Midnight Steakout

Drinks cabinet stored on the piano

A few wasabi peas to start

The steak. Les assures me it was good quality.

In the kitchen

Tuna steak and gratin dauphinoise

A rainy night in London's East End, above a betting shop, you find the supperclub of statuesque Florida native, artist and DJ Amanda. Charmingly she gives no specific instructions on how to enter other than the address. Fat Les and I giggled as we walked around trying to find the entrance:

"Do you think we go through the betting shop to a back room?" I wondered, visions of passing through thugs in shirtsleeves, wearing visors and waistcoats, high rollers over a green baize card table.

Finally, round the back, we climb dark stairs to a candle-lit rooftop, laid out with red and white checked oilcloths on tables and overhead a vine covered pergola. It feels like a Greek taverna, stranded in wet cobbled London.

Midnight Steakout is a barbecue, but this is Britain and you can't rely on the weather. Amanda worries...

"Shall we bring all the tables inside?"

She looks glamorous in towering heels, a vintage pinny, bare legs and a kimono top.

"No, it's going to clear up"

she announces brightly with can-do American positivity.

Venturing outside after a couple of gin and tonics, a blanket was laid over my shoulders as I sat down, by 'Tracks', tonight's front of house volunteer. Some people get wet bums on the rain-soaked chairs but soon warm up as good red wine is handed out. We are given warm buttery fresh peas in their pods and bowls of radishes to snack upon.

Apart from Fat Les, I am sitting with a beautiful Bengali girl, a PR for Sainsburys who seems to know an awful lot about S & M clubs and a guy who plans to open a Cal-Mex burrito joint in Dalston.

The Bengali girl and I compare conventional restaurants to underground restaurants:

"When I go to a normal restaurant I'm always in the position of wondering if I can afford the whole experience...dessert, coffee, aperitif, wine. Here I know I can" she says.

Tracks takes our money and asks how we'd like our steak. Amanda fires up the barbecue, a roll up hanging from her lip, displaying an insouciant glamour at the grill. But relaxed vibe aside, she knows her stuff: my tuna steak and Les' beef steak are beautifully seasoned and cooked. It is accompanied by creamy gratin dauphinoise, French beans and three different sauces: horseradish, mustard and mayonnaise. 50s music, a tape made by Amanda, tinkers in the background.

For dessert we are given tiny vintage glasses which are filled with Armagnac to match with almond cake, raspberry sauce and cream.

Sometimes Amanda comes to sit with us "This started out as a dinner for friends who could then bring a friend" she explains. "I just wanted to make simple food: steak and potatoes and salad".

Simple it may be, but everything is delicious.

After dessert we make our way inside, Roy Orbison is on the turntable. Cheese, biscuits and cherry chutney are handed around.

Later one of the guests tinkers melodically at the piano; the window is open and the curtain blowing; the vibe is mellow. Amanda proffers a heart shaped box filled with mint chocolates; generous hospitality, Yankee style.

At midnight we get up to go, Amanda (who reminds me of another tall American beauty in London, Jerry Hall) is dismayed, drawling

"I can't believe you are all going so early! I'm just getting started..."

Midnight Steakout

Contact: midnightsteakout@gmail.com

Upcoming dates at The Underground Restaurant

Forthcoming Autumn dates and themes at The Underground Restaurant

All dinners £25, £20 for unemployed, unless stated otherwise. A dinner is generally a free cocktail with nibbles, home baked bread, starter, mains, salad, dessert, coffee. And remember the shed can hired as a private room, £50 extra including bottle of champagne.

2nd Sept: Private birthday dinner, possibly with Flamenco dancing

5th Sept: Afternoon focaccia making course with nibbles and drinks £40

11th Sept: All things 9/11, including I love New York and conspiracy theorists

12th Sept: Previous night's menu, but tweaked!

25th Sept: Quiz night with Marcus Berkmann, writer and quiz master of The Prince of Wales, Highgate.

26th Sept: Quiz night with Marcus Berkmann

4th October: Meet the Domestic Sluts from Domestic Sluttery for High Tea and vintage glamour. 3pm

10th Oct: Gay men's night, singles encouraged

11th Oct: Gay women's night, contact Citipink

31st Oct: Harry Potter night, magical food including butterbeer. Sorting hat, which house are you in?

13th Nov: Good food.

14th Nov: Same but with 'The Conversational'. Also 'Expert in a shed'.

28th Nov: Umami night with food anthropologist @scandilicious. Every course umami...

5th Dec: Baked Vacherin night or Cheese fondu. 'Tis the season...

12th Dec: Getting into the spirit of Christmas...

25th Dec: Christmas day at The Underground Restaurant, open fire, crackers, mistletoe, games, champagne, smoked salmon, roasted vegetables in the Aga, all kinds of goodies £60 (Doing it so you don't have to...)

31st Dec: New Years Eve...£50

More dates may be added...

If you would like to do a house concert or would like to perform at The Underground Restaurant please get in touch...

The Last Supper Club in Brixton

The confessional menu

View from the back

The kitchen

Aubergine with pesto and pine nuts

Saltfish croquettes with salad and spicy tomato sauce

Tasty frangipane (particularly delicious) with home-made icecream

Biscotti

The gorgeous room upstairs...

Kitchen Jezebel, as she'd like to be known, has finally found a use for her basement! Turn it into a supperclub!

I met Fat Les there and we started with drinks in the garden, moving inside to the exotically decorated lower ground floor room for dinner. The other guests, two of whom, like Jezebel, were from Irish backgrounds, were all interesting and the conversation soon moved onto politics. Some of us despaired that we had no one to vote for. One guest felt so strongly about voting that he felt people should be jailed if they didn't. Conversation was stimulating and lively.

The dinner was wittily themed around The Last Supper:

An eating ceremony:

Confessional Menu

Bad Thoughts

Glass of Pomegranate fizz

Venal sin

Aubergine and goats cheese wraps with pine nuts, thyme and caper sauce.

Mortal sin

Salt cod croquettes and sweet tomato sauce.

Absolution

Almond tart with blackberry ice cream.

Forgiveness

Tea, coffee and pistachio biscotti.

Having just come from a day trip to Lille in which I spend all day eating, I didn't feel that I could do her food justice in the way that it deserved on this occasion. Especially as, upon entering, the first thing she said to me was "I've spent days cooking. It's such hard work!"

Jezebel by day is an eco consultant, she has campaigned for safe cosmetics, primary prevention of breast cancer and a 'nesting' project which encourages nesting mothers to be to cautious about toys and the use of chemicals when decorating and furnishing the room where their baby will sleep.

She doesn't use synthetic fragrance, believing that in the future, wearing strong synthetic perfumes in a restaurant will be as unseemly as smoking over your food. She cites the example of the perfume 'Poison' being banned in certain restaurants.

Jezebel says

"Strangely,when we are clean we spray, lather, rub and douse ourselves with a cocktail of toxic substances and then, depending on your perception, we might 'stink'. People would be shocked if they knew what's in the products they use. The closest thing some products have ever come to 'natural' is the picture of the flowers on the bottle! The whole issue of our perceptions of what is 'clean' is something that's studied closely by the cosmetics industry."

The writer William Boyd agrees, writing recently in The Observer that 'it can't be long before perfume is banned like smoking'.

Jezebel is allergic to dairy, wheat, vinegar and sugar but does eat meat. She minimises the use of salt, preferring to let the inherent taste of fresh food shine through.

However she will cook dairy and wheat dishes for the supperclub but will do a special evening for the increasing numbers of people who share her allergies. She also plans to do an Irish night with stew and soda bread.

Contact Kitchen Jezebel to book places and find out more here. Tickets £25

The proposal

My mum was a free spirit, always wanted to travel. My dad, inspired by Count Basie's 'April in Paris', and partly in an attempt to woo her, suggested that they go on a cheap tour of Europe. They hitched everywhere. Their budget was something like 50p a day. When they arrived in Cologne, at a restaurant, my mum perused the menu and chose the cheapest thing. The menu being in German, she had no idea what she would be getting.

The waiter, with a silver domed platter held high, weaved his way through the crowded restaurant. He placed the heavy silver dish on their table and, with a dramatic flourish, lifted off the lid. There, squatting angrily on the platter, an apple between it's teeth, was an entire pig's head. This is what my mother had ordered.

She gasped.

"I'm not eating that!" she exclaimed.

The whole restaurant, having followed the progress of the waiter, burst into laughter.

When things had calmed down, my dad whispered:

"Don't worry. I'll eat it"

As he commenced tucking in, a smile playing around his lips, my mother breathed out heavily:

"I think you should know that I'm pregnant"

It turns out that I was conceived on a wall in Minori, Italy, earlier in the trip.

My dad, unperturbed, gestured with his fork towards the pig's head and said:

"I suppose we are going to have to marry you then".

On holiday...a gastronomic childhood

I've been brought up to eat well. We travelled through France, Italy and Spain every summer stopping at Relais Routiers and family-run restaurants en route. Every winter we went skiing, eating fondu, raclette and drinking gluwein in Austria and Switzerland.

Once my father insisted on taking us to a very expensive restaurant in Spain, near Malaga. This restaurant had a great reputation. We drove through winding mountain roads for hours to get there. My father ordered the best Rioja wine and the seafood platter, the speciality of the house. When it came there was a large sprawling langoustine in the middle, it's eyes on stalks waggling around. My mum and us kids recoiled. We refused to eat anything at all. It didn't help that we were all sunburnt and tired. My dad was very angry.

My father eats anything. He'll suck the bone marrow out of bones...on your plate, not just on his. He's the one that made us eat frog's legs and snails...

The snail incident was traumatic; we stayed in a farmhouse in France, family friends. The back room was dedicated to keeping snails, mostly kept in buckets, being 'cleaned' by being fed on bread for three days. Some of the snails escaped, they were everywhere, shiny trails on the chalky walls and stone floor. We went to a restaurant nearby which served them stuffed with garlic, butter and parsley. My dad exhorted us to try one "go on, just one".

Us three kids spent the next couple of days in bed with terrible diarrhea. Our bedroom was upstairs in this farmhouse, thankfully far from the snail room, but there was no inside toilet. We spent two days shitting in a communal bucket as we were too ill to make it to the outside toilet. I never tried snails again.

On this same trip, same farmhouse, my dad woke us early.

"We are going mushroom hunting" he whispered.

Sleepy eyed, we stepped out into the dark and walked what seemed like forever, down the poplar lined French country roads, to the forest. On this holiday, my dad read us chapters, with all the voices, from 'Lord of the Rings' every night, by the huge fireplace. The forest, when we arrived, seemed to me to be populated by elves, trolls and hobbits. The trees were Ents and I imagined Aragorn sweeping me up in his arms. After hours of searching, dawn came up, we found three orange chanterelle mushrooms and a few ceps.

We carried them back to the farmhouse where they were fried in butter and garlic. Nothing has tasted better since, although we found the texture of the ceps a little slimy.

In London, special occasions were marked with dinner at Robert Carrier's restaurant in Islington. I remember my first meal there; every course was tiny and perfectly arranged on the plate. Sights that are common now in terms of plate styling, like French beans all lined up in a neat pile, exactly the same size, were objects of wonder. You felt you wouldn't get enough to eat, but of course you did.

One night my dad brought home an entire octopus. He laid this huge tentacled creature, with it's large body full of ink, out on the kitchen table. Us kids came down to stare at this Jules Verne monster. My dad was excited, my mum left the room muttering "I'll leave you to it".

In those days Google didn't exist. My mother's cookbooks didn't explain how to deal with octopus either. So my dad, a journalist, dealt with this crisis just as he would a story: call an expert, a good 'source', and ask them. He phoned Robert Carrier, who he didn't know, who was at that time probably the most famous chef in Britain, at his restaurant. In the middle of service. Robert Carrier, a very helpful gentleman, came to the phone and patiently explained to my father how to remove the ink sac, how to prepare and cook this octopus.

He followed the instructions, amazed, despite his habitual cheek (something I seem to have inherited) at getting this help.

Of course, none of us would touch it.

The Bruncheon club

MsMarmitelover's favourite breakfast spread

£12 each

The Elderberry tree

The Bruncheon club have come up with a great idea; after your underground dinner, nursing your hangover, you'll need the antidote, a secret brunch.

There are two sittings, 11 am and 2pm, on irregular Sundays "basically whenever we feel like it" laughs Gregg, one of the two hosts, along with Maya, opening this large garden flat in Hackney to the public.

It has the feel of a well organised squat or commune, with other housemates and sofa surfers wandering around, strumming on guitars, picking at sewing on a picnic blanket, lounging in hammocks.

Taking advantage of the warmer weather, the table for six is outside, Sunday papers, broadsheets not tabloids, are laying on the table.

Other guests were trendy and interesting conversationalists; I prefer mixed tables but it is a relief not to get stuck with bores: a DJ with a Liza Minnelli fringe circa Cabaret, one half of Broken Hearts.

"Do you have broken hearts?" I ask somewhat obviously.

She shakes her head.

I observe "ah you must break them then".

She doesn't deny it.

There are two girls that work in film; a sound editor and a visuals editor who are habitueés of supperclubs, having visited most of them.

"Why supperclubs rather than restaurants?" I ask Becky, the sound editor.

"First of all I loved the secrecy aspect but now I go because it's so social, we get to meet so many people" she explains.

Lastly there is a couple, about to move to San Francisco; she's a PR, including Peter Jones of Dragons Den as a client; he is a software engineer, working on bluetooth devices 'Jawbone' a high-end example of the genre.

Talking to him about Twitter, he is scathing "it's the most simple piece of software ever", about the attack over the last week he snorts "you could sneeze at Twitter and it would stop working! You could type hashtag question mark and it would seize up!".

Brunch starts with a strong Bloody Mary which seems to contain horseradish. Then we have a small bowl of summer berries. The piece de resistance is duck egg benedict, two rich yellow yolked poached eggs with homemade hollandaise on smoked salmon and toasted buttered muffins. I started to feel the need for my daily dose of Marmite and Gregg obliged with a slice of warm home-baked bread.

We were served croissants English style with butter and jams.

"Are they home-made?" asked a guest.

"No, but we thought about it" responds Gregg brightly. "We googled it and thought, er...."

We all laughed and someone said "Well Tesco's do quite a good job too don't they?"

Gregg and Maya told me afterwards that they heard laughter while in the kitchen. Sometimes, you are cooking and there is silence in the dining room and you wonder, is everybody alright? Are they having a good time? And then you hear an explosion of laughter and all tension melts away...phew everybody is enjoying it.

Back outside The Rolling Stones play somewhere on a music system, two of the housemates decide to climb a tree and collect Elderberries, we sip on coffee or tea...three hours goes by very quickly.

The Bruncheon Club

Sundays. £12

Contact thebruncheonclub@googlemail.com

Savoy Truffle Club

A hatch...

Shave beard?

Beetroot marinated salmon

Chicken liver parfait, chicken terrine, chutney and brioche

Goats cheese, tarragon and grape salad

Duck confit, blackberry compote and vanilla mash

Pan-fried sea bass with salsa verde and vanilla mash

Blackberry Granita

Chocolate brownie 'jenga'

Their bedroom! You can't even get in...

Not a couple of mugs...

Alison and Gavin joined everybody for a chat afterwards

Spices

The cosy flat of journalist Alison Tyler and her husband Gavin hosts bi-weekly dinners in Blackheath.

Gavin started cooking a year ago, training at Acorn House restaurant in Kings Cross. He's learnt well: the cooking and presentation tonight were of a high standard. One of the strands of the home restaurant/supperclub movement is it's adoption by sous-chefs as an opportunity to present their own style of cooking to the public. Aided by Alison, acting as his manager/publicist and charming front of house, I can see Gavin opening his own restaurant in the future. Whether he'll end up "on television" as Alison ambitiously plans, is less certain, he seems too self-effacing. I envy the backing he gets from his clever wife however.

I shared a table with two lively couples; one set auditioned for The Restaurant BBC show last year but pulled out. The husband, in his 50s, after decades in advertising, bravely decided two years ago to retrain as a chef. He is currently working 16 hour days for minimum wage and loving it.

His wife does not believe women can cook as well as men "they don't have flair. All the top chefs are men". (Although to their credit, the two male chefs present disagreed with her).

It's a circular argument. Top chefs tend to be men but this is surely due to the time commitment necessary to make it to the top rather than lack of ability. You can't do 16 hour days if you have children. Traditional peak years for building a career just happen to coincide with child-bearing/rearing years. And when women emerge out of the other side of bringing up children, they are no longer youthful. As Fern Britten, Arlene Phillips etc know all too well, youth, especially for women, is essential in our culture. Notably our top female chefs, Angela Hartnett, Allegra McEvedy, Thomasina Miers, do not yet have children. Great cookery writers such as Julia Child and Elizabeth David didn't have children either.

Women that I have spoken to in the industry have talked about working in kitchens and being ignored for weeks by the men. It reminds me of my apprenticeship as a photographer in the darkroom of a News Agency years ago. I was the first female to last more then two weeks. I was deliberately intimated: dunking me in 'the fix', accusing me of stealing, putting me 'in Coventry'. There were grumbles about having to take down their topless posters, although I had not requested this; it really didn't bother me.

Young women (worried they won't get a boyfriend if they say they are feminists) think feminism is a dirty word, and assume all the battles are won. Look at the opprobrium that Harriet Harman has attracted with her recent remarks about how men have cocked things up. (1)

With 12 guests, the evening was intimate, friendly and relaxed. You could see Gavin working through the hatch between the living room and kitchen. I want a hatch! I love hatches. (Ponders taking a sledge hammer to wall between living room and kitchen).

Gavin took the week off work to do three consecutive nights of the supper club, it wouldn't be possible otherwise.

We started with a glass of Prosecco and plum coulis. Alison and Gavin have an allotment and much of their produce comes from there. While waiting for late guests, who ended up as no shows, we ate bread dipped in olive oil and a spoonful of beetroot marinated salmon.

Having given up on the late-comers, thankfully they had paid in advance, I ate my starter of goat's cheese, grapes, tarragon, nicely dressed with balsamic and oil, a Jamie Oliver recipe. I've never had a salad made mostly from tarragon, it worked very well, perfumed but light.

The others had chicken terrine, chicken parfait, fig & apple chutney and brioche.

For my main course: I had pan fried sea bass on a bed of rosemary and vanilla mashed potato topped with horse-radish cream and salsa verde. It was absolutely delicious; the potato was so light and fluffy, the crispy fish skin seasoned with Maldon salt, and the horseradish cream a lovely contrast.

The meat-eaters had duck confit, blackberry compote and vanilla mash.

We were then given a palate cleanser of blackberry granita which was nice but perhaps a touch too Ribena and solid in texture. But that's only if I strained to be fussy.

Lastly dessert was the wittily named Chocolate brownie 'Jenga' with ginger cream and a hot caramel sauce.

We finished with tea and coffee.

Afterwards our hosts came out to join us. Three consecutive nights might be a bit too much, Alison said. Their bedroom made me laugh, it's crammed full of the furniture that is normally in their sitting room. It reminded me of home.

Alison and Gavin plan to do events at Acorn house restaurant and move towards pop up venues in the future as they want to be as legal as possible.

Bring your own wine. Four/five course meal £37.50p

Contact here for reservations.

Here is Gavin's recipe for Pan-fried fillet of sea bass on vanilla and rosemary mash with horseradish cream and salsa verde.

For four you'll need...

4 fillets of sea bass (skin on)

Mash
750kg of potatoes (king edwards or maris pipers)
1 bunch of rosemary
2 vanilla pods
100g of butter
200ml of cream

Salsa verde
small bunch of fresh mint
small bunch of basil
small bunch of tarragon
small bunch of flat leaf parsley
4 anchovy fillets
A small handful of capers
teaspoon of dijon mustard
tablespoon of red wine vinegar
A generous few glugs of extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Horseradish cream
100ml of creme fraiche
A tablespoon of fresh horseradish, finely grated
Salt and pepper


Method for fish
Generously season the skin of the fillets with sea salt and pepper.
Get a non-stick frying pan smoking hot, add a glug of light olive oil to the pan and place fillets skin-side down in pan and season flesh side.
Cook for three minutes or until skin is crisp.
Turn fillets and cook for a further minute, serve on mash skin side up, with the horseradish cream and salsa verde on top.

Method for mash

First, melt the butter and cream along with the rosemary and the vanilla pods - scrape the seeds out of the pod and add them along with the empty pods - bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in salted water until nice and soft.

Strain the cream mixture, drain the potatoes. Add the cream to the potatoes and mash. Season well to taste.


Method for Salsa verde

Finely chop all the herbs, capers, anchovies and combine all the ingredients to taste.


Method for the Horseradish cream
Simply combine the creme fraiche and horseradish and season to taste.

Delicious!

(1) Harriet of course sold single parents down the river in 1997, collaborating in the removal of the universally applied (you got it whether you worked or not) lone parent benefit in a bid to get into Tony Blair's good books.It was a small amount of money, £6 a week, but there as recognition that single parents have it harder and that two can live as cheaply as one. Still Harman's betrayal of us did her no good. Used as female 'window dressing' to get the legislation through, Blair dispensed with her after that. Women in the West are equal until they have children. Then everything changes.

The Shed

The Shed

One of the chicks was ill so was living indoors "Does it run around the track?" my friend asked

Next door's garden!

3 shots of soup

Lentil cakes

Fish pie

Cheese course

White chocolate croissant pudding

Notice board in The Shed of other underground restaurants

I love wooden sheds. I like the idea of being inside just a 2-by-4's breadth away from nature, the smell of wood and the dolls house/Swiss chalet feel. So you can imagine how excited I was, after putting guests in my shed on an over-booked night, to hear that somebody was opening a supper club in their shed.

I went to visit Nicola and her boyfriend Andrew at their ground floor flat in Newington Green a few weeks ago. Nicola was making chutney in their narrow kitchen. The large garden had a hen house with chickens.(1) Next door's garden was interesting; their gardening technique was to cover the whole thing with black plastic bags so nothing would grow!

Nicola works for a fine food company and is obsessed with food. She's the kind of woman who leafs through cookbooks in bed. The type of woman that Martin Amis would detest, for apparently he divorced his first wife for precisely this behaviour. Andrew her partner, is a solicitor and a vegetarian.

The Shed is open weekly on Tuesday nights and is a fine addition to the Underground Restaurant network. The menu will change monthly. I'm not sure how Nicola is going to manage as she will have been at work all day...

To start with we had tiny fingers of Welsh rarebit (melted cheese on toast with Worcester sauce and Guinness) matched with a welcome drink of Black Cat beer.

I was starving so this simple but tasty canape was very welcome.

Next was three shot glasses of three different soups: a chilled fennel and Greek yoghurt soup; leek and potato and spiced pumpkin topped with roasted pumpkin seeds. Absolutely delicious and the combination of the soups worked so well. As an appetiser it left you longing for more.

In the warmth of the shed, Indian music weaved it way through the atmosphere; outside you could see candles flickering in the green grass.

The soup was followed by delicate spicy lentil cakes served with home-made tomato sauce and capers.

Main course was a perfectly proportioned fish pie with green beans. The fish pie was creamy and light with gorgeous crusty mash on top.

Cheese course consisted of Colston Bassett stilton and Tunworth from Hampshire, served with home-made apple chutney and biscuits, one of which was particularly good, from Peter's Yard, a Swedish bakery in Edinburgh.

I was starting to feel full now but made room in my special extra stomach for desserts for the white chocolate croissant pudding in creme anglaise.

Man that girl can cook!

Nicola has given me the recipes for my favourite course, in particular the fennel and pumpkin soups:

Chilled Fennel and Greek Yoghurt Soup

50g butter
2 medium onions, finely chopped

1 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 heads fennel, finely chopped

2 pints vegetable stock

Finely grated rind of and orange

2 tablespoons of Greek yoghurt

Small handful finely chopped dill

Salt and pepper

Melt the butter and gently cook the onion and garlic in a covered saucepan for 10 minutes without colouring. Add the fennel, stick on a lid and cook for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time, to release the full flavour of the fennel - do not let things colour. Add the stock and orange rind and simmer for a further 30 minutes until everything is nice and soft. Allow to cool a little then purée in a blender and pass through a sieve. Stir in the yoghurt to your taste, add the dill and season. Allow to cool then refrigerate until use.

Spicy Pumpkin Soup from Moro East

600 gm(s) Pumpkin, cut into 3cm cubes (1kg unprepared pumpkin)
1 medium onion, thinly sliced across the grain
6 tbsp(s) olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely sliced
1.5 tsp(s) cinnamon
1.5 tsp(s) chilli flakes
1 ltr(s) vegetable stock
1 potato, sliced into 2cm cubes
1 tbsp(s) roughly chopped corriander
salt and pepper
For the garnishes
butter
2 tbsp(s) pine nuts
1 tsp(s) cinnamon
100 ml(s) greek yoghurt
2.5 clove garlic, minced with a pinch of salt
1.5 tbsp(s) milk

This is from memory so hopefully I won't have missed anything!

Preheat oven to 160 degrees or gas mark 6

Toss the pumpkin in 2 tbsp of olive oil, a little salt and roast on a tray in the oven for 1hr, turning occasionally.

20 minutes before the pumpkin is ready, very gently fry the onion in the remaining 4 tbsp oil for 15 minutes until soft and golden-brown in colour. Add the garlic, cinnamon, and chilli and fry for a further minute.

Add the potato and fry for a further 5 minutes, taking care not to burn the garlic. Add the pumpkin and the vegetable stock, and simmer for 20 minutes, until the potato is cooked.

In the meantime, prepare the garnishes;

In your smallest pan, melt the butter until it foams, and add the cinnamon and pine nuts and fry until the nuts are golden brown. Remove from pan and keep in a warm bowl so as not to burn them.

Mix together the yoghurt, milk, and garlic and salt.

Blend the soup, return to the pan, add the coriander and season to taste.

The Shed

theshedlikesfood@googlemail.com

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Newington Green

Tuesdays

(1) We used to have chickens, which I illegally snuck over from France in a cardboard box. I was stopped at Dover, customs searched my van as they often do with vans, looking for illegal immigrants. There were a couple, but customs didn't find them. I drowned their squawks with loud techno. These French chicks were hardier than the British ones I bought. Unfortunately I stepped on one by mistake when they were let loose in the house (my daughter called me "murderer" for months after that) and the other got eaten by a fox, leading to days of mourning.