Maybe six years ago Bev made a couscous salad for my now goddaughter’ baby shower. I can’t remember any of the other ingredients, but the revelation for me was the inclusion of pomegranate seeds. I’d long had the fear about fruit in salads, not liking sweet & savoury food together (clearly I had been fed too much gammon & pineapple at school dinners), but I gritted my teeth, took a spoonful for politeness, & had a kitchen Damascene moment. Since then I’ve happily messed about with fruit in salads, and opened my mind a little more.
But I’d forgotten about that especial salad until last weekend when I thought to make a couscous pilaf-y thing for our garden party and suddenly the idea of feta & pomegranate sprang into my thoughts.
I love the contrast of textures and flavours in this dish: there’s the intense, smooth saltiness of the feta, then the crunch and sweet explosion from the pomegranate seeds, the chewy nuts, the earthiness of the chickpeas and and the restrained kick & crispness of the raw scallions. For a carb-heavy side dish, as above, I go large on the couscous, and just use the additions as a flavouring rather than as a major part.
If I was making this as a main course salad for four or so people, instead of as a party side dish, I would make enough couscous for four, (I’m not going to tell you how as I have a hit & miss record with couscous but follow the instructions on the packet), but would probably still add pretty much the same amount of other ingredients as I list below.
I made the couscous the night before, so that it wouldn’t be too wet when I came to amalgamate all the ingredients — soggy, claggy couscous is grim. A standard pound bag of (wholemeal) couscous made two pretty large bowls (as above), enough to be used as one type of several side dishes at a large barbecue party.
To the couscous I added:
One tin of drained chickpeas. I set the colander out in the sun to dry them off, but you could just use kitchen paper — again soggy couscous is grim, so open & drain the chickpeas first, and add them last when they are as dry as possible.
One block of feta, finely crumbled. For a main course salad I’d break it into slightly larger chunks.
One pomegranate. Cut it in half and dig out all the seeds, removing every last bit of white pith.
Half a bunch of flat leaf parsley. Chop this up very finely
A bunch of spring onions/scallions. Top and tail, and slice finely — including the greens.
A small packet of flaked almonds. Just dump ‘em in. Upon reflection unsalted pistachios would be great too.
Lots of Maldon salt. Kosher or other sea salt is good too.
Lots of freshly ground black pepper
At the last minute I drizzled over a little grassy Greek olive oil to bind it together. Normally I would add some finely sliced red chilis, but there were infants present, so I thought best not.
JARDINS DU PALAIS ROYAL, 146–148, GALERIE DE VALOIS, 75001 PARIS, FRANCE
T: +33 (0)1 49 27 97 91
PALAISROYAL@CORTO.COM
www.corto.com
I didn’t have much time to cook for the garden party lil’sis & threw for 50 people & 15 infants last Saturday. The plan was to cook all day on Friday, and have Saturday for organising & unpacking the Tesco home delivery before the guests arrived from 1pm. The plan upended when lil’sis had an accident at Bristol Station and we didn’t get home from hospital until 4am on Friday morning.
In the end I slept & mooched around in the day, & went for super simple food that took a total of five or so hours, spread between a scant 3hrs cooking on Friday night & a couple of hours on Saturday morning, with chopping help from Miss P on Sat am. Sausages for the grown-ups, chipolatas for the infants, lots of salads and four puddings…
So Friday: I grilled a large batch of courgettes, made two purees — a roasted aubergine & yogurt one, and a knockout garlic & chickpea one, roasted & skinned long pointy red peppers, cooked a kilo of couscous ready for pilaf-ing in the morning, & then knocked up a fat Victoria sponge, a pound of paté brisée for fruit tarts, and a strawberry jelly with skinned & chopped white peaches for the infants. I also made two dozen scones but they were crap so I binned them.
On Saturday morning I made my apple cake with cinnamon crumble topping, prepared the ingredients for the couscous, made tomato salads, a litre of crème patissiere, boiled new potatoes with mint, chopped up fruit for Pimms, and made cruditiés for the dips.
Victoria sponge with double cream, strawberries & blueberries; tarte aux prunes
Strawberry jelly with skinned white peaches; apple cake with crumble topping
Best comment of the day about the food after the event (found on Twitter):
“Honestly, all a bit of a gin-induced blur — I know I tried all 4 (puddings), and loved every morsel. Also, I stole the children’s fruit jelly.”
Yesterday I met up with Kiki to for a walk on Hampstead Heath. Unwittingly we chose the same footwear. When I posted this photo on Twitter I was deluged with queries about our footwear, so I am re-publishing this post from 2009.
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I am obsessed with Minnetonka moccasins. Obsessed, I tell you. This burning love crept up slowly over a few years, and has developed into a long lasting relationship.
It all started back in 2006, when a very nice man, who worked next door to the idiot boy I was then dating, invited me to his office to have a squint at the shoes he imported from the US to the UK.
Being a fashion editor an’all, I was intrigued. In the small room were multiple shelves of moccasins. So far, so whatever.
Then I tried on the Moosehide Driving Mocs.
Instant convert. The super thick cushioned inner sole is marshmallow soft; they were definitively the most comfortable shoe I had ever worn. (One of the reasons that they are so comfy is that traditional moccasins, unlike normal shoes, have their sides and sole constructed from one piece of leather which is then sewn to the upper, and which allows the shoe to flex and shape itself to your foot.)
The very nice man generously gifted me two pairs, the marshmallow-y driving shoes and a pair of classic beaded Thunderbirds, but I was busy being a high heel wearing fashion editor and, when I moved to New York a few months later, there just wasn’t much call for flat shoes in my life.
Fast forward to the beginning of this year just after I left my US magazine. Running around on assignment in New York and driving nearly 5000 miles around California, I needed comfortable everyday shoes. I dug out both pairs and I’ve pretty much worn them to the exclusion of anything else. It doesn’t hurt that they suddenly look right with everything from bare legs & shorts to skirts & opaque tights.
(My feet in Santa Barbara back in April)
They also make those suede moccasin boots that are always being photographed on Kate Moss et al. (Minnetonkas are the ur-moccasins in the American commercial market: they’ve been making them since 1946.)
UK: www.minnetonka.co.uk (official website, every style available)
US: Net a Porter (ankle & knee boots only)
Zappos (Neither style pictured above but a pretty wide selection nonetheless)
Minnetonkasales.com (very wide selection including the ones above)
They are substantially cheaper in the US, but I don’t advise UK purchasers to order them from US websites: by the time customs, taxes & postage are paid, the difference often evaporates.
When I was in Madrid back in May, I ate in a fantastic re-imagining of a traditional tapas joint, Bar Tomate (which I wrote about here). In a total coincidence, the excellent Hotel Omm where Miss P & I stayed in Barcelona two weeks ago is also owned by the same restaurant & hotel group, Grupo Tragaluz.
When the delightful publicist for the Hotel Omm clocked that Miss P & I were of a gourmand gourmet disposition (we eat & drink like gannets), she sent us off to meet the manager & have lunch at Barcelona’s Bar Lobo, Bar Tomate’s sister restaurant, down off the Ramblas in the El Raval area of the city (translation: within spitting distance of all the tourist hot spots.)
The ground floor is a light, bright, double height room, with an open kitchen. The tables are clothless, with pots of herbs & plenty of space. There’s an outside terrace, but our pale, northern European bodies couldn’t take the heat, so we sat in a sunny indoors corner and watched a fearsomely good-looking man feed his toddler tapas, *hearts melting*, whilst diners of all ages wandered in and out, and plates of delectable food wafted past our noses.
The menu roves around: there are super-trad tapas for those who don’t like to stray from the classics, like the plate of delectable sea salt scattered pimientos padron I scarfed in seconds (below right), and modern tapas of seared tuna with guacamole (below left) & houmous with flat bread for those that do (above right). I’m not sure where the textbook tempura asparagus with Romanesco sauce (above left) fits in, but it took roughly seconds for it to disappear off the plate and into my mouth.
Here’s the delicious menu in full:
Bar Lobo. C/ Pintor Fortuny 3, 08002 Barcelona.
+34934815346
barlobo@groupotragaluz.com
LLG & Miss P were deliriously happy guests of Bar Lobo
It’s seven weeks until the start of London Fashion Week, and already I am putting together spreadsheets, taking meetings and drawing up my campaign plan. I met with Mercedes GB’s reps on Monday and we have most exciting plans for our coverage of the collections this season, including a daily film, shot by me, of all the goings on front & back stage at LFW. The lovely Kiki will be helping me out again this season, so we met up yesterday to go through some preliminaries.
We both work from home, so I suggested a walk on Hampstead Heath as a much nicer alternative to sitting in a warm flat for our discussion. “There will be additions to Posetta Baddog”, I warned. Poor Kiki. She got given a lead the moment she arrived at lil’sis’ house, and from there she was dragged up to Gospel Oak by an excitable Jack Russell, whilst I wrangled PB and Billy the whippet.
My mother was in town for lunch with a friend, so she had deposited her hounds with my sister for the day. They definitely took to Kiki.
Absolutely nothing to do with her ice cream.
The dogs had a whale of a time, new scents for everyone. (You can just see Posetta’s periscope tail by the bushes in the picture above.) Whilst we walked across Parliament Hill and round and down to the Mens’ Bathing Pond.
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There was much advanced ball throwing for the indefatigable Posetta and in between canine wrangling Kiki & I managed to have a good work discussion.
And she even got a goodbye kiss from Billy when we got back to Gospel Oak (& there was no ice cream in the vicinity.)
Whilst I was hunkered down in the Hotel InterContinental in Madrid, trying to persuade myself I wasn’t sick, I went for an exploratory tour of the hotel. I may not have been able to walk very far, but hotels have elevators and lovely tho my room was, the appeal of CNN & BBC World had started to pale after 24hrs.
I should admit here that I am a hotel geek. All those years of reviewing hotels means there is little I enjoy more when abroad than having a good poke around a hotel’s nether regions. And, in this case, its upper regions too. Because the InterContinental Madrid has a Royal Suite of such grandeur that it would have been a crying shame not to have investigated it properly.
At 400 square metres, my Manhattan apartment would have fitted into the master bedroom alone. Of course that’s not all there is: the master bedroom has its own living area and en-suite bathroom and there are two further bedrooms. And in case you thought that was sufficient, think again: there is also a main living room, dining room, private kitchenette and additional bathroom.
But the pièce de résistance is a large outdoor terrace overlooking the Paseo de la Castellana. It’s quite the most beautiful space for an outdoor supper party, far away from the madding crowd. I know the suite is not exactly an everyday place to stay, but we can all dream…
LLG was a guest of the Hotel InterContinental Madrid
Three weeks ago I was frantically searching for a smart day dress. Well, I was, if searching means waving my arms around a lot and looking worried. It’s almost impossible for me to buy off the peg given my list of requirements, so I hadn’t even started looking.
After all: I require a dress to be above the knee, belt & tie-less, have a V neck or at least a deep scoop (people with a bosom look upholstered in anything with a high neck), and not too tight — I do like to breathe — and eat. Preferably it will also have sleeves or at least some kind of bingo wing camouflage. And not be pink or red.
Given that most designers cannot resist the temptation to cut smart summer dresses in the many of the styles which only work on lithe, breastless women (shifts, spaghetti strap floaty things, bias cuts, strapless, racer back etc), I had resigned myself to throwing vast sums of money at a solution.
And then I thought of Whistles, much spoken of since its relaunch under Jane Shepherdson who turned Topshop from a shop where trends went to die to High Street agenda-setting superstar.
Into Selfridges I went, to hunt for their Whistles concession. I glided upstairs on the escalator, walked into the Whistles area, saw a great silk dress, tried it on - and, dear reader, I bought it.
JUST LIKE THAT.
For £135.
I don’t know by which part I was more astonished: the ease of the process, the fact that they had something that suited me, with no compromise as to colour, quality, chic, fit or style, or that it was so (relatively) cheap.
The dress has lots of clever drapey bits, so it hides my hated not-flat-yet stomach and has plenty of room for my breasts, (which look alarmingly disproportionate in most frocks), whilst the clever pleating which drops to the waist camouflages their size. Although it is sleeveless, it has small shoulder pads that pull the pleating out over the arm, so hiding incipient bingo-wing-age. There is a tie in the front — but it’s a faux one, so no sack of potatoes style drawing in of my apple waist area. I’m clearly curvier than the model, and so the dress falls beautifully over my hips. And it’s short, so it shows off my legs.
I bought the dress above in navy that time — I love blue dresses, as anything pink or red isn’t great with my rosacea, but you wouldn’t believe how few stores — at any price level — ever make anything in blue, let alone in navy, one of the most universally flattering shades.
And that’s another reason why I love Whistles. Jane Shepherdson has really thought about what women in their 30s+ want to wear. Not what she wants them to wear. A subtle difference that many other labels in this arena would do well to take on board. But for all that, there’s no compromise in style or taste. The collection feels as current as anything four or five times as expensive.
And then my cup really did spillith over: I discovered that this is a Whistles hero dress, which they make in lots of different prints & colourways. Including this bright blue, my favourite dress colour. I almost have no words that could do justice to this dress.
This morning I am blissfully happy, as I thought it had sold out, and I kept forgetting to do anything about tracking one down. And there it was on-line all the time, just waiting for me to beckon a finger and bring it on home…
EDIT: One of my lovely Antipodean Twitter followers has just pointed out that Whistles ships to Australia for a tenner. She’s very happy.
As regular readers will know, back at the end of May I flew from New York to Madrid to attend MANGO
’s AW10 fashion show. I wrote about the after-party here, and gave the build up here, but illness got in the way before we got to the show report
AW clothes are starting to land in stores, so this is as good a time as any to show you the collection: A distillation of some of the strongest trends for fall, many of which looked back to the final decades of the 20th century. The new skirt length that Marc Jacobs is pushing, the midi, hovering around below the knee, was much in evidence, bringing to mind the Princess of Wales circa 1982 & the heyday of the Sloane Ranger’s Handbook. And the more I see it, the more I want to wear it. Probably because it’s just about the only look that hasn’t been plundered from the Eighties in recent years.
The pants on offer had been injected with a bucketload of Seventies sass (with a wave to the upcoming Chloe collection). It was as if Revlon’s Charlie girl had been hanging out with Ali McGraw circa Love Story as girls with shiny swinging hair, high-necked blouses, long strap shoulder bags & high waisted jeans strode confidently down the mirrored runway.
Eveningwear was covered up, dropped to the floor, and often long sleeved, or styled with cardigans, and all the more sexier for it.
Mango really have raised their game in recent years. This was a confident roadmap for the upcoming season, and far more directional than we have any right to expect from the High Street.
Photos courtesy of MANGO
Clearly, this white gold dachshund pendant by Katie Hillier could have been designed with me in mind. From Katie Hillier’s first jewellery collection under her ‘Hillier’ label, it’s part of a series of animal shapes made from 18-carat gold wire twists are shaped into woodland creatures: the original signature rabbit in four different coloured golds, an owl, the sausage dog above, a snail, a mouse and a squirrel, and each is set with a diamond eye available in a rainbow of colours.
£940 from Dover Street Market
Previous Objects of Desire here & dachshund love here
