I’ve just been reading an article in The Telegraph about Simon Hopkinson, the author of Roast Chicken and Other Stories (and more recently Week in Week Out) and I was particularly interested in what he recommends as kitchen cupboard essentials.
By Simon’s standards, I’m doing ok but I’ll admit that I am falling down on the stock cubes and gin stakes. I have most of the stuff he’s mentioned but I’d like to add Angostura bitters, hot pepper sauce, tomato puree, dessicated coconut (for coconut bake) and good quality curry powder (Turban and Madras if you please). I’d really love to hear what other people consider their cupboard essentials.
Here’s what Simon says.
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I got some unusual tomatoes in my organic vegetable box the other day, coeur de boeuf (literally translated as beef heart) tomatoes and couldn’t decide at first what I wanted to do with them.
For more than a week, I looked at the tomatoes, admired their unusual shape and kept thinking that I needed to cook them specially, because they seemed way too nice to just cut up and eat in a salad.
Then one grey, overcast morning I woke up longing for Trinidad and I was inspired to make one of the simplest and tastiest delicacies known to Trinis: tomato choka.
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