Bilberry Tart, Tarte aux Myrtilles

[singlepic id=333 w=280 h=210 float=right]If you’re familiar with the French bakery-cafe chain Paul then you’ll know they do a mean Tarte aux Myrtilles, so deeply purple as to be almost black and utterly loaded with the tiny berries. For me, Paul are one of the few places helping to rescue the word “chain” from being shorthand for “crap”.

I’ve noticed, while seeking recipes, that myrtilles translate into English as “blueberries”. But they’re not. They’re not the fat, blue American imports that Tesco & co refer to as blueberries at all. They are bilberries, whortleberries, wimberries, or whatever local dialectal term for the wild English blueberry you care to name. I wish the supermarket sold these by the punnet, just so I could get them a teensy bit out of season.

But since it’s August and we’re still enjoying tramping into the hills to pick loads of bilberries of our own I decided to make a tarte aux myrtilles. Bilberry tart, as we ought to say. I found a good looking recipe here on La Recette du Jour and didn’t really play with it much at all.

The result was bloody fabulous. Okay, along the way I over-cooked the first pastry case. The instructions said 20 minutes, I checked after 15 and it was too far gone. Lesson: your oven and your cookware are your own, don’t trust the recipe, trust your eyes.

But the second time, the result was a tart-and-a-half! Dead simple sweet crunchy pastry to go with the ever-so-slightly tart but mostly sweet bilberries. The tiny bit of simple custard in the recipe turns the same black-purple as the berries and is scarcely present as a binding, so you’ve essentially just got beautiful fruit and pastry. Veronica at La Recette suggests serving with a blob of crème fraiche. Non. Superfluous to requirements. Just the tart, I promise you.
[singlepic id=334 w=400 h=310 float=center]
Bilberry tart (Tarte aux myrtilles)

350g bilberries
170g plain flour
85g caster sugar
85g butter
1 egg
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp crème fraiche
  1. Cream together the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy (easier if the butter isn’t too cold)
  2. Sieve the flour in and use a cutting motion to mix it in until you have a crumbly mixture
  3. Add about 1 tbsp milk, mix together with a fork and eventually use your hand to pull it all into a ball of pastry. Wrap in clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 30 minutes or more
  4. Pre-heat the oven to 200C and grease a 22cm tart tin
  5. Roll out the pastry to just over the size of the tin and transfer it. If there’s one problem with this simple pastry it’s that it falls apart very easily. Don’t worry! You can mush bits back together and basically mould it with your fingers once it is in the tin. In fact, the edges of the tart only need to be a centimeter or so high, and it may be easiest to form them by squishing the pastry up from the base.
  6. Pop the tart tin in the oven for about 15 minutes, but what you’re really looking for is the pastry to be going lightly golden, not properly brown. Take it out of the oven, and turn the oven down to 180C
  7. Add perhaps a half tablespoon of sugar to the bilberries, just to balance the tartness, then tip them all into the pastry case. Stick it back in the oven for another 10 minutes
  8. Meanwhile, beat the egg with the tablespoon of sugar and a big tablespoon of crème fraiche
  9. Pour this mixture slowly all over the bilberries, then put the tart back in the oven for a final 15 minutes, although what you really want is for the visible bits of custard to be set and a bit browned. Turn the oven off and leave the tart inside for 10 more minutes, then take it out to cool
  10. Wait as long as you can, then enjoy!

[singlepic id=335 w=400 h=310 float=center]

Bilberry picking

[singlepic id=330 w=240 h=180 float=right]Bilberries are one of my favourite wild foods, right up there with wild garlic and parasol mushrooms. They start to appear in August and can be got into September, it all seems to depend on where exactly they’re growing. You’d also be well advised to look for them somewhere that sheep aren’t grazing, as the fat woolly lawnmowers will happily nibble up all the berries they can find. Up here in Shropshire you can see this easily comparing The Long Mynd and Stiperstones, both beautiful hills clad in bilberries and within sight of each other. Yet the sheep-grazed Mynd is miserable pickings while on Stiperstones we picked half a kilo in half an hour. This is well worth doing, as they pack a whole lot more flavour and goodness than their bloated cultivated cousins the blueberries. And of course food you found yourself is always better. Somehow the dark purple stains on your fingers that resist all attempts to wash it off just enhances the taste!

[singlepic id=331 w=240 h=180 float=right]A couple of handfuls of bilberries make for a very intense milkshake. This one was made with a few scoops of proper vanilla ice cream, a splash of milk and a couple of juicy peaches too. Depending on how sweet the bilberries you’ve got are it may be helpful to add a couple of teaspoons of sugar. I also added a couple of spoonfuls of bilberry sauce for intensity.

This simple bilberry sauce is my favourite thing to do with bilberries for sheer versatility. It intensifies the flavour and you can judge the level of sweetness to balance out any sourness in your crop as I have to admit that bilberries eaten straight from the bush are a bit of a lottery. There are always a few face-puckering moments.

It’s a sweet sauce, perfect on ice cream, muesli, yogurt or anything else needing an intensely fruity hit. But the power of the fruit is enough that you can pair it as-is with savoury foods like duck, mackerel, game, lamb or cheese. Or, use it as a base: I added a couple of teaspoons of brandy and a tablespoon of sherry vinegar to a few tablespoons of the sauce and then simmered it gently for another ten minutes before serving on poached and pan-fried pheasant breast. Another one that worked well was to saute some shallot and garlic in butter, then add the sauce and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. Finish with a splop of cream.
[singlepic id=329 w=400 h=310 float=center]

Bilberry sauce

250g bilberries
2 tbsp apple juice
2 dsp honey
juice of half a lemon
4 star anise
pinch of salt
  1. Rinse and drain your bilberries, picking out any leaves and bits of twig that got in the tub
  2. Put all the ingredients in a small saucepan and simmer for about 20 minutes
  3. Check the balance half-way (blow on the spoon, the sauce will be volcanic!) and add more honey or lemon as necessary.
  4. Pour into a jar straight from the heat and put the lid on, turning upside-down once – the sauce will still be well above boiling hot and that sterilises the jar and lid pretty well. Note: there’s no need to pass through a sieve, there are no noticeable seeds in bilberries and the sauce is better for the texture of the berries.

Enjoy!
[singlepic id=332 w=440 h=310 float=center]

Review: Ceviche, Soho

[singlepic id=325 w=280 h=210 float=right]My experience of South American food from the three months we spent there at the end of our year around the world was generally poor. How could a continent that provided us with so many of the most brilliant staple ingredients have such rubbish cuisine? And I don’t just mean the roasted guinea pigs. South America gave us potatoes, sweetcorn, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, peanuts, pineapples, the list goes on. Yet we spent most of our time there wishing we were back in South East Asia or Australasia.

Okay, to be more specific we spent most of our visit in Chile, and whether trying local restaurants in towns well off the tourist trail or opting for Lonely Planet favourites we found the food to range between passable and irredeemably horrid. Meat, meat, meat, uninspiring and usually served with suspect salad. Even their fantastic seafood was treated with sad disrespect by every kitchen we encountered. Odd forays into fine dining were predictably miserable. But perhaps we haven’t given Peru a fair shake yet, as our time there was centred on the tourist hotspot of Cuzco. The food was adequate tourist-fodder, at least up a notch on their southern neighbour. Lima we missed.

[singlepic id=326 w=280 h=210 float=right]Which brings me to Ceviche, a friendly little joint in Soho that gave us a chance to explore more Peruvian delights. There was a nice buzz to Ceviche, as someone who works ground crew on the runway at Heathrow might say. Or as I might say, it was so astonishingly noisy that you had to hold direct-to-ear nightclub conversations with the other people at your table. This did result in me drinking rather too many pisco sours, as it was easier to keep my lips occupied that way than by trying to keep up a meaningful discussion. Maybe that’s their intention?

To the food. We tucked into some good ceviche of sea bass in tangy lime and chilli based marinade. If you’ve never enjoyed ceviche, this was a fine specimen as an introduction. I also picked out a variation that included basil and green mango. Oddly, it was less than half the size of the standard ceviche which for the same price seemed (perhaps unintentionally) mean and the mango and basil didn’t do anything exciting to the dish. I’ve had some dazzling ceviches (in Miami, not Peru) and they could certainly try harder here.

[singlepic id=327 w=280 h=210 float=right]Some very nice skewers of grilled beef heart, one thing I do recall fondly from the continent. If you’ve never tried heart, it is muscle and so more akin to meat than to other offal. Grilled it has a deeply savoury, salty taste. The grilled fish and chicken skewers were also good, though hardly particular to Peruvian cuisine. Causa is a layered dish of cold mashed potato and various toppings. We tried a luridly colourful one of coriander mash with a beetroot topping, it looked the part and tasted… nice. I can’t really go beyond nice. The more typical causa, topped with avocado and a seafood cocktail, was a much better dish.

We washed our meal down with pisco sours and a number of other pisco cocktails, the best by far being a delicious concoction involving passion fruit and cinnamon. The staple pisco sour was also a good specimen, not over-sweet nor too strong. Our friend Tim stuck with wine but couldn’t find a glass that was any more than hmm. His advice: stick to the pisco. Puddings were okay rather than astonishing. Dulce de leche ice cream had the taste but lacked the expected slick deliciousness of that gooey South American treat. The lucuma ice cream had such a subtle hint of the fruit that it may as well have not been there.

If you want to try Peruvian cuisine, or you want to relive your trip to Machu Picchu, I’d say Ceviche delivers a solid experience of the staple dishes that everyone knows. Albeit without the fried guinea pig. But they don’t seem particularly adept when it comes to lifting these staples to another level, or riffing into the world of more refined cuisine. Stick to the basics and you’ll have a good time. With all the pisco sours we managed to rack up £50 per person including tip but every dish is under £10 so your bill is pretty much in your own hands.
[singlepic id=328 w=400 h=310 float=center]

Review: The Checkers, Montgomery

[singlepic id=323 w=280 h=210 float=right]One thing a restaurant really can’t be blamed for is having to share a dining room with a big party of cheerfully noisy people. Indeed, as they’re likely to have a storming drinks bill it’s only to be expected that restaurants would actively court such parties.

The Checkers is a cosy, friendly restaurant in the modern country hotel style. They scooped a recent Michelin star which was enough to drag us the forty minute drive from Ludlow. We were introduced to some very comfy sofas in the lounge for pre-prandial drinks, but I’d scarcely admired the huge old fireplace beside us when the big party drifted in. Swiftly armed with champagne they stood around us and nearly on top of us, chatting away volubly with old friends. My sofa felt like it had been transported to a house party for very mature students. Jarring, having just started to relax. I needed to find my zen. It would be terribly unprofessional to allow something like this to affect my review. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that a top-notch server might have noticed that the four poor souls adrift on their sofa in the middle of the party had fallen strangely quiet, and shuffled them off to their table a little quicker.

[singlepic id=321 w=280 h=210 float=right]Of course we ended up sat right next to the big table. And of course one of the chaps was of the cheerful loudmouth variety who gets noisier as the evening draws on and apparently tells the most hilarious jokes ever heard in rural Montgomeryshire. The braying reached a point where I was ready to ask a waiter to please enquire politely if the table next door would kindly shut the frigging damn hell up? Zen. Zennnnn…

My starter was a generous plate of scallops, beautifully – perfectly – cooked and accompanied by a delicate fennel and ginger salad. They hadn’t been brave enough with the confit ginger, a shame as this was a spot-on match for the scallops when I did find a bit in my mouthful. The fennel by contrast didn’t give the scallops quite enough. Maureen’s spiced yellow fin was also very nicely seared and served up with soy and sesame dressing. For me the puddle of soy washing around the plate didn’t look very pretty, and we all agreed that there was a note of citrus palpably absent from this starter.

For main course I was seduced by roast squab pigeon with date puree, couscous and orange jus. The squab was dense and lovely, treated just perfectly. Good jus, good couscous, lovely slow-roasted tomatoes, but the date puree was a nigardly blob that disappeared with the first three mouthfuls of bird. It was the date that seduced me, dammit, I want more! Maureen’s rabbit was a truly single-minded plate of protein. If there was any carbohydrate present I missed it, and the blob of shallot puree and confit tomatoes were lost in the heap of bunny. Really, deliciously, beautifully cooked bunny though it was.

[singlepic id=322 w=280 h=210 float=right]I finished off with a hot praline souffle, because I like praline and was intrigued to see how they’d managed to balance the obvious sweetness. They hadn’t. It was incredibly rich and sickly, and the scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side wasn’t going to do anything to control that. I couldn’t finish it. Maureen by contrast went for the selection of Checkers desserts and faced a mountain of puddings. They must have all been pretty good as the plate was devastated by the end, but we couldn’t find anything particular to hold up as amazing. It’s always good to have a real “Ooo… YUM!” from at least one pud on a selection plate.

The Checkers is a good find in the wild and woolly Welsh marches. From our visit I would say that their great strength is execution – everything is cooked to perfection. In contrast, they seem to have missed the mark a few times in balancing a plate or picking a combination. I’d go again, to see whether different menu selections turn out to be better balanced, although at £75 a head with only one-and-a-half bottles of wine between the four of us I’ll probably wait a little while.
[singlepic id=324 w=400 h=310 float=center]

Review: Tanroagan, Isle of Man

[singlepic id=318 w=280 h=210 float=right]The Isle of Man is one of the most unusual parts of the British Isles. It is as much of a backwater as you can find on these busy islands and that’s a pleasure in many ways. Manx folklore abounds with tales of fairies and monsters, and every damp woodland or ruined chapel has some local fairy associated with it. We roamed mouldering castles, verdant glens and rugged coastline for two days with scarcely another soul in sight and often felt pretty close to bumping into the moddey dhoo, the mooinjer veggey or the fenodyree, to name but three of the Manx fairies. It’s a fey and fascinating place, made more so by the weather which has ranged from cheery sunshine to eerie fog within an hour. I’d recommend a short break over here, though you may struggle to fill an entire week unless you really like hiking.

Of course, in other ways being a backwater eddying along a couple of decades behind the UK can be detrimental, and certainly seemed to be in the case of eating out.

We had supper one evening at the best Chinese restaurant on the island (as proclaimed by more than one apparently independent adjudicator) and it was execrable in every way, from the wallpaper paste consistency of the hot and sour soup to the nasty beef and aubergine hotpot; bits of aubergine cooked down to lumps of snot with strips of black skin hanging off in a gloopy sauce oddly reminiscent of the hot and sour soup. We also tried the renowned Manx kippers, and found them to be just the kind of ho-hum kippers I remember [singlepic id=311 w=280 h=210 float=left]having for tea as a kid and nothing whatsoever like the gorgeous specimens from the Black Mountain Smokery that we breakfasted on at the Felin Fach Griffin a while back. We tried our luck on a new and rather expensive restaurant in the hills, only to be served the kind of stolidly unexciting food that classy restaurants felt safe charging top dollar for thirty years ago. They’ve obviously also only just discovered Italian coffee on the island, as every cappuccino I tried came as a mug (yes, a mug) of scalding hot milk with a trace of burnt coffee and a scurf of foam on the surface.

So it was a pleasure to enjoy one decent meal, at a little fish restaurant called Tanroagan just off the north quay of the main town of Douglas. The restaurant is tucked down a side road and is a cosy little hole-in-the-wall with just a handful of tables. Rustic décor with blue, yellow and white is just about spot-on for a friendly informal seafood joint. Service was patchy, hilarious considering there were two servers and only one other table seated when we arrived. This seems to be a theme on Man: our B&B had a detailed list of recommendations almost all of which said something along the lines of “good food, service patchy”. Of course, they also recommended the horrible Chinese.

[singlepic id=315 w=280 h=210 float=right]I digress. Back in Tanroagan our starter was a tian of smoked haddock brandade topped with a crisp fried poached egg and surrounded by a ring of delicate hollandaise. The brandade was super, either very good smoked haddock or the chef had salted it a while before making the dish.

For the main course I couldn’t resist sharing a whole pan-roasted turbot. In hindsight this isn’t the best way to review a fish restaurant; rather like enjoying a simple steak, you can’t do much more than judge whether the chef has cooked it to the right degree. In this case he had, and it was a clean and meaty piece of fish. On a plate, with a lemon. Chips were pretty good, and the side of veg was suitably summery, tossed in a little hollandaise to enrich.

Back home I wouldn’t call this meal a bargain, nor would I laud it as a truly great fish restaurant. But given the competition we tried on our three night stay, I’d definitely say Tanroagan should be on your short-list of restaurants for any trip to the Isle of Man. They even made a perfectly acceptable espresso to round off our supper.
[singlepic id=317 w=400 h=310 float=center]