10 Valentine's Day treats to enjoy on your own

The usual bombardment of hearts and flowers that heralds Valentine’s Day is bound to make anyone who doesn’t have a Valentine feel a bit out of it. But there’s no reason not to enjoy yourself . . .

There are any number of tempting ready-made dishes and desserts in the shops (there will be even more on the 15th when the supermarkets have unsold Valentine’s Day stock to sell) so there’s no need to even cook.

You can of course buy mini bottles of wine which are apparently selling well, the Co-op told me recently, but they tend to be quite basic wines and disproportionately expensive. Buy a whole bottle and stopper the rest...

Here are my top 10 Valentine’s treats for happy singletons

Champagne, sole goujons and tartare sauce. (Or Cava and fish fingers - fizz and fried fish always hits the spot)

Generously-filled smoked salmon sandwiches and Sauvignon Blanc (Yes, even better than champagne)

Sushi and prosecco There’s a slight sweetness in both which makes them hit it off perfectly. This would be my choice btw.

A BIG steak and a glass of Malbec. Or any other medium-to-full-bodied red you enjoy . . .

Mushroom risotto and a glass of pinot noir. You could always add a sneaky bit of truffle oil (to the risotto, not the pinot obviously)

Macaroni cheese (or even an oozy cheese toastie) and a glass of Merlot

An IPA and a good curry. IPA (aka India Pale Ale) is better with curry than lager

Bread and butter pudding and a glass of Sauternes (or other late harvest Sauvignon Blanc) Or even, in this weather, a steamed syrup sponge ...

A chocolate brownie and a glass of PX (very sweet) sherry or a mini pack of Maltesers and a dram of Lagavulin. (Really! Try it!)

A couple of scoops of lemon sorbet topped with a shot of frozen vodka

And not so much a pairing more a hot cocktail - a mug of hot chocolate or cocoa made with a good slug of Bailey’s or other Irish cream liqueur (Lidl does a great one)

What would you treat yourself to if you were/are spending Valentine’s night on your own?

* Before one of you points it out this site of course is not immune to V Day mania. You’ll find recommendations for the most popular Valentines’ Day foods, a list of the sexiest cheeses, suggestions for Valentine’s cocktails and a cheat's menu for lazy lovers . . .

Why I drink wine. A guest post from a doctor who knows the risks

I'm handing over my blog this week to Dr Jonathan Tricker, a practising GP. We were discussing the UK Government latest guidelines on alcohol on the train a while back and he offered to share his perspective as a doctor who is also a winelover.

"I enjoy drinking wine. I enjoy that first sip after getting in from clinic; I enjoy bubbles on Fridays and sherry on Saturdays. I most especially enjoy the conviviality and friendship around a shared bottle.

In the UK the Chief Medical Officer's guidelines on alcohol recommend a reduction in the amount of alcohol consumed by men from 21 units a week to 14. The recommendations for women have stayed at 14 units per week. They advise to spread these drinks over 3 or more days, and avoid regular episodes of heavy drinking. They additionally recommend you should not drink during pregnancy.

For the most part, by staying within these guidelines the risks of harm from alcohol are brought down to the level of risk associated with other normal everyday activities (like driving). You may choose to drink more, and that’s okay, but the choice should be an informed one.

Do I drink too much? Sometimes. This last year I’ve woken up a few with that decidedly dusty feeling, with heartburn, and even collywobbles. Some weeks I have drunk over the old male weekly recommendations of 21 units. Most weeks I am at, or close to, the new recommendations of 14 units. I’ve certainly had more than the 5-7 units of an evening that could have put me at risk of acute injury and accidents.

I have traded of the enjoyment of alcohol against the short and longer term risks. Though I suppose I may have felt differently if I’d tripped and broken my arm, or developed an irregular heart rhythm or vomited up blood.

I sit in clinic and most days will see the associated problems of alcohol* Usually the problems are covert. Could my patient’s high blood pressure be related to their alcohol consumption? Possibly. What about obesity or depression? Probably. Sleep problems? Could well be and that in turn may lead to poor concentration. That colon cancer? Perhaps.

What about the benefits? There’s the enjoyment, the pleasure and the community around drinking. Perhaps you needed some Dutch courage to talk to someone at the bar? That’s a benefit of sorts. For me, it’s my hobby. But unfortunately the health benefits of alcohol have probably been overstated, and are marginal at best (see below**).

Might you be drinking too much?

* Most people underestimate how much they are drinking

* A unit isn’t much wine. A small (125ml) glass of 12.5% wine is actually 1.5 units. (Click here to work out how many units you are drinking.)

* If you think you are drinking too much, then you probably are.

* You may want to complete the AUDIT questionnaire here. If you are concerned, perhaps it would best to speak with a health professional. Be honest with yourself. It’s relatively easy to creep into the ‘increasing risk’ category. For what it’s worth, I scored 9.

* You might still wonder why I drink at all when I’m so conscious of the risks. I guess it's worth reiterating that with alcohol it’s dose-related. Drink judiciously and the risks remain low. *** And I choose to accept the small increase in risk, just as I do if I go coasteering, or horse riding.

How to cut down the amount you drink

* Buy better wine. Better quality wine will hopefully have greater length - that often-delicious lingering taste, that can stay with you for minutes after a sip. Also, if it’s more expensive you’re likely to buy less of it. (There’s a close relationship with the cost of alcohol and how much is consumed).

* Think about buying half bottles. There’s a temptation with normal bottles to pour larger glasses or, not wanting it to go to waste, polishing it off.

* Try pouring less into your glass. You want the wine to be able to aerate. The aromas will collect in the glass, and it’ll probably taste better.

* All too often a pub/bar/restaurant will overfill a glass. A large (250ml) glass is 1/3 bottle. Try ordering a smaller glass. (See point 3, and, as I understand it, they are legally obliged to provide you with a 125ml serving if you ask).

* Aim to have more days off drinking than on.

* Don’t forget that alcohol is a significant source of calories. In fact a greater source of calories per gram than sugar. (1 gram sugar = 4 calories, 1 gram alcohol = 7 calories, a unit of alcohol contains 56 calories). I have had patients lose a considerable amount of weight just by stopping drinking.

* Specific goals may help. Rather than saying ‘this week I’ll drink less’; you could set yourself a target: ‘this week I’ll only have a drink on 4 days, and I won’t have more than one small glass of wine each time’.

* It may be a help to enlist the support of your friends and family.

Notes:

* There are about 30 health conditions directly attributed to alcohol, including: alcohol dependence, alcohol withdrawal, acute intoxication, alcoholic gastritis (irritation lining of stomach), alcoholic polyneuropathy (damage to the small nerves of the hands and feet), alcoholic cardiomyopathy (alcohol causing the heart to become like a floppy bag), various effects on the liver such as hepatitis (inflammation), to cirrhosis (permanent damage to the liver, which can no longer perform its vital functions for the body)

Then there’s a whole load of chronic conditions that cannot be wholly attributed to alcohol but there’s sufficient evidence of a causal relationship. This is a big list but includes cancers of mouth/oropharynx, oesophagus, stomach, colon, liver, breast and perhaps lung; depression; high blood pressure; Other conduction disorders of the heart (where the hearts electric circuits get messed up and can led to abnormal heart rhythm), pneumonias caught outside hospital; pancreatitis…

And finally there are acute conditions where alcohol is a component cause. These include: road traffic accidents, drownings, falls.

For the most part in these conditions there’s a dose-response relationship. That is, the more alcohol you consume the greater the risk.

**Most of the reported health benefits have been linked with a reduction of death from ischaemic heart disease [IHD] (that is the disease process which leads to most angina and heart attacks). Most of these effects can be achieved with alcohol of less 12g (that’s 1.5 units) every other day. If you have experienced IHD then a pattern of low dose drinking may reduce risk of recurrence. There is some biological evidence to potentially back this up. Particularly that low dose alcohol can improve one’s lipid (fats + cholesterol) profile, particularly with an increase of fats call HDL (high density lipoproteins, but usually referred by GP as ‘good-fats’ or ‘good-cholesterol’ ) and there’s a link between better lipid profile and reduced rates of IHD.

But, and it’s a pretty big but, most of these big studies have tended to use ’non-drinkers’ or ‘abstainers’ as their control, against which they compare light/moderate/heavy drinkers. But non-drinkers tend to include ex-drinkers (such as people who have stopped drinking due to ill health), and we know that these people can have much worse health outcomes. What this can do in give the control group worse outcomes and artificially inflate the benefit of drinking. Some studies (the most recent in BMJ in February 2015) tries to take this into account, and separate ex-drinkers and non-drinkers, and when this is done the beneficial effect of alcohol largely disappears.

Additionally most of the studies have looked at average alcohol intake rather than drinking habits. In studies that have shown beneficial effect for light drinking, but no benefit or detrimental effects with heavy drinking episodes (even if you are a regular light drinker)

*** Sometimes the portrayal of the statistics can be alarming. They present it as ‘Relative Risk’. So relative risk of oesophageal cancer (that’s the food pipe) if you’re a moderate to heavy drinker is something like 100%. Sounds alarming. But the baseline chance of oesophageal cancer may be 1/75 (1.3%) so ‘absolute risk’ in a drinker might be 1/38 (2.6%). Personally I think these statistics should presented as absolute risks.

The return of the vol-au-vent

Are we about to witness a revival of that 70s classic, the vol-au-vent? There appear to be sightings. Philip Sweeney reports

Clifton, Bristol, August 2017, yet another new restaurant, Wellbourne, the venture of former employees of Dabbous of London, opens its doors. A reason for excitement if only among one particular sector of the public: flaky pastry enthusiasts.

Wellbourne’s daily menu features the vol au vent, a dish nowadays restricted along with Black Forest Gateau to ironic retro cooking magazine articles, and a few select epicurean addresses such as Quo Vadis of Soho, which had a trout version on the menu only last week. Two vol au vents don’t make a revival, but this is a step in the right direction.

Paris, France, August 2017, the home of the species, is another vol au vent desert. Are they flying at half mast, perhaps, for the passing of Jeanne Moreau? No, the v-a-v is a dish for autumn and winter, therefore absent from the cartes of half the handful of restaurants still featuring it, most of which are shut for the holidays anyway.

The vol au vent is a very traditional dish, neither cheap nor easy, so these are not among the shedloads of caves a manger or taco-vendors currently in fashion, but grand old classics like Drouant, where the Prix Goncourt jury has met since the 1940s, or Benoit, the beautiful Michelin starred bistro de luxe on the edge of the Marais, which still does a vol au vent de sole a la marinière based on a recipe by Escoffier.

Though not in August. Only Le 110 de Taillevent, the cheap (28€ a vol au vent) and cheerful offshoot of the extremely grand Taillevent, is still offering pastry relief, and the chef, Emile Cotte, is happy to comment.

Cotte’s vol au vent (above) is exquisite, served in the traditional manner, the sauce poured over the filled pastry shell at the table, with a small pan of extra filling and a jug of sauce left for topping up. This is a vol au vent a la financière, the banker’s wife bit a reference to the coin-sized dimensions of the solid matter in the filling: lamb sweetbreads, wild mushrooms, poultry wing meat and kidneys, coxcombs, quenelles of poultry, crayfish. Far from some snack-cousin of the sausage roll, but an item of full dress French cuisine bourgeoise.

Vol-au-vents or bouchées?

As you’d expect from its genealogy, usually traced back to the great eighteenth century cook Antonin Carême, who replaced the normal heavy pastry in a tourte with breeze-light pate feuilleté. This was still a full size multi portion pie, until Marie Leszcynska, pastry-loving queen to Louis XV, hit upon the idea of individual vol au vents, or bouchées, whence the bouchée a la reine still found in good neighbourhood traiteurs today. In modern practice, some bouchées are pretty substantial, and the vol au vent is invariably a main course dish, and your dinky aperitif vol au vents are strictly speaking mini-bouchées.

By a stroke of luck, I witnessed the vol au vent in its most ostentatious grande bourgeoise finery only recently, at a dinner for three hundred at the Quai D’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, a riot of gilded mirrors, pilasters, cherubs and ushers in white tie and tails.

Alain Ducasse, the most ubiquitous, successful and Macchiavellian culinary wheeler dealer in France, was entrusted with just the main course, a grand vol au vent with all the trimmings, for which he’d demanded his own brigade of 18 extra staff, dozens of silver saucepans for service to table, a huge quantity of black truffles at 750 Euros a kilo and the headgear of flocks of cockerels.

Ducasse’s recipe, which he had sent to me, involves 34 ingredients as opposed to Taillevent’s 16, some of which are themselves complex pre-prepared products like matignon - fondue of vegetables – and calf’s foot jelly.

The creator, a guest at the dinner, sat across the table for me looking about as involved as a bank chairman idly observing the signing of a loan agreement by some of his minions. At the appointed time, a line of waiters queued in the wings like a Broadway chorus line to bring on plates of pastry shells, then spoon into them the filling and finally pour over the rich brown sauce from the silver pans. Bloody good, though cooler and less crispy of pastry than Taillevent’s, due no doubt to the constraints of service en masse. The coxcombs were intact, little pale gelatinous things, unlike Taillevent’s: Emile Cotte minces them up as some clients are squeamish, but insists the taste is worth it.

But back to reality. The traiteur, where you get your take away dishes, rather than the restaurant, is the more common habitat nowadays of the Parisian vol au vent. Though here too the situation is deteriorating, with the traditional traiteurs declining in number and Chinese traiteurs asiatiques taking over their shops at an alarming pace.

Nonetheless, my local traiteur, the Charcuterie de Montmartre, turned out twice daily ovenloads of bouchées à la reine, filled with chicken breast, jambon de Paris, mushrooms, and quenelles de volaille in a white sauce based on chicken stock, for four euros, and the Grande Epicerie on the Left Bank, a sort of superior version of Harvey Nicholls food hall, was selling big tasty square specimens, one chicken and one seafood at just under six euros, while awaiting the new season party list: Saint Jacques and pesto, ecrevisses homardine, ris de veai, volaille and morilles.

And then there was Sebastien Gaudard, actually a celebrity patissier rather than a traiteur, but a purveyor also of highly rated vol au vents in his refined salon de thé on rue des Pyramides. Sorry, no vol au vents in August, announced Gaudard, then taunted me with a description of his specially lightened béchamel filling.

But what about sweet vol au vents?

Apparently Quo Vadis does them. About to leave Gaudard’s empty handed, my eye lit upon a golden puff pastry roundel among the ranks of eclairs and religieuses in a glass cabinet. "It’s a puits d’amour" said Gaudard, "an old Parisian patisserie. Try one". I did; as wonderful as you’d expect of a breeze-light pastry cup filled with crème Chiboust, which is crème patissiere mixed with Italian merinque and caramelised under a grill. And as fascinatingly historic as the vol au vent itself, invented in the eighteenth century by one Vincent La Chapelle, whose original recipe involved not crème patissière but confiture, making the puits d’amour nothing less than a long lost ancestor of the Jammy Dodger.

Which brings us back to the Wellbourne. Vol au vents on the diminutive side, served on slates, containing non standard mayonnaise-based fillings. And, provoking sharp intakes of breath around the table, topped not by pastry lids but nasturtium petals. A laudable entry into the vol-au-vent stakes, much to be welcomed, but not quite there yet.

May have to call in Alain Ducasse and his bag of coxcombs for a tune-up, but not till autumn.

Philip Sweeney is a freelance food and travel writer, vol-au-vent aficionado and a regular contributor to The Independent.

What to drink with a vol-au-vent

It's light, airy and the filling is usually creamy. What else to sip with a vol-au-vent but a glass of champagne? FB

Photo ©Packshot @fotolia.com

New Christmas traditions: my 24 hour post-Christmas break

It’s the evening of December 27th and my daughter and I are holed up in the luxurious Rosewood hotel in London tucking into a club sandwich (her) and a lobster macaroni cheese (me) on room service.

It’s part of a new tradition we’ve established to spend 24 hours together in London just after Christmas. Kate’s not a great one for big family parties so this is the way we celebrate together starting with lunch (this year bento boxes at the excellent Sosharu to which we walked through the deserted streets) a spot of shopping (not high-end, a makeup raid on nearby Superdrug) and the rest of the day in the room, chatting and watching old TV series.

I chose the Rosewood because it’s always beautifully decked out with twinkly lights and Christmas trees (and they were nice enough to give me a media discount otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford it). Last year we went to the Hoxton in Shoreditch which is always fun but not quite central enough and the year before, the newly opened Beaumont just off Oxford Street which is sadly much spendier than it was then. The idea is to be able to walk to the shops - and hit the sales (the main point of going after rather than before Christmas). If you look online early enough there are always deals on sites such as booking.com. The period between the 27th and the 30th is a relatively fallow one for London and other city centre hotels)

I like the idea of new Christmas rituals. You can never totally recapture those of the past. Circumstances - good or bad - force change upon you. The break-up of relationships, the arrival of children, the acceptance, years on, that they may sometimes want to spend Christmas elsewhere ...

When I met my husband we used to spend family Christmases in France with all the new traditions that involved, mostly food-related. Capon rather than turkey as the centrepiece of the Christmas lunch, boudin blanc rather than chipolatas and bûche de Noel in place of Christmas pudding though we did use to take over some mincemeat to make mince pies.

Since he died just over a year ago I’ve gone to my son and Spanish daughter-in-law’s who have incorporated some Spanish traditions - always a big leg of jamon (last year’s was actually from Lidl rather than Spain!), and addictive turron (nougat) sitting there temptingly whenever you walk by. (We still had the time-honoured bubble and squeak on Boxing Day though.)

Just like everything else in life Christmas changes. I think the answer, hard though it sometimes is, is to embrace that and regard it as an opportunity rather than a loss. Spending the day with just one of your children rather than frantically trying to make sure everyone gets on is a good plan for a start.

A friend told me yesterday that she’d taken a friend’s 14 year old horse-mad daughter to the Boxing Day meet for the first time, how magical that had been for both of them and that they would do it again next year*.

So what are the new Christmas traditions you’ve established over the last few years and which ones couldn’t you let go?

*yes controversial I know but before you start piling in this piece is about establishing new meaningful traditions not about foxhunting!