One glance above, and those of you who know me best will understand that I am in a state of torment. Lovely N&D came back from their holiday in Spain and brought me a glorious packet of Joselito chorizo Iberico. I mean, look at this vision: pimenton-dyed oil threading through those mylar wrinkles, the unctuous slivers of fat, the deep deep red of the meat… I don’t know whether to invite everyone over to share the love with a dry rosado, furtively scoff the lot myself, or hang it on the wall and just gaze at it all winter.

Dear lovely spambots who left me 387 comments while I was away in France,
I’m tickled pink to come back to such a mountain of feedback and you’re all just darlings to take the time to write. I’m going to mention a couple of things, though, just so you don’t get your feelings hurt if your little comment doesn’t quite make it through the approval process. Don’t be discouraged: it’s an overcrowded field, and these pointers are just to get you on track about the sort of thing that makes us more ‘particular’* types just sparkle with delight.

Things I am not:
• an acne sufferer
• a World of Warcraft player
• susceptible to generic “you go” exhortations
• an Apple geek or any other form of software engineer
• able to translate arabic, but thank you for thinking I might be
• the owner of an iPhone (™ and please note the capitalization - details matter, dears)
• an erectilely disfunct gun enthusiast yearning for bondage gear and dog clothes
• German
Just in case you think I’m being a bit beastly, here’s an anonymous gem that came oh-just-so-so-close to hitting the mark:
“In his fissure donnybrook, San Mateo County Chief Deputy Neighbourhood [sic] Attorney Steve Wagstaffe painted Alvarez as a deleterious felon who basic brutally worn out another teenaged man at the Villa Taqueria, shot at May minutes later to avoid wealthy aid to penal institution on a parole breaching and then stood over the fallen gendarme and executed him. Cheers.”
It’s quite enchanting really - as if Kerouac got extra drunk and churned out a dime novel. But sweetie, can we try and stay a little more on-topic? I’m having a hard time relating this to a post on the perfect frying pan. I’ll give you an E for Effort, with a side of Must Try Harder.

Keep at it, kids. You’ll get it!

(*This is a play on words. I can do this, you cannot, unless it’s very, very clever, which this example obviously isn’t. It’s my blog and I decide.)

Remember our little anarchist chum? Well here he is rushing down to the shops, ready to take his righteous place on the shelves. July 1st is d-for-democracy day, when all vegetables shall be equal in the eyes of EU regulation. Well, almost all, and almost equal - some are still more equal than others. But it’s progress, citoyens.

There is something incredibly satisfying about making preserves. I’m usually not one to challenge my elders and betters, but when it comes to home-made marmalade, I had - I thought - a slight logistical problem: my elders and betters, along with the preferred citrus, were all on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The original e&b in my version of this provenance was Mrs Miller, a neighbor in Scotland and a warm and smiley lady whose enormous, slavering black labrador knocked small unwary children flat on their bums every chance he got. (This, no doubt, was considered character-forming for me and endlessly entertaining for him.) Her marmalade was Dundee style made with Seville oranges, the stuff that launched a thousand breakfasts and that to this day my littlest sister spreads directly on her bacon, much to my father’s horror. Mrs Miller gave her recipe to Miss Richardson, another formative influence from my childhood, who is still, at 99 and counting, making a batch of it every year. Having tried the allegedly ‘bitter’ marmalades available in the shops over here and finding them all way too sickly or too redolent of floor cleaner, I started wheedling any friend or family member coming over from the UK into smuggling some of the good stuff in; this got old fast for all concerned. Then a Honduran friend’s chance remark led me off on a wild google chase that ended with the discovery that a naranja agria is just a Seville orange in a Gators cap. (It’s well worth a trip here for the full fabulous history.) I had seen piles of these lumpy, black-spotted ‘agrias’ hanging out in my local C-Town - I just hadn’t realized that I was looking at America’s oldest and least overpriced heirloom fruit import. Having checked that Ritchie wouldn’t consider it insufferable cheek if I gave marmalade-making a shot myself, I boiled up a pot of old jam jars and went for it.

naranjas agrias, aka amargas aka bigaradas

Click through for the recipe.

You can do your own editorialising this time: I have no intention of messing with a combined 140-odd years of marmalade-making experience, as dictated by Mrs Miller to Miss Richardson, and by Miss Richardson to my mum, so here it is verbatim.

mulberries and salad cups fresh from the farm

As well as the spectacular berries, they had lettuces, cucumbers, gorgeous baby fennel, free range eggs and pork for sale, all products of the farm’s 47 acres - New York City’s “largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland”, according to their website. As I’m in the middle of a marmalade making marathon (more on that later), I wanted something other than jam to do with the mulberries. Mulberry wine seemed to be another popular option in my older cookbooks, but I wasn’t sure this was the time to freak out the neighbors and tackle home fermentation either. In the end, the indomitable Constance Spry came up trumps.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have tackled the mulberry de-stemming late last night after a day spent in the sunshine drinking the Queens farm’s basil sweet tea cocktails. But I think a little berry juice gives Connie a nice patina, and I was going to clean the kitchen floor anyway.

After you’ve strained them out, you can use the gin-soaked berries to make your own sweet tea cocktails. Be patient with the gin, though: as our Constance says grandly, “This improves with keeping.” Mum’s fiendish damson gin, which has left many an unsuspecting dinner guest snockered, never debuts right away; she keeps it lurking in the back of the pantry until it’s reached its own Golden Ratio of potency and flavor, then brings it out as a post-prandial digestif. So if you try your mulberry gin and find it a little underwhelming, cork it up again and ignore it for another three months or so. I intend to launch this batch next summer, when mulberries are back in season and I can pair tiny liquer glasses of the gin with some of the fresh fruit, scented leaf geranium sorbet and paper thin almond crisps. For now, I’m off to scrub my hands for the thirty-sixth time and tackle the kitchen floor.

newly streaky Spry

Now that everyone’s into the idea of cooking restaurant-style at home, one of the biggest complaints I hear from friends and clients is how hard it is to sear properly. You can use butter instead of oil (i.e. cheat) and a really hot pan, but you have to disconnect the smoke alarm, throw open the windows, and flap tea towels around, and the end result is only cosmetic, because true searing - as a cooking technique, not just a coloring mechanism - requires temperature control. It all comes down to commercial vs. domestic gas lines, and the regulators on the stoves that deliver the flame. Even with a Wolf or a Viking lumbering in the kitchen, without high pressure delivery most people resort to using a well-seasoned heavy cast iron pan that will retain a lot of heat so they can cook more than one steak, say, at a time. This leaves little option for the quick-response adjustments that line cooks take for granted (after being beaten over the head a few times and learning that full blast is not the only BTU option).

Here, however, is a Technical Top Tip. According to one of my all-time culinary heroes, the apparition above is the answer - quadruple layer non-stick coating, super durable riveted steel handle and a body made from thick, heavy duty aluminium. The result: it conducts heat fast and micron-level evenly, retains it well, and the coating ensures that all your careful caramelization sticks to the food, not the pan. And in a delightfully snobby “I was made in France for professional chefs” way, it has no interest in making the acquaintance of induction cookers or dishwashing machines. This is as far removed from those dollar store, black-flakes-in-your-eggs, ring-bottomed, plastic-handled frying pans you had in your first apartment as you can get: my new toy may be non-stick (yup, still getting over some prejudices about that one) but this baby doesn’t ‘clink’, it ‘thunks’ with the big boys and demands a modicum of maintenance and pampering. Our relationship started after I sat in the dining room in The Capital in London, eating this…

fillet of sea bass with chorizo and crushed potatoes

…and had a road-to-Damascus moment about seared fish skin. Fortuitously, after lunch I got to go upstairs for a masterclass with the afore-mentioned hero, Chef Eric Chavot, where he proceeded to demonstrate exactly how he does it. Also present: seven other acolytes, an awe-inspiringly calm sous-chef called Richard - that’s Reeesharrrrr to you - and a bewildered stagiaire on his first day who had been assigned to be Chef Chavot’s teaching assistant/straight man. So when you’ve just eaten a piece of fish skin that is exactly, perfectly, delicately crisp, even after presumably sitting in the pass for at least long enough for plates for an 8-top to be gathered up by four waiters, and a Frenchman with 23 plus years professional experience and 2 Michelin stars (which he has held consistently since 2001) tells you to use a Bourgeat non-stick pan? I went and bought one two days later and lugged it back across the Atlantic.