Champéry and the Tour des Dents du Midi
August 13th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
The range of seven peaks known as the Dents du Midi (Teeth of the South) sits high above the Rhône valley in Western Switzerland and is tantalisingly visible from the shores of Lac Léman (lake Geneva).
After staring at these dreamy mountains for years since I first visited the area back in the 1980s I was finally going to approach them on foot via the long distance footpath called the Tour des Dents du Midi. If you were really up for it you could complete the walk in 2 long days: we decided to opt for the 4 day option making our base the picturesque alpine village of Champéry in the canton of Valais.
Wending our way up the Val d’Illiez towards Champéry we kept seeing roadside stalls selling Valais apricots. The Valais is named after the mighty Rhône valley which dominates the region. It is the warmest and sunniest part of Switzerland and is famed for its red wines and its fruit trees. I’d previously experienced Valais fruit in the winter in the form of hideously strong schnapps, pomme (apple), williamine (pear) and the like. At the third roadside stall we just had to break our journey to experience the fruit in its much more pleasant undistilled form:
Delicious, ripe and juicy, much more appealing than the bullet-hard pellets that pass for apricots in supermarkets back home.
Our base in Champéry was the comfortable and good value Beau Séjour hotel at one end of the village main street. It’s pretty as a picture, all dark wood and pink geraniums and the annexe rooms where we slept were spacious and well-equipped. The hotel doesn’t serve meals other than breakfast but this was not a problem as we strolled down to the excellent Café du Nord for dinner.
The Beau Séjour does do a fine breakfast, the highlight of which for us was cooking our own pancakes on a dinky electrically heated tabletop device. Sadly, looking out of the window from our cost breakfast table, the weather outside was, exactly as forecast, grim. Undaunted, we merely donned our waterproofs and set off from the Grand Paradis chairlift carpark. We had 6 hours walking ahead of us including 900m of ascent.
The showers stopped intermittently and we were rewarded with views of precipitous slopes and alpine meadows. We took a lunch break at the Cabane d’Antème, pretty basic with building work audibly in progress. Soup was reconstituted Maggi or similar and coffee was instant but the chocolate cake was the real deal.
After another 3 hours’ trudging in the rain, the Alpage de Chindonne was a welcome sight bas we rounded our final corner. This was amazingly comfortable for a mountain hut, more like a small hotel, with prices too match! We were too late for the cheaper basic pasta meal, the répas du randonneur, so it was the à la carte option of viand sechée du Valais followed by the national Swiss potato dish, rösti.
Here is the board of viande sechée du Valais:
After a breakfast of bread and jam we set out on day 2 of our walk. Mercifully the rain had stopped and the sun broke through clouds and it became a beautiful day. A good thing too as we had 7 hours walking ahead of us. We spent the morning rounding the corner into the main Rhône valley arriving at the cliff top village of Mex in time for lunch. We then had a gruelling 1,000m climb up to the col du Jorat from where we could see down to our destination, the Auberge de Salanfe. By common consent this was the best hut of the tour. It has a spectacular lakeside setting, comfortable rooms, good food and efficient and friendly service. Dinner, a homemade vegetable soup and emincé de boeuf (beef casserole) with rice and vegetables, was wolfed down by all.
Day 3 turned out to be a relatively short 3 hour walk over the col to the Cabane de Susanfe as our planned peak, the Haut Cîme, 3,257m, turned out to be unobtainable because of the quantity of fresh snow down to 2,400m. We arrived at the Cabane at around lunchtime and spent a lazy afternoon in the sunshine rehydrating first on sirop de mélisse (homemade lemon balm cordial) and later on a microbrewery beer from Sion. Dinner was packet cream of asparagus soup followed by chilling con carne, then apple sauce for pudding. Sounds a little odd but it all tastes good after a day’s hiking. The Cabane de Susanfe is a genuine Swiss Alpine Club hut with just a coomunal dormitory and hut bunk sleeping arrangements. This proved the most difficult part of the walk: sharing a mattress with a pot-bellied snoring stranger is not my idea of fun….
After a slightly Spartan breakfast of homemade bread (good but not enough of it), jam and instant hot chocolate, we set off on the final leg of the journey back to Champéry and civilisation. After a tricky first hour we were through the steepest section of the walk, the Pas d’Encel, effectively the jaws of the valley. The buvette de Bonavau made a welcome break with tempting homemade fruit tarts on display:
Too soon it was back to civilization in Champéry. It was a sunny Sunday lunchtime and we were pleasantly surprised to find both the bakery open and a little market in full swing in the village centre. We stocked up on bread – both Valais rye bread with walnuts plus white bread for the softies in our party. The cheeses were a wonderfully ripe and stinky Tomme de Bruson from the neighbouring valley and a local artisan-made rinded goat cheese. The salami was chewy, flavoursome and flavoured with génepi. I think this variety of peach is called doughnut – they were small, fragantly white-fleshed and juicy.
A perfect picnic to conclude a successful walk, even if the Haut Cîme remained out of reach this time.
Riverside picnic
June 24th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
At this time of year, my thoughts turn to the perfect riverside picnic. I blame my obsession with this idea on a photograph in my mother’s copy of “The Robert Carrier Cookbook” which, as a child, I would turn to repeatedly. The picture showed a bottle of Loire white wine chilling in a gently flowing river somewhere in the green heart of La France Profonde. Mature trees in full leaf shaded a table set for two on the river bank. The food on offer was freshwater crayfish and, I think, quenelles de brochet (delicate little poached pike mousses).
So now once a year my family indulges me in living out this fantasy albeit in a less elaborate form than the Robert Carrier original. When good weather is forecast for a weekend in late spring we pack up a hamper of suitable food and head off for the limestone dales of the Peak District.
What constitutes suitable foods for such a picnic? I draw inspiration from the surrounding landscape. Watercress has to feature as it grows wild in the limestone streams, also river fish, generally trout as it’s easy to come by. I give a recipe below for a quick and easy smoked trout pâté. Young goat cheese has become part of the ritual and tastes good with the watercress and a loaf of walnut bread. Nantwich based Ravens Oak dairy (now owned by Butlers) produces very likeable goat cheeses which, conveniently are stocked by Marks & Spencer. I picked up both their Kidderton Ash and regular Ravens Oak goat cheeses for this picnic. You can have a look at the Butlers range at www.butlerscheeses.co.uk The Cheese Hamlet in Didsbury stock a lovely Ticklemore goat’s cheese from Devon in the summer months too.
Asparagus is in season and adds a festive note to the proceedings. I always roast rather than steam it now as it’s a foolproof method that concentrates its flavour. A cool jambon persillé would be good too – the chunks of pink ham in its bright green parsley jelly recalling the clear river water and flowing water weed.
This year, I took along a chilled soup – a refreshing Spanish Ajo Blanco. This is an odd-sounding mixture of bread, almonds, garlic, sherry vinegar and plain cold water which which, when blended to a thin purée, chilled and garnished with halved grapes turns into an infinitely refreshing chilled soup, much more than the sum of its disparate parts. The soup seemed very appropriate as wild garlic was everywhere in all its pungent glory.
A picnic wouldn’t be a picnic without cake to finish. I try and keep the cool green theme going even here. Jane Grigson’s gooseberry pound cake has been successful on a previous picnic, but this time we took along wedges of my courgette and lemon cake: see my previous post http://rhubarbfool.co.uk/2010/05/22/relaxed-cooking-for-the-holidays/
Here are two of my recipes – both very simple for summer lunches at home as well as picnics
Recipe for smoked trout pâté
Ingredients
4 smoked trout fillets (or 2 whole smoked trout if you can buy them this way)
6 oz cream cheese
1 teaspoon grated horseradish or wasabi
juice of half a lemon
black pepper
If using whole trout, skin them, fillet them and place the trout fillets roughly broken up in a food processor. If you’re using pre-prepared trout fillets the skinning and filleting will already have been done for you. Add the remaining ingredients to the food processor bowl and pulse carefully until the desired texture is achieved. I like a slightly rough texture so this doesn’t take long. Check for seasoning and add more horseradish, lemon and pepper to taste. The wasabi was an inspired discovery one day when I ran out of horseradish. Pile into a bowl to serve (or box to transport to your picnic. Good with oatcakes or walnut bread.
I have no current photos of trout in pâté form but here are the real thing swimming in the Derbyshire River Wye, home to both rainbow and wild brown trout. We have a favourite footbridge for fish spotting and feeding – the fish are very partial to leftover bread and crumbs from Duchy Originals gingered biscuits!
Recipe for Ajo Blanco
Chilled Spanish garlic, bread and almond soup sometimes referred to as white gazpacho.
Ingredients
4 oz blanched almonds – try and use Spanish ones ie Marcona which Sainsbury’s stock as part of their Taste the Difference range
8 oz good white bread (ie from a decent unsliced loaf with a bit of flavour), crusts removed
salt
2-3 tbsp best quality extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp best quality sherry vinegar
1 pint chilled water
2 cloves garlic, sliced
few seedless grapes, green are traditional but black fine as well
Dip the bread in cold water, squeeze out the excess and place in the goblet of a liquidiser along with the remaining ingredients except the garlic and grapes. Blend until smooth. Pour into a suitable container, add the sliced garlic which will gently infuse its flavour, and chill for several hours or overnight. Most ajo blanco recipes tell you to blend the garlic along with the other ingredients but I found that garlic pulverised in this way becomes unpleasantly intense in the finished soup. Serve garnished with halved grapes.
Make your own mountain bars
March 10th, 2010 § 2 Comments
March heralds the arrival of spring, and most importantly the ski-touring season. I have a trip planned to the Vanoise in France mid month and Tim to Glarus in Switzerland a week later, so time to make a batch of mountain bars to provide energy on the hill.
I found this recipe a few years ago on the University of Oregon Library Staff Association website. They call it “Johnny Crunch” and recommend it as the ideal food for skiing, hiking, in fact any kind of strenuous outdoor activity.
Here’s a bar shot on location at the Kinder Downfall in the Peak District last autumn.
The bars taste good, are high in calories, are compact for slipping into your pocket, they don’t freeze to a tooth-shattering lump at low temperatures, nor do they melt at warmer ones. Oh, and there’s the added bonus that you can rub the almond oil they contain into your skin for an inpromptu handcream!
Once you’ve assembled the ingredients, it’s merely a case of mixing them up:
…then pressing into a suitably sized tin:
Recipe for Mountain Bars
Thanks to the University of Oregon Library Staff Association for this recipe. The quantities are all in American cups (US cup is 8 fl oz). Helpfully a standard 370g jar of honey, peanut butter etc equates approximately to a US cup so the measurements can be done by eye which makes life easier with dense sticky ingredients.
Most of the ingredients can be picked up easily at your local supermarket. Try a health food shop for the almond butter and barley malt/date syrup.
Note for those on gluten free diets. As far as I’m aware, the only gluten-containing ingredient in this recipe is the barley malt syrup. If you use date syrup instead, you have the perfect high energy gluten free snack. I skied with aspirant (now fully qualified) mountain guide Mark Thomas last year. Mark doesn’t tolerate gluten which makes life very difficult in the mountains where much of the staple food on offer (bread, pasta, cake etc) contains gluten. This one’s for you Mark!
Ingredients
2 cups puffed rice (I used rice crispies made by you-know who)
1 and 1/2 cups chopped walnuts or other favourite nuts
1 and 1/2 cups sesame seeds
3/4 cup runny honey
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter (I like Whole Earth)
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup barley malt syrup (or date syrup for a gluten-free option)
1/2 cup almond butter
1/2 cup chocolate chips
Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl with a wooden spoon. The mixture should be very firm and sticky. If it seems not firm enough, add more rice crispies and sesame seeds to give the correct consistency. Press into a 9 by 9 inch tin (or rectangular tin of similar area). DO NOT BAKE. Refrigerate overnight then cut into small squares and wrap individually in cling film. Makes 25-30 squares. Store in fridge or better still freezer if not using straightaway.
Variations: you can substitute linseeds for some of the sesame seeds and dried goji berries for some of the dried cranberries.
Clonter opera picnic: what to eat with Rigoletto
October 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Our friends Emma and Andrew organise a trip to Clonter Opera each October for an ever-increasing group of friends and neighbours. Clonter is the Cheshire equivalent of Glyndebourne and strikes a harmonious balance between serious music-making and jolly social occasion. Clonter specialises in giving young singers fresh out of conservatoire a leg-up in establishing their careers. For example, we heard New Zealand bass baritone Jonathan Lemalu at Clonter a few years ago and he’s now made quite a name for himself as an up-and-coming artist.
Enough of music and onto the serious business of the food. What the Clonter audience usually does is arrive at 6.30 and unpack hampers onto the tables provided in the barn seating area for drinks, canapés and first course. The performance then starts at 7.30 with a 70 minute long supper interval, just long enough for main course and pudding. We’re old hands now and know there is never time or appetite for cheese or coffee so we cut the stress and don’t bother with these now.
We were a group of 19 this year and Emma asked me if I might do some platefuls of nibbles to hand round which would serve both as canapé and as first course without the need to be formally seated. Nice idea but allowing 5 items per person and rounding up, this would necessitate making 100 canapés which is a tall order for a busy Saturday afternoon. I set myself the additional challenge of theming the canapés with the opera which was Rigoletto.
The opera is set in Mantua and was given its first performance in Venice. There is plenty of drama in Verdi’s dark tale of debauchery and deception but it is light on frivolous drinking and feasting scenes. The dreadful climax of the opera comes when court jester Rigoletto realises that the body in the sack he is about to hurl into the river is not that of the evil Duke of Mantua, but that of his beloved only daughter Gilda.
A few minutes mulling over the opera plotline and I came up with the idea for Northern Italian finger-food featuring miniature filo pastry sacks. Is this in poor taste and taking theming a little too far? Yes probably but I’m afraid that is how my mind works…..
Anyway without dwelling overmuch on my foibles, the chosen canapé menu was:
Stuffed olives. Waitrose do some gorgeous large Kalkidis (sic) olives stuffed with fruit compôte - not entirely authentically Italian but nevertheless very good. Surely these should be spelt Halkidikis or at the very least Kalkidikis? Looks like a syllable has gone missing. Maybe I’ll write to Waitrose to point this out.
Twists of parma ham artfully spiralled around rustic breadsticks – both elements picked up at favourite local shop Goose Green Delicatessen
Bruschetta with Gorgonzola dolce, walnuts and slices of fresh pear (painstakingly dipped in lemon juice to stop them going brown)
Mozzarella, tomato and basil bites – individual buffalo mozzarella bocconcini balls threaded onto a cocktail stick with a mixture of red and yellow cherry tomatoes and a single perfect folded basil leaf
All the above were pretty straightforward to put together – essentially an assembly job with deli ingredients. The pièce de résistance was to be the Mantuan miniature filo pastry sacks – Mantuan because of the chosen filling of roast butternut squash, sage and parmesan. I visited Mantua on a tour of Northern Italy a few years ago now. Its most famous dish is Tortelli di Zucca – ravioli filled with pumpkin, served with a simple sauce of sage-flavoured butter. I took inspiration from this dish for my sacks. Butternut squash is a pretty good substitute for the local Mantuan pumpkin having the necessary sweetness and depth of flavour once it’s been given the roasting treatment. I cut the squash into chunks and tossed them in a tablespoon or so of olive oil into which I’d thrown a few snipped purple sage leaves from the garden and some sliced garlic cloves, then baked them in the oven for about an hour. My baked squash became intensely savoury before being incorporated into the filling for the filo pastry sacks.
Here is the beautiful orange squash ready to go into the oven:
And here are the finished canapés ready for serving on our Clonter picnic table. All disappeared in a fraction of the time they took to prepare.
Almost forgot to mention that the performance of Rigoletto was a triumph – fantastic singing and inspired casting. One of the best performances I’ve seen in ages.
The recipe of my own devising for the Mantuan filo pastry sacks follows. These would have been best served warm but were in fact still pretty good at room temperature having been transported from kitchen to Clonter.
Recipe for Mantuan filo pastry parcels
Makes 20 parcels
Ingredients
1 medium butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and cut into 1 inch chunks
8-10 sage leaves, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons light olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 oz finely grated parmesan or grana padano
270g pack filo pastry sheets
2 oz melted butter, maybe more if required
Make the filling. Peel, deseed and chop the squash into chunks. In a large bowl, toss the chunks with the oil, sage and a little salt and pepper and tip the whole lot onto a shallow baking tray lined with baking paper to avoid the squash sticking. Bake at 200 degrees C until the squash is cooked through and is become deliciously slightly charred and toasty round the edges. Don’t take it too far – you are looking to intensify the squash flavour, not burn it.
Let the baked squash cool a little then tip it into a roomy bowl and go in with a crinkle-cut chip cutter to reduce the squash to a chunky not too smooth purée. Add the cheese, nutmeg, and egg yolk, mix, then taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. If you are concerned about eating raw egg yolk, do the tasting bit before mixing in the egg yolk.
Now form the parcels. Melt the butter in a small pan and allow to cool a little. From memory, the pastry packet contains 10 large sheets folded pastry. Begin by cutting these 10 sheets neatly in half to make 20. Put aside and cover 10 of these half sheets and work with the other 10. Filo pastry is very thin and dries out quickly so you need to keep covered what you are not using in the next few minutes. Cut your ten half sheets in half again to make 20 smallish squares.
For each parcel, take 2 squares and lay them out on a pastry board. Brush each square scantily with melted butter and lay one one on top of the other at a 90 degree angle to create a rough star shape. Place a generous teaspoon of the squash filling in the centre and pick up and roughly twist the pastry together to create a sack or money-bag effect. Dab the formed parcel with some additional melted butter. Place the completed parcel onto a metal baking sheet. Continue until you have 10 parcels then gauge whether you need some more melted butter and repeat the process with the other half of your pastry.
Bake the parcels at 180 degrees C for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and becoming crisp in parts. Cool on a rack.
Train picnic: dining in style
September 12th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
It was my birthday on Friday 11 September. Until recently this was not a noteworthy or memorable date and sadly it is now for all the wrong reasons. I chose to celebrate quietly this year by attending the finals of the Leeds Piano Competition. Music may be the food of love but I have been married to Tim now for 16 years and I need more solid sustenance. A picnic on the train as we journeyed across the heather-clad Pennines from Manchester to Leeds was the obvious solution.
Where to look for inspiration for this special picnic? First stop was New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser’s book “Cooking for Mr Latte” a chronicle, with recipes, of her courtship with future husband. Chapter 26 is entitled “Fine Dining in the Sky” and contains some excellent advice which is easily transferable to a train journey.
Hesser’s general advice is “the food must be compact and light, yet it cannot be skimpy. It must include favorite food like cheeses, cookies and olives, and it should in some way be lavish.” Suggestions to pack include salted nuts, especially delicious salted almonds from Spain, a chewy country roll and a nutty, soft cheese. Further recommendations are excellent cured meats, salads prepared with aged vinegars and nut oils, fresh herbs and homemade mayonnaise. Bought treats are suggested to complete the meal – a tart, cake or petit four or a caramel-filled chocolate.
Next stop was the unlikely sounding “Constance Spry Cookery Book”. Chapter XXXIV is “Menus, Parties and Food for Special Occasions and contains an apt little section headed “Train Food”. Who would expect that an English cookery book first published in 1956 could be such a repository of enticing food ideas?.
Ms Spry’s general advice about train food is as follows: “The primary qualification about such food is that it shall taste fresh and be really appetizing. It should never the bear the faintest trace of paper flavouring, something not so easy to avoid as one might think.”
She goes on to describe a delicious meal made by a family member for small party going up to “the far north” (Manchester? Scotland perhaps! the destination is never specified). It makes delectable reading:
“Each of us was handed when we got into our sleepers a small, neat cardboard box containing two little screw-top cartons and other small packages. In one carton was a perfect freshly made lobster salad in a delicious dressing, the second contained fresh fruit salad of peaches, strawberries, and orange. Crisp, poppy-seed-sprinkled rolls were quartered and buttered, and a Porosan bag held the crisp heart of a Cos lettuce. There were small cream cheese rolls made by taking two short pieces of celery, filling the hollow made when they were put together with cream cheese, and rolling the whole in brown bread and butter…”
Suitable inspired, I made by own preparations. Visits to the deli and greengrocer provided me with Spanish salted almonds, extra large stuffed green olives and thinly sliced meltingly soft Bellota ham accompanied by crisp celery sticks and crunchy radishes. These would be served with chilled champagne to begin the meal. Next, I took my cue from Constance Spry and prepared a simple but delicious lobster salad, combining new potatoes, soft-boiled quail eggs and squeaky blanched green beans with the diced lobster meat. The whole lot was packed into a carefully lettuce lined food storage box and topped with a dollop of wobbly yellow homemade mayonnaise flavoured with lemon zest and a little chopped tarragon. Next was a ripe St Marcellin cheese served in its own dinky indivdual terracotta pot. I then put together my favourite simple fruit salad of sliced white nectarines in passion fruit pulp. A quick trip to the bakery provided us with fresh rolls and cherry and almond tartlets, which along with half a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape completed the preparations. The whole lot was packed into a small wicker basket along with forks and a couple of glasses and we were off!
It was all just as good as it all sounds as I hope the pictures below demonstrate. It definitely beats the usual railway offering of a pack of peanuts and a curled-up pre-pack sandwich hands down!
