Yellow Courgette and Sweetcorn Curry – two ways



Autumn might feel like it’s arrived early, but I can’t deny that this is probably my favourite season for cooking. I love chopping big chunky autumn vegetables and chucking them in a pot to slowly cook down into something earthy and wonderful.

This is a really versatile recipe. You can pretty much chuck anything in, as long as you remember the yellow theme when you choose your ingredients. Add a carrot or two, toast some cumin seeds and add them to the pot, or some chilli powder. I made mine pretty mild, but it would be really good with some chilli kick.

The inspiration for this curry is our giant monster of a courgette plant. Early in the summer it quietly started to flower and we had a couple of pretty small courgettes to nibble on. Then we went away for a few days and it sprung to life, providing plenty of beautiful yellow vegetables for me to experiment with. Then we went away again and returned to this!


Around this time, of course, the markets are full of beautiful, sweet cobs of corn, and I figured it might be nice to stick with the yellow theme and make a soup for me and Sidney. I added turmeric and onion, a squeeze of lemon and a stick of celery, coriander being the only green allowed. It made a delicious summer soup, with an almost coconut flavour.

The soup reminded me of curries I’d had travelling in Asia, and here in Vietnamese restaurants, often accompanied by cashew nuts and chicken. So I made my own version, which is the second recipe here and which could be made with a variety of ingredients; it would be really tasty with mushrooms instead of chicken, for example, or with some chopped fresh chillies.

Thick Yellow Courgette and Sweetcorn Curry Soup

Serves 4

1 corn cob, leaves removed
200g basmati rice
a big knob of butter
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2cm piece ginger, chopped
4 or 5 yellow courgettes (or 1 giant one), sliced or chopped
1 celery stick, sliced
a small bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
1 tsp turmeric
50g mixed seeds, such as pumpkin and sunflower
100ml crème fraîche
a squeeze of lemon juice
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put a pan of boiling water on the heat and cook your corn cob for a few minutes until plump. Remove the cob from the pan and set aside to cool a little, then slice the corn off the cob. Cook the rice in the water in which you cooked the corn.

Put a large heavy bottomed pan over a medium heat and melt the butter. Add the chopped onion and carrots and cook until softened. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for a minute, then add the courgettes and celery and cook until browned. Add the chopped coriander, most of the sweetcorn, scatter the turmeric over the top and season to taste. Stir the whole thing together and leave to cook down for about 10 minutes.


In a separate pan toast the seeds, then add half to the curry mixture and transfer the whole thing to a blender, or use a hand blender, and whizz up until smooth. Stir the crème fraîche into the soup with a squeeze of lemon.

Spoon the rice into bowls and top with the soup and a dollop of crème fraiched. Scatter the remaining sweetcorn and seeds over the top and serve.



Yellow Courgette, Sweetcorn and Chicken Curry

Serves 4

1 corn cob, leaves removed
500g free-range chicken pieces (or 400g boneless)
50g butter
1 onion, diced
4 or 5 yellow courgettes (or 1 giant one), sliced or chopped
1 celery stick, sliced
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2cm piece ginger, chopped
a large bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
1 x 400g tin coconut milk
1 tsp turmeric
50g cashew nuts
50g mixed seeds, such as pumpkin and sunflower
extra-virgin olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
basmati rice, to serve

Put a pan of boiling water on the heat and cook your corn cob for a few minutes until plump. Remove the cob from the pan and set aside to cool a little, then slice the corn off the cob.

Put a large heavy bottomed pan over a high heat and melt a little oil. Add your chicken and sear on all sides. Transfer the chicken to a plate and lower the heat to medium-low.

Melt the butter in the pan and add the chopped onion. Cook until softened and then transfer to the plate with the chicken. Add the chopped courgettes and celery to the pan and cook until browned. Tip them onto the plate with the chicken and onions.

Add the chopped garlic and ginger to the pan and cook for a minute, then tip the chicken, onion, courgette and celery back into the pan along with the sweetcorn, half the chopped coriander and the coconut milk. Scatter the turmeric over the top and season to taste.

Stir the whole thing together, put a lid on the pan if you have one, and leave to cook down for about 10 minutes. (If you don’t have something you can use for a lid you can add a ladleful of water later on to thin out the mixture.)

Cook the rice in the water in which you cooked the corn.

In a separate pan toast the cashew nuts and seeds. If you have small children you can bash these up or put them in a blender.

Take the chicken pieces out of the mixture and set aside on a warm plate. Add half the toasted nuts and seeds to the curry mixture, then transfer to a blender, or use a hand blender, and whizz up to a smooth paste.

Spoon the rice onto a serving plate, top with chicken pieces and spoon the curry mixture over the top. Scatter the remaining coriander over the curry and top with the remaining toasted nuts and seeds.


Cheap and Cheerful Tomato Crumble


At the end of our holiday in Brittany we spent a few days in Laval with Seb’s good friends, Thomas and Laeticia. We’ve stayed with them a few times now and I love their home. Laeticia has a colourful Lavallois family history; she comes from a family of seed growers from the town and inherited the family home via a priest uncle who passed on the modest payment for the property to his congregation.

It’s a sprawling house above an opticians near the city centre, with a walled kitchen garden and rickety old shed out back. Having studied catering and worked in restaurants, both changed careers in their late-twenties to become carers – she for young people with learning disabilities, he for psychiatric patients at the hospital – so they weren’t rolling in cash when they took on the old building, but I love what they’ve done with it, scrubbing back the wooden floors and giving the whole place a good lick of primary coloured paint.

Not only did they inherit the house, but also the vintage family furniture. I pine for the Formica table relegated to the laundry room and original features like the mid-century taps in the spare room. Plus they have all the memorabilia from the seed-growing years. Their breakfast bar is plastered with old seed packets, which made a handy learning/distraction tool for a hungry toddler learning his vegetables.


In typically French fashion, I’m reminded every time I visit Laval that life is food, and life is love. And food with love is the icing on the cake. Which is great for us because we eat well every time we go there. Thomas was vegetarian for many years, so the pair have an impressive repertoire of cheap but delicious vegetarian food, including the cherry tomato crumble we were treated to on this particular trip.

The tomatoes, of course, came from the garden, carefully collected by Sidney and ourselves, then tipped  unceremoniously over the mud before being painstakingly returned to the basket, one tomato at a time. With all the French sunshine they must have had throughout the summer they were sweet to the point where it could have felt like we were eating a dessert if it weren’t for the balsamic vinegar and cheesy crumble.


It’s such a cheap and tasty dish, I decided to make it again at home. I used plum tomatoes because I couldn’t resist them at the market, but they also made a slightly more savoury pudding, which I liked. I also added fresh thyme from the garden – again, to temper the sweetness of the tomatoes – and swapped white flour for wholemeal.



Here’s my recipe:

Cheap and Cheerful Tomato Crumble

Serves 4

1kg ripe tomatoes, chopped into big chunks (halved if cherry)
500g shallots, peeled and quartered
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
a few sprigs of thyme, leaves separated
150g wholemeal flour
100g butter, cubed
75g Parmesan, grated
75g goats’ cheese, sliced
extra-virgin olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 150°C/gas 2.

Scatter the chopped tomatoes and shallots over the base of a casserole or baking dish and toss with the balsamic vinegar and half the thyme leaves. Season to taste (I just add pepper and let the Parmesan in the crumble provide the saltiness) and bake for 1 hour. Take the dish out of the oven and turn up the heat to 220°C/gas 7.

Rub together the flour, butter and half the grated Parmesan with your fingers until you have a breadcrumb consistency. Scatter over the cooked tomatoes and onions and lay the slices of goats’ cheese over the top. Scatter over the remaining thyme leaves and Parmesan. Bake for a further 30 minutes, until the top is crispy and golden brown.


Serve with something neutral like fresh salad leaves and green peas to balance the richness of the crumble.


Brixton Galettes with Scallops, Bacon and Apple Compote



We’ve been in France again – such a chore with all that beautiful Breton countryside, good cheap wine and tasty galettes – and it seems to be working; Sidney, who has been happily announcing every apple that’s fallen into the garden over the last few weeks, proudly lifted one he’d found the other morning and declared pomme, like a good petit bonhomme.


It’s incredibly easy to underestimate children, particularly around the 18-month mark, when they take giant leaps in their understanding. The first time we realised Sidney understood commands he was, in fact, responding to French. Où sont tes chaussons, Sidney? Where are your slippers? He disappeared into the kitchen and duly returned, arms outstretched, slippers in hand.

It must be pretty confusing for a little person, eager to understand the words swimming around him and communicate his own in return. After all, we are asking him to understand not only ‘cockerel’ and ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’, but also le coq and cocorico. That’s twice as many words and sounds to take in and I’ve noticed that while in the spring he would say ‘dog’, and was trying to say ‘aeroplane’, as soon as we took him to France and switched to le chien and l’avion, he stopped giving them names completely.

It felt like a step backwards – though that is far too strong; he can take as long as he needs to start communicating in either language as far as we’re concerned – but, in the long run, he is so lucky to have these languages filtering into his brain at such a young age. I just hope he continues with both. I know a lot of children reject the second language as they get older and simply refuse to speak it.

Since Sidney was born, his dad has spoken to him almost exclusively in French while I, with my poor French skills, have spoken to him almost entirely in English. Seb did a lot of research before Sidney was born to find out how best to raise him with dual languages and there is a huge amount of information online, but it tends to boil down to either of two methods: one person–one language, i.e. I speak English, Seb speaks French; or we both speak French exclusively at home. Option B wasn’t really feasible for us and I was concerned that my family would feel alienated if we brought Sidney up speaking a different language. I hope my French skills will improve as Sidney gets older (all those French board books must be sinking in, right?) because friends of ours have admitted that their children’s desire to actually speak French improved dramatically once their English mother started speaking French at home. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

We are lucky in that several of Seb’s friends have young children around the same age, with whom Sidney will be spending his holidays and getting up to mischief throughout his childhood. Hopefully these friendships will inspire him to keep communicating in French. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to try to keep up!


So, galettes. Take a trip to Brittany and you’ll struggle to escape them. The Breton galette is a savoury version of a crêpe. It uses buckwheat flour and is usually stuffed with ham, cheese, eggs, mushrooms or, in this region, Andouille, a strong-flavoured French delicacy that you either love or hate: I’m with the latter.

Galettes are brilliant because children love them as much as adults do. The buckwheat gives them a satisfying nuttiness and the pancake crisps up at the edges while staying soft towards the centre where it takes on the flavours and juices of the stuffing ingredients.

Buckwheat is also a healthy alternative to wheat (it’s actually the seed of a plant related to rhubarb, rather than a grass); it’s packed with protein, gluten-free and has all sorts of other good things in it (trust Oprah). If you’ve ever had soba noodles or salmon blinis, you’ve had buckwheat, but you can also make porridge with it, gnocchi; you can even sprout the seeds and eat them raw.

One particular speciality of the region is a sweet scallop galette with creamed leeks and lettuce. I had one in the pretty medieval river port town of Saint-Goustan and the sweetness of the scallops and creaminess of the leeks against the savoury, crisp galette definitely did it for me. It made a refreshing change from the standard cheese-ham-egg combo.

I decided to experiment with the sweet/creamy/savoury thing when I got home. We’ve been making apple compote to use up some of the apples from the garden. It’s so simple to make: just peel, core and chop your apples, sprinkle with a little sugar (not too much) and heat in a pan until the apples are soft and the sugar is incorporated. It’s delicious with yoghurt for a refreshing dessert.

Here’s my recipe for Galette a la Brixton. I used the standard ratio for pancakes as a guide: 2-parts flour; 2-parts liquid; 1-part egg; ½-part butter, and just substituted buckwheat flour for plain. A top tip from my culinarily gifted French friend – beat the batter for a good 5 minutes before you rest it for at least 1 hour; it brings air into the slightly heavier buckwheat batter and letting it settle will give you a softer galette.

Brixton Galettes with Scallops, Bacon and Apple Compote

Makes 5 or 6

For the pancake
225g buckwheat flour
300ml milk
2 eggs
½ tsp salt
butter, for frying

For the filling – choose your own quantities
bacon rashers
scallops
apple compote
lettuce leaves
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
lemon juice
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and add the eggs and milk. Beat with a whisk for a good 5 minutes and then cover and leave to rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Warm some plates in the oven before you start cooking – some for the grown-ups and 2 to keep your ingredients warm while you’re cooking.

Melt a knob of butter in a large, heavy frying pan over a medium-high heat. Pour a ladleful of batter into the pan and swirl it around a bit to spread out the batter. Cook for a couple of minutes, until the bottom of the galette has a nice brown tinge to it. Flip it over and cook the other side. Transfer to one of your plates and keep warm in the oven. Add another knob of butter to the pan and cook the next galette, and so on.


Grill or fry your bacon until crisp at the edges, then transfer to one of your warmed plates. Tip the scallops into the pan to cook in the fat from the bacon. They’ll only need a couple of minutes each side, so keep an eye on them or they’ll quickly overcook. No one likes a rubbery scallop.

Take your galettes from the oven and slide them onto the warmed plates. Quickly spread with apple compote, lay the warm bacon over the top and then top with the cooked scallops.

Scatter lettuce leaves around the edges and drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Squeeze some lemon juice over the top and season with salt and pepper. 


(For Sidney’s galette I used some leftover vegetables and cooked them with an egg, to make it easier for him to eat and to avoid too much salt.)


Voilà.

Useful info on strategies for raising bilingual children can be found here: