Sabrina Ghayour’s tahini cinnamon swirls recipe

Cinnamon Swirls post McCarthy Holden estate agents

“I love cinnamon in pastry and desserts. There really is no sweet treat that doesn’t work with a little cinnamon in it, and these swirls have always been a favourite of mine,” says Sabrina Ghayour.

“The tahini really enriches them, giving them a lovely nutty flavour that is something quite different and pleasing. They are great with coffee or served with vanilla ice cream. You can also freeze a whole roll of prepared pastry for later use, then cut and bake from frozen for an extra couple of minutes.”

Cinnamon Swirls post McCarthy Holden estate agents

Tahini cinnamon swirls recipe

Ingredients:

(Makes 12)

1 x 320g ready-rolled puff pastry sheet

4–5tbsp tahini (make sure it’s not too thin, and avoid using excess oil)

3tbsp golden granulated sugar

2tsp ground cinnamon

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan), gas mark 6. Line a large baking tray with baking paper.

2. Lay the pastry sheet on your work surface.

3. Mix the tahini with the sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Spread the mixture evenly all over the pastry sheet, leaving a two centimetre clear border along one long edge. Starting from the opposite long edge, roll up the pastry tightly.

4. Cut the roll into four, then cut each section into three equal slices. Lay the slices with the swirl facing up on the lined tray, spaced slightly apart, and flatten each one gently. Bake for 20–22 minutes until nicely browned on top. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the tray before serving.

Persiana Everyday by Sabrina Ghayour is published by Aster, priced £26. Photography by Kris Kirkham. Available now.

Article By Prudence Wade, PA

 

Footnote – If your looking for a fabulous kitchen to cook in why not try this property

Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules on cooking as an act of resistance

Ukrainian Chef post from McCarthy Holden estate agents

For Olia Hercules, cooking is normally her therapy, her safe space – but she lost this when Russia invaded her native country, Ukraine.

“For the first two months or so, I couldn’t really cook – it was a weird feeling,” the 38-year-old remembers. “Normally it’s an act of meditation and stress relief. If it’s a normal, everyday stress, I cook – especially if I make something a bit more involved, like dough, breadmaking, dumplings – something like that, it’s amazing.

“But when you’re going through trauma, it was completely different. I felt guilty eating at first, then I felt guilty cooking. It was a horrible feeling, and I couldn’t shake it off.”

Ukrainian Chef post from McCarthy Holden estate agents

She eventually felt differently while making her parents a meal in Italy after they fled Ukraine. “That’s when it lifted, and I was like yes, I’ve got it back. I’m enjoying making this borscht for them, I know it’s going to do so much good.”

Now, Hercules says she realises cooking is “an act of resistance and defiance, and not letting Putin and his goons take all the joy away from us – because that’s what they’re trying to do”.

Recently, after some particularly bad news about the war, Hercules regressed to those feelings – but her mother brought her back to herself. “She said, ‘This is what he’s [Vladimir Putin] trying to do. Don’t let him do this – this is how we’re going to lose if we’re going to be paralysed by fear all the time and stop living.’ So we can’t stop living – and food is life.”

Now, Hercules is learning to take better care of herself, whether that’s returning to cooking, booking herself into an embroidery course, or writing. She also set up the Cook for Ukraine campaign with friend and food writer Alissa Timoshkina, as a way of raising awareness.

“At first we thought, OK, this is going to be a hashtag, and maybe we’ll think of something – a donation situation,” she says. “We were like, it’s good enough to just do a hashtag, cook a Ukrainian meal, and educate people and keep Ukraine in the news, keep talking about it – and also this thing of connection.”

If somebody in Britain makes a Ukrainian dish, Hercules suggests: “It’s much easier for them to imagine a family that would have been having this dish somewhere in Ukraine – and now they can’t do that anymore. The headlines are there, and with time it’s only natural for people to start disassociating, and being like, OK, I need to preserve my sanity, I can’t look at this horror all the time.

“But having something cultural – especially something to do with food – keeps you connected, and also gives you strength in a way.”

The campaign’s success exceeded Hercules’ expectations, and as well as raising awareness around the situation in Ukraine, it’s also a window into the country’s unique cuisine.

She accepts there are preconceptions about Ukrainian food. “People have said it is all about potatoes and dumplings and overcooked cabbage, which was actually really hurtful. But stereotypes are stereotypes – I don’t blame people for having them.”

Ukrainian Chef post from McCarthy Holden estate agents

Instead, she wants people to know the cuisine is so much more than that – it’s “diverse, and can be fresh and herbaceous”.

Now though, Hercules doesn’t feel like she has to convince everyone that Ukraine is a rich and diverse country. It is – but she also says: “It’s time to embrace all of our potato and cabbage dishes, because they’re actually extremely delicious.”

She has one of these potato dishes in her latest cookbook, Home Food. A staple growing up, the recipe for crispy potatoes and onions is “something everybody could do – students do it – and the perfection of this dish is because you cut the potatoes in an imperfect way. [Even if] you’re striving to do really thin slices, inevitably some will be thicker than others – and that’s what you want, that’s what makes it so good. Because some of the potatoes become more crispy, and some become soft.”

Hercules rediscovered the recipe during the start of the pandemic, asking her mum about it (who, by the way, didn’t think it even counted as a recipe) – and now it’s well and truly back in her repertoire.

Ukrainian Chef post from McCarthy Holden estate agents

Through writing her new book, Hercules realised how much food can connect people – regardless of where you come from. She reflects on her time in Italy (she spent a year there during university as part of an exchange program), saying: “When I lived in Italy, I immediately connected to my fellow students” through food.

In her halls of residence, “We became friends with loads of Italian students living there – they were from all over, especially from the south of Italy. A few of them used to receive parcels from their families – one of the boys’ papa was a butcher, so he’d receive hunks of amazing cuts of meat and jars with what they call ‘sugo de la mama’ – like tomato sauce, either with meatballs or whatever. And we’d all benefit from it, because it’s so delicious.

This immediately transported Hercules back in time, to when her older brother went to university in Odessa when she was 12. “I remember my mum packing these big boxes, and once she even packed a whole roasted duck into the box, and you’d go to the bus station, and you’d pay someone to take the box on the bus, and then he’d receive it on the other end.”

When she first arrived in Italy, Hercules admits her grasp of the language was rudimentary – but she managed to communicate this story to her new friends, and find common ground.

“[Food] breaks barriers, and immediately makes you feel closer,” she reflects. “I think the book has become that in many ways, reflecting through cultures. I realised food and humour have been the two ways for me, in each culture I experienced or tried to assimilate into – as soon as there was some kind of a connection in what we ate, and as soon as I understood the humour in another language, I was like OK, this is it. I feel at home now.”

Home Food: Recipes To Comfort And Connect by Olia Hercules is published by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced £26. Photography by Joe Woodhouse. Available now.

Article by Prudence Wade, PA

JAY RAYNER: ‘The Best Foods Operate as a Time Machine’

jay rayner

The restaurant critic discusses memory, food and Dairylea with Ella Walker, on the release of his latest book.

“People have this image of me, face down in whatever’s available,” explains restaurant critic and MasterChef judge Jay Rayner, somewhat irked.

He admits that, to an extent, he does play up to that assumption, but beneath all the fork-wielding bravado, he is trying to impart that food “really isn’t just about how things taste. It goes into every part of our lives; it’s about politics and the environment, sex, relationships, family, and history – you can investigate the world through what’s on your plate.”

So accuse him of just stuffing his face for a living and he’ll tell you, “You don’t understand – it’s a subject as deep as the ocean”.

His new memoir-menu hybrid, My Last Supper: One Meal, A Lifetime In The Making, deep-dives into the bit of culinary ocean associated with him; 53-year-old, London born and bred Jay Rayner, father-of-two, radio presenter, jazz pianist, and garlic butter-drenched snails fanatic.

And yet it also asks a very fundamental question of us all: Imagine you’re on death row, what would your final meal be? It’s a question that’s been levelled an absurd number of times at Rayner, yet his usual quip (“I’d have lost my appetite”) doesn’t quite capture what’s really going on.

jay rayner

“What you’re really being asked is, ‘If there were no consequences, if nobody was watching, if you didn’t have to hate yourself in the morning, what would you have?'” he explains. “That struck me as interesting, because actually what you’re talking about is the foods that matter to you, that make you who you are.

“It’s about memory. The foods we love are not just to do with flavour and aesthetics, they’re to do with when you first tasted them and why, and what mood you were in.”

He recalls a tweet someone sent him about their own last meal: “[He wrote] ‘I’d go and knock on the door of what was my gran’s house, and ask if I could sit on the back step and eat a Dairylea triangle’.

“I thought, ‘Oh bless you, that’s absolutely lovely’ – now, is Dairylea the finest cheese in the world? No, but for that person, do they remind him of somebody he loved and who loved him, and loss, and all of that? Yes, they absolutely do, and in a way, the best foods operate as a time machine.”

My Last Supper tracks Rayner as he defines, and then serves, his own last meal – featuring those garlicky snails, as well as oysters and chips (his top five ‘fried-potato experiences are suitably ranked’) – while he is “still in a good enough state to enjoy it”. He takes stock of his life as he goes.

It is by turns exposing (“quite literally so,” he says of an instant in a brothel that turned into a bath-based interview), indulgent, envy-inducing, peppered with recipes, and unexpected – for him as well as the reader.

jay rayner

For instance, the chapter on alcohol and his “appalling booze choices over the years” (Thunderbird made it into his final dinner, not that we’re judging) “was actually about my control issues” he says, while to the consternation of many – particularly his younger son – salad features in what you’d think would be a wholly decadent dinner.

“I realise it’s because it reminds me of who I am,” says Rayner sincerely. “I love having salad at the end of a meal, and also it’s about self-care – which is a term I only came to understand very recently. It’s how you look after yourself, you’ve only got one body and all that sort of stuff.” And yes, you can find him in the gym quite regularly.

When asked what he learned about himself writing the book he pauses, then says, without bitterness or malice, that what “did strike me was that drama and adventure slightly comes to an end when children arrive”.

“I suppose that makes absolute sense,” he says, noting his sons are now 20 and 15. “The first 25 years of my life I did some outrageous things.”

“You need to embrace that period of your life when you are freer,” he adds. “I’m not always sure I did embrace it with enough commitment.”

jay rayner

He mentions his regret over not going to Berlin to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, “because I was 23 and an important freelance journalist with too many deadlines – for god’s sake!” he says, laughing at himself with a certain amount of despair. “I was quite grandiose as a young man.”

Throughout the book he is frank, both in his recollections and his assessment of his life and tastes. (“The very least you owe the reader is to be honest and to be open.”)

“This is my last supper, it’s not anyone else’s,” he says, to the point of bluntness. “This is not a menu recommendation, and certainly, the last supper menu that comes out of it – please, don’t try this at home kids! It’s an insane meal in many ways, but that’s because it’s mine, it’s made up of my stories and my passions.”

So whatever your own ‘last meal’ might be (and whether or not it would include Dairylea), remember says Rayner: “It’s all so emotional, it’s about neighbourhoods, it’s about the people who feed you, it’s about memory.”

My Last Supper: One Meal, A Lifetime In The Making by Jay Rayner is published by Guardian Faber, priced £16.99. Available now. Visit jayrayner.co.uk/live-shows for My Last Supper live show details.

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