Secret Garden Club: cooking with herbs

Menu:
Hot gin with lavender honey toddy
Tamarind coconut and lemongrass soup
Lavash with herb salad
Blood orange salad with fennel pollen and pomegranate molasses
Sage and ricotta bakes
Bay leaf and nutmeg icecream

Read more about this menu here

Lavender gin toddy recipe:

Serves 8: 

100ml of honey

Lavender sprigs

250ml of gin

Juice of 4 lemons

250ml of hot water

Heat the honey and lavender together gently. Leave to infuse for a couple of hours. (You can keep this for months actually).

Then warm up the gin, lemons, hot water (add more if you want the cocktail to be weaker) and add the honey and lavender. If it isn't sweet enough feel free to add more honey.

You could also use lavender sugar which is sold in Waitrose or you could make it yourself simply by adding lavender flower sprigs to a bag of sugar, leaving it for a few weeks.

Ricotta Sage bakes

500g fresh ricotta
4 eggs
Handful of torn sage leaves
olive oil or butter
2 tablespoons of creme fraiche
Salt and pepper

Oil or butter your muffin mould.
Mix the ricotta, eggs, sage leaves, creme fraiche together. Season with salt and pepper. Scoop into a muffin mould. Decorate with a sage leaf. Bake on a medium oven for 15 to 20 minutes until risen and golden around the edges. Check they are cooked inside with a metal skewer, if it emerges without too much runny gunk on it, they are done.

For more information on growing herbs go here.

Thatcher Tea

 Each one of these took about an hour to make 'Thatcher pops'

 Union Jack biscuits...and for how much longer will there be a Union Jack flag?

 Treasury cake...loadsa money!

 Guests...navy and pearls...the guy on the far left works for Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith!

 Mrs Thatcher's own recipe 'orange and walnut' cake

 The uterine symbol of power...handbag biscuits and RR loves MT (Ronald Reagan loves Margaret)

 Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out

 No war but class war!

 Mrs Thatcher invented Mr Whippy but this is my home made version

 Milk Snatcher cupcakes with milk bottles on top

 My signature sandwich

 Grantham Gingerbread from Mrs Thatcher's home town

Champagne socialism in action!

Video: asparagus mimosa

More details here at Lovefood.com 

How to: make your own crisps!

The British love crisps (and in this I am speaking geographically and including the Irish). American author Greg Gutfeld in 'Lessons from the land of pork scratchings' writes about our socialist approach to eating crisps in pubs:

"When a bag is purchased, it doesn't matter who buys them, they are for everyone. And this is underlined by the method in which the bag is opened. (One) tears the bag down the seam on the rear of the bag, splaying it out flat so that the crisps are available from all sides by anyone at a table...Generally Yanks open them from the top, and pull from the inside. Only the purchaser can get at them."

I'm a recent fan of Irish fried offerings...Tayto's and Chipsticks, the latter wincingly vinegary. I'm still upset about Walker's reversing the traditional colours for Salt and Vinegar (green!) and Cheese and Onion (blue!). The extant Smiths crisps (they still trade in Australia) with their characteristic blue paper teardrop shaped twist of salt were invented near me in a garage in Cricklewood. 
The best crisps I ever ate were cooked on a street stall in Madrid outside the Prado museum: I emerged from peering at gloomy Goya oils to scoffing hot fried disks of thinly sliced potato, scooped from a metal basket into brown paper bags. To eat them was to experience a delirious orgy of bubbles of olive oil breaking like mini dams on your tongue, the crunch and the salt... the sublime mouth feel, soft then sharp, pain then pleasure.
The continentals favour paprika on their snacks, we, on the other hand, famed for our street fashion vulgarity, discard minimalism and embrace Prawn Cocktail, Worcester Sauce, Roast Chicken, Steak & Onion, Smoky Bacon, Lamb & Mint, Ham & Mustard, Barbecue, BBQ rib, Tomato Ketchup, Sausage & Ketchup, Pickled Onion, Curry, Branston Pickle and even Marmite. 
I don't like posh pub crisps, all that home-spun 'Kettle' fried nonsense, costing £1.50p a bag, so thick that they cut your gums to shreds.
But I would recommend making them at home....especially easy if you have an electric deep fat fryer.
Recipe:
1 kilo of good frying potatoes such as King Edward, Russets, Maris Piper or Sante, scrubbed. You can peel or not peel, up to you.
1 litre of good oil 
Sea Salt


Slice the potatoes as thinly as possible, using a mandolin. 
Soak the potatoes in cold water for a couple of hours.
Then dry the potato slices thoroughly with kitchen towel or tea towels.
Prepare a counter with kitchen towel laid upon it to soak up oil.
In your fryer bring the oil up to 90 degrees.
Place a layer of the dried potato slices in the fryer. Not too many. Yes this is time consuming but you want crispy crisps don't you?
Fry until golden and transparent.
Leave in single layers on the counter prepared with kitchen towel.
Sprinkle good sea salt on them.
Keep going, layer after layer.
If they have been carefully fried and drained the crisps should keep a month in an air tight container.

A birthday treat for you

This Sunday it's my birthday. How old am I? None of your sodding business. Ok I'm 72, yes a lifetime of extra olive oil, no dieting, no smoking and drinking in moderation has done wonders for my complexion. I'm also coming up to the third anniversary of creating The Underground Restaurant.
To celebrate I'm giving you dear readers a present...

One of the best cookery writers is Diana Henry and I have her reissued 2008 classic book 'Roast Figs, Sugar Snow' to give away. A collection of interesting and inspiring recipes drawn from Northern countries and perfect for that push through winter, Henry was ahead of her time in promoting Scandinavian cookery. The days are getting longer now...not long till Spring.
All you have to do is...leave a comment below why age doesn't matter or what kind of birthday treat would make that special or even why birthdays are a waste of time to celebrate? Preferably with your email address so I can send the book to you!