Heston’s red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice-cream

I’ve mentioned before that I do love a Heston Blumenthal book, even if more for their food-porn with-a-twist aspect than actually using the recipes therein. Well, now I have Heston at Home, in which he’s made a sterling effort to offer recipes more within the reach of the average home cook.

They’re still enough of a challenge, and they have the Heston quality that sets every recipe apart from anything likely to be encountered in any other book. There are echoes of his Fantastical Feasts in the whisky gums, raspberry sherbert and salted butter caramels with edible wrappers. There’s a sequence of re-imagined classic beverages, such as gin & tonic with cucumber ice. There are banana and bacon cookies, but then what appears to be a totally straightforward lemon tart. There’s a delightful playfulness in really humble dishes or toe-curlingly tacky recipes from the eighties being given the Heston treatment – the process of making a ham-and-cheese toastie involves an initial stage with a wettex filling the space where the cheese will go, so that it doesn’t get overcooked in the time it takes the outside to brown.     

The photo of Heston’s red cabbage gazpacho was so sumptuous I couldn’t go past it, and central to the fascination was the mustard ice-cream he suggested should go with it. So I made them both.   

The soup is basically red cabbage juice, with a little pink mayonnaise based on red wine and red wine vinegar blended in. 

The flavours are clear and raw and somehow earthy, with a peppery edge that loooves the mustard ice-cream. The strangest thing is that the sweetness that the ice-cream has when tasted by itself dramatically recedes when accompanied by this soup, and it becomes all about the hot affair between the pepperiness and the mustardiness. Such goings-on.   

A-marketing and a-pickling and a-quiche-making

I hadn’t been to the Victoria Market for a while, but when E mentioned the sudden appearance of mangos about town I was down there like a shot. And what a transformation had taken place! There were verily mangoes, for like a dollar each, but also huge smooth eggplants at $2 a kilo instead of the shrivelled seedy $7/kilo offerings of a few weeks ago. Lebanese cucumbers were $1.50/kg, and so were delicate little zucchinis. I also loaded up with $1 strawberries, $5/kg swiss mushrooms, $1 bunches of baby asparagus, $2 silverbeet and loads of other stuff, and was back on the train to Parliament without even needing to go to the bank. Amazing what can be managed when spring has sprung and the Meat Hall and Deli is left for another more prosperous week – one that hasn’t seen expenditure on tax bills and flights to Europe, don’t you know. (It’s the one week of the year I can sound this sick-makingly yuppieish, and I’m trying it on for size.)

So because all this largesse wouldn’t fit into my narrow fridge, I had to think like a frugal pre-war housewife and preserve it and generally use it up some other way. I’ve never pickled anything before, but Alida Irwin’s all over it and has been known to ask for Fowler's Vacola sealing rings for Xmas. And so, unlike a pre-war housewife, I googled cucumber pickles and zucchini pickles and was rewarded with the Zuni Café’s zucchini. No sterilising, too easy with the food processor slicing attachment, and at last an opportunity to get out the Japanese pickle press.

The small pickle press could barely handle half a kilo of zucchini...

...but lo, it gave up its juices and reduced by half.

And then I made Dr Ben’s Cucumber Kimchi, scaling it down to three cucumbers.

 To use up some ingredients to eat sooner, I took a leaf out of Martha Stewart’s website, and another out of Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, which I’ve done before, and sort of made up a leek and asparagus quiche. For the pastry case, I followed Martha Stewart’s Favourite Pie Crust just because it was there, with the addition of 15 minutes’ blind-baking in a 180C oven.

 a bit of butter

a clove or two of garlic, finely chopped

1 large leek or 2 small, sliced

2 bunches asparagus, sliced into 2cm bits

4 eggs

a cup of milk and cream, proportions as desired – I went half & half, then to the gym

2 tablespoons seedy mustard

some thyme leaves

Saute garlic in the butter until fragrant, add the leeks for a few minutes, then the asparagus for about 8 minutes until reaching tenderness but still bright green. Allow to cool slightly before adding to the waiting blind-baked pastry case.

Briefly whisk together with a fork the eggs, mustard, thyme, and milk/cream, and salt and pepper. Pour over the leek and asparagus, and put in the still-on 180C oven for about an hour or until it’s golden on top and only moves slightly when jiggled.

Meanwhile, the rest is earmarked for later – there will be Ottolenghi’s Mango Soba Noodles with Aubergine and Mango, a recipe beloved of the Quiltmaker, and Roasted Cauliflower with Dill from the same book, Plenty, and spanakopita, and an actual cooked breakfast of mushroom and spinach. And by Cup Day it will all be gone.

Olive oil crackers

I noticed these in the Ottolenghi cookbook last weekend when I made eight of its dishes including the Parmesan and poppy biscuits on the facing page to these, which is a story for another day. These are the sort of thing for which one always has the ingredients, for a change. And they’re pretty good, even without the dip one has failed to procure for Friday-night office wine.

Adapted from Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, p186

250g plain flour (I used 100g each of plain and bread flour, and 50gm wholemeal flour)
1 tsp baking powder
115ml water
25ml olive oil, plus extra for brushing (I used extra virgin)
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne
¼ teaspoon black pepper
course sea salt for sprinkling – I found Maldon a bit too coarse on the first tray’s worth, so ground normal salt over the rest

Combine all the ingredients except the sea salt in the mixer bowl, and knead it with the dough hook until it all comes together in a firm consistency. (Or do it by hand.) Wrap in cling film and leave it to rest for an hour in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 220°C. On a well-floured surface, use a rolling pin to roll walnut-sized bits of the dough as close to paper-thin as possible – or at least attempt this for one long, oval ‘witch’s tongue’, feel despairing at the result, have a brainwave and GET OUT YOUR PASTA MACHINE!

It really does look like a sulphurous witch's tongue...

Oh, it’s so inexpressibly pleasing when I find an unexpected use for such a guilt-provokingly underutilised utensil as the Imperia Tipo Lusso SP150. Putting the bits of dough through the largest setting and then the second-or-third-smallest to produce perfect thinness was the easiest task in the world, even though I’ve carelessly lost the attachment that bolts the machine to a benchtop, so that most of my left hand was employed holding the machine down while a few leftover fingers had to elevate the dough as it fed through the rollers.

Lay the pieces on trays lined with baking paper, brush generously with olive oil, then sprinkle on the sea salt, or topping of your choice – I tried fennel and cumin seeds for the third tray. Next time I might try chopped rosemary or thyme.

Bake for about 6 minutes, until crisp and golden brown. Allow to cool and store in an airtight container.