THE SUN-SOAKED PLATE...Mediterranean recipes for family and friends

At all three Fosh restaurants, we are about to change our menus for the summer season ahead. Planning a successful and manageable menu for a restaurant involves making a number of important decisions about both style & content. Personally, I have never liked long and over complicated menus and I always prefer to narrow them down to a specific type of cuisine. Too many restaurateurs try and conjure up long-winded menus in the hope that they will appeal to just about everybody. I feel that those restaurants tend to lack any real personality and customers find the menus difficult to navigate. More importantly, chefs and waiters can also find these menus difficult to work with, making them unable to memorize all the dishes you offer, their ingredients and their preparation. You may also find yourself faced with food waste from the ingredients you stock for unpopular menu items. A small, well refined menu gives customers only your best offerings, cuts

--> STRAWBERRY TIME Local Strawberries are in season right now and they are bursting with flavour. I think these succulent, fragrant berries are as beautiful as they are flavourful. When ripe, fresh strawberries contain a wonderful combination of fruity, caramel and spice flavours. When at the market, look for unblemished strawberries with bright-green hulls. Try to buy only local mallorcan strawberries where possible or buy freshly picked fruit from local farms, you'll be getting produce that's approaching the peak of ripeness in contrast to imported fruit, which is likely to have been picked early. Strawberries are the quintessential summer treat. For better flavour, let strawberries come to room temperature before eating them: if possible, put them out to warm in the sun for a couple of hours to bring out their full taste and aroma. As with any other delicate berries, wash and handle them gently and as little as possible to avoid bruising them. Al...

                  THE SWEETEST THING Before peaches, plums and berries appear in markets, apricots arrive. Ancient Romans were so impressed by this fruit’s early ripening that they took to calling it praecocium, Latin for “precocious.” Most apricots are destined to be canned or dried, and their season is short, so get the fresh ones fast.  A relative of the peach, nectarine, plum and cherry, apricots are sour-sweet in flavour with a wonderfully fragrant character and a mixture of fresh and tropical tones. They are silky smooth with a soft, velvety skin that ranges from pale yellow to deep orange. Although an apricot's colour is not always a reliable guide to flavour,

  For most people anchovies are a love or hate ingredient. I have to admit that I love them! Like salt, anchovies are a natural flavour enhancer. They're rich in a compound called inosinate which, when combined with the glutamate you get in beef or lamb, emphasises the natural meatiness of those ingredients. The very intelligent Romans knew this. Though the ancient Greeks probably invented garum, the liquor of salted anchovy (or mackerel) guts, dried in the sun, flavoured with herbs, decomposed by its own bacteria and then matured that became the chief condiment of Rome, seasoning almost every dish in the repertoire.

--> Let’s face it…who doesn’t like pancakes? They have been popular in some shape or form the world over for centuries and Archaeological evidence suggests that pancakes are probably the earliest and most widespread cereal food eaten in prehistoric societies dating back to 5th century B:C! With their beautifully freckled surface, glistening straight from the pan, pancakes are delicious eaten simply with lemon juice and sugar, but they can be filled with a variety of sweet ingredients such as maple syrup, fruit, ice cream or chocolate sauce. They make a good base for savoury fillings too, such as fried mushrooms, cheese, spinach, seafood – anything goes really. Pancakes are made from a wide variety of flours and in a range of styles in many countries.

Most of us like a glass of wine with dinner. It somehow makes a meal more civilized and enjoyable. Yet the real power of alcohol, especially for the cook, lies not in what it does at the table but what it does in the kitchen. Like Salt, alcohol has the ability to bring out the flavour in food. Whether you’re cooking with wine, beer, or liquor, the alcohol in those beverages improves flavour perception in at least two important ways: by evaporation and by molecular bonding. My favourite alcoholic beverage in the kitchen is brandy, a spirit distilled from wine that’s made from grapes.

I recently returned from a fantastic trip to India and was lucky enough to spend a few days on a spice plantation. As a chef, it was incredibly inspiring to see exactly where all the spices that we use everyday actually from and how they are produced. Cardamon Factory Spices were among the first of many foods brought back to Europe from the east by Marco polo and encouraged the early voyages of Columbus and Vasco Da Gama, who succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Indian Ocean to calicot on the coast of India.

--> For some time now, chefs have been portrayed as artists, and I must admit that it’s a title that doesn’t quite fit as far as I’m concerned. Sure enough, to present your food or paint a picture on a plate, an artistic streak helps, but it won’t make you a better cook or turn you into a culinary genius. With a large amount of common sense and a little understanding of kitchen science, you’re more likely to succeed. Chefs that have the ability to be totally unique and original, whilst maintaining some kind of understanding with flavours and textures, might attain cult status and something close to true artistry, but they never forget taste. Taste has nothing to do with art and everything to do with science. CHOCOLATE, BASIL, MANGO & POLLEN What Einstein Told His Cook Two of my favourite books are both about the science of food. I’ll never read them from cover-to-cover, but they are a great treasure trove of information on the history and science be...

--> Pork on the wild side This week saw the hardest part of my first stab of pig keeping when it came time to take them to the slaughterhouse.   I certainly found it difficult but I was comforted to know that they had lived well, eaten liked kings and hopefully, are going to have an unbelievably great flavour! I also helped some friends with their traditional Spanish “Matanzas”. It isn’t recommended for the squeamish but takes place in a festive atmosphere, with everyone joining in to help and nothing goes to waste as just about every part of the animal is put to good use in the making of sausage-like "Embutidos" (charcuterie). Among these are Chorizo, Salchichon, Morcilla, Butifarra, Sobrasada and

I couldn’t imagine my kitchens without lemons; there is no other ingredient that can transform a dish in a single squeeze. PRESERVED LEMONS Although available all year round, Spanish lemons taste best when left to ripen on the tree and the months of January and February are the perfect time to enjoy their fabulous aroma.

--> With the coming of winter, I think it’s a good excuse to try out some amazing dishes that have become gastronomic legends. Esteemed, time-honoured recipes that have stood the test time and that are still as relevant today as they ever were. Classic Chocolate Marquise from Misa Braseria Dishes like Tournados Rossini, coq au vin, Cassoulet, French onion soup or the celebrated Soupe aux truffes Élysée V.G.E. This renowned Black Truffle Soup was invented in 1975 when Paul Bocuse sought to create the perfect dish to serve to the then French President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing at the Élysée Palace on the occasion of Chef Bocuse receiving the Legion of Honor.