Cookbook of the week - Noma

    If you've read the blog for a while you may remember this post about the book Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. I said there that it wasn't really a book for the home cook to use in the kitchen, and that stands, but just for fun we have now tried a recipe: René Redzepi's famous malt soil!!

    Click back to the earlier post and in the last picture, bottom right, you'll see what we were aiming at, though we went for the other version of it, the 'vegetable garden'. The recipe is here, and there's a helpful suggestion on substitutions here, but to cut a long story short it's a blend of different flours (we used chestnut as we couldn't get hazelnut), with a few other additions, made over two days and sieved so that the end result looks like rich loam or good compost.

    We had it at a fine tilth until Mr. C. decided to add some liquid to it to help the vegetables stay in place (talk about muddying things up), but that didn't affect the taste which I thought was nicely nutty - I really like this strange stuff - though Harriet described it as "burnt toast made into fine breadcrumbs".

    Anyway, I said we were having fun with this mad dish, and so as it was supposed to be a vegetable garden (and the 'crop' was better than the picture above suggests), we thought it should have some gardeners to tend it,

so out came the Sylvanians ...

    There was much hilarity in the kitchen.