Adloyada

Fish babka

One of the pleasures of getting invited out on my friendship network of Shabbos dinners is that, not only do you get the company and the dinner, but, if you've got my level of nosiness lively curiosity, you can scan their library and their cookbook stock as well.

Last time I had one of S & P's fabulous Shabbos lunches, she had this beautiful Jewish cookbook, which a trainee she'd been mentoring had just given her as a thank you present.

I don't usually like encyclopaedia cookbooks; they're usually all about seducing you with pictures, but the recipes always end up as a disappointment. This one, though, was full of enticing sounding fish recipes that I'd never come across in Jewish recipe books before, not even in Claudia Roden's wonderful "Book of Jewish Food", which I think would be the one I would choose if I had to be dumped on a desert island with just one book.

Fish babka? A traditional Jewish dish from Ukraine, just down the road from where my maternal grandmother's family came from? How come I never heard of it? But it looked like an interesting version of fish pie without the pastry or the high fat sauces and toppings. So I made it, and...it turned out to be something quite special, much more attractive and versatile than the recipe and the photo showed.

As the recipe said, it was souffle-like. Which meant that when baked, it rose almost as much as a conventional souffle-- but stayed puffed up and impressive. The egg yolks, milk, fried onion, bits of bread and stiff egg white give it a lovely light and very tasty texture; an aerated clear yellow omlette-style base in which the embedded pieces of fish and herbs (nutmeg and dill or tarragon) are delicious, subtle and moist.

So I've experimented further with it, and worked out it would make great individual pies; the other week, I made seven for my Shabbos lunch guests, using high quality smoked salmon offcuts instead of the white fish cubes from the recipe. It was very easy, looked incredibly impressive and was even more delicious than the originals. And the pies kept beautifully in the fridge in individual plastic boxes.

This Thursday evening, I made some more with some supermarket sell-off smoked haddock, and that was very successful, though I like the smoked salmon version best. That made me two big and two small ones; the picture above is the one I had for supper on Thursday night

London spring morning

This morning, for the first time since last summer, the sun pouring into my living room felt really warm on my back. Really frosty, though, and freezing cold once I actually ventured out onto the deck.

We've had two or three days like this over the last week--not so warm, but the same sequence of very chilly frost, followed by beautiful, pure, pale sunshine. For the first time, the grass on the lawn is an intense, gold-flecked, brilliant fresh green.

Since December, I've had a small but never failing daily lift to my spirits from the sight of the white hellebores blooming by the front door. They're the variety called "Christmas roses", but they rarely do bloom on time. You're much more likely to find them flowering in late January. But these ones have surprised me, first coming into flower before Christmas, and they just keep going and putting out more and more showy little white blooms. Now the oldest ones have just started turning green, which is a bonus, as I really like green flowers.

Out on the deck, IKEA have provided me with some brilliant pots of campanula as the centre of the display when all the potted shrubs had stopped blooming and the bulbs hadn't come out yet.

But here comes the cavalry! The iris reticulata came out early last week.

And this morning, there were fronds of new leaf waving about on the wisteria. The first muscari were turning a full clear blue.

On my Shabbos walk yesterday, I walked as usual from my home in Finchley, through the Little Wood and the Big Wood of the Garden Suburb, across the square and onto the Heath extension and the Heath itself. Then over into the astounding garden of Inverforth House. And that's where I saw the first japonica blooms of this year, fragile and pale coral, against a pale blue sky.

February 17th. "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" (Samuel Johnson)