Sole Veronique is a French classic. It’s a very simple dish, but the amount of fiddling in the prep can put some people off! Tarragon is the central flavour and it’s beautiful with the delicate white fish.

Filleting flat fish can be tricky, but with practice you’ll soon get the hang of it and it’s very satisfying to be able to do it yourself! You’ll also need to skin the grapes, this can be a daunting task, but if you pop them in boiling water for about 90 seconds, they’ll slip out of their skins.

I like serving the grapes chilled – it adds a lovely contrast with the warm fish and rich sauce. I served it with some crushed new potatoes (I added plenty of tarragon to help tie them to the white sauce and a splash of vinegar for acidity).

The flavour combinations work so well it would be fun to try and deconstruct the dish a little. Serve the rolls of sole on top of a pomme fondant with a white wine and tarragon foam and a grape jelly?

The weather this weekend has been insanely hot, 32°C in my kitchen, which makes baking pretty difficult, chocolate won’t set properly and pastry is a complete nightmare, but undeterred I made full use of the time.

Foodie Festival – Battersea Park
When the weather is sunny, whats the logical thing to do? Sit in the park drinking cocktails munching on great produce. Foodie Festivals are run all over the country and the showcase local produce and run demonstrations from top chefs.

Clare Smyth
Clare has a pretty spectacular CV, with stints at Louis XV, The Fat Duck, The Waterside, The French Laundry and her current job, Head Chef of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. She is one of only a handful of 3* female chefs and the only one in the UK.

She gave a fantastic demonstration of one of her dishes from Royal Hospital Road – Suckling Pig. You start with an entire suckling pig (at which point the couple next to me walked out – bless their little veggie socks) which is then presented five ways:

Sausage – From the shoulder and belly
Loin – Simply pan fried
Head and Feet – poached inside a savoy cabbage leaf
Ham – A miniature ham from the leg, cured and served with a miniature pineapple.
Pork Belly – Cooked sous-vide and then crisped

Thats quite a lot of work, but she didn’t tackle it solo, three sous chefs helped and it was amazing to see them go from pig to plate inside 40 minutes – great stuff.

The Food
I ate a variety of different dishes from the various stalls:
Llama Sausage – Surprisingly beefy with a subtle gamey note. Very nice!
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Argentinian Steak Sandwich – Barbecue is a South American institution and these friendly chaps where cooking up half a cow, using layered racks to beautifully cook great chunks of beef, it was stunningly tender and beautifully smokey.

Moules Frites – The Mussel Men are making a bid to bring back mussels as a British staple, serving up simple, delicious fast food. Very very tasty!

Weird Baking
Strange flavour combinations are all the rage in modern cooking and it’s starting to trickle down to simple things like cupcakes. Keen to get in on the craze I tried two ‘unusual’ recipes this weekend:

Elvis Whoopie Pies
The King is famous for his rock music, but also for his famous favourite flavour combination: banana, peanut and bacon. Most people look at that and shiver – but was Elvis on to something?

It’s a simple Whoopie recipe, with banana added to the base. A peanut butter frosting filling, crispy bacon pieces and a drizzle of honey make for a fascinating cake. The flavours balance much more subtley than you’d expect it’s very savoury, the banana blending behind the peanut butter which accentuates the salty bacon, the honey lifting it all a touch. Weirdly good.

Choco-Crisp-Caramel Cupcakes
Salt/sweet is an established thing – salted caramel is everywhere these days. Texture combinations are very important, but often lacking from cupcakes. Cupcakes are soft and sweet, what crunchy and salty? Crisps – obviously. I baked up a batch of milky chocolate cupcakes, frosted them with a bitter chocolate ganache and stuffed crisps in the top. Then simply drizzle over a salted caramel sauce – I made mine very dark, next time I’ll take it off the heat earlier.

It was a pretty quiet weekend from a food point of view, too much sport to watch!

Carpetbag Steak
My sister often claims this is her favourite dish, so as a special treat I rustled it up. I’ve never seen it on a menu anywhere, and only learnt of it from a South African boss at a previous job. The origin of the dish is a bit murky, some people claim its Australian, others South African, but either way it’s delicious. Steak and Oysters are a classic British combination, certainly during the Georgian period, so it seems only logical to grab a nice thick steak, hollow out a pocket and fill it with oysters before sealing it back up with a cocktail stick. As the steak cooks, the rich, creamy seafood flavour permeates the steak. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

Cinnamon Loaf

I’ve got a bit of a thing for cinnamon buns, Chelsea buns, basically anything in the baked cinnamon genre. Fitzbillies in Cambridge sets the bar for sticky cinnamon goodness, but occasionally you need something that doesn’t need a secret recipe and several rises. This recipe, from the lovely people at Outsider Tart, provides the same hit in a little under an hour.

The result is a lovely cakey slice that is just begging for a nice strong coffee and a lazy afternoon.

Swordfish, Monkfish, Tuna
When your fishmonger runs out of enough swordfish to feed two people what do you do? Buy his sole remaining piece (pun intended) as well as some great tuna and a lovely monkfish tail. Normally attempting three fish would be suicide, trying to get them to fry evenly without overlooking is just impossible. With sous vide it’s very easy, dump them all in the water bath, give them 30 seconds to colour in a hot pan and enjoy the results! I’ve never tried a medley like this before and it’s very effective, it accentuates the differences between each fish and gives them a real chance to shine – try it sometime!

Having thoroughly enjoyed making sausages for the BBQ I decided to have another go, though with a more traditional method.

Sausages
My previous attempt used a kit from Lakeland, with dried beef casings and a premixed seasoning/filler. This time I wanted to use traditional natural hog casings and an organic breadcrumb filler.

The natural casings came pre-spooled and just need a little rinsing before threading them onto the sausage stuffer, they’re far more flexible than the Lakeland ones and stuffing went much smoother. I got the filling and spices from Weschenfelder, whose ‘Gold’ mix is gorgeous, lots of nutmeg and sage. I used a dried organic breadcrumb filler which gave a beautiful moist texture.

I decided to just fry them rather than giving them a spell in the sous vide or poaching them first. The skins held together really well and browned in to a far crispier texture than the beef casings. The result was great, porky, rich and with a subtle savoury hint. Next time I’m going to try some more interesting flavours – pork and apple beckons.

Sausage Rolls
I made a large mix of sausage meat so I decided to make some rolls as well. Having never made puff pastry from scratch I thought it would be fun to try making it from scratch. The results are great, a lovely light savoury pastry with a yummy moist filling.

The Sampler
A colleague told me about this fantastic little place just behind South Kensington tube station. It’s a pretty comprehensive wine merchant, with an excellent champagne selection, but the real selling point? Wine vending machines. You get a little card which you can charge up and then use to sample around 80 wines which rotate every couple of weeks. It’s a great chance to try some more unusual wines and sample some very expensive ones. I was delighted to discover they had a coupe of vintages from one of my favourite producers – Domaine de Pegau, its very hard to find! They also offer swanky nibbles and a cheese board – ill definitely be back to sample that!

Brownies

The perfect brownie is a bit of a minefield – some people like it dense and cakey, others want an airy sponge and thick rich fudge is also popular. I’ve done several recipes recently but my sister said I had to try these.

It’s a Good Housekeeping recipe, which really takes the ratios to the extreme – 550g of dark chocolate to 75g of flour. It’s pretty dense! Judging when it’s cooked is very difficult, it’s forms a thin crust very quickly so you need to keep prodding it with a knife to double check. The verdict?

Fab – really really good. I like a little more ‘cake’ to it, but this is an excellent recipe if you want something slightly airier!