Food Files: Hector

Meet Hector.

I found this Spanish lad-about-town recoiled furtively on a curb in Old Compton Street. There was something outrageous about him... his piratical appearance... his pride in his socks... his decision to park that well-toned butt on a double-yellow line.

I liked it. I wanted to take a photo. And I wanted to know what he ate.

Hector protested and claimed that he was shy - surprising for a man who has a ring tattooed around his head. After some gentle pressure however he relented.

Hector eats brown rice and vegetables, sometimes chicken.

Sweet shoes.

Pea and Broad Bean Risotto with Goats' Cheese and Za'atar

Making risotto for guests is sweaty, miserable and lonely. Like many people in late-capitalist society, that's how I feel most nights – I don't need it for a dinner party.

You know how it goes. Everyone likes risotto, right? So what better for a convivial supper? Here's the reality: the guests turn up; you palm them off with a beaker of vino; then it's back to the pot. As The Beatles once sung, I don't know why you say hello, I say goodbye.

For the next twenty minutes, your face hovers over a boiling mass of stodge. Your features contort in sweaty rancour as it stubbornly refuses to transmogrify into risotto. When you finally waddle through with the goods, your face resembles a gargoyle water-feature. And dinner party banter? Forget it. You've been in your own world for the last half hour. You're gonna be about as with it as Grandma.

Not this time, cholo.

This time I cheated. I nudged the risotto into a state of readiness two hours before the guests arrived. Get the first ladle of stock in, then turn off the heat. The risotto stands there, frozen in time, ready for its rescue - kind of like when Jabba the Hut merked Han Solo. That tip is from reluctantly right-on meat fanatic, Anthony Bourdain.

Unfortunately, there is another labour-intensive element to this dish... broad beans. Because you have to shell them. You really must. Their sallow, scrotal sacks have no place on a dinner plate. There may be a voice in your head that says “leave 'em on”. It may make some specious reference to 'roughage'. Ignore that voice.

And don't underestimate how long it takes to shell broad beans. At six thirty, I had plenty of time. Guest weren't due till seven thirty. An hour later, I was still tiddly-winking these little bastards all over my kitchen like a maniac. There is no technique to shelling a broad bean. Thank Christ the peas were frozen.

I don't really want to talk about it but I won't be cooking broad beans again.

Recipe – serves 3-4

Bag of broad beans

Munchkin's fistful of frozen peas

Four measures of risotto rice

One leek

Garlic

Shallot

Mature, firm goats' cheese

Za'atar (available from Middle Eastern delis or your local Mother Earth-style shop)

Butter

Three of four leaves of fresh mint, chopped.

Lemon zest

1. Sauté the shallots, the garlic and the leek in olive oil. That's right: I said leek. Normally it would be celery, but I saw some darling baby leeks in the London Fields farmers' market and this seemed a good time to use them.

   Why? A logical chain: this dish has peas and broad beans... they go with mint... and a lot of dairy-rich Middle Eastern dishes pair leek and mint... and this dish has a Middle Eastern garnish. So in the leeks go and anyone who doesn't like it can jolly well go to blazes.

2. Once the alium medley is translucent, turn up the heat and toss in the risotto rice. At this point, imagine you're an old school police officer who's just taken custody of a pack of ruffians you suspect of kidnapping a local grandee. They're no good to you when they're all sticking together in a big, cocky mass. You've got to smack 'em about a little with a wooden implement. Don't let them settle. Soon they'll separate into individuals, each one out for himself. That's what we want from the rice: no stickiness; just individual grains.
   
   

   Now throw in the dregs of the white wine you've been slurping. Do it with a Floyd-like flourish if at all possible. You're pouring some out for a dead homey. A boozy-smelling spirit will rise from the pot and ascend t'ward the heavens.

3. In goes your first ladleful of stock. When I say stock, I mean Marigold Bouillon. And when I say ladleful, I mean just slop a load of it into the pot. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the ladlefuls and the more frequent their addition, the better the performance of the chef. And the worse the performance of the host. So work out what you wanna do – have a chinwag with your buddies or gurn into a saucepan. Find a balance. Soon enough the risotto will be done.

4. When it gets there, act fast. Heat off. Lob in the broad beans – good riddance. Drop your payload of peas. Fling in some mint. Lemon zest. Salt. Then a John Holmes knob of butter. Without enough butter, your risotto has little chance of oozing across the plate. And that is the correct texture of risotto. With the final touches applied, put the lid on the pot and let the risotto sit. The ingredients get to know each other, and you should go re-acquaint yourself with your guests.

5. These are the most precious ten minutes of your dinner party – your hard work is all done and no-one yet knows if your risotto is actually gash. Relax. Be a host. If it's too late to plug into your guests' conversation, why not entertain them with a few hilarious armpit farts?

6. The ten minutes are up. Take the plates from the oven. Put a blob of risotto in the middle of each. Does it ooze? Tough shit. Carefully place a slice of your goats' cheese on top of the risotto. Now a little swirl of olive oil. And finally a sprinkling of za'atar* on the goats' cheese.
   
   

Serve with a Sancerre, Menetou-Salon or, preferably, a Pouilly-Fume.

*Za'atar is a Middle Eastern mix of wild thyme, toasted sesame and sumac. It tends to be made by people who are getting a raw deal in every other part of their life, so why not buy a pack? Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall loves the stuff so who the hell are you to turn your nose up?

Griddled Asparagus with Truffled Balsamic and Old Winchester Cheese

Griddle me this, griddle me that

But the flesh needs colour

The chars bring black

- The Griddler

Do not attempt this recipe without the thickest, stickiest balsamic imaginable.

That shit's gotta be older than Sophia Loren. It just so happens that mine is also infused with white truffles – a lovely bequest from my landlady. Lucky old Cereal Killah, eh? If you don't have this to hand, just reduce some normal balsamic in a pan until it has the consistency of syrup.

Now when I plan to serve a dish with truffles, my thoughts turn immediately to something dirty and farmyardy. That means egg or cheese. Or forcing yourself upon a chicken.

Well after a week of slurping miserably through a grotesque alioli surplus, I had ordered an egg embargo. What I wanted now was a hard cheese to grate over my griddled spears and caramelise onto their charred skin.

Pecorino? Parmesan? No. There was, as so often, an under-appreciated English alternative. One of the many undervalued cheeses in our dairy canon is Old Winchester. It's halfway between the Italian showponies cited above. And it just feels better when serving something as English as asparagus. Waitrose have stocked it in the past, but you can also get it online from Lyburn Farm.

Ingredients:

Two bunches of English asparagus

Really old, thick balsamic vinegar

Old Winchester cheese (or Parmesan or Pecorino if you want to be an unpatriotic dog)

Pretty simple stuff really:

1. Prep the asparagus spears. You know the routine – bend them till they snap. This technique magically finds the natural cut-off between succulent flesh and chewy wood. Apparently. It's a bit like a ouija board though – your instinct manually guides the final result.

2. Parboil those boys. This means two or three minutes in a really big pan of water. The more water is boiling, the less impact a fistful of asparagus is going to have on its temperature; the less impact on temperature, the quicker the boil; and the quicker your greens boil, the more vivid their final emerald robes. Finally, freeze that colour in by water-boarding the asparagus in ice-cold H2O.

3. Get your plates ready. This means drizzling some kind of centrifugal pattern on the plate wit your balsamic (pre-prepped if it's a reduction.) It shouldn't be too perfect – this is not a restaurant and it shouldn't try to be. Clearly, the vinegar shouldn't run. It should hit the plate and stick.

4. Take the asparagus spears out of their cold bath. Dry 'em off, real nice and tender like. What these guys don't know is that you've got a griddle pan smoking hot and you're gonna toss them across its scorching bars - ha! There will be screams of protest, but that's what we're after here.

Two things on griddling:

The asparagus should criss-cross the contours of the griddle pan. In the words of Monica Geller, if they're not at a right angle, they're at a wrong angle.

You must leave them on the pan for a good few minutes without moving them. We want one or two black chars on the asparagus, not a series of dark green smudges. If need be, focus on one spear and see how he's getting on. Don't move the whole lot around until you know that fella's ready to roll. You're a stage performer focusing on one member of the audience.

Ok, shake the spears about till you see a lot of charred sides up, then let them cook for another two minutes or so. Heat off - the asparagus is done.

5. Visually enumerate the asparagus spears and divide this total by the number of diners, rounding down to the nearest unit. Use tongs to grab this number of spears, and lay them across the balsamic swirls on each plate in a London Underground formation.

Finish by grating a fine shower of Old Winchester onto the spears, quick while they're still hot. Wait a moment, then a little drizzle of olive oil. And crumble some Maldon seat salt on, naturally.

Serve.

This made a decent starter to my dinner party with the lovely Carolin and Anna.

The end of the asparagus season is nigh!

London Fields farmers' market greeted its patrons with an apocalyptic boarding:

"The end of the asparagus season is nigh!"

The asparagus woman stood at her sales altar in the usual state of grace, sheltered from the blazes by a steepling green tarpaulin. I drifted toward her as though she were my high priest and I had but moments to ready my soul for doomsday.


The main sin I had to confess was my pitiful intake of asparagus this season. There were kids about, so I kept schtum about the crack and the hookers.

She heard out my confession and suggested I buy two handfuls of her mis-shaped spears in repentance. At £3.50 for the pair, this was an indulgence I could afford. Before I could leave, the asparagus woman gave me a wistful tale of the harvest:

“'Tis a moooooon vegetable”, she told. “I plucked these boys at four o'clock this very morning. When the stars align, I'm picking four times a day. The optimal conditions for asparagus are a full moon on a midsomer's night.”

She cackled awhile on the glory that met her in the asparagus patch that night: rows upon rows of young priapic spears – her “boys”, standing to attention for her arrival in the twilight.

The phallic overtones of her story were making me feel queasy. I bagged the asparagus and ambled toward the cheese-wallah, who spends his working life manhandling teats.

Why I don't dig on flesh

Why am I a vegetarian? How did I discover a carnivorous diet was not for me? The hard way, baby....

The story starts in 2006, when I embarked on a mission. My mission? To create the Ultimate Male Body (UMB).

*

Some background:

I've been in decent shape ever since my pre-teens at boarding school. This owes to a sadistic dorm prefect, known as “The Man”.

During our dormitory inspections each morning, The Man made it his business to find socks out of place, drawers peeping open and pillows at jaunty angles. Any such violation meant five pay-back push-ups. We did at least twenty every morning before breakfast - rumps straining to our prefect's rhythmic command as vapid sausage fat mingled with the mist and seeped over the horizon.

To this day, it would feel wrong for me to have breakfast without first dropping down and hitting some pay-back push-ups. That old boarding school ritual is part of my life now. By contrast, punishment buggery is just a bitter-sweet memory.

Fast forward to my early twenties:

Still in good, athletic shape. Periodically I target what Chairman Mao might call 'A Great Leap Forward'. For me, this meant concerted effort to achieve step-change in my physique. Weights increase, crunches slow and star jumps reach new heights of camp abandon. Pathetic, but that's how it was.

Looking back, Great Leaps Forward in my physique always followed Great Knocks Back in my love life. If a girl dumped me, I wouldn't hang around to be handed a box of Kleenex. Before she could even murmur something about staying friends, I would be upstairs in my room - Eye Of The Tiger blaring, dumb-bells pumping like glo-sticks at a rave.

Because when you're dumped, you feel inadequate. So what to do? You can't make yourself a different person. No-one in their right mind should attempt plastic surgery. And it's my sad duty to report that penis enhancements simply don't work. That leaves one route to being a better human being:

Increased muscular mass and definition.

*

2006: a Saharan dry patch in the love life of Cereal Killah.

Great Leap Forward follows Great Leap Forward with inexorable, marsupial rhythm. Soon I was in the shape of my life. Work-out endorphins became an addiction. But weights were only half the story. My unsustainable physique owed much to an unsustainable diet. We're talking meat... and lots of it. The UMB diet is simple: if it isn't protein, it isn't any good.

Though I stuck to higher welfare meat, my diet was an outrage to sustainability: chicken breasts at lunch... steak for supper... meat.... meat.... meat.... every day... for a year...

... until that night.

The great hero of Greek mythology was killed through his heel. This dupe of the Atkins diet was to be smighted in his toe. Following a razor clam and chorizo blow-out, I woke at 4am in agony. My big toe felt as though some rogue acupuncturist had stuffed it with needles as I slept. I couldn't walk on it for a week.

Diagnosis?

Gout.

The cause?

Too much meat.

A message?

A calling.