31 Aug 2024
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, shares the tastes she has savoured this summer.
I have had a summer of being utterly spoilt food-wise. In my last column, I talked about the delicious fare I ate in Tuscany while on tour with my choir. My usual fortnightly column then took a break (spent eating, largely), so it’s been a month since I put pen to paper, or fingertip to keyboard, as it were.
At the risk of turning this into a regular ‘What and Where Did Elena Eat?’ feature, and because no further travel is booked in the foreseeable future (or distant, for that matter), I thought you might allow me to celebrate the tasty morsels I’ve been lucky enough to savour this summer, in the hope that you might feel as inspired as me to attempt to recreate some of them.
We have just returned from a week in Portugal; specifically, the Algarve. We stayed in a very pleasant hotel near Alvor that had the most fabulous array of health foods at the breakfast buffet.
Yes, there were of course pancakes, pastries and bacon on offer, but the majority of the spread was given over to the likes of oats, bran and quinoa flakes, kombucha, powdered sprout shoots, chia, nuts, spirulina, wheatgrass, a rainbow of fruit, and even a bowl of bee pollen next to the huge slab of honeycomb you could help yourself to.
Every morning began with healthy vigour and rigour, only to be decimated through the day with ice cream, drinks,sides of fries and – that restaurant temptress – the bread-basket, always hungrily emptied moments after hitting the tabletop and guaranteeing a carb-coma by the time mains arrived.
In the interests of pithiness, I shall limit myself to the most rewarding meals we ate, like the sunny, vibrant salad we were served at a beach-front restaurant overlooking a twinkling Atlantic and an array of random beach umbrellas. The salad was an excellent example of fruit complementing savoury, with soft, syrupy nectarine slices surrounding deliciously briny king prawns.
I realised, as the waiter placed the plate down, that the blue ceramic plate was much like the azure water before me, and the salad itself depicted quite closely the colourful, scallop-edged umbrellas. A sensory symbiosis of taste and sight.
Also highly worth mentioning was a harbour-side fish and seafood restaurant in Alvor. The place was teeming even as early as 7pm and from our table we could see the hardworking (short-straw-(short-straw-pulling?) chef working the ferociously hot grill, flipping fish bronzed from the flames and tossing squid with fistfuls of squeezed lemon.
Sardines are a huge part of Portuguese cuisine and those, along with an exquisite whole turbot, were by far the centrepieces.
A couple of days later we ventured inland to a restaurant high enough in the hills that the view across miles and miles down to the coast would have been the highlight, were it not for the food.
There were no tourists at this place; only locals. And the reason we knew about it is that my husband, who holidayed in the Algarve most years as a boy, used to eat here every summer in the mid- to late- eighties. Incredibly, it hasn’t changed.
The same silver platters bear the food to the tables, the same pinball machine stands in the corner, albeit no longer working, and the same delicacies populate the menu.
The nostalgia abounded for my husband, especially when the chicken and rice soup (known as canja) came to the table in squat, untrendy bowls.
In this humble dish, pieces of tender chicken thigh sit in an oil-flecked broth and buttery, soft rice sits at the bottom of the bowl, hiding until your spoon finds it.
The savoury notes reach dizzying heights as far as comfort-food goes and my husband’s joy as he watched the children devour these bowls of humble soup was priceless, even if their manners had gone out the window with their direct-from-the-bowl slurping to get the last drops.
There followed a plate of peri peri chicken drumsticks and a couple of quails (abundant in Portugal and not recherché, like in Britain), as well as a dish of diced pork that was fiercely garlicky and lemony. I’m salivating just recollecting it. Even the simple plate of sliced tomatoes were teeming with flavour, not just from the onions that adorned them, but from the olive oil that had been liberally drizzled over and had huge depth.
As pudding time came, our friendly waiter told us that, while all the puddings were made by hand in the local area, two in particular were made by the proprietor’s mother, who could be seen pottering around and helping out. Her desserts were duly ordered: a particularly luxurious crème caramel and an unctuous, moist cake of pumpkin and almond, typical of the area. Both were divine, of course.
In my opening paragraph I mentioned potentially recreating some of these dishes. Although our kettle barbecue doesn’t quite match the grill of the harbour- side seafood restaurant, I am going to try barbecuing some whole fish before the summer is entirely behind us. And although making an authentic peri peri marinade is no mean feat, I’m determined to give it a go.
As for that chicken and rice soup, my son has decided he’s going to try and recreate it. He’s a self-declared cookaphobe, so this is testament to just how good it was. The restaurant’s called Paraíso de Montanha and is near Monchique. I hope you get to try it yourselves one day soon.
