This recipe doesn’t have a name. I call it “That Sausage and Bean Stuff”.  It has overtones of eastern European stews, Indian curries, and Creole jambalayas without really being any of those things. It’s sweet, spicy, sour, smoky, and intense. It’s a regular weeknight supper around here, and it’s delicious.

I used to make this with Mattesons smoked sausage. Yes, I know, it’s kind of gross. So are hot dogs and we still eat those. However, I recently discovered Polish country sausage, or Wiejska Kielbasa. So good in dishes like this, also good just sliced and served with bread and mustard. If you can’t make it to a market or to one of the many Polish groceries that have popped up in the last few years for your Kielbasa, they sell a pretty decent version at the deli counter in Morrison’s. It has a tough-yet-papery casing that you might want to peel or cut off as it can be hard or impossible to chew. I don’t mind working through it or just picking it out (it tends to come loose from the sausage in tight spirals during cooking) but you may feel differently.

This dish is still delicious – and completely vegan – without any sausage at all, or with a tin of chickpeas in place of the sausage.

*A note on ingredients – please, please don’t skimp on your tinned tomatoes. Get a good, Italian brand – I like Napolina. Cheaper brands use cheap, yellowish, unripe tomatoes. Napolina toms are expensive but you can often get them half-price if you keep an eye out.  Get whole plum tomatoes instead of chopped, as well. The best, most attractive tomatoes are used for the whole plum tomatoes, the ugly lower-quality toms get chopped up. It’s a piece of cake to break the whole plum tomatoes up with a fork when you add them to a dish.

Sausage and Bean Stuff – serves two extremely greedy people or four regular people

• 1 red onion
• 1 bell pepper
• 1 courgette
• 5-6 fat mushrooms
• Salt to taste
• 6-8 inch piece of Wiejska Kielbasa (the one you’re looking for is dark red on the outside, horseshoe shaped, and 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter), or a Mattesons smoked sausage if you’re gross like I used to be.
• 1/2 tablespoon whole cumin seeds
• Chili flakes to taste
• 1/2 tablespoon smoked paprika (optional, the sausage is plenty smokey but I love as much smoke as possible)
• 2-3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 tin good quality plum tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon wholegrain mustard
• 2 good tablespoons dark brown sugar
• 1 tomato tin full of water
• 1 tablespoon cider or red wine vinegar
• 1 tin red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• Plenty of black pepper

So this isn’t rocket surgery- roughly chop the veg and cook in a little oil with a good dose of salt until it just starts to go soft. Throw in the sausage, which you will have cut into coins or half -moon shapes. When things start to get a little brown around the edges, add in the dry spices and stir til fragrant. Add in the garlic, stir for a moment or two, and add in the tomatoes before it starts to burn. Break them up with a fork or the edge of your cooking spoon (you did use whole plum tomatoes, right?) and then add in the rest of the ingredients. Bring it up to a simmer and taste – does it need more sugar? More salt? More heat? More vinegar?  More anything? This is a great dish for practicing your flavour-adjusting skills. When you get it just right, let it simmer for 20 minutes or so until it’s nice and thick but still saucy, and serve over plain white rice.

First, Mr. Bourdain’s most recent effort, Medium Raw. I was, until fairly recently, a big fan, but I’m starting to get over the whole macho, hard-drinking, hard-living asshole chef schtick. To Tony’s credit, he seems to be getting over it, too. There’s a hell of a lot of self-deprecation here – he isn’t afraid to admit that he’s a bit of a jerk, a good-but-not-great chef, and a lucky bastard. I find him charming when he’s talking smack about himself. I adore him when he’s talking about his genuine love of food and food culture. I find him nearly unbearable when he insults and gossips about other cooks and food writers, which he spends about half of this book doing. The mean-boys stuff is interesting, in a car-wreck kind of way. It’s also, ultimately, a cheap trick, and he can do better. I’m glad I got this from the library instead of buying it because I don’t think I’ll want to read it again.

The other two books have been on my shelf for a while. Secret Ingredients – The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink is a collection of food writing from, you guessed it, The New Yorker. There is some amazing stuff in here . Dorothy Parker recreates a neurotic, bored, and tipsy dinner party guest’s slightly insane interior monologue (which is probably autobiographical, now that I think about it). Steve Martin imagines a couple of absurdist menus – one of which features a banana split with fried ice cream and cow fat, the other a salad of “dehumidified ocean air on a bed of fileted basil”. There are essays, histories, biographies, poems, cartoons, and short fiction pieces that attack the subject of food from every possible angle. I LOVE this book.

And finally, Remembrance of Things Paris – Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet Magazine. I really miss Gourmet, and this book reminds me why. It pulls from the entire history of the magazine, beginning from its first issue in 1941. The writing from the years of deprivation during and just after the war are especially beautiful – wistful and gritty and hopeful all at the same time. There are stories about ordinary Parisians doing their ordinary shopping and eating in their ordinary cafes and there are stories about famous chefs making unbelievably decadent food for the creme de la creme of society. It’s a great read.

The next day, after work was done, I had a look at the Bullring shopping centre before I caught my train. It was… a shopping centre. Unless I have something specific to buy, shopping for clothes holds no interest for me. The only thing I would have been interested in, the bookstore, was a victim of the Great Borders Massacre, but luckily there was an overpriced-but-beautiful food hall at Selfridge’s that kept me occupied for a bit. Here are the donuts I bought at Krispy Kreme. I was going to get a dozen to share out at work, until I saw the price tag. £12 for 12 donuts!!! I used to pick up a dozen glazed Krispy Kremes on the way to work back in the states for a fifth of that price. Still, they looked good, so I got four, for an eye-watering £7.00. The strawberry creme was almost worth it.

I also bought a beautiful porky pie. See that fancy label? That means it has to be good, right? And it was, actually. And shared out over two meals for the two of us, even at nearly £5.00, it was definitely worth it. We had it with salad and slices of cheese and apple two nights in a row. Perfect for a hot summer evening. I have no patience for a cheap pork pie, but there’s not much better than a really nice one.

So, Birmingham. It seems like a pretty cool place, and I think I might go back on purpose soon, when I have a bit more time.

You know what I love? A good dessert, preferably involving fruit and/or chocolate. You know what I really don’t care for? Baking. I get in the mood for it sometimes, usually around Christmas, but it’s pretty rare. I usually buy biscuits or cakes at the grocery, which is just kind of sad, considering what a food-obsessed person I am. So this afternoon I noticed some apples sitting around and came up with this incredibly simple delicious sweet thing that took about five minutes.

• 2 apples (preferably on the tart side) peeled and chopped or sliced roughly
• Squeeze of lemon juice
• Tablespoon of butter
• Sugar, 2-3 tablespoons, depending on tartness of apples
• 1/2-3/4 cup of water
• Small handful roughly chopped walnuts (optional)
• teaspoon each cinnamon and fresh grated nutmeg

Toss chopped apples with a squeeze of lemon juice. Saute in butter in a wide frying pan, stirring regularly, just until the apples start to colour around the edges. Add walnuts if using, stir around for another minute, and add cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar and water. Cook until a syrup forms. Taste and add more sugar if you like.

Serve warm over vanilla ice cream, or let it cool a bit and do what I did -make a rough tart-type thing by pouring it in the centre of a rectangle of pre-made puff pastry (yes, yes, I know). Fold the sides towards the centre to almost-but-not-quite cover the filling and paint the whole thing with a beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar before baking according to the directions on the puff pastry package. I made some Bird’s custard to go with for my fella. He is in the living room snarfing a big slice as we speak! I’ll have mine later, probably with a spoonful of Greek yoghurt on top, or maybe a thin slice of cheddar cheese.

When we arrived, there were little bowls of hot, spicy peanuts on the table. I love touches like this. It seems like so many restaurants would charge you for the rental of your plates if they could, so it’s a pleasure to visit a restaurant that is at least as interested in making sure you have a nice time as it is in emptying your purse.

We started with the dip selection – cheese dip, salsa, guacamole, and bean dip  with two baskets of fresh fried tortilla chips. Generous portions of each dip, all fresh, all delicious, and more than enough for the six of us. I especially liked the bean dip. Rather than a puree, it consisted of whole, perfectly tender beans stirred into sour cream and Monterey Jack cheese. Awesome. I am afraid I got more than my fair share while the others were distracted by the cheese dip.

Rather than mains, most of us got two of the small plates. I had the pork tacos with pickled red onions – gorgeous little portions of tender slow-cooked pork in authentic corn tortillas. I also had the special of Elote – roasted corn on the cob spread with mayonnaise, lime, and spicy chili powder. It’s something simple and unusual that adds up to something much, much greater than the sum of its parts. I had this once before from a street vendor in a Mexican neighbourhood in Chicago, and I’ve never been to perfectly recreate it at home, but Salsa Mexicana got it just right. Everything was delicious, but the other highlight at our table was the perfect sweet-sour-spicy ceviche . I nearly ordered some of my own, because the little bite my tablemate shared with me wasn’t nearly enough.

The food is the whole point of this place, but the atmosphere is charming, too. Simple, light, and rustic with just the right amount of Mexican kitsch. The service is friendly and attentive and they make sure you have a drink when you want one without hovering. Salsa Mexicana do a killer classic margarita cocktail, but my one teeny, tiny complaint is that I would like the option of a big, trashy American-style margarita on the rocks – because, well, I’m American. We like things big and trashy and served with tons of ice. If margies aren’t your bag, Salsa Mexicana also carry my favourite Mexican beer- Bohemia- and it’s a good thing because  otherwise I might have had four or five of their perfect, deadly little margaritas instead of just two.

I would happily eat here every week if it weren’t  30 minutes on the bus and nearly three miles entirely uphill by bike. Seriously, a Headingley/Hyde Park branch is needed pronto.

Salsa Mexicana

www.salsamexicana.co.uk

116a Harrogate Road, LS7 4NY

Thanks to the lovely Fiona for the lovely photo of the lovely ceviche.

Tuna pasta bake is based around either a béchamel sauce (milk thickened with a flour and butter roux) or a mornay sauce (béchamel with added cheese). Béchamel is one of the four “mother sauces” of classic French cuisine, and probably the easiest to make of the four. You just take equal measures of flour and butter (about a tablespoon of each per cup of milk) stir it over medium heat until it forms a paste and just BARELY starts to smell nutty and turn the palest shade of toasty brown, and then add the milk and stir like crazy until it starts to thicken. Simmer it over low heat for a few minutes until it’s as thick as you like and season with salt and black pepper. White pepper is traditional to keep it all smooth and lovely and white, but I like the black specks.

For tuna pasta bake, I make the sauce in the same pan with the vegetables (usually mushroom, onions, and celery, but the mix is up to you- I would definitely keep the onion though). It’s not exactly the classic French way of doing things, but it works great and it’s much easier.

Recipe-serves 2 very greedy people

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 4-5 mushrooms, sliced
• half of a small onion, diced
• 1/2 stick celery, diced
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 cups whole or semi-skimmed milk (skimmed doesn’t thicken as well in my experience)
• 1 handful good-quality frozen garden peas or petits pois
• 2-3 shakes of Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon english mustard
• 2- shakes tabasco sauce (optional)
• Plenty of black pepper
• 2 teaspoons smoked sweet paprika or a teaspoon of good-quality curry powder
• 2 good handfuls of nice, sharp cheddar cheese
• 1 can drained sustainable Skipjack tuna
• 250-300 grams of cooked, drained pasta. I like spirals but really any 1-2 inch shapes will do.
• small handful of fresh breadcrumbs (I usually just whizz the heel of whatever bread is around in the mini chopper with a little salt, or just tear it up as small as I can if I don’t feel like messing with the chopper)

Sauté the vegetables with a pinch of salt in the butter until very lightly browned. Sprinkle flour over veg and stir until everything is well-coated.

Pour in cold milk and stir like mad until the sauce is thickened and bubbling nicely-this shouldn’t take long. Sometimes for reasons unknown to me, the sauce won’t thicken. When this happens, I just whisk together a couple of tablespoons each of flour and milk and add it a tiny bit at a time to the simmering sauce until it gets its act together.

Add the peas to the sauce, bring back to the simmer and then remove from heat. Stir in the cheese. It should melt in smoothly, if not just keep stirring, don’t put it back on the heat because it might seize up or separate.

Stir in the drained tuna and all the seasoning except salt – you’ll want to taste it first, because the tuna might add all the salt you need.

Mix the drained pasta with the sauce in a casserole, or in a couple of mini-casseroles if you want to be fancy. Top with breadcrumbs and a little more pepper. Bake in a hot oven for 25-35 minutes until bubbly and brown.

Matthew eats his with HP sauce, because he is weird. I like mine with plenty of tabasco because I am awesome. I never really bother to serve a side dish with this, but a salad with a sharp vinaigrette might be nice.

The last two times I’ve been, it’s been solidly mediocre, and my most recent visit was the last straw. While the sauce on my favourite dish (Dunwandhar – smoked lamb in a rich tomato-based sauce) was as delicious as always, the lamb was tough and chewy. The onion naan I shared with my table-mates was small (smaller than the dinner plate it was served on!) and doughy in the middle, and my mushroom pilau was obviously just regular pilau with sliced mushrooms thrown in as an afterthought, because they weren’t even cooked.

It wasn’t a complete failure. The service was fine, if not particularly enthusiastic, and my friends both enjoyed their curries (they had mild chicken dishes, one with pineapples and one with cashews). Unfortunately, ‘fine’ isn’t what I’m looking for when I go out for a meal with friends. I want delicious food, a great atmosphere, and memorable experience. It doesn’t look like I’m going to find that at Shabab any more. I need a new favourite curry spot – any suggestions?

Shabab
Photo from toptable.com

Sunday night I decided to dig up some confit pork (a recipe for another day ) from its lardy home in the back of the fridge to serve with polenta chips (one batch of your favourite savoury polenta, spread in a pan, cooled in the fridge, cut into chips, drizzled with olive oil, and pan fried on each side ‘til browned and crispy). What with all this richness and creaminess, some bite was needed. Enter the pickled cabbage, which Americans would refer to as vinegar slaw (and as far as I am concerned, a much superior product for most applications than its more popular cousin, mayonnaise coleslaw).

I love pickles. Throw something – anything, really – into a vinegary brine and I will eat it. I think lots of people think of making pickles and imagine something difficult, involving sterilised jars and carefully measured vinegar solutions, and so they just buy a jar of something from the store. Next time you pick up some pickled beetroot or what have you, have a look at the ingredients. There’s probably a good chance you’re going to find artificial sweeteners and preservatives. Who needs it? You can make amazing pickles in ten minutes at home with nothing more than vinegar, water, sugar (depending on the recipe) and salt, plus whatever herbs and spices you like. If you’re going to eat them within the week, there’s no need to put them up in sterilised jars – just keep them in a glass, ceramic, or plastic container in the fridge.

The lovely turmeric-yellow sweet-and-sour cabbage pickle aka coleslaw in the photo was a perfect foil to the rich, fatty pork and creamy-on-the-inside, crunchy-on-the-outside polenta chips. It was great the next day on a salami sandwich, too. And it was ready to eat less than an hour after I made it.

Sweet and Sour cabbage slaw

½ small white cabbage, cut into wedges and then sliced as thinly as possible

½ red onion (or a whole one if it’s tiny or you love onions), again sliced as thinly as possible

1 red or yellow or green bell pepper – guess how you slice it?

For Brine

½ cup cider or sherry vinegar

½ cup water

2-3 tablespoons soft dark brown sugar

½ tablespoon whole mustard seed

½ tablespoon ground turmeric

Good pinch of sea salt

Bring the brine to a boil and then pour over cabbage, onion, and pepper in a non-metal bowl or jar. If the brine doesn’t cover the veg completely, top it up with equal amounts of vinegar and water. Taste for salt and sugar and adjust to your taste. Cool to at least room temperature before eating, keep in fridge for up to a week. I’ve heard of people who strain, re-boil, and re-use the brine, but unless there’s a critical vinegar shortage I’d just make it fresh, as it’s so easy.

You can use the half vinegar/half water formula to pickle just about anything pickle-able. Adjust the proportions slightly – mild rice wine vinegar will take less water, strong malt vinegar might like a little more. Boiling the brine is an important step for hard vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower, but it isn’t really necessary for something soft like cucumber. If you’re doing a mixed pickle, boil the brine for the hard vegetables and then add in the soft vegetables after it cools.

Here are some more lovely pickle ideas. As before, if the brine doesn’t cover your veg, top it up with more vinegar and water in the same proportions called for in the recipe and adjust the other seasonings to taste. All of these can be kept in the fridge for at least a week, or until the veg starts looking limp (but I bet they don’t last that long). You might want to up the sugar or honey content. And definitely taste the brine and adjust the water and vinegar ratio to your liking – vinegar can vary widely in acidity level. And if you have a mandolin for slicing, or if you want to use the slicing attachment on your food chopper, go crazy! I just use a knife, it doesn’t take long and there’s less to clean.

Japanese-style cucumber pickles – great with rice dishes or miso soup or served on the side of a stir fry.

1 seeded and thinly sliced cucumber

2 thinly sliced scallions (green only)

For Brine:

¾ cup rice wine vinegar

¼ to 1/3 cup of water

1-2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

½ tablespoon toasted sesame oil

Salt to taste

Leave to marinate for at least 3-4 hours, stir each time you serve to mix sesame oil in as it will settle on top

Sweetheart Cabbage and Coriander slaw with honey-lime dressing – great with grilled chicken or fish or as a topping for tacos or fajitas.

1 thinly sliced Sweetheart cabbage, sliced paper, paper thin (this is important since this is a cold brine and this sort of cabbage is somewhere between a hard and soft vegetable – if in doubt, you can boil the brine, but don’t add the coriander until it cools)

½ thinly sliced white onion

1-3 thinly sliced green chiles (or to taste)

1 good handful chopped coriander

For brine:

½ cup plain white vinegar or white wine vinegar

¼ cup fresh squeezed lime juice

½-3/4 cup water

3-4 tablespoons honey

Salt and black pepper to taste

I love pickles. Throw something – anything, really – into a vinegary brine and I will eat it. I think lots of people think of making pickles and imagine something difficult, involving sterilised jars and carefully measured vinegar solutions, and so they just buy a jar of something from the store. Next time you pick up some pickled beetroot or what have you, have a look at the ingredients. There’s probably a good chance you’re going to find artificial sweeteners and preservatives. Who needs it? You can make amazing pickles in ten minutes at home with nothing more than vinegar, water, sugar (depending on the recipe) and salt, plus whatever herbs and spices you like. If you’re going to eat them within the week, there’s no need to put them up in sterilised jars – just keep them in a glass, ceramic, or plastic container in the fridge.

The lovely turmeric-yellow sweet-and-sour cabbage pickle aka coleslaw in the photo was a perfect foil to the rich, fatty pork and creamy-on-the-inside, crunchy-on-the-outside polenta chips. It was great the next day on a salami sandwich, too. And it was ready to eat less than an hour after I made it.

Sweet and Sour cabbage slaw

½ small white cabbage, cut into wedges and then sliced as thinly as possible

½ red onion (or a whole one if it’s tiny or you love onions), again sliced as thinly as possible

1 red or yellow or green bell pepper – guess how you slice it?

For Brine

½ cup cider or sherry vinegar

½ cup water

2-3 tablespoons soft dark brown sugar

½ tablespoon whole mustard seed

½ tablespoon ground turmeric

Good pinch of sea salt

Bring the brine to a boil and then pour over cabbage, onion, and pepper in a non-metal bowl or jar. If the brine doesn’t cover the veg completely, top it up with equal amounts of vinegar and water. Taste for salt and sugar and adjust to your taste. Cool to at least room temperature before eating, keep in fridge for up to a week. I’ve heard of people who strain, re-boil, and re-use the brine, but unless there’s a critical vinegar shortage I’d just make it fresh, as it’s so easy.

You can use the half vinegar/half water formula to pickle just about anything pickle-able. Adjust the proportions slightly – mild rice wine vinegar will take less water, strong malt vinegar might like a little more. Boiling the brine is an important step for hard vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower, but it isn’t really necessary for something soft like cucumber. If you’re doing a mixed pickle, boil the brine for the hard vegetables and then add in the soft vegetables after it cools.

Here are some more lovely pickle ideas. As before, if the brine doesn’t cover your veg, top it up with more vinegar and water in the same proportions called for in the recipe and adjust the other seasonings to taste. All of these can be kept in the fridge for at least a week, or until the veg starts looking limp (but I bet they don’t last that long). You might want to up the sugar or honey content. And definitely taste the brine and adjust the water and vinegar ratio to your liking – vinegar can vary widely in acidity level. And if you have a mandolin for slicing, or if you want to use the slicing attachment on your food chopper, go crazy! I just use a knife, it doesn’t take long and there’s less to clean.

Japanese-style cucumber pickles – great with rice dishes or miso soup or served on the side of a stir fry.

1 seeded and thinly sliced cucumber

2 thinly sliced scallions (green only)

For Brine:

¾ cup rice wine vinegar

¼ to 1/3 cup of water

1-2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

½ tablespoon toasted sesame oil

Salt to taste

Leave to marinate for at least 3-4 hours, stir each time you serve to mix sesame oil in as it will settle on top

Sweetheart Cabbage and Coriander slaw with honey-lime dressing – great with grilled chicken or fish or as a topping for tacos or fajitas.

1 thinly sliced Sweetheart cabbage, sliced paper, paper thin (this is important since this is a cold brine and this sort of cabbage is somewhere between a hard and soft vegetable – if in doubt, you can boil the brine, but don’t add the coriander until it cools)

½ thinly sliced white onion

1-3 thinly sliced green chiles (or to taste)

1 good handful chopped coriander

For brine:

½ cup plain white vinegar or white wine vinegar

¼ cup fresh squeezed lime juice

½-3/4 cup water

3-4 tablespoons honey

Salt and black pepper to taste

Step one is to find a big bowl and dump the ingredients in. That’s 430 grams of flour, 345 grams of water, 1 gram of yeast and 8 grams of salt. If you’re a volume baker instead of a weight baker, you should seriously reconsider that stance, but for now you can find the volume measurements in the link at the beginning of this article. Anyway, the recipe calls for dried yeast, but since I have some fresh yeast  at the moment I decided to use that instead. I just used a tiny amount – as in a piece smaller than a pea, which I stirred into the water. If you’re using dried yeast, a scant 1/4 teaspoon should be plenty. That’s all you need because this bread rises for at least 18 hours, which is plenty of time for your little yeast colony to do a fine job. If you started with more you might fill your entire kitchen with dough! After a good stir, your dough should look like the picture – shaggy and messy and completely un-kneadable. Now all you need to do is cover it with a towel or some plastic wrap and forget about it for a while. After 18-24 hours (don’t get too worried about the exact timing, this is supposed to be easy!) it should look like this.

See the tiny bubbles all over the surface? That’s from the hard work and asexual reproduction skills of your tiny, intrepid yeast colony. And see how it kind of pulls away from the side of the bowl in strands when you tilt it? That’s the gluten that has developed while you were doing other things. The gluten that normally takes 20 minutes of hard work in a drier, more traditional bread recipe. The trick now is to get this gloopy bread dough into something that resembles a loaf of bread. First of all, sprinkle half a cup or so of flour onto your countertop, and get your hands all floury, too. Pull and pour the dough out of the bowl and then do your best to shape it into a ball. Some of it will stick to your hands, and that’s OK! Just get it done and plop it onto a piece of baking parchment. I sprinkled my baking parchment with some dried polenta, which I also sprinkled on top of the bread, to give it a little extra crunch and texture. Now you just need to cover it with a bit of plastic wrap (I re-used the plastic that was covering the bowl before, rubbed with a little oil so as not to stick to the dough) and leave it to rise for 2-3 hours. Actually, ‘rise’ is the wrong word. I should say ‘expand’, because it will spread plenty but it won’t get much taller.

So your bread is all ready to cook. In order to get the amazing crispy crust that makes this bread so special, you’re going to need a dutch oven or a big casserole with a cover. Make sure that the handle is heat-proof, because you’re going to be cooking at 220 degrees/gas mark 6 or 7, and most non-metal handles cant’ take that much heat. If the handle is attached with a screw, you should be able to remove it easily. You need to stick the casserole or dutch oven in the oven for at least 30 minutes to preheat, otherwise your bread won’t get any ‘oven spring’ and it will probably stick like crazy, too. So once your cooking vessel is nice and hot, just dump the dough right in. Don’t worry about preserving the shape or anything like that. Just get it in there, and if it’s off centre, give the pot a shake to even it out. Now you need to put the lid back on and stick the whole thing in the oven for 30 minutes, after which you take the lid off and let it bake for another 20-30 minutes until it is beautiful and golden brown. In case you are wondering what the point of all this is, the pot and lid make a mini-oven inside your oven, and the steam coming from the wet dough is what develops the crust. You can certainly make this bread in regular bread pans, or make it on a sheet pan instead of in a pot, and it will still be good. It just won’t be quite as OMG AMAZING.

So here’s the finished product. I wish my blog had sound effects so you could hear how the crust crackles when you poke it. This is simply the most perfect European bakery boule (not as pretty, perhaps, but I might try slashing some designs in the top next time) and it came out of my kitchen with about ten minutes of actual work, total. The hardest part was finding the second oven mitt to get the hot pot out of the oven. Wait, no, actually the hardest part was not cutting into it right away. Bread is not finished baking when it comes out of the oven – it continues to cook as it cools down, and if you cut it too soon, all the heat dissipates and the interior can be a bit gummy and under-cooked. So be patient and wait until it’s just barely warm. Get the butter ready, and maybe a little bit of sea salt. And you might want to go ahead and start on the next loaf, because this one probably won’t last very long.

I first visited Calls Landing Stew and Oyster Kitchen back in February. It was a cold, blustery day and I thought a nice stew would be just the thing. I was really surprised by the food – was my great grandma back from the dead and working in the kitchen? Because I was served an exact replica of her tomato beef soup. She used to make it with leftover bits of meat and vegetables (usually pot-roast beef, carrots, potatoes, and possibly beans, peas, or corn) heated through with jarred pureed tomatoes put up from the previous summer’s garden. The Calls Landing version was nice -the beef, carrots, and potatoes were tender, the tomato broth was, well, tomatoey. It was just the kind of tasty, simple, filling food that a woman who raised a family during the Great Depression would throw together to make sure that nothing went to waste. It was NOT, however, anything that even remotely resembled Beef Bourguignon, which is what I actually ordered. Beef Bourguignon is a slow-cooked dish with lots of red wine (Bourguignon is the adjectival form of Bourgogn, aka burgundy, which is of course a red wine – the clue is in the name!) plus onions, garlic, and usually mushrooms. No tomatoes, no carrots, no potatoes.

See, this kind of thing really gets under my skin. You can’t just call a dish whatever you want. Beef Bourguignon is not a catch-all name for any dish that contains beef in a sauce. It is certainly not any kind of soup. If you are serving tomato soup with beef, carrots, and potatoes, then call it that!  I certainly will. So, the tomato-beef soup was nice. The bread they served with it was OK, too, but the butter in little foil packets was ice cold and rock hard and therefore impossible to spread on the soft bread. I thought of putting the packets in my bra for a few minutes to warm them through but in the end decided just to go without. The “stew” was served with a fork, a knife, but no spoon – and as the broth was thinner than tinned tomato soup, a spoon was necessary. It was as if they thought that they could trick me into seeing stew instead of soup if they didn’t provide a spoon. Unfortunately the server had disappeared somewhere so I had to search the dining room to find the cutlery stash myself – and two other diners immediately followed suit.

Nomenclature and cutlery issues aside, this is a nice place, small and cosy and decorated in a kind of artsy/industrial way warmed up with rich brown leather seating. There are three ales on draught and a large outdoor waterside patio. I decided to give them another go last week for lunch with my fella. Sadly, they were out of all three ales, so I settled on a Guinness and Matthew on a Sagres lager. He ordered the three-bean chili con carne and I got the cassoulet stew with Italian sausage. Again, it was all tasty, but neither dish really had anything to do with what they were called. Matthew’s chili had no cumin, chili powder, or really any spice at all. It had a clean, sharp, tomatoey taste but there was no hint of the dark, rich, flavours that you get from a properly spiced and slow-cooked chili. It was nice for what it was, and if it had been called minced beef stew with tomato and beans, no one would have been disappointed. My “cassoulet” was more flavourful – the broth was light orange, containing tomato and cream I think, with hints of thyme and garlic. It was delicious, actually. There were also four or five small bites of sausage and a few tender butterbeans. It was one of the loveliest soups I’ve had in a while – but it was in no sense a cassoulet. And I had to find my own spoon again (at least I knew where they were this time).

The food here is fresh enough and nice enough that they don’t need to trick diners with fancy or familiar names that have nothing to do with the dishes. There is absolutely nothing wrong with calling your food “Beef Soup” or “Cream of Tomato Soup with Sausage and Butterbeans”. And if you’re going to call something a stew, make sure that it can actually be eaten with a fork and a piece of bread. Hiding the spoons doesn’t turn a soup into a stew!

I’m not done with Calls Landing, I’ll definitely be back when it warms up a bit to try the outdoor seating area – and I still haven’t gotten around to trying the oysters, so I have that to look forward to. Sadly I might have to wait until September now, since oysters should really only be eaten in months with an R in the name. Is this a myth? I’d be happy to hear that it is! Prices here are reasonable – £3 to £5.50 depending on the serving size for a rotating daily selection of three stews, one of which is veggie, and there are also non-stew and non-oyster options, including cupcakes (they’re everywhere!) and something described as a “savoury cake” with meats and cheese baked in that I might have to try next time.

Calls Landing Stew and Oyster Kitchen
36-38 The Calls
LS2 7EW
0113 242 5299
www.callslanding.com