Banana & Walnut Cake

I'm not normally one for making cakes - or even desserts very often. Needs a special occasion to motivate me - usually guests. When I was a school girl I used to love making biscuits and slices and cakes largely because I could lick the bowl and snaffle great mouthfuls of icing when no one was looking. Unfettered greed indulged. On Sunday afternoons my sister and I would take it in turns to bake our party piece - mine was butterfly cup cakes while Jane usually made rock cakes, then the whole family would gather for afternoon tea and scoff the lot with a big pot of tea. After a blow out Sunday lunch not actually sure how we managed it! In my teenage years I used to bake biscuits and things for school lunches but once school was done so was the home-made baking.

Every now and again I get the urge to do it again. This week, maybe because the lovely boyfriend had been poorly, and because he eats lots of biscuits (that I buy in packets, mostly Duchy of Cornwall because Prince Charles makes them himself with his own fair hands) I decided to make a banana and walnut cake. It's more of a loaf really and I had some walnuts in the cupboard that I'd brought back from France and I bought a big bunch of bananas at Borough Market so it all came together. It makes a seriously good cake that is gorgeously moist.

The recipe comes from googling 'banana cake recipe' - was there life before google? It is from the Waitrose site but is in fact a recipe from Sue Dykes, head baker of the tea rooms at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. Quintessential place for inspirational cake.

Banana & Walnut Cake

"In the café, we serve this with a rich topping," says Sue. "Make your own by beating 75g softened butter and 125g full-fat soft cheese with 200g sifted icing sugar and a dash of vanilla extract."

Makes 1 x 900g loaf

Preparation time: 30 minutes Cooking time: 40-45 minutes

Ingredients
2 ripe bananas (about 400g)
150g softened butter
150g soft brown sugar
100g walnuts
300g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 medium eggs, lightly beaten
100ml vegetable oil

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Butter a 900g loaf tin and line the bottom and sides with non-stick baking parchment.

Peel and mash the bananas. Put the butter and sugar into a mixing bowl and cream together until light and fluffy. Stir in the bananas and walnuts. Sift together the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Add the flour mix and the beaten egg, each about a third at a time, to the banana mix, beating well between each addition. Finally, stir in the oil.

Pour into the loaf tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until well risen and golden brown and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Leave in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out on to a wire rack to cool completely.


Makes a great cake - and a great deal of washing up - so be prepared! Technically speaking this is not exactly their recipe - they use 80g sultanas where I use walnuts but I prefer the texture and flavour of the nuts.

I Bought

6 ginger pig sausages, a piece of skirt steak to cure, a piece of pork fillet, and some unsmoked oyster bacon at the Ginger Pig - £23
Buffalo mozzarella and parma ham from the new Italian stall - £7.50
A pork pie from Mrs Elizabeth King - £4.50
Baby plum tomatoes - £3.50
Cucumber, onions, spring onions, sugar snap peas from Booths - £3.20
3 red peppers, 3 aubergine, and a bunch of bananas from Tony £3
3 courgettes from a local farm stall that always has glowingly good looking vegetables - £1.66 - which however good they taste cannot be value for money at the height of the summer
A hunk of caerphilly - £4.45
Carrots from Total Organics - 95p
Bread and milk at Neal's Yard - £4.50

The lovely boyfriend was ill - so this was a slightly truncated shop because I had to carry it all by myself

Total this week at Borough - £56.26

This Week

Saturday - we had bread and jam mid morning, pork pie and salad for lunch, and fabulous mussels with chorizo and coriander for supper

Sunday - we had our summer smoothies and coffee, nectarines and buffalo mozzarella and ciabatta for lunch and the best half of the red braised pork with rice for dinner

Monday - we had more smoothies, poached chicken, rice, tomatoes and raw thin little french beans for lunch - the beans were a big improvement on the thicker bobby beans I'd used (once!) the week before - and for lunch each day till Friday - and curried vegetables and rice for supper

Tuesday - Coffee, cereals, yoghurt with cooked berries for breakfast for the rest of the week, I was out with a friend in the evening so Giles had asparagus soup from the freezer and some rye bread - which was a lot better than the icky burger I had...

Wednesday - we had the other serving of the red pork with rice

Thursday - I fancied a decent burger - so we had burgers with roasted red onion and green bean salad and a new and different potato salad made by cooking the potatoes in stock and olive oil and cider vinegar that was good, but didn't translate so well the next day

Friday - lunch was leftover salads - the beans/onion combo was lovely, the potato less so, but the tomatoes were sweet and juicy so lunch was okay, dinner will be pasta

And that lovely hunk of watermelon? It tasted of almost nothing - there was just enough flavour to give a hint of how good it should have been. Major disappointment. So I puréed it and mixed in some pomegranate molasses and grenadine syrup and froze it in the hope that it would make a passable granita. It didn't. Some you lose.

Red Braised Pork

Fuchsia Dunlop is the most talented non-Asian exponent of Sichuan food around - and it was with some delight that I found she was doing the recipe page in the Observer recently. She's a joy to read because she is so deeply knoweldgeable, she provides all manner of interesting information about the food, its history and narratives. All her recipes sound fabulous. The first one I chose to make was red braised pork - a favourite of Chairman Mao apparently, and a central dish in Hunan province cuisine. A deep glossy red and intensely flavoured, once you've eaten it it's easy to know why.

I bought a lovely piece of belly pork at the Ginger Pig, it was about a kilo in weight so I planned to make a double quantity and freeze half for another time. All was going well, I blanched the meat, toffeed the sugar, watched the meat take on its rich colour when added to the pan, pottered happily in the kitchen wrapped in the delicate aromas of the dish as it braised for nearly an hour, reducing down to a rich glossy sauce. I cooked some basmati rice, chopped the spring onion to toss in at the last moment and the final element, as dinner was almost ready, was to steam some leeks in an inch of water in a covered pan. Rather than freeze spring onions, I ladled half the pork out of the wok into a tub just as all was ready.

And then.... and then...

My sweetheart, who likes being in the kitchen while I cook, and is generally happy chopping and stirring and basting whatever needs it, offered at that moment to help. I was draining the rice and so suggested he stir the spring onions through the pork. He seemed hesitant and said he thought they'd be better separate and, with my back to him while I was at the sink I said no, add them now, they'll just wilt a fraction in the heat. I know not what possessed him - he is after all a man who knows his onions - but he picked up my little pan of steaming leeks and tippped them, water and all, into the meat. I was gobsmacked. Disaster for a dinner. A look of horrified comprehension passed over the lovely boy's face.

We did eat dinner - the half that I'd already removed from the pan with rice and a sprinkling of spring onions over the top. It was extraordinarily good. I sort of rescued the other half - I drained the contents of the pan through a colander, skimmed the fat from the juices and added them back into the meat (and leeks!) and we had it for dinner later in the week. My lovely glossy reduction was a bit disappointing rehydrated but it was okay. The delightful boyfriend is a little more hesitant about his helping but it could have been worse - stuff happens!

Red Braised Pork

500g belly pork (skin optional)
2 tbsp groundnut oil
2 tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine (or medium dry sherry)
20g fresh ginger, skin left on and sliced
1 star anise
2 dried red chillies
a small piece cassia bark or cinnamon stick
light soy sauce,
salt and sugar
a few lengths spring onion greens

Plunge the pork into a pan of boiling water and simmer for 3-4 minutes until partially cooked. Remove and, when cool enough to handle, cut into bite-sized chunks.
Heat the oil and white sugar in a wok over a gentle flame until the sugar melts, then raise the heat and stir until the melted sugar turns a rich caramel brown. Add the pork and splash in the Shaoxing wine.

Add enough water to just cover the pork, along with the ginger, star anise, chillies, cassia and salt to taste. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 40-50 minutes. Towards the end of the cooking time, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce and season with soy sauce and a little sugar to taste. Add the spring onion greens just before serving.

It really is very good.

I Bought

A lovely piece of belly pork and six eggs from Ginger Pig - £8.20
A huge bag of mussels from Shell Seekers £6
Baby plum tomatoes from Isle of Wight - £3.50
2 punnets of Kent strawberries, a tub of cooked berries for breakfasts with yoghurt and an apple juice - £6
Chocolate brownie for Giles £1.50
Half a watermelon, potatoes, cucumber, spring onions, lettuce, leeks, delicate green beans from Booths £5.80
Buffalo mozzarella from the new Italian stall that sells only this and parma ham - both sublimely good versions of each product - £3.10
Ciabatta, milk and yoghurt from Neal's Yard - £8.40
Nectarines - £1.50 for a tub of 8 - they were a little underripe but smelt good and are ripening nicely in a paper bag
French corn fed chicken from the English poultry company to poach for lunches and to make some more stock for the freezer - £5
Pork pie from Mrs Elizabeth King - £4.50

Spent this week - £53.50

This Week

Saturday we had buffalo mozzarella and sliced nectarines for lunch, and char grilled scallops and salad with crusty bread for dinner - a real treat!

Sunday Giles made strawberry smoothies and coffee to go with reading the papers in bed, we had a pie from the square pie company in Selfridges while we were out and roast beef with boiled new potatoes and carrots and courgettes for supper - it makes for a much lighter meal than roasting vegetables which I like better at the end of a hot day

Monday more strawberry smoothies and coffee, cold roast beef with potato salad and tomatoes and chopped carrots for lunches till Thursday, we had falafel that I bought at the wonderful Green Valley store in Upper Berkeley Street, it is a magical place of all things Lebanese. I made some hummus and tabbouleh and beetroot salad and we stuffed hot pitta breads for a really sumptuous dinner

Tuesday and it's coffee and cereals and yoghurt for breakfast for the rest of the week, and we had omelette with the remains of the tabbouleh and beetroot with a sesame stick from Paul after seeing the remarkable 'Death of Mr Lazarescu' at the ICA.

Wednesday we had magret - I bought some duck breasts home from France that had been in the freezer and I cooked them slowly to rend the fat - it never fails to amaze me how much fat comes out on a flame not much hotter than blood heat - then sautéed new potatoes in the fat with a little rosemary and garlic and served it with a plain green salad - proper Gersois repast.

Thursday we had leftover duck and potatoes for lunch - quite a treat - and Thursday night we had a spicy courgette and tomato curry with rice for tea.

Friday it was a somewhat ascetic cold rice and salad veg for lunch and we were out in the evening at the largely uninspiring Future Cities exhibition at the Barbican then a nice supper at Alba in Whitecross Street.

Spicy Tomato and Courgettes

Mid week I like to have a few quick and cheerful dishes up my sleeve so that we still eat well and with lots of variety but it's good if it's not too complicated and time consuming - or messy from the lovely boyfriend's point of view as he's the one left with the washing up mountain (a fair division of labour I think!) When I lived alone I would almost always have a grilled steak or pork chop with salad - quick, simple, healthy and still one of my favourite meals. But you live with another and compromises have to be made - one of mine was that my sweetheart doesn't like to eat meat every day. Coming from Australia's vast meat consumption culture as I do it took me a while to believe him but now I no longer automatically default to grill and salad as my easy option. Though I do sometimes.

So now I have an ever evolving repertoire of pastas and rice dishes and egg dishes and curries and stir fries that keep us going. I like the clean hot flavours of a lot of Asian food - and it is a good source of inspiration for meals with little or no meat. Tomato and ginger are a brilliant combination - they meld to create a strong base for other vegetables and make a good liquid to soak into rice or noodles. Grating the courgettes means they cook quickly and add another texture to the dish. Serve spooned over bowls of steaming basmati rice.

Spicy Tomato & Courgette Sauce

1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
6 curry leaves, crushed between your fingers
1 tin peeled, chopped tomatoes
2 tbspns of ginger, peeled and grated
1 tbspn vegetable oil
750g/1 1/2lb courgettes, grated
Salt and pepper

Sauté the onion and garlic on a gentle heat for 10 minutes or so until it starts to colour. Add the grated ginger and fry for another minute or two then add the tomatoes and curry leaves and simmer gently for about twenty minutes. Add the grated courgettes and stir through. Cook for another 10 minutes to just meld the flavours then serve with rice.

Dinner in half an hour!