Hummus with spiced lamb and pine nuts

The new series I am writing for Borough Market, Box Clever, is encouraging me to be much more adventurous with my packed lunches and how I pack them. Don’t you just love these Indian tiffin tins? I bought them for pretty pictures, but I find I am using them all the time.

I first tried this dish in a little family-run Lebanese restaurant called Emma’s on Liberty in Enmore, Sydney. They called it “traditional houmous” but it was so much better than any hummus I’d tried before. It did make me wonder why I’d been eating the unadorned version my whole life. Never again.

The dish is more often called hummus kawarma or hummus b’lahmeh, both of which mean hummus with lamb, but I am sure there are many other names to match the myriad recipes. There are almost as many versions of this dish throughout the Middle East as there are recipes for hummus. Chopped lamb or minced? Pine nuts or pomegranate seeds? Chunky or smooth? Tahini? Herbs? Spices? It depends who you ask.

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Cake baking and decorating with Juliet Sear

Last Saturday I went to an Easter baking and cake decorating class at Borough Market. The teacher was Juliet Sear, one of the UK’s leading cake designers and baking experts. She sells to some of the country's most prestigious department stores, Fortnum and Mason and Harvey Nichols, and has baked cakes for numerous celebrities. She is also a food writer, consultant, has done stints on TV and teaches baking master classes. Anyone else feeling a little incompetent? 

I felt very lucky to attend this event at Borough Market’s invitation. It's the first cooking class they have done in their event space, The Cook House, which until now has mainly been used for tastings, dinners and photo shoots. It is a lovely space; tastefully furnished and full of light. It's great for cooking lessons with a well equipped demonstration kitchen on one side and a dining area, which can also be used as extra workspace, on the other.

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Artichoke spaghetti with chilli, lemon and parsley

I made this pasta a few weeks back for my cooking demo at the Natoora shop in Chiswick. Everyone loved it. One man loved it so much he bought every ingredient on the recipe card so he could recreate it at home.

For such a simple pasta, it took a while to perfect. The first one was too dry, the second too lemony, the third was just right. This is the third recipe.

In the pictures, the artichokes are the mammole variety. They are similar to globe artichokes, in that they have meaty and tender outer leaves which can be eaten raw or cooked. A colleague who was watching me do my practice run for the shop asked why I had used mammole if I was only using the heart. He suggested tema or spiky artichokes instead. He is Italian so I thought I’d best not argue.

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Purple sprouting broccoli with burnt anchovy butter

There is one thing I will miss about winter: purple sprouting broccoli. It is one of my favourite vegetables of the season. I have been eating it tossed in a little burnt anchovy butter every other week. 

Natoora source their purple sprouting broccoli from Martin Sanders in Worcestershire. His family have been growing it for many generations. They save the seeds from the best plants, which improves the quality of the crop with each passing year. The result is a purple sprouting broccoli with tight, dense florets, tender leaves and high sugar content in the stems.

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Test Kitchen Tuesday at Craft London

My friend Mark is a fussy eater. He favours crunchy, dry or well-cooked foods. He is repelled by rare meats and goo. There are three rules to follow when cooking for Mark: no blood, no egg and not too spicy. One look at the menu at Test Kitchen Tuesdays and I could see that this was going to be a test in more ways than one.

Test Kitchen Tuesdays is a fun concept by Craft London to get customer feedback on dishes that are in development, giving the chefs a chance to experiment with new techniques or ingredients and the customers a unique opportunity to be a part of the creative process.

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