So, it’s been a while since I last blogged. Almost six months in fact. As seems to be have been the theme this past year, a lot has happened to keep me from writing – I finally moved back to London permanently, we moved out of my boyfriend’s god awful, rundown ex-council, sorry-excuse-for-a-flat in Lewisham and into to our own place in Brixton, while at the same time my boyfriend was admitted to hospital, diagnosed with a brain tumour and had brain surgery all in the space of two weeks (he’s fine now thank god). Oh and I went from being a blonde to a brunette. Also, I found my dream job.

From this…

…to this!

Having left London at the beginning of 2011 because I needed to get out of a job I hated, I spent the next six months trying to work out what career would make me happy. I was bored of working in jobs that didn’t challenge me and that I didn’t find interesting. What I realised looking back at my last position, as a researcher for a B2B publication for the PR and marketing industries, was how much I wanted to be on the other side, working in PR, promoting and organising the events I was researching. The other thing I knew was that I wanted to work in food; I wanted to be part of the food industry, promoting the subject that occupied so many of my thoughts so much of the time. And so with no PR degree or experience, but armed with knowledge of the events industry, a journalism qualification, this blog and bundles of enthusiasm, I decided I was going to break into the world of food PR.

I applied for a few advertised positions without success (including one internship, which I was turned down for on the basis that I was too experienced) and eventually, after a momentary loss of faith when I considered becoming a career waitress, I decide to go down the speculative application route. I knew enough not to churn out identikit applications but I also no longer had the energy to write too many letters, and so I picked five food PR companies that I’d become familiar with through my last job and took the plunge.

I’d tried the speculative approach for media jobs after completing my journalism course a few years ago with not one response, so I didn’t hold out much hope. But low and behold, of five applications three got back to me - one saying they didn’t have any vacancies but still, with the current job market being such that it’s a rarity to receive any acknowledgement of your application, I was touched by any sort of response.

Another of the responses was from Kate Johns of Nudge PR. I was familiar with Kate’s company because part of my old job was researching awareness campaigns, and Kate organises Chocolate Week. Yes, that’s right a whole week dedicated to promoting the world of fine chocolate. It’s not difficult to imagine my reaction when Kate suggested we meet up. It’s also not difficult to imagine how happy I was to turn down the trial shift at a restaurant I’d just accepted for the same day. And so I started the following week as PR Assistant at Nudge PR. On my first day I attended a chocolate tasting - that has got to be right up there on a list of the best first days at a new job.

The next month was a bit of a whirlwind as I started work just three weeks before Chocolate Week. Not only did I have to learn a lot about fine chocolate in a short amount of time (oh the hardship…) I also had a lot of work to do, including helping to organise Chocolate Unwrapped, a consumer show at Vinopolis attended by 4000 people at the end of the week. No pressure… I’m not sure I’ve ever been as tired as I was that Sunday evening in all my life, but it was an amazing feeling realising I was tired from being busy doing something I actually enjoyed rather than from the tedium of my old job.

Me at Chocolate Unwrapped, taking a photo of the judges and winner of the Chocolate Cake Off (photo by Paul Winch-Furness)

As well as organising Chocolate Week, Nudge also has a number of food PR clients, a roster that has been continually growing since I started. Our clients include Paul a Young, one of the UK’s top chocolatiers and someone who never fails to inspire me no matter how many times I hear him talk about chocolate (which is a lot); The Cake & Bake Show, a brand new show dedicated to all things baking and featuring baking gods Paul Hollywood, Mary Berry and Richard Bertinet among others; Oialla, a truly exquisite chocolate made from wild cocoa beans from deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest; Thorntons, the chocolate shop we all grew up with and whose factory I can’t wait to visit; Vivien Lloyd, the person to ask about anything marmalade, jam or chutney-related; and RAW – the Artisan Wine Fair, which is all about natural wine, a subject I’m only just learning about but already find absolutely fascinating.

Me wearing a chocolate diamond ring worth around about £20k ever so briefly - a nice perk of the job…

It’s only now that I’m feeling a little more settled (and am not moving house or traipsing back and forth to the hospital) that I’ve felt the desire to go back to blogging. I’m getting back in the kitchen, trying out new foods (in the last few months I’ve started drinking coffee and, thanks to my proud boyfriend, only good coffee) and wanting to share my discoveries with others, beyond the limitations of 140 characters. I wasn’t immediately sure how to combine a job in food PR with a personal food blog, which is why I wanted to be upfront about my job from the start, but I think I’ve figured it out in my head now. You don’t have to worry, I don’t plan to make this blog a tribute to our clients. However, if I do blog about them now and again, believe me when I say the passion is genuine, I love what I do and if I choose to write an essay on one of Paul a Young’s brownies, it’s not because I do his PR, it’s because he honestly makes the best goddamn brownies I’ve ever tasted.

I plan to make this the last ‘life update’ blog and will get back to my usual cooking disasters and discoveries entries from now on. I hope you can join me.

 Watching a lot of American imports on television and in film, we in the UK (and people around the world to be honest) are used to our favourite characters making the occasional reference to a particular person, institution or Americanism that goes over our heads. It’s probably only once or twice in a series, you get used to it and it is either one joke out of twenty in an episode that doesn’t work for you, or else it’s easier enough to get the jist and laugh anyway. The episode during the seventh series of Friends where Monica is trying to recreate Phoebe’s grandmother’s cookies only to discover it’s just the Nestlé Toll House recipe is one such episode. I love Friends and must have watched every episode twenty times (this is a total underestimation) yet until this week I had no idea what Toll House cookies were. But Monica translating Phoebe’s French pronunciation of her relative’s name ‘Nestley Tolouse’ and pointing at a packet of cookies saying ‘is this the recipe?’ gave me all the clues I needed to understand that it was actually famous cookie brand’s recipe (even if we did have to put up with the awful American pronunciation of Nestlé – yes Phoebe you’re right, you Americans really do butcher the French language). For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, watch the scene here.

Then just the other day, overcome by a craving for chocolate chip cookies, not to mention boredom from been cooped up all day alone in my boyfriend’s flat, and without my trusty Green & Black’s Ultimate Chocolate Recipes book which I know features a delicious cookie recipe, I decided to google recipes. Scrolling down the search results, the extract from the Wikipedia entry describing the origins of the chocolate chip cookie was enough to distract the geeky History graduate in me. It turns out the invention of the chocolate chip cookie is credited to none other than the owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, Ruth Graves Wakefield. The story goes that Ruth cut up a bar of Nestlé chocolate into bits and stirred them into the cookie dough, expecting the chocolate to melt into the mixture but instead of course, the ‘chips’ held their shape. Ruth went on to sell the recipe to Nestlé, and thus the Nestlé Toll House cookie was born.

The bit I never quite got in the Friends’ joke was that there was a recipe on the packet. I think I always assumed Monica meant the ingredients rather than recipe, but it turns out Nestlé actually does print a variation of the original recipe on every packet, which I think is rather nice. Given that Monica wants the recipe so she can be the ‘mum that makes the world’s best chocolate chip cookies’, and the fact I was craving soft, chewy American-style chocolate chip cookies rather than English biscuits, I just had to try out the recipe for myself.

It wasn’t the smoothest of baking processes. For starters I had to contend with the American custom of measuring things in cups. While I see where the process would have come from, and it makes a certain amount of sense for flour and sugar, measuring butter by cups is just plain odd, not to mention inaccurate. I do actually have measuring cups packed up somewhere in my mum’s house, but I was in my boyfriend’s kitchen - where the sight of a mere spatula would be a miracle – so I definitely didn’t have any cups. I used the internet to do the conversions and apparently one cup of flour is 128g. I am in awe of anyone who can use a measuring cup with such accuracy but I just went with the conversions anyway using my digital scales (apparently these are unheard of in the US). I of course didn’t have access to the American ingredients but to be honest, there’s no chance I’d ever use Nestlé Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels over good quality dark chocolate anyway.

 The dough came together nicely and the obligatory spoonfuls eaten straight from the mixing bowl before I started actually baking the cookies nearly quelled my original cravings on their own. I realised even I couldn’t eat all the cookie dough I’d made though so started dolloping balls of dough on to a baking tray. Which is when I hit my next problem; the only baking tray in my beloved boyfriend’s kitchen could only hold four cookies, and even that I realised after the first batch, was a push. And even if he did have more than one baking tray, there’s only one shelf in the oven! But I persevered and spent the next hour putting tray after tray in the oven until roughly 25 cookies later, I gave up and decided to save the rest of the dough for the next day (read: to eat raw later while watching Twilight).

The end result was, in general, a success. I had produced deliciously soft chewy chocolate chip cookies, which if I’d had some sort of spatula or fish slice to take them off the tray may have even been less squashed-looking, and my boyfriend and his housemate, as well as his colleagues the next day, all seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. But if I were to have kids, would this recipe make me the ‘mum that makes the world’s best chocolate chip cookies’? I don’t think so. For now, I highly recommend you stick to Green & Black’s Ultimate Chocolate Recipes.

Yu Kyung and Seunghyun cook up a feast with the help of Chun and Haruka (Image courtesy of Stian Oshaung)

Tteokgalbi are basically Korean beef burgers. I discovered these on my trip across America. Not in LA or New York or any other major city, nor in a restaurant, but in a campsite half an hour’s drive outside of Washington DC.

You see, while I went on my trip across the US to discover America and experience and enjoy the country’s food and culture, the added benefit of doing this with a company like Trek America was the international make up of my fellow travellers. While Trek America is a British company, in my group of thirteen there were two English, two Scots (they were adamant about not being referred to as Brits…), two Danes, two Koreans, one Australian, one American, one Norwegian, one Japanese and a Bulgarian, plus our American guide. Quite the mix! Spending three weeks in the company of such a varied group was quite fascinating, not least when it came to mealtimes.

We were travelling on a minimal budget, mostly staying on campsites and cooking our own food. While lunches were predominantly sandwiches as we were usually on the road in the day (cheap sugary bread, watery and sugary processed meat, rubbery cheese – nobody was a fan), we split into groups and took it in turns to cook dinner.

It was an interesting and at times, testing system. The group ranged from 20-30 years old and there were plenty who clearly never cooked at home plus a couple of us who we soon learned were basically food snobs (something I’ve never denied about myself to be honest). At the end of the day though, it’s difficult to shop and then cook for fourteen on a minimal budget, on a camp stove with minimal equipment, especially when you are tired and hungry. Just to make it more interesting, the Bulgarian was a vegetarian. And after a couple of veggie pasta dishes, we learned our Scandinavians couldn’t comprehend a meal without meat. I myself was not impressed when my group, having decided on camping favourite chilli con carne, was told by the Americans to use turkey mince because it’s healthier, and I still had to pour away all the ‘fat’, or as I insisted on calling it, ‘flavour’! Not only that but I was told to cook the mince separately from the sauce, rather than just doing two batches. Luckily or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, I’m all about avoiding confrontation, so kept a lid on my frustration.

There were also the language barrier issues you’d expect in such an international group, though on the whole it was actually the American-British differences that required the most explanation; aubergine/eggplant, courgette/zucchini, ground/mince were just some of the problematic words I remember. The only time I was stumped was cilantro (which I eventually remembered as coriander while walking around a food market in Brooklyn, days after I’d finished the Trek).

But as I said, for all the limitations and difficulties, I felt this setup was hugely beneficial to the trip. While food nowadays is very international, and I can easily eat four or five dishes a week that are influenced by different countries, there is so much more to learn when you talk to someone from a different country about their food and have them cook for you, experiencing the way it’s meant to be cooked. Personally, I was in my element when the Korean girls in our group, Yu Kyung and Seunghyun, were on dinner duty. I’d never eaten Korean food before but the girls, despite only being 20 and 21-years old, knew their flavourings and clearly knew their way around the kitchen, or in our case, the camp stove and picnic bench!

And so, having given you a little background as to how I discovered this dish, I just had to share with you the recipe for tteokgalbi, the most popular dish of my trip. Tteokgalbi is not a literal translation for beef burgers  – I believe galbi is a meat dish, while tteok means sticky rice cake, but a beef pattie has a similar consistency and the sticky sweet additions of honey and terijaki only enhance this image.  Given our obvious limitations in the kitchen, it’s a simple recipe – I’m sure there are more complex versions available – but I think the deliciously sweet stickiness and strong garlic flavour works a treat. We ate them with a simple mix of stir-fried vegetables and rice (we did have to cater for the vegetarian), though as it’s summer and the sun is, momentarily, out, they’d be a perfect for a barbeque, as an alternative to boring old plain beef burgers.

Ingredients

• 500g beef mince
• One carrot
• One onion
• Six garlic cloves
• Three spring onions, finely chopped
• Terijaki sauce (can also use soy sauce)
• Honey
• Sesame oil
• Black pepper

 Method

• If you have a food processor, you can roughly chop the carrot and onion and then just throw them in, along with the garlic until finely processed and then add the beef mince and mix until it is a dough consistency. Obviously though, we didn’t have such luxuries while we were camping, so it’s perfectly fine to just finely chop the onion, grate the carrot and crush the garlic before mixing with the beef by hand

• Once the meat and vegetable are mixed, add the spring onions, a few tablespoons of Terijaki sauce, a couple of honey, one of sesame oil and season with black pepper, before mixing again.

• Shape into burgers and slowly griddle, or BBQ, making sure to turn them regularly as the sugar in the honey and terijaki will burn if left too long, on too high a heat.

I’ve been using Peppadew peppers for a number of years now and I thought it was about time I sung their praises in print. Chopped up and added to marinades or sauces, topping pizzas, stuffed whole or eaten straight from the jar, these peppers are extremely versatile and can add a deliciously sweet spice to any dish. They have also saved me many a time on those days when I didn’t have time to go to the supermarket and those last few withered vegetables in the fridge looked less than appetizing. I usually buy the Mild variety, but Hot is also available for those of you with a higher heat tolerance. Here’s the recipe for my favourite way to use Peppadew peppers.

Lamb kebabs: serves 3-4

Ingredients:

For the lamb:

500g lamb mince

Handful of chopped mint

2 tsp of Harissa paste

3-4 Peppadew peppers, chopped

Seasoning

Large pitta breads

250g halloumi

Salad leaves

Natural yoghurt

Tub of hummus

Paprika

Olive Oil

Handful of Peppadew peppers, chopped

Method:

• In a bowl, mix the lamb mince, mint and Harissa and chopped peppers, not forgetting to season. Using your hands, massage the mix and shape into small, sausage-like koftes. Griddle for 12-15 minutes, turning occasionally.

• Cut the halloumi into slices about half a centimetre thick and grill for 4-5 minutes, turning once.

• Toast the pitta bread and slice open.

• Tip the hummus on to a small plate and using the back of spoon make a small well in the centre. Sprinkle with paprika and drizzle with olive oil. (I got this is a great tip to jazz up hummus from Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals.)

• I think the best way to serve this meal is to put everything out on the table and let your diners create their own kebab. Personally, I spread the hummus on the pitta first, followed by the salad leaves and koftes, a couple of spoonfuls of yoghurt and topped with those all important Peppadew peppers and a couple of slices of halloumi.

• Serve with couscous.  

And so I have returned from my trip across the States. It was an amazing experience, one I would have loved to extend had funds allowed. As promised, I have lots to share with you, and where better to start than the stop on the itinerary I was most intrigued by and which only exceeded expectations: Monument Valley and its Navajo tacos.

Situated on the Utah-Arizona border, Monument Valley lies within the Navajo Nation Reservation and quite simply, it is breathtaking. While you may not know the name, the scenery should be familiar, having made numerous appearances in film and TV, starting with John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939 with a young John Wayne and including more recently the likes of Forrest Gump and Mission: Impossible II.

It was in this stunning setting we were lucky enough to be treated not only to a very entertaining jeep tour, but also an overnight stay sleeping under the stars, preceded by food and entertainment from our Navajo hosts.

I’d read before I embarked on the trip that we would be sampling Navajo tacos but had no idea how these differed from Tex-Mex style tacos. My only experience of tacos up until then came in a box labelled El Paso or Discovery! But I assumed, given that it was the only food deemed worth mentioning on the itinerary, that it was something different to look forward to.

Rather than a flour tortilla or a crispy corn taco, Navajo tacos use fry bread, a deep-fried flatbread popular throughout Native American tribes, thought to have come about when Native Americans were forced on to the reservations and given rations of flour and lard. It is topped with the usual taco suspects – beans, cheese, lettuce, tomato and onions - and in our case a frying steak as well. As is so often the case, it’s the simplest foods that often taste the best and this was fresh, hearty and delicious. Despite being deep-fried (I won’t tell you the calorie estimate I found while perusing the internet…) the bread was only ever so slightly crisp on the outside and still light and fluffy on the inside. After a long day of travelling (on top of several long days of travelling and general holiday excitement) it was the sort of food that brought a very big smile to your face, followed by quite a sleepy one.

I was very glad we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Navajo women in the process of making the bread, because you can’t help but sometimes wonder on these tours if they’re just going to serve up some shop-bought stuff for the tourists, but I needn’t have worried; the Navajo really know how to treat their guests and they take their fry bread very seriously. Later in the evening everyone took part in a Navajo wedding ceremony and us girls had to vow to always make frybread for our husbands! I am now in theory married to a Norwegian called Stian; I’m assuming it wasn’t binding…

I didn’t get a chance to ask the women what they put into their bread, which was a shame because like so many traditional recipes, there’s debate over what the best and most authentic ingredients are. Having taken a look around the internet, the basic ingredients seem to be flour, baking powder, salt and water and vegetable oil, with any suggestion of adding powdered milk shot down as unnecessary. But if you want to get truly authentic that requires specificity and that means using Blue Bird Flour and Crisco shortening.

Once home, I just had to have a go at making my own fry bread. I decided on a recipe from the Food Network website, which seemed pretty straight forward and from the comments, relatively authentic. However as I’ve mentioned before I don’t have an electric fryer and have an innate fear of setting the house on fire, so I think my attempt suffered from the oil not being hot enough. I really must invest in a cooking thermometer. I served my little fry breads (I didn’t have a pan big enough to make large ones) with honey, something our guide Carlos told us after we’d stuffed our selves silly on tacos that we just had to try - luckily everyone knows there’s always a corner of your stomach reserved for dessert. Should you decide to try making your own fry bread, I highly recommend trying both the sweet and savoury serving suggestions.

Navajo tacos are not complicated and while delicious were not the best thing I’ve ever tasted. But not everything you eat has to be. The food I ate with the Navajo was greatly enhanced by the awe-inspiring and truly spiritual setting in which I was lucky enough to enjoy it. Food and culture have also been intertwined and for the first time in my life I was able to experience and learn about a totally different culture through their cuisine, in the very surroundings it was meant to be consumed.

                                                                                      © TrekAmerica

Back at the start of the year I made some pretty big decisions, which included quitting my less-than-satisfying job and upping sticks out of London and back to the Cotswold village where I grew up. The main intention of these rather life-changing decisions was so I could take that ‘holiday of a lifetime’ so many of my friends did during gap years before and after university that I, the good girl that I was, never took.

And so, the time is finally upon me. On Sunday I will be flying out to Los Angeles, all on my lonesome, before meeting up with a group of strangers and spending the next three weeks with them travelling across the Grand Ol’ US of A in a minibus, camping all the way, before enjoying a few days of well-earned R&R in NYC. Of America, I’ve only ever done New York before, so to be taking a trip from West to East, across the South, through dessert and swamps, from Vegas to Navajo country to New Orleans to the capital, it should be quite the experience.

This holiday will not be food-focused; it’s about seeing awesome sights, meeting great people, learning to rough it (I’m not even taking my hair straighteners!) and for what I’m sure will feel like a few very short weeks, living a completely different life. Having said that, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t trying new foods and experiencing new tastes. I can’t wait to taste Navajo food, try gumbo for the first time and see and smell the shrimps of Louisiana.

My time on the tour will be pretty tight, I will be throwing myself into plenty of activities (including white water rafting apparently – god help me!) but before the tour I’ll be spending a couple of days in LA on my own and afterwards, five days in New York, so while I’m in both I’d love to seek out some exciting food markets and unmissable cheap eats. This is where you come in - if anyone has any recommendations for foodie spots I just have to visit, please let me know, as guide books only get you so far; personal recommendations always go further.

I’m not sure what internet connection I’ll have while I’m away so it’s unlikely I’ll be posting anything until I get back, but watch this space in July, where I am sure to post lots about my new foodie finds…