The start of a whirlwind romance

Once upon a time there was a 21 year old student called Rebecca. She loved cooking, she loved being with her friends, and she loved surprises. Then, one day, she met a slow cooker. And it was the beginning of a lifelong romance.

A few days ago my parents bought me a slow cooker to take to uni. I don't know why I'd been hesitant about using one - maybe because I kept confusing it with a pressure cooker which still frighten me a little bit. It is potentially the best investment I've ever made. I'm a big fan of anything where you just throw food into something, forget about it for a few hours and then suddenly go, "oh, there's something in there" and then are presented with a meal you've made without even realising it. Suddenly I can see myself heading out of the house for university having put, I don't know, stuff into the slow cooker, working all day, then coming home and having a meal already made. If that's not the perfect scenario then I really don't know what is.

I'm moving back to university in about a months' time, so I thought I should probably get acquainted with the slow cooker. After meeting up with someone for a very long coffee and planning session, I came home and added sausages, bacon, the remnants of some chorizo, two tins of chopped tomatoes, a tin of cannellini beans, an enormous clove of garlic, and half an onion to the slow cooker, seasoned it, gave it all a stir, then turned the heat right up, stuck the lid on and forgot about it for almost four hours until my parents came home making all the appropriate "yummy" noises as they walked through the door.

I'd consider anything that gets cooked in a slow cooker to be fast, although you could easily argue that anything that takes four hours to cook is hardly quick - but to my mind, if it's something you can get started and then leave for anything from three hours to overnight without constantly needing to poke and prod at it - it's fast food. And it really does fit in perfectly with a student lifestyle - throw the ingredients in and stick the cooker on when you leave the house to go onto campus (high if it's, say, a lecture or a seminar; low if you're going to be particularly studious and go to the library afterwards), come home and dinner's ready. I think that it really should make the list of student necessities. With hindsight, it probably would've made mine - although, my list three years ago (when did that happen??) included a corkscrew, a cafetière and a garlic press so maybe I'm not the best frame of reference for a typical student...

Falafel

It was exactly a year ago yesterday that I arrived in Montpellier, absolutely terrified out of my wits as to what the coming year would entail. I don't think I've quite processed the fact that not only is my year abroad over; it's been over for nearly two months.

Opposite my university was a little falafel place that did falafel wraps and chips for the princely sum of about 4€. I only ever tried it once, which is possibly my biggest regret of the year. There is something incredibly satisfying about a flatbread filled with salad and falafel, and it's hard to describe how it feels to be sitting in a foreign country where you speak the language - but not the language that the owner of the restaurant was chatting to his friend in. It feels more authentic somehow, to be sat eating a traditionally Middle Eastern food surrounded by people speaking Arabic.

What I had for lunch today was somewhat less authentic, but no less satisfying. A while ago, on one of the weekly trips to the deli, I spotted a box of falafel mix and decided I had to buy it. It was simplicity itself to make - just add water to the dried mix and give it a good stir, leave it for 2-3 minutes then fry for about 30 seconds in hot oil. In the absence of pitta bread, I decided to have my falafel as part of a salad, and dressed it with a yoghurt and mint dressing. The mint was sourced all the way from our back garden, and pre-washed by the sudden shower that lasted just long enough for the laundry on the line to get soaked and for me to rush out into the rain to get it in.

While I'd love to find a tried-and-tested, genuine falafel recipe, a mix like this definitely fits the bill in the interim.

"La petite madeleine"

Because I am, as we have already established, broken as a student, about a week ago my mum and I sat down and looked through the Lakeland catalogue, making a wishlist like children at Christmas. Something I've noticed about Lakeland is that for every item that you wonder when one would actually have need for such a thing (banana guard), there will be something that you don't need but have to have (silicone cupcake cases that look like flowerpots), and something that you absolutely need in your life right this second. For me, that was a silicone madeleine tray.

Marcel Proust wrote about the experience of dunking a madeleine into a cup of tea, and how this simple act took him back to his childood in the first part (Du côté de chez Swann) of his unnecessarily long work, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Since then, the delicious treats have become synonymous with French childhoods - possibly helped along by the famous little girl who lived in an old house in Paris all covered in vines...

This weekend, as the weather has been ridiculous, making some lovely treats to make me feel like I was in Paris was really the only thing to do.

I looked all over the internet for a suitable recipe for my little madeleines but the ones I found seemed lacking in something. There were a couple that sounded lovely but I couldn't make as I was missing some ingredients (ginger madeleines, you will be mine!), but some seemed to have too much butter, or too much flour, or too many eggs. Getting thoroughly fed up, I suddenly had a brainwave. "Hey!" I thought, "I speak French. Let's put my degree to good use by looking up a French recipe." For surely, surely, if something is so quintessentially French and appears to be the Gallic equivalent of making fairy cakes, then every French person would have a suitable recipe, right?

Happily my theory was correct and here is my translation of the one I found and used, which originally came from here. This makes 48 mini madeleines from this mould, and would make around 20 normal-sized madeleines 

2 eggs

150g flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

125g butter

150g sugar

Zest of one lemon

1. Mix together the eggs and sugar until the mixture is frothy.
2. Melt the butter completely, then add to the egg and sugar mixture.
3. Sift in the flour and baking powder gradually, stirring well to ensure everything's well mixed.
4. Add the lemon zest or, if you prefer, 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract.
5. Spoon into the madeleine moulds and bake in the top half of an oven set to 200 degrees (that's for a fan oven) for 5-7 minutes.

I was incredibly grateful to have had warning that the mixture is incredibly liquid - probably due to melting the butter rather than just softening it - and if you're making mini ones, the ten minutes it takes for the first batch to bake, cool and for a few to be eaten is just long enough for the mixture to firm up a bit. A few recipes I found advocated letting the batter sit in a fridge for anything from 2 hours to the entire night - but honestly I couldn't say I noticed a difference in taste between the ones that were baked right after the batter had been mixed and the ones where the batter had rested.

Yummy, especially just out of the oven, and also pretty divine dipped into a cup of tea - particularly the next day when they'd gone all sticky. Maybe Proust did know what he was going on about after all.

Bacon, lettuce and cannellini stew

A few months ago, I found a really lovely blog that's become really quite famous, Loveaudrey. With hindsight, finding it in the middle of exams was perhaps not the best as it meant that when I really should've been revising the history of the French language, I was reading back through her posts and feeling... Well, feeling like a massive underachiever, if truth be told.

I'm pretty sure that Loveaudrey is actually a superhero in disguise. She managed to juggle two degrees, with all the stress and essays they entail, with being a wife and a mother to two kids - and she always leaves the house with really lovely lipstick on. To say she's become something of an idol to me is putting it mildly.

As I read through her posts, I realised that I really don't have the excuse of being too busy to make a decent meal every day. If she can do it, then I definitely can.

I'd copied down one of her recipes because it had really appealed to me, and last night, with the house (read: the kitchen) to myself, I decided to give it a bash.

Here's the recipe as written up on Loveaudrey's blog:

6 rashers of bacon (or a generous handful of chopped black olives if you're craving something vegetarian)

2cloves of garlic

4 tbsp olive oil

1/4 tsp fennel seeds

1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes

200ml chicken stock

1 x 400g tin of canellini beans (I also used a small tin of pinto beans and a drop more stock)

150g lettuce (the recipe calls for cos but I used 2 little gems)

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Chop the bacon and garlic. Heat the oil in a pan and add the bacon. Cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic and fennel seeds.

2.Pour in the tinned tomatoes and cook on a high heat for 5 minutes.

3. Add the stock and the drained beans, and cook for a further 5 minutes.

4. Season well, add the chopped lettuce, and allow to wilt before serving.

5. Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with lots of black pepper.

I made a couple of adjustments - firstly I halved(ish) the quantities as I was only making it for me and I still had some left over for lunch the next day. I also added a spring onion as we had a few that were languishing in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, looking very sad indeed. We didn't have any tinned chopped tomatoes either, so instead I just cut up a big beef tomato and added some water. The final change I made was to throw in a glug of white wine.

I've really become a convert to adding lettuce to hot dishes and just letting it wilt down, but I think the trick is to pick a variety that won't just go totally soggy. Cos lettuce or baby gems have quite a rigid 'spine' (anybody know what that thing is actually called??), which means that the leafy bits go soft but there's still enough crunch for it not to just turn into mush.

It was really delicious and felt very virtuous - the fact that there was plenty left over for lunch the next day is always a bonus; and it's the kind of dish that would be perfect in the middle of winter when you're really craving something warming. It was still delicious even at the height (ha!) of summer because it's not too heavy. I cooked the sauce down so it was quite thick and resembled a stew, but it'd be easy to let it stay quite clear so it's more like a soup.

I can highly recommend giving Loveaudrey's blog a look - as long as you've got plenty of time to waste going back through all of her posts! 

Loveaudrey| loveaudrey-loveaudrey.blogspot.co.uk