Stuffed aubergines

I got the idea to stuff some aubergines from looking through one of my favourite cookbooks, Ghillie Basan's Classic Turkish Cookery. But what I cooked bore little relationship to her recipe.

First, Basan tells you to use torpedo-shaped aubergines, which of course I had little chance of buying. Next, she recommends deep frying them in sunflower oil before stuffing them. That no doubt produces a delicious result, but quite an oily one. Instead, I baked my aubergines, for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, having first pricked them with the tip of a knife to stop them exploding.

Basan's stuffing is raw lamb mince, mixed with tomatoes, garlic, onion and spices, and manipulated by hand until it is pasty. This mixture would be ideal as a stuffing, because easy to manipulate. Nevertheless, I cooked the simple stew from this moussaka recipe -- but without the onion and with the addition of a couple of tbsps of pine nuts that I had toasted in a dry pan over a gentle heat.

After 30 minutes in the oven, the aubergines were softened enough, but not tender. I slit them from the stem ends to the bases, cutting through most of the way. I grated over a little salt, and drizzled about a tsp of olive oil into each. Then I put them into a roasting tin and shoved the stew into the cavities, packing it in as snugly as I could.

I had four aubergines, and soon realised that my stew (consisting of 400g of mince) would overflow. So I cut a red pepper in half, deseeded it, and stuffed that too.

I wanted the stuffed vegetables to steam. I poured a layer of boiling water round them, covered the tin with foil, and put it into the oven at gas mark 4/180C for an hour.

We ate the stuffed vegetables at room temperature. The only flaw was that the aubergines were a little watery. I cannot see an easy way to solve that problem: one could cut them in half and salt them for the initial baking, but then one would not be able to reassemble them as a package for the stuffing. Still, this was a great dish for a warm, late summer evening.

Potatoes, cheese and bacon gratin

There is an obvious solution to the problem that I described in this post from July. If you put cheese with the sliced potatoes in a creamy gratin, I wrote, the acidity in the cheese delays the softening of the potatoes. The solution is to add the cheese later.

The other night, I put sliced potatoes, pancetta cubes, and chopped garlic into a buttered gratin dish, with a little salt. (The dish would have benefited from some nutmeg). I poured over about 150ml of double cream (there were enough potatoes for two), stirred everything about, covered the dish with foil, and put it into a gas mark 5/190C oven.

The potatoes were tender after about 50 minutes. I gently stirred through about 110g of grated Gruyere, covered the dish again, and put it back into the oven, turned down to gas mark S/130C -- I needed only to melt the cheese. I gave it another five minutes.

Chicken in yoghurt

Recipes for grilled, marinated meats generally tell you to scrape off the marinade before placing the meat on the barbecue or griddle. Discarding that flavoursome stuff seems a shame. That is why I prefer to cook dishes involving yoghurt marinades in the oven. You can simply bung the whole lot into a roasting dish.

The following recipe is one I cooked just for myself. Yes, it is very self-indulgent, in quantity and in heat. But I should point out that most chillis (unless they are Scotch Bonnets), even seeded ones, are not unbearable hot; and that my 10 free-range chicken wings cost just £1.70.

10 chicken wings
1 regular tub Greek yoghurt
1/2tsp coriander seeds
1/2tsp cumin seeds
1/3tsp black peppercorns
1 clove garlic, chopped
Salt
1/2tsp turmeric
1/3tsp cayenne pepper
6 green chillis, stalks cut off, whizzed in a small vegetable mill, or chopped

Warm the coriander, cumin and pepper in a small saucepan (dry) over a gentle heat until they give off a toasted aroma. Grind them in a mortar. Add a little salt, and grind the garlic with them too. Tip the yoghurt into a bowl, and stir in the spice and garlic mixture with the other ingredients. Throw in the chicken wings, turning to coat them in the spicy yoghurt. It is worth doing this several hours in advance of cooking -- the spicy yoghurt does penetrate the meat.

I tipped my chicken into a roasting tin, which I put into a gas mark 6/200C oven for 30 minutes, by which time the yoghurt had become a kind of glaze. Bits of the marinade were catching, so I turned the oven right down, to gas mark S/130C, allowing another 20 minutes.

The chicken was wonderfully tender, and, as you may imagine, headily spicy.

Artichoke

The large artichokes on sale in Normandy markets in August are probably best suited to boiling whole. You strip off the leaves, dip them in vinaigrette or butter, and suck out the fleshy bits. Once you have done that, you discard the hairy choke, and eat the heart.

Nice enough, but a bit boring. I thought that I would pare away the leaves and cook the heart. There were two problems: I should have started with a smaller, more compact artichoke; and I have always had difficulty in understanding cookery writers' instructions on how to do the preparation. I found it impossible to snap off the leaves while leaving behind the fleshy parts, and I wasted a fair amount of decent vegetable.

Nevertheless, the hearts, eaten in a salad, were a rare, if expensive, treat.

Chicken gratin

This is a rather posh description of a dish using up leftovers. I apologise for the vagueness of the quantities, my only excuse being that it's in the spirit of an improvised recipe. For 4.

4 portions cold chicken
About 56g butter
I clove garlic, chopped
2tbsp flour
About 600ml chicken stock
2tbsp creme fraiche or double cream
1tsp Dijon mustard
Handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper

Arrange the chicken in a gratin dish.

Melt the butter over a gentle heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Soften the garlic in it for a minute or so, and then stir in the flour, allowing it to cook for a minute. Add more butter if the roux seems thick: it should be the consistency of loose, wet sand. (My general rule in recipes involving a roux-based sauce is to allow as much as will be thickened by a dstsp of flour for each person.) It does not matter if this roux -- unlike the one for a bechamel -- takes on a little colour.

Turn up the heat and add the stock, portion by portion, incorporating each one until the lumps disappear before adding the next. Stop when you have a pourable, coating consistency, not too thick. Stir in the cream, mustard, and parsley; allow the sauce to bubble for a minute or so, stirring constantly. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Pour the sauce over the chicken. (You might like to cover everything with a layer of breadcrumbs, or Parmesan.) Bake in a gas mark 5/190C oven for about 15 minutes, or until bubbling and warmed through.

Aubergine and courgette gratin

This gratin, simpler than this one or this one, was particularly delicious because of the quality of the ingredients, which came from a French market. The aubergine, with its rich and creamy flesh, made me realise that most of the ones I buy at home are poor relations.

Baking aubergine slices is the easiest way to cook them. But I usually saute courgettes, which need cooking only until the white flesh turns translucent -- they taste fresher that way. At home, I would have passed my tomato sauce through a vegetable mill; not having one here, I poured it through a sieve, stirring it through with a wooden spoon until only gunk remained. (Quite a bit of sauce needs to be scraped from the underside of the sieve.)

Serves 2.

1 aubergine
1 or 2 courgettes (mine was a large one -- normally large ones are dull, but this wasn't)
1 clove garlic
2 large tomatoes
Olive oil
Salt
Breadcrumbs

Cut the aubergine into rounds the thickness of two £1 coins. Pour some olive oil into a saucer, and coat the aubergine slices with it using the back of the tines of a fork. Lay the slices on a baking sheet. Season with salt, and pepper if you like. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, until soft.

Slice the courgette(s) thinly. In a little more olive oil, saute them on a medium heat. Salting them will encourage them to give up some of their liquid, which should evaporate.

Chop the garlic, and soften it in a little more olive oil. Roughly chop the tomatoes, and add them to the pan, again with a little salt. Simmer this sauce on a low to medium heat until thick. (The tomatoes will have broken down.) Pass it through a vegetable mill or sieve.

Mix the aubergines, courgettes and tomato sauce in a gratin dish (you could layer the ingredients if you like). Scatter a layer of breadcrumbs on top. Bake at gas mark 6/200C until the breadcrumbs have browned (about 15 minutes -- but keep checking). Serve hot, tepid, or at room temperature. (I like it tepid.)

Mackerel on the barbecue

I have written before about my insecurity concerning barbecues. One of my worries concerns when to decide that the coals are in their optimum state to be spread out, before I place the rack on top and start grilling. I suspect that I always go too soon, fearing that the temperature will fall. The problem then is that drops of fat cause the coals to flare up, charring the food.

Reading my entry on grilled mackerel from last year, I get the impression that it was a simple, untroubled processs. Not this time. I exacerbated the problem of flaring coals by coating the fish in a little oil, and by placing sprigs of rosemary in the breast cavities. Both encouraged ignition. It was crazy to oil mackerel, which is an oily fish; but here in France, I do not have the fish-shaped basket that protects the skin from sticking on the rack. The skin stuck anyway.

As soon as I put the fish on the rack, there was a conflagration. I moved the mackerel to the side of the rack until the flames died down. I moved it back; more flames. So I may have given it less time than it needed.

The largest mackerel was still a little undercooked. Still, all the cooked fish was delicious.

One is inclined to feel that it's essential to tart up food before cooking it. But all a grilled mackerel requires is the fish, with, when it's ready, perhaps a little lemon, salt, and pepper.

Split custard

I may have remarked before that factory creme fraiche always splits when I cook it. Creme fraiche fermiere never does. Unfortunately, the first kind was the only one available when I shopped yesterday, and I took a risk with it -- with the usual result. The following recipe -- a variation of this one -- would have worked perfectly otherwise.

I used a delicious, lemony honey that was a birthday present from my sister in law. It has the exotic provenance of Rotherhithe. There is more about it here, on the Pure London Honey website.

Whole eggs give a lighter texture than egg yolks. If you prefer the richness of yolks alone, use 5 or 6, depending on size.

Serves 5 to 6 (in small portions -- but it is rich).

4 whole eggs
400ml creme fraiche (fermiere) or double cream
100ml milk
1tsp vanilla essence (a vanilla pod would be better -- see this recipe)
3 dstsp honey
A little butter

Grease the oven dish with the butter. Heat the oven to gas mark 2/150C.

Beat the eggs.

In a saucepan, warm the creme fraiche, milk, vanilla, and honey. When bubbles appear, pour a little of the liquid on to the eggs; then a little more; then the rest. (If you pour on all the hot liquid at once, you risk curdling some of the egg.) Pour the mixture into the oven dish.

Put the oven dish inside a roasting tin or other receptacle, and pour in boiling water (not into the cream and egg mixture) to come half way up the sides of the dish. Put the tin into the oven, and bake for 40 minutes to an hour, or until the top of the custard is set and wobbly.

Banger to rights

My latest New Statesman column (the headline above is the NS's) concerns sausages, commenting on ideas in this entry and in this one. To summarise: I still believe that the best way to cook sausages is in a heavy frying pan over a low heat, allowing 30 minutes or more. Even in these conditions, some sausages might split. I do not think that pricking them -- a heretical action, in the view of some aficionados -- will make much difference to the consistency of the meat when fully cooked.

Here in France, most butchers sell merguez sausages -- red, spicy ones, made usually with lamb but sometimes with a mixture of lamb and beef. I fry them in the same way, unless there are enough to make it worthwhile to set up the barbecue. Like chorizos, though to a lesser extent, they release spicy oil, which one must not waste. I poured it over crushed new potatoes.

A battered roasting tin

One of the mysteries of cooking is how apparently poor equipment can sometimes work particularly well. In Simple French Food, Richard Olney recalls how the doyenne of the beurre blanc -- a tricky sauce to get right -- used to operate in a tiny kitchen with a battered enamel saucepan. Here in France, we have hopeless, worn, thin roasting tins; yet somehow they produce excellent roast potatoes, which never stick.

The ingredients must have something to do with it. The potatoes, red-skinned, are waxy and flavoursome. Also, this time, I did blanche them, bringing them to the boil in a pan of water and allowing them to bubble for a minute. The purpose was not to soften them or to roughen the edges, but simply to remove the surface starch. Then, with an hour's cooking time to go, I removed the chicken from the tin, tipped in the potatoes and stirred them round with a little more olive oil, and put the chicken back on top. As in the previous recipes, I removed the chicken when done, allowed it to rest, and returned the potatoes to the top shelf of the oven at full heat until they had absorbed the sauce and had browned. They did not stick.

Spare ribs, slow roasted

We had spare ribs on Saturday. A 750g rack provided enough for three people.

There are marinade recipes here and here. This time, I used about 3tbsps of tomato ketchup, a dstsp of soy sauce, a tbsp of sunflower oil, two cloves of garlic crushed with salt, and the juice of half a lemon. I spooned the marinade over the meat, which I left out in a roasting tin covered with foil for a couple of hours.

As I have written before, this cut of pork benefits from slow cooking. It remains juicy; and there is the additional benefit that the marinade does not burn.

I put the roasting tin -- foil removed -- on the lowest shelf of the oven, set at gas mark S/130C, and left it for three and a half hours, turning the meat a few times. I let the meat rest out of the oven for 10 minutes before carving it into separate ribs.

Potatoes, cream and cheese

This is a version of gratin dauphinois. The cheese transforms it into a -- very rich -- main course. It also introduces acidity to the dish. Simmering in milk and cream, potatoes soften quickly, but with cheese there as well they can retain their crunch for a long time. Even if you slice them thinly, you may find that you need to cook the dish for a good hour and a half. For 4.

Small knob of butter
700g Charlotte or similar new potatoes
1 clove garlic, chopped
150g Gruyere or other hard cheese
250ml double cream
Pinch of nutmeg

Butter a gratin dish. Scrape or peel the potatoes, according to taste, and slice them thinly. Layer them in the dish with the cheese and the chopped garlic. (Add salt if you like, but remember that the cheese is salty.) Pour over the cream, and grate over a little nutmeg.

Bake in the oven, starting at gas mark 4/180C and turning down the heat after 30 minutes or so if you think that the dish is bubbling too vigorously.

You may think, before you put the dish in the oven, that it does not contain enough liquid and that the top potatoes are not submerged. Wait until it starts simmering. You will probably find that more liquid has materialised. If not, pour over a little milk.

Cook until the potatoes are soft, and sitting in thickened liquid.

Chicken and vinegar

Another chicken recipe -- a version of this one. I think I liked it even better. The sauce, while given piquancy by the vinegar, is not as sharp as the one containing tomatoes, and it gets a glossy richness from the butter. The chicken tenderises through slow cooking in the liquid, even though the pan is uncovered. For 4.

4 chicken thighs and 4 drumsticks
Salt
1tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
150ml red or white wine vinegar
200ml chicken stock
Rosemary and/or bay (optional)
20g butter, cut into cubes and kept in the fridge

Warm the olive oil in a heavy casserole or frying pan, large enough to contain the chicken in one layer, over a gentle heat. (Do not use a seasoned frying pan, because the vinegar will de-season it.) Sprinkle the chicken pieces with a little salt, and brown them slowly, starting skin side down, for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Throw in the garlic, and when it has softened a little in the fat, pour in the vinegar, scraping at any stuck bits of chicken. Throw in the herbs, if using. Simmer gently, uncovered, until the vinegar has almost all evaporated. (Timings will vary -- the process took about 30 minutes when I did it.) Pour in the stock, and carry on simmering the stew gently, turning the chicken occasionally, until the liquid has reduced by about half. Check the seasoning.

Remove from the heat, and transfer a thigh and a drumstick to each of four warmed plates. Stir the chilled butter into the sauce, and spoon the sauce over the chicken.

Late night chicken sandwich

The times when you are most grateful for store-cupboard standbys are when you get home at 9 p.m. after a few drinks.

My local Turkish supermarket stocks Turkish brands of grilled vegetables, such as aubergines and courgettes, in sunflower oil. I also had some leftover chicken, from the spatchcocked recipe. I spread each of two slices of bread with a tsp of harissa and a tsp of mayonnaise on top, making a kind of rouille. I scattered over the chicken, and then slices of grilled aubergine. Two open sandwiches. They hit the spot.

Spatchcocked chicken

Spatchcocking a chicken enables you to lay it flat on a barbecue. There is less point in the procedure if you are going to cook the bird in the oven; but it's nice to introduce a bit of variety from time to time.

I usually ask my butcher to do the spatchcocking (or to joint a chicken), because I am so rubbish at it. Yesterday, I managed it myself, without serious mishap. You cut along both sides of the backbone with poultry shears or a very sharp knife, and remove it. Then you lay the chicken breast side up, and flatten it out with your hand. I marinated my chicken: I scattered over it (both sides) three cloves of garlic that I had crushed with some salt; I squeezed over the juice of a lime, added a few glugs of olive oil, grated over some more salt, and threw over a couple of sprigs of rosemary. (I would have added pepper, and perhaps chilli, had I not foreseen objections.) I left the chicken for a few hours in the roasting tin, covered with foil.

I scraped and sliced some new potatoes about 0.5cms thick, and transferred them to a bowl of cold water.

As spatchcocked chicken is designed to be grilled (at quite a fierce heat), I roasted it at a higher setting than I use for roast chicken. I pre-heated the oven to gas mark 9/240C, drained the potatoes, transferred the chicken to a plate, tipped the potatoes into the tin and stirred them with some more olive oil, put back the chicken on top, and put the tin into the oven, which I turned down to 7/220C. After 30 minutes, I turned down the oven to 4/180C, basted the chicken, and cooked it for a further 45 minutes (it was a 1.75kg bird). The risk in using this high temperature is drying out the breast; but I got away with it.

I took out the chicken, and allowed it to rest for 20 minutes on a plate sitting in the grill section above my oven. Meanwhile, I stirred the potatoes, returning them to the oven to crisp at gas mark 8/230C. (I had cooked the chicken on the middle shelf, which I moved up a level for the potatoes.)

Potatoes that have not been blanched or parboiled before roasting are inclined to stick. If you like crispy scrapings, you might consider this a bonus.

I have written this recipe in response to a request for dishes using non-battery chickens from Kate on A Merrier World. My chicken was a Label Anglais, about which you can read more information here.

Plantain

All sorts of exotic fruit and vegetables have come into fashion in the past 20 years. But not plantain. You do not see it on the menus of trendy restaurants or gastropubs. Probably it has failed to make the breakthrough because it is a little one-dimensional: perfectly pleasant, but less interesting than a banana. However, fried and served with chilli sauce and rice, it offers a decent lunch from time to time.

Plantains look unappetising in the shops, because with their blackened skins they appear to be overripe. (Many of my local shops sell bananas in that state too.) But you find when you peel them that the flesh is unharmed. Blackened skin indicates readiness. (The ones in the picture would need to be kept for a bit.)

Having written recently about couscous, I decided to fry my plantains in a couscous coating rather than in breadcrumbs. Naively, I thought that because the couscous was pre-cooked, I would not have to do anything to it before frying. That was a mistake.

I cut each plantain into three crosswise, and cut each portion lengthwise into three slices. I had a plate of flour, a shallow bowl of beaten egg, and a plate of couscous, and I coated the plantains in the usual way: roll them in the flour, roll them in the egg, roll them in the couscous (or breadcrumbs). The couscous (or breadcrumbs) soon turns soggy: one needs to refresh it with a new, dry batch. Because of sticky fingers, one cannot get the slices uniformly coated: it does not matter. I laid them on plates, and put them in the fridge for half an hour to allow the coating to firm up.

I poured about two-thirds of a bottle of sunflower oil into a saucepan, to a depth of about 5cms, and heated it gently, until a little cube of bread sizzled in it. I fried my plantains in batches, and kept the cooked ones on kitchen towels on a plate in a heated but switched-off oven.

They were somewhat crunchy. Not unpleasant; but next time I shall soak the couscous first.

La graine and le mulet

My latest New Statesman column was prompted by the film Couscous (La graine and le mulet), a vivid and affecting study of an Algerian family living in the French port of Sete. The point I try to make is that couscous, meaning both the grains and the feast, resonates as a film title in a way that few other food names would.

Most of the couscous we buy is, unlike the grains Souad prepares in the film, pre-cooked. We do not have to steam it for an hour or so, but simply to soak it. What I used to do was put it into an oven dish, pour over boiling water to moisten but not to drown the grains, cover the dish, and transfer it to the oven for five minutes (at any temperature). A few weeks ago, I checked the instructions on a Ferrero packet, and discovered a method I now prefer.

You put your couscous (about 75g for each person is a decent amount) into a measuring jug. Check the level. Tip the couscous back into a bowl. Pour water into the jug to the same level; transfer the water to a saucepan with a little salt and about a tbsp of olive oil for each 150g of grains; bring the contents of the pan to the boil; tip in the couscous and make sure all the grains are soaked; cover and leave for five minutes. Stir through the couscous with a fork.

Carrots and cumin

Carrots continue to arrive in the vegetable box, demanding summery recipes. I am not particularly keen on grated carrot in salads, and am far happier with spicy dishes, such as this one or the following.

5 carrots
1tbsp olive oil
1tsp cumin seeds
Cayenne pepper, to taste
A little salt

Put the cumin into a small saucepan over a gentle flame, and cook until toasted. Grind in a mortar or electric mill.

Cut the carrots into batons. Put water into a saucepan to a depth of 0.5cms, bring to the boil, and throw in the carrots with the oil, cumin, cayenne, and salt. Cover and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, or until just tender, adding a little more water from time to time if necessary. Uncover the pan, turn up the heat, and cook until the liquid has evaporated; you will need to stir the contents at the end, as the carrots are left with a coating of spicy oil.

Asparagus, olive and cheese frittata

I must conduct an experiment sometime to test the truth of the frequent assertion that green vegetables, if they are to retain their colour, should be cooked in plenty of boiling water in an uncovered pan. The theory is good: acidity is what turns asparagus, broccoli and the rest an unappetising khaki, and acidity increases in a covered pan. Chefs also advise you to plunge the cooked vegetables into iced water, to "fix" the colour. But both these procedures -- boiling in a copious quantity of water, and refreshing the vegetables -- lose more nutrients than would steaming. Maybe it is better to put up with grey-green vegetables. We are trying to feed ourselves, not win Michelin stars.

For this frittata, for three, I used six eggs. But I think it would have been better to follow my previous advice and use five. The longer the frittata cooks, the tougher it will be. I also threw on the cheese towards the end -- and that was an improvement. It needs only to melt, rather than to cook with the egg.

5 eggs, lightly beaten
Knob of butter
60g hard cheese (I used Cheddar)
Bunch of asparagus
Handful of pitted black olives (I like the Crespo Greek-style ones)

Melt the butter over a very gentle heat to coat a heavy, 28cm frying pan. Pour in the eggs.

Meanwhile, bring a pan with an inch or so of water to the boil. Cut off and discard the tough ends of the asparagus, throw the stalks into the pan, and simmer for a couple of minutes, until tender when pierced by a knife. Drain, and cut into fork-sized pieces. Stone the olives, if necessary.

When the bottom of the omelette is set, but with a runny surface, scatter over the cheese, asparagus, and olives. Finish cooking for a minute or so under a low grill.

Cut into wedges, and serve hot or cold.

Summer lamb stew

The butcher has good cuts of stewing lamb at the moment, offputting only if you imagine a thick winter stew with flour and rich stock. This one has a light sauce, made by the meat and vegetables. For 4.

800g lamb neck fillet
1tbsp white wine vinegar
8 cloves garlic
3 onions, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves
2tbsp olive oil
Salt
2 tins cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

Cut the lamb into rounds. On a medium to high heat, brown the pieces on a ridged grill pan, in batches. Transfer them to a heavy casserole. Pour the vinegar on to the pan, allow it to bubble until reduced to about 1 dstsp, and pour it and the pan scrapings on to the meat. (If your pan is very hot, you'll find that the vinegar evaporates to nothing almost immediately.)

Throw in the garlic, onion and herbs, and stir in the oil. Season to taste. Put the casserole into a gas mark 2/150C oven for an hour. If the contents of the pan are bubbling, you can turn the oven down to gas mark S/130C. Cook for a further two hours. Half an hour before the end, stir in the beans.

Harissa 2

If you use the most widely available small, dried chillis (such as the Rajah brand) for my previous harissa recipe, you get a searingly hot concoction. Only when I saw this recipe, by Yotam Ottolenghi, did I realise that it was possible to temper the chillis with other ingredients. This is the version I made.

1 red pepper
2tsp dried chillis (for a milder version, but still with some kick, 1tsp would be fine)
1tsp of a mixture, according to taste, of cumin, caraway and coriander seeds
1 clove garlic, chopped
A little salt

Bake the pepper in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 30 minutes, or until the skin blisters.

Pour boiling water over the chillis in a bowl.

In a small saucepan, and over a gentle heat, cook the spices until they give off a toasty aroma. Grind them in a mortar (or in the machine you use to make the harissa).

When the pepper is cool enough to handle, skin and deseed it. Drain the chillis.

You could grind together these ingredients by hand; but it would be hard work. I use a small, electric mill (Moulinex). Throw in all the ingredients, and pulse until smooth.

Decant into a glass jar, and cover with oil. If the harissa remains submerged, it should keep in the fridge for three weeks to a month.

This harissa was looser in texture than the stuff you buy in tins and tubes. After making it, I looked again at Ottolenghi's recipe, and saw that he included tomato paste. I shall try that next time -- although I wonder whether it might contribute a somewhat artificial flavour. I might also try adding fried onion and garlic, while being mindful that it is impossible to get a red onion "dark and smoky" after six to eight minutes' frying.

More about moussaka

You might prefer to fry the aubergines, rather than to bake them, for a moussaka. In which case, you might be tempted to salt them first -- not because they are bitter, but because according to some writers they will absorb less oil if treated in that way. Salting is not necessary. Treat the aubergines as you would if you were baking them, by brushing them with oil. Lay them in a heavy-bottomed pan, over a low-to-medium heat, and season them. As they cook, they will of course lose the moisture that an initial salting was intended to remove. In other words, you get the same result.

Browning mince is another procedure about which most cookbooks are misleading. The process takes a long time if you throw 400g of mince into a pan and stir it around: first, the mince throws off its moisture, in which it stews; eventually, the moisture evaporates, and the mince starts to brown; bits of the mince start catching on the pan. If I want to brown mince (perhaps for shepherd's pie), I form it into patties, which I flash-fry or place on a hot grill pan. For the stews in spaghetti Bolognese or moussaka, I don't bother -- and I am not sure that I notice the difference. (More about this subject here.)

Moussaka

Moussaka, prepared properly, is a time-consuming dish. The version I made yesterday was not proper. My use of pork and beef mince, rather than lamb, was just one of the inauthentic touches. For 4. (Or, in our case, 3.)

2 medium-to-large aubergines, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
Olive oil
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
200g beef mince
200g pork mince
1 bay leaf
1/2 chicken stock cube
2tsp tomato puree
3dstsp plain flour
35g butter, or enough to make a roux with the flour
300ml milk
1 egg, beaten
2tbsp Parmesan or Pecorino

Pour some olive oil into a saucer. Dip in a fork, and brush the aubergine rounds with the back of it. Place them in a roasting tin or on a baking sheet. Season with salt, and with pepper if you like. (You may, as I did, need a second tin or sheet; place it in the oven below the first one, and transfer it to the top shelf when the first batch is ready.) Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 20 to 30 minutes, until soft. (This is a far easier method of cooking aubergines than frying.)

Make a simple stew. Soften the onions and garlic in about 2tbsps of olive oil, over a gentle heat, for a few minutes. Throw in the beef and pork mince, and keep stirring. It will separate as it sheds moisture and the fat runs. Add the bay leaf, the half stock cube (I use Knorr), and the tomato puree. (I also added a drop of fish sauce, and a few splashes of soy sauce -- as I said, the recipe was inauthentic.) Season, and cook for about 10 more minutes. The meat should have produced enough liquid to stop it sticking.

I do not add any more liquid. Here (and in a lasagne), I like the stew to be moist but not runny. If I had been cooking for adults only, I would have been tempted to pour in about 200mls of red wine, and to cook the stew very gently until most of the liquid had evaporated. If there had been stock in the fridge, I would have used that instead of the cube: again, gently cooking it to evaporate it and concentrate the flavour.

Make a thick bechamel. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a gentle heat. Add the flour, and stir it in. The roux should have the consistency of wet sand. Cook it for a minute. 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. You want a thick, almost pasty consistency. When the sauce has cooled a little, stir in the egg. (After baking, the sauce should puff up.) You could season the bechamel with nutmeg as well as salt.

Assemble the moussaka in a gratin dish. I started with a layer of stew, followed by aubergines, followed by the rest of the stew, followed by the rest of the aubergines; I poured the sauce on top, and scattered over the Parmesan. Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, or until the top is brown and everything is bubbling.

Moussaka is delicious if served warm, rather than piping hot. Here is a vegetarian version.

Cheese omelette

My omelette pan is thin, old, and bashed-about. It may once have been non-stick; now the surface is patchy and grimy. You cannot rest the pan flat. It has only one use, for which it is ideal. Omelettes slide about on it, and never get stuck.

It is 20cms, a good size for a two-egg omelette.

The two important points in cooking a tender omelette are to beat the eggs only lightly, and to cook the omelette quickly -- in no more than a minute. Have your grated cheese (no more than a couple of tbsps) and your beaten eggs, seasoned at the last minute (apparently salt does something to the texture) ready.

Warm the pan for 30 seconds on a medium heat, and throw in a knob of butter, which should foam, but not turn brown. (Throughout this process, you may have to move the pan on and off the heat, to regulate the temperature.) When the pan is coated, pour in the eggs. Swirl them around, and with a spatula draw the edges of the omelette as it sets towards the centre of the pan, so that runny egg can fill the place. Keep doing this, to set the omelette as quickly as possible. (You need a very slick pan.)

When you have just a film of runny egg on the surface of the omelette, turn the heat right down, and scatter over the cheese. You do not want too much, or it will get in your way as you try to roll the omelette. This is the bit I am not very good at; but I am getting better. Tip the pan away from you (there should still be a hint of runniness, because the omelette will carry on cooking), and coax the near edge of the omelette to roll over. Keep encouraging it, with a mixture of tipping and pushing. As the omelette falls towards the far edge of the pan, complete the process by turning the pan almost upright to tip the omelette on to a waiting, warm plate.

Store cupboard essentials

My latest New Statesman column is about store cupboard standbys. I wrote it in response to an Observer Food Monthly feature on the subject.

A favourite quick lunch is rice with several of these items, and others, stirred in. On Saturday, the ingredients were a handful of olives, half a dozen sun-dried tomatoes each sliced into about four pieces, two handfuls of halved cherry tomatoes, and cubes of Gruyere. I had mine with a splash or two of Encona. Instead of the cheese, there might be fried cubes of pancetta, or tinned tuna, or tinned sardines. Artichokes, spring onions, peppers, and pine kernels are among the many other possible ingredients.

New potatoes, Gruyere and onion pie

This is a variation on Nigel Slater's blue cheese and potato pie. It works particularly well at this time of the year, because the new potato skins add interest to the texture. Any hard cheese would suit -- as would any blue one. A generous portion for two.

600g new potatoes, scraped
4 onions, each cut in half then cut into chunks
Olive oil
150g Gruyere, grated
Salt, pepper

Put the potatoes into cold water in a saucepan, bring slowly to the boil, and simmer gently until tender. Drain.

Meanwhile, fry the onions in enough oil to prevent their catching on the pan, until soft and golden. About 20 minutes.

Roughly mash the potatoes with a fork, leaving them slightly lumpy. Stir in the onions and cheese. Add a little salt (the cheese is salty), and pepper according to taste. You could grate over a little nutmeg if you like.

Tip into a warm gratin dish, and bake in a gas mark 6/200C oven for about 15 minutes.

Spinach and pea risotto

This was a very rich, indulgent risotto for a Friday night. The combination of cream, Gruyere, and green vegetables -- tanginess, richness, and freshness -- worked perfectly.

The basic risotto technique is here. In brief: soften an onion, slowly and thoroughly, in a little butter, adding water if it threatens to catch; meanwhile, heat stock in another pan; tip the rice on to the onions, and stir until the grains are coated and hot; add stock, a ladleful at a time, keeping the contents of the pan at a gentle simmer and adding more stock when the previous addition has been absorbed; stop cooking when the rice is plump but still ad dente.

This time, I had 300g of arborio rice, a bag of spinach from the vegetable box, three handfuls of frozen peas, 150g of grated Gruyere, and about 125ml of cream. I washed the spinach and removed the stalks, and cooked it in my usual way: shoved wet into a pan, covered and cooked at full heat, stirred round after a minute or so until it has all wilted, and drained. When it was cool, I squeezed out some of the water (it seems as if you could go on extracting water from it for ever; I give up after a while), and chopped it. I cooked the peas in a little of the stock.

You (perhaps I mean I) want risotto that is moist but not fluid, so the trick is to get it to that state just as the rice is perfectly cooked. At this point I added the cream; there seemed to be rather a lot, and I turned up the heat to thicken it. But the risotto threatened to catch on the bottom of the pan. So I turned down the heat, tipped in the spinach and peas, gave them a quick stir, turned off the heat, and stirred in the Gruyere. I need not have worried: it all thickened up nicely. It served three greedy people.

Pork, aubergines and rice

I am pretty confident that no Chinese chef has ever cooked the ingredients for a stir-fry in the oven. But I do not like frying aubergines: cubed ones, in particular, are reluctant to soften, and tend to stick to even well-seasoned pans. Once I had tossed my aubergines in oil, seasoned them, and put them in the oven, I realised that I did not need another pan for my other ingredients (leftover belly pork, cubed; sliced spring onions; chopped garlic). After 25 minutes, I threw them into the roasting tin with the aubergines, stirred them about with a little more oil (groundnut), turned down the oven (from gas mark 6/200C) to gas mark 2/150C, and gave everything a further 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, I cooked the rice (the link on the right takes you to various agonised posts on this subject), tipped it into the roasting tin, and mixed everything up with some soy sauce, nam pla, and rice vinegar. (There is a more detailed recipe, for another inauthentic pork stir fry, here.)

Simple chicken again

My latest New Statesman column is about how I am not always principled enough to do the ethical, ecological thing; and about how I am not always sure what the ethical thing is. Someone who is sure, on the subject of Israeli potatoes, has made a comment here.

I bought a much better batch of Jerseys at the weekend. I did not use them, though, on a version of this recipe, which I made with a particularly flavoursome Label Anglais chicken. The French potatoes were ideal, retaining their shape and their waxy texture.

This is an example of a dish that might not pass the highest culinary examination, but that is nevertheless home cooking at its best. The potatoes, not having lost their surface starch through parboiling, have a slimy quality -- in this context, delicious. Also, they have soaked up the chicken juices, as well as oil, garlic (I put whole cloves in the chicken cavity), and lemon (squeezed over the bird, and then placed inside the cavity).

To summarise: rub chicken with olive oil, season, squirt with lemon juice, stuff cavity with lemon hulls and unpeeled garlic cloves, and roast at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes; turn down heat to gas mark 2/150C, and roast for a further 90 minutes. (My chicken was 2kg.) Scrape and slice potatoes, transfer to bowl of water. Drain, and tip into the roasting tin, around and under the chicken, when there are 45 minutes to go. At the end of the two hours cooking time, transfer chicken to a plate, and allow to rest. Turn up oven to full heat, and cook potatoes, turning them if necessary, until they are brown and have absorbed most of the liquid -- about 20 to 30 minutes. The chicken should still be pretty hot; if it is lukewarm, no matter.

This version has some variations on my earlier one, largely because of the different oven temperatures here and in France. Also, I did not bother trying to remove some of the potato starch with paper towels. Why had I been so fussy?

Mackerel and potato salad

My first Jersey Royals (80p a pound) from the greengrocer were disappointing, perhaps compromised by the terrible weather in April. At Tesco this week, the Jerseys were £2.45 for a small bag; I bought organic new potatoes, of an unnamed variety and from Israel, instead. Some might say that buying Israeli potatoes from Tesco is unsound for three reasons (political, ecological, and societal); but I go only so far as an ethical shopper. Israeli farmers have a right to earn a living, I think.

I used them for a Delia Smith-style cheats' dinner: ready-prepared smoked mackerel fillets, flaked (I like their oiliness); half a bottle of artichoke hearts, drained; half a bottle of "Greek-style" black olives, stoned; one bottled pepper, sliced. Once the potatoes (about 10 of them, sliced) had cooled, I stirred everything together with two dstsps of mayonnaise -- which I had made. Plenty for two.

Falafels - der Haroutunian

I love falafels, but until last week I had not succeeded in making decent ones. There is a good deal of variation between recipes. One I have seen suggests concocting the mixture by grounding up raw chick peas. Several contain grated onions, which, in my experience, make the patties or balls too soft: they absorb a huge amount of oil. Other efforts have fallen to bits. Recipe writers disagree over whether the falafels should be bound by flour, or by breadcrumbs and egg.

At last, I have had success, thanks to the ever-excellent Grub Street's reissue of Vegetarian Dishes of the Middle East by the late Arto der Haroutunian. (The company's website was not working when I checked.) What follows is an adaptation of his recipe: I used the quantity of chick peas that came in a jar rather than the 450g in his version, and I upped the cumin content. If you have a tin (standard drained weight: 225g) or two tins, you can adjust the quantities accordingly.

400g cooked chick peas
Salt, to taste (bottled or tinned chick peas may already be salty)
1/2tsp black pepper
1/2tsp turmeric
1tsp cumin, toasted over a gentle heat in a dry saucepan and ground
1/4tsp cayenne pepper
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
1tbsp tahini or olive oil
50g white breadcrumbs
1 egg, beaten
Flour
Sunflower oil, for deep frying

Whizz the chick peas in a food processor. Scrape the sides of the jug, and keep whizzing until you have a paste, which does not have to be completely smooth. Transfer to a bowl, and mix in all the other ingredients except the flour and sunflower oil. You want a thick, sticky mass. If it won't cohere, add a little water.

Heat the oil -- you may need about a litre -- in a saucepan over a medium flame.

Form the chick pea mixture into balls or patties of whatever size you like. I went for eight patties. Roll them in flour.

Test the oil by dropping in a little piece of bread. If it sizzles, add the falafels -- I cooked them four at a time. You want them to take about five minutes to brown (so that they cook through), so adjust the flame accordingly. When they are ready, lift them from the oil with a slotted spoon on to paper towels. Then put them on to a plate in a very low oven while you cook the next batch.

We ate them with Greek yoghurt. Mine had minced garlic and chillis (fresh) stirred in.

Aubergine, courgette and bean gratin

I made a version of this gratin the other night, but as a one-pot meal, including courgettes and dried beans as well.

Instead of cooking the courgettes (I had three small ones) separately, I thought: why not simply tip them into the tomato sauce and let them simmer for a few minutes? Then I could add the beans (I used alubia beans, from a jar), warm them too, and pour the whole mixture into a gratin dish. At the moment when I was adding the sliced courgettes, I saw the potential problem: vegetables do not soften in an acid environment. (Do not ever try to cook potatoes in tomato sauce -- unless they are cooked already, in which case they should retain their shape.) But I got away with it. The courgettes were slightly crunchy, but not unpleasantly so.

I topped this mixture of tomato sauce, courgettes and beans with slices of aubergine, and poured my sauce on top of that.

Tardy Jersey Royals

My latest New Statesman column is about Jersey Royals -- which I have not tasted yet this year. My greengrocer says that they are still too expensive. The crop is down, as the Jersey Royal Company told me; I should guess that the supermarkets have taken a large share of it.

So we had some new potatoes from France: not bad, but definitely second best. I was not as clear as I might have been in the column when I wrote that I did not like to assemble the potatoes with lots of other ingredients; what I meant to say was that I did not like preparing them with ingredients that masked their flavour. Yesterday, we had a big mixed salad: potatoes; roast belly pork; roasted peppers; rocket; a few tomatoes. I made a vinaigrette with 1tbsp of vinegar, half a tsp of Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, 2tbsp of olive oil, 1tbsp of sesame oil, and 1dstsp of soy sauce.

Rocket and cheese salad

Greens are appearing in the vegetable box again. At last, I am doing something about the realisation that green salads are tedious, no matter how varied the leaves. They are fine with another, assertive ingredient -- particularly cheese, I think.

Yesterday, for lunch (for 2), I toasted 2tbsp of pine nuts in a small saucepan over a gentle heat. I cubed 100g of Gruyere. I made a sauce with 1dstsp of white wine vinegar, 3dstsp of olive oil, a little salt, and a lot of pepper. I tossed the nuts and cheese in the sauce with washed rocket from a bag. A dull and chewy leaf tasting only of pepper, rocket complements the other ingredients here.

A different kind of tortilla

I large potato
5 eggs
80g grated cheese, such as Gruyere or Cheddar

Peel the potato, cut it into equal-sized pieces, put them into cold water, bring to a simmer, and cook until soft. Drain. Then -- this is the different bit -- mash them.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs lightly. Mix them with the cheese and potato, and a little salt if you like.

Melt a large knob of butter in a heavy, 28cm frying pan over the lowest possible heat. Pour in the egg mixture. Cook until there is a decent amount of set egg on the bottom -- about 10 minutes. Put the pan under a low grill for a minute or so, to set the top.

I got this idea from Allegra McEvedy's column in the Guardian. I am sure that her spicy version would be delicious. I am less sure about baking it -- the egg would be more likely to toughen, I think. I certainly would not entrust the mixture to my Pyrex dish: it would stick. However, one of the effects of the mash seems to be to give a more tender result.

My tortilla would have benefited from a couple of sliced Spanish onions, fried very gently and tipped into the egg mixture before being returned to the pan.

Red pepper hummus

This is the hummus I made with my tahini. It was lighter, less pasty, than versions I have made with tahini from a jar. The pepper helped to loosen the texture too.

1 tin chickpeas, rinsed in a sieve
Juice of 1 lemon
1 clove garlic, chopped
2tbsp tahini
1 red pepper (from a Cypressa jar -- or fresh and roasted)
A little salt (the chickpeas have been sitting in brine)
Pinch cayenne
1dstsp olive oil

Put all the ingredients, expect the oil, in a food processor, and whizz. You may need to interrupt the whizzing to scrape the mixture from the sides of the bowl. Pour a little water through the spout if the hummus seems too thick.

You do not need to add a lot more oil to a mixture that already contains the oily tahini. In my experience, olive oil whizzed in a processor loses its fruitiness; I prefer to stir it in at the end.

A stew with lamb shanks

Saturday was the nicest day of the year so far. Something grilled, with new potatoes, seemed appropriate; but, when I got to the butcher, I found the lamb shanks the most tempting items on display. My greengrocer is not selling any Jersey Royals yet -- still too expensive, he says. So we had a wintry lamb stew, with mash.

The shanks were large. I bought two for three people, and I cooked them roughly as in this recipe, but with a couple of modifications. First, I used a little sunflower oil rather than olive oil for the initial browning -- it has a higher smoke point, and is therefore less likely to degrade and tarnish the stew. Second, I deglazed the pan with white wine vinegar: about 80ml, which I allowed to bubble until it had almost disappeared. Then I added the stock -- bought beef stock, from the butcher -- before putting the casserole in the oven.

At the end of cooking, I removed the shanks, and sieved and reduced the sauce, as in the previous recipe. But this time I stripped the meat from the shank bones, and returned it to the sauce (of which there was now about 250ml) to warm through. This stew, with its combination of tender, gelatinous meat and garlicky sauce, was quite the most wonderful I have eaten for a long time -- despite the season.

Tahini

Tahini from a jar is, I find, palate-coating, like a savoury form of peanut butter. It gives hummus a sludgy, adhesive quality. Making your own tahini is not complicated. There are two ingredients.

Recipes tell you to put the sesame seeds on to a baking sheet in a gas mark 4/180C oven for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring them every so often to make sure they do not brown. It is easier to cook them in a heavy saucepan over a low heat -- but you have to stir them regularly, and to recognise the point after which they will be overcooked. Toasted sesame seeds, delicious in a salad, are bitter in a tahini sauce.

I have a small, electric mill -- similar to what Delia Smith calls a mini-chopper. When the seeds are cool, I whizz them in the mill with sunflower oil. The standard ratio is about 4 parts sesame seeds to 1 part, or slightly more, of oil. It is a good idea to add the oil a little at a time, until you get the consistency you want. You need to whizz the mixture thoroughly -- and you are unlikely to get a completely smooth result.

Red onions

Raw red onions can give you an unpleasant shock. They are supposed to be mild, and sweet; but often they are not.

A good way to ensure sweetness is to slice the onions, put them in a bowl, and cover them with boiling water. Leave them for half an hour, or longer, and drain them, squeezing out the liquid (with your hands, or with the back of a spoon pushed gently against the onions in a sieve). The milkiness in the bowl, and in the liquid that emerges from the squeezed onions, is sulphur, which is what causes raw onions to burn our mouths and sting our eyes.

I like red onions in salads with beans and/or rice. It might go, instead of the fried onions, in this recipe, for example.

Penne with mushrooms and purple sprouting broccoli

Some vegetables do not go very far. Mushrooms, once they have given off their water, shrink dramatically; you need a substantial bunch of purple sprouting broccoli, even if you keep as much of the stalks as possible, to feed several people. Last night, I used the entire bag of mushrooms and the entire bag of broccoli from the vegetable box in a pasta sauce for three -- and the portions of vegetables were not generous. But there was plenty of cream. More than was healthy, no doubt.

I brought my pasta water to the boil, and dropped in my broccoli for just a couple of minutes. Some people insist that you cook green vegetables this way, rather than steaming them: it retains the colour, they claim. I am not sure about that, but I have never given the argument a proper test. In this recipe, though, it is economical to use the water twice. I fished out the broccoli (with a slotted spoon), and transferred it to a colander. I salted the water, and tipped in 375g of penne.

Meanwhile, I had been cooking my sliced chestnut mushrooms with a chopped clove of garlic, a little salt, and a splash or two of olive oil. My normal practice is to wait for the disgorged water to cook off; but that was not necessary here. The mushrooms were not likely to be undercooked. I poured in an entire 284ml pot of Rachel's Organic double cream, and bubbled it for about five minutes, until it had thickened and reduced. With about a minute to go before the pasta was ready, I added the broccoli to the mushroom sauce to warm through.

I drained the pasta, and tossed it with a large knob of butter (our hearts will need a couple of days to recover); I plated it, and served it with the sauce on top.

Lamb with lemon and garlic

Not all the recipes in Delia Smith's How To Cheat at Cooking involve cans, frozen things, or other pre-prepared foods. There is a wonderfully simple one for Greek lamb baked with lemon and garlic. My adaptation is even simpler, because I did not have any flat-leaf parsley, which Delia suggests scattering over the dish at the end in a mixture with lemon zest and garlic -- gremolata.

I was grateful for the illustration in the book. Delia tells you to wrap the ingredients in foil, to which food can stick; the photograph shows kitchen paper inside the foil.

For two.

1 lamb neck fillet, weighing about 350g
Zest of 1 lemon, juice of half
1 clove garlic, sliced
Salt, pepper

Cut the fillet crosswise into medallions -- 2.5cm thick, Delia says. Make cuts in the flesh with a sharp knife, and insert the slivers of garlic. Give each medallion several slivers if that is necessary to use up the clove.

Lay a sheet of foil in and up the sides of a roasting tin. Lay a sheet of kitchen paper on top, and the meat on top of that. Squirt over the lemon juice, and distribute the zest. Grind over salt and pepper. Fold up the foil and paper to make a parcel, and bake the dish at gas mark 1/140C for three hours. It is delicious.

Chilli sauce

I stir chilli sauce or harissa into almost everything I cook that is vaguely compatible: pasta dishes, rice dishes, bean and lentil dishes, soups. This week, I returned to the most widely available chilli sauce brand, Encona, after experimenting with various others including the excellent Asia's Finest (a past winner of a Great Taste Award); and I concluded that it is as good as any. It has a distinctive, fruity zing -- perhaps some would find it a little too vinegary.

Richard Whittington, in his otherwise excellent Home Food (out of print, sad to say), says that you can use Encona chilli sauce as a marinade for jerk chicken. You cannot, in my experience. It turns acrid when grilled or roasted.

Onion sauce

The onion sauce I made at the weekend was not a success.

My theory had been that cooking the onion in milk first, rather than in water, would produce a more flavoursome sauce. But the reduced and grainy milk gave the dish a rather sickly quality.

I roughly chopped two onions, covered them in milk seasoned with salt and nutmeg, and simmered them for 25 minutes. I made a roux with a dstsp of flour and enough butter (about 20g, I should guess) to turn it into the consistency of wet sand; I cooked the roux very gently for two minutes, and poured in the milk and onions gradually, incorporating each addition before pouring in the next.

In Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, the recipe advises cooking the onions -- cut however you like them -- in water. You retain the water when you drain them, and make a sauce with that and an equal quantity of flavoured milk; then you add onions and cream.

Or there is Nigel Slater's baked onions, from Kitchen Diaries. You peel the onions, simmer them for 20 minutes, cut them in half and place in a baking dish, pour over cream and scatter with parmesan. Bake until bubbling.

I am sure that both recipes are nicer than mine.

Rice and lentils

Rice and lentils offer complementary proteins, and are often paired in recipes. Here is a basic one that I came up with.

It seems neater to cook the rice and lentils together, rather than to boil them separately, drain them, and mix them. That means using the dreaded absorption method. I have found two brands whose rice does not turn into a starchy lump when cooked in this way: Crazy Jack and Essential. (Tesco's is hopeless; but fine when boiled in plenty of water.)

For dishes such as this, or a pilaf, it is no good measuring the water as you would when cooking the rice on its own. Twice its volume of water might not cover it, because of the volume of the other ingredients.

These quantities give generous portions for two. Rice and lentils is good with poached eggs. Or perhaps with leeks in a cheese sauce.

2 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
Olive oil
100g Puy or other green lentils, rinsed in a sieve
100g basmati rice, rinsed in a sieve
1tsp harissa, or more to taste
Salt, black pepper

Soften the onion and garlic with the cumin seeds in a tbsp or two of oil. Tip in the lentils and harissa, and pour over enough water to cover by about a cm; bring to a simmer, turn down the heat, and cover. Keep checking, and top up with water if necessary.

When the lentils are starting to soften, tip in the rice. Add more water, again covering the contents of the pan with about a cm to spare, return to a simmer, replace the lid, and cook over a low heat for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, and leave for a further five minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

Good enough cooking

My latest New Statesman column is prompted by my recent experience -- described here -- of making chips.

I want to produce very good food. But there is only so much effort I am prepared to make; and, no matter how much effort I make, I run up against the limitations of my ability. Sometimes it seems that the good enough, produced within the constraints of the home cook, is more satisfying than anything else.

Pak choi

I do not own a wok, and regret the lack only when I cook pak choi. The stalks and, particularly, the leaves of pak choi disgorge a lot of water, which the high heat and large surface area of the wok help to evaporate. A large frying pan does not perform the job so well; a saucepan, hardly at all.

You strip off the leaves, and cut the stalks into fork-sized pieces. Heat the pan and the oil, and, before the oil starts smoking, throw in the stalks. They tenderise much more quickly than do those of, say, chard -- in about three to four minutes. Throw in the leaves, and give them a minute to wilt.

It's done. If you have water in your pan, drain the pak choi. It would be a shame to overcook it while waiting for the water to evaporate.

Poached eggs, the Delia way

Delia Smith's How To Cheat at Cooking -- sorry to bang on about it again -- is not just about throwing together tins of this and frozen packets of that. It offers some cooking instructions too. One that interested me was her recipe for poached eggs: you slip the eggs into the simmering water, cook them for a minute, then turn off the heat and cover the pan, waiting for a further six minutes.

The theory behind this technique is that the egg whites, like any protein, will toughen if cooked too aggressively. Salt and vinegar in the water also help to keep them tender; unfortunately, they also prevent the egg cohering. As I have note in the comments section of this entry, I now poach eggs in water with nothing added.

I crack the eggs into cups before slipping them into the water, because I am likely to make a mess of them if I try to perform the operation in one go. If there are more than two, they will lower the temperature of the water considerably, so I keep the heat high; if there are four eggs, the water may just be returning to simmering point by the time the first minute is up.

I like poached eggs to be well done, but still squidgy. A further six minutes in the water is too long even for large eggs, I have found. Four and a half to five minutes is about right. I lift them out of the water with a slotted spoon, holding a paper towel held underneath.

Lobster and coconut soup

This is the soup I mentioned in my post on Delia. I did not use the "English Provender very lazy ginger" she recommends; the pinch of cayenne is my addition. Her soup includes a coriander garnish; but are you going to buy a bunch of coriander specially?

Delia recommends the Blue Dragon brand, which I like too. I suspect that other brands of coconut milk would also be fine. Normally, I steer clear of "light" products; but full-fat coconut milk is very fatty.

You may find that your soup contains tough little strands of lemongrass, which is hard to mince finely.

415g tin lobster bisque ("such as Baxters", Delia says)
165ml tin light coconut milk
1 stalk Blue Dragon lemongrass (from a jar)
Fingernail-sized piece ginger
Pinch cayenne pepper (or more, to taste)
1dstsp fish sauce
1tbsp lime juice

Mince the lemongrass and ginger, in a small electric mill if you have one. Warm the bisque, coconut milk, lemongrass, ginger and cayenne in a small saucepan over a gentle heat; when it is steaming, turn the heat down low, and warm it for a further 10 minutes, stirring regularly and without letting it boil. Add the fish sauce and lime juice, and serve.

Warning: this soup has an assertive flavour, which will linger.

Defending Delia

My latest New Statesman column concerns my use of tinned and other pre-prepared products. They are compromises, of course; but, to judge by the words of some of Delia Smith's detractors, you would conclude that promoting them was akin to ordering a cull of the first-born.

I filed another version of this piece before discovering that Rachel Cooke, in her TV column, had also written about Delia. Rachel gave her a kicking. Here is what I wrote.

Delia Smith has the place in the national consciousness reserved for resolute women. Liking her – or liking Queen Victoria, or Margaret Thatcher – is not the point. (Although Delia was weirdly endearing when, in high spirits, she went on to the pitch at Norwich City to yell “Let’s be having you!” at her fellow supporters.) Instead, aficionados admire her. They trust her. She is nanny. Hence the shock that has greeted publication of her new book, How To Cheat at Cooking. It may be number one on the bestseller lists, but on Amazon the book has more reviews in the bottom, one-star category than in any other. “Woeful, and profoundly disappointing”; “a lazy, dirty, distasteful, money-making exercise”; “Delia has sold out”: these are some of the comments.

Delia’s crime is to present recipes largely assembled from store-cupboard, frozen and pre-prepared ingredients. Her “good old shepherd’s pie” – which perhaps she should not have named so phonily -- consists of an onion, a tin of Marks & Spencer minced lamb, diced carrot and swede from Tesco, olive oil, thyme and cinnamon; you top it with Aunt Bessie’s Homestyle frozen mash, chopped leaks, and ready-grated cheddar. It’s cooking, but not as one normally understands the term; and not as promoted in Delia’s How To Cook. Melanzane Parmigiana includes frozen aubergine slices, ready-prepared tomato sauce, and ready-grated cheeses. Avocado with prawns is avocado with Tesco finest prawn cocktail, enlivened with Whole Earth tomato ketchup and some lime juice and cayenne.

As do Delia’s detractors, I draw the line at some of these ingredients. Grated cheeses and pre-prepared vegetables seem to me to be decadent, overpriced products; and their packaging is nutritionally and environmentally suspect. Excellent though Aunt Bessie’s mash may be, I do not mind peeling, cutting and cooking a few potatoes. My only local supermarket is a Tesco Metro, which does not stock the items Delia recommends.

No cookery book, though, ever offers an entire new collection of recipes for one’s repertoire. One picks and chooses. It seems to me that, taken in this spirit, How To Cheat at Cooking is brilliantly inspiring. I like to cook fresh food, and I also like, when time is pressing and when culinary standards need not be so high, to assemble meals from the store cupboard; I wish more writers would recommend particular brands, as Delia does. I can vouch for a few of her choices, especially the spices from Seasoned Pioneers.

Corner-cutting, not ersatz approximation, is her theme. One recipe, for Greek lamb stew, involves no pre-prepared ingredients at all, but simply lamb, garlic and lemon: I am very eager to try it. Today, for lunch, I had lobster and coconut soup, consisting of tinned bisque, coconut milk, lemon grass, ginger, and lime. Yes, it fell short of Michelin standards. But it took -- in the middle of a working day -- less than 15 minutes to prepare, and it tasted fine. While that may not be good enough for some Amazon customers, it is for me.

Red cabbage and rice salad

A good thing to do with red cabbage is to eat it raw, in a salad with rice.

Chop a quarter of red cabbage finely, and soak it in water. Cook 150g of rice in whatever way works for you. (Some of my thoughts on the subject are here and here.)

While the rice is cooking, pour boiling water on to a large handful of raisins, to soften them and plump them up. Put a handful of pine kernels into a dry saucepan, and set them over a low heat until toasted. Stir them occasionally, and keep a careful watch so that they do not burn.

Make a vinaigrette by stirring together a dstsp of red or white wine vinegar with three dstsps of olive oil, salt, and plenty of pepper. (You might want to dissolve the salt in the vinegar before whisking in the oil.) Soy sauce and a little fish sauce are nice additions; also, you can substitute some of the olive oil with sesame oil.

Drain the cabbage, pat it dry with paper towels, and mix it with the rice, drained raisins, pine kernels, and vinaigrette. Serves three to four.

Gnocchi with chard

I admit it: from time to time, I do what Delia Smith recommends, and use pre-prepared ingredients. One of these days, I shall make my own gnocchi; meanwhile, I'll carry on using packet varieties. They are quite doughy, almost rubbery, but satisfying in their way.

How To Cheat at Cooking has a gnocchi recipe with spinach and cheese sauce. I used chard, cooking it like this; and I made my own cheese sauce, following the recipe in this eggs Florentine entry. (Inspired by Delia, my recipe is pre-prepared.)

I cooked the bagful of chard that came in my vegetable box, mixed the leaves and the stalks, and put them in a gratin dish. Then I made the bechamel, while heating a saucepan of water for the gnocchi (a 250g packet). I stirred the cheese with a grating of nutmeg and some pepper into the bechamel, and turned off the heat. I tipped the gnocchi into the boiling water (which included the water in which the chard had cooked), and waited for a few minutes, until they rose to the surface. I drained them.

I tipped the gnocchi on to the chard in the gratin dish, poured the cheese sauce on top, and put the dish into a gas mark 6/200C oven for 10 minutes, until the sauce was bubbling. I finished the dish by flashing it under a hot grill.

This was a generous quantity for two.

Turnips

I said in the entry on celeriac and swede curry that by March one is getting a little bored with root vegetables. But some roots start to appear now, and they are a treat. They are small spring turnips, with cream and purple skins.

A good way to cook them -- once peeled and cut into chunks (mine are usually fork-sized) -- is in a covered pan with a few tbsps of liquid and a knob of butter. (It works for carrots too.) Stock is particularly good. At the weekend, I made a lamb stew, with a sauce that needed reduction; before I started boiling it down, I put some of it in the pan with my turnips.

Turnips take 10 to 15 minutes to soften. You need to keep an eye on the liquid, particularly if it is stock, which will thicken and reduce. You end up with turnips in a delicious, buttery glaze. Season them with a little salt and with generous grindings of pepper.

Chips

Before Heston Blumenthal came up with his triple-cooked chips, the most widely recommended chip recipe involved double-cooking. You cook the potatoes at about 140C, in effect boiling them; you take them out of the oil, turn up the heat until the oil reaches about 190C, and return the potatoes to the pan for browning.

I am not going to bother with the Blumenthal version; and my recipe for fried potatoes, which are just like chips only cubed, has convinced me that the double-cooking method can be simplified. You do not need a thermometer, and you do not need to remove the potatoes from the pan half way through cooking. Also, you can fry a surprisingly large quantity of chips with success, rather than doing it in batches. This weekend, I managed six medium potatoes-worth, for four people.

I used a stock pot/pasta pan with a capacity of four litres, and I poured a litre bottle of sunflower oil into it.

Method

Warm the pan with the oil above a low to medium heat.

Peel the potatoes, and cut them lengthwise into wedges about 1cm thick; or, if they are big, cut them in half crosswise, and then lengthwise into wedges. Cut these wedges lengthwise into chips, and put them in a bowl of water. Rub them a little to disperse some of the surface starch.

If you do not have a thermometer (or a chip pan), test the heat of the oil with a little cube of bread. It is ready when the bread sizzles gently on impact.

Remove the chips in batches from the water to paper towels, and dry them. You do not have to be too thorough; but if you leave a lot of water on them, they will cause the oil to bubble up alarmingly. Add them to the oil as you go. Regulate the heat if necessary to keep them simmering in the oil.

After 10 minutes, simply increase the heat -- I turned my flame (one of the back rings, and not the most powerful) to full. The chips should take about 10 minutes further to brown. Lift them from the oil with a slotted spoon to colanders lined with paper towels.

These chips, made with King Edwards, were superb: crisp outside, creamy inside. I do not think that any more elaborate method is necessary.

Celeriac and swede curry

I am pleased to see that Delia Smith, in the controversial How To Cheat at Cooking (more about this book later), recommends the spices from Seasoned Pioneers. I have mentioned them here and here, but without prompting such a notable sales spike.

At this time of year, one can get bored with the root vegetables that come every week in the vegetable box. (I should be fair and say that Growing Communities varies its offerings well.) But I never tire of root vegetable curries. I apologise to vegetarians: I do like the flavour of chicken stock, or a stock cube, in dishes such as this. For 2.

2 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 tsp Seasoned Pioneers black cumin seeds
1/2 tsp Seasoned Pioneers ajowan seeds
Groundnut or sunflower oil
Celeriac and/or swede and/or turnip, peeled and cut into fork-size pieces (I should have weighed the vegetables I used -- but you know how much you want, don't you?)
150 ml chicken stock, or half a Knorr chicken cube and 150 ml water
1/3 tsp cayenne (or more, or less, according to taste -- the Crazy Jack brand is good)
1 tsp Seasoned Pioneers garam masala
Salt

Fry the onions, garlic, cumin and ajowan seeds in a tbsp or two of oil (enough to prevent the vegetables from catching), until golden. Meanwhile, steam the root vegetables until tender. Throw them into the pan with the onions, along with the stock, cayenne, garam masala and salt (you may not need much salt if you have used a stock cube). Cook very gently for five minutes. The vegetables will absorb and thicken the liquid; you may want more.

Garnish with chopped chillis, if you like.

Curries may seem to be daunting dishes to cook. This one, screamingly inauthentic, is quick and easy, and tastes better than the offerings in a good many Indian restaurants.

Pork and lemon stew

My butcher sells spare rib chops, which come from the pig's shoulder. They are cheaper, moister and more tender than loin chops. Versatile as well: you can grill or fry them as you would a loin chop, and slow-cook them in a stew. For 4.

4 spare rib chops (or more if they are small)
Olive oil
3 onions, roughly chopped
8 garlic cloves
2 bay leaves
100 ml chicken stock
I lemon, zested and cut into quarters
Salt

I have taken to browning meat, without oil, on a ridged grill pan. Cut each chop into two or three pieces (whatever suits you), salt them, and brown them, in batches, on a high heat for a minute or two each side. Transfer to a plate when done. Meanwhile, in a casserole, soften the onions on a low to medium heat in the oil (a tbsp or two -- enough to prevent the onions from catching).

Tip the pork into the casserole, along with the whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, chicken stock, zest and quartered lemons, and a little more salt.

You do not need to bring the contents to a simmer: a gentle increase of heat in a low oven (gas mark 1/140 C) will help to keep the pork tender. Leave the casserole to cook gently for a couple of hours.

You may find that you have a surprising quantity of sauce. If there is too much, and it seems too thin, remove the pork to a warm plate, cover it, and bubble the sauce on top of the stove until reduced.

Lasagne that does what it says on the packet

My latest New Statesman column concerns my liberating discovery that it is possible to cook non-pre-cook lasagne without pre-cooking it. As I say in the column, and as I wrote here, I used to find that the only way to get this product to soften consistently, and to prevent it from absorbing most of the liquid in the sauces, was to give it an initial blanching. Yotam Ottolenghi's potato lasagne, described in this entry, taught me another way.

Here is a recipe for a more conventional lasagne. Once you have assembled the ingredients, cover the dish with foil and put it into the oven at gas mark 4/180C; after 30 minutes, turn down the dial to 2/150C. After another 30 minutes, remove the foil, scatter parmesan on top, and cook at gas mark 6/200C for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the top is browned.

No more entries this week. Back next Monday.

Eggs Florentine -- final

Right: here is my definitive version. Sorry to bang on about it; but eggs Florentine is one of my favourite dishes. Previous posts are here and here; this one trumps them, because it ensures that each component is cooked for the right length of time and no longer.

Place gratin dish in warm oven. Heat saucepan or frying pan of water for the eggs. No salt or vinegar (see why in the comments section here). Crack eggs into cups. Wash spinach. Grate cheese.

Make bechamel (there's a recipe in the 11.6.07 entry). Season, and leave to simmer over a very low light above a heat disperser, stirring from time to time.

Transfer wet spinach to saucepan, clamp on lid, and place on high heat. Lower eggs into simmering water; turn down heat to lowest setting.

The spinach should have started to wilt. Take off the lid, and stir, until all the leaves are wilted and cooked. Transfer the spinach to a colander, and push it against the sides with a wooden spoon, to squeeze out the water. When you think you have done a decent job of that, take the gratin dish out of the oven, and lay the spinach in it. Grind over some salt and pepper.

The eggs should be poached by now. Lift them from the water with a slotted spoon, and lay them on the spinach. Stir the cheese into the bechamel; pour the sauce over the spinach and eggs. Put the dish under a hot grill for a minute or two, until the sauce bubbles and browns on top.

Chicken liver pate

This is not a proper chicken liver pate. Delicious nonetheless, it is a quick concoction made out of the single liver that comes -- if you buy your free range or organic chicken at the butcher rather than at the supermarket -- in a bag inside the bird. If you spread it on toast, it will make four little snacks (or six, if you spread it thinly on croutons).

These livers are stringy. If you are making a proper pate, you get rid of the unwanted bits by shoving the cooked mixture through a sieve. Here, you scrape the liver off the stringy tissue. You reduce it to an unprepossessing mush; but that does not matter.

You do not need to flame brandy to evaporate the alcohol. I have done tests, and discovered that reducing the liquid in the normal way works just as well; indeed, it seems to work better, resulting in a milder flavour. Perhaps flamed brandy is scorched.

1 chicken liver
1 clove garlic, crushed with salt
Large knob (about 20g) butter
1 tbsp brandy
Ground black pepper
Pinch cayenne pepper

Cut up the liver, scraping it away from the stringy bits, which you should discard.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, and add the garlic. When it starts to cook and to give off its aroma, turn up the heat to medium, and add the liver. Toss it around; it will be cooked in about 10 to 15 seconds. Tip it into a small bowl. Put the pan back on to the heat, pour in the brandy, and boil it for a few seconds, until reduced to about a dstsp of syrup. Pour it on to the liver; add the peppers. You may not need any more salt.

Crush the liver with a fork, scraping at the bits that stick to the tines with a knife, and recrushing until the mixture is smooth. Cover the bowl with a saucer, and put it into the fridge for an hour.

Greens and baked eggs

This recipe (the first one -- scroll down) by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is essentially an eggs Florentine, but with kale rather than spinach. The difference is that you mix the green vegetable with the cheese sauce, rather than pouring the sauce on top.

One way of making eggs Florentine is to prepare the spinach and the sauce, put the spinach into an oven dish, crack the eggs on top, pour over the sauce, and bake for about 20 minute. The problem is that it's hard to tell whether you are overcooking or undercooking the eggs. Or you can prepare the spinach and put it into a dish, poach the eggs to your desired consistency, rest them on the spinach, pour on the sauce, and flash the dish under a grill. This time the problem is that it's easiest to prepare the spinach first -- but then how do you keep it warm? In a low oven, perhaps. Fearnley-Whittingstall's technique seemed worth a try.

Never again. After 10 minutes, both the egg yolks and whites were runny. Arriving at set whites and soft but not runny yolks took 25 minutes, by which time some of the white was hard and adhering to the sides of the dish. The washing up was a pain.

In this entry, I described a hybrid between the two methods mentioned above. It now seems to me to be best to put the spinach in a warm dish in a warm oven while you poach the eggs and allow your bechamel to simmer. Put the poached eggs on to the spinach, stir the cheese into the sauce (it need only be melted, rather than cooked), pour the sauce on top, and place under the grill (I put the dish into the grill pan with the rack removed) until bubbling.

Marmalade

My latest New Statesman column is about marmalade. Seville oranges are still in the shops, but will not be there for much longer.

The recipe I used was from Nigella Lawson's How To Eat. Its appeal is that it saves you the business of separating pith and pips from the uncooked oranges, and with muslin bags. Nevertheless, Nigella confesses -- or confessed when she wrote this book (published 10 years ago) -- that she has never made marmalade; and the recipe illustrates the drawback of writing about a procedure that you have not carried out yourself. She does not tell you whether to cook the oranges in a covered or uncovered pan; and she does not emphasise, when she tells you to return the cooked, cut-up oranges to the pan, that the pan also contains the cooking water. These points are obvious, no doubt, to an experienced cook, but were not obvious to me.

I cooked the oranges in a covered pan. That left a high proportion of liquid to orange mixture; but the marmalade did set, albeit after 30 minutes rather than the 15 that Nigella specifies. A friend tried the recipe with an uncovered pan, successfully. I would worry that too much liquid would evaporate, and that the oranges, incompletely submerged, would not cook properly. A compromise is in order.

I did not have enough caster sugar. I used about 900 g of caster, and 500 g of muscovado. The marmalade is so delicious that I shall use this mixture every time from now on.

700g Seville oranges
1.2 litres water
Juice of 2 lemons
900 g caster sugar
500 g muscovado sugar

Put the oranges and the water into a saucepan, bring to the boil, and simmer, partly covered, for two hours. Remove the oranges, reserving the water, and cut them up, pulp and all, into whatever size peel you prefer.

Remove the pips, along with those from the juiced lemons, put them in a small pan, cover them with a little of the orange cooking liquor, and boil for five minutes. Strain this juice back into the cut-up oranges. Add the lemon juice.

Pour the sugar into the pan with the cooking liquor, and cook over a low heat until dissolved. Tip in the orange mixture, turn up the heat, and simmer until set. You test by putting a teaspoon of it on to a saucer, putting the saucer in the fridge for a few minutes, and stroking the mixture with a fingertip. If the surface wrinkles, the marmalade is ready. If you are worried that the marmalade might become too set, take it off the heat while the sample portion is cooling.

When it is ready, stir the marmalade to distribute the peel. Spoon it into pots; it should fill about five standard-sized ones.