Dinner with HM: delicious, delectable, maybe Eggs Drumkilbo

The new month on the calendar that hangs over my desk looks quite delicious and delectable.

It's a Blackcurrant Sorbet, particularly fashionable during the reign of George IV (1820–30) but still served at Buckingham Palace today.

I picked my calendar up when we visited one of the palace gift shops during our trip to England last fall. The calendar is colourful and elegant, adapted from a recent royal cookbook — 12 gorgeous photos of mostly sophisticated dishes that are served at State Dinners but are also enjoyed by the family.

The cookbook and calendar both use the same cover — a photogenic rhubarb and white chocolate parfait. In some of my browsing, I read that it seems like an unusual combination but the tart rhubarb and the sweet white chocolate go very nicely together. We're always looking for new ways to use rhubarb so maybe I'll add this to the list.

Another of their pretty desserts is coming up in September and is called Sablé Breton with English Strawberries and Lemon Cream. It sure sounds good and if you make it at your house, it probably isn't compulsory for it to look like this:

It's not a terribly complicated recipe although it calls for 2 250g punnets of strawberries.

A punnet is a small box for the gathering and sale of fruit and vegetables, typically small berries. The word is largely confined to Commonwealth countries and is of uncertain origin, but is thought to be a diminutive of "pun", a British dialect word for pound, from the days in which such containers were used as a unit of measurement or from the name of Reginald Crundall Punnett (1875–1967), a geneticist and grower of strawberries who used to sell them in the London market in a small chip basket.

One of the more eccentric dishes showed up for the month of April. It's called Eggs Drumkilbo and I wasn't surprised to read that it was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

The story goes that one night, back in the 1950s, some guests arrived late at Drumkilbo House, long after dinner had been cleared away and the owner of the house, Lord Elphinstone, asked his cook to feed his guests with whatever she could put together.

In the fridge she found some leftover lobster, there were some eggs which she hard-boiled, prawns and tomatoes. However, with the addition of anchovy sauce, Tabasco, stock, gelatine and mayonnaise — a dish to be proud of was born. So much so, that Lord Elphinstone served it to his neighbour and aunt, the Queen Mother, who immediately got her chef to copy the recipe and include it within their repertoire of dishes.

Eggs Drumkilbo is a magnificent dish, combining Scottish seafood with haute cuisine, or to put it another way, it is like a posh prawn cocktail and egg mayonnaise all wrapped into one!

I can see that Eggs Drumkilbo might be quite tasty.

I had asparagus for dinner today. Ours was steamed until just fork-tender, then plunged into cold water so it would stay nice and green. It was then tossed with halved cherry tomatoes, minced garlic, a chiffonade of fresh basil leaves and a little olive oil. It was beautiful asparagus and I think Her Majesty would have liked it.

Hers, however, looks like this:

Her chef says it's a spectacular starter. It's made to look like a crown and the extra flavours added are crab and mango.

Another cook says:

The asparagus is lightly cooked and then lined into metal rings to create a crown like, circular shape. The middle is filled with crabmeat, mango, chives, lemon and lime before being topped with salad leaves dressed in a lemon vinaigrette. It’s lifted carefully out of the rings and tied together with chives.

I've only scratched the surface of the royal menus but as the months go by and I turn my calendar pages, I'll probably be inspired to return to this subject.

Dinner is served – pass the chopsticks please

Do you think our dinner met the Canada Food Guide requirements for servings of vegetables?

I always feel quite virtuous when I'm working on a home-style stir-fry. Standing there chopping all those vegetables definitely feels worth it when they're all arranged, waiting for the wok.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about wok cooking and I shared the two cookbooks that first introduced me to Chinese/Asian-style cooking.

I give these books every credit for helping me with the basics for last night's dinner – the marinade for the chicken which becomes the sauce in the wok which becomes the vehicle to accompany those vegetables to cover the rice!

I used chicken breast cut into one-inch chunks. To the bowl, I added lots of minced garlic, fresh chopped ginger, then a bit of safflower oil, rice vinegar, pomegranate molasses, chili oil, sesame oil, fish sauce, oyster sauce and soy sauce. I can't tell you how much – I've been making this dish for a long time and I've figured it out over the years.

After the chicken sits in the marinade for awhile and when the rice is almost done – a sticky rice, usually Cal-rose here – it's time to heat the wok. I don't like it smoking hot but let's say moderately hot.

I use safflower oil for this part also and, of course, I throw in the veg in the order of the length of time they need to cook. When the veg are tender crisp (I usually hold the broccoli florets out until the bitter end so they'll stay nice and green) I push everything aside and dump in the chicken and the marinade. I let the chicken monopolize the centre of the wok for a few minutes. I stir it. It doesn't take long to cook.

Because stir-frying is an intense experience, I didn't take any photos of each separate vegetable being added; neither did I summon my photographer. But before you knew it, we had reached this point. The rice is in the small pot.

The last step is adding the vermicelli. It's a rice vermicelli that I'd poured boiling water over five minutes before adding. The second last step was adding a tiny bit of corn starch, stirred into a small amount of cold water.

And here it is, just before it was placed into a serving bowl and taken to the table.

There were accolades all around and if I do say so myself, it was quite tasty.

It's easy as pie — and that's pretty easy

My mother was really good at making bread and making pastry. She was good at other things too — not just baking — but bread and pastry are two of the fundamentals that it's really important to master.

She taught me the basics of bread and pastry but I'm afraid one of the things I came away with was her tendency to suggest I add a little of this, maybe a little of that and when I rather impatiently asked how I was supposed to know how much to add, her famous last words were always, "You'll know by the feel of it."

It's many years later but I now know why she said that and yes, I do know by the feel of it.

I still talk to people all the time who tell me they can't make a pie crust. I understand that because I couldn't, for the longest time. I remember the tears of frustration when I was trying to roll out a sheet of pastry and it was breaking apart and sticking to the rolling pin and splitting in the middle. I remember putting it into the pie plate in pieces and splicing it together and using a wet thumb to try and patch it into submission.

What a mess. You might get away with it if you were making a one-crust pie and you were going to cover that disaster with a tasty filling but if you were set on an apple pie with a top crust, you were right out of luck.

I regularly saw — in magazines or newspapers or cookbooks — the promise of a recipe for a "no-fail-pie-crust." All fake, believe me.

But then one day, my luck changed. I was telling you a few weeks ago about a little set of cookbooks I'd found called, The Wonderful World of Cooking. Each of the four books contained recipes from different parts of the world and in this one, I found what I'd been looking for:

On page 238, with no country's name attached, is a recipe for "Pastry for 9-inch pie." There are four ingredients, such basic ingredients, they're right at your fingertips. You barely have to move five steps in your kitchen to assemble them.

They are: 1 cup flour, ½ tsp. salt, 1/3 cup shortening, 3-4 tablespoons cold water.

What could be simpler, right? How could I not do this?

The first thing I'll advise is, obey the recipe when it says "cold." Make sure your shortening is cold right out of the fridge and put an ice cube in your little glass of water.

And get one of these:

This made all the difference.

The second thing I would advise is: don't pay attention if the recipe says "blend shortening and dry ingredients until it resembles small peas." What does that even mean? Just work the shortening into the flour until the shortening is all incorporated.

When it comes to adding the ice water, this is where Mum would say, "You'll be able to tell by the feel of it." Of course, she was right. I know that now and I could say the same thing but I try to avoid it.

The recipe says 3-4 tablespoons. I sprinkle about three tablespoons over the flour mixture and mix lightly with a fork. When I suspect I'm close, I pinch a bit of the dough between thumb and forefinger. It shouldn't be sticky but it should stick together. You might have to use all four tablespoons. Remember that you shouldn't over-handle it but it should "come together" and not crumble. Recipes always say to chill before you roll and I guess that's a good idea. I don't always though — depends on whether I have time.

If you've played all your cards right and the stars have aligned, you should be able to roll your pastry into a ball, pat it into a disc, sprinkle some flour on to it, and get out the rolling pin. And let the rolling pin do the work. Don't lean too heavily.

And here's your final product.

Or maybe this. (These are apple and mincemeat.)

This really is the most basic and, I would say, fool-proof pastry recipe there is. If you think you can't make a pie, I urge you to try it and let me know it worked.

Once you've mastered it, you will know the feel of it and you can work in some variations: maybe you'd prefer lard or butter to the shortening. For a savoury pie, you can stir in some grated cheese and some herbs. You can be your creative self and feel a great sense of accomplishment at the same time.

Bon appétit!

The food of the Mediterranean: classic and delicious

The last cookbook story I wrote was about my introduction to Chinese cooking — my TV relationship with Chef Martin Yan and my plunge into the complicated world of Chinese cuisine as taught at the California Culinary Academy.

I love Chinese cooking and I still do it a lot but there came a day when I admitted to myself that my heart is really in Mediterranean cooking. It's the style that comes naturally to me and I'm never happier when I have good olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, oregano, basil, anchovies, and a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano sitting on my counter, awaiting their instructions.

I first went to Spain back in the 1970s. Life was very different then. Food and cooking and eating had not evolved in Canada to where it is now so encountering the sights and smells and tastes and the food in Spain was much more exotic then than it would be to travellers today. In restaurants, all the tables had cruets of oil and vinegar and as soon as you sat down, even before a menu, you were served a beautiful crisp salad which you dressed yourself — just a toss with that beautiful olive oil and vinegar and what a salad!

All the food was memorable but the tapas custom soon becomes everyone's favourite. Because the Spaniards don't sit down to eat dinner until 10:00 p.m., they need a little something to tide them over and that's where the tapas come in — delectable small servings of delicious foods, hot or cold, mostly but not exclusively eaten with the fingers or speared with a toothpick.

They're usually eaten standing at the bar with a glass of wine. There's a vast display behind the bar and the bartender will hand you a small saucer and you choose your own — in some cases, the bartender will serve you. I remember small plates of potato salad dressed in a very egg-y, lemon-y mayonnaise and of course, plates and plates of seafood: shrimp, scallops, calamares, mussels, sardines. And bites of chicken, chorizo, serrano ham, meatballs. Chunks of roasted peppers, cauliflower, mushrooms. And more varieties of olives than you knew existed.

Part of the enjoyment of that kind of eating is the atmosphere — the noise and excitement and the crowds. But the food is so good, you do want to duplicate it.

Years after I was first in Spain, Valerie gave me a cookbook for my birthday:

It's a cookbook of glossy pages and beautiful colour photos. It demands that you head to the kitchen and start cooking. I've made many snacks from this book but as I'm looking at it now, I realize happily, I still have a lot of recipes to enjoy from this one. On my list.

I had already been converted to Italian cuisine, long before my first trip to Italy. Italian does seem to be at the top of the pecking order of cuisines — although I suppose the French and the Chinese would dispute that. Italian chefs — Lidia Bastianich, Mary Ann Esposito, Nick Stellino, and many others — dominate PBS cooking shows and the Food Network. And non-Italians occasionally become famous for leaning toward Italian cooking: Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of London's River Café, and Jamie Oliver — just to name a few.

I have lots of cookbooks devoted to Italian cooking but what could beat this one:

Dan gave me this one and any book that has the number 1000 right on the cover has to be taken seriously. One thousand is a lot of recipes. The titles of all the recipes are in Italian — there are translated sub-titles — and some of them take me right to hillside village streets where I've never been: salami and caper tart; sausage and prosciutto with potato, pork with tomatoes and onions, liver soufflé, saffron pancakes with mussels.

As with the tapas book, I still have plenty of recipes to try out of this one.

I'm afraid I complain quite a lot about being in a cooking rut but it looks as if it's my own fault. A quick trip through either of these books should solve that.

Cloud ears and lily buds are on my shopping list

The first chef I remember seeing on television – before television exploded with cooking shows and chefs became celebrities – was Martin Yan. His show was called Yan Can Cook and his catch-phrase was "If Yan can cook, so can you!"

I found him very likable and appealing although he was somewhat manic and told really corny jokes. He was cute though.

And of course, I loved his cooking. He was a master with the chopping knife – a showman, in fact. He would give a flirty signal when he was going to start and he'd flick his wrist and then his hand would become a blur as the onion fell in slices so thin, you could read the recipe through them.

His style of cooking – and his ingredients – were foreign to me and I mean that completely literally. But I was enthralled and his was the first cookbook I had that I felt was authentically of another culture. (It probably wasn't but it seemed so to me at that time.)

I've taken the book off the shelf for the first time in ages and it makes me think I must get back to it. The first recipe I saw when I opened it was for "porcupine meatballs" – definitely Martin's kind of humour. The meatballs are tasty spicy ground pork, rolled in broken cellophane noodles and fried in hot oil. You can see where the "porcupine" reference comes from. He has "remarks" at the end of each recipe and yes, they're often funny or corny – and sometimes both.

The second book I got around the same time is called Chinese Cooking at the Academy – California Culinary Academy.

I found a shopping list inside it just now: bamboo shoots, black beans, black mushrooms dried, cloud ears, 5-spice powder, lily buds, dried tofu, water chestnuts. Except for the 5-spice powder and the rice, these are ingredients I don't have right now. They sound good though, especially the cloud ears and lily buds.

This book has glossy pages and coloured photos unlike Martin's which is much plainer. Both books are instructional though and go further than simply providing recipes. I realize flipping through them that there are some very complex – some really hard – recipes. They appear so challenging that I think I'm going to have to confront them – after a visit to an Asian grocery.

Here's a nice description of a menu for a "winter supper":

A whole chicken simmering in a fragrant mixture of soy sauce, wine, fresh ginger and spices gives its perfume to the whole house. Warm Green Onion Cakes and a garlicky cabbage stew also help ward off the chill. In true Chinese fashion, the soup is not served as a separate course, but is sipped throughout the meal.

I love the idea of sipping the soup throughout the meal because I like soup but I find if I have it as a first course, it's too filling and it takes away the full appeal of the main course.

I use a carbon steel wok for my Chinese cooking. It was a gift from good friends, right around the time I started to enjoy this kind of cooking. It needs to be "seasoned" as cast-iron does and never washed with soap and water. Looks something like this:

I quite often do a stir-fry, always with lots of veg and maybe some chicken or shrimp or pork. My marinade uses any combination of vegetable oil, rice vinegar, fresh ginger, minced garlic, sesame oil, chili oil, oyster sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, maybe a little honey. My vegetables are pretty much always carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, broccoli, whatever green leaves I might have, and some thin long noodles – vermicelli. We have it with sticky rice.

It's good but I'm always complaining about being in a cooking rut so I think I'll go back to the excitement I felt when I first owned these books.

Crispy chicken wings with lemon dip sounds good.

The enchanting story of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Many cookbooks come with their own history. I've told you about the little set of books that first introduced me to cooking from around the world.

In passing, I mentioned the Oil and Vinegar cookbook, that I love.

I have other cookbooks with stories.

When I first moved to Halifax, I was Dan's tenant; I rented the little apartment in the lowest level of the house he owned. (That's a whole other story, which I'll probably tell you sometime.) We became friends very soon after we met and enjoyed spending time together. We both worked downtown and although I can't remember that we ever walked to work together (he left much earlier than I did), we occasionally met after work and walked home together.

At the time, we were both members of a co-op bookstore called Red Herring. It was on the route home and, whether together or separately, we often dropped in to see what was new.

One day, on my own, I was browsing the shelves in the cookbook section. It was getting close to Christmas and I knew Dan liked to cook — as I did. We cooked for each other from time to time, both upstairs at his place and downstairs at my place.

That day, I saw the book that I knew was the perfect Christmas gift.

Talk about enchanted. I was enchanted.

This was not a book I was familiar with but the very idea of the beautiful little stalks of broccoli that look like little trees anyway being described this way made the book irresistible before I even read the recipes.

As luck would have it, Dan arrived at the store while I was still browsing but I managed to tuck the book away with other stuff I was carrying and I paid and smuggled it out of the store without him seeing it.

The day before he was leaving to visit his mother over Christmas, we exchanged gifts. I was so happy with my choice but I could tell by his face when he opened it that he was uncomfortable. Sure enough, he already had the book. There it was, on his shelf, where I had never noticed it. Boo hoo.

I kept the book for myself. Either his or mine is still on our shelf today — but yes, we only have one. The other is long gone, into a yard sale or sold off for some good cause. Of course, I've happily used the book over the years for its intended purpose but when I look at it, I can still get that sweet almost-romantic feeling I had that day in the Red Herring bookstore, when I really thought I had found the perfect gift.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is where I first discovered a very simple but delicious dish that remains, to this day, one of our favourites — especially when the tomatoes are just picked, sun-warmed from the garden. William would eat this every day:

MARINATED TOMATO SAUCE

Adapted from Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Preparation time: 15 minutes to prepare, plus at least 30 minutes to rest before serving

Yield: 5 or 6 servings (plenty for 3/4 pound dried pasta after it is cooked)

This is a simple uncooked tomato sauce to make in the heart of the tomato season. Use it for pasta or rice, or just serve it as an appetizer with some fresh, crusty bread to mop up the juices. (It's really that good!)

BASIC SAUCE:

2 to 3 pounds ripe tomatoes, peeled and seeded

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 large clove of garlic, minced

3 to 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 to 2 tablespoons red wine or balsamic vinegar

About 12 to 15 leaves fresh basil, minced

freshly ground black pepper to taste

MANY OPTIONAL ADDITIONS AND EMBELLISHMENTS

(Use some or all — or none):

1/2 pound fresh mozzarella cheese, in small cubes

1/2 cup Nicoise olives

1/2 cup minced red onion

1/2 cup minced fresh parsley

1 to 2 tablespoons minced anchovies

1 to 2 tablespoons capers

3 to 4 tablespoons lightly toasted pine nuts

We pretty much stick with the basic recipe and we don't usually add the vinegar to this one. Just lots of minced garlic, chopped tomatoes, basil leaves, s&p and cubed mozzarella cheese. And so we'll have something green we often have a Caesar Salad on the side.

Tastes like summer.