descended into inedible messes, or the various ‘kitchen experiments’ I’ve dabbled in which have resulted in me nearly blowing my cooker up and streaking my freshly painted walls with daubs of hot grease. But then again, who wants to read a blog post which says “I made this, it was shit and I was left with third degree burns. Look, here’s a instagrammed photo of it where it looks like a vintage dog turd!” Instead, you shove the broken crockery and burnt bits into an overflowing bin bag, throw a pretty tablecloth over the stained kitchen counter and put your game face on (hoping that – when you finally post your masterpiece – no one notices the chipped tiles next to your sink.)

It feels as though there are a million and one rules about food blogging nowadays – how often you need to post, the kind of lighting you need to use, and even what blog platform you should use. Stick the phrase ‘how to start a food blog’ into Twitter, and you’ll find all sorts of armchair experts telling you how to turn your hastily cooked (and often hastily written) creations into a money spinning blogging empire. It’s as though we’ve all convinced ourselves that following these arbitrary rules leads to perfection, and perfection leads to success. which is daft. It just saps all the joy out of the process. Firing up WordPress to write a post goes from something which is all a bit of fun to something which is an immense chore. You’re too busy trying to show that your life is all sunshine and sparkles and perfectly iced cupcakes rather than a huge morass of messy mundanities.

One of my favourite food bloggers is Joy the Baker. The reason that her blog works so well is that it’s beautiful, filled with delicious recipes (and gorgeous cat pictures – always a winner) and because it’s real. Joy makes an effort to show us that she’s human, and prone to making mistakes. One of my all time favourite posts of hers is this ‘10 Real-Talk Blog Tips,’ where she encourages wannabe blog superstars to not sweat the small stuff. “Do what you do, and keep doing it better and better,” she advises which is great advice for life as well as blogging.

So, lets not be afraid to show off our ragged edges, our imperfections, our loaves of bread which emerge from the oven looking like burnt housebricks. Sometimes it’s those culinary disasters which make the best blog posts – even if they’re accompanied by the least Pinterest friendly pictures possible. After all, nobody’s perfect.

A review of the Smitten Kitchen cookbook and a recipe for Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats

If you ever ask me to list my favourite food blogs, I will mention ‘Smitten Kitchen’ without even thinking about it. Written by the wonderful Deb Perelman, it is a lexicon of deliciousness – full of brilliant, innovative recipes that she throws together in her tiny New York apartment kitchen. My kitchen is also somewhat compact and bijou, so I’m frequently in awe of the amazing things she manages to create with such little workspace at her disposal.

There are so many things to love about Smitten Kitchen. Deb insists on using simple ingredients you can purchase easily in any supermarket (making her recipes accessible to us unfortunate schlubs who don’t have a Waitrose on our doorstep). Her recipes work (I’ve yet to make something from Smitten Kitchen that hasn’t resulted in utter deliciousness). There’s also the fact that she is the proud mother of what might very well be the cutest toddler ever (which is really saying something coming from someone who isn’t the biggest fan of children). Every time I absorb a new post from Deb via my Google Reader, it’s like hearing the voice of an old friend – a friend who frequently spends her spare time up to her armpits in bread dough.

I’d been trying to get my hands on the Smitten Kitchen cookbook for ages; I even contemplated buying a copy when I was in the USA recently. So, when I was offered a UK version (it has recipe ingredients given in grams rather than pesky cups) I jumped at the chance. And, I’m pleased to say, it’s an absolute gem – the kind of cookbook destined to be plastered in notes, picking up dogeared pages and mysterious stains from overuse.

The book is divided into nine sections; Breakfast, Salads, Sandwiches Tarts & Pizzas, Vegetarian main courses, Seafood Poultry & Meat main courses, ‘Sweet Things’, Cakes (my personal favourite), Puddings & Sweets and Party Snacks & Drinks. That’s over 100 recipes and they all look absolutely sublime. As someone currently trying to reduce their meat consumption, I particularly liked the section on vegetarian main courses. Deb is a former vegetarian and really knows how to make these recipes shine. Not once do you notice the absence of meat in any of the dishes and her Mushroom Bourguignon has already become a firm favourite in my house.

I’ve spent the last fortnight cooking my way through the Smitten Kitchen cookbook and have yet to find a dud recipe in there. The Avocado Tartine with Cucumber and Sesame Seeds has become a firm post-run snack and I found myself scoffing an entire tub of buttermilk-and-toasted-almond-laden Broccoli Slaw in one guilty gulp as soon as I made it. The Potato Frittata with Feta and Spring Onion makes a great weekend brunch (and will win over even the most ardent of egg haters), while the Flat Roasted Chicken with tiny Potatoes was the perfect thing to throw together after a long Monday in the office. And then there’s the Tomato-glazed Meatloaves with Mashed Potatoes – a Sunday lunch assembled in an hour after a post-football cleaning binge – which will be raved about in our house for a long, long time. If there’s one complaint I could make, it’s that you’ll find quite a few of the recipes online, in the Smitten Kitchen blog archives. However, this is a minor gripe, and considering there are oodles of amazing, well-tested and beautifully photographed recipes in there, who could blame Deb for choosing creations that taste good, look great and which she knows will work time and time again?

I’ve decided to showcase her Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats on Little Red Courgette as I made these for mine and Mr McMc’s offices and have never seen a sweet treat I’ve made be snapped up so quickly or receive so many rave reviews (indeed, I know one of Mr McMc’s colleagues is continually pressing F5 on this blog so he can get the recipe for these bad boys – Hiya Terry!) Best of all, these take a mere 20 minutes to make and you don’t even need to switch the oven on. Delicious, sweet-salty complex-tasting crispy treats in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Coronation Street? I told you the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook was something special.

The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook can be purchased from all good bookshops. I was fortunate enough to receive mine as a review copy from the publisher.

SALTED BROWN BUTTER CRISPY TREATS (Makes 16 5cm squares – more than enough to feed an office full of hungry people)

You will need:

• 115g unsalted butter, plus more for the pan
• ¼ teaspoon flaky sea salt
• 285g marshmallows (I used the small pink & white ones that you find in the baking aisle of most supermarkets)
• 170g puffed-rice cereal

Make It!

1. Butter (or coat) a 20cm square baking tin.
2. Brown the Butter: In a large pot, melt butter over a medium-low heat. It will melt, then foam, then turn clear golden, and finally turn brown and smell nutty. Stir frequently, scraping up any bits from the bottom as you do. Don’t take your eyes off the pot: you may be impatient for it to start browning, but the period between the time the butter begins to take on colour and point where it burns is often less than a minute.
3. Make the crispy treats: As soon as the butter takes on a nutty colour, turn the heat off, sprinkle salt over the butter and stir in the marshmallows. The residual heat from the melted butter should be enough to melt them, but if it isn’t, turn it back on over low heat until the marshmallows are smooth. Be careful not to cook the marshmallows, which will destroy their stretchy softness. You’re looking for just enough heat so that they melt and smooth out.
4. Remove the pot from the stove and stir in the cereal, folding it gently with the marshmallow mixture until the cereal is evenly coated. Quickly spread into a prepared pan. A good way to do this is to use a piece of waxed or parchment paper sprayed with oil – press it firmly and evenly into the edges and corners and smooth the top. Using a silicon spatula to do this works equally well.
5. Allow to cool, then cut into squares and get ready to make new friends.

Avocado, Bacon and Tomato Scramble

Like many people, I have a bit of a Sunday ritual. Wake up, immediately curse myself for drinking too much wine the night before (and for passing out on the sofa in front of Match of the Day), and then spend a good hour or so working myself to have the ‘energy’ (by which I mean ‘compulsion’) to go for a run. I’m training for my first half marathon at the moment, and I see every creaky Sunday morning five miler as yet another milestone on my way to becoming Bootle’s answer to Paula Radcliffe.

However, as anyone who has ever visited Bootle knows, it’s not the most scenic of places. I run down a stretch of tarmac known as the Dock Road, a rather grim looking dual carriageway lined with petrol stations, crumbling warehouses and perilous potholes. It also stinks. On good days, the air will be redolent with the smell of rotting grain (which smells curiously like dog food) with underlying notes of tyre fires. On bad days, it’s just tyre fires. When faced with such unfragrant conditions, a girl needs the thought of a good breakfast at the end of her exertions to keep her going.

This Avocado, Bacon and Tomato Scramble is the kind of  meal I would happily run marathons for. Made out a bunch of ingredients shoved away at the back of my fridge that were just on the verge of transforming from delicious ripeness to fetid mush, it’s full of brightness, salt and spice. Avocados and eggs work wonderfully together – the buttery soft sweetness of the avocado working wonderfully with the silken custardy wobble of barely set scrambled eggs. Add a handful of chopped tomatoes, a few crumbles of crispy bacon and a gigantic dash of hot sauce, and you’re done.

I’d advise you to make much more of this than you think you’ll need, or – at the very least – to stock up on the ingredients, as this is the kind of thing you’ll want to make again and again once you see how good (and how easy to make) it is. When served up with some granary toast and a mug of tea in front of the football, this is a weekend breakfast delight to savour.

AVOCADO, BACON AND TOMATO SCRAMBLE (Serves Two)

You will need:

• 4 medium sized eggs
• 4 rashers of good quality bacon
• The innards of a ripe, medium sized avocado, diced
• 6 cherry tomatoes, diced
• A dash of hot sauce (I used Frank’s)
• Salt and Pepper to season

Make It!

1. First, grill your bacon. If you don’t know how to grill bacon, then I’m afraid we’re through. I can’t really help you there. (Although one of these helps.) Once it’s crispy, chop it into fine pieces. Set to one side.
2. While your bacon is cooking, scramble some eggs. Crack them into a bowl, and add a dash of milk and plenty of salt and pepper. Heat a teaspoon of butter in a saucepan, and pour in the egg mixture. Once it has started to set at the sides of the saucepan, scramble the mixture with a fork. Keep scrambling until it has barely set, and has a custardy texture.
3. Add the avocado chunks, diced tomatoes and bits of bacon. Smother with Frank’s hot sauce and eat immediately (preferably accompanied by a buttered roll and a giant mug of tea.)

Christina vs. Food: A few things I ate in Chicago

The Chicago Skyline

OK, so there’s not much that’s worse than when a blogger apologises for not having posted for a few weeks due to the constraints of their ‘busy rock-and-roll-life’ (after all, who isn’t ridiculously busy nowadays?) But, as you may have guessed from the radio silence around here recently, things have been…well…a little hectic. A week of ridiculous deadlines was swiftly followed by a business trip to the USA, which saw me travelling between Chicago, Las Vegas and L.A. in the space of eight days. All great fun if you enjoy surviving on a diet of adrenalin, caffeine and french fries, and you ignore the jet lag, sleep deprivation and the incident where I called my Mum from Las Vegas and cried “I’M IN A PYRAMID, I HAVEN’T SLEPT PROPERLY IN FIVE DAYS AND EVERYTHING IS GOING WRONG” down the phone.

Las Vegas wowed me by charging $52.00 for three drinks in the Hard Rock Hotel and L.A. saw me commandeering a taxi to take me to the nearest branch of In-n-Out burger. But it was Chicago that really won my heart. Everything about it transfixed me, from the elevated trains running above the streets, rattling over my head when I went out for breakfast each morning, to the gigantic skyscrapers that scrape the landscape and make you feel like you’re walking through the pages of a Marvel comic. While I didn’t get to experience the place fully during my four day stay there, I did manage to shove some excellent meals down my ever hungry maw. These mostly came in the form of sandwiches. For if there is one thing I learned about Chicago during my time there, it’s that it is land of the exemplary sandwich.

Italian Beef sandwich at Max’s Chicago

A perfect example was this bad boy, an Italian Beef from the rather nondescript looking Max’s Chicago. While the decor left a bit to be desired, the food didn’t. A giant sub roll was stuffed full of thin, slightly fatty slices of beef, giardiniera – a mixture of pickled carrots, cauliflower and courgette and served ‘wet’, meaning that a thin beef gravy was spooned over the roll before it was served. All of those delicious meaty, briny  juices soaked into the sub roll, suffusing it with flavour as well as making it perilously difficult to eat in a ladylike manner. I have no idea if this is a particularly good example of the species; I just know that on a cold Sunday afternoon where I was tired, hungry and terrified of skidding on the huge piles of snow littering the pavements, it hit the spot.

Special mention should also go to Ada’s Famous Deli on Wabash, a small Jewish deli I frequently lunched at during my stay. Go for their giant Reuben sandwiches (a $12.00 lunchtime treat that could easily feed two people, but which I decided to eat by myself because I am a giant glutton) and stay for their amazing dill pickles, which are as thick as a baby’s arm. The limp beef rolls I buy from the sandwich shop next to my office will never look the same again.

Garrett’s Chicago Mix popcorn

And then there were the snacks. Numerous people told me that I couldn’t visit Chicago without trying a bag of Garrett’s ‘Chicago Mix’ – a mixture of caramel and cheese flavoured popcorn that sounds utterly disgusting, but tastes amazing. Made fresh in front of you, it’s the perfect conglomeration of salt and sweet – crisp, tangy and oddly addictive. Its neon orange dust also stains everything it lands on, which, in my case, was hotel pillows and duvet covers. I found myself eating gigantic handfuls of the stuff at 5am on a Monday morning, plagued by jetlag, watching awful news reports on CBS (“Are council employees watching Hula-Hooping strippers on YOUR tax dollars?”) I’m not entirely sure that it’s the kind of serving suggestion that the makers would suggest themselves, but it certainly gave me comfort when I needed it.

The Scotch Egg at The Gage

Honorable mention should also go to The Gage, an ‘upmarket tavern’ I visited on my last night in the city. I ate their restaurant week menu and, while certain elements of it disappointed, (such as a soup which tasted like a cup-a-soup with an egg plunked in it) I was pleasantly surprised by their meaty, punchy – if slightly overcooked – Scotch Egg, adored their amazing bread and butter and was utterly wowed by a White Chocolate Sponge. I’m not a white chocolate fan, but this cake was infused with a warm, spicy cardamom syrup that will haunt my dreams.

Sadly, work constraints meant that I didn’t get to see as much of Chicago as I would have liked to. Oh, I had well laid out plans of where I’d go and what I’d see, but by the time I’d finished work each day, I had just enough energy to consume a few cocktails and an easily accessible meal before passing out in my hotel bed in front of the TV. As I have discovered, the problem with work trips is that you actually have to work. However, I’m already planning my next trip back so I can explore more of this amazing city. Oh yes, and get my hands on more of that popcorn.

Lentil, Butternut Squash & Carrot Shepherd’s Pie

God bless lentils, the small nubbly saviours of my student years. Back when I lived in halls (which is longer now than I care to admit), I used to live off gigantic bags of red and green lentils that I’d buy from the local health food store for £1. They went in pretty much everything I cooked – curries, stews, and – on one notable occasion – into a sauce made out of half a jar of sweet-and-sour-flavoured ‘Chicken Tonight.’ (Pro tip: don’t ever do this. It was possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever made.) By the time I graduated, I never ever wanted to see a lentil again, let alone contemplate the idea of actually making something edible out of them.

However, now I am an adult with a job which provides me with enough income to stop living off 20p instant noodles and Strongbow, I have come to reappreciate these lovely, protein-rich little flying saucers. I’m trying to eat less carbohydrates at the moment, and puy lentils go with practically everything you have in your cupboards – from chicken thighs to rich tomato sauces. They’re the kind of thing that it’s always good to have on hand, particularly in these dog days of Winter where it feels as though the sun will never shine again.

While at first glance this Lentil, Butternut Squash and Carrot Shepherd’s Pie looks like something that you might find in a vegetarian cookbook from the 1970s, it’s actually a joy to both make and eat. Puy lentils are simmered with winter vegetables, oats, herbs and a good glug of wine until their innards turn creamy and pop in your mouth with a delightful hit of umami. The mixture is topped with a creamy roasted butternut squash and carrot mash which is velvet smooth from being combined with creme fraiche and a good dollop of butter. This is healthy comfort food at its finest, a meal which sticks to your ribs and hugs your insides. Lentils may be cheap, but they’re definitely not just for skint students.

LENTIL, BUTTERNUT SQUASH & CARROT SHEPHERD’S PIE (Makes 4 portions)

Adapted from The Kitchn

You will need:

For the butternut squash & carrot mash

• 1 large butternut squash, cut into chunks
• 4 medium carrots, peeled and chopped into chunks
• 4 tbsp creme fraiche
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• ½ tsp dried sage
• Salt & Pepper to season

For the filling

• 150g puy (green) lentils
• 50g porridge oats
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 punnet of chestnut mushrooms, sliced
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 medium carrot, diced into chunks
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 175ml vegetable stock
• A good glug of red wine
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons smoked paprika
• A large handful of chopped fresh parsley

Make It!

1. Preheat your oven to 400°C/Gas Mark 6. Drizzle the butternut squash chunks with oil, and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 45 minutes to 1 hour until soft to the touch. (make sure you don’t get distracted by Pointless and forget about them like I did.) Leave to cool, then peel. Boil your carrots with a pinch of salt for 10-15 minutes until they are soft and slightly mushy. Drain, and mash with the peeled butternut squash chunks, creme fraiche and butter. Add the sage, season with salt & pepper and taste. Once everything is to your liking, put the mash to one side until ready to use.
2. In a medium pot, combine the lentils, oats, bay leaf and a pinch of salt. Cover with cold water, bring to a boil and then simmer uncovered for 15-20 minutes or until lentils are soft (but not mushy!) Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to ensure that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the saucepan. Discard the bay leaf and drain the mixture into a sieve.
3. While the lentils and oats are cooking, warm the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and a pinch of salt and cook until soft. Add the onion, carrot, celery and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until everything begins to turn soft. Add the lentil and oat mixture, followed by the vegetable stock, wine, tomato paste, soy sauce, smoked paprika, and parsley. Taste and season if needed. Simmer the mixture for 5 minutes until it has thickened.
4. Evenly spread the lentil mixture into large baking dish. Spoon the butternut squash and carrot mash over the lentils, and smooth with a fork. Bake at 200°C/Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes, or until the filling is bubbling at the edges. Serve with green vegetables and a glass of red wine.

Skint Lunch Club: 81 Renshaw Street

Streaky Bacon, Cream Cheese & Spring Onion sandwich and a large bowl of Sweet Potato and Chickpea soup.

Hands up who’s skint. Well, that makes two of us. I looked at my bank account last week and let out a wail that could probably be heard across Merseyside. To add insult to injury, January looks to be the month where everything I own suddenly decides to break or run out. Eyeliner, jeans, PC hard drives, you name it. It’s like one long Monday where your bank manager has you on speed dial and you can’t afford to drown your sorrows in overpriced cocktails.

However, like the brave little soldier I am, I refuse to allow my straightened circumstances to stop me indulging in the odd lunch out every now and then. Thankfully, I’m lucky enough to work in an area of Liverpool where I’m spoilt for inexpensive lunch options, one of these being the recently opened 81 Renshaw Street.

81 Renshaw Street is an ‘arts cafe’, which opened with relatively little fanfare a few months ago. It’s the kind of unassuming little place you could easily walk past if you didn’t already know it was there. Like so many recent Liverpool openings, it’s decorated in ‘shabby chic’ (Christ I hate that term), so there are lots of old cabinets full of vintage crockery, rickety-looking tables, large squishy sofas and a gas fire that I’m sure my Nana June owned back in 1989. Where in other places this kind of ‘I’ve just accidentally wandered into a jumble sale’ style looks contrived, here it works – although this may just be because you can tell it’s there with no sense of irony whatsoever.

I had the soup and a sandwich, which consisted of a Streaky Bacon, Cream Cheese & Spring Onion sandwich and a large bowl of Sweet Potato and Chickpea soup. The sandwich itself was fairly utilitarian – two slices of crunchy streaky bacon and a large smear of spring-onion-studded cream cheese on a crunchy ciabatta roll – yet salty, creamy, crunchy and delicious. Plus, it wasn’t filled with any of the limp lettuce and watery tomato slices that can so easily ruin a perfectly good sarnie.

The real star of the show, though, was the Sweet Potato & Chickpea Soup. It’s always good when you see a simple dish done right, and this was as warm and welcoming as a bear hug. Hearty, slightly sweet and heady with toasty cumin, here was a soup that actually tasted of something, a delightful change from the bland fibrous mulch I’ve often had served up to me in other places. As a testament to how good it was, I overheard a woman at one of the other tables asking her waitress for the recipe, which she duly scribbled down. You don’t get that at Subway.

Flourless Clementine Cake

But woman cannot live on soup alone, so I decided to buy a slice of Flourless Clementine Cake for the road. Packed full of almonds and sour-sweet clementine peel, this was a squidgy slice of tasty complexity, and a cake that I will definitely be attempting to recreate in my kitchen sometime in the next few weeks. While I was there, I also had a sample of their Banana Bread in my mouth and didn’t instantly spit it out and cross myself. As regular readers will know, I deem bananas to be the devil’s own fruit, so the fact I managed to eat something containing them without wanting to wash my mouth out immediately with antiseptic is definite progress.

With its ramshackle charm, minimal web presence and really good homemade food, there’s a refreshing lack of pretence to 81 Renshaw Street. While its food is never going to win any awards for originality, it will win plaudits for being simple, tasty and full of heart. Plus, you can eat like a queen and get change from a tenner. And, in these times of economic hardship, you can’t really say fairer than that.

Butternut Squash Lasagne

Ah, January. The month where it seems everyone has succumbed to the siren calls of diets, detoxing and temperance in a futile bid to wash all of the bad habits out of their systems. Whenever I go online at the moment, I’m met with calls to give up alcohol for an entire month (I’m looking at you here Facebook – you’ll pry my beloved red wine from my cold dead hands) and embrace living on 500 calories a day while whipping up a delicious ‘Winter Salad’ (ingredients: leftover sprouts and crystallised misery). As you may have guessed, I have no truck with this mass display of puritanism. After all, January is the most miserable month of the year – 31 days of darkness, biting cold and abject skintness. Why shouldn’t we all indulge in a little bit of unbridled hedonism? It’s either that or go to the gym.

I would like to think that this Butternut Squash Lasagne goes some way towards mollifying people’s urge for a healthy meal that is comforting and (most importantly) COVERED IN CHEESE. I’ve taken a fairly standard lasagne recipe and subbed the pasta sheets for huge hunks of butternut squash, which – when roasted – becomes wonderfully soft, earthy and sweet. If you’re baulking at the idea of sticking turkey in a bolognese sauce, well, it’s your loss, but it can easily be substituted with lean beef mince.

So, the next time you’re looking forlornly out of your office window wondering if there’s anything you can have for dinner that’s nutritious but doesn’t contain kale, why not treat yourself to a gigantic pile of butternut squash lasagne? It tastes much better than a Weight Watchers Ready Meal and serves as a reminder that healthy eating doesn’t mean depriving yourself of the occasional hunk of melted mozzarella.

Trust me, it tastes better than it looks.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH LASAGNE (Makes four portions)

You will need:

For the Turkey Bolognese

• 200g turkey mince
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 large carrot, diced
• 1 celery stalk, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• ½ tsp rosemary
• ½ tsp oregano
• 1 bay leaf

For the bechamel sauce

• 1 pint of milk
• 2 bay leaves
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• 50g unsalted butter
• 50g plain flour

For the lasagne

• 1 large butternut squash, peeled and chopped into large chunks
• 250g ricotta
• 150g mozzarella

Make It!

1. Heat your oven to 200 degrees C/Gas Mark 4.
2. Make your turkey bolognese: Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a medium sized saucepan and brown the turkey mince in batches. Set to one side. Heat another tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, and cook your diced onion, celery, and carrot for around five minutes until they begin to turn soft. Add the tomato paste and diced garlic and gently cook for another 30 seconds. Add the chopped tomatoes, rosemary, oregano and bay leaves, season with salt and pepper, then simmer the sauce for half an hour until it has thickened. You don’t want it to be too thin, as then it will make everything horribly watery.
3. While your bolognese is simmering, make the bechamel sauce: Place the milk in a large non-stick saucepan, add the bay leaves and nutmeg and bring to a gentle simmer. In a separate saucepan melt the butter and add the flour. Beat well and cook for two minutes. Remove the milk from the heat and add a little to the flour mixture. Combine well, and when all the milk has been absorbed, add a little more. Keep doing this until all the milk has been added, whisking continually. By the end, you should have a smooth, lump-free sauce.
4. Assemble your masterp  iece: Spoon a third of the bechamel sauce into the bottom of a casserole dish. Add a layer of butternut squash chunks and a handful of crumbled ricotta. Follow this with a layer of the turkey bolognese sauce. Repeat until all of the ingredients have been used up, and top with chunks of torn mozzarella.
5. Cover the casserole dish with a lid (or some foil) and bake at 200 degrees C/Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes. Then, remove the lid/foil and bake uncovered for another 30 minutes. The lasagne is done when the cheese has turned brown and bubbly, and the butternut squash is soft.
6. Serve with a green salad and a glass of wine.