The Forgotten Pantry (2024)

15/10/2022

🍂 Today is maybe a day for pancakes with chestnut flour in them and maybe even blackberries, and maybe maybe the surreally brilliant Valeria Luiselli's novel, Faces in the Crowd 🍂

"Perhaps he thought that by bringing examples of everyday objects to the house, his blind brother would be able to hold onto a notion of the things that foolishly supported the world: a fork, a radio, a rag doll. Maybe the successive addition of shadows would end by shoring up the thing-in-itself and Homer would be saved from the void which was gradually making its way through his head."

28/04/2022

Pwdin reis was once eaten for Sunday dinner all over Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿Slow-cooked overnight to make use of a hot oven after baking bread.

These clever tricks to save energy are becoming more important than ever ♻️. In the post-war mining valleys of south Wales they were just second nature. Does anyone know more of these old ways?

Find this rice pudding recipe and Dee, the 80 year old woman who inspired it, on blog (link in bio). It's so so simple. A proper spoonful of nostalgia✌️

21/02/2021

S U N D A Y R E A D I N G (and cooking) // Recipes and stories of grandmothers from eight east African countries. So many simple, delicious, resourceful recipes, I've basically bookmarked every page.

Interesting as ever to see how universal our grandmothers' cooking is. Always recipes for using up bread, for stretching meat into delicious stews, for making the most of leafy greens, for clever use of spices and herbs to revive the most basic of ingredients... yet despite these patterns, the results are always different, always specific to the person, the place and time.

Universal Not Uniform! A reminder I have on my desk, and why true home-cooking is something to be celebrated. This is joining my desk favourites immediately ✍️

14/02/2021

BEANS 'ON' TOAST // What your beans say about you... so accurate 😂 With handmade mug 💓

03/01/2021

Seeing in 2021 with a squinty sun-filled Sunday, breakfast sarnies and all the food chats with the wonder that is Kurdish cooking genius Melek. Always a joy me dear 😙

30/12/2020

Chicken & buttery pilau rice // Trying to stay (in imagination at least) in Istanbul after finishing Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul.

You have to love a fiction that themes every chapter with food, but also that fills it with colourful strong female characters and bolder historical storytelling. This book landed her in the Turkish courts for telling the tale of two families, one Armenian and the other Turkish, and their shared history in the 1915 Armenian genocide. She talks about it on TED Radio Hour and the power of telling stories in our divided times, which is soo worth a listen ✍️

29/12/2020

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not". Joan Didion spouting some insightful thoughts on why keeping notebooks is so useful. I agree.

I've spent much of this break rereading 20 years-worth of notebooks and journals. It is like finding letters from the past. Circa 2001 is the cringiest (mainly because I fancy a different boy every month at age 14) but this one is the most enlightening, starting 8 years ago after my first year in London.

It is too tempting for me to think of the last 10 years as one of extreme upheaval and change, all the new and old friendships, loves and heartbreaks, job quitting and house moves. And yes I suppose I have changed amidst all of that. But amongst all of that, there is a continuity that is very comforting and which makes seemingly random/out-the-box 2020 choices, ideals and ambitions make a whole lot more sense.

Joan D went on to say, "it is a good idea then to keep in touch and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. We are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves. Your notebook will never help me, nor mine you". Cheers Joan. This is a good reminder ✍️

28/12/2020

🐑 ☁️

20/12/2020

"I’ve had three heart attacks, love, and I’m still here", Ella singsongs down the phone. "No point in being miserable". Welsh grandmothers say it like it is // new blog post up on The Forgotten Pantry ☝🏽

There’s nothing quite like a Welsh woman of 92 to put this lockdown into perspective. I've spent much of the past few months calling up Welsh grandmothers, all in the name of food research. I spoke to Ella and Eirwen, Winnie and Lena, Nia and Myfi all with own stories to tell. Most spoke Welsh as their first language.

They rattled off their Welshcake recipes by rote and always by ounces, which is what got me to make these more unusual savoury versions (thanks to Winnie) with leeks and Caerphilly cheese. You can find the recipe along with the more traditional sweet welshcakes recipe, and Ella's story at the link in profile 😊

If you subscribed to my newsletter, you'll have got it there too, along with some of my fave links. Not least to the wonderful ☀️ Happy longest-night-of-the-year y'allx

19/12/2020

Gone a bit east with me pancakes today 🌍 with milk kefir instead of regular milk for extra fluff (a la Russia/Ukraine), with a bit of Middle East on the side w/ yoghurt, Palestinian medjool dates and tahini, whisked as I've seen in Israel with water and lemon 🍋

Feat: .kefir really delicious milk kefir made in Sussex, a mix of incredible organic spelt flour and plain flour, Palestinian dates and homemade blackcurrant jam yeeeah 🥞

12/12/2020

Jessica Darling, my acupuncturist and all-round legend pouring me some of her sour cream + onion soup (inspired by borscht she says and the times she'd take the transiberian to China) along with her homemade flaxseed buns before our session.

Jessica is 72 and grew up in China. She is British but speaks Chinese fluently and it was there she learned Chinese medicine. I always leave with some Chinese potion or a recipe or an ingredient or two and it always blows my mind how she can tell my general mental state by the three pulses she reads on my wrist. 'Your liver pulse is thin today' she'll say, or deep or bouncy. The Chinese way of describing the body, and how it is interconneced with mind and spirit is often like a mythical story in itself.

Jessica works as part of the Pathways Trust in Bethnal Green. They operate like a cooperative and you pay on a sliding scale so it's affordable for everyone. The care and attention you get is like nowhere else ✌️

11/12/2020

C R E A T I V I T Y // Words of wisdom from Bjork this morn, courtesy of . Where is yours showing up?

"I think creativity always lives somewhere in everyone but its nature is quite pranksterish and slippery and every time you grab its tail it's found a new corner to thrive in. Perhaps the trick is not to force it and put it up against a wall, and want it to be in a particular area.

But, rather, with a lot of kindness, sniff it out and wonder where it has gone to this time around. If it's in sauce recipes, writing theatre plays, paper mache improv with nephews, discovering new hiking routes or simply trying to figure out a family member's sense of humour.

I definitely don't succeed in this all the time but feel, overall, things have been more fertile when I trust this creature's instincts and follow it rather than me willfully reforming it into a circus animal colouring by numbers...As much as you'd like to ignore this animal you have to attend it because if you don't...dark times turn up."

Photo taken in Wales, among what mum calls the Disco Trees, a whole wood of them, their branches bent and curved and angled, growing out and around each other in wonderfully haphazard ways 🌳

09/12/2020

The type of specific food recommendation I like: the falafel at the kosher kebab shop at the top of my street, but only if 'made by the old guy'. Actually, it's made by this woman who makes the spiced chickpea mix herself but the 'old guy' claims jokingly that he makes them himself (but only if we like them).

The menu has things like Cholent and 'Yemenite Soup (amazing)', hummus, 'baclava (delicious)' Turkish coffee, mint tea and Rubicon, and some bits only in Hebrew. The bracketed words are not my own. Some Jewish men come in to get a plate of hot stew warmed up in the micro. The type of place I love in London, a mix of foods on a menu you might not see anywhere else and which, 2 miles down the road would be different again. The falafel I have to say was pretty good.

07/12/2020

Dreaming of pots of kubbeh soup in this little Iraqi-Jewish place in the middle of Jerusalem's Machne Yehuda market.

Kubbeh soup is basically semolina dough balls stuffed with herbyground beef. These were cooked in a beetroot broth. Ideal for this time of year👌 What was the name of this place?

27/11/2020

These trees 💚 Today the Weeping Ash and Horse Chestnuts cut themselves out of a white paper sky. It is almost winter and the coldest day yet, and the trees keep doing their thing.

They lose their leaves and the birds perch differently on their branches and the squirrels move differently too. The rain falls in changing patterns, the sun filters through at new angles, the sound of the wind... there's a different feeling to it all. I visit this wood almost everyday and see that approaching winter is a beautiful thing ❄️🌿

23/11/2020

B R E A D & G R A I N // In Palestine, dimpled flatbreads are cooked on hot stones so their grooves become little pools for olive oil or for juicy roasted meat piled on top.

Pretty much wherever you are in the world, humans have found a way to turn grain into bread. Flatbreads and loaves, baked in a hot oven or over a fire. I'm fascinated by how these ovens and methods differ across countries, like the round clay tone ovens built in the ground in Georgia where flatbreads are stuck to the side of it. Also the community aspect of it. I hear in Turkey (thanks )) and also among Kurdish communities in London that bread making is a time for women to gather, preparing large amounts of bread for the month ahead.

Their starchy bulk is used to wrap, scoop or mop whatever is local and seasonal. Anything from meat or fish to wild greens or cheese. Isn't that quite something?

22/11/2020

S U N D A Y R E A D I N G // How have I only just heard of this book? Tuscans are known as the beaneaters or 'mangiafagioli' of Italy and this is all about that...

Tuscan food and the people who make it. A kind of frugal cooking that is both creative, delicious, and tied to the land it comes from. What Italians do best really. Reading this with a bowl of Olive Mill Soup, with random veg from my fridge and beans blitzed into the base ✌️

20/11/2020

S C O B Y // This weird, rubbery odd-looking creature is a kombucha SCOBY. The acronym for a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeasts that will turn sweetened tea into some fizzy, fermented kombucha. I just got one from my neighbour a few doors down.

A SCOBY is a greedy thing that multiplies and spawns baby SCOBYs the more you feed it with sugar. It's worth asking around to see if anyone has one to give away.

I think that's one of the reasons I love fermenting. Whether it's a SCOBY to make kombucha or a sourdough starter to make bread or kefir grains to make kefir, they all require this 'mother' culture to make it. Well looked after, these mother cultures get passed around from person to person. Like those stories of sourdough starters lasting for generations. There's something in that idea of sharing, borrowing and passing on that I like very much

10/11/2020

Welsh faggots + hand-written letters // Wonderful Welsh Winnie, 82, sent me her Mam's recipe for traditional Welsh faggots (along with a tonne of other recipes) and this letter. She told me she doesn't do email and would much rather a letter any day.

So here I am following her recipe so that I can report back. Faggots are made with pig's offal. This recipe was with minced pig's liver and belly, breadcrumbs, grated onion and apple, and wrapped up in pieces of the pig's apron. Know what that is? The butcher didn't either.

Turns out the 'pig's apron' is the Welsh translation for the caul fat; a lacey, thin membrane that covers the pig's internal organs. Sound gross but actually not.

I don't eat meat very often at all, but I'm embracing this, using up parts of the animal that are not used often. Pig's offal forms the foundation of Welsh cooking, as the annual slaughter of a pig every year would be followed by a huge ritual of preserving and using every last bit of it.

I have some of that caul fat leftover. Any thoughts on what I should do with it? Aside from making more faggots....

02/11/2020

No-waste cheese fritters. Made from almost-off milk, that I turned into fresh cheese (see previous post or stories highlights), which then became these little bites ☀️

Mix fresh cheese (ricotta works too) with an egg and enough flour to make a sticky dough, then dollop tablespoonfuls into hot pan with a bit of oil. Fry till golden. If you like, add a few chopped herbs, maybe some lemon zest to the raw mix, and salt if cheese isn't salted.

It's amazing what you can do when you know how to turn what's in the fridge into a basic staple. Milk into cheese, cream into butter, apple cores into vinegar, fresh vegetables into pickles... Somehow we've been taught to think these basics are too difficult or technical or time-consuming for us to make.

We're more likely to throw the almost-off milk at the same time as wishing we had some cheese to put in a sandwich. I still feel surprise whenever I do something as magic as making cheese, and wonder at the chemistry of our cooking and actually how simple and true it all is. When we regain that knowledge, we regain power and agency. We are able to feed ourselves and cut food waste and make choices that make sense to us, and that can only be a good thing 🌎

02/11/2020

No-waste cheese fritters. From what was milk about to go off, turned into fresh cheese (see previous post or stories highlights), turned into these little bites ☀️

Mix fresh cheese (ricotta works too) with an egg and enough flour to make a sticky dough, then dollop tablespoonfuls into hot pan with a bit of oil. Fry till golden. If you like, add a few chopped herbs, maybe some lemon zest to the raw mix, and salt if cheese isn't salted.

It's amazing what you can do when you know how to turn what's in the fridge into a basic staple. Milk into cheese, cream into butter, apple cores into vinegar, fresh vegetables into pickles... Somehow we've been taught to think these basics are too difficult or technical or time-consuming for us to make.

We're more likely to throw the almost-off milk at the same time as wishing we had some cheese to put in a sandwich. I still feel surprise whenever I do something as magic as making cheese, and wonder at the chemistry of our cooking and actually how simple and true it all is. When we regain that knowledge, we regain power and agency. We are able to feed ourselves and cut food waste and make choices that make sense to us, and that can only be a good thing 🌎

01/11/2020

Happy End of Quarantine my friends, and that Hunters Moon looking all nice 🌕

29/10/2020

No-waste fresh cheese // I made fresh cheese using milk on the turn. It's honestly so easy. All you need is milk and lemon juice and about 30 mins max. See how to do it in my stories highlights ☺️

Fresh curd cheese like this is ubiquitous around the world. In Eastern Europe I saw many people make fresh cheese every morning after milking their cow. In India, paneer is the most common, which you've probs heard of. You can use fresh cheese like cottage cheese, put it in sandwiches or turn it into cheese fritters (swipe, so good!). If paneer, fry it.

Some answers to some of your q's:
- both whole milk or semi-skimmed works. The more fat in the milk, the creamier and more flavourful your cheese, but semi is fine

- make a firmer, paneer-style cheese by pressing the curds overnight under a weight (like a tin of beans) so as much liquid is drained as possible. For cottage cheese consistency, you don't need to press it at all.

- if your milk doesn't curdle the first time, add more lemon juice or bring it to a gentle simmer again

- my milk was on the turn, meaning it had that faint whiff. Adding spiced salt or herbs adds flavour and masks that faint acidity. I would avoid really off milk just as it tastes bad and wouldn't be as easy to mask.

Let me know how it goes 😊

25/10/2020

If you do anything today, listen to Irish poet, John O'Donohue, on the On Being Podcast, where he talks about the meaning of beauty, the mysteries of existence and a bit of Celtic mythology and melancholy.

This bit: 'Beauty isn't all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.'

As winter approaches, the old oak from home, Table Mountain and darkening skies felt an appropriate image 🌙

The Forgotten Pantry

15/10/2022

28/04/2022

21/02/2021

14/02/2021

03/01/2021

30/12/2020

29/12/2020

28/12/2020

20/12/2020

19/12/2020

12/12/2020

11/12/2020

09/12/2020

07/12/2020

27/11/2020

23/11/2020

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20/11/2020

10/11/2020

02/11/2020

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29/10/2020

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