Gruyere Cheese Risotto

This sounds like overkill, and I will admit that it is rather rich, but that makes this perfect comfort food, think of it as the more elegant cousin of mac & cheese.

There is a misconception that making risotto is challenging, that it requires skill or talent, this couldn't be any further from the truth, what it does take is time. Yes, it does require almost constant stirring, but very little concentration, and I find there to be something quite soothing and therapeutic about the constant stirring, it can be immensely relaxing after a long day.

Melt a large knob of butter, with a little vegetable oil to stop it burning, in a large frying pan, and cook some spring onions until soft and translucent. Add the arborio rice to the pan and keep stirring for around a minute. Add some wine and a teaspoonful of mustard, and let the wine cook down until it has been absorbed by the rice

Make up the vegetable or chicken stock, and turn up the heat under the rice. Add the stock to the frying pan, and stir the rice until the liquid is absorbed. You can either make up the stock in a saucepan and add it with a ladle, or you can make the stock in a jug, and pour it in. I prefer the latter, but both methods are perfectly acceptable.

Keep stirring in the stock until it has all been absorbed and the rice is tender, this should take about 20 minutes. When the rice is cooked through remove it from the heat, and add the cheese, folding it into the rice until all the cheese has melted.

Serve on warmed plates or bowls, sprinkled with a little chopped chive if wished.

ingredients

1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 finely sliced spring onions
300g arborio rice
125ml white wine
1/2 teaspoon french mustard
1 litre hot vegetable or chicken stock
125g chopped gruyere cheese
chopped fresh chives (optional)

Chicken and Bacon Pie

I am always looking to try new recipes, and the genesis for this dish came from a leaflet my friend picked up at the supermarket. My mother has made pies like this for years, mostly using swiss chard or spinach, and a cheese, often mozzarella. This simple but comforting dish is almost embarrassingly easy, and makes a great standby supper.

This dish is similar to the pies my mother used to make but with a vaguely more complicated filling, though it is still fairly manageable. What is also great about this pie is that it can be made in advance and stored, ready to be cooked in the fridge. You can also make a vegetarian version of this pie, using quorn chicken and omitting the bacon, though you will need to add more liquid, as not only will the quorn not give out any liquid, on the contrary it will soak it up.

Start by preparing and dicing the chicken thighs, and chopping 4 rashers of streaky bacon, and browning them in a pan with a little olive oil and some thyme leaves.

When the chicken has browned add two tablespoons of plain flour, and stir vigorously until the flour has combined with the juices. Pour in some white wine and allow it to bubble for a few minutes.

Dice the mushrooms and make up your chicken stock, add both to the pan and allow it to simmer until the sauce has thickened and the mushrooms are tender. At this point the chicken should be cooked through and there should be no pink. Remove from the heat and add the creme fraiche, stirring to combine.

While the filling is simmering roll out the puff pastry to slightly larger than your dish and cut a cross in the middle to let the steam escape. Ladle the pie filling into an ovenproof dish, and cover with the pastry, folding the points of the cross over to make a square hole. Fold the excess pastry over to make a border and crimp the edge with a fork. Brush the pastry with milk.

Bake the pie in a 200 degree oven until the pastry is golden and crisp. Serve with mashed potatoes made by mashing peeled and boiled potatoes with the leftover creme fraiche, season well.

ingredients

olive oil
4 rashers smoked streaky bacon, chopped
6 boneless chicken thigh fillets, diced
2 sprigs thyme
2 tbsp plain flour
100ml white wine
300ml chicken stock
250g button mushrooms
4 tbsp creme fraiche
1 pack puff pastry
2 tbsp milk

Pesto Alla Trapanese

This is quite possibly the most traditionally italian dish I have ever written about, and the only changes I have made are to use ingredients commonly found outside of Italy.

This dish originated in Sicily, as so many great italian dishes do, and is essentially a sicilian version of pesto, which originates from Genoa. The basil of Pesto alla Genovese is substituted for tomatoes, and instead of pine nuts, almonds are used instead.

Start by cooking your pasta, you can make the sauce while this is cooking. I like linguine with pesto, but spaghetti will work just as well.

To make your sauce finely chop a small handful of salted roasted almonds. You can also use raw nuts, but I prefer the rich flavour and saltiness of these almonds, which are usually used as bar snacks.

Also chop a handful of sultanas and a few cloves of garlic, throw all of these into a small hand blender and add a large glug of olive oil and a healthy pinch of salt and pepper. Throw in a few teaspoons of capers, I absolutely adore these so I tend to add quite a lot. Finally add about half a can of chopped tomatoes, and blitz until the mixture has a smooth, fudgy texture.

Drain your pasta and add the sauce to the pasta in the saucepan, off the heat, stir to combine and to warm the sauce, and serve, topped with a basil leaf, if you wish.

This sauce is almost embarrassingly easy, and like all good pasta sauces, it can be made while the pasta is cooking. It is refreshingly different to pesto, having a more subtle flavor, and more body than Pesto alla Genovese.

ingredients

500g linguine
3 cloves garlic
1/2 can chopped tomatoes
25 grams sultanas
2 tablespoons capers
60ml olive oil
salt & pepper

Sausage Traybake

I can take absolutely no credit for this wonderful recipe, my friend Alice made it for me for the first time last week, and was entirely taken by it.

Traybakes are perfect for students as they are relatively cheap and very easy, given that you can basically put everything in the oven at the same time. This tray bake is a wonderful combination of flavours, and might even be able to convince the average student to eat a vegetable occasionally.

You can use pretty much whatever sausages you want for this, thyme and rosemary sausages work especially well. Even vegetarian sausages will work, though you may need to add some liquid to the tray if you do this.

Start by roughly dicing your potatoes, and put them in the bottom of the pan with some olive oil and seasoning, stirring to coat the potatoes. Prick the sausages lightly with a fork and coat them in oil, strip rosemary needles from the stalk and crush a few cloves of garlic and sprinkle them over the potatoes and sausages. Roast in the oven on a medium heat until the sausages have browned slightly.

Peel a red onion and slice it into eighths, sprinkle it over the sausages, and return the tray to the oven. Finally dice some button mushrooms and add them to the tray with some cherry tomatoes and a little more oil, until the sausages have cooked through and have browned, and the potatoes are soft in the middle.

Ingredients

9 sausages (or 3 per person)
300g potatoes, diced
1 red onion
200g button mushrooms
a handful of Cherry Tomatoes
olive oil
salt & pepper

Macaroni & Marmite

You will either love or hate this recipe, and thankfully I love it. There is something about this salty umami dish that I find intensely comforting. Like most of the dishes here, it is almost embarrassingly fast to make, requiring you to only spoon a few ingredients over the pasta and melt it together.

The seed of this idea comes from an episode of Nigella Bites I watched months ago, probably whilst sprawled hungover on the sofa in a slightly stained silk kimono watching food network. It is essentially just a riff on noodles in butter and cheese, with the addition of some yeast extract.

The first step is to cook your pasta, according to the packet instructions, when your pasta is cooked drain and return it to the hob with the heat off and add about a tablespoon of marmite and a large knob of butter, and stir together until both have melted and combined.

Grate in a little parmesan allowing it to melt and then stirring it into the hot sauce. Serve and top with a little more grated parmesan.

ingredients

150g Macaroni
1 large tablespoon Marmite, or to taste
1 large knob of butter
4 tablespoons grated parmesan

A British Institution

Cooking a roast dinner can be fairly challenging, and I give great amounts of kudos to all the women (or men) all over the British Isles who cook a sunday roast every single week, for it is no mean feat.

I have been meaning to cook a sunday roast with my friends ever since I moved back to the UK over a year ago, and this week I finally got round to it. The real challenge of a roast is making sure that everything is ready at the same time.

The first thing you should cook is your protein, we opted for chicken, stuff the chicken with a lemon, that has been skewered with a knife and with a few thyme stalks, and top with thyme sprigs, oil, and salt and pepper, massaging the oil into the bird.

Prep your veg. Quarter and parboil the potatoes, cooking them until they are still firm, but are almost cooked through. Toss the potatoes, and other root vegetables in oil and seasoning, and cook them separately in the same oven as the bird.

Now you can turn your attention to your green veg, I cooked broccoli and green beans, separate the broccoli into florets, top and tail the green beans, and set them aside ready for cooking later. Around now you can start making your yorkshire puddings, I have already detailed how to make the perfect yorkshire puddings here.

Finally, you just need to cook your green veg, and make your gravy. Lightly steam the broccoli florets until they are tender and cooked through. Cook the green beans in lightly salted boiling water, and when they are cooked drain them, and add a large knob of butter to the pan and a few cloves of crushed garlic, stirring until the butter has melted and been infused with the hot pungent garlic.

Finally, make your gravy, you can do this one of two ways, if there are no pan juices, you can just use granules, which will make a perfectly fine gravy, or you can deglaze the pan in which the chicken was cooked.

Add the drippings with a little white wine. Slake a little flour with some stock and add it to the pan. Reduce over a medium heat, whisking in some stock if needed, until you have a thick and luscious gravy.

Getting everything adequately cooked, and ready at the same time is no mean feat, luckily the only items which require any precision are the chicken and the yorkshire puddings, with everything else you have a fair amount of leniency.

All thats left is to enjoy this british institution, perhaps with a glass of chilled chardonnay and a board game.

ingredients

1 chicken

oil

salt & Pepper

A few sprigs of thyme

1 lemon

1 kg potatoes

500g green beans, trimmed

1 kg parsnips

1 head of broccoli

1 recipe yorkshire puddings

The Perfect Yorkshire Pudding

My grandmother always made wonderful yorkshire puddings, light and crispy they are a must with any roast dinner, and are a quintessential comfort food for many people.

You'll have to forgive me the slightly hyperbolic title, of course there is no such thing as a perfect yorkshire pudding, everyone's tastes will be slightly different, but these are pretty good nonetheless.

There are a few secrets to follow when making yorkshire puddings, and if you follow these you should have no trouble making them, and your puddings should rise every single time.

Start by making your batter, this is very simple as it contains basically three ingredients. Eggs, milk and flour, with a dash of salt. Recipes vary on how many eggs to use, I say that 2 eggs for about 12 yorkshire puddings is right, not too rich, but enough to give them lift.

My first tip is to let the batter rest before you cook it. About half an hour minimum, what I generally do is make the batter before I start cooking a roast, and leave it in the fridge until it needs cooking, this usually gives it about an hour of resting.

Fill the wells of a muffin tin with about a centimetre of sunflower oil, or alternatively with beef dripping. My second tip is to heat the fat in the tin until it gets really really hot, and starts to smoke. It needs to be so hot that when the batter is poured in it starts to bubble and spit, and rises up the sides of the wells.

Put the tray with the batter into a hot oven, for 20 minutes. My third tip is to leave the oven door closed until they are fully cooked otherwise they will start to sink, the batter will fill with grease and they won't become crisp.

Remove them from the tray with a fork, and serve with a roast, filled with gravy.

ingredients

115g plain flour
pinch of salt
2 medium eggs, beaten
290ml milk
vegetable oil or dripping for cooking

Pasta with Deconstructed Pesto

This is a great pasta dish to make for a late night supper in summer, when you have really fresh basil. So it is without irony that I made this dish last on a cold and rainy february evening.

The concept of this dish, is that it contains all of the same ingredients as pesto, but rather than blending them, they are added to the cooked pasta individually and the flavours are allowed to meld for a few moments.

The great advantage of this dish is that it takes no time to prepare, you can literally prepare the ingredients for the sauce while the pasta is cooking.

Start by cooking your pasta, I prefer to use macaroni for this dish, but you could also use penne or fusilli. While the pasta is cooking roughly chop some fresh basil and sprinkle it with salt. Peel and chop or crush 2 large cloves of garlic.

Drain the pasta when it's cooked and return it to the hot pan off the heat, add the basil and about 2 tablespoons of good quality olive oil stirring to combine, add a small handful of pine nuts to the pan and grate in some parmesan, stirring until it combines to form a cohesive sauce.

Serve steaming hot, preferably curled up on the sofa, topped with more parmesan and some freshly ground black pepper.

Ingredients

150g pasta
30g fresh basil roughly chopped
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons of freshly grated parmesan plus more to garnish
a small handful of pine nuts
salt & pepper to taste

French Onion Soup

This is one of my favorite soups, and one of my favorite recipes to make. It truly does have a great wow factor, and is wonderful served either as a starter, or alternatively as a lunch. Personally I find that there are few things more luxurious or more simple than sitting down in the living room of my parents house in Paris on a rainy afternoon, rain lashing on the veranda with a bowl of warming onion soup.

My recipe is very simple, some recipes add alcohol or vinegar to the stock, some even add bacon changing the nature of the dish entirely. It is also possible to top the soup with a poached egg as is often done in belgium, however here I prefer to top the soup with the more traditional gruyere toast.

This recipe should feed around four people. To start off finely chop a whole kilo of onions and fry them in a generous quantity of butter, sprinkling them with a generous amount of salt to ensure that they don't brown too deeply. When they have softened and turned slightly translucent cover with 500ml of stock, you can either use vegetable stock, though beef stock is traditionally used (and no, I don't and have never made my own stock).

Simmer for 15 minutes until the flavours have mellowed and the stock has darkened. While the soup is simmering, thickly slice a baguette and place it under the grill on a baking tray until it has toasted lightly, flip and toast the other side. When the soup has simmered ladle it into ovenproof bowls and top with the toast. Top with grated gruyere cheese (though you could also use emmental or cheddar) and place under the grill until the cheese has melted and browned.

I must credit my mother for providing the recipe and I will confess that I don't often make it at home, as my version pales in comparison to hers, which uses fat white onions from the garden, and crusty french bread direct from the bakery, however don't let that put you off making this classic dish, one of the simplest soups to make, and wonderfully comforting and warming.

Ingredients:

1kg Onions
50g unsalted butter
500ml stock
1 baguette
200g Gruyere Cheese

Pea & Leek Pasta Risotto

This is a little gem of a recipe, and part of the reason that it is so wonderful is that everything that you need for this dish is non perishable, and will keep for at least a month in the fridge. This makes this a great standby dish. You will need a specific type of pasta for this recipe, often called orzo, which is often used in soup, and which is shaped similarly to large grains of rice. This pasta is cooked in a frying pan, rather than a saucepan, much like a risotto, but it has an advantage over risotto because it doesn't require stirring. I must credit Nigella Lawson for the inspiration behind this recipe, as I often do, which I have adapted slightly since I discovered it a couple of years ago.

Firstly chop your leek finely, and fry it in a scant amount of oil in a hot frying pan, seasoning lightly. Add two large handfuls of frozen peas to the pan, and stir allowing them to soften slightly in the hot oil. At this point, if you like you may add some pancetta, finely chopped to the pan, and allow it to brown. Pour the orzo pasta into the pan, and put the kettle on to boil, stirring the frying pan to mix. Add the boiling water to the pan and turn the heat down to a medium low heat.

After about ten minutes most of the water will have evaporated and the pasta will be tender, start stirring to ensure that the pasta doesn't stick and take the pan off the heat. Add a large knob of butter to the top of the pasta, and allow it to melt, making the pasta slight and glossy. Finally add some parmesan cheese and some freshly crushed pepper, stirring to combine.

I can't state enough how charming this recipe is, it's perfect for a weekday dinner curled up on the sofa and eaten out of a bowl in front of the television.

Ingredients

olive oil
1 leek
150g pancetta cubes (optional)
150g frozen peas
boiling water
250g Orzo pasta
salt & pepper (to taste)
parmesan cheese (to taste)
large knob of butter

Tarte Tatin

I'm not usually a fan of attempting french baking at home, I find it far too fiddly and complicated, and, given that my parents live in France, I am fortunately able to leave the delicacy of patisserie to the experts. I have little desire to whip egg whites to make macarons, when there is a man down the road who I can pay to do much the same thing, with a whole lot more finesse.

Tarte tatin is an upside down apple tart, in which the apples are slow cooked soaking in caramel, with a layer of crisp pastry above. The proportions of this recipe are relatively tricky, and it is challenging to get the tart with not too much caramel, but with enough apple and pastry. A trick I always follow, to get the right amount of pastry, and to get it thin enough, is to make a half batch of pastry, this ensures that you won't have left over pastry, and that it will be thin enough. You will also need to decide how dark you want your caramel, my parents love everything bitter, so I made my caramel very dark, if you prefer your caramel slightly paler, reduce the cooking time of the caramel.

Start by melting in a pan, the butter with the caster sugar, while this is melting together peel, core and halve your apples, and put them in a bowl with lemon zest and juice, and a little sugar, leave them to steep, by which time your caramel should be starting to brown. Turn off the heat under the caramel and place the apples in the pan round side down. Use a spoon to cover the apples in the caramel and put the pan in the oven.

Next make your pastry, and roll it out very thinly, the pastry should be more of a base for the apples, and not the main event, so fir this reason I use a simple unsweetened shortcrust pastry. Remove the apples from the oven and cover them gently with the pastry, working fast to not melt the butter, push the pastry into between the apples and bake it in a medium hot oven until the pastry is crisp and golden, and cooked through.

Turn the tart out onto a serving dish and serve when cooled.

Ingredients

For the Filling
6 Golden Delicious apples cored, peeled and halved
1 lemon, zested and juiced
1 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
pinch salt

For the Pastry
110g plain flour
50g butter
pinch salt

Linguine with Garlic Butter and Parsley

Bowl food is a particular passion of mine, and indeed most of my families. There is little better than curling up on the sofa or in bed with a steaming bowl of nourishment. The following recipe I first tried after a night out, and indeed it is perfect for curling up with in bed, still slightly inebriated.

This Nigella recipe is perfect should you find yourself going home alone at the end of a night out! This is truly comfort food at its best.

Start by putting your linguine to cook, then you can get on with making the sauce.

For the sauce start by peeling and crushing about 4 cloves of garlic. Of course you could use more or less as you prefer. Put the garlic in a cold saucepan with 50 grams of butter, and heat gently, making sure not to brown the butter or burn the garlic.

When the pasta is cooked retain a cup of the pasta cooking water, and drain the linguine. Tip the drained pasta back into the pan with the garlic and the butter, and add the starchy water, whisking it together to create a velvety sauce.

Next finely chop some fresh parsley, about a cupful, and add it to the pasta, stirring to combine, finally season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve, perhaps with a side of netflix.

ingredients

150g linguine
50g butter
4 cloves garlic
salt and pepper
1 cup of finely chopped parsley

Slow Roasted Tomato Cobbler

Cobbler can be used to refer to a variety of foods, in this case it refers to a cooked vegetable filling, covered with a savoury scone. In theory you can take this concept and apply it to virtually any filling and topping, however given that the scone topping is relatively dry, the filling needs to be relatively wet.

My mother first introduced me to this recipe a few weeks ago, and I was instantly rather taken with it, the flavours of herbes de provence, rich, sweet tomatoes and caramelized onions melded so fantastically together. When I arrived back in britain for the new term, I made the dish for my housemates.

I started by slow roasting the tomatoes, and yes, I was forced to roast them significantly faster than I would otherwise have liked to. This being january, the tomatoes pale in comparison to the ones from my parents garden, but they were delicious nonetheless. I put the tomatoes in a large earthenware dish, doused them with olive oil and salt & pepper and roasted them for a good hour and a medium-hot oven.

When the tomatoes are almost done, lightly fry a couple of onions until soft. In order to stop the onions from browning, season them lightly with salt. When they are cooked through, turn off the heat and add balsamic vinegar to the pan, reducing it to form a thick sauce, tossing the onions in the vinegar to coat them.

Remove the tomatoes from the oven, and cover with the onions, make the scones (recipe below) adding parmesan and herbes de provence and roll the mixture out to a 1/2 inch thickness. Cut out the scones using either a cookie cutter or a wine glass, and cover the onions with them. Brush the scones with an egg wash and cook the dish on a high heat for half an hour, or until the scones are risen and golden

Sticky Toffee Pudding

In his epic A la recherche des temps perdus, In search of lost time Marcel Proust describes how memories can be either voluntary or involuntary. Proust describes an episode in which the smell of a freshly baked madeline triggers a flashback. The same is ultimately also true of taste. And as in ratatouille how the feared food critic Anton Ego, is taken back to his childhood in rural france by the intense savour of a fresh ratatouille. Much the same thing recently happened to me.

I have vivid and fairly happy memories of being a young child, and one of my greatest pleasures was in microwave food, vegetable hot pot and microwave lasagne, followed by spotted dick or sticky toffee pudding. Soft melting sponge surrounded by a sweet, sticky caramel is truly one of the defining tastes of my childhood.

Sticky toffee pudding is a steamed pudding, of the kind which the english so often excell. Covered with a toffee sauce, it often requires cooking in a steamer, served with a toffee sauce. Nigella Lawson, who I adore, gives a no muss no fuss recipe, which is nothing short of revolutionary.

The sponge is a simple sponge, made with brown sugar, with the addition of some chopped dates, for extra moistness. The sponge is a simple wet into dry mix, I can't be bothered with the fussy creaming, sifting and folding which accompanies most cake recipes, and I've never really experienced any lighter sponge because of it. 

Once the dates have been folded into the sponge mixture, the batter is transferred into a large heatproof bowl, in the absence of said bowl, I instead divided my mixture between two le creuset soup bowls, for want of a better receptacle.

On top of the cake mixture I placed several lumps of butter, and some dark brown sugar, I enjoy using incredibly dark molasses sugar, but any moist brown sugar will work. I then put the bowl (or in my case bowls) into the oven, and fill them with recently boiled water, until the whole shebang is covered.

This recipe is truly a revelation, and as the sponge rises out of the sauce, becoming crisp and golden, the butter and sugar melds together without the need for so much as a whisk into a dark rich toffee sauce. The sponge remains gloriously moist thanks in part to the addition of dates, and to the sauce under which it is cooked.

I leave a list of ingredients below, and I strongly urge you to try this recipe, it truly is so simple to make, and the results are definitely worth what little effort there is involved. Steamed puddings are such an important part of our collective british baking heritage, that it is important to keep them alive, even if many of us would perish at the thought of steaming anything other than vegetables, this recipe is a nice compromise.

• Ingredients

• for the cake
• 100 grams dark brown muscovado sugar
• 175 grams self-raising flour
• 125 ml full fat milk
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 50 grams unsalted butter (melted)
• 200 grams chopped dates

for the sauce

• 200 grams dark brown muscovado sugar
• approx. 25 grams unsalted butter (in little blobs)
• 500 ml boiling water

Marrakech - A Culinary Odyssey

This week I visited Marrakech, and I fell in love. I've had a vision since I was seven, of walking through a market in morocco, and I finally made it come true. I will admit to not being especially passionate about moroccan food, unlike my parents, who are quite simply obsessed with it.

I arrived in Marrakech on tuesday night, having been delayed for two hours. We finally touched down on the tarmac to find the city being lashed with torrential rain, not exactly the weather I was looking for. We managed to hail a cab outside the airport, which is, incidentally the same airport where Sex and the City 2 was filmed, and made it to the hotel after a short dash through the streets of Marrakech which were swarming with mobylettes and beige coloured taxis.

After freshening up we walked to dinner, stumbling upon a small cafe a few streets from our hotel. The cafe was devoid of all tourists and filled with moroccans and smoke (yes you can smoke inside there). I ordered a pita and a virgin mary, as sadly the cafe didn't serve alcohol, as many places in Marrakech don't. The pita arrived on a metal contraption which resembled a keyboard stand and though the virgin mary was sadly lacking a splash of vodka, it was otherwise refreshingly salty and cool. I tucked into the pita with gusto, having eaten nothing but airplane food that day, except for a slice of banana bread that morning. The pita was fresh and thick, and the dressing was thankfully plentiful, I slept satisfied that night.

I got up early the next morning ready to explore the city, at breakfast there was a woman cooking fresh donuts in a large wok, taken still warm from the oil and tossed in sugar these are wonderful, and were a welcome start to the day.

Heading out into the sunshine I became embroiled in the hustle of the city. I stopped for a coffee outside the koutoubia mosque, enjoying the sun on my pasty british skin. Coffee in Marrakech is rarely brewed in the turkish was as is common in other parts of the middle east, however it is often served in a coffee cup without a handle, a style that is now being appropriated in trendy parts of Europe.

Moving on I walked past the koutoubia mosque to the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. There is no direct translation of Jemaa el-Fnaa into english, but it may be paraphrased as either the "congregation of the dead" or rather more poetically "the mosque at the end of the world". The square has historically been used for executions, and an underground prison actively remains beneath the square. Today however the square is mainly filled with orange juice vendors selling freshly squeezed juice for a mere few dirham, and tattoo artists offering henna tattoos.

Near the entrance of the square there were men with chained barbary apes on their shoulders, which should have been cute but was actually fairly repulsive.

I spent the rest of the morning wandering the souk, being propositioned by vendors and bartering for tea sets and tajines. I found a sunny corner of the square and spent a few hours eating couscous with mixed vegetables. The couscous was yellow with saffron and fluffed, and the vegetables were fresh and tender. After lunch I had a cup of mint tea, hot and sweet and refreshing. Mint tea is almost addictive to moroccans and to the rest of the maghreb, who drink is copiously after every meal. It is considered rude to refuse mint tea if it is offered to you when you are a guest.

I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and enjoying the hot african sun, before taking a tour of the city on a horse drawn cart, which litter the city in huge numbers. Our driver took us on a tour of the old walls of the city, and in spite of the cars and mopeds swarming around us, it was remarkably peaceful.

The next day it was time for round two, at breakfast a woman was making moroccan pancakes, she stretched them out with her hands, folded them over and cooked them on a griddle, flipping them with her bare hands with an impressive agility and dexterity.

I was hoping to see a snake charmer, and whilst in theory there is something magical and mystical about snake charmers, in reality a grown man walking towards you waving a large poisonous snake is fairly intimidating.

After having a sandwich for lunch, I decided to go to the Jardins Majorelle, once owned by Yves Saint Laurent the gardens are a beautiful oasis in the heart of a rather rough neighbourhood. The garden is calm and still, and it made a welcome break from the exuberant chaos of Marrakech.

Having had my fill of peace I took a horse drawn carriage back to the hotel, ready to sleep and recuperate for my flight tomorrow. Upon leaving Marrakech I can't wait to return to the spice, the heat and the bustle. Marrakech, shukran.

Red Lentil and Lemon Soup

There are few things as comforting or as nourishing in the dead of winter as a bowl of warm soup, with bread and cheese to soak up the excess. This morning with little else to do I decided to spend my time pottering around the kitchen making soup for lunch, which is an oddly perfect way to spend a tranquil monday morning.

My mother had recommended to me a soup featured in the New York Times some months earlier, but I find making soup only for myself a terrible bother, and I always end up making too much, and eating it three meals a day for the next week.

I started by lightly sweating some onions and garlic in a large saucepan. When I’m staying with my parents I generally use a cast iron Le Creuset pan for making soup, they allow an incredible diffusion of heat, ensuring that nothing sticks, and you can put them in the oven, so they are great for casseroles. Yes they are pricey, but the one I am currently using was bought over two decades ago, and is still going strong today.

Another tip I always follow when cooking garlic, is to add it to the pan while the oil is still cold, and to heat the garlic and oil up together, this ensures that the garlic won’t burn as easily, and nothing ruins a dish more easily than burnt, acrid and bitter garlic.

After sweating these down I stirred in a little tomato paste and some spices, I always sweat tomato puree in the pan for a few minutes, and I find this helpful to rid it of some of its acidity. Then I stirred in cumin, slightly bruised in a pestle and mortar, salt and pepper and cayenne. For more exact measurements see the recipe below.

Finally I added diced carrots and stock, bringing the mixture to a rolling boil before adding red lentils and turning down the heat.

Some cooks loathe the idea of a thin blended soup, and I tend to agree with them in most cases, the vast majority of soups should be a little chunky, and this soup is no exception. So I remove half of the soup and blend it, leaving the rest untouched, and pouring the liquidized soup back into the pan and combining.

The soup is best served hot with both lemon juice and zest, with a little chopped fresh coriander. It was delicious, with the lemon providing freshness and brightness, and the spices creating a beautiful warmth underneath. I have in the past found red lentil soups to be rather gloopy and challenging, but this soup is warming, fresh and fragrant. The recipe in full can be found below.

Ingredients:

• Olive oil, for frying
• 1 large onion
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• salt & pepper to taste
• pinch of cayenne
• 2 pints chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 cup of red lentils
• 1 large carrot, diced
• juice and zest of 1/2 lemon
• 3 tablespoons of chopped coriander

Method

• Sweat the garlic and onion in a little olive oil, and add the tomato paste and spices, stirring with a wooden spoon
• Add the diced carrot and the stock to the pan, and mix in the red lentils, simmering the mixture until the lentils are cooked and the carrots are tender
• Before serving grate the zest of a 1/2 lemon and add the juice, and season to taste
• Serve garnished with chopped fresh coriander and with fresh bread