UK Archives - Page 6 of 13

Go Love Your Shop – Kate Spade Pop-Up Shop

October 22, 2010 By Paola 2 Comments

The Kate Spade brand is not well known in the UK, but that should all change with their new month long pop-up shop in London’s Covent Garden.

If ‘mirrormirror’ were ever to turn into a physical bricks and mortar shop then this is exactly how I envisaged it in my mind. In fact forget about shopping, I just want to move in and live there.

Of course the stunning Georgian house with a its gracious staircase and light, bright rooms provides the perfect backdrop to all the pretty – does anyone fancy lending me £10 million?

More pics here and fab vid below.

Have any of you Londoners been yet?

Recipe of the Week – A Traditionally English Bramley Apple Pie

October 1, 2010 By Paola 7 Comments

One of the challenges on my 101 List is to ‘Win something – anything’, which means I actually need to enter competitions.

Cue the 2nd Annual Queen Anne Farmers’ Market Blue Ribbon Pie Contest, which I decided to enter on a whim, despite the fact that I haven’t actually baked a pie for about ten years – crumble always seems so much quicker, easier and less daunting – and that Seattle is home to some fiendishly expert piemakers.

This year I’ve been able, through extensive excitable Twittering and emailing, to locate a local source of Bramley apples. Despite being home to more fabulous apple varieties than you can shake a stick at, America appears to be almost entirely ignorant of Bramleys, which I’ve missed horribly over the past couple of years.

For those of you who don’t know, Bramleys are a large knobbly British heirloom ‘cooking’ apple – too tart to eat raw, but which, thanks to the extra acidity, have a uniquely wonderful flavour and soft fluffy texture when cooked. It’s funny the things you miss, but I am not the only Brit to nearly wet my knickers with excitement at finding them.

So, I decided to make a traditionally English Bramley Apple Pie for the competition and show Americans what they’re missing out on.

And here’s my finished pie literally seconds before it slipped out of my hands as I was putting it in the oven and it crashed to the oven floor. Fortunately I was able to perform extensive reconstructive surgery using leftover scraps of pastry and make it look like a pie again, but it certainly wasn’t going to win any beauty competitions.

So you can imagine that I wasn’t holding out much hope of a prize when I was greeted by a veritable masterclass in the piemaker’s art on arriving at the market. (My poor battered pie is at top right in the red pie dish, I didn’t even bother to take a proper close up photo of it).

Here it is after the judges had tucked into it.

And here it is sporting its ribbon for 3rd Prize! You could have knocked me down with a feather, quite literally. They clearly weren’t judging on looks.

Anyway, it was a lovely and very unexpected surprise to end to what has been a fairly shitty week, so many thanks to all at Queen Anne Farmers’ Market, to Jones Creek farms for their wonderful Bramley apples, to my lovely friend M for coming to my rescue with lard, and to my fellow competitors who made some SERIOUSLY delicious pies (enough already, it’s getting like the Oscars round here :- the Ed)

And it’s made me think that maybe I should make pie more often.

Ingredients

Shortcrust Pastry

250g/2cups flour

75g/5 tbsps butter*

75g/5tbsps lard or vegetable shortening**

Iced water + lemon juice

Filling

1-2 tbsps of butter

5 Bramley apples – peeled, cored and sliced***

1 tbsp lemon juice

3 tbsps raisins soaked in Madeira****

6 tbsps bakers/caster sugar

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ground cloves

A few grindings of nutmeg

1 tbsp cornstarch/cornflour/plain flour

* I used an imported European butter as the fat content is higher and it apparently works better for pastry. You can get Kerrygold and Lurpak reasonably easily in the US. I also used salted butter as Il like the whole salty /sweet thing in my desserts.

**It appears that good quality lard is also very difficult to get hold of in the US. It’s available as ‘manteca’ and extensively used for Mexican cuisine but the brands I’ve found seem to be full of partially hydrogenated fats. Or else you need to track down ‘leaf lard’ from a good butcher or farmer. I was lucky enough to be given some by a friend. Brits, treasure that pack of Tesco’s lard you’ve had squashed in the back of the fridge since time immemorial.

*** Bramleys are unique in my experience. If you can’t get hold of them, Granny Smiths have a similar tart taste, but very different texture and I’ve heard that Gravensteins and Belle de Boskoop are other good cooking varieties. You may need to adjust cooking method (below) accordingly.

**** Madeira is yet another very English thing. If you don’t have madeira, rum, whisky or Calvados would be great. If kids are going to eat the pie use apple or oran ge juice.

Method

Pastry

Soak your raisins in your booze of choice a few hours before starting.

Chop your fats into small dice and put the flour and fats into the freezer for around 15 minutes. If you didn’t use salted butter, you could maybe add a pinch of salt.

Prepare a cup of iced water and add a squeeze of lemon.

Put your flour and fats into a food processor and pulse process until the fats are fully incorporated and the mixture looks like coarse sand or oatmeal.

Add iced water to the mix a teaspoon at a time and keep pulsing until everything has almost clumped together. Fish it out and knead it into a smooth dough by hand. (You can of course use the traditional ‘rubbing in’ method. I like the above, courtesy of Nigella Lawson – God love that despicable woman – because it’s quick, easy and means you don’t have to handle the pastry more than is strictly necessary).

Put the pastry in the fridge for at least 30 mins to relax.

Filling

Core, peel and slice your apples and place the slices in a bowl of cold water with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice to stop them browning. Americans seem to prefer more discernible lumps of apple in their pies, so may want to slice them more thickly.

Melt a tablespoon or two of butter in a large frying pan and then turn off the heat and add your apples, drained raisins, approximately 6 tablespoons of caster sugar depending on how sweet your apples are (if you’re not using tart Bramleys you may want to use a bit less), the spices and the cornflour. I also added a little lemon juice, and you can adjust this according to the tartness or otherwise of your apples. If you’re using very sweet dessert apples go for more.

Stir the apples around until all the buttery juices are amalgamated. If you prefer a softer pie filling or are using dessert apples that don’t disintegrate easily you may want to cook the apples gently at this stage. I didn’t with my Bramleys.

Assembly

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Roll out the one of the pastry circles and line the bottom of your pie dish.

Add the filling.

Roll out the other pastry circle and place over the top of the pie dish, cutting the excess away with a knife.

Paint the edge of the pie with milk and then crimp together the top and bottom layers. Pierce vents in the top layer to let the steam escape and decorate how you like with the pastry scraps, eggwash or milk and lots of sugar. I experimented using different types of sugar – caster, demerara, and large-crystalled ‘sparkling’ sugar to decorate different elements of my design.

Bake for about 45-50 minutes until golden. I covered my pie with foil for the first 20 minutes so it wouldn’t get too brown.

I’m not going to count this as a win for the 101 Things, since it was only a 3rd place. However ask me again when the three years is nearly up. Oh and here’s a gratuitous cute picture of the Minx chatting up a baby at the market.

{Update}

Here’s a link to a write-up about the competition on the Queen Anne Farmers’ Market website, with a rare flattering photo of me (on the far left).

Photo by John Schussler

Thank goodness I didn’t know that professional bakers would be competing and that we would be judged by professional pastry chefs.

Here are links to the three other prize-winning recipes which all looked utterly incredible. Mine was apparently the highest-ranked apple pie (of which there were several) which I attribute entirely to the amazing power of the Bramley apple.

Recipe of the Week – Brown Bread Ice Cream

September 23, 2010 By Paola 5 Comments

Or ice cream as health food. Kinda.

A week or three ago I was honoured to be invited to an ‘Ice Cream Social’ at the home of Seattle Bon Vivant. ‘Viv’ doesn’t blog much anymore but she is a huge presence on the Seattle foodie scene and I knew I was going to be in exalted foodie company.

So which ice cream to make? I wanted something that would be unusual enough to intrigue an American foodie crowd; something either very English or very Italian to reflect my heritage, and of course something utterly delicious. And that’s when I remembered Brown Bread Ice Cream.

This ice cream is as British as it comes, apparently made by the Victorians, and still served today in British restaurants and gastropubs, though you won’t find it in a British supermarket (why on earth not? – Ed)

It’s also pretty quick and simple to make. I used Gordon Ramsay’s recipe here as my base but made several changes.

Ingredients

Olive oil, for greasing

75g (2 1/2 ozs) brown bread (I used 3 large thick slices of a well made wholemeal or whole grain loaf without too many nuts or seeds)

75g (2 1/2ozs) soft brown sugar

250ml (1 cup) milk

250ml (1 cup) double/heavy cream (American heavy cream is not as rich as British double cream but still works)

1 tsp vanilla extract (Gordon uses a vanilla pod, if you have one refer to his recipe above)

6 free-range egg yolks

50g (1/4 cup) caster sugar

Method

– Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6

– Make brown breadcrumbs by slicing thick slices of your wholemeal loaf, removing the crusts, letting them go stale over a day or two and then whizzing them in a food processor. If you’ve forgotten to let them go stale, just bake them for 30 minutes or so in a very cool oven before whizzing.

– Add the same weight in light brown sugar to the crumbs. I forgot to make precise cup measures., sorry. Suffice to say that you should make LOTS of the caramel breadcrumbs as they are delicious stirred into any shop-bought vanilla; so just make loads, keeping the weight of bread and sugar the same.

– Grease a baking tray with a little olive oil using a pastry brush or spray. Spread out the breadcrumbs and sugar and cook for 10-15 minutes or until the sugar caramelises. I burnt my first batch, so for the second batch I stirred the bread crumbs with a wooden spoon every 3 minutes until they were crunchy and caramelly – about 10 minutes in my oven. I highly recommend doing this. Watch the crumbs like a hawk anyway.

– Leave the crumbs to cool. When they’re cool, bash them with a rolling pin or meat tenderiser or similar, so that they’re crumby and not all clumped together.

– Whisk the egg yolks and caster sugar together in a bowl until thick, pale and creamy and then whisk in the cream, milk and vanilla extract. Transfer to a thick-based pan and cook gently over a low heat until the mixture coats the back of the spoon. Pass through a sieve if you’re feeling fancy.

– Cool in the fridge overnight. Gordon forgets to mention this, but it’s imperative for my ice cream maker (the Kitchen Aid ice cream attachment)

– Pour the custard into your ice-cream churn and, just as it starts to set, add the breadcrumbs and churn until they’re stirred through. Then put in the freezer to freeze completely. This ice cream benefits hugely from twenty minutes ‘ripening’ in the fridge before serving.

– I served mine with strawberries marinaded in sugar and lemon juice.

– If I were you, and if you were going to serve this to adults only, I’d definitely experiment with adding a splash of Baileys or Irish whiskey to the mix instead of vanilla.

If I say so myself this ice cream was super good – dense and rich, with a sweet chewy nuttiness – and it was fab to see the change come over some initially highly sceptical faces at the Ice Cream Social.

Things I Am Loving – Jme Foods for Williams-Sonoma

August 27, 2010 By Paola 7 Comments

Or, more precisely, I’m loving the labelling, since I haven’t tried the foods themselves yet.

Jamie Oliver has just launched his Jme range of artisanal British foods in the US in conjunction with Williams-Sonoma. I’m definitely going to be trying the mango chutney, mint sauce and marmelade as it’s difficult to get good versions of these oh so British delicacies over here. (Though I’m also noting how flippin’ expensive they are in comparison with the same products in the UK.) I’m hoping that at some point his full range of British products finds its way over here.

What I’m most intrigued by, though, by the packaging. It looks very British – as in so many things American packaging can get very busy and very ‘more is more’ – whereas this is simple, old-fashioned in a modern way, if that makes sense and quite austere.

I love how the simplicity and retro styling makes everything hang together, despite using a mishmash of different packaging shapes, fonts, label styles and colours. It looks like a very idealised version of how my mother’s pantry might have looked in the Mad Men era (in her dreams haha!). Interestingly the actual branding is very subtle, the only thing the have in common is the sixties-style ’J’ on the labelling. I’m also loving that he’s calling a biscuit a biscuit.

I’m most intrigued by how this reads to an American audience. Does the styling make you want to buy the food? Or does it just seem too plain, too old-fashioned and unappealing?

Go Fug Your Room – Sebastian Conran

July 26, 2010 By Paola 8 Comments

Or, when designers don’t decorate.

I opened my new copy of Livingetc with some excitement as the front cover promised me an ‘at home with Sebastian Conran’. I knew he had one of those huge Victorian wedding cake houses in Notting Hill and this would surely provide some great material for a ‘Go Love Your Room’ post.

For those of you in the US who may be unaware of them, the Conrans are pretty much design royalty in the UK. Designer Sir Terence Conran founded the Habitat chain and the Conran Shop, has published a series of seminal works on interior design and owns a string of beautifully-designed, fabulous food-serving restaurants in London. He almost single-handedly dragged Britain out of the chintzy Fifties into the fab Sixties interiors-wise and has been a giant on the UK design scene ever since.

His children from various marriages are also successful designers and foodies in their own right – fashion designer Jasper, Notting Hill restaurateur Tom, interior designer and foodie Sophie and product designer Sebastian.

Sebastian is well-known as a product designer, probably most famously as the design brains behind Nigella Lawson’s Living Kitchen range, though as you can see from his website he has a number of great products to his credit.

And there’s no denying that he’s got some great STUFF. Wink chairs, Le Corbusier lounger, antique rugs, Arco lamp, interesting art, iconic Sex Pistols and the Clash poster artwork (designed by Conran as a student).

AND there’s no denying that he has, as you’d expect, paid a lot of attention to detail. The units, for example, are painted in a colour Sebastian created from a gouache of stainless steel, “I wanted a shade that had the same tonal value as the metal to give cohesion to the mix of materials”. A lot of remodelling has been done – hallways widened, door frames raised, huge French doors installed at the back and the sightlines adjusted to make sure the vistas through the house were perfectly aligned.

And yet, and yet, I can’t help feeling that this looks a bit like a student bedsit, with white walls, mismatched chairs, posters on the walls and rumpled rugs (albeit a student with access to a phenomenal amount of money).

Everything seems somewhat haphazard and studiously UNdecorated – no interesting curtains or cushions (except in the bedroom and you can bet they belong to the stylist), no unifying colour scheme or much colour of any description, no flashes of wit, no striking arrangements, no interesting light fixtures. It’s the home of someone who celebrates form and function over everything and as such seems both curiously sterile, strangely uncohesive and not particularly comfortable.

What do you guys think?

poll by twiigs.com

{All images and Sebastian Conran quotes from Livingetc August 2010}

Vote Early, Vote Often

May 6, 2010 By Paola 6 Comments

Portrait Badge of Emmeline Pankhurst c. 1909 From the Museum of London.

Feeling bad today as for the first time in my adult life I’m not going to be voting in a UK Election – for some unfathomable reason we just forgot to register. I hope that Mrs Pankhurst, wherever she is, can find it in her heart to forgive me.

It’s made even worse because today is the first election I can remember where it really isn’t clear what the outcome is going to be, and so it is all rather exciting, though in a somewhat depressing way, as none of the candidates are particularly inspiring. Where is a Barack Obama when you need him?

Still we have the Prosecco on ice in the hopes that by tomorrow the rather unpleasant Gordon Brown will no longer be Prime Minister. (Champagne doesn’t seem appropriate given the parlous state of the British economy whoever gets in).

I’m going to be watching the all-night coverage via The Telly, worth hooking up to for any other British expats out there.

Traditional English Apricot Flapjacks

April 19, 2010 By Paola 12 Comments

or possibly the best flapjack recipe in the world.

These are what I made for the Food Bloggers’ Bake Sale. I chose them because they’re quick and easy, as English as the Queen (no bake sale in the UK would be complete without flapjacks, in fact the Queen probably has her own ‘go to’ recipe) but would probably be a novel taste experience for an American audience.

I believe that in the US a ‘flapjack’ is a type of pancake, but in the UK a flapjack is a squidgy, chewy bar a bit like a granola bar, full of oats and redolent with sugar and butter.

Their unique taste comes from the addition of ‘golden syrup’, a traditional British cane sugar syrup with a distinctive buttery flavour. It’s becoming increasingly available in the US and we have found it here in Seattle at Metropolitan Market, Cost Plus World Market and at British food stores.

If you buy some it’s also absolutely delicious on pancakes and porridge as well as being used for lots of other traditional British recipes such as treacle tart. You could substitute corn syrup, honey or molasses at a pinch, but your flapjacks won’t taste quite the same.

This recipe comes from my mother-in-law by way of Waitrose I think (some British supermarket anyway) which I’ve adapted for American measures and temperatures etc. The thing I like about it is the inclusion of not-so-traditional sweetened condensed milk, which definitely ups the sticky squidgy factor.

Ingredients

1 1/2 sticks/6oz/170g unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups/6oz/170g soft brown sugar

2 tablespoons golden syrup

2 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk

4 cups/12oz/340g rolled (old fashioned) porridge oats

6 oz/170g chopped dried apricots

Method

Line a 13” x 9” pan with baking parchment and grease the paper with butter.

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C/Gas Mark 4.

In a saucepan gently heat the butter, sugar, golden syrup and condensed milk, until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved.

Stir the chopped apricots into the oats until they’re evenly distributed and then stir in the sugary, buttery, syrupy liquid until all the oats are evenly coated.

Press the mixture into your prepared pan. There’s no need to press down too hard, but make sure the top is even.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. At the end your flapjacks will be slightly more golden, but won’t look much different from when they went into the oven.

Leave them to cool in the pan, then cut into 12-15 servings and devour.

Flapjacks are very tolerant creatures, so go to town with variations and additions. Try different dried fruits (raisins are very often used), nuts and seeds, coconut, glace cherries or even chocolate chips .

We had to wrap our offerings as well. Flapjacks are not the most aesthetically beautiful things (the pleasure is all in the munching) so I wrapped them with baking parchment sealed with Happytape (yes, the Husband took the anvil-sized on blog hint for Valentines Day).

Oh, and as predicted Megan Not Martha was the star of the bake sale with these.

Bloggers Bake Sale for Share Our Strength

April 15, 2010 By Paola 4 Comments

On Saturday I, and a number of other much more famous Seattle food bloggers, such as NotMartha, Cakespy and Gluten Free Girl, will be donating baked items to the Food Bloggers bake sale. Megan NotMartha will apparently be upstaging us all with a secret something baked in jars. I will be contributing something very, VERY British.

Details:

When: April 17, 2010
10:am -12:pm

Where:
Metropolitan Market Uptown
100 Mercer Street
(free parking available)

What: Cookies, Cakes and baked goods made by Seattle food bloggers
Recipes will be available too.

Why:
Nearly 17 million— almost one in four—children in America face hunger. Despite the good efforts of governments, private-sector institutions and everyday Americans, millions of our children still don’t have daily access to the nutritious meals they need to live active, healthy lives. More information on SOS can be found at Share Our Strength.

The Seattle bake sale has been organised by Keren of FranticFoodie and if you can’t make it to Met Market in Seattle, then there are bake sales being organised throughout the US by Gaby of What’s Gaby Cooking.

Just running out the door to get rolled oats. British readers I bet you can guess what I’m baking!

Small But Perfectly Formed

January 20, 2010 By Paola Leave a Comment

As you may have noticed I’ve become slightly obsessed by all things tiny and dollshousy recently, so I was thrilled and delighted to see a dolls house, would you believe, get a full editorial spread in last month’s Elle Deco UK.

Of course in order to hold its own against the fabulous full size apartments on show, this was of course no ordinary dolls house. It’s a pretty vintage 1960s house full of lovingly collected vintage furniture and showcasing miniature versions of designer Deborah Bowness’s handprinted trompe l’oeil wallpapers, put together by Bowness and her friend Emily Chalmers of East London vintage store Caravan.

I sort of want to move in immediately.

Fancy Hotel of the Week – the Scarlet

December 9, 2009 By Paola 3 Comments

A UK friend of mine and occasional blog commenter stayed a couple of weeks back at this brand new hotel in Cornwall and thought I would love it as much as she did. And from the pictures she was right. We used to go down to Cornwall nearly every year when we lived in the UK and it’s another place I miss horribly. I MUST get to this hotel sooner rather than later as it looks amazing (though annoyingly it doesn’t appear to take kids).

The building itself is a fabulous purpose built affair, making the most of sea views and built to the highest eco-standards by architects Harrison Sutton.

This is the wonderful bar area. Love the colours and the mix of chunky wood and leather.

Like the seating and the low hanging lamps, though wonder if they’d be annoying if you were actually in the bed.

Pretty colours, though the big wooden boat is a bit of a Cornish cliche. Kelly Wearstler should look here to see a more successful use of statuary though.

More lovely colours, prints and unusual lampshades in the library and lobby.

And everywhere fabulous sea views. Why are there no hotels like this close to Seattle? Cornwall does actually remind me of the Pacific Northwest a lot. Maybe I should open one.

{All images from The Scarlet’s website. Check out more from their gallery here. And they have quite an interesting blog here about the trials and tribulations of building a hotel. Interiors by Max Bentheim Interior Design}