Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music... Ad Infinitum

Photograph: Jonathan Lovekin for the Observer

I've heard a lot about kale recently. This recipe might just serve as an introduction for me to this vegetable and its benefits. Plus, it is autumn and that means, Nigel Slater's cooking!

Sweet potato and kale bubble and squeak recipe

The recipe
Peel 1kg of sweet potatoes and cut them into large pieces. Place them in a steamer basket or colander and steam over boiling water for about 30-40 minutes, until tender to the point of a knife.

In a dry frying pan, toast ½ tsp of cumin seed and ½ tsp of chilli flakes. Remove and mix them with ½ tsp of sweet, mild, ground paprika.

Lift the sweet potatoes out, tip them into a bowl (or the saucepan emptied of its water) and mash them thoroughly with a good 50g of butter, some salt and a grinding of black pepper, and the toasted cumin, chilli and paprika.

Remove the tough stalks from 150g of kale (you need 100g trimmed weight). Cook the kale for a minute or two in a saucepan with about 1cm of water, covered by a lid. Drain and roughly chop.

Fold the kale into the sweet potato. Pile into a dish, top with a few knobs of butter and bake for about 25 minutes until lightly crisped on the top. Serves 2, generously.

The trick
A steamer basket or a colander, balanced over a pan of boiling water, is probably a more successful way of cooking sweet potato than boiling it. The exceptionally soft flesh will collapse if cooked in water and produce a soggy mash. Toast the cumin seeds and chilli flakes in a dry frying pan, using no oil or butter, watching very carefully, as they will burn in a heartbeat.

The twist
Some floury Maris Pipers will be good here instead of the sweet potato, or use half potato and half celeriac. Kale is just one of the suitable brassicas: Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage or purple kale will all work well. Sprouts are best quartered, shredded or separated into individual leaves. Fold small pieces of cheese, a good 150g, through the hot potato when it is mashed. Blue cheeses work exceptionally well here, in which case I would omit the cumin.

The music

I would like to start this section tonight with my latest musical crush, Karine Polwart. I have just had a few of her CDs ordered for my birthday. You can judge by yourselves. Her voice sounds like pure autumn gold.



Another lady is my second guest tonight. All the way from Spain it is the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners pop sensation, Bebe. Another voice that bubbles like the bubble and squeak recipe I have offered you tonight. Caution, though, this is no easy-listening pop, but pop with meaning and depth. Just like autumn.



Another CD I am getting soon. This is the type of collaboration I love, the sort of coming-together that makes music the beautiful human phenomenon it is. Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal, the former, a kora player, the latter, a cellist, creating magic. Just like autumn food.




Next Post: "Summer Tale for an Autumn Day", to be published on Sunday 15th November at 10am (GMT)

Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

This post is really a question. A question with an open-ended answer. In fact, this post is an open-ended question with an open-ended answer. It is not a yes-or-no type of column, but rather a what-do-you-think and how-do-you-feel kind of outing.

I have written on this blog at length about the challenges an immigrant faces in their new country of residence. It does not matter whether they are a new arrival or an “oldie”, like me. In my case one subject about which I have always been confused is education. Despite the fact that for the last twelve and a half years I have worked with or, for the last seven, in schools. It is the sheer variety of school types that throws me off. That is why tonight my post will be rather short. I would like you to give me your opinion on the subject I am about to introduce. Especially, if you were born in this country or did your schooling here, I would love to have your input. Whether I agree with your comments or not is not the point, for I am looking for open-ended answers to my open-ended questions.

In a nutshell, schools in England (I use England as in the country or England, not the UK because differences exist between the four home nations; just to make matters more confusing!) can be community schools, which means that they are under the control of the local authority. I work in one and my children attend one. They are what you would call in other countries “state schools”. There are also voluntary aided schools, i.e., “faith schools”. They are run like state schools but are free to teach only about their own religion. Then you have “public schools”, a name that is so confusing that I have had to learn the etymology of the phrase by heart in order to explain it to non-Brits. This type of school is a fee-paying establishment (private) that differs from a "normal" private one in that its main aim is to educate students from low-income backgrounds (the "public" bit). I mentioned “private schools”. Self-explanatory really. You pay a fee as well but this is for the benefit of the owner. Have I not exhausted you yet? Shall I carry on? OK, I'm getting there, don't worry. In recent years we have had academies and free schools. The former do not follow the national curriculum and can set their own term times.  They are managed by the government directly, not by the local authority. Free schools are government-funded, not-for-profit entities that can be set up by a charity, or a group of teachers or parents, or a religious organisation.

And then we have grammar schools. Nothing to do with the correct use of the verb “to have” in the third person singular or second person plural. It is all to do with selection. That is how this post came about. I read in the paper a few days ago that the government was planning to open an “extension” to a current grammar school in Kent and my immigrant’s mind was suddenly tickled. The brouhaha this attracted centred chiefly on whether opening grammar schools would entrench inequality or eliminate it. I asked work colleagues, born and raised here, what this meant to them. Some could not give two monkeys about the subject and others were disappointed after hearing the news. A grammar school is run by a local council, foundation or trust, but (and here’s the rub) selects its pupil intake based on an entry exam. How students fare in this exam is down to both academic ability and… means to achieve that academic ability. Without mentioning names, I know of one much-coveted school that applies such criteria and for which parents start preparing their child from Year 4 or 5 before they sit the exam in Year 6. A lot of money goes into hiring private tutors who fine-tune their little ones into the not-so-subtle art of passing an 11-plus test.

Image by Ros Asquith for The Guardian

Is this fair? Of course this question is open to all, wherever you are in the world. But since this blog is visited and read by so many bloggers born on these isles, I would really like to read your opinions.  What do you think about this new direction the government is taking in regards to our education system? How do you feel about it? Should we worry?

© 2015

Next Post: “London, my London”, to be published on Wednesday 28^th October at 6pm (GMT)