'Hey lady! I love fish and chips!'

Ever since Jamie 'did' Marrakech as part of the 'Jamie does...' series, it seems Marrakech is 'doing' Jamie. I just spent a couple of weeks in Morocco, and although the attention directed at solo female travellers is legendary for being unpleasant, about half of the shout-outs now seem to be the result of Mr Oliver's fleshy English footprint. On day one I was walking down the street trying to strike a balance between inconspicuous and intrepid-chic, and a dude followed me on his bike for a while, before calling out 'fish and chips!' It was so absurd that I burst out laughing and he pedalled off. As it turns out, everyone yells that in Marrakech, as well as the odd 'lovely jubbly', and sometimes just 'Jimmy Holver!', as I saw it written down somewhere. Not that you can buy fish and chips anywhere, mind, and I became quite certain that most people don't know what it is, because occasionally someone would just yell 'fish 'n!' In retrospect, I should have turned around and yelled 'tajine!'

So on a related and unoriginal note, Moroccan food is delicious. As ever with cultures that aren't big on dining out, the street food and markets are where the yum is at. I ate at a couple of quite good restaurants and a couple of very bad ones ('What's wrong with your dinner, Sal?' -- '...just a few maggots') but for me nothing beat the Jma el Fna square in Marrakech and the fish souk in Essaouira. The former packs out with demountable stalls at night, selling everything from calamari with chilli sauce to sesame sweets and spicy teas; at the latter, 80p will catch you about twenty sardines, and another £5 will get them grilled and brought to a big table, with enough bread, salads, sauces and fries for you and your four friends. And not to forget all the stuff that you just can't avoid, like fresh orange juice stalls, mountains of dates and figs, big, beautiful pomegranates, mint tea, and a healthy dose of sunburn.

Now here's something interesting, they use margarine in Moroccan pastries because they're traditionally cooked in wood ovens and butter burns too easily. Oh, and I discovered that these ovens are often in communal bakeries, where homemade dough is dropped off to be cooked and picked up all brown and crispy later in the day. Mornings are for bread, while the oven is very hot, and it will be ready in time for lunch, while afternoons are reserved for pastries, when the temperature in there has backed off a bit. I was so excited to stumble across one of these places in operation that I jumped up and down a bit and asked if I could take photos. They were really accommodating, and then the teenager accidentally-on-purpose grabbed my bum.

I had Stein/Oliver fantasies of having my hands guided to make bread by a wizened old woman who speaks no English, but evidently I failed to realise them. Failed to the point of molestation, in fact, so I took a cooking class while in Essaouira to get around such difficulties. We made Zaalouk, which is a lightly spiced aubergine and tomato salad (although it's really more of a dip), a lamb, date, and almond tajine, some almond crescent pastries, and some sultana, lime and sesame biscuits. And, come to think of it, Mona at l'Atelier Madada, though not old, did not speak English and was definitely maternal. Go there! It is also a beautiful hotel, for all ye who are not 23 and some of ye who are and earn more money than me.

My friend James once said, 'I just don't understand why people travel if it's not to eat', and I'm with him there. Apparently television was designed to be an advertising medium, so that the programmes are essentially only there to break up the ads, and sometimes holidays feel a bit like that: cultural activities and museum visits are just ways to divert attention from the real, slightly surreptitious objective. I was pleased to be reassured that this is even true of vacationers whose worldview is less food-centric than my own.

Big ups to imperialism for consistently good patisseries, crepes, and coffee, too.

Not Counter Culture So Much As Active Cultures

I always used to find myself rootling around for two cents in girly discussions of Desirable Male Celebrities. It’s easy enough to choose some classics, of course. Last year during a quiet moment in Mexico, I said to my dear friend Jim, ‘You know what? Brad Pitt’s really hot’, to which he replied something like ‘Oh really, how interesting. Welcome to the fucking party, Hannah.’ Fair, all fair. I’m a member of the crowd that’s pleased by Johnny Depp. I even had a poster of him on my wall for a time, but that blend of cappuccino grunge just mocked me. I don’t care enough, that isn’t love. Brad seems like a very nice person, which is good for his despicable wife, but nice don’t get me grinning like an idiot. Johnny ticks all kinds of boxes, but I think he’s too cool for me. I enjoy how he “keeps people guessing”, but I sometimes wish he would just tell us the answer so he can start enjoying himself. Also, and now I’m going somewhere with this, both of the women in these men’s lives look a bit undernourished if you ask me, and this speaks volumes. The ribs of happiness are not well defined.

But it’s all OK now, because I’ve found my two cents and they are going straight into a plum pudding. At 23 years young I feel lucky that I know what I want so early, and he’s a wine-guzzling, Keats-spouting, barge-riding bon vivant with two left feet and a penchant for pink shirts. He’s 40 years older than me and he’s Rick Stein. Now stop laughing, because I haven’t just dazzled you with wit. I’m not being ironic or trying to “keep people guessing”. At some point in the last year I stopped trying to love snake-hipped young things in RayBans A, B, or C, and started dreaming of a life that smells of garlic and permanence. Not that Rick and I would stay still for long. We’d travel, and oh! the places we’d go. We’d have a ball on Rick and Hannah Stein’s Latin American Odyssey; because I hablo español and Rick parle un peu français we’d even have our Caribbean bases covered, and on the beach at Ipanema we’d laugh together about how hard it is to pronounce Portuguese. He studied English Literature and I study English Literature. He likes dogs and I like dogs! I’m Australian and his wife is Australi—DAMMIT!

I’m young. I’ll mend. He has sons. Maybe he can be my mentor, because the love affair isn’t just with Rick, it’s with everything he loves, too. For the first time I find myself with an interest. A capital ‘I’ Interest, at that, in everything culinary. Not that it came out of nowhere, by any means. I owe a lot to my mum, the mega-foodie and wordsmith, and my dad, the best eater I know. I have always loved baking, but generally as the means to a delicious end. The most alarming development was when I started cooking things to cook them, not even to eat them. I should have twigged, really. Throughout my undergraduate years I had some sweet jobs, like at a really nice cocktail bar, or doing cushy admin for good money at a PR firm. Straight out of uni I landed a contract position at a major Australian publishing house. But the best memories I have of my employed self are from a summer I spent as the kitchenhand for my friend Andrew Gimber, now heading up Jimmy Lik’s in Sydney. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day during the Christmas/New Year period and no time to dry my sodden clothes in between shifts. But the food was amazing, and even though I was shelling prawns and washing dishes, it was fun.

So now I live in Edinburgh where I’m studying a Masters in English Literature, and things have got a little out of control. I can’t eat fast enough to do justice to what I’m cooking, so I palm a lot of it off to the wonderful Sarah and Emily down the road. Emily, the creator of such gems as, “I hate people who see bread as a path to health. Bread is a path to happiness,” rightly pointed out that my sudden leap into action is the result of having to write a dissertation. Ain’t nothing like staring at the space where 30,000 words should be to make you whip up a batch of bagels. And a cake. And maybe run down to the shops to get the remaining ingredients for meatballs. And homemade icecream. May I add that all this is done largely without the use of appliances because I am a poor student. A poor student that had confit duck on puy lentils last night. Yeah you heard me.

Don’t worry about me, I do cool young person things too occasionally. I have friends and hangovers, but that’s not what this blog is about. It’s about how today I made Chelsea Buns, and how I did it.

Chelsea Buns

Inspired by James Martin’s list of things to do with Hot Cross Bun dough, and I changed the flavourings of his Apricot and Almond Chelsea Buns to suit what I had in the cupboard.

Dough

450g white bread flour

2 sachets instant yeast

50g caster sugar

150ml warm milk

50ml warm water

1 egg, beaten

50g butter, melted

Insides

25g soft butter

80g raisins

40g mixed peel

85g toasted flaked almonds

25g caster sugar

2 tbsp marmalade (or whatever jam you have handy)

toasted flaked almonds to decorate

Heat the oven to 200C and grease a deep 21cm cake tin, preferably loose-bottomed.

To make the dough, mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the milk, water, egg and butter and mix it all together, first with a wooden spoon and then with your hands. Flour your work surface — wooden is best — and knead the dough until soft and smooth. I read somewhere that it should go from cellulite to a baby’s bottom; be patient, it can take a while. Transfer the dough into a large, lightly greased bowl, cover with a damp teatowel. Put it somewhere warm for about an hour, or until it has doubled in size.

When it has doubled, take it out and knock it around for a few seconds to get the air out of it, then roll it out into rectangle roughly 20 x 30cm. Spread the softened butter over the top, then evenly sprinkle over the raisins, peel, almonds and sugar. Starting with a long side, roll the whole thing up tightly like a Swiss roll, making sure to tuck it under as you go. Wet the end with a little water if you need help making it stick.

Cut into 7 or 8 even pieces and arrange in the cake tin, cut sides up. They should look like pinwheels dotted with the fruit. Cover again with a damp teatowel and leave to prove for another 20 minutes.

Bake for 10 minutes then turn the oven down to 180C and cook for a further 10 until golden brown. They should sound nice and hollow if you give them a wee tap on the crusty parts.

Melt the marmalade and strain it, if you like. Drizzle or brush it all over the top of the buns and sprinkle more flaked almonds to decorate.