I’ve been busy lately. Real busy. But I’m pleased to say I found time for a little R&R in Devon, or South Devon to be precise, which is in many senses my homeland.

Trips down to Devon in the autumn are about windswept walks with the dog along the beach, driving over fog-topped moorland, the smell of woodfire smoke pumping out the chimneys of thatched cottages and, of course, food.

Here are a few snaps of the kind of food I love to treat myself with down in Devon. It’s hearty, homely and guilt-free if you consider all the walking that gets done in the wild outdoors of the Westcountry. Why hold back?

What's a trip to Devon without a cream tea?

Or a tankard of cider, for that matter?

Fish mezze by the river - whitebait, battered squid and juicy prawns

A Halloween hog roast on the moors

Sea bream's a must when it appears on the specials board

Colourful vegetarian food at a cosy hippie cafe

Sunday roast: Pork with carefully positioned crackling

Sunday roast: Lamb with red wine jus

I know it doesn't look it but this treacle sponge was so light as to be almost dainty

Don't underestimate the humble trifle: Boozy sponge, tangy raspberries and that combo of custard and cream - I'd have died happy

(You might notice that I haven’t told you where I was eating. As mean spirited as this may sound, I’ve done this on purpose. It’s great to share, but some things have to be off limits, kept for myself. Plus, I don’t have to feel too bad about it — it’s not hard to eat well in South Devon.)

It’s cold and you want a warm dessert, but you’re poor. What do you do?

Why, bake some fruit, of course!

Except it doesn’t have to be as plain Jane as throwing some cored cooking apples in the oven. Also, poor is relative, this recipe featuring amaretti biscuits that I bought from Waitrose.

(I’ve pretty much undermined the whole premise of my introduction now, haven’t I?)

Another excellent thing about this recipe for baked peaches is the book it was inspired by. I’ve got more to say on that subject, but it’s worthy of a post all of its own. In the meantime, if you’re curious here’s a hint: the Association for the Guardianship and Exploitation of the Traditional Culinary-Gastronomic Heritage of Italy. Catchy, huh?

These peaches don’t need to be served with cream or ice cream, they’ve got several layers of flavour making them a rich and fulfilling experience all by themselves — the sweet amaretti, the bitterness of the chocolate and the fragrant orange.

The recipe says it serves six, but if it were only to serve three would that be such a pity? I suppose it depends how poor you are.

Chocolate and amaretti baked peaches

Printable recipe

Serves 6

7 medium peaches
2 heaped tablespoons of sugar
50g butter
4-5 amaretti biscuits
1 egg yolk
100g dark chocolate
½ cup of orange juice

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Wash the peaches and dry them. Cut six of the peaches into halves leaving the peel on. Remove the stones.

Scoop out some of the flesh from each of the peach halves and put it in a bowl. Peel the seventh peach and add its flesh to the bowl. Place the hollowed peach halves in an oven-proof dish greased with 20g of butter.

Add to the peach flesh the sugar, 30g of butter, the crumbled amaretti biscuits and the egg yolk. Mix together using a hand blender until a slightly lumpy mixture has formed.

Fill the hollowed peach halves with the mixture. Add a small piece of dark chocolate to the top of each filled peach half. Tip the orange juice over and around the peaches.

Place the peaches in the oven for around an hour. The dish can be served hot or cold.

I used to live with a vegan. It’s really not as bad as it sounds.

I used to be vegetarian myself so don’t tend to feel cheated if I’m sitting down to a meal that doesn’t contain meat, which is one of the reasons why, although no longer bound by anyone’s self-imposed dietary constraints, I still make this vegan version of bolognese sauce every so often.

Okay, so it’s not a patch on the real ragù, the meaty slow-cooked sauce we Brits have developed a tradition for serving with spaghetti, even though it’s better suited to a thicker pasta to give the meat something to cling to. Tagliatelle is what they tend to use in the sauce’s birthplace Bologna, which also happens to be my girlfriend’s hometown, hence the need to be making vegan bolognese (of all things) in the first place.

What I like about this dish is that it’s a lot quicker to cook than the traditional bolognese sauce, with a cooking time of up to a half an hour vs. many an hour for a flavoursome meat sauce. With the vegan version you’ve got a few more herbs doing the work for you in terms of developing the taste. I also like this recipe because the lentils have a stick-to-your-ribs quality — which is great for warming up as the nights draw in — without weighing on your stomach the way meat can.

On this occasion I went with some super-wide strips of artisanal pasta with coloured lines running through it, courtesy of my mother. Very special occasion, even if it was just a regular Saturday afternoon. It worked well, but then you can’t really go wrong if you’re using something thicker than spaghetti (even penne will do) and you’ve gotten the lentils cooked just right. Having eaten a fair few vegan meals in my time, this really is one of the most flavoursome dishes I’ve come across. And the credit goes to my girlfriend for developing the recipe.

Vegan tagliatelle alla bolognese

Printable recipe

Serves 4

• Four shallots, finely chopped
• One large or two small cloves of garlic, finely chopped/crushed
• One large or two small carrots, grated
• Two celery sticks, finely chopped
• A handful of fresh sage, finely chopped
• A handful of fresh rosemary, finely chopped
• One tin of chopped tomatoes
• 100g red lentils
• 500ml vegetable stock
• A little tomato paste
• Salt and pepper to taste
• A little olive oil
• A splash of red wine
• 450-500 g tagliatelle (or another shape of pasta that will hold the thick sauce — tortiglioni, penne, conchiglie, zite etc.)

Shallow fry the garlic in oil on a low flame until the garlic turns golden. Add the shallots, carrots and the celery, turning the heat up a little, and allow them to cook together for a bit. Then add the sage and rosemary. Allow everything to cook until the vegetables soften.

Add the lentils with stock. After a minute or so, add the chopped tomatoes. Bring the flame up to medium. After about ten minutes, you can put the pasta on to cook in salted boiling water. Keep stirring the sauce, adding vegetable stock to the lentils and vegetables mix if it starts drying out. Add salt and pepper if you think it’s needed and tomato paste if necessary.

The sauce should take around 20 minutes in total to cook. Towards the end of its cooking time, add a bit of red wine and bring the flame higher to let it cook off. Drain the pasta when it’s al dente, throw it in with the sauce and mix it all together.

Serve accompanied by a Tuscan or Emilia-Romagna red, for example San Giovese Superiore or Montepulciano.

When you come across an Italian restaurant full of Italians in London, it’s generally a good sign. But what about when those Italians all have London guidebooks resting on the table alongside them? These are people who have travelled to London to eat at a restaurant they could easily visit in their own backyard, seeing as Neopolitan pizza chain Rossopomodoro has restaurants in around 30 Italian cities. Can we trust the opinions of people with such closed culinary minds?

Well, yes and no. One thing is for sure — Rossopomodoro knows how to make pizza.

We tried the Verduretta, which came with an assortment of grilled veg, mozzarella, basil and parmesan as a topping. It was delicious. The courgettes and peppers were perhaps pre-grilled so rich were they in flavour, but it was the base that made it a very special pizza.

It says on the menu that attention to detail in terms of pizza-making extends to using water imported from Naples (the birthplace of pizza) to make the dough. A large wood-fired oven dominates the open kitchen, resplendent in gold mosaic, the smell of smouldering wood wafting out over the diners every so often. Benefitting from both high quality ingredients and traditional preparation, the base was possibly the best I’ve tasted.

From the dizzying heights of pizza perfection to the shocking low of the other main meal we ordered. Perhaps it wouldn’t have felt like such a low had the pizza not been so good? Actually no, I’m pretty sure it would still have felt like a low.

Pictured above is the Rossopomodoro, featuring buffalo cacciottella cheese, egg, olives and rocket. I ordered it keen to taste a new cheese and excited by the prospects of a tasty salad made by a restaurant obviously keen on creating food using quality produce if its dedication to pizza was anything to go by. A restaurant has to be proud of a dish that it names after itself, right? Oh, how wrong I can be.

My first taste was one of the tomatoes — watery. Then the cheese — salty and rubbery, not to mention a bad match with the eggs. By the time I’d finished (I was hungry) all that was left was a puddle of water, presumably where the salad had been washed and not dried off.

Other things disturbed me about Rossopomodoro. The slow and inattentive service shouldn’t have been so after the lunchtime rush at 3pm when we visited. A second round of drinks never arrived. The crockery was gaudy and interfered with the presentation of the food, which in itself was amateurish (see the ‘A Tiella fried starter above).

The pizza I would happily eat again. The starter was tasty, too, but you probably won’t catch me at Rossopomodoro for a return visit. Even if I was after a really great pizza, there are other pizzarie in London that I’d sooner try — Spaccanapoli and Franco Manca, for example — than go back to this chain.

We paid £30 for one starter, two main courses, one drink and service. There are two other branches of Rossopomodoro in London, in Chelsea and in Notting Hill.

Where?
50 Monmouth Street, WC2

Tube
Leicester Square

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but please, try the bulgogi.

If you’re not familiar with Korean table-top barbecues (and I wasn’t until last week), bulgogi is barbecued marinated meat, in this case beef. It was my second visit to Myung Ga in a week, that’s honestly how good I thought it was.

And it wasn’t just the sumptuous bulgogi in all its sauce and juices, it was also the fact that the staff were friendly and helpful, ready to advise when my friend and I sat staring blankly at the menu, wondering how many dishes would feed two people.

I tried sirloin, pork and tiger prawns on the barbecue. Nothing beat the bulgogi, wrapped in fresh lettuce and accompanied by cold, spicy buckwheat noodles, cut with scissors because of their tendency to cling together. Juice ran down my fingers and into my sleeve. Was I even meant to be eating with my hands?

Myung Ga is the third Korean restaurant I’ve ever visited. The first, in Paris, made me ill. The second, Woo Jung by Centre Point, was hit and miss. Myung Ga was spot on. I’m a Korean food convert, and I don’t even like meat that much. But I do like bulgogi.

Where?
1 Kingly Street, W1

Tube:
Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus

I feel ridiculous but I’m going to be honest — it’d been over a year that I’d been meaning to try Chinatown’s Baozi Inn. I first heard about this cosy Szechuan/Beijing street food café after Time Out gave it a good review.* When I saw that other bloggers concurred it went on my Must Try list. Somehow, despite multiple trips into Soho and Chinatown for lunch and dinner, that’s how Baozi Inn remained, on my Must Try list.

Maybe I knew what was coming? Or maybe I liked Jen Café and their handmade dumpling window too much to tear myself away? I think I got into a vicious cycle of leaving it so long that it didn’t seem to matter if I left it a bit longer…

And then, for no reason I am able to fathom, I broke the curse and arranged to meet a friend for dinner at Baozi Inn.

For a Chinatown eatery Baozi Inn’s kitsch in a funky way with its cascade of red lanterns glowing in the window and garlands of plastic vegetables strung from the walls. That it’s cramped is no surprise given the low price of the food. We arrived towards the end of the evening so missed out on having to queue, but the service showed no sign of slowing with our first dish — a pretty three sliver salad of kelp, carrot and thread noodles — showing up on our table within three minutes of having ordered it.

In addition to the salad we took two bowls of noodles and a plate of Dragon Dumplings from what I felt was a limited menu offering just a handful of options under the headings of Noodles, Rice and so on.

We tucked into the pre-prepped salad as soon as it arrived and found it to be fresh and flavoursome, offering only as an afterthought a hint of the chilli kick I’ve come to associate with Szechuan food. Next came the pork and aubergine noodles with a sauce so syrupy and umami-rich that I had difficulty savouring either the aubergine or the pork. The noodles were thick and well-prepared, separating easily but not too al dente, but the serving of sauce compared to the serving of noodles was miserly.

While the dan dan noodles suffered less from sauce shortage, they did present their own problems. The pork and aubergine dish may have bashed me over the head with its richness, but the dan dan noodles were pretty underwhelming. They packed less chilli than the salad while the pork was on the dry side.

The bowl of dumplings we chose took the longest to arrive, the tenderness of their skins testifying that they had been freshly made. They were tasty, but really not a patch on those made in the window across the street at Jen Café.

You know where this is going, don’t you? That’s right — I’d waited so long, but ultimately Baozi Inn was a disappointment.

Maybe we ordered wrong (the rice dishes we saw coming out looked like the offered more variety). Maybe by waiting so long the sparkle that goes with trying somewhere truly new that people are buzzing about had worn off. Maybe Baozi Inn isn’t quite the same place it was a year ago? I’m not saying don’t go there, and I wouldn’t completely rule out going back (it’s always nice to expand my list of addresses where dinner for two comes in at £20), but there are other places around Chinatown and Soho where I feel more at home, where the menu is more extensive and where the food tastes better for little if any extra cost.

Where?
25 Newport Court, WC2

Tube
Leicester Square

* Notice how Urbanspoon says Time Out gives it 5/6 stars but when you click through it’s only got 3/5? Good on Time Out for keeping their scores up to date.

If you think that ham with melon is weird, that cheese and honey should never go together, or that the border between sweet and savoury should generally never be transgressed, please look away now because I am about to confirm what you really don’t want to hear — yes, that’s a picture of ice cream with ham on top. Melon cream gelato to be exact, sprinkled with pieces of Parma-style cured ham.

And while your gaze is transfixed in horror, here’s another one:

That one’s honey flavoured ice cream topped with lumps of pecorino cheese.

I’m mean, aren’t I?

Really though, I’d have had no idea of the revulsion such sweet/savoury, frozen/room temperature food combinations could incite if it hadn’t been for my partner in gelato crime for that visit to the ice cream parlour Scoop in Covent Garden. As I tucked into my tub of cheese and ice cream she watched me nose crinkled, mouth turned down into a grimace, her little plastic spoon of bright green After Eight flavoured gelato suspended on the way to her mouth.

“That — is disgusting.”

I urged her to try it. She refused, slowly shaking her head and fixing me in the eye as if I’d just been outed as having a hard drive full of kiddie porn.

Savoury gelato combinations are not for everyone, obviously. It was a hot sunny day and as usual the queue for Scoop was out the door and trailing down the pavement, but I only saw one other person taking a savoury option.

A feature in Italian foodie magazine Gambero Rosso a couple of months back had whet my appetite for unusual ice cream combinations. It had also lead me to imagine that the gelato would be both fig and salami flavour, for example, or that there would be a scoop of ham flavour and a scoop of melon flavour.

I can’t say I was disappointed upon discovering that this wasn’t the case at Scoop (I’m a pretty open minded kinda gal after all), but there was a drawback. For as long as I can remember I’ve suffered from sensitive teeth. Chewing and ice cream don’t generally go together so my dental issues have never really got between me and my love of frozen desserts.

However, this was one instance where I felt bereaved for not being able to sink my teeth in as sucking on percorino and Parma ham doesn’t  tend to release much flavour (I discovered).

Sucking away the ice cream and then chewing on the meat/cheese (is this too much information?) was enough to get an idea though. Scoop’s ice cream is so well realised, the flavours so purely rendered, that it was really very similar to eating quality plates of ham & melon/cheese & honey. So what’s the difference?

Other than the sucking-then-chewing, a weaker aroma from the melon and honey ice creams makes the flavours muted compared to their non-gelatified counterparts. On the other hand, the wildly different temperature and texture was less of a drawback and more of a thrill, like adding hot chilli to a meal — the experience becomes more visceral, something your body has to cope with rather than simply ingest.

As you can see from the list above, the combinations I didn’t get to try were fig cream and salami, plum cream and crispy bacon, and kiwi and prawn. I’d have loved to have tasted them all but alas two tubs was already too much for me, and with my companion having none of it there was no one else’s to nab (my usual trick).

I’m certain savoury gelato combinations are not going to become a regular feature at Scoop. Oddly though, if they were I think I might be partial to have one on occasion, being an established fan of sweet-n-savoury. Entirely savoury ice cream without a hint of sweetness, however — it’s something I would try but probably not want to indulge in too often. Then again, who knows? Maybe I underestimate just how broad my horizons are.

But if you’re happy underestimating the breadth of your horizons, you’ve not got an excuse to miss out on Scoop’s final summer special event on Saturday, September 19. They’ve called it ‘I Love Chocolate’ — need I say more?

Where?
40 Shorts Garden, WC2

Tube:
Leicester Square, Covent Garden

You know times are tight when I start posting about what I’m cooking at home. So tight in fact that when instead of toasting the almonds I burnt them, I carried on rather than throw half a bag of nuts in the bin.

Almonds are one of the ingredients that differentiate this Sicilian pesto recipe from its Ligurian cousin, the basil-based green Genovese pesto (where hazel and pine are the nuts of choice). Another is tomatoes. I’m sure there are some Italians who would argue that this pesto trapanese (pesto from the western Sicilian town of Trapani) isn’t pesto at all, the only true pesto being Genovese. After that much pestling, however, the muscles of my right arm begged to differ.

The recipe comes from I tesori della cucina siciliana, a little light reading picked up last year at Falcone Borsellino airport just outside Palermo. If you’re passing I recommend you pick up a copy (although they’d sold out of English translations at the time). The recipes are simple but authentic.

Handicapping any attempt to recreate Sicilian cooking in the UK is, of course, the quality of ingredients. I tried to compensate for this by using baby plum tomatoes rather than just plain old toms, because they usually at least taste of something. If only I hadn’t burnt those almonds. This is definitely a recipe I want to make again and improve upon, plus I’ll try not to tuck in before taking a photo next time.

Caserecce con pesto trapanese

For 4 people

400g pasta, caserecce or busiate

1kg mature tomatoes

4 cloves of garlic

100g almonds, peeled and toasted

1 bunch of basil

Extra virgin olive oil

Grate pecorino or parmesan

Salt, pepper

Wash the tomatoes and soak them in hot water for five minutes. Peel them, remove their seeds and chop them roughly.

Using a pestle and mortar crush the almonds into a paste with a pinch of salt in the mortar. Once crushed transfer them into a bowl and begin crushing the garlic and basil with a little added salt. Keep going until you achieve a homogenous paste.

Add the tomatoes and continue to crush the mixture in the pestle and mortar until the ingredients are well mixed. At this point, add the mixture to the almonds. Mix in a glass of oil, salt to taste, and a generous sprinkling of black pepper. Stir in and leave to stand for a couple of hours.

Cook the pasta al dente in salted water. Drain it and mix in the prepared sauce. Serve with grated pecorino.

I don’t have a car but if I did it would be a convertible. Until I get that payrise I can live the dream through the proud owners of a battered old Audi A80 Cabriolet who also happen to be my friends.

On a sunny August day we roadtripped from Clapham to Stoke Newington, south to north via Blackfriars Bridge. I leave you with a few visions of London as seen from the backseat, the beguiling beauty of which hopefully offsets any extra fuel spent travelling without an aerodynamic roof.

I know a girl called Harman. Seeing as we’re friends and we get on pretty well I think it follows that we’d have a few things in common. So when I texted her to say I’d spotted a restaurant that shares her name, she was completely on my wavelength. We both knew we had to eat there. After weeks of plotting, we chose a sunny Sunday afternoon to dine at at Harman, a Turkish/Mediterranean restaurant at the Archway end of Holloway Road.

I first saw Harman (not the girl, the restaurant! Ho ho, this never gets old) while visiting friends who live nearby. They came along too, happy to sample the food at this relatively new establishment, and soak up the relaxed and convivial vibe of leafy but trafficky Upper Holloway, which, for the record, is nothing like Central Holloway (large groups selling contraband cigarettes out of binliners in front of the Nag’s Head shopping centre) and pretty far from Lower Holloway (which is basically Highbury Corner. Hang on darling, are we in Islington?).

We never got round to telling the staff that they had a Harman eating at Harman (surely the fuss would be even better than when you tell a restaurant it’s someone at your table’s birthday?), probably because we were transfixed by a very ample selection of dishes on the menu, as well as a factoid explaining that ‘Harman’ means harvest in Turkish.

We decided to kick things off by trying something new. We chickened out of turnip juice and ordered two glasses of salep, which the menu described as a ‘traditional Turkish milk drink’. We asked for further clarification — our server told us salep was a ‘hot milkshake’. Hot it was, a milkshake it was not.

Other than the colour there was nothing particularly milky about it. Under the Trade Descriptions Act milk had to be in there somewhere, but the salep’s consistency was more synthetic gloop than Horlicks. The overwhelming impression the drink left on me, however, was Christmassy. It’s a pretty spicy concoction.

As far as food was concerned, we each went for a starter and a main, the idea of ordering a ton of starters/mezze having been vetoed on the grounds of people being too hungry to just pick. In retrospect it’s a shame we passed up that opportunity because Harman’s food turned out to be good and I’d have liked to have tasted more. Their mezze/starter list is extensive. Next time.

I took fried courgette cake or mucver to start. For a starter it was a hearty dish — two cakes covered in a light tomato sauce, a very edible side salad and a generous helping of yoghurt topped with chilli sauce. The cakes were tasty and well cooked, nice and springy, but there were a lot of flavours going on and if I’m honest it was the chilli/yoghurt combo that made it for me, uncouth glutton that I am. The cakes were completely overpowered.

My palate having been opened to the possibilities of stuffed veg while in Turkey at the beginning of the year I chose pepper dolma for my main. Three green peppers came stuffed with aromatic rice, pine nuts and blackcurrants served with another crunchy and colourful side salad plus generous helpings of homemade (hence profusion thereof) yoghurt and a different chilli sauce (much like a salsa, visible front right in the photo above) served table side from two large bowls.

The yoghurt was particularly good, the chilli sauce fiery in that big green chilli way, but unlike the courgette cakes the pepper dolma were no push over. Strong herbs and spices flavouring the rice held their own with the texture of the pine nuts offering a welcome contrast, while the blackcurrants added a fruity lift as well as nice visuals.

Really though I should have waited till dessert to get all excited about presentation.

Okay, so it’s not exactly the pinnacle of edible sculpture. But we ended up paying £15 a head for a three course meal with more than one drink each (not to mention readily available tap water). I didn’t expect my stewed fruit with pistachio and chocolate to come out so well dressed for that for that kind of price. Considering the description mentioned cream, chocolate and nuts, the pear was actually quite a light dessert. Again lots of tastes on one plate, and a resurfacing of synthetic with the chocolate and berrie sauces, but the pear and pistachio tasted genuine enough.

I wouldn’t advise travelling from the other end of town to visit Harman (unless she’s expecting you), but if you’re in the area it’s definitely worth checking out, whether for a snack, for lunch, for a coffee or even for dinner. There are tables and chairs outside (although few roads in London are as busy as Holloway Road), the service is relaxed and friendly, and there’s plenty of space indoors. Prices are more than reasonable and food is fair-to-good. My Archway friends are lucky to have such an establishment on their doorstep. When I finally find my namesake restaurant I can only hope that it does me as proud as Harman does Harman.

Where?
673 Holloway Road, N19

Tube
Archway