Butterflied Leg of Lamb with Anchovy, Prosciutto and Parsley

You simply can't visit North Wales without enjoying at least one meal involving the finest of Welsh lamb (unless you are a vegetarian of course). Driving up to Abersoch, through the mountains of Snowdonia National Park gives you a taste of what awaits. As you drive along the the perilous mountain roads, clattering over cattle grids and marvelling at the fabulous views you see literally thousands of sheep. In fact, you must take care not to hit them as you take in the scenery - they make a point of standing right in the road and refusing to move until you are literally inches away.

As a child, travelling up at Easter and seeing the many gambolling lambs, I used to balk slightly when Larry the lamb was dished up on Easter Sunday. Fortunately the delicious flavour soon made me forget my sensitivities.

After the six hour drive last week I was delighted to be greeted by wonderful lamb chops cooked by my mother and served with leeks in cheese sauce - heaven!



The meat came from Abersoch's excellent butcher - it has been run by the same family for years and everyone is on first name terms. During August, there is a permanent queue snaking out of the door onto the street as holiday-makers stock up on the good pre-marinated barbecue meats, homemade sausages and prime cuts of beef and lamb.


On Sunday I organised a barbecue for family to celebrate my birthday. I ordered a butterflied leg of lamb - so much easier to get it ready-boned from a good butcher. I probably paid a little extra for it but I was a) on holiday and was b) celebrating my birthday. A little laziness never hurt!


I prepared a delicious stuffing of anchovy, prosciutto and parsley - a strange sounding mixture, but one that works really well with the lamb and stands up well to the barbecue. This recipe comes from a book called 'Barbecue' by Eric Treuille and Birgit Erath. This really is a superb book for anyone who wants to venture beyond the 'burger and banger' type of barbecue. It is well illustrated with clear instructions and inspiring ideas.

Don't be put off by the anchovy if you don't like it. It doesn't taste of anchovy at all. The anchovies just give a deeply savoury flavour to the meat. Wonderful.


Ingredients (serves 4-6)


2kg leg of lamb, butterflied

60g prosciutto
6 anchovy fillets
1 handful flat-leaf parsley
2 garlic cloves
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar (plus 2tbsp extra for drizzling)


Also need 2 long, flat metal skewers

1. Place the prosciutto, anchovies, parsley and 1tbsp vinegar in a blender and pulse to a smooth paste.


2. Place lamb skin side down. With a sharp knife cut deep slits across the lamb, about 5cm apart. Stuff the paste right into the slits.


3. Insert skewers diagonally from opposite corers through butterflied lamb.


4. Grill over medium-hot coals, turning once, for 15 minutes each side for medium rare (longer for medium), drizzling over balsamic vinegar on both sides during cooking.


5. Once cooked, allow meat to rest, covered in foil, for 10 minutes. Slice and season with salt and pepper.

Notes -

I have made this recipe twice. The first time the lamb cooked perfectly - I did have to cover it with a lid. On this occasion I was impatient and put it on the grill too early, the fat caused the BBQ to flame too much so I place foil underneath the joint. It was a HUGE piece of meat (as you will see from the photo) and was taking ages to cook so in the end I threw it in a hot oven for 20 minutes. It was perfect!

The skewers help keep the meat together and make it easier to turn the meat over on the grill.

Summer Berry Clafoutis

I have just returned from a most wonderful week in North Wales where it was not in fact wet (much) but gloriously sunny and sparkly. Leaving this morning on yet another sunny day was a real wrench, relieved in part by the spectacular high-altitude drive through the mountains.

Plenty of food news from the holiday including those longed-for mackerel, where to find the best bara brith in North Wales (I've conducted extensive research!), my impressions of a birthday meal at the Porth Tocyn Hotel and some seriously good barbecued lamb. But firstly, just to ease myself back in gently, a quick pudding that I have made twice over the past fortnight which is a doddle to whip up and which those fond of comforting puddings will love.

Clafoutis has always appealed although there has been one major snag. I don't like cherries. No. Really. I don't. The almondy batter? Yes please. The cherries? Definitely not. Then one day when I was strolling around Waitrose (as one does), I picked up a recipe card for a raspberry version. Perfect. Why hadn't I thought of that?

In the end, I lost the aforementioned recipe card, but found a similar recipe on BBC Good Food's wonderful recipe resource. Here is the recipe, written my way. Follow the link for the original (plus a rather better photo!).

Ingredients (serves 6)

400g mixed fruit (I used raspberries and strawberries. Next time I might mix in some blackberries too. Cherries are the traditional choice)

50g ground almonds

2 tbsp plain flour

100g golden caster sugar

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

250ml double cream

1. Pre-heat oven to 190C. Grease a 23cm round (or similar size) gratin dish or flan tin with a fixed, not loose, base.

2. Sprinkle the fruit into the prepared tin. Whizz together all the other ingredients and pour the batter over the fruit.

3. Bake for 25 minutes - until golden and just set.

Notes - I found I needed to cook this for a little longer than the recipe. If there is any left over (unlikely), it is delicious eaten cold the next day!

Getting wet in Wales...

A quick post to apologise in advance for the lack of blog action over the next week or so. In an hour I shall be jumping in the car for the long drive to North Wales for the annual family pilgrimage to the seaside village of Abersoch. It is set to be cold and wet so the jumpers and wellies are already packed but I'm optimistic and the swimsuit and suncream are in there too.

Unlikely I will have access to the internet, but I've lots to report on so if it is particularly rainy, I may be able to post. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to really good bara brith, fishing for and eating fresh mackerel, some good Welsh lamb, Welsh cakes, a slice of birthday cake next Sunday (Happy Birthday to me!), the feeling of salt on my skin, the view from Rhiw (go on, click the link - it is stunning), windswept walks at Hell's Mouth, the sound of the seagulls, a drink in the yacht club and the feeling of space.

Back on the 29th with lots of food to share....

Happy Holidays!

The Famous Four Meme

I was delighted recently to discover excellent food blog, The Tracing Paper. Within this pleasingly laid-out blog, Nick reports on the origins of our food with a strong focus on seasonal produce. A great resource for any interested foodie. He also has a great directory of UK-based food blogs.

Anyway, I was surprised on firing up the laptop yesterday to discover that Nick had tagged me for a blog meme called 'the famous four'. I've not done one of these before, but have enjoyed reading fellow bloggers responses, so thought I would give it a go. Like Nick, I'm sticking broadly with the foodie theme. If you are not interested, I apologise. Check back soon for last night's delicious fish cakes and a rather good summer berry clafoutis!

4 Jobs I've Had

1. Tour guide for Champagne Mercier in Epernay - a great place to live and work for four months, though it passed in something of a bubbly blur!

2. Waitress in 'Tiffins of Cowes'. The only place to by your sandwiches if you are going sailing from Cowes. They will even heat-seal them to stop the water getting in!

3. Translator/bibliography compiler for a writer.

4. Organiser and host of wine tastings and wine-related events (currently).


4 Places I've Lived

1. Cowes, Isle of Wight. Best restaurant by a mile is Café Mozart. Best/only deli is Prime Foods (where I also worked, slicing cheese, one Christmas!).

2. Edinburgh. Valvona and Crolla. Need I say more? (Other than this simply IS the most amazing city in the world. I defy any city to even come close!).

3. Paris. I lived on the corner of the wonderful rue Cler, a really wonderful Parisian street market that pulses with life and delights the senses with a glorious array of produce.

4. Battersea, London. My current abode.


4 Places I've Holidayed

1. Alsace


A gastronomic paradise for food and wine lovers which is thoroughly beautiful. I've been twice and shall certainly go again! Read more about some of the food and wine I enjoyed on my recent trip here and also here.

2. Abersoch, North Wales. All childhood summers were spent in this seaside village on the Llyn Peninsula. It will always hold great, magical memories for me.

3. Tresco, Scilly Isles. A great new discovery. A natural paradise reached by helicopter from Penzance. Another good foodie destination too - lots of deliciously fresh fish. Eat at the Island Hotel for an upmarket dinner with a great view, or try the one and only pub, The New Inn which serves excellent, informal fare. The fish and chips is to die for.

4. New Zealand. Another natural paradise - so varied in terms of landscape. Wonderful meat.

4 Favourite Foods

This is an impossible question for a food blogger, no? I'll give it a go...

1. Really good lemon curd.

2. Well-made fish pie with a side order of peas.

3. Game - hard to narrow it down. I love all game whether feathered or four-legged.

4. Fondant au chocolat.

4 Places I'd Rather Be

1. Abersoch, North Wales, with my extended family. I join them tomorrow.

2. Trailing down the Northcote Road, shopping for food and flowers, basket in hand.

3. Kinloch Lodge, Isle of Skye. Claire MacDonald's highland home. A wonderful hotel and cookery school with superb breakfasts (and dinners) in beautiful surroundings.

4. Burgh Island.

4 Bloggers to Tag

1. Wendy at A Wee Bit of Cooking.

2. Lynn at Lynn's Cooking Blog

3. Patricia at Technicolour Kitchen

4. Margaret at Kitchen Delights

Bara Brith

Whilst browsing on one of my favourite food blogs, The Passionate Cook, I came across a food blogging event which appealed. Having a very sweet tooth, I couldn't resist the temptation of partaking in 'sugar high fridays', an event created by Jennifer at The Domestic Goddess. The idea being to make something sweet and delicious around a theme of the host's choosing.

This month, the idea is to re-create a local speciality. Hmmm. Well. I live in Battersea. London. A veritable melting pot no less, but hardly the scene for a truly local, regional speciality. So, I decided to cheat a little. Since I was tiny, I have spent time every August in a certain seaside village in North Wales. I have so many food memories associated with long, hazy summer holidays in Abersoch. Freshly caught mackerel fried in Welsh butter for breakfast (really), sandy sandwiches and pork pies on the beach, delicious local lamb, Welsh cakes for tea, orange and lemon sparkle ice lollies... But probably my favourite speciality is... Bara Brith.

Bara Brith translates as 'speckled bread'. It is a type of traditional tea-bread speckled with dried fruits. It is delicious spread with good Welsh butter for a treat at breakfast and particularly good when toasted!

The high number of excellent bakeries around my holiday destination mean that I have never attempted to make this gorgeously spicy bread, but I have always craved it from time to time on returning home. You just don't see it here. I'd never even given much thought as to how it was made. Until now. The 'nudge' I needed to give it a go.

The deliberate mistake....

Ah. Yes. Well, post bara-brith-baking and pre-posting, I returned to the Sugar High Friday post and discovered that I am supposed to be making a dessert of some kind. Ooops. This is a teabread. Not a dessert. Though it makes an excellent bread and butter pudding! I am hoping that Johanna will let me through all the same, it being my first attempt at this event (and considering the 'bara brith journey' I have been on since starting on this project)!

Step One - What makes the perfect Bara Brith?

Google. 'Bara Brith Recipe'. That should do it. How wrong could I be?Little did I know that there were so many versions of this fruity bread. Some used yeast, some used baking soda. Some soaked the fruit in tea overnight, some added it dry. Some had many ingredients. Some had just a few.

I had serious decisions to make. What to me were the essential components of Bara Brith?

1) To me, it is definitely more of a 'bread' than a 'cake'. Apparently, in North Wales, the 'bread' approach is favoured, whilst in the South, baking soda is used as the raising agent. As my affinity is with North Wales, I feel duty-bound to reproduce the yeasted version. Besides, you can't toast a cake, and that is my favourite way to eat it.

2) Tea. In my mind, tea is essential. Not only should the fruit be soaked overnight in black tea, but that tea should be incorporated into the loaf for flavour and colour.

3) Spice. The loaf should be quite spicy.

Seems quite simple, huh? Well, that is where you would be wrong. I was unable to find a recipe that involved soaking the fruit in tea AND using yeast. It was either/or. Baffled, I decided to e-mail a Welsh bakery, Popty Pen Uchaf. There I'd get the definitive answer. Thank you to Eleri for the following answer -

'Dear Antonia
Hello ,thanks for the e mail regarding bara brith recipes, At my bakery I use a traditional family recipe which contains fruit ,demerara sugar, soaked in black tea overnight, and then I add this mixture to S R flour to which a small amount of butter has been rubbed in ,and finally free range eggs are mixed in before putting in the tins. I have made some using yeast but I found out they did not keep so well but they were really nice toasted ,the recipe with tea will not toast ,good luck with your research!
Regards Eleri'

Useful. But still appeared to be either/or. I wanted BOTH. No compromise. So, I bravely decided to go it alone (drum roll, please). This was an interesting idea considering that I am not the bread-baking sort. At all. I have, on occasion baked bread. And enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to say that I have found it to be therapeutic. But I've never been entirely thrilled with the result. Rather, it has been good, but nothing like as good as freshly baked bread from my local bakery; The Lighthouse Bakery. Horribly upsetting, however, I learn that the bakery had recently re-located. So perhaps it is time to learn...

Step Two - The Recipe

I decided that the most reliable source was probably Delia. Having spent her childhood in Wales and being the reliable sort, I felt confident that she would know best, despite no mention of the black tea. Her recipe states that yeast makes the best bara brith for toasting (hoorah) and that the bread should be very spicy (double hoorah).

I decided to follow her recipe with a few subtle alterations. I would soak the fruit over night in hot black tea (one bag of Earl Grey and one of Breakfast Tea for argument's sake) and use luke warm tea in place of the milk in her recipe.

Step Three - Biting the bullet and making the bread...

I won't repeat the recipe here as you can go straight to her site (and this post is already an epic). I followed it to the tee, kneading the dough until soft and elastic...

I then left it to rise for nearly two hours. Despite my kitchen being quite warm, it didn't seem to double in size. I tried twice, on two consecutive nights. It just didn't seem to rise quite enough. Better on night two though, so I persevered. I knocked back the dough and added in the nicely plumped-up fruit.

Problem. Yes. The fruit was very moist, plumped up with all that tea. Kneading it into the dough was incredibly sticky and tricky. What a mess! I had to add more flour. And it was hard to impregnated the elastic dough with the fruit. Next time I'd add the fruit in the initial mixing stage.

I popped the dough into the tin to prove...

It rose. But again, not as much as I would have expected. But the dough sprung back slowly when pressed lightly - the sign of a risen dough.


I popped it in the oven for half an hour, then covered with foil for the remaining half hour. The flat filled with the most glorious smell. No doubt the neighbours thought I was mad - by the time I took the loaf out, it was midnight. A strange time to be baking!


The worst part was having to wait until morning to sample the wonderful looking and smelling bread.

Early this morning, I sliced into the (quite firm) loaf. The fruit was not as well distributed as I would have liked and it was a little dense and yeasty. But it was pretty delicious, I have to say. Even better toasted... Fruity and spicy... Not bad for a first attempt.



Step Four - You live and learn. What I'd do differently next time...

1) I think there maybe the yeast I used wasn't at its best. I'll buy new next time.

2) I'll squeeze some of the tea from the soaked fruit and mix it in in the initial mixing stage and add slightly less liquid to make a drier dough.

3) I'll add more mixed spice - I like it really spicy.

4) I'll use muscovado sugar for a deeper flavour and colour.

5) I might try lapsang souchong tea for a slight smoky flavour.

6) I'll try the no yeast recipes and stop being so prejudiced!

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, I'd be only to happy to hear. As I mentioned, I am not a bread-baker (more of a cake baker) and so could use the advice!

Oriental Duck Salad

Last birthday I was given a year's subscription to BBC Good Food Magazine. Each month I look forward to the magazine dropping through the letter box as it is one of my favourite sources of new recipes and ideas. Tonight I decided to sample the Oriental Duck Salad from the September edition. It was absolutely superb - a great mix of flavours. Simple and quick to assemble yet extremely tasty.

Here is the recipe, written my way. I halved the recipe for myself, using a little over half the dressing, and it worked perfectly. Though the recipe is fairly generous in terms of tomatoes, rocket and spring onion. I had an avocado lurking around that needed eating and threw that in too. A good decision.

Ingredients (serves 2)

2 duck breasts, skin on

100g bag of rocket and watercress salad

small bunch of spring onion (salad onions)

FOR THE DRESSING:

1 garlic clove, grated

1 tsp fresh root ginger, grated

2 tbsp dark soy sauce

2 tbsp runny honey

1. Heat oven to 200C. Score the skin of the duck breasts and season.

2. Heat a non-stick frying pan over a high heat, add the duck skin-side down and cook until skin is crisp (around 4 minutes). Turn over and quickly brown the underside then transfer to a baking tray.

3. Mix the dressing ingredients together and drizzle all but 2 tablespoons of it over the duck. Place in oven for 10 minutes for pink (longer if you like it well-done).

4. Meanwhile, slice spring onions on the diagonal and chop tomatoes in half. Toss together with the rocket and watercress.

5. Remove duck from oven and rest for 4 minutes. Slice into strips and toss into salad. Drizzle with remaining dressing and serve whilst still warm.

Bad baking comes in threes/Holidays

So after the floppy flapjacks and the not-so-brilliant brownies, it was not surprising that my first attempt at making the wonderful Welsh tea bread 'bara brith' went badly too. I was inspired to make this bread when I read about blogging event, Sugar High Fridays, which is being hosted this month by Johanna from The Passionate Cook. This month the theme is 'going local'. Whilst I actually live in South-West London, I have spent a great deal of time in North Wales. Every summer, as a child, we would de-camp to our house up there and remain for the whole of August. As I have yet to come across any specialities peculiar to Battersea, I decided that North Wales would be a better bet. Plus I have lots of great food memories associated with the area - for me, eating bara brith is akin to Proust with his Madeleine.

Anyway, I shall say no more on this as I will post fully on my baking experience once complete. Attempt number one was going perfectly well until my dough totally failed to rise despite last night's warmth. Grrr. I threw it away, thinking that I had probably killed the yeast by adding it to liquid that was slightly to warm. Of course, when I looked in the bin this morning, it was beautifully puffed and risen. Typical! Bad things always come in threes (although, there is also the saying 'third time lucky'), so I have every confidence that my next bara brith attempt will work well (!)

This spate of baking bad luck is unusual - normally, baking is my strong point in the kitchen. Clearly I need a holiday. Ah - as luck would have it, I have a mini holiday coming up. I'm off to the Isle of Wight this evening, where my parents live, to take in the tail end of the world's most famous sailing regatta; Cowes Week. All the family will be there (brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces) plus lots of friends, so it should be a jolly weekend. I'll be quiet on the blogging front though until next week (when I'll be posting about the best bara brith ever eaten). Happy Weekend!