Spicy potato cakes

Some recipes for potato cakes involve flour, in a ratio of about 1 g flour to 4 g potato. The flour acts as binding; but I find the results a little glutenous. (Or perhaps I mean glutinous, which means gluey.)

If you leave out the flour, you have to treat the cakes with care. The longer they spend in the frying pan, the more likely they are to break up; so I fry them quickly, and then put them in the oven to warm through. The quick frying means that they absorb less oil, because they rapidly develop a crust.

The quantity of spices here may seem large. But you need a lot of spice to spice up a potato.

For 2
4 medium potatoes
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp coriander seeds
4 dried chillis
Salt
Groundnut or sunflower oil, for frying

Peel the potatoes, cut them into chunks, and put them into a saucepan of cold, salted water. (Salt speeds softening -- and you're going to mash these potatoes.) Bring to the boil, and simmer until tender. Drain, and return to the hot pan to steam. When they're dry, mash them. (I use a masher, because I don't mind a course texture; but when I'm cooking mashed potatoes, I push them through a vegetable mill.)

Meanwhile, put the cumin and coriander into a dry saucepan above a gentle heat, and cook them until they give off a toasted aroma. Whizz them with the chillis. (I have a small, electric herb mill. You might also use a pestle and mortar -- though it's hard to disintegrate chillis in this way.)

Tip the spices and chilli into the mashed potato; add salt if necessary. When the mixture is cool enough, form it with your hands into eight patties. If you have time, put them into the fridge, where they will firm up.

Turn the oven to gas mark 6/200 C. Heat a frying pan above a medium to high flame; add a layer of oil, and fry the potato cakes; you want each side to be browned in a couple of minutes. Transfer the cakes to a baking tray, and put in the oven for 10 minutes to finish warming through.

Bread sauce

Here is the bread sauce recipe (for 4 to 6) from my book (links on the right). It still seems plausible to me; you might, bearing on mind the comment I made yesterday about salty bread, leave out the salt.

Bring 280 ml of milk slowly to the boil with half a peeled onion studded with a couple of cloves, along with a little salt, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, and a pinch of nutmeg; turn off the heat, cover, and leave to infuse for half an hour. Strain into another pan through a sieve, add breadcrumbs, and warm through. I’m afraid that I don’t know how many breadcrumbs you’ll need. Add some, stir and simmer; the sauce will continue to thicken, so err on the side of too few at first (unless you want an excuse to add more milk and create more sauce – but of course this milk will be unflavoured). When the sauce has the consistency you want, take it off the heat and stir in a walnut-sized knob of butter. You could add a couple of tbsps of cream too. You can leave the sauce and warm it up later, by which time it will have become very thick, and will need loosening with a little more milk.

Among the Christmas cooking tips in the Guardian yesterday, Tom Norrington-Davies suggested throwing slices of bread into the milk, and then whizzing the sauce in a blender. The drawback with this method is that you will not know whether you have added too much or too little bread until you've blended the sauce; whereas with my method you can add breadcrumbs gradually, until the consistency is right. Norrington-Davies simmers his milk until the onion is soft, and blends the onion with the milk and bread. Chacun, etc.

Stuffing

You can follow an elaborate recipe when making the stuffing on Christmas day, or you can put together almost any combination of breadcrumbs and flavourings, and it will be delicious. Here is a recipe that I am making up as I write. It will work, I promise.

2 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 plateful breadcrumbs
3 heaped tbsp chopped parsley
Zest of 1 lemon
Pepper
1 egg, beaten

Soften the onion and garlic in butter or oil until golden -- about 15 minutes. Tip them into the breadcrumbs in a bowl, and mix in the parsley (you might use other herbs, or a combination, of course) and lemon zest, along with generous grindings of black pepper. (You may not need any more salt than is already contained in the bread.) Bind the mixture with the egg, and pack it into a buttered oven dish.

You can put the stuffing into the oven when you take out the turkey (or other fowl) to rest. Timing and oven heat do not have to be precise. Thirty minutes at gas mark 5/190 C should work fine; but no doubt you'll have potatoes roasting in the oven as well, possibly at gas mark 6/200 C. They'll be on the top shelf, and the stuffing will have to go underneath. That will be fine, too.

There are some general tips about Christmas lunch in my New Stateseman column, here.

Sticky rice

Little time for blogging today. I'm off to a Christmas lunch given by Much Ado Books, which has invited me, Nick Hornby and Geraldine McCaughrean as speakers. The audience will have heard of two of us.

I cooked rice for my daughters last night. I rinsed it, covered it in just over 1.5 times its volume of water, brought it to the boil, covered it, put a heat disperser under the pan, lowered the heat, and left it for 20 minutes. That produced a sticky, starchy clump. Washing the rice was probably one of my mistakes; I wish I knew what the others were.

Stuffed cabbage

Stuffed cabbage is the kind of "simple French food" that involves painstaking work. You make your stuffing; you carefully detach leaves from a head of cabbage; you blanch them; you assemble little parcels of leaves and stuffing. The recipe suggestion in my vegetable box last week dispensed with all that stuffing nonsense. You slice the cabbage, and steam or boil if for five minutes; you layer it with sausage meat; you put it in the oven. That's it. It might be simpler still: why bother with the initial cooking of the cabbage when it's going to steam in the oven for an hour and a half?

I like an easy life; but even I think that it may be worth putting in a bit more work than that. This is what I made (for four) yesterday.

250 g pork mince
250 g beef mince
2 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
Large handful parsley, chopped
1 cabbage
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

As I have written, the easiest way to brown mince is to form it into hamburger-like patties. Make about eight patties with the pork and beef; put a frying pan over a medium-to-high heat; when the pan is hot, pour in a layer of oil. Fry the patties in two or three batches -- if you crowd the pan you will lower the temperature, with the result that water escaping from the meat will not evaporate and the meat will not brown. You want to give it no more than a minute on each side. Put the browned mince into a bowl.

In another pan, soften the onion and garlic in some more olive oil until golden -- about 15 minutes. Tip them into the mince, along with the parsley, salt, and a lot of pepper. (You might like a little nutmeg, too.) Mix it all up, with your hands if you like.

Halve the cabbage vertically, then slice horizontally. You do not have to get rid of the core, which will soften with slow cooking. Wash and refresh the cabbage slices for a minute or two in a bowl of cold water.

Put a layer of cabbage in a casserole or other oven dish. Add a layer of meat, some more cabbage, some more meat, and some more cabbage. Cover, and bake gently in a gas mark 1/140 C oven for three hours.

Notes
Cabbage is delicious if cooked for five minutes, or if cooked for an hour and a half or longer. Cook it for 20 minutes, and it will evoke the horrors of institutional dinners.

The cabbage at the top of the dish will brown. That doesn't matter. Make sure the oven heat is gentle, though. I turned down my oven to its lowest setting for the last hour.

The meat does not cohere, as the term "stuffing" would imply. So this is a stuffed cabbage in which the cabbage is not stuffed, and the stuffing is not stuffing. I recommend it, though.

Sausage sauce

Often, home cooking involves compromises between timing, quantities, tastes and ingredients. I had two sausages from Rocco's deli that I wanted to use in a pasta sauce. The girls were eating before us. One daughter likes tomato sauce, and had not been given it for a while. Normally, I would use a 400 g tin of tomatoes in a sauce for two (that's a lot by Italian standards -- but this was an inauthentic, British pasta supper), so I needed some extra for her.

I bought two large, fresh tomatoes -- Dutch ones, which I usually avoid, but which were going to have their thin flavour concentrated through cooking and combination with other ingredients. I softened an onion and a clove of garlic in olive oil, added the tinned tomatoes and their juice, and the fresh tomatoes, chopped. I simmered the contents of the pan until they were thick, and pushed them through a vegetable mill. I dressed my daughter's pasta with some of this sauce.

I skinned and broke up the sausages, and added them to the tomato mixture with 100 ml double cream. (Browning the sausages would have given extra flavour, but is a messy job -- bits of sausage tend to stick to the pan and burn.) I simmered this sauce for about 30 minutes, to thicken it again and to cook the sausage.

We ate it with conchiglie -- pasta shells, inside which bits of sausage satisfyingly nestled.

Baked custard

Books for Cooks invited me to give a lunchtime talk when the paperback of Don't Sweat the Aubergine (links on the right) came out. The shop did not blow my cover by asking me to cook the lunch; Eric Treuille, co-owner with his wife Rosie Kindersley, did that. He made both versions of the custard in the book: one, richer, including egg yolks; the second including whole eggs. He told me that he preferred the lighter version.

We had it for lunch yesterday. It took 10 minutes to prepare.

For a classier result, you might use a vanilla pod. The bain-marie is not essential; but it does help to spread the heat through the dish, and to prevent the edges from overcooking.

This recipe would serve three, or, in dainty portions, four. Two of us ate it all.

150 ml double cream
150 ml milk
1 tbsp caster sugar, or 1 dstsp honey
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
A little butter

Warm the cream, milk, sugar (or honey) and vanilla in a small saucepan. Beat the eggs. Butter an oven dish, and put it in a roasting tin. When bubbles appear on the cream mixture, pour it gradually into the eggs, whisking all the time. (You need to disperse the heat so that you do not get bits of scrambled egg.) Pour the custard into the oven dish. Pour boiling water into the roasting tin to come half way up the sides of the dish.

Bake at gas mark 3/160 C for about 30 minutes, or until the custard is set. Eat hot or cold.

Aubergine gratin

One of my favourite dishes is Parmigiana di melanzane: layers of aubergine, tomato sauce, mozzarella, and parmesan. But it is let down by many brands of mozzarella, which toughen when cooked. Another favourite is moussaka, particularly when it has a buoyant, cheesy topping. Let's perm them.

For 2
1 aubergine
Olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 400 g tin tomatoes
28 g butter
28 g flour
250 ml milk
Pinch nutmeg
2 heaped tbsp pecorino
1 egg yolk

Cut the aubergine into rounds about 5 mm thick. Brush them with olive oil (I pour the oil into a saucer, and brush the aubergines with the tines of a fork), put them in a roasting tin, season, and bake at gas mark 6/200 C for 20 to 30 minutes, or until soft. (There is more on cooking aubergines here.)

Soften the garlic in a saucepan with another tbsp olive oil. Pour in the tomatoes, breaking them up with a wooden spoon as they cook. Add a little salt, and simmer until the sauce is sludgy. (This is a very basic sauce. You might begin with a base of onion, celery and carrot; you might add herbs.)

Make a bechamel. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the flour, and cook for a minute or so; don't let it go brown. Pour in the milk gradually, stirring to incorporate each portion before adding the next. Let the sauce bubble for a minute or two, stirring constantly, then turn off the heat. The sauce should be quite thick. Stir in the cheese (you might use any hard cheese -- cheddar would be fine), then the egg yolk (which would scramble if added to the boiling sauce). Add nutmeg and pepper; you should not need salt.

Unless your gratin dish has a small base, you may not have enough ingredients to form several layers. When I made this dish the other night, I simply poured in the tomato sauce, arranged the aubergine slices on top, and finished with the cheese sauce. I baked it at gas mark 4/180 C for 30 minutes, after which the topping was brown and, thanks to the egg, pleasingly puffed up.

We ate this when it was lukewarm, an hour later. It was at its best then, I think; but it would also have been delicious hot, or cold.

Steaming rice

I am clueless. I fail to understand even quite straightforward aspects of the world's workings. Geography was one of my worst subjects at school: the explanations for such phenomena as the building of cities by rivers were opaque to me. Learning to cook has been a slow wrestle with this natural disability. When I first made a Bolognese sauce, I did not grasp that the reason why the contents of my uncovered pan were drying up was that the liquid was evaporating. That is how clueless I am.

A branch of the budget supermarket Lidl opened in Finsbury Park last week, offering a vegetable/rice steamer for the irresistible price of £9.99. You put the rice basket inside the steamer basket. I tried it; 20 minutes later, my rice was still dry and hard. I checked Sri Owen's Rice Book, and discovered that you're supposed to put rice AND WATER into the basket. Doh!

I tried again, using my usual formula with Tilda basmati rice: one part rice by volume to two parts water. The rice was cooked after 20 minutes, but still sitting in water.

For my third attempt, I used just enough water to submerge the rice. Not bad, but a little clumpy. Perhaps the grains would have separated had I stirred a little butter or oil through them. The advantage of the steamer was that the rice did not stick to the basket.

My only fail-safe method of cooking rice is to boil it in plenty of water. Drained after 10 minutes, the grains are separate and of a perfect consistency. The "absorption method" -- by which you cook the rice in just the amount of water it will soak up -- preserves more flavour and nutrients; but, despite long experience of cooking the same brand of rice, I still get variable results. The quest goes on.

Heston's carrots

Heston Blumenthal's television programme will end soon, and then what will I have to write about? He has given me the subjects for several entries here, as well as for a column in the New Statesman. I shall miss him.

The third component of his meal last week, along with the roast chicken and the roast potatoes, was carrots. Do not boil them in water, he said: put them in a pan with some butter, salt and pepper, and let them steam in the liquid they produce. He lifted the lid of a saute pan, revealing bright orange carrots bearing, suspiciously, no trace of caramelised butter.

Usually, I cut carrots into thick batons (not rounds, which cook more quickly), put them in a pan with water just to cover them and with a knob of butter, and boil them rapidly until the water evaporates, leaving them with a butter glaze. The softening and evaporation times coincide. The carrots retain their sweetness, which tends to dissipate when they cook in a large volume of water. I could see that Heston's method might retain even more flavour.

It worked pretty well when I tried it last night. The only problem was that my carrots -- chunky, knobbly, organic ones -- did not throw off as much water as Heston had predicted: the result was that the butter caught in places on the pan, and that one or two carrot edges charred. I think that about 3 tbsp water in the pan would be a useful precaution. When the carrots are nearly ready, one can take off the lid, turn up the flame, and allow the carrots to become glossy with butter.

Should one add salt to the pan? As I wrote on the subject of roast potatoes, salt speeds softening. My large and slightly mealy carrots were a little too mushy at the edges, but might not have been had I waited to season them at the table.

Chicken soup

The 2 kg Label Anglais chicken I bought last weekend cost £11. That money -- about £8 more than I might have paid for a battery bird -- went a long way. There was the roast chicken. There was my chicken curry. There was a sandwich for one of my daughters. And there was a stock, which contributed to several dishes, including a chicken soup.

The soup also gave a home to a box of out-of-season plum tomatoes, which someone had unwisely bought and left untouched for a week, and to the last carrot from the organic box. Some lentils provided thickening. Cumin and cardamom, those regular features of my cooking, also put in an appearance.

This recipe made four helpings, which two of us ate.

1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 tsp cumin
5 cardamoms
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, diced
50 g red lentils, washed
4 ladlefuls hot stock
1 punnet plum tomatoes, chopped
Cooked chicken, diced

Soften the garlic with the spices -- crushed in a mortar -- in some oil of your choice (I used olive). Add the onion and carrot, and fry gently until golden. Tip in the lentils, add the stock, and simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes, or until the lentils and carrot are soft. Season.

Meanwhile, tip the tomatoes into another saucepan on a gentle heat, and cook off the juices until you have a concentrated sludge.

Push the contents of both pans through a vegetable mill, which will catch the tomato skins.

Throw in the chicken, and warm the soup gently, adding more stock or water if the consistency seems too thick.

When I made this soup, I did not concentrate the tomatoes, but added them to the lentil/onion/carrot mixture and cooked them for five minutes. Their flavour was too thin. Also, again using a leftover (this time from the orange and lemon mousse), I swirled in some cream.

Heston's roast potatoes

Sorry: him again. There were three components to his perfect roast chicken meal on Tuesday night: the chicken, the roast potatoes, and the carrots. I wrote about the chicken yesterday, and I shall come to the carrots some other time. There are a couple of features of his roast potatoes I want to mention.

Blumenthal boiled his potatoes -- Maris Pipers -- until they were crumbly at the edges. As he said, you have to get the timing right: a minute later, and they would have turned into mash. But, as I have written, I parboil maincrop potatoes for just a few minutes, to get rid of some of the surface starch. The edges will crumble a little if you stir them in a hot, dry pan, and be crunchy once roasted.

On the other hand, Heston Blumenthal is a Michelin three-starred chef, and I am someone whose daughters accuse of being unable to cook frozen peas properly.

He boiled two batches of potatoes: one in salted and the other in unsalted water. The former batch was crunchier when roasted, he said. He did not explain why -- although he may do in his book. Turning to his guru -- and mine -- Harold McGee, I learn that the reason may be that salt speeds the softening of cells. The potatoes from the salted water were probably crumblier.

He roasted his potatoes in olive oil. I do too, sometimes; but more often I use sunflower oil -- frowned upon in some quarters.

Heston's roast chicken

Heston Blumenthal's perfect roast chicken on BBC 2 last night was a refinement of the slow-roasting technique he promoted in his first book, Family Food. You brine your chicken -- a Poulet de Bresse, please. You blanch it for 30 seconds, plunge it into iced water, then repeat the process. You cook the chicken for four and a half hours at 60 C. You fry the chicken quickly in groundnut oil. Voila!

The brining helps to keep the meat moist. The blanching -- the Chinese do it with duck -- promotes crispy skin. Slow cooking means that the proteins do not squeeze out moisture. The last stage is the crisping of the skin in a frying pan.

I am sure that brining works well -- it certainly did when I tried it with belly pork. It does produce salty meat, though, so you have to be sure that you want that. However, something else rules out my trying the Blumenthal method: my oven. A not-inexpensive Parkinson Cowan, it has a lowest temperature, according to my oven thermometer, of more than 100 C.

So I shall stick to my imperfect recipe. Roasting chicken -- unless, like Gordon Ramsay, you separate the legs and the breast -- involves a compromise: you have to cook the legs properly, and to brown the bird, while trying to ensure that the breast, which requires only a short cooking time, does not dry out too much.

I follow Nigella Lawson's timings: 20 minutes for each 500 g, plus half an hour. But she suggests a temperature of gas mark 6/200 C throughout -- unnecessarily high, I think. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tells you to lower the temperature to gas mark 4/180 C; but that, too, is fiercer than you need.

I reported that, for the first time ever, I had found my chicken not properly cooked after the standard time. At the weekend, I was determined to make no mistake. I took the chicken out of the fridge four hours before I was due to put it in the oven. (Richard Ehrlich has shown that a chicken will hardly warm up at all after the one hour that is usually recommended.) I turned the oven up to full heat for half an hour, spread butter over the chicken and between the skin and the breast, squirted over half a lemon and put the hull inside the bird, ground over salt and pepper, turned down the oven to gas mark 6/200 C, and put in the chicken. After half an hour, I turned down the dial to gas mark 2/150 C.

You need the initial blast of heat, I think, to brown the skin and to get the cooking process properly underway, so that the chicken will not have to spend too long in the oven. After that, a low temperature -- next time, I shall try gas mark 1/140 C -- will continue the job perfectly well. In my experience, turning the chicken during cooking is not worthwhile.

I took my 2 kg chicken out of the oven after one hour and 50 minutes, and let it rest in the grill section above the warm oven for 25 minutes before carving. (Hacking is what I do.) It was not perfect. But it was pretty good.

See also:
Brining chicken revisited
Heston's roast chicken: support for my scepticism

Browning onions; a crude curry

One of the first disillusioning discoveries the home cook makes is that softening and browning onions takes a lot longer than the recipe books state. You have to fuss over them as well, or else bits of onion stick to the pan, and burn.

Butter, which itself browns easily, helps the browning process. But you need quite a lot of butter for even one onion, because of the separation of the solids and liquid, which evaporates. That does not happen to oil; so, to ensure that there is lubrication in the pan, I usually brown onions in a butter/oil mixture. They need regular stirring, because the oil will not protect the butter from burning. Turning up the heat in an effort to speed the process is a bad idea.

Brown onions enrich the sauce in a stew or a curry. Last night, I made a chicken curry, of the kind that is likely to feature leftover turkey in many homes at the end of this month. It is the kind of dish -- makeshift, and hot -- that I love to prepare when I'm cooking for myself.

I browned my onion, and threw in a chopped clove of garlic and a finely chopped (small) knob of ginger, along with 1/3 tsp cumin seeds and 4 cardamoms -- both crunched a bit in a mortar. After another couple of minutes of stirring and frying, I poured in the remains of some roast chicken gravy (I had about 125 ml) and a ladleful of stock, along with a little salt, 1/3 tsp turmeric, and 1/3 tsp chilli powder. I let this bubble for five minutes. Then I added leftover chicken, and simmered for five minutes longer.

Browning the onions apart, this meal -- including some boiled rice -- was very quick and simple to prepare. It was far nicer than any takeaway I've had recently. The ginger was the key ingredient, lifting but not dominating all the other flavours.

Orange and lemon mousse

I am sorry to keep banging on about mousses. But their preparation raises a few issues that I have not yet resolved. Here is another recipe, following the one for cold caramel souffles, adapted from Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book. Notes follow.

5 eggs -- 3 whole, and 2 separated
55g caster sugar
1 orange, zest and juice
1 lemon, zest and juice
4 leaves gelatine
150 ml double cream

In a bowl suspended over hot water, beat the eggs, egg yolks and sugar until they are pale and thick. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for about four minutes, until they are soft and slippery. Remove them from the water, and gently squeeze them. Put the orange juice and lemon juice in a pan on a gentle heat; when the liquid is warm, but long before it shows signs of bubbling, stir in the gelatine, which should dissolve. Beat this juice into the egg, and allow to cool.

When the egg and juice are starting to set, lightly whip the cream, and whip the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Fold cream and egg whites into the egg mixture. Pour into glasses, cover with clingfilm, and put in the fridge to set.

Notes
I thought that I had an orange in the house; I did not. I grated a satsuma -- which, being soft, is not well suited to such a procedure. Then I squeezed the juice from it. The resulting mousse needed a little more citric tartness.

After misjudging the amount of gelatine I had needed for the caramel souffle, I poured the beaten egg and sugar into a measuring jug. They reached the 600 ml mark. I had yet to add cream and fruit juice. Each gelatine leaf, according to my packets, sets 200 ml liquid. Hence the four leaves.

At what point do you decide that the gelatinous egg and juice mixture is "starting to set"? I am not sure; but I think that I, nervous of trying to blend cream and egg white into jelly, tend to jump the gun. You want the juice to be thoroughly merged into the mousse. It separates from the egg mixture; but then it gets stirred in again, and the folded-in cream and egg white hold it in suspension. There was just a very thin layer of juicy jelly beneath my mousses; had the mixture been thicker, it might not have escaped.

What does "lightly whipped" mean? I whipped the cream until it held its shape, but before it would have gone stiff . But that appeared to be too much -- the cream stayed in globs in the egg mixture, and had to be beaten in to be properly incorporated. So I think that you should whip the cream until it just starts to thicken while remaining liquid, stir it into the gelatinous egg and juice, and then fold in the egg whites.

Beetroot for lunch

We received our second lot of beetroot in the vegetable box this week. The first time, I surrounded them -- after washing them gently -- in a pool of boiling water in a baking dish, covered the dish with foil, and put it into the oven for an hour and a half at gas mark 4/180 C. Yesterday, I simply wrapped each beetroot in foil, and baked the parcels for the same length of time. (I had in both cases tested the vegetables after an hour -- not quite done.)

The first technique worked better. (Unless it was the beetroots that were better.) The beetroots were moister, and sweeter. We ate them as a side dish, with just a sprinkling of red wine vinegar.

Nevertheless, lunch yesterday was very good. I toasted a couple of tbsp of sunflower seeds -- the deliciousness of which I had discovered in a salad made by a neighbour -- in a dry saucepan. (Pine kernels would have worked well too.) I washed and dried a bunch of watercress, and tossed it, and the seeds, in a vinaigrette made with 1 tsp red wine vinegar and 3 tsp olive oil, with salt and pepper. I arranged the watercress on two plates, put sliced beetroot (one each) on top, and sliced feta (100 g each) on top of that.

A lovely combination of nutty, peppery, salty and sweet flavours.