Harissa

Harissa, if you haven’t discovered it yet, is a vibrant Middle Eastern condiment that can be added to many dishes to give them a zesty hit of sweet and spice and all things nice.

It goes particularly well with lamb. I often use it as a condiment alongside roast lamb, coated lamb chops in it, slathered it on burgers and my new favourite, in a bun with merguez sausage, mayo and rocket.

It can also work with chicken or a meaty fish, like monkfish or hake, so long as you are not too heavy handed. I love adding a tablespoon or two to a tomato-based stew, such as my chicken, chorizo and chickpea stew or albondigas. You can also stir it through mayonnaise or yogurt to give them a bit of a kick.

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Bigos

Buon Natale, Wesołych Świąt, Merry Christmas. 

I'm writing this from Bormio in the Dolomites, a mountain range in northeastern Italy. This morning I braved the cold at first light and walked halfway up the nearby snow-capped peaks. I hoped to capture the sunrise, but my camera did it no justice at all. After several hours shopping for Christmas lunch I headed up to Bagni Vecchi, the ancient thermal baths just out of town:

Today I am sharing a Polish Christmas recipe called bigos. I have been writing a series for Borough Market about food and identity, where I interview traders about the foods that are important to them. One of my interviewees, Ewa Weremij, is Polish. She told me that bigos "is a special dish for the Christmas time". You can read more about the Christmas traditions that Ewa and her family observe on the Borough Market blog.

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Moroccan-spiced carrots

Today I am updating a post from November last year to make use of these glorious heritage carrots from Natoora. Of course, you can just use normal ones or baby carrots as I did originally. The introduction that follows remains the same, but I have edited the recipe.

As a budding young food anthropologist I feel very ambivalent about the name I have just given this recipe. I just spent my summer writing a dissertation querying the very notion that any dish or cuisine can be assigned a nationality. However, the alternative is a bit of a mouthful: “Carrots with preserved lemon, cumin, caraway and coriander seeds”. I could keep things vague, e.g. “Middle-Eastern spiced carrots”, but that only extends the problem, anthropologically speaking. Anyway, the point here is these carrots are bloody delicious and I really ought to leave such musings to my anthropology pages.

This is such a simple recipe. I threw it together for the first time a few weeks back when all I had in the fridge was a bunch of carrots from the farmers’ market and some preserved lemons that I made a few months ago. (Any excuse to use the lemons – they are fabulous.)

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